Rachel Pike : The science behind a climate headline
In 4 minutes , atmospheric chemist Rachel Pike provides a glimpse of the massive scientific effort behind the bold headlines on climate change , with her team -- one of thousands who contributed -- taking a risky flight over the rainforest in pursuit of data on a key molecule .
I 'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper .
Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change , and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog .
They are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science .
Recently the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , or IPCC , put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system .
That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries .
They wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic .
And all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers , from 113 countries .
It 's a big community . It 's such a big community , in fact , that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world .
Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that .
And every one of those scientists is in a research group , and every research group studies a wide variety of topics .
For us at Cambridge , it 's as varied as the El Niño oscillation , which affects weather and climate , to the assimilation of satellite data , to emissions from crops that produce biofuels , which is what I happen to study .
And in each one of these research areas , of which there are even more , there are PhD students , like me , and we study incredibly narrow topics , things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules .
And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene , which is here . It 's a small organic molecule . You 've probably never heard of it .
The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion -- 10 to the 21st -- molecules of isoprene .
But despite its very small weight , enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet .
It 's a huge amount of stuff . It 's equal to the weight of methane .
And because it 's so much stuff , it 's really important for the atmospheric system .
Because it 's important to the atmospheric system , we go to all lengths to study this thing .
We blow it up and look at the pieces .
This is the EUPHORE Smog Chamber in Spain .
Atmospheric explosions , or full combustion , takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car .
But still , we look at the pieces .
We run enormous models on supercomputers ; this is what I happen to do .
Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each , on minute timescales .
And it takes weeks to perform our integrations .
And we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what 's happening .
We also fly all over the world looking for this thing .
I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia . There are others .
We found a global atmospheric watchtower there , in the middle of the rainforest , and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower , to look for isoprene , and of course , other things while we were there .
This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest , from above .
And this is the tower from below .
And on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us .
And this plane , the model , BA146 , which was run by FAAM , normally flies 120 to 130 people .
So maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today .
But we didn 't just fly it . We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule -- incredibly dangerous stuff .
We have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements .
We hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering .
We have to get special flight clearance .
And as you come around the banks in these valleys , the forces can get up to two Gs .
And the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they 're on board .
So , as you can imagine , the inside of this aircraft doesn 't look like any plane you would take on vacation .
It 's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule .
We do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule .
And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule , they write one scientific paper on the subject .
And out of that field campaign we 'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules .
And as a body of knowledge builds up , it will form one subsection , or one sub-subsection of an assessment like the IPCC , although we have others .
And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections .
So you can imagine the scale of the effort .
In each one of those assessments that we write , we always tag on a summary , and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience .
And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers , in order to make headlines like these .
Thank you very much .
Christopher deCharms : A look inside the brain in real time
Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demonstrates a new way to use fMRI to show brain activity -- thoughts , emotions , pain -- while it is happening . In other words , you can actually see how you feel .
Hi . I 'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back , just the way I am -- kind of a royal wave .
You can mimic what you can see .
You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm .
Soon , you 'll be able to look inside your brain and program , control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there .
I 'm going to tell you about that technology .
People have wanted to look inside the human mind , the human brain , for thousands of years .
Well , coming out of the research labs just now , for our generation , is the possibility to do that .
People envision this as being very difficult .
You had to take a spaceship , shrink it down , inject it into the bloodstream .
It was terribly dangerous .
You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries .
But now , we have a real technology to do this .
We 're going to fly into my colleague Peter 's brain .
We 're going to do it non-invasively using MRI .
We don 't have to inject anything . We don 't need radiation .
We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter 's brain -- literally , fly into his body -- but more importantly , we can look into his mind .
When Peter moves his arm , that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter 's mind taking place .
Now you 've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms , that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains .
What 's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis .
We 've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds , and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he 's inside the scanner .
He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second .
If he can see this pattern in his own brain , he can learn how to control it .
There have been three ways to try to impact the brain : the therapist 's couch , pills and the knife .
This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have .
We all know that as we form thoughts , they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains .
Chronic pain is an example . If you burn yourself , you pull your hand away .
But if you 're still in pain in six months ' or six years ' time , it 's because these circuits are producing pain that 's no longer helping you .
If we can look at the activation in the brain that 's producing the pain , we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information , and then we can select the areas that produce the pain .
So put your arms back up and flex your bicep .
Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing .
What you 're seeing here is , we 've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient .
This may shock you , but we 're literally reading this person 's brain in real time .
They 're watching their own brain activation , and they 're controlling the pathway that produces their pain .
They 're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates .
As they do it , in the upper left is a display that 's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled .
When they control their brain , they can control their pain .
This is an investigational technology , but , in clinical trials , we 're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients .
This is not " The Matrix . " You can only do this to yourself . You take control .
I 've seen inside my brain . You will too , soon .
When you do , what do you want to control ?
You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself , all your experiences .
These are some of the areas we 're working on today that I don 't have time to go into in detail .
But I want to leave with you the big question .
We are the first generation that 's going to be able to enter into , using this technology , the human mind and brain .
Where will we take it ?
Beeban Kidron : The shared wonder of film
Movies have the power to create a shared narrative experience and to shape memories and worldviews . British film director Beeban Kidron invokes iconic film scenes -- from & lt ; em & gt ; Miracle in Milan & lt ; / em & gt ; to & lt ; em & gt ; Boyz n the Hood & lt ; / em & gt ; -- as she shows how her group FILMCLUB shares great films with kids .
Evidence suggests that humans in all ages and from all cultures create their identity in some kind of narrative form .
From mother to daughter , preacher to congregant , teacher to pupil , storyteller to audience .
Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet , human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable .
We are inveterate storytellers .
But where , in our increasingly secular and fragmented world , do we offer communality of experience , unmediated by our own furious consumerism ?
And what narrative , what history , what identity , what moral code are we imparting to our young ?
Cinema is arguably the 20th century 's most influential art form .
Its artists told stories across national boundaries , in as many languages , genres and philosophies as one can imagine .
Indeed , it is hard to find a subject that film has yet to tackle .
During the last decade we 've seen a vast integration of global media , now dominated by a culture of the Hollywood blockbuster .
We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation , not story , is king .
What was common to us all 40 years ago -- the telling of stories between generations -- is now rarified .
As a filmmaker , it worried me .
As a human being , it puts the fear of God in me .
What future could the young build with so little grasp of where they 've come from and so few narratives of what 's possible ?
The irony is palpable ; technical access has never been greater , cultural access never weaker .
And so in 2006 we set up FILMCLUB , an organization that ran weekly film screenings in schools followed by discussions .
If we could raid the annals of 100 years of film , maybe we could build a narrative that would deliver meaning to the fragmented and restless world of the young .
Given the access to technology , even a school in a tiny rural hamlet could project a DVD onto a white board .
In the first nine months we ran 25 clubs across the U.K. , with kids in age groups between five and 18 watching a film uninterrupted for 90 minutes .
The films were curated and contextualized .
But the choice was theirs , and our audience quickly grew to choose the richest and most varied diet that we could provide .
The outcome , immediate .
It was an education of the most profound and transformative kind .
In groups as large as 150 and as small as three , these young people discovered new places , new thoughts , new perspectives .
By the time the pilot had finished , we had the names of a thousand schools that wished to join .
The film that changed my life is a 1951 film by Vittorio De Sica , " Miracle in Milan . "
It 's a remarkable comment on slums , poverty and aspiration .
I had seen the film on the occasion of my father 's 50th birthday .
Technology then meant we had to hire a viewing cinema , find and pay for the print and the projectionist .
But for my father , the emotional and artistic importance of De Sica 's vision was so great that he chose to celebrate his half-century with his three teenage children and 30 of their friends , " In order , " he said , " to pass the baton of concern and hope on to the next generation . "
In the last shot of " Miracle in Milan , " slum-dwellers float skyward on flying brooms .
Sixty years after the film was made and 30 years after I first saw it , I see young faces tilt up in awe , their incredulity matching mine .
And the speed with which they associate it with " Slumdog Millionaire " or the favelas in Rio speaks to the enduring nature .
In a FILMCLUB season about democracy and government , we screened " Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . "
Made in 1939 , the film is older than most of our members ' grandparents .
Frank Capra 's classic values independence and propriety .
It shows how to do right , how to be heroically awkward .
It is also an expression of faith in the political machine as a force of honor .
Shortly after " Mr. Smith " became a FILMCLUB classic , there was a week of all-night filibustering in the House of Lords .
And it was with great delight that we found young people up and down the country explaining with authority what filibustering was and why the Lords might defy their bedtime on a point of principle .
After all , Jimmy Stewart filibustered for two entire reels .
In choosing " Hotel Rwanda , " they explored genocide of the most brutal kind .
It provoked tears as well as incisive questions about unarmed peace-keeping forces and the double-dealing of a Western society that picks its moral fights with commodities in mind .
And when " Schindler 's List " demanded that they never forget , one child , full of the pain of consciousness , remarked , " We already forgot , otherwise how did ' Hotel Rwanda ' happen ? "
As they watch more films their lives got palpably richer .
" Pickpocket " started a debate about criminality disenfranchisement .
" To Sir , with Love " ignited its teen audience .
They celebrated a change in attitude towards non-white Britons , but railed against our restless school system that does not value collective identity , unlike that offered by Sidney Poitier 's careful tutelage .
By now , these thoughtful , opinionated , curious young people thought nothing of tackling films of all forms -- black and white , subtitled , documentary , non-narrative , fantasy -- and thought nothing of writing detailed reviews that competed to favor one film over another in passionate and increasingly sophisticated prose .
Six thousand reviews each school week vying for the honor of being review of the week .
From 25 clubs , we became hundreds , then thousands , until we were nearly a quarter of a million kids in 7,000 clubs right across the country .
And although the numbers were , and continue to be , extraordinary , what became more extraordinary was how the experience of critical and curious questioning translated into life .
Some of our kids started talking with their parents , others with their teachers , or with their friends .
And those without friends started making them .
The films provided communality across all manner of divide .
And the stories they held provided a shared experience .
" Persepolis " brought a daughter closer to her Iranian mother , and " Jaws " became the way in which one young boy was able to articulate the fear he 'd experienced in flight from violence that killed first his father then his mother , the latter thrown overboard on a boat journey .
Who was right , who wrong ?
What would they do under the same conditions ?
Was the tale told well ?
Was there a hidden message ?
How has the world changed ? How could it be different ?
A tsunami of questions flew out of the mouths of children who the world didn 't think were interested .
And they themselves had not known they cared .
And as they wrote and debated , rather than seeing the films as artifacts , they began to see themselves .
I have an aunt who is a wonderful storyteller .
In a moment she can invoke images of running barefoot on Table Mountain and playing cops and robbers .
Quite recently she told me that in 1948 , two of her sisters and my father traveled on a boat to Israel without my grandparents .
When the sailors mutinied at sea in a demand for humane conditions , it was these teenagers that fed the crew .
I was past 40 when my father died .
He never mentioned that journey .
My mother 's mother left Europe in a hurry without her husband , but with her three-year-old daughter and diamonds sewn into the hem of her skirt .
After two years in hiding , my grandfather appeared in London .
He was never right again .
And his story was hushed as he assimilated .
My story started in England with a clean slate and the silence of immigrant parents .
I had " Anne Frank , " " The Great Escape , " " Shoah , " " Triumph of the Will . "
It was Leni Riefenstahl in her elegant Nazi propaganda who gave context to what the family had to endure .
These films held what was too hurtful to say out loud , and they became more useful to me than the whispers of survivors and the occasional glimpse of a tattoo on a maiden aunt 's wrist .
Purists may feel that fiction dissipates the quest of real human understanding , that film is too crude to tell a complex and detailed history , or that filmmakers always serve drama over truth .
But within the reels lie purpose and meaning .
As one 12-year-old said after watching " Wizard of Oz , " " Every person should watch this , because unless you do you may not know that you too have a heart . "
We honor reading , why not honor watching with the same passion ?
Consider " Citizen Kane " as valuable as Jane Austen .
Agree that " Boyz n the Hood , " like Tennyson , offers an emotional landscape and a heightened understanding that work together .
Each a piece of memorable art , each a brick in the wall of who we are .
And it 's okay if we remember Tom Hanks better than astronaut Jim Lovell or have Ben Kingsley 's face superimposed onto that of Gandhi 's .
And though not real , Eve Harrington , Howard Beale , Mildred Pierce are an opportunity to discover what it is to be human , and no less helpful to understanding our life and times as Shakespeare is in illuminating the world of Elizabethan England .
We guessed that film , whose stories are a meeting place of drama , music , literature and human experience , would engage and inspire the young people participating in FILMCLUB .
What we could not have foreseen was the measurable improvements in behavior , confidence and academic achievement .
Once-reluctant students now race to school , talk to their teachers , fight , not on the playground , but to choose next week 's film -- young people who have found self-definition , ambition and an appetite for education and social engagement from the stories they have witnessed .
Our members defy the binary description of how we so often describe our young .
They are neither feral nor myopically self-absorbed .
They are , like other young people , negotiating a world with infinite choice , but little culture of how to find meaningful experience .
We appeared surprised at the behaviors of those who define themselves by the size of the tick on their shoes , yet acquisition has been the narrative we have offered .
If we want different values we have to tell a different story , a story that understands that an individual narrative is an essential component of a person 's identity , that a collective narrative is an essential component of a cultural identity , and without it it is impossible to imagine yourself as part of a group .
Because when these people get home after a screening of " Rear Window " and raise their gaze to the building next door , they have the tools to wonder who , apart from them , is out there and what is their story .
Thank you .
Ellen Jorgensen : Biohacking -- you can do it , too
We have personal computing , why not personal biotech ? That 's the question biologist Ellen Jorgensen and her colleagues asked themselves before opening Genspace , a nonprofit DIYbio lab in Brooklyn devoted to citizen science , where amateurs can go and tinker with biotechnology . Far from being a sinister Frankenstein 's lab , Genspace offers a long list of fun , creative and practical uses for DIYbio .
It 's a great time to be a molecular biologist .
Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper .
By the end of this year , we 'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros .
Biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector .
It has the power , potentially , to replace our fossil fuels , to revolutionize medicine , and to touch every aspect of our daily lives .
So who gets to do it ?
I think we 'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it .
But what about that guy ?
In 2009 , I first heard about DIYbio .
It 's a movement that -- it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone , not just scientists and people in government labs .
The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate , it could really stimulate innovation .
Putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they 've got the best idea of what their needs are .
And here 's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road , all these associated social , moral , ethical questions , and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we 're doing in those labs .
So wouldn 't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff , do it hands-on ?
I thought so .
So , three years ago , I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace .
It 's a nonprofit , a community biotech lab in Brooklyn , New York , and the idea was people could come , they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open , friendly atmosphere .
None of my previous experience prepared me for what came next . Can you guess ?
The press started calling us .
And the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy , the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein , and as a result , for the next six months , when you Googled my name , instead of getting my scientific papers , you got this .
[ " Am I a biohazard ? " ] It was pretty depressing .
The only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world , there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were .
They were opening biohacker spaces , and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did , more regulations , less resources .
But now , three years later , here 's where we stand .
It 's a vibrant , global community of hackerspaces , and this is just the beginning .
These are some of the biggest ones , and there are others opening every day .
There 's one probably going to open up in Moscow , one in South Korea , and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of .
Let me take you on a little tour .
Biohackers work alone .
We work in groups , in big cities — — and in small villages .
We reverse engineer lab equipment .
We genetically engineer bacteria .
We hack hardware , software , wetware , and , of course , the code of life .
We like to build things .
Then we like to take things apart .
We make things grow .
We make things glow .
And we make cells dance .
The spirit of these labs , it 's open , it 's positive , but , you know , sometimes when people think of us , the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety , bio-security , all the dark side stuff .
I 'm not going to minimize those concerns .
Any powerful technology is inherently dual use , and , you know , you get something like synthetic biology , nanobiotechnology , it really compels you , you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups , because they have better infrastructure , they have better facilities , and they have access to pathogens .
So the United Nations did just that , and they recently issued a report on this whole area , and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative , and they even looked specifically at the DIYbio community , and they noted , not surprisingly , that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics .
As a matter of fact , DIY people from all over the world , America , Europe , got together last year , and we hammered out a common code of ethics .
That 's a lot more than conventional science has done .
Now , we follow state and local regulations .
We dispose of our waste properly , we follow safety procedures , we don 't work with pathogens .
You know , if you 're working with a pathogen , you 're not part of the biohacker community , you 're part of the bioterrorist community , I 'm sorry .
And sometimes people ask me , " Well , what about an accident ? "
Well , working with the safe organisms that we normally work with , the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating , like , some sort of superbug , that 's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the Sahara Desert .
Now , it could happen , but I 'm not going to plan my life around it .
I 've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk .
I signed up for something called the Personal Genome Project .
It 's a study at Harvard where , at the end of the study , they 're going to take my entire genomic sequence , all of my medical information , and my identity , and they 're going to post it online for everyone to see .
There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion .
The one I liked the best is , someone could download my sequence , go back to the lab , synthesize some fake Ellen DNA , and plant it at a crime scene .
But like DIYbio , the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk .
Now , you might be asking yourself , " Well , you know , what would I do in a biolab ? "
Well , it wasn 't that long ago we were asking , " Well , what would anyone do with a personal computer ? "
So this stuff is just beginning .
We 're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg .
Let me show you what you could do right now .
A biohacker in Germany , a journalist , wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street ?
Yep , you guessed it . He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs , analyzed the saliva , identified the dog , and confronted the dog owner .
I discovered an invasive species in my own backyard .
Looked like a ladybug , right ?
It actually is a Japanese beetle .
And the same kind of technology -- it 's called DNA barcoding , it 's really cool -- You can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga , if that sushi is really tuna , or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat 's .
In a biohacker space , you can analyze your genome for mutations .
You can analyze your breakfast cereal for GMO 's , and you can explore your ancestry .
You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere , collect microbes , see what 's up there .
You can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water .
You can make some sort of a biofuel cell .
You can do a lot of things .
You can also do an art science project . Some of these are really spectacular , and they look at social , ecological problems from a completely different perspective .
It 's really cool .
Some people ask me , well , why am I involved ?
I could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science .
The thing is , there 's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you can 't find anywhere else .
There 's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project , and you don 't have to justify to anyone that it 's going to make a lot of money , that it 's going to save mankind , or even that it 's feasible .
It just has to follow safety guidelines .
If you had spaces like this all over the world , it could really change the perception of who 's allowed to do biotech .
It 's spaces like these that spawned personal computing .
Why not personal biotech ?
If everyone in this room got involved , who knows what we could do ?
This is such a new area , and as we say back in Brooklyn , you ain 't seen nothin ' yet .
Geert Chatrou : A whistleblower you haven 't heard
In this engaging talk , world champion whistler Geert Chatrou performs the whimsical " Eleonora " by A. Honhoff , and his own " Fête de la Belle . " In a fascinating interlude , he talks about what brought him to the craft . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Thank you very much .
That was whistling .
I 'm trying to do this in English .
What is a chubby , curly-haired guy from Holland -- why is he whistling ?
Well actually , I 've [ been ] whistling since the age of four , about four .
My dad was always whistling around the house , and I just thought that 's part of communication in my family .
So I whistled along with him .
And actually , till I was 34 , I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling , because , to be honest , my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior .
I whistled alone . I whistled in the classroom .
I whistled on [ my ] bike . I whistled everywhere .
And I also whistled at a Christmas Eve party with my family-in-law .
And they had some , in my opinion , terrible Christmas music .
And when I hear music that I don 't like , I try to make it better .
So " Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer " -- you know it ?
But it can also sound like this .
But during a Christmas party -- at dinner actually -- it 's very annoying .
So my sister-in-law asked me a few times , " Please stop whistling . "
And I just couldn 't .
And at one point -- and I had some wine , I have to admit that -- at one point I said , " If there was a contest , I would join . "
And two weeks later I received a text message : " You 're going to America . "
So , okay , I 'm going to America .
I would love to , but why ?
So I immediately called her up , of course .
She Googled , and she found this World Whistling Championship in America , of course .
She didn 't expect me to go there .
And I would have lost my face .
I don 't know if that 's correct English .
But the Dutch people here will understand what I mean .
I lost my face .
And she thought , " He will never go there . "
But actually I did .
So I went to Louisburg , North Carolina , southeast United States , and I entered the world of whistling .
And I also entered the world championship , and I won there in 2004 .
That was great fun , of course .
And to defend my title -- like judokas do and sportsmen -- I thought , well let 's go back in 2005 , and I won again .
Then I couldn 't participate for a few years .
And in 2008 I entered again in Japan , Tokyo , and I won again .
So what happened now is I 'm standing here in Rotterdam , in the beautiful city , on a big stage , and I 'm talking about whistling .
And actually I earn my money whistling at the moment .
So I quit my day job as a nurse .
And I try to live my dream -- well , actually , it was never my dream , but it sounds so good .
Okay , I 'm not the only one whistling here .
You say , " Huh , what do you mean ? "
Well actually , you are going to whistle along .
And then always the same thing happens : people are watching each other and think , " Oh , my God .
Why ? Can I go away ? "
No , you can 't .
Actually it 's very simple .
The track that I will whistle is called " Fête de la Belle . "
It 's about 80 minutes long .
No , no , no . It 's four minutes long .
And I want to first rehearse with you your whistling .
So I whistle the tone .
Sorry . I forgot one thing .
You whistle the same tone as me .
I heard a wide variety of tones .
This is very promising .
This is very promising .
I 'll ask the technicians to start the music .
And if it 's started , I just point where you whistle along , and we will see what happens .
Oh , hah .
I 'm so sorry , technicians .
I 'm so used to that .
I start it myself .
Okay , here it is .
Okay .
It 's easy , isn 't it ?
Now comes the solo . I propose I do that myself .
Max Westerman : Geert Chatrou , the World Champion [ of ] Whistling .
Geert Chatrou : Thank you . Thank you .
Roberto D 'Angelo + Francesca Fedeli : In our baby 's illness , a life lesson
Roberto D 'Angelo and Francesca Fedeli thought their baby boy Mario was healthy -- until at 10 days old , they discovered he 'd had a perinatal stroke . With Mario unable to control the left side of his body , they grappled with tough questions : Would he be " normal ? " Could he live a full life ? The poignant story of parents facing their fears -- and how they turned them around .
Francesca Fedeli : Ciao .
So he 's Mario . He 's our son .
He was born two and a half years ago , and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for , like , eight months .
But in the end everything seemed to be under control .
So he got the right weight at birth .
He got the right Apgar index .
So we were pretty reassured by this .
But at the end , 10 days later after he was born , we discovered that he had a stroke .
As you might know , a stroke is a brain injury .
A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth , and in his case , as you can see , the right part of his brain has gone .
So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario 's body could be the fact that he couldn 't be able to control the left side of his body .
Just imagine , if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit , to input to print out a document , but the printer doesn 't have the right drives , so the same is for Mario .
It 's just like , he would like to move his left side of his body , but he 's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg .
So life had to change .
We needed to change our schedule .
We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life .
As you may imagine , unfortunately , we were not ready .
Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities , and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds .
And that has been really a tough time .
Questions , some basics , like , you know , why did this happen to us ?
And what went wrong ?
Some more tough , like , really , what will be the impact on Mario 's life ?
I mean , at the end , will he be able to work ?
Will he be able to be normal ?
And , you know , as a parent , especially for the first time , why is he not going to be better than us ?
And this , indeed , really is tough to say , but a few months later , we realized that we were really feeling like a failure .
I mean , the only real product of our life , at the end , was a failure .
And you know , it was not a failure for ourselves in itself , but it was a failure that will impact his full life .
Honestly , we went down .
I mean we went really down , but at the end , we started to look at him , and we said , we have to react .
So immediately , as Francesca said , we changed our life .
We started physiotherapy , we started the rehabilitation , and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot .
Basically , we spent months doing this with Mario .
You have an object , and we showed him how to grab the object .
Now , the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains , exactly now , as you watch me doing this , you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions .
It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation .
But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand .
He was looking at us .
We were his mirror .
And the problem , as you might feel , is that we were down , we were depressed , we were looking at him as a problem , not as a son , not from a positive perspective .
And that day really changed our perspective .
We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario .
We restarted from our strengths , and at the same time we restarted from his strengths .
We stopped looking at him as a problem , and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve .
And really , this was the change , and from our side , we said , " What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario ? "
And we started from our passions .
I mean , at the end , my wife and myself are quite different , but we have many things in common .
We love to travel , we love music , we love to be in places like this , and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him .
This short video is from last week .
I am not saying -- — I am not saying it 's a miracle . That 's not the message , because we are just at the beginning of the path .
But we want to share what was the key learning , the key learning that Mario drove to us , and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss , and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity .
And this is the message that we want to share with you .
This is why we are here .
Mario !
And this is why -- — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him .
And we thank you so much , all of you .
Thank you . Thank you . Bye .
Thank you .
Mark Shaw : One very dry demo
Mark Shaw demos Ultra-Ever Dry , a liquid-repellent coating that acts as an astonishingly powerful shield against water and water-based materials . At the nano level , the spray covers a surface with an umbrella of air so that water bounces right off . Watch for an exciting two-minute kicker .
I 'm here to show you how something you can 't see can be so much fun to look at .
You 're about to experience a new , available and exciting technology that 's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives .
What I have here is a cinder block that we 've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material .
It 's called Ultra-Ever Dry , and when you apply it to any material , it turns into a superhydrophobic shield .
So this is a cinder block , uncoated , and you can see that it 's porous , it absorbs water .
Not anymore .
Porous , nonporous .
So what 's superhydrophobic ?
Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface .
The rounder it is , the more hydrophobic it is , and if it 's really round , it 's superhydrophobic .
A freshly waxed car , the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees .
A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees .
But what you 're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees , and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic .
So as part of the demonstration , what I have is a pair of gloves , and we 've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating , and let 's see if you can tell which one , and I 'll give you a hint .
Did you guess the one that was dry ?
When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience , what 's occurred is that we 're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits .
And we 're talking really small here .
The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers , and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter , and to put some scale to that , if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick , and you put it side by side , and you had 50,000 of them , you 'd be the width of a human hair .
So very small , but very useful .
And it 's not just water that this works with .
It 's a lot of water-based materials like concrete , water-based paint , mud , and also some refined oils as well .
You can see the difference .
Moving onto the next demonstration , we 've taken a pane of glass and we 've coated the outside of it , we 've framed it with the nanotechnology coating , and we 're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle , and you 're going to see , it 's going to spread out on glass like you 'd normally think it would , except when it hits the coating , it stops , and I can 't even coax it to leave .
It 's that afraid of the water .
So what 's going on here ? What 's happening ?
Well , the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface .
You 'd think it 'd be smooth , but it 's actually not .
And it has billions of interstitial spaces , and those spaces , along with the nanoparticles , reach up and grab the air molecules , and cover the surface with air .
It 's an umbrella of air all across it , and that layer of air is what the water hits , the mud hits , the concrete hits , and it glides right off .
So if I put this inside this water here , you can see a silver reflective coating around it , and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that 's protecting the water from touching the paddle , and it 's dry .
So what are the applications ?
I mean , many of you right now are probably going through your head .
Everyone that sees this gets excited , and says , " Oh , I could use it for this and this and this . "
The applications in a general sense could be anything that 's anti-wetting .
We 've certainly seen that today .
It could be anything that 's anti-icing , because if you don 't have water , you don 't have ice .
It could be anti-corrosion .
No water , no corrosion .
It could be anti-bacterial .
Without water , the bacteria won 't survive .
And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well .
So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work .
And I 'm going to leave you with one last demonstration , but before I do that , I would like to say thank you , and think small .
It 's going to happen . Wait for it . Wait for it .
You guys didn 't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED ?
[ Two minutes later ... ] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part .
It 's happening !

Dan Ariely : Our buggy moral code
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code : the hidden reasons we think it 's OK to cheat or steal . Clever studies help make his point that we 're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can 't grasp .
I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality .
And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital .
I was burned very badly .
And if you spend a lot of time in hospital , you 'll see a lot of types of irrationalities .
And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me .
Now , you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point , and you must have wondered what 's the right approach .
Do you rip it off quickly -- short duration but high intensity -- or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly -- you take a long time , but each second is not as painful -- which one of those is the right approach ?
The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one , so they would grab hold and they would rip , and they would grab hold and they would rip .
And because I had 70 percent of my body burned , it would take about an hour .
And as you can imagine , I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity .
And I would try to reason with them and say , " Why don 't we try something else ?
Why don 't we take it a little longer -- maybe two hours instead of an hour -- and have less of this intensity ? "
And the nurses told me two things .
They told me that they had the right model of the patient -- that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain -- and they also told me that the word patient doesn 't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ...
This is not just in Hebrew , by the way .
It 's in every language I 've had experience with so far .
And , you know , there 's not much -- there wasn 't much I could do , and they kept on doing what they were doing .
And about three years later , when I left the hospital , I started studying at the university .
And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way , and you can try to examine this question , maybe learn something about the world .
So that 's what I did .
I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients .
So originally I didn 't have much money , so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter 's vice .
And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it , and I would crunch it a little bit .
And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods , and pain that went up and pain that went down , and with breaks and without breaks -- all kinds of versions of pain .
And when I finished hurting people a little bit , I would ask them , so , how painful was this ? Or , how painful was this ?
Or , if you had to choose between the last two , which one would you choose ?
I kept on doing this for a while .
And then , like all good academic projects , I got more funding .
I moved to sounds , electrical shocks -- I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain .
But at the end of this process , what I learned was that the nurses were wrong .
Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience , and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time .
It turns out that because we don 't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity , I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower .
It turns out it would have been better to start with my face , which was much more painful , and move toward my legs , giving me a trend of improvement over time -- that would have been also less painful .
And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain .
All of these would have been great things to do , and my nurses had no idea .
And from that point on I started thinking , are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision , or is it a more general case ?
And it turns out it 's a more general case -- there 's a lot of mistakes we do .
And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities , and I want to talk to you about cheating .
And the reason I picked cheating is because it 's interesting , but also it tells us something , I think , about the stock market situation we 're in .
So , my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene , exploded all of a sudden , and I started thinking about what is happening here .
Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things , or are we talking a more endemic situation , that many people are actually capable of behaving this way ?
So , like we usually do , I decided to do a simple experiment .
And here 's how it went .
If you were in the experiment , I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve , but I wouldn 't give you enough time .
When the five minutes were over , I would say , " Pass me the sheets of paper , and I 'll pay you a dollar per question . "
People did this . I would pay people four dollars for their task -- on average people would solve four problems .
Other people I would tempt to cheat .
I would pass their sheet of paper .
When the five minutes were over , I would say , " Please shred the piece of paper .
Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack , and tell me how many questions you got correctly . "
People now solved seven questions on average .
Now , it wasn 't as if there was a few bad apples -- a few people cheated a lot .
Instead , what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit .
Now , in economic theory , cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis .
You say , what 's the probability of being caught ?
How much do I stand to gain from cheating ?
And how much punishment would I get if I get caught ?
And you weigh these options out -- you do the simple cost-benefit analysis , and you decide whether it 's worthwhile to commit the crime or not .
So , we try to test this .
For some people , we varied how much money they could get away with -- how much money they could steal .
We paid them 10 cents per correct question , 50 cents , a dollar , five dollars , 10 dollars per correct question .
You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases , people would cheat more , but in fact it wasn 't the case .
We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit .
What about the probability of being caught ?
Some people shredded half the sheet of paper , so there was some evidence left .
Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper .
Some people shredded everything , went out of the room , and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars .
You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down , people would cheat more , but again , this was not the case .
Again , a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit , and they were insensitive to these economic incentives .
So we said , " If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations , to these forces , what could be going on ? "
And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces .
At one hand , we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves , so we don 't want to cheat .
On the other hand , we can cheat a little bit , and still feel good about ourselves .
So , maybe what is happening is that there 's a level of cheating we can 't go over , but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree , as long as it doesn 't change our impressions about ourselves .
We call this like a personal fudge factor .
Now , how would you test a personal fudge factor ?
Initially we said , what can we do to shrink the fudge factor ?
So , we got people to the lab , and we said , " We have two tasks for you today . "
First , we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school , or to recall The Ten Commandments , and then we tempted them with cheating .
Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments -- and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments -- but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments , given the opportunity to cheat , did not cheat at all .
It wasn 't that the more religious people -- the people who remembered more of the Commandments -- cheated less , and the less religious people -- the people who couldn 't remember almost any Commandments -- cheated more .
The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments , they stopped cheating .
In fact , even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat , they don 't cheat at all .
Now , Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system , so we said , " Why don 't we get people to sign the honor code ? "
So , we got people to sign , " I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code . "
Then they shredded it . No cheating whatsoever .
And this is particularly interesting , because MIT doesn 't have an honor code .
So , all this was about decreasing the fudge factor .
What about increasing the fudge factor ?
The first experiment -- I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators -- these were common refrigerators for the undergrads .
And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke -- how long does it last in the refrigerators ?
As you can expect it doesn 't last very long ; people take it .
In contrast , I took a plate with six one-dollar bills , and I left those plates in the same refrigerators .
No bill ever disappeared .
Now , this is not a good social science experiment , so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before .
A third of the people we passed the sheet , they gave it back to us .
A third of the people we passed it to , they shredded it , they came to us and said , " Mr. Experimenter , I solved X problems . Give me X dollars . "
A third of the people , when they finished shredding the piece of paper , they came to us and said , " Mr Experimenter , I solved X problems . Give me X tokens . "
We did not pay them with dollars ; we paid them with something else .
And then they took the something else , they walked 12 feet to the side , and exchanged it for dollars .
Think about the following intuition .
How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home , compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box ?
These things feel very differently .
Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference ?
Our subjects doubled their cheating .
I 'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute .
But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet , because in Enron , there 's also a social element .
People see each other behaving .
In fact , every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating .
What does this cause us ?
So , we did another experiment .
We got a big group of students to be in the experiment , and we prepaid them .
So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment , and we told them that at the end , we asked them to pay us back the money they didn 't make . OK ?
The same thing happens .
When we give people the opportunity to cheat , they cheat .
They cheat just by a little bit , all the same .
But in this experiment we also hired an acting student .
This acting student stood up after 30 seconds , and said , " I solved everything . What do I do now ? "
And the experimenter said , " If you 've finished everything , go home .
That 's it . The task is finished . "
So , now we had a student -- an acting student -- that was a part of the group .
Nobody knew it was an actor .
And they clearly cheated in a very , very serious way .
What would happen to the other people in the group ?
Will they cheat more , or will they cheat less ?
Here is what happens .
It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they 're wearing .
Here is the thing .
We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh .
And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities , Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh .
All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students .
When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student -- he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student -- but he was a part of their group , cheating went up .
But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt , cheating went down .
Now , this is important , because remember , when the moment the student stood up , it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating , because the experimenter said , " You 've finished everything . Go home , " and they went with the money .
So it wasn 't so much about the probability of being caught again .
It was about the norms for cheating .
If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating , we feel it 's more appropriate , as a group , to behave this way .
But if it 's somebody from another group , these terrible people -- I mean , not terrible in this -- but somebody we don 't want to associate ourselves with , from another university , another group , all of a sudden people 's awareness of honesty goes up -- a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment -- and people cheat even less .
So , what have we learned from this about cheating ?
We 've learned that a lot of people can cheat .
They cheat just by a little bit .
When we remind people about their morality , they cheat less .
When we get bigger distance from cheating , from the object of money , for example , people cheat more .
And when we see cheating around us , particularly if it 's a part of our in-group , cheating goes up .
Now , if we think about this in terms of the stock market , think about what happens .
What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way ?
Would they not be able to see it this way ?
Of course they would .
What happens when you do other things , like you remove things from money ?
You call them stock , or stock options , derivatives , mortgage-backed securities .
Could it be that with those more distant things , it 's not a token for one second , it 's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time -- could it be that people will cheat even more ?
And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them ?
I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market .
More generally , I want to tell you something about behavioral economics .
We have many intuitions in our life , and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong .
The question is , are we going to test those intuitions ?
We can think about how we 're going to test this intuition in our private life , in our business life , and most particularly when it goes to policy , when we think about things like No Child Left Behind , when you create new stock markets , when you create other policies -- taxation , health care and so on .
And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them .
So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages .
And I learned two interesting things .
One was that my favorite nurse , Ettie , told me that I did not take her pain into consideration .
She said , " Of course , you know , it was very painful for you .
But think about me as a nurse , taking , removing the bandages of somebody I liked , and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time .
Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me , too . "
And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her .
But it was actually more interesting than that , because she said , " I did not think that your intuition was right .
I felt my intuition was correct . "
So , if you think about all of your intuitions , it 's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong .
And she said , " Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right ... " -- she thought her intuition was right -- it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong .
But in fact , this is the situation we 're all in all the time .
We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things -- our own ability , how the economy works , how we should pay school teachers .
But unless we start testing those intuitions , we 're not going to do better .
And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition , and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions .
Thank you very much .
Jane McGonigal : Massively multi-player … thumb-wrestling ?
What happens when you get an entire audience to stand up and connect with one another ? Chaos , that 's what . At least , that 's what happened when Jane McGonigal tried to teach TED to play her favorite game . Then again , when the game is " massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , " what else would you expect ?
Today I am going to teach you how to play my favorite game : massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
It 's the only game in the world that I know of that allows you , the player , the opportunity to experience 10 positive emotions in 60 seconds or less .
This is true , so if you play this game with me today for just one single minute , you will get to feel joy , relief , love , surprise , pride , curiosity , excitement , awe and wonder , contentment , and creativity , all in the span of one minute .
So this sounds pretty good , right ? Now you 're willing to play .
In order to teach you this game , I 'm going to need some volunteers to come up onstage really quickly , and we 're going to do a little hands-on demo .
While they 're coming up , I should let you know , this game was invented 10 years ago by an artists ' collective in Austria named Monochrom .
So thank you , Monochrom .
Okay , so most people are familiar with traditional , two-person thumb-wrestling .
Sunni , let 's just remind them .
One , two , three , four , I declare a thumb war , and we wrestle , and of course Sunni beats me because she 's the best .
Now the first thing about massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , we 're the gamer generation .
There are a billion gamers on the planet now , so we need more of a challenge .
So the first thing we need is more thumbs .
So Eric , come on over .
So we could get three thumbs together , and Peter could join us .
We could even have four thumbs together , and the way you win is you 're the first person to pin someone else 's thumb .
This is really important . You can 't , like , wait while they fight it out and then swoop in at the last minute .
That is not how you win .
Ah , who did that ? Eric you did that .
So Eric would have won . He was the first person to pin my thumb .
Okay , so that 's the first rule , and we can see that three or four is kind of the typical number of thumbs in a node , but if you feel ambitious , you don 't have to hold back .
We can really go for it .
So you can see up here .
Now the only other rule you need to remember is , gamer generation , we like a challenge .
I happen to notice you all have some thumbs you 're not using .
So I think we should kind of get some more involved .
And if we had just four people , we would do it just like this , and we would try and wrestle both thumbs at the same time .
Perfect .
Now , if we had more people in the room , instead of just wrestling in a closed node , we might reach out and try and grab some other people .
And in fact , that 's what we 're going to do right now .
We 're going to try and get all , something like , I don 't know , 1,500 thumbs in this room connected in a single node .
And we have to connect both levels , so if you 're up there , you 're going to be reaching down and reaching up .
Now — — before we get started -- This is great . You 're excited to play . — before we get started , can I have the slides back up here really quick , because if you get good at this game , I want you to know there are some advanced levels .
So this is the kind of simple level , right ?
But there are advanced configurations .
This is called the Death Star Configuration .
Any Star Wars fans ?
And this one 's called the Möbius Strip .
Any science geeks , you get that one .
This is the hardest level . This is the extreme .
So we 'll stick with the normal one for now , and I 'm going to give you 30 seconds , every thumb into the node , connect the upper and the lower levels , you guys go on down there .
Thirty seconds . Into the network . Make the node .
Stand up ! It 's easier if you stand up .
Everybody , up up up up up !
Stand up , my friends .
All right .
Don 't start wrestling yet .
If you have a free thumb , wave it around , make sure it gets connected .
Okay . We need to do a last-minute thumb check .
If you have a free thumb , wave it around to make sure .
Grab that thumb !
Reach behind you . There you go .
Any other thumbs ?
Okay , on the count of three , you 're going to go .
Try to keep track . Grab , grab , grab it .
Okay ? One , two , three , go !
Did you win ? You got it ? You got it ? Excellent !
Well done . Thank you . Thank you very much .
All right .
While you are basking in the glow of having won your first massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling game , let 's do a quick recap on the positive emotions .
So curiosity .
I said " massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling . "
You were like , " What the hell is she talking about ? "
So I provoked a little curiosity .
Creativity : it took creativity to solve the problem of getting all the thumbs into the node .
I 'm reaching around and I 'm reaching up .
So you used creativity . That was great .
How about surprise ? The actual feeling of trying to wrestle two thumbs at once is pretty surprising .
You heard that sound go up in the room .
We had excitement . As you started to wrestle , maybe you 're starting to win or this person 's , like , really into it , so you kind of get the excitement going .
We have relief . You got to stand up .
You 've been sitting for awhile , so the physical relief , getting to shake it out .
We had joy . You were laughing , smiling . Look at your faces . This room is full of joy .
We had some contentment .
I didn 't see anybody sending text messages or checking their email while we were playing , so you were totally content to be playing .
The most important three emotions , awe and wonder , we had everybody connected physically for a minute .
When was the last time you were at TED and you got to connect physically with every single person in the room ?
And it 's truly awesome and wondrous .
And speaking of physical connection , you guys know I love the hormone oxytocin , you release oxytocin , you feel bonded to everyone in the room .
You guys know that the best way to release oxytocin quickly is to hold someone else 's hand for at least six seconds .
You guys were all holding hands for way more than six seconds , so we are all now biochemically primed to love each other . That is great .
And the last emotion of pride .
How many people are like me . Just admit it .
You lost both your thumbs .
It just didn 't work out for you .
That 's okay , because you learned a new skill today .
You learned , from scratch , a game you never knew before .
Now you know how to play it . You can teach other people .
So congratulations .
How many of you won just won thumb ?
All right . I have very good news for you .
According to the official rules of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling , this makes you a grandmaster of the game .
Because there aren 't that many people who know how to play , we have to kind of accelerate the program more than a game like chess .
So congratulations , grandmasters .
Win one thumb once , you will become a grandmaster .
Did anybody win both their thumbs ?
Yes . Awesome . Okay .
Get ready to update your Twitter or Facebook status .
You guys , according to the rules , are legendary grandmasters , so congratulations .
I will just leave you with this tip , if you want to play again .
The best way to become a legendary grandmaster , you 've got your two nodes going on .
Pick off the one that looks easiest .
They 're not paying attention . They look kind of weak .
Focus on that one and do something crazy with this arm .
As soon as you win , suddenly stop .
Everybody is thrown off . You go in for the kill .
That 's how you become a legendary grandmaster of massively multiplayer thumb-wrestling .
Thank you for letting me teach you my favorite game .
Wooo !
Thank you .
David Byrne : How architecture helped music evolve
As his career grew , David Byrne went from playing CBGB to Carnegie Hall . He asks : Does the venue make the music ? From outdoor drumming to Wagnerian operas to arena rock , he explores how context has pushed musical innovation .
This is the venue where , as a young man , some of the music that I wrote was first performed .
It was , remarkably , a pretty good sounding room .
With all the uneven walls and all the crap everywhere , it actually sounded pretty good .
This is a song that was recorded there .
This is not Talking Heads , in the picture anyway .
" by Talking Heads ) So the nature of the room meant that words could be understood .
The lyrics of the songs could be pretty much understood .
The sound system was kind of decent .
And there wasn 't a lot of reverberation in the room .
So the rhythms could be pretty intact too , pretty concise .
Other places around the country had similar rooms .
This is Tootsie 's Orchid Lounge in Nashville .
The music was in some ways different , but in structure and form , very much the same .
The clientele behavior was very much the same too .
And so the bands at Tootsie 's or at CBGB 's had to play loud enough -- the volume had to be loud enough to overcome people falling down , shouting out and doing whatever else they were doing .
Since then , I 've played other places that are much nicer .
I 've played the Disney Hall here and Carnegie Hall and places like that .
And it 's been very exciting .
But I also noticed that sometimes the music that I had written , or was writing at the time , didn 't sound all that great in some of those halls .
We managed , but sometimes those halls didn 't seem exactly suited to the music I was making or had made .
So I asked myself : Do I write stuff for specific rooms ?
Do I have a place , a venue , in mind when I write ?
Is that a kind of model for creativity ?
Do we all make things with a venue , a context , in mind ?
Okay , Africa .
Most of the popular music that we know now has a big part of its roots in West Africa .
And the music there , I would say , the instruments , the intricate rhythms , the way it 's played , the setting , the context , it 's all perfect . It all works perfect .
The music works perfectly in that setting .
There 's no big room to create reverberation and confuse the rhythms .
The instruments are loud enough that they can be heard without amplification , etc . , etc .
It 's no accident .
It 's perfect for that particular context .
And it would be a mess in a context like this . This is a gothic cathedral .
In a gothic cathedral , this kind of music is perfect .
It doesn 't change key , the notes are long , there 's almost no rhythm whatsoever , and the room flatters the music .
It actually improves it .
This is the room that Bach wrote some of his music for . This is the organ .
It 's not as big as a gothic cathedral , so he can write things that are a little bit more intricate .
He can , very innovatively , actually change keys without risking huge dissonances .
This is a little bit later .
This is the kind of rooms that Mozart wrote in .
I think we 're in like 1770 , somewhere around there .
They 're smaller , even less reverberant , so he can write really frilly music that 's very intricate -- and it works .
It fits the room perfectly .
This is La Scala .
It 's around the same time , I think it was built around 1776 .
People in the audience in these opera houses , when they were built , they used to yell out to one another .
They used to eat , drink and yell out to people on the stage , just like they do at CBGB 's and places like that .
If they liked an aria , they would holler and suggest that it be done again as an encore , not at the end of the show , but immediately .
And well , that was an opera experience .
This is the opera house that Wagner built for himself .
And the size of the room is not that big .
It 's smaller than this .
But Wagner made an innovation .
He wanted a bigger band .
He wanted a little more bombast , so he increased the size of the orchestra pit so he could get more low-end instruments in there .
Okay .
This is Carnegie Hall .
Obviously , this kind of thing became popular .
The halls got bigger . Carnegie Hall 's fair-sized .
It 's larger than some of the other symphony halls .
And they 're a lot more reverberant than La Scala .
Around the same , according to Alex Ross who writes for the New Yorker , this kind of rule came into effect that audiences had to be quiet -- no more eating , drinking and yelling at the stage , or gossiping with one another during the show .
They had to be very quiet .
So those two things combined meant that a different kind of music worked best in these kind of halls .
It meant that there could be extreme dynamics , which there weren 't in some of these other kinds of music .
Quiet parts could be heard that would have been drowned out by all the gossiping and shouting .
But because of the reverberation in those rooms like Carnegie Hall , the music had to be maybe a little less rhythmic and a little more textural .
This is Mahler .
It looks like Bob Dylan , but it 's Mahler .
That was Bob 's last record , yeah .
Popular music , coming along at the same time .
This is a jazz band .
According to Scott Joplin , the bands were playing on riverboats and clubs .
Again , it 's noisy . They 're playing for dancers .
There 's certain sections of the song -- the songs had different sections that the dancers really liked .
And they 'd say , " Play that part again . "
Well , there 's only so many times you can play the same section of a song over and over again for the dancers .
So the bands started to improvise new melodies .
And a new form of music was born .
These are played mainly in small rooms .
People are dancing , shouting and drinking .
So the music has to be loud enough to be heard above that .
Same thing goes true for -- that 's the beginning of the century -- for the whole of 20th-century popular music , whether it 's rock or Latin music or whatever .
[ Live music ] doesn 't really change that much .
It changes about a third of the way into the 20th century , when this became one of the primary venues for music .
And this was one way that the music got there .
Microphones enabled singers , in particular , and musicians and composers , to completely change the kind of music that they were writing .
So far , a lot of the stuff that was on the radio was live music , but singers , like Frank Sinatra , could use the mic and do things that they could never do without a microphone .
Other singers after him went even further .
This is Chet Baker .
And this kind of thing would have been impossible without a microphone .
It would have been impossible without recorded music as well .
And he 's singing right into your ear .
He 's whispering into your ears .
The effect is just electric .
It 's like the guy is sitting next to you , whispering who knows what into your ear .
So at this point , music diverged .
There 's live music , and there 's recorded music .
And they no longer have to be exactly the same .
Now there 's venues like this , a discotheque , and there 's jukeboxes in bars , where you don 't even need to have a band .
There doesn 't need to be any live performing musicians whatsoever , and the sound systems are good .
People began to make music specifically for discos and for those sound systems .
And , as with jazz , the dancers liked certain sections more than they did others .
So the early hip-hop guys would loop certain sections .
The MC would improvise lyrics in the same way that the jazz players would improvise melodies .
And another new form of music was born .
Live performance , when it was incredibly successful , ended up in what is probably , acoustically , the worst sounding venues on the planet : sports stadiums , basketball arenas and hockey arenas .
Musicians who ended up there did the best they could .
They wrote what is now called arena rock , which is medium-speed ballads .
They did the best they could given that this is what they 're writing for .
The tempos are medium . It sounds big .
It 's more a social situation than a musical situation .
And in some ways , the music that they 're writing for this place works perfectly .
So there 's more new venues .
One of the new ones is the automobile .
I grew up with a radio in a car .
But now that 's evolved into something else .
The car is a whole venue .
The music that , I would say , is written for automobile sound systems works perfectly on it .
It might not be what you want to listen to at home , but it works great in the car -- has a huge frequency spectrum , you know , big bass and high-end and the voice kind of stuck in the middle .
Automobile music , you can share with your friends .
There 's one other kind of new venue , the private MP3 player .
Presumably , this is just for Christian music .
And in some ways it 's like Carnegie Hall , or when the audience had to hush up , because you can now hear every single detail .
In other ways , it 's more like the West African music because if the music in an MP3 player gets too quiet , you turn it up , and the next minute , your ears are blasted out by a louder passage .
So that doesn 't really work .
I think pop music , mainly , it 's written today , to some extent , is written for these kind of players , for this kind of personal experience where you can hear extreme detail , but the dynamic doesn 't change that much .
So I asked myself : Okay , is this a model for creation , this adaptation that we do ?
And does it happen anywhere else ?
Well , according to David Attenborough and some other people , birds do it too -- that the birds in the canopy , where the foliage is dense , their calls tend to be high-pitched , short and repetitive .
And the birds on the floor tend to have lower pitched calls , so that they don 't get distorted when they bounce off the forest floor .
And birds like this Savannah sparrow , they tend to have a buzzing type call .
And it turns out that a sound like this is the most energy efficient and practical way to transmit their call across the fields and savannahs .
Other birds , like this tanager , have adapted within the same species .
The tananger on the East Coast of the United States , where the forests are a little denser , has one kind of call , and the tananger on the other side , on the west has a different kind of call .
So birds do it too .
And I thought : Well , if this is a model for creation , if we make music , primarily the form at least , to fit these contexts , and if we make art to fit gallery walls or museum walls , and if we write software to fit existing operating systems , is that how it works ?
Yeah . I think it 's evolutionary .
It 's adaptive .
But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there .
This is a reverse view of things from the kind of traditional Romantic view .
The Romantic view is that first comes the passion and then the outpouring of emotion , and then somehow it gets shaped into something .
And I 'm saying , well , the passion 's still there , but the vessel that it 's going to be injected into and poured into , that is instinctively and intuitively created first .
We already know where that passion is going .
But this conflict of views is kind of interesting .
The writer , Thomas Frank , says that this might be a kind of explanation why some voters vote against their best interests , that voters , like a lot of us , assume , that if they hear something that sounds like it 's sincere , that it 's coming from the gut , that it 's passionate , that it 's more authentic .
And they 'll vote for that .
So that , if somebody can fake sincerity , if they can fake passion , they stand a better chance which seems a little dangerous .
I 'm saying the two , the passion , the joy , are not mutually exclusive .
Maybe what the world needs now is for us to realize that we are like the birds .
We adapt .
We sing .
And like the birds , the joy is still there , even though we have changed what we do to fit the context .
Thank you very much .
Kevin Breel : Confessions of a depressed comic
Kevin Breel didn 't look like a depressed kid : team captain , at every party , funny and confident . But he tells the story of the night he realized that -- to save his own life -- he needed to say four simple words .
For a long time in my life , I felt like I 'd been living two different lives .
There 's the life that everyone sees , and then there 's the life that only I see .
And in the life that everyone sees , who I am is a friend , a son , a brother , a stand-up comedian and a teenager .
That 's the life everyone sees .
If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me , that 's what they would tell you .
And that 's a huge part of me . That is who I am .
And if you were to ask me to describe myself , I 'd probably say some of those same things .
And I wouldn 't be lying , but I wouldn 't totally be telling you the truth , either , because the truth is , that 's just the life everyone else sees .
In the life that only I see , who I am , who I really am , is someone who struggles intensely with depression .
I have for the last six years of my life , and I continue to every day .
Now , for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn 't really know what that means , that might surprise them to hear , because there 's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong , when you break up with your girlfriend , when you lose a loved one , when you don 't get the job you wanted .
But that 's sadness . That 's a natural thing .
That 's a natural human emotion .
Real depression isn 't being sad when something in your life goes wrong .
Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right .
That 's real depression , and that 's what I suffer from .
And to be totally honest , that 's hard for me to stand up here and say .
It 's hard for me to talk about , and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about , so much so that no one 's talking about it .
And no one 's talking about depression , but we need to be , because right now it 's a massive problem .
It 's a massive problem .
But we don 't see it on social media , right ?
We don 't see it on Facebook . We don 't see it on Twitter .
We don 't see it on the news , because it 's not happy , it 's not fun , it 's not light .
And so because we don 't see it , we don 't see the severity of it .
But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this : every 30 seconds , every 30 seconds , somewhere , someone in the world takes their own life because of depression , and it might be two blocks away , it might be two countries away , it might be two continents away , but it 's happening , and it 's happening every single day .
And we have a tendency , as a society , to look at that and go , " So what ? "
So what ? We look at that , and we go , " That 's your problem .
That 's their problem . "
We say we 're sad and we say we 're sorry , but we also say , " So what ? "
Well , two years ago it was my problem , because I sat on the edge of my bed where I 'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal .
I was suicidal , and if you were to look at my life on the surface , you wouldn 't see a kid who was suicidal .
You 'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team , the drama and theater student of the year , the English student of the year , someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party .
So you would say I wasn 't depressed , you would say I wasn 't suicidal , but you would be wrong .
You would be wrong . So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it .
I came this close to doing it .
And I didn 't , so that makes me one of the lucky ones , one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump , one of the lucky ones who survives .
Well , I survived , and that just leaves me with my story , and my story is this : In four simple words , I suffer from depression .
I suffer from depression , and for a long time , I think , I was living two totally different lives , where one person was always afraid of the other .
I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was , that I wasn 't the perfect , popular kid in high school everyone thought I was , that beneath my smile , there was struggle , and beneath my light , there was dark , and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain .
See , some people might fear girls not liking them back .
Some people might fear sharks . Some people might fear death .
But for me , for a large part of my life , I feared myself .
I feared my truth , I feared my honesty , I feared my vulnerability , and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner , like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out , and so I thought about that way every single day .
I thought about it every single day , and if I 'm being totally honest , standing here I 've thought about it again since , because that 's the sickness , that 's the struggle , that 's depression , and depression isn 't chicken pox .
You don 't beat it once and it 's gone forever .
It 's something you live with . It 's something you live in .
It 's the roommate you can 't kick out . It 's the voice you can 't ignore .
It 's the feelings you can 't seem to escape , the scariest part is that after a while , you become numb to it . It becomes normal for you , and what you really fear the most isn 't the suffering inside of you .
It 's the stigma inside of others , it 's the shame , it 's the embarrassment , it 's the disapproving look on a friend 's face , it 's the whispers in the hallway that you 're weak , it 's the comments that you 're crazy .
That 's what keeps you from getting help .
That 's what makes you hold it in and hide it .
It 's the stigma . So you hold it in and you hide it , and you hold it in and you hide it , and even though it 's keeping you in bed every day and it 's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it , you hide it , because the stigma in our society around depression is very real .
It 's very real , and if you think that it isn 't , ask yourself this : Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you 're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you 're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you 're depressed ?
That 's the stigma , because unfortunately , we live in a world where if you break your arm , everyone runs over to sign your cast , but if you tell people you 're depressed , everyone runs the other way .
That 's the stigma .
We are so , so , so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains . And that 's ignorance .
That 's pure ignorance , and that ignorance has created a world that doesn 't understand depression , that doesn 't understand mental health .
And that 's ironic to me , because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world , yet it 's one of the least discussed .
We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it 's not there and hope it 'll fix itself .
Well , it won 't . It hasn 't , and it 's not going to , because that 's wishful thinking , and wishful thinking isn 't a game plan , it 's procrastination , and we can 't procrastinate on something this important .
The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one .
Well , we haven 't done that , so we can 't really expect to find an answer when we 're still afraid of the question .
And I don 't know what the solution is .
I wish I did , but I don 't -- but I think , I think it has to start here .
It has to start with me , it has to start with you , it has to start with the people who are suffering , the ones who are hidden in the shadows .
We need to speak up and shatter the silence .
We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in , because if there 's one thing that I 've come to realize , if there 's one thing that I see as the biggest problem , it 's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others .
It 's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves , where we 're okay with who we are , because when we get honest , we see that we all struggle and we all suffer .
Whether it 's with this , whether it 's with something else , we all know what it is to hurt .
We all know what it is to have pain in our heart , and we all know how important it is to heal .
But right now , depression is society 's deep cut that we 're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it 's not there .
Well , it is there . It is there , and you know what ? It 's okay .
Depression is okay . If you 're going through it , know that you 're okay .
And know that you 're sick , you 're not weak , and it 's an issue , not an identity , because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others , you can see depression for what it really is , and that 's just a part of life , just a part of life , and as much as I hate , as much as I hate some of the places , some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to , in a lot of ways I 'm grateful for it .
Because yeah , it 's put me in the valleys , but only to show me there 's peaks , and yeah it 's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light .
My pain , more than anything in 19 years on this planet , has given me perspective , and my hurt , my hurt has forced me to have hope , have hope and to have faith , faith in myself , faith in others , faith that it can get better , that we can change this , that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance , fight back against intolerance , and more than anything , learn to love ourselves , learn to accept ourselves for who we are , the people we are , not the people the world wants us to be .
Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn 't mean ignoring your dark .
The world I believe in is one where we 're measured by our ability to overcome adversities , not avoid them .
The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say , " I 'm going through hell , " and they can look back at me and go , " Me too , " and that 's okay , and it 's okay because depression is okay . We 're people .
We 're people , and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry , and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness , then I 'm here to tell you you 're wrong .
You 're wrong , because it 's the opposite .
We 're people , and we have problems .
We 're not perfect , and that 's okay .
So we need to stop the ignorance , stop the intolerance , stop the stigma , and stop the silence , and we need to take away the taboos , take a look at the truth , and start talking , because the only way we 're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together , by standing strong together .
And I believe that we can .
I believe that we can . Thank you guys so much .
This is a dream come true . Thank you .
Thank you .
Ronny Edry : Israel and Iran : A love story ?
When war between Israel and Iran seemed imminent , Israeli graphic designer Ronny Edry shared a poster on Facebook of himself and his daughter with a bold message : " Iranians ... we [ heart ] you . " Other Israelis quickly created their own posters with the same message -- and Iranians responded in kind . The simple act of communication inspired surprising Facebook communities like " Israel loves Iran , " " Iran loves Israel " and even " Palestine loves Israel . "
On March 14 , this year , I posted this poster on Facebook .
This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag .
I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted .
A few days ago , I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store , and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other , and the owner was explaining to the client that we 're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel .
And the client was saying , no , it 's 10,000 a day .
This is the context . This is where we are now in Israel .
We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now , and we have people , you know , afraid .
It 's like every year it 's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran .
It 's like , if we don 't act now , it 's too late forever , for 10 years now .
So at some point it became , you know , to me , I 'm a graphic designer , so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before .
Most of the time , I make posters , I post them on Facebook , my friends like it , don 't like it , most of the time don 't like it , don 't share it , don 't nothing , and it 's another day .
So I went to sleep , and that was it for me .
And later on in the night , I woke up because I 'm always waking up in the night , and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots , you know , on Facebook , which I 've never seen before .
And I was like , " What 's going on ? "
So I come to the computer and I start looking on , and suddenly I see many people talking to me , most of them I don 't know , and a few of them from Iran , which is -- What ?
Because you have to understand , in Israel we don 't talk with people from Iran .
We don 't know people from Iran .
It 's like , on Facebook , you have friends only from -- it 's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook .
And now people from Iran are talking to me .
So I start answering this girl , and she 's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come , because they don 't have a computer , she asked her family to come to see the poster , and they 're all sitting in the living room crying .
So I 'm like , whoa .
I ask my wife to come , and I tell her , you have to see that .
People are crying , and she came , she read the text , and she started to cry .
And everybody 's crying now .
So I don 't know what to do , so my first reflex , as a graphic designer , is , you know , to show everybody what I 'd just seen , and people started to see them and to share them , and that 's how it started .
The day after , when really it became a lot of talking , I said to myself , and my wife said to me , I also want a poster , so this is her .
Because it 's working , put me in a poster now .
But more seriously , I was like , okay , these ones work , but it 's not just about me , it 's about people from Israel who want to say something .
So I 'm going to shoot all the people I know , if they want , and I 'm going to put them in a poster and I 'm going to share them .
So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them , give me a picture , I will make you a poster .
And that 's how it started . And that 's how , really , it 's unleashed , because suddenly people from Facebook , friends and others , just understand that they can be part of it .
It 's not just one dude making one poster , it 's -- we can be part of it , so they start sending me pictures and ask me , " Make me a poster . Post it .
Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too . "
It became , you know , at some point it was really , really intense .
I mean , so many pictures , so I asked friends to come , graphic designers most of them , to make posters with me , because I didn 't have the time .
It was a huge amount of pictures .
So for a few days , that 's how my living room was .
And we received Israeli posters , Israeli images , but also lots of comments , lots of messages from Iran .
And we took these messages and we made posters out of it , because I know people : They don 't read , they see images .
If it 's an image , they may read it .
So here are a few of them .
This one is really moving for me because it 's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning , and now that she sees the posters that we 're sending , she starts -- she said that she changed her mind , and now she loves that blue , she loves that star , and she loves that flag , talking about the Israeli flag , and she wished that we 'd meet and come to visit one another , and just a few days after I posted the first poster .
The day after , Iranians started to respond with their own posters .
They have graphic designers . What ?
Crazy , crazy .
So you can see they are still shy , they don 't want to show their faces , but they want to spread the message .
They want to respond . They want to say the same thing .
So . And now it 's communication .
It 's a two-way story . It 's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message , one to each other .
This never happened before , and this is two people supposed to be enemies , we 're on the verge of a war , and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say , " I like this guy . I love those guys . "
And it became really big at some point .
And then it became news .
Because when you 're seeing the Middle East , you see only the bad news .
And suddenly , there is something that was happening that was good news . So the guys on the news , they say , " Okay , let 's talk about this . "
I remember one day , Michal , she was talking with the journalist , and she was asking him , " Who 's gonna see the show ? " And he said , " Everybody . "
So she said , " Everybody in Palestine , in where ? Israel ?
Who is everybody ? " " Everybody . "
They said , " Syria ? " " Syria . "
" Lebanon ? " " Lebanon . "
At some point , he just said , " 40 million people are going to see you today .
It 's everybody . " The Chinese .
And we were just at the beginning of the story .
Something crazy also happened .
Every time a country started talking about it , like Germany , America , wherever , a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories , so at the beginning we had " Iran-Loves-Israel , " which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran , saying , " Okay , Israel loves Iran ?
I give you Iran-Loves-Israel . "
You have Palestine-Loves-Israel .
You have Lebanon that just -- a few days ago .
And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message , to people sending their love , one to each other .
The moment I really understood that something was happening , a friend of mine told me , " Google the word ' Israel . ' " And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing , " Israel " or " Iran . "
We really changed how people see the Middle East .
Because you 're not in the Middle East .
You 're somewhere over there , and then you want to see the Middle East , so you go on Google and you say , " Israel , " and they give you the bad stuff .
And for a few days you got those images .
Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number , 80,831 , and two million people last week went on the page and shared , liked , I don 't know , commented on one of the photos .
So for five months now , that 's what we are doing , me , Michal , a few of my friends , are just making images .
We 're showing a new reality by just making images because that 's how the world perceives us .
They see images of us , and they see bad images .
So we 're working on making good images . End of story .
Look at this one . This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page .
This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran . This is not my page .
This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page .
This is the enemy .
What ?
And it 's going both ways .
It 's like , we are showing respect , one to each other .
And we 're understanding . And you show compassion .
And you become friends .
And at some point , you become friends on Facebook , and you become friends in life .
You can go and travel and meet people .
And I was in Munich a few weeks ago .
I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me , " Okay , you 're going to be in Europe , I 'm coming . I 'm coming from France , from Holland , from Germany , " of course , and from Israel people came , and we just met there for the first time in real life .
I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time . And we just shake hands , and have a coffee and a nice discussion , and we talk about food and basketball .
And that was the end of it .
Remember that image from the beginning ?
At some point we met in real life , and we became friends .
And it goes the other way around .
Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel , born and raised in Iran , lives in Germany , afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us , decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel , and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says , " Okay , not that big a deal . "
So a few weeks ago , the stress is getting higher , so we start this new campaign called " Not ready to die in your war . "
I mean , it 's plus / minus the same message , but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it .
And again , something amazing happened , something that we didn 't have on the first wave of the campaign .
Now people from Iran , the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent , you know , their foot and half their faces , now they 're sending their faces , and they 're saying , " Okay , no problem , we 're into it . We are with you . "
Just read where those guys are from .
And for every guy from Israel , you 've got someone from Iran .
Just people sending their pictures .
Crazy , yes ?
So -- So you may ask yourself , who is this dude ?
My name is Ronny Edry , and I 'm 41 , I 'm an Israeli , I 'm a father of two , I 'm a husband , and I 'm a graphic designer . I 'm teaching graphic design .
And I 'm not that naive , because a lot of the time I 've been asked , many times I 've been asked , " Yeah , but , this is really naive , sending flowers over , I mean — " I was in the army . I was in the paratroopers for three years , and I know how it looks from the ground .
I know how it can look really bad .
So to me , this is the courageous thing to do , to try to reach the other side before it 's too late , because when it 's going to be too late , it 's going to be too late .
And sometimes war is inevitable , sometimes , but maybe [ with ] effort , we can avoid it .
Maybe as people , because especially in Israel , we 're in a democracy . We have the freedom of speech , and maybe that little thing can change something .
And really , we can be our own ambassadors .
We can just send a message and hope for the best .
So I want to ask Michal , my wife , to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image , because it 's all about images .
And maybe that image will help us change something .
Just raise that . Exactly .
And I 'm just going to take a picture of it , and I 'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of " Israelis for peace " or something .
Oh my God .
Don 't cry .
Thank you guys .
Charles Moore : Seas of plastic
Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash . Now he 's drawing attention to the growing , choking problem of plastic debris in our seas .
Let 's talk trash .
You know , we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II .
After the war , we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime .
Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes .
Mental note to the liberators : throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don 't biodegrade .
Only we humans make waste that nature can 't digest .
Plastics are also hard to recycle .
A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream .
It 's diddly-point-squat .
That 's the percentage we recycle .
Now , melting point has a lot to do with this .
Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal .
It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off the oily contaminants for which it is a sponge .
Half of each year 's 100 billion pounds of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash .
A large , unruly fraction of our trash will flow downriver to the sea .
Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the L.A. airport .
And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the diesel plant we visited yesterday .
In spite of deposit fees , much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles .
We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes , here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan , who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail .
Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California .
Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja 's sparsely populated central coast .
Notice that the bottles here have caps on them .
Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate , PET , will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization .
Also , the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic , polypropylene .
They will float in seawater , but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills .
Let 's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo .
After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific , while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas .
After ten years , a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch , while ours litter the Philippines .
After 20 years , we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre .
It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks .
A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach .
Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish , like cigarette lighters ...
but , mostly bottle caps .
Sadly , their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface .
The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals .
This is Mae West , still alive at a zookeeper 's home in New Orleans .
I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem , so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula , at the east end of our long beach .
We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown .
I offered five cents each for bottle caps .
I got plenty of takers .
Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected .
I thought I would spend 20 bucks .
That day I ended up spending nearly 60 .
I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro .
Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display .
In spite of my " girly man " hat , crocheted from plastic shopping bags , they shook my hand .
I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton .
Here 's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like .
Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this .
And this .
Now , when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this .
And this particular beach is Kailua Beach , the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington .
Now , how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton ?
We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes , from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter .
Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater .
We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean , at the base of the food chain , was ingesting these poison pills .
We did hundreds of necropsies , and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs .
The record-holder , only two-and-a-half inches long , had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach .
Now , you can buy certified organic produce .
But no fishmonger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish .
This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations .
The throwaway society cannot be contained -- it has gone global .
We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff .
We have to throw it away .
Now , the market can do a lot for us , but it can 't fix the natural system in the ocean we 've broken .
All the king 's horses and all the king 's men ...
will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again .
Narrator : The levels are increasing , the amount of packaging is increasing , the " throwaway " concept of living is proliferating , and it 's showing up in the ocean .
Anchor : He offers no hope of cleaning it up .
Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process .
The solution , Moore says , is to stop the plastic at its source : stop it on land before it falls in the ocean .
And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world , he doesn 't hold out much hope for that , either .
This is Brian Rooney for Nightline , in Long Beach , California .
Charles Moore : Thank you .
Carolyn Steel : How food shapes our cities
Every day , in a city the size of London , 30 million meals are served . But where does all the food come from ? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city , and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world .
How do you feed a city ?
It 's one of the great questions of our time .
Yet it 's one that 's rarely asked .
We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant , or indeed into this theater 's foyer in about an hour 's time , there is going to be food there waiting for us , having magically come from somewhere .
But when you think that every day for a city the size of London , enough food has to be produced , transported , bought and sold , cooked , eaten , disposed of , and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth , it 's remarkable that cities get fed at all .
We live in places like this as if they 're the most natural things in the world , forgetting that because we 're animals and that we need to eat , we 're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were .
And as more of us move into cities , more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me -- it 's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil -- in order to feed us .
These are extraordinary landscapes , but few of us ever get to see them .
And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either .
As more of us move into cities , more of us are eating meat , so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals .
And given that it takes three times as much grain -- actually ten times as much grain -- to feed a human if it 's passed through an animal first , that 's not a very efficient way of feeding us .
And it 's an escalating problem too .
By 2050 , it 's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities .
And it 's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed .
So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand .
And that 's going to pose an enormous problem .
Six billion hungry carnivores to feed , by 2050 .
That 's a big problem . And actually if we carry on as we are , it 's a problem we 're very unlikely to be able to solve .
Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land .
Although at the same time we 're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion .
We 're very hungry for fossil fuels too .
It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West .
And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost , we don 't actually value it .
Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away .
And to end all of this , at the end of this long process , we 're not even managing to feed the planet properly .
A billion of us are obese , while a further billion starve .
None of it makes very much sense .
And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations , it 's a grim picture .
As we 're moving into cities , the world is also embracing a Western diet .
And if we look to the future , it 's an unsustainable diet .
So how did we get here ?
And more importantly , what are we going to do about it ?
Well , to answer the slightly easier question first , about 10,000 years ago , I would say , is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East , known as the Fertile Crescent .
Because , as you can see , it was crescent shaped .
And it was also fertile .
And it was here , about 10,000 years ago , that two extraordinary inventions , agriculture and urbanism , happened roughly in the same place and at the same time .
This is no accident , because agriculture and cities are bound together . They need each other .
Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements .
And if we look at what those settlements were like , we see they were compact .
They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur , that were , in fact , effectively , spiritualized , central food distribution centers .
Because it was the temples that organized the harvest , gathered in the grain , offered it to the gods , and then offered the grain that the gods didn 't eat back to the people .
So , if you like , the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them .
And in fact , that 's true of every ancient city .
But of course not all of them were that small .
Famously , Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D.
So how did a city like this feed itself ?
The answer is what I call " ancient food miles . "
Basically , Rome had access to the sea , which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away .
This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world , because it was very difficult to transport food over roads , which were rough .
And the food obviously went off very quickly .
So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves .
And , in fact , you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long , drawn out militarized shopping spree , really .
In fact -- I love the fact , I just have to mention this : Rome in fact used to import oysters from London , at one stage . I think that 's extraordinary .
So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite .
But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world .
If we look at a map of London in the 17th century , we can see that its grain , which is coming in from the Thames , along the bottom of this map .
So the grain markets were to the south of the city .
And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside , which was the main market , were also grain markets .
And if you look at the name of one of those streets , Bread Street , you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago .
And the same of course was true for fish .
Fish was , of course , coming in by river as well . Same thing .
And of course Billingsgate , famously , was London 's fish market , operating on-site here until the mid-1980s .
Which is extraordinary , really , when you think about it .
Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port .
This is another thing about food in cities : Once its roots into the city are established , they very rarely move .
Meat is a very different story because , of course , animals could walk into the city .
So much of London 's meat was coming from the northwest , from Scotland and Wales .
So it was coming in , and arriving at the city at the northwest , which is why Smithfield , London 's very famous meat market , was located up there .
Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on , to the northeast .
I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this . Anyway , and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes .
And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside , that 's where they were sold , which is why it 's called Poultry .
And , in fact , if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age , you can trace food coming in to it .
You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food , both by reading the names of the streets , which give you a lot of clues .
Friday Street , in a previous life , is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday .
But also you have to imagine it full of food .
Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold .
And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from .
In fact , if you were having Sunday lunch , the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier .
So this was obviously an organic city , part of an organic cycle .
And then 10 years later everything changed .
This is an image of the Great Western in 1840 .
And as you can see , some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep .
So all of a sudden , these animals are no longer walking into market .
They 're being slaughtered out of sight and mind , somewhere in the countryside .
And they 're coming into the city by rail .
And this changes everything .
To start off with , it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities , really any size and shape , in any place .
Cities used to be constrained by geography ; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means .
All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography .
And as you can see from these maps of London , in the 90 years after the trains came , it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot , and so on , to a large splurge , that would be very , very difficult to feed with anybody on foot , either animals or people .
And of course that was just the beginning . After the trains came cars , and really this marks the end of this process .
It 's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all .
And this is the kind of city that 's devoid of smell , devoid of mess , certainly devoid of people , because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape .
In fact , what they did to get food was they got in their cars , drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts , came back with a week 's worth of shopping , and wondered what on earth to do with it .
And this really is the moment when our relationship , both with food and cities , changes completely .
Here we have food -- that used to be the center , the social core of the city -- at the periphery .
It used to be a social event , buying and selling food .
Now it 's anonymous .
We used to cook ; now we just add water , or a little bit of an egg if you 're making a cake or something .
We don 't smell food to see if it 's okay to eat .
We just read the back of a label on a packet .
And we don 't value food . We don 't trust it .
So instead of trusting it , we fear it .
And instead of valuing it , we throw it away .
One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they 've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder .
By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place , they 've actually distanced us from our most important relationship , which is that of us and nature .
And also they 've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver , that , as we 've seen , are unsustainable .
So what are we going to do about that ?
It 's not a new question .
500 years ago it 's what Thomas More was asking himself .
This is the frontispiece of his book " Utopia . "
And it was a series of semi-independent city-states , if that sounds remotely familiar , a day 's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad , and grew vegetables in their back gardens , and ate communal meals together , and so on .
And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia , even though More never framed it that way .
And here is another very famous " Utopian " vision , that of Ebenezer Howard , " The Garden City . "
Same idea : series of semi-independent city-states , little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around , joined to one another by railway .
the ordering principle of his vision .
It even got built , but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had .
And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas , that they are Utopian .
Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately .
It was a kind of joke , because it 's got a double derivation from the Greek .
It can either mean a good place , or no place .
Because it 's an ideal . It 's an imaginary thing . We can 't have it .
And I think , as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling , that makes it not much use .
So I 've come up with an alternative , which is Sitopia , from the ancient Greek , " sitos " for food , and " topos " for place .
I believe we already live in Sitopia .
We live in a world shaped by food , and if we realize that , we can use food as a really powerful tool -- a conceptual tool , design tool , to shape the world differently .
So if we were to do that , what might Sitopia look like ?
Well I think it looks a bit like this .
I have to use this slide . It 's just the look on the face of the dog .
But anyway , this is -- it 's food at the center of life , at the center of family life , being celebrated , being enjoyed , people taking time for it .
This is where food should be in our society .
But you can 't have scenes like this unless you have people like this .
By the way , these can be men as well .
It 's people who think about food , who think ahead , who plan , who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them .
We need these people . We 're part of a network .
Because without these kinds of people we can 't have places like this .
Here , I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable .
But networks , markets where food is being grown locally .
It 's common . It 's fresh .
It 's part of the social life of the city .
Because without that , you can 't have this kind of place , food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape , and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole .
Cows with a view .
Steaming piles of humus .
This is basically bringing the whole thing together .
And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto .
It 's a greenhouse , where kids get told all about food and growing their own food .
Here is a plant called Kevin , or maybe it 's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin . I don 't know .
But anyway , these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important .
So Sitopia , for me , is really a way of seeing .
It 's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere .
The trick is to join them up , to use food as a way of seeing .
And if we do that , we 're going to stop seeing cities as big , metropolitan , unproductive blobs , like this .
We 're going to see them more like this , as part of the productive , organic framework of which they are inevitably a part , symbiotically connected .
But of course , that 's not a great image either , because we need not to be producing food like this anymore .
We need to be thinking more about permaculture , which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing .
It 's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives .
The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago .
It 's Ambrogio Lorenzetti 's " Allegory of Good Government . "
It 's about the relationship between the city and the countryside .
And I think the message of this is very clear .
If the city looks after the country , the country will look after the city .
And I want us to ask now , what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today ?
What would an allegory of good government look like today ?
Because I think it 's an urgent question .
It 's one we have to ask , and we have to start answering .
We know we are what we eat .
We need to realize that the world is also what we eat .
But if we take that idea , we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better .
Thank you very much .
Eddi Reader : " Kiteflyer 's Hill "
Singer / songwriter Eddi Reader performs " Kiteflyer 's Hill , " a tender look back at a lost love . With Thomas Dolby on piano .
This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer 's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going " When is he coming back ? When is he coming back ? "
So this is another one dedicated to that guy ...
who I 've got over .
But this is " Kiteflyer 's Hill . "
It 's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan , actually , for me .
Boo Hewerdine , Thomas Dolby , thank you very much for inviting me . It 's been a blessing singing for you .
Thank you very much .
Do you remember when we used to go up to Kiteflyer 's Hill ? Those summer nights , so still with all of the city beneath us and all of our lives ahead before cruel and foolish words were cruelly and foolishly said Some nights I think of you and then I go up on Kiteflyer 's Hill wrapped up against the winter chill And somewhere in the city beneath me you lie asleep in your bed and I wonder if ever just briefly do I creep in your dreams now and then Where are you now ? My wild summer love Where are you now ? Have the years been kind ? And do you think of me sometimes up on Kiteflyer 's Hill ? Oh , I pray you one day will We won 't say a word We won 't need them Sometimes silence is best We 'll just stand in the still of the evening and whisper farewell to loneliness Where are you now ? My wild summer love Where are you now ? Do you think of me sometimes ? And do you ever make that climb ? Where are you now ? My wild summer love Where are you now ? Have the years been kind ? And do you ever make that climb up on Kiteflyer 's Hill ? Kiteflyer 's ... [ French ] Where are you ? Where are you now ? Where are you now ? Kiteflyer 's ... Gracias . Thank you very much .
Christopher C. Deam : The Airstream , restyled
In this low-key , image-packed talk from 2002 , designer Christopher C. Deam talks about his makeover of an American classic : the Airstream travel trailer .
a plastic laminate company , which is the largest plastic laminate company in the world -- they asked me to design a trade show booth for exhibition at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York , in 2000 .
So looking at their three main markets for their product which were basically transportation design , interiors and furniture , we came up with the solution of taking an old Airstream trailer and gutting it , and trying to portray laminate , and a trailer , in kind of a fresh , new contemporary look .
When this trailer showed up at my shop in Berkeley , I 'd actually never stepped foot in an Airstream trailer , or any other trailer .
So I can be somebody that can look at this in a totally fresh perspective and see if I can optimize it in its most idealistic fashion .
I decided I had to do some research and really figure out what had gone wrong somewhere along the history of Airstream .
What I discovered in these interiors is that there was a disconnect between the exterior shell and the interior architecture of the pieces .
In that the shell was originally conceived as a lightweight , modern , futuristic , high-tech pod for hurtling down the freeway , and the interiors were completely out of sync with that .
In fact it appeared like they referenced a mountain cabin .
That seemed really like a crisis to me , that they had never been able to develop a vocabulary about escape , and about travel , and modernity in this trailer that was consistent with the shell .
We really needed to do some archeology in the trailer itself to figure out what 's authentic in an Airstream trailer , and what feels like it has true purpose and utility .
We stripped out all the vinyl and zolatone paint that was covering up this just fantastic aluminum shell .
We took off all the visible hardware and trim that was kind of doing the country cabin thing .
I literally drew on the walls of the trailer , mocked it up in cardboard , we 'd come in and cut , decide things were wrong , pull it out , put it back in .
The main goal was to smooth out the interior , and begin to speak about motion , and mobility , and independence .
The biggest difficulty on one of these trailers is that when you 're designing there 's actually no logical place to stop and start materials because of the continuous form of the trailer .
There 's no such things as two walls and a ceiling coming together , where you can change materials and shapes .
So that became a challenge .
Compounding that , the material of choice , laminate , that I was trying to highlight , only bends in two dimensions .
It 's a compound curve interior .
What I had to devise was a way of fooling the eye into believing that all these panels are curved with the shell .
What I came up with was a series of second skins that basically float over the aluminum shell .
And what I was trying to do there was direct your eye in the space , so that you would perceive the geometry in a different way , and that the casework wouldn 't break up the space .
They also gave us a way to run power and rewire the trailer without tearing out the skin , so they function as an electrical chase .
That 's the trailer , pretty much finished .
That trailer led to another commission , to participate in whats called Tokyo Designers Block .
Its a week of furniture design events in Tokyo , in October .
Teruo Kurosaki , who owns a furniture company called Idee , he asked me to ship him two trailers to Tokyo .
He said one he would like to make a real trailer , functioning , and we would sell that one .
Trailer number two , you have a blank slate , you can to anything you want .
We came up with a fantasy scenario of a DJ traveling around the States , that would collect records and go on tours .
This trailer housed two turntables , mixer , wet bar , fridge , integrated sound system .
It 's got a huge couch , fits quite a few people , and basically we 'd had a great time with this .
And so in this trailer I took it upon myself to think about travel , and escape , in an idiosyncratic sense .
A lot of these ideas migrated into the production trailers for Airstream .
This brings us up to the time that I started consulting to Airstream .
They came to me and said , " Well , what can we do to freshen this thing up ?
And do you think kids , you know , skateboarders , surfers , rock climbers , would use these things ? "
And I said , " Well , not in that interior . "
Anyway , I went out to Airstream about six times during the process of building this prototype , and it 's called the Bambi prototype .
I thought , " Finally , oh yeah great , big company , I 'm gonna work with somebody with money for tooling and molding . "
And I walked in their prototype facility , and it 's exactly like my shop , only bigger -- same tools , same things .
So the problem became -- and they set this dilemma to me -- that you have to design the interior using only our existing technology , and there 's no money for tooling or molding .
The trailers themselves are actually hand-built .
All the casework is hand-scribed in , uniquely , so you can 't just cut 100 parts for 100 trailers , you have to cut them big , and every single one is hand-fit .
They didn 't want to go to a componentized system .
And there it is , that 's the Bambi 16 .
Elliot Krane : The mystery of chronic pain
We think of pain as a symptom , but there are cases where the nervous system develops feedback loops and pain becomes a terrifying disease in itself . Starting with the story of a girl whose sprained wrist turned into a nightmare , Elliot Krane talks about the complex mystery of chronic pain , and reviews the facts we 're just learning about how it works and how to treat it .
I 'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist , so I put children to sleep for a living .
And I 'm an academic , so I put audiences to sleep for free .
But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children 's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto .
And it 's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning , that pain is a disease .
Now most of the time , you think of pain as a symptom of a disease , and that 's true most of the time .
It 's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation .
But about 10 percent of the time , after the patient has recovered from one of those events , pain persists .
It persists for months and oftentimes for years , and when that happens , it is its own disease .
And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it , I want to show you how it feels for my patients .
So imagine , if you will , that I 'm stroking your arm with this feather , as I 'm stroking my arm right now .
Now , I want you to imagine that I 'm stroking it with this .
Please keep your seat .
A very different feeling .
Now what does it have to do with chronic pain ?
Imagine , if you will , these two ideas together .
Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather , but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling -- and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain .
In fact , imagine something even worse .
Imagine I were to stroke your child 's arm with this feather , and their brain [ was ] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch .
That was the experience of my patient , Chandler , whom you see in the photograph .
As you can see , she 's a beautiful , young woman .
She was 16 years old last year when I met her , and she aspired to be a professional dancer .
And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals , she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist .
Now you would probably imagine , as she did , that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person 's life .
Wrap it in an ACE bandage , take some ibuprofen for a week or two , and that 's the end of the story .
But in Chandler 's case , that was the beginning of the story .
This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain .
You can see that the arm is discolored , purplish in color .
It was cadaverically cold to the touch .
The muscles were frozen , paralyzed -- dystonic is how we refer to that .
The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands , to her fingertips , from her wrist up to her elbow , almost all the way to her shoulder .
But the worst part was , not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day .
The worst part was that she had allodynia , the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch .
The lightest touch of her arm -- the touch of a hand , the touch even of a sleeve , of a garment , as she put it on -- caused excruciating , burning pain .
How can the nervous system get this so wrong ?
How can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame ?
Well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house .
In your house , wires run in the wall , from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb .
And when you turn the switch on , the light goes on .
And when you turn the switch off , the light goes off .
So people imagine the nervous system is just like that .
If you hit your thumb with a hammer , these wires in your arm -- that , of course , we call nerves -- transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires , new nerves , take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt .
But the situation , of course , in the human body is far more complicated than that .
Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion , in fact , what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions -- laterally , vertically , up and down in the spinal cord -- and they start interacting with other adjacent cells .
These cells , called glial cells , were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together , like the nerves .
But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation , amplification and , in the case of pain , the distortion of sensory experiences .
These glial cells become activated .
Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins , which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves , and they start releasing their neurotransmitters , and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells , and so on and so forth , until what we have is a positive feedback loop .
It 's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch , the toilet flushed three doors down , or your dishwasher went on , or your computer monitor turned off .
That 's crazy , but that 's , in fact , what happens with chronic pain .
And that 's why pain becomes its own disease .
The nervous system has plasticity .
It changes , and it morphs in response to stimuli .
Well , what do we do about that ?
What can we do in a case like Chandler 's ?
We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time .
We treat them with symptom-modifying drugs -- painkillers -- which are , frankly , not very effective for this kind of pain .
We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet , and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics .
And most importantly , what we do is we use a rigorous , and often uncomfortable , process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life .
And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency , despair and depression that always accompanies severe , chronic pain .
It 's successful , as you can see from this video of Chandler , who , two months after we first met her , is now doings a back flip .
And I had lunch with her yesterday because she 's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here , and she 's doing absolutely fantastic .
But the future is actually even brighter .
The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem , as we have now , but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells , or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate , that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up , or plasticity , that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain .
So I have hope that in the future , the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized , who said , " My philosophy : No pain , no pain . "
Thank you very much .
Bruce Aylward : How we 'll stop polio for good
Polio is almost completely eradicated . But as Bruce Aylward says : Almost isn 't good enough with a disease this terrifying . Aylward lays out the plan to continue the scientific miracle that ended polio in most of the world -- and to snuff it out everywhere , forever .
I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea .
Actually , it 's a really big idea .
But to get us started , I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world .
Now I bet , in this audience , you 're thinking of some really incredible technology , some stuff that I haven 't even heard of , I 'm absolutely sure .
But I 'm also sure , pretty sure , that absolutely nobody is thinking of this .
This is a polio vaccine .
And it 's a great thing actually that nobody 's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted .
This is a great technology .
We can take it completely for granted .
But it wasn 't always that way .
Even here in California , if we were to go back just a few years , it was a very different story .
People were terrified of this disease .
They were terrified of polio , and it would cause public panic .
And it was because of scenes like this .
In this scene , people are living in an iron lung .
These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before , and then two days later , they can no longer breathe , and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs , but also their breathing muscles .
And they were going to spend the rest of their lives , usually , in this iron lung to breathe for them .
This disease was terrifying .
There was no cure , and there was no vaccine .
The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it .
Twenty years later , they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine .
It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s .
Finally , a vaccine that could stop this awful disease , and here in the United States it had an incredible impact .
As you can see , the virus stopped , and it stopped very , very fast .
But this wasn 't the case everywhere in the world .
And it happened so fast in the United States , however , that even just last month Jon Stewart said this : Jon Stewart : Where is polio still active ?
Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated .
Bruce Aylward : Oops . Jon , polio 's almost been eradicated .
But the reality is that polio still exists today .
We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists .
This is the picture .
There 's not very much left in the world .
But the reason there 's not very much left is because there 's been an extraordinary public / private partnership working behind the scenes , almost unknown , I 'm sure to most of you here today .
It 's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease , and it 's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic .
But just last year , we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn 't good enough with a virus like polio .
And this is the reason : in two countries that hadn 't had this disease for more than probably a decade , on opposite sides of the globe , there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks .
Hundreds of people were paralyzed .
Hundreds of people died -- children as well as adults .
And in both cases , we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses , and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries .
They had come from thousands of miles away .
And in one case , it originated on another continent .
And not only that , but when they came into these countries , then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia , where , for the first time in over a decade last year , children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years .
Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you , these are under control now , and it looks like they 'll probably stop very , very quickly .
But the message was very clear .
Polio is still a devastating , explosive disease .
It 's just happening in another part of the world .
And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis .
So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership , the Polio Partnership , is trying to do .
We 're not trying to control polio .
We 're not trying to get it down to just a few cases , because this disease is like a root fire ; it can explode again if you don 't snuff it out completely .
So what we 're looking for is a permanent solution .
We want a world in which every child , just like you guys , can take for granted a polio-free world .
So we 're looking for a permanent solution , and this is where we get lucky .
This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary .
This virus can only survive in people .
It can 't live for a very long time in people .
It doesn 't survive in the environment hardly at all .
And we 've got pretty good vaccines , as I 've just showed you .
So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely .
What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth .
Now we don 't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this , to eradicating diseases .
It 's been tried six times in the last century , and it 's been successful exactly once .
And this is because disease eradication , it 's still the venture capital of public health .
The risks are massive , but the pay-off -- economic , humanitarian , motivational -- it 's absolutely huge .
One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days -- in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs .
And if we can finish polio eradication , the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone .
So those are the kind of stakes that we 're after .
But smallpox eradication was hard ; it was very , very hard .
And polio eradication , in many ways , is even tougher , and there 's a few reasons for that .
The first is that , when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago , more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox .
And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries .
So it was a massive effort .
The second challenge we had was -- in contrast to the smallpox vaccine , which was very stable , and a single dose protected you for life -- the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile .
It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we 've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it 's exposed to too much heat , and we can tell that it 's not a good vaccine to use on a child -- it 's not potent ; it 's not going to protect them .
Even then , kids need many doses of the vaccine .
But the third challenge we have -- and probably even bigger one , the biggest challenge -- is that , in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy -- every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash .
So you could get around the disease ; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off .
With polio it 's almost completely different .
The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease .
So you can 't see the enemy most of the time , and as a result , we 've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox .
We 've had to create one of the largest social movements in history .
There 's over 10 million people , probably 20 million people , largely volunteers , who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime .
These people , these 20 million people , vaccinate over 500 million children every single year , multiple times at the peak of our operation .
Now giving the polio vaccine is simple .
It 's just two drops , like that .
But reaching 500 million people is much , much tougher .
And these vaccinators , these volunteers , they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest , densest urban slums in the world .
They 've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote , difficult to reach places in the world .
And they also have to dodge bullets , because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children , even in areas affected by conflict .
One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago -- a place which has eradicated polio , not once , but twice , because they got reinfected .
He was sitting outside of the road , watching one of these polio campaigns unfold , and a few months later he wrote : " This is foreign aid at its most heroic . "
And these heroes , they come from every walk of life , all sorts of backgrounds .
But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International .
This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years .
They 're right at the center of the whole thing .
Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication -- more than 15 years , much longer than it should have -- but once it was built , the results were striking .
Within a couple of years , every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses , with the exception of four countries that you see here .
And in each of those , it was only part of the country .
And then , by 1999 , one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide -- proof of concept .
And then today , there 's been a 99 percent reduction -- greater than 99 percent reduction -- in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease .
When we started , over 20 years ago , 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus .
Last year , it was 1,000 .
And at the same time , the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas .
It 's been working to help control pandemic flu , SARS for example .
It 's also tried to save children by doing other things -- giving vitamin A drops , giving measles shots , giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns .
But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us , the international community , to reach every single child , every single community , the most vulnerable people in the world , with the most basic of health services , irrespective of geography , poverty , culture and even conflict .
So things were looking very exciting , and then about five years ago , this virus , this ancient virus , started to fight back .
The first problem we ran into was that , in these last four countries , the strongholds of this virus , we just couldn 't seem to get the virus rooted out .
And then to make the matters even worse , the virus started to spread out of these four places , especially northern India and northern Nigeria , into much of Africa , Asia , and even into Europe , causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades .
And then , in one of the most important , tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world , we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have .
In conditions like this , the vaccine just couldn 't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to .
Now at that time , there was a great , as you can imagine , frustration -- let 's call it frustration -- it started to grow very , very quickly .
And all of a sudden , some very important voices in the world of public health started to say , " Hang on .
We should abandon this idea of eradication .
Let 's settle for control -- that 's good enough . "
Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds , it 's a false premise .
The brutal truth is , if we don 't have the will or the skill , or even the money that we need to reach children , the most vulnerable children in the world , with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine , then pretty soon , more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year .
There 's absolutely no question .
These are children like Umar .
Umar is seven years old , and he 's from northern Nigeria .
He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters .
Umar also has polio .
Umar was paralyzed for life .
His right leg was paralyzed in 2004 .
This leg , his right leg , now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl , because it 's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends , keep up with his brothers and sisters , than to get up on his crutches and walk .
But Umar is a fantastic student . He 's an incredible kid .
As you probably can 't see the detail here , but this is his report card , and you 'll see , he 's got perfect scores .
He got 100 percent in all the important things , like nursery rhymes , for example there .
But you know I 'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days , but it 's not true .
Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances .
The reality of polio today is something very different .
Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world .
It leaves their children paralyzed , and it drags their families deeper into poverty , because they 're desperately searching and they 're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have , trying in vain to find a cure for their children .
We think children deserve better .
And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago , when people were saying , " We should call it off , " the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions , new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again .
In northern India , we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this , so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters , so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services .
In northern Nigeria , the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders , they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence .
And now they 've even started using these devices -- speaking of cool technology -- these little devices , little GIS trackers like this , which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators .
And then they can track them , and at the end of the day , they look and see , did these guys get every single street , every single house .
This is the kind of commitment now we 're seeing to try and reach all of the children we 've been missing .
And in Afghanistan , we 're trying new approaches -- access negotiators .
We 're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child .
But as we tried these extraordinary things , as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics , we went back to the vaccine -- it 's a 50-year-old vaccine -- and we thought , surely we can make a better vaccine , so that when they finally get to these kids , we can have a better bang for our buck .
And this started an incredible collaboration with industry , and within six months , we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted , just two years ago , the last two types of polio in the world .
Now June the ninth , 2009 , we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine , and it turned out to be a game-changer .
The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had , and we immediately started using this .
Well , in a couple of months we had to get it out of production .
And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world .
And we didn 't start with the easy places .
The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan , because it 's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this .
Now here at TED , over the last couple of days , I 've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible .
So this morning at about seven o 'clock , I decided that we 'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again , so that you could see something that 's just unfolding today , which proves that the impossible is possible .
And only two years ago , people were saying that this is impossible .
Now remember , northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio .
Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio -- Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- 500,000 children every single month .
Sanitation is terrible , and our old vaccine , you remember , worked half as well as it should have .
And yet , the impossible is happening .
Today marks exactly six months -- and for the first time in history , not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar .
India 's not unique .
In Umar 's home country of Nigeria , a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year .
And in the last six months , we 've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history .
Ladies and gentlemen , with a combination of smart people , smart technology and smart investments , polio can now be eradicated anywhere .
We have major challenges , you can imagine , to finish this job , but as you 've also seen , it 's doable , it has great secondary benefits , and polio eradication is a great buy .
And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus , it 's a stark reminder that we are failing , as a society , to reach children with the most basic of services .
And for that reason , polio eradication : it 's the ultimate in equity and it 's the ultimate in social justice .
The huge social movement that 's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children .
It 's ready to reach them with bed nets , with other things .
But capitalizing on their enthusiasm , capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago .
Finishing polio is a smart thing to do , and it 's the right thing to do .
Now we 're in tough times economically .
But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio , " There 's never a wrong time to do the right thing . "
Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do .
And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years .
We have a new vaccine , we have new resolve , and we have new tactics .
We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history .
But if we blink now , we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease .
Here 's a great idea to spread : End polio now .
Help us tell the story .
Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child , every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever .
Thank you .
Bill Gates : Well Bruce , where do you think the toughest places are going to be ?
Where would you say we need to be the smartest ?
B The four places where you saw , that we 've never stopped -- northern Nigeria , northern India , the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan -- they 're going to be the toughest .
But the interesting thing is , of those three , India 's looking real good , as you just saw in the data .
And Afghanistan , Afghanistan , we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly .
It keeps getting reinfected .
So the tough ones : going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished .
They 're going to be the tough ones .
Now what about the money ?
Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year .
And is it easy to raise that money ?
And what 's it going to be like the next couple of years ?
B It 's interesting .
We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year .
That 's what it costs to reach 500 million children .
It sounds like a lot of money ; it is a lot of money .
But when you 're reaching 500 million children multiple times -- 20 , 30 cents to reach a child -- that 's not very much money .
But right now we don 't have enough of that .
We have a big gap in that money . We 're cutting corners , and every time we cut corners , more places get infected that shouldn 't have , and it just slows us down .
And that great buy costs us a little bit more .
Well , hopefully we 'll get the word out , and the governments will keep their generosity up .
So good luck . We 're all in this with you .
Thank you .
Frank Warren : Half a million secrets
" Secrets can take many forms -- they can be shocking , or silly , or soulful . " Frank Warren , the founder of PostSecret.com , shares some of the half-million secrets that strangers have mailed him on postcards .
Hi , my name is Frank , and I collect secrets .
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004 .
I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards , just like this .
They were blank on one side , and on the other side I listed some simple instructions .
I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they 'd never told anyone before .
And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington , D.C. , not knowing what to expect .
But soon the idea began spreading virally .
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards .
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox , not just with postmarks from Washington , D.C. , but from Texas , California , Vancouver , New Zealand , Iraq .
Soon my crazy idea didn 't seem so crazy .
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world .
And this is my postcard collection today .
You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets .
What I 'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection , starting with this one .
" I found these stamps as a child , and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to .
I never did have someone . "
Secrets can take many forms .
They can be shocking or silly or soulful .
They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we 'll never meet .
Maybe one of you sent this one in .
I don 't know .
This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard .
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side .
" Dear Birthmother , I have great parents .
I 've found love . I 'm happy . "
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas , of frailty and heroism , playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now .
" Everyone who knew me before 9 / 11 believes I 'm dead . "
" I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people , so sometimes I didn 't wear panties , and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself . "
This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you .
I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students .
And sometimes afterwards I 'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students .
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos .
And I should also mention that , just like today , at that PostSecret event , I was using a wireless microphone .
" Your mic wasn 't off during sound check .
We all heard you pee . "
This was really embarrassing when it happened , until I realized it could have been worse .
Right . You know what I 'm saying .
" Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn 't use .
I feel like the happiest person on Earth " " One of these men is the father of my son .
He pays me a lot to keep it a secret . "
" That Saturday when you wondered where I was , well , I was getting your ring .
It 's in my pocket right now . "
I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine 's Day .
It was the very bottom , the last secret in the long column .
And it hadn 't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard .
And he said , " Frank , I 've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life . "
He said , " My knees are still shaking . "
He said , " For three years , my girlfriend and I , we 've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud .
I read some to her , she reads some to me . "
He says , " It 's really brought us closer together through the years .
And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom , I was beside myself .
And I tried to act calm , not to give anything away .
And just like every Sunday , we started reading the secrets out loud to each other . "
He said , " But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one . "
But she finally did .
She got to that bottom secret , his proposal to her .
And he said , " She read it once and then she read it again . "
And she turned to him and said , " Is that our cat ? "
And when she saw him , he was down on one knee , he had the ring out .
He popped the question , she said yes . It was a very happy ending .
So I emailed him back and I said , " Please share with me an image , something , that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending . "
And he emailed me this picture .
" I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer .
I finally got the pictures developed and I 'd love to give them to you . "
This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it , but this secret has impacted many lives , starting with a student up in Canada named Matty .
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website , a website called IFoundYourCamera .
Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they 've found , memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos .
And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week .
And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they 've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for .
This one 's my favorite .
Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers .
And it might seem like a simple idea , and it is , but the impact it can have on people 's lives can be huge .
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture .
" That 's me , my husband and son .
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother .
Thank you for making your site .
These pictures mean more to me than you know .
My son 's birth is on this camera .
He turns four tomorrow . "
Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it -- sometimes crossing oceans , sometimes going through language barriers .
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today .
" When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again . "
When I posted this secret , dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones , sometimes ones they 'd been keeping for years , messages from family or friends who had died .
They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them , it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive .
One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother .
Secrets can take many forms .
They can be shocking or silly or soulful .
They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we 'll never meet again .
Voicemail recording : First saved voice message .
It 's somebody 's birthday today Somebody 's birthday today The candles are lighted on somebody 's cake And we 're all invited for somebody 's sake You 're 21 years old today .
Have a real happy birthday , and I love you .
I 'll say bye for now .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Frank , that was beautiful , so touching .
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard ?
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret ?
I have one of my own secrets in every book .
I think in some ways , the reason I started the project , even though I didn 't know it at the time , was because I was struggling with my own secrets .
And it was through crowd-sourcing , it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me , that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me .
And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book ?
Has anyone in your life been able to tell ?
Sometimes I share that information , yeah .
Tony Porter : A call to men
At TEDWomen , Tony Porter makes a call to men everywhere : Don 't " act like a man . " Telling powerful stories from his own life , he shows how this mentality , drummed into so many men and boys , can lead men to disrespect , mistreat and abuse women and each other . His solution : Break free of the " man box . "
I grew up in New York City , between Harlem and the Bronx .
Growing up as a boy , we were taught that men had to be tough , had to be strong , had to be courageous , dominating -- no pain , no emotions , with the exception of anger -- and definitely no fear ; that men are in charge , which means women are not ; that men lead , and you should just follow and do what we say ; that men are superior ; women are inferior ; that men are strong ; women are weak ; that women are of less value , property of men , and objects , particularly sexual objects .
I 've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men , better known as the " man box . "
See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man .
Now I also want to say , without a doubt , there are some wonderful , wonderful , absolutely wonderful things about being a man .
But at the same time , there 's some stuff that 's just straight up twisted , and we really need to begin to challenge , look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing , redefining , what we come to know as manhood .
This is my two at home , Kendall and Jay .
They 're 11 and 12 .
Kendall 's 15 months older than Jay .
There was a period of time when my wife -- her name is Tammie -- and I , we just got real busy and whip , bam , boom : Kendall and Jay .
And when they were about five and six , four and five , Jay could come to me , come to me crying .
It didn 't matter what she was crying about , she could get on my knee , she could snot my sleeve up , just cry , cry it out .
Daddy 's got you . That 's all that 's important .
Now Kendall on the other hand -- and like I said , he 's only 15 months older than her -- he 'd come to me crying , it 's like as soon as I would hear him cry , a clock would go off .
I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds , which means , by the time he got to me , I was already saying things like , " Why are you crying ?
Hold your head up . Look at me .
Explain to me what 's wrong .
Tell me what 's wrong . I can 't understand you .
Why are you crying ? "
And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box , I would find myself saying things like , " Just go in your room .
Just go on , go on in your room .
Sit down , get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a -- " what ?
Like a man .
And he 's five years old .
And as I grow in life , I would say to myself , " My God , what 's wrong with me ?
What am I doing ? Why would I do this ? "
And I think back .
I think back to my father .
There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family .
My brother , Henry , he died tragically when we were teenagers .
We lived in New York City , as I said .
We lived in the Bronx at the time , and the burial was in a place called Long Island , it was about two hours outside of the city .
And as we were preparing to come back from the burial , the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city .
And the limousine empties out .
My mother , my sister , my auntie , they all get out , but my father and I stayed in the limousine , and no sooner than the women got out , he burst out crying .
He didn 't want cry in front of me , but he knew he wasn 't going to make it back to the city , and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women .
And this is a man who , 10 minutes ago , had just put his teenage son in the ground -- something I just can 't even imagine .
The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me , and at the same time , he was also giving me props , lifting me up , for not crying .
I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men , this fear that just has us paralyzed , holding us hostage to this man box .
I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy , a football player , and I asked him , I said , " How would you feel if , in front of all the players , your coach told you you were playing like a girl ? "
Now I expected him to say something like , I 'd be sad ; I 'd be mad ; I 'd be angry , or something like that .
No , the boy said to me -- the boy said to me , " It would destroy me . "
And I said to myself , " God , if it would destroy him to be called a girl , what are we then teaching him about girls ? "
It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old .
I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city .
At this time we 're living in the Bronx , and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny .
He was about 16 years old , and we were all about 12 years old -- younger guys .
And he was hanging out with all us younger guys .
And this guy , he was up to a lot of no good .
He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder , " What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys ? "
And he did spend a lot of time up to no good .
He was a troubled kid .
His mother had died from a heroin overdose .
He was being raised by his grandmother .
His father wasn 't on the set .
His grandmother had two jobs .
He was home alone a lot .
But I 've got to tell you , we young guys , we looked up to this dude , man .
He was cool . He was fine .
That 's what the sisters said , " He was fine . "
He was having sex .
We all looked up to him .
So one day , I 'm out in front of the house doing something -- just playing around , doing something -- I don 't know what .
He looks out his window ; he calls me upstairs ; he said , " Hey Anthony . "
They called me Anthony growing up as a kid .
" Hey Anthony , come on upstairs . "
Johnny call , you go .
So I run right upstairs .
As he opens the door , he says to me , " Do you want some ? "
Now I immediately knew what he meant .
Because for me growing up at that time , and our relationship with this man box , " Do you want some ? " meant one of two things : sex or drugs -- and we weren 't doing drugs .
Now my box , my card , my man box card , was immediately in jeopardy .
Two things : One , I never had sex .
We don 't talk about that as men .
You only tell your dearest , closest friend , sworn to secrecy for life , the first time you had sex .
For everybody else , we go around like we 've been having sex since we were two .
There ain 't no first time .
The other thing I couldn 't tell him is that I didn 't want any .
That 's even worse . We 're supposed to always be on the prowl .
Women are objects , especially sexual objects .
Anyway , so I couldn 't tell him any of that .
So , like my mother would say , make a long story short , I just simply said to Johnny , " Yes . "
He told me to go in his room .
I go in his room . On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila .
She 's 16 years old .
She 's nude .
She 's what I know today to be mentally ill , higher-functioning at times than others .
We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her .
Anyway , Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her .
Well actually , he raped her , but he would say he had sex with her .
Because , while Sheila never said no , she also never said yes .
So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same .
So when I go in the room , I close the door .
Folks , I 'm petrified .
I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can 't bust in the room and see that I 'm not doing anything , and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something .
So now I 'm no longer trying to figure out what I 'm going to do ; I 'm trying to figure out how I 'm going to get out of this room .
So in my 12 years of wisdom , I zip my pants down , I walk out into the room , and lo and behold to me , while I was in the room with Sheila , Johnny was back at the window calling guys up .
So now there 's a living room full of guys .
It was like the waiting room in the doctor 's office .
And they asked me how was it , and I say to them , " It was good , " and I zip my pants up in front of them , and I head for the door .
Now I say this all with remorse , and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time , but I was conflicted , because , while I was feeling remorse , I was excited , because I didn 't get caught .
But I knew I felt bad about what was happening .
This fear , getting outside the man box , totally enveloped me .
It was way more important to me , about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her .
See collectively , we as men are taught to have less value in women , to view them as property and the objects of men .
We see that as an equation that equals violence against women .
We as men , good men , the large majority of men , we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization .
We kind of see ourselves separate , but we 're very much a part of it .
You see , we have to come to understand that less value , property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can 't happen without it .
So we 're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem .
The center for disease control says that men 's violence against women is at epidemic proportions , is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad .
So quickly , I 'd like to just say , this is the love of my life , my daughter Jay .
The world I envision for her -- how do I want men to be acting and behaving ?
I need you on board . I need you with me .
I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men -- that it 's okay to not be dominating , that it 's okay to have feelings and emotions , that it 's okay to promote equality , that it 's okay to have women who are just friends and that 's it , that it 's okay to be whole , that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman .
I remember asking a nine-year-old boy , I asked a nine-year-old boy , " What would life be like for you , if you didn 't have to adhere to this man box ? "
He said to me , " I would be free . "
Thank you folks .
Stanley McChrystal : Listen , learn ... then lead
Four-star general Stanley McChrystal shares what he learned about leadership over his decades in the military . How can you build a sense of shared purpose among people of many ages and skill sets ? By listening and learning -- and addressing the possibility of failure .
Ten years ago , on a Tuesday morning , I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg , North Carolina .
It was a routine training jump , like many more I 'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before .
We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early .
You do some routine refresher training , and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you .
And you put on the T-10 parachute .
And you 're very careful how you put the straps , particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs .
And then you put on your reserve , and then you put on your heavy rucksack .
And then a jumpmaster comes , and he 's an experienced NCO in parachute operations .
He checks you out , he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed , your shoulders are crushed down , and , of course , he 's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well .
Then you sit down , and you wait a little while , because this is the Army .
Then you load the aircraft , and then you stand up and you get on , and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this , in a line of people , and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft .
And you wait a little bit longer , because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait .
Then you take off .
And it 's painful enough now -- and I think it 's designed this way -- it 's painful enough so you want to jump .
You didn 't really want to jump , but you want out .
So you get in the aircraft , you 're flying along , and at 20 minutes out , these jumpmasters start giving you commands .
They give 20 minutes -- that 's a time warning .
You sit there , OK .
Then they give you 10 minutes .
And of course , you 're responding with all of these .
And that 's to boost everybody 's confidence , to show that you 're not scared .
Then they give you , " Get ready . "
Then they go , " Outboard personnel , stand up . "
If you 're an outboard personnel , now you stand up .
If you 're an inboard personnel , stand up .
And then you hook up , and you hook up your static line .
And at that point , you think , " Hey , guess what ?
I 'm probably going to jump .
There 's no way to get out of this at this point . "
You go through some additional checks , and then they open the door .
And this was that Tuesday morning in September , and it was pretty nice outside .
So nice air comes flowing in .
The jumpmasters start to check the door .
And then when it 's time to go , a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes , " Go . "
The first guy goes , and you 're just in line , and you just kind of lumber to the door .
Jump is a misnomer ; you fall .
You fall outside the door , you 're caught in the slipstream .
The first thing you do is lock into a tight body position -- head down in your chest , your arms extended , put over your reserve parachute .
You do that because , 27 years before , an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that .
I have no idea whether it makes any difference , but he seemed to make sense , and I wasn 't going to test the hypothesis that he 'd be wrong .
And then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open .
If you don 't get an opening shock , you don 't get a parachute -- you 've got a whole new problem set .
But typically you do ; typically it opens .
And of course , if your leg straps aren 't set right , at that point you get another little thrill .
Boom .
So then you look around , you 're under a canopy and you say , " This is good . "
Now you prepare for the inevitable .
You are going to hit the ground .
You can 't delay that much .
And you really can 't decide where you hit very much , because they pretend you can steer , but you 're being delivered .
So you look around , where you 're going to land , you try to make yourself ready .
And then as you get close , you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line , so that it 's not on you when you land , and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall .
Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance -- the toes of your feet , your calves , your thighs , your buttocks and your push-up muscles .
It 's this elegant little land , twist and roll .
And that 's not going to hurt .
In 30-some years of jumping , I never did one .
I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window .
And as soon as I hit , the first thing I did is I 'd see if I 'd broken anything that I needed .
I 'd shake my head , and I 'd ask myself the eternal question : " Why didn 't I go into banking ? "
And I 'd look around , and then I 'd see another paratrooper , a young guy or girl , and they 'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they 'd be picking up their equipment .
They 'd be doing everything that we had taught them .
And I realized that , if they had to go into combat , they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders .
And I realized that , if they came out of combat , it would be because we led them well .
And I was hooked again on the importance of what I did .
So now I do that Tuesday morning jump , but it 's not any jump -- that was September 11th , 2001 .
And when we took off from the airfield , America was at peace .
When we landed on the drop-zone , everything had changed .
And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very , very real -- and leadership seemed important .
But things had changed ; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general .
I 'd been successful , but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes , and on that morning , I didn 't know it .
I was raised with traditional stories of leadership : Robert E. Lee , John Buford at Gettysburg .
And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership .
This was my father in Vietnam .
And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful ; they didn 't lie , cheat , steal or abandon their comrades .
And I still believe real leaders are like that .
But in my first 25 years of career , I had a bunch of different experiences .
One of my first battalion commanders , I worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with Lt. McChrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march , and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds .
And I 'm not sure that was real interaction .
But then a couple of years later , when I was a company commander , I went out to the National Training Center .
And we did an operation , and my company did a dawn attack -- you know , the classic dawn attack : you prepare all night , move to the line of departure .
And I had an armored organization at that point .
We move forward , and we get wiped out -- I mean , wiped out immediately .
The enemy didn 't break a sweat doing it .
And after the battle , they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an " after action review " to teach you what you 've done wrong .
Sort of leadership by humiliation .
They put a big screen up , and they take you through everything : " and then you didn 't do this , and you didn 't do this , etc . "
I walked out feeling as low as a snake 's belly in a wagon rut .
And I saw my battalion commander , because I had let him down .
And I went up to apologize to him , and he said , " Stanley , I thought you did great . "
And in one sentence , he lifted me , put me back on my feet , and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure .
When 9 / 11 came , 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world .
First , the things that are obvious , that you 're familiar with : the environment changed -- the speed , the scrutiny , the sensitivity of everything now is so fast , sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it .
But everything we do is in a different context .
More importantly , the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries .
And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them , I 'm now leading a force that 's dispersed , and I 've got to use other techniques .
I 've got to use video teleconferences , I 've got to use chat , I 've got to use everything I can , not just for communication , but for leadership .
A 22-year-old individual operating alone , thousands of miles from me , has got to communicate to me with confidence .
I have to have trust in them and vice versa .
And I also have to build their faith .
And that 's a new kind of leadership for me .
We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations .
An emerging opportunity came -- didn 't have time to get everybody together .
So we had to get complex intelligence together , we had to line up the ability to act .
It was sensitive , we had to go up the chain of command , convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium .
We failed .
The mission didn 't work .
And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force , rebuild their confidence -- me and them , and them and me , and our seniors and us as a force -- all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder .
Entirely new requirement .
Also , the people had changed .
You probably think that the force that I led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons .
In reality , much of the force I led looked exactly like you .
It was men , women , young , old -- not just from military ; from different organizations , many of them detailed to us just from a handshake .
And so instead of giving orders , you 're now building consensus and you 're building a sense of shared purpose .
Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference , the ages , had changed so much .
I went down to be with a Ranger platoon on an operation in Afghanistan , and on that operation , a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a Taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team .
We talked about the operation , and then at the end I did what I often do with a force like that .
I asked , " Where were you on 9 / 11 ? "
And one young Ranger in the back -- his hair 's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind -- he said , " Sir , I was in the sixth grade . "
And it reminded me that we 're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness , and yet he has different experiences , in many cases a different vocabulary , a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders .
And yet , we need to have that shared sense .
It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise , because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot , that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn 't what the force was doing anymore .
So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven 't done what the people you 're leading are doing ?
And it 's a brand new leadership challenge .
And it forced me to become a lot more transparent , a lot more willing to listen , a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower .
And yet , again , you 're not all in one room .
Then another thing .
There 's an effect on you and on your leaders .
There 's an impact , it 's cumulative .
You don 't reset , or recharge your battery every time .
I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces .
And I remembered his son was in our force .
And I said , " John , where 's your son ? And how is he ? "
And he said , " Sir , he 's fine . Thanks for asking . "
I said , " Where is he now ? "
And he pointed at the screen , he said , " He 's in that firefight . "
Think about watching your brother , father , daughter , son , wife in a firefight in real time and you can 't do anything about it .
Think about knowing that over time .
And it 's a new cumulative pressure on leaders .
And you have to watch and take care of each other .
I probably learned the most about relationships .
I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together .
I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment .
And every morning in the Ranger regiment , every Ranger -- and there are more than 2,000 of them -- says a six-stanza Ranger creed .
You may know one line of it , it says , " I 'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy . "
And it 's not a mindless mantra , and it 's not a poem .
It 's a promise .
Every Ranger promises every other Ranger , " No matter what happens , no matter what it costs me , if you need me , I 'm coming . "
And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger .
Think about it . It 's extraordinarily powerful .
It 's probably more powerful than marriage vows .
And they 've lived up to it , which gives it special power .
And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing .
And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever .
We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007 , and an old friend of mine , that I had spent many years at various points of my career with -- godfather to one of their kids -- he sent me a note , just in an envelope , that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said , " I knew if I ever got in a tight spot , that you would come , if alive . "
And having that kind of relationship , for me , turned out to be critical at many points in my career .
And I learned that you have to give that in this environment , because it 's tough .
That was my journey .
I hope it 's not over .
I came to believe that a leader isn 't good because they 're right ; they 're good because they 're willing to learn and to trust .
This isn 't easy stuff .
It 's not like that electronic abs machine where , 15 minutes a month , you get washboard abs .
And it isn 't always fair .
You can get knocked down , and it hurts and it leaves scars .
But if you 're a leader , the people you 've counted on will help you up .
And if you 're a leader , the people who count on you need you on your feet .
Thank you .
Arunachalam Muruganantham : How I started a sanitary napkin revolution !
When he realized his wife had to choose between buying family meals and buying her monthly " supplies , " Arunachalam Muruganantham vowed to help her solve the problem of the sanitary pad . His research got very very personal -- and led him to a powerful business model .
So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife .
It makes me to stand here , the fame , the money I got out of it .
So what I did , I 'd gone back to my early marriage days .
What you did in the early marriage days , you tried to impress your wife . I did the same .
On that occasion , I found my wife carrying something like this .
I saw . " What is that ? " I asked .
My wife replied , " None of your business . "
Then , being her husband , I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth .
I don 't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler .
Then I understood this -- adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days .
Then I immediately asked her , why are you [ using ] that unhygienic method ?
She replied , I also know about [ sanitary pads ] , but myself and my sisters , if they start using that , we have to cut our family milk budget .
Then I was shocked . What is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget ?
And it 's called affordability .
I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads .
I went to a local shop , I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet .
That fellow looks left and right , and spreads a newspaper , rolls it into the newspaper , gives it to me like a banned item , something like that .
I don 't know why . I did not ask for a condom .
Then I took that pad . I want to see that . What is inside it ?
The very first time , at the age of 29 , that day I am touching the sanitary pad , first ever .
I must know : How many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad ?
They are not going to touch that , because it 's not your matter .
Then I thought to myself , white substance , made of cotton -- oh my God , that guy is just using a penny value of raw material -- inside they are selling for pounds , dollars .
Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife ?
That 's how all this started , but after making a sanitary pad , where can I check it ?
It 's not like I can just check it in the lab .
I need a woman volunteer . Where can I get one in India ?
Even in Bangalore you won 't get [ one ] , in India .
So only problem : the only available victim is my wife .
Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti -- my wife 's name is Shanti .
" Close your eyes . Whatever I give , it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring , even a chocolate , I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it .
Close your eyes . "
Because I tried to make it intimate .
Because it 's an arranged marriage , not a love marriage .
So one day she said , openly , I 'm not going to support this research .
Then other victims , they got into my sisters .
But even sisters , wives , they 're not ready to support in the research .
That 's why I am always jealous with the saints in India .
They are having a lot of women volunteers around them .
Why I am not getting [ any ] ?
You know , without them even calling , they 'll get a lot of women volunteers .
Then I used , tried to use the medical college girls .
They also refused . Finally , I decide , use sanitary pad myself .
Now I am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon .
Armstrong . Then Tenzing [ and ] Hillary , in Everest , like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe .
I wore a sanitary pad . I filled animal blood in a football bottle , I tied it up here , there is a tube going into my panties , while I 'm walking , while I 'm cycling , I made a press , doses of blood will go there .
That makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect . That five days I 'll never forget -- the messy days , the lousy days , that wetness .
My God , it 's unbelievable .
But here the problem is , one company is making napkin out of cotton . It is working well .
But I am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton . It 's not working .
That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research .
You need first funds .
Not only financial crises , but because of the sanitary pad research , I come through all sorts of problems , including a divorce notice from my wife .
Why is this ? I used medical college girls .
She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls .
Finally , I came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood , but even after that , you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material . Again , a stop-up .
Then I spend another four years to create my own machine tools , a simple machine tool like this .
In this machine , any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant , anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall .
That is my invention .
So after that , what I did , usually if anyone got a patent or an invention , immediately you want to make , convert into this .
I never did this . I dropped it just like this , because you do this , if anyone runs after money , their life will not [ have ] any beauty . It is boredom .
A lot of people making a lot of money , billion , billions of dollars accumulating .
Why are they coming for , finally , for philanthropy ?
Why the need for accumulating money , then doing philanthropy ?
What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one ?
That 's why I am giving this machine only in rural India , for rural women , because in India , [ you 'll be ] surprised , only two percent of women are using sanitary pads . The rest , they 're using a rag cloth , a leaf , husk , [ saw ] dust , everything except sanitary pads .
It is the same in the 21st century . That 's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India .
So far , 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries .
Now I 'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational , transnational giants -- makes all MBA students a question mark .
A school dropout from Coimbatore , how he is able to sustaining ?
That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs .
Play video one .
Arunachalam Muruganantham : The thing I saw in my wife 's hand , " Why are you using that nasty cloth ? "
She replied immediately , " I know about napkins , but if I start using napkins , then we have to cut our family milk budget . "
Why not make myself a low-cost napkin ?
So I decided I 'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups .
That is my idea .
AM : And previously , you need a multimillion investment for machine and all . Now , any rural woman can .
They are performing puja .
: You just think , competing giants , even from Harvard , Oxford , is difficult .
I make a rural woman to compete with multinationals .
I 'm sustaining on seventh year .
Already 600 installations . What is my mission ?
I 'm going to make India [ into ] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime .
In this way I 'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that I 'm going to create .
That 's why I 'm not running after this bloody money .
I 'm doing something serious .
If you chase a girl , the girl won 't like you .
Do your job simply , the girl will chase you .
Like that , I never chased Mahalakshmi .
Mahalakshmi is chasing me , I am keeping in the back pocket .
Not in front pocket . I 'm a back pocket man .
That 's all . A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad .
I am becoming a solution provider . I 'm very happy .
I don 't want to make this as a corporate entity .
I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe . That 's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software .
Now 110 countries are accessing it . Okay ?
So I classify the people into three : uneducated , little educated , surplus educated .
Little educated , done this . Surplus educated , what are you going to do for the society ?
Thank you very much . Bye !
Stephen Hawking : Questioning the universe
In keeping with the theme of TED2008 , professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe -- How did the universe begin ? How did life begin ? Are we alone ? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them .
There is nothing bigger or older than the universe .
The questions I would like to talk about are : one , where did we come from ?
How did the universe come into being ?
Are we alone in the universe ?
Is there alien life out there ?
What is the future of the human race ?
Up until the 1920s , everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time .
Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding .
Distant galaxies were moving away from us .
This meant they must have been closer together in the past .
If we extrapolate back , we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago .
This was the Big Bang , the beginning of the universe .
But was there anything before the Big Bang ?
If not , what created the universe ?
Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did ?
We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts .
First , there were the laws like Maxwell 's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe , given its state over all of space at one time .
And second , there was no question of the initial state of the universe .
We have made good progress on the first part , and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions .
But until recently , we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe .
However , this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions depends on time and space being separate and distinct .
Under extreme conditions , general relativity and quantum theory allow time to behave like another dimension of space .
This removes the distinction between time and space , and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state .
The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing .
Moreover , we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states .
These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background , which is an imprint of the very early universe .
We think we have solved the mystery of creation .
Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence .
I now turn to the second big question : are we alone , or is there other life in the universe ?
We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth , so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets , of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy .
But we don 't know how life first appeared .
We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing .
The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago .
The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years .
So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible , which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of a planet of Earth type .
This suggests that a probability of life appearing is reasonably high .
If it was very low , one would have expected it to take most of the ten billion years available .
On the other hand , we don 't seem to have been visited by aliens .
I am discounting the reports of UFOs .
Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdoes ?
If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring , it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far .
Furthermore , despite an extensive search by the SETI project , we haven 't heard any alien television quiz shows .
This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years .
Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet .
This brings me to the last of the big questions : the future of the human race .
If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy , we should make sure we survive and continue .
But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history .
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially , along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill .
But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past .
It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years , let alone the next thousand or million .
Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth , but to spread out into space .
The answers to these big questions show that we have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years .
But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years , our future is in space .
That is why I am in favor of manned -- or should I say , personed -- space flight .
All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions .
I have been very lucky that my disability has not been a serious handicap .
Indeed , it has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge .
The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe , and we are making good progress .
Thank you for listening .
Professor , if you had to guess either way , do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way , as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher ?
This answer took seven minutes , and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED .
Stephen Hawking : I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years ; otherwise we would have heard radio waves .
The alternative is that civilizations don 't last very long , but destroy themselves .
Professor Hawking , thank you for that answer .
We will take it as a salutary warning , I think , for the rest of our conference this week .
Professor , we really thank you for the extraordinary effort you made to share your questions with us today .
Thank you very much indeed .
Amanda Bennett : We need a heroic narrative for death
Amanda Bennett and her husband were passionate and full of life all throughout their lives together -- and up until the final days , too . Bennett gives a sweet yet powerful talk on why , for the loved ones of the dying , having hope for a happy ending shouldn 't warrant a diagnosis of " denial . " She calls for a more heroic narrative for death -- to match the ones we have in life .
So I 'd like you to come back with me just for a few minutes to a dark night in China , the night I met my husband .
It was a city so long ago that it was still called Peking .
So I went to a party .
I sat down next to a stout , middle-aged man with owl glasses and a bow tie , and he turned out to be a Fulbright scholar , there in China specifically to study Sino-Soviet relations .
What a gift it was to the eager , young foreign correspondent that I was then .
I 'd pump him for information , I 'm mentally scribbling notes for the stories I plan to write .
I talk to him for hours .
Only months later , I discover who he really was .
He was the China representative for the American Soybean Association .
" I don 't understand . Soybeans ?
You told me you were a Fulbright scholar . "
" Well , how long would you have talked to me if I told you we 're in soybeans ? "
I said , " You jerk . "
Only jerk wasn 't the word I used .
I said , " You could 've gotten me fired . "
And he said , " Let 's get married . "
" Travel the world and have lots of kids . "
So we did .
And what an alive man Terence Bryan Foley turned out to be .
He was a Chinese scholar who later , in his 60s , got a Ph.D. in Chinese history .
He spoke six languages , he played 15 musical instruments , he was a licensed pilot , he had once been a San Francisco cable car operator , he was an expert in swine nutrition , dairy cattle , Dixieland jazz , film noir , and we did travel the country , and the world , and we did have a lot of kids .
We followed my job , and it seemed like there was nothing that we couldn 't do .
So when we found the cancer , it doesn 't seem strange to us at all that without saying a word to each other , we believed that , if we were smart enough and strong enough and brave enough , and we worked hard enough , we could keep him from dying ever .
And for years , it seemed like we were succeeding .
The surgeon emerged from the surgery .
What 'd he say ? He said what surgeons always say : " We got it all . "
Then there was a setback when the pathologists looked at the kidney cancer closely .
It turned out to be a rare , exceedingly aggressive type , with a diagnosis that was almost universally fatal in several weeks at most .
And yet , he did not die .
Mysteriously , he lived on .
He coached Little League for our son .
He built a playhouse for our daughter .
And meanwhile , I 'm burying myself in the Internet looking for specialists .
I 'm looking for a cure .
So a year goes by before the cancer , as cancers do , reappears , and with it comes another death sentence , this time nine months .
So we try another treatment , aggressive , nasty .
It makes him so sick , he has to quit it , yet still he lives on .
Then another year goes by .
Two years go by .
More specialists .
We take the kids to Italy .
We take the kids to Australia .
And then more years pass , and the cancer begins to grow .
This time , there 's new treatments on the horizon .
They 're exotic . They 're experimental .
They 're going to attack the cancer in new ways .
So he enters a clinical trial , and it works .
The cancer begins to shrink , and for the third time , we 've dodged death .
So now I ask you , how do I feel when the time finally comes and there 's another dark night , sometime between midnight and 2 a.m. ?
This time it 's on the intensive care ward when a twentysomething resident that I 've never met before tells me that Terence is dying , perhaps tonight .
So what do I say when he says , " What do you want me to do ? "
There 's another drug out there .
It 's newer . It 's more powerful .
He started it just two weeks ago .
Perhaps there 's still hope ahead .
So what do I say ?
I say , " Keep him alive if you can . "
And Terence died six days later .
So we fought , we struggled , we triumphed .
It was an exhilarating fight , and I 'd repeat the fight today without a moment 's hesitation .
We fought together , we lived together .
It turned what could have been seven of the grimmest years of our life into seven of the most glorious .
It was also an expensive fight .
It was the kind of fight and the kind of choices that everyone here agrees pump up the cost of end-of-life care , and of healthcare for all of us .
And for me , for us , we pushed the fight right over the edge , and I never got the chance to say to him what I say to him now almost every day : " Hey , buddy , it was a hell of a ride . "
We never got the chance to say goodbye .
We never thought it was the end .
We always had hope .
So what do we make of all of this ?
Being a journalist , after Terence died , I wrote a book , " The Cost Of Hope . "
I wrote it because I wanted to know why I did what I did , why he did what he did , why everyone around us did what they did .
And what did I discover ?
Well , one of the things I discovered is that experts think that one answer to what I did at the end was a piece of paper , the advance directive , to help families get past the seemingly irrational choices .
Yet I had that piece of paper .
We both did .
And they were readily available .
I had them right at hand .
Both of them said the same thing : Do nothing if there is no further hope .
I knew Terence 's wishes as clearly and as surely as I knew my own .
Yet we never got to no further hope .
Even with that clear-cut paper in our hands , we just kept redefining hope .
I believed I could keep him from dying , and I 'd be embarrassed to say that if I hadn 't seen so many people and have talked to so many people who have felt exactly the same way .
Right up until days before his death , I felt strongly and powerfully , and , you might say , irrationally , that I could keep him from dying ever .
Now , what do the experts call this ?
They say it 's denial .
It 's a strong word , isn 't it ?
Yet I will tell you that denial isn 't even close to a strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through .
And I hear the medical professionals say , " Well , we 'd like to do such-and-such , but the family 's in denial .
The family won 't listen to reason .
They 're in denial .
How can they insist on this treatment at the end ?
It 's so clear , yet they 're in denial . "
Now , I think this maybe isn 't a very useful way of thinking .
It 's not just families either .
The medical professionals too , you out there , you 're in denial too .
You want to help . You want to fix .
You want to do .
You 've succeeded in everything you 've done , and having a patient die , well , that must feel like failure .
I saw it firsthand .
Just days before Terence died , his oncologist said , " Tell Terence that better days are just ahead . "
Days before he died .
Yet Ira Byock , the director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth said , " You know , the best doctor in the world has never succeeded in making anyone immortal . "
So what the experts call " denial , " I call " hope , " and I 'd like to borrow a phrase from my friends in software design .
You just redefine denial and hope , and it becomes a feature of being human .
It 's not a bug .
It 's a feature .
So we need to think more constructively about this very common , very profound and very powerful human emotion .
It 's part of the human condition , and yet our system and our thinking isn 't built to accommodate it .
So Terence told me a story on that long-ago night , and I believed it .
Maybe I wanted to believe it .
And during Terence 's illness , I , we , we wanted to believe the story of our fight together too .
Giving up the fight -- for that 's how it felt , it felt like giving up -- meant giving up not only his life but also our story , our story of us as fighters , the story of us as invincible , and for the doctors , the story of themselves as healers .
So what do we need ?
Maybe we don 't need a new piece of paper .
Maybe we need a new story , not a story about giving up the fight or of hopelessness , but rather a story of victory and triumph , of a valiant battle and , eventually , a graceful retreat , a story that acknowledges that not even the greatest general defeats every foe , that no doctor has ever succeeded in making anyone immortal , and that no wife , no matter how hard she tried , has ever stopped even the bravest , wittiest and most maddeningly lovable husband from dying when it was his time to go .
People did mention hospice , but I wouldn 't listen .
Hospice was for people who were dying , and Terence wasn 't dying .
As a result , he spent just four days in hospice , which I 'm sure , as you all know , is a pretty typical outcome , and we never said goodbye because we were unprepared for the end .
We have a noble path to curing the disease , patients and doctors alike , but there doesn 't seem to be a noble path to dying .
Dying is seen as failing , and we had a heroic narrative for fighting together , but we didn 't have a heroic narrative for letting go .
So maybe we need a narrative for acknowledging the end , and for saying goodbye , and maybe our new story will be about a hero 's fight , and a hero 's goodbye .
Terence loved poetry , and the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy is one of my favorite poets .
So I 'll give you a couple lines from him .
This is a poem about Mark Antony .
You know Mark Antony , the conquering hero , Cleopatra 's guy ?
Actually , one of Cleopatra 's guys .
And he 's been a pretty good general .
He 's won all the fights , he 's eluded all the people that are out to get him , and yet this time , finally , he 's come to the city of Alexandria and realized he 's lost .
The people are leaving . They 're playing instruments .
They 're singing .
And suddenly he knows he 's been defeated .
And he suddenly knows he 's been deserted by the gods , and it 's time to let go .
And the poet tells him what to do .
He tells him how to say a noble goodbye , a goodbye that 's fit for a hero .
" As if long-prepared , as if courageous , as it becomes you who were worthy of such a city , approach the window with a firm step , and with emotion , but not with the entreaties or the complaints of a coward , as a last enjoyment , listen to the sounds , the exquisite instruments of the musical troops , and bid her farewell , the Alexandria you are losing . "
That 's a goodbye for a man who was larger than life , a goodbye for a man for whom anything , well , almost anything , was possible , a goodbye for a man who kept hope alive .
And isn 't that what we 're missing ?
How can we learn that people 's decisions about their loved ones are often based strongly , powerfully , many times irrationally , on the slimmest of hopes ?
The overwhelming presence of hope isn 't denial .
It 's part of our DNA as humans , and maybe it 's time our healthcare system -- doctors , patients , insurance companies , us , started accounting for the power of that hope .
Hope isn 't a bug .
It 's a feature .
Thank you .
Juliana Machado Ferreira : The fight to end rare-animal trafficking in Brazil
Biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira , a TED Senior Fellow , talks about her work helping to save birds and other animals stolen from the wild in Brazil . Once these animals are seized from smugglers , she asks , then what ?
Illegal wildlife trade in Brazil is one of the major threats against our fauna , especially birds , and mainly to supply the pet market with thousands of animals taken from nature every month , and transported far from their origins , to be sold mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo .
It is estimated that all kinds of illegal wildlife trade in Brazil withdraw from nature almost 38 million animals every year , a business worth almost two billion dollars .
The police intercepts these huge cargos with live animals , intended to supply the pet market , or they seize the animals directly from the people 's houses , and this is how we end up , every month , with thousands of seized animals .
And for us to understand what happens with them , we 're going to follow Brad .
In the eyes of many people , after the animals are seized , they say , " Yay , justice has been served .
The good guys arrived , took the cute , mistreated animals from the hands of the evil traffickers , and everyone lived happily ever after . "
But did they ? Actually , no , and this is where many of our problems begin .
Because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals .
In Brazil , they are usually first sent to governmental triage facilities , in which most of the cases , the conditions are as bad as with the traffickers .
In 2002 , these centers received 45,000 animals , of which 37,000 were birds .
And the police estimates that we seize only five percent of what 's being trafficked .
Some lucky ones -- and among them , Brad -- go to serious rehabilitation centers after that .
And in these places they are cared for .
They train their flying , they learn how to recognize the food they will find in nature , and they are able to socialize with others from the same species .
But then what ?
The Brazil Ornithological Society -- so now we 're talking only birds -- claims that we have too little knowledge about the species in nature .
Therefore , it would be too risky to release these animals , both for the released and for the natural populations .
They also claim that we spend too many resources in their rehabilitation .
Following this argument , they suggest that all the birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized .
However , this would mean having killed 26,267 birds , only in the state of São Paulo , only in 2006 .
But , some researchers , myself included -- some NGOs and some people from the Brazilian government -- believe there is an alternative .
We think that if and when the animals meet certain criteria concerning their health , behavior , inferred origin and whatever we know about the natural populations , then technically responsible releases are possible , both for the well-being of the individual , and for the conservation of the species and their ecosystems , because we will be returning genes for these populations -- which could be important for them in facing environmental challenges -- and also we could be returning potential seed dispersers , predators , preys , etc .
All of these were released by us .
On the top , the turtles are just enjoying freedom .
On the middle , this guy nested a couple of weeks after the release .
And on the bottom , my personal favorite , the little male over there , four hours after his release he was together with a wild female .
So , this is not new , people have been doing this around the world .
But it 's still a big issue in Brazil .
We believe we have performed responsible releases .
We 've registered released animals mating in nature and having chicks .
So , these genes are indeed going back to the populations .
However this is still a minority for the very lack of knowledge .
So , I say , " Let 's study more , let 's shed light on this issue , let 's do whatever we can . "
I 'm devoting my career to that .
And I 'm here to urge each and every one of you to do whatever is in your reach : Talk to your neighbor , teach your children , make sure your pet is from a legal breeder .
We need to act , and act now , before these ones are the only ones left .
Thank you very much .
Shawn Achor : The happy secret to better work
We believe that we should work to be happy , but could that be backwards ? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk , psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old , we were playing on top of a bunk bed .
I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean , I 'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do , and I wanted to play war .
So we were up on top of our bunk beds .
And on one side of the bunk bed , I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry .
And on the other side were all my sister 's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge .
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon , but since my sister is not here with us today , let me tell you the true story -- -- which is my sister 's a little bit on the clumsy side .
Somehow , without any help or push from her older brother at all , suddenly Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor .
Now I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground .
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible .
And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy 's arm just one week before ...
... heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet , for which I have yet to be thanked , I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn 't even see it coming -- I was trying as hard as I could to be on my best behavior .
And I saw my sister 's face , this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from the long winter 's nap for which they had settled .
So I did the only thing my little frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy .
And if you have children , you 've seen this hundreds of times before .
I said , " Amy , Amy , wait . Don 't cry . Don 't cry .
Did you see how you landed ?
No human lands on all fours like that .
Amy , I think this means you 're a unicorn . "
Now that was cheating , because there was nothing in the world my sister would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister , but Amy the special unicorn .
Of course , this was an option that was open to her brain at no point in the past .
And you could see how my poor , manipulated sister faced conflict , as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced , or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn .
And the latter won out .
Instead of crying , instead of ceasing our play , instead of waking my parents , with all the negative consequences that would have ensued for me , instead a smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn ...
... with one broken leg .
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain .
What we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology , which is the reason that I 'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning .
When I first started talking about this research outside of academia , out with companies and schools , the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk with a graph .
The very first thing I want to do is start my talk with a graph .
This graph looks boring , but this graph is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning .
And this graph doesn 't even mean anything ; it 's fake data .
What we found is -- If I got this data back studying you here in the room , I would be thrilled , because there 's very clearly a trend that 's going on there , and that means that I can get published , which is all that really matters .
The fact that there 's one weird red dot that 's up above the curve , there 's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are , I saw you earlier -- that 's no problem .
That 's no problem , as most of you know , because I can just delete that dot .
I can delete that dot because that 's clearly a measurement error .
And we know that 's a measurement error because it 's messing up my data .
So one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statistics and business and psychology courses is how , in a statistically valid way , do we eliminate the weirdos .
How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit ?
Which is fantastic if I 'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two .
But if I 'm interested in potential , if I 'm interested in your potential , or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity , what we 're doing is we 're creating the cult of the average with science .
If I asked a question like , " How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom ? "
scientists change the answer to " How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom ? "
and then we tailor the class right towards the average .
Now if you fall below the average on this curve , then psychologists get thrilled , because that means you 're either depressed or you have a disorder , or hopefully both .
We 're hoping for both because our business model is , if you come into a therapy session with one problem , we want to make sure you leave knowing you have 10 , so you keep coming back over and over again .
We 'll go back into your childhood if necessary , but eventually what we want to do is make you normal again .
But normal is merely average .
And what I posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we study what is merely average , we will remain merely average .
Then instead of deleting those positive outliers , what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say , why ?
Why is it that some of you are so high above the curve in terms of your intellectual ability , athletic ability , musical ability , creativity , energy levels , your resiliency in the face of challenge , your sense of humor ?
Whatever it is , instead of deleting you , what I want to do is study you .
Because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up to the average , but how we can move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide .
The reason this graph is important to me is , when I turn on the news , it seems like the majority of the information is not positive , in fact it 's negative .
Most of it 's about murder , corruption , diseases , natural disasters .
And very quickly , my brain starts to think that 's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world .
What that 's doing is creating something called the medical school syndrome -- which , if you know people who 've been to medical school , during the first year of medical training , as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that could happen , suddenly you realize you have all of them .
I have a brother in-law named Bobo -- which is a whole other story .
Bobo married Amy the unicorn .
Bobo called me on the phone from Yale Medical School , and Bobo said , " Shawn , I have leprosy . "
Which , even at Yale , is extraordinarily rare .
But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause .
See what we 're finding is it 's not necessarily the reality that shapes us , but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality .
And if we can change the lens , not only can we change your happiness , we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time .
When I applied to Harvard , I applied on a dare .
I didn 't expect to get in , and my family had no money for college .
When I got a military scholarship two weeks later , they allowed me to go .
Suddenly , something that wasn 't even a possibility became a reality .
When I went there , I assumed everyone else would see it as a privilege as well , that they 'd be excited to be there .
Even if you 're in a classroom full of people smarter than you , you 'd be happy just to be in that classroom , which is what I felt .
But what I found there is , while some people experience that , when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to ; I wasn 't that guy .
I was an officer of Harvard to counsel students through the difficult four years .
And what I found in my research and my teaching is that these students , no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school , two weeks later their brains were focused , not on the privilege of being there , nor on their philosophy or their physics .
Their brain was focused on the competition , the workload , the hassles , the stresses , the complaints .
When I first went in there , I walked into the freshmen dining hall , which is where my friends from Waco , Texas , which is where I grew up -- I know some of you have heard of it .
When they 'd come to visit me , they 'd look around , they 'd say , " This freshman dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart 's from the movie " Harry Potter , " which it does .
This is Hogwart 's from the movie " Harry Potter " and that 's Harvard .
And when they see this , they say , " Shawn , why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard ?
Seriously , what does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about ? "
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness .
Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels , when in reality , if I know everything about your external world , I can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness .
90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world , but by the way your brain processes the world .
And if we change it , if we change our formula for happiness and success , what we can do is change the way that we can then affect reality .
What we found is that only 25 percent of job successes are predicted by I.Q.
75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels , your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat .
I talked to a boarding school up in New England , probably the most prestigious boarding school , and they said , " We already know that .
So every year , instead of just teaching our students , we also have a wellness week .
And we 're so excited . Monday night we have the world 's leading expert coming in to speak about adolescent depression .
Tuesday night it 's school violence and bullying .
Wednesday night is eating disorders .
Thursday night is elicit drug use .
And Friday night we 're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness . "
I said , " That 's most people 's Friday nights . "
Which I 'm glad you liked , but they did not like that at all .
Silence on the phone .
And into the silence , I said , " I 'd be happy to speak at your school , but just so you know , that 's not a wellness week , that 's a sickness week .
What you 've done is you 've outlined all the negative things that can happen , but not talked about the positive . "
The absence of disease is not health .
Here 's how we get to health : We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success .
In the last three years , I 've traveled to 45 different countries , working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn .
And what I found is that most companies and schools follow a formula for success , which is this : If I work harder , I 'll be more successful .
And if I 'm more successful , then I 'll be happier .
That undergirds most of our parenting styles , our managing styles , the way that we motivate our behavior .
And the problem is it 's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons .
First , every time your brain has a success , you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like .
You got good grades , now you have to get better grades , you got into a good school and after you get into a better school , you got a good job , now you have to get a better job , you hit your sales target , we 're going to change your sales target .
And if happiness is on the opposite side of success , your brain never gets there .
What we 've done is we 've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society .
And that 's because we think we have to be successful , then we 'll be happier .
But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order .
If you can raise somebody 's level of positivity in the present , then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage , which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative , neutral or stressed .
Your intelligence rises , your creativity rises , your energy levels rise .
In fact , what we 've found is that every single business outcome improves .
Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative , neutral or stressed .
You 're 37 percent better at sales .
Doctors are 19 percent faster , more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative , neutral or stressed .
Which means we can reverse the formula .
If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present , then our brains work even more successfully as we 're able to work harder , faster and more intelligently .
What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of .
Because dopamine , which floods into your system when you 're positive , has two functions .
Not only does it make you happier , it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way .
We 've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive .
In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row , we can actually rewire your brain , allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully .
We 've done these things in research now in every single company that I 've worked with , getting them to write down three new things that they 're grateful for for 21 days in a row , three new things each day .
And at the end of that , their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world , not for the negative , but for the positive first .
Journaling about one positive experience you 've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it .
Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters .
We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we 've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand .
And finally , random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness .
We get people , when they open up their inbox , to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social support network .
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies , what we 've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success , and in doing so , not only create ripples of positivity , but create a real revolution .
Thank you very much .
Dan Ariely : What makes us feel good about our work ?
What motivates us to work ? Contrary to conventional wisdom , it isn 't just money . But it 's not exactly joy either . It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose . Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work .
When we think about how people work , the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze -- that all people care about is money , and the moment we give people money , we can direct them to work one way , we can direct them to work another way .
This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways .
And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like .
At the same time , if you think about it , there 's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us .
Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing .
If you read books of people who climb mountains , difficult mountains , do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness ?
No , they are full of misery .
In fact , it 's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing -- cold , challenging circumstances .
And if people were just trying to be happy , the moment they would get to the top , they would say , " This was a terrible mistake .
I 'll never do it again . "
" Instead , let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos . "
But instead , people go down , and after they recover , they go up again .
And if you think about mountain climbing as an example , it suggests all kinds of things .
It suggests that we care about reaching the end , a peak .
It suggests that we care about the fight , about the challenge .
It suggests that there 's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways .
And for me personally , I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me .
This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier .
And he came one day back to campus .
And he told me the following story : He said that for more than two weeks , he was working on a PowerPoint presentation .
He was working in a big bank .
This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition .
And he was working very hard on this presentation -- graphs , tables , information .
He stayed late at night every day .
And the day before it was due , he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss , and his boss wrote him back and said , " Nice presentation , but the merger is canceled . "
And the guy was deeply depressed .
Now at the moment when he was working , he was actually quite happy .
Every night he was enjoying his work , he was staying late , he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation .
But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed .
So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor .
And to start with , we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos , and we asked them to build with Legos .
And for some people , we gave them Legos and we said , " Hey , would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars ?
We 'll pay you three dollars for it . "
And people said yes , and they built with these Legos .
And when they finished , we took it , we put it under the table , and we said , " Would you like to build another one , this time for $ 2.70 ? "
If they said yes , we gave them another one .
And when they finished , we asked them , " Do you want to build another one ? " for $ 2.40 , $ 2.10 , and so on , until at some point people said , " No more . It 's not worth it for me . "
This was what we called the meaningful condition .
People built one Bionicle after another .
After they finished every one of them , we put them under the table .
And we told them that at the end of the experiment , we will take all these Bionicles , we will disassemble them , we will put them back in the boxes , and we will use it for the next participant .
There was another condition .
This other condition was inspired by David , my student .
And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition .
And if you remember the story about Sisyphus , Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill , and when he almost got to the end , the rock would roll over , and he would have to start again .
And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work .
You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills , at least he would have some sense of progress .
Also , if you look at prison movies , sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished , they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again .
There 's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating .
So in the second condition of this experiment , that 's exactly what we did .
We asked people , " Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars ? "
And if they said yes , they built it .
Then we asked them , " Do you want to build another one for $ 2.70 ? "
And if they said yes , we gave them a new one , and as they were building it , we took apart the one that they just finished .
And when they finished that , we said , " Would you like to build another one , this time for 30 cents less ? "
And if they said yes , we gave them the one that they built and we broke .
So this was an endless cycle of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes .
Now what happens when you compare these two conditions ?
The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven -- in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition .
And by the way , we should point out that this was not a big meaning .
People were not curing cancer or building bridges .
People were building Bionicles for a few cents .
And not only that , everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon .
So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning .
But even the small meaning made a difference .
Now we had another version of this experiment .
In this other version of the experiment , we didn 't put people in this situation , we just described to them the situation , much as I am describing to you now , and we asked them to predict what the result would be .
What happened ?
People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude .
People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle .
So people understand that meaning is important , they just don 't understand the magnitude of the importance , the extent to which it 's important .
There was one other piece of data we looked at .
If you think about it , there are some people who love Legos and some people who don 't .
And you would speculate that the people who love Legos will build more Legos , even for less money , because after all , they get more internal joy from it .
And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower .
And that 's actually what we found in the meaningful condition .
There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego and the amount of Legos people built .
What happened in the Sisyphic condition ?
In that condition the correlation was zero .
There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built , which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people 's eyes , we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity .
We basically eliminated it .
Soon after I finished running this experiment , I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle .
I can 't tell you who they were , but they were a big company in Seattle .
And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building .
And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company .
And the week before I showed up , the CEO of this big software company went to that group , 200 engineers , and canceled the project .
And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I 've ever talked to .
And I described to them some of these Lego experiments , and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment .
And I asked them , I said , " How many of you now show up to work later than you used to ? "
And everybody raised their hand .
I said , " How many of you now go home earlier than you used to ? "
And everybody raised their hand .
I asked them , " How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports ? "
And they didn 't really raise their hands , but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports .
And then I asked them , I said , " What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed ? "
And they came up with all kinds of ideas .
They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do .
He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization .
He could have asked them to build some prototypes , some next-generation prototypes , and seen how they would work .
But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation .
And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning .
If the CEO , just like our participants , thought the essence of meaning is unimportant , then he [ wouldn 't ] care .
And he would tell them , " At the moment I directed you in this way , and now that I am directing you in this way , everything will be okay . "
But if you understood how important meaning is , then you would figure out that it 's actually important to spend some time , energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they 're doing .
The next experiment was slightly different .
We took a sheet of paper with random letters , and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other .
That was the task .
And people did the first sheet .
And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money and the next sheet for a little bit less money , and so on and so forth .
And we had three conditions .
In the first condition , people wrote their name on the sheet , found all the pairs of letters , gave it to the experimenter .
The experimenter would look at it , scan it from top to bottom , say " uh huh " and put it on the pile next to them .
In the second condition , people did not write their name on it .
The experimenter looked at it , took the sheet of paper , did not look at it , did not scan it , and simply put it on the pile of pages .
So you take a piece , you just put it on the side .
And in the third condition , the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder .
What happened in those three conditions ?
In this plot I 'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped .
So low numbers mean that people worked harder . They worked for much longer .
In the acknowledged condition , people worked all the way down to 15 cents .
At 15 cents per page , they basically stopped these efforts .
In the shredder condition , it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet .
And this is basically the result we had before .
You shred people 's efforts , output , you get them not to be as happy with what they 're doing .
But I should point out , by the way , that in the shredder condition , people could have cheated .
They could have done not so good work , because they realized that people were just shredding it .
So maybe the first sheet you would do good work , but then you see nobody is really testing it , so you would do more and more and more .
So in fact , in the shredder condition , people could have submitted more work and gotten more money and put less effort into it .
But what about the ignored condition ?
Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder , or somewhere in the middle ?
It turns out it was almost like the shredder .
Now there 's good news and bad news here .
The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes .
Ignoring gets you a whole way out there .
The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done , scanning it and saying " uh huh , " that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people 's motivations .
So the good news is that adding motivation doesn 't seem to be so difficult .
The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy , and if we don 't think about it carefully , we might overdo it .
So this is all in terms of negative motivation or eliminating negative motivation .
The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation .
So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA .
And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble .
And I don 't know about you , but every time I assemble one of those , it takes me much longer , it 's much more effortful , it 's much more confusing .
I put things in the wrong way .
I can 't say enjoy those pieces .
I can 't say I enjoy the process .
But when I finish it , I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones .
And there 's an old story about cake mixes .
So when they started cake mixes in the ' 40s , they would take this powder and they would put it in a box , and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in , stir some water in it , mix it , put it in the oven , and -- voila ! -- you had cake .
But it turns out they were very unpopular .
People did not want them .
And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that .
Maybe the taste was not good .
No , the taste was great .
What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved .
It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say , " Here is my cake . "
No , no , no , it was somebody else 's cake .
It was as if you bought it in the store .
It didn 't really feel like your own .
So what did they do ?
They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder .
Now you had to break the eggs and add them .
You had to measure the milk and add it , mixing it .
Now it was your cake . Now everything was fine .
Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect , by getting people to work harder , they actually got them to love what they 're doing to a higher degree .
So how do we look at this question experimentally ?
We asked people to build some origami .
We gave them instructions on how to create origami , and we gave them a sheet of paper .
And these were all novices , and they built something that was really quite ugly -- nothing like a frog or a crane .
But then we told them , we said , " Look , this origami really belongs to us .
You worked for us , but I 'll tell you what , we 'll sell it to you .
How much do you want to pay for it ? "
And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it .
And we had two types of people .
We had the people who built it , and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers .
And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami , and they were willing to pay for them five times more than the people who just evaluated them externally .
Now you could say , if you were a builder , do you think that , " Oh , I love this origami , but I know that nobody else would love it ? "
Or do you think , " I love this origami , and everybody else will love it as well ? "
Which one of those two is correct ?
Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more , they thought that everybody would see the world in their view .
They thought everybody else would love it more as well .
In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect .
We tried to make it more difficult .
So for some people we gave the same task .
For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions .
At the top of the sheet , we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami .
For some people we just eliminated that .
So now this was tougher . What happened ?
Well in an objective way , the origami now was uglier , it was more difficult .
Now when we looked at the easy origami , we saw the same thing : Builders loved it more , evaluators loved it less .
When you looked at the hard instructions , the effect was larger .
Why ? Because now the builders loved it even more .
They put all this extra effort into it .
And evaluators ? They loved it even less .
Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version .
Of course , this tells you something about how we evaluate things .
Now think about kids .
Imagine I asked you , " How much would you sell your kids for ? "
Your memories and associations and so on .
Most people would say for a lot , a lot of money -- on good days .
But imagine this was slightly different .
Imagine if you did not have your kids , and one day you went to the park and you met some kids , and they were just like your kids .
And you played with them for a few hours .
And when you were about to leave , the parents said , " Hey , by the way , just before you leave , if you 're interested , they 're for sale . "
How much would you pay for them now ?
Most people say not that much .
And this is because our kids are so valuable , not just because of who they are , but because of us , because they are so connected to us and because of the time and connection .
And by the way , if you think that IKEA instructions are not good , think about the instructions that come with kids .
Those are really tough .
By the way , these are my kids , which , of course , are wonderful and so on .
Which comes to tell you one more thing , which is , much like our builders , when they look at the creature of their creation , we don 't see that other people don 't see things our way .
Let me say one last comment .
If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx , Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency .
He gave an example of a pin factory .
He said pins have 12 different steps , and if one person does all 12 steps , production is very low .
But if you get one person to do step one and one person to do step two and step three and so on , production can increase tremendously .
And indeed , this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency .
Karl Marx , on the other hand , said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing .
And if you make all 12 steps , you care about the pin .
But if you make one step every time , maybe you don 't care as much .
And I think that in the Industrial Revolution , Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx , but the reality is that we 've switched and now we 're in the knowledge economy .
And you can ask yourself , what happens in a knowledge economy ?
Is efficiency still more important than meaning ?
I think the answer is no .
I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort , attention , caring , how connected they feel to it , are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on , all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us .
So when we think about labor , we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing , but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning , creation , challenges , ownership , identity , pride , etc .
And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them , how do we create our own meaning , pride , motivation , and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees , I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier .
Thank you very much .
Amy Lockwood : Selling condoms in the Congo
HIV is a serious problem in the DR Congo , and aid agencies have flooded the country with free and cheap condoms . But few people are using them . Why ? " Reformed marketer " Amy Lockwood offers a surprising answer that upends a traditional model of philanthropy .
I am a reformed marketer , and I now work in international development .
In October , I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo , which is the [ second ] largest country in Africa .
In fact , it 's as large as Western Europe , but it only has 300 miles of paved roads .
The DRC is a dangerous place .
In the past 10 years , five million people have died due to a war in the east .
But war isn 't the only reason that life is difficult in the DRC .
There are many health issues as well .
In fact , the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults .
This might not sound like a large number , but in a country with 76 million people , it means there are 930,000 that are infected .
And due to the poor infrastructure , only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need .
Which is why , in part , donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost .
And so while I was in the DRC , I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms , including Damien .
Damien runs a hotel outside of Kinshasa .
It 's a hotel that 's only open until midnight , so it 's not a place that you stay .
But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come .
Now Damien knows all about condoms , but he doesn 't sell them .
He said there 's just not in demand .
It 's not surprising , because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms .
Joseph and Christine , who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms , said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost , and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them , their customers don 't buy the branded versions .
They like the generics .
And as a marketer , I found that curious .
And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like .
And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms : fear , financing and fidelity .
They name the condoms things like Vive , " to live " or Trust .
They package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of HIV , put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them , show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently .
Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom .
What is it that you think about just before you get a condom ?
Sex !
And the private companies that sell condoms in these places , they understand this .
Their marketing is slightly different .
The name might not be much different , but the imagery sure is .
Some brands are aspirational , and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative .
And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing : understanding who 's the audience .
And for donor agencies , unfortunately , the audience tends to be people that aren 't even in the country they 're working [ in ] .
It 's people back home , people that support their work , people like these .
But if what we 're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV , we need to think about the customer , the people whose behavior needs to change -- the couples , the young women , the young men -- whose lives depend on it .
And so the lesson is this : it doesn 't really matter what you 're selling ; you just have to think about who is your customer , and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior .
It might just save their lives .
Thank you .
Vicki Arroyo : Let 's prepare for our new climate
As Vicki Arroyo says , it 's time to prepare our homes and cities for our changing climate , with its increased risk of flooding , drought and uncertainty . She illustrates this inspiring talk with bold projects from cities all over the world -- local examples of thinking ahead .
This is the skyline of my hometown , New Orleans .
It was a great place to grow up , but it 's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world .
Half the city is already below sea level .
In 2005 , the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina .
One thousand , eight hundred and thirty-six people died . Nearly 300,000 homes were lost .
These are my mother 's , at the top -- although that 's not her car , it was carried there by floodwaters up to the roof -- and that 's my sister 's , below .
Fortunately , they and other family members got out in time , but they lost their homes , and as you can see , just about everything in them .
Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways .
In 2008 , Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar .
Climate change is affecting our homes , our communities , our way of life . We should be preparing at every scale and at every opportunity .
This talk is about being prepared for , and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes and our collective home , the Earth .
The changes in these times won 't affect us all equally .
There are important distributional consequences , and they 're not what you always might think .
In New Orleans , the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable .
For those in vulnerable , low-lying nations , how do you put a dollar value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried ? And where will your people go ?
And how will they cope in a foreign land ?
Will there be tensions over immigration , or conflicts over competition for limited resources ?
It 's already fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur .
Like it or not , ready or not , this is our future .
Sure , some are looking for opportunities in this new world .
That 's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice .
But while there might be some short-term individual winners , our collective losses will far outweigh them .
Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses from extreme weather events .
The military gets it . They call climate change a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security , while governments around the world are evaluating how to respond .
So what can we do ? How can we prepare and adapt ?
I 'd like to share three sets of examples , starting with adapting to violent storms and floods .
In New Orleans , the I-10 Twin Spans , with sections knocked out in Katrina , have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge .
And these raised and energy-efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth Ward .
The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher , it 's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country .
They 're selling electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels , reflective paint and more .
Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars .
Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way , but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind .
For example , in Galveston , here 's a resilient home that survived Hurricane Ike , when others on neighboring lots clearly did not .
And around the world , satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh .
But as important as technology and infrastructure are , perhaps the human element is even more critical .
We need better planning and systems for evacuation .
We need to better understand how people make decisions in times of crisis , and why .
While it 's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation , others who did refused to leave as the storm approached , often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets .
Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue .
Fortunately in 2006 , Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act — it spells " PETS " — to change that .
Second , preparing for heat and drought .
Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa , from Australia to Oklahoma , while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003 , and again in Russia in 2010 .
In Ethiopia , 70 percent , that 's 7-0 percent of the population , depends on rainfall for its livelihood .
Oxfam and Swiss Re , together with Rockefeller Foundation , are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water , but they 're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come .
The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest .
It 's giving them access to affordable credit .
It 's allowing them to become more productive so that they can afford their own insurance over time , without assistance .
It 's a virtuous cycle , and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world .
After a lethal 1995 heat wave turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues , Chicago became a recognized leader , tamping down on the urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers , outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods , planting trees , creating cool white or vegetated green roofs .
This is City Hall 's green roof , next to Cook County 's [ portion of the ] roof , which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface .
Washington , D.C. , last year , actually led the nation in new green roofs installed , and they 're funding this in part thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags .
They 're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs with home and building owners .
The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact but they save energy , and therefore money , the emissions that cause climate change , and they also reduce stormwater runoff .
So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins .
Third , adapting to rising seas .
Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems , agriculture , even major cities . This is what one to two meters of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta .
That 's where half of Vietnam 's rice is grown .
Infrastructure is going to be affected .
Airports around the world are located on the coast .
It makes sense , right ? There 's open space , the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings .
Here 's just one example , San Francisco Airport , with 16 inches or more of flooding .
Imagine the staggering cost of protecting this vital infrastructure with levees .
But there might be some changes in store that you might not imagine . For example , planes require more runway for takeoff because the heated , less dense air , provides for less lift .
San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment , as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater , causing backups at the plant , harming the bacteria that are needed to treat the waste .
So these outfall pipes have been retrofitted to shut seawater off from entering the system .
Beyond these technical solutions , our work at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available and to consider how they can accommodate change .
For example , in land use , which areas do you want to protect , through adding a seawall , for example , alter , by raising buildings , or retreat from , to allow the migration of important natural systems , such as wetlands or beaches ?
Other examples to consider . In the U.K. , the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge .
The Asian Cities Climate [ Change ] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves .
These are not only important ecosystems in their own right , but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities .
New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms , as you can see from this clever sign , and to sea level rise , and to storm surge , as you can see from the subway flooding .
But back above ground , these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive . In fact , in New York , San Francisco and London , designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind .
I think these are inspiring examples of what 's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different .
But now , a word of caution .
Adaptation 's too important to be left to the experts .
Why ? Well , there are no experts .
We 're entering uncharted territory , and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past .
" Stationarity " is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past , and plan accordingly , and this principle governs much of our engineering , our design of critical infrastructure , city water systems , building codes , even water rights and other legal precedents .
But we can simply no longer rely on established norms .
We 're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years .
The larger point I 'm trying to make is this .
It 's up to us to look at our homes and our communities , our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk , and to find ways to not just survive , but to thrive , and it 's up to us to plan and to prepare and to call on our government leaders and require them to do the same , even while they address the underlying causes of climate change .
There are no quick fixes .
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions .
We 're all learning by doing .
But the operative word is doing .
Thank you .
Aubrey de Grey : A roadmap to end aging
Cambridge researcher Aubrey de Grey argues that aging is merely a disease -- and a curable one at that . Humans age in seven basic ways , he says , all of which can be averted .
18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit , so I 'm going to dive straight in , right at the point where I get this thing to work .
Here we go . I 'm going to talk about five different things .
I 'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable .
I 'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together , and actually talk about this a bit more than we do .
I 'm going to talk about feasibility as well , of course .
I 'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging .
And then I 'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about , you know , how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong , namely , by actually doing something about it .
I 'm going to do that in two steps .
The first one I 'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension -- which I 'm going to define as 30 years , applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start -- to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging .
Namely , essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year -- or indeed , to get sick in the first place .
And of course , the last thing I 'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step , that point of maybe 30 years life extension .
So I 'm going to start with why we should .
Now , I want to ask a question .
Hands up : anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria ?
That was easy . OK .
OK . Hands up : anyone in the audience who 's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing ?
OK . So we all think malaria is a bad thing .
That 's very good news , because I thought that was what the answer would be .
Now the thing is , I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging .
And here is that characteristic .
The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does .
Now , I like in an audience , in Britain especially , to talk about the comparison with foxhunting , which is something that was banned after a long struggle , by the government not very many months ago .
I mean , I know I 'm with a sympathetic audience here , but , as we know , a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic .
And this is actually a rather good comparison , it seems to me .
You know , a lot of people said , " Well , you know , city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time .
It 's a traditional part of the way of life , and we should be allowed to carry on doing it .
It 's ecologically sound ; it stops the population explosion of foxes . "
But ultimately , the government prevailed in the end , because the majority of the British public , and certainly the majority of members of Parliament , came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society .
And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades .
What part of this do people not understand ?
It 's not just about life , of course -- -- it 's about healthy life , you know -- getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun , whether or not dying may be fun .
So really , this is how I would like to describe it .
It 's a global trance .
These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging .
And , I mean , OK , I 'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless .
There are some good points to be made here , things that we ought to be thinking about , forward planning so that nothing goes too -- well , so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging .
But these are completely crazy , when you actually remember your sense of proportion .
You know , these are arguments ; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about .
But the question is , are they so dangerous -- these risks of doing something about aging -- that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite , namely , leaving aging as it is ?
Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death ?
You know , if you haven 't got an argument that 's that strong , then just don 't waste my time , is what I say .
Now , there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong , and here it is .
People worry about overpopulation ; they say , " Well , if we fix aging , no one 's going to die to speak of , or at least the death toll is going to be much lower , only from crossing St. Giles carelessly .
And therefore , we 're not going to be able to have many kids , and kids are really important to most people . "
And that 's true .
And you know , a lot of people try to fudge this question , and give answers like this .
I don 't agree with those answers . I think they basically don 't work .
I think it 's true , that we will face a dilemma in this respect .
We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate , or a high death rate .
A high death rate will , of course , arise from simply rejecting these therapies , in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids .
And , I say that that 's fine -- the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice .
What 's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future .
If we vacillate , hesitate , and do not actually develop these therapies , then we are condemning a whole cohort of people -- who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies , but will not be , because we haven 't developed them as quickly as we could -- we 'll be denying those people an indefinite life span , and I consider that that is immoral .
That 's my answer to the overpopulation question .
Right . So the next thing is , now why should we get a little bit more active on this ?
And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks .
It 's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging .
Aging is ghastly , but it 's inevitable , so , you know , we 've got to find some way to put it out of our minds , and it 's rational to do anything that we might want to do , to do that .
Like , for example , making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all .
But of course , that only works when we have both of these components .
And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear -- and we might be in range of doing something about aging -- this becomes part of the problem .
This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things .
And that 's why we have to really talk about this a lot -- evangelize , I will go so far as to say , quite a lot -- in order to get people 's attention , and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard .
So that 's all I 'm going to say about that .
I 'm now going to talk about feasibility .
And the fundamental reason , I think , why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I 'm giving here .
A very simple definition .
Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place , which is to say , metabolism .
This is not a completely tautological statement ; it 's a reasonable statement .
Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars , and it also happens to us , despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms , because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect .
So basically , metabolism , which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next , has side effects .
Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology .
That 's a fine definition . So we can put it this way : we can say that , you know , we have this chain of events .
And there are really two games in town , according to most people , with regard to postponing aging .
They 're what I 'm calling here the " gerontology approach " and the " geriatrics approach . "
The geriatrician will intervene late in the day , when pathology is becoming evident , and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time , and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon .
Of course , it 's a very short-term-ist strategy ; it 's a losing battle , because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on .
The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface , because , you know , prevention is better than cure .
But unfortunately the thing is that we don 't understand metabolism very well .
In fact , we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work -- even cells we 're not really too good on yet .
We 've discovered things like , for example , RNA interference only a few years ago , and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work .
Basically , gerontology is a fine approach in the end , but it is not an approach whose time has come when we 're talking about intervention .
So then , what do we do about that ?
I mean , that 's a fine logic , that sounds pretty convincing , pretty ironclad , doesn 't it ?
But it isn 't .
Before I tell you why it isn 't , I 'm going to go a little bit into what I 'm calling step two .
Just suppose , as I said , that we do acquire -- let 's say we do it today for the sake of argument -- the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age , let 's say 55 .
I 'm going to call that " robust human rejuvenation . " OK .
What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today -- or equivalently , of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive -- would actually live ?
In order to answer that question -- you might think it 's simple , but it 's not simple .
We can 't just say , " Well , if they 're young enough to benefit from these therapies , then they 'll live 30 years longer . "
That 's the wrong answer .
And the reason it 's the wrong answer is because of progress .
There are two sorts of technological progress really , for this purpose .
There are fundamental , major breakthroughs , and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs .
Now , they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames .
Fundamental breakthroughs : very hard to predict how long it 's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough .
It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun , and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it .
But after that , things were pretty steady and pretty uniform .
I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight .
We can think , really , that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one , if you like .
The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore .
This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough .
And you see it in all sorts of technologies .
Computers : you can look at a more or less parallel time line , happening of course a bit later .
You can look at medical care . I mean , hygiene , vaccines , antibiotics -- you know , the same sort of time frame .
So I think that actually step two , that I called a step a moment ago , isn 't a step at all .
That in fact , the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension , even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive , will be at some sort of cusp .
They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years .
In other words , they will be staying ahead of the game .
The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us .
This is a very important point for me to get across .
Because , you know , most people , when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more , they think that I 'm saying that we 're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more .
I 'm not saying that at all .
I 'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough .
They 'll never be perfect , but we 'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of , before we have any 200-year-olds .
And the same for 300 and 400 and so on .
I decided to give this a little name , which is " longevity escape velocity . "
Well , it seems to get the point across .
So , these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live , in terms of remaining life expectancy , as measured by their health , for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive .
If you 're already 100 , or even if you 're 80 -- and an average 80-year-old , we probably can 't do a lot for you with these therapies , because you 're too close to death 's door for the really initial , experimental therapies to be good enough for you .
You won 't be able to withstand them .
But if you 're only 50 , then there 's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and , you know -- -- eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense , in terms of your youthfulness , both physical and mental , and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes .
And of course , if you 're a bit younger than that , then you 're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes .
So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to , that the first 150-year-old -- we don 't know how old that person is today , because we don 't know how long it 's going to take to get these first-generation therapies .
But irrespective of that age , I 'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 -- subject of course , to , you know , global catastrophes -- is actually , probably , only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old .
And that 's quite a thought .
Alright , so finally I 'm going to spend the rest of the talk , my last seven-and-a-half minutes , on step one ; namely , how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity ?
And in order to do that , I need to talk about mice a little bit .
I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation .
I 'm calling it " robust mouse rejuvenation , " not very imaginatively .
And this is what it is .
I say we 're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse , which basically means mice that live about three years on average .
We do exactly nothing to them until they 're already two years old .
And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them , and with those therapies , we get them to live , on average , to their fifth birthday .
So , in other words , we add two years -- we treble their remaining lifespan , starting from the point that we started the therapies .
The question then is , what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans ?
Which we can now , as I 've explained , equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity .
Secondly , what does it mean for the public 's perception of how long it 's going to take for us to get to those things , starting from the time we get the mice ?
And thirdly , the question is , what will it do to actually how much people want it ?
And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question , and it 's extremely hard to answer .
One has to be very speculative , and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation , that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more .
I say that 's nonsense .
I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this .
We need to give our best guess as to the time frame , in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities .
So , I say that we have a 50 / 50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone , robust human rejuvenation , within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation .
15 years from the robust mouse .
The public 's perception will probably be somewhat better than that .
The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are .
So they 'll probably think it 's five years away .
They 'll be wrong , but that actually won 't matter too much .
And finally , of course , I think it 's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier , the coping strategy .
That will be history at this point , because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans , since it 's been postponed so very effectively in mice .
So we 're likely to end up with a very strong change in people 's attitudes , and of course that has enormous implications .
So in order to tell you now how we 're going to get these mice , I 'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging .
I 'm going to use this word " damage " to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology .
Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology , the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life , starting before we 're born .
But it is not part of metabolism itself .
And this turns out to be useful .
Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way .
We can say that , fundamentally , the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage .
And I 'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment .
And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology .
And the reason it 's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate .
So there 's a third approach , if we look at it this way .
We can call it the " engineering approach , " and I claim that the engineering approach is within range .
The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes .
It does not intervene in this process or this one .
And that 's good because it means that it 's not a losing battle , and it 's something that we are within range of being able to do , because it doesn 't involve improving on evolution .
The engineering approach simply says , " Let 's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage -- not necessarily repair them completely , but repair them quite a lot , so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist , that causes it to be pathogenic . "
We know that this threshold exists , because we don 't get age-related diseases until we 're in middle age , even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born .
Why do I say that we 're in range ? Well , this is basically it .
The point about this slide is actually the bottom .
If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging , we will be here all night , because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another .
This list is just for illustration ; it is incomplete .
The list on the right is also incomplete .
It 's a list of types of pathology that are age-related , and it 's just an incomplete list .
But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete -- this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage , side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end , or that might cause pathology .
And there are only seven of them .
They 're categories of things , of course , but there 's only seven of them .
Cell loss , mutations in chromosomes , mutations in the mitochondria and so on .
First of all , I 'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete .
Of course one can make a biological argument .
One can say , " OK , what are we made of ? "
We 're made of cells and stuff between cells .
What can damage accumulate in ?
The answer is : long-lived molecules , because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage , but then the molecule is destroyed -- like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis -- then the damage is gone , too .
It 's got to be long-lived molecules .
So , these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news , because it means that , you know , we 've come a long way in biology in these 20 years , so the fact that we haven 't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there 's no extension to be done .
However , it 's better than that ; we actually know how to fix them all , in mice , in principle -- and what I mean by in principle is , we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade .
Some of them are partially implemented already , the ones at the top .
I haven 't got time to go through them at all , but my conclusion is that , if we can actually get suitable funding for this , then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years , but we do need to get serious about it .
We do need to really start trying .
So of course , there are some biologists in the audience , and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have .
You may have been dissatisfied with this talk , but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff .
I 've published a great deal on this ; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based , and there 's quite a lot of detail there .
The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I 'm predicting here .
So if you think that I 'm wrong , you 'd better damn well go and find out why you think I 'm wrong .
And of course the main thing is that you shouldn 't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because , as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field , you know , you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously .
So , you know , you 've got to actually do your homework , in order to understand whether this is true .
And we 'll just end with a few things .
One thing is , you know , you 'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time , and everyone said , " Well , it 's obviously impossible . "
And you know what happened .
So , you know , this does happen .
We have various strategies -- there 's the Methuselah Mouse Prize , which is basically an incentive to innovate , and to do what you think is going to work , and you get money for it if you win .
There 's a proposal to actually put together an institute .
This is what 's going to take a bit of money .
But , I mean , look -- how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq ?
Not very long . OK .
It 's got to be philanthropic , because profits distract biotech , but it 's basically got a 90 percent chance , I think , of succeeding in this .
And I think we know how to do it . And I 'll stop there .
Thank you .
OK . I don 't know if there 's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance .
Audience : Since you 've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it , why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man ?
AG : Because I am an old man . I am actually 158 .
Audience : Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate .
However , as far as I know , all the species have evolved to actually die , so when cells divide , the telomerase get shorter , and eventually species die .
So , why does -- evolution has -- seems to have selected against immortality , when it is so advantageous , or is evolution just incomplete ?
AG : Brilliant . Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer .
I 'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question , which I happen to agree with , which is that , no , aging is not a product of selection , evolution ; [ aging ] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect .
In other words , we have aging because it 's hard work not to have aging ; you need more genetic pathways , more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly , and that carries on being true the longer you push it out .
So , to the extent that evolution doesn 't matter , doesn 't care whether genes are passed on by individuals , living a long time or by procreation , there 's a certain amount of modulation of that , which is why different species have different lifespans , but that 's why there are no immortal species .
The genes don 't care but we do ?
AG : That 's right .
Audience : Hello . I read somewhere that in the last 20 years , the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years .
If I project that , that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don 't crash on my motorbike .
That means that I 'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old ?
AG : If you lose a bit of weight .
Your numbers are a bit out .
The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade .
So , it 's not quite as good as you might think , you might hope .
But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible .
Audience : I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo , and that the brain cells last 80 years or so .
If that is indeed true , biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation ?
If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years , as opposed to a typical , you know , couple of months ?
AG : There are technical implications certainly .
Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate , especially neurons , but we don 't want to replace them any faster than that -- or not much faster anyway , because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function .
What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification .
There are species that have no aging -- Hydra for example -- but they do it by not having a nervous system -- and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells .
Lewis Pugh : My mind-shifting Everest swim
After he swam the North Pole , Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip . Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas , created by recent glacial melting , and Lake Pumori , a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest -- and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change .
Last year when I was here , I was speaking to you about a swim which I did across the North Pole .
And while that swim took place three years ago , I can remember it as if it was yesterday .
I remember standing on the edge of the ice , about to dive into the water , and thinking to myself , I have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening .
The water is completely black .
The water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade , or 29 degrees Fahrenheit .
It 's flipping freezing in that water .
And then a thought came across my mind : if things go pear-shaped on this swim , how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean ?
And then I said to myself , I 've just got to get this thought And the only way I can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my iPod and really revving myself up , listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to Puff Daddy , and then committing myself a hundred percent -- there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind -- and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water .
And that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds , and it felt like 18 days .
And I remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers , and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because -- you know , we 're made partially of water -- when water freezes it expands , and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst .
And the most immediate thought when I came out of that water was the following : I 'm never , ever going to do another cold water swim in my life again .
Anyway , last year , I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the -- and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change .
I heard about this lake , Lake Imja .
This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier .
The glacier 's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake .
And I firmly believe that what we 're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great , big battleground on this earth .
Nearly two billion people -- so one in three people on this earth -- rely on the water from the Himalayas .
And with a population increasing as quickly as it is , and with the water supply from these glaciers -- because of climate change -- decreasing so much , I think we have a real risk of instability .
North , you 've got China ; south , you 've India , Pakistan , Bangladesh , all these countries .
And so I decided to walk up to Mt . Everest , the highest mountain on this earth , and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of Mt . Everest .
Now , I don 't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to Mt . Everest , but it 's quite an ordeal getting up there .
28 great , big , powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain -- I don 't just have my Speedo , but there 's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world .
The other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude .
I wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level .
So it 's right up in the heavens .
It 's very , very difficult to breath . You get altitude sickness .
I feels like you 've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time .
That 's not the worst part of it .
The worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on Mt . Everest .
Many , many people have died on Mt . Everest , and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain .
And when you 're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before , and , in fact , no fish -- there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters -- When you 're trying to do that , and then the bodies are coming past you , it humbles you , and you also realize very , very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are .
And we walked up this pathway , all the way up .
And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier .
And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice .
And then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of Mt . Everest , and I prepared myself the same way as I 've always prepared myself , for this swim which was going to be so very difficult .
I put on my iPod , I listened to some music , I got myself as aggressive as possible -- but controlled aggression -- and then I hurled myself into that water .
I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters , and then I realized very , very quickly , I had a huge problem on my hands .
I could barely breathe .
I was gasping for air .
I then began to choke , and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water .
And it all happened so quickly : I then -- I don 't know how it happened -- but I went underwater .
And luckily , the water was quite shallow , and I was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air .
And then I said , carry on . Carry on . Carry on .
I carried on for another five or six strokes , and then I had nothing in my body , and I went down to the bottom of the lake .
And I don 't where I got it from , but I was able to somehow get to the side of the lake .
I 've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have .
I have never , ever heard such utter bollocks .
It is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have .
I got myself to the side of the lake .
My crew grabbed me , and then we walked as quickly as we could down -- over the rubble -- down to our camp .
And there , we sat down , and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on Mt . Everest .
And my team just gave it to me straight .
They said , Lewis , you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim .
Every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming , you must forget .
Every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the British army , about speed and aggression , you put that to one side .
We want you to walk up the hill in another two days ' time .
Take some time to rest and think about things .
We want you to walk up the mountain in two days ' time , and instead of swimming fast , swim as slowly as possible .
Instead of swimming crawl , swim breaststroke .
And remember , never ever swim with aggression .
This is the time to swim with real humility .
And so we walked back up to the mountain two days later .
And I stood there on the edge of the lake , and I looked up at Mt . Everest -- and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth -- and I said to myself , just do this slowly .
And I swam across the lake .
And I can 't begin to tell you how good I felt when I came to the other side .
But I learned two very , very important lessons there on Mt . Everest , and I thank my team of Sherpas who taught me this .
The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well , doesn 't mean it 's going to work in the future .
And similarly , now , before I do anything , I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task .
And taking that into the world of climate change -- which is , frankly , the Mt . Everest of all problems -- just because we 've lived the way we have lived for so long , and populated the earth the way we have for so long , doesn 't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on .
The warning signs are all there .
When I was born , the world 's population was 3.5 billion people .
We 're now 6.8 billion people , and we 're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050 .
And then the second lesson , the radical , tactical shift .
And I 've come here to ask you today : what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment , which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world , and most importantly , in a sustainable world ?
And I ask you , please , to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make , which will make that big difference , and then commit a hundred percent to doing it .
Blog about it , tweet about it , talk about it , and commit a hundred percent , because very , very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it .
So thank you very , very much .
John Hodgman : Design , explained .
John Hodgman , comedian and resident expert , " explains " the design of three iconic modern objects . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Today I 'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design , and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor 's degree in Literature .
But I 'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs , so I pretty much know everything there is .
Now , I 'm sure you recognize this object ; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days .
This is known as the Theme Building ; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky .
And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture .
It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX , although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era , when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants .
It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located , of course , at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design , the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously , the much better access to parking .
When it was uncovered , it ushered in a new era of streamlined , archaically futuristic design called Googie , which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age , a misnomer .
After all , the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often , preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls .
Ah yes , a table .
We use these every day .
And on top of it , the juicy salif .
This is a design by Philippe Starck , who I believe is in the audience at this very moment .
And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision , its playfulness , its innovation and its promise of imminent violence .
It is a design that challenges your intuition -- it is not what you think it is when you first see it .
It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d 'oeuvres at a time , which would be useful out in the lobby , I would say .
And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism , it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts .
It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that , you never see it as anything else again .
It is also not a monument to design , it is a monument to design 's utility .
You can take it home with you , unlike the Theme Building , which will stay where it is forever .
This is affordable and can come home with you and , as such , it can sit on your kitchen counter -- it can 't go in your drawers ; trust me , I found that out the hard way -- and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design .
One other thing about it , if you do have one at home , let me tell you one of the features you may not know : when you fall asleep , it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep .
Okay , what is this object ?
I have no idea . I don 't know what that thing is .
It looks terrible . Is it a little hot plate ?
I don 't get it .
Does anyone know ? Chi ?
It 's an ... iPhone. iPhone .
Oh yes , that 's right , I remember those ; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days .
No , I have an iPhone . Of course I do .
Here is my well-loved iPhone .
I do so many things on this little device .
I like to read books on it .
More than that , I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it 's perfect .
I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox , for example .
Every now and then , I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally .
And yet I forget about it all the time .
This is a design that once you saw it , you forgot about it .
It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life .
Unlike the Theme Building , this is not alien technology .
Or I should say , what it did was it took technology which , unlike people in this room , to many other people in the world , still feels very alien , and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate .
And unlike the juicy salif , it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain , rather , it simply attaches itself to your brain .
And you didn 't even notice it happened .
So there you go . My name is John Hodgman .
I just explained design .
Thank you very much .
Lakshmi Pratury : The lost art of letter-writing
Lakshmi Pratury remembers the lost art of letter-writing and shares a series of notes her father wrote to her before he died . Her short but heartfelt talk may inspire you to set pen to paper , too .
So I thought , " I will talk about death . "
Seemed to be the passion today .
Actually , it 's not about death .
It 's inevitable , terrible , but really what I want to talk about is , I 'm just fascinated by the legacy people leave when they die .
That 's what I want to talk about .
So Art Buchwald left his legacy of humor with a video that appeared soon after he died , saying , " Hi ! I 'm Art Buchwald , and I just died . "
And Mike , who I met at Galapagos , a trip which I won at TED , is leaving notes on cyberspace where he is chronicling his journey through cancer .
And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook .
In the last two years of his life , when he was sick , he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me .
He wrote about my strengths , weaknesses , and gentle suggestions for improvement , quoting specific incidents , and held a mirror to my life .
After he died , I realized that no one writes to me anymore .
Handwriting is a disappearing art .
I 'm all for email and thinking while typing , but why give up old habits for new ?
Why can 't we have letter writing and email exchange in our lives ?
There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him , and trade all those years for one hug .
But too late .
But that 's when I take out his letters and I read them , and the paper that touched his hand is in mine , and I feel connected to him .
So maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy , and not a financial one .
A value for things with a personal touch -- an autograph book , a soul-searching letter .
If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper -- John , it 'll be a recycled one -- and write a beautiful letter to someone they love , we actually may start a revolution where our children may go to penmanship classes .
So what do I plan to leave for my son ?
I collect autograph books , and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them -- and CDs too , Tracy .
I plan to publish my own notebook .
As I witnessed my father 's body being swallowed by fire , I sat by his funeral pyre and wrote .
I have no idea how I 'm going to do it , but I am committed to compiling his thoughts and mine into a book , and leave that published book for my son .
I 'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father 's cremation .
And those linguists , please pardon the grammar , because I 've not looked at it in the last 10 years .
I took it out for the first time to come here .
" Picture in a frame , ashes in a bottle , boundless energy confined in the bottle , forcing me to deal with reality , forcing me to deal with being grown up .
I hear you and I know that you would want me to be strong , but right now , I am being sucked down , surrounded and suffocated by these raging emotional waters , craving to cleanse my soul , trying to emerge on a firm footing one more time , to keep on fighting and flourishing just as you taught me .
Your encouraging whispers in my whirlpool of despair , holding me and heaving me to shores of sanity , to live again and to love again . "
Thank you .
Sergey Brin : Why Google Glass ?
It 's not a demo , more of a philosophical argument : Why did Sergey Brin and his team at Google want to build an eye-mounted camera / computer , codenamed Glass ? Onstage at TED2013 , Brin calls for a new way of seeing our relationship with our mobile computers -- not hunched over a screen but meeting the world heads-up .
Okay , it 's great to be back at TED .
Why don 't I just start by firing away with the video ?
Okay , Glass , record a video .
This is it . We 're on in two minutes .
Okay Glass , hang out with The Flying Club .
Google " photos of tiger heads . " Hmm .
You ready ? You ready ?
Right there . Okay , Glass , take a picture .
Go !
Man 6 : Holy [ beep ] ! That is awesome .
Whoa ! Look at that snake !
Woman 3 : Okay , Glass , record a video !
Man 7 : After this bridge , first exit .
Man 8 : Okay , A12 , right there !
Man 9 : Google , say " delicious " in Thai .
Google Glass : อร ่ อยMan 9 : Mmm , อร ่ อย .
Woman 4 : Google " jellyfish . "
Man 10 : It 's beautiful .
Sergey Brin : Oh , sorry , I just got this message from a Nigerian prince .
He needs help getting 10 million dollars .
I like to pay attention to these because that 's how we originally funded the company , and it 's gone pretty well .
Though in all seriousness , this position that you just saw me in , looking down at my phone , that 's one of the reasons behind this project , Project Glass .
Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life , how you want to connect to information .
Should it be by just walking around looking down ?
But that was the vision behind Glass , and that 's why we 've created this form factor .
Okay . And I don 't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot , but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it .
In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you 're out and about looking at your phone , it 's kind of , is this what you 're meant to do with your body ?
You 're standing around there and you 're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass .
You 're just kind of moving around .
So when we developed Glass , we thought really about , can we make something that frees your hands ?
You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there .
They were all wearing Glass , and that 's how we got that footage .
And also you want something that frees your eyes .
That 's why we put the display up high , out of your line of sight , so it wouldn 't be where you 're looking and it wouldn 't be where you 're making eye contact with people .
And also we wanted to free up the ears , so the sound actually goes through , conducts straight to the bones in your cranium , which is a little bit freaky at first , but you get used to it .
And ironically , if you want to hear it better , you actually just cover your ear , which is kind of surprising , but that 's how it works .
My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn 't have to have a search query at all .
You 'd just have information come to you as you needed it .
And this is now , 15 years later , sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you 're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth .
This project has lasted now , been just over two years .
We 've learned an amazing amount .
It 's been really important to make it comfortable .
So our first prototypes we built were huge .
It was like cell phones strapped to your head .
It was very heavy , pretty uncomfortable .
We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job , and then she almost ran away screaming .
But we 've come a long way .
And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera .
Our original prototypes didn 't have cameras at all , but it 's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family , my kids .
I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment .
And lastly I 've realized , in experimenting with this device , that I also kind of have a nervous tic .
The cell phone is -- yeah , you have to look down on it and all that , but it 's also kind of a nervous habit .
Like if I smoked , I 'd probably just smoke instead .
I would just light up a cigarette . It would look cooler .
You know , I 'd be like -- But in this case , you know , I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to .
But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away , be it email or social posts or whatnot , even though it wasn 't really -- there 's nothing really that important or that pressing .
And with this , I know I will get certain messages if I really need them , but I don 't have to be checking them all the time .
Yeah , I 've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more , doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video .
Thank you all very much .
Brené Brown : Listening to shame
Shame is an unspoken epidemic , the secret behind many forms of broken behavior . Brené Brown , whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit , explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on . Her own humor , humanity and vulnerability shine through every word .
I 'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk .
I woke up the morning after I gave that Talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life .
And I actually didn 't leave my house for about three days .
The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch .
And when I walked in , she was already at the table .
And I sat down , and she said , " God , you look like hell . "
I said , " Thanks . I feel really -- I 'm not functioning . "
And she said , " What 's going on ? "
And I said , " I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability .
And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data , as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living , I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown .
I had a slide that said Breakdown .
At what point did I think that was a good idea ? "
And she said , " I saw your Talk live-streamed .
It was not really you .
It was a little different than what you usually do .
But it was great . "
And I said , " This can 't happen .
YouTube , they 're putting this thing on YouTube .
And we 're going to be talking about 600 , 700 people . "
And she said , " Well , I think it 's too late . "
And I said , " Let me ask you something . "
And she said , " Yeah . "
And I said , " Do you remember when we were in college and really wild and kind of dumb ? "
And she said , " Yeah . "
And I said , " Remember when we 'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend 's answering machine ?
Then we 'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape ? "
And she goes , " Uh ... no . "
So of course , the only thing I could think of to say at that point was , " Yeah , me neither .
That ... me neither . "
And I 'm thinking to myself , " Brene , what are you doing ? What are you doing ?
Why did you bring this up ? Have you lost your mind ?
Your sisters would be perfect for this . "
So I looked back up and she said , " Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube ? "
And I said , " I 'm just thinking about it a little bit . "
She said , " You 're like the worst vulnerability role model ever . "
And then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic , but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic .
I said , " If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000 , my life is over . "
I had no contingency plan for four million .
And my life did end when that happened .
And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself , and that was that , as much as I would frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world , there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small , staying right under the radar .
But I want to talk about what I 've learned .
There 's two things that I 've learned in the last year .
The first is vulnerability is not weakness .
And that myth is profoundly dangerous .
Let me ask you honestly -- and I 'll give you this warning , I 'm trained as a therapist , so I can out-wait you uncomfortably -- so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome -- how many of you honestly , when you 're thinking about doing something vulnerable or saying something vulnerable , think , " God , vulnerability 's weakness . This is weakness ? "
How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously ?
The majority of people .
Now let me ask you this question : This past week at TED , how many of you , when you saw vulnerability up here , thought it was pure courage ?
Vulnerability is not weakness .
I define vulnerability as emotional risk , exposure , uncertainty .
It fuels our daily lives .
And I 've come to the belief -- this is my 12th year doing this research -- that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage -- to be vulnerable , to let ourselves be seen , to be honest .
One of the weird things that 's happened is , after the TED explosion , I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country -- everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies .
And so many of the calls went like this , " Hey , Dr. Brown . We loved your TEDTalk .
We 'd like you to come in and speak .
We 'd appreciate it if you wouldn 't mention vulnerability or shame . "
What would you like for me to talk about ?
There 's three big answers .
This is mostly , to be honest with you , from the business sector : innovation , creativity and change .
So let me go on the record and say , vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation , creativity and change .
To create is to make something that has never existed before .
There 's nothing more vulnerable than that .
Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability .
The second thing , in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage , the second thing I learned is this : We have to talk about shame .
And I 'm going to be really honest with you .
When I became a " vulnerability researcher " and that became the focus because of the TEDTalk -- and I 'm not kidding .
I 'll give you an example .
About three months ago , I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store .
About from a hundred feet away , this is what I hear : " Vulnerability TED ! Vulnerability TED ! "
I 'm a fifth generation Texan .
Our family motto is " Lock and load . "
I am not a natural vulnerability researcher .
So I 'm like , just keep walking , she 's on my six .
And then I hear , " Vulnerability TED ! "
I turn around , I go , " Hi . "
She 's right here and she said , " You 're the shame researcher who had the breakdown . "
At this point parents are , like , pulling their children close .
" Look away . "
And I 'm so worn out at this point in my life , I look at her and I actually say , " It was a frickin ' spiritual awakening . "
And she looks back and does this , " I know . "
And she said , " We watched your TEDTalk in my book club .
Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves ' The Breakdown Babes . ' " And she said , " Our tagline is : ' We 're falling apart and it feels fantastic . ' " You can only imagine what it 's like for me in a faculty meeting .
So when I became Vulnerability TED , like an action figure -- like Ninja Barbie , but I 'm Vulnerability TED -- I thought , I 'm going to leave that shame stuff behind , because I spent six years studying shame before I really started writing and talking about vulnerability .
And I thought , thank God , because shame is this horrible topic , no one wants to talk about it .
It 's the best way to shut people down on an airplane .
" What do you do ? " " I study shame . " " Oh . "
And I see you .
But in surviving this last year , I was reminded of a cardinal rule -- not a research rule , but a moral imperative from my upbringing -- you 've got to dance with the one who brung ya .
And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability .
I learned about these things from studying shame .
And so I want to walk you in to shame .
Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul .
And we 're going to walk in .
And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there .
It is to put on some galoshes and walk through and find our way around .
Here 's why .
We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country , and I think globally , around race , right ?
Yes ? We heard that .
Yes ?
Cannot have that conversation without shame , because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege .
And when people start talking about privilege , they get paralyzed by shame .
We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery , which is have a checklist .
You can 't fix that problem without addressing shame , because when they teach those folks how to suture , they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful .
And all-powerful folks don 't need checklists .
And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn 't mess it up here .
Myshkin Ingawale , I hope I did right by you .
I saw the TED Fellows my first day here .
And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia because people were dying unnecessarily .
And he said , " I saw this need .
So you know what I did ? I made it . "
And everybody just burst into applause , and they were like " Yes ! "
And he said , " And it didn 't work .
And then I made it 32 more times , and then it worked . "
You know what the big secret about TED is ?
I can 't wait to tell people this .
I guess I 'm doing it right now .
This is like the failure conference .
No , it is .
You know why this place is amazing ?
Because very few people here are afraid to fail .
And no one who gets on the stage , so far that I 've seen , has not failed .
I 've failed miserably , many times .
I don 't think the world understands that because of shame .
There 's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt .
A lot of people refer to it as the " Man in the Arena " quote .
And it goes like this : " It is not the critic who counts .
It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles .
The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat .
But when he 's in the arena , at best he wins , and at worst he loses , but when he fails , when he loses , he does so daring greatly . "
And that 's what this conference , to me , is about .
That 's what life is about , about daring greatly , about being in the arena .
When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door , and you think , " I 'm going in and I 'm going to try this , " shame is the gremlin who says , " Uh , uh .
You 're not good enough .
You never finished that MBA . Your wife left you .
I know your dad really wasn 't in Luxembourg , he was in Sing Sing .
I know those things that happened to you growing up .
I know you don 't think that you 're pretty enough or smart enough or talented enough or powerful enough .
I know your dad never paid attention , even when you made CFO . "
Shame is that thing .
And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say , " I 'm going to do this , " we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing , 99 percent of the time is who ?
Us .
Shame drives two big tapes -- " never good enough " and , if you can talk it out of that one , " who do you think you are ? "
The thing to understand about shame is it 's not guilt .
Shame is a focus on self , guilt is a focus on behavior .
Shame is " I am bad . "
Guilt is " I did something bad . "
How many of you , if you did something that was hurtful to me , would be willing to say , " I 'm sorry . I made a mistake ? "
How many of you would be willing to say that ?
Guilt : I 'm sorry . I made a mistake .
Shame : I 'm sorry . I am a mistake .
There 's a huge difference between shame and guilt .
And here 's what you need to know .
Shame is highly , highly correlated with addiction , depression , violence , aggression , bullying , suicide , eating disorders .
And here 's what you even need to know more .
Guilt , inversely correlated with those things .
The ability to hold something we 've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive .
It 's uncomfortable , but it 's adaptive .
The other thing you need to know about shame is it 's absolutely organized by gender .
If shame washes over me and washes over Chris , it 's going to feel the same .
Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame .
We 're pretty sure that the only people who don 't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy .
Which means , yes , I have a little shame ; no , I 'm a sociopath .
So I would opt for , yes , you have a little shame .
Shame feels the same for men and women , but it 's organized by gender .
For women , the best example I can give you is Enjoli the commercial : " I can put the wash on the line , pack the lunches , hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine .
I can bring home the bacon , fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you 're a man . "
For women , shame is do it all , do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat .
I don 't know how much perfume that commercial sold , but I guarantee you , it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds .
Shame , for women , is this web of unobtainable , conflicting , competing expectations about who we 're supposed to be .
And it 's a straight-jacket .
For men , shame is not a bunch of competing , conflicting expectations .
Shame is one , do not be perceived as what ?
Weak .
I did not interview men for the first four years of my study .
And it wasn 't until a man looked at me one day after a book signing , said , " I love what you have to say about shame , I 'm curious why you didn 't mention men . "
And I said , " I don 't study men . "
And he said , " That 's convenient . "
And I said , " Why ? "
And he said , " Because you say to reach out , tell our story , be vulnerable .
But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters ? "
I said , " Yeah . "
" They 'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down .
When we reach out and be vulnerable we get the shit beat out of us .
And don 't tell me it 's from the guys and the coaches and the dads , because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else . "
So I started interviewing men and asking questions .
And what I learned is this : You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear , I 'll show you a woman who 's done incredible work .
You show me a man who can sit with a woman who 's just had it , she can 't do it all anymore , and his first response is not , " I unloaded the dishwasher , " but he really listens -- because that 's all we need -- I 'll show you a guy who 's done a lot of work .
Shame is an epidemic in our culture .
And to get out from underneath it , to find our way back to each other , we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we 're parenting , the way we 're working , the way we 're looking at each other .
Very quickly , some research by Mahalik at Boston College .
He asked , what do women need to do to conform to female norms ?
The top answers in this country : nice , thin , modest and use all available resources for appearance .
When he asked about men , what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms , the answers were : always show emotional control , work is first , pursue status and violence .
If we 're going to find our way back to each other , we have to understand and know empathy , because empathy 's the antidote to shame .
If you put shame in a Petri dish , it needs three things to grow exponentially : secrecy , silence and judgment .
If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy , it can 't survive .
The two most powerful words when we 're in struggle : me too .
And so I 'll leave you with this thought .
If we 're going to find our way back to each other , vulnerability is going to be that path .
And I know it 's seductive to stand outside the arena , because I think I did it my whole life , and think to myself , I 'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I 'm bulletproof and when I 'm perfect .
And that is seductive .
But the truth is that never happens .
And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there , that 's not what we want to see .
We want you to go in .
We want to be with you and across from you .
And we just want , for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with , to dare greatly .
So thank you all very much . I really appreciate it .
Eric Whitacre : Virtual Choir Live
Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre has inspired millions by bringing together " virtual choirs , " singers from many countries spliced together on video . Now , for the first time ever , he creates the experience in real time , as 32 singers from around the world Skype in to join an onstage choir for an epic performance of Whitacre 's " Cloudburst , " based on a poem by Octavio Paz .
In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life .
I was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree .
I took a couple victory laps in there .
And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California , and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus , and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains .
And there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise , and as we sat there , over the mountains coming in from the north were these Steven Spielbergian clouds rolling toward us , and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley , so help me God , every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time .
This electric hush , as if they could sense what was about to happen .
And then the clouds came over us , and then , boom ! This massive thunderclap , and sheets of rain .
It was just extraordinary , and when I came back home I found a poem by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz , and decided to set it to music , a piece for choir called " Cloudburst , " which is the piece that we 'll perform for you in just a moment .
Now fast forward to just three years ago .
And we released to YouTube this , the Virtual Choir Project , 185 singers from 12 different countries .
You can see my little video there conducting these people , alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home .
Two years ago , on this very stage , we premiered Virtual Choir 2 , 2,052 singers from 58 different countries , this time performing a piece that I had written called " Sleep . "
And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3 , " Water Night , " another piece that I had written , this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries .
And when I was speaking to Chris about the future of Virtual Choir and where we might be able to take this , he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could .
Could we do this all in real time ?
Could we have people singing together in real time ?
And with the help of Skype , that is what we are going to attempt today .
Now , we 'll perform " Cloudburst " for you .
The first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage .
I 'm joined by singers from Cal State Long Beach , Cal State Fullerton and Riverside Community College , some of the best amateur choirs in the country , and — -- and in the second half of the piece , the virtual choir will join us , 30 different singers from 30 different countries .
Now , we 've pushed the technology as far as it can go , but there 's still less than a second of latency , but in musical terms , that 's a lifetime .
We deal in milliseconds .
So what I 've done is , I 've adapted " Cloudburst " so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together .
So with deep humility , and for your approval , we present " Cloudburst . "
[ The rain ... ] [ Eyes of shadow-water ] [ eyes of well-water ] [ eyes of dream-water . ] [ Blue suns , green whirlwinds , ] [ birdbeaks of light pecking open ] [ pomegranate stars . ] [ But tell me , burnt earth , is there no water ? ] [ Only blood , only dust , ] [ only naked footsteps on the thorns ? ] [ The rain awakens ... ] [ We must sleep with open eyes , ] [ we must dream with our hands , ] [ we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course , ] [ of the sun dreaming its worlds . ] [ We must dream aloud , ] [ we must sing till the song puts forth roots , ] [ trunk , branches , birds , stars . ] [ We must find the lost word , ] [ and remember what the blood , ] [ the tides , the earth , and the body say , ] [ and return to the point of departure ... ] [ " Cloudburst " Octavio Paz ] [ translation by Lysander Kemp , adapted by Eric Whitacre ] Eric Whitacre : Beth . Annabelle , where are you ? Jacob .
Thank you .
Laura Trice : Remember to say thank you
In this deceptively simple 3-minute talk , Dr. Laura Trice muses on the power of the magic words " thank you " -- to deepen a friendship , to repair a bond , to make sure another person knows what they mean to you . Try it .
Hi . I 'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise , admiration and thank you , and having it be specific and genuine .
And the way I got interested in this was , I noticed in myself , when I was growing up , and until about a few years ago , that I would want to say thank you to someone , I would want to praise them , I would want to take in their praise of me and I 'd just stop it .
And I asked myself , why ?
I felt shy , I felt embarrassed .
And then my question became , am I the only one who does this ?
So , I decided to investigate .
I 'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility , so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction .
And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as , their core wound is their father died without ever saying he 's proud of them .
But then , they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him , but he never told the son .
It 's because he didn 't know that his son needed to hear it .
So my question is , why don 't we ask for the things that we need ?
I know a gentleman , married for 25 years , who 's longing to hear his wife say , " Thank you for being the breadwinner , so I can stay home with the kids , " but won 't ask .
I know a woman who 's good at this .
She , once a week , meets with her husband and says , " I 'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids . "
And he goes , " Oh , this is great , this is great . "
And praise really does have to be genuine , but she takes responsibility for that .
And a friend of mine , April , who I 've had since kindergarten , she thanks her children for doing their chores .
And she said , " Why wouldn 't I thank it , even though they 're supposed to do it ? "
So , the question is , why was I blocking it ?
Why were other people blocking it ?
Why can I say , " I 'll take my steak medium rare , I need size six shoes , " but I won 't say , " Would you praise me this way ? "
And it 's because I 'm giving you critical data about me .
I 'm telling you where I 'm insecure .
I 'm telling you where I need your help .
And I 'm treating you , my inner circle , like you 're the enemy .
Because what can you do with that data ?
You could neglect me .
You could abuse it .
Or you could actually meet my need .
And I took my bike into the bike store-- I love this -- same bike , and they 'd do something called " truing " the wheels .
The guy said , " You know , when you true the wheels , it 's going to make the bike so much better . "
I get the same bike back , and they 've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I 've had for two and a half years , and my bike is like new .
So , I 'm going to challenge all of you .
I want you to true your wheels : be honest about the praise that you need to hear .
What do you need to hear ? Go home to your wife -- go ask her , what does she need ?
Go home to your husband -- what does he need ?
Go home and ask those questions , and then help the people around you .
And it 's simple .
And why should we care about this ?
We talk about world peace .
How can we have world peace with different cultures , different languages ?
I think it starts household by household , under the same roof .
So , let 's make it right in our own backyard .
And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands , great mothers , friends , daughters , sons .
And maybe somebody 's never said that to you , but you 've done a really , really good job .
And thank you for being here , just showing up and changing the world with your ideas .
Thank you .
Carter Emmart : A 3D atlas of the universe
For the last 12 years , Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists , artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe . He demos this stunning tour and explains how it 's being shared with facilities around the world .
It 's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe , which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe .
And so I think we can roll the video that we have .
[ The Himalayas . ] The flat horizon that we 've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite : unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste .
It wasn 't until we really left Earth , got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself , that we could understand our planet as a limited condition .
The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years .
We maintain that , put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales .
What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe , as we see .
NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world .
The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do -- our main space shows in the dome .
But what you see here is the result of , actually , internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden .
I 've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work , and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden .
This software allows interactive use , so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live .
I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan , where I live , and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology .
And so as we move out , we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies , as we see here , light-travel time , giving you a sense of how far away we are .
As we move out , the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long , we 're essentially backing up into the past .
We back so far up we 're finally seeing a containment around us -- the afterglow of the Big Bang .
This is the WMAP microwave background that we see .
We 'll fly outside it here , just to see this sort of containment .
If we were outside this , it would almost be meaningless , in the sense as before time .
But this our containment of the visible universe .
We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see .
Coming back quickly , we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning , but these are positions , the latest positions of exoplanets that we 've mapped , and our sun here , obviously , with our own solar system .
What you 're going to see -- we 're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system -- these are the paths of Voyager 1 , Voyager 2 , Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10 , the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system .
Coming in closer , picking up Earth , orbit of the Moon , and we see the Earth .
This map can be updated , and we can add in new data .
I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I.
for the Cassini mission .
But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases , ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon , Titan , which is larger that the planet Mercury , diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase .
This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this .
This software can also be networked between domes .
We have a growing user base of this , and we network domes .
And we can network between domes and classrooms .
We 're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia .
And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school .
This is an image from Saturday , photographed by the Aqua satellite , but through the Uniview software .
So you 're seeing the edge of the Earth .
This is Nepal .
This is , in fact , right here is the valley of Lhasa , right here in Tibet .
But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India .
This is Nepal and Tibet .
And just in closing , I 'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on -- here we see a bit of the snow so I 'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is .
Because our home is the universe , and we are the universe , essentially .
We carry that in us .
And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all , I think , in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe .
Thank you .
Esther Perel : The secret to desire in a long-term relationship
In long-term relationships , we often expect our beloved to be both best friend and erotic partner . But as Esther Perel argues , good & lt ; em & gt ; and & lt ; / em & gt ; committed sex draws on two conflicting needs : our need for security and our need for surprise . So how do you sustain desire ? With wit and eloquence , Perel lets us in on the mystery of erotic intelligence .
So , why does good sex so often fade , even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever ?
And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex , contrary to popular belief ?
Or , the next question would be , can we want what we already have ?
That 's the million-dollar question , right ?
And why is the forbidden so erotic ?
What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent ?
And why does sex make babies , and babies spell erotic disaster in couples ?
It 's kind of the fatal erotic blow , isn 't it ?
And when you love , how does it feel ?
And when you desire , how is it different ?
These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love .
So I travel the globe , and what I 'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered , there seems to be a crisis of desire .
A crisis of desire , as in owning the wanting -- desire as an expression of our individuality , of our free choice , of our preferences , of our identity -- desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies .
You know , this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term , not because we want 14 children , for which we need to have even more because many of them won 't make it , and not because it is exclusively a woman 's marital duty .
This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire .
So what sustains desire , and why is it so difficult ?
And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship , I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs .
On the one hand , our need for security , for predictability , for safety , for dependability , for reliability , for permanence -- all these anchoring , grounding experiences of our lives that we call home .
But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure , for novelty , for mystery , for risk , for danger , for the unknown , for the unexpected , surprise -- you get the gist -- for journey , for travel .
So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship , or what we today like to call a passionate marriage , used to be a contradiction in terms .
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship .
But now we want our partner to still give us all these things , but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot , and we live twice as long .
So we come to one person , and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide : Give me belonging , give me identity , give me continuity , but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one .
Give me comfort , give me edge .
Give me novelty , give me familiarity .
Give me predictability , give me surprise .
So now we get to the existential reality of the story , right ?
Because I think , in some way -- and I 'll come back to that -- but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination .
So why does good sex so often fade ?
What is the relationship between love and desire ?
How do they relate , and how do they conflict ?
Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism .
So if there is a verb , for me , that comes with love , it 's " to have . "
And if there is a verb that comes with desire , it is " to want . "
In love , we want to have , we want to know the beloved .
We want to minimize the distance . We want to contract that gap .
We want to neutralize the tensions . We want closeness .
But in desire , we tend to not really want to go back to the places we 've already gone .
Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest .
In desire , we want an Other , somebody on the other side that we can go visit , that we can go spend some time with , that we can go see what goes on in their red light district .
In desire , we want a bridge to cross .
Or in other words , I sometimes say , fire needs air .
Desire needs space .
And when it 's said like that , it 's often quite abstract .
But then I took a question with me .
And I 've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with " Mating in Captivity , " and I asked people , when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner ?
Not attracted sexually , per se , but most drawn .
And across culture , across religion , and across gender -- except for one -- there are a few answers that just keep coming back .
So the first group is : I am most drawn to my partner when she is away , when we are apart , when we reunite .
Basically , when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner , when my imagination comes back in the picture , and when I can root it in absence and in longing , which is a major component of desire .
But then the second group is even more interesting : I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio , when she is onstage , when he is in his element , when she 's doing something she 's passionate about , when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him , when I see her hold court .
Basically , when I look at my partner radiant and confident , probably the biggest turn-on across the board .
Radiant , as in self-sustaining .
I look at this person -- by the way , in desire people rarely talk about it , when we are blended into one , five centimeters from each other . I don 't know in inches how much that is .
But it 's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them .
It 's when I 'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance , where this person that is already so familiar , so known , is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious , somewhat elusive .
And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan , lies that movement toward the other .
Because sometimes , as Proust says , mystery is not about traveling to new places , but it 's about looking with new eyes .
And so , when I see my partner on his own or her own , doing something in which they are enveloped , I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception , and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me .
And then , more importantly , in this description about the other or myself -- it 's the same -- what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire .
Nobody needs anybody .
There is no caretaking in desire .
Caretaking is mightily loving . It 's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac .
I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them .
Wanting them is one thing . Needing them is a shutdown , and women have known that forever , because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge .
For good reasons , right ?
And then the third group of answers usually would be when I 'm surprised , when we laugh together , as somebody said to me in the office today , when he 's in his tux , so I said , you know , it 's either the tux or the cowboy boots .
But basically it 's when there is novelty .
But novelty isn 't about new positions . It isn 't a repertoire of techniques .
Novelty is , what parts of you do you bring out ?
What parts of you are just being seen ?
Because in some way one could say sex isn 't something you do , eh ?
Sex is a place you go . It 's a space you enter inside yourself and with another , or others .
So where do you go in sex ?
What parts of you do you connect to ?
What do you seek to express there ?
Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union ?
Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive ?
Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything ?
Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes ?
What comes out there ? It 's a language .
It isn 't just a behavior .
And it 's the poetic of that language that I 'm interested in , which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence .
You know , animals have sex .
It 's the pivot , it 's biology , it 's the natural instinct .
We are the only ones who have an erotic life , which means that it 's sexuality transformed by the human imagination .
We are the only ones who can make love for hours , have a blissful time , multiple orgasms , and touch nobody , just because we can imagine it .
We can hint at it . We don 't even have to do it .
We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation , which is a mortar to desire , the ability to imagine it , as if it 's happening , to experience it as if it 's happening , while nothing is happening and everything is happening at the same time .
So when I began to think about eroticism , I began to think about the poetics of sex , and if I look at it as an intelligence , then it 's something that you cultivate .
What are the ingredients ? Imagination , playfulness , novelty , curiosity , mystery .
But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination .
But more importantly , for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark , what sustains desire , I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism , the mystical definition , and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking actually at trauma , which is the other side , and I looked at it looking at the community that I had grown up in , which was a community in Belgium , all Holocaust survivors , and in my community there were two groups : those who didn 't die , and those who came back to life .
And those who didn 't die lived often very tethered to the ground , could not experience pleasure , could not trust , because when you 're vigilant , worried , anxious , and insecure , you can 't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative .
Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death .
They knew how to keep themselves alive .
And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with , I sometimes would hear people say , " I want more sex , " but generally people want better sex , and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness , of vibrancy , of renewal , of vitality , of eros , of energy that sex used to afford them , or that they 've hoped it would afford them .
And so I began to ask a different question .
" I shut myself off when ... " began to be the question .
" I turn off my desires when ... " which is not the same question as , " What turns me off is ... " and " You turn me off when ... "
And people began to say , " I turn myself off when I feel dead inside , when I don 't like my body , when I feel old , when I haven 't had time for myself , when I haven 't had a chance to even check in with you , when I don 't perform well at work , when I feel low self esteem , when I don 't have a sense of self-worth , when I don 't feel like I have a right to want , to take , to receive pleasure . "
And then I began to ask the reverse question .
" I turn myself on when ... " Because most of the time , people like to ask the question , " You turn me on , what turns me on , " and I 'm out of the question . You know ?
Now , if you are dead inside , the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine 's .
It won 't make a dent . There is nobody at the reception desk .
So I turn myself on when , I turn my desires , I wake up when ...
Now , in this paradox between love and desire , what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality , reciprocity , protection , worry , responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire .
Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love : jealousy , possessiveness , aggression , power , dominance , naughtiness , mischief .
Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day .
You know , the erotic mind is not very politically correct .
If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses , we wouldn 't be having such interesting talks about this .
But no , in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don 't always know how to bring to the person that we love , because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word : the ability to stay connected to one 's self in the presence of another .
So I want to draw that little image for you , because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs , we are born with that .
Our need for connection , our need for separateness , or our need for security and adventure , or our need for togetherness and for autonomy , and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable , and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore .
That 's the beginning of desire , that exploratory needs curiosity , discovery .
And then at some point they turn around and they look at you , and if you tell them , " Hey kiddo , the world 's a great place . Go for it .
There 's so much fun out there , " then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time .
They can go off in their imagination , off in their body , off in their playfulness , all the while knowing that there 's somebody when they come back .
But if on this side there is somebody who says , " I 'm worried . I 'm anxious . I 'm depressed .
My partner hasn 't taken care of me in so long .
What 's so good out there ? Don 't we have everything you need together , you and I ? "
then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize .
Some of us will come back , came back a long time ago , and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other .
I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection .
And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection , and I won 't know how to leave you in order to go play , in order to go experience pleasure , in order to discover , to enter inside myself .
Translate this into adult language .
It starts very young . It continues into our sex lives up to the end .
Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time .
" Are you going to be there ?
Are you going to curse me ? Are you going to scold me ?
Are you going to be angry with me ? "
And they may be gone , but they 're never really away , and those are often the people that will tell you , in the beginning it was super hot .
Because in the beginning , the growing intimacy wasn 't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire .
The more connected I became , the more responsible I felt , the less I was able to let go in your presence .
The third child doesn 't really come back .
So what happens , if you want to sustain desire , it 's that real dialectic piece .
On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go .
On the other hand if you can 't go , you can 't have pleasure , you can 't culminate , you don 't have an orgasm , you don 't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own .
So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs , there are a few things that I 've come to understand erotic couples do .
One , they have a lot of sexual privacy .
They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them .
They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing .
Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm .
They also understand that an erotic space isn 't about , you begin to stroke the other .
It 's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc . , maybe where you leave the agile program , and you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible .
Responsibility and desire just butt heads .
They don 't really do well together .
Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes .
It 's pretty much like the moon . It has intermittent eclipses .
But what they know is they know how to resurrect it .
They know how to bring it back , and they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth , which is the myth of spontaneity , which is that it 's just going to fall from heaven while you 're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina , and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship already has .
Committed sex is premeditated sex .
It 's willful . It 's intentional .
It 's focus and presence .
Merry Valentine 's .
Nalini Nadkarni : Life science in prison
Nalini Nadkarni challenges our perspective on trees and prisons -- she says both can be more dynamic than we think . Through a partnership with the state of Washington , she brings science classes and conservation programs to inmates , with unexpected results .
Trees epitomize stasis .
Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations , but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs , trees become very dynamic entities , moving and growing .
And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists .
I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig .
I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas , and that produced art .
The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir , and what I learned was that different species have different signatures , like a Picasso versus a Monet .
But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it , so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree -- which produced this painting -- moved in a single year , I simply measured and summed each of those lines .
I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year .
And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year .
You might have a guess .
The answer is actually 186,540 miles , or seven times around the globe .
And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs , we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities , but rather extremely dynamic .
And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees , to consider other entities that are also static and stuck , but which cry for change and dynamicism , and one of those entities is our prisons .
Prisons , of course , are where people who break our laws are stuck , confined behind bars .
And our prison system itself is stuck .
The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women .
That number is rising .
Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released , 60 will return to prison .
Funds for education , for training and for rehabilitation are declining , so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues .
I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons , and I think the answer is yes .
In the year 2007 , I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections .
Working with four prisons , we began bringing science and scientists , sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons .
We give science lectures , and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting .
That , I think , is movement .
We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state .
That , I think , is movement .
We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs -- the Oregon spotted frog -- for later release into protected wetlands .
That , I think , is movement .
And just recently , we 've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities .
They 've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners .
They 're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day .
When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals , they 're placed in immobile booths like this .
For one hour a day they 're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards .
Although we can 't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments , we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards , putting them on the walls , so at least they get contact with visual images of nature .
This is Mr. Lopez , who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months , and he 's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene , more calm , less apt to violence .
And so what we see , I think , is that small , collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope .
We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks .
But if trees can create art , if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year , if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs , then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves , like grief , like addictions , like racism , that can also change .
Thank you very much .
Sleepy Man Banjo Boys : Bluegrass virtuosity from ... New Jersey ?
All under the age of 16 , brothers Jonny , Robbie and Tommy Mizzone are from New Jersey , a US state that 's better known for the rock of Bruce Springsteen than the bluegrass of Earl Scruggs . Nonetheless , the siblings began performing bluegrass covers , as well as their own compositions , at a young age . Here , they play three dazzling songs in three different keys , passing the lead back and forth from fiddle to banjo to guitar .
Robbie Mizzone : Thank you .
Tommy Mizzone : Thank you very much .
We 're so excited to be here . It 's such an honor for us .
Like he said , we 're three brothers from New Jersey -- you know , the bluegrass capital of the world .
We discovered bluegrass a few years ago , and we fell in love with it . We hope you guys will too .
This next song is an original we wrote called " Timelapse , " and it will probably live up to its name .
TM : Thank you very much .
RM : I 'm just going to take a second to introduce the band .
On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy .
On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny .
He 's also our brother .
And I 'm Robbie , and I 'm 14 , and I play the fiddle .
As you can see , we decided to make it hard on ourselves , and we chose to play three songs in three different keys .
Yeah . I 'm also going to explain , a lot of people want to know where we got the name Sleepy Man Banjo Boys from .
So it started when Jonny was little , and he first started the banjo , he would play on his back with his eyes closed , and we 'd say it looked like he was sleeping .
So you can probably piece the rest together .
TM : We can 't really figure out the reason for this .
It might have been that it weighs about a million pounds .
TM : Thank you very much .
RM : Thank you .
Michael Hansmeyer : Building unimaginable shapes
Inspired by cell division , Michael Hansmeyer writes algorithms that design outrageously fascinating shapes and forms with millions of facets . No person could draft them by hand , but they 're buildable -- and they could revolutionize the way we think of architectural form .
As an architect , I often ask myself , what is the origin of the forms that we design ?
What kind of forms could we design if we wouldn 't work with references anymore ?
If we had no bias , if we had no preconceptions , what kind of forms could we design if we could free ourselves from our experience ?
If we could free ourselves from our education ?
What would these unseen forms look like ?
Would they surprise us ? Would they intrigue us ?
Would they delight us ?
If so , then how can we go about creating something that is truly new ?
I propose we look to nature .
Nature has been called the greatest architect of forms .
And I 'm not saying that we should copy nature , I 'm not saying we should mimic biology , instead I propose that we can borrow nature 's processes .
We can abstract them and to create something that is new .
Nature 's main process of creation , morphogenesis , is the splitting of one cell into two cells .
And these cells can either be identical , or they can be distinct from each other through asymmetric cell division .
If we abstract this process , and simplify it as much as possible , then we could start with a single sheet of paper , one surface , and we could make a fold and divide the surface into two surfaces .
We 're free to choose where we make the fold .
And by doing so , we can differentiate the surfaces .
Through this very simple process , we can create an astounding variety of forms .
Now , we can take this form and use the same process to generate three-dimensional structures , but rather than folding things by hand , we 'll bring the structure into the computer , and code it as an algorithm .
And in doing so , we can suddenly fold anything .
We can fold a million times faster , we can fold in hundreds and hundreds of variations .
And as we 're seeking to make something three-dimensional , we start not with a single surface , but with a volume .
A simple volume , the cube .
If we take its surfaces and fold them again and again and again and again , then after 16 iterations , 16 steps , we end up with 400,000 surfaces and a shape that looks , for instance , like this .
And if we change where we make the folds , if we change the folding ratio , then this cube turns into this one .
We can change the folding ratio again to produce this shape , or this shape .
So we exert control over the form by specifying the position of where we 're making the fold , but essentially you 're looking at a folded cube .
And we can play with this .
We can apply different folding ratios to different parts of the form to create local conditions .
We can begin to sculpt the form .
And because we 're doing the folding on the computer , we are completely free of any physical constraints .
So that means that surfaces can intersect themselves , they can become impossibly small .
We can make folds that we otherwise could not make .
Surfaces can become porous .
They can stretch . They can tear .
And all of this expounds the scope of forms that we can produce .
But in each case , I didn 't design the form .
I designed the process that generated the form .
In general , if we make a small change to the folding ratio , which is what you 're seeing here , then the form changes correspondingly .
But that 's only half of the story -- 99.9 percent of the folding ratios produce not this , but this , the geometric equivalent of noise .
The forms that I showed before were made actually through very long trial and error .
A far more effective way to create forms , I have found , is to use information that is already contained in forms .
A very simple form such as this one actually contains a lot of information that may not be visible to the human eye .
So , for instance , we can plot the length of the edges .
White surfaces have long edges , black ones have short ones .
We can plot the planarity of the surfaces , their curvature , how radial they are -- all information that may not be instantly visible to you , but that we can bring out , that we can articulate , and that we can use to control the folding .
So now I 'm not specifying a single ratio anymore to fold it , but instead I 'm establishing a rule , I 'm establishing a link between a property of a surface and how that surface is folded .
And because I 've designed the process and not the form , I can run the process again and again and again to produce a whole family of forms .
These forms look elaborate , but the process is a very minimal one .
There is a simple input , it 's always a cube that I start with , and it 's a very simple operation -- it 's making a fold , and doing this over and over again .
So let 's bring this process to architecture .
How ? And at what scale ?
I chose to design a column .
Columns are architectural archetypes .
They 've been used throughout history to express ideals about beauty , about technology .
A challenge to me was how we could express this new algorithmic order in a column .
I started using four cylinders .
Through a lot of experimentation , these cylinders eventually evolved into this .
And these columns , they have information at very many scales .
We can begin to zoom into them .
The closer one gets , the more new features one discovers .
Some formations are almost at the threshold of human visibility .
And unlike traditional architecture , it 's a single process that creates both the overall form and the microscopic surface detail .
These forms are undrawable .
An architect who 's drawing them with a pen and a paper would probably take months , or it would take even a year to draw all the sections , all of the elevations , you can only create something like this through an algorithm .
The more interesting question , perhaps , is , are these forms imaginable ?
Usually , an architect can somehow envision the end state of what he is designing .
In this case , the process is deterministic .
There 's no randomness involved at all , but it 's not entirely predictable .
There 's too many surfaces , there 's too much detail , one can 't see the end state .
So this leads to a new role for the architect .
One needs a new method to explore all of the possibilities that are out there .
For one thing , one can design many variants of a form , in parallel , and one can cultivate them .
And to go back to the analogy with nature , one can begin to think in terms of populations , one can talk about permutations , about generations , about crossing and breeding to come up with a design .
And the architect is really , he moves into the position of being an orchestrator of all of these processes .
But enough of the theory .
At one point I simply wanted to jump inside this image , so to say , I bought these red and blue 3D glasses , got up very close to the screen , but still that wasn 't the same as being able to walk around and touch things .
So there was only one possibility -- to bring the column out of the computer .
There 's been a lot of talk now about 3D printing .
For me , or for my purpose at this moment , there 's still too much of an unfavorable tradeoff between scale , on the one hand , and resolution and speed , on the other .
So instead , we decided to take the column , and we decided to build it as a layered model , made out of very many slices , thinly stacked over each other .
What you 're looking at here is an X-ray of the column that you just saw , viewed from the top .
Unbeknownst to me at the time , because we had only seen the outside , the surfaces were continuing to fold themselves , to grow on the inside of the column , which was quite a surprising discovery .
From this shape , we calculated a cutting line , and then we gave this cutting line to a laser cutter to produce -- and you 're seeing a segment of it here -- very many thin slices , individually cut , on top of each other .
And this is a photo now , it 's not a rendering , and the column that we ended up with after a lot of work , ended up looking remarkably like the one that we had designed in the computer .
Almost all of the details , almost all of the surface intricacies were preserved .
But it was very labor intensive .
There 's a huge disconnect at the moment still between the virtual and the physical .
It took me several months to design the column , but ultimately it takes the computer about 30 seconds to calculate all of the 16 million faces .
The physical model , on the other hand , is 2,700 layers , one millimeter thick , it weighs 700 kilos , it 's made of sheet that can cover this entire auditorium .
And the cutting path that the laser followed goes from here to the airport and back again .
But it is increasingly possible .
Machines are getting faster , it 's getting less expensive , and there 's some promising technological developments just on the horizon .
These are images from the Gwangju Biennale .
And in this case , I used ABS plastic to produce the columns , we used the bigger , faster machine , and they have a steel core inside , so they 're structural , they can bear loads for once .
Each column is effectively a hybrid of two columns .
You can see a different column in the mirror , if there 's a mirror behind the column that creates a sort of an optical illusion .
So where does this leave us ?
I think this project gives us a glimpse of the unseen objects that await us if we as architects begin to think about designing not the object , but a process to generate objects .
I 've shown one simple process that was inspired by nature ; there 's countless other ones .
In short , we have no constraints .
Instead , we have processes in our hands right now that allow us to create structures at all scales that we couldn 't even have dreamt up .
And , if I may add , at one point we will build them .
Thank you .
David Hoffman : Sputnik mania
Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania , which shows how the Soviet Union 's launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race -- and jump-started science and math education around the world .
Fifty years ago in the old Soviet Union , a team of engineers was secretly moving a large object through a desolate countryside .
With it , they were hoping to capture the minds of people everywhere by being the first to conquer outer space .
The rocket was huge .
And packed in its nose was a silver ball with two radios inside .
On October 4 , 1957 , they launched their rocket .
One of the Russian scientists wrote at the time : " We are about to create a new planet that we will call Sputnik .
In the olden days , explorers like Vasco da Gama and Columbus had the good fortune to open up the terrestrial globe .
Now we have the good fortune to open up space .
And it is for those in the future to envy us our joy . "
You 're watching snippets from " Sputnik , " my fifth documentary feature , which is just about completed .
It tells the story of Sputnik , and the story of what happened to America as a result .
For days after the launch , Sputnik was a wonderful curiosity .
A man-made moon visible by ordinary citizens , it inspired awe and pride that humans had finally launched an object into space .
But just three days later , on a day they called Red Monday , the media and the politicians told us , and we believed , that Sputnik was proof that our enemy had beaten us in science and technology , and that they could now attack us with hydrogen bombs , using their Sputnik rocket as an IBM missile .
All hell broke loose .
Sputnik quickly became one of the three great shocks to hit America -- historians say the equal of Pearl Harbor or 9 / 11 .
It provoked the missile gap .
It exploded an arms race .
It began the space race .
Within a year , Congress funded huge weapons increases , and we went from 1,200 nuclear weapons to 20,000 .
And the reactions to Sputnik went far beyond weapons increases .
For example , some here will remember this day , June 1958 , the National Civil Defense Drill , where tens of millions of people in 78 cities went underground .
Or the Gallup Poll that showed that seven in 10 Americans believed that a nuclear war would happen , and that at least 50 percent of our population was going to be killed .
But Sputnik provoked wonderful changes as well .
For example , some in this room went to school on scholarship because of Sputnik .
Support for engineering , math and science -- education in general -- boomed .
And Vint Cerf points out that Sputnik led directly to ARPA , and the Internet , and , of course , NASA .
My feature documentary shows how a free society can be stampeded by those who know how to use media .
But it also shows how we can turn what appears at first to be a bad situation , into something that was overall very good for America .
" Sputnik " will soon be released .
In closing , I would like to take a moment to thank one of my investors : longtime TEDster , Jay Walker .
And I 'd like to thank you all .
Thank you , Chris .
Harish Manwani : Profit 's not always the point
You might not expect the chief operating officer of a major global corporation to look too far beyond either the balance sheet or the bottom line . But Harish Manwani , COO of Unilever , makes a passionate argument that doing so to include value , purpose and sustainability in top-level decision-making is not just savvy , it 's the only way to run a 21st century business responsibly .
The entire model of capitalism and the economic model that you and I did business in , and , in fact , continue to do business in , was built around what probably Milton Friedman put more succinctly .
And Adam Smith , of course , the father of modern economics actually said many , many years ago , the invisible hand , which is , " If you continue to operate in your own self-interest you will do the best good for society . "
Now , capitalism has done a lot of good things and I 've talked about a lot of good things that have happened , but equally , it has not been able to meet up with some of the challenges that we 've seen in society .
The model that at least I was brought up in and a lot of us doing business were brought up in was one which talked about what I call the three G 's of growth : growth that is consistent , quarter on quarter ; growth that is competitive , better than the other person ; and growth that is profitable , so you continue to make more and more shareholder value .
And I 'm afraid this is not going to be good enough and we have to move from this 3G model to a model of what I call the fourth G : the G of growth that is responsible .
And it is this that has to become a very important part of creating value .
Of not just creating economic value but creating social value .
And companies that will thrive are those that will actually embrace the fourth G.
And the model of 4G is quite simple : Companies cannot afford to be just innocent bystanders in what 's happening around in society .
They have to begin to play their role in terms of serving the communities which actually sustain them .
And we have to move to a model of an and / and model which is how do we make money and do good ?
How do we make sure that we have a great business but we also have a great environment around us ?
And that model is all about doing well and doing good .
But the question is easier said than done .
But how do we actually get that done ?
And I do believe that the answer to that is going to be leadership .
It is going to be to redefine the new business models which understand that the only license to operate is to combine these things .
And for that you need businesses that can actually define their role in society in terms of a much larger purpose than the products and brands that they sell .
And companies that actually define a true north , things that are nonnegotiable whether times are good , bad , ugly -- doesn 't matter .
There are things that you stand for .
Values and purpose are going to be the two drivers of software that are going to create the companies of tomorrow .
And I 'm going to now shift to talking a little bit about my own experiences .
I joined Unilever in 1976 as a management trainee in India .
And on my first day of work I walked in and my boss tells me , " Do you know why you 're here ? "
I said , " I 'm here to sell a lot of soap . "
And he said , " No , you 're here to change lives . "
You 're here to change lives .
You know , I thought it was rather facetious .
We are a company that sells soap and soup .
What are we doing about changing lives ?
And it 's then I realized that simple acts like selling a bar of soap can save more lives than pharmaceutical companies .
I don 't know how many of you know that five million children don 't reach the age of five because of simple infections that can be prevented by an act of washing their hands with soap .
We run the largest hand-washing program in the world .
We are running a program on hygiene and health that now touches half a billion people .
It 's not about selling soap , there is a larger purpose out there .
And brands indeed can be at the forefront of social change .
And the reason for that is , when two billion people use your brands that 's the amplifier .
Small actions can make a big difference .
Take another example , I was walking around in one of our villages in India .
Now those of you who have done this will realize that this is no walk in the park .
And we had this lady who was one of our small distributors -- beautiful , very , very modest , her home -- and she was out there , dressed nicely , her husband in the back , her mother-in-law behind and her sister-in-law behind her .
The social order was changing because this lady is part of our Project Shakti that is actually teaching women how to do small business and how to carry the message of nutrition and hygiene .
We have 60,000 such women now in India .
It 's not about selling soap , it 's about making sure that in the process of doing so you can change people 's lives .
Small actions , big difference .
Our R & amp ; D folks are not only working to give us some fantastic detergents , but they 're working to make sure we use less water .
A product that we 've just launched recently , One Rinse product that allows you to save water every time you wash your clothes .
And if we can convert all our users to using this , that 's 500 billion liters of water .
By the way , that 's equivalent to one month of water for a whole huge continent .
So just think about it .
There are small actions that can make a big difference .
And I can go on and on .
Our food chain , our brilliant products -- and I 'm sorry I 'm giving you a word from the sponsors -- Knorr , Hellman 's and all those wonderful products .
We are committed to making sure that all our agricultural raw materials are sourced from sustainable sources , 100-percent sustainable sources .
We were the first to say we are going to buy all of our palm oil from sustainable sources .
I don 't know how many of you know that palm oil , and not buying it from sustainable sources , can create deforestation that is responsible for 20 percent of the greenhouse gasses in the world .
We were the first to embrace that , and it 's all because we market soap and soup .
And the point I 'm making here is that companies like yours , companies like mine have to define a purpose which embraces responsibility and understands that we have to play our part in the communities in which we operate .
We introduced something called The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan , which said , " Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace , and we are gong to change the lives of one billion people over 2020 . "
Now the question here is , where do we go from here ?
And the answer to that is very simple : We 're not going to change the world alone .
There are plenty of you and plenty of us who understand this .
The question is , we need partnerships , we need coalitions and importantly , we need that leadership that will allow us to take this from here and to be the change that we want to see around us .
Thank you very much .
Susan Cain : The power of introverts
In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else , it can be difficult , even shameful , to be an introvert . But , as Susan Cain argues in this passionate talk , introverts bring extraordinary talents and abilities to the world , and should be encouraged and celebrated .
When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time .
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books , which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do .
Because in my family , reading was the primary group activity .
And this might sound antisocial to you , but for us it was really just a different way of being social .
You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you , but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind .
And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this , but better .
I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns .
Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol .
And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit .
And it went like this : " R-O-W-D-I-E , that 's the way we spell rowdie .
Rowdie , rowdie , let 's get rowdie . "
Yeah .
So I couldn 't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy , or why we had to spell this word incorrectly .
But I recited a cheer . I recited a cheer along with everybody else .
I did my best .
And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books .
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase , the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me , " Why are you being so mellow ? " -- mellow , of course , being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E .
And then the second time I tried it , the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing .
And so I put my books away , back in their suitcase , and I put them under my bed , and there they stayed for the rest of the summer .
And I felt kind of guilty about this .
I felt as if the books needed me somehow , and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them .
But I did forsake them and I didn 't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer .
Now , I tell you this story about summer camp .
I could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go , that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert .
And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were .
But for years I denied this intuition , and so I became a Wall Street lawyer , of all things , instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too .
And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends .
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively , that I wasn 't even aware that I was making them .
Now this is what many introverts do , and it 's our loss for sure , but it is also our colleagues ' loss and our communities ' loss .
And at the risk of sounding grandiose , it is the world 's loss .
Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership , we need introverts doing what they do best .
A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half .
So that 's one out of every two or three people you know .
So even if you 're an extrovert yourself , I 'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society .
We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we 're doing .
Now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is .
It 's different from being shy .
Shyness is about fear of social judgment .
Introversion is more about , how do you respond to stimulation , including social stimulation .
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation , whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they 're in quieter , more low-key environments .
Not all the time -- these things aren 't absolute -- but a lot of the time .
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us .
But now here 's where the bias comes in .
Our most important institutions , our schools and our workplaces , they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts ' need for lots of stimulation .
And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink , which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place .
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays : When I was going to school , we sat in rows .
We sat in rows of desks like this , and we did most of our work pretty autonomously .
But nowadays , your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other .
And kids are working in countless group assignments .
Even in subjects like math and creative writing , which you think would depend on solo flights of thought , kids are now expected to act as committee members .
And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone , those kids are seen as outliers often or , worse , as problem cases .
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert , even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable , according to research .
Okay , same thing is true in our workplaces .
Now , most of us work in open plan offices , without walls , where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers .
And when it comes to leadership , introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions , even though introverts tend to be very careful , much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays .
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do , because when they are managing proactive employees , they 're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas , whereas an extrovert can , quite unwittingly , get so excited about things that they 're putting their own stamp on things , and other people 's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface .
Now in fact , some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts .
I 'll give you some examples .
Eleanor Roosevelt , Rosa Parks , Gandhi -- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy .
And they all took the spotlight , even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to .
And this turns out to have a special power all its own , because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm , not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at ; they were there because they had no choice , because they were driven to do what they thought was right .
Now I think at this point it 's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts .
I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts , including my beloved husband .
And we all fall at different points , of course , along the introvert / extrovert spectrum .
Even Carl Jung , the psychologist who first popularized these terms , said that there 's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert .
He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum , if he existed at all .
And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum , and we call these people ambiverts .
And I often think that they have the best of all worlds .
But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other .
And what I 'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance .
We need more of a yin and yang between these two types .
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity , because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people , what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas , but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them .
And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity .
So Darwin , he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations .
Theodor Geisel , better known as Dr. Seuss , he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla , California .
And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona .
Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubical in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time .
And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up .
Now of course , this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point , is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe .
And in fact , we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude .
It 's only recently that we 've strangely begun to forget it .
If you look at most of the world 's major religions , you will find seekers -- Moses , Jesus , Buddha , Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community .
So no wilderness , no revelations .
This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology .
It turns out that we can 't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring , mimicking their opinions .
Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you 're attracted to , you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that 's what you 're doing .
And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room , even though there 's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- I mean zero .
So ...
You might be following the person with the best ideas , but you might not .
And do you really want to leave it up to chance ?
Much better for everybody to go off by themselves , generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics , and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there .
Now if all this is true , then why are we getting it so wrong ?
Why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces ?
And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time ?
One answer lies deep in our cultural history .
Western societies , and in particular the U.S. , have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and " man " of contemplation .
But in America 's early days , we lived in what historians call a culture of character , where we still , at that point , valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude .
And if you look at the self-help books from this era , they all had titles with things like " Character , the Grandest Thing in the World . "
And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming .
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him " A man who does not offend by superiority . "
But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality .
What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business .
And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities .
And instead of working alongside people they 've known all their lives , now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers .
So , quite understandably , qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important .
And sure enough , the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like " How to Win Friends and Influence People . "
And they feature as their role models really great salesmen .
So that 's the world we 're living in today .
That 's our cultural inheritance .
Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant , and I 'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all .
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust .
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together .
But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves , the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems .
So now I 'd like to share with you what 's in my suitcase today .
Guess what ?
Books .
I have a suitcase full of books .
Here 's Margaret Atwood , " Cat 's Eye . "
Here 's a novel by Milan Kundera .
And here 's " The Guide for the Perplexed " by Maimonides .
But these are not exactly my books .
I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather 's favorite authors .
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up , partly because it was filled with his very gentle , very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books .
I mean literally every table , every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books .
Just like the rest of my family , my grandfather 's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read .
But he also loved his congregation , and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi .
He would takes the fruits of each week 's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought .
And people would come from all over to hear him speak .
But here 's the thing about my grandfather .
Underneath this ceremonial role , he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons , he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years .
And even away from the podium , when you called him to say hello , he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time .
But when he died at the age of 94 , the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him .
And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather 's example in my own way .
So I just published a book about introversion , and it took me about seven years to write .
And for me , that seven years was like total bliss , because I was reading , I was writing , I was thinking , I was researching .
It was my version of my grandfather 's hours of the day alone in his library .
But now all of a sudden my job is very different , and my job is to be out here talking about it , talking about introversion .
And that 's a lot harder for me , because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now , this is not my natural milieu .
So I prepared for moments like these as best I could .
I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get .
And I call this my " year of speaking dangerously . "
And that actually helped a lot .
But I 'll tell you , what helps even more is my sense , my belief , my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude , we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change .
I mean , we are .
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision .
Number one : Stop the madness for constant group work .
Just stop it .
Thank you .
And I want to be clear about what I 'm saying , because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual , chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know , the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas .
That is great .
It 's great for introverts and it 's great for extroverts .
But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work .
School , same thing .
We need to be teaching kids to work together , for sure , but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own .
This is especially important for extroverted children too .
They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part .
Okay , number two : Go to the wilderness .
Be like Buddha , have your own revelations .
I 'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again , but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often .
Number three : Take a good look at what 's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there .
So extroverts , maybe your suitcases are also full of books .
Or maybe they 're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment .
Whatever it is , I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy .
But introverts , you being you , you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what 's inside your own suitcase .
And that 's okay .
But occasionally , just occasionally , I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see , because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry .
So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you .
Yves Behar : Designing objects that tell stories
Designer Yves Behar digs up his creative roots to discuss some of the iconic objects he 's created . Then he turns to the witty , surprising , elegant objects he 's working on now -- including the " $ 100 laptop . "
Being a child , and sort of crawling around the house , I remember these Turkish carpets , and there were these scenes , these battle scenes , these love scenes .
I mean , look , this animal is trying to fight back this spear from this soldier .
And my mom took these pictures actually , last week , of our carpets , and I remember this to this day .
There was another object , this sort of towering piece of furniture with creatures and gargoyles and nudity -- pretty scary stuff , when you 're a little kid .
What I remember today from this is that objects tell stories , so storytelling has been a really strong influence in my work .
And then there was another influence .
I was a teenager , and at 15 or 16 , I guess like all teenagers , we want to just do what we love and what we believe in .
And so , I fused together the two things I loved the most , which was skiing and windsurfing .
Those are pretty good escapes from the drab weather in Switzerland .
So , I created this compilation of the two : I took my skis and I took a board and I put a mast foot in there , and some foot straps , and some metal fins , and here I was , going really fast on frozen lakes .
It was really a death trap . I mean , it was incredible , it worked incredibly well , but it was really dangerous .
And I realized then I had to go to design school .
I mean , look at those graphics there .
So , I went to design school , and it was the early ' 90s when I finished .
And I saw something extraordinary happening in Silicon Valley , so I wanted to be there , and I saw that the computer was coming into our homes , that it had to change in order to be with us in our homes .
And so I got myself a job and I was working for a consultancy , and we would get in to these meetings , and these managers would come in , and they would say , " Well , what we 're going to do here is really important , you know . "
And they would give the projects code names , you know , mostly from " Star Wars , " actually : things like C3PO , Yoda , Luke .
So , in anticipation , I would be this young designer in the back of the room , and I would raise my hand , and I would ask questions .
I mean , in retrospect , probably stupid questions , but things like , " What 's this Caps Lock key for ? "
or " What 's this Num Lock key for ? " You know , that thing ?
" You know , do people really use it ?
Do they need it ? Do they want it in their homes ? "
What I realized then is , they didn 't really want to change the legacy stuff ; they didn 't want to change the insides .
They were really looking for us , the designers , to create the skins , to put some pretty stuff outside of the box .
And I didn 't want to be a colorist .
It wasn 't what I wanted to do .
I didn 't want to be a stylist in this way .
And then I saw this quote : " advertising is the price companies pay for being unoriginal . "
So , I had to start on my own . So I moved to San Francisco , and I started a little company , fuseproject .
And what I wanted to work on is important stuff .
And I wanted to really not just work on the skins , but I wanted to work on the entire human experience .
And so the first projects were sort of humble , but they took technology and maybe made it into things that people would use in a new way , and maybe finding some new functionality .
This is a watch we made for Mini Cooper , the car company , right when it launched , and it 's the first watch that has a display that switches from horizontal to vertical .
And that allows me to check my timer discretely , here , without bending my elbow .
And other projects , which were really about transformation , about matching the human need .
This is a little piece of furniture for an Italian manufacturer , and it ships completely flat , and then it folds into a coffee table and a stool and whatnot .
And something a little bit more experimental : this is a light fixture for Swarovski , and what it does is , it changes shape .
So , it goes from a circle , to a round , to a square , to a figure eight .
And just by drawing on a little computer tablet , the entire light fixture adjusts to what shape you want .
And then finally , the leaf lamp for Herman Miller .
This is a pretty involved process ; it took us about four and a half years .
But I really was looking for creating a unique experience of light , a new experience of light .
So , we had to design both the light and the light bulb .
And that 's a unique opportunity , I would say , in design .
And the new experience I was looking for is giving the choice for the user to go from a warm , sort of glowing kind of mood light , all the way to a bright work light .
So , the light bulb actually does that .
It allows the person to switch , and to mix these two colorations .
And it 's done in a very simple way : one just touches the base of the light , and on one side , you can mix the brightness , and on the other , the coloration of the light .
So , all of these projects have a humanistic sense to them , and I think as designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship between our work and the world , whether it 's for business , or , as I 'm going to show , on some civic-type projects .
Because I think everybody agrees that as designers we bring value to business , value to the users also , but I think it 's the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value .
And the values we bring can be about environmental issues , about sustainability , about lower power consumption .
You know , they can be about function and beauty ; they can be about business strategy .
But designers are really the glue that brings these things together .
So Jawbone is a project that you 're familiar with , and it has a humanistic technology .
It feels your skin . It rests on your skin , and it knows when it is you 're talking .
And by knowing when it is you 're talking , it gets rid of the other noises that it knows about , which is the environmental noises .
But the other thing that is humanistic about Jawbone is that we really decided to take out all the techie stuff , and all the nerdy stuff out of it , and try to make it as beautiful as we can .
I mean , think about it : the care we take in selecting sunglasses , or jewelry , or accessories is really important , so if it isn 't beautiful , it really doesn 't belong on your face .
And this is what we 're pursuing here .
But how we work on Jawbone is really unique .
I want to point at something here , on the left .
This is the board , this is one of the things that goes inside that makes this technology work .
But this is the design process : there 's somebody changing the board , putting tracers on the board , changing the location of the ICs , as the designers on the other side are doing the work .
So , it 's not about slapping skins , anymore , on a technology .
It 's really about designing from the inside out .
And then , on the other side of the room , the designers are making small adjustments , sketching , drawing by hand , putting it in the computer .
And it 's what I call being design driven .
You know , there is some push and pull , but design is really helping define the whole experience from the inside out .
And then , of course , design is never done .
And this is -- the other new way that is unique in how we work is , because it 's never done , you have to do all this other stuff .
The packaging , and the website , and you need to continue to really touch the user , in many ways .
But how do you retain somebody , when it 's never done ?
And Hosain Rahman , the CEO of Aliph Jawbone , you know , really understands that you need a different structure .
So , in a way , the different structure is that we 're partners , it 's a partnership . We can continue to work and dedicate ourselves to this project , and then we also share in the rewards .
And here 's another project , another partnership-type approach .
This is called Y Water , and it 's this guy from Los Angeles , Thomas Arndt , Austrian originally , who came to us , and all he wanted to do was to create a healthy drink , or an organic drink for his kids , to replace the high-sugar-content sodas that he 's trying to get them away from .
So , we worked on this bottle , and it 's completely symmetrical in every dimension .
And this allows the bottle to turn into a game .
The bottles connect together , and you can create different shapes , different forms .
Thank you .
And then while we were doing this , the shape of the bottle upside down reminded us of a Y , and then we thought , well these words , " why " and " why not , " are probably the most important words that kids ask .
So we called it Y Water . And so this is another place where it all comes together in the same room : the three-dimensional design , the ideas , the branding , it all becomes deeply connected .
And then the other thing about this project is , we bring intellectual property , we bring a marketing approach , we bring all this stuff , but I think , at the end of the day , what we bring is these values , and these values create a soul for the companies we work with .
And it 's especially rewarding when your design work becomes a creative endeavor , when others can be creative and do more with it .
Here 's another project , which I think really emulates that .
This is the One Laptop per Child , the $ 100 laptop .
This picture is incredible .
In Nigeria , people carry their most precious belongings on their heads .
This girl is going to school with a laptop on her head .
I mean , to me , it just means so much .
But when Nicholas Negroponte -- and he has spoken about this project a lot , he 's the founder of OLPC -- came to us about two and a half years ago , there were some clear ideas .
He wanted to bring education and he wanted to bring technology , and those are pillars of his life , but also pillars of the mission of One Laptop per Child .
But the third pillar that he talked about was design .
And at the time , I wasn 't really working on computers .
I didn 't really want to , from the previous adventure .
But what he said was really significant , is that design was going to be why the kids were going to love this product , how we were going to make it low cost , robust .
And plus , he said he was going to get rid of the Caps Lock key -- -- and the Num Lock key , too .
So , I was convinced . We designed it to be iconic , to look different . To look like it 's for a kid , but not like a toy .
And then the integration of all these great technologies , which you 've heard about , the Wi-Fi antennas that allow the kids to connect ; the screen , which you can read in sunlight ; the keyboard , which is made out of rubber , and it 's protected from the environment .
You know , all these great technologies really happened because of the passion and the OLPC people and the engineers .
They fought the suppliers , they fought the manufacturers .
I mean , they fought like animals for this to remain they way it is .
And in a way , it is that will that makes projects like this one -- allows the process from not destroying the original idea .
And I think this is something really important .
So , now you get these pictures -- you get up in the morning , and you see the kids in Nigeria and you see them in Uruguay with their computers , and in Mongolia .
And we went away from obviously the beige .
I mean it 's colorful , it 's fun .
In fact , you can see each logo is a little bit different .
It 's because we were able to run , during the manufacturing process , 20 colors for the X and the O , which is the name of the computer , and by mixing them on the manufacturing floor , you get 20 times 20 : you get 400 different options there .
So , the lessons from seeing the kids using them in the developing world are incredible .
But this is my nephew , Anthony , in Switzerland , and he had the laptop for an afternoon , and I had to take it back . It was hard .
And it was a prototype . And a month and a half later , I come back to Switzerland , and there he is playing with his own version .
Like paper , paper and cardboard .
So , I 'm going to finish with one last project , and this is a little bit more of adult play .
Some of you might have heard about the New York City condom .
It 's actually just launched , actually launched on Valentine 's Day , February 14 , about 10 days ago .
So , the Department of Health in New York came to us , and they needed a way to distribute 36 million condoms for free to the citizens of New York .
So a pretty big endeavor , and we worked on the dispensers .
These are the dispensers . There 's this friendly shape .
It 's a little bit like designing a fire hydrant , and it has to be easily serviceable : you have to know where it is and what it does .
And we also designed the condoms themselves .
And I was just in New York at the launch , and I went to see all these places where they 're installed : this is at a Puerto Rican little mom-and-pop store ; at a bar in Christopher Street ; at a pool hall .
I mean , they 're being installed in homeless clinics -- everywhere .
Of course , clubs and discos , too .
And here 's the public service announcement for this project .
Get some .
So , this is really where design is able to create a conversation .
I was in these venues , and people were , you know , really into getting them . They were excited .
It was breaking the ice , it was getting over a stigma , and I think that 's also what design can do .
So , I was going to throw some condoms in the room and whatnot , but I 'm not sure it 's the etiquette here .
Yeah ? All right , all right . I have only a few .
So , I have more , you can always ask me for some more later .
And if anybody asks why you 're carrying a condom , you can just say you like the design .
So , I 'll finish with just one thought : if we all work together on creating value , but if we really keep in mind the values of the work that we do , I think we can change the work that we do .
We can change these values , can change the companies we work with , and eventually , together , maybe we can change the world .
So , thank you .
Paul Root Wolpe : It 's time to question bio-engineering
Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe describes an astonishing series of recent bio-engineering experiments , from glowing dogs to mice that grow human ears . He asks : Isn 't it time to set some ground rules ? & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Today I want to talk about design , but not design as we usually think about it .
I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific , biotechnological culture , where , for really the first time in history , we have the power to design bodies , to design animal bodies , to design human bodies .
In the history of our planet , there have been three great waves of evolution .
The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution .
So , as you all know , species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments , and the pressures of those environments selected which changes , through random mutation in species , were going to be preserved .
Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution , which was we changed the environment in which we evolved .
We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization .
And that has been the second great -- couple 100,000 years , 150,000 years -- flow of our evolution .
By changing our environment , we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve .
Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities , all the way through modern medicine , we have changed our own evolution .
Now we 're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history , which has been called many things : " intentional evolution , " " evolution by design " -- very different than intelligent design -- whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet .
So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species , as well as our cultures , because of this change .
Now we actually have been doing it for a long time .
We started selectively breeding animals many , many thousands of years ago .
And if you think of dogs for example , dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures .
There isn 't a dog on this earth that 's a natural creature .
Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like .
But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them .
We don 't have to do it that way anymore .
This is a beefalo .
A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid .
And they are now making them , and someday , perhaps pretty soon , you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket .
This is a geep , a goat-sheep hybrid .
The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards .
I think they said it tasted like chicken .
This is a cama .
A cama is a camel-llama hybrid , created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama .
And they are now using these in certain cultures .
Then there 's the liger .
This is the largest cat in the world -- the lion-tiger hybrid .
It 's bigger than a tiger .
And in the case of the liger , there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild .
But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology .
And then finally , everybody 's favorite , the zorse .
None of this is Photoshopped . These are real creatures .
And so one of the things we 've been doing is using genetic enhancement , or genetic manipulation , of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics .
And if that were all this was about , then it would be an interesting thing .
But something much , much more powerful is happening now .
These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish .
We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow .
Well , they 've now taken that gene , that bioluminescent gene , and put it into mammal cells .
These are normal cells .
And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light .
Once they could do that with cells , they could do it with organisms .
So they did it with mouse pups , kittens .
And by the way , the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that 's a bioluminescent gene from coral , while this is from jellyfish .
They did it with pigs .
They did it with puppies .
And , in fact , they did it with monkeys .
And if you can do it with monkeys -- though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes -- if they can do it in monkeys , they can probably figure out how to do it in apes , which means they can do it in human beings .
In other words , it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark .
Be easier to find us at night .
And in fact , right now in many states , you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets .
These are zebra fish . They 're normally black and silver .
These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow , green , red , and they are actually available now in certain states .
Other states have banned them .
Nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures .
There is no area of the government -- not the EPA or the FDA -- that controls genetically-engineered pets .
And so some states have decided to allow them , some states have decided to ban them .
Some of you may have read about the FDA 's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon .
The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon , using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat , to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed .
And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether , pretty soon , you could be eating this fish -- it 'll be sold in the stores .
And before you get too worried about it , here in the United States , the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it .
So even as we worry about it , we have allowed it to go on in this country -- much different in Europe -- without any regulation , and even without any identification on the package .
These are all the first cloned animals of their type .
So in the lower right here , you have Dolly , the first cloned sheep -- now happily stuffed in a museum in Edinburgh ; Ralph the rat , the first cloned rat ; CC the cat , for cloned cat ; Snuppy , the first cloned dog -- Snuppy for Seoul National University puppy -- created in South Korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo , which he had not .
He actually was the first person to clone a dog , which is a very difficult thing to do , because dog genomes are very plastic .
This is Prometea , the first cloned horse .
It 's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy , a real " gold ring " of cloning , because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings .
In other words , the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed .
But if you can clone that horse , you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud .
These were the first cloned calves , the first cloned grey wolves , and then , finally , the first cloned piglets : Alexis , Chista , Carrel , Janie and Dotcom .
In addition , we 've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species .
This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create .
So with antithrombin in that goat -- that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create .
And then in addition , transgenic pigs , knockout pigs , from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea , to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them , instead of producing them in an industrial way .
These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species .
The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate .
A somatic cell , a body cell , was taken from its body , gestated in the ovum of a cow , and then that cow gave birth to a guar .
Same thing happened with the mouflon , where it 's an endangered species of sheep .
It was gestated in a regular sheep body , which actually raises an interesting biological problem .
We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies .
We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA , but we also have DNA in our mitochondria , which are the energy packets of the cell .
That DNA is passed down through our mothers .
So really , what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon , but a guar with cow mitochondria , and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA , and a mouflon with another species of sheep 's mitochondrial DNA .
These are really hybrids , not pure animals .
And it raises the question of how we 're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology -- a question that we 're not really sure yet how to solve .
This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach .
And what they 've done here is they 've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top , and it 's on a big computer tracking ball .
And now , using a joystick , they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right , forwards or backwards .
They 've created a kind of insect bot , or bugbot .
It gets worse than that -- or perhaps better than that .
This actually is one of DARPA 's very important -- DARPA is the Defense Research Agency -- one of their projects .
These goliath beetles are wired in their wings .
They have a computer chip strapped to their backs , and they can fly these creatures around the lab .
They can make them go left , right . They can make them take off .
They can 't actually make them land .
They put them about one inch above the ground , and then they shut everything off and they go pfft .
But it 's the closest they can get to a landing .
And in fact , this technology has gotten so developed that this creature -- this is a moth -- this is the moth in its pupa stage , and that 's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology , so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth , it is already prewired .
The wires are already in its body , and they can just hook it up to their technology , and now they 've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance .
They can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones .
It 's not just insects .
This is the ratbot , or the robo-rat by Sanjiv Talwar at SUNY Downstate .
Again , it 's got technology -- it 's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres ; it 's got a camera on top of its head .
The scientists can make this creature go left , right .
They have it running through mazes , controlling where it 's going .
They 've now created an organic robot .
The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar 's lab said , " Is this ethical ?
We 've taken away the autonomy of this animal . "
I 'll get back to that in a minute .
There 's also been work done with monkeys .
This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke .
He took owl monkeys , wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved , especially looking at the movement of their right arm .
The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways .
They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm , which you see here in the picture , put the arm in another room .
Pretty soon , the computer learned , by reading the monkey 's brainwaves , to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey 's arm did .
Then he put a video monitor in the monkey 's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm , and the monkey got fascinated .
The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm , this prosthetic arm would do .
And eventually she was moving it and moving it , and eventually stopped moving her right arm and , staring at the screen , could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves -- which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms .
And it 's not just technology that we 're putting into animals .
This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida .
He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons -- so these are just individual neurons from rats -- put them on a chip .
They self-aggregated into a network , became an integrated chip .
And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator .
So now we have organic computer chips made out of living , self-aggregating neurons .
Finally , Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern took a completely intact , independent lamprey eel brain .
This is a brain from a lamprey eel .
It is living -- fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides , attached photosensitive sensors to the brain , put it into a cart -- here 's the cart , the brain is sitting there in the middle -- and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart , when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart , the cart moves toward the light ; when you turn it off , it moves away .
It 's photophilic .
So now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain .
Is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts , sitting there in its nutrient medium ?
I don 't know , but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding .
So , we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes .
This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts .
He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin , put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being .
Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation .
This is where we are in this process .
Finally , not that long ago , Craig Venter created the first artificial cell , where he took a cell , took a DNA synthesizer , which is a machine , created an artificial genome , put it in a different cell -- the genome was not of the cell he put it in -- and that cell then reproduced as the other cell .
In other words , that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent -- it did not have an organic parent .
And so , asks The Economist : " The first artificial organism and its consequences . "
So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that .
But in fact , that 's not what Frankenstein 's lab looks like .
This is what Frankenstein 's lab looks like .
This is a DNA synthesizer , and here at the bottom are just bottles of A , T , C and G -- the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain .
And so , we need to ask ourselves some questions .
For the first time in the history of this planet , we are able to directly design organisms .
We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power , and it confers on us a responsibility .
Is everything okay ?
Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want ?
Do we have free reign to design animals ?
Do we get to go someday to Pets ' R ' Us and say , " Look , I want a dog .
I 'd like it to have the head of a Dachshund , the body of a retriever , maybe some pink fur , and let 's make it glow in the dark " ?
Does industry get to create creatures who , in their milk , in their blood , and in their saliva and other bodily fluids , create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines ?
Do we get to create organic robots , where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings ?
And then the final step of this , once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings , what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then ?
It 's already happening . It 's not science fiction .
We are not only already using these things in animals , some of them we 're already beginning to use on our own bodies .
We are now taking control of our own evolution .
We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet .
It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now .
It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future .
Thanks .
Péter Fankhauser : Meet Rezero , the dancing ballbot
Engineering student Péter Fankhauser demonstrates Rezero , a robot that balances on a ball . Designed and built by students , Rezero is the first ballbot made to move quickly and gracefully -- and even dance .
Let me introduce to you Rezero .
This little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH-Zurich .
Our robot belongs to a family of robots called Ballbots .
Instead of wheels , a Ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball .
The main characteristics of such a system is that there 's one sole contact point to the ground .
This means that the robot is inherently unstable .
It 's like when I am trying to stand on one foot .
You might ask yourself , what 's the usefulness of a robot that 's unstable ?
Now we 'll explain that in a second .
Let me first explain how Rezero actually keeps his balance .
Rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor .
He then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately .
This happens 160 times per second , and if anything fails in this process , Rezero would immediately fall to the ground .
Now to move and to balance , Rezero needs to turn the ball .
The ball is driven by three special wheels that allow Rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time .
Due to his instability , Rezero is always in motion . Now here 's the trick .
It 's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very [ dynamically ] .
Let 's play a little .
You may have wondered what happens if I give the robot a little push .
In this mode , he 's trying to maintain his position .
For the next demo , I 'd like you to introduce to my colleagues Michael , on the computer , and Thomas who 's helping me onstage .
In the next mode , Rezero is passive , and we can move him around .
With almost no force I can control his position and his velocity .
I can also make him spin .
In the next mode , we can get Rezero to follow a person .
He 's now keeping a constant distance to Thomas .
This works with a laser sensor that 's mounted on top of Rezero .
With the same method , we can also get him to circle a person .
We call this the orbiting mode .
All right , thank you , Thomas .
Now , what 's the use of this technology ?
For now , it 's an experiment , but let me show you some possible future applications .
Rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks .
With a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way .
In a hospital , this device could be used to carry around medical equipment .
Due to the Ballbot system , it has a very small footprint and it 's also easy to move around .
And of course , who wouldn 't like to take a ride on one of these .
And these are more practical applications .
But there 's also a certain beauty within this technology .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Deborah Rhodes : A test that finds 3x more breast tumors , and why it 's not available to you
Working with a team of physicists , Dr. Deborah Rhodes developed a new tool for tumor detection that 's 3 times as effective as traditional mammograms for women with dense breast tissue . The life-saving implications are stunning . So why haven 't we heard of it ? Rhodes shares the story behind the tool 's creation , and the web of politics and economics that keep it from mainstream use .
There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography -- women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn 't work well at all .
Do you know which group you 're in ?
If you don 't , you 're not alone .
Because the breast has become are very political organ .
The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press , politicians , radiologists and medical imaging companies .
I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth .
But first , my disclosures .
I am not a breast cancer survivor .
I 'm not a radiologist .
I don 't have any patents , and I 've never received any money from a medical imaging company , and I am not seeking your vote .
What I am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question .
She came to see me after discovering a breast lump .
Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s .
She and I were both very pregnant at that time , and my heart just ached for her , imagining how afraid she must be .
Fortunately , her lump proved to be benign .
But she asked me a question : how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one ?
So I studied her mammogram , and I reviewed the radiology literature , and I was shocked to discover that , in her case , our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin .
You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world 's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s .
Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force , even though most of them weren 't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies .
It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage .
Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines .
The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post .
The radiologists were , in turn , criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest .
But in my view , the radiologists are heroes .
There 's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms , and that 's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret , and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause .
But that very fact is telling .
Where there is this much legal smoke , there is likely to be some fire .
The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density .
Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat -- pictured here in yellow -- versus connective and epithelial tissues -- pictured in pink .
And that proportion is primarily genetically determined .
Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue , which is why mammography doesn 't work as well in them .
And although breast density generally declines with age , up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause .
So how do you know if your breasts are dense ?
Well , you need to read the details of your mammography report .
Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram .
If the breast is less than 25 percent dense , that 's called fatty-replaced .
The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities , followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense .
And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense .
The problem with breast density is that it 's truly the wolf in sheep 's clothing .
Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram , and the X-ray often can 't distinguish between the two .
So it 's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast .
But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast .
That 's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts , but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts .
Now it 's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer , but it turns out that it 's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer .
It 's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer .
At the time my patient posed this question to me , breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature , and very few women having mammograms , or the physicians ordering them , knew about this .
But what else could I offer her ?
Mammograms have been around since the 1960 's , and it 's changed very little .
There have been surprisingly few innovations , until digital mammography was approved in 2000 .
Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast , but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally , just like we can with a digital camera .
The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment , and what have we gained from that investment ?
In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars , digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography , and in fact , it was worse in older women .
But it was better in one group , and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts , and in those women , digital mammography found twice as many cancers , but it still only found 60 percent .
So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment , but it 's been a very small step forward for womankind .
What about ultrasound ?
Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies , so it 's not widely used .
And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors , but it 's also very expensive .
If we think about disruptive technology , we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive .
Think about iPods compared to stereos .
But it 's the exact opposite in health care .
The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive .
Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer .
It 's just way too much equipment .
One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs .
And sooner or later , we 're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can 't always come at a much higher price .
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation , and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual 's genius .
Rather , big ideas can be orchestrated , if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don 't ordinarily talk about .
It 's like the essence of TED .
He quotes one innovator who says , " The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick . "
This makes no sense , because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don 't realize have solutions .
And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don 't realize are problems .
Now , take a look at this cartoon that accompanied Gladwell 's article , and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers .
So if you will allow me a little creative license , I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient 's problem with a physicist 's solution .
Shortly after her visit , I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O 'Conner , who was a specialist in cardiac imaging , something I had nothing to do with .
And he happened to tell me about a conference he 'd just returned from in Israel , where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector .
Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart , and it had even been tried to image the breast .
But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge , bulky tubes , and they were filled with these scintillating crystals , and you just couldn 't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors .
But the potential advantage was that gamma rays , unlike X-rays , are not influenced by breast density .
But this technology could not find tumors when they 're small , and finding a small tumor is critical for survival .
If you can find a tumor when it 's less than a centimeter , survival exceeds 90 percent , but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases .
But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he 'd seen , and this is it .
It 's made not of a bulky tube , but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector .
And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density , and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors .
So after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape -- -- Michael hacked off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out , and we attached the new detector , and we decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging , or MBI .
This is an image from our first patient .
And you can see , using the old gamma technology , that it just looked like noise .
But using our new detector , we could begin to see the outline of a tumor .
So here we were , a nuclear physicist , an internist , soon joined by Carrie Hruska , a biomedical engineer , and two radiologists , and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape .
To say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement , but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system .
This is our current detector .
And you can see that it looks a lot different .
The duct tape is gone , and we added a second detector on top of the breast , which has further improved our tumor detection .
So how does this work ?
The patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that 's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells , but not by normal cells , and this is the key difference from mammography .
Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue , and we 've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast .
But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors , and therefore , it 's impervious to breast density .
After the injection , the patient 's breast is placed between the detectors .
And if you 've ever had a mammogram -- if you 're old enough to have had a mammogram -- you know what comes next : pain .
You may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that 's regulated by federal law , and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study .
But with MBI , we use just light , pain-free compression .
And the detector then transmits the image to the computer .
So here 's an example .
You can see , on the right , a mammogram showing a faint tumor , the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue .
But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly , as well as a second tumor , which profoundly influence that patient 's surgical options .
In this example , although the mammogram found one tumor , we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors -- one is small as three millimeters .
Our big break came in 2004 .
After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors , we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation .
And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts , comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI .
Of the tumors that we found , mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors .
MBI found 83 percent .
Here 's an example from that screening study .
The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue , but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake , which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor .
In this case , a one-centimeter tumor .
And in this case , a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo , who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young , wanted to enroll in our study .
And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue , but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake , which we can also see on a color image .
And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball .
But fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes .
So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast , we had to solve one very important problem .
We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose , and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this .
And I 'm very happy to report that we 're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram .
And at this low dose , we 're continuing this screening study , and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram , but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer .
So this is not just young women that it 's benefiting .
It 's also older women with dense tissue .
And we 're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that 's used in any other type of gamma technology .
MBI generates four images per breast .
MRI generates over a thousand .
It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding .
But I suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the MBI image .
But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive -- it 's as accurate as MRI , and it 's a fraction of the cost .
But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo .
After achieving what we felt were remarkable results , our manuscript was rejected by four journals .
After the fourth rejection , we requested reconsideration of the manuscript , because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology .
Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology .
We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose , and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions , and this could take five or more years .
If this technology is widely adopted , I will not benefit financially in any way , and that is very important to me , because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth .
But I recognize -- I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science .
The MBI unit has now been FDA approved , but it 's not yet widely available .
So until something is available for women with dense breasts , there are things that you should know to protect yourself .
First , know your density .
Ninety percent of women don 't , and 95 percent of women don 't know that it increases your breast cancer risk .
The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram .
I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago , and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is .
Of course we should .
And if you don 't know , please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report .
Second , if you 're pre-menopausal , try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle , when breast density is relatively lower .
Third , if you notice a persistent change in your breast , insist on additional imaging .
And fourth and most important , the mammography debate will rage on , but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram .
Mammography isn 't perfect , but it 's the only test that 's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer .
But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography 's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation .
Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later , and most women , thankfully , survive .
So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer .
Mammography 's the only one that 's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim .
It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations .
We need to individualize screening based on density .
For women without dense breasts , mammography is the best choice .
But for women with dense breasts ; we shouldn 't abandon screening altogether , we need to offer them something better .
The babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school , and the answer has been so slow to come .
She 's given me her blessing to share this story with you .
After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer , she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy .
We can and must do better , not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters , but in time for you .
Thank you .
Pranav Mistry : The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology
At TEDIndia , Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new , paradigm-shifting paper " laptop . " In an onstage Q & amp ; A , Mistry says he 'll open-source the software behind SixthSense , to open its possibilities to all .
We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us .
There are an enormous number of them that we use every day .
Unlike most of our computing devices , these objects are much more fun to use .
When you talk about objects , one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing , and that is gestures : how we manipulate these objects , how we use these objects in everyday life .
We use gestures not only to interact with these objects , but we also use them to interact with each other .
A gesture of " Namaste ! " , maybe , to respect someone , or maybe -- in India I don 't need to teach a kid that this means " four runs " in cricket .
It comes as a part of our everyday learning .
So , I am very interested , from the beginning , that how -- how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures , and how we use these objects , can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world .
Rather than using a keyboard and mouse , why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world ?
So , I started this exploration around eight years back , and it literally started with a mouse on my desk .
Rather than using it for my computer , I actually opened it .
Most of you might be aware that , in those days , the mouse used to come with a ball inside , and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving , and , accordingly , where the mouse is moving .
So , I was interested in these two rollers , and I actually wanted more , so I borrowed another mouse from a friend -- never returned to him -- and I now had four rollers .
Interestingly , what I did with these rollers is , basically , I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line .
It had some strings and pulleys and some springs .
What I got is basically a gesture interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars .
So , here , whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made , around eight years back , in 2000 .
Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds , I thought of sticky notes .
I thought , " Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world ? "
A message written on a sticky note to my mom on paper can come to an SMS , or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar -- a to-do list that automatically syncs with you .
But you can also search in the digital world , or maybe you can write a query , saying , " What is Dr. Smith 's address ? "
and this small system actually prints it out -- so it actually acts like a paper input-output system , just made out of paper .
In another exploration , I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions .
So , I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions , but they can actually draw so that it 's more intuitive to use that way .
Then I thought , " Why not make a Google Map , but in the physical world ? "
Rather than typing a keyword to find something , I put my objects on top of it .
If I put a boarding pass , it will show me where the flight gate is .
A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee , or where you can trash the cup .
So , these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly .
Among all these experiments , there was one thing in common : I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world .
I was taking some part of the objects , or any of the intuitiveness of real life , and bringing them to the digital world , because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive .
But then I realized that we humans are not actually interested in computing .
What we are interested in is information .
We want to know about things .
We want to know about dynamic things going around .
So I thought , around last year -- in the beginning of the last year -- I started thinking , " Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way ? "
Maybe , " How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information ? "
Because pixels are actually , right now , confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets .
Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects , everyday life so that I don 't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels ?
So , in order to realize this dream , I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head .
I think that 's why this is called a head-mounted projector , isn 't it ?
I took it very literally , and took my bike helmet , put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely .
So now , what I can do -- I can augment the world around me with this digital information .
But later , I realized that I actually wanted to interact with those digital pixels , also .
So I put a small camera over there , that acts as a digital eye .
Later , we moved to a much better , consumer-oriented pendant version of that , that many of you now know as the SixthSense device .
But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go .
You can start using any surface , any wall around you , as an interface .
The camera is actually tracking all your gestures .
Whatever you 're doing with your hands , it 's understanding that gesture .
And , actually , if you see , there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it .
You can start painting on any wall .
You stop by a wall , and start painting on that wall .
But we are not only tracking one finger , here .
We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands , of a map just by pinching all present .
The camera is actually doing -- just , getting all the images -- is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside .
So , technically , it 's a little bit complex , but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use , in some sense .
But I 'm more excited that you can actually take it outside .
Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket , you can just do the gesture of taking a photo and it takes a photo for you .
Thank you .
And later I can find a wall , anywhere , and start browsing those photos or maybe , " OK , I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend . "
So , we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world .
And , of course , if you don 't have any surface , you can start using your palm for simple operations .
Here , I 'm dialing a phone number just using my hand .
The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements , but , interestingly , is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand .
What we 're doing here is actually -- for example , in this case , the book cover is matched with so many thousands , or maybe millions of books online , and checking out which book it is .
Once it has that information , it finds out more reviews about that , or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that , so you can actually hear , on a physical book , a review as sound .
This was Obama 's visit last week to MIT .
So , I was seeing the live [ video ] of his talk , outside , on just a newspaper .
Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated -- like , you have to check your computer in order to do that , right ?
When I 'm going back , I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed , because at that particular time , I 'm not feeling like opening my iPhone , and checking out a particular icon .
And I think this technology will not only change the way -- yes .
It will change the way we interact with people , also , not only the physical world .
The fun part is , I 'm going to the Boston metro , and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground , right ?
And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life .
But many of you argue , actually , that all of our work is not only about physical objects .
We actually do lots of accounting and paper editing and all those kinds of things ; what about that ?
And many of you are excited about the next generation tablet computers to come out in the market .
So , rather than waiting for that , I actually made my own , just using a piece of paper .
So , what I did here is remove the camera -- All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera .
I removed the microphone from that , and then just pinched that -- like I just made a clip out of the microphone -- and clipped that to a piece of paper , any paper that you found around .
So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I 'm touching the paper .
But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving .
You can of course watch movies .
and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54 . " ) And you can of course play games .
Here , the camera is actually understanding how you 're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game .
Many of you already must have thought , OK , you can browse .
Yeah . Of course you can browse to any websites or you can do all sorts of computing on a piece of paper wherever you need it .
So , more interestingly , I 'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way .
When I come back to my desk I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer .
And why only computers ? We can just play with papers .
Paper world is interesting to play with .
Here , I 'm taking a part of a document and putting over here a second part from a second place -- and I 'm actually modifying the information that I have over there .
Yeah . And I say , " OK , this looks nice , let me print it out , that thing . "
So I now have a print-out of that thing , and now -- the workflow is more intuitive the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back , rather than now switching between these two worlds .
So , as a last thought , I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide , the gap between these two worlds , but will also help us , in some way , to stay human , to be more connected to our physical world .
And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines .
That 's all . Thank you .
Thank you .
So , Pranav , first of all , you 're a genius .
This is incredible , really .
What are you doing with this ? Is there a company being planned ?
Or is this research forever , or what ?
Pranav Mistry : So , there are lots of companies -- actually sponsor companies of Media Lab -- interested in taking this ahead in one or another way .
Companies like mobile phone operators want to take this in a different way than the NGOs in India , [ who ] are thinking , " Why can we only have ' Sixth Sense ' ?
We should have a ' Fifth Sense ' for missing-sense people who cannot speak .
This technology can be used for them to speak out in a different way with maybe a speaker system . "
What are your own plans ? Are you staying at MIT , or are you going to do something with this ?
PM : I 'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device , because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own .
We will provide all the open source software for them , maybe starting next month .
Open source ? Wow .
Are you going to come back to India with some of this , at some point ?
PM : Yeah . Yes , yes , of course .
What are your plans ? MIT ?
India ? How are you going to split your time going forward ?
PM : There is a lot of energy here . Lots of learning .
All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India .
And now , if you see , it 's more about the cost-effectiveness : this system costs you $ 300 compared to the $ 20,000 surface tables , or anything like that .
Or maybe even the $ 2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $ 5,000 ?
So , we actually -- I showed that , at a conference , to President Abdul Kalam , at that time , and then he said , " OK , we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that . "
So I 'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment .
Based on the people we 've seen at TED , I would say you 're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now .
It 's an honor to have you at TED .
Thank you so much .
That 's fantastic .
Kevin Stone : The bio-future of joint replacement
Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints , but few get the best remedy -- real biological tissue . Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel use of animal tissue .
So let me just start with my story .
So I tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college .
Then I went on to tear my ACL , the ligament in my knee , and then developed an arthritic knee .
And I 'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story , and , by the way , I married a woman who has exactly the same story .
So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn 't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me .
So with that , let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we 're trying to explain .
We are all aware of the risk of cancer , but there 's another disease that 's destined to affect even more of us : arthritis .
Cancer may kill you , but when you look at the numbers , arthritis ruins more lives .
Assuming you live a long life , there 's a 50 percent chance you 'll develop arthritis .
And it 's not just aging that causes arthritis .
Common injuries can lead to decades of pain , until our joints quite literally grind to a halt .
Desperate for a solution , we 've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts , but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body , shouldn 't we stop and ask if there 's a better , more natural way ?
Let 's consider an alternative path .
What if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature , or within our own stem cells ?
This is the field of biologic replacements , where we replace worn-out parts with new , natural ones .
Kevin Stone : And so , the mission is : how do I treat these things biologically ?
And let 's talk about both what I did for my wife , and what I 've done for hundreds of other patients .
First thing for my wife , and the most common thing I hear from my patients , particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group , 70-year-old age group , is they come in and say , " Hey , Doc , isn 't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee ?
I 'm not ready for joint replacement . "
And so for her , I put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that [ knee ] joint space .
And [ the allograft ] replaces [ the missing meniscus ] .
And then for that unstable ligament , we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee .
And then for the damaged arthritis on the surface , we did a stem cell paste graft , which we designed in 1991 , to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there .
So here 's my wife 's bad knee on the left , and her just hiking now four months later in Aspen , and doing well .
And it works , not just for my wife , but certainly for other patients .
The girl on the video , Jen Hudak , just won the Superpipe in Aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee , as you see in the other image -- and having a paste graft to that knee .
And so we can regrow these surfaces biologically .
So with all this success , why isn 't that good enough , you might ask .
Well the reason is because there 's not enough donor cycles .
There 's not enough young , healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us .
And the tissue 's very expensive .
And so that 's not going to be a solution that 's going to get us global with biologic tissue .
But the solution is animal tissue because it 's plentiful , it 's cheap , you can get it from young , healthy tissues , but the barrier is immunology .
And the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl , or gal epitope .
So if we 're going to transplant animal tissues to people , we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope .
So my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984 .
And I started first with cow Achilles tendon , where we would take the cow Achilles tendon , which is type-I collagen , strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template .
We would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient 's knee .
We 've now done that procedure , and it 's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases , so it 's an FDA-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus .
And that 's great when I can degrade the tissue .
But what happens for your ligament when I need an intact ligament ?
I can 't grind it up in a blender .
So in that case , I have to design -- and we designed with Uri Galili and Tom Turek -- an enzyme wash to wash away , or strip , those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme .
And we call that a " gal stripping " technique .
What we do is humanize the tissue .
It 's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it , and then we can put it back into a patient 's knee .
And we 've done that . Now we 've taken pig ligament -- young , healthy , big tissue , put it into 10 patients in an FDA-approved trial -- and then one of our patients went on to have three Canadian Masters Downhill championships -- on his " pig-lig , " as he calls it . So we know it can work .
And there 's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending .
So what about the next step ?
What about getting to a total biologic knee replacement , not just the parts ?
How are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement ?
Well here 's how we 're going to do it .
So what we 're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young , healthy pig , strip it of its antigens , load it with your stem cells , then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee , tack it on there , have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee .
So that 's our biologic approach right now .
We 're going to rebuild your knee with the parts .
We 're going to resurface it with a completely new surface .
But we have other advantages from the animal kingdom .
There 's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation .
We can harness those benefits .
We can use thicker , younger , better tissues than you might have injured in your knee , or that you might have when you 're 40 , 50 or 60 .
We can do it as an outpatient procedure .
We can strip that tissue very economically , and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global .
And so welcome to super biologics .
It 's not hardware .
It 's not software .
It 's bioware .
It 's version 2.0 of you .
And so with that , coming to a -- coming to an operating theater near you soon , I believe .
Thank you very much .
Marcel Dicke : Why not eat insects ?
Marcel Dicke makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone 's diet . His message to squeamish chefs and foodies : delicacies like locusts and caterpillars compete with meat in flavor , nutrition and eco-friendliness .
Okay , I 'm going to show you again something about our diets .
And I would like to know what the audience is , and so who of you ever ate insects ?
That 's quite a lot .
But still , you 're not representing the overall population of the Earth .
Because there 's 80 percent out there that really eats insects .
But this is quite good .
Why not eat insects ? Well first , what are insects ?
Insects are animals that walk around on six legs .
And here you see just a selection .
There 's six million species of insects on this planet , six million species .
There 's a few hundreds of mammals -- six million species of insects .
In fact , if we count all the individual organisms , we would come at much larger numbers .
In fact , of all animals on Earth , of all animal species , 80 percent walks on six legs .
But if we would count all the individuals , and we take an average weight of them , it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on Earth .
That means that in terms of biomass , insects are more abundant than we are , and we 're not on a planet of men , but we 're on a planet of insects .
Insects are not only there in nature , but they also are involved in our economy , usually without us knowing .
There was an estimation , a conservative estimation , a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year .
It 's a number -- very large -- a contribution to the economy of the United States for free .
And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year .
It was 80 billion U.S. dollars .
Well we know that that was not a cheap war .
So insects , just for free , contribute to the economy of the United States with about the same order of magnitude , just for free , without everyone knowing .
And not only in the States , but in any country , in any economy .
What do they do ?
They remove dung , they pollinate our crops .
A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants .
They control pests , and they 're food for animals .
They 're at the start of food chains .
Small animals eat insects .
Even larger animals eat insects .
But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals , still larger animals .
And at the end of the food chain , we are eating them as well .
There 's quite a lot of people that are eating insects .
And here you see me in a small , provincial town in China , Lijiang -- about two million inhabitants .
If you go out for dinner , like in a fish restaurant , where you can select which fish you want to eat , you can select which insects you would like to eat .
And they prepare it in a wonderful way .
And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars , locusts , bee pupae -- delicacies .
And you can eat something new everyday .
There 's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe .
That 's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we 're eating , like a cow or a pig or a sheep .
More than 1,000 species -- an enormous variety .
And now you may think , okay , in this provincial town in China they 're doing that , but not us .
Well we 've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally , but I can tell you that every one of you is eating insects , without any exception .
You 're eating at least 500 grams per year .
What are you eating ?
Tomato soup , peanut butter , chocolate , noodles -- any processed food that you 're eating contains insects , because insects are here all around us , and when they 're out there in nature they 're also in our crops .
Some fruits get some insect damage .
Those are the fruits , if they 're tomato , that go to the tomato soup .
If they don 't have any damage , they go to the grocery .
And that 's your view of a tomato .
But there 's tomatoes that end up in a soup , and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency , there can be all kinds of things in there , no problem .
In fact , why would we put these balls in the soup , there 's meat in there anyway ?
In fact , all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of .
So anything is a good protein source already .
Now you may say , " Okay , so we 're eating 500 grams just by accident . "
We 're even doing this on purpose .
In a lot of food items that we have -- I have only two items here on the slide -- pink cookies or surimi sticks or , if you like , Campari -- a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye .
The surimi sticks [ of ] crabmeat , or is being sold as crab meat , is white fish that 's being dyed with cochineal .
Cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti .
It 's being produced in large amounts , 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the Canary Islands in Peru , and it 's big business .
One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros .
One gram of gold is 30 euros .
So it 's a very precious thing that we 're using to dye our foods .
Now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me , for everyone on this Earth .
The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially .
Where , at the moment , we have something between six and seven billion people , it will grow to about nine billion in 2050 .
That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed , and this is something that worries more and more people .
There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this .
How are we going to feed this world ?
And if you look at the figures up there , it says that we have a third more mouths to feed , but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent .
And that 's especially because this world population is increasing , and it 's increasing , not only in numbers , but we 're also getting wealthier , and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat .
And meat , in fact , is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production .
Our diet consists , [ in ] some part , of animal proteins , and at the moment , most of us here get it from livestock , from fish , from game .
And we eat quite a lot of it .
In the developed world it 's on average 80 kilograms per person per year , which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries , but on average 80 kilograms per person per year .
In the developing world it 's much lower .
It 's 25 kilograms per person per year .
But it 's increasing enormously .
In China in the last 20 years , it increased from 20 to 50 , and it 's still increasing .
So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average , and a third of the world population is living in China and in India , we 're having an enormous demand on meat .
And of course , we are not there to say that 's only for us , it 's not for them .
They have the same share that we have .
Now to start with , I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world .
We could do with much , much less -- and I know , I 've been a vegetarian for a long time , and you can easily do without anything .
You 'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway .
But then there 's a lot of problems that come with meat production , and we 're being faced with that more and more often .
The first problem that we 're facing is human health .
Pigs are quite like us .
They 're even models in medicine , and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human .
That means that pigs also share diseases with us .
And a pig disease , a pig virus , and a human virus can both proliferate , and because of their kind of reproduction , they can combine and produce a new virus .
This has happened in the Netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak .
You get a new disease that can be deadly .
We eat insects -- they 're so distantly related from us that this doesn 't happen .
So that 's one point for insects .
And there 's the conversion factor .
You take 10 kilograms of feed , you can get one kilogram of beef , but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat .
So if you would be an entrepreneur , what would you do ?
With 10 kilograms of input , you can get either one or nine kg. of output .
So far we 're taking the one , or up to five kilograms of output .
We 're not taking the bonus yet .
We 're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet .
So that 's two points for insects .
And there 's the environment .
If we take 10 kilograms of food -- and it results in one kilogram of beef , the other nine kilograms are waste , and a lot of that is manure .
If you produce insects , you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce .
So less waste .
Furthermore , per kilogram of manure , you have much , much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure So you have less waste , and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung .
So that 's three points for insects .
Now there 's a big " if , " of course , and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality .
Well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein , or fat , or vitamins , it 's very good .
In fact , it 's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment .
And even in terms of calories , it is very good .
One kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs , or six Big Macs .
So that 's four points for insects .
I can go on , and I could make many more points for insects , but time doesn 't allow this .
So the question is , why not eat insects ?
I gave you at least four arguments in favor .
We 'll have to .
Even if you don 't like it , you 'll have to get used to this because at the moment , 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock .
That 's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding , but it 's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported .
We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests , but there 's a limitation very soon .
And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent , we 're not going to make it that way .
We could much better change from meat , from beef , to insects .
And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects , so we are just a minority -- in a country like the U.K. , the USA , the Netherlands , anywhere .
On the left-hand side , you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night .
On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper .
So people there are eating them , not because they 're hungry , but because they think it 's a delicacy .
It 's just very good food .
You can vary enormously .
It has many benefits .
In fact , we have delicacy that 's very much like this grasshopper : shrimps , a delicacy being sold at a high price .
Who wouldn 't like to eat a shrimp ?
There are a few people who don 't like shrimp , but shrimp , or crabs , or crayfish , are very closely related .
They are delicacies .
In fact , a locust is a " shrimp " of the land , and it would make very good into our diet .
So why are we not eating insects yet ?
Well that 's just a matter of mindset .
We 're not used to it , and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us .
That 's why we 're changing the perception of insects .
And I 'm working very hard with my colleague , Arnold van Huis , in telling people what insects are , what magnificent things they are , what magnificent jobs they do in nature .
And in fact , without insects , we would not be here in this room , because if the insects die out , we will soon die out as well .
If we die out , the insects will continue very happily .
So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects .
And some might think , well they 're not yet available .
Well they are .
There are entrepreneurs in the Netherlands that produce them , and one of them is here in the audience , Marian Peeters , who 's in the picture .
I predict that later this year , you 'll get them in the supermarkets -- not visible , but as animal protein in the food .
And maybe by 2020 , you 'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you 're going to eat .
And they 're being made in the most wonderful ways .
A Dutch chocolate maker .
So there 's even a lot of design to it .
Well in the Netherlands , we have an innovative Minister of Agriculture , and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry .
And when she got all the Ministers of Agriculture of the E.U.
over to the Hague recently , she went to a high-class restaurant , and they ate insects all together .
It 's not something that is a hobby of mine .
It 's really taken off the ground .
So why not eat insects ?
You should try it yourself .
A couple of years ago , we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town , and they ate insects at the same moment , and this was still big , big news .
I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects , because it 's just a normal way of doing .
So you can try it yourself today , and I would say , enjoy .
And I 'm going to show to Bruno some first tries , and he can have the first bite .
Look at them first . Look at them first .
Marcel Dicke : It 's all protein .
That 's exactly the same [ one ] you saw in the video actually .
And it looks delicious .
They just make it [ with ] nuts or something .
MD : Thank you .
Cameron Sinclair : The refugees of boom-and-bust
At TEDGlobal U , Cameron Sinclair shows the unreported cost of real estate megaprojects gone bust : thousands of migrant construction laborers left stranded and penniless . To his fellow architects , he says there is only one ethical response .
A few years ago , my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry .
In 2006 , young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps .
And since then I 've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights .
In the last six months , more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled .
Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker .
1.1 million of them .
Mainly Indian , Pakistani , Sri Lankan and Nepalese , these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home .
They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there .
And when they arrive , they find themselves in labor camps with no water , no air conditioning , and their passports taken away .
While it 's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities , 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector , and so therefore we 're equally , if not more , accountable .
Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged , but the numbers are simply overwhelming .
In August 2008 , UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country 's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations .
And last summer , more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages , for the poor quality of food , and inadequate housing .
And then the financial collapse happened .
When the contractors have gone bust , as they 've been overleveraged like everyone else , the difference is everything goes missing , documentation , passports , and tickets home for these workers .
Currently , right now , thousands of workers are abandoned .
There is no way back home .
And there is no way , and no proof of arrival .
These are the boom-and-bust refugees .
The question is , as a building professional , as an architect , an engineer , as a developer , if you know this is going on , as we go to the sights every single week , are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations ?
So let 's forget your environmental footprint .
Let 's think about your ethical footprint .
What good is it to build a zero-carbon , energy efficient complex , when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best ?
Now , recently I 've been told I 've been taking the high road .
But , quite frankly , on this issue , there is no other road .
So let 's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse .
And that as we worry about our next job in the office , the next design that we can get , to keep our workers .
Let 's not forget these men , who are truly dying to work .
Thank you .
Kevin Surace : Eco-friendly drywall
Kevin Surace suggests we rethink basic construction materials -- such as the familiar wallboard -- to reduce the huge carbon footprint generated by the manufacturing and construction of our buildings . He introduces EcoRock , a clean , recyclable and energy-efficient drywall created by his team at Serious Materials .
What 's happening to the climate ?
It is unbelievably bad .
This is , obviously , that famous view now of the Arctic , which is likely to be gone at this point in the next three or four or five years . Very , very , very scary .
So we all look at what we can do .
And when you look at the worldwide sources of CO2 , 52 percent are tied to buildings .
Only nine percent is passenger cars , interestingly enough .
So we ran off to a sushi bar .
And at that sushi bar we came up with a great idea .
And it was something called EcoRock .
And we said we could redesign the 115-year-old gypsum drywall process that generates 20 billion pounds of CO2 a year .
So it was a big idea . We wanted to reduce that by 80 percent , which is exactly what we 've done .
We started R & amp ; D in 2006 .
Decided to use recycled content from cement and steel manufacturing .
There is the inside of our lab . We haven 't shown this before .
But our people had to do some 5,000 different mixes to get this right , to hit our targets .
And they worked absolutely very , very , very hard .
So then we went forward and built our production line in China .
We don 't build this production equipment any longer in the U.S. , unfortunately .
We did the line install over the summer .
We started right there , with absolutely nothing .
You 're seeing for the first time , a brand new drywall production line , not made using gypsum at all .
That 's the finished production line there .
We got our first panel out on December third .
That is the slurry being poured onto paper , basically . That 's the line running .
The exciting thing is , look at the faces of the people .
These are people who worked this project for two to three years .
And they are so excited . That 's the first board off the line .
Our Vice President of Operation kissing the board . Obviously very , very excited .
But this has a huge , huge impact on the environment .
We signed the first panel just a few weeks after that , had a great signing ceremony , leading to people hopefully using these products across the world .
And we 've got Cradle-to-Cradle Gold on this thing .
We happened to win , just recently , the Green Product of the Year for " The Re-Invention of Drywall , " from Popular Science .
Thank you . Thank you .
So here is what we learned : 8,000 gallons of gas equivalent to build one house .
You probably had no idea . It 's like driving around the world six times .
We must change everything .
Look around the room : chairs , wood , everything around us has to change or we 're not going to lick this problem .
Don 't listen to the people who say you can 't do this , because anyone can .
And these job losses , we can fix them with green-collar jobs .
We 've got four plants . We 're building this stuff around the country .
We 're going as fast as we can .
Two and a half million cars worth of gypsum , you know , CO2 generated . Right ?
So what will you do ? I 'll tell you what I did and why I did it . And I know my time 's up .
Those are my kids , Natalie and David .
When they have their kids , 2050 , they 'd better look back at Grandpa and say , " Hey , you gave it a good shot . You did the best you could with the team that you had . "
So my hope is that when you leave TED , you will look at reducing your carbon footprint in however you can do it .
And if you don 't know how , please find me -- I will help you .
Last but not least , Bill Gates , I know you invented Windows .
Wait till you see , maybe next year , what kind of windows we 've invented .
Thank you so much .
Shigeru Ban : Emergency shelters made from paper
Long before sustainability was a buzzword , Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban had begun his experiments with ecologically sound building materials such as cardboard tubes . His remarkable structures are often intended as temporary housing for disaster-struck nations such as Haiti , Rwanda , Japan . Yet often the buildings remain a beloved part of the landscape long after they have served their intended purpose .
Hi . I am an architect .
I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube , and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes .
1986 , much , much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues , I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure .
It 's very complicated to test the new material for the building , but this is much stronger than I expected , and also it 's very easy to waterproof , and also , because it 's industrial material , it 's also possible to fireproof .
Then I built the temporary structure , 1990 .
This is the first temporary building made out of paper .
There are 330 tubes , diameter 55 [ centimeters ] , there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters , or four feet , wide .
As you see it in the photo , inside is the toilet .
In case you 're finished with toilet paper , you can tear off the inside of the wall .
So it 's very useful .
Year 2000 , there was a big expo in Germany .
I was asked to design the building , because the theme of the expo was environmental issues .
So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes , recyclable paper .
My goal of the design is not when it 's completed .
My goal was when the building was demolished , because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year , we create a lot of industrial waste , so my building has to be reused or recycled .
After , the building was recycled .
So that was the goal of my design .
Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz .
Because I was so poor , I wanted to rent an office in Paris , but I couldn 't afford it , so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves .
So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office .
We stayed there for six years without paying any rent .
Thank you . I had one big problem .
Because we were part of the exhibition , even if my friend wanted to see me , they had to buy a ticket to see me .
That was the problem .
Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz .
It 's a very popular museum now , and I created a big monument for the government .
But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect , because we are not helping , we are not working for society , but we are working for privileged people , rich people , government , developers .
They have money and power .
Those are invisible .
So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture .
That is our profession , even historically it 's the same , even now we are doing the same .
So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society , even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters .
But I must say they are no longer natural disasters .
For example , earthquakes never kill people , but collapse of the buildings kill people .
That 's the responsibility of architects .
Then people need some temporary housing , but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people .
So I thought , even as architects , we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing .
We can make it better .
So that is why I started working in disaster areas .
1994 , there was a big disaster in Rwanda , Africa .
Two tribes , Hutu and Tutsi , fought each other .
Over two million people became refugees .
But I was so surprised to see the shelter , refugee camp organized by the U.N.
They 're so poor , and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season , In the shelters built by the U.N. , they were just providing a plastic sheet , and the refugees had to cut the trees , and just like this .
But over two million people cut trees .
It just became big , heavy deforestation and an environmental problem .
That is why they started providing aluminum pipes , aluminum barracks .
Very expensive , they throw them out for money , then cutting trees again .
So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong , but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit .
We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites , so on .
And then , year afterward , 1995 , in Kobe , Japan , we had a big earthquake .
Nearly 7,000 people were killed , and the city like this Nagata district , all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake .
And also I found out there 's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church -- all the building was totally destroyed .
So I went there and also I proposed to the priests , " Why don 't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes ? "
And he said , " Oh God , are you crazy ?
After a fire , what are you proposing ? "
So he never trusted me , but I didn 't give up .
I started commuting to Kobe , and I met the society of Vietnamese people .
They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park .
So I proposed to rebuild . I raised -- did fundraising .
I made a paper tube shelter for them , and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish , I used beer crates as a foundation .
I asked the Kirin beer company to propose , because at that time , the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red , which doesn 't go with the color of the paper tubes .
The color coordination is very important .
And also I still remember , we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate , but it came empty .
So I remember it was so disappointing .
So during the summer with my students , we built over 50 units of the shelters .
Finally the priest , finally he trusted me to rebuild .
He said , " As long as you collect money by yourself , bring your students to build , you can do it . "
So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church .
It was meant to stay there for three years , but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it .
Then , in Taiwan , they had a big earthquake , and we proposed to donate this church , so we dismantled them , we sent them over to be built by volunteer people .
It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now .
So this building became a permanent building .
Then I wonder , what is a permanent and what is a temporary building ?
Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it .
Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money .
In 1999 , in Turkey , the big earthquake , I went there to use the local material to build a shelter .
2001 , in West India , I built also a shelter .
In 2004 , in Sri Lanka , after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami , I rebuilt Islamic fishermen 's villages .
And in 2008 , in Chengdu , Sichuan area in China , nearly 70,000 people were killed , and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor .
I was asked to rebuild the temporary church .
I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students .
In one month , we completed nine classrooms , over 500 square meters .
It 's still used , even after the current earthquake in China .
In 2009 , in Italy , L 'Aquila , also they had a big earthquake .
And this is a very interesting photo : former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso -- you know , because we have to change the prime minister ever year .
And they are very kind , affording my model .
I proposed a big rebuilding , a temporary music hall , because L 'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed , so musicians were moving out .
So I proposed to the mayor , I 'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium .
He said , " As long as you bring your money , you can do it . "
And I was very lucky .
Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit , and our former prime minister came , so they helped us to collect money , and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium .
Year 2010 in Haiti , there was a big earthquake , but it 's impossible to fly over , so I went to Santo Domingo , next-door country , to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes .
This is what happened in Japan two years ago , in northern Japan .
After the earthquake and tsunami , people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium .
But look at this . There 's no privacy .
People suffer mentally and physically .
So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes , just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain .
However , some of the facility authority doesn 't want us to do it , because , they said , simply , it 's become more difficult to control them .
But it 's really necessary to do it .
They don 't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one .
Look at this . Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing , so dense and so messy because there is no storage , nothing , water is leaking , so I thought , we have to make multi-story building because there 's no land and also it 's not very comfortable .
So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions .
Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi .
He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [ fields ] .
I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable , within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same , but much more comfortable .
Many of the people want to stay here forever .
I was very happy to hear that .
Now I am working in New Zealand , Christchurch .
About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened , also they had a big earthquake , and many Japanese students were also killed , and the most important cathedral of the city , the symbol of Christchurch , was totally destroyed .
And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral .
So this is under construction .
And I 'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Neil Burgess : How your brain tells you where you are
How do you remember where you parked your car ? How do you know if you 're moving in the right direction ? Neuroscientist Neil Burgess studies the neural mechanisms that map the space around us , and how they link to memory and imagination .
When we park in a big parking lot , how do we remember where we parked our car ?
Here 's the problem facing Homer .
And we 're going to try to understand what 's happening in his brain .
So we 'll start with the hippocampus , shown in yellow , which is the organ of memory .
If you have damage there , like in Alzheimer 's , you can 't remember things including where you parked your car .
It 's named after Latin for " seahorse , " which it resembles .
And like the rest of the brain , it 's made of neurons .
So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it .
And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other .
The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells , which are very densely interconnected .
And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food .
So we 're going to imagine we 're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here .
And when it fires a little spike of electricity , there 's going to be a red dot and a click .
So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment .
And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike .
So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal 's location .
And if we record from lots of different neurons , we 'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment , like in this square box shown here .
So together they form a map for the rest of the brain , telling the brain continually , " Where am I now within my environment ? "
Place cells are also being recorded in humans .
So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring .
And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town .
And place cells in their hippocampi would fire , become active , start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town .
So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment ?
Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important .
So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat 's in .
And when you expand the box , the firing location expands .
The one below likes to fire whenever there 's a wall close by to the south .
And if you put another wall inside the box , then the cell fires in both place wherever there 's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box .
So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you -- extended buildings and so on -- is particularly important for the hippocampus .
And indeed , on the inputs to the hippocampus , cells are found which project into the hippocampus , which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it 's exploring around .
So the cell on the left , you can see , it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east , whether it 's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table , which the animals are running around .
And the cell on the right there fires whenever there 's a boundary to the south , whether it 's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart .
So that 's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it 's exploring around .
We can also test where we think objects are , like this goal flag , in simple environments -- or indeed , where your car would be .
So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember .
And then , if we put them back in the environment , generally they 're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was .
But on some trials , we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell .
In that case , we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment .
And what you see , for example , if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment , and then if you ask people where it was , but you 've made the environment bigger , where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out .
It 's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location , and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern .
That guides you back to the location that you want to remember .
But we also know where we are through movement .
So if we take some outbound path -- perhaps we park and we wander off -- we know because our own movements , which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back .
And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell .
Now grid cells are found , again , on the inputs to the hippocampus , and they 're a bit like place cells .
But now as the rat explores around , each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid .
And if you record from several grid cells -- shown here in different colors -- each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment , and each cell 's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells .
So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one .
So together , it 's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment -- a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you 'd find on a map , but using triangles .
And as it moves around , the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is , so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment .
Do people have grid cells ?
Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry , the same orientations of grid , shown in orange here , it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we 're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between .
So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal .
And indeed , you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex , which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats .
So back to Homer .
He 's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked .
And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells .
He 's also remembering the path he took out of the car park , which would be represented in the firing of grid cells .
Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire .
And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car .
And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car 's actually there .
Maybe it 's been towed .
But he knows where it was , so he knows to go and get it .
So beyond spatial memory , if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain , we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks , like remembering the last time you went to a wedding , for example .
So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene , at least , of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them .
So if this was happening , your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint .
And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space .
Another kind of cell , head direction cells , which I didn 't mention yet , they fire like a compass according to which way you 're facing .
They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery , so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding , for example .
So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we 're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains .
Thank you very much .
Nigel Marsh : How to make work-life balance work
Work-life balance , says Nigel Marsh , is too important to be left in the hands of your employer . Marsh lays out an ideal day balanced between family time , personal time and productivity -- and offers some stirring encouragement to make it happen .
What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request .
I 'd like all of you to pause for a moment , you wretched weaklings , and take stock of your miserable existence .
Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century .
It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40 .
Up until that moment , I had been that classic corporate warrior -- I was eating too much , I was drinking too much , I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family .
And I decided that I would try and turn my life around .
In particular , I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance .
So I stepped back from the workforce , and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children .
But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn 't have any work .
Not a very useful skill , especially when the money runs out .
So I went back to work , and I 've spent these seven years since struggling with , studying and writing about work-life balance .
And I have four observations I 'd like to share with you today .
The first is : if society 's to make any progress on this issue , we need an honest debate .
But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance .
All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue , which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family .
Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you 're in .
And the reality of the society that we 're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet , screaming desperation , where they work long , hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don 't need to impress people they don 't like .
It 's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [ a ] T-shirt isn 't really getting to the nub of the issue .
The second observation I 'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren 't going to solve this issue for us .
We should stop looking outside .
It 's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead .
If you don 't design your life , someone else will design it for you , and you may just not like their idea of balance .
It 's particularly important -- this isn 't on the World Wide Web , is it ? I 'm about to get fired -- it 's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation .
Now I 'm not talking here just about the bad companies -- the " abattoirs of the human soul , " as I call them .
I 'm talking about all companies .
Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [ as ] they can get away with .
It 's in their nature ; it 's in their DNA ; it 's what they do -- even the good , well-intentioned companies .
On the one hand , putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened .
On the other hand , it 's a nightmare -- it just means you spend more time at the bloody office .
We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life .
The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance .
Before I went back to work after my year at home , I sat down and I wrote out a detailed , step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to .
And it went like this : wake up well rested after a good night 's sleep .
Have sex .
Walk the dog .
Have breakfast with my wife and children .
Have sex again .
Drive the kids to school on the way to the office .
Do three hours ' work .
Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime .
Do another three hours ' work .
Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink .
Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids .
Meditate for half an hour .
Have sex .
Walk the dog . Have sex again .
Go to bed .
How often do you think I have that day ?
We need to be realistic .
You can 't do it all in one day .
We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life , but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the " I 'll have a life when I retire , when my kids have left home , when my wife has divorced me , my health is failing , I 've got no mates or interests left . "
A day is too short ; " after I retire " is too long .
There 's got to be a middle way .
A fourth observation : We need to approach balance in a balanced way .
A friend came to see me last year -- and she doesn 't mind me telling this story -- a friend came to see me last year and said , " Nigel , I 've read your book .
And I realize that my life is completely out of balance .
It 's totally dominated by work .
I work 10 hours a day ; I commute two hours a day .
All of my relationships have failed .
There 's nothing in my life apart from my work .
So I 've decided to get a grip and sort it out .
So I joined a gym . "
Now I don 't mean to mock , but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn 't more balanced ; it 's more fit .
Lovely though physical exercise may be , there are other parts to life -- there 's the intellectual side ; there 's the emotional side ; there 's the spiritual side .
And to be balanced , I believe we have to attend to all of those areas -- not just do 50 stomach crunches .
Now that can be daunting .
Because people say , " Bloody hell mate , I haven 't got time to get fit .
You want me to go to church and call my mother . "
And I understand .
I truly understand how that can be daunting .
But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective .
My wife , who is somewhere in the audience today , called me up at the office and said , " Nigel , you need to pick our youngest son " -- Harry -- " up from school . "
Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening .
So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates .
We walked down to the local park , messed around on the swings , played some silly games .
I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe , and we shared a pizza for two , then walked down the hill to our home , and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas .
I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl 's " James and the Giant Peach . "
I then put him to bed , tucked him in , gave him a kiss on his forehead and said , " Goodnight , mate , " and walked out of his bedroom .
As I was walking out of his bedroom , he said , " Dad ? " I went , " Yes , mate ? "
He went , " Dad , this has been the best day of my life , ever . "
I hadn 't done anything , hadn 't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation .
Now my point is the small things matter .
Being more balanced doesn 't mean dramatic upheaval in your life .
With the smallest investment in the right places , you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life .
Moreover , I think , it can transform society .
Because if enough people do it , we can change society 's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins , to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like .
And that , I think , is an idea worth spreading .
Sam Harris : Science can answer moral questions
Questions of good and evil , right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science . But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues , shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life .
I 'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values .
Now , it 's generally understood that questions of morality -- questions of good and evil and right and wrong -- are questions about which science officially has no opinion .
It 's thought that science can help us get what we value , but it can never tell us what we ought to value .
And , consequently , most people -- I think most people probably here -- think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life : questions like , " What is worth living for ? "
" What is worth dying for ? "
" What constitutes a good life ? "
So , I 'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history .
Now , it 's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values , because science deals with facts , and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres .
It 's often thought that there 's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be .
But I think this is quite clearly untrue .
Values are a certain kind of fact .
They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures .
Why is it that we don 't have ethical obligations toward rocks ?
Why don 't we feel compassion for rocks ?
It 's because we don 't think rocks can suffer . And if we 're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects , as indeed we are , it 's because we think they 're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering .
Now , the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim : This is something that we could be right or wrong about . And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects .
And there 's no notion , no version of human morality and human values that I 've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes .
Even if you get your values from religion , even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death -- either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell -- you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes .
And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim , which , of course , may or may not be true .
Now , to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life , for human beings , we know that there is a continuum of such facts .
We know that it 's possible to live in a failed state , where everything that can go wrong does go wrong -- where mothers cannot feed their children , where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration , where people are murdered indiscriminately .
And we know that it 's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic , to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable .
And we know -- we know -- that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space .
Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea ?
Probably not .
Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye , so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors ? Probably not .
There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish , whether or not we understand these truths .
And morality relates to these truths .
So , in talking about values we are talking about facts .
Now , of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels -- from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements .
But if we 're going to talk about human well-being we are , of necessity , talking about the human brain .
Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain -- whatever happens after death .
Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife , in this life , his personality -- his rather unfortunate personality -- is the product of his brain .
So the contributions of culture -- if culture changes us , as indeed it does , it changes us by changing our brains .
And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can , at least in principle , be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind -- neuroscience , psychology , etc .
So , what I 'm arguing is that value 's reduced to facts -- to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings .
And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings .
And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape , with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures , both personal and collective .
And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access , that few people access .
And these await our discovery .
Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual .
Perhaps there are other states that we can 't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them .
Now , let me be clear about what I 'm not saying . I 'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space , or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question .
I don 't think , for instance , that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child , or whether we should bomb Iran 's nuclear facilities , or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense .
But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers , whether or not we can find them .
And just admitting this -- just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish -- will change the way we talk about morality , and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future .
For instance , there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal , where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board , hard , and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin .
And hundreds of thousands of children , incidentally , are subjected to this every year .
The locations of these enlightened districts , I think , will fail to surprise you .
We 're not talking about Connecticut .
And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious .
The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod , lest we spoil the child -- this is in Proverbs 13 and 20 , and I believe , 23 .
But we can ask the obvious question : Is it a good idea , generally speaking , to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior ?
Is there any doubt that this question has an answer , and that it matters ?
Now , many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined , and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed .
And so , how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being ?
Well , consider by analogy , the concept of physical health .
The concept of physical health is undefined .
As we just heard from Michael Specter , it has changed over the years .
When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30 .
It 's now around 80 in the developed world .
There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability .
People will send you donations when you 're in that condition .
Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open , genuinely open for revision , does not make it vacuous .
The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science .
Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape : There may be equivalent ways to thrive ; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing .
Now , why wouldn 't this undermine an objective morality ?
Well think of how we talk about food : I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat .
There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food .
But there 's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison .
The fact that there are many right answers to the question , " What is food ? "
does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition .
Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions .
So , for instance , if it 's really wrong to lie , it must always be wrong to lie , and if you can find an exception , well then there 's no such thing as moral truth .
Why would we think this ?
Consider , by analogy , the game of chess .
Now , if you 're going to play good chess , a principle like , " Don 't lose your Queen , " is very good to follow .
But it clearly admits some exceptions .
There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do .
There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do .
And yet , chess is a domain of perfect objectivity .
The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all .
Now , this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere .
Consider the great problem of women 's bodies : What to do about them ?
Well this is one thing you can do about them : You can cover them up .
Now , it is the position , generally speaking , of our intellectual community that while we may not like this , we might think of this as " wrong " in Boston or Palo Alto , who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags ?
And who are we to say , even , that they 're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable , or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way ?
Well , who are we not to say this ?
Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this ?
I 'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil -- women should be able to wear whatever they want , as far as I 'm concerned .
But what does voluntary mean in a community where , when a girl gets raped , her father 's first impulse , rather often , is to murder her out of shame ?
Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute : Your daughter gets raped , and what you want to do is kill her .
What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing ?
Now , to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society .
For instance , this is what it 's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world .
Now , granted , for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images .
But if we are in a reflective mood , we can ask , " Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women 's bodies ? "
I mean , is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children ?
Probably not . OK , so perhaps there 's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance .
Perhaps there are many such places -- again , given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape .
But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak .
Now the irony , from my perspective , is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another .
And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind , not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being .
In fact , the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering .
This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue .
But the demagogues are right about one thing : We need a universal conception of human values .
Now , what stands in the way of this ?
Well , one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality -- especially secular , academic , scientist types .
When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don 't in any other area of our lives .
So , for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion , and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness .
On the other hand , we have someone like Ted Bundy ; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women .
So , we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one 's time .
Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say , " Well , there 's nothing for the Dalai Lama or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science .
He likes chocolate , he likes vanilla .
There 's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other . "
Notice that we don 't do this in science .
On the left you have Edward Witten .
He 's a string theorist .
If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around , in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten .
The other half will tell you they don 't like the question .
So , what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said , " String theory is bogus .
It doesn 't resonate with me . It 's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale .
I 'm not a fan . "
Well , nothing would happen because I 'm not a physicist ; I don 't understand string theory .
I 'm the Ted Bundy of string theory .
I wouldn 't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member .
But this is just the point .
Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded .
That is what it is to have a domain of expertise .
That is what it is for knowledge to count .
How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise , or moral talent , or moral genius even ?
How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count ?
How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering ?
Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering ? No .
How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being ?
So , this , I think , is what the world needs now .
It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing , and morality relates to that domain of facts .
It is possible for individuals , and even for whole cultures , to care about the wrong things , which is to say that it 's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering .
Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality .
We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less , and they will one day mean nothing .
We live in a world filled with destructive technology , and this technology cannot be uninvented ; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them .
It seems to me , therefore , patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads , or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes .
We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life .
And to do that , we have to admit that these questions have answers .
Thank you very much .
So , some combustible material there .
Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world , hearing some of this , may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing , after as well , some of them .
Language seems to be really important here .
When you 're talking about the veil , you 're talking about women dressed in cloth bags .
I 've lived in the Muslim world , spoken with a lot of Muslim women .
And some of them would say something else . They would say , " No , you know , this is a celebration of female specialness , it helps build that and it 's a result of the fact that " -- and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view -- " that male lust is not to be trusted . "
I mean , can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist ?
Sam Harris : Yeah , well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence , watching the clock ticking , but the question is : What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations , and you 're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don 't veil yourself ?
And so , if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil , or a very funny hat , or tattoo their face -- I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want , but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under .
And so I think we shouldn 't be so eager to always take their word for it , especially when it 's 120 degrees out and you 're wearing a full burqa .
A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress .
But can you reconcile that ?
I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn 't become one dimensional , where we all have to think the same .
Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward , 100 years forward , how you would like to think of the world , balancing moral progress with richness .
SH : Well , I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail , then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail .
So , we 're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion , and we 're going to understand the factors that encourage it -- whether they 're genetic , whether they 're how people talk to one another , whether they 're economic systems , and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space .
So , everything is not going to be up for grabs .
It 's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women .
I mean I don 't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea -- but at a certain point we 're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them .
Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems ?
And I think there are clearly right answers to that .
And if the results come out that actually they do , are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues ?
SH : Well yeah , modulo one obvious fact , that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system .
So , you can say like , " Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend , I chopped his head off . And that was the most compassionate thing I could do . "
If you get all those parts aligned , yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love .
But again , then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context .
It 's all of us in this together , not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus .
Sam , this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours .
We don 't have that , but maybe another time . Thank you for coming to TED .
SH : Really an honor . Thank you .
Kathryn Schulz : On being wrong
Most of us will do anything to avoid being wrong . But what if we 're wrong about that ? " Wrongologist " Kathryn Schulz makes a compelling case for not just admitting but embracing our fallibility .
So it 's 1995 , I 'm in college , and a friend and I go on a road trip from Providence , Rhode Island to Portland , Oregon .
And you know , we 're young and unemployed , so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests -- basically the longest route we can possibly take .
And somewhere in the middle of South Dakota , I turn to my friend and I ask her a question that 's been bothering me for 2,000 miles .
" What 's up with the Chinese character I keep seeing by the side of the road ? "
My friend looks at me totally blankly .
There 's actually a gentleman in the front row who 's doing a perfect imitation of her look .
And I 'm like , " You know , all the signs we keep seeing with the Chinese character on them . "
She just stares at me for a few moments , and then she cracks up , because she figures out what I 'm talking about .
And what I 'm talking about is this .
Right , the famous Chinese character for picnic area .
I 've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this -- why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us , and how we behave when that happens , and what all of this can tell us about human nature .
In other words , as you heard Chris say , I 've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong .
This might strike you as a strange career move , but it actually has one great advantage : no job competition .
In fact , most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong , or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong .
We get it in the abstract .
We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes .
The human species , in general , is fallible -- okay fine .
But when it comes down to me , right now , to all the beliefs I hold , here in the present tense , suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can 't actually think of anything I 'm wrong about .
And the thing is , the present tense is where we live .
We go to meetings in the present tense ; we go on family vacations in the present tense ; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense .
So effectively , we all kind of wind up traveling through life , trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything .
I think this is a problem .
I think it 's a problem for each of us as individuals , in our personal and professional lives , and I think it 's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture .
So what I want to do today is , first of all , talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right .
And second , why it 's such a problem .
And finally , I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so , it is the single greatest moral , intellectual and creative leap you can make .
So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right ?
One reason , actually , has to do with a feeling of being wrong .
So let me ask you guys something -- or actually , let me ask you guys something , because you 're right here : How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong ?
Dreadful . Thumbs down .
Embarrassing . Okay , wonderful , great .
Dreadful , thumbs down , embarrassing -- thank you , these are great answers , but they 're answers to a different question .
You guys are answering the question : How does it feel to realize you 're wrong ?
Realizing you 're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things , right ?
I mean it can be devastating , it can be revelatory , it can actually be quite funny , like my stupid Chinese character mistake .
But just being wrong doesn 't feel like anything .
I 'll give you an analogy .
Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there 's this pathetic coyote who 's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner ?
In pretty much every episode of this cartoon , there 's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff , which is fine -- he 's a bird , he can fly .
But the thing is , the coyote runs off the cliff right after him .
And what 's funny -- at least if you 're six years old -- is that the coyote 's totally fine too .
He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he 's in mid-air .
That 's when he falls .
When we 're wrong about something -- not when we realize it , but before that -- we 're like that coyote after he 's gone off the cliff and before he looks down .
You know , we 're already wrong , we 're already in trouble , but we feel like we 're on solid ground .
So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago .
It does feel like something to be wrong ; it feels like being right .
So this is one reason , a structural reason , why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness .
I call this error blindness .
Most of the time , we don 't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we 're wrong about something , until it 's too late .
But there 's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well -- and this one is cultural .
Think back for a moment to elementary school .
You 're sitting there in class , and your teacher is handing back quiz papers , and one of them looks like this .
This is not mine , by the way .
So there you are in grade school , and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper .
It 's the dumb kid , the troublemaker , the one who never does his homework .
So by the time you are nine years old , you 've already learned , first of all , that people who get stuff wrong are lazy , irresponsible dimwits -- and second of all , that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes .
We learn these really bad lessons really well .
And a lot of us -- and I suspect , especially a lot of us in this room -- deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students , perfectionists , over-achievers .
Right , Mr. CFO , astrophysicist , ultra-marathoner ?
You 're all CFO , astrophysicists , ultra-marathoners , it turns out .
Okay , so fine .
Except that then we freak out at the possibility that we 've gotten something wrong .
Because according to this , getting something wrong means there 's something wrong with us .
So we just insist that we 're right , because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe .
So let me tell you a story .
A couple of years ago , a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a surgery .
Beth Israel 's in Boston .
It 's the teaching hospital for Harvard -- one of the best hospitals in the country .
So this woman comes in and she 's taken into the operating room .
She 's anesthetized , the surgeon does his thing -- stitches her back up , sends her out to the recovery room .
Everything seems to have gone fine .
And she wakes up , and she looks down at herself , and she says , " Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages ? "
Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one .
When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident , he said something very interesting .
He said , " For whatever reason , the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient . "
The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous .
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world .
And when we act like it is , and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong , well that 's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico , or torpedoing the global economy .
So this is a huge practical problem .
But it 's also a huge social problem .
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right .
It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality .
And when you feel that way , you 've got a problem to solve , which is , how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you ?
It turns out , most of us explain those people the same way , by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions .
The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they 're ignorant .
They don 't have access to the same information that we do , and when we generously share that information with them , they 're going to see the light and come on over to our team .
When that doesn 't work , when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us , then we move on to a second assumption , which is that they 're idiots .
They have all the right pieces of the puzzle , and they are too moronic to put them together correctly .
And when that doesn 't work , when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart , then we move on to a third assumption : they know the truth , and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes .
So this is a catastrophe .
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly .
But to me , what 's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human .
It 's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds .
And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing .
That is not true , and if it were , life would be incredibly boring .
The miracle of your mind isn 't that you can see the world as it is .
It 's that you can see the world as it isn 't .
We can remember the past , and we can think about the future , and we can imagine what it 's like to be some other person in some other place .
And we all do this a little differently , which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this .
And yeah , it is also why we get things wrong .
1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about " I think therefore I am , " this guy , St. Augustine , sat down and wrote " Fallor ergo sum " -- " I err therefore I am . "
Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up , it 's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system , something we can eradicate or overcome .
It 's totally fundamental to who we are .
Because , unlike God , we don 't really know what 's going on out there .
And unlike all of the other animals , we are obsessed with trying to figure it out .
To me , this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity .
Last year , for various reasons , I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life .
And so I 'm listening and I 'm listening , and at some point , I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong .
And my first thought was , " I 've lost it .
I 've become the crazy wrongness lady .
I just imagined it everywhere , " which has happened .
But a couple of months later , I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass , who 's the host of the show .
And I mentioned this to him , and he was like , " No actually , that 's true .
In fact , " he says , " as a staff , we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme .
And the crypto-theme is : ' I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead . ' And the thing is , " says Ira Glass , " we need this .
We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work . "
And for the rest of us , audience members , as listeners , as readers , we eat this stuff up .
We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings .
When it comes to our stories , we love being wrong .
But , you know , our stories are like this because our lives are like this .
We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead .
George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq , find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction , liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East .
And something else happened instead .
And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life , until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son .
And something else happened instead .
And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together .
And something else happened instead .
And I have to tell you that I thought I was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize .
And something else happened instead .
I mean , this is life .
For good and for ill , we generate these incredible stories about the world around us , and then the world turns around and astonishes us .
No offense , but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong .
We just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements , but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements ?
Because half the stuff that 's the most mind-boggling and world-altering -- TED 1998 -- eh .
Didn 't really work out that way , did it ?
Where 's my jet pack , Chris ?
So here we are again .
And that 's how it goes .
We come up with another idea .
We tell another story .
We hold another conference .
The theme of this one , as you guys have now heard seven million times , is the rediscovery of wonder .
And to me , if you really want to rediscover wonder , you need to step outside of that tiny , terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say , " Wow , I don 't know .
Maybe I 'm wrong . "
Thank you .
Thank you guys .
Neil MacGregor : 2600 years of history in one object
A clay cylinder covered in Akkadian cuneiform script , damaged and broken , the Cyrus Cylinder is a powerful symbol of religious tolerance and multi-culturalism . In this enthralling talk Neil MacGregor , Director of the British Museum , traces 2600 years of Middle Eastern history through this single object .
The things we make have one supreme quality -- they live longer than us .
We perish , they survive ; we have one life , they have many lives , and in each life they can mean different things .
Which means that , while we all have one biography , they have many .
I want this morning to talk about the story , the biography -- or rather the biographies -- of one particular object , one remarkable thing .
It doesn 't , I agree , look very much .
It 's about the size of a rugby ball .
It 's made of clay , and it 's been fashioned into a cylinder shape , covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun .
And as you can see , it 's been knocked about a bit , which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879 .
But today , this thing is , I believe , a major player in the politics of the Middle East .
And it 's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet .
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces , the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change .
And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with , Belshazzar 's feast -- because we 're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC .
And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling .
What you 're looking at is Rembrandt 's painting , now in the National Gallery in London , illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures .
And you all know roughly the story .
Belshazzar , the son of Nebuchadnezzar , Nebuchadnezzar who 'd conquered Israel , sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon .
Not only the Jews , he 'd taken the temple vessels .
He 'd ransacked , desecrated the temple .
And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon .
Belshazzar , his son , decides to have a feast .
And in order to make it even more exciting , he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun , and he brings out the temple vessels .
He 's already at war with the Iranians , with the king of Persia .
And that night , Daniel tells us , at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall , " You are weighed in the balance and found wanting , and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians . "
And that very night Cyrus , king of the Persians , entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell .
It is , of course , a great moment in the history of the Jewish people .
It 's a great story . It 's story we all know .
" The writing on the wall " is part of our everyday language .
What happened next was remarkable , and it 's where our cylinder enters the story .
Cyrus , king of the Persians , has entered Babylon without a fight -- the great empire of Babylon , which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean , falls to Cyrus .
And Cyrus makes a declaration .
And that is what this cylinder is , the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people .
In ringing Babylonian -- it was written in Babylonian -- he says , " I am Cyrus , king of all the universe , the great king , the powerful king , king of Babylon , king of the four quarters of the world . "
They 're not shy of hyperbole as you can see .
This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we 've got .
And it 's written , as we 'll see in due course , by very skilled P.R. consultants .
So the hyperbole is not actually surprising .
And what is the great king , the powerful king , the king of the four quarters of the world going to do ?
He goes on to say that , having conquered Babylon , he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians -- Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar -- have captured and enslaved go free .
He 'll let them return to their countries .
And more important , he will let them all recover the gods , the statues , the temple vessels that had been confiscated .
All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home , and they 'll take with them their gods .
And they 'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way , in their own place .
This is the decree , this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews , after the exile in Babylon , the years they 'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon , weeping when they remembered Jerusalem , those Jews were allowed to go home .
They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple .
It 's a central document in Jewish history .
And the Book of Chronicles , the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms .
This is the Jewish version of the same story .
" Thus said Cyrus , king of Persia , ' All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee , and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem .
Who is there among you of his people ?
The Lord God be with him , and let him go up . ' " " Go up " -- aaleh .
The central element , still , of the notion of return , a central part of the life of Judaism .
As you all know , that return from exile , the second temple , reshaped Judaism .
And that change , that great historic moment , was made possible by Cyrus , the king of Persia , reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay .
Two great texts , what about the politics ?
What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history .
The empire of Iran , the Medes and the Persians , united under Cyrus , became the first great world empire .
Cyrus begins in the 530s BC .
And by the time of his son Darius , the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control .
This empire is , in fact , the Middle East as we now know it , and it 's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it .
It was the largest empire the world had known until then .
Much more important , it was the first multicultural , multifaith state on a huge scale .
And it had to be run in a quite new way .
It had to be run in different languages .
The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing .
And it had to recognize their different habits , different peoples , different religions , different faiths .
All of those are respected by Cyrus .
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational , multifaith , multicultural society .
And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen , and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander .
It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit , and a unit where people of different faiths could live together .
The Greek invasions ended that .
And of course , Alexander couldn 't sustain a government and it fragmented .
But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central .
The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book " Cyropaedia " promoting Cyrus as the great ruler .
And throughout European culture afterward , Cyrus remained the model .
This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was .
And Xenophon 's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution .
Jefferson was a great admirer -- the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state .
Meanwhile , back in Babylon , things had not been going well .
After Alexander , the other empires , Babylon declines , falls into ruins , and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost -- until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon .
And it enters now another story .
It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century : Are the scriptures reliable ? Can we trust them ?
We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures .
No other evidence .
Suddenly , this appeared .
And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution , by geology , here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true .
It 's a great 19th century moment .
But -- and this , of course , is where it becomes complicated -- the facts were true , hurrah for archeology , but the interpretation was rather more complicated .
Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect .
The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon , Marduk .
And , not surprisingly , they tell you that all this was done by Marduk .
" Marduk , we hold , called Cyrus by his name . "
Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand , calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon .
Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great , generous things of setting the people free .
And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk .
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament , you will not be surprised to learn , take a rather different view of this .
For them , of course , it can 't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen .
It can only be Jehovah .
And so in Isaiah , we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this , not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel -- the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name , also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people .
It 's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event , two different religious takeovers of a political fact .
God , we know , is usually on the side of the big battalions .
The question is , which god was it ?
And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion .
And it 's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah , and yet , Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk .
And there 's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this , because he says , this is God speaking , of course , " I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me . "
I think it 's recognized that Cyrus doesn 't realize that he 's acting under orders from Jehovah .
And equally , he 'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk .
Because interestingly , of course , Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts .
That 's 1879 .
40 years on and we 're in 1917 , and the cylinder enters a different world .
This time , the real politics of the contemporary world -- the year of the Balfour Declaration , the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East , Britain , decides that it will declare a Jewish national home , it will allow the Jews to return .
And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic .
And across Eastern Europe , Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side -- the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem .
And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan .
You all know what happened .
The state of Israel is setup , and 50 years later , in the late 60s , it 's clear that Britain 's role as the imperial power is over .
And another story of the cylinder begins .
The region , the U.K. and the U.S. decide , has to be kept safe from communism , and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran , the Shah .
And so the Shah invents an Iranian history , or a return to Iranian history , that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder .
When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis , he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum , goes to Tehran , and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty .
Cyrus cylinder : guarantor of the Shah .
10 years later , another story : Iranian Revolution , 1979 .
Islamic revolution , no more Cyrus ; we 're not interested in that history , we 're interested in Islamic Iran -- until Iraq , the new superpower that we 've all decided should be in the region , attacks .
Then another Iran-Iraq war .
And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past , their great past when they fought Iraq and won .
It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims , Christians , Zoroastrians , Jews living in Iran , people who are devout , not devout .
And the obvious emblem is Cyrus .
So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together , as we 've been doing , the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan .
It 's the only object they want .
They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder .
And last year , the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time .
It 's shown being presented here , put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran , one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions , Mrs. Ardakani .
It was a huge event .
This is the other side of that same picture .
It 's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months .
This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West .
And it 's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means , what Cyrus means , but above all , Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder -- Cyrus as the defender of the homeland , the champion , of course , of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples , tolerant of all faiths .
And in the current Iran , Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament , something to be very , very proud of .
To see this object in Tehran , thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it .
It became a great emblem , a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad .
Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed ?
Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated ?
This is heady national rhetoric , and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return .
Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran .
It was a narrative presented by the president himself .
And for me , to take this object to Iran , to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is , what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today .
It 's a debate that 's still continuing , and it will continue to rumble , because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration .
It stands with the American constitution .
It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta .
It is a document that can mean so many things , for Iran and for the region .
A replica of this is at the United Nations .
In New York this autumn , it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place .
And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures .
It will appear , certainly , in many more Middle Eastern stories .
And what story of the Middle East , what story of the world , do you want to see reflecting what is said , what is expressed in this cylinder ?
The right of peoples to live together in the same state , worshiping differently , freely -- a Middle East , a world , in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate .
In the world of the Middle East at the moment , the debates are , as you know , shrill .
But I think it 's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing , the Cyrus cylinder .
Thank you .
Joshua Klein : A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows
Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows . After a long amateur study of corvid behavior , he 's come up with an elegant thought experiment : a machine that could form a new bond between animal and human .
How many of you have seen the Alfred Hitchcock film " The Birds " ?
Any of you get really freaked out by that ?
You might want to leave now .
So , this is a vending machine for crows .
And over the past few days , many of you have been asking me , " How did you come to this ? How did you get started doing this ? "
And it started , as with many great ideas , or many ideas you can 't get rid of anyway , at a cocktail party .
About 10 years ago , I was at a cocktail party with a friend of mine , and we 're sitting there , and he was complaining about the crows that he had seen that were all over his yard and making a big mess .
And he was telling me that really , we ought to try and eradicate these things .
We gotta kill them because they 're making a mess .
I said that was stupid , you know , maybe we should just train them to do something useful .
And he said that was impossible .
And I 'm sure I 'm in good company in finding that tremendously annoying -- when someone tells you it 's impossible .
So , I spent the next 10 years reading about crows in my spare time .
And after 10 years of this , my wife eventually said , " Look , you know , you gotta do this thing you 've been talking about , and build the vending machine . "
So I did .
But part of the reason that I found this interesting is that I started noticing that we are very aware of all the species that are going extinct on the planet as a result of human habitation expansion , and no one seems to be paying attention to all the species that are actually living -- that are surviving .
And I 'm talking specifically about synanthropic species , which are species that have adapted specifically for human ecologies , species like rats and cockroaches and crows .
And as I started looking at them , I was finding that they had hyper-adapted .
They 'd become extremely adept at living with us .
And in return , we just tried to kill them all the time .
And in doing so , we were breeding them for parasitism .
We were giving them all sorts of reasons to adapt new ways .
So , for example , rats are incredibly responsive breeders .
And cockroaches , as anyone who 's tried to get rid of them knows , have become really immune to the poisons that we 're using .
So , I thought , let 's build something that 's mutually beneficial .
Well , then let 's build something that we can both benefit from , and find some way to make a new relationship with these species .
And so I built the vending machine .
But the story of the vending machine is a little more interesting if you know more about crows .
It turns out that crows aren 't just surviving with human beings -- they 're actually really thriving .
They 're found everywhere on the planet except for the Arctic and the southern tip of South America .
And in all that area , they 're only rarely found breeding more than five kilometers away from human beings .
So we may not think about them , but they 're always around .
And not surprisingly , given the human population growth , more than half of the human population is living in cities now .
And out of those , nine-tenths of the human growth population is occurring in cities .
We 're seeing a population boom with crows .
So bird counts are indicating that we might be seeing up to exponential growth in their numbers .
So that 's no great surprise .
But what was really interesting to me was to find out that the birds were adapting in a pretty unusual way .
And I 'll give you an example of that .
So this is Betty . She 's a New Caledonian crow .
And these crows use sticks in the wild to get insects and whatnot out of pieces of wood .
Here , she 's trying to get a piece of meat out of a tube .
But the researchers had a problem .
They messed up and left just a stick of wire in there .
And she hadn 't had the opportunity to do this before .
You see , it wasn 't working very well .
So she adapted .
Now this is completely unprompted . She had never seen this done before .
No one taught her to bend this into a hook , had shown her how it could happen .
But she did it all on her own .
So keep in mind that she 's never seen this done .
Right .
Yeah . All right .
That 's the part where the researchers freak out .
So , it turns out we 've been finding more and more that crows are really , really intelligent .
Their brains are proportionate , in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are .
There are all kinds of anecdotes for different kinds of intelligence they have .
For example , in Sweden , crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice .
And when the fishermen move off , the crows fly down , reel up the lines , and eat the fish or the bait .
It 's pretty annoying for the fishermen .
On an entirely different tack , at University of Washington , they , a few years ago , were doing an experiment where they captured some crows on campus .
Some students went out and netted some crows , brought them in , and were -- weighed them , and measured them and whatnot , and then let them back out again .
And were entertained to discover that for the rest of the week , these crows , whenever these particular students walked around campus , these crows would caw at them , and run around and make their life kind of miserable .
They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week .
And the next month . And after summer break .
Until they finally graduated and left campus , and -- glad to get away , I 'm sure -- came back sometime later , and found the crows still remembered them .
So -- the moral being , don 't piss off crows .
So now , students at the University of Washington that are studying these crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask .
It 's fairly interesting .
So we know that these crows are really smart , but the more I dug into this , the more I found that they actually have an even more significant adaptation .
Crows have become highly skilled at making a living in these new urban environments .
In this Japanese city , they have devised a way of eating a food that normally they can 't manage : drop it among the traffic .
The problem now is collecting the bits , without getting run over .
Wait for the light to stop the traffic .
Then , collect your cracked nut in safety .
Joshua Klein : Yeah , yeah . Pretty interesting .
So what 's significant about this isn 't that crows are using cars to crack nuts .
In fact , that 's old hat for crows .
This happened about 10 years ago in a place called Sendai City , at a driving school in the suburbs of Tokyo .
And since that time , all of the crows in the neighborhood are picking up this behavior .
And now , every crow within five kilometers is standing by a sidewalk , waiting to collect its lunch .
So , they 're learning from each other . And research bears this out .
Parents seem to be teaching their young .
They 've learned from their peers . They 've learned from their enemies .
If I have a little extra time , I 'll tell you about a case of crow infidelity that illustrates that nicely .
The point being that they 've developed cultural adaptation .
And as we heard yesterday , that 's the Pandora 's box that 's getting human beings in trouble , and we 're starting to see it with them .
They 're able to very quickly and very flexibly adapt to new challenges and new resources in their environment , which is really useful if you live in a city .
So we know that there 's lots of crows .
We found out they 're really smart , and we found out that they can teach each other .
And when all this became clear to me , I realized the only obvious thing to do is build a vending machine .
So that 's what we did .
This is a vending machine for crows .
And it uses Skinnerian training to shape their behavior over four stages .
It 's pretty simple .
Basically , what happens is that we put this out in a field , or someplace where there 's lots of crows , and we put coins and peanuts all around the base of the machine .
And crows eventually come by , and eat the peanuts and get used to the machine being there .
And eventually , they eat up all the peanuts .
And then they see that there are peanuts here on the feeder tray , and they hop up and help themselves .
And then they leave , and the machine spits up more coins and peanuts , and life is really dandy , if you 're a crow .
Then you can come back anytime and get yourself a peanut .
So , when they get really used to that , we move on to the crows coming back .
Now , they 're used to the sound of the machine , and they keep coming back , and digging out these peanuts from amongst the pile of coins that 's there .
And when they get really happy about this , we go ahead and stymie them .
And we move to the third stage , where we only give them a coin .
Now , like most of us who have gotten used to a good thing , this really pisses them off .
So , they do what they do in nature when they 're looking for something -- they sweep things out of the way with their beak .
And they do that here , and that knocks the coins down the slot , and when that happens , they get a peanut .
And so this goes on for some time .
The crows learn that all they have to do is show up , wait for the coin to come out , put the coin in the slot , and then they get their peanut .
And when they 're really good and comfortable with that , we move to the final stage , in which they show up and nothing happens .
And this is where we see the difference between crows and other animals .
Squirrels , for example , would show up , look for the peanut , go away .
Come back , look for the peanut , go away .
They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored , and then they go off and play in traffic .
Crows , on the other hand , show up , and they try and figure it out .
They know that this machine 's been messing with them , through three different stages of behavior .
They figure it 's gotta have more to it .
So , they poke at it and peck at it and whatnot .
And eventually some crow gets a bright idea that , " Hey , there 's lots of coins lying around from the first stage , lying around on the ground , " hops down , picks it up , drops it in the slot .
And then , we 're off to the races .
That crow enjoys a temporary monopoly on peanuts , until his friends figure out how to do it , and then there we go .
So , what 's significant about this to me isn 't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts .
Mind you , there 's 216 million dollars ' worth of change lost every year , but I 'm not sure I can depend on that ROI from crows .
Instead , I think we should look a little bit larger .
I think that crows can be trained to do other things .
For example , why not train them to pick up garbage after stadium events ?
Or find expensive components from discarded electronics ?
Or maybe do search and rescue ?
The main thing , the main point of all this for me is that we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species .
We can find ways to interact with these other species that doesn 't involve exterminating them , but involves finding an equilibrium with them that 's a useful balance .
Thanks very much .
David Logan : Tribal leadership
David Logan talks about the five kinds of tribes that humans naturally form -- in schools , workplaces , even the driver 's license bureau . By understanding our shared tribal tendencies , we can help lead each other to become better individuals .
What we 're really here to talk about is the " how . "
Okay , so how exactly do we create this world-shattering , if you will , innovation ?
Now , I want to tell you a quick story .
We 'll go back a little more than a year .
In fact , the date -- I 'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date ?
It was February 3rd , 2008 .
Anyone remember what happened , February 3rd , 2008 ?
Super Bowl . I heard it over here . It was the date of the Super Bowl .
And the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues , John King and Halee Fischer-Wright , and I noticed as we began to debrief various Super Bowl parties , is that it seemed to us that across the United States , if you will , tribal councils had convened .
And they had discussed things of great national importance .
Like , " Do we like the Budweiser commercial ? "
and , " Do we like the nachos ? " and , " Who is going to win ? "
But they also talked about which candidate they were going to support .
And if you go back in time to February 3rd , it looked like Hilary Clinton was going to get the Democratic nomination .
And there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way .
But when we talked to people , it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the United States .
Now what is a tribe ? A tribe is a group of about 20 -- so kind of more than a team -- 20 to about 150 people .
And it 's within these tribes that all of our work gets done .
But not just work . It 's within these tribes that societies get built , that important things happen .
And so as we surveyed the , if you will , representatives from various tribal councils that met , also known as Super Bowl parties , we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day .
February 4th , we posted it on our website . This was before Super Tuesday .
We said , " The tribes that we 're in are saying it 's going to be Obama . "
Now , the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes , studying these naturally occurring groups .
All of you are members of tribes .
In walking around at the break , many of you had met members of your tribe . And you were talking to them .
And many of you were doing what great , if you will , tribal leaders do , which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe , and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe , and make introductions .
That is in fact what great tribal leaders do .
So here is the bottom line .
If you focus in on a group like this -- this happens to be a USC game -- and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people , you would in fact see not a single crowd , just like there is not a single crowd here , but you would see these tribes that are then coming together .
And from a distance it appears that it 's a single group .
And so people form tribes .
They always have . They always will .
Just as fish swim and birds fly , people form tribes . It 's just what we do .
But here 's the rub .
Not all tribes are the same , and what makes the difference is the culture .
Now here is the net out of this .
You 're all a member of tribes .
If you can find a way to take the tribes that you 're in and nudge them forward , along these tribal stages to what we call Stage Five , which is the top of the mountain .
But we 're going to start with what we call Stage One .
Now , this is the lowest of the stages .
You don 't want this . Okay ?
This is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen .
But it 's one that I think we need to learn from .
Stage One produces people who do horrible things .
This is the kid who shot up Virginia Tech .
Stage One is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes , and then pool together with people who think like they do .
Stage One is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons .
Now , again , we don 't often deal with Stage One .
And I want to make the point that as members of society , we need to .
It 's not enough to simply write people off .
But let 's move on to Stage Two .
Now , Stage One , you 'll notice , says , in effect , " Life Sucks . "
So , this other book that Steve mentioned , that just came out , called " The Three Laws of Performance , " my colleague , Steve Zaffron and I , argue that as people see the world , so they behave .
Well , if people see the world in such a way that life sucks , then their behavior will follow automatically from that .
It will be despairing hostility .
They 'll do whatever it takes to survive , even if that means undermining other people .
Now , my birthday is coming up shortly , and my driver 's license expires .
And the reason that that 's relevant is that very soon I will be walking into what we call a Stage Two tribe , which looks like this .
Now , am I saying that in every Department of Motor Vehicles across the land , you find a Stage Two culture ?
No . But in the one near me , where I have to go in just a few days , what I will say when I 'm standing in line is , " How can people be so dumb , and yet live ? "
Now , am I saying that there are dumb people working here ?
Actually , no , I 'm not .
But I 'm saying the culture makes people dumb .
So in a Stage Two culture -- and we find these in all sorts of different places -- you find them , in fact , in the best organizations in the world .
You find them in all places in society .
I 've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class .
But here is the point . If you believe and you say to people in your tribe , in effect , " My life sucks .
I mean , if I got to go to TEDx USC my life wouldn 't suck . But I don 't . So it does . "
If that 's how you talked , imagine what kind of work would get done .
What kind of innovation would get done ?
The amount of world-changing behavior that would happen ?
In fact it would be basically nil .
Now when we go on to Stage Three : this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us .
Because it is in Stage Three that many of us move .
And we park . And we stay .
Stage Three says , " I 'm great . And you 're not . "
I 'm great and you 're not .
Now imagine having a whole room of people saying , in effect , " I 'm great and you 're not . "
Or , " I 'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that . "
A whole group of people communicating that way , talking that way .
I know this sounds like a joke . Three doctors walk into a bar .
But , in this case , three doctors walk into an elevator .
I happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book .
And one doctor said to the others , " Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine ? "
And the other said , " No . That 's great . Congratulations ! "
The next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said , " Well while you were , you know , doing your research , " -- notice the condescending tone -- " While you were off doing your research , I was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution . "
And the third one got the same wry smile and said , " Well , while you were off doing your research , and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery , that eventually we 'll train monkeys to do , or cells or robots , or maybe not even need to do it at all , I was off running the future of the residency program , which is really the future of medicine . "
And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back .
And the elevator door opened , and they all walked out .
That is a meeting of a Stage Three tribe .
Now , we find these in places where really smart , successful people show up .
Like , oh , I don 't know , TEDx USC .
Here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation .
It is moving from Stage Three to Stage Four .
Let 's take a look at a quick video snippet .
This is from a company called Zappos , located outside Las Vegas .
And my question on the other side is just going to be , " What do you think they value ? "
It was not Christmas time . There was a Christmas tree .
This is their lobby .
Employees volunteer time in the advice booth .
Notice it looks like something out of a Peanuts cartoon .
Okay , we 're going through the hallway here at Zappos .
This is a call center . Notice how it 's decorated .
Notice people are applauding for us .
They don 't know who we are and they don 't care . And if they did they probably wouldn 't applaud .
But you 'll notice the level of excitement .
Notice , again , how they decorate their office .
Now , what 's important to people at Zappos , these may not be the things that are important to you .
But they value things like fun . And they value creativity .
One of their stated values is , " Be a little bit weird . "
And you 'll notice they are a little bit weird .
So when individuals come together and find something that unites them that 's greater than their individual competence , then something very important happens .
The group gels . And it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger , into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence .
Stage Four tribes can do remarkable things .
But you 'll notice we 're not at the top of the mountain yet .
There is , in fact , another stage .
Now , some of you may not recognize the scene that 's up here .
And if you take a look at the headline of Stage Five , which is " Life is Great , " this may seem a little incongruous .
This is a scene or snippet from the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa for which Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize .
Now think about that . South Africa , terrible atrocities had happened in the society .
And people came together focused only on those two values : truth and reconciliation .
There was no road map . No one had ever done anything like this before .
And in this atmosphere , where the only guidance was people 's values and their noble cause , what this group accomplished was historic .
And people , at the time , feared that South Africa would end up going the way that Rwanda has gone , descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end .
In fact , South Africa has not gone down that road .
Largely because people like Desmond Tutu set up a Stage Five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country , to bring everyone together .
So , people hear this and they conclude the following , as did we in doing the study .
Okay , got it . I don 't want to talk Stage One .
That 's like , you know , " Life sucks . " Who wants to talk that way ?
I don 't want to talk like they do at the particular DMV that 's close to where Dave lives .
I really don 't want to just say " I 'm great , " because that kind of sounds narcissistic , and then I won 't have any friends .
Saying , " We 're great " -- that sounds pretty good .
But I should really talk Stage Five , right ? " Life is great . "
Well , in fact , there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this .
The first one , if you look at the Declaration of Independence and actually read it , the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights .
I mean , that 's Stage Five , right ? Life is great , oriented only by our values , no other guidance .
In fact , most of the document is written at Stage Two .
" My life sucks because I live under a tyrant , also known as King George .
We 're great ! Who is not great ? England ! "
Sorry .
Well , what about other great leaders ? What about Gandhi ?
What about Martin Luther King ?
I mean , surely these were just people who preached , " Life is great , " right ?
Just one little bit of happiness and joy after another .
In fact , Martin Luther King 's most famous line was at Stage Three .
He didn 't say " We have a dream . " He said , " I have a dream . "
Why did he do that ? Because most people are not at Stage Five .
Two percent are at Stage One .
About 25 percent are at Stage Two , saying , in effect , " My life sucks . "
48 percent of working tribes say , these are employed tribes , say , " I 'm great and you 're not . "
And we have to duke it out every day , so we resort to politics .
Only about 22 percent of tribes are at Stage Four , oriented by our values , saying " We 're great .
And our values are beginning to unite us . "
Only two percent , only two percent of tribes get to Stage Five .
And those are the ones that change the world .
So the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society .
But you don 't leave them where you found them . Okay ?
Tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are .
So we have to have the ability to talk all the levels , to go to where they are .
And then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level .
I 'd like to show you some examples of this .
One of the people we interviewed was Frank Jordan , former Mayor of San Francisco . Before that he was Chief of Police in San Francisco .
And he grew up essentially in Stage One .
And you know what changed his life ? It was walking into one of these , a Boys and Girls Club .
Now here is what happened to this person who eventually became Mayor of San Francisco .
He went from being alive and passionate at Stage One -- remember , " Life sucks , despairing hostility , I will do whatever it takes to survive " -- to walking into a Boys and Girls Club , folding his arms , sitting down in a chair , and saying , " Wow . My life really sucks .
I don 't know anybody .
I mean , if I was into boxing , like they were , then my life wouldn 't suck . But I don 't . So it does .
So I 'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything . "
In fact , that 's progress .
We move people from Stage One to Stage Two by getting them in a new tribe and then , over time , getting them connected .
So , what about moving from Stage Three to Stage Four ?
I want to argue that we 're doing that right here .
TED represents a set of values , and as we unite around these values , something really interesting begins to emerge .
If you want this experience to live on as something historic , then at the reception tonight I 'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking .
Which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach , extend your influence , but instead , find someone you don 't know , and find someone else you don 't know , and introduce them .
That 's called a triadic relationship .
See , people who build world-changing tribes do that .
They extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them , not just to myself , so that my following is greater , but I connect people who don 't know each other to something greater than themselves .
And ultimately that adds to their values .
But we 're not done yet . Because then how do we go from Stage Four , which is great , to Stage Five ?
The story that I like to end with is this . It comes out of a place called the Gallup Organization .
You know they do polls , right ?
So it 's Stage Four . We 're great . Who is not great ?
Pretty much everybody else who does polls .
If Gallup releases a poll on the same day that NBC releases a poll , people will pay attention to the Gallup poll . Okay , we understand that .
So , they were bored .
They wanted to change the world . So here is the question someone asked .
" How could we , instead of just polling what Asia thinks or what the United States thinks , or who thinks what about Obama versus McCain or something like that , what does the entire world think ? "
And they found a way to do the first-ever world poll .
They had people involved who were Nobel laureates in economics , who reported being bored .
And suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out , " How do we survey the population of Sub-Saharan Africa ?
How do we survey populations that don 't have access to technology , and speak languages we don 't speak , and we don 't know anyone who speaks those languages . Because in order to achieve on this great mission , we have to be able to do it .
Incidentally , they did pull it off .
And they released the first-ever world poll .
So I 'd like to leave you with these thoughts .
First of all : we all form tribes , all of us .
You 're in tribes here . Hopefully you 're extending the reach of the tribes that you have .
But the question on the table is this : What kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making ?
You 're hearing one presentation after another , often representing a group of people , a tribe , about how they have changed the world .
If you do what we 've talked about , you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you 're in .
And you don 't leave them where they are . You nudge them forward .
You remember to talk all five culture stages .
Because we 've got people in all five , around us .
And the question that I 'd like to leave you with is this : Will your tribes change the world ?
Thank you very much .
Frederick Balagadde : Bio-lab on a microchip
Drugs alone can 't stop disease in sub-Saharan Africa : We need diagnostic tools to match . TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde shows how we can multiply the power and availability of an unwieldy , expensive diagnostic lab -- by miniaturizing it to the size of a chip .
The greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden .
If we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest , we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst hit region by HIV / AIDS .
This is the most devastating epidemic of our time .
We also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease .
There are very few doctors and , quite frankly , these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics .
So what the Western countries , developed countries , have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in Third World countries who actually can 't afford these medications .
And this has already saved millions of lives , and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in Sub-Saharan Africa .
But there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease , because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who don 't have diagnostic services , you end up creating a problem of drug resistance .
This is already beginning to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa .
The problem is that , what begins as a tragedy in the Third World could easily become a global problem .
And the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of HIV popping up all over the world , because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-ARV carnage of HIV / AIDS .
I experienced this firsthand as a high school student in Uganda .
This was in the 90s during the peak of the HIV epidemic , before there were any ARVs in Sub-Saharan Africa .
And during that time , I actually lost more relatives , as well as the teachers who taught me , to HIV / AIDS .
So this became one of the driving passions of my life , to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems .
We all know about the miracle of miniaturization .
Back in the day , computers used to fill this entire room , and people actually used to work inside the computers .
But what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone .
And I 'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world , in the Third World countries .
The good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories .
So , right now , we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips .
I was very lucky to come to the US right after high school , and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices .
This is a microfluidic chip that I developed .
A close look at how the technology works : These are channels that are about the size of a human hair -- so you have integrated valves , pumps , mixers and injectors -- so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system .
So what I plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an HIV kit in a microfluidic system .
So , with one microfluidic chip , which is the size of an iPhone , you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time .
For each patient , we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient .
And this is only done in four hours , 50 times faster than the current state of the art , at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options .
So this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the Third World at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place .
I invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality .
Thank you very much .
Jonathan Drori : The beautiful tricks of flowers
In this visually dazzling talk , Jonathan Drori shows the extraordinary ways flowering plants -- over a quarter million species -- have evolved to attract insects to spread their pollen : growing ' landing-strips ' to guide the insects in , shining in ultraviolet , building elaborate traps , and even mimicking other insects in heat .
Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are ?
There are a quarter of a million -- at least those are the ones we know about -- a quarter of a million species of flowering plants .
And flowers are a real bugger .
They 're really difficult for plants to produce .
They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources .
Why would they go to that bother ?
And the answer of course , like so many things in the world , is sex .
I know what 's on your mind when you 're looking at these pictures .
And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important -- there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce .
You can take cuttings ; they can sort of have sex with themselves ; they can pollinate themselves .
But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches .
Evolution works that way .
Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen .
Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before .
As I say , every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these .
And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants .
And that 's actually rather useful for forensics and so on .
Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen , and that 's a very inefficient process , which is why it gets up our noses so much .
Because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it , hoping that your sex cells , your male sex cells , which are held within the pollen , will somehow reach another flower just by chance .
So all the grasses , which means all of the cereal crops , and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen .
But most species actually use insects to do their bidding , and that 's more intelligent in a way , because the pollen , they don 't need so much of it .
The insects and other species can take the pollen , transfer it directly to where it 's required .
So we 're aware , obviously , of the relationship between insects and plants .
There 's a symbiotic relationship there , whether it 's flies or birds or bees , they 're getting something in return , and that something in return is generally nectar .
Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations -- the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation .
The plant gets something , and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else .
Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way .
There are markings on many plants that look like other insects .
These are the anthers of a lily , cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it , the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with .
And there 's an orchid that might look to you as if it 's got jaws , and in a way , it has ; it forces the insect to crawl out , getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else .
Orchids : there are 20,000 , at least , species of orchids -- amazingly , amazingly diverse .
And they get up to all sorts of tricks .
They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding .
This orchid , known as Darwin 's orchid , because it 's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it -- you can see that there 's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid .
And basically what the insect has to do -- we 're in the middle of the flower -- it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar .
And Darwin said , looking at this flower , " I guess something has coevolved with this . "
And sure enough , there 's the insect .
And I mean , normally it kind of rolls it away , but in its erect form , that 's what it looks like .
Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators , then , just as in human sex , people might start to deceive .
They might say , " I 've got a bit of nectar . Do you want to come and get it ? "
Now this is a plant .
This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love , and they 've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom .
And this is the mimic .
So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant .
And here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic , because the mimic doesn 't give it any nectar . It thought it would get some .
So not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant , it 's also -- if you look very closely just at the head end , you can see that it 's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant , if only some botanist hadn 't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card .
Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom .
This flower with its black dots : they might look like black dots to us , but if I tell you , to a male insect of the right species , that looks like two females who are really , really hot to trot .
And when the insect gets there and lands on it , dousing itself in pollen , of course , that it 's going to take to another plant , if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture , you can see that there are actually some patterning there , which is three-dimensional .
So it probably even feels good for the insect , as well as looking good .
And these electron microscope pictures -- here 's one of an orchid mimicking an insect -- you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye , have very , very different textures to what an insect might perceive .
And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles .
And under the scanning electron microscope , you can see the surface there -- really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at .
Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect , even to us .
I mean , I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast .
It 's a wonderful , amazing thing .
This one 's clever . It 's called obsidian .
I think of it as insidium sometimes .
To the right species of bee , this looks like another very aggressive bee , and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away , and , of course , covers itself with pollen .
The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects .
And this one doesn 't have anything for them .
So it 's deceiving on two levels -- fabulous .
Here we see ylang ylang , the component of many perfumes .
I actually smelt someone with some on earlier .
And the flowers don 't really have to be that gaudy .
They 're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that 'll have it .
This one doesn 't smell so good .
This is a flower that really , really smells pretty nasty and is designed , again , evolved , to look like carrion .
So flies love this .
They fly in and they pollinate .
This , which is helicodiceros , is also known as dead horse arum .
I don 't know what a dead horse actually smells like , but this one probably smells pretty much like it .
It 's really horrible .
And blowflies just can 't help themselves .
They fly into this thing , and they fly all the way down it .
They lay their eggs in it , thinking it 's a nice bit of carrion , and not realizing that there 's no food for the eggs , that the eggs are going to die , but the plant , meanwhile , has benefited , because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower -- fantastic .
Here 's arum , arum maculatum , " lords and ladies , " or " cuckoo-pint " in this country .
I photographed this thing last week in Dorset .
This thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature -- amazing .
And if you look down into it , there 's this sort of dam past the spadix , flies get attracted by the heat -- which is boiling off volatile chemicals , little midges -- and they get trapped underneath in this container .
They drink this fabulous nectar and then they 're all a bit sticky .
At night they get covered in pollen , which showers down over them , and then the bristles that we saw above , they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out , covered in pollen -- fabulous thing .
Now if you think that 's fabulous , this is one of my great favorites .
This is the philodendron selloum .
For anyone here from Brazil , you 'll know about this plant .
This is the most amazing thing .
That sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long .
And it does something that no other plant that I know of does , and that is that when it flowers -- that 's the spadix in the middle there -- for a period of about two days , it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals .
So instead of having starch , which is the food of plants , it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it 's burning fat , metabolizing , about the rate of a small cat .
And that 's twice the energy output , weight for weight , than a hummingbird -- absolutely astonishing .
This thing does something else which is unusual .
Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit , 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade , for two days , but it keeps constant temperature .
There 's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature .
" Now why does it do this , " I hear you ask .
Now wouldn 't you know it , there 's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature .
And they get inside , and they get it all on .
And the plant showers them with pollen , and off they go and pollinate .
And what a wonderful thing it is .
Now most pollinators that we think about are insects , but actually in the tropics , many birds and butterflies pollinate .
And many of the tropical flowers are red , and that 's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us , we think , and can see the color red very well .
But if you look at the spectrum , birds and us , we see red , green and blue and see that spectrum .
Insects see green , blue and ultraviolet , and they see various shades of ultraviolet .
So there 's something that goes on off the end there .
" And wouldn 't it be great if we could somehow see what that is , " I hear you ask .
Well yes we can .
So what is an insect seeing ?
Last week I took these pictures of rock rose , helianthemum , in Dorset .
These are little yellow flowers like we all see , little yellow flowers all over the place .
And this is what it looks like with visible light .
This is what it looks like if you take out the red .
Most bees don 't perceive red .
And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very , very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got .
And that 's a real fantastic bull 's eye .
Now we don 't know exactly what a bee sees , any more than you know what I 'm seeing when I call this red .
We can 't know what 's going on in -- let alone an insect 's -- another human being 's mind .
But the contrast will look something like that , so standing out a lot from the background .
Here 's another little flower -- different range of ultraviolet frequencies , different filters to match the pollinators .
And that 's the sort of thing that it would be seeing .
Just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property -- no flower was damaged in the process of this shot ; it was just attached to the tripod , not killed -- then under ultraviolet light , look at that .
And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light .
So maybe the chemical in that would be useful .
Finally , there 's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me -- fantastic hidden pattern .
And I love the idea of something hidden .
I think there 's something poetic here , that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter , the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus -- actually the clouds of Venus .
That 's the main use of that filter .
Venus , of course , is the god of love and fertility , which is the flower story .
And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding , they 've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death , and particularly at marriage , which , when you think of it , is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another .
Thank you very much .
Srdja Popovic : How to topple a dictator
2011 was a year of people-powered resistance , starting with Arab Spring and spreading across the world . How did it work ? Srdja Popovic lays out the plans , skills and tools each movement needs -- from nonviolent tactics to a sense of humor . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Good afternoon . I am proud to be here at TEDxKrakow .
I 'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can and is actually changing the world , and whose name is people power .
I 'll start with the anecdote , or for those of you who are Monty Python lovers , a Monty Python type of sketch .
Here it is . It is December 15 , 2010 .
Somebody gives you a bet . You will look at a crystal ball and you will see the future . The future will be accurate .
But you need to share it with the world . Okay ?
Curiosity killed the cat . You take the bet .
You look at the crystal ball . One hour later , you are sitting in a building on the national TV in a talkshow , and you tell the story .
" Before the end of 2011 , Ben Ali and Mubarak and Gaddafi will be down and prosecuted .
Saleh of Yemen and Assad of Syria would be either challenged or already on their knees .
Osama bin Laden will be dead , and Ratko Mladic will be in the Hague . "
Now , the anchor watches you with a strange gaze on his face , and then on the top of it you add , " And thousands of the young people from Athens , Madrid and New York will demonstrate for social justice , claiming that they are inspired with Arabs . "
Next thing you know , two guys in white appear .
They give you the strange t-shirt , take you to the nearest mental institution .
So I would like to speak a little bit about the phenomenon which is behind what already seems to be the very bad year for bad guys , and this phenomenon is called people power .
Well , people power has been there for a while .
It helped Gandhi kick the Brits from India .
It helped Martin Luther King win a historic racial struggle .
It helped local Lech Walesa to kick out one million Soviet troops from Poland and beginning the end of the Soviet Union as we know it .
So what 's new in it ? What seems to be very new , which is the idea I would like to share with you today , that there is a set of rules and skills which can be learned and taught in order to perform successful nonviolent struggle .
If this is true , we can help these movements .
Well , first one , analytic skills .
I 'll try where it all started in the Middle East , and for so many years we were living with completely the wrong perception of the Middle East .
It was looking like the frozen region , literally a refrigerator , and there are only two types of meals there : steak , which stands for a Mubarak , Ben Ali-type of military police dictatorship , or a potato , which stands for Tehran types of theocracies .
And everybody was amazed when the refrigerator opened and millions of young , mainly secular people step out to do the change . Guess what ? They didn 't watch the demographics .
What is the average age of Egyptians ? 24 .
How long was Mubarak in power ? 31 .
So this system : just obsolete . They expired , and young people of the Arab World have awakened one morning and understood that power lies in their hands .
The rest is the year in front of us . And guess what ?
The same Generation Epsilon with their rules , with their tools , with their games and with their language , which sounds a little bit strange to me . I am 38 now .
And can you look at the age of the people on the streets of Europe ?
It seems that Generation Epsilon is coming .
Now let me set another example .
I 'm meeting different people throughout the world , and they are , you know , academics and professors and doctors , and they will always talk conditions .
They will say , " People power will work only if the regime is not too oppressive . "
They will say , " People power will work if the annual income of the country is between X and Z. "
They will say , " People power will work only if there is a foreign pressure . "
They will say , " People power will work only if there is no oil . "
And , I mean , there is a set of conditions .
Well , the news here is that your skills [ that you ] bring in the conflict seem to be more important than the conditions , namely skills of unity , planning , and maintaining nonviolent discipline .
Let me give you the example .
I am coming from a country called Serbia .
It took us 10 years to unite 18 opposition party leaders , with their big egos , behind one single candidate against Balkan dictator Slobodan Milosevic .
Guess what ? That was the day of his defeat .
You look at the Egyptians , they fire on Tahrir Square , they get rid of their individual symbols .
They appear on the street only with the flag of Egypt .
I will give you a counter-example .
You see nine presidential candidates running against Lukashenko .
You will know the outcome .
So unity is a big thing , and this can be achieved .
Same with planning . Somebody has lied to you about the successful and spontaneous nonviolent revolution ?
That thing doesn 't exist in the world .
Whenever you see young people in front of the road trying to fraternize with the police or military , somebody was thinking about it before .
Now , at the end , nonviolent discipline , and this is probably the game-changer .
If you maintain nonviolent discipline , you will exclusively win .
You have 100,000 people in a nonviolent march , and one idiot or agent provocateur is throwing stones , guess what takes all the cameras ? That one guy .
One single act of violence can literally destroy your movement .
Now let me move to another place .
It 's selection of strategies and tactics .
There are certain rules in nonviolent struggle you may follow .
First , you start small .
Second , you pick the battles you can win .
It 's only 200 of us in this room .
We won 't call for the March of Millions .
But what if we organize spraying graffiti throughout the night all over Krakow city ? The city will know .
So we pick the tactics which accommodates to the event , especially this thing we call the small tactics of dispersion .
They 're very useful in a violent oppression .
We are actually witnessing the picture of one of the best tactics ever used .
It was on Tahrir Square , where the international community was constantly frightened that the Islamists will overtake the revolution . Well , they 've organized Christians protecting Muslims , who are there praying , Coptic wedding cheered by thousands of Muslims .
The world has just changed the picture , but somebody was thinking about this previously .
So there are so many things you can do instead of getting into one place , shouting and showing off in front of the security forces .
Now there is also another very important dynamic , and this is a dynamic normally analytics don 't see .
This is dynamics between fear and apathy on one side and enthusiasm and humor on another side .
So it works like in a video game .
You have a fear high , you have status quo .
You have enthusiasm higher , you see fear starting to melt .
Day two , you see people running towards police instead of from the police .
In Egypt , you can tell that something is happening there .
And then it 's about humor . Humor is such a powerful game-changer , and of course it was very big in Poland .
And you know , we were just a small group of crazy students in Serbia when we made this big skit .
We put the big petrol barrel with a portrait picture of Mr. President on it in the middle of the Main Street . There was a hole on the top so you could literally come , put a coin in , get a baseball bat , and pow , hit his face .
Sounds loud . And within the minutes , we were sitting in a nearby cafe having coffee , and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing .
Well , that 's just the beginning of the show .
The real show starts when the police appears .
What will they do ? Arrest us ? We are nowhere to be seen .
We are three blocks away observing it from our espresso bar .
Arrest the shoppers with kids ? Doesn 't make sense .
Of course , you could bet they have done the most stupid thing : They arrested the barrel . And now the picture of the smashed face on the barrel with the policeman dragging them to the police car , that was the best day for the photographers from newspapers that they ever will have .
So , I mean , these are the things you can do , and you can always use the humor .
There is also one big thing about the humor : It really hurts , because these guys really are taking themselves too seriously .
When you start to mock them , it hurts .
Now , everybody is talking about His Majesty , the Internet , and it is also a very useful skill , but don 't rush to label things like Facebook Revolution , Twitter Revolution .
Don 't mix tools with the substance .
It is true that the Internet and new media are very useful in making things faster and cheaper .
They make it also a bit safer for the participants because they give the part of anonymity .
We are watching the great example of something else the Internet can do .
It can put the price tag of state-sponsored violence over nonviolent protesters .
This is a famous group , We are all Khaled Said , made by Wael Ghonim in Egypt and his friend .
This is the mutilated face of the guy who was beaten by the police .
This is how he became the public , and this is what probably became the straw which broke the camel 's back .
But here is also the bad news .
The nonviolent struggle is won in the real world , in the streets . You will never change your society towards democracy or economics if you sit down and click .
There are risks to be taken and there are living people who are winning the struggle .
Well , million dollar question : What will happen in the Arab World ?
And though young people from the Arab World were pretty successful in bringing down three dictators , shaking the region , kind of persuading clever kings from Jordan and Morocco doing substantial reforms , it is yet to be seen what will be the outcome , whether the Egyptians and Tunisians will make it through the transition or this will end in bloody ethnic and religious conflict , whether the Syrians will maintain nonviolent discipline , faced with the brutal daily violence which kills thousands already , or they will slip into violent struggle and make ugly civil war .
Will these revolutions be whole like through the transitions to democracy or be overtaken by military or extremists of all kinds ? We cannot tell .
Same works for the Western sector , where you can see all of these excited young people protesting around the world , occupying this , occupying that .
Are they going to become the world wave ?
Are they going to find their skills , their enthusiasm , and their strategy to find what they really want and push for the reform , or will they just stay complaining about the endless list of the things they hate ?
This is the difference between two towns .
Now , what [ do ] the statistics have ?
My friend 's book , Maria Stephan 's book , talks a lot about violent and nonviolent struggle , and there are some shocking data .
If you look at the last 35 years and different social transitions from dictatorship to democracy , you will see that out of 67 different cases , in 50 of these cases it was nonviolent struggle which was the key power .
This is one more reason to look at this phenomenon .
This is one more reason to look at the Generation Epsilon , enough for me to give them credit and hope that they will find their skills and their courage to use the nonviolent struggle and thus fix at least a part of the mess our generation is making in this world .
Thank you .
Gordon Brown : Wiring a web for global good
We 're at a unique moment in history , says UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown : we can use today 's interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic -- and work together to confront the challenges of poverty , security , climate change and the economy .
Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and Whitehall ?
This is Kim , a nine-year-old Vietnam girl , her back ruined by napalm , and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War .
This is Birhan , who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s , 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued , and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world .
This is Tiananmen Square .
A man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance .
This next is the Sudanese girl , a few moments from death , a vulture hovering in the background , a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty .
This is Neda , the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago , and she is now the focus , rightly so , of the YouTube generation .
And what do all these pictures and events have in common ?
What they have in common is what we see unlocks what we cannot see .
What we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community .
What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others , however distantly .
What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves .
What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions , across all faiths , across all continents -- a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others , and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted , see injuries that need to be corrected , see problems that need to be rectified .
There is a story about Olof Palme , the Swedish Prime Minister , going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s .
Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said -- and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister -- " Isn 't this man a communist ? "
The reply was , " No , Mr President , he 's an anti-communist . "
And Ronald Reagan said , " I don 't care what kind of communist he is ! "
Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme , the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden , " Well , what do you believe in ? Do you want to abolish the rich ? "
He said , " No , I want to abolish the poor . "
Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full .
I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith , and people of no faith .
But I think what 's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world .
We now have the capacity to find common ground with people who we will never meet , but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication ; that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with ; and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history , and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society .
Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters .
They protested across Britain .
They won public opinion over a long period of time .
But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful .
What could they have done with the pictures that they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people 's hearts and minds ?
Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb , the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago .
She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria , that in Britain she wanted to take action , but she had to go house to house , leaflet to leaflet , to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children , an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world .
But what more could she have done if she 'd had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately ?
Now look at what 's happened in the last 10 years .
In Philippines in 2001 , President Estrada -- a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime , eventually brought it down and it was , of course , called the " coup de text . "
Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago .
Because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations , it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do .
Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out , a country that nobody knew anything about that was happening , until these blogs told the world that there was a repression , meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi , who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world , had to be listened to .
Then take Iran itself , and what people are doing today : following what happened to Neda , people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran , any by everybody who is blogging , changing their address to Tehran , Iran , and making it difficult for the security services .
Take , therefore , what modern technology is capable of : the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally .
That , in my view , gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world .
Foreign policy can never be the same again . It cannot be run by elites ; it 's got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging , who are communicating with each other around the world .
200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery .
150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people , children , had the right to education .
100 years ago in most countries in Europe , the pressure was for the right to vote .
50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare .
In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism , anti-Semitism , racism , apartheid , discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality ; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns that have been run by people to change the world .
I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago , when he was in London .
I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation .
I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela -- I was very privileged to do so -- when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage .
And Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was .
Amy Winehouse said , " Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common .
My husband too has spent a long time in prison . "
Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all .
He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain , the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid .
He said that there was a greater challenge ahead , the challenge of poverty , of climate change -- global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society .
We are the first generation which is in a position to do this .
Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally , with the challenges that we now face , most of which are global in their nature .
Climate change cannot be solved in one country , but has got to be solved by the world working together .
A financial crisis , just as we have seen , could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone ; it needed the world to work together .
Take the problems of security and terrorism and , equally , the problem of human rights and development : they cannot be solved by Africa alone ; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone .
We cannot solve these problems unless we work together .
So the great project of our generation , it seems to me , is to build for the first time , out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together , a truly global society , built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future .
We have now , and are the first generation with , the power to do this .
Take climate change . Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem , where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that , when we want to create a global carbon market , but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem ?
One of the things that has got to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda .
One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have got to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well , so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations .
Take the financial crisis .
If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America .
If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many , many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain , and people 's ordinary savings are affected by it , then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision .
You need in the long run for stability , for economic growth , for jobs , as well as for financial stability , global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared , and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible .
So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility , not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years .
Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world , the poorest part of the world .
We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future , and yet , out of people 's desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done .
I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone .
This is a country of six and a half million people , but it has only 80 doctors ; it has 200 nurses ; it has 120 midwives .
You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources .
Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania , a girl called Miriam .
She was 11 years old ; her parents had both died from AIDS , her mother and then her father .
She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for .
She herself was suffering from HIV ; she was suffering from tuberculosis .
I met her in a field , she was ragged , she had no shoes .
When you looked in her eyes , any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future , but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl 's eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment , I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV / AIDS fund would be rewarded by people being prepared to make donations .
We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture , so that Africa is not a net importer of food , but an exporter of food .
Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world .
Burma is in chains , Zimbabwe is a human tragedy , in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent .
In the Rwanda Children 's Museum , there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children 's Museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died .
There is a photograph of a boy called David .
Beside that photograph there is the information about his life .
It said " David , age 10 . "
David : ambition to be a doctor .
Favorite sport : football . What did he enjoy most ?
Making people laugh .
How did he die ?
Tortured to death .
Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death : " Don 't worry . The United Nations are coming . "
And we never did .
And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda , and we never did .
So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid , but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world .
So my argument today is basically this .
We have the means by which we could create a truly global society .
The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors .
That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work , but we should not lose the chance in this generation , in this decade in particular , with President Obama in America , with other people working with us around the world , to create global institutions for the environment , and for finance , and for security and for development , that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples , our desire to bind the world together , and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist .
It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences , people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero , " Great speech . "
But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences , people turned to each other and didn 't say " Great speech . "
They said , " Let 's march . "
We should be marching towards a global society .
Thank you .
Oliver Sacks : What hallucination reveals about our minds
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome -- when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations . He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon .
We see with the eyes , but we see with the brain as well .
And seeing with the brain is often called imagination .
And we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination , our inscapes . We 've lived with them all our lives .
But there are also hallucinations as well , and hallucinations are completely different .
They don 't seem to be of our creation .
They don 't seem to be under our control .
They seem to come from the outside , and to mimic perception .
So I am going to be talking about hallucinations , and a particular sort of visual hallucination which I see among my patients .
A few months ago , I got a phone call from a nursing home where I work .
They told me that one of their residents , an old lady in her 90s , was seeing things , and they wondered if she 'd gone bonkers or , because she was an old lady , whether she 'd had a stroke , or whether she had Alzheimer 's .
And so they asked me if I would come and see Rosalie , the old lady .
I went in to see her .
It was evident straight away that she was perfectly sane and lucid and of good intelligence , but she 'd been very startled and very bewildered , because she 'd been seeing things .
And she told me -- the nurses hadn 't mentioned this -- that she was blind , that she had been completely blind from macular degeneration for five years .
But now , for the last few days , she 'd been seeing things .
So I said , " What sort of things ? "
And she said , " People in Eastern dress , in drapes , walking up and down stairs .
A man who turns towards me and smiles .
But he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth .
Animals too .
I see a white building . It 's snowing , a soft snow .
I see this horse with a harness , dragging the snow away .
Then , one night , the scene changes .
I see cats and dogs walking towards me .
They come to a certain point and then stop .
Then it changes again .
I see a lot of children . They are walking up and down stairs .
They wear bright colors , rose and blue , like Eastern dress . "
Sometimes , she said , before the people come on , she may hallucinate pink and blue squares on the floor , which seem to go up to the ceiling .
I said , " Is this like a dream ? "
And she said , " No , it 's not like a dream . It 's like a movie . "
She said , " It 's got color . It 's got motion .
But it 's completely silent , like a silent movie . "
And she said that it 's a rather boring movie .
She said , " All these people with Eastern dress , walking up and down , very repetitive , very limited . "
And she has a sense of humor .
She knew it was a hallucination .
But she was frightened . She 'd lived 95 years and she 'd never had a hallucination before .
She said that the hallucinations were unrelated to anything she was thinking or feeling or doing , that they seemed to come on by themselves , or disappear .
She had no control over them .
She said she didn 't recognize any of the people or places in the hallucinations .
And none of the people or the animals , well , they all seemed oblivious of her .
And she didn 't know what was going on .
She wondered if she was going mad or losing her mind .
Well , I examined her carefully .
She was a bright old lady , perfectly sane . She had no medical problems .
She wasn 't on any medications which could produce hallucinations .
But she was blind .
And I then said to her , " I think I know what you have . "
I said , " There is a special form of visual hallucination which may go with deteriorating vision or blindness .
This was originally described , " I said , " right back in the 18th century , by a man called Charles Bonnet .
And you have Charles Bonnet syndrome .
There is nothing wrong with your brain . There is nothing wrong with your mind .
You have Charles Bonnet syndrome . "
And she was very relieved at this , that there was nothing seriously the matter , and also rather curious .
She said , " Who is this Charles Bonnet ? "
She said , " Did he have them himself ? "
And she said , " Tell all the nurses that I have Charles Bonnet syndrome . "
" I 'm not crazy . I 'm not demented . I have Charles Bonnet syndrome . "
Well , so I did tell the nurses .
Now this , for me , is a common situation .
I work in old-age homes , largely .
I see a lot of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired .
About 10 percent of the hearing impaired people get musical hallucinations .
And about 10 percent of the visually impaired people get visual hallucinations .
You don 't have to be completely blind , only sufficiently impaired .
Now with the original description in the 18th century , Charles Bonnet did not have them .
His grandfather had these hallucinations .
His grandfather was a magistrate , an elderly man .
He 'd had cataract surgery .
His vision was pretty poor .
And in 1759 , he described to his grandson various things he was seeing .
The first thing he said was he saw a handkerchief in midair .
It was a large blue handkerchief with four orange circles .
And he knew it was a hallucination .
You don 't have handkerchiefs in midair .
And then he saw a big wheel in midair .
But sometimes he wasn 't sure whether he was hallucinating or not , because the hallucinations would fit in the context of the visions .
So on one occasion , when his granddaughters were visiting them , he said , " And who are these handsome young men with you ? "
And they said , " Alas , Grandpapa , there are no handsome young men . "
And then the handsome young men disappeared .
It 's typical of these hallucinations that they may come in a flash and disappear in a flash .
They don 't usually fade in and out .
They are rather sudden , and they change suddenly .
Charles Lullin , the grandfather , saw hundreds of different figures , different landscapes of all sorts .
On one occasion , he saw a man in a bathrobe smoking a pipe , and realized it was himself .
That was the only figure he recognized .
On one occasion when he was walking in the streets of Paris , he saw -- this was real -- a scaffolding .
But when he got back home , he saw a miniature of the scaffolding six inches high , on his study table .
This repetition of perception is sometimes called palinopsia .
With him and with Rosalie , what seems to be going on -- and Rosalie said , " What 's going on ? " -- and I said that as you lose vision , as the visual parts of the brain are no longer getting any input , they become hyperactive and excitable , and they start to fire spontaneously .
And you start to see things .
The things you see can be very complicated indeed .
With another patient of mine , who , also had some vision , the vision she had could be disturbing .
On one occasion , she said she saw a man in a striped shirt in a restaurant .
And he turned around . And then he divided into six figures in striped shirts , who started walking towards her .
And then the six figures came together again , like a concertina .
Once , when she was driving , or rather , her husband was driving , the road divided into four and she felt herself going simultaneously up four roads .
She had very mobile hallucinations as well .
A lot of them had to do with a car .
Sometimes she would see a teenage boy sitting on the hood of the car .
He was very tenacious and he moved rather gracefully when the car turned .
And then when they came to a stop , the boy would do a sudden vertical takeoff , 100 foot in the air , and then disappear .
Another patient of mine had a different sort of hallucination .
This was a woman who didn 't have trouble with her eyes , but the visual parts of her brain , a little tumor in the occipital cortex .
And , above all , she would see cartoons .
These cartoons would be transparent and would cover half the visual field , like a screen .
And especially she saw cartoons of Kermit the Frog .
Now , I don 't watch Sesame Street , but she made a point of saying , " Why Kermit ? " She said , " Kermit the Frog means nothing to me .
You know , I was wondering about Freudian determinants .
Why Kermit ?
Kermit the Frog means nothing to me . "
She didn 't mind the cartoons too much .
But what did disturb her was she got very persistent images or hallucinations of faces and as with Rosalie , the faces were often deformed , with very large teeth or very large eyes .
And these frightened her .
Well , what is going on with these people ?
As a physician , I have to try and define what 's going on , and to reassure people , especially to reassure them that they 're not going insane .
Something like 10 percent , as I said , of visually impaired people get these .
But no more than one percent of the people acknowledge them , because they are afraid they will be seen as insane or something .
And if they do mention them to their own doctors they may be misdiagnosed .
In particular , the notion is that if you see things or hear things , you 're going mad , but the psychotic hallucinations are quite different .
Psychotic hallucinations , whether they are visual or vocal , they address you . They accuse you .
They seduce you . They humiliate you .
They jeer at you .
You interact with them .
There is none of this quality of being addressed with these Charles Bonnet hallucinations .
There is a film . You 're seeing a film which has nothing to do with you , or that 's how people think about it .
There is also a rare thing called temporal lobe epilepsy , and sometimes , if one has this , one may feel oneself transported back to a time and place in the past .
You 're at a particular road junction .
You smell chestnuts roasting .
You hear the traffic . All the senses are involved .
And you 're waiting for your girl .
And it 's that Tuesday evening back in 1982 .
And the temporal lobe hallucinations are all-sense hallucinations , full of feeling , full of familiarity , located in space and time , coherent , dramatic .
The Charles Bonnet ones are quite different .
So in the Charles Bonnet hallucinations , you have all sorts of levels , from the geometrical hallucinations -- the pink and blue squares the woman had -- up to quite elaborate hallucinations with figures and especially faces .
Faces , and sometimes deformed faces , are the single commonest thing in these hallucinations .
And one of the second commonest is cartoons .
So , what is going on ?
Fascinatingly , in the last few years , it 's been possible to do functional brain imagery , to do fMRI on people as they are hallucinating .
And in fact , to find that different parts of the visual brain are activated as they are hallucinating .
When people have these simple geometrical hallucinations , the primary visual cortex is activated .
This is the part of the brain which perceives edges and patterns .
You don 't form images with your primary visual cortex .
When images are formed , a higher part of the visual cortex is involved in the temporal lobe .
And in particular , one area of the temporal lobe is called the fusiform gyrus .
And it 's known that if people have damage in the fusiform gyrus , they maybe lose the ability to recognize faces .
But if there is an abnormal activity in the fusiform gyrus , they may hallucinate faces , and this is exactly what you find in some of these people .
There is an area in the anterior part of this gyrus where teeth and eyes are represented , and that part of the gyrus is activated when people get the deformed hallucinations .
There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons .
It 's activated when one recognizes cartoons , when one draws cartoons , and when one hallucinates them .
It 's very interesting that that should be specific .
There are other parts of the brain which are specifically involved with the recognition and hallucination of buildings and landscapes .
Around 1970 , it was found that there were not only parts of the brain , but particular cells .
" Face cells " were discovered around 1970 .
And now we know that there are hundreds of other sorts of cells , which can be very , very specific .
So you may not only have " car " cells , you may have " Aston Martin " cells .
I saw an Aston Martin this morning .
I had to bring it in .
And now it 's in there somewhere .
Now , at this level , in what 's called the inferotemporal cortex , there are only visual images , or figments or fragments .
It 's only at higher levels that the other senses join in and there are connections with memory and emotion .
And in the Charles Bonnet syndrome , you don 't go to those higher levels .
You 're in these levels of inferior visual cortex where you have thousands and tens of thousands and millions of images , or figments , or fragmentary figments , all neurally encoded in particular cells or small clusters of cells .
Normally these are all part of the integrated stream of perception , or imagination , and one is not conscious of them .
It is only if one is visually impaired or blind that the process is interrupted .
And instead of getting normal perception , you 're getting an anarchic , convulsive stimulation , or release , of all of these visual cells in the inferotemporal cortex .
So , suddenly you see a face . Suddenly you see a car .
Suddenly this , and suddenly that .
The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this , but not terribly successfully .
When these were first described , it was thought that they could be interpreted like dreams .
But in fact people say , " I don 't recognize the people . I can 't form any associations . "
" Kermit means nothing to me . "
You don 't get anywhere thinking of them as dreams .
Well , I 've more or less said what I wanted .
I think I just want to recapitulate and say this is common .
Think of the number of blind people .
There must be hundreds of thousands of blind people who have these hallucinations , but are too scared to mention them .
So this sort of thing needs to be brought into notice , for patients , for doctors , for the public .
Finally , I think they are infinitely interesting and valuable , for giving one some insight as to how the brain works .
Charles Bonnet said , 250 years ago -- he wondered how , thinking these hallucinations , how , as he put it , the theater of the mind could be generated by the machinery of the brain .
Now , 250 years later , I think we 're beginning to glimpse how this is done .
Thanks very much .
That was superb . Thank you so much .
You speak about these things with so much insight and empathy for your patients .
Have you yourself experienced any of the syndromes you write about ?
Oliver Sacks : I was afraid you 'd ask that .
Well , yeah , a lot of them .
And actually I 'm a little visually impaired myself .
I 'm blind in one eye , and not terribly good in the other .
And I see the geometrical hallucinations .
But they stop there .
And they don 't disturb you ?
Because you understand what 's doing it , it doesn 't make you worried ?
OS : Well they don 't disturb me any more than my tinnitus , which I ignore .
They occasionally interest me , and I have many pictures of them in my notebooks .
I 've gone and had an fMRI myself , to see how my visual cortex is taking over .
And when I see all these hexagons and complex things , which I also have , in visual migraine , I wonder whether everyone sees things like this , and whether things like cave art or ornamental art may have been derived from them a bit .
That was an utterly , utterly fascinating talk .
Thank you so much for sharing .
OS : Thank you . Thank you .
Bart Weetjens : How I taught rats to sniff out land mines
No one knows exactly how many landmines still litter the world , but it 's safe to safe : millions , waiting to kill and maim unsuspecting civilians . Clearing them is slow , expensive and dangerous . The founder of Apopo . Bart Weetjens , talks about his extraordinary project : training rats to sniff out land mines . He shows clips of his " hero rats " in action , and previews his work 's next phase : teaching them to turn up tuberculosis in the lab .
I 'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey -- extraordinarily rewarding journey , actually -- which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis .
As a child , I had two passions .
One was a passion for rodents .
I had all kinds of rats , mice , hamsters , gerbils , squirrels .
You name it , I bred it , and I sold them to pet shops .
I also had a passion for Africa .
Growing up in a multicultural environment , we had African students in the house , and I learned about their stories , so different backgrounds , dependency on imported know-how , goods , services , exuberant cultural diversity .
Africa was truly fascinating for me .
I became an industrial engineer , engineer in product development , and I focused on appropriate detection technologies , actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries .
I started working in the industry , but I wasn 't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear , extracting and manufacturing mode .
I quit my job to focus on the real world problem : landmines .
We 're talking ' 95 now .
Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development , which is really true .
As long as these devices are there , or there is suspicion of landmines , you can 't really enter into the land .
Actually , there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they 're needed to produce , which is mainly in the developing world .
We chose rats .
Why would you choose rats ?
Because , aren 't they vermin ?
Well , actually rats are , in contrary to what most people think about them , rats are highly sociable creatures .
And actually , our product -- what you see here .
There 's a target somewhere here .
You see an operator , a trained African with his rats in front who actually are left and right .
There , the animal finds a mine .
It scratches on the soil .
And the animal comes back for a food reward .
Very , very simple .
Very sustainable in this environment .
Here , the animal gets its food reward .
And that 's how it works .
Very , very simple .
Now why would you use rats ?
Rats have been used since the ' 50s last century , in all kinds of experiments .
Rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species .
They 're extremely sensitive to smell .
Moreover , they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it .
Now how do we communicate with rats ?
Well don 't talk rat , but we have a clicker , a standard method for animal training , which you see there .
A clicker , which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors .
First of all , we associate the click sound with a food reward , which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe .
Once the animal knows click , food , click , food , click , food -- so click is food -- we bring it in a cage with a hole , and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed , and to do that for five seconds -- five seconds , which is long for a rat .
Once the animal knows this , we make the task a bit more difficult .
It learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes , up to 10 holes .
Then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets .
In the next step , animals learn to find real mines in real minefields .
They are tested and accredited according to International Mine Action Standards , just like dogs have to pass a test .
This consists of 400 square meters .
There 's a number of mines placed blindly , and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets .
If the animal does that , it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field -- just like dogs , by the way .
Maybe one slight difference : we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog .
This is our team in Mozambique : one Tanzanian trainer , who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows .
And you should see the pride in the eyes of these people .
They have a skill , which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid .
Moreover , this small team together with , of course , you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up .
But with this small investment in a rat capacity , we have demonstrated in Mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal -- two dollars per square meter , we do it at $ 1.18 , and we can still bring that price down .
Question of scale .
If you can bring in more rats , we can actually make the output even bigger .
We have a demonstration site in Mozambique .
Eleven African governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology .
They have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the Great Lakes region , and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines .
But let me bring you to a very different problem .
And there 's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine , but worldwide last year , almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection .
Especially in Africa where T.B. and HIV are strongly linked , there is a huge common problem .
Microscopy , the standard WHO procedure , reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability .
In Tanzania -- the numbers don 't lie -- 45 percent of people -- T.B. patients -- get diagnosed with T.B. before they die .
It means that , if you have T.B. , you have more chance that you won 't be detected , but will just die from T.B. secondary infections and so on .
And if , however , you are detected very early , diagnosed early , treatment can start , and even in HIV-positives , it makes sense .
You can actually cure T.B. , even in HIV-positives .
So in our common language , Dutch , the name for T.B.
is " tering , " which , etymologically , refers to the smell of tar .
Already the old Chinese and the Greek , Hippocrates , have actually published , documented , that T.B. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients .
So what we did is we collected some samples -- just as a way of testing -- from hospitals , trained rats on them and see if this works , and wonder , well , we can reach 89 percent sensitivity , 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row .
This is how it works , and really , this is a generic technology .
We 're talking now explosives , tuberculosis , but can you imagine , you can actually put anything under there .
So how does it work ?
You have a cassette with 10 samples .
You put these 10 samples at once in the cage .
An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent , so it goes extremely fast .
Here it 's already at the third sample .
This is a positive sample .
It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward .
And by doing so , very fast , we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive , which are negative .
Just as an indication , whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day , a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only .
A cage like this -- A cage like this -- provided that you have rats , and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats -- a cage like this , operating throughout the day , can process 1,680 samples .
Can you imagine the potential offspring applications -- environmental detection of pollutants in soils , customs applications , detection of illicit goods in containers and so on .
But let 's stick first to tuberculosis .
I just want to briefly highlight , the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in Dar es Salaam on a population of 500,000 people , where 15,000 reported to get a test done .
Microscopy for 1,800 patients .
And by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back , we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent .
Throughout last year , we 've been -- depending on which intervals you take -- we 've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in Dar es Salaam between 30 and 40 percent .
So this is really considerable .
Knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people , healthy people , per year , you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives .
At least our hero rats have saved lots of lives .
The way forward for us is now to standardize this technology .
And there are simple things like , for instance , we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds .
So , to standardize this .
Also , to standardize the pellets , the food rewards , and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people .
To conclude , there are also other applications at the horizon .
Here is a first prototype of our camera rat , which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on .
This is in a prototype stage .
We don 't have a working system here yet .
To conclude , I would actually like to say , you may think this is about rats , these projects , but in the end it is about people .
It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult , expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks , and doing that with a local resource , plenty available .
So something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you , whether they are environmental , technological , animal , or human .
And to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable work .
Thank you very much .
Amy Tan : Where does creativity hide ?
Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process , looking for hints of how hers evolved .
The Value of Nothing : Out of Nothing Comes Something .
That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B + .
What I 'm going to talk about : nothing out of something , and how we create .
And I 'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within , and to follow the TED commandments : that is , actually , something that creates a near-death experience , but near-death is good for creativity .
OK .
So , I also want to explain , because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie , or not true to universal creativity .
And I 've done it this way for half the audience , who is scientific .
When I say we , I don 't mean you , necessarily ; I mean me , and my right brain , my left brain and the one that 's in between that is the censor and tells me what I 'm saying is wrong .
And I 'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process , which includes a number of things that happened , actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I 'm creating something new .
And that includes nature , and nurture , and what I refer to as nightmares .
Now in the nature area , we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something , perhaps in our brains , some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect .
And some people would say that we 're born with it in some other means .
And others , like my mother , would say that I get my material from past lives .
Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of , you know , psychosis , or depression .
I do have to say , somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn 't really necessarily psychotic , that he might have had temporal lobe seizures , and that might have caused his spurt of creativity , and I don 't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain .
And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago , but it was during the time I was writing my last book , and some people say that book is quite different .
I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis : you know , who am I , why am I this particular person , why am I not black like everybody else ?
And sometimes you 're equipped with skills , but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity .
I used to draw . I thought I would be an artist .
And I had a miniature poodle .
And it wasn 't bad , but it wasn 't really creative .
Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way .
And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book .
And then , I also wasn 't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be , and you know , you look at those scores , and it wasn 't bad , but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words .
Also , one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma .
And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had , and that is that , you know , I had expectations placed on me .
That figure right there , by the way , figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old , and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age .
I have some ones that were long lasting : from the age of five to 15 , this was supposed to be my side occupation , and it led to a sense of failure .
But actually , there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14 .
And it was discovered that my brother , in 1967 , and then my father , six months later , had brain tumors .
And my mother believed that something had gone wrong , and she was gonna find out what it was , and she was gonna fix it .
My father was a Baptist minister , and he believed in miracles , and that God 's will would take care of that .
But , of course , they ended up dying , six months apart .
And after that , my mother believed that it was fate , or curses -- she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened .
Everything except randomness . She did not believe in randomness .
There was a reason for everything .
And one of the reasons , she thought , was that her mother , who had died when she was very young , was angry at her .
And so , I had this notion of death all around me , because my mother also believed that I would be next , and she would be next .
And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon , you begin to think very much about everything .
You become very creative , in a survival sense .
And this , then , led to my big questions .
And they 're the same ones that I have today .
And they are : why do things happen , and how do things happen ?
And the one my mother asked : how do I make things happen ?
It 's a wonderful way to look at these questions , when you write a story .
Because , after all , in that framework , between page one and 300 , you have to answer this question of why things happen , how things happen , in what order they happen . What are the influences ?
How do I , as the narrator , as the writer , also influence that ?
And it 's also one that , I think , many of our scientists have been asking .
It 's a kind of cosmology , and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe , as the creator of that universe .
And you see , there 's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen , trying to figure it out -- years and years , oftentimes .
So , when I look at creativity , I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress , my looking at associations in practically anything in life .
And I got a lot of them during what 's been going on throughout this conference , almost everything that 's been going on .
And so I 'm going to use , as the metaphor , this association : quantum mechanics , which I really don 't understand , but I 'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor .
So , in quantum mechanics , of course , you have dark energy and dark matter .
And it 's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen .
There 's a lot of unknown , and you often don 't know what it is except by its absence .
But when you make those associations , you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story , and what you 're finding is what matters . The meaning .
And that 's what I look for in my work , a personal meaning .
There is also the uncertainty principle , which is part of quantum mechanics , as I understand it .
And this happens constantly in the writing .
And there 's the terrible and dreaded observer effect , in which you 're looking for something , and you know , things are happening simultaneously , and you 're looking at it in a different way , and you 're trying to really look for the about-ness , or what is this story about . And if you try too hard , then you will only write the about .
You won 't discover anything .
And what you were supposed to find , what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way , is no longer there .
Now , I don 't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe , like many of our scientists have .
And so , I am going to just throw in string theory here , and just say that creative people are multidimensional , and there are 11 levels , I think , of anxiety .
And they all operate at the same time .
There is also a big question of ambiguity .
And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant .
And you don 't know what is operating , but something is operating there .
And ambiguity , to me , is very uncomfortable in my life , and I have it . Moral ambiguity .
It is constantly there . And , just as an example , this is one that recently came to me .
It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq . And she said , " Save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
A very famous Chinese saying , she said .
And that means because we went into Iraq , we should stay there until things were solved . You know , maybe even 100 years .
So , there was another one that I came across , and it 's " saving fish from drowning . "
And it 's what Buddhist fishermen say , because they 're not supposed to kill anything .
And they also have to make a living , and people need to be fed .
So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning , and unfortunately , in the process the fish die .
Now , what 's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors -- actually , one of them is my mother 's interpretation , and it is a famous Chinese saying , because she said it to me : " save a man from drowning , you are responsible to him for life . "
And it was a warning -- don 't get involved in other people 's business , or you 're going to get stuck .
OK . I think if somebody really was drowning , she 'd save them .
But , both of these sayings -- saving a fish from drowning , or saving a man from drowning -- to me they had to do with intentions .
And all of us in life , when we see a situation , we have a response .
And then we have intentions .
There 's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do , and then we do something .
And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been .
Maybe things go wrong . And so , after that , what are our responsibilities ?
What are we supposed to do ?
Do we stay in for life , or do we do something else and justify and say , well , my intentions were good , and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it ?
That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me , and led me to write a book called " Saving Fish From Drowning . "
I saw examples of that . Once I identified this question , it was all over the place .
I got these hints everywhere .
And then , in a way , I knew that they had always been there .
And then writing , that 's what happens . I get these hints , these clues , and I realize that they 've been obvious , and yet they have not been .
And what I need , in effect , is a focus .
And when I have the question , it is a focus .
And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question , and what happens is those particular things become relevant .
And it seems like it 's happening all the time .
You think there 's a sort of coincidence going on , a serendipity , in which you 're getting all this help from the universe .
And it may also be explained that now you have a focus .
And you are noticing it more often .
But you apply this .
You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions .
Your brother , who 's fallen in trouble , do you take care of him ?
Why or why not ?
It may be something that is perhaps more serious -- as I said , human rights in Burma .
I was thinking that I shouldn 't go because somebody said , if I did , it would show that I approved of the military regime there .
And then , after a while , I had to ask myself , " Why do we take on knowledge , why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us ? "
And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up , and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father , who was a Baptist minister .
So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions , and still didn 't know that if I went there , what the result of that would be , if I wrote a book -- and I just would have to face that later , when the time came .
We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of .
We come to this point and say , what do I as an individual do ?
Not all of us can go to Africa , or work at hospitals , so what do we do , if we have this moral response , this feeling ?
Also , I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at , and we talked about today , is genocide .
This leads to this question .
When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable , and I consider what my intentions should be , I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child -- and why am I here , and what is the meaning of my life , and what is my place in the universe ?
It seems so obvious , and yet it is not .
We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense , and yet it is also absolutely necessary .
In writing a story , it is the place where I begin .
Sometimes I get help from the universe , it seems .
My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book , because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know .
Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally , from an overdose of opium , while having too much of a good time , I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself , and that actually was the way it happened .
And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother .
There are also things , quite uncanny , which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book .
In this case , I was writing a story that included some kind of detail , period of history , a certain location .
And I needed to find something historically that would match that .
And I took down this book , and I -- first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting , and the time period , and the kind of character I needed -- was the Taiping rebellion , happening in the area near Guilin , outside of that , and a character who thought he was the son of God .
You wonder , are these things random chance ?
Well , what is random ? What is chance ? What is luck ?
What are things that you get from the universe that you can 't really explain ?
And that goes into the story , too .
These are the things I constantly think about from day to day .
Especially when good things happen , and , in particular , when bad things happen .
But I do think there 's a kind of serendipity , and I do want to know what those elements are , so I can thank them , and also try to find them in my life .
Because , again , I think that when I am aware of them , more of them happen .
Another chance encounter is when I went to a place -- I just was with some friends , and we drove randomly to a different place , and we ended up in this non-tourist location , a beautiful village , pristine .
And we walked three valleys beyond , and the third valley , there was something quite mysterious and ominous , a discomfort I felt . And then I knew that had to be [ the ] setting of my book .
And in writing one of the scenes , it happened in that third valley .
For some reason I wrote about cairns -- stacks of rocks -- that a man was building .
And I didn 't know exactly why I had it , but it was so vivid .
I got stuck , and a friend , when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs , that I said , sure . And about 45 minutes later , walking along the beach , I came across this .
And it was a man , a Chinese man , and he was stacking these things , not with glue , not with anything .
And I asked him , " How is it possible to do this ? "
And he said , " Well , I guess with everything in life , there 's a place of balance . "
And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point .
I had so many examples -- I have so many instances like this , when I 'm writing a story , and I cannot explain it .
Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things ?
Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain , like the cosmological constant ?
A big thing that I also think about is accidents .
And as I said , my mother did not believe in randomness .
What is the nature of accidents ?
And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are , outside of a court of law ?
I was able to see that in a firsthand way , when I went to beautiful Dong village , in Guizhou , the poorest province of China .
And I saw this beautiful place . I knew I wanted to come back .
And I had a chance to do that , when National Geographic asked me And I said yes , about this village of singing people , singing minority .
And they agreed , and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went , there was a terrible accident . A man , an old man , fell asleep , and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm .
60 homes were destroyed , and 40 were damaged .
Responsibility was assigned to the family .
The man 's sons were banished to live three kilometers away , in a cowshed .
And , of course , as Westerners , we say , " Well , it was an accident . That 's not fair .
It 's the son , not the father . "
When I go on a story , I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs .
It takes a while , but I have to let go of them and just go there , and be there .
And so I was there on three occasions , different seasons .
And I began to sense something different about the history , and what had happened before , and the nature of life in a very poor village , and what you find as your joys , and your rituals , your traditions , your links with other families . And I saw how this had a kind of justice , in its responsibility .
I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using , a ceremony they hadn 't used in about 29 years . And it was to send some men -- a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses .
Now you , as Westerners , and I , as Westerners , would say well , that 's superstition . But after being there for a while , and seeing the amazing things that happened , you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world , determining how things happen .
So I remained with them , and the more I wrote that story , the more I got into those beliefs , and I think that 's important for me -- to take on the beliefs , because that is where the story is real , and that is where I 'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life .
Years go by , of course , and the writing , it doesn 't happen instantly , as I 'm trying to convey it to you here at TED .
The book comes and it goes . When it arrives , it is no longer my book .
It is in the hands of readers , and they interpret it differently .
But I go back to this question of , how do I create something out of nothing ?
And how do I create my own life ?
And I think it is by questioning , and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths .
I believe in specifics , the specifics of story , and the past , the specifics of that past , and what is happening in the story at that point .
I also believe that in thinking about things -- my thinking about luck , and fate , and coincidences and accidents , God 's will , and the synchrony of mysterious forces -- I will come to some notion of what that is , how we create .
I have to think of my role . Where I am in the universe , and did somebody intend for me to be that way , or is it just something I came up with ?
And I also can find that by imagining fully , and becoming what is imagined -- and yet is in that real world , the fictional world .
And that is how I find particles of truth , not the absolute truth , or the whole truth .
And they have to be in all possibilities , including those I never considered before .
So , there are never complete answers .
Or rather , if there is an answer , it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything , and that is good , because then I will discover something new .
And if there is a partial answer , a more complete answer from me , it is to simply imagine .
And to imagine is to put myself in that story , until there was only -- there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating .
And that 's how I 've discovered that if I feel what is in the story -- in one story -- then I come the closest , I think , to knowing what compassion is , to feeling that compassion .
Because for everything , in that question of how things happen , it has to do with the feeling .
I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that .
We 've come to the end of the talk , and I will reveal what is in the bag , and it is the muse , and it is the things that transform in our lives , that are wonderful and stay with us .
There she is .
Thank you very much !
Andrew Fitzgerald : Adventures in Twitter fiction
In the 1930s , broadcast radio introduced an entirely new form of storytelling ; today , micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are changing the scene again . Andrew Fitzgerald takes a look at the short but fascinating history of new forms of creative experimentation in fiction and storytelling .
So in my free time outside of Twitter I experiment a little bit with telling stories online , experimenting with what we can do with new digital tools .
And in my job at Twitter , I actually spent a little bit of time working with authors and storytellers as well , helping to expand out the bounds of what people are experimenting with .
And I want to talk through some examples today of things that people have done that I think are really fascinating using flexible identity and anonymity on the web and blurring the lines between fact and fiction .
But I want to start and go back to the 1930s .
Long before a little thing called Twitter , radio brought us broadcasts and connected millions of people to single points of broadcast .
And from those single points emanated stories .
Some of them were familiar stories .
Some of them were new stories .
And for a while they were familiar formats , but then radio began to evolve its own unique formats specific to that medium .
Think about episodes that happened live on radio .
Combining the live play and the serialization of written fiction , you get this new format .
And the reason why I bring up radio is that I think radio is a great example of how a new medium defines new formats which then define new stories .
And of course , today , we have an entirely new medium to play with , which is this online world .
This is the map of verified users on Twitter and the connections between them .
There are thousands upon thousands of them .
Every single one of these points is its own broadcaster .
We 've gone to this world of many to many , where access to the tools is the only barrier to broadcasting .
And I think that we should start to see wildly new formats emerge as people learn how to tell stories in this new medium .
I actually believe that we are in a wide open frontier for creative experimentation , if you will , that we 've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it , and those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create .
I believe this starts with an evolution of existing methods .
The short story , for example , people are saying that the short story is experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to e-readers , digital marketplaces .
One writer , Hugh Howey , experimented with short stories on Amazon by releasing one very short story called " Wool . "
And he actually says that he didn 't intend for " Wool " to become a series , but that the audience loved the first story so much they demanded more , and so he gave them more .
He gave them " Wool 2 , " which was a little bit longer than the first one , " Wool 3 , " which was even longer , culminating in " Wool 5 , " which was a 60,000-word novel .
I think Howey was able to do all of this because he had the quick feedback system of e-books .
He was able to write and publish in relatively short order .
There was no mediator between him and the audience .
It was just him directly connected with his audience and building on the feedback and enthusiasm that they were giving him .
So this whole project was an experiment .
It started with the one short story , and I think the experimentation actually became a part of Howey 's format .
And that 's something that this medium enabled , was experimentation being a part of the format itself .
This is a short story by the author Jennifer Egan called " Black Box . "
It was originally written specifically with Twitter in mind .
Egan convinced The New Yorker to start a New Yorker fiction account from which they could tweet all of these lines that she created .
Now Twitter , of course , has a 140-character limit .
Egan mocked that up just writing manually in this storyboard sketchbook , used the physical space constraints of those storyboard squares to write each individual tweet , and those tweets ended up becoming over 600 of them that were serialized by The New Yorker .
Every night , at 8 p.m. , you could tune in to a short story from The New Yorker 's fiction account .
I think that 's pretty exciting : tune-in literary fiction .
The experience of Egan 's story , of course , like anything on Twitter , there were multiple ways to experience it .
You could scroll back through it , but interestingly , if you were watching it live , there was this suspense that built because the actual tweets , you had no control over when you would read them .
They were coming at a pretty regular clip , but as the story was building , normally , as a reader , you control how fast you move through a text , but in this case , The New Yorker did , and they were sending you bit by bit by bit , and you had this suspense of waiting for the next line .
Another great example of fiction and the short story on Twitter , Elliott Holt is an author who wrote a story called " Evidence . "
It began with this tweet : " On November 28 at 10 : 13 p.m. , a woman identified as Miranda Brown , 44 , of Brooklyn , fell to her death from the roof of a Manhattan hotel . "
It begins in Elliott 's voice , but then Elliott 's voice recedes , and we hear the voices of Elsa , Margot and Simon , characters that Elliott created on Twitter specifically to tell this story , a story from multiple perspectives leading up to this moment at 10 : 13 p.m.
when this woman falls to her death .
These three characters brought an authentic vision from multiple perspectives .
One reviewer called Elliott 's story " Twitter fiction done right , " because she did .
She captured that voice and she had multiple characters and it happened in real time .
Interestingly , though , it wasn 't just Twitter as a distribution mechanism .
It was also Twitter as a production mechanism .
Elliott told me later she wrote the whole thing with her thumbs .
She laid on the couch and just went back and forth between different characters tweeting out each line , line by line .
I think that this kind of spontaneous creation of what was coming out of the characters ' voices really lent an authenticity to the characters themselves , but also to this format that she had created of multiple perspectives in a single story on Twitter .
As you begin to play with flexible identity online , it gets even more interesting as you start to interact with the real world .
Things like Invisible Obama or the famous " binders full of women " that came up during the 2012 election cycle , or even the fan fiction universe of " West Wing " Twitter in which you have all of these accounts for every single one of the characters in " The West Wing , " including the bird that taps at Josh Lyman 's window in one single episode .
All of these are rapid iterations on a theme .
They are creative people experimenting with the bounds of what is possible in this medium .
You look at something like " West Wing " Twitter , in which you have these fictional characters that engage with the real world .
They comment on politics , they cry out against the evils of Congress .
Keep in mind , they 're all Democrats .
And they engage with the real world .
They respond to it .
So once you take flexible identity , anonymity , engagement with the real world , and you move beyond simple homage or parody and you put these tools to work in telling a story , that 's when things get really interesting .
So during the Chicago mayoral election there was a parody account .
It was Mayor Emanuel .
It gave you everything you wanted from Rahm Emanuel , particularly in the expletive department .
This foul-mouthed account followed the daily activities of the race , providing commentary as it went .
It followed all of the natural tropes of a good , solid Twitter parody account , but then started to get weird .
And as it progressed , it moved from this commentary to a multi-week , real-time science fiction epic in which your protagonist , Rahm Emanuel , engages in multi-dimensional travel on election day , which is -- it didn 't actually happen .
I double checked the newspapers .
And then , very interestingly , it came to an end .
This is something that doesn 't usually happen with a Twitter parody account .
It ended , a true narrative conclusion .
And so the author , Dan Sinker , who was a journalist , who was completely anonymous this whole time , I think Dan -- it made a lot of sense for him to turn this into a book , because it was a narrative format in the end , and I think that turning it into a book is representative of this idea that he had created something new that needed to be translated into previous formats .
One of my favorite examples of something that 's happening on Twitter right now , actually , is the very absurdist Crimer Show .
Crimer Show tells the story of a supercriminal and a hapless detective that face off in this exceptionally strange lingo , with all of the tropes of a television show .
Crimer Show 's creator has said that it is a parody of a popular type of show in the U.K. , but , man , is it weird .
And there are all these times where Crimer , the supercriminal , does all of these TV things .
He 's always taking off his sunglasses or turning to the camera , but these things just happen in text .
I think borrowing all of these tropes from television and additionally presenting each Crimer Show as an episode , spelled E-P-P-A-S-O-D , " eppasod , " presenting them as episodes really , it creates something new .
There is a new " eppasod " of Crimer Show on Twitter pretty much every day , and they 're archived that way .
And I think this is an interesting experiment in format .
Something totally new has been created here out of parodying something on television .
I think in nonfiction real-time storytelling , there are a lot of really excellent examples as well .
RealTimeWWII is an account that documents what was happening on this day 60 years ago in exceptional detail , as if you were reading the news reports from that day .
And the author Teju Cole has done a lot of experimentation with putting a literary twist on events of the news .
In this particular case , he 's talking about drone strikes .
I think that in both of these examples , you 're beginning to see ways in which people are telling stories with nonfiction content that can be built into new types of fictional storytelling .
So with real-time storytelling , blurring the lines between fact and fiction , the real world and the digital world , flexible identity , anonymity , these are all tools that we have accessible to us , and I think that they 're just the building blocks .
They are the bits that we use to create the structures , the frames , that then become our settlements on this wide open frontier for creative experimentation .
Thank you .
Rachelle Garniez : " La Vie en Rose "
Featuring the vocals and mischievous bell-playing of accordionist and singer Rachelle Garniez , the TED House Band -- led by Thomas Dolby on keyboard -- delivers this delightful rendition of the Edith Piaf standard " La Vie en Rose . "
Thomas Dolby : For pure pleasure please welcome the lovely , the delectable , and the bilingual Rachelle Garniez .
Rachelle Garniez : Quand il me prend dans ses bras Il me parle tout bas , Je vois la vie en rose . Il me dit des mots d 'amour , Des mots de tous les jours , Et ca me fait quelque chose . Il est entre dans mon coeur Une part de bonheur Dont je connais la cause . C 'est lui pour moi . Moi pour lui Dans la vie , Il me l 'a dit , l 'a jure [ pour ] la vie . Et des que je l 'apercois Alors je sens en moi Mon coeur qui bat
Catherine Bracy : Why good hackers make good citizens
Hacking is about more than mischief-making or political subversion . As Catherine Bracy describes in this spirited talk , it can be just as much a force for good as it is for evil . She spins through some inspiring civically-minded projects in Honolulu , Oakland and Mexico City — and makes a compelling case that we all have what it takes to get involved .
I 'm going to talk about hackers .
And the image that comes to your mind when I say that word is probably not of Benjamin Franklin , but I 'm going to explain to you why it should be .
The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous , or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity , or of an international rogue with a political agenda .
And mainstream culture has kind of fed this idea that hackers are people that we should be afraid of .
But like most things in technology and the technology world , hacking has equal power for good as it has for evil .
For every hacker that 's trying to steal your identity there 's one that 's building a tool that will help you find your loved ones after a disaster or to monitor environmental quality after an oil spill .
Hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system , and it is a deeply democratic activity .
It 's about critical thinking .
It 's about questioning existing ways of doing things .
It 's the idea that if you see a problem , you work to fix it , and not just complain about it .
And in many ways , hacking is what built America .
Betsy Ross was a hacker .
The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack .
And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs , hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy .
So if there 's one thing I want to leave you here with today , it 's that the next time you think about who a hacker is , you think not of this guy but of this guy , Benjamin Franklin , who was one of the greatest hackers of all time .
He was one of America 's most prolific inventors , though he famously never filed a patent , because he thought that all human knowledge should be freely available .
He brought us bifocals and the lightning rod , and of course there was his collaboration on the invention of American democracy .
And in Code For America , we really try to embody the spirit of Ben Franklin .
He was a tinkerer and a statesman whose conception of citizenship was always predicated on action .
He believed that government could be built by the people , and we call those people civic hackers .
So it 's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy , like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise , are the same values that underly the Internet .
And so it 's no surprise that many hackers are turning their attention to the problem of government .
But before I give you a few examples of what civic hacking looks like , I want to make clear that you don 't have to be a programmer to be a civic hacker .
You just have to believe that you can bring a 21st-century tool set to bear on the problems that government faces .
And we hear all the time from our community of civic hackers at Code for America that they didn 't understand how much nontechnical work actually went into civic hacking projects .
So keep that in mind .
All of you are potential civic hackers .
So what does civic hacking look like ?
Our team last year in Honolulu , which in this case was three full-time fellows who were doing a year of public service , were asked by the city to rebuild the website .
And it 's a massive thing of tens of thousands of pages which just wasn 't going to be possible in the few months that they had .
So instead , they decided to build a parallel site that better conformed to how citizens actually want to interact with information on a city website .
They 're looking for answers to questions , and they want to take action when they 're done , which is really hard to do from a site that looks like this .
So our team built Honolulu Answers , which is a super-simple search interface where you enter a search term or a question and get back plain language answers that drive a user towards action .
Now the site itself was easy enough to build , but the team was faced with the challenge of how they populate all of the content .
It would have taken the three of them a very long time , especially given that none of them are actually from Honolulu .
And so they did something that 's really radical , when you think about how government is used to working .
They asked citizens to write the content .
So you 've heard of a hack-a-thon .
They held a write-a-thon , where on one Saturday afternoon -- — Wild pigs are a huge problem in Honolulu , apparently .
In one Saturday afternoon , they were able to populate most of the content for most of the frequently asked questions , but more importantly than that , they created a new way for citizens to participate in their government .
Now , I think this is a really cool story in and of itself , but it gets more awesome .
On the National Day of Civic Hacking this past June in Oakland , where I live , the Code For America team in Oakland took the open source code base of Honolulu Answers and turned it into Oakland Answers , and again we held a write-a-thon where we took the most frequently asked questions and had citizens write the answers to them , and I got into the act .
I authored this answer , and a few others .
And I 'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation .
And by stitching together my small act with the thousands of other small acts of participation that we 're enabling through civic hacking , we think we can reenergize citizenship and restore trust in government .
At this point , you may be wondering what city officials think of all this .
They actually love it .
As most of you guys know , cities are being asked every day to do more with less , and they 're always looking for innovative solutions to entrenched problems .
So when you give citizens a way to participate beyond attending a town hall meeting , cities can actually capture the capacity in their communities to do the business of government .
Now I don 't want to leave the impression that civic hacking is just an American phenomenon .
It 's happening across the globe , and one of my favorite examples is from Mexico City , where earlier this year , the Mexico House of Representatives entered into a contract with a software development firm to build an app that legislators would use to track bills .
So this was just for the handful of legislators in the House .
And the contract was a two-year contract for 9.3 million dollars .
Now a lot of people were really angry about this , especially geeks who knew that 9.3 million dollars was an absolutely outrageous amount of money for what was a very simple app .
But instead of taking to the streets , they issued a challenge .
They asked programmers in Mexico to build something better and cheaper , and they offered a prize of 9,300 dollars -- 10,000 times cheaper than the government contract , and they gave the entrants 10 days .
And in those 10 days , they submitted 173 apps , five of which were presented to Congress and are still in the app store today .
And because of this action , that contract was vacated , and now this has sparked a movement in Mexico City which is home to one of our partners , Code for Mexico City .
And so what you see in all three of these places , in Honolulu and in Oakland and in Mexico City , are the elements that are at the core of civic hacking .
It 's citizens who saw things that could be working better and they decided to fix them , and through that work , they 're creating a 21st-century ecosystem of participation .
They 're creating a whole new set of ways for citizens to be involved , besides voting or signing a petition or protesting .
They can actually build government .
So back to our friend Ben Franklin , who , one of his lesser-known accomplishments was that in 1736 he founded the first volunteer firefighting company in Philadelphia , called a brigade .
And it 's because he and his friends noticed that the city was having trouble keeping up with all the fires that were happening in the city , so in true civic hacker fashion , they built a solution .
And we have our own brigades at Code for America working on the projects that I 've just described , and we want to ask you to follow in Ben Franklin 's footsteps and come join us .
We have 31 brigades in the U.S.
We are pleased to announce today that we 're opening up the brigade to international cities for the first time , starting with cities in Poland and Japan and Ireland .
You can find out if there 's a brigade where you live at brigade.codeforamerica.org , and if there 's not a brigade where you live , we will help you .
We 've created a tool kit which also lives at brigade.codeforamerica.org , and we will support you along the way .
Our goal is to create a global network of civic hackers who are innovating on the existing system in order to build tools that will solve entrenched problems , that will support local government , and that will empower citizens .
So please come hack with us .
Thank you .
Ananda Shankar Jayant : Fighting cancer with dance
Renowned classical Indian dancer Ananda Shankar Jayant was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 . She tells her personal story of not only facing the disease but dancing through it , and gives a performance revealing the metaphor of strength that helped her do it .
[ Sanskrit ] This is an ode to the mother goddess , that most of us in India learn when we are children .
I learned it when I was four at my mother 's knee .
That year she introduced me to dance , and thus began my tryst with classical dance .
Since then -- it 's been four decades now -- I 've trained with the best in the field , performed across the globe , taught young and old alike , created , collaborated , choreographed , and wove a rich tapestry of artistry , achievement and awards .
The crowning glory was in 2007 , when I received this country 's fourth highest civilian award , the Padma Shri , for my contribution to art .
But nothing , nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on the first of July 2008 .
I heard the word " carcinoma . "
Yes , breast cancer .
As I sat dumbstruck in my doctor 's office , I heard other words : " cancer , " " stage , " " grade . "
Until then , Cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend , stage was what I performed on , and grades were what I got in school .
That day , I realized I had an unwelcome , uninvited , new life partner .
As a dancer , I know the nine rasas or the navarasas : anger , valor , disgust , humor and fear .
I thought I knew what fear was .
That day , I learned what fear was .
Overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control , I shed copious tears and asked my dear husband , Jayant .
I said , " Is this it ? Is this the end of the road ?
Is this the end of my dance ? "
And he , the positive soul that he is , said , " No , this is just a hiatus , a hiatus during the treatment , and you 'll get back to doing what you do best . "
I realized then that I , who thought I had complete control of my life , had control of only three things : My thought , my mind -- the images that these thoughts created -- and the action that derived from it .
So here I was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you , with the enormity of the situation , wanting to go to a place of healing , health and happiness .
I wanted to go from where I was to where I wanted to be , for which I needed something .
I needed something that would pull me out of all this .
So I dried my tears , and I declared to the world at large ...
I said , " Cancer 's only one page in my life , and I will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life . "
I also declared to the world at large that I would ride it out , and I would not allow cancer to ride me .
But to go from where I was to where I wanted to be , I needed something .
I needed an anchor , an image , a peg to peg this process on , so that I could go from there .
And I found that in my dance , my dance , my strength , my energy , my passion , my very life breath .
But it wasn 't easy .
Believe me , it definitely wasn 't easy .
How do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days ?
How do you not despair when , with the body ravaged by chemotherapy , climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture , that to someone like me who could dance for three hours ?
How do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all ?
All I wanted to do was curl up and weep .
But I kept telling myself fear and tears are options I did not have .
So I would drag myself into my dance studio -- body , mind and spirit -- every day into my dance studio , and learn everything I learned when I was four , all over again , reworked , relearned , regrouped .
It was excruciatingly painful , but I did it .
Difficult .
I focused on my mudras , on the imagery of my dance , on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself .
And slowly , I moved out of that miserable state of mind .
But I needed something else .
I needed something to go that extra mile , and I found it in that metaphor which I had learned from my mother when I was four .
The metaphor of Mahishasura Mardhini , of Durga .
Durga , the mother goddess , the fearless one , created by the pantheon of Hindu gods .
Durga , resplendent , bedecked , beautiful , her 18 arms ready for warfare , as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy Mahishasur .
Durga , the epitome of creative feminine energy , or shakti .
Durga , the fearless one .
I made that image of Durga and her every attribute , her every nuance , my very own .
Powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training , I brought laser-sharp focus into my dance , laser-sharp focus to such an extent that I danced a few weeks after surgery .
I danced through chemo and radiation cycles , much to the dismay of my oncologist .
I danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule .
What I had done is I had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance .
Yes , cancer has just been one page in my life .
My story is a story of overcoming setbacks , obstacles and challenges that life throws at you .
My story is the power of thought .
My story is the power of choice .
It 's the power of focus .
It 's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you , so moves you , that something even like cancer becomes insignificant .
My story is the power of a metaphor .
It 's the power of an image .
Mine was that of Durga , Durga the fearless one .
She was also called Simhanandini , the one who rode the lion .
As I ride out , as I ride my own inner strength , my own inner resilience , armed as I am with what medication can provide and continue treatment , as I ride out into the battlefield of cancer , asking my rogue cells to behave , I want to be known not as a cancer survivor , but as a cancer conqueror .
I present to you an excerpt of that work " Simhanandini . "
Thomas Dolby : " Love Is a Loaded Pistol "
To write his first studio album in decades , " A Map of the Floating City , " Thomas Dolby has been working in the inspirational setting of a restored lifeboat . At TED2010 he premieres a gorgeous , evocative song from that album -- about one night with a legend . He 's backed by members of the modern string quartet Ethel .
I 've been playing TED for nearly a decade , and I 've very rarely played any new songs of my own .
And that was largely because there weren 't any .
So I 've been busy with a couple of projects , and one of them was this : The Nutmeg .
A 1930s ship 's lifeboat , which I 've been restoring in the garden of my beach house in England .
And , so now , when the polar ice caps melt , my recording studio will rise up like an ark , and I 'll float off into the drowned world like a character from a J.G. Ballard novel .
During the day , the Nutmeg collects energy from solar panels on the roof of the wheelhouse , and from a 450 watt turbine up the mast .
So that when it gets dark , I 've got plenty of power .
And I can light up the Nutmeg like a beacon .
And so I go in there until the early hours of the morning , and I work on new songs .
I 'd like to play to you guys , if you 're willing to be the first audience to hear it .
It 's about Billie Holiday .
And it appears that , some night in 1947 she left her physical space and was missing all night , until she reappeared in the morning .
But I know where she was .
She was with me on my lifeboat .
And she was hot .
Billie crept softly into my waking arms warm like a sip of sour mash Strange fruit for a sweet hunk of trash Panic at the stage door of Carnegie Hall " Famous Jazz Singer Gone AWOL " Must have left the building body and soul On a creaky piano stool tonight as the moon is my only witness She was breathing in my ear " This time it 's love " But love is a loaded pistol By daybreak she 's gone Over the frozen river , home Me and Johnny Walker See in the new age alone Stay with me again tonight Billie , time , time is a wily trickster Still an echo in my heart says , " This time it 's love "
Jeremy Gilley : One day of peace
Here 's a crazy idea : Persuade the world to try living in peace for just one day , every September 21 . In this energetic , honest talk , Jeremy Gilley tells the story of how this crazy idea became real -- real enough to help millions of kids in war-torn regions .
I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world .
I couldn 't understand the starvation , the destruction , the killing of innocent people .
Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do .
And when I was 12 , I became an actor .
I was bottom of the class . I haven 't got any qualifications .
I was told I was dyslexic .
In fact , I have got qualifications .
I got a D in pottery , which was the one thing that I did get -- which was useful , obviously .
And so concern is where all of this comes from .
And then , being an actor , I was doing these different kinds of things , and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn 't cutting it , that there surely had to be more .
And at that point , I read a book by Frank Barnaby , this wonderful nuclear physicist , and he said that media had a responsibility , that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward .
And that fascinated me , because I 'd been messing around with a camera most of my life .
And then I thought , well maybe I could do something .
Maybe I could become a filmmaker .
Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference .
Maybe there 's a little change I can get involved in .
So I started thinking about peace , and I was obviously , as I said to you , very much moved by these images , trying to make sense of that .
Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on ?
Because it 's obviously incredibly frightening .
But I realized that , having been messing around with structure as an actor , that a series of sound bites in itself wasn 't enough , that there needed to be a mountain to climb , there needed to be a journey that I had to take .
And if I took that journey , no matter whether it failed or succeeded , it would be completely irrelevant .
The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of -- is humankind fundamentally evil ?
Is the destruction of the world inevitable ? Should I have children ?
Is that a responsible thing to do ? Etc . , etc .
So I was thinking about peace , and then I was thinking , well where 's the starting point for peace ?
And that was when I had the idea .
There was no starting point for peace .
There was no day of global unity .
There was no day of intercultural cooperation .
There was no day when humanity came together , separate in all of those things and just shared it together -- that we 're in this together , and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated , then that might be the key to humanity 's survival .
That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces -- if we did it just for a day .
So obviously we didn 't have any money .
I was living at my mom 's place .
And we started writing letters to everybody .
You very quickly work out what is it that you 've got to do to fathom that out .
How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day , the 21st of September ?
And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad 's favorite number .
He was a prisoner of war .
He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki .
It poisoned his blood . He died when I was 11 .
So he was like my hero .
And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left , 23 came back , two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground .
And that 's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace .
So we began this journey , and we launched it in 1999 .
And we wrote to heads of state , their ambassadors , Nobel Peace laureates , NGOs , faiths , various organizations -- literally wrote to everybody .
And very quickly , some letters started coming back .
And we started to build this case .
And I remember the first letter .
One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama .
And of course we didn 't have the money ; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [ this mail ] .
A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying , " This is an amazing thing . Come and see me .
I 'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace . "
And we didn 't have money for the flight .
And I rang Sir Bob Ayling , who was CEO of BA at the time , and said , " Mate , we 've got this invitation .
Could you give me a flight ? Because we 're going to go see him . "
And of course , we went and saw him and it was amazing .
And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward .
And actually , let me go back to that slide , because when we launched it in 1999 -- this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence -- we invited thousands of people .
Well not thousands -- hundreds of people , lots of people -- all the press , because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day , a peace day .
And we invited everybody , and no press showed up .
There were 114 people there -- they were mostly my friends and family .
And that was kind of like the launch of this thing .
But it didn 't matter because we were documenting , and that was the thing .
For me , it was really about the process .
It wasn 't about the end result .
And that 's the beautiful thing about the camera .
They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword . I think the camera is .
And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually .
So anyway , we began the journey .
And here you see people like Mary Robinson , I went to see in Geneva .
I 'm cutting my hair , it 's getting short and long , because every time I saw Kofi Annan , I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it , and that was kind of what was going on .
Yeah , I 'm not worried about it now .
So Mary Robinson , she said to me , " Listen , this is an idea whose time has come . This must be created . "
Kofi Annan said , " This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground . "
The OAU at the time , led by Salim Ahmed Salim , said , " I must get the African countries involved . "
Dr. Oscar Arias , Nobel Peace laureate , president now of Costa Rica , said , " I 'll do everything that I can . "
So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States .
I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks , and so on and so on and so on -- while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense .
And then we were listening to the people . We were documenting everywhere .
76 countries in the last 12 years , I 've visited .
And I 've always spoken to women and children wherever I 've gone .
I 've recorded 44,000 young people .
I 've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts .
I 'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry , their art , their literature , their music , their sport , whatever it might be .
And we were listening to everybody .
And it was an incredibly thing , working with the U.N.
and working with NGOs and building this case .
I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day .
And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was , the better chance we had of creating this day .
And it was this stuff , this , where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened , it didn 't actually matter .
It didn 't matter if it didn 't create a day of peace .
The fact is that , if I tried and it didn 't work , then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite -- until , it was in Somalia , picking up that young girl .
And this young child who 'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic , and that young boy who was a child soldier , who told me he 'd killed people -- he was about 12 -- these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop .
And that actually , at that moment something happened to me , which obviously made me go , " I 'm going to document .
If this is the only film that I ever make , I 'm going to document until this becomes a reality . "
Because we 've got to stop , we 've got to do something where we unite -- separate from all the politics and religion that , as a young person , is confusing me .
I don 't know how to get involved in that process .
And then on the seventh of September , I was invited to New York .
The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly , with 54 co-sponsors , the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day , the 21st of September , as a fixed calendar date , and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world .
Yeah , but there were hundreds of individuals , obviously , who made that a reality .
And thank you to all of them .
That was an incredible moment .
I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen .
And as I mentioned , when it started , we were at the Globe , and there was no press .
And now I was thinking , " Well , the press it really going to hear this story . "
And suddenly , we started to institutionalize this day .
Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference .
And it was 8 : 00 AM when I stood there .
And I was waiting for him to come down , and I knew that he was on his way .
And obviously he never came down . The statement was never made .
The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence .
And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives , there and then subsequently all over the world .
It never happened .
And I remember thinking , " This is exactly why , actually , we have to work even harder .
And we have to make this day work .
It 's been created ; nobody knows .
But we have to continue this journey , and we have to tell people , and we have to prove it can work . "
And I left New York freaked , but actually empowered .
And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did , then maybe we wouldn 't see things like that .
I remember putting that film out and going to cynics .
I was showing the film , and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film -- that it 's just a day of peace , it doesn 't mean anything .
It 's not going to work ; you 're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan ; the Taliban won 't listen , etc . , etc .
It 's just symbolism .
And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways , because it couldn 't not work .
I 'd spoken in Somalia , Burundi , Gaza , the West Bank , India , Sri Lanka , Congo , wherever it was , and they 'd all tell me , " If you can create a window of opportunity , we can move aid , we can vaccinate children .
Children can lead their projects .
They can unite . They can come together . If people would stop , lives will be saved . "
That 's what I 'd heard .
And I 'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about .
And so I went back to the United Nations .
I decided that I 'd continue filming and make another movie .
And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years .
We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system , governments and NGOs , trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it , see if we could make it possible .
And after lots and lots of meetings obviously , I 'm delighted that this man , Ahmad Fawzi , one of my heroes and mentors really , he managed to get UNICEF involved .
And UNICEF , God bless them , they said , " Okay , we 'll have a go . "
And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan .
It was historical . Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society , etc . , etc . , etc . ?
And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it , and I was thinking , " This is it . This is the possibility of it maybe working .
But even if it doesn 't , at least the door is open and there 's a chance . "
And so I went back to London , and I went and saw this chap , Jude Law .
And I saw him because he was an actor , I was an actor , I had a connection to him , because we needed to get to the press , we needed this attraction , we needed the media to be involved .
Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there 'd be more -- when we got into certain areas , maybe there would be more people interested .
And maybe we 'd be helped financially a little bit more , which had been desperately difficult .
I won 't go into that .
So Jude said , " Okay , I 'll do some statements for you . "
While I was filming these statements , he said to me , " Where are you going next ? "
I said , " I 'm going to go to Afghanistan . " He said , " Really ? "
And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest .
So I said to him , " Do you want to come with me ?
It 'd be really interesting if you came .
It would help and bring attention .
And that attention would help leverage the situation , as well as all of the other sides of it . "
I think there 's a number of pillars to success .
One is you 've got to have a great idea .
The other is you 've got to have a constituency , you 've got to have finance , and you 've got to be able to raise awareness .
And actually I could never raise awareness by myself , no matter what I 'd achieved .
So these guys were absolutely crucial .
So he said yes , and we found ourselves in Afghanistan .
It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there , I was talking to various people , and they were saying to me , " You 've got to get everybody involved here .
You can 't just expect it to work . You have to get out and work . "
And we did , and we traveled around , and we spoke to elders , we spoke to doctors , we spoke to nurses , we held press conferences , we went out with soldiers , we sat down with ISAF , we sat down with NATO , we sat down with the U.K. government .
I mean , we basically sat down with everybody -- in and out of schools with ministers of education , holding these press conferences , which of course , now were loaded with press , everybody was there .
There was an interest in what was going on .
This amazing woman , Fatima Gailani , was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians .
And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere .
And she was really crucial in getting the message in .
And then we went home . We 'd sort of done it .
We had to wait now and see what happened .
And I got home , and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban .
And that letter basically said , " We 'll observe this day .
We will observe this day .
We see it as a window of opportunity .
And we will not engage . We 're not going to engage . "
And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn 't be kidnapped or killed .
And then suddenly , I obviously knew at this point , there was a chance .
And days later , 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping .
And like the General Assembly , obviously the most wonderful , wonderful moment .
And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back .
We put it into Dari and Pashto . We put it in the local dialects .
We went back to Afghanistan , because the next year was coming , and we wanted to support .
But more importantly , we wanted to go back , because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes .
They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it , etc . , etc . -- and they made it real .
And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say , " Look , you guys made this possible . And thank you very much . "
And we gave the film over .
Obviously it was shown , and it was amazing .
And then that year , that year , 2008 , this ISAF statement from Kabul , Afghanistan , September 17th : " General Stanley McChrystal , commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan , announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September . "
They were saying they would stop .
And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that , in Afghanistan , because of this work , the violence was down by 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least .
And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything .
And I remember being stuck in New York , this time because of the volcano , which was obviously much less harmful .
And I was there thinking about what was going on .
And I kept thinking about this 70 percent .
70 percent reduction in violence -- in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn 't do .
And that made me think that , if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan , then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere .
We have to go for a global truce .
We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce , go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities , both domestically and internationally , ever recorded .
That 's exactly what we must do .
And on the 21st of September this year , we 're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process , to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities .
And we will utilize all kinds of things -- have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website , sign the petition .
And it 's in the six official languages of the United Nations .
And we 'll globally link with government , inter-government , non-government , education , unions , sports .
And you can see the education box there .
We 've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce .
And obviously the life-saving is increased , the concepts help .
Linking up with the Olympics -- I went and saw Seb Coe . I said , " London 2012 is about truce .
Ultimately , that 's what it 's about . "
Why don 't we all team up ? Why don 't we bring truce to life ?
Why don 't you support the process of the largest ever global truce ?
We 'll make a new film about this process .
We 'll utilize sport and football .
On the Day of Peace , there 's thousands of football matches all played , from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be .
So , utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action .
And ultimately , we have to try that .
We have to work together .
And when I stand here in front of all of you , and the people who will watch these things , I 'm excited , on behalf of everybody I 've met , that there is a possibility that our world could unite , that we could come together as one , that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues , brought about by individuals .
I was with Brahimi , Ambassador Brahimi .
I think he 's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics -- in Afghanistan , in Iraq .
He 's an amazing man .
And I sat with him a few weeks ago .
And I said to him , " Mr. Brahimi , is this nuts , going for a global truce ?
Is this possible ? Is it really possible that we could do this ? "
He said , " It 's absolutely possible . "
I said , " What would you do ?
Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system ? "
He said , " No , I 'd talk to the individuals . "
It 's all about the individuals .
It 's all about you and me .
It 's all about partnerships .
It 's about your constituencies ; it 's about your businesses .
Because together , by working together , I seriously think we can start to change things .
And there 's a wonderful man sitting in this audience , and I don 't know where he is , who said to me a few days ago -- because I did a little rehearsal -- and he said , " I 've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares , and one of them is white . "
And it then made me think about a glass of water , which is clear .
If you put one drop , one drop of something , in that water , it 'll change it forever .
By working together , we can create peace one day .
Thank you TED . Thank you .
Thank you .
Thanks a lot .
Thank you very much . Thank you .
Norman Spack : How I help transgender teens become who they want to be
Puberty is an awkward time for just about everybody , but for transgender teens it can be a nightmare , as they grow overnight into bodies they aren 't comfortable with . In a heartfelt talk , endocrinologist Norman Spack tells a personal story of how he became one of the few doctors in the US to treat minors with hormone replacement therapy . By staving off the effects of puberty , Spack gives trans teens the time they need .
I want you all to think about the third word that was ever said about you , or if you were delivering , about the person you were delivering .
And you can all mouth it if you want or say it out loud .
It was , the first two were , " It 's a ... "
Well , it shows you that I also deal with issues where there 's not certainty of whether it 's a girl or a boy , so the mixed answer was very appropriate .
Of course , now the answer often comes not at birth but at the ultrasound , unless the prospective parents choose to be surprised like we all were .
But I want you to think about what it is that leads to that statement on the third word , because the third word is a description of your sex , and by that I mean , made by a description of your genitals .
Now , as a pediatric endocrinologist , I used to be very , very involved , and still somewhat am , in cases in which there are mismatches in the externals or between the externals and the internals , and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex .
But there is nothing that is definable at the time of birth that would define you , and when I talk about definition , I 'm talking about your sexual orientation .
We don 't say , " It 's a gay boy . "
" A lesbian girl . "
Those situations don 't really define themselves more until the second decade of life .
Nor do they define your gender , which , as different from your anatomic sex , describes your self-concept .
Do you see yourself as a male or female or somewhere in the spectrum in between ?
That sometimes shows up in the first decade of life , but it can be very confusing for parents because it is quite normative for children to act in a cross-gender play and way , and that in fact there are studies that show that even 80 percent of children who act in that fashion will not persist in wanting to be the opposite gender at the time when puberty begins .
But at the time that puberty begins , that means between about age 10 to 12 in girls , 12 to 14 in boys , with breast budding or two to three times increase in the gonads in the case of genetic males , by that particular point , the child who says they are in the absolute wrong body is almost certain to be transgender and is extremely unlikely to change those feelings , no matter how anybody tries reparative therapy or any other noxious things .
Now this is relatively rare , so I had relatively little personal experience with this , and my experience was more typical only because I had an adolescent practice .
And I saw someone age 24 , went through Harvard , genetically female , went through Harvard with three male roommates who knew the whole story , a registrar who always listed his name on course lists as a male name , and came to me after graduating saying , " Help me .
I know you know a lot of endocrinology . "
And indeed I 've treated a lot of people who were born without gonads .
This wasn 't rocket science .
But I made a deal with him : I 'll treat you if you teach me .
And so he did .
And what an education I got from taking care of all the members of his support group .
And then I got really confused , because I thought it was relatively easy at that age to just give people the hormones of the gender in which they were affirming , but then my patient married , and he married a woman who had been born as a male , had married as a male , had two children , then went through a transition into female , and now this delightful female was attached to my male patient , in fact got legally married because they showed up as a man and a woman , and who knew ?
Right ?
And while I was confused about , does this make so-and-so gay ?
Does this make so-and-so straight ?
I was getting sexual orientation confused with gender identity .
And my patient said to me , " Look , look , look .
If you just think of the following , you 'll get it right : Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with ; gender identity is who you go to bed as . "
And I subsequently learned from the many adults -- I took care of about 200 adults — I learned from them that if I didn 't look , peek as to who their partner was in the waiting room , I would never be able to guess better than chance whether they were gay , straight , bi , or asexual in their affirmed gender .
In other words , one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other .
And the data show it .
Now , as I took care of the 200 adults , I found it extremely painful .
These people were -- many of them had to give up so much of their lives .
Sometimes their parents would reject them , siblings , their own children , and then their divorcing spouse would forbid them from seeing their children .
It was so awful , but why did they do it at 40 and 50 ?
Because they felt they had to affirm themselves before they would kill themselves .
And indeed , the rate of suicide among untreated transgendered people is among the highest in the world .
So what to do ?
I was intrigued in going to a conference in Holland , where they are experts in this , and saw the most remarkable thing .
They were treating young adolescents after giving them the most intense psychometric testing of gender , and they were treating them by blocking the puberty that they didn 't want .
Because basically , kids look about the same , each sex , until they go through puberty , at which point , if you feel you 're in the wrong sex , you feel like Pinocchio becoming a donkey .
The fantasy that you had that your body will change to be who you want it to be with puberty actually is nullified by the puberty you get .
And they fall apart .
So that 's why putting the puberty on hold — Why on hold ? You can 't just give them the opposite hormones that young .
They 'll end up stunted in growth , and you think you can have a meaningful conversation about the fertility effects of such treatment with a 10-year-old girl , a 12-year-old boy ?
So this buys time in the diagnostic process for four or five years so that they can work it out , they can have more and more testing , they can live without feeling their bodies are running away from them .
And then , in a program they call 12-16-18 , around age 12 is when they give the blocking hormones , and then at age 16 with retesting , they requalify .
Now remember , the blocking hormones are reversible , but when you give the hormones of the opposite sex , you now start spouting breasts and facial hair and voice , depending on what you 're using , and those effects are permanent or require surgery to remove or electrolysis , and you can never really affect the voice .
So this is serious , and this is 15- , 16-year-old stuff .
And then at 18 , they 're eligible for surgery , and while there 's no good surgery for females to males genitally , the male-to-female surgery has fooled gynecologists .
That 's how good it can be .
So I looked at how the patients were doing , and I looked at patients who just looked like everybody else , except they were pubertally delayed .
But once they gave them the hormones consistent with the gender they affirm , they look beautiful .
They look normal . They had normal heights .
in a crowd .
So at that point , I decided I 'm going to do this .
This is really where the pediatric endocrine realm comes in , in kids age 10-12 , 10-14 , that 's pediatric endocrinology .
So I brought some kids in , and this now became the standard of care , and Children 's Hospital was behind it .
By my showing them the kids before and after , people who never got treated and people who wished to be treated , and pictures of the Dutch , they came to me and said , " You 've got to do something for these kids . "
Well , where were these kids before ?
They were out there suffering , is where they were .
So we started a program in 2007 .
It became the first program of its kind -- but it 's really of the Dutch kind -- in North America .
And since then , we have 160 patients .
Did they come from Afghanistan ? No .
They came , 75 percent of them came from within 150 miles of Boston .
And some came from England .
Jackie had been abused in the Midlands , in England .
She 's 12 years old there , she was living as a girl but she was being beaten up .
It was a horror show .
They had to homeschool her .
And the reason the British were coming was because they would not treat anybody with anything under age 16 , which means they were consigning them to an adult body , no matter what happened , even if they tested them well .
Jackie , on top of it , was , by virtue of skeletal markings , destined to be six feet five .
And yet , she had just begun a male puberty .
Well , I did something a little bit innovative , because I do know hormones , and that estrogen is much more potent in closing epiphyses , the growth plates , and stopping growth , than testosterone is .
So we blocked her testosterone with a blocking hormone , but we added estrogen , not at 16 , but at 13 .
And so here she is at 16 , on the left .
And on her 16th birthday , she went to Thailand , where they would do a genital plastic surgery .
They will do it at 18 now .
And she ended up 5 ' 11 " but more than that , she has normal breast size , because by blocking testosterone , every one of our patients has normal breast size if they get to us at the appropriate age , not too late .
And on the far right , there she is .
She went public , semifinalist in the Miss England competition .
The judges debated as to , can they do this ?
Can they make her — And one of them quipped , I 'm told , " But she has more natural self than half the other contestants . "
And some of them have been rearranged a little bit , but it 's all her DNA .
And she 's become a remarkable spokeswoman .
And she was offered contracts as a model , at which point she teased me , where she said , " You know , I might have had a better chance as a model if you 'd made me six feet one . "
Go figure .
So this picture , I think , says it all .
It really says it all .
These are Nicole and brother Jonas , identical twin boys , and proven to be identical , in which Nicole had affirmed herself as a girl as early as age three .
At age seven , they changed her name , and came to me at the very beginnings of a male puberty .
Now you can imagine looking at Jonas at only 14 that male puberty is early in this family , because he looks more like a 16-year-old , but it makes the point all the more why you have to be conscious of where the patient is .
Nicole has done pubertal blockade in here , and Jonas is just going -- biologic control .
This is what Nicole would look like if we weren 't doing what we were doing .
He 's got a prominent Adam 's apple .
He 's got angular bones to the face , a mustache , and you can see there 's a height difference because he 's gone through a growth spurt that she won 't get .
Now Nicole is on estrogen .
She has a bit of a form to her .
This family went to the White House last spring because of their work in overturning an anti-discrimination , there was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms , and it looked like the bill was going to pass , and that would have been a problem , but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said , " I can do this .
If they see me , they 'll understand why I 'm no threat in the lady 's room , but I can be threatened in the men 's room . "
And then they finally got it .
So where do we go from here ?
Well , we still have a ways to go in terms of anti-discrimination .
There are only 17 states that have an anti-discrimination law against discrimination in housing , employment , public accommodation , only 17 states , and five of them are in New England .
We need less expensive drugs .
They cost a fortune .
And we need to get this condition out of the DSM .
It is as much a psychiatric disease as being gay and lesbian , and that went out the window in 1973 , and the whole world changed .
And this isn 't going to break anybody 's budget .
This is not that common .
But the risks of not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide , but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society .
Thank you .
Melinda Gates : What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola
In her talk , Melinda Gates makes a provocative case for nonprofits taking a cue from corporations such as Coca-Cola , whose plugged-in , global network of marketers and distributors ensures that every remote village wants -- and can get -- a Coke . Why shouldn 't this work for condoms , sanitation , vaccinations too ? & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world , and I do that quite regularly .
And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places , I 'm really struck by the things that we have in common .
They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful , to be healthy , and to have a successful life .
But I also see lots of poverty , and it 's quite jarring , both in the scale and the scope of it .
My first trip in India , I was in a person 's home where they had dirt floors , no running water , no electricity , and that 's really what I see all over the world .
So in short , I 'm startled by all the things that they don 't have .
But I am surprised by one thing that they do have : Coca-Cola .
Coke is everywhere .
In fact , when I travel to the developing world , Coke feels ubiquitous .
And so when I come back from these trips , and I 'm thinking about development , and I 'm flying home and I 'm thinking , " We 're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations , " you know , Coke 's success kind of stops and makes you wonder : how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places ?
If they can do that , why can 't governments and NGOs do the same thing ?
And I 'm not the first person to ask this question .
But I think , as a community , we still have a lot to learn .
It 's staggering , if you think about Coca-Cola .
They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day .
That 's like every man , woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week .
So why does this matter ?
Well , if we 're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we 're set as a world , we need to learn from the innovators , and those innovators come from every single sector .
I feel that , if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous , we can apply those lessons then for the public good .
Coke 's success is relevant , because if we can analyze it , learn from it , then we can save lives .
So that 's why I took a bit of time to study Coke .
And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola .
They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product .
They tap into local entrepreneurial talent , and they do incredible marketing .
So let 's start with the data .
Now Coke has a very clear bottom line -- they report to a set of shareholders , they have to turn a profit .
So they take the data , and they use it to measure progress .
They have this very continuous feedback loop .
They learn something , they put it back into the product , they put it back into the market .
They have a whole team called " Knowledge and Insight . "
It 's a lot like other consumer companies .
So if you 're running Namibia for Coca-Cola , and you have a 107 constituencies , you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite , Fanta or Coke was sold , whether it was a corner store , a supermarket or a pushcart .
So if sales start to drop , then the person can identify the problem and address the issue .
Let 's contrast that for a minute to development .
In development , the evaluation comes at the very end of the project .
I 've sat in a lot of those meetings , and by then , it is way too late to use the data .
I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark .
They said , " You roll the ball , you hear some pins go down .
It 's dark , you can 't see which one goes down until the lights come on , and then you an see your impact . "
Real-time data turns on the lights .
So what 's the second thing that Coke 's good at ?
They 're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent .
Coke 's been in Africa since 1928 , but most of the time they couldn 't reach the distant markets , because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world , which was a large truck rolling down the street .
And in Africa , the remote places , it 's hard to find a good road .
But Coke noticed something -- they noticed that local people were taking the product , buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places .
And so they took a bit of time to learn about that .
And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs , giving them small loans .
They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers , and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people , who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product .
There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa .
In Tanzania and Uganda , they represent 90 percent of Coke 's sales .
Let 's look at the development side .
What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke ?
Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well , because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places , their neighbors , and they know what motivates them to make change .
I think a great example of this is Ethiopia 's new health extension program .
The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic , they were over a day 's travel away from a health clinic .
So if you 're in an emergency situation -- or if you 're a mom about to deliver a baby -- forget it , to get to the health care center .
They decided that wasn 't good enough , so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this , and they adapted it for Ethiopia .
And in 2003 , the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country .
They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people .
In just five years , their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people .
Now , think about how this can change people 's lives .
Health extension workers can help with so many things , whether it 's family planning , prenatal care , immunizations for the children , or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery .
That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia , and it 's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008 .
In Ethiopia , there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program .
So what 's the next step for Ethiopia ?
Well , they 're already starting talk about this .
They 're starting to talk about , " How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas ?
How do you incent them based on the impact that they 're getting out in those remote villages ? "
That 's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people 's potential .
The third component of Coke 's success is marketing .
Ultimately , Coke 's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola .
Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow .
So , they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing , and what 's the secret to their marketing ?
Well , it 's aspirational .
It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live .
So even though it 's a global company , they take a very local approach .
Coke 's global campaign slogan is " Open Happiness . "
But they localize it .
And they don 't just guess what makes people happy ; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life .
And in South Africa , they associate happiness with seriti or community respect .
Now , that played itself out in the World Cup campaign .
Let 's listen to this song that Coke created for it , " Wavin ' Flag " by a Somali hip hop artist .
K 'Naan : Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh Give you freedom , give you fire Give you reason , take you higher See the champions take the field now You define us , make us feel proud In the streets our heads are lifted As we lose our inhibition Celebration , it 's around us Every nation , all around us Melinda French Gates : It feels pretty good , right ?
Well , they didn 't stop there -- they localized it into 18 different languages .
And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries .
It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood , " I 'd Like to Teach the World to Sing , " that also went number one on the pop charts .
Both songs have something in common : that same appeal of celebration and unity .
So how does health and development market ?
Well , it 's based on avoidance , not aspirations .
I 'm sure you 've heard some of these messages .
" Use a condom , don 't get AIDS . "
" Wash you hands , you might not get diarrhea . "
It doesn 't sound anything like " Wavin ' Flag " to me .
And I think we make a fundamental mistake -- we make an assumption , that we think that , if people need something , we don 't have to make them want that .
And I think that 's a mistake .
And there 's some indications around the world that this is starting to change .
One example is sanitation .
We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation .
But there 's a solution : you build a toilet .
But what we 're finding around the world , over and over again , is , if you build a toilet and you leave it there , it doesn 't get used .
People reuse it for a slab for their home .
They sometimes store grain in it .
I 've even seen it used for a chicken coop .
But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea ?
Well , you work with the community .
You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn 't be done in the village , and they agree to that .
But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern , trendy convenience .
One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship .
And it works -- look at these headlines .
I 'm not kidding .
Women are refusing to marry men without toilets .
No loo , no " I do . "
Now , it 's not just a funny headline -- it 's innovative . It 's an innovative marketing campaign .
But more importantly , it saves lives .
Take a look at this -- this is a room full of young men and my husband , Bill .
And can you guess what the young men are waiting for ?
They 're waiting to be circumcised .
Can you you believe that ?
We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men .
And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation , I have to admit , Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying , " But who 's going to volunteer for this procedure ? "
But it turns out the men do , because they 're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it , and the men also believe it improves their sex life .
So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development , we can change communities and we can change whole nations .
Well , why is all of this so important ?
So let 's talk about what happens when this all comes together , when you tie the three things together .
And polio , I think , is one of the most powerful examples .
We 've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years .
So if you look back to 1988 , there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year .
In 2009 , we 're down to 1,600 cases .
Well how did that happen ?
Let 's look at a country like India .
They have over a billion people in this country , but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis , and clinicians , a huge reporting system in chemists .
They have two and a half million vaccinators .
But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you .
Let me tell you the story of Shriram , an 18 month boy in Bihar , a northern state in India .
This year on August 8th , he felt paralysis and on the 13th , his parents took him to the doctor .
On August 14th and 15th , they took a stool sample , and by the 25th of August , it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio .
By August 30th , a genetic test was done , and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had .
Now it could have come from one of two places .
It could have come from Nepal , just to the north , across the border , or from Jharkhand , a state just to the south .
Luckily , the genetic testing proved that , in fact , this strand came north , because , had it come from the south , it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission .
So many more people would have been affected .
So what 's the endgame ?
Well on September 4th , there was a huge mop-up campaign , which is what you do in polio .
They went out and where Shriram lives , they vaccinated two million people .
So in less than a month , we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program .
And I 'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio .
That 's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading , and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands ; they can save lives .
Now one of the challenges in polio , still , is marketing , but it might not be what you think .
It 's not the marketing on the ground .
It 's not telling the parents , " If you see paralysis , take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated . "
We have a problem with marketing in the donor community .
The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years , but we 're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren 't willing to fund polio any longer .
So by next summer , we 're sighted to run out of money on polio .
So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we 're about to run short of money .
And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational , if we could focus as a community on how far we 've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease , we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us .
And if we could do that , we could stop vaccinating everybody , worldwide , in all of our countries for polio .
And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet .
And we are so close .
And this victory is so possible .
So if Coke 's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness , I 'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms .
To me , that is deep happiness .
And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector , then in the future we make together , that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola .
Thank you .
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin : Stunning data visualization in the AlloSphere
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the AlloSphere , a new way to see , hear and interpret scientific data . Dive into the brain , feel electron spin , hear the music of the elements ... and detect previously unseen patterns that could lead to new discoveries .
The AlloSphere : it 's a three-story metal sphere in an echo-free chamber .
Think of the AlloSphere as a large , dynamically varying digital microscope that 's connected to a supercomputer .
20 researchers can stand on a bridge suspended inside of the sphere , and be completely immersed in their data .
Imagine if a team of physicists could stand inside of an atom and watch and hear electrons spin .
Imagine if a group of sculptors could be inside of a lattice of atoms and sculpt with their material .
Imagine if a team of surgeons could fly into the brain , as though it was a world , and see tissues as landscapes , and hear blood density levels as music .
This is some of the research that you 're going to see that we 're undertaking at the AlloSphere .
But first a little bit about this group of artists , scientists , and engineers that are working together .
I 'm a composer , orchestrally-trained , and the inventor of the AlloSphere .
With my visual artist colleagues , we map complex mathematical algorithms that unfold in time and space , visually and sonically .
Our scientist colleagues are finding new patterns in the information .
And our engineering colleagues are making one of the largest dynamically varying computers in the world for this kind of data exploration .
I 'm going to fly you into five research projects in the AlloSphere that are going to take you from biological macroscopic data all the way down to electron spin .
This first project is called the AlloBrain .
And it 's our attempt to quantify beauty by finding which regions of the brain are interactive while witnessing something beautiful .
You 're flying through the cortex of my colleague 's brain .
Our narrative here is real fMRI data that 's mapped visually and sonically .
The brain now a world that we can fly through and interact with .
You see 12 intelligent computer agents , the little rectangles that are flying in the brain with you .
They 're mining blood density levels .
And they 're reporting them back to you sonically .
Higher density levels mean more activity in that point of the brain .
They 're actually singing these densities to you with higher pitches mapped to higher densities .
We 're now going to move from real biological data to biogenerative algorithms that create artificial nature in our next artistic and scientific installation .
In this artistic and scientific installation , biogenerative algorithms are helping us to understand self-generation and growth : very important for simulation in the nanoscaled sciences .
For artists , we 're making new worlds that we can uncover and explore .
These generative algorithms grow over time , and they interact and communicate as a swarm of insects .
Our researchers are interacting with this data by injecting bacterial code , which are computer programs , that allow these creatures to grow over time .
We 're going to move now from the biological and the macroscopic world , down into the atomic world , as we fly into a lattice of atoms .
This is real AFM -- Atomic Force Microscope -- data from my colleagues in the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center .
They 've discovered a new bond , a new material for transparent solar cells .
We 're flying through 2,000 lattice of atoms -- oxygen , hydrogen and zinc .
You view the bond in the triangle .
It 's four blue zinc atoms bonding with one white hydrogen atom .
You see the electron flow with the streamlines we as artists have generated for the scientists .
This is allowing them to find the bonding nodes in any lattice of atoms .
We think it makes a beautiful structural art .
The sound that you 're hearing are the actual emission spectrums of these atoms .
We 've mapped them into the audio domain , so they 're singing to you .
Oxygen , hydrogen and zinc have their own signature .
We 're going to actually move even further down as we go from this lattice of atoms to one single hydrogen atom .
We 're working with our physicist colleagues that have given us the mathematical calculations of the n-dimensional Schrödinger equation in time .
What you 're seeing here right now is a superposition of an electron in the lower three orbitals of a hydrogen atom .
You 're actually hearing and seeing the electron flow with the lines .
The white dots are the probability wave that will show you where the electron is in any given point of time and space in this particular three-orbital configuration .
In a minute we 're going to move to a two-orbital configuration , and you 're going to notice a pulsing .
And you 're going to hear an undulation between the sound .
This is actually a light emitter .
As the sound starts to pulse and contract , our physicists can tell when a photon is going to be emitted .
They 're starting to find new mathematical structures in these calculations .
And they 're understanding more about quantum mathematics .
We 're going to move even further down , and go to one single electron spin .
This will be the final project that I show you .
Our colleagues in the Center for Quantum Computation and Spintronics are actually measuring with their lasers decoherence in a single electron spin .
We 've taken this information and we 've made a mathematical model out of it .
You 're actually seeing and hearing quantum information flow .
This is very important for the next step in simulating quantum computers and information technology .
So these brief examples that I 've shown you give you an idea of the kind of work that we 're doing at the University of California , Santa Barbara , to bring together , arts , science and engineering into a new age of math , science and art .
We hope that all of you will come to see the AlloSphere .
Inspire us to think of new ways that we can use this unique instrument that we 've created at Santa Barbara .
Thank you very much .
Ben Saunders : Why bother leaving the house ?
Explorer Ben Saunders wants you to go outside ! Not because it 's always pleasant and happy , but because that 's where the meat of life is , " the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days . " Saunders ' next outdoor excursion ? To try to be the first in the world to walk from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again .
I essentially drag sledges for a living , so it doesn 't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually , but I 'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year : " Philosophically , does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving ?
After all , if it is being done somewhere by someone , and we can participate virtually , then why bother leaving the house ? "
I 'm usually introduced as a polar explorer .
I 'm not sure that 's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles , but I 've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle , so I get out of the house a fair bit .
And in my nature , I guess , I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things , and it 's that dichotomy , the gulf between ideas and action that I 'm going to try and explore briefly .
The pithiest answer to the question " why ? "
that 's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap , the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back , second from the left , George Lee Mallory . Many of you will know his name .
In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt . Everest .
He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest , more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary .
No one knows if he got to the top . It 's still a mystery .
But he was credited with coining the phrase , " Because it 's there . "
Now I 'm not actually sure that he did say that .
There 's very little evidence to suggest it , but what he did say is actually far nicer , and again , I 've printed this . I 'm going to read it out .
" The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this : What is the use of climbing Mt . Everest ?
And my answer must at once be , it is no use .
There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever .
Oh , we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes , and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation , but otherwise nothing will come of it .
We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver , and not a gem , nor any coal or iron .
We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food . So it is no use .
If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it , that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward , then you won 't see why we go .
What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy , and joy , after all , is the end of life .
We don 't live to eat and make money .
We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life .
That is what life means , and that is what life is for . "
Mallory 's argument that leaving the house , embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun , however , doesn 't tally that neatly with my own experience .
The furthest I 've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004 . I still don 't know exactly what came over me , but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean .
I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole , and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada .
No one had ever done this . I was 26 at the time .
A lot of experts were saying it was impossible , and my mum certainly wasn 't very keen on the idea .
The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point , the edge of the pack ice , the coast of the Arctic Ocean , took about five hours , and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up , rather than just coming down , you 'll appreciate the sense of apprehension , as I sat in a helicopter thundering north , and the sense , I think if anything , of impending doom .
I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into .
There was a bit of fun , a bit of joy .
I was 26 . I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge . I had my skis ready to go , I had a satellite phone , a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear .
I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter .
We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn , and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger . Part of me felt quite proud of myself , but mostly I was just utterly terrified .
And that journey lasted 10 weeks , 72 days .
I didn 't see anyone else . We took this photo next to the helicopter .
Beyond that , I didn 't see anyone for 10 weeks .
The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea , so I 'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean .
NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began .
I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies , about 400 pounds . The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35 . Minus 50 was the coldest .
So again , there wasn 't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had .
One of the magical things about this journey , however , is that because I 'm walking over the sea , over this floating , drifting , shifting crust of ice that 's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it 's an environment that 's in a constant state of flux .
The ice is always moving , breaking up , drifting around , refreezing , so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me . No one else will ever , could ever , possibly see the views , the vistas , that I saw for 10 weeks .
And that , I guess , is probably the finest argument for leaving the house .
I can try to tell you what it was like , but you 'll never know what it was like , and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely , I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles , it was cold , nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day , the more words fall short , and I 'm unable to do it justice .
And it seems to me , therefore , that the doing , you know , to try to experience , to engage , to endeavor , rather than to watch and to wonder , that 's where the real meat of life is to be found , the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days .
And I would add a cautionary note here , however .
In my experience , there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what 's humanly possible .
Now I don 't just mean in the field of daft macho Edwardian style derring-do , but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer , there is something addictive about this , and in my case , I think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit .
I can 't explain quite how good it is until you 've tried it , but it has the capacity to burn up all the money I can get my hands on , to ruin every relationship I 've ever had , so be careful what you wish for .
Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain , and I wonder if that 's the case whether there 's something in the challenge itself , in the endeavor , and particularly in the big , unfinished , chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us , and in my experience that 's certainly the case .
There is one unfinished challenge that 's been calling out to me for most of my adult life .
Many of you will know the story .
This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team .
Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole .
No one knew what was there . It was utterly unmapped at the time . We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica .
Scott , as many of you will know , was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team , who used dogs and dogsleds . Scott 's team were on foot , all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges , and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there , I 'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized .
All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey .
There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it 's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure .
When I talk about Antarctica , people often say , " Hasn 't , you know , that 's interesting , hasn 't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike ? "
Or , " That 's nice . You know , my grandmother 's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year . You know .
Is there a chance you 'll see her there ? "
But Scott 's journey remains unfinished .
No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again .
It is , arguably , the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration , and it seemed to me high time , given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels , that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job .
So that 's precisely what I 'm setting out to do .
This time next year , in October , I 'm leading a team of three .
It will take us about four months to make this return journey .
That 's the scale . The red line is obviously halfway to the pole .
We have to turn around and come back again .
I 'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting . You 'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before .
And it 'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question , " Why ? "
And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been . There certainly isn 't much call for explorers nowadays . My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option .
If I wanted to know , for example , how many stars were in the Milky Way , how old those giant heads on Easter Island were , most of you could find that out right now without even standing up .
And yet , if I 've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places , it is that true , real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge , from stepping away from what 's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown .
In life , we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to , and I think metaphorically speaking , at least , we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often , if only we could summon up the courage .
I certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what 's outside .
Thank you very much .
Tal Golesworthy : How I repaired my own heart
Tal Golesworthy is a boiler engineer -- he knows piping and plumbing . When he needed surgery to repair a life-threatening problem with his aorta , he mixed his engineering skills with his doctors ' medical knowledge to design a better repair job .
I 'm a process engineer .
I know all about boilers and incinerators and fabric filters and cyclones and things like that , but I also have Marfan syndrome .
This is an inherited disorder .
And in 1992 I participated in a genetic study and found to my horror , as you can see from the slide , that my ascending aorta was not in the normal range , the green line at the bottom .
Everyone in here will be between 3.2 and 3.6 cm .
I was already up at 4.4 .
And as you can see , my aorta dilated progressively , and I got closer and closer to the point where surgery was going to be necessary .
The surgery on offer was pretty gruesome -- anesthetize you , open your chest , put you on an artificial heart and lung machine , drop your body temperature to about 18 centigrade , stop your heart , cut the aorta out , replace it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta , and , most importantly , commit you to a lifetime of anticoagulation therapy , normally warfarin .
The thought of the surgery was not attractive .
The thought of the warfarin was really quite frightening .
So I said to myself , I 'm an engineer , I 'm in R and D , this is just a plumbing problem .
I can do this . I can change this .
So I set out to change the entire treatment for aortic dilation .
The project aim is really quite simple .
The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is it lacks some tensile strength .
So the possibility exists to simply externally wrap the pipe .
And it would remain stable and operate quite happily .
If your high-pressure hose pipe , or your high-pressure hydraulic line , bulges a little , you just wrap some tape around the outside of it .
It really is that simple in concept , though not in execution .
The great advantage of an external support for me was that I could retain all of my own bits , all of my own endothelium and valves , and not need any anticoagulation therapy .
So where do we start ?
Well this is a sagittal slice through me .
You could see in the middle that device , that little structure , squeezing out .
Now that 's a left ventricle pushing blood up through the aortic valve -- you can see two of the leaflets of the aortic valve working there -- up into the ascending aorta .
And it 's that part , the ascending aorta , which dilates and ultimately bursts , which , of course , is fatal .
We started by organizing image acquisition from magnetic resonance imaging machines and CT imaging machines from which to make a model of the patient 's aorta .
This is a model of my aorta .
I 've got a real one in my pocket , if anyone would like to look at it and play with it .
You can see , it 's quite a complex structure .
It has a funny trilobal shape at the bottom , which contains the aortic valve .
It then comes back into a round form and then tapers and curves off .
So it 's quite a difficult structure to produce .
This , like I say , is a CAD model of me , and this is one of the later CAD models .
We went through an iterative process of producing better and better models .
When we produced that model we turn it into a solid plastic model , as you can see , using a rapid prototyping technique , another engineering technique .
We then use that former to manufacture a perfectly bespoke porous textile mesh , which takes the shape of the former and perfectly fits the aorta .
So this is absolutely personalized medicine at its best really .
Every patient we do has an absolutely bespoke implant .
Once you 've made it , the installation 's quite easy .
John Pepper , bless his heart , professor of cardiothoracic surgery -- never done it before in his life -- he put the first one in , didn 't like it , took it out , put the second one in .
Happy , away I went .
Four and a half hours on the table and everything was done .
So the surgical implantation actually was the easiest part .
If you compare our new treatment to the existing alternative , the so-called composite aortic root graft , there are one of two startling comparisons , which I 'm sure will be clear to all of you .
Two hours to install one of our devices compared to six hours for the existing treatment .
The existing treatment requires , as I 've said , the heart and lung bypass machine and it requires a total body cooling .
We don 't need any of that ; we work on a beating heart .
He opens you up , he accesses the aorta while your heart is beating , all at the right temperature .
No breaking into your circulatory system .
So it really is great .
But for me , absolutely the best point is there is no anticoagulation therapy required .
I don 't take any drugs at all other than recreational ones that I would choose to take .
And in fact , if you speak to people who are on long-term warfarin , it is a serious compromise to your quality of life .
And even worse , it inevitably foreshortens your life .
Likewise , if you have the artificial valve option , you 're committed to antibiotic therapy whenever you have any intrusive medical treatment at all .
Even trips to the dentist require that you take antibiotics , in case you get an internal infection on the valve .
Again , I don 't have any of that , so I 'm entirely free .
My aorta is fixed , I haven 't got to worry about it , which is a rebirth for me .
Back to the theme of the presentation : In multidisciplinary research , how on earth does a process engineer used to working with boilers end up producing a medical device which transforms his own life ?
Well the answer to that is a multidisciplinary team .
This is a list of the core team .
And as you can see , there are not only two principal technical disciplines there , medicine and engineering , but also there are various specialists from within those two disciplines .
John Pepper there was the cardiac surgeon who did the actual work on me , but everyone else there had to contribute one way or another .
Raad Mohiaddin , medical radiologist : We had to get good quality images from which to make the CAD model .
Warren Thornton , who still does all our CAD models for us , had to write a bespoke piece of CAD code to produce this model from this really rather difficult input data set .
There are some barriers to this though . There are some problems with it .
Jargon is a big one .
I would think no one in this room understands those four first jargon points there .
The engineers amongst you will recognize rapid prototyping and CAD .
The medics amongst you , if there are any , will recognize the first two .
But there will be nobody else in this room that understands all of those four words .
Taking the jargon out was very important to ensure that everyone in the team understood exactly what was meant when a particular phrase was used .
Our disciplinary conventions were funny as well .
We took a lot of horizontal slice images through me , produced those slices and then used those to build a CAD model .
And the very first CAD model we made , the surgeons were playing with the plastic model , couldn 't quite figure it out .
And then we realized that it was actually a mirror image of the real aorta .
And it was a mirror image because in the real world we always look down on plans , plans of houses or streets or maps .
In the medical world they look up at plans .
So the horizontal images were all an inversion .
So one needs to be careful with disciplinary conventions .
Everyone needs to understand what is assumed and what is not assumed .
Institutional barriers were another serious headache in the project .
The Brompton Hospital was taken over by Imperial College 's School of Medicine , and there are some seriously bad relationship problems between the two organizations .
I was working with Imperial and the Brompton , and this generated some serious problems with the project , really problems that shouldn 't exist .
Research and ethics committee : If you want to do anything new in surgery , you have to get a license from your local research and ethics .
I 'm sure it 's the same in Poland .
There will be some form of equivalent , which licenses new types of surgery .
We didn 't only have the bureaucratic problems associated with that , was also had professional jealousies .
There were people on the research and ethics committee who really didn 't want to see John Pepper succeed again , because he 's so successful .
And they made extra problems for us .
Bureaucratic problems : Ultimately when you have a new treatment you have to have a guidance note going out for all of the hospitals in the country .
In the U.K. we have the National Institute for Clinical Excellence , NICE .
You 'll have an equivalent in Poland , no doubt .
We had to get past the NICE problem .
We now have a great clinical guidance out on the Net .
So any of the hospitals interested can come along , read the NICE report get in touch with us and then get doing it themselves .
Funding barriers : Another big area to be concerned with .
A big problem with understanding one of those perspectives : When we first approached one of the big U.K. charitable organizations that funds this kind of stuff , what they were looking at was essentially an engineering proposal .
They didn 't understand it ; they were doctors , they were next to God .
It must be rubbish . They binned it .
So in the end I went to private investors and I just gave up on it .
But most R and D is going to be institutionally funded , by the Polish Academy of Sciences or the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council or whatever , and you need to get past those people .
Jargon is a huge problem when you 're trying to work across disciplines , because in an engineering world , we all understand CAD and R.P. -- not in the medical world .
I suppose ultimately the funding bureaucrats have really got to get their act together .
They 've really got to start talking to each other , and they 've got to exercise a bit of imagination , if that 's not too much to ask -- which it probably is .
I 've coined a phrase " obstructive conservatism . "
So many people in the medical world don 't want to change , particularly not when some jumped-up engineer has come along with the answer .
They don 't want to change .
They simply want to do whatever they 've done before .
And in fact , there are many surgeons in the U.K.
still waiting for one of our patients so that they can say , " Ah , I told you that was no good . "
We 've actually got 30 patients .
I 'm at seven and a half years .
We 've got 90 post-op patient years between us , and we haven 't had a single problem .
And still , there are people in the U.K. saying , " Yeah , that external aortic root , yeah , it 'll never work , you know . "
It really is a problem . It really is a problem .
I 'm sure everyone in this room has come across arrogance amongst medics , doctors , surgeons at some point .
The middle point is simply the way that the doctors protect themselves .
" Yeah , well of course , I 'm looking after my patient . "
I think it 's not good , but there you are , that 's my view .
Egos , of course , again , a huge problem If you 're working in a multidisciplinary team , you 've got to give your guys the benefit of the doubt .
You 've got to express support for them .
Tom Treasure , professor of cardiothoracic surgery : incredible guy .
Dead easy to give him respect .
Him giving me respect ? Slightly different .
That 's all the bad news .
The good news is the benefits are stonkingly huge .
Translate that one . I bet they can 't .
When you have a group of people who have had a different professional training , a different professional experience , they not only have a different knowledge base , but they have a different perspective on everything .
And if you can bring those guys together and you can get them talking and understanding each other , the results can be spectacular .
You can find novel solutions , really novel solutions , that have never been looked at before very , very quickly and easily .
You can shortcut huge amounts of work simply by using the extended knowledge base you have .
And as a result , it 's an entirely different use of the technology and the knowledge around you .
The result of all this is that you can get incredibly quick progress on incredibly small budgets .
I 'm so embarrassed at how cheap it was to get from my idea to me being implanted that I 'm not prepared to tell you what it cost .
Because I suspect there are absolutely standard surgical treatments probably in the USA which cost more for a one-off patient than the cost of us getting from my dream to my reality .
That 's all I want to say , and I 've got three minutes left .
So Heather 's going to like me .
If you have any questions , please come up and talk to me later on .
It would be a pleasure to speak with you . Many thanks .
Mark Bittman : What 's wrong with what we eat
In this fiery and funny talk , New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what 's wrong with the way we eat now , and why it 's putting the entire planet at risk .
I write about food . I write about cooking .
I take it quite seriously , but I 'm here to talk about something that 's become very important to me in the last year or two .
It is about food , but it 's not about cooking , per se .
I 'm going to start with this picture of a beautiful cow .
I 'm not a vegetarian -- this is the old Nixon line , right ?
But I still think that this -- -- may be this year 's version of this .
Now , that is only a little bit hyperbolic .
And why do I say it ?
Because only once before has the fate of individual people and the fate of all of humanity been so intertwined .
There was the bomb , and there 's now .
And where we go from here is going to determine not only the quality and the length of our individual lives , but whether , if we could see the Earth a century from now , we 'd recognize it .
It 's a holocaust of a different kind , and hiding under our desks isn 't going to help .
Start with the notion that global warming is not only real , but dangerous .
Since every scientist in the world now believes this , and even President Bush has seen the light , or pretends to , we can take this is a given .
Then hear this , please .
After energy production , livestock is the second-highest contributor to atmosphere-altering gases .
Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas is generated by livestock production -- more than transportation .
Now , you can make all the jokes you want about cow farts , but methane is 20 times more poisonous than CO2 , and it 's not just methane .
Livestock is also one of the biggest culprits in land degradation , air and water pollution , water shortages and loss of biodiversity .
There 's more .
Like half the antibiotics in this country are not administered to people , but to animals .
But lists like this become kind of numbing , so let me just say this : if you 're a progressive , if you 're driving a Prius , or you 're shopping green , or you 're looking for organic , you should probably be a semi-vegetarian .
Now , I 'm no more anti-cattle than I am anti-atom , but it 's all in the way we use these things .
There 's another piece of the puzzle , which Ann Cooper talked about beautifully yesterday , and one you already know .
There 's no question , none , that so-called lifestyle diseases -- diabetes , heart disease , stroke , some cancers -- are diseases that are far more prevalent here than anywhere in the rest of the world .
And that 's the direct result of eating a Western diet .
Our demand for meat , dairy and refined carbohydrates -- the world consumes one billion cans or bottles of Coke a day -- our demand for these things , not our need , our want , drives us to consume way more calories than are good for us .
And those calories are in foods that cause , not prevent , disease .
Now global warming was unforeseen .
We didn 't know that pollution did more than cause bad visibility .
Maybe a few lung diseases here and there , but , you know , that 's not such a big deal .
The current health crisis , however , is a little more the work of the evil empire .
We were told , we were assured , that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate , the healthier we 'd be .
No . Overconsumption of animals , and of course , junk food , is the problem , along with our paltry consumption of plants .
Now , there 's no time to get into the benefits of eating plants here , but the evidence is that plants -- and I want to make this clear -- it 's not the ingredients in plants , it 's the plants .
It 's not the beta-carotene , it 's the carrot .
The evidence is very clear that plants promote health .
This evidence is overwhelming at this point .
You eat more plants , you eat less other stuff , you live longer .
Not bad .
But back to animals and junk food .
What do they have in common ?
One : we don 't need either of them for health .
We don 't need animal products , and we certainly don 't need white bread or Coke .
Two : both have been marketed heavily , creating unnatural demand .
We 're not born craving Whoppers or Skittles .
Three : their production has been supported by government agencies at the expense of a more health- and Earth-friendly diet .
Now , let 's imagine a parallel .
Let 's pretend that our government supported an oil-based economy , while discouraging more sustainable forms of energy , knowing all the while that the result would be pollution , war and rising costs .
Incredible , isn 't it ?
Yet they do that .
And they do this here . It 's the same deal .
The sad thing is , when it comes to diet , is that even when well-intentioned Feds try to do right by us , they fail .
Either they 're outvoted by puppets of agribusiness , or they are puppets of agribusiness .
So , when the USDA finally acknowledged that it was plants , rather than animals , that made people healthy , they encouraged us , via their overly simplistic food pyramid , to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day , along with more carbs .
What they didn 't tell us is that some carbs are better than others , and that plants and whole grains should be supplanting eating junk food .
But industry lobbyists would never let that happen .
And guess what ?
Half the people who developed the food pyramid have ties to agribusiness .
So , instead of substituting plants for animals , our swollen appetites simply became larger , and the most dangerous aspects of them remained unchanged .
So-called low-fat diets , so-called low-carb diets -- these are not solutions .
But with lots of intelligent people focusing on whether food is organic or local , or whether we 're being nice to animals , the most important issues just aren 't being addressed .
Now , don 't get me wrong .
I like animals , and I don 't think it 's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches .
But there 's no way to treat animals well , when you 're killing 10 billion of them a year .
That 's our number . 10 billion .
If you strung all of them -- chickens , cows , pigs and lambs -- to the moon , they 'd go there and back five times , there and back .
Now , my math 's a little shaky , but this is pretty good , and it depends whether a pig is four feet long or five feet long , but you get the idea .
That 's just the United States .
And with our hyper-consumption of those animals producing greenhouse gases and heart disease , kindness might just be a bit of a red herring .
Let 's get the numbers of the animals we 're killing for eating down , and then we 'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left .
Another red herring might be exemplified by the word " locavore , " which was just named word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary .
Seriously .
And locavore , for those of you who don 't know , is someone who eats only locally grown food -- which is fine if you live in California , but for the rest of us it 's a bit of a sad joke .
Between the official story -- the food pyramid -- and the hip locavore vision , you have two versions of how to improve our eating .
They both get it wrong , though .
The first at least is populist , and the second is elitist .
How we got to this place is the history of food in the United States .
And I 'm going to go through that , at least the last hundred years or so , very quickly right now .
A hundred years ago , guess what ?
Everyone was a locavore : even New York had pig farms nearby , and shipping food all over the place was a ridiculous notion .
Every family had a cook , usually a mom .
And those moms bought and prepared food .
It was like your romantic vision of Europe .
Margarine didn 't exist .
In fact , when margarine was invented , several states passed laws declaring that it had to be dyed pink , so we 'd all know that it was a fake .
There was no snack food , and until the ' 20s , until Clarence Birdseye came along , there was no frozen food .
There were no restaurant chains .
There were neighborhood restaurants run by local people , but none of them would think to open another one .
Eating ethnic was unheard of unless you were ethnic .
And fancy food was entirely French .
As an aside , those of you who remember Dan Aykroyd in the 1970s doing Julia Child imitations can see where he got the idea of stabbing himself from this fabulous slide .
Back in those days , before even Julia , back in those days , there was no philosophy of food .
You just ate .
You didn 't claim to be anything .
There was no marketing . There were no national brands .
Vitamins had not been invented .
There were no health claims , at least not federally sanctioned ones .
Fats , carbs , proteins -- they weren 't bad or good , they were food .
You ate food .
Hardly anything contained more than one ingredient , because it was an ingredient .
The cornflake hadn 't been invented .
The Pop-Tart , the Pringle , Cheez Whiz , none of that stuff .
Goldfish swam .
It 's hard to imagine . People grew food , and they ate food .
And again , everyone ate local .
In New York , an orange was a common Christmas present , because it came all the way from Florida .
From the ' 30s on , road systems expanded , trucks took the place of railroads , fresh food began to travel more .
Oranges became common in New York .
The South and West became agricultural hubs , and in other parts of the country , suburbs took over farmland .
The effects of this are well known . They are everywhere .
And the death of family farms is part of this puzzle , as is almost everything from the demise of the real community to the challenge of finding a good tomato , even in summer .
Eventually , California produced too much food to ship fresh , so it became critical to market canned and frozen foods .
Thus arrived convenience .
It was sold to proto-feminist housewives as a way to cut down on housework .
Now , I know everybody over the age of , like 45 -- their mouths are watering at this point .
If we had a slide of Salisbury steak , even more so , right ?
But this may have cut down on housework , but it cut down on the variety of food we ate as well .
Many of us grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional raw carrot or maybe an odd lettuce salad .
I , for one -- and I 'm not kidding -- didn 't eat real spinach or broccoli till I was 19 .
Who needed it though ? Meat was everywhere .
What could be easier , more filling or healthier for your family than broiling a steak ?
But by then cattle were already raised unnaturally .
Rather than spending their lives eating grass , for which their stomachs were designed , they were forced to eat soy and corn .
They have trouble digesting those grains , of course , but that wasn 't a problem for producers .
New drugs kept them healthy .
Well , they kept them alive .
Healthy was another story .
Thanks to farm subsidies , the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress , soy , corn and cattle became king .
And chicken soon joined them on the throne .
It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began , the thing we 're only realizing just now .
Listen to this , between 1950 and 2000 , the world 's population doubled .
Meat consumption increased five-fold .
Now , someone had to eat all that stuff , so we got fast food .
And this took care of the situation resoundingly .
Home cooking remained the norm , but its quality was down the tubes .
There were fewer meals with home-cooked breads , desserts and soups , because all of them could be bought at any store .
Not that they were any good , but they were there .
Most moms cooked like mine : a piece of broiled meat , a quickly made salad with bottled dressing , canned soup , canned fruit salad .
Maybe baked or mashed potatoes , or perhaps the stupidest food ever , Minute Rice .
For dessert , store-bought ice cream or cookies .
My mom is not here , so I can say this now .
This kind of cooking drove me to learn how to cook for myself .
It wasn 't all bad .
By the ' 70s , forward-thinking people began to recognize the value of local ingredients .
We tended gardens , we became interested in organic food , we knew or we were vegetarians .
We weren 't all hippies , either .
Some of us were eating in good restaurants and learning how to cook well .
Meanwhile , food production had become industrial . Industrial .
Perhaps because it was being produced rationally , as if it were plastic , food gained magical or poisonous powers , or both .
Many people became fat-phobic .
Others worshiped broccoli , as if it were God-like .
But mostly they didn 't eat broccoli .
Instead they were sold on yogurt , yogurt being almost as good as broccoli .
Except , in reality , the way the industry sold yogurt was to convert it to something much more akin to ice cream .
Similarly , let 's look at a granola bar .
You think that that might be healthy food , but in fact , if you look at the ingredient list , it 's closer in form to a Snickers than it is to oatmeal .
Sadly , it was at this time that the family dinner was put in a coma , if not actually killed -- the beginning of the heyday of value-added food , which contained as many soy and corn products as could be crammed into it .
Think of the frozen chicken nugget .
The chicken is fed corn , and then its meat is ground up , and mixed with more corn products to add bulk and binder , and then it 's fried in corn oil .
All you do is nuke it . What could be better ?
And zapped horribly , pathetically .
By the ' 70s , home cooking was in such a sad state that the high fat and spice contents of foods like McNuggets and Hot Pockets -- and we all have our favorites , actually -- made this stuff more appealing than the bland things that people were serving at home .
At the same time , masses of women were entering the workforce , and cooking simply wasn 't important enough for men to share the burden .
So now , you 've got your pizza nights , you 've got your microwave nights , you 've got your grazing nights , you 've got your fend-for-yourself nights and so on .
Leading the way -- what 's leading the way ?
Meat , junk food , cheese : the very stuff that will kill you .
So , now we clamor for organic food .
That 's good .
And as evidence that things can actually change , you can now find organic food in supermarkets , and even in fast-food outlets .
But organic food isn 't the answer either , at least not the way it 's currently defined .
Let me pose you a question .
Can farm-raised salmon be organic , when its feed has nothing to do with its natural diet , even if the feed itself is supposedly organic , and the fish themselves are packed tightly in pens , swimming in their own filth ?
And if that salmon 's from Chile , and it 's killed down there and then flown 5,000 miles , whatever , dumping how much carbon into the atmosphere ?
I don 't know .
Packed in Styrofoam , of course , before landing somewhere in the United States , and then being trucked a few hundred more miles .
This may be organic in letter , but it 's surely not organic in spirit .
Now here is where we all meet .
The locavores , the organivores , the vegetarians , the vegans , the gourmets and those of us who are just plain interested in good food .
Even though we 've come to this from different points , we all have to act on our knowledge to change the way that everyone thinks about food .
We need to start acting .
And this is not only an issue of social justice , as Ann Cooper said -- and , of course , she 's completely right -- but it 's also one of global survival .
Which bring me full circle and points directly to the core issue , the overproduction and overconsumption of meat and junk food .
As I said , 18 percent of greenhouse gases are attributed to livestock production .
How much livestock do you need to produce this ?
70 percent of the agricultural land on Earth , 30 percent of the Earth 's land surface is directly or indirectly devoted to raising the animals we 'll eat .
And this amount is predicted to double in the next 40 years or so .
And if the numbers coming in from China are anything like what they look like now , it 's not going to be 40 years .
There is no good reason for eating as much meat as we do .
And I say this as a man who has eaten a fair share of corned beef in his life .
The most common argument is that we need nutrients -- even though we eat , on average , twice as much protein as even the industry-obsessed USDA recommends .
But listen : experts who are serious about disease reduction recommend that adults eat just over half a pound of meat per week .
What do you think we eat per day ? Half a pound .
But don 't we need meat to be big and strong ?
Isn 't meat eating essential to health ?
Won 't a diet heavy in fruit and vegetables turn us into godless , sissy , liberals ?
Some of us might think that would be a good thing .
But , no , even if we were all steroid-filled football players , the answer is no .
In fact , there 's no diet on Earth that meets basic nutritional needs that won 't promote growth , and many will make you much healthier than ours does .
We don 't eat animal products for sufficient nutrition , we eat them to have an odd form of malnutrition , and it 's killing us .
To suggest that in the interests of personal and human health Americans eat 50 percent less meat -- it 's not enough of a cut , but it 's a start .
It would seem absurd , but that 's exactly what should happen , and what progressive people , forward-thinking people should be doing and advocating , along with the corresponding increase in the consumption of plants .
I 've been writing about food more or less omnivorously -- one might say indiscriminately -- for about 30 years .
During that time , I 've eaten and recommended eating just about everything .
I 'll never stop eating animals , I 'm sure , but I do think that for the benefit of everyone , the time has come to stop raising them industrially and stop eating them thoughtlessly .
Ann Cooper 's right .
The USDA is not our ally here .
We have to take matters into our own hands , not only by advocating for a better diet for everyone -- and that 's the hard part -- but by improving our own .
And that happens to be quite easy .
Less meat , less junk , more plants .
It 's a simple formula : eat food .
Eat real food .
We can continue to enjoy our food , and we continue to eat well , and we can eat even better .
We can continue the search for the ingredients we love , and we can continue to spin yarns about our favorite meals .
We 'll reduce not only calories , but our carbon footprint .
We can make food more important , not less , and save ourselves by doing so .
We have to choose that path .
Thank you .
David Hanson : Robots that " show emotion "
David Hanson 's robot faces look and act like yours : They recognize and respond to emotion , and make expressions of their own . Here , an " emotional " live demo of the Einstein robot offers a peek at a future where robots truly mimic humans .
I 'm Dr. David Hanson , and I build robots with character .
And by that , I mean that I develop robots that are characters , but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you .
So we 're starting with a variety of technologies that have converged into these conversational character robots that can see faces , make eye contact with you , make a full range of facial expressions , understand speech and begin to model how you 're feeling and who you are , and build a relationship with you .
I developed a series of technologies that allowed the robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved , on lower power , So , it 's a full range of facial expressions simulating all the major muscles in the human face , running on very small batteries , extremely lightweight .
The materials that allowed the battery-operated facial expressions is a material that we call Frubber , and it actually has three major innovations in the material that allow this to happen .
One is hierarchical pores , and the other is a macro-molecular nanoscale porosity in the material .
There he 's starting to walk .
This is at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology .
I built the head . They built the body .
So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines , and not just sentience , but empathy .
We 're working with the Machine Perception Laboratory at the U.C. San Diego .
They have this really remarkable facial expression technology that recognizes facial expressions , what facial expressions you 're making .
It also recognizes where you 're looking , your head orientation .
We 're emulating all the major facial expressions , and then controlling it with the software that we call the Character Engine .
And here is a little bit of the technology that 's involved in that .
In fact , right now -- plug it from here , and then plug it in here , and now let 's see if it gets my facial expressions .
Okay . So I 'm smiling .
Now I 'm frowning .
And this is really heavily backlit .
Okay , here we go .
Oh , it 's so sad .
Okay , so you smile , frowning .
So his perception of your emotional states is very important for machines to effectively become empathetic .
Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing . Right ?
Those machines have no place for empathy .
And there is billions of dollars being spent on that .
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy .
So , if they achieve human level intelligence or , quite possibly , greater than human levels of intelligence , this could be the seeds of hope for our future .
So , we 've made 20 robots in the last eight years , during the course of getting my Ph.D.
And then I started Hanson Robotics , which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing .
This is one of our robots that we showed at Wired NextFest a couple of years ago .
And it sees multiple people in a scene , remembers where individual people are , and looks from person to person , remembering people .
So , we 're involving two things .
One , the perception of people , and two , the natural interface , the natural form of the interface , so that it 's more intuitive for you to interact with the robot .
You start to believe that it 's alive and aware .
So one of my favorite projects was bringing all this stuff together in an artistic display of an android portrait of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick , who wrote great works like , " Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? "
which was the basis of the movie " Bladerunner . "
In these stories , robots often think that they 're human , and they sort of come to life .
So we put his writings , letters , his interviews , correspondences , into a huge database of thousands of pages , and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him .
And it was kind of spooky , because he would say these things that just sounded like they really understood you .
And this is one of the most exciting projects that we 're developing , for friendly artificial intelligence , friendly machine intelligence .
And we 're getting this mass-manufactured .
We specked it out to actually be doable with a very , very low-cost bill of materials , so that it can become a childhood companion for kids .
Interfacing with the Internet , it gets smarter over the years .
As artificial intelligence evolves , so does his intelligence .
Thank you so much . That 's incredible .
Gever Tulley : Life lessons through tinkering
Gever Tulley uses engaging photos and footage to demonstrate the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School . When given tools , materials and guidance , these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats , bridges and even a roller coaster !
This is the exact moment that I started creating something called Tinkering School .
Tinkering School is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects , and be trusted .
Trusted not to hurt themselves , and trusted not to hurt others .
Tinkering School doesn 't follow a set curriculum , and there are no tests .
We 're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing .
When the kids arrive they 're confronted with lots of stuff : wood and nails and rope and wheels , and lots of tools , real tools .
It 's a six-day immersive experience for the kids .
And within that context , we can offer the kids time -- something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives .
Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived , and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around .
Nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever .
And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry -- and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success , or gleeful calamity .
We start from doodles and sketches .
And sometimes we make real plans .
And sometimes we just start building .
Building is at the heart of the experience : hands on , deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand .
Robin and I , acting as collaborators , keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion .
Success is in the doing , and failures are celebrated and analyzed .
Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear .
When faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities , a really interesting behavior emerges : decoration .
Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation .
From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before .
All materials are available for use .
Even those mundane , hateful , plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined .
And the things that they build amaze even themselves .
Three , two , one , go !
Gever Tulley : A rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds .
Yay !
GT : Thank you . It 's been a great pleasure .
Marco Tempest : Augmented reality , techno-magic
Using sleight-of-hand techniques and charming storytelling , illusionist Marco Tempest brings a jaunty stick figure to life onstage at TEDGlobal .
So magic is a very introverted field .
While scientists regularly publish their latest research , we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets .
That 's true even amongst peers .
But if you look at creative practice as a form of research , or art as a form of R & amp ; D for humanity , then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research ?
Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic .
And about three years ago , I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic -- tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster .
Today , I 'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations .
It 's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system , or a digital storytelling tool .
Could we bring down the lights please ? Thank you .
So let 's give this a try .
And I 'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life .
Terribly sorry . I forgot the floor .
Wake up .
Hey .
Come on .
Please .
Come on .
Ah , sorry about that .
Forgot this .
Give it another try .
Okay .
He figured out the system .
Uh oh .
All right . Let 's try this .
Come on .
Hey .
You heard her , go ahead .
Bye-bye .
Jackson Browne : A song inspired by the ocean
Jackson Browne plays a song he started writing last April aboard Mission Blue Voyage , the Sylvia Earle-inspired trip to brainstorm ways to save the ocean . " If I could be anywhere , " he sings , " anywhere right now , I would be here . " & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Thank you .
Slide into the shimmering surface between two worlds . Standing at the center of time as it uncurls . Cutting through the veil of illusion . Moving beyond past conclusions . Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear . If I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere right now , I would want to be here . Searching for the future among the things we 're throwing away . Trying to see the world through the junk we produce everyday . They say nothing lasts forever , but all the plastic ever made is still here . And no amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear . If I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere in history , I would want to be here . The Romans , the Spanish the British , the Dutch , American exceptionalism , so out of touch . The folly of empire repeating its course , imposing its will and ruling by force on and on through time . But the world can 't take it very much longer . We 're not going to make it unless we 're smarter and stronger . The world is going to shake itself free of our greed somehow . If I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere in time , if I could be anywhere and change things , it would have to be now . They say nothing last forever , but all the plastic ever made is still here . And no amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear . And the world can 't take it very much longer . We 're not going to make it unless we 're smarter and stronger . The world 's gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow . And the world can 't take it , that you can see . If the oceans don 't make it , neither will we . The world 's gonna shake itself all the way free somehow . If I could be anywhere , if I could be anywhere in time , if I could be anywhere and change the outcome , it would have to be now . Thank you .

Majora Carter : Greening the ghetto
In an emotionally charged talk , MacArthur-winning activist Majora Carter details her fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx -- and shows how minority neighborhoods suffer most from flawed urban policy .
If you 're here today -- and I 'm very happy that you are -- you 've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves . However , when we 're not at TED , we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible , especially in large , urban areas like New York City .
And that 's because most people with decision-making powers , in both the public and the private sector , really don 't feel as though they 're in danger .
The reason why I 'm here today , in part , is because of a dog : an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain , back in 1998 .
She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I 'd anticipated .
When she came into my life , we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront , despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city 's commercial waste : a sewage treatment pelletizing plant , a sewage sludge plant , four power plants , the world 's largest food distribution center , as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week .
The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city .
So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $ 10,000 seed grant initiative seed grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects , I thought they were really well-meaning , but a bit naive .
I 'd lived in this area all my life , and you could not get to the river because of all the lovely facilities that I 'd mentioned earlier .
Then , while jogging with my dog one morning , she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump .
There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won 't mention here , but she kept dragging me -- and lo and behold , at the end of that lot was the river .
I knew that this forgotten little street-end , abandoned like the dog that brought me there , was worth saving .
And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx .
And just like my new dog , it was an idea that got bigger than I 'd imagined .
We garnered much support along the way .
And the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years .
We leveraged that $ 10,000 seed grant more than 300 times into a $ 3 million park .
And , in the fall , I 'm actually going to -- I exchange marriage vows with my beloved . Thank you very much .
That 's him pressing my buttons back there , which he does all the time .
But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coalmine . We feel the problems right now , and have for some time .
Environmental justice , for those of you who may not be familiar with the term , goes something like this : no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other .
Unfortunately , race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff , like parks and trees , and where one might find the bad stuff , like power plants and waste facilities .
As a black person in America , I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health .
I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility -- which I do .
These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity , diabetes and asthma .
Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood ?
Our 27 percent obesity rate is high , even for this country , and diabetes comes with it .
One out of four South Bronx children has asthma .
Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average .
These impacts are coming everyone 's way .
And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs , health problems associated with pollution and more odiously , the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men , who possess untold amounts of untapped potential .
50 percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line .
25 percent of us are unemployed . Low-income citizens often use emergency room visits as primary care .
This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits .
Poor people are not only still poor ; they are still unhealthy .
Fortunately , there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won 't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term , and won 't destroy us all in the long term .
None of us want that , and we all have that in common . So what else do we have in common ?
Well , first of all , we 're all incredibly good-looking -- -- graduated high school , college , post-graduate degrees , traveled to interesting places , didn 't have kids in your early teens , financially stable , never been imprisoned . OK .
Good .
But , besides being a black woman , I am different from most of you in some other ways .
I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down .
My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam , only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home .
Jesus . I grew up with a crack house across the street .
Yeah , I 'm a poor black child from the ghetto .
These things make me different from you .
But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community , and I am in between these two worlds , with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other .
So how did things get so different for us ?
In the late ' 40s , my dad -- a Pullman porter , son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx , and a few years later he married my mom .
At the time , the community was a mostly white , working-class neighborhood .
My dad was not alone .
And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream , white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country .
Red-lining was used by banks , wherein certain sections of the city , including ours , were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment .
Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding .
Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community , but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to .
A national highway construction boom was added to our problems .
In New York State , Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway expansion campaign .
One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan .
The South Bronx , which lies in between , did not stand a chance .
Residents were often given less than a month 's notice before their buildings were razed .
600,000 people were displaced .
The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx .
And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community , that is bad and ugly , how could it not reflect on you ?
So now , my family 's property was worthless , save for that it was our home and all we had .
And luckily for me , that home and the love inside of it , along with help from teachers , mentors and friends along the way , was enough .
Now , why is this story important ?
Because from a planning perspective , economic degradation begets environmental degradation , which begets social degradation .
The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come .
Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood .
Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided ?
What costs are associated with these decisions ? And who pays ?
Who profits ? Does anything justify what the local community goes through ?
This was " planning " -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind .
Once we realized that , we decided it was time to do our own planning .
That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a greenway movement in the South Bronx .
I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths .
Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety , the placement of the waste and other facilities , which , if done properly , don 't compromise a community 's quality of life .
They provide opportunities to be more physically active , as well as local economic development .
Think bike shops , juice stands .
We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects .
This is Lafayette Avenue -- and as redesigned by Matthews-Nielsen landscape architects .
And once this path is constructed , it 'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall 's Island Park .
Right now we 're separated by about 25 feet of water , but this link will change that .
As we nurture the natural environment , its abundance will give us back even more .
We run a project called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training , which provides job training in the fields of ecological restorations , so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs .
Little by little , we 're seeding the area with green collar jobs -- then the people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment .
The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era , built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it .
Even during rush hour , it goes virtually unused .
The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway .
We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland , affordable housing and local economic development .
We also built the city 's -- New York City 's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices .
Cool roofs are highly reflective surfaces that don 't absorb solar heat and pass it on to the building or atmosphere .
Green roofs are soil and living plants .
Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat , contribute to urban " heat island " effect and degrade under the sun , which we in turn breathe . Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall , so they reduce a city 's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which , incidentally , are often located in environmental justice communities like mine .
And they provide habitats for our little friends !
So -- -- so cool !
Anyway , the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business , bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx .
I like that , too .
Anyway , I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here , but since I have all of your attention : we need investors . End of pitch .
It 's better to ask for forgiveness than permission .
Anyway -- OK . Katrina . Prior to Katrina , the South Bronx and New Orleans ' Ninth Ward had a lot in common . Both were largely populated by poor people of color , both hotbeds of cultural innovation : think hip-hop and jazz .
Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another .
In the post-Katrina era , we have still more in common .
We 're at best ignored and maligned and abused , at worst , by negligent regulatory agencies , pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability .
Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable .
But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out .
We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight .
Or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone .
Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did ?
Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine ?
Now listen , I do not expect individuals , corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral .
This presentation today only represents some of what I 've been through , like a tiny little bit . You 've no clue .
But I 'll tell you later if you want to know .
But -- I know it 's the bottom line , or one 's perception of it , that motivates people in the end .
I 'm interested in what I like to call the " triple bottom line " that sustainable development can produce .
Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned : the developers , government and the community where these projects go up .
At present , that 's not happening in New York City .
And we are operating with a comprehensive urban planning deficit .
A parade of government subsidies is going to proposed big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx , but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic , pollution , solid waste and the impacts on open space . And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it 's not even funny .
Because on top of that , the world 's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks .
Now , we 'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier .
And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars , these projects include thousands of new parking spaces , yet zip in terms of mass public transit .
Now , what 's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy , environmentally challenged community , versus incorporating structural , sustainable changes .
My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues .
Now let 's get this straight . I am not anti-development .
Ours is a city , not a wilderness preserve . And I 've embraced my inner capitalist .
You probably all have it , and if you haven 't , you need to .
So I don 't have a problem with developers making money .
There 's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable , community-friendly development can still make a fortune .
Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that .
I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit .
That it continues is a shame upon us all , because we are all responsible for the future that we create .
But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities .
This is my version of globalization .
Let 's take Bogota . Poor , Latino , surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking : a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx .
However , this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly influential mayor named Enrique Penalosa .
He looked at the demographics .
Few Bogatanos own cars , yet a huge portion of the city 's resources was dedicated to serving them .
If you 're a mayor , you can do something about that .
His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three , outlawed parking on those streets , expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes , created public plazas , created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world .
For his brilliant efforts , he was nearly impeached .
But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives , incredible things happened .
People stopped littering ; crime rates dropped -- because the streets were alive with people .
His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time , and on a third-world budget at that .
We have no excuse in this country . I 'm sorry .
But the bottom line is : their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars , but rather to provide opportunities for all Bogatanos to participate in the city 's resurgence . That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the US .
But Bogota 's example has the power to change that .
You , however , are blessed with the gift of influence .
That 's why you 're here and why you value the information we exchange .
Use your influence in support of comprehensive sustainable change everywhere .
Don 't just talk about it at TED . This is a nationwide policy agenda I 'm trying to build , and as you all know , politics are personal .
Help me make green the new black . Help me make sustainability sexy .
Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations .
Help me fight for environmental and economic justice .
Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return .
Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere .
Oh good , glad I have a little more time !
Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast , I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy .
His response was a grant program .
I don 't think he understood that I wasn 't asking for funding .
I was making him an offer .
What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around .
Now , don 't get me wrong , we need money .
But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process .
Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day , don 't add wasting our energy , intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count .
I have come from so far to meet you like this .
Please don 't waste me . By working together , we can become one of those small , rapidly growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world .
We might have come to this conference from very , very different stations in life , but believe me , we all share one incredibly powerful thing : we have nothing to lose and everything to gain .
Ciao bellos !
Kary Mullis : A next-gen cure for killer infections
Drug-resistant bacteria kills , even in top hospitals . But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise . Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis , who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed , unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise .
So it was about four years ago , five years ago , I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia , I think it was , with a bag similar to this .
And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag .
And I was saying , you don 't know this molecule really well , but your body knows it extremely well .
And I was thinking that your body hated it , at the time , because we are very immune to this . This is called alpha-gal epitope .
And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can 't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily .
Actually our body doesn 't hate these .
Our body loves these . It eats them .
I mean , the cells in our immune system are always hungry .
And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell , it means " that 's food . "
Now , I was thinking about that and I said , you know , we 've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don 't make , and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff .
But I said we can 't get rid of it , because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can 't get rid of that immunity .
And I said , why don 't you use that ?
What if I could stick this molecule , slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me , that had just invaded my lungs ?
I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there , where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it -- it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on .
It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you , like when you 're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A. , and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car , and then charges you for possession of marijuana .
It 's like this very fast , very efficient way to get people off the street .
So you can take a bacteria that really doesn 't make these things at all , and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street .
And for certain bacteria we don 't have really efficient ways to do that anymore .
Our antibiotics are running out .
And , I mean , the world apparently is running out too .
So probably it doesn 't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won 't be here . But if we are -- we 're going to need something to do with the bacteria .
So I started working with this thing , with a bunch of collaborators .
And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones , bacteria that we don 't like .
And I feel now like George Bush .
It 's like " mission accomplished . "
So I might be doing something dumb , just like he was doing at the time .
But basically what I was talking about there we 've now gotten to work .
And it 's killing bacteria . It 's eating them .
This thing can be stuck , like that little green triangle up there , sort of symbolizing this right now .
You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer .
And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it .
So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don 't like , like Staphylococcus -- I don 't like it in particular , because it killed a professor friend of mine last year .
It doesn 't respond to antibiotics . So I don 't like it .
And I 'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it .
That will know how to find Staph when it 's in your body , and will alert your immune system to go after it .
Here 's what happened . See that line on the very top with the little dots ?
That 's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas , at Brooks Air Base , with anthrax .
And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular , and direct your immune system to it .
You 'll notice they all lived , the ones on the top line -- that 's a 100 percent survival rate .
And they actually lived another 14 days , or 28 when we finally killed them , and took them apart and figured out what went wrong .
Why did they not die ?
And they didn 't die because they didn 't have anthrax anymore .
So we did it . Okay ?
Mission accomplished !
Hans Rosling : Global population growth , box by box
The world 's population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years -- and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth . This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED @ Cannes using colorful new data display technology .
I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people , and that was in 1960 .
I 'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future , but I will not use digital technology , as I 've done during my first five TEDTalks .
Instead , I have progressed , and I am , today , launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKE this box .
This box contains one billion people .
And our teacher told us that the industrialized world , 1960 , had one billion people .
In the developing world , she said , they had two billion people .
And they lived away then .
There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world .
In the industrialized world , people were healthy , educated , rich , and they had small families .
And their aspiration was to buy a car .
And in 1960 , all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this .
This was the economic level at which Sweden was .
But in contrast to this , in the developing world , far away , the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day .
They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes .
There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up .
And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world , which we still use linguistically when we talk about " the West " and " the Developing World . "
But the world has changed , and it 's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world , and to understand it .
And that 's what I 'm going to show you , because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population .
Just look how many .
The world population has doubled since I went to school .
And of course , there 's been economic growth in the West .
A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy , so the Western population moved over to here .
And now their aspiration is not only to have a car .
Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly .
So this is where they are today .
And the most successful of the developing countries , they have moved on , you know , and they have become emerging economies , we call them .
They are now buying cars .
And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company , Geely , they acquired the Volvo company , and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world .
So there they are .
And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes , they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago .
The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions , the three billions here , which are also becoming emerging economies , because they are quite healthy , relatively well-educated , and they already also have two to three children per woman , as those [ richer also ] have .
And their aspiration now is , of course , to buy a bicycle , and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also .
But this is the world we have today , no longer any gap .
But the distance from the poorest here , the very poorest , to the very richest over here is wider than ever .
But there is a continuous world from walking , biking , driving , flying -- there are people on all levels , and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle .
This is the new world we have today in 2010 .
And what will happen in the future ?
Well , I 'm going to project into 2050 .
I was in Shanghai recently , and I listened to what 's happening in China , and it 's pretty sure that they will catch up , just as Japan did .
All the projections [ say that ] this one [ billion ] will [ only ] grow with one to two or three percent .
[ But this second ] grows with seven , eight percent , and then they will end up here .
They will start flying .
And these lower or middle income countries , the emerging income countries , they will also forge forwards economically .
And if , but only if , we invest in the right green technology -- so that we can avoid severe climate change , and energy can still be relatively cheap -- then they will move all the way up here .
And they will start to buy electric cars .
This is what we will find there .
So what about the poorest two billion ?
What about the poorest two billion here ?
Will they move on ?
Well , here population [ growth ] comes in because there [ among emerging economies ] we already have two to three children per woman , family planning is widely used , and population growth is coming to an end .
Here [ among the poorest ] , population is growing .
So these [ poorest ] two billion will , in the next decades , increase to three billion , and they will thereafter increase to four billion .
There is nothing -- but a nuclear war of a kind we 've never seen -- that can stop this [ growth ] from happening .
Because we already have this [ growth ] in process .
But if , and only if , [ the poorest ] get out of poverty , they get education , they get improved child survival , they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [ to live ] here , then population growth will stop in 2050 .
We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth .
And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology .
Here I have on the screen my country bubbles .
Every bubble is a country . The size is population .
The colors show the continent .
The yellow on there is the Americas ; dark blue is Africa ; brown is Europe ; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia .
That 's India and this is China . Size is population .
Here I have children per woman : two children , four children , six children , eight children -- big families , small families .
The year is 1960 .
And down here , child survival , the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school : 60 percent , 70 percent , 80 percent , 90 , and almost 100 percent , as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries .
But look , this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960 : one billion Western world here -- high child-survival , small families -- and all the rest , the rainbow of developing countries , with very large families and poor child survival .
What has happened ? I start the world . Here we go .
Can you see , as the years pass by , child survival is increasing ?
They get soap , hygiene , education , vaccination , penicillin and then family planning . Family size is decreasing .
[ When ] they get up to 90-percent child survival , then families decrease , and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [ to small families ] .
Look , Bangladesh catching up with India .
The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size , but we still have the poorest billion .
Can you see the poorest billion , those [ two ] boxes I had over here ?
They are still up here .
And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent , meaning that if you have six children born , there will be at least four who survive to the next generation .
And the population will double in one generation .
So the only way of really getting world population [ growth ] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent .
That 's why investments by Gates Foundation , UNICEF and aid organizations , together with national government in the poorest countries , are so good ; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world .
We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things .
Child survival is the new green .
It 's only by child survival that we will stop population growth .
And will it happen ?
Well , I 'm not an optimist , neither am I a pessimist .
I 'm a very serious " possibilist . "
It 's a new category where we take emotion apart , and we just work analytically with the world .
It can be done .
We can have a much more just world .
With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty , and global governance , the world can become like this .
And look at the position of the old West .
Remember when this blue box was all alone , leading the world , living its own life .
This will not happen [ again ] .
The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world -- nothing more , nothing less .
But it 's a very important role .
Do it well and get used to it .
Thank you very much .
Joe Sabia : The technology of storytelling
iPad storyteller Joe Sabia introduces us to Lothar Meggendorfer , who created a bold technology for storytelling : the pop-up book . Sabia shows how new technology has always helped us tell our own stories , from the walls of caves to his own onstage iPad .
Ladies and gentlemen , gather around .
I would love to share with you a story .
Once upon a time in 19th century Germany , there was the book .
Now during this time , the book was the king of storytelling .
It was venerable .
It was ubiquitous .
But it was a little bit boring .
Because in its 400 years of existence , storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device .
But then one author arrived , and he changed the game forever .
His name was Lothar , Lothar Meggendorfer .
Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down , and he said , " Genug ist genug ! "
He grabbed his pen , he snatched his scissors .
This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold .
History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as -- who else ? -- the world 's first true inventor of the children 's pop-up book .
For this delight and for this wonder , people rejoiced .
They were happy because the story survived , and that the world would keep on spinning .
Lothar Meggendorfer wasn 't the first to evolve the way a story was told , and he certainly wasn 't the last .
Whether storytellers realized it or not , they were channeling Meggendorfer 's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville , radio news to radio theater , film to film in motion to film in sound , color , 3D , on VHS and on DVD .
There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis .
And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around .
Because , not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world , but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices .
For example , one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine .
One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D .
And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate .
And after all this , everyone paused ; they took a step back .
They realized that , in 6,000 years of storytelling , they 've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls .
And this was a cause for celebration .
The art of storytelling has remained unchanged .
And for the most part , the stories are recycled .
But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure , consistent novelty .
And they remembered a man , one amazing German , every time a new storytelling device popped up next .
And for that , the audience -- the lovely , beautiful audience -- would live happily ever after .
Jeff Smith : Lessons in business ... from prison
Jeff Smith spent a year in prison . But what he discovered inside wasn 't what he expected -- he saw in his fellow inmates boundless ingenuity and business savvy . He asks : Why don 't we tap this entrepreneurial potential to help ex-prisoners contribute to society once they 're back outside ?
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future .
He had a vision . When he got out , he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight , and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision .
He 'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars .
It was my first week in federal prison , and I was learning quickly that it wasn 't what you see on TV .
In fact , it was teeming with smart , ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate .
Now , 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside , but when they talked about what they did , they talked about it in a different jargon , but the business concepts that they talked about weren 't unlike those that you 'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton : promotional incentives , you never charge a first-time user , focus-grouping new product launches , territorial expansion .
But they didn 't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days .
For the most part , everyone was just trying to survive .
It 's a lot harder than you might think .
Contrary to what most people think , people don 't pay , taxpayers don 't pay , for your life when you 're in prison . You 've got to pay for your own life .
You 've got to pay for your soap , your deodorant , toothbrush , toothpaste , all of it .
And it 's hard for a couple of reasons .
First , everything 's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you 'd pay on the street , and second , you don 't make a lot of money .
I unloaded trucks . That was my full-time job , unloading trucks at a food warehouse , for $ 5.25 , not an hour , but per month .
So how do you survive ?
Well , you learn to hustle , all kinds of hustles .
There 's legal hustles .
You pay everything in stamps . Those are the currency .
You charge another inmate to clean his cell .
There 's sort of illegal hustles , like you run a barbershop out of your cell .
There 's pretty illegal hustles : You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell .
And there 's very illegal hustles , which you smuggle in , you get smuggled in , drugs , pornography , cell phones , and just as in the outer world , there 's a risk-reward tradeoff , so the riskier the enterprise , the more profitable it can potentially be .
You want a cigarette in prison ? Three to five dollars .
You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head ? Three hundred bucks .
You want a dirty magazine ?
Well , it can be as much as 1,000 dollars .
So as you can probably tell , one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity .
Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse , sculpting people 's hair with toenail clippers , or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs , prisoners learn how to make do with less , and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they 've learned to the outside and start restaurants , barber shops , personal training businesses .
But there 's no training , nothing to prepare them for that , no rehabilitation at all in prison , no one to help them write a business plan , figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises , no access to the Internet , even .
And then , when they come out , most states don 't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background .
So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years .
Look , I lied to the Feds . I lost a year of my life from it .
But when I came out , I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn 't have to waste any more of their life than they already had .
So I hope that you 'll think about helping in some way .
The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons , because if we don 't , they 're not going to learn any new skills that 's going to help them , and they 'll be right back .
All they 'll learn on the inside is new hustles .
Thank you .
Alex Laskey : How behavioral science can lower your energy bill
What 's a proven way to lower your energy costs ? Would you believe : learning what your neighbor pays . Alex Laskey shows how a quirk of human behavior can make us all better , wiser energy users , with lower bills to prove it .
How many of you have checked your email today ?
Come on , raise your hands .
How many of you are checking it right now ?
And how about finances ? Anybody check that today ?
Credit card , investment account ?
How about this week ?
Now , how about your household energy use ?
Anybody check that today ?
This week ? Last week ?
A few energy geeks spread out across the room .
It 's good to see you guys .
But the rest of us -- this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet , and even we aren 't paying attention to the energy use that 's driving climate change .
The woman in the photo with me is Harriet .
We met her on our first family vacation .
Harriet 's paying attention to her energy use , and she is decidedly not an energy geek .
This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention .
This is coal , the most common source of electricity on the planet , and there 's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year .
But unfortunately , between here and here , most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat .
In fact , only 10 percent ends up as light .
So this coal will last a little bit more than a month .
If you wanted to light this bulb for a year , you 'd need this much coal .
The bad news here is that , for every unit of energy we use , we waste nine .
That means there 's good news , because for every unit of energy we save , we save the other nine .
So the question is , how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we 're using , and start wasting less of it ?
The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer , 10 years ago , and only 90 miles from here , in San Marcos , California .
Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood , asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans .
One quarter of the homes received a message that said , did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer ?
Turn off your air conditioning , turn on your fans .
Another group got an environmental message .
And still a third group got a message about being good citizens , preventing blackouts .
Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all .
In fact , none of these messages worked .
They had zero impact on energy consumption .
It was as if the grad students hadn 't shown up at all .
But there was a fourth message , and this message simply said , " When surveyed , 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans .
Please join them . Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans . "
And wouldn 't you know it , they did .
The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing .
So what does this tell us ?
Well , if something is inconvenient , even if we believe in it , moral suasion , financial incentives , don 't do much to move us -- but social pressure , that 's powerful stuff .
And harnessed correctly , it can be a powerful force for good .
In fact , it already is .
Inspired by this insight , my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower .
We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy .
We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes .
Just like those effective door hangers , we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors , and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save .
We started with paper , we moved to a mobile application , web , and now even a controllable thermostat , and for the last five years we 've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world .
And it 's working .
Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills , and we 're just getting started .
This year alone , in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries , we 're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings .
Now , the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours , but for the rest of us , two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year .
Two terawatt hours , it 's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year .
And two terawatt hours ? In terms of coal , we 'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity .
And we 're not burning anything .
We 're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior .
But we 're just one company , and this is just scratching the surface .
Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted , and when I say wasted , I don 't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs . They may .
I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms , and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody 's home .
That 's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change .
That 's 40 billion -- with a B -- every year in the U.S. alone .
That 's half our coal usage right there .
Now thankfully , some of the world 's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these , and this is both fantastic and essential .
But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future , it isn 't on this slide .
It 's in this room . It 's you , and it 's me .
And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science .
We can do it today , we know it works , and it will save us money right away .
So what are we waiting for ?
Well , in most places , utility regulation hasn 't changed much since Thomas Edison .
Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy .
They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it .
But this story is much more than about household energy use .
Take a look at the Prius .
It 's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science .
The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they 're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers .
Which brings us back to Harriet .
We met her on our first family vacation .
She came over to meet my young daughter , and she was tickled to learn that my daughter 's name is also Harriet .
She asked me what I did for a living , and I told her , I work with utilities to help people save energy .
It was then that her eyes lit up .
She looked at me , and she said , " You 're exactly the person I need to talk to .
You see , two weeks ago , my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility .
It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors . "
" And for the last two weeks , all we can think about , talk about , and even argue about , is what we should be doing to save energy .
We did everything that letter told us to do , and still I know there must be more .
Now I 'm here with a genuine expert .
Tell me . What should I do to save energy ? "
There are many experts who can help answer Harriet 's question .
My goal is to make sure we are all asking it .
Thank you .
Miwa Matreyek : Glorious visions in animation and performance
Using animation , projections and her own moving shadow , Miwa Matreyek performs a gorgeous , meditative piece about inner and outer discovery . Take a quiet 10 minutes and dive in . With music from Anna Oxygen , Mirah , Caroline Lufkin and Mileece .
You learned how to be a diver Put on a mask and believe Gather a dinner of shells for me Take the tank down so you can breathe Below Movements slow You are an island All the secrets until then Pried open I held them Until they were still Until they were still Until they were still Dream time , I will find you You are shady , you are new I 'm not so good at mornings I can see too clearly I prefer the nighttime Dark and blurry Falling night Hovering light Calling night Hovering light In the moontime I will give up my life And in the deep dreams You will find me [ Excerpts from " Myth and Infrastructure " ] Come back .
Miwa Matreyek !
Ami Klin : A new way to diagnose autism
Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder can improve the lives of everyone affected , but the complex network of causes make it incredibly difficult to predict . At TEDxPeachtree , Ami Klin describes a new early detection method that uses eye-tracking technologies to gauge babies ' social engagement skills and reliably measure their risk of developing autism . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement , to resonate other people 's feelings , thoughts , intentions , motivations , in the act of being with them .
As a scientist , I always wanted to measure that resonance , that sense of the other that happens so quickly , in the blink of an eye .
We intuit other people 's feelings .
We know the meaning of their actions even before they happen .
We 're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else 's subjectivity .
We do that all the time . We just can 't shake it off .
It 's so important that the very tools that we use to understand ourselves , to understand the world around them , is shaped by that stance .
We are social to the core .
So my journey in autism really started when I lived in a residential unit for adults with autism .
Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals . This is a long time ago .
And for them , autism was devastating .
They had profound intellectual disabilities .
They didn 't talk . But most of all , they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them , from their environment and from the people .
In fact , at the time , if you walked into a school for individuals with autism , you 'd hear a lot of noise , plenty of commotion , actions , people doing things , but they 're always doing things by themselves .
So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling , or they may be isolated in the corner , or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements , in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere .
Extremely , extremely isolated .
Well , now we know that autism is this disruption , the disruption of this resonance that I am telling you .
These are survival skills .
These are survival skills that we inherited over many , many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution .
You see , babies are born in a state of utter fragility .
Without the caregiver , they wouldn 't survive , so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival .
They orient to the caregiver .
From the first days and weeks of life , babies prefer to hear human sounds rather than just sounds in the environment .
They prefer to look at people rather than at things , and even as they 're looking at people , they look at people 's eyes , because the eye is the window to the other person 's experiences , so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away .
Well , they orient to the caregiver .
The caregiver seeks the baby .
And it 's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind , the social mind , the social brain , depends on .
We always think about autism as something that happens later on in life .
It doesn 't . It begins with the beginning of life .
As babies engage with caregivers , they soon realize that , well , there is something in between the ears that is very important -- it 's invisible , you can 't see -- but is really critical , and that thing is called attention .
And they learn soon enough , even before they can utter one word that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want .
They also learn to follow other people 's gaze , because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about .
And soon enough , they start to learn about the meaning of things , because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something , they 're not just getting a directional cue , they are getting the other person 's meaning of that thing , the attitude , and soon enough they start building this body of meanings , but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction .
Those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others .
Well , this is a little 15-month-old little girl , and she has autism .
And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe two inches from her face , and she 's quite oblivious to me .
Imagine if I did that to you , and I came two inches from your face .
You 'd do probably two things , wouldn 't you ?
You would recoil . You would call the police .
You would do something , because it 's literally impossible to penetrate somebody 's physical space and not get a reaction .
We do so , remember , intuitively , effortlessly .
This is our body wisdom . It 's not something that is mediated by our language . Our body just knows that , and we 've known that for a long time .
And this is not something that happens to humans only .
It happens to some of our phylatic cousins , because if you 're a monkey , and you look at another monkey , and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you , and that is considered to be a signal or threat , well , you are not going to be alive for long .
So something that in other species are survival mechanisms , without them they wouldn 't basically live , we bring into the context of human beings , and this is what we need to simply act , act socially .
Now , she is oblivious to me , and I am so close to her , and you think , maybe she can see you , maybe she can hear you .
Well , a few minutes later , she goes to the corner of the room , and she finds a tiny little piece of candy , an M & amp ; M.
So I could not attract her attention , but something , a thing , did .
Now , most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people .
Now , for this girl , that division line is not so clear , and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like .
Now remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences .
Now , what she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging moment by moment as she is isolating herself further and further .
So we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic , the brain determines who we are going to be .
But in fact the brain also becomes who we are , and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction , this is what 's happening with her mind and this is what 's happening with her brain .
Well , autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders , and it 's a brain disorder .
It 's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born .
We now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism .
There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled , but there are those that are gifted .
There are those individuals who don 't talk at all .
There are those individuals who talk too much .
There are those individuals that if you observe them in their school , you see them running the periphery fence of the school all day if you let them , to those individuals who cannot stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly , relentlessly , but often in an awkward fashion , without that immediate resonance .
Well , this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time .
When I started in this field , we thought that there were four individuals with autism per 10,000 , a very rare condition .
Well , now we know it 's more like one in 100 .
There are millions of individuals with autism all around us .
The societal cost of this condition is huge .
In the U.S. alone , maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars , and you know what ? Most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled , individuals who need wrap-around services , services that are very , very intensive , and those services can cost in excess of 60 to 80,000 dollars a year .
Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment , because now we know that autism creates itself as they diverge in that pathway of learning that I mentioned to you .
Were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point , and intervene and treat , I can tell you , and this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years , this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition .
Also , we have a window of opportunity , because the brain is malleable for just so long , and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life .
It 's not that that window closes . It doesn 't .
But it diminishes considerably .
And yet , the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years , and in disadvantaged populations , the populations that don 't have access to clinical services , rural populations , minorities , the age of diagnosis is later still , which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe .
So I feel that we have a bio-ethical imperative .
The science is there , but no science is of relevance if it doesn 't have an impact on the community , and we just can 't afford that missed opportunity , because children with autism become adults with autism , and we feel that those things that we can do for these children , for those families , early on , will have lifetime consequences , for the child , for the family , and for the community at large .
So this is our view of autism .
There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism . In fact , we believe that there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism , and genetic anomalies , much more than just genes .
And we actually have a bit of a question here , because if there are so many different causes of autism , how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome ? Because people like myself , when we walk into a playroom , we recognize a child as having autism .
So how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity ?
And the answer is , what lies in between , which is development .
And in fact , we are very interested in those first two years of life , because those liabilities don 't necessarily convert into autism .
Autism creates itself .
Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life , we might attenuate for some , and God knows , maybe even prevent for others .
So how do we do that ?
How do we enter that feeling of resonance , how do we enter another person 's being ?
I remember when I interacted with that 15-month-older , that the thing that came to mind was , " How do you come into her world ?
Is she thinking about me ? Is she thinking about others ? "
Well , it 's hard to do that , so we had to create the technologies . We had to basically step inside a body .
We had to see the world through her eyes .
And so in the past many years we 've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking .
We can see moment by moment what children are engaging with .
Well , this is my colleague Warren Jones , with whom we 've been building these methods , these studies , for the past 12 years , and you see there a happy five-month-older , it 's a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world , his mom , the caregiver , but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare .
What we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory , but in order for us to do that , we had to create these very sophisticated measures , measures of how people , how little babies , how newborns , engage with the world , moment by moment , what is important , and what is not .
Well , we created those measures , and here , what you see is what we call a funnel of attention .
You 're watching a video .
Those frames are separated by about a second through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds , and we freeze one frame , and this is what the typical children are doing .
In this scan pass , in green here , are two-year-olds with autism .
So on that frame , the children who are typical are watching this , the emotion of expression of that little boy as he 's fighting a little bit with the little girl .
What are the children with autism doing ?
They are focusing on the revolving door , opening and shutting .
Well , I can tell you that this divergence that you 're seeing here doesn 't happen only in our five-minute experiment .
It happens moment by moment in their real lives , and their minds are being formed , and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers .
Well , we took a construct from our pediatrician friends , the concept of growth charts .
You know , when you take a child to the pediatrician , and so you have physical height , and weight .
Well we decided that we 're going to create growth charts of social engagement , and we sought children from the time that they are born , and what you see here on the x-axis is two , three , four , five , six months and nine , until about the age of 24 months , and this is the percent of their viewing time that they are focusing on people 's eyes , and this is their growth chart .
They start over here , they love people 's eyes , and it remains quite stable .
It sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months .
Now , let 's see what 's happening with babies who became autistic .
It 's something very different .
It starts way up here , but then it 's a free fall .
It 's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people , but it has no traction .
It 's almost as if that stimulus , you , you 're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives .
Now , we thought that those data were so powerful in a way , that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life , because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-older , you 'd be surprised by how social those babies are .
And what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily .
And using these kinds of measures , and many others , what we found out is that our science could , in fact , identify this condition early on .
We didn 't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life .
If we measured things that are , evolutionarily , highly conserved , and developmentally very early emerging , things that are online from the first weeks of life , we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months , and that 's what we are doing now .
Now , we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children , but this would be for naught if we didn 't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community .
Now we want those devices , of course , to be deployed by those who are in the trenches , our colleagues , the primary care physicians , who see every child , and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice , because they have to see so many children .
And we want to do that universally so that we don 't miss any child , but this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention , for treatment .
We need to be able to work with the families , to support the families , to manage those first years with them . We need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment , because those treatments are going to change these children 's and those families ' lives .
Now , when we think about what we [ can ] do in those first years , I can tell you , having been in this field for so long , one feels really rejuvenated .
There is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities , preventing , in fact , those experiences that I really started in my journey in this field .
I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition .
No longer . We can do a great deal of things .
And the idea is not to cure autism .
That 's not the idea .
What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times , the profound intellectual disabilities , the lack of language , the profound , profound isolation .
We feel that individuals with autism , in fact , have a very special perspective on the world , and we need diversity , and they can work extremely well in some areas of strength : predictable situations , situations that can be defined .
Because after all , they learn about the world almost like about it , rather than learning how to function in it .
But this is a strength , if you 're working , for example , in technology .
And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities .
We want them to be free of that .
We want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths but to fulfill their promise .
Well thank you for listening to me .
Alan Siegel : Let 's simplify legal jargon !
Tax forms , credit agreements , healthcare legislation : They 're crammed with gobbledygook , says Alan Siegel , and incomprehensibly long . He calls for a simple , sensible redesign -- and plain English -- to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us .
So , basically we have public leaders , public officials who are out of control ; they are writing bills that are unintelligible , and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations , total complexity , which has a dramatically negative impact on our life .
If you 're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits ; if you 're trying to get a small business loan , you face a blizzard of paperwork .
What are we going to do about it ? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity , transparency and empathy , building humanity into communications .
I 've been simplifying things for 30 years .
I come out of the advertising and design business .
My focus is understanding you people , and how you interact with the government to get your benefits , how you interact with corporations to decide whom you 're going to do business with , and how you view brands .
So , very quickly , when President Obama said , " I don 't see why we can 't have a one-page , plain English consumer credit agreement . "
So , I locked myself in a room , figured out the content , organized the document , and wrote it in plain English .
I 've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country .
This is a real thing .
Now , I went one step further and said , " Why do we have to stick with the stodgy lawyers and just have a paper document ? Let 's go online . "
And many people might need help in computation .
Working with the Harvard Business School , you 'll see this example when you talk about minimum payment : If you spent 62 dollars for a meal , the longer you take to pay out that loan , you see , over a period of time using the minimum payment it 's 99 dollars and 17 cents .
How about that ? Do you think your bank is going to show that to people ?
But it 's going to work . It 's more effective than just computational aids .
And what about terms like " over the limit " ?
Perhaps a stealth thing .
Define it in context . Tell people what it means .
When you put it in plain English , you almost force the institution to give the people a way , a default out of that , and not put themselves at risk .
Plain English is about changing the content .
And one of the things I 'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM .
It 's a grid , it 's a calendar .
At such and such a date , IBM has responsibilities , you have responsibilities .
Received very favorably by business .
And there is some good news to report today .
Each year , one in 10 taxpayers receives a notice from the IRS .
There are 200 million letters that go out .
Running through this typical letter that they had , I ran it through my simplicity lab , it 's pretty unintelligible .
All the parts of the document in red are not intelligible .
We looked at doing over 1,000 letters that cover 70 percent of their transactions in plain English .
They have been tested in the laboratory .
When I run it through my lab , this heat-mapping shows everything is intelligible .
And the IRS has introduced the program .
There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention .
There is a lot of discussion now about a consumer financial protection agency , how to mandate simplicity .
We see all this complexity .
It 's incumbent upon us , and this organization , I believe , to make clarity , transparency and empathy a national priority .
There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate .
There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible .
So , how are we going to change the world ?
Make clarity , transparency and simplicity a national priority .
I thank you .
Rodney Brooks : Why we will rely on robots
Scaremongers play on the idea that robots will simply replace people on the job . In fact , they can become our essential collaborators , freeing us up to spend time on less mundane and mechanical challenges . Rodney Brooks points out how valuable this could be as the number of working-age adults drops and the number of retirees swells . He introduces us to Baxter , the robot with eyes that move and arms that react to touch , which could work alongside an aging population -- and learn to help them at home , too .
Well , Arthur C. Clarke , a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s , said that , " We overestimate technology in the short term , and we underestimate it in the long term . "
And I think that 's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots .
That we 're overestimating the technology in the short term .
But I am worried whether we 're going to get the technology we need in the long term .
Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing and that we , our society , is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future .
So I 'm scared we won 't have enough robots .
But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time .
Back in 1957 , there was a Spencer Tracy , Katharine Hepburn movie .
So you know how it ended up , Spencer Tracy brought a computer , a mainframe computer of 1957 , in to help the librarians .
The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives , " What are the names of Santa 's reindeer ? "
And they would look that up .
And this mainframe computer was going to help them with that job .
Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn 't much use for that job .
The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear .
But that 's not what happened in fact .
The number of jobs for librarians increased for a long time after 1957 .
It wasn 't until the Internet came into play , the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down .
And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today .
And we can just ask : " What are the names of Santa 's reindeer ? " and be told instantly -- or anything else we want to ask .
By the way , the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period , because librarians became partners of computers .
Computers became tools , and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time .
Same thing happened in offices .
Back in the old days , people used spreadsheets .
Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper , and they calculated by hand .
But here was an interesting thing that came along .
With the revolution around 1980 of P.C. ' s , the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers , not to replace office workers , but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers .
So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets .
It increased their capabilities .
They no longer had to do the mundane computations , but they could do something much more .
Now today , we 're starting to see robots in our lives .
On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot .
When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan , instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick , as they used to do up until about 2002 , they now send the robot out .
So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs .
On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh .
These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S.
And they take the dirty sheets down to the laundry .
They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen .
They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy .
And it frees up the nurses and the nurse 's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients .
In fact , robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways .
But I think when it comes to factory robots , people are sort of afraid , because factory robots are dangerous to be around .
In order to program them , you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions .
And ordinary people can 't interact with them .
And I think it 's the sort of technology that 's gone wrong .
It 's displaced the worker from the technology .
And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with .
And so I want to tell you today about Baxter , which we 've been talking about .
And Baxter , I see , as a way -- a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting .
So Baxter is up here .
This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics .
We 've got a conveyor there .
And if the lighting isn 't too extreme -- Ah , ah ! There it is . It 's picked up the object off the conveyor .
It 's going to come bring it over here and put it down .
And then it 'll go back , reach for another object .
The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense .
By the way , what 's going on with the eyes ?
The eyes are on the screen there .
The eyes look ahead where the robot 's going to move .
So a person that 's interacting with the robot understands where it 's going to reach and isn 't surprised by its motions .
Here Chris took the object out of its hand , and Baxter didn 't go and try to put it down ; it went back and realized it had to get another one .
It 's got a little bit of basic common sense , goes and picks the objects .
And Baxter 's safe to interact with .
You wouldn 't want to do this with a current industrial robot .
But with Baxter it doesn 't hurt .
It feels the force , understands that Chris is there and doesn 't push through him and hurt him .
But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface .
And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now .
And when he grabs an arm , it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen .
You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm .
He 's going to put something in its hand , he 's going to bring it over here , press a button and let go of that thing in the hand .
And the robot figures out , ah , he must mean I want to put stuff down .
It puts a little icon there .
He comes over here , and he gets the fingers to grasp together , and the robot infers , ah , you want an object for me to pick up .
That puts the green icon there .
He 's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from .
It just moves it around , and the robot figures out that was an area search .
He didn 't have to select that from a menu .
And now he 's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object while we continue talking .
So as we continue here , I want to tell you about what this is like in factories .
These robots we 're shipping every day .
They go to factories around the country .
This is Mildred .
Mildred 's a factory worker in Connecticut .
She 's worked on the line for over 20 years .
One hour after she saw her first industrial robot , she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory .
She decided she really liked robots .
And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand .
Now she 's got the robot doing it .
When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better , one of the questions we asked them was , " Do you want your children to work in a factory ? "
The universal answer was " No , I want a better job than that for my children . "
And as a result of that , Mildred is very typical of today 's factory workers in the U.S.
They 're older , and they 're getting older and older .
There aren 't many young people coming into factory work .
And as their tasks become more onerous on them , we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with , so that they can be part of the solution , so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S.
And so our vision is that Mildred who 's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer .
She lifts her game , like the office workers of the 1980s lifted their game of what they could do .
We 're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use .
They 're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes .
There 's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable .
That 's climate change and demographics .
Demographics is really going to change our world .
This is the percentage of adults who are working age .
And it 's gone down slightly over the last 40 years .
But over the next 40 years , it 's going to change dramatically , even in China .
The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically .
And turned up the other way , the people who are retirement age goes up very , very fast , as the baby boomers get to retirement age .
That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services .
But more than that , as we get older we get more frail and we can 't do all the tasks we used to do .
If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers , before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older .
That 's happening statistically right now .
And as the number of people who are older , above retirement age and getting older , as they increase , there will be less people to take care of them .
And I think we 're really going to have to have robots to help us .
And I don 't mean robots in terms of companions .
I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older .
Getting the groceries in from the car , up the stairs , into the kitchen .
Or even , as we get very much older , driving our cars to go visit people .
And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution .
So they don 't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them .
And so I really think that we 're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives . And that we will -- Here , Baxter , it 's good .
And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives .
Thanks very much .
Marco Tempest : A magical tale
Marco Tempest spins a beautiful story of what magic is , how it entertains us and how it highlights our humanity -- all while working extraordinary illusions with his hands and an augmented reality machine .
Marco Tempest : What I 'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment .
Today 's its debut .
It 's a demonstration of augmented reality .
And the visuals you 're about to see are not prerecorded .
They are live and reacting to me in real time .
I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic .
So fingers crossed .
And keep your eyes on the big screen .
Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery .
It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask , why , in a technological age , we continue to have this magical sense of wonder .
Magic is deception , but it is a deception we enjoy .
To enjoy being deceived , an audience must first suspend its disbelief .
It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge : I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that , for a moment , constitutes poetic faith .
MT : This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience .
Without it , a script is just words .
Augmented reality is just the latest technology .
And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity .
We are all very good at suspending our disbelief .
We do it every day , while reading novels , watching television or going to the movies .
We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had .
Without this ability there is no magic .
It was Jean Robert-Houdin , France 's greatest illusionist , who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller .
He said something that I 've posted on the wall of my studio .
Jean Robert-Houdin : A conjurer is not a juggler .
He is an actor playing the part of a magician .
MT : Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story .
The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction .
There are tales of creation and loss , death and resurrection , and obstacles that must be overcome .
Now many of them are intensely dramatic .
Magicians play with fire and steel , defy the fury of the buzzsaw , dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape .
But audiences don 't come to see the magician die , they come to see him live .
Because the best stories always have a happy ending .
The tricks of magic have one special element .
They are stories with a twist .
Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines .
He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think .
Edward de Bono : Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error .
The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable , but do not , in fact , match what is being done in front of them .
MT : In that respect , magic tricks are like jokes .
Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination .
But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected , we laugh .
The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks .
The finale defies logic , gives new insight into the problem , and audiences express their amazement with laughter .
It 's fun to be fooled .
One of the key qualities of all stories is that they 're made to be shared .
We feel compelled to tell them .
When I do a trick at a party -- that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again .
They want to share the experience .
That makes my job more difficult , because , if I want to surprise them , I need to tell a story that starts the same , but ends differently -- a trick with a twist on a twist .
It keeps me busy .
Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained .
We think in narrative structures .
We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood .
It 's a uniquely human achievement .
We all want to share our stories , whether it is the trick we saw at the party , the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation .
Today , thanks to technology , we can share those stories as never before , by email , Facebook , blogs , tweets , on TED.com.
The tools of social networking , these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story .
We turn facts into similes and metaphors , and even fantasies .
We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole .
Our stories make us the people we are and , sometimes , the people we want to be .
They give us our identity and a sense of community .
And if the story is a good one , it might even make us smile .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Chip Kidd : Designing books is no laughing matter . OK , it is .
Chip Kidd doesn 't judge books by their cover , he creates covers that embody the book -- and he does it with a wicked sense of humor . In one of the funniest talks from TED2012 , he shows the art and deep thought of his cover designs . This talk is from The Design Studio session at TED2012 , guest-curated by Chee Pearlman and David Rockwell .
Hi .
I did that for two reasons .
First of all , I wanted to give you a good visual first impression .
But the main reason I did it is that that 's what happens to me when I 'm forced to wear a Lady Gaga skanky mic .
I 'm used to a stationary mic .
It 's the sensible shoe of public address .
But you clamp this thing on my head , and something happens .
I just become skanky .
So I 'm sorry about that .
And I 'm already off-message .
Ladies and gentlemen , I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books .
( " Yes , BOOKS . You know , the bound volumes with ink on paper .
You cannot turn them off with a switch .
Tell your kids . " ) It all sort of started as a benign mistake , like penicillin .
What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City .
But upon arrival there , in the fall of 1986 , and doing a lot of interviews , I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf , a book publisher .
Now I was stupid , but not so stupid that I turned it down .
I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of , and I was incredibly lucky .
Soon , it had occurred to me what my job was .
My job was to ask this question : " What do the stories look like ? "
Because that is what Knopf is .
It is the story factory , one of the very best in the world .
We bring stories to the public .
The stories can be anything , and some of them are actually true .
But they all have one thing in common : They all need to look like something .
They all need a face .
Why ? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into .
A book designer gives form to content , but also manages a very careful balance between the two .
Now , the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University , the teacher , Lanny Sommese , came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard , and wrote the word " Apple " underneath , and he said , " OK . Lesson one . Listen up . "
And he covered up the picture and he said , " You either say this , " and then he covered up the word , " or you show this .
But you don 't do this . "
Because this is treating your audience like a moron .
And they deserve better .
And lo and behold , soon enough , I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf .
The first was Katharine Hepburn 's memoirs , and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich .
Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style , it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you .
The Dietrich book was an observation by her daughter ; it was a biography .
So the Hepburn story is words and the Dietrich story is pictures , and so we did this .
So there you are .
Pure content and pure form , side by side .
No fighting , ladies .
Now , what is the story here ?
Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber .
Genius !
Now , luckily for me , I live and work in New York City , where there are plenty of dinosaurs .
So , I went to the Museum of Natural History , and I checked out the bones , and I went to the gift shop , and I bought a book .
And I was particularly taken with this page of the book , and more specifically the lower right-hand corner .
Now I took this diagram , and I put it in a Photostat machine , and I took a piece of tracing paper , and I taped it over the Photostat with a piece of Scotch tape -- stop me if I 'm going too fast -- -- and then I took a Rapidograph pen -- explain it to the youngsters -- and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur .
I had no idea what I was doing , I had no idea where I was going , but at some point , I stopped -- when to keep going would seem like I was going too far .
And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being .
We 're in the middle of the process .
And then I just threw some typography on it .
Very basic stuff , slightly suggestive of public park signage .
Everybody in house loved it , and so off it goes to the author .
And even back then , Michael was on the cutting edge .
That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine .
I miss Michael .
And sure enough , somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image , just in case they might want to use it .
Well , they used it .
And I was thrilled .
We all know it was an amazing movie , and it was so interesting to see it go out into the culture and become this phenomenon and to see all the different permutations of it .
But not too long ago , I came upon this on the Web .
No , that is not me .
But whoever it is , I can 't help but thinking they woke up one day like , " Oh my God , that wasn 't there last night . Ooooohh !
I was so wasted . "
But if you think about it , from my head to my hands to his leg .
That 's a responsibility .
And it 's a responsibility that I don 't take lightly .
The book designer 's responsibility is threefold : to the reader , to the publisher and , most of all , to the author .
I want you to look at the author 's book and say , " Wow ! I need to read that . "
David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers , and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony .
And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image , and he wanted to explore what was underlying that .
For me , it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of .
But when you do , you don 't get what you expect .
You get something that goes much deeper than that .
And David especially loved this design because at book signings , which he does a lot of , he could take a magic marker and do this .
Hello !
Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called [ " Dry " ] , and it 's about his time in rehab .
In his 20s , he was a hotshot ad executive , and as Mad Men has told us , a raging alcoholic .
He did not think so , however , but his coworkers did an intervention and they said , " You are going to rehab , or you will be fired and you will die . "
Now to me , this was always going to be a typographic solution , what I would call the opposite of Type 101 .
What does that mean ?
Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography , you get the assignment of , select a word and make it look like what it says it is . So that 's Type 101 , right ?
Very simple stuff .
This is going to be the opposite of that .
I want this book to look like it 's lying to you , desperately and hopelessly , the way an alcoholic would .
The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine .
I set up the type , I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink , taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it . Presto !
Then when we went to press , the printer put a spot gloss on the ink and it really looked like it was running .
Not long after it came out , Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books .
And this woman came up to it , and she squinted , and she took it to the register , and she said to the man behind the counter , " This one 's ruined . "
And the guy behind the counter said , " I know , lady . They all came in that way . "
Now , that 's a good printing job .
A book cover is a distillation .
It is a haiku , if you will , of the story .
This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha , and it 's eight volumes in all . But the best thing is when it 's on your shelf , you get a shelf life of the Buddha , moving from one age to the next .
All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book , but once the book designer has read the text , then he has to be an interpreter and a translator .
This story was a real puzzle .
This is what it 's about .
All right , so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together .
And so , here 's the design , right ?
And so here 's the front and the spine , and it 's flat .
But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf .
Ahh ! We come upon them , the clandestine lovers . Let 's draw them out .
Huhh ! They 've been discovered by the sultan .
He will not be pleased .
Huhh ! And now the sultan is in danger .
And now , we have to open it up to find out what 's going to happen next .
Try experiencing that on a Kindle .
Don 't get me started .
Seriously .
Much is to be gained by eBooks : ease , convenience , portability .
But something is definitely lost : tradition , a sensual experience , the comfort of thingy-ness -- a little bit of humanity .
Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing when he would get a copy of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf ?
He 'd smell it .
Then he 'd run his hand over the rag paper , and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages .
All those years , all those books , he never got tired of it .
Now , I am all for the iPad , but trust me -- smelling it will get you nowhere .
Now the Apple guys are texting , " Develop odor emission plug-in . "
And the last story I 'm going to talk about is quite a story .
A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway . When she gets to the bottom , she can 't help but feel that , all of a sudden , she 's entered a new reality that 's just slightly different from the one that she left , but very similar , but different .
And so , we 're talking about parallel planes of existence , sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers .
So how do we show this ?
We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich , but now we merge them .
So we 're talking about different planes , different pieces of paper .
So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum .
It 's one part of the form and content .
When it 's on top of the paper board , which is the opposite , it forms this .
So even if you don 't know anything about this book , you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence .
And the object itself invited exploration interaction , consideration and touch .
This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list .
This is unheard of , both for us the publisher , and the author .
We 're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling , and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode .
Not exactly Jackie Collins .
Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list , eight printings , and still going strong .
So even though we love publishing as an art , we very much know it 's a business too , and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky , that great art can be great business .
So that 's my story . To be continued .
What does it look like ?
Yes . It can , it does and it will , but for this book designer , page-turner , dog-eared place-holder , notes in the margins-taker , ink-sniffer , the story looks like this .
Thank you .
Aicha el-Wafi + Phyllis Rodriguez : The mothers who found forgiveness , friendship
Phyllis Rodriguez and Aicha el-Wafi have a powerful friendship born of unthinkable loss . Rodriguez ' son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11 , 2001 ; el-Wafi 's son Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted of a role in those attacks and is serving a life sentence . In hoping to find peace , these two moms have come to understand and respect one another .
Phyllis Rodriguez : We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship .
And it is .
And yet , it feels natural to us now .
I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th , 2001 .
We didn 't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later .
At the time , we knew that it was political .
We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son -- my husband , Orlando , and I and our family .
And when I saw it -- and yet , through the shock , the terrible shock , and the terrible explosion in our lives , literally , we were not vengeful .
And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism , and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him , if convicted , my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that , publicly .
Through that and through human rights groups , we were brought together with several other victims ' families .
When I saw Aicha in the media , coming over when her son was indicted , and I thought , " What a brave woman .
Someday I want to meet that woman when I 'm stronger . "
I was still in deep grief ; I knew I didn 't have the strength .
I knew I would find her someday , or we would find each other .
Because , when people heard that my son was a victim , I got immediate sympathy .
But when people learned what her son was accused of , she didn 't get that sympathy .
But her suffering is equal to mine .
So we met in November 2002 , and Aicha will now tell you how that came about .
Aicha el-Wafi : Good afternoon , ladies and gentlemen .
I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui .
And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims .
So they introduced me to five families .
And I saw Phyllis , and I watched her .
She was the only mother in the group .
The others were brothers , sisters .
And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother , just like me .
I suffered a lot as a mother .
I was married when I was 14 .
I lost a child when I was 15 , a second child when I was 16 .
So the story with Zacarias was too much really .
And I still suffer , because my son is like he 's buried alive .
I know she really cried for her son .
But she knows where he is .
My son , I don 't know where he is .
I don 't know if he 's alive . I don 't know if he 's tortured .
I don 't know what happened to him .
So that 's why I decided to tell my story , so that my suffering is something positive for other women .
For all the women , all the mothers that give life , you can give back , you can change .
It 's up to us women , because we are women , because we love our children .
We must be hand-in-hand and do something together .
It 's not against women , it 's for us , for us women , for our children .
I talk against violence , against terrorism .
I go to schools to talk to young , Muslim girls so they don 't accept to be married against their will very young .
So if I can save one of the young girls , and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did , well this is something good .
This is why I 'm here in front of you .
PR : I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha , starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members -- which was a very private meeting with security , because it was November 2002 , and , frankly , we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country -- those of us family members .
But we were all so nervous .
" Why does she want to meet us ? "
And then she was nervous .
" Why did we want to meet her ? "
What did we want from each other ?
Before we knew each others ' names , or anything , we had embraced and wept .
Then we sat in a circle with support , with help , from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation .
And Aicha started , and she said , " I don 't know if my son is guilty or innocent , but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families .
I know what it is to suffer , and I feel that if there is a crime , a person should be tried fairly and punished . "
But she reached out to us in that way , and it was , I 'd like to say , it was an ice-breaker .
And what happened then is we all told our stories , and we all connected as human beings .
By the end of the afternoon -- it was about three hours after lunch -- we 'd felt as if we 'd known each other forever .
Now what I learned from her , is a woman , not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then , and what was being done to her son , but the life she 's had .
I never had met someone with such a hard life , from such a totally different culture and environment from my own .
And I feel that we have a special connection , which I value very much .
And I think it 's all about being afraid of the other , but making that step and then realizing , " Hey , this wasn 't so hard .
Who else can I meet that I don 't know , or that I 'm so different from ? "
So , Aicha , do you have a couple of words for conclusion ?
Because our time is up .
AW : I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people , the other .
You have to be generous , and your hearts must be generous , your mind must be generous .
You must be tolerant .
You have to fight against violence .
And I hope that someday we 'll all live together in peace and respecting each other .
This is what I wanted to say .

Graham Hill : Why I 'm a weekday vegetarian
We all know the arguments that being vegetarian is better for the environment and for the animals -- but in a carnivorous culture , it can be hard to make the change . Graham Hill has a powerful , pragmatic suggestion : Be a weekday veg .
About a year ago , I asked myself a question : " Knowing what I know , why am I not a vegetarian ? "
After all , I 'm one of the green guys : I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin .
I started a site called TreeHugger -- I care about this stuff .
I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third .
Cruelty : I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we , hypocritically , wouldn 't even consider for our own cats , dogs and other pets .
Environmentally , meat , amazingly , causes more emissions than all of transportation combined : cars , trains , planes , buses , boats , all of it .
And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do .
I also knew that I 'm not alone .
We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s .
So what was once the special little side treat now is the main , much more regular .
So really , any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian .
Yet , there I was -- chk , chk , chk -- tucking into a big old steak .
So why was I stalling ?
I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution .
It was either you 're a meat eater or you 're a vegetarian , and I guess I just wasn 't quite ready .
Imagine your last hamburger .
So my common sense , my good intentions , were in conflict with my taste buds .
And I 'd commit to doing it later , and not surprisingly , later never came .
Sound familiar ?
So I wondered , might there be a third solution ?
And I thought about it , and I came up with one .
I 've been doing it for the last year , and it 's great .
It 's called weekday veg .
The name says it all : Nothing with a face Monday through Friday .
On the weekend , your choice .
Simple .
If you want to take it to the next level , remember , the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats .
So you want to swap those out with some good , sustainably harvested fish .
It 's structured , so it ends up being simple to remember , and it 's okay to break it here and there .
After all , cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake .
The program has been great , weekday veg .
My footprint 's smaller , I 'm lessening pollution , I feel better about the animals , I 'm even saving money .
Best of all , I 'm healthier , I know that I 'm going to live longer , and I 've even lost a little weight .
So , please ask yourselves , for your health , for your pocketbook , for the environment , for the animals : What 's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot ?
After all , if all of us ate half as much meat , it would be like half of us were vegetarians .
Thank you .
Taryn Simon : Photographs of secret sites
Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography -- to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise . She shares two projects : one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public , the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit .
Okay , so 90 percent of my photographic process is , in fact , not photographic .
It involves a campaign of letter writing , research and phone calls to access my subjects , which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia .
And oddly , the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World , a seemingly innocuous site .
And it read -- I 'm just going to read a key sentence : " Especially during these violent times , I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to . "
Photography threatens fantasy .
They didn 't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities , myths and beliefs , and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth .
But there are multiple truths attached to every image , depending on the creator 's intention , the viewer and the context in which it is presented .
Over a five year period following September 11th , when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders , most notably weapons of mass destruction , I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America 's foundation , mythology and daily functioning .
I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen , self-imposed and real , and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge .
It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn 't have access to accurate information .
And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes , but what I came away with is a photograph .
And it 's just another place from which to observe , and the understanding that there are no absolute , all-knowing insiders .
And the outsider can never really reach the core .
I 'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series .
It 's titled , " An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar , " and it 's comprised of nearly 70 images .
In this context I 'll just show you a few .
This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State , where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water .
A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly .
And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America , which you can see here .
And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text .
So I create these two poles .
Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text .
And what I 'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image , and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image .
So , at best , the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy .
And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground .
But in this context I 'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts .
This is a cryopreservation unit , and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger , who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health , with advancements in science and technology , all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars , for forever .
This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty .
Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state , allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage .
So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen , allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse , to simulate the loss of virginity .
This is a jury simulation deliberation room , and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror .
And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they 're hoping for .
This process costs 60,000 dollars .
This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room , a contraband room , at John F. Kennedy International Airport .
On that table you can see 48 hours ' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States .
There is a pig 's head and African cane rats .
And part of my photographic work is I 'm not just documenting what 's there .
I do take certain liberties and intervene .
And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting , so I spent some time with the smells and items .
This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley , Virginia , their original headquarters building .
And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts .
And it 's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics .
And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency , and had thus come under question , is abstract expressionism .
This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility , and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition .
And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene .
This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States .
It 's a research crop marijuana grow room .
And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can 't find any discernible formula in how these things -- they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security -- and you can 't completely understand how information is being distributed .
These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean , connecting North America to Europe .
They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations , and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability .
This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut .
But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago , like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn 't necessarily progressed .
This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine .
And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired , and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity .
And Playboy is always in the top few .
But you 'd be surprised , they don 't do the photographs . It 's just the text .
This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine , where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza .
This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead .
And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States .
And the film was shot on 72 millimeter , government-issue film .
And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film .
All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding -- that would be mother to son , father to daughter , sister to brother -- to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger .
Meaning white fur , ice blue eyes , a pink nose .
And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth .
It 's a very violent process that is little known .
And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment .
Kenny was born . He actually made it to adulthood .
He has since passed away , but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities .
This , on a lighter note , is at George Lucas ' personal archive .
This is the Death Star .
And it 's shown here in its true orientation .
In the context of " Star Wars : Return of the Jedi , " its mirror image is presented .
They flip the negative .
And you can see the photoetched brass detailing , and the painted acrylic facade .
In the context of the film , this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire , capable of annihilating planets and civilizations , and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet .
This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky .
It 's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site .
Essentially they 've simulated a city for urban combat , and this is one of the structures that exists in that city .
It 's called the World Church of God .
It 's supposed to be a generic site of worship .
And after I took this photograph , they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq .
And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice .
And we put that wall around the World Church of God , and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army .
And I put them into my photograph .
This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School , who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity .
And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world .
It runs 24 hours a day , commercial free .
However , it 's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States .
And in 2004 , they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq , which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq .
Now I 'm going to move on to another project I did .
It 's titled " The Innocents . "
And for the men in these photographs , photography had been used to create a fantasy .
Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth , in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie .
I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit , violent crimes .
I investigate photography 's ability to blur truth and fiction , and its influence on memory , which can lead to severe , even lethal consequences .
For the men in these photographs , the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification .
A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement 's use of images .
But through exposure to composite sketches , Polaroids , mug shots and line-ups , eyewitness testimony can change .
I 'll give you an example from a case .
A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker .
She saw some similarities in one of the photographs , but couldn 't quite make a positive identification .
Days later , she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs , except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array .
And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory , if there ever was an actual memory .
Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals , and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications .
Frederick Daye , who is photographed at his alibi location , where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime .
He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape , kidnapping and vehicle theft .
And he served 10 years of a life sentence .
Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison .
But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick 's photograph .
Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping , rape and murder of a young girl walking to school .
He served 18 years of a death sentence .
I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho .
And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction .
The scene of arrest , the scene of misidentification , the alibi location .
And here , the scene of the crime , it 's this place to which he 's never been , but changed his life forever .
So photographing there , I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction , in both his life and in photography .
Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder .
He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco , Texas .
Larry Mayes , I photographed at the scene of arrest , where he hid between two mattresses in Gary , Indiana , in this very room to hide from the police .
He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery .
The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification , days later , from a photo array .
Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival .
He is photographed at his alibi location .
Ron Williamson . Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club , and served 11 years of a death sentence .
I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A 's to play professional baseball just before his conviction .
And the state 's key witness in Ron 's case was , in the end , the actual perpetrator .
Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman .
I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago .
William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary .
He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky .
Timothy Durham , who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime , was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence , for several charges of rape and robbery .
He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim .
Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia .
He was convicted of rape , kidnapping and robbery , and served seven years of a 47 year sentence .
Troy 's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward , but said he looked too old .
The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier , which they entered into a photo array days later , and he was positively identified .
Now I 'm going to leave you with a self portrait .
And it reiterates that distortion is a constant , and our eyes are easily deceived .
That 's it . Thank you .
Ed Boyden : A light switch for neurons
Ed Boyden shows how , by inserting genes for light-sensitive proteins into brain cells , he can selectively activate or de-activate specific neurons with fiber-optic implants . With this unprecedented level of control , he 's managed to cure mice of analogs of PTSD and certain forms of blindness . On the horizon : neural prosthetics . Session host Juan Enriquez leads a brief post-talk Q & amp ; A.
Think about your day for a second .
You woke up , felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door , encountered new colleagues and had great discussions , and felt in awe when you found something new .
But I bet there 's something you didn 't think about today -- something so close to home that you probably don 't think about it very often at all .
And that 's that all the sensations , feelings , decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain .
Now the brain may not look like much from the outside -- a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh , amorphous -- but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain , and to see the intricacy of what lies within .
And they 've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons .
Now unlike a human-designed computer , where there 's a fairly small number of different parts -- we know how they work , because we humans designed them -- the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells , maybe tens of thousands .
They come in different shapes ; they 're made out of different molecules .
And they project and connect to different brain regions , and they also change different ways in different disease states .
Let 's make it concrete .
There 's a class of cells , a fairly small cell , an inhibitory cell , that quiets its neighbors .
It 's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia .
It 's called the basket cell .
And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about .
New ones are being discovered everyday .
As just a second example : these pyramidal cells , large cells , they can span a significant fraction of the brain .
They 're excitatory .
And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy .
Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device .
They receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs , which then , if they pass a certain threshold , will go to thousands of downstream partners .
And this process , which takes just a millisecond or so , happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells , as long as you live and think and feel .
So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does ?
Ideally , we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies .
If we could activate cells , we could see what powers they can unleash , what they can initiate and sustain .
If we could turn them off , then we could try and figure out what they 're necessary for .
And that 's a story I 'm going to tell you about today .
And honestly , where we 've gone through over the last 11 years , through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off , both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans .
Now before I tell you about the technology , the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room , if we live long enough , will encounter , perhaps , a brain disorder .
Already , a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them , and the numbers don 't do it justice though .
These disorders -- schizophrenia , Alzheimer 's , depression , addiction -- they not only steal our time to live , they change who we are .
They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people .
Now in the 20th century , there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders , and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders , practically none of them can be considered to be cured .
And part of that 's because we 're bathing the brain in the chemical .
This elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance .
That 's also why , perhaps , most of the drugs , and not all , on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too .
Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain .
And for Parkinson 's disease , Cochlear implants , these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder .
But electricity also will go in all directions -- the path of least resistance , which is where that phrase , in part , comes from .
And it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix .
So again , we 're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control .
Could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go ?
So when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago , I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist , and the first thing I thought about was , if these neurons are electrical devices , all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance .
If we could turn on the electricity in one cell , but not its neighbors , that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells , figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they 're embedded .
And also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry .
Now how are we going to do that ?
Well there are many molecules that exist in nature , which are able to convert light into electricity .
You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells .
If we can install these molecules in neurons somehow , then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light .
And their neighbors , which don 't have the molecule , would not .
There 's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen , and that 's the ability to get light into the brain .
And to do that -- the brain doesn 't feel pain -- you can put -- taking advantage of all the effort that 's gone into the Internet and communications and so on -- optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate , in animal models for example , in pre-clinical studies , these neurons and to see what they do .
So how do we do this ?
Around 2004 , in collaboration with Gerhard Nagel and Karl Deisseroth , this vision came to fruition .
There 's a certain alga that swims in the wild , and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally .
And it senses light with a little eye-spot , which works not unlike how our eye works .
In its membrane , or its boundary , it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity .
So these molecules are called channelrhodopsins .
And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about .
When blue light hits it , it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot , and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery .
So what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons .
And because it 's a protein , it 's encoded for in the DNA of this organism .
So all we 've got to do is take that DNA , put it into a gene therapy vector , like a virus , and put it into neurons .
So it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy , and lots of viruses were coming along .
So this turned out to be very simple to do .
And early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004 , we gave it a try , and it worked on the first try .
You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron .
The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell , like putting solar panels on a roof , and the next thing you know , you have a neuron which can be activated with light .
So this is very powerful .
One of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors .
And you can do that ; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others .
And there 's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells .
This field has now come to be known as optogenetics .
And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do , you can take a complex network , use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network .
And then when you shine light on the entire network , just that cell type will be activated .
So for example , lets sort of consider that basket cell I told you about earlier -- the one that 's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory .
If we can deliver that gene to these cells -- and they 're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene , of course -- and then flash blue light over the entire brain network , just these cells are going to be driven .
And when the light turns off , these cells go back to normal , so they don 't seem to be averse against that .
Not only can you use this to study what these cells do , what their power is in computing in the brain , but you can also use this to try to figure out -- well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells , if indeed they 're atrophied .
Now I want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we 're using this , both at the scientific , clinical and pre-clinical levels .
One of the questions we 've confronted is , what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward ?
Because if you could find those , those would be some of the signals that could drive learning .
The brain will do more of whatever got that reward .
And also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction .
So if we could figure out what cells they are , we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against , or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability .
So to do that , we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorella group , where one side of this little box , if the animal goes there , the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light .
So if these cells can mediate reward , the animal should go there more and more .
And so that 's what happens .
This animal 's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there , and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that .
And he 'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times .
These are the dopamine neurons , which some of you may have heard about , in some of the pleasure centers in the brain .
Now we 've shown that a brief activation of these is enough , indeed , to drive learning .
Now we can generalize the idea .
Instead of one point in the brain , we can devise devices that span the brain , that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns -- arrays of optical fibers , each coupled to its own independent miniature light source .
And then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish -- like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen .
Or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders .
And one story I want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder -- a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear .
And one of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear .
This goes back to the Pavlovian days .
It 's called Pavlovian fear conditioning -- where a tone ends with a brief shock .
The shock isn 't painful , but it 's a little annoying .
And over time -- in this case , a mouse , which is a good animal model , commonly used in such experiments -- the animal learns to fear the tone .
The animal will react by freezing , sort of like a deer in the headlights .
Now the question is , what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear ?
So what we do is we play that tone again after it 's been associated with fear .
But we activate targets in the brain , different ones , using that optical fiber array I told you about in the previous slide , in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear .
And so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we 're working on now .
This is an area in the prefrontal cortex , a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states .
And the animal 's going to hear a tone -- and a flash of light occurred there .
There 's no audio on this , but you can see the animal 's freezing .
This tone used to mean bad news .
And there 's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner , so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this .
And now this next clip is just eight minutes later .
And the same tone is going to play , and the light is going to flash again .
Okay , there it goes . Right now .
And now you can see , just 10 minutes into the experiment , that we 've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory .
Now over the last couple of years , we 've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off .
If we could do that , this could be extremely powerful .
If you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds , you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they 're embedded .
And we 've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life -- every kingdom of life except for animals , we see slightly differently .
And we found all sorts of molecules , they 're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins , that respond to green and yellow light .
And they do the opposite thing of the molecule I told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin .
Let 's give an example of where we think this is going to go .
Consider , for example , a condition like epilepsy , where the brain is overactive .
Now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment , one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain .
But that 's obviously irreversible , and there could be side effects .
What if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time , until the seizure dies away , and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state -- sort of like a dynamical system that 's being coaxed down into a stable state .
So this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light , and we beam light in , and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure , we 're hoping to be able to turn it off .
And so we don 't have data to show you on this front , but we 're very excited about this .
Now I want to close on one story , which we think is another possibility -- which is that maybe these molecules , if you can do ultra-precise control , can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic , an optical prosthetic .
I already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon .
Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson 's deep-brain stimulators implanted .
Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants , which allow them to hear .
There 's another thing , which is you 've got to get these genes into cells .
And new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus , which probably most of us around this room have , and it doesn 't have any symptoms , which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body .
And so far , there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus .
There 's one last elephant in the room , the proteins themselves , which come from algae and bacteria and fungi , and all over the tree of life .
Most of us don 't have fungi or algae in our brains , so what is our brain going to do if we put that in ?
Are the cells going to tolerate it ? Will the immune system react ?
In its early days -- these have not been done on humans yet -- but we 're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this , and so far we haven 't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light .
So it 's early days , to be upfront , but we 're excited about it .
I wanted to close with one story , which we think could potentially be a clinical application .
Now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors , our light sensors that are in the back of our eye , are gone .
And the retina , of course , is a complex structure .
Now let 's zoom in on it here , so we can see it in more detail .
The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top , and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom , the ganglion cells , relay the information to the brain , where we see that as perception .
In many forms of blindness , like retinitis pigmentosa , or macular degeneration , the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed .
Now how could you repair this ?
It 's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored , because there 's nothing for the drug to bind to .
On the other hand , light can still get into the eye .
The eye is still transparent and you can get light in .
So what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras .
And because there 's so many of these cells in the eye , potentially , they could be very high-resolution cameras .
So this is some work that we 're doing .
It 's being led by one of our collaborators , Alan Horsager at USC , and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company Eos Neuroscience , which is funded by the NIH .
And what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze .
It 's a six-arm maze . And there 's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move , or he 'll just sit there .
And the goal , of course , of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that 's under the lit top port .
Now mice are smart , so this mouse solves the maze eventually , but he does a brute-force search .
He 's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform .
So he 's not using vision to do it .
These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans .
And so we 're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach .
So how are we going to solve this ?
We 're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide .
We 're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera -- just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive .
Light is converted to electricity on them .
So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus .
And now you can see , the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again .
And to point out the power of this : these animals are able to get to that platform So this pre-clinical study , I think , bodes hope for the kinds of things we 're hoping to do in the future .
To close , I want to point out that we 're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology .
We 're developing these tools , but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world , so people can study and try to treat different disorders .
And our hope is that , by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them , we can take some of these intractable disorders that I told you about earlier , practically none of which are cured , and in the 21st century make them history .
Thank you .
Juan Enriquez : So some of the stuff is a little dense .
But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs , and being able to target those specifically is a first step .
The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors , like an on / off switch .
Ed Boyden : That 's right .
JE : Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code .
Right , yeah .
So with blue light , we can drive information , and it 's in the form of a one .
And by turning things off , it 's more or less a zero .
So our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities .
JE : And in theory , that means that , as a mouse feels , smells , hears , touches , you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros .
Sure , yeah . We 're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings , and use that to understand more about the brain .
JE : Does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them ?
Well that 's something we 're starting to work on very hard .
We 're now working on some work where we 're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too .
So we can record information and then drive information back in -- sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing .
JE : Well , that might change a couple things . Thank you .
Ueli Gegenschatz : Extreme wingsuit flying
Wingsuit jumping is the leading edge of extreme sports -- an exhilarating feat of almost unbelievable daring , where skydivers soar through canyons at over 100MPH . Ueli Gegenschatz talks about how he does it , and shows jawdropping film .
I started with paragliding .
Paragliding is taking off from mountains with a paraglider , with the possibility to fly cross-country , distance , just with the use of thermals to soar .
Also different aerobatic maneuvers are possible with a paraglider .
From there I started with skydiving .
In this picture you can see there is a four-way skydive , four people flying together , and on the left hand side it 's the camera flier with the camera mounted to his helmet so he can film the whole jump , for the film itself and also for the judging .
From regular , relative skydiving I went on to freeflying .
Freeflying is more the three-dimensional skydiving .
You can see the skydiver with the red suit , he 's in a stand-up position .
The one with the yellow-green suit , he 's flying head-down .
And that 's me in the background , carving around the whole formation in freefall also , with the helmet cam to film this jump .
From freeflying I went on to skysurfing .
Skysurfing is skydiving with a board on the feet .
You can imagine with this big surface of a skysurfing board , there is a lot of force , a lot of power .
Of course I can use this power for example for nice spinning -- we call it " helicopter moves . "
From there I went on to wingsuit flying .
Wingsuit flying is a suit , that I can make fly , just only with my body .
If I put some tension on my body , tension on my suit , I can make it fly . And as you see the fall rate is much much slower because of the bigger surface .
With a proper body position I 'm able to really move forward to gain quite some distance .
This is a jump I did in Rio de Janeiro .
You can see the Copacabana on the left-hand side .
From there with all the skills and knowledge from paragliding and all the different disciplines in skydiving , I went on to BASE jumping .
BASE jumping is skydiving from fixed objects , like buildings , antennae , bridges and earth -- meaning mountains , cliffs .
of being in free fall , with all the visual references .
So my goal soon was to discover new places that nobody had jumped before .
So in summer 2000 I was the first to BASE jump the Eiger North Face in Switzerland .
Two years after this , I was the first to BASE jump from Matterhorn , a very famous mountain that probably everybody knows in here .
2005 I did a BASE jump from the Eiger , from the Monk and from the Jungfrau , three very famous mountains in Switzerland .
The special thing on these three jumps were , I hiked them all and climbed them all in only one day .
In 2008 I jumped the Eiffel Tower in Paris .
So with all this knowledge , I also wanted to get into stunts .
So with some friends we started to do different tricks , like for example this jump here , I jumped from a paraglider .
Or here -- everybody was freezing , pretty much , except me , because it was very cold in Austria where we did this filming .
Everybody sitting in a basket , and I was on top of the balloon , ready to slide down with my skysurf board .
Or this jump , from a moving truck on the highway .
Extreme sports on top level like this is only possible if you practice step by step , if you really work hard on your skills and on your knowledge .
Of course you need to be in physical , very good , condition , so I 'm training a lot .
You need to have the best possible equipment .
And probably the most important is you have to work on your mental skills , mental preparation .
And all this to come as close as possible to the human dream of being able to fly .
So for 2009 , I 'm training hard for my two new projects .
The first one , I want to set a world record in flying from a cliff with my wingsuit .
And I want to set a new record , with the longest distance ever flown .
For my second project , I have a sensational idea of a jump that never has been done before .
So now , on the following movie you will see that I 'm much better in flying a wingsuit than speaking in English .
Enjoy , and thank you very much .
I have some questions .
I think we all might have some questions .
Question one : so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does ?
Because it looks like it might .
Ueli Gegenschatz : Pretty much . I believe this is probably the closest possibility to come to the dream of being able to fly .
I know the answer to this , but how do you land ?
UE : Parachute . We have to open a parachute just seconds before , I would say , impact .
It 's not possible to land a wingsuit yet .
Yet . But people are trying . Are you among those -- you 're not going to commit -- are you among those trying to do it ?
UE : It 's a dream . It 's a dream . Yeah .
We 're still working on it and we 're developing the wingsuits to get better performance , to get more knowledge .
And I believe soon .
All right . Well we will watch this space . But I have two more questions .
What is the -- there was exhaust coming out of the back of the wingsuit . Was that a propelled wingsuit that you were wearing ?
UE : Nope . It 's just smoke .
Coming off of you ?
UE : Hopefully not .
That seems dangerous .
UE : No , smoke is for two reasons , you can see the speed , you can see the way where I was flying .
That 's reason number one . And reason number two : it 's much easier for the camera guy to film If I 'm using smoke .
Ah , I see . So the wingsuit is set up to deliberately release smoke so that you can be tracked . One more question .
What do you do to to cover your face ?
Because I just keep thinking of going that fast and having your whole face smushed backwards .
Are you in a helmet ? Are you in goggles ?
UE : The purest and the best feeling would be with only goggles .
And is that how you usually fly ?
UE : Usually I 'm wearing a helmet . In the mountains I 'm always wearing a helmet because of landings -- usually it 's difficult -- it 's not like regular skydiving where you have like the big landings .
So you have to be prepared .
Right . Now is there anything you don 't do ?
Do people come to you with projects and say , " We want you to do this ! "
and do you ever say , " No , no I 'm not going to . "
UE : Oh of course , of course . Some people have crazy ideas and -- ... a round of applause ...
UE : Thank you very much .
Amanda Palmer : The art of asking
Don 't make people pay for music , says Amanda Palmer : Let them . In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer , she examines the new relationship between artist and fan .
So I didn 't always make my living from music .
For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university , this was my day job .
I was a self-employed living statue called the 8-Foot Bride , and I love telling people l did this for a job , because everybody always wants to know , who are these freaks in real life ?
Hello .
I painted myself white one day , stood on a box , put a hat or a can at my feet , and when someone came by and dropped in money , I handed them a flower and some intense eye contact .
And if they didn 't take the flower , I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing as they walked away .
So I had the most profound encounters with people , especially lonely people who looked like they hadn 't talked to anyone in weeks , and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street , and we would sort of fall in love a little bit .
And my eyes would say , " Thank you . I see you . "
And their eyes would say , " Nobody ever sees me . Thank you . "
And I would get harassed sometimes .
People would yell at me from their passing cars .
" Get a job ! "
And I 'd be , like , " This is my job . "
But it hurt , because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair , shameful .
I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box .
And for the economists out there , you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income , which was shocking to me given I had no regular customers , but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday , 90 bucks on a Friday .
It was consistent .
And meanwhile , I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band , the Dresden Dolls .
This was me on piano , a genius drummer .
I wrote the songs , and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue , and as we started touring , I really didn 't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people , because I loved it .
So after all of our shows , we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people , and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us , and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows , and they would pass the hat , and then they would come in and join us onstage , so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird , random circus guests .
And then Twitter came along , and made things even more magic , because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere .
So I would need a piano to practice on , and an hour later I would be at a fan 's house . This is in London .
People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us . This is in Seattle .
Fans who worked in museums and stores and any kind of public space would wave their hands if I would decide to do a last-minute , spontaneous , free gig .
This is a library in Auckland .
On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat , because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast , and they showed up care of this dude , Chris from Newport Beach , who says hello .
I once tweeted , where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot ?
And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in , and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death .
And I love this kind of random closeness , which is lucky , because I do a lot of couchsurfing .
In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there 's no wireless , and in punk squats , everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless , clearly making it the better option .
My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl , still living at home , and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras .
And that night , her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds .
And I lay there thinking , these people have so little .
Is this fair ?
And in the morning , her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible , and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English , " Your music has helped my daughter so much .
Thank you for staying here . We 're all so grateful . "
And I thought , this is fair .
This is this .
A couple months later , I was in Manhattan , and I tweeted for a crash pad , and at midnight , I 'm ringing a doorbell on the Lower East Side , and it occurs to me I 've never actually done this alone .
I 've always been with my band or my crew .
Is this what stupid people do ?
Is this how stupid people die ?
And before I can change my mind , the door busts open .
She 's an artist . He 's a financial blogger for Reuters , and they 're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath , and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that .
So I couchsurf a lot . I also crowdsurf a lot .
I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing .
You 're falling into the audience and you 're trusting each other .
I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get themselves some extra money , something that I did a lot .
And as usual , the band was psyched , but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn 't bring himself to go out there .
It felt too much like begging to stand there with the hat .
And I recognized his fear of " Is this fair ? " and " Get a job . "
And meanwhile , my band is becoming bigger and bigger .
We signed with a major label .
And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret .
It 's not for everybody .
Well , maybe it 's for you .
We sign , and there 's all this hype leading up to our next record .
And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks , and the label considers this a failure .
And I was like , " 25,000 , isn 't that a lot ? "
They were like , " No , the sales are going down . It 's a failure . "
And they walk off .
Right at this same time , I 'm signing and hugging after a gig , and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $ 10 bill , and he says , " I 'm sorry , I burned your CD from a friend . "
" But I read your blog , I know you hate your label .
I just want you to have this money . "
And this starts happening all the time .
I become the hat after my own gigs , but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people , and unlike the guy in the opening band , I 've actually had a lot of practice standing there .
Thank you .
And this is the moment I decide I 'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible , so it 's like Metallica over here , Napster , bad ; Amanda Palmer over here , and I 'm going to encourage torrenting , downloading , sharing , but I 'm going to ask for help , because I saw it work on the street .
So I fought my way off my label and for my next project with my new band , the Grand Theft Orchestra , I turned to crowdfunding , and I fell into those thousands of connections that I 'd made , and I asked my crowd to catch me .
And the goal was 100,000 dollars .
My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million , which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date .
And you can see how many people it is .
It 's about 25,000 people .
And the media asked , " Amanda , the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy .
How did you make all these people pay for music ? "
And the real answer is , I didn 't make them . I asked them .
And through the very act of asking people , I 'd connected with them , and when you connect with them , people want to help you .
It 's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists .
They don 't want to ask for things .
But it 's not easy . It 's not easy to ask .
And a lot of artists have a problem with this .
Asking makes you vulnerable .
And I got a lot of criticism online after my Kickstarter went big for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices , specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer , and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website .
And this hurt in a really familiar way .
And people saying , " You 're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help , " really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling , " Get a job . "
Because they weren 't with us on the sidewalk , and they couldn 't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd , an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them .
So this is slightly not safe for work .
This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin .
At the end of the night , I stripped and let everyone draw on me .
Now let me tell you , if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers , I recommend this , especially if those strangers are drunk German people .
This was a ninja master-level fan connection , because what I was really saying here was , I trust you this much .
Should I ? Show me .
For most of human history , musicians , artists , they 've been part of the community , connectors and openers , not untouchable stars .
Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance , but the Internet and the content that we 're freely able to share on it are taking us back .
It 's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough .
So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price .
They see it as an unpredictable risk , but the things I 've done , the Kickstarter , the street , the doorbell , I don 't see these things as risk .
I see them as trust .
Now , the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street , they 're getting there .
But the perfect tools aren 't going to help us if we can 't face each other and give and receive fearlessly , but , more important , to ask without shame .
My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box , so blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers , our mistakes , and we see each other .
And I think when we really see each other , we want to help each other .
I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question , which is , " How do we make people pay for music ? "
What if we started asking , " How do we let people pay for music ? "
Thank you .
Mikko Hypponen : How the NSA betrayed the world 's trust -- time to act
Recent events have highlighted , underlined and bolded the fact that the United States is performing blanket surveillance on any foreigner whose data passes through an American entity -- whether they are suspected of wrongdoing or not . This means that , essentially , every international user of the internet is being watched , says Mikko Hypponen . An important rant , wrapped with a plea : to find alternative solutions to using American companies for the world 's information needs .
The two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone .
They 've changed the world .
However , largely to our surprise , they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state .
It turned out that the capability to collect data , information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we 've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies , mostly U.S. intelligence agencies , watching over the rest of the world .
We 've heard about these starting with the revelations from June 6 .
Edward Snowden started leaking information , top secret classified information , from the U.S. intelligence agencies , and we started learning about things like PRISM and XKeyscore and others .
And these are examples of the kinds of programs U.S. intelligence agencies are running right now , against the whole rest of the world .
And if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by George Orwell , well it turns out that George Orwell was an optimist .
We are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined .
And this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah .
Due to be opened very soon , it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center .
You could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting .
And it 's a pretty big building .
How big ? Well , I can give you the numbers -- 140,000 square meters -- but that doesn 't really tell you very much .
Maybe it 's better to imagine it as a comparison .
You think about the largest IKEA store you 've ever been in .
This is five times larger .
How many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store ?
Right ? It 's pretty big .
We estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year .
And this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever , keep it for extended periods of time , keep it for years , keep it for decades .
And this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all .
And what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone .
Well , not exactly everyone , because the U.S. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners .
They can monitor foreigners when foreigners ' data connections end up in the United States or pass through the United States .
And monitoring foreigners doesn 't sound too bad until you realize that I 'm a foreigner and you 're a foreigner .
In fact , 96 percent of the planet are foreigners .
Right ?
So it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us , all of us who use telecommunications and the Internet .
But don 't get me wrong : There are actually types of surveillance that are okay .
I love freedom , but even I agree that some surveillance is fine .
If the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer , or they 're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting , and they have leads and they have suspects , then it 's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect 's phone , and to intercept his Internet communications .
I 'm not arguing that at all , but that 's not what programs like PRISM are about .
They are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings .
They 're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent .
So the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this , well , the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations , there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations , saying that we knew all this already , we knew it was happening , there 's nothing new here .
And that 's not true . Don 't let anybody tell you that we knew this already , because we did not know this already .
Our worst fears might have been something like this , but we didn 't know this was happening .
Now we know for a fact it 's happening .
We didn 't know about this . We didn 't know about PRISM .
We didn 't know about XKeyscore . We didn 't know about Cybertrans .
We didn 't know about DoubleArrow .
We did not know about Skywriter -- all these different programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies .
But now we do .
And we did not know that U.S. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose .
And what that means is that you take something which is secure , an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file , nobody can decrypt that file .
Even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file , it 's going to take millions of years .
So that 's basically perfectly safe , uncrackable .
You take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose , making all of us less secure as an end result .
A real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because , you know , bad people might have house alarms , but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result .
Backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind .
But of course , these intelligence agencies are doing their job .
This is what they have been told to do : do signals intelligence , monitor telecommunications , monitor Internet traffic .
That 's what they 're trying to do , and since most , a very big part of the Internet traffic today is encrypted , they 're trying to find ways around the encryption .
One way is to sabotage encryption algorithms , which is a great example about how U.S. intelligence agencies are running loose .
They are completely out of control , and they should be brought back under control .
So what do we actually know about the leaks ?
Everything is based on the files leaked by Mr. Snowden .
The very first PRISM slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers , and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to .
They even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers .
So for example , they name the collection from Microsoft started on September 11 , 2007 , for Yahoo on the March 12 , 2008 , and then others : Google , Facebook , Skype , Apple and so on .
And every single one of these companies denies .
They all say that this simply isn 't true , that they are not giving backdoor access to their data .
Yet we have these files .
So is one of the parties lying , or is there some other alternative explanation ?
And one explanation would be that these parties , these service providers , are not cooperating .
Instead , they 've been hacked .
That would explain it . They aren 't cooperating . They 've been hacked .
In this case , they 've been hacked by their own government .
That might sound outlandish , but we already have cases where this has happened , for example , the case of the Flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the U.S. government , and which , to spread , subverted the security of the Windows Update network , meaning here , the company was hacked by their own government .
And there 's more evidence supporting this theory as well .
Der Spiegel , from Germany , leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies .
Inside NSA , the unit is called TAO , Tailored Access Operations , and inside GCHQ , which is the U.K. equivalent , it 's called NAC , Network Analysis Centre .
And these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from the United Kingdom targeting a telecom here in Belgium .
And what this really means is that an E.U. country 's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow E.U. country on purpose , and they discuss it in their slides completely casually , business as usual .
Here 's the primary target , here 's the secondary target , here 's the teaming .
They probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub .
They even use cheesy PowerPoint clip art like , you know , " Success , " when they gain access to services like this .
What the hell ?
And then there 's the argument that okay , yes , this might be going on , but then again , other countries are doing it as well .
All countries spy .
And maybe that 's true .
Many countries spy , not all of them , but let 's take an example .
Let 's take , for example , Sweden .
I 'm speaking of Sweden because Sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the United States .
When your data traffic goes through Sweden , their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic .
All right , how many Swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use , every day , U.S.-based services , like , you know , run Windows or OSX , or use Facebook or LinkedIn , or store their data in clouds like iCloud or Skydrive or DropBox , or maybe use online services like Amazon web services or sales support ?
And the answer is , every single Swedish business leader does that every single day .
And then we turn it around .
How many American leaders use Swedish webmails and cloud services ?
And the answer is zero .
So this is not balanced .
It 's not balanced by any means , not even close .
And when we do have the occasional European success story , even those , then , typically end up being sold to the United States .
Like , Skype used to be secure .
It used to be end-to-end encrypted .
Then it was sold to the United States .
Today , it no longer is secure .
So once again , we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose , making all of us less secure as an outcome .
And then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists .
It 's the war on terror .
You shouldn 't worry about it .
Well , it 's not the war on terror .
Yes , part of it is war on terror , and yes , there are terrorists , and they do kill and maim , and we should fight them , but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders , to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil , to read email traffic inside the United Nations Headquarters and E.U. Parliament , and I don 't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the E.U. Parliament , right ?
It 's not the war on terror .
Part of it might be , and there are terrorists , but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them ?
Are the Americans ready to throw away the Constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists ?
And the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the E.U. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom ?
Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat , we are ready to do anything at all ?
But people are scared about terrorists , and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide .
Feel free to survey me if that helps .
And whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply hasn 't thought about this long enough .
Because we have this thing called privacy , and if you really think that you have nothing to hide , please make sure that 's the first thing you tell me , because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets , because obviously you can 't keep a secret .
But people are brutally honest with the Internet , and when these leaks started , many people were asking me about this .
And I have nothing to hide .
I 'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal .
Yet , I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency , especially a foreign intelligence agency .
And if we indeed need a Big Brother , I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother .
And when the leaks started , the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how , when you 've been using search engines , you 've been potentially leaking all that to U.S. intelligence .
And two minutes later , I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me , like , why am I worried about this ?
What am I sending to worry about this ? Am I sending naked pictures or something ?
And my answer to Kimberly was that what I 'm sending is none of your business , and it should be none of your government 's business either .
Because that 's what it 's about . It 's about privacy .
Privacy is nonnegotiable .
It should be built in to all the systems we use .
And one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines .
You show me your search history , and I 'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes .
We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families .
Search engines know more about you than your family members know about you .
And this is all the kind of information we are giving away , we are giving away to the United States .
And surveillance changes history .
We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon .
Imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today .
And let me actually quote the president of Brazil , Ms. Dilma Rousseff .
She was one of the targets of NSA surveillance .
Her email was read , and she spoke at the United Nations Headquarters , and she said , " If there is no right to privacy , there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion , and therefore , there can be no effective democracy . "
That 's what it 's about .
Privacy is the building block of our democracies .
And to quote a fellow security researcher , Marcus Ranum , he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies .
So we are back to the age of colonization , and we , the foreign users of the Internet , we should think about Americans as our masters .
So Mr. Snowden , he 's been blamed for many things .
Some are blaming him for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations -- and blaming Snowden for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming .
So , what is there to be done ?
Should we worry . No , we shouldn 't worry .
We should be angry , because this is wrong , and it 's rude , and it should not be done .
But that 's not going to really change the situation .
What 's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States .
And that 's much easier said than done .
How do you do that ?
A single country , any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the U.S.-made operating systems and cloud services .
But maybe you don 't have to do it alone .
Maybe you can do it together with other countries .
The solution is open source .
By building together open , free , secure systems , we can go around such surveillance , and then one country doesn 't have to solve the problem by itself .
It only has to solve one little problem .
And to quote a fellow security researcher , Haroon Meer , one country only has to make a small wave , but those small waves together become a tide , and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time , and the tide we will build with secure , free , open-source systems , will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state .
Thank you very much .
Charlie Todd : The shared experience of absurdity
Charlie Todd causes bizarre , hilarious , and unexpected public scenes : Seventy synchronized dancers in storefront windows , " ghostbusters " running through the New York Public Library , and the annual no-pants subway ride . In his talk , he shows how his group , Improv Everywhere , uses these scenes to bring people together . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy .
Because I was new to the city , I didn 't have access to a stage , so I decided to create my own in public places .
So the first project we 're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride .
Now this took place in January of 2002 .
And this woman is the star of the video .
She doesn 't know she 's being filmed .
She 's being filmed with a hidden camera .
This is on the 6 train in New York City .
And this is the first stop along the line .
These are two Danish guys who come out and sit down next to the hidden camera .
And that 's me right there in a brown coat .
It 's about 30 degrees outside .
I 'm wearing a hat . I 'm wearing a scarf .
And the girl 's going to notice me right here .
And as you 'll see now , I 'm not wearing pants .
So at this point -- at this point she 's noticed me , but in New York there 's weirdos on any given train car .
One person 's not that unusual .
She goes back to reading her book , which is unfortunately titled " Rape . "
So she 's noticed the unusual thing , but she 's gone back to her normal life .
Now in the meantime , I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well .
They 're going to be entering this car one by one .
We 'll act as though we don 't know each other .
And we 'll act as if it 's just an unfortunate mistake we 've made , forgetting our pants on this cold January day .
So at this point , she decides to put the rape book away .
And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings .
Now in the meantime , the two Danish guys to the left of the camera , they 're cracking up .
They think this is the funniest thing they 've ever seen before .
And watch her make eye contact with them right about now .
And I love that moment in this video , because before it became a shared experience , it was something that was maybe a little bit scary , or something that was at least confusing to her .
And then once it became a shared experience , it was funny and something that she could laugh at .
So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line .
So the video won 't show everything .
This goes on for another four stops .
A total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear .
At the eighth stop , a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar -- like you might sell batteries or candy on the train .
We all very matter of factly bought a pair of pants , put them on and said , " Thank you . That 's exactly what I needed today , " and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions .
Thank you .
So that 's a still from the video there .
And I love that girl 's reaction so much .
And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do .
And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people .
It 's a prank , but it 's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell .
And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride .
And we 've continued to do it every year .
This January , we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York -- almost every single train line in the city .
And also in 50 other cities around the world , people participated .
As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians , I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects .
So I could do more large-scale projects .
Well one day I was walking through Union Square , and I saw this building , which had just been built in 2005 .
And there was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing .
And it was very peculiar , because it was dark out , but she was back-lit with florescent lighting , and she was very much onstage , and I couldn 't figure out why she was doing it .
After about 15 seconds , her friend appeared -- she had been hiding behind a display -- and they laughed and hugged each other and ran away .
So it seemed like maybe she had been dared to do this .
So I got inspired by that .
Looking at the entire facade -- there were 70 total windows -- and I knew what I had to do .
So this project is called Look Up More . We had 70 actors dress in black .
This was completely unauthorized .
We didn 't let the stores know we were coming .
And I stood in the park giving signals .
The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out " Look Up More , " the name of the project .
The second signal was for everybody to do Jumping jacks together .
You 'll see that start right here .
And then we had dancing . We had everyone dance .
And then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them .
So then I gave a new hand signal , which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21 , and he danced .
There were several other activities .
We had people jumping up and down , people dropping to the ground .
And I was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt , putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement .
And because it was in Union Square Park , right by a subway station , there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing .
There 's a better photo of it .
So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon .
The next project I want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger .
A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said , " You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around . "
So I wrote this high school kid back immediately , and I said , " Yes , you are correct .
I think I 'll try to do that this weekend . Thank you . "
So here 's the video .
So again , this is 2005 .
This is the Best Buy in New York City .
We had about 80 people show up to participate , entering one-by-one .
There was an eight year-old girl , a 10 year-old girl .
There was also a 65 year-old man who participated .
So a very diverse group of people .
And I told people , " Don 't work . Don 't actually do work .
But also , don 't shop .
Just stand around and don 't face products . "
Now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt .
Everybody else is one of our actors .
The lower level employees thought it was very funny .
And in fact , several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us .
A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers .
The managers and the security guards , on the other hand , did not find it particularly funny .
You can see them in this footage .
They 're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt .
And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911 .
So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming , watch out , the cops were coming .
And you can see the cops in this footage right here .
That 's a cop wearing black right there , being filmed with a hidden camera .
Ultimately , the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not , in fact , illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants .
Thank you .
So we had been there for 20 minutes ; we were happy to exit the store .
One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras .
And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags .
But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop .
So I like that concept of using their own technology against them .
I think our best projects are ones that are site specific and happen at a particular place for a reason .
And one morning , I was riding the subway .
I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators .
And it 's a very depressing place to be in the morning , it 's very crowded .
So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning .
So this was in the winter of 2009 -- 8 : 30 in the morning .
It 's morning rush hour .
It 's very cold outside .
People are coming in from Queens , transferring from the E train to the 6 train .
And they 're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs .
Thank you .
So there 's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better .
He gave 2,000 high fives that day , and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick .
And that was done also without permission , although no one seemed to care .
So I 'd say over the years , one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is : " These people have too much time on their hands . "
And you know , not everybody 's going to like everything you do , and I 've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to Internet comments , but that one 's always bothered me , because we don 't have too much time on our hands .
The participants at Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers , they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way .
You know , every Saturday and Sunday , hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games .
And I 've never seen anybody comment , looking at a football game , saying , " All those people in the stands , they have too much time on their hands . "
And of course they don 't .
It 's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon , watching a football game in a stadium .
But I think it 's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library .
Or listening to the same MP3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park , or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical , or diving into the ocean in Coney Island wearing formal attire .
You know , as kids , we 're taught to play .
And we 're never given a reason why we should play .
It 's just acceptable that play is a good thing .
And I think that 's sort of the point of Improv Everywhere .
It 's that there is no point and that there doesn 't have to be a point .
We don 't need a reason .
As long as it 's fun and it seems like it 's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time , then that 's enough for us .
And I think , as adults , we need to learn that there 's no right or wrong way to play .
Thank you very much .
Edi Rama : Take back your city with paint
Make a city beautiful , curb corruption . Edi Rama took this deceptively simple path as mayor of Tirana , Albania , where he instilled pride in his citizens by transforming public spaces with colorful designs . With projects that put the people first , Rama decreased crime -- and showed his citizens they could have faith in their leaders . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
In my previous life , I was an artist .
I still paint . I love art .
I love the joy that color can give to our lives and to our communities , and I try to bring something of the artist in me in my politics , and I see part of my job today , the reason for being here , not just to campaign for my party , but for politics , and the role it can play for the better in our lives .
For 11 years , I was mayor of Tirana , our capital .
We faced many challenges .
Art was part of the answer , and my name , in the very beginning , was linked with two things : demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back , and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city .
But this use of colors was not just an artistic act .
Rather , it was a form of political action in a context when the city budget I had available after being elected amounted to zero comma something .
When we painted the first building , by splashing a radiant orange on the somber gray of a facade , something unimaginable happened .
There was a traffic jam and a crowd of people gathered as if it were the location of some spectacular accident , or the sudden sighting of a visiting pop star .
The French E.U. official in charge of the funding rushed to block the painting .
He screeched that he would block the financing .
" But why ? " I asked him .
" Because the colors you have ordered do not meet European standards , " he replied .
" Well , " I told him , " the surroundings do not meet European standards , even though this is not what we want , but we will choose the colors ourselves , because this is exactly what we want .
And if you do not let us continue with our work , I will hold a press conference here , right now , right in this road , and we will tell people that you look to me just like the censors of the socialist realism era . "
Then he was kind of troubled , and asked me for a compromise .
But I told him no , I 'm sorry , compromise in colors is gray , and we have enough gray to last us a lifetime .
So it 's time for change .
The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost .
The pride of people about their own place of living , and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal , barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space .
And when colors came out everywhere , a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people .
Big noise raised up : " What is this ? What is happening ?
What are colors doing to us ? "
And we made a poll , the most fascinating poll I 've seen in my life .
We asked people , " Do you want this action , and to have buildings painted like that ? "
And then the second question was , " Do you want it to stop or do you want it to continue ? "
To the first question , 63 percent of people said yes , we like it .
Thirty-seven said no , we don 't like it .
But to the second question , half of them that didn 't like it , they wanted it to continue .
So we noticed change .
People started to drop less litter in the streets , for example , started to pay taxes , started to feel something they had forgotten , and beauty was acting as a guardsman where municipal police , or the state itself , were missing .
One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored , and where we were in the process of planting trees , when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop .
They had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place .
" Why did you throw away the shutters ? " I asked him .
" Well , because the street is safer now , " they answered .
" Safer ? Why ? They have posted more policemen here ? "
" Come on , man ! What policemen ?
You can see it for yourself . There are colors , streetlights , new pavement with no potholes , trees . So it 's beautiful ; it 's safe . "
And indeed , it was beauty that was giving people this feeling of being protected .
And this was not a misplaced feeling .
Crime did fall .
The freedom that was won in 1990 brought about a state of anarchy in the city , while the barbarism of the ' 90s brought about a loss of hope for the city .
The paint on the walls did not feed children , nor did it tend the sick or educate the ignorant , but it gave hope and light , and helped to make people see there could be a different way of doing things , a different spirit , a different feel to our lives , and that if we brought the same energy and hope to our politics , we could build a better life for each other and for our country .
We removed 123,000 tons of concrete only from the riverbanks .
We demolished more than 5,000 illegal buildings all over the city , up to eight stories high , the tallest of them .
We planted 55,000 trees and bushes in the streets .
We established a green tax , and then everybody accepted it and all businessmen paid it regularly .
By means of open competitions , we managed to recruit in our administration many young people , and we thus managed to build a de-politicized public institution where men and women were equally represented .
International organizations have invested a lot in Albania during these 20 years , not all of it well spent .
When I told the World Bank directors that I wanted them to finance a project to build a model reception hall for citizens precisely in order to fight endemic daily corruption , they did not understand me .
But people were waiting in long queues under sun and under rain in order to get a certificate or just a simple answer from two tiny windows of two metal kiosks .
They were paying in order to skip the queue , the long queue .
The reply to their requests was met by a voice coming from this dark hole , and , on the other hand , a mysterious hand coming out to take their documents while searching through old documents for the bribe .
We could change the invisible clerks within the kiosks , every week , but we could not change this corrupt practice .
" I 'm convinced , " I told a German official with the World Bank , " that it would be impossible for them to be bribed if they worked in Germany , in a German administration , just as I am convinced that if you put German officials from the German administration in those holes , they would be bribed just the same . "
It 's not about genes .
It 's not about some being with a high conscience and some others having not a conscience .
It 's about system , it 's about organization .
It 's also about environment and respect .
We removed the kiosks .
We built the bright new reception hall that made people , Tirana citizens , think they had traveled abroad when they entered to make their requests .
We created an online system of control and so speeded up all the processes .
We put the citizen first , and not the clerks .
The corruption in the state administration of countries like Albania -- it 's not up to me to say also like Greece -- can be fought only by modernization .
Reinventing the government by reinventing politics itself is the answer , and not reinventing people based on a ready-made formula that the developed world often tries in vain to impose to people like us .
Things have come to this point because politicians in general , but especially in our countries , let 's face it , think people are stupid .
They take it for granted that , come what may , people have to follow them , while politics , more and more , fails to offer answers for their public concerns or the exigencies of the common people .
Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians , while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation .
Seen from those stairs , all politicians today seem the same , and politics has come to resemble a sport that inspires more aggressiveness and pessimism than social cohesion and the desire for civic protaganism .
Barack Obama won — — because he mobilized people as never before through the use of social networks .
He did not know each and every one of them , but with an admirable ingenuity , he managed to transform them into activists by giving them all the possibility to hold in their hands the arguments and the instruments that each would need to campaign in his name by making his own campaign .
I tweet . I love it .
I love it because it lets me get the message out , but it also lets people get their messages to me .
This is politics , not from top down , but from the bottom up , and sideways , and allowing everybody 's voice to be heard is exactly what we need .
Politics is not just about leaders .
It 's not just about politicians and laws .
It is about how people think , how they view the world around them , how they use their time and their energy .
When people say all politicians are the same , ask yourself if Obama was the same as Bush , if François Hollande is the same as Sarkozy .
They are not . They are human beings with different views and different visions for the world .
When people say nothing can change , just stop and think what the world was like 10 , 20 , 50 , 100 years ago .
Our world is defined by the pace of change .
We can all change the world .
I gave you a very small example of how one thing , the use of color , can make change happen .
I want to make more change as Prime Minister of my country , but every single one of you can make change happen if you want to .
President Roosevelt , he said , " Believe you can , and you are halfway there . "
Efharisto and kalinihta .

Dan Meyer : Math class needs a makeover
Today 's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork , robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems : formulating them . In his talk , Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something -- a movie , an album , a song or a book -- and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked , and you anticipated that reaction , you waited for it , and it came back , and the person hated it ?
So , by way of introduction , that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years .
I teach high school math .
I sell a product to a market that doesn 't want it , but is forced by law to buy it .
I mean , it 's just a losing proposition .
So there 's a useful stereotype about students that I see , a useful stereotype about you all .
I could give you guys an algebra-two final exam , and I would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate .
And both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the U.S. today .
To start with , I 'd like to break math down into two categories .
One is computation ; this is the stuff you 've forgotten .
For example , factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one .
This stuff is also really easy to relearn , provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning . Math reasoning -- we 'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us -- this is hard to teach .
This is what we would love students to retain , even if they don 't go into mathematical fields .
This is also something that , the way we teach it in the U.S.
all but ensures they won 't retain it .
So , I 'd like to talk about why that is , why that 's such a calamity for society , what we can do about it and , to close with , why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher .
So first , five symptoms that you 're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom .
One is a lack of initiative ; your students don 't self-start .
You finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks .
Students lack perseverance .
They lack retention ; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later , wholesale .
There 's an aversion to word problems , which describes 99 percent of my students .
And then the other one percent is eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation .
This is really destructive .
David Milch , creator of " Deadwood " and other amazing TV shows , has a really good description for this .
He swore off creating contemporary drama , shows set in the present day , because he saw that when people fill their mind with four hours a day of , for example , " Two and a Half Men , " no disrespect , it shapes the neural pathways , he said , in such a way that they expect simple problems .
He called it , " an impatience with irresolution . "
You 're impatient with things that don 't resolve quickly .
You expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes , three commercial breaks and a laugh track .
And I 'll put it to all of you , what you already know , that no problem worth solving is that simple .
I am very concerned about this because I 'm going to retire in a world that my students will run .
I 'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when I teach this way .
I 'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks -- particularly mass-adopted textbooks -- teach math reasoning and patient problem solving , it 's functionally equivalent to turning on " Two and a Half Men " and calling it a day .
In all seriousness . Here 's an example from a physics textbook .
It applies equally to math .
Notice , first of all here , that you have exactly three pieces of information there , each of which will figure into a formula somewhere , eventually , which the student will then compute .
I believe in real life .
And ask yourself , what problem have you solved , ever , that was worth solving where you knew all of the given information in advance ; where you didn 't have a surplus of information and you had to filter it out , or you didn 't have sufficient information and had to go find some .
I 'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that .
And the textbook , I think , knows how it 's hamstringing students because , watch this , this is the practice problem set .
When it comes time to do the actual problem set , we have problems like this right here where we 're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit .
And if the student still doesn 't recognize the stamp this was molded from , it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula .
You could literally , I mean this , pass this particular unit without knowing any physics , just knowing how to decode a textbook . That 's a shame .
So I can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math .
Here 's a really cool problem . I like this .
It 's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift .
But what you have here is actually four separate layers , and I 'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers and , particularly , how when they 're compressed together and presented to the student all at once , how that creates this impatient problem solving .
I 'll define them here : You have the visual .
You also have the mathematical structure , talking about grids , measurements , labels , points , axes , that sort of thing .
You have substeps , which all lead to what we really want to talk about : which section is the steepest .
So I hope you can see .
I really hope you can see how what we 're doing here is taking a compelling question , a compelling answer , but we 're paving a smooth , straight path from one to the other and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way .
That 's all we 're doing here .
So I want to put to you that if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students , we can have everything we 're looking for in terms of patient problem solving .
So right here I start with the visual , and I immediately ask the question : Which section is the steepest ?
And this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers .
So you get people arguing against each other , friend versus friend , in pairs , journaling , whatever .
And then eventually we realize it 's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line .
And we realize how great would it be if we just had some A , B , C and D labels to talk about them more easily .
And then as we start to define what does steepness mean , we realize it would be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down , specifically what that means .
And then and only then , we throw down that mathematical structure .
The math serves the conversation , the conversation doesn 't serve the math .
And at that point , I 'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope , steepness thing .
But if you need to , your students can then develop those substeps together .
Do you guys see how this , right here , compared to that -- which one creates that patient problem solving , that math reasoning ?
It 's been obvious in my practice , to me .
And I 'll yield the floor here for a second to Einstein , who , I believe , has paid his dues .
He talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important , and yet in my practice , in the U.S. here , we just give problems to students ; we don 't involve them in the formulation of the problem .
So 90 percent of what I do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving .
And here 's how it works .
I like this question . It 's about a water tank .
The question is : How long will it take you to fill it up ?
First things first , we eliminate all the substeps .
Students have to develop those , they have to formulate those .
And then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you 'll need .
None of it 's a distractor , so we lose that .
Students need to decide , " All right , well , does the height matter ? Does the side of it matter ?
Does the color of the valve matter ? What matters here ? "
Such an underrepresented question in math curriculum .
So now we have a water tank .
How long will it take you to fill it up ? And that 's it .
And because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms , not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks , we go out and we take a picture of it .
So now we have the real deal .
How long will it take it to fill it up ?
And then even better is we take a video , a video of someone filling it up .
And it 's filling up slowly , agonizingly slowly .
It 's tedious .
Students are looking at their watches , rolling their eyes , and they 're all wondering at some point or another , " Man , how long is it going to take to fill up ? "
That 's how you know you 've baited the hook , right ?
And that question , off this right here , is really fun for me because , like the intro , I teach kids -- because of my inexperience -- I teach the kids that are the most remedial , all right ?
And I 've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula ; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me , so I won 't talk about it .
But here , every student is on a level playing field of intuition .
Everyone 's filled something up with water before , so I get kids answering the question , " How long will it take ? "
I 've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation .
We put names on the board , attach them to guesses , and kids have bought in here .
And then we follow the process I 've described .
And the best part here , or one of the better parts is that we don 't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher 's edition .
We , instead , just watch the end of the movie .
And that 's terrifying , because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher 's edition , that 's great , but it 's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical .
But those conversations have been so valuable , among the most valuable .
So I 'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class .
These are the kids who now , one semester in , I can put something on the board , totally new , totally foreign , and they 'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year , which is just so fun .
We 're no longer averse to word problems , because we 've redefined what a word problem is .
We 're no longer intimidated by math , because we 're slowly redefining what math is .
This has been a lot of fun .
I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia , because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color ; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field ; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation ; to let students build the problem , because Einstein said so ; and to finally , in total , just be less helpful , because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways : It 's buying you out of your obligation , for patient problem solving and math reasoning , to be less helpful .
And why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket .
It 's ubiquitous and fairly cheap , and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous .
I put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks .
I get emails still from teachers in countries I 've never visited saying , " Wow , yeah . We had a good conversation about that .
Oh , and by the way , here 's how I made your stuff better , " which , wow .
I put this problem on my blog recently : In a grocery store , which line do you get into , the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three , five , two and one items .
And the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom , but it eventually got me on " Good Morning America " a few weeks later , which is just bizarre , right ?
And from all of this , I can only conclude that people , not just students , are really hungry for this .
Math makes sense of the world .
Math is the vocabulary for your own intuition .
So I just really encourage you , whatever your stake is in education -- whether you 're a student , parent , teacher , policy maker , whatever -- insist on better math curriculum .
We need more patient problem solvers . Thank you .
Nellie McKay : " Mother of Pearl , " " If I Had You "
The wonderful Nellie McKay sings " Mother of Pearl " and " If I Had You " from her sparkling set at TED2008 .
Feminists don 't have a sense of humor . Feminists just want to be alone -- boo hoo , hoo , hoo . Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . They have a tumor on their funny bone . They say child molestation isn 't funny -- ha , ha , ha , ha . Rape and degradation 's just a crime -- lighten up , ladies . Rampant prostitution 's sex for money -- what 's wrong with that ? Can 't these chicks do anything but whine ? Dance break ! Da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . Da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . Woo-hoo ! Da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da -- yeah , take it off . Da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , dum . They say cheap objectification isn 't witty -- it 's hot ! Equal work and wages worth the fight -- sing us a new one . On-demand abortion every city -- OK , but no gun control . Won 't these women ever get a life ? Feminists don 't have a sense of humor -- poor Hillary . Feminists and vegetarians -- make mine a Big Mac . Feminists spread vicious lies and rumors . They 're far too sensitive to ever be a ham , that 's why these feminists just need to find a man . Da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da , da . I 'm Dennis Kucinich and I approved this message .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
I asked my mother , you know , should I say anything in support of anyone ?
And she said , " Oh no ! Just dis everybody , except Ralph Nader . "
I could show the world how to smile , I could be glad all of the while . I could turn the gray skies to blue , if I had you . I could leave the old days behind , leave all my pals , I 'd never mind . I could start my life all anew , if I had you . I could climb the snow-capped mountains , sail the mighty ocean wide . I could cross the burning desert , if I had you by my side . I could be a king , dear , uncrowned , humble or poor , rich or renowned . There is nothing I couldn 't do , if I had you . Thank you . Well , thank you so much .
Mariana Mazzucato : Government -- investor , risk-taker , innovator
Why doesn 't the government just get out of the way and let the private sector -- the " real revolutionaries " -- innovate ? It 's rhetoric you hear everywhere , and Mariana Mazzucato wants to dispel it . In an energetic talk , she shows how the state -- which many see as a slow , hunkering behemoth -- is really one of our most exciting risk-takers and market-shapers .
Have you ever asked yourselves why it is that companies , the really cool companies , the innovative ones , the creative , new economy-type companies -- Apple , Google , Facebook -- are coming out of one particular country , the United States of America ?
Usually when I say this , someone says , " Spotify !
That 's Europe . " But , yeah .
It has not had the impact that these other companies have had .
Now what I do is I 'm an economist , and I actually study the relationship between innovation and economic growth at the level of the company , the industry and the nation , and I work with policymakers worldwide , especially in the European Commission , but recently also in interesting places like China , and I can tell you that that question is on the tip of all of their tongues : Where are the European Googles ?
What is the secret behind the Silicon Valley growth model , which they understand is different from this old economy growth model ?
And what is interesting is that often , even if we 're in the 21st century , we kind of come down in the end to these ideas of market versus state .
It 's talked about in these modern ways , but the idea is that somehow , behind places like Silicon Valley , the secret have been different types of market-making mechanisms , the private initiative , whether this be about a dynamic venture capital sector that 's actually able to provide that high-risk finance to these innovative companies , the gazelles as we often call them , which traditional banks are scared of , or different types of really successful commercialization policies which actually allow these companies to bring these great inventions , their products , to the market and actually get over this really scary Death Valley period in which many companies instead fail .
But what really interests me , especially nowadays and because of what 's happening politically around the world , is the language that 's used , the narrative , the discourse , the images , the actual words .
So we often are presented with the kind of words like that the private sector is also much more innovative because it 's able to think out of the box .
They are more dynamic .
Think of Steve Jobs ' really inspirational speech to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford , where he said to be innovative , you 've got to stay hungry , stay foolish .
Right ? So these guys are kind of the hungry and foolish and colorful guys , right ?
And in places like Europe , it might be more equitable , we might even be a bit better dressed and eat better than the U.S. , but the problem is this damn public sector .
It 's a bit too big , and it hasn 't actually allowed these things like dynamic venture capital and commercialization to actually be able to really be as fruitful as it could .
And even really respectable newspapers , some that I 'm actually subscribed to , the words they use are , you know , the state as this Leviathan . Right ?
This monster with big tentacles .
They 're very explicit in these editorials .
They say , " You know , the state , it 's necessary to fix these little market failures when you have public goods or different types of negative externalities like pollution , but you know what , what is the next big revolution going to be after the Internet ?
We all hope it might be something green , or all of this nanotech stuff , and in order for that stuff to happen , " they say -- this was a special issue on the next industrial revolution -- they say , " the state , just stick to the basics , right ?
Fund the infrastructure . Fund the schools .
Even fund the basic research , because this is popularly recognized , in fact , as a big public good which private companies don 't want to invest in , do that , but you know what ?
Leave the rest to the revolutionaries . "
Those colorful , out-of-the-box kind of thinkers .
They 're often called garage tinkerers , because some of them actually did some things in garages , even though that 's partly a myth .
And so what I want to do with you in , oh God , only 10 minutes , is to really think again this juxtaposition , because it actually has massive , massive implications beyond innovation policy , which just happens to be the area that I often talk with with policymakers .
It has huge implications , even with this whole notion that we have on where , when and why we should actually be cutting back on public spending and different types of public services which , of course , as we know , are increasingly being outsourced because of this juxtaposition .
Right ? I mean , the reason that we need to maybe have free schools or charter schools is in order to make them more innovative without being emburdened by this heavy hand of the state curriculum , or something .
So these kind of words are constantly , these juxtapositions come up everywhere , not just with innovation policy .
And so to think again , there 's no reason that you should believe me , so just think of some of the smartest revolutionary things that you have in your pockets and do not turn it on , but you might want to take it out , your iPhone .
Ask who actually funded the really cool , revolutionary thinking-out-of-the-box things in the iPhone .
What actually makes your phone a smartphone , basically , instead of a stupid phone ?
So the Internet , which you can surf the web anywhere you are in the world ; GPS , where you can actually know where you are anywhere in the world ; the touchscreen display , which makes it also a really easy-to-use phone for anybody .
These are the very smart , revolutionary bits about the iPhone , and they 're all government-funded .
And the point is that the Internet was funded by DARPA , U.S. Department of Defense .
GPS was funded by the military 's Navstar program .
Even Siri was actually funded by DARPA .
The touchscreen display was funded by two public grants by the CIA and the NSF to two public university researchers at the University of Delaware .
Now , you might be thinking , " Well , she 's just said the word ' defense ' and ' military ' an awful lot , " but what 's really interesting is that this is actually true in sector after sector and department after department .
So the pharmaceutical industry , which I am personally very interested in because I 've actually had the fortune to study it in quite some depth , is wonderful to be asking this question about the revolutionary versus non-revolutionary bits , because each and every medicine can actually be divided up on whether it really is revolutionary or incremental .
So the new molecular entities with priority rating are the revolutionary new drugs , whereas the slight variations of existing drugs -- Viagra , different color , different dosage -- are the less revolutionary ones .
And it turns out that a full 75 percent of the new molecular entities with priority rating are actually funded in boring , Kafkian public sector labs .
This doesn 't mean that Big Pharma is not spending on innovation .
They do . They spend on the marketing part .
They spend on the D part of R & amp ; D.
They spend an awful lot on buying back their stock , which is quite problematic .
In fact , companies like Pfizer and Amgen recently have spent more money in buying back their shares to boost their stock price than on R & amp ; D , but that 's a whole different TED Talk which one day I 'd be fascinated to tell you about .
Now , what 's interesting in all of this is the state , in all these examples , was doing so much more than just fixing market failures .
It was actually shaping and creating markets .
It was funding not only the basic research , which again is a typical public good , but even the applied research .
It was even , God forbid , being a venture capitalist .
So these SBIR and SDTR programs , which give small companies early-stage finance have not only been extremely important compared to private venture capital , but also have become increasingly important .
Why ? Because , as many of us know , V.C. is actually quite short-term .
They want their returns in three to five years .
Innovation takes a much longer time than that , 15 to 20 years .
And so this whole notion -- I mean , this is the point , right ?
Who 's actually funding the hard stuff ?
Of course , it 's not just the state .
The private sector does a lot .
But the narrative that we 've always been told is the state is important for the basics , but not really providing that sort of high-risk , revolutionary thinking out of the box .
In all these sectors , from funding the Internet to doing the spending , but also the envisioning , the strategic vision , for these investments , it was actually coming within the state .
The nanotechnology sector is actually fascinating to study this , because the word itself , nanotechnology , came from within government .
And so there 's huge implications of this .
First of all , of course I 'm not someone , this old-fashioned person , market versus state .
What we all know in dynamic capitalism is that what we actually need are public-private partnerships .
But the point is , by constantly depicting the state part as necessary but actually -- pffff -- a bit boring and often a bit dangerous kind of Leviathan , I think we 've actually really stunted the possibility to build these public-private partnerships in a really dynamic way .
Even the words that we often use to justify the " P " part , the public part -- well , they 're both P 's -- with public-private partnerships is in terms of de-risking .
What the public sector did in all these examples I just gave you , and there 's many more , which myself and other colleagues have been looking at , is doing much more than de-risking .
It 's kind of been taking on that risk . Bring it on .
It 's actually been the one thinking out of the box .
But also , I 'm sure you all have had experience with local , regional , national governments , and you 're kind of like , " You know what , that Kafkian bureaucrat , I 've met him . "
That whole juxtaposition thing , it 's kind of there .
Well , there 's a self-fulfilling prophecy .
By talking about the state as kind of irrelevant , boring , it 's sometimes that we actually create those organizations in that way .
So what we have to actually do is build these entrepreneurial state organizations .
DARPA , that funded the Internet and Siri , actually thought really hard about this , how to welcome failure , because you will fail .
You will fail when you innovative .
One out of 10 experiments has any success .
And the V.C. guys know this , and they 're able to actually fund the other losses from that one success .
And this brings me , actually , probably , to the biggest implication , and this has huge implications beyond innovation .
If the state is more than just a market fixer , if it actually is a market shaper , and in doing that has had to take on this massive risk , what happened to the reward ?
We all know , if you 've ever taken a finance course , the first thing you 're taught is sort of the risk-reward relationship , and so some people are foolish enough or probably smart enough if they have time to wait , to actually invest in stocks , because they 're higher risk which over time will make a greater reward than bonds , that whole risk-reward thing .
Well , where 's the reward for the state of having taken on these massive risks and actually been foolish enough to have done the Internet ?
The Internet was crazy .
It really was . I mean , the probability of failure was massive .
You had to be completely nuts to do it , and luckily , they were .
Now , we don 't even get to this question about rewards unless you actually depict the state as this risk-taker .
And the problem is that economists often think , well , there is a reward back to the state . It 's tax .
You know , the companies will pay tax , the jobs they create will create growth so people who get those jobs and their incomes rise will come back to the state through the tax mechanism .
Well , unfortunately , that 's not true .
Okay , it 's not true because many of the jobs that are created go abroad .
Globalization , and that 's fine . We shouldn 't be nationalistic .
Let the jobs go where they have to go , perhaps .
I mean , one can take a position on that .
But also these companies that have actually had this massive benefit from the state -- Apple 's a great example .
They even got the first -- well , not the first , but 500,000 dollars actually went to Apple , the company , through this SBIC program , which predated the SBIR program , as well as , as I said before , all the technologies behind the iPhone .
And yet we know they legally , as many other companies , pay very little tax back .
So what we really need to actually rethink is should there perhaps be a return-generating mechanism that 's much more direct than tax . Why not ?
It could happen perhaps through equity .
This , by the way , in the countries that are actually thinking about this strategically , countries like Finland in Scandinavia , but also in China and Brazil , they 're retaining equity in these investments .
Sitra funded Nokia , kept equity , made a lot of money , it 's a public funding agency in Finland , which then funded the next round of Nokias .
The Brazilian Development Bank , which is providing huge amounts of funds today to clean technology , they just announced a 56 billion program for the future on this , is retaining equity in these investments .
So to put it provocatively , had the U.S. government thought about this , and maybe just brought back just something called an innovation fund , you can bet that , you know , if even just .05 percent of the profits from what the Internet produced had come back to that innovation fund , there would be so much more money to spend today on green technology .
Instead , many of the state budgets which in theory are trying to do that are being constrained .
But perhaps even more important , we heard before about the one percent , the 99 percent .
If the state is thought about in this more strategic way , as one of the lead players in the value creation mechanism , because that 's what we 're talking about , right ?
Who are the different players in creating value in the economy , and is the state 's role , has it been sort of dismissed as being a backseat player ?
If we can actually have a broader theory of value creation and allow us to actually admit what the state has been doing and reap something back , it might just be that in the next round , and I hope that we all hope that the next big revolution will in fact be green , that that period of growth will not only be smart , innovation-led , not only green , but also more inclusive , so that the public schools in places like Silicon Valley can actually also benefit from that growth , because they have not .
Thank you .
Jennifer 8 . Lee : The hunt for General Tso
Reporter Jennifer 8 . Lee talks about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes -- exploring the hidden spots where these two cultures have combined to form a new cuisine .
There are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonald 's , Burger King , Kentucky Fried Chicken and Wendy 's , combined -- 40,000 , actually .
Chinese restaurants have played an important role in American history , as a matter of fact .
The Cuban missile crisis was resolved in a Chinese restaurant called Yenching Palace in Washington , D.C. , which unfortunately is closed now , and about to be turned into Walgreen 's .
And the house that John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is actually also now a Chinese restaurant called Wok ' n Roll , on H Street in Washington .
And it 's not completely gratuitous , because wok and roll -- Chinese food and Japanese foods , so it kind of works out .
And Americans love their Chinese food so much they 've actually brought it into space .
NASA , for example , serves thermal-stabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts .
So , let me present the question to you : If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie , you should ask yourself , how often do you eat apple pie , versus how often do you eat Chinese food . Right ?
And if you think about it , a lot of the foods that you think of or we think of or Americans think of as Chinese food are barely recognizable to Chinese , for example : beef with broccoli , egg rolls , General Tso 's Chicken , fortune cookies , chop suey , the take-out boxes .
For example , I took a whole bunch of fortune cookies back to China , gave them to Chinese to see how they would react .
What is this ?
Should I try it ?
Try it !
What is it called ?
Fortune cookie .
There 's a piece of paper inside !
What is this ?
You 've won a prize !
What is this ?
It 's a fortune !
Tasty !
So , where are they from ?
The short answer is , actually , they 're from Japan .
And in Kyoto , outside , there are still small family-run bakeries that make fortune cookies , as they did over 100 years ago , 30 years before fortune cookies were introduced in the United States .
If you see them side by side , there 's yellow and brown .
Theirs are actually flavored with miso and sesame paste , so they 're not as sweet as our version .
So , how did they get to the United States ?
Well , the short answer is , the Japanese immigrants came over , and a bunch of the bakers introduced them -- including at least one in Los Angeles , and one here in San Francisco called Benkyo-do , which is on the corner of Sutter and Buchanan .
They back then , actually , made fortune cookies using very much the similar kind of irons that we saw back in Kyoto .
So , the interesting question is , how do you go from fortune cookies being something that is Japanese to being something that is Chinese ?
Well , the short answer is , we locked up all the Japanese during World War II , including those that made fortune cookies , so that 's the time when the Chinese moved in , kind of saw a market opportunity and took over .
So , fortune cookies : invented by the Japanese , popularized by the Chinese , but ultimately consumed by Americans .
They are more American than anything else .
Another one of my favorite dishes : General Tso 's Chicken -- which , by the way , in the US Naval Academy is called Admiral Tso 's Chicken .
I love this dish .
The original name in my book was actually called The Long March of General Tso , and he has marched very far indeed , because he is sweet , he is fried , and he is chicken -- all things that Americans love .
He has marched so far , actually , that the chef who originally invented the dish doesn 't recognize it ; he 's kind of horrified .
He 's in Taiwan right now .
He 's retired , deaf and plays a lot of Mahjong .
So , he -- after this I showed him , he got up , and he 's like , " Mominqimiao , " which means , " This is all nonsense , " and goes back to play his Mahjong game during the afternoon .
So , another dish . One of my favorites . Beef with broccoli .
Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable ; in fact , it is originally an Italian vegetable .
It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s , but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s .
In fact , the Chinese had their own version of broccoli , which is called Chinese broccoli , but right now , what -- they 've now discovered American broccoli , and are importing it as a , sort of , exotic delicacy .
I guarantee you , General Tso never saw a stalk of broccoli in his life -- and indeed , that actually was a picture of General Tso .
I went to his home town .
This is a billboard that says : " Welcome to the birthplace of General Tso . "
And I went looking for chicken .
Finally found a cow -- and did find chicken .
Believe it or not , these guys were actually crossing the road .
And -- -- I actually found a whole bunch of General Tso 's relatives who are still in the little town .
This guy is now five generations removed from the General ; this guy is about seven .
Showed them all the pictures of General Tso Chicken that I showed you , and they 're like , we don 't know this dish .
And then they 're like , is this Chinese food ?
Because it doesn 't look like Chinese food to them .
But they weren 't kind of surprised I traveled around the world to visit them , because in their eyes he is , after all , a famous Qing dynasty military hero .
He played an important role in the Taiping rebellion , which was a war started by a guy who thought he was the son of God and the baby brother of Jesus Christ .
And caused the war that killed 20 million people -- still the deadliest civil war in the world to this day .
So , you know , I realized when I was there , General Tso is kind of a lot like Colonel Sanders in America , in that he 's known for chicken and not war .
But in China , this guy 's actually known for war and not chicken .
But the granddaddy of all the Chinese-American dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey , which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century .
And according to New York Times , in 1904 , there was an outbreak of Chinese restaurants all over town , and " the city has gone ' chop suey ' mad . "
So it took about 30 years before the Americans realized that , whoa , chop suey is actually not known in China .
And as this article points out , " The average native of any city in China knows nothing of chop suey . "
You know , back then it was a way to show that you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan : if you were a guy and you wanted to impress a girl , you could take her out on a chop suey date .
I like to say chop suey 's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another , because chop suey , if you translate into Chinese , means tsap sui , which , if you translate back , means " odds and ends . "
So , these people are going around China asking for chop suey , which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying , I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called " leftovers , " and it is particularly -- -- right ?
And not only that : this dish is particularly popular after that holiday you call Thanksgiving .
So , why -- why and where -- did chop suey come from ?
Let 's go back to mid-1800s when the Chinese first came to America .
Now back then , the Americans were not clamoring to eat Chinese food .
In fact , they saw this people who landed at their shores as alien .
These people weren 't eating dogs -- they were eating cats -- and they weren 't eating cats -- they were eating rats .
In fact , The New York Times , my esteemed employer , in 1883 ran an article that asked , " Do Chinese eat rats ? "
And not the most PC question to be asked today , but if you kind of look at the popular imagery of the time , not so outlandish .
This is actually a real advertisement for rat poison from the late 1800s , and if you see , under the word " Clears " -- very small -- it says , " They must go , " which refers not only to the rats , but to the Chinese in their midst , because the way that the food was perceived was that these people who ate foods different from us must be different from us .
And another way that you saw , sort of , this sort of , this antipathy towards the Chinese is through documents like this .
This is actually in the Library of Congress ; it is a pamphlet published by Samuel Gompers , hero of our American labor movement , and it 's called , " Some Reason for Chinese Exclusion : Meat versus Rice : American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism : Which shall survive ?
And it basically made the argument that Chinese men who ate rice would necessarily bring down the standard of living for American men who ate meat .
And as a matter of fact , then , this is one of the reasons why we must exclude them from this country So , with sentiments like these , the Chinese Exclusion Act was sort of passed between 1882 and 1902 , the only time in American history when a group was specifically excluded for its national origin or ethnicity .
So , in a way , because the Chinese were attacked , chop suey was created as a defense mechanism .
Now , who came up with the idea of chop suey ?
There 's a lot of different mysteries , a lot of different legends , but of the ones that I 've found that I thought was most interesting is this article from 1904 .
A Chinese guy named Lem Sen shows up in Chinatown , New York City , and says , I want you guys all to stop making chop suey , because I am the original creator and sole proprietor of the dish known as chop suey .
And the way that he tells it , there was a guy , there was a famous Chinese diplomat that showed up , and he was told to make a dish that looked very popular and could , quote , " pass " as Chinese .
And as he said -- we would never print this today -- but basically , the American man has become very rich .
Lem Sen , who 's this guy : I would have made this money , too , but I 've spent all this time looking for the American man who stole my recipe .
Now I 've come and found him , and I want my recipe back and I want everyone to stop making chop suey , or pay me for the right to do the same .
So it was an early exercise of intellectual property rights .
So the thing is , this kind of idea of Chinese-American food doesn 't exist only in America .
In fact , if you think about it , Chinese food is the most pervasive food on the planet , served on all seven continents , even Antarctica , because Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station , which is the main scientific station in Antarctica .
So , you see different varieties of Chinese food .
For example , there is French Chinese food , where they serve salt and pepper frog legs .
There is Italian Chinese food , where they don 't have fortune cookies , so they serve fried gelato .
My downstairs neighbor , Alessandra , was completely shocked when I told her , " Dude , fried gelato is not Chinese . "
She 's like , " It 's not ?
But they serve it in all the Chinese restaurants in Italy . "
And even the Brits have their own version .
This is a dish called crispy shredded beef , which has a lot of crisp , a lot of shred , and not a lot of beef .
There is West Indian Chinese food , there 's Jamaican Chinese food , there is Middle Eastern Chinese food , there 's Mauritian Chinese food .
This is a dish called Magic Bowl that I discovered .
There 's Indian Chinese food , Korean Chinese food , Japanese Chinese food , where they take the bao , the little buns , and they make them into pizza versions , and they take -- and they -- like , totally randomly they 'll take Chinese noodle dishes , and they 'll just Ramen-ize them .
This is , like , this is something that in the Chinese version has no soup .
So , there 's Peruvian Chinese food , which should not be mixed with Mexican Chinese food , where they basically take things and make it look like fajitas .
And then -- one thing : they have things like risotto chop suey .
My personal favorite of all the restaurants I 've encountered around the world was this one in Brazil , called " Kung Food . "
So , let 's take a step back , and kind of , understand what is to be appreciated in America .
McDonald 's has , sort of , garnered a lot of attention , a lot of respect , for basically standardizing the menu , décor and dining experience in post-World War II America .
But you know what ?
They actually did so through a centralized headquarters out of Illinois , right ?
Chinese restaurants have done largely the same thing , I would argue , with the menu and the décor -- even the restaurant name -- but without a centralized headquarters .
So , this actually became very clear to me with the March 30 , 2005 Powerball drawing , where , you know , they expected , based on the number of ticket sales they had , to have three or four second-place winners -- those are the people who match five or six Powerball numbers .
Instead , they had 110 , and they were completely shocked .
They looked all across the country , and discovered it couldn 't necessarily be fraud , because it happened , you know , in different states , across different computer systems .
So whatever it was , it caused people to sort of behave in a mass synchronized way .
So , like , OK , maybe it had to do with the patterns on the little pieces of paper -- you know , like , it was a diamond , or , you know , diagonal .
It wasn 't that .
It wasn 't that , so they 're like , OK , let 's look at television , so they looked at an episode of " Lost . "
Now , I don 't have a TV , which makes me a freak , but very productive , and -- -- and this episode of " Lost , " I understand , where the overweight guy has a lucky number which was not a lucky number , which was how long they 'd been on the island , but they looked , and the numbers did not match .
So they looked at " The Young and The Restless , " and it wasn 't that , either .
So , it wasn 't until the first guy shows up the next day , and they ask him , " Where did you get your number from ? "
He 's like , " Oh , I got it from a fortune cookie . "
This actually is a slip that one of the winners had , because the Tennessee lottery security officials were like , oh , no -- like , this can 't be true .
But it was true , and basically , of those 110 people , and 104 of them or so had gotten their number from the fortune cookie .
Yeah . So , I went and started looking .
I went across the country , looking for these restaurants where these people had gotten their fortune cookies from .
You know , there are a bunch of them , including Lee 's China in Omaha -- which is actually run by Koreans , but that 's another point -- and a bunch of them named China Buffet .
So , what 's interesting is that their stories were similar , but they were different .
It was lunch , it was take-out , it was sit-down , it was buffet , it was three weeks ago , it was three months ago .
But at some point , all these people had a very similar experience that converged at a fortune cookie and at a Chinese restaurant , and all these Chinese restaurants were serving fortune cookies , which , of course we know aren 't even Chinese to begin with .
So it 's kind of part of the phenomenon I called spontaneous self-organization , right , where , like in ant colonies , where little decisions made by -- on the micro-level actually have a big impact on the macro-level .
So , a good sort of contrast is Chicken McNuggets .
McDonald 's actually spent 10 years coming out with a chicken-like product .
They did chicken pot pie , they did fried chicken , and then they finally introduced Chicken McNuggets .
And the great innovation of Chicken McNuggets was not nuggetfying them , because that 's kind of an easy concept , but the trick behind Chicken McNuggets was , they were able to remove the chicken from the bone in a cost-effective manner , which is why it took so long for other people to copy them .
It took 10 years , and then within a couple of months , it was such a hit they just introduced it and rolled it across the entire system of McDonald 's in the country .
In contrast , we have General Tso 's Chicken , which actually started in New York City in the early 1970s , as I was also starting in the university in New York City in the early 1970s , so ...
And this logo !
So me , General Tso 's Chicken and this logo are all karmacally related .
But that dish also took about 10 years to spread across America from a random restaurant in New York City .
Someone 's like , oh , God -- it 's sweet , it 's fried , it 's chicken : Americans will love this .
So , what I like to say , you know , this being sort of Bay Area , Silicon Valley -- is that we think of McDonald 's as sort of the Microsoft of the dining experiences .
We can think of Chinese restaurants perhaps as Linux : sort of an open source thing , right , where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system , that there can be specialized versions of Chinese food , you know , depending on the region .
For example , you know , in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food , where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish , right ?
And in Philadelphia , you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll , which looks like an egg roll on the outside , but a cheesesteak on the inside .
I was really surprised to discover that , not only in Philadelphia , but also in Atlanta , because what had happened was that a Chinese family had moved from Atlanta to -- sorry , from Philadelphia to Atlanta , and brought that with them .
So , the thing is , our historical lore , because of the way we like narratives , are full of vast characters such as , you know , Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc with McDonald 's and Asa Chandler with Coca-Cola .
But , you know , it 's very easy to overlook the smaller characters -- oops -- for example , like Lem Sen , who introduced chop suey , Chef Peng , who introduced General Tso Chicken , and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies .
So , the point of my presentation is to make you think twice , that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much , if not more , impact on what we eat today .
So . Thank you very much .
Dong Woo Jang : The art of bow-making
Dong Woo Jang has an unusual after school hobby . Jang , who was 15 when he gave the talk , tells the story of how living in the concrete jungle of Seoul inspired him to build the perfect bow . Watch him demo one of his beautiful hand-crafted archer 's bows .
It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence , and I believe this is true , especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success .
Well , I can tell you that , in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system , also known as pressure cooker , not everyone can do well in that environment .
While many people responded in different ways about our education system , my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building .
Why bows ?
I 'm not quite sure .
Perhaps , in the face of constant pressure , my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows .
If you think about it , the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times .
The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty , where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves .
In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact , the government has planted mulberry trees .
The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics .
The area near these walls , which nobody bothers to pay attention to , had been left free from major intervention , and this is where I first found my treasures .
As I fell deeper into bow making , I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood .
When I went on school field trips , family vacations , or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes , I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag .
And they would be somethings like saws , knives , sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel .
I would bring the branches home , riding buses and subways , barely holding them in my hands .
And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach .
Airport security .
In the privacy of my room , covered in sawdust , I would saw , trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape .
One day , I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire .
Where ? The rooftop of my apartment building , a place where 96 families call home .
A customer from a department store across from my building called 911 , and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned .
I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom , in the audience today : Mom , I was really sorry , and I will be more careful with open fire from now on .
My mother had to do a lot of explaining , telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson .
I also researched extensively on bows around the world .
In that process , I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow .
I also worked with many different types of wood , such as maple , yew and mulberry , and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before .
The most effective bow for me would be like this .
One : Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow .
Two : Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight , which means more power .
Three : Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage .
And four : Horn used to store energy in compression .
After fixing , breaking , redesigning , mending , bending and amending , my ideal bow began to take shape , and when it was finally done , it looked like this .
I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own .
This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum , and see how my bow resembles them .
Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention .
Through bowmaking , I came in contact with part of my heritage .
Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me .
You see , I searched far and wide , but never bothered to look close and near .
From this realization , I began to take interest in Korean history , which had never inspired me before .
In the end , the grass is often greener on my side of the fence , although we don 't realize it .
Now , I am going to show you how my bow works .
And let 's see how this one works .
This is a bamboo bow , with 45-pound draw weights .
A bow may function in a simple mechanism , but in order to make a good bow , a great amount of sensitivity is required .
You need to console and communicate with the wood material .
Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being , and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow .
I may be an [ odd ] student with unconventional interests , but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you .
My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind , where everyone is needed exactly where they are , like the fibers and the tendons in a bow , a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient .
The bow resembles me , and I resemble the bow .
Now , I am shooting a part of myself to you .
No , better yet , a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind .
Did it strike you ?
Thank you .
Erin McKean : The joy of lexicography
Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction ? In this infectiously exuberant talk , leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways today 's print dictionary is poised for transformation .
Now , have any of y 'all ever looked up this word ?
You know , in a dictionary ? Yeah , that 's what I thought .
How about this word ?
Here , I 'll show it to you .
Lexicography : the practice of compiling dictionaries .
Notice -- we 're very specific -- that word " compile . "
The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite , out of a lump of rock . It 's made up of lots of little bits .
It 's little discrete -- that 's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E -- bits .
And those bits are words .
Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer -- besides getting to come to TED -- is that you get to say really fun words , like lexicographical .
Lexicographical has this great pattern : it 's called a double dactyl . And just by saying double dactyl , I 've sent the geek needle all the way into the red .
But " lexicographical " is the same pattern as " higgledy-piggledy . "
Right ? It 's a fun word to say , and I get to say it a lot .
Now , one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people don 't usually have a kind of warm , fuzzy , snuggly image of the dictionary .
Right ? Nobody hugs their dictionaries .
But what people really often think about the dictionary is , they think more like this .
Just to let you know , I do not have a lexicographical whistle .
But people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary , and keep the bad words out .
But the thing is , I don 't want to be a traffic cop .
For one thing , I just do not do uniforms .
And for another , deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy .
And it 's not very fun . And when parts of your job are not easy or fun , you kind of look for an excuse not to do them .
So if I had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work , I would much rather be a fisherman .
I want to throw my big net into the deep , blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom .
But why do people want me to direct traffic , when I would much rather go fishing ?
Well , I blame the Queen .
Why do I blame the Queen ?
Well , first of all , I blame the Queen because it 's funny .
But secondly , I blame the Queen because dictionaries have really not changed .
Our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign .
The only thing that Queen Victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the F-word , which has happened in American dictionaries since 1965 .
So , there 's this guy , right ? Victorian era .
James Murray , first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary .
I do not have that hat . I wish I had that hat .
So he 's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today .
When a guy who looks like that , in that hat , is the face of modernity , you have a problem .
And so , James Murray could get a job on any dictionary today .
There 'd be virtually no learning curve .
And of course , a few of us are saying : okay , computers !
Computers ! What about computers ?
The thing about computers is , I love computers .
I mean , I 'm a huge geek , I love computers .
I would go on a hunger strike before I let them take away Google Book Search from me .
But computers don 't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries .
They don 't change the end result .
Because what a dictionary is , is it 's Victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion .
It 's steampunk . What we have is an electric velocipede .
You know , we have Victorian design with an engine on it . That 's all !
The design has not changed .
And OK , what about online dictionaries , right ?
Online dictionaries must be different .
This is the Oxford English Dictionary Online , one of the best online dictionaries .
This is my favorite word , by the way .
Erinaceous : pertaining to the hedgehog family ; of the nature of a hedgehog .
Very useful word . So , look at that .
Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen .
This is flat . Look how many links there are in the actual entry : two !
Right ? Those little buttons , I had them all expanded except for the date chart .
So there 's not very much going on here .
There 's not a lot of clickiness .
And in fact , online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print , except for searchability .
And when you improve searchability , you actually take away the one advantage of print , which is serendipity .
Serendipity is when you find things you weren 't looking for , because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult .
So -- -- now , when you think about this , what we have here is a ham butt problem .
Does everyone know the ham butt problem ?
Woman 's making a ham for a big , family dinner .
She goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away , and she looks at this piece of ham and she 's like , " This is a perfectly good piece of ham . Why am I throwing this away ? "
She thought , " Well , my mom always did this . "
So she calls up mom , and she says , " Mom , why 'd you cut the butt off the ham , when you 're making a ham ? "
She says , " I don 't know , my mom always did it ! "
So they call grandma , and grandma says , " My pan was too small ! "
So , it 's not that we have good words and bad words .
We have a pan that 's too small !
You know , that ham butt is delicious ! There 's no reason to throw it away .
The bad words -- see , when people think about a place and they don 't find a place on the map , they think , " This map sucks ! "
When they find a nightspot or a bar , and it 's not in the guidebook , they 're like , " Ooh , this place must be cool ! It 's not in the guidebook . "
When they find a word that 's not in the dictionary , they think , " This must be a bad word . " Why ? It 's more likely to be a bad dictionary .
Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan ?
So , you can 't get a smaller ham .
The English language is as big as it is .
So , if you have a ham butt problem , and you 're thinking about the ham butt problem , the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive : paper is the enemy of words .
How can this be ? I mean , I love books . I really love books .
Some of my best friends are books .
But the book is not the best shape for the dictionary .
Now they 're going to think " Oh , boy .
People are going to take away my beautiful , paper dictionaries ? "
No . There will still be paper dictionaries .
When we had cars -- when cars became the dominant mode of transportation , we didn 't round up all the horses and shoot them .
You know , there 're still going to be paper dictionaries , but it 's not going to be the dominant dictionary .
The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in . And it 's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in .
So , think about it this way : if you 've got an artificial constraint , artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview .
What if biologists could only study animals that made people go , " Aww . " Right ?
What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals , and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study ?
We 'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna , and not very much about much else .
And I think this is a problem .
I think we should study all the words , because when you think about words , you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts .
Lexicography is really more about material science .
We are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression : your speeches and your writing . And then , often people say to me , " Well , OK , how do I know that this word is real ? "
They think , " OK , if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts , how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers ?
How can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer ? "
They 're just the right tools for the job .
And so people say to me , " How do I know if a word is real ? "
You know , anybody who 's read a children 's book knows that love makes things real .
If you love a word , use it . That makes it real .
Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction .
It doesn 't make a word any more real than any other way .
If you love a word , it becomes real .
So if we 're not worrying about directing traffic , if we 've transcended paper , if we are worrying less about control and more about description , then we can think of the English language as being this beautiful mobile .
And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes , is touched , any time you touch a word , you use it in a new context , you give it a new connotation , you verb it , you make the mobile move .
You didn 't break it . It 's just in a new position , and that new position can be just as beautiful .
Now , if you 're no longer a traffic cop -- the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection , or the cars get confused . Right ?
But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic , but maybe to count the cars that go by , then more eyeballs are better .
You can ask for help !
If you ask for help , you get more done . And we really need help .
Library of Congress : 17 million books , of which half are in English .
If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that 's not in the dictionary in it , that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries .
And I find an un-dictionaried word -- a word like " un-dictionaried , " for example -- in almost every book I read . What about newspapers ?
Newspaper archive goes back to 1759 , 58.1 million newspaper pages . If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it , it would be an entire other OED .
That 's 500,000 more words . So that 's a lot .
And I 'm not even talking about magazines . I 'm not talking about blogs -- and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time .
There 's a lot going on there .
And I 'm not even talking about polysemy , which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves .
So if you think of the word " set , " a set can be a badger 's burrow , a set can be one of the pleats in an Elizabethan ruff , and there 's one numbered definition in the OED .
The OED has 33 different numbered definitions for set .
Tiny , little word , 33 numbered definitions .
One of them is just labeled " miscellaneous technical senses . "
Do you know what that says to me ?
That says to me , it was Friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub .
That 's a lexicographical cop out , to say , " miscellaneous technical senses . "
So , we have all these words , and we really need help !
And the thing is , we could ask for help -- asking for help 's not that hard .
I mean , lexicography is not rocket science .
See , I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers , and this is more of a visual explanation .
If we think of the dictionary as being the map of the English language , these bright spots are what we know about , and the dark spots are where we are in the dark .
If that was the map of all the words in American English , we don 't know very much .
And we don 't even know the shape of the language .
If this was the dictionary -- if this was the map of American English -- look , we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida , but there 's no California !
We 're missing California from American English .
We just don 't know enough , and we don 't even know that we 're missing California .
We don 't even see that there 's a gap on the map .
So again , lexicography is not rocket science .
But even if it were , rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days . You know ?
It can 't be that hard to find some words !
So , enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help , and they 're doing a good job of it .
For instance , there 's eBird , where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings .
And then , ornithologists can go and help track populations , migrations , etc .
And there 's this guy , Mike Oates . Mike Oates lives in the U.K.
He 's a director of an electroplating company .
He 's found more than 140 comets .
He 's found so many comets , they named a comet after him .
It 's kind of out past Mars . It 's a hike .
I don 't think he 's getting his picture taken there anytime soon .
But he found 140 comets without a telescope .
He downloaded data from the NASA SOHO satellite , and that 's how he found them .
If we can find comets without a telescope , shouldn 't we be able to find words ?
Now , y 'all know where I 'm going with this .
Because I 'm going to the Internet , which is where everybody goes .
And the Internet is great for collecting words , because the Internet 's full of collectors .
And this is a little-known technological fact about the Internet , but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm .
And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography . Isn 't that great ?
So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now , but the problem with some of them is that they 're not scientific enough .
They show the word , but they don 't show any context .
Where did it come from ? Who said it ?
What newspaper was it in ? What book ?
Because a word is like an archaeological artifact .
If you don 't know the provenance or the source of the artifact , it 's not science , it 's a pretty thing to look at .
So a word without its source is like a cut flower .
You know , it 's pretty to look at for a while , but then it dies .
It dies too fast .
So , this whole time I 've been saying , " The dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary , the dictionary . "
Not " a dictionary , " or " dictionaries . " And that 's because , well , people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language .
They use it synecdochically .
And one of the problems of knowing a word like " synecdochically " is that you really want an excuse to say " synecdochically . "
This whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where I could say " synecdochically " to all of you .
So I 'm really sorry . But when you use a part of something -- like the dictionary is a part of the language , or a flag stands for the United States , it 's a symbol of the country -- then you 're using it synecdochically .
But the thing is , we could make the dictionary the whole language .
If we get a bigger pan , then we can put all the words in .
We can put in all the meanings .
Doesn 't everyone want more meaning in their lives ?
And we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language -- we can make it be the whole language .
You see , what I 'm really hoping for is that my son , who turns seven this month -- I want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in .
This is what dictionaries used to look like .
I want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape .
It 's a format that died because it wasn 't useful enough .
It wasn 't really what people needed .
And the thing is , if we can put in all the words , no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad , we can really describe the language like scientists .
We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers .
If we can do that , then I can spend all my time fishing , and I don 't have to be a traffic cop anymore .
Thank you very much for your kind attention .
Angela Belcher : Using nature to grow batteries
Inspired by an abalone shell , Angela Belcher programs viruses to make elegant nanoscale structures that humans can use . Selecting for high-performing genes through directed evolution , she 's produced viruses that can construct powerful new batteries , clean hydrogen fuels and record-breaking solar cells . In her talk , she shows us how it 's done .
I thought I would talk a little bit about how nature makes materials .
I brought along with me an abalone shell .
This abalone shell is a biocomposite material that 's 98 percent by mass calcium carbonate and two percent by mass protein .
Yet , it 's 3,000 times tougher than its geological counterpart .
And a lot of people might use structures like abalone shells , like chalk .
I 've been fascinated by how nature makes materials , and there 's a lot of sequence to how they do such an exquisite job .
Part of it is that these materials are macroscopic in structure , but they 're formed at the nanoscale .
They 're formed at the nanoscale , and they use proteins that are coded by the genetic level that allow them to build these really exquisite structures .
So something I think is very fascinating is what if you could give life to non-living structures , like batteries and like solar cells ?
What if they had some of the same capabilities that an abalone shell did , in terms of being able to build really exquisite structures at room temperature and room pressure , using non-toxic chemicals and adding no toxic materials back into the environment ?
So that 's the vision that I 've been thinking about .
And so what if you could grow a battery in a Petri dish ?
Or , what if you could give genetic information to a battery so that it could actually become better as a function of time , and do so in an environmentally friendly way ?
And so , going back to this abalone shell , besides being nano-structured , one thing that 's fascinating , is when a male and a female abalone get together , they pass on the genetic information that says , " This is how to build an exquisite material .
Here 's how to do it at room temperature and pressure , using non-toxic materials . "
Same with diatoms , which are shown right here , which are glasseous structures .
Every time the diatoms replicate , they give the genetic information that says , " Here 's how to build glass in the ocean that 's perfectly nano-structured .
And you can do it the same , over and over again . "
So what if you could do the same thing with a solar cell or a battery ?
I like to say my favorite biomaterial is my four year-old .
But anyone who 's ever had , or knows , small children knows they 're incredibly complex organisms .
And so if you wanted to convince them to do something they don 't want to do , it 's very difficult .
So when we think about future technologies , we actually think of using bacteria and virus , simple organisms .
Can you convince them to work with a new toolbox , so that they can build a structure that will be important to me ?
Also , when we think about future technologies , we start with the beginning of Earth .
Basically , it took a billion years to have life on Earth .
And very rapidly , they became multi-cellular , they could replicate , they could use photosynthesis as a way of getting their energy source .
But it wasn 't until about 500 million years ago -- during the Cambrian geologic time period -- that organisms in the ocean started making hard materials .
Before that , they were all soft , fluffy structures .
And it was during this time that there was increased calcium and iron and silicon in the environment , and organisms learned how to make hard materials .
And so that 's what I would like be able to do -- convince biology to work with the rest of the periodic table .
Now if you look at biology , there 's many structures like DNA and antibodies and proteins and ribosomes that you 've heard about that are already nano-structured .
So nature already gives us really exquisite structures on the nanoscale .
What if we could harness them and convince them to not be an antibody that does something like HIV ?
But what if we could convince them to build a solar cell for us ?
So here are some examples : these are some natural shells .
There are natural biological materials .
The abalone shell here -- and if you fracture it , you can look at the fact that it 's nano-structured .
There 's diatoms made out of SIO2 , and they 're magnetotactic bacteria that make small , single-domain magnets used for navigation .
What all these have in common is these materials are structured at the nanoscale , and they have a DNA sequence that codes for a protein sequence that gives them the blueprint to be able to build these really wonderful structures .
Now , going back to the abalone shell , the abalone makes this shell by having these proteins .
These proteins are very negatively charged .
And they can pull calcium out of the environment , put down a layer of calcium and then carbonate , calcium and carbonate .
It has the chemical sequences of amino acids , which says , " This is how to build the structure .
Here 's the DNA sequence , here 's the protein sequence in order to do it . "
And so an interesting idea is , what if you could take any material that you wanted , or any element on the periodic table , and find its corresponding DNA sequence , then code it for a corresponding protein sequence to build a structure , but not build an abalone shell -- build something that , through nature , it has never had the opportunity to work with yet .
And so here 's the periodic table .
And I absolutely love the periodic table .
Every year for the incoming freshman class at MIT , I have a periodic table made that says , " Welcome to MIT . Now you 're in your element . "
And you flip it over , and it 's the amino acids with the PH at which they have different charges .
And so I give this out to thousands of people .
And I know it says MIT , and this is Caltech , but I have a couple extra if people want it .
And I was really fortunate to have President Obama visit my lab this year on his visit to MIT , and I really wanted to give him a periodic table .
So I stayed up at night , and I talked to my husband , " How do I give President Obama a periodic table ?
What if he says , ' Oh , I already have one , ' or , ' I 've already memorized it ' ? "
And so he came to visit my lab and looked around -- it was a great visit .
And then afterward , I said , " Sir , I want to give you the periodic table in case you 're ever in a bind and need to calculate molecular weight . "
And I thought molecular weight sounded much less nerdy than molar mass .
And so he looked at it , and he said , " Thank you . I 'll look at it periodically . "
And later in a lecture that he gave on clean energy , he pulled it out and said , " And people at MIT , they give out periodic tables . "
So basically what I didn 't tell you is that about 500 million years ago , organisms starter making materials , but it took them about 50 million years to get good at it .
It took them about 50 million years to learn how to perfect how to make that abalone shell .
And that 's a hard sell to a graduate student .
" I have this great project -- 50 million years . "
And so we had to develop a way of trying to do this more rapidly .
And so we use a virus that 's a non-toxic virus called M13 bacteriophage that 's job is to infect bacteria .
Well it has a simple DNA structure that you can go in and cut and paste additional DNA sequences into it .
And by doing that , it allows the virus to express random protein sequences .
And this is pretty easy biotechnology .
And you could basically do this a billion times .
And so you can go in and have a billion different viruses that are all genetically identical , but they differ from each other based on their tips , on one sequence that codes for one protein .
Now if you take all billion viruses , and you can put them in one drop of liquid , you can force them to interact with anything you want on the periodic table .
And through a process of selection evolution , you can pull one out of a billion that does something that you 'd like it to do , like grow a battery or grow a solar cell .
So basically , viruses can 't replicate themselves ; they need a host .
Once you find that one out of a billion , you infect it into a bacteria , and you make millions and billions of copies of that particular sequence .
And so the other thing that 's beautiful about biology is that biology gives you really exquisite structures with nice link scales .
And these viruses are long and skinny , and we can get them to express the ability to grow something like semiconductors or materials for batteries .
Now this is a high-powered battery that we grew in my lab .
We engineered a virus to pick up carbon nanotubes .
So one part of the virus grabs a carbon nanotube .
The other part of the virus has a sequence that can grow an electrode material for a battery .
And then it wires itself to the current collector .
And so through a process of selection evolution , we went from being able to have a virus that made a crummy battery to a virus that made a good battery to a virus that made a record-breaking , high-powered battery that 's all made at room temperature , basically at the bench top .
And that battery went to the White House for a press conference .
I brought it here .
You can see it in this case -- that 's lighting this LED .
Now if we could scale this , you could actually use it to run your Prius , which is my dream -- to be able to drive a virus-powered car .
But it 's basically -- you can pull one out of a billion .
You can make lots of amplifications to it .
Basically , you make an amplification in the lab , and then you get it to self-assemble into a structure like a battery .
We 're able to do this also with catalysis .
This is the example of photocatalytic splitting of water .
And what we 've been able to do is engineer a virus to basically take dye-absorbing molecules and line them up on the surface of the virus so it acts as an antenna , and you get an energy transfer across the virus .
And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen that can be used for clean fuels .
And I brought an example with me of that today .
My students promised me it would work .
These are virus-assembled nanowires .
When you shine light on them , you can see them bubbling .
In this case , you 're seeing oxygen bubbles come out .
And basically , by controlling the genes , you can control multiple materials to improve your device performance .
The last example are solar cells .
You can also do this with solar cells .
We 've been able to engineer viruses to pick up carbon nanotubes and then grow titanium dioxide around them -- and use as a way of getting electrons through the device .
And what we 've found is through genetic engineering , we can actually increase the efficiencies of these solar cells to record numbers for these types of dye-sensitized systems .
And I brought one of those as well that you can play around with outside afterward .
So this is a virus-based solar cell .
Through evolution and selection , we took it from an eight percent efficiency solar cell to an 11 percent efficiency solar cell .
So I hope that I 've convinced you that there 's a lot of great , interesting things to be learned about how nature makes materials -- and taking it the next step to see if you can force , or whether you can take advantage of how nature makes materials , to make things that nature hasn 't yet dreamed of making .
Thank you .
Stefan Sagmeister : Happiness by design
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments of his life that made him happy -- and notes how many of these moments have to do with good design .
About 15 years ago , I went to visit a friend in Hong Kong .
And at the time I was very superstitious .
So , upon landing -- this was still at the old Hong Kong airport that 's Kai Tak , when it was smack in the middle of the city -- I thought , " If I see something good , I 'm going to have a great time here in my two weeks . And if I see something negative , I 'm going to be miserable , indeed . "
So the plane landed in between the buildings and got to a full stop in front of this little billboard .
And I actually went to see some of the design companies in Hong Kong in my stay there .
And it turned out that -- I just went to see , you know , what they are doing in Hong Kong .
But I actually walked away with a great job offer .
And I flew back to Austria , packed my bags , and , another week later , I was again on my way to Hong Kong still superstitions and thinking , " Well , if that ' Winner ' billboard is still up , I 'm going to have a good time working here .
But if it 's gone , it 's going to be really miserable and stressful . "
So it turned out that not only was the billboard still up but they had put this one right next to it .
On the other hand , it also taught me where superstition gets me because I really had a terrible time in Hong Kong .
However , I did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life -- of , you know , I think what the conference brochure refers to as " moments that take your breath away . "
And since I 'm a big list maker , I actually listed them all .
Now , you don 't have to go through the trouble of reading them and I won 't read them for you .
I know that it 's incredibly boring to hear about other people 's happinesses .
What I did do , though is , I actually looked at them from a design standpoint and just eliminated all the ones that had nothing to do with design .
And , very surprisingly , over half of them had , actually , something to do with design .
So there are , of course , two different possibilities .
There 's one from a consumer 's point of view -- where I was happy while experiencing design .
And I 'll just give you one example . I had gotten my first Walkman .
This is 1983 .
My brother had this great Yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely .
And The Police 's " Synchronicity " cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of Bregenz .
So you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting The Police on the new Sony Walkman .
And I remember it as a true moment of happiness .
You know , of course , they are related to this combination of at least two of them being , you know , design objects .
And , you know , there 's a scale of happiness when you talk about in design but the motorcycle incident would definitely be , you know , situated somewhere here -- right in there between Delight and Bliss .
Now , there is the other part , from a designer 's standpoint -- if you 're happy while actually doing it .
And one way to see how happy designers are when they 're designing could be to look at the authors ' photos on the back of their monographs ?
So , according to this , the Australians and the Japanese as well as the Mexicans are very happy .
While , somewhat , the Spaniards ...
and , I think , particularly , the Swiss , don 't seem to be doing all that well .
Last November , a museum opened in Tokyo called The Mori Museum , in a skyscraper , up on the 56th floor .
And their inaugural exhibit was called " Happiness . "
And I went , very eagerly , to see it , because -- well , also , with an eye on this conference .
And they interestingly sectioned the exhibit off into four different areas .
Under " Arcadia , " they showed things like this , from the Edo period -- a hundred ways to write " happiness " in different forms .
Or they had this apple by Yoko Ono -- that , of course , later on was , you know , made into the label for The Beatles .
Under " Nirvana " they showed this Constable painting .
And there was a little -- an interesting theory about abstraction .
This is a blue field -- it 's actually an Yves Klein painting .
And the theory was that if you abstract an image , you really , you know open as much room for the un-representable -- and , therefore , you know , are able to involve the viewer more .
Then , under " Desire , " they showed these Shunsho paintings -- also from the Edo period -- ink on silk .
And , lastly , under " Harmony , " they had this 13th-century mandala from Tibet .
Now , what I took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the mandala most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness .
And I felt a little bit cheated , because the visualization -- that 's a really easy thing to do .
And , you know , my studio -- we 've done it all the time .
This is , you know , a book .
A happy dog -- and you take it out , it 's an aggressive dog .
It 's a happy David Byrne and an angry David Byrne .
Or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face .
You know , that 's not a big deal to accomplish .
It has gotten to the point where , you know , within advertising or within the movie industry , " happy " has gotten such a bad reputation that if you actually want to do something with the subject and still appear authentic , you almost would have to , you know , do it from a cynical point of view .
This is , you know , the movie poster .
Or we , a couple of weeks ago , designed a box set for The Talking Heads where the happiness visualized on the cover definitely has , very much , a dark side to it .
Much , much more difficult is this , where the designs actually can evoke happiness -- and I 'm going to just show you three that actually did this for me .
This is a campaign done by a young artist in New York , who calls himself " True . "
Everybody who has ridden the New York subway system will be familiar with these signs ?
True printed his own version of these signs .
Met every Wednesday at a subway stop with 20 of his friends .
They divided up the different subway lines and added their own version .
So this is one .
Now , the way this works in the system is that nobody ever looks at these signs .
So you 're you 're really bored in the subway , and you kind of stare at something .
And it takes you a while until it actually -- you realize that this says something different than what it normally says .
I mean , that 's , at least , how it made me happy .
Now , True is a real humanitarian .
He didn 't want any of his friends to be arrested , so he supplied everybody with this fake volunteer card .
And also gave this fake letter from the MTA to everybody -- sort of like pretending that it 's an art project financed by The Metropolitan Transit Authority .
Another New York project .
This is at P.S. 1 -- a sculpture that 's basically a square room by James Turrell , that has a retractable ceiling .
Opens up at dusk and dawn every day .
You don 't see the horizon .
You 're just in there , watching the incredible , subtle changes of color in the sky .
And the room is truly something to be seen .
People 's demeanor changes when they go in there .
And , for sure , I haven 't looked at the sky in the same way after spending an hour in there .
There are , of course , more than those three projects that I 'm showing here .
I would definitely say that observing Vik Muniz ' " Cloud " a couple of years ago in Manhattan for sure made me happy , as well .
But my last project is , again , from a young designer in New York .
He 's from Korea originally .
And he took it upon himself to print 55,000 speech bubbles -- empty speech bubbles stickers , large ones and small ones .
And he goes around New York and just puts them , empty as they are , on posters .
And other people go and fill them in .
This one says , " Please let me die in peace . "
I think that was -- the most surprising to myself was that the writing was actually so good .
This is on a musician poster , that says : " I am concerned that my CD will not sell more than 200,000 units and that , as a result , my recoupable advance from my label will be taken from me , after which , my contract will be cancelled , and I 'll be back doing Journey covers on Bleecker Street . "
I think the reason this works so well is because everybody involved wins .
Jee gets to have his project ; the public gets a sweeter environment ; and different public gets a place to express itself ; and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads .
Well , there was a question , of course , that was on my mind for a while : You know , can I do more of the things that I like doing in design and less of the ones that I don 't like to be doing ?
Which brought me back to my list making -- you know , just to see what I actually like about my job .
You know , one is : just working without pressure .
Then : working concentrated , without being frazzled .
Or , as Nancy said before , like really immerse oneself into it .
Try not to get stuck doing the same thing -- or try not get stuck behind the computer all day .
This is , you know , related to it : getting out of the studio .
Then , of course , trying to , you know , work on things where the content is actually important for me .
And being able to enjoy the end results .
And then I found another list in one of my diaries that actually contained all the things that I thought I learned in my life so far .
And , just about at that time , an Austrian magazine called and asked if we would want to do six spreads -- design six spreads that work like dividing pages between the different chapters in the magazine ?
And the whole thing just fell together .
So I just picked one of the things that I thought I learned -- in this case , " Everything I do always comes back to me " -- and we made these spreads right out of this .
So it was : " Everything I do always comes back to me . "
A couple of weeks ago , a French company asked us to design five billboards for them .
Again , we could supply the content for it .
So I just picked another one .
And this was two weeks ago .
We flew to Arizona -- the designer who works with me , and myself -- and photographed this one .
So it 's : " Trying to look good limits my life . "
And then we did one more of these .
This is , again , for a magazine , dividing pages .
This is : " Having " -- this is the same thing ; it 's just , you know , photographed from the side .
This is from the front .
Again , it 's the same thing -- " guts " is just the same room , reworked .
Then it 's : " always works out . "
Then it 's " for , " with the light on .
And it 's " me . "
Thank you so much .
Stephen Hawking 's zero g flight
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis talks about how he helped Stephen Hawking fulfill his dream of going to space -- by flying together into the upper atmosphere and experiencing weightlessness at zero g .
Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier .
So when I had the chance to give the world 's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity , it was incredible .
And I want to tell you that story .
I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics .
It 's a competition we 're holding , the second X PRIZE , for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days .
We have something called the Genome 100 -- 100 individuals we 're sequencing as part of that .
Craig Venter chairs that event .
And I met Professor Hawking , and he said his dream was to travel into space .
And I said , " I can 't take you there , but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g .
And he said , on the spot , " Absolutely , yes . "
Well , the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight , weightless flight .
You take an airplane , you fly over the top , you 're weightless for 25 seconds .
Come back down , you weigh twice as much .
You do it again and again .
You can get eight , 10 minutes of weightlessness -- how NASA 's trained their astronauts for so long .
We set out to do this .
It took us 11 years to become operational .
And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking .
We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say , you 're crazy , don 't do that , you 're going kill the guy .
And he wanted to go .
We worked hard to get all the permissions .
And six months later , we sat down at Kennedy Space Center .
We had a press conference , we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola , give him 25 seconds of zero-g .
And if it went really well , we might do three parabolas .
Well , we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this .
And what he said , for me , was very moving .
He said , " Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster ...
I think the human race doesn 't have a future if it doesn 't go into space .
I therefore want to encourage public interest in space . "
We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center , up inside the NASA vehicle , into the back of the zero-g airplane .
We had about 20 people who made donations -- we raised $ 150,000 in donations for children 's charities -- who flew with us .
A few TEDsters here .
We set up a whole ER .
We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane .
We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood , his heart rate , his blood pressure .
We had everything all set in case of an emergency ; God knows , you don 't want to hurt this world-renowned expert .
We took off from the shuttle landing facility , where the shuttle takes off and lands .
And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g .
Once he was there , [ we ] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like .
And after that first parabola , you know , the doc said everything is great . He was smiling , and we said go .
So we did a second parabola .
And a third .
We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did .
And we did a fourth , and a fifth and a sixth .
And a seventh and an eighth .
And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man .
He was so happy .
We are living on a precious jewel , and it 's during our lifetime that we 're moving off this planet .
Please join us in this epic adventure .
Thank you so much .
Matt Killingsworth : Want to be happier ? Stay in the moment
When are humans most happy ? To gather data on this question , Matt Killingsworth built an app , Track Your Happiness , that let people report their feelings in real time . Among the surprising results : We 're often happiest when we 're lost in the moment . And the flip side : The more our mind wanders , the less happy we can be . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
So , people want a lot of things out of life , but I think , more than anything else , they want happiness .
Aristotle called happiness " the chief good , " the end towards which all other things aim .
According to this view , the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn 't that these things are intrinsically valuable .
It 's that we expect them to bring us happiness .
Now in the last 50 years , we Americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want . We 're richer .
We live longer . We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago .
The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically , we haven 't actually gotten any happier .
Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven 't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness , there 's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself .
People have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time , in fact for thousands of years , but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved .
Well , as with many other domains in life , I think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question .
In fact , in the last few years , there 's been an explosion in research on happiness . For example , we 've learned a lot about its demographics , how things like income and education , gender and marriage relate to it .
But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don 't seem to have a particularly strong effect .
Yes , it 's better to make more money rather than less , or to graduate from college instead of dropping out , but the differences in happiness tend to be small .
Which leaves the question , what are the big causes of happiness ?
I think that 's a question we haven 't really answered yet , but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences .
It certainly seems that we 're going about our lives , that what we 're doing , who we 're with , what we 're thinking about , have a big influence on our happiness , and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult , in fact almost impossible , for scientists to study .
A few years ago , I came up with a way to study people 's happiness moment to moment as they 're going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world , something we 'd never been able to do before . Called trackyourhappiness.org , it uses the iPhone to monitor people 's happiness in real time .
How does this work ? Basically , I send people signals at random points throughout the day , and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal .
The idea is that , if we can watch how people 's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day , minute to minute in some cases , and try to understand how what people are doing , who they 're with , what they 're thinking about , and all the other factors that describe our day , how those might relate to those changes in happiness , we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness .
We 've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data , a lot more data of this kind than I think has ever been collected before , over 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people .
And it 's not just a lot of people , it 's a really diverse group , people from a wide range of ages , from 18 to late 80s , a wide range of incomes , education levels , people who are married , divorced , widowed , etc .
They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries .
What I 'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we 've been investigating , and that 's mind-wandering .
As human beings , we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present .
This guy is sitting here working on his computer , and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month , wondering what he 's going to have for dinner .
Maybe he 's worried that he 's going bald .
This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing . It allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can .
And yet it 's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness .
You 've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present . " Be here now , " you 've probably heard a hundred times .
Maybe , to really be happy , we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment .
Maybe these people are right . Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing .
On the other hand , when our minds wander , they 're unconstrained . We can 't change the physical reality in front of us , but we can go anywhere in our minds .
Since we know people want to be happy , maybe when our minds wander , they 're going to someplace happier than the place that they 're leaving . It would make a lot of sense .
In other words , maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering .
Well , since I 'm a scientist , I 'd like to try to resolve this debate with some data , and in particular I 'd like to present some data to you from three questions that I ask with Track Your Happiness . Remember , this is from sort of moment-to-moment experience in people 's real lives .
There are three questions . The first one is a happiness question : How do you feel , on a scale ranging from very bad to very good ? Second , an activity question : What are you doing , on a list of 22 different activities including things like eating and working and watching TV ?
And finally a mind-wandering question : Are you thinking about something other than what you 're currently doing ?
People could say no -- in other words , I 'm focused only on my task -- or yes -- I am thinking about something else -- and the topic of those thoughts are pleasant , neutral or unpleasant .
Any of those yes responses are what we called mind-wandering .
So what did we find ?
This graph shows happiness on the vertical axis , and you can see that bar there representing how happy people are when they 're focused on the present , when they 're not mind-wandering .
As it turns out , people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they 're not .
Now you might look at this result and say , okay , sure , on average people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering , but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn 't very enjoyable to begin with , at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us .
Nope . As it turns out , people are less happy when they 're mind-wandering no matter what they 're doing . For example , people don 't really like commuting to work very much .
It 's one of their least enjoyable activities , and yet they are substantially happier when they 're focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else .
It 's amazing .
So how could this be happening ? I think part of the reason , a big part of the reason , is that when our minds wander , we often think about unpleasant things , and they are enormously less happy when they do that , our worries , our anxieties , our regrets , and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral , they 're still considerably less happy than when they 're not mind-wandering at all .
Even when they 're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant , they 're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren 't mind-wandering .
If mind-wandering were a slot machine , it would be like having the chance to lose 50 dollars , 20 dollars or one dollar . Right ? You 'd never want to play .
So I 've been talking about this , suggesting , perhaps , that mind-wandering causes unhappiness , but all I 've really shown you is that these two things are correlated .
It 's possible that 's the case , but it might also be the case that when people are unhappy , then they mind-wander .
Maybe that 's what 's really going on . How could we ever disentangle these two possibilites ?
Well , one fact that we can take advantage of , I think a fact you 'll all agree is true , is that time goes forward , not backward . Right ? The cause has to come before the effect .
We 're lucky in this data we have many responses from each person , and so we can look and see , does mind-wandering tend to precede unhappiness , or does unhappiness tend to precede mind-wandering , to get some insight into the causal direction .
As it turns out , there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later , consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy .
In contrast , there 's no relationship between being unhappy now and mind-wandering a short time later .
In other words , mind-wandering very likely seems to be an actual cause , and not merely a consequence , of unhappiness .
A few minutes ago , I likened mind-wandering to a slot machine you 'd never want to play .
Well , how often do people 's minds wander ?
Turns out , they wander a lot . In fact , really a lot .
Forty-seven percent of the time , people are thinking about something other than what they 're currently doing .
How does that depend on what people are doing ?
This shows the rate of mind-wandering across 22 activities ranging from a high of 65 percent — — when people are taking a shower , brushing their teeth , to 50 percent when they 're working , to 40 percent when they 're exercising , all the way down to this one short bar on the right that I think some of you are probably laughing at .
Ten percent of the time people 's minds are wandering when they 're having sex .
But there 's something I think that 's quite interesting in this graph , and that is , basically with one exception , no matter what people are doing , they 're mind-wandering at least 30 percent of the time , which suggests , I think , that mind-wandering isn 't just frequent , it 's ubiquitous .
It pervades basically everything that we do .
In my talk today , I 've told you a little bit about mind-wandering , a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness .
My hope is that over time , by tracking people 's moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life , we 'll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness , and then in the end , a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that 's not only richer and healthier , but happier as well .
Thank you .
Eli Beer : The fastest ambulance ? A motorcycle
As a young EMT on a Jerusalem ambulance , Eli Beer realized that , stuck in brutal urban traffic , they often arrived too late to help . So he organized a group of volunteer EMTs -- many on foot -- ready to drop everything and dash to save lives in their neighborhood . Today , United Hatzlah uses a smartphone app and a fleet of " ambucycles " to help nearby patients until an ambulance arrives . With an average response time of 3 minutes , last year , they treated 207,000 people in Israel . And the idea is going global .
This is an ambucycle .
This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency .
It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed .
You see the defibrillator . You see the equipment .
We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston .
When I was looking at these pictures , it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child .
I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem .
When I was six years old , I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother .
We were passing by a bus stop .
We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes .
The bus was on fire , and many people were hurt and killed .
I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up .
He just needed someone helping him .
We were so scared and we just ran away .
Growing up , I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives .
Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child .
When I was 15 , I took an EMT course , and I went to volunteer on an ambulance .
For two years , I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem .
I helped many people , but whenever someone really needed help , I never got there in time . We never got there .
The traffic is so bad . The distance , and everything .
We never got there when somebody really needed us .
One day , we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog .
Traffic was horrific , and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem .
When we got there , 20 minutes later , we started CPR on the kid .
A doctor comes in from a block away , stop us , checks the kid , and tells us to stop CPR .
That second he declared this child dead .
At that moment , I understood that this child died for nothing .
If this doctor , who lived one block away from there , would have come 20 minutes earlier , not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance , if he would have heard about it way before , he would have saved this child .
He could have run from a block away .
He could have saved this child .
I said to myself , there must be a better way .
Together with 15 of my friends -- we were all EMTs — we decided , let 's protect our neighborhood , so when something like that happens again , we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance .
So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him , " Please , whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood , we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they 're doing and run and save lives .
Just alert us by beeper .
We 'll buy these beepers , just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper , and we will run and save lives . "
Well , he was laughing . I was 17 years old . I was a kid .
And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy , but he said to me , " Kid , go to school , or go open a falafel stand .
We 're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures .
We 're not interested in your help . " And he threw me out of the room .
" I don 't need your help , " he said .
I was a very stubborn kid .
As you see now , I 'm walking around like crazy , meshugenah .
So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you 've probably all heard of , chutzpah .
And the next day , I went and I bought two police scanners , and I said , " The hell with you , if you don 't want to give me information , I 'll get the information myself . "
And we did turns , who 's going to listen to the radio scanners .
The next day , while I was listening to the scanners , I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood .
I ran there by foot . I had no medical equipment .
When I got there , the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor , blood was gushing out of his neck .
He was on Coumadin .
I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die .
I took off my yarmulke , because I had no medical equipment , and with a lot of pressure , I stopped his bleeding .
He was bleeding from his neck .
When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later , I gave them over a patient who was alive .
When I went to visit him two days later , he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life .
At that moment , when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance , I knew this is my life 's mission .
So today , 22 years later , we have United Hatzalah .
" Hatzalah " means " rescue , " for all of you who don 't know Hebrew .
I forgot I 'm not in Israel .
So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives , and they 're spread all around , so whenever a call comes in , they just stop everything and go and run and save a life .
Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel .
I 'm talking about heart attacks , I 'm talking about car accidents , God forbid bomb attacks , shootings , whatever it is , even a woman 3 o 'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her .
Three minutes , we 'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up .
The reasons why we 're so successful are because of three things .
Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don 't even know .
We 're not there to replace ambulances .
We 're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive .
And we save people that otherwise would not be saved .
The second reason is because of our technology .
You know , Israelis are good in technology .
Every one of us has on his phone , no matter what kind of phone , a GPS technology done by NowForce , and whenever a call comes in , the closest five volunteers get the call , and they actually get there really quick , and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time .
And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time .
And the third thing are these ambucycles .
These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels .
We don 't transfer people , but we stabilize them , and we save their lives .
They never get stuck in traffic . They could even go on a sidewalk .
They never , literally , get stuck in traffic .
That 's why we get there so fast .
A few years after I started this organization , in a Jewish community , two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up .
They ask me to meet . They wanted to meet with me .
Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan .
When Muhammad told me his personal story , how his father , 55 years old , collapsed at home , had a cardiac arrest , and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive , and he saw his father die in front of his eyes , he asked me , " Please start this in east Jerusalem . "
I said to myself , I saw so much tragedy , so much hate , and it 's not about saving Jews . It 's not about saving Muslims .
It 's not about saving Christians . It 's about saving people .
So I went ahead , full force -- — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem , and that 's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well .
We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs .
Arabs were saving Jews . Jews were saving Arabs .
Something special happened .
Arabs and Jews , they don 't always get along together , but here in this situation , the communities , literally , it 's an unbelievable situation that happened , the diversities , all of a sudden they had a common interest : Let 's save lives together .
Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers .
It 's an unbelievable concept that could work only when you have such a great cause .
And these are all volunteers .
No one is getting money .
They 're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives .
When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest , one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah .
And he saved my father .
Could you imagine how I felt in that moment ?
When I started this organization , I was 17 years old .
I never imagined that one day I 'd be speaking at TEDMED .
I never even knew what TEDMED was then .
I don 't think it existed , but I never imagined , I never imagined that it 's going to go all around , it 's going to spread around , and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil .
All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me , passionate about saving lives , and willing to do it .
And I 'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back .
Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg , and now it 's all over the Jewish community in New York , even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities .
But it could spread everywhere .
It 's very easy to adopt .
You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center .
Last year alone , we treated in Israel 207,000 people .
Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations .
And we made a difference .
I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob , and it works .
When I look all around here , I see lots of people who would go an extra mile , run an extra mile to save other people , no matter who they are , no matter what religion , no matter who , where they come from .
We all want to be heroes .
We just need a good idea , motivation and lots of chutzpah , and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved .
Thank you very much .
Joshua Silver : Adjustable liquid-filled eyeglasses
Josh Silver delivers his brilliantly simple solution for correcting vision at the lowest cost possible -- adjustable , liquid-filled lenses . At TEDGlobal 2009 , he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020 .
I 'm going to tell you about one of the world 's largest problems and how it can be solved .
I 'd like to start with a little experiment .
Could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses , or you 've had laser refractive surgery ?
Now , unfortunately , there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly .
But it looks like -- I 'm guessing -- that it 'll be about 60 percent of the room because that 's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction .
The World Health Organization estimates -- well , they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses -- the lowest estimate is 150 million people .
They also have an estimate of around a billion .
But in fact , I would argue that we 've just done an experiment here and now , which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population .
And the problem of poor vision , is actually not just a health problem , it 's also an educational problem , and it 's an economic problem , and it 's a quality of life problem .
Glasses are not very expensive . They 're quite plentiful .
The problem is , there aren 't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world .
There are just way too few eye care professionals .
So this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that 's the ratio in the U.K.
This is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-Saharan Africa .
In fact , there are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there 's one optometrist for eight million of the population .
How do you do this ? How do you solve this problem ?
I came up with a solution to this problem , and I came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this .
And the idea is you make eye glasses , and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem .
What I want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses .
I shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses . I shall pop this in my pocket .
I 'm short sighted . I look at the signs at the end , I can hardly see them .
So -- okay , I can now see that man running out there , I 've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription .
Next step in my process .
So , I 've now made eye glasses to my prescription .
Okay , so I 've made these glasses and ...
Okay , I 've made the glasses to my prescription and ...
... I 've just ...
And I 've now made some glasses . That 's it .
Now , these aren 't the only pair in the world .
In fact , this technology 's been evolving .
I started working on it in 1985 , and it 's been evolving very slowly .
There are about 30,000 in use now .
And they 're in fifteen countries . They 're spread around the world .
And I have a vision , which I 'll share with you .
I have a global vision for vision .
And that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020 .
To do that -- this is an early example of the technology .
The technology is being further developed -- the cost has to be brought down .
This pair , in fact , these currently cost about 19 dollars .
But the cost has to be brought right down .
It has to be brought down because we 're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day .
How do you solve this problem ?
You start to get into detail .
And on this slide , I 'm basically explaining all the problems you have .
How do you distribute ? How do you work out how to fit the thing ?
How do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem ?
How do you deal with the industry ?
And the answer to that is research .
What we 've done is to set up the Center for Vision in the Developing World here in the university .
If you want to know more , just come have a look at our website . Thank you .
Julia Bacha : Pay attention to nonviolence
In 2003 , the Palestinian village of Budrus mounted a 10-month-long nonviolent protest to stop a barrier being built across their olive groves . Did you hear about it ? Didn 't think so . Brazilian filmmaker Julia Bacha asks why we only pay attention to violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict -- and not to the nonviolent leaders who may one day bring peace .
I 'm a filmmaker .
For the last 8 years , I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means .
When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States , one question always comes up : Where is the Palestinian Gandhi ?
Why aren 't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance ?
The challenge I face when I hear this question is that often I have just returned from the Middle East where I spent my time filming dozens of Palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from Israeli soldiers and settlers .
These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region .
Yet , most of you have probably never heard about them .
This divide between what 's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don 't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful .
So I 'm here today to talk about the power of attention , the power of your attention , and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank , Gaza and elsewhere -- but today , my case study is going to be Palestine .
I believe that what 's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence , but for us to start paying attention to those who already are .
Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus .
About seven years ago , they faced extinction , because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier , and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village .
They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded , so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank .
Through inspired local leadership , they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening .
Let me show you some brief clips , so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground .
Palestinian We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel .
Here in Budrus , we realized the wall would steal our land .
Israeli The fence has , in fact , created a solution to terror .
Today you 're invited to a peaceful march .
You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters .
Israeli Activist : Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition .
We saw the men trying to push the soldiers , but none of them could do that .
But I think the girls could do it .
Fatah Party Member : We must empty our minds of traditional thinking .
Hamas Party Member : We were in complete harmony , and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine .
Chanting : One united nation .
Fatah , Hamas and the Popular Front !
News Anchor : The clashes over the fence continue .
Reporter : Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd .
They were allowed to use any force necessary .
These are live bullets .
It 's like Fallujah . Shooting everywhere .
Israeli Activist : I was sure we were all going to die .
But there were others around me who weren 't even cowering .
Israeli A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [ unclear ] .
Protester : This is a peaceful march .
There is no need to use violence .
Chanting : We can do it ! We can do it !
We can do it !
Julia Bacha : When I first heard about the story of Budrus , I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago , in 2003 .
What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful .
The residents , after 10 months of peaceful resistance , convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line , which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories .
The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem .
Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories .
This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow , or even survive , in Palestine .
Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common ; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause .
If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue , it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight .
The power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room .
The surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit .
The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior , since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it .
Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children .
But that 's true for adults too .
In fact , the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced , depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention .
I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today .
In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank , in Gaza and in East Jerusalem , I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation .
In a village called Wallajeh , which sits very close to Jerusalem , the community was facing a very similar plight to Budrus .
They were going to be surrounded , lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access , either to the West Bank or Jerusalem .
They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention .
So we organized a screening .
A week later , they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date .
The organizers say that the villagers , upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film , felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing , that people cared .
So they kept on going .
On the Israeli side , there is a new peace movement called Solidariot , which means solidarity in Hebrew .
The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools .
They report that Israelis who had never been active before , upon seeing the film , understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities .
The examples of Wallajeh and the Solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior .
Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil 'in , Ni 'lin , Wallajeh , in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan -- the nonviolent leaders would become more visible , valued and effective in their work .
I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don 't pay attention to these efforts , they are invisible , and it 's as if they never happened .
But I have seen first hand that if we do , they will multiply .
If they multiply , their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict .
And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation .
These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus .
Let 's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere .
Thank you .
Seth Godin : How to get your ideas to spread
In a world of too many options and too little time , our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff . Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why , when it comes to getting our attention , bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones .
I 'm going to give you four specific examples -- and I 'm going to cover at the end -- about how a company called Silk tripled their sales by doing one thing , how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact , to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect .
And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years , a record label I started that had a CD called " Sauce . "
Before I can do that I 've got to tell you about sliced bread , and a guy named Otto Rohwedder .
Now , before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said ?
Like the greatest invention since ... the telegraph or something .
But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread , and he focused , like most inventors did , on the patent part and the making part .
And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this -- that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it ; no one knew about it ; it was a complete and total failure .
And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread , no one wanted it .
That the success of sliced bread , like the success of almost everything we 've been talking about at this conference , is not always about what the patent is like , or what the factory is like -- it 's about can you get your idea to spread , or not .
And I think that the way you 're going to get what you want , or cause the change that you want to change , to happen , is that you 've got to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread .
And it doesn 't matter to me whether you 're running a coffee shop or you 're an intellectual , or you 're in business , or you 're flying hot air balloons .
I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do .
That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion .
That people who can spread ideas , regardless of what those ideas are , win .
And when I talk about it I usually pick business because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation , and because it 's the easiest sort of way to keep score .
But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I 'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do .
At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV .
TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way .
I call it the " TV-industrial complex . "
The way the TV-industrial complex works , is you buy some ads -- interrupt some people -- that gets you distribution .
You use the distribution you get to sell more products .
You take the profit from that to buy more ads .
And it goes around and around and around , the same way that military-industrial complex worked a long time ago .
And that model of , and we heard it yesterday , if we could only get onto the homepage of Google , if we could only figure out how to get promoted there , if we could only figure out how to grab that person by the throat , and tell them about what we want to do .
If we do that then everyone would pay attention , and we would win .
Well , this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours .
I mean , all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren 't expecting , in a way they didn 't necessarily want , with an ad , over and over and over again until they bought it .
And the thing that 's happened is , they canceled the TV-industrial complex .
That just over the last few years , what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it 's not working the way that it used to .
This picture is really fuzzy , I apologize ; I had a bad cold when I took it .
But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child .
Right . I go to the deli ; I 'm sick ; I need to buy some medicine .
The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year .
100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff -- all so I could ignore every single message .
And I ignored every message because I don 't have a pain reliever problem .
I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have .
And I 'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem , because I don 't care .
Here 's a magazine called " Hydrate . " It 's 180 pages about water .
Right . Articles about water , ads about water .
Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago when it was just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek .
Now there are magazines about water .
New products from Coke Japan -- water salad .
OK . Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks , because they have no idea what 's going to work and what 's not .
I couldn 't have written this better myself . It came out four days ago -- I circled the important parts so you can see them here .
They 've come out ... Arby 's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold , hoping that that will get people to go to Arby 's and buy a roast beef sandwich .
Now , I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold , that would get you to get in your car , drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich .
Now , this is Copernicus , and he was right , when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea .
The world revolves around me . Me , me , me , me , me . My favorite person -- me .
I don 't want to get email from anybody ; I want to get " memail . "
So consumers , and I don 't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway ; I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something , or people at , you know , the New Yorker who might print your article .
Consumers don 't care about you at all ; they just don 't care .
Part of the reason is -- they 've got way more choices than they used to , and way less time .
And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time , the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff .
And my parable here is you 're driving down the road and you see a cow , and you keep driving because you 've seen cows before .
Cows are invisible . Cows are boring .
Who 's going to stop and pull over and say -- oh , look , a cow . Nobody .
But if the cow was purple -- isn 't that a great special effect ?
I could do that again if you want it .
If the cow was purple , you 'd notice it for a while .
I mean , if all cows were purple you 'd get bored with those , too .
The thing that 's going to decide what gets talked about , what gets done , what gets changed , what gets purchased , what gets built , is : is it remarkable ?
And " remarkable " is a really cool word because we think it just means neat , but it also means -- worth making a remark about .
And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going .
That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car , big enough to hold a mini in its trunk .
People are paying full price for both , and the only thing they have in common is that they don 't have anything in common .
Every week the number one best-selling DVD in America changes .
It 's never " The Godfather ; " it 's never " Citizen Kane ; " it 's always some third rate movie with some second rate star .
But the reason it 's number one is because that 's the week it came out .
Because it 's new , because it 's fresh .
Because people saw it and said -- I didn 't know that was there -- and they noticed it .
Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail -- one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box , and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them .
The only thing they have in common is that they 're different .
We 're now in the fashion business , no matter what we do for a living , we 're in the fashion business .
And the thing is , people in the fashion business know what it 's like to be in the fashion business -- they 're used to it .
The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way .
How to understand that it 's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads , or insisting on meetings with people .
But it 's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread , and which ones don 't .
This chair -- they sold a billion dollars ' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair .
They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought , to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work .
This guy , Lionel Poilane , the most famous baker in the world -- he died two and a half months ago , and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend .
He lived in Paris . Last year he sold 10 million dollars ' worth of French bread .
Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned , by one baker at a time , in a wood-fired oven .
And when Lionel started his bakery the French pooh-pooh-ed it .
They didn 't want to buy his bread . It didn 't look like " French bread . "
It wasn 't what they expected .
It was neat ; it was remarkable ; and slowly it spread from one person to another person until finally , it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris .
Now he 's in London , and he ships by FedEx all around the world .
What marketers used to do is make average products for average people .
That 's what mass marketing is .
Smooth out the edges ; go for the center ; that 's the big market .
They would ignore the geeks , and God forbid , the laggards .
It was all about going for the center .
But in a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken , I don 't think that 's a strategy we want to use any more .
I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they 're really good at ignoring you .
But market to these people because they care .
These are the people who are obsessed with something .
And when you talk to them they 'll listen because they like listening -- it 's about them .
And if you 're lucky , they 'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve , and it 'll spread .
It 'll spread to the entire curve .
They have something I call " otaku " -- it 's a great Japanese word .
It describes the desire of someone who 's obsessed to say , drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place , because that 's what they do : they get obsessed with it .
To make a product , to market an idea , to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn 't have a constituency with an otaku , is almost impossible .
Instead , you have to find a group that really , desperately cares about what it is you have to say .
Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends .
There 's a hot sauce otaku , but there 's no mustard otaku .
That 's why there 's lots and lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces , and not so many kinds of mustard .
Not because it 's hard to make interesting mustard -- you can make interesting mustard -- but people don 't because no one 's obsessed with it , and thus no one tells their friends .
Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out .
Krispy Kreme has a strategy , and what they do is , they enter a city , they talk to the people with otaku , and then they spread through the city to the people who 've just crossed the street .
This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars , but it sleeps for 12 minutes .
Not everybody wants it but they don 't care .
They want to talk to the people who do , and maybe it 'll spread .
These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world .
It 's as loud as a 747 jet . You can 't get in the car ; it 's got bulletproof glass on the windows because they 'll blow out the windshield otherwise .
But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car , if they 've got the otaku or they 've heard from someone who does , they go ahead and they pick this .
It 's really simple -- you sell to the people who are listening , and maybe , just maybe those people tell their friends .
So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote , right , who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial -- that 's the only thing keeping his company in business -- is that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial , and then tell their friends .
Pearl Jam , 96 albums released in the last two years .
Every one made a profit . How ?
They only sell them on their website .
Those people who buy them on the website have the otaku , and then they tell their friends , and it spreads and it spreads .
This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars , 10 times the standard .
But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model .
Hard Candy nail polish , doesn 't appeal to everybody , but to the people who love it , they talk about it like crazy .
This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company , making them a fortune . It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about , because it 's remarkable .
They didn 't just slap a new ad on the product ; they changed what it meant to build a paint product .
AmIhotornot.com -- everyday 250,000 people go to this site , run by two volunteers , and I can tell you they are hard graders , and they didn 't get this way by advertising a lot .
They got this way by being remarkable , sometimes a little too remarkable .
And this picture frame has a cord going out the back , and you plug it into the wall .
My father has this on his desk , and he sees his grandchildren everyday , changing constantly .
And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk .
And one person at a time , the idea spreads .
These are not diamonds , not really .
They 're made from " cremains . "
After you 're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem .
Oh , you like my ring ? It 's my grandmother .
Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry .
But you don 't have to be Ozzie Osborne -- you don 't have to be super-outrageous to do this .
What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them .
A couple of quick rules to wrap up .
The first one is : Design is free when you get to scale .
And the people who come up with stuff that 's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them .
Number two : The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe .
Proctor and Gamble knows this , right ?
The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people .
That 's risky . The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes , be remarkable .
And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do .
Very good is boring . Very good is average .
It doesn 't matter whether you 're making a record album , or you 're an architect , or you have a tract on sociology .
If it 's very good , it 's not going to work , because no one 's going to notice it .
So my three stories .
Silk . Put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section .
Sales tripled . Why ?
Milk , milk , milk , milk , milk -- not milk .
For the people who were there and looking at that section , it was remarkable .
They didn 't triple their sales with advertising ; they tripled it by doing something remarkable .
That is a remarkable piece of art . You don 't have to like it , but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable .
Frank Gehry didn 't just change a museum ; he changed an entire city 's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see .
Now , at countless meetings at , you know , the Portland City Council , or who knows where , they said , we need an architect -- can we get Frank Gehry ?
Because he did something that was at the fringes .
And my big failure ? I came out with an entire record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD format -- this remarkable new format -- and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos .
People with 20,000-dollar stereos don 't like new music .
So what you need to do is figure out who does care .
Who is going to raise their hand and say , " I want to hear what you 're doing next , " and sell something to them .
The last example I want to give you .
This is a map of Soap Lake , Washington .
As you can see , if that 's nowhere , it 's in the middle of it .
But they do have a lake .
And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake .
They don 't anymore . So the founding fathers said , " We 've got some money to spend .
What can we build here ? " And like most committees , they were going to build something pretty safe .
And then an artist came to them -- this is a true artist 's rendering -- he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town .
That 's a purple cow ; that 's something worth noticing .
I don 't know about you but if they build it , that 's where I 'm going to go .
Thank you very much for your attention .
Rob Hopkins : Transition to a world without oil
Rob Hopkins reminds us that the oil our world depends on is steadily running out . He proposes a unique solution to this problem -- the Transition response , where we prepare ourselves for life without oil and sacrifice our luxuries to build systems and communities that are completely independent of fossil fuels .
As a culture , we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future , and where we might move forward from this point .
Some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us .
Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling .
But I want to tell you a different story here today .
Like all stories , it has a beginning .
My work , for a long time , has been involved in education , in teaching people practical skills for sustainability , teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food , how to build buildings using local materials , how to generate their own energy , and so on .
I lived in Ireland , built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland , and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing .
But all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model , and moderating what comes in at one end , And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly .
And in order to introduce you to that , I 've got something here that I 'm going to unveil , which is one of the great marvels of the modern age .
And it 's something so astounding and so astonishing that I think maybe as I remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate .
If you could help me with that it would be fantastic .
This is a liter of oil .
This bottle of oil , distilled over a hundred million years of geological time , ancient sunlight , contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor -- equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you .
We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials , medicine , modern clothing , laptops , a whole range of different things .
It gives us an energy return that 's unimaginable , historically .
We 've based the design of our settlements , our business models , our transport plans , even the idea of economic growth , some would argue , on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity .
Yet , when we take a step back , and look over the span of history , at what we might call the petroleum interval , it 's a short period in history where we 've discovered this extraordinary material , and then based a whole way of life around it .
But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain , at this stage , we move from a time where our economic success , our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume , to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability .
And it 's increasingly clear that we aren 't going to be able to rely on the fact that we 're going to have this at our disposal forever .
For every four barrels of oil that we consume , we only discover one .
And that gap continues to widen .
There is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling .
In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it .
Completely unprecedented , historically .
Already that 's fallen to about 11 .
And that 's why , now , the new breakthroughs , the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta , or at the bottom of the oceans .
There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world .
But of those , 65 have already passed their peak .
The moment when the world on average passes this peak , people wonder when that 's going to happen .
And there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last July when the oil prices were so high .
But are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side ?
No . But the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are .
There is also the issue of climate change , is the other thing that underpins this transition approach .
But the thing that I notice , as I talk to climate scientists , is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes , as the data that 's coming in , which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about .
So the IPCC said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100 , in their worst case scenario .
Actually , if current trends continue , it could all be gone in five or 10 years ' time .
If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms , it would offset all the savings that we need to make , in carbon , over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change .
We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization .
But I 'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us .
" The generation that lived at the top of the mountain , that partied so hard , and so abused its inheritance . "
And one of the ways I like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil , before we had fossil fuels , and people relied on their own muscle , animal muscle energy , or a little bit of wind , little bit of water energy .
We had stories like " The Seven-League Boots " : the giant who had these boots , where , once you put them on , with every stride you could cover seven leagues , or 21 miles , a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal .
Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot , where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words , this pot would just make as much food as you liked , without you having to do any work , provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge .
Otherwise you 'd flood your entire town with warm porridge .
There is the story of " The Elves and the Shoemaker . "
The people who make shoes go to sleep , wake up in the morning , and all the shoes are magically made for them .
It 's something that was unimaginable to people then .
Now we have the seven-league boots in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet .
We have the magic porridge pot in the form of Walmart and Tesco .
And we have the elves in the form of China .
But we don 't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been .
And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now , as we look forward about where we 're going to go .
And I would argue that there are four . There is the idea of business as usual , that the future will be like the present , just more of it .
But as we 've seen over the last year , I think that 's an idea that is increasingly coming into question .
And in terms of climate change , is something that is not actually feasible .
There is the idea of hitting the wall , that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse .
This is a popular story in some places .
The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything , that technology can somehow get us through this completely .
And it 's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks , the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis , that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints , the idea that we 'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side , the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world .
But the world isn 't Second Life .
We can 't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse .
And as we sit , exchanging free ideas with each other , there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers , extracting the minerals to make all of those things .
The breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances , usually at the expense of the local , more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past , which we 've so effectively devalued and dismantled .
We can be astonishingly inventive and creative .
But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands .
Energy and technology are not the same thing .
What I 'm involved with is the transition response .
And this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face , and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need .
It 's something which has spread incredibly fast .
And it is something which has several characteristics .
It 's viral . It seems to spread under the radar very , very quickly .
It 's open source . It 's something which everybody who 's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it .
It 's self-organizing . There is no great central organization that pushes this ; people just pick up an idea and they run with it , and they implement it where they are .
It 's solutions-focused . It 's very much looking at what people can do where they are , to respond to this .
It 's sensitive to place and to scale .
Transitional is completely different .
Transition groups in Chile , transition groups in the U.S. , transition groups here , what they 're doing looks very different in every place that you go to .
It learns very much from its mistakes .
And it feels historic . It tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary .
And it 's a process which is really joyful .
People have a huge amount of fun doing this , reconnecting with other people as they do it .
One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience .
And I think , in many ways , the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability .
The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology .
And it 's really about how systems , settlements , withstand shock from the outside .
When they encounter shock from the outside that they don 't just unravel and fall to pieces .
And I think it 's a more useful concept than sustainability , as I said .
When our supermarkets have only two or three days ' worth of food in them at any one time , often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in .
Looking through the lens of resilience , we really question how we 've let ourselves get into a situation that 's so vulnerable .
Resilience runs much deeper : it 's about building modularity into what we do , building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us .
This is a photograph of the Bristol and District Market Gardeners Association , in 1897 .
This is at a time when the city of Bristol , which is quite close to here , was surrounded by commercial market gardens , which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town , and created a lot of employment for people , as well .
There was a degree of resilience , if you like , at that time , which we can now only look back on with envy .
So how does this transition idea work ?
So basically , you have a group of people who are excited by the idea .
They pick up some of the tools that we 've developed .
They start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town .
They show films , they give talks , and so on .
It 's a process which is playful and creative and informative .
Then they start to form working groups , looking at different aspects of this , and then from that , there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable .
So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland , where I was teaching , and has since spread .
There are now over 200 formal transition projects .
And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage .
They are mulling whether they 're going to take it further .
And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff .
But what do they actually do ? You know , it 's a kind of nice idea , but what do they actually do on the ground ?
Well , I think it 's really important to make the point that actually you know , this isn 't something which is going to do everything on its own .
We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on .
We need national responses . We need local government responses .
But all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front , making unelectable policies electable , over the next 5 to 10 years .
Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects , like community-supported agriculture schemes , urban food production , creating local food directories , and so on .
A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies , community-owned energy companies , where the community can invest money into itself , to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need .
A lot of places are working with their local schools .
Newent in the Forest of Dean : big polytunnel they built for the school ; the kids are learning how to grow food .
Promoting recycling , things like garden-share , that matches up people who don 't have a garden who would like to grow food , with people who have gardens they aren 't using anymore .
Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces .
And also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies .
This is Lewes in Sussex , who have recently launched the Lewes Pound , a currency that you can only spend within the town , as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy .
You take it anywhere else , it 's not worth anything .
But actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively .
Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan , which is basically to develop a plan B for the town .
Most of our local authorities , when they sit down to plan for the next five , 10 , 15 , 20 years of a community , still start by assuming that there will be more energy , more cars , more housing , more jobs , more growth , and so on .
What does it look like if that 's not the case ? And how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody ?
As a friend of mine says , " Life is a series of things you 're not quite ready for . "
And that 's certainly been my experience with transition .
From three years ago , it just being an idea , this has become something that has virally swept around the world .
We 're getting a lot of interest from government . Ed Miliband , the energy minister of this country , was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener .
Which he did -- -- and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea .
There are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities , Leicestershire and Somerset . And in Stroud , the transition group there , in effect , wrote the local government 's food plan .
And the head of the council said , " If we didn 't have Transition Stroud , we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time . "
As we see the spread of it , we see national hubs emerging .
In Scotland , the Scottish government 's climate change fund has funded Transition Scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this .
And we see it all over the place as well now .
But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now , but that things are already inevitably changing , and what we need to do is to work creatively with that , based on asking the right questions .
I think I 'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories .
Because I think stories are vital here .
And actually the stories that we tell ourselves , we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here .
And one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing .
Stories about the community that 's produced its own 21 pound note , for example , the school that 's turned its car park into a food garden , the community that 's founded its own energy company .
And for me , one of the great stories recently was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House to create a vegetable garden . Because the last time that was done , when Eleanor Roosevelt did it , it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States .
So the question I 'd like to leave you with , really , is -- for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive , how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions , while also building resilience ?
Personally , I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil .
I 've been astonishingly lucky , we 've been astonishingly lucky .
But let us honor what it has bought us , and move forward from this point .
Because if we cling to it , and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices , the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable .
And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us , and that the Oil Age has done for us , we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient , more nourishing , and in which , we find ourselves fitter , more skilled and more connected to each other .
Thank you very much .
Elizabeth Pisani : Sex , drugs and HIV -- let 's get rational
Armed with bracing logic , wit and her " public-health nerd " glasses , Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today 's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV . Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive measures that could stall the spread of this devastating disease .
" People do stupid things .
That 's what spreads HIV . "
This was a headline in a U.K. newspaper , The Guardian , not that long ago .
I 'm curious , show of hands , who agrees with it ?
Well , one or two brave souls .
This is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who 's been in field of HIV for 15 years , worked on four continents , and you 're looking at her .
And I am now going to argue that this is only half true .
People do get HIV because they do stupid things , but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons .
Now , " rational " is the dominant paradigm in public health , and if you put your public health nerd glasses on , you 'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what 's good for them and what 's bad for them , if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information , and a little bit of motivation , people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives .
Wonderful .
That 's slightly problematic for me because I work in HIV , and although I 'm sure you all know that HIV is about poverty and gender inequality , and if you were at TED ' 07 it 's about coffee prices ...
Actually , HIV 's about sex and drugs , and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational , they are erections and addiction .
So , let 's start with what 's rational for an addict .
Now , I remember speaking to an Indonesian friend of mine , Frankie .
We were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in Bali for a drug injection .
It was someone 's birthday , and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail , and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues .
And so everyone lined up , all the smackheads in a row , and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit , and he went down and started injecting people .
So he injects the first guy , and then he 's wiping the needle on his shirt , and he injects the next guy .
And Frankie says , " I 'm number 22 in line , and I can see the needle coming down towards me , and there is blood all over the place .
It 's getting blunter and blunter .
And a small part of my brain is thinking , ' That is so gross and really dangerous , ' but most of my brain is thinking , ' Please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me .
Please let there be some left . ' " And then , telling me this story , Frankie said , " You know ... God , drugs really make you stupid . "
And , you know , you can 't fault him for accuracy .
But , actually , Frankie , at that time , was a heroin addict and he was in jail .
So his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high .
And if there 's one place you really want to get high , it 's when you 're in jail .
But I 'm a scientist and I don 't like to make data out of anecdotes , so let 's look at some data .
We talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in Indonesia , and we said , " Well , do you know how you get HIV ? "
" Oh yeah , by sharing needles . "
I mean , nearly 100 percent . Yeah , by sharing needles .
And , " Do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that ? "
" Oh yeah . " Hundred percent .
" We 're smackheads ; we know where to get clean needles . "
" So are you carrying a needle ? "
We 're actually interviewing people on the street , in the places where they 're hanging out and taking drugs .
" Are you carrying clean needles ? "
One in four , maximum .
So no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10 , and the other nine in 10 are sharing .
So you 've got this massive mismatch ; everyone knows that if they share they 're going to get HIV , but they 're all sharing anyway .
So what 's that about ? Is it like you get a better high if you share or something ?
We asked that to a junkie and they 're like , " Are you nuts ? "
You don 't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you 're sleeping with .
There 's just kind of an ick factor there .
" No , no . We share needles because we don 't want to go to jail . "
So , in Indonesia at this time , if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up , they could put you into jail .
And that changes the equation slightly , doesn 't it ?
Because your choice now is either I use my own needle now , or I could share a needle now and get a disease that 's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now , or I could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow .
And while junkies think that it 's a really bad idea to expose themselves to HIV , they think it 's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they 'll probably end up in Frankie 's situation and expose themselves to HIV anyway .
So , suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles .
Now , let 's look at it from a policy maker 's point of view .
This is a really easy problem .
For once , your incentives are aligned .
We 've got what 's rational for public health .
You want people to use clean needles -- and junkies want to use clean needles .
So we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest .
Now , the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known , bleeding heart liberal Margaret Thatcher .
And she put in the world 's first national needle exchange program , and other countries followed suit : Australia , The Netherlands and few others .
And in all of those countries , you can see , not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with HIV .
Now , places that didn 't do this -- New York City for example , Moscow , Jakarta -- we 're talking , at its peak , one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease .
Now , Margaret Thatcher didn 't do this because she has any great love for junkies .
She did it because she ran a country that had a national health service .
So , if she didn 't invest in effective prevention , she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on , and obviously those are much higher .
So she was making a politically rational decision .
Now , if I take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data , it seems like a no-brainer , doesn 't it ?
But in this country , where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens , we 've taken a very different approach .
So what we 've been doing in the United States is reviewing the data -- endlessly reviewing the data .
So , these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the United States , and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective -- quite a lot of them .
Now , the ones that show that needle programs aren 't effective -- you think that 's one of these annoying dynamic slides and I 'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it 's going to come up , but no -- that 's the whole slide .
There is nothing on the other side .
So , completely irrational , you would think .
Except that , wait a minute , politicians are rational , too , and they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
So what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this .
So it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors .
Now let 's talk about sex .
Are we any more rational about sex ?
Well , I 'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the Catholic Church , who think somehow that if you give out condoms , everyone 's going to run out and have sex .
I don 't know if Pope Benedict watches TEDTalks online , but if you do , I 've got news for you Benedict -- I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid .
It 's not that easy !
Here , maybe you 'll have better luck .
Okay , seriously , HIV is actually not that easy to transmit sexually .
So , it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids .
And what we 've got is a very , very high level of virus right at the beginning when you 're first infected , then you start making antibodies , and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time -- 10 or 12 years -- you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection .
But basically , nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic AIDS , and by that stage , you 're not looking great , you 're not feeling great , you 're not having that much sex .
So the sexual transmission of HIV is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia .
Now , this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups , and that 's considered stigmatizing .
I 've always been a bit curious about that because I think stigma is a bad thing , whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing , but we 'll leave that be .
The truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time .
And those groups are , globally , people who sell sex and their more regular partners .
They are gay men on the party scene who have , on average , three times more partners than straight people on the party scene .
And they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy , and almost all of those countries are in east or southern Africa .
And that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today .
You can see these horrifying figures from Africa .
These are all countries in southern Africa where between one in seven , and one in three of all adults , are infected with HIV .
Now , in the rest of the world , we 've got basically nothing going on in the general population -- very , very low levels -- but we have extraordinarily high levels of HIV in these other populations who are at highest risk : drug injectors , sex workers and gay men .
And you 'll note , that 's the local data from Los Angeles : 25 percent prevalence among gay men .
Of course , you can 't get HIV just by having unprotected sex .
You can only HIV by having unprotected sex with a positive person .
In most of the world , these few prevention failures notwithstanding , we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex : condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries .
And , again , it 's because of an alignment of the incentives .
What 's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it 's really bad for business to have another STI .
No one wants it .
And , actually , clients don 't want to go home with a drip either .
So essentially , you 're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex .
But in " intimate " relations it 's much more difficult because , with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things , we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy , and nothing is quite so unromantic as the , " My condom or yours , darling ? " question .
So in the face of that , you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms .
This , for example , this gentleman is called Joseph .
He 's from Haiti and he has AIDS .
And he 's probably not having a lot of sex right now , but he is a reminder in the population , of why you might want to be using condoms .
This is also in Haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex , perhaps .
Now , funnily enough , this is also Joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment .
Not for nothing do we call it the Lazarus Effect .
But it is changing the equation of what 's rational in sexual decision-making .
So , what we 've got -- some people say , " Oh , it doesn 't matter very much because , actually , treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit HIV . "
So , if you look at the viremia thing again , if you do start treatment when you 're sick , well , what happens ? Your viral load comes down .
But compared to what ? What happens if you 're not on treatment ?
Well , you die , so your viral load goes to zero .
And all of this green stuff here , including the spikes -- which are because you couldn 't get to the pharmacy , or you ran out of drugs , or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs , or because you 've started to get resistance , or whatever -- all of that is virus that wouldn 't be out there , except for treatment .
Now , am I saying , " Oh , well , great prevention strategy .
Let 's just stop treating people . "
Of course not , of course not .
We need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can .
But what I am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need .
That 's simply not necessarily true , and I think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now .
And what we 've seen is that , actually , condom use rates , which were very , very high -- the gay community responded very rapidly to HIV , with extremely little help from public health nerds , I would say -- that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really : One is the assumption of , " Oh well , if he 's infected , he 's probably on meds , and his viral load 's going to be low , so I 'm pretty safe . "
And the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of HIV as they were of AIDS , and rightly so .
AIDS was a disfiguring disease that killed you , and HIV is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day .
And that 's boring , but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex , no matter how drunk you are , no matter how many poppers you 've taken , whatever ?
If we look at the data , we can see that the answer to that question is , mmm .
So these are data from Scotland .
You see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program .
Then it came way down .
And both in heterosexuals -- mostly in commercial sex -- and in drug users , you 've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins , and that 's because of that alignment of incentives that I talked about earlier .
But in gay men , you 've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available .
This is of new infections .
What does that mean ?
It means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population -- more people living longer , healthier lives , more likely to be getting laid with HIV -- is outweighing the effects of lower viral load , and that 's a very worrisome thing .
What does it mean ?
It means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have .
Is that what 's happening ?
No , and I call it the " compassion conundrum . "
We 've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days , and what 's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers , unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies .
But once they 've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we don 't want to condone to being AIDS victims , we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives .
It doesn 't make any sense from a public health point of view .
I want to give what 's very nearly the last word to Ines .
Ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of Jakarta ; she 's a chick with a dick .
Why does she do that job ?
Well , of course , because she 's forced into it because she doesn 't have any better option , etc . , etc .
And if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory , all would be well .
This is what factory workers earn in an hour in Indonesia : on average , 20 cents .
It varies a bit province to province .
I do speak to sex workers , 15,000 of them for this particular slide , and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour .
So it 's not a great job , but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice .
Okay , Ines .
We 've got the tools , the knowledge and the cash , and commitment to preventing HIV too .
Ines : So why is prevalence still rising ?
It 's all politics .
When you get to politics , nothing makes sense .
Elizabeth Pisani : " When you get to politics , nothing makes sense . "
So , from the point of view of a sex worker , politicians are making no sense .
From the point of view of a public health nerd , junkies are doing dumb things .
The truth is that everyone has a different rationale .
There are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet , and that 's one of the glories of human existence .
But those ways of being rational are not independent of one another , so it 's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that 's made by a politician , and it 's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they 're responding to what they think the voters want .
But here 's the thing : we are the voters .
We 're not all of them , of course , but TED is a community of opinion leaders .
And everyone who 's in this room , and everyone who 's watching this out there on the web , I think , has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense .
It 's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what 's rational for every Frankie and every Ines out there , but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV .
Thank you .
Ellen Dunham-Jones : Retrofitting suburbia
Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years ' big sustainable design project : retrofitting suburbia . To come : Dying malls rehabilitated , dead " big box " stores re-inhabited , parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
In the last 50 years , we 've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences .
And I 'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia .
So whether it 's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots , I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing , especially retail , sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places .
And in the process , what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost , and have the infrastructure in place , instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges .
So why is this important ?
I think there are any number of reasons , and I 'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few .
Just from the perspective of climate change , the average urban dweller in the U.S.
has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller , mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more , and living in detached buildings , you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of .
So strictly from a climate change perspective , the cities are already relatively green .
The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs .
All that driving that we 've been doing out in the suburbs , we have doubled the amount of miles we drive .
It 's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency .
We 're just driving so much more ; we haven 't been able to keep up technologically .
Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting .
Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles .
And those have been linked then with the rather alarming , growing rates of obesity , shown in these maps here , and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes .
And that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore , again , because of our development patterns .
And then there 's finally -- there 's the affordability question .
I mean , how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices ?
Suburban expansion to cheap land , for the last 50 years -- you know the cheap land out on the edge -- has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream .
But increasingly , the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability -- which is basically our model -- those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs .
For instance , here in Atlanta , about half of households make between $ 20,000 and $ 50,000 a year , and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation .
I mean , that 's 2005 figures .
That 's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon .
You know , none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs , and they 're not going down any time soon .
Whether you love suburbia 's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips , there are reasons why it 's important to retrofit .
But is it practical ?
I think it is .
June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade , and we 've found over 80 varied projects .
But that they 're really all market driven , and what 's driving the market in particular -- number one -- is major demographic shifts .
We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place , but that 's really not the case anymore .
Since 2000 , already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them .
We just haven 't caught up with the actual realities of this .
The reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now : the Baby Boomers retiring -- and then there 's a gap , Generation X , which is a small generation .
They 're still having kids -- but Generation Y hasn 't even started hitting child-rearing age .
They 're the other big generation .
So as a result of that , demographers predict that through 2025 , 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them .
And the market research , consumer research , asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like , what they would like to live in , tells us there is going to be a huge demand -- and we 're already seeing it -- for more urban lifestyles within suburbia .
That basically , the Boomers want to be able to age in place , and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle , but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia .
The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt .
Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band , but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots -- and suburbia is full of them .
When the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown , it made sense to just build surface parking lots .
But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again , as we 've just continued to sprawl , and they now have a relatively central location .
It no longer just makes sense .
That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots .
It now makes sense to go back in , build a deck and build up on those sites .
So what do you do with a dead mall , dead office park ?
It turns out , all sorts of things .
In a slow economy like ours , re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies .
So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that 's been re-inhabited as art-space .
It 's now home to artist studios , theater groups , dance troupes .
It 's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was , but it 's serving its community .
It 's keeping the lights on .
It 's becoming , I think , a really great institution .
Other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes , as universities , and as all variety of office space .
We also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well -- lots of schools , lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one .
This was a little grocery store , a Food Lion grocery store , that is now a public library .
In addition to , I think , doing a beautiful adaptive reuse , they tore up some of the parking spaces , put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff , put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods .
And they 've made this , what was just a store along a commercial strip , into a community gathering space .
This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix , Arizona .
Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint , a gourmet grocery , and they put up a restaurant in the old post office .
Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination .
It 's been so successful , they 've now taken over the strip across the street .
The real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim , " Walking distance to Le Grande Orange , " because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call " a third place . "
If home is the first place and work is the second place , the third place is where you go to hang out and build community .
And especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family , the family households , there 's a real hunger for more third places .
So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category , the next strategy : redevelopment .
Now , during the boom , there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density , a sort of compact , walkable urban neighborhoods .
But some of them have been much more incremental .
This is Mashpee Commons , the oldest retrofit that we 've found .
And it 's just incrementally , over the last 20 years , built urbanism on top of its parking lots .
So the black and white photo shows the simple 60 's strip shopping center .
And then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact , mixed-use New England village , and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side .
So , you know , sometimes it 's incremental .
Sometimes , it 's all at once .
This is another infill project on the parking lots , this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C.
When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site , the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street , several apartments and condo buildings , while keeping the existing office buildings .
Here is the site in 1940 : It was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville .
By 1980 , it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right .
Today , the transit , the Main Street and the new housing have all been built .
Eventually , I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall .
Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped .
Transit is a big driver of retrofits .
So here 's what it looks like .
You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new Main Street .
This one is one of my favorites , Belmar .
I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction .
There 's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines .
This was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock .
It 's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets , two public parks , eight bus lines and a range of housing types , and so it 's really given Lakewood , Colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had .
Here was the mall in its heyday .
They had their prom in the mall . They loved their mall .
So here 's the site in 1975 with the mall .
By 1995 , the mall has died .
The department store has been kept -- and we found this was true in many cases .
The department stores are multistory ; they 're better built .
They 're easy to be re-adapted .
But the one story stuff ...
that 's really history .
So here it is at projected build-out .
This project , I think , has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods .
It 's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle .
It 's about two-thirds built out right now .
Here 's what the new Main Street looks like .
It 's very successful , and it 's helped to prompt -- regional malls in Denver have now , or have announced plans to be , retrofitted .
But it 's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring -- just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city .
No , it 's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties .
And so it 's giving people more choices , but it 's not taking away choices .
But it 's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability .
You want to also try to get more systemic transformation .
We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves .
So this is one that has been retrofitted in California .
They took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below , and they built a boulevard that has become the Main Street for their town .
And it 's transformed from being an ugly , unsafe , undesirable address , to becoming a beautiful , attractive , dignified sort of good address .
I mean now we 're hoping we start to see it ; they 've already built City Hall , attracted two hotels .
I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree .
So there 's a lot of great things , but I 'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting .
But densification is not going to work everywhere .
Sometimes re-greening is really the better answer .
There 's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like Flint , Michigan .
There 's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement -- sort of victory gardens meets the Internet .
But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology , as in this example outside of Minneapolis .
When the shopping center died , the city restored the site 's original wetlands , creating lakefront property , which then attracted private investment , the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years .
So they 've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time .
This is another re-greening example .
It also makes sense in very strong markets .
This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop .
And the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit .
The creek had been culverted under the parking lot .
But daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat .
So I 've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits .
What 's next ?
I think we have three challenges for the future .
The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale .
We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened .
Where should we be redeveloping ?
And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation ?
These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta .
I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now .
And we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves -- expensive , but simple .
One , in a hundred years , transit on all major rail and road corridors .
Two , in a hundred years , thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors .
It 's a little extreme , but we 've got a little water problem .
In a hundred years , subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won 't be viable .
And so we 've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production .
So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits .
And I close with this image of democracy in action : This is a protest that 's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring , Maryland on an Astroturf town green .
Now , retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism , and not without reason ; you don 't get much more phony than an Astroturf town green .
I have to say , these are very hybrid places .
They are new but trying to look old .
They have urban streetscapes , but suburban parking ratios .
Their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia , but they 're less diverse than cities .
And they are public places , but that are managed by private companies .
And just the surface appearance are often -- like the Astroturf here -- they make me wince .
So , you know , I mean I 'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job .
The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks , the streets and blocks , the putting in of public space , compromised as it may be , is still a really great thing .
But we 've got to get the architecture better .
The final challenge is for all of you .
I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places -- more sustainable places , period .
But culturally , we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic , and we expect that .
But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to .
It 's time to let them grow up , so I want you to all support the zoning changes , the road diets , the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you .
Thank you .
Mitchell Besser : Mothers helping mothers fight HIV
In sub-Saharan Africa , HIV infections are more prevalent and doctors scarcer than anywhere else in the world . With a lack of medical professionals , Mitchell Besser enlisted the help of his patients to create mothers2mothers -- an extraordinary network of HIV-positive women whose support for each other is changing and saving lives .
I want you to take a trip with me .
Picture yourself driving down a small road in Africa , and as you drive along , you look off to the side , and this is what you see : you see a field of graves .
And you stop , and you get out of your car and you take a picture .
And you go into the town , and you inquire , " What 's going on here ? "
and people are initially reluctant to tell you .
And then someone says , " These are the recent AIDS deaths in our community . "
HIV isn 't like other medical conditions ; it 's stigmatizing .
People are reluctant to talk about it -- there 's a fear associated with it .
And I 'm going to talk about HIV today , about the deaths , about the stigma .
It 's a medical story , but more than that , it 's a social story .
This map depicts the global distribution of HIV .
And as you can see , Africa has a disproportionate share of the infection .
There are 33 million people living with HIV in the world today .
Of these , two-thirds , 22 million are living in sub-Saharan Africa .
There are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with HIV and of these , 90 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa .
We talk about things in relative terms .
And I 'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and HIV-positive mothers .
The United States -- a large country -- each year , 7,000 mothers with HIV who give birth to a child .
But you go to Rwanda -- a very small country -- 8,000 mothers with HIV who are pregnant .
And then you go to Baragwanath Hospital , outside of Johannesburg in South Africa , and 8,000 HIV-positive pregnant women giving birth -- a hospital the same as a country .
And to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to South Africa , it just pales , because in South Africa , each year 300,000 mothers with HIV give birth to children .
So we talk about PMTCT , and we refer to PMTCT , prevention of mother to child transmission .
I think there 's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is HIV-positive , she 's going to infect her child .
The reality is really , very different .
In resource-rich countries , with all the tests and treatment we currently have , less than two percent of babies are born HIV-positive -- 98 percent of babies are born HIV-negative .
And yet , the reality in resource-poor countries , in the absence of tests and treatment , 40 percent -- 40 percent of children are infected -- 40 percent versus two percent -- an enormous difference .
So these programs -- and I 'm going to refer to PMTCT though my talk -- these prevention programs , simply , they 're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies , and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children .
So it 's the test a mother gets when she comes in .
It 's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that 's inside the uterus and during delivery .
It 's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex .
It 's an entire package of services , and it works .
So in the United States , since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s , there 's been an 80-percent decline in the number of HIV-infected children .
Less than 100 babies are born with HIV each year in the United States and yet , still , over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with HIV .
What does that mean ?
It means 1,100 children infected each day -- 1,100 children each day , infected with HIV .
And where do they come from ?
Well , less than one comes from the United States .
One , on average , comes from Europe .
100 come from Asia and the Pacific .
And each day , a thousand babies -- a thousand babies are born each day with HIV in Africa .
So again , I look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of HIV in Africa .
And let 's look at another map .
And here , again , we see Africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors .
That thin sliver you see here , that 's Africa .
And it 's the same with nurses .
The truth is sub-Saharan Africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world 's health care workers .
That means doctors and nurses simply don 't have the time to take care of patients .
A nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day , which leaves her just minutes per patient -- minutes per patient .
And so when we look at these PMTCT programs , what does it mean ?
Well , back in 2001 , when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug , a nurse , in the course of her few minutes with a patient , would have to counsel for the HIV test , perform the HIV test , explain the results , dispense a single dose of the drug , Nevirapine , explain how to take it , discuss infant feeding options , reinforce infant feeding , and test the baby -- in minutes .
Well , fortunately since 2001 , we 've got new treatments , new tests , and we 're far more successful , but we don 't have any more nurses .
And so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes .
It 's not possible -- it doesn 't work .
And so we need to find better ways of providing care .
This is a picture of a maternal health clinic in Africa -- mothers coming , pregnant and with their babies .
These women are here for care , but we know that just doing a test , just giving someone a drug , it 's not enough .
Meds don 't equal medical care .
Doctors and nurses , frankly , don 't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand .
I 'm a doctor -- I tell people things to do , and I expect them to follow my guidance -- because I 'm a doctor ; I went to Harvard -- but the reality is , if I tell a patient , " You should have safer sex .
You should always use a condom , " and yet , in her relationship , she 's not empowered -- what 's going to happen ?
If I tell her to take her medicines every day and yet , no one in the household knows about her illness , so it 's just not going to work .
And so we need to do more , we need to do it differently , we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale , which means it can be done everywhere .
So , I want to tell you a story -- I want to take you on a little trip .
Imagine yourself , if you can , you 're a young woman in Africa , you 're going to the hospital or clinic .
You go in for a test and you find out that you 're pregnant , and you 're delighted .
And then they give you another test and they tell you you 're HIV-positive , and you 're devastated .
And the nurse takes you into a room , and she tells you about the tests and HIV and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby , and you hear none of it .
All you 're hearing is , " I 'm going to die , and my baby is going to die . "
And then you 're out on the street , and you don 't know where to go .
And you don 't know who you can talk to , because the truth is , HIV is so stigmatizing that if you partner , your family , anyone in your home , you 're likely to be thrown out without any means of support .
And this -- this is the face and story of HIV in Africa today .
But we 're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news .
And I want to change the story a little bit .
Take the same mother , and the nurse , after she gives her her test , takes her to a room .
The door opens and there 's a room full of mothers , mothers with babies , and they 're sitting , and they 're talking , they 're listening .
They 're drinking tea , they 're having sandwiches .
And she goes inside , and woman comes up to her and says , " Welcome to mothers2mothers .
Have a seat . You 're safe here .
We 're all HIV-positive .
You 're going to be okay . You 're going to live .
Your baby is going to be HIV-negative . "
We view mothers as a community 's single greatest resource .
Mothers take care of the children , take care of the home .
So often the men are gone .
They 're working , or they 're not part of the household .
Our organization , mothers2mothers , enlists women with HIV as care providers .
We bring mothers who have HIV , who 've been through these PMTCT programs in the very facilities , to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team .
These mothers , we call them mentor mothers , are able to engage women who , just like themselves , pregnant with babies , have found out about being HIV-positive , who need support and education .
And they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines , how to take care of themselves , how to take care of their babies .
Consider : if you needed surgery , you would want the best possible technical surgeon , right ?
But if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life , you 'd like to engage someone , someone who 's had the procedure .
Patients are experts on their own experience , and they can share that experience with others .
This is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines .
So the mothers who work for us , they come from the communities in which they work .
They 're hired -- they 're paid as professional members of the health care teams , just like doctors and nurses .
And we open bank accounts for them and they 're paid directly into the accounts , because their money 's protected ; the men can 't take it away from them .
They go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education , training .
Now , doctors and nurses -- they too get trained .
But so often , they only get trained once , so they 're not aware of new medicines , new guidelines as they come out .
Our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained .
And so doctors and nurses -- they look up to them as experts .
Imagine that : a woman , a former patient , being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she 's taking care of .
Our organization has three goals .
The first , to prevent mother-to-child transmission .
The second : keep mothers healthy , keep mothers alive , keep the children alive -- no more orphans .
And the third , and maybe the most grand , is to find ways to empower women , enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with HIV .
So how do we do it ?
Well , maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one , seeing patients one-to-one , educating them , supporting them , explaining how they can take care of themselves .
We go beyond that ; we try to bring in the husbands , the partners .
In Africa , it 's very , very hard to engage men .
Men are not frequently part of pregnancy care .
But in Rwanda , in one country , they 've got a policy that a woman can 't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her -- that 's the rule .
And so the father and the mother , together , go through the counseling and the testing .
The father and the mother , together , they get the results .
And this is so important in breaking through the stigma .
Disclosure is so central to prevention .
How do you have safer sex , how do you use a condom regularly if there hasn 't been disclosure ?
Disclosure is so important to treatment , because again , people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly .
We also work in groups .
Now the groups , it 's not like me lecturing , but what happens is women , they come together -- under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers -- they come together , and they share their personal experiences .
And it 's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves , how to disclose how to take medicines .
And then there 's the community outreach , engaging women in their communities .
If we can change the way households believe and think , we can change the way communities believe and think .
And if we can change enough communities , we can change national attitudes .
We can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to HIV .
The hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction .
We have the medicines , we have the tests , but how do you reduce the stigma ?
And it 's important about disclosure .
So , a couple years ago , one of the mentor mothers came back , and she told me a story .
She had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client , because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her HIV status , and she was afraid to go by herself .
And so the mentor mother went along with .
And the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings , " I have something to tell you . I 'm HIV-positive . "
And everybody was quiet .
And then her oldest brother stood up and said , " I too have something to tell you .
I 'm HIV-positive .
I 've been afraid to tell everybody . "
And then this older sister stood up and said , " I too am living with the virus , and I 've been ashamed . "
And then her younger brother stood up and said , " I 'm also positive .
I thought you were going to throw me out of the family . "
And you see where this is going .
The last sister stood up and said , " I 'm also positive .
I thought you were going to hate me . "
And there they were , all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time .
Female Women come to us , and they are crying and scared .
I tell them my story , that I am HIV-positive , but my child is HIV-negative .
I tell them , " You are going to make it , and you will raise a healthy baby . "
I am proof that there is hope .
Mitchell Besser : Remember the images I showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in Africa .
And it is a crisis in health care systems .
Even as we have more tests and more drugs , we can 't reach people ; we don 't have enough providers .
So we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting .
Task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it .
Typically , it 's a doctor giving a job to a nurse .
And the issue in Africa is that there are fewer nurses , really than doctors , and so we need to find new paradigm for health care .
How do you build a better health care system ?
We 've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor , a nurse and a mentor mother .
And so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs , the side effects .
They delegate education about infant feeding , family planning , safer sex , actions that nurses simple just don 't have time for .
So we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission .
The world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health .
And our organization helps women across that bridge .
The care doesn 't stop when the baby 's born -- we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby , ensuring that they live healthy , successful lives .
Our organization works on three levels .
The first , at the patient level -- mothers and babies keeping babies from getting HIV , keeping mothers healthy to raise them .
The second , communities -- empowering women .
They become leaders within their communities .
They change the way communities think -- we need to change attitudes to HIV .
We need to change attitudes to women in Africa .
We have to do that .
And then rework the level of the health care systems , building stronger health care systems .
Our health care systems are broken .
They 're not going to work the way they 're currently designed .
And so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people 's behaviors don 't have the skills , don 't have the time -- our mentor mothers do .
And so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in , we can do that .
I started the program in Capetown , South Africa back in 2001 .
It was at that point , just the spark of an idea .
Referencing Steven Johnson 's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from , I was in the shower at the time -- I was alone .
The program is now working in nine countries , we have 670 program sites , we 're seeing about 230,000 women every month , we 're employing 1,600 mentor mothers , and last year , they enrolled 300,000 HIV-positive pregnant women and mothers .
That is 20 percent of the global HIV-positive pregnant women -- 20 percent of the world .
What 's extraordinary is how simple the premise is .
Mothers with HIV caring for mothers with HIV .
Past patients taking care of present patients .
And empowerment through employment -- reducing stigma .
Female There is hope , hope that one day we shall win this fight against HIV and AIDS .
Each person must know their HIV status .
Those who are HIV-negative must know how to stay negative .
Those who are HIV-infected must know how to take care of themselves .
HIV-positive pregnant women must get PMTCT services in order to have HIV-negative babies .
All of this is possible , if we each contribute to this fight .
MB : Simple solutions to complex problems .
Mothers caring for mothers .
It 's transformational .
Thank you .
Jenna McCarthy : What you don 't know about marriage
In this funny , casual talk from TEDx , writer Jenna McCarthy shares surprising research on how marriages really work . One tip : Do not try to win an Oscar for best actress . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Every year in the United States alone , 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together ...
and not to have sex with anyone else , ever .
He buys a ring , she buys a dress .
They go shopping for all sorts of things .
She takes him to Arthur Murray for ballroom dancing lessons .
And the big day comes .
And they 'll stand before God and family and some guy her dad once did business with , and they 'll vow that nothing , not abject poverty , not life-threatening illness , not complete and utter misery will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion .
These optimistic young bastards promise to honor and cherish each other through hot flashes and mid-life crises and a cumulative 50-lb. weight gain , until that far-off day when one of them is finally able to rest in peace .
You know , because they can 't hear the snoring anymore .
And then they 'll get stupid drunk and smash cake in each others ' faces and do the " Macarena , " and we 'll be there showering them with towels and toasters and drinking their free booze and throwing birdseed at them every single time -- even though we know , statistically , half of them will be divorced within a decade .
Of course , the other half won 't , right ?
They 'll keep forgetting anniversaries and arguing about where to spend holidays and debating which way the toilet paper should come off of the roll .
And some of them will even still be enjoying each others ' company when neither of them can chew solid food anymore .
And researchers want to know why .
I mean , look , it doesn 't take a double-blind , placebo-controlled study to figure out what makes a marriage not work .
Disrespect , boredom , too much time on Facebook , having sex with other people .
But you can have the exact opposite of all of those things -- respect , excitement , a broken Internet connection , mind-numbing monogamy -- and the thing still can go to hell in a hand basket .
So what 's going on when it doesn 't ?
What do the folks who make it all the way to side-by-side burial plots have in common ?
What are they doing right ?
What can we learn from them ?
And if you 're still happily sleeping solo , why should you stop what you 're doing and make it your life 's work to find that one special person that you can annoy for the rest of your life ?
Well researchers spend billions of your tax dollars trying to figure that out .
They stalk blissful couples and they study their every move and mannerism .
And they try to pinpoint what it is that sets them apart from their miserable neighbors and friends .
And it turns out , the success stories share a few similarities , actually , beyond they don 't have sex with other people .
For instance , in the happiest marriages , the wife is thinner and better looking than the husband .
Obvious , right .
It 's obvious that this leads to marital bliss because , women , we care a great deal about being thin and good looking , whereas men mostly care about sex ...
ideally with women who are thinner and better looking than they are .
The beauty of this research though is that no one is suggesting that women have to be thin to be happy ; we just have to be thinner than our partners .
So instead of all that laborious dieting and exercising , we just need to wait for them to get fat , maybe bake a few pies .
This is good information to have , and it 's not that complicated .
Research also suggests that the happiest couples are the ones that focus on the positives .
For example , the happy wife .
Instead of pointing out her husband 's growing gut or suggesting he go for a run , she might say , " Wow , honey , thank you for going out of your way to make me relatively thinner . "
These are couples who can find good in any situation .
" Yeah , it was devastating when we lost everything in that fire , but it 's kind of nice sleeping out here under the stars , and it 's a good thing you 've got all that body fat to keep us warm . "
One of my favorite studies found that the more willing a husband is to do house work , the more attractive his wife will find him .
Because we needed a study to tell us this .
But here 's what 's going on here .
The more attractive she finds him , the more sex they have ; the more sex they have , the nicer he is to her ; the nicer he is to her , the less she nags him about leaving wet towels on the bed -- and ultimately , they live happily ever after .
In other words , men , you might want to pick it up a notch in the domestic department .
Here 's an interesting one .
One study found that people who smile in childhood photographs are less likely to get a divorce .
This is an actual study , and let me clarify .
The researchers were not looking at documented self-reports of childhood happiness or even studying old journals .
The data were based entirely on whether people looked happy in these early pictures .
Now I don 't know how old all of you are , but when I was a kid , your parents took pictures with a special kind of camera that held something called film , and , by God , film was expensive .
They didn 't take 300 shots of you in that rapid-fire digital video mode and then pick out the nicest , smileyest one for the Christmas card .
Oh no .
They dressed you up , they lined you up , and you smiled for the fucking camera like they told you to or you could kiss your birthday party goodbye .
But still , I have a huge pile of fake happy childhood pictures and I 'm glad they make me less likely than some people to get a divorce .
So what else can you do to safeguard your marriage ?
Do not win an Oscar for best actress .
I 'm serious .
Bettie Davis , Joan Crawford , Hallie Berry , Hillary Swank , Sandra Bullock , Reese Witherspoon , all of them single soon after taking home that statue .
They actually call it the Oscar curse .
It is the marriage kiss of death and something that should be avoided .
And it 's not just successfully starring in films that 's dangerous .
It turns out , merely watching a romantic comedy causes relationship satisfaction to plummet .
Apparently , the bitter realization that maybe it could happen to us , but it obviously hasn 't and it probably never will , makes our lives seem unbearably grim in comparison .
And theoretically , I suppose if we opt for a film where someone gets brutally murdered or dies in a fiery car crash , we are more likely to walk out of that theater feeling like we 've got it pretty good .
Drinking alcohol , it seems , is bad for your marriage .
Yeah .
I can 't tell you anymore about that one because I stopped reading it at the headline .
But here 's a scary one : Divorce is contagious .
That 's right -- when you have a close couple friend split up , it increases your chances of getting a divorce by 75 percent .
Now I have to say , I don 't get this one at all .
My husband and I have watched quite a few friends divide their assets and then struggle with being our age and single in an age of sexting and Viagra and eHarmony .
And I 'm thinking they 've done more for my marriage than a lifetime of therapy ever could .
So now you may be wondering , why does anyone get married ever ?
Well the U.S. federal government counts more than a thousand legal benefits to being someone 's spouse -- a list that includes visitation rights in jail , but hopefully you 'll never need that one .
But beyond the profound federal perks , married people make more money .
We 're healthier , physically and emotionally .
We produce happier , more stable and more successful kids .
We have more sex than our supposedly swinging single friends -- believe it or not .
We even live longer , which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place .
Now if you 're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return , I can 't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness who prefers horror movies and doesn 't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce , but I can only encourage you to try , because the benefits , as I 've pointed out , are significant .
The bottom line is , whether you 're in it or you 're searching for it , I believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting .
So I hope you 'll use the information I 've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors .
For instance , in my marriage , I 'd say I 'm doing okay .
One the one hand , I have a husband who 's annoyingly lean and incredibly handsome .
So I 'm obviously going to need fatten him up .
And like I said , we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up .
So we have to keep an eye on that .
And we do like a cocktail or two .
On the other hand , I have the fake happy picture thing .
And also , my husband does a lot around the house , and would happily never see another romantic comedy as long as he lives .
So I 've got all those things going for me .
But just in case , I plan to work extra hard to not win an Oscar anytime soon .
And for the good of your relationships , I would encourage you to do the same .
I 'll see you at the bar .
John Maeda : How art , technology and design inform creative leaders
John Maeda , former President of the Rhode Island School of Design , delivers a funny and charming talk that spans a lifetime of work in art , design and technology , concluding with a picture of creative leadership in the future . Watch for demos of Maeda 's earliest work -- and even a computer made of people .
I have to say that I 'm very glad to be here .
I understand we have over 80 countries here , so that 's a whole new paradigm for me to speak to all of these countries .
In each country , I 'm sure you have this thing called the parent-teacher conference .
Do you know about the parent-teacher conference ?
Not the ones for your kids , but the one you had as a child , where your parents come to school and your teacher talks to your parents , and it 's a little bit awkward .
Well , I remember in third grade , I had this moment where my father , who never takes off from work , he 's a classical blue collar , a working-class immigrant person , going to school to see his son , how he 's doing , and the teacher said to him , he said , " You know , John is good at math and art . "
And he kind of nodded , you know ?
The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our tofu store , and he said , " You know , John 's good at math . "
And that always stuck with me all my life .
Why didn 't Dad say art ? Why wasn 't it okay ?
Why ? It became a question my entire life , and that 's all right , because being good at math meant he bought me a computer , and some of you remember this computer , this was my first computer .
Who had an Apple II ? Apple II users , very cool .
As you remember , the Apple II did nothing at all .
You 'd plug it in , you 'd type in it and green text would come out .
It would say you 're wrong most of the time .
That was the computer we knew .
That computer is a computer that I learned about going to MIT , my father 's dream . And at MIT , however , I learned about the computer at all levels , and after , I went to art school to get away from computers , and I began to think about the computer as more of a spiritual space of thinking .
And I was influenced by performance art -- so this is 20 years ago . I made a computer out of people .
It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment .
I have a power manager , mouse driver , memory , etc . , and I built this in Kyoto , the old capital of Japan .
It 's a room broken in two halves .
I 've turned the computer on , and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard , and it 's put into the computer .
And the floppy disk drive person wears it .
She finds the first sector on the disk , and takes data off the disk and passes it off to , of course , the bus .
So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer to the memory , to the CPU , the VRAM , etc . , and it 's an actual working computer . That 's a bus , really .
And it looks kind of fast . That 's a mouse driver , where it 's XY .
It looks like it 's happening kind of quickly , but it 's actually a very slow computer , and when I realized how slow this computer was compared to how fast a computer is , it made me wonder about computers and technology in general .
And so I 'm going to talk today about four things , really .
The first three things are about how I 've been curious about technology , design and art , and how they intersect , how they overlap , and also a topic that I 've taken on since four years ago I became the President of Rhode Island School of Design : leadership .
And I 'll talk about how I 've looked to combine these four areas into a kind of a synthesis , a kind of experiment .
So starting from technology , technology is a wonderful thing .
When that Apple II came out , it really could do nothing .
It could show text and after we waited a bit , we had these things called images .
Remember when images were first possible with a computer , those gorgeous , full-color images ?
And then after a few years , we got CD-quality sound .
It was incredible . You could listen to sound on the computer .
And then movies , via CD-ROM . It was amazing .
Remember that excitement ?
And then the browser appeared . The browser was great , but the browser was very primitive , very narrow bandwidth .
Text first , then images , we waited , CD-quality sound over the Net , then movies over the Internet . Kind of incredible .
And then the mobile phone occurred , text , images , audio , video . And now we have iPhone , iPad , Android , with text , video , audio , etc .
You see this little pattern here ?
We 're kind of stuck in a loop , perhaps , and this sense of possibility from computing is something I 've been questioning for the last 10 or so years , and have looked to design , as we understand most things , and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine .
And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson .
Designers talk about the relationship between form and content , content and form . Now what does that mean ?
Well , content is the word up there : fear .
It 's a four-letter word . It 's a kind of a bad feeling word , fear .
Fear is set in Light Helvetica , so it 's not too stressful , and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica , it 's like , " Oh , fear , who cares ? " Right ?
You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big , and like , whoa , that hurts . Fear .
So you can see how you change the scale , you change the form . Content is the same , but you feel differently .
You change the typeface to , like , this typeface , and it 's kind of funny . It 's like pirate typeface , like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface . Arr ! Fear !
Like , aww , that 's not fearful . That 's actually funny .
Or fear like this , kind of a nightclub typeface .
Like , we gotta go to Fear .
It 's , like , amazing , right ?
It just changes the same content .
Or you make it -- The letters are separated apart , they 're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic , and you feel sorry for the letters , like , I feel the fear .
You feel for them .
Or you change the typeface to something like this .
It 's very classy . It 's like that expensive restaurant , Fear .
I can never get in there .
It 's just amazing , Fear . But that 's form , content .
If you just change one letter in that content , you get a much better word , much better content : free .
" Free " is a great word . You can serve it almost any way .
Free bold feels like Mandela free .
It 's like , yes , I can be free .
Free even light feels kind of like , ah , I can breathe in free .
It feels great . Or even free spread out , it 's like , ah , I can breathe in free , so easily .
And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove , and I have , like , Don Draper free .
So you see that -- form , content , design , it works that way .
It 's a powerful thing . It 's like magic , almost , like the magicians we 've seen at TED . It 's magic .
Design does that .
And I 've been curious about how design and technology intersect , and I 'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore , to give you a sense of what I used to do .
So -- yeah .
So I made a lot of work in the ' 90s .
This was a square that responds to sound .
People ask me why I made that . It 's not clear .
But I thought it 'd be neat for the square to respond to me , and my kids were small then , and my kids would play with these things , like , " Aaah , " you know , they would say , " Daddy , aaah , aaah . " You know , like that .
We 'd go to a computer store , and they 'd do the same thing .
And they 'd say , " Daddy , why doesn 't the computer respond to sound ? "
And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn 't the computer respond to sound ?
So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time .
And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this , and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself , so I had to hang up my mouse .
But in ' 96 , I made my last piece . It was in black and white , monochrome , fully monochrome , all in integer mathematics .
It 's called " Tap , Type , Write . "
It 's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary .
It has 10 variations .
There 's a shift .
Ten variations . This is , like , spin the letter around .
This is , like , a ring of letters .
This is 20 years old , so it 's kind of a -- Let 's see , this is — I love the French film " The Red Balloon . "
Great movie , right ? I love that movie . So , this is sort of like a play on that .
It 's peaceful , like that .
I 'll show this last one . This is about balance , you know .
It 's kind of stressful typing out , so if you type on this keyboard , you can , like , balance it out .
If you hit G , life 's okay , so I always say , " Hit G , and it 's going to be all right .
Thank you .
Thank you .
So that was 20 years ago , and I was always on the periphery of art .
By being President of RISD I 've gone deep into art , and art is a wonderful thing , fine art , pure art .
You know , when people say , " I don 't get art .
I don 't get it at all . " That means art is working , you know ?
It 's like , art is supposed to be enigmatic , so when you say , like , " I don 't get it , " like , oh , that 's great .
Art does that , because art is about asking questions , questions that may not be answerable .
At RISD , we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab . It has 80,000 samples of animal , bone , mineral , plants .
You know , in Rhode Island , if an animal gets hit on the road , they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it .
And why do we have this facility ?
Because at RISD , you have to look at the actual animal , the object , to understand its volume , to perceive it .
At RISD , you 're not allowed to draw from an image .
And many people ask me , John , couldn 't you just digitize all this ? Make it all digital ? Wouldn 't it be better ?
And I often say , well , there 's something good to how things used to be done . There 's something very different about it , something we should figure out what is good about how we did it , even in this new era .
And I have a good friend , he 's a new media artist named Tota Hasegawa . He 's based in London , no , actually it 's in Tokyo , but when he was based in London , he had a game with his wife . He would go to antique shops , and the game was as such : When we look at an antique we want , we 'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique , and if it 's a good story , we 'll buy it .
So they 'd go to an antique shop , and they 'd look at this cup , and they 'd say , " Tell us about this cup . "
And the shopkeeper would say , " It 's old . "
" Tell us more . " " Oh , it 's really old . "
And he saw , over and over , the antique 's value was all about it being old .
And as a new media artist , he reflected , and said , you know , I 've spent my whole career making new media art .
People say , " Wow , your art , what is it ? " It 's new media .
And he realized , it isn 't about old or new .
It 's about something in between .
It isn 't about " old , " the dirt , " new , " the cloud . It 's about what is good .
A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at .
You see it in all interesting art today , in all interesting businesses today . How we combine those two together to make good is very interesting .
So art makes questions , and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions .
We aren 't functioning so easily anymore .
We aren 't a simple authoritarian regime anymore .
As an example of authoritarianism , I was in Russia one time traveling in St. Petersburg , at a national monument , and I saw this sign that says , " Do Not Walk On The Grass , " and I thought , oh , I mean , I speak English , and you 're trying to single me out . That 's not fair .
But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people , and it was the best sign ever to say no .
It was like , " No swimming , no hiking , no anything . "
My favorite ones are " no plants . " Why would you bring a plant to a national monument ? I 'm not sure .
And also " no love . "
So that is authoritarianism .
And what is that , structurally ?
It 's a hierarchy . We all know that a hierarchy is how we run many systems today , but as we know , it 's been disrupted .
It is now a network instead of a perfect tree .
It 's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy . And that 's kind of awkward .
And so today , leaders are faced with how to lead differently , I believe .
This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont on creative leadership . What can we learn from artists and designers for how to lead ?
Because in many senses , a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes .
Someone who 's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes .
A traditional leader is always wanting to be right , whereas a creative leader hopes to be right .
And this frame is important today , in this complex , ambiguous space , and artists and designers have a lot to teach us , I believe .
And I had a show in London recently where my friends invited me to come to London for four days to sit in a sandbox , and I said great .
And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight , six hours every day , six-minute appointments with anyone in London , and that was really bad .
But I would listen to people , hear their issues , draw in the sand , try to figure things out , and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing .
You know ? It 's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days .
And it felt kind of like being president , actually .
I was like , " Oh , this my job . President . I do a lot of meetings , you know ? "
And by the end of the experience , I realized why I was doing this .
It 's because leaders , what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen , and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London , and so leadership , connecting people , is the great question today .
Whether you 're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy , it 's a wonderful design challenge .
And one thing I 've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective .
Let me show you something I haven 't shown anywhere , actually .
So what this is , is a kind of a sketch , an application sketch I wrote in Python . You know how there 's Photoshop ?
This is called Powershop , and the way it works is imagine an organization . You know , the CEO isn 't ever at the top . The CEO 's at the center of the organization .
There may be different subdivisions in the organization , and you might want to look into different areas . For instance , green are areas doing well , red are areas doing poorly .
You know , how do you , as the leader , scan , connect , make things happen ? So for instance , you might open up a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there , and know that you know someone in Eco , over here , and these people here are in Eco , the people you might engage with as CEO , people going across the hierarchy .
And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find connections across areas , and so you might look in R & amp ; D , and here you see one person who crosses the two areas of interest , and it 's a person important to engage .
So you might want to , for instance , get a heads-up display on how you 're interacting with them .
How many coffees do you have ?
How often are you calling them , emailing them ?
What is the tenor of their email ? How is it working out ?
Leaders might be able to use these systems to better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy .
You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso , the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep text analysis . What is the tenor of your communications ?
So these kind of systems , I believe , are important .
They 're targeted social media systems around leaders .
And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design , because art and design lets you think like this , find different systems like this , and I 've just begun thinking like this , so I 'm glad to share that with you .
So in closing , I want to thank all of you for your attention . Thanks very much .
Emiliano Salinas : A civil response to violence
In this passionate talk that 's already caused a sensation in Mexico , Emiliano Salinas , son of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari , confronts the current climate of violence in Mexico -- or rather , how Mexican society responds to it . He calls on ordinary citizens to move from denial and fear to peaceful , community-based action .
My name is Emiliano Salinas and I 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now .
I was born in 1976 .
I grew up in a traditional Mexican family .
As a child , I had a pretty normal life : I would go to school , play with my friends and cousins .
But then my father became President of Mexico and my life changed .
What I 'm about to say , at least some of what I 'm about to say , will cause controversy .
Firstly , because I 'm the one who 's going to say it .
And secondly , because what I 'm going to say is true , and it will make a lot of people nervous because it 's something we don 't want to hear .
But it 's imperative that we listen because it 's undeniable and definitive .
It will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons .
I 'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon , and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence .
I know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that I 'm Carlos Salinas de Gortari 's son from the fact that I 'm a citizen concerned about the country 's current situation .
Don 't worry .
It 's not necessary for understanding the importance of what I 'm going to say .
I think we have a problem in Mexico .
We have a big problem .
I think there 's consensus on this .
No one argues -- we all agree there 's a problem .
What we don 't agree on is what the problem actually is .
Is it the Zetas ? The drug traffickers ? The government ?
Corruption ? Poverty ? Or is it something else ?
I think none of these is the problem .
I don 't mean they don 't deserve attention .
But we won 't be able to take care of any of those things if we don 't solve the real problem we have in Mexico first .
The real problem we have is most of us Mexicans , we believe we are victims of our circumstances .
We are a country of victims .
Historically , we 've always acted as victims of something or somebody .
We were victims of the Spaniards .
Then we were victims of the French .
Then we were victims of Don Porfirio .
Then we were victims of the PRI .
Even of Salinas .
And of El Peje .
And now of the Zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers ...
Hold on ! Wait a minute !
What if none of these things is the problem ?
The problem is not the things we feel victims of .
The problem is that we play the role of victims .
We need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims .
If only we stopped feeling like victims , if we stopped acting as victims , our country would change so much !
I 'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible , involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands .
I 'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence , from weakest to strongest .
The first level , the weakest level of civil response against violence , is denial and apathy .
Today , much of Mexican society is in denial of the situation we 're going through .
We want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances .
Daily life in our country is , to say the least , under extraordinary , exceptional circumstances .
It 's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it 's the flu and it will just go away .
We want to pretend that Mexico has the flu .
But it doesn 't .
Mexico has cancer .
And if we don 't do something about it , the cancer will end up killing it .
We need to move Mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response , which is , effectively , recognition .
And that recognition will sow fear -- recognizing the seriousness of the situation .
But , fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something .
Many people in Mexico are afraid today .
We 're very afraid .
And we 're acting out of that fear .
And let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear -- and this is the second level of civil response : fear .
Let 's think about Mexican streets : they 're unsafe because of violence , so people stay at home .
Does that make streets more or less safe ?
Less safe !
So streets become more desolate and unsafe , so we stay home more -- which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe , and we stay home even more .
This vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses , scared to death -- even more afraid than when we were out on the streets .
We need to confront this fear .
We need to move Mexican society , the members of society who are at this level , to the next level , which is action .
We need to face our fears and take back our streets , our cities , our neighborhoods .
For many people , acting involves courage .
We go from fear to courage .
They say , " I can 't take it anymore .
Let 's do something about it . "
Recently -- this is a sensitive figure -- 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in Mexico .
Usually it 's one or two a year .
Now we 're experiencing one every week .
This shows that society is desperate and it 's taking the law into its own hands .
Unfortunately , violent action -- though action is better than no action -- but taking part in it only disguises violence .
If I 'm violent with you and you respond with violence , you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence .
So civil action is vital , but it 's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level , which is non-violent action .
It 's pacific , coordinated civil action , which doesn 't mean passive action .
It means it 's determined and effective , but not violent .
There are examples of this kind of action in Mexico .
Two years ago , in Galena City , Chihuahua , a member of the community was kidnapped , Eric Le Barón .
His brothers , Benjamín and Julián , got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action : to pay the ransom , to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help .
In the end , Benjamín and Julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together .
So what did they do ?
They mobilized the whole community of Le Barón to go to Chihuahua , where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city .
They sent a message to the kidnappers : " If you want your ransom come and get it .
We 'll be waiting for you right here . "
They stayed there .
Seven days later , Eric was set free and was able to return home .
This is an example of what an organized society can do , a society that acts .
Of course , criminals can respond .
And in this case , they did .
On July 7th , 2009 , Benjamín Le Barón was murdered .
But Julián Le Barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in Chihuahua for over a year .
And for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head .
But he keeps fighting .
He keeps organizing .
He keeps mobilizing .
These heroic acts are present all over the country .
With a thousand Juliáns working together , Mexico would be a very different country .
And they 're out there !
They just have to raise their hands .
I was born in Mexico , I grew up in Mexico and along the way , I learned to love Mexico .
I think anyone who has stepped foot on this land -- not to mention all Mexican people -- will agree that it 's not difficult to love Mexico .
I 've traveled a lot and nowhere else have I found the passion Mexicans have .
That devotion we feel for the national football team .
That devotion we show in helping victims of disasters , such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year 's floods .
The passion with which we 've been singing the national anthem since we were kids .
When we thought Masiosare was the strange enemy , and we sang , with a childlike heart , " a soldier in each son . "
I think the biggest insult , the worst way you can offend a Mexican is to insult their mother .
A mother is the most sacred thing in life .
Mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children .
We are going through the darkest moment in our recent history .
Our mother , Mexico , is being violated before our very eyes .
What are we going to do ?
Masiosare , the strange enemy , is here .
Where is the soldier in each son ?
Mahatma Gandhi , one of the greatest civil fighters of all time , said , " Be the change you wish to see in the world . "
Today in Mexico we 're asking for Gandhis .
We need Ghandis .
We need men and women who love Mexico and who are willing to take action .
This is a call for every true Mexican to join this initiative .
This is a call so that every single thing we love about Mexico -- the festivals , the markets , the restaurants , the cantinas , the tequila , the mariachis , the serenades , the posadas , El Grito , the Day of the Dead , San Miguel , the joy , the passion for life , the fight and everything it means to be Mexican -- doesn 't disappear from this world .
We 're facing a very powerful opponent .
But we are many more .
They can take a man 's life .
Anyone can kill me , or you , or you .
But no one can kill the spirit of true Mexicans .
The battle is won , but we still have to fight it .
2000 years ago , the Roman poet Juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true Mexican .
He said , " Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor , and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living . "
Thank you .
Evelyn Glennie : How to truly listen
In this soaring demonstration , deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums .
I 'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o 'clock or so in the morning .
But anyway , it 's just great to see such a full theater , and really I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation .
One of the interesting things , of course , is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology , and of course what he said about listening to our young people .
Of course , my job is all about listening , and my aim , really , is to teach the world to listen .
That 's my only real aim in life .
And it sounds quite simple , but actually it 's quite a big , big job .
Because you know , when you look at a piece of music -- for example , if I just open my little motorbike bag -- we have here , hopefully , a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page .
And , you know , we open it up and I read the music .
So technically , I can actually read this .
I will follow the instructions , the tempo markings , the dynamics .
I will do exactly as I 'm told .
And so therefore , because time is short , if I just play you literally the first maybe two lines or so . It 's very straightforward .
There 's nothing too difficult about the piece .
But here I 'm being told that the piece of music is very quick .
I 'm being told where to play on the drum .
I 'm being told which part of the stick to use .
And I 'm being told the dynamic .
And I 'm also being told that the drum is without snares .
Snares on , snares off .
So therefore , if I translate this piece of music , we have this idea .
And so on . My career would probably last about five years .
However , what I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music .
Everything that there isn 't time to learn from a teacher , or to talk about , even , from a teacher .
But it 's the things that you notice when you 're not actually with your instrument that in fact become so interesting , and that you want to explore through this tiny , tiny surface of a drum .
So there , we experience the translation . Now we 'll experience the interpretation .
Now my career may last a little longer !
But in a way , you know , it 's the same if I look at you and I see a nice bright young lady with a pink top on .
I see that you 're clutching a teddy bear , etc . , etc .
So I get a basic idea as to what you might be about , what you might like , what you might do as a profession , etc . , etc .
However , that 's just , you know , the initial idea I may have that we all get when we actually look , and we try to interpret , but actually it 's so unbelievably shallow .
In the same way , I look at the music ; I get a basic idea ; I wonder what technically might be hard , or , you know , what I want to do .
Just the basic feeling .
However , that is simply not enough .
And I think what Herbie said -- please listen , listen .
We have to listen to ourselves , first of all .
If I play , for example , holding the stick -- where literally I do not let go of the stick -- you 'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm .
And you feel really quite -- believe it or not -- detached from the instrument and from the stick , even though I 'm actually holding the stick quite tightly .
By holding it tightly , I feel strangely more detached .
If I just simply let go and allow my hand , my arm , to be more of a support system , suddenly I have more dynamic with less effort . Much more .
And I just feel , at last , one with the stick and one with the drum .
And I 'm doing far , far less .
So in the same way that I need time with this instrument , I need time with people in order to interpret them .
Not just translate them , but interpret them .
If , for example , I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician -- that is , someone who is basically a percussion player ...
And so on . If I think of myself as a musician ...
And so on . There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just -- -- thinking about .
And I remember when I was 12 years old , and I started playing tympani and percussion , and my teacher said , " Well , how are we going to do this ? You know , music is about listening . "
And I said , " Yes , I agree with that . So what 's the problem ? "
And he said , " Well , how are you going to hear this ? How are you going to hear that ? "
And I said , " Well , how do you hear it ? "
He said , " Well , I think I hear it through here . "
And I said , " Well , I think I do too -- but I also hear it through my hands , through my arms , cheekbones , my scalp , my tummy , my chest , my legs and so on . "
And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums -- in particular , the kettle drums , or tympani -- to such a narrow pitch interval , so something like ...
that of a difference . Then gradually ... and gradually ...
and it 's amazing that when you do open your body up , and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through , that in fact the tiny , tiny difference ...
can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger , there .
And so what we would do is that I would put my hands on the wall of the music room , and together we would " listen " to the sounds of the instruments , and really try to connect with those sounds far , far more broadly than simply depending on the ear .
Because of course , the ear is , I mean , subject to all sorts of things .
The room we happen to be in , the amplification , the quality of the instrument , the type of sticks ... etc . , etc .
They 're all different .
Same amount of weight , but different sound colors .
And that 's basically what we are . We 're just human beings , but we all have our own little sound colors , as it were , that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things .
And as I grew older , I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London , and they said , " Well , no , we won 't accept you , because we haven 't a clue , you know , of the future of a so-called ' deaf ' musician . "
And I just couldn 't quite accept that .
And so therefore , I said to them , " Well , look , if you refuse -- if you refuse me through those reasons , as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound -- then we have to think very , very hard about the people you do actually accept . "
And as a result -- once we got over a little hurdle , and having to audition twice -- they accepted me . And not only that -- what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom .
Under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms , no legs -- they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand .
No circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry .
And every single entry had to be listened to , experienced and then based on the musical ability -- then that person could either enter or not .
So therefore , this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions .
And I have to say , many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world .
The interesting thing about this as well , though -- -- is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound -- which is basically all of us , and we well know that music really is our daily medicine .
I say " music , " but actually I mean " sound . "
Because you know , some of the extraordinary things I 've experienced as a musician , when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges , who may not be able to control his movements , who may be deaf , who may be blind , etc . , etc . -- suddenly , if that young lad sits close to this instrument , and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba , and you play something that 's so incredibly organ-like , almost -- I don 't really have the right sticks , perhaps -- but something like this . Let me change .
Something that 's so unbelievably simple -- but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn 't be , because I 'm on top of the sound .
I have the sound coming this way .
He would have the sound coming through the resonators .
If there were no resonators on here , we would have ...
So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn 't experience , those of you in the back few rows wouldn 't experience either .
Every single one of us , depending on where we 're sitting , will experience this sound quite , quite differently .
And of course , being the participator of the sound , and that is starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce -- for example , this sound .
Can you hear anything ?
Exactly . Because I 'm not even touching it .
But yet , we get the sensation of something happening .
In the same way that when I see tree moves , then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound .
Do you see what I mean ?
Whatever the eye sees , then there 's always sound happening .
So there 's always , always that huge -- I mean , just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from .
So all of my performances are based on entirely what I experience , and not by learning a piece of music , putting on someone else 's interpretation of it , buying all the CDs possible of that particular piece of music , and so on and so forth .
Because that isn 't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic , and something that I can fully experience the journey of .
So it may be that , in certain halls , this dynamic may well work .
It may be that in other halls , they 're simply not going to experience that at all and so therefore , my level of soft , gentle playing may have to be ...
Do you see what I mean ? So , because of this explosion in access to sound , especially through the deaf community , this has not only affected how music institutions , how schools for the deaf treat sound -- and not just as a means of therapy -- although of course , being a participator of music , that definitely is the case as well .
But it 's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together . There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics , dare I say . But by that I mean where you can absolutely do anything you imagine .
The tiniest , softest , softest sound to something that is so broad , so huge , so incredible ! There 's always something -- it may sound good up there , may not be so good there .
May be great there , but terrible up there .
Maybe terrible over there , but not too bad there , etc . , etc .
So to find an actual hall is incredible -- for which you can play exactly what you imagine , without it being cosmetically enhanced .
And so therefore , acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired , and who are participators of sound .
And this is quite interesting .
I cannot , you know , give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls , but it 's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years we 've been saying , " Well , how on Earth can they experience music ? You know , they 're deaf . "
We just -- we go like that , and we imagine that that 's what deafness is about .
Or we go like that , and we imagine that 's what blindness is about .
If we see someone in a wheelchair , we assume they cannot walk .
It may be that they can walk three , four , five steps . That , to them , means they can walk .
In a year 's time , it could be two extra steps .
In another year 's time , three extra steps .
Those are hugely important aspects to think about .
So when we do listen to each other , it 's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills , to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber , to stop the judgment .
For me , as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music , it 's very easy for me to say , " Oh yes , I like that piece .
Oh no , I don 't like that piece . " And so on .
And you know , I just find that I have to give those pieces of music real time .
It may be that the chemistry isn 't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music , but that doesn 't mean I have the right to say it 's a bad piece of music .
And you know , it 's just one of the great things about being a musician , is that it is so unbelievably fluid .
So there are no rules , no right , no wrong , this way , that way .
If I asked you to clap -- maybe I can do this .
If I can just say , " Please clap and create the sound of thunder . "
I 'm assuming we 've all experienced thunder .
Now , I don 't mean just the sound ; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves .
And please try to create that through your clapping . Try . Just -- please try .
Very good ! Snow . Snow . Have you ever heard snow ?
Audience : No .
Evelyn Glennie : Well then , stop clapping . Try again .
Try again . Snow .
See , you 're awake .
Rain . Not bad . Not bad .
You know , the interesting thing here , though , is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question .
Now -- great imagination , thank you very much .
However , not one of you got out of your seats to think , " Right ! How can I clap ? OK , maybe ...
Maybe I can use my jewelry to create extra sounds .
Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds . "
Not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands .
In the same way that when we listen to music , we assume that it 's all being fed through here .
This is how we experience music . Of course it 's not .
We experience thunder -- thunder , thunder . Think , think , think .
Listen , listen , listen . Now -- what can we do with thunder ?
I remember my teacher . When I first started , my very first lesson , I was all prepared with sticks , ready to go .
And instead of him saying , " OK , Evelyn , please , feet slightly apart , arms at a more-or-less 90 degree angle , sticks in a more-or-less V shape , keep this amount of space here , etc .
Please keep your back straight , etc . , etc . , etc . " -- where I was probably just going to end up absolutely rigid , frozen , and I would not be able to strike the drum , because I was thinking of so many other things -- he said , " Evelyn , take this drum away for seven days , and I 'll see you next week . "
So , heavens ! What was I to do ? I no longer required the sticks ; I wasn 't allowed to have these sticks .
I had to basically look at this particular drum , see how it was made , what these little lugs did , what the snares did .
Turned it upside down , experimented with the shell , experimented with the head .
Experimented with my body , experimented with jewelry , experimented with all sorts of things .
And of course , I returned with all sorts of bruises and things like that -- but nevertheless , it was such an unbelievable experience , because then , where on Earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music ?
Where on Earth are you going to experience that in a study book ?
So we never , ever dealt with actual study books .
So for example , one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player , as opposed to a musician , is basically straightforward single stroke rolls .
Like that . And then we get a little faster and a little faster and a little faster .
And so on and so forth . What does this piece require ?
Single stroke rolls . So why can 't I then do that whilst learning a piece of music ?
And that 's exactly what he did .
And interestingly , the older I became , and when I became a full-time student at a so called " music institution , " all of that went out of the window .
We had to study from study books .
And constantly , the question , " Well , why ? Why ? What is this relating to ?
I need to play a piece of music . " " Oh , well , this will help your control ! "
" Well , how ? Why do I need to learn that ? I need to relate it to a piece of music .
You know . I need to say something .
" Why am I practicing paradiddles ?
Is it just literally for control , for hand-stick control ? Why am I doing that ?
I need to have the reason , and the reason has to be by saying something through the music . "
And by saying something through music , which basically is sound , we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people .
But I don 't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage .
That 's up to you , when you walk through a hall .
Because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things .
I may feel sorrowful , or happy , or exhilarated , or angry when I play certain pieces of music , but I 'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing .
So please , the next time you go to a concert , just allow your body to open up , allow your body to be this resonating chamber .
Be aware that you 're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is .
The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound , because they 're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum , or the mallet on the bit of wood , or the bow on the string , etc . , or the breath that 's creating the sound from wind and brass .
They 're experiencing that rawness there .
But yet they 're experiencing something so unbelievably pure , which is before the sound is actually happening .
Please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike , or breath , is being pulled . Just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that I wished I 'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference , rather than just arriving last night .
But I hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses .
But thank you very much for having me !
Adam Sadowsky : How to engineer a viral music video
The band OK Go dreamed up the idea of a massive Rube Goldberg machine for their next music video -- and Adam Sadowsky 's team was charged with building it . He tells the story of the effort and engineering behind their labyrinthine creation that quickly became the YouTube sensation " This Too Shall Pass . " & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Hi there .
I 'm going to be talking a little bit about music , machines and life .
Or , more specifically , what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video .
Some of you may recognize this image .
This is the opening frame of the video that we created .
We 'll be showing the video at the end , but before we do , I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted .
Now , when we first started talking to OK Go -- the name of the song is " This Too Shall Pass " -- we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with .
And we were very excited about this because , of course , they have a history of dancing with machines .
They 're responsible for this video , " Here It Goes Again . "
50-million-plus views on YouTube .
Four guys dancing on treadmills , no cuts , just a static camera .
A fantastically viral and wonderful video .
So we were really excited about working with them .
And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted .
And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine .
Now , for those of you who don 't know , a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption , an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task .
So we were excited by this idea , and we started talking about exactly what it would look like .
And we came up with some parameters , because , you know , building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations , but it also is pretty wide open .
And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video .
So we came up with a list of requirements , the " 10 commandments , " and they were , in order of ascending difficulty : The first is " No magic . "
Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer .
The rule of thumb was that , if my mother couldn 't understand it , then we couldn 't use it in the video .
They wanted band integration , that is , the machine acting upon the band members , specifically not the other way around .
They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling .
So as the song picks up emotion , so should the machine get grander in its process .
They wanted us to make use of the space .
So we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using , divided between two floors .
It included an exterior loading dock .
We used all of that , including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through .
They wanted it messy , and we were happy to oblige .
The machine itself would start the music .
So the machine would get started , it would travel some distance , reacting along the way , hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback .
And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout .
And speaking of synchronization , they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way .
Okay .
They wanted it to end precisely on time .
Okay , so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect .
And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song .
And as if that wasn 't enough , all of these incredibly complicating things , right , they wanted it in one shot .
Okay .
So , just some statistics about what we went through in the process .
The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions .
It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction .
Of those 85 takes , only three actually successfully completed their run .
We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process .
We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times .
And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers , Heather Knight , left her high-heeled shoe -- after a nice dinner , and returned back to the build -- and left it in a pile of stuff .
And another engineer thought , " Well , that would be a really good thing to use " and ended up using it as a really nice trigger .
And it 's actually in the machine .
So what did we learn from all of this ?
Well , having completed this , we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things .
And we learned that small stuff stinks .
Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust , and they fall out of the tracks , the exact angles makes it hard to get right .
And yet , a bowling ball will always follow the same path .
It doesn 't matter what temperature it is , doesn 't matter what 's in its way ; it will pretty much get where it needs to go .
But as much as the small stuff stinks , we needed somewhere to start , so that we would have somewhere to go .
And so you have to start with it . You have to focus on it .
Small stuff stinks , but , of course , it 's essential , right ?
What else ? Planning is incredibly important .
You know , we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things .
It 's been said that , " No battle plan survives contact with the enemy . "
I think our enemy was physics -- and she 's a cruel mistress .
Often , we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever .
And so while planning is important , so is flexibility .
These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine .
So also , put reliable stuff last , the stuff that 's going to run every time .
Again , small to large is relevant here .
The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big , real car near the end of the video .
The big , real car works every time ; there 's no problem about it .
The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that 's a problem .
But you don 't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn 't work , right .
So you put that up front so that , if it fails , at least you know you don 't have to reset the whole thing .
Life can be messy .
There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing .
Months were spent in this tiny , cold warehouse .
And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it .
So it 's important to remember that whether it 's good or it 's bad , " This Too Shall Pass . "
Thank you very much .
And now to introduce their music video , we have OK Go .
OK Go : An introduction . Hello TEDxUSC .
We are OK Go .
What are we doing ? Oh , just hanging out with our Grammy . What what !
It think we can do better than this . Hello TEDxUSC .
We are OK Go . Have you read the " Natural Curiosity Cabinet ? "
I mean , " Curiosity " -- excuse me .
Let me start again .
We need some more ridiculous things besides " The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities . "
Tim 's sundial hat .
Have you seen the new work they 've done to the Waltz Towers ?
Sorry , start again .
Dogs .
Hello , TEDxUSC . We are OK Go , and this our new video , " This Too Shall Pass . "
[ unclear ] Kay , we can still do one better I think , yeah .
That one 's pretty good . It 's getting better .
You know you can 't keep letting it get you down And you can 't keep dragging that dead weight around If there ain 't all that much to lug around Better run like hell when you hit the ground When the morning comes When the morning comes You can 't stop these kids from dancing Why would you want to ? Especially when you 're already getting yours Cuz if your mind don 't move and your knees don 't bend Well don 't go blaming the kids again When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes Let it go This too shall pass Let it go This too shall pass You know you can 't keep letting it get you down No , you can 't keep letting it get you down Let it go This too shall pass When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes When the morning comes
James Hansen : Why I must speak out about climate change
Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change . In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply worried about the future .
What do I know that would cause me , a reticent , Midwestern scientist , to get myself arrested in front of the White House protesting ?
And what would you do if you knew what I know ?
Let 's start with how I got to this point .
I was lucky to grow up at a time when it was not difficult for the child of a tenant farmer to make his way to the state university .
And I was really lucky to go to the University of Iowa where I could study under Professor James Van Allen who built instruments for the first U.S. satellites .
Professor Van Allen told me about observations of Venus , that there was intense microwave radiation .
Did it mean that Venus had an ionosphere ?
Or was Venus extremely hot ?
The right answer , confirmed by the Soviet Venera spacecraft , was that Venus was very hot -- 900 degrees Fahrenheit .
And it was kept hot by a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere .
I was fortunate to join NASA and successfully propose an experiment to fly to Venus .
Our instrument took this image of the veil of Venus , which turned out to be a smog of sulfuric acid .
But while our instrument was being built , I became involved in calculations of the greenhouse effect here on Earth , because we realized that our atmospheric composition was changing .
Eventually , I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important .
Its changes will affect all of humanity .
The greenhouse effect had been well understood for more than a century .
British physicist John Tyndall , in the 1850 's , made laboratory measurements of the infrared radiation , which is heat .
And he showed that gasses such as CO2 absorb heat , thus acting like a blanket warming Earth 's surface .
I worked with other scientists to analyze Earth climate observations .
In 1981 , we published an article in Science magazine concluding that observed warming of 0.4 degrees Celsius in the prior century was consistent with the greenhouse effect of increasing CO2 .
That Earth would likely warm in the 1980 's , and warming would exceed the noise level of random weather by the end of the century .
We also said that the 21st century would see shifting climate zones , creation of drought-prone regions in North America and Asia , erosion of ice sheets , rising sea levels and opening of the fabled Northwest Passage .
All of these impacts or are now well under way .
That paper was reported on the front page of the New York Times and led to me testifying to Congress in the 1980 's , testimony in which I emphasized that global warming increases both extremes of the Earth 's water cycle .
Heatwaves and droughts on one hand , directly from the warming , but also , because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor with its latent energy , rainfall will become in more extreme events .
There will be stronger storms and greater flooding .
Global warming hoopla became time-consuming and distracted me from doing science -- partly because I had complained that the White House altered my testimony .
So I decided to go back to strictly doing science and leave the communication to others .
By 15 years later , evidence of global warming was much stronger .
Most of the things mentioned in our 1981 paper were facts .
I had the privilege to speak twice to the president 's climate task force .
But energy policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels .
By then we had two grandchildren , Sophie and Connor .
I decided that I did not want them in the future to say , " Opa understood what was happening , but he didn 't make it clear . "
So I decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy .
I gave the talk at the University of Iowa in 2004 and at the 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union .
This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak with the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters .
After I informed the New York Times about these restrictions , NASA was forced to end the censorship .
But there were consequences .
I had been using the first line of the NASA mission statement , " To understand and protect the home planet , " to justify my talks .
Soon the first line of the mission statement was deleted , never to appear again .
Over the next few years I was drawn more and more into trying to communicate the urgency of a change in energy policies , while still researching the physics of climate change .
Let me describe the most important conclusion from the physics -- first , from Earth 's energy balance and , second , from Earth 's climate history .
Adding CO2 to the air is like throwing another blanket on the bed .
It reduces Earth 's heat radiation to space , so there 's a temporary energy imbalance .
More energy is coming in than going out , until Earth warms up enough to again radiate to space as much energy as it absorbs from the Sun .
So the key quantity is Earth 's energy imbalance .
Is there more energy coming in than going out ?
If so , more warming is in the pipeline .
It will occur without adding any more greenhouse gasses .
Now finally , we can measure Earth 's energy imbalance precisely by measuring the heat content in Earth 's heat reservoirs .
The biggest reservoir , the ocean , was the least well measured , until more than 3,000 Argo floats were distributed around the world 's ocean .
These floats reveal that the upper half of the ocean is gaining heat at a substantial rate .
The deep ocean is also gaining heat at a smaller rate , and energy is going into the net melting of ice all around the planet .
And the land , to depths of tens of meters , is also warming .
The total energy imbalance now is about six-tenths of a watt per square meter .
That may not sound like much , but when added up over the whole world , it 's enormous .
It 's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity .
It 's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year .
That 's how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day .
This imbalance , if we want to stabilize climate , means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm , parts per million , back to 350 ppm .
That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming .
Climate change deniers argue that the Sun is the main cause of climate change .
But the measured energy imbalance occurred during the deepest solar minimum in the record , when the Sun 's energy reaching Earth was least .
Yet , there was more energy coming in than going out .
This shows that the effect of the Sun 's variations on climate is overwhelmed by the increasing greenhouse gasses , mainly from burning fossil fuels .
Now consider Earth 's climate history .
These curves for global temperature , atmospheric CO2 and sea level were derived from ocean cores and Antarctic ice cores , from ocean sediments and snowflakes that piled up year after year over 800,000 years forming a two-mile thick ice sheet .
As you see , there 's a high correlation between temperature , CO2 and sea level .
Careful examination shows that the temperature changes slightly lead the CO2 changes by a few centuries .
Climate change deniers like to use this fact to confuse and trick the public by saying , " Look , the temperature causes CO2 to change , not vice versa . "
But that lag is exactly what is expected .
Small changes in Earth 's orbit that occur over tens to hundreds of thousands of years alter the distribution of sunlight on Earth .
When there is more sunlight at high latitudes in summer , ice sheets melt .
Shrinking ice sheets make the planet darker , so it absorbs more sunlight and becomes warmer .
A warmer ocean releases CO2 , just as a warm Coca-Cola does .
And more CO2 causes more warming .
So CO2 , methane , and ice sheets were feedbacks that amplified global temperature change causing these ancient climate oscillations to be huge , even though the climate change was initiated by a very weak forcing .
The important point is that these same amplifying feedbacks will occur today .
The physics does not change .
As Earth warms , now because of extra CO2 we put in the atmosphere , ice will melt , and CO2 and methane will be released by warming ocean and melting permafrost .
While we can 't say exactly how fast these amplifying feedbacks will occur , it is certain they will occur , unless we stop the warming .
There is evidence that feedbacks are already beginning .
Precise measurements by GRACE , the gravity satellite , reveal that both Greenland and Antarctica are now losing mass , several hundred cubic kilometers per year .
And the rate has accelerated since the measurements began nine years ago .
Methane is also beginning to escape from the permafrost .
What sea level rise can we look forward to ?
The last time CO2 was 390 ppm , today 's value , sea level was higher by at least 15 meters , 50 feet .
Where you are sitting now would be under water .
Most estimates are that , this century , we will get at least one meter .
I think it will be more if we keep burning fossil fuels , perhaps even five meters , which is 18 feet , this century or shortly thereafter .
The important point is that we will have started a process that is out of humanity 's control .
Ice sheets would continue to disintegrate for centuries .
There would be no stable shoreline .
The economic consequences are almost unthinkable .
Hundreds of New Orleans-like devastations around the world .
What may be more reprehensible , if climate denial continues , is extermination of species .
The monarch butterfly could be one of the 20 to 50 percent of all species that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates will be ticketed for extinction by the end of the century if we stay on business-as-usual fossil fuel use .
Global warming is already affecting people .
The Texas , Oklahoma , Mexico heatwave and drought last year , Moscow the year before and Europe in 2003 , were all exceptional events , more than three standard deviations outside the norm .
Fifty years ago , such anomalies covered only two- to three-tenths of one percent of the land area .
In recent years , because of global warming , they now cover about 10 percent -- an increase by a factor of 25 to 50 .
So we can say with a high degree of confidence that the severe Texas and Moscow heatwaves were not natural ; they were caused by global warming .
An important impact , if global warming continues , will be on the breadbasket of our nation and the world , the Midwest and Great Plains , which are expected to become prone to extreme droughts , worse than the Dust Bowl , within just a few decades , if we let global warming continue .
How did I get dragged deeper and deeper into an attempt to communicate , giving talks in 10 countries , getting arrested , burning up the vacation time that I had accumulated over 30 years ?
More grandchildren helped me along .
Jake is a super-positive , enthusiastic boy .
Here at age two and a half years , he thinks he can protect his two and a half-day-old little sister .
It would be immoral to leave these young people with a climate system spiraling out of control .
Now the tragedy about climate change is that we can solve it with a simple , honest approach of a gradually rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and distributed 100 percent electronically every month to all legal residents on a per capita basis , with the government not keeping one dime .
Most people would get more in the monthly dividend than they 'd pay in increased prices .
This fee and dividend would stimulate the economy and innovations , creating millions of jobs .
It is the principal requirement for moving us rapidly to a clean energy future .
Several top economists are coauthors on this proposition .
Jim DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Protection describes it thusly : " Transparent . Market-based .
Does not enlarge government .
Leaves energy decisions to individual choices .
Sounds like a conservative climate plan . "
But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society , our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by 400 to 500 billion dollars per year worldwide , thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel -- mountaintop removal , longwall mining , fracking , tar sands , tar shale , deep ocean Arctic drilling .
This path , if continued , guarantees that we will pass tipping points leading to ice sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations .
A large fraction of species will be committed to extinction .
And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world , causing massive famines and economic decline .
Imagine a giant asteroid on a direct collision course with Earth .
That is the equivalent of what we face now .
Yet , we dither , taking no action to divert the asteroid , even though the longer we wait , the more difficult and expensive it becomes .
If we had started in 2005 , it would have required emission reductions of three percent per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century .
If we start next year , it is six percent per year .
If we wait 10 years , it is 15 percent per year -- extremely difficult and expensive , perhaps impossible .
But we aren 't even starting .
So now you know what I know that is moving me to sound this alarm .
Clearly , I haven 't gotten this message across .
The science is clear .
I need your help to communicate the gravity and the urgency of this situation and its solutions more effectively .
We owe it to our children and grandchildren .
Thank you .
Laura Snyder : The Philosophical Breakfast Club
In 1812 , four men at Cambridge University met for breakfast . What began as an impassioned meal grew into a new scientific revolution , in which these men -- who called themselves " natural philosophers " until they later coined " scientist " -- introduced four major principles into scientific inquiry . Historian and philosopher Laura Snyder tells their intriguing story .
I 'd like you to come back with me for a moment to the 19th century , specifically to June 24 , 1833 .
The British Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its third meeting at the University of Cambridge .
It 's the first night of the meeting , and a confrontation is about to take place that will change science forever .
An elderly , white-haired man stands up .
The members of the Association are shocked to realize that it 's the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , who hadn 't even left his house in years until that day .
They 're even more shocked by what he says .
" You must stop calling yourselves natural philosophers . "
Coleridge felt that true philosophers like himself pondered the cosmos from their armchairs .
They were not mucking around in the fossil pits or conducting messy experiments with electrical piles like the members of the British Association .
The crowd grew angry and began to complain loudly .
A young Cambridge scholar named William Whewell stood up and quieted the audience .
He politely agreed that an appropriate name for the members of the association did not exist .
" If ' philosophers ' is taken to be too wide and lofty a term , " he said , " then , by analogy with ' artist , ' we may form ' scientist . ' " This was the first time the word scientist was uttered in public , only 179 years ago .
I first found out about this confrontation when I was in graduate school , and it kind of blew me away .
I mean , how could the word scientist not have existed until 1833 ?
What were scientists called before ?
What had changed to make a new name necessary precisely at that moment ?
Prior to this meeting , those who studied the natural world were talented amateurs .
Think of the country clergyman or squire collecting his beetles or fossils , like Charles Darwin , for example , or , the hired help of a nobleman , like Joseph Priestley , who was the literary companion to the Marquis of Lansdowne when he discovered oxygen .
After this , they were scientists , professionals with a particular scientific method , goals , societies and funding .
Much of this revolution can be traced to four men who met at Cambridge University in 1812 : Charles Babbage , John Herschel , Richard Jones and William Whewell .
These were brilliant , driven men who accomplished amazing things .
Charles Babbage , I think known to most TEDsters , invented the first mechanical calculator and the first prototype of a modern computer .
John Herschel mapped the stars of the southern hemisphere , and , in his spare time , co-invented photography .
I 'm sure we could all be that productive without Facebook or Twitter to take up our time .
Richard Jones became an important economist who later influenced Karl Marx .
And Whewell not only coined the term scientist , as well as the words anode , cathode and ion , but spearheaded international big science with his global research on the tides .
In the Cambridge winter of 1812 and 1813 , the four met for what they called philosophical breakfasts .
They talked about science and the need for a new scientific revolution .
They felt science had stagnated since the days of the scientific revolution that had happened in the 17th century .
It was time for a new revolution , which they pledged to bring about , and what 's so amazing about these guys is , not only did they have these grandiose undergraduate dreams , but they actually carried them out , even beyond their wildest dreams .
And I 'm going to tell you today about four major changes to science these men made .
About 200 years before , Francis Bacon and then , later , Isaac Newton , had proposed an inductive scientific method .
Now that 's a method that starts from observations and experiments and moves to generalizations about nature called natural laws , which are always subject to revision or rejection should new evidence arise .
However , in 1809 , David Ricardo muddied the waters by arguing that the science of economics should use a different , deductive method .
The problem was that an influential group at Oxford began arguing that because it worked so well in economics , this deductive method ought to be applied to the natural sciences too .
The members of the philosophical breakfast club disagreed .
They wrote books and articles promoting inductive method in all the sciences that were widely read by natural philosophers , university students and members of the public .
Reading one of Herschel 's books was such a watershed moment for Charles Darwin that he would later say , " Scarcely anything in my life made so deep an impression on me .
It made me wish to add my might to the accumulated store of natural knowledge . "
It also shaped Darwin 's scientific method , as well as that used by his peers .
[ Science for the public good ] Previously , it was believed that scientific knowledge ought to be used for the good of the king or queen , or for one 's own personal gain .
For example , ship captains needed to know information about the tides in order to safely dock at ports .
Harbormasters would gather this knowledge and sell it to the ship captains .
The philosophical breakfast club changed that , working together .
Whewell 's worldwide study of the tides resulted in public tide tables and tidal maps that freely provided the harbormasters ' knowledge to all ship captains .
Herschel helped by making tidal observations off the coast of South Africa , and , as he complained to Whewell , he was knocked off the docks during a violent high tide for his trouble .
The four men really helped each other in every way .
They also relentlessly lobbied the British government for the money to build Babbage 's engines because they believed these engines would have a huge practical impact on society .
In the days before pocket calculators , the numbers that most professionals needed -- bankers , insurance agents , ship captains , engineers — were to be found in lookup books like this , filled with tables of figures .
These tables were calculated using a fixed procedure over and over by part-time workers known as -- and this is amazing -- computers , but these calculations were really difficult .
I mean , this nautical almanac published the lunar differences for every month of the year .
Each month required 1,365 calculations , so these tables were filled with mistakes .
Babbage 's difference engine was the first mechanical calculator devised to accurately compute any of these tables .
Two models of his engine were built in the last 20 years by a team from the Science Museum of London using his own plans .
This is the one now at the Computer History Museum in California , and it calculates accurately . It actually works .
Later , Babbage 's analytical engine was the first mechanical computer in the modern sense .
It had a separate memory and central processor .
It was capable of iteration , conditional branching and parallel processing , and it was programmable using punched cards , an idea Babbage took from Jacquard 's loom .
Tragically , Babbage 's engines never were built in his day because most people thought that non-human computers would have no usefulness for the public .
[ New scientific institutions ] Founded in Bacon 's time , the Royal Society of London was the foremost scientific society in England and even in the rest of the world .
By the 19th century , it had become a kind of gentleman 's club populated mainly by antiquarians , literary men and the nobility .
The members of the philosophical breakfast club helped form a number of new scientific societies , including the British Association .
These new societies required that members be active researchers publishing their results .
They reinstated the tradition of the Q & amp ; A after scientific papers were read , which had been discontinued by the Royal Society as being ungentlemanly .
And for the first time , they gave women a foot in the door of science .
Members were encouraged to bring their wives , daughters and sisters to the meetings of the British Association , and while the women were expected to attend only the public lectures and the social events like this one , they began to infiltrate the scientific sessions as well .
The British Association would later be the first of the major national science organizations in the world to admit women as full members .
[ External funding for science ] Up to the 19th century , natural philosophers were expected to pay for their own equipment and supplies .
Occasionally , there were prizes , such as that given to John Harrison in the 18th century , for solving the so-called longitude problem , but prizes were only given after the fact , when they were given at all .
On the advice of the philosophical breakfast club , the British Association began to use the extra money generated by its meetings to give grants for research in astronomy , the tides , fossil fish , shipbuilding , and many other areas .
These grants not only allowed less wealthy men to conduct research , but they also encouraged thinking outside the box , rather than just trying to solve one pre-set question .
Eventually , the Royal Society and the scientific societies of other countries followed suit , and this has become -- fortunately it 's become -- a major part of the scientific landscape today .
So the philosophical breakfast club helped invent the modern scientist .
That 's the heroic part of their story .
There 's a flip side as well .
They did not foresee at least one consequence of their revolution .
They would have been deeply dismayed by today 's disjunction between science and the rest of culture .
It 's shocking to realize that only 28 percent of American adults have even a very basic level of science literacy , and this was tested by asking simple questions like , " Did humans and dinosaurs inhabit the Earth at the same time ? "
and " What proportion of the Earth is covered in water ? "
Once scientists became members of a professional group , they were slowly walled off from the rest of us .
This is the unintended consequence of the revolution that started with our four friends .
Charles Darwin said , " I sometimes think that general and popular treatises are almost as important for the progress of science as original work . "
In fact , " Origin of Species " was written for a general and popular audience , and was widely read when it first appeared .
Darwin knew what we seem to have forgotten , that science is not only for scientists .
Thank you .
Zach Kaplan + Keith Schacht : Toys and materials from the future
The Inventables guys , Zach Kaplan and Keith Schacht , demo some amazing new materials and how we might use them . Look for squishy magnets , odor-detecting ink , " dry " liquid and a very surprising 10-foot pole .
Zach Kaplan : Keith and I lead a research team .
We investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties . Over the last three years , we found over 200 of these things , and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for TED .
Of these six , the first one that we 're going to talk about is in the black envelope you 're holding .
It comes from a company in Japan called GelTech . Now go ahead and open it up .
Keith Schacht : Now be sure and take the two pieces apart .
What 's unexpected about this is that it 's soft , but it 's also a strong magnet .
Zach and I have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this .
We spent a long time thinking about why this is , and it 's just recently that we realized : it 's when we see something unexpected , it changes our understanding of the way things work .
As you 're seeing this gel magnet for the first time , if you assume that all magnets had to be hard , then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work .
ZK : Now , it 's important to understand what the unexpected properties are .
But to really think about the implications of what this makes possible , we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world .
So , a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors .
If you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material -- if a cabinet slams shut it wouldn 't make a loud noise , and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed .
Imagine taking the same material , but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker .
You know , this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door , in your closet , and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf .
For me , I really love this idea .
If you come to my apartment and see my closet , I 'm sure you 'd figure out why : it 's a mess .
Seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications -- it helps you see why this is significant , what the potential is .
But we 've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference .
ZK : It was like six months ago that Keith and I were out in L.A. , and we were at Starbucks having coffee with Roman Coppola .
He works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company , The Directors Bureau .
As we were talking , Roman told us that he 's kind of an inventor on the side .
And we were showing him the same gel magnet that you 're holding in your hand -- and you know , we shared the same ideas . And you could see it in his face : Roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder ; he opens it up and Keith and I look in , and he starts showing us concepts that he 's been working on .
These things just get him really excited . And so we 're looking at these concepts , and we were just like , whoa , this guy 's good .
Because the way that he presented the concept -- his approach was totally different than ours . He sold it to you as if it was for sale right now .
When we were going in the car back to the airport , we were thinking : why was this so powerful ?
And as we thought about it more , we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience , just as if you saw it on TV . So , for TED we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future .
Do you have a need for speed ?
Inventables Water Adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast , so tall , that when you hit the bottom , it uses brakes to stop .
Aqua Rocket : coming this summer .
Now , we showed the concept to a few people before this , and they asked us , when 's it coming out ?
So I just wanted to let you know , it 's not actually coming out , just the concept is .
ZK : So now , when we dream up these concepts , it 's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint .
So I just want to quickly explain how this would work .
This is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial .
The gel that you 're holding would be lining the bottom of the board .
Now this is important for two reasons .
One : the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that , if it were to hit the rider in the head , it wouldn 't injure him .
In addition , you can see from the diagram on the right , the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet .
So this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you 're going down .
The force of the water rushing down , in addition to that repulsion force , would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market .
It 's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system .
When you get to the very bottom of the slide -- -- the rider passes through an aluminum tube .
And I 'm going to kick it to Keith to explain why that 's important from a technical standpoint .
So I 'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal , it 's not a magnetic material . But something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube .
So we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you .
Now , you see the magnet fell really slowly .
Now , I 'm not going to get into the physics of it , but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet 's falling , the greater the stopping force .
ZK : Now , our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole , and I have it right here in my pocket .
There 're a few different versions of it .
Some of them automatically unroll like this one .
They can be made to automatically roll up , or they can be made stable , like Zach 's , to hold any position in between .
ZK : As we were talking to the vendor -- to try to learn about how you could apply these , or how they 're being applied currently -- he was telling us that , in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests -- very concealed -- and then , when they 're out on the field , erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base .
In our brainstorms , we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal : so at the end of the game , you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag .
Now , the interesting thing about this is , you don 't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting .
So we decided to go out onto the streets of Chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this .
I clean my ceiling fans with that and I get the spider webs off my house -- I do it that way .
I 'd make my very own walking stick .
I would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree .
An olive server .
Some type of extension pole -- like what the painters use .
I would make a spear that , when you went deep sea diving , you could catch the fish really fast , and then roll it back up , and you could swim easier ... Yeah .
ZK : Now , for our next technology we 're going to do a little demonstration , and so we need a volunteer from the audience .
You sir , come on up .
Come on up . Tell everybody your name .
Steve Jurvetson : Steve .
ZK : It 's Steve . All right Steve , now , follow me .
We need you to stand right in front of the TED sign .
Right there . That 's great .
And hold onto this . Good luck to you .
No , not yet .
ZK : I 'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by Target .
Little bit -- that 's perfect , just perfect .
Now , Zach , we 're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future .
So here , come on up to the front . All right , so now if you 'll see here -- no , no , it 's OK .
So , describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt . Go ahead .
SJ : It 's cold .
Now the reason it 's cold is that 's it 's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns -- it 's a dry liquid developed by 3M .
It 's perfectly clear , it 's odorless , it 's colorless .
It 's so safe you could drink this stuff .
And the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water .
All right , well thanks for coming up .
ZK : Wait , wait , Steven -- before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends .
SJ : Excellent , thank you .
Thanks for coming up . Let 's give him a big round of applause .
So what 's the significance of this dry liquid ?
Early versions of the fluid were actually used on a Cray Supercomputer .
Now , the unexpected thing about this is that Zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we 'd damage the electronics , that we 'd get him wet , that we 'd hurt the books or the computers . It works because it 's non-conductive .
So you can see here , you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it wouldn 't cause any damage .
You can circulate it to draw the heat away .
But today it 's most widely used in office buildings -- in the sprinkler system -- as a fire-suppression fluid .
Again , it 's perfectly safe for people . It puts out the fires , doesn 't hurt anything .
But our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game . So during halftime , it could rain down on the players , cool everyone down , and in a matter of minutes it would dry . Wouldn 't hurt the court .
ZK : Our next technology comes to us from a company in Japan called Sekisui Chemical . One of their R & amp ; D engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer .
While he was doing this , he noticed an unexpected thing .
We have a video to show you .
So you see there , it didn 't bounce back . Now , this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing .
It 's technically called , " shape-retaining property . "
Now , think about your interactions with aluminum foil .
Shape-retaining is common in metal : you bend a piece of aluminum foil , and it holds its place . Contrast that with a plastic garbage can -- and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back .
ZK : For example , you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist , but doesn 't use a buckle .
Taking it a little further , if you wove those strips together -- kind of like a little basket -- you could make a shape-retaining sheet , and then you could embed it in a cloth : so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table , so that way on a windy day it wouldn 't blow away .
For our next technology , it 's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself , because it 's an ink .
So , we 've prepared a video to show it applied to paper .
As this paper is bending , the resistance of the ink changes .
So with simple electronics , you can detect how much the page is being bent .
Now , to think about the potential for this , think of all the places ink is supplied : on business cards , on the back of cereal boxes , board games . Any place you use ink , you could change the way you interact with it .
ZK : So my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book .
This could totally change the way that you interface with paper .
You see the dark line on the side and the top . As you turn the pages of the book , the book can actually detect what page you 're on , based on the curvature of the pages .
In addition , if you were to fold in one of the corners , then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes .
For our last technology , we worked again with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works .
Old Milk Carton : Oh yeah , it smells good .
Who are you ?
New Milk Carton : I 'm New Milk .
OMC : I used to smell like you .
Fresh Watch , from Inventables Dairy Farms .
Packaging that changes color when your milk 's gone off .
Don 't let milk spoil your morning .
ZK : Now , this technology was developed by these two guys : Professor Ken Suslick and Neil Rakow , of the University of Illinois .
Now the way it works : there 's a matrix of color dyes .
And these dyes change color in response to odors .
So the smell of vanilla , that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow . This matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells .
But like in the milk commercial , if you know what odor you want to detect , then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor .
ZK : Right . It was that that started a conversation with Professor Suslick and myself , and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible , beyond just detecting spoiled food . It 's really where the significance of it lies .
His company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn , how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene ?
And he kind of comically explained that time after time , what the firemen would say is : they would rush to the scene of the crime ; they would look around ; if there were no dead policemen , it was OK to go .
I mean , this is a true story . They 're using policemen as canaries .
But more seriously , they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans , and say if it 's safe for the firemen .
In addition , he 's spun off a company from the University called ChemSensing , where they 're working on medical equipment .
So , a patient can come in and actually blow into their device .
By detecting the odor of particular bacteria , or viruses , or even lung cancer , the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results .
This can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients .
Currently , they 're using a method of trial and error , but this could tell you precisely what disease you have .
So that was the six we had for you today , but I hope you 're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating .
Because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world . Prior to seeing this , we would have assumed : a 10-foot pole couldn 't fit in your pocket ; something as inexpensive as ink couldn 't sense the way paper is being bent ; every one of these things -- and we 're constantly trying to find more .
ZK : This is something that Keith and I really enjoy doing .
I 'm sure it 's obvious to you now , but it was actually yesterday that I was reminded of why . I was having a conversation with Steve Jurvetson , over downstairs by the escalators , and he was telling me that when Chris sent out that little box , one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand -- the sand that doesn 't get wet . He said that he was playing with it with his son .
And you know , his son was mesmerized , because he would dunk it in the water , he would take it out and it was bone dry . A few weeks later , he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother 's hair , and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair .
And he took the thing and he looked up to Steve and he said , " Look , hydrophobic string . "
I mean , after hearing that story -- that really summed it up for me .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Rose George : Let 's talk crap . Seriously .
It 's 2013 , yet 2.5 billion people in the world have no access to a basic sanitary toilet . And when there 's no loo , where do you poo ? In the street , probably near your water and food sources -- causing untold death and disease from contamination . Get ready for a blunt , funny , powerful talk from journalist Rose George about a once-unmentionable problem .
Let 's talk dirty .
A few years ago , oddly enough , I needed the bathroom , and I found one , a public bathroom , and I went into the stall , and I prepared to do what I 'd done most of my life : use the toilet , flush the toilet , forget about the toilet .
And for some reason that day , instead , I asked myself a question , and it was , where does this stuff go ?
And with that question , I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation -- there 's more coming -- — sanitation , toilets and poop , and I have yet to emerge .
And that 's because it 's such an enraging , yet engaging place to be .
To go back to that toilet , it wasn 't a particularly fancy toilet , it wasn 't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization .
That 's the other WTO .
But it had a lockable door , it had privacy , it had water , it had soap so I could wash my hands , and I did because I 'm a woman , and we do that .
But that day , when I asked that question , I learned something , and that was that I 'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right , when in fact it 's a privilege .
2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet .
They don 't have a bucket or a box .
Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet .
And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway , which is called open defecation , or poo-pooing in the open .
And he does that every day , and every day , probably , that guy in the picture walks on by , because he sees that little boy , but he doesn 't see him .
But he should , because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers .
Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit .
All those things , the eggs , the cysts , the bacteria , the viruses , all those can travel in one gram of human feces .
How ? Well , that little boy will not have washed his hands .
He 's barefoot . He 'll run back into his house , and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet .
In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in , the most common symptoms associated with those diseases , diarrhea , is now a bit of a joke .
It 's the runs , the Hershey squirts , the squits .
Where I come from , we call it Delhi belly , as a legacy of empire .
But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency , this is the picture that you come up with .
Still not sure about the bikini .
And here 's another image of diarrhea .
This is Marie Saylee , nine months old .
You can 't see her , because she 's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia , because she died in three days from diarrhea -- the Hershey squirts , the runs , a joke .
And that 's her dad .
But she wasn 't alone that day , because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea , and they do every day .
Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide , and you 've probably been asked to care about things like HIV / AIDS or T.B. or measles , but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together .
It 's a very potent weapon of mass destruction .
And the cost to the world is immense : 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation .
These are cholera beds in Haiti .
You 'll have heard of cholera , but we don 't hear about diarrhea .
It gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases .
But we know how to fix this .
We know , because in the mid-19th century , wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet , and disease dropped dramatically .
Child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history .
The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal , and they were choosing over the Pill , anesthesia , and surgery .
It 's a wonderful waste disposal device .
But I think that it 's so good — it doesn 't smell , we can put it in our house , we can lock it behind a door — and I think we 've locked it out of conversation too .
We don 't have a neutral word for it .
Poop 's not particularly adequate .
Shit offends people . Feces is too medical .
Because I can 't explain otherwise , when I look at the figures , what 's going on .
We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation , but if you look at the budgets of countries , developing and developed , you 'll think there 's something wrong with the math , because you 'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation , even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year .
But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget , and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply , which is great ; we all need water .
No one 's going to refuse clean water .
But the humble latrine , or flush toilet , reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water .
Think about it . That little boy who 's running back into his house , he may have a nice , clean fresh water supply , but he 's got dirty hands that he 's going to contaminate his water supply with .
And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development , because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us .
So a toilet can put a girl back in school .
Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation .
They 've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in .
We 've all done that , but they do it every day , and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating , it just gets too much .
And I understand that . Who can blame them ?
So if you met an educationalist and said , " I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing , " you 'd make a lot of friends in education .
That 's not the only thing it can do for you .
Poop can cook your dinner .
It 's got nutrients in it .
We ingest nutrients . We excrete nutrients as well .
We don 't keep them all .
75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners ' bowels .
So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare .
They 're genocidal inmates , most of them , and they 're stirring the contents of their own latrines , because if you put poop in a sealed environment , in a tank , pretty much like a stomach , then , pretty much like a stomach , it gives off gas , and you can cook with it .
And you might think it 's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit , but it 's also good economic sense , because they 're saving a million dollars a year .
They 're cutting down on deforestation , and they 've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible , infinite and free at the point of production .
It 's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives .
Here 's a woman who 's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes , which is what you think it is , except not quite , because it 's actually donated .
There is now a new career path called stool donor .
It 's like the new sperm donor .
Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff , and it 's resistant to antibiotics in many cases .
She 's been suffering for years .
She gets a dose of healthy human feces , and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent .
It 's astonishing , but hardly anyone is still doing it .
Maybe it 's the ick factor .
That 's okay , because there 's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample , a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate .
So you 'd be thinking by now , okay , the solution 's simple , we give everyone a toilet .
And this is where it gets really interesting , because it 's not that simple , because we are not simple .
So the really interesting , exciting work -- this is the engaging bit -- in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology .
We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware .
They 've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they 've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground .
So the idea is to manipulate human emotion .
It 's been done for decades . The soap companies did it in the early 20th century .
They tried selling soap as healthy . No one bought it .
They tried selling it as sexy . Everyone bought it .
In India now there 's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don 't have a toilet .
It 's called " No Loo , No I Do . "
And in case you think that poster 's just propaganda , here 's Priyanka , 23 years old .
I met her last October in India , and she grew up in a conservative environment .
She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India , and she was engaged at 14 , and then at 21 or so , she moved into her in-law 's house .
And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn 't have a toilet .
She 'd grown up with a latrine .
It was no big deal , but it was a latrine .
And the first night she was there , she was told that at 4 o 'clock in the morning -- her mother-in-law got her up , told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open .
And she was scared . She was scared of drunks hanging around .
She was scared of snakes . She was scared of rape .
After three days , she did an unthinkable thing .
She left .
And if you know anything about rural India , you 'll know that 's an unspeakably courageous thing to do .
But not just that .
She got her toilet , and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing .
It 's what I call social contagion , and it 's really powerful and really exciting .
Another version of this , another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village , called Lakara , and about a year ago , it had no toilets whatsoever .
Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera .
Some visitors came , using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other .
Somehow , people who 'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought , " Oops . "
Not only that , but they were ingesting their neighbors ' shit .
That 's what really made them change their behavior .
So this woman , this boy 's mother installed this latrine in a few hours .
Her entire life , she 'd been using the banana field behind , but she installed the latrine in a few hours .
It cost nothing . It 's going to save that boy 's life .
So when I get despondent about the state of sanitation , even though these are pretty exciting times because we 've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reinventing the toilet , which is great , we 've got Matt Damon going on bathroom strike , which is great for humanity , very bad for his colon .
But there are things to worry about .
It 's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal .
It 's about 50 or so years off track .
We 're not going to meet targets , providing people with sanitation at this rate .
So when I get sad about sanitation , I think of Japan , because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks , and now it 's a nation of what are called Woshurettos , washlet toilets .
They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely , hands-free cleaning experience , and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the " marriage-saver . "
But most importantly , what they have done in Japan , which I find so inspirational , is they 've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door .
They 've made it conversational .
People go out and upgrade their toilet .
They talk about it . They 've sanitized it .
I hope that we can do that . It 's not a difficult thing to do .
All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent , shameful issue that it is .
And don 't think that it 's just in the poor world that things are wrong .
Our sewers are crumbling .
Things are going wrong here too .
The solution to all of this is pretty easy .
I 'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing , and that 's to go out , protest , speak about the unspeakable , and talk shit .
Thank you .
Frank Gehry : My days as a young rebel
Before he was a legend , architect Frank Gehry takes a whistlestop tour of his early work , from his house in Venice Beach to the American Center in Paris , which was under construction when he gave this talk .
I 'm going to go right into the slides .
And all I 'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that I do just very straight stuff .
And my ideas are -- in my head , anyway -- they 're very logical and relate to what 's going on and problem solving for clients .
I either convince clients at the end that I solve their problems , or I really do solve their problems , because usually they seem to like it .
Let me go right into the slides .
Can you turn off the light ? Down .
I like to be in the dark .
I don 't want you to see what I 'm doing up here .
Anyway , I did this house in Santa Monica , and it got a lot of notoriety .
In fact , it appeared in a porno comic book , which is the slide on the right .
This is in Venice .
I just show it because I want you to know I 'm concerned about context .
On the left-hand side , I had the context of those little houses , and I tried to build a building that fit into that context .
When people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird , and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they 're photographed or seen in that space .
And then , once I deal with the context , I then try to make a place that 's comfortable and private and fairly serene , as I hope you 'll find that slide on the right .
And then I did a law school for Loyola in downtown L.A.
I was concerned about making a place for the study of law .
And we continue to work with this client .
The building on the right at the top is now under construction .
The garage on the right -- the gray structure -- will be torn down , finally , and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we 've created , this campus .
And it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place .
They wanted a sense of place .
And so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown , in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into .
And it was my theory , or my point of view , that one didn 't upstage the neighborhood -- one made accommodations .
I tried to be inclusive , to include the buildings in the neighborhood , whether they were buildings I liked or not .
In the ' 60s I started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in Bloomingdale 's .
We even made flooring , walls and everything , out of cardboard .
And the success of it threw me for a loop .
I couldn 't deal with the success of furniture -- I wasn 't secure enough as an architect -- and so I closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like .
So , nobody would like this .
And it was in this , preliminary to these pieces of furniture , that Ricky and I worked on furniture by the slice .
And after we failed , I just kept failing .
The piece on the left -- and that ultimately led to the piece on the right -- happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket .
And I put a piece of tape around it , as you see there , and realized you could sit on it , and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on .
So , it was an accidental discovery .
I got into fish .
I mean , the story I tell is that I got mad at postmodernism -- at po-mo -- and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man , and if you 're going to go back , we might as well go back to the beginning .
And so I started making these funny things .
And they started to have a life of their own and got bigger -- as the one glass at the Walker .
And then , I sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what I was learning about the form of the fish and the movement .
And a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it -- accidental , again -- it was an intuitive kind of thing , and I just kept going with it , and made this proposal for a building , which was only a proposal .
I did this building in Japan .
I was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed .
And I love sake and Kobe and all that stuff .
And after I got -- I was really drunk -- I was asked to do some sketches on napkins .
And I made some sketches on napkins -- little boxes and Morandi-like things that I used to do .
And the client said , " Why no fish ? "
And so I made a drawing with a fish , and I left Japan .
Three weeks later , I received a complete set of drawings saying we 'd won the competition .
Now , it 's hard to do . It 's hard to translate a fish form , because they 're so beautiful -- perfect -- into a building or object like this .
And Oldenburg , who I work with a little once in a while , told me I couldn 't do it , and so that made it even more exciting .
But he was right -- I couldn 't do the tail .
I started to get the head OK , but the tail I couldn 't do .
It was pretty hard .
The thing on the right is a snake form , a ziggurat .
And I put them together , and you walk between them .
It was a dialog with the context again .
Now , if you saw a picture of this as it was published in Architectural Record -- they didn 't show the context , so you would think , " God , what a pushy guy this is . "
But a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant .
Couldn 't find it .
So ...
As for craft and technology and all those things that you 've all been talking about , I was thrown for a complete loop .
This was built in six months .
The way we sent drawings to Japan : we used the magic computer in Michigan that does carved models , and we used to make foam models , which that thing scanned .
We made the drawings of the fish and the scales .
And when I got there , everything was perfect -- except the tail .
So , I decided to cut off the head and the tail .
And I made the object on the left for my show at the Walker .
And it 's one of the nicest pieces I 've ever made , I think .
And then Jay Chiat , a friend and client , asked me to do his headquarters building in L.A.
For reasons we don 't want to talk about , it got delayed .
Toxic waste , I guess , is the key clue to that one .
And so we built a temporary building -- I 'm getting good at temporary -- and we put a conference room in that 's a fish .
And , finally , Jay dragged me to my hometown , Toronto , Canada .
And there is a story -- it 's a real story -- about my grandmother buying a carp on Thursday , bringing it home , putting it in the bathtub when I was a kid .
I played with it in the evening .
When I went to sleep , the next day it wasn 't there .
And the next night , we had gefilte fish .
And so I set up this interior for Jay 's offices and I made a pedestal for a sculpture .
And he didn 't buy a sculpture , so I made one .
I went around Toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother 's , and I put the fish in .
It was a joke .
I play with funny people like [ Claes ] Oldenburg .
We 've been friends for a long time .
And we 've started to work on things .
A few years ago , we did a performance piece in Venice , Italy , called " Il Corso del Coltello " -- the Swiss Army knife .
And most of the imagery is -- Claes ' , but those two little boys are my sons , and they were Claes ' assistants in the play .
He was the Swiss Army knife .
He was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter , and I was Frankie P. Toronto .
P for Palladio .
Dressed up like the AT & amp ; T building by Claes -- with a fish hat .
The highlight of the performance was at the end .
This beautiful object , the Swiss Army knife , which I get credit for participating in .
And I can tell you -- it 's totally an Oldenburg .
I had nothing to do with it .
The only thing I did was , I made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal , because I love sailing .
We made it into a sailing craft .
I 've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing .
I do it because it 's a curious thing in the culture , when things are made in such great quantities , absorbed in such great quantities , and there 's so much denial about them .
People hate it .
And I 'm fascinated with that , which , like the paper furniture -- it 's one of those materials .
And I 'm always drawn to that .
And so I did a lot of dirty things with chain link , which nobody will forgive me for .
But Claes made homage to it in the Loyola Law School .
And that chain link is really expensive .
It 's in perspective and everything .
And then we did a camp together for children with cancer .
And you can see , we started making a building together .
Of course , the milk can is his .
But we were trying to collide our ideas , to put objects next to each other .
Like a Morandi -- like the little bottles -- composing them like a still life .
And it seemed to work as a way to put he and I together .
Then Jay Chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in Venice , and I started with this three-piece thing , and you entered in the middle .
And Jay asked me what I was going to do with the piece in the middle .
And he pushed that .
And one day I had a -- oh , well , the other way .
I had the binoculars from Claes , and I put them there , and I could never get rid of them after that .
Oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal .
It made my building look sick .
And it was this interaction between that kind of , up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting .
It led to the building on the left .
And I still think the Time magazine picture will be of the binoculars , you know , leaving out the -- what the hell .
I use a lot of metal in my work , and I have a hard time connecting with the craft .
The whole thing about my house , the whole use of rough carpentry and everything , was the frustration with the crafts available .
I said , " If I can 't get the craft that I want , I 'll use the craft I can get . "
There were plenty of models for that , in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns , and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials .
I went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture .
And it was all of one material , and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls .
The metalworkers , for the most part , do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff .
I was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers ' unions of America and Canada in Washington , and I did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings , etc. etc .
And it 's working very well to have these people , these craftsmen , interested in it .
I just tell the stories .
It 's a way of connecting , at least , with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture .
The metal continued into a building -- Herman Miller , in Sacramento .
And it 's just a complex of factory buildings .
And Herman Miller has this philosophy of having a place -- a people place .
I mean , it 's kind of a trite thing to say , but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be , where the people would come and where the people working would interact .
So it 's out in the middle of nowhere , and you approach it .
It 's copper and galvanize .
I used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge , so it would buckle .
I spent a lot of time undoing Richard Meier 's aesthetic .
Everybody 's trying to get the panels perfect , and I always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy .
And they end up looking like stone .
This is the central area .
There 's a ramp .
And that little dome in there is a building by Stanley Tigerman .
Stanley was instrumental in my getting this job .
And when I was awarded the contract I , at the very beginning , asked the client if they would let Stanley do a cameo piece with me .
Because these were ideas that we were talking about , building things next to each other , making -- it 's all about [ a ] metaphor for a city , maybe .
And so Stanley did the little dome thing .
And we did it over the phone and by fax .
He would send me a fax and show me something .
He 'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower .
I told him , " No , no , that 's too ongepotchket .
I don 't want the tower . "
So he came back with a simpler building , but he put some funny details on it , and he moved it closer to my building .
And so I decided to put him in a depression .
I put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in .
And so then he put two bridges -- this all happened on the fax , going back and forth over a couple of weeks ' period .
And he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it .
And so then I put this big billboard behind it .
And I call it , " David and Goliath . "
And that 's my cafeteria .
In Boston , we had that old building on the left .
It was a very prominent building off the freeway , and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of -- I thought -- the language of the neighborhood , which had these cornices , projecting cornices .
Mine got a little exuberant , but I used lead copper , which is a beautiful material , and it turns green in 100 years .
Instead of , like , copper in 10 or 15 .
We redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space .
And it surprised both Boston and myself that we got it approved , because they have very strict kind of design guideline , and they wouldn 't normally think I would fit them .
The detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building .
In Barcelona , on Las Ramblas for some film festival , I did the Hollywood sign going and coming , made a building out of it , and they built it .
I flew in one night and took this picture .
But they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me .
And then more metal and some chain link in Santa Monica -- a little shopping center .
And this is a laser laboratory at the University of Iowa , in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back .
It 's the support labs , which , by some coincidence , required no windows .
And the shape fit perfectly .
I just joined the points .
In the curved part there 's all the mechanical equipment .
That solid wall behind it is a pipe chase -- a pipe canyon -- and so it was an opportunity that I seized , because I didn 't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form .
It gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it .
This is a small house somewhere .
They 've been building it so long I don 't remember where it is .
It 's in the West Valley .
And we started with the stream and built the house along the stream -- dammed it up to make a lake .
These are the models .
The reality , with the lake -- the workmanship is pretty bad .
And it reminded me why I play defensively in things like my house .
When you have to do something really cheaply , it 's hard to get perfect corners and stuff .
That big metal thing is a passage , and in it is -- you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom , which is on the right .
It 's kind of like a whole built town .
I was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at Yale .
I thought it was fitting for me to be doing that .
This is a house next to a Philip Johnson house in Minnesota .
The owners had a dilemma -- they asked Philip to do it .
He was too busy .
He didn 't recommend me , by the way .
We ended up having to make it a sculpture , because the dilemma was , how do you build a building that doesn 't look like the language ?
Is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided ?
Etc. etc .
You 've got the idea .
And so we finally ended up making it .
These people are art collectors .
And we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side .
And the building is very sculptural as you walk around it .
It 's made of metal and the brown stuff is Fin-Ply -- it 's that formed lumber from Finland .
We used it at Loyola on the chapel , and it didn 't work .
I keep trying to make it work .
In this case we learned how to detail it .
In Cleveland , there 's Burnham Mall , on the left .
It 's never been finished .
Going out to the lake , you can see all those new buildings we built .
And we had the opportunity to build a building on this site .
There 's a railroad track .
This is the city hall over here somewhere , and the courthouse .
And the centerline of the mall goes out .
Burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built , and so we followed .
Sohio is on the axis here , and we followed the axis , and they 're two kind of goalposts .
And this is our building , which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company .
We collaborated with Oldenburg and put the newspaper on top , folded .
The health club is fastened to the garage with a C-clamp , for Cleveland .
You drive down .
So it 's about a 10-story C-clamp .
And all this stuff at the bottom is a museum , and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry .
This owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries .
And this would be a hotel .
So , the centerline of this thing -- we 'd preserve it , and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by Pelli and Kohn Pederson Fox , etc . , that are underway .
It 's hard to do high-rise .
I feel much more comfortable down here .
This is a piece of property in Brentwood .
And a long time ago , about ' 82 or something , after my house -- I designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard -- and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left .
And she came back , I guess wealthier or something -- something happened -- and asked me to design a house for her on this site .
And following that basic idea of the village , we changed it as we got into it .
I locked the house into the site by cutting the back end -- here you see on the photographs of the site -- slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall , creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom , which I designed like a kind of a barge , looking like a boat .
And that 's it , built .
The dome was a request from the client .
She wanted a dome somewhere in the house .
She didn 't care where .
When you sleep in this bedroom , I hope -- I mean , I haven 't slept in it yet .
I 've offered to marry her so I could sleep there , but she said I didn 't have to do that .
But when you 're in that room , you feel like you 're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake .
And it 's very private .
The landscape is being built around to create a private garden .
And then up above there 's a garden on this side of the living room , and one on the other side .
These aren 't focused very well .
I don 't know how to do it from here .
Focus the one on the right .
It 's up there .
Left -- it 's my right .
Anyway , you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees .
That 's the living room .
Servants ' quarters .
A guest bedroom , which has this dome with marble on it .
And then you enter into the living room and then so on .
This is the bedroom .
You come down from this level along the stairway , and you enter the bedroom here , going into the lake .
And the bed is back in this space , with windows looking out onto the lake .
These Stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot .
The material is lead copper , like in the building in Boston .
And so it was an intent to make this small piece of land -- it 's 100 by 250 -- into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it .
And this happened by accident that I got this right on axis with the dining room table .
It looks like I got a Baldessari painting for free .
But the idea is , the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside .
Eventually this will be screened -- these trees will come up -- and it will be very private .
And you feel like you 're in your own kind of village .
This is for Michael Eisner -- Disney .
We 're doing some work for him .
And this is in Anaheim , California , and it 's a freeway building .
You go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour , and there 's another bridge here .
And you 're through this room in a split second , and the building will sort of reflect that .
On the backside , it 's much more humane -- entrance , dining hall , etc .
And then this thing here -- I 'm hoping as you drive by you 'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it .
Kind of a fun thing to do .
I 'm doing a building in Switzerland , Basel , which is an office building for a furniture company .
And we struggled with the image .
These are the early studies , but they have to sell furniture to normal people , so if I did the building and it was too fancy , then people might say , " Well , the furniture looks OK in his thing , but no , it ain 't going to look good in my normal building . "
So we 've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here , and we 've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate .
And you 're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces .
This is in Paris , along the Seine .
Palais des Sports , the Gare de Lyon over here .
The Minister of Finance -- the guy that moved from the Louvre -- goes in here .
There 's a new library across the river .
And back in here , in this already treed park , we 're doing a very dense building called the American Center , which has a theater , apartments , dance school , an art museum , restaurants and all kinds of -- it 's a very dense program -- bookstores , etc .
In a very tight , small -- this is the ground level .
And the French have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off .
They call it the plan coupe .
And I struggled with that thing -- how to get around the corner .
These are the models for it .
I showed you the other model , the one -- this is the way I organized myself so I could make the drawing -- so I understood the problem .
I was trying to get around this plan coupe -- how do you do it ?
Apartments , etc .
And these are the kind of study models we did .
And the one on the left is pretty awful .
You can see why I was ready to commit suicide when this one was built .
But out of it came finally this resolution , where the elevator piece worked frontally to this , parallel to this street , and also parallel to here .
And then this kind of twist , with this balcony and the skirt , kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer .
The restaurants here -- the apartments and the theater , etc .
So it would all be built in stone , in French limestone , except for this metal piece .
And it faces into a park .
And the idea was to make this express the energy of this .
On the side facing the street it 's much more normal , except I slipped a few mansards down , so that coming on the point , these housing units made a gesture to the corner .
And this will be some kind of high-tech billboard .
If any of you guys have any ideas for it , please contact me .
I don 't know what to do .
Jay Chiat is a glutton for punishment , and he hired me to do a house for him in the Hamptons .
And it 's got a fish .
And I keep thinking , " This is going to be the last fish . "
It 's like a drug addict .
I say , " I 'm not going to do it anymore -- I don 't want to do it anymore -- I 'm not going to do it . "
And then I do it .
There it is .
But it 's the living room .
And this piece here is -- I don 't know what it is .
I just added it so that we 'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out .
This is Euro Disney , and I 've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier .
We 've had a lot of fun working together .
I think I 'm from Mars for them , and they are for me , but somehow we all manage to work together , and I think , productively .
So far .
This is a shopping thing .
You come into the Magic Kingdom and the hotel that Tony Baxter 's group is doing out here .
And then this is a kind of a shopping mall , with a rodeo and restaurants .
And another restaurant .
What I did -- because of the Paris skies being quite dull , I made a light grid that 's perpendicular to the train station , to the route of the train .
It looks like it 's kind of been there , and then crashed all these simpler forms into it .
The light grid will have a light , be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling .
In Switzerland -- Germany , actually -- on the Rhine across from Basel , we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum .
And I tried to -- there 's a Nick Grimshaw building over here , there 's an Oldenburg sculpture over here -- I tried to make a relationship urbanistically .
And I don 't gave good slides to show -- it 's just been completed -- but this piece here is this building , and these pieces here and here .
And as you pass by it 's always part -- you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood .
It 's plaster and just zinc .
And you wonder , if this is a museum , what it 's going to be like inside ?
If it 's going to be so busy and crazy that you wouldn 't show anything , and just wait .
I 'm so cunning and clever -- I made it quiet and wonderful .
But on the outside it does scream out at you a bit .
It 's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff .
And from the building in the back , you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills .
I know I 'm over time .
See , that skylight goes down and becomes that one .
So it 's pretty quiet inside .
This is the Disney Hall -- the concert hall .
It 's a complicated project .
It has a chamber hall .
It 's related to an existing Chandler Pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring .
And it 's not a great building , but I approached it optimistically , that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us .
And the plan of this -- it 's a concert hall .
This is the foyer , which is kind of a garden structure .
There 's commercial at the ground floor .
These are offices , which , really , in the competition , we didn 't have to design .
But finally , there 's a hotel there .
These were the kind of relationships made to the Chandler , composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed -- to MOCA , etc .
The acoustician in the competition gave us criteria , which led to this compartmentalized scheme , which we found out after the competition would not work at all .
But everybody liked these forms and liked the space , and so that 's one of the problems of a competition .
You have to then try and get that back in some way .
And we studied many models .
This was our original model .
These were the three buildings that were the ideal -- the Concertgebouw , Boston and Berlin .
Everybody liked the surround .
Actually , this is the smallest hall in size , and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies .
Our client doesn 't want balconies , so -- and when we met our new acoustician , he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape .
And we tried many shapes , trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical , acceptable format .
We finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the Concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls , which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they weren 't , but now we have them .
And our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room .
That 's the idea .
And the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural .
And the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit , and create intimacy .
Now , this is not a final design -- these are just on the way to being -- and so I wouldn 't take it literally , except the feeling of the space .
We studied the acoustics with laser stuff , and they bounce them off this and see where it all works .
But you get the sense of the hall in section .
Most halls come straight down into a proscenium .
In this case we 're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners .
And so it will be quite a different shape .
The original building , because it was frog-like , fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well .
When you get into a box , it 's harder to do it -- and here we are , struggling with how to put the hotel in .
And this is a teapot I designed for Alessi .
I just stuck it on there .
But this is how I do work . I do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away .
And of course it 's not going to look like that , but it is the crazy way I tend to work .
And then finally , in L.A. I was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of Interstate Bank Tower , the highest building in L.A.
Larry Halprin is doing the stairs .
And I was asked to do a fish , and so I did a snake .
It 's a public space , and I made it kind of a garden structure , and you can go in it .
It 's a kiva , and Larry 's putting some water in there , and it works much better than a fish .
In Barcelona I was asked to do a fish , and we 're working on that , at the foot of a Ritz-Carlton Tower being done by Skidmore , Owings and Merrill .
And the Ritz-Carlton Tower is being designed with exposed steel , non-fire proof , much like those old gas tanks .
And so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it , perverted it , into the form of the fish , and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like , that will sit -- this is the beach and the harbor out in front , and this is really a shopping center with department stores .
And we split these bridges .
Originally , this was all solid with a hole in it .
We cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel .
We showed this to the hotel people the other day , and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the Ritz-Carlton anymore , because of this fish .
And finally , I just threw these in -- Lou Danziger .
I didn 't expect Lou Danziger to be here , but this is a building I did for him in 1964 , I think .
A little studio -- and it 's sadly for sale .
Time goes on .
And this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing .
He designed the robot as the cashier , and the head moves , and I did the rest of it .
And the food wasn 't as good as the stuff , and so it failed .
It should have been the other way around -- the food should have been good first .
It didn 't work .
Thank you very much .
Nicholas Negroponte : Taking OLPC to Colombia
TED follows Nicholas Negroponte to Colombia as he delivers laptops inside territory once controlled by guerrillas . His partner ? Colombia 's Defense Department , who see One Laptop per Child as an investment in the region .
It 's amazing , when you meet a head of state and you say , " What is your most precious natural resource ? " -- they will not say children at first .
And then when you say children , they will pretty quickly agree with you .
: We 're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia , head of the army and the head of the police , and we 're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television , no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years .
The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC , the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement .
There are one billion children in the world , and 50 percent of them don 't have electricity at home or at school .
And in some countries -- let me pick Afghanistan -- 75 percent of the little girls don 't go to school .
And I don 't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade -- they don 't go .
So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype , it 's gone from an idea to a real laptop .
We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children .
We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children , and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment .
So , in rough numbers , there are a million laptops .
That 's smaller than I predicted -- I predicted three to 10 million -- but is still a very large number .
In Colombia , we have about 3,000 laptops .
It 's the Minister of Defense with whom we 're working , not the Minister of Education , because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off , in which the people who had been causing , if you will , 40 years ' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived .
And suddenly , the kids have connected laptops .
They 've leapfrogged .
The change is absolutely monumental , because it 's not just opening it up , but it 's opening it up to the rest of the world .
So yes , they 're building roads , yes , they 're putting in telephone , yes , there will be television .
But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages , so the children grow up with access to information , with a window into the rest of the world .
Before , they were closed off .
Interestingly enough , in other countries , it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth .
And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years .
It 's not going to happen , you know , in one year , but it 's an important , deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children .
Thirty-one countries in total are involved , and in the case of Uruguay , half the children already have them , and by the middle of 2009 , every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop -- a little green laptop .
Now what are some of the results ?
Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much , and reading comprehension measured by third parties -- not by us -- skyrockets .
Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents .
They own the laptops . They take them home .
And so when I met with three children from the schools , who had traveled all day to come to Bogota , one of the three children brought her mother .
And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write .
Her mother had not gone to primary school .
And this is such an inversion , and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change .
So now , in closing , people say , now why laptops ?
Laptops are a luxury ; it 's like giving them iPods . No .
The reason you want laptops is that the word is education , not laptop .
This is an education project , not a laptop project .
They need to learn learning . And then , just think -- they can have , let 's say , 100 books .
In a village , you have 100 laptops , each with a different set of 100 books , and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books .
You and I didn 't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school .
Sometimes school is under a tree , or in many cases , the teacher has only a fifth-grade education , so you need a collaborative model of learning , not just building more schools and training more teachers , which you have to do anyway .
So we 're once again doing " Give One , Get One . "
Last year , we ran a " Give One , Get One " program , and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free .
And by being a zero-dollar laptop , we can go to countries that can 't afford it at all .
And that 's what we did . We went to Haiti , we went to Rwanda , Afghanistan , Ethiopia , Mongolia .
Places that are not markets , seeding it with the principles of saturation , connectivity , low ages , etc .
And then we can actually roll out large numbers .
So think of it this way : think of it as inoculating children against ignorance .
And think of the laptop as a vaccine .
You don 't vaccinate a few children .
You vaccinate all the children in an area .
Nate Silver : Does racism affect how you vote ?
Nate Silver has data that answers big questions about race in politics . For instance , in the 2008 presidential race , did Obama 's skin color actually keep him from getting votes in some parts of the country ? Stats and myths collide in this fascinating talk that ends with a remarkable insight .
I want to talk about the election .
For the first time in the United States , a predominantly white group of voters voted for an African-American candidate for President .
And in fact Barack Obama did quite well .
He won 375 electoral votes .
And he won about 70 million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate -- of any race , of any party -- in history .
If you compare how Obama did against how John Kerry had done four years earlier -- Democrats really like seeing this transition here , where almost every state becomes bluer , becomes more democratic -- even states Obama lost , like out west , those states became more blue .
In the south , in the northeast , almost everywhere but with a couple of exceptions here and there .
One exception is in Massachusetts .
That was John Kerry 's home state .
No big surprise , Obama couldn 't do better than Kerry there .
Or in Arizona , which is John McCain 's home , Obama didn 't have much improvement .
But there is also this part of the country , kind of in the middle region here .
This kind of Arkansas , Tennessee , Oklahoma , West Virginia region .
Now if you look at ' 96 , Bill Clinton -- the last Democrat to actually win -- how he did in ' 96 , you see real big differences in this part of the country right here , the kind of Appalachians , Ozarks , highlands region , as I call it : 20 or 30 point swings from how Bill Clinton did in ' 96 to how Obama did in 2008 .
Yes Bill Clinton was from Arkansas , but these are very , very profound differences .
So , when we think about parts of the country like Arkansas , you know .
There is a book written called , " What 's the Matter with Kansas ? "
But really the question here -- Obama did relatively well in Kansas .
He lost badly but every Democrat does .
He lost no worse than most people do .
But yeah , what 's the matter with Arkansas ?
And when we think of Arkansas we tend to have pretty negative connotations .
We think of a bunch of rednecks , quote , unquote , with guns .
And we think people like this probably don 't want to vote for people who look like this and are named Barack Obama .
We think it 's a matter of race . And is this fair ?
Are we kind of stigmatizing people from Arkansas , and this part of the country ?
And the answer is : it is at least partially fair .
We know that race was a factor , and the reason why we know that is because we asked those people .
Actually we didn 't ask them , but when they conducted exit polls in every state , in 37 states , out of the 50 , they asked a question , that was pretty direct , about race .
They asked this question .
In deciding your vote for President today , was the race of the candidate a factor ?
We 're looking for people that said , " Yes , race was a factor ; moreover it was an important factor , in my decision , " and people who voted for John McCain as a result of that factor , maybe in combination with other factors , and maybe alone .
We 're looking for this behavior among white voters or , really , non-black voters .
So you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question .
In Louisiana , about one in five white voters said , " Yes , one of the big reasons why I voted against Barack Obama is because he was an African-American . "
If those people had voted for Obama , even half of them , Obama would have won Louisiana safely .
Same is true with , I think , all of these states you see on the top of the list .
Meanwhile , California , New York , we can say , " Oh we 're enlightened " but you know , certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted , I suppose , manifestation of racially-based voting .
Here is the same data on a map .
You kind of see the relationship between the redder states of where more people responded and said , " Yes , Barack Obama 's race was a problem for me . "
You see , comparing the map to ' 96 , you see an overlap here .
This really seems to explain why Barack Obama did worse in this one part of the country .
So we have to ask why .
Is racism predictable in some way ?
Is there something driving this ?
Is it just about some weird stuff that goes on in Arkansas that we don 't understand , and Kentucky ?
Or are there more systematic factors at work ?
And so we can look at a bunch of different variables .
These are things that economists and political scientists look at all the time -- things like income , and religion , education .
Which of these seem to drive this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on November 4th ?
And there are a couple of these that have strong predictive relationships , one of which is education , where you see the states with the fewest years of schooling per adult are in red , and you see this part of the country , the kind of Appalachians region , is less educated . It 's just a fact .
And you see the relationship there with the racially-based voting patterns .
The other variable that 's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in .
States that are more rural -- even to some extent of the states like New Hampshire and Maine -- they exhibit a little bit of this racially-based voting against Barack Obama .
So it 's the combination of these two things : it 's education and the type of neighbors that you have , which we 'll talk about more in a moment .
And the thing about states like Arkansas and Tennessee is that they 're both very rural , and they are educationally impoverished .
So yes , racism is predictable .
These things , among maybe other variables , but these things seem to predict it .
We 're going to drill down a little bit more now , into something called the General Social Survey .
This is conducted by the University of Chicago every other year .
And they ask a series of really interesting questions .
In 2000 they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes .
One simple question they asked is , " Does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood ? "
We can see in different types of communities that the results are quite different .
In cites , about 80 percent of people have someone whom they consider a neighbor of another race , but in rural communities , only about 30 percent .
Probably because if you live on a farm , you might not have a lot of neighbors , period .
But nevertheless , you 're not having a lot of interaction with people who are unlike you .
So what we 're going to do now is take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors -- or , really , some neighbor of another race -- and people who have only white neighbors .
And we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes , not a lot of difference .
This was eight years ago , some people were more Republican back then .
But you see Democrats versus Republican , not a big difference based on who your neighbors are .
And even some questions about race -- for example affirmative action , which is kind of a political question , a policy question about race , if you will -- not much difference here .
Affirmative action is not very popular frankly , with white voters , period .
But people with black neighbors and people with mono-racial neighborhoods feel no differently about it really .
But if you probe a bit deeper and get a bit more personal if you will , " Do you favor a law banning interracial marriage ? "
There is a big difference .
People who don 't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely to oppose interracial marriage as people who do .
Just based on who lives in your immediate neighborhood around you .
And likewise they asked , not in 2000 , but in the same survey in 1996 , " Would you not vote for a qualified black president ? "
You see people without neighbors who are African-American who were much more likely to say , " That would give me a problem . "
So it 's really not even about urban versus rural .
It 's about who you live with .
Racism is predictable . And it 's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you , people of other races .
So if you want to address it , the goal is to facilitate interaction with people of other races .
I have a couple of very obvious , I suppose , ideas for maybe how to do that .
I 'm a big fan of cities .
Especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable , and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups .
I think cities facilitate more of the kind of networking , the kind of casual interaction than you might have on a daily basis .
But also not everyone wants to live in a city , certainly not a city like New York .
So we can think more about things like street grids .
This is the neighborhood where I grew up in East Lansing , Michigan .
It 's a traditional Midwestern community , which means you have real grid .
You have real neighborhoods and real trees , and real streets you can walk on .
And you interact a lot with your neighbors -- people you like , people you might not know .
And as a result it 's a very tolerant community , which is different , I think , than something like this , which is in Schaumburg , Illinois , where every little set of houses has their own cul-de-sac and drive-through Starbucks and stuff like that .
I think that actually this type of urban design , which became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s -- I think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under Ronald Reagan .
But also here is another idea we have -- is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from New York abroad .
But frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from NYU , have them go study for a semester at the University of Arkansas , and vice versa . Do it at the high school level .
Literally there are people who might be in school in Arkansas or Tennessee and might never interact in a positive affirmative way with someone from another part of the country , or of another racial group .
I think part of the education variable we talked about before is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise .
But the point is , this is all good news , because when something is predictable , it is what I call designable .
You can start thinking about solutions to solving that problem , even if the problem is pernicious and as intractable as racism .
If we understand the root causes of the behavior and where it manifests itself and where it doesn 't , we can start to design solutions to it .
So that 's all I have to say . Thank you very much .
Denis Dutton : A Darwinian theory of beauty
TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton 's provocative theory on beauty -- that art , music and other beautiful things , far from being simply " in the eye of the beholder , " are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins .
Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart , which is beauty .
I do the philosophy of art , aesthetics , actually , for a living .
I try to figure out intellectually , philosophically , psychologically , what the experience of beauty is , what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it .
Now this is an extremely complicated subject , in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different .
I mean just think of the sheer variety -- a baby 's face , Berlioz 's " Harold in Italy , " movies like " The Wizard of Oz " or the plays of Chekhov , a central California landscape , a Hokusai view of Mt . Fuji , " Der Rosenkavalier , " a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match , Van Gogh 's " Starry Night , " a Jane Austen novel , Fred Astaire dancing across the screen .
This brief list includes human beings , natural landforms , works of art and skilled human actions .
An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy .
I can , however , give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have .
And we get it not from a philosopher of art , not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic .
No , this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding , and you know who I mean : Charles Darwin .
Of course , a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question , " What is beauty ? "
It 's in the eye of the beholder .
It 's whatever moves you personally .
Or , as some people , especially academics prefer , beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder .
People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste .
Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease .
Beethoven is adored in Japan .
Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints .
Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums , while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth .
Or just think about American jazz or American movies -- they go everywhere .
There are many differences among the arts , but there are also universal , cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values .
How can we explain this universality ?
The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes .
We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric , largely pleistocene environments , where we became fully human , but also by the social situations in which we evolved .
This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory .
I mean fossils , cave paintings and so forth .
And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries .
Now , I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty , with its emotional intensity and pleasure , belongs to our evolved human psychology .
The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations .
Beauty is an adaptive effect , which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment .
As many of you will know , evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms .
The first of these is natural selection -- that 's random mutation and selective retention -- along with our basic anatomy and physiology -- the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails .
Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions , such as the horrid smell of rotting meat , or fears , such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff .
Natural selection also explains pleasures -- sexual pleasure , our liking for sweet , fat and proteins , which in turn explains a lot of popular foods , from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs .
The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection , and it operates very differently .
The peacock 's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this .
It did not evolve for natural survival .
In fact , it goes against natural survival .
No , the peacock 's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens .
It 's quite a familiar story .
It 's women who actually push history forward .
Darwin himself , by the way , had no doubts that the peacock 's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen .
He actually used that word .
Now , keeping these ideas firmly in mind , we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination , even obsession , in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction .
Beauty is nature 's way of acting at a distance , so to speak .
I mean , you can 't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape .
It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover .
So evolution 's trick is to make them beautiful , to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them .
Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure , the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes .
People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape , a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved .
This landscape shows up today on calendars , on postcards , in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand .
It 's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees .
The trees , by the way , are often preferred if they fork near the ground , that is to say , if they 're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix .
The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view , or evidence of water in a bluish distance , indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally -- get this -- a path or a road , perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline , that extends into the distance , almost inviting you to follow it .
This landscape type is regarded as beautiful , even by people in countries that don 't have it .
The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience .
But , someone might argue , that 's natural beauty .
How about artistic beauty ?
Isn 't that exhaustively cultural ?
No , I don 't think it is .
And once again , I 'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it .
It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet .
Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old , along with a few small , realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period .
But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that .
Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you 'd see at an arts and crafts fair , as well as ochre body paint , have been found from around 100,000 years ago .
But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this .
I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes .
The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa .
They go back about two-and-a-half-million years .
These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries , until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single , thin stone blades , sometimes rounded ovals , but often in what are to our eyes an arresting , symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form .
These Acheulian hand axes -- they 're named after St. Acheul in France , where finds were made in 19th century -- have been unearthed in their thousands , scattered across Asia , Europe and Africa , almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed .
Now , the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can 't have been made for butchering animals .
And the plot really thickens when you realize that , unlike other pleistocene tools , the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges .
And some , in any event , are too big to use for butchery .
Their symmetry , their attractive materials and , above all , their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes , even today .
So what were these ancient -- I mean , they 're ancient , they 're foreign , but they 're at the same time somehow familiar .
What were these artifacts for ?
The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art , practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects , contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship .
Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history -- tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call " fitness signals " -- that is to say , displays that are performances like the peacock 's tail , except that , unlike hair and feathers , the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted .
Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities -- intelligence , fine motor control , planning ability , conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials .
Over tens of thousands of generations , such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable .
You know , it 's an old line , but it has been shown to work -- " Why don 't you come up to my cave , so I can show you my hand axes ? "
Except , of course , what 's interesting about this is that we can 't be sure how that idea was conveyed , because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language .
It 's hard to grasp , but it 's an incredible fact .
This object was made by a hominid ancestor , Homo erectus or Homo ergaster , between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language .
Stretching over a million years , the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history .
By the end of the hand axe epic , Homo sapiens -- as they were then called , finally -- were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by , who knows , telling jokes , storytelling , dancing , or hairstyling .
Yes , hairstyling -- I insist on that .
For us moderns , virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies , to express intense emotions with music , painting and dance .
But still , one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings : the beauty we find in skilled performances .
From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall , human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts .
We find beauty in something done well .
So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone , don 't be so sure it 's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful .
Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it , even before they could put their love into words .
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder ?
No , it 's deep in our minds .
It 's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors .
Our powerful reaction to images , to the expression of emotion in art , to the beauty of music , to the night sky , will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists .
Thank you .
Lawrence Lessig : We the People , and the Republic we must reclaim
There is a corruption at the heart of American politics , caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens . That 's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig . With rapid-fire visuals , he shows how the funding process weakens the Republic in the most fundamental way , and issues a rallying bipartisan cry that will resonate with many in the U.S. and beyond .
Once upon a time , there was a place called Lesterland .
Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States .
Like the United States , it has about 311 million people , and of that 311 million people , it turns out 144,000 are called Lester .
If Matt 's in the audience , I just borrowed that , I 'll return it in a second , this character from your series .
So 144,000 are called Lester , which means about .05 percent is named Lester .
Now , Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power .
There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland .
One is called the general election .
The other is called the Lester election .
And in the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , but in the Lester election , it 's the Lesters who get to vote .
And here 's the trick .
In order to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the Lester election .
You don 't necessarily have to win , but you must do extremely well .
Now , what can we say about democracy in Lesterland ?
What we can say , number one , as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United , that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials , because , after all , there is a general election , but only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in the general election .
And number two , obviously , this dependence upon the Lesters is going to produce a subtle , understated , we could say camouflaged , bending to keep the Lesters happy .
Okay , so we have a democracy , no doubt , but it 's dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people .
It has competing dependencies , we could say conflicting dependencies , depending upon who the Lesters are .
Okay . That 's Lesterland .
Now there are three things I want you to see now that I 've described Lesterland .
Number one , the United States is Lesterland .
The United States is Lesterland .
The United States also looks like this , also has two elections , one we called the general election , the second we should call the money election .
In the general election , it 's the citizens who get to vote , if you 're over 18 , in some states if you have an ID .
In the money election , it 's the funders who get to vote , the funders who get to vote , and just like in Lesterland , the trick is , to run in the general election , you must do extremely well in the money election .
You don 't necessarily have to win . There is Jerry Brown .
But you must do extremely well .
And here 's the key : There are just as few relevant funders in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland .
Now you say , really ?
Really .05 percent ?
Well , here are the numbers from 2010 : .26 percent of America gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate , .05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate , .01 percent -- the one percent of the one percent -- gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates , and in this election cycle , my favorite statistic is .000042 percent — for those of you doing the numbers , you know that 's 132 Americans — gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent in the cycle we have just seen ending .
So I 'm just a lawyer , I look at this range of numbers , and I say it 's fair for me to say it 's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America .
In this sense , the funders are our Lesters .
Now , what can we say about this democracy in USA-land ?
Well , as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United , we could say , of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials . We have a general election , but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election .
And number two , obviously , this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle , understated , camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy .
Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power , and the question we need to ask is , what does it do to them , these humans , as they spend their time behind the telephone , calling people they 've never met , but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent ?
As anyone would , as they do this , they develop a sixth sense , a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money .
They become , in the words of " The X-Files , " shape-shifters , as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money , not on issues one to 10 , but on issues 11 to 1,000 .
Leslie Byrne , a Democrat from Virginia , describes that when she went to Congress , she was told by a colleague , " Always lean to the green . "
Then to clarify , she went on , " He was not an environmentalist . "
So here too we have a democracy , a democracy dependent upon the funders and dependent upon the people , competing dependencies , possibly conflicting dependencies depending upon who the funders are .
Okay , the United States is Lesterland , point number one .
Here 's point number two .
The United States is worse than Lesterland , worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said , " Hey , you get to pick who gets to run in the general election , " we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters .
You know , there are Lesters from every part of social society .
There are rich Lesters , poor Lesters , black Lesters , white Lesters , not many women Lesters , but put that to the side for one second .
We have Lesters from everywhere . We could think , " What could we do to make Lesterland better ? "
It 's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland .
But in our land , in this land , in USA-land , there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there , many of them in this room here today , but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters , because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent are not comprising it for the public interest .
It 's for their private interest . In this sense , the USA is worse than Lesterland .
And finally , point number three : Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland , against the background of its history , its traditions , in our land , in USA-land , Lesterland is a corruption , a corruption .
Now , by corruption I don 't mean brown paper bag cash secreted among members of Congress .
I don 't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption .
I don 't mean any criminal act .
The corruption I 'm talking about is perfectly legal .
It 's a corruption relative to the framers ' baseline for this republic .
The framers gave us what they called a republic , but by a republic they meant a representative democracy , and by a representative democracy , they meant a government , as Madison put it in Federalist 52 , that would have a branch that would be dependent upon the people alone .
So here 's the model of government .
They have the people and the government with this exclusive dependency , but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence , no longer a dependence upon the people alone , increasingly a dependence upon the funders .
Now this is a dependence too , but it 's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone so long as the funders are not the people .
This is a corruption .
Now , there 's good news and bad news about this corruption .
One bit of good news is that it 's bipartisan , equal-opportunity corruption .
It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about .
It blocks the right too , as it makes principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible .
So the right wants smaller government .
When Al Gore was Vice President , his team had an idea for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry .
The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill , and as he reported back to me , the response was , " Hell no !
If we deregulate these guys , how are we going to raise money from them ? "
This is a system that 's designed to save the status quo , including the status quo of big and invasive government .
It works against the left and the right , and that , you might say , is good news .
But here 's the bad news .
It 's a pathological , democracy-destroying corruption , because in any system where the members are dependent upon the tiniest fraction of us for their election , that means the tiniest number of us , the tiniest , tiniest number of us , can block reform .
I know that should have been , like , a rock or something .
I can only find cheese . I 'm sorry . So there it is .
Block reform .
Because there is an economy here , an economy of influence , an economy with lobbyists at the center which feeds on polarization .
It feeds on dysfunction .
The worse that it is for us , the better that it is for this fundraising .
Henry David Thoreau : " There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root . "
This is the root .
Okay , now , every single one of you knows this .
You couldn 't be here if you didn 't know this , yet you ignore it .
You ignore it . This is an impossible problem .
You focus on the possible problems , like eradicating polio from the world , or taking an image of every single street across the globe , or building the first real universal translator , or building a fusion factory in your garage .
These are the manageable problems , so you ignore — — so you ignore this corruption .
But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore .
We need a government that works .
And not works for the left or the right , but works for the left and the right , the citizens of the left and right , because there is no sensible reform possible until we end this corruption .
So I want you to take hold , to grab the issue you care the most about .
Climate change is mine , but it might be financial reform or a simpler tax system or inequality .
Grab that issue , sit it down in front of you , look straight in its eyes , and tell it there is no Christmas this year .
There will never be a Christmas .
We will never get your issue solved until we fix this issue first .
So it 's not that mine is the most important issue . It 's not .
Yours is the most important issue , but mine is the first issue , the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about .
No sensible reform , and we cannot afford a world , a future , with no sensible reform .
Okay . So how do we do it ?
Turns out , the analytics here are easy , simple .
If the problem is members spending an extraordinary amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America , the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans , to spread it out , to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea of dependence upon the people alone .
And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment , changing the First Amendment .
To do this would require a single statute , a statute establishing what we think of as small dollar funded elections , a statute of citizen-funded campaigns , and there 's any number of these proposals out there : Fair Elections Now Act , the American Anti-Corruption Act , an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project to give vouchers to people to fund elections , an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act .
Each of these would fix this corruption by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us .
The analytics are easy here .
It 's the politics that 's hard , indeed impossibly hard , because this reform would shrink K Street , and Capitol Hill , as Congressman Jim Cooper , a Democrat from Tennessee , put it , has become a farm league for K Street , a farm league for K Street .
Members and staffers and bureaucrats have an increasingly common business model in their head , a business model focused on their life after government , their life as lobbyists .
Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004 left to become lobbyists , 42 percent of the House .
Those numbers have only gone up , and as United Republic calculated last April , the average increase in salary for those who they tracked was 1,452 percent .
So it 's fair to ask , how is it possible for them to change this ?
Now I get this skepticism .
I get this cynicism . I get this sense of impossibility .
But I don 't buy it .
This is a solvable issue .
If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve in the 20th century , issues like racism , or sexism , or the issue that we 've been fighting in this century , homophobia , those are hard issues .
You don 't wake up one day no longer a racist .
It takes generations to tear that intuition , that DNA , out of the soul of a people .
But this is a problem of just incentives , just incentives .
Change the incentives , and the behavior changes , and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems have seen overnight a change in the practice .
When Connecticut adopted this system , in the very first year , 78 percent of elected representatives gave up large contributions and took small contributions only .
It 's solvable , not by being a Democrat , not by being a Republican .
It 's solvable by being citizens , by being citizens , by being TEDizens .
Because if you want to kickstart reform , look , I could kickstart reform at half the price of fixing energy policy , I could give you back a republic .
Okay . But even if you 're not yet with me , even if you believe this is impossible , what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me as I 've spoken about this issue again and again is , even if you think it 's impossible , that is irrelevant .
Irrelevant .
I spoke at Dartmouth once , and a woman stood up after I spoke , I write in my book , and she said to me , " Professor , you 've convinced me this is hopeless . Hopeless .
There 's nothing we can do . "
When she said that , I scrambled .
I tried to think , " How do I respond to that hopelessness ?
What is that sense of hopelessness ? "
And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son .
And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying , " Your son has terminal brain cancer , and there 's nothing you can do .
Nothing you can do . "
So would I do nothing ?
Would I just sit there ? Accept it ? Okay , nothing I can do ?
I 'm going off to build Google Glass .
Of course not . I would do everything I could , and I would do everything I could because this is what love means , that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can , the odds be damned .
And then I saw the obvious link , because even we liberals love this country .
And so when the pundits and the politicians say that change is impossible , what this love of country says back is , " That 's just irrelevant . "
We lose something dear , something everyone in this room loves and cherishes , if we lose this republic , and so we act with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong .
So here 's my question : Do you have that love ?
Do you have that love ?
Because if you do , then what the hell are you , what are the hell are we doing ?
When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787 , he was stopped in the street by a woman who said , " Mr. Franklin , what have you wrought ? "
Franklin said , " A republic , madam , if you can keep it . "
A republic . A representative democracy .
A government dependent upon the people alone .
We have lost that republic .
All of us have to act to get it back .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Gary Greenberg : The beautiful nano details of our world
When photographed under a 3D microscope , grains of sand appear like colorful pieces of candy and the stamens in a flower become like fantastical spires at an amusement park . Gary Greenberg reveals the thrilling details of the micro world .
So I want to talk a little bit about seeing the world from a totally unique point of view , and this world I 'm going to talk about is the micro world .
I 've found , after doing this for many , many years , that there 's a magical world behind reality .
And that can be seen directly through a microscope , and I 'm going to show you some of this today .
So let 's start off looking at something rather not-so-small , something that we can see with our naked eye , and that 's a bee . So when you look at this bee , it 's about this size here , it 's about a centimeter .
But to really see the details of the bee , and really appreciate what it is , you have to look a little bit closer .
So that 's just the eye of the bee with a microscope , and now all of a sudden you can see that the bee has thousands of individual eyes called ommatidia , and they actually have sensory hairs in their eyes so they know when they 're right up close to something , because they can 't see in stereo .
As we go smaller , here is a human hair .
A human hair is about the smallest thing that the eye can see .
It 's about a tenth of a millimeter .
And as we go smaller again , about ten times smaller than that , is a cell .
So you could fit 10 human cells across the diameter of a human hair .
So when we would look at cells , this is how I really got involved in biology and science is by looking at living cells in the microscope .
When I first saw living cells in a microscope , I was absolutely enthralled and amazed at what they looked like .
So if you look at the cell like that from the immune system , they 're actually moving all over the place .
This cell is looking for foreign objects , bacteria , things that it can find .
And it 's looking around , and when it finds something , and recognizes it being foreign , it will actually engulf it and eat it .
So if you look right there , it finds that little bacterium , and it engulfs it and eats it .
If you take some heart cells from an animal , and put it in a dish , they 'll just sit there and beat .
That 's their job . Every cell has a mission in life , and these cells , the mission is to move blood around our body .
These next cells are nerve cells , and right now , as we see and understand what we 're looking at , our brains and our nerve cells are actually doing this right now . They 're not just static . They 're moving around making new connections , and that 's what happens when we learn .
As you go farther down this scale here , that 's a micron , or a micrometer , and we go all the way down to here to a nanometer and an angstrom . Now , an angstrom is the size of the diameter of a hydrogen atom .
That 's how small that is .
And microscopes that we have today can actually see individual atoms . So these are some pictures of individual atoms . Each bump here is an individual atom .
This is a ring of cobalt atoms .
So this whole world , the nano world , this area in here is called the nano world , and the nano world , the whole micro world that we see , there 's a nano world that is wrapped up within that , and the whole -- and that is the world of molecules and atoms .
But I want to talk about this larger world , the world of the micro world .
So if you were a little tiny bug living in a flower , what would that flower look like , if the flower was this big ?
It wouldn 't look or feel like anything that we see when we look at a flower . So if you look at this flower here , and you 're a little bug , if you 're on that surface of that flower , that 's what the terrain would look like .
The petal of that flower looks like that , so the ant is kind of crawling over these objects , and if you look a little bit closer at this stigma and the stamen here , this is the style of that flower , and you notice that it 's got these little -- these are like little jelly-like things that are what are called spurs . These are nectar spurs .
So this little ant that 's crawling here , it 's like it 's in a little Willy Wonka land .
It 's like a little Disneyland for them . It 's not like what we see .
These are little bits of individual grain of pollen there and there , and here is a -- what you see as one little yellow dot of pollen , when you look in a microscope , it 's actually made of thousands of little grains of pollen .
So this , for example , when you see bees flying around these little plants , and they 're collecting pollen , those pollen grains that they 're collecting , they pack into their legs and they take it back to the hive , and that 's what makes the beehive , the wax in the beehive . And they 're also collecting nectar , and that 's what makes the honey that we eat .
Here 's a close-up picture , or this is actually a regular picture of a water hyacinth , and if you had really , really good vision , with your naked eye , you 'd see it about that well .
There 's the stamen and the pistil . But look what the stamen and the pistil look like in a microscope . That 's the stamen .
So that 's thousands of little grains of pollen there , and there 's the pistil there , and these are the little things called trichomes . And that 's what makes the flower give a fragrance , and plants actually communicate with one another through their fragrances .
I want to talk about something really ordinary , just ordinary sand .
I became interested in sand about 10 years ago , when I first saw sand from Maui , and in fact , this is a little bit of sand from Maui .
So sand is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
Each sand grain is about a tenth of a millimeter in size .
But when you look closer at this , look at what 's there .
It 's really quite amazing . You have microshells there .
You have things like coral .
You have fragments of other shells . You have olivine .
You have bits of a volcano . There 's a little bit of a volcano there . You have tube worms .
An amazing array of incredible things exist in sand .
And the reason that is , is because in a place like this island , a lot of the sand is made of biological material because the reefs provide a place where all these microscopic animals or macroscopic animals grow , and when they die , their shells and their teeth and their bones break up and they make grains of sand , things like coral and so forth .
So here 's , for example , a picture of sand from Maui .
This is from Lahaina , and when we 're walking along a beach , we 're actually walking along millions of years of biological and geological history .
We don 't realize it , but it 's actually a record of that entire ecology .
So here we see , for example , a sponge spicule , two bits of coral here , that 's a sea urchin spine . Really some amazing stuff .
So when I first looked at this , I was -- I thought , gee , this is like a little treasure trove here .
I couldn 't believe it , and I 'd go around dissecting the little bits out and making photographs of them .
Here 's what most of the sand in our world looks like .
These are quartz crystals and feldspar , so most sand in the world on the mainland is made of quartz crystal and feldspar . It 's the erosion of granite rock .
So mountains are built up , and they erode away by water and rain and ice and so forth , and they become grains of sand .
There 's some sand that 's really much more colorful .
These are sand from near the Great Lakes , and you can see that it 's filled with minerals like pink garnet and green epidote , all kinds of amazing stuff , and if you look at different sands from different places , every single beach , every single place you look at sand , it 's different . Here 's from Big Sur , like they 're little jewels .
There are places in Africa where they do the mining of jewels , and you go to the sand where the rivers have the sand go down to the ocean , and it 's like literally looking at tiny jewels through the microscope .
So every grain of sand is unique . Every beach is different .
Every single grain is different . There are no two grains of sand alike in the world .
Every grain of sand is coming somewhere and going somewhere .
They 're like a snapshot in time .
Now sand is not only on Earth , but sand is ubiquitous throughout the universe . In fact , outer space is filled with sand , and that sand comes together to make our planets and the Moon .
And you can see those in micrometeorites .
This is some micrometeorites that the Army gave me , and they get these out of the drinking wells in the South Pole .
And they 're quite amazing-looking , and these are the tiny constituents that make up the world that we live in -- the planets and the Moon .
So NASA wanted me to take some pictures of Moon sand , so they sent me sand from all the different landings of the Apollo missions that happened 40 years ago .
And I started taking pictures with my three-dimensional microscopes .
This was the first picture I took . It was kind of amazing .
I thought it looked kind of a little bit like the Moon , which is sort of interesting .
Now , the way my microscopes work is , normally in a microscope you can see very little at one time , so what you have to do is you have to refocus the microscope , keep taking pictures , and then I have a computer program that puts all those pictures together into one picture so you can see actually what it looks like , and I do that in 3D . So there , you can see , is a left-eye view . There 's a right-eye view .
So sort of left-eye view , right-eye view .
Now something 's interesting here . This looks very different than any sand on Earth that I 've ever seen , and I 've seen a lot of sand on Earth , believe me .
Look at this hole in the middle . That hole was caused by a micrometeorite hitting the Moon .
Now , the Moon has no atmosphere , so micrometeorites come in continuously , and the whole surface of the Moon is covered with powder now , because for four billion years it 's been bombarded by micrometeorites , and when micrometeorites come in at about 20 to 60,000 miles an hour , they vaporize on contact .
And you can see here that that is -- that 's sort of vaporized , and that material is holding this little clump of little sand grains together .
This is a very small grain of sand , this whole thing .
And that 's called a ring agglutinate .
And many of the grains of sand on the Moon look like that , and you 'd never find that on Earth .
Most of the sand on the Moon , especially -- and you know when you look at the Moon , there 's the dark areas and the light areas . The dark areas are lava flows . They 're basaltic lava flows , and that 's what this sand looks like , very similar to the sand that you would see in Haleakala .
Other sands , when these micrometeorites come in , they vaporize and they make these fountains , these microscopic fountains that go up into the -- I was going to say " up into the air , " but there is no air -- goes sort of up , and these microscopic glass beads are formed instantly , and they harden , and by the time they fall down back to the surface of the Moon , they have these beautiful colored glass spherules .
And these are actually microscopic ; you need a microscope to see these .
Now here 's a grain of sand that is from the Moon , and you can see that the entire crystal structure is still there .
This grain of sand is probably about three and a half or four billion years old , and it 's never eroded away like the way we have sand on Earth erodes away because of water and tumbling , air , and so forth . All you can see is a little bit of erosion down here by the Sun , has these solar storms , and that 's erosion by solar radiation .
So what I 've been trying to tell you today is things even as ordinary as a grain of sand can be truly extraordinary if you look closely and if you look from a different and a new point of view .
I think that this was best put by William Blake when he said , " To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower , hold infinity in the palm of your hand , and eternity in an hour . "
Thank you .
Edith Widder : The weird , wonderful world of bioluminescence
In the deep , dark ocean , many sea creatures make their own light for hunting , mating and self-defense . Bioluminescence expert Edith Widder was one of the first to film this glimmering world . At TED2011 , she brings some of her glowing friends onstage , and shows more astonishing footage of glowing undersea life .
So I want to take you on a trip to an alien world .
And it 's not a trip that requires light-years of travel , but it 's to a place where it 's defined by light .
So it 's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light .
I 've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence .
I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs .
I also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution .
But mostly I 'm entranced by it .
Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible , when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays , I 've been a bioluminescence junky .
But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words , and they were totally inadequate to the task .
I needed some way to share the experience directly .
And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover .
This next video clip , you 're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence .
And the first thing you 're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across .
In front of the sub , a mess screen will come into contact with the soft-bodied creatures of the deep sea .
With the sub 's lights switched off , it is possible to see their bioluminescence -- the light produced when they collide with the mesh .
This is the first time it has ever been recorded .
Edith Widder : So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye .
Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible .
But just to try to prove that fact to you , I 've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration .
So , if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible , I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it .
And you 'll note there 's no light coming from them right now , either because they 're dead -- or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like .
Oops . Sorry .
I spend most of my time working in the dark ; I 'm used to that .
Okay .
So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate , a single-celled alga .
So why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light ?
Well , it uses it to defend itself from its predators .
The flash is like a scream for help .
It 's what 's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm , and just like the alarm on your car or your house , it 's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder , thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away .
There 's a lot of animals that use this trick , for example this black dragonfish .
It 's got a light organ under its eye .
It 's got a chin barbel .
It 's got a lot of other light organs you can 't see , but you 'll see in here in a minute .
So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime , because the top speed of this fish is one knot , which was the top speed of the submersible .
But it was worth it , because we caught it in a special capture device , brought it up into the lab on the ship , and then everything on this fish lights up .
It 's unbelievable .
The light organs under the eyes are flashing .
That chin barbel is flashing .
It 's got light organs on its belly that are flashing , fin lights .
It 's a scream for help ; it 's meant to attract attention .
It 's phenomenal .
And you normally don 't get to see this because we 've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets .
There 's other ways you can defend yourself with light .
For example , this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud .
This blinds or distracts the predator .
This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this .
Now it may look like a tasty morsel , or a pig 's head with wings -- but if it 's attacked , it puts out a barrage of light -- in fact , a barrage of photon torpedoes .
I just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing .
It 's phenomenal .
So there 's a lot of animals in the open ocean -- most of them that make light .
And we have a pretty good idea , for most of them , why .
They use it for finding food , for attracting mates , for defending against predators .
But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean , that 's where things get really strange .
And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in " Avatar , " but you don 't have to travel to Pandora to see them .
They 're things like this .
This is a golden coral , a bush .
It grows very slowly .
In fact , it 's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old , which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed .
The other reason is this amazing bush glows .
So if you brush up against it , any place you brushed against it , you get this twinkling blue-green light that 's just breathtaking .
And you see things like this .
This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book -- just all manner of creatures all over this thing .
And these are flytrap anemones .
Now if you poke it , it pulls in its tentacles .
But if you keep poking it , it starts to produce light .
And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy .
It produces these strings of light , presumably as some form of defense .
There are starfish that can make light .
And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms .
This looks like a plant , but it 's actually an animal .
And it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock .
So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents , as you see here .
But if we collect it very gently , and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock , it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume , changing color as it goes , from green to blue .
Colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure .
But we have no idea why it does that .
Here 's another one . This is also a sea pen .
It 's got a brittle star hitching a ride .
It 's a green saber of light .
And like the one you just saw , it can produce these as bands of light .
So if I squeeze the base , the bands go from base to tip .
If I squeeze the tip , they go from tip to base .
So what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle ?
I 'd be very interested in your theories about what that 's about .
So there 's a language of light in the deep ocean , and we 're just beginning to understand it , and one way we 're going about that is we 're imitating a lot of these displays .
This is an optical lure that I 've used .
We call it the electronic jellyfish .
It 's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays .
And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that 's invisible to most animals , so it 's unobtrusive .
So I just want to show you some of the responses we 've elicited from animals in the deep sea .
So the camera 's black and white .
It 's not high-resolution .
And what you 're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of -- like the cockroaches of the ocean -- there are isopods all over it .
And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish .
And when it starts flashing , it 's just going to be one of the LEDs that 's flashing very fast .
But as soon as it starts to flash -- and it 's going to look big , because it blooms on the camera -- I want you to look right here .
There 's something small there that responds .
We 're talking to something .
It looks like a little of string pearls basically -- in fact , three strings of pearls .
And this was very consistent .
This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet .
We basically have a chat room going on here , because once it gets started , everybody 's talking .
And I think this is actually a shrimp that 's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water .
But the cool thing is , we 're talking to it .
We don 't know what we 're saying .
Personally , I think it 's something sexy .
And then finally , I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world 's first deep-sea webcam , which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year .
We 've only just begun to analyze all of this data .
This is going to be a glowing source first , which is like bioluminescent bacteria .
And it is an optical cue that there 's carrion on the bottom of the ocean .
So this scavenger comes in , which is a giant sixgill shark .
And I can 't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in , because there 's bait right there .
But if it had been following the odor plume , it would have come in from the other direction .
And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish .
That 's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark .
Okay , so this next one is from the webcam , and it 's going to be this pinwheel display .
And this is a burglar alarm .
And that was a Humboldt squid , a juvenile Humboldt squid , about three feet long .
This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon .
But if it 's a burglar alarm , you wouldn 't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly .
It 's supposed to be attacking what 's attacking the jellyfish .
But we did see a bunch of responses like this .
This guy is a little more contemplative .
" Hey , wait a minute .
There 's supposed to be something else there . "
He 's thinking about it .
But he 's persistent .
He keeps coming back .
And then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more , and thinks , " Maybe if I come in from a different angle . "
Nope .
So we are starting to get a handle on this , but only just the beginnings .
We need more eyes on the process .
So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible , by all means , climb in and take the plunge .
This is something that should be on everybody 's bucket list , because we live on an ocean planet .
More than 90 percent , 99 percent , of the living space on our planet is ocean .
It 's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures , alien life forms that you don 't have to travel to another planet to see .
But if you do take the plunge , please remember to turn out the lights .
But I warn you , it 's addictive .
Thank you .
Vusi Mahlasela : " Thula Mama "
South African singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela dedicates his song , " Thula Mama , " to all women -- and especially his grandmother .
I 'd like to dedicate this one to all the women in South Africa -- those women who refused to dwindle in the midst of apartheid .
And , of course , I 'm dedicating it also to my grandmother , whom I think really played quite a lot of important roles , especially for me when I was an activist , and being harassed by the police .
You will recall that in 1976 , June 16 , the students of South Africa boycotted the language of Afrikaans as the medium of the oppressor , as they were sort of like really told that they must do everything in Afrikaans -- biology , mathematics -- and what about our languages ?
And the students wanted to speak to the government , and police answered with bullets .
So every year , June 16 , we will commemorate all those comrades or students who died .
And I was very young then . I think I was 11 years , and I started asking questions , and that 's when my political education started .
And I joined , later on , the youth organization under the African National Congress .
So as part of organizing this and whatever , this commemoration , the police will round us up as they call us leaders .
And I used to run away from home , when I know that maybe the police might be coming around the ninth or 10th of June or so .
And my grandmother one time said , " No , look , you 're not going to run away .
This is your place , you stay here . "
And indeed , the police came -- because they 'll just arrest us and put us in jail and release us whenever they feel like , after the 20th or so .
So it was on the 10th of June , and they came , and they surrounded the house , and my grandmother switched off all the lights in the house , and opened the kitchen door .
And she said to them , " Vusi 's here , and you 're not going to take him tonight .
I 'm tired of you having to come here , harassing us , while your children are sleeping peacefully in your homes .
He is here , and you 're not going to take him .
I 've got a bowl full of boiling water -- the first one who comes in here , gets it . "
And they left .
Thula Mama , Thula Mama , Thula Mama , Thula Mama . Through the mist of the tears in your eyes on my childhood memory , I know the truth in your smile , I know the truth in your smile , piercing through the gloom of my ignorance . Oh , there is a mama lying down sleeping you 're very ill and your heart crying . Wondering , wondering , wondering , wondering where is this world coming to . Is it right the children have to fend for themselves ? No , no , no , no , no. no . Is it right heaping trouble on an old lady 's head ? So unlucky faceless people . Thula Mama Mama , Thula Mama . Thula Mama Mama . Thula Mama , Thula Mama , Thula Mama Mama , Thula Mama Tomorrow it 's going to be better . Tomorrow it 's going to be better to climb , Mama . Thula Mama , Thula Mama . Am I to break into the song like the blues man or troubadour . And then from long distance in no blues club am I to sing , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby , baby . Should I now stop singing of love , now that my memory 's surrounded by blood ? Sister , why oh why do we at times mistake a pimple for a cancer ? So who are they who says , no more love poems now ? I want to sing a song of love for that woman who jumped the fences pregnant and still gave birth to a healthy child . Softly I walk into the sun rays of the smile that will ignite my love song , my song of life , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love , my song of life . Ooh , I 've not tried to run away from song , I hear a persistent voice , more powerful than the enemy bombs . The song that washed our lives and the rains of our blood . My song of love and my song of life , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love -- I want everybody to sing with me -- my song of life , my song of love , my song of life -- everybody sing with me -- my song of life , my song of love -- I can 't hear you -- my song of love , my song of life -- you can do better -- my song of life , my song of love -- keep singing , keep singing -- my song of love , my song of life , yes , my song of love -- you can do better than that -- my song of life , yes , my song of love , my song of life , my song of love -- keep singing , keep singing , keep singing -- my song of love . Oh yeah . My song of -- a love song , my song of life . Sing . A love song , my song of life . Sing . Love song , my song of life . Sing . Love song , my song of life . Sing . Love song , my song of life . Sing . Love song , my song of life . Love song , my song of life .
Gary Lauder 's new traffic sign : Take Turns
Fifty percent of traffic accidents happen at intersections . Gary Lauder shares a brilliant and cheap idea for helping drivers move along smoothly : a new traffic sign that combines the properties of " Stop " and " Yield . "
I only have three minutes so I 'm going to have to talk fast , and it will use up your spare mental cycles , so multitasking may be hard .
So , 27 years ago I got a traffic ticket that got me thinking .
I 've had some time to think it over .
And energy efficiency is more than just about the vehicle -- it 's also about the road .
Road design makes a difference , particularly intersections , of which there are two types : signalized and unsignalized , which means stop signs .
Fifty percent of crashes happen at intersections .
Roundabouts are much better .
A study of 24 intersections has found crashes drop 40 percent from when you convert a traffic light into a roundabout .
Injury crashes have dropped 76 percent , fatal crashes down 90 percent .
But that 's just safety .
What about time and gas ?
So , traffic keeps flowing , so that means less braking , which means less accelerating , less gas and less pollution , less time wasted , and that partly accounts for Europe 's better efficiency than we have in the United States .
So , unsignalized intersections , meaning stop signs , they save many lives , but there 's an excessive proliferation of them .
Small roundabouts are starting to appear .
This is one in my neighborhood . And they are much better -- better than traffic lights , better than four-way stop signs .
They 're expensive to install , but they are more expensive not to . So , we should look at that .
But they are not applicable in all situations .
So , take , for example , the three-way intersection .
So , it 's logical that you 'd have one there , on the minor road entering the major .
But the other two are somewhat questionable .
So , here 's one . There 's another one which I studied .
Cars rarely appear on that third road .
And so , the question is , what does that cost us ?
That intersection I looked at had about 3,000 cars per day in each direction , and so that 's two ounces of gas to accelerate out of .
That 's five cents each , and times 3,000 cars per day , that 's $ 51,000 per year .
That 's just the gasoline cost . There is also pollution , wear on the car , and time .
What 's that time worth ?
Well , at 10 seconds per 3,000 cars , that 's 8.3 hours per day . The average wage in the U.S.
is $ 20 an hour . That is 60,000 per year .
Add that together with the gas , and it 's $ 112,000 per year , just for that sign in each direction .
Discount that back to the present , at five percent : over two million dollars for a stop sign , in each direction .
Now , if you look at what that adjacent property is worth , you could actually buy the property , cut down the shrubbery to improve the sight line , and then sell it off again .
And you 'd still come out ahead .
So , it makes one wonder , " Why is it there ? "
I mean , why is there that stop sign in each direction ?
Because it is saving lives . So , is there a better way to accomplish that goal ?
The answer is to enable cars to come in from that side road safely .
Because there are a lot of people who might live up there and if they 're waiting forever a long queue could form because the cars aren 't slowing down on the main road .
Can that be accomplished with existing signs ?
So , there is a long history of stop signs and yield signs .
Stop signs were invented in 1915 , yield signs in 1950 . But that 's all we got .
So , why not use a yield sign ?
Well the meaning of yield is : You must yield the right-of-way .
That means that if there are five cars waiting , you have to wait till they all go , then you go . It lacks the notion of alternating , or taking turns , and it 's always on the minor road , allowing the major one to have primacy .
So , it 's hard to create a new meaning for the existing sign .
You couldn 't suddenly tell everyone , " OK , remember what you used to do at yield signs ? Now do something different . "
That would not work .
So , what the world needs now is a new type of sign .
So , you 'd have a little instruction below it , you know , for those who didn 't see the public service announcements .
And it merges the stop sign and yield signs .
It 's kind of shaped like a T , as in taking turns .
And uncertainty results in caution .
When people come to an unfamiliar situation they don 't know how to deal with they slow down .
So , now that you are all " Road Scholars " ...
don 't wait for that sign to be adopted , these things don 't change quickly .
But you all are members of communities , and you can exercise your community influence to create more sensible traffic flows .
And you can have more impact on the environment just getting your neighborhood to change these things than by changing your vehicle . Thank you very much .
Maira Kalman : The illustrated woman
Author and illustrator Maira Kalman talks about her life and work , from her covers for The New Yorker to her books for children and grown-ups . She is as wonderful , as wise and as deliciously off-kilter in person as she is on paper .
What I am always thinking about is what this session is about , which is called simplicity .
And almost , I would almost call it being simple-minded , but in the best sense of the word .
I 'm trying to figure out two very simple things : how to live and how to die , period .
That 's all I 'm trying to do , all day long .
And I 'm also trying to have some meals , and have some snacks , and , you know , and yell at my children , and do all the normal things that keep you grounded .
So , I was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child .
My older sister was busy torturing my parents , and they were busy torturing her .
I was lucky enough to be completely ignored , which is a fabulous thing , actually , I want to tell you .
So , I was able to completely daydream my way through my life .
And I finally daydreamed my way into NYU , at a very good time , in 1967 , where I met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of NYU .
And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him .
And feminists hated us , and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end .
But I kept writing bad poetry , and he didn 't blow up the math building , but he went to Cuba .
But I gave him the money , because I was from Riverdale so I had more money than he did .
And that was a good thing to help , you know , the cause .
But , then he came back , and things happened , and I decided I really hated my writing , that it was awful , awful , purple prose .
And I decided that I wanted to tell -- but I still wanted to tell a narrative story and I still wanted to tell my stories .
So I decided that I would start to draw . How hard could that be ?
And so what happened was that I started just becoming an editorial illustrator through , you know , sheer whatever , sheer ignorance .
And we started a studio .
Well , Tibor really started the studio , called M & amp ; Co .
And the premise of M & amp ; Co was , we don 't know anything , but that 's all right , we 're going to do it anyway .
And as a matter of fact , it 's better not to know anything , because if you know too much , you 're stymied .
So , the premise in the studio was , there are no boundaries , there is no fear .
And I -- and my full-time job , I landed the best job on Earth , was to daydream , and to actually come up with absurd ideas that -- fortunately , there were enough people there , and it was a team , it was a collective , it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas .
But the point was that I was there as myself , as a dreamer .
And so some of the things -- I mean , it was a long history of M & amp ; Co , and clearly we also needed to make some money , so we decided we would create a series of products .
And some of the watches there , attempting to be beautiful and humorous -- maybe not attempting , hopefully succeeding .
That to be able to talk about content , to break apart what you normally expect , to use humor and surprise , elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us .
It was a very high , it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say , the content is what 's important , not the package , not the wrapping .
You really have to be journalists , you have to be inventors , you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything .
So , the good news is that I have a dog and , though I don 't know if I believe in luck -- I don 't know what I believe in , it 's a very complicated question , but I do know that before I go away , I crank his tail seven times .
So , whenever he sees a suitcase in the house , because everybody 's always , you know , leaving , they 're always cranking this wonderful dog 's tail , and he runs to the other room .
But I am able to make the transition from working for children and -- from working for adults to children , and back and forth , because , you know , I can say that I 'm immature , and in a way , that 's true .
I don 't really -- I mean , I could tell you that I didn 't understand , I 'm not proud of it , but I didn 't understand let 's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference .
But I have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and I have a gorgeous onion from Murray Gell-Mann 's talk .
And I have a beautiful page of doodles from Jonathan Woodham 's talk .
So , good things come out of , you know , incomprehension -- -- which I will do a painting of , and then it will end up in my work .
So , I 'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new .
So , in writing for children , it seems simple , and it is .
You have to condense a story into 32 pages , usually .
And what you have to do is , you really have to edit down to what you want to say .
And hopefully , you 're not talking down to kids and you 're not talking in such a way that you , you know , couldn 't stand reading it after one time .
So , I hopefully am writing , you know , books that are good for children and for adults .
But the painting reflects -- I don 't think differently for children than I do for adults .
I try to use the same kind of imagination , the same kind of whimsy , the same kind of love of language .
So , you know , and I have lots of wonderful-looking friends .
This is Andrew Gatz , and he walked in through the door and I said , " You ! Sit down there . " You know , I take lots of photos .
And the Bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair .
So , I get to put in all of the things that I love .
Hopefully , a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels , and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve .
And the books are really journals of my life .
I never -- I don 't like plots .
I don 't know what a plot means .
I can 't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning , you know , beginning , middle and end . It really scares me , because my life is too random and too confused , and I enjoy it that way .
But anyway , so we were in Venice , and this is our room . And I had this dream that I was wearing this fantastic green gown , and I was looking out the window , and it was really a beautiful thing .
And so , I was able to put that into this story , which is an alphabet , and hopefully go on to something else .
The letter C had other things in it .
I was fortunate also , to meet the man who 's sitting on the bed , though I gave him hair over here and he doesn 't have hair .
Well , he has some hair but -- well , he used to have hair .
And with him , I was able to do a project that was really fantastic .
I work for the New Yorker , and I do covers , and 9 / 11 happened and it was , you know , a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it .
And Rick and I were on our way to a party in the Bronx , and somebody said Bronxistan , and somebody said Ferreristan , and we came up with this New Yorker cover , which we were able to -- we didn 't know what we were doing .
We weren 't trying to be funny , we weren 't trying to be -- well , we were trying to be funny actually , that 's not true .
We hoped we 'd be funny , but we didn 't know it would be a cover , and we didn 't know that that image , at the moment that it happened , would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people .
And it really became the -- I don 't know , you know , it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on .
And from , you know , Fattushis , to Taxistan to , you know , for the Fashtoonks , Botoxia , Pashmina , Khlintunisia , you know , we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign , who are -- what 's going on over here ?
Who are these people ? What are these tribes ?
And David Remnick , who was really wonderful about it , had one problem . He didn 't like Al Zheimers , because he thought it would insult people with Alzheimer 's .
But you know , we said , " David , who 's going to know ?
They 're not . "
So it stayed in , and it was , and , you know , it was a good thing .
You know , in the course of my life , I never know what 's going to happen and that 's kind of the beauty part .
And we were on Cape Cod , a place , obviously , of great inspiration , and I picked up this book , " The Elements of Style , " at a yard sale .
And I didn 't -- and I 'd never used it in school , because I was too busy writing poems , and flunking out , and I don 't know what , sitting in cafes .
But I picked it up and I started reading it and I thought , this book is amazing .
I said , people should know about this book .
So I decided it needed a few -- it needed a lift , it needed a few illustrations .
And basically , I called the , you know , I convinced the White Estate , and what an intersection of like , you know , Polish Jew , you know , main WASP family . Here I am , saying , I 'd like to do something to this book .
And they said yes , and they left me completely alone , which was a gorgeous , wonderful thing .
And I took the examples that they gave , and just did 56 paintings , basically .
So , this is , I don 't know if you can read this .
" Well , Susan , this is a fine mess you are in . "
And when you 're dealing with grammar , which is , you know , incredibly dry , E.B. White wrote such wonderful , whimsical -- and actually , Strunk -- and then you come to the rules and , you know , there are lots of grammar things . " Do you mind me asking a question ?
Do you mind my asking a question ? "
" Would , could , should , or would , should , could . "
And " would " is Coco Chanel 's lover , " should " is Edith Sitwell , and " could " is an August Sander subject .
And , " He noticed a large stain in the center of the rug . "
So , there 's a kind of British understatement , murder-mystery theme that I really love very much .
And then , " Be obscure clearly ! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand . "
E.B. White wrote us a number of rules , which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time , or you can ignore them , which I do , or you can , I don 't know what , you know , eat a sandwich .
So , what I did when I was painting was I started singing , because I really adore singing , and I think that music is the highest form of all art .
So , I commissioned a wonderful composer , Nico Muhly , who wrote nine songs using the text , and we performed this fantastic evening of -- he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals .
I played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the New York Public Library , where you 're supposed to be very , very quiet , and it was a phenomenally wonderful event , which we hopefully will do some more .
Who knows ? The New York TimesSelect , the op-ed page , asked me to do a column , and they said , you can do whatever you want .
So , once a month for the last year , I 've been doing a column called " The Principles of Uncertainty , " which , you know , I don 't know who Heisenberg is , but I know I can throw that around now . You know , it 's the principles of uncertainty , so , you know .
I 'm going to read quickly -- and probably I 'm going to edit some , because I don 't have that much time left -- a few of the columns .
And basically , I was so , you know , it was so amusing , because I said , " Well , how much space do I have ? "
And they said , " Well , you know , it 's the Internet . "
And I said , " Yes , but how much space do I have ? "
And they said , " It 's unlimited , it 's unlimited . "
OK . So , the first one I was very timid , and I 'll begin .
" How can I tell you everything that is in my heart ?
Impossible to begin . Enough . No . Begin with the hapless dodo . "
And I talk about the dodo , and how the dodo became extinct , and then I talk about Spinoza .
" As the last dodo was dying , Spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything , called eudaemonia .
And then he breathed his last , with loved ones around him , and I know that he had chicken soup also , as his last meal . "
I happen to know it for a fact .
And then he died , and there was no more Spinoza . Extinct .
And then , we don 't have a stuffed Spinoza , but we do have a stuffed Pavlov 's dog , and I visited him in the Museum of Hygiene in St. Petersburg , in Russia .
And there he is , with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic , decrepit palace .
" And I think it must have been a very , very dark day when the Bolsheviks arrived .
Maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs , but Stalin was a paranoid man , even more than my father . "
You don 't even know .
" And decided his top people had to be extinctified . "
Which I think I made up , which is a good thing .
And so , this is a chart of , you know , just a small chart , because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed .
So , shot dead , smacked over the head , you know , thrown away .
" Nabokov 's family fled Russia . How could the young Nabokov , sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair , leafing through a book and butterflies , imagine such displacement , such loss ? "
And then I want to tell you that this is a map .
So , " My beautiful mother 's family fled Russia as well .
Too many pogroms .
Leaving the shack , the wild blueberry woods , the geese , the River Sluch , they went to Palestine and then America . "
And my mother drew this map for me of the United States of America , and that is my DNA over here , because that person who I grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever .
Facts were actually banished from our home .
And so , if you see that Texas -- you know , Texas and California are under Canada , and that South Carolina is on top of North Carolina , this is the home that I grew up in , OK ?
So , it 's a miracle that I 'm here today .
But actually , it 's not . It 's actually a wonderful thing .
But then she says Tel Aviv and Lenin , which is the town they came from , and , " Sorry , the rest unknown , thank you . "
But in her lexicon , " sorry , the rest unknown , thank you " is " sorry , the rest unknown , go to hell , " because she couldn 't care less .
" The Impossibility of February " is that February 's a really wretched month in New York and the images for me conjure up these really awful things .
Well , not so awful .
I received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead .
And I say , " I hope he 's not really dead , just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow , but the caption says he is dead . "
And actually , he was . I think he 's dead , though I don 't know , maybe he 's not dead .
" And this woman leans over in anguish , not about that man , but about all sad things . It happens quite often in February . "
There 's consoling .
This man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase , and basically -- you know , I guess onions are a theme here .
And he says , " It is impossible not to lie .
It is February and not lying is impossible . "
And I really spend a lot of time wondering , how much truth do we tell ?
What is it that we 're actually -- what story are we actually telling ?
How do we know when we are ourselves ?
How do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories , you know , are real sentences ?
Or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying ?
I 'm going to quickly go through this .
A quote by Bertrand Russell , " All the labor of all the ages , all the devotion , all the inspiration , all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction .
So now , my friends , if that is true , and it is true , what is the point ? "
A complicated question .
And so , you know , I talk to my friends and I go to plays where they 're singing Russian songs .
Oh my God , you know what ?
Could we have -- no , we don 't have time .
I taped my aunt . I taped my aunt singing a song in Russian from the -- you know , could we have it for a second ?
Do you have that ?
OK . I taped my -- my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85 .
So -- and that 's a song about how everybody 's miserable because , you know , we 're from Russia .
I went to visit Kitty Carlisle Hart , and she is 96 , and when I brought her a copy of " The Elements of Style , " she said she would treasure it .
And then I said -- oh , and she was talking about Moss Hart , and I said , " When you met him , you knew it was him . "
And she said , " I knew it was he . "
So , I was the one who should have kept the book , but it was a really wonderful moment .
And she dated George Gershwin , so , you know , get out .
Gershwin died at the age of 38 .
He 's buried in the same cemetery as my husband .
I don 't want to talk about that now .
I do want to talk -- the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the Barricini family mausoleum nearby .
I think the Barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate .
And I would like to run it for them .
And I went to visit Louise Bourgeoise , who 's also still working , and I looked at her sink , which is really amazing , and left .
And then I photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street .
And a woman who lives on our street , Lolita .
And then I go and have some tea .
And then my Aunt Frances dies , and before she died , she tried to pay with Sweet 'N Low packets for her bagel .
And I wonder what the point is and then I know , and I see that Hy Meyerowitz , Rick Meyerowitz 's father , a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the Bronx , won the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in 1931 .
That 's actually Hy .
And I look at a beautiful bowl of fruit , and I look at a dress that I sewed for friends of mine .
And it says , " Ich habe genug , " which is a Bach cantata , which I once thought meant " I 've had it , I can 't take it anymore , give me a break , " but I was wrong .
It means " I have enough . " And that is utterly true .
I happen to be alive , end of discussion . Thank you .
Gabe Barcia-Colombo : My DNA vending machine
Vending machines generally offer up sodas , candy bars and chips . Not so for the one created by TED Fellow Gabe Barcia-Colombo . This artist has dreamed up a DNA Vending Machine , which dispenses extracted human DNA , packaged in a vial along with a collectible photo of the person who gave it . It 's charming and quirky , but points out larger ethical issues that will arise as access to biotechnology increases .
This is a vending machine in Los Angeles .
It 's in a shopping mall , and it sells fish eggs .
It 's a caviar vending machine .
This is the Art-o-mat , an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists , usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes , in limited edition .
This is Oliver Medvedik . He 's not a vending machine , but he is one of the founders of Genspace , a community biolab in Brooklyn , New York , where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA .
In fact , I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago , and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I 'm going to talk to you right now .
Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating , because it 's so beautiful .
I 'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before , before I saw it in this form .
And a lot of people , especially in the art community , don 't necessarily engage in science in this way .
I instantly joined Genspace after this , and I asked Oliver , " Well , if we can do this strawberries , can we do this with people as well ? "
And about 10 minutes later , we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction .
And I started doing this on my own , and this is what my DNA actually looks like .
And I was at a dinner party with some friends , some artist friends , and I was telling them about this project , and they couldn 't believe that you could actually see DNA .
So I said , all right , let 's get out some supplies right now .
And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions , and I would actually capture them on video , because it created this kind of funny portrait as well .
These are people who don 't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever .
You can kind of tell from their reactions .
But they became fascinated by it , and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science .
And so I started doing this regularly .
It 's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights , but this is what I started doing , and I started collecting a whole group of my friends ' DNA in small vials and categorizing them .
This is what that looked like .
And it started to make me think about a couple of things .
First of all , this looked a lot like my Facebook wall .
So in a way , I 've created sort of a genetic network , a genetic social network , really .
And the second thing was , one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like , " Oh .
Why are they numbered ? Is this person more rare than the other one ? "
And I hadn 't even thought about that .
They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in .
But that made me think about collecting toys , and this thing that 's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys , and being able to collect these rare toys .
You buy these boxes . You 're not sure what 's going to be inside of them .
But then , when you open them up , you have different rarities of the toys .
And so I thought that was interesting .
I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together , and some reason , I was one night drawing a vending machine , thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine , and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there , and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine .
And so , of course , I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine .
Here it is .
[ " DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology . " ] [ " For a reasonable cost , you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine . " ] [ " Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen . " ] [ " DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA . " ] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo : So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York , and it 's selling out pretty well , actually .
We 're in the first edition of 100 pieces , hoping to do another edition pretty soon .
I 'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub , like Grand Central or Penn Station , right next to some of the other , actual vending machines in that location .
But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question , and that is , when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as , say , laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine , will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine ?
And how much will these samples be worth ?
And will you buy someone else 's sample ?
And what will you be able to do with that sample ?
Thank you .
Dan Dennett : The illusion of consciousness
Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don 't we understand our own consciousness , but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us .
So I 'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that 's that I 'm a philosopher .
When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say , " I 'm a professor , " their eyes glaze over .
When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around , they ask me what field I 'm in and I say , " philosophy " -- their eyes glaze over .
When I go to a philosopher 's party and they ask me what I work on and I say , " consciousness , " their eyes don 't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl .
And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think , " That 's impossible ! You can 't explain consciousness . "
The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question .
My late , lamented friend Bob Nozick , a fine philosopher , in one of his books , " Philosophical Explanations , " is commenting on the ethos of philosophy -- the way philosophers go about their business .
And he says , you know , " Philosophers love rational argument . "
And he says , " It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion , and if they don 't accept the conclusion , they die .
Their heads explode . " The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents .
But in fact that doesn 't change people 's minds at all .
It 's very hard to change people 's minds about something like consciousness , and I finally figured out the reason for that .
The reason for that is that everybody 's an expert on consciousness .
We heard the other day that everybody 's got a strong opinion about video games .
They all have an idea for a video game , even if they 're not experts .
But they don 't consider themselves experts on video games ; they 've just got strong opinions .
I 'm sure that people here who work on , say , climate change and global warming , or on the future of the Internet , encounter people who have very strong opinions about what 's going to happen next .
But they probably don 't think of these opinions as expertise .
They 're just strongly held opinions .
But with regard to consciousness , people seem to think , each of us seems to think , " I am an expert .
Simply by being conscious , I know all about this . "
And so , you tell them your theory and they say , " No , no , that 's not the way consciousness is !
No , you 've got it all wrong . "
And they say this with an amazing confidence .
And so what I 'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence . Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself .
I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are , yourselves , authoritative about your own consciousness .
That 's the order of the day here .
Now , this nice picture shows a thought-balloon , a thought-bubble .
I think everybody understands what that means .
That 's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness .
This is my favorite picture of consciousness that 's ever been done .
It 's a Saul Steinberg of course -- it was a New Yorker cover .
And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque .
That reminds him of the word baroque , barrack , bark , poodle , Suzanne R. -- he 's off to the races .
There 's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along , you learn a lot about this man .
What I particularly like about this picture , too , is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style .
Which reminds us , as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday : what we are , what each of us is -- what you are , what I am -- is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots .
That 's what we 're made of .
No other ingredients at all . We 're just made of cells , about 100 trillion of them .
Not a single one of those cells is conscious ; not a single one of those cells knows who you are , or cares .
Somehow , we have to explain how when you put together teams , armies , battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells -- not so different really from a bacterium , each one of them -- the result is this . I mean , just look at it .
The content -- there 's color , there 's ideas , there 's memories , there 's history . And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons .
How is that possible ? Many people just think it isn 't possible at all .
They think , " No , there can 't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness . "
This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel , who 's a professor of religion , actually , at the University of Hawaii , and he 's an expert magician , and an expert on the street magic of India , which is what this book is about , " Net of Magic . "
And there 's a passage in it which I would love to share with you .
It speaks so eloquently to the problem .
" ' I 'm writing a book on magic , ' I explain , and I 'm asked , ' Real magic ? ' By ' real magic , ' people mean miracles , thaumaturgical acts , and supernatural powers .
'No , ' I answer . ' Conjuring tricks , not real magic . ' ' Real magic , ' in other words , refers to the magic that is not real ; while the magic that is real , that can actually be done , is not real magic . "
Now , that 's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness .
Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks .
If you 're going to explain this as a bag of tricks , then it 's not real consciousness , whatever it is .
And , as Marvin said , and as other people have said , " Consciousness is a bag of tricks . "
This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness .
So this is the problem . So I have to that a lot of you won 't like , for the same reason that you don 't like to see a magic trick explained to you .
How many of you here , if somebody -- some smart aleck -- starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done , you sort of want to block your ears and say , " No , no , I don 't want to know !
Don 't take the thrill of it away . I 'd rather be mystified .
Don 't tell me the answer . "
A lot of people feel that way about consciousness , I 've discovered .
And I 'm sorry if I impose some clarity , some understanding on you .
You 'd better leave now if you don 't want to know some of these tricks .
But I 'm not going to explain it all to you .
I 'm going to do what philosophers do .
Here 's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick .
You know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick ?
The philosopher says , " I 'm going to explain to you how that 's done .
You see , the magician doesn 't really saw the lady in half . "
" He merely makes you think that he does . "
And you say , " Yes , and how does he do that ? "
He says , " Oh , that 's not my department , I 'm sorry . "
So now I 'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness .
But I 'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn 't quite as marvelous -- your own consciousness isn 't quite as wonderful -- as you may have thought it is .
This is something , by the way , that Lee Siegel talks about in his book .
He marvels at how he 'll do a magic show , and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X , Y , and Z. He never did those things .
He didn 't even try to do those things .
People 's memories inflate what they think they saw .
And the same is true of consciousness .
Now , let 's see if this will work . All right . Let 's just watch this .
Watch it carefully .
I 'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named Nick Deamer , and this is a little demo that he 's done for me , part of a larger project some of you may be interested in .
We 're looking for a backer .
It 's a feature-length documentary on consciousness .
OK , now , you all saw what changed , right ?
How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color ?
Every one . I 'll just show you by running it again .
Even when you know that they 're all going to change color , it 's very hard to notice . You have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all .
Now , this is an example -- one of many -- of a phenomenon that 's now being studied quite a bit .
It 's one that I predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book , " Consciousness Explained , " where I said if you did experiments of this sort , you 'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes .
If there 's time at the end , I 'll show you the much more dramatic case .
Now , how can it be that there are all those changes going on , and that we 're not aware of them ?
Well , earlier today , Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades , the way your eye moves around three or four times a second .
He didn 't mention the speed . Your eye is constantly in motion , moving around , looking at eyes , noses , elbows , looking at interesting things in the world .
And where your eye isn 't looking , you 're remarkably impoverished in your vision .
That 's because the foveal part of your eye , which is the high-resolution part , is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length .
That 's the detail part .
It doesn 't seem that way , does it ?
It doesn 't seem that way , but that 's the way it is .
You 're getting in a lot less information than you think .
Here 's a completely different effect . This is a painting by Bellotto .
It 's in the museum in North Carolina .
Bellotto was a student of Canaletto 's .
And I love paintings like that -- the painting is actually about as big as it is right here .
And I love Canalettos , because Canaletto has this fantastic detail , and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting .
And I started across the hall in North Carolina , because I thought it was probably a Canaletto , and would have all that in detail .
And I noticed that on the bridge there , there 's a lot of people -- you can just barely see them walking across the bridge .
And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people , see their clothes , and so forth .
And as I got closer and closer , I actually screamed .
I yelled out because when I got closer , I found the detail wasn 't there at all .
There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint .
And as I walked towards the picture , I was expecting detail that wasn 't there .
The artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things , and my brain had taken the suggestion .
You 're familiar with a more recent technology , which is -- There , you can get a better view of the blobs .
See , when you get close they 're really just blobs of paint .
You will have seen something like this -- this is the reverse effect .
I 'll just give that to you one more time .
Now , what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion ?
When an artful blob of paint or two , by an artist , suggests a person -- say , one of Marvin Minsky 's little society of mind -- do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere ?
I don 't think so . Not a chance . But then , how on Earth is it done ?
Well , remember the philosopher 's explanation of the lady ?
It 's the same thing .
The brain just makes you think that it 's got the detail there .
You think the detail 's there , but it isn 't there .
The brain isn 't actually putting the detail in your head at all .
It 's just making you expect the detail .
Let 's just do this experiment very quickly .
Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right , rotated ?
Yes .
How many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind 's eye , to see if it matched up with the one on the right ?
How many of you rotated the one on the right ? OK .
How do you know that 's what you did ?
There 's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science -- various experiments started by Roger Shepherd , who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images .
Yes , it 's possible to do that .
But the details of the process are still in significant controversy .
And if you read that literature , one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you 're the subject in the experiment , you don 't know .
You don 't know how you do it .
You just know that you have certain beliefs .
And they come in a certain order , at a certain time .
And what explains the fact that that 's what you think ?
Well , that 's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician .
This is a figure that I love : Bradley , Petrie , and Dumais .
You may think that I 've cheated , that I 've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there .
How many of you see that sort of boundary , with the Necker cube floating in front of the circles ?
Can you see it ?
Well , you know , in effect , the boundary 's really there , in a certain sense .
Your brain is actually computing that boundary , the boundary that goes right there .
But now , notice there are two ways of seeing the cube , right ?
It 's a Necker cube .
Everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube ? OK .
Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube ?
Because there 's another way of seeing it .
If you 're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles , some black circles , there 's another way of seeing it .
As a cube , on a black background , as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese .
Can you get it ? How many of you can 't get it ? That 'll help .
Now you can get it . These are two very different phenomena .
When you see the cube one way , behind the screen , those boundaries go away .
But there 's still a sort of filling in , as we can tell if we look at this .
We don 't have any trouble seeing the cube , but where does the color change ?
Does your brain have to send little painters in there ?
The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who 's going to paint that bit behind the curtain ? No .
Your brain just lets it go . The brain doesn 't need to fill that in .
When I first started talking about the Bradley , Petrie , Dumais example that you just saw -- I 'll go back to it , this one -- I said that there was no filling-in behind there .
And I supposed that that was just a flat truth , always true .
But Rob Van Lier has recently shown that it isn 't .
Now , if you think you see some pale yellow -- I 'll run this a few more times .
Look in the gray areas , and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there -- yeah , it 's amazing . There 's nothing there . It 's no trick .
[ " Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes " slide ] This is Ron Rensink 's work , which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book .
Let me just pause this for a second if I can .
This is change-blindness .
What you 're going to see is two pictures , one of which is slightly different from the other .
You see here the red roof and the gray roof , and in between them there will be a mask , which is just a blank screen , for about a quarter of a second .
So you 'll see the first picture , then a mask , then the second picture , then a mask .
And this will just continue , and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change .
So , show the original picture for 240 milliseconds . Blank .
Show the next picture for 240 milliseconds . Blank .
And keep going , until the subject presses the button , saying , " I see the change . "
So now we 're going to be subjects in the experiment .
We 're going to start easy . Some examples .
No trouble there .
Can everybody see ? All right .
Indeed , Rensink 's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button .
Can you see that one ?
2.9 seconds .
How many don 't see it still ?
What 's on the roof of that barn ?
It 's easy .
Is it a bridge or a dock ?
There are a few more really dramatic ones , and then I 'll close .
I want you to see a few that are particularly striking .
This one because it 's so large and yet it 's pretty hard to see .
Can you see it ?
Audience : Yes .
Dan Dennett : See the shadows going back and forth ? Pretty big .
So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there .
I love this one . I 'll end with this one , just because it 's such an obvious and important thing .
How many still don 't see it ? How many still don 't see it ?
How many engines on the wing of that Boeing ?
Right in the middle of the picture !
Thanks very much for your attention .
What I wanted to show you is that scientists , using their from-the-outside , third-person methods , can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of , and that , in fact , you 're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are .
And we 're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind .
Jeff Hawkins , this morning , was describing his attempt to get theory , and a good , big theory , into the neuroscience .
And he 's right . This is a problem .
Harvard Medical School once -- I was at a talk -- director of the lab said , " In our lab , we have a saying .
If you work on one neuron , that 's neuroscience .
If you work on two neurons , that 's psychology . "
We have to have more theory , and it can come as much from the top down .
Thank you very much .
Danny Hillis : The Internet could crash . We need a Plan B
In the 1970s and 1980s , a generous spirit suffused the Internet , whose users were few and far between . But today , the net is ubiquitous , connecting billions of people , machines and essential pieces of infrastructure -- leaving us vulnerable to cyber-attack or meltdown . Internet pioneer Danny Hillis argues that the Internet wasn 't designed for this kind of scale , and sounds a clarion call for us to develop a Plan B : a parallel system to fall back on if -- or when -- the Internet crashes .
So , this book that I have in my hand is a directory of everybody who had an email address in 1982 .
Actually , it 's deceptively large .
There 's actually only about 20 people on each page , because we have the name , address and telephone number of every single person .
And , in fact , everybody 's listed twice , because it 's sorted once by name and once by email address .
Obviously a very small community .
There were only two other Dannys on the Internet then .
I knew them both .
We didn 't all know each other , but we all kind of trusted each other , and that basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network , and there was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things .
So just to give you an idea of the level of trust in this community , let me tell you what it was like to register a domain name in the early days .
Now , it just so happened that I got to register the third domain name on the Internet .
So I could have anything I wanted other than bbn.com and symbolics.com.
So I picked think.com , but then I thought , you know , there 's a lot of really interesting names out there .
Maybe I should register a few extras just in case .
And then I thought , " Nah , that wouldn 't be very nice . "
That attitude of only taking what you need was really what everybody had on the network in those days , and in fact , it wasn 't just the people on the network , but it was actually kind of built into the protocols of the Internet itself .
So the basic idea of I.P. , or Internet protocol , and the way that the -- the routing algorithm that used it , were fundamentally " from each according to their ability , to each according to their need . "
And so , if you had some extra bandwidth , you 'd deliver a message for someone .
If they had some extra bandwidth , they would deliver a message for you .
You 'd kind of depend on people to do that , and that was the building block .
It was actually interesting that such a communist principle was the basis of a system developed during the Cold War by the Defense Department , but it obviously worked really well , and we all saw what happened with the Internet .
It was incredibly successful .
In fact , it was so successful that there 's no way that these days you could make a book like this .
My rough calculation is it would be about 25 miles thick .
But , of course , you couldn 't do it , because we don 't know the names of all the people with Internet or email addresses , and even if we did know their names , I 'm pretty sure that they would not want their name , address and telephone number published to everyone .
So the fact is that there 's a lot of bad guys on the Internet these days , and so we dealt with that by making walled communities , secure subnetworks , VPNs , little things that aren 't really the Internet but are made out of the same building blocks , but we 're still basically building it out of those same building blocks with those same assumptions of trust .
And that means that it 's vulnerable to certain kinds of mistakes that can happen , or certain kinds of deliberate attacks , but even the mistakes can be bad .
So , for instance , in all of Asia recently , it was impossible to get YouTube for a little while because Pakistan made some mistakes in how it was censoring YouTube in its internal network .
They didn 't intend to screw up Asia , but they did because of the way that the protocols work .
Another example that may have affected many of you in this audience is , you may remember a couple of years ago , all the planes west of the Mississippi were grounded because a single routing card in Salt Lake City had a bug in it .
Now , you don 't really think that our airplane system depends on the Internet , and in some sense it doesn 't .
I 'll come back to that later .
But the fact is that people couldn 't take off because something was going wrong on the Internet , and the router card was down .
And so , there are many of those things that start to happen .
Now , there was an interesting thing that happened last April .
All of a sudden , a very large percentage of the traffic on the whole Internet , including a lot of the traffic between U.S. military installations , started getting re-routed through China .
So for a few hours , it all passed through China .
Now , China Telecom says it was just an honest mistake , and it is actually possible that it was , the way things work , but certainly somebody could make a dishonest mistake of that sort if they wanted to , and it shows you how vulnerable the system is even to mistakes .
Imagine how vulnerable the system is to deliberate attacks .
So if somebody really wanted to attack the United States or Western civilization these days , they 're not going to do it with tanks .
That will not succeed .
What they 'll probably do is something very much like the attack that happened on the Iranian nuclear facility .
Nobody has claimed credit for that .
There was basically a factory of industrial machines .
It didn 't think of itself as being on the Internet .
It thought of itself as being disconnected from the Internet , but it was possible for somebody to smuggle a USB drive in there , or something like that , and software got in there that causes the centrifuges , in that case , to actually destroy themselves .
Now that same kind of software could destroy an oil refinery or a pharmaceutical factory or a semiconductor plant .
And so there 's a lot of -- I 'm sure you 've read a lot in papers , about worries about cyberattacks and defenses against those .
But the fact is , people are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet , and there 's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium .
And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that , because it 's actually kind of fragile .
So actually , in the early days , back when it was the ARPANET , there were actually times -- there was a particular time it failed completely because one single message processor actually got a bug in it .
And the way the Internet works is the routers are basically exchanging information about how they can get messages to places , and this one processor , because of a broken card , decided it could actually get a message to some place in negative time .
So , in other words , it claimed it could deliver a message before you sent it .
So of course , the fastest way to get a message anywhere was to send it to this guy , who would send it back in time and get it there super early , so every message in the Internet started getting switched through this one node , and of course that clogged everything up .
Everything started breaking .
The interesting thing was , though , that the sysadmins were able to fix it , but they had to basically turn every single thing on the Internet off .
Now , of course you couldn 't do that today .
I mean , everything off , it 's like the service call you get from the cable company , except for the whole world .
Now , in fact , they couldn 't do it for a lot of reasons today .
One of the reasons is a lot of their telephones use IP protocol and use things like Skype and so on that go through the Internet right now , and so in fact we 're becoming dependent on it for more and more different things , like when you take off from LAX , you 're really not thinking you 're using the Internet .
When you pump gas , you really don 't think you 're using the Internet .
What 's happening increasingly , though , is these systems are beginning to use the Internet .
Most of them aren 't based on the Internet yet , but they 're starting to use the Internet for service functions , for administrative functions , and so if you take something like the cell phone system , which is still relatively independent of the Internet for the most part , Internet pieces are beginning to sneak into it in terms of some of the control and administrative functions , and it 's so tempting to use these same building blocks because they work so well , they 're cheap , they 're repeated , and so on .
So all of our systems , more and more , are starting to use the same technology and starting to depend on this technology .
And so even a modern rocket ship these days actually uses Internet protocol to talk from one end of the rocket ship to the other .
That 's crazy . It was never designed to do things like that .
So we 've built this system where we understand all the parts of it , but we 're using it in a very , very different way than we expected to use it , and it 's gotten a very , very different scale than it was designed for .
And in fact , nobody really exactly understands all the things it 's being used for right now .
It 's turning into one of these big emergent systems like the financial system , where we 've designed all the parts but nobody really exactly understands how it operates and all the little details of it and what kinds of emergent behaviors it can have .
And so if you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it can do this , or it does do this , or it will do that , you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather , or something like that .
They have an informed opinion , but it 's changing so quickly that even the experts don 't know exactly what 's going on .
So if you see one of these maps of the Internet , it 's just somebody 's guess .
Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it 's different than it was an hour ago .
It 's constantly changing . It 's constantly reconfiguring .
And the problem with it is , I think we are setting ourselves up for a kind of disaster like the disaster we had in the financial system , where we take a system that 's basically built on trust , was basically built for a smaller-scale system , and we 've kind of expanded it way beyond the limits of how it was meant to operate .
And so right now , I think it 's literally true that we don 't know what the consequences of an effective denial-of-service attack on the Internet would be , and whatever it would be is going to be worse next year , and worse next year , and so on .
But so what we need is a plan B.
There is no plan B right now .
There 's no clear backup system that we 've very carefully kept to be independent of the Internet , made out of completely different sets of building blocks .
So what we need is something that doesn 't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet , but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department even without the Internet , or the hospitals have to order fuel oil .
This doesn 't need to be a multi-billion-dollar government project .
It 's actually relatively simple to do , technically , because it can use existing fibers that are in the ground , existing wireless infrastructure .
It 's basically a matter of deciding to do it .
But people won 't decide to do it until they recognize the need for it , and that 's the problem that we have right now .
So there 's been plenty of people , plenty of us have been quietly arguing that we should have this independent system for years , but it 's very hard to get people focused on plan B when plan A seems to be working so well .
So I think that , if people understand how much we 're starting to depend on the Internet , and how vulnerable it is , we could get focused on just wanting this other system to exist , and I think if enough people say , " Yeah , I would like to use it , I 'd like to have such a system , " then it will get built .
It 's not that hard a problem .
It could definitely be done by people in this room .
And so I think that this is actually , of all the problems you 're going to hear about at the conference , this is probably one of the very easiest to fix .
So I 'm happy to get a chance to tell you about it .
Thank you very much .
Stefan Larsson : What doctors can learn from each other
Different hospitals produce different results on different procedures . Only , patients don 't know that data , making choosing a surgeon a high-stakes guessing game . Stefan Larsson looks at what happens when doctors measure and share their outcomes on hip replacement surgery , for example , to see which techniques are proving the most effective . Could health care get better -- and cheaper -- if doctors learn from each other in a continuous feedback loop ?
Five years ago , I was on a sabbatical , and I returned to the medical university where I studied .
I saw real patients and I wore the white coat for the first time in 17 years , in fact since I became a management consultant .
There were two things that surprised me during the month I spent .
The first one was that the common theme of the discussions we had were hospital budgets and cost-cutting , and the second thing , which really bothered me , actually , was that several of the colleagues I met , former friends from medical school , who I knew to be some of the smartest , most motivated , engaged and passionate people I 'd ever met , many of them had turned cynical , disengaged , or had distanced themselves from hospital management .
So with this focus on cost-cutting , I asked myself , are we forgetting the patient ?
Many countries that you represent and where I come from struggle with the cost of healthcare .
It 's a big part of the national budgets .
And many different reforms aim at holding back this growth .
In some countries , we have long waiting times for patients for surgery .
In other countries , new drugs are not being reimbursed , and therefore don 't reach patients .
In several countries , doctors and nurses are the targets , to some extent , for the governments .
After all , the costly decisions in health care are taken by doctors and nurses .
You choose an expensive lab test , you choose to operate on an old and frail patient .
So , by limiting the degrees of freedom of physicians , this is a way to hold costs down .
And ultimately , some physicians will say today that they don 't have the full liberty to make the choices they think are right for their patients .
So no wonder that some of my old colleagues are frustrated .
At BCG , we looked at this , and we asked ourselves , this can 't be the right way of managing healthcare .
And so we took a step back and we said , " What is it that we are trying to achieve ? "
Ultimately , in the healthcare system , we 're aiming at improving health for the patients , and we need to do so at a limited , or affordable , cost .
We call this value-based healthcare .
On the screen behind me , you see what we mean by value : outcomes that matter to patients relative to the money we spend .
This was described beautifully in a book in 2006 by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg .
On this picture , you have my father-in-law surrounded by his three beautiful daughters .
When we started doing our research at BCG , we decided not to look so much at the costs , but to look at the quality instead , and in the research , one of the things that fascinated us was the variation we saw .
You compare hospitals in a country , you 'll find some that are extremely good , but you 'll find a large number that are vastly much worse .
The differences were dramatic .
Erik , my father-in-law , he suffers from prostate cancer , and he probably needs surgery .
Now living in Europe , he can choose to go to Germany that has a well-reputed healthcare system .
If he goes there and goes to the average hospital , he will have the risk of becoming incontinent by about 50 percent , so he would have to start wearing diapers again .
You flip a coin . Fifty percent risk . That 's quite a lot .
If he instead would go to Hamburg , and to a clinic called the Martini-Klinik , the risk would be only one in 20 .
Either you a flip a coin , or you have a one in 20 risk .
That 's a huge difference , a seven-fold difference .
When we look at many hospitals for many different diseases , we see these huge differences .
But you and I don 't know . We don 't have the data .
And often , the data actually doesn 't exist .
Nobody knows .
So going the hospital is a lottery .
Now , it doesn 't have to be that way . There is hope .
In the late ' 70s , there were a group of Swedish orthopedic surgeons who met at their annual meeting , and they were discussing the different procedures they used to operate hip surgery .
To the left of this slide , you see a variety of metal pieces , artificial hips that you would use for somebody who needs a new hip .
They all realized they had their individual way of operating .
They all argued that , " My technique is the best , " but none of them actually knew , and they admitted that .
So they said , " We probably need to measure quality so we know and can learn from what 's best . "
So they in fact spent two years debating , " So what is quality in hip surgery ? "
" Oh , we should measure this . " " No , we should measure that . "
And they finally agreed .
And once they had agreed , they started measuring , and started sharing the data .
Very quickly , they found that if you put cement in the bone of the patient before you put the metal shaft in , it actually lasted a lot longer , and most patients would never have to be re-operated on in their lifetime .
They published the data , and it actually transformed clinical practice in the country .
Everybody saw this makes a lot of sense .
Since then , they publish every year .
Once a year , they publish the league table : who 's best , who 's at the bottom ?
And they visit each other to try to learn , so a continuous cycle of improvement .
For many years , Swedish hip surgeons had the best results in the world , at least for those who actually were measuring , and many were not .
Now I found this principle really exciting .
So the physicians get together , they agree on what quality is , they start measuring , they share the data , they find who 's best , and they learn from it .
Continuous improvement .
Now , that 's not the only exciting part .
That 's exciting in itself .
But if you bring back the cost side of the equation , and look at that , it turns out , those who have focused on quality , they actually also have the lowest costs , although that 's not been the purpose in the first place .
So if you look at the hip surgery story again , there was a study done a couple years ago where they compared the U.S. and Sweden .
They looked at how many patients have needed to be re-operated on seven years after the first surgery .
In the United States , the number was three times higher than in Sweden .
So many unnecessary surgeries , and so much unnecessary suffering for all the patients who were operated on in that seven year period .
Now , you can imagine how much savings there would be for society .
We did a study where we looked at OECD data .
OECD does , every so often , look at quality of care where they can find the data across the member countries .
The United States has , for many diseases , actually a quality which is below the average in OECD .
Now , if the American healthcare system would focus a lot more on measuring quality , and raise quality just to the level of average OECD , it would save the American people 500 billion U.S. dollars a year .
That 's 20 percent of the budget , of the healthcare budget of the country .
Now you may say that these numbers are fantastic , and it 's all logical , but is it possible ?
This would be a paradigm shift in healthcare , and I would argue that not only can it be done , but it has to be done .
The agents of change are the doctors and nurses in the healthcare system .
In my practice as a consultant , I meet probably a hundred or more than a hundred doctors and nurses and other hospital or healthcare staff every year .
The one thing they have in common is they really care about what they achieve in terms of quality for their patients .
Physicians are , like most of you in the audience , very competitive .
They were always best in class .
We were always best in class .
And if somebody can show them that the result they perform for their patients is no better than what others do , they will do whatever it takes to improve .
But most of them don 't know .
But physicians have another characteristic .
They actually thrive from peer recognition .
If a cardiologist calls another cardiologist in a competing hospital and discusses why that other hospital has so much better results , they will share .
They will share the information on how to improve .
So it is , by measuring and creating transparency , you get a cycle of continuous improvement , which is what this slide shows .
Now , you may say this is a nice idea , but this isn 't only an idea .
This is happening in reality .
We 're creating a global community , and a large global community , where we 'll be able to measure and compare what we achieve .
Together with two academic institutions , Michael Porter at Harvard Business School , and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden , BCG has formed something we call ICHOM .
You may think that 's a sneeze , but it 's not a sneeze , it 's an acronym .
It stands for the International Consortium for Health Outcome Measurement .
We 're bringing together leading physicians and patients to discuss , disease by disease , what is really quality , what should we measure , and to make those standards global .
They 've worked -- four working groups have worked during the past year : cataracts , back pain , coronary artery disease , which is , for instance , heart attack , and prostate cancer .
The four groups will publish their data in November of this year .
That 's the first time we 'll be comparing apples to apples , not only within a country , but between countries .
Next year , we 're planning to do eight diseases , the year after , 16 .
In three years ' time , we plan to have covered 40 percent of the disease burden .
Compare apples to apples . Who 's better ?
Why is that ?
Five months ago , I led a workshop at the largest university hospital in Northern Europe .
They have a new CEO , and she has a vision : I want to manage my big institution much more on quality , outcomes that matter to patients .
This particular day , we sat in a workshop together with physicians , nurses and other staff , discussing leukemia in children .
The group discussed , how do we measure quality today ?
Can we measure it better than we do ?
We discussed , how do we treat these kids , what are important improvements ?
And we discussed what are the costs for these patients , can we do treatment more efficiently ?
There was an enormous energy in the room .
There were so many ideas , so much enthusiasm .
At the end of the meeting , the chairman of the department , he stood up .
He looked over the group and he said -- first he raised his hand , I forgot that -- he raised his hand , clenched his fist , and then he said to the group , " Thank you .
Thank you . Today , we 're finally discussing what this hospital does the right way . "
By measuring value in healthcare , that is not only costs but outcomes that matter to patients , we will make staff in hospitals and elsewhere in the healthcare system not a problem but an important part of the solution .
I believe measuring value in healthcare will bring about a revolution , and I 'm convinced that the founder of modern medicine , the Greek Hippocrates , who always put the patient at the center , he would smile in his grave .
Thank you .
Brian Cox : Why we need the explorers
In tough economic times , our exploratory science programs -- from space probes to the LHC -- are first to suffer budget cuts . Brian Cox explains how curiosity-driven science pays for itself , powering innovation and a profound appreciation of our existence .
We live in difficult and challenging economic times , of course .
And one of the first victims of difficult economic times , I think , is public spending of any kind , but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science , and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration .
So I want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that 's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do .
But I think to set the scene , I want to show -- the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst TED slide in the history of TED , but it is a bit of a mess .
But actually , it 's not my fault ; it 's from the Guardian newspaper .
And it 's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs .
Because , if I 'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration , I should tell you how much it costs .
So this is a game called " spot the science budgets . "
This is the U.K. government spend .
You see there , it 's about 620 billion a year .
The science budget is actually -- if you look to your left , there 's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs .
And it 's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob .
It 's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion .
That funds everything in the U.K.
from medical research , space exploration , where I work , at CERN in Geneva , particle physics , engineering , even arts and humanities , funded from the science budget , which is that 3.3 billion , that little , tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen .
So that 's what we 're arguing about .
That percentage , by the way , is about the same in the U.S. and Germany and France .
R & amp ; D in total in the economy , publicly funded , is about 0.6 percent of GDP .
So that 's what we 're arguing about .
The first thing I want to say , and this is straight from " Wonders of the Solar System , " is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful .
This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn , after we 'd finished filming " Wonders of the Solar System . "
So it isn 't in the series .
It 's of the moon Enceladus .
So that big sweeping , white sphere in the corner is Saturn , which is actually in the background of the picture .
And that crescent there is the moon Enceladus , which is about as big as the British Isles .
It 's about 500 kilometers in diameter .
So , tiny moon .
What 's fascinating and beautiful ...
this an unprocessed picture , by the way , I should say , it 's black and white , straight from Saturnian orbit .
What 's beautiful is , you can probably see on the limb there some faint , sort of , wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb .
This is how we visualize that in " Wonders of the Solar System . "
It 's a beautiful graphic .
What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon .
That 's fascinating and beautiful in itself , but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon .
And what 's important about that is that , on our planet , on Earth , wherever we find liquid water , we find life .
So , to find strong evidence of liquid , pools of liquid , beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the Earth is really quite astounding .
So what we 're saying , essentially , is maybe that 's a habitat for life in the solar system .
Well , let me just say , that was a graphic . I just want to show this picture .
That 's one more picture of Enceladus .
This is when Cassini flew beneath Enceladus .
So it made a very low pass , just a few hundred kilometers above the surface .
And so this , again , a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space , absolutely beautiful .
But that 's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system .
That 's probably this place , which is a moon of Jupiter , Europa .
And again , we had to fly to the Jovian system to get any sense that this moon , as most moons , was anything other than a dead ball of rock .
It 's actually an ice moon .
So what you 're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa , which is a thick sheet of ice , probably a hundred kilometers thick .
But by measuring the way that Europa interacts with the magnetic field of Jupiter , and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around , we 've inferred very strongly that there 's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of Europa .
So below the ice , there 's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon .
It could be hundreds of kilometers deep , we think .
We think it 's saltwater , and that would mean that there 's more water on that moon of Jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the Earth combined .
So that place , a little moon around Jupiter , is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the Earth , that we know of .
Tremendous and beautiful discovery .
Our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful .
It may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask , which is : " Are we alone in the universe ? "
Is there any other use to exploration and science , other than just a sense of wonder ?
Well , there is .
This is a very famous picture taken , actually , on my first Christmas Eve , December 24th , 1968 , when I was about eight months old .
It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon .
Earthrise from Apollo 8 .
A famous picture ; many people have said that it 's the picture that saved 1968 , which was a turbulent year -- the student riots in Paris , the height of the Vietnam War .
The reason many people think that about this picture , and Al Gore has said it many times , actually , on the stage at TED , is that this picture , arguably , was the beginning of the environmental movement .
Because , for the first time , we saw our world , not as a solid , immovable , kind of indestructible place , but as a very small , fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space .
What 's also not often said about the space exploration , about the Apollo program , is the economic contribution it made .
I mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this , it cost a lot , didn 't it ?
Well , actually , many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness , the economic impact of Apollo .
The biggest one was in 1975 by Chase Econometrics .
And it showed that for every $ 1 spent on Apollo , 14 came back into the U.S. economy .
So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration , in engineering , achievement and , I think , in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over .
So exploration can pay for itself .
What about scientific discovery ?
What about driving innovation ?
Well , this looks like a picture of virtually nothing .
What it is , is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen .
See , back in the 1880s , 1890s , many scientists , many observers , looked at the light given off from atoms .
And they saw strange pictures like this .
What you 're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it doesn 't just glow like a white light , it just emits light at particular colors , a red one , a light blue one , some dark blue ones .
Now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that 's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them .
And the electrons can only be in particular places .
And when they jump up to the next place they can be , and fall back down again , they emit light at particular colors .
And so the fact that atoms , when you heat them up , only emit light at very specific colors , was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory , the theory of the structure of atoms .
I just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable .
This is actually a picture of the spectrum of the Sun .
And now , this is a picture of atoms in the Sun 's atmosphere absorbing light .
And again , they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down , jump up and fall down .
But look at the number of black lines in that spectrum .
And the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the Sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element .
And that 's why helium 's called helium .
It 's called " helios " -- helios from the Sun .
Now , that sounds esoteric , and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit , but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon , for example .
The way that silicon behaves , the fact that you can build transistors , is a purely quantum phenomenon .
So without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms , which led to this rather esoteric theory , quantum mechanics , then we wouldn 't have transistors , we wouldn 't have silicon chips , we wouldn 't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy .
There 's one more , I think , wonderful twist to that tale .
In " Wonders of the Solar System , " we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal .
It 's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on Earth , is you can transport it , not only to the planets , but to the most distant stars and galaxies .
And one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics , just by looking at the structure of atoms -- the same theory that describes transistors -- is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than , quite specifically , 1.4 times the mass of the Sun .
That 's a limit imposed on the mass of stars .
You can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory , get a telescope , swing it to the sky , and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun .
That 's quite an incredible prediction .
What happens when you have a star that 's right on the edge of that mass ?
Well , this is a picture of it .
This is the picture of a galaxy , a common " our garden " galaxy with , what , 100 billion stars like our Sun in it .
It 's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe .
There are a billion stars in the galactic core , which is why it 's shining out so brightly .
This is about 50 million light years away , so one of our neighboring galaxies .
But that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy .
So that star is also 50 million light years away .
It 's part of that galaxy , and it 's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it .
That 's a Type Ia supernova explosion .
Now that 's an incredible phenomena , because it 's a star that sits there .
It 's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
It sits there about , say , 1.3 times the mass of the Sun .
And it has a binary companion that goes around it , so a big star , a big ball of gas .
And what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star , until it gets to this limit called the Chandrasekhar limit , and then it explodes .
And it explodes , and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks , and releases , not only energy , but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe .
In fact , that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf .
Now , there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the Big Bang .
And there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars .
It was made in stars like that , locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets , stars , new solar systems and , indeed , people like us .
I think that 's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics , because we understand that process , because we understand the structure of atoms here on Earth .
This is a beautiful quote that I found -- we 're talking about serendipity there -- from Alexander Fleming : " When I woke up just after dawn on September 28 , 1928 , I certainly didn 't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world 's first antibiotic . "
Now , the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor .
And they certainly didn 't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions , which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe .
So , I think science can be -- serendipity is important .
It can be beautiful . It can reveal quite astonishing things .
It can also , I think , finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet .
This is a spectacular picture of our home planet .
Now , it doesn 't look like our home planet .
It looks like Saturn because , of course , it is .
It was taken by the Cassini space probe .
But it 's a famous picture , not because of the beauty and majesty of Saturn 's rings , but actually because of a tiny , faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings .
And if I blow it up there , you see it .
It looks like a moon , but in fact , it 's a picture of Earth .
It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn .
That 's our planet from 750 million miles away .
I think the Earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it , the more beautiful it seems .
But that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet .
It was taken by this thing , which is called the Voyager spacecraft .
And that 's a picture of me in front of it for scale .
The Voyager is a tiny machine .
It 's currently 10 billion miles away from Earth , transmitting with that dish , with the power of 20 watts , and we 're still in contact with it .
But it visited Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus and Neptune .
And after it visited all four of those planets , Carl Sagan , who 's one of my great heroes , had the wonderful idea of turning Voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited .
And it took this picture of Earth .
Now it 's very hard to see the Earth there , it 's called the " Pale Blue Dot " picture , but Earth is suspended in that red shaft of light .
That 's Earth from four billion miles away .
And I 'd like to read you what Sagan wrote about it , just to finish , because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken .
He said , " Consider again that dot .
That 's here . That 's home . That 's us .
On it , everyone you love , everyone you know , everyone you 've ever heard of , every human being who ever was lived out their lives .
The aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions , ideologies and economic doctrines , every hunter and forager , every hero and coward , every creator and destroyer of civilization , every king and peasant , every young couple in love , every mother and father , hopeful child , inventor and explorer , every teacher of morals , every corrupt politician , every superstar , every supreme leader , every saint and sinner in the history of our species , lived there , on a mote of dust , suspended in a sunbeam .
It 's been said that astronomy 's a humbling and character-building experience .
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world .
To me , it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot , the only home we 've ever known . "
Beautiful words about the power of science and exploration .
The argument has always been made , and it will always be made , that we know enough about the universe .
You could have made it in the 1920s ; you wouldn 't have had penicillin .
You could have made it in the 1890s ; you wouldn 't have the transistor .
And it 's made today in these difficult economic times .
Surely , we know enough .
We don 't need to discover anything else about our universe .
Let me leave the last words to someone who 's rapidly becoming a hero of mine , Humphrey Davy , who did his science at the turn of the 19th century .
He was clearly under assault all the time .
" We know enough at the turn of the 19th century .
Just exploit it ; just build things . "
He said this , he said , " Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate , that our triumphs are complete , that there are no mysteries in nature , and that there are no new worlds to conquer . "
Thank you .
Janna Levin : The sound the universe makes
We think of space as a silent place . But physicist Janna Levin says the universe has a soundtrack -- a sonic composition that records some of the most dramatic events in outer space . An accessible and mind-expanding soundwalk through the universe .
I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that , by far , most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light .
We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes .
The Sun burns our peripheral vision .
We see light reflected off the Moon .
And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies , the known universe has come to us through light , across vast eras in cosmic history .
And with all of our modern telescopes , we 've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe -- these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang .
And yet , the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn 't silent .
I 'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself , because space can wobble like a drum .
It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold .
Now we 'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe -- a sonic composition .
And while we 've never heard the sounds from space , we really should , in the next few years , start to turn up the volume on what 's going on out there .
So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe , we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have , because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song , which I 'd like to play for you -- some of our predictions for what that song will be like .
Now black holes are dark against a dark sky .
We can 't see them directly .
They 're not brought to us with light , at least not directly .
We can see them indirectly , because black holes wreak havoc on their environment .
They destroy stars around them .
They churn up debris in their surroundings .
But they won 't come to us directly through light .
We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background , but we haven 't yet .
And yet black holes may be heard even if they 're not seen , and that 's because they bang on space-time like a drum .
Now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to Albert Einstein -- to whom we owe so much .
Einstein realized that if space were empty , if the universe were empty , it would be like this picture , except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it .
But if we were freely falling through the space , even without this helpful grid , we might be able to paint it ourselves , because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines , undeflected straight paths through the universe .
Einstein also realized -- and this is the real meat of the matter -- that if you put energy or mass in the universe , it would curve space , and a freely falling object would pass by , let 's say , the Sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space .
It was Einstein 's great general theory of relativity .
Now even light will be bent by those paths .
And you can be bent so much that you 're caught in orbit around the Sun , as the Earth is , or the Moon around the Earth .
These are the natural curves in space .
What Einstein did not realize was that , if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers -- so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across , you would make a black hole , an object so dense that if light veered too close , it would never escape -- a dark shadow against the universe .
It wasn 't Einstein who realized this , it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I -- joined the German army already an accomplished scientist , working on the Russian front .
I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire , and then , in between , calculating Einstein 's equations -- as you do in the trenches .
And he was reading Einstein 's recently published general theory of relativity , and he was thrilled by this theory .
And he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary : curves so strong that space would rain down into them , space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole .
And even light could not escape this current .
Light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be , and all that would be left would be a shadow .
Now he wrote to Einstein , and he said , " As you will see , the war has been kind to me enough .
Despite the heavy gunfire , I 've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas . "
And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution , and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist .
This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions .
And he took Schwarzschild 's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week .
But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity .
He did not believe they existed in nature .
He thought nature would protect us from their formation .
It was decades before the term " black hole " was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects -- in fact they 're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime .
Now our Sun will not collapse to a black hole .
It 's actually not massive enough .
But if we did a little thought experiment -- as Einstein was very fond of doing -- we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers , and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit , maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun .
And it would be self-illuminated , because now the Sun 's gone , we have no other source of light -- so let 's make our little Earth self-illuminated .
And you would realize you could put the Earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole .
This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan , more or less .
It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth .
But basically that 's what we 're talking about .
We 're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan .
So we move this Earth very close -- 30 kilometers outside -- and we notice it 's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole .
There 's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe , but you actually have to get very close to fall in .
But what 's very impressive is that , from our vantage point , we can always see the Earth .
It cannot hide behind the black hole .
The light from the Earth , some of it falls in , but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us .
So you can 't hide anything behind a black hole .
If this were Battlestar Galactica and you 're fighting the Cylons , don 't hide behind the black hole .
They can see you .
Now , our Sun will not collapse to a black hole -- it 's not massive enough -- but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy .
And if one were to eclipse the Milky Way , this is what it would look like .
We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes .
And if we were to fall towards this black hole , we would see all of that light lensed around it , and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened .
It would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we couldn 't , anymore than light can escape .
But even though the black hole is dark from the outside , it 's not dark on the inside , because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us .
And even though , due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation , our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time , it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us , right before we were crushed to death by the black hole .
It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel , but it 's a total death experience .
And there 's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel .
Now we 've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole , but black holes can be heard , even if they 're not seen .
Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation -- imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together .
Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes -- each one 10 times the mass of the Sun .
So now we 're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across .
They can be spinning hundreds of times a second .
At the end of their lives , they 're going around each other very near the speed of light .
So they 're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second , and as they do so , they not only curve space , but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space , an actual wave on space-time .
Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe .
And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light .
This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard .
It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem .
This was one of the groups .
It shows two black holes in orbit around each other , again , with these helpfully painted curves .
And if you can see -- it 's kind of faint -- but if you can see the red waves emanating out , those are the gravitational waves .
They 're literally the sounds of space ringing , and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning , quiet black hole at the end of the day .
If you were standing near enough , your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space .
You would literally hear the sound .
Now of course , your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully , so you might have trouble understanding what 's going on .
But I 'd like to play for you the sound that we predict .
This is from my group -- a slightly less glamorous computer modeling .
Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole .
The sound you 're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close .
If it gets far away , it 's a little too quiet .
But it comes in like a mallet , and it literally cracks space , wobbling it like a drum .
And we can predict what the sound will be .
We know that , as it falls in , it gets faster and it gets louder .
And eventually , we 're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy .
Then it 's gone .
Now I 've never heard it that loud -- it 's actually more dramatic .
At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic .
It 's sort of like ding , ding , ding .
This is another sound from my group .
No , I 'm not showing you any images , because black holes don 't leave behind helpful trails of ink , and space is not painted , showing you the curves .
But if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this , you want to get moving .
Want to get away from the sound .
Both black holes are moving .
Both black holes are getting closer together .
In this case , they 're both wobbling quite a lot .
And then they 're going to merge .
Now it 's gone .
Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging -- that it chirps up at the end .
Now that 's our prediction for what we 'll see .
Luckily we 're at this safe distance in Long Beach , California .
And surely , somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged .
And surely , the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years , or a million years , at the speed of light to get to us .
But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear .
There are very industrious experiments being built on Earth -- one called LIGO -- which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers .
It 's a remarkably ambitious experiment , and it 's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years -- to pick this up .
There 's also a mission proposed for space , which hopefully will launch in the next ten years , called LISA .
And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes -- black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun .
In this Hubble image , we see two galaxies .
They look like they 're frozen in some embrace .
And each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core .
But they 're not frozen ; they 're actually merging .
These two black holes are colliding , and they will merge over a billion-year time scale .
It 's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration .
But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe 's history , the last 15 minutes before they fall together .
And it 's not just black holes , but it 's also any big disturbance in the universe -- and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang .
When that expression was coined , it was derisive -- like , " Oh , who would believe in a Big Bang ? "
But now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang .
It might make a sound .
This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside .
We don 't ever want to do that actually . We want to be inside the universe because there 's no such thing as standing outside the universe .
So imagine you 're inside the Big Bang .
It 's everywhere , it 's all around you , and the space is wobbling chaotically .
Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us .
Galaxies form , and generations of stars form in those galaxies , and around one star , at least one star , is a habitable planet .
And here we are frantically building these experiments , doing these calculations , writing these computer codes .
Imagine a billion years ago , two black holes collided .
That song has been ringing through space for all that time .
We weren 't even here .
It gets closer and closer -- 40,000 years ago , we 're still doing cave paintings .
It 's like hurry , build your instruments .
It 's getting closer and closer , and in 20 ...
whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity -- we 'll build them , we 'll turn on the machines and , bang , we 'll catch it -- the first song from space .
If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up , it would sound like this .
It 's a terrible sound .
It 's literally the definition of noise .
It 's white noise ; it 's such a chaotic ringing .
But it 's around us everywhere , presumably , if it hasn 't been wiped out by some other process in the universe .
And if we pick it up , it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation , of our observable universe .
So within the next few years , we 'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit , render the universe in audio .
But if we detect those earliest moments , it 'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang , which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest , most elusive , questions .
If we run the movie of our universe backwards , we know that there was a Big Bang in our past , and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it , but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang ?
I mean we have to ask , has it happened before ?
Will it happen again ?
I mean , in the spirit of rising to TED 's challenge to reignite wonder , we can ask questions , at least for this last minute , that honestly might evade us forever .
But we have to ask : Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history ?
Or , is it possible that we 're just a branch off of a multiverse -- each branch with its own Big Bang in its past -- maybe some of them with black holes playing drums , maybe some without -- maybe some with sentient life , and maybe some without -- not in our past , not in our future , but somehow fundamentally connected to us ?
So we have to wonder , if there is a multiverse , in some other patch of that multiverse , are there creatures ?
Here 's my multiverse creatures .
Are there other creatures in the multiverse , wondering about us and wondering about their own origins ?
And if they are , I can imagine them as we are , calculating , writing computer code , building instruments , trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there .
Thank you . Thank you .
Joe Kowan : How I beat stage fright
Humanity 's fine-tuned sense of fear served us well as a young species , giving us laser focus to avoid being eaten by competing beasts . But it 's less wonderful when that same visceral , body-hijacking sense of fear kicks in in front of 20 folk-music fans at a Tuesday night open-mic . Palms sweat , hands shake , vision blurs , and the brain says RUN : it 's stage fright . In this charming , tuneful little talk , Joe Kowan talks about how he conquered it .
Joe Kowan : I have stage fright .
I 've always had stage fright , and not just a little bit , it 's a big bit .
And it didn 't even matter until I was 27 .
That 's when I started writing songs , and even then I only played them for myself .
Just knowing my roommates were in the same house made me uncomfortable .
But after a couple of years , just writing songs wasn 't enough .
I had all these stories and ideas , and I wanted to share them with people , but physiologically , I couldn 't do it .
I had this irrational fear .
But the more I wrote , and the more I practiced , the more I wanted to perform .
So on the week of my 30th birthday , I decided I was going to go to this local open mic , and put this fear behind me .
Well , when I got there , it was packed .
There were like 20 people there .
And they all looked angry .
But I took a deep breath , and I signed up to play , and I felt pretty good .
Pretty good , until about 10 minutes before my turn , when my whole body rebelled , and this wave of anxiety just washed over me .
Now , when you experience fear , your sympathetic nervous system kicks in .
So you have a rush of adrenaline , your heart rate increases , your breathing gets faster .
Next your non-essential systems start to shut down , like digestion .
So your mouth gets dry , and blood is routed away from your extremities , so your fingers don 't work anymore .
Your pupils dilate , your muscles contract , your Spidey sense tingles , basically your whole body is trigger-happy .
That condition is not conducive to performing folk music .
I mean , your nervous system is an idiot .
Really ? Two hundred thousand years of human evolution , and it still can 't tell the difference between a saber tooth tiger and 20 folksingers on a Tuesday night open mic ?
I have never been more terrified -- until now .
So then it was my turn , and somehow , I get myself onto the stage , I start my song , I open my mouth to sing the first line , and this completely horrible vibrato -- you know , when your voice wavers -- comes streaming out .
And this is not the good kind of vibrato , like an opera singer has , this is my whole body just convulsing with fear .
I mean , it 's a nightmare .
I 'm embarrassed , the audience is clearly uncomfortable , they 're focused on my discomfort .
It was so bad .
But that was my first real experience as a solo singer-songwriter .
And something good did happen -- I had the tiniest little glimpse of that audience connection that I was hoping for .
And I wanted more . But I knew I had to get past this nervousness .
That night I promised myself : I would go back every week until I wasn 't nervous anymore .
And I did . I went back every single week , and sure enough , week after week , it didn 't get any better . The same thing happened every week .
I couldn 't shake it .
And that 's when I had an epiphany .
And I remember it really well , because I don 't have a lot of epiphanies .
All I had to do was write a song that exploits my nervousness .
That only seems authentic when I have stage fright , and the more nervous I was , the better the song would be . Easy .
So I started writing a song about having stage fright .
First , fessing up to the problem , the physical manifestations , how I would feel , how the listener might feel .
And then accounting for things like my shaky voice , and I knew I would be singing about a half-octave higher than normal , because I was nervous .
By having a song that explained what was happening to me , while it was happening , that gave the audience permission to think about it .
They didn 't have to feel bad for me because I was nervous , they could experience that with me , and we were all one big happy , nervous , uncomfortable family .
By thinking about my audience , by embracing and exploiting my problem , I was able to take something that was blocking my progress , and turn it into something that was essential for my success .
And having the stage fright song let me get past that biggest issue right in the beginning of a performance .
And then I could move on , and play the rest of my songs with just a little bit more ease .
And eventually , over time , I didn 't have to play the stage fright song at all .
Except for when I was really nervous , like now .
Would it be okay if I played the stage fright song for you ?
Can I have a sip of water ?
Thank you .
I 'm not joking , you know , this stage fright is real . And if I 'm up here trembling and singing , well , you 'll know how I feel . And the mistake I 'd be making , the tremolo caused by my whole body shaking . As you sit there feeling embarrassed for me , well , you don 't have to be . Well , maybe just a little bit . And maybe I 'll try to imagine you all without clothes . But singing in front of all naked strangers scares me more than anyone knows . Not to discuss this at length , but my body image was never my strength . So frankly , I wish that you all would get dressed , I mean , you 're not even really naked . And I 'm the one with the problem . And you tell me , don 't worry so much , you 'll be great . But I 'm the one living with me and I know how I get . Your advice is gentle but late . If not just a bit patronizing . And that sarcastic tone doesn 't help me when I sing . But we shouldn 't talk about these things right now , really , I 'm up on stage , and you 're in the crowd . Hi . And I 'm not making fun of unnurtured , irrrational fear , and if I wasn 't ready to face this , I sure as hell wouldn 't be here . But if I belt one note out clearly , you 'll know I 'm recovering slowly but surely . And maybe next week , I 'll set my guitar ringin ' my voice clear as water , and everyone singin ' . But probably I 'll just get up and start groovin ' , my vocal cords movin ' , at speeds slightly faster than sound .
Alan Kay : A powerful idea about ideas
With all the intensity and brilliance for which he is known , Alan Kay envisions better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways - – mathematically and scientifically -- that only computers can .
A great way to start , I think , with my view of simplicity is to take a look at TED . Here you are , understanding why we 're here , what 's going on with no difficulty at all .
The best A.I. in the planet would find it complex and confusing , and my little dog Watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point .
He would have a great time .
And of course , if you 're a speaker here , like Hans Rosling , a speaker finds this complex , tricky . But in Hans Rosling 's case , he had a secret weapon yesterday , literally , in his sword swallowing act .
And I must say , I thought of quite a few objects that I might try to swallow today and finally gave up on , but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing .
So Puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense , but that we 're easily fooled . In fact , what Shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled , so we 're actually looking forward to it .
We go to magic shows in order to be fooled .
And this makes many things fun , but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves .
And our friend , Betty Edwards , the " Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain " lady , shows these two tables to her drawing class and says , " The problem you have with learning to draw is not that you can 't move your hand , but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty .
It 's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what 's there . "
And to prove it , she says , " The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same , and I 'm going to prove it to you . "
She does this with cardboard , but since I have an expensive computer here I 'll just rotate this little guy around and ...
Now having seen that -- and I 've seen it hundreds of times , because I use this in every talk I give -- I still can 't see that they 're the same size and shape , and I doubt that you can either .
So what do artists do ? Well , what artists do is to measure .
They measure very , very carefully .
And if you measure very , very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge , you 'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size .
And the Talmud saw this a long time ago , saying , " We see things not as they are , but as we are . "
I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then , if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion .
So if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are , then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here . It 's a waking dream , and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history .
And what that means : " simple and understandable " might not be actually simple or understandable , and things we think are " complex " might be made simple and understandable .
Somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws .
We can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel .
The way I think of it is , we can 't learn to see until we admit we 're blind .
Once you start down at this very humble level , then you can start finding ways to see things .
And what 's happened , over the last 400 years in particular , is that human beings have invented " brainlets " -- little additional parts for our brain -- made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways .
And these are in the form of sensory apparatus -- telescopes , microscopes -- reasoning apparatus -- various ways of thinking -- and , most importantly , in the ability to change perspective on things .
I 'll talk about that a little bit .
It 's this change in perspective on what it is we think we 're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history .
And yet , it is not taught in any K through 12 curriculum in America that I 'm aware of .
So one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more . We like more .
If we do more in a kind of a stupid way , the simplicity gets complex and , in fact , we can keep on doing it for a very long time .
But Murray Gell-Mann yesterday talked about emergent properties ; another name for them could be " architecture " as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious , non-simple ways of combining it .
And in fact , what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature -- of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar -- all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish , and they 're in violent motion .
Those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world .
But how simple ?
So , when I saw Roslings ' Gapminder stuff a few years ago , I just thought it was the greatest thing I 'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply .
But then I had a thought of , " Boy , maybe it 's too simple . "
And I put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side , and I found that they matched up very well .
So the Roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what 's important about the data .
Whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell , as a former molecular biologist , I didn 't like that at all .
Not because it wasn 't beautiful or anything , but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology , and that is : why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed ?
And what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous ; they just swooped in the air and bound , and something happened .
But in fact , those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second ; they 're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds ; they 're completely crowded together , they 're jammed , they 're bashing up against each other .
And if you don 't understand that in your mental model of this stuff , what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous , and I think that 's exactly the wrong image for when you 're trying to teach science .
So , another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle .
So a kid who 's 14 in high school gets this version of the Pythagorean theorem , which is a truly subtle and interesting proof , but in fact it 's not a good way to start learning about mathematics .
So a more direct one , one that gives you more of the feeling of math , is something closer to Pythagoras ' own proof , which goes like this : so here we have this triangle , and if we surround that C square with three more triangles and we copy that , notice that we can move those triangles down like this .
And that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ...
and bingo . That is all you have to do .
And this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you 're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the , literally , 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of Pythagoras ' theorem that have been discovered .
Now let 's go to young children .
This is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher , but was a natural mathematician .
So she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician ; she just had a feeling for math .
And here are her six-year-olds , and she 's got them making shapes out of a shape .
So they pick a shape they like -- like a diamond , or a square , or a triangle , or a trapezoid -- and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape , and the next larger shape .
You can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there .
And what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project , and then something like science .
So they had created these artifacts .
Now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious , which I thought for a long time , until she explained to me was to slow them down so they 'll think .
So they 're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up .
But the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out .
" What have you noticed about what you did ? "
And so six-year-old Lauren there noticed that the first one took one , and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one , the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one , and then the next one .
She saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two , so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there .
And she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six , where she wasn 't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was , but then she was confident again .
So that 's what Lauren did .
And then the teacher , Gillian Ishijima , had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor , and everybody went batshit : " Holy shit ! They 're the same ! "
No matter what the shapes were , the growth law is the same .
And the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation , derived by six-year-olds .
Well , that 's pretty amazing .
That isn 't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds .
So , let 's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this .
And so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do .
I 'm using the software that we 're putting on the $ 100 laptop .
So I 'd like to draw a little car here -- I 'll just do this very quickly -- and put a big tire on him .
And I get a little object here and I can look inside this object , I 'll call it a car . And here 's a little behavior : car forward .
Each time I click it , car turn .
If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again , I just drag these guys out and set them going .
And I can try steering the car here by ...
See the car turn by five here ?
So what if I click this down to zero ?
It goes straight . That 's a big revelation for nine-year-olds .
Make it go in the other direction .
But of course , that 's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car , so the kids want to do a steering wheel ; so they draw a steering wheel .
And we 'll call this a wheel .
See this wheel 's heading here ?
If I turn this wheel , you can see that number over there going minus and positive .
That 's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here , and now I can steer the car with the steering wheel .
And it 's interesting .
You know how much trouble the children have with variables , but by learning it this way , in a situated fashion , they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it .
And we can reflect here the way Gillian Ishijima did .
So if you look at the little script here , the speed is always going to be 30 .
We 're going to move the car according to that over and over again .
And I 'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things ; they 're evenly spaced because they 're 30 apart .
And what if I do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying , " OK , I 'm going to increase the speed by two each time , and then I 'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time ?
What do I get there ? "
We get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration .
So how do the children do science ?
Teacher : [ Choose ] objects that you think will fall to the Earth at the same time .
Student 1 : Ooh , this is nice .
Teacher : Do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing .
Who 's got the apple ?
Alan Kay : They 've got little stopwatches .
Student 2 : What did you get ? What did you get ?
AK : Stopwatches aren 't accurate enough .
Student 3 : 0.99 seconds .
Teacher : So put " sponge ball " ...
Student 4l : [ I decided to ] do the shot put and the sponge ball because they 're two totally different weights , and if you drop them at the same time , maybe they 'll drop at the same speed .
Teacher : Drop . Class : Whoa !
AK : So obviously , Aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because , of course , he didn 't bother doing the experiment , and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas .
And it was not until Galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child , only 400 years ago .
We get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase .
Now , what if we want to look at this more closely ?
We can take a movie of what 's going on , but even if we single stepped this movie , it 's tricky to see what 's going on .
And so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up .
So when the children see this , they say , " Ah ! Acceleration , " remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways , and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is .
So what I 'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image , about a fifth of a second later , like that . And they 're getting faster and faster each time , and if I stack these guys up , then we see the differences ; the increase in the speed is constant .
And they say , " Oh , yeah . Constant acceleration .
We 've done that already . "
And how shall we look and verify that we actually have it ?
So you can 't tell much from just making the ball drop there , but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time , we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model .
Galileo , by the way , did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute .
I pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a Newton and the apple type story , but it 's a great story .
And I thought I would do just one thing on the $ 100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here .
So once you have gravity , here 's this -- increase the speed by something , increase the ship 's speed .
If I start the little game here that the kids have done , it 'll crash the space ship .
But if I oppose gravity , here we go ... Oops !
One more .
I guess the best way to end this is with two quotes : Marshall McLuhan said , " Children are the messages that we send to the future , " but in fact , if you think of it , children are the future we send to the future .
Forget about messages ; children are the future , and children in the first and second world and , most especially , in the third world need mentors .
And this summer , we 're going to build five million of these $ 100 laptops , and maybe 50 million next year .
But we couldn 't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life .
That means that we , once again , have a thing where we can put technology out , but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new iChat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing .
I believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface , and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars .
It sounds like a lot , but it is literally 18 minutes of what we 're spending in Iraq -- we 're spending 8 billion dollars a month ; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars -- so this is actually cheap .
And Einstein said , " Things should be as simple as possible , but not simpler . "
Thank you .
Rives : If I controlled the Internet
How many poets could cram eBay , Friendster and Monster.com into 3-minute poem worthy of a standing ovation ? Enjoy Rives ' unique talent .
I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television , " I 'm really getting into the Internet lately .
I just wish it were more organized . "
So ...
If I controlled the Internet , you could auction your broken heart on eBay .
Take the money ; go to Amazon ; buy a phonebook for a country you 've never been to -- call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language .
If I were in charge of the Internet , you could Mapquest your lover 's mood swings .
Hang left at cranky , right at preoccupied , U-turn on silent treatment , all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin ' .
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection .
Some days , I 'm as shallow as a baking pan , but I still stretch miles in all directions .
If I owned the Internet , Napster , Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website .
That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you 're really just chattin ' with your pals .
Heck , if I ran the Web , you could email dead people .
They would not email you back -- but you 'd get an automated reply .
Their name in your inbox -- it 's all you wanted anyway .
And a message saying , " Hey , it 's me . I miss you .
Listen , you 'll see being dead is dandy .
Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy . "
If I designed the Internet , childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard , with a ski pole for a sword , trashcan lid for a shield , shouting , " I am the emperor of oranges .
I am the emperor of oranges . I am the emperor of oranges . "
Now follow me , OK ?
Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions .
One , two , three .
That links with hotdiggitydog.com.
That is my grandfather .
They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad.
He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom , who downloads the boy in the orchard , the emperor of oranges , who grows up to be me -- the guy who usually goes too far .
So if I were emperor of the Internet , I guess I 'd still be mortal , huh ?
But at that point , I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis -- so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office .
I wouldn 't need it .
I 'd be like some kind of Internet genius , and me , I 'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that -- pop ! -- I 'd go wireless .
Huh ? Maybe Google would hire this .
I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise , as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle / oracle can get , but , ooh-eee , you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I 'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net ?
I guess it 's just like life .
It is not a question of if you can -- it 's : do ya ?
We can interfere with the interface .
We can make " You 've got Hallelujah " the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on .
You don 't say a prayer .
You don 't write a psalm .
You don 't chant an " om . "
You send one blessed email to whomever you 're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com.
Thank you , TED .
Bill Davenhall : Your health depends on where you live
Where you live : It impacts your health as much as diet and genes do , but it 's not part of your medical records . At TEDMED , Bill Davenhall shows how overlooked government geo-data can mesh with mobile GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop . Call it " geo-medicine . "
Can geographic information make you healthy ?
In 2001 I got hit by a train .
My train was a heart attack .
I found myself in a hospital in an intensive-care ward , recuperating from emergency surgery .
And I suddenly realized something : that I was completely in the dark .
I started asking my questions , " Well , why me ? "
" Why now ? " " Why here ? "
" Could my doctor have warned me ? "
So , what I want to do here in the few minutes I have with you is really talk about what is the formula for life and good health .
Genetics , lifestyle and environment .
That 's going to sort of contain our risks , and if we manage those risks we 're going to live a good life and a good healthy life .
Well , I understand the genetics and lifestyle part .
And you know why I understand that ?
Because my physicians constantly ask me questions about this .
Have you ever had to fill out those long , legal-size forms in your doctor 's office ?
I mean , if you 're lucky enough you get to do it more than once , right ?
Do it over and over again . And they ask you questions about your lifestyle and your family history , your medication history , your surgical history , your allergy history ... did I forget any history ?
But this part of the equation I didn 't really get , and I don 't think my physicians really get this part of the equation .
What does that mean , my environment ?
Well , it can mean a lot of things .
This is my life . These are my life places .
We all have these .
While I 'm talking I 'd like you to also be thinking about : How many places have you lived ?
Just think about that , you know , wander through your life thinking about this .
And you realize that you spend it in a variety of different places .
You spend it at rest and you spend it at work .
And if you 're like me , you 're in an airplane a good portion of your time traveling some place .
So , it 's not really simple when somebody asks you , " Where do you live , where do you work , and where do you spend all your time ?
And where do you expose yourselves to risks that maybe perhaps you don 't even see ? "
Well , when I have done this on myself , I always come to the conclusion that I spend about 75 percent of my time relatively in a small number of places .
And I don 't wander far from that place for a majority of my time , even though I 'm an extensive global trekker .
Now , I 'm going to take you on a little journey here .
I started off in Scranton , Pennsylvania .
I don 't know if anybody might hail from northeastern Pennsylvania , but this is where I spent my first 19 years with my little young lungs .
You know , breathing high concentrations here of sulfur dioxide , carbon dioxide and methane gas , in unequal quantities -- 19 years of this .
And if you 've been in that part of the country , this is what those piles of burning , smoldering coal waste look like .
So then I decided to leave that part of the world , and I was going to go to the mid-west .
OK , so I ended up in Louisville , Kentucky .
Well , I decided to be neighbors to a place called Rubbertown .
They manufacture plastics . They use large quantities chloroprene and benzene .
Okay , I spent 25 years , in my middle-age lungs now , breathing various concentrations of that .
And on a clear day it always looked like this , so you never saw it .
It was insidious and it was really happening .
Then I decided I had to get really smart , I would take this job in the West Coast .
And I moved to Redlands California .
Very nice , and there my older , senior lungs , as I like to call them , I filled with particulate matter , carbon dioxide and very high doses of ozone .
Okay ? Almost like the highest in the nation .
Alright , this is what it looks like on a good day .
If you 've been there , you know what I 'm talking about .
So , what 's wrong with this picture ?
Well , the picture is , there is a huge gap here .
The one thing that never happens in my doctor 's office : They never ask me about my place history .
No doctor , can I remember , ever asking me , " Where have you lived ? "
They haven 't asked me what kind of the quality of the drinking water that I put in my mouth or the food that I ingest into my stomach .
They really don 't do that . It 's missing .
Look at the kind of data that 's available .
This data 's from all over the world -- countries spend billions of dollars investing in this kind of research .
Now , I 've circled the places where I 've been .
Well , by design , if I wanted to have a heart attack I 'd been in the right places . Right ?
So , how many people are in the white ?
How many people in the room have spent the majority of their life in the white space ?
Anybody ? Boy you 're lucky .
How many have spent it in the red places ?
Oh , not so lucky .
There are thousands of these kinds of maps that are displayed in atlases all over the world .
They give us some sense of what 's going to be our train wreck .
But none of that 's in my medical record .
And it 's not in yours either .
So , here 's my friend Paul .
He 's a colleague . He allowed his cell phone to be tracked every two hours , 24 / 7 , 365 days out of the year for the last two years , everywhere he went .
And you can see he 's been to a few places around the United States .
And this is where he has spent most of his time .
If you really studied that you might have some clues as to what Paul likes to do .
Anybody got any clues ? Ski . Right .
We can zoom in here , and we suddenly see that now we see where Paul has really spent a majority of his time .
And all of those black dots are all of the toxic release inventories that are monitored by the EPA .
Did you know that data existed ?
For every community in the United States , you could have your own personalized map of that .
So , our cell phones can now build a place history .
This is how Paul did it . He did it with his iPhone .
This might be what we end up with .
This is what the physician would have in front of him and her when we enter that exam room instead of just the pink slip that said I paid at the counter . Right ?
This could be my little assessment .
And he looks at that and he says , " Whoa Bill , I suggest that maybe you not decide , just because you 're out here in beautiful California , and it 's warm every day , that you get out and run at six o 'clock at night .
I 'd suggest that that 's a bad idea Bill , because of this report . "
What I 'd like to leave you for are two prescriptions .
Okay , number one is , we must teach physicians about the value of geographical information .
It 's called geomedicine . There are about a half a dozen programs in the world right now that are focused on this .
And they 're in the early stages of development .
These programs need to be supported , and we need to teach our future doctors of the world the importance of some of the information I 've shared here with you today .
The second thing we need to do is while we 're spending billions and billions of dollars all over the world building an electronic health record , we make sure we put a place history inside that medical record .
It not only will be important for the physician ; it will be important for the researchers that now will have huge samples to draw upon .
But it will also be useful for us .
I could have made the decision , if I had this information , not to move to the ozone capital of the United States , couldn 't I ? I could make that decision .
Or I could negotiate with my employer to make that decision in the best interest of myself and my company .
With that , I would like to just say that Jack Lord said this almost 10 years ago .
Just look at that for a minute .
That was what the conclusion of the Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare was about , was saying that we can explain the geographic variations that occur in disease , in illness , in wellness , and how our healthcare system actually operates .
That was what he was talking about on that quote .
And I would say he got it right almost a decade ago .
So , I 'd very much like to see us begin to really seize this as an opportunity to get this into our medical records .
So with that , I 'll leave you that in my particular view of view of health : Geography always matters .
And I believe that geographic information can make both you and me very healthy . Thank you .
Gary Wolf : The quantified self
At TED @ Cannes , Gary Wolf gives a 5-min intro to an intriguing new pastime : using mobile apps and always-on gadgets to track and analyze your body , mood , diet , spending -- just about everything in daily life you can measure -- in gloriously geeky detail .
I got up this morning at 6 : 10 a.m.
after going to sleep at 12 : 45 a.m.
I was awakened once during the night .
My heart rate was 61 beats per minute -- my blood pressure , 127 over 74 .
I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday , so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn 't calculated .
I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine , zero of alcohol .
And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index , or the NPI-16 , is a reassuring 0.31 .
We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise , manage , govern , search .
I 'm going to talk about how they 're useful when we reflect , learn , remember and want to improve .
A few years ago , Kevin Kelly , my partner , and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary , familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day .
People were tracking their food via Twitter , their kids ' diapers on their iPhone .
They were making detailed journals of their spending , their mood , their symptoms , their treatments .
Now , we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle -- the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices , the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing , and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors .
This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer .
It tracks your movement through space .
It is , as you can see , very small and also very cheap .
They 're now down to well under a dollar a piece , and they 're going into all kinds of devices .
But what 's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this .
This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device -- among early adopters at the moment -- the Fitbit .
This tracks your activity and also your sleep .
It has just that sensor in it .
You 're probably familiar with the Nike + system .
I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor .
It 's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that 's in a doorbell .
And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor .
This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike + system .
This is a beautiful , new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data , not just whether you 're asleep or awake , but also your phase of sleep -- deep sleep , light sleep , REM sleep .
The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there .
The rest of it is the bedside console ; just for reference , this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago -- I mean , really until now .
And this is the sleep tracking system of today .
This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C.
Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler , but the top is a very small GPS transceiver , which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident , giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors .
Now , we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world -- these tiny sensors that gather data in nature , the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used , and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute .
But we think of these tools as pointing outward , as windows and I 'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors .
So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement , we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement , for self-discovery , self-awareness , self-knowledge .
Here 's a biometric device : a pair of Apple Earbuds .
Last year , Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation , heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds .
What is this for ?
What should it be for ?
Some people will say it 's for biometric security .
Some people will say it 's for public health research .
Some people will say it 's for avant-garde marketing research .
I 'd like to tell you that it 's also for self-knowledge .
And the self isn 't the only thing ; it 's not even most things .
The self is just our operation center , our consciousness , our moral compass .
So , if we want to act more effectively in the world , we have to get to know ourselves better .
Thank you .
JR : My wish : Use art to turn the world inside out
JR , a semi-anonymous French street artist , uses his camera to show the world its true face , by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases . At TED2011 , he makes his audacious TED Prize wish : to use art to turn the world inside out . Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.
Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris , and the phone rang and I heard , " Hey , JR , you won the TED Prize 2011 .
You have to make a wish to save the world . "
I was lost .
I mean , I can 't save the world . Nobody can .
The world is fucked up .
Come on , you have dictators ruling the world , population is growing by millions , there 's no more fish in the sea , the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said , we 're all becoming fat .
Except maybe French people .
Whatever .
So I called back and I told her , " Look , Amy , tell the TED guys I just won 't show up .
I can 't do anything to save the world . "
She said , " Hey , JR , your wish is not to save the world , but to change the world . "
" Oh , all right . "
" That 's cool . "
I mean , technology , politics , business do change the world -- not always in a good way , but they do .
What about art ?
Could art change the world ?
I started when I was 15 years old .
And at that time , I was not thinking about changing the world .
I was doing graffiti -- writing my name everywhere , using the city as a canvas .
I was going in the tunnels of Paris , on the rooftops with my friends .
Each trip was an excursion , was an adventure .
It was like leaving our mark on society , to say , " I was here , " on the top of a building .
So when I found a cheap camera on the subway , I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies -- really small photos just that size .
That 's how , at 17 years old , I started pasting them .
And I did my first " expo de rue , " which means sidewalk gallery .
And I framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising .
I mean , the city 's the best gallery I could imagine .
I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people .
I would control it directly with the public in the streets .
So that 's Paris .
I would change -- depending on the places I would go -- the title of the exhibition .
That 's on the Champs-Elysees .
I was quite proud of that one .
Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees .
Then when the photo left , the frame was still there .
November 2005 : the streets are burning .
A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris .
Everyone was glued to the TV , watching disturbing , frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood .
I mean , these kids , without control , throwing Molotov cocktails , attacking the cops and the firemen , looting everything they could in the shops .
These were criminals , thugs , dangerous , destroying their own environment .
And then I saw it -- could it be possible ? -- my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car -- a pasting I 'd done a year earlier -- an illegal one -- still there .
I mean , these were the faces of my friends .
I know those guys .
All of them are not angels , but they 're not monsters either .
So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television .
So I went back there with a 28 mm lens .
It was the only one I had at that time .
But with that lens , you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person .
So you can do it only with their trust .
So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet .
They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves .
And then I pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of Paris with the name , age , even building number of these guys .
A year later , the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris .
And we go from thug images , who 've been stolen and distorted by the media , who 's now proudly taking over his own image .
That 's where I realized the power of paper and glue .
So could art change the world ?
A year later , I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict .
I mean , at that time , trust me , they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict .
So with my friend Marco , we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis .
Are they so different ?
When we got there , we just went in the street , started talking with people everywhere , and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media .
So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs -- taxi-driver , lawyer , cooks .
Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment .
Not a smile -- that really doesn 't tell about who you are and what you feel .
They all accepted to be pasted next to the other .
I decided to paste in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall .
We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever .
We called the project Face 2 Face .
The experts said , " No way .
The people will not accept .
The army will shoot you , and Hamas will kidnap you . "
We said , " Okay , let 's try and push as far as we can . "
I love the way that people will ask me , " How big will my photo be ? "
" It will be as big as your house . "
When we did the wall , we did the Palestinian side .
So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough .
And so Palestinians guys say , " Calm down . No wait . I 'm going to find you a solution . "
So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born .
We did Face 2 Face with only six friends , two ladders , two brushes , a rented car , a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper .
We had all sorts of help from all walks of life .
Okay , for example , that 's Palestine .
We 're in Ramallah right now .
We 're pasting portraits -- so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market .
People come around us and start asking , " What are you doing here ? "
" Oh , we 're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an Israeli and a Palestinian doing the same job .
And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers . "
And then there was always a silence .
" You mean you 're pasting an Israeli face -- doing a face -- right here ? "
" Well , yeah , yeah , that 's part of the project . "
And I would always leave that moment , and we would ask them , " So can you tell me who is who ? "
And most of them couldn 't say .
We even pasted on Israeli military towers , and nothing happened .
When you paste an image , it 's just paper and glue .
People can tear it , tag on it , or even pee on it -- some are a bit high for that , I agree -- but the people in the street , they are the curator .
The rain and the wind will take them off anyway .
They are not meant to stay .
But exactly four years after , the photos , most of them are still there .
Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible -- and , you know what , even easy .
We didn 't push the limit ; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought .
In the Middle East , I experienced my work in places without [ many ] museums .
So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting .
So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums .
When you go in these developing societies , women are the pillars of their community , but the men are still the ones holding the streets .
So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos .
I called that project Women Are Heroes .
When I listened to all the stories everywhere I went on the continents , I couldn 't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict .
I just observed .
Sometimes there was no words , no sentence , just tears .
I just took their pictures and pasted them .
Women Are Heroes took me around the world .
Most of the places I went to , I decided to go there because I 've heard about it through the media .
So for example , in June 2008 , I was watching TV in Paris , and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro -- the first favela of Brazil named Providencia .
Three kids -- that was three students -- were [ detained ] by the army because they were not carrying their papers .
And the army took them , and instead of bringing them to the police station , they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces .
I was shocked .
All Brazil was shocked .
I heard it was one of the most violent favelas , because the largest drug cartel controls it .
So I decided to go there .
When I arrived -- I mean , I didn 't have any contact with any NGO .
There was none in place -- no association , no NGOs , nothing -- no eyewitnesses .
So we just walked around , and we met a woman , and I showed her my book .
And she said , " You know what ?
We 're hungry for culture .
We need culture out there . "
So I went out and I started with the kids .
I just took a few photos of the kids , and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them .
The day after , I came back and they were already scratched .
But that 's okay .
I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them .
Then the next day , I held a meeting on the main square and some women came .
They were all linked to the three kids that got killed .
There was the mother , the grandmother , the best friend -- they all wanted to shout the story .
After that day , everyone in the favela gave me the green light .
I took more photos , and we started the project .
The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place , so I told them , " You know what ?
I 'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons .
You see that enough in the media .
What I want to show is the incredible life and energy .
I 've been seeing it around me the last few days . "
So that 's a really symbolic pasting , because that 's the first one we did that you couldn 't see from the city .
And that 's where the three kids got arrested , and that 's the grandmother of one of them .
And on that stairs , that 's where the traffickers always stand and there 's a lot of exchange of fire .
Everyone there understood the project .
And then we pasted everywhere -- the whole hill .
What was interesting is that the media couldn 't get in .
I mean , you should see that .
They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens , and we would see ourselves , on TV , pasting .
And they would put a number : " Please call this number if you know what 's going on in Providencia . "
We just did a project and then left so the media wouldn 't know .
So how can we know about the project ?
So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them .
So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women .
We kept traveling .
We went to Africa , Sudan , Sierra Leone , Liberia , Kenya .
In war-torn places like Monrovia , people come straight to you .
I mean , they want to know what you 're up to .
They kept asking me , " What is the purpose of your project ?
Are you an NGO ? Are you the media ? "
Art . Just doing art .
Some people question , " Why is it in black and white ?
Don 't you have color in France ? "
Or they tell you , " Are these people all dead ? "
Some who understood the project would explain it to others .
And to a man who did not understand , I heard someone say , " You know , you 've been here for a few hours trying to understand , discussing with your fellows .
During that time , you haven 't thought about what you 're going to eat tomorrow .
This is art . "
I think it 's people 's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects .
And then it becomes more .
It becomes a desire , a need , an armor .
On this bridge that 's in Monrovia , ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war .
Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict .
This is Kibera , Kenya , one of the largest slums of Africa .
You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008 .
This time we covered the roofs of the houses , but we didn 't use paper , because paper doesn 't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house -- vinyl does .
Then art becomes useful .
So the people kept it .
You know what I love is , for example , when you see the biggest eye there , there are so [ many ] houses inside .
And I went there a few months ago -- photos are still there -- and it was missing a piece of the eye .
So I asked the people what happened .
" Oh , that guy just moved . "
When the roofs were covered , a woman said as a joke , " Now God can see me . "
When you look at Kibera now , they look back .
Okay , India .
Before I start that , just so you know , each time we go to a place , we don 't have authorization , so we set up like commandos -- we 're a group of friends who arrive there , and we try to paste on the walls .
But there are places where you just can 't paste on a wall .
In India it was just impossible to paste .
I heard culturally and because of the law , they would just arrest us at the first pasting .
So we decided to paste white , white on the walls .
So imagine white guys pasting white papers .
So people would come to us and ask us , " Hey , what are you up to ? "
" Oh , you know , we 're just doing art . " " Art ? "
Of course , they were confused .
But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets , and the more dust you would have going up in the air , on the white paper you can almost see , but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker .
So the more dust you have , the more it will reveal the photo .
So we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves .
Thank you .
So we didn 't get caught this time .
Each project -- that 's a film from Women Are Heroes .
Okay .
For each project we do a film .
And most of what you see -- that 's a trailer from " Women Are Heroes " -- its images , photography , taken one after the other .
And the photos kept traveling even without us .
Hopefully , you 'll see the film , and you 'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos .
Because that 's a big part of it . There 's layers behind each photo .
Behind each image is a story .
Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities , and the women kept that dynamic after we left .
For example , we did books -- not for sale -- that all the community would get .
But to get it , they would have to [ get ] it signed by one of the women .
We did that in most of the places .
We go back regularly .
And so in Providencia , for example , in the favela , we have a cultural center running there .
In Kibera , each year we cover more roofs .
Because of course , when we left , the people who were just at the edge of the project said , " Hey , what about my roof ? "
So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project .
A really important point for me is that I don 't use any brand or corporate sponsors .
So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects .
And that is for me one of the more important things in the work .
I think , today , as important as the result is the way you do things .
And that has always been a central part of the work .
And what 's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising .
We just did some pasting in Los Angeles on another project in the last weeks .
And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum .
But yesterday the city called them and said , " Look , you 're going to have to tear it down .
Because this can be taken for advertising , and because of the law , it has to be taken down . "
But tell me , advertising for what ?
The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community .
But they asked me for a promise basically .
They asked me , " Please , make our story travel with you . "
So I did . That 's Paris .
That 's Rio .
In each place , we built exhibitions with a story , and the story traveled .
You understand the full scope of the project .
That 's London .
New York .
And today , they are with you in Long Beach .
All right , recently I started a public art project where I don 't use my artwork anymore .
I use Man Ray , Helen Levitt , Giacomelli , other people 's artwork .
It doesn 't matter today if it 's your photo or not .
The importance is what you do with the images , the statement it makes where it 's pasted .
So for example , I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country .
This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally , and I pasted it in Southern Italy , where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground .
In some ways , art can change the world .
Art is not supposed to change the world , to change practical things , but to change perceptions .
Art can change the way we see the world .
Art can create an analogy .
Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions , and then enables you to change the world .
When I do my work , I have two kinds of reactions .
People say , " Oh , why don 't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan .
They would be really useful . "
Or , " How can we help ? "
I presume that you belong to the second category , and that 's good , because for that project , I 'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them .
So now my wish is : I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project , and together we 'll turn the world inside out .
And this starts right now .
Yes , everyone in the room .
Everyone watching .
I wanted that wish to actually start now .
So a subject you 're passionate about , a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos -- tell me what you stand for .
Take the photos , the portraits , upload it -- I 'll give you all the details -- and I 'll send you back your poster . Join by groups and reveal things to the world .
The full data is on the website -- insideoutproject.net -- that is launching today .
What we see changes who we are .
When we act together , the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts .
So I hope that , together , we 'll create something that the world will remember .
And this starts right now and depends on you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Suzanne Lee : Grow your own clothes
Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based material that can be used like fabric or vegetable leather to make clothing . The process is fascinating , the results are beautiful and the potential is simply stunning .
So as a fashion designer , I 've always tended to think of materials something like this , or this , or maybe this .
But then I met a biologist , and now I think of materials like this -- green tea , sugar , a few microbes and a little time .
I 'm essentially using a kombucha recipe , which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria , yeasts and other micro-organisms , which spin cellulose in a fermentation process .
Over time , these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface .
So we start by brewing the tea .
I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time , and then while it 's still hot , add a couple of kilos of sugar .
We stir this in until it 's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath .
We need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees C.
And then we 're ready to add the living organism .
And along with that , some acetic acid .
And once you get this process going , you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid .
We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth .
And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it .
And actually , in hot weather , I can just grow it outside .
So this is my mini fabric farm .
After about three days , the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid .
So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing .
And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid .
So they 're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose .
And they 're sticking together , forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface .
After about two to three weeks , we 're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness .
So the bath on the left is after five days , and on the right , after 10 .
And this is a static culture .
You don 't have to do anything to it ; you just literally watch it grow .
It doesn 't need light .
And when it 's ready to harvest , you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold , soapy water .
At this point , it 's really heavy .
It 's over 90 percent water , so we need to let that evaporate .
So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet .
Again , you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air .
And as it 's drying , it 's compressing , so what you 're left with , depending on the recipe , is something that 's either like a really light-weight , transparent paper , or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather .
And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally , or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape .
And as it evaporates , it will knit itself together , forming seams .
So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea .
I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin , which intrigues me .
Since it 's organic , I 'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals .
I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation .
Using fruit and vegetable staining , create organic patterning .
And using indigo , make it anti-microbial .
And in fact , cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark .
And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose , it just takes one , and a really short one at that .
What I can 't yet do is make it water-resistant .
So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today , I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water .
The dress would get really heavy , and eventually the seams would probably fall apart -- leaving me feeling rather naked .
Possibly a good performance piece , but definitely not ideal for everyday wear .
What I 'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that I need .
So what I want to do is say to a future bug , " Spin me a thread .
Align it in this direction .
Make it hydrophobic .
And while you 're at it , just form it around this 3D shape . "
Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing , and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels , possibly even replacement bone tissue .
But with synthetic biology , we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality , quantity and shape of material that we desire .
Obviously , as a designer , that 's really exciting because then I start to think , wow , we could actually imagine growing consumable products .
What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency .
So we only grow what we need .
There 's no waste .
And in fact , we could make it from a waste stream -- so for example , a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant .
Finally , at the end of use , we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings .
What I 'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton , leather or other textile materials .
But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources .
Ultimately , maybe it won 't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact .
We could , for example , imagine growing a lamp , a chair , a car or maybe even a house .
So I guess what my question to you is : in the future , what would you choose to grow ?
Thank you very much .
Suzanne , just a curiosity , what you 're wearing is not random .
This is one of the jackets you grew ?
SL : Yes , it is .
It 's probably -- part of the project 's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes .
It 's absorbing my sweat , and it 's feeding on it .
Okay , so we 'll let you go and save it , and rescue it .
Suzanne Lee .
Jon Nguyen : Tour the solar system from home
Want to navigate the solar system without having to buy that expensive spacecraft ? Jon Nguyen demos NASAJPL 's " Eyes on the Solar System " -- free-to-use software for exploring the planets , moons , asteroids , and spacecraft that rotate around our sun in real-time .
As a kid , I was fascinated with all things air and space .
I would watch Nova on PBS .
Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy .
When I was in elementary school , my next door neighbor , he gave me a book for my birthday .
It was an astronomy book , and I poured over that thing for hours on end , and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream , and part of that dream was , I always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft .
Well , a number of years later , I graduated from UCLA and I found myself at NASA , working for the jet propulsion laboratory , and there our team was challenged to create a 3D visualization of the solar system , and today I want to show you what we 've done so far .
Now , the kicker is , everything I 'm about to do here you can do at home , because we built this for the public for you guys to use .
So what you 're looking at right now is the Earth .
You can see the United States and California and San Diego , and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around .
Now , this isn 't new . Anyone who 's used Google Earth has seen this before , but one thing we like to say in our group is , we do the opposite of Google Earth .
Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard .
We go from this view out to the stars .
So the Earth is cool , but what we really want to show are the spacecraft , so I 'm going to bring the interface back up , and now you 're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the Earth .
These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters .
We haven 't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites .
If we did , it would be a complete mess , because there 's a lot of stuff out there .
And the cool thing is , we actually created 3D models for a number of these spacecraft , so if you want to visit any of these , all you need to do is double-click on them .
So I 'm going to find the International Space Station , double-click , and it will take us all the way down to the ISS .
And now you 're riding along with the ISS where it is right now .
And the other cool thing is , not only can we move the camera around , we can also control time , so I can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward , and now we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like , and they get one every 90 minutes .
All right , so what about the rest of it ?
Well , I can click on this home button over here , and that will take us up to the inner solar system , and now we 're looking at the rest of the solar system .
You can see , there 's Saturn , there 's Jupiter , and while we 're here , I want to point out something .
It 's actually pretty busy .
Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars , just launched last weekend .
Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter , there .
We have Dawn orbiting Vesta , and we have over here New Horizons on a straight shot to Pluto .
And I mention this because there 's this strange public perception that NASA 's dead , that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there 's no more spacecraft out there .
Well , a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration , and we have a lot of spacecraft out there .
Granted , we 're not sending humans up at the moment , well at least with our own launch vehicles , but NASA is far from dead , and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there 's so many other things that we 're doing .
Anyway , while we 're here , again , if you want to visit anything , all you need to do is double-click .
So I 'm just going to double-click on Vesta , and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta , and this is happening right now .
I 'm going to double-click on Uranus , and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons .
You can see how it 's tilted at about 89 degrees .
And just being able to visit different places and go through different times , we have data from 1950 to 2050 .
Granted , we don 't have everything in between , because some of the data is hard to get .
Just being able to visit places in different times , you can explore this for hours , literally hours on end , but I want to show you one thing in particular , so I 'm going to open up the destination tab , spacecraft outer planet missions , Voyager 1 , and I 'm going to bring up the Titan flyby .
So now we 've gone back in time .
We 're now riding along with Voyager 1 .
The date here is November 11 , 1980 .
Now , there 's a funny thing going on here .
It doesn 't look like anything 's going on .
It looks like I 've paused the program .
It 's actually running at real rate right now , one second per second , and in fact , Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at I think it 's 38,000 miles per hour .
It only looks like nothing 's moving because , well , Saturn here is 700,000 miles away , and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away .
It 's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing 's happening .
But to make it more interesting , I 'm going to speed up time , and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan , which is a hazy moon of Saturn .
It actually has a very thick atmosphere .
And I 'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn , here .
I 'm going to pull out , and I want to show you Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn .
There 's a point to be made here .
With a 3D visualization like this , we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn .
There 's a whole story to tell here .
And even better , because it 's an interactive application , you can tell the story for yourself .
If you want to pause it , you can pause it .
If you want to keep going , if you want to change the camera angle , you can do that , and because of that , I can show you that Voyager 1 doesn 't just fly by Saturn .
It actually flies underneath Saturn .
Now , what happens is , as it flies underneath Saturn , Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system , so if I just keep letting this go , you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that .
And , in fact , I 'm going to go back to the solar system .
I 'm going to go back to today , now , and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is .
Right there , above , way above the solar system , way beyond our solar system .
And here 's the thing . Now you know how it got there .
Now you know why , and to me , that 's the point of this program .
You can manipulate it yourself .
You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself .
You know , the theme today is " The World In Your Grasp . "
Well , we 're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp — — and we hope once it 's there , you 'll be able to learn for yourself what we 've done out there , and what we 're about to do .
And my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired , as I was as a kid , to pursue STEM education and to pursue a dream in space exploration .
Thank you .
Quixotic Fusion : Dancing with light
Quixotic Fusion is an ensemble of artists that brings together aerial acrobatics , dance , theater , film , music and visual fx . Watch as they perform three transporting dance pieces at TED2012 .
Andreas Raptopoulos : No roads ? There 's a drone for that
A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads . Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them ? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so . He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine , food , goods and supplies wherever they are needed .
One billion people in the world today do not have access to all-season roads .
One billion people .
One seventh of the Earth 's population are totally cut off for some part of the year .
We cannot get medicine to them reliably , they cannot get critical supplies , and they cannot get their goods to market in order to create a sustainable income .
In sub-Saharan Africa , for instance , 85 percent of roads are unusable in the wet season .
Investments are being made , but at the current level , it 's estimated it 's going to take them 50 years to catch up .
In the U.S. alone , there 's more than four million miles of roads , very expensive to build , very expensive to maintain infrastructure , with a huge ecological footprint , and yet , very often , congested .
So we saw this and we thought , can there be a better way ?
Can we create a system using today 's most advanced technologies that can allow this part of the world to leapfrog in the same way they 've done with mobile telephones in the last 10 years ?
Many of those nations have excellent telecommunications today without ever putting copper lines in the ground .
Could we do the same for transportation ?
Imagine this scenario .
Imagine you are in a maternity ward in Mali , and have a newborn in need of urgent medication .
What would you do today ?
Well , you would place a request via mobile phone , and someone would get the request immediately .
That 's the part that works .
The medication may take days to arrive , though , because of bad roads .
That 's the part that 's broken .
We believe we can deliver it within hours with an electric autonomous flying vehicle such as this .
This can transport a small payload today , about two kilograms , over a short distance , about 10 kilometers , but it 's part of a wider network that may cover the entire country , maybe even the entire continent .
It 's an ultra-flexible , automated logistics network .
It 's a network for a transportation of matter .
We call it Matternet .
We use three key technologies .
The first is electric autonomous flying vehicles .
The second is automated ground stations that the vehicles fly in and out of to swap batteries and fly farther , or pick up or deliver loads .
And the third is the operating system that manages the whole network .
Let 's look at each one of those technologies in a bit more detail .
First of all , the UAVs .
Eventually , we 're going to be using all sorts of vehicles for different payload capacities and different ranges .
Today , we 're using small quads .
These are able to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers in just about 15 minutes .
Compare this with trying to trespass a bad road in the developing world , or even being stuck in traffic in a developed world country .
These fly autonomously .
This is the key to the technology .
So they use GPS and other sensors on board to navigate between ground stations .
Every vehicle is equipped with an automatic payload and battery exchange mechanism , so these vehicles navigate to those ground stations , they dock , swap a battery automatically , and go out again .
The ground stations are located on safe locations on the ground .
They secure the most vulnerable part of the mission , which is the landing .
They are at known locations on the ground , so the paths between them are also known , which is very important from a reliability perspective from the whole network .
Apart from fulfilling the energy requirements of the vehicles , eventually they 're going to be becoming commercial hubs where people can take out loads or put loads into the network .
The last component is the operating system that manages the whole network .
It monitors weather data from all the ground stations and optimizes the routes of the vehicles through the system to avoid adverse weather conditions , avoid other risk factors , and optimize the use of the resources throughout the network .
I want to show you what one of those flights looks like .
Here we are flying in Haiti last summer , where we 've done our first field trials .
We 're modeling here a medical delivery in a camp we set up after the 2010 earthquake .
People there love this .
And I want to show you what one of those vehicles looks like up close .
So this is a $ 3,000 vehicle .
Costs are coming down very rapidly .
We use this in all sorts of weather conditions , very hot and very cold climates , very strong winds . They 're very sturdy vehicles .
Imagine if your life depended on this package , somewhere in Africa or in New York City , after Sandy .
The next big question is , what 's the cost ?
Well , it turns out that the cost to transport two kilograms over 10 kilometers with this vehicle is just 24 cents .
And it 's counterintuitive , but the cost of energy expended for the flight is only two cents of a dollar today , and we 're just at the beginning of this .
When we saw this , we felt that this is something that can have significant impact in the world .
So we said , okay , how much does it cost to set up a network somewhere in the world ?
And we looked at setting up a network in Lesotho for transportation of HIV / AIDS samples .
The problem there is how do you take them from clinics where they 're being collected to hospitals where they 're being analyzed ?
And we said , what if we wanted to cover an area spanning around 140 square kilometers ?
That 's roughly one and a half times the size of Manhattan .
Well it turns out that the cost to do that there would be less than a million dollars .
Compare this to normal infrastructure investments .
We think this can be -- this is the power of a new paradigm .
So here we are : a new idea about a network for transportation that is based on the ideas of the Internet .
It 's decentralized , it 's peer-to-peer , it 's bidirectional , highly adaptable , with very low infrastructure investment , very low ecological footprint .
If it is a new paradigm , though , there must be other uses for it .
It can be used perhaps in other places in the world .
So let 's look at the other end of the spectrum : our cities and megacities .
Half of the Earth 's population lives in cities today .
Half a billion of us live in megacities .
We are living through an amazing urbanization trend .
China alone is adding a megacity the size of New York City every two years .
These are places that do have road infrastructure , but it 's very inefficient .
Congestion is a huge problem .
So we think it makes sense in those places to set up a network of transportation that is a new layer that sits between the road and the Internet , initially for lightweight , urgent stuff , and over time , we would hope to develop this into a new mode of transportation that is truly a modern solution to a very old problem .
It 's ultimately scalable with a very small ecological footprint , operating in the background 24 / 7 , just like the Internet .
So when we started this a couple of years ago now , we 've had a lot of people come up to us who said , " This is a very interesting but crazy idea , and certainly not something that you should engage with anytime soon . "
And of course , we 're talking about drones , right , a technology that 's not only unpopular in the West but one that has become a very , very unpleasant fact of life for many living in poor countries , especially those engaged in conflict .
So why are we doing this ?
Well , we chose to do this one not because it 's easy , but because it can have amazing impact .
Imagine one billion people being connected to physical goods in the same way that mobile telecommunications connected them to information .
Imagine if the next big network we built in the world was a network for the transportation of matter .
In the developing world , we would hope to reach millions of people with better vaccines , reach them with better medication .
It would give us an unfair advantage against battling HIV / AIDS , tuberculosis and other epidemics .
Over time , we would hope it would become a new platform for economic transactions , lifting millions of people out of poverty .
In the developed world and the emerging world , we would hope it would become a new mode of transportation that could help make our cities more livable .
So for those that still believe that this is science fiction , I firmly say to you that it is not .
We do need to engage , though , in social fiction to make it happen .
Thank you .
Rives : Reinventing the encyclopedia game
Prompted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica ending its print publication , performance poet Rives resurrects a game from his childhood . Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha , Rives takes us on a charming tour through random bits of human knowledge : from Chimborazo , the farthest point from the center of the Earth , to Ham the Astrochimp , the first chimpanzee in outer space .
So , last month , the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years , which made me nostalgic , because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when I was a kid , maybe 12 years old .
And I wondered if I could update that game , not just for modern methods , but for the modern me .
So I tried .
I went to an online encyclopedia , Wikipedia , and I entered the term " Earth . "
You can start anywhere , this time I chose Earth .
And the first rule of the game is pretty simple .
You just have to read the article until you find something you don 't know , and preferably something your dad doesn 't even know .
And in this case , I quickly found this : The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest , like I might have thought , it 's the tip of this mountain : Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador .
The Earth spins , of course , as it travels around the sun , so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle , like some Earthlings .
And even though Mount Chimborazo isn 't the tallest mountain in the Andes , it 's one degree away from the equator , it 's riding that bulge , and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth .
And it is really fun to say .
So I immediately decided , this is going to be the name of the game , or my new exclamation .
You can use it at TED .
Chimborazo , right ?
It 's like " eureka " and " bingo " had a baby .
I didn 't know that ; that 's pretty cool .
Chimborazo !
So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple .
You just have to find another term and look that up .
Now in the old days , that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically , maybe getting sidetracked , that was fun .
Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from .
I can go literally anywhere in the world , I think since I was already in Ecuador , I just decided to click on the word " tropical . "
That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth .
Now that 's the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south , that much I knew , but I was surprised to learn this little fact : Those are not cartographers ' lines , like latitude or the borders between nations , they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth 's tilt , and they change .
They move ; they go up , they go down .
In fact , for years , the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year , and nobody told me that .
I didn 't know it .
Chimborazo !
So to keep the game going , I just have to find another term and look that one up .
Since I 'm already in the tropics , I chose " Tropical rainforest . "
Famous for its diversity , human diversity .
There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet .
They 're all over the globe , but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests .
This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get " friended . "
The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end .
It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera , which turn out to be beetles .
Now I clicked on this on purpose , but if I 'd somehow gotten here by mistake , it does remind me , for the band , see " The Beatles , " for the car see " Volkswagon Beetle , " but I am here for beetle beetles .
This is the most successful order on the planet by far .
Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet , including plants , are beetles .
That means the next time you are in the grocery store , take a look at the four people ahead of you in line .
Statistically , one of you is a beetle .
And if it is you , you are astonishingly well adapted .
There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums .
There are predator beetles , that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us .
There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings .
This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri , who renews the ball of the sun every morning , which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun .
Beetles , I was reminded , have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom .
Fireflies are not flies , fireflies are beetles .
Fireflies are coleoptera , and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well .
Like my next link : The chemical language of pheromones .
Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex .
Yeah .
And the link to aphrodisiac .
Now that 's something that increases sexual desire , possibly chocolate .
There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac .
But as the article mentions , because of enzyme breakdown , it 's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally .
So those of you who only eat your chocolate , you might have to experiment .
The link I clicked on here , " sympathetic magic , " mostly because I understand what both of those words mean .
But not when they 're together like that .
I do like sympathy . I do like magic .
So when I click on " sympathetic magic , " I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls .
This is the boy in me getting lucky again .
Sympathetic magic is imitation .
If you imitate something , maybe you can have an effect on it .
That 's the idea behind voodoo dolls , and possibly also cave paintings .
The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind .
I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves .
We 've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork .
Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands , usually the left hand .
We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia , so even though I don 't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube , I can easily picture how he did it .
And I really don 't think it 's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I 'm going to use now to click on the term for " hand , " go to the page for " hand , " where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I 've found in a long time . It 's simply this : The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar .
Now that 's embarrassing , because up until now , every time I 've said , " I know it like the back of my hand , " I 've really been saying , " I 'm totally familiar with that , I just don 't know it 's freaking name , right ? "
And the link I clicked on here , well , lemurs , monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar .
I click on chimpanzee , and I get our closest genetic relative .
Pan troglodytes , the name we give him , means " cave dweller . "
He doesn 't .
He lives in rainforests and savannas .
It 's just that we 're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us , evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us , and in some cases , he gets places before us .
Like my next link , the almost irresistible link , Ham the Astrochimp .
I click on him , and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice , in fact .
He 's born in Cameroon , which is smack in the middle of my tropics map , and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles .
In between those two landmarks in Ham 's life , he flew into space .
He experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it , Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin .
When I click on Yuri Gagarin 's page , I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature , huge in heroism .
Top estimates , Soviet estimates , put this guy at 1.65 meters , that is less than five and a half feet tall max , possibly because he was malnourished as a child .
Germans occupied Russia .
A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household , and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut .
Years later , the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space , the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet .
And he didn 't just leave it , he circled it once .
Fifty years later , as a tribute , the International Space Station , which is still up there tonight , synced its orbit with Gagarin 's orbit , at the exact same time of day , and filmed it , so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride , possibly a lonely one , the first person to ever see such a thing .
And then when you 've had your fill of that , you can click on one more link .
You can come back to Earth .
You return to where you started .
You can finish your game .
You just need to find one more fact that you didn 't know .
And for me , I quickly landed on this one : The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid , which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls .
This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy .
I found it myself .
It 's got some math that I can do .
I 'm pretty sure my dad doesn 't know it .
What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball , if you could take planet Earth , with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests , astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees , voodoo dolls , fireflies , chocolate , sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea , you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball , it would be as smooth as a billiard ball , presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle .
That 's pretty cool .
I didn 't know that .
Chimborazo !
Thank you .
Fiorenzo Omenetto : Silk , the ancient material of the future
Fiorenzo Omenetto shares 20 + astonishing new uses for silk , one of nature 's most elegant materials -- in transmitting light , improving sustainability , adding strength and making medical leaps and bounds . On stage , he shows a few intriguing items made of the versatile stuff .
Thank you .
I 'm thrilled to be here .
I 'm going to talk about a new , old material that still continues to amaze us , and that might impact the way we think about material science , high technology -- and maybe , along the way , also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation .
So that 's kind of a bold statement .
I 'll tell you a little bit more .
This material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true .
It 's sustainable ; it 's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature -- and is biodegradable with a clock , so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years .
It 's edible ; it 's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response .
It actually gets reintegrated in the body .
And it 's technological , so it can do things like microelectronics , and maybe photonics do .
And the material looks something like this .
In fact , this material you see is clear and transparent .
The components of this material are just water and protein .
So this material is silk .
So it 's kind of different from what we 're used to thinking about silk .
So the question is , how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia ?
The process of discovery , generally , is inspired by nature .
And so we marvel at silk worms -- the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber .
The silk worm does a remarkable thing : it uses these two ingredients , protein and water , that are in its gland , to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection -- so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar .
And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about , and that we 're familiar with , for the textile industry , the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things .
We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar , to this natural Kevlar .
So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material .
And this is an insight that came , about two decades ago , from a person that I 'm very fortunate to work with , David Kaplan .
And so we get this starting material .
And so this starting material is back to the basic building block .
And then we use this to do a variety of things -- like , for example , this film .
And we take advantage of something that is very simple .
The recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do .
They find their way to self-assemble .
So the recipe is simple : you take the silk solution , you pour it , and you wait for the protein to self-assemble .
And then you detach the protein and you get this film , as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates .
But I mentioned that the film is also technological .
And so what does that mean ?
It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology , like microelectronics and nanoscale technology .
And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface , which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale .
So it would be able to replicate the information that is on the DVD .
And we can store information that 's film with water and protein .
So we tried something out , and we wrote a message in a piece of silk , which is right here , and the message is over there .
And much like in the DVD , you can read it out optically .
And this requires a stable hand , so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people .
So let me see .
So as you see the film go in transparently through there , and then ...
And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that .
So once you have these attributes of this material , then you can do a lot of things .
It 's actually not limited to films .
And so the material can assume a lot of formats .
And then you go a little crazy , and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays , like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes .
Or you can do beautiful things that , if the camera can capture , you can make .
You can add a third dimensionality to the film .
And if the angle is right , you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk .
But you can do other things .
You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light , and so we 've made optical fibers .
But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics .
And you can think of different formats .
So for instance , if you 're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle , we do microneedle arrays .
What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that 's made of silk -- just to give you a sense of size .
You can do bigger things .
You can do gears and nuts and bolts -- that you can buy at Whole Foods .
And the gears work in water as well .
So you think of alternative mechanical parts .
And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins , for example , or maybe an entire bone .
And so you have here a little example of a small skull -- what we call mini Yorick .
But you can do things like cups , for example , and so , if you add a little bit of gold , if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods .
You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap .
Or if you 're fashion forward , some silk LED tattoos .
So there 's versatility , as you see , in the material formats , that you can do with silk .
But there are still some unique traits .
I mean , why would you want to do all these things for real ?
I mentioned it briefly at the beginning ; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible .
And you see here a picture of a tissue section .
And so what does that mean , that it 's biodegradable and biocompatible ?
You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted .
Which means that all the devices that you 've seen before and all the formats , in principle , can be implanted and disappear .
And what you see there in that tissue section , in fact , is you see that reflector tape .
So , much like you 're seen at night by a car , then the idea is that you can see , if you illuminate tissue , you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk .
And you see there , it gets reintegrated in tissue .
And reintegration in the human body is not the only thing , but reintegration in the environment is important .
So you have a clock , you have protein , and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt -- unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday .
It 's edible , so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food .
It doesn 't taste good , so I 'm going to need some help with that .
But probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle .
Silk , during its self-assembly process , acts like a cocoon for biological matter .
And so if you change the recipe , and you add things when you pour -- so you add things to your liquid silk solution -- where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines , the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants .
So it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive .
So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together -- a fractured bone together -- and deliver drugs at the same , while your bone is healing , for example .
Or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge .
So we 've made a silk card with penicillin in it .
And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C , so 140 degrees Fahrenheit , for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin .
And so that could be --- that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels .
And of course , there 's no use in storage if you can 't use [ it ] .
And so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have , that they 're programmably degradable .
And so what you see there is the difference .
In the top , you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade , and in the bottom , a film that has been programmed to degrade in water .
And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it .
So it allows for the recovery of what we 've stored before .
And so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you 've seen .
So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread .
We 're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do , whether you want to replace a vein or a bone , or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics , perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt , maybe carry your drugs in your pocket , deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert , the answer may be in a thread of silk .
Thank you .
Sandra Aamodt : Why dieting doesn 't usually work
In the US , 80 % of girls have been on a diet by the time they 're 10 years old . In this honest , raw talk , neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt uses her personal story to frame an important lesson about how our brains manage our bodies , as she explores the science behind why dieting not only doesn 't work , but is likely to do more harm than good . She suggests ideas for how to live a less diet-obsessed life , intuitively .
Three and a half years ago , I made one of the best decisions of my life .
As my New Year 's resolution , I gave up dieting , stopped worrying about my weight , and learned to eat mindfully .
Now I eat whenever I 'm hungry , and I 've lost 10 pounds .
This was me at age 13 , when I started my first diet .
I look at that picture now , and I think , you did not need a diet , you needed a fashion consult .
But I thought I needed to lose weight , and when I gained it back , of course I blamed myself .
And for the next three decades , I was on and off various diets .
No matter what I tried , the weight I 'd lost always came back .
I 'm sure many of you know the feeling .
As a neuroscientist , I wondered , why is this so hard ?
Obviously , how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn .
What most people don 't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain , mostly without your awareness .
Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes , and that is a good thing , because your conscious mind -- how do we put this politely ? -- it 's easily distracted .
It 's good that you don 't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie .
You don 't forget how to walk because you 're thinking about what to have for dinner .
Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh , no matter what you consciously believe .
This is called your set point , but that 's a misleading term , because it 's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds .
You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range , but it 's much , much harder to stay outside of it .
The hypothalamus , the part of the brain that regulates body weight , there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight , more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it , and the system works like a thermostat , responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger , activity and metabolism , to keep your weight stable as conditions change .
That 's what a thermostat does , right ?
It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside .
Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter , but that 's not going to change the setting on the thermostat , which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up .
Your brain works exactly the same way , responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal .
If you lose a lot of weight , your brain reacts as if you were starving , and whether you started out fat or thin , your brain 's response is exactly the same .
We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not , but it can 't .
If you do lose a lot of weight , you become hungry , and your muscles burn less energy .
Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed .
That 's a lot of food .
This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin .
From an evolutionary perspective , your body 's resistance to weight loss makes sense .
When food was scarce , our ancestors ' survival depended on conserving energy , and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage .
Over the course of human history , starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating .
This may explain a very sad fact : Set points can go up , but they rarely go down .
Now , if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair , this is the kind of thing she was talking about .
Successful dieting doesn 't lower your set point .
Even after you 've kept the weight off for as long as seven years , your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back .
If that weight loss had been due to a long famine , that would be a sensible response .
In our modern world of drive-thru burgers , it 's not working out so well for many of us .
That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available , and it 's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity .
Sadly , a temporary weight gain can become permanent .
If you stay at a high weight for too long , probably a matter of years for most of us , your brain may decide that that 's the new normal .
Psychologists classify eaters into two groups , those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower , like most dieters .
Let 's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters .
The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight , and they spend less time thinking about food .
Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising , super-sizing , and the all-you-can-eat buffet .
And a small indulgence , like eating one scoop of ice cream , is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters .
Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging .
Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later , even if they started at a normal weight , and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders .
The other factor , by the way , those of you who are parents , was being teased by family members about their weight .
So don 't do that .
I left almost all my graphs at home , but I couldn 't resist throwing in just this one , because I 'm a geek , and that 's how I roll .
This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits : eating enough fruits and vegetables , exercise three times a week , not smoking , and drinking in moderation .
Let 's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study .
The height of the bars is the risk of death , and those zero , one , two , three , four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had .
And as you 'd expect , the healthier the lifestyle , the less likely people were to die during the study .
Now let 's look at what happens in overweight people .
The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death .
Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range .
For obese people with no healthy habits , the risk is very high , seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study .
But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too .
In fact , if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits , you can see that weight makes very little difference .
You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle , even If you can 't lose weight and keep it off .
Diets don 't have very much reliability .
Five years after a diet , most people have regained the weight .
Forty percent of them have gained even more .
If you think about this , the typical outcome of dieting is that you 're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it .
If I 've convinced you that dieting might be a problem , the next question is , what do you do about it ?
And my answer , in a word , is mindfulness .
I 'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga .
I 'm talking about mindful eating : learning to understand your body 's signals so that you eat when you 're hungry and stop when you 're full , because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you 're not hungry .
How do you do it ?
Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want , and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good .
Sit down to regular meals without distractions .
Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop , and let your hunger decide when you should be done .
It took about a year for me to learn this , but it 's really been worth it .
I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life .
I often don 't think about it .
I forget we have chocolate in the house .
It 's like aliens have taken over my brain .
It 's just completely different .
I should say that this approach to eating probably won 't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you 're not hungry , but doctors don 't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people , and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss .
Let 's face it : If diets worked , we 'd all be thin already .
Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results ?
Diets may seem harmless , but they actually do a lot of collateral damage .
At worst , they ruin lives : Weight obsession leads to eating disorders , especially in young kids .
In the U.S. , we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they 've been on a diet .
Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale .
Even at its best , dieting is a waste of time and energy .
It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project , and because willpower is limited , any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else .
Let me leave you with one last thought .
What if we told all those dieting girls that it 's okay to eat when they 're hungry ?
What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it ?
I think most of them would be happier and healthier , and as adults , many of them would probably be thinner .
I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13 .
Thanks .
Lee Cronin : Print your own medicine
Chemist Lee Cronin is working on a 3D printer that , instead of objects , is able to print molecules . An exciting potential long-term application : printing your own medicine using chemical inks .
Organic chemists make molecules , very complicated molecules , by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering .
And as a chemist , one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is , could we make a really cool universal chemistry set ?
In essence , could we " app " chemistry ?
Now what would this mean , and how would we do it ?
Well to start to do this , we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware .
And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time , we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry .
Now what could this mean ?
Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine , so if you have a cell that 's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill , if you have this embedded in your device at the same time , and you do the chemistry , you may be able to make drugs in a new way .
So how are we doing this in the lab ?
Well it requires software , it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks .
And so the really cool bit is , the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer , and you download the blueprint , the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device .
And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software .
So what could this mean ?
Well , ultimately , it could mean that you could print your own medicine .
And this is what we 're doing in the lab at the moment .
But to take baby steps to get there , first of all we want to look at drug design and production , or drug discovery and manufacturing .
Because if we can manufacture it after we 've discovered it , we could deploy it anywhere .
You don 't need to go to the chemist anymore .
We can print drugs at point of need .
We can download new diagnostics .
Say a new super bug has emerged .
You put it in your search engine , and you create the drug to treat the threat .
So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly .
But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells , with your genes and your environment , and you print your own personal medicine .
And if that doesn 't seem fanciful enough , where do you think we 're going to go ?
Well , you 're going to have your own personal matter fabricator .
Beam me up , Scotty .
Eli Pariser : Beware online " filter bubbles "
As web companies strive to tailor their services to our personal tastes , there 's a dangerous unintended consequence : We get trapped in a " filter bubble " and don 't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview . Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy .
Mark Zuckerberg , a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed .
And the journalist was asking him , " Why is this so important ? "
And Zuckerberg said , " A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa . "
And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like .
So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine , the Internet meant something very different to me .
It meant a connection to the world .
It meant something that would connect us all together .
And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society .
But there 's this shift in how information is flowing online , and it 's invisible .
And if we don 't pay attention to it , it could be a real problem .
So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time -- my Facebook page .
I 'm progressive , politically -- big surprise -- but I 've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives .
I like hearing what they 're thinking about ; I like seeing what they link to ; I like learning a thing or two .
And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed .
was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on , and it was noticing that , actually , I was clicking more on my liberal friends ' links than on my conservative friends ' links .
And without consulting me about it , it had edited them out .
They disappeared .
So Facebook isn 't the only place that 's doing this kind of invisible , algorithmic editing of the Web .
Google 's doing it too .
If I search for something , and you search for something , even right now at the very same time , we may get very different search results .
Even if you 're logged out , one engineer told me , there are 57 signals that Google looks at -- everything from what kind of computer you 're on to what kind of browser you 're using to where you 're located -- that it uses to personally tailor your query results .
Think about it for a second : there is no standard Google anymore .
And you know , the funny thing about this is that it 's hard to see .
You can 't see how different your search results are from anyone else 's .
But a couple of weeks ago , I asked a bunch of friends to Google " Egypt " and to send me screen shots of what they got .
So here 's my friend Scott 's screen shot .
And here 's my friend Daniel 's screen shot .
When you put them side-by-side , you don 't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are .
But when you do read the links , it 's really quite remarkable .
Daniel didn 't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results .
Scott 's results were full of them .
And this was the big story of the day at that time .
That 's how different these results are becoming .
So it 's not just Google and Facebook either .
This is something that 's sweeping the Web .
There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization .
Yahoo News , the biggest news site on the Internet , is now personalized -- different people get different things .
Huffington Post , the Washington Post , the New York Times -- all flirting with personalization in various ways .
And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see , but not necessarily what we need to see .
As Eric Schmidt said , " It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them . "
So I do think this is a problem .
And I think , if you take all of these filters together , you take all these algorithms , you get what I call a filter bubble .
And your filter bubble is your own personal , unique universe of information that you live in online .
And what 's in your filter bubble depends on who you are , and it depends on what you do .
But the thing is that you don 't decide what gets in .
And more importantly , you don 't actually see what gets edited out .
So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix .
And they were looking at the Netflix queues , and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed , which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses .
They enter the queue , they just zip right out .
So " Iron Man " zips right out , and " Waiting for Superman " can wait for a really long time .
What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there 's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves .
You know we all want to be someone who has watched " Rashomon , " but right now we want to watch " Ace Ventura " for the fourth time .
So the best editing gives us a bit of both .
It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan .
It gives us some information vegetables ; it gives us some information dessert .
And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters , these personalized filters , is that , because they 're mainly looking at what you click on first , it can throw off that balance .
And instead of a balanced information diet , you can end up surrounded by information junk food .
What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong .
In a broadcast society -- this is how the founding mythology goes -- in a broadcast society , there were these gatekeepers , the editors , and they controlled the flows of information .
And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way , and it allowed all of us to connect together , and it was awesome .
But that 's not actually what 's happening right now .
What we 're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones .
And the thing is that the algorithms don 't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did .
So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us , if they 're going to decide what we get to see and what we don 't get to see , then we need to make sure that they 're not just keyed to relevance .
We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important -- this is what TED does -- other points of view .
And the thing is , we 've actually been here before as a society .
In 1915 , it 's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities .
Then people noticed that they were doing something really important .
That , in fact , you couldn 't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn 't get a good flow of information , that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter , and then journalistic ethics developed .
It wasn 't perfect , but it got us through the last century .
And so now , we 're kind of back in 1915 on the Web .
And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they 're writing .
I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google -- Larry and Sergey -- people who have helped build the Web as it is , and I 'm grateful for that .
But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life , a sense of civic responsibility .
We need you to make sure that they 're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters .
And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn 't .
Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being .
We need it to connect us all together .
We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives .
And it 's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one .
Thank you .
Alan Russell : The potential of regenerative medicine
Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine -- a breakthrough way of thinking about disease and injury , using a process that can signal the body to rebuild itself .
I 'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope .
When we go to the physician today -- when we go to the doctor 's office and we walk in , there are words that we just don 't want to hear .
There are words that we 're truly afraid of .
Diabetes , cancer , Parkinson 's , Alzheimer 's , heart failure , lung failure -- things that we know are debilitating diseases , for which there 's relatively little that can be done .
And what I want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease , why it 's important , why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already hasn 't , and where we are clinically today , and where we might go tomorrow , and what some of the hurdles are .
And we 're going to do all of that in 18 minutes , I promise .
I want to start with this slide , because this slide sort of tells the story the way Science Magazine thinks of it .
This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human .
It was basically a regenerative medicine issue .
Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand .
It 's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale .
So we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there .
We know that if we have a damaged hip , you can put an artificial hip in .
And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover .
This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine .
This is not regenerative medicine .
Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago .
The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like -- and I 'll come back to that theme a few times -- instead of doing that , we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue .
So that at the end of the treatment , you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment .
Very few good ideas -- if you agree that this is a good idea -- very few good ideas are truly novel .
And this is just the same .
If you look back in history , Charles Lindbergh , who was better known for flying airplanes , was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel , one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller , to begin to think about , could you culture organs ?
And they published this book in 1937 , where they actually began to think about , what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs ?
We 've come a long way since then .
I 'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that 's going on .
But before doing that , what I 'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you .
Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life , and reducing poverty , and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe .
One of the challenges is that the richer we are , the longer we live .
And the longer we live , the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older .
This is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65 .
And you can basically see that the richer a country is , the older the people are within it .
Why is this important ?
And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now ?
If the average age of your population is 30 , then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again , maybe a little bit of asthma .
If the average age in your country is 45 to 55 , now the average person is looking at diabetes , early-onset diabetes , heart failure , coronary artery disease -- things that are inherently more difficult to treat , and much more expensive to treat .
Just have a look at the demographics in the U.S. here .
This is from " The Untied States of America . "
In 1930 , there were 41 workers per retiree .
41 people who were basically outside of being really sick , paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease .
In 2010 , two workers per retiree in the U.S.
And this is matched in every industrialized , wealthy country in the world .
How can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this ?
This is age versus cost of health care .
And you can see that right around age 45 , 40 to 45 , there 's a sudden spike in the cost of health care .
It 's actually quite interesting . If you do the right studies , you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care , plotted over your lifetime .
And about seven years before you 're about to die , there 's a spike .
And you can actually -- -- we won 't get into that .
There are very few things , very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging .
I 'd suggest there are four things , and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system .
All those things do is change who pays .
They don 't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is .
One thing you can do is not treat . You can ration health care .
We won 't talk about that anymore . It 's too depressing .
You can prevent .
Obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention .
But perhaps most interesting , to me anyway , and most important , is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression , and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom .
Think of it in terms of diabetes , for instance .
Today , with diabetes , what do we do ?
We diagnose the disease eventually , once it becomes symptomatic , and then we treat the symptom for 10 , 20 , 30 , 40 years .
And we do OK . Insulin 's a pretty good therapy .
But eventually it stops working , and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease .
Why couldn 't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease , perhaps even before it was symptomatic ?
And it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it , but if it worked , we would truly be able to do something different .
This video , I think , gets across the concept that I 'm talking about quite dramatically .
This is a newt re-growing its limb .
If a newt can do this kind of thing , why can 't we ?
I 'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment .
But what we 're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body , for tissues and for organs themselves .
So today 's reality is that if we get sick , the message is we will treat your symptoms , and you need to adjust to a new way of life .
I would pose to you that tomorrow -- and when tomorrow is we could debate , but it 's within the foreseeable future -- we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation .
There 's a limb prosthetic up here , similar actually one on the soldier that 's come back from Iraq .
There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs .
Imagine if instead of facing that , they could actually face the regeneration of that limb .
It 's a wild concept .
I 'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept .
But it 's applicable , again , to every organ system .
How can we do that ?
The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body .
We need to learn to speak the body 's language .
And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus .
A mammalian fetus , if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy , will re-grow that limb .
So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms .
It 's a natural process , but it is lost as we age .
In a child , before the age of about six months , if they lose their fingertip in an accident , they 'll re-grow their fingertip .
By the time they 're five , they won 't be able to do that anymore .
So to engage in that conversation with the body , we need to speak the body 's language .
And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today .
I 'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body .
The first is cellular therapies .
Clearly , we heal ourselves in a natural process , using cells to do most of the work .
Therefore , if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body , they may do the healing .
Secondly , we can use materials .
We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials .
If we can invent materials , design materials , or extract materials from a natural environment , then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself .
And finally , we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal .
I 'm going to show you an example of each of these , and I 'm going to start with materials .
Steve Badylak -- who 's at the University of Pittsburgh -- about a decade ago had a remarkable idea .
And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig , if you threw away all the cells , and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active , may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself .
And he asked a very important question .
He asked the question , if I take that material , which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine , and I place it somewhere else on a person 's body , would it give a tissue-specific response , or would it make small intestine if I tried to make a new ear ?
I wouldn 't be telling you this story if it weren 't compelling .
The picture I 'm about to show you is a compelling picture .
However , for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish -- even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends -- the lights are down . This is a good time to look at your feet , check your Blackberry , do anything other than look at the screen .
What I 'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer .
And although -- it 's good to laugh before we look at this .
This is the reality of diabetes .
I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics , diabetic ulcers , we just don 't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment , which is amputation , if you can 't heal it .
So I 'm going to put the slide up now . It won 't be up for long .
This is a diabetic ulcer . It 's tragic .
The treatment for this is amputation .
This is an older lady . She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes , and has decided to die with what ' s left of her body intact .
And this lady decided , after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer , that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented .
That 's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later .
That material contained only natural signals .
And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn 't have before .
There 's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you -- I 'll let you know when you can look again .
This is a horse . The horse is not in pain .
If the horse was in pain , I wouldn 't show you this slide .
The horse just has another nostril that 's developed because of a riding accident .
Just a few weeks after treatment -- in this case , taking that material , turning it into a gel , and packing that area , and then repeating the treatment a few times -- and the horse heals up .
And if you took an ultrasound of that area , it would look great .
Here 's a dolphin where the fin 's been re-attached .
There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds .
Could you regenerate a limb ?
DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question .
And I 'll show you the 15 million dollar picture .
This is a 78 year-old man who 's lost the end of his fingertip .
Remember that I mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips .
After treatment that 's what it looks like .
This is happening today .
This is clinically relevant today .
There are materials that do this . Here are the heart patches .
But could you go a little further ?
Could you , say , instead of using material , can I take some cells along with the material , and remove a damaged piece of tissue , put a bio-degradable material on there ?
You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish .
This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women 's Hospital .
He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish .
He chills the dish , it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish .
It 's the coolest stuff .
Now I 'm going to show you cell-based regeneration .
And what I 'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient .
Again , if you 're squeamish , you don 't want to watch .
But this one 's kind of cool .
So this is a bypass operation , just like what Al Gore had , with a difference .
In this case , at the end of the bypass operation , you 're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient .
And I 'm standing up here because at one point I 'm going to show you just how early this technology is .
Here go the stem cells , right into the beating heart of the patient .
And if you look really carefully , it 's going to be right around this point you 'll actually see a back-flush .
You see the cells coming back out .
We need all sorts of new technology , new devices , to get the cells to the right place at the right time .
Just a little bit of data , a tiny bit of data .
This was a randomized trial .
At this time this was an N of 20 . Now there 's an N of about 100 .
Basically , if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass , they get a little bit better .
If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass , for these particular patients , they became asymptomatic .
These are now two years out .
The coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early , and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state .
This is the same procedure , but now done minimally invasively , with only three holes in the body where they 're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure .
There go the cells .
We don 't have time to go into all of those details , but basically , that works too .
You can take patients who are less sick , and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy .
Here 's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn 't quite clinical yet , but I think very soon will be .
This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh , along with a number of colleagues around the world .
They 've decided that liposuction fluid , which -- in the United States , we have a lot of liposuction fluid .
It 's a great source of stem cells .
Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid .
So you could go in , you could get your tummy-tuck .
Out comes the liposuction fluid , and in this case , the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons .
All done in the lab .
And I think fairly soon , you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived , or adipose-derived , stem cells .
I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease .
Here 's just one example before I close up .
This is equally tragic .
We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army , who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq .
Many of those patients are very severely burned .
And if there 's anything that 's been learned about burn , it 's that we don 't know how to treat it .
Everything that is done to treat burn -- basically we do a sodding approach .
We make something over here , and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound , and we try and get the two to take .
In this case here , a new , wearable bio-reactor has been designed -- it should be tested clinically later this year at ISR -- by Joerg Gerlach in Pittsburgh .
And that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed .
The gun that you see there sprays cells .
That 's going to spray cells over that area .
The reactor will serve to fertilize the environment , deliver other things as well at the same time , and therefore we will seed that lawn , as opposed to try the sodding approach .
It 's a completely different way of doing it .
So my 18 minutes is up .
So let me finish up with some good news , and maybe a little bit of bad news .
The good news is that this is happening today .
It 's very powerful work .
Clearly the images kind of get that across .
It 's incredibly difficult because it 's highly inter-disciplinary .
Almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen .
A number of governments , and a number of regions , have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease .
The Japanese government were perhaps the first , when they decided to invest first 3 billion , later another 2 billion in this field .
It 's no coincidence .
Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age .
They need this to work or their health system dies .
So they 're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area .
The European Union , same thing .
China , the same thing .
China just launched a national tissue-engineering center .
The first year budget was 250 million US dollars .
In the United States we 've had a somewhat different approach .
Oh , for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president .
We 've had a different approach .
And the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along .
But there 's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way .
And I 'm going to finish up with a quote , maybe a little cheap shot , at the director of the NIH , who 's a very charming man .
Myself and Jay Vacanti from Harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago , to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he 's going to get next year and focus it , in a strategic way , to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients .
And at the end of a very testy meeting , what the NIH director said was , " Your vision is larger than our appetite . "
I 'd like to close by saying that no one 's going to change our vision , but together we can change his appetite .
Thank you .
Terry Moore : Why is ' x ' the unknown ?
Why is ' x ' the symbol for an unknown ? In this short and funny talk , Terry Moore gives the surprising answer .
I have the answer to a question that we 've all asked .
The question is , Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown ?
Now I know we learned that in math class , but now it 's everywhere in the culture -- The X prize , the X-Files , Project X , TEDx .
Where 'd that come from ?
About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic , which turns out to be a supremely logical language .
To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation , because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information .
That 's one of the reasons so much of what we 've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks .
This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra .
And al-jebr roughly translates to " the system for reconciling disparate parts . "
Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra .
One example among many .
The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe -- which is to say Spain -- in the 11th and 12th centuries .
And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language .
But there were problems .
One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don 't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice .
Trust me on that one .
Also , those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages .
Here 's one of the culprits .
This is the letter SHeen , and it makes the sound we think of as SH -- " sh . "
It 's also the very first letter of the word shalan , which means " something " just like the the English word " something " -- some undefined , unknown thing .
Now in Arabic , we can make this definite by adding the definite article " al . "
So this is al-shalan -- the unknown thing .
And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics , such as this 10th century derivation of proofs .
The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can 't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn 't have that SH , that " sh " sound .
So by convention , they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound , " ck " sound , from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai .
Later when this material was translated into a common European language , which is to say Latin , they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X.
And once that happened , once this material was in Latin , it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years .
But now we have the answer to our question .
Why is it that X is the unknown ?
X is the unknown because you can 't say " sh " in Spanish .
And I thought that was worth sharing .
Mike Biddle : We can recycle plastic
Less than 10 % of plastic trash is recycled -- compared to almost 90 % of metals -- because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds . Frustrated by this waste , Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can , and does , recycle any kind of plastic .
I 'm a garbage man .
And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man , because I absolutely hate waste .
I hope , within the next 10 minutes , to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life .
And I 'd like to start at the very beginning .
Think back when you were just a kid .
How did look at the stuff in your life ?
Perhaps it was like these toddler rules : It 's my stuff if I saw it first .
The entire pile is my stuff if I 'm building something .
The more stuff that 's mine , the better .
And of course , it 's your stuff if it 's broken .
Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry , it 's become pretty clear to me that we don 't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults .
And let me tell you why I have that perspective .
Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people 's discarded stuff .
Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff , but it 's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world -- well less than one percent .
In fact , the United Nations estimates that there 's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year -- and that 's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream .
And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth , that number well more than doubles .
And of course , the more developed the country , the bigger these mountains .
Now when you see these mountains , most people think of garbage .
We see above-ground mines .
And the reason we see mines is because there 's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place .
And it 's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams .
Because as we 've heard all week at TED , the world 's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff .
And of course , they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted .
And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day ?
It 's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals .
And the metals , we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world .
And the plastics , we get from oil , which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract .
And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we 're already starting to see today .
The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff , particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner .
Most of what 's extracted from our end-of-life stuff , if it makes it to a recycler , are the metals .
To put that in perspective -- and I 'm using steel as a proxy here for metals , because it 's the most common metal -- if your stuff makes it to a recycler , probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose .
Plastics are a whole other story : well less than 10 percent are recovered .
In fact , it 's more like five percent .
Most of it 's incinerated or landfilled .
Now most people think that 's because plastics are a throw-away material , have very little value .
But actually , plastics are several times more valuable than steel .
And there 's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel .
So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material ?
Well it 's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another .
They have very different densities .
They have different electrical and magnetic properties .
And they even have different colors .
So it 's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials .
Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range .
They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties .
And any plastic can be any color , as you probably well know .
So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don 't work for plastics .
Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world -- and sadly to say , particularly from the United States , where we don 't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe -- finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling .
People , for as little as a dollar a day , pick through our stuff .
They extract what they can , which is mostly the metals -- circuit boards and so forth -- and they leave behind mostly what they can 't recover , which is , again , mostly the plastics .
Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here .
And they extract the metals by hand .
Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution , this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution .
I call this environmental arbitrage .
And it 's not fair , it 's not safe and it 's not sustainable .
Now because the plastics are so plentiful -- and by the way , those other methods don 't lead to the recovery of plastics , obviously -- but people do try to recover the plastics .
This is just one example .
This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai , India .
They store the plastics on the roofs .
They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these , and people try very hard to separate the plastics , by color , by shape , by feel , by any technique they can .
And sometimes they 'll resort to what 's known as the " burn and sniff " technique where they 'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic .
None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way .
And by the way , please don 't try this technique at home .
So what are we to do about this space-age material , at least what we used to call a space-aged material , these plastics ?
Well I certainly believe that it 's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke .
So about 20 years ago , I literally started in my garage tinkering around , trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other , and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends , in the mining world actually , and in the plastics world , and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world .
Because after all , we 're doing above-ground mining .
And we eventually broke the code .
This is the last frontier of recycling .
It 's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth .
And we finally figured out how to do it .
And in the process , we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics .
The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals .
You breakdown the molecules , you recombine them in very specific ways , to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day .
We said , there 's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics .
And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint , sustainable from an economic standpoint as well .
Well a good place to start is with waste .
It certainly doesn 't cost as much as oil , and it 's plentiful , as I hope that you 've been able to see from the photographs .
And because we 're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them , we 're using a mining approach to extract the materials .
We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment .
We have enormous energy savings .
I don 't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way .
And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life , our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them .
And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that 's made from petrochemicals .
Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings .
They get to close the loop with their products .
And they get to make more sustainable products .
In the short time period I have , I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this .
It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits .
They recover the metals and leave behind what 's called shredder residue -- it 's their waste -- a very complex mixture of materials , but predominantly plastics .
We take out the things that aren 't plastics , such as the metals they missed , carpeting , foam , rubber , wood , glass , paper , you name it .
Even an occasional dead animal , unfortunately .
And it goes in the first part of our process here , which is more like traditional recycling .
We 're sieving the material , we 're using magnets , we 're using air classification .
It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point .
At the end of this process , we have a mixed plastic composite : many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics .
This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process , and the really hard work , multi-step separation process begins .
We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail .
We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics , not only by type , but by grade .
And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic : one type , one grade .
We then use optical sorting to color sort this material .
We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos .
We push that material to extruders where we melt it , push it through small die holes , make spaghetti-like plastic strands .
And we chop those strands into what are called pellets .
And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry .
This is the same material that you would get from oil .
And today , we 're producing it from your old stuff , and it 's going right back into your new stuff .
So now , instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke , you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products , in your office , or back at work in your home .
And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic , replacing virgin plastic , to make their new products .
So I hope I 've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life .
We took our clues from mother nature .
Mother nature wastes very little , reuses practically everything .
And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer -- that 's a label I 've always hated my entire life -- and think of yourself as just using resources in one form , until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time .
And finally , I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to : " If it 's broken , it 's my stuff . "
Thank you for your time .
Lalitesh Katragadda : Making maps to fight disaster , build economies
As of 2005 , only 15 percent of the world was mapped . This slows the delivery of aid after a disaster -- and hides the economic potential of unused lands and unknown roads . In this short talk , Google 's Lalitesh Katragadda demos Map Maker , a group map-making tool that people around the globe are using to map their world .
In 2008 , Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar .
Millions of people were in severe need of help .
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area .
But there were no maps , no maps of roads , no maps showing hospitals , no way for help to reach the cyclone victims .
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London , it is hard to believe that as of 2005 , only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail .
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world 's populous faces : not having detailed maps .
But help was coming .
At Google , 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads , 3,000 hospitals , logistics and relief points .
And it took them four days .
The new software they used ? Google Mapmaker .
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally .
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers , from schools to local businesses , and video stores to the corner store .
Maps matter .
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land .
For example , a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone .
In the last year alone , thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information , and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable .
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere .
Let 's look at some of the maps being created by users right now .
So , as we speak , people are mapping the world in these 170 countries .
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal .
And , closer to home , Chalua , an N.G. road in Bangalore .
This is the result of computational geometry , gesture recognition , and machine learning .
This is a victory of thousands of users , in hundreds of cities , one user , one edit at a time .
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet .
Welcome to the new world .
Nathan Myhrvold : Cooking as never seen before
Cookbook author Nathan Myhrvold talks about his magisterial work , " Modernist Cuisine " -- and shares the secret of its cool photographic illustrations , which show cross-sections of food in the very act of being cooked .
So I 'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food .
I 've been interested in food for a long time .
I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this .
I went to chef school in France .
And there is a way the world both envisions food , the way the world writes about food and learns about food .
And it 's largely what you would find in these books .
And it 's a wonderful thing .
But there 's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established .
In the last 20 years , people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food .
In fact , understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking -- some of the chemistry , some of the physics and so forth .
But that 's not in any of those books .
There 's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed , some about new aesthetics , new approaches to food .
There 's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria .
He 's developed a very avant-garde cuisine .
A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal , he 's developed his avant-garde cuisine .
None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books .
None of them are taught in cooking schools .
In order to learn them , you have to go work in those restaurants .
And finally , there 's the old way of viewing food is the old way .
And so a few years ago -- fours years ago , actually -- I set out to say , is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder ?
Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before ?
So we tried , and I 'll show you what we came up with .
This is a picture called a cutaway .
This is actually the first picture I took in the book .
The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
And this magic view allows you to see all of what 's happening while the broccoli steams .
Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact .
And the hope was two-fold .
One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli .
But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical , maybe a little bit more scientific , maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have .
Because with that beautiful photo , maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time .
Steaming ought to be faster .
It turns out it isn 't because of something called film condensation , and this explains that .
Well , that first cutaway picture worked , so we said , " Okay , let 's do some more . "
So here 's another one .
We discovered why woks are the shape they are .
This shaped wok doesn 't work very well ; this caught fire three times .
But we had a philosophy , which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second .
And one of our canning cutaways .
Once you start cutting things in half , you kind of get carried away , so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan .
And each of these text blocks explains a key thing that 's going on .
In this case , boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic .
You don 't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can 't grow in the acid .
So this is great for pickled vegetables , which is what we 're canning here .
Here 's our hamburger cutaway .
One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish .
So you can lavish all the same care , all the same technique , on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish .
And if you do lavish as much technique as possible , and you try to make the highest quality hamburger , it gets to be a little bit involved .
The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called " The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer . "
Because our hamburger recipe , our ultimate hamburger recipe , if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff , it does take about 30 hours .
Of course , you 're not actually working the whole time .
Most of the time is kind of sitting there .
The point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven 't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers , because , believe it or not , there is something to the physics and chemistry -- in particular , those flames underneath the burger .
Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste doesn 't come from the wood or the charcoal .
Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference .
Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing , or burning .
So it 's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste .
Now you might wonder , how do we make these cutaways ?
Most people assume we use Photoshop .
And the answer is : no , not really ; we use a machine shop .
And it turns out , the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half .
So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world .
We cut a $ 5,000 restaurant oven in half .
The manufacturer said , " What would it take for you to cut one in half ? "
I said , " It would have to show up free . "
And so it showed up , we used it a little while , we cut it in half .
Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots .
We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front .
We used a red , very high-temperature silicon to do that .
The great thing is , when you cut something in half , you have another half .
So you photograph that in exactly the same position , and then you can substitute in -- and that part does use Photoshop -- just the edges .
So it 's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air , supported by wires , and then they take the wires away digitally so you 're flying through the air .
In most cases , though , there was no glass .
Like for the hamburger , we just cut the damn barbecue .
And so those coals that kept falling off the edge , we kept having to put them back up .
But again , it only has to work for a thousandth of a second .
The wok shot caught fire three times .
What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh !
One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way .
But hey , they grow back .
In addition to cutaways , we also explain physics .
This is Fourier 's law of heat conduction .
It 's a partial differential equation .
We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it .
But to make them palatable , we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this .
We 've got lots of little tidbits in the book .
Everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage , right ?
But you probably don 't know that much about James Watt .
But now you will ; we put a biography of James Watt in .
It 's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt , and where he got his inspiration .
It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey .
We also did a lot of calculation .
I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook .
Here 's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue , or other radiant heat source , goes as you move away from it .
So as you move vertically away from this surface , the heat falls off .
As you move side to side , it moves off .
That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot .
That 's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent .
So that 's the place where you really want to cook .
And it 's got this funny horn-shaped thing , which as far as I know , again , the first cookbook to ever do this .
Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it .
You know , there 's two ways you can make a product .
You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want , or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it .
Here 's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger .
If you really want great hamburger , it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain .
And it 's really simple , as you can see here .
As it comes out of the grinder , you just have a little tray , and you just take it off in little passes , build it up , slice it vertically .
Here 's the final hamburger .
This is the 30-hour hamburger .
We make every aspect of this burger .
The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it .
We also have things about how to make the bun .
There 's a mushroom , ketchup -- it goes on and on .
Now watch closely . This is popcorn . I 'll explain it here .
The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics .
Isn 't that beautiful ?
We have a very high-speed camera , which we had lots of fun with on the book .
The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600 .
That 's what 's happening to the water inside that popcorn .
So it 's a great illustration of that .
Now I 'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual .
We have a chapter on gels .
And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI , I thought , well , let 's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin .
Well , if you have a high-speed camera , and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around , pretty soon somebody does this .
Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot -- that 's why you shouldn 't get shot .
The other amazing thing is , when this ballistics gelatin comes down , it falls back down as a nice block .
Anyway , here 's the book .
Here it is .
2,438 pages .
And they 're nice big pages too .
A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen , so there 's a sixth volume that has washable , waterproof paper .
Brian Greene : Is our universe the only universe ?
Is there more than one universe ? In this visually rich , action-packed talk , Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the " multiverse . "
A few months ago the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two teams of astronomers for a discovery that has been hailed as one of the most important astronomical observations ever .
And today , after briefly describing what they found , I 'm going to tell you about a highly controversial framework for explaining their discovery , namely the possibility that way beyond the Earth , the Milky Way and other distant galaxies , we may find that our universe is not the only universe , but is instead part of a vast complex of universes that we call the multiverse .
Now the idea of a multiverse is a strange one .
I mean , most of us were raised to believe that the word " universe " means everything .
And I say most of us with forethought , as my four-year-old daughter has heard me speak of these ideas since she was born .
And last year I was holding her and I said , " Sophia , I love you more than anything in the universe . "
And she turned to me and said , " Daddy , universe or multiverse ? "
But barring such an anomalous upbringing , it is strange to imagine other realms separate from ours , most with fundamentally different features , that would rightly be called universes of their own .
And yet , speculative though the idea surely is , I aim to convince you that there 's reason for taking it seriously , as it just might be right .
I 'm going to tell the story of the multiverse in three parts .
In part one , I 'm going to describe those Nobel Prize-winning results and to highlight a profound mystery which those results revealed .
In part two , I 'll offer a solution to that mystery .
It 's based on an approach called string theory , and that 's where the idea of the multiverse will come into the story .
Finally , in part three , I 'm going to describe a cosmological theory called inflation , which will pull all the pieces of the story together .
Okay , part one starts back in 1929 when the great astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the distant galaxies were all rushing away from us , establishing that space itself is stretching , it 's expanding .
Now this was revolutionary .
The prevailing wisdom was that on the largest of scales the universe was static .
But even so , there was one thing that everyone was certain of : The expansion must be slowing down .
That , much as the gravitational pull of the Earth slows the ascent of an apple tossed upward , the gravitational pull of each galaxy on every other must be slowing the expansion of space .
Now let 's fast-forward to the 1990s when those two teams of astronomers I mentioned at the outset were inspired by this reasoning to measure the rate at which the expansion has been slowing .
And they did this by painstaking observations of numerous distant galaxies , allowing them to chart how the expansion rate has changed over time .
Here 's the surprise : They found that the expansion is not slowing down .
Instead they found that it 's speeding up , going faster and faster .
That 's like tossing an apple upward and it goes up faster and faster .
Now if you saw an apple do that , you 'd want to know why .
What 's pushing on it ?
Similarly , the astronomers ' results are surely well-deserving of the Nobel Prize , but they raised an analogous question .
What force is driving all galaxies to rush away from every other at an ever-quickening speed ?
Well the most promising answer comes from an old idea of Einstein 's .
You see , we are all used to gravity being a force that does one thing , pulls objects together .
But in Einstein 's theory of gravity , his general theory of relativity , gravity can also push things apart .
How ? Well according to Einstein 's math , if space is uniformly filled with an invisible energy , sort of like a uniform , invisible mist , then the gravity generated by that mist would be repulsive , repulsive gravity , which is just what we need to explain the observations .
Because the repulsive gravity of an invisible energy in space -- we now call it dark energy , but I 've made it smokey white here so you can see it -- its repulsive gravity would cause each galaxy to push against every other , driving expansion to speed up , not slow down .
And this explanation represents great progress .
But I promised you a mystery here in part one .
Here it is .
When the astronomers worked out how much of this dark energy must be infusing space to account for the cosmic speed up , look at what they found .
This number is small .
Expressed in the relevant unit , it is spectacularly small .
And the mystery is to explain this peculiar number .
We want this number to emerge from the laws of physics , but so far no one has found a way to do that .
Now you might wonder , should you care ?
Maybe explaining this number is just a technical issue , a technical detail of interest to experts , but of no relevance to anybody else .
Well it surely is a technical detail , but some details really matter .
Some details provide windows into uncharted realms of reality , and this peculiar number may be doing just that , as the only approach that 's so far made headway to explain it invokes the possibility of other universes -- an idea that naturally emerges from string theory , which takes me to part two : string theory .
So hold the mystery of the dark energy in the back of your mind as I now go on to tell you three key things about string theory .
First off , what is it ?
Well it 's an approach to realize Einstein 's dream of a unified theory of physics , a single overarching framework that would be able to describe all the forces at work in the universe .
And the central idea of string theory is quite straightforward .
It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely , at first you 'll find molecules and then you 'll find atoms and subatomic particles .
But the theory says that if you could probe smaller , much smaller than we can with existing technology , you 'd find something else inside these particles -- a little tiny vibrating filament of energy , a little tiny vibrating string .
And just like the strings on a violin , they can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes .
These little fundamental strings , when they vibrate in different patterns , they produce different kinds of particles -- so electrons , quarks , neutrinos , photons , all other particles would be united into a single framework , as they would all arise from vibrating strings .
It 's a compelling picture , a kind of cosmic symphony , where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little , tiny strings can play .
But there 's a cost to this elegant unification , because years of research have shown that the math of string theory doesn 't quite work .
It has internal inconsistencies , unless we allow for something wholly unfamiliar -- extra dimensions of space .
That is , we all know about the usual three dimensions of space .
And you can think about those as height , width and depth .
But string theory says that , on fantastically small scales , there are additional dimensions crumpled to a tiny size so small that we have not detected them .
But even though the dimensions are hidden , they would have an impact on things that we can observe because the shape of the extra dimensions constrains how the strings can vibrate .
And in string theory , vibration determines everything .
So particle masses , the strengths of forces , and most importantly , the amount of dark energy would be determined by the shape of the extra dimensions .
So if we knew the shape of the extra dimensions , we should be able to calculate these features , calculate the amount of dark energy .
The challenge is we don 't know the shape of the extra dimensions .
All we have is a list of candidate shapes allowed by the math .
Now when these ideas were first developed , there were only about five different candidate shapes , so you can imagine analyzing them one-by-one to determine if any yield the physical features we observe .
But over time the list grew as researchers found other candidate shapes .
From five , the number grew into the hundreds and then the thousands -- A large , but still manageable , collection to analyze , since after all , graduate students need something to do .
But then the list continued to grow into the millions and the billions , until today .
The list of candidate shapes has soared to about 10 to the 500 .
So , what to do ?
Well some researchers lost heart , concluding that was so many candidate shapes for the extra dimensions , each giving rise to different physical features , string theory would never make definitive , testable predictions .
But others turned this issue on its head , taking us to the possibility of a multiverse .
Here 's the idea .
Maybe each of these shapes is on an equal footing with every other .
Each is as real as every other , in the sense that there are many universes , each with a different shape , for the extra dimensions .
And this radical proposal has a profound impact on this mystery : the amount of dark energy revealed by the Nobel Prize-winning results .
Because you see , if there are other universes , and if those universes each have , say , a different shape for the extra dimensions , then the physical features of each universe will be different , and in particular , the amount of dark energy in each universe will be different .
Which means that the mystery of explaining the amount of dark energy we 've now measured would take on a wholly different character .
In this context , the laws of physics can 't explain one number for the dark energy because there isn 't just one number , there are many numbers .
Which means we have been asking the wrong question .
It 's that the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves in a universe with a particular amount of dark energy we 've measured instead of any of the other possibilities that are out there ?
And that 's a question on which we can make headway .
Because those universes that have much more dark energy than ours , whenever matter tries to clump into galaxies , the repulsive push of the dark energy is so strong that it blows the clump apart and galaxies don 't form .
And in those universes that have much less dark energy , well they collapse back on themselves so quickly that , again , galaxies don 't form .
And without galaxies , there are no stars , no planets and no chance for our form of life to exist in those other universes .
So we find ourselves in a universe with the particular amount of dark energy we 've measured simply because our universe has conditions hospitable to our form of life .
And that would be that .
Mystery solved , multiverse found .
Now some find this explanation unsatisfying .
We 're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe .
But the point is , if the feature you 're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality , then thinking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided .
An early example comes from the great astronomer Johannes Kepler who was obsessed with understanding a different number -- why the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth .
And he worked for decades trying to explain this number , but he never succeeded , and we know why .
Kepler was asking the wrong question .
We now know that there are many planets at a wide variety of different distances from their host stars .
So hoping that the laws of physics will explain one particular number , 93 million miles , well that is simply wrongheaded .
Instead the right question to ask is , why do we humans find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance , instead of any of the other possibilities ?
And again , that 's a question we can answer .
Those planets which are much closer to a star like the Sun would be so hot that our form of life wouldn 't exist .
And those planets that are much farther away from the star , well they 're so cold that , again , our form of life would not take hold .
So we find ourselves on a planet at this particular distance simply because it yields conditions vital to our form of life .
And when it comes to planets and their distances , this clearly is the right kind of reasoning .
The point is , when it comes to universes and the dark energy that they contain , it may also be the right kind of reasoning .
One key difference , of course , is we know that there are other planets out there , but so far I 've only speculated on the possibility that there might be other universes .
So to pull it all together , we need a mechanism that can actually generate other universes .
And that takes me to my final part , part three .
Because such a mechanism has been found by cosmologists trying to understand the Big Bang .
You see , when we speak of the Big Bang , we often have an image of a kind of cosmic explosion that created our universe and set space rushing outward .
But there 's a little secret .
The Big Bang leaves out something pretty important , the Bang .
It tells us how the universe evolved after the Bang , but gives us no insight into what would have powered the Bang itself .
And this gap was finally filled by an enhanced version of the Big Bang theory .
It 's called inflationary cosmology , which identified a particular kind of fuel that would naturally generate an outward rush of space .
The fuel is based on something called a quantum field , but the only detail that matters for us is that this fuel proves to be so efficient that it 's virtually impossible to use it all up , which means in the inflationary theory , the Big Bang giving rise to our universe is likely not a one-time event .
Instead the fuel not only generated our Big Bang , but it would also generate countless other Big Bangs , each giving rise to its own separate universe with our universe becoming but one bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes .
And now , when we meld this with string theory , here 's the picture we 're led to .
Each of these universes has extra dimensions .
The extra dimensions take on a wide variety of different shapes .
The different shapes yield different physical features .
And we find ourselves in one universe instead of another simply because it 's only in our universe that the physical features , like the amount of dark energy , are right for our form of life to take hold .
And this is the compelling but highly controversial picture of the wider cosmos that cutting-edge observation and theory have now led us to seriously consider .
One big remaining question , of course , is , could we ever confirm the existence of other universes ?
Well let me describe one way that might one day happen .
The inflationary theory already has strong observational support .
Because the theory predicts that the Big Bang would have been so intense that as space rapidly expanded , tiny quantum jitters from the micro world would have been stretched out to the macro world , yielding a distinctive fingerprint , a pattern of slightly hotter spots and slightly colder spots , across space , which powerful telescopes have now observed .
Going further , if there are other universes , the theory predicts that every so often those universes can collide .
And if our universe got hit by another , that collision would generate an additional subtle pattern of temperature variations across space that we might one day be able to detect .
And so exotic as this picture is , it may one day be grounded in observations , establishing the existence of other universes .
I 'll conclude with a striking implication of all these ideas for the very far future .
You see , we learned that our universe is not static , that space is expanding , that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies .
But because the expansion is speeding up , in the very far future , those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won 't be able to see them -- not because of technological limitations , but because of the laws of physics .
The light those galaxies emit , even traveling at the fastest speed , the speed of light , will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us .
So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static , inky , black stillness .
And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single central oasis of matter that they inhabit -- a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong .
Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era , like ours , attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies .
But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge ?
Or would they believe in the black , static empty universe that their own state-of-the-art observations reveal ?
I suspect the latter .
Which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration .
It appears that it may not always be that way .
Because today 's astronomers , by turning powerful telescopes to the sky , have captured a handful of starkly informative photons -- a kind of cosmic telegram billions of years in transit .
and the message echoing across the ages is clear .
Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law .
Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon .
Thank you very much .
Brian , thank you .
The range of ideas you 've just spoken about are dizzying , exhilarating , incredible .
How do you think of where cosmology is now , in a sort of historical side ?
Are we in the middle of something unusual historically in your opinion ?
Well it 's hard to say .
When we learn that astronomers of the far future may not have enough information to figure things out , the natural question is , maybe we 're already in that position and certain deep , critical features of the universe already have escaped our ability to understand because of how cosmology evolves .
So from that perspective , maybe we will always be asking questions and never be able to fully answer them .
On the other hand , we now can understand how old the universe is .
We can understand how to understand the data from the microwave background radiation that was set down 13.72 billion years ago -- and yet , we can do calculations today to predict how it will look and it matches .
Holy cow ! That 's just amazing .
So on the one hand , it 's just incredible where we 've gotten , but who knows what sort of blocks we may find in the future .
You 're going to be around for the next few days .
Maybe some of these conversations can continue .
Thank you . Thank you , Brian .
Michael Tilson Thomas : Music and emotion through time
In this epic overview , Michael Tilson Thomas traces the development of classical music through the development of written notation , the record , and the re-mix .
Well when I was asked to do this TEDTalk , I was really chuckled , because , you see , my father 's name was Ted , and much of my life , especially my musical life , is really a talk that I 'm still having with him , or the part of me that he continues to be .
Now Ted was a New Yorker , an all-around theater guy , and he was a self-taught illustrator and musician .
He didn 't read a note , and he was profoundly hearing impaired .
Yet , he was my greatest teacher .
Because even through the squeaks of his hearing aids , his understanding of music was profound .
And for him , it wasn 't so much the way the music goes as about what it witnesses and where it can take you .
And he did a painting of this experience , which he called " In the Realm of Music . "
Now Ted entered this realm every day by improvising in a sort of Tin Pan Alley style like this .
But he was tough when it came to music .
He said , " There are only two things that matter in music : what and how .
And the thing about classical music , that what and how , it 's inexhaustible . "
That was his passion for the music .
Both my parents really loved it .
They didn 't know all that much about it , but they gave me the opportunity to discover it together with them .
And I think inspired by that memory , it 's been my desire to try and bring it to as many other people as I can , sort of pass it on through whatever means .
And how people get this music , how it comes into their lives , really fascinates me .
One day in New York , I was on the street and I saw some kids playing baseball between stoops and cars and fire hydrants .
And a tough , slouchy kid got up to bat , and he took a swing and really connected .
And he watched the ball fly for a second , and then he went , " Dah dadaratatatah .
Brah dada dadadadah . "
And he ran around the bases .
And I thought , go figure .
How did this piece of 18th century Austrian aristocratic entertainment turn into the victory crow of this New York kid ?
How was that passed on ? How did he get to hear Mozart ?
Well when it comes to classical music , there 's an awful lot to pass on , much more than Mozart , Beethoven or Tchiakovsky .
Because classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years .
And every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it 's like to be alive .
Now the raw material of it , of course , is just the music of everyday life .
It 's all the anthems and dance crazes and ballads and marches .
But what classical music does is to distill all of these musics down , to condense them to their absolute essence , and from that essence create a new language , a language that speaks very lovingly and unflinchingly about who we really are .
It 's a language that 's still evolving .
Now over the centuries it grew into the big pieces we always think of , like concertos and symphonies , but even the most ambitious masterpiece can have as its central mission to bring you back to a fragile and personal moment -- like this one from the Beethoven Violin Concerto .
It 's so simple , so evocative .
So many emotions seem to be inside of it .
Yet , of course , like all music , it 's essentially not about anything .
It 's just a design of pitches and silence and time .
And the pitches , the notes , as you know , are just vibrations .
They 're locations in the spectrum of sound .
And whether we call them 440 per second , A , or 3,729 , B flat -- trust me , that 's right -- they 're just phenomena .
But the way we react to different combinations of these phenomena is complex and emotional and not totally understood .
And the way we react to them has changed radically over the centuries , as have our preferences for them .
So for example , in the 11th century , people liked pieces that ended like this .
And in the 17th century , it was more like this .
And in the 21st century ...
Now your 21st century ears are quite happy with this last chord , even though a while back it would have puzzled or annoyed you or sent some of you running from the room .
And the reason you like it is because you 've inherited , whether you knew it or not , centuries-worth of changes in musical theory , practice and fashion .
And in classical music we can follow these changes very , very accurately because of the music 's powerful silent partner , the way it 's been passed on : notation .
Now the impulse to notate , or , more exactly I should say , encode music has been with us for a very long time .
In 200 B.C. , a man named Sekulos wrote this song for his departed wife and inscribed it on her gravestone in the notational system of the Greeks .
And a thousand years later , this impulse to notate took an entirely different form .
And you can see how this happened in these excerpts from the Christmas mass " Puer Natus est nobis , " " For Us is Born . "
In the 10th century , little squiggles were used just to indicate the general shape of the tune .
And in the 12th century , a line was drawn , like a musical horizon line , to better pinpoint the pitch 's location .
And then in the 13th century , more lines and new shapes of notes locked in the concept of the tune exactly , and that led to the kind of notation we have today .
Well notation not only passed the music on , notating and encoding the music changed its priorities entirely , because it enabled the musicians to imagine music on a much vaster scale .
Now inspired moves of improvisation could be recorded , saved , considered , prioritized , made into intricate designs .
And from this moment , classical music became what it most essentially is , a dialogue between the two powerful sides of our nature : instinct and intelligence .
And there began to be a real difference at this point between the art of improvisation and the art of composition .
Now an improviser senses and plays the next cool move , but a composer is considering all possible moves , testing them out , prioritizing them out , until he sees how they can form a powerful and coherent design of ultimate and enduring coolness .
Now some of the greatest composers , like Bach , were combinations of these two things .
Bach was like a great improviser with a mind of a chess master .
Mozart was the same way .
But every musician strikes a different balance between faith and reason , instinct and intelligence .
And every musical era had different priorities of these things , different things to pass on , different ' whats ' and ' hows ' .
So in the first eight centuries or so of this tradition the big ' what ' was to praise God .
And by the 1400s , music was being written that tried to mirror God 's mind as could be seen in the design of the night sky .
The ' how ' was a style called polyphony , music of many independently moving voices that suggested the way the planets seemed to move in Ptolemy 's geocentric universe .
This was truly the music of the spheres .
This is the kind of music that Leonardo DaVinci would have known .
And perhaps its tremendous intellectual perfection and serenity meant that something new had to happen -- a radical new move , which in 1600 is what did happen .
Singer : Ah , bitter blow !
Ah , wicked , cruel fate !
Ah , baleful stars !
Ah , avaricious heaven !
MTT : This , of course , was the birth of opera , and its development put music on a radical new course .
The what now was not to mirror the mind of God , but to follow the emotion turbulence of man .
And the how was harmony , stacking up the pitches to form chords .
And the chords , it turned out , were capable of representing incredible varieties of emotions .
And the basic chords were the ones we still have with us , the triads , either the major one , which we think is happy , or the minor one , which we perceive as sad .
But what 's the actual difference between these two chords ?
It 's just these two notes in the middle .
It 's either E natural , and 659 vibrations per second , or E flat , at 622 .
So the big difference between human happiness and sadness ?
37 freakin ' vibrations .
So you can see in a system like this there was enormous subtle potential of representing human emotions .
And in fact , as man began to understand more his complex and ambivalent nature , harmony grew more complex to reflect it .
Turns out it was capable of expressing emotions beyond the ability of words .
Now with all this possibility , classical music really took off .
It 's the time in which the big forms began to arise .
And the effects of technology began to be felt also , because printing put music , the scores , the codebooks of music , into the hands of performers everywhere .
And new and improved instruments made the age of the virtuoso possible .
This is when those big forms arose -- the symphonies , the sonatas , the concertos .
And in these big architectures of time , composers like Beethoven could share the insights of a lifetime .
A piece like Beethoven 's Fifth basically witnessing how it was possible for him to go from sorrow and anger , over the course of a half an hour , step by exacting step of his route , to the moment when he could make it across to joy .
And it turned out the symphony could be used for more complex issues , like gripping ones of culture , such as nationalism or quest for freedom or the frontiers of sensuality .
But whatever direction the music took , one thing until recently was always the same , and that was when the musicians stopped playing , the music stopped .
Now this moment so fascinates me .
I find it such a profound one .
What happens when the music stops ?
Where does it go ? What 's left ?
What sticks with people in the audience at the end of a performance ?
Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude ?
And how might that change their lives ?
To me this is the intimate , personal side of music .
It 's the passing on part . It 's the ' why ' part of it .
And to me that 's the most essential of all .
Mostly it 's been a person-to-person thing , a teacher-student , performer-audience thing , and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on , albeit an impersonal one .
People could now hear music all the time , even though it wasn 't necessary for them to play an instrument , read music or even go to concerts .
And technology democratized music by making everything available .
It spearheaded a cultural revolution in which artists like Caruso and Bessie Smith were on the same footing .
And technology pushed composers to tremendous extremes , using computers and synthesizers to create works of intellectually impenetrable complexity beyond the means of performers and audiences .
At the same time technology , by taking over the role that notation had always played , shifted the balance within music between instinct and intelligence way over to the instinctive side .
The culture in which we live now is awash with music of improvisation that 's been sliced , diced , layered and , God knows , distributed and sold .
What 's the long-term effect of this on us or on music ?
Nobody knows .
The question remains : What happens when the music stops ?
What sticks with people ?
Now that we have unlimited access to music , what does stick with us ?
Well let me show you a story of what I mean by " really sticking with us . "
I was visiting a cousin of mine in an old age home , and I spied a very shaky old man making his way across the room on a walker .
He came over to a piano that was there , and he balanced himself and began playing something like this .
And he said something like , " Me ... boy ... symphony ... Beethoven . "
And I suddenly got it , and I said , " Friend , by any chance are you trying to play this ? "
And he said , " Yes , yes . I was a little boy .
The symphony : Isaac Stern , the concerto , I heard it . "
And I thought , my God , how much must this music mean to this man that he would get himself out of his bed , across the room to recover the memory of this music that , after everything else in his life is sloughing away , still means so much to him ?
Well , that 's why I take every performance so seriously , why it matters to me so much .
I never know who might be there , who might be absorbing it and what will happen to it in their life .
But now I 'm excited that there 's more chance than ever before possible of sharing this music .
That 's what drives my interest in projects like the TV series " Keeping Score " with the San Francisco Symphony that looks at the backstories of music , and working with the young musicians at the New World Symphony on projects that explore the potential of the new performing arts centers for both entertainment and education .
And of course , the New World Symphony led to the YouTube Symphony and projects on the internet that reach out to musicians and audiences all over the world .
And the exciting thing is all this is just a prototype .
There 's just a role here for so many people -- teachers , parents , performers -- to be explorers together .
Sure , the big events attract a lot of attention , but what really matters is what goes on every single day .
We need your perspectives , your curiosity , your voices .
And it excites me now to meet people who are hikers , chefs , code writers , taxi drivers , people I never would have guessed who loved the music and who are passing it on .
You don 't need to worry about knowing anything .
If you 're curious , if you have a capacity for wonder , if you 're alive , you know all that you need to know .
You can start anywhere . Ramble a bit .
Follow traces . Get lost . Be surprised , amused inspired .
All that ' what ' , all that ' how ' is out there waiting for you to discover its ' why ' , to dive in and pass it on .
Thank you .
Boghuma Kabisen Titanji : Ethical riddles in HIV research
It 's an all too common story : after participating in an HIV clinical trial , a woman in sub-Saharan Africa is left without the resources to buy a bus ticket to her health clinic , let alone to afford life-saving antiretrovirals . Boghuma Kabisen Titanji asks an important question : how can researchers looking for a cure make sure they 're not taking advantage of those most affected by the pandemic ?
I 'd like to share with you the story of one of my patients called Celine .
Celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district of Cameroon in west Central Africa .
Six years ago , at the time of her HIV diagnosis , she was recruited to participate in the clinical trial which was running in her health district at the time .
When I first met Celine , a little over a year ago , she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral therapy , and she was very ill .
She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the 35-kilometer distance .
Now during the clinical trial , she 'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs free of charge , and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds .
All of these ended once the trial was completed , leaving Celine with no alternatives .
She was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she 'd received during the trial , or even what the trial had been about .
I didn 't bother to ask her what the results of the trial were because it seemed obvious to me that she would have no clue .
Yet what puzzled me most was Celine had given her informed consent to be a part of this trial , yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed .
Now , I have shared this story with you as an example of what can happen to participants in the clinical trial when it is poorly conducted .
Maybe this particular trial yielded exciting results .
Maybe it even got published in a high-profile scientific journal .
Maybe it would inform clinicians around the world on how to improve on the clinical management of HIV patients .
But it would have done so at a price to hundreds of patients who , like Celine , were left to their own devices once the research had been completed .
I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries is bad .
On the contrary , clinical trials are extremely useful tools , and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries .
However , the inequalities that exist between richer countries and developing countries in terms of funding pose a real risk for exploitation , especially in the context of externally-funded research .
Sadly enough , the fact remains that a lot of the studies that are conducted in developing countries could never be authorized in the richer countries which fund the research .
I 'm sure you must be asking yourselves what makes developing countries , especially those in sub-Saharan Africa , so attractive for these HIV clinical trials ?
Well , in order for a clinical trial to generate valid and widely applicable results , they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high incidence of new HIV infections .
Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description , with 22 million people living with HIV , an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide .
Also , research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty , endemic diseases and inadequate health care systems .
A clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized , and in the absence of good health care systems , almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing .
Even more problematic reasons include lower risk of litigation , less rigorous ethical reviews , and populations that are willing to participate in almost any study that hints at a cure .
As funding for HIV research increases in developing countries and ethical review in richer countries become more strict , you can see why this context becomes very , very attractive .
The high prevalence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research that is sometimes scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable .
How then can we ensure that , in our search for the cure , we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected by the pandemic ?
I invite you to consider four areas I think we can focus on in order to improve the way in which things are done .
The first of these is informed consent .
Now , in order for a clinical trial to be considered ethically acceptable , participants must be given the relevant information in a way in which they can understand , and must freely consent to participate in the trial .
This is especially important in developing countries , where a lot of participants consent to research because they believe it is the only way in which they can receive medical care or other benefits .
Consent procedures that are used in richer countries are often inappropriate or ineffective in a lot of developing countries .
For example , it is counterintuitive to have an illiterate study participant , like Celine , sign a lengthy consent form that they are unable to read , let alone understand .
Local communities need to be more involved in establishing the criteria for recruiting participants in clinical trials , as well as the incentives for participation .
The information in these trials needs to be given to the potential participants in linguistically and culturally acceptable formats .
The second point I would like for you to consider is the standard of care that is provided to participants within any clinical trial .
Now , this is subject to a lot of debate and controversy .
Should the control group in the clinical trial be given the best current treatment which is available anywhere in the world ?
Or should they be given an alternative standard of care , such as the best current treatment available in the country in which the research is being conducted ?
Is it fair to evaluate a treatment regimen which may not be affordable or accessible to the study participants once the research has been completed ?
Now , in a situation where the best current treatment is inexpensive and simple to deliver , the answer is straightforward .
However , the best current treatment available anywhere in the world is often very difficult to provide in developing countries .
It is important to assess the potential risks and benefits of the standard of care which is to be provided to participants in any clinical trial , and establish one which is relevant for the context of the study and most beneficial for the participants within the study .
That brings us to the third point I want you think about : the ethical review of research .
An effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of clinical trials is primordial to safeguard participants within any clinical trial .
Unfortunately , this is often lacking or inefficient in a lot of developing countries .
Local governments need to set up effective systems for reviewing the ethical issues around the clinical trials which are authorized in different developing countries , and they need to do this by setting up ethical review committees that are independent of the government and research sponsors .
Public accountability needs to be promoted through transparency and independent review by nongovernmental and international organizations as appropriate .
The final point I would like for you to consider tonight is what happens to participants in the clinical trial once the research has been completed .
I think it is absolutely wrong for research to begin in the first place without a clear plan for what would happen to the participants once the trial has ended .
Now , researchers need to make every effort to ensure that an intervention that has been shown to be beneficial during a clinical trial is accessible to the participants of the trial once the trial has been completed .
In addition , they should be able to consider the possibility of introducing and maintaining effective treatments in the wider community once the trial ends .
If , for any reason , they feel that this might not be possible , then I think they should have to ethically justify why the clinical trial should be conducted in the first place .
Now , fortunately for Celine , our meeting did not end in my office .
I was able to get her enrolled into a free HIV treatment program closer to her home , and with a support group to help her cope .
Her story has a positive ending , but there are thousands of others in similar situations who are much less fortunate .
Although she may not know this , my encounter with Celine has completely changed the way in which I view HIV clinical trials in developing countries , and made me even more determined to be part of the movement to change the way in which things are done .
I believe that every single person listening to me tonight can be part of that change .
If you are a researcher , I hold you to a higher standard of moral conscience , to remain ethical in your research , and not compromise human welfare in your search for answers .
If you work for a funding agency or pharmaceutical company , I challenge you to hold your employers to fund research that is ethically sound .
If you come from a developing country like myself , I urge you to hold your government to a more thorough review of the clinical trials which are authorized in your country .
Yes , there is a need for us to find a cure for HIV , to find an effective vaccine for malaria , to find a diagnostic tool that works for T.B. , but I believe that we owe it to those who willingly and selflessly consent to participate in these clinical trials to do this in a humane way .
Thank you .
Jared Diamond : How societies can grow old better
There 's an irony behind the latest efforts to extend human life : It 's no picnic to be an old person in a youth-oriented society . Older people can become isolated , lacking meaningful work and low on funds . In this intriguing talk , Jared Diamond looks at how many different societies treat their elders -- some better , some worse -- and suggests we all take advantage of experience .
To give me an idea of how many of you here may find what I 'm about to tell you of practical value , let me ask you please to raise your hands : Who here is either over 65 years old or hopes to live past age 65 or has parents or grandparents who did live or have lived past 65 , raise your hands please .
Okay . You are the people to whom my talk will be of practical value .
The rest of you won 't find my talk personally relevant , but I think that you will still find the subject fascinating .
I 'm going to talk about growing older in traditional societies .
This subject constitutes just one chapter of my latest book , which compares traditional , small , tribal societies with our large , modern societies , with respect to many topics such as bringing up children , growing older , health , dealing with danger , settling disputes , religion and speaking more than one language .
Those tribal societies , which constituted all human societies for most of human history , are far more diverse than are our modern , recent , big societies .
All big societies that have governments , and where most people are strangers to each other , are inevitably similar to each other and different from tribal societies .
Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society .
They constitute experiments from which we ourselves may be able to learn .
Tribal societies shouldn 't be scorned as primitive and miserable , but also they shouldn 't be romanticized as happy and peaceful .
When we learn of tribal practices , some of them will horrify us , but there are other tribal practices which , when we hear about them , we may admire and envy and wonder whether we could adopt those practices ourselves .
Most old people in the U.S. end up living separately from their children and from most of their friends of their earlier years , and often they live in separate retirements homes for the elderly , whereas in traditional societies , older people instead live out their lives among their children , their other relatives , and their lifelong friends .
Nevertheless , the treatment of the elderly varies enormously among traditional societies , from much worse to much better than in our modern societies .
At the worst extreme , many traditional societies get rid of their elderly in one of four increasingly direct ways : by neglecting their elderly and not feeding or cleaning them until they die , or by abandoning them when the group moves , or by encouraging older people to commit suicide , or by killing older people .
In which tribal societies do children abandon or kill their parents ?
It happens mainly under two conditions .
One is in nomadic , hunter-gather societies that often shift camp and that are physically incapable of transporting old people who can 't walk when the able-bodied younger people already have to carry their young children and all their physical possessions .
The other condition is in societies living in marginal or fluctuating environments , such as the Arctic or deserts , where there are periodic food shortages , and occasionally there just isn 't enough food to keep everyone alive .
Whatever food is available has to be reserved for able-bodied adults and for children .
To us Americans , it sounds horrible to think of abandoning or killing your own sick wife or husband or elderly mother or father , but what could those traditional societies do differently ?
They face a cruel situation of no choice .
Their old people had to do it to their own parents , and the old people know what now is going to happen to them .
At the opposite extreme in treatment of the elderly , the happy extreme , are the New Guinea farming societies where I 've been doing my fieldwork for the past 50 years , and most other sedentary traditional societies around the world .
In those societies , older people are cared for .
They are fed . They remain valuable .
And they continue to live in the same hut or else in a nearby hut near their children , relatives and lifelong friends .
There are two main sets of reasons for this variation among societies in their treatment of old people .
The variation depends especially on the usefulness of old people and on the society 's values .
First , as regards usefulness , older people continue to perform useful services .
One use of older people in traditional societies is that they often are still effective at producing food .
Another traditional usefulness of older people is that they are capable of babysitting their grandchildren , thereby freeing up their own adult children , the parents of those grandchildren , to go hunting and gathering food for the grandchildren .
Still another traditional value of older people is in making tools , weapons , baskets , pots and textiles .
In fact , they 're usually the people who are best at it .
Older people usually are the leaders of traditional societies , and the people most knowledgeable about politics , medicine , religion , songs and dances .
Finally , older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern , literate societies , where our sources of information are books and the Internet .
In contrast , in traditional societies without writing , older people are the repositories of information .
It 's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience .
Those , then , are the ways in which older people are useful in traditional societies .
Their usefulness varies and contributes to variation in the society 's treatment of the elderly .
The other set of reasons for variation in the treatment of the elderly is the society 's cultural values .
For example , there 's particular emphasis on respect for the elderly in East Asia , associated with Confucius ' doctrine of filial piety , which means obedience , respect and support for elderly parents .
Cultural values that emphasize respect for older people contrast with the low status of the elderly in the U.S.
Older Americans are at a big disadvantage in job applications .
They 're at a big disadvantage in hospitals .
Our hospitals have an explicit policy called age-based allocation of healthcare resources .
That sinister expression means that if hospital resources are limited , for example if only one donor heart becomes available for transplant , or if a surgeon has time to operate on only a certain number of patients , American hospitals have an explicit policy of giving preference to younger patients over older patients on the grounds that younger patients are considered more valuable to society because they have more years of life ahead of them , even though the younger patients have fewer years of valuable life experience behind them .
There are several reasons for this low status of the elderly in the U.S.
One is our Protestant work ethic which places high value on work , so older people who are no longer working aren 't respected .
Another reason is our American emphasis on the virtues of self-reliance and independence , so we instinctively look down on older people who are no longer self-reliant and independent .
Still a third reason is our American cult of youth , which shows up even in our advertisements .
Ads for Coca-Cola and beer always depict smiling young people , even though old as well as young people buy and drink Coca-Cola and beer .
Just think , what 's the last time you saw a Coke or beer ad depicting smiling people 85 years old ? Never .
Instead , the only American ads featuring white-haired old people are ads for retirement homes and pension planning .
Well , what has changed in the status of the elderly today compared to their status in traditional societies ?
There have been a few changes for the better and more changes for the worse .
Big changes for the better include the fact that today we enjoy much longer lives , much better health in our old age , and much better recreational opportunities .
Another change for the better is that we now have specialized retirement facilities and programs to take care of old people .
Changes for the worse begin with the cruel reality that we now have more old people and fewer young people than at any time in the past .
That means that all those old people are more of a burden on the few young people , and that each old person has less individual value .
Another big change for the worse in the status of the elderly is the breaking of social ties with age , because older people , their children , and their friends , all move and scatter independently of each other many times during their lives .
We Americans move on the average every five years .
Hence our older people are likely to end up living distant from their children and the friends of their youth .
Yet another change for the worse in the status of the elderly is formal retirement from the workforce , carrying with it a loss of work friendships and a loss of the self-esteem associated with work .
Perhaps the biggest change for the worse is that our elderly are objectively less useful than in traditional societies .
Widespread literacy means that they are no longer useful as repositories of knowledge .
When we want some information , we look it up in a book or we Google it instead of finding some old person to ask .
The slow pace of technological change in traditional societies means that what someone learns there as a child is still useful when that person is old , but the rapid pace of technological change today means that what we learn as children is no longer useful 60 years later .
And conversely , we older people are not fluent in the technologies essential for surviving in modern society .
For example , as a 15-year-old , I was considered outstandingly good at multiplying numbers because I had memorized the multiplication tables and I know how to use logarithms and I 'm quick at manipulating a slide rule .
Today , though , those skills are utterly useless because any idiot can now multiply eight-digit numbers accurately and instantly with a pocket calculator .
Conversely , I at age 75 am incompetent at skills essential for everyday life .
My family 's first TV set in 1948 had only three knobs that I quickly mastered : an on-off switch , a volume knob , and a channel selector knob .
Today , just to watch a program on the TV set in my own house , I have to operate a 41-button TV remote that utterly defeats me .
I have to telephone my 25-year-old sons and ask them to talk me through it while I try to push those wretched 41 buttons .
What can we do to improve the lives of the elderly in the U.S. , and to make better use of their value ?
That 's a huge problem .
In my remaining four minutes today , I can offer just a few suggestions .
One value of older people is that they are increasingly useful as grandparents for offering high-quality childcare to their grandchildren , if they choose to do it , as more young women enter the workforce and as fewer young parents of either gender stay home as full-time caretakers of their children .
Compared to the usual alternatives of paid babysitters and day care centers , grandparents offer superior , motivated , experienced child care .
They 've already gained experience from raising their own children .
They usually love their grandchildren , and are eager to spend time with them .
Unlike other caregivers , grandparents don 't quit their job because they found another job with higher pay looking after another baby .
A second value of older people is paradoxically related to their loss of value as a result of changing world conditions and technology .
At the same time , older people have gained in value today precisely because of their unique experience of living conditions that have now become rare because of rapid change , but that could come back .
For example , only Americans now in their 70s or older today can remember the experience of living through a great depression , the experience of living through a world war , and agonizing whether or not dropping atomic bombs would be more horrible than the likely consequences of not dropping atomic bombs .
Most of our current voters and politicians have no personal experience of any of those things , but millions of older Americans do .
Unfortunately , all of those terrible situations could come back .
Even if they don 't come back , we have to be able to plan for them on the basis of the experience of what they were like .
Older people have that experience .
Younger people don 't .
The remaining value of older people that I 'll mention involves recognizing that while there are many things that older people can no longer do , there are other things that they can do better than younger people .
A challenge for society is to make use of those things that older people are better at doing .
Some abilities , of course , decrease with age .
Those include abilities at tasks requiring physical strength and stamina , ambition , and the power of novel reasoning in a circumscribed situation , such as figuring out the structure of DNA , best left to scientists under the age of 30 .
Conversely , valuable attributes that increase with age include experience , understanding of people and human relationships , ability to help other people without your own ego getting in the way , and interdisciplinary thinking about large databases , such as economics and comparative history , best left to scholars over the age of 60 .
Hence older people are much better than younger people at supervising , administering , advising , strategizing , teaching , synthesizing , and devising long-term plans .
I 've seen this value of older people with so many of my friends in their 60s , 70s , 80s and 90s , who are still active as investment managers , farmers , lawyers and doctors .
In short , many traditional societies make better use of their elderly and give their elderly more satisfying lives than we do in modern , big societies .
Paradoxically nowadays , when we have more elderly people than ever before , living healthier lives and with better medical care than ever before , old age is in some respects more miserable than ever before .
The lives of the elderly are widely recognized as constituting a disaster area of modern American society .
We can surely do better by learning from the lives of the elderly in traditional societies .
But what 's true of the lives of the elderly in traditional societies is true of many other features of traditional societies as well .
Of course , I 'm not advocating that we all give up agriculture and metal tools and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle .
There are many obvious respects in which our lives today are far happier than those in small , traditional societies .
To mention just a few examples , our lives are longer , materially much richer , and less plagued by violence than are the lives of people in traditional societies .
But there are also things to be admired about people in traditional societies , and perhaps to be learned from them .
Their lives are usually socially much richer than our lives , although materially poorer .
Their children are more self-confident , more independent , and more socially skilled than are our children .
They think more realistically about dangers than we do .
They almost never die of diabetes , heart disease , stroke , and the other noncommunicable diseases that will be the causes of death of almost all of us in this room today .
Features of the modern lifestyle predispose us to those diseases , and features of the traditional lifestyle protect us against them .
Those are just some examples of what we can learn from traditional societies .
I hope that you will find it as fascinating to read about traditional societies as I found it to live in those societies .
Thank you .
Jae Rhim Lee : My mushroom burial suit
Here 's a powerful provocation from artist Jae Rhim Lee . Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner , greener Earth , even after death ? Naturally -- using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms . Yes , this just might be the strangest TEDTalk you 'll ever see ...
So I 'm here to explain why I 'm wearing these ninja pajamas .
And to do that , I 'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies .
So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A , BPA .
It 's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that 's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics .
So BPA mimics the body 's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems .
And it 's everywhere .
A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older .
But it 's just one chemical .
The Center for Disease Control in the U.S.
says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies , and this includes preservatives , pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury .
To me , this says three things .
First , don 't become a cannibal .
Second , we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution .
And third , our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins .
So what happens to all these toxins when we die ?
The short answer is : They return to the environment in one way or another , continuing the cycle of toxicity .
But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse .
If you 're cremated , all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere .
And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year .
And in a traditional American funeral , a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive .
It 's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition -- a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel .
So by trying to preserve our dead bodies , we deny death , poison the living and further harm the environment .
Green or natural burials , which don 't use embalming , are a step in the right direction , but they don 't address the existing toxins in our bodies .
I think there 's a better solution .
I 'm an artist , so I 'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art , science and culture .
The Infinity Burial Project , an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
The Infinity Burial Project began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom -- a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies , clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots , leaving clean compost .
But I learned it 's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom .
I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil .
So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body .
So today , I 'm collecting what I shed or slough off -- my hair , skin and nails -- and I 'm feeding these to edible mushrooms .
As the mushrooms grow , I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms .
It 's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife .
So when I die , the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it .
All right , so for some of you , this may be really , really out there .
Just a little .
I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food .
We want to eat , not be eaten by , our food .
But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body , I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment .
See for me , cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet , it 's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay .
It 's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet .
Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture , a concept that was developed by an entomologist , Timothy Myles .
The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I 'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation -- the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies .
And now about these ninja pajamas .
Once it 's completed , I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects .
First , a burial suit infused with mushroom spores , the Mushroom Death Suit .
I 'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit .
It 's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores .
The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia , which are the equivalent of plant roots .
I 'm also making a decompiculture kit , a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation .
These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly , a kind of second skin , which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms .
So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two , and then I 'd like to begin testing them , first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects .
And believe it or not , a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms .
What I 've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment .
I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms , so I formed the Decompiculture Society , a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options , seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom .
The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift , from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture , a radical acceptance of death and decomposition .
Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment , as the research on environmental toxins confirms .
And the saying goes , we came from dust and will return to dust .
And once we understand that we 're connected to the environment , we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet .
I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility .
Thank you .
Jonathan Klein : Photos that changed the world
Photographs do more than document history -- they make it . At TED University , Jonathan Klein of Getty Images shows some of the most iconic , and talks about what happens when a generation sees an image so powerful it can 't look away -- or back .
In my industry , we believe that images can change the world .
Okay , we 're naive , we 're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed .
The truth is that we know that the images themselves don 't change the world , but we 're also aware that , since the beginning of photography , images have provoked reactions in people , and those reactions have caused change to happen .
So let 's begin with a group of images .
I 'd be extremely surprised if you didn 't recognize many or most of them .
They 're best described as iconic : so iconic , perhaps , they 're cliches .
In fact , they 're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form .
But I think we 're looking for something more .
We 're looking for something more .
We 're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues , images that transcend borders , that transcend religions , images that provoke us to step up and do something -- in other words , to act .
Well , this image you 've all seen .
It changed our view of the physical world .
We had never seen our planet from this perspective before .
Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time -- its smallness , its fragility .
Forty years later , this group , more than most , are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment .
And at last , we appear to be doing something about it .
This destructive power takes many different forms .
For example , these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo .
These gorillas were murdered , some would even say crucified , and unsurprisingly , they sparked international outrage .
Most recently , we 've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti .
Well , I think what is far worse is man 's destructive power over man .
Samuel Pisar , an Auschwitz survivor , said , and I 'll quote him , " The Holocaust teaches us that nature , even in its cruelest moments , is benign in comparison with man , when he loses his moral compass and his reason . "
There 's another kind of crucifixion .
The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact .
The publication of those images , as opposed to the images themselves , caused a government to change its policies .
Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act .
Furthermore , those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces .
Let 's go back a little .
In the 1960s and 1970s , the Vietnam War was basically shown in America 's living rooms day in , day out .
News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war : a little girl burned by napalm , a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest .
In fact , these images became the voices of protest themselves .
Now , images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion , ignorance , and in particular -- I 've given a lot of talks on this but I 'll just show one image -- the issue of HIV / AIDS .
In the 1980s , the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it .
A simple act , in 1987 , of the most famous woman in the world , the Princess of Wales , touching an HIV / AIDS infected baby did a great deal , especially in Europe , to stop that .
She , better than most , knew the power of an image .
So when we are confronted by a powerful image , we all have a choice : We can look away , or we can address the image .
Thankfully , when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998 , they put a lot of focus and attention and , in the end , a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts .
Did the images change the world ?
No , but they had a major impact .
Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other .
We all saw those images after Katrina , and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact .
And I think it 's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008 .
Unfortunately , some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them .
I 'll show you one photo here , and it 's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work , which has never been published , called War Is Personal .
But images don 't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war .
John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery .
After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world , there 's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still , much more than the others .
Ansel Adams said , and I 'm going to disagree with him , " You don 't take a photograph , you make it . "
In my view , it 's not the photographer who makes the photo , it 's you .
We bring to each image our own values , our own belief systems , and as a result of that , the image resonates with us .
My company has 70 million images .
I have one image in my office .
Here it is .
I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you , you 'll better understand why , and I know that speaking to this audience , you 'll definitely do something about it .
And thank you to all the photographers .
John Hunter : Teaching with the World Peace Game
John Hunter puts all the problems of the world on a 4'x5 ' plywood board -- and lets his 4th-graders solve them . At TED2011 , he explains how his World Peace Game engages schoolkids , and why the complex lessons it teaches -- spontaneous , and always surprising -- go further than classroom lectures can .
I 'm very fortunate to be here .
I feel so fortunate .
I 've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me .
I called my wife Leslie , and I said , " You know , there 's so many good people trying to do so much good .
It feels like I 've landed in a colony of angels . "
It 's a true feeling .
But let me get to the talk -- I see the clock is running .
I 'm a public school teacher , and I just want to share a story of my superintendent .
Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County , Virginia , the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains .
And she 's a very high-tech superintendent .
She uses smart boards , she blogs , she Tweets , she does Facebook , she does all this sort of high-tech stuff .
She 's a technology leader and instructional leader .
But in her office , there 's this old wooden , weather-worn table , kitchen table -- peeling green paint , it 's kind of rickety .
And I said , " Pam , you 're such a modern , cutting-edge person .
Why is this old table in your office ? "
And she told me , she said , " You know , I grew up in Southwestern Virginia , in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia , and this table was in my grandfather 's kitchen .
And we 'd come in from playing , he 'd come in from plowing and working , and we 'd sit around that table every night .
And as I grew up , I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table , I began to call it the wisdom table .
And when he passed on , I took this table with me and brought it to my office , and it reminds me of him .
It reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes . "
The project I 'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game , and essentially it is also an empty space .
And I 'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table , really .
It all started back in 1977 .
I was a young man , and I had been dropping in and out of college .
And my parents were very patient , but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on a mystical quest .
And I remember the last time I came back from India -- in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses -- and I said to my father , " Dad , I think I 've just about found spiritual enlightenment . "
He said , " Well there 's one more thing you need to find . "
I said , " What is that , dad ? " " A job . "
And so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something .
So I got a degree and it turned out to be education .
It was an experimental education program .
It could have been dentistry , but the word " experimental " was in it , and so that 's what I had to go for .
And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia , the capital city , bought a three-piece suit -- my concession to convention -- kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes -- at the time it was the ' 70s -- and I walked in , and I sat down and had an interview .
And I guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor , her name was Anna Aro , said I had the job teaching gifted children .
And I was so shocked , so stunned , I got up and said , " Well , thank you , but what do I do ? "
Gifted education hadn 't really taken hold too much .
There weren 't really many materials or things to use .
And I said , " What do I do ? "
And her answer shocked me . It stunned me .
Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that .
She said , " What do you want to do ? "
And that question cleared the space .
There was no program directive , no manual to follow , no standards in gifted education in that way .
And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students , an empty space , whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding .
So this happened in 1978 , and I was teaching many years later , and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker .
His name is Chris Farina .
Chris Farina is here today at his own cost .
Chris , could you stand up and let them see you -- a young , visionary filmmaker who 's made a film .
This film is called " World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements . "
He proposed the film to me -- it 's a great title .
He proposed the film to me , and I said , " Yeah , maybe it 'll be on local TV , and we can say hi to our friends . "
But the film has really gone places .
Now it 's still in debt , but Chris has managed , through his own sacrifice , to get this film out .
So we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me , more than a story about one teacher .
It 's a story that 's a testament to teaching and teachers .
And it 's a beautiful thing .
And the strange thing is , when I watch the film -- I have the eerie sensation of seeing it -- I saw myself literally disappear .
What I saw was my teachers coming through me .
I saw my geometry teacher in high school , Mr. Rucell 's wry smile under his handlebar mustache .
That 's the smile I use -- that 's his smile .
I saw Jan Polo 's flashing eyes .
And they weren 't flashing in anger , they were flashing in love , intense love for her students .
And I have that kind of flash sometimes .
And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day .
And you know , she had that old-school teacher stare .
You know the one .
" And I 'm not even talking about you behind me , because I 've got eyes in the back of my head . "
You know that teacher ?
I didn 't use that stare very often , but I do have it in my repertoire .
And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me .
And then I saw my own parents , my first teachers .
My father , very inventive , spatial thinker .
That 's my brother Malcolm there on the right .
And my mother , who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia , who was my inspiration .
And really , I feel as though , when I see the film -- I have a gesture she does , like this -- I feel like I am a continuation of her gesture .
I am one of her teaching gestures .
And the beautiful thing was , I got to teach my daughter in elementary school , Madeline .
And so that gesture of my mother 's continues through many generations .
It 's an amazing feeling to have that lineage .
And so I 'm here standing on the shoulders of many people .
I 'm not here alone .
There are many people on this stage right now .
And so this World Peace Game I 'd like to tell you about .
It started out like this : it 's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school , 1978 .
I was creating a lesson for students on Africa .
We put all the problems of the world there , and I thought , let 's let them solve it .
I didn 't want to lecture or have just book reading .
I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies .
So I thought , well they like to play games .
I 'll make something -- I didn 't say interactive ; we didn 't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive .
And so we made the game , and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure .
And it has four Plexiglass layers .
There 's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining .
There 's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces , a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining .
There are four countries around the board .
The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich ; some are poor .
They have different assets , commercial and military .
And each country has a cabinet .
There 's a Prime Minister , Secretary of State , Minister of Defense and a CFO , or Comptroller .
I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them .
I offer them the job , they can turn it down , and then they choose their own cabinet .
There 's a World Bank , arms dealers and a United Nations .
There 's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather .
That 's not all .
And then there 's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems .
So that , if one thing changes , everything else changes .
I throw them into this complex matrix , and they trust me because we have a deep , rich relationship together .
And so with all these crises , we have -- let 's see -- ethnic and minority tensions ; we have chemical and nuclear spills , nuclear proliferation .
There 's oil spills , environmental disasters , water rights disputes , breakaway republics , famine , endangered species and global warming .
If Al Gore is here , I 'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week .
And they 've done it several times too .
So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it 's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they , on the surface , are trying to save the world and their position in the game .
But they 're also trying to undermine everything in the game .
And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies , trying to cause everyone to think more deeply .
The saboteur is there , and we also read from Sun Tzu 's " The Art of War . "
Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to , not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction , the path to war .
They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking , to think in a long-term , more consequential way .
Stewart Brand is here , and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force .
And in the game , sometimes students actually form a peace force .
I 'm just a clock watcher .
I 'm just a clarifier . I 'm just a facilitator .
The students run the game .
I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing .
So I 'll just share with you ...
Boy : The World Peace Game is serious .
You 're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world .
See , Mr. Hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot , and he 's trying to tell us how to fix that problem .
John Hunter : I offered them a -- Actually , I can 't tell them anything because I don 't know the answer .
And I admit the truth to them right up front : I don 't know .
And because I don 't know , they 've got to dig up the answer .
And so I apologize to them as well .
I say , " I 'm so sorry , boys and girls , but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape , and we hope you can fix it for us , and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it . "
It 's a sincere apology , and they take it very seriously .
Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like .
Well when we have the game start , here 's what you see .
JH : All right , we 're going into negotiations as of now . Go .
JH : My question to you is , who 's in charge of that classroom ?
It 's a serious question : who is really in charge ?
I 've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time .
There 's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don 't have to do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher : control every conversation and response in the classroom .
It 's impossible . Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine , and I admit it to them openly .
So I 'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened .
In this game we had a little girl , and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest nation .
And the Defense Minister -- she had the tank corps and Air Force and so forth .
And she was next door to a very wealthy , oil-rich neighbor .
Without provocation , suddenly she attacked , against her Prime Minister 's orders , the next-door neighbor 's oil fields .
She marched into the oil field reserves , surrounded it , without firing a shot , and secured it and held it .
And that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up .
We were all upset with her , " Why are you doing this ?
This is the World Peace Game . What is wrong with you ? "
This was a little girl and , at nine years old , she held her pieces and said , " I know what I 'm doing . "
To her girlfriends she said that .
That 's a breach there .
And we learned in this , you don 't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks .
They are the toughest opponents .
And we were very upset .
I thought I was failing as a teacher . Why would she do this ?
But come to find out , a few game days later -- and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team -- actually there 's a negotiation period with all teams , and each team takes a turn , then we go back in negotiation , around and around , so each turn around is one game day .
So a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world .
Had they had their fuel supplies , they would have done it .
She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game .
Now she used a small war to avert a larger war , so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right , conditional good , or not right .
That 's the kind of thinking that we put them in , the situations .
I could not have designed that in teaching it .
It came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom .
Another example , a beautiful thing happened .
We have a letter in the game .
If you 're a military commander and you wage troops -- the little plastic toys on the board -- and you lose them , I put in a letter .
You have to write a letter to their parents -- the fictional parents of your fictional troops -- explaining what happened and offering your condolences .
So you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat .
And so we had this situation come up -- last summer actually , at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County -- and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said , " Mr. Hunter , let 's ask -- there 's a parent over there . "
There was a parent visiting that day , just sitting in the back of the room .
" Let 's ask that mom to read the letter .
It 'll be more realer if she reads it . "
So we did , we asked her , and she gamely picked up the letter .
" Sure . " She started reading . She read one sentence .
She read two sentences .
By the third sentence , she was in tears .
I was in tears .
Everybody understood that when we lose somebody , the winners are not gloating .
We all lose .
And it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding .
I 'll show you what my friend David says about this .
He 's been in many battles .
David : We 've really had enough of people attacking .
I mean , we 've been lucky [ most of ] the time .
But now I 'm feeling really weird because I 'm living what Sun Tzu said one week .
One week he said , " Those who go into battle and win will want to go back , and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win . "
And so I 've been winning battles , so I 'm going into battles , more battles .
And I think it 's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said .
JH : I get chills every time I see that .
That 's the kind of engagement you want to have happen .
And I can 't design that , I can 't plan that , and I can 't even test that .
But it 's self-evident assessment .
We know that 's an authentic assessment of learning .
We have a lot of data , but I think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what 's going on .
So I 'll just share a third story .
This is about my friend Brennan .
We had played the game one session after school for many weeks , about seven weeks , and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises .
The way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country 's asset value has to be increased above its starting point .
Some are poor , some are wealthy . There are billions .
The World Bank president was a third-grader one time .
He says , " How many zeros in a trillion ? I 've got to calculate that right away . "
But he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him .
So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer .
There was no way they could win .
And we were approaching four o 'clock , our cut-off time -- there was about a minute left -- and despair just settled over the room .
I thought , I 'm failing as a teacher .
I should have gotten it so they could have won .
They shouldn 't be failing like this .
I 've failed them .
And I was just feeling so sad and dejected .
And suddenly , Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell , the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets , and he ran back to his seat , rang the bell .
Everybody ran to his chair : there was screaming ; there was yelling , waving of their dossiers .
They get these dossiers full of secret documents .
They were gesticulating ; they were running around .
I didn 't know what they were doing . I 'd lost control of my classroom .
Principal walks in , I 'm out of a job .
The parents were looking in the window .
And Brennan runs back to his seat . Everybody runs back to their seat .
He rings the bell again . He says , " We have " -- and there 's 12 seconds left on the clock -- " we have , all nations , pooled all our funds together .
And we 've got 600 billion dollars .
We 're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country .
And if they accept it , it 'll raise their asset value and we can win the game .
Will you accept it ? "
And there are three seconds left on the clock .
Everybody looks at this prime minister of that country , and he says , " Yes . "
And the game is won .
Spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for , that was unexpected and unpredictable .
Every game we play is different .
Some games are more about social issues , some are more about economic issues .
Some games are more about warfare .
But I don 't try to deny them that reality of being human .
I allow them to go there and , through their own experience , learn , in a bloodless way , how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing .
And they find out what is right their own way , their own selves .
And so in this game , I 've learned so much from it , but I would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world , they may save us all .
If only .
And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I 'm standing , thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Nic Marks : The Happy Planet Index
Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation 's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people . He introduces the Happy Planet Index , which tracks national well-being against resource use . Which countries rank highest in the HPI ? You might be surprised .
Martin Luther King did not say , " I have a nightmare , " when he inspired the civil rights movements .
He said , " I have a dream . "
And I have a dream .
I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare , and this is going to be a challenge , because , if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times , nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic .
I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times , " The Road . "
It 's a beautiful piece of filmmaking , but everything is desolate , everything is dead .
And just a father and son trying to survive , walking along the road .
And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future .
For too long , we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what 's going to happen .
We have focused on the worst-case scenario .
We have focused on the problems .
And we have not thought enough about the solutions .
We 've used fear , if you like , to grab people 's attention .
And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism .
It 's part of the fight and flight mechanism , that when an animal is frightened -- think of a deer .
A deer freezes very , very still , poised to run away .
And I think that 's what we 're doing when we 're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change .
People are freezing and running away because we 're using fear .
And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is .
What would it be like to be improving the human lot ?
And one of the problems that we face , I think , is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is , an economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow , if we get the right numbers to go up , we 're going to be better off , whether that 's on the stock market , whether that 's with GDP and economic growth , that somehow life is going to get better .
This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better .
Come on . In the Western world , we have enough .
Maybe some parts of the world don 't , but we have enough .
And we 've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations .
In fact , the architect of our national accounting system , Simon Kuznets , in the 1930s , said that , " A nation 's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income . "
But we 've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff .
And indeed , this is probably historical , and it had its time .
In the second World War , we needed to produce a lot of stuff .
And indeed , we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe , and we had to rebuild it afterwards .
And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce .
But as early as 1968 , this visionary man , Robert Kennedy , at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign , gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been .
And he finished his talk with the phrase , that , " The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile . "
How crazy is that ? That our measure of progress , our dominant measure of progress in society , is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile ?
I believe , if Kennedy was alive today , he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile .
He 'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice , sustainability and people 's well-being .
And actually , social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world .
This is from a global survey .
It 's asking people , what do they want .
And unsurprisingly , people all around the world say that what they want is happiness , for themselves , for their families , their children , their communities .
Okay , they think money is slightly important .
It 's there , but it 's not nearly as important as happiness , and it 's not nearly as important as love .
We all need to love and be loved in life .
It 's not nearly as important as health .
We want to be healthy and live a full life .
These seem to be natural human aspirations .
Why are statisticians not measuring these ?
Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms , instead of just how much stuff we have ?
And really , this is what I 've done with my adult life -- is think about how do we measure happiness , how do we measure well-being , how can we do that within environmental limits .
And we created , at the organization that I work for , the New Economics Foundation , something we call the Happy Planet Index , because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy .
Why don 't we create a measure of progress that shows that ?
And what we do , is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens .
That should be the goal of every nation on the planet .
But we have to remember that there 's a fundamental input to that , and that is how many of the planet 's resources we use .
We all have one planet . We all have to share it .
It is the ultimate scarce resource , the one planet that we share .
And economics is very interested in scarcity .
When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome , it thinks in terms of efficiency .
It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck .
And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use .
It is an efficiency measure .
And probably the easiest way to show you that , is to show you this graph .
Running horizontally along the graph , is " ecological footprint , " which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet .
More is bad .
Running vertically upwards , is a measure called " happy life years . "
It 's about the well-being of nations .
It 's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy .
It 's like quality and quantity of life in nations .
And the yellow dot there you see , is the global average .
Now , there 's a huge array of nations around that global average .
To the top right of the graph , are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being , but they 're using a lot of planet to get there .
They are the U.S.A. , other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually .
Conversely , at the bottom left of the graph , are countries that are not producing much well-being -- typically , sub-Saharan Africa .
In Hobbesian terms , life is short and brutish there .
The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years .
Malaria , HIV / AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world .
But now for the good news !
There are some countries up there , yellow triangles , that are doing better than global average , that are heading up towards the top left of the graph .
This is an aspirational graph .
We want to be top left , where good lives don 't cost the earth .
They 're Latin American .
The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven 't been to .
Maybe some of you have .
Costa Rica .
Costa Rica -- average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years .
That is longer than in the USA .
They are , according to the latest Gallup world poll , the happiest nation on the planet -- than anybody ; more than Switzerland and Denmark .
They are the happiest place .
They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [ the ] Western world -- a quarter of the resources .
What 's going on there ?
What 's happening in Costa Rica ?
We can look at some of the data .
99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources .
Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021 .
They abolished the army in 1949 -- 1949 .
And they invested in social programs -- health and education .
They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world .
And they have that Latin vibe , don 't they .
They have the social connectedness .
The challenge is , that possibly -- and the thing we might have to think about -- is that the future might not be North American , might not be Western European .
It might be Latin American .
And the challenge , really , is to pull the global average up here .
That 's what we need to do .
And if we 're going to do that , we need to pull countries from the bottom , and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph .
And then we 're starting to create a happy planet .
That 's one way of looking at it .
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends .
We don 't have good data going back for every country in the world , but for some of the richest countries , the OECD group , we do .
And this is the trend in well-being over that time , a small increase , but this is the trend in ecological footprint .
And so in strict happy-planet methodology , we 've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to .
And the point really is , is that I think , probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening .
It 's actually not very long away .
It 's half a human lifetime away .
A child entering school today will be my age in 2050 .
This is not the very distant future .
This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like .
And I put it to you , that is not business as usual .
That is changing our business .
That is changing the way we create our organizations , we do our government policy and we live our lives .
And the point is , we need to carry on increasing well-being .
No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce .
None of us , I think , want human progress to stop .
I think we want it to carry on .
I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing .
And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in .
I think this is what they want . They want quality of life to keep increasing .
They want to hold on to what they 've got .
And if we 're going to engage them , I think that 's what we 've got to do .
And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more .
Now that 's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that , but the point is we need to turn those curves .
And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory , systems engineers , where they create feedback loops , put the right information at the right point of time .
Human beings are very motivated by the " now . "
You put a smart meter in your home , and you see how much electricity you 're using right now , how much it 's costing you , your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly .
What would that look like for society ?
Why is it , on the radio news every evening , I hear the FTSE 100 , the Dow Jones , the dollar pound ratio -- I don 't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news .
And why do I hear that ?
Why don 't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday , or American used yesterday ?
Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions ?
That 's how you create a collective goal .
You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it .
And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level , they might create national accounts of well-being .
At a business level , you might look at the well-being of your employees , which we know is really linked to creativity , which is linked to innovation , and we 're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues .
At a personal level , we need these nudges too .
Maybe we don 't quite need the data , but we need reminders .
In the U.K. , we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do -- never my best thing .
What are these for happiness ?
What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier ?
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago , a big program called the Foresight program -- lots and lots of people -- involved lots of experts -- everything evidence based -- a huge tome .
But a piece of work we did was on : what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life ?
And the point of these is they are , not quite , the secrets of happiness , but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from .
And the first of these is to connect , is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life .
Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do , and energy ?
Keep building them .
The second one is be active .
The fastest way out of a bad mood : step outside , go for a walk , turn the radio on and dance .
Being active is great for our positive mood .
The third one is take notice .
How aware are you of things going on around the world , the seasons changing , people around you ?
Do you notice what 's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge ?
Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness , cognitive behavioral therapy , [ very ] strong for our well being .
The fourth is keep learning and keep is important -- learning throughout the whole life course .
Older people who keep learning and are curious , they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down .
But it doesn 't have to be formal learning ; it 's not knowledge based .
It 's more curiosity .
It can be learning to cook a new dish , picking up an instrument you forgot as a child .
Keep learning .
And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities , but give .
Our generosity , our altruism , our compassion , are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain .
We feel good if we give .
You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning .
You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people .
You measure their happiness at the end of the day , those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves .
And these five ways , which we put onto these handy postcards , I would say , don 't have to cost the earth .
They don 't have any carbon content .
They don 't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied .
And so I think it 's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth .
Now , Martin Luther King , on the eve of his death , gave an incredible speech .
He said , " I know there are challenges ahead , there may be trouble ahead , but I fear no one . I don 't care .
I have been to the mountain top , and I have seen the Promised Land . "
Now , he was a preacher , but I believe the environmental movement and , in fact , the business community , government , needs to go to the top of the mountain top , and it needs to look out , and it needs to see the Promised Land , or the land of promise , and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want .
And not only that , we need to create a Great Transition to get there , and we need to pave that great transition with good things .
Human beings want to be happy .
Pave them with the five ways .
And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them -- something like the Happy Planet Index .
And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want , where happiness does not cost the earth .
Shirin Neshat : Art in exile
Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat explores the paradox of being an artist in exile : a voice for her people , but unable to go home . In her work , she explores Iran pre- and post-Islamic Revolution , tracing political and societal change through powerful images of women .
The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist , as an Iranian woman artist , as an Iranian woman artist living in exile .
Well , it has its pluses and minuses .
On the dark side , politics doesn 't seem to escape people like me .
Every Iranian artist , in one form or another , is political .
Politics have defined our lives .
If you 're living in Iran , you 're facing censorship , harassment , arrest , torture -- at times , execution .
If you 're living outside like me , you 're faced with life in exile -- the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family .
Therefore , we don 't find the moral , emotional , psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility .
Oddly enough , an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice , the speaker of my people , even if I have , indeed , no access to my own country .
Also , people like myself , we 're fighting two battles on different grounds .
We 're being critical of the West , the perception of the West about our identity -- about the image that is constructed about us , about our women , about our politics , about our religion .
We are there to take pride and insist on respect .
And at the same time , we 're fighting another battle .
That is our regime , our government -- our atrocious government , [ that ] has done every crime in order to stay in power .
Our artists are at risk .
We are in a position of danger .
We pose a threat to the order of the government .
But ironically , this situation has empowered all of us , because we are considered , as artists , central to the cultural , political , social discourse in Iran .
We are there to inspire , to provoke , to mobilize , to bring hope to our people .
We are the reporters of our people , and are communicators to the outside world .
Art is our weapon .
Culture is a form of resistance .
I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression .
For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics .
From the fact that they are only serving one audience , mainly the Western culture .
But also , I worry about the West , because often in this country , in this Western world that we have , culture risks being a form of entertainment .
Our people depend on our artists , and culture is beyond communication .
My journey as an artist started from a very , very personal place .
I did not start to make social commentary about my country .
The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years .
It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 .
While I was absent from Iran , the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture .
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society .
But instead , I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn 't recognize anymore .
More so , I became very interested , as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions , I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution -- how , indeed , it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women .
I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting , in the way the women of Iran , historically , seemed to embody the political transformation .
So in a way , by studying a woman , you can read the structure and the ideology of the country .
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life , and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse -- the subject of martyrdom , the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God , faith , but violence and crime and cruelty .
For me , this became incredibly important .
And yet , I had an unusual position toward this .
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place , but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution .
This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn 't know I would discover .
So my art became slightly more critical .
My knife became a little sharper .
And I fell into a life in exile .
I am a nomadic artist .
I work in Morocco , in Turkey , in Mexico .
I go everywhere to make believe it 's Iran .
Now I am making films .
Last year , I finished a film called " Women Without Men . "
" Women Without Men " returns to history , but another part of our Iranian history .
It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader , Dr. Mossadegh .
The book is written by an Iranian woman , Shahrnush Parsipur .
It 's a magical realist novel .
This book is banned , and she spent five years in prison .
My obsession with this book , and the reason I made this into a film , is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female -- traditionally , historically in Iran -- and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change , freedom and democracy -- while the country of Iran , equally , as if another character , also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions .
I made this film because I felt it 's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country .
That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution .
That Iran was once a secular society , and we had democracy , and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government , by the British government .
This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized -- in the way we looked , in the way we played music , in the way we had intellectual life .
And most of all , in the way that we fought for democracy .
These are some of the shots actually from my film .
These are some of the images of the coup .
And we made this film in Casablanca , recreating all the shots .
This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story , but also a feminine story .
Being a visual artist , indeed , I am foremost interested to make art -- to make art that transcends politics , religion , the question of feminism , and become an important , timeless , universal work of art .
The challenge I have is how to do that .
How to tell a political story but an allegorical story .
How to move you with your emotions , but also make your mind work .
These are some of the images and the characters of the film .
Now comes the green movement -- the summer of 2009 , as my film is released -- the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran .
What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film , the cry for democracy and social justice , repeats itself now again in Tehran .
The green movement significantly inspired the world .
It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy .
What was most significant for me was , once again , the presence of the women .
They 're absolutely inspirational for me .
If in the Islamic Revolution , the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn 't have a voice , now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran -- women who were educated , forward thinking , non-traditional , sexually open , fearless and seriously feminist .
These women and those young men united Iranians across the world , inside and outside .
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women .
That , under all circumstances , they have pushed the boundary .
They have confronted the authority .
They have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way .
And once again , they proved themselves .
I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice , and their voice is giving me my voice .
And it 's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist , even if I have to operate in the West only for now .
Thank you so much .
Beau Lotto : Optical illusions show how we see
Beau Lotto 's color games puzzle your vision , but they also spotlight what you can 't normally see : how your brain works . This fun , first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what 's really out there .
I want to start with a game .
And to win this game , all you have to do is see the reality that 's in front of you as it really is . All right ?
So , we have two panels here , of colored dots .
And one of those dots is the same in the two panels . Okay ?
And you have to tell me which one .
Now , narrow it down to the gray one , the green one and , say , the orange one .
So , by a show of hands -- we 'll start with the easiest one -- Show of hands : how many people think it 's the gray one ?
Really ? Okay .
How many people think it 's the green one ?
And how many people think it 's the orange one ?
Pretty even split .
Let 's find out what the reality is .
Here is the orange one .
Here is the green one .
And here is the gray one .
So , for all of you who saw that , you 're a complete realist . All right ?
So , this is pretty amazing , actually , isn 't it ?
Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another .
So , for us , seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does .
And yet , even at this most fundamental level , context is everything .
What I want to talk about is not that context is everything , but why is context everything .
Because it 's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do , but who we are as individuals , and who we are as a society .
But first , we have to ask another question , which is , " What is color for ? "
And instead of telling you , I 'll just show you .
What you see here is a jungle scene , and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect .
Now , can any of you see the predator that 's about to jump out at you ?
And if you haven 't seen it yet , you 're dead . Right ?
Can anyone see it ? Anyone ? No ?
Now , let 's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect .
And now you see it .
So , color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces , according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect .
But what you 've just done is , in many respects , mathematically impossible .
Why ? Because , as Berkeley tells us , we have no direct access to our physical world , other than through our senses .
And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world -- not only the color of objects , but also the color of their illumination , and the color of the space between us and those objects .
You vary any one of those parameters , and you 'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye .
This is a huge problem because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources .
So let me show you what I mean . Imagine that this is the back of your eye .
And these are two projections from the world .
They are identical in every single way .
Identical in shape , size , spectral content .
They are the same , as far as your eye is concerned .
And yet they come from completely different sources .
The one on the right comes from a yellow surface , in shadow , oriented facing the left , viewed through a pinkish medium .
The one on the left comes from an orange surface , under direct light , facing to the right , viewed through a sort of a bluish medium .
Completely different meanings , giving rise to the exact same retinal information .
And yet it 's only the retinal information that we get .
So how on Earth do we even see ?
So , if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes , remember this : that the light that falls on to your eye , sensory information , is meaningless , because it could mean literally anything .
And what 's true for sensory information is true for information generally .
There is no inherent meaning in information .
It 's what we do with that information that matters .
So , how do we see ? Well , we see by learning to see .
So , the brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns , finding relationships in information and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning , a significance , by interacting with the world .
We 're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes , like language .
So , I 'm going to give you some letter strings . And I want you to read them out for me , if you can .
Audience : " Can you read this ? "
" You are not reading this . "
" What are you reading ? "
Beau Lotto : " What are you reading ? " Half the letters are missing . Right ?
There is no a priori reason why an " H " has to go between that " W " and " A. "
But you put one there . Why ?
Because in the statistics of your past experience it would have been useful to do so . So you do so again .
And yet you don 't put a letter after that first " T. "
Why ? Because it wouldn 't have been useful in the past .
So you don 't do it again .
So let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality , even at the simplest thing the brain does , which is color .
So , if I could have the lights down up here .
I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same .
One is simply the flipping of the other . Okay ?
Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red . Okay ?
And I want you to stare at that dot . Don 't look anywhere else .
And we 're going to look at that for about 30 seconds , which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk .
But I really want you to learn .
And I 'll tell you -- don 't look anywhere else -- and I 'll tell you what 's happening inside your head .
Your brain is learning . And it 's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination ; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination .
That 's what it 's learning . Okay ?
Now , when I tell you , I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes .
So why don 't you do that now ?
Can I have the lights up again ?
I take it from your response they don 't look the same anymore . Right ?
Why ? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light , and the left one is still under green light .
That 's your new normal .
So , what does this mean for context ?
It means that I can take these two identical squares , and I can put them in light and dark surrounds .
And now the one on the dark surround looks lighter than the one on the light surround .
What 's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter .
It 's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past .
So I 'll show you what I mean . Here we have that exact same illusion .
We have two identical tiles , on the left , one in a dark surround , one in a light surround .
And the same thing over on the right .
Now , what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to review those two scenes .
But I 'm not going to change anything within those boxes , except their meaning .
And see what happens to your perception .
Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite : one very white and one very dark .
All right ? Whereas on the right , the two tiles look nearly the same .
And yet there is still one on a dark surround and one on a light surround .
Why ? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow , and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow , it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics .
So you see it that way .
Whereas on the right , the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light .
If they are under the same light , reflecting the same amount of light to your eye , then they must be equally reflective .
So you see it that way .
Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions .
This is one I made a few years ago .
And you 'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top , and a bright orange tile at the side .
That is your perceptual reality . The physical reality is that those two tiles are the same .
Here you see four gray tiles on your left , seven gray tiles on the right .
I 'm not going to change those tiles at all , but I 'm going to reveal the rest of the scene and see what happens to your perception .
The four blue tiles on the left are gray .
The seven yellow tiles on the right are also gray .
They are the same . Okay ?
Don 't believe me ? Let 's watch it again .
What 's true for color is also true for complex perceptions of motion .
So here we have -- let 's turn this around -- a diamond .
And what I 'm going to do is , I 'm going to hold it here , and I 'm going to spin it .
And for all of you , you 'll see it probably spinning this direction .
Now I want you to keep looking at it .
Move your eyes around , blink , maybe close one eye .
And suddenly it will flip , and start spinning the opposite direction .
Yes ? Raise your hand if you got that . Yes ?
Keep blinking . Every time you blink it will switch . Alright ?
So I can ask you , which direction is it rotating ?
How do you know ?
Your brain doesn 't know . Because both are equally likely .
So depending on where it looks , it flips between the two possibilities .
Are we the only ones that see illusions ?
The answer to this question is no .
Even the beautiful bumblebee , with its mere one million brain cells , which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina , sees illusions , does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can 't do .
So in my lab , we of course work on bumblebees .
Because we can completely control their experience , and see how that alters the architecture of their brain .
And we do this in what we call the Bee Matrix .
And here you have the hive . You can see the queen bee , that large bee in the middle there . Those are all her daughters , the eggs .
And they go back and forth between this hive and the arena , via this tube .
And you 'll see one of the bees come out here .
You see how she has a little number on her ?
Yeah there is another one coming out . She has another number on her .
Now , they are not born that way . Right ?
We pull them out , put them in the fridge , and they fall asleep .
And then you can superglue little numbers on them .
And now , in this experiment they get rewarded if they go to the blue flowers .
And they land on the flower . They stick their tongue in there , called a proboscis , and they drink sugar water .
Now she is drinking a glass of water that 's about that big to you and I , will do that about three times , and then fly .
And sometimes they learn not to go to the blue , but to go to where the other bees go .
So they copy each other . They can count to five . They can recognize faces .
And here she comes down the ladder .
And she 'll come into the hive , find an empty honey pot and throw up , and that 's honey .
Now remember -- -- she 's supposed to be going to the blue flowers .
But what are these bees doing in the upper right corner ?
It looks like they 're going to green flowers .
Now , are they getting it wrong ?
And the answer to the question is no . Those are actually blue flowers .
But those are blue flowers under green light .
So they are using the relationships between the colors to solve the puzzle , which is exactly what we do .
So , illusions are often used , especially in art , in the words of a more contemporary artist , " to demonstrate the fragility of our senses . "
Okay , this is complete rubbish .
The senses aren 't fragile . And if they were , we wouldn 't be here .
Instead , color tells us something completely different , that the brain didn 't actually evolve to see the world the way it is .
We can 't . Instead , the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past .
And how we see is by continually redefining normality .
So how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently ?
Well , one of the ways we do in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound and we enable people to hear their visual world .
And they can navigate the world using their ears .
Here is David , in the right . And he is holding a camera .
On the left is what his camera sees .
And you 'll see there is a line , a faint line going across that image .
That line is broken up into 32 squares .
In each square we calculate the average color .
And then we just simply translate that into sound .
And now he 's going to turn around , close his eyes , and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed .
He finds it . Amazing . Right ?
So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired , but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world .
But we can also do something else . We can also make music with color .
So , working with kids , they created images , thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them .
And then we translated these images .
And this is one of those images .
And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra .
And this is what it sounds like .
So , a six-year-old child . Okay ?
Now , what does all this mean ?
What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature . Okay ?
We are not defined by our central properties , by the bits that make us up .
We 're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment -- by our ecology .
And that ecology is necessarily relative , historical and empirical .
So what I 'd like to finish with is this over here .
Because what I 've been trying to do is really celebrate uncertainty .
Because I think only through uncertainty is there potential for understanding .
So , if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain , I 'd like to do this one .
So , if we have the lights down .
And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left , and 25 , call it yellowish , surfaces on your right ?
So , now , what I want to do : I 'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination by simply putting a filter behind them .
All right . Now you can see that changes the light that 's coming through there . Right ?
Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter .
I 'm going to do this opposite on the left here .
I 'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light .
Now , some of you will notice that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right , or your left , is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right .
Agreed ? Yes ?
Okay . So they are physically the same .
Let 's pull the covers off .
Now remember , you know the middle nine are exactly the same .
Do they look the same ? No .
The question is , " Is that an illusion ? "
And I 'll leave you with that .
So , thank you very much .
David Pogue : The music wars
& lt ; i & gt ; New York Times & lt ; / i & gt ; tech columnist David Pogue performs a satirical mini-medley about iTunes and the downloading wars , borrowing a few notes from Sonny and Cher and the Village People .
Ladies and gentlemen , the history of music and television on the Internet in three minutes .
A TED medley -- a TEDley .
It 's nine o ' clock on a Saturday The record store 's closed for the night So I fire up the old iTunes music store And soon I am feelin ' all right I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody With one dollar pricing that rocks I can type in the track and get album names back While still in my PJs and socks Sell us a song , you 're the music man My iPod 's still got 10 gigs to go Yes , we might prefer more compatibility But Steve likes to run the whole show I heard " Desperate Housewives " was great last night But I had a bad piece of cod As I threw up my meal , I thought , " It 's no big deal " I 'll watch it tonight on my ' Pod And now all of the networks are joining in Two bucks a show without ads It 's a business those guys always wanted to try But only Steve Jobs had the ' nads They say we 're young , don 't watch TV They say the Internet is all we see But that 's not true ; they 've got it wrong See , all our shows are just two minutes long Hey I got YouTube I got YouTube And now , ladies and gentlemen , a tribute to the Recording Industry Association of America -- the RIAA !
Young man , you were surfin ' along And then , young man , you downloaded a song And then , dumb man , copied it to your ' Pod Then a phone call came to tell you ... You 've just been sued by the R-I-A-A You 've just been screwed by the R-I-A-A Their attorneys say you committed a crime And there 'd better not be a next time They 've lost their minds at the R-I-A-A Justice is blind at the R-I-A-A You 're depriving the bands You are learning to steal You can 't do whatever you feel CD sales have dropped every year They 're not greedy , they 're just quaking with fear Yes indeedy , what if their end is near And we download all our music Yeah , that would piss off the R-I-A-A No plastic discs from the R-I-A-A What a way to make friends It 's a plan that can 't fail All your customers off to jail Who 'll be next for the R-I-A-A ? What else is vexing the R-I-A-A ? Maybe whistling a tune Maybe humming along Maybe mocking ' em in a song
Martin Seligman : The new era of positive psychology
Martin Seligman talks about psychology -- as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner . As it moves beyond a focus on disease , what can modern psychology help us to become ?
When I was president of the American Psychological Association , they tried to media-train me , and an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I 'm going to be talking about today , which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic .
The editor of Discover told us 10 of them , I 'm going to give you the eleventh .
So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said , " Professor Seligman , would you tell us about the state of psychology today ?
We 'd like to interview you about that . " And I said , " Great . "
And she said , " But this is CNN , so you only get a sound bite . "
So I said , " Well , how many words do I get ? "
And she said , " Well , one . "
And cameras rolled , and she said , " Professor Seligman , what is the state of psychology today ? "
" Good . "
" Cut . Cut . That won 't do .
We 'd really better give you a longer sound bite . "
" Well , how many words do I get this time ? " " I think , well , you get two .
Doctor Seligman , what is the state of psychology today ? "
" Not good . "
" Look , Doctor Seligman , we can see you 're really not comfortable in this medium .
We 'd better give you a real sound bite .
This time you can have three words .
Professor Seligman , what is the state of psychology today ? "
" Not good enough . " And that 's what I 'm going to be talking about .
I want to say why psychology was good , why it was not good and how it may become , in the next 10 years , good enough .
And by parallel summary , I want to say the same thing about technology , about entertainment and design , because I think the issues are very similar .
So , why was psychology good ?
Well , for more than 60 years , psychology worked within the disease model .
Ten years ago , when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate , and told them what I did , they 'd move away from me .
And because , quite rightly , they were saying psychology is about finding what 's wrong with you . Spot the loony .
And now , when I tell people what I do , they move toward me .
And what was good about psychology , about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made , about working in the disease model , about what you mean by psychology , is that , 60 years ago , none of the disorders were treatable -- it was entirely smoke and mirrors .
And now , 14 of the disorders are treatable , two of them actually curable .
And the other thing that happened is that a science developed , a science of mental illness .
That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression , alcoholism -- and measure them with rigor .
That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses .
That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses .
We could look across time at the same people -- people , for example , who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia -- and ask what the contribution of mothering , of genetics are , and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses .
And best of all , we were able , in the last 50 years , to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments .
And then we were able to test them rigorously , in random assignment , placebo controlled designs , throw out the things that didn 't work , keep the things that actively did .
And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry , over the last 60 years , can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable .
And I think that 's terrific . I 'm proud of it .
But what was not good , the consequences of that were three things .
The first was moral , that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists , pathologizers , that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble , bricks fell on you .
And we forgot that people made choices and decisions .
We forgot responsibility . That was the first cost .
The second cost was that we forgot about you people .
We forgot about improving normal lives .
We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier , more fulfilled , more productive . And " genius , " " high-talent , " became a dirty word .
No one works on that .
And the third problem about the disease model is , in our rush to do something about people in trouble , in our rush to do something about repairing damage , it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier , positive interventions .
So that was not good .
And so , that 's what led people like Nancy Etcoff , Dan Gilbert , Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology , which has three aims .
The first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness .
It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage .
It should be interested in the best things in life .
And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling , and with genius , with nurturing high talent .
So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future , we 've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology , a science of what makes life worth living .
It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness .
And any of you , for free , can go to that website and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness .
You can ask , how do you stack up for positive emotion , for meaning , for flow , against literally tens of thousands of other people ?
We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities : a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio , how they 're defined , how to diagnose them , what builds them and what gets in their way .
We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states , the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness .
I 've spent my life working on extremely miserable people , and I 've asked the question , how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you ?
And starting about six years ago , we asked about extremely happy people .
And how do they differ from the rest of us ?
And it turns out there 's one way .
They 're not more religious , they 're not in better shape , they don 't have more money , they 're not better looking , they don 't have more good events and fewer bad events .
The one way in which they differ : they 're extremely social .
They don 't sit in seminars on Saturday morning .
They don 't spend time alone .
Each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends .
But watch out here . This is merely correlational data , not causal , and it 's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I 'm going to talk about : happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer .
And I 'm going to suggest to you that 's not nearly enough , in just a moment .
We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries , from the Buddha to Tony Robbins .
About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy .
And we find that we 've been able to manualize many of them , and we actually carry out random assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies .
That is , which ones actually make people lastingly happier ?
In a couple of minutes , I 'll tell you about some of those results .
But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have , in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill , and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable , is can psychology actually make people happier ?
And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much -- we 've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy .
And I believe there are three different -- and I call them different because different interventions build them , it 's possible to have one rather than the other -- three different happy lives .
The first happy life is the pleasant life .
This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can , and the skills to amplify it .
The second is a life of engagement -- a life in your work , your parenting , your love , your leisure , time stops for you .
That 's what Aristotle was talking about .
And third , the meaningful life .
So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them .
The first life is the pleasant life and it 's simply , as best we can find it , it 's having as many of the pleasures as you can , as much positive emotion as you can , and learning the skills -- savoring , mindfulness -- that amplify them , that stretch them over time and space .
But the pleasant life has three drawbacks , and it 's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn 't end here .
The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life , your experience of positive emotion , is heritable , about 50 percent heritable , and , in fact , not very modifiable .
So the different tricks that Matthieu [ Ricard ] and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks , getting more of it .
Second is that positive emotion habituates . It habituates rapidly , indeed .
It 's all like French vanilla ice cream , the first taste is a 100 percent ; by the time you 're down to the sixth taste , it 's gone .
And , as I said , it 's not particularly malleable .
And this leads to the second life .
And I have to tell you about my friend , Len , to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion , more than building pleasure .
In two of the three great arenas of life , by the time Len was 30 , Len was enormously successful . The first arena was work .
By the time he was 20 , he was an options trader .
By the time he was 25 , he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company .
Second , in play -- he 's a national champion bridge player .
But in the third great arena of life , love , Len is an abysmal failure .
And the reason he was , was that Len is a cold fish .
Len is an introvert .
American women said to Len , when he dated them , " You 're no fun . You don 't have positive emotion . Get lost . "
And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst , who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him .
But it turned out there wasn 't any sexual trauma .
It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and watched football , and played bridge -- Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities .
The question is , is Len unhappy ? And I want to say not .
Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity , I think Len is one of the happiest people I know .
He 's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness and that 's because Len , like most of you , is enormously capable of flow .
When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9 : 30 in the morning , time stops for him . And it stops till the closing bell .
When the first card is played , until 10 days later , the tournament is over , time stops for Len .
And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about , about flow . And it 's distinct from pleasure in a very important way .
Pleasure has raw feels : you know it 's happening . It 's thought and feeling .
But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow , you can 't feel anything .
You 're one with the music . Time stops .
You have intense concentration .
And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life .
And we think there 's a recipe for it , and it 's knowing what your highest strengths are .
And again , there 's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are .
And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can .
Re-crafting your work , your love , your play , your friendship , your parenting .
Just one example . One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi 's .
Hated the job .
She 's working her way through college .
Her highest strength was social intelligence , so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer 's day .
Now obviously she failed .
But what she did was to take her highest strengths , and re-craft work to use them as much as possible .
What you get out of that is not smiley-ness .
You don 't look like Debbie Reynolds .
You don 't giggle a lot . What you get is more absorption .
So , that 's the second path . The first path , positive emotion .
The second path is eudaimonian flow .
And the third path is meaning .
This is the most venerable of the happinesses , traditionally .
And meaning , in this view , consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia -- it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are , and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are .
I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives , the pleasant life , the good life , the meaningful life , people are now hard at work on the question , are there things that lastingly change those lives ?
And the answer seems to be yes . And I 'll just give you some samples of it .
It 's being done in a rigorous manner .
It 's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works .
So we do random assignment , placebo controlled , long-term studies of different interventions .
And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect , when we teach people about the pleasant life , how to have more pleasure in your life , one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills , the savoring skills , and you 're assigned to design a beautiful day .
Next Saturday , set a day aside , design yourself a beautiful day , and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures .
And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced .
Gratitude visit . I want you all to do this with me now , if you would .
Close your eyes .
I 'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction , and who you never properly thanked .
The person has to be alive . OK .
Now , OK , you can open your eyes .
I hope all of you have such a person .
Your assignment , when you 're learning the gratitude visit , is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person , call them on the phone in Phoenix , ask if you can visit , don 't tell them why , show up at their door , you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens .
And what happens is when we test people one week later , a month later , three months later , they 're both happier and less depressed .
Another example is a strength date , in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test , and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths , and we find this is a strengthener of relationships .
And fun versus philanthropy .
But it 's so heartening to be in a group like this , in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy .
Well , my undergraduates and the people I work with haven 't discovered this , so we actually have people do something altruistic and do something fun , and to contrast it .
And what you find is when you do something fun , it has a square wave walk set .
When you do something philanthropic to help another person , it lasts and it lasts .
So those are examples of positive interventions .
So , the next to last thing I want to say is we 're interested in how much life satisfaction people have .
And this is really what you 're about . And that 's our target variable .
And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives , how much life satisfaction do you get ?
So we ask -- and we 've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people -- to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure , the pursuit of positive emotion , the pleasant life , the pursuit of engagement , time stopping for you , and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction ?
And our results surprised us , but they were backward of what we thought .
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction .
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest .
The pursuit of engagement is also very strong .
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning , then pleasure 's the whipped cream and the cherry .
Which is to say , the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts , if you 've got all three .
Conversely , if you have none of the three , the empty life , the sum is less than the parts .
And what we 're asking now is does the very same relationship , physical health , morbidity , how long you live and productivity , follow the same relationship ?
That is , in a corporation , is productivity a function of positive emotion , engagement and meaning ?
Is health a function of positive engagement , of pleasure , and of meaning in life ?
And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes .
So , Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard , and so this was amazing for me . I 've never been in a gathering like this .
I 've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much , which was one of the remarkable things .
But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology , entertainment and design in the following way .
We all know that technology , entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes .
We also know that technology , entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery .
And by the way , the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important .
I thought , when I first became a therapist 30 years ago , that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed , not anxious , not angry , that I 'd make them happy .
And I never found that . I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero .
But they were empty .
And it turns out the skills of happiness , the skills of the pleasant life , the skills of engagement , the skills of meaning , are different from the skills of relieving misery .
And so , the parallel thing holds with technology , entertainment and design , I believe .
That is , it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness , to increase positive emotion , and that 's typically how they 've been used .
But once you fractionate happiness the way I do -- not just positive emotion , that 's not nearly enough -- there 's flow in life , and there 's meaning in life .
As Laura Lee told us , design , and , I believe , entertainment and technology , can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well .
So in conclusion , the eleventh reason for optimism , in addition to the space elevator , is that I think with technology , entertainment and design , we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet .
And if technology can , in the next decade or two , increase the pleasant life , the good life and the meaningful life , it will be good enough .
If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion , meaning , eudaimonia , it will be good enough .
And if design can increase positive emotion , eudaimonia , and flow and meaning , what we 're all doing together will become good enough . Thank you .
AnnMarie Thomas : Hands-on science with squishy circuits
In a zippy demo at TED U , AnnMarie Thomas shows how two different kinds of homemade play dough can be used to demonstrate electrical properties -- by lighting up LEDs , spinning motors , and turning little kids into circuit designers .
I 'm a huge believer in hands-on education .
But you have to have the right tools .
If I 'm going to teach my daughter about electronics , I 'm not going to give her a soldering iron .
And similarly , she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands .
So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of : Play-Doh .
And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes .
And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough -- pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen .
We have two favorite recipes -- one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt .
And they 're great . We can make great little sculptures with these .
But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together .
You see that really salty Play-Doh ?
Well , it conducts electricity .
And this is nothing new .
It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity , and high school physics teachers have used that for years .
But our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial Play-Doh .
And that sugar dough ?
Well it 's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough .
So what does that mean ?
Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits -- circuits that the most creative , tiny , little hands can build on their own .
And so I want to do a little demo for you .
So if I take this salt dough , again , it 's like the play-dough you probably made as kids , and I plug it in -- it 's a two-lead battery pack , simple battery pack , you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else -- we can actually then light things up .
But if any of you have studied electrical engineering , we can also create a short circuit .
If I push these together , the light turns off .
Right , the current wants to run through the play-dough , not through that LED .
If I separate them again , I have some light .
Well now if I take that sugar dough , the sugar dough doesn 't want to conduct electricity .
It 's like a wall to the electricity .
If I place that between , now all the dough is touching , but if I stick that light back in , I have light .
In fact , I could even add some movement to my sculptures .
If I want a spinning tail , let 's grab a motor , put some play-dough on it , stick it on and we have spinning .
And once you have the basics , we can make a slightly more complicated circuit .
We call this our sushi circuit . It 's very popular with kids .
I plug in again the power to it .
And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits .
I can start plugging in lots of lights .
And we can start talking about things like electrical load .
What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor ?
It 'll dim .
We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we 've done .
You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this .
So this is all in your home kitchen .
We 've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab .
We have a website , it 's all there . These are the home recipes .
We 've got some videos . You can make them yourselves .
And it 's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone .
We 've had a mom in Utah who used them with her kids , to a science researcher in the U.K. , and curriculum developers in Hawaii .
So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh , grab some salt , grab some sugar and start playing .
We don 't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers , but maybe we should .
Have fun . Thank you .
Billy Graham : On technology and faith
Speaking at TED in 1998 , Rev. Billy Graham marvels at technology 's power to improve lives and change the world -- but says the end of evil , suffering and death will come only after the world accepts Christ . A legendary talk from TED 's archives .
As a clergyman , you can imagine how out of place I feel .
I feel like a fish out of water , or maybe an owl out of the air .
I was preaching in San Jose some time ago , and my friend Mark Kvamme , who helped introduce me to this conference , brought several CEOs and leaders of some of the companies here in the Silicon Valley to have breakfast with me , or I with them .
And I was so stimulated .
And had such -- it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science .
I know that we 're near the end of this conference , and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion .
Richard can answer that , because he made that decision .
But some years ago I was on an elevator in Philadelphia , coming down .
I was to address a conference at a hotel .
And on that elevator a man said , " I hear Billy Graham is staying in this hotel . "
And another man looked in my direction and said , " Yes , there he is . He 's on this elevator with us . "
And this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds , and he said , " My , what an anticlimax ! "
I hope that you won 't feel that these few moments with me is not a -- is an anticlimax , after all these tremendous talks that you 've heard , and addresses , which I intend to listen to every one of them .
But I was on an airplane in the east some years ago , and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of Charlotte , North Carolina .
His name was John Belk . Some of you will probably know him .
And there was a drunk man on there , and he got up out of his seat two or three times , and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do .
And he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by , and everybody was upset with him .
And finally , John Belk said , " Do you know who 's sitting here ? "
And the man said , " No , who ? "
He said , " It 's Billy Graham , the preacher . "
He said , " You don 't say ! "
And he turned to me , and he said , " Put her there ! "
He said , " Your sermons have certainly helped me . "
And I suppose that that 's true with thousands of people .
I know that as you have been peering into the future , and as we 've heard some of it here tonight , I would like to live in that age and see what is going to be .
But I won 't , because I 'm 80 years old . This is my eightieth year , and I know that my time is brief .
I have phlebitis at the moment , in both legs , and that 's the reason that I had to have a little help in getting up here , because I have Parkinson 's disease in addition to that , and some other problems that I won 't talk about .
But this is not the first time that we 've had a technological revolution .
We 've had others .
And there 's one that I want to talk about .
In one generation , the nation of the people of Israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the Near East .
A man by the name of David came to the throne , and King David became one of the great leaders of his generation .
He was a man of tremendous leadership .
He had the favor of God with him .
He was a brilliant poet , philosopher , writer , soldier -- with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today .
But about two centuries before David , the Hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron , and , slowly , that skill spread .
But they wouldn 't allow the Israelis to look into it , or to have any .
But David changed all of that , and he introduced the Iron Age to Israel .
And the Bible says that David laid up great stores of iron , and which archaeologists have found , that in present-day Palestine , there are evidences of that generation .
Now , instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones , Israel now had iron plows , and sickles , and hoes and military weapons .
And in the course of one generation , Israel was completely changed .
The introduction of iron , in some ways , had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation .
And David found that there were many problems that technology could not solve .
There were many problems still left .
And they 're still with us , and you haven 't solved them , and I haven 't heard anybody here speak to that .
How do we solve these three problems that I 'd like to mention ?
The first one that David saw was human evil .
Where does it come from ?
How do we solve it ?
Over again and again in the Psalms , which Gladstone said was the greatest book in the world , David describes the evils of the human race .
And yet he says , " He restores my soul . "
Have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are ?
On one hand , we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology , as this conference vividly demonstrates .
We 've seen under the sea , three miles down , or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future .
But on the other hand , something is wrong .
Our battleships , our soldiers , are on a frontier now , almost ready to go to war with Iraq .
Now , what causes this ?
Why do we have these wars in every generation , and in every part of the world ?
And revolutions ?
We can 't get along with other people , even in our own families .
We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we can 't break .
Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world , bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death .
Even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle .
I would like to see Oracle take up that , or some other technological geniuses work on this .
How do we change man , so that he doesn 't lie and cheat , and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever ?
The Bible says the problem is within us , within our hearts and our souls .
Our problem is that we are separated from our Creator , which we call God , and we need to have our souls restored , something only God can do .
Jesus said , " For out of the heart come evil thoughts : murders , sexual immorality , theft , false testimonies , slander . "
The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man , but he said , " It 's in our hearts that the evil lies , and it 's from our hearts that it must be plucked out . "
Albert Einstein -- I was just talking to someone , when I was speaking at Princeton , and I met Mr. Einstein .
He didn 't have a doctor 's degree , because he said nobody was qualified to give him one .
But he made this statement .
He said , " It 's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man . "
And many of you , I 'm sure , have thought about that and puzzled over it .
You 've seen people take beneficial technological advances , such as the Internet we 've heard about tonight , and twist them into something corrupting .
You 've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems .
The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology , horribly used .
The problem is not technology .
The problem is the person or persons using it .
King David said that he knew the depths of his own soul .
He couldn 't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery .
Yet King David sought God 's forgiveness , and said , " You can restore my soul . "
You see , the Bible teaches that we 're more than a body and a mind .
We are a soul .
And there 's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding .
That 's the part of us that yearns for God , or something more than we find in technology .
Your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life , and which seeks for something beyond this life .
It 's the part of you that yearns , really , for God .
I find [ that ] young people all over the world are searching for something .
They don 't know what it is . I speak at many universities , and I have many questions and answer periods , and whether it 's Cambridge , or Harvard , or Oxford -- I 've spoken at all of those universities .
I 'm going to Harvard in about three or four -- no , it 's about two months from now -- to give a lecture .
And I 'll be asked the same questions that I was asked the last few times I 've been there .
And it 'll be on these questions : where did I come from ? Why am I here ? Where am I going ?
What 's life all about ? Why am I here ?
Even if you have no religious belief , there are times when you wonder that there 's something else .
Thomas Edison also said , " When you see everything that happens in the world of science , and in the working of the universe , you cannot deny that there 's a captain on the bridge . "
I remember once , I sat beside Mrs. Gorbachev at a White House dinner .
I went to Ambassador Dobrynin , whom I knew very well .
And I 'd been to Russia several times under the Communists , and they 'd given me marvelous freedom that I didn 't expect .
And I knew Mr. Dobrynin very well , and I said , " I 'm going to sit beside Mrs. Gorbachev tonight .
What shall I talk to her about ? "
And he surprised me with the answer .
He said , " Talk to her about religion and philosophy .
That 's what she 's really interested in . "
I was a little bit surprised , but that evening that 's what we talked about , and it was a stimulating conversation .
And afterward , she said , " You know , I 'm an atheist , but I know that there 's something up there higher than we are . "
The second problem that King David realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering .
Writing the oldest book in the world was Job , and he said , " Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward . "
Yes , to be sure , science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering .
But I 'm -- in a few months , I 'll be 80 years of age .
I admit that I 'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years .
My doctors at the Mayo Clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this -- to be here .
I haven 't given a talk in nearly four months .
And when you speak as much as I do , three or four times a day , you get rusty .
That 's the reason I 'm using this podium and using these notes .
Every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere , I 'm ad-libbing .
I 'm not reading . I never read an address .
I never read a speech or a talk or a lecture .
I talk ad lib .
But tonight , I 've got some notes here so that if I begin to forget , which I do sometimes , I 've got something I can turn to .
But even here among us , most -- in the most advanced society in the world , we have poverty .
We have families that self-destruct , friends that betray us .
Unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us .
I 've never met a person in the world that didn 't have a problem or a worry .
Why do we suffer ? It 's an age-old question that we haven 't answered .
Yet David again and again said that he would turn to God .
He said , " The Lord is my shepherd . "
The final problem that David knew he could not solve was death .
Many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation .
Most people live as if they 're never going to die .
Technology projects the myth of control over our mortality .
We see people on our screens .
Marilyn Monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person , and our -- many young people think she 's still alive .
They don 't know that she 's dead .
Or Clark Gable , or whoever it is .
The old stars , they come to life .
And they 're -- they 're just as great on that screen as they were in person .
But death is inevitable .
I spoke some time ago to a joint session of Congress , last year .
And we were meeting in that room , the statue room .
About 300 of them were there .
And I said , " There 's one thing that we have in common in this room , all of us together , whether Republican or Democrat , or whoever . "
I said , " We 're all going to die .
And we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us . "
And it 's often difficult for young people to understand that .
It 's difficult for them to understand that they 're going to die .
As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes wrote , he said , there 's every activity under heaven .
There 's a time to be born , and there 's a time to die .
I 've stood at the deathbed of several famous people , whom you would know .
I 've talked to them .
I 've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death .
And yet , a few years earlier , death never crossed their mind .
I talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor .
She said he never thought of God , never talked about God , didn 't believe in God . He was an atheist .
But she said , as he came to die , he sat up on the side of the bed one day , and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain .
And he said , for the first time in his life he 'd thought about the inevitable , and about God .
Was there a God ?
A few years ago , a university student asked me , " What is the greatest surprise in your life ? "
And I said , " The greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life .
It passes so fast . "
But it does not need to have to be that way .
Wernher von Braun , in the aftermath of World War II concluded , quote : " science and religion are not antagonists .
On the contrary , they 're sisters . "
He put it on a personal basis .
I knew Dr. von Braun very well .
And he said , " Speaking for myself , I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator . "
He also said , " In our search to know God , I 've come to believe that the life of Jesus Christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration .
The reality of this life and His resurrection is the hope of mankind . "
I 've done a lot of speaking in Germany and in France , and in different parts of the world -- 105 countries it 's been my privilege to speak in .
And I was invited one day to visit Chancellor Adenauer , who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern Germany , since the war .
And he once -- and he said to me , he said , " Young man . " He said , " Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ ? "
And I said , " Sir , I do . "
He said , " So do I. "
He said , " When I leave office , I 'm going to spend my time writing a book on why Jesus Christ rose again , and why it 's so important to believe that . "
In one of his plays , Alexander Solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying , who says to those gathered around his bed , " The moment when it 's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying . "
How should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying ?
Blaise Pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century France .
Pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization .
He was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics , even as a teenager .
He is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory , and a creator of the first model of a computer .
And of course , you are all familiar with the computer language named for him .
Pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
He was astounded at the phenomenon we 've been considering : that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science , the arts and human enterprise , yet they also are full of anger , hypocrisy and have -- and self-hatreds .
Pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion .
On November 23 , 1654 , Pascal had a profound religious experience .
He wrote in his journal these words : " I submit myself , absolutely , to Jesus Christ , my redeemer . "
A French historian said , two centuries later , " Seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of Jesus Christ . "
Pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of God could bring us back into harmony , but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven , and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven .
He experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason .
It was he who penned the well-known words , " The heart has its reasons , which reason knows not of . "
Equally well known is Pascal 's Wager .
Essentially , he said this : " if you bet on God , and open yourself to his love , you lose nothing , even if you 're wrong .
But if instead you bet that there is no God , then you can lose it all , in this life and the life to come . "
For Pascal , scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of God .
The knowledge of God was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind .
He was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39 .
King David lived to be 70 , a long time in his era .
Yet he too had to face death , and he wrote these words : " even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death , I will fear no evil , for you are with me . "
This was David 's answer to three dilemmas of evil , suffering and death .
It can be yours , as well , as you seek the living God and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future .
When I was 17 years of age , I was born and reared on a farm in North Carolina .
I milked cows every morning , and I had to milk the same cows every evening when I came home from school .
And there were 20 of them that I had -- that I was responsible for , and I worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies .
I didn 't make good grades in high school .
I didn 't make them in college , until something happened in my heart .
One day , I was faced face-to-face with Christ .
He said , " I am the way , the truth and the life . "
Can you imagine that ? " I am the truth .
I 'm the embodiment of all truth . "
He was a liar .
Or he was insane .
Or he was what he claimed to be .
Which was he ?
I had to make that decision .
I couldn 't prove it .
I couldn 't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it .
But by faith I said , I believe him , and he came into my heart and changed my life .
And now I 'm ready , when I hear that call , to go into the presence of God .
Thank you , and God bless all of you .
Thank you for the privilege . It was great .
Richard Wurman : You did it .
Thanks .
Patricia Ryan : Don 't insist on English !
In her talk , longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question : Is the world 's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages ? It 's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I know what you 're thinking .
You think I 've lost my way , and somebody 's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat .
I get that all the time in Dubai .
" Here on holiday are you , dear ? "
" Come to visit the children ?
How long are you staying ? "
Well actually , I hope for a while longer yet .
I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years .
And in that time , I have seen a lot of changes .
Now that statistic is quite shocking .
And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English .
I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi .
And one fine day , she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary .
But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants , as well as their uses -- medicinal uses , cosmetics , cooking , herbal .
How did those students get all that knowledge ?
Of course , from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents .
It 's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations .
But sadly , today , languages are dying at an unprecedented rate .
A language dies every 14 days .
Now , at the same time , English is the undisputed global language .
Could there be a connection ?
Well I don 't know .
But I do know that I 've seen a lot of changes .
When I first came out to the Gulf , I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post .
Actually , not that long ago .
That is a little bit too early .
But nevertheless , I was recruited by the British Council , along with about 25 other teachers .
And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait .
We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education .
And of course , the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth .
Okay .
Now this is the major change that I 've seen -- how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today .
No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum , and no longer the sole domain of mother England , it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth .
And why not ?
After all , the best education -- according to the latest World University Rankings -- is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S.
So everybody wants to have an English education , naturally .
But if you 're not a native speaker , you have to pass a test .
Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone ?
Perhaps you have a computer scientist who 's a genius .
Would he need the same language as a lawyer , for example ?
Well , I don 't think so .
We English teachers reject them all the time .
We put a stop sign , and we stop them in their tracks .
They can 't pursue their dream any longer , ' til they get English .
Now let me put it this way : if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer , would I stop him from entering my British University ?
I don 't think so .
But indeed , that is exactly what we do .
We English teachers are the gatekeepers .
And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough .
Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society .
Maybe the barrier would be too universal .
Okay .
" But , " I hear you say , " what about the research ?
It 's all in English . "
So the books are in English , the journals are done in English , but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy .
It feeds the English requirement .
And so it goes on .
I ask you , what happened to translation ?
If you think about the Islamic Golden Age , there was lots of translation then .
They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic , into Persian , and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages .
And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe .
Now don 't get me wrong ; I am not against teaching English , all you English teachers out there .
I love it that we have a global language .
We need one today more than ever .
But I am against using it as a barrier .
Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English , or Chinese ?
We need more than that . Where do we draw the line ?
This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English , which is quite arbitrary .
And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today 's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English , they didn 't have to pass an English test .
Case in point , Einstein .
He , by the way , was considered remedial at school because he was , in fact , dyslexic .
But fortunately for the world , he did not have to pass an English test .
Because they didn 't start until 1964 with TOEFL , the American test of English .
Now it 's exploded .
There are lots and lots of tests of English .
And millions and millions of students take these tests every year .
Now you might think , you and me , " Those fees aren 't bad , they 're okay , " but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people .
So immediately , we 're rejecting them .
It brings to mind a headline I saw recently : " Education : The Great Divide . "
Now I get it , I understand why people would want to focus on English .
They want to give their children the best chance in life .
And to do that , they need a Western education .
Because , of course , the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities , that I put on earlier .
It 's a circular thing .
Okay .
Let me tell you a story about two scientists , two English scientists .
They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals .
But they couldn 't get the results they wanted .
They really didn 't know what to do , until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb , whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German .
So bingo , problem solved .
If you can 't think a thought , you are stuck .
But if another language can think that thought , then , by cooperating , we can achieve and learn so much more .
My daughter came to England from Kuwait .
She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic .
It 's an Arabic medium school .
She had to translate it into English at her grammar school .
And she was the best in the class at those subjects .
Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad , we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know , and they know it in their own language .
When a language dies , we don 't know what we lose with that language .
This is -- I don 't know if you saw it on CNN recently -- they gave the Heroes Award to a young Kenyan shepherd boy who couldn 't study at night in his village , like all the village children , because the kerosene lamp , it had smoke and it damaged his eyes .
And anyway , there was never enough kerosene , because what does a dollar a day buy for you ?
So he invented a cost-free solar lamp .
And now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home .
When he received his award , he said these lovely words : " The children can lead Africa from what it is today , a dark continent , to a light continent . "
A simple idea , but it could have such far-reaching consequences .
People who have no light , whether it 's physical or metaphorical , cannot pass our exams , and we can never know what they know .
Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark .
Let us celebrate diversity .
Mind your language .
Use it to spread great ideas .
Thank you very much .
Alex Steffen : The shareable future of cities
How can cities help save the future ? Alex Steffen shows some cool neighborhood-based green projects that expand our access to things we want and need -- while reducing the time we spend in cars .
Climate change is already a heavy topic , and it 's getting heavier because we 're understanding that we need to do more than we are .
We 're understanding , in fact , that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions .
That 's , to put it mildly , not what 's on the table now .
And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face .
And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us , we tend to seek simple answers .
And I think this is what we 've done with climate change .
We look at where the emissions are coming from -- they 're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth , and we say , okay , well the problem is that they 're coming out of fossil fuels that we 're burning , so therefore , the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy .
And while , of course , we do need clean energy , I would put to you that it 's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem , we 're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it .
And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing .
That shouldn 't be news to any of us .
However , it 's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization .
By mid-century , we 're going to have about eight billion -- perhaps more -- people living in cities or within a day 's travel of one .
We will be an overwhelmingly urban species .
In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today , we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy .
It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy .
So if we 're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet , we need to look somewhere else for the solution .
The solution , in fact , may be closer to hand than we think , because all of those cities we 're building are opportunities .
Every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants .
We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing -- I choose to turn this light switch on -- but really , enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in .
I won 't show you very many graphs today , but if I can just focus on this one for a moment , it really tells us a lot of what we need to know -- which is , quite simply , that if you look , for example , at transportation , a major category of climate emissions , there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air .
And the correlation , of course , is that denser places tend to have lower emissions -- which isn 't really all that difficult to figure out , if you think about it .
Basically , we substitute , in our lives , access to the things we want .
We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place .
And we 're basically using mobility to get the access we need .
But when we live in a denser community , suddenly what we find , of course , is that the things we need are close by .
And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place , suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable .
And it is possible , of course , to increase the density of the communities around us .
Some places are doing this with new eco districts , developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods , which is nice work if you can get it , but most of the time , what we 're talking about is , in fact , reweaving the urban fabric that we already have .
So we 're talking about things like infill development : really sharp little changes to where we have buildings , where we 're developing .
Urban retrofitting : creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there .
Increasingly , we 're realizing that we don 't even need to densify an entire city .
What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don 't drive as much and so on .
And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot .
So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city .
And we find that when we do that , we can , in fact , have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results .
Now we may find that there are places that are really , really dense and still hold onto their cars , but the reality is that , by and large , what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect , where people simply stop driving as much , and increasingly , more and more people , if they 're surrounded by places that make them feel at home , give up their cars altogether .
And this is a huge , huge energy savings , because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars .
We have the manufacture of the car , the disposal of the car , all of the parking and freeways and so on .
When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn 't use any of them really , you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent .
And people are embracing this .
All around the world , we 're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life .
People are saying that it 's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood .
And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we 're starting to see , what you find is , in fact , even more access suffused into spaces .
Some of it 's transportation access .
This is a Mapnificent map that shows me , in this case , how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation .
Some of it is about walking . It 's not all perfect yet .
This is Google Walking Maps .
I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway , and it told me to go via Guernsey .
It did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths , though .
But the technologies are getting better , and we 're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation .
And as we just heard earlier , of course , we 're also learning how to put information on dumb objects .
Things that don 't have any wiring in them at all , we 're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation .
Part of what we 're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption , which is to get a bunch of stuff , is not , in fact , how we really live best in dense environments .
What we 're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things .
My favorite example is a drill . Who here owns a drill , a home power drill ?
Okay . I do too .
The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime , depending on who you ask .
And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time , use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit .
Our cities , I would put to you , are stockpiles of these surplus capacities .
And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities -- such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit -- what we probably will find is that , in fact , turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them , is a far smarter way to go .
And in fact , even space itself is turning into a service .
We 're finding that people can share the same spaces , do stuff with vacant space .
Buildings are becoming bundles of services .
So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on -- like heating , cooling etc . -- and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on .
So we light our buildings with daylight .
We cool them with breezes . We heat them with sunshine .
In fact , when we use all these things , what we 've found is that , in some cases , energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent .
Which brings on another threshold effect I like to call furnace dumping , which is , quite simply , if you have a building that doesn 't need to be heated with a furnace , you save a whole bunch of money up front .
These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives .
Now when we look at being able to slash our product use , slash our transportation use , slash our building energy use , all of that is great , but it still leaves something behind .
And if we 're going to really , truly become sustainable cities , we need to think a little differently .
This is one way to do it .
This is Vancouver 's propaganda about how green a city they are .
And certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery .
So we have visions like this .
We have visions like this . We have visions like this .
Now all of these are fine projects , but they really have missed an essential point , which is it 's not about the leaves above , it 's about the systems below .
Do they , for instance , capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use ?
Water is energy intensive .
Do they , perhaps , include green infrastructure , so that we can take runoff and water that 's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees ?
Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by , for example , connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration ?
Do they allow for pollination , pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities ?
Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth , and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon -- take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities ?
I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible , they 're being done right now , and that it 's a darn good thing .
Because right now , our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said , " by stealing the future , selling it in the present and calling it GDP . "
And if we have another eight billion or seven billion , or six billion , even , people , living on a planet where their cities also steal the future , we 're going to run out of future really fast .
But if we think differently , I think that , in fact , we can have cities that are not only zero emissions , but have unlimited possibilities as well .
Thank you very much .
Angela Patton : A father-daughter dance ... in prison
At Camp Diva , Angela Patton works to help girls and fathers stay connected and in each others ' lives . But what about girls whose fathers can 't be there -- because they 're in jail ? Patton tells the story of a very special father-daughter dance . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I was sitting with my girls , and Joy said , " Dang , I wish he 'd get off my back .
My daddy , he calls me all the time . "
" Lucky for you he calls at all , " said Jasmine .
" I haven 't heard from my dad in years . "
At this moment , I knew the girls needed a way to connect with their fathers .
At Camp Diva , my non-profit organization , we have these types of conversations all the time as a way to help girls of African descent prepare for their passage into womanhood .
These girls just needed a way to invite their fathers into their lives on their own terms .
So I asked the girls , " How can we help other girls develop healthy relationships with their fathers ? "
" Let 's have a dance , " one girl shouted , and all the girls quickly backed her up .
They started dreaming about the decorations , invitations , the dresses they were going to wear , and what their fathers could and could not wear .
It was off and running before I could even blink my eyes , but even if I could have slowed down those girls , I wouldn 't have , because one thing that I have learned from over a decade of working with girls is that they already know what they need .
The wisdom lives inside of them .
As long as they have infrastructure , mentorship and resources , they can build what they need , not only to survive , but to thrive .
So we had a dance , and girls and their fathers came in multitudes .
They were dressed to the nines .
They acted sweet .
They acted silly .
They really enjoyed each other 's company .
It was a huge success .
And the girls decided to make it an annual event .
So as the seasons changed , and it was time to plan the dance again , one girl named Brianna spoke up , and she said , " My dad can 't come to the dance , and this whole thing is making me sad . "
" Why not ? " the girls asked .
" Because he 's in jail , " she bravely admitted .
" Well , can he just get out for a day ? " one of the girls asked .
" And come in shackles ?
That 's worse than not having him here at all . "
At this moment , I saw an opportunity for the girls to rise to the occasion and to become their own heroes .
So I asked , " What do you think we should do about this ?
We want every girl to experience the dance , right ? "
So the girls thought for a moment , and one girl suggested , " Why don 't we just take the dance in the jail ? "
Most of the girls doubted the possibility of that , and said , " Are you crazy ?
Who is going to allow a bunch of little girls , dressed up — " " — to come inside a jail and dance with their daddies in Spongebob suits ? "
Because that 's what they called them .
I said , " Girls , well , well , you never know unless you ask . "
So a letter was written to the Richmond City Sheriff , signed collectively by each girl , and I would have to say , he is a very special sheriff .
He contacted me immediately and said , whenever there is an opportunity to bring families inside , his doors are always open .
Because one thing he did know , that when fathers are connected to their children , it is less likely that they will return .
So , 16 inmates and 18 girls were invited .
The girls were dressed in their Sunday best , and the fathers traded in their yellow and blue jumpsuits for shirts and ties .
They hugged .
They shared a full catered meal of chicken and fish .
They laughed together .
It was beautiful .
The fathers and daughters even experienced an opportunity to have a physical connection , something that a lot of them didn 't even have for a while .
Fathers were in a space where they were able to make their daughters play , and pull out her chair and extend his hand for a dance .
Even the guards cried .
But after the dance , we all realized that Dad still would be in jail .
So we needed to create something that they could take with them .
So we brought in Flip cams , and we had them look at the Flip cams and just interview each other -- their messages , their thoughts .
This was going to be used as a touchstone so when they started to miss each other and feel disconnected , they could reconnect through this image .
I 'll never forget that one girl looked in her father 's eyes with that camera and said , " Daddy , when you look at me , what do you see ? "
Because our daddies are our mirrors that we reflect back on when we decide about what type of man we deserve , and how they see us for the rest of our lives .
I know that very well , because I was one of the lucky girls .
I have had my father in my life always .
He 's even here today .
And that is why it is extremely special for me to make sure that these girls are connected to their fathers , especially those who are separated because of barbed wires and metal doors .
We have just created a form for girls who have heavy questions on their heart to be in a position to ask their fathers those questions and given the fathers the freedom to answer .
Because we know that the fathers are even leaving with this one thought : What type of woman am I preparing to put in the world ?
Because a father is locked in does not mean he should be locked out of his daughter 's life .
Dennis vanEngelsdorp : A plea for bees
Bees are dying in droves . Why ? Leading apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp looks at the gentle , misunderstood creature 's important place in nature and the mystery behind its alarming disappearance .
What I 'd like you to do is , just really quickly , is just , sort of , nod to the person on your right , and then nod to the person on your left .
Now , chances are that over the last winter , if you had been a beehive , either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died .
Now , that 's an awful lot of bees .
And this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies , or we estimate we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter .
Now , that 's a lot , a lot of bees , and that 's really important .
And most of those losses are because of things we know .
We know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses , and we also have this new phenomenon , which I talked about last year , Colony Collapse Disorder .
And here we see a picture on top of a hill in Central Valley last December .
And below , you can see all these out yards , or temporary yards , where the colonies are brought in until February , and then they 're shipped out to the almonds .
And one documentary writer , who was here and looked at this two months after I was here , described this not as beehives but as a graveyard , with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them .
Now , I 'm going to sum up a year 's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is .
And what we know is that it 's as if the bees have caught a flu .
And this flu has wiped through the population of bees .
In some cases , and in fact in most cases in one year , this flu was caused by a new virus to us , or newly identified by us , called Israeli Acute Paralysis virus .
It was called that because a guy in Israel first found it , and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease , because , of course , there 's the implication .
But we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous .
It 's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus , and so the question we 're still struggling with , and the question that keeps us up at night , is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu , and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases ?
And we don 't have the answer to that yet , and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out .
We think perhaps it 's a combination of factors .
We know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that , you know , we 're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive , and surprisingly , sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides . And so we discover all these very strange things that we can 't begin to understand .
And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health .
Now of course , if you lose a lot of colonies , beekeepers can replace them very quickly .
And that 's why we 've been able to recover from a lot of loss .
If we lost one in every three cows in the winter , you know , the National Guard would be out .
But what beekeepers can do is , if they have one surviving colony , they can split that colony in two .
And then the one half that doesn 't have a queen , they can buy a queen .
It comes in the mail ; it can come from Australia or Hawaii or Florida , and you can introduce that queen .
And in fact , America was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact , it 's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country .
If you don 't just want a queen , you can buy , actually , a three-pound package of bees , which comes in the mail , and of course , the Postal Office is always very concerned when they get , you know , your three-pound packages of bees .
And you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out .
So it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs , and so they 've been able to cover those losses .
So even though we 've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year , the same number of colonies have existed in the country , at about 2.4 million colonies .
Now , those losses are tragic on many fronts , and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper .
And it 's really important to talk about beekeepers first , because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you 'll ever meet .
If this was a group of beekeepers , you would have everyone from the card-carrying NRA member who 's , you know , live free or die , to the , you know , the self-expressed quirky San Francisco backyard pig farmer .
And you get all of these people in the same room , and they 're all engaged and they 're getting along , and they 're all there because of the passion for bees .
Now , there 's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers , the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone .
And these tend to be some of the most independent , tenacious , intuitive , you know , inventive people you will ever meet .
They 're just fascinating . And they 're like that all over the world .
I had the privilege of working in Haiti just for two weeks earlier this year .
And Haiti , if you 've ever been there , is just a tragedy .
I mean , there may be 100 explanations for why Haiti is the impoverished nation it is , but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor .
But you meet this beekeeper , and I met this beekeeper here , and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers I 've ever met .
No formal education , but very knowledgeable .
We needed beeswax for a project we were working on ; he was so capable , he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax I have ever seen from cow dung , tin cans and his veil , which he used as a screening , right in this meadow . And so that ingenuity is inspiring .
We also have Dave Hackenberg , who is the poster child of CCD .
He 's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells .
And he has a history of these trucks , and he 's moved these bees up and down the coast .
And a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees , and that being bad , but we 've done that for thousands of years .
The ancient Egyptians used to move bees up and down the Nile on rafts , so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all .
And one of our real worries with Colony Collapse Disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies .
And you can do that one year in a row , you may be able to do it two years in a row .
But if you 're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies , you can 't survive three years in a row . And we 're really worried about losing this segment of our industry .
And that 's important for many fronts , and one of them is because of that culture that 's in agriculture .
And these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of America .
You know , they pick up their hives ; they move their families once or twice in a year .
And if you look at Florida , in Dade City , Florida , that 's where all the Pennsylvania beekeepers go .
And then 20 miles down the road is Groveland , and that 's where all the Wisconsin beekeepers go .
And if you 're ever in Central Valley in February , you go to this café at 10 o 'clock in the morning , Kathy and Kate 's .
And that 's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves .
They all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there . And it 's a great experience , and I really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time , because that 's quite essential American experience .
And we see these families , these nomadic families , you know , father to son , father to son , and these guys are hurting .
And they 're not people who like to ask for help , although they are the most helpful people ever .
If there 's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul , everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies .
And so , it 's a very dynamic , and I think , historic and exciting community to be involved with .
Of course , the real importance for bees is not the honey .
And although I highly encourage you , all use honey .
I mean , it 's the most ethical sweetener , and you know , it 's a dynamic and fun sweetener .
But we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees .
Now , I want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast I had yesterday morning -- a little cranberry juice , some fruits , some granola , I should have had whole wheat bread , I realized , but you know , jam on my Wonderbread , and some coffee -- and had we taken out all those ingredients , -- except for the almonds I wasn 't going to pick out from the granola -- if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated , we wouldn 't have much on our plate .
So if we did not have bees , it 's not like we would starve , but clearly our diet would be diminished .
It 's said that for bees , the flower is the fountain of life , and for flowers bees are the messengers of love .
And that 's a really great expression , because really , bees are the sex workers for flowers . They are , you know -- they get paid for their services .
They get paid by pollen and nectar , to move that male sperm , the pollen , from flower to flower .
And there are flowers that are self-infertile . That means they can 't -- the pollen in their bloom can 't fertilize themselves .
So in an apple orchard , for instance , you 'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety , and then you have another apple tree that 's a different type of pollen .
And bees are very faithful .
When they 're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower , they stay to that crop exclusively , in order to help generate .
And of course , they 're made to carry this pollen .
They build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom .
However , honeybees are a minority .
Honeybees are not native to America ; they were introduced with the colonialists .
And there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined .
In Pennsylvania alone , we have been surveying bees for 150 years , and very intensely in the last three years .
We have identified over 400 species of bees in Pennsylvania .
Thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950 .
Now , that could be because we haven 't been sampling right , but it does , I think , suggest that something 's wrong with the pollinator force . And these bees are fascinating .
We have bumblebees on the top .
And bumblebees are what we call eusocial : they 're not truly social , because only the queen is , over winter .
We also have the sweat bees , and these are little gems flying around .
They 're like tiny little flies and they fly around .
And then you have another type of bee , which we call kleptoparasites , which is a very fancy way of saying , bad-minded , murdering -- what 's the word I 'm looking for ? Murdering -- Audience : Bee ?
Dennis vanEngelsdorp : Bee . Okay , thanks .
What these bees do is , they sit there . These solitary bees , they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch , and they collect pollen and make it into a ball , and they lay an egg on it .
Well , these bees hang out at that hole , and they wait for that mother to fly away , they go in , eat the egg , and lay their own egg there . So they don 't do any work .
And so , in fact , if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees , you know that your environment is healthy , because they 're top-of-the-food-chain bees .
And in fact , there is now a red list of pollinators that we 're worried have disappeared , and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites , but also these bumblebees .
And in fact , if you guys live on the West Coast , go to these websites here , and they 're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees , because we think some have gone extinct . Or some , the population has declined .
And so it 's not just honeybees that are in trouble , but we don 't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community .
And of course , bees are not the only important factor here .
There are other animals that pollinate , like bats , and bats are in trouble too .
And I 'm glad I 'm a bee man and not a bat man , because there 's no money to research the bat problems .
And bats are dying at an extraordinary rate .
White-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats .
If there 's a cave in New York that had 15,000 bats in it , and there are 1,000 left . That 's like San Francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years .
And so that 's incredible . And there 's no money to do that .
But I 'm glad to say that I think we know the cause of all these conditions , and that cause is NDD : Nature Deficit Disorder .
And that is that I think that what we have in our society is , we forgot our connection with nature .
And I think if we reconnect to nature , we 'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems .
And I think that there is an easy cure for NDD .
And that is , make meadows and not lawns .
And I think we have lost our connection , and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment .
I 've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while , and it is terribly engaging .
And if we look at the history of lawns , it 's actually rather tragic .
It used to be , two , three hundred years ago , that a lawn was a symbol of prestige , and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually , deserts : they 're totally sterile .
Americans spent , in 2001 -- 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns .
Five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns .
And so it 's incredible the amount of resources we 've spent keeping our lawns , which are these useless biosystems .
And so we need to rethink this idea .
In fact , you know , the White House used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in World War I , which probably is not a bad idea ; it wouldn 't be a bad idea .
I want to say this not because I 'm opposed completely to mowing lawns .
I think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale , and I think we 're encouraged to do that .
But I also want to reinforce some of the ideas we 've heard here , because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational .
That it is amazing that connection we can have with what 's there .
These milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years . Add to watch the different plants , or insects , that come to these flowers , to watch that -- and we 've heard about , you know , this relationship you can have with wine , this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances .
And this is a companion , and this is a relationship that never dries up .
You never run out of that companion as you drink this wine , too .
And I encourage you to look at that .
Now , not all of us have meadows , or lawns that we can convert , and so you can always , of course , grow a meadow in a pot .
Bees apparently , can be the gateway to , you know , other things .
So I 'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot , but a pot in a meadow .
But you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers , these beekeepers that live -- This is in Paris where these beekeepers live .
And everyone should open a beehive , because it is the most amazing , incredible thing .
And if we want to cure ourselves of NDD , or Nature Deficit Disorder , I think this is a great way of doing it .
Get a beehive and grow a meadow , and watch that life come back into your life .
And so with that , I think that what we can do , if we do this , we can make sure that our future -- our more perfect future -- includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows .
And that journey -- that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there -- is an extremely exciting one .
And I hope that you experience it and I hope you tell me about it one day .
So thank you very much for being here . Thank you very much .
Danielle de Niese : A flirtatious aria
Can opera be ever-so-slightly sexy ? The glorious soprano Danielle de Niese shows how , singing the flirty " Meine Lippen , sie küssen so heiss . " Which , translated , means , as you might guess : " I kiss so hot . " From Giuditta by Frans Lehár ; accompanist : Ingrid Surgenor .
I don 't understand myself , why they keep talking of love , if they come near me , if they look into my eyes and kiss my hand . I don 't understand myself , why they talk of magic , that no one withstands , if he sees me , if he passes by . But if the red light is on in the middle of the night and everybody listens to my song , then it is plain to see . My lips , they give so fiery a kiss , my limbs , they are supple and white . It is written for me in the stars , thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . My feet , they glide and float , my eyes , they lure and glow . And I dance as if entranced , ' cause I know , my lips give so fiery a kiss . In my veins , runs a dancer 's blood , because my beautiful mother was the Queen of dance in the gilded Alcazar . She was so very beautiful , I often saw her in my dreams . If she beat the tambourine to her beguiling dance , all eyes were glowing admiringly . She reawakened in me , mine is the same lot . I dance like her at midnight and from deep within I feel : My lips , they give so fiery a kiss , my limbs , they are supple and white . It is written for me in the stars , thou shalt kiss , thou shalt love . And I dance as if entranced , ' cause I know , my lips give so fiery a kiss .
Eve Ensler : Embrace your inner girl
In this passionate talk , Eve Ensler declares that there is a girl cell in us all -- a cell that we have all been taught to suppress . She tells heartfelt stories of girls around the world who have overcome shocking adversity and violence to reveal the astonishing strength of being a girl .
Namaste . Good morning .
I 'm very happy to be here in India .
And I 've been thinking a lot about what I have learned over these last particularly 11 years with V-Day and " The Vagina Monologues , " traveling the world , essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women .
What I want to talk about today is this particular cell , or grouping of cells , that is in each and every one of us .
And I want to call it the girl cell .
And it 's in men as well as in women .
I want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race .
And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell , the oppression of these cells , the reinterpretation of these cells , the undermining of these cells , getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing , eradicating , destroying , reducing these cells , basically began the process of killing off the girl cell , which was , by the way , patriarchy .
I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness .
And it is essential to balance , to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us .
And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion , and it 's empathy , and it 's passion itself , and it 's vulnerability , and it 's openness , and it 's intensity , and it 's association , and it 's relationship , and it is intuitive .
And then let 's think how compassion informs wisdom , and that vulnerability is our greatest strength , and that emotions have inherent logic , which lead to radical , appropriate , saving action .
And then let 's remember that we 've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be , that compassion clouds your thinking , that it gets in the way , that vulnerability is weakness , that emotions are not to be trusted , and you 're not supposed to take things personally , which is one of my favorites .
I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl .
How do we bring up boys ? What does it mean to be a boy ?
To be a boy really means not to be a girl .
To be a man means not to be a girl .
To be a woman means not to be a girl .
To be strong means not to be a girl .
To be a leader means not to be a girl .
I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we 've had to train everyone not to be that .
And I 'd also like to say that the irony of course , is that denying girl , suppressing girl , suppressing emotion , refusing feeling has lead thus here .
Where we have now come to live in a world where the most horrific poverty , genocide , mass rapes , the destruction of the Earth , is completely out of control .
And because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship , we do not feel what is going on .
So , we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening .
I want to talk a little bit about the Democratic Republic of Congo .
For me , it was the turning point of my life .
I have spent a lot of time there in the last three years .
I feel up to that point I had seen a lot in the world , a lot of violence .
I essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years .
But the Democratic Republic of Congo really was the turning point in my soul .
I went and I spent time in a place called Bukavu in a hospital called the Panzi Hospital , with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person I 've ever met .
His name is Dr. Denis Mukwege .
there has been a war raging for the last 12 years , a war that has killed nearly six million people .
It is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there .
When I spent my first weeks at Panzi hospital I sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories .
Their stories were so horrific , and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence , that to be perfectly honest with you , I was shattered .
And I will tell you that what happened is through that shattering , listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated , who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes , literally , inside them where their pee and poop came out of them .
Listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled , and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically , all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the West can have it and profit from them .
My mind was so shattered .
But what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way I have never been emboldened .
That shattering , that opening of my girl cell , that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous , and braver , and actually more clever than I had been in the past in my life .
I want to say that I think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually -- that feelings get in the way of empire-building .
Feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the Earth , and excavating the Earth , and destroying things .
I remember , for example , when my father , who was very , very violent , used to beat me .
And he would actually say , while he was beating me , " Don 't you cry . Don 't you dare cry . "
Because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him .
And even in the moment he didn 't want to be reminded of what he was doing .
I know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell .
And I want to say we 've annihilated it in men as well as in women .
And I think in some ways we 've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell .
I see how boys have been brought up , and I see this across the planet : to be tough , to be hardened , to distance themselves from their tenderness , to not cry .
I actually realized once in Kosovo , when I watched a man break down , that bullets are actually hardened tears , that when we don 't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability , and have their compassion , and have their hearts , that they become hardened and hurtful and violent .
And I think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure , to pretend they know things when they don 't know things , or why would we be where we are ?
To pretend they 're not a mess when they are a mess .
And I will tell you a very funny story .
On my way here on the airplane , I was walking up and down the aisle of the plane .
And all these men , literally at least 10 men , were in their little seats watching chick flicks .
And they were all alone , and I thought , " This is the secret life of men . "
I 've traveled , as I said , to many , many countries , and I 've seen , if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it 's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world .
And we heard from Sunitha yesterday , and Kavita about what we do to girls .
But I just want to say that I 've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns , who are literally being treated like ashtrays .
I 've seen girls be treated like garbage cans .
I 've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles .
I 've seen girls starving themselves to death in America in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves .
I 've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate , or we make them feel bad about being too smart .
We silence them . We make them feel guilty for being smart . We get them to behave , to tone it down , not to be too intense .
We sell them , we kill them as embryos , we enslave them , we rape them .
We are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities .
The selling of girls is rampant across the planet .
And in many places they are worth less than goats and cows .
But I also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24 , they are they key , really , in the developing world , as well as in the whole world , to the future of humanity .
And if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be , including lack of access to healthcare , education , healthy foods , labor force participation .
The burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings , which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers .
The state of girls , the condition of girls , will , in my belief -- and that 's the girl inside us and the girl in the world -- determine whether the species survives .
And what I want to suggest is that , having talked to girls , because I just finished a new book called " I Am an Emotional Creature : The Secret Life of Girls Around the World , " I 've been talking to girls for five years , and one of the things that I 've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that 's been enforced on girl is the verb " to please . "
Girls are trained to please .
I want to change the verb .
I want us all to change the verb .
I want the verb to be " educate , " or " activate , " or " engage , " or " confront , " or " defy , " or " create . "
If we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them .
And I have to now share a few stories of girls I 've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl , all the circumstances around them .
I know a 14-year-old girl in the Netherlands , for example , who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself .
There is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face .
There is a girl , Julia Butterfly Hill , who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks .
There is a girl who I met 14 years ago in Afghanistan who I have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed . Her mother was a revolutionary .
And this girl , when she was 17 years old , wore a burqa in Afghanistan , and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women , underneath her burqa , with a video .
And that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9 / 11 to show what was going on in Afghanistan .
I want to talk about Rachel Corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an Israeli tank to say , " End the occupation . "
And she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank .
And I want to talk about a girl that I just met recently in Bukavu , who was impregnated by her rapist .
And she was holding her baby .
And I asked her if she loved her baby .
And she looked into her baby 's eyes and she said , " Of course I love my baby . How could I not love my baby ?
It 's my baby and it 's full of love . "
The capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels , to me , is mind-blowing .
There is a girl named Dorcas , and I just met her in Kenya .
Dorcas is 15 years old , and she was trained in self-defense .
A few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men .
They kidnapped her , they put her in a car .
And through her self-defense , she grabbed their Adam 's apples , she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car .
In Kenya , in August , I went to visit one of the V-Day safe houses for girls , a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named Agnes Pareyio .
Agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl , she was female genitally mutilated .
And she made a decision as many women do across this planet , that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls .
So , for years Agnes walked through the Rift valley .
She taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like , and what a mutilated vagina looked like .
And in that time she saved many girls . And when we met her we asked her what we could do for her , and she said , " Well , if you got me a Jeep I could get around a lot faster . "
So , we got her a Jeep . And then she saved 4,500 girls .
And then we asked her , " Okay , what else do you need ? "
And she said , " Well , now , I need a house . "
So , seven years ago Agnes built the first V-Day safe house in Narok , Kenya , in the Masai land .
And it was a house where girls could run away , they could save their clitoris , they wouldn 't be cut , they could go to school .
And in the years that Agnes has had the house , she has changed the situation there .
She has literally become deputy mayor .
She 's changed the rules .
The whole community has bought in to what she 's doing .
When we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls , who have run away , with their families .
And there was a young girl named Jaclyn .
Jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her Masai family and there 's a drought in Kenya .
So cows are dying , and cows are the most valued possession .
And Jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows .
And she knew that meant she would be cut .
She knew that meant she wouldn 't go to school .
She knew that meant she wouldn 't have a future .
She knew she would have to marry that old man , and she was 14 .
So , one afternoon , she 'd heard about the safe house , Jaclyn left her father 's house and she walked for two days , two days through Masai land .
She slept with the hyenas . She hid at night .
She imagined her father killing her on one hand , and Mama Agnes greeting her , with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house .
And when she got to the house she was greeted .
Agnes took her in , and Agnes loved her , and Agnes supported her for the year .
She went to school and she found her voice , and she found her identity , and she found her heart .
Then , her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation , after a year .
I had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled .
In that hut , we walked in , and her father and his four wives were sitting there , and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled , and her primary mother , who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders .
When her father saw her and saw who she had become , in her full girl self , he threw his arms around her and broke down crying .
He said , " You are beautiful . You have grown into a gorgeous woman .
We will not cut you .
And I give you my word , here and now , that we will not cut your sisters either . "
And what she said to him was , " You were willing to sell me for four cows , and a calf and some blankets .
But I promise you , now that I will be educated I will always take care of you , and I will come back and I will build you a house .
And I will be in your corner for the rest of your life . "
For me , that is the power of girls .
And that is the power of transformation .
I want to close today with a new piece from my book .
And I want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here .
And I want to do it for Sunitha .
And I want to do it for the girls that Sunitha talked about yesterday , the girls who survive , the girls who can become somebody else .
But I really want to do it for each and every person here , to value the girl in us , to value the part that cries , to value the part that 's emotional , to value the part that 's vulnerable , to understand that 's where the future lies .
This is called " I 'm An Emotional Creature . "
And it happened because I met a girl in Watts , L.A.
I was asking girls if they like being a girl , and all the girls were like , " No , I hate it . I can 't stand it .
It 's all bad . My brothers get everything . "
And this girl just sat up and went , " I love being a girl .
I 'm an emotional creature ! "
This is for her : I love being a girl .
I can feel what you 're feeling as you 're feeling inside the feeling before .
I am an emotional creature .
Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas .
They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears .
Oh , I know when your girlfriend 's really pissed off , even though she appears to give you what you want .
I know when a storm is coming .
I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air .
I can tell you he won 't call back . It 's a vibe I share .
I am an emotional creature .
I love that I do not take things lightly .
Everything is intense to me , the way I walk in the street , the way my momma wakes me up , the way it 's unbearable when I lose , the way I hear bad news .
I am an emotional creature .
I am connected to everything and everyone . I was born like that .
Don 't you say all negative that it 's only only a teenage thing , or it 's only because I 'm a girl .
These feelings make me better .
They make me present . They make me ready . They make me strong .
I am an emotional creature .
There is a particular way of knowing .
It 's like the older women somehow forgot .
I rejoice that it 's still in my body .
Oh , I know when the coconut 's about to fall .
I know we have pushed the Earth too far .
I know my father isn 't coming back , and that no one 's prepared for the fire .
I know that lipstick means more than show , and boys are super insecure , and so-called terrorists are made , not born .
I know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability .
And you know what ? Sometimes it should .
This is not extreme . It 's a girl thing , what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open .
Don 't tell me not to cry , to calm it down , not to be so extreme , to be reasonable .
I am an emotional creature .
It 's how the earth got made , how the wind continues to pollinate .
You don 't tell the Atlantic Ocean to behave .
I am an emotional creature .
Why would you want to shut me down or turn me off ?
I am your remaining memory .
I can take you back .
Nothing 's been diluted .
Nothing 's leaked out .
I love , hear me , I love that I can feel the feelings inside you , even if they stop my life , even if they break my heart , even if they take me off track , they make me responsible .
I am an emotional , I am an emotional , incondotional , devotional creature .
And I love , hear me , I love , love , love being a girl .
Can you say it with me ?
I love , I love , love , love being a girl !
Thank you very much .
Rives : The 4 a.m. mystery
Poet Rives does 8 minutes of lyrical origami , folding history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours , 4 o 'clock in the morning .
This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times .
The punch line ?
" On the other hand , I don 't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador . "
This is a recent cover of New York Magazine .
Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment , births , strokes , heart disease , hip replacements , 4 a.m. emergencies .
And this is a song medley I put together -- Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand ?
It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour .
A time for inconveniences , mishaps , yearnings .
A time for plotting to whack the chief of police , like in this classic scene from " The Godfather . "
Coppola 's script describes these guys as , " exhausted in shirt sleeves .
It is four in the morning . "
A time for even grimmer stuff than that , like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende 's " The House of the Spirits . "
After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered , the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians ' paste .
They worked until four o 'clock in the morning .
A time for even grimmer stuff than that , like in last April 's New Yorker magazine .
This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out , " On September 11 , 2001 , he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland , Maine , and Mohamed Atta 's last day began . "
For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day , four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press -- across a lot of different media from a lot of big names .
And it made me suspicious .
I figured , surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world , really , aren 't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it , right ?
Could it be there is something more going on here ?
Something deliberate , something secret , and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway ?
I say this guy -- Alberto Giacometti , shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note .
He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art .
Its title -- " The Palace at Four in the Morning -- 1932 .
Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find .
I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it .
I call this The Giacometti Code , a TED exclusive .
No , feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you 've got them .
It works a little something like -- this is a recent Google search for four in the morning .
Results vary , of course . This is pretty typical .
The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young 's song , " It 's Four in the Morning , " three hits for Judi Dench 's film , " Four in the Morning , " one hit for Wislawa Szymborska 's poem , " Four in the Morning . "
But what , you may ask , do a Polish poet , a British Dame , a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking ?
Well , let 's start with Faron Young -- who was born incidentally in 1932 .
In 1996 , he shot himself in the head on December ninth -- which incidentally is Judi Dench 's birthday .
But he didn 't die on Dench 's birthday .
He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 -- which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died .
Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this ?
She has the world 's most absolutely watertight alibi .
On that very day , December 10 , 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning , Faron Young , was giving up the ghost in Nashville , Tennessee , Ms. Four in the Morning -- or one of them anyway -- Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm , Sweden , accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature .
100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself .
Coincidence ? No , it 's creepy .
Coincidence to me has a much simpler metric .
That 's like me telling you , " Hey , you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901 , which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born ? "
No , not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm , but that does not mean there 's not something going on at the highest possible levels .
In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we 're about to see .
Homer Simpson : We have a tennis court , a swimming pool , a screening room -- You mean if I want pork chops , even in the middle of the night , your guy will fry them up ?
Herbert Powell : Sure , that 's what he 's paid for .
Now do you need towels , laundry , maids ?
HS : Wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait -- let me see if I got this straight .
It is Christmas Day , 4 a.m.
There 's a rumble in my stomach .
Marge Simpson : Homer , please .
Rives : Wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait .
Let me see if I got this straight , Matt .
When Homer Simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock , but the whole freaking calendar , he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the Baby Jesus .
And no , I don 't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things , but obviously I know a coded message when I see one .
I said , I know a coded message when I see one .
And folks , you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton 's " My Life " from the bookstore here at TED .
Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want .
Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt .
And how far down into it you figure we 'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket ?
Would you believe about a dozen paragraphs ?
This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you 're following along : " Though it was getting better , I still wasn 't satisfied with the inaugural address .
My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day , I was still changing it . "
Sure you were , because you 've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you .
And then -- three paragraphs later we get this little beauty : " We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time .
It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m. "
Well , how could it have ?
By his own writing , this man was either asleep , at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase .
What happens to American presidents at 0400 on inauguration day ?
What happened to William Jefferson Clinton ?
We might not ever know .
And I noticed , he 's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions .
It could get awkward , right ?
I mean after all , this whole business happened on his watch .
But if he were here -- he might remind us , as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography , that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey -- a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades .
In generations .
The first since this man , Franklin Delano Roosevelt , who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election , way back in a simpler time , way back in 1932 -- the year Alberto Giacometti made " The Palace at Four in the Morning . "
The year , let 's remember , that this voice , now departed , first came a-cryin ' into this big old crazy world of ours .
George Dyson : The birth of the computer
Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers .
Last year , I told you the story , in seven minutes , of Project Orion , which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked , but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened .
So it didn 't happen . It was a dream that did not happen .
This year I 'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing .
This was a perfect introduction .
And it 's a story that did work . It did happen , and the machines are all around us .
And it was a technology that was inevitable .
If the people I 'm going to tell you the story about , if they hadn 't done it , somebody else would have .
So , it was sort of the right idea at the right time .
This is Barricelli 's universe . This is the universe we live in now .
It 's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things , including changing biology .
I 'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at Trinity , which was the Manhattan Project . It was a little bit like TED : it brought a whole lot of very smart people together .
And three of the smartest people were Stan Ulam , Richard Feynman and John von Neumann .
And it was Von Neumann who said , after the bomb , he was working on something much more important than bombs : he 's thinking about computers .
So , he wasn 't only thinking about them ; he built one . This is the machine he built .
He built this machine , and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works , with these little bits . And it 's an idea that goes way back .
The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes , who , in 1651 , explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing , and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic , you can do it all with arithmetic .
He said you needed addition and subtraction .
Leibniz , who came a little bit later -- this is 1679 -- showed that you didn 't even need subtraction .
You could do the whole thing with addition .
Here , we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution .
And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine .
He talked about doing it with marbles , having gates and what we now call shift registers , where you shift the gates , drop the marbles down the tracks .
And that 's what all these machines are doing , except , instead of doing it with marbles , they 're doing it with electrons .
And then we jump to Von Neumann , 1945 , when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing .
And 1945 , after the war , the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine .
So June 1945 -- actually , the bomb hasn 't even been dropped yet -- and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing , which also goes back to Turing , who , before that , gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless , little , finite state machine , just reading a tape in and reading a tape out .
The other sort of genesis of what Von Neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather .
Lewis Richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people , giving them each a little chunk , and putting it together .
Here , we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will , but capable of only two ideas .
And that 's really the simplest computer .
It 's basically why you need the qubit , because it only has two ideas .
And you put lots of those together , you get the essentials of the modern computer : the arithmetic unit , the central control , the memory , the recording medium , the input and the output .
But , there 's one catch . This is the fatal -- you know , we saw it in starting these programs up .
The instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail .
So , the programming has to be perfect , or it won 't work .
If you look at the origins of this , the classic history sort of takes it all back to the ENIAC here .
But actually , the machine I 'm going to tell you about , the Institute for Advanced Study machine , which is way up there , really should be down there . So , I 'm trying to revise history , and give some of these guys more credit than they 've had .
Such a computer would open up universes , which are , at the present , outside the range of any instruments .
So it opens up a whole new world , and these people saw it .
The guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle , Vladimir Zworykin , from RCA .
RCA , in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time , decided not to go into computers .
But the first meetings , November 1945 , were at RCA 's offices .
RCA started this whole thing off , and said , you know , televisions are the future , not computers .
The essentials were all there -- all the things that make these machines run .
Von Neumann , and a logician , and a mathematician from the army put this together . Then , they needed a place to build it .
When RCA said no , that 's when they decided to build it in Princeton , where Freeman works at the Institute .
That 's where I grew up as a kid .
That 's me , that 's my sister Esther , who 's talked to you before , so we both go back to the birth of this thing .
That 's Freeman , a long time ago , and that was me .
And this is Von Neumann and Morgenstern , who wrote the " Theory of Games . "
All these forces came together there , in Princeton .
Oppenheimer , who had built the bomb .
The machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations .
And Julian Bigelow , who took Zworkykin 's place as the engineer , to actually figure out , using electronics , how you would build this thing . The whole gang of people who came to work on this , and women in front , who actually did most of the coding , were the first programmers .
These were the prototype geeks , the nerds .
They didn 't fit in at the Institute .
This is a letter from the director , concerned about -- " especially unfair on the matter of sugar . "
You can read the text .
This is hackers getting in trouble for the first time .
These were not theoretical physicists .
They were real soldering-gun type guys , and they actually built this thing .
And we take it for granted now , that each of these machines has billions of transistors , doing billions of cycles per second without failing .
They were using vacuum tubes , very narrow , sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes .
They actually used 6J6 , the common radio tube , because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes .
And what they did at the Institute was publish every step of the way .
Reports were issued , so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world .
And it really was . It was the original microprocessor .
All the computers now are copies of that machine .
The memory was in cathode ray tubes -- a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube -- very , very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances .
So , there 's 40 of these tubes , like a V-40 engine running the memory .
The input and the output was by teletype tape at first .
This is a wire drive , using bicycle wheels .
This is the archetype of the hard disk that 's in your machine now .
Then they switched to a magnetic drum .
This is modifying IBM equipment , which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry , later at IBM .
And this is the beginning of computer graphics .
The " Graph 'g-Beam Turn On . " This next slide , that 's the -- as far as I know -- the first digital bitmap display , 1954 .
So , Von Neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud , doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components .
Those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks , trying to get this thing to work , with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time .
And that 's what I 've been doing , this last six months , is going through the logs .
" Running time : two minutes . Input , output : 90 minutes . "
This includes a large amount of human error .
So they are always trying to figure out , what 's machine error ? What 's human error ?
What 's code , what 's hardware ?
That 's an engineer gazing at tube number 36 , trying to figure out why the memory 's not in focus .
He had to focus the memory -- seems OK .
So , he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running , let alone having , you know , software problems .
" No use , went home . "
" Impossible to follow the damn thing , where 's a directory ? "
So , already , they 're complaining about the manuals : " before closing down in disgust ... " " The General Arithmetic : Operating Logs . "
Burning lots of midnight oil .
" MANIAC , " which became the acronym for the machine , Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator , " lost its memory . "
" MANIAC regained its memory , when the power went off . " " Machine or human ? "
" Aha ! " So , they figured out it 's a code problem .
" Found trouble in code , I hope . "
" Code error , machine not guilty . "
" Damn it , I can be just as stubborn as this thing . "
" And the dawn came . " So they ran all night .
Twenty-four hours a day , this thing was running , mainly running bomb calculations .
" Everything up to this point is wasted time . " " What 's the use ? Good night . "
" Master control off . The hell with it . Way off . "
" Something 's wrong with the air conditioner -- smell of burning V-belts in the air . "
" A short -- do not turn the machine on . "
" IBM machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards . The tar is from the roof . "
So they really were working under tough conditions .
Here , " A mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack , set blower to vibrating . Result : no more mouse . "
" Here lies mouse . Born : ? . Died : 4 : 50 a.m. , May 1953 . "
There 's an inside joke someone has penciled in : " Here lies Marston Mouse . "
If you 're a mathematician , you get that , because Marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there .
" Picked a lightning bug off the drum . " " Running at two kilocycles . "
That 's two thousand cycles per second -- " yes , I 'm chicken " -- so two kilocycles was slow speed .
The high speed was 16 kilocycles .
I don 't know if you remember a Mac that was 16 Megahertz , that 's slow speed .
" I have now duplicated both results .
How will I know which is right , assuming one result is correct ?
This now is the third different output .
I know when I 'm licked . "
" We 've duplicated errors before . "
" Machine run , fine . Code isn 't . "
" Only happens when the machine is running . "
And sometimes things are okay .
" Machine a thing of beauty , and a joy forever . " " Perfect running . "
" Parting thought : when there 's bigger and better errors , we 'll have them . "
So , nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs .
They 're designing hydrogen bombs . But someone in the logbook , late one night , finally drew a bomb .
So , that was the result . It was Mike , the first thermonuclear bomb , in 1952 .
That was designed on that machine , in the woods behind the Institute .
So Von Neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems .
Barricelli , he came to do what we now call , really , artificial life , trying to see if , in this artificial universe -- he was a viral-geneticist , way , way , way ahead of his time .
He 's still ahead of some of the stuff that 's being done now .
Trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer .
Began -- his universe started March 3 , ' 53 .
So it 's almost exactly -- it 's 50 years ago next Tuesday , I guess .
And he saw everything in terms of -- he could read the binary code straight off the machine .
He had a wonderful rapport .
Other people couldn 't get the machine running . It always worked for him .
Even errors were duplicated .
" Dr. Barricelli claims machine is wrong , code is right . "
So he designed this universe , and ran it .
When the bomb people went home , he was allowed in there .
He would run that thing all night long , running these things , if anybody remembers Stephen Wolfram , who reinvented this stuff .
And he published it . It wasn 't locked up and disappeared .
It was published in the literature .
" If it 's that easy to create living organisms , why not create a few yourself ? "
So , he decided to give it a try , to start this artificial biology going in the machines .
And he found all these , sort of -- it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny , 5,000-byte universe , and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world , in biology .
This is some of the generations of his universe .
But they 're just going to stay numbers ; they 're not going to become organisms .
They have to have something .
You have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype .
They have to go out and do something . And he started doing that , started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with -- playing chess with other machines and so on .
And they did start to evolve .
And he went around the country after that .
Every time there was a new , fast machine , he started using it , and saw exactly what 's happening now .
That the programs , instead of being turned off -- when you quit the program , you 'd keep running and , basically , all the sorts of things like Windows is doing , running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines , he envisioned all that happening .
And he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process .
It wasn 't any sort of creator intelligence , but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence .
And he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike , or a new kind of life .
It just was another version of the same thing happening .
And there 's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago .
And could you do it again now ?
So , when I went into these archives looking at this stuff , lo and behold , the archivist came up one day , saying , " I think we found another box that had been thrown out . "
And it was his universe on punch cards .
So there it is , 50 years later , sitting there -- sort of suspended animation .
That 's the instructions for running -- this is actually the source code for one of those universes , with a note from the engineers saying they 're having some problems .
" There must be something about this code that you haven 't explained yet . "
And I think that 's really the truth . We still don 't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity .
What 's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive ?
These cards , now , thanks to me showing up , are being saved .
And the question is , should we run them or not ?
You know , could we get them running ?
Do you want to let it loose on the Internet ?
These machines would think they -- these organisms , if they came back to life now -- whether they 've died and gone to heaven , there 's a universe .
My laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when Barricelli quit the project .
He was thinking far ahead , to how this would really grow into a new kind of life .
And that 's what 's happening !
When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth , of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab , that 's what Barricelli imagined : that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code -- it already is coding from nucleic acids .
We 've been doing that since , you know , since we started PCR and synthesizing small strings of DNA .
And real soon , we 're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins , and , like Steve showed us , that just opens an entirely new world .
It 's a world that Von Neumann himself envisioned .
This was published after he died : his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines , what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce .
It took really three people : Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing ; Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines -- that now , last count , four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours ; and Julian Bigelow , who died 10 days ago -- this is John Markoff 's obituary for him -- he was the important missing link , the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work .
And all our computers have , inside them , the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day , sort of on pencil and paper .
And we owe a tremendous credit to that .
And he explained , in a very generous way , the spirit that brought all these different people to the Institute for Advanced Study in the ' 40s to do this project , and make it freely available with no patents , no restrictions , no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world .
That 's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down , July 1958 .
And it 's Julian Bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off .
And that 's the end .
Thank you very much .
Don Norman : 3 ways good design makes you happy
In this talk from 2003 , design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye toward beauty , fun , pleasure and emotion , as he looks at design that makes people happy . He names the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed .
The new me is beauty .
Yeah , people used to say , " Norman 's OK , but if you followed what he said , everything would be usable but it would be ugly . "
Well , I didn 't have that in mind , so ...
This is neat .
Thank you for setting up my display .
I mean , it 's just wonderful .
And I haven 't the slightest idea of what it does or what it 's good for , but I want it .
And that 's my new life .
My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about , and " pretty , " and " emotions . "
The new me is all about making things kind of neat and fun .
And so this is a Philippe Starck juicer , produced by Alessi .
It 's just neat ; it 's fun . It 's so much fun I have it in my house -- but I have it in the entryway , I don 't use it to make juice .
In fact , I bought the gold-plated special edition and it comes with a little slip of paper that says , " Don 't use this juicer to make juice . "
The acid will ruin the gold plating .
So actually , I took a carton of orange juice and I poured it in the glass to take this picture .
Beneath it is a wonderful knife .
It 's a Global cutting knife made in Japan .
First of all , look at the shape -- it 's just wonderful to look at .
Second of all , it 's really beautifully balanced : it holds well , it feels well .
And third of all , it 's so sharp , it just cuts .
It 's a delight to use .
And so it 's got everything , right ?
It 's beautiful and it 's functional .
And I can tell you stories about it , which makes it reflective , and so you 'll see I have a theory of emotion .
And those are the three components .
Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and placed a projector above it , and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water with fish swimming in it .
And as you play ping-pong , whenever the ball hits part of the table , the ripples spread out and the fish run away .
But of course , then the ball hits the other side , the ripples hit the -- poor fish , they can 't find any peace and quiet .
Is that a good way to play ping-pong ?
No . But is it fun ?
Yeah ! Yeah .
Or look at Google .
If you type in , oh say , " emotion and design , " you get 10 pages of results .
So Google just took their logo and they spread it out .
Instead of saying , " You got 73,000 results .
This is one through 20 . Next , " they just give you as many o 's as there are pages .
It 's really simple and subtle .
I bet a lot of you have seen it and never noticed it .
That 's the subconscious mind that sort of notices it -- it probably is kind of pleasant and you didn 't know why .
And it 's just clever .
And of course , what 's especially good is , if you type " design and emotion , " the first response out of those 10 pages is my website .
Now , the weird thing is Google lies , because if I type " design and emotion , " it says , " You don 't need the ' and . ' We do it anyway . "
So , OK .
So I type " design emotion " and my website wasn 't first again .
It was third .
Oh well , different story .
There was this wonderful review in The New York Times about the MINI Cooper automobile .
It said , " You know , this is a car that has lots of faults .
Buy it anyway .
It 's so much fun to drive . "
And if you look at the inside of the car -- I mean , I loved it , I wanted to see it , I rented it , this is me taking a picture while my son is driving -- and the inside of the car , the whole design is fun .
It 's round , it 's neat .
The controls work wonderfully .
So that 's my new life ; it 's all about fun .
I really have the feeling that pleasant things work better , and that never made any sense to me until I finally figured out -- look ...
I 'm going to put a plank on the ground .
So , imagine I have a plank about two feet wide and 30 feet long and I 'm going to walk on it , and you see I can walk on it without looking , I can go back and forth and I can jump up and down .
No problem .
Now I 'm going to put the plank 300 feet in the air -- and I 'm not going to go near it , thank you .
Intense fear paralyzes you .
It actually affects the way the brain works .
So , Paul Saffo , before his talk said that he didn 't really have it down until just a few days or hours before the talk , and that anxiety was really helpful in causing him to focus .
That 's what fear and anxiety does ; it causes you to be -- what 's called depth-first processing -- to focus , not be distracted .
And I couldn 't force myself across that .
Now some people can -- circus workers , steel workers .
But it really changes the way you think .
And then , a psychologist , Alice Isen , did this wonderful experiment .
She brought students in to solve problems .
So , she 'd bring people into the room , and there 'd be a string hanging down here and a string hanging down here .
It was an empty room , except for a table with a bunch of crap on it -- some papers and scissors and stuff .
And she 'd bring them in , and she 'd say , " This is an IQ test and it determines how well you do in life .
Would you tie those two strings together ? "
So they 'd take one string and they 'd pull it over here and they couldn 't reach the other string .
Still can 't reach it .
And , basically , none of them could solve it .
You bring in a second group of people , and you say , " Oh , before we start , I got this box of candy , and I don 't eat candy .
Would you like the box of candy ? "
And turns out they liked it , and it made them happy -- not very happy , but a little bit of happy .
And guess what -- they solved the problem .
And it turns out that when you 're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain , which focuses you makes you depth-first .
And when you 're happy -- what we call positive valence -- you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes , which makes you a breadth-first problem solver : you 're more susceptible to interruption ; you do out-of-the-box thinking .
That 's what brainstorming is about , right ?
With brainstorming we make you happy , we play games , and we say , " No criticism , " and you get all these weird , neat ideas .
But in fact , if that 's how you always were you 'd never get any work done because you 'd be working along and say , " Oh , I got a new way of doing it . "
So to get work done , you 've got to set a deadline , right ?
You 've got be anxious .
The brain works differently if you 're happy . Things work better because you 're more creative .
You get a little problem , you say , " Ah , I 'll figure it out . "
No big deal .
There 's something I call the visceral level of processing , and there will be visceral-level design .
Biology -- we have co-adapted through biology to like bright colors .
That 's especially good that mammals and primates like fruits and bright plants , because you eat the fruit and you thereby spread the seed .
There 's an amazing amount of stuff that 's built into the brain .
We dislike bitter tastes , we dislike loud sounds , we dislike hot temperatures , cold temperatures .
We dislike scolding voices . We dislike frowning faces ; we like symmetrical faces , etc . , etc .
So that 's the visceral level .
In design , you can express visceral in lots of ways , like the choice of type fonts and the red for hot , exciting .
Or the 1963 Jaguar : It 's actually a crummy car , falls apart all the time , but the owners love it .
And it 's beautiful -- it 's in the Museum of Modern Art .
A water bottle : You buy it because of the bottle , not because of the water .
And when people are finished , they don 't throw it away .
They keep it for -- you know , it 's like the old wine bottles , you keep it for decoration or maybe fill it with water again , which proves it 's not the water .
It 's all about the visceral experience .
The middle level of processing is the behavioral level and that 's actually where most of our stuff gets done .
Visceral is subconscious , you 're unaware of it .
Behavioral is subconscious , you 're unaware of it .
Almost everything we do is subconscious .
I 'm walking around the stage -- I 'm not attending to the control of my legs .
I 'm doing a lot ; most of my talk is subconscious ; it has been rehearsed and thought about a lot .
Most of what we do is subconscious .
Automatic behavior -- skilled behavior -- is subconscious , controlled by the behavioral side .
And behavioral design is all about feeling in control , which includes usability , understanding -- but also the feel and heft .
That 's why the Global knives are so neat .
They 're so nicely balanced , so sharp , that you really feel you 're in control of the cutting .
Or , just driving a high-performance sports car over a demanding curb -- again , feeling that you are in complete control of the environment .
Or the sensual feeling .
This is a Kohler shower , a waterfall shower , and actually , all those knobs beneath are also showerheads .
It will squirt you all around and you can stay in that shower for hours -- and not waste water , by the way , because it recirculates the same dirty water .
Or this -- this is a really neat teapot I found at high tea at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago .
It 's a Ronnefeldt tilting teapot .
That 's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back , and you put tea in , and then you fill it with water .
The water then seeps over the tea .
And the tea is sitting in this stuff to the right -- the tea is to the right of this line .
There 's a little ledge inside , so the tea is sitting there and the water is filling it up like that .
And when the tea is ready , or almost ready , you tilt it .
And that means the tea is partially covered while it completes the brewing .
And when it 's finished , you put it vertically , and now the tea is -- you remember -- above this line and the water only comes to here -- and so it keeps the tea out .
On top of that , it communicates , which is what emotion does .
Emotion is all about acting ; emotion is really about acting .
It 's being safe in the world .
Cognition is about understanding the world , emotion is about interpreting it -- saying good , bad , safe , dangerous , and getting us ready to act , which is why the muscles tense or relax .
And that 's why we can tell the emotion of somebody else -- because their muscles are acting , subconsciously , except that we 've evolved to make the facial muscles really rich with emotion .
Well , this has emotions if you like , because it signals the waiter that , " Hey , I 'm finished . See -- upright . "
And the waiter can come by and say , " Would you like more water ? "
It 's kind of neat . What a wonderful design .
And the third level is reflective , which is , if you like the superego , it 's a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do , no control over the -- doesn 't see the senses , doesn 't control the muscles .
It looks over what 's going on .
It 's that little voice in your head that 's watching and saying , " That 's good . That 's bad . "
Or , " Why are you doing that ? I don 't understand . "
It 's that little voice in your head that 's the seat of consciousness .
Here 's a great reflective product .
Owners of the Hummer have said , " You know I 've owned many cars in my life -- all sorts of exotic cars , but never have I had a car that attracted so much attention . "
It 's about attention . It 's about their image , not about the car .
If you want a more positive model -- this is the GM car .
And the reason you might buy it now is because you care about the environment .
And you 'll buy it to protect the environment , even though the first few cars are going to be really expensive and not perfected .
But that 's reflective design as well .
Or an expensive watch , so you can impress people -- " Oh gee , I didn 't know you had that watch . "
As opposed to this one , which is a pure behavioral watch , which probably keeps better time than the $ 13,000 watch I just showed you .
But it 's ugly .
This is a clear Don Norman watch .
And what 's neat is sometimes you pit one emotion against the other , the visceral fear of falling against the reflective state saying , " It 's OK . It 's OK . It 's safe . It 's safe . "
If that amusement park were rusty and falling apart , you 'd never go on the ride .
So , it 's pitting one against the other .
The other neat thing ...
So Jake Cress is this furniture maker , and he makes this unbelievable set of furniture .
And this is his chair with claw , and the poor little chair has lost its ball and it 's trying to get it back before anybody notices .
And what 's so neat about it is how you accept that story .
And that 's what 's nice about emotion .
So that 's the new me .
I 'm only saying positive things from now on .
Renny Gleeson : Our antisocial phone tricks
In this funny 3-minute talk , social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we 're having right now is less interesting than what we 'll tweet about it later .
What I wanted to talk to you about today is two things : one , the rise of a culture of availability ; and two , a request .
So we 're seeing a rise of this availability being driven by mobile device proliferation , globally , across all social strata .
We 're seeing , along with that proliferation of mobile devices , an expectation of availability .
And , with that , comes the third point , which is obligation -- and an obligation to that availability .
And the problem is , we 're still working through , from a societal standpoint , how we allow people to be available .
There 's a significant delta , in fact , between what we 're willing to accept .
Apologies to Hans Rosling -- he said anything that 's not using real stats is a lie -- but the big delta there is how we deal with this from a public standpoint .
So we 've developed certain tactics and strategies to cover up .
This first one 's called " the lean . "
And if you 've ever been in a meeting where you play sort of meeting " chicken , " you 're sitting there , looking at the person , waiting for them to look away , and then quickly checking the device .
Although you can see the gentleman up on the right is busting him .
" The stretch . "
OK , the gentleman on the left is saying , " Screw you , I 'm going to check my device . "
But the guy , here , on the right , he 's doing the stretch .
to get that device just below the tabletop .
Or , my favorite , the " Love you ; mean it . "
Nothing says " I love you " like " Let me find somebody else I give a damn about . "
Or , this one , coming to us from India .
You can find this on YouTube , the gentleman who 's recumbent on a motorcycle while text messaging .
Or what we call the " sweet gravy , stop me before I kill again ! "
That is actually the device .
What this is doing is , we find a -- a direct collision -- we find a direct collision between availability -- and what 's possible through availability -- and a fundamental human need -- which we 've been hearing about a lot , actually -- the need to create shared narratives .
We 're very good at creating personal narratives , but it 's the shared narratives that make us a culture .
And when you 're standing with someone , and you 're on your mobile device , effectively what you 're saying to them is , " You are not as important as , literally , almost anything that could come to me through this device . "
Look around you .
There might be somebody on one right now , participating in multi-dimensional engagement .
Our reality right now is less interesting than the story we 're going to tell about it later .
This one I love .
This poor kid , clearly a prop -- don 't get me wrong , a willing prop -- but the kiss that 's being documented kind of looks like it sucks .
This is the sound of one hand clapping .
So , as we lose the context of our identity , it becomes incredibly important that what you share becomes the context of shared narrative , becomes the context in which we live .
The stories that we tell -- what we push out -- becomes who we are .
People aren 't simply projecting identity , they 're creating it .
And so that 's the request I have for everybody in this room .
We are creating the technology that is going to create the new shared experience , which will create the new world .
And so my request is , please , let 's make technologies that make people more human , and not less .
Thank you .
Keith Chen : Could your language affect your ability to save money ?
What can economists learn from linguists ? Behavioral economist Keith Chen introduces a fascinating pattern from his research : that languages without a concept for the future -- " It rain tomorrow , " instead of " It will rain tomorrow " -- correlate strongly with high savings rates .
The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that 's actually one of the oldest questions in economics , dating back to at least before Adam Smith .
And that is , why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior ?
Now , many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question , and as a field we 've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this .
What I 'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I 've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save .
Let me tell you a little bit about savings rates , a little bit about language , and then I 'll draw that connection .
Let 's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD , or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development .
OECD countries , by and large , you should think about these as the richest , most industrialized countries in the world .
And by joining the OECD , they were affirming a common commitment to democracy , open markets and free trade .
Despite all of these similarities , we see huge differences in savings behavior .
So all the way over on the left of this graph , what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year , and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year .
Holding down the right flank of the OECD , all the way on the other side , is Greece .
And what you can see is that over the last 25 years , Greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their GDP .
It should be noted , of course , that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line .
Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates , how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences ?
Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ .
Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now .
And then I 'll draw the connection between these two behaviors .
Many of you have probably already noticed that I 'm Chinese .
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States .
And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and -- in fact , more fundamentally than that -- ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways .
Now , how might that be ? Let me give you an example .
Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle .
You understood exactly what I just said in English .
If we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each other , though , I wouldn 't have that luxury .
I wouldn 't have been able to convey so little information .
What my language would have forced me to do , instead of just telling you , " This is my uncle , " is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information .
My language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother 's side or my father 's side , whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth , and if this man was my father 's brother , whether he was older than or younger than my father .
All of this information is obligatory . Chinese doesn 't let me ignore it .
And in fact , if I want to speak correctly , Chinese forces me to constantly think about it .
Now , that fascinated me endlessly as a child , but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time .
So for example , if I 'm speaking in English , I have to speak grammatically differently if I 'm talking about past rain , " It rained yesterday , " current rain , " It is raining now , " or future rain , " It will rain tomorrow . "
Notice that English requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events .
Why ? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I 'm saying to say , " It will rain , " or " It 's going to rain . "
It 's simply not permissible in English to say , " It rain tomorrow . "
In contrast to that , that 's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese .
A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker 's ears .
They can say , " Yesterday it rain , " " Now it rain , " " Tomorrow it rain . "
In some deep sense , Chinese doesn 't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly .
Is this difference in languages only between very , very distantly related languages , like English and Chinese ?
Actually , no .
So many of you know , in this room , that English is a Germanic language .
What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier .
It is the only Germanic language that requires this .
For example , most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying , " Morgen regnet es , " quite literally to an English ear , " It rain tomorrow . "
This led me , as a behavioral economist , to an intriguing hypothesis .
Could how you speak about time , could how your language forces you to think about time , affect your propensity to behave across time ?
You speak English , a futured language .
And what that means is that every time you discuss the future , or any kind of a future event , grammatically you 're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it 's something viscerally different .
Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak .
If that 's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present , that 's going to make it harder to save .
If , on the other hand , you speak a futureless language , the present and the future , you speak about them identically .
If that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically , that 's going to make it easier to save .
Now this is a fanciful theory .
I 'm a professor , I get paid to have fanciful theories .
But how would you actually go about testing such a theory ?
Well , what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature .
And interestingly enough , there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world .
This is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern Europe .
Interestingly enough , when you start to crank the data , these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be , by and large , some of the world 's best savers .
Just to give you a hint of that , let 's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about .
What you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the OECD that speak futured languages .
What is the average difference here ?
Five percentage points of your GDP saved per year .
Over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation .
Now while these findings are suggestive , countries can be different in so many different ways that it 's very , very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences .
What I 'm going to show you , though , is something that I 've been engaging in for a year , which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists , and I 'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences , hoping to get this relationship to break .
And just in summary , no matter how far I push this , I can 't get it to break .
Let me show you how far you can do that .
One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world .
So for example , there is the Survey of Health , [ Aging ] and Retirement in Europe .
From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers .
So imagine that you 're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door .
" Excuse me , would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio ?
Do you happen to know how much your house is worth ? Do you mind telling me ?
Would you happen to have a hallway that 's more than 10 meters long ?
If you do , would you mind if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway ?
Would you mind squeezing as hard as you can , in your dominant hand , this device so I can measure your grip strength ?
How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity ? "
The survey takes over a day .
Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa , for example , which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in , for example , rural Nigeria .
Combine that with a world value survey , which measures the political opinions and , fortunately for me , the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world .
Take all of that data , combine it , and this map is what you get .
What you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages .
And what I 'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure , and then I 'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels .
What are the characteristics we can control for ?
Well I 'm going to match families on country of birth and residence , the demographics -- what sex , their age -- their income level within their own country , their educational achievement , a lot about their family structure .
It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe .
And most granularly , I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world -- so an extreme level of granularity .
There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself .
Now effectively everything I 'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families .
It 's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions , but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French ; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria , one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo .
Now even after all of this granular level of control , do futureless language speakers seem to save more ?
Yes , futureless language speakers , even after this level of control , are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year .
Does this have cumulative effects ?
Yes , by the time they retire , futureless language speakers , holding constant their income , are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings .
Can we push this data even further ?
Yes , because I just told you , we actually collect a lot of health data as economists .
Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings ?
Well , think about smoking , for example .
Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings .
If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure , smoking is just the opposite .
It 's current pleasure in exchange for future pain .
What we should expect then is the opposite effect .
And that 's exactly what we find .
Futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given point in time compared to identical families , and they 're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire , and they 're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter .
I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find .
It 's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect isn 't present .
My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak .
Ultimately , the goal , once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making , we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future .
Thank you very much .
Ken Robinson : Bring on the learning revolution !
In this poignant , funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk , Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids ' natural talents can flourish .
I was here four years ago , and I remember , at the time , that the talks weren 't put online .
I think they were given to TEDsters in a box , a box set of DVDs , which they put on their shelves , where they are now .
And actually , Chris called me a week after I 'd given my talk and he said , " We 're going to start putting them online .
Can we put yours online ? " And I said , " Sure . "
And four years later , as I said , it 's been seen by four ...
Well , it 's been downloaded four million times .
So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who 've seen it .
And , as Chris says , there is a hunger for videos of me .
... don 't you feel ?
So , this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you , so here it is .
Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis .
And I referenced that at the end of my last talk .
So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes , frankly .
So , as I was saying ...
You see , he 's right .
I mean , there is a major climate crisis , obviously , and I think if people don 't believe it , they should get out more .
But I believe there 's a second climate crisis , which is as severe , which has the same origins , and that we have to deal with with the same urgency .
And I mean by this -- and you may say , by the way , " Look , I 'm good .
I have one climate crisis ; I don 't really need the second one . "
But this is a crisis of , not natural resources -- though I believe that 's true -- but a crisis of human resources .
I believe fundamentally , as many speakers have said during the past few days , that we make very poor use of our talents .
Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be , or if they have any to speak of .
I meet all kinds of people who don 't think they 're really good at anything .
Actually , I kind of divide the world into two groups now .
Jeremy Bentham , the great utilitarian philosopher , once spiked this argument .
He said , " There are two types of people in this world : those who divide the world into two types and those who do not . "
Well , I do .
I meet all kinds of people who don 't enjoy what they do .
They simply go through their lives getting on with it .
They get no great pleasure from what they do .
They endure it rather than enjoy it and wait for the weekend .
But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn 't imagine doing anything else .
If you said to them , " Don 't do this anymore , " they 'd wonder what you were talking about .
Because it isn 't what they do , it 's who they are . They say , " But this is me , you know .
It would be foolish for me to abandon this , because it speaks to my most authentic self . "
And it 's not true of enough people .
it 's still true of a minority of people .
I think there are many possible explanations for it .
And high among them is education , because education , in a way , dislocates very many people from their natural talents .
And human resources are like natural resources ; they 're often buried deep .
You have to go looking for them , they 're not just lying around on the surface .
You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves .
And you might imagine education would be the way that happens , but too often it 's not .
Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it 's not enough .
Reform is no use anymore , because that 's simply improving a broken model .
What we need -- and the word 's been used many times during the course of the past few days -- is not evolution , but a revolution in education .
This has to be transformed into something else .
One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education .
Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don 't find very easy , for the most part .
It means challenging what we take for granted , things that we think are obvious .
The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense ; things that people think , " Well , it can 't be done any other way because that 's the way it 's done . "
I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln , who I thought you 'd be pleased to have quoted at this point .
He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress .
I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time .
We don 't teach American history in Britain .
We suppress it . You know , this is our policy .
So , no doubt , something fascinating was happening in December 1862 , which the Americans among us will be aware of .
But he said this : " The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present .
The occasion is piled high with difficulty , and we must rise with the occasion . "
I love that .
Not rise to it , rise with it .
" As our case is new , so we must think anew and act anew .
We must disenthrall ourselves , and then we shall save our country . "
I love that word , " disenthrall . "
You know what it means ?
That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to , which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things , the way things are .
And many of our ideas have been formed , not to meet the circumstances of this century , but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries .
But our minds are still hypnotized by them , and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them .
Now , doing this is easier said than done .
It 's very hard to know , by the way , what it is you take for granted .
And the reason is that you take it for granted .
So let me ask you something you may take for granted .
How many of you here are over the age of 25 ?
That 's not what I think you take for granted , I 'm sure you 're familiar with that already .
Are there any people here under the age of 25 ?
Great . Now , those over 25 , could you put your hands up if you 're wearing your wristwatch ?
Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing .
Teenagers do not wear wristwatches .
I don 't mean they can 't or they 're not allowed to , they just often choose not to .
And the reason is , you see , that we were brought up in a pre-digital culture , those of us over 25 .
And so for us , if you want to know the time you have to wear something to tell it .
Kids now live in a world which is digitized , and the time , for them , is everywhere .
They see no reason to do this .
And by the way , you don 't need to do it either ; it 's just that you 've always done it and you carry on doing it .
My daughter never wears a watch , my daughter Kate , who 's 20 .
She doesn 't see the point .
As she says , " It 's a single function device . "
" Like , how lame is that ? "
And I say , " No , no , it tells the date as well . "
" It has multiple functions . "
But , you see , there are things we 're enthralled to in education .
Let me give you a couple of examples .
One of them is the idea of linearity : that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right , you will end up set for the rest of your life .
Everybody who 's spoken at TED has told us implicitly , or sometimes explicitly , a different story : that life is not linear ; it 's organic .
We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us .
But , you know , we have become obsessed with this linear narrative .
And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college .
I think we are obsessed with getting people to college .
Certain sorts of college .
I don 't mean you shouldn 't go to college , but not everybody needs to go and not everybody needs to go now .
Maybe they go later , not right away .
And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing .
There was this guy buying a book , he was in his 30s .
And I said , " What do you do ? "
And he said , " I 'm a fireman . "
And I said , " How long have you been a fireman ? "
He said , " Always . I 've always been a fireman . "
And I said , " Well , when did you decide ? "
He said , " As a kid . " He said , " Actually , it was a problem for me at school , because at school , everybody wanted to be a fireman . "
He said , " But I wanted to be a fireman . "
And he said , " When I got to the senior year of school , my teachers didn 't take it seriously .
This one teacher didn 't take it seriously .
He said I was throwing my life away if that 's all I chose to do with it ; that I should go to college , I should become a professional person , that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that . "
And he said , " It was humiliating because he said it in front of the whole class and I really felt dreadful .
But it 's what I wanted , and as soon as I left school , I applied to the fire service and I was accepted . "
And he said , " You know , I was thinking about that guy recently , just a few minutes ago when you were speaking , about this teacher , " he said , " because six months ago , I saved his life . "
He said , " He was in a car wreck , and I pulled him out , gave him CPR , and I saved his wife 's life as well . "
He said , " I think he thinks better of me now . "
You know , to me , human communities depend upon a diversity of talent , not a singular conception of ability .
And at the heart of our challenges -- At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence .
This linearity thing is a problem .
When I arrived in L.A.
about nine years ago , I came across a policy statement -- very well-intentioned -- which said , " College begins in kindergarten . "
No , it doesn 't .
It doesn 't .
If we had time , I could go into this , but we don 't .
Kindergarten begins in kindergarten .
A friend of mine once said , " You know , a three year-old is not half a six year-old . "
They 're three .
But as we just heard in this last session , there 's such competition now to get into kindergarten -- to get to the right kindergarten -- that people are being interviewed for it at three .
Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels , you know , with their resumes , flipping through and saying , " Well , this is it ? "
" You 've been around for 36 months , and this is it ? "
" You 've achieved nothing -- commit .
Spent the first six months breastfeeding , the way I can see it . "
See , it 's outrageous as a conception , but it [ unclear ] .
The other big issue is conformity .
We have built our education systems on the model of fast food .
This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day .
You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering .
One is fast food , where everything is standardized .
The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants , where everything is not standardized , they 're customized to local circumstances .
And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education , and it 's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies .
I think we have to recognize a couple of things here .
One is that human talent is tremendously diverse .
People have very different aptitudes .
I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar .
You know , it worked out for Eric , that 's all I 'm saying .
In a way , it did not for me .
I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it .
It just wouldn 't work .
But it 's not only about that .
It 's about passion .
Often , people are good at things they don 't really care for .
It 's about passion , and what excites our spirit and our energy .
And if you 're doing the thing that you love to do , that you 're good at , time takes a different course entirely .
My wife 's just finished writing a novel , and I think it 's a great book , but she disappears for hours on end .
You know this , if you 're doing something you love , an hour feels like five minutes .
If you 're doing something that doesn 't resonate with your spirit , five minutes feels like an hour .
And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn 't feed their spirit , it doesn 't feed their energy or their passion .
So I think we have to change metaphors .
We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education , a manufacturing model , which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people .
We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture .
We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process ; it 's an organic process .
And you cannot predict the outcome of human development .
All you can do , like a farmer , is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish .
So when we look at reforming education and transforming it , it isn 't like cloning a system .
There are great ones , like KIPP 's ; it 's a great system .
There are many great models .
It 's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you 're actually teaching .
And doing that , I think , is the answer to the future because it 's not about scaling a new solution ; it 's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions , but with external support based on a personalized curriculum .
Now in this room , there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business , in multimedia , in the Internet .
These technologies , combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers , provide an opportunity to revolutionize education .
And I urge you to get involved in it because it 's vital , not just to ourselves , but to the future of our children .
But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model , where each school can be flourishing tomorrow .
That 's where children experience life .
Or at home , if that 's where they choose to be educated with their families or their friends .
There 's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days .
And I wanted to just very quickly ...
I was very struck by Natalie Merchant 's songs last night , recovering old poems .
I wanted to read you a quick , very short poem from W. B. Yeats , who some of you may know .
He wrote this to his love , Maud Gonne , and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn 't really give her what he thought she wanted from him .
And he says , " I 've got something else , but it may not be for you . "
He says this : " Had I the heavens ' embroidered cloths , Enwrought with gold and silver light , The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light , I would spread the cloths under your feet : But I , being poor , have only my dreams ; I have spread my dreams under your feet ; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams . "
And every day , everywhere , our children spread their dreams beneath our feet .
And we should tread softly .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Elizabeth Murchison : Fighting a contagious cancer
What is killing the Tasmanian devil ? A virulent cancer is infecting them by the thousands -- and unlike most cancers , it 's contagious . Researcher Elizabeth Murchison tells us how she 's fighting to save the Taz , and what she 's learning about all cancers from this unusual strain . Contains disturbing images of facial cancer .
Everyone 's familiar with cancer , but we don 't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease .
The Tasmanian devil has shown us that , not only can cancer be a contagious disease , but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction .
So first of all , what is a Tasmanian devil ?
Many of you might be familiar with Taz , the cartoon character , the one that spins around and around and around .
But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil , and it 's the world 's largest carnivorous marsupial .
A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo .
The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes .
The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger , and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals .
[ The ] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania , which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia .
And despite their ferocious appearance , Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals .
In fact , growing up in Tasmania , it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild .
But the Tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline .
And in fact , there 's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years .
And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease , a contagious cancer .
The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face .
At the time , this was thought to be a one-off .
Animals , just like humans , sometimes get strange tumors .
However , we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease , which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania .
The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave .
Now there 's only a small part of the population , which remains unaffected .
This disease appears first as tumors , usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils .
These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors , such as these ones here .
And the next image I 'm going to show is quite gruesome .
But inevitably , these tumors progress towards being enormous , ulcerating tumors like this one here .
This one in particular sticks in my mind , because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself .
And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating , foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw .
She hadn 't eaten for days .
Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms .
Her body was riddled with secondary tumors .
And yet , she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch .
Of course , they died along with the mother .
They were too young to survive without their mother .
In fact , in the area where she comes from , more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease .
Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer , this infectious cancer , that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population .
And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women , which is spread by a virus , and to the AIDS epidemic , which is associated with a number of different types of cancer .
All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus .
However , we now know -- and I 'll tell you right now -- that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus .
In fact , the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister , and something that we hadn 't really thought of before .
But in order for me to explain what that is , I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself .
Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year .
One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives .
I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14 .
Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself .
Paradoxically , once established , natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer .
Natural selection is survival of the fittest .
And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells , if one of them acquires new mutations , which allow them to grow more quickly , acquire nutrients more successfully , invade the body , they 'll be selected for by evolution .
That 's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat .
It evolves .
Throw a drug at it , and resistant cells will grow back .
An amazing fact is that , given the right environment and the right nutrients , a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever .
However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies , and its continued growth , its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues , leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself .
So cancer could be thought of as a strange , short-lived , self-destructive life form -- an evolutionary dead end .
But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation .
And the answer came from studying the Tasmanian devil cancer 's DNA .
This was work from many people , but I 'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago .
The next slide is going to be gruesome .
This is Jonas .
He 's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face .
And being a geneticist , I 'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations .
So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas ' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body .
I took these back to the lab .
I extracted DNA from them .
And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA , and compared the sequence of Jonas ' tumor to that of the rest of his body , I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile .
In fact , Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you .
What this told us was that Jonas ' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body .
In fact , more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil -- and Jonas was clearly a male .
So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas ' face ?
Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania .
We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA .
Think about that for a minute .
That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil , that have broken free of that first devil 's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population .
But how can a cancer spread in a population ?
Well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild .
They tend to bite each other , often quite ferociously and usually on the face .
We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor , get into the saliva .
When the devil bites another devil , it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil , so the tumor continues to grow .
So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer .
It 's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it .
It spreads through the population , has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system , and it 's the only cancer that we know of that 's threatening an entire species with extinction .
But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils , why hasn 't it happened in other animals or even humans ?
Well the answer is , it has .
This is Kimbo .
He 's a dog that belongs to a family in Mombasa in Kenya .
Last year , his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region .
She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting .
And if you 're squeamish , please look away now .
He discovered this , a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo 's penis .
The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor , a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs .
And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells , so is this dog cancer .
But this dog cancer is quite remarkable , because it spread all around the world .
And in fact , these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City , in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia .
We also believe this cancer might be very old .
In fact , genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old , which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals .
This cancer is remarkable .
It 's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of .
It 's a living relic of the distant past .
So we 've seen that this can happen in animals .
Could cancers be contagious between people ?
Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam , a cancer doctor in the 1950s .
Ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else .
And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer , who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary .
Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells .
But a small number of them did , and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill -- whose immune systems were probably compromised .
What this tells us , ethical issues aside , is that ...
it 's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people .
However , under some circumstances , it can happen .
And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future .
So just finally , cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments .
But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer .
In fact , I believe , given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer 's growth , we can defeat cancer .
My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer .
Let 's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer .
Thank you .
Derek Paravicini and Adam Ockelford : In the key of genius
Born three and a half months prematurely , Derek Paravicini is blind and has severe autism . But with perfect pitch , innate talent and a lot of practice , he became an acclaimed concert pianist by the age of 10 . Here , his longtime piano teacher , Adam Ockelford , explains his student 's unique relationship to music , while Paravicini shows how he has ripped up the " Chopsticks " rule book .
Adam Ockelford : I promise there won 't be too much of me talking , and a lot of Derek playing , but I thought it would just be nice to recap on how Derek got to where he is today .
It 's amazing now , because he 's so much bigger than me , but when Derek was born , he could have fitted on the palm of your hand .
He was born three and a half months premature , and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive .
He had to have a lot of oxygen , and that affected your eyes , Derek , and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world .
But that was the end of the bad news , because when Derek came home from the hospital , his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you , Derek , really for the rest of your childhood .
And Nanny 's great insight , really , was to think , here 's a child who can 't see .
Music must be the thing for Derek .
And sure enough , she sang , or as Derek called it , warbled , to him for his first few years of life .
And I think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe , you know , in his brain something was stirring , some sort of musical gift .
Here 's a little picture of Derek going up now , when you were with your nanny .
Now Nanny 's great other insight was to think , perhaps we should get Derek something to play , and sure enough , she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft , never thinking really that anything much would come of it .
But Derek , your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it , bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break .
But out of all the bashing , after a few months , emerged the most fantastic music , and I think there was just a miracle moment , really , Derek , when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard .
That was the great eureka moment .
Now , not being able to see meant , of course , that you taught yourself .
Derek Paravicini : I taught myself to play .
AO : You did teach yourself to play , and as a consequence , playing the piano for you , Derek , was a lot of knuckles and karate chops , and even a bit of nose going on in there .
And now , here 's what Nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had , and this is a wonderful tape , now , of Derek playing when you were four years old .
DP : " Molly Malone . "
AO : It wasn 't actually " Cockles and Mussels . "
This one is " English Country Garden . "
DP : " English Country Garden . "
AO : There you are .
I think that 's just fantastic .
You know , there 's this little child who can 't see , can 't really understand much about the world , has no one in the family who plays an instrument , and yet he taught himself to play that .
And as you can see from the picture , there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing , Derek .
Now , along -- Derek and I met when he was four and a half years old , and at first , Derek , I thought you were mad , to be honest , because when you played the piano , you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard , and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way .
So as soon as I tried to get near the piano , I was firmly shoved off .
And having said to your dad , Nic , that I would try to teach you , I was then slightly confused as to how I might go about that if I wasn 't allowed near the piano .
But after a while , I thought , well , the only way is to just pick you up , shove Derek over to the other side of the room , and in the 10 seconds that I got before Derek came back , I could just play something very quickly for him to learn .
And in the end , Derek , I think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together .
As you can see , there 's me in my early , pre-marriage days with a brown beard , and little Derek concentrating there .
I just realized this is going to be recorded , isn 't it ? Right . Okay .
Now then , by the age of 10 , Derek really had taken the world by storm .
This is a photo of you , Derek , playing at the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic Pops .
Basically it was just an exciting journey , really .
And in those days , Derek , you didn 't speak very much , and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you 'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you 'd play the right piece in the right key , and all that kind of thing .
But the orchestra were wowed as well , and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces .
Now the question is , how do you do it , Derek ?
And hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do .
I think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little , Derek , was that by the time you were two , your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults .
And so whenever you heard any note at all -- if I just play a random note -- -- you knew instantly what it was , and you 'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano .
Now that 's called perfect pitch , and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano .
You can see how -- you get a sense of playing with Derek .
But Derek , your ear is so much more than that .
If I just put the microphone down for a bit , I 'm going to play a cluster of notes .
Those of you who can see will know how many notes , but Derek , of course , can 't .
Not only can you say how many notes , it 's being able to play them all at the same time . Here we are .
Well , forget the terminology , Derek . Fantastic .
And it 's that ability , that ability to hear simultaneous sounds , not only just single sounds , but when a whole orchestra is playing , Derek , you can hear every note , and instantly , through all those hours and hours of practice , reproduce those on the keyboard , that makes you , I think , is the basis of all your ability .
Now then .
It 's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique , and luckily , Derek , you decided that , once we did start learning , you 'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings .
So for example using your thumb under with C major .
Etc .
And in the end , you got so quick , that things like " Flight of the Bumblebee " were no problem , were they ?
DP : No .
AO : Right . So here , by the age of 11 , Derek was playing things like this .
DP : This .
AO : Derek , let 's have a bow .
Well done .
Now the truly amazing thing was , with all those scales , Derek , you could not only play " Flight of the Bumblebee " in the usual key , but any note I play , Derek can play it on .
So if I just choose a note at random , like that one .
Can you play " Flight of the Bumblebee " on that note ?
DP : " Flight of the Bumblebee " on that note .
AO : Or another one ? How about in G minor ?
DP : G minor .
AO : Fantastic . Well done , Derek .
So you see , in your brain , Derek , is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate , recalculate , all the pieces in the world that are out there .
Most pianists would have a heart attack if you said , " Sorry , do you mind playing ' Flight of the Bumblebee ' in B minor instead of A minor ? " as we went on .
In fact , the first time , Derek , you played that with an orchestra , you 'd learned the version that you 'd learned , and then the orchestra , in fact , did have a different version , so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert , Derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra .
Fantastic chap .
The other wonderful thing about you is memory .
DP : Memory . AO : Your memory is truly amazing , and every concert we do , we ask the audience to participate , of course , by suggesting a piece Derek might like to play .
And people say , " Well , that 's terribly brave because what happens if Derek doesn 't know it ? "
And I say , " No , it 's not brave at all , because if you ask for something that Derek doesn 't know , you 're invited to come and sing it first , and then he 'll pick it up . "
So just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish .
But seriously , would anyone like to choose a piece ?
DP : Choose a piece . Choose , choose , would you like to choose ? AO : Because it 's quite dark . You 'll just have to shout out .
Would you like to hear me play ?
AO : Paganini . DP : " The Theme of Paganini . "
AO : Well done .
Derek 's going to L.A. soon , and it 's a milestone , because it means that Derek and I will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together , which is quite interesting , isn 't it Derek ?
DP : Very interesting , Adam , yes . Long-haul flights . Yes .
AO : You may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking , but Derek does it effortlessly . Now then .
But in America , they 've coined this term , " the human iPod " for Derek , which I think is just missing the point , really , because Derek , you 're so much more than an iPod .
You 're a fantastic , creative musician , and I think that was nowhere clearer to see , really , than when we went to Slovenia , and someone -- in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in , and this person , very , very nervously came onto the stage .
DP : He played " Chopsticks . " AO : And played " Chopsticks . "
DP : " Chopsticks . "
AO : A bit like this . DP : Like this . Yes .
AO : I should really get Derek 's manager to come and play it .
He 's sitting there .
DP : Somebody played " Chopsticks " like this . AO : Just teasing , right ? Here we go .
DP : Let Derek play it .
AO : What did you do with it , Derek ?
DP : I got to improvise with it , Adam .
AO : This is Derek the musician .
Keep up with Derek .
The TED people will kill me , but perhaps there 's time for one encore .
DP : For one encore . AO : One encore , yes .
So this is one of Derek 's heroes .
It 's the great Art Tatum -- DP : Art Tatum .
AO : -- who also was a pianist who couldn 't see , and also , I think , like Derek , thought that all the world was a piano , so whenever Art Tatum plays something , it sounds like there 's three pianos in the room .
And here is Derek 's take on Art Tatum 's take on " Tiger Rag . "
DP : " Tiger Rag . "
Bjorn Lomborg : Global priorities bigger than climate change
Given $ 50 billion to spend , which would you solve first , AIDS or global warming ? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg comes up with surprising answers .
What I 'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world .
I 'm not going to talk about " The Skeptical Environmentalist " -- probably that 's also a good choice .
But I am going talk about : what are the big problems in the world ?
And I must say , before I go on , I should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because I 'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that .
So get out your pen and paper .
Bottom line is , there is a lot of problems out there in the world .
I 'm just going to list some of them .
There are 800 million people starving .
There 's a billion people without clean drinking water .
Two billion people without sanitation .
There are several million people dying of HIV and AIDS .
The lists go on and on .
There 's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change -- so on .
There are many , many problems out there .
In an ideal world , we would solve them all , but we don 't .
We don 't actually solve all problems .
And if we do not , the question I think we need to ask ourselves -- and that 's why it 's on the economy session -- is to say , which ones should we solve first ?
And that 's the question I 'd like to ask you .
If we had say , 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world , where should we spend it ?
We identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world , and I will just briefly read them : climate change , communicable diseases , conflicts , education , financial instability , governance and corruption , malnutrition and hunger , population migration , sanitation and water , and subsidies and trade barriers .
We believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world .
The obvious question would be to ask , what do you think are the biggest things ?
Where should we start on solving these problems ?
But that 's a wrong problem to ask .
That was actually the problem that was asked in Davos in January .
But of course , there 's a problem in asking people to focus on problems .
Because we can 't solve problems .
Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die .
But we don 't have a technology to solve that , right ?
So the point is not to prioritize problems , but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems .
And that would be -- of course that gets a little more complicated .
To climate change that would be like Kyoto .
To communicable diseases , it might be health clinics or mosquito nets .
To conflicts , it would be U.N. ' s peacekeeping forces , and so on .
The point that I would like to ask you to try to do , is just in 30 seconds -- and I know this is in a sense an impossible task -- write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities .
And also -- and that 's , of course , where economics gets evil -- to put down what are the things we should not do , first .
What should be at the bottom of the list ?
Please , just take 30 seconds , perhaps talk to your neighbor , and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world 's biggest issues .
The amazing part of this process -- and of course , I mean , I would love to -- I only have 18 minutes , I 've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time , right ?
I 'd love to go into , and get you to think about this process , and that 's actually what we did .
And I also strongly encourage you , and I 'm sure we 'll also have these discussions afterwards , to think about , how do we actually prioritize ?
Of course , you have to ask yourself , why on Earth was such a list never done before ?
And one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable .
Nobody wants to do this .
Of course , every organization would love to be on the top of such a list .
But every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list .
And since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones , it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list .
We 've had the U.N. for almost 60 years , yet we 've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world , and said , which of them should we do first ?
So it doesn 't mean that we are not prioritizing -- any decision is a prioritization , so of course we are still prioritizing , if only implicitly -- and that 's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization , and went in and talked about it .
So what I 'm proposing is really to say that we have , for a very long time , had a situation when we 've had a menu of choices .
There are many , many things we can do out there , but we 've not had the prices , nor the sizes .
We have not had an idea .
Imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card , but you have no idea what the price is .
You know , you have a pizza ; you 've no idea what the price is .
It could be at one dollar ; it could be 1,000 dollars .
It could be a family-size pizza ; it could be a very individual-size pizza , right ?
We 'd like to know these things .
And that is what the Copenhagen Consensus is really trying to do -- to try to put prices on these issues .
And so basically , this has been the Copenhagen Consensus ' process .
We got 30 of the world 's best economists , three in each area .
So we have three of world 's top economists write about climate change .
What can we do ? What will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that ?
Likewise in communicable diseases .
Three of the world 's top experts saying , what can we do ?
What would be the price ?
What should we do about it , and what will be the outcome ?
And so on .
Then we had some of the world 's top economists , eight of the world 's top economists , including three Nobel Laureates , meet in Copenhagen in May 2004 .
We called them the " dream team . "
The Cambridge University prefects decided to call them the Real Madrid of economics .
That works very well in Europe , but it doesn 't really work over here .
And what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list .
And then you ask , why economists ?
And of course , I 'm very happy you asked that question -- -- because that 's a very good question .
The point is , of course , if you want to know about malaria , you ask a malaria expert .
If you want to know about climate , you ask a climatologist .
But if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first , you can 't ask either of them , because that 's not what they do .
That is what economists do .
They prioritize .
They make that in some ways disgusting task of saying , which one should we do first , and which one should we do afterwards ?
So this is the list , and this is the one I 'd like to share with you .
Of course , you can also see it on the website , and we 'll also talk about it more , I 'm sure , as the day goes on .
They basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects -- basically , projects where if you invest a dollar , you get less than a dollar back .
Then there 's fair projects , good projects and very good projects .
And of course , it 's the very good projects we should start doing .
I 'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects .
These were the bad projects .
As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change .
This offends a lot of people , and that 's probably one of the things where people will say I shouldn 't come back , either .
And I 'd like to talk about that , because that 's really curious .
Why is it it came up ?
And I 'll actually also try to get back to this because it 's probably one of the things that we 'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down .
The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto -- or doing something more than Kyoto -- is a bad deal is simply because it 's very inefficient .
It 's not saying that global warming is not happening .
It 's not saying that it 's not a big problem .
But it 's saying that what we can do about it is very little , at a very high cost .
What they basically show us , the average of all macroeconomic models , is that Kyoto , if everyone agreed , would cost about 150 billion dollars a year .
That 's a substantial amount of money .
That 's two to three times the global development aid that we give the Third World every year .
Yet it would do very little good .
All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100 .
So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106 .
Which is a little good , but not very much good .
So the idea here really is to say , well , we 've spent a lot of money doing a little good .
And just to give you a sense of reference , the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount , for about 75 billion dollars a year , we could solve all major basic problems in the world .
We could give clean drinking water , sanitation , basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet .
So we have to ask ourselves , do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good ?
Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good ?
And that is really why it becomes a bad project .
It 's not to say that if we had all the money in the world , we wouldn 't want to do it .
But it 's to say , when we don 't , it 's just simply not our first priority .
The fair projects -- notice I 'm not going to comment on all these -- but communicable diseases , scale of basic health services -- just made it , simply because , yes , scale of basic health services is a great thing .
It would do a lot of good , but it 's also very , very costly .
Again , what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation .
If you look at the good projects , a lot of sanitation and water projects came in .
Again , sanitation and water is incredibly important , but it also costs a lot of infrastructure .
So I 'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world .
The fourth best problem is malaria -- dealing with malaria .
The incidence of malaria is about a couple of [ million ] people get infected every year .
It might even cost up towards a percentage point of GDP every year for affected nations .
If we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years , we could bring that incidence down to half .
We could avoid about 500,000 people dying , but perhaps more importantly , we could avoid about a [ million ] people getting infected every year .
We would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with -- of course , in the long run , also to deal with global warming .
This third best one was free trade .
Basically , the model showed that if we could get free trade , and especially cut subsidies in the U.S. and Europe , we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year , half of which would accrue to the Third World .
Again , the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty , very radically fast , in about two to five years .
That would be the third best thing we could do .
The second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition .
Not just malnutrition in general , but there 's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition , namely , the lack of micronutrients .
Basically , about half of the world 's population is lacking in iron , zinc , iodine and vitamin A.
If we invest about 12 billion dollars , we could make a severe inroad into that problem .
That would be the second best investment that we could do .
And the very best project would be to focus on HIV / AIDS .
Basically , if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years , we could avoid 28 new million cases of HIV / AIDS .
Again , what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with HIV / AIDS .
One is treatment ; the other one is prevention .
And again , in an ideal world , we would do both .
But in a world where we don 't do either , or don 't do it very well , we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first .
And treatment is much , much more expensive than prevention .
So basically , what this focuses on is saying , we can do a lot more by investing in prevention .
Basically for the amount of money that we spend , we can do X amount of good in treatment , and 10 times as much good in prevention .
So again , what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment , at first rate .
What this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities .
I 'd like to have you look at your priority list and say , did you get it right ?
Or did you get close to what we came up with here ?
Well , of course , one of the things is climate change again .
I find a lot of people find it very , very unlikely that we should do that .
We should also do climate change , if for no other reason , simply because it 's such a big problem .
But of course , we don 't do all problems .
There are many problems out there in the world .
And what I want to make sure of is , if we actually focus on problems , that we focus on the right ones .
The ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good .
And I think , actually -- Thomas Schelling , one of the participants in the dream team , he put it very , very well .
One of things that people forget , is that in 100 years , when we 're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be , people will be much , much richer .
Even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the U.N.
estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today .
Much more likely , they will be two to four times richer than we are .
And of course , we 'll be even richer than that .
But the point is to say , when we talk about saving people , or helping people in Bangladesh in 2100 , we 're not talking about a poor Bangladeshi .
We 're actually talking about a fairly rich Dutch guy .
do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little , 100 years from now , a fairly rich Dutch guy ?
Or do we want to help real poor people , right now , in Bangladesh , who really need the help , and whom we can help very , very cheaply ?
Or as Schelling put it , imagine if you were a rich -- as you will be -- a rich Chinese , a rich Bolivian , a rich Congolese , in 2100 , thinking back on 2005 , and saying , " How odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change , and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather , whom they could have helped so much more , and who needed the help so much more ? "
So I think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight .
Even if it doesn 't accord to the typical way we see this problem .
Of course , that 's mainly because climate change has good pictures .
We have , you know , " The Day After Tomorrow " -- it looks great , right ?
It 's a good film in the sense that I certainly want to see it , right , but don 't expect Emmerich to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie digging latrines in Tanzania or something .
It just doesn 't make for as much of a movie .
So in many ways , I think of the Copenhagen Consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems .
To make sure that we realize it 's not about making us feel good .
It 's not about making things that have the most media attention , but it 's about making places where we can actually do the most good .
The other objections , I think , that are important to say , is that I 'm somehow -- or we are somehow -- positing a false choice .
Of course , we should do all things , in an ideal world -- I would certainly agree .
I think we should do all things , but we don 't .
In 1970 , the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did , right now , than in 1970 , on the developing world .
Since then our aid has halved .
So it doesn 't look like we 're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems .
Likewise , people are also saying , but what about the Iraq war ?
You know , we spend 100 billion dollars -- why don 't we spend that on doing good in the world ?
I 'm all for that .
If any one of you guys can talk Bush into doing that , that 's fine .
But the point , of course , is still to say , if you get another 100 billion dollars , we still want to spend that in the best possible way , don 't we ?
So the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities .
I should just mention briefly , is this really the right list that we got out ?
You know , when you ask the world 's best economists , you inevitably end up asking old , white American men .
And they 're not necessarily , you know , great ways of looking at the entire world .
So we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem .
The only two requirements were that they were studying at the university , and they spoke English .
The majority of them were , first , from developing countries .
They had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion , and they certainly did , to come up with their own lists .
And the surprising thing was that the list was very similar -- with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom .
We 've done this many other times .
There 's been many other seminars and university students , and different things .
They all come out with very much the same list .
And that gives me great hope , really , in saying that I do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities , and saying , what is the important thing in the world ?
Of course , in an ideal world , again we 'd love to do everything .
But if we don 't do it , then we can start thinking about where should we start ?
I see the Copenhagen Consensus as a process .
We did it in 2004 , and we hope to assemble many more people , getting much better information for 2008 , 2012 .
Map out the right path for the world -- but also to start thinking about political triage .
To start thinking about saying , " Let 's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost , not the things that we don 't know how to do , but let 's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good , at very low cost , right now . "
At the end of the day , you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these , but we have to be honest and frank about saying , if there 's some things we do , there are other things we don 't do .
If we worry too much about some things , we end by not worrying about other things .
So I hope this will help us make better priorities , and think about how we better work for the world .
Thank you .
Bill Gates : Mosquitos , malaria and education
Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world 's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy . In a passionate and , yes , funny 18 minutes , he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them .
I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation , sharing some of the problems .
And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that -- being honest about what was going well , what wasn 't , and making it kind of an annual thing .
A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems , because I think there are some very important problems that don 't get worked on naturally .
That is , the market does not drive the scientists , the communicators , the thinkers , the governments to do the right things .
And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to .
So this morning I 'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand .
But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist .
Any tough problem , I think it can be solved .
And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past .
Over the past century , average lifespan has more than doubled .
Another statistic , perhaps my favorite , is to look at childhood deaths .
As recently as 1960 , 110 million children were born , and 20 million of those died before the age of five .
Five years ago , 135 million children were born -- so , more -- and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five .
So that 's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate .
It 's a phenomenal thing .
Each one of those lives matters a lot .
And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs : vaccines that were used more widely .
For example , measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000 .
So we really can make changes .
The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again .
And I think that 's doable in well under 20 years .
Why ? Well there 's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths : diarrhea , pneumonia and malaria .
So that brings us to the first problem that I 'll raise this morning , which is how do we stop a deadly disease that 's spread by mosquitos ?
Well , what 's the history of this disease ?
It 's been a severe disease for thousands of years .
In fact , if we look at the genetic code , it 's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths .
Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s .
So it was absolutely gigantic .
And the disease was all over the world .
A terrible disease . It was in the United States . It was in Europe .
People didn 't know what caused it until the early 1900s , when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos .
So it was everywhere .
And two tools helped bring the death rate down .
One was killing the mosquitos with DDT .
The other was treating the patients with quinine , or quinine derivatives .
And so that 's why the death rate did come down .
Now , ironically , what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones , which is where the rich countries are .
So we can see : 1900 , it 's everywhere .
1945 , it 's still most places .
1970 , the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it .
1990 , you 've gotten most of the northern areas .
And more recently you can see it 's just around the equator .
And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries , it doesn 't get much investment .
For example , there 's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria .
Now , baldness , it 's a terrible thing .
And rich men are afflicted .
And so that 's why that priority has been set .
But , malaria -- even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact .
Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it .
It means that you can 't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much .
Now , malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos .
I brought some here , just so you could experience this .
We 'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit .
There 's no reason only poor people should have the experience .
Those mosquitos are not infected .
So we 've come up with a few new things . We 've got bed nets .
And bed nets are a great tool .
What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night , so the mosquitos that bite late at night can 't get at them .
And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent .
And that 's happened now in a number of countries .
It 's great to see .
But we have to be careful because malaria -- the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves .
So every tool that we 've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective .
And so you end up with two choices .
If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way , you do it vigorously , you can actually get a local eradication .
And that 's where we saw the malaria map shrinking .
Or , if you go in kind of half-heartedly , for a period of time you 'll reduce the disease burden , but eventually those tools will become ineffective , and the death rate will soar back up again .
And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn 't pay attention .
Now we 're on the upswing .
Bed net funding is up .
There 's new drug discovery going on .
Our foundation has backed a vaccine that 's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months .
And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it 's effective .
So we 're going to have these new tools .
But that alone doesn 't give us the road map .
Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things .
It involves communicators to keep the funding high , to keep the visibility high , to tell the success stories .
It involves social scientists , so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets , but 90 percent .
We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this , to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together .
Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise .
We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things .
And so as these elements come together , I 'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria .
Now let me turn to a second question , a fairly different question , but I 'd say equally important .
And this is : How do you make a teacher great ?
It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on , and we 'd understand very well .
And the answer is , really , that we don 't .
Let 's start with why this is important .
Well , all of us here , I 'll bet , had some great teachers .
We all had a wonderful education .
That 's part of the reason we 're here today , part of the reason we 're successful .
I can say that , even though I 'm a college drop-out .
I had great teachers .
In fact , in the United States , the teaching system has worked fairly well .
There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places .
So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education .
And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world , if you measure them against the other top 20 percent .
And they 've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront .
Now , the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis , but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting .
Not only has that been weak. it 's getting weaker .
And if you look at the economy , it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education .
And we have to change this .
We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity .
We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education , like science and mathematics .
When I first learned the statistics , I was pretty stunned at how bad things are .
Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school .
And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year .
Because they weren 't tracking where the kids were before that .
But most of the dropouts had taken place before that .
They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent .
For minority kids , it 's over 50 percent .
And even if you graduate from high school , if you 're low-income , you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree .
If you 're low-income in the United States , you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree .
And that doesn 't seem entirely fair .
So , how do you make education better ?
Now , our foundation , for the last nine years , has invested in this .
There 's many people working on it .
We 've worked on small schools , we 've funded scholarships , we 've done things in libraries .
A lot of these things had a good effect .
But the more we looked at it , the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing .
And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers , between , say , the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile .
How much variation is there within a school or between schools ?
And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable .
A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year .
What does that mean ?
That means that if the entire U.S. , for two years , had top quartile teachers , the entire difference between us and Asia would go away .
Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away .
So , it 's simple . All you need are those top quartile teachers .
And so you 'd say , " Wow , we should reward those people .
We should retain those people .
We should find out what they 're doing and transfer that skill to other people . "
But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today .
What are the characteristics of this top quartile ?
What do they look like ?
You might think these must be very senior teachers .
And the answer is no .
Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter .
The variation is very , very small .
You might think these are people with master 's degrees .
They 've gone back and they 've gotten their Master 's of Education .
This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality .
That bottom thing , which says there 's no effect at all , is a master 's degree .
Now , the way the pay system works is there 's two things that are rewarded .
One is seniority .
Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension .
The second is giving extra money to people who get their master 's degree .
But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher .
Teach for America : slight effect .
For math teachers majoring in math there 's a measurable effect .
But , overwhelmingly , it 's your past performance .
There are some people who are very good at this .
And we 've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it , to raise the average capability -- or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system .
You might say , " Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher 's leave ? "
The answer is , on average , the slightly better teachers leave the system .
And it 's a system with very high turnover .
Now , there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made .
A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP .
KIPP means Knowledge Is Power .
It 's an unbelievable thing .
They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools , some high schools -- and what goes on is great teaching .
They take the poorest kids , and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges .
And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools .
They 're team teaching . They 're constantly improving their teachers .
They 're taking data , the test scores , and saying to a teacher , " Hey , you caused this amount of increase . "
They 're deeply engaged in making teaching better .
When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms , at first it 's very bizarre .
I sat down and I thought , " What is going on ? "
The teacher was running around , and the energy level was high .
I thought , " I 'm in the sports rally or something .
What 's going on ? "
And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren 't paying attention , which kids were bored , and calling kids rapidly , putting things up on the board .
It was a very dynamic environment , because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention , nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn 't want to be there .
Everybody needs to be involved .
And so KIPP is doing it .
How does that compare to a normal school ?
Well , in a normal school , teachers aren 't told how good they are .
The data isn 't gathered .
In the teacher 's contract , it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year .
And they need advanced notice to do that .
So imagine running a factory where you 've got these workers , some of them just making crap and the management is told , " Hey , you can only come down here once a year , but you need to let us know , because we might actually fool you , and try and do a good job in that one brief moment . "
Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn 't have the tools to do it .
They don 't have the test scores , and there 's a whole thing of trying to block the data .
For example , New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers .
And so that 's sort of working in the opposite direction .
But I 'm optimistic about this , I think there are some clear things we can do .
First of all , there 's a lot more testing going on , and that 's given us the picture of where we are .
And that allows us to understand who 's doing it well , and call them out , and find out what those techniques are .
Of course , digital video is cheap now .
Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools .
And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say , " OK , here 's a little clip of something I thought I did well .
Here 's a little clip of something I think I did poorly .
Advise me -- when this kid acted up , how should I have dealt with that ? "
And they could all sit and work together on those problems .
You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it , have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff .
You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course , learn from that .
If you have a kid who 's behind , you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept .
And in fact , these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet , but you could make it so that DVDs were always available , and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers .
And so by thinking of this as a personnel system , we can do it much better .
Now there 's a book actually , about KIPP -- the place that this is going on -- that Jay Matthews , a news reporter , wrote -- called , " Work Hard , Be Nice . "
And I thought it was so fantastic .
It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does .
I 'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book .
Now , we put a lot of money into education , and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have .
In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it 's interesting -- the House version actually had money in it for these data systems , and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things .
But I -- I 'm optimistic .
I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is , and it really can make a difference for millions of lives , if we get it right .
I only had time to frame those two problems .
There 's a lot more problems like that -- AIDS , pneumonia -- I can just see you 're getting excited , just at the very name of these things .
And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad .
You know , the system doesn 't naturally make it happen .
Governments don 't naturally pick these things in the right way .
The private sector doesn 't naturally put its resources into these things .
So it 's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things , get other people involved -- and you 're helping to come up with solutions .
And with that , I think there 's some great things that will come out of it .
Thank you .

Suheir Hammad : Poems of war , peace , women , power
Poet Suheir Hammad performs two spine-tingling spoken-word pieces : " What I Will " and " break " -- meditations on war and peace , on women and power . Wait for the astonishing line : " Do not fear what has blown up . If you must , fear the unexploded . "
" What I Will " I will not dance to your war drum .
I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum .
I will not dance to that beating .
I know that beat .
It is lifeless .
I know intimately that skin you are hitting .
It was alive once , hunted , stolen , stretched .
I will not dance to your drummed-up war .
I will not pop , spin , break for you .
I will not hate for you or even hate you .
I will not kill for you .
Especially I will not die for you .
I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide .
I will not side with you or dance to bombs because everyone is dancing .
Everyone can be wrong .
Life is a right , not collateral or casual .
I will not forget where I come from .
I will craft my own drum .
Gather my beloved near , and our chanting will be dancing .
Our humming will be drumming .
I will not be played .
I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat .
I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance .
This heartbeat is louder than death .
Your war drum ain 't louder than this breath . Haaa .
What 's up TED people ? Let me hear you make some noise .
A bunch of pacifists .
Confused , aspiring pacifists .
I understand .
I 've been wrong a lot lately .
Like a lot .
So I couldn 't figure out what to read today .
I mean , I 've been saying I 've been prepping .
What that means is prepping my outfit , prepping options , trying to figure out what I 'm coming behind and going in front of .
Poetry does that .
It preps you . It aims you .
So I am going to read a poem that was chosen just now .
But I 'm going to need you to just sit for like 10 minutes and hold a woman who is not here .
Hold her now with you .
You don 't need to say her name out loud , you can just hold her .
Are you holding her ?
This is " Break Clustered . "
All holy history banned .
Unwritten books predicted the future , projected the past .
But my head unwraps around what appears limitless , man 's creative violence .
Whose son shall it be ?
Which male child will perish a new day ?
Our boys ' deaths galvanize .
We cherish corpses .
We mourn women , complicated .
Bitches get beat daily .
Profits made , prophets ignored .
War and tooth , enameled salted lemon childhoods .
All colors run , none of us solid .
Don 't look for shadow behind me . I carry it within .
I live cycles of light and darkness .
Rhythm is half silence .
I see now , I never was one and not the other .
Sickness , health , tender violence .
I think now I never was pure .
Before form I was storm , blind , ign 'ant -- still am .
Human contracted itself blind , malignant .
I never was pure .
Girl spoiled before ripened .
Language can 't math me .
I experience exponentially .
Everything is everything .
One woman loses 15 , maybe 20 , members of her family .
One woman loses six .
One woman loses her head .
One woman searches rubble . One woman feeds on trash .
One woman shoots her face . One woman shoots her husband .
One woman straps herself .
One woman gives birth to a baby .
One woman gives birth to borders .
One woman no longer believes love will ever find her .
One woman never did .
Where do refugee hearts go ?
Broken , dissed , placed where they 're not from , don 't want to be missed .
Faced with absence .
We mourn each one or we mean nothing at all .
My spine curves spiral .
Precipice running to and running from human beings .
Cluster bombs left behind .
De facto landmines .
A smoldering grief .
Harvest contaminated tobacco .
Harvest bombs .
Harvest baby teeth .
Harvest palms , smoke .
Harvest witness , smoke .
Resolutions , smoke .
Salvation , smoke .
Redemption , smoke .
Breathe .
Do not fear what has blown up .
If you must , fear the unexploded .
Thank you .
Saul Griffith : High-altitude wind energy from kites !
In this brief talk , Saul Griffith unveils the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on : giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean , renewable energy .
If you 're at all like me , this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco : you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils capable of more than 30 knots .
And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind , and it can do amazing things .
And one day , a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record .
But kites aren 't just toys like this .
Kites : I 'm going to give you a brief history , and tell you about the magnificent future of every child 's favorite plaything .
So , kites are more than a thousand years old , and the Chinese used them for military applications , and even for lifting men .
So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights .
I 'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man .
In 1827 , a fellow called George Pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the English countryside .
Then of course , at the dawn of aviation , all of the great inventors of the time -- like Hargreaves , like Langley , even Alexander Graham Bell , inventor of the telephone , who was flying this kite -- were doing so in the pursuit of aviation .
Then these two fellows came along , and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight .
So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright , and the Wright Flyer .
And their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion , where we powered up and took off for the first-ever 12-second human flight .
And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation .
But unfortunately , it relegated kites once again to be considered children 's toys .
That was until the 1970s , where we had the last energy crisis .
And a fabulous man called Miles Loyd who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco , wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the Journal of Energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to generate enormous amounts of electricity .
The real key observation he made is that a free-flying wing can sweep through more sky and generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed-wing turbine .
So turbines grew . And they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub height , but they can 't really go a lot higher , and more height is where the more wind is , and more power -- as much as twice as much .
So cut to now . We still have an energy crisis , and now we have a climate crisis as well . You know , so humans generate about 12 trillion watts , or 12 terawatts , from fossil fuels .
And Al Gore has spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets , and in reality what that means is in the next 30 to 40 years , we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow .
Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar : 3600 terawatts , more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over .
The majority of it is in the higher altitudes , above 300 feet , where we don 't have a technology as yet to get there .
So this is the dawn of the new age of kites .
This is our test site on Maui , flying across the sky .
I 'm now going to show you the first autonomous generation of power by every child 's favorite plaything .
As you can tell , you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours .
It makes you a little nauseous .
And here we 're actually generating about 10 kilowatts -- so , enough to power probably five United States households -- with a kite not much larger than this piano .
And the real significant thing here is we 're developing the control systems , as did the Wright brothers , that would enable sustained , long-duration flight .
And it doesn 't hurt to do it in a location like this either .
So this is the equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow -- that 's tracing your name in the sky .
And this is where we 're actually going .
So we 're beyond the 12-second steps .
And we 're working towards megawatt-scale machines that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity .
So you ask , how big are those machines ?
Well , this paper plane would be maybe a -- oop !
That would be enough to power your cell phone .
Your Cessna would be 230 killowatts .
If you 'd loan me your Gulfstream , I 'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt .
If you give me a 747 , I 'll make six megawatts , which is more than the largest wind turbines today .
And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing .
So that is audacious , you say . I agree .
But audacious is what has happened many times before in history .
This is a refrigerator factory , churning out airplanes for World War II .
Prior to World War II , they were making 1000 planes a year .
By 1945 , they were making 100,000 .
With this factory and 100,000 planes a year , we could make all of America 's electricity in about 10 years .
So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams . There are many of us .
I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them .
And I think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things .
Thank you .
Matthieu Ricard : The habits of happiness
What is happiness , and how can we all get some ? Biochemist turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says we can train our minds in habits of well-being , to generate a true sense of serenity and fulfillment .
So , I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey .
And so I just came , two days ago , from the Himalayas to your kind invitation .
So I would like to invite you , also , for a while , to the Himalayas themselves .
And to show the place where meditators , like me , who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute , and found their way to the mountains .
So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there .
There 's the Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet -- wonderful setting .
This is from Marlboro country .
This is a turquoise lake .
A meditator .
This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet , on August 1 .
And the night before , we camped , and my Tibetan friends said , " We are going to sleep outside . " And I said , " Why ? We have enough space in the tent . "
They said , " Yes , but it 's summertime . "
So now , we are going to speak of happiness .
As a Frenchman , I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting .
I just wrote an essay on happiness , and there was a controversy .
And someone wrote an article saying , " Don 't impose on us the dirty work of happiness . "
" We don 't care about being happy . We need to live with passion .
We like the ups and downs of life .
We like our suffering because it 's so good when it ceases for a while . "
This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas .
It 's about two meters by three , and you are all welcome any time .
Now , let 's come to happiness or well-being .
And first of all , you know , despite what the French intellectuals say , it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking , " May I suffer the whole day ? "
Which means that somehow -- consciously or not , directly or indirectly , in the short or the long term , whatever we do , whatever we hope , whatever we dream -- somehow , is related to a deep , profound desire for well-being or happiness .
As Pascal said , even the one who hangs himself , somehow , is looking for cessation of suffering -- he finds no other way .
But then , if you look in the literature , East and West , you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness .
Some people say , I only believed in remembering the past , imagining the future , never the present .
Some people say happiness is right now ; it 's the quality of the freshness of the present moment .
And that led to Henri Bergson , the French philosopher , to say , " All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that they could define -- each of them could define their own terms . "
Well , that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life .
But now , if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life , then we better know what it is , have some clearer idea .
And probably , the fact that we don 't know that is why , so often , although we seek happiness , it seems we turn our back to it .
Although we want to avoid suffering , it seems we are running somewhat towards it .
And that can also come from some kind of confusions .
One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure .
But , if you look at the characteristics of those two , pleasure is contingent upon time , upon its object , upon the place .
It is something that -- changes of nature .
Beautiful chocolate cake : first serving is delicious , second one not so much , then we feel disgust .
That 's the nature of things . We get tired .
I used to be a fan of Bach . I used to play it on the guitar , you know .
I can hear it two , three , five times .
If I had to hear it 24 hours , non-stop , it might be very tiring .
If you are feeling very cold , you come near a fire , it 's so wonderful .
Then , after some moments , you just go a little back , and then it starts burning .
It sort of uses itself as you experience it .
And also , again , it can -- also , it 's something that you -- it is not something that is radiating outside .
Like , you can feel intense pleasure and some others around you can be suffering a lot .
Now , what , then , will be happiness ?
And happiness , of course , is such a vague word , so let 's say well-being .
And so , I think the best definition , according to the Buddhist view , is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation .
It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment , a state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states , and all the joys and sorrows that can come one 's way .
For you , that might be surprising .
Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad ? In a way , why not ?
Because we are speaking of a different level .
Look at the waves coming here to shore .
When you are at the bottom of the wave , you hit the bottom .
You hit the solid rock .
When you are surfing on the top , you are all elated .
So you go from elation to depression -- there 's no depth .
Now , if you look at the high sea , there might be beautiful , calm ocean , like a mirror .
There might be storms , but the depth of the ocean is still there , unchanged .
So now , how is that ?
It can only be a state of being , not just a fleeting emotion , sensation .
Even joy -- that can be the spring of happiness .
But there 's also wicked joy , you can rejoice in someone 's suffering .
So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness ? Very often , we look outside .
We think that if we could gather this and that , all the conditions , something that we say , " Everything to be happy -- to have everything to be happy . "
That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness .
To have everything . If we miss something , it collapses .
And also , when things go wrong , we try to fix the outside so much , but our control of the outer world is limited , temporary , and often , illusory .
So now , look at inner conditions . Aren 't they stronger ?
Isn 't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering ?
And isn 't that stronger ?
We know , by experience , that we can be what we call " a little paradise , " and yet , be completely unhappy within .
The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal , and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere .
So one evening , he said , " Look , you are doing all these things , but isn 't it nice , also , to build something within ? "
And he said , " Unless that -- even you get high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building , if you are deeply unhappy within , all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump . "
So now , at the opposite , we know a lot of people who , in very difficult circumstances , manage to keep serenity , inner strength , inner freedom , confidence .
So now , if the inner conditions are stronger -- of course , the outer conditions do influence , and it 's wonderful to live longer , healthier , to have access to information , education , to be able to travel , to have freedom . It 's highly desirable .
However , this is not enough . Those are just auxiliary , help conditions .
The experience that translates everything is within the mind .
So then , when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness , the inner conditions , and which are those which will undermine happiness .
So then , this just needs to have some experience .
We have to know from ourselves , there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing , to this well-being , what the Greeks called eudaimonia , flourishing .
There are some which are adverse to this well-being .
And so , if we look from our own experience , anger , hatred , jealousy , arrogance , obsessive desire , strong grasping , they don 't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it .
And also , they are detrimental to others ' happiness .
So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind , and , like a chain reaction , the more we feel miserable , we feel tormented .
At the opposite , everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity , if from the distance , without anyone knowing anything about it , we could save a child 's life , make someone happy .
We don 't need the recognition . We don 't need any gratitude .
Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature .
And we would like to be like that all the time .
So is that possible , to change our way of being , to transform one 's mind ?
Aren 't those negative emotions , or destructive emotions , inherent to the nature of mind ?
Is change possible in our emotions , in our traits , in our moods ?
For that we have to ask , what is nature of mind ?
And if we look from the experiential point of view , there is a primary quality of consciousness that 's just the mere fact to be cognitive , to be aware .
Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it .
You can have ugly faces , beautiful faces in the mirror .
The mirror allows that , but the mirror is not tainted , is not modified , is not altered by those images .
Likewise , behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness , pure awareness .
This is the nature . It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because , then , if it was always there -- like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth -- then it would be found all the time , somewhere .
We know we 're not always angry , always jealous , always generous .
So , because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone , there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting .
That is the ground for mind training .
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time .
You could go from love to hate .
But you cannot , at the same time , toward the same object , the same person , want to harm and want to do good .
You cannot , in the same gesture , shake hand and give a blow .
So , there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being .
So that 's the way to proceed . Rejoicing compared to jealousy .
A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession .
Benevolence , loving kindness against hatred .
But , of course , each emotion then would need a particular antidote .
Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions , and that 's by looking at the very nature .
Usually , when we feel annoyed , hatred or upset with someone , or obsessed with something , the mind goes again and again to that object .
Each time it goes to the object , it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance .
So then , it 's a self-perpetuating process .
So what we need to look now is , instead of looking outward , we look inward .
Look at anger itself .
It looks very menacing , like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm .
But we think we could sit on the cloud -- but if you go there , it 's just mist .
Likewise , if you look at the thought of anger , it will vanish like frost under the morning sun .
If you do this again and again , the propensity , the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it .
And , at the end , although it may rise , it will just cross the mind , like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track .
So this is the principal of mind training .
Now , it takes time because we -- it took time for all those faults in our mind , the tendencies , to build up , so it will take time to unfold them as well .
But that 's the only way to go .
Mind transformation -- that is the very meaning of meditation .
It means familiarization with a new way of being , new way of perceiving things , which is more in adequation with reality , with interdependence , with the stream and continuous transformation , which our being and our consciousness is .
So , the interface with cognitive science , since we need to come to that , and it was , I suppose , the subject of -- we have to deal in such a short time with brain plasticity . The brain was thought to be more or less fixed .
All the nominal connections , in numbers and quantities , were thought -- until the last 20 years -- thought to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age .
Now , recently , it has been found that it can change a lot .
A violinist , as we heard , who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice , some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain change a lot , increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections .
So can we do that with human qualities ?
With loving kindness , with patience , with openness ?
So that 's what those great meditators have been doing .
Some of them who came to the labs , like in Madison , Wisconsin , or in Berkeley , did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation .
They do , like , three years ' retreat , where they do meditate 12 hours a day .
And then , the rest of their life , they will do that three or four hours a day .
They are real Olympic champions of mind training .
This is the place where the meditators -- you can see it 's kind of inspiring .
Now , here with 256 electrodes .
So what did they find ? Of course , same thing .
The scientific embargo -- if ever has been to submitted to " Nature , " hopefully , it will be accepted .
It deals with the state of compassion , unconditional compassion .
We asked meditators , who have been doing that for years and years and years , to put their mind in a state where there 's nothing but loving kindness , total availability to sentient being .
Of course , during the training , we do that with objects .
We think of people suffering , we think of people we love , but at some point , it can be a state which is all pervading .
Here is the preliminary result , which I can show because it 's already been shown .
The bell curve shows 150 controls , and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe .
In very short , people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed , withdrawn . They don 't describe a lot of positive affect .
It 's the opposite on the left side : more tendency to altruism , to happiness , to express , and curiosity and so forth .
So there 's a basic line for people . And also , it can be changed .
If you see a comic movie , you go off to the left side .
If you are happy about something , you 'll go more to the left side .
If you have a bout of depression , you 'll go to the right side .
Here , the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion .
It 's something that is totally out of the bell curve .
So , I 've no time to go into all the different scientific results .
Hopefully , they will come .
But they found that -- this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI , it 's like coming out of a space ship .
Also , it has been shown in other labs -- for instance , Paul Ekman 's labs in Berkeley -- that some meditators are able , also , to control their emotional response more than it could be thought .
Like the startle experiments , for example .
If you sit a guy on a chair with all this kind of apparatus measuring your physiology , and there 's kind of a bomb that goes off , it 's so instinctive response that , in 20 years , they never saw anyone who will not jump .
Some meditators , without trying to stop it , but simply by being completely open , thinking that that bang is just going to be just a small event like a shooting star , they are able not to move at all .
So the whole point of that is not , sort of , to make , like , a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump , or whatever .
It 's more to say that mind training matters . That this is not just a luxury .
This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul .
This is something that 's going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives .
We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education .
We love to do jogging , fitness .
We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful .
Yet , we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most -- the way our mind functions -- which , again , is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience .
Now , our compassion is supposed to be put in action .
That 's what we try to do in different places .
Just this one example is worth a lot of work .
This lady with bone TB , left alone in a tent , is going to die with her only daughter .
One year later , how she is .
Different schools and clinics we 've been doing in Tibet .
And just , I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say .
And jumping monks of Tibet .
Flying monks .
Thank you very much .
Ariel Garten : Know thyself , with a brain scanner
Imagine playing a video game controlled by your mind . Now imagine that game also teaches you about your own patterns of stress , relaxation and focus . Ariel Garten shows how looking at our own brain activity gives new meaning to the ancient dictum " know thyself . " & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
The maxim , " Know thyself " has been around since the ancient Greeks .
Some attribute this golden world knowledge to Plato , others to Pythagoras .
But the truth is it doesn 't really matter which sage said it first , because it 's still sage advice , even today .
" Know thyself . "
It 's pithy almost to the point of being meaningless , but it rings familiar and true , doesn 't it ?
" Know thyself . "
I understand this timeless dictum as a statement about the problems , or more exactly the confusions , of consciousness .
I 've always been fascinated with knowing the self .
This fascination led me to submerge myself in art , study neuroscience and later to become a psychotherapist .
Today I combine all my passions as the CEO of InteraXon , a thought-controlled computing company .
My goal , quite simply , is to help people become more in tune with themselves .
I take it from this little dictum , " Know thyself . "
If you think about it , this imperative is kind of the defining characteristic of our species , isn 't it ?
I mean , it 's self-awareness that separates Homo sapiens from earlier instances of our mankind .
Today we 're often too busy tending to our iPhones and iPods to really stop and get to know ourselves .
Under the deluge of minute-to-minute text conversations , emails , relentless exchange of media channels and passwords and apps and reminders and Tweets and tags , we lose sight of what all this fuss is supposed to be about in the first place : ourselves .
Much of the time we 're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world .
And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves .
We 've cluttered ourselves up with all this .
And we feel like we have to get far , far away to a secluded retreat , leaving it all behind .
So we go far away to the top of a mountain , assuming that perching ourselves on a piece is bound to give us the respite we need to sort the clutter , the chaotic everyday , and find ourselves again .
But on that mountain where we gain that beautiful peace of mind , what are we really achieving ?
It 's really only a successful escape .
Think of the term we use , " Retreat . "
This is the term that armies use when they 've lost a battle .
It means we 've got to get out of here .
Is this how we feel about the pressures of our world , that in order to get inside ourselves , you have to run for the hills ?
And the problem with escaping your day-to-day life is that you have to come home eventually .
So when you think about it , we 're almost like a tourist visiting ourselves over there .
And eventually that vacation 's got to come to an end .
So my question to you is , can we find ways to know ourselves without the escape ?
Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek ?
Can we live here and now in our wired web and still follow those ancient instructions , " Know thyself ? "
I say the answer is yes .
And I 'm here today to share a new way that we 're working with technology to this end to get familiar with our inner self like never before -- humanizing technology and furthering that age-old quest of ours to more fully know the self .
It 's called thought-controlled computing .
You may or may not have noticed that I 'm wearing a tiny electrode on my forehead .
This is actually a brainwave sensor that 's reading the electrical activity of my brain as I give this talk .
These brainwaves are being analyzed and we can see them as a graph .
Let me show you what it looks like .
That blue line there is my brainwave .
It 's the direct signal being recorded from my head , rendered in real time .
The green and red bars show that same signal displayed by frequency , with lower frequencies here and higher frequencies up here .
You 're actually looking inside my head as I speak .
These graphs are compelling , they 're undulating , but from a human 's perspective , they 're actually not very useful .
That 's why we 've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make this data meaningful to the people who use it .
For instance , what if I could use this data to find out how relaxed I am at any moment ?
Or what if I can take that information and put it into an organic shape up on the screen ?
The shape on the right over here has become an indicator of what 's going on in my head .
The more relaxed I am , the more the energy 's going to fall through it .
I may also be interested in knowing how focused I am , so I can put my level of attention into the circuit board on the other side .
And the more focused my brain is , the more the circuit board is going to surge with energy .
Ordinarily , I would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed I was in any tangible way .
As we know , our feelings about how we 're feeling are notoriously unreliable .
We 've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn 't deserve it , and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier .
This new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves .
We 're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient , our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever .
I 'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit , but first I want to take a look at how we got here .
By the way , feel free to check in on my head at any time .
My team at InteraXon and I have been developing throught-controlled application for almost a decade now .
In the first phase of development we were really enthused by all the things we could control with our mind .
We were making things activate , light up and work just by thinking .
We were transcending the space between the mind and the device .
We brought to life a vast array of prototypes and products that you could control with your mind , like thought-controlled home appliances or slot car games or video games or a levitating chair .
We created technology and applications that engaged people 's imaginations , and it was really exciting .
And then we were asked to do something really big for the Olympics .
We were invited to create a massive installation at the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics , were used in Vancouver , got to control the lighting on the C.N. Tower , the Canadian Parliament buildings and Niagara Falls from all the way across the country using their minds .
Over 17 days at the Olympics 7,000 visitors from all over the world actually got to individually control the light from the C.N. Tower , parliament and Niagara in real time with their minds from across the country , 3,000 km away .
So controlling stuff with your mind is pretty cool .
But we 're always interested in multi-tiered levels of human interaction .
And so we began looking into inventing thought-controlled applications in a more complex frame than just control .
And that was responsiveness .
We realized that we had a system that allowed technology to know something about you .
And it could join into the relationship with you .
We created the responsive room where the lights music and blinds adjusted to your state .
They followed these little shifts in your mental activity .
So as you settled into relaxation at the end of a hard day , on the couch in our office , the music would mellow with you .
When you read , the desk lamp would get brighter .
If you nod off , the system would know , dimming to darkness as you do .
We then realized that if technology could know something about you and use it to help you , there 's an even more valuable application than that .
That you could know something about yourself .
We could know sides of ourselves that were all but invisible and come to see things that were previously hidden .
Let me show you an example of what I 'm talking about here .
Here 's an application that I created for the iPad .
So the goal of the original game Zen Bound is to wrap a rope around a wooden form .
So you use it with your headset .
The headset connects wirelessly to an iPad or a smartphone .
In that headset you have fabric sensors on your forehead and above the ear .
In the original Zen Bound game , you play it by scrolling your fingers over the pad .
In the game that we created , of course , you control the wooden form that 's on the screen there with your mind .
As you focus on the wooden form , it rotates .
The more you focus , the faster the rotation .
This is for real .
This is not a fake .
What 's really interesting to me though is at the end of the game you get stats and feedback about how you did .
You have graphs and charts that tell you how your brain was doing -- not just how much rope you used or what your high score is , but what was going on inside of your mind .
And this is valuable feedback that we can use to understand what 's going on inside of ourselves .
I like to call this " intra-active . "
Normally we think about technology as interactive .
This technology is intra-active .
It understands what 's inside of you and builds a sort of responsive relationship between you and your technology so that you can use this information to move you forward .
So you can use this information to understand you in a responsive loop .
At InteraXon , intra-active technology is one of our really defining mandates .
It 's how we understand the world inside and reflect it outside into this tight loop .
For example , thought-controlled computing can teach children with ADD how to improve their focus .
With ADD , children have a low proportion of beta waves for focus states and a high proportion of theta states .
So you can create applications that reward focused brain states .
So you can imagine kids playing video games with their brain waves and improving their ADD symptoms as they do it .
This can be as effective as Ritalin .
Perhaps even more importantly , thought-controlled computing can give children with ADD insights into their own fluctuating mental states , so they can better understand themselves and their learning needs .
The way these children will be able to use their new awareness to improve themselves will upend many of the damaging and widespread social stigmas that people who are diagnosed as different are challenged with .
We can peer inside our heads and interact with what was once locked away from us , what once mystified and separated us .
Brainwave technology can understand us , anticipate our emotions and find the best solutions for our needs .
Imagine this collected awareness of the individual computed and reflected across an entire lifespan .
Imagine the insights that you can gain from this kind of second sight .
It would be like plugging into your own personal Google .
On the subject of Google , today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them .
You can tag pictures of baby animals as happy , or whatever baby animals are to you , and then you can search that database , navigating with your feelings , rather than the keywords that just hint at them .
Or you could tag Facebook photos with the emotions that you had associated with those memories and then instantly prioritize the streams that catch your attention , just like this .
Humanizing technology is about taking what 's already natural about the human-tech experience and building technology seamlessly in tandem with it .
As it aligns with our human behaviors , it can allow us to make better sense of what we do and , more importantly , why , creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are .
With humanized technology we can monitor the quality of your sleep cycles .
When our productivity starts to slacken , we can go back to that data and see how we can make more effective balance between work and play .
Do you know what causes fatigue in you or what brings out your energetic self , what triggers cause you to be depressed or what fun things are going to bring you out of that funk ?
Imagine if you had access to data that allowed you to rank on a scale of overall happiness which people in your life made you the happiest , or what activities brought you joy .
Would you make more time for those people ? Would you prioritize ?
Would you get a divorce ?
What thought-controlled computing can allow you to do is build colorful layered pictures of our lives .
And with this , we can get the skinny on our psychological happenings and build a story of our behaviors over time .
We can begin to see the underlying narratives that propel us forward and tell us about what 's going on .
And from this , we can learn how to change the plot , the outcome and the character of our personal stories .
Two millennia ago , those Greeks had some powerful insights .
They knew that a fundamental piece falls into place when you start to live out their little phrase , when you come into contact with yourself .
They understood the power of human narrative and the value that we place on humans as changing , evolving and growing .
But they understood something more fundamental -- the sheer joy in discovery , the delight and fascination that we get from the world and being ourselves in it , the richness that we get from seeing , feeling and knowing the lives that we are .
My mom 's an artist , and as a child I 'd often see her bring things to life with the stroke of a brush .
One moment it was all white space , pure possibility .
The next , it was alive with her colorful ideas and expressions .
As I sat easel-side , watching her transform canvas after canvas , I learned that you could create your own world .
I learned that our own inner worlds -- our ideas , emotions and imaginations -- were , in fact , not bound by our brains and bodies .
If you could think it , if you could discover it , you could bring it to life .
To me , thought-controlled computing is as simple and powerful as a paintbrush -- one more tool to unlock and enliven the hidden worlds within us .
I look forward to the day that I can sit beside you , easel-side , watching the world that we can create with our new toolboxes and the discoveries that we can make about ourselves .
Thank you .
Graham Hill : Less stuff , more happiness
Writer and designer Graham Hill asks : Can having less stuff , in less room , lead to more happiness ? He makes the case for taking up less space , and lays out three rules for editing your life .
What 's in the box ?
Whatever it is must be pretty important , because I 've traveled with it , moved it , from apartment to apartment to apartment .
Sound familiar ?
Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago ?
Three times .
So you 'd think , with all this extra space , we 'd have plenty of room for all our stuff .
Nope .
There 's a new industry in town , a 22 billion-dollar , 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry : that of personal storage .
So we 've got triple the space , but we 've become such good shoppers that we need even more space .
So where does this lead ?
Lots of credit card debt , huge environmental footprints , and perhaps not coincidentally , our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years .
Well I 'm here to suggest there 's a better way , that less might actually equal more .
I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less : college -- in your dorm , traveling -- in a hotel room , camping -- rig up basically nothing , maybe a boat .
Whatever it was for you , I bet that , among other things , this gave you a little more freedom , a little more time .
So I 'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint .
It 's actually a great way to save you some money .
And it 's going to give you a little more ease in your life .
So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area .
First up : crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com.
I wanted it all -- home office , sit down dinner for 10 , room for guests , and all my kite surfing gear .
With over 300 entries from around the world , I got it , my own little jewel box .
By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft .
instead of 600 , immediately I 'm saving 200 grand .
Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities -- save some more money there , but also a smaller footprint .
And because it 's really designed around an edited set of possessions -- my favorite stuff -- and really designed for me , I 'm really excited to be there .
So how can you live little ?
Three main approaches .
First of all , you have to edit ruthlessly .
We 've got to clear the arteries of our lives .
And that shirt that I hadn 't worn in years ?
It 's time for me to let it go .
We 've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives , and we 've got to learn to stem the inflow .
We need to think before we buy .
Ask ourselves , " Is that really going to make me happier ? Truly ? "
By all means , we should buy and own some great stuff .
But we want stuff that we 're going to love for years , not just stuff .
Secondly , our new mantra : small is sexy .
We want space efficiency .
We want things that are designed for how they 're used the vast majority of the time , not that rare event .
Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three ?
So we want things that nest , we want things that stack , and we want it digitized .
You can take paperwork , books , movies , and you can make it disappear -- it 's magic .
Finally , we want multifunctional spaces and housewares -- a sink combined with a toilet , a dining table becomes a bed -- same space , a little side table stretches out to seat 10 .
In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here , we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space .
Look at the coffee table -- it grows in height and width to seat 10 .
My office folds away , easily hidden .
My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers .
Guests ? Move the moving wall , have some fold-down guest beds .
And of course , my own movie theater .
So I 'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft .
But consider the benefits of an edited life .
Go from 3,000 to 2,000 , from 1,500 to 1,000 .
Most of us , maybe all of us , are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags , maybe a small space , a hotel room .
So when you go home and you walk through your front door , take a second and ask yourselves , " Could I do with a little life editing ?
Would that give me a little more freedom ?
Maybe a little more time ? "
What 's in the box ?
It doesn 't really matter .
I know I don 't need it .
What 's in yours ?
Maybe , just maybe , less might equal more .
So let 's make room for the good stuff .
Thank you .
Hans Rosling : Asia 's rise -- how and when
Hans Rosling was a young guest student in India when he first realized that Asia had all the capacities to reclaim its place as the world 's dominant economic force . At TEDIndia , he graphs global economic growth since 1858 and predicts the exact date that India and China will outstrip the US .
Once upon a time , at the age of 24 , I was a student at St. John 's Medical College in Bangalore .
I was a guest student during one month of a public health course .
And that changed my mindset forever .
The course was good , but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset .
It was the brutal realization , the first morning , that the Indian students were better than me .
You see , I was a study nerd .
I loved statistics from a young age .
And I studied very much in Sweden .
I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended .
But in St. John 's , I was in the lower quarter .
And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden .
They read the textbook twice , or three times or four times .
In Sweden we read it once and then we went partying .
And that , to me , that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed .
And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever .
And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience .
It 's that realization of someone you meet that really made you change your ideas about the world .
It 's not the statistics , although I tried to make it funny .
And I will now , here , onstage , try to predict when that will happen -- that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world , as it used to be , over thousands of years .
And I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India , in China , will reach that of the West .
And I don 't mean the whole economy , because to grow an economy of India to the size of U.K. -- that 's a piece of cake , with one billion people .
But I want to see when will the average pay , the money for each person , per month , in India and China , when will that have reached that of U.K. and the United States ?
But I will start with a historical background .
And you can see my map if I get it up here . You know ?
I will start at 1858 .
1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West .
That was the year when Queen Victoria was able , for the first time , to communicate with President Buchanan , through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable .
And they were the first to " Twitter " transatlantically .
And I 've been able , through this wonderful Google and Internet , to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria .
And it ends like this : " This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion , civilization , liberty and law throughout the world . "
Those are nice words . But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty , and liberty for whom .
And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858 .
Because 1858 was also watershed year in the history of Asia .
1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces .
And India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination .
1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces .
And that meant that foreigners , as it said in the treaty , were allowed to trade freely in China .
It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods .
And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable condition for the U.S.
And they were threatened by those black ships there , that had been in Tokyo harbor over the last year .
But , Japan , in contrast to India and China , maintained its national sovereignty .
And let 's see how much difference that can make .
And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here , where you can see each bubble is a country .
The size of the bubble here is the population .
On this axis , as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar .
And on that axis I have life expectancy , the health of people .
And I also bring an innovation here .
I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological , recyclable version here , in green India .
And we will see , you know .
Look here , 1858 , India was here , China was here , Japan was there , United States and United Kingdom was richer over there .
And I will start the world like this .
India was not always like this level .
Actually if we go back into the historical record , there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe .
But 1850 had already been many , many years of foreign domination , and India had been de-industrialized .
And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom .
And they were also , by the end of the century , getting healthy , and Japan was starting to catch up .
India was trying down here .
Can you see how it starts to move there ?
But really , really natural sovereignty was good for Japan .
And Japan is trying to move up there .
And it 's the new century now . Health is getting better , United Kingdom , United States .
But careful now -- we are approaching the First World War .
And the First World War , you know , we 'll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here .
United Kingdom is going down .
And now comes the Spanish flu also .
And then after the First World War , they continue up .
Still under foreign domination , and without sovereignty , India and China are down in the corner .
Not much has happened .
They have grown their population but not much more .
In the 1930 's now , you can see that Japan is going to a period of war , with lower life expectancy .
And the Second World War was really a terrible event , also economically for Japan .
But they did recover quite fast afterwards .
And we are moving into the new world .
In 1947 India finally gained its independence .
And they could raise the Indian flag and become a sovereign nation , but in very big difficulties down there .
In 1949 we saw the emergence of the modern China in a way which surprised the world .
And what happened ?
What happens in the after independence ?
You can see that the health started to improve .
Children started to go to school .
Health services were provided .
This is the Great Leap Forward , when China fell down .
It was central planning by Mao Tse Tung .
China recovered . Then they said , " Nevermore , stupid central planning . "
But they went up here , and India was trying to follow .
And they were catching up indeed .
And both countries had the better health , but still a very low economy .
And we came to 1978 , and Mao Tse Tung died , and a new guy turned up from the left .
And it was Deng Xiaoping coming out here .
And he said , " Doesn 't matter if a cat is white or black , as long as it catches mice . "
Because catching mice is what the two cats wanted to do .
And you can see the two cats being here , China and India , wanting to catch the mices over there , you know .
And they decided to go not only for health and education , but also starting to grow their economy .
And the market reformer was successful there .
In ' 92 India follows with a market reform .
And they go quite closely together , and you can see that the similarity with India and China , in many ways , are greater than the differences with them .
And here they march on . And will they catch up ?
This is the big question today .
There they are today .
Now what does it mean that the -- the averages there -- this is the average of China .
If I would split China , look here , Shanghai has already catched up .
Shanghai is already there .
And it 's healthier than the United States .
But on the other hand , Guizhou , one of the poorest inland provinces of China , is there .
And if I split Guizhou into urban and rural , the rural part of Guizhou goes down there .
You see this enormous inequity in China , in the midst of fast economic growth .
And if I would also look at India , you have another type of inequity , actually , in India .
The geographical , macro-geographical difference is not so big .
Uttar Pradesh , the biggest of the states here , is poorer and has a lower health than the rest of India .
Kerala is flying on top there , matching United States in health , but not in economy .
And here , Maharashtra , with Mumbai , is forging forward .
Now in India , the big inequities are within the state , rather than between the states .
And that is not a bad thing , in itself .
If you have a lot inequity , macro-geographical inequities can be more difficult in the long term to deal with , than if it is in the same area where you have a growth center relatively close to where poor people are living .
No , there is one more inequity . Look there , United States .
Oh , they broke my frame .
Washington , D.C. went out here .
My friends at Gapminder wanted me to show this because there is a new leader in Washington who is really concerned about the health system .
And I can understand him , because Washington , D.C.
is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala .
It 's quite interesting , isn 't it ?
I can see a business opportunity for Kerala , helping fix the health system in the United States .
Now here we have the whole world . You have the legend down there .
And when you see the two giant cats here , pushing forward , you see that in between them and ahead of them , is the whole emerging economies of the world , which Thomas Friedman so correctly called the " flat world . "
You can see that in health and education , a large part of the world population is putting forward , but in Africa , and other parts , as in rural Guizhou in China , there is still people with low health and very low economy .
We have an enormous disparity in the world .
But most of the world in the middle are pushing forwards very fast .
Now , back to my projections .
When will it catch up ? I have to go back to very conventional graph .
I will show income per person on this axis instead , poor down here , rich up there .
And then time here , from 1858 I start the world .
And we shall see what will happen with these countries .
You see , China under foreign domination actually lowered their income and came down to the Indian level here .
Whereas U.K. and United States is getting richer and richer .
And after Second World War , United States is richer than U.K.
But independence is coming here .
Growth is starting , economic reform .
Growth is faster , and with projection from IMF you can see where you expect them to be in 2014 .
Now , the question is , " When will the catch up take place ? "
Look at , look at the United States .
Can you see the bubble ?
The bubbles , not my bubbles , but the financial bubbles .
That 's the dot com bubble . This is the Lehman Brothers doorstep there .
You see it came down there .
And it seems this is another rock coming down there , you know .
So they doesn 't seem to go this way , these countries .
They seem to go in a more humble growth way , you know .
And people interested in growth are turning their eyes towards Asia .
I can compare to Japan . This is Japan coming up .
You see , Japan did it like that .
We add Japan to it .
And there is no doubt that fast catch up can take place .
Can you see here what Japan did ?
Japan did it like this , until full catch up , and then they follow with the other high-income economies .
But the real projections for those ones , I would like to give it like this .
Can be worse , can be better .
It 's always difficult to predict , especially about the future .
Now , a historian tells me it 's even more difficult to predict about the past .
I think I 'm in a difficult position here .
Inequalities in China and India I consider really the big obstacle because to bring the entire population into growth and prosperity is what will create a domestic market , what will avoid social instability , and which will make use of the entire capacity of the population .
So , social investments in health , education and infrastructure , and electricity is really what is needed in India and China .
You know the climate . We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing , and actions has to be taken , otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change .
And I consider India and China the best partners in the world in a good global climate policy .
But they ain 't going to pay for what others , who have more money , have largely created , and I can agree on that .
But what I 'm really worried about is war .
Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy , and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years , back to Asia ?
And will Asia be able to handle that new position of being in charge of being the most mighty , and the governors of the world ?
So , always avoid war , because that always pushes human beings backward .
Now if these inequalities , climate and war can be avoided , get ready for a world in equity , because this is what seems to be happening .
And that vision that I got as a young student , 1972 , that Indians can be much better than Swedes , is just about to happen .
And it will happen precisely the year 2048 in the later part of the summer , in July , more precisely , the 27th of July .
The 27th of July , 2048 is my 100th birthday .
And I expect to speak in the first session of the 39th TED India .
Get your bookings in time . Thank you very much .
Carl Schoonover : How to look inside the brain
There have been remarkable advances in understanding the brain , but how do you actually study the neurons inside it ? Using gorgeous imagery , neuroscientist and TED Fellow Carl Schoonover shows the tools that let us see inside our brains .
This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain .
It 's a diagram of the visual system .
And some things look very familiar today .
Two eyes at the bottom , optic nerve flowing out from the back .
There 's a very large nose that doesn 't seem to be connected to anything in particular .
And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system , you 'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years .
And that 's because today we can see what 's inside of the brain , rather than just looking at its overall shape .
Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard , a mouse , a screen .
You really would be kind of out of luck .
You want to be able to open it up , crack it open , look at the wiring inside .
And up until a little more than a century ago , nobody was able to do that with the brain .
Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain 's wiring .
And that 's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it , put it under even a very powerful microscope , there 's nothing there .
It 's gray , formless .
There 's no structure . It won 't tell you anything .
And this all changed in the late 19th century .
Suddenly , new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring .
The computer was cracked open .
So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain .
And it works in a very particular way .
Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue , it somehow only stains about one percent of them .
It clears the forest , reveals the trees inside .
If everything had been labeled , nothing would have been visible .
So somehow it shows what 's there .
Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal , who 's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience , applied this Golgi stain , which yields data which looks like this , and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell , the neuron .
And if you 're thinking of the brain as a computer , this is the transistor .
And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don 't operate alone , but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer .
Today , a century later , when researchers want to visualize neurons , they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them .
And there 's several ways of doing this .
But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein .
Now green fluorescent protein , which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish , is very useful .
Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell , that cell will glow green -- or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein , you get a cell to glow many different colors .
And so coming back to the brain , this is from a genetically engineered mouse called " Brainbow . "
And it 's so called , of course , because all of these neurons are glowing different colors .
Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons , molecules , rather than the entire cell .
And there 's several ways of doing this , but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies .
And you 're familiar , of course , with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system .
But it turns out that they 're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules , like , for example , the code protein of a virus that 's invading the body .
And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain , recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually .
And a lot of the images I 've been showing you here are very beautiful , but they 're also very powerful .
They have great explanatory power .
This , for example , is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain .
And you 've heard of serotonin , of course , in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety .
You 've heard of SSRIs , which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases .
And in order to understand how serotonin works , it 's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is .
And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question .
I 'd like to leave you with the following thought : Green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go .
They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason , or in order to detect the code protein of an invading virus , for example .
And only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say , " Hey , these are tools , these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette . "
And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch , there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all .
Thank you .
Lian Pin Koh : A drone 's-eye view of conservation
Ecologist Lian Pin Koh makes a persuasive case for using drones to protect the world 's forests and wildlife . These lightweight autonomous flying vehicles can track animals in their natural habitat , monitor the health of rainforests , even combat crime by detecting poachers via thermal imaging . Added bonus ? They 're also entirely affordable .
When we think of Nepal , we tend to think of the snow-capped mountains of the Himalayas , the crystal-clear still waters of its alpine lakes , or the huge expanse of its grasslands .
What some of us may not realize is that in the Himalayan foothills , where the climate is much warmer and the landscape much greener , there lives a great diversity of wildlife , including the one-horned rhinoceros , the Asian elephant and the Bengal tiger .
But unfortunately , these animals are under constant threat from poachers who hunt and kill them for their body parts .
To stop the killing of these animals , battalions of soldiers and rangers are sent to protect Nepal 's national parks , but that is not an easy task , because these soldiers have to patrol thousands of hectares of forests on foot or elephant backs .
It is also risky for these soldiers when they get into gunfights with poachers , and therefore Nepal is always looking for new ways to help with protecting the forests and wildlife .
Well recently , Nepal acquired a new tool in the fight against wildlife crime , and these are drones , or more specifically , conservation drones .
For about a year now , my colleagues and I have been building drones for Nepal and training the park protection personnel on the use of these drones .
Not only does a drone give you a bird 's-eye view of the landscape , but it also allows you to capture detailed , high-resolution images of objects on the ground .
This , for example , is a pair of rhinoceros taking a cooling bath on a hot summer day in the lowlands of Nepal .
Now we believe that drones have tremendous potential , not only for combating wildlife crime , but also for monitoring the health of these wildlife populations .
So what is a drone ?
Well , the kind of drone I 'm talking about is simply a model aircraft fitted with an autopilot system , and this autopilot unit contains a tiny computer , a GPS , a compass , a barometric altimeter and a few other sensors .
Now a drone like this is meant to carry a useful payload , such as a video camera or a photographic camera .
It also requires a software that allows the user to program a mission , to tell the drone where to go .
Now people I talk to are often surprised when they hear that these are the only four components that make a conservation drone , but they are even more surprised when I tell them how affordable these components are .
The facts is , a conservation drone doesn 't cost very much more than a good laptop computer or a decent pair of binoculars .
So now that you 've built your own conservation drone , you probably want to go fly it , but how does one fly a drone ?
Well , actually , you don 't , because the drone flies itself .
All you have to do is to program a mission to tell the drone where to fly .
But you simply do that by clicking on a few way points on the Google Maps interface using the open-source software .
Those missions could be as simple as just a few way points , or they could be slightly longer and more complicated , to fly along a river system .
Sometimes , we fly the drone in a lawnmower-type pattern and take pictures of that area , and those pictures can be processed to produce a map of that forest .
Other researchers might want to fly the drone along the boundaries of a forest to watch out for poachers or people who might be trying to enter the forest illegally .
Now whatever your mission is , once you 've programmed it , you simply upload it to the autopilot system , bring your drone to the field , and launch it simply by tossing it in the air .
And often we 'll go about this mission taking pictures or videos along the way , and usually at that point , we will go grab ourselves a cup of coffee , sit back , and relax for the next few minutes , although some of us sit back and panic for the next few minutes worrying that the drone will not return .
Usually it does , and when it does , it even lands automatically .
So what can we do with a conservation drone ?
Well , when we built our first prototype drone , our main objective was to fly it over a remote rainforest in North Sumatra , Indonesia , to look for the nest of a species of great ape known as the orangutan .
The reason we wanted to do that was because we needed to know how many individuals of this species are still left in that forest .
Now the traditional method of surveying for orangutans is to walk the forest on foot carrying heavy equipment and to use a pair of binoculars to look up in the treetops where you might find an orangutan or its nest .
Now as you can imagine , that is a very time-consuming , labor-intensive , and costly process , so we were hoping that drones could significantly reduce the cost of surveying for orangutan populations in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia .
So we were very excited when we captured our first pair of orangutan nests on camera .
And this is it ; this is the first ever picture of orangutan nests taken with a drone .
Since then we have taken pictures of dozens of these nests from around various parts of Southeast Asia , and we 're now working with computer scientists to develop algorithms that can automatically count the number of nests from the thousands of photos we 've collected so far .
But nests are not the only objects these drones can detect .
This is a wild orangutan happily feeding on top of a palm tree , seemingly oblivious to our drone that was flying overhead , not once but several times .
We 've also taken pictures of other animals including forest buffalos in Gabon , elephants , and even turtle nests .
But besides taking pictures of just the animals themselves , we also take pictures of the habitats these animals live in , because we want to keep track of the health of these habitats .
Sometimes , we zoom out a little and look at other things that might be happening in the landscape .
This is an oil palm plantation in Sumatra .
Now oil palm is a major driver of deforestation in that part of the world , so we wanted to use this new drone technology to keep track of the spread of these plantations in Southeast Asia .
But drones could also be used to keep track of illegal logging activities .
This is a recently logged forest , again in Sumatra .
You could even still see the processed wooden planks left on the ground .
But perhaps the most exciting part about taking pictures from the air is we could later stitch these pictures together using special software to create a map of the entire landscape , and this map gives us crucial information for monitoring land use change , to let us know where and when plantations might be expanding , where forests might be contracting , or where fires might be breaking out .
Aerial images could also be processed to produce three-dimensional computer models of forests .
Now these models are not just visually appealing , but they are also geometrically accurate , which means researchers can now measure the distance between trees , calculate surface area , the volume of vegetation , and so on , all of which are important information for monitoring the health of these forests .
Recently , we 've also begun experimenting with thermal imaging cameras .
Now these cameras can detect heat-emitting objects from the ground , and therefore they are very useful for detecting poachers or their campfires at night .
So I 've told you quite a lot about what conservation drones are , how you might operate one of these drones , and what a drone could do for you .
I will now tell you where conservation drones are being used around the world .
We built our first prototype drones in Switzerland .
We brought a few of these to Indonesia for the first few test flights .
Since then , we 've been building drones for our collaborators from around the world , and these include fellow biologists and partners from major conservation organizations .
Perhaps the best and most rewarding part about working with these collaborators is the feedback they give us on how to improve our drones .
Building drones for us is a constant work in progress .
We are constantly trying to improve them in terms of their range , their ruggedness , and the amount of payload they can carry .
We also work with collaborators to discover new ways of using these drones .
For example , camera traps are a common tool used by biologists to take pictures of shy animals hiding in the forests , but these are motion-activated cameras , so they snap a picture every time an animal crosses their path .
But the problem with camera traps is that the researcher has to go back to the forest every so often to retrieve those images , and that takes a lot of time , especially if there are dozens or hundreds of these cameras placed in the forest .
Now a drone could be designed to perform the task much more efficiently .
This drone , carrying a special sensor , could be flown over the forest and remotely download these images from wi-fi – enabled cameras .
Radio collars are another tool that 's commonly used by biologists .
Now these collars are put onto animals .
They transmit a radio signal which allows the researcher to track the movements of these animals across the landscape .
But the traditional way of tracking animals is pretty ridiculous , because it requires the researcher to be walking on the ground carrying a huge and cumbersome radio antenna , not unlike those old TV antennae we used to have on our rooftops . Some of us still do .
A drone could be used to do the same job much more efficiently .
Why not equip a drone with a scanning radio receiver , fly that over the forest canopy in a certain pattern which would allow the user or the operator to triangulate the location of these radio-collared animals remotely without having to step foot in the forest .
A third and perhaps most exciting way of using these drones is to fly them to a really remote , never-explored-before rainforest somewhere hidden in the tropics , and parachute down a tiny spy microphone that would allow us to eavesdrop on the calls of mammals , birds , amphibians , the Yeti , the Sasquatch , Bigfoot , whatever .
That would give us biologists a pretty good idea of what animals might be living in those forests .
And finally , I would like to show you the latest version of our conservation drone .
The MAJA drone has a wingspan of about two meters .
It weighs only about two kilograms , but it can carry half its weight .
It is a fully autonomous system .
During its mission , it can even transmit a live video feed back to a ground station laptop , which allows the user to see what the drone is seeing in real time .
It carries a variety of sensors , and the photo quality of some of these sensors can be as high as one to two centimeters per pixel .
This drone can stay in the air for 40 to 60 minutes , which gives it a range of up to 50 kilometers .
That is quite sufficient for most of our conservation applications .
Now , conservation drones began as a crazy idea from two biologists who are just deeply passionate about this technology .
And we believe , strongly believe , that drones can and will be a game changer for conservation research and applications .
We 've had our fair share of skeptics and critics who thought that we were just fooling around with toy planes .
And in a way , they are right .
I mean , let 's be honest , drones are the ultimate toys for boys .
But at the same time , we 've also gotten to know many wonderful colleagues and collaborators who share our vision and see the potential of conservation drones .
To us , it is obvious that conservation biologists and practitioners should make full use of every available tool , including drones , in our fight to save the last remaining forests and wildlife of this planet .
Thank you .
Anthony Atala : Printing a human kidney
Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem : a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney . Using similar technology , Dr. Atala 's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago ; we meet him onstage .
There 's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs .
The fact is that we 're living longer .
Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer , and the problem is , as we age , our organs tend to fail more , and so currently there are not enough organs to go around .
In fact , in the last 10 years , the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled , while in the same time , the actual number of transplants has barely gone up .
So this is now a public health crisis .
So that 's where this field comes in that we call the field of regenerative medicine .
It really involves many different areas .
You can use , actually , scaffolds , biomaterials -- they 're like the piece of your blouse or your shirt -- but specific materials you can actually implant in patients and they will do well and help you regenerate .
Or we can use cells alone , either your very own cells or different stem cell populations .
Or we can use both .
We can use , actually , biomaterials and the cells together .
And that 's where the field is today .
But it 's actually not a new field .
Interestingly , this is a book that was published back in 1938 .
It 's titled " The Culture of Organs . "
The first author , Alexis Carrel , a Nobel Prize winner .
He actually devised some of the same technologies used today for suturing blood vessels , and some of the blood vessel grafts we use today were actually designed by Alexis .
But I want you to note his co-author : Charles Lindbergh .
That 's the same Charles Lindbergh who actually spent the rest of his life working with Alexis at the Rockefeller Institute in New York in the area of the culture of organs .
So if the field 's been around for so long , why so few clinical advances ?
And that really has to do to many different challenges .
But if I were to point to three challenges , the first one is actually the design of materials that could go in your body and do well over time .
And many advances now , we can do that fairly readily .
The second challenge was cells .
We could not get enough of your cells to grow outside of your body .
Over the last 20 years , we 've basically tackled that .
Many scientists can now grow many different types of cells .
Plus we have stem cells .
But even now , 2011 , there 's still certain cells that we just can 't grow from the patient .
Liver cells , nerve cells , pancreatic cells -- we still can 't grow them even today .
And the third challenge is vascularity , the actual supply of blood to allow those organs or tissues to survive once we regenerate them .
So we can actually use biomaterials now .
This is actually a biomaterial .
We can weave them , knit them , or we can make them like you see here .
This is actually like a cotton candy machine .
You saw the spray going in .
That was like the fibers of the cotton candy creating this structure , this tubularized structure , which is a biomaterial that we can then use to help your body regenerate using your very own cells to do so .
And that 's exactly what we did here .
This is actually a patient who [ was ] presented with a deceased organ , and we then created one of these smart biomaterials , and then we then used that smart biomaterial to replace and repair that patient 's structure .
What we did was we actually used the biomaterial as a bridge so that the cells in the organ could walk on that bridge , if you will , and help to bridge the gap to regenerate that tissue .
And you see that patient now six months after with an X-ray showing you the regenerated tissue , which is fully regenerated when you analyze it under the microscope .
We can also use cells alone .
These are actually cells that we obtained .
These are stem cells that we create from specific sources , and we can drive them to become heart cells , and they start beating in culture .
So they know what to do .
The cells genetically know what to do , and they start beating together .
Now today , many clinical trials are using different kinds of stem cells for heart disease .
So that 's actually now in patients .
Or if we 're going to use larger structures to replace larger structures , we can then use the patient 's own cells , or some cell population , and the biomaterials , the scaffolds , together .
So the concept here : so if you do have a deceased or injured organ , we take a very small piece of that tissue , less than half the size of a postage stamp .
We then tease the cells apart , we grow the cells outside the body .
We then take a scaffold , a biomaterial -- again , looks very much like a piece of your blouse or your shirt -- we then shape that material , and we then use those cells to coat that material one layer at a time -- very much like baking a layer cake , if you will .
We then place it in an oven-like device , and we 're able to create that structure and bring it out .
This is actually a heart valve that we 've engineered , and you can see here , we have the structure of the heart valve and we 've seeded that with cells , and then we exercise it .
So you see the leaflets opening and closing -- of this heart valve that 's currently being used experimentally to try to get it to further studies .
Another technology that we have used in patients actually involves bladders .
We actually take a very small piece of the bladder from the patient -- less than half the size of a postage stamp .
We then grow the cells outside the body , take the scaffold , coat the scaffold with the cells -- the patient 's own cells , two different cell types .
We then put it in this oven-like device .
It has the same conditions as the human body -- 37 degrees centigrade , 95 percent oxygen .
A few weeks later , you have your engineered organ that we 're able to implant back into the patient .
For these specific patients , we actually just suture these materials .
We use three-dimensional imagining analysis , but we actually created these biomaterials by hand .
But we now have better ways to create these structures with the cells .
We use now some type of technologies , where for solid organs , for example , like the liver , what we do is we take discard livers .
As you know , a lot of organs are actually discarded , not used .
So we can take these liver structures , which are not going to be used , and we then put them in a washing machine-like structure that will allow the cells to be washed away .
Two weeks later , you have something that looks like a liver .
You can hold it like a liver , but it has no cells ; it 's just a skeleton of the liver .
And we then can re-perfuse the liver with cells , preserving the blood vessel tree .
So we actually perfuse first the blood vessel tree with the patient 's own blood vessel cells , and we then infiltrate the parenchyma with the liver cells .
And we now have been able just to show the creation of human liver tissue just this past month using this technology .
Another technology that we 've used is actually that of printing .
This is actually a desktop inkjet printer , but instead of using ink , we 're using cells .
And you can actually see here the printhead going through and printing this structure , and it takes about 40 minutes to print this structure .
And there 's a 3D elevator that then actually goes down one layer at a time each time the printhead goes through .
And then finally you 're able to get that structure out .
You can pop that structure out of the printer and implant it .
And this is actually a piece of bone that I 'm going to show you in this slide that was actually created with this desktop printer and implanted as you see here .
That was all new bone that was implanted using these techniques .
Another more advanced technology we 're looking at right now , our next generation of technologies , are more sophisticated printers .
This particular printer we 're designing now is actually one where we print right on the patient .
So what you see here -- I know it sounds funny , but that 's the way it works .
Because in reality , what you want to do is you actually want to have the patient on the bed with the wound , and you have a scanner , basically like a flatbed scanner .
That 's what you see here on the right side .
You see a scanner technology that first scans the wound on the patient and then it comes back with the printheads actually printing the layers that you require on the patients themselves .
This is how it actually works .
Here 's the scanner going through , scanning the wound .
Once it 's scanned , it sends information in the correct layers of cells where they need to be .
And now you 're going to see here a demo of this actually being done in a representative wound .
And we actually do this with a gel so that you can lift the gel material .
So once those cells are on the patient they will stick where they need to be .
And this is actually new technology still under development .
We 're also working on more sophisticated printers .
Because in reality , our biggest challenge are the solid organs .
I don 't know if you realize this , but 90 percent of the patients on the transplant list are actually waiting for a kidney .
Patients are dying every day because we don 't have enough of those organs to go around .
So this is more challenging -- large organ , vascular , a lot of blood vessel supply , a lot of cells present .
So the strategy here is -- this is actually a CT scan , an X-ray -- and we go layer by layer , using computerized morphometric imaging analysis and 3D reconstruction to get right down to those patient 's own kidneys .
We then are able to actually image those , do 360 degree rotation to analyze the kidney in its full volumetric characteristics , and we then are able to actually take this information and then scan this in a printing computerized form .
So we go layer by layer through the organ , analyzing each layer as we go through the organ , and we then are able to send that information , as you see here , through the computer and actually design the organ for the patient .
This actually shows the actual printer .
And this actually shows that printing .
In fact , we actually have the printer right here .
So while we 've been talking today , you can actually see the printer back here in the back stage .
That 's actually the actual printer right now , and that 's been printing this kidney structure that you see here .
It takes about seven hours to print a kidney , so this is about three hours into it now .
And Dr. Kang 's going to walk onstage right now , and we 're actually going to show you one of these kidneys that we printed a little bit earlier today .
Put a pair of gloves here .
Thank you .
Go backwards .
So , these gloves are a little bit small on me , but here it is .
You can actually see that kidney as it was printed earlier today .
Has a little bit of consistency to it .
This is Dr. Kang who 's been working with us on this project , and part of our team .
Thank you , Dr. Kang . I appreciate it .
So this is actually a new generation .
This is actually the printer that you see here onstage .
And this is actually a new technology we 're working on now .
In reality , we now have a long history of doing this .
I 'm going to share with you a clip in terms of technology we have had in patients now for a while .
And this is actually a very brief clip -- only about 30 seconds -- of a patient who actually received an organ .
Luke Massella : I was really sick . I could barely get out of bed .
I was missing school . It was pretty much miserable .
I couldn 't go out and play basketball at recess without feeling like I was going to pass out when I got back inside .
I felt so sick .
I was facing basically a lifetime of dialysis , and I don 't even like to think about what my life would be like if I was on that .
So after the surgery , life got a lot better for me .
I was able to do more things .
I was able to wrestle in high school .
I became the captain of the team , and that was great .
I was able to be a normal kid with my friends .
And because they used my own cells to build this bladder , it 's going to be with me .
I 've got it for life , so I 'm all set .
Juan Enriquez : These experiments sometimes work , and it 's very cool when they do .
Luke , come up please .
So Luke , before last night , when 's the last time you saw Tony ?
LM : Ten years ago , when I had my surgery -- and it 's really great to see him .
JE : And tell us a little bit about what you 're doing .
LM : Well right now I 'm in college at the University of Connecticut .
I 'm a sophomore and studying communications , TV and mass media , and basically trying to live life like a normal kid , which I always wanted growing up .
But it was hard to do that when I was born with spina bifida and my kidneys and bladder weren 't working .
I went through about 16 surgeries , and it seemed impossible to do that when I was in kidney failure when I was 10 .
And this surgery came along and basically made me who I am today and saved my life .
JE : And Tony 's done hundreds of these ?
LM : What I know from , he 's working really hard in his lab and coming up with crazy stuff .
I know I was one of the first 10 people to have this surgery .
And when I was 10 , I didn 't realize how amazing it was .
I was a little kid , and I was like , " Yeah . I 'll have that . I 'll have that surgery . "
All I wanted to do was to get better , and I didn 't realize how amazing it really was until now that I 'm older and I see the amazing things that he 's doing .
JE : When you got this call out of the blue -- Tony 's really shy , and it took a lot of convincing to get somebody as modest as Tony to allow us to bring Luke .
So Luke , you go to your communications professors -- you 're majoring in communications -- and you ask them for permission to come to TED , which might have a little bit to do with communications , and what was their reaction ?
LM : Most of my professors were all for it , and they said , " Bring pictures and show me the clips online , " and " I 'm happy for you . "
There were a couple that were a little stubborn , but I had to talk to them .
I pulled them aside .
JE : Well , it 's an honor and a privilege to meet you .
Thank you so much .
JE : Thank you , Tony .
Tom Shannon , John Hockenberry : The painter and the pendulum
TED visits Tom Shannon in his Manhattan studio for an intimate look at his science-inspired art . An eye-opening , personal conversation with John Hockenberry reveals how nature 's forces -- and the onset of Parkinson 's tremors -- interact in his life and craft .
John Hockenberry : It 's great to be here with you , Tom .
And I want to start with a question that has just been consuming me since I first became familiar with your work .
In you work there 's always this kind of hybrid quality of a natural force in some sort of interplay with creative force .
Are they ever in equilibrium in the way that you see your work ?
Tom Shannon : Yeah , the subject matter that I 'm looking for , it 's usually to solve a question .
I had the question popped into my head : What does the cone that connects the sun and the Earth look like if you could connect the two spheres ?
And in proportion , what would the size of the sphere and the length , and what would the taper be to the Earth ?
And so I went about and made that sculpture , turning it out of solid bronze .
And I did one that was about 35 feet long .
The sun end was about four inches in diameter , and then it tapered over about 35 feet to about a millimeter at the Earth end .
And so for me , it was really exciting just to see what it looks like if you could step outside and into a larger context , as though you were an astronaut , and see these two things as an object , because they are so intimately bound , and one is meaningless without the other .
JH : Is there a relief in playing with these forces ?
And I 'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is in playing with these forces .
TS : Well , like the magnetically levitated objects -- like that silver one there , that was the result of hundreds of experiments with magnets , trying to find a way to make something float with the least possible connection to the ground .
So I got it down to just one tether to be able to support that .
JH : Now is this electromagnetic here , or are these static ?
TS : Those are permanent magnets , yeah .
JH : Because if the power went out , there would just be a big noise .
TS : Yeah .
It 's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art .
JH : I agree .
TS : The magnetic works are a combination of gravity and magnetism , so it 's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces that influence everything .
The sun has a tremendous field that extends way beyond the planets and the Earth 's magnetic field protects us from the sun .
So there 's this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe .
But with the pendulum , it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up .
My sculptures are normally very simplified .
I try to refine them down to very simple forms .
But the paintings become very complex , because I think the fields that are supporting them , they 're billowing , and they 're interpenetrating , and they 're interference patterns .
JH : And they 're non-deterministic .
I mean , you don 't know necessarily where you 're headed when you begin , even though the forces can be calculated .
So the evolution of this -- I gather this isn 't your first pendulum .
TS : No .
TS : The first one I did was in the late 70 's , and I just had a simple cone with a spigot at the bottom of it .
I threw it into an orbit , and it only had one color , and when it got to the center , the paint kept running out , so I had to run in there , didn 't have any control over the spigot remotely .
So that told me right away : I need a remote control device .
But then I started dreaming of having six colors .
I sort of think about it as the DNA -- these colors , the red , blue , yellow , the primary colors and white and black .
And if you put them together in different combinations -- just like printing in a sense , like how a magazine color is printed -- and put them under certain forces , which is orbiting them or passing them back and forth or drawing with them , these amazing things started appearing .
JH : It looks like we 're loaded for bear here .
TS : Yeah , well let 's put a couple of canvases .
I 'll ask a couple of my sons to set up the canvases here .
I want to just say -- so this is Jack , Nick and Louie .
JH : Thanks guys .
TS : So here are the -- JH : All right , I 'll get out of the way here .
TS : I 'm just going to throw this into an orbit and see if I can paint everybody 's shoes in the front .
JH : Whoa . That is ...
ooh , nice .
TS : So something like this .
I 'm doing this as a demo , and it 's more playful , but inevitably , all of this can be used .
I can redeem this painting , just continuing on , doing layers upon layers .
And I keep it around for a couple of weeks , and I 'm contemplating it , and I 'll do another session with it and bring it up to another level , where all of this becomes the background , the depth of it .
JH : That 's fantastic .
So the valves at the bottom of those tubes there are like radio-controlled airplane valves .
TS : Yes , they 're servos with cams that pinch these rubber tubes .
And they can pinch them very tight and stop it , or you can have them wide open .
And all of the colors come out one central port at the bottom .
You can always be changing colors , put aluminum paint , or I could put anything into this .
It could be tomato sauce , or anything could be dispensed -- sand , powders or anything like that .
JH : So many forces there .
You 've got gravity , you 've got the centrifugal force , you 've got the fluid dynamics .
Each of these beautiful paintings , are they images in and of themselves , or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas ?
TS : Well , this painting here , I wanted to do something very simple , a simple , iconic image of two ripples interfering .
So the one on the right was done first , and then the one on the left was done over it .
And then I left gaps so you could see the one that was done before .
And then when I did the second one , it really disturbed the piece -- these big blue lines crashing through the center of it -- and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap .
There are lines in front of the one on the right , and there are lines behind the one on the left , and so it takes it into different planes .
What it 's also about , just the little events , the events of the interpenetration of -- JH : Two stars , or -- TS : Two things that happened -- there 's an interference pattern , and then a third thing happens .
There are shapes that come about just by the marriage of two events that are happening , and I 'm very interested in that .
Like the occurrence of moire patterns .
Like this green one , this is a painting I did about 10 years ago , but it has some -- see , in the upper third -- there are these moires and interference patterns that are radio kind of imagery .
And that 's something that in painting I 've never seen done .
I 've never seen a representation of a kind of radio interference patterns , which are so ubiquitous and such an important part of our lives .
JH : Is that a literal part of the image , or is my eye making that interference pattern -- is my eye completing that interference pattern ?
TS : It is the paint actually , makes it real .
It 's really manifested there .
If I throw a very concentric circle , or concentric ellipse , it just dutifully makes these evenly spaced lines , which get closer and closer together , which describes how gravity works .
There 's something very appealing about the exactitude of science that I really enjoy .
And I love the shapes that I see in scientific observations and apparatus , especially astronomical forms and the idea of the vastness of it , the scale , is very interesting to me .
My focus in recent years has kind of shifted more toward biology .
Some of these paintings , when you look at them very close , odd things appear that really look like horses or birds or crocodiles , elephants .
There are lots of things that appear .
When you look into it , it 's sort of like looking at cloud patterns , but sometimes they 're very modeled and highly rendered .
And then there are all these forms that we don 't know what they are , but they 're equally well-resolved and complex .
So I think , conceivably , those could be predictive .
Because since it has the ability to make forms that look like forms that we 're familiar with in biology , it 's also making other forms that we 're not familiar with .
And maybe it 's the kind of forms we 'll discover underneath the surface of Mars , where there are probably lakes with fish swimming under the surface .
JH : Oh , let 's hope so . Oh , my God , let 's .
Oh , please , yes . Oh , I 'm so there .
You know , it seems at this stage in your life , you also very personally are in this state of confrontation with a sort of dissonant -- I suppose it 's an electromagnetic force that somehow governs your Parkinson 's and this creative force that is both the artist who is in the here and now and this sort of arc of your whole life .
Is that relevant to your work ?
TS : As it turns out , this device kind of comes in handy , because I don 't have to have the fine motor skills to do , that I can operate slides , which is more of a mental process .
I 'm looking at it and making decisions : It needs more red , it needs more blue , it needs a different shape .
And so I make these creative decisions and can execute them in a much , much simpler way .
I mean , I 've got the symptoms .
I guess Parkinson 's kind of creeps up over the years , but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms .
In my case , my left hand has a significant tremor and my left leg also .
I 'm left-handed , and so I draw .
All my creations really start on small drawings , which I have thousands of , and it 's my way of just thinking .
I draw with a simple pencil , and at first , the Parkinson 's was really upsetting , because I couldn 't get the pencil to stand still .
JH : So you 're not a gatekeeper for these forces .
You don 't think of yourself as the master of these forces .
You think of yourself as the servant .
TS : Nature is -- well , it 's a godsend .
It just has so much in it .
And I think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature , humans are of the universe .
The universe is in our mind , and our minds are in the universe .
And we are expressions of the universe , basically .
As humans , ultimately being part of the universe , we 're kind of the spokespeople or the observer part of the constituency of the universe .
And to interface with it , with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do , giving them pigment and paint just like an artist , it 's a good ally .
It 's a terrific studio assistant .
JH : Well , I love the idea that somewhere within this idea of fine motion and control with the traditional skills that you have with your hand , some sort of more elemental force gets revealed , and that 's the beauty here .
Tom , thank you so much . It 's been really , really great .
TS : Thank you , John .
Moshe Safdie : How to reinvent the apartment building
In 1967 , Moshe Safdie reimagined the monolithic apartment building , creating " Habitat ' 67 , " which gave each unit an unprecedented sense of openness . Nearly 50 years later , he believes the need for this type of building is greater than ever . In this short talk , Safdie surveys a range of projects that do away with the high-rise and let light permeate into densely-packed cities .
When , in 1960 , still a student , I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America .
We traveled the country .
We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities : New York , Philadelphia .
Those who have no choice lived there .
And then we traveled from suburb to suburb , and I came back thinking , we 've got to reinvent the apartment building .
There has to be another way of doing this .
We can 't sustain suburbs , so let 's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit .
Habitat would be all about gardens , contact with nature , streets instead of corridors .
We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy , and there it is almost 50 years later .
It 's a very desirable place to live in .
It 's now a heritage building , but it did not proliferate .
In 1973 , I made my first trip to China .
It was the Cultural Revolution .
We traveled the country , met with architects and planners .
This is Beijing then , not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai .
Shenzhen didn 't even exist as a city .
There were hardly any cars .
Thirty years later , this is Beijing today .
This is Hong Kong .
If you 're wealthy , you live there , if you 're poor , you live there , but high density it is , and it 's not just Asia .
São Paulo , you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment .
And with it , comes congestion , and we lose mobility , and so on and so forth .
So a few years ago , we decided to go back and rethink Habitat .
Could we make it more affordable ?
Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today ?
And we realized , it 's basically about light , it 's about sun , it 's about nature , it 's about fractalization .
Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior ?
We came up with a number of models : economy models , cheaper to build and more compact ; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens .
And then we decided to take New York as a test case , and we looked at Lower Manhattan .
And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan .
On the left is Manhattan today : blue for housing , red for office buildings , retail .
On the right , we reconfigured it : the office buildings form the base , and then rising 75 stories above , are apartments .
There 's a street in the air on the 25th level , a community street .
It 's permeable .
There are gardens and open spaces for the community , almost every unit with its own private garden , and community space all around .
And most important , permeable , open .
It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city , and light permeates everywhere .
And in the last two or three years , we 've actually been , for the first time , realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia .
This in Qinhuangdao in China : middle-income housing , where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight .
That 's measured in the winter solstice .
And under construction in Singapore , again middle-income housing , gardens , community streets and parks and so on and so forth .
And Colombo .
And I want to touch on one more issue , which is the design of the public realm .
A hundred years after we 've begun building with tall buildings , we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city , in creating the public realm .
In Singapore , we had an opportunity : 10 million square feet , extremely high density .
Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor , promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life .
So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces , and you move from one to the other , and there is contact with nature , and most relevantly , at every level of the structure , public gardens and open space : on the roof of the podium , climbing up the towers , and finally on the roof , the sky park , two and a half acres , jogging paths , restaurants , and the world 's longest swimming pool .
And that 's all I can tell you in five minutes .
Thank you .
Siegfried Woldhek : The search for the true face of Leonardo
& lt ; i & gt ; Mona Lisa & lt ; / i & gt ; is one of the best-known faces on the planet . But would you recognize an image of Leonardo da Vinci ? Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek uses some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo .
Good morning .
Let 's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all , Leonardo da Vinci .
We 're all familiar with his fantastic work -- his drawings , his paintings , his inventions , his writings .
But we do not know his face .
Thousands of books have been written about him , but there 's controversy , and it remains , about his looks .
Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians .
So , what do you think ?
Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn 't it ?
Let 's find out .
Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him .
He drew people , anatomy , plants , animals , landscapes , buildings , water , everything .
But no faces ?
I find that hard to believe .
His contemporaries made faces , like the ones you see here -- en face or three-quarters .
So , surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time .
So let 's try to find them .
I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits , we would find his face looking at us .
So I looked at all of his drawings , more than 700 , and looked for male portraits .
There are about 120 , you see them here .
Which ones of these could be self-portraits ?
Well , for that they have to be done as we just saw , en face or three-quarters .
So we can eliminate all the profiles .
It also has to be sufficiently detailed .
So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized .
And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome , even beautiful man .
So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures .
And look what happens -- only three candidates remain that fit the bill .
And here they are .
Yes , indeed , the old man is there , as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus .
And lastly , the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted , " The Musician . "
Before we go into these faces , I should explain why I have some right to talk about them .
I 've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers , over the course of 300 -- 30 years , sorry , 30 years only .
But there are 1,100 , and very few artists have drawn so many faces .
So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces .
OK , now let 's look at these three portraits .
And hold onto your seats , because if we zoom in on those faces , remark how they have the same broad forehead , the horizontal eyebrows , the long nose , the curved lips and the small , well-developed chin .
I couldn 't believe my eyes when I first saw that .
There is no reason why these portraits should look alike .
All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait , and look , they are very similar .
Now , are they made in the right order ?
The young man should be made first .
And as you see here from the years that they were created , it is indeed the case .
They are made in the right order .
What was the age of Leonardo at the time ? Does that fit ?
Yes , it does . He was 33 , 38 and 63 when these were made .
So we have three pictures , potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time .
But how do we know it 's him , and not someone else ?
Well , we need a reference .
And here 's the only picture of Leonardo that 's widely accepted .
It 's a statue made by Verrocchio , of David , for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15 .
And if we now compare the face of the statue , with the face of the musician , you see the very same features again .
The statue is the reference , and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces .
Ladies and gentlemen , this story has not yet been published .
It 's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first .
The icon of icons finally has a face .
Here he is : Leonardo da Vinci .
Eric Dishman : Health care should be a team sport
When Eric Dishman was in college , doctors told him he had 2 to 3 years to live . That was a long time ago . Now , Dishman puts his experience and his expertise as a medical tech specialist together to suggest a bold idea for reinventing health care -- by putting the patient at the center of a treatment team .
I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I 've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world .
Twenty-four years ago , I had -- a sophomore in college , I had a series of fainting spells . No alcohol was involved .
And I ended up in student health , and they ran some labwork and came back right away , and said , " Kidney problems . "
And before I knew it , I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me .
And I 'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound , and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once , and I 'm like , " Uh oh , this is bad news . "
And their diagnosis was this : They said , " You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually , you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away , and you 'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant , and you 're not likely to live more than two or three years . "
Now , with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis , it just sucked me in immediately , as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me , until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room , who became a dear friend , and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases , and said , " Eric , these people who get this are normally in their ' 70s and ' 80s .
They don 't know anything about you . Wake up .
Take control of your health and get on with your life . "
And I did .
Now , these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people .
In fact , these professionals were miracle workers , but they 're working in a flawed , expensive system that 's set up the wrong way .
It 's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need .
It 's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us .
It 's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails , and so something either works or you die .
And it 's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don 't ask any questions .
Now the problem with this model is that it 's unsustainable globally .
It 's unaffordable globally .
We need to invent what I call a personal health system .
So what does this personal health system look like , and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail ?
Now , I 'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine , Libby , somebody I 've become quite attached to over the last six months .
This is Libby , or actually , this is an ultrasound image of Libby .
This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have .
Now , this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today , and you 'll notice , on the edge of this image , there 's some dark spots there , which was really concerning to me .
So we 're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby 's doing .
This is not a wardrobe malfunction . I have to take my belt off here .
Don 't you in the front row worry or anything .
I 'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante .
This is a portable ultrasound .
It can plug into a smartphone . It can plug into a tablet .
Mobisante is up in Redmond , Washington , and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself .
They 're not approved to do this . Patients are not approved to do this .
This is a concept demo , so I want to make that clear .
All right , I gotta gel up .
Now the people in the front row are very nervous .
And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk , who 's another friend of mine .
He 's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland , Oregon .
So let me just make sure . Hey , Dr. Batiuk . Can you hear me okay ?
And actually , can you see Libby ?
Thomas Batuik : Hi there , Eric .
You look busy . How are you ?
Eric Dishman : I 'm good . I 'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people . It 's wonderful .
So I just wanted to see , is this the image you need to get ?
And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there .
TB : Okay . Well let 's scan around a little bit here , give me a lay of the land .
ED : All right.TB : Okay . Turn it a little bit inside , a little bit toward the middle for me .
Okay , that 's good . How about up a little bit ?
Okay , freeze that image . That 's a good one for me .
ED : All right . Now last week , when I did this , you had me measure that spot to the right .
Should I do that again ?
TB : Yeah , let 's do that .
ED : All right . This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring , but I 've got it , I think , and I 'll save that image and send it to you .
So tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means .
It 's not something I was very happy about .
TB : Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney .
Most of the time it doesn 't create any kind of mischief , but it does warrant looking at , so I 'm happy we 've got an opportunity to look at it today , make sure that it 's not growing , it 's not creating any problems .
Based on the other images we have , I 'm really happy how it looks today .
ED : All right . Well , I guess we 'll double check it when I come in .
I 've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks , and I 'm going to let you do that in the clinic , because I don 't think I can do that one on myself .
TB : Good choice.ED : All right , thanks , Dr. Batiuk .
All right . So what you 're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies , of mobile , social and analytic technologies .
These are the foundations of what 's going to make personal health possible .
Now there 's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now , and it 's care anywhere , care networking and care customization .
And you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with Dr. Batiuk .
So let 's start with care anywhere .
Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s . It is time to update our thinking .
We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care , because these places are often the wrong tool , and the most expensive tool , for the job .
And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients , especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections .
And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they 're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built .
Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age .
This was me in third grade .
I broke my elbow very seriously , had to have surgery , worried that they were going to actually lose the arm .
Recovering from the surgery in the hospital , I get bedsores .
Those bedsores become infected , and they give me an antibiotic which I end up being allergic to , and now my whole body breaks out , and now all of those become infected .
The longer I stayed in the hospital , the sicker I became , and the more expensive it became , and this happens to millions of people around the world every year .
The future of personal health that I 'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model , not in a hospital or clinic .
You have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job .
Now the smartphones that we 're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them , and a whole array of others , today , and as sensing is built into these , we 'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we 've never had before .
Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what 's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now .
Now the software is also getting smarter , right ?
Think about a coach , an agent online , that 's going to help me do safe self-care .
That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing , and the device will say , " Up , down , left , right , ah , Eric , that 's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor . "
Now , if we 've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere , it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff , and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about , care networking .
We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care .
Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best , and it is deadly at worst .
Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members .
I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school , when we 're under treatment for the kidney , and suddenly , they 're like , " Oh , we think you have a heart problem . "
And I have these palpitations that are showing up .
They put me through five weeks of tests -- very expensive , very scary -- before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper , my meds list that I 've been carrying to every single appointment , and says , " Oh my gosh . "
Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me .
I did not have a heart problem . I had an overdose problem .
I had a care coordination problem .
And this happens to millions of people every year .
I want to use technology that we 're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport .
Now this is the most frightening thing to me .
Out of all the care I 've had in hospitals and clinics around the world , the first time I 've ever had a true team-based care experience was at Legacy Good Sam these last six months for me to go get this .
And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy .
There 's a couple of the folks here . You 'll recognize Dr. Batiuk .
We just talked to him . Here 's Jenny , one of the nurses , Allison , who helped manage the transplant list , and a dozen other people who aren 't pictured , a pharmacist , a psychologist , a nutritionist , even a financial counselor , Lisa , who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles .
I wept the day I graduated .
I should have been happy , because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors , but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team .
And here 's the most important part .
The other people in this picture are me and my wife , Ashley .
Legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics .
That 's the only way that the model works .
My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities .
We 're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers , as well as have an exchange network online , where , for example , I can donate three hours of care a day to your mom , if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals , and we exchange all of that online .
The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past .
The future of health care is smart teams , and you 'd better be on that team for yourself .
Now , the last thing that I want to talk to you about is care customization , because if you 've got care anywhere and you 've got care networking , those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system , but there 's still too much guesswork .
Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis , and those are important things , don 't get me wrong .
These population studies that we 've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives , but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages , not unique individuals , because at the end of the day , the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied . That 's what 's leading to the guesswork .
The technologies that are coming , high-performance computing , analytics , big data that everyone 's talking about , will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients .
And the magic here is , experiment on my avatar in software , not my body in suffering .
Now , I 've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey .
The first was quite simple . I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity .
It 's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live .
I was optimizing my life for quality of life , and quality of life for me means time in snow .
So on my chart , I forced them to put , " Patient goal : low doses of drugs over longer periods of time , side effects friendly to skiing . "
And I think that 's why I achieved longevity .
I think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that I had .
Now the second example of customization -- and by the way , you can 't customize care if you don 't know your own goals , so health care can 't know those until you know your own health care goals .
But the second example I want to give you is , I happened to be an early guinea pig , and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced .
Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel 's highest-end servers to make this happen , and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data .
And at the end of all of that , they said , " Yes , those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong , and we have a better path forward . "
The future that Intel 's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours , and make this kind of tool available , not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world , but in the mainstream -- every patient , every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing .
And I tell you , this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime .
So these three pillars of personal health , care anywhere , care networking , care customization , are happening in pieces now , but this vision will completely fail if we don 't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles .
It 's what my friend Verna said : Wake up and take control of your health .
Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways .
And it 's in that spirit that I want to introduce you to one last friend , very quickly .
Tracey Gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that I was never supposed to have .
So Tracey , just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you .
Tracey Gamley : For me , it was really easy .
I only had one night in the hospital .
The surgery was done laparoscopically , so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen , and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I 'd done before without any changes .
ED : Well , I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again .
So " thank you " feel likes a really trite word , but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life .
This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies , and I 've done that here today , and I 've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers , I mean , my gosh , artificial kidneys , even printable kidneys , that are coming .
But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us , and even when they are , it 's up to us to care for , and even save , one another .
I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone . Thanks so much .
Dennis Hong : My seven species of robot
Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning , all-terrain robots -- like the humanoid , soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR -- all built by his team at RoMeLa , Virginia Tech . Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab 's incredible technical success . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So , the first robot to talk about is called STriDER .
It stands for Self-excited Tripedal Dynamic Experimental Robot .
It 's a robot that has three legs , which is inspired by nature .
But have you seen anything in nature , an animal that has three legs ?
Probably not . So , why do I call this a biologically inspired robot ? How would it work ?
But before that , let 's look at pop culture .
So , you know H.G. Wells ' " War of the Worlds , " novel and movie .
And what you see over here is a very popular video game , and in this fiction they describe these alien creatures that are robots that have three legs that terrorize Earth .
But my robot , STriDER , does not move like this .
So , this is an actual dynamic simulation animation .
I 'm just going to show you how the robot works .
It flips its body 180 degrees and it swings its leg between the two legs and catches the fall .
So , that 's how it walks . But when you look at us human being , bipedal walking , what you 're doing is you 're not really using a muscle to lift your leg and walk like a robot . Right ?
What you 're doing is you really swing your leg and catch the fall , stand up again , swing your leg and catch the fall .
You 're using your built-in dynamics , the physics of your body , just like a pendulum .
We call that the concept of passive dynamic locomotion .
potential energy to kinetic energy , potential energy to kinetic energy .
It 's a constantly falling process .
So , even though there is nothing in nature that looks like this , really , we were inspired by biology and applying the principles of walking to this robot . Thus it 's a biologically inspired robot .
What you see over here , this is what we want to do next .
We want to fold up the legs and shoot it up for long-range motion .
And it deploys legs -- it looks almost like " Star Wars " -- when it lands , it absorbs the shock and starts walking .
What you see over here , this yellow thing , this is not a death ray .
This is just to show you that if you have cameras or different types of sensors -- because it is tall , it 's 1.8 meters tall -- you can see over obstacles like bushes and those kinds of things .
So we have two prototypes .
The first version , in the back , that 's STriDER I.
The one in front , the smaller , is STriDER II .
The problem that we had with STriDER I is it was just too heavy in the body . We had so many motors , you know , aligning the joints , and those kinds of things .
So , we decided to synthesize a mechanical mechanism so we could get rid of all the motors , and with a single motor we can coordinate all the motions .
It 's a mechanical solution to a problem , instead of using mechatronics .
So , with this now the top body is light enough . So , it 's walking in our lab ; this was the very first successful step .
It 's still not perfected -- its coffee falls down -- so we still have a lot of work to do .
The second robot I want to talk about is called IMPASS .
It stands for Intelligent Mobility Platform with Actuated Spoke System .
So , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid robot .
So , think of a rimless wheel or a spoke wheel , but the spokes individually move in and out of the hub ; so , it 's a wheel-leg hybrid .
We are literally re-inventing the wheel here .
Let me demonstrate how it works .
So , in this video we 're using an approach called the reactive approach .
Just simply using the tactile sensors on the feet , it 's trying to walk over a changing terrain , a soft terrain where it pushes down and changes .
And just by the tactile information , it successfully crosses over these type of terrain .
But , when it encounters a very extreme terrain , in this case , this obstacle is more than three times the height of the robot , Then it switches to a deliberate mode , where it uses a laser range finder , and camera systems , to identify the obstacle and the size , and it plans , carefully plans the motion of the spokes and coordinates it so that it can show this kind of very very impressive mobility .
You probably haven 't seen anything like this out there .
This is a very high mobility robot that we developed called IMPASS .
Ah , isn 't that cool ?
When you drive your car , when you steer your car , you use a method called Ackermann steering .
The front wheels rotate like this .
For most small wheeled robots , they use a method called differential steering where the left and right wheel turns the opposite direction .
For IMPASS , we can do many , many different types of motion .
For example , in this case , even though the left and right wheel is connected with a single axle rotating at the same angle of velocity .
We just simply change the length of the spoke .
It affects the diameter and then can turn to the left , turn to the right .
So , these are just some examples of the neat things that we can do with IMPASS .
This robot is called CLIMBeR : Cable-suspended Limbed Intelligent Matching Behavior Robot .
So , I 've been talking to a lot of NASA JPL scientists -- at JPL they are famous for the Mars rovers -- and the scientists , geologists always tell me that the real interesting science , the science-rich sites , are always at the cliffs .
But the current rovers cannot get there .
So , inspired by that we wanted to build a robot that can climb a structured cliff environment .
So , this is CLIMBeR .
So , what it does , it has three legs . It 's probably difficult to see , but it has a winch and a cable at the top -- and it tries to figure out the best place to put its foot .
And then once it figures that out in real time , it calculates the force distribution : how much force it needs to exert to the surface so it doesn 't tip and doesn 't slip .
Once it stabilizes that , it lifts a foot , and then with the winch it can climb up these kinds of thing .
Also for search and rescue applications as well .
Five years ago I actually worked at NASA JPL during the summer as a faculty fellow .
And they already had a six legged robot called LEMUR .
So , this is actually based on that . This robot is called MARS : Multi-Appendage Robotic System . So , it 's a hexapod robot .
We developed our adaptive gait planner .
We actually have a very interesting payload on there .
The students like to have fun . And here you can see that it 's walking over unstructured terrain .
It 's trying to walk on the coarse terrain , sandy area , but depending on the moisture content or the grain size of the sand the foot 's soil sinkage model changes .
So , it tries to adapt its gait to successfully cross over these kind of things .
And also , it does some fun stuff , as can imagine .
We get so many visitors visiting our lab .
So , when the visitors come , MARS walks up to the computer , starts typing " Hello , my name is MARS . "
Welcome to RoMeLa , the Robotics Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech .
This robot is an amoeba robot .
Now , we don 't have enough time to go into technical details , I 'll just show you some of the experiments .
So , this is some of the early feasibility experiments .
We store potential energy to the elastic skin to make it move .
Or use an active tension cords to make it move forward and backward . It 's called ChIMERA .
We also have been working with some scientists and engineers from UPenn to come up with a chemically actuated version of this amoeba robot .
We do something to something And just like magic , it moves . The blob .
This robot is a very recent project . It 's called RAPHaEL .
Robotic Air Powered Hand with Elastic Ligaments .
There are a lot of really neat , very good robotic hands out there in the market .
The problem is they 're just too expensive , tens of thousands of dollars .
So , for prosthesis applications it 's probably not too practical , because it 's not affordable .
We wanted to go tackle this problem in a very different direction .
Instead of using electrical motors , electromechanical actuators , we 're using compressed air .
We developed these novel actuators for joints .
It is compliant . You can actually change the force , simply just changing the air pressure .
And it can actually crush an empty soda can .
It can pick up very delicate objects like a raw egg , or in this case , a lightbulb .
The best part , it took only $ 200 dollars to make the first prototype .
This robot is actually a family of snake robots that we call HyDRAS , Hyper Degrees-of-freedom Robotic Articulated Serpentine .
This is a robot that can climb structures .
This is a HyDRAS 's arm .
It 's a 12 degrees of freedom robotic arm .
But the cool part is the user interface .
The cable over there , that 's an optical fiber .
And this student , probably the first time using it , but she can articulate it many different ways .
So , for example in Iraq , you know , the war zone , there is roadside bombs . Currently you send these remotely controlled vehicles that are armed .
It takes really a lot of time and it 's expensive to train the operator to operate this complex arm .
In this case it 's very intuitive ; this student , probably his first time using it , doing very complex manipulation tasks , picking up objects and doing manipulation , just like that . Very intuitive .
Now , this robot is currently our star robot .
We actually have a fan club for the robot , DARwIn : Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence .
As you know , we are very interested in humanoid robot , human walking , so we decided to build a small humanoid robot .
This was in 2004 ; at that time , this was something really , really revolutionary .
This was more of a feasibility study : What kind of motors should we use ?
Is it even possible ? What kinds of controls should we do ?
So , this does not have any sensors .
So , it 's an open loop control .
For those who probably know , if you don 't have any sensors and there are any disturbances , you know what happens .
So , based on that success , the following year we did the proper mechanical design starting from kinematics .
And thus , DARwIn I was born in 2005 .
It stands up , it walks -- very impressive .
However , still , as you can see , it has a cord , umbilical cord . So , we 're still using an external power source and external computation .
So , in 2006 , now it 's really time to have fun .
Let 's give it intelligence . We give it all the computing power it needs : a 1.5 gigahertz Pentium M chip , two FireWire cameras , rate gyros , accelerometers , four force sensors on the foot , lithium polymer batteries .
And now DARwIn II is completely autonomous .
It is not remote controlled .
There are no tethers . It looks around , searches for the ball , looks around , searches for the ball , and it tries to play a game of soccer , autonomously : artificial intelligence .
Let 's see how it does . This was our very first trial , and ... Spectators : Goal !
Dennis Hong : So , there is actually a competition called RoboCup .
I don 't know how many of you have heard about RoboCup .
It 's an international autonomous robot soccer competition .
And the goal of RoboCup , the actual goal is , by the year 2050 we want to have full size , autonomous humanoid robots play soccer against the human World Cup champions and win .
It 's a true actual goal . It 's a very ambitious goal , but we truly believe that we can do it .
So , this is last year in China .
We were the very first team in the United States that qualified in the humanoid RoboCup competition .
This is this year in Austria .
You 're going to see the action , three against three , completely autonomous .
There you go . Yes !
The robots track and they team play amongst themselves .
It 's very impressive . It 's really a research event packaged in a more exciting competition event .
Louis Vuitton Cup trophy .
So , this is for the best humanoid , and we would like to bring this for the very first time , to the United States next year , so wish us luck .
Thank you .
DARwIn also has a lot of other talents .
Last year it actually conducted the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra for the holiday concert .
This is the next generation robot , DARwIn IV , but smarter , faster , stronger .
And it 's trying to show off its ability : " I 'm macho , I 'm strong .
I can also do some Jackie Chan-motion , martial art movements . "
And it walks away . So , this is DARwIn IV .
And again , you 'll be able to see it in the lobby .
We truly believe this is going to be the very first running humanoid robot in the United States . So , stay tuned .
All right . So I showed you some of our exciting robots at work .
So , what is the secret of our success ?
Where do we come up with these ideas ?
How do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
We have a fully autonomous vehicle that can drive into urban environments . We won a half a million dollars in the DARPA Urban Challenge .
We also have the world 's very first vehicle that can be driven by the blind .
We call it the Blind Driver Challenge , very exciting .
And many , many other robotics projects I want to talk about .
These are just the awards that we won in 2007 fall from robotics competitions and those kinds of things .
So , really , we have five secrets .
First is : Where do we get inspiration ?
Where do we get this spark of imagination ?
This is a true story , my personal story .
At night when I go to bed , 3 - 4 a.m. in the morning , I lie down , close my eyes , and I see these lines and circles and different shapes floating around .
And they assemble , and they form these kinds of mechanisms .
And then I think , " Ah this is cool . "
So , right next to my bed I keep a notebook , a journal , with a special pen that has a light on it , LED light , because I don 't want to turn on the light and wake up my wife .
So , I see this , scribble everything down , draw things , and I go to bed .
Every day in the morning , the first thing I do before my first cup of coffee , before I brush my teeth , I open my notebook .
Many times it 's empty , sometimes I have something there -- if something 's there , sometimes it 's junk -- but most of the time I can 't even read my handwriting .
And so , 4 am in the morning , what do you expect , right ?
So , I need to decipher what I wrote .
But sometimes I see this ingenious idea in there , and I have this eureka moment .
I directly run to my home office , sit at my computer , I type in the ideas , I sketch things out and I keep a database of ideas .
So , when we have these calls for proposals , I try to find a match between my potential ideas and the problem . If there is a match we write a research proposal , get the research funding in , and that 's how we start our research programs .
But just a spark of imagination is not good enough .
How do we develop these kinds of ideas ?
At our lab RoMeLa , the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory , we have these fantastic brainstorming sessions .
So , we gather around , we discuss about problems and social problems and talk about it .
But before we start we set this golden rule .
The rule is : Nobody criticizes anybody 's ideas .
Nobody criticizes any opinion .
This is important , because many times students , they fear or they feel uncomfortable how others might think about their opinions and thoughts .
So , once you do this , it is amazing how the students open up .
They have these wacky , cool , crazy , brilliant ideas , and the whole room is just electrified with creative energy .
And this is how we develop our ideas .
Well , we 're running out of time . One more thing I want to talk about is , you know , just a spark of idea and development is not good enough .
There was a great TED moment , I think it was Sir Ken Robinson , was it ?
He gave a talk about how education and school kills creativity .
Well , actually , there are two sides to the story .
So , there is only so much one can do with just ingenious ideas and creativity and good engineering intuition .
If you want to go beyond a tinkering , if you want to go beyond a hobby of robotics and really tackle the grand challenges of robotics through rigorous research we need more than that . This is where school comes in .
Batman , fighting against bad guys , he has his utility belt , he has his grappling hook , he has all different kinds of gadgets .
For us roboticists , engineers and scientists , these tools , these are the courses and classes you take in class .
Math , differential equations .
I have linear algebra , science , physics , even nowadays , chemistry and biology , as you 've seen .
These are all the tools that we need .
So , the more tools you have , for Batman , more effective at fighting the bad guys , for us , more tools to attack these kinds of big problems .
So , education is very important .
Also , it 's not about that , only about that . You also have to work really , really hard .
So , I always tell my students , " Work smart , then work hard . "
This picture in the back this is 3 a.m. in the morning .
I guarantee if you come to your lab at 3 - 4 am we have students working there , not because I tell them to , but because we are having too much fun .
Which leads to the last topic : Do not forget to have fun .
That 's really the secret of our success , we 're having too much fun .
I truly believe that highest productivity comes when you 're having fun , and that 's what we 're doing .
There you go . Thank you so much .
Mikko Hypponen : Fighting viruses , defending the net
It 's been 25 years since the first PC virus hit the net , and what was once an annoyance has become a sophisticated tool for crime and espionage . Computer security expert Mikko Hyppönen tells us how we can stop these new viruses from threatening the internet as we know it .
I love the Internet .
It 's true .
Think about everything it has brought us .
Think about all the services we use , all the connectivity , all the entertainment , all the business , all the commerce .
And it 's happening during our lifetimes .
I 'm pretty sure that one day we 'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now . This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online , the generation that built something really and truly global .
But yes , it 's also true that the Internet has problems , very serious problems , problems with security and problems with privacy .
I 've spent my career fighting these problems .
So let me show you something .
This here is Brain .
This is a floppy disk -- five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A.
It 's the first virus we ever found for PC computers .
And we actually know where Brain came from .
We know because it says so inside the code .
Let 's take a look .
All right .
That 's the boot sector of an infected floppy , and if we take a closer look inside , we 'll see that right there , it says , " Welcome to the dungeon . "
And then it continues , saying , 1986 , Basit and Amjad .
And Basit and Amjad are first names , Pakistani first names .
In fact , there 's a phone number and an address in Pakistan .
Now , 1986 .
Now it 's 2011 .
That 's 25 years ago .
The PC virus problem is 25 years old now .
So half a year ago , I decided to go to Pakistan myself .
So let 's see , here 's a couple of photos I took while I was in Pakistan .
This is from the city of Lahore , which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad , where Bin Laden was caught .
Here 's a typical street view .
And here 's the street or road leading to this building , which is 730 Nizam block at Allama Iqbal Town .
And I knocked on the door .
You want to guess who opened the door ?
Basit and Amjad ; they are still there .
So here standing up is Basit .
Sitting down is his brother Amjad .
These are the guys who wrote the first PC virus .
Now of course , we had a very interesting discussion .
I asked them why .
I asked them how they feel about what they started .
And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years .
So there is some sort of justice in the world after all .
Now , the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more .
So let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like .
What I 'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer .
So let me just mount some drives . Go over there .
What we have here is a list of old viruses .
So let me just run some viruses on my computer .
For example , let 's go with the Centipede virus first .
And you can see at the top of the screen , there 's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one .
You know that you 're infected because it actually shows up .
Here 's another one . This is the virus called Crash , invented in Russia in 1992 .
Let me show you one which actually makes some sound .
And the last example , guess what the Walker virus does ?
Yes , there 's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected .
So it used to be fairly easy to know that you 're infected by a virus , when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers .
Today , they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers .
Today , viruses are a global problem .
What we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs , where we track virus infections worldwide .
So we can actually see in real time that we 've just blocked viruses in Sweden and Taiwan and Russia and elsewhere .
In fact , if I just connect back to our lab systems through the Web , we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses , how many new examples of malware we find every single day .
Here 's the latest virus we 've found , in a file called Server.exe.
And we found it right over here three seconds ago -- the previous one , six seconds ago .
And if we just scroll around , it 's just massive .
We find tens of thousands , even hundreds of thousands .
And that 's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day .
So where are all these coming from then ?
Well today , it 's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses .
It 's gangs like -- let 's go to GangstaBucks.com.
This is a website operating in Moscow where these guys are buying infected computers .
So if you are a virus writer and you 're capable of infecting Windows computers , but you don 't know what to do with them , you can sell those infected computers -- somebody else 's computers -- to these guys .
And they 'll actually pay you money for those computers .
So how do these guys then monetize those infected computers ?
Well there 's multiple different ways , such as banking trojans , which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking , or keyloggers .
Keyloggers silently sit on your computer , hidden from view , and they record everything you type .
So you 're sitting on your computer and you 're doing Google searches .
Every single Google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals .
Every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals .
Same thing with every single password and so on .
But the thing that they 're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store .
Because when you do purchases in online stores , you will be typing in your name , the delivery address , your credit card number and the credit card security codes .
And here 's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago .
That 's the credit card number , that 's the expiration date , that 's the security code , and that 's the name of the owner of the card .
Once you gain access to other people 's credit card information , you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information .
And that , obviously , is a problem .
We now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime .
One example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations : we go and have a look at the pages of INTERPOL and search for wanted persons .
We find guys like Bjorn Sundin , originally from Sweden , and his partner in crime , also listed on the INTERPOL wanted pages , Mr. Shaileshkumar Jain , a U.S. citizen .
These guys were running an operation called I.M.U. , a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions .
They are both right now on the run .
Nobody knows where they are .
U.S. officials , just a couple of weeks ago , froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain , and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it .
So the amount of money online crime generates is significant .
And that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks .
We know that online criminals are hiring programmers , hiring testing people , testing their code , having back-end systems with SQL databases .
And they can afford to watch how we work -- like how security people work -- and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build .
They also use the global nature of Internet to their advantage .
I mean , the Internet is international .
That 's why we call it the Internet .
And if you just go and take a look at what 's happening in the online world , here 's a video built by Clarified Networks , which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world .
This operation , believed to be originally from Estonia , moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down .
So you just can 't shut these guys down .
They will switch from one country to another , from one jurisdiction to another -- moving around the world , using the fact that we don 't have the capability to globally police operations like this .
So the Internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world .
Now , criminals who weren 't capable of reaching us before can reach us .
So how do you actually go around finding online criminals ?
How do you actually track them down ?
Let me give you an example .
What we have here is one exploit file .
Here , I 'm looking at the Hex dump of an image file , which contains an exploit .
And that basically means , if you 're trying to view this image file on your Windows computer , it actually takes over your computer and runs code .
Now , if you 'll take a look at this image file -- well there 's the image header , and there the actual code of the attack starts .
And that code has been encrypted , so let 's decrypt it .
It has been encrypted with XOR function 97 .
You just have to believe me , it is , it is .
And we can go here and actually start decrypting it .
Well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted .
And I know , it doesn 't really look much different from the original .
But just keep staring at it .
You 'll actually see that down here you can see a Web address : unionseek.com / d / ioo.exe And when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program .
And that 's a backdoor which will take over your computer .
But even more interestingly , if we continue decrypting , we 'll find this mysterious string , which says O600KO78RUS .
That code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature .
It 's not used for anything .
And I was looking at that , trying to figure out what it means .
So obviously I Googled for it .
I got zero hits ; wasn 't there .
So I spoke with the guys at the lab .
And we have a couple of Russian guys in our labs , and one of them mentioned , well , it ends in RUS like Russia .
And 78 is the city code For example , you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that .
So I went looking for contacts in St. Petersburg , and through a long road , we eventually found this one particular website .
Here 's this Russian guy who 's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website , and he runs a blog under the popular Live Journal .
And on this blog , he blogs about his life , about his life in St. Petersburg -- he 's in his early 20s -- about his cat , about his girlfriend .
And he drives a very nice car .
In fact , this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz S600 V12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower .
Now that 's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in St. Petersburg .
How do I know about this car ?
Because he blogged about the car .
He actually had a car accident .
In downtown St. Petersburg , he actually crashed his car into another car .
And he put blogged images about the car accident -- that 's his Mercedes -- right here is the Lada Samara he crashed into .
And you can actually see that the license plate of the Samara ends in 78RUS .
And if you actually take a look at the scene picture , you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS .
Now I 'm not a lawyer , but if I would be , this is where I would say , " I rest my case . "
So what happens when online criminals are caught ?
Well in most cases it never gets this far .
The vast majority of the online crime cases , we don 't even know which continent the attacks are coming from .
And even if we are able to find online criminals , quite often there is no outcome .
The local police don 't act , or if they do , there 's not enough evidence , or for some reason we can 't take them down .
I wish it would be easier ; unfortunately it isn 't .
But things are also changing at a very rapid pace .
You 've all heard about things like Stuxnet .
So if you look at what Stuxnet did is that it infected these .
That 's a Siemens S7-400 PLC , programmable logic [ controller ] .
And this is what runs our infrastructure .
This is what runs everything around us .
PLC 's , these small boxes which have no display , no keyboard , which are programmed , are put in place , and they do their job .
For example , the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these .
And when Stuxnet infects one of these , that 's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about .
Because everything around us is being run by these .
I mean , we have critical infrastructure .
You go to any factory , any power plant , any chemical plant , any food processing plant , you look around -- everything is being run by computers .
Everything is being run by computers .
Everything is reliant on these computers working .
We have become very reliant on Internet , on basic things like electricity , obviously , on computers working .
And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us .
We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail .
So preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted aren 't there .
It 's actually very basic stuff -- thinking about continuity , thinking about backups , thinking about the things that actually matter .
Now I told you -- I love the Internet . I do .
Think about all the services we have online .
Think about if they are taken away from you , if one day you don 't actually have them for some reason or another .
I see beauty in the future of the Internet , but I 'm worried that we might not see that .
I 'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime .
Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us .
I 've spent my life defending the Net , and I do feel that if we don 't fight online crime , we are running a risk of losing it all .
We have to do this globally , and we have to do it right now .
What we need is more global , international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs -- these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks .
That 's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls .
What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks , and even more importantly , we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime , but haven 't yet done it .
We have to find the people with the skills , but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good .
Thank you very much .
Rogier van der Heide : Why light needs darkness
Lighting architect Rogier van der Heide offers a beautiful new way to look at the world -- by paying attention to light . Examples from classic buildings illustrate a deeply thought-out vision of the play of light around us . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
There 's a beautiful statement on the screen that says , " Light creates ambiance , light makes the feel of a space , and light is also the expression of structure . "
Well that was not by me .
That was , of course , by Le Corbusier , the famous architect .
And here you can see what he meant in one of his beautiful buildings -- the chapel Notre Dame du Haut , Ronchamp -- where he creates this light that he could only make because there 's also dark .
And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk -- that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness .
So this is how we normally would light our offices .
We have codes and standards that tell us that the lights should be so much lux and of great uniformity .
This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps .
And that is quite different from what I just showed you from Le Corbusier .
If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome , it would never have looked like this , because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building .
And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said , " Light : I make it in my buildings for comfort . "
And he didn 't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal , but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people .
He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun .
And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky , and where you can experience the sun , that give us a better life in the built environment , just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows .
What it all boils down to is , of course , the sun .
And this image of the sun may suggest that the sun is something evil and aggressive , but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the sun , and light is only a manifestation of that energy .
The sun is for dynamics , for color changes .
The sun is for beauty in our environment , like in this building -- the High Museum in Atlanta , which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy , together with Arup Lighting , a brilliant team of lighting designers , who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space , responding to what the sun does outside , just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof .
So in an indirect way , you can see the sun .
And what they did is they created an integral building element to improve the quality of the space that surrounds the visitors of the museum .
They created this shade that you can see here , which actually covers the sun , but opens up to the good light from the sky .
And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models , with quantitative , as well as qualitative , methods to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture .
They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way .
As you can see here , there 's some direct light on the floor , but they could easily figure out where that comes from .
And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun , the good part of the sun .
And enjoying the sun can be in many different ways , of course .
It can be just like this , or maybe like this , which is rather peculiar , but this is in 1963 -- the viewing of a sun eclipse in the United States .
And it 's just a bit bright up there , so these people have found a very intriguing solution .
This is , I think , a very illustrative image of what I try to say -- that the beautiful dynamics of sun , bringing these into the building , creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives .
And this is all about darkness as much as it is about lightness , of course , because otherwise you don 't see these dynamics .
As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk , this is a well-known office , which is the White Group .
They are in green energy consulting , or something like that .
And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn 't have any electric lighting at all .
It has only on one side this big , big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range .
So it can be very dim over there , and you do your work , and it can be very bright over there , and you do your work .
But actually the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull , and therefore helps us to enhance our lives .
I really owe a short introduction of this man to you .
This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago , which is the reason I bring him up now , because it 's kind of an anniversary year .
In the 1930s , Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design .
And he coined three terms , which are " focal glow , " " ambient luminescence " and " play of the brilliants " -- three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience .
So you begin with focal glow .
He meant something like this -- where the light gives direction to the space and helps you to get around .
Or something like this , which is the lighting design he did for General Motors , for the car showroom .
And you enter that space , and you feel like , " Wow ! This is so impressive , " just because of this focal point , this huge light source in the middle .
To me it is something from theatre , and I will get back to that a little bit later .
It 's the spotlight on the artist that helps you to focus .
It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land , highlighting it compared to the dim environment .
Or it can be in today 's retail , in the shopping environment -- lighting the merchandise and creating accents that help you to get around .
Ambient luminescence is something very different .
Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite , something without any focus , something where all details actually dissolve in infinity .
And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate .
It could also be something like this : the National Museum of Science in London , where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture .
And then finally , Kelly 's play of brilliants attitude , that really some play of the skyline of Hong Kong , or perhaps the chandelier in the opera house , or in the theater here , which is a decoration , the icing on the cake , something playful , something that is just an addition to the architectural environment , I would say .
These three distinct elements , together , make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better .
And we can only create these out of darkness .
And I will explain that further .
And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly , here on the left , was explaining to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe .
And behind them , you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design .
Those times , there were some early attempts also for light therapy already .
You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine , where people are put in the sun to get better .
It 's a little bit of a different story , this health aspect of light , than what I 'm telling you today .
In today 's modern medicine , there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way .
And there is the idea that , when we look at things , it is the yellow light that helps us the most , that we are the most sensitive for .
But our circadian rhythms , which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on , they are much more triggered by blue light .
And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment , we can help people to relax , or to be alert , to fall asleep , or to stay awake .
And that is how , maybe in the near future , light can help hospitals to make people better sooner , recover them quicker .
Maybe in the airplane , we can overcome jet lag like that .
Perhaps in school , we can help children to learn better because they concentrate more on their work .
And you can imagine a lot more applications .
But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life .
So light is , of course , for social interaction also -- to create relationships with all the features around us .
It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other .
And it is all about this planet .
But when you look at this planet at night , it looks like this .
And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today .
Because all this light here goes up to the sky .
It never reaches the ground where it was meant for .
It never is to the benefit of people .
It only spoils the darkness .
So at a global scale , it looks like this .
And , I mean , that is quite amazing , what you see here -- how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground .
Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be , it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything .
The world is changing though , and urbanization is a big driver of everything .
I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou , and I realized that 10 years ago , there was nothing like this , of these buildings .
It was just a much smaller city , and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous .
And we have to understand these main questions : How do people move through these new urban spaces ?
How do they share their culture ?
How do we tackle things like mobility ?
And how can light help there ?
Because the new technologies , they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments .
It 's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps .
And of course , we had the metal halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that .
Now we have LED , but here you see the latest one , and you see how incredibly small it is .
And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity because this tiny , tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it .
And we can actually leave it out where it 's not needed at all and where we can preserve darkness .
So that is a really interesting proposition , I think , and a new way of lighting the architectural environment with our well-being in mind .
The problem is though that I wanted to explain to you how this really works -- but I can have four of these on my finger , so you would not to be able to really see them .
So I asked our laboratory to do something about it , and they said , " Well , we can do something . "
They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam .
So here it is .
It 's the same thing as you can see over there -- just 200 times bigger .
And I will very quickly show you how it works .
So just to explain .
Now , every LED that is made these days gives blue light .
Now this is not very pleasant and comfortable .
And for that reason , we cover the LED with a phosphor cap .
And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant .
And then when you add the lens to that , you can bundle the light and send it to wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else .
So you can preserve the darkness and make the light .
I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works .
Thank you .
We can go further .
So we have to rethink the way we light our cities .
We have to think again about light as a default solution .
Why are all these motorways permanently lit ?
Is it really needed ?
Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness ?
Can we be more gentle with light ?
Like here -- this is a very low light level actually .
Can we engage people more in the lighting projects that we create , so they really want to connect with it , like here ?
Or can we create simply sculptures that are very inspiring to be in and to be around ?
And can we preserve the darkness ?
Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very , very challenging .
And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult .
Even in the oceans , we are creating a lot of light that we could actually ban also for animal life to have a much greater well-being .
And it 's known that migrating birds , for example , get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms .
And we discovered that , when we make those lights green , the birds , they actually go the right way .
They are not disturbed anymore .
And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here .
In all of these examples , I think , we should start making the light out of darkness , and use the darkness as a canvas -- like the visual artists do , like Edward Hopper in this painting .
I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting .
I think , when I see it , I start to think , who are those people ?
Where have they come from ? Where are they going ?
What just happened ? What will be happening in the next five minutes ?
And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light .
Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark .
And we can learn from that and create more interesting and inspiring architectural environments .
We can do that in commercial spaces like this .
And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe , which is , of course , the universe itself .
So I give you this wonderful , informative image of the sky , ranging from the inner city , where you may see one or two stars and nothing else , all the way to the rural environments , where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars .
In architecture , it works just the same .
By appreciating the darkness when you design the light , you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives .
This is the most well-known example , Tadao Ando 's Church of Light .
But I also think of Peter Zumthor 's spa in Vals , where light and dark , in very gentle combinations , alter each other to define the space .
Or Richard McCormack 's Southern tube station in London , where you can really see the sky , even though you are under the ground .
And finally I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater .
And I think it 's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks .
It wouldn 't be such an inspiring scenography without this theater .
And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light .
Thank you very much .
Eva Zeisel : The playful search for beauty
The ceramics designer Eva Zeisel looks back on a 75-year career . What keeps her work as fresh today as in 1926 ? Her sense of play and beauty , and her drive for adventure . Listen for stories from a rich , colorful life .
So I understand that this meeting was planned , and the slogan was From Was to Still .
And I am illustrating Still .
Which , of course , I am not agreeing with because , although I am 94 , I am not still working .
And anybody who asks me , " Are you still doing this or that ? "
I don 't answer because I 'm not doing things still , I 'm doing it like I always did .
I still have -- or did I use the word still ? I didn 't mean that .
I have my file which is called To Do . I have my plans .
I have my clients . I am doing my work like I always did .
So this takes care of my age .
I want to show you my work so you know what I am doing and why I am here .
This was about 1925 .
All of these things were made during the last 75 years .
But , of course , I 'm working since 25 , doing more or less what you see here . This is Castleton China .
This was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art .
This is now for sale at the Metropolitan Museum .
This is still at the Metropolitan Museum now for sale .
This is a portrait of my daughter and myself .
These were just some of the things I 've made .
I made hundreds of them for the last 75 years .
I call myself a maker of things .
I don 't call myself an industrial designer because I 'm other things .
Industrial designers want to make novel things .
Novelty is a concept of commerce , not an aesthetic concept .
The industrial design magazine , I believe , is called " Innovation . "
Innovation is not part of the aim of my work .
Well , makers of things : they make things more beautiful , more elegant , more comfortable than just the craftsmen do .
I have so much to say . I have to think what I am going to say .
Well , to describe our profession otherwise , we are actually concerned with the playful search for beauty .
That means the playful search for beauty was called the first activity of Man .
Sarah Smith , who was a mathematics professor at MIT , wrote , " The playful search for beauty was Man 's first activity -- that all useful qualities and all material qualities were developed from the playful search for beauty . "
These are tiles . The word , " playful " is a necessary aspect of our work because , actually , one of our problems is that we have to make , produce , lovely things throughout all of life , and this for me is now 75 years .
So how can you , without drying up , make things with the same pleasure , as a gift to others , for so long ?
The playful is therefore an important part of our quality as designer .
Let me tell you some about my life .
As I said , I started to do these things 75 years ago .
My first exhibition in the United States was at the Sesquicentennial exhibition in 1926 -- that the Hungarian government sent one of my hand-drawn pieces as part of the exhibit .
My work actually took me through many countries , and showed me a great part of the world .
This is not that they took me -- the work didn 't take me -- I made the things particularly because I wanted to use them to see the world .
I was incredibly curious to see the world , and I made all these things , which then finally did take me to see many countries and many cultures .
I started as an apprentice to a Hungarian craftsman , and this taught me what the guild system was in Middle Ages .
The guild system : that means when I was an apprentice , I had to apprentice myself in order to become a pottery master .
In my shop where I studied , or learned , there was a traditional hierarchy of master , journeyman and learned worker , and apprentice , and I worked as the apprentice .
The work as an apprentice was very primitive .
That means I had to actually learn every aspect of making pottery by hand .
We mashed the clay with our feet when it came from the hillside .
After that , it had to be kneaded . It had to then go in , kind of , a mangle .
And then finally it was prepared for the throwing .
And there I really worked as an apprentice .
My master took me to set ovens because this was part of oven-making , oven-setting , in the time .
And finally , I had received a document that I had accomplished my apprenticeship successfully , that I had behaved morally , and this document was given to me by the Guild of Roof-Coverers , Rail-Diggers , Oven-Setters , Chimney Sweeps and Potters .
I also got at the time a workbook which explained my rights and my working conditions , and I still have that workbook .
First I set up a shop in my own garden , and made pottery which I sold on the marketplace in Budapest .
And there I was sitting , and my then-boyfriend -- I didn 't mean it was a boyfriend like it is meant today -- but my boyfriend and I sat at the market and sold the pots .
My mother thought that this was not very proper , so she sat with us to add propriety to this activity .
However , after a while there was a new factory being built in Budapest , a pottery factory , a large one .
And I visited it with several ladies , and asked all sorts of questions of the director .
Then the director asked me , why do you ask all these questions ?
I said , I also have a pottery .
So he asked me , could he please visit me , and then finally he did , and explained to me that what I did now in my shop was an anachronism , that the industrial revolution had broken out , and that I rather should join the factory .
There he made an art department for me where I worked for several months .
However , everybody in the factory spent his time at the art department .
The director there said there were several women casting and producing my designs now in molds , and this was sold also to America .
I remember that it was quite successful .
However , the director , the chemist , model maker -- everybody -- concerned himself much more with the art department -- that means , with my work -- than making toilets , so finally they got a letter from the center , from the bank who owned the factory , saying , make toilet-setting behind the art department , and that was my end .
So this gave me the possibility because now I was a journeyman , and journeymen also take their satchel and go to see the world .
So as a journeyman , I put an ad into the paper that I had studied , that I was a down-to-earth potter 's journeyman and I was looking for a job as a journeyman .
And I got several answers , and I accepted the one which was farthest from home and practically , I thought , halfway to America .
And that was in Hamburg .
Then I first took this job in Hamburg , at an art pottery where everything was done on the wheel , and so I worked in a shop where there were several potters .
And the first day , I was coming to take my place at the turntable -- there were three or four turntables -- and one of them , behind where I was sitting , was a hunchback , a deaf-mute hunchback , who smelled very bad .
So I doused him in cologne every day , which he thought was very nice , and therefore he brought bread and butter every day , which I had to eat out of courtesy .
The first day I came to work in this shop there was on my wheel a surprise for me .
My colleagues had thoughtfully put on the wheel where I was supposed to work a very nicely modeled natural man 's organs .
After I brushed them off with a hand motion , they were very -- I finally was now accepted , and worked there for some six months .
This was my first job .
If I go on like this , you will be here till midnight .
So I will try speed it up a little Moderator : Eva , we have about five minutes .
Eva Zeisel : Are you sure ?
Moderator : Yes , I am sure .
EZ : Well , if you are sure , I have to tell you that within five minutes I will talk very fast .
And actually , my work took me to many countries because I used my work to fill my curiosity .
And among other things , other countries I worked , was in the Soviet Union , where I worked from ' 32 to ' 37 -- actually , to ' 36 .
I was finally there , although I had nothing to do -- I was a foreign expert .
I became art director of the china and glass industry , and eventually under Stalin 's purges -- at the beginning of Stalin 's purges , I didn 't know that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were arrested .
So I was arrested quite early in Stalin 's purges , and spent 16 months in a Russian prison .
The accusation was that I had successfully prepared an Attentat on Stalin 's life .
This was a very dangerous accusation .
And if this is the end of my five minutes , I want to tell you that I actually did survive , which was a surprise .
But since I survived and I 'm here , and since this is the end of the five minutes , I will -- Moderator : Tell me when your last trip to Russia was .
Weren 't you there recently ?
EZ : Oh , this summer , in fact , the Lomonosov factory was bought by an American company , invited me .
They found out that I had worked in ' 33 at this factory , and they came to my studio in Rockland County , and brought the 15 of their artists to visit me here .
And they invited myself to come to the Russian factory last summer , in July , to make some dishes , design some dishes .
And since I don 't like to travel alone , they also invited my daughter , son-in-law and granddaughter , so we had a lovely trip to see Russia today , which is not a very pleasant and happy view .
Here I am now , if this is the end ? Thank you .
Bonnie Bassler : How bacteria " talk "
Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria " talk " to each other , using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks . The find has stunning implications for medicine , industry -- and our understanding of ourselves .
Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth .
They 've been here for billions of years , and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms .
So they are one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA .
They have very few genes , and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out .
And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment , they grow to twice their size , they cut themselves down in the middle , and one cell becomes two , and so on and so on .
They just grow and divide , and grow and divide -- so a kind of boring life , except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters .
I know you guys think of yourself as humans , and this is sort of how I think of you .
This man is supposed to represent a generic human being , and all of the circles in that man are all of the cells that make up your body .
There is about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do , but you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life .
So , 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being .
And of course it 's the DNA that counts , so here 's all the A , T , Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code , and give you all your charming characteristics .
You have about 30,000 genes .
Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life .
At the best , you 're 10 percent human , but more likely about one percent human , depending on which of these metrics you like .
I know you think of yourself as human beings , but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial .
These bacteria are not passive riders , these are incredibly important , they keep us alive .
They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy .
They digest our food , they make our vitamins , they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out .
So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive , and they never get any press for that .
But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well .
So , there 's all kinds of bacteria on the Earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time , and if they are , they make you incredibly sick .
And so , the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do , or all the bad things that bacteria do .
The question we had is how could they do anything at all ?
I mean they 're incredibly small , you have to have a microscope to see one .
They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide , and they 've always been considered to be these asocial reclusive organisms .
And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals .
And so we wanted to think if there couldn 't be a different way that bacteria live .
The clue to this came from another marine bacterium , and it 's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri .
What you 're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium , a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean , named Vibrio fischeri .
This bacterium has the special property that it makes light , so it makes bioluminescence , like fireflies make light .
We 're not doing anything to the cells here .
We just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room , and this is what we see .
What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light , but when the bacteria made light .
What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone , so when they were in dilute suspension , they made no light .
But when they grew to a certain cell number all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously .
The question that we had is how can bacteria , these primitive organisms , tell the difference from times when they 're alone , and times when they 're in a community , and then all do something together .
What we 've figured out is that the way that they do that is that they talk to each other , and they talk with a chemical language .
This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell .
When it 's alone it doesn 't make any light .
But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones , and these are the red triangles , and when the bacteria is alone the molecules just float away and so no light .
But when the bacteria grow and double and they 're all participating in making these molecules , the molecule -- the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number .
And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are , they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony .
That 's how bioluminescence works -- they 're talking with these chemical words .
The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology .
Again , another plug for the animals in the ocean , Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid .
What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid , and it 's been turned on its back , and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells , they live in there , at high cell number that molecule is there , and they 're making light .
The reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light .
The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii , just in sort of shallow knee-deep water .
The squid is nocturnal , so during the day it buries itself in the sand and sleeps , but then at night it has to come out to hunt .
On bright nights when there is lots of starlight or moonlight that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in , since it 's just in those couple feet of water .
What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over this specialized light organ housing the bacteria .
Then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back .
And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom -- which is made by the bacterium -- exactly matches how much light hits the squid 's back , so the squid doesn 't make a shadow .
It actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an anti-predation device so predators can 't see its shadow , calculate its trajectory , and eat it .
This is like the stealth bomber of the ocean .
But then if you think about it , the squid has this terrible problem because it 's got this dying , thick culture of bacteria and it can 't sustain that .
And so what happens is every morning when the sun comes up the squid goes back to sleep , it buries itself in the sand , and it 's got a pump that 's attached to its circadian rhythm , and when the sun comes up it pumps out like 95 percent of the bacteria .
Now the bacteria are dilute , that little hormone molecule is gone , so they 're not making light -- but of course the squid doesn 't care . It 's asleep in the sand .
And as the day goes by the bacteria double , they release the molecule , and then light comes on at night , exactly when the squid wants it .
First we figured out how this bacterium does this , but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what 's the mechanism .
And what we found -- so this is now supposed to be , again , my bacterial cell -- is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein -- that 's the red box -- it 's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule , the red triangle .
And then as the cells grow , they 're all releasing that molecule into the environment , so there 's lots of molecule there .
And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule .
These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells .
When the molecule increases to a certain amount -- which says something about the number of cells -- it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light .
Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous , glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean -- all bacteria have systems like this .
So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other .
They make chemical words , they recognize those words , and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison .
We have a fancy name for this : we call it quorum sensing .
They vote with these chemical votes , the vote gets counted , and then everybody responds to the vote .
What 's important for today 's talk is that we know that there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions .
But the one that 's probably the most important to you is virulence .
It 's not like a couple bacteria get in you and they start secreting some toxins -- you 're enormous , that would have no effect on you . You 're huge .
What they do , we now understand , is they get in you , they wait , they start growing , they count themselves with these little molecules , and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together , they are going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host .
Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing .
That 's how it works .
We also then went to look at what are these molecules -- these were the red triangles on my slides before .
This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule .
This is the word that it talks with .
So then we started to look at other bacteria , and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we 've discovered .
What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related .
The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria .
But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species .
What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages .
Each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other .
So these are private , secret conversations .
These conversations are for intraspecies communication .
Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that 's its language that allows it to count its own siblings .
Once we got that far we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors .
But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don 't live by themselves , they live in incredible mixtures , with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria .
And that 's depicted on this slide . This is your skin .
So this is just a picture -- a micrograph of your skin .
Anywhere on your body , it looks pretty much like this , and what I hope you can see is that there 's all kinds of bacteria there .
And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria , and it 's about counting your neighbors , it 's not enough to be able to only talk within your species .
There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population .
So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria , and what we 've found now is that in fact , bacteria are multilingual .
They all have a species-specific system -- they have a molecule that says " me . "
But then , running in parallel to that is a second system that we 've discovered , that 's generic .
So , they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor , and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria .
It 's used by all different bacteria and it 's the language of interspecies communication .
What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you .
They take that information inside , and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who 's in the minority and who 's in the majority of any given population .
Then again we turn to chemistry , and we figured out what this generic molecule is -- that was the pink ovals on my last slide , this is it .
It 's a very small , five-carbon molecule .
What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule .
So they 're all using this molecule for interspecies communication .
This is the bacterial Esperanto .
Once we got that far , we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language .
But what we started to think is that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well .
I 've told you that bacteria do have all these social behaviors , they communicate with these molecules .
Of course , I 've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing .
We thought , what if we made these bacteria so they can 't talk or they can 't hear ?
Couldn 't these be new kinds of antibiotics ?
Of course , you 've just heard and you already know that we 're running out of antibiotics .
Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now , and that 's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria .
They either pop the bacterial membrane , they make the bacterium so it can 't replicate its DNA .
We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants .
And so now of course we have this global problem in infectious diseases .
We thought , well what if we could sort of do behavior modifications , just make these bacteria so they can 't talk , they can 't count , and they don 't know to launch virulence .
And so that 's exactly what we 've done , and we 've sort of taken two strategies .
The first one is we 've targeted the intraspecies communication system .
So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules -- which you saw -- but they 're a little bit different .
And so they lock into those receptors , and they jam recognition of the real thing .
By targeting the red system , what we are able to do is to make species-specific , or disease-specific , anti-quorum sensing molecules .
We 've also done the same thing with the pink system .
We 've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we 've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system .
The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria .
To finish I 'll just show you the strategy .
In this one I 'm just using the interspecies molecule , but the logic is exactly the same .
What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal , in this case , a mouse , it doesn 't initiate virulence right away .
It gets in , it starts growing , it starts secreting its quorum sensing molecules .
It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they 're going to launch their attack , and the animal dies .
What we 've been able to do is to give these virulent infections , but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum sensing molecules -- so these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing , but they 're a little bit different which I 've depicted on this slide .
What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium -- a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium -- in the same time we give our anti-quorum sensing molecule , in fact , the animal lives .
We think that this is the next generation of antibiotics and it 's going to get us around , at least initially , this big problem of resistance .
What I hope you think , is that bacteria can talk to each other , they use chemicals as their words , they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we 're just now starting to learn about .
Of course what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular .
So in the spirit of TED they 're doing things together because it makes a difference .
What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors , and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals .
What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity .
Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years ; humans , couple hundred thousand .
We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works .
We think , by studying bacteria , we 're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body .
We know that the principles and the rules , if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms , the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well .
I hope that what you 've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other .
By using these two molecules they can say " me " and they can say " you . "
Again of course that 's what we do , both in a molecular way , and also in an outward way , but I think about the molecular stuff .
This is exactly what happens in your body .
It 's not like your heart cells and your kidney cells get all mixed up every day , and that 's because there 's all of this chemistry going on , these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is , and what their tasks should be .
Again , we think that bacteria invented that , and you 've just evolved a few more bells and whistles , but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study .
The final thing is , again just to reiterate that there 's this practical part , and so we 've made these anti-quorum sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics .
But then , to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the Earth , we 've also made pro-quorum sensing molecules .
So , we 've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better .
Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you , keeping you healthy .
What we 're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you , in the hopes of making you more healthy , making those conversations better , so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own .
Finally , I wanted to show you this is my gang at Princeton , New Jersey .
Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture .
I hope when you learn things , like about how the natural world works -- I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you get to hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world it was done by a child .
Science is done by that demographic .
All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old , and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country .
It 's a really lucky demographic to work with .
I keep getting older and older and they 're always the same age , and it 's just a crazy delightful job .
I want to thank you for inviting me here .
It 's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference .
Thanks .
Richard Baraniuk : The birth of the open-source learning revolution
In 2006 , open-learning visionary Richard Baraniuk explains the vision behind Connexions , an open-source , online education system . It cuts out the textbook , allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely , anywhere in the world .
I 'm Rich Baraniuk .
And what I 'd like to talk a little bit about today are some ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been talked about the last two days .
In fact , so many different points of resonance that it 's going to be difficult to bring them all up , but I 'll try to do my best .
Does anybody remember these ?
OK , so these are LP records and they 've been replaced , right ?
They 've been swept away over the last two decades by these types of world-flattening digitization technologies , right ?
And I think it was best witnessed when Thomas was playing the music as we came in the room today .
What 's happened in the music world is there 's a culture or an ecosystem that 's been created that , if you take some words from Apple , the catchphrase that we create , rip , mix and burn .
What I mean by that is that anyone in the world is free and allowed to create new music and musical ideas .
Anyone in the world is allowed to rip or copy musical ideas , use them in innovative ways .
Anyone is allowed to mix them in different types of ways , draw connections between musical ideas and people can burn them or create final products and continue the circle .
And what that 's done is it 's created , like I said , a vibrant community that 's very inclusive with people continually working to connect musical ideas , innovate them and keep things constantly up to date .
Today 's hit single is not last year 's hit single .
But , I 'm not here to talk about music today .
I 'm here to talk about books .
In particular , textbooks and the kind of educational materials that we use every day in school .
Has anyone here ever been to school ?
OK , does anybody realize there 's a crisis in our schools , around the world ?
OK , I 'm not going to spend too much time on that , but what I want to talk about is some of the disconnects that appear when an author publishes a book that in fact , the publishing process -- just because of the fact that it 's complicated , it 's heavy , books are expensive -- creates a sort of a wall between authors of books and the ultimate users of books , be they teachers , students or just general readers .
And this is even more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world 's major languages , and especially English .
And I 'm going to call these people below the barrier Shut-outs , because they 're really shut out of the process of being able to share their knowledge with the world .
And so what I want to talk about today is trying to take these ideas that we 've seen in the musical culture and try to bring these towards reinventing the way we think about writing books , using them and teaching from them .
So , that 's what I 'd like to talk about and really , how do we get from where we are now to where we need to go ?
So , the first thing I 'd like you to do is a little thought experiment .
So , imagine taking all the world 's books .
OK , everybody imagine books and imagine just tearing out the pages .
So , liberating these pages and imagine digitizing them and then storing them in a vast , interconnected , global repository .
Think of it as a massive iTunes for book type content .
And then take that material and imagine making it all open , so that people can modify it , play with it , improve it .
Imagine making it free , so that anyone in the world can have access to all of this knowledge , and imagine using information technology so that you can update this content , improve it , play with it , on a timescale that 's more on the order of seconds instead of years .
Instead of editions coming out every two years , of a book , imagine it coming out every 25 seconds .
So , imagine we could do that and imagine we could put people into this .
So that we could truly build an ecosystem with not just authors , but all the people who could be or want to be authors in all the different languages of the world , and I think if you could do this , it would be called , well , I 'm just going to refer to it as a knowledge ecosystem .
So , really , this is the dream and in a sense what you can think of it is we are trying to enable anyone in the world , I mean anyone in the world , to be their own educational DJ , creating educational materials , sharing them with the world , constantly innovating on them . So , this is the dream .
In fact , this dream is actually being realized .
Over the last six-and-a-half years , we 've been working really hard at Rice University on a project called Connexions , and so what I 'd like to do for the rest of the talk is just tell you a little bit about what people are doing with Connexions , which you can kind of think of as the counterpoint to Nicholas Negroponte 's talk yesterday , where they 're working on the hardware of bringing education to the world .
We 're working on the open-source tools and the content .
So , that 's sort of to put it in perspective here .
So , create . So what are some of the people that are using these kind of tools ?
Well , the first thing is there 's a community of engineering professors , from Cambridge to Kyoto , who are developing engineering content in electrical engineering to develop what you can think of as a massive , super textbook that covers the entire area of electrical engineering -- and not only that , it can be customized for use in each of their own individual institutions .
If people like Kitty Jones -- right , a shut-out -- a private music teacher and mom from Champagne , Illinois , who wanted to share her fantastic music content with the world , on how to teach kids how to play music .
Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month .
Tremendous , tremendous use .
In fact , a lot of this use coming from Unites States , K-through-12 schools because anyone who 's involved in a school scale back , the first thing that 's cut is the music curriculum and so this is just indicating the tremendous thirst for this kind of open , free content .
A lot of teachers are using this stuff . OK , what about ripping ?
What about copying , reusing , right ?
A team of volunteers at the University of Texas El Paso , graduate students translating this engineering super textbook ideas and within about a week , having this be some of our most popular material in widespread use all over Latin America and in particular in Mexico , because of the open extensible nature of this .
People , volunteers and even companies that are translating material into Asian languages like Chinese , Japanese and Thai , to spread the knowledge even further .
OK , what about people who are mixing ? What does " mixing " mean ?
" Mixing " means building customized courses , means building customized books .
Companies like National Instruments , who are embedding very powerful , interactive simulations into the materials , so that we can go way beyond our regular kind of textbook to an experience that all the teaching materials are things you can actually interact with and play around with and actually learn as you do .
We 've been working with Teachers Without Borders who are very interested in mixing our materials .
They 're going to be using Connexions as their platform to develop and deliver teaching materials for teaching teachers how to teach in 84 countries that are around the world .
TWB is currently in Iraq training 20,000 teachers supported by USAID and to them , this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context is extraordinarily important , because just providing free content to people has actually been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism , that if you don 't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material , translate it into their own language and take ownership of it , it 's not good .
OK , other organizations we 've been working with , UC Merced , people know about UC Merced .
It 's a new university in California , in the Central Valley , working very closely with community colleges .
They 're actually developing a lot of their science and engineering curriculum to spread widely around the world in our system and they 're also trying to develop all of their software tools completely open-source .
We 've been working with AMD , which has a project called 50 by ' 15 , which is trying to bring Internet connectivity to 50 percent of the world 's population by 2015 .
We 're going to be providing content to them in a whole range of different languages .
And we 've also been working with a number of other organizations .
In particular , a bunch of the projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation , who have taken a real leadership role in this area of open content .
OK , burn , I think this is sort of , quite interesting .
" Burn " is the idea of trying to create the physical instantiation of one of these courses .
And I think a lot of you received , I think all of you received one of these music books in your gift pack .
A little present for you .
Just to tell you quickly about it : this is an engineering textbook .
It 's about 300 pages long , hardbound .
This costs , anybody guess ?
How much would it cost in a bookstore ?
Audience : 65 dollars .
Richard Baraniuk : This costs 22 dollars to the student .
Why does it cost 22 dollars ?
Because it 's published on demand and it 's developed from this repository of open materials .
If this book were to be published by a regular publisher , it would cost at least 122 dollars .
So what we 're seeing is moving this burning or publication process from the regular sort of single-authored book towards community-authored materials that are modular , that are customized to each individual class and published on demand very inexpensively , either pushed out through Amazon , or published directly through an on-demand press , like Coop .
And I think that this is an extraordinarily interesting area because there is tremendous area under this long tail in publishing .
We 're not talking about the Harry Potter end , right at the left side .
We 're talking about books on hyper geometric partial differential equations .
Right , books that might sell 100 copies a year , 1,000 copies a year .
There is tremendous sustaining revenue under this long tail to sustain open projects like ours , but also to sustain this new emergence of on-demand publishers , like Coop , who produced these two books .
And I think one of the things that you should take away from this talk , is that there 's an impending cut-out-the-middle-man , disintermediation , that 's going to be happening in the publishing industry , and it 's going to reach a crescendo over the next few years , and I think that it 's for our benefit , really , and for the world 's benefit .
OK , so what are the enablers ?
What 's really making all of this happen ?
There 's tons of technology , and the only piece of technology that I really want to talk about is XML .
How many people know about XML ?
Oh , great , so it 's the future of the web , right ?
It 's semantic representation of comment , content , and what you can really think of XML in this case , is it 's the packaging that we 're putting around these pages .
Remember we took the book , tore the pages out ?
Well , what the XML is going to do is it 's going to turn those pages into Lego blocks .
XML are the nubs on the Lego that allow us to combine the content together in myriad different ways , and it provides us a framework to share content .
So , it lets you take this ecosystem in its primordial state , right , of all this content , all the pages you 've torn out of books , and create highly sophisticated learning machines : books , courses , course packs .
It gives you the ability to personalize the learning experience to each individual student , so that every student can have a book or a course that 's customized to their learning style , their context , their language and the things that excite them .
It lets you reuse the same materials in multiple different ways and surprising new ways .
It lets you interconnect ideas indicating how fields relate to each other , and I 'll just give you my personal story .
We came up with this six-and-a-half years ago because I teach the stuff in the red box .
And my day job , as Chris said , I 'm an electrical engineering professor .
I teach signal processing and my challenge was to show that this math -- wow , about half of you have already fallen asleep just looking at the equation -- but this seemingly dry math is actually the center of this tremendously powerful web that links technology -- that links really cool applications like music synthesizers to tremendous economic opportunities , but also governed by intellectual property .
And the thing that I realized is there was no way that I , as an engineer , could write this book that would get all of this across .
We needed a community to do it and we needed new tools to be able to interconnect these ideas , and I think that really , in a sense , what we 're trying to do is make Minsky 's dream come to a reality , where you can imagine all the books in a library actually starting to talk to each other .
And people who are teachers out here , whoever taught , you know this -- it 's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about .
OK , back to math . Imagine this is possible -- that every single equation that you click on in one of your new e-texts is something that you 're going to be able to explore and experiment with .
So imagine your kid 's algebra textbook in seventh grade .
You can click on every single equation and bring up a little tool to be able to experiment with it , tinker with it , understand it , because we really don 't understand until we do .
The same type of mark-up , like mathML , for chemistry .
Imagine chemistry textbooks that actually understand the structure of how molecules are formed .
Imagine music XML that actually lets you delve into the semantic structure of music , play with it , understand it .
It 's no wonder that everybody 's getting into it , right ?
Even the three wise men .
OK , the second big enabler , and this is where I told a big lie .
The second big enabler is intellectual property , because in fact I got up here and I talked about how great the music culture is .
We can share and rip , mix and burn , but in fact that 's all illegal .
And we would be accused of pirates for doing that , because this music has been propertized .
It 's now owned , right , much of it by big industries .
So , really , the key thing here is we can 't let this happen .
We can 't let this Napster thing happen here .
So , what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning and what we have to do is find an intellectual property framework that makes sharing safe , and makes it easily understandable , and the inspiration here is taken from open-source software , things like Linux and the GPL .
And the ideas , the creative commons licenses .
How many people have heard of creative commons ?
If you have not , you must learn about it . Creativecommons.org.
At the bottom of every piece of material in Connexions and in lots of other projects , you can find their logo .
Clicking on that logo takes you to an absolute no-nonsense , human-readable document , a deed , that tells you exactly what you can do with this content .
In fact , you 're free to share it , to do all of these things , to copy it , to change it , even to make commercial use of it as long as you attribute the author .
Because in academic publishing and much of educational publishing , it 's really this idea of sharing knowledge and making impact that 's why people write , not necessarily making bucks .
We 're not talking about Harry Potter , right ?
We 're at the long tail end here .
Behind that is the legal code , so if you want to very carefully construct it , and creative commons is taking off -- over 43 million things out there , licensed with a creative commons license .
Not just text , but music , images , video , and there 's actually a tremendous uptake of the number of people that are actually licensing music to make it free for people who do this whole idea of re-sampling , rip , mixing , burning and sharing .
So I 'd like to conclude with just the last few points .
So , we 've built this idea of a commons . People are using it .
We get over 500,000 unique visitors per month , just to our particular site .
MIT open courseware , which is another large open-content site , gets a similar number of hits , but how do we protect this ?
How do we protect it into the future ?
And the first thing that people are probably thinking is quality control , right ?
Because we 're saying that anybody can contribute things to this commons . Anybody can contribute anything .
So that could be a problem .
It didn 't take long until people started contributing materials , for example , on lingerie , which is actually a pretty good module .
The only problem is it 's plagiarized from a major French feminist journal , and when you go to the supposed course website , it points to a lingerie-selling website .
This is a little bit of a problem , so we clearly need some kind of idea of quality control , and this is really where the idea of review and peer review comes in .
OK , you come to TED . Why do you come to TED ?
Because Chris and his team have ensured that things are very , very high quality , right , and so we need to be able to do the same thing .
And we need to be able to design structures and what we 're doing is designing social software to enable anyone to build their own peer review process , and we call these things " lenses . "
And basically what they allow is anyone out there to develop their own peer review process , so that they can focus on the content in the repository that they think is really important and you can think of TED as a potential lens .
So I 'd just like to end by saying , you can really view this as a call to action .
Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge .
All of you here are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge and what I 'd like to do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of its type , because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and educational publishing .
So , thanks very much .
Sam Martin : Claim your " manspace "
Author Sam Martin shares photos of a quirky world hobby that 's trending with the XY set : " manspaces . " Grab a cold one and enjoy .
So , I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves , but first I want to tell you why I 'm here .
I 'm here for two reasons . These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren .
When Ford was about three years old , we shared a very small room together , in a very small space .
My office was on one half of the bedroom , and his bedroom was on the other half .
And you can imagine , if you 're a writer , that things would get really crowded around deadlines .
So when Wren was on the way , I realized I needed to find a space of my own .
There was no more space in the house . So I went out to the backyard , and without any previous building experience , and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials , I built this space .
It had everything I needed . It was quiet .
There was enough space . And I had control , which was very important .
As I was building this space , I thought to myself , " Surely I 'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own . "
So I did some research .
And I found that there was an historic precedence .
Hemingway had his writing space .
Elvis had two or three manspaces , which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland .
In the popular culture , Superman had the Fortress of Solitude , and there was , of course , the Batcave .
So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now .
Here is one of the first spaces I found . It is in Austin , Texas , which is where I 'm from .
On the outside it looks like a very typical garage , a nice garage .
But on the inside , it 's anything but .
And this , to me , is a pretty classic manspace .
It has neon concert posters , a bar and , of course , the leg lamp , which is very important .
I soon realized that manspaces didn 't have to be only inside .
This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard , out of landscaping timbers , astroturf .
And he found the scoreboard in the trash .
Here 's another outdoor space , a little bit more sophisticated .
This a 1923 wooden tugboat , made completely out of Douglas fir .
The guy did it all himself .
And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside .
So , pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find , which was , quite frankly , a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs .
There were definitely hang-out spots .
But some were for working , some were for playing , some were for guys to collect their things .
Most of all , I was just surprised with what I was finding .
Take this place for example .
On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage .
This is in Long Island , New York .
The only thing that might tip you off is the round window .
On the inside it 's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house .
The man imported all the materials from Japan , and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style .
It has no nails or screws .
All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed .
Here is another pretty typical scene . This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood .
But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside .
And so there is a good reason for this .
It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough .
He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics , and he trains in this space . He trains other people .
And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments , which is another sort of important part about a manspace .
So , while this space represents someone 's profession , this one certainly represents a passion .
It 's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship .
It 's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s .
Museum quality .
So , as I came to the end of my journey , I found over 50 spaces .
And they were unexpected and they were surprising .
But they were also -- I was really impressed by how personalized they were , and how much work went into them .
And I realized that 's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did .
And they really loved their professions .
And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies .
And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do , and who they were .
So if you don 't have a space of your own , I highly recommend finding one , and getting into it .
Thank you very much .
Stefon Harris : There are no mistakes on the bandstand
What is a mistake ? By talking through examples with his improvisational Jazz quartet , Stefon Harris walks us to a profound truth : many actions are perceived as mistakes only because we don 't react to them appropriately .
Okay , I have no idea what we 're going to play .
I won 't be able to tell you what it is until it happens .
I didn 't realize there was going to be a little music before .
So I think I 'm going to start with what I just heard .
Okay , so first of all , let 's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums , Burniss Travis on the bass , and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano .
So the bandstand , as we call it , this is an incredible space .
It is really a sacred space .
And one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future , or the past .
You really are alive right here in this moment .
There are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand .
We had no idea what key we were going to play in .
In the middle , we sort of made our way into a song called " Titi Boom . "
But that could have happened -- maybe , maybe not .
Everyone 's listening . We 're responding .
You have no time for projected ideas .
So the idea of a mistake : From the perspective of a jazz musician , it 's easier to talk about someone else 's mistake .
So the way I perceive a mistake when I 'm on the bandstand -- first of all , we don 't really see it as a mistake .
The only mistake lies in that I 'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did .
Every " mistake " is an opportunity in jazz .
So it 's hard to even describe what a funny note would be .
So for example , if I played a color , like we were playing on a palette , that sounded like this ...
So if Christian played a note -- like play an F.
See , these are all right inside of the color palette .
If you played an E.
See , these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting .
If you played an F # though , to most people 's ears , they would perceive that as a mistake .
So I 'm going to show you , we 're going to play just for a second .
And we 're going to play on this palette .
And at some point , Christian will introduce this note .
And we won 't react to it .
He 'll introduce it for a second and then I 'll stop , I 'll talk for a second .
We 'll see what happens when we play with this palette .
So someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake .
The only way that I would say it was a mistake is in that we didn 't react to it .
It was an opportunity that was missed .
So it 's unpredictable . We 'll paint this palette again .
He 'll play it . I don 't know how we 'll react to it , but something will change .
We 'll all accept his ideas , or not .
So you see , he played this note .
I ended up creating a melody out of it .
The texture changed in the drums this time .
It got a little bit more rhythmic , a little bit more intense in response to how I responded to it .
So there is no mistake .
The only mistake is if I 'm not aware , if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we don 't allow for creativity .
So jazz , this bandstand is absolutely amazing .
It 's a very purifying experience .
And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don 't take it for granted .
We know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing .
So how does this all relate to behavioral finance ?
Well we 're jazz musicians , so stereotypically we don 't have a great relationship to finance .
Anyway , I just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it .
And the other dynamic of it is that we don 't micromanage in jazz .
You have some people who do .
But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities .
If I come up and I dictate to the band that I want to play like this and I want the music to go this way , and I just jump right in ...
ready , just play some time .
One , two , one , two , three , four .
It 's kind of chaotic because I 'm bullying my ideas .
I 'm telling them , " You come with me over this way . "
If I really want the music to go there , the best way for me to do it is to listen .
This is a science of listening .
It has far more to do with what I can perceive than what it is that I can do .
So if I want the music to get to a certain level of intensity , the first step for me is to be patient , to listen to what 's going on and pull from something that 's going on around me .
When you do that , you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more , and gradually it builds .
Watch . One , two , a one , two , three , four .
Totally different experience when I 'm pulling ideas .
It 's much more organic . It 's much more nuanced .
It 's not about bullying my vision or anything like that .
It 's about being here in the moment , accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow .
Thank you .
Michael Archer : How we 'll resurrect the gastric brooding frog , the Tasmanian tiger
The gastric brooding frog lays its eggs just like any other frog -- then swallows them whole to incubate . That is , it did until it went extinct 30 years ago . Paleontologist Michael Archer makes a case to bring back the gastric brooding frog and the thylacine , commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I do want to test this question we 're all interested in : Does extinction have to be forever ?
I 'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about .
One is the Thylacine Project .
The other one is the Lazarus Project , and that 's focused on the gastric brooding frog .
And it would be a fair question to ask , well , why have we focused on these two animals ?
Well , point number one , each of them represents a unique family of its own .
We 've lost a whole family .
That 's a big chunk of the global genome gone .
I 'd like it back .
The second reason is that we killed these things .
In the case of the thylacine , regrettably , we shot every one that we saw . We slaughtered them .
In the case of the gastric brooding frog , we may have " fungicided " it to death .
There 's a dreadful fungus that 's sort of moving through the world that 's called the chytrid fungus , and it 's nailing frogs all over the world .
We think that 's probably what got this frog , and humans are spreading this fungus .
And this introduces a very important ethical point , and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up .
What I think is important is that , if it 's clear that we exterminated these species , then I think we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it , but I think we 've got a moral imperative to try to do something , if we can .
Okay . Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project .
It 's a frog . And you think , frog .
Yeah , but this was not just any frog .
Unlike a normal frog , which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well , this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs , swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food , didn 't digest the eggs , and turned its stomach into a uterus .
In the stomach , the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles , and in the stomach , the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs , and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart .
It has a little cough and a hiccup , and out comes sprays of little frogs .
Now , when biologists saw this , they were agog .
They thought , this is incredible .
No animal , let alone a frog , has been known to do this , to change one organ in the body into another .
And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well .
If we could understand how that frog is managing the way its tummy works , is there information here that we need to understand or could usefully use to help ourselves ?
Now , I 'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach , but I am suggesting it 's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut .
And just as everybody got excited about it , bang !
It was extinct .
I called up my friend , Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide .
He was the last person who had this frog , a colony of these things , in his lab .
And I said , " Mike , by any chance -- " this was 30 or 40 years ago — " by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog ? "
And he thought about it , and he went to his deep freezer , minus 20 degrees centigrade , and he poured through everything in the freezer , and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs .
This was very exciting , but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work , because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it , cryoprotectants , to look after it when it was frozen .
And normally , when water freezes , as you know , it expands , and the same thing happens in a cell .
If you freeze tissues , the water expands , damages or bursts the cell walls .
Well , we looked at the tissue under the microscope .
It actually didn 't look bad . The cell walls looked intact .
So we thought , let 's give it a go .
What we did is something called somatic cell nuclear transplantation .
We took the eggs of a related species , a living frog , and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg .
We used ultraviolet radiation to do that .
And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg .
Now by rights , this is kind of like a cloning project , like what produced Dolly , but it 's actually very different , because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells .
That was a miracle , but it was workable .
What we 're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work .
Well , we had no real reason to expect it would , and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these .
And just last February , the last time we did these trials , I saw a miracle starting to happen .
What we found was , most of these eggs didn 't work , but then suddenly one of them began to divide .
That was so exciting . And then the egg divided again .
And then again . And pretty soon , we had early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those .
We even DNA tested some of these cells , and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells .
So we 're very excited . This is not a tadpole .
It 's not a frog . But it 's a long way along the journey to producing , or bringing back , an extinct species .
And this is news . We haven 't announced this publicly before .
We 're excited . We 've got to get past this point .
We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate , to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues .
It 'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog .
Watch this space . I think we 're going to have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again .
Thank you .
We haven 't done it yet , but keep those applause ready .
The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project .
The thylacine looks a bit , to most people , like a dog , or maybe like a tiger , because it has stripes .
But it 's not related to any of those .
It 's a marsupial . It raised its young in a pouch , like a koala or a kangaroo would do , and it has a long history , a long , fascinating history , that goes back 25 million years .
But it 's also a tragic history .
The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests of Australia about 25 million years ago , and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits . This is Riversleigh .
In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals .
We found marsupial lions .
We found carnivorous kangaroos .
It 's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo , but these are meat-eating kangaroos .
We found the biggest bird in the world , bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar , and it too was a flesh-eater . It was a giant , weird duck .
And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either .
You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing , sitting in a pool of water .
These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground .
We had , in Australia , drop crocs . They really do exist .
But what they were dropping on was not only other weird animals but also thylacines .
There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests , and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua .
Paris Hilton would have been able to carry one of these things around in a little handbag , until a drop croc landed on her .
At any rate , it was a fascinating place , but unfortunately , Australia didn 't stay this way .
Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time , and gradually , the forests disappeared , the country began to dry out , and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline , until by five million years ago , only one left .
By 10,000 years ago , they had disappeared from New Guinea , and unfortunately by 4,000 years ago , somebodies , we don 't know who this was , introduced dingoes -- this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia .
And as you can see , dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines .
That similarity meant they probably competed .
They were eating the same kinds of foods .
It 's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets , and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival .
All we know is , soon after the dingoes were brought in , thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland , and after that they only survived in Tasmania .
Then , unfortunately , the next sad part of the thylacine story is that Europeans arrived in 1788 , and they brought with them the things they valued , and that included sheep .
They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania , and they thought , hang on , this is not going to work .
That guy is going to eat all our sheep .
That was not what happened , actually .
Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep , but the thylacine got a bad rap .
But immediately , the government said , that 's it , let 's get rid of them , and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw .
By the early 1930s , 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered . It was a disaster , and they were about to hit the wall .
Have a look at this bit of film footage .
It makes me very sad , because , while , it 's a fascinating animal , and it 's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction , we didn 't , unfortunately , at this same time , have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species .
These are photos of the last surviving thylacine , Benjamin , who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart .
To add insult to injury , having swept this species nearly off the table , this animal , when it died of neglect , the keepers didn 't let it into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart . It died of exposure , and in the morning , when they found the body of Benjamin , they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump .
Does it have to stay this way ?
In 1990 , I was in the Australian Museum .
I was fascinated by thylacines . I 've always been obsessed with these animals .
And I was studying skulls , trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals , and I saw this jar , and here , in the jar , was a little girl thylacine pup , perhaps six months old .
The guy who had found it and killed the mother had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol .
I 'm a paleontologist , but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative .
But this was 1990 , and I asked my geneticist friends , couldn 't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA , if it 's there , and then somewhere down the line in the future , we 'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back ?
The geneticists laughed . But this was six years before Dolly .
Cloning was science fiction . It had not happened .
But then suddenly cloning did happen .
And I thought , when I became director of the Australian Museum , I 'm going to give this a go .
I put a team together .
We went into that pup to see what was in there , and we did find thylacine DNA . It was a eureka moment .
We were very excited .
Unfortunately , we also found a lot of human DNA .
Every old curator who 'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen , put their hand in the jar , pulled it out and thought , " Wow , look at that , " plop , dropped it back in the jar , contaminating this specimen .
And that was a worry . If the goal here was to get the DNA out and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back , what we didn 't want happening when the information was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around and the lights flashed , was to have a wizened old horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine .
It would 've kept the curator very happy , but it wasn 't going to keep us happy .
So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around , and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls , hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers , and we found much better quality DNA .
We found nuclear mitochondrial genes . It 's there .
So we got it .
Okay . What could we do with this stuff ?
Well , George Church in his book , " Regenesis , " has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA .
We would hope that we 'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form , and then , much like we 've done with the Lazarus Project , get that stuff into an egg of a host species .
It has to be a different species .
What could it be ? Why couldn 't it be a Tasmanian devil ?
They 're related distantly to thylacines .
And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop a thylacine out the south end .
Critics of this project say , hang on .
Thylacine , Tasmanian devil ? That 's going to hurt .
No , it 's not . These are marsupials .
They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean .
That Tasmanian devil 's not even going to know it gave birth .
It is , shortly , going to think it 's got the ugliest Tasmanian devil baby in the world , so maybe it 'll need some help to keep it going .
Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time .
And it 's sort of in the future , we haven 't got there yet , but it 's the kind of thing we want to think about .
They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA and they spliced it into a mouse genome , but they put a tag on it so that anything that this thylacine DNA produced would appear blue-green in the mouse baby .
In other words , if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA , it would be able to be recognized .
When the baby popped up , it was filled with blue-green tissues .
And that tells us if we can get that genome back together , get it into a live cell , it 's going to produce thylacine stuff .
Is this a risk ?
You 've taken the bits of one animal and you 've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal .
Are we going to get a Frankenstein ?
You know , some kind of weird hybrid chimera ?
And the answer is no .
If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA , that 's the only thing that can pop out the other end of the devil .
Okay , if we can do this , could we put it back ?
This is a key question for everybody .
Does it have to stay in a laboratory , or could we put it back where it belongs ?
Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts in Tasmania where it belongs , restore that ecosystem ?
Or has Tasmania changed so much that that 's no longer possible ?
I 've been to Tasmania . I 've been to many of the areas where the thylacines were common .
I 've even spoken to people , like Peter Carter here , who when I spoke to him was 90 years old , but in 1926 , this man and his father and his brother caught thylacines . They trapped them .
And it just , when I spoke to this man , I was looking in his eyes and thinking , behind those eyes is a brain that has memories of what thylacines feel like , what they smelled like , what they sounded like .
He led them around on a rope .
He has personal experiences that I would give my left leg to have in my head .
We 'd all love to have this sort of thing happen .
Anyway , I asked Peter , by any chance , could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines .
My interest was in whether the environment had changed .
He thought hard . I mean , it was nearly 80 years before this that he 'd been at this hut .
At any rate , he led us down this bush track , and there , right where he remembered , was the hut , and tears came into his eyes .
He looked at the hut . We went inside .
There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night .
And he told me , as it all was flooding back in memories .
He said , " I remember the thylacines going around the hut wondering what was inside , " and he said they made sounds like " Yip ! Yip ! Yip ! "
All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers .
And the key question for me was to ask Peter , has it changed ? And he said no .
The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926 .
The grasslands were sweeping away .
That 's classic thylacine habitat .
And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around .
So could we put it back ? Yes .
Is that all we would do ? And this is an interesting question .
Sometimes you might be able to put it back , but is that the safest way to make sure it never goes extinct again , and I don 't think so .
I think gradually , as we see species all around the world , it 's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild .
We 'd love to think it is , but we know it isn 't .
We need other parallel strategies coming online .
And this one interests me .
Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos , sanctuaries , even at the museums , had collar marks on the neck .
They were being kept as pets , and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets , and they say they were wonderful , friendly .
This particular one came in out of the forest to lick this boy and curled up around the fireplace to go to sleep . A wild animal .
And I 'd like to ask the question , all of -- we need to think about this .
If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then , would the thylacine be extinct now ?
And I 'm positive it wouldn 't .
We need to think about this in today 's world .
Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them , maybe they won 't go extinct ?
And this is such a critical issue for us , because if we don 't do that , we 're going to watch more of these animals plunge off the precipice .
As far as I 'm concerned , this is why we 're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects .
We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset .
Thank you .
Mohamed Hijri : A simple solution to the coming phosphorus crisis
Biologist Mohamed Hijri brings to light a farming crisis no one is talking about : We are running out of phosphorus , an essential element that 's a key component of DNA and the basis of cellular communication . All roads of this crisis lead back to how we farm -- with chemical fertilizers chock-full of the element , which plants are not efficient at absorbing . One solution ? Perhaps … a microscopic mushroom .
I 'm going to start by asking you a question : Is anyone familiar with the blue algae problem ?
Okay , so most of you are .
I think we can all agree it 's a serious issue .
Nobody wants to drink blue algae-contaminated water , or swim in a blue algae-infested lake .
Right ?
I hope you won 't be disappointed , but today , I won 't be talking about blue algae .
Instead , I 'll be talking about the main cause at the root of this issue , which I will be referring to as the phosphorus crisis .
Why have I chosen to talk to you about the phosphorus crisis today ?
For the simple reason that nobody else is talking about it .
And by the end of my presentation , I hope that the general public will be more aware of this crisis and this issue .
Now , the problem is that if I ask , why do we find ourselves in this situation with blue algae ?
The answer is that it comes from how we farm .
We use fertilizers in our farming , chemical fertilizers .
Why do we use chemical fertilizers in agriculture ?
Basically , to help plants grow and to produce a better yield .
The issue is that this is set to engender an environmental problem that is without precedent .
Before going further , let me give you a crash course in plant biology .
So , what does a plant need in order to grow ?
A plant , quite simply , needs light , it needs CO2 , but even more importantly , it needs nutrients , which it draws from the soil .
Several of these nutrients are essential chemical elements : phosphorus , nitrogen and calcium .
So , the plant 's roots will extract these resources .
Today I 'll be focusing on a major problem that is linked to phosphorus .
Why phosphorus in particular ?
Because it is the most problematic chemical element .
By the end of my presentation , you will have seen what these problems are , and where we are today .
Phosphorus is a chemical element that is essential to life . This is a very important point .
I 'd like everyone to understand precisely what the phosphorus issue is .
Phosphorus is a key component in several molecules , in many of our molecules of life .
Experts in the field will know that cellular communication is phosphorus-based -- phosphorylation , dephosphorylation .
Cell membranes are phosphorus-based : These are called phospholipids .
The energy in all living things , ATP , is phosphorus-based .
And more importantly still , phosphorus is a key component of DNA , something everyone is familiar with , and which is shown in this image .
DNA is our genetic heritage .
It is extremely important , and once again , phosphorus is a key player .
Now , where do we find this phosphorus ?
As humans , where do we find it ?
As I explained earlier , plants extract phosphorus from the soil , through water .
So , we humans get it from the things we eat : plants , vegetables , fruits , and also from eggs , meat and milk .
It 's true that some humans eat better than others .
Some are happier than others .
And now , looking at this picture , which speaks for itself , we see modern agriculture , which I also refer to as intensive agriculture .
Intensive agriculture is based on the use of chemical fertilizers .
Without them , we would not manage to produce enough to feed the world 's population .
Speaking of humans , there are currently 7 billion of us on Earth .
In less than 40 years , there will be 9 billion of us .
And the question is a simple one : Do we have enough phosphorus to feed our future generations ?
So , in order to understand these issues , where do we find our phosphorus ?
Let me explain .
But first , let 's just suppose that we are using 100 percent of a given dose of phosphorus .
Only 15 percent of this 100 percent goes to the plant . Eighty-five percent is lost .
It goes into the soil , ending its journey in the lakes , resulting in lakes with extra phosphorus , which leads to the blue algae problem .
So , you 'll see there 's a problem here , something that is illogical .
A hundred percent of the phosphorus is used , but only 15 percent goes to the plant .
You 're going to tell me it 's wasteful .
Yes , it is . What is worse is that it is very expensive .
Nobody wants to throw their money out the window , but unfortunately that 's what is happening here .
Eighty percent of each dose of phosphorus is lost .
Modern agriculture depends on phosphorus .
And because in order to get 15 percent of it to the plant , all the rest is lost , we have to add more and more .
Now , where will we get this phosphorus from ?
Basically , we get it out of mines .
This is the cover of an extraordinary article published in Nature in 2009 , which really launched the discussion about the phosphorus crisis .
Phosphorus , a nutrient essential to life , which is becoming increasingly scarce , yet nobody is talking about it .
And everyone agrees : Politicians and scientists are in agreement that we are headed for a phosphorus crisis .
What you are seeing here is an open-pit mine in the U.S. , and to give you an idea of the dimensions of this mine , if you look in the top right-hand corner , the little crane you can see , that is a giant crane .
So that really puts it into perspective .
So , we get phosphorus from mines .
And if I make a comparison with oil , there 's an oil crisis , we talk about it , we talk about global warming , yet we never mention the phosphorus crisis .
To come back to the oil problem , oil is something we can replace .
We can use biofuels , or solar power , or hydropower , but phosphorus is an essential element , indispensable to life , and we can 't replace it .
What is the current state of the world 's phosphorus reserves ?
This graph gives you a rough idea of where we are today .
The black line represents predictions for phosphorus reserves .
In 2030 , we 'll reach the peak .
By the end of this century , it will all be gone .
The dotted line shows where we are today .
As you can see , they meet in 2030 , I 'll be retired by then .
But we are indeed heading for a major crisis , and I 'd like people to become aware of this problem .
Do we have a solution ?
What are we to do ? We are faced with a paradox .
Less and less phosphorus will be available .
By 2050 there will be 9 billion of us , and according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization , we will need to produce twice as much food in 2050 than we do today .
So , we will have less phosphorus , but we 'll need to produce more food .
What should we do ?
It truly is a paradoxical situation .
Do we have a solution , or an alternative which will allow us to optimize phosphorus use ?
Remember that 80 percent is destined to be lost .
The solution I 'm offering today is one that has existed for a very long time , even before plants existed on Earth , and it 's a microscopic mushroom that is very mysterious , very simple , and yet also extremely complex .
I 've been fascinated by this little mushroom for over 16 years now .
It has led me to further my research and to use it as a model for my laboratory research .
This mushroom exists in symbiosis with the roots .
By symbiosis , I mean a bidirectional and mutually beneficial association which is also called mycorrhiza .
This slide illustrates the elements of a mycorrhiza .
You 're looking at the root of wheat , one of the world 's most important plants .
Normally , a root will find phosphorus all by itself .
It will go in search of phosphorus , but only within the one millimeter which surrounds it .
Beyond one millimeter , the root is ineffective .
It cannot go further in its search for phosphorus .
Now , imagine this tiny , microscopic mushroom .
It grows much faster , and is much better designed to seek out phosphorus .
It can go beyond the root 's one-millimeter scope to seek out phosphorus .
I haven 't invented anything at all ; it 's a biotechnology that has existed for 450 million years .
And over time , this mushroom has evolved and adapted to seek out even the tiniest trace of phosphorus , and to put it to use , to make it available to the plant .
What you 're seeing here , in the real world , is a carrot root , and the mushroom with its very fine filaments .
Looking closer , we can see that this mushroom is very gentle in its penetration .
It will proliferate between the root 's cells , eventually penetrating a cell and starting to form a typical arbuscular structure , which will considerably increase the exchange interface between the plant and the mushroom .
And it is through this structure that mutual exchanges will occur .
It 's a win-win trade : I give you phosphorus , and you feed me .
True symbiosis .
Now let 's add a mycorrhiza plant into the diagram I used earlier .
And instead of using a 100 percent dose , I 'm going to reduce it to 25 percent .
You 'll see that of this 25 percent , most will benefit the plant , more than 90 percent .
A very small amount of phosphorus will remain in the soil .
That 's completely natural .
What 's more is that in certain cases , we don 't even need to add phosphorus .
If you recall the graphs I showed you earlier , 85 percent of phosphorus is lost in the soil , and the plants are unable to access it .
Even though it is present in the soil , it is in insoluble form .
The plant is only able to seek out soluble forms .
The mushroom is capable of dissolving this insoluble form and making it available for the plant to use .
To further support my argument , here is a picture that speaks for itself .
These are trials in a field of sorghum .
On the left side , you see the yield produced using conventional agriculture , with a 100 percent phosphorus dose .
On the other side , the dose was reduced to 50 percent , and just look at the yield .
With only a half-dose , we achieved a better yield .
This is to show you that this method works .
And in some cases , in Cuba , Mexico and India , the dose can be reduced to 25 percent , and in several other cases , there 's no need to add any phosphorus at all , because the mushrooms are so well adapted to finding phosphorus and drawing it from the soil .
This is an example of soy production in Canada .
Mycorrhiza was used in one field but not in the other .
And here , where blue indicates a better yield , and yellow a weaker yield .
The black rectangle is the plot from which the mycorrhiza was added .
In other words , as I already said , I have invented nothing .
Mycorrhiza has existed for 450 million years , and it has even helped modern-day plant species to diversify .
So , this it isn 't something that is still undergoing lab tests .
Mycorrhiza exists , it works , it 's produced at an industrial scale and commercialized worldwide .
The problem is that people are not aware of it .
People like food producers and farmers are still not aware of this problem .
We have a technology that works , and one that , if used correctly , will alleviate some of the pressure we are putting on the world 's phosphorus reserves .
In conclusion , I am a scientist and a dreamer .
I 'm passionate about this topic .
So if you were to ask me what my retirement dream is , which will be at the moment we reach that phosphorus peak , it would be that we use one label , " Made with mycorrhiza , " and that my children and grandchildren buy products bearing that label too .
Thank you for your attention .
William Ury : The walk from " no " to " yes "
William Ury , author of " Getting to Yes , " offers an elegant , simple way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations -- from family conflict to , perhaps , the Middle East . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Well , the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East , of a man who left to his three sons 17 camels .
To the first son , he left half the camels .
To the second son , he left a third of the camels , and to the youngest son , he left a ninth of the camels .
Well three sons got into a negotiation .
Seventeen doesn 't divide by two .
It doesn 't divide by three .
It doesn 't divide by nine .
Brotherly tempers started to get strained .
Finally , in desperation , they went and they consulted a wise old woman .
The wise old woman thought about their problem for a long time , and finally she came back and said , " Well , I don 't know if I can help you , but at least , if you want , you can have my camel . "
So then they had 18 camels .
The first son took his half -- half of 18 is nine .
The second son took his third -- a third of 18 is six .
The youngest son took his ninth -- a ninth of 18 is two .
You get 17 .
They had one camel left over .
They gave it back to the wise old woman .
Now if you think about that story for a moment , I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in .
They start off like 17 camels -- no way to resolve it .
Somehow , what we need to do is step back from those situations , like that wise old woman , look at the situation through fresh eyes and come up with an 18th camel .
Now finding that 18th camel in the world 's conflicts has been my life passion .
I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers .
We 're all one family .
We know that scientifically , thanks to the communications revolution , all the tribes on the planet , all 15,000 tribes , are in touch with each other .
And it 's a big family reunion , and yet , like many family reunions , it 's not all peace and light .
There 's a lot of conflict , and the question is , how do we deal with our differences ?
How do we deal with our deepest differences , given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction ?
That 's the question .
As I 've spent the last better part of three decades , almost four , traveling the world , trying to work , getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela , some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet , I 've been asking myself that question .
And I think I 've found , in some ways , what is the secret to peace .
It 's actually surprisingly simple .
It 's not easy , but it 's simple .
It 's not even new .
It may be one of our most ancient human heritages .
The secret to peace is us .
It 's us who act as the surrounding community around any conflict , who can play a constructive role .
Let me give you just a story , an example .
About 20 years ago , I was in South Africa working with the parties in that conflict , and I had an extra month , so I spent some time living with several groups of San Bushmen .
I was curious about them and about the way in which they resolve conflict .
Because , after all , within living memory , they were hunters and gatherers , living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story .
And all the men have these poison arrows that they use for hunting -- absolutely fatal .
So how do they deal with their differences ?
Well what I learned is whenever tempers rise in those communities , someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the bush , and then everyone sits around in a circle like this , and they sit , and they talk , and they talk .
It may take two days , three days , four days , but they don 't rest until they find a resolution , or better yet , a reconciliation .
And if tempers are still too high , then they send someone off to visit some relatives as a cooling-off period .
Well that system is , I think , probably the system that kept us alive to this point , given our human tendencies .
That system , I call the " third side . "
Because if you think about it , normally when we think of conflict , when we describe it , there 's always two sides -- it 's Arabs versus Israelis , labor versus management , husband versus wife , Republicans versus Democrats .
But what we don 't often see is that there 's always a third side , and the third side of the conflict is us , it 's the surrounding community , it 's the friends , the allies , the family members , the neighbors .
And we can play an incredibly constructive role .
Perhaps the most fundamental way in which the third side can help is to remind the parties of what 's really at stake .
For the sake of the kids , for the sake of the family , for the sake of the community , for the sake of the future , let 's stop fighting for a moment and start talking .
Because , the thing is , when we 're involved in conflict , it 's very easy to lose perspective .
It 's very easy to react .
Human beings -- we 're reaction machines .
And as the saying goes , when angry , you will make the best speech you will ever regret .
And so the third side reminds us of that .
The third side helps us go to the balcony , which is a metaphor for a place of perspective , where we can keep our eyes on the prize .
Let me tell you a little story from my own negotiating experience .
Some years ago , I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya .
There was a war going on , as you know .
And we met in the Hague , in the Peace Palace , in the same room where the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was taking place .
And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said , " You should stay right here in your seats , because you 're going to be on trial for war crimes . "
And then he went on , and then he turned to me and said , " You 're an American .
Look at what you Americans are doing in Puerto Rico . "
And my mind started racing , " Puerto Rico ? What do I know about Puerto Rico ? "
I started reacting , but then I tried to remember to go to the balcony .
And then when he paused , and everyone looked at me for a response , from a balcony perspective , I was able to thank him for his remarks and say , " I appreciate your criticism of my country , and I take it as a sign that we 're among friends and can speak candidly to one another .
And what we 're here to do is not to talk about Puerto Rico or the past .
What we 're here to do is to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya . "
The conversation got back on track .
That 's the role of the third side , is to help the parties to go to the balcony .
Now let me take you for a moment to what 's widely regarded as the world 's most difficult conflict , or the most impossible conflict , is the Middle East .
Question is : where 's the third side there ?
How could we possibly go to the balcony ?
Now I don 't pretend to have an answer to the Middle East conflict , but I think I 've got a first step , literally , a first step , something that any one of us could do as third-siders .
Let me just ask you one question first .
How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do ?
Just out of curiosity , how many of you ?
Okay , so the great majority of us .
And here , it 's so far away .
Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict ?
Is it the number of deaths ?
There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East .
No , it 's because of the story , because we feel personally involved in that story .
Whether we 're Christians , Muslims or Jews , religious or non-religious , we feel we have a personal stake in it .
Stories matter . As an anthropologist , I know that .
Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge .
They give meaning to our lives .
That 's what we tell here at TED , we tell stories .
Stories are the key .
And so my question is , yes , let 's try and resolve the politics there in the Middle East , but let 's also take a look at the story .
Let 's try to get at the root of what it 's all about .
Let 's see if we can apply the third side to it .
What would that mean ? What is the story there ?
Now as anthropologists , we know that every culture has an origin story .
What 's the origin story of the Middle East ?
In a phrase , it 's : 4,000 years ago , a man and his family walked across the Middle East , and the world has never been the same since .
That man , of course , was Abraham .
And what he stood for was unity , the unity of the family .
He 's the father of us all .
But it 's not just what he stood for , it 's what his message was .
His basic message was unity too , the interconnectedness of it all , the unity of it all , and his basic value was respect , was kindness toward strangers .
That 's what he 's known for , his hospitality .
So in that sense , he 's the symbolic third side of the Middle East .
He 's the one who reminds us that we 're all part of a greater whole .
Now how would you -- now think about that for a moment .
Today we face the scourge of terrorism .
What is terrorism ?
Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear .
What 's the opposite of terrorism ?
It 's taking an innocent stranger and treating them as a friend whom you welcome into your home in order to sow and create understanding , or respect , or love .
So what if then you took the story of Abraham , which is a third side story , what if that could be -- because Abraham stands for hospitality -- what if that could be an antidote to terrorism ?
What if that could be a vaccine against religious intolerance ?
How would you bring that story to life ?
Now it 's not enough just to tell a story -- that 's powerful -- but people need to experience the story .
They need to be able to live the story . How would you do that ?
And that was my thinking of how would you do that .
And that 's what comes to the first step here .
Because the simple way to do that You go for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham .
You retrace the footsteps of Abraham .
Because walking has a real power .
You know , as an anthropologist , walking is what made us human .
Walking , it 's funny , when you walk , you walk side-by-side in the same common direction .
Now if I were to come to you face-to-face and come this close to you , you would feel threatened .
But if I walk shoulder-to-shoulder , even touching shoulders , it 's no problem .
Who fights while they walk ?
That 's why in negotiations , often , when things get tough , people go for walks in the woods .
So the idea came to me of what about inspiring a path , a route -- think the silk route , think the Appalachian trail -- that followed in the footsteps of Abraham .
People said , " That 's crazy . You can 't .
You can 't retrace the footsteps of Abraham . It 's too insecure .
You 've got to cross all these borders .
It goes across 10 different countries in the Middle East , because it unites them all . "
And so we studied the idea at Harvard .
We did our due diligence .
And then a few years ago , a group of us , about 25 of us from about 10 different countries , decided to see if we could retrace the footsteps of Abraham , going from his initial birthplace in the city of Urfa in Southern Turkey , Northern Mesopotamia .
And we then took a bus and took some walks and went to Harran , where , in the Bible , he sets off on his journey .
Then we crossed the border into Syria , went to Aleppo , which , turns out , is named after Abraham .
We went to Damascus , which has a long history associated with Abraham .
We then came to Northern Jordan , to Jerusalem , which is all about Abraham , to Bethlehem , and finally to the place where he 's buried in Hebron .
So effectively , we went from womb to tomb .
We showed it could be done . It was an amazing journey .
Let me ask you a question .
How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood , or strange land , and a total stranger , perfect stranger , comes up to you and shows you some kindness , maybe invites you into their home , gives you a drink , gives you a coffee , gives you a meal ?
How many of you have ever had that experience ?
That 's the essence of the Abraham path .
But that 's what you discover , is you go into these villages in the Middle East where you expect hostility , and you get the most amazing hospitality , all associated with Abraham .
" In the name of father Abraham , let me offer you some food . "
So what we discovered is that Abraham is not just a figure out of a book for those people .
He 's alive ; he 's a living presence .
And to make a long story short , in the last couple of years now , thousands of people have begun to walk parts of the path of Abraham in the Middle East , enjoying the hospitality of the people there .
They 've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine , in Jordan , in Turkey , in Syria .
It 's an amazing experience .
Men , women , young people , old people -- more women than men , actually , interestingly .
For those who can 't walk , who are unable to get there right now , people started to organize walks in cities , in their own communities .
In Cincinnati , for instance , that organized a walk from a church to a mosque to a synagogue and all had an Abrahamic meal together .
It was Abraham Path Day .
In Sao Paulo , Brazil , it 's become an annual event for thousands of people to run in a virtual Abraham Path Run , uniting the different communities .
The media love it ; they really adore it .
They lavish attention on it because it 's visual , and it spreads the idea , this idea of Abrahamic hospitality of kindness towards strangers .
And just a couple weeks ago , there was an NPR story on it .
Last month , there was a piece in the Guardian , in the Manchester Guardian , about it -- two whole pages .
And they quoted a villager who said , " This walk connects us to the world . "
He said it was like a light that went on in our lives .
It brought us hope .
And so that 's what it 's about .
But it 's not just about psychology ; it 's about economics , because as people walk they spend money .
And this woman right here , Um Ahmad , is a woman who lives on a path in Northern Jordan .
She 's desperately poor .
She 's partially blind , her husband can 't work , she 's got seven kids .
But what she can do is cook , and so she 's begun to cook for some groups of walkers who come through the village and have a meal in her home .
They sit on the floor .
She doesn 't even have a tablecloth .
She makes the most delicious food that 's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside .
And so more and more walkers have come , and lately she 's begun to earn an income to support her family .
And so she told our team there , she said , " You have made me visible in a village where people were once ashamed to look at me . "
That 's the potential of the Abraham path .
There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East , across the path .
The potential is basically to change the game .
And to change the game , you have to change the frame , the way we see things -- to change the frame from hostility to hospitality , from terrorism to tourism .
And in that sense , the Abraham path is a game-changer .
Let me just show you one thing .
I have a little acorn here that I picked up while I was walking on the path earlier this year .
Now the acorn is associated with the oak tree , of course -- grows into an oak tree , which is associated with Abraham .
The path right now is like an acorn ; it 's still in its early phase .
What would the oak tree look like ?
Well I think back to my childhood , a good part of which I spent , after being born here in Chicago , I spent in Europe .
If you had been in the ruins of , say , London in 1945 , or Berlin , and you had said , " Sixty years from now , this is going to be the most peaceful , prosperous part of the planet , " people would have thought you were certifiably insane .
But they did it thanks to a common identity -- Europe -- and a common economy .
So my question is , if it can be done in Europe , why not in the Middle East ?
Why not , thanks to a common identity , which is the story of Abraham , and thanks to a common economy that would be based in good part on tourism ?
So let me conclude then by saying that in the last 35 years , as I 've worked in some of the most dangerous , difficult and intractable conflicts around the planet , I have yet to see one conflict that I felt could not be transformed .
It 's not easy , of course , but it 's possible .
It was done in South Africa .
It was done in Northern Ireland .
It could be done anywhere .
It simply depends on us .
It depends on us taking the third side .
So let me invite you to consider taking the third side , even as a very small step .
We 're about to take a break in a moment .
Just go up to someone who 's from a different culture , a different country , a different ethnicity , some difference , and engage them in a conversation ; listen to them .
That 's a third side act .
That 's walking Abraham 's path .
After a TEDTalk , why not a TEDWalk ?
So let me just leave you with three things .
One is , the secret to peace is the third side .
The third side is us .
Each of us , with a single step , can take the world , can bring the world a step closer to peace .
There 's an old African proverb that goes : " When spider webs unite , they can halt even the lion . "
If we 're able to unite our third-side webs of peace , we can even halt the lion of war .
Thank you very much .
Shereen El Feki : A little-told tale of sex and sensuality
" If you really want to know a people , start by looking inside their bedrooms , " says Shereen El Feki , who traveled through the Middle East for five years , talking to people about sex . While those conversations reflected rigid norms and deep repression , El Feki also discovered that sexual conservatism in the Arab world is a relatively new thing . She wonders : could a re-emergence of public dialogue lead to more satisfying , and safer , sex lives ?
So when I was in Morocco , in Casablanca , not so long ago , I met a young unmarried mother called Faiza .
Faiza showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception , pregnancy , and delivery .
It was a remarkable tale , but Faiza saved the best for last .
" You know , I am a virgin , " she told me .
" I have two medical certificates to prove it . "
This is the modern Middle East , where two millennia after the coming of Christ , virgin births are still a fact of life .
Faiza 's story is just one of hundreds I 've heard over the years , traveling across the Arab region talking to people about sex .
Now , I know this might sound like a dream job , or possibly a highly dubious occupation , but for me , it 's something else altogether .
I 'm half Egyptian , and I 'm Muslim .
But I grew up in Canada , far from my Arab roots .
Like so many who straddle East and West , I 've been drawn , over the years , to try to better understand my origins .
That I chose to look at sex comes from my background in HIV / AIDS , as a writer and a researcher and an activist .
Sex lies at the heart of an emerging epidemic in the Middle East and North Africa , which is one of only two regions in the world where HIV / AIDS is still on the rise .
Now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society , because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage : in politics and economics , in religion and tradition , in gender and generations .
As I found , if you really want to know a people , you start by looking inside their bedrooms .
Now to be sure , the Arab world is vast and varied .
But running across it are three red lines -- these are topics you are not supposed to challenge in word or deed .
The first of these is politics .
But the Arab Spring has changed all that , in uprisings which have blossomed across the region since 2011 .
Now while those in power , old and new , continue to cling to business as usual , millions are still pushing back , and pushing forward to what they hope will be a better life .
That second red line is religion .
But now religion and politics are connected , with the rise of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood .
And some people , at least , are starting to ask questions about the role of Islam in public and private life .
You know , as for that third red line , that off-limits subject , what do you think it might be ?
Audience : Sex .
Shereen El Feki : Louder , I can 't hear you .
Audience : Sex .
SEF : Again , please don 't be shy .
Audience : Sex .
SEF : Absolutely , that 's right , it 's sex .
Across the Arab region , the only accepted context for sex is marriage -- approved by your parents , sanctioned by religion and registered by the state .
Marriage is your ticket to adulthood .
If you don 't tie the knot , you can 't move out of your parents ' place , and you 're not supposed to be having sex , and you 're definitely not supposed to be having children .
It 's a social citadel ; it 's an impregnable fortress which resists any assault , any alternative .
And around the fortress is this vast field of taboo against premarital sex , against condoms , against abortion , against homosexuality , you name it .
Faiza was living proof of this .
Her virginity statement was not a piece of wishful thinking .
Although the major religions of the region extoll premarital chastity , in a patriarchy , boys will be boys .
Men have sex before marriage , and people more or less turn a blind eye .
Not so for women , who are expected to be virgins on their wedding night -- that is , to turn up with your hymen intact .
This is not a question of individual concern , this is a matter of family honor , and in particular , men 's honor .
And so women and their relatives will go to great lengths to preserve this tiny piece of anatomy -- from female genital mutilation , to virginity testing , to hymen repair surgery .
Faiza chose a different route : non-vaginal sex .
Only she became pregnant all the same .
But Faiza didn 't actually realize this , because there 's so little sexuality education in schools , and so little communication in the family .
When her condition became hard to hide , Faiza 's mother helped her flee her father and brothers .
This is because honor killings are a real threat for untold numbers of women in the Arab region .
And so when Faiza eventually fetched up at a hospital in Casablanca , the man who offered to help her , instead tried to rape her .
Sadly , Faiza is not alone .
In Egypt , where my research is focused , I have seen plenty of trouble in and out of the citadel .
There are legions of young men who can 't afford to get married , because marriage has become a very expensive proposition .
They are expected to bear the burden of costs in married life , but they can 't find jobs .
This is one of the major drivers of the recent uprisings , and it is one of the reasons for the rising age of marriage in much of the Arab region .
There are career women who want to get married , but can 't find a husband , because they defy gender expectations , or as one young female doctor in Tunisia put it to me , " The women , they are becoming more and more open .
But the man , he is still at the prehistoric stage . "
And then there are men and women who cross the heterosexual line , who have sex with their own sex , or who have a different gender identity .
They are on the receiving end of laws which punish their activities , even their appearance .
And they face a daily struggle with social stigma , with family despair , and with religious fire and brimstone .
Now , it 's not as if it 's all rosy in the marital bed either .
Couples who are looking for greater happiness , greater sexual happiness in their married lives , but are at a loss of how to achieve it , especially wives , who are afraid of being seen as bad women if they show some spark in the bedroom .
And then there are those whose marriages are actually a veil for prostitution .
They have been sold by their families , often to wealthy Arab tourists .
This is just one face of a booming sex trade across the Arab region .
Now raise your hand if any of this is sounding familiar to you , from your part of the world .
Yeah . It 's not as if the Arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups .
And although we don 't yet have an Arab Kinsey Report to tell us exactly what 's happening inside bedrooms across the Arab region , It 's pretty clear that something is not right .
Double standards for men and women , sex as a source of shame , family control limiting individual choices , and a vast gulf between appearance and reality : what people are doing and what they 're willing to admit to , and a general reluctance to move beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion .
As one doctor in Cairo summed it up for me , " Here , sex is the opposite of sport .
Football , everybody talks about it , but hardly anyone plays .
But sex , everybody is doing it , but nobody wants to talk about it . "
SEF : I want to give you a piece of advice , which if you follow it , will make you happy in life .
When your husband reaches out to you , when he seizes a part of your body , sigh deeply and look at him lustily .
When he penetrates you with his penis , try to talk flirtatiously and move yourself in harmony with him .
Hot stuff !
And it might sound that these handy hints come from " The Joy of Sex " or YouPorn .
But in fact , they come from a 10th-century Arabic book called " The Encyclopedia of Pleasure , " which covers sex from aphrodisiacs to zoophilia , and everything in between .
The Encyclopedia is just one in a long line of Arabic erotica , much of it written by religious scholars .
Going right back to the Prophet Muhammad , there is a rich tradition in Islam of talking frankly about sex : not just its problems , but also its pleasures , and not just for men , but also for women .
A thousand years ago , we used to have whole dictionaries of sex in Arabic .
Words to cover every conceivable sexual feature , position and preference , a body of language that was rich enough to make up the body of the woman you see on this page .
Today , this history is largely unknown in the Arab region .
Even by educated people , who often feel more comfortable talking about sex in a foreign language than they do in their own tongue .
Today 's sexual landscape looks a lot like Europe and America on the brink of the sexual revolution .
But while the West has opened on sex , what we found is that Arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction .
In Egypt and many of its neighbors , this closing down is part of a wider closing in political , social and cultural thought .
And it is the product of a complex historical process , one which has gained ground with the rise of Islamic conservatism since the late 1970s .
" Just say no " is what conservatives around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo .
In the Arab region , they brand these attempts as a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Arab and Islamic values .
But what 's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control : sex wrapped up in religion .
But history shows us that even as recently as our fathers ' and grandfathers ' day , there have been times of greater pragmatism , and tolerance , and a willingness to consider other interpretations : be it abortion , or masturbation , or even the incendiary topic of homosexuality .
It is not black and white , as conservatives would have us believe .
In these , as in so many other matters , Islam offers us at least 50 shades of gray .
Over my travels , I 've met men and women across the Arab region who 've been exploring that spectrum -- sexologists who are trying to help couples find greater happiness in their marriages , innovators who are managing to get sexuality education into schools , small groups of men and women , lesbian , gay , transgendered , transsexual , who are reaching out to their peers with online initiatives and real-world support .
Women , and increasingly men , who are starting to speak out and push back against sexual violence on the streets and in the home .
Groups that are trying to help sex workers protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards , and NGOs that are helping unwed mothers like Faiza find a place in society , and critically , stay with their kids .
Now these efforts are small , they 're often underfunded , and they face formidable opposition .
But I am optimistic that , in the long run , times are changing , and they and their ideas will gain ground .
Social change doesn 't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation , beating or indeed baring of breasts , but rather through negotiation .
What we 're talking here is not about a sexual revolution , but a sexual evolution , learning from other parts of the world , adapting to local conditions , forging our own path , not following one blazed by another .
That path , I hope , will one day lead us to the right to control our own bodies , and to access the information and services we need to lead satisfying and safe sexual lives .
The right to express our ideas freely , to marry whom we choose , to choose our own partners , to be sexually active or not , to decide whether to have children and when , all this without violence or force or discrimination .
Now we are very far from this across the Arab region , and so much needs to change : law , education , media , the economy , the list goes on and on , and it is the work of a generation , at least .
But it begins with a journey that I myself have made , asking hard questions of received wisdoms in sexual life .
And it is a journey which has only served to strengthen my faith , and my appreciation of local histories and cultures by showing me possibilities where I once only saw absolutes .
Now given the turmoil in many countries in the Arab region , talking about sex , challenging the taboos , seeking alternatives might sound like something of a luxury .
But at this critical moment in history , if we do not anchor freedom and justice , dignity and equality , privacy and autonomy in our personal lives , in our sexual lives , we will find it very hard to achieve in public life .
The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows , and that is true for us all .
no matter where we live and love .
Thank you .
iO Tillett Wright : Fifty shades of gay
Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and asked many of them : Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are ? Most people , it turns out , consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality , not 100 % gay or straight . Which presents a real problem when it comes to discrimination : Where do you draw the line ?
Human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other -- Is that person dangerous ? Are they attractive ?
Are they a potential mate ? Are they a potential networking opportunity ?
We do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them .
What 's your name ? Where are you from ?
How old are you ? What do you do ?
Then we get more personal with it .
Have you ever had any diseases ?
Have you ever been divorced ?
Does your breath smell bad while you 're answering my interrogation right now ?
What are you into ? Who are you into ?
What gender do you like to sleep with ?
I get it .
We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves .
We start forming cliques as soon as we 're old enough to know what acceptance feels like .
We bond together based on anything that we can -- music preference , race , gender , the block that we grew up on .
We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices .
Sometimes , though , just the question " what do you do ? "
can feel like somebody 's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it .
Because the categories , I 've found , are too limiting .
The boxes are too narrow .
And this can get really dangerous .
So here 's a disclaimer about me , though , before we get too deep into this .
I grew up in a very sheltered environment .
I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s , two blocks from the epicenter of punk music .
I was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing .
Where I come from , if you weren 't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind , you were the weirdo .
It was an unorthodox upbringing , but as a kid on the streets of New York , you learn how to trust your own instincts , you learn how to go with your own ideas .
So when I was six , I decided that I wanted to be a boy .
I went to school one day and the kids wouldn 't let me play basketball with them .
They said they wouldn 't let girls play .
So I went home , and I shaved my head , and I came back the next day and I said , " I 'm a boy . "
I mean , who knows , right ?
When you 're six , maybe you can do that .
I didn 't want anyone to know that I was a girl , and they didn 't .
I kept up the charade for eight years .
So this is me when I was 11 .
I was playing a kid named Walter in a movie called " Julian Po . "
I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him .
See , I was also a child actor , which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity , because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy .
In fact , no one in my life knew that I was a girl -- not my teachers at school , not my friends , not the directors that I worked with .
Kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam 's apple or grab my crotch to check what I was working with .
When I would go to the bathroom , I would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like I was peeing standing up .
At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn 't want to kiss me without outing myself .
It 's worth mentioning though that I didn 't hate my body or my genitalia .
I didn 't feel like I was in the wrong body .
I felt like I was performing this elaborate act .
I wouldn 't have qualified as transgender .
If my family , though , had been the kind of people to believe in therapy , they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty .
But in my particular case , I just woke up one day when I was 14 , and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again .
Puberty had hit , and I had no idea what being a girl meant , and I was ready to figure out who I actually was .
When a kid behaves like I did , they don 't exactly have to come out , right ?
No one is exactly shocked .
But I wasn 't asked to define myself by my parents .
When I was 15 , and I called my father to tell him that I had fallen in love , it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl .
Three years later , when I fell in love with a man , neither of my parents batted an eyelash either .
See , it 's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that I wasn 't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point .
I was just allowed to be me , growing and changing in every moment .
So four , almost five years ago , Proposition 8 , the great marriage equality debate , was raising a lot of dust around this country .
And at the time , getting married wasn 't really something I spent a lot of time thinking about .
But I was struck by the fact that America , a country with such a tarnished civil rights record , could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly .
And I remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country , between places where people believed in it and places where people didn 't .
And then , that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me .
If this was a war with two disparate sides , I , by default , fell on team gay , because I certainly wasn 't 100 percent straight .
At the time I was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl 's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy , over-compensating , boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was , a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person .
I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls , much like myself , who fell kind of between-the-lines -- girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear , girls who had boys ' haircuts but wore girly nail polish , girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees , girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything .
I loved these people , and I admired their freedom , but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television .
And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority , and in my own home country , based on one facet of my character .
I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen .
I was not an activist .
I wave no flags in my own life .
But I was plagued by this question : How could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that I knew based on one element of their character ?
How could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else ?
Were we even a group ? What group ?
And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination ?
Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was ?
And then it occurred to me , perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do .
It might give them pause .
Obviously I couldn 't get 20 million people to the same dinner party , so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice , without any lighting , or without any manipulation of any kind on my part .
Because in a photograph you can examine a lion 's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off .
For me , photography is not just about exposing film , it 's about exposing the viewer to something new , a place they haven 't gone before , but most importantly , to people that they might be afraid of .
Life magazine introduced generations of people to distant , far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures .
So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits , mugshots if you will .
And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight , which , if you don 't know , is a limitless number of people .
So this was a very large undertaking , and to do it we needed some help .
So I ran out in the freezing cold , and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to in February of about two years ago .
And I took those photographs , and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help .
And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York .
And then we made this .
I 'm iO Tillett Wright , and I 'm an artist born and raised in New York City .
Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today .
My aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who 's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way .
My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face .
" We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal . "
It 's written in the Declaration of Independence .
We are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded .
There is no equality in the United States .
[ " What does equality mean to you ? " ] [ " Marriage " ] [ " Freedom " ] [ " Civil rights " ] [ " Treat every person as you 'd treat yourself " ] It 's when you don 't have to think about it , simple as that .
The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage .
Today in 29 states , more than half of this country , you can legally be fired just for your sexuality .
[ " Who is responsible for equality ? " ] I 've heard hundreds of people give the same answer : " We are all responsible for equality . "
So far we 've shot 300 faces in New York City .
And we wouldn 't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign .
I want to take the project across the country .
I want to visit 25 American cities , and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people .
This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation .
I challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being .
Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that .
Almost 85,000 people watched that video , and then they started emailing us from all over the country , asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces .
And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated .
So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces .
That video was made in the spring of 2011 , and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people .
I know that this is a talk , but I 'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them .
Because if a picture is worth a thousand words , then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary .
So after traveling and talking to people in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas , we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on .
Visibility really is key .
Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy .
Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family , you 're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it .
Of course , in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight , but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian .
Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths .
But here 's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting : Self Evident Truths doesn 't erase the differences between us .
In fact , on the contrary , it highlights them .
It presents , not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings , but the complexities found within each individual person .
It wasn 't that we had too many boxes , it was that we had too few .
At some point I realized that my mission to photograph " gays " was inherently flawed , because there were a million different shades of gay .
Here I was trying to help , and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid -- yet another box .
At some point I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay .
And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me .
People didn 't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before .
Can you quantify your openness ?
Once they got over the shock , though , by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks .
Of course , there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other , but I found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced .
I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as " Grey . "
Let me be clear though -- and this is very important -- in no way am I saying that preference doesn 't exist .
And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative , because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice , I invite you to go out and try to be grey .
I 'll take your picture just for trying .
What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional .
The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this : If you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here , and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another , there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between .
And the reality that this presents is a complicated one .
Because , for example , if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior , where exactly do you draw the line ?
Is it over here , by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far ?
Or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far ?
Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen ?
Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is .
After traveling so much and meeting so many people , let me tell you , there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the LGBT community as there are within the human race .
Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs , and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle , just being other than straight doesn 't necessarily mean that we have anything in common .
So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming , as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms , bus shelters , billboards , Facebook pages , screen savers , perhaps in watching this procession of humanity , something interesting and useful will begin to happen .
Hopefully these categories , these binaries , these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they 'll begin to fall away .
Because really , they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are .
What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity .
And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity .
At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights .
So is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing , the right to adopt children , the right to marriage , the freedom to shop here , live here , buy here ?
Am I the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father , your neighbor , your cousin , your uncle , the president , your police woman or the fireman ?
It 's too late .
Because I already am all of those things .
We already are all of those things , and we always have been .
So please don 't greet us as strangers , greet us as your fellow human beings , period .
Thank you .
Andres Lozano : Parkinson 's , depression and the switch that might turn them off
Deep brain stimulation is becoming very precise . This technique allows surgeons to place electrodes in almost any area of the brain , and turn them up or down -- like a radio dial or thermostat -- to correct dysfunction . Andres Lozano offers a dramatic look at emerging techniques , in which a woman with Parkinson 's instantly stops shaking and brain areas eroded by Alzheimer 's are brought back to life .
One of the things I want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots .
I just wanted you to know that .
So I am indeed a neurosurgeon , and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery , and what I 'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain , being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients .
So as I said , neurosurgery comes from a long tradition .
It 's been around for about 7,000 years .
In Mesoamerica , there used to be neurosurgery , and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients .
And they were trying to -- they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease .
They didn 't know exactly what they were doing .
Not much has changed , by the way .
But they thought that , if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease , it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit .
So if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems , then the way to treat this is , of course , to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape .
So this was the thinking back then , and these individuals made these holes .
Sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because , you can tell that the holes are made partially and then , I think , there was some trepanation , and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole , and we know they survived these procedures .
But this was common .
There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes , and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common , and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago .
Now , in the course of time , we 've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things .
So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite , and so on .
And when things work well , then the nervous system works well , and everything functions .
But once in a while , things don 't go so well , and there 's trouble in these circuits , and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble , or sometimes they 're underactive and they 're not quite working as they should .
Now , the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are .
So when these neurons are in the motor circuit , you get dysfunction in the movement system , and you get things like Parkinson 's disease .
When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood , you get things like depression , and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function , then you get things like Alzheimer 's disease .
So what we 've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain , and we 've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down .
So this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial .
Once you choose the right station , whether it be jazz or opera , in our case whether it be movement or mood , we can put the dial there , and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume , to turn it up or turn it down .
So what I 'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients .
And this is accomplished using this kind of device , and this is called deep brain stimulation .
So what we 're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain .
Again , we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime , putting an electrode in , and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest , and with a remote control very much like a television remote control , we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain .
We can turn it up or down , on or off .
Now , about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation , and I 'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement , disorders of mood and disorders of cognition .
So this looks something like this when it 's in the brain .
You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there , and we can place this really anywhere in the brain .
I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon , because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now .
Now the first example I 'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson 's disease , and this lady has Parkinson 's disease , and she has these electrodes in her brain , and I 'm going to show you what she 's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson 's symptoms , and then we 're going to turn it on .
So this looks something like this .
The electrodes are turned off now , and you can see that she has tremor .
Okay . I can 't . Can you try to touch my finger ?
That 's a little better . That side is better .
We 're now going to turn it on .
It 's on . Just turned it on .
And this works like that , instantly .
And the difference between shaking in this way and not -- The difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus .
So we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them , " Gentlemen , that 's enough .
We want you to stop doing that . "
And we do that with electricity .
So we use electricity to dictate how they fire , and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity .
So in this case , we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons .
We started using this technique in other problems , and I 'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered , a case of dystonia .
So dystonia is a disorder affecting children .
It 's a genetic disorder , and it involves a twisting motion , and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they can 't breathe , until they get sores , urinary infections , and then they die .
So back in 1997 , I was asked to see this young boy , perfectly normal . He has this genetic form of dystonia .
There are eight children in the family .
Five of them have dystonia .
So here he is .
This boy is nine years old , perfectly normal until the age six , and then he started twisting his body , first the right foot , then the left foot , then the right arm , then the left arm , then the trunk , and then by the time he arrived , within the course of one or two years of the disease onset , he could no longer walk , he could no longer stand .
He was crippled , and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted , progressively disabled , and many of these children do not survive .
So he is one of five kids .
The only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this .
He did not respond to any drugs .
We did not know what to do with this boy .
We did not know what operation to do , where to go in the brain , but on the basis of our results in Parkinson 's disease , we reasoned , why don 't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in Parkinson 's disease , and let 's see what happens ?
So here he was . We operated on him hoping that he would get better . We did not know .
So here he is now , back in Israel where he lives , three months after the procedure , and here he is .
On the basis of this result , this is now a procedure that 's done throughout the world , and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery .
This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life .
This has been one of the most satisfying cases that I have ever done in my entire career , to restore movement and walking to this kind of child .
We realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things , and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood .
And we decided to take on depression , and the reason we took on depression is because it 's so prevalent , and as you know , there are many treatments for depression , with medication and psychotherapy , even electroconvulsive therapy , but there are millions of people , and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond , and it is these patients that we want to help .
And let 's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression .
So the first thing we did was , we compared , what 's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal , and what we did was PET scans to look at the blood flow of the brain , and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals , areas of the brain are shut down , and those are the areas in blue .
So here you really have the blues , and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation , in drive and decision-making , and indeed , if you 're severely depressed as these patients were , those are impaired . You lack motivation and drive .
The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive , area 25 , seen there in red , and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain .
If I make any of you sad , for example , I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died , this area of the brain lights up .
It is the sadness center of the brain .
And so patients with depression have hyperactivity .
The area of the brain for sadness is on red hot .
The thermostat is set at 100 degrees , and the other areas of the brain , involved in drive and motivation , are shut down .
So we wondered , can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat , can we turn down the activity , and what will be the consequence of that ?
So we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression .
This is work done with my colleague Helen Mayberg from Emory .
And we placed electrodes in area 25 , and in the top scan you see before the operation , area 25 , the sadness area is red hot , and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue , and then , after three months of continuous stimulation , 24 hours a day , or six months of continuous stimulation , we have a complete reversal of this .
We 're able to drive down area 25 , down to a more normal level , and we 're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain , and indeed we 're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression .
So now we are in clinical trials , and are in Phase III clinical trials , and this may become a new procedure , if it 's safe and we find that it 's effective , to treat patients with severe depression .
I 've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson 's disease and dystonia .
I 've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression .
Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter ?
Anybody interested in that ?
Of course we can , right ?
So what we 've decided to do is we 're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain .
We 're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity .
Now we 're not going to do this in normal people .
We 're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits , and we 've chosen to treat patients with Alzheimer 's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits .
As you know , this is the main symptom of early onset Alzheimer 's disease .
So we 've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix , which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit , with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit , and whether that can , in turn , help these patients with Alzheimer 's disease .
Now it turns out that in Alzheimer 's disease , there 's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain .
The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose .
It uses 20 percent of all your -- even though it only weighs two percent -- it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight .
Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain , and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment , which is a precursor for Alzheimer 's , all the way to Alzheimer 's disease , then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose .
They shut down . They turn off .
And indeed , what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely .
This is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain , a regional power failure .
So the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with Alzheimer 's disease , and the question is , are the lights out forever , or can we turn the lights back on ?
Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again ?
So this is what we did . We implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with Alzheimer 's disease , we turned it on , and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain .
And indeed , at the top , you 'll see before the surgery , the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal , predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes .
These areas of the brain are shut down .
The lights are out in these areas of the brain .
We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year , and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization .
And indeed , we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again .
So the message here is that , in Alzheimer 's disease , the lights are out , but there is someone home , and we 're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain , and as we do so , we expect that their functions will return .
So this is now in clinical trials .
We are going to operate on 50 patients with early Alzheimer 's disease to see whether this is safe and effective , whether we can improve their neurologic function .
So the message I want to leave you with today is that , indeed , there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states , whether we 're talking about Parkinson 's disease , depression , schizophrenia , Alzheimer 's .
We are now learning to understand what are the circuits , what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases .
We can now reach those circuits .
We can introduce electrodes within those circuits .
We can graduate the activity of those circuits .
We can turn them down if they are overactive , if they 're causing trouble , trouble that is felt throughout the brain , or we can turn them up if they are underperforming , and in so doing , we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain .
The implications of this , of course , is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease , but I haven 't told you but there 's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity , and this is something for the future , to see if , indeed , we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested .
So I envision that we 're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique .
We 're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain .
One of the most exciting things about this is that , indeed , it involves multidisciplinary work .
It involves the work of engineers , of imaging scientists , of basic scientists , of neurologists , psychiatrists , neurosurgeons , and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there 's the excitement .
And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on , and the consequence of that , of course , will be that we will be able to help many more patients .
Thank you very much .
Damon Horowitz : Philosophy in prison
Damon Horowitz teaches philosophy through the Prison University Project , bringing college-level classes to inmates of San Quentin State Prison . In this powerful short talk , he tells the story of an encounter with right and wrong that quickly gets personal .
Meet Tony . He 's my student .
He 's about my age , and he 's in San Quentin State Prison .
When Tony was 16 years old , one day , one moment , " It was mom 's gun .
Just flash it , scare the guy . He 's a punk .
He took some money ; we 'll take his money . That 'll teach him .
Then last minute , I 'm thinking , ' Can 't do this . This is wrong . ' My buddy says , ' C 'mon , let 's do this . ' I say , ' Let 's do this . ' " And those three words , Tony 's going to remember , because the next thing he knows , he hears the pop .
There 's the punk on the ground , puddle of blood .
And that 's felony murder -- 25 to life , parole at 50 if you 're lucky , and Tony 's not feeling very lucky .
So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say , " In this class , we will discuss the foundations of ethics , " Tony interrupts me .
" What are you going to teach me about right and wrong ?
I know what is wrong . I have done wrong .
I am told every day , by every face I see , every wall I face , that I am wrong .
If I ever get out of here , there will always be a mark by my name .
I 'm a convict ; I am branded ' wrong . ' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong ? "
So I say to Tony , " Sorry , but it 's worse than you think .
You think you know right and wrong ?
Then can you tell me what wrong is ?
No , don 't just give me an example .
I want to know about wrongness itself , the idea of wrong .
What is that idea ?
What makes something wrong ?
How do we know that it 's wrong ? Maybe you and I disagree .
Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong .
Maybe it 's you , maybe it 's me -- but we 're not here to trade opinions ; everyone 's got an opinion .
We are here for knowledge .
Our enemy is thoughtlessness . This is philosophy . "
And something changes for Tony .
" Could be I 'm wrong . I 'm tired of being wrong .
I want to know what is wrong .
I want to know what I know . "
What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy , the project that begins in wonder -- what Kant called " admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within . "
What can creatures like us know of such things ?
It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence -- what Heidegger called " the always already there . "
It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it -- what Socrates called " the examined life . "
Socrates , a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing .
Socrates died in prison , his philosophy intact .
So Tony starts doing his homework .
He learns his whys and wherefores , his causes and correlations , his logic , his fallacies .
Turns out , Tony 's got the philosophy muscle .
His body is in prison , but his mind is free .
Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous , the epistemologically anxious , the ethically dubious , the metaphysically ridiculous .
That 's Plato , Descartes , Nietzsche and Bill Clinton .
So when he gives me his final paper , in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure , I say , " I don 't know .
Let us think about that . "
Because in that moment , there 's no mark by Tony 's name ; it 's just the two of us standing there .
It is not professor and convict , it is just two minds ready to do philosophy .
And I say to Tony , " Let 's do this . "
Thank you .
Halla Tomasdottir : A feminine response to Iceland 's financial crash
Halla Tomasdottir managed to take her company Audur Capital through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland by applying 5 traditionally " feminine " values to financial services . At TEDWomen , she talks about these values and the importance of balance .
It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland , because until a couple of years ago , people knew hardly anything about us , and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us .
But in the last couple of years we 've become infamous for a couple of things .
First , of course , the economic meltdown .
It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay .
Ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve .
Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends , including President Obama .
By the way , the pronunciation is " Eyjafjallajokull . "
None of your media got it right .
But I 'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly .
I 'm here to tell you the story of Audur Capital , which is a financial firm founded by me and Kristin -- who you see in the picture -- in the spring of 2007 , just over a year before the economic collapse hit .
Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm ?
Well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone .
And I 'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country .
But I can surely tell you that in my country , much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere , men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector , and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems .
So we decided , a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this wasn 't sustainable , to found a financial services firm based on our values , and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance .
Raised quite a few eyebrows in Iceland .
We weren 't known as the typical " women " women in Iceland up until then .
So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then .
And we got a great group of people to join us -- principled people with great skills , and investors with a vision and values to match ours .
And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients .
And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that -- and also there 's a factor of luck and timing -- we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values .
So let me share with you our values .
We believe in risk awareness .
What does that mean ?
We believe that you should always understand the risks that you 're taking , and we will not invest in things we don 't understand .
Not a complicated thing .
But in 2007 , at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures , it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market .
We also believe in straight-talking , telling it as it is , using simple language that people understand , telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides , and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter , like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the Icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us .
And , although we do work in the financial sector , where Excel is king , we believe in emotional capital .
And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence .
It is actually people that make money and lose money , not Excel spreadsheets .
Last , but not least , we believe in profit with principles .
We care how we make our profit .
So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers , we are willing to do it with a long-term view , and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter .
So we like to see profits , plus positive social and environmental benefits , when we invest .
But it wasn 't just about the values , although we are convinced that they matter .
It was also about a business opportunity .
It 's the female trend , and it 's the sustainability trend , that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come .
The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men ; it is actually about women being different from men , bringing different values and different ways to the table .
So what do you get ? You get better decision-making , and you get less herd behavior , and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results .
But one has to wonder , now that we 've had this financial sector collapse upon us in Iceland -- and by the way , Europe looks pretty bad right now , and many would say that you in America are heading for some more trouble as well .
Now that we 've had all that happen , and we have all this data out there telling us that it 's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables , will we see business and finance change ?
Will government change ?
Well I 'll give you my straight talk about this .
I have days that I believe , but I have days that I 'm full of doubt .
Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us ?
Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity -- to do the same things over and over again , hoping for a different outcome .
So I guess the world is insane , because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again , hoping that this time it 's not going to collapse upon us .
I want to see more revolutionary thinking , and I remain hopeful .
Like TED , I believe in people .
And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious , and they are going to start voting with their wallets , and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside , if they don 't do it from the inside .
But I 'm more of the revolutionary , and I should be ; I 'm from Iceland .
We have a long history of strong , courageous , independent women , ever since the Viking age .
And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society , I was seven -- it happened to be my mother 's birthday -- October 24 , 1975 .
Women in Iceland took the day off .
From work or from home , they took the day off , and nothing worked in Iceland .
They marched into the center of Reykjavik , and they put women 's issues onto the agenda .
And some say this was the start of a global movement .
For me it was the start of a long journey , but I decided that day to matter .
Five years later , Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president -- first female to become head of state , single mom , a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed .
And at one of the campaign sessions , she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she couldn 't become president -- she was a woman , and even half a woman .
That night she won the election , because she came back -- not just because of his crappy behavior -- but she came back and said , " Well , I 'm actually not going to breastfeed the Icelandic nation ; I 'm going to lead it . "
So I 've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today .
But in spite of that , I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman .
Started in corporate America , and I was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual , that women and men would have just the same opportunities .
But I 've come to conclude lately that it isn 't like that .
We are not the same , and it 's great . Because of our differences , we create and sustain life .
So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge .
The final thought I want to leave with you is that I 'm fed up with this tyranny of either / or choices in life -- either it 's men or it 's women .
We need to start embracing the beauty of balance .
So let 's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there , and let 's start thinking about doing good business .
That 's how we change the world . That 's the only sustainable future .
Thank you .
Kate Hartman : The art of wearable communication
Artist Kate Hartman uses wearable electronics to explore how we communicate , with ourselves and with the world . In this quirky and thought-provoking talk , she shows the " Talk to Yourself Hat " , the " Inflatable Heart " , the " Glacier Embracing Suit " , and other unexpected devices .
My name is Kate Hartman .
And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate .
So I 'm specifically interested in how we , as humans , relate to ourselves , each other and the world around us .
So just to give you a bit of context , as June said , I 'm an artist , a technologist and an educator .
I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics .
And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form .
And so anytime I talk about what I do , I like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter .
And it 's pretty simple .
Everybody 's got one -- all of you .
I can guarantee , everyone in this room , all of you over there , the people in the cushy seats , the people up top with the laptops -- we all have bodies .
Don 't be ashamed .
It 's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world .
And so when working as an interaction designer , or as an artist who deals with participation -- creating things that live on , in or around the human form -- it 's really a powerful space to work within .
So within my own work , I use a broad range of materials and tools .
So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing .
And to tell you a bit about the things that I make , the easiest place to start the story is with a hat .
And so it all started several years ago , late one night when I was sitting on the subway , riding home , and I was thinking .
And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little .
And so I was thinking about how it might be great if I could just take all these noises -- like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head -- if I could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that I could share them with somebody else .
And so I went home , and I made a prototype of this hat .
And I called it the Muttering Hat , because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you , but you could detach them and share them with somebody else .
So I make other hats as well .
This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat .
It 's fairly self-explanatory .
It physically carves out conversation space for one .
And when you speak out loud , the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears .
And so when I make these things , it 's really not so much about the object itself , but rather the negative space around the object .
So what happens when a person puts this thing on ?
What kind of an experience do they have ?
And how are they transformed by wearing it ?
So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves .
So this particular device is called the Gut Listener .
And it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards .
And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication .
And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves .
So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions .
So they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst .
And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences .
So the Discommunicator is a tool for arguments .
And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange , but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered .
And in the end , some of these things just act as invitations .
So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say .
So even though I 'm really interested in the relationship between people , I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us .
And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back , I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them .
And I thought , " Well , hey !
Maybe if I want to better relate to walls , maybe I need to be more wall-like myself . "
So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack .
And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me .
And so jumping off of that , thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world , I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls -- which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols .
So when a plant is thirsty , it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter .
And so this really shifts the human / plant dynamic , because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time .
And so kind of thinking about scale , my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers -- of course .
And so glaciers are these magnificent beings , and there 's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them , but what I 'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations .
Because there seems to be an issue .
The glaciers are actually leaving us .
They 're both shrinking and retreating -- and some of them have disappeared altogether .
And so I actually live in Canada now , so I 've been visiting one of my local glaciers .
And this one 's particularly interesting , because , of all the glaciers in North America , it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year .
They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier .
And this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter .
When I meet a glacier for the very first time , what do I do ?
There 's no kind of social protocol for this .
I really just don 't even know how to say hello .
Do I carve a message in the snow ?
Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes -- ice cube Morse code .
Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool , like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice .
But really the most satisfying experience I 've had is the act of listening , which is what we need in any good relationship .
And I was really struck by how much it affected me .
This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier .
And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days , I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit .
And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice .
And once again , it 's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug .
So , yea , this is actually just the beginning .
These are initial musings for this project .
And just as with the wall , how I wanted to be more wall-like , with this project , I 'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace .
And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines -- artists , technologists , scientists -- to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations .
So beyond that , in closing , I 'd just like to say that we 're in this era of communications and device proliferation , and it 's really tremendous and exciting and sexy , but I think what 's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world .
Thanks .
Miguel Nicolelis : A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts . No , really .
Can we use our brains to directly control machines ? Miguel Nicolelis suggests yes , showing how a clever monkey in the US learned to control a robot arm in Japan purely with its thoughts . The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and in fact , it powered the exoskeleton that kicked off the 2014 World Cup .
The kind of neuroscience that I do and my colleagues do is almost like the weatherman .
We are always chasing storms .
We want to see and measure storms -- brainstorms , that is .
And we all talk about brainstorms in our daily lives , but we rarely see or listen to one .
So I always like to start these talks by actually introducing you to one of them .
Actually , the first time we recorded more than one neuron -- a hundred brain cells simultaneously -- we could measure the electrical sparks of a hundred cells in the same animal , this is the first image we got , the first 10 seconds of this recording .
So we got a little snippet of a thought , and we could see it in front of us .
I always tell the students that we could also call neuroscientists some sort of astronomer , because we are dealing with a system that is only comparable in terms of number of cells to the number of galaxies that we have in the universe .
And here we are , out of billions of neurons , just recording , 10 years ago , a hundred .
We are doing a thousand now .
And we hope to understand something fundamental about our human nature .
Because , if you don 't know yet , everything that we use to define what human nature is comes from these storms , comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories , our beliefs , our feelings , our plans for the future .
Everything that we ever do , everything that every human has ever done , do or will do , requires the toil of populations of neurons producing these kinds of storms .
And the sound of a brainstorm , if you 've never heard one , is somewhat like this .
You can put it louder if you can .
My son calls this " making popcorn while listening to a badly-tuned A.M. station . "
This is a brain .
This is what happens when you route these electrical storms to a loudspeaker and you listen to a hundred brain cells firing , your brain will sound like this -- my brain , any brain .
And what we want to do as neuroscientists in this time is to actually listen to these symphonies , these brain symphonies , and try to extract from them the messages they carry .
In particular , about 12 years ago we created a preparation that we named brain-machine interfaces .
And you have a scheme here that describes how it works .
The idea is , let 's have some sensors that listen to these storms , this electrical firing , and see if you can , in the same time that it takes for this storm to leave the brain and reach the legs or the arms of an animal -- about half a second -- let 's see if we can read these signals , extract the motor messages that are embedded in it , translate it into digital commands and send it to an artificial device that will reproduce the voluntary motor wheel of that brain in real time .
And see if we can measure how well we can translate that message when we compare to the way the body does that .
And if we can actually provide feedback , sensory signals that go back from this robotic , mechanical , computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain , back to the brain , how the brain deals with that , of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery .
And that 's exactly what we did 10 years ago .
We started with a superstar monkey called Aurora that became one of the superstars of this field .
And Aurora liked to play video games .
As you can see here , she likes to use a joystick , like any one of us , any of our kids , to play this game .
And as a good primate , she even tries to cheat before she gets the right answer .
So even before a target appears that she 's supposed to cross with the cursor that she 's controlling with this joystick , Aurora is trying to find the target , no matter where it is .
And if she 's doing that , because every time she crosses that target with the little cursor , she gets a drop of Brazilian orange juice .
And I can tell you , any monkey will do anything for you if you get a little drop of Brazilian orange juice .
Actually any primate will do that .
Think about that .
Well , while Aurora was playing this game , as you saw , and doing a thousand trials a day and getting 97 percent correct and 350 milliliters of orange juice , we are recording the brainstorms that are produced in her head and sending them to a robotic arm that was learning to reproduce the movements that Aurora was making .
Because the idea was to actually turn on this brain-machine interface and have Aurora play the game just by thinking , without interference of her body .
Her brainstorms would control an arm that would move the cursor and cross the target .
And to our shock , that 's exactly what Aurora did .
She played the game without moving her body .
So every trajectory that you see of the cursor now , this is the exact first moment she got that .
That 's the exact first moment a brain intention was liberated from the physical domains of a body of a primate and could act outside , in that outside world , just by controlling an artificial device .
And Aurora kept playing the game , kept finding the little target and getting the orange juice that she wanted to get , that she craved for .
Well , she did that because she , at that time , had acquired a new arm .
The robotic arm that you see moving here 30 days later , after the first video that I showed to you , is under the control of Aurora 's brain and is moving the cursor to get to the target .
And Aurora now knows that she can play the game with this robotic arm , but she has not lost the ability to use her biological arms to do what she pleases .
She can scratch her back , she can scratch one of us , she can play another game .
By all purposes and means , Aurora 's brain has incorporated that artificial device as an extension of her body .
The model of the self that Aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm .
Well , we did that 10 years ago .
Just fast forward 10 years .
Just last year we realized that you don 't even need to have a robotic device .
You can just build a computational body , an avatar , a monkey avatar .
And you can actually use it for our monkeys to either interact with them , or you can train them to assume in a virtual world the first-person perspective of that avatar and use her brain activity to control the movements of the avatar 's arms or legs .
And what we did basically was to train the animals to learn how to control these avatars and explore objects that appear in the virtual world .
And these objects are visually identical , but when the avatar crosses the surface of these objects , they send an electrical message that is proportional to the microtactile texture of the object that goes back directly to the monkey 's brain , informing the brain what it is the avatar is touching .
And in just four weeks , the brain learns to process this new sensation and acquires a new sensory pathway -- like a new sense .
And you truly liberate the brain now because you are allowing the brain to send motor commands to move this avatar .
And the feedback that comes from the avatar is being processed directly by the brain without the interference of the skin .
So what you see here is this is the design of the task .
You 're going to see an animal basically touching these three targets .
And he has to select one because only one carries the reward , the orange juice that they want to get .
And he has to select it by touch using a virtual arm , an arm that doesn 't exist .
And that 's exactly what they do .
This is a complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body and the motor in a perceptual task .
The animal is controlling the avatar to touch the targets .
And he 's sensing the texture by receiving an electrical message directly in the brain .
And the brain is deciding what is the texture associated with the reward .
The legends that you see in the movie don 't appear for the monkey .
And by the way , they don 't read English anyway , so they are here just for you to know that the correct target is shifting position .
And yet , they can find them by tactile discrimination , and they can press it and select it .
So when we look at the brains of these animals , on the top panel you see the alignment of 125 cells showing what happens with the brain activity , the electrical storms , of this sample of neurons in the brain when the animal is using a joystick .
And that 's a picture that every neurophysiologist knows .
The basic alignment shows that these cells are coding for all possible directions .
The bottom picture is what happens when the body stops moving and the animal starts controlling either a robotic device or a computational avatar .
As fast as we can reset our computers , the brain activity shifts to start representing this new tool , as if this too was a part of that primate 's body .
The brain is assimilating that too , as fast as we can measure .
So that suggests to us that our sense of self does not end at the last layer of the epithelium of our bodies , but it ends at the last layer of electrons of the tools that we 're commanding with our brains .
Our violins , our cars , our bicycles , our soccer balls , our clothing -- they all become assimilated by this voracious , amazing , dynamic system called the brain .
How far can we take it ?
Well , in an experiment that we ran a few years ago , we took this to the limit .
We had an animal running on a treadmill at Duke University on the East Coast of the United States , producing the brainstorms necessary to move .
And we had a robotic device , a humanoid robot , in Kyoto , Japan at ATR Laboratories that was dreaming its entire life to be controlled by a brain , a human brain , or a primate brain .
What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movements in the monkey was transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke , so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her .
So she could be rewarded , not by what her body was doing but for every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet controlled by her brain activity .
Funny thing , that round trip around the globe took 20 milliseconds less than it takes for that brainstorm to leave its head , the head of the monkey , and reach its own muscle .
The monkey was moving a robot that was six times bigger , across the planet .
This is one of the experiments in which that robot was able to walk autonomously .
This is CB1 fulfilling its dream in Japan under the control of the brain activity of a primate .
So where are we taking all this ?
What are we going to do with all this research , besides studying the properties of this dynamic universe that we have between our ears ?
Well the idea is to take all this knowledge and technology and try to restore one of the most severe neurological problems that we have in the world .
Millions of people have lost the ability to translate these brainstorms into action , into movement .
Although their brains continue to produce those storms and code for movements , they cannot cross a barrier that was created by a lesion on the spinal cord .
So our idea is to create a bypass , is to use these brain-machine interfaces to read these signals , larger-scale brainstorms that contain the desire to move again , bypass the lesion using computational microengineering and send it to a new body , a whole body called an exoskeleton , a whole robotic suit that will become the new body of these patients .
And you can see an image produced by this consortium .
This is a nonprofit consortium called the Walk Again Project that is putting together scientists from Europe , together to work to actually get this new body built -- a body that we believe , through the same plastic mechanisms that allow Aurora and other monkeys to use these tools through a brain-machine interface and that allows us to incorporate the tools that we produce and use in our daily life .
This same mechanism , we hope , will allow these patients , not only to imagine again the movements that they want to make and translate them into movements of this new body , but for this body to be assimilated as the new body that the brain controls .
So I was told about 10 years ago that this would never happen , that this was close to impossible .
And I can only tell you that as a scientist , I grew up in southern Brazil in the mid- ' 60s watching a few crazy guys telling [ us ] that they would go to the Moon .
And I was five years old , and I never understood why NASA didn 't hire Captain Kirk and Spock to do the job ; after all , they were very proficient -- but just seeing that as a kid made me believe , as my grandmother used to tell me , that " impossible is just the possible that someone has not put in enough effort to make it come true . "
So they told me that it 's impossible to make someone walk .
I think I 'm going to follow my grandmother 's advice .
Thank you .
Lisa Margonelli : The political chemistry of oil
In the Gulf oil spill 's aftermath , Lisa Margonelli says drilling moratoriums and executive ousters make for good theater , but distract from the issue at its heart : our unrestrained oil consumption . She shares her bold plan to wean America off of oil -- by confronting consumers with its real cost . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So I 'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important , long , oily , hot summer , and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted .
But before I talk about the political chemistry , I actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil .
This is a photograph from when I visited Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2002 to watch the Minerals Management Service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice .
And what you see here is , you see a little bit of crude oil , you see some ice cubes , and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm .
The napalm is burning there quite nicely .
And the thing is , is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the American consumer .
We 're four percent of the world 's population ; we use 25 percent of the world 's oil production .
And we don 't really understand what oil is , until you check out its molecules , And you don 't really understand that until you see this stuff burn .
So this is what happens as that burn gets going .
It takes off . It 's a big woosh .
I highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday , because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again .
It 'll just bake your retinas .
Let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil .
Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules .
It starts of with the very small ones , which are one carbon , four hydrogen -- that 's methane -- it just floats off .
Then there 's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon .
You 've probably heard of benzene rings ; they 're very carcinogenic .
And it goes all the way over to these big , thick , galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons , and they have thousands of hydrogens , and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them .
Those are called the asphaltenes ; they 're an ingredient in asphalt .
They 're very important in oil spills .
Let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water .
It is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous .
Oil doesn 't sink , it floats .
If it sank , it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill .
And the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water .
It spreads out to be really thin , so you have a hard time corralling it .
The next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate , and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that , and shrimp .
And then the asphaltenes -- and this is the crucial thing -- the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion , something like mayonnaise .
It triples the amount of oily , messy goo that you have in the water , and it makes it very hard to handle .
It also makes it very viscous .
When the Prestige sank off the coast of Spain , there were big , floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil , with the consistency , or the viscosity , of chewing gum .
It 's incredibly hard to clean up .
And every single oil is different when it hits water .
When the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics , it 's absolutely explosive .
For the first time , American consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves .
They have a " eureka ! " moment , when we suddenly understand oil in a different context .
So I 'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics , because it 's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important , why we need to stay focused .
Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks , " Wow ! I 'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work . "
No , they think , " Ugh . I have to go buy gas .
I 'm so angry about it . The oil companies are ripping me off .
They set the prices , and I don 't even know .
I am helpless over this . "
And this is what happens to us at the gas pump -- and actually , gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger .
You might notice that many gas pumps , including this one , are designed to look like ATMs .
I 've talked to engineers . That 's specifically to diffuse our anger , because supposedly we feel good about ATMs .
That shows you how bad it is .
But actually , I mean , this feeling of helplessness comes in because most Americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy , not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market .
And the thing is , too , is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume , which is somewhat reasonable , because in fact , we have designed this system where , if you want to get a job , it 's much more important to have a car that runs , to have a job and keep a job , than to have a GED .
And that 's actually very perverse .
Now there 's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas , which is that we 'd rather be doing anything else .
This is BP 's gas station in downtown Los Angeles .
It is green . It is a shrine to greenishness .
" Now , " you think , " why would something so lame work on people so smart ? "
Well , the reason is , is because , when we 're buying gas , we 're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance .
I mean , we 're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else .
We don 't want to be buying oil ; we want to be doing something green .
And we get kind of in on our own con .
I mean -- and this is funny , it looks funny here .
But in fact , that 's why the slogan " beyond petroleum " worked .
But it 's an inherent part of our energy policy , which is we don 't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use .
We talk about energy independence . We talk about hydrogen cars .
We talk about biofuels that haven 't been invented yet .
And so , cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil , and it 's really important to dealing with this oil spill .
Okay , so the politics of oil are very moral in the United States .
The oil industry is like a huge , gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else , but we actually see it in very moral terms .
This is an early-on photograph -- you can see , we had these gushers .
Early journalists looked at these spills , and they said , " This is a filthy industry . "
But they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing .
They weren 't farmers , they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground .
It 's the " Beverly Hillbillies , " basically .
But in the beginning , this was seen as a very morally problematic thing , long before it became funny .
And then , of course , there was John D. Rockefeller .
And the thing about John D. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry , and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company , a multinational .
It was terrifying ; you think Walmart is a terrifying business model now , imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s .
And it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy .
But what 's really amazing is that Ida Tarbell , the journalist , went in and did a big exposé of Rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place .
But in many ways , that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us .
And here 's one of the things that Ida Tarbell said -- she said , " He has a thin nose like a thorn .
There were no lips .
There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them . "
Okay , so that guy is actually still with us .
I mean , this is a very pervasive -- this is part of our DNA .
And then there 's this guy , okay .
So , you might be wondering why it is that , every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill , we call these CEOs down to Washington , and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them .
And this is something that we 've been doing since 1974 , when we first asked them , " Why are there these obscene profits ? "
And we 've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these CEOs .
And we take it as , you know -- we look at it on a moral level , rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level .
And so I 'm not saying these guys aren 't liable to answer questions -- I 'm just saying that , when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards , you don 't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate , or you 're going to get around and reducing our dependence on oil .
So I 'm saying this is kind of a distraction .
But it makes for good theater , and it 's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week .
So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing .
I mean , these pictures -- this is from the Santa Barbara spill .
You have these pictures of birds .
They really influence people .
When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969 , it formed the environmental movement in its modern form .
It started Earth Day .
It also put in place the National Environmental Policy Act , the Clean Air Act , the Clean Water Act .
Everything that we are really stemmed from this period .
I think it 's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us .
Here we are normally ; we 're standing at the gas pump , and we 're feeling kind of helpless .
We look at these pictures and we understand , for the first time , our role in this supply chain .
We connect the dots in the supply chain .
And we have this kind of -- as voters , we have kind of a " eureka ! " moment .
This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important .
But it 's also really important that we don 't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it .
We actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem .
One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms .
We were very reactive , as opposed to being proactive about what happened .
And so what we did was , actually , we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling .
We stopped drilling in ANWR , but we didn 't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed .
In fact , it 's continued to increase .
The only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices .
As you can see , our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out .
We only have two percent of the world 's oil reserves ; 65 percent of them are in the Persian Gulf .
One of the things that 's happened because of this is that , since 1969 , the country of Nigeria , or the part of Nigeria that pumps oil , which is the delta -- which is two times the size of Maryland -- has had thousands of oil spills a year .
I mean , we 've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations .
That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969 .
And we can wrap our heads around the spills , because that 's what we see here , but in fact , these guys actually live in a war zone .
There 's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of Maryland , and it 's all related to the oil .
And these guys , I mean , if they were in the U.S. , they might be actually here in this room .
They have degrees in political science , degrees in business -- they 're entrepreneurs . They don 't actually want to be doing what they 're doing .
And it 's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us .
The other thing that we 've done , as we 've continued to increase demand , is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs .
One of the places we put in a big oil project in Chad , with Exxon .
So the U.S. taxpayer paid for it ; the World Bank , Exxon paid for it .
We put it in . There was a tremendous banditry problem .
I was there in 2003 .
We were driving along this dark , dark road , and the guy in the green stepped out , and I was just like , " Ahhh ! This is it . "
And then the guy in the Exxon uniform stepped out , and we realized it was okay .
They have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields .
But at the same time , Chad has become much more unstable , and we are not paying for that price at the pump .
We pay for it in our taxes on April 15th .
We do the same thing with the price of policing the Persian Gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open .
This is 1988 -- we actually bombed two Iranian oil platforms that year .
That was the beginning of an escalating U.S. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump .
We pay for it on April 15th , and we can 't even calculate the cost of this involvement .
The other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the Gulf of Mexico , which was not part of the moratoriums .
Now what 's happened in the Gulf of Mexico -- as you can see , this is the Minerals Management diagram of wells for gas and oil .
It 's become this intense industrialized zone .
It doesn 't have the same resonance for us that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has , but it should , I mean , it 's a bird sanctuary .
Also , every time you buy gasoline in the United States , half of it is actually being refined along the coast , because the Gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well .
So the people of the Gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment .
And finally , American families also pay a price for oil .
Now on the one hand , the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil , but on the other hand , the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work , generally in a fairly crummy car .
If you look at people who make $ 50,000 a year , they have two kids , they might have three jobs or more , and then they have to really commute .
They 're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care .
And the same thing happens at the 50th percentile , around 80,000 .
Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy , but they 're also a drain on individual families and it 's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher .
So , what I 'm going to talk to you about now is : what do we have to do this time ?
What are the laws ? What do we have to do to keep ourselves focused ?
One thing is -- we need to stay away from the theater .
We need to stay away from the moratoriums .
We need to focus really back again on the molecules .
The moratoriums are fine , but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil .
One of the things that we also need to do , into thinking that you can have a green world , before you reduce the amount of oil that we use .
We need to focus on reducing the oil .
What you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the U.S. economy .
It comes in on the side -- the useful stuff is the dark gray , and the un-useful stuff , which is called the rejected energy -- the waste , goes up to the top .
Now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount .
And one of the things that we need to do is , not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient , but we also need to fix the economy in general .
We need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel .
For example , we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000 .
We actually encourage people to drive more .
We have policies that reward sprawl -- we have all kinds of policies .
We need to have more mobility choices .
We need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil .
And we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry , which is at least 10 billion dollars a year , into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute .
Whether that 's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road , this is where we need to be .
We need to kind of rationalize this whole thing , and you can find more about this policy .
It 's called STRONG , which is " Secure Transportation Reducing Oil Needs Gradually , " and the idea is instead of being helpless , we need to be more strong .
They 're up at NewAmerica.net.
What 's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump , to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are , having kind of that special moment , where we connect the dots actually at the pump .
Now supposedly , oil taxes are the third rail of American politics -- the no-fly zone .
I actually -- I agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much , but I think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline , and upped it to six cents next year , nine cents the following year , all the way up to 30 cents by 2020 , that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption , and at the same time we would give people time to prepare , time to respond , and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time .
Let me give you a little sense of how this would work .
This is a gas receipt , hypothetically , for a year from now .
The first thing that you have on the tax is -- you have a tax for a stronger America -- 33 cents .
So you 're not helpless at the pump .
And the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign , very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack .
And what it says is , " The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs . "
That 's a lot .
And so this -- you can see that you 're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax .
And also , the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system .
And at the same time , you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting , or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car , or whatever it is you 're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence .
With this whole sort of suite of policies , we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption -- or our oil consumption -- by 20 percent by 2020 .
So , three million barrels a day .
But in order to do this , one of the things we really need to do , is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon .
We need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater , not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there .
We need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules .
Thank you .
Ludwick Marishane : A bath without water
If you had to walk a mile for a jug of water every day , as millions of people do , it 's unlikely you 'd use that precious water to bathe . Young entrepreneur Ludwick Marishane tells the amazing , funny story of how he invented a cheap , clean and convenient solution : DryBath , the world 's first bath-substituting lotion .
So I grew up in Limpopo , on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga , a little town called Motetema .
Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather , and growing up in these tough situations , at the age of 17 , I was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter , and we were sunbathing .
The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter .
So as we were sunbathing , my best friend next to me says , " Man , why doesn 't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you don 't have to bathe ? "
And I sat , and I was like , " Man , I would buy that , eh ? "
So I went home , and I did a little research , and I found some very shocking statistics .
Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation .
Four hundred and fifty million of them are in Africa , and five million of them are in South Africa .
Various diseases thrive in this environment , the most drastic of which is called trachoma .
Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye . Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind .
The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year . The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma , all you have to do is wash your face : no medicine , no pills , no injections .
So after seeing these shocking statistics , I thought to myself , " Okay , even if I 'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that I don 't want to bathe , I at least need to do it to try to save the world . "
So with my trusty little steed , my Nokia 6234 cell phone -- I didn 't have a laptop , I didn 't have Internet much , except for the 20-rand-an-hour Internet cafe — I did research on Wikipedia , on Google , about lotions , creams , the compositions , the melting points , the toxicities -- I did high school science -- and I wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper , and it looked like the KFC special spice , you know ?
So I was like , okay , so we 've got the formula ready .
Now we need to get this thing into practice .
Fast forward four years later , after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone , having written my patent on the cell phone , I 'm the youngest patent-holder in the country , and — — I can 't say any more than that .
I had invented DryBath , the world 's first bath-substituting lotion .
You literally put it on your skin , and you don 't have to bathe .
So after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources I had , I went to university , met a few people , got it into practice , and we have a fully functioning product that 's ready to go to the market . It 's actually available on the market .
So we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making DryBath available .
One of the things we learned was that poor communities don 't buy products in bulk .
They buy products on demand . A person in Alex doesn 't buy a box of cigarettes . They buy one cigarette each day , even though it 's more expensive .
So we packaged DryBath in these innovative little sachets .
You just snap them in half , and you squeeze it out .
And the cool part is , one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand .
After creating that model , we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product .
We realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want DryBath .
At least once a week .
Anyway , we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath , and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas , two hours more for school , two hours more for homework , two hours more to just be a kid .
After seeing that global impact , we narrowed it down to our key value proposition , which was cleanliness and convenience .
DryBath is a rich man 's convenience and a poor man 's lifesaver .
Having put the product into practice , we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market , and one question I have for the audience today is , on the gravel roads of Limpopo , with an allowance of 50 rand a week , I came up with a way for the world not to bathe .
What 's stopping you ?
I 'm not done yet . I 'm not done yet .
And another key thing that I learned a lot throughout this whole process , last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world .
I 'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world , the first African to get that accolade , and one thing that really puzzles me is , I did all of this just because I didn 't want to bathe . Thank you .
David Steindl-Rast : Want to be happy ? Be grateful
The one thing all humans have in common is that each of us wants to be happy , says Brother David Steindl-Rast , a monk and interfaith scholar . And happiness , he suggests , is born from gratitude . An inspiring lesson in slowing down , looking where you 're going , and above all , being grateful .
There is something you know about me , something very personal , and there is something I know about every one of you and that 's very central to your concerns .
There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world , on the street , that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with , and that is that all of us want to be happy .
In this , we are all together .
How we imagine our happiness , that differs from one another , but it 's already a lot that we have all in common , that we want to be happy .
Now my topic is gratefulness .
How is the connection between happiness and gratefulness ?
Many people would say , well , that 's very easy .
When you are happy , you are grateful .
But think again .
Is it really the happy people that are grateful ?
We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy , and they are not happy , because they want something else or they want more of the same .
And we all know people who have lots of misfortune , misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have , and they are deeply happy .
They radiate happiness . You are surprised .
Why ? Because they are grateful .
So it is not happiness that makes us grateful .
It 's gratefulness that makes us happy .
If you think it 's happiness that makes you grateful , think again .
It 's gratefulness that makes you happy .
Now , we can ask , what really do we mean by gratefulness ?
And how does it work ?
I appeal to your own experience .
We all know from experience how it goes .
We experience something that 's valuable to us .
Something is given to us that 's valuable to us .
And it 's really given .
These two things have to come together .
It has to be something valuable , and it 's a real gift .
You haven 't bought it . You haven 't earned it .
You haven 't traded it in . You haven 't worked for it .
It 's just given to you .
And when these two things come together , something that 's really valuable to me and I realize it 's freely given , then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart , happiness spontaneously rises in my heart .
That 's how gratefulness happens .
Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while .
We cannot only have grateful experiences .
We can be people who live gratefully .
Grateful living , that is the thing .
And how can we live gratefully ?
By experiencing , by becoming aware that every moment is a given moment , as we say .
It 's a gift . You haven 't earned it .
You haven 't brought it about in any way .
You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you , and yet , that 's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us , this moment , with all the opportunity that it contains .
If we didn 't have this present moment , we wouldn 't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything , and this moment is a gift .
It 's a given moment , as we say .
Now , we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity .
What you are really grateful for is the opportunity , not the thing that is given to you , because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn 't have the opportunity to enjoy it , to do something with it , you wouldn 't be grateful for it .
Opportunity is the gift within every gift , and we have this saying , opportunity knocks only once .
Well , think again .
Every moment is a new gift , over and over again , and if you miss the opportunity of this moment , another moment is given to us , and another moment .
We can avail ourselves of this opportunity , or we can miss it , and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity , it is the key to happiness .
Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands .
Moment by moment , we can be grateful for this gift .
Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything ?
Certainly not .
We cannot be grateful for violence , for war , for oppression , for exploitation .
On the personal level , we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend , for unfaithfulness , for bereavement .
But I didn 't say we can be grateful for everything .
I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity , and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult , we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us .
It isn 't as bad as it might seem .
Actually , when you look at it and experience it , you find that most of the time , what is given to us is opportunity to enjoy , and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity .
But once in a while , something very difficult is given to us , and when this difficult thing occurs to us , it 's a challenge to rise to that opportunity , and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful .
Learning patience , for instance .
We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint , but is more like a marathon .
That takes patience . That 's difficult .
It may be to stand up for your opinion , to stand up for your conviction .
That 's an opportunity that is given to us .
To learn , to suffer , to stand up , all these opportunities are given to us , but they are opportunities , and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire .
They make something out of life .
And those who fail get another opportunity .
We always get another opportunity .
That 's the wonderful richness of life .
So how can we find a method that will harness this ?
How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully , not just once in a while being grateful , but moment by moment to be grateful .
How can we do it ?
It 's a very simple method .
It 's so simple that it 's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street .
Stop . Look . Go .
That 's all .
But how often do we stop ?
We rush through life . We don 't stop .
We miss the opportunity because we don 't stop .
We have to stop . We have to get quiet .
And we have to build stop signs into our lives .
When I was in Africa some years ago and then came back , I noticed water .
In Africa where I was , I didn 't have drinkable water .
Every time I turned on the faucet , I was overwhelmed .
Every time I clicked on the light , I was so grateful . It made me so happy .
But after a while , this wears off .
So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet , and every time I turned it on , water .
So leave it up to your own imagination .
You can find whatever works best for you , but you need stop signs in your life .
And when you stop , then the next thing is to look .
You look . You open your eyes .
You open your ears . You open your nose .
You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us .
There is no end to it , and that is what life is all about , to enjoy , to enjoy what is given to us .
And then we can also open our hearts , our hearts for the opportunities , for the opportunities also to help others , to make others happy , because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy .
And when we open our hearts to the opportunities , the opportunities invite us to do something , and that is the third .
Stop , look , and then go , and really do something .
And what we can do is whatever life offers to you in that present moment .
Mostly it 's the opportunity to enjoy , but sometimes it 's something more difficult .
But whatever it is , if we take this opportunity , we go with it , we are creative , those are the creative people , and that little stop , look , go , is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world .
Because we need , we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness , and you will be surprised if you -- I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word " gratefulness " and " gratitude " comes up .
Everywhere you find it , a grateful airline , a restaurant gratefulness , a cafe gratefulness , a wine that is gratefulness .
Yes , I have even come across a toilet paper that the brand is called Thank You .
There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world .
It can change our world in immensely important ways , because if you 're grateful , you 're not fearful , and if you 're not fearful , you 're not violent .
If you 're grateful , you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity , and you are willing to share .
If you are grateful , you are enjoying the differences between people , and you are respectful to everybody , and that changes this power pyramid under which we live .
And it doesn 't make for equality , but it makes for equal respect , and that is the important thing .
The future of the world will be a network , not a pyramid , not a pyramid turned upside down .
The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution , and it 's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution , because a normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones did before .
What we need is a networking of smaller groups , smaller and smaller groups who know one another , who interact with one another , and that is a grateful world .
A grateful world is a world of joyful people .
Grateful people are joyful people , and joyful people , the more and more joyful people there are , the more and more we 'll have a joyful world .
We have a network for grateful living , and it has mushroomed .
We couldn 't understand why it mushroomed .
We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something .
And there have been 15 million candles lit in one decade .
People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world , and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop , look , go , to transform the world , to make it a happy place .
And that is what I hope for us , and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same , stop , look , go .
Thank you .
Julian Treasure : Shh ! Sound health in 8 steps
Julian Treasure says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health -- even costing lives . He lays out an 8-step plan to soften this sonic assault and restore our relationship with sound .
The Hindus say , " Nada brahma , " one translation of which is , " The world is sound . "
And in a way , that 's true , because everything is vibrating .
In fact , all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating .
Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies .
So you are , in fact , a chord -- each of you an individual chord .
One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony .
Your ears can 't hear that chord ; Incidentally , we see just one octave .
Your ears are always on -- you have no ear lids .
They work even when you sleep .
The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters .
The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that .
Ears are made not for hearing , but for listening .
Listening is an active skill , whereas hearing is passive , listening is something that we have to work at -- it 's a relationship with sound .
And yet it 's a skill that none of us are taught .
For example , have you ever considered that there are listening positions , places you can listen from ?
Here are two of them .
Reductive listening is listening " for . "
It reduces everything down to what 's relevant and it discards everything that 's not relevant .
Men typically listen reductively .
So he 's saying , " I 've got this problem . "
He 's saying , " Here 's your solution . Thanks very much . Next . "
That 's the way we talk , right guys ?
Expansive listening , on the other hand , is listening " with , " not listening " for . "
It 's got no destination in mind -- it 's just enjoying the journey .
Women typically listen expansively .
If you look at these two , eye contact , facing each other , possibly both talking at the same time .
Men , if you get nothing else out of this talk , practice expansive listening , and you can transform your relationships .
The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise , surrounding us all the time .
Noise like this , according to the European Union , is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe .
Two percent of the population of Europe -- that 's 16 million people -- are having their sleep devastated by noise like that .
Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe .
It 's a really big problem .
Now , when you were little , if you had noise and you didn 't want to hear it , you 'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum .
These days , you can do a similar thing , it just looks a bit cooler .
It looks a bit like this .
The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues .
The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined : " schizophonia . "
It 's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear .
So , we 're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us .
I think there 's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia .
The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression .
We squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this .
Listen to this -- this is an uncompressed piece of music .
And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed .
I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two .
There is a cost of compression .
It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data .
You 're having to imagine it .
It 's not good for you in the long run .
The third problem with headphones is this : deafness -- noise-induced hearing disorder .
Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another , but really worryingly , 16 percent -- roughly one in six -- of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse .
One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse .
We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people .
Now that 's a really serious problem .
I 'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children , please .
Professional hearing protectors are great ; I use some all the time .
If you 're going to use headphones , buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you don 't have to have it so loud .
If you can 't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice , it 's too loud .
And thirdly , if you 're in bad sound , it 's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it .
Protect your ears in that way .
Let 's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out .
WWB : Wind , water , birds -- stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events , all of it very healthy , all of it sound that we evolved to over the years .
Seek those sounds out ; they 're good for you and so it this .
Silence is beautiful .
The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence .
I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art .
Have a foreground , a background , all in beautiful proportion .
It 's fun to get into designing with sound .
If you can 't do it yourself , get a professional to do it for you .
Sound design is the future , and I think it 's the way we 're going to change the way the world sounds .
I 'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities , eight ways sound can improve health .
First , ultrasound : we 're very familiar with it from physical therapy ; it 's also now being used to treat cancer .
Lithotripsy -- saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound .
Sound healing is a wonderful modality .
It 's been around for thousands of years .
I do urge you to explore this .
There are great things being done there , treating now autism , dementia and other conditions .
And music , of course . Just listening to music is good for you , if it 's music that 's made with good intention , made with love , generally .
Devotional music , good -- Mozart , good .
There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy .
And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved .
First of all , listen consciously .
I hope that that after this talk you 'll be doing that .
It 's a whole new dimension to your life and it 's wonderful to have that dimension .
Secondly , get in touch with making some sound -- create sound .
The voice is the instrument we all play , and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice ? Get trained ; learn to sing , learn to play an instrument .
Musicians have bigger brains -- it 's true .
You can do this in groups as well .
It 's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia ; to make music and sound in a group of people , whichever style you enjoy particularly .
And let 's take a stewarding role for the sound around us .
Protect your ears ? Yes , absolutely .
Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work .
And let 's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on .
So I 'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound .
My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things , we will take a very big step in that direction .
So I urge you to take that path .
I 'm leaving you with a little more birdsong , which is very good for you .
I wish you sound health .
Eben Bayer : Are mushrooms the new plastic ?
Product designer Eben Bayer reveals his recipe for a new , fungus-based packaging material that protects fragile stuff like furniture , plasma screens -- and the environment .
So , I 'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years .
But before I do that , I need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics , which require huge amounts of energy to create and , because of their disposal issues , are slowly poisoning our planet .
I also want to tell you and share with you how my team and I have been using mushrooms over the last three years .
Not like that .
We 're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials , which perform a lot like plastics during their use , but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives .
But first , I need to talk to you about what I consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category .
This is a material you all know is Styrofoam , but I like to think of it as toxic white stuff .
In a single cubic foot of this material -- about what would come around your computer or large television -- you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol .
Yet , after just a few weeks of use , you 'll throw this material in the trash .
And this isn 't just found in packaging .
20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year , in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops .
And that 's not the only place it 's found .
The EPA estimates , in the United States , by volume , this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills .
Even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment -- on the side of the road or next to a river .
If it 's not picked up by a human , like me and you , it 'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years .
Perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans , like in the great plastic gyre , where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits , but they 're not really going away .
They 're not biologically compatible .
They 're basically fouling up Earth 's respiratory and circulatory systems .
And because these materials are so prolific , because they 're found in so many places , there 's one other place you 'll find this material , styrene , which is made from benzene , a known carcinogen .
You 'll find it inside of you .
So , for all these reasons , I think we need better materials , and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials .
The first is feedstocks .
Today , we use a single feedstock , petroleum , to heat our homes , power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you .
We recognize this is a finite resource , and it 's simply crazy to do this , to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package .
Second of all , we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials .
I say far less , because 10 percent isn 't going to cut it .
We should be talking about half , a quarter , one-tenth the energy content .
And lastly , and I think perhaps most importantly , we should be creating materials that fit into what I call nature 's recycling system .
This recycling system has been in place for the last billion years .
I fit into it , you fit into it , and a hundred years tops , my body can return to the Earth with no preprocessing .
Yet that packaging I got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years .
This is crazy .
But nature provides us with a really good model here .
When a tree 's done using its leaves -- its solar collectors , these amazing molecular photon capturing devices -- at the end of a season , it doesn 't pack them up , take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves .
It just drops them , the shortest distance possible , to the forest floor , where they 're actually upcycled into next year 's topsoil .
And this gets us back to the mushrooms .
Because in nature , mushrooms are the recycling system .
And what we 've discovered is , by using a part of the mushroom you 've probably never seen -- analogous to its root structure ; it 's called mycelium -- we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics .
Now , mycelium is an amazing material , because it 's a self-assembling material .
It actually takes things we would consider waste -- things like seed husks or woody biomass -- and can transform them into a chitinous polymer , which you can form into almost any shape .
In our process , we basically use it as a glue .
And by using mycelium as a glue , you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry , and you can create materials with many different properties , materials that are insulating , fire-resistant , moisture-resistant , vapor-resistant -- materials that can absorb impacts , that can absorb acoustical impacts .
But these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts , not petroleum .
And because they 're made of natural materials , they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard .
So I 'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials .
The first is selecting a feedstock , preferably something that 's regional , that 's in your area , right -- local manufacturing .
The next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool , physically filling an enclosure , a mold , in whatever shape you want to get .
Then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles , and that 's where the magic happens , because the organism is doing the work in this process , not the equipment .
The final step is , of course , the product , whether it 's a packaging material , a table top , or building block .
Our vision is local manufacturing , like the local food movement , for production .
So we 've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts .
If you 're in China , you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull .
If you 're in Northern Europe or North America , you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls .
We then process these husks with some basic equipment .
And I want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale .
So what you 're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from Texas , in this case .
It 's a waste product .
And what they 're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system , which cleans , cooks , cools and pasteurizes these materials , while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium .
This gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape , though today we 're making corner blocks .
And it 's when this lid goes on the part , that the magic really starts .
Because the manufacturing process is our organism .
It 'll actually begin to digest these wastes and , over the next five days , assemble them into biocomposites .
Our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark , quietly self-assembling materials -- and everything from building materials to , in this case , a packaging corner block .
So I 've said a number of times that we grow materials .
And it 's kind of hard to picture how that happens .
So my team has taken five days-worth of growth , a typical growth cycle for us , and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse .
And I want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen , because , over the five-day period , what they do is extend out and through this material , using the energy that 's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix .
This matrix self-assembles , growing through and around the particles , making millions and millions of tiny fibers .
And what parts of the seed husk we don 't digest , actually become part of the final , physical composite .
So in front of your eyes , this part just self-assembled .
It actually takes a little longer . It takes five days .
But it 's much faster than conventional farming .
The last step , of course , is application .
In this case , we 've grown a corner block .
A major Fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment .
They used to use a plastic packaging buffer , but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material .
Best of all , when it gets to the customer , it 's not trash .
They can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing , and it 's going to improve the local soil .
So , why mycelium ?
The first reason is local open feedstocks .
You want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls , because you have multiple choices .
The next is self-assembly , because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process .
You don 't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility .
So you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world .
Biological yield is really important .
And because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product , even the parts that aren 't digested become part of the structure , we 're getting incredible yield rates .
Natural polymers , well ... I think that 's what 's most important , because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years , in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans .
They 're not going to clog up Earth 's ecosystems . They work great .
And while , today , we can practically guarantee that yesterday 's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years , what I want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years , our descendants , our children 's children , will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy Earth .
And I think that can be some really good news .
Thank you .
Nirmalya Kumar : India 's invisible innovation
Can India become a global hub for innovation ? Nirmalya Kumar thinks it already has . He details four types of " invisible innovation " currently coming out of India and explains why companies that used to just outsource manufacturing jobs are starting to move top management positions overseas , too . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Over the last two decades , India has become a global hub for software development and offshoring of back office services , as we call it , and what we were interested in finding out was that because of this huge industry that has started over the last two decades in India , offshoring software development and back office services , there 's been a flight of white collar jobs from the developed world to India .
When this is combined with the loss of manufacturing jobs to China , it has , you know , led to considerable angst amongst the Western populations .
In fact , if you look at polls , they show a declining trend for support for free trade in the West .
Now , the Western elites , however , have said this fear is misplaced .
For example , if you have read — I suspect many of you have done so — read the book by Thomas Friedman called " The World Is Flat , " he said , basically , in his book that , you know , this fear for free trade is wrong because it assumes , it 's based on a mistaken assumption that everything that can be invented has been invented .
In fact , he says , it 's innovation that will keep the West ahead of the developing world , with the more sophisticated , innovative tasks being done in the developed world , and the less sophisticated , shall we say , drudge work being done in the developing world .
Now , what we were trying to understand was , is this true ?
Could India become a source , or a global hub , of innovation , just like it 's become a global hub for back office services and software development ?
And for the last four years , my coauthor Phanish Puranam and I spent investigating this topic .
Initially , or , you know , as people would say , you know , in fact the more aggressive people who are supporting the Western innovative model , say , " Where are the Indian Googles , iPods and Viagras , if the Indians are so bloody smart ? "
So initially , when we started our research , we went and met several executives , and we asked them , " What do you think ? Will India go from being a favored destination for software services and back office services to a destination for innovation ? "
They laughed . They dismissed us .
They said , " You know what ? Indians don 't do innovation . "
The more polite ones said , " Well , you know , Indians make good software programmers and accountants , but they can 't do the creative stuff . "
Sometimes , it took a more , took a veneer of sophistication , and people said , " You know , it 's nothing to do with Indians .
It 's really the rule-based , regimented education system in India that is responsible for killing all creativity . "
They said , instead , if you want to see real creativity , go to Silicon Valley , and look at companies like Google , Microsoft , Intel .
So we started examining the R & amp ; amp ; D and innovation labs of Silicon Valley .
Well , interestingly , what you find there is , usually you are introduced to the head of the innovation lab or the R & amp ; amp ; D center as they may call it , and more often than not , it 's an Indian .
So I immediately said , " Well , but you could not have been educated in India , right ?
You must have gotten your education here . "
It turned out , in every single case , they came out of the Indian educational system .
So we realized that maybe we had the wrong question , and the right question is , really , can Indians based out of India do innovative work ?
So off we went to India . We made , I think , about a dozen trips to Bangalore , Mumbai , Gurgaon , Delhi , Hyderabad , you name it , to examine what is the level of corporate innovation in these cities .
And what we found was , as we progressed in our research , was , that we were asking really the wrong question .
When you ask , " Where are the Indian Googles , iPods and Viagras ? " you are taking a particular perspective on innovation , which is innovation for end users , visible innovation .
Instead , innovation , if you remember , some of you may have read the famous economist Schumpeter , he said , " Innovation is novelty in how value is created and distributed . "
It could be new products and services , but it could also be new ways of producing products .
It could also be novel ways of organizing firms and industries .
Once you take this , there 's no reason to restrict innovation , the beneficiaries of innovation , just to end users .
When you take this broader conceptualization of innovation , what we found was , India is well represented in innovation , but the innovation that is being done in India is of a form we did not anticipate , and what we did was we called it " invisible innovation . "
And specifically , there are four types of invisible innovation that are coming out of India .
The first type of invisible innovation out of India is what we call innovation for business customers , which is led by the multinational corporations , which have -- in the last two decades , there have been 750 R & amp ; amp ; D centers set up in India by multinational companies employing more than 400,000 professionals .
Now , when you consider the fact that , historically , the R & amp ; amp ; D center of a multinational company was always in the headquarters , or in the country of origin of that multinational company , to have 750 R & amp ; amp ; D centers of multinational corporations in India is truly a remarkable figure .
When we went and talked to the people in those innovation centers and asked them what are they working on , they said , " We are working on global products . "
They were not working on localizing global products for India , which is the usual role of a local R & amp ; amp ; D.
They were working on truly global products , and companies like Microsoft , Google , AstraZeneca , General Electric , Philips , have already answered in the affirmative the question that from their Bangalore and Hyderabad R & amp ; amp ; D centers they are able to produce products and services for the world .
But of course , as an end user , you don 't see that , because you only see the name of the company , not where it was developed .
The other thing we were told then was , " Yes , but , you know , the kind of work that is coming out of the Indian R & amp ; amp ; D center cannot be compared to the kind of work that is coming out of the U.S. R & amp ; amp ; D centers . "
So my coauthor Phanish Puranam , who happens to be one of the smartest people I know , said he 's going to do a study .
What he did was he looked at those companies that had an R & amp ; amp ; D center in USA and in India , and then he looked at a patent that was filed out of the U.S. and a similar patent filed out of the same company 's subsidiary in India , so he 's now comparing the patents of R & amp ; amp ; D centers in the U.S. with R & amp ; amp ; D centers in India of the same company to find out what is the quality of the patents filed out of the Indian centers and how do they compare with the quality of the patents filed out of the U.S. centers ?
Interestingly , what he finds is — and by the way , the way we look at the quality of a patent is what we call forward citations : How many times does a future patent reference the older patent ? — he finds something very interesting .
What we find is that the data says that the number of forward citations of a patent filed out of a U.S. R & amp ; amp ; D subsidiary is identical to the number of forward citations of a patent filed by an Indian subsidiary of the same company within that company .
So within the company , there 's no difference in the forward citation rates of their Indian subsidiaries versus their U.S. subsidiaries .
So that 's the first kind of invisible innovation coming out of India .
The second kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call outsourcing innovation to Indian companies , where many companies today are contracting Indian companies to do a major part of their product development work for their global products which are going to be sold to the entire world .
For example , in the pharma industry , a lot of the molecules are being developed , but you see a major part of that work is being sent to India .
For example , XCL Technologies , they developed two of the mission critical systems for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner , one to avoid collisions in the sky , and another to allow landing in zero visibility .
But of course , when you climb onto the Boeing 787 , you are not going to know that this is invisible innovation out of India .
The third kind of invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call process innovations , because of an injection of intelligence by Indian firms .
Process innovation is different from product innovation .
It 's about how do you create a new product or develop a new product or manufacture a new product , but not a new product itself ?
Only in India do millions of young people dream of working in a call center .
What happens — You know , it 's a dead end job in the West , what high school dropouts do .
What happens when you put hundreds of thousands of smart , young , ambitious kids on a call center job ?
Very quickly , they get bored , and they start innovating , and they start telling the boss how to do this job better , and out of this process innovation comes product innovations , which are then marketed around the world .
For example , 24 / 7 Customer , traditional call center company , used to be a traditional call center company . Today they 're developing analytical tools to do predictive modeling so that before you pick up the phone , you can guess or predict what this phone call is about .
It 's because of an injection of intelligence into a process which was considered dead for a long time in the West .
And the last kind of innovation , invisible innovation coming out of India is what we call management innovation .
It 's not a new product or a new process but a new way to organize work , and the most significant management innovation to come out of India , invented by the Indian offshoring industry is what we call the global delivery model .
What the global delivery model allows is , it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks , break them up into parts , send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists , and then specify the means for reintegrating them .
Without that , you could not have any of the other invisible innovations today .
So , what I 'm trying to say is , what we are finding in our research is , that if products for end users is the visible tip of the innovation iceberg , India is well represented in the invisible , large , submerged portion of the innovation iceberg .
Now , this has , of course , some implications , and so we developed three implications of this research .
The first is what we called sinking skill ladder , and now I 'm going to go back to where I started my conversation with you , which was about the flight of jobs .
Now , of course , when we first , as a multinational company , decide to outsource jobs to India in the R & amp ; amp ; D , what we are going to do is we are going to outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India , the least sophisticated jobs , just like Tom Friedman would predict .
Now , what happens is , when you outsource the bottom rung of the ladder to India for innovation and for R & amp ; amp ; D work , at some stage in the very near future you are going to have to confront a problem , which is where does the next step of the ladder people come from within your company ?
So you have two choices then : Either you bring the people from India into the developed world to take positions in the next step or you say , there 's so many people in the bottom step of the ladder waiting to take the next position in India , why don 't we move the next step to India ?
What we are trying to say is that once you outsource the bottom end of the ladder , you -- it 's a self-perpetuating act , because of the sinking skill ladder , and the sinking skill ladder is simply the point that you can 't be an investment banker without having been an analyst once .
You can 't be a professor without having been a student .
You can 't be a consultant without having been a research associate .
So , if you outsource the least sophisticated jobs , at some stage , the next step of the ladder has to follow .
The second thing we bring up is what we call the browning of the TMT , the top management teams .
If the R & amp ; amp ; D talent is going to be based out of India and China , and the largest growth markets are going to be based out of India and China , you have to confront the problem that your top management of the future is going to have to come out of India and China , because that 's where the product leadership is , that 's where the important market leadership is .
Right ? And the last thing we point out in this slide , which is , you know , that to this story , there 's one caveat .
India has the youngest growing population in the world .
This demographic dividend is incredible , but paradoxically , there 's also the mirage of mighty labor pools .
Indian institutes and educational system , with a few exceptions , are incapable of producing students in the quantity and quality needed to keep this innovation engine going , so companies are finding innovative ways to overcome this , but in the end it does not absolve the government of the responsibility for creating this educational structure .
So finally , I want to conclude by showing you the profile of one company , IBM .
As many of you know , IBM has always been considered for the last hundred years to be one of the most innovative companies .
In fact , if you look at the number of patents filed over history , I think they are in the top or the top two or three companies in the world of all patents filed in the USA as a private company .
Here is the profile of employees of IBM over the last decade .
In 2003 , they had 300,000 employees , or 330,000 employees , out of which , 135,000 were in America , 9,000 were in India .
In 2009 , they had 400,000 employees , by which time the U.S. employees had moved to 105,000 , whereas the Indian employees had gone to 100,000 .
Well , in 2010 , they decided they 're not going to reveal this data anymore , so I had to make some estimates based on various sources .
Here are my best guesses . Okay ? I 'm not saying this is the exact number , it 's my best guess .
It gives you a sense of the trend .
There are 433,000 people now at IBM , out of which 98,000 are remaining in the U.S. , and 150,000 are in India .
So you tell me , is IBM an American company , or an Indian company ?
Ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much .
Jody Williams : A realistic vision for world peace
Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams brings tough love to the dream of world peace , with her razor-sharp take on what " peace " really means , and a set of profound stories that zero in on the creative struggle -- and sacrifice -- of those who work for it .
I 'm actually here to make a challenge to people .
I know there have been many challenges made to people .
The one I 'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means .
Peace is not " Kumbaya , my Lord . "
Peace is not the dove and the rainbow -- as lovely as they are .
When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove , I think of personal serenity .
I think of meditation .
I do not think about what I consider to be peace , which is sustainable peace with justice and equality .
It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives , where these people have enough access to education and health care , so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear .
This is called human security .
And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really , really heavy-duty , non-violent friends , like Mairead McGuire .
I understand that humans are so " messed up " -- to use a nice word , because I promised my mom I 'd stop using the F-bomb in public .
And I 'm trying harder and harder .
Mom , I 'm really trying .
We need a little bit of police ; we need a little bit of military , but for defense .
We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world .
It is not arming our country to the teeth .
It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them .
It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure , to make the people of the world secure .
I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress , where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote .
I certainly support the START vote .
But he 's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons .
Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars ?
Just that little bit of money , which to me , I wish it was in my bank account -- it 's not , but ...
In global terms , it 's a little bit of money .
But it 's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime , unless we get up off our ...
and take action to make it happen , unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we 've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security .
It is saving the tigers .
It is stopping the tar sands .
It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer .
It is all of those things .
It is using our money for all of those things .
It is about action .
I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago , and His Holiness -- we 're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city , and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates .
And he 's a bad guy . He 's like a bad kid in church .
We 're staring at everybody , waiting our turn to speak , and he leans over to me , and he says , " Jody , I 'm a Buddhist monk . "
I said , " Yes , Your Holiness .
Your robe gives it away . "
He said , " You know that I kind of like meditation , and I pray . "
I said , " That 's good . That 's good .
We need that in the world .
I don 't follow that , but that 's cool . "
And he says , " But I have become skeptical .
I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world .
I think what we need is action . "
His Holiness , in his robes , is my new action hero .
I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago .
As most of you know , she 's a hero for democracy in her country , Burma .
You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy .
She was just released a couple of weeks ago , and we 're very concerned to see how long she will be free , because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon , agitating for change .
She is already out in the streets , working with the party to try to rebuild it .
But I talked to her for a range of issues .
But one thing that I want to say , because it 's similar to what His Holiness said .
She said , " You know , we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country .
But I don 't believe in hope without endeavor .
I don 't believe in the hope of change , unless we take action to make it so . "
Here 's another woman hero of mine .
She 's my friend , Dr. Shirin Ebadi , the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize .
She has been in exile for the last year and a half .
You ask her where she lives -- where does she live in exile ?
She says the airports of the world .
She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections .
And instead of going home , she conferred with all the other women that she works with , who said to her , " Stay out . We need you out .
We need to be able to talk to you out there , so that you can give the message of what 's happening here . "
A year and a half -- she 's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country .
Wangari Maathai -- 2004 Peace laureate .
They call her the " Tree Lady , " but she 's more than the Tree Lady .
Working for peace is very creative .
It 's hard work every day .
When she was planting those trees , I don 't think most people understand that , at the same time , she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country .
People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail .
But if they were together planting trees for the environment , it was okay -- creativity .
But it 's not just iconic women like Shirin , like Aung Sun Suu Kyi , like Wangari Maathai -- it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world .
The Women 's League of Burma , 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there 's strength in numbers .
Working together is what changes our world .
The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights , to bring democracy to that country .
When one is arrested and taken to prison , another one comes out and joins the movement , recognizing that if they work together , they will ultimately bring change in their own country .
Mairead McGuire in the middle , Betty Williams on the right-hand side -- bringing peace to Northern Ireland .
I 'll tell you the quick story .
An IRA driver was shot , and his car plowed into people on the side of the street .
There was a mother and three children .
The children were killed on the spot .
It was Mairead 's sister .
Instead of giving in to grief , depression , defeat in the face of that violence , Mairead hooked up with Betty -- a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic -- and they took to the streets to say , " No more violence . "
And they were able to get tens of thousands of , primarily , women , some men , in the streets to bring about change .
And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland , and they 're still working on it , because there 's still a lot more to do .
This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum .
She also received the Peace Prize .
She is now running for president .
She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy , about how you bring democracy to the country , about educating , about how to vote -- but that democracy is not just about voting ; it 's about being an active citizen .
That 's what I got stuck doing -- the landmine campaign .
One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world , working together in common cause to ban landmines .
Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month .
They could maybe volunteer that much .
There were others , like myself , who were full-time .
But it was the actions , together , of all of us that brought about that change .
In my view , what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace .
It 's not a dirty word .
It 's hard work every single day .
And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could , we would change this world , we would save this world .
And we can 't wait for the other guy . We have to do it ourselves .
Thank you .
Toni Griffin : A new vision for rebuilding Detroit
Once the powerhouse of America 's industrial might , Detroit is more recently known in the popular imagination as a fabulous ruin , crumbling and bankrupt . But city planner Toni Griffin asks us to look again -- and to imagine an entrepreneurial future for the city 's 700,000 residents .
By 2010 , Detroit had become the poster child for an American city in crisis .
There was a housing collapse , an auto industry collapse , and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010 , and many people were beginning to write it off , as it had topped the list of American shrinking cities .
By 2010 , I had also been asked by the Kresge Foundation and the city of Detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future .
I come to this work as an architect and an urban planner , and I 've spent my career working in other contested cities , like Chicago , my hometown ; Harlem , which is my current home ; Washington , D.C. ; and Newark , New Jersey .
All of these cities , to me , still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice , issues of equity , inclusion and access .
Now by 2010 , as well , popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like Detroit , and devoting whole issues to " fixing the city . "
I was asked by a good friend , Fred Bernstein , to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine , and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title , " Can This Planner Save Detroit ? "
So I 'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now , because obviously , it 's completely absurd that a single person , let alone a planner , could save a city .
But I 'm also smiling because I thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis .
So I 'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city , a little bit about Detroit , and I want to do that through the voices of Detroiters .
So we began our process in September of 2010 .
It 's just after a special mayoral election , this citywide planning process , which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among Detroiters .
We had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process , and people came out from all over the city , including areas that were stable neighborhoods , as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy .
And most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent African-American population in the city at that time .
So obviously , we have a Q & amp ; A portion of our program , and people line up to mics to ask questions .
Many of them step very firmly to the mic , put their hands across their chest , and go , " I know you people are trying to move me out of my house , right ? "
So that question is really powerful , and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment , when you connect it to the stories that some Detroiters had , and actually a lot of African-Americans ' families have had that are living in Midwestern cities like Detroit .
Many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents , who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North , as depicted in this painting by Jacob Lawrence , " The Great Migration . "
They came to Detroit for a better way of life .
Many found work in the automobile industry , the Ford Motor Company , as depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art .
The fruits of their labors would afford them a home , for many the first piece of property that they would ever know , and a community with other first-time African-American home buyers .
The first couple of decades of their life in the North is quite well , up until about 1950 , which coincides with the city 's peak population at 1.8 million people .
Now it 's at this time that Detroit begins to see a second kind of migration , a migration to the suburbs .
Between 1950 and 2000 , the region grows by 30 percent .
But this time , the migration leaves African-Americans in place , as families and businesses flee the city , leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs .
During that same period , between 1950 and 2000 , 2010 , the city loses 60 percent of its population , and today it hovers at above 700,000 .
The audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it 's like to live in a city with such depleted population .
Many tell us that they 're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied , and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches .
Citywide , there are 80,000 vacant homes .
They can also see vacant property .
They 're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties , like illegal dumping , and they know that because the city has lost so much population , their costs for water , electricity , gas are rising , because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need .
Citywide , there are about 100,000 vacant parcels .
Now , to quickly give you all a sense of a scale , because I know that sounds like a big number , but I don 't think you quite understand until you look at the city map .
So the city is 139 square miles .
You can fit Boston , San Francisco , and the island of Manhattan within its footprint .
So if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together , it looks like about 20 square miles , and that 's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we 're sitting on today , Manhattan , at 22 square miles .
So it 's a lot of vacancy .
Now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities , and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots , and they 're starting community gardens , which are creating a great sense of community stewardship , but they 're very , very clear to tell us that this is not enough , that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them .
Now there 's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property , and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening , or what we call urban agriculture .
So many people would say to us , " What if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland ?
It can provide fresh foods , and it can put Detroiters back to work too . "
When I hear that story , I always imagine the folks from the Great Migration rolling over in their graves , because you can imagine that they didn 't sacrifice moving from the South to the North to create a better life for their families , only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle , especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the American dream : steady work and a home that they owned .
Now , there 's a third wave of migration happening in Detroit : a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs .
These folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new , entrepreneurial ideas and profit , so much so that former models can move to Detroit , buy property , start successful businesses and restaurants , and become successful community activists in their neighborhood , bringing about very positive change .
Similarly , we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city .
This company , Shinola , which is a luxury watch and bicycle company , deliberately chose to relocate to Detroit , and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of Detroit 's innovation .
And they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things .
Now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods , we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises , and we have businesses relocating , and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all , a city that 's under the control of an emergency manager , and just this July filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy .
So 2010 , we started this process , and by 2013 , we released Detroit Future City , which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence -- not what it was , but what it could be , looking at new ways of economic growth , new forms of land use , more sustainable and denser neighborhoods , a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system , and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change .
Three key imperatives were really important to our work .
One was that the city itself wasn 't necessarily too large , but the economy was too small .
There are only 27 jobs per 100 people in Detroit , very different from a Denver or an Atlanta or a Philadelphia that are anywhere between 35 to 70 jobs per 100 people .
Secondly , there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come .
It wasn 't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before , and urban agriculture , while a very productive and successful intervention happening in Detroit , was not the only answer , that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new , productive , innovative , and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities , where still nearly 300,000 residents lived .
So we came up with one neighborhood typology -- there are several -- called a live-make neighborhood , where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises , with a specific emphasis on looking at the , again , majority 82 percent African-American population .
So they , too , could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided .
Then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses , so that it could be used for storm water management , for example , by using surface lakes and retention ponds , that created neighborhood amenities , places of recreation , and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels .
Or we could use it as research plots , where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils , or we could use it to generate energy .
So the descendants of the Great Migration could either become precision watchmakers at Shinola , like Willie H. , who was featured in one of their ads last year , or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like Shinola .
The good news is , there is a future for the next generation of Detroiters , both those there now and those that want to come .
So no thank you , Mayor Menino , who recently was quoted as saying , " I 'd blow up the place and start over . "
There are very important people , business and land assets in Detroit , and there are real opportunities there .
So while Detroit might not be what it was , Detroit will not die .
Thank you .
Anil Ananthaswamy : What it takes to do extreme astrophysics
All over the planet , giant telescopes and detectors are looking for clues to the workings of the universe . At the INK Conference , science writer Anil Ananthaswamy tours us around these amazing installations , taking us to some of the most remote and silent places on Earth .
I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon , which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it .
My own interest in this subject , and my passion for it , began rather accidentally .
I had bought a copy of this book , " The Universe and Dr. Einstein " -- a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle .
A few years after that , in Bangalore , I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night , and I picked up this book , thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes .
And as it happened , I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot .
And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do .
And that feeling hasn 't left me yet .
That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career -- from being a software engineer to become a science writer -- so that I could partake in the joy of science , and also the joy of communicating it to others .
And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts , to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes , detectors , instruments that people are building , or have built , in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail .
So it took me from places like Chile -- the Atacama Desert in Chile -- to Siberia , to underground mines in the Japanese Alps , in Northern America , all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole .
And today I would like to share with you some images , some stories of these trips .
I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting , literally at times , their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe .
And I first begin with a pie chart -- and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation -- but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos .
All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter -- the stuff that we 're all made of -- and that 's four percent of the universe .
Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe , which makes up 23 percent of the universe , and something called dark energy , which permeates the fabric of space-time , that makes up another 73 percent .
So if you look at this pie chart , 96 percent of the universe , at this point in our exploration of it , is unknown or not well understood .
And most of the experiments , telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question , these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy .
I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter .
And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors .
And the reason why they have to go underground is that , if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth , the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays , ambient radio activity , even our own bodies . You might not believe it , but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment .
So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector .
And I went to see one of these experiments , and this is actually -- you can barely see it , and the reason for that is it 's entirely dark in there -- this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960 .
And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s .
And the miners in the early part of the last century worked , literally , in candlelight .
And today , you would see this inside the mine , half a mile underground .
This is one of the largest underground labs in the world .
And , among other things , they 're looking for dark matter .
There is another way to search for dark matter , which is indirectly .
If dark matter exists in our universe , in our galaxy , then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about -- one of them being neutrinos .
And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules .
When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light , a flash of blue light , and by looking for this blue light , you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then , indirectly , something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino .
But you need very , very large volumes of water in order to do this .
You need something like tens of megatons of water -- almost a gigaton of water -- in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino .
And where in the world would you find such water ?
Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard .
This is Lake Baikal .
It is the largest lake in the world . It 's 800 km long .
It 's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places , and one to two kilometers deep .
And what the Russians are doing is they 're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light .
And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there .
This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter .
The lake is entirely frozen .
And the line of black dots that you see in the background , that 's the ice camp where the physicists are working .
The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don 't have the money to work in summer and spring , which , if they did that , they would need ships and submersibles to do their work .
So they wait until winter -- the lake is completely frozen over -- and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work .
So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter .
They have to drill holes in the ice , dive down into the water -- cold , cold water -- to get hold of the instrument , bring it up , do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do , put it back and get out before the ice melts .
Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it 's full of cracks .
And you have to imagine , there 's an entire sea-like lake underneath , moving .
I still don 't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest , but that tells you how hard he was working .
And these people , a handful of people , have been working for 20 years , looking for particles that may or may not exist .
And they have dedicated their lives to it .
And just to give you an idea , they have spent 20 million over 20 years .
It 's very harsh conditions .
They work on a shoestring budget .
The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack .
And it 's that basic , but they do this every year .
From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile , to see something called The Very Large Telescope .
The Very Large Telescope is one of these things that astronomers do -- they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively .
I can tell you for a fact , that the next one that they 're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope .
And you wouldn 't believe it , but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope .
But nonetheless , it 's an extraordinary piece of engineering .
These are four 8.2 meter telescopes .
And these telescopes , among other things , they 're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time .
And the more you understand that , the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about .
And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror .
Each mirror , there are four of them , is made of a single piece of glass , a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic , that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [ to ] imagine a city like Paris , with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower , if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy , you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high .
And that 's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured .
An extraordinary set of telescopes .
Here 's another view of the same .
The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert .
The dry air is really good for telescopes , and also , the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies .
Finally , I want to take you to Antarctica .
I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world .
This is cosmology 's final frontier .
Some of the most amazing experiments , some of the most extreme experiments , are being done in Antarctica .
I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight , which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere , the upper stratosphere , 40 km up .
And that 's where they do their experiments , and then the balloon , the payload , is brought down .
So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica .
That 's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica .
And here we are about to board our bus .
And I don 't know if you can read the lettering , but it says , " Ivan the Terribus . "
And that 's taking us to McMurdo .
And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo .
And you barely might be able to make out this hut here .
This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole .
Because it 's so cold , the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it , with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there .
It 's an extraordinary place .
This is McMurdo itself . About a thousand people work here in summer , and about 200 in winter when it 's completely dark for six months .
I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument .
This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km .
What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight .
So you 're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km .
And the engineers , the technicians , the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf , because Antarctica -- I won 't go into the reasons why -- but it 's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches , except for the weather .
The weather , as you can imagine , this is summer , and you 're standing on 200 ft of ice .
And there 's a volcano behind , which has glaciers at the very top .
And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon -- the fabric , parachute and everything -- on the ice and then fill it up with helium .
And that process takes about two hours .
And the weather can change as they 're putting together this whole assembly .
For instance , here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind , which is eventually going to be filled up with helium .
Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium .
Now , in case the weather changes before the launch , they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station .
And this particular balloon , because it has to launch two tons of weight , is an extremely huge balloon .
The fabric alone weighs two tons .
In order to minimize the weight , it 's very thin , it 's as thin as a sandwich wrapper .
And if they have to pack it back , they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again -- except , when they did it first , Here , they can 't do it with the kind shoes they 're wearing , so they have to take their shoes off , get barefoot into the boxes , in this cold , and do that kind of work .
That 's the kind of dedication these people have .
Here 's the balloon being filled up with helium , and you can see it 's a gorgeous sight .
Here 's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end .
So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side , and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there 's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute , and then the parachute is then connected to the payload .
And remember , all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold , in sub-zero temperatures .
They 're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff , but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that .
And I would like to share with you a launch .
Radio : Okay , release the balloon , release the balloon , release the balloon .
Anil Ananthaswamy : And I 'll finally like to leave you with two images .
This is an observatory in the Himalayas , in Ladakh in India .
And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side .
And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery .
This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery .
And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has .
One is exploring the cosmos on the outside , and the other one is exploring our interior being .
And both require silence of some sort .
And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes , the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence , whether it 's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever .
And it was very obvious that , if we destroy these silent places on Earth , we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards , because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space .
Thank you .

Steven Johnson : Where good ideas come from
People often credit their ideas to individual " Eureka ! " moments . But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story . His fascinating tour takes us from the " liquid networks " of London 's coffee houses to Charles Darwin 's long , slow hunch to today 's high-velocity web .
Just a few minutes ago , I took this picture about 10 blocks from here .
This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford .
I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650 .
That 's its great claim to fame , and I wanted to show it to you , not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England , but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years , what we now call the Enlightenment .
And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment , in part , because of what people were drinking there .
Because , before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture , what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out , from dawn until dusk was alcohol .
Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice .
You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch , a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day .
That was the healthy choice -- right -- because the water wasn 't safe to drink .
And so , effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse , you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day .
And you can imagine what that would be like , right , in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day , and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life , you would have better ideas .
You would be sharper and more alert .
And so it 's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee .
But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space .
It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds , different fields of expertise , and share .
It was a space , as Matt Ridley talked about , where ideas could have sex .
This was their conjugal bed , in a sense -- ideas would get together there .
And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story .
I 've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years , because I 've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from .
What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation , unusual levels of creativity ?
What 's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity ?
And what I 've done is I 've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse ; I 've looked at media environments , like the world wide web , that have been extraordinarily innovative ; I 've gone back to the history of the first cities ; I 've even gone to biological environments , like coral reefs and rainforests , that involve unusual levels of biological innovation ; and what I 've been looking for is shared patterns , kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments .
Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from , that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives , or our own organizations , or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative ?
And I think I 've found a few .
But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation .
We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration .
We have the kind of the flash of insight , the stroke of insight , we have epiphanies , we have " eureka ! " moments , we have the lightbulb moments , right ?
All of these concepts , as kind of rhetorically florid as they are , share this basic assumption , which is that an idea is a single thing , it 's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment .
But in fact , what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level .
I mean , this is what is happening inside your brain .
An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain .
It 's a new configuration that has never formed before .
And the question is : how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form ?
And it turns out that , in fact , the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain .
So the metaphor I 'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that 's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s .
A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero , who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters .
They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of , you know , the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world .
One of the things that 's very frustrating about this is that we know , by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context , if we can keep premature babies warm , basically -- it 's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments .
So , the technology is there .
These are standard in all the industrialized worlds .
The problem is , if you buy a $ 40,000 incubator , and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa , it will work great for a year or two years , and then something will go wrong and it will break , and it will remain broken forever , because you don 't have a whole system of spare parts , and you don 't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $ 40,000 piece of equipment .
And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries , and then it ends up being useless .
So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see : what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts ?
And what they noticed was they don 't have a lot of DVRs , they don 't have a lot of microwaves , but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road .
There 's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places .
They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working .
So they started to think , " Could we build a neonatal incubator that 's built entirely out of automobile parts ? "
And this is what they ended up coming with .
It 's called a " neonurture device . "
From the outside , it looks like a normal little thing you 'd find in a modern , Western hospital .
In the inside , it 's all car parts .
It 's got a fan , it 's got headlights for warmth , it 's got door chimes for alarm -- it runs off a car battery .
And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight , and you can repair this thing .
Now , that 's a great idea , but what I 'd like to say is that , in fact , this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen .
We like to think our breakthrough ideas , you know , are like that $ 40,000 , brand new incubator , state-of-the-art technology , but more often than not , they 're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby .
We take ideas from other people , from people we 've learned from , from people we run into in the coffee shop , and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new .
That 's really where innovation happens .
And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like , right .
I mean , this is one vision of it .
Another is Newton and the apple , when Newton was at Cambridge .
This is a statue from Oxford .
You know , you 're sitting there thinking a deep thought , and the apple falls from the tree , and you have the theory of gravity .
In fact , the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this , right .
This is Hogarth 's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern , but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then .
This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together , where people were likely to have new , interesting , unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds .
So , if we 're trying to build organizations that are more innovative , we have to build spaces that -- strangely enough -- look a little bit more like this .
This is what your office should look like , is part of my message here .
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable , when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas , or their history of their best ideas .
And a few years ago , a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from .
He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job .
So when they were sitting in front of the microscope , when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler , and all these things .
And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas , where they happened .
And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab , we have this image -- you know , they 're pouring over the microscope , and they see something in the tissue sample .
And " oh , eureka , " they 've got the idea .
What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that , in fact , almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab , in front of the microscope .
They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting , when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings , oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having , the error , the noise in the signal they were discovering .
And something about that environment -- and I 've started calling it the " liquid network , " where you have lots of different ideas that are together , different backgrounds , different interests , jostling with each other , bouncing off each other -- that environment is , in fact , the environment that leads to innovation .
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames .
So they want to tell the story of the " eureka ! " moment .
They want to say , " There I was , I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head . "
it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods -- I call this the " slow hunch . "
We 've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity , but in fact , a lot of great ideas linger on , sometimes for decades , in the back of people 's minds .
They have a feeling that there 's an interesting problem , but they don 't quite have the tools yet to discover them .
They spend all this time working on certain problems , but there 's another thing lingering there that they 're interested in , but they can 't quite solve .
Darwin is a great example of this .
Darwin himself , in his autobiography , tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic " eureka ! " moment .
He 's in his study , it 's October of 1838 , and he 's reading Malthus , actually , on population .
And all of a sudden , the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says , " Ah , at last , I had a theory with which to work . "
That 's in his autobiography .
About a decade or two ago , a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin 's notebooks from this period .
And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had , every little hunch .
And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany , reading Malthus in October of 1838 .
There are passages where you can read it , and you think you 're reading from a Darwin textbook , from the period before he has this epiphany .
And so what you realize is that Darwin , in a sense , had the idea , he had the concept , but was unable of fully thinking it yet .
And that is actually how great ideas often happen ; they fade into view over long periods of time .
Now the challenge for all of us is : how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life , right ?
It 's hard to go to your boss and say , " I have an excellent idea for our organization .
It will be useful in 2020 .
Could you just give me some time to do that ? "
Now a couple of companies -- like Google -- they have innovation time off , 20 percent time , where , in a sense , those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization .
But that 's a key thing .
And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people 's hunches ; that 's what often happens .
You have half of an idea , somebody else has the other half , and if you 're in the right environment , they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts .
So , in a sense , we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property , you know , building barricades , having secretive R & amp ; D labs , patenting everything that we have , so that those ideas will remain valuable , and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas , and the culture will be more innovative .
But I think there 's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time , if not more , valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them .
And I 'll leave you with this story , which I think captures a lot of these values , and it 's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways .
It 's October of 1957 , and Sputnik has just launched , and we 're in Laurel Maryland , at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University .
And it 's Monday morning , and the news has just broken about this satellite that 's now orbiting the planet .
And of course , this is nerd heaven , right ?
There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking , " Oh my gosh ! This is incredible . I can 't believe this has happened . "
And two of them , two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues .
And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach .
And they start talking , and one of them says , " Hey , has anybody tried to listen for this thing ?
There 's this , you know , man-made satellite up there in outer space that 's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal .
We could probably hear it , if we tune in . "
And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues , and everybody 's like , " No , I hadn 't thought of doing that .
That 's an interesting idea . "
And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception , and he 's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office .
And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach 's office , and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking , as we might call it now .
And after a couple of hours , they actually start picking up the signal , because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track .
It was right at 20 MHz , so you could pick it up really easily , because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax , basically .
So they made it really easy to find it .
So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal , and people start kind of coming into the office and saying , " Wow , that 's pretty cool . Can I hear ? Wow , that 's great . "
And before long , they think , " Well jeez , this is kind of historic .
We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this .
We should record it . "
And so they bring in this big , clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep , bleeps .
And they start writing the kind of date stamp , time stamps for each little bleep that they record .
And they they start thinking , " Well gosh , you know , we 're noticing small little frequency variations here .
We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling , if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect . "
And then they played around with it a little bit more , and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties .
And they said , " Jeez , you know , we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it 's farthest away .
That 's pretty cool . "
And eventually , they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn 't been officially part of their job description .
They get permission to use the new , you know , UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they 'd just gotten at the APL .
They run some more of the numbers , and at the end of about three or four weeks , turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth , just from listening to this one little signal , going off on this little side hunch that they 'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning .
A couple weeks later their boss , Frank McClure , pulls them into the room and says , " Hey , you guys , I have to ask you something about that project you were working on .
You 've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground .
Could you go the other way ?
Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground , if you knew the location of the satellite ? "
And they thought about it and they said , " Well , I guess maybe you could . Let 's run the numbers here . "
So they went back , and they thought about it .
And they came back and said , " Actually , it 'll be easier . "
And he said , " Oh , that 's great .
Because see , I have these new nuclear submarines that I 'm building .
And it 's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow , if you don 't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean .
So we 're thinking , we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean .
Could you work on that problem ? "
And that 's how GPS was born .
30 years later , Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform , left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it .
And now , I guarantee you certainly half of this room , if not more , has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space .
And I bet you one of you , if not more , has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- in the last day or last week , right ?
And that , I think , is a great case study , a great lesson in the power , the marvelous , kind of unplanned emergent , unpredictable power of open innovative systems .
When you build them right , they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of .
I mean , here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch , this little passion that had developed , then they thought they were fighting the Cold War , and then it turns out they 're just helping somebody find a soy latte .
That is how innovation happens .
Chance favors the connected mind .
Thank you very much .
Pattie Maes + Pranav Mistry : Meet the SixthSense interaction
This demo -- from Pattie Maes ' lab at MIT , spearheaded by Pranav Mistry -- was the buzz of TED . It 's a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment . Imagine " Minority Report " and then some .
I 've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense -- a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we 're coming across .
And some of you may argue , well , don 't today 's cell phones do that already ?
But I would say no .
When you meet someone here at TED -- and this is the top networking place , of course , of the year -- you don 't shake somebody 's hand and then say , " Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you ? "
Or when you go to the supermarket and you 're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers , you don 't take out your cell phone , and open a browser , and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make .
So we don 't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take .
And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way , without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior .
And I 'm here to unveil our latest effort , and most successful effort so far , which is still very much a work in process .
I 'm actually wearing the device right now and we 've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf -- and that , by the way , only cost 350 dollars at this point in time .
I 'm wearing a camera , just a simple webcam , a portable , battery-powered projection system with a little mirror .
These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device .
And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry , who 's really the genius who 's been implementing and designing this whole system .
And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him .
The system tracks the four significant fingers .
In this case , he 's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize .
But if you want a more stylish version you could also paint your nails in different colors .
And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he 's making so he can just go to , for example , a map of Long Beach , zoom in and out , etc .
The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the " take a picture " gesture , and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you .
And when he then walks back to the Media Lab , he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he 's taken , sort through them and organize them , and re-size them , etc . , again using all natural gestures .
So , some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han or some of you may think , " Well , doesn 't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table ? "
And yes , you also interact using natural gestures , both hands , etc .
But the difference here is that you can use any surface , you can walk to up to any surface , including your hand if nothing else is available and interact with this projected data .
The device is completely portable , and can be ...
So one important difference is that it 's totally mobile .
Another even more important difference is that in mass production this would not cost more tomorrow than today 's cell phones could look a lot more stylish than this version that I 'm wearing around my neck .
But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in " Minority Report , " the reason why we 're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixth-sense devices that gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you .
So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he 's shopping for some paper towels .
And , as he picks up a product the system can recognize the product that he 's picking up , using either image recognition or marker technology , and give him the green light or an orange light .
He can ask for additional information .
So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice , given his personal criteria .
Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically-responsible choice .
If he picks up a book in the bookstore , he can get an Amazon rating -- it gets projected right on the cover of the book .
This is Juan 's book , our previous speaker , which gets a great rating , by the way , at Amazon .
And so , Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book -- reader comments , maybe sort of information by his favorite critic , etc .
If he turns to a particular page he finds an annotation by maybe an expert of a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page .
Reading the newspaper -- it never has to be outdated .
You can get video annotations of the event that you 're reading about You can get the latest sports scores etc .
This is a more controversial one .
As you interact with someone at TED , maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags , the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages .
In this case , the student is interested in cameras , etc .
On your way to the airport , if you pick up your boarding pass , it can tell you that your flight is delayed , that the gate has changed , etc .
And , if you need to know what the current time is it 's as simple as drawing a watch -- on your arm .
So that 's where we 're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across .
My student Pranav , who 's really , like I said , the genius behind this .
He does deserve a lot of applause because I don 't think he 's slept much in the last three months , actually .
And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either .
But it 's not perfect yet , it 's very much a work in progress .
And who knows , maybe in another 10 years we 'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant .
Thank you .
Harald Haas : Wireless data from every light bulb
What if every light bulb in the world could also transmit data ? At TEDGlobal , Harald Haas demonstrates , for the first time , a device that could do exactly that . By flickering the light from a single LED , a change too quick for the human eye to detect , he can transmit far more data than a cellular tower -- and do it in a way that 's more efficient , secure and widespread .
Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide ?
And these are base stations .
And we also have more than five billion of these devices here .
These are cellular mobile phones .
And with these mobile phones , we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month .
This is a 6 with 14 zeroes -- a very large number .
And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water .
We use it everyday . We use it in our everyday lives now -- in our private lives , in our business lives .
And we even have to be asked sometimes , very kindly , to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons .
And it 's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has , because it 's so fundamental to our lives .
And one of the issues is capacity .
The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves -- in particular , radio waves .
And radio waves are limited .
They are scarce ; they are expensive ; and we only have a certain range of it .
And it 's this limitation that doesn 't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month .
And we are simply running out of spectrum .
There 's another problem .
That is efficiency .
These 1.4 million cellular radio masts , or base stations , consume a lot of energy .
And mind you , most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves , it is used to cool the base stations .
Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent .
And that creates a big problem .
Then there 's another issue that you 're all aware of .
You have to switch off your mobile phone during flights .
In hospitals , they are security issues .
And security is another issue .
These radio waves penetrate through walls .
They can be intercepted , and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions .
So these are the main four issues .
But on the other hand , we have 14 billion of these : light bulbs , light .
And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum .
So let 's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum , where we have gamma rays .
You don 't want to get close to gamma rays , it could be dangerous .
X-rays , useful when you go to hospitals .
Then there 's ultraviolet light .
it 's good for a nice suntan , but otherwise dangerous for the human body .
Infrared -- due to eye safety regulations , can be only used with low power .
And then we have the radio waves , they have the issues I 've just mentioned .
And in the middle there , we have this visible light spectrum .
It 's light , and light has been around for many millions of years .
And in fact , it has created us , has created life , has created all the stuff of life .
So it 's inherently safe to use .
And wouldn 't it be great to use that for wireless communications ?
Not only that , I compared [ it to ] the entire spectrum .
I compared the radio waves spectrum -- the size of it -- with the size of the visible light spectrum .
And guess what ?
We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum , which is there for us to use .
So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum , let 's compare that with a number I 've just mentioned .
We have 1.4 million expensively deployed , inefficient radio cellular base stations .
And multiply that by 10,000 , then you end up at 14 billion .
14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already .
So we have the infrastructure there .
Look at the ceiling , you see all these light bulbs .
Go to the main floor , you see these light bulbs .
Can we use them for communications ?
Yes .
What do we need to do ?
The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs , florescent lights , with this new technology of LED , LED light bulbs .
An LED is a semiconductor . It 's an electronic device .
And it has a very nice acute property .
Its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds , and it can be switched off at very high speeds .
And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology .
So let 's show how we do that .
Let 's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum -- go to remote controls .
You all know remote controls have an infrared LED -- basically you switch on the LED , and if it 's off , you switch it off .
And it creates a simple , low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second , 20,000 bits per second .
Not usable for a YouTube video .
What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb .
We transmit with our technology , not only a single data stream , we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel , at even higher speeds .
And the technology we have developed -- it 's called SIM OFDM .
And it 's spacial modulation -- these are the only technical terms , I 'm not going into details -- but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data .
You will say , " Okay , this is nice -- a slide created in 10 minutes . "
But not only that .
What we 've done is we have also developed a demonstrator .
And I 'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator .
And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp .
We fit in an LED light bulb , worth three U.S. dollars , put in our signal processing technology .
And then what we have here is a little hole .
And the light goes through that hole .
There 's a receiver .
The receiver will convert these little , subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal .
And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream .
In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones .
And not only integrate a photo detector here , but maybe use the camera inside .
So what happens when I switch on that light ?
As you would expect , it 's a light , a desk lamp .
Put your book beneath it and you can read .
It 's illuminating the space .
But at the same time , you see this video coming up here .
And that 's a video , a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam .
You 're critical .
You think , " Ha , ha , ha .
This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here . "
But let me do this .
Once again .
Still don 't believe ?
It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream .
And if you look at the light , it is illuminating as you would expect .
You don 't notice with your human eye .
You don 't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude that we impress onto this light bulb .
It 's serving the purpose of illumination , but at the same time , we are able to transmit this data .
And you see , even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver .
It can ignore that constant light , because all the receiver 's interested in are subtle changes .
You also have a critical question now , and you say , " Okay , do I have to have the light on all the time to have this working ? "
And the answer is yes .
But , you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off .
And you are still able to transmit data -- that 's possible .
So I 've mentioned to you the four challenges .
Capacity : We have 10,000 times more spectrum , 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there .
You would agree with me , hopefully , there 's no issue of capacity anymore .
Efficiency : This is data through illumination -- it 's first of all an illumination device .
And if you do the energy budget , the data transmission comes for free -- highly energy efficient .
I don 't mention the high energy efficiency of these LED light bulbs .
If the whole world would deploy them , you would save hundreds of power plants .
That 's aside .
And then I 've mentioned the availability .
You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital .
You need to see what to do .
You have lights in an aircraft .
So it 's everywhere in a day there is light .
Look around . Everywhere . Look at your smart phone .
It has a flashlight , an LED flashlight .
These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission .
And then there 's security .
You would agree with me that light doesn 't penetrate through walls .
So no one , if I have a light here , if I have secure data , no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data .
And there 's only data where there is light .
So if I don 't want that receiver to receive the data , then what I could do , turn it away .
So the data goes in that direction , not there anymore .
Now we can in fact see where the data is going to .
So for me , the applications of it , to me , are beyond imagination at the moment .
We have had a century of very nice , smart application developers .
And you only have to notice , where we have light , there is a potential way to transmit data .
But I can give you a few examples .
Well you may see the impact already now .
This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean .
And they use light to illuminate space down there .
And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [ use ] to communicate with each other .
Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant -- you can 't use RF , it may generate antenna sparks , but you can use light -- you see plenty of light there .
In hospitals , for new medical instruments ; in streets for traffic control .
Cars have LED-based headlights , LED-based back lights , and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information .
Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on .
And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world .
And every street lamp could be a free access point .
We call it , in fact , a Li-Fi , light-fidelity .
And then we have these aircraft cabins .
There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin , and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data .
So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home .
Online life . So that is a vision , I think , that is possible .
So , all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device .
And this would then combine two basic functionalities : illumination and wireless data transmission .
And it 's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days .
And in the future , you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs , you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide -- for a cleaner , a greener , and even a brighter future .
Thank you .
Daniel Kraft : A better way to harvest bone marrow
Daniel Kraft demos his Marrow Miner -- a new device that quickly harvests life-saving bone marrow with minimal pain to the donor . He emphasizes that the adult stem cells found in bone marrow can be used to treat many terminal conditions , from Parkinson 's to heart disease .
So I am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation .
Now , inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year , I didn 't bring a human brain , but I did bring a liter of bone marrow .
And bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients , most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases .
So , a few years ago , I 'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford .
I 'm in the operating room . We have Bob here , who is a volunteer donor .
We 're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia .
So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow ?
Well we have a whole O.R. team , general anesthesia , nurses , and another doctor across from me .
Bob 's on the table , and we take this sort of small needle , you know , not too big .
And the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue , and kind of punch it into the hard bone , into the tuchus -- that 's a technical term -- and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out , each time , with a syringe .
And hand it off to the nurse . She squirts it into a tin .
Hands it back to me . And we do that again and again .
About 200 times usually .
And by the end of this my arm is sore , I 've got a callus on my hand , let alone Bob , whose rear end looks something more like this , like Swiss cheese .
So I 'm thinking , you know , this procedure hasn 't changed in about 40 years .
And there is probably a better way to do this .
So I thought of a minimally invasive approach , and a new device that we call the Marrow Miner .
This is it .
And the Marrow Miner , the way it works is shown here .
Our standard see-through patient .
Instead of entering the bone dozens of times , we enter just once , into the front of the hip or the back of the hip .
And we have a flexible , powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip , as it moves around .
So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate , or suck out , rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole .
We can do multiple passes through that same entry .
No robots required .
And , so , very quickly , Bob can just get one puncture , local anesthesia , and do this harvest as an outpatient .
So I did a few prototypes . I got a small little grant at Stanford .
And played around with this a little bit .
And our team members developed this technology .
And eventually we got two large animals , and pig studies .
And we found , to our surprise , that we not only got bone marrow out , but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner , compared to the normal device .
This device was just FDA approved in the last year .
Here is a live patient . You can see it following the flexible curves around .
There will be two passes here , in the same patient , from the same hole .
This was done under local anesthesia , as an outpatient .
And we got , again , about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient .
So why should you care ? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells .
You all know about embryonic stem cells .
They 've got great potential but haven 't yet entered clinical trials .
Adult stem cells are throughout our body , including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow , which we 've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years .
In the last decade there 's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient 's other diseases such as heart disease , vascular disease , orthopedics , tissue engineering , even in neurology to treat Parkinson 's and diabetes .
We 've just come out , we 're commercializing , this year , generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner .
The hope is that this gets more stem cells out , which translates to better outcomes .
It may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors .
It may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells , when you 're younger and healthier , to use in the future should you need it .
And ultimately -- and here 's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors , who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford .
Hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future .
Thanks .
Marco Tempest : A cyber-magic card trick like no other
The suits , numbers and colors in a deck of cards correspond to the seasons , moon cycles and calendar . Marco Tempest straps on augmented reality goggles and does a card trick like you 've never seen before , weaving a lyrical tale as he deals .
Good morning . So magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve , to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow .
As a cyber-magician , I combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced .
You 've probably all heard of Google 's Project Glass .
It 's new technology . You look through them and the world you see is augmented with data : names of places , monuments , buildings , maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street .
So these are my illusion glasses .
They 're a little bigger . They 're a prototype .
And when you look through them , you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist .
Let me show you what I mean .
All we need is a playing card . Any card will do .
Like this . And let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again .
All right . Very significant mark .
And let 's put it back into the deck , somewhere in the middle , and let 's get started .
Voice : System ready . Acquiring image .
Marco Tempest : For those of you who don 't play cards , a deck of cards is made up of four different suits : hearts , clubs , diamonds and spades .
The cards are amongst the oldest of symbols , and have been interpreted in many different ways .
Now , some say that the four suits represent the four seasons .
There 's spring , summer , autumn and ⠀ ” Voice : My favorite season is winter.MT : Well yeah , mine too .
Winter is like magic . It 's a time of change , when warmth turns to cold , water turns to snow , and then it all disappears .
There are 13 cards in each suit .
Voice : Each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles .
MT : So over here is low tide , and over here is high tide , and in the middle is the moon .
Voice : The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic .
MT : There are two colors in a deck of cards .
There is the color red and the color black , representing the constant change from day to night .
Voice : Marco , I did not know you could do that .
MT : And is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards , just as there are 52 weeks in a year ?
Voice : If you total all the spots on a deck of cards , the result is 365 .
MT : Oh , 365 , the number of days in a year , the number of days between each birthday .
Make a wish .
Voice : Don 't tell , or it won 't come true .
MT : Well , as a matter of fact , it was on my sixth birthday that I received my first deck of cards , and ever since that day , I have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls , men and women , husbands and wives , even kings and queens .
Voice : And who are these ? MT : Ah , mischief-makers . Watch .
Wake up .
Joker : Whoa.MT : Are you ready for your party piece ?
Joker : Ready ! MT : Let me see what you 've got .
Joker : Presenting my pogo stick.MT : Ah . Watch out .
Joker : Whoa , whoa , whoa , oh !
MT : But today , I am performing for a different kind of audience .
I 'm performing for you .
Voice : Signed card detected.MT : Well , sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician ? Is it a 9-to-5 job ?
Of course not ! You 've got to practice 24 / 7 .
I don 't literally mean 24 hours , seven days a week .
24 / 7 is a little bit of an exaggeration , but it does take practice . Now , some people will say , well , magic , that must be the work of some evil supernatural force .
Whoa .
Well , to this , I just say , no no .
Actually , in German , it 's nein nein .
Magic isn 't that intense . I have to warn you , though , if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this , don 't play for money .
Voice : Why not ? That 's a very good hand .
The odds of getting it are 4,165 to one .
MT : Yeah , but I guess my hand is better . We beat the odds .
Voice : I think you got your birthday wish.MT : And that actually leaves me with the last , and most important card of all : the one with this very significant mark on it .
And unlike anything else we 've just seen , virtual or not.Voice : Signed card detected .
Digital MT : This is without a question the real thing .
MT : Bye bye .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Nancy Lublin : Texting that saves lives
When Nancy Lublin started texting teenagers to help with her social advocacy organization , what she found was shocking -- they started texting back about their own problems , from bullying to depression to abuse . So she 's setting up a text-only crisis line , and the results might be even more important than she expected .
To most of you , this is a device to buy , sell , play games , watch videos .
I think it might be a lifeline .
I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin .
Texting : I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting , a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see -- hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else -- or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL , LMAO , HMU .
I can help you with those later .
But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids .
It might be the only way to communicate with your kids .
The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month , unless she 's a girl , then it 's closer to 4,000 .
And the secret is she opens every single one .
Texting has a 100 percent open rate .
Now the parents are really alarmed .
It 's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn 't respond to you when you ask her when she 's coming home for dinner .
I promise she read that text .
And this isn 't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon .
Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth .
I know this because at DoSomething.org , which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America , about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging .
We 're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that .
We 're finding it 11 times more powerful than email .
We 've also found an unintended consequence .
We 've been getting text messages back like these .
" I don 't want to go to school today .
The boys call me faggot . "
" I was cutting , my parents found out , and so I stopped .
But I just started again an hour ago . "
Or , " He won 't stop raping me .
He told me not to tell anyone .
It 's my dad . Are you there ? "
That last one 's an actual text message that we received .
And yeah , we 're there .
I will not forget the day we got that text message .
And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline .
Because this isn 't what we do .
We do social change .
Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there 's nowhere else to turn that they 're sending them to us .
So think about it , a text hotline ; it 's pretty powerful .
It 's fast , it 's pretty private .
No one hears you in a stall , you 're just texting quietly .
It 's real time .
We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals .
That 's great .
But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data .
Because I 'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals .
I want to prevent this shit from happening .
So think about a cop .
There 's something in New York City .
The police did it . It used to be just guess work , police work .
And then they started crime mapping .
And so they started following and watching petty thefts , summonses , all kinds of things -- charting the future essentially .
And they found things like , when you see crystal meth on the street , if you add police presence , you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen .
In fact , the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place , the murder rate fell 60 percent .
So think about the data from a crisis text line .
There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape -- no census .
Maybe there 's some studies , some longitudinal studies , that cost lots of money and took lots of time .
Or maybe there 's some anecdotal evidence .
Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues .
You could inform legislation .
You could inform school policy .
You could say to a principal , " You 're having a problem every Thursday at three o 'clock .
What 's going on in your school ? "
You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result .
This is really , to me , the power of texting and the power of data .
Because while people are talking about data , making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade , or Target to know when it 's time for me to buy more diapers , or some dude to build a better baseball team , I 'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school , to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father 's raping her .
Thank you .
Phil Hansen : Embrace the shake
In art school , Phil Hansen developed an unruly tremor in his hand that kept him from creating the pointillist drawings he loved . Hansen was devastated , floating without a sense of purpose . Until a neurologist made a simple suggestion : embrace this limitation ... and transcend it .
So , when I was in art school , I developed a shake in my hand , and this was the straightest line I could draw .
Now in hindsight , it was actually good for some things , like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid , but at the time this was really doomsday .
This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist .
The shake developed out of , really , a single-minded pursuit of pointillism , just years of making tiny , tiny dots .
And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles , because of the shake .
So to compensate , I 'd hold the pen tighter , and this progressively made the shake worse , so I 'd hold the pen tighter still .
And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues , I had trouble holding anything .
And after spending all my life wanting to do art , I left art school , and then I left art completely .
But after a few years , I just couldn 't stay away from art , and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage .
And he actually took one look at my squiggly line , and said , " Well , why don 't you just embrace the shake ? "
So I did . I went home , I grabbed a pencil , and I just started letting my hand shake and shake .
I was making all these scribble pictures .
And even though it wasn 't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about , it felt great .
And more importantly , once I embraced the shake , I realized I could still make art .
I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted .
Now , I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism , seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole .
So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn 't affect the work , like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas , or , in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours , creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch .
I discovered that , if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials , my hand really wouldn 't hurt , and after having gone from a single approach to art , I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons .
This was the first time I 'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity .
At the time , I was finishing up school , and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies .
I had this horrible little set of tools , and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have .
I actually didn 't even have a regular pair of scissors .
I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at .
So I got out of school , I got a job , I got a paycheck , I got myself to the art store , and I just went nuts buying supplies .
And then when I got home , I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box .
But I sat there for hours , and nothing came to mind .
The same thing the next day , and then the next , quickly slipping into a creative slump .
And I was in a dark place for a long time , unable to create .
And it didn 't make any sense , because I was finally able to support my art , and yet I was creatively blank .
But as I searched around in the darkness , I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before .
And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands .
Embrace the shake .
And I realized , if I ever wanted my creativity back , I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it .
I wondered , could you become more creative , then , by looking for limitations ?
What if I could only create with a dollar 's worth of supplies ?
At this point , I was spending a lot of my evenings in -- well , I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one , so I decided to ask for 50 .
Surprisingly , they just handed them right over , and then with some pencils I already had , I made this project for only 80 cents .
It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless .
I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas , and wondered what if , instead of painting on a canvas , I could only paint on my chest ?
So I painted 30 images , one layer at a time , one on top of another , with each picture representing an influence in my life .
Or what if , instead of painting with a brush , I could only paint with karate chops ?
So I 'd dip my hands in paint , and I just attacked the canvas , and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks .
Or , what if instead of relying on myself , I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art ?
So for six days , I lived in front of a webcam .
I slept on the floor and I ate takeout , and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment .
Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas .
Or what if instead of making art to display , I had to destroy it ?
This seemed like the ultimate limitation , being an artist without art .
This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art , where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation .
In the beginning of Goodbye Art , I focused on forced destruction , like this image of Jimi Hendrix , made with over 7,000 matches .
Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally .
I looked for temporary materials , like spitting out food -- — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine .
The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn 't actually exist in the first place .
So I organized candles on a table , I lit them , and then blew them out , then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles , then assembled the videos into the larger image .
So the end image was never visible as a physical whole .
It was destroyed before it ever existed .
In the course of this Goodbye Art series , I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display .
What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation , as each time I created , the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project .
It did not happen overnight .
There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground , or , even worse , after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing .
But having committed to the process , I continued on , and something really surprising came out of this .
As I destroyed each project , I was learning to let go , let go of outcomes , let go of failures , and let go of imperfections .
And in return , I found a process of creating art that 's perpetual and unencumbered by results .
I found myself in a state of constant creation , thinking only of what 's next and coming up with more ideas than ever .
When I think back to my three years away from art , away from my dream , just going through the motions , instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream , I just quit , I gave up .
And what if I didn 't embrace the shake ?
Because embracing the shake for me wasn 't just about art and having art skills .
It turned out to be about life , and having life skills .
Because ultimately , most of what we do takes place here , inside the box , with limited resources .
Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and , collectively , transform our world .
Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life .
Now , when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped , I sometimes still struggle , but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities , like using hundreds of real , live worms to make an image , using a pushpin to tattoo a banana , or painting a picture with hamburger grease .
One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I 've learned into something others can replicate .
Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity , but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts , rethink categories and challenge accepted norms .
And instead of telling each other to seize the day , maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation .
Thank you .
Kelly McGonigal : How to make stress your friend
Stress . It makes your heart pound , your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat . But while stress has been made into a public health enemy , new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case . Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive , and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction : reaching out to others .
I have a confession to make , but first , I want you to make a little confession to me .
In the past year , I want you to just raise your hand if you 've experienced relatively little stress .
Anyone ?
How about a moderate amount of stress ?
Who has experienced a lot of stress ?
Yeah . Me too .
But that is not my confession .
My confession is this : I am a health psychologist , and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier .
But I fear that something I 've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good , and it has to do with stress .
For years I 've been telling people , stress makes you sick .
It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease .
Basically , I 've turned stress into the enemy .
But I have changed my mind about stress , and today , I want to change yours .
Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress .
This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years , and they started by asking people , " How much stress have you experienced in the last year ? "
They also asked , " Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health ? "
And then they used public death records to find out who died .
Okay . Some bad news first .
People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying .
But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health .
People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die .
In fact , they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study , including people who had relatively little stress .
Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths , 182,000 Americans died prematurely , not from stress , but from the belief that stress is bad for you .
That is over 20,000 deaths a year .
Now , if that estimate is correct , that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year , killing more people than skin cancer , HIV / AIDS and homicide .
You can see why this study freaked me out .
Here I 've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health .
So this study got me wondering : Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier ? And here the science says yes .
When you change your mind about stress , you can change your body 's response to stress .
Now to explain how this works , I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out .
It 's called the social stress test .
You come into the laboratory , and you 're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you , and to make sure you feel the pressure , there are bright lights and a camera in your face , kind of like this .
And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging , non-verbal feedback like this .
Now that you 're sufficiently demoralized , time for part two : a math test .
And unbeknownst to you , the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it .
Now we 're going to all do this together .
It 's going to be fun .
For me .
Okay . I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven .
as fast as you can , starting with 996 .
Go !
Audience : Go faster . Faster please .
You 're going too slow .
Stop . Stop , stop , stop .
That guy made a mistake .
We are going to have to start all over again .
You 're not very good at this , are you ?
Okay , so you get the idea .
Now , if you were actually in this study , you 'd probably be a little stressed out .
Your heart might be pounding , you might be breathing faster , maybe breaking out into a sweat .
And normally , we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren 't coping very well with the pressure .
But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized , was preparing you to meet this challenge ?
Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University .
Before they went through the social stress test , they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful .
That pounding heart is preparing you for action .
If you 're breathing faster , it 's no problem .
It 's getting more oxygen to your brain .
And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance , well , they were less stressed out , less anxious , more confident , but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed .
Now , in a typical stress response , your heart rate goes up , and your blood vessels constrict like this .
And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease .
It 's not really healthy to be in this state all the time .
But in the study , when participants viewed their stress response as helpful , their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this .
Their heart was still pounding , but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile .
It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage .
Over a lifetime of stressful experiences , this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s .
And this is really what the new science of stress reveals , that how you think about stress matters .
So my goal as a health psychologist has changed .
I no longer want to get rid of your stress .
I want to make you better at stress .
And we just did a little intervention .
If you raised your hand and said you 'd had a lot of stress in the last year , we could have saved your life , because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress , you 're going to remember this talk and you 're going to think to yourself , this is my body helping me rise to this challenge .
And when you view stress in that way , your body believes you , and your stress response becomes healthier .
Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from , so we are going to do one more intervention .
I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response , and the idea is this : Stress makes you social .
To understand this side of stress , we need to talk about a hormone , oxytocin , and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get .
It even has its own cute nickname , the cuddle hormone , because it 's released when you hug someone .
But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in .
Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone .
It fine-tunes your brain 's social instincts .
It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships .
Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family .
It enhances your empathy .
It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about .
Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin to become more compassionate and caring .
But here 's what most people don 't understand about oxytocin .
It 's a stress hormone .
Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response .
It 's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound .
And when oxytocin is released in the stress response , it is motivating you to seek support .
Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel instead of bottling it up .
Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other .
When life is difficult , your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you .
Okay , so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier ?
Well , oxytocin doesn 't only act on your brain .
It also acts on your body , and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress .
It 's a natural anti-inflammatory .
It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress .
But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart .
Your heart has receptors for this hormone , and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage .
This stress hormone strengthens your heart , and the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support , so when you reach out to others under stress , either to seek support or to help someone else , you release more of this hormone , your stress response becomes healthier , and you actually recover faster from stress .
I find this amazing , that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience , and that mechanism is human connection .
I want to finish by telling you about one more study .
And listen up , because this study could also save a life .
This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States , and they ranged in age from 34 to 93 , and they started the study by asking , " How much stress have you experienced in the last year ? "
They also asked , " How much time have you spent helping out friends , neighbors , people in your community ? "
And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died .
Okay , so the bad news first : For every major stressful life experience , like financial difficulties or family crisis , that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent .
But -- and I hope you are expecting a but by now -- but that wasn 't true for everyone .
People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying . Zero .
Caring created resilience .
And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable .
How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress .
When you choose to view your stress response as helpful , you create the biology of courage .
And when you choose to connect with others under stress , you can create resilience .
Now I wouldn 't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life , but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress .
Stress gives us access to our hearts .
The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others , and yes , your pounding physical heart , working so hard to give you strength and energy , and when you choose to view stress in this way , you 're not just getting better at stress , you 're actually making a pretty profound statement .
You 're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life 's challenges , and you 're remembering that you don 't have to face them alone .
Thank you .
This is kind of amazing , what you 're telling us .
It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone 's life expectancy .
How would that extend to advice , like , if someone is making a lifestyle choice between , say , a stressful job and a non-stressful job , does it matter which way they go ?
It 's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it , in some sense ?
Kelly McGonigal : Yeah , and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort .
And so I would say that 's really the best way to make decisions , is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows .
Thank you so much , Kelly . It 's pretty cool . KM : Thank you .
Rory Sutherland : Perspective is everything
The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them , says Rory Sutherland . At TEDxAthens , he makes a compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
What you have here is an electronic cigarette .
It 's something that 's , since it was invented a year or two ago , has given me untold happiness .
A little bit of it , I think , is the nicotine , but there 's something much bigger than that .
Which is ever since , in the U.K. , they banned smoking in public places , I 've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again .
And the reason , I only worked out just the other day , which is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people , you don 't actually want to spend all the time talking .
It 's really , really tiring .
Sometimes you just want to stand there silently , alone with your thoughts .
Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window .
Now the problem is , when you can 't smoke , if you stand and stare out of the window on your own , you 're an antisocial , friendless idiot .
If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette , you 're a fucking philosopher .
So the power of reframing things cannot be overstated .
What we have is exactly the same thing , the same activity , but one of them makes you feel great and the other one , with just a small change of posture , makes you feel terrible .
And I think one of the problems with classical economics is it 's absolutely preoccupied with reality .
And reality isn 't a particularly good guide to human happiness .
Why , for example , are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed ?
Both of them , after all , are in exactly the same stage of life .
You both have too much time on your hands and not much money .
But pensioners are reportedly very , very happy , whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed .
The reason , I think , is that the pensioners believe they 've chosen to be pensioners , whereas the young unemployed feel it 's been thrust upon them .
In England the upper middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly , because they 've re-branded unemployment .
If you 're an upper-middle-class English person , you call unemployment " a year off . "
And that 's because having a son who 's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing , but having a son who 's unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment .
But actually the power to re-brand things -- to understand that actually our experiences , costs , things don 't actually much depend on what they really are , but on how we view them -- I genuinely think can 't be overstated .
There 's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor .
Every now and then an electric shock is applied to the floor , which pains the dogs .
The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box .
And when it nuzzles the button , the electric shock stops .
The other dog doesn 't have the button .
It 's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box , but it has no control over the circumstances .
Generally the first dog can be relatively content .
The second dog lapses into complete depression .
The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives .
It 's an interesting question .
We ask the question -- the whole debate in the Western world is about the level of taxation .
But I think there 's another debate to be asked , which is the level of control we have over our tax money .
That what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse .
What costs us 10 pounds in a different context we may actually welcome .
You know , pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health and you 're merely feeling a mug .
Pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward and you 're called a philanthropist .
I 'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax .
So I 'll give you one in return . How you frame things really matters .
Do you call it the bailout of Greece or the bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to Greece ?
Because they are actually the same thing .
What you call them actually affects how you react to them , viscerally and morally .
I think psychological value is great to be absolutely honest .
One of my great friends , a professor called Nick Chater , who 's the Professor of Decision Sciences in London , believes that we should spend far less time looking into humanity 's hidden depths and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows .
I think that 's true actually .
I think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do .
But what we don 't have is a really good model of human psychology .
At least pre-Kahneman perhaps , we didn 't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering , of neoclassical economics .
So people who believed in psychological solutions didn 't have a model .
We didn 't have a framework .
This is what Warren Buffett 's business partner Charlie Munger calls " a latticework on which to hang your ideas . "
Engineers , economists , classical economists all had a very , very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung .
We merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model .
And what that means is that in looking at solutions , we 've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions , Newtonian solutions , and not nearly enough to the psychological ones .
You know my example of the Eurostar .
Six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes .
For 0.01 percent of this money you could have put WiFi on the trains , which wouldn 't have reduced the duration of the journey , but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefullness far more .
For maybe 10 percent of the money , you could have paid all of the world 's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers .
You 'd still have five [ million ] pounds in change , and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down .
Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically ?
I think it 's because there 's an imbalance , an asymmetry , in the way we treat creative , emotionally-driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational , numerical , spreadsheet-driven ideas .
If you 're a creative person , I think quite rightly , you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you .
You have to go in and you have to have a cost-benefit analysis , a feasibility study , an ROI study and so forth .
And I think that 's probably right .
But this does not apply the other way around .
People who have an existing framework , an economic framework , an engineering framework , feel that actually logic is its own answer .
What they don 't say is , " Well the numbers all seem to add up , but before I present this idea , I 'll go and show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better . "
And so we , artificially I think , prioritize what I 'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas .
An example of a great psychological idea : The single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground per pound spent came when they didn 't add any extra trains nor change the frequency of the trains , they put dot matrix display board on the platforms .
Because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality , its duration , but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait .
Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes , knuckle-biting going , " When 's this train going to damn well arrive ? "
Here 's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in Korea .
Red traffic lights have a countdown delay .
It 's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments .
Why ? Because road rage , impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait .
In China , not really understanding the principle behind this , they applied the same principle to green traffic lights .
Which isn 't a great idea .
You 're 200 yards away , you realize you 've got five seconds to go , you floor it .
The Koreans , very assiduously , did test both .
The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights ; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights .
This is all I 'm asking for really in human decision making , is the consideration of these three things .
I 'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other .
I 'm merely saying that when you solve problems , you should look at all three of these equally and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle .
If you actually look at a great business , you 'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play .
Really , really successful businesses -- Google is great , great technological success , but it 's also based on a very good psychological insight : People believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else .
It 's an innate thing called goal dilution .
Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this .
Everybody else at the time of Google , more or less , was trying to be a portal .
Yes , there 's a search function , but you also have weather , sports scores , bits of news .
Google understood that if you 're just a search engine , people assume you 're a very , very good search engine .
All of you know this actually from when you go in to buy a television .
And in the shabbier end of the row of flat screen TVs you can see are these rather despised things called combined TV and DVD players .
And we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things , but we look at a combined TV and DVD player and we go , " Uck .
It 's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a DVD player . "
So we walk out of the shops with one of each .
Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one .
I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn 't even realize were problems at all .
This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics .
Don 't give them 24 white pills .
Give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones .
It 's called chunking .
The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle .
One of the great mistakes , I think , of economics is it fails to understand that what something is , whether it 's retirement , unemployment , cost , is a function , not only of its amount , but also its meaning .
This is a toll crossing in Britain .
Quite often queues happen at the tolls .
Sometimes you get very , very severe queues .
You could apply the same principle actually , if you like , to the security lanes in airports .
What would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge , but go through a lane that 's an express lane ?
It 's not an unreasonable thing to do . It 's an economically efficient thing to do .
Time means more to some people than others .
If you 're waiting trying to get to a job interview , you 'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane .
If you 're on the way to visit your mother in-law , you 'd probably prefer to stay on the left .
The only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution , people hate it .
Because they think you 're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue , and " Why on earth should I pay to subsidize your imcompetence ? "
On the other hand , change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management , so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company , it goes to charity , and the mental willingness to pay completely changes .
You have a relatively economically efficient solution , but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection , rather than being seen as bastardy .
So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money .
Actually my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount , but where I think that money is going .
And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy .
It could revolutionize the public services .
It could really change things quite significantly .
Here 's a guy you all need to study .
He 's an Austrian school economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna .
What was interesting about the Austrian school is they actually grew up alongside Freud .
And so they 're predominantly interested in psychology .
They believed that there was a discipline called praxeology , which is a prior discipline to the study of economics .
Praxeology is the study of human choice , action and decision making .
I think they 're right .
I think the danger we have in today 's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology .
But as Charlie Munger says , " If economics isn 't behavioral , I don 't know what the hell is . "
Von Mises , interestingly , believes economics is just a subset of psychology .
I think he just refers to economics as " the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity . "
But von Mises , among many other things , I think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing , the value of perceived value and the fact that we should actually treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value .
We tend to , all of us -- even those of us who work in marketing -- to think of value in two ways .
There 's the real value , which is when you make something in a factory and provide a service , and then there 's a kind of dubious value , which you create by changing the way people look at things .
Von Mises completely rejected this distinction .
And he used this following analogy .
He referred actually to strange economists called the French Physiocrats , who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land .
So if you 're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer , you created true value .
If however , you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat , you weren 't actually creating value , you were exploiting the shepherd .
Now von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing .
He says , if you run a restaurant , there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor .
One of them creates , perhaps , the primary product -- the thing we think we 're paying for -- the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product .
And the idea that one of them should actually have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong .
Try this quick thought experiment .
Imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food , but actually where the restaurant smells of sewage and there 's human feces on the floor .
The best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further , it 's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor .
And it 's vital we understand this .
If that seems like some strange , abstruse thing , in the U.K. , the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day .
They decided this wasn 't good enough and they wanted to get it up to 99 .
The effort to do that almost broke the organization .
If at the same time you 'd gone and asked people , " What percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day ? "
the average answer , or the modal answer would have been 50 to 60 percent .
Now if your perception is much worse than your reality , what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality ?
That 's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks .
What you need to do is first of all tell people that 98 percent of mail gets there the next day , first-class mail .
That 's pretty good .
I would argue , in Britain there 's a much better frame of reference , which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the U.K. than in Germany .
Because generally in Britain if you want to make us happy about something , just tell us we do it better than the Germans .
Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value and therefore the actual value is completely tranformed .
It has to be said of the Germans that the Germans and the French are doing a brilliant job of creating a united Europe .
The only thing they don 't expect is they 're uniting Europe through a shared mild hatred of the French and Germans .
But I 'm British , that 's the way we like it .
What you also notice is that in any case our perception is leaky .
We can 't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it .
All of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted .
When you drive away , your car feels as if it drives better .
And the reason for this , unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which I 'm not paying him for and I 'm unaware of , is because perception is in any case leaky .
Analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded .
I don 't just mean through reported pain reduction , actual measured pain reduction .
And so perception actually is leaky in any case .
So if you do something that 's perceptually bad in one respect , you can damage the other .
Thank you very much .
Elif Shafak : The politics of fiction
Listening to stories widens the imagination ; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls , embrace different experiences , feel what others feel . Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics .
I 'm a storyteller .
That 's what I do in life -- telling stories , writing novels -- and today I would like to tell you a few stories about the art of storytelling and also some supernatural creatures called the djinni .
But before I go there , please allow me to share with you glimpses of my personal story .
I will do so with the help of words , of course , but also a geometrical shape , the circle , so throughout my talk , you will come across several circles .
I was born in Strasbourg , France to Turkish parents .
Shortly after , my parents got separated , and I came to Turkey with my mom .
From then on , I was raised as a single child by a single mother .
Now in the early 1970s , in Ankara , that was a bit unusual .
Our neighborhood was full of large families , where fathers were the heads of households , so I grew up seeing my mother as a divorcee in a patriarchal environment .
In fact , I grew up observing two different kinds of womanhood .
On the one hand was my mother , a well-educated , secular , modern , westernized , Turkish woman .
On the other hand was my grandmother , who also took care of me and was more spiritual , less educated and definitely less rational .
This was a woman who read coffee grounds to see the future and melted lead into mysterious shapes to fend off the evil eye .
Many people visited my grandmother , people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands .
Each time , my grandmother would utter some words in Arabic , take a red apple and stab it with as many rose thorns as the number of warts she wanted to remove .
Then one by one , she would encircle these thorns with dark ink .
A week later , the patient would come back for a follow-up examination .
Now , I 'm aware that I should not be saying such things in front of an audience of scholars and scientists , but the truth is , of all the people who visited my grandmother for their skin conditions , I did not see anyone go back unhappy or unhealed .
I asked her how she did this . Was it the power of praying ?
In response she said , " Yes , praying is effective , but also beware of the power of circles . "
From her , I learned , amongst many other things , one very precious lesson -- that if you want to destroy something in this life , be it an acne , a blemish or the human soul , all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls .
It will dry up inside .
Now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle .
We all do .
We 're born into a certain family , nation , class .
But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted , then we too run the risk of drying up inside .
Our imagination might shrink ; our hearts might dwindle , and our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons .
Our friends , neighbors , colleagues , family -- if all the people in our inner circle resemble us , it means we are surrounded with our mirror image .
Now one other thing women like my grandma do in Turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out .
It 's an old Eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it 's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection .
Ironically , [ living in ] communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today 's globalized world .
And it 's happening everywhere , among liberals and conservatives , agnostics and believers , the rich and the poor , East and West alike .
We tend to form clusters based on similarity , and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people .
In my opinion , one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling .
Stories cannot demolish frontiers , but they can punch holes in our mental walls .
And through those holes , we can get a glimpse of the other , and sometimes even like what we see .
I started writing fiction at the age of eight .
My mother came home one day with a turquoise notebook and asked me if I 'd be interested in keeping a personal journal .
In retrospect , I think she was slightly worried about my sanity .
I was constantly telling stories at home , which was good , except I told this to imaginary friends around me , which was not so good .
I was an introverted child , to the point of communicating with colored crayons and apologizing to objects when I bumped into them , so my mother thought it might do me good to write down my day-to-day experiences and emotions .
What she didn 't know was that I thought my life was terribly boring , and the last thing I wanted to do was to write about myself .
Instead , I began to write about people other than me and things that never really happened .
And thus began my life-long passion for writing fiction .
So from the very beginning , fiction for me was less of an autobiographical manifestation than a transcendental journey into other lives , other possibilities .
And please bear with me : I 'll draw a circle and come back to this point .
Now one other thing happened around this same time .
My mother became a diplomat .
So from this small , superstitious , middle-class neighborhood of my grandmother , I was zoomed into this posh , international school [ in Madrid ] , where I was the only Turk .
It was here that I had my first encounter with what I call the " representative foreigner . "
In our classroom , there were children from all nationalities , yet this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan , egalitarian classroom democracy .
Instead , it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen -- not as an individual on his own , but as the representative of something larger .
We were like a miniature United Nations , which was fun , except whenever something negative , with regards to a nation or a religion , took place .
The child who represented it was mocked , ridiculed and bullied endlessly .
And I should know , because during the time I attended that school , a military takeover happened in my country , a gunman of my nationality nearly killed the Pope , and Turkey got zero points in [ the ] Eurovision Song Contest .
I skipped school often and dreamed of becoming a sailor during those days .
I also had my first taste of cultural stereotypes there .
The other children asked me about the movie " Midnight Express , " which I had not seen ; they inquired how many cigarettes a day I smoked , because they thought all Turks were heavy smokers , and they wondered at what age I would start covering my hair .
I came to learn that these were the three main stereotypes about my country : politics , cigarettes and the veil .
After Spain , we went to Jordan , Germany and Ankara again .
Everywhere I went , I felt like my imagination was the only suitcase I could take with me .
Stories gave me a sense of center , continuity and coherence , the three big Cs that I otherwise lacked .
In my mid-twenties , I moved to Istanbul , the city I adore .
I lived in a very vibrant , diverse neighborhood where I wrote several of my novels .
I was in Istanbul when the earthquake hit in 1999 .
When I ran out of the building at three in the morning , I saw something that stopped me in my tracks .
There was the local grocer there -- a grumpy , old man who didn 't sell alcohol and didn 't speak to marginals .
He was sitting next to a transvestite with a long black wig and mascara running down her cheeks .
I watched the man open a pack of cigarettes with trembling hands and offer one to her , and that is the image of the night of the earthquake in my mind today -- a conservative grocer and a crying transvestite smoking together on the sidewalk .
In the face of death and destruction , our mundane differences evaporated , and we all became one even if for a few hours .
But I 've always believed that stories , too , have a similar effect on us .
I 'm not saying that fiction has the magnitude of an earthquake , but when we are reading a good novel , we leave our small , cozy apartments behind , go out into the night alone and start getting to know people we had never met before and perhaps had even been biased against .
Shortly after , I went to a women 's college in Boston , then Michigan .
I experienced this , not so much as a geographical shift , as a linguistic one .
I started writing fiction in English .
I 'm not an immigrant , refugee or exile -- they ask me why I do this -- but the commute between languages gives me the chance to recreate myself .
I love writing in Turkish , which to me is very poetic and very emotional , and I love writing in English , which to me is very mathematical and cerebral .
So I feel connected to each language in a different way .
For me , like millions of other people around the world today , English is an acquired language .
When you 're a latecomer to a language , what happens is you live there with a continuous and perpetual frustration .
As latecomers , we always want to say more , you know , crack better jokes , say better things , but we end up saying less because there 's a gap between the mind and the tongue .
And that gap is very intimidating .
But if we manage not to be frightened by it , it 's also stimulating .
And this is what I discovered in Boston -- that frustration was very stimulating .
At this stage , my grandmother , who had been watching the course of my life with increasing anxiety , started to include in her daily prayers that I urgently get married so that I could settle down once and for all .
And because God loves her , I did get married .
But instead of settling down , I went to Arizona .
And since my husband is in Istanbul , I started commuting between Arizona and Istanbul -- the two places on the surface of earth that couldn 't be more different .
I guess one part of me has always been a nomad , physically and spiritually .
Stories accompany me , keeping my pieces and memories together , like an existential glue .
Yet as much as I love stories , recently , I 've also begun to think that they lose their magic if and when a story is seen as more than a story .
And this is a subject that I would love to think about together .
When my first novel written in English came out in America , I heard an interesting remark from a literary critic .
" I liked your book , " he said , " but I wish you had written it differently . "
I asked him what he meant by that .
He said , " Well , look at it . There 's so many Spanish , American , Hispanic characters in it , but there 's only one Turkish character and it 's a man . "
Now the novel took place on a university campus in Boston , so to me , it was normal that there be more international characters in it than Turkish characters , but I understood what my critic was looking for .
And I also understood that I would keep disappointing him .
He wanted to see the manifestation of my identity .
He was looking for a Turkish woman in the book because I happened to be one .
We often talk about how stories change the world , but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated , read and reviewed .
Many authors feel this pressure , but non-Western authors feel it more heavily .
If you 're a woman writer from the Muslim world , like me , then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and , preferably , the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women .
You 're expected to write informative , poignant and characteristic stories and leave the experimental and avant-garde to your Western colleagues .
What I experienced as a child in that school in Madrid is happening in the literary world today .
Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own , but as the representatives of their respective cultures : a few authors from China , a few from Turkey , a few from Nigeria .
We 're all thought to have something very distinctive , if not peculiar .
The writer and commuter James Baldwin gave an interview in 1984 in which he was repeatedly asked about his homosexuality .
When the interviewer tried to pigeonhole him as a gay writer , Baldwin stopped and said , " But don 't you see ? There 's nothing in me that is not in everybody else , and nothing in everybody else that is not in me . "
When identity politics tries to put labels on us , it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger .
There 's a fuzzy category called multicultural literature in which all authors from outside the Western world are lumped together .
I never forget my first multicultural reading , in Harvard Square about 10 years ago .
We were three writers , one from the Philippines , one Turkish and one Indonesian -- like a joke , you know .
And the reason why we were brought together was not because we shared an artistic style or a literary taste .
It was only because of our passports .
Multicultural writers are expected to tell real stories , not so much the imaginary .
A function is attributed to fiction .
In this way , not only the writers themselves , but also their fictional characters become the representatives of something larger .
But I must quickly add that this tendency to see a story as more than a story does not solely come from the West .
It comes from everywhere .
And I experienced this firsthand when I was put on trial in 2005 for the words my fictional characters uttered in a novel .
I had intended to write a constructive , multi-layered novel about an Armenian and a Turkish family through the eyes of women .
My micro story became a macro issue when I was prosecuted .
Some people criticized , others praised me for writing about the Turkish-Armenian conflict .
But there were times when I wanted to remind both sides that this was fiction .
It was just a story .
And when I say , " just a story , " I 'm not trying to belittle my work .
I want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is , not as a means to an end .
Writers are entitled to their political opinions , and there are good political novels out there , but the language of fiction is not the language of daily politics .
Chekhov said , " The solution to a problem and the correct way of posing the question are two completely separate things .
And only the latter is an artist 's responsibility . "
Identity politics divides us . Fiction connects .
One is interested in sweeping generalizations .
The other , in nuances .
One draws boundaries .
The other recognizes no frontiers .
Identity politics is made of solid bricks .
Fiction is flowing water .
In the Ottoman times , there were itinerant storytellers called " meddah . "
They would go to coffee houses , where they would tell a story in front of an audience , often improvising .
With each new person in the story , the meddah would change his voice , impersonating that character .
Everybody could go and listen , you know -- ordinary people , even the sultan , Muslims and non-Muslims .
Stories cut across all boundaries , like " The Tales of Nasreddin Hodja , " which were very popular throughout the Middle East , North Africa , the Balkans and Asia .
Today , stories continue to transcend borders .
When Palestinian and Israeli politicians talk , they usually don 't listen to each other , but a Palestinian reader still reads a novel by a Jewish author , and vice versa , connecting and empathizing with the narrator .
Literature has to take us beyond .
If it cannot take us there , it is not good literature .
Books have saved the introverted , timid child that I was -- that I once was .
But I 'm also aware of the danger of fetishizing them .
When the poet and mystic , Rumi , met his spiritual companion , Shams of Tabriz , one of the first things the latter did was to toss Rumi 's books into water and watch the letters dissolve .
The Sufis say , " Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance . "
The problem with today 's cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge -- we know a lot about each other , or so we think -- but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves : it makes us elitist , distant and disconnected .
There 's a metaphor which I love : living like a drawing compass .
As you know , one leg of the compass is static , rooted in a place .
Meanwhile , the other leg draws a wide circle , constantly moving .
Like that , my fiction as well .
One part of it is rooted in Istanbul , with strong Turkish roots , but the other part travels the world , connecting to different cultures .
In that sense , I like to think of my fiction as both local and universal , both from here and everywhere .
Now those of you who have been to Istanbul have probably seen Topkapi Palace , which was the residence of Ottoman sultans for more than 400 years .
In the palace , just outside the quarters of the favorite concubines , there 's an area called The Gathering Place of the Djinn .
It 's between buildings .
I 'm intrigued by this concept .
We usually distrust those areas that fall in between things .
We see them as the domain of supernatural creatures like the djinn , who are made of smokeless fire and are the symbol of elusiveness .
But my point is perhaps that elusive space is what writers and artists need most .
When I write fiction I cherish elusiveness and changeability .
I like not knowing what will happen 10 pages later .
I like it when my characters surprise me .
I might write about a Muslim woman in one novel , and perhaps it will be a very happy story , and in my next book , I might write about a handsome , gay professor in Norway .
As long as it comes from our hearts , we can write about anything and everything .
Audre Lorde once said , " The white fathers taught us to say , ' I think , therefore I am . ' " She suggested , " I feel , therefore I am free . "
I think it was a wonderful paradigm shift .
And yet , why is it that , in creative writing courses today , the very first thing we teach students is " write what you know " ?
Perhaps that 's not the right way to start at all .
Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about .
We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel .
We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next .
In the end , stories move like whirling dervishes , drawing circles beyond circles .
They connect all humanity , regardless of identity politics , and that is the good news .
And I would like to finish with an old Sufi poem : " Come , let us be friends for once ; let us make life easy on us ; let us be lovers and loved ones ; the earth shall be left to no one . "
Thank you .
Naturally 7 : A full-band beatbox
One-of-a-kind R & amp ; B group Naturally 7 beatboxes an orchestra 's worth of instruments to groove through their smooth single , " Fly Baby . "
I think I 'm ready to do my thing I think I 'm ready to take my chances I 've been dining out and all stressed out Due to the circumstances . See ? I gotta get up , get up , get up , get up Wake up , wake up , wake up , wake up I see what you 're saying We sent a demo to the world , they said it sounds like Take 6 I said " Hold on , wait a minute , I 'll be back with the remix " They looking at us funny , we can 't make any money It took us years to figure out that we was dealing with dummies They didn 't understand the sound from the Bronx , that 's the boogie down to Huntsville , Alabama , there 's no circles in my planner , so It was time to make the product , so we hooked up with Townsend Made a deal with John Neal , on the road sold ten thousand WBA , that means a trip to Nashville Festplatte showed up and said them boys are naturals Can you hear what they were hearing ? See what they were seeing ? From Bronx to Berlin , we took the tour European All vocal yeah , we widit , call the album " What is it ? " With Sarah Connor , set the goal for number one and we hit it But now it 's Kev , Sim , Drew , Stew , time for a new day Ring the alarm , hit ' em on Skype or a two-way Sung by the words , we ready to fly ! Fly baby ! Time to leave that nest Fly baby ! This ain 't no time to rest Come on fly baby , we got work to do Here we go , spread my wings and ... Fly baby ! Time to leave that nest Fly baby ! This ain 't no time to rest . Come on Fly baby ! We got work to do Here we go . Spread my wings and fly . One more time Fly baby ! Time to leave that nest Fly baby ! This ain 't no time to rest Fly baby ! We got work to do Here we go , spread my wings and ... Fly baby ! Fly baby fly Fly baby ! Fly baby high Fly baby ! Up to the sky Spread my wings and fly Instrumental !
We 're ready to fly ! Thank you very much .
Chris Bliss : Comedy is translation
Every act of communication is , in some way , an act of translation . Onstage at TEDxRainier , writer Chris Bliss thinks hard about the way that great comedy can translate deep truths for a mass audience . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite writers , for his storytelling , but even more , I think , for the beauty and precision of his prose .
And whether it 's the opening line from " One Hundred Years of Solitude " or the fantastical stream of consciousness in " Autumn of the Patriarch , " where the words rush by , page after page of unpunctuated imagery sweeping the reader along like some wild river twisting through a primal South American jungle , reading Márquez is a visceral experience .
Which struck me as particularly remarkable during one session with the novel when I realized that I was being swept along on this remarkable , vivid journey in translation .
Now I was a comparative literature major in college , which is like an English major , only instead of being stuck studying Chaucer for three months , we got to read great literature in translation from around the world .
And as great as these books were , you could always tell that you were getting close to the full effect .
But not so with Márquez who once praised his translator 's versions as being better than his own , which is an astonishing compliment .
So when I heard that the translator , Gregory Rabassa , had written his own book on the subject , I couldn 't wait to read it .
It 's called apropos of the Italian adage that I lifted from his forward , " If This Be Treason . "
And it 's a charming read .
It 's highly recommended for anyone who 's interested in the translator 's art .
But the reason that I mention it is that early on , Rabassa offers this elegantly simple insight : " Every act of communication is an act of translation . "
Now maybe that 's been obvious to all of you for a long time , but for me , as often as I 'd encountered that exact difficulty on a daily basis , I had never seen the inherent challenge of communication in so crystalline a light .
Ever since I can remember thinking consciously about such things , communication has been my central passion .
Even as a child , I remember thinking that what I really wanted most in life was to be able to understand everything and then to communicate it to everyone else .
So no ego problems .
It 's funny , my wife , Daisy , whose family is littered with schizophrenics -- and I mean littered with them -- once said to me , " Chris , I already have a brother who thinks he 's God .
I don 't need a husband who wants to be . "
Anyway , as I plunged through my 20s ever more aware of how unobtainable the first part of my childhood ambition was , it was that second part , being able to successfully communicate to others whatever knowledge I was gaining , where the futility of my quest really set in .
Time after time , whenever I set out to share some great truth with a soon-to-be grateful recipient , it had the opposite effect .
Interestingly , when your opening line of communication is , " Hey , listen up , because I 'm about to drop some serious knowledge on you , " it 's amazing how quickly you 'll discover both ice and the firing squad .
Finally , after about 10 years of alienating friends and strangers alike , I finally got it , a new personal truth all my own , that if I was going to ever communicate well with other people the ideas that I was gaining , I 'd better find a different way of going about it .
And that 's when I discovered comedy .
Now comedy travels along a distinct wavelength from other forms of language .
If I had to place it on an arbitrary spectrum , I 'd say it falls somewhere between poetry and lies .
And I 'm not talking about all comedy here , because , clearly , there 's plenty of humor that colors safely within the lines of what we already think and feel .
What I want to talk about is the unique ability that the best comedy and satire has at circumventing our ingrained perspectives -- comedy as the philosopher 's stone .
It takes the base metal of our conventional wisdom and transforms it through ridicule into a different way of seeing and ultimately being in the world .
Because that 's what I take from the theme of this conference : Gained in Translation .
That it 's about communication that doesn 't just produce greater understanding within the individual , but leads to real change .
Which in my experience means communication that manages to speak to and expand our concept of self-interest .
Now I 'm big on speaking to people 's self-interest because we 're all wired for that .
It 's part of our survival package , and that 's why it 's become so important for us , and that 's why we 're always listening at that level .
And also because that 's where , in terms of our own self-interest , we finally begin to grasp our ability to respond , our responsibility to the rest of the world .
Now as to what I mean by the best comedy and satire , I mean work that comes first and foremost from a place of honesty and integrity .
Now if you think back on Tina Fey 's impersonations on Saturday Night Live of the newly nominated vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin , they were devastating .
Fey demonstrated far more effectively than any political pundit the candidate 's fundamental lack of seriousness , cementing an impression that the majority of the American public still holds today .
And the key detail of this is that Fey 's scripts weren 't written by her and they weren 't written by the SNL writers .
They were lifted verbatim from Palin 's own remarks .
Here was a Palin impersonator quoting Palin word for word .
Now that 's honesty and integrity , and it 's also why Fey 's performances left such a lasting impression .
On the other side of the political spectrum , the first time that I heard Rush Limbaugh refer to presidential hopeful John Edwards as the Breck girl I knew that he 'd made a direct hit .
Now it 's not often that I 'm going to associate the words honesty and integrity with Limbaugh , but it 's really hard to argue with that punchline .
The description perfectly captured Edwards ' personal vanity .
And guess what ?
That ended up being the exact personality trait that was at the core of the scandal that ended his political career .
Now The Daily Show with John Stewart is by far the most -- it 's by far the most well-documented example of the effectiveness of this kind of comedy .
Survey after survey , from Pew Research to the Annenberg Center for Public Policy , has found that Daily Show viewers are better informed about current events than the viewers of all major network and cable news shows .
Now whether this says more about the conflict between integrity and profitability of corporate journalism than it does about the attentiveness of Stewart 's viewers , the larger point remains that Stewart 's material is always grounded in a commitment to the facts -- not because his intent is to inform . It 's not .
His intent is to be funny .
It just so happens that Stewart 's brand of funny doesn 't work unless the facts are true .
And the result is great comedy that 's also an information delivery system that scores markedly higher in both credibility and retention than the professional news media .
Now this is doubly ironic when you consider that what gives comedy its edge at reaching around people 's walls is the way that it uses deliberate misdirection .
A great piece of comedy is a verbal magic trick , where you think it 's going over here and then all of a sudden you 're transported over here .
And there 's this mental delight that 's followed by the physical response of laughter , which , not coincidentally , releases endorphins in the brain .
And just like that , you 've been seduced into a different way of looking at something because the endorphins have brought down your defenses .
This is the exact opposite of the way that anger and fear and panic , all of the flight-or-fight responses , operate .
Flight-or-fight releases adrenalin , which throws our walls up sky-high .
And the comedy comes along , dealing with a lot of the same areas where our defenses are the strongest -- race , religion , politics , sexuality -- only by approaching them through humor instead of adrenalin , we get endorphins and the alchemy of laughter turns our walls into windows , revealing a fresh and unexpected point of view .
Now let me give you an example from my act .
I have some material about the so-called radical gay agenda , which starts off by asking , how radical is the gay agenda ?
Because from what I can tell , the three things gay Americans seem to want most are to join the military , get married and start a family .
Three things I 've tried to avoid my entire life .
Have at it you radical bastards . The field is yours .
And that 's followed by these lines about gay adoption : What is the problem with gay adoption ?
Why is this remotely controversial ?
If you have a baby and you think that baby 's gay , you should be allowed to put it up for adoption .
You have given birth to an abomination .
Remove it from your household .
Now by taking the biblical epithet " abomination " and attaching it to the ultimate image of innocence , a baby , this joke short circuits the emotional wiring behind the debate and it leaves the audience with the opportunity , through their laughter , to question its validity .
Misdirection isn 't the only trick that comedy has up its sleeve .
Economy of language is another real strong suit of great comedy .
There are few phrases that pack a more concentrated dose of subject and symbol than the perfect punchline .
Bill Hicks -- and if you don 't know his work , you should really Google him -- Hicks had a routine about getting into one of those childhood bragging contests on the playground , where finally the other kid says to him , " Huh ? Well my dad can beat up your dad , " to which Hicks replies , " Really ? How soon ? "
That 's an entire childhood in three words .
Not to mention what it reveals about the adult who 's speaking them .
And one last powerful attribute that comedy has as communication is that it 's inherently viral .
People can 't wait to pass along that new great joke .
And this isn 't some new phenomenon of our wired world .
Comedy has been crossing country with remarkable speed way before the Internet , social media , even cable TV .
Back in 1980 when comedian Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire during a freebasing accident , I was in Los Angeles the day after it happened and then I was in Washington D.C. two days after that .
And I heard the exact same punchline on both coasts -- something about the Ignited Negro College Fund .
Clearly , it didn 't come out of a Tonight Show monologue .
And my guess here -- and I have no research on this -- is that if you really were to look back at it and if you could research it , you 'd find out that comedy is the second oldest viral profession .
First there were drums and then knock-knock jokes .
But it 's when you put all of these elements together -- when you get the viral appeal of a great joke with a powerful punchline that 's crafted from honesty and integrity , it can have a real world impact at changing a conversation .
Now I have a close friend , Joel Pett , who 's the editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald-Leader .
And he used to be the USA Today Monday morning guy .
I was visiting with Joel the weekend before the Copenhagen conference on climate change opened in December of 2009 .
And Joel was explaining to me that , because USA Today was one of America 's four papers of record , it would be scanned by virtually everyone in attendance at the conference , which meant that , if he hit it out of the park with his cartoon on Monday , the opening day of the conference , it could get passed around at the highest level among actual decision-makers .
So we started talking about climate change .
And it turned out that Joel and I were both bothered by the same thing , which was how so much of the debate was still focused on the science and how complete it was or wasn 't , which , to both of us , seems somewhat intentionally off point .
Because first of all , there 's this false premise that such a thing as complete science exists .
Now Governor Perry of my newly-adopted state of Texas was pushing this same line this past summer at the beginning of his oops-fated campaign for the Republican presidential nomination , proclaiming over and over that the science wasn 't complete out of 254 counties in the state of Texas were on fire .
And Perry 's policy solution was to ask the people of Texas to pray for rain .
Personally , I was praying for four more fires so we could finally complete the damn science .
But back in 2009 , the question Joel and I kept turning over and over was why this late in the game so much energy was being spent talking about the science when the policies necessary to address climate change were unequivocally beneficial for humanity in the long run regardless of the science .
So we tossed it back and forth until Joel came up with this .
Cartoon : " What if it 's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing ? "
You 've got to love that idea .
How about that ? How about we create a better world for nothing ?
Not for God , not for country , not for profit -- just as a basic metric for global decision-making .
And this cartoon hit the bull 's eye .
Shortly after the conference was over , Joel got a request for a signed copy from the head of the EPA in Washington whose wall it now hangs on .
And not long after that , he got another request for a copy from the head of the EPA in California who used it as part of her presentation at an international conference on climate change in Sacramento last year .
And it didn 't stop there .
To date , Joel 's gotten requests from over 40 environmental groups , in the United States , Canada and Europe .
And earlier this year , he got a request from the Green Party in Australia who used it in their campaign where it became part of the debate that resulted in the Australian parliament adopting the most rigorous carbon tax regime of any country in the world .
That is a lot of punch for 14 words .
So my suggestion to those of you out here who are seriously focused on creating a better world is to take a little bit of time each day and practice thinking funny , because you might just find the question that you 've been looking for .
Thank you .
Sheikha Al Mayassa : Globalizing the local , localizing the global
Sheikha Al Mayassa , a patron of artists , storytellers and filmmakers in Qatar , talks about how art and culture create a country 's identity -- and allow every country to share its unique identity with the wider world . As she says : " We don 't want to be all the same , but we do want to understand each other . "
Both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic , which Pat said makes 70 percent , but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region 's population .
Qatar is no exception to the region .
It 's a very young nation led by young people .
We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods , and for me the abaya , my traditional dress that I 'm wearing today .
Now this is not a religious garment , nor is it a religious statement .
Instead , it 's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear .
Now I remember a few years ago , a journalist asked Dr. Sheikha , who 's sitting here , president of Qatar University -- who , by the way , is a woman -- he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way .
Her answer was quite the contrary .
Instead , she felt more free , more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya .
She could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care .
Not that you do ; I 'm just saying .
My point is here , people have a choice -- just like the Indian lady could wear her sari or the Japanese woman could wear her kimono .
We are changing our culture from within , but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions .
We know that modernization is happening .
And yes , Qatar wants to be a modern nation .
But at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our Arab heritage .
It 's important for us to grow organically .
And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance .
In fact , research has shown that the more the world is flat , if I use Tom Friedman 's analogy , or global , the more and more people are wanting to be different .
And for us young people , they 're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves .
Which is why I prefer the Richard Wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global .
We don 't want to be all the same , but we want to respect each other and understand each other .
And therefore tradition becomes more important , not less important .
Life necessitates a universal world , however , we believe in the security of having a local identity .
And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do .
We 're trying to be part of this global village , but at the same time we 're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development .
I 'm a representation of that phenomenon .
And I think a lot of people in this room , I can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself .
And I 'm sure , although we can 't see the people in Washington , they are in the same position .
We 're continuously trying to straddle different worlds , different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others .
So I want to ask a question : What should culture in the 21st century look like ?
In a time where the world is becoming personalized , when the mobile phone , the burger , the telephone , everything has its own personal identity , how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others ?
How does that impact our desert culture ?
I 'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and , the more recent , Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008 .
I myself am personalizing these cultural developments , but I also understand that this has to be done organically .
Yes , we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions , but what I think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this can 't happen from outside , it has to come from within .
And guess what ?
You might be surprised to know that most people in the Gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women .
I want to ask you , why do you think this is ?
Is it because it 's a soft option ; we have nothing else to do ?
No , I don 't think so .
I think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally .
It 's a natural component for bringing people together , discussing ideas -- in the same way we 're doing here at TED .
We 're here , we 're part of a community , sharing out ideas and discussing them .
Art becomes a very important part of our national identity .
The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation 's development of cultural identity is very important .
You know , art and culture is big business .
Ask me .
Ask the chairpersons and CEOs of Sotheby 's and Christie 's .
Ask Charles Saatchi about great art .
They make a lot of money .
So I think women in our society are becoming leaders , because they realize that for their future generations , it 's very important to maintain our cultural identities .
Why else do Greeks demand the return of the Elgin Marbles ?
And why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum ?
Why does it take me months on end to get an export license from London or New York in order to get pieces into my country ?
In few hours , Shirin Neshat , my friend from Iran who 's a very important artist for us will be talking to you .
She lives in New York City , but she doesn 't try to be a Western artist .
Instead , she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture , nation and heritage .
She does that through important visual forms of photography and film .
In the same way , Qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within .
Our mission is of cultural integration and independence .
We don 't want to have what there is in the West .
We don 't want their collections .
We want to build our own identities , our own fabric , create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us .
In a few days , we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art .
We have done extensive research to ensure that Arab and Muslim artists , and Arabs who are not Muslims -- not all Arabs are Muslims , by the way -- but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution .
This institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades .
We will open the museum in a few days , and I welcome all of you to get on Qatar Airways and come and join us .
Now this museum is just as important to us as the West .
Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine , but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso 's studio in Paris in the 1930s .
For me it was a new discovery .
And I think with time , in the years to come we 'll be learning a lot about our Picassos , our Legers and our Cezannes .
We do have artists , but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet .
Now visual expression is just one form of culture integration .
We have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of YouTube and social networking to express their stories , share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices .
In a similar way , we have created the Doha Film Institute .
Now the Doha Film Institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking .
Last year we didn 't have one Qatari woman filmmaker .
Today I am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 Qatari women filmmakers to edit , tell their own stories in their own voices .
Now if you 'll allow me , I would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture .
And this is one of our filmmakers ' products .
Boy : Hey listen ! Did you know that the stocks are up ?
Who are you playing ?
Girl : Uncle Khaled . Here , put on the headscarf .
Khaled : Why would I want to put it on ?
Girl : Do as you 're told , young girl .
Boy : No , you play mom and I play dad .
Play by yourself then .
Girl : Women ! One word and they get upset .
Useless .
Thank you . Thank you !
SM : Going back to straddling between East and West , last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha .
The Doha Tribeca Film Festival was held at our new cultural hub , Katara .
It attracted 42,000 people , and we showcased 51 films .
Now the Doha Tribeca Film Festival is not an imported festival , but rather an important festival between the cities of New York and Doha .
It 's important for two things .
First , it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world , New York City .
At the same time , we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world .
They 're learning our culture , our language , our heritage and realizing we 're just as different and just the same as each other .
Now over and over again , people have said , " Let 's build bridges , " and frankly , I want to do more than that .
I would like break the walls of ignorance between East and West -- no , not the soft option that we have discussed before , but rather the soft power that Joseph Nye has spoken about before .
Culture 's a very important tool to bring people together .
We should not underestimate it .
" Know thyself , " that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling .
Now I don 't pretend to have all the answers , but I know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading .
This is a very interesting journey .
I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions .
Familiarity destroys and trumps fear . Try it .
Ladies and gentlemen , thank you very much . Shokran .
Christopher " moot " Poole " : The case for anonymity online
The founder of 4chan , a controversial , uncensored online imageboard , describes its subculture , some of the Internet " memes " it has launched , and the incident in which its users managed a very public , precision hack of a mainstream media website . The talk raises questions about the power -- and price -- of anonymity .
Tom Green : That 's a 4chan thing .
These kids on the Internet , they have this group of kids and they like to say funny words like " barrel roll . "
It 's a video game move from " Star Fox . "
" Star Fox 20 " ?
Tom Green : Yeah . And they 've been dogging me for a year .
I got to tell you , it 's driving me nuts , actually .
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I scream , " 4chan ! "
Christopher Poole : When I was 15 , I found this website called Futaba Channel .
And it was a Japanese forum and imageboard .
That format of forum , at that time , was not well-known outside of Japan .
And so what I did is I took it , I translated it into English , and I stuck it up for my friends to use .
Now , six and a half years later , over seven million people are using it , contributing over 700,000 posts per day .
And we 've gone from one board to 48 boards .
This is what it looks like .
So , what 's unique about the site is that it 's anonymous , and it has no memory .
There 's no archive , there are no barriers , there 's no registration .
These things that we 're used to with forums don 't exist on 4chan .
And that 's led to this discussion that 's completely raw , completely unfiltered .
What the site 's known for , because it has this environment , is it 's fostered the creation of a lot of Internet phenomena , viral videos and whatnot , known as " memes . "
Two of the largest memes that have come out of this site some of you might be familiar with are these LOLcats -- just silly pictures of cats with text .
And this resonates with millions of people , apparently , because there are tens of thousands of these , and there is a whole blogging empire now dedicated to pictures like these .
And Rick Astley 's kind of rebirth these past two years ...
Rickroll was this bait and switch , really simple , classic bait and switch .
Somebody says they 're linking to something interesting , and you get an ' 80s pop song . That 's all it was .
And it got big enough to the point where there was a float last year at the Macy 's Thanksgiving Day parade , and Rick Astley pops out , and rickrolls millions of people on television .
There are thousands of memes that come out of the site .
There are a handful that have escaped into the mainstream , the ones I 've just shown you , but every day , every month , people are producing thousands of these .
So does a site like this have rules ?
We do ; they 're the codified rules that I 've come up with , which are more-or-less ignored by the community .
And so they 've come up with their own set of rules , the " Rules of the Internet . "
And so there are three that I want to show you specifically .
Rule one is you don 't talk about / b / .
Two is you do not talk about / b / .
And this one 's kind of interesting : " If it exists , there is porn of it . No exceptions . "
And I will spare you that slide .
I assure you , it is very true .
/ b / is the first board we started with , and it is , in many ways , the beating heart of the website .
It is where a third of all the traffic is going .
And / b / is known for , more than anything , not just the memes they 've created , but the exploits .
And Chris just touched on one of those a second ago , and that was the Time 100 poll .
So somebody at Time , at the magazine , thought it would be fun to nominate me for this thing they did last year .
And so they placed me on it , and the Internet got wind of it . My community decided they wanted me to win it .
I didn 't instruct them to do it ; they just decided that that 's what they wanted .
And so , you know , 390 percent approval rating ain 't so bad .
So they broke that poll .
And I ended up on top .
I ended up at this really fancy party .
But that 's not what 's interesting about this .
It 's that they weren 't putting me at the top of this list ; they were actually -- it got so sophisticated to the point where they gamed all of the top 21 places to spell " mARBLECAKE . ALSO , THE GAME . "
The amount of time and effort that went into that is absolutely incredible .
And " marble cake " is significant because it is the channel that this group called Anonymous organized .
Anonymous is this group of people that protested , very famously , Scientology .
The story is , Scientology had this embarrassing video of Tom Cruise . It went up online .
They got it taken offline and managed to piss off part of the Internet .
And so these people , over 7,000 people , less than one month later , organized in a hundred cities around the globe and -- this is L.A. -- protested the Church of Scientology , and they have continued to do so , now , two full years after the fact .
They are still protesting .
So we 've got this activist group that 's this grassroots group that 's come out of the site .
And last , I 'm going to show you the example , the story of Dusty the cat .
Dusty is the name that we 've given to this cat .
This young man posted a video of him abusing his cat on YouTube .
And , you know , this didn 't sit well with people , and so there was this outpouring of support for people to do something about this .
So what they did is they -- I mean , they put CSI to shame here -- the Internet detectives came out .
They matched , they found his MySpace .
They took the YouTube video and they mashed everything in the video .
Within 24 hours , they had his name , and within 48 hours , he was arrested .
And so , what I think is really intriguing about a community like 4chan is just that it 's this open place .
As I said , it 's raw , it 's unfiltered .
And sites like it are kind of going the way of the dinosaur right now .
They 're endangered because we 're moving towards social networking .
We 're moving towards persistent identity .
We 're moving towards , you know , a lack of privacy , really .
We 're sacrificing a lot of that , and I think in doing so , moving towards those things , we 're losing something valuable .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Got a couple questions for you .
But if I ask them , is the TED website going to go down ?
CP : You 're lucky that this is not being streamed to them live right now .
Well , you never know . Some of them -- we 've got people in 75 countries out there watching .
Don 't tell .
But seriously , this issue on anonymity is -- I mean , you made the case there .
But anonymity basically allows people to say anything , all the rules gone .
You 've had to wrestle with issues like child pornography .
And I 'm just curious whether you sometimes lie awake in the night worrying that you 've opened Pandora 's box .
CP : Yes and no .
I mean , for as much good that kind of comes out of this environment , there is plenty of bad .
There are plenty of downsides .
But I think that the greater good is being served here by just allowing people -- there are very few places , now , where you can go and not have identity , to be completely anonymous and say whatever you 'd like .
And saying whatever you like , I think , is powerful .
Doing whatever you like is now crossing a line .
But I think it 's important to have these places .
When I get emails , people say , " Thank you for giving me this place , this outlet , where I can come after work and be myself . "
But words , saying things , you know , can be constructive ; it can be really damaging .
And if you cut the link between what is said and any attribution back to you , I mean , surely there are huge risks with that .
CP : There are , certainly .
But -- Tell me about what -- I mean , I think you asked the board what you might say at TED , right ?
CP : Yeah , I posted a thread on Sunday .
And within 24 hours , it had over 12,000 responses .
And the thing is , I didn 't make it into that presentation because I can 't read to you anything that they said , more or less .
99 percent of it is just , would have been , you know , bleeped out .
But there were some good things that came out of that too .
Love and peace were mentioned .
Love and peace were mentioned , kind of with quote marks around them , right ?
CP : Cats and dogs were mentioned too .
And that content is all off the board now .
Right , it 's gone ? Or is it still up there ?
CP : I stuck that thread so it lasted a few days .
It went up to about 16,000 posts , and now it has been taken off .
Okay , well .
Now , I 'm not sure I would have necessarily recommended everyone at TED to go and check it out anyway .
Chris , you yourself ? I mean , you 're a figure of some intrigue .
You 've got this surprising semi-underground influence , but it 's not making you a lot of money , yet .
What 's the commercial picture here ?
CP : The commercial picture is that there really isn 't much of one , I guess .
The site has adult content on it .
I mean , obviously , it 's got some very offensive , obscene content on it , just in terms of language alone .
And when you 've got that , you 've pretty much sacrificed any hope of making lots of money .
But you still live at home , right ?
CP : I actually moved out recently .
That 's very cool .
CP : I got out of Mom 's , and I 'm back in school right now .
But what conversations did you or do you have with your mother about 4chan ?
CP : At first , very kind of pained , awkward conversations .
The content is not dinner table conversation in the least .
But my parents -- I think part of why they kind of are able to appreciate it is because they don 't understand it .
And they were probably pleased to see you on top of the Time poll .
CP : Yeah . They still didn 't know what to think of that though .
And so , in 10 years ' time , what do you picture yourself doing ?
CP : That 's a good question .
As I said , I just went back to school , and I am considering majoring in urban studies and then going on to urban planning , kind of taking whatever I 've learned from online communities and trying to adapt that to a physical community .
Chris , thank you . Absolutely fascinating . Thank you for coming to TED .
Matt Ridley : When ideas have sex
At TEDGlobal 2010 , author Matt Ridley shows how , throughout history , the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas . It 's not important how clever individuals are , he says ; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is .
When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s , the future of the world was bleak .
The population explosion was unstoppable .
Global famine was inevitable .
A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives .
The acid rain was falling on the forests .
The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year .
The oil was running out , and a nuclear winter would finish us off .
None of those things happened , and astonishingly , if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime , the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet , in real terms , adjusted for inflation , has tripled .
Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime .
Child mortality is down by two-thirds .
Per-capita food production is up by a third .
And all this at a time when the population has doubled .
How did we achieve that , whether you think it 's a good thing or not ?
How did we achieve that ?
How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous ?
The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population , and the level of the graph represents GDP per capita .
I think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine , to meet and , indeed , to mate .
In other words , you need to understand how ideas have sex .
I want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this .
These are both real objects .
One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus .
The other is obviously a computer mouse .
They 're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree .
I 've tried to work out which is bigger , and it 's almost impossible .
And that 's because they 're both designed to fit the human hand .
They 're both technologies . In the end , their similarity is not that interesting .
It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand .
The differences are what interest me , because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years -- from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago .
Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations .
Of course there were a few changes , but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days .
There was no progress , no innovation .
It 's an extraordinary phenomenon , but it 's true .
Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years .
And there 's another difference too , which is the object on the left is made from one substance .
The object on the right is made from a confection of different substances , from silicon and metal and plastic and so on .
And more than that , it 's a confection of different ideas , the idea of plastic , the idea of a laser , the idea of transistors .
They 've all been combined together in this technology .
And it 's this combination , this cumulative technology , that intrigues me , because I think it 's the secret to understanding what 's happening in the world .
My body 's an accumulation of ideas too : the idea of skin cells , the idea of brain cells , the idea of liver cells .
They 've come together .
How does evolution do cumulative , combinatorial things ?
Well , it uses sexual reproduction .
In an asexual species , if you get two different mutations in different creatures , a green one and a red one , then one has to be better than the other .
One goes extinct for the other to survive .
But if you have a sexual species , then it 's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages .
So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species .
It 's not confined to its own lineage .
What 's the process that 's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution ?
And I think the answer is exchange , the habit of exchanging one thing for another .
It 's a unique human feature .
No other animal does it .
You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange -- and indeed there 's reciprocity in other animals -- But the exchange of one object for another never happens .
As Adam Smith said , " No man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog . "
You can have culture without exchange .
You can have , as it were , asexual culture .
Chimpanzees , killer whales , these kinds of creatures , they have culture .
They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring .
In this case , chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks .
But the difference is that these cultures never expand , never grow , never accumulate , never become combinatorial , and the reason is because there is no sex , as it were , there is no exchange of ideas .
Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops .
There 's no exchange of ideas between them .
And why does exchange raise living standards ?
Well , the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817 .
And here is a Stone Age version of his story , although he told it in terms of trade between countries .
Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe .
Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe .
So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam .
He doesn 't need Adam .
He can make his own spears and axes .
Well no , because if you think about it , if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes , and then they trade , then they will each have saved an hour of work .
And the more they do this , the more true it 's going to be , because the more they do this , the better Adam is going to get at making axes and the better Oz is going to get at making spears .
So the gains from trade are only going to grow .
And this is one of the beauties of exchange , is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization , which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on .
Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time .
That is prosperity , the saving of time in satisfying your needs .
Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by .
If you had to start from scratch , let 's say you go out into the countryside .
You find a sheep . You kill it . You get the fat out of it .
You render it down . You make a candle , etc. etc .
How long is it going to take you ? Quite a long time .
How long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you 're on the average wage in Britain today ?
And the answer is about half a second .
Back in 1950 , you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light .
And that 's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you 've gained since 1950 , as it were , because that 's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else , or you can acquire another good or service .
And back in 1880 , it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage .
Back in 1800 , you 'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour .
In other words , the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800 .
Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse , and ask yourself : " Who made them and for who ? "
The stone axe was made by someone for himself .
It was self-sufficiency .
We call that poverty these days .
But the object on the right was made for me by other people .
How many other people ?
Tens ? Hundreds ? Thousands ?
You know , I think it 's probably millions .
Because you 've got to include the man who grew the coffee , which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig , who was drilling for oil , which was going to be made into the plastic , etc .
They were all working for me , to make a mouse for me .
And that 's the way society works .
That 's what we 've achieved as a species .
In the old days , if you were rich , you literally had people working for you .
That 's how you got to be rich ; you employed them .
Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him .
They made his silly outfits , like this , and they did his silly hairstyles , or whatever .
He had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night .
But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles and looking at Louis XIV 's pictures , he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too .
They 're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over Paris , and they 're all ready to serve you at an hour 's notice with an excellent meal that 's probably got higher quality than Louis XIV even had .
And that 's what we 've done , because we 're all working for each other .
We 're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other 's living standards .
Now , you do get other animals working for each other too .
Ants are a classic example ; workers work for queens and queens work for workers .
But there 's a big difference , which is that it only happens within the colony .
There 's no working for each other across the colonies .
And the reason for that is because there 's a reproductive division of labor .
That is to say , they specialize with respect to reproduction .
The queen does it all .
In our species , we don 't like doing that .
It 's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves , is reproduction .
Even in England , we don 't leave reproduction to the Queen .
So when did this habit start ?
And how long has it been going on ? And what does it mean ?
Well , I think , probably , the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor .
But I 've got no evidence for that .
It just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male .
In all hunter-gatherer societies today , there 's a foraging division of labor between , on the whole , hunting males and gathering females .
It isn 't always quite that simple , but there 's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females .
And the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides .
The woman knows that , in the Hadzas ' case here -- digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat -- she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat .
And she doesn 't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog .
And the man knows that he doesn 't have to do any digging to get roots .
All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it 's big enough to share some .
And so both sides raise each other 's standards of living through the sexual division of labor .
When did this happen ? We don 't know , but it 's possible that Neanderthals didn 't do this .
They were a highly cooperative species .
They were a highly intelligent species .
Their brains on average , by the end , were bigger than yours and mine in this room today .
They were imaginative . They buried their dead .
They had language , probably , because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us , which was discovered here in Oxford .
And so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills .
They were brilliant people . I 'm not dissing the Neanderthals .
But there 's no evidence of a sexual division of labor .
There 's no evidence of gathering behavior by females .
It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men .
And the other thing there 's no evidence for is exchange between groups , because the objects that you find in Neanderthal remains , the tools they made , are always made from local materials .
For example , in the Caucasus there 's a site where you find local Neanderthal tools .
They 're always made from local chert .
In the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date , 30,000 years ago , and some of those are from local chert , but more -- but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away .
And when human beings began moving objects around like this , it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups .
Trade is 10 times as old as farming .
People forget that . People think of trade as a modern thing .
Exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years .
And the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa , when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in Ethiopia .
You also see seashells -- as discovered by a team here in Oxford -- moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria .
And that 's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups .
And that will have led to specialization .
How do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration ?
Well , you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals , who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mount Isa , which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe .
They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs , and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia .
So long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade , not migration .
What happens when you cut people off from exchange , from the ability to exchange and specialize ?
And the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress , you can actually throw it into reverse .
An example is Tasmania .
When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago , the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland , they actually experienced regress .
They gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had .
It 's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island .
How many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years ?
It didn 't happen in Tierra del Fuego -- similar island , similar people .
The reason : because Tierra del Fuego is separated from South America by a much narrower straight , and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years .
The Tasmanians were isolated .
Go back to this image again and ask yourself , not only who made it and for who , but who knew how to make it .
In the case of the stone axe , the man who made it knew how to make it .
But who knows how to make a computer mouse ?
Nobody , literally nobody .
There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse .
I mean this quite seriously .
The president of the computer mouse company doesn 't know .
He just knows how to run a company .
The person on the assembly line doesn 't know because he doesn 't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic , and so on .
We all know little bits , but none of us knows the whole .
I am of course quoting from a famous essay by Leonard Read , the economist in the 1950s , called " I , Pencil " in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made , and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil , because the people who assemble it don 't know how to mine graphite , and they don 't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing .
And what we 've done in human society , through exchange and specialization , is we 've created the ability to do things that we don 't even understand .
It 's not the same with language .
With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other .
But with technology , we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities .
We 've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree .
And by the way , that 's one of the reasons that I 'm not interested in the debate about I.Q. , about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups .
It 's completely irrelevant .
What 's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas , and how well they 're cooperating , not how clever the individuals are .
So we 've created something called the collective brain .
We 're just the nodes in the network .
We 're the neurons in this brain .
It 's the interchange of ideas , the meeting and mating of ideas between them , that is causing technological progress , incrementally , bit by bit .
However , bad things happen .
And in the future , as we go forward , we will , of course , experience terrible things .
There will be wars ; there will be depressions ; there will be natural disasters .
Awful things will happen in this century , I 'm absolutely sure .
But I 'm also sure that , because of the connections people are making , and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before , I 'm also sure that technology will advance , and therefore living standards will advance .
Because through the cloud , through crowd sourcing , through the bottom-up world that we 've created , where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate , we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation .
Thank you .
Honor Harger : A history of the universe in sound
Artist-technologist Honor Harger listens to the weird and wonderful noises of stars and planets and pulsars . In her work , she tracks the radio waves emitted by ancient celestial objects and turns them into sound , including " the oldest song you will ever hear , " the sound of cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang .
Space , we all know what it looks like .
We 've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives , from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies .
But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space , we have no sense of what space sounds like .
And indeed , most people associate space with silence .
But the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking .
And yet despite this , hardly any of us have ever heard space .
How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star ?
Well in case you 've ever wondered , this is what the Sun sounds like .
This is the planet Jupiter .
And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn .
This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter , spinning in the distant universe .
So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe .
And you may wonder , how do we know what these sounds are ?
How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar ?
Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy .
Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers , which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky .
And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth , we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques .
And therefore , it 's through listening that we 've come to uncover some of the universe 's most important secrets -- its scale , what it 's made of and even how old it is .
So today , I 'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening .
It 's punctuated by three quick anecdotes , which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space .
Now this story doesn 't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft , but a rather more humble technology -- and in fact , the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we 're all part of today : the telephone .
It 's 1876 , it 's in Boston , and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone .
A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire , which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston .
The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name .
But like any long length of charged wire , it also inadvertently became an antenna .
Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected .
Now you have to remember , this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves -- 15 years before Nikola Tesla 's four-tuned circuit -- nearly 20 years before Marconi 's first broadcast .
So Thomas Watson wasn 't listening to us .
We didn 't have the technology to transmit .
So what were these strange noises ?
Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature .
Some of the crackles and pops were lightning , but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin .
Using the very first telephone , Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens .
As he correctly guessed , some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun .
It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to -- a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora .
So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution , Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves .
He had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them .
Fast-forward 50 years , and Bell and Watson 's technology has completely transformed global communications .
But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter .
And so before long , Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution .
Radio could carry sound without wires .
But the medium is lossy -- it 's subject to a lot of noise and interference .
So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises , to try and find out where they came from , with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec , which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony .
Most of the noises that the engineer , Karl Jansky , investigated were fairly prosaic in origin .
They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power .
But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn 't identify , and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day .
Now any astronomer will tell you , this is the telltale sign of something that doesn 't originate from Earth .
Jansky had made a historic discovery , that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves .
Fifty years on from Watson 's accidental encounter with the Sun , Jansky 's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration : the radio astronomy age .
Over the next few years , astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky , about Jupiter and the Sun , by listening .
Let 's jump ahead again .
It 's 1964 , and we 're back at Bell Labs .
And once again , two scientists have got a problem with noise .
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell 's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision .
They were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity .
There was a glitch in their soundtrack .
A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research .
It was in the microwave range , and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously .
Now this didn 't make any sense , and like any reasonable engineer or scientist , they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself , it must be the dish .
There were pigeons roosting in the dish .
And so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings , get the disk kind of operational again , normal operations would resume .
But the noise didn 't disappear .
The mysterious noise that Penzias and Wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard .
It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe .
This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago .
So our story ends at the beginning -- the beginning of all things , the Big Bang .
This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard -- the oldest sound that you 're ever going to hear , the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang .
Thanks .
Stewart Brand : The dawn of de-extinction . Are you ready ?
Throughout humankind 's history , we 've driven species after species extinct : the passenger pigeon , the Eastern cougar , the dodo ... But now , says Stewart Brand , we have the technology to bring back species that humanity wiped out . So -- should we ? Which ones ? He asks a big question whose answer is closer than you may think .
Now , extinction is a different kind of death .
It 's bigger .
We didn 't really realize that until 1914 , when the last passenger pigeon , a female named Martha , died at the Cincinnati zoo .
This had been the most abundant bird in the world that 'd been in North America for six million years .
Suddenly it wasn 't here at all .
Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun .
Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm , a feathered tempest .
And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest , from the Mississippi to the Atlantic , from Canada down to the Gulf .
But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades .
What happened ?
Well , commercial hunting happened .
These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton , and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground , they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands .
It was the cheapest source of protein in America .
By the end of the century , there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers .
There 's an upside to the story .
This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison , and so these birds saved the buffalos .
But a lot of other animals weren 't saved .
The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere .
It was hunted to death for its feathers .
There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen .
It was loved . They tried to protect it . It died anyway .
A local newspaper spelled out , " There is no survivor , there is no future , there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again . "
There 's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things , and it happened to lots of birds that people loved .
It happened to lots of mammals .
Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs .
There was sort of a movie made about it recently .
And the aurochs was like the bison .
This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent , from Spain to Korea .
The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings .
The extinctions still go on .
There 's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo .
It went extinct in 2000 .
There was a marvelous animal , a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania , south of Australia , called the Tasmanian tiger .
It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos .
A little bit of film was shot .
Sorrow , anger , mourning .
Don 't mourn . Organize .
What if you could find out that , using the DNA in museum specimens , fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back , what would you do ? Where would you start ?
Well , you 'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there .
I started with my wife , Ryan Phelan , who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct , and through her , one of her colleagues , George Church , one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed .
So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons , conservation ornithologists , bioethicists , and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro .
All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue , because down in there is what is called ancient DNA .
It 's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented , but with good techniques now , you can basically reassemble the whole genome .
Then the question is , can you reassemble , with that genome , the whole bird ?
George Church thinks you can .
So in his book , " Regenesis , " which I recommend , he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species , and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine .
It 's kind of like an evolution machine .
You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip , and the ones that win , that you can then put into a living organism . It 'll work .
The precision of this , one of George 's famous unreadable slides , nevertheless points out that there 's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair .
The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome .
So what you 're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene .
It 's called an allele .
Well that 's what happens in normal hybridization anyway .
So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative .
Now along the way , George points out that his technology , the technology of synthetic biology , is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore 's Law .
It 's been doing that since 2005 , and it 's likely to continue .
Okay , the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon . They 're abundant . There 's some around here .
Genetically , the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon .
There 's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon .
If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits , you 've got the extinct bird back , cooing at you .
Now , there 's work to do .
You have to figure out exactly what genes matter .
So there 's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon , genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon , and so on with the red eye , peach-colored breast , flocking , and so on .
Add them all up and the result won 't be perfect .
But it should be be perfect enough , because nature doesn 't do perfect either .
So this meeting in Boston led to three things .
First off , Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way , and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak , who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA , himself sequenced the passenger pigeon , using money from his family and friends .
We hired him full-time .
Now , this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian , he 's looking down at Martha , the last passenger pigeon alive .
So if he 's successful , she won 't be the last .
The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction , but they 'd never met each other .
And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century , discovery was basically finding things , and in this century , discovery is basically making things .
De-extinction falls in that category .
So they hosted and funded this meeting . And 35 scientists , they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists , basically meeting to see if they had work to do together .
Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical .
There 's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species , they 're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia , in the Netherlands , and in Hawaii .
Henri , from the Netherlands , with a Dutch last name I won 't try to pronounce , is working on the aurochs .
The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle , and so basically its genome is alive , it 's just unevenly distributed .
So what they 're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive , hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild , over time , with selective back-breeding , the aurochs .
Now , re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America , and so the plan is , with these re-wilded areas all over Europe , they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job , its old ecological role , of clearing the somewhat barren , closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it .
Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias .
Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain .
The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive , but then they captured her , they got a little bit of tissue from her ear , they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen , released her back into the wild , but a few months later , she was found dead under a fallen tree .
They took the DNA from that ear , they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat , the pregnancy came to term , and a live baby bucardo was born .
It was the first de-extinction in history .
It was short-lived .
Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems .
This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes , but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then , and this will move ahead , and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain .
Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder .
At the San Diego zoo , his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years .
Now , when it 's frozen that deep , minus 196 degrees Celsius , the cells are intact and the DNA is intact .
They 're basically viable cells , so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng , put it in a cow , the cow went to term , and what was born was a live , healthy baby Javan banteng , who thrived and is still alive .
The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells , like sperm and eggs .
So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland , and Mike 's doing miracles with birds .
So he 'll take , say , falcon skin cells , fibroblast , turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells .
Since it 's so pluripotent , it can become germ plasm .
He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have , basically , the gonads of a falcon .
You get a male and a female each of those , and out of them comes falcons .
Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens .
Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting .
He showed how all of this can be put together .
The sequence of events : he 'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon , he 'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA , the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew , get that DNA into chicken gonads , and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs , squabs , and now you 're getting a population of passenger pigeons .
It does raise the question of , they 're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon .
So what do you do about that ?
Well birds are pretty hard-wired , as it happens , so most of that is already in their DNA , but to supplement it , part of Ben 's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and feeding grounds .
There were some conservationists , really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple , who is one of the founders of conservation biology , and Kate Jones from the IUCN , which does the Red List .
They 're excited about all this , but they 're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive , that haven 't gone extinct yet .
You see , you want to work on protecting the animals out there .
You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you 're not using 25,000 elephants a year .
But at the same time , conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out .
And so the Red List is really important , keep track of what 's endangered and critically endangered , and so on .
But they 're about to create what they call a Green List , and the Green List will have species that are doing fine , thank you , species that were endangered , like the bald eagle , but they 're much better off now , thanks to everybody 's good work , and protected areas around the world that are very , very well managed .
So basically , they 're learning how to build on good news .
And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on .
Here 's a couple related examples .
Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species .
The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987 .
Everybody thought is was finished .
Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo , there 's 405 of them now , 226 are out in the wild .
That technology will be used on de-extincted animals .
Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa .
In 1981 , Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct .
There were just 254 left .
Now there are 880 . They 're increasing in population by three percent a year .
The secret is , they have an eco-tourism program , which is absolutely brilliant .
So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone .
That 's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors .
Another interesting project , though it 's going to need some help , is the northern white rhinoceros .
There 's no breeding pairs left .
But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo .
A bit of cloning , you can get them back .
So where do we go from here ?
These have been private meetings so far .
I think it 's time for the subject to go public .
What do people think about it ?
You know , do you want extinct species back ?
Do you want extinct species back ?
Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down .
It is a Tinker Bell moment , because what are people excited about with this ?
What are they concerned about ?
We 're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon .
So Ben Novak , even as we speak , is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz .
They 're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon .
As that data matures , they 'll send it to George Church , who will work his magic , get passenger pigeon DNA out of that .
We 'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents , and then from then on , it 's passenger pigeons all the way , maybe for the next six million years .
You can do the same thing , as the costs come down , for the Carolina parakeet , for the great auk , for the heath hen , for the ivory-billed woodpecker , for the Eskimo curlew , for the Caribbean monk seal , for the woolly mammoth .
Because the fact is , humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years .
We have the ability now , and maybe the moral obligation , to repair some of the damage .
Most of that we 'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands , by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species .
But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them .
Thank you .
Thank you .
I 've got a question .
So , this is an emotional topic . Some people stand .
I suspect there are some people out there sitting , kind of asking tormented questions , almost , about , well , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait , wait a minute , there 's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way .
There 's going to be unintended consequences .
You 're going to uncork some sort of Pandora 's box of who-knows-what . Do they have a point ?
Stewart Brand : Well , the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct , and many of them were keystone species , and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go .
Now , there 's the shifting baseline problem , which is , so when these things come back , they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love .
I think that 's , you know , part of how it 'll work .
This is a long , slow process -- One of the things I like about it , it 's multi-generation .
We will get woolly mammoths back .
Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling .
Thank you so much for presenting . SB : Thank you .
Thank you .
Tan Le : A headset that reads your brainwaves
Tan Le 's astonishing new computer interface reads its user 's brainwaves , making it possible to control virtual objects , and even physical electronics , with mere thoughts . She demos the headset , and talks about its far-reaching applications .
Up until now , our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms .
Whether it 's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch , or even as complex as programming robotics , we have always had to give a command to a machine , or even a series of commands , in order for it to do something for us .
Communication between people , on the other hand , is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed .
We observe facial expressions , body language , and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another .
This actually forms a large part of our decision-making process .
Our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human-computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do , but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences .
And what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain , our center for control and experience .
Well , it sounds like a pretty good idea , but this task , as Bruno mentioned , isn 't an easy one for two main reasons : First , the detection algorithms .
Our brain is made up of billions of active neurons , around 170,000 km of combined axon length .
When these neurons interact , the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse , which can be measured .
The majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain , and to increase the area that 's available for mental capacity , the brain surface is highly folded .
Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses .
Each individual 's cortex is folded differently , very much like a fingerprint .
So even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain , by the time the structure has been folded , its physical location is very different between individuals , even identical twins .
There is no longer any consistency in the surface signals .
Our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex , so that we can map the signals closer to its source , and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population .
The second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves .
EEG measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors , like the one that you can see here in the photo .
A technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion .
Now this is quite time consuming and isn 't the most comfortable process .
And on top of that , these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars .
So with that , I 'd like to invite onstage Evan Grant , who is one of last year 's speakers , who 's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we 've been able to develop .
So the device that you see is a 14-channel , high-fidelity EEG acquisition system .
It doesn 't require any scalp preparation , no conductive gel or paste .
It only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle .
It 's also wireless , so it gives you the freedom to move around .
And compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional EEG system , this headset only costs a few hundred dollars .
Now on to the detection algorithms .
So facial expressions -- as I mentioned before in emotional experiences -- are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization .
But with the limited time we have available , I 'd like to show you the cognitive suite , which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind .
Now , Evan is new to this system , so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him .
He 's obviously not Joanne -- so we 'll " add user . "
Evan . Okay .
So the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal .
With neutral , there 's nothing in particular that Evan needs to do .
He just hangs out . He 's relaxed .
And the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain , because every brain is different .
It takes eight seconds to do this , and now that that 's done , we can choose a movement-based action .
So Evan , choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind .
Evan Grant : Let 's do " pull . "
Tan Le : Okay , so let 's choose " pull . "
So the idea here now is that Evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen , and there 's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he 's doing that .
The first time , nothing will happen , because the system has no idea how he thinks about " pull . "
But maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds .
So : one , two , three , go .
Okay .
So once we accept this , the cube is live .
So let 's see if Evan can actually try and imagine pulling .
Ah , good job !
That 's really amazing .
So we have a little bit of time available , so I 'm going to ask Evan to do a really difficult task .
And this one is difficult because it 's all about being able to visualize something that doesn 't exist in our physical world .
This is " disappear . "
So what you want to do -- at least with movement-based actions , we do that all the time , so you can visualize it .
But with " disappear , " there 's really no analogies -- so Evan , what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out , okay .
Same sort of drill . So : one , two , three , go .
Okay . Let 's try that .
Oh , my goodness . He 's just too good .
Let 's try that again .
EG : Losing concentration .
TL : But we can see that it actually works , even though you can only hold it As I said , it 's a very difficult process to imagine this .
And the great thing about it is that we 've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about " disappear . "
As there is a machine learning algorithm in this -- Thank you .
Good job . Good job .
Thank you , Evan , you 're a wonderful , wonderful example of the technology .
So , as you can see , before , there is a leveling system built into this software so that as Evan , or any user , becomes more familiar with the system , they can continue to add more and more detections , so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts .
And once you 've trained up the detections , these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform , application or device .
So I 'd like to show you a few examples , because there are many possible applications for this new interface .
In games and virtual worlds , for example , your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character .
Obviously , you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind .
And also , colors , lighting , sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you 're having , in real time .
And moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world , with robots and simple machines , for example -- in this case , flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking " lift " with your mind .
The technology can also be applied to real world applications -- in this example , a smart home .
You know , from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains .
And of course , also to the lighting -- turning them on or off .
And finally , to real life-changing applications , such as being able to control an electric wheelchair .
In this example , facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands .
Now blink right to go right .
Now blink left to turn back left .
Now smile to go straight .
TL : We really -- Thank you .
We are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today , and with the community 's input , and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world , we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here . Thank you so much .
Madeleine Albright : On being a woman and a diplomat
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright talks bluntly about politics and diplomacy , making the case that women 's issues deserve a place at the center of foreign policy . Far from being a " soft " issue , she says , women 's issues are often the very hardest ones , dealing directly with life and death . A frank and funny Q & amp ; A with Pat Mitchell from the Paley Center .
Pat Mitchell : What is the story of this pin ?
Madeleine Albright : This is " Breaking the Glass Ceiling . "
PM : Oh .
That was well chosen , I would say , for TEDWomen .
Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen .
And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn 't been for Saddam Hussein .
I 'll tell you what happened .
I went to the United Nations as an ambassador , and it was after the Gulf War , and I was an instructed ambassador .
And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions , and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly , which he deserved -- he had invaded another country .
And so all of a sudden , a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things , but among them an " unparalleled serpent . "
And so I happened to have a snake pin .
So I wore it when we talked about Iraq .
And when I went out to meet the press , they zeroed in , said , " Why are you wearing that snake pin ? "
I said , " Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent . "
And then I thought , well this is fun .
So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would , in fact , reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day .
So that 's how it all started .
PM : So how large is the collection ?
Pretty big .
It 's now traveling .
At the moment it 's in Indianapolis , but it was at the Smithsonian .
And it goes with a book that says , " Read My Pins . "
PM : So is this a good idea .
I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State , and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing , how you looked -- the thing that happens to a lot of women , especially if they 're the first in a position .
So how do you feel about that -- the whole -- Well , it 's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing .
But people did pay attention to what clothes I had .
What was interesting was that , before I went up to New York as U.N. ambassador , I talked to Jeane Kirkpatrick , who 'd been ambassador before me , and she said , " You 've got to get rid of your professor clothes .
Go out and look like a diplomat . "
So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping .
But still , there were all kinds of questions about -- " did you wear a hat ? " " How short was your skirt ? "
And one of the things -- if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots , and she got criticized over that .
And no guy ever gets criticized . But that 's the least of it .
PM : It is , for all of us , men and women , finding our ways of defining our roles , and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future .
How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother , a grandmother , nurturing ...
and so how did you handle that ?
Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I 'd been named .
And I said , " Well I 've been a woman for 60 years , but I 've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes . "
So it evolved .
But basically I love being a woman .
And so what happened -- and I think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this -- I went to my first meeting , first at the U.N. , and that 's when this all started , because that is a very male organization .
And I 'm sitting there -- there are 15 members of the Security Council -- so 14 men sat there staring at me , and I thought -- well you know how we all are .
You want to get the feeling of the room , and " do people like me ? "
and " will I really say something intelligent ? "
And all of a sudden I thought , " Well , wait a minute .
I am sitting behind a sign that says ' The United States , ' and if I don 't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard , " and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal , reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country .
And so that happened more at various times , but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman .
I think we are a lot better at personal relationships , and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it 's necessary .
But I have to tell you , I have my youngest granddaughter , when she turned seven last year , said to her mother , my daughter , " So what 's the big deal about Grandma Maddie being Secretary of State ?
Only girls are Secretary of State . "
PM : Because in her lifetime -- That would be so .
PM : What a change that is .
As you travel now all over the world , which you do frequently , how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls ?
Where are we ?
I think we 're slowly changing , but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different .
And therefore it means that we have to remember that , while many of us have had huge opportunities -- and Pat , you have been a real leader in your field -- is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women .
And so what I have felt -- and I have looked at this from a national security issue -- when I was Secretary of State , I decided that women 's issues had to be central to American foreign policy , not just because I 'm a feminist , but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered , that values are passed down , the health situation is better , education is better , there is greater economic prosperity .
So I think that it behooves us -- those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice -- that we need to help other women .
And I really dedicated myself to that , both at the U.N. and then as Secretary of State .
PM : And did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy ?
From some people .
I think that they thought that it was a soft issue .
The bottom line that I decided was actually women 's issues are the hardest issues , because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects , and because , as I said , it is really central to the way that we think about things .
Now for instance , some of the wars that took place when I was in office , a lot of them , the women were the main victims of it .
For instance , when I started , there were wars in the Balkans .
The women in Bosnia were being raped .
We then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues .
And by the way , one of the things that I did at that stage was , I had just arrived at the U.N. , and when I was there , there were 183 countries in the U.N.
Now there are 192 .
But it was one of the first times that I didn 't have to cook lunch myself .
So I said to my assistant , " Invite the other women permanent representatives . "
And I thought when I 'd get to my apartment that there 'd be a lot of women there .
I get there , and there are six other women , out of 183 .
So the countries that had women representatives were Canada , Kazakhstan , Philippines , Trinidad Tobago , Jamaica , Lichtenstein and me .
So being an American , I decided to set up a caucus .
And so we set it up , and we called ourselves the G7 .
PM : Is that " Girl 7 ? " Girl 7 .
And we lobbied on behalf of women 's issues .
So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal .
And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war , that it was against humanity .
PM : So when you look around the world and you see that , in many cases -- certainly in the Western world -- women are evolving into more leadership positions , and even other places some barriers are being brought down , but there 's still so much violence , still so many problems , and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables .
Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren 't , when there was maybe you -- one voice , maybe one or two others .
Do you believe , and can you tell us why , there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis ?
Well I do think , when there are more women , that the tone of the conversation changes , and also the goals of the conversation change .
But it doesn 't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women .
If you think that , you 've forgotten high school .
But the bottom line is that there is a way , when there are more women at the table , that there 's an attempt to develop some understanding .
So for instance , what I did when I went to Burundi , we 'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda .
And so I think the capability of women to put themselves -- I think we 're better about putting ourselves into the other guy 's shoes and having more empathy .
I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room .
When I was Secretary of State , there were only 13 other women foreign ministers .
And so it was nice when one of them would show up .
For instance , she is now the president of Finland , but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and , at a certain stage , head of the European Union .
And it was really terrific .
Because one of the things I think you 'll understand .
We went to a meeting , and the men in my delegation , when I would say , " Well I feel we should do something about this , " and they 'd say , " What do you mean , you feel ? "
And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me .
And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control , and she said , " Well I feel we should do this . "
And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden .
But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions .
The other thing that I think is really important : A lot of national security policy isn 't just about foreign policy , but it 's about budgets , military budgets , and how the debts of countries work out .
So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts , they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries .
PM : So how do we get this balance we 're looking for , then , in the world ?
More women 's voices at the table ?
More men who believe that the balance is best ?
Well I think one of the things -- I 'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that works to support women candidates .
I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office , to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices .
I think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other .
Now I have a saying that I feel very strongly about , because I am of a certain age where , when I started in my career , believe it or not , there were other women who criticized me : " Why aren 't you in the carpool line ? "
or " Aren 't your children suffering because you 're not there all the time ? "
And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty .
In fact , I think " guilt " is every woman 's middle name .
And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other .
And my motto is that there 's a special place in hell for women who don 't help each other .
PM : Well Secretary Albright , I guess you 'll be going to heaven .
Thank you for joining us today .
Thank you all . Thanks Pat .
Eric Giler : A demo of wireless electricity
Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power . Here , he covers what this sci-fi tech offers , and demos MIT 's breakthrough version , WiTricity -- a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone , car , pacemaker .
Early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by Nikola Tesla basically about 100 years ago .
The thought that you wouldn 't want to transfer electric power wirelessly , no one ever thought of that .
They thought , " Who would use it if you didn 't ? "
And so , in fact , he actually set about doing a variety of things .
Built the Tesla coil . This tower was built on Long Island back at the beginning of the 1900s .
And the idea was , it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on Earth .
We 'll never know if this stuff worked . Actually , I think the Federal Bureau of Investigation took it down for security purposes , sometime in the early 1900s .
But the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much .
I mean , think about how much we love this .
If you just walk outside , there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world , putting up wires to get power from where it 's created to where it 's used .
The other thing is , we love batteries .
And for those of us that have an environmental element to us , there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that , generally speaking , is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power .
So , before I got here , I thought , " You know , I am from North America .
We do have a little bit of a reputation in the United States . "
So I thought I 'd better look it up first .
So definition number six is the North American definition of the word " suck . "
Wires suck , they really do .
Think about it . Whether that 's you in that picture or something under your desk .
The other thing is , batteries suck too .
And they really , really do .
Do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff ?
40 billion of these things built .
This is what happens .
They fall apart , they disintegrate , and they end up here .
So when you talk about expensive power , the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds .
Think about that .
The most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that .
So fortunately , one of the other definitions of " suck " that was in there , it does create a vacuum .
And nature really does abhor a vacuum .
What happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at MIT actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance .
Basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters .
It got about 50 percent of the efficiency -- by the way , that 's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be , to do the same thing .
But were able to light that , and do it very successfully .
This was actually the experiment . So you can see the coils were somewhat larger .
The light bulb was a fairly simple task , from their standpoint .
This all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife 's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power .
And he was thinking , " With all the electricity that 's out there in the walls , why couldn 't some of that just come into the phone so I could get some sleep ? "
And he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer .
But inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire .
And those two coils of wire are really , really close to each other , and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly , only over a very short distance .
What Dr. Soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology , which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room .
It 's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a MacArthur Fellowship Award , which is nicknamed the Genius Award , last September , for his discovery .
So how does it work ?
Imagine a coil . For those of you that are engineers , there 's a capacitor attached to it too .
And if you can cause that coil to resonate , what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies -- at a fairly high frequency , by the way .
And if you can bring another device close enough to the source , that will only work at exactly that frequency , you can actually get them to do what 's called strongly couple , and transfer magnetic energy between them .
And then what you do is , you start out with electricity , turn it into magnetic field , take that magnetic field , turn it back into electricity , and then you can use it .
Number one question I get asked .
I mean , people are worried about cellphones being safe .
You know . What about safety ?
The first thing is this is not a " radiative " technology .
It doesn 't radiate .
There aren 't electric fields here . It 's a magnetic field .
It stays within either what we call the source , or within the device .
And actually , the magnetic fields we 're using are basically about the same as the Earth 's magnetic field .
We live in a magnetic field .
And the other thing that 's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency .
And it 's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen .
Then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do .
They 've pretty much set field exposure limits , which all of the things in the stuff I 'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines .
Mobile electronics .
Home electronics .
Those cords under your desk , I bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries .
There are industrial applications .
And then finally , electric vehicles .
These electric cars are beautiful .
But who is going to want to plug them in ?
Imagine driving into your garage -- we 've built a system to do this -- you drive into your garage , and the car charges itself , because there is a mat on the floor that 's plugged into the wall .
And it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently .
Then there 's all kinds of other applications . Implanted medical devices , where people don 't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up .
Credit cards , robot vacuum cleaners .
So what I 'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you , actually , how it works .
And what I 'm going to do is to show you pretty much what 's here .
You 've got a coil .
That coil is connected to an R.F. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field .
We put one on the back of the television set .
By the way , I do make it look a little bit easier than it is .
There 's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it .
But then what 's going to happen is , it will create a field .
It will cause one to get created on the other side .
And if the demo gods are willing , in about 10 seconds or so we should see it .
The 10 seconds actually are because we -- I don 't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a T.V. in when you use just a cord .
Generally , you have to go over and hit the button . So I thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that .
So , I 'll plug that in .
It creates a magnetic field here .
It causes one to be created out here .
And as I said , in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see ...
This is a commercially -- available color television set .
Imagine , you get one of these things . You want to hang them on the wall .
How many people want to hang them on the wall ?
Think about it . You don 't want those ugly cords coming down .
Imagine if you can get rid of it .
The other thing I wanted to talk about was safety .
So , there is nothing going on . I 'm okay .
And I 'll do it again , just for safety 's sake .
Almost immediately , though , people ask , " How small can you make this ? Can you make this small enough ? "
Because remember Dr. Soljacic 's original idea was his wife 's cellphone beeping .
So , I wanted to show you something .
We 're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing .
This a Google G1 .
You know , it 's the latest thing that 's come out .
It runs the Android operating system .
I think I heard somebody talk about that before .
It 's odd . It has a battery .
It also has coiled electronics that WiTricity has put into the back of it .
And if I can get the camera -- okay , great -- you 'll see , as I get sort of close ...
you 're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly .
And I know some of you are Apple aficionados .
So , you know they don 't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones .
So we put a little sleeve on the back , but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too .
And those of you that have an iPhone recognize the green center .
And Nokia as well .
You 'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back , to do that , and it probably beeps , actually , as it goes on as well .
But they typically use it to light up the screen .
So , imagine these things could go ... they could go in your ceiling .
They could go in the floor . They could go , actually , underneath your desktop .
So that when you walk in or you come in from home , if you carry a purse , it works in your purse .
You never have to worry about plugging these things in again .
And think of what that would do for you .
So I think in closing , sort of in the immortal visions of The New Yorker magazine , I thought I 'd put up one more slide .
And for those of you who can 't read it , it says , " It does appear to be some kind of wireless technology . "
So , thank you very much .
Rob Dunbar : Discovering ancient climates in oceans and ice
Rob Dunbar hunts for data on our climate from 12,000 years ago , finding clues inside ancient seabeds and corals and inside ice sheets . His work is vital in setting baselines for fixing our current climate -- and in tracking the rise of deadly ocean acidification .
If you really want to understand the problem that we 're facing with the oceans , you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics .
We can 't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way .
So I 'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean .
We 'll look at sea level rise .
We 'll look at ocean warming .
And then the last thing on the list there , ocean acidification -- if you were to ask me , you know , " What do you worry about the most ?
What frightens you ? "
for me , it 's ocean acidification .
And this has come onto the stage pretty recently .
So I will spend a little time at the end .
I was in Copenhagen in December like a number of you in this room .
And I think we all found it , simultaneously , an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience .
I sat in this large negotiation hall , at one point , for three or four hours , without hearing the word " oceans " one time .
It really wasn 't on the radar screen .
The nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders -- it tended to be the leaders of the small island states , the low-lying island states .
And by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations , a lot of the low-lying states , like Kiribati and Nauru , they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows .
You know , they were marginalized in the negotiation room .
One of the problems is coming up with the right target .
It 's not clear what the target should be .
And how can you figure out how to fix something if you don 't have a clear target ?
Now , you 've heard about " two degrees " : that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees .
But there 's not a lot of science behind that number .
We 've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere .
Should it be 450 ? Should it be 400 ?
There 's not a lot of science behind that one either .
Most of the science that is behind these numbers , these potential targets , is based on studies on land .
And I would say , for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be , we would argue that they must be much lower .
You know , from an oceanic perspective , 450 is way too high .
Now there 's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350 .
We are , right now , at 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere .
We 're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450 , so we 've got to accept we 're going to do an overshoot , and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what 's the pathway back to 350 .
Now , why is this so complicated ?
Why don 't we know some of these things a little bit better ?
Well , the problem is that we 've got very complicated forces in the climate system .
There 's all kinds of natural causes of climate change .
There 's air-sea interactions .
Here in Galapagos , we 're affected by El Ninos and La Nina .
But the entire planet warms up when there 's a big El Nino .
Volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere .
That changes our climate .
The ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet .
So anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet .
And we know the solar output 's not constant through time .
So those are all natural causes of climate change .
And then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well .
We 're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land , the reflectivity .
We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere , and we have trace gases , and not just carbon dioxide -- it 's methane , ozone , oxides of sulfur and nitrogen .
So here 's the thing . It sounds like a simple question .
Is CO2 produced by man 's activities causing the planet to warm up ?
But to answer that question , to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide , you have to know something about all of these other agents of change .
But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things .
You know , thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes .
And we 've got it worked out , and we can say , " Yes , CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now . "
Now , we have many ways to study natural variability .
I 'll show you a few examples of this now .
This is the ship that I spent the last three months on in the Antarctic .
It 's a scientific drilling vessel .
We go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change , right .
Like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had CO2 double what it is today .
And so that 's what we 've done with this ship .
This was -- this is south of the Antarctic Circle .
It looks downright tropical there .
One day where we had calm seas and sun , which was the reason I could get off the ship .
Most of the time it looked like this .
We had a waves up to 50 ft .
and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots .
So that trip just ended , and I can 't show you too many results from that right now , but we 'll go back one more year , to another drilling expedition I 've been involved in .
This was led by Ross Powell and Tim Naish .
It 's the ANDRILL project .
And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet .
This is a crazy thing , this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm , drilling at temperatures of minus 40 .
And we drilled in the Ross Sea .
That 's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there .
So , this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica .
Now , West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep .
So that ice sheet is partly floating , and it 's exposed to the ocean , to the ocean heat .
This is the part of Antarctica that we worry about .
Because it 's partly floating , you can imagine , is sea level rises a little bit , the ice lifts off the bed , and then it can break off and float north .
When that ice melts , sea level rises by six meters .
So we drill back in time to see how often that 's happened , and exactly how fast that ice can melt .
Here 's the cartoon on the left there .
We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor .
So it 's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled .
It took about 10 years to put this project together .
And here 's what we found .
Now , there 's 40 scientists working on this project , and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses .
But it turns out , you know , the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description .
You know , we saw this in the core samples as they came up .
We saw these alternations between sediments that look like this -- there 's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand .
That 's the kind of material in the deep sea .
It can only get there if it 's carried out by ice .
So we know there 's an ice shelf overhead .
And that alternates with a sediment that looks like this .
This is absolutely beautiful stuff .
This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants .
And these plants need sunlight , so we know when we find that sediment there 's no ice overhead .
And we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water , between gravels and these plant sediments .
So what that means is , what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region , this ice shelf , melted back and formed anew about 35 times .
And this is in the past four million years .
This was completely unexpected .
Nobody imagined that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was this dynamic .
In fact , the lore for many years has been , " The ice formed many tens of millions of years ago , and it 's been there ever since . "
And now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again , and sea level went up and down , six meters at a time .
What caused it ?
Well , we 're pretty sure that it 's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching Antarctica , just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the Earth .
But here 's the key thing : you know , the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold , that the planet warmed up enough -- and the number 's about one degree to one and a half degrees Centigrade -- the planet warmed up enough that it became ...
that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted .
And you know what ?
We 've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount .
So many of us are convinced now that West Antarctica , the West Antarctic Ice Sheet , is starting to melt .
We do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century .
And it could be larger than that .
This is a serious consequence for nations like Kiribati , you know , where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level .
Okay , the second story takes place here in Galapagos .
This is a bleached coral , coral that died during the 1982- ' 83 El Nino .
This is from Champion Island .
It 's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony .
And it 's covered with algae . That 's what happens .
When these things die , immediately , organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface .
And so , when a coral colony is killed by an El Nino event , it leaves this indelible record .
You can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this .
So one of the things thought of in the ' 80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the Galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event .
And just so you know , 1982- ' 83 , that El Nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in Galapagos .
Then there was similar mortality in ' 97- ' 98 .
And what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events .
We saw no other mass mortality events .
So these events in our recent past really are unique .
So they 're either just truly monster El Ninos , or they 're just very strong El Ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming .
Either case , it 's bad news for the corals of the Galapagos Islands .
Here 's how we sample the corals .
This is actually Easter Island . Look at this monster .
This coral is eight meters tall , right .
And it been growing for about 600 years .
Now , Sylvia Earle turned me on to this exact same coral .
And she was diving here with John Lauret -- I think it was 1994 -- and collected a little nugget and sent it to me .
And we started working on it , and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this .
So we have a diamond drill .
We 're not killing the colony ; we 're taking a small core sample out of the top .
The core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone .
And that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it .
You can see some of the coral cores there on the right .
So we 've done that all over the Eastern Pacific .
We 're starting to do it in the Western Pacific as well .
I 'll take you back here to the Galapagos Islands .
And we 've been working at this fascinating uplift here in Urbina Bay .
That the place where , during an earthquake in 1954 , this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly , and it was lifted up about six to seven meters .
And so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet .
If you go on the ground there , it looks like this , and this is the grandaddy coral .
It 's 11 meters in diameter , and we know that it started growing in the year 1584 .
Imagine that .
And that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters , until 1954 , when the earthquake happened .
Now the reason we know it 's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands .
When you cut them , slice those cores in half and x-ray them , you see these light and dark bands .
Each one of those is a year .
We know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year .
And we just count on down to the bottom .
Then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry .
We can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral , and there 's a whole bunch of things we can do .
But in this case , we measured the different isotopes of oxygen .
Their ratio tells us the water temperature .
In this example here , we had monitored this reef in Galapagos with temperature recorders , so we know the temperature of the water the coral 's growing in .
Then after we harvest a coral , we measure this ratio , and now you can see , those curves match perfectly .
In this case , at these islands , you know , corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water .
And of course , our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here .
The coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years .
So , what we do : we 've merged a lot of different data sets .
It 's not just my group ; there 's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this .
But we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years , and we put them together .
Here 's a synthetic diagram .
There 's a whole family of curves here .
But what 's happening : we 're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet .
And there 's five or six different compilations there , But each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals .
We do similar things with ice cores .
We work with tree rings .
And that 's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century , right ?
And I chose this one because it 's complicated and messy looking , right .
This is as messy as it gets .
You can see there 's some signals there .
Some of the records show lower temperatures than others .
Some of them show greater variability .
But they all tell us what the natural variability is .
Some of them are from the northern hemisphere ; some are from the entire globe .
But here 's what we can say : what 's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down .
It was cooling down until about 1900 or so .
And there is natural variability caused by the Sun , caused by El Ninos .
A century-scale , decadal-scale variability , and we know the magnitude ; it 's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree Centigrade .
But then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black .
And there 's the temperature up there in 2009 .
You know , we 've warmed the globe about a degree Centigrade in the last century , and there 's nothing in the natural part of that record that resembles what we 've seen in the last century .
You know , that 's the strength of our argument , that we are doing something that 's truly different .
So I 'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification .
I like it as a component of global change to talk about , because , even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic , and I talk to that community fairly often , you cannot deny the simple physics of CO2 dissolving in the ocean .
You know , we 're pumping out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere , from fossil fuels , from cement production .
Right now , about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea , right ?
And as it does so , it makes the ocean more acidic .
So , you cannot argue with that .
That is what 's happening right now , and it 's a very different issue than the global warming issue .
It has many consequences .
There 's consequences for carbonate organisms .
There are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate -- plants and animals both .
The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate .
That material is more soluble in acidic fluid .
So one of the things we 're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells .
At some point , as this transience , as this CO2 uptake in the ocean continues , that material 's actually going to start to dissolve .
And on coral reefs , where some of the main framework organisms disappear , we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity .
But it 's not just the carbonate producers that are affected .
There 's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean .
So many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean .
So , all of these things -- greater metabolic demands , reduced reproductive success , changes in respiration and metabolism .
You know , these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience .
So we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track CO2 levels in the atmosphere , going back millions of years .
We used to do it just with ice cores , but in this case , we 're going back 20 million years .
And we take samples of the sediment , and it tells us the CO2 level of the ocean , and therefore the CO2 level of the atmosphere .
And here 's the thing : you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were about what they are today .
You have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were double what they are today .
Now , what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean , with CO2 levels lower than they are today .
That 's the reason that they 're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that 's going on right now .
So , Charlie Veron came up with this statement last year : " The prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO2 release . "
And I think that may very well be true , so I 'll close with this .
You know , we do need the protected areas , absolutely , but for the sake of the oceans , we have to cap or limit CO2 emissions as soon as possible .
Thank you very much .
John Underkoffler : Pointing to the future of UI
& lt ; em & gt ; Minority Report & lt ; / em & gt ; science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak -- the real-life version of the film 's eye-popping , tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface . Is this how tomorrow 's computers will be controlled ?
We 're 25 , 26 years after the advent of the Macintosh , which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general .
It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation , thought about computers , how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them .
It was such a radical change , in fact , that the early Macintosh development team in ' 82 , ' 83 , ' 84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up .
Now , this is an interesting little message , and it 's a lesson that has since , I think , been forgotten or lost or something , and that is , namely , that the OS is the interface .
The interface is the OS .
It 's like the land and the king they 're inseparable , they are one .
And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter .
It wasn 't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines .
There were no graphics routines . There were no mouse drivers .
So it was a necessity .
But in the quarter-century since then , we 've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk .
So memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million .
Same thing for processor speeds .
Networks , we didn 't have networks at all at the time of the Macintosh 's introduction , and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers .
And , of course , graphics : Today 84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago .
So we 've got that incredible ramp-up .
Then , on the side , we 've got the Web and , increasingly , the cloud , which is fantastic , but also -- in the regard in which an interface is fundamental -- kind of a distraction .
So we 've forgotten to invent new interfaces .
Certainly we 've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard , and people are starting to wake up about that .
So what happens next ? Where do we go from there ?
The problem , as we see it , has to do with a single , simple word : " space , " or a single , simple phrase : " real world geometry . "
Computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in , that we teach them in , are hideously insensate when it comes to space .
They don 't understand real world space .
It 's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well .
They also don 't understand time , but that 's a matter for a separate talk .
So what happens if you start to explain space to them ?
One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room .
The Luminous Room is a system in which it 's considered that input and output spaces are co-located .
That 's a strangely simple , and yet unexplored idea , right ?
When you use a mouse , your hand is down here on the mouse pad .
It 's not even on the same plane as what you 're talking about : The pixels are up on the display .
So here was a room in which all the walls , floors , ceilings , pets , potted plants , whatever was in there , were capable , not only of display but of sensing as well .
And that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this .
That 's a digital storage in a physical container .
The contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers .
Has to come back out , whatever you put in .
This little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well .
If you presented it with a chess board , it tried to figure out what you might mean by that .
And if there was nothing for them to do , the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away .
The academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous , so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser .
The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects , and the system projects down the laser beam path .
So you 've got an interface that has no interface .
You operate the world as you operate the real world , which is to say , with your hands .
Similarly , a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left -- not that remarkable in a sense ; we didn 't invent the mathematics .
But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display , it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object , a real world object in that .
Here , the real world merges with the simulation .
And finally , to pull out all the stops , this is a system called Urp , for urban planners , in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use CAD systems .
And we make the machine meet them half way .
It projects down digital shadows , as you see here .
And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock , then you can control the sun 's position in the sky .
That 's 8 a.m. shadows .
They get a little shorter at 9 a.m.
There you are , swinging the sun around .
Short shadows at noon and so forth .
And we built up a series of tools like this .
There are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate , even though they don 't know anything about urban planning : To move a building , you simply reach out your hand and you move the building .
A material wand makes the building into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions .
Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways ?
A zoning tool connects distant structures , a building and a roadway .
Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission ? And so forth .
Now , if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated , that 's great ; they should seem familiar .
This work is 15 years old .
This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii , director of the Tangible Media Group .
But it was that work that was seen by Alex McDowell , one of the world 's legendary production designers .
But Alex was preparing a little , sort of obscure , indie , arthouse film called " Minority Report " for Steven Spielberg , and invited us to come out from MIT and design the interfaces that would appear in that film .
And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude , the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable , that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R & amp ; D effort .
And the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual .
People still reference those sequences in " Minority Report " when they talk about new UI design .
So this led full circle , in a strange way , to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface : the Spatial Operating Environment , we call it .
So here we have a bunch of stuff , some images .
And , using a hand , we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom , six degrees of navigational control .
And it 's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett 's eye .
And you can come back out through the scary orangutan .
And that 's all well and good .
Let 's do something a little more difficult .
Here , we have a whole bunch of disparate images .
We can fly around them .
So navigation is a fundamental issue .
You have to be able to navigate in 3D .
Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial .
And the part that isn 't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it .
Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways .
So we can throw it out like that . Let 's reset it .
We can organize it this way .
And , of course , it 's not just about navigation , but about manipulation as well .
So if we don 't like stuff , or we 're intensely curious about Ernst Haeckel 's scientific falsifications , we can pull them out like that .
And then if it 's time for analysis , we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution .
Let 's just come down a bit and fly around .
So that 's a different way to look at stuff .
If you 're of a more analytical nature then you might want , actually , to look at this as a color histogram .
So now we 've got the stuff color-sorted , angle maps onto color .
And now , if we want to select stuff , 3D , space , the idea that we 're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in , not in 2D , not in fake 2D , but in actual 3D .
Here are some selection planes .
And we 'll perform this Boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass .
So , from there to the world of real work .
Here 's a logistics system , a small piece of one that we 're currently building .
There 're a lot of elements .
And one thing that 's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information .
So here 's a familiar place .
And we 'll bring this back here for a second .
Maybe select a little bit of that .
And bring out this graph .
And we should , now , be able to fly in here and have a closer look .
These are logistics elements that are scattered across the United States .
One thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers .
That 's the old way , that 's the old mantra : one machine , one human , one mouse , one screen .
Well , that doesn 't really cut it anymore .
In the real world , we have people who collaborate ; we have people who have to work together , and we have many different displays .
And we might want to look at these various images .
We might want to ask for some help .
The author of this new pointing device is sitting over there , so I can pull this from there to there .
These are unrelated machines , right ?
So the computation is space soluble and network soluble .
So I 'm going to leave that over there because I have a question for Paul .
Paul is the designer of this wand , and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what 's going on .
So let me get some of these out of the way .
Let 's pull this apart : I 'll go ahead and explode it .
Kevin , can you help ?
Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board .
Mind you , it 's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise , but we do it in the lab all the time .
All right .
So collaborative work , whether it 's immediately co-located or distant and distinct , is always important .
And again , that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space .
And finally , I 'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery .
This is a system called TAMPER , which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be .
We at Oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form .
So we have a large number of movies stuck inside here .
And let 's just pick out a few elements .
We can zip through them as a possibility .
We can grab elements off the front , where upon they reanimate , come to life , and drag them down onto the table here .
We 'll go over to Jacques Tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well .
We may need more than one .
And we probably need , well , we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest .
Yeah , let 's take that one .
You see , cowboys and French farce people don 't go well together , and the system knows that .
Let me leave with one final thought , and that is that one of the greatest English language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift .
And he wasn 't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [ dollars ] , or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen Vermeer ; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence .
And I think that it 's time that we asked for the same from technology .
Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity , and we need to demand that , in fact .
For some of this kind of technology , ground center is a combination of design , which is crucially important .
We can 't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start .
And , as well , as of efficacy , agency .
We 're , as human beings , the creatures that create , and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image .
So I will leave you with that . Thank you .
So to ask the obvious question -- actually this is from Bill Gates -- when ?
When real ? When for us , not just in a lab and on a stage ?
Can it be for every man , or is this just for corporations and movie producers ?
JU : No , it has to be for every human being .
That 's our goal entirely .
We won 't have succeeded unless we take that next big step .
I mean it 's been 25 years .
Can there really be only one interface ? There can 't .
But does that mean that , at your desk or in your home , you need projectors , cameras ?
You know , how can it work ?
JU : No , this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display .
It 'll be built into architecture .
The gloves go away in a matter of months or years .
So this is the inevitability about it .
So , in your mind , five years time , someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface ?
JU : I think in five years time when you buy a computer , you 'll get this .
Well that 's cool .
The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used .
What do you think , what in your mind is the first killer app for this ?
JU : That 's a good question , and we ask ourselves that every day .
At the moment , our early-adopter customers -- and these systems are deployed out in the real world -- do all the big data intensive , data heavy problems with it .
So , whether it 's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction , financial services , pharmaceuticals , bioinformatics , those are the topics right now , but that 's not a killer app .
And I understand what you 're asking .
C 'mon , c 'mon . Martial arts , games . C 'mon .
John , thank you for making science-fiction real .
JU : It 's been a great pleasure .
Thank you to you all .
Caroline Casey : Looking past limits
Activist Caroline Casey tells the story of her extraordinary life , starting with a revelation . In a talk that challenges perceptions , Casey asks us all to move beyond the limits we may think we have .
Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17 ?
Do you know what I wanted to be ?
I wanted to be a biker chick .
I wanted to race cars , and I wanted to be a cowgirl , and I wanted to be Mowgli from " The Jungle Book . "
Because they were all about being free , the wind in your hair -- just to be free .
And on my seventeenth birthday , my parents , knowing how much I loved speed , gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday .
Not that we could have afforded I drive , but to give me the dream of driving .
And on my seventeenth birthday , I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence , as I always had all my life -- my visually impaired sister -- to go to see an eye specialist .
Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters .
And my little sister wanted to be a pilot -- God help her .
So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun .
And on my seventeenth birthday , after my fake eye exam , the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday .
And he said , " So what are you going to do to celebrate ? "
And I took that driving lesson , and I said , " I 'm going to learn how to drive . "
And then there was a silence -- one of those awful silences when you know something 's wrong .
And he turned to my mother , and he said , " You haven 't told her yet ? "
On my seventeenth birthday , as Janis Ian would best say , I learned the truth at 17 .
I am , and have been since birth , legally blind .
And you know , how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that ?
Well , if anybody says country music isn 't powerful , let me tell you this : I got there because my father 's passion for Johnny Cash and a song , " A Boy Named Sue . "
I 'm the eldest of three . I was born in 1971 .
And very shortly after my birth , my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism .
And what the hell does that mean to you ?
So let me just tell you , the great part of all of this ?
I can 't see this clock and I can 't see the timing , so holy God , woohoo !
I might buy some more time .
But more importantly , let me tell you -- I 'm going to come up really close here . Don 't freak out , Pat .
Hey .
See this hand ?
Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline .
Every man in this room , even you , Steve , is George Clooney .
And every woman , you are so beautiful .
And when I want to look beautiful , I step three feet away from the mirror , and I don 't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I 've done all my life from all the dark lights .
The really strange part is that , at three and a half , just before I was going to school , my parents made a bizarre , unusual and incredibly brave decision .
No special needs schools .
No labels .
No limitations .
My ability and my potential .
And they decided to tell me that I could see .
So just like Johnny Cash 's Sue , a boy given a girl 's name , I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive , when they were no longer there to protect me , or just take it all away .
But more significantly , they gave me the ability to believe , totally , to believe that I could .
And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things , a big fat " no , " everybody imagines I was devastated .
And don 't get me wrong , because when I first heard it -- aside from the fact that I thought he was insane -- I got that thump in my chest , just that " huh ? "
But very quickly I recovered . It was like that .
The first thing I thought about was my mom , who was crying over beside me .
And I swear to God , I walked out of his office , " I will drive . I will drive .
You 're mad . I 'll drive . I know I can drive . "
And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child -- he taught me how to sail , knowing I could never see where I was going , I could never see the shore , and I couldn 't see the sails , and I couldn 't see the destination .
But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face .
And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive .
And for the next 11 years , I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn 't see , because I didn 't want to be a failure , and I didn 't want to be weak .
And I believed I could do it .
So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do .
And I was an archeologist , and then I broke things .
And then I managed a restaurant , and then I slipped on things .
And then I was a masseuse . And then I was a landscape gardener .
And then I went to business school .
And you know , disabled people are hugely educated .
And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture .
And they didn 't even know .
And it 's extraordinary how far belief can take you .
In 1999 , two and a half years into that job , something happened .
Wonderfully , my eyes decided , enough .
And temporarily , very unexpectedly , they dropped .
And I 'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world , where you work hard , play hard , you gotta be the best , you gotta be the best .
And two years in , I really could see very little .
And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999 , saying something I never imagined that I would say .
I was 28 years old .
I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn 't do .
And I simply said , " I 'm sorry .
I can 't see , and I need help . "
Asking for help can be incredibly difficult .
And you all know what it is . You don 't need to have a disability to know that .
We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure .
And it 's frightening , isn 't it ?
But all that belief had fueled me so long .
And can I tell you , operating in the sighted world when you can 't see , it 's kind of difficult -- it really is .
Can I tell you , airports are a disaster .
Oh , for the love of God .
And please , any designers out there ?
OK , designers , please put up your hands , even though I can 't even see you .
I always end up in the gents ' toilets .
And there 's nothing wrong with my sense of smell .
But can I just tell you , the little sign for a gents ' toilet or a ladies ' toilet is determined by a triangle .
Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes ?
It 's such a small thing , right ?
And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you 're not , or to be somebody that you aren 't ?
And so after admitting I couldn 't see to HR , they sent me off to an eye specialist .
And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life .
But before I got to him , I was so lost .
I had no idea who I was anymore .
And that eye specialist , he didn 't bother testing my eyes .
God no , it was therapy .
And he asked me several questions , of which many were , " Why ?
Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself ?
And do you love what you do , Caroline ? "
And you know , when you go to a global consulting firm , they put a chip in your head , and you 're like , " I love Accenture . I love Accenture . I love my job . I love Accenture .
I love Accenture . I love Accenture . I love my job . I love Accenture . "
To leave would be failure .
And he said , " Do you love it ? "
I couldn 't even speak I was so choked up .
I just was so -- how do I tell him ?
And then he said to me , " What did you want to be when you were little ? "
Now listen , I wasn 't going to say to him , " Well , I wanted to race cars and motorbikes . "
Hardly appropriate at this moment in time .
He thought I was mad enough anyway .
And as I left his office , he called me back and he said , " I think it 's time .
I think it 's time to stop fighting and do something different . "
And that door closed .
And that silence just outside a doctor 's office , that many of us know .
And my chest ached .
And I had no idea where I was going . I had no idea .
But I did know the game was up .
And I went home , and , because the pain in my chest ached so much , I thought , " I 'll go out for a run . "
Really not a very sensible thing to do .
And I went on a run that I know so well .
I know this run so well , by the back of my hand .
I always run it perfectly fine .
I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with .
And there was a rock that I always missed .
And I 'd never fallen on it , never .
And there I was crying away , and smash , bash on my rock .
Broken , fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000 , typical Irish weather on a Wednesday -- gray , snot , tears everywhere , ridiculously self-pitying .
And I was floored , and I was broken , and I was angry .
And I didn 't know what to do .
And I sat there for quite some time going , " How am I going to get off this rock and go home ?
Because who am I going to be ?
What am I going to be ? "
And I thought about my dad , and I thought , " Good God , I 'm so not Sue now . "
And I kept thinking over and over in my mind , what had happened ? Where did it go wrong ? Why didn 't I understand ?
And you know , the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers .
I had lost my belief .
Look where my belief had brought me to .
And now I had lost it . And now I really couldn 't see .
I was crumpled .
And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me , " What do you want to be ? What do you want to be ?
What did you want to be when you were little ? Do you love what you do ?
Do something different . What do you want to be ?
Do something different . What do you want to be ? "
And really slowly , slowly , slowly , it happened .
And it did happen this way .
And then the minute it came , it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart -- something different .
" Well , how about Mowgli from ' The Jungle Book ' ?
You don 't get more different than that . "
And the moment , and I mean the moment , the moment that hit me , I swear to God , it was like woo hoo ! You know -- something to believe in .
And nobody can tell me no .
Yes , you can say I can 't be an archeologist .
But you can 't tell me , no , I can 't be Mowgli , because guess what ?
Nobody 's ever done it before , so I 'm going to go do it .
And it doesn 't matter whether I 'm a boy or a girl , I 'm just going to scoot .
And so I got off that rock , and , oh my God , did I run home .
And I sprinted home , and I didn 't fall , and I didn 't crash .
And I ran up the stairs , and there was one of my favorite books of all time , " Travels on My Elephant " by Mark Shand -- I don 't know if any of you know it .
And I grabbed this book off , and I 'm sitting on the couch going , " I know what I 'm going to do .
I know how to be Mowgli .
I 'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant .
I 'm going to be an elephant handler . "
And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler .
From global management consultant to elephant handler .
I had no idea how . I had no idea how you hire an elephant , get an elephant .
I didn 't speak Hindi . I 'd never been to India . Hadn 't a clue .
But I knew I would .
Because , when you make a decision at the right time and the right place , God , that universe makes it happen for you .
Nine months later , after that day on snot rock , I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi .
And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India .
The most powerful thing of all , it 's not that I didn 't achieve before then . Oh my God , I did .
But you know , I was believing in the wrong thing .
Because I wasn 't believing in me , really me , all the bits of me -- all the bits of all of us .
Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we 're not ?
And you know what , when you really believe in yourself and everything about you , it 's extraordinary what happens .
And you know what , that trip , that thousand kilometers , it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations .
Six thousand people got to see because of that .
When I came home off that elephant , do you know what the most amazing part was ?
I chucked in my job at Accenture .
I left , and I became a social entrepreneur , and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family , which deals with Asian elephant conservation .
And I set up Kanchi , because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant , because disability is like the elephant in the room .
And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way -- no charity , no pity .
But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible .
It was extraordinary .
That 's what I wanted to do .
And I never thought about noes anymore , or not seeing , or any of that kind of nothing .
It just seemed that it was possible .
And you know , the oddest part is , when I was on my way traveling here to TED , I 'll be honest , I was petrified .
And I speak , but this is an amazing audience , and what am I doing here ?
But as I was traveling here , you 'll be very happy to know , I did use my white symbol stick cane , because it 's really good to skip queues in the airport .
And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn 't see .
And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine , he texted me on the way over , knowing I was scared .
Even though I present confident , I was scared .
He said , " Be you . "
And so here I am .
This is me , all of me .
And I have learned , you know what , cars and motorbikes and elephants , that 's not freedom .
Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom .
And I never needed eyes to see -- never .
I simply needed vision and belief .
And if you truly believe -- and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart -- you can make change happen .
And we need to make it happen , because every single one of us -- woman , man , gay , straight , disabled , perfect , normal , whatever -- everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves .
I no longer want anybody to be invisible .
We all have to be included .
And stop with the labels , the limiting .
Losing of labels , because we are not jam jars .
We are extraordinary , different , wonderful people .
Thank you .
Sam Richards : A radical experiment in empathy
By leading the Americans in his audience step by step through the thought process , sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge : can they understand -- not approve of , but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent ? And by extension , can anyone truly understand and empathize with another ? & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
My students often ask me , " What is sociology ? "
And I tell them , " It 's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don 't see . "
And they say , " So how can I be a sociologist ?
How can I understand those invisible forces ? "
And I say , " Empathy .
Start with empathy .
It all begins with empathy .
Take yourself out of your shoes , put yourself into the shoes of another person . "
Here , I 'll give you an example .
So I imagine my life : if a hundred years ago China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal , and they found it , and , in fact , they found lots of it right here .
And pretty soon , they began shipping that coal , ton by ton , rail car by rail car , boatload by boatload , back to China and elsewhere around the world .
And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so .
And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal .
And back here in the United States , we saw economic despair , deprivation .
This is what I saw .
I saw people struggling to get by , not knowing what was what and what was next .
And then I asked myself the question .
I say , " How 's it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States , because the coal is such a wealthy resource , it 's so much money ? "
And I realized , because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves .
And the rest of us , the vast majority of us , struggle to get by .
And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship .
Does this sound familiar ?
And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal .
And everywhere , were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere , a constant reminder .
And back in China , what do they say in China ?
Nothing . They don 't talk about us . They don 't talk about the coal .
If you ask them , they 'll say , " Well , you know the coal , we need the coal .
I mean , come on , I 'm not going to turn down my thermostat .
You can 't expect that . "
And so I get angry , and I get pissed , as do lots of average people .
And we fight back , and it gets really ugly .
And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way .
And before we know it , they send in the tanks and then send in the troops , and lots of people are dying , and it 's a very , very difficult situation .
Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes ?
Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers ?
And just imagine what you would feel .
Because you know why they 're here , and you know what they 're doing here .
And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear .
If you can , that 's empathy -- that 's empathy .
You 've left your shoes , and you 've stood in mine .
And you 've got to feel that .
Okay , so that 's the warm up .
That 's the warm up .
Now we 're going to have the real radical experiment .
And so for the remainder of my talk , what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular , in Iraq .
And so to help you , perhaps you 're a member of this middle class family in Baghdad -- and what you want is the best for your kids .
You want your kids to have a better life .
And you watch the news , you pay attention , you read the newspaper , you go down to the coffee shop with your friends , and you read the newspapers from around the world .
And sometimes you even watch satellite , CNN , from the United States .
So you have a sense of what the Americans are thinking .
But really , you just want a better life for yourself .
That 's what you want .
You 're Arab Muslim living in Iraq .
You want a better life for yourself .
So here , let me help you .
Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking .
Number one : this incursion into your land these past 20 years , and before , the reason anyone is interested in your land , and particularly the United States , it 's oil .
It 's all about oil ; you know that , everybody knows that .
People here back in the United States know it 's about oil .
It 's because somebody else has a design for your resource .
It 's your resource ; it 's not somebody else 's .
It 's your land ; it 's your resource .
Somebody else has a design for it .
And you know why they have a design ?
You know why they have their eyes set on it ?
Because they have an entire economic system that 's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil , oil from other parts of the world that they don 't own .
And what else do you think about these people ?
The Americans , they 're rich .
Come on , they live in big houses , they have big cars , they all have blond hair , blue eyes , they 're happy .
You think that . It 's not true , of course , but that 's the media impression , and that 's like what you get .
And they have big cities , and the cities are all dependent on oil .
And back home , what do you see ?
Poverty , despair , struggle .
Look , you don 't live in a wealthy country .
This is Iraq .
This is what you see .
You see people struggling to get by .
I mean , it 's not easy ; you see a lot of poverty .
And you feel something about this .
These people have designs for your resource , and this is what you see ?
Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don 't talk about this , but you do .
There 's this thing , this militarization of the world , and it 's centered right in the United States .
And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world 's military spending -- four percent of the world 's population .
And you feel it ; you see it every day .
It 's part of your life .
And you talk about it with your friends .
You read about it .
And back when Saddam Hussein was in power , the Americans didn 't care about his crimes .
When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran , they didn 't care about it .
When oil was at stake , somehow , suddenly , things mattered .
And what you see , something else , the United States , the hub of democracy around the world , they don 't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world .
There are a lot of countries , oil-producing countries , that aren 't very democratic , but supported by the United States .
That 's odd .
Oh , these incursions , these two wars , the 10 years of sanctions , the eight years of occupation , the insurgency that 's been unleashed on your people , the tens of thousands , the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths , all because of oil .
You can 't help but think that .
You talk about it .
It 's in the forefront of your mind always .
You say , " How is that possible ? "
And this man , he 's every man -- your grandfather , your uncle , your father , your son , your neighbor , your professor , your student .
Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly , pain and sorrow .
Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence , the bloodshed , the pain , the horror , everybody .
Not a single person in your country has not been touched .
But there 's something else .
There 's something else about these people , these Americans who are there .
There 's something else about them that you see -- they don 't see themselves .
And what do you see ? They 're Christians .
They 're Christians .
They worship the Christian God , they have crosses , they carry Bibles .
Their Bibles have a little insignia that says " U.S. Army " on them .
And their leaders , their leaders : before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off , they go to a Christian church , and they pray to their Christian God , and they ask for protection and guidance from that god .
Why ?
Well , obviously , when people die in the war , they are Muslims , they are Iraqis -- they 're not Americans .
You don 't want Americans to die . Protect our troops .
And you feel something about that -- of course you do .
And they do wonderful things .
You read about it , you hear about it .
They 're there to build schools and help people , and that 's what they want to do .
They do wonderful things , but they also do the bad things , and you can 't tell the difference .
And this guy , you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin .
I mean , here 's a guy who says that your God is a false God .
Your God 's an idol ; his God is the true God .
The solution to the problem in the Middle East , according to him , is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion .
And you know that . Americans don 't read about this guy .
They don 't know anything about him , but you do .
You pass it around . You pass his words around .
I mean this is serious . You 're afraid .
He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq .
And you 're thinking , " God , if this guy is saying that , then all the soldiers must be saying that . "
And this word here , George Bush called this war a crusade .
Man , the Americans , they 're just like , " Ah , crusade .
Whatever . I don 't know . "
You know what it means .
It 's a holy war against Muslims .
Look , invade , subdue them , take their resources .
If they won 't submit , kill them .
That 's what this is about .
And you 're thinking , " My God , these Christians are coming to kill us . "
This is frightening .
You feel frightened . Of course you feel frightened .
And this man , Terry Jones : I mean here 's a guy who wants to burn Korans , right ?
And the Americans : " Ah , he 's a knucklehead .
He 's a former hotel manager ; he 's got three-dozen members of his church . "
They laugh him off . You don 't laugh him off .
Because in the context of everything else , all the pieces fit .
I mean , of course , this is how Americans take it , so people all over the Middle East , not just in your country , are protesting .
" He wants to burn Korans , our holy book .
These Christians , who are these Christians ?
They 're so evil , they 're so mean -- this is what they 're about . "
This is what you 're thinking as an Arab Muslim , as an Iraqi .
Of course you 're going to think this .
And then your cousin says , " Hey cuz , check out this website .
You 've got to see this -- Bible Boot Camp .
These Christians are nuts .
They 're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus .
And they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say , " Sir , yes , sir , " and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance .
And go to the website .
It says " U.S. Army " right on it .
I mean , these Christians , they 're nuts . How would they do this to their little kids ? "
And you 're reading this website .
And of course , Christians back in the United States , or anybody , says , " Ah , this is some little , tiny church in the middle of nowhere . "
You don 't know that .
For you , this is like all Christians .
It 's all over the Web , Bible Boot Camp .
And look at this : they even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the U.S. Marines train .
Isn 't that interesting .
And it scares you , and it frightens you .
So these guys , you see them .
You see , I , Sam Richards , I know who these guys are .
They 're my students , my friends .
I know what they 're thinking : " You don 't know . "
When you see them , they 're something else , they 're something else .
That 's what they are to you .
We don 't see it that way in the United States , but you see it that way .
So here .
Of course , you got it wrong .
You 're generalizing . It 's wrong .
You don 't understand the Americans .
It 's not a Christian invasion .
We 're not just there for oil ; we 're there for lots of reasons .
You have it wrong . You 've missed it .
And of course , most of you don 't support the insurgency ; you don 't support killing Americans ; you don 't support the terrorists .
Of course you don 't . Very few people do .
But some of you do .
And this is a perspective .
Okay , so now , here 's what we 're going to do .
Step outside of your shoes that you 're in right now and step back into your normal shoes .
So everyone 's back in the room , okay .
Now here comes the radical experiment .
So we 're all back home .
This photo : this woman , man , I feel her .
I feel her .
She 's my sister , my wife , my cousin , my neighbor .
She 's anybody to me .
These guys standing there , everybody in the photo , I feel this photo , man .
So here 's what I want you to do .
Let 's go back to my first example of the Chinese .
So I want you to go there .
So it 's all about coal , and the Chinese are here in the United States .
And what I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising .
And the soldiers are Chinese , and everybody else is Chinese .
As an American , how do you feel about this picture ?
What do you think about that scene ?
Okay , try this . Bring it back .
This is the scene here .
It 's an American , American soldiers , American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East -- in Iraq or Afghanistan .
Now , put yourself in the shoes , go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq .
What are you feeling and thinking about this photo , about this woman ?
Okay , now follow me on this , because I 'm taking a big risk here .
And so I 'm going to invite you to take a risk with me .
These gentlemen here , they 're insurgents .
They were caught by the American soldiers , trying to kill Americans .
And maybe they succeeded . Maybe they succeeded .
Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them .
Can you feel the rage ?
Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks ?
Can you go there ?
It shouldn 't be that difficult .
You just -- oh , man .
Now , put yourself in their shoes .
Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders ?
Which one ?
Can you feel their anger , their fear , their rage at what has happened in their country ?
Can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said , " Dear , I 'll be back later .
I 'm going out to defend your freedom , your lives .
I 'm going out to look out for us , the future of our country . "
Can you imagine that ?
Can you imagine saying that ?
Can you go there ?
What do you think they 're feeling ?
You see , that 's empathy .
It 's also understanding .
Now , you might ask , " Okay , Sam , so why do you do this sort of thing ?
Why would you use this example of all examples ? "
And I say , because ... because .
You 're allowed to hate these people .
You 're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being .
And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch , one tiny inch , then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life .
You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person 's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane , or your teenage son , or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings .
Whatever it is , you can go so far .
And this is what I tell my students : step outside of your tiny , little world .
Step inside of the tiny , little world of somebody else .
And then do it again and do it again and do it again .
And suddenly all these tiny , little worlds , they come together in this complex web .
And they build a big , complex world .
And suddenly , without realizing it , you 're seeing the world differently .
Everything has changed .
Everything in your life has changed .
And that 's , of course , what this is about .
Attend to other lives , other visions .
Listen to other people , enlighten ourselves .
I 'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq , but as a sociologist , what I am saying is I understand .
And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do too .
Thank you .

Robin Ince : Science versus wonder ?
Does science ruin the magic of life ? In this grumpy but charming monologue , Robin Ince makes the argument against . The more we learn about the astonishing behavior of the universe -- the more we stand in awe .
I 'd like to apologize , first of all , to all of you because I have no form of PowerPoint presentation .
So what I 'm going to do is , every now and again , I will make this gesture , and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy , you can imagine what you 'd like to see .
I do a radio show .
The radio show is called " The Infinite Monkey Cage . "
It 's about science , it 's about rationalism .
So therefore , we get a lot of complaints every single week -- complaints including one we get very often , which is to say the very title , " Infinite Monkey Cage , " celebrates the idea of vivisection .
We have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy .
We also had someone else who said , " ' The Infinite Monkey Cage ' idea is ridiculous .
An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare .
We know this because they did an experiment . "
Yes , they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week , and after a week , they only used it as a bathroom .
So the main element though , the main complaint we get -- and one that I find most worrying -- is that people say , " Oh , why do you insist on ruining the magic ?
You bring in science , and it ruins the magic . "
Now I 'm an arts graduate ; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing .
That 's what I do .
But I also don 't understand how it does ruin the magic .
All of the magic , I think , that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful .
Astrology , for instance : like many rationalists , I 'm a Pisces .
Now astrology -- we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted ; that you 'll , perhaps today , meet a lucky man who 's wearing a hat .
That is gone .
But if we want to look at the sky and see predictions , we still can .
We can see predictions of galaxies forming , of galaxies colliding into each other , of new solar systems .
This is a wonderful thing .
If the Sun could one day -- and indeed the Earth , in fact -- if the Earth could read its own astrological , astronomical chart , one day it would say , " Not a good day for making plans .
You 'll been engulfed by a red giant . "
And that to me as well , that if you think I 'm worried about losing worlds , well Many Worlds theory -- one of the most beautiful , fascinating , sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation -- is a wonderful thing .
That every person here , every decision that you 've made today , every decision you 've made in your life , you 've not really made that decision , but in fact , every single permutation of those decisions is made , each one going off into a new universe .
That is a wonderful idea .
If you ever think that your life is rubbish , always remember there 's another you that 's made much worse decisions than that .
If you ever think , " Ah , I want to end it all , " don 't end it all .
Remember that in the majority of universes , you don 't even exist in the first place .
This to me , in its own strange way , is very , very comforting .
Now reincarnation , that 's another thing gone -- the afterlife .
But it 's not gone .
Science actually says we will live forever .
Well , there is one proviso .
We won 't actually live forever . You won 't live forever .
Your consciousness , the you-ness of you , the me-ness of me -- that gets this one go .
But every single thing that makes us , every atom in us , has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things .
We have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people 's knees .
Who knows , maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon 's knee .
That is a good thing .
Unlike the occupants of the universe , the universe itself is not wasteful .
We are all totally recyclable .
And when we die , we don 't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs .
This is a wonderful thing .
Understanding , to me , does not remove the wonder and the joy .
For instance , my wife could turn to me and she may say , " Why do you love me ? "
And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say , " Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors . "
Though I 'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well .
And that is a wonderful thing there .
Love does not die because of that thing .
Pain doesn 't go away either .
This is a terrible thing , even though I understand pain .
If someone punches me -- and because of my personality , this is recently a regular occurrence -- I understand where the pain comes from .
It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant -- that 's what it is .
But at no point can I react and go , " Ha ! Is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you 've got ? "
No , I just spit out a tooth .
And that is all of these different things -- the love for my child .
I have a son . His name is Archie .
I 'm very lucky , because he 's better than all the other children .
Now I know you don 't think that .
You may well have your own children and think , " Oh no , my child 's best . "
That 's the wonderful thing about evolution -- the predilection to believe that our child is best .
Now in many ways , that 's just a survival thing .
The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes , and therefore we love it .
But we don 't notice that bit ; we just unconditionally love .
That is a wonderful thing .
Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children .
I 've done some tests .
And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder .
Even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework , for instance .
Perhaps you 've been at home for a week on your own .
You house is in a terrible state .
Your partner is about to return .
You think , what should I do ?
Do nothing .
All you have to do is , when she walks in , using a quantum interpretation , say , " I 'm so sorry .
I stopped observing the house for a moment , and when I started observing again , everything had happened . "
That 's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming .
For me , it 's a very , very important thing .
Even on my journey up here -- the joy that I have on my journey up here every single time .
If you actually think , you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful .
I 'm sitting on a train .
Every time I breathe in , I 'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen .
I 'm sitting on a chair .
Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space , I find it comfortable .
I look out the window , and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window , framed in that window , wherever we are , I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth .
If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter , you will be disappointed .
And I realize I 'm observing this with the brain , the human brain , the most complex thing in the known universe .
That , to me , is an incredible thing .
And do you know what , that might be enough .
Steven Weinberg , the Nobel laureate , once said , " The more the universe seems comprehensible , the more it seems pointless . "
Now for some people , that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism .
But for me , it doesn 't . That is a wonderful thing .
I 'm glad the universe is pointless .
It means if I get to the end of my life , the universe can 't turn to me and go , " What have you been doing , you idiot ?
That 's not the point . "
I can make my own purpose .
You can make your own purpose .
We have the individual power to go , " This is what I want to do . "
And in a pointless universe , that , to me , is a wonderful thing .
I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation .
You , I imagine , can do much better things with your time .
Thank you very much . Goodbye .
Renny Gleeson : 404 , the story of a page not found
Oops ! Nobody wants to see the 404 : Page Not Found . But as Renny Gleeson shows us , while he runs through a slideshow of creative and funny 404 pages , every error is really a chance to build a better relationship .
So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it .
But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is .
The 404 page is that .
It 's that broken experience on the Web .
It 's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can 't find it .
And it serves you the 404 page .
It 's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it .
And I just want you to think a little bit about , remember for yourself , it 's annoying when you hit this thing .
Because it 's the feeling of a broken relationship .
And that 's where it 's actually also interesting to think about , where does 404 come from ?
It 's from a family of errors actually -- a whole set of relationship errors , which , when I started digging into them , it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples couselor .
You sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey .
Yes .
But these things are everywhere .
They 're on sites big , they 're on sites small .
This is a global experience .
What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks .
And that 's not a good experience when you 're used to experiences like this .
You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone .
A 404 page is not what you 're looking for .
You get that , and it 's like a slap in the face .
Trying to think about how a 404 felt , and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there 's the guy behind the counter and you 're over there and there 's no skim milk .
And you say , " Hey , could you bring the skim milk ? "
And they walk out from behind the counter and they 've got no pants on .
And you 're like , " Oh , I didn 't want to see that . "
That 's the 404 feeling .
I mean , I 've heard about that .
So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator , and we had eight startups sitting around there .
And those startups are focused on what they are , not what they 're not , until one day Athletepath , which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes , found this video .
Joey !
Crowd : Whoa !
Renny Gleeson : You just ... no , he 's not okay .
They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place .
Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404 .
So this turned into a contest .
Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page .
Stayhound , which helps you find pet sitters through your social network , commiserated with your pet .
Each one of them found this .
It turned into a 24-hour contest .
At 4 : 04 the next day , we gave out $ 404 in cash .
And what they learned was that those little things , done right , actually matter , and that well-designed moments can build brands .
So you take a look out in the real world , and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself .
You can type in an URL and put in a 404 and these will pop .
This is one that commiserates with you .
This is one that blames you .
This is one that I loved .
This is an error page , but what if this error page was also an opportunity ?
So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be .
Because back to the whole relationship issue , what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you 're not , or it can remind me of why I should love you .
Thank you .
Amber Case : We are all cyborgs now
Technology is evolving us , says Amber Case , as we become a screen-staring , button-clicking new version of homo sapiens . We now rely on " external brains " to communicate , remember , even live out secondary lives . But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us ? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves .
I would like to tell you all that you are all actually cyborgs , but not the cyborgs that you think .
You 're not RoboCop , and you 're not Terminator , but you 're cyborgs every time you look at a computer screen or use one of your cell phone devices .
So what 's a good definition for cyborg ?
Well , traditional definition is " an organism to which exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new environments . "
That came from a 1960 paper on space travel , because , if you think about it , space is pretty awkward .
People aren 't supposed to be there .
But humans are curious , and they like to add things to their bodies so they can go to the Alps one day and then become a fish in the sea the next .
So let 's look at the concept of traditional anthropology .
Somebody goes to another country , says , " How fascinating these people are , how interesting their tools are , how curious their culture is . "
And then they write a paper , and maybe a few other anthropologists read it , and we think it 's very exotic .
Well , what 's happening is that we 've suddenly found a new species .
I , as a cyborg anthropologist , have suddenly said , " Oh , wow . Now suddenly we 're a new form of Homo sapiens , and look at these fascinating cultures , and look at these curious rituals that everybody 's doing around this technology .
They 're clicking on things and staring at screens . "
Now there 's a reason why I study this , versus traditional anthropology .
And the reason is that tool use , in the beginning -- for thousands and thousands of years , everything has been a physical modification of self .
It has helped us to extend our physical selves , go faster , hit things harder , and there 's been a limit on that .
But now what we 're looking at is not an extension of the physical self , but an extension of the mental self , and because of that , we 're able to travel faster , communicate differently .
And the other thing that happens is that we 're all carrying around little Mary Poppins technology .
We can put anything we want into it , and it doesn 't get heavier , and then we can take anything out .
What does the inside of your computer actually look like ?
Well , if you print it out , it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you 're carrying around all the time .
And if you actually lose that information , it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind , that you suddenly feel like something 's missing , except you aren 't able to see it , so it feels like a very strange emotion .
The other thing that happens is that you have a second self .
Whether you like it or not , you 're starting to show up online , and people are interacting with your second self when you 're not there .
And so you have to be careful about leaving your front lawn open , which is basically your Facebook wall , so that people don 't write on it in the middle of the night -- because it 's very much the equivalent .
And suddenly we have to start to maintain our second self .
You have to present yourself in digital life in a similar way that you would in your analog life .
So , in the same way that you wake up , take a shower and get dressed , you have to learn to do that for your digital self .
And the problem is that a lot of people now , especially adolescents , have to go through two adolescences .
They have to go through their primary one , that 's already awkward , and then they go through their second self 's adolescence , and that 's even more awkward because there 's an actual history of what they 've gone through online .
And anybody coming in new to technology is an adolescent online right now , and so it 's very awkward , and it 's very difficult for them to do those things .
So when I was little , my dad would sit me down at night and he would say , " I 'm going to teach you about time and space in the future . "
And I said , " Great . "
And he said one day , " What 's the shortest distance between two points ? "
And I said , " Well , that 's a straight line . You told me that yesterday . "
I thought I was very clever .
He said , " No , no , no . Here 's a better way . "
He took a piece of paper , drew A and B on one side and the other and folded them together so where A and B touched .
And he said , " That is the shortest distance between two points . "
And I said , " Dad , dad , dad , how do you do that ? "
He said , " Well , you just bend time and space , it takes an awful lot of energy , and that 's just how you do it . "
And I said , " I want to do that . "
And he said , " Well , okay . "
And so , when I went to sleep for the next 10 or 20 years , I was thinking at night , " I want to be the first person to create a wormhole , to make things accelerate faster .
And I want to make a time machine . "
I was always sending messages to my future self using tape recorders .
But then what I realized when I went to college is that technology doesn 't just get adopted because it works .
It gets adopted because people use it and it 's made for humans .
So I started studying anthropology .
And when I was writing my thesis on cell phones , I realized that everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pockets .
They weren 't physically transporting themselves ; they were mentally transporting themselves .
They would click on a button , and they would be connected as A to B immediately .
And I thought , " Oh , wow . I found it . This is great . "
So over time , time and space have compressed because of this .
You can stand on one side of the world , whisper something and be heard on the other .
One of the other ideas that comes around is that you have a different type of time on every single device that you use .
Every single browser tab gives you a different type of time .
And because of that , you start to dig around for your external memories -- where did you leave them ?
So now we 're all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we 've lost on our external brains that we 're carrying around in our pockets .
And that incites a sort of panic architecture -- " Oh no , where 's this thing ? "
We 're all " I Love Lucy " on a great assembly line of information , and we can 't keep up .
And so what happens is , when we bring all that into the social space , we end up checking our phones all the time .
So we have this thing called ambient intimacy .
It 's not that we 're always connected to everybody , but at anytime we can connect to anyone we want .
And if you were able to print out everybody in your cell phone , the room would be very crowded .
These are the people that you have access to right now , in general -- all of these people , all of your friends and family that you can connect to .
And so there are some psychological effects that happen with this .
One I 'm really worried about is that people aren 't taking time for mental reflection anymore , and that they aren 't slowing down and stopping , being around all those people in the room all the time that are trying to compete for their attention on the simultaneous time interfaces , paleontology and panic architecture .
They 're not just sitting there .
And really , when you have no external input , that is a time when there is a creation of self , when you can do long-term planning , when you can try and figure out who you really are .
And then , once you do that , you can figure out how to present your second self in a legitimate way , instead of just dealing with everything as it comes in -- and oh , I have to do this , and I have to do this , and I have to do this .
And so this is very important .
I 'm really worried that , especially kids today , they 're not going to be dealing with this down-time , that they have an instantaneous button-clicking culture , and that everything comes to them , and that they become very excited about it and very addicted to it .
So if you think about it , the world hasn 't stopped either .
It has its own external prosthetic devices , and these devices are helping us all to communicate and interact with each other .
But when you actually visualize it , all the connections that we 're doing right now -- this is an image of the mapping of the Internet -- it doesn 't look technological .
It actually looks very organic .
This is the first time in the entire history of humanity that we 've connected in this way .
And it 's not that machines are taking over .
It 's that they 're helping us to be more human , helping us to connect with each other .
The most successful technology gets out of the way and helps us live our lives .
And really , it ends up being more human than technology , because we 're co-creating each other all the time .
And so this is the important point that I like to study : that things are beautiful , that it 's still a human connection -- it 's just done in a different way .
We 're just increasing our humanness and our ability to connect with each other , regardless of geography .
So that 's why I study cyborg anthropology .
Thank you .
Diana Nyad : Extreme swimming with the world 's most dangerous jellyfish
In the 1970s , Diana Nyad set long-distance swim records that are still unbroken . Thirty years later , at 60 , she attempted her longest swim yet , from Cuba to Florida . In this funny , powerful talk at TEDMED , she talks about how to prepare mentally to achieve an extreme dream , and asks : What will YOU do with your wild , precious life ?
Yeah , so a couple of years ago I was turning 60 , and I don 't like being 60 .
And I started grappling with this existential angst of what little I had done with my life .
It wasn 't the resume of breaking this record here , it was more like , who had I become ?
How had I spent my valuable time ?
How could this have gone by like lightning ?
And I couldn 't forgive myself for the countless , countless hours I had lost in negative thought -- all the time I had spent beating myself up for losing my marriage and not stopping the sexual abuse when I was a kid and career moves and this and this and this .
Just why , why didn 't I do it better ? Why ? Why ? Why ?
And then my mother died at 82 .
And so I starting thinking , not only am I not happy with the past , now I 'm getting choked with , " I 've only got 22 years left . "
What am I going to do with this short amount of time that 's just fleeting ?
And I 'm not in the present whatsoever .
And I decided the remedy to all this malaise was going to be for me to chase an elevated dream , an extreme dream , something that would require utter conviction and unwavering passion , something that would make me be my best self in every aspect of my life , every minute of every day , because the dream was so big that I couldn 't get there without that kind of behavior and that kind of conviction .
And I decided , it was an old dream that was lingering , that was from so many years ago , three decades ago -- the only sort of world class swim I had tried and failed at back in my 20s -- was going from Cuba to Florida .
It was deep in my imagination .
No one 's ever done it without a shark cage .
It 's daunting .
It 's more than a hundred miles across a difficult passage of ocean .
It 's probably , at my speed , at my age -- for anybody 's speed at anybody 's age -- going to take 60 , maybe 70 , hours of continuous swimming , never getting out on the boat .
And I started to train .
I hadn 't swum for 31 years , not a stroke .
And I had kept in good shape , but swimming 's a whole different animal .
As a matter of fact , this picture is supposed to be me during training .
It 's a smiling face .
And when you 're training for this sport , you are not smiling .
It 's an arduous , difficult sport , and I don 't remember smiling at any time during this sport .
As I said , I respect other sports , and I compare this sport sometimes to cycling and to mountain climbing and other of the expedition type events , but this is a sensory deprivation , a physical duress .
And when I started in with the eight hours and the 10 hours and the 12 hours and the 14 hours and the 15 hours and the 24-hour swims , I knew I had it , because I was making it through these .
And when I said I 'm going to go out and do a 15-hour swim , and we 're coming into the dock after a long day and it 's now night , and we come in and it 's 14 hours and 58 minutes and I can touch the dock and we 're done , the trainer says , " That 's great .
It 's 14 hours 58 minutes . Who cares the last two minutes ? "
I say , " No , it 's got to be 15 hours , " and I swim another minute out and another minute back to make the 15 hours .
And I put together an expedition .
It 's not that I didn 't have help , but honestly , I sort of led , I was the team leader .
And to get the government permissions , you read in the paper , you think it 's easy to get into Cuba everyday ?
Try going in with an armada like we had of 50 people and five boats and CNN 's crew , etc .
The navigation is difficult .
There 's a big river called the Gulf Stream that runs across and it 's not going in the direction you are .
It 's going to the east and you 'd like to go north .
It 's tricky .
And there 's dehydration .
And there 's hypothermia .
And there are sharks .
And there are all kinds of problems .
And I gathered together , honestly , the world 's leading experts in every possible way .
And a month ago , the 23rd of September , I stood on that shore and I looked across to that long , long faraway horizon and I asked myself , do you have it ?
Are your shoulders ready ?
And they were . They were prepared .
No stone left unturned .
Was the mind ready ?
You know , you 're swimming with the fogged goggles , you 're swimming at 60 strokes a minute , so you 're never really focused on anything , you don 't see well .
You 've got tight bathing caps over your ears trying to keep the heat of the head , because it 's where the hypothermia starts , and so you don 't hear very well .
You 're really left alone with your own thoughts .
And I had all kinds of counting systems ready there in English , followed by German , followed by Spanish , followed by French .
You save the French for last .
And I had songs , I had a playlist in my head -- not through headphones , in my own head -- of 65 songs .
And I couldn 't wait to get into the dark in the middle of the night , because that 's when Neil Young comes out .
And it 's odd , isn 't it ?
You 'd think you 'd be singing Leonard Cohen 's " Hallelujah " out in the majesty of the ocean , not songs about heroin addiction in New York City .
But no , for some reason I couldn 't wait to get into the dark of the night and be singing , " A heard you knocking at my cellar door I love you baby and I want some more Ooh , ooh , the damage done " The night before I started , I finished Stephen Hawking 's " The Grand Design . "
And I couldn 't wait to trip the mind fantastic .
About the 50th hour , I was going to start thinking about the edge of the universe .
Is there an edge ?
Is this an envelope we 're living inside of , or no , does it go onto infinity in both time and space ?
And there 's nothing like swimming for 50 hours in the ocean that gets you thinking about things like this .
I couldn 't wait to prove the athlete I am , that nobody else in the world can do this swim .
And I knew I could do it .
And when I jumped into that water , I yelled in my mother 's French , " Courage ! "
And I started swimming , and , oh my God , it was glassy .
And we knew it , all 50 people on the boat , we all knew this was it , this was our time .
And I reminded myself a couple hours in , you know , the sport is sort of a microcosm of life itself .
First of all , you 're going to hit obstacles .
And even though you 're feeling great at any one moment , don 't take it for granted , be ready , because there 's going to be pain , there 's going to be suffering .
It 's not going to feel this good all the way across .
And I was thinking of the hypothermia and maybe some shoulder pain and all the other things -- the vomiting that comes from being in the saltwater .
You 're immersed in the liquid .
Your body doesn 't like the saltwater .
After a couple of days , three days , you tend to rebel in a lot of physical ways .
But no , two hours in , wham ! Never in my life ...
I knew there were Portuguese men o ' war , all kinds of moon jellies , all kinds of things , but the box jellyfish from the southern oceans is not supposed to be in these waters .
And I was on fire -- excruciating , excruciating pain .
I don 't know if you can still see the red line here and up the arm .
Evidently , a piece this big of tentacle has a hundred-thousand little barbs on it and each barb is not just stinging your skin , it 's sending a venom .
The most venomous animal that lives in the ocean is the box jellyfish .
And every one of those barbs is sending that venom into this central nervous system .
So first I feel like boiling hot oil , I 've been dipped in .
And I 'm yelling out , " Fire ! Fire ! Fire ! Fire !
Help me ! Somebody help me ! "
And the next thing is paralysis .
I feel it in the back and then I feel it in the chest up here , and I can 't breathe .
And now I 'm not swimming with a nice long stroke , I 'm sort of crabbing it this way .
Then come convulsions .
A young man on our boat is an EMT . He dives in to try to help me .
He 's stung .
They drag him out on the boat , and he 's -- evidently , I didn 't see any of this -- but lying on the boat and giving himself epinephrine shots and crying out .
He 's 29 years old , very well-built , lean , he 's six-foot , five , weighs 265 lbs . , and he is down .
And he is crying and he 's yelling to my trainer who 's trying to help me .
And he 's saying , " Bonnie , I think I 'm going to die .
My breath is down to three breaths a minute .
I need help , and I can 't help Diana . "
So that was at eight o 'clock at night .
The doctor , medical team from University of Miami arrived at five in the morning .
So I swam through the night , and at dawn they got there and they started with prednisone shots .
I didn 't get out , but was in the water taking prednisone shots , taking Xanax , oxygen to the face .
It was like an ICU unit in the water .
And I guess the story is that even Navy SEALS who are stung by the box jelly , they 're done .
They either die or they quickly get to a hospital .
And I swam through the night and I swam through the next day .
And the next night at dusk , again , wham !
The box jelly again -- all across the neck , all across here .
And this time , I don 't like it , I didn 't want to give into it , but there 's a difference between a non-stop swim and a staged swim .
And I gave in to the staged swim .
And they got me out and they started again with the epinephrine and the prednisone and with the oxygen and with everything they had on board .
And I got back in .
And I swam through that night and into the next day .
And at 41 hours , this body couldn 't make it .
The devastation of those stings had taken the respiratory system down so that I couldn 't make the progress I wanted .
And the dream was crushed .
And how odd is this intelligent person who put this together and got all these world experts together .
And I knew about the jellyfish , but I was sort of cavalier .
A lot of athletes have this , you know , sort of invincibility .
They should worry about me . I don 't worry about them .
I 'll just swim right through them .
We 've got benadryl on board . If I get stung , I 'll just grin and bear it .
Well there was no grin and bearing this .
As a matter of fact , the best advice I got was from an elementary school class in the Caribbean .
And I was telling these kids , 120 of them -- they were all in the school on the gymnasium floor -- and I was telling them about the jellyfish and how they 're gelatinous and you can 't see them at night especially .
And they have these long 30 to 40 to 50-ft. tentacles .
And they do this wrapping .
And they can send the poison into the system .
And a little kid from the back was like this .
And I said , " What 's your name ? " " Henry . "
" Henry , what 's your question ? "
He said , " Well , I didn 't have a question so much as I had a suggestion . "
He said , " You know those guys who really believe in what they believe in and so they wear bombs ? "
And I said , " Well it 's odd that you 've learned of this as a noble kind of pursuit , but yeah , I know those guys . "
He said , " That 's what you need .
You need like a school of fish that would swim in front of you like this . "
" And when the jellyfish come and they wrap their tentacles around the fish , they 're going to be busy with them , and you 'll just scoot around . "
I said , " Oh , it 's like a suicide army . "
He said , " That 's what I 'm talking about . That 's what you need . "
And little did I know , that you should listen to eight year-olds .
And so I started that swim in a bathing suit like normal , and , no joke , this is it ; it came from the shark divers .
I finished the swim like this .
I was swimming with this thing on .
That 's how scared of the jellyfish I was .
So now what do I do ?
I wouldn 't mind if every one of you came up on this stage tonight and told us how you 've gotten over the big disappointments of your lives .
Because we 've all had them , haven 't we ?
We 've all had a heartache .
And so my journey now is to find some sort of grace in the face of this defeat .
And I can look at the journey , not just the destination .
I can feel proud . I can stand here in front of you tonight and say I was courageous .
Yeah .
Thank you .
And with all sincerity , I can say , I am glad I lived those two years of my life that way , because my goal to not suffer regrets anymore , I got there with that goal .
When you live that way , when you live with that kind of passion , there 's no time , there 's no time for regrets , you 're just moving forward .
And I want to live every day of the rest of my life that way , swim or no swim .
But the difference in accepting this particular defeat is that sometimes , if cancer has won , if there 's death and we have no choice , then grace and acceptance are necessary .
But that ocean 's still there .
This hope is still alive .
And I don 't want to be the crazy woman who does it for years and years and years , and tries and fails and tries and fails and tries and fails , but I can swim from Cuba to Florida , and I will swim from Cuba to Florida .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
And so , what after that ?
Are you going to swim the Atlantic ?
No , that 's the last swim .
It 's the only swim I 'm interested in .
But I 'm ready .
And by the way , a reporter called me the other day and he said he looked on Wikipedia and he said he saw my birthday was August 22nd 1949 , and for some odd reason in Wikipedia , they had my death date too .
He said , " Did you know you 're going to die the same place you were born , New York City , and it 's going to be in January of ' 35 ? "
I said , " Nope . I didn 't know . "
And now I 'm going to live to 85 .
I have three more years than I thought .
And so I ask myself , I 'm starting to ask myself now , even before this extreme dream gets achieved for me , I 'm asking myself , and maybe I can ask you tonight too , to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver , she says , " So what is it , what is it you 're doing , with this one wild and precious life of yours ? "
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Live it large . Live it large .
Liza Donnelly : Drawing on humor for change
New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly shares a portfolio of her wise and funny cartoons about modern life -- and talks about how humor can empower women to change the rules .
I was afraid of womanhood .
Not that I 'm not afraid now , but I 've learned to pretend .
I 've learned to be flexible .
In fact , I 've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear .
Let me explain .
Back in the ' 50s and ' 60s , when I was growing up , little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft , and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy -- really not quite clear what we were supposed to be .
There were plenty of role models all around us .
We had our mothers , our aunts , our cousins , our sisters , and of course , the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words , telling us how to be .
Now my mother was different .
She was a homemaker , but she and I didn 't go out and do girlie things together , and she didn 't buy me pink outfits .
Instead , she knew what I needed , and she bought me a book of cartoons .
And I just ate it up .
I drew , and I drew , and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family , I could draw , do what I wanted to do , and not have to perform , not have to speak -- I was very shy -- and I could still get approval .
I was launched as a cartoonist .
Now when we 're young , we don 't always know . We know there are rules out there , but we don 't always know -- we don 't perform them right , even though we are imprinted at birth with these things , and we 're told what the most important color in the world is .
We 're told what shape we 're supposed to be in .
We 're told what to wear -- -- and how to do our hair -- -- and how to behave .
Now the rules that I 'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture .
We 're being corrected , and the primary policemen are women , because we are the carriers of the tradition .
We pass it down from generation to generation .
Not only that -- we always have this vague notion that something 's expected of us .
And on top of all off these rules , they keep changing .
We don 't know what 's going on half the time , so it puts us in a very tenuous position .
Now if you don 't like these rules , and many of us don 't -- I know I didn 't , and I still don 't , even though I follow them half the time , not quite aware that I 'm following them -- what better way than to change them [ than ] with humor ?
Humor relies on the traditions of a society .
It takes what we know , and it twists it .
It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress , and it makes it unexpected , and that 's what elicits a laugh .
Now what if you put together women and humor ?
I think you can get change .
Because women are on the ground floor , and we know the traditions so well , we can bring a different voice to the table .
Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos .
I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C.
during the Civil Rights movement , the assassinations , the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement , and I think I was drawing , trying to figure out what was going on .
And then also my family was in chaos , and I drew to try to bring my family together -- -- try to bring my family together with laughter .
It didn 't work .
My parents got divorced , and my sister was arrested .
But I found my place .
I found that I didn 't have to wear high heels , I didn 't have to wear pink , and I could feel like I fit in .
Now when I was a little older , in my 20s , I realized there are not many women in cartooning .
And I thought , " Well , maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning , " and so I did . I became a cartoonist .
And then I thought -- in my 40s I started thinking , " Well , why don 't I do something ?
I always loved political cartoons , so why don 't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we 're following as well as laugh ? "
Now my perspective is a particularly -- -- my perspective is a particularly American perspective .
I can 't help it . I live here .
Even though I 've traveled a lot , I still think like an American woman .
But I believe that the rules that I 'm talking about are universal , of course -- that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions , and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S.
Consequently , we have .
Women , because we 're on the ground , we know the tradition .
We have amazing antennae .
Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists , which I so enjoy , and it 's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth , to get at the issues quickly and succinctly .
And not only that , it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect , but through the heart .
My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world -- countries such as Saudi Arabia , Iran , Turkey , Argentina , France -- and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties .
And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances .
But I feel blessed to be able to work with them .
And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions , because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers , that we can have the great potential to be change-agents .
And I think , I truly believe , that we can change this thing one laugh at a time .
Thank you .
Jeff Skoll : My journey into movies that matter
Film producer Jeff Skoll talks about his film company , Participant Productions , and the people who 've inspired him to do good .
I 've actually been waiting by the phone for a call from TED for years .
And in fact , in 2000 , I was ready to talk about eBay , but no call .
In 2003 , I was ready to do a talk about the Skoll Foundation and social entrepreneurship . No call .
In 2004 , I started Participant Productions and we had a really good first year , and no call .
And finally , I get a call last year , and then I have to go up after J.J. Abrams .
You 've got a cruel sense of humor , TED .
When I first moved to Hollywood from Silicon Valley , I had some misgivings .
But I found that there were some advantages to being in Hollywood .
And , in fact , some advantages to owning your own media company .
And I also found that Hollywood and Silicon Valley have a lot more in common than I would have dreamed .
Hollywood has its sex symbols , and the Valley has its sex symbols .
Hollywood has its rivalries , and the Valley has its rivalries .
Hollywood gathers around power tables , and the Valley gathers around power tables .
So it turned out there was a lot more in common than I would have dreamed .
But I 'm actually here today to tell a story .
And part of it is a personal story . When Chris invited me to speak , he said , people think of you as a bit of an enigma , and they want to know what drives you a bit .
And what really drives me is a vision of the future that I think we all share .
It 's a world of peace and prosperity and sustainability .
And when we heard a lot of the presentations over the last couple of days , Ed Wilson and the pictures of James Nachtwey , I think we all realized how far we have to go to get to this new version of humanity that I like to call " Humanity 2.0 . "
And it 's also something that resides in each of us , to close what I think are the two big calamities in the world today .
One is the gap in opportunity -- this gap that President Clinton last night called uneven , unfair and unsustainable -- and , out of that , comes poverty and illiteracy and disease and all these evils that we see around us .
But perhaps the other , bigger gap is what we call the hope gap .
And someone , at some point , came up with this very bad idea that an ordinary individual couldn 't make a difference in the world .
And I think that 's just a horrible thing .
And so chapter one really begins today , with all of us , because within each of us is the power to equal those opportunity gaps and to close the hope gaps .
And if the men and women of TED can 't make a difference in the world , I don 't know who can .
And for me , a lot of this started when I was younger and my family used to go camping in upstate New York .
And there really wasn 't much to do there for the summer , except get beaten up by my sister or read books .
And so I used to read authors like James Michener and James Clavell and Ayn Rand .
And their stories made the world seem a very small and interconnected place .
And it struck me that if I could write stories that were about this world as being small and interconnected , that maybe I could get people interested in the issues that affected us all , and maybe engage them to make a difference .
I didn 't think that was necessarily the best way to make a living , so I decided to go on a path to become financially independent , so I could write these stories as quickly as I could .
I then had a bit of a wake-up call when I was 14 .
And my dad came home one day and announced that he had cancer , and it looked pretty bad .
And what he said was , he wasn 't so much afraid that he might die , but that he hadn 't done the things that he wanted to with his life .
And knock on wood , he 's still alive today , many years later .
But for a young man that made a real impression on me , that one never knows how much time one really has .
So I set out in a hurry . I studied engineering .
I started a couple of businesses that I thought would be the ticket to financial freedom .
One of those businesses was a computer rental business called Micros on the Move , which is very well named , because people kept stealing the computers .
So I figured I needed to learn a little bit more about business , so I went to Stanford Business School and studied there .
And while I was there , I made friends with a fellow named Pierre Omidyar , who is here today . And Pierre , I apologize for this . This is a photo from the old days .
And just after I 'd graduated , Pierre came to me with this idea to help people buy and sell things online with each other .
And with the wisdom of my Stanford degree , I said , " Pierre , what a stupid idea . "
And needless to say , I was right .
But right after that , Pierre -- in ' 96 , Pierre and I left our full-time jobs to build eBay as a company . And the rest of that story , you know .
The company went public two years later and is today one of the best known companies in the world .
Hundreds of millions of people use it in hundreds of countries , and so on .
But for me , personally , it was a real change .
I went from living in a house with five guys in Palo Alto and living off their leftovers , to all of a sudden having all kinds of resources .
And I wanted to figure out how I could take the blessing of these resources and share it with the world .
And around that time , I met John Gardner , who is a remarkable man .
He was the architect of the Great Society programs under Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s .
And I asked him what he felt was the best thing I could do , or anyone could do , to make a difference in the long-term issues facing humanity .
And John said , " Bet on good people doing good things .
Bet on good people doing good things . "
And that really resonated with me .
I started a foundation to bet on these good people doing good things .
These leading , innovative , nonprofit folks , who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems .
People today we call social entrepreneurs .
And to put a face on it , people like Muhammad Yunus , who started the Grameen Bank , has lifted 100 million people plus out of poverty around the world , won the Nobel Peace Prize .
But there 's also a lot of people that you don 't know .
Folks like Ann Cotton , who started a group called CAMFED in Africa , because she felt girls ' education was lagging .
And she started it about 10 years ago , and today , she educates over a quarter million African girls .
And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale , who started the world 's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company , and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis , also known as black fever .
And by 2010 , she hopes to eliminate this disease , which is really a scourge in the developing world .
And so this is one way to bet on good people doing good things .
And a lot of this comes together in a philosophy of change that I find really is powerful .
It 's what we call , " Invest , connect and celebrate . "
And invest : if you see good people doing good things , invest in them . Invest in their organizations , or in business . Invest in these folks .
Connecting them together through conferences -- like a TED -- brings so many powerful connections , or through the World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship that my foundation does at Oxford every year .
And celebrate them : tell their stories , because not only are there good people doing good work , but their stories can help close these gaps of hope .
And it was this last part of the mission , the celebrate part , that really got me back to thinking when I was a kid and wanted to tell stories to get people involved in the issues that affect us all .
And a light bulb went off , which was , first , that I didn 't actually have to do the writing myself , I could find writers .
And then the next light bulb was , better than just writing , what about film and TV , to get out to people in a big way ?
And I thought about the films that inspired me , films like " Gandhi " and " Schindler 's List . "
And I wondered who was doing these kinds of films today .
And there really wasn 't a specific company that was focused on the public interest .
So , in 2003 , I started to make my way around Los Angeles to talk about the idea of a pro-social media company and I was met with a lot of encouragement .
One of the lines of encouragement that I heard over and over was , " The streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of people like you , who think you 're going to come to this town and make movies . "
And then of course , there was the other adage .
" The surest way to become a millionaire is to start by being a billionaire and go into the movie business . "
Undeterred , in January of 2004 , I started Participant Productions with the vision to be a global media company focused on the public interest .
And our mission is to produce entertainment that creates and inspires social change .
And we don 't just want people to see our movies and say , that was fun , and forget about it .
We want them to actually get involved in the issues .
In 2005 , we launched our first slate of films , " Murder Ball , " " North Country , " " Syriana " and " Good Night and Good Luck . "
And much to my surprise , they were noticed .
We ended up with 11 Oscar nominations for these films .
And it turned out to be a pretty good year for this guy .
Perhaps more importantly , tens of thousands of people joined the advocacy programs and the activism programs that we created to go around the movies .
And we had an online component of that , our community sect called Participate.net.
But with our social sector partners , like the ACLU and PBS and the Sierra Club and the NRDC , once people saw the film , there was actually something they could do to make a difference .
One of these films in particular , called " North Country , " was actually kind of a box office disaster .
But it was a film that starred Charlize Theron and it was about women 's rights , women 's empowerment , domestic violence and so on .
And we released the film at the same time that the Congress was debating the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act .
And with screenings on the Hill , and discussions , and with our social sector partners , like the National Organization of Women , the film was widely credited with influencing the successful renewal of the act .
And that to me , spoke volumes , because it 's -- the film started about a true-life story about a woman who was harassed , sued her employer , led to a landmark case that led to the Equal Opportunity Act , and the Violence Against Women Act and others .
And then the movie about this person doing these things , then led to this greater renewal .
And so again , it goes back to betting on good people doing good things .
Speaking of which , our fellow TEDster , Al -- I first saw Al do his slide show presentation on global warming in May of 2005 .
At that point , I thought I knew something about global warming .
I thought it was a 30 to 50 year problem .
And after we saw his slide show , it became clear that it was much more urgent .
And so right afterwards , I met backstage with Al , and with Lawrence Bender , who was there , and Laurie David , and Davis Guggenheim , who was running documentaries for Participant at the time .
And with Al 's blessing , we decided on the spot to turn it into a film , because we felt that we could get the message out there far more quickly than having Al go around the world , speaking to audiences of 100 or 200 at a time .
And you know , there 's another adage in Hollywood , that nobody knows nothing about anything .
And I really thought this was going to be a straight-to-PBS charitable initiative .
And so it was a great shock to all of us when the film really captured the public interest , and today is mandatory viewing in schools in England and Scotland , and most of Scandinavia .
We 've sent 50,000 DVDs to high school teachers in the U.S.
and it 's really changed the debate on global warming .
It was also a pretty good year for this guy .
We now call Al the George Clooney of global warming .
And for Participant , this is just the start .
Everything we do looks at the major issues in the world .
And we have 10 films in production right now , and dozens others in development .
I 'll quickly talk about a few coming up .
One is " Charlie Wilson 's War , " with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts .
And it 's the true story of Congressman Charlie Wilson , and how he funded the Taliban to fight the Russians in Afghanistan .
And we 're also doing a movie called " The Kite Runner , " based on the book " The Kite Runner , " also about Afghanistan .
And we think once people see these films , they 'll have a much better understanding of that part of the world and the Middle East in general .
We premiered a film called " The Chicago 10 " at Sundance this year .
It 's based on the protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968 , Abby Hoffman and crew , and , again , a story about a small group of individuals who did make change in the world .
And a documentary that we 're doing on Jimmy Carter and his Mid-East peace efforts over the years .
And in particular , we 've been following him on his recent book tour , which , as many of you know , has been very non-controversial -- -- which is really bad for getting people to come see a movie .
In closing , I 'd like to say that everybody has the opportunity to make change in their own way .
And all the people in this room have done so through their business lives , or their philanthropic work , or their other interests .
And one thing that I 've learned is that there 's never one right way to make change .
One can do it as a tech person , or as a finance person , or a nonprofit person , or as an entertainment person , but every one of us is all of those things and more .
And I believe if we do these things , we can close the opportunity gaps , we can close the hope gaps .
And I can imagine , if we do this , the headlines in 10 years might read something like these : " New AIDS Cases in Africa Fall to Zero , " " U.S. Imports its Last Barrel of Oil " -- -- " Israelis and Palestinians Celebrate 10 Years of Peaceful Coexistence . "
And I like this one , " Snow Has Returned to Kilimanjaro . "
And finally , an eBay listing for one well-traveled slide show , now obsolete , museum piece . Please contact Al Gore .
And I believe that , working together , we can make all of these things happen .
And I want to thank you all for having me here today .
It 's been a real honor . Thank you .
Oh , thank you .
Sebastian Wernicke : 1000 TEDTalks , 6 words
Sebastian Wernicke thinks every TEDTalk can be summarized in six words . In this talk , he shows how to do just that -- and less . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
There 's currently over a thousand TEDTalks on the TED website .
And I guess many of you here think that this is quite fantastic -- except for me . I don 't agree with this .
I think we have a situation here .
Because if you think about it , 1,000 TEDTalks , that 's over 1,000 ideas worth spreading .
How on earth are you going to spread a thousand ideas ?
Even if you just try to get all of those ideas into your head by watching all those thousand TED videos , it would actually currently take you over 250 hours to do so .
And I did a little calculation of this .
The damage to the economy for each one who does this is around $ 15,000 .
So having seen this danger to the economy , I thought , we need to find a solution to this problem .
Here 's my approach to it all .
If you look at the current situation , you have a thousand TEDTalks .
Each of those TEDTalks has an average length of about 2,300 words .
Now take this together and you end up with 2.3 million words of TEDTalks , which is about three Bibles-worth of content .
The obvious question here is , does a TEDTalk really need 2,300 words ?
Isn 't there something shorter ?
I mean , if you have an idea worth spreading , surely you can put it into something shorter than 2,300 words .
The only question is , how short can you get ?
What 's the minimum amount of words you would need to do a TEDTalk ?
While I was pondering this question , I came across this urban legend about Ernest Hemingway , who allegedly said that these six words here : " For sale : baby shoes , never worn , " were the best novel he had ever written .
And I also encountered a project called Six-Word Memoirs where people were asked , take your whole life and please sum this up into six words , such as these here : " Found true love , married someone else . "
Or " Living in existential vacuum ; it sucks . "
I actually like that one .
So if a novel can be put into six words and a whole memoir can be put into six words , you don 't need more than six words for a TEDTalk .
We could have been done by lunch here .
I mean ...
And if you did this for all thousand TEDTalks , you would get from 2.3 million words down to 6,000 .
So I thought this was quite worthwhile .
So I started asking all my friends , please take your favorite TEDTalk and put that into six words .
So here are some of the results that I received . I think they 're quite nice .
For example , Dan Pink 's talk on motivation , which was pretty good if you haven 't seen it : " Drop carrot . Drop stick . Bring meaning . "
It 's what he 's basically talking about in those 18 and a half minutes .
Or some even included references to the speakers , such as Nathan Myhrvold 's speaking style , or the one of Tim Ferriss , which might be considered a bit strenuous at times .
The challenge here is , if I try to systematically do this , I would probably end up with a lot of summaries , but not with many friends in the end .
So I had to find a different method , preferably involving total strangers .
And luckily there 's a website for that called Mechanical Turk , which is a website where you can post tasks that you don 't want to do yourself , such as " Please summarize this text for me in six words . "
And I didn 't allow any low-cost countries to work on this , but I found out I could get a six-word summary for just 10 cents , which I think is a pretty good price .
Even then , unfortunately , it 's not possible to summarize each TEDTalk individually .
Because if you do the math , you have a thousand TEDTalks , the pay 10 cents each ; you have to do more than one summary for each of those talks , because some of them will probably be , or are , really bad .
So I would end up paying hundreds of dollars .
So I thought of a different way by thinking , well , the talks revolve around certain themes .
So what if I don 't let people summarize individual TEDTalks to six words , but give them 10 TEDTalks at the same time and say , " Please do a six-word summary for that one . "
I would cut my costs by 90 percent .
So for $ 60 , I could summarize a thousand TEDTalks into just 600 summaries , which would actually be quite nice .
Now some of you might actually right now be thinking , It 's downright crazy to have 10 TEDTalks summarized into just six words .
But it 's actually not , because there 's an example by statistics professor , Hans Rosling .
I guess many of you have seen one or more of his talks .
He 's got eight talks online , and those talks can basically be summed up into just four words , because that 's all he 's basically showing us , our intuition is really bad .
He always proves us wrong .
So people on the Internet , some didn 't do so well .
I mean , when I asked them to summarize the 10 TEDTalks at the same time , some took the easy route out .
They just had some general comment .
There were others , and I found this quite cheeky .
They used their six words to talk back to me and ask me if I 'd been too much on Google lately .
And finally also , I never understood this , some people really came up with their own version of the truth .
I don 't know any TEDTalk that contains this .
But , oh well . In the end , however , and this is really amazing , for each of those 10 TEDTalk clusters that I submitted , I actually received meaningful summaries .
Here are some of my favorites .
For example , for all the TEDTalks around food , someone summed this up into : " Food shaping body , brains and environment , " which I think is pretty good .
Or happiness : " Striving toward happiness = moving toward unhappiness . "
So here I was .
I had started out with a thousand TEDTalks and I had 600 six-word summaries for those .
Actually it sounded nice in the beginning , but when you look at 600 summaries , it 's quite a lot .
It 's a huge list .
So I thought , I probably have to take this one step further here and create summaries of the summaries -- and this is exactly what I did .
So I took the 600 summaries that I had , put them into nine groups according to the ratings that the talks had originally received on TED.com and asked people to do summaries of those .
Again , there were some misunderstandings .
For example , when I had a cluster of all the beautiful talks , someone thought I was just trying to find the ultimate pick-up line .
But in the end , amazingly , again , people were able to do it .
For example , all the courageous TEDTalks : " People dying , " or " People suffering , " was also one , " with easy solutions around . "
Or the recipe for the ultimate jaw-dropping TEDTalk : " Flickr photos of intergalactic classical composer . "
I mean that 's the essence of it all .
Now I had my nine groups , but , I mean , it 's already quite a reduction .
But of course , once you are that far , you 're not really satisfied .
I wanted to go all the way , all the way down the distillery , starting out with a thousand TEDTalks .
I wanted to have a thousand TEDTalks summarized into just six words -- which would be a 99.9997 percent reduction in content .
And I would only pay $ 99.50 -- so stay even below a hundred dollars for it .
So I had 50 overall summaries done .
This time I paid 25 cents because I thought the task was a bit harder .
And unfortunately when I first received the answers -- and here you 'll see six of the answers -- I was a bit disappointed .
Because I think you 'll agree , they all summarize some aspect of TED , but to me they felt a bit bland , or they just had a certain aspect of TED in them .
So I was almost ready to give up when one night I played around with these sentences and found out that there 's actually a beautiful solution in here .
So here it is , a crowd-sourced , six-word summary of a thousand TEDTalks at the value of $ 99.50 : " Why the worry ? I 'd rather wonder . "
Thank you very much .
Underwater astonishments
David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures , including a color-shifting cuttlefish , a perfectly camouflaged octopus , and a Times Square 's worth of neon light displays from fish who live in the blackest depths of the ocean . This short talk celebrates the pioneering work of ocean explorers like Edith Widder and Roger Hanlon .
We 're going to go on a dive to the deep sea , and anyone that 's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down , it 's a perfectly positively pitch-black world .
And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn 't describe : these blinking lights -- a world of bioluminescence , like fireflies .
Dr. Edith Widder -- she 's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association -- was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals , and that 's what you 're seeing here on the screen .
That 's all bioluminescence . So , like I said : just like fireflies .
There 's a flying turkey under a tree .
I 'm a geologist by training . But I love that .
And you see , some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten , some they use to attract prey , but all of it , from an artistic point of view , is positively amazing .
And a lot of what goes on inside ...
there 's a fish with glowing eyes , pulsating eyes .
Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize , these lovely patterns . And then this last one , one of my favorites , this pinwheel design .
Just absolutely amazing , every single dive .
That 's the unknown world , and today we 've only explored about 3 percent of what 's out there in the ocean .
Already we 've found the world 's highest mountains , the world 's deepest valleys , underwater lakes , underwater waterfalls -- a lot of that we shared with you from the stage .
And in a place where we thought no life at all , we find more life , we think , and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest , which tells us that we don 't know much about this planet at all .
There 's still 97 percent , and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises .
But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing .
Cephalopods -- head-foots . As a kid I knew them as calamari , mostly .
This is an octopus -- this is the work of Dr. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab -- and it 's just fascinating how cephalopods can , with their incredible eyes , sense their surroundings , look at light , look at patterns .
Here 's an octopus moving across the reef , finds a spot to settle down , curls up and then disappears into the background .
Tough thing to do .
In the next bit , we 're going to see a couple squid .
These are squid . Now males , when they fight , if they 're really aggressive , they turn white .
And these two males are fighting , they do it by bouncing their butts together , which is an interesting concept . Now , here 's a male on the left and a female on the right , and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder gentler squid in him .
And the male ... We 're going to see it again .
Let 's take a look at it again . Watch the coloration : white on the right , brown on the left .
He takes a step back -- so he 's keeping off the other males by splitting his body -- and comes up on the other side ...
Bingo ! Now I 'm told that 's not just a squid phenomenon with males , but I don 't know .
Cuttlefish . I love cuttlefish . This is a Giant Australian Cuttlefish .
And there he is , his droopy little eyes up here .
But they can do pretty amazing things , too .
Here we 're going to see one backing into a crevice , and watch his tentacles -- he just pulls them in , makes them look just like algae .
Disappears right into the background .
Positively amazing . Here 's two males fighting .
Once again , they 're smart enough , these cephalopods ; they know not to hurt each other .
But look at the patterns that they can do with their skin .
That 's an amazing thing .
Here 's an octopus . Sometimes they don 't want to be seen when they move because predators can see them .
Here , this guy actually can make himself look like a rock , and , looking at his environment , can actually slide across the bottom , using the waves and the shadows so he can 't be seen .
His motion blends right into the background -- the moving rock trick . So , we 're learning lots new from the shallow water .
Still exploring the deep , but learning lots from the shallow water .
There 's a good reason why : the shallow water 's full of predators -- here 's a barracuda -- and if you 're an octopus or a cephalopod , you need to really understand how to use your surroundings to hide .
In the next scene , you 're going to see a nice coral bottom .
And you see that an octopus would stand out very easily there if you couldn 't use your camouflage , use your skin to change color and texture .
Here 's some algae in the foreground ...
and an octopus . Ain 't that amazing ? Now , Roger spooked him so he took off in a cloud of ink , and when he lands the octopus says , " Oh , I 've been seen .
The best thing to do is to get as big as I can get . "
That big brown makes his eyespot very big .
So , he 's bluffing . Let 's do it backwards -- I thought he was joking when he first showed it to me .
I thought it was all graphics -- so here it is in reverse .
Watch the skin color ; watch the skin texture .
Just an amazing animal , it can change color and texture to match the surroundings . Watch him blend right into this algae .
One , two , three .
And now he 's gone , and so am I. Thank you very much .
Theo Jansen : My creations , a new form of life
Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles . His creatures are designed to move -- and even survive -- on their own .
I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago , and it 's about making new forms of life .
And these are made of this kind of tube -- electricity tube , we call it in Holland .
And we can start a film about that , and we can see a little bit backwards in time .
Eventually , these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches .
Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution .
Theo Jansen : I want to put these forms of life on the beaches .
And they should survive over there , on their own , in the future .
Learning to live on their own -- and it 'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own .
The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food , but from the wind .
The wind will move feathers on their back , which will drive their feet .
The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach , with its nose pointed into the wind .
As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand , it stops , and walks in the opposite direction .
Evolution has generated many species .
This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa .
TJ : This is a herd , and it is built according to genetical codes .
And it is a sort of race , and each and every animal is different , and the winning codes will multiply .
This is the wave , going from left to right . You can see this one .
And now it goes from -- yes , now it goes from left to right .
This is a new generation , a new family , which is able to store the winds .
So , the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles , which are on top of that .
And they can use that energy in case the wind falls away , and the tide is coming up , and there is still a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives , because they are drowned very easily .
I could show you this animal .
Thank you .
So , the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking .
There are 11 numbers , which I call the 11 holy numbers .
These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way .
In fact , it 's a new invention of the wheel .
It works the same as a wheel .
The axis of a wheel is staying on the same level , and this hip is staying on the same level as well .
In fact , this is better than a wheel , because when you try to drive with your bicycle on the beach , you will notice it 's very hard to do .
And the feet just step over the sand , and the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in between .
So , 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel , we have a new wheel . And I will show you , in the next video -- can you start it , please ? -- that very heavy loads can be moved .
There 's a guy pushing there , behind , but can also walk on the wind very well .
It 's 3.2 tons .
And this is working on the stored winds in the bottles .
It has a feeler , where it can feel obstacles and turn around .
And that stuff , you see , is going to it the other way .
Can I have the feeler here ?
OK . Good .
So , they have to survive all the dangers of the beach , and one of the big dangers is the sea . This is the sea .
And it must feel the water of the sea .
And this is the water feeler .
And what 's very important is this tube . It sucks in air normally , but when it swallows water , it feels the resistance of it .
So imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea .
As soon as it touches the water , you should hear a sort of sound of running air .
Yes ! So if it doesn 't feel , it will be drowned , OK ?
Here , we have the brain of the animal .
In fact , it is a step counter , and it counts the steps .
It 's a binary step counter .
So as soon it has been to the sea , it changes the pattern of zeroes and ones here , and it knows always where it is on the beach . So it 's very simple brain .
It says , well , there 's the sea , there are dunes , and I 'm here .
So it 's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal .
Thank you .
One of the biggest enemies are the storms .
This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere , and when the nose is fixed -- of the animal -- the whole animal is fixed .
So when the storm is coming up , it drives a pin into the ground .
And the nose is fixed , the whole animal is fixed .
The wind may turn , but the animal will turn always its nose into the wind .
Now , another couple of years , and these animals will survive on their own .
I still have to help them a lot .
Thank you very much , ladies and gentlemen .
JD Schramm : Break the silence for suicide attempt survivors
Even when our lives appear fine from the outside , locked within can be a world of quiet suffering , leading some to the decision to end their life . At TEDYou , JD Schramm asks us to break the silence surrounding suicide and suicide attempts , and to create much-needed resources to help people who reclaim their life after escaping death . Resources : http : / / t.co / wsNrY9C
From all outward appearances , John had everything going for him .
He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit , and he 'd only owned it for five years .
The school where he graduated from with his master 's had just offered him a teaching appointment , which meant not only a salary , but benefits for the first time in ages .
And yet , despite everything going really well for John , he was struggling , fighting addiction and a gripping depression .
On the night of June 11th , 2003 , he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below .
Remarkably -- no , miraculously -- he lived .
The fall shattered his right arm , broke every rib that he had , punctured his lung , and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River , under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry , where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain , contacted the boat 's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital .
And that 's actually where our story begins .
Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together -- first physically , then emotionally , and then spiritually -- he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did .
Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail .
But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time .
This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them .
And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life , because of our taboos around suicide , we 're not sure what to say , and so quite often we say nothing .
And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in .
I know John 's story very well because I 'm John .
And this is , today , I 've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on .
But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide , and sitting last year at TEDActive , I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading -- and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help .
As the Trevor Project says , it gets better .
It gets way better .
And I 'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you , to urge you , that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide , or you know somebody who has , talk about it ; get help .
It 's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading .
Thank you .
Pankaj Ghemawat : Actually , the world isn 't flat
It may seem that we 're living in a borderless world where ideas , goods and people flow freely from nation to nation . We 're not even close , says Pankaj Ghemawat . With great data , he argues that there 's a delta between perception and reality in a world that 's maybe not so hyperconnected after all .
I 'm here to talk to you about how globalized we are , how globalized we aren 't , and why it 's important to actually be accurate in making those kinds of assessments .
And the leading point of view on this , whether measured by number of books sold , mentions in media , or surveys that I 've run with groups ranging from my students to delegates to the World Trade Organization , is this view that national borders really don 't matter very much anymore , cross-border integration is close to complete , and we live in one world .
And what 's interesting about this view is , again , it 's a view that 's held by pro-globalizers like Tom Friedman , from whose book this quote is obviously excerpted , but it 's also held by anti-globalizers , who see this giant globalization tsunami that 's about to wreck all our lives if it hasn 't already done so .
The other thing I would add is that this is not a new view .
I 'm a little bit of an amateur historian , so I 've spent some time going back , trying to see the first mention of this kind of thing . And the best , earliest quote that I could find was one from David Livingstone , writing in the 1850s about how the railroad , the steam ship , and the telegraph were integrating East Africa perfectly with the rest of the world .
Now clearly , David Livingstone was a little bit ahead of his time , but it does seem useful to ask ourselves , " Just how global are we ? "
before we think about where we go from here .
So the best way I 've found of trying to get people to take seriously the idea that the world may not be flat , may not even be close to flat , is with some data .
So one of the things I 've been doing over the last few years is really compiling data on things that could either happen within national borders or across national borders , and I 've looked at the cross-border component as a percentage of the total .
I 'm not going to present all the data that I have here today , but let me just give you a few data points .
I 'm going to talk a little bit about one kind of information flow , and , of course , trade in products and services .
So let 's start off with plain old telephone service .
Of all the voice-calling minutes in the world last year , what percentage do you think were accounted for by cross-border phone calls ?
Pick a percentage in your own mind .
The answer turns out to be two percent .
If you include Internet telephony , you might be able to push this number up to six or seven percent , but it 's nowhere near what people tend to estimate .
Or let 's turn to people moving across borders .
One particular thing we might look at , in terms of long-term flows of people , is what percentage of the world 's population is accounted for by first-generation immigrants ?
Again , please pick a percentage .
Turns out to be a little bit higher .
It 's actually about three percent .
Or think of investment . Take all the real investment that went on in the world in 2010 .
What percentage of that was accounted for by foreign direct investment ?
Not quite ten percent .
And then finally , the one statistic that I suspect many of the people in this room have seen : the export-to-GDP ratio .
If you look at the official statistics , they typically indicate a little bit above 30 percent .
However , there 's a big problem with the official statistics , in that if , for instance , a Japanese component supplier ships something to China to be put into an iPod , and then the iPod gets shipped to the U.S. , that component ends up getting counted multiple times .
So nobody knows how bad this bias with the official statistics actually is , so I thought I would ask the person who 's spearheading the effort to generate data on this , Pascal Lamy , the Director of the World Trade Organization , what his best guess would be of exports as a percentage of GDP , without the double- and triple-counting , and it 's actually probably a bit under 20 percent , rather than the 30 percent-plus numbers that we 're talking about .
So it 's very clear that if you look at these numbers or all the other numbers that I talk about in my book , " World 3.0 , " that we 're very , very far from the no-border effect benchmark , which would imply internationalization levels of the order of 85 , 90 , 95 percent .
So clearly , apocalyptically-minded authors have overstated the case .
But it 's not just the apocalyptics , as I think of them , who are prone to this kind of overstatement .
I 've also spent some time surveying audiences in different parts of the world on what they actually guess these numbers to be .
Let me share with you the results of a survey that Harvard Business Review was kind enough to run of its readership as to what people 's guesses along these dimensions actually were .
So a couple of observations stand out for me from this slide .
First of all , there is a suggestion of some error .
Okay .
Second , these are pretty large errors . For four quantities whose average value is less than 10 percent , you have people guessing three , four times that level .
Even though I 'm an economist , I find that a pretty large error .
And third , this is not just confined to the readers of the Harvard Business Review .
I 've run several dozen such surveys in different parts of the world , and in all cases except one , where a group actually underestimated the trade-to-GDP ratio , people have this tendency towards overestimation , and so I thought it important to give a name to this , and that 's what I refer to as globaloney , the difference between the dark blue bars and the light gray bars .
Especially because , I suspect , some of you may still be a little bit skeptical of the claims , I think it 's important to just spend a little bit of time thinking about why we might be prone to globaloney .
A couple of different reasons come to mind .
First of all , there 's a real dearth of data in the debate .
Let me give you an example . When I first published some of these data a few years ago in a magazine called Foreign Policy , one of the people who wrote in , not entirely in agreement , was Tom Friedman . And since my article was titled " Why the World Isn 't Flat , " that wasn 't too surprising .
What was very surprising to me was Tom 's critique , which was , " Ghemawat 's data are narrow . "
And this caused me to scratch my head , because as I went back through his several-hundred-page book , I couldn 't find a single figure , chart , table , reference or footnote .
So my point is , I haven 't presented a lot of data here to convince you that I 'm right , but I would urge you to go away and look for your own data to try and actually assess whether some of these hand-me-down insights that we 've been bombarded with actually are correct .
So dearth of data in the debate is one reason .
A second reason has to do with peer pressure .
I remember , I decided to write my " Why the World Isn 't Flat " article , because I was being interviewed on TV in Mumbai , and the interviewer 's first question to me was , " Professor Ghemawat , why do you still believe that the world is round ? " And I started laughing , because I hadn 't come across that formulation before .
And as I was laughing , I was thinking , I really need a more coherent response , especially on national TV . I 'd better write something about this .
But what I can 't quite capture for you was the pity and disbelief with which the interviewer asked her question .
The perspective was , here is this poor professor .
He 's clearly been in a cave for the last 20,000 years .
He really has no idea as to what 's actually going on in the world .
So try this out with your friends and acquaintances , if you like . You 'll find that it 's very cool to talk about the world being one , etc .
If you raise questions about that formulation , you really are considered a bit of an antique .
And then the final reason , which I mention , especially to a TED audience , with some trepidation , has to do with what I call " techno-trances . "
If you listen to techno music for long periods of time , it does things to your brainwave activity .
Something similar seems to happen with exaggerated conceptions of how technology is going to overpower in the very immediate run all cultural barriers , all political barriers , all geographic barriers , because at this point I know you aren 't allowed to ask me questions , but when I get to this point in my lecture with my students , hands go up , and people ask me , " Yeah , but what about Facebook ? "
And I got this question often enough that I thought I 'd better do some research on Facebook .
Because , in some sense , it 's the ideal kind of technology to think about . Theoretically , it makes it as easy to form friendships halfway around the world as opposed to right next door .
What percentage of people 's friends on Facebook are actually located in countries other than where people we 're analyzing are based ?
The answer is probably somewhere between 10 to 15 percent .
Non-negligible , so we don 't live in an entirely local or national world , but very , very far from the 95 percent level that you would expect , and the reason 's very simple .
We don 't , or I hope we don 't , form friendships at random on Facebook . The technology is overlaid on a pre-existing matrix of relationships that we have , and those relationships are what the technology doesn 't quite displace . Those relationships are why we get far fewer than 95 percent of our friends being located in countries other than where we are .
So does all this matter ? Or is globaloney just a harmless way of getting people to pay more attention to globalization-related issues ?
I want to suggest that actually , globaloney can be very harmful to your health .
First of all , recognizing that the glass is only 10 to 20 percent full is critical to seeing that there might be potential for additional gains from additional integration , whereas if we thought we were already there , there would be no particular point to pushing harder .
It 's a little bit like , we wouldn 't be having a conference on radical openness if we already thought we were totally open to all the kinds of influences that are being talked about at this conference .
So being accurate about how limited globalization levels are is critical to even being able to notice that there might be room for something more , something that would contribute further to global welfare .
Which brings me to my second point .
Avoiding overstatement is also very helpful because it reduces and in some cases even reverses some of the fears that people have about globalization .
So I actually spend most of my " World 3.0 " book working through a litany of market failures and fears that people have that they worry globalization is going to exacerbate .
I 'm obviously not going to be able to do that for you today , so let me just present to you two headlines as an illustration of what I have in mind .
Think of France and the current debate about immigration .
When you ask people in France what percentage of the French population is immigrants , the answer is about 24 percent . That 's their guess .
Maybe realizing that the number is just eight percent might help cool some of the superheated rhetoric that we see around the immigration issue .
Or to take an even more striking example , when the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations did a survey of Americans , asking them to guess what percentage of the federal budget went to foreign aid , the guess was 30 percent , which is slightly in excess of the actual level — — of U.S. governmental commitments to federal aid .
The reassuring thing about this particular survey was , when it was pointed out to people how far their estimates were from the actual data , some of them — not all of them — seemed to become more willing to consider increases in foreign aid .
So foreign aid is actually a great way of sort of wrapping up here , because if you think about it , what I 've been talking about today is this notion -- very uncontroversial amongst economists -- that most things are very home-biased .
" Foreign aid is the most aid to poor people , " is about the most home-biased thing you can find .
If you look at the OECD countries and how much they spend per domestic poor person , and compare it with how much they spend per poor person in poor countries , the ratio — Branko Milanovic at the World Bank did the calculations — turns out to be about 30,000 to one .
Now of course , some of us , if we truly are cosmopolitan , would like to see that ratio being brought down to one-is-to-one .
I 'd like to make the suggestion that we don 't need to aim for that to make substantial progress from where we are .
If we simply brought that ratio down to 15,000 to one , we would be meeting those aid targets that were agreed at the Rio Summit 20 years ago that the summit that ended last week made no further progress on .
So in summary , while radical openness is great , given how closed we are , even incremental openness could make things dramatically better . Thank you very much .
Bono : The good news on poverty
Human beings have been campaigning against inequality and poverty for 3,000 years . But this journey is accelerating . Bono " embraces his inner nerd " and shares inspiring data that shows the end of poverty is in sight … if we can harness the momentum .
Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED .
That 's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct .
I said , " Chris , that would take a miracle . "
He said , " Bono , wouldn 't that be a good use of your messianic complex ? "
So , yeah .
Then I thought , let 's go even further than 25 years .
Let 's go back before Christ , three millennia , to a time when , at least in my head , the journey for justice , the march against inequality and poverty really began .
Three thousand years ago , civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile , some slaves , Jewish shepherds in this instance , smelling of sheep shit , I guess , proclaimed to the Pharaoh , sitting high on his throne , " We , your majesty-ness , are equal to you . "
And the Pharaoh replies , " Oh , no .
You , your miserableness , have got to be kidding . "
And they say , " No , no , that 's what it says here in our holy book . "
Cut to our century , same country , same pyramids , another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book .
This time it 's called the Facebook .
Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square .
They turn a social network from virtual to actual , and kind of rebooted the 21st century .
Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been , neither to oversell the role of technology , but these things have given a sense of what 's possible when the age-old model of power , the pyramid , gets turned upside down , putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom , as it were .
It 's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality , because facts , like people , want to be free , and when they 're free , liberty is usually around the corner , even for the poorest of the poor -- facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia , facts that tell us what 's working and , more importantly , what 's not , so we can fix it , facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005 , when he asked us to be that great generation that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity , extreme poverty , facts that build a powerful momentum .
So I thought , forget the rock opera , forget the bombast , my usual tricks .
The only thing singing today would be the facts , for I have truly embraced by inner nerd .
So exit the rock star .
Enter the evidence-based activist , the factivist .
Because what the facts are telling us is that the long , slow journey , humanity 's long , slow journey of equality , is actually speeding up .
Look at what 's been achieved .
Look at the pictures these data sets print .
Since the year 2000 , since the turn of the millennium , there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs .
Malaria : There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent .
For kids under five , child mortality , kids under five , it 's down by 2.65 million a year .
That 's a rate of 7,256 children 's lives saved each day .
Wow . Wow .
Let 's just stop for a second , actually , and think about that .
Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number ? Wow .
Great news . It drives me nuts that most people don 't seem to know this news .
Seven thousand kids a day . Here 's two of them .
This is Michael and Benedicta , and they 're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah -- she 's amazing -- and the Global Fund , which all of you financially support , whether you know it or not .
And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids .
This fantastic news didn 't happen by itself .
It was fought for , it was campaigned for , it was innovated for .
And this great news gives birth to even more great news , because the historic trend is this .
The number of people living in back-breaking , soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world 's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010 .
Give it up for that .
Halved . Halved .
Now , the rate is still too high -- still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives .
There 's still work to do .
But it 's heart-stopping . It 's mind-blowing stuff .
And if you live on less than $ 1.25 a day , if you live in that kind of poverty , this is not just data .
This is everything .
If you 're a parent who wants the best for your kids -- and I am -- this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope .
And guess what ? If the trajectory continues , look where the amount of people living on $ 1.25 a day gets to by 2030 .
Can 't be true , can it ?
That 's what the data is telling us . If the trajectory continues , we get to , wow , the zero zone .
For number-crunchers like us , that is the erogenous zone , and it 's fair to say that I am , by now , sexually aroused by the collating of data .
So virtual elimination of extreme poverty , as defined by people living on less than $ 1.25 a day , adjusted , of course , for inflation from a 1990 baseline .
We do love a good baseline .
That 's amazing .
Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil -- and who doesn 't love a Brazilian model ? -- but look at sub-Saharan Africa .
There 's a collection of 10 countries , some call them the lions , who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation , a tripling of aid , a tenfold increase in FDI -- that 's foreign direct investment -- which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources -- that 's local money -- which , when spent wisely -- that 's good governance -- cut childhood mortality by a third , doubled education completion rates , and they , too , halved extreme poverty , and at this rate , these 10 get to zero too .
So the pride of lions is the proof of concept .
There are all kinds of benefits to this .
For a start , you won 't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself .
How about that ?
And 2028 , 2030 ? It 's just around the corner .
I mean , it 's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away .
I hope . I 'm hoping .
Makes us look really young .
So why aren 't we jumping up and down about this ?
Well , the opportunity is real , but so is the jeopardy .
We can 't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done .
Look at this graph .
It 's called inertia . It 's how we screw it up .
And the next one is really beautiful .
It 's called momentum .
And it 's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero , just doing the things that we know work .
So inertia versus momentum .
There is jeopardy , and of course , the closer you get , it gets harder .
We know the obstacles that are in our way right now , in difficult times .
In fact , today in your capital , in difficult times , some who mind the nation 's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund .
But you can do something about that .
You can tell politicians that these cuts [ can cost ] lives .
Right now today , in Oslo as it happens , oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries .
You can do something about that too .
You can join the One Campaign , and leaders like Mo Ibrahim , the telecom entrepreneur .
We 're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it .
And right now , we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease . It 's corruption .
But there 's a vaccine for that too .
It 's called transparency , open data sets , something the TED community is really on it .
Daylight , you could call it , transparency .
And technology is really turbocharging this .
It 's getting harder to hide if you 're doing bad stuff .
So let me tell you about the U-report , which I 'm really excited about . It 's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda , young people armed with 2G phones , an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what 's in the budget and how their money is being spent .
This is exciting stuff .
Look , once you have these tools , you can 't not use them .
Once you have this knowledge , you can 't un-know it .
You can 't delete this data from your brain , but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant , impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives .
You can erase that , you really can , because it 's not true anymore .
It 's transformational .
2030 ? By 2030 , robots , not just serving us Guinness , but drinking it .
By the time we get there , every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way .
So I 'm here to -- I guess we 're here to try and infect you with this virtuous , data-based virus , the one we call factivism .
It 's not going to kill you .
In fact , it could save countless lives .
I guess we in the One Campaign would love you to be contagious , spread it , share it , pass it on .
By doing so , you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken , the ever-demanding journey of equality .
Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be ?
Might we answer that clarion call with science , with reason , with facts , and , dare I say it , emotions ?
Because as is obvious , factivists have feelings too .
I 'm thinking of Wael Ghonim , though .
Some of you know him . He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo .
He got thrown in jail for it , but I have his words tattooed on my brain .
" We are going to win because we don 't understand politics .
We are going to win because we don 't play their dirty games .
We are going to win because we don 't have a party political agenda .
We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
We are going to win because we have dreams , and we 're willing to stand up for those dreams . "
Wael is right .
We 're going to win if we work together as one , because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power .
Thank you .
Thank you so much .
Jason Fried : Why work doesn 't happen at work
Jason Fried has a radical theory of working : that the office isn 't a good place to do it . In his talk , he lays out the main problems and offers three suggestions to make work work . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So I 'm going to talk about work , specifically why people can 't seem to get work done at work , which is a problem we all kind of have .
But let 's , sort of , start at the beginning .
So we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort .
And they expect these people who work for them to do great work -- I would hope , at least .
At least good work , hopefully , at least it 's good work -- hopefully great work .
And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work .
So a company , or a charity , or an organization of any kind , they typically -- unless you 're working in Africa , if you 're really lucky to do that -- most people have to go to an office every day .
And so these companies , they build offices .
They go out and they buy a building , or they rent a building , or they lease some space , and they fill the space with stuff .
They fill it with tables , or desks , chairs , computer equipment , software , Internet access , maybe a fridge , maybe a few other things , and they expect their employees , or their volunteers , to come to that location every day to do great work .
It seems like it 's perfectly reasonable to ask that .
However , if you actually talk to people and even question yourself , and you ask yourself , where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done ?
You 'll find out that people don 't say what businesses think they would say .
If you ask people the question : where do you really need to go when you need to get something done ?
Typically you get three different kinds of answers .
One is kind of a place or a location or a room .
Another one is a moving object and a third is a time .
So here 's some examples .
When I ask people -- and I 've been asking people this question for about 10 years -- I ask them , " Where do you go when you really need to get something done ? "
I 'll hear things like , the porch , the deck , the kitchen .
I 'll hear things like an extra room in the house , the basement , the coffee shop , the library .
And then you 'll hear things like the train , a plane , a car -- so , the commute .
And then you 'll hear people say , " Well , it doesn 't really matter where I am , as long as it 's really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends . "
You almost never hear someone say the office .
But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office , and they 're making people go to it all the time , yet people don 't do work in the office .
What is that about ?
Why is that ?
Why is that happening ?
And what you find out is that , if you dig a little bit deeper , you find out that people -- this is what happens -- people go to work , and they 're basically trading in their workday for a series of " work moments . "
That 's what happens at the office .
You don 't have a workday anymore . You have work moments .
It 's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart , and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits , because you have 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there , and then something else happens and you 're pulled off your work , and you 've got to do something else , then you have 20 minutes , then it 's lunch .
Then you have something else to do .
Then you 've got 15 minutes , and someone pulls you aside and asks you this question , and before you know it , it 's 5 p.m. , and you look back on the day , and you realize that you didn 't get anything done .
I mean , we 've all been through this .
We probably went through it yesterday , or the day before , or the day before that .
You look back on your day , and you 're like , I got nothing done today .
I was at work .
I sat at my desk . I used my expensive computer .
I used the software they told me to use .
I went to these meetings I was asked to go to .
I did these conference calls . I did all this stuff .
But I didn 't actually do anything .
I just did tasks .
I didn 't actually get meaningful work done .
And what you find is that , especially with creative people -- designers , programmers , writers , engineers , thinkers -- that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done .
You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem .
You might have a quick idea , but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully , you need long stretches of uninterrupted time .
And even though the workday is typically eight hours , how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office ?
How about seven hours ?
Six ? Five ? Four ?
When 's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office ?
Two hours ? One , maybe ?
Very , very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office .
And this is why people choose to do work at home , or they might go to the office , but they might go to the office really early in the day , or late at night when no one 's around , or they stick around after everyone 's left , or they go in on the weekends , or they get work done on the plane , or they get work done in the car or in the train because there are no distractions .
Now , there are different kinds of distractions , but there aren 't the really bad kinds of distractions that I 'll talk about in just a minute .
of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn 't work when you 're interrupted , and that is sleep .
I think that sleep and work are very closely related , and it 's not just that you can work while you 're sleeping and you can sleep while you 're working .
That 's not really what I mean .
I 'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phased-based , or stage-based , events .
So sleep is about sleep phases , or stages -- some people call them different things .
There 's five of them , and in order to get to the really deep ones , the really meaningful ones , you have to go through the early ones .
And if you 're interrupted while you 're going through the early ones -- if someone bumps you in bed , or if there 's a sound , or whatever happens -- you don 't just pick up where you left off .
If you 're interrupted and woken up , you have to start again .
So you have to go back a few phases and start again .
And what ends up happening -- sometimes you might have days like this where you wake up at eight in the morning , or seven in the morning , or whenever you get up , and you 're like , man , I didn 't really sleep very well .
I did the sleep thing -- I went to bed , I laid down -- but I didn 't really sleep .
People say you go to sleep , but you really don 't go to sleep , you go towards sleep .
It just takes a while . You 've got to go through these phases and stuff , and if you 're interrupted , you don 't sleep well .
So how do we expect -- does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they 're interrupted all night ?
I don 't think anyone would say yes .
Why do we expect people to work well if they 're being interrupted all day at the office ?
How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they 're going to the office to be interrupted ?
That doesn 't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me .
So what are these interruptions that happen at the office that don 't happen at other places ?
Because in other places , you can have interruptions , like , you can have the TV , or you could go for a walk , or there 's a fridge downstairs , or you 've got your own couch , or whatever you want to do .
And if you talk to certain managers , they 'll tell you that they don 't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions .
They 'll also say -- sometimes they 'll also say , " Well , if I can 't see the person , how do I know they 're working ? "
which is ridiculous , of course , but that 's one of the excuses that managers give .
And I 'm one of these managers .
I understand . I know how this goes .
We all have to improve on this sort of thing .
But oftentimes they 'll cite distractions .
" I can 't let someone work at home .
They 'll watch TV . They 'll do this other thing . "
It turns out that those aren 't the things that are really distracting .
Because those are voluntary distractions .
You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV .
You decide when you want to turn something on .
You decide when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk .
At the office , most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary .
So let 's go through a couple of those .
Now , managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites , and in fact , they 'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work .
Some of you may work at places where you can 't get to these certain sites .
I mean , is this China ? What the hell is going on here ?
You can 't go to a website at work , and that 's the problem , that 's why people aren 't getting work done , because they 're going to Facebook and they 're going to Twitter ?
That 's kind of ridiculous . It 's a total decoy .
And today 's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube , these things are just modern-day smoke breaks .
No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago , so why does everyone care about someone going to Facebook here and there , or Twitter here and there , or YouTube here and there ?
Those aren 't the real problems in the office .
The real problems are what I like to call the M & amp ; Ms , the Managers and the Meetings .
Those are the real problems in the modern office today .
And this is why things don 't get done at work -- it 's because of the M & amp ; Ms.
Now what 's interesting is , if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work -- like at home , or in a car , or on a plane , or late at night , or early in the morning -- you don 't find managers and meetings .
You find a lot of other distractions , but you don 't find managers and meetings .
So these are the things that you don 't find elsewhere , but you do find at the office .
And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people .
That 's pretty much what managers are for . They 're for interrupting people .
They don 't really do the work , so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work , which is an interruption .
And we have a lot of managers in the world now , and there 's a lot of people in the world now , and there 's a lot of interruptions in the world now because of these managers .
They have to check in : " Hey , how 's it going ?
Show me what 's up , " and this sort of thing and they keep interrupting you at the wrong time , while you 're actually trying to do something they 're paying you to do , they tend to interrupt you .
That 's kind of bad .
But what 's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all , which is call meetings .
And meetings are just toxic , terrible , poisonous things during the day at work .
We all know this to be true , and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees .
It doesn 't work that way .
The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together , and it 's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people -- is to say , " Hey look , we 're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting .
I don 't care what you 're doing .
Just , you 've got to stop doing what you 're doing , so you can have this meeting . "
I mean , what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop ?
What if they 're thinking about something important ?
What if they 're doing important work ?
All of a sudden you 're telling them that they have to stop doing that to do something else .
So they go into a meeting room , they get together , and they talk about stuff that doesn 't really matter usually .
Because meetings aren 't work .
Meetings are places to go to talk about things you 're supposed to be doing later .
But meetings also procreate .
So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting and tends to lead to another meeting .
There 's often too many people in the meetings , and they 're very , very expensive to the organization .
Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting , but that 's not true , unless there 's only one person in that meeting .
If there are 10 people in the meeting , it 's a 10-hour meeting ; it 's not a one-hour meeting .
It 's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one one-hour meeting , which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes .
But instead , there 's a long scheduled meeting , because meetings are scheduled the way software works , which is in increments of 15 minutes , or 30 minutes , or an hour .
You don 't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook .
You can 't . I don 't even know if you can .
You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour .
And so we tend to fill these times up when things should really go really quickly .
So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today , especially to offices .
These things don 't exist outside of the office .
So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation .
What can managers do -- enlightened managers , hopefully -- what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work , so it 's not the last resort , but it 's the first resort ?
It 's that people start to say , " When I really want to get stuff done , I go to the office . "
Because the offices are well equipped , everything should be there for them to do their work , but they don 't want to go there right now , so how do we change that ?
I have three suggestions I 'll share with you guys .
I have about three minutes , so that 'll fit perfectly .
We 've all heard of the casual Friday thing .
I don 't know if people still do that .
But how about " no-talk Thursdays ? "
How about -- pick one Thursday once a month and cut that day in half and just say the afternoon -- I 'll make it really easy for you .
So just the afternoon , one Thursday .
The first Thursday of the month -- just the afternoon -- nobody in the office can talk to each other .
Just silence , that 's it .
And what you 'll find is that a tremendous amount of work actually gets done when no one talks to each other .
This is when people actually get stuff done , is when no one 's bothering them , when no one 's interrupting them .
And you can give someone -- giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work .
It 's better than a computer .
It 's better than a new monitor . It 's better than new software , or whatever people typically use .
Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable .
And if you try that , I think you 'll find that you agree .
And maybe , hopefully you can do it more often .
So maybe it 's every other week , or every week , once a week , afternoons no one can talk to each other .
That 's something that you 'll find will really , really work .
Another thing you can try is switching from active communication and collaboration , which is like face-to-face stuff , tapping people on the shoulder , saying hi to them , having meetings , and replace that with more passive models of communication , using things like email and instant messaging , or collaboration products -- things like that .
Now some people might say email is really distracting and I.M. is really distracting , and these other things are really distracting , but they 're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing .
You can quit the email app ; you can 't quit your boss .
You can quit I.M. ; you can 't hide your manager .
You can put these things away , and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule , at your own time , when you 're available , when you 're ready to go again .
Because work , like sleep , happens in phases .
So you 're going to be kind of going up and doing some work , and then you 're going to come down from that work , and then maybe it 's time to check that email , or check that I.M.
And there are very , very few things that are that urgent that need to happen , that need to be answered right this second .
So if you 're a manager , start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email and other things that someone else can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule .
And the last suggestion I have is that , if you do have a meeting coming up , if you have the power , just cancel . Just cancel that next meeting .
Today 's Friday -- so Monday , usually people have meetings on Monday .
Just don 't have it .
I don 't mean move it ; I mean just erase it from memory , it 's gone .
And you 'll find out that everything will be just fine .
All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday , just forget about them , and things will be just fine .
People have a more open morning , they can actually think , and you 'll find out that maybe all these things you thought you had to do , you don 't actually have to do .
So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys to think about this .
And I hope that some of these ideas were at least provocative enough for managers and bosses and business owners and organizers and people who are in charge of other people to think about laying off a little bit and giving people some more time to get some work done .
And I think it 'll all pay off in the end .
So thanks for listening .
Dianna Cohen : Tough truths about plastic pollution
Artist Dianna Cohen shares some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean and in our lives -- and some thoughts on how to free ourselves from the plastic gyre .
I 'm a visual artist , and I 'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition .
I 've been working with plastic bags , which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations .
Upon working with the plastic , after about the first eight years , some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic .
And I thought , " Great .
It 's ephemeral just like us . "
Upon educating myself a little further about plastics , I actually realized this was a bad thing .
It 's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits , because it 's always still plastic .
And what we 're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment .
I then , in the last few years , learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre .
And my initial reaction -- and I think this is a lot of people 's first reaction to learning about it -- is , " Oh my God !
We 've got to go out there and clean this thing up . "
So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers , a crane , a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine .
And my intention was to go out to the gyre , raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic , chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities .
I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so , I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world , and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture .
And the bigger picture is : we need to find a way to turn off the faucet .
We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics , which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale .
So in looking at that , I also realized that I was really angry .
I wasn 't just concerned about plastic that you 're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres , potentially , of plastic in five major oceans in the world .
It 's not just that gyre of plastic that I 'm concerned about -- it 's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket .
I 'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic .
All of my beverages are packaged in plastic , even at the health food market .
I 'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator , and I 'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies .
So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue , and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition .
We have many initiatives that we 're working on , but some of them are very basic .
One is : if 80 to 90 percent of what we 're finding in the ocean -- of the marine debris that we 're finding in the ocean -- is plastic , then why don 't we call it what it is .
It 's plastic pollution .
Recycling -- everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling .
You put something in a bin and you don 't have to think about it again .
What is the reality of that ?
In the United States , less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled .
And if you really look into it , particularly when it comes to plastic bottles , most of it is only down-cycled , or incinerated , or shipped to China .
It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things , while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again -- a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again .
So this is a big issue for us .
Another thing that we 're looking at and asking people to think about is we 've added a fourth R onto the front of the " Reduce , Reuse , Recycle , " three R 's , and that is refuse .
Whenever possible , refuse single-use and disposable plastics .
Alternatives exist ; some of them are very old-school .
I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in .
And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family .
It 's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle , if you 're traveling and you 've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water , versus purchasing plastic bottled water .
I guess what I want to say to everybody here -- and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue -- is that this is a huge problem in the oceans , but this is a problem that we 've created as consumers and we can solve .
We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives .
So whenever possible , to choose alternatives to single-use plastics .
We can cut the stem -- tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so , save our oceans , save our planet , save ourselves .
Thank you .
Jay Walker : The world 's English mania
Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English . He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English -- " the world 's second language " -- by the thousands .
Let 's talk about manias .
Let 's start with Beatle mania : hysterical teenagers , crying , screaming , pandemonium .
Sports mania : deafening crowds , all for one idea -- get the ball in the net .
Okay , religious mania : there 's rapture , there 's weeping , there 's visions .
Manias can be good .
Manias can be alarming .
Or manias can be deadly .
The world has a new mania .
A mania for learning English .
Listen as Chinese students practice their English by screaming it .
Teacher : ... change my life !
Students : I will change my life .
T : I don 't want to let my parents down .
S : I don 't want to let my parents down .
T : I don 't ever want to let my country down .
S : I don 't ever want to let my country down .
T : Most importantly ... S : Most importantly ...
T : I don 't want to let myself down .
S : I don 't want to let myself down .
Jay Walker : How many people are trying to learn English worldwide ?
Two billion of them .
Students : A t-shirt . A dress .
JW : In Latin America , in India , in Southeast Asia , and most of all in China .
If you are a Chinese student you start learning English in the third grade , by law .
That 's why this year China will become the world 's largest English-speaking country .
Why English ? In a single word : Opportunity .
Opportunity for a better life , a job , to be able to pay for school , or put better food on the table .
Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days .
Her score on this one test literally determines her future .
She studies 12 hours a day for three years to prepare .
25 percent of her grade is based on English .
It 's called the Gaokao , and 80 million high school Chinese students have already taken this grueling test .
The intensity to learn English is almost unimaginable , unless you witness it .
Teacher : Perfect ! Students : Perfect !
T : Perfect ! S : Perfect !
T : I want to speak perfect English .
S : I want to speak perfect English .
T : I want to speak -- S : I want to speak -- T : perfect English . S : perfect English .
T : I want to change my life !
S : I want to change my life !
JW : So is English mania good or bad ?
Is English a tsunami , washing away other languages ? Not likely .
English is the world 's second language .
Your native language is your life .
But with English you can become part of a wider conversation : a global conversation about global problems , like climate change or poverty , or hunger or disease .
The world has other universal languages .
Mathematics is the language of science .
Music is the language of emotions .
And now English is becoming the language of problem-solving .
Not because America is pushing it , but because the world is pulling it .
So English mania is a turning point .
Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities or the fall of the Berlin Wall , English represents hope for a better future -- a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems .
Thank you very much .
Maz Jobrani : A Saudi , an Indian and an Iranian walk into a Qatari bar ...
Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani takes to the TEDxSummit stage in Doha , Qatar to take on serious issues in the Middle East -- like how many kisses to give when saying " Hi , " and what not to say on an American airplane .
Hello , Doha . Hello . Salaam alaikum .
I love coming to Doha . It 's such an international place .
This is like -- it feels like the United Nations just here .
You land at the airport , and you 're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services , where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan .
You go to the hotel and you check in . There 's a Lebanese .
Yeah ? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room .
I said , " Where are the Qataris ? "
They said , " No , no , it 's too hot . They come out later . They 're smart . "
" They know . "
And of course it 's growing so fast , sometimes there 's growing pains .
You know , like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well , but they don 't know it that well .
My Indian cab driver showed up at the W , and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton , and he said , " No problem , sir . "
And then we sat there for two minutes .
I said , " What 's wrong ? " He said , " One problem , sir . "
I said , " What ? " He goes , " Where is it ? "
I go , " You 're the driver , you should know . " He goes , " No , I just arrived , sir . "
I go , " You just arrived at the W ? " " No , I just arrived in Doha , sir .
I was on my way home from the airport . I got a job .
I 'm working already . "
He goes , " Sir , why don 't you drive ? "
I go , " I don 't know where we 're going . "
" Neither do I. It will be an adventure , sir . "
It is an adventure . The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple years .
The Middle East is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this . Are there any Lebanese here tonight ?
Any Lebanese by applause ? Lebanese .
Yeah . The Middle East is going crazy .
You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region .
Who would have thought ? Oh my gosh .
No . There 's serious issues in the region .
Some people don 't want to talk about them . I 'm here to talk about them tonight .
Ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East , here 's a serious issue . When we see each other , when we say hello , how many kisses are we going to do ?
Every country is different and it 's confusing , okay ?
In Lebanon , they do three . In Egypt , they do two .
I was in Lebanon , I got used to three .
I went to Egypt . I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy , I went , one , two . I went for three . He wasn 't into it .
I told him , I said , " No , no , no , I was just in Lebanon . "
He goes , " I don 't care where you were . You just stay where you are , please . Just stay where you are . "
I went to Saudi Arabia . In Saudi Arabia , they go one , two , and then they stay on the same side -- three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 .
Next time you see a Saudi , look closely . They 're just a little bit tilted .
" Abdul , are you okay ? " " Yeah , I was saying hello for half an hour .
I 'm going to be all right . "
Qataris , you guys do the nose to nose .
Why is that ? Are you too tired to go all the way around ?
" Habibi , it 's so hot . Just come here for a second . Say hello .
Hello , Habibi . Just don 't move . Just stay there please .
I need to rest . "
Every country — Iranians , sometimes we do two , sometimes we do three .
A friend of mine explained to me , before the ' 79 revolution , it was two . After the revolution , three .
So with Iranians , you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you .
Yeah , if you go one , two , three -- " I can 't believe you support this regime with your three kisses . "
But no , guys , really , it is exciting to be here , and like I said , you guys are doing a lot culturally , you know , and it 's amazing , and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West . Like a lot of Americans don 't know a lot about us , about the Middle East .
I 'm Iranian and American . I 'm there . I know , I 've traveled here .
There 's so much , we laugh , right ?
People don 't know we laugh . When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour , it came out on Comedy Central , I went online to see what people were saying about it . I ended up on a conservative website .
One guy wrote another guy . He said , " I never knew these people laughed . "
Think about it . You never see us laughing in American film or television , right ?
Maybe like an evil -- like , " Wuhahaha , wuhahaha .
I will kill you in the name of Allah , wuhahahahaha . "
But never like , " ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha . "
We like to laugh . We like to celebrate life .
And I wish more Americans would travel here . I always encourage my friends : Travel , see the Middle East , there 's so much to see , so many good people .
And it 's vice versa , and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening .
For example , I don 't know if you heard about this , a little while ago in the U.S. there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane talking about the safest place to sit on the plane .
Some passengers overheard them , somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk , got them kicked off the plane .
It was a family , a mother , father , child , walking down the aisle , talking about the seating . Now as a Middle Eastern male , I know there 's certain things I 'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the U.S. , right ?
I 'm not supposed to be , like , walking down the aisle , and be like , " Hi , Jack . " You know , that 's not cool .
Even if I 'm there with my friend named Jack , I say , " Greetings , Jack . Salutations , Jack . "
Never " Hi , Jack . "
But now apparently we can 't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane .
So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim , so to , you know , Indians , and Latinos , everyone , if you 're brown -- here 's my advice to my brown friends .
The next time you 're on an airplane in the U.S. , just speak your mother tongue .
That way no one knows what you 're saying . Life goes on .
Granted , some mother tongues might sound a little threatening to the average American , right ?
If you 're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic , you might freak them out , if you 're walking , " [ Arabic ] , " they might say , " What 's he talking about ? "
So the key , to my Arab brothers and sisters , you gotta throw in random good words to put people at ease as you 're walking down the aisle .
Just as you 're walking down : " [ Imitating Arabic ] -- strawberry ! "
" [ Imitating Arabic ] -- rainbow ! "
" [ Imitating Arabic ] -- Tutti Frutti ! "
" I think he 's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream . "
Thank you very much . Have a good night .
Thank you , TED .
Handspring Puppet Co . : The genius puppetry behind War Horse
" Puppets always have to try to be alive , " says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company , a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors . Beginning with the tale of a hyena 's subtle paw , puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment : the wonderfully life-like Joey , the War Horse , who trots convincingly onto the TED stage .
Adrian Kohler : Well , we 're here today to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse .
Basil Jones : But actually we 're going to start this evolution with a hyena .
AK : The ancestor of the horse .
Okay , we 'll do something with it .
Hahahaha .
The hyena is the ancestor of the horse because it was part of a production called " Faustus in Africa , " a Handspring Production from 1995 , where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy .
This production was directed by South African artist and theater director , William Kentridge .
So it needed a very articulate front paw .
But , like all puppets , it has other attributes .
BJ : One of them is breath , and it kind of breathes .
AK : Haa haa haaa .
BJ : Breath is really important for us .
It 's the kind of original movement for any puppet for us onstage .
It 's the thing that distinguishes the puppet -- AK : Oops .
BJ : From an actor .
Puppets always have to try to be alive .
It 's their kind of ur-story onstage , that desperation to live .
AK : Yeah , it 's basically a dead object , as you can see , and it only lives because you make it .
An actor struggles to die onstage , but a puppet has to struggle to live .
And in a way that 's a metaphor for life .
BJ : So every moment it 's on the stage , it 's making the struggle .
So we call this a piece of emotional engineering that uses up-to-the-minute 17th century technology -- to turn nouns into verbs .
AK : Well actually I prefer to say that it 's an object constructed out of wood and cloth with movement built into it to persuade you to believe that it has life .
BJ : Okay so .
AK : It has ears that move passively when the head goes .
BJ : And it has these bulkheads made out of plywood , covered with fabric -- curiously similar , in fact , to the plywood canoes that Adrian 's father used to make when he was a boy in their workshop .
AK : In Port Elizabeth , the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa .
BJ : His mother was a puppeteer .
And when we met at art school and fell in love in 1971 , I hated puppets .
I really thought they were so beneath me .
I wanted to become an avant-garde artist -- and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go .
And , in fact , it took about 10 years to discover the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa , where there 's a fabulous tradition of puppetry , to learn a renewed , or a new , respect for this art form .
AK : So in 1981 , I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine to form a puppet company .
And 20 years later , miraculously , we collaborated with a company from Mali , the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako , where we made a piece about a tall giraffe .
It was just called " Tall Horse , " which was a life-sized giraffe .
BJ : And here again , you see the same structure .
The bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane , but it 's ultimately the same structure .
It 's got two people inside it on stilts , which give them the height , and somebody in the front who 's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head .
AK : The person in the hind legs is also controlling the tail , a bit like the hyena -- same mechanism , just a bit bigger .
And he 's controlling the ear movement .
BJ : So this production was seen by Tom Morris And just around that time , his mother had said , " Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo called ' War Horse ' ? "
AK : It 's about a boy who falls in love with a horse .
The horse is sold to the First World War , and he joins up to find his horse .
BJ : So Tom gave us a call and said , " Do you think you could make us a horse for a show to happen at the National Theatre ? "
AK : It seemed a lovely idea .
BJ : But it had to ride . It had to have a rider .
AK : It had to have a rider , and it had to participate in cavalry charges .
A play about early 20th century plowing technology and cavalry charges was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department at the National Theatre in London .
But they agreed to go along with it for a while .
So we began with a test .
BJ : This is Adrian and Thys Stander , who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse , and our next-door neighbor Katherine , riding on a ladder .
The weight is really difficult when it 's up above your head .
AK : And once we put Katherine through that particular brand of hell , we knew that we might be able to make a horse , which could be ridden .
So we made a model .
This is a cardboard model , a little bit smaller than the hyena .
You 'll notice that the legs are plywood legs and the canoe structure is still there .
BJ : And the two manipulators are inside .
But we didn 't realize at the time that we actually needed a third manipulator , because we couldn 't manipulate the neck from inside and walk the horse at the same time .
AK : We started work on the prototype after the model was approved , and the prototype took a bit longer than we anticipated .
We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones .
And we had a crate built for it .
It had to be shipped to London .
We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town , and it got to midnight and we hadn 't done that yet .
BJ : So we got a camera , and we posed the puppet in various galloping stances .
And we sent it off to the National Theatre , hoping that they believed that we created something that worked .
AK : A month later , we were there in London with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us .
BJ : About 40 people .
AK : We were terrified .
We opened the lid , we took the horse out , and it did work ; it walked and it was able to be ridden .
Here I have an 18-second clip of the very first walk of the prototype .
This is in the National Theatre studio , the place where they cook new ideas .
It had by no means got the green light yet .
The choreographer , Toby Sedgwick , invented a beautiful sequence where the baby horse , which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs , grew up into the big horse .
And Nick Starr , the director of the National Theatre , saw that particular moment , he was standing next to me -- he nearly wet himself .
And so the show was given the green light .
And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely .
Here is the plan .
And here is our factory in Cape Town where we make horses .
You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there .
The horses are completely handmade .
There is very little 20th century technology in them .
We used a bit of laser cutting on the plywood and some of the aluminum pieces .
But because they have to be light and flexible , and each one of them is different , they can 't be mass-produced , unfortunately .
So here are some half-finished horses ready to be worked in London .
And now we would like to introduce you to Joey .
Joey boy , you there ?
Joey .
Joey .
Joey , come here .
No , no , I haven 't got it .
He 's got it ; it 's in his pocket .
BJ : Joey .
AK : Joey , Joey , Joey , Joey .
Come here . Stand here where people can see you .
Move around . Come on .
I 'd just like to describe -- I won 't talk too loud . He might get irritated .
Here , Craig is working the head .
He has bicycle brake cables going down to the head control in his hand .
Each one of them operates either an ear , separately , or the head , up and down .
But he also controls the head directly by using his hand .
The ears are obviously a very important emotional indicator of the horse .
When they point right back , the horse is fearful or angry , depending upon what 's going on in front of him , around him .
Or , when he 's more relaxed , the head comes down and the ears listen , either side .
Horses ' hearing is very important .
It 's almost more important than their eyesight .
Over here , Tommy 's got what you call the heart position .
He 's working the leg .
You see the string tendon from the hyena , the hyena 's front leg , automatically pulls the hoop up .
Horses are so unpredictable .
The way a hoof comes up with a horse immediately gives you the feeling that it 's a convincing horse action .
The hind legs have got the same action .
BJ : And Mikey also has , in his fingers , the ability to move the tail from left to right , and up and down with the other hand .
And together , there 's quite a complex possibility of tail expression .
AK : You want to say something about the breathing ?
BJ : We had a big challenge with breathing .
Adrian thought that he was going to have to split the chest of the puppet in two and make it breathe like that -- because that 's how a horse would breathe , with an expanded chest .
But we realized that , if that were to be happening , you wouldn 't , as an audience , see the breath .
So he made a channel in here , and the chest moves up and down in that channel .
So it 's anti-naturalistic really , the up and down movement , but it feels like breath .
And it 's very , very simple because all that happens is that the puppeteer breathes with his knees .
AK : Other emotional stuff .
If I were to touch the horse here on his skin , the heart puppeteer can shake the body from inside and get the skin to quiver .
You 'll notice , of course , that the puppet is made out of cane lines .
And I would like you to believe that it was an aesthetic choice , that I was making a three-dimensional drawing of a horse that somehow moves in space .
But of course , it was the cane is light , the cane is flexible , the cane is durable and the cane is moldable .
And so it was a very practical reason why it was made of cane .
The skin itself is made out of a see-through nylon mesh , which , if the lighting designer wants the horse to almost disappear , she can light the background and the horse becomes ghostlike .
You see the skeletal structure of it .
Or if you light it from above , it becomes more solid .
Again , that was a practical consideration .
The guys inside the horse have to be able to see out .
They have to be able to act along with their fellow actors in the production .
And it 's very much an in-the-moment activity that they 're engaged in .
It 's three heads making one character .
But now we would like you to put Joey through some paces .
And plant .
Thank you .
And now just -- All the way from sunny California we have Zem Joaquin who 's going to ride the horse for us .
So we would like to stress that the performance you see in the horse is three guys who have studied horse behavior incredibly thoroughly .
BJ : Not being able to talk to one another while they 're onstage because they 're mic 'd .
The sound that that very large chest makes , of the horse -- the whinnying and the nickering and everything -- that starts usually with one performer , carries on with a second person and ends with a third .
AK : Mikey Brett from Leicestershire .
Mikey Brett , Craig , Leo , Zem Joaquin and Basil and me .
Thank you . Thank you .
Amy Webb : How I hacked online dating
Amy Webb was having no luck with online dating . The dates she liked didn 't write her back , and her own profile attracted crickets . So , as any fan of data would do : she started making a spreadsheet . Hear the story of how she went on to hack her online dating life -- with frustrating , funny and life-changing results .
So my name is Amy Webb , and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion .
And I thought , you know , what 's wrong with me ?
I don 't understand why this keeps happening .
So I asked everybody in my life what they thought .
I turned to my grandmother , who always had plenty of advice , and she said , " Stop being so picky .
You 've got to date around .
And most importantly , true love will find you when you least expect it . "
Now as it turns out , I 'm somebody who thinks a lot about data , as you 'll soon find .
I am constantly swimming in numbers and formulas and charts .
I also have a very tight-knit family , and I 'm very , very close with my sister , and as a result , I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up .
So I 'm at the end of this bad breakup , I 'm 30 years old , I figure I 'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I 'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate , and we have to have that happen for a while before we can get engaged .
And if I want to start having children by the time I 'm 35 , that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago .
So that wasn 't going to work .
If my strategy was to least-expect my way into true love , then the variable that I had to deal with was serendipity .
In short , I was trying to figure out , well , what 's the probability of my finding Mr. Right ?
Well , at the time I was living in the city of Philadelphia , and it 's a big city , and I figured , in this entire place , there are lots of possibilities .
So again , I started doing some math .
Population of Philadelphia : It has 1.5 million people .
I figure about half of that are men , so that takes the number down to 750,000 .
I 'm looking for a guy between the ages of 30 and 36 , which was only four percent of the population , so now I 'm dealing with the possibility of 30,000 men .
I was looking for somebody who was Jewish , because that 's what I am and that was important to me .
That 's only 2.3 percent of the population .
I figure I 'm attracted to maybe one out of 10 of those men , and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer .
So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia .
In the meantime , my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children , and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already .
So if I have two possible strategies at this point I 'm sort of figuring out .
One , I can take my grandmother 's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 35 possible men in the entire 1.5 million-person city of Philadelphia , or I could try online dating .
Now , I like the idea of online dating , because it 's predicated on an algorithm , and that 's really just a simple way of saying I 've got a problem , I 'm going to use some data , run it through a system and get to a solution .
So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other , but as it turns out , algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture .
In fact , in Judaism , there were matchmakers a long time ago , and though they didn 't have an explicit algorithm per se , they definitely were running through formulas in their heads , like , is the girl going to like the boy ?
Are the families going to get along ?
What 's the rabbi going to say ?
Are they going to start having children right away ?
And the matchmaker would sort of think through all of this , put two people together , and that would be the end of it .
So in my case , I thought , well , will data and an algorithm lead me to my Prince Charming ?
So I decided to sign on .
Now , there was one small catch .
As I 'm signing on to the various dating websites , as it happens , I was really , really busy .
But that actually wasn 't the biggest problem .
The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind , and I certainly don 't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes .
So I just copied and pasted from my résumé .
So in the descriptive part up top , I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker .
When I was asked about fun activities and my ideal date , I said monetization and fluency in Japanese .
I talked a lot about JavaScript .
So obviously this was not the best way to put my most sexy foot forward .
But the real failure was that there were plenty of men for me to date .
These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates -- what turned out to be truly awful dates .
There was this guy Steve , the I.T. guy .
The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets , we share a love of math and data and ' 80s music , and so I agreed to go out with him .
So Steve the I.T. guy invited me out to one of Philadelphia 's white-table-cloth , extremely expensive restaurants .
And we went in , and right off the bat , our conversation really wasn 't taking flight , but he was ordering a lot of food .
In fact , he didn 't even bother looking at the menu .
He was ordering multiple appetizers , multiple entrées , for me as well , and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table , also lots and lots of bottles of wine .
So we 're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner , and I 've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other , but we 'll part ways as friends , when he gets up to go to the bathroom , and in the meantime the bill comes to our table .
And listen , I 'm a modern woman .
I am totally down with splitting the bill .
But then Steve the I.T. guy didn 't come back .
And that was my entire month 's rent .
So needless to say , I was not having a good night .
So I run home , I call my mother , I call my sister , and as I do , at the end of each one of these terrible , terrible dates , I regale them with the details .
And they say to me , " Stop complaining . "
" You 're just being too picky . "
So I said , fine , from here on out I 'm only going on dates where I know that there 's wi-fi , and I 'm bringing my laptop .
I 'm going to shove it into my bag , and I 'm going to have this email template , and I 'm going to fill it out and collect information on all these different data points during the date to prove to everybody that empirically , these dates really are terrible .
So I started tracking things like really stupid , awkward , sexual remarks ; bad vocabulary ; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him .
So I started to crunch some numbers , and that allowed me to make some correlations .
So as it turns out , for some reason , men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately .
Well , it turns out that these probably weren 't bad guys .
There were just bad for me .
And as it happens , the algorithms that were setting us up , they weren 't bad either .
These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do , which was to take our user-generated information , in my case , my résumé , and match it up with other people 's information .
See , the real problem here is that , while the algorithms work just fine , you and I don 't , when confronted with blank windows where we 're supposed to input our information online .
Very few of us have the ability to be totally and brutally honest with ourselves .
The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like , are you a dog person or a cat person ?
Do you like horror films or romance films ?
I 'm not looking for a pen pal .
I 'm looking for a husband . Right ?
So there 's a certain amount of superficiality in that data .
So I said fine , I 've got a new plan .
I 'm going to keep using these online dating sites , but I 'm going to treat them as databases , and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up , I think I 'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system .
So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people , I decided instead to ask my own questions .
What was every single possible thing that I could think of that I was looking for in a mate ?
So I started writing and writing and writing , and at the end , I had amassed 72 different data points .
I wanted somebody was Jew ... ish , so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture , but wasn 't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday .
I wanted somebody who worked hard , because work for me is extremely important , but not too hard .
For me , the hobbies that I have are really just new work projects that I 've launched .
I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children , but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do , so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three , and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it .
So things like that , but I also wanted somebody who would go to far-flung , exotic places , like Petra , Jordan .
I also wanted somebody who would weigh 20 pounds more than me at all times , regardless of what I weighed .
So I now have these 72 different data points , which , to be fair , is a lot .
So what I did was , I went through and I prioritized that list .
I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points , and I ranked everything starting at 100 and going all the way down to 91 , and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart , who would challenge and stimulate me , and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points .
These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers .
So once I had all this done , I then built a scoring system , because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me .
I figured there would be a minimum of 700 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message .
For 900 points , I 'd agree to go out on a date , and I wouldn 't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 1,500 point threshold .
Well , as it turns out , this worked pretty well .
So I go back online now .
I found Jewishdoc57 who 's incredibly good-looking , incredibly well-spoken , he had hiked Mt . Fuji , he had walked along the Great Wall .
He likes to travel as long as it doesn 't involve a cruise ship .
And I thought , I 've done it !
I 've cracked the code .
I have just found the Jewish Prince Charming of my family 's dreams .
There was only one problem : He didn 't like me back .
And I guess the one variable that I haven 't considered is the competition .
Who are all of the other women on these dating sites ?
I found SmileyGirl1978 .
She said she was a " fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing . "
She listed her job as teacher .
She said she is " silly , nice and friendly . "
She likes to make people laugh " alot . "
At this moment I knew , clicking after profile after profile after profile that looked like this , that I needed to do some market research .
So I created 10 fake male profiles .
Now , before I lose all of you -- -- understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system .
I didn 't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody .
I really was just scraping their data .
But I didn 't want everybody 's data .
I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really , really wanted to marry .
When I released these men into the wild , I did follow some rules .
So I didn 't reach out to any woman first .
I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract , and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets .
So I was looking at qualitative data , so what was the humor , the tone , the voice , the communication style that these women shared in common ?
And also quantitative data , so what was the average length of their profile , how much time was spent between messages ?
What I was trying to get at here was that I figured in person , I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl1978 .
I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online .
Well , one month later , I had a lot of data , and I was able to do another analysis .
And as it turns out , content matters a lot .
So smart people tend to write a lot -- 3,000 , 4,000 , 5,000 words about themselves , which may all be very , very interesting .
The challenge here , though , is that the popular men and women are sticking to 97 words on average that are written very , very well , even though it may not seem like it all the time .
The other sort of hallmark of the people who do this well is that they 're using non-specific language .
So in my case , you know , " The English Patient " is my most favorite movie ever , but it doesn 't work to use that in a profile , because that 's a superficial data point , and somebody may disagree with me and decide they don 't want to go out with me because they didn 't like sitting through the three-hour movie .
Also , optimistic language matters a lot .
So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women , words like " fun " and " girl " and " love . "
And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile .
Remember , I 'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that .
The difference is that it 's about being more approachable and helping people understand the best way to reach out to you .
And as it turns out , timing is also really , really important .
Just because you have access to somebody 's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it 's 2 o 'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake , doesn 't mean that that 's a good time to communicate with those people .
The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication .
And that 's what we would normally do in the usual process of courtship .
And finally , there were the photos .
All of the women who were popular showed some skin .
They all looked really great , which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded .
Once I had all of this information , I was able to create a super profile , so it was still me , but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem .
And as it turns out , I did a really good job .
I was the most popular person online .
And as it turns out , lots and lots of men wanted to date me .
So I call my mom , I call my sister , I call my grandmother .
I 'm telling them about this fabulous news , and they say , " This is wonderful !
How soon are you going out ? "
And I said , " Well , actually , I 'm not going to go out with anybody . "
Because remember , in my scoring system , they have to reach a minimum threshold of 700 points , and none of them have done that .
They said , " What ? You 're still being too damn picky . "
Well , not too long after that , I found this guy , Thevenin , and he said that he was culturally Jewish , he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter , which I thought was very clever .
He talked in detail about travel .
He made a lot of really interesting cultural references .
He looked and talked exactly like what I wanted , and immediately , he scored 850 points .
It was enough for a date .
Three weeks later , we met up in person for what turned out to be a 14-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant , and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him -- [ 1,050 points ! ] -- thought , you know what , this entire time I haven 't been picky enough .
Well , a year and a half after that , we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra , Jordan , when he got down on his knee and proposed .
A year after that , we were married , and about a year and a half after that , our daughter , Petra , was born .
Obviously , I 'm having a fabulous life , so -- -- the question is , what does all of this mean for you ?
Well , as it turns out , there is an algorithm for love .
It 's just not the ones that we 're being presented with online .
In fact , it 's something that you write yourself .
So whether you 're looking for a husband or a wife or you 're trying to find your passion or you 're trying to start a business , all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules , and feel free to be as picky as you want .
Well , on my wedding day , I had a conversation again with my grandmother , and she said , " All right , maybe I was wrong .
It looks like you did come up with a really , really great system .
Now , your matzoh balls .
They should be fluffy , not hard . "
And I 'll take her advice on that .
Richard Seymour : How beauty feels
A story , a work of art , a face , a designed object -- how do we tell that something is beautiful ? And why does it matter so much to us ? Designer Richard Seymour explores our response to beauty and the surprising power of objects that exhibit it .
When I was little -- and by the way , I was little once -- my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker .
And what this guy had done : he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches .
And one day , one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he 'd bought .
And the guy took it apart , and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels .
And as he did so , his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving , were words .
And he said to the guy , " Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see ? "
And the watchmaker turned around and said , " God can see it . "
Now I 'm not in the least bit religious , neither was my father , but at that point , I noticed something happening here .
I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves , and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere , I guess .
But I felt something .
And it was a physiological response .
And from that point on , from my age at the time , I began to think of things in a different way .
And as I took on my career as a designer , I began to ask myself the simple question : Do we actually think beauty , or do we feel it ?
Now you probably know the answer to this already .
You probably think , well , I don 't know which one you think it is , but I think it 's about feeling beauty .
And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things .
One of the most early work was done in automotive design -- some very exciting work was done there .
And during a lot of this work , we found something , or I found something , that really fascinated me , and maybe you can remember it .
Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off , click click , when you closed the door in a car ?
And then somebody , I think it was BMW , introduced a light that went out slowly .
Remember that ?
I remember it clearly .
Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that ?
I remember sitting there thinking , this is fantastic .
In fact , I 've never found anybody that doesn 't like the light that goes out slowly .
I thought , well what the hell 's that about ?
So I started to ask myself questions about it .
And the first was , I 'd ask other people : " Do you like it ? " " Yes . "
" Why ? " And they 'd say , " Oh , it feels so natural , " or , " It 's nice . "
I thought , well that 's not good enough .
Can we cut down a little bit further , because , as a designer , I need the vocabulary , I need the keyboard , of how this actually works .
And so I did some experiments .
And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that -- light to dark in six seconds -- exactly that .
Do you know what it is ? Anyone ?
You see , using this bit , the thinky bit , the slow bit of the brain -- using that .
And this isn 't a think , it 's a feel .
And would you do me a favor ?
For the next 14 minutes or whatever it is , will you feel stuff ?
I don 't need you to think so much as I want you to feel it .
I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation .
And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater .
It 's actually just happened here -- light to dark in six seconds .
And when that happens , are you sitting there going , " No , the movie 's about to start , " or are you going , " That 's fantastic . I 'm looking forward to it .
I get a sense of anticipation " ?
Now I 'm not a neuroscientist .
I don 't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex .
But it might be .
Because the people I speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this .
And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don 't get it in the same way .
Everybody likes it , but some like it more than others .
So this leads me to think of this in a different way .
We 're not feeling it . We 're thinking beauty is in the limbic system -- if that 's not an outmoded idea .
These are the bits , the pleasure centers , and maybe what I 'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking .
The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit , the cortex .
They arrive first .
So how do we make that actually work ?
And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know , or what we 're going to learn , about something ?
This is one of the most beautiful things I know .
It 's a plastic bag .
And when I looked at it first , I thought , no , there 's no beauty in that .
Then I found out , post exposure , that this plastic bag if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff , that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure , potable drinking water .
And all of a sudden , this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me .
Now I 'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit .
Would you mind taking the brain out , and I just want you to feel something .
Look at that . What are you feeling about it ?
Is it beautiful ? Is it exciting ?
I 'm watching your faces very carefully .
There 's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that .
Maybe there 's an innocence to it .
Now I 'm going to tell you what it is . Are you ready ?
This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi , five years old , before she died of cancer to the spine .
It 's the last thing she did , the last physical act .
Look at that picture .
Look at the innocence . Look at the beauty in it .
Is it beautiful now ?
Stop . Stop . How do you feel ?
Where are you feeling this ?
I 'm feeling it here . I feel it here .
And I 'm watching your faces , because your faces are telling me something .
The lady over there is actually crying , by the way .
But what are you doing ?
I watch what people do .
I watch faces .
I watch reactions .
Because I have to know how people react to things .
And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty , something stupefyingly delicious , is what I call the OMG .
And by the way , there 's no pleasure in that face .
It 's not a " this is wonderful ! "
The eyebrows are doing this , the eyes are defocused , and the mouth is hanging open .
That 's not the expression of joy .
There 's something else in that .
There 's something weird happening .
So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in .
Poignancy is a word I love as a designer .
It means something triggering a big emotional response , often quite a sad emotional response , but it 's part of what we do .
It isn 't just about nice .
And this is the dilemma , this is the paradox , of beauty .
Sensorily , we 're taking in all sorts of things -- mixtures of things that are good , bad , exciting , frightening -- to come up with that sensorial exposure , that sensation of what 's going on .
Pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl 's drawing .
And also triumph , this sense of transcendence , this " I never knew that . Ah , this is something new . "
And that 's packed in there as well .
And as we assemble these tools , from a design point of view , I get terribly excited about it , because these are things , as we 've already said , they 're arriving at the brain , it would seem , before cognition , before we can manipulate them -- electrochemical party tricks .
Now what I 'm also interested in is : Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty ?
By that , I mean intrinsically beautiful things , just something that 's exquisitely beautiful , that 's universally beautiful .
Very hard to find . Maybe you 've got some examples of it .
Very hard to find something that , to everybody , is a very beautiful thing , without a certain amount of information packed in there before .
So a lot of it tends to be extrinsic .
It 's mediated by information before the comprehension .
Or the information 's added on at the back , like that little girl 's drawing that I showed you .
Now when talking about beauty you can 't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you .
And one of the most tedious ones , I think , was saying that beauty was about symmetry .
Well it obviously isn 't .
This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people , and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face .
And they found that it was almost exact coincidence .
So it wasn 't about symmetry .
In fact , this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face , of which both sides are beautiful .
But they 're both different .
And as a designer , I can 't help meddling with this , so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this , and tried to understand what the individual elements were , but feeling it as I go .
Now I can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if I look at that eye .
I 'm not getting it off the eyebrow .
So I don 't know how much this is helping me , but it 's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off .
And as I say , I 'm not a neuroscientist , but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements .
Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are , but as we are .
So I 'm going to shamelessly expose something to you , which is beautiful to me .
And this is the F1 MV Agusta .
Ahhhh .
It is really -- I mean , I can 't express to you how exquisite this object is .
But I also know why it 's exquisite to me , because it 's a palimpsest of things .
It 's masses and masses of layers .
This is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension .
It 's something much bigger .
Layer after layer of legend , sport , details that resonate .
I mean , if I just go through some of them now -- I know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects , and that does it consummately well , you can see it can .
So that 's getting me excited .
And I feel that here .
This bit , the big secret of automotive design -- reflection management .
It 's not about the shapes , it 's how the shapes reflect light .
Now that thing , light flickers across it as you move , so it becomes a kinetic object , even though it 's standing still -- managed by how brilliantly that 's done on the reflection .
This little relief on the footplate , by the way , to a rider means there 's something going on underneath it -- in this case , a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably , taking the power from the engine .
I 'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things .
Titanium lacquer on this .
I can 't tell you how wonderful this is .
That 's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel .
I 'm really getting into this now .
And of course , a racing bike doesn 't have a prop stand , but this one , because it 's a road bike , it all goes away and it folds into this little gap .
So it disappears .
And then I can 't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator , which is curved .
Why would you do that ?
Because I know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics .
So it 's more expensive , but it 's wonderful .
And to cap it all , brand royalty -- Agusta , Count Agusta , from the great histories of this stuff .
The bit that you can 't see is the genius that created this .
Massimo Tamburini .
They call him " The Plumber " in Italy , as well as " Maestro , " because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time .
There 's so little compromise on this , you can 't see it .
But unfortunately , the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty .
We have to deal with it .
So I have to work with a supply chain , and I 've got to work with the technologies , and I 've got to work with everything else all the time , and so compromises start to fit into it .
And so look at her .
I 've had to make a bit of a compromise there .
I 've had to move that part across , but only a millimeter .
No one 's noticed , have they yet ?
Did you see what I did ?
I moved three things by a millimeter .
Pretty ? Yes .
Beautiful ? Maybe lesser .
But then , of course , the consumer says that doesn 't really matter .
So that 's okay , isn 't it ?
Another millimeter ?
No one 's going to notice those split lines and changes .
It 's that easy to lose beauty , because beauty 's incredibly difficult to do .
And only a few people can do it .
And a focus group cannot do it .
And a team rarely can do it .
It takes a central cortex , if you like , to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time .
This is a beautiful water bottle -- some of you know of it -- done by Ross Lovegrove , the designer .
This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty . This one , as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this .
It 's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious .
I might like it more than you like it , because I know how bloody hard it is to do it .
It 's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that , that comes out of the tool correctly , that goes down the line without falling over .
Underneath this , like the story of the swan , is a million things very difficult to do .
So all hail to that .
It 's a fantastic example , a simple object .
And the one I showed you before was , of course , a massively complex one .
And they 're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it .
You all , I guess , like me , enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance .
And part of the joy of it is , you know the difficulty .
You also may be taking into account the fact that it 's incredibly painful .
Anybody seen a ballet dancer 's toes when they come out of the points ?
While she 's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you , something horrible 's going on down here .
The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what 's actually going on .
Now I 'm using microseconds wrongly here , so please ignore me .
But what I have to do now , feeling again , what I 've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes , of these triggers into something early on in the process , that you pick it up , not through your thinking , but through your feeling .
So we 're going to have a little experiment .
Right , are you ready ? I 'm going to show you something for a very , very brief moment .
Are you ready ? Okay .
Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash ?
It 's not .
Tell me something , did you think it was quick when you first saw it ? Yes you did .
Did you think it was modern ? Yes you did .
That blip , that information , shot into you before that .
And because your brain starter motor began there , now it 's got to deal with it .
And the great thing is , this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it 's green technology and it 's good for you and it 's light and it 's all part of the future .
So is that wrong ?
Well in this case it isn 't , because it 's a very , very ecologically-sound piece of technology .
But you 're a slave of that first flash .
We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second -- and that 's where much of my work has to win or lose , on a shelf in a shop .
It wins or loses at that point .
You may see 50 , 100 , 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it , but I have to work within that domain , to ensure that it gets you there first .
And finally , the layer that I love , of knowledge .
Some of you , I 'm sure , will be familiar with this .
What 's incredible about this , and the way I love to come back to it , is this is taking something that you hate or bores you , folding clothes , and if you can actually do this -- who can actually do this ? Anybody try to do this ?
Yeah ?
It 's fantastic , isn 't it ?
Look at that . Do you want to see it again ?
No time . It says I have two minutes left , so we can 't do this .
But just go to the Web , YouTube , pull it down , " folding T-shirt . "
That 's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your T-shirt .
You didn 't maybe know it .
But how do you feel about it ?
It feels fantastic when you do it , you look forward to doing it , and when you tell somebody else about it -- like you probably have -- you look really smart .
The knowledge bubble that sits around the outside , the stuff that costs nothing , because that knowledge is free -- bundle that together and where do we come out ?
Form follows function ?
Only sometimes . Only sometimes .
Form is function . Form is function .
It informs , it tells us , it supplies us answers before we 've even thought about it .
And so I 've stopped using words like " form , " and I 've stopped using words like " function " as a designer .
What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things .
Because if I can get that right , I can make them wonderful , and I can make them repeatedly wonderful .
And you know what those products and services are , because you own some of them .
They 're the things that you 'd snatch if the house was on fire .
Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it .
Thank you very much .
Tom Thum : The orchestra in my mouth
In a highly entertaining performance , beatboxer Tom Thum slings beats , comedy and a mouthful of instrumental impersonations into 11 minutes of creativity and fun that will make you smile .
My name is Tom , and I 've come here today to come clean about what I do for money .
Basically , I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash .
I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners , so this mightn 't be the most appropriate setting , but I 'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do .
And now , for my next number , I 'd like to return to the classics .
We 're going to take it back , way back , back into time .
Billie Jean is not my lover She 's just a girl who claims that I am the one But the kid is not my son All right .
Wassup .
Thank you very much , TEDx .
If you guys haven 't figured it out already , my name 's Tom Thum , and I 'm a beatboxer , which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice , and the only thing was my voice .
And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever .
And I 'm very , very stoked — You guys are just applauding for everything . It 's great .
Look at this , Mom ! I made it !
I 'm very , very stoked to be here today , representing my kinfolk and all those that haven 't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking .
Because it is a bit of a niche market , and there 's not much work going on , especially where I 'm from .
You know , I 'm from Brisbane , which is a great city to live in .
Yeah ! All right ! Most of Brisbane 's here . That 's good .
You know , I 'm from Brizzy , which is a great city to live in , but let 's be honest -- it 's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere .
So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia , and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world .
So I 'd like to share with you , if I may , my experiences .
So ladies and gentlemen , I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself .
We start our journey in the central deserts .
India .
China .
Germany .
Party , party , yeah .
And before we reach our final destination , ladies and gentlemen , I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane .
These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads , and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice .
For example , the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound , which gives me that -- -- flavor .
And the other ones here , I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that .
I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here .
TEDx .
I got way too much time on my hands .
And last but not least , the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice .
So with all that in mind , ladies and gentlemen , I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar .
All right boys , take it away .
Ladies and gentlemen , I 'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine , one of the greatest double bassists I know .
Mr. Smokey Jefferson , let 's take it for a walk . Come on , baby .
All right , ladies and gentlemen , I 'd like to introduce you to the star of the show , one of the greatest jazz legends of our time .
Music lovers and jazz lovers alike , please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom . Take it away .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Lesley Hazleton : On reading the Koran
Lesley Hazleton sat down one day to read the Koran . And what she found -- as a non-Muslim , a self-identified " tourist " in the Islamic holy book -- wasn 't what she expected . With serious scholarship and warm humor , Hazleton shares the grace , flexibility and mystery she found , in this myth-debunking talk . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
You may have heard about the Koran 's idea of paradise being 72 virgins , and I promise I will come back to those virgins .
But in fact , here in the northwest , we 're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise , defined 36 times as " gardens watered by running streams . "
Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union , this makes perfect sense to me .
But the thing is , how come it 's news to most people ?
I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who 've begun reading the Koran , but given up , disconcerted by its " otherness . "
The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world 's greatest heroes , yet even he called the Koran " as toilsome reading as I ever undertook , a wearisome , confused jumble . "
Part of the problem , I think , is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book -- as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach , as though God -- and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad -- were just another author on the bestseller list .
Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it 's so easy to quote -- that is , to misquote .
Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the " highlighter version , " which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes .
So this past spring , as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad , I realized I needed to read the Koran properly -- as properly as I could , that is .
My Arabic 's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary , so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side , verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic .
Now I did have an advantage .
My last book was about the story behind the Shi 'a-Sunni split , and for that I 'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories , so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers , its frame of reference .
I knew enough , that is , to know that I 'd be a tourist in the Koran -- an informed one , an experienced one even , but still an outsider , an agnostic Jew reading some else 's holy book .
So I read slowly .
I 'd set aside three weeks for this project , and that , I think , is what is meant by " hubris " -- -- because it turned out to be three months .
I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are .
But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran -- that feeling of " I get it now " -- it would slip away overnight , wondering if I wasn 't lost in a strange land , and yet the terrain was very familiar .
The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels .
So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham , Moses , Joseph , Mary , Jesus .
God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh -- jealously insisting on no other gods .
The presence of camels , mountains , desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert .
And then there was the language , the rhythmic cadence of it , reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory .
And I began to grasp why it 's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic .
Take the Fatihah , the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord 's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined .
It 's just 29 words in Arabic , but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation .
And yet the more you add , the more seems to go missing .
The Arabic has an incantatory , almost hypnotic , quality that begs to be heard rather than read , felt more than analyzed .
It wants to be chanted out loud , to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue .
So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself , or as Arthur Arberry called his version , " an interpretation . "
But all is not lost in translation .
As the Koran promises , patience is rewarded , and there are many surprises -- a degree of environmental awareness , for instance , and of humans as mere stewards of God 's creation , unmatched in the Bible .
And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men , using the second and third person masculine , the Koran includes women -- talking , for instance , of believing men and believing women , honorable men and honorable women .
Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers .
Yes , it does say that , but in a very specific context : the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden , and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers .
Not " You must kill unbelievers in Mecca , " but only after a grace period is over and only if there 's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba , and only if they attack you first .
And even then -- God is merciful ; forgiveness is supreme -- and so , essentially , better if you don 't .
This was perhaps the biggest surprise -- how flexible the Koran is , at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible .
" Some of these verses are definite in meaning , " it says , " and others are ambiguous . "
The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities , trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own .
Only God knows the true meaning .
The phrase " God is subtle " appears again and again , and indeed , the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe .
As in , for instance , that little matter of virgins and paradise .
Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here .
The word used four times is Houris , rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts , or as fair , high-bosomed virgins .
Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word : Houris .
Not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight .
Now this may be a way of saying " pure beings " -- like in angels -- or it may be like the Greek Kouros or Kórē , an eternal youth .
But the truth is nobody really knows , and that 's the point .
Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you 'll be " a new creation in paradise " and that you will be " recreated in a form unknown to you , " which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin .
And that number 72 never appears .
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran .
That idea only came into being 300 years later , and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps .
Paradise is quite the opposite .
It 's not virginity ; it 's fecundity .
It 's plenty .
It 's gardens watered by running streams .
Thank you .
Eddi Reader : " What You 've Got "
Singer / songwriter Eddi Reader performs " What You Do With What You 've Got , " a meditation on a very TED theme : how to use your gifts and talents to make a difference . With Thomas Dolby on piano .
This song is one of Thomas ' favorites , called " What You Do with What You 've Got . "
You must know someone like him He was tall and strong and lean With a body like a greyhound and a mind so sharp and keen But his heart , just like laurel grew twisted around itself Till almost everything he did brought pain to someone else It 's not just what you 're born with It 's what you choose to bear It 's not how big your share is It 's how much you can share It 's not the fights you dreamed of It 's those you really fought It 's not what you 've been given It 's what you do with what you 've got What 's the use of two strong legs if you only run away ? And what 's the use of the finest voice if you 've nothing good to say ? What 's the use of strength and muscle if you only push and shove ? And what 's the use of two good ears if you can 't hear those you love ? What 's the use of two strong legs if you only run away ? And what 's the use of the finest voice if you 've nothing good to say ? What 's the use of strength and muscle if you only push and shove ? And what 's the use of two good ears if you can 't hear those you love ? Between those who use their neighbors and those who use the cane Between those in constant power and those in constant pain Between those who run to glory and those who cannot run Tell me which ones are the cripples and which ones touch the sun Which ones touch the sun Which ones touch the sun Thank you very much .
Karen Tse : How to stop torture
Political prisoners aren 't the only ones being tortured -- the vast majority of judicial torture happens in ordinary cases , even in ' functioning ' legal systems . Social activist Karen Tse shows how we can , and should , stand up and end the use of routine torture .
In 1994 , I walked into a prison in Cambodia , and I met a 12-year-old boy who had been tortured and was denied access to counsel .
And as I looked into his eyes , I realized that for the hundreds of letters I had written for political prisoners , that I would never have written a letter for him , because he was not a 12-year-old boy who had done something important for anybody .
He was not a political prisoner .
He was a 12-year-old boy who had stolen a bicycle .
What I also realized at that point was that it was not only Cambodia , but of the 113 developing countries that torture , 93 of these countries have all passed laws that say you have a right to a lawyer and you have a right not to be tortured .
And what I recognized was that there was an incredible window of opportunity for us as a world community to come together and end torture as an investigative tool .
We often think of torture as being political torture or reserved for just the worst , but , in fact , 95 percent of torture today is not for political prisoners .
It is for people who are in broken-down legal systems , and unfortunately because torture is the cheapest form of investigation -- it 's cheaper than having a legal system , cheaper than having a lawyer and early access to counsel -- it is what happens most of the time .
I believe today that it is possible for us as a world community , if we make a decision , to come together and end torture as an investigative tool in our lifetime , but it will require three things .
First is the training , empowerment , and connection of defenders worldwide .
The second is insuring that there is systematic early access to counsel .
And the third is commitment .
So in the year 2000 , I began to wonder , what if we came together ?
Could we do something for these 93 countries ?
And I founded International Bridges to Justice which has a specific mission of ending torture as an investigative tool and implementing due process rights in the 93 countries by placing trained lawyers at an early stage in police stations and in courtrooms .
My first experiences , though , did come from Cambodia , and at the time I remember first coming to Cambodia and there were , in 1994 , still less than 10 attorneys in the country because the Khmer Rouge had killed them all .
And even 20 years later , there was only 10 lawyers in the country , so consequently you 'd walk into a prison and not only would you meet 12-year-old boys , you 'd meet women and you 'd say , " Why are you here ? " Women would say , " Well I 've been here for 10 years because my husband committed a crime , but they can 't find him . "
So it 's just a place where there was no rule of law .
The first group of defenders came together and I still remember , as I was training , I said , " Okay , what do you do for an investigation ? "
And there was silence in the class , and finally one woman stood up , [ inaudible name ] , and she said " Khrew , " which means " teacher . "
She said , " I have defended more than a hundred people , and I 've never had to do any investigation , because they all come with confessions . "
And we talked about , as a class , the fact that number one , the confessions might not be reliable , but number two , we did not want to encourage the police to keep doing this , especially as it was now against the law .
And it took a lot of courage for these defenders to decide that they would begin to stand up and support each other in implementing these laws .
And I still remember the first cases where they came , all 25 together , she would stand up , and they were in the back , and they would support her , and the judges kept saying , " No , no , no , no , we 're going to do things the exact same way we 've been doing them . "
But one day the perfect case came , and it was a woman who was a vegetable seller , she was sitting outside of a house .
She said she actually saw the person run out who she thinks stole whatever the jewelry was , but the police came , they got her , there was nothing on her .
She was pregnant at the time . She had cigarette burns on her . She 'd miscarried .
And when they brought her case to the judge , for the first time he stood up and he said , " Yes , there 's no evidence except for your torture confession and you will be released . "
And the defenders began to take cases over and over again and you will see , they have step by step began to change the course of history in Cambodia .
But Cambodia is not alone .
I used to think , well is it Cambodia ?
Or is it other countries ?
But it is in so many countries .
In Burundi I walked into a prison and it wasn 't a 12-year-old boy , it was an 8-year-old boy for stealing a mobile phone .
Or a woman , I picked up her baby , really cute baby , I said " Your baby is so cute . "
It wasn 't a baby , she was three .
And she said " Yeah , but she 's why I 'm here , " because she was accused of stealing two diapers and an iron for her baby and still had been in prison .
And when I walked up to the prison director , I said , " You 've got to let her out .
A judge would let her out . "
And he said , " Okay , we can talk about it , but look at my prison . Eighty percent of the two thousand people here are without a lawyer . What can we do ? "
So lawyers began to courageously stand up together to organize a system where they can take cases .
But we realized that it 's not only the training of the lawyers , but the connection of the lawyers that makes a difference .
For example , in Cambodia , it was that [ inaudible name ] did not go alone but she had 24 lawyers with her who stood up together . And in the same way , in China , they always tell me , " It 's like a fresh wind in the desert when we can come together . "
Or in Zimbabwe , where I remember Innocent , after coming out of a prison where everybody stood up and said , " I 've been here for one year , eight years , 12 years without a lawyer , " he came and we had a training together and he said , " I have heard it said " -- because he had heard people mumbling and grumbling -- " I have heard it said that we cannot help to create justice because we do not have the resources . "
And then he said , " But I want you to know that the lack of resources is never an excuse for injustice . "
And with that , he successfully organized 68 lawyers who have been systematically taking the cases .
The key that we see , though , is training and then early access .
I was recently in Egypt , and was inspired to meet with another group of lawyers , and what they told me is that they said , " Hey , look , we don 't have police on the streets now . The police are one of the main reasons why we had the revolution . They were torturing everybody all the time . "
And I said , " But there 's been tens of millions of dollars that have recently gone in to the development of the legal system here .
What 's going on ? "
I met with one of the development agencies , and they were training prosecutors and judges , which is the normal bias , as opposed to defenders .
And they showed me a manual which actually was an excellent manual .
I said , " I 'm gonna copy this . "
It had everything in it . Lawyers can come at the police station . It was perfect .
Prosecutors were perfectly trained .
But I said to them , " I just have one question , which is , by the time that everybody got to the prosecutor 's office , what had happened to them ? "
And after a pause , they said , " They had been tortured . "
So the pieces are , not only the training of the lawyers , but us finding a way to systematically implement early access to counsel , because they are the safeguard in the system for people who are being tortured .
And as I tell you this , I 'm also aware of the fact that it sounds like , " Oh , okay , it sounds like we could do it , but can we really do it ? "
Because it sounds big .
And there are many reasons why I believe it 's possible .
The first reason is the people on the ground who find ways of creating miracles because of their commitment .
It 's not only Innocent , who I told you about in Zimbabwe , but defenders all over the world who are looking for these pieces .
We have a program called JusticeMakers , and we realized there are people that are courageous and want to do things , but how can we support them ?
So it 's an online contest where it 's only five thousand dollars if you come up with and innovative way of implementing justice .
And there are 30 JusticeMakers throughout the world , from Sri Lanka to Swaziland to the DRC , who with five thousand dollars do amazing things , through SMS programs , through paralegal programs , through whatever they can do .
And it 's not only these JusticeMakers , but people we courageously see figure out who their networks are and how they can move it forward .
So in China , for instance , great laws came out where it says police cannot torture people or they will be punished .
And I was sitting side by side with one of our very courageous lawyers , and said , " How can we get this out ? How can we make sure that this is implemented ?
This is fantastic . " And he said to me , " Well , do you have money ? " And I said , " No . " And he said , " That 's okay , we can still figure it out . "
And on December 4 , he organized three thousand members of the Youth Communist League , from 14 of the top law schools , who organized themselves , developed posters with the new laws , and went to the police stations and began what he says is a non-violent legal revolution to protect citizen rights .
So I talked about the fact that we need to train and support defenders .
We need to systematically implement early access to counsel .
But the third and most important thing is that we make a commitment to this .
And people often say to me , " You know , this is great , but it 's wildly idealistic .
Never going to happen . "
And the reason that I think that those words are interesting is because those were the same kinds of words that were used for people who decided they would end slavery , or end apartheid .
It began with a small group of people who decided they would commit .
Now , there 's one of our favorite poems from the defenders , which they share from each other , is : " Take courage friends , the road is often long , the path is never clear , and the stakes are very high , but deep down , you are not alone . "
And I believe that if we can come together as a world community to support not only defenders , but also everyone in the system who is looking towards it , we can end torture as an investigative tool .
I end always , because I 'm sure the questions are -- and I 'd be happy to talk to you at any point -- " But what can I really do ? "
Well , I would say this . First of all , you know what you can do . But second of all , I would leave you with the story of Vishna , who actually was my inspiration for starting International Bridges to Justice .
Vishna was a 4-year-old boy when I met him who was born in a Cambodian prison in Kandal Province . But because he was born in the prison , everybody loved him , including the guards , so he was the only one who was allowed to come in and out of the bars .
So , you know , there 's bars . And by the time that Vishna was getting bigger , which means what gets bigger ? Your head gets bigger .
So he would come to the first bar , the second bar and then the third bar , and then really slowly move his head so he could fit through , and come back , third , second , first . And he would grab my pinkie , because what he wanted to do every day is he wanted to go visit .
You know , he never quite made it to all of them every day , but he wanted to visit all 156 prisoners . And I would lift him , and he would put his fingers through .
Or if they were dark cells , it was like iron corrugated , and he would put his fingers through .
And most of the prisoners said that he was their greatest joy and their sunshine , and they looked forward to him . And I was like , here 's Vishna . He 's a 4-year-old boy .
He was born in a prison with almost nothing , no material goods , but he had a sense of his own heroic journey , which I believe we are all born into . He said , " Probably I can 't do everything .
But I 'm one . I can do something .
And I will do the one thing that I can do . "
So I thank you for having the prophetic imagination to imagine the shaping of a new world with us together , and invite you into this journey with us .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Kim Gorgens : Protecting the brain against concussion
In a lively talk , neuropsychologist Kim Gorgens makes the case for better protecting our brains against the risk of concussion -- with a compelling pitch for putting helmets on kids . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So , a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist : I had a baby .
And that 's not to say I ever went on to become a brilliant , world-class neuropsychologist .
But I did go on to be a reasonably astute , arguably world-class worrier .
One of my girlfriends in graduate school , Marie , said , " Kim , I figured it out .
It 's not that you 're more neurotic than everyone else ; it 's just that you 're more honest about how neurotic you are . "
So in the spirit of full disclosure , I brought some pictures to share .
Awwww .
I 'll just say , July .
Zzzzzzip for safety .
Water wings -- an inch of water .
And then , finally , all suited up for the 90-minute drive to Copper Mountain .
So you can get kind of a feel for this .
So my baby , Vander , is eight years old now .
And , despite being cursed with my athletic inability , he plays soccer .
He 's interested in playing football .
He wants to learn how to ride a unicycle .
So why would I worry ?
Because this is what I do . This is what I teach .
It 's what I study . It 's what I treat .
And I know that kids get concussed every year .
In fact , more than four million people sustain a concussion every year , and these data are just among kids under 14 who were seen in emergency rooms .
And so when kids sustain a concussion , we talk about them getting dinged or getting their bell rung , but what is it that we 're really talking about ?
Let 's take a look .
All right . " Starsky and Hutch , " arguably , yes .
So a car accident .
Forty miles an hour into a fixed barrier -- 35 Gs .
A heavy weight boxer punches you straight in the face -- 58 Gs .
In case you missed it , we 'll look again .
So look to the right-hand side of the screen .
What would you say ?
How many Gs ?
Close .
Seventy-two .
Would it be crazy to know , 103 Gs .
The average concussive impact is 95 Gs .
Now , when the kid on the right doesn 't get up , we know they 've had a concussion .
But how about the kid on the left , or the athlete that leaves the field of play ?
How do we know if he or she has sustained a concussion ?
How do we know that legislation that would require that they be pulled from play , cleared for return to play , applies to them ?
The definition of concussion doesn 't actually require a loss of consciousness .
It requires only a change in consciousness , and that can be any one of a number of symptoms , including feeling foggy , feeling dizzy , hearing a ringing in your ear , being more impulsive or hostile than usual .
So given all of that and given how darn neurotic I am , how do I get any sleep at all ?
Because I know our brains are resilient .
They 're designed to recover from an injury .
If , God forbid , any of us left here tonight and sustained a concussion , most of us would go on to fully recover inside of a couple hours to a couple of weeks .
But kids are more vulnerable to brain injury .
In fact , high school athletes are three times more likely to sustain catastrophic injuries relative even to their college-age peers , and it takes them longer to return to a symptom-free baseline .
After that first injury , their risk for second injury is exponentially greater .
From there , their risk for a third injury , greater still , and so on .
And here 's the really alarming part : we don 't fully understand the long-term impact of multiple injuries .
You guys may be familiar with this research that 's coming out of the NFL .
In a nutshell , this research suggests that among retired NFL players with three or more career concussions , the incidents of early-onset dementing disease is much greater than it is for the general population .
So you 've all seen that -- New York Times , you 've seen it .
What you may not be familiar with is that this research was spearheaded by NFL wives who said , " Isn 't it weird that my 46-year-old husband is forever losing his keys ?
Isn 't it weird that my 47-year-old husband is forever losing the car ?
Isn 't it weird that my 48-year-old husband is forever losing his way home in the car , from the driveway ? "
So I may have forgotten to mention that my son is an only child .
So it 's going to be really important that he be able to drive me around some day .
So how do we guarantee the safety of our kids ?
How can we 100 percent guarantee the safety of our kids ?
Let me tell you what I 've come up with .
If only .
My little boy 's right there , and he 's like , " She 's not kidding .
She 's totally not kidding . "
So in all seriousness , should my kid play football ?
Should your kid play football ? I don 't know .
But I do know there are three things you can do .
The first : study up .
You have to be familiar with the issues we 're talking about today .
There are some great resources out there .
The CDC has a program , Heads Up .
It 's at CDC.gov.
Heads Up is specific to concussion in kids .
The second is a resource I 'm personally really proud of .
We 've just rolled this out in the last couple months -- CO Kids With Brain Injury .
This is a great resource for student athletes , teachers , parents , professionals , athletic and coaching staff .
It 's a great place to start if you have questions .
The second thing is : speak up .
Just two weeks ago , a bill introduced by Senator Kefalas that would have required athletes , kids under 18 , to wear a helmet when they 're riding their bike died in committee .
It died in large part because it lacked constituent buy-in ; it lacked stakeholder traction .
Now I 'm not here to tell you what kind of legislation you should or shouldn 't support , but I am going to tell you that , if it matters to you , your legislators need to know that .
Speak up also with coaching staff .
Ask about what kind of protective equipment is available .
What 's the budget for protective equipment ?
How old it is ?
Maybe offer to spearhead a fundraiser to buy new gear -- which brings us to suit up .
Wear a helmet .
The only way to prevent a bad outcome is to prevent that first injury from happening .
Recently , one of my graduate students , Tom said , " Kim , I 've decided to wear a bike helmet on my way to class . "
And Tom knows that that little bit of foam in a bike helmet can reduce the G-force of impact by half .
Now I thought that it was because I have this totally compelling helmet crusade , right , this epiphany of Tom 's .
As it turns out , it occurred to Tom that a $ 20 helmet is a good way to protect a $ 100,000 graduate education .
So , should Vander play football ?
I can 't say no , but I can guarantee that every time he leaves the house that kid 's wearing a helmet -- like to the car , or at school .
So whether athlete , scholar , over-protected kid , neurotic mom , or otherwise , here 's my baby , Vander , reminding you to mind your matter .
Thank you .
Ellen ' t Hoen : Pool medical patents , save lives
Patenting a new drug helps finance its immense cost to develop -- but that same patent can put advanced treatments out of reach for sick people in developing nations , at deadly cost . Ellen ' t Hoen talks about an elegant , working solution to the problem : the Medicines Patent Pool . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
In 2002 , a group of treatment activists met to discuss the early development of the airplane .
The Wright Brothers , in the beginning of the last century , had for the first time managed to make one of those devices fly .
They also had taken out numerous patents on essential parts of the airplane .
They were not the only ones .
That was common practice in the industry , and those who held patents on airplanes were defending them fiercely and suing competitors left and right .
This actually wasn 't so great for the development of the aviation industry , and this was at a time that in particular the U.S. government was interested in ramping up the production of military airplanes .
So there was a bit of a conflict there .
The U.S. government decided to take action , and forced those patent holders to make their patents available to share with others to enable the production of airplanes .
So what has this got to do with this ?
In 2002 , Nelson Otwoma , a Kenyan social scientist , discovered he had HIV and needed access to treatment .
He was told that a cure did not exist .
AIDS , he heard , was lethal , and treatment was not offered . This was at a time that treatment actually existed in rich countries .
AIDS had become a chronic disease .
People in our countries here in Europe , in North America , were living with HIV , healthy lives .
Not so for Nelson . He wasn 't rich enough , and not so for his three-year-old son , who he discovered a year later also had HIV .
Nelson decided to become a treatment activist and join up with other groups .
In 2002 , they were facing a different battle .
Prices for ARVs , the drugs needed to treat HIV , cost about 12,000 [ dollars ] per patient per year .
The patents on those drugs were held by a number of Western pharmaceutical companies that were not necessarily willing to make those patents available .
When you have a patent , you can exclude anyone else from making , from producing or making low-cost versions , for example , available of those medications .
Clearly this led to patent wars breaking out all over the globe .
Luckily , those patents did not exist everywhere .
There were countries that did not recognize pharmaceutical product patents , such as India , and Indian pharmaceutical companies started to produce so-called generic versions , low-cost copies of antiretroviral medicines , and make them available in the developing world , and within a year the price had come down from 10,000 dollars per patient per year to 350 dollars per patient per year , and today that same triple pill cocktail is available for 60 dollars per patient per year , and of course that started to have an enormous effect on the number of people who could afford access to those medicines .
Treatment programs became possible , funding became available , and the number of people on antiretroviral drugs started to increase very rapidly .
Today , eight million people have access to antiretroviral drugs .
Thirty-four million are infected with HIV .
Never has this number been so high , but actually this is good news , because what it means is people stop dying .
People who have access to these drugs stop dying .
And there 's something else .
They also stop passing on the virus .
This is fairly recent science that has shown that .
What that means is we have the tools to break the back of this epidemic .
So what 's the problem ?
Well , things have changed .
First of all , the rules have changed .
Today , all countries are obliged to provide patents for pharmaceuticals that last at least 20 years .
This is as a result of the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization .
So what India did is no longer possible .
Second , the practice of patent-holding companies have changed .
Here you see the patent practices before the World Trade Organization 's rules , before ' 95 , before antiretroviral drugs .
This is what you see today , and this is in developing countries , so what that means is , unless we do something deliberate and unless we do something now , we will very soon be faced with another drug price crisis , because new drugs are developed , new drugs go to market , but these medicines are patented in a much wider range of countries .
So unless we act , unless we do something today , we will soon be faced [ with ] what some have termed the treatment time bomb .
It isn 't only the number of drugs that are patented .
There 's something else that can really scare generic manufacturers away .
This shows you a patent landscape .
This is the landscape of one medicine .
So you can imagine that if you are a generic company about to decide whether to invest in the development of this product , unless you know that the licenses to these patents are actually going to be available , you will probably choose to do something else .
Again , deliberate action is needed .
So surely if a patent pool could be established to ramp up the production of military airplanes , we should be able to do something similar to tackle the HIV / AIDS epidemic .
And we did .
In 2010 , UNITAID established the Medicines Patent Pool for HIV .
And this is how it works : Patent holders , inventors that develop new medicines patent those inventions , but make those patents available to the Medicines Patent Pool . The Medicines Patent Pool then license those out to whoever needs access to those patents .
That can be generic manufacturers .
It can also be not-for-profit drug development agencies , for example .
Those manufacturers can then sell those medicines at much lower cost to people who need access to them , to treatment programs that need access to them .
They pay royalties over the sales to the patent holders , so they are remunerated for sharing their intellectual property .
There is one key difference with the airplane patent pool .
The Medicines Patent Pool is a voluntary mechanism .
The airplane patent holders were not left a choice whether they 'd license their patents or not .
They were forced to do so .
That is something that the Medicines Patent Pool cannot do .
It relies on the willingness of pharmaceutical companies to license their patents and make them available for others to use .
Today , Nelson Otwoma is healthy .
He has access to antiretroviral drugs .
His son will soon be 14 years old .
Nelson is a member of the expert advisory group of the Medicines Patent Pool , and he told me not so long ago , " Ellen , we rely in Kenya and in many other countries on the Medicines Patent Pool to make sure that new medicines also become available to us , that new medicines , without delay , become available to us . "
And this is no longer fantasy .
Already , I 'll give you an example .
In August of this year , the United States drug agency approved a new four-in-one AIDS medication .
The company , Gilead , that holds the patents , has licensed the intellectual property to the Medicines Patent Pool .
The pool is already working today , two months later , with generic manufacturers to make sure that this product can go to market at low cost where and when it is needed . This is unprecedented .
This has never been done before .
The rule is about a 10-year delay for a new product to go to market in developing countries , if at all .
This has never been seen before .
Nelson 's expectations are very high , and quite rightly so . He and his son will need access to the next generation of antiretrovirals and the next , throughout their lifetime , so that he and many others in Kenya and other countries can continue to live healthy , active lives .
Now we count on the willingness of drug companies to make that happen . We count on those companies that understand that it is in the interest , not only in the interest of the global good , but also in their own interest , to move from conflict to collaboration , and through the Medicines Patent Pool they can make that happen .
They can also choose not to do that , but those that go down that road may end up in a similar situation the Wright brothers ended up with early last century , facing forcible measures by government . So they 'd better jump now .
Thank you .
David Deutsch : Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars
Legendary scientist David Deutsch puts theoretical physics on the back burner to discuss a more urgent matter : the survival of our species . The first step toward solving global warming , he says , is to admit that we have a problem .
We 've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising .
So I 'll try and do that , but I want to start with two things that everyone already knows .
And the first one , in fact , is something that has been known for most of recorded history .
And that is that the planet Earth , or the solar system , or our environment or whatever , is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution -- or creation , as it used to be thought -- and our present existence , and most important , our future survival .
Nowadays this idea has a dramatic name : Spaceship Earth .
And the idea there is that outside the spaceship , the universe is implacably hostile , and inside is all we have , all we depend on .
And we only get the one chance : if we mess up our spaceship , we 've got nowhere else to go .
Now , the second thing that everyone already knows is that contrary to what was believed for most of human history , human beings are not , in fact , the hub of existence .
As Stephen Hawking famously said , we 're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that 's in orbit around a typical star , which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy , and so on .
Now the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we 're at a very un-typical place , uniquely suited and so on , and the second one is saying that we 're at a typical place .
And especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions , then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other .
But that doesn 't prevent them from both being completely false .
And they are . So let me start with the second one : Typical . Well -- is this a typical place ? Well , let 's look around , you know , and look in a random direction , and we see a wall , and chemical scum -- -- and that 's not typical of the universe at all .
All you 've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back , and you won 't see any walls or chemical scum at all -- all you see is a blue planet . And if you go further than that , you 'll see the sun , the solar system , and the stars and so on .
But that 's still not typical of the universe , because stars come in galaxies .
And most places in the universe , a typical place in the universe , is nowhere near any galaxies .
So let 's go out further , till we 're outside the galaxy , and look back , and yeah , there 's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us .
And at this point we 've come 100,000 light years from here .
But we 're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe .
To get to a typical place , you 've got to go 1,000 times as far as that into intergalactic space .
And so what does that look like ? Typical .
What does a typical place in the universe look like ?
Well , at enormous expense , TED has arranged a high-resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of intergalactic space -- the view from intergalactic space .
So can we have the lights off , please , so we can see it ?
Well , not quite , not quite perfect -- you see , in intergalactic space -- intergalactic space is completely dark , pitch dark .
It 's so dark that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you , and that star were to explode as a supernova , and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you , you still wouldn 't be able to see even a glimmer .
That 's how big and how dark the universe is .
And that 's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright , so brilliant an event , that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light years .
And yet from intergalactic space , it 's so far away you wouldn 't even see it .
It 's also very cold out there -- less than three degrees above absolute zero .
And it 's very empty . The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create . So that 's how different a typical place is from this place .
And that is how un-typical this place is .
So can we have the lights back on please ? Thank you .
Now how do we know about an environment that 's so far away , and so different , and so alien , from anything we 're used to ?
Well , the Earth -- our environment , in the form of us -- is creating knowledge .
Well , what does that mean ? Well , look out even further than we 've just been -- I mean from here , with a telescope -- and you 'll see things that look like stars .
They 're called " quasars . " Quasars originally meant quasi-stellar object .
Which means things that look a bit like stars . But they 're not stars .
And we know what they are . Billions of years ago , and billions of light years away , the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole .
And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse . And some of the matter , back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of -- I think it 's a trillion suns .
Now , the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet .
We couldn 't survive for an instant in it . Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets .
It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion , but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time .
And yet , that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later , on the other side of the universe , some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe , and model , and predict , and explain , above all -- there 's your reference -- what was happening there , in reality .
The one physical system , the brain , contains an accurate working model of the other -- the quasar .
Not just a superficial image of it , though it contains that as well , but an explanatory model , embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure .
Now that is knowledge . And if that weren 't amazing enough , the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time . That is the growth of knowledge .
So , the laws of physics have this special property .
That physical objects , as unlike each other as they could possibly be , can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time .
So we are a chemical scum that is different . This chemical scum has universality .
Its structure contains , with ever-increasing precision , the structure of everything . This place , and not other places in the universe , is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality . And so , far from being insignificant , the fact that the laws of physics allow this , or even mandate that this can happen , is one of the most important things about the physical world .
Now how does the solar system -- and our environment , in the form of us -- acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe ?
Well , one thing that 's true about Stephen Hawking 's remark -- I mean , it is true , but it 's the wrong emphasis . One thing that 's true about it is that it doesn 't do it with any special physics . There 's no special dispensation , no miracles involved . It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance .
One of them is matter , because the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing . Information processing is computation , computation requires a computer -- there 's no known way of making a computer without matter .
We also need energy to make the computer , and most important , to make the media in effect onto which we record the knowledge that we discover .
And then thirdly , less tangible , but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge , of explanations , is evidence .
Now , our environment is inundated with evidence .
We happen to get round to testing , let 's say , Newton 's Law of Gravity about 300 years ago .
But the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that , and will continue to fall on for billions of years afterwards . And the same is true for all the other sciences .
As far as we know , evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking on our planet .
Our location is saturated with evidence , and also with matter and energy .
Out in intergalactic space , those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply .
As I said , it 's empty ; it 's cold ; and it 's dark out there . Or is it ?
Now actually , that 's just another parochial misconception .
Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space , the same size as our home , the solar system . Now that cube is very empty by human standards , but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter .
And a million tons is enough to make , say , a self-contained space station , on which there 's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge , and so on .
Now , it 's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on .
But the thing is , in a comprehensible universe , if something isn 't forbidden by the laws of physics , then what could possibly prevent us from doing it , other than knowing how ?
In other words , it 's a matter of knowledge , not resources .
And the same -- well , if we could do that we 'd automatically have an energy supply , because the transmutation would be a fusion reactor -- and evidence ?
Well , again , it 's dark out there to human senses . But all you 've got to do is take a telescope , even one of present-day design , look out and you 'll see the same galaxies as we do from here .
And with a more powerful telescope , you 'll be able to see stars , and planets .
In those galaxies , you 'll be able to do astrophysics , and learn the laws of physics .
And locally there you could build particle accelerators , and learn elementary particle physics , and chemistry , and so on .
Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips -- -- because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back .
But I have to tell you -- and sorry , Richard -- but I never did like biology field trips much , and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years .
So in fact , intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge . Any such cube , anywhere in the universe , could become the same kind of hub that we are , if the knowledge of how to do so were present there .
So we 're not in a uniquely hospitable place .
If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations , then so is almost every other environment . So is the Earth . So is a polluted Earth .
And the limiting factor , there and here , is not resources , because they 're plentiful , but knowledge , which is scarce .
Now this cosmic knowledge-based view may -- and I think ought to -- make us feel very special . But it should also make us feel vulnerable , because it means that without the specific knowledge that 's needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe , we won 't survive them .
All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light years away , and we 'll all be dead !
Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things , from astrophysics , to scientific experiments gone wrong , and most importantly to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction .
And he thinks that civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving this century .
I think he 's going to talk about that later in the conference .
Now I don 't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in .
But I do agree with him about this . We can survive , and we can fail to survive .
But it depends not on chance , but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time .
The danger is not at all unprecedented . Species go extinct all the time .
Civilizations end . The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history .
And if we want to be the exception to that , then logically our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species , and our civilization , from all the others -- namely , our special relationship with the laws of physics , our ability to create new explanations , new knowledge -- to be a hub of existence .
So let me now apply this to a current controversy , not because I want to advocate any particular solution , but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean .
And the controversy is global warming .
Now , I 'm a physicist , but I 'm not the right kind of physicist . In regard to global warming , I 'm just a layman . And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory . And according to that theory , it 's already too late to avoid a disaster .
Because if it 's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol , with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is , then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure .
And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem , merely to postpone it by a little . So it 's already too late to avoid it , and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger .
It was probably already too late in the 1970s , when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die .
Now the lesson of that seems clear to me , and I don 't know why it isn 't informing public debate .
It is that we can 't always know . When we know of an impending disaster , and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself , then there 's not going to be much argument , really .
But no precautions , and no precautionary principle , can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee .
Hence , we need a stance of problem-fixing , not just problem-avoidance .
And it 's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure , but that 's only if we know what to prevent .
If you 've been punched on the nose , then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches .
If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only , then it would achieve very little of either .
The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs .
It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature , and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs , but efficiently and cheaply . And some such plans exist , things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away , and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide .
At the moment , these things are fringe research .
They 're not central to the human effort to face this problem , or problems in general .
And with problems that we are not aware of yet , the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope , not just of solving problems , but of survival .
So take two stone tablets , and carve on them .
On one of them , carve : " Problems are soluble . "
And on the other one carve : " Problems are inevitable . "
Thank you .
Cynthia Schneider : The surprising spread of Idol TV
Cynthia Schneider looks at two international " American Idol " -style shows -- one in Afghanistan , and one in the United Arab Emirates -- and shows the surprising effect that these reality-TV competitions are creating in their societies .
I 'd like to ask you , what do these three people have in common ?
Well , you probably recognize the first person .
I 'm sure you 're all avid " American Idol " watchers .
But you might not recognize Aydah Al Jahani , who is a contestant , indeed a finalist , in the Poet of the Millions competition , which is broadcast out of Abu Dhabi , and seen throughout the Arab world .
In this contest people have to write and recite original poetry , in the Nabati form of poetry , which is the traditional Bedouin form .
And Lima Sahar was a finalist in the Afghan Star singing competition .
Now , before I go any further , yes , I know it all began with " Britain 's Got Talent . "
But my point in discussing this is to show you -- I hope I 'll be able to show you how these merit-based competitions , with equal access to everyone , with the winner selected via voting by SMS , are changing tribal societies .
And I 'm going to focus on Afghanistan and the Arab world with the UAE , how they 're changing tribal societies , not by introducing Western ideas , but by being integrated into the language in those places .
It all begins with enjoyment .
We are late to watch " Afghan Star . "
We are going to watch " Afghan Star . " We are late .
We are running late .
We must go to watch " Afghan Star . "
Cynthia Schneider : These programs are reaching incredibly deeply into society .
In Afghanistan , people go to extraordinary lengths to be able to watch this program .
And you don 't necessarily have to have your own TV set .
People watch it all over the country also in public places .
But it goes beyond watching , because also , part of this is campaigning .
People become so engaged that they have volunteers , just like political volunteers anyway , who fan out over the countryside , campaigning for their candidate .
Contestants also put themselves forward .
Now , of course there is a certain degree of ethnic allegiance , but not entirely .
Because each year the winner has come from a different tribal group .
This has opened up the door , particularly for women .
And in the last season there were two women in the finalists .
One of them , Lima Sahar , is a Pashtun from Kandahar , a very conservative part of the country .
And here she relates , in the documentary film " Afghan Star , " how her friends urged her not to do this and told her that she was leaving them for democracy .
But she also confides that she knows that members of the Taliban are actually SMS-ing votes in for her .
Aydah Al Jahnani also took risks and put herself out , to compete in the Poet of the Millions competition .
I have to say , her husband backed her from the start .
But her tribe and family urged her not to compete and were very much against it .
But , once she started to win , then they got behind her again .
It turns out that competition and winning is a universal human value .
And she 's out there .
Her poetry is about women , and the life of women in society .
So just by presenting herself and being in competition with men -- this shows the voting on the program -- it sets a very important example for young women -- these are young women in the audience of the program -- in Abu Dhabi , but also people in the viewing audience .
Now you 'd think that " American Idol " would introduce a measure of Americanization .
But actually , just the opposite is happening .
By using this engaging popular format for traditional , local culture , it actually , in the Gulf , is precipitating a revival of interest in Nabati poetry , also in traditional dress and dance and music .
And for Afghanistan , where the Taliban banned music for many years , it is reintroducing their traditional music .
They don 't sing pop songs , they sing Afghan music .
And they also have learned how to lose gracefully , without avenging the winner .
No small thing .
And the final , sort of , formulation of this " American Idol " format , which has just appeared in Afghanistan , is a new program called " The Candidate . "
And in this program , people present policy platforms that are then voted on .
Many of them are too young to run for president , but by putting the issues out there , they are influencing the presidential race .
So for me , the substance of things unseen is how reality TV is driving reality .
Thank you .
Bastian Schaefer : A 3D-printed jumbo jet ?
Designer Bastian Schaefer shows off a speculative design for the future of jet planes , with a skeleton inspired by strong , flexible , natural forms and by the needs of the world 's , ahem , growing population . Imagine an airplane that 's full of light and space -- and built up from generative parts in a 3D printer .
What do we know about the future ?
Difficult question , simple answer : nothing .
We cannot predict the future .
We only can create a vision of the future , how it might be , a vision which reveals disruptive ideas , which is inspiring , and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking .
There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future , for instance , this vision here from the early 20th century .
It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future .
It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean .
Today , we know that this future vision didn 't come true .
So this is our largest airplane which we have , the Airbus A380 , and it 's quite huge , so a lot of people fit in there and it 's technically completely different than the vision I 've shown to you .
I 'm working in a team with Airbus , and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation .
So sustainability is quite important for us , which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values .
So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone , or a skeleton , which occurs in nature .
So that 's why it looks maybe a little bit weird , especially to the people who deal with structures in general .
But at least it 's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future .
What are the main customers of the future ?
So , we have the old , we have the young , we have the uprising power of women , and there 's one mega-trend which affects all of us .
These are the future anthropometrics .
So our children are getting larger , but at the same time we are growing into different directions .
So what we need is space inside the aircraft , inside a very dense area .
These people have different needs .
So we see a clear need of active health promotion , especially in the case of the old people .
We want to be treated as individuals .
We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain , and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface , and we want to integrate this and show this in one product .
So we combined these needs with technology 's themes .
So for instance , we are asking ourselves , how can we create more light ?
How can we bring more natural light into the airplane ?
So this airplane has no windows anymore , for example .
What about the data and communication software which we need in the future ?
My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness .
It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology .
This will be very different in the future .
It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment .
And then we are talking also about materials , synthetic biology , for example .
And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on , because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design .
So let 's compare the old world with the new world .
I just want to show you here what we are doing today .
So this is a bracket of an A380 crew rest compartment .
It takes a lot of weight , and it follows the classical design rules .
This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose .
It follows the design of bone .
The design process is completely different .
At the one hand , we have 1.2 kilos , and at the other hand 0.6 kilos .
So this technology , 3D printing , and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight , which is the biggest issue in aircraft design , because it 's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions .
Push this idea a little bit forward .
So how does nature build its components and structures ?
So nature is very clever . It puts all the information into these small building blocks , which we call DNA .
And nature builds large skeletons out of it .
So we see a bottom-up approach here , because all the information , as I said , are inside the DNA .
And this is combined with a top-down approach , because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles , we train our skeleton , and it 's getting stronger .
And the same approach can be applied to technology as well .
So our building block is carbon nanotubes , for example , to create a large , rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day .
How this looks in particular , you can show it here .
So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer , and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic , and follow the forces which occur in your component .
And you 've got trillions of them .
So you really align them to wood , and you take this wood and make morphological optimization , so you make structures , sub-structures , which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data .
And now we take this material , combine this with a top-down approach , and build bigger and bigger components .
So how might the airplane of the future look ?
So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger , with the different anthropometrics .
We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf .
And finally , this bionic structure , which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane , will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future .
So as Jason Silva said , if we can imagine it , why not make it so ?
See you in the future . Thank you .
Adam Garone : Healthier men , one moustache at a time
Adam Garone has an impressive moustache , and it 's for a good cause . A co-founder of Movember , Garone 's initiative to raise awareness for men 's health -- by having men grow out their moustaches every November -- began as a dare in a bar in 2003 . Now , it 's a worldwide movement that raised $ 126 million for prostate cancer research last year .
I think the beautiful Malin [ Akerman ] put it perfectly .
Every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury .
Ladies and gentlemen , and more importantly , Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — — for the next 17 minutes , I 'm going to share with you my Movember journey , and how , through that journey , we 've redefined charity , we 're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world , and I hope , through that process , that I inspire you to create something significant in your life , something significant that will go on and make this world a better place .
So the most common question I get asked , and I 'm going to answer it now so I don 't have to do it over drinks tonight , is how did this come about ?
How did Movember start ?
Well , normally , a charity starts with the cause , and someone that is directly affected by a cause .
They then go on to create an event , and beyond that , a foundation to support that .
Pretty much in every case , that 's how a charity starts .
Not so with Movember . Movember started in a very traditional Australian way . It was on a Sunday afternoon .
I was with my brother and a mate having a few beers , and I was watching the world go by , had a few more beers , and the conversation turned to ' 70s fashion — — and how everything manages to come back into style .
And a few more beers , I said , " There has to be some stuff that hasn 't come back . "
Then one more beer and it was , whatever happened to the mustache ?
Why hasn 't that made a comeback ?
So then there was a lot more beers , and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back .
So in Australia , " mo " is slang for mustache , so we renamed the month of November " Movember " and created some pretty basic rules , which still stand today .
And they are : start the month clean-shaven , rock a mustache -- not a beard , not a goatee , a mustache -- for the 30 days of November , and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month , have a mustache-themed party , and award a prize for the best , and of course , the worst mustache .
Now trust me , when you 're growing a mustache back in 2003 , and there were 30 of us back then , and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement — — it created a lot of controversy .
So my boss wouldn 't let me go and see clients .
My girlfriend at the time , who 's no longer my girlfriend — — hated it .
Parents would shuffle kids away from us .
But we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey , and it was a real journey .
And we had a lot of fun , and in 2004 , I said to the guys , " That was so much fun . We need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year . "
So we started thinking about that , and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer .
And we thought , you know what , there 's nothing for men 's health .
Why is that ? Why can 't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men 's health ?
And I started to research that topic , and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it .
But there was nothing for this cause , so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer , and then we created our tagline , which is , " Changing the face of men 's health . "
And that eloquently describes the challenge , changing your appearance for the 30 days , and also the outcome that we 're trying to achieve : getting men engaged in their health , having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face .
So with that model , I then cold-called the CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation .
I said to him , " I 've got the most amazing idea that 's going to transform your organization . "
And I didn 't want to share with him the idea over the phone , so I convinced him to meet with me for coffee in Melbourne in 2004 .
And we sat down , and I shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across Australia , raising awareness for this cause , and funds for his organization . And I needed a partnership to legitimately do that .
And I said , " We 're going to come together at the end , we 're going to have a mustache-themed party , we 're going to have DJs , we 're going to celebrate life , and we 're going to change the face of men 's health . "
And he just looked at me and laughed , and he said , he said , " Adam , that 's a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization .
We can 't have anything to do with you . "
So I paid for coffee that day — — and his parting comment as we shook hands was , " Listen , if you happen to raise any money out of this , we 'll gladly take it . "
So my lesson that year was persistence .
And we persisted , and we got 450 guys growing mustaches , and together we raised 54,000 dollars , and we donated every cent of that to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia , and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they 'd ever received .
So from that day forward , my life has become about a mustache .
Every day -- this morning , I wake up and go , my life is about a mustache .
Essentially , I 'm a mustache farmer .
And my season is November .
So in 2005 , the campaign got more momentum , was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand , and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point .
It was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought , we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund Movember so that I could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level .
It 's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches .
Let me tell you that there 's not too many people interested in investing in that , not even the Prostate Cancer Foundation , who we 'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage .
So again we persisted , and Foster 's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship , and that was enough for me to quit my job , I did consulting on the side .
And leading into Movember 2006 , we 'd run through all the money from Foster 's , we 'd run through all the money I had , and essentially we had no money left , and we 'd convinced all our suppliers -- creative agencies , web development agencies , hosting companies , whatnot -- to delay their billing until December .
So we 'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt . So if Movember 2006 didn 't happen , the four founders , well , we would 've been broke , we would 've been homeless , sitting on the street with mustaches .
But we thought , you know what , if that 's the worst thing that happens , so what ?
We 're going to have a lot of fun doing it , and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks .
Then in early 2007 , a really interesting thing happened .
We had Mo Bros from Canada , from the U.S. , and from the U.K. emailing us and calling us and saying , hey , there 's nothing for prostate cancer .
Bring this campaign to these countries .
So we thought , why not ? Let 's do it .
So I cold-called the CEO of Prostate Cancer Canada , and I said to him , " I have this most amazing concept . "
" It 's going to transform your organization . I don 't want to tell you about it now , but will you meet with me if I fly all the way to Toronto ? " So I flew here , met down on Front Street East , and we sat in the boardroom , and I said , " Right , here 's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across Canada raising awareness and funds for your organization . "
And he looked at me and laughed and said , " Adam , sounds like a really novel idea , but we 're an ultraconservative organization . "
I 've heard this before . I know how it goes .
But he said , " We will partner with you , but we 're not going to invest in it . You need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work . "
So what we did was , we took some of the money that we raised in Australia to bring the campaign across to this country , the U.S , and the U.K. , and we did that because we knew , if this was successful , we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in Australia . And that money fuels research , and that research will get us to a cure .
And we 're not about finding an Australian cure or a Canadian cure , we 're about finding the cure .
So in 2007 , we brought the campaign across here , and it was , it set the stage for the campaign .
It wasn 't as successful as we thought it would be .
We were sort of very gung ho with our success in Australia and New Zealand at that stage .
So that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets .
But what I 'm really pleased to say is , in 2010 , Movember became a truly global movement .
Canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world .
Last year we had 450,000 Mo Bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars .
And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world .
And that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches .
And for us , we have redefined charity .
Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon .
Our ambassadors are the Mo Bros and the Mo Sistas , and I think that 's been fundamental to our success .
We hand across our brand and our campaign to those people .
We let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way .
So now I live in Los Angeles , because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there , and I always get asked by the media down there , because it 's so celebrity-driven , " Who are your celebrity ambassadors ? "
And I say to them , " Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors . "
And they go , " What , what do you mean ? "
And it 's like , everything single person , every single Mo Bro and Mo Sista that participates in Movember is our celebrity ambassador , and that is so , so important and fundamental to our success .
Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments , and it happened here in Toronto last year , at the end of the campaign .
I was out with a team . It was the end of Movember .
We 'd had a great campaign , and to be honest , we 'd had our fair share of beer that night , but I said , " You know what , I think we 've got one more bar left in us . "
So we piled into a taxi , and this is our taxi driver , and I was sitting in the back seat , and he turned around and said , " Where are you going ? "
And I said , " Hang on , that is an amazing mustache . "
And he said , " I 'm doing it for Movember . " And I said , " So am I. " And I said , " Tell me your Movember story . "
And he goes , " Listen , I know it 's about men 's health , I know it 's about prostate cancer , but this is for breast cancer . "
And I said , " Okay , that 's interesting . "
And he goes , " Last year , my mom passed away from breast cancer in Sri Lanka , because we couldn 't afford proper treatment for her , " and he said , " This mustache is my tribute to my mom . "
And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi , and I didn 't tell him who I was , because I didn 't think it was appropriate , and I just shook his hand and I said , " Thank you so much .
Your mom would be so proud . "
And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache , having a joke .
It 's about each person coming to this platform , embracing it in their own way , and being significant in their own life .
For us now at Movember , we really focus on three program areas , and having a true impact : awareness and education , survivor support programs , and research .
Now we always focus , naturally , on how much we raise , because it 's a very tangible outcome , but for me , awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise , because I know that is changing and saving lives today , and it 's probably best exampled by a young guy that I met at South by Southwest in Austin , Texas , at the start of the year .
He came up to me and said , " Thank you for starting Movember . "
And I said , " Thank you for doing Movember . "
And I looked at him , and I was like , " I 'm pretty sure you can 't grow a mustache . "
And I said , " What 's your Movember story ? "
And he said , " I grew the worst mustache ever . "
" But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner , and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on . "
" And we talked -- I talked to them about Movember , and then after that , my dad came up to me , and at the age of 26 , for the first time ever , I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men 's health . I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer , and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease , and he didn 't know that , and he hadn 't been getting screened for it . "
So now , that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer .
So those conversations , getting men engaged in this , at whatever age , is so critically important , and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise .
Now to the funds we raise , and research , and how we 're redefining research .
We fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries .
We literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world , and when we looked at this more recently , we realized there 's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions , let alone nationally , let alone globally , and this is not unique to prostate cancer . This is cancer research the world over .
And so we said , right , we 'd redefined charity . We need to redefine the way these guys operate . How do we do that ?
So what we did was , we created a global action plan , and we 're taking 10 percent of what 's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund , and we 've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund , and they come together each year and identify the number one priority , and that , last year , was getting a better screening test .
So they identified that as a priority , and then they 've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic , essentially the same topic .
So now we 're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together , and that 's a unique thing in the cancer world , and we know , through that collaboration , it will accelerate outcomes .
And that 's how we 're redefining the research world .
So , what I know about my Movember journey is that , with a really creative idea , with passion , with persistence , and a lot of patience , four mates , four mustaches , can inspire a room full of people , and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city , and that city is Melbourne , my home .
And that city can go on and inspire a state , and that state can go on and inspire a nation , and beyond that , you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men 's health .
My name is Adam Garone , and that 's my story .
Thank you .
Simon Sinek : How great leaders inspire action
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question " Why ? " His examples include Apple , Martin Luther King , and the Wright brothers ... & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
How do you explain when things don 't go as we assume ?
Or better , how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions ?
For example : Why is Apple so innovative ?
Year after year , after year , after year , they 're more innovative than all their competition .
And yet , they 're just a computer company .
They 're just like everyone else .
They have the same access to the same talent , the same agencies , the same consultants , the same media .
Then why is it that they seem to have something different ?
Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement ?
He wasn 't the only man who suffered in a pre-civil rights America , and he certainly wasn 't the only great orator of the day .
Why him ?
And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled , powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified , better funded ...
and they didn 't achieve powered man flight , and the Wright brothers beat them to it .
There 's something else at play here .
About three and a half years ago I made a discovery .
And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked , and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it .
As it turns out , there 's a pattern .
As it turns out , all the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world -- whether it 's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers -- they all think , act and communicate the exact same way .
And it 's the complete opposite to everyone else .
All I did was codify it , and it 's probably the world 's simplest idea .
I call it the golden circle .
Why ? How ? What ?
This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren 't .
Let me define the terms really quickly .
Every single person , every single organization on the planet knows what they do , 100 percent .
Some know how they do it , whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP .
But very , very few people or organizations know why they do what they do .
And by " why " I don 't mean " to make a profit . "
That 's a result . It 's always a result .
By " why , " I mean : What 's your purpose ?
What 's your cause ? What 's your belief ?
Why does your organization exist ?
Why do you get out of bed in the morning ?
And why should anyone care ?
Well , as a result , the way we think , the way we act , the way we communicate is from the outside in .
It 's obvious . We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing .
But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations -- regardless of their size , regardless of their industry -- all think , act and communicate from the inside out .
Let me give you an example .
I use Apple because they 're easy to understand and everybody gets it .
If Apple were like everyone else , a marketing message from them might sound like this : " We make great computers .
They 're beautifully designed , simple to use and user friendly .
Want to buy one ? " " Meh . "
And that 's how most of us communicate .
That 's how most marketing is done , that 's how most sales is done and that 's how most of us communicate interpersonally .
We say what we do , we say how we 're different or how we 're better and we expect some sort of a behavior , a purchase , a vote , something like that .
Here 's our new law firm : We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients , we always perform for our clients who do business with us .
Here 's our new car : It gets great gas mileage , it has leather seats , buy our car .
But it 's uninspiring .
Here 's how Apple actually communicates .
" Everything we do , we believe in challenging the status quo .
We believe in thinking differently .
The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed , simple to use and user friendly .
We just happen to make great computers .
Want to buy one ? "
Totally different right ? You 're ready to buy a computer from me .
All I did was reverse the order of the information .
What it proves to us is that people don 't buy what you do ; people buy why you do it .
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it .
This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple .
But we 're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple , or a phone from Apple , or a DVR from Apple .
But , as I said before , Apple 's just a computer company .
There 's nothing that distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors .
Their competitors are all equally qualified to make all of these products .
In fact , they tried .
A few years ago , Gateway came out with flat screen TVs .
They 're eminently qualified to make flat screen TVs .
They 've been making flat screen monitors for years .
Nobody bought one .
Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs , and they make great quality products , and they can make perfectly well-designed products -- and nobody bought one .
In fact , talking about it now , we can 't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell .
Why would you buy an MP3 player from a computer company ?
But we do it every day .
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it .
The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have .
The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe .
Here 's the best part : None of what I 'm telling you is my opinion .
It 's all grounded in the tenets of biology .
Not psychology , biology .
If you look at a cross-section of the human brain , looking from the top down , what you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle .
Our newest brain , our Homo sapien brain , our neocortex , corresponds with the " what " level .
The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language .
The middle two sections make up our limbic brains , and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings , like trust and loyalty .
It 's also responsible for all human behavior , all decision-making , and it has no capacity for language .
In other words , when we communicate from the outside in , yes , people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures .
It just doesn 't drive behavior .
When we can communicate from the inside out , we 're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior , and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do .
This is where gut decisions come from .
You know , sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures , and they say , " I know what all the facts and details say , but it just doesn 't feel right . "
Why would we use that verb , it doesn 't " feel " right ?
Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn 't control language .
And the best we can muster up is , " I don 't know . It just doesn 't feel right . "
Or sometimes you say you 're leading with your heart , or you 're leading with your soul .
Well , I hate to break it to you , those aren 't other body parts controlling your behavior .
It 's all happening here in your limbic brain , the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language .
But if you don 't know why you do what you do , and people respond to why you do what you do , then how will you ever get people to vote for you , or buy something from you , or , more importantly , be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do .
Again , the goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have ; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe .
The goal is not just to hire people who need a job ; it 's to hire people who believe what you believe .
I always say that , you know , if you hire people just because they can do a job , they 'll work for your money , but if you hire people who believe what you believe , they 'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears .
And nowhere else is there a better example of this than with the Wright brothers .
Most people don 't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley .
And back in the early 20th century , the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day .
Everybody was trying it .
And Samuel Pierpont Langley had , what we assume , to be the recipe for success .
I mean , even now , you ask people , " Why did your product or why did your company fail ? "
and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things : under-capitalized , the wrong people , bad market conditions .
It 's always the same three things , so let 's explore that .
Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine .
Money was no problem .
He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected ; he knew all the big minds of the day .
He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic .
The New York Times followed him around everywhere , and everyone was rooting for Langley .
Then how come we 've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley ?
A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio , Orville and Wilbur Wright , they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success .
They had no money ; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop ; not a single person on the Wright brothers ' team had a college education , not even Orville or Wilbur ; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere .
The difference was , Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause , by a purpose , by a belief .
They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine , it 'll change the course of the world .
Samuel Pierpont Langley was different .
He wanted to be rich , and he wanted to be famous .
He was in pursuit of the result .
He was in pursuit of the riches .
And lo and behold , look what happened .
The people who believed in the Wright brothers ' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears .
The others just worked for the paycheck .
And they tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out , they would have to take five sets of parts , because that 's how many times they would crash before they came in for supper .
And , eventually , on December 17th , 1903 , the Wright brothers took flight , and no one was there to even experience it .
We found out about it a few days later .
And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing : The day the Wright brothers took flight , he quit .
He could have said , " That 's an amazing discovery , guys , and I will improve upon your technology , " but he didn 't .
He wasn 't first , he didn 't get rich , he didn 't get famous so he quit .
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it .
And if you talk about what you believe , you will attract those who believe what you believe .
But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe ?
Something called the law of diffusion of innovation , and if you don 't know the law , you definitely know the terminology .
The first two and a half percent of our population are our innovators .
The next 13 and a half percent of our population are our early adopters .
The next 34 percent are your early majority , your late majority and your laggards .
The only reason these people buy touch tone phones is because you can 't buy rotary phones anymore .
We all sit at various places at various times on this scale , but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea , you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration , and then the system tips .
And I love asking businesses , " What 's your conversion on new business ? "
And they love to tell you , " Oh , it 's about 10 percent , " proudly .
Well , you can trip over 10 percent of the customers .
We all have about 10 percent who just " get it . "
That 's how we describe them , right ?
That 's like that gut feeling , " Oh , they just get it . "
The problem is : How do you find the ones that get it before you 're doing business with them versus the ones who don 't get it ?
So it 's this here , this little gap that you have to close , as Jeffrey Moore calls it , " Crossing the Chasm " -- because , you see , the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first .
And these guys , the innovators and the early adopters , they 're comfortable making those gut decisions .
They 're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available .
These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out , when you could have just walked into the store the next week and bought one off the shelf .
These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat screen TVs when they first came out , even though the technology was substandard .
And , by the way , they didn 't do it because the technology was so great ; they did it for themselves .
It 's because they wanted to be first .
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe .
In fact , people will do the things that prove what they believe .
The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours , stood in line for six hours , was because of what they believed about the world , and how they wanted everybody to see them : They were first .
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it .
So let me give you a famous example , a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation .
First , the famous failure .
It 's a commercial example .
As we said before , a second ago , the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions , right ? You should have success then .
Look at TiVo .
From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day , they are the single highest-quality product on the market , hands down , there is no dispute .
They were extremely well-funded .
Market conditions were fantastic .
I mean , we use TiVo as verb .
I TiVo stuff on my piece of junk Time Warner DVR all the time .
But TiVo 's a commercial failure .
They 've never made money .
And when they went IPO , their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted , and it 's never traded above 10 .
In fact , I don 't think it 's even traded above six , except for a couple of little spikes .
Because you see , when TiVo launched their product they told us all what they had .
They said , " We have a product that pauses live TV , skips commercials , rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking . "
And the cynical majority said , " We don 't believe you .
We don 't need it . We don 't like it .
You 're scaring us . "
What if they had said , " If you 're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life , boy , do we have a product for you .
It pauses live TV , skips commercials , memorizes your viewing habits , etc . , etc . "
People don 't buy what you do ; they buy why you do it , and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe .
Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation .
In the summer of 1963 , 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak .
They sent out no invitations , and there was no website to check the date .
How do you do that ?
Well , Dr. King wasn 't the only man in America who was a great orator .
He wasn 't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America .
In fact , some of his ideas were bad .
But he had a gift .
He didn 't go around telling people what needed to change in America .
He went around and told people what he believed .
" I believe , I believe , I believe , " he told people .
And people who believed what he believed took his cause , and they made it their own , and they told people .
And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people .
And lo and behold , 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak .
How many of them showed up for him ?
Zero .
They showed up for themselves .
It 's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August .
It 's what they believed , and it wasn 't about black versus white : 25 percent of the audience was white .
Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world : those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by man .
And not until all the laws that are made by man are consistent with the laws that are made by the higher authority will we live in a just world .
It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life .
We followed , not for him , but for ourselves .
And , by the way , he gave the " I have a dream " speech , not the " I have a plan " speech .
Listen to politicians now , with their comprehensive 12-point plans .
They 're not inspiring anybody .
Because there are leaders and there are those who lead .
Leaders hold a position of power or authority , but those who lead inspire us .
Whether they 're individuals or organizations , we follow those who lead , not because we have to , but because we want to .
We follow those who lead , not for them , but for ourselves .
And it 's those who start with " why " that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them .
Thank you very much .
Inge Missmahl : Bringing peace to the minds of Afghanistan
When Jungian analyst Inge Missmahl visited Afghanistan , she saw the inner wounds of war -- widespread despair , trauma and depression . And yet , in this county of 30 million people , there were only two dozen psychiatrists . Missmahl talks about her work helping to build the country 's system of psychosocial counseling , promoting both individual and , perhaps , national healing .
So I want to tell you a story -- an encouraging story -- about addressing desperation , depression and despair in Afghanistan , and what we have learned from it , and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead -- in the future -- and how to participate again in everyday life .
So , I am a Jungian psychoanalyst , and I went to Afghanistan in January 2004 , by chance , on an assignment for Medica Mondiale .
Jung in Afghanistan -- you get the picture .
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world , and 70 percent of the people are illiterate .
War and malnutrition kills people together with hope .
You may know this from the media , but what you may not know is that the average age of the Afghan people is 17 years old , which means they grow up in such an environment and -- I repeat myself -- in 30 years of war .
So this translates into ongoing violence , foreign interests , bribery , drugs , ethnic conflicts , bad health , shame , fear and cumulative traumatic experiences .
Local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations .
And people had hope , yes , but until they realized their situation worsens every day -- either because they are being killed or because , somehow , they are poorer than eight years ago .
One figure for that : 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition .
Yet , there is hope .
One day a man told me , " My future does not look brilliant , but I want to have a brilliant future for my son . "
This is a picture I took in 2005 , walking on Fridays over the hills in Kabul , and for me it 's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation .
So , doctors prescribe medication .
And donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads .
Military collect weapons , and depression stays intact .
Why ?
Because people don 't have tools to cope with it , to get over it .
So , soon after my arrival , I had confirmed something which I had already known ; that my instruments come from the heart of modern Europe , yes .
However , what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds -- they are universal .
And the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context .
After a counseling session , a woman said to me , " Because you have felt me , I can feel myself again , and I want to participate again in my family life . "
This was very important , because the family is central in Afghans ' social system .
No one can survive alone .
And if people feel used , worthless and ashamed , because something horrible has happened to them , then they retreat , and they fall into social isolation , and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones , because they do not want to burden them .
And very often violence is a way to cope with it .
Traumatized people also easily lose control -- symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks -- so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly , suddenly , and they cannot control it .
To compensate this loss of inner control , they try to control the outside , very understandably -- mostly the family -- and unfortunately , this fits very well into the traditional side , regressive side , repressive side , restrictive side of the cultural context .
So , husbands start beating wives , mothers and fathers beat their children , and afterward , they feel awful .
They did not want to do this , it just happened -- they lost control .
The desperate try to restore order and normality , and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence , it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt .
And partly this is already happening .
So everybody needs a sense for the future , and the Afghan sense of the future is shattered .
But let me repeat the words of the woman .
" Because you have felt me , I can feel myself again . "
So the key here is empathy .
Somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you .
Somebody has to feel how you felt .
And somebody has to see you and listen to you .
Everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true , and this only goes with another person .
So everybody must be able to say , " This happened to me , and it did this with me , but I 'm able to live with it , to cope with it , and to learn from it .
And I want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children , and I will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter , " -- what happens too often in Afghanistan .
So something can be done , even in such extreme environments as Afghanistan .
And I started thinking about a counseling program .
But , of course , I needed help and funds .
And one evening , I was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in Kabul , and he asked what I thought would be good in Afghanistan .
And I explained to him quickly , I would train psycho-social counselors , I would open centers , and I explained to him why .
This man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said , " If you want to do this , call me . "
At that time , it was the head of Caritas Germany .
So , I was able to launch a three-year project with Caritas Germany , and we trained 30 Afghan women and men , and we opened 15 counseling centers in Kabul .
This was our sign -- it 's hand-painted , and we had 45 all over Kabul .
Eleven thousand people came -- more than that .
And 70 percent regained their lives .
This was a very exciting time , developing this with my wonderful Afghan team .
And they are working with me up to today .
We developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach .
So , from 2008 up until today , a substantial change and step forward has been taking place .
The European Union delegation in Kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the Ministry of Public Health , to lobby this approach -- we succeeded .
We revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system .
This means , certainly , to retrain all health staff .
But for that , we already have the training manuals , which are approved by the Ministry and moreover , this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in Afghanistan .
So we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces , and you are the first to see the results .
We wanted to know if what is being done is effective .
And here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression , moderate and severe .
And the red line is the treatment as usual -- medication with a medical doctor .
And all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse .
And the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only , without medication .
And you can see the symptoms almost completely go away , and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly , which is explicable , because you cannot take away the psycho-social stresses , but you can learn how to cope with them .
So this makes us very happy , because now we also have some evidence that this is working .
So here you see , this is a health facility in Northern Afghanistan , and every morning it looks like this all over .
And doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients , but now this will change .
They go to the clinics , because they want to cure their immediate symptoms , and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions , develop their resources , learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future .
And I would like to share one short vignette .
One Hazara said to his Pashtun counselor , " If we were to have met some years ago , then we would have killed each other .
And now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future . "
And another counselor said to me after the training , " You know , I never knew why I survived the killings in my village , but now I know , because I am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in Afghanistan . "
So I believe this kept me running .
And this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation .
And also -- I think -- without psycho-social therapy , and without considering this in all humanitarian projects , we cannot build-up civil societies .
I thought it was an idea worth spreading , and I think it must be , can be , could be replicated elsewhere .
I thank you for your attention .
Brenda Romero : Gaming for understanding
It 's never easy to get across the magnitude of complex tragedies -- so when Brenda Romero 's daughter came home from school asking about slavery , she did what she does for a living -- she designed a game . She describes the surprising effectiveness of this game , and others , in helping the player really understand the story .
When we think of games , there 's all kinds of things .
Maybe you 're ticked off , or maybe you 're looking forward to a new game . You 've been up too late playing a game .
All these things happen to me .
But when we think about games , a lot of times we think about stuff like this : first-person shooters , or the big , what we would call AAA games , or maybe you 're a Facebook game player .
This is one my partner and I worked on .
Maybe you play Facebook games , and that 's what we 're making right now . This is a lighter form of game .
Maybe you think about the tragically boring board games that hold us hostage in Thanksgiving situations .
This would be one of those tragically boring board games that you can figure out .
Or maybe you 're in your living room , you know , playing with the Wii with the kids , or something like that , and , you know , there 's this whole range of games , and that 's very much what I think about .
I make my living from games . I 've been lucky enough to do this since I was 15 , which also qualifies as I 've never really had a real job .
But we think about games as fun , and that 's completely reasonable , but let 's just think about this .
So this one here , this is the 1980 Olympics .
Now I don 't know where you guys were , but I was in my living room . It was practically a religious event .
And this is when the Americans beat the Russians , and this was -- yes , it was technically a game .
Hockey is a game . But really , was this a game ?
I mean , people cried . I 've never seen my mother cry like that at the end of Monopoly .
And so this was just an amazing experience .
Or , you know , if anybody here is from Boston -- So when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series after , I believe , 351 years , when they won the World Series , it was amazing .
I happened to be living in Springfield at the time , and the best part of it was -- is that -- you would close the women 's door in the bathroom , and I remember seeing " Go Sox , " and I thought , really ?
Or the houses , you 'd come out , because every game , well , I think almost every game , went into overtime , right ?
So we 'd be outside , and all the other lights are on on the whole block , and kids , like , the attendance was down in school , and kids weren 't going to school .
But it 's okay , it 's the Red Sox , right ?
I mean , there 's education , and then there 's the Red Sox , and we know where they 're stacked .
So this was an amazing experience , and again , yes , it was a game , but they didn 't write newspaper articles , people didn 't say -- you know , really , " I can die now because the Red Sox won . " And many people did .
So games , it means something more to us .
It absolutely means something more .
So now , just , this is an abrupt transition here .
There was three years where I actually did have a real job , sort of .
I was the head of a college department teaching games , so , again , it was sort of a real job , and now I just got to talk about making as opposed to making them .
And I was at a dinner . Part of the job of it , when you 're a chair of a department , is to eat , and I did that very well , and so I 'm out at a dinner with this guy called Zig Jackson .
So this is Zig in this photograph . This is also one of Zig 's photographs . He 's a photographer .
And he goes all around the country taking pictures of himself , and you can see here he 's got Zig 's Indian Reservation . And this particular shot , this is one of the more traditional shots . This is a rain dancer .
And this is one of my favorite shots here .
So you can look at this , and maybe you 've even seen things like this . This is an expression of culture , right ?
And this is actually from his Degradation series .
And what was most fascinating to me about this series is just , look at that little boy there .
Can you imagine ? Now let 's , we can see that 's a traditional Native American . Now I just want to change that guy 's race .
Just imagine if that 's a black guy .
So , " Honey , come here , let 's get your picture with the black guy . "
Right ? Like , seriously , nobody would do this .
It baffles the mind . And so Zig , being Indian , likewise it baffles his mind . His favorite photograph -- my favorite photograph of his , which I don 't have in here is Indian taking picture of white people taking pictures of Indians .
So I happen to be at dinner with this photographer , and he was talking with another photographer about a shooting that had occurred , and it was on an Indian reservation . He 'd taken his camera up there to photograph it , but when he got there , he discovered he couldn 't do it . He just couldn 't capture the picture . And so they were talking back and forth about this question . Do you take the picture or not ?
And that was fascinating to me as a game designer , because it never occurs to me , like , should I make the game about this difficult topic or not ?
Because we just make things that are fun or , you know , will make you feel fear , you know , that visceral excitement .
But every other medium does it .
So this is my kid . This is Maezza , and when she was seven years old , she came home from school one day , and like I do every single day , I asked her , " What 'd you do today ? "
So she said , " We talked about the Middle Passage . "
Now , this was a big moment . Maezza 's dad is black , and I knew this day was coming . I wasn 't expecting it at seven . I don 't know why , but I wasn 't .
Anyways , so I asked her , " How do you feel about that ? "
So she proceeded to tell me , and so any of you who are parents will recognize the bingo buzzwords here .
So the ships start in England , they come down from England , they go to Africa , they go across the ocean -- that 's the Middle Passage part — they come to America where the slaves are sold , she 's telling me .
But Abraham Lincoln was elected president , and then he passed the Emancipation Proclamation , and now they 're free .
Pause for about 10 seconds .
" Can I play a game , Mommy ? "
And I thought , that 's it ? And so , you know , this is the Middle Passage , this is an incredibly significant event , and she 's treating it like , basically some black people went on a cruise , is more or less how it sounds to her .
And so , to me , I wanted more value in this , so when she asked if she could play a game , I said , " Yes . "
And so I happened to have all of these little pieces .
I 'm a game designer , so I have this stuff sitting around my house .
So I said , " Yeah , you can play a game , " and I give her a bunch of these , and I tell her to paint them in different families . These are pictures of Maezza when she was — God , it still chokes me up seeing these .
So she 's painting her little families .
So then I grab a bunch of them and I put them on a boat .
This was the boat . It was made quickly obviously .
And so the basic gist of it is , I grabbed a bunch of families , and she 's like , " Mommy , but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things . "
And she says , " They want to go . " And I said , " Honey , no they don 't want to go . This is the Middle Passage .
Nobody wants to go on the Middle Passage . "
So she gave me a look that only a daughter of a game designer would give a mother , and as we 're going across the ocean , following these rules , she realizes that she 's rolling pretty high , and she says to me , " We 're not going to make it . "
And she realizes , you know , we don 't have enough food , and so she asks what to do , and I say , " Well , we can either " -- Remember , she 's seven -- " We can either put some people in the water or we can hope that they don 't get sick and we make it to the other side . "
And she -- just the look on her face came over and she said -- now mind you this is after a month of -- this is Black History Month , right ?
After a month she says to me , " Did this really happen ? "
And I said , " Yes . " And so she said , " So , if I came out of the woods " — this is her brother and sister — " If I came out of the woods , Avalon and Donovan might be gone . " " Yes . "
" But I 'd get to see them in America . " " No . "
" But what if I saw them ? You know , couldn 't we stay together ? " " No . "
" So Daddy could be gone . " " Yes . "
And she was fascinated by this , and she started to cry , and I started to cry , and her father started to cry , and now we 're all crying . He didn 't expect to come home from work to the Middle Passage , but there it goes .
And so , we made this game , and she got it .
She got it because she spent time with these people .
It wasn 't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie .
And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience .
This is the game , which I 've ended up calling The New World , because I like the phrase .
I don 't think the New World felt too new worldly exciting to the people who were brought over on slave ships .
But when this happened , I saw the whole planet .
I was so excited . It was like , I 'd been making games for 20-some years , and then I decided to do it again .
My history is Irish .
So this is a game called Síochán Leat . It 's " peace be with you . "
It 's the entire history of my family in a single game .
I made another game called Train .
I was making a series of six games that covered difficult topics , and if you 're going to cover a difficult topic , this is one you need to cover , and I 'll let you figure out what that 's about on your own .
And I also made a game about the Trail of Tears .
This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces .
I was crazy when I decided to start it , but I 'm in the middle of it now .
It 's the same thing .
I 'm hoping that I 'll teach culture through these games .
And the one I 'm working on right now , which is -- because I 'm right in the middle of it , and these for some reason choke me up like crazy -- is a game called Mexican Kitchen Workers .
And originally it was a math problem more or less .
Like , here 's the economics of illegal immigration .
And the more I learned about the Mexican culture -- my partner is Mexican — the more I learned that , you know , for all of us , food is a basic need , but , and it is obviously with Mexicans too , but it 's much more than that .
It 's an expression of love . It 's an expression of — God , I 'm totally choking up way more than I thought .
I 'll look away from the picture .
It 's an expression of beauty . It 's how they say they love you .
It 's how they say they care , and you can 't hear somebody talk about their Mexican grandmother without saying " food " in the first sentence .
And so to me , this beautiful culture , this beautiful expression is something that I want to capture through games .
And so games , for a change , it changes how we see topics , it changes how our perceptions about those people in topics , and it changes ourselves .
We change as people through games , because we 're involved , and we 're playing , and we 're learning as we do so . Thank you .
Ann Cooper : What 's wrong with school lunches
Speaking at the 2007 EG conference , " renegade lunch lady " Ann Cooper talks about the coming revolution in the way kids eat at school -- local , sustainable , seasonal and even educational food .
My thing with school lunch is , it 's a social justice issue .
I 'm the Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District . I have 90 employees and 17 locations , 9,600 kids .
I 'm doing 7,100 meals a day and I 've been doing it for two years , trying to change how we feed kids in America .
And that 's what I want to talk to you a little bit about today .
These are some of my kids with a salad bar .
I put salad bars in all of our schools when I got there .
Everyone says it couldn 't be done .
Little kids couldn 't eat off the salad bar , big kids would spit in it -- neither happened .
When I took over this , I tried to really figure out , like , what my vision would be .
How do we really change children 's relationship to food ?
And I 'll tell you why we need to change it , but we absolutely have to change it .
And what I came to understand is , we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet , healthy food and healthy kids .
And that if we don 't do that , the antithesis , although we 've heard otherwise , is we 're really going to become extinct , because we 're feeding our children to death .
That 's my premise .
We 're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker .
And the reason this is happening , by and large , is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food , the way the government oversees our food , the way the USDA puts food on kids ' plates that 's unhealthy , and allows unhealthy food into schools .
And by -- tacitly , all of us send our kids , or grandchildren , or nieces , or nephews , to school and tell them to learn , you know , learn what 's in those schools .
And when you feed these kids bad food , that 's what they 're learning . So that 's really what this is all about .
The way we got here is because of big agribusiness .
We now live in a country where most of us don 't decide , by and large , what we eat . We see big businesses , Monsanto and DuPont , who brought out Agent Orange and stain-resistant carpet .
They control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country .
These are -- 10 companies control much of what 's in our grocery stores , much of what people eat . And that 's really , really a problem .
So when I started thinking about these issues and how I was going to change what kids ate , I really started focusing on what we would teach them .
And the very first thing was about regional food -- trying to eat food from within our region .
And clearly , with what 's going on with fossil fuel usage , or when -- as the fossil fuel is going away , as oil hits its peak oil , you know , we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should , or could , be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it .
So we talked to kids about that , and we really start to feed kids regional food .
And then we talk about organic food .
Now , most school districts can 't really afford organic food , but we , as a nation , have to start thinking about consuming , growing and feeding our children food that 's not chock-full of chemicals .
We can 't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones .
We can 't keep doing that .
You know , it doesn 't work .
And the results of that are kids getting sick .
One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics .
Seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumed in animal husbandry .
We are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day .
Seventy percent -- it 's unbelievable .
And the result of it is , we have diseases .
We have things like E. coli that we can 't fix , that we can 't make kids better when they get sick .
And , you know , certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed , but it 's an issue in the food supply .
One of my favorite facts is that U.S. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year .
That means every one of us , and our children , consumes what would equal a five-pound bag -- those bags you have at home . If I had one here and ripped it open , and that pile I would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply , because of the way we consume produce in America .
The USDA allows these antibiotics , these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply , and the USDA paid for this ad in Time magazine .
Okay , we could talk about Rachel Carson and DDT , but we know it wasn 't good for you and me .
And that is what the USDA allows in our food supply .
And that has to change , you know .
The USDA cannot be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what 's allowed .
We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart .
The antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food .
That 's what I really try and get people to understand .
I really try and teach it to kids . I think it 's the most important .
It 's consuming food in a way in which we 'll still have a planet , in which kids will grow up to be healthy , and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we 're seeing .
It really is just a new idea .
I mean , people toss around sustainability , but we have to figure out what sustainability is .
In less than 200 years , you know , just in a few generations , we 've gone from being 200 -- being 100 percent , 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers .
We now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers -- 2.1 million prisoners , 1.9 million farmers .
And we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison , and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child .
It 's no wonder , you know , we have criminals .
And what 's happening is , we 're getting sick .
We 're getting sick and our kids are getting sick .
It is about what we feed them .
What goes in is what we are .
We really are what we eat .
And if we continue down this path , if we continue to feed kids bad food , if we continue not to teach them what good food is , what 's going to happen ? You know , what is going to happen ?
What 's going to happen to our whole medical system ?
What 's going to happen is , we 're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own .
The CDC , the Center for Disease Control , has said , of the children born in the year 2000 -- those seven- and eight-year-olds today -- one out of every three Caucasians , one out of every two African-Americans and Hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime .
And if that 's not enough , they 've gone on to say , most before they graduate high school .
This means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade . Within a decade .
What 's going to happen ?
Well , the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country 's history to die at a younger age than their parents .
And it 's because of what we feed them .
Because eight-year-olds don 't get to decide -- and if they do , you should be in therapy .
You know , we are responsible for what kids eat .
But oops , maybe they 're responsible for what kids eat .
Big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids .
20 billion dollars a year . 10,000 ads most kids see .
They spend 500 dollars for every one dollar -- 500 dollars marketing foods that kids shouldn 't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy , nutritious food .
The result of which is kids think they 're going to die if they don 't have chicken nuggets .
You know that everybody thinks they should be eating more , and more , and more .
This is the USDA portion size , that little , tiny thing .
And the one over there , that 's bigger than my head , is what McDonald 's and Burger King and those big companies think we should eat .
And why can they serve that much ?
Why can we have 29-cent Big Gulps and 99-cent double burgers ?
It 's because of the way the government commodifies food , and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really , really cheap .
Which is why I say it 's a social justice issue .
Now , I said I 'm doing this in Berkeley , and you might think , " Oh , Berkeley . Of course you can do it in Berkeley . "
Well , this is the food I found 24 months ago .
This is not even food .
This is the stuff we were feeding our kids : Extremo Burritos , corn dogs , pizza pockets , grilled cheese sandwiches .
Everything came in plastic , in cardboard .
The only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter .
The only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher , because if it didn 't come in a can , it came frozen in a box .
The USDA allows this .
The USDA allows all of this stuff .
In case you can 't tell , that 's , like , pink Danish and some kind of cupcakes .
Chicken nuggets , Tater Tots , chocolate milk with high fructose , canned fruit cocktail -- a reimbursable meal .
That 's what the government says is okay to feed our kids .
It ain 't okay . You know what ? It is not okay .
And we , all of us , have to understand that this is about us , that we can make a difference here .
Now I don 't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets , but I 'm sure you 're rich if you did .
But whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart , a giraffe , a star ?
Well , Tyson did , because there 's no chicken in the chicken .
And that they could figure it out , that we could sell this stuff to kids .
You know , what 's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken ?
But this is what most schools serve .
In fact , this may be what a lot of parents serve , as opposed to -- this is what we try and serve .
We really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food .
We really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe .
You know , that vegetables are actually colorful , that they have flavor , that carrots grow in the ground , that strawberries grow in the ground .
There 's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush .
You know , we have to change the way we teach kids about these things .
There 's a lot of stuff we can do . There 's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs . There 's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools .
Now , in Berkeley , we 've gone totally fresh .
We have no high-fructose corn syrup , no trans fats , no processed foods .
We 're cooking from scratch every day .
We have 25 percent of our -- thank you -- 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local . We cook .
Those are my hands . I get up at 4 a.m.
every day and go cook the food for the kids , because this is what we need to do .
We can 't keep serving kids processed crap , full of chemicals , and expect these are going to be healthy citizens .
You 're not going to get the next generation , or the generation after , to be able to think like this if they 're not nourished .
If they 're eating chemicals all the time , they 're not going to be able to think .
They 're not going to be smart .
You know what ? They 're just going to be sick .
Now one of the things that -- what happened when I went into Berkeley is I realized that , you know , this was all pretty amazing to people , very , very different , and I needed to market it .
I came up with these calendars that I sent home to every parent .
And these calendars really started to lay out my program .
Now I 'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district .
So this is a typical menu .
This is what we 're serving this week at the schools .
And you see these recipes on the side ?
Those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes .
They do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes .
They also may be growing them . And we serve them in the cafeterias .
If we 're going to change children 's relationship to food , it 's delicious , nutritious food in the cafeterias , hands-on experience -- you 're looking in cooking and gardening classes -- and academic curriculum to tie it all together .
Now you 've probably garnered that I don 't love the USDA , and I don 't have any idea what to do with their pyramid , this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top , I don 't know .
You know , run up into the end of the rainbow , I don 't know what you do with it . So , I came up with my own .
This is available on my website in English and Spanish , and it 's a visual way to talk to kids about food .
The really tiny hamburger , the really big vegetables .
We have to start changing this .
We have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference .
We have cooking classes -- we have cooking classrooms in our schools .
And why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation , maybe two , of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food , one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a TV or computer .
What are kids learning ? Where is the family time ?
Where is socialization ? Where is discussion ?
Where is learning to talk ?
You know , we have to change it .
I work with kids a lot . These are kids I work with in Harlem .
EATWISE -- Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating .
We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts aren 't breakfast .
We have to teach kids that if they 're on a diet of refined sugar , they go up and down , just like if they 're on a diet of crack .
And we have to pull it all together . We have composting in all of our schools .
We have recycling in all of our schools .
You know , the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important , we have to teach kids about in school .
It has to be so much a part of them that they really get it .
Because , you know what , many of us are sort of at the end of our careers , and we need to be giving these kids -- these young kids , the next generation -- the tools to save themselves and save the planet .
One of the things I do a lot is public-private partnerships .
I work with private companies who are willing to do R & amp ; D with me , who are willing to do distribution for me , who are really willing to work to go into schools .
Schools are underfunded .
Most schools in America spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child .
That comes down to under five dollars an hour .
Most of you spend 10 , 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them .
So we 're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system .
And if we 're going to change it , and change how we feed kids , we really have to rethink that .
So , public and private partnerships , advocacy groups , working with foundations .
In our school district , the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services . And I think if every school district allocated a half to one percent , we could start to really fix this program .
We really need to change it .
It 's going to take more money .
Of course , it 's not all about food ; it 's also about kids getting exercise .
And one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch .
It 's sort of this " duh " thing .
You know , if you have kids coming into lunch and all they 're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess , you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside .
And then , at one in the afternoon , they 're totally crashing .
These are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up , because they haven 't had lunch .
So if the only thing they 'd have to do after lunch is go to class , believe me , they 're going to sit there and eat their lunch .
We need to -- we need to educate .
We need to educate the kids .
We need to educate the staff .
I had 90 employees .
Two were supposed to be cooks -- none could .
And , you know , I 'm not that better off now .
But we really have to educate .
We have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again , because , of course , they don 't -- because we 've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long .
We need 40-minute lunches -- most schools have 20-minute lunches -- and lunches that are time-appropriate .
There was just a big study done , and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning .
That is not lunchtime .
You know , it 's crazy . It 's crazy what we 're doing .
And just remember , at very least tacitly , this is what we 're teaching children as what they should be doing .
I think if we 're going to fix this , one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the National School Lunch Program .
Instead of the National School Lunch Program being under the USDA , I think it should be under CDC .
If we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative , and we started thinking about food as health , then I think we wouldn 't have corn dogs as lunch .
Okay , Finance 101 on this , and this -- I 'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece , because I think this is something we all have to understand .
The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year .
That number probably needs to double .
People say , " Oh my God , where are we going to get 8 billion ? "
In this country , we 're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food .
We spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids .
We spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables , which is why we need all the diet aids .
We spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today , with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes .
200 billion .
So you know what , when we talk about needing 8 billion more , it 's not a lot .
That 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents -- that 's what the government allocates for lunch .
Most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead .
That means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools -- most schools , 80 to 90 cents . In L.A. , it 's 56 cents .
So we 're spending less than a dollar , OK , on lunch .
Now I don 't know about you , but I go to Starbucks and Pete 's and places like that , and venti latte in San Francisco is five dollars .
One gourmet coffee , one , is more -- we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools .
You know what ? We should be ashamed .
We , as a country , should be ashamed at that .
The richest country .
In our country , it 's the kids that need it the most , who get this really , really lousy food .
It 's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that can 't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food .
And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick .
Those are the same kids who we should be taking care of .
We can all make a difference .
That every single one of us , whether we have children , whether we care about children , whether we have nieces or nephews , or anything -- that we can make a difference .
Whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids , whether you take your kids , or grandchildren , or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers ' market . Just do tastings with them .
Sit down and care .
And on the macro level , we 're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign , and of all the things we 're asking all of these potential leaders , what about asking for the health of our children ?
Thank you .
Fabian Oefner : Psychedelic science
Swiss artist and photographer Fabian Oefner is on a mission to make eye-catching art from everyday science . In this charming talk , he shows off some recent psychedelic images , including photographs of crystals as they interact with soundwaves . And , in a live demo , he shows what really happens when you mix paint with magnetic liquid--or when you set fire to whiskey .
An image is worth more than a thousand words , so I 'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured .
So by now , my talk is already 6,000 words long , and I feel like I should stop here .
At the same time , I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw .
What I am trying to do as a photographer , as an artist , is to bring the world of art and science together .
Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it 's bursting , as you can see in this image , whether it 's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint , strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways , or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces , I 'm always trying to link those two fields together .
What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing : They are a response to their surroundings .
And yet , they do it in a very different way .
If you look at science on one hand , science is a very rational approach to its surroundings , whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings .
What I am trying to do is I 'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer 's heart but also to the viewer 's brain .
Let me demonstrate this based on three projects .
The first one has to do with making sound visible .
Now as you may know , sound travels in waves , so if you have a speaker , a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal , transform it into a vibration , which is then transported through the air , is captured by our ear , and transformed into an audio signal again .
Now I was thinking , how can I make those sound waves visible ?
So I came up with the following setup .
I took a speaker , I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker , and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker .
And now , if I would play a sound through that speaker , it would cause the crystals to move up and down .
Now this happens very fast , in the blink of an eye , so , together with LG , we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second .
Let me show you what this looks like .
Thank you very much .
I agree , it looks pretty amazing .
But I have to tell you a funny story .
I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles .
Now in Los Angeles , you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches , but I got mine indoors , and what happened is that , if you 're shooting at 3,000 frames per second , you need to have a silly amount of light , lots of lights .
So we had this speaker set up , and we had the camera facing it , and lots of lights pointing at the speaker , and I would set up the speaker , put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker , and we would do this over and over again , and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker .
What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side , so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week .
Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances .
Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid ?
Ah , some of you have . Excellent .
Should I skip that part ?
Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior .
It 's a liquid that is completely black .
It 's got an oily consistency .
And it 's got tiny little particles of metal in it , which makes it magnetic .
So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field , it would change its appearance .
Now I 've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you .
So I 've got a camera pointing down at this plate , and underneath that plate , there is a magnet .
Now I 'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet .
Let 's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more . Excellent .
So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes .
This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid .
Now this looks already quite interesting , but let me now add some watercolors to it .
Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with .
You wouldn 't paint with syringes , but it works just the same .
So what happened now is , when the watercolor was flowing into the structure , the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid .
That 's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic .
That means it doesn 't mix with the water .
And at the same time , it tries to maintain its position above the magnet , and therefore , it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint .
So that was the second project .
Let me now turn to the last project , which involves the national beverage of Scotland .
This image , and also this one , were made using whiskey .
Now you might ask yourself , how did he do that ?
Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper ?
I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures .
Now , whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol , and alcohol has got some very interesting properties .
Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before , but I am talking about the physical properties , not the other ones .
So when I open the bottle , the alcohol molecules would spread in the air , and that 's because alcohol is a very volatile substance .
And at the same time , alcohol is highly flammable .
And it was with those two properties that I was able to create the images that you 're seeing right now .
Let me demonstrate this over here .
And what I have here is an empty glass vessel .
It 's got nothing in it .
And now I 'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey .
Add some more .
Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle .
And now , let 's set that on fire .
So that 's all that happens .
It goes really fast , and it 's not that impressive .
I could do it again to show it one more time , but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey , and that I should rather drink it .
But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration .
So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom , burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol .
So the images that you saw at the beginning , they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle , and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees .
So that 's how those images were made .
Thank you .
So , I have now showed you three projects , and you might ask yourself , what is it good for ?
What 's the idea behind it ?
Is it just a waste of whiskey ?
Is it just some strange materials ?
Those three projects , they 're based on very simple scientific phenomena , such as magnetism , the sound waves , or over here , the physical properties of a substance , and what I 'm trying to do is I 'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way , and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us .
Thank you very much .
James Flynn : Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'
It 's called the " Flynn effect " -- the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it . Are we actually getting smarter , or just thinking differently ? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century , moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising consequences .
We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century , because during that century , our minds have altered dramatically .
As you all know , the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology .
And our minds have altered , too .
We 've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world , and it 's a world where we 've had to develop new mental habits , new habits of mind .
And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification , introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent , and also taking the hypothetical seriously , that is , wondering about what might have been rather than what is .
Now , this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time , and these have been truly massive .
That is , we don 't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests .
We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented .
Indeed , if you score the people a century ago against modern norms , they would have an average I.Q. of 70 .
If you score us against their norms , we would have an average I.Q. of 130 .
Now this has raised all sorts of questions .
Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation ?
Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation .
Or are we on the verge of all being gifted ?
Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness .
Now I 'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that 's much more illuminating than either of those , and to put this into perspective , let 's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization .
And this Martian was an archaeologist , and they found scores , target scores , that people had used for shooting .
And first they looked at 1865 , and they found that in a minute , people had only put one bullet in the bullseye .
And then they found , in 1898 , that they 'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute .
And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye .
And initially , that archaeologist would be baffled .
They would say , look , these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand , how keen their eyesight was , whether they had control of their weapon .
How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree ?
Well we now know , of course , the answer .
If that Martian looked at battlefields , they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War , and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I.
And , in other words , it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible , not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand .
Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years , and I think again that another thinker will help us here , and that 's Luria .
Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age , and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world .
They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use .
He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical , to speculating about what might be , and he found finally that they didn 't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions .
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews .
He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia .
They 'd only had , as people had in 1900 , about four years of schooling .
And he asked that particular person , what do crows and fish have in common ?
And the fellow said , " Absolutely nothing .
You know , I can eat a fish . I can 't eat a crow .
A crow can peck at a fish .
A fish can 't do anything to a crow . "
And Luria said , " But aren 't they both animals ? "
And he said , " Of course not .
One 's a fish .
The other is a bird . "
And he was interested , effectively , in what he could do with those concrete objects .
And then Luria went to another person , and he said to them , " There are no camels in Germany .
Hamburg is a city in Germany .
Are there camels in Hamburg ? "
And the fellow said , " Well , if it 's large enough , there ought to be camels there . "
And Luria said , " But what do my words imply ? "
And he said , " Well , maybe it 's a small village , and there 's no room for camels . "
In other words , he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem , and he was used to camels being in villages , and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical , to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany .
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole .
And Luria said , " At the North Pole , there is always snow .
Wherever there is always snow , the bears are white .
What color are the bears at the North Pole ? "
And the response was , " Such a thing is to be settled by testimony .
If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white , I might believe him , but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear . "
Now you see again , this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience , and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is , they had to hunt bears .
They weren 't willing to engage in this .
One of them said to Luria , " How can we solve things that aren 't real problems ?
None of these problems are real .
How can we address them ? "
Now , these three categories -- classification , using logic on abstractions , taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room ?
And let me give you a few illustrations .
First , almost all of us today get a high school diploma .
That is , we 've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education , and 52 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education .
Now , not only do we have much more education , and much of that education is scientific , and you can 't do science without classifying the world .
You can 't do science without proposing hypotheses .
You can 't do science without making it logically consistent .
And even down in grade school , things have changed .
In 1910 , they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds , and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information .
They were things like , what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time ?
When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990 , they were all about abstractions .
They were things like , why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital ?
And you were supposed to think , well , the state legislature was rural-controlled , and they hated the big city , so rather than putting the capital in a big city , they put it in a county seat .
They put it in Albany rather than New York .
They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia .
And so forth .
So the tenor of education has changed .
We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously , to use abstractions , and to link them logically .
What about employment ?
Well , in 1900 , three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding .
Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers .
Today , 35 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions , not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer , but many , many sub-professions having to do with being a technician , a computer programmer .
A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands .
And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible .
And it 's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions .
The professions have been upgraded .
Compare the doctor in 1900 , who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve , with the modern general practitioner or specialist , with years of scientific training .
Compare the banker in 1900 , who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage .
Well , the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss , but they were cognitively very agile .
They went far beyond that 1900 banker .
They had to look at computer projections for the housing market .
They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset .
They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA , though in many cases , they had virtually bribed the rating agencies .
And they also , of course , had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable .
Or take a farmer today .
I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900 .
So it hasn 't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions .
It 's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties .
But I 've talked about education and employment .
Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas .
I 'm primarily a moral philosopher .
I merely have a holiday in psychology , and what interests me in general is moral debate .
Now over the last century , in developed nations like America , moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously , and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections .
When I came home in 1955 from university at the time of Martin Luther King , a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents .
My father was born in 1885 , and he was mildly racially biased .
As an Irishman , he hated the English so much he didn 't have much emotion for anyone else .
But he did have a sense that black people were inferior .
And when we said to our parents and grandparents , " How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black ? "
they said that is the dumbest thing you 've ever said .
Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning -- -- that turned black ?
In other words , they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited .
They would not take the hypothetical seriously , and without the hypothetical , it 's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground .
You have to say , imagine you were in Iran , and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong .
How would you feel about that ?
And if someone of the older generation says , well , our government takes care of us , and it 's up to their government to take care of them , they 're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously .
Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped , and he feels he 's honor-bound to kill her .
Well , he 's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited , and they 're unmovable in any way by logic .
They 're just inherited mores .
Today we would say something like , well , imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized .
Would you deserve to be killed ?
And he would say , well that 's not in the Koran .
That 's not one of the principles I 've got .
Well you , today , universalize your principles .
You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them .
If you have a principle such as , people shouldn 't suffer unless they 're guilty of something , then to exclude black people you 've got to make exceptions , don 't you ?
You have to say , well , blackness of skin , you couldn 't suffer just for that .
It must be that blacks are somehow tainted .
And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear , can 't we , and say , well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black .
And you can get moral argument off the ground , then , because you 're not treating moral principles as concrete entities .
You 're treating them as universals , to be rendered consistent by logic .
Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests ?
That 's what initially got me going on cognitive history .
If you look at the I.Q. test , you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas .
The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification , and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest .
There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions .
Some of you may have taken Raven 's Progressive Matrices , and it 's all about analogies .
And in 1900 , people could do simple analogies .
That is , if you said to them , cats are like wildcats .
What are dogs like ?
They would say wolves .
But by 1960 , people could attack Raven 's on a much more sophisticated level .
If you said , we 've got two squares followed by a triangle , what follows two circles ?
They could say a semicircle .
Just as a triangle is half of a square , a semicircle is half of a circle .
By 2010 , college graduates , if you said two circles followed by a semicircle , two sixteens followed by what , they would say eight , because eight is half of 16 .
That is , they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question .
Now , I should say one thing that 's very disheartening .
We haven 't made progress on all fronts .
One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics , and sadly you can have humane moral principles , you can classify , you can use logic on abstractions , and if you 're ignorant of history and of other countries , you can 't do politics .
We 've noticed , in a trend among young Americans , that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands , and they 're essentially ahistorical .
They live in the bubble of the present .
They don 't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam .
They don 't know who was an ally of America in World War II .
Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order , and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions .
And that is , they had barely left , and there wasn 't a trace in the sand .
Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars .
You know , the Spanish didn 't sink the battleship Maine , the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions , the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet , and , of course , Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it , and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms , when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost .
But I don 't want to end on a pessimistic note .
The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized , and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn 't make it , that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities .
Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea , and he said , " Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have ? "
As if they were a reptile .
Well , Dickens was right and he was wrong . [ Correction : Rudyard Kipling ] [ Kipling ] said , " The colonel 's lady and Judy O 'Grady are sisters underneath the skin . "
Dan Gilbert : Why we make bad decisions
Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness -- sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself . Watch through to the end for a sparkling Q & amp ; A with some familiar TED faces .
We all make decisions every day ; we want to know what the right thing is to do -- in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic .
And surely , if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times , that would be a tremendous gift .
It turns out that , in fact , the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli .
And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is , and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn 't made a damn bit of difference .
Now , this is Bernoulli 's gift . This is a direct quote .
And if it looks like Greek to you , it 's because , well , it 's Greek .
But the simple English translation -- much less precise , but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say -- was this : The expected value of any of our actions -- that is , the goodness that we can count on getting -- is the product of two simple things : the odds that this action will allow us to gain something , and the value of that gain to us .
In a sense , what Bernoulli was saying is , if we can estimate and multiply these two things , we will always know precisely how we should behave .
Now , this simple equation , even for those of you who don 't like equations , is something that you 're quite used to .
Here 's an example : if I were to tell you , let 's play a little coin toss game , and I 'm going to flip a coin , and if it comes up heads , I 'm going to pay you 10 dollars , but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me , most of you would say , sure , I 'll take that bet . Because you know that the odds of you winning are one half , the gain if you do is 10 dollars , that multiplies to five , and that 's more than I 'm charging you to play . So , the answer is , yes .
This is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet .
Now , the idea is simple when we 're applying it to coin tosses , but in fact , it 's not very simple in everyday life .
People are horrible at estimating both of these things , and that 's what I want to talk to you about today .
There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do , and those are errors in estimating the odds that they 're going to succeed , and errors in estimating the value of their own success .
Now , let me talk about the first one first .
Calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy : there are six sides to a die , two sides to a coin , 52 cards in a deck .
You all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads .
But as it turns out , this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life . That 's why Americans spend more -- I should say , lose more -- gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined .
The reason is , this isn 't how people do odds .
The way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs .
Now , the question I 'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in Oxford .
And of course , you all know that the answer is dogs .
And the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you 've seen dogs and pigs on leashes .
It was very easy to remember seeing dogs , not so easy to remember pigs . And each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind , then dogs on leashes are more probable .
That 's not a bad rule of thumb , except when it is .
So , for example , here 's a word puzzle .
Are there more four-letter English words with R in the third place or R in the first place ?
Well , you check memory very briefly , make a quick scan , and it 's awfully easy to say to yourself , Ring , Rang , Rung , and very hard to say to yourself , Pare , Park : they come more slowly .
But in fact , there are many more words in the English language with R in the third than the first place .
The reason words with R in the third place come slowly to your mind isn 't because they 're improbable , unlikely or infrequent .
It 's because the mind recalls words by their first letter .
You kind of shout out the sound , S -- and the word comes .
It 's like the dictionary ; it 's hard to look things up by the third letter .
So , this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability -- how this idea could lead you astray . It 's not just puzzles , though .
For example , when Americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways -- these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million U.S. citizens .
And these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado , fireworks , asthma , drowning , etc .
Compare these to the actual numbers .
Now , you see a very interesting pattern here , which is first of all , two things are vastly over-estimated , namely tornadoes and fireworks .
Two things are vastly underestimated : dying by drowning and dying by asthma . Why ?
When was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was , " Boy dies of Asthma ? "
It 's not interesting because it 's so common .
It 's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we 've seen tornadoes devastating cities , or some poor schmuck who 's blown his hands off with a firework on the Fourth of July .
Drownings and asthma deaths don 't get much coverage .
They don 't come quickly to mind , and as a result , we vastly underestimate them .
Indeed , this is kind of like the Sesame Street game of " Which thing doesn 't belong ? " And you 're right to say it 's the swimming pool that doesn 't belong , because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that 's actually very dangerous .
The way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide .
The lottery is an excellent example , of course -- an excellent test-case of people 's ability to compute probabilities .
And economists -- forgive me , for those of you who play the lottery -- but economists , at least among themselves , refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax , because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet -- which , by the way , doesn 't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything .
Why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery ?
Well , there are many answers , but one answer surely is , we see a lot of winners . Right ? When this couple wins the lottery , or Ed McMahon shows up at your door with this giant check -- how the hell do you cash things that size , I don 't know .
We see this on TV ; we read about it in the paper .
When was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost ?
Indeed , if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner , the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say , " Me ? I lost . " " Me ? I lost . "
Now , if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television -- no sleep , no potty breaks -- and you saw loss after loss after loss , and then at the end there 's 30 seconds of , " and I won , " the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small .
Look , I can prove this to you : here 's a little lottery .
There 's 10 tickets in this lottery .
Nine of them have been sold to these individuals .
It costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and , if you win , you get 20 bucks . Is this a good bet ?
Well , Bernoulli tells us it is .
The expected value of this lottery is two dollars ; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money .
And most people say , " OK , I 'll play . "
Now , a slightly different version of this lottery : imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named Leroy .
Leroy has nine tickets ; there 's one left .
Do you want it ? Most people won 't play this lottery .
Now , you can see the odds of winning haven 't changed , but it 's now fantastically easy to imagine who 's going to win .
It 's easy to see Leroy getting the check , right ?
You can 't say to yourself , " I 'm as likely to win as anybody , " because you 're not as likely to win as Leroy .
The fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play , even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds .
Now , estimating odds , as difficult as it may seem , is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value : trying to say what something is worth , how much we 'll enjoy it , how much pleasure it will give us .
I want to talk now about errors in value .
How much is this Big Mac worth ? Is it worth 25 dollars ?
Most of you have the intuition that it 's not -- you wouldn 't pay that for it .
But in fact , to decide whether a Big Mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one , and only one question , which is : What else can I do with 25 dollars ?
If you 've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to Australia and realized that they 're not going to serve you any food , but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the McDonald 's bag , and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat , you think , I can 't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours .
I can 't even set it on fire -- they took my cigarette lighter !
Suddenly , 25 dollars for a Big Mac might be a good deal .
On the other hand , if you 're visiting an underdeveloped country , and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal , it 's exorbitant for a Big Mac .
Why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no , before I 'd even told you anything about the context ?
Because most of you compared the price of this Big Mac to the price you 're used to paying . Rather than asking , " What else can I do with my money , " comparing this investment to other possible investments , you compared to the past .
And this is a systematic error people make .
What you knew is , you paid three dollars in the past ; 25 is outrageous .
This is an error , and I can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads .
For example , this is , of course , one of the most delicious tricks in marketing , is to say something used to be higher , and suddenly it seems like a very good deal .
When people are asked about these two different jobs : a job where you make 60K , then 50K , then 40K , a job where you 're getting a salary cut each year , and one in which you 're getting a salary increase , people like the second job better than the first , despite the fact they 're all told they make much less money . Why ?
Because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages , even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period . Here 's another nice example .
Here 's a $ 2,000 Hawaiian vacation package ; it 's now on sale for 1,600 .
Assuming you wanted to go to Hawaii , would you buy this package ?
Most people say they would . Here 's a slightly different story : $ 2,000 Hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars , so you decide to mull it over for a week .
By the time you get to the ticket agency , the best fares are gone -- the package now costs 1,500 . Would you buy it ? Most people say , no .
Why ? Because it used to cost 700 , and there 's no way I 'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week .
This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal . In other words , a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal .
Here 's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions .
Imagine that you 're going to the theater .
You 're on your way to the theater .
In your wallet you have a ticket , for which you paid 20 dollars .
You also have a 20-dollar bill .
When you arrive at the theater , you discover that somewhere along the way you 've lost the ticket .
Would you spend your remaining money on replacing it ?
Most people answer , no .
Now , let 's just change one thing in this scenario .
You 're on your way to the theater , and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills .
When you arrive you discover you 've lost one of them .
Would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket ?
Well , of course , I went to the theater to see the play .
What does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do ?
Now , just in case you 're not getting it , here 's a schematic of what happened , OK ?
Along the way , you lost something .
In both cases , it was a piece of paper .
In one case , it had a U.S. president on it ; in the other case it didn 't .
What the hell difference should it make ?
The difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself , I 'm not paying twice for the same thing .
You compare the cost of the play now -- 40 dollars -- to the cost that it used to have -- 20 dollars -- and you say it 's a bad deal .
Comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people 's attempts to assign value .
But even when we compare with the possible , instead of the past , we still make certain kinds of mistakes .
And I 'm going to show you one or two of them .
One of the things we know about comparison : that when we compare one thing to the other , it changes its value .
So in 1992 , this fellow , George Bush , for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum , didn 't seem like such a great guy .
Suddenly , we 're almost longing for him to return .
The comparison changes how we evaluate him .
Now , retailers knew this long before anybody else did , of course , and they use this wisdom to help you -- spare you the undue burden of money .
And so a retailer , if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine , and you see them here for eight , 27 and 33 dollars , what would you do ?
Most people don 't want the most expensive , they don 't want the least expensive .
So , they will opt for the item in the middle .
If you 're a smart retailer , then , you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf , because suddenly the $ 33 wine doesn 't look as expensive in comparison .
So I 'm telling you something you already knew : namely , that comparison changes the value of things .
Here 's why that 's a problem : the problem is that when you get that $ 33 bottle of wine home , it won 't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to .
The comparisons we make when we are appraising value , where we 're trying to estimate how much we 'll like things , are not the same comparisons we 'll be making when we consume them .
This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions .
Let me just give you an example .
I have to show you something from my own lab , so let me sneak this in .
These are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions : How much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now ?
They 're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them .
For some of the subjects , sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of Godiva chocolates , and for others is a can of Spam .
In fact , these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they 're going to enjoy the potato chips .
Namely , those who are looking at Spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty ; those who are looking at Godiva chocolate think they won 't be nearly so tasty .
Of course , what happens when they eat the potato chips ?
Well , look , you didn 't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy , salty , crispy , delicious snacks , what 's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience .
Nonetheless , their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience .
You 've all experienced this yourself , even if you 've never come into our lab to eat potato chips . So here 's a question : You want to buy a car stereo .
The dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars , but if you drive across town , you can get it for 100 bucks .
So would you drive to get 50 percent off , saving 100 dollars ?
Most people say they would .
They can 't imagine buying it for twice the price when , with one trip across town , they can get it for half off .
Now , let 's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo , and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000 .
But if you drove across town , you could get it for 30,900 .
Would you drive to get it ? At this point , 0.003 savings -- the 100 dollars .
Most people say , no , I 'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car ?
This kind of thinking drives economists crazy , and it should .
Because this 100 dollars that you save -- hello ! -- doesn 't know where it came from .
It doesn 't know what you saved it on .
When you go to buy groceries with it , it doesn 't go , I 'm the money saved on the car stereo , or , I 'm the dumb money saved on the car . It 's money .
And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks , it 's worth 100 bucks no matter what you 're saving it on . People don 't think that way .
That 's why they don 't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment , but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste .
Now , you can see , this is the problem of shifting comparisons , because what you 're doing is , you 're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you 're making , but when you go to spend that money you won 't be making that comparison .
You 've all had this experience .
If you 're an American , for example , you 've probably traveled in France .
And at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown , and you thought , " Oh , my God , these people are so warm . They 're so nice to me .
I mean , compared to all these people who hate me when I try to speak their language and hate me more when I don 't , these people are just wonderful . " And so you tour France with them , and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner , and what do you find ?
Compared to your regular friends , they are boring and dull , right ? Because in this new context , the comparison is very , very different . In fact , you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for French citizenship .
Now , you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo .
You go to the stereo store , you see two sets of speakers -- these big , boxy , monoliths , and these little , sleek speakers , and you play them , and you go , you know , I do hear a difference : the big ones sound a little better .
And so you buy them , and you bring them home , and you entirely violate the décor of your house .
And the problem , of course , is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you 'll never make again .
What are the odds that years later you 'll turn on the stereo and go , " Sounds so much better than those little ones , " which you can 't even remember hearing .
The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time .
People have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time .
And what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules .
So let me give you one very easy problem , a second very easy problem and then a third , hard , problem .
Here 's the first easy problem : You can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now . Which would you prefer ?
This is what we call a one-item IQ test , OK ?
All of us , I hope , prefer more money , and the reason is , we believe more is better than less .
Here 's the second problem : You can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month . Which would you prefer ?
Again , an easy decision , because we all know that now is better than later .
What 's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict .
For example , when you 're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month .
This typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting , but you have to be patient .
What do we know ? What do people do in these kinds of situations ?
Well , by and large people are enormously impatient .
That is , they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars .
Maybe that isn 't so remarkable , but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing when the delivery of these monetary units will happen .
Imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year -- that 's 12 months -- or 60 dollars in 13 months .
What do we find now ?
People are gladly willing to wait : as long as they 're waiting 12 , they might as well wait 13 .
What makes this dynamic inconsistency happen ?
Comparison . Troubling comparison . Let me show you .
This is just a graph showing the results that I just suggested you would show if I gave you time to respond , which is , people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they 'll be delivered in now or one month , respectively -- a 30-day delay -- but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year .
Now , why in the world do you get this pattern of results ?
These guys can tell us .
What you see here are two lads , one of them larger than the other : the fireman and the fiddler .
They are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon , and I want you to notice two things .
At no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler . No point .
However , the difference between them seems to be getting smaller .
First it 's an inch in your view , then it 's a quarter-inch , then a half-inch , and then finally they go off the edge of the earth .
Here are the results of what I just showed you .
This is the subjective height -- the height you saw of these guys at various points .
And I want you to see that two things are true .
One , the farther away they are , the smaller they look ; and two , the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler .
But watch what happens when we make some of them disappear . Right .
At a very close distance , the fiddler looks taller than the fireman , but at a far distance their normal , their true , relations are preserved .
As Plato said , what space is to size , time is to value .
These are the results of the hard problem I gave you : 60 now or 50 in a month ?
And these are subjective values , and what you can see is , our two rules are preserved .
People always think more is better than less : 60 is always better than 50 , and they always think now is better than later : the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side .
Watch what happens when we drop some out .
Suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us .
We have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month , but not if that decision is far in the future .
Notice something interesting that this implies -- namely , that when people get to the future , they will change their minds .
That is , as that month 12 approaches , you will say , what was I thinking , waiting an extra month for 60 dollars ?
I 'll take the 50 dollars now .
Well , the question with which I 'd like to end is this : If we 're so damn stupid , how did we get to the moon ?
Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people 's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value .
The answer to this question , I think , is an answer you 've already heard in some of the talks , and I dare say you will hear again : namely , that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living .
They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups , rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves , had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today .
Bernoulli 's gift , Bernoulli 's little formula , allows us , it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us .
That explains why we are so bad at using it , but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good , fast .
We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands .
We have no significant predators , we 're the masters of our physical environment ; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us .
The only thing -- the only thing -- that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions .
If we 're not here in 10,000 years , it 's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738 , because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures .
Thank you .
That was remarkable .
We have time for some questions for Dan Gilbert . One and two .
Bill Lyell : Would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us , and is there some way that we could counteract that ?
Dan Gilbert : I actually was consulting recently with the Department of Homeland Security , which generally believes that American security dollars should go to making borders safer .
I tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people 's psychological reaction to a set of events , and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified , rather than -- not rather than , but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we 're all concerned about .
Surely the kinds of play that at least American media give to -- and forgive me , but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents .
We already know , for example , in the United States , more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes -- because they were scared -- and driving on highways , than were killed in 9 / 11 . OK ?
If I told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 Americans next year , you might be alarmed if you didn 't find out it was the flu .
These are small-scale accidents , and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play , the kind of coverage , that they do .
Surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they 'll be hurt in these various ways , and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us .
Dan , I 'd like to hear more on this . So , you 're saying that our response to terror is , I mean , it 's a form of mental bug ?
Talk more about it .
It 's out-sized . I mean , look .
If Australia disappears tomorrow , terror is probably the right response .
That 's an awful large lot of very nice people . On the other hand , when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed , more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country .
Is terror the right response ?
What causes the bug ? Is it the drama of the event -- that it 's so spectacular ?
Is it the fact that it 's an intentional attack by , quote , outsiders ?
What is it ?
Yes . It 's a number of things , and you hit on several of them .
First , it 's a human agent trying to kill us -- it 's not a tree falling on us by accident .
Second , these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again .
People are being killed for no reason instead of good reason -- as if there 's good reason , but sometimes people think there are .
So there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event , but let 's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read . So there 's a large role here played by the media , who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can .
I mean , what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it ?
Well , go to Israel . You know , go to Israel . And a mall blows up , and then everybody 's unhappy about it , and an hour-and-a-half later -- at least when I was there , and I was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up -- I went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on .
And as the Israeli mother said , she said , " We never let them win by stopping weddings . "
I mean , this is a society that has learned -- and there are others too -- that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it , shall I say , as those of us who have not had many terror attacks .
But is there a rational fear that actually , the reason we 're frightened about this is because we think that the Big One is to come ?
Yes , of course . So , if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be , there might be more and more buses of 30 people -- we would probably not be nearly so frightened .
I don 't want to say -- please , I 'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying , " Terrorism is fine and we shouldn 't be so distressed . "
That 's not my point at all .
What I 'm saying is that , surely , rationally , our distress about things that happen , about threats , should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come .
I think in the case of terrorism , it isn 't .
And many of the things we 've heard about from our speakers today -- how many people do you know got up and said , Poverty ! I can 't believe what poverty is doing to us .
People get up in the morning ; they don 't care about poverty .
It 's not making headlines , it 's not making news , it 's not flashy .
There are no guns going off .
I mean , if you had to solve one of these problems , Chris , which would you solve ? Terrorism or poverty ?
That 's a tough one .
There 's no question .
Poverty , by an order of magnitude , a huge order of magnitude , unless someone can show that there 's , you know , terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come .
The latest I 've read , seen , thought is that it 's incredibly hard for them to do that .
If that turns out to be wrong , we all look silly , but with poverty it 's a bit -- Even if that were true , still more people die from poverty .
We 've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks . Is that because in the past , in the ancient past , we just didn 't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth , and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things ?
People died ; so be it .
But if you got attacked , that was something you could do something about .
And so we evolved these responses .
Is that what happened ?
Well , you know , the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves .
My guess is that there 's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past . But rather , if you 're looking for an evolutionary explanation , you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic -- that is , they 're a little scared of stuff that 's new and different .
And there 's a good reason to be , because old stuff didn 't eat you . Right ?
Any animal you see that you 've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you 've never seen before .
So , you know , when a school bus is blown up and we 've never seen this before , our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated .
I don 't think it 's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to , but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it .
Jay Walker : You know , economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets . But I suspect you 're making the exact same error you 're accusing those people of , which is the error of value .
I know , because I 've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years .
It turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning .
That 's what you think it is . All right ?
The average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year , so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose , and yet she buys 150 tickets a year . Why is that ?
It 's not because she is stupid or he is stupid .
It 's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain , and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you 've lost .
Or , to put it another way , for the dollar investment , you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet , which you cannot have a good feeling from .
Now , economists tend to -- -- economists tend to view the world through their own lenses , which is : this is just a bunch of stupid people .
And as a result , many people look at economists as stupid people .
And so fundamentally , the reason we got to the moon is , we didn 't listen to the economists . Thank you very much .
Well , no , it 's a great point . It remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery . Because remember , people who didn 't buy tickets don 't feel awful the next day either , even though they don 't feel great during the drawing .
I would disagree that people know they 're not going to win .
I think they think it 's unlikely , but it could happen , which is why they prefer that to the flushing .
But certainly I see your point : that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning .
Now , I think there 's many good reasons not to listen to economists .
That isn 't one of them , for me , but there 's many others .
Last question .
Aubrey de Grey : My name 's Aubrey de Grey , from Cambridge .
I work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills -- I work on aging -- and I 'm interested in doing something about it , as we 'll all hear tomorrow .
I very much resonate with what you 're saying , because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever . Do you have any advice ?
For you or for them ?
AdG : In persuading them .
Ah , for you in persuading them .
Well , it 's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted .
But one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly .
One of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future .
To the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future , people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way .
So , would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you 're 65 is a question that 's very different than , imagine who you 'll be when you 're 65 : will you be living , what will you look like , how much hair will you have , who will you be living with .
Once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario , suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money .
But these are tricks around the margins .
I think in general you 're battling a very fundamental human tendency , which is to say , " I 'm here today , and so now is more important than later . "
Dan , thank you . Members of the audience , that was a fantastic session . Thank you .
Richard Wilkinson : How economic inequality harms societies
We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong . Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality , and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart : real effects on health , lifespan , even such basic values as trust .
You all know the truth of what I 'm going to say .
I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution .
What 's changed is we now can look at the evidence , we can compare societies , more and less equal societies , and see what inequality does .
I 'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I 'm going to be showing you exist .
But first , see what a miserable lot we are .
I want to start though with a paradox .
This shows you life expectancy against gross national income -- how rich countries are on average .
And you see the countries on the right , like Norway and the USA , are twice as rich as Israel , Greece , Portugal on the left .
And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all .
There 's no suggestion of a relationship there .
But if we look within our societies , there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society .
This , again , is life expectancy .
These are small areas of England and Wales -- the poorest on the right , the richest on the left .
A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us .
Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top .
So income means something very important within our societies , and nothing between them .
The explanation of that paradox is that , within our societies , we 're looking at relative income or social position , social status -- where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us .
And as soon as you 've got that idea , you should immediately wonder : what happens if we widen the differences , or compress them , make the income differences bigger or smaller ?
And that 's what I 'm going to show you .
I 'm not using any hypothetical data .
I 'm taking data from the U.N. -- it 's the same as the World Bank has -- on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies .
The measure we 've used , because it 's easy to understand and you can download it , is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country .
And you see in the more equal countries on the left -- Japan , Finland , Norway , Sweden -- the top 20 percent are about three and a half , four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent .
But on the more unequal end -- U.K. , Portugal , USA , Singapore -- the differences are twice as big .
On that measure , we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies .
Now I 'm going to show you what that does to our societies .
We collected data on problems with social gradients , the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder .
Internationally comparable data on life expectancy , on kids ' maths and literacy scores , on infant mortality rates , homicide rates , proportion of the population in prison , teenage birthrates , levels of trust , obesity , mental illness -- which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction -- and social mobility .
We put them all in one index .
They 're all weighted equally .
Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things .
And there , you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I 've just shown you , which I shall use over and over again in the data .
The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems .
It 's an extraordinarily close correlation .
But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita , gross national income , there 's nothing there , no correlation anymore .
We were a little bit worried that people might think we 'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence , so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being .
It has 40 different components put together by other people .
It contains whether kids can talk to their parents , whether they have books at home , what immunization rates are like , whether there 's bullying at school .
Everything goes into it .
Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality .
Kids do worse in the more unequal societies .
Highly significant relationship .
But once again , if you look at that measure of child well-being , in relation to national income per person , there 's no relationship , no suggestion of a relationship .
What all the data I 've shown you so far says is the same thing .
The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth .
That 's very important in poorer countries , but not in the rich developed world .
But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much .
I 'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index .
Here , for instance , is trust .
It 's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted .
It comes from the World Values Survey .
You see , at the more unequal end , it 's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others .
But in the more equal societies , it rises to 60 or 65 percent .
And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital , very similar relationships closely related to inequality .
I may say , we did all this work twice .
We did it first on these rich , developed countries , and then as a separate test bed , we repeated it all on the 50 American states -- asking just the same question : do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures ?
So here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality .
Very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust .
Same thing is going on .
Basically we found that almost anything that 's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed .
We 're not just talking about a fluke .
This is mental illness .
WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society .
This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year .
And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that -- whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others .
And again , closely related to inequality .
This is violence .
These red dots are American states , and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces .
But look at the scale of the differences .
It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150 .
This is the proportion of the population in prison .
There 's a about a tenfold difference there , log scale up the side .
But it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison .
That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime .
In some places , that 's part of it .
But most of it is about more punitive sentencing , harsher sentencing .
And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty .
Here we have children dropping out of high school .
Again , quite big differences .
Extraordinarily damaging , if you 're talking about using the talents of the population .
This is social mobility .
It 's actually a measure of mobility based on income .
Basically , it 's asking : do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons , or is there no relationship between the two ?
And at the more unequal end , fathers ' income is much more important -- in the U.K. , USA .
And in Scandinavian countries , fathers ' income is much less important .
There 's more social mobility .
And as we like to say -- and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here -- if Americans want to live the American dream , they should go to Denmark .
I 've shown you just a few things in italics here .
I could have shown a number of other problems .
They 're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient .
But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries -- not just a little bit worse , but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common .
Think of the expense , the human cost of that .
I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points .
One is that , in graph after graph , we find the countries that do worse , whatever the outcome , seem to be the more unequal ones , and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan .
So what we 're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality .
It 's not just one or two things that go wrong , it 's most things .
The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that , if you look at the bottom , Sweden and Japan , they 're very different countries in all sorts of ways .
The position of women , how closely they keep to the nuclear family , are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world .
But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality .
Sweden has huge differences in earnings , and it narrows the gap through taxation , general welfare state , generous benefits and so on .
Japan is rather different though .
It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax .
It has lower taxes .
It has a smaller welfare state .
And in our analysis of the American states , we find rather the same contrast .
There are some states that do well through redistribution , some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax .
So we conclude that it doesn 't much matter how you get your greater equality , as long as you get there somehow .
I am not talking about perfect equality , I 'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies .
Another really surprising part of this picture is that it 's not just the poor who are affected by inequality .
There seems to be some truth in John Donne 's " No man is an island . "
And in a number of studies , it 's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy .
This is just one example .
It 's infant mortality .
Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification .
And so it 's anachronistically a classification by fathers ' occupations , so single parents go on their own .
But then where it says " low social class , " that 's unskilled manual occupations .
It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle , then the junior non-manual , going up high to the professional occupations -- doctors , lawyers , directors of larger companies .
You see there that Sweden does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy .
The biggest differences are at the bottom of society .
But even at the top , there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society .
We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally .
And that seems to be the general picture -- that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom , but has some benefits even at the top .
But I should say a few words about what 's going on .
I think I 'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality .
More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority , of being valued and devalued , respected and disrespected .
And of course , those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society .
It also leads to status insecurity .
We worry more about how we 're judged and seen by others , whether we 're regarded as attractive , clever , all that kind of thing .
The social-evaluative judgments increase , the fear of those social-evaluative judgments .
Interestingly , some parallel work going on in social psychology : some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones , their responses to doing stressful tasks , measured .
And in the review , what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol , the central stress hormone .
And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat -- threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance .
Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress .
Now we have been criticized .
Of course , there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising .
I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data , we never pick and choose data .
We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we 're looking at , it goes into the analysis .
Our data source decides whether it 's reliable data , we don 't .
Otherwise that would introduce bias .
What about other countries ?
There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals .
This isn 't confined to these countries here , hiding a very simple demonstration .
The same countries , the same measure of inequality , one problem after another .
Why don 't we control for other factors ?
Well we 've shown you that GNP per capita doesn 't make any difference .
And of course , others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on .
What about causality ?
Correlation in itself doesn 't prove causality .
We spend a good bit of time .
And indeed , people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes .
The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system , the cardiovascular system .
Or for instance , the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on .
I should say that to deal with this , we 've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things .
We 've got to constrain income , the bonus culture incomes at the top .
I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can .
I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us .
Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies , and that 's exciting .
Thank you .
Andras Forgacs : Leather and meat without killing animals
By 2050 , it will take 100 billion land animals to provide the world 's population with meat , dairy , eggs and leather goods . Maintaining this herd will take a huge , potentially unsustainable toll on the planet . What if there were a different way ? In this eye-opening talk , tissue engineering advocate Andras Forgacs argues that biofabricating meat and leather is a civilized way to move past killing animals for hamburgers and handbags .
When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs , some people initially thought we were a little crazy .
But since then , much progress has been made , both in our lab and other labs around the world .
And given this , we started getting questions like , " If you can grow human body parts , can you also grow animal products like meat and leather ? "
When someone first suggested this to me , quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy , but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all .
What 's crazy is what we do today .
I 'm convinced that in 30 years , when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags , we 'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy .
Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat , dairy , eggs and leather goods ?
And over the next few decades , as the world 's population expands to 10 billion , this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals .
But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet .
Animals are not just raw materials .
They 're living beings , and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land , fresh water , and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change .
On top of this , when you get so many animals so close together , it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse .
Clearly , we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment , public health , and food security at risk .
There is another way , because essentially , animal products are just collections of tissues , and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues .
What if , instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal , we started with what the tissues are made of , the basic unit of life , the cell ?
This is biofabrication , where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs .
Already in medicine , biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts , like ears , windpipes , skin , blood vessels and bone , that have been successfully implanted into patients .
And beyond medicine , biofabrication can be a humane , sustainable and scalable new industry .
And we should begin by reimagining leather .
I emphasize leather because it is so widely used .
It is beautiful , and it has long been a part of our history .
Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat .
It mainly uses one cell type , and it is largely two-dimensional .
It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators .
Until biofabrication is better understood , it is clear that , initially at least , more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods , no matter how delicious .
In this sense , leather is a gateway material , a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry .
If we can succeed here , it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon .
Now how do we do it ?
To grow leather , we begin by taking cells from an animal , through a simple biopsy .
The animal could be a cow , lamb , or even something more exotic .
This process does no harm , and Daisy the cow can live a happy life .
We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium .
This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions .
And we then coax these cells to produce collagen , as they would naturally .
This collagen is the stuff between cells .
It 's natural connective tissue .
It 's the extracellular matrix , but in leather , it 's the main building block .
And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets , and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another , like phyllo pastry , to form thicker sheets , which we then let mature .
And finally , we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process , we create leather .
And so I 'm very excited to show you , for the first time , the first batch of our cultured leather , fresh from the lab .
This is real , genuine leather , without the animal sacrifice .
It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells , and better yet , there is no hair to remove , no scars or insect 's bites , and no waste .
This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet , a handbag or a car seat .
It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator .
And because we make this material , we grow this leather from the ground up , we can control its properties in very interesting ways .
This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick , and as you can see , it is nearly transparent .
And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque .
You don 't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather .
And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities , like softness , breathability , durability , elasticity and even things like pattern .
We can mimic nature , but in some ways also improve upon it .
This type of leather can do what today 's leather does , but with imagination , probably much more .
What could the future of animal products look like ?
It need not look like this , which is actually the state of the art today .
Rather , it could be much more like this .
Already , we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years , beginning with products like wine , beer and yogurt .
And speaking of food , our cultured food has evolved , and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful , sterile facilities like this .
A brewery is essentially a bioreactor .
It is where cell culture takes place .
Imagine that in this facility , instead of brewing beer , we were brewing leather or meat .
Imagine touring this facility , learning about how the leather or meat is cultured , seeing the process from beginning to end , and even trying some .
It 's clean , open and educational , and this is in contrast to the hidden , guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today .
Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind .
It 's environmentally responsible , efficient and humane .
It allows us to be creative .
We can design new materials , new products , and new facilities .
We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved .
Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured .
Thank you .
Nick Sears : Demo : The Orb
Inventor Nick Sears demos the first generation of the Orb , a rotating persistence-of-vision display that creates glowing 3D images . A short , cool tale of invention .
In 1962 , Buckminster Fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the Geoscope .
It was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the East River in New York City , in full view of the United Nations .
It was a big idea , for sure , and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data , trends and other information regarding the globe , on this sphere .
And today , 45 years later , we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective , but what we do have is improved technology .
Today we don 't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display .
We can use LEDs .
LEDs are smaller , they 're cheaper , they 're longer lasting , they 're more efficient .
Most importantly for this , they 're faster .
And this speed , combined with today 's high-performance micro-controllers , allows us to actually simulate , in this piece , over 17,000 LEDs -- using just 64 .
And the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision .
But as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm -- that 's 28 times per second .
The equator 's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour .
There are four on-board micro-controllers that , each time this ring rotates it , as it passes the rear of the display , it picks up a position signal .
And from that , the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations .
But this is really just the beginning .
In addition to higher resolution versions of this display , my father and I are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon .
It achieves this by rotating LEDs about two axes .
So as you can see here , this is a , eleven-inch diameter circuit board .
These blocks represent LEDs .
And so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis , it will create a disc of light that we can control .
That 's nothing new : that 's a propeller clock ; that 's the rims that you can buy for your car .
But what is new is that , when we rotate this disc about this axis , this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light .
And so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric , three-dimensional display with just 256 LEDs .
Now this piece is currently in process -- due out in May -- but what we 've done is we 've put together a small demo , just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere .
I 've got a little video to show you , but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control , and this is also with only four LEDs .
This is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in May .
So , take a look .
And here you can see it 's rotating about the vertical axis only , creating circles .
And then , as the other axis kicks in , those actually blur into a volume .
And the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case .
But this piece is due out in May .
It 'll be on display at the Interactive Telecommunications Spring Show in Greenwich Village in New York City -- that 's open to the public , definitely invite you all to come and attend -- it 's a fantastic show .
There are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects .
This piece , actually , will be on display down in the Sierra Simulcast Lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show .
So I 'd love to talk to you all , and invite you to come down and take a closer look .
It 's an honor to be here . Thanks very much .
Adam Ostrow : After your final status update
Many of us have a social media presence -- a virtual personality made up of status updates , tweets and connections , stored in the cloud . Adam Ostrow asks a big question : What happens to that personality after you 've died ? Could it ... live on ?
By the end of this year , there 'll be nearly a billion people on this planet that actively use social networking sites .
The one thing that all of them have in common is that they 're going to die .
While that might be a somewhat morbid thought , I think it has some really profound implications that are worth exploring .
What first got me thinking about this was a blog post authored earlier this year by Derek K. Miller , who was a science and technology journalist who died of cancer .
And what Miller did was have his family and friends write a post that went out shortly after he died .
Here 's what he wrote in starting that out .
He said , " Here it is . I 'm dead , and this is my last post to my blog .
In advance , I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer , then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote -- the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive . "
Now , while as a journalist , Miller 's archive may have been better written and more carefully curated than most , the fact of the matter is that all of us today are creating an archive that 's something completely different than anything that 's been created by any previous generation .
Consider a few stats for a moment .
Right now there are 48 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute .
There are 200 million Tweets being posted every day .
And the average Facebook user is creating 90 pieces of content each month .
So when you think about your parents or your grandparents , at best they may have created some photos or home videos , or a diary that lives in a box somewhere .
But today we 're all creating this incredibly rich digital archive that 's going to live in the cloud indefinitely , years after we 're gone .
And I think that 's going to create some incredibly intriguing opportunities for technologists .
Now to be clear , I 'm a journalist and not a technologist , so what I 'd like to do briefly is paint a picture of what the present and the future are going to look like .
Now we 're already seeing some services that are designed to let us decide what happens to our online profile and our social media accounts after we die .
One of them actually , fittingly enough , found me when I checked into a deli at a restaurant in New York on foursquare .
Adam Ostrow : Hello .
Death : Adam ?
AO : Yeah .
Death : Death can catch you anywhere , anytime , even at the Organic .
AO : Who is this ?
Death : Go to ifidie.net before it 's too late .
Adam Ostrow : Kind of creepy , right ?
So what that service does , quite simply , is let you create a message or a video that can be posted to Facebook after you die .
Another service right now is called 1,000 Memories .
And what this lets you do is create an online tribute to your loved ones , complete with photos and videos and stories that they can post after you die .
But what I think comes next is far more interesting .
Now a lot of you are probably familiar with Deb Roy who , back in March , demonstrated how he was able to analyze more than 90,000 hours of home video .
I think as machines ' ability to understand human language and process vast amounts of data continues to improve , it 's going to become possible to analyze an entire life 's worth of content -- the Tweets , the photos , the videos , the blog posts -- that we 're producing in such massive numbers .
And I think as that happens , it 's going to become possible for our digital personas to continue to interact in the real world long after we 're gone thanks to the vastness of the amount of content we 're creating and technology 's ability to make sense of it all .
Now we 're already starting to see some experiments here .
One service called My Next Tweet analyzes your entire Twitter stream , everything you 've posted onto Twitter , to make some predictions as to what you might say next .
Well right now , as you can see , the results can be somewhat comical .
You can imagine what something like this might look like five , 10 or 20 years from now as our technical capabilities improve .
Taking it a step further , MIT 's media lab is working on robots that can interact more like humans .
But what if those robots were able to interact based on the unique characteristics of a specific person based on the hundreds of thousands of pieces of content that person produces in their lifetime ?
Finally , think back to this famous scene from election night 2008 back in the United States , where CNN beamed a live hologram of hip hop artist will.i.am into their studio for an interview with Anderson Cooper .
What if we were able to use that same type of technology to beam a representation of our loved ones into our living rooms -- interacting in a very lifelike way based on all the content they created while they were alive ?
I think that 's going to become completely possible as the amount of data we 're producing and technology 's ability to understand it both expand exponentially .
Now in closing , I think what we all need to be thinking about is if we want that to become our reality -- and if so , what it means for a definition of life and everything that comes after it .
Thank you very much .
Jehane Noujaim : My wish : A global day of film
Jehane Noujaim unveils her 2006 TED Prize wish : to bring the world together for one day a year through the power of film .
I can 't help but with this wish to think about when you 're a little kid and you -- all your friends ask you if a genie could give you one wish in the world , what would it be ?
And I always answered , " Well , I 'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for . "
Well , then you 'd be screwed because you 'd know what to wish for and you 'd used up your wish .
And now , since we only have one wish -- unlike last year they had three wishes -- I 'm not going to wish for that .
So let 's get to what I would like , which is world peace .
And I know what you 're thinking .
You 're thinking , the poor girl up there -- she thinks she 's at a beauty pageant .
She 's not . She 's at the TED Prize .
But I really do think it makes sense , and I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other .
I 've met a lot of different people over the years and I 've filmed some of them -- from a dotcom executive in New York that wanted to take over the world to a military press officer in Qatar that would rather not take over the world .
If you 've seen the film " Control Room " that was sent out , you 'd understand a little bit why . Thank you .
Wow ! Some of you watched it .
That 's great . That 's great .
So basically what I 'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel , to meet people in a different way than -- because you can 't travel all over the world at the same time .
And a long time ago -- well , about 40 years ago -- my mom had an exchange student .
And I 'm going to show you slides of the exchange student .
This is Donna .
This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty .
This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike .
This is Donna eating ice cream .
And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance .
Now I really think as the world is getting smaller , it becomes more and more important that we learn each other 's dance moves , that we meet each other , we get to know each other , we are able to figure out a way to cross borders , to understand each other , to understand people 's hopes and dreams , what makes them laugh and cry .
And I know that we can 't all do exchange programs , and I can 't force everybody to travel .
I 've already talked about that to Chris and Amy , and they said that there 's a problem with this .
You can 't force people of free will , and I totally support that .
So we 're not forcing people to travel .
But I 'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn 't require a ship or an airplane , and just requires a movie camera , a projector and a screen .
And that 's what I 'm going to talk to you about today .
I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from , and Cameron , I don 't know how you managed to get out of that one , but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from .
I 'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father .
So I 'm the living product of two cultures coming together .
No pun intended .
And I 've also been called -- as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name -- the " Middle East Peace Crisis . "
So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together , a way to take the worlds with me , a way to tell stories visually .
It all kind of started that way , but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt , when I was about 16 . My mother took me there .
She 's somebody that believes strongly in community service and decided that this was something that I needed to do and so I went there and I met some amazing women there .
There was a center there where they were teaching people how to read and write and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage .
And I began to start teaching there .
I taught English , and I met some incredible women there .
I met people that live seven people to a room , barely can afford their evening meal , yet live with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities .
I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there .
I took pictures of weddings and older family members , things that they wanted memories of .
About two years after I started taking these pictures , the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference .
So I was 18 ; I was very excited .
It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there , and after about two days , they all came down except for three .
People were very upset , very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo , and why didn 't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame ?
And as I sat there , I got very depressed .
I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were , you know , very pretty photographs and I was like , I failed at this .
But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs .
I mean , here I was , this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to , and all of a sudden I put these photographs on the wall and there were arguments , and they had to be taken down .
And I just saw the power of the image .
And it was incredible .
And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves , that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances .
And I think it was at that point that I decided that I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps , to bridge cultures , bring people together , cross borders .
And so that 's what really kind of started me off .
Did a stint at MTV , made a film called " Startup.com , " and I 've done a couple of music films -- but in 2003 , when the war in Iraq was about to start , it was a very surreal feeling for me because before the war started , there was kind of this media war that was going on .
And I was watching television in New York and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across , and the coverage went from the U.S. State Department to embedded troops and what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings , and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad .
And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East where my parents were .
I knew that there was a completely other story being told , and I was thinking , how are people supposed to communicate with each other when they 're getting completely different messages and nobody knows what the other 's being told ?
How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future ?
So I knew that I had to go there .
I just wanted to be in the center .
I had no plan . I had no funding .
I didn 't even have a camera at the time .
I had somebody bring it there because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera , George Bush 's favorite channel and a place which I was very curious about because it 's disliked by many governments across the Arab world and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the U.S. government .
So I was thinking , you know , this station that 's hated by so many people has to be doing something right .
I 've got to go see what this is all about .
And I also wanted to go see Central Command , which was 10 minutes away , and that way I could get access to how this news was being created on the Arab side reaching the Arab world , and on the U.S. and Western side reaching the U.S.
And when I went there and sat there , and met these people that were in the center of it and sat with these characters , I met some surprising , very complex people .
And I 'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them , and you listen to them , and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite , the amazing complexity of people emerge .
Sameer Khader : Business as usual .
Iraq , and then Iraq , and then Iraq .
But between us , if I 'm offered a job with Fox , I 'll take it .
To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream .
I still have that dream .
Maybe I will never be able to do it .
But I have plans for my children .
When they finish their high school I will send them to America to study there .
I will pay for their study .
And they will stay there .
Josh Rushing : The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers -- Al Jazeera showed them -- it was powerful because America doesn 't show those kinds of images .
Most of the news in America won 't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform strewn about a floor , a cold tile floor .
And it was revolting .
It was absolutely revolting .
It made me sick to my stomach .
And then what hit me was , the night before , there had been some kind of bombing in Basra , and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people .
And they were equally if not more horrifying -- the images were .
And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office and thought to myself , " Wow , that 's gross .
That 's bad . "
And then going away , and probably eating dinner or something .
And it didn 't affect me as much .
So -- the impact it had on me , me realizing that I just saw people on the other side , and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night .
And it upset me on a profound level that I wasn 't bothered as much the night before .
It makes me hate war .
But it doesn 't make me believe that we 're in world that can live without war yet .
Jehane Noujaim : I was overwhelmed by the response of the film , for we didn 't know whether it would be able to get out there .
We had no funding for it .
We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up , and when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world we had such incredible reactions .
It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film .
In the Arab world -- and it 's not really by the film ; it 's by the characters .
I mean , Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things .
And when I showed the film in the Middle East , people wanted to meet Josh .
He kind of redefined us as an American population .
People started to , you know , ask me , where is this guy now ?
Al Jazeera offered him a job .
And Sameer , on the other hand , was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see , because it brought out the complexities of this love / hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West .
In the United States , I was blown away by the motivations , the positive motivations of the American people when they 'd see this film .
You know , we 're criticized abroad for believing we 're the saviors of the world in some way , but the flip side of it is that actually , when people do see what is happening abroad and people 's reactions to some of our policy abroad , we feel this power that we need to -- we feel like we have to get the power to change things .
And I saw this with audiences .
This woman came up to me after the screening and said , " You know , I know this is crazy . I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes ; I saw the military going out to war .
But you don 't understand people 's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war , and how do we get out of this bubble ?
How do we understand what the other person is thinking ? "
Now , I don 't know whether a film can change the world , but I know that it starts -- I know the power of it -- I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world .
Now , I 'm not a philosopher , so I feel like I shouldn 't go into great depth on this but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world .
Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders .
I 'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world .
And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we are faced with today .
As long as there is injustice , someone must make a sacrifice !
That 's no sacrifice , that 's revenge !
If you kill , there 's no difference between victim and occupier .
If we had airplanes , we wouldn 't need martyrs , that 's the difference .
The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger .
Then let us be equal in death .
We still have Paradise .
There is no Paradise ! It only exists in your head !
God forbid !
May God forgive you .
If you were not Abu Azzam 's daughter ...
Anyway , I 'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell !
In this life , we 're dead anyway .
One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer .
And what about us ? The ones who remain ?
Will we win that way ?
Don 't you see what you 're doing is destroying us ?
And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on ?
So with no alibi , Israel will stop ?
Perhaps . We have to turn it into a moral war .
How , if Israel has no morals ?
Be careful !
Tzvika : My wife Ayelet called me and said , " There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv . "
Ayelet : What do you know about the casualties ?
We 're looking for three girls .
Tzvika : We have no information .
Ayelet : One is wounded here , but we haven 't heard from the other three .
Tzvika : I said , " OK , that 's Bat-Chen , that 's my daughter .
Are you sure she is dead ? "
They said yes .
George : On that day , at around 6 : 30 I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket .
When we got to here , we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road .
When we passed by the first jeep , they opened fire on us .
And my 12-year-old daughter Christine was killed in the shooting .
I am the headmaster for all parts .
George : But there is a teacher that is in charge ?
Tzvika : Yes , I have assistants .
I deal with children all the time .
George : At first , I thought it was a strange idea .
But after thinking logically about it , I didn 't find any reason why not to meet them and let them know of our suffering .
George : There were many things that touched me .
We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot , who lost children , and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation .
If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other , and look forward to a better future , then everyone else must do so , too .
Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we 're coming from .
You could give them a long political speech they would still not understand .
But I tell you , when you finish that song , people will be like , " Damn , I know where you niggaz are coming from .
I know where you guys are coming from .
Death unto apartheid ! "
It 's about the liberation struggle .
It 's about those children who took to the streets , fighting , screaming , " Free Nelson Mandela ! "
It 's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom .
Yes . Yes !
Freedom !
Jehane Noujaim : I think everybody 's had that feeling of sitting in a theater , in a dark room , with other strangers , watching a very powerful film , and they felt that feeling of transformation .
And what I 'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film ?
I 've been listening to the talks in some of the conference , and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person 's humanity , then they will have an appreciation for ours .
And that 's what this is about .
It 's about connecting people through film , getting these independent voices out there .
Now Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera , so his feeling is that he 's on Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West .
And that 's an amazing thing .
But I 've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices , to give power to the filmmakers , to give power to people who are trying to use film for change .
And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already .
There 's Witness , that you heard from earlier .
There 's Just Vision , that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace , and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it 's a powerful tool to show that this is a woman who 's had her daughter killed in an attack , and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this .
There 's Working Films and there 's Current TV , which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their -- yes , it 's amazing .
I watched it and I 'm just -- I 'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world , independent voices from around the world , and create a truly democratic , global television .
So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations , to create some momentum , to get everybody in the world involved in this movement ?
I 'd like for us to imagine for a second -- imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world .
You have towns and villages and theaters all from around the world getting together , and sitting in the dark , and sharing a communal experience of watching a film , or a couple of films , together .
Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live , or just a character that defies stereotypes , Comedies , documentaries , shorts .
This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together , to cross borders and have people feel like they 're having a communal experience .
So if you imagine this day when all around the world you have theaters from around the world and places where we project films .
If you imagine from -- projecting from Times Square to Tahir Square in Cairo , the same film in Ramallah , the same film in Jerusalem .
You know , we 've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China .
It 's endless what you can imagine , in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience .
And I believe that this one day , if we can create it , this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices .
There isn 't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there , and yet I 'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest danger in our future is [ lack of ] understanding the other and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders .
And if film can do that , and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together , this could be an incredible day .
So we 've already made a partnership actually , set up through somebody from the TED community , John Camen , introduced me to Steven Apkon , from the Jacob Burns Film Center .
And we started calling up everybody .
And in the last week , there have been so many people that have responded to us from as close as Palo Alto to Mongolia and to India .
There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film , to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there .
Now , we 've thought about a name for this day and I 'd like to share this with you .
Now , the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes , and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future ?
How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future , so that we can build community and have these communities working together , through the Internet ?
There was a time , many , many years ago , when all of the continents were stuck together .
And we called that landmass Pangea .
So what we 'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day .
And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching , then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better .
I know that it 's very intangible , touching people 's hearts and souls , but the only way that I know how to do it , the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody 's heart and soul all across the world is by showing them a film .
And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen .
And that 's my wish .
So I guess I 'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish , but we 're way out of time .
That is an incredible wish .
Pangea Cinema -- the day the world comes together .
JN : It 's more tangible than world peace , and it 's certainly more immediate .
But it would be the day that the world comes together through film , the power of film .
Ladies and gentlemen , Jehane Noujaim .
Daniel Libeskind : 17 words of architectural inspiration
Daniel Libeskind builds on very big ideas . Here , he shares 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture -- raw , risky , emotional , radical -- and that offer inspiration for any bold creative pursuit .
I 'll start with my favorite muse , Emily Dickinson , who said that wonder is not knowledge , neither is it ignorance .
It 's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be , and a tradition we may have forgotten .
And I think , when I listen to these incredible people here , I 've been so inspired -- so many incredible ideas , so many visions .
And yet , when I look at the environment outside , you see how resistant architecture is to change .
You see how resistant it is to those very ideas .
We can think them out . We can create incredible things .
And yet , at the end , it 's so hard to change a wall .
We applaud the well-mannered box .
But to create a space that never existed is what interests me ; to create something that has never been , a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits .
And I think that 's really what architecture is based on .
Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil .
It 's based on wonder .
And that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities , the greatest spaces that we have had .
And I think that is indeed what architecture is . It is a story .
By the way , it is a story that is told through its hard materials .
But it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities .
If you think of the great buildings , of the cathedrals , of the temples , of the pyramids , of pagodas , of cities in India and beyond , you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea , but by people .
So , anything that has been made can be unmade .
Anything that has been made can be made better .
There it is : the things that I really believe are of important architecture .
These are the dimensions that I like to work with .
It 's something very personal .
It 's not , perhaps , the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners .
But I think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings , to live in cities , to connect ourselves in a social space .
And I therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward .
It 's the only profession where you have to believe in the future .
You can be a general , a politician , an economist who is depressed , a musician in a minor key , a painter in dark colors .
But architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better .
And it is that belief that I think drives society .
And today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us .
And yet it is in times like this that I think architecture can thrive with big ideas , ideas that are not small . Think of the great cities .
Think of the Empire State Building , the Rockefeller Center .
They were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way .
And yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy .
So again , I am a believer in the expressive .
I have never been a fan of the neutral .
I don 't like neutrality in life , in anything .
I think expression .
And it 's like espresso coffee , you know , you take the essence of the coffee .
That 's what expression is .
It 's been missing in much of the architecture , because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered , the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion , that has no value .
And yet , I believe it is the expression -- expression of the city , expression of our own space -- that gives meaning to architecture .
And , of course , expressive spaces are not mute .
Expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know .
Expressive spaces may disturb us .
And I think that 's also part of life .
Life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile , but to reach out across the abyss of history , to places we have never been , and would have perhaps been , had we not been so lucky .
So again , radical versus conservative .
Radical , what does it mean ? It 's something which is rooted , and something which is rooted deep in a tradition .
And I think that is what architecture is , it 's radical .
It 's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms .
It is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of , and a story that is certainly ongoing .
It 's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending .
It 's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way .
So again I am a believer in the radical architecture .
You know the Soviet architecture of that building is the conservation .
It 's like the old Las Vegas used to be .
It 's about conserving emotions , conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them .
And I think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses .
Therefore I believe it should not be cool .
There is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture .
I 've always been an opponent of it . I think emotion is needed .
Life without emotion would really not be life .
Even the mind is emotional .
There is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere , in the philosophical mystery of what we are .
So I think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space , into city life .
And of course , we are all about the struggle of emotions .
And I think that is what makes the world a wondrous place .
And of course , the confrontation of the cool , the unemotional with emotion , is a conversation that I think cities themselves have fostered .
I think that is the progress of cities .
It 's not only the forms of cities , but the fact that they incarnate emotions , not just of those who build them , but of those who live there as well .
Inexplicable versus understood . You know , too often we want to understand everything .
But architecture is not the language of words .
It 's a language . But it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write .
Too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story , but the story is very short , which says , " We have no story to tell you . "
So the important thing actually , is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions , which might be totally inexplicable in words , because they operate in proportions , in materials , in light .
They connect themselves into various sources , into a kind of complex vector matrix that isn 't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives , and in the history of a city , and of a people .
So again , the notion that a building should just be explicit I think is a false notion , which has reduced architecture into banality .
Hand versus the computer .
Of course , what would we be without computers ?
Our whole practice depends on computing .
But the computer should not just be the glove of the hand ; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power .
Because I believe that the hand in all its primitive , in all its physiological obscurity , has a source , though the source is unknown , though we don 't have to be mystical about it .
We realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy .
And I think when I draw drawings which may imitate the computer , but are not computer drawings -- drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known , not normal , not seen , yet the hand -- and that 's what I really , to all of you who are working -- how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer .
I think that 's part of what the complexity of architecture is .
Because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good . But I don 't believe it .
Listening to all of you , the complexity of thought , the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming .
And I think we shouldn 't shy away in architecture , You know , brain surgery , atomic theory , genetics , economics are complex complex fields .
There is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple .
It is complex . Space is complex .
Space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds .
And as wondrous as it is , it cannot be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired .
And yet , our lives are complex .
Our emotions are complex .
Our intellectual desires are complex .
So I do believe that architecture as I see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have , in every intimacy that we possess .
Of course that means that architecture is political .
The political is not an enemy of architecture .
The politeama is the city . It 's all of us together .
And I 've always believed that the act of architecture , even a private house , when somebody else will see it , is a political act , because it will be visible to others .
And we live in a world which is connecting us more and more .
So again , the evasion of that sphere , which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture , the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me .
And I do believe that this interaction with the history , with history that is often very difficult , to grapple with it , to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique .
Because architecture is also the asking of questions .
It 's not only the giving of answers .
It 's also , just like life , the asking of questions .
Therefore it is important that it be real .
You know we can simulate almost anything .
But the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart , the human soul .
And architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere .
So the reality of architecture is visceral . It 's not intellectual .
It 's not something that comes to us from books and theories .
It 's the real that we touch -- the door , the window , the threshold , the bed -- such prosaic objects . And yet , I try , in every building , to take that virtual world , which is so enigmatic and so rich , and create something in the real world .
Create a space for an office , a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real .
Unexpected versus habitual .
What is a habit ? It 's just a shackle for ourselves .
It 's a self-induced poison .
So the unexpected is always unexpected .
You know , it 's true , the cathedrals , as unexpected , will always be unexpected .
You know Frank Gehry 's buildings , they will continue to be unexpected in the future .
So not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability , but an architecture that is full of tension , an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart , and that breaks out of the shackles of habits .
And of course habits are enforced by architecture .
When we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles , of those lights , of those materials .
We think the world really looks like our buildings .
And yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them .
So again , the unexpected which is also the raw .
And I often think of the raw and the refined .
What is raw ? The raw , I would say is the naked experience , untouched by luxury , untouched by expensive materials , untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture .
So the rawness , I think , in space , the fact that sustainability can actually , in the future translate into a raw space , a space that isn 't decorated , a space that is not mannered in any source , but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature , might be refractive to our desires .
A space that doesn 't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us , but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities , other experiences , that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture .
And of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy .
And so I do like something which is pointed , not blunt , something which is focused on reality , something that has the power , through its leverage , to transform even a very small space .
So architecture maybe is not so big , like science , but through its focal point it can leverage in an Archimedian way what we think the world is really about .
And often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done , what has been done , how the world has remained both in between stability and instability .
And of course buildings have their shapes .
Those shapes are difficult to change .
And yet , I do believe that in every social space , in every public space , there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought , that blunt technique , but something that pinpoints , and can point in various directions forward , backward , sideways and around .
So that is indeed what is memory .
So I believe that my main interest is to memory .
Without memory we would be amnesiacs .
We would not know which way we were going , and why we are going where we 're going .
So I 've been never interested in the forgettable reuse , rehashing of the same things over and over again , which , of course , get accolades of critics .
Critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way .
But I rather play something completely unheard of , and even with flaws , than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness .
So again , memory is the city , memory is the world .
Without the memory there would be no story to tell .
There would be nowhere to turn .
The memorable , I think , is really our world , what we think the world is .
And it 's not only our memory , but those who remember us , which means that architecture is not mute .
It 's an art of communication .
It tells a story . The story can reach into obscure desires .
It can reach into sources that are not explicitly available .
It can reach into millennia that have been buried , and return them in a just and unexpected equity .
So again , I think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me .
Silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city .
Cities should be full of vibrations , full of sound , full of music .
And that indeed is the architectural mission that I believe is important , is to create spaces that are vibrant , that are pluralistic , that can transform the most prosaic activities , and raise them to a completely different expectation .
Create a shopping center , a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment .
And these are our dreams .
And of course risk . I think architecture should be risky .
You know it costs a lot of money and so on , but yes , it should not play it safe .
It should not play it safe , because if it plays it safe it 's not moving us in a direction that we want to be .
And I think , of course , risk is what underlies the world .
World without risk would not be worth living .
So yes , I do believe that the risk we take in every building .
Risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent .
Risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying , as they should be , for a pioneering city .
Risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws , into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing .
And of course that is finally what I believe architecture to be .
It 's about space . It 's not about fashion .
It 's not about decoration .
It 's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated , cannot be simulated in any other sphere .
And there of course is the space that we need to breathe , is the space we need to dream .
These are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us , but are important for everybody in this world .
So again , it 's not about the changing fashions , changing theories .
It 's about carving out a space for trees .
It 's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city .
A space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density .
And I think that is really the nature of architecture .
Now I am a believer in democracy .
I don 't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes .
Where people cannot speak , cannot vote , cannot do anything .
We too often admire those buildings . We think they are beautiful .
And yet when I think of the poverty of society which doesn 't give freedom to its people , I don 't admire those buildings .
So democracy , as difficult as it is , I believe in it .
And of course , at Ground Zero what else ?
It 's such a complex project .
It 's emotional . There is so many interests .
It 's political . There is so many parties to this project .
There is so many interests . There 's money . There 's political power .
There are emotions of the victims .
And yet , in all its messiness , in all its difficulties , I would not have liked somebody to say , " This is the tabula rasa , mister architect -- do whatever you want . "
I think nothing good will come out of that .
I think architecture is about consensus .
And it is about the dirty word " compromise . " Compromise is not bad .
Compromise , if it 's artistic , if it is able to cope with its strategies -- and there is my first sketch and the last rendering -- it 's not that far away .
And yet , compromise , consensus , that is what I believe in .
And Ground Zero , despite all its difficulties , it 's moving forward .
It 's difficult . 2011 , 2013 . Freedom Tower , the memorial .
And that is where I end .
I was inspired when I came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others , looking at America from that point of view .
This is America . This is liberty .
This is what we dream about . Its individuality , demonstrated in the skyline . It 's resilience .
And finally , it 's the freedom that America represents , not just to me , as an immigrant , but to everyone in the world . Thank you .
I 've got a question .
So have you come to peace with the process that happened at Ground Zero and the loss of the original , incredible design that you came up with ?
Daniel Libeskind : Look . We have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian , that we can determine everything that happens .
We have to rely on others , and shape the process in the best way possible .
I came from the Bronx . I was taught not to be a loser , not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight .
You have to fight for what you believe . You don 't always win everything you want to win . But you can steer the process .
And I believe that what will be built at Ground Zero will be meaningful , will be inspiring , will tell other generations of the sacrifices , of the meaning of this event .
Not just for New York , but for the world .
Thank you so much , Daniel Libeskind .
Ben Cameron : The true power of the performing arts
Arts administrator and live-theater fan Ben Cameron looks at the state of the live arts -- asking : How can the magic of live theater , live music , live dance compete with the always-on Internet ? In his talk , he offers a bold look forward . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I am a cultural omnivore , one whose daily commute is made possible by attachment to an iPod -- an iPod that contains Wagner and Mozart , pop diva Christina Aguilera , country singer Josh Turner , gangsta rap artist Kirk Franklin , concerti , symphonies and more and more .
I 'm a voracious reader , a reader who deals with Ian McEwan down to Stephanie Meyer .
I have read the " Twilight " tetralogy .
And one who lives for my home theater , a home theater where I devour DVDs , video-on-demand and a lot of television .
For me , " Law and Order : SVU , " Tine Fey and " 30 Rock " and " Judge Judy " -- " The people are real , the cases are real , the rulings are final . "
Now , I 'm convinced a lot of you probably share my passions , especially my passion for Judge Judy , and you 'd fight anybody who attempted to take her away from us , but I 'm a little less convinced that you share the central passion of my life , a passion for the live professional performing arts , performing arts that represent the orchestral repertoire , yes , but jazz as well , modern dance , opera , theater and more and more and more .
You know , frankly it 's a sector that many of us who work in the field worry is being endangered and possibly dismantled by technology .
While we initially heralded the Internet as the fantastic new marketing device that was going to solve all our problems , we now realize that the Internet is , if anything , too effective in that regard .
Depending on who you read , an arts organization or an artist , who tries to attract the attention of a potential single ticket buyer , now competes with between three and 5,000 different marketing messages a typical citizen sees every single day .
We now know in fact that technology is our biggest competitor for leisure time .
Five years ago , Gen-X 'ers spent 20.7 hours online and TV , the majority on TV .
Gen-Y 'ers spent even more -- 23.8 hours , the majority online .
And now , a typical university entering student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and an additional 10,000 hours playing video games -- a stark reminder that we operate in a cultural context where video games now outsell music and movie recordings combined .
Moreover , we 're afraid that technology has altered our very assumptions of cultural consumption .
Thanks to the Internet , we believe we can get anything we want whenever we want it , delivered to our own doorstep .
We can shop at three in the morning or eight at night , ordering jeans tailor-made for our unique body-types .
Expectations of personalization and customization that the live performing arts -- which have set curtain times , set venues , attendant inconveniences of travel , parking and the like -- simply cannot meet .
And we 're all acutely aware : what 's it going to mean in the future when we ask someone to pay a hundred dollars for a symphony , opera or ballet ticket , when that cultural consumer is used to downloading on the internet 24 hours a day for 99 cents a song or for free ?
These are enormous questions for those of us who work in this terrain .
But as particular as they feel to us , we know we 're not alone .
All of us are engaged in a seismic , fundamental realignment of culture and communications , a realignment that is shaking and decimating the newspaper industry , the magazine industry , the book and publishing industry and more .
Saddled in the performing arts as we are , by antiquated union agreements that inhibit and often prohibit mechanical reproduction and streaming , locked into large facilities that were designed to ossify the ideal relationship between artist and audience most appropriate to the 19th century and locked into a business model dependent on high ticket revenues , where we charge exorbitant prices .
Many of us shudder in the wake of the collapse of Tower Records and ask ourselves , " Are we next ? "
Everyone I talk to in performing arts resonates to the words of Adrienne Rich , who , in " Dreams of a Common Language , " wrote , " We are out in a country that has no language , no laws .
Whatever we do together is pure invention .
The maps they gave us are out of date by years . "
And for those of you who love the arts , aren 't you glad you invited me here to brighten your day ?
Now , rather than saying that we 're on the brink of our own annihilation , I prefer to believe that we are engaged in a fundamental reformation , a reformation like the religious Reformation of the 16th century .
The arts reformation , like the religious Reformation , is spurred in part by technology , with indeed , the printing press really leading the charge on the religious Reformation .
Both reformations were predicated on fractious discussion , internal self-doubt and massive realignment of antiquated business models .
And at heart , both reformations , I think were asking the questions : who 's entitled to practice ?
How are they entitled to practice ?
And indeed , do we need anyone to intermediate for us in order to have an experience with a spiritual divine ?
Chris Anderson , someone I trust you all know , editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of " The Long Tail , " really was the first -- for me -- to nail a lot of this .
He wrote a long time ago , you know , thanks to the invention of the Internet , web technology , mini-cams and more , the means of artistic production have been democratized for the first time in all of human history .
In the 1930s , if any of you wanted to make a movie , you had to work for Warner Brothers or RKO because who could afford a movie set and lighting equipment and editing equipment and scoring and more ?
And now who in this room doesn 't know a 14 year-old hard at work on her second , third , or fourth movie ?
Similarly , the means of artistic distribution have been democratized for the first time in human history .
Again , in the ' 30s , Warner Brothers , RKO did that for you .
Now , go to YouTube , Facebook ; you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom .
This double impact is occasioning a massive redefinition of the cultural market , a time when anyone is a potential author .
Frankly , what we 're seeing now in this environment is a massive time , when the entire world is changing as we move from a time when audience numbers are plummeting .
But the number of arts participants , people who write poetry , who sing songs , who perform in church choirs , is exploding beyond our wildest imaginations .
This group , others have called the " pro ams , " amateur artists doing work at a professional level .
You see them on YouTube , in dance competitions , film festivals and more .
They are radically expanding our notions of the potential of an aesthetic vocabulary , while they are challenging and undermining the cultural autonomy of our traditional institutions .
Ultimately , we now live in a world defined not by consumption , but by participation .
But I want to be clear , just as the religious Reformation did not spell the end to the formal Church or to the priesthood ; I believe that our artistic institutions will continue to have importance .
They currently are the best opportunities for artists to have lives of economic dignity -- not opulence -- of dignity .
And they are the places where artists who deserve and want to work at a certain scale of resources will find a home .
But to view them as synonymous with the entirety of the arts community is , by far , too short-sighted .
And indeed , while we 've tended to polarize the amateur from the professional , the single most exciting development in the last five to 10 years has been the rise of the professional hybrid artist , the professional artist who works , not primarily in the concert hall or on the stage ; but most frequently around women 's rights , or human rights , or on global warming issues or AIDS relief for more -- not out of economic necessity , but out of a deep , organic conviction that the work that she or he , is called to do cannot be accomplished in the traditional hermetic arts environment .
Today 's dance world is not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada , but by Liz Lerman 's Dance Exchange -- a multi-generational , professional dance company , whose dancers range in age from 18 to 82 , and who work with genomic scientists to embody the DNA strand and with nuclear physicists at CERN .
Today 's professional theater community is defined , not only the Shaw and Stratford Festivals , but by the Cornerstone Theater of Los Angeles -- a collective of artists that after 9 / 11 , brought together 10 different religious communities -- the Bahia , the Catholic , the Muslim , the Jewish , even the Native American and the gay and lesbian communities of faith , helping them create their own individual plays and one massive play , where they explored the differences in their faith and found commonality as an important first step toward cross-community healing .
Today 's performers , like Rhodessa Jones , work in women 's prisons , helping women prisoners articulate the pain of incarceration , while today 's playwrights and directors work with youth gangs to find alternate channels to violence and more and more and more .
And indeed , I think , rather than being annihilated , the performing arts are posed on the brink of a time when we will be more important than we have ever been .
You know , we 've said for a long time , we are critical to the health of the economic communities in your town .
And absolutely -- I hope you know that every dollar spent on a performing arts ticket in a community generates five to seven additional dollars for the local economy , dollars spent in restaurants or on parking , at the fabric stores where we buy fabric for costumes , the piano tuner who tunes the instruments and more .
But the arts are going to be more important to economies as we go forward , especially in industries we can 't even imagine yet , just as they have been central to the iPod and the computer game industries , which few , if any of us come have foreseen 10 to 15 years ago .
Business leadership will depend more and more on emotional intelligence , the ability to listen deeply , to have empathy , to articulate change , to motivate others -- the very capacities that the arts cultivate with every encounter .
Especially now , as we all must confront the fallacy of a market-only orientation , uninformed by social conscience ; we must seize and celebrate the power of the arts to shape our individual and national characters , and especially characters of the young people , who all too often , are subjected to bombardment of sensation , rather than digested experience .
Ultimately , especially now in this world , where we live in a context of regressive and onerous immigration laws , in reality TV that thrives on humiliation , and in a context of analysis , where the thing we hear most repeatedly , day-in , day-out in the United States , in every train station , every bus station , every plane station is , " Ladies and gentlemen , please report any suspicious behavior or suspicious individuals to the authorities nearest you , " when all of these ways we are encouraged to view our fellow human being with hostility and fear and contempt and suspicion .
The arts , whatever they do , whenever they call us together , invite us to look at our fellow human being with generosity and curiosity .
God knows , if we ever needed that capacity in human history , we need it now .
You know , we 're bound together , not , I think by technology , entertainment and design , but by common cause .
We work to promote healthy vibrant societies , to ameliorate human suffering , to promote a more thoughtful , substantive , empathic world order .
I salute all of you as activists in that quest and urge you to embrace and hold dear the arts in your work , whatever your purpose may be .
I promise you the hand of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation is stretched out in friendship for now and years to come .
And I thank you for your kindness and your patience in listening to me this afternoon .
Thank you , and godspeed .
Niels Diffrient : Rethinking the way we sit down
Design legend Niels Diffrient talks about his life in industrial design . He details his quest to completely rethink the office chair starting from one fundamental data set : the human body .
When I was five years old I fell in love with airplanes .
Now I 'm talking about the ' 30s .
In the ' 30s an airplane had two wings and a round motor , and was always flown by a guy who looked like Cary Grant .
He had high leather boots , jodhpurs , an old leather jacket , a wonderful helmet and those marvelous goggles -- and , inevitably , a white scarf , to flow in the wind .
He 'd always walk up to his airplane in a kind of saunter , devil-may-care saunter , flick the cigarette away , grab the girl waiting here , give her a kiss .
And then mount his airplane , maybe for the last time .
Of course I always wondered what would happen if he 'd kissed the airplane first .
But this was real romance to me .
Everything about flying in those years , which was -- you have to stop and think for a moment -- was probably the most advanced technological thing going on at the time .
So as a youngster , I tried to get close to this by drawing airplanes , constantly drawing airplanes .
It 's the way I got a part of this romance .
And of course , in a way , when I say romance , I mean in part the aesthetics of that whole situation .
I think the word is the holistic experience revolving around a product .
The product was that airplane .
But it built a romance .
Even the parts of the airplane had French names .
Ze fuselage , ze empanage , ze nessal .
You know , from a romance language .
So that it was something that just got into your spirit .
It did mine .
And I decided I had to get closer than just drawing fantasy airplanes .
I wanted to build airplanes .
So I built model airplanes .
And I found that in doing the model airplanes the appearance drawings were not enough .
You couldn 't transfer those to the model itself .
If you wanted it to fly you had to learn the discipline of flying .
You had to learn about aeronautics .
You had to learn what made an airplane stay in the air .
And of course , as a model in those years , you couldn 't control it .
So it had to be self-righting , and stay up without crashing .
So I had to give up the approach of drawing the fantasy shapes and convert it to technical drawings -- the shape of the wing , the shape of the fuselage and so on -- and build an airplane over these drawings that I knew followed some of the principles of flying .
And in so doing , I could produce a model that would fly , stay in the air .
And it had , once it was in the air , some of this romance that I was in love with .
Well the act of drawing airplanes led me to , when I had the opportunity to choose a course in school , led me to sign up for aeronautical engineering .
And when I was sitting in classes -- in which no one asked me to draw an airplane -- to my surprise .
I had to learn mathematics and mechanics and all this sort of thing .
I 'd wile away my time drawing airplanes in the class .
One day a young man looked over my shoulder , he said , " You draw very well .
You should be in the art department . "
And I said , " Why ? "
And he said , " Well for one thing , there are more girls there . "
So my romance was temporarily shifted .
And I went into art because they appreciated drawing .
Studied painting ; didn 't do very well at that .
Went through design , some architecture .
Eventually hired myself out as a designer .
And for the following 25 years , living in Italy , living in America , I doled out a piece of this romance to anybody who 'd pay for it -- this sense , this aesthetic feeling , for the experience revolving around a designed object .
And it exists .
Any of you who rode the automobiles -- was it yesterday ? -- at the track , you know the romance revolving around those high performance cars .
Well in 25 years I was mostly putting out pieces of this romance and not getting a lot back in because design on call doesn 't always connect you with a circumstance in which you can produce things of this nature .
So after 25 years I began to feel as though I was running dry .
And I quit .
And I started up a very small operation -- went from 40 people to one , in an effort to rediscover my innocence .
I wanted to get back where the romance was .
And I couldn 't choose airplanes because they had gotten sort of unromantic at that point , even though I 'd done a lot of airplane work , on the interiors .
So I chose furniture .
And I chose chairs specifically because I knew something about them .
I 'd designed a lot of chairs , over the years for tractors and trucks and submarines -- all kinds of things .
But not office chairs .
So I started doing that .
And I found that there were ways to duplicate the same approach that I used to use on the airplane .
Only this time , instead of the product being shaped by the wind , it was shaped by the human body .
So the discipline was -- as in the airplane you learn a lot about how to deal with the air , for a chair you have to learn a lot about how to deal with the body , and what the body needs , wants , indicates it needs .
And that 's the way , ultimately after some ups and downs , I ended up designing the chair I 'm going to show you .
I should say one more thing . When I was doing those model airplanes , I did everything .
I conceived the kind of airplane .
I basically engineered it .
I built it .
And I flew it .
And that 's the way I work now .
When I started this chair it was not a preconceived notion .
Design nowadays , if you mean it , you don 't start with styling sketches .
I started with a lot of loose ideas , roughly eight or nine years ago .
And the loose ideas had something to do with what I knew happened with people in the office , at the work place -- people who worked , and used task seating , a great many of them sitting in front of a computer all day long .
And I felt , the one thing they don 't need , is a chair that interferes with their main reason for sitting there .
So I took the approach that the chair should do as much for them as humanly possible or as mechanistically possible so that they didn 't have to fuss with it .
So my idea was that , instead of sitting down and reaching for a lot of controls , that you would sit on the chair , and it would automatically balance your weight against the force required to recline .
Now that may not mean a lot to some of you .
But you know most good chairs do recline because it 's beneficial to open up this joint between your legs and your upper body for better breathing and better flow .
So that if you sit down on my chair , whether you 're five feet tall or six foot six , it always deals with your weight and transfers the amount of force required to recline in a way that you don 't have to look for something to adjust .
I 'll tell you right up front , this is a trade off .
There are drawbacks to this .
One is : you can 't accommodate everybody .
There are some very light people , some extremely heavy people , maybe people with a lot of bulk up top .
They begin to fall off the end of your chart .
But the compromise , I felt , was in my favor because most people don 't adjust their chairs .
They will sit in them forever .
I had somebody on the bus out to the racetrack tell me about his sister calling him .
He said she had one of the new , better chairs .
She said , " Oh I love it . "
She said , " But it 's too high . "
So he said , " Well I 'll come over and look at it . "
He came over and looked at it .
He reached down . He pulled a lever . And the chair sank down .
She said , " Oh it 's wonderful . How did you do that ? "
And he showed her the lever .
Well , that 's typical of a lot of us working in chairs .
And why should you get a 20-page manual about how to run a chair ?
I had one for a wristwatch once . 20 pages .
Anyway , I felt that it was important that you didn 't have to make an adjustment in order to get this kind of action .
The other thing I felt was that armrests had never really been properly approached from the standpoint of how much of an aid they could be to your work life .
But I felt it was too much to ask to have to adjust each individual armrest in order to get it where you wanted .
So I spent a long time .
I said I worked eight or nine years on it .
And each of these things went along sort of in parallel but incrementally were a problem of their own .
I worked a long time on figuring out how to move the arms over a much greater arc -- that is up and down -- and make them a lot easier , so that you didn 't have to use a button .
And so after many trials , many failures , we came up with a very simple arrangement in which we could just move one arm or the other .
And they go up easily .
And stop where you want .
You can put them down , essentially out of the way .
No arms at all .
Or you can pull them up where you want them .
And this was another thing that I felt , while not nearly as romantic as Cary Grant , nevertheless begins to grab a little bit of aesthetic operation , aesthetic performance into a product .
The next area that was of interest to me was the fact that reclining was a very important factor .
And the more you can recline , in a way , the better it is .
The more the angle between here and here opens up -- and nowadays , with a screen in front of you , you don 't want to have your eye drop too far in the recline , so we keep it at more or less the same level -- but you transfer weight off your tailbones .
Would everybody put their hand under their bottom and feel their tailbone ?
You feel that bone under there ?
Just your own .
There 's two of them , one on either side .
All the weight of your upper torso -- your arms , your head -- goes right down through your back , your spine , into those bones when you sit .
And that 's a lot of load .
Just relieving your arms with armrests takes 20 percent of that load off .
Now that , if your spine is not held in a good position , will help bend your spine the wrong way , and so on .
So to unload that great weight -- if that indeed exists -- you can recline .
When you recline you take away a lot of that load off your bottom end , and transfer it to your back .
At the same time , as I say , you open up this joint .
And breathability is good .
But to do that , if you have any amount of recline , it gets to the point where you need a headrest because nearly always , automatically hold your head in a vertical position , see ?
As I recline , my head says more or less vertical .
Well if you 're reclined a great deal , you have to use muscle force to hold your head there .
So that 's where a headrest comes in .
Now headrest is a challenge because you want it to adjust enough so that it 'll fit , you know , a tall guy and a short girl .
So here we are .
I 've got five inches of adjustment here in order to get the headrest in the right place .
But then I knew from experience and looking around in offices where there were chairs with headrests that nobody would ever bother to reach back and turn a knob and adjust the headrest to put it in position .
And you need it in a different position when you 're upright , then when you 're reclined .
So I knew that had to be solved , and had to be automatic .
So if you watch this chair as I recline , the headrest comes up to meet my neck .
Ideally you want to put the head support in the cranial area , right there .
So that part of it took a long time to work out .
And there is a variety of other things : the shape of the cushions , the gel we put .
We stole the idea from bicycle seats , and put gel in the cushions and in the armrests to absorb point load -- distributes the loading so you don 't get hard spots .
You cant hit your elbow on bottom .
And I did want to demonstrate the fact that the chair can accommodate people .
While you 're sitting in it you can adjust it down for the five-footer , or you can adjust it for the six-foot-six guy -- all within the scope of a few simple adjustments .
Tom Chatfield : 7 ways games reward the brain
We 're bringing gameplay into more aspects of our lives , spending countless hours -- and real money -- exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures . Why ? As Tom Chatfield shows , games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more .
I love video games .
I 'm also slightly in awe of them .
I 'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination , in terms of technology , in terms of concept .
But I think , above all , I 'm in awe at their power to motivate , to compel us , to transfix us , like really nothing else we 've ever invented has quite done before .
And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this .
And in particular , I think we can learn things about learning .
Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media .
From about 10 billion in 1990 , it 's worth 50 billion dollars globally today , and it shows no sign of slowing down .
In four years ' time , it 's estimated it 'll be worth over 80 billion dollars .
That 's about three times the recorded music industry .
This is pretty stunning , but I don 't think it 's the most telling statistic of all .
The thing that really amazes me is that , today , people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games .
This is a screenshot from the virtual game world , Entropia Universe .
Earlier this year , a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars .
And this is a Titan class ship in the space game , EVE Online .
And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build , plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that .
And yet , many of these get built .
At the other end of the scale , the game Farmville that you may well have heard of , has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day .
This may all sound really quite alarming to some people , an index of something worrying or wrong in society .
But we 're here for the good news , and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort , this very intense generation of value , is occurring .
And by answering that question , I think we can take something extremely powerful away .
And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards .
And specifically , it 's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively .
Now if we look at what 's going on in someone 's head when they are being engaged , two quite different processes are occurring .
On the one hand , there 's the wanting processes .
This is a bit like ambition and drive -- I 'm going to do that . I 'm going to work hard .
On the other hand , there 's the liking processes , fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back .
It 's a really great image . It 's pretty cool .
It 's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally , one of whom is me , another of whom is my wife .
And this kind of a world , this vast flying beast you can ride around , shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking .
Because it 's very powerful . It 's pretty awesome .
It gives you great powers .
Your ambition is satisfied , but it 's very beautiful .
It 's a very great pleasure to fly around .
And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement .
But this isn 't the really interesting stuff .
The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it .
Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything .
Every single thing that every single person who 's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured .
The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players , about what everybody does -- far more detail than you 'd ever get from any website .
And this allows something very special to happen in games .
It 's something called the reward schedule .
And by this , I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate , the nature , the type , the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort .
Now , to try and explain this in sort of real terms , I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games .
Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item .
my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute , little monsters .
Simple game quest .
Now you can think about this , if you like , as a problem about boxes .
I 've got to keep opening boxes .
I don 't know what 's inside them until I open them .
And I go around opening box after box until I 've got 15 pies .
Now , if you take a game like Warcraft , you can think about it , if you like , as a great box-opening effort .
The game 's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes , getting better and better stuff in them .
This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling .
And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data .
Let 's think about probability .
If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies , we want to make sure it 's neither too easy , nor too difficult , to find a pie .
So what do you do ? Well , you look at a million people -- no , 100 million people , 100 million box openers -- and you work out , if you make the pie rate about 25 percent -- that 's neither too frustrating , nor too easy .
It keeps people engaged .
But of course , that 's not all you do -- there 's 15 pies .
Now , I could make a game called Piecraft , where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies .
That would be very boring .
Fifteen is a pretty optimal number .
You find that -- you know , between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going .
But we don 't just have pies in the boxes .
There 's 100 percent up here .
And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened , there 's something in it , some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged .
In most adventure games , it 's a little bit in-game currency , a little bit experience .
But we don 't just do that either .
We also say there 's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement .
There 's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item .
There 's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item .
And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item .
And also , we say , " Well , how many monsters ? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters ? "
No , we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time .
So I 'm drawn on . It 's not too easy , not too difficult .
So all this is very powerful .
But we 're in virtuality . These aren 't real boxes .
So we can do some rather amazing things .
We notice , looking at all these people opening boxes , that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies , their perception shifts , they start to get a bit bored , a bit testy .
They 're not rational about probability .
They think this game is unfair .
It 's not giving me my last two pies . I 'm going to give up .
If they 're real boxes , there 's not much we can do , but in a game we can just say , " Right , well .
When you get to 13 pies , you 've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now . "
Keep you engaged . Look at what people do -- adjust the world to match their expectation .
Our games don 't always do this .
And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item , they make very sure another one doesn 't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value , to keep it special .
And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways .
Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years , we evolved to find certain things stimulating , and as very intelligent , civilized beings , we 're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning .
But now , we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes .
So what does all this mean in practice ?
Well , I 've come up with seven things that , I think , show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games .
The first one is very simple : experience bars measuring progress -- something that 's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year .
It 's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States , among other places .
It 's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces , you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny , tiny , tiny little increments which they feel are their own .
And everything comes towards that , and they watch it creeping up , and they own that as it goes along .
Second , multiple long and short-term aims -- 5,000 pies , boring , 15 pies , interesting .
So , you give people lots and lots of different tasks .
You say , it 's about doing 10 of these questions , but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time , but another task is collaborating with other people , another task is showing you 're working five times , another task is hitting this particular target .
You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities .
Third , you reward effort .
It 's your 100 percent factor . Games are brilliant at this .
Every time you do something , you get credit ; you get a credit for trying .
You don 't punish failure . You reward every little bit of effort -- a little bit of gold , a little bit of credit . You 've done 20 questions -- tick .
It all feeds in as minute reinforcement .
Fourth , feedback .
This is absolutely crucial , and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this .
If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we 've been hearing amazing things about , it 's very , very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions .
Pollution , global warming , these things -- the consequences are distant in time and space .
It 's very hard to learn , to feel a lesson .
But if you can model things for people , if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes , then they can learn a lesson , they can see , they can move on , they can understand .
And fifth , the element of uncertainty .
Now this is the neurological goldmine , if you like , because a known reward excites people , but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward , the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty , that they didn 't quite know whether they were going to get it or not .
The 25 percent . This lights the brain up .
And if you think about using this in testing , in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training , you can transform the levels of people 's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism .
When we don 't quite predict something perfectly , we get really excited about it .
We just want to go back and find out more .
As you probably know , the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine .
It 's associated with reward-seeking behavior .
And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K. , where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain .
And what this means is we can predict learning , we can predict enhanced engagement , these windows , these windows of time , in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level .
And two things really flow from this .
The first has to do with memory , that we can find these moments .
When someone is more likely to remember , we can give them a nugget in a window .
And the second thing is confidence , that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver , make them more willing to take risks , more willing to take on difficulty , harder to discourage .
This can all seem very sinister .
But you know , sort of " our brains have been manipulated ; we 're all addicts . "
The word " addiction " is thrown around .
There are real concerns there .
But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people .
This is what really excites us .
In reward terms , it 's not money ; it 's not being given cash -- that 's nice -- it 's doing stuff with our peers , watching us , collaborating with us .
And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 -- a video game called EverQuest .
And in this video game , there were two really big dragons , and you had to team up to kill them -- 42 people , up to 42 to kill these big dragons .
That 's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items .
So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other , fairly and transparently .
What happened was , they paid each other a virtual currency they called " dragon kill points . "
And every time you turned up to go on a mission , you got paid in dragon kill points .
They tracked these on a separate website .
So they tracked their own private currency , and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted -- all organized by the players themselves .
Now the staggering system , not just that this worked in EverQuest , but that today , a decade on , every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system -- tens of millions of people .
And the success rate is at close to 100 percent .
This is a player-developed , self-enforcing , voluntary currency , and it 's incredibly sophisticated player behavior .
And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world .
Let 's start with business .
I mean , we 're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation .
We 're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters .
And I just look at this , and I think , yes , we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets , by using elements of uncertainty , by using these multiple targets , by using a grand , underlying reward and incentive system , by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups , in terms of streets to collaborate and compete , to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see .
In terms of education , perhaps most obviously of all , we can transform how we engage people .
We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment .
We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks .
We can use calculated randomness .
We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together .
And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together , these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms .
Government , well , one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government , among others , is literally starting to pay people to lose weight .
So we 're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity .
But again , those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal , to take the data , to take the observations , of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement .
And in the end , it 's this word , " engagement , " that I want to leave you with .
It 's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games .
But it 's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games .
And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards , then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands .
Thank you very much .
Matthew Childs : 9 life lessons from rock climbing
In this talk from TED University 2009 , veteran rock climber Matthew Childs shares nine pointers for rock climbing . These handy tips bear on an effective life at sea level , too .
It 's pretty simple . There are nine , sort of , rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing .
Most of them are pretty basic .
Number one : don 't let go -- very sure success method .
But really , truly -- often you think about letting go way before your body does .
So hang in there , and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions .
Number two : hesitation is bad .
This is a friction climb , up in Tuolumne Meadows , in the Yosemite high country .
Friction climbing doesn 't have any sort of hard positive edges .
You 're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock .
The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock .
And then from that point on , you 're basically falling .
So momentum is good . Don 't stop .
Rule number three : have a plan .
This is a climb called the Naked Edge , in El Dorado Canyon , outside of Boulder .
This climber is on the last pitch of it .
He 's actually right about where I fell .
There is about 1,000 feet of air below him .
And all the hard pitches are actually below him .
Often what happens is you 're planning so hard for like , " How do I get through the hardest part ? How do I get through the hardest part ? "
And then what happens ?
You get to the last pitch . It 's easy .
And you 're completely flamed out . Don 't do it .
You have to plan ahead to get to the top .
But you also can 't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete .
This is a climb called the Dike Route , on Pywjack Dome , up in the Yosemite high country .
The interesting thing about this climb is it 's not that hard .
But if you 're the leader on it , at the hardest move , you 're looking at about 100 foot fall , onto some low angle slabs .
So you 've got to focus .
You don 't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge 's Kubla Kahn .
You 've got to keep going .
Rule number five : know how to rest .
It 's amazing . The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest , regroup , calm themselves , focus , and keep going .
This is a climb in the Needles , again in California .
Fear really sucks because what it means is you 're not focusing on what you 're doing .
You 're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you 're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively .
One of the things in climbing is , most people sort of take it straight on . And they follow the most obvious solution .
This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming , which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from " Close Encounters . "
With this , typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing .
The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks , and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up .
Rule number eight : strength doesn 't always equal success .
In the 35 years I 've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls , and stuff like that , the most important thing I 've learned was , guys will always try to do pull-ups .
Beginning guys , it 's like , they thrash , they thrash , they get 15 feet up -- and they can do about 15 pull-ups right -- And then they just flame out .
Women are much more in balance because they don 't have that idea that they 're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups .
They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it 's sort of natural -- they carry you all day long .
So balance is really critical , and keeping your weight on your feet , which is your strongest muscle .
And of course there is rule number nine .
I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn 't plan for a fall , and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib .
Once you get to that point where you know it 's going to happen , you need to start thinking about how you 're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt -- how you 're going to fall onto the rope , or if you 're climbing without a rope , fall to a place where you can actually control the fall .
So don 't hang on till the bitter end .
Thank you very much .
Jim Fallon : Exploring the mind of a killer
Psychopathic killers are the basis for some must-watch TV , but what really makes them tick ? Neuroscientist Jim Fallon talks about brain scans and genetic analysis that may uncover the rotten wiring in the nature of murderers . In a too-strange-for-fiction twist , he shares a fascinating family history that makes his work chillingly personal .
I 'm a neuroscientist , a professor at the University of California .
And over the past 35 years , I 've studied behavior on the basis of everything from genes through neurotransmitters , dopamine , things like that , all the way through circuit analysis .
So that 's what I normally do .
But then , for some reason , I got into something else , just recently .
And it all grew out of one of my colleagues asking me to analyze a bunch of brains of psychopathic killers .
And so this would be the typical talk I would give .
And the question is , " How do you end up with a psychopathic killer ? "
What I mean by psychopathic killer are these people , these types of people .
And so some of the brains that I 've studied are people you know about .
When I get the brains I don 't know what I 'm looking at .
It 's blind experiments . They also gave me normal people and everything .
So I 've looked at about 70 of these .
And what came up was a number of pieces of data .
So we look at these sorts of things theoretically , on the basis of genetics , and brain damage , and interaction with environment , and exactly how that machine works .
So we 're interested in exactly where in the brain , and what 's the most important part of the brain .
So we 've been looking at this : the interaction of genes , what 's called epigenetic effects , brain damage , and environment , and how these are tied together .
And how you end up with a psychopath , and a killer , depends on exactly when the damage occurs .
It 's really a very precisely timed thing .
You get different kinds of psychopaths .
So we 're going along with this . And here 's , just to give you the pattern .
who was a murderer , and was a serial killer , had damage to their orbital cortex , which is right above the eyes , the orbits , and also the interior part of the temporal lobe .
So there is the pattern that every one of them had , but they all were a little different too .
They had other sorts of brain damage .
A key thing is that the major violence genes , it 's called the MAO-A gene .
And there is a variant of this gene that is in the normal population .
Some of you have this . And it 's sex-linked .
It 's on the X chromosome . And so in this way you can only get it from your mother .
And in fact this is probably why mostly men , boys , are psychopathic killers , or are very aggressive .
Because a daughter can get one X from the father , one X from the mother , it 's kind of diluted out .
But for a son , he can only get the X chromosome from his mother .
So this is how it 's passed from mother to son .
And it has to do with too much brain serotonin during development , which is kind of interesting because serotonin is supposed to make you calm and relaxed .
But if you have this gene , in utero your brain is bathed in this , so your whole brain becomes insensitive to serotonin , so it doesn 't work later on in life .
And I 'd given this one talk in Israel , just this past year .
And it does have some consequences .
Theoretically what this means is that in order to express this gene , in a violent way , very early on , before puberty , you have to be involved in something that is really traumatic -- not a little stress , not being spanked or something , but really seeing violence , or being involved in it , in 3D .
Right ? That 's how the mirror neuron system works .
And so , if you have that gene , and you see a lot of violence in a certain situation , this is the recipe for disaster , absolute disaster .
And what I think might happen in these areas of the world , where we have constant violence , you end up having generations of kids that are seeing all this violence .
And if I was a young girl , somewhere in a violent area , you know , a 14 year old , and I want to find a mate , I 'd find some tough guy , right , to protect me .
Well what the problem is this tends to concentrate these genes .
And now the boys and the girls get them .
So I think after several generations , and here is the idea , we really have a tinderbox .
So that was the idea .
But then my mother said to me , " I hear you 've been going around talking about psychopathic killers .
And you 're talking as if you come from a normal family . "
I said , " What the hell are you talking about ? "
She then told me about our own family tree .
Now she blamed this on my father 's side , of course .
This was one of these cases , because she has no violence in her background , but my father did .
Well she said , " There is good news and bad news .
One of your cousins is Ezra Cornell , founder of Cornell university .
But the bad news is that your cousin is also Lizzie Borden .
Now I said , " Okay , so what ? We have Lizzie . "
She goes , " No it gets worse , read this book . "
And here is this " Killed Strangely , " and it 's this historical book .
And the first murder of a mother by a son was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather .
Okay , so that 's the first case of matricide .
And that book is very interesting . Because it 's about witch trials , and how people thought back then .
But it doesn 't stop there .
There were seven more men , on my father 's side , starting then , Cornells , that were all murderers .
Okay , now this gives one a little pause .
Because my father himself , and my three uncles , in World War II , were all conscientious objectors , all pussycats .
But every once in a while , like Lizzie Borden , like three times a century , and we 're kind of due .
So the moral of the story is : people in glass houses shouldn 't throw stones .
But more likely is this .
And we had to take action . Now our kids found out about it .
And they all seemed to be OK .
But our grandkids are going to be kind of concerned here .
So what we 've done is I 've started to do PET scans of everybody in the family .
We started to do PET scans , EEGs and genetic analysis to see where the bad news is .
Now the only person -- it turns out one son and one daughter , siblings , didn 't get along and their patterns are exactly the same .
They have the same brain , and the same EEG .
And now they are close as can be .
But there 's gonna be bad news somewhere .
And we don 't know where it 's going to pop up .
So that 's my talk .
Robert Gordon : The death of innovation , the end of growth
The US economy has been expanding wildly for two centuries . Are we witnessing the end of growth ? Economist Robert Gordon lays out 4 reasons US growth may be slowing , detailing factors like epidemic debt and growing inequality , which could move the US into a period of stasis we can 't innovate our way out of . Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Erik Brynjolfsson .
That 's how we traveled in the year 1900 .
That 's an open buggy . It doesn 't have heating .
It doesn 't have air conditioning .
That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound , and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains .
That 's a Boeing 707 .
Only 60 years later , it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound , and we don 't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust .
So I started wondering and pondering , could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us ?
And that leads to the suggestion , maybe economic growth is almost over .
Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial .
There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face .
They 're demographics , education , debt and inequality .
They 're powerful enough to cut growth in half .
So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline .
And here 's my theme : Because of the headwinds , if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years , growth is cut in half .
If innovation is less powerful , invents less great , wonderful things , then growth is going to be even lower than half of history .
Now here 's eight centuries of economic growth .
The vertical axis is just percent per year of growth , zero percent a year , one percent a year , two percent a year .
The white line is for the U.K. , and then the U.S.
takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900 , when the line switches to red .
You 'll notice that , for the first four centuries , there 's hardly any growth at all , just 0.2 percent .
Then growth gets better and better .
It maxes out in the 1930s , ' 40s and ' 50s , and then it starts slowing down , and here 's a cautionary note .
That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data .
That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent .
But you know what the actual facts are ?
You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years ?
Negative .
This led to a fantasy .
What if I try to fit a curved line to this historical record ?
I can make the curved line end anywhere I wanted , but I decided I would end it at 0.2 , just like the U.K. growth for the first four centuries .
Now the history that we 've achieved is that we 've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period , 1891 to 2007 , and remember it 's been a little bit negative since 2007 .
But if growth slows down , instead of doubling our standard of living every generation , Americans in the future can 't expect to be twice as well off as their parents , or even a quarter [ more well off than ] their parents .
Now we 're going to change and look at the level of per capita income .
The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today 's prices .
You 'll notice that in 1891 , over on the left , we were at about 5,000 dollars .
Today we 're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population .
Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years ?
Well , it 's a matter of arithmetic .
Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years .
That means we 'd go from 44,000 to 180,000 .
Well , we 're not going to do that , and the reason is the headwinds .
The first headwind is demographics .
It 's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity , rises faster than output per hour , if hours per person increased .
And we got that gift back in the ' 70s and ' 80s when women entered the labor force .
But now it 's turned around .
Now hours per person are shrinking , first because of the retirement of the baby boomers , and second because there 's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution .
The next headwind is education .
We 've got problems all over our educational system despite Race to the Top .
In college , we 've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care .
We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt , and our college completion rate is 15 points , 15 percentage points below Canada .
We have a lot of debt .
Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing .
Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today .
And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate , and the only way that 's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements , also called transfer payments .
And that gets us down from the 1.5 , And then we have inequality .
Over the 15 years before the financial crisis , the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we 've been talking about before .
All the rest went to the top one percent .
So that brings us down to 0.8 .
And that 0.8 is the big challenge .
Are we going to grow at 0.8 ?
If so , that 's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years .
So let 's see what some of those inventions were .
If you wanted to read in 1875 at night , you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp .
They created pollution , they created odors , they were hard to control , the light was dim , and they were a fire hazard .
By 1929 , electric light was everywhere .
We had the vertical city , the invention of the elevator .
Central Manhattan became possible .
And then , in addition to that , at the same time , hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools , all achieved by electricity .
Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women .
Women , back in the late 19th century , spent two days a week doing the laundry .
They did it on a scrub board .
Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry .
Then they had to bring them in .
The whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week .
And then we had the electric washing machine .
And by 1950 , they were everywhere .
But the women still had to shop every day , but no they didn 't , because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator .
Back in the late 19th century , the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating .
The bedrooms were cold . They were unheated .
But by 1929 , certainly by 1950 , we had central heating everywhere .
What about the internal combustion engine , which was invented in 1879 ?
In America , before the motor vehicle , transportation depended entirely on the urban horse , which dropped , without restraint , 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine .
That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities .
Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land .
That 's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses .
Of course , when the motor vehicle was invented , and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929 , that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export .
And here 's an interesting ratio : Starting from zero in 1900 , only 30 years later , the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years .
Back before the turn of the century , women had another problem .
All the water for cooking , cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside .
It 's a historical fact that in 1885 , the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water .
But by 1929 , cities around the country had put in underground water pipes .
They had put in underground sewer pipes , and as a result , one of the great scourges of the late 19th century , waterborne diseases like cholera , began to disappear .
And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century , the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century .
So it 's a truism that things can 't be more than 100 percent of themselves .
And I 'll just give you a few examples .
We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound .
Electrification , central heat , ownership of motor cars , they all went from zero to 100 percent .
Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm .
We went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years .
What about the electronic revolution ?
Here 's an early computer .
It 's amazing . The mainframe computer was invented in 1942 .
By 1960 we had telephone bills , bank statements were being produced by computers .
The earliest cell phones , the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s .
The 1980s brought us Bill Gates , DOS , ATM machines to replace bank tellers , bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector .
Fast forward through the ' 90s , we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth .
But I 'm now going to give you an experiment .
You have to choose either option A or option B.
Option A is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago .
So you get Google , you get Amazon , you get Wikipedia , and you get running water and indoor toilets .
Or you get everything invented to yesterday , including Facebook and your iPhone , but you have to give up , go out to the outhouse , and carry in the water .
Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century , maybe for a couple of days , in some cases for more than a week , electricity , running water , heating , gasoline for their cars , and a charge for their iPhones .
The problem we face is that all these great inventions , we have to match them in the future , and my prediction that we 're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2 , the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning .
So here we are back to the horse and buggy .
I 'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century , the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers , I 'd like to call them all up here , and they 're going to call back to you .
Your challenge is , can you match what we achieved ?
Thank you .
Derek Sivers : How to start a movement
With help from some surprising footage , Derek Sivers explains how movements really get started .
So , ladies and gentlemen , at TED we talk a lot about leadership and how to make a movement .
So let 's watch a movement happen , start to finish , in under three minutes and dissect some lessons from it .
First , of course you know , a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed .
But what he 's doing is so easy to follow .
So here 's his first follower with a crucial role ; he 's going to show everyone else how to follow .
Now , notice that the leader embraces him as an equal .
So , now it 's not about the leader anymore ; it 's about them , plural .
Now , there he is calling to his friends .
Now , if you notice that the first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself .
It takes guts to stand out like that .
The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader .
And here comes a second follower .
Now it 's not a lone nut , it 's not two nuts -- three is a crowd , and a crowd is news .
So a movement must be public .
It 's important to show not just to show the leader , but the followers , because you find that new followers emulate the followers , not the leader .
Now , here come two more people , and immediately after , three more people .
Now we 've got momentum . This is the tipping point .
Now we 've got a movement .
So , notice that , as more people join in , it 's less risky .
So those that were sitting on the fence before , now have no reason not to .
They won 't stand out , they won 't be ridiculed , but they will be part of the in-crowd if they hurry .
So , over the next minute , you 'll see all of those that prefer to stick with the crowd because eventually they would be ridiculed for not joining in .
And that 's how you make a movement .
But let 's recap some lessons from this .
So first , if you are the type , like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone , remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it 's clearly about the movement , not you .
Okay , but we might have missed the real lesson here .
The biggest lesson , if you noticed -- did you catch it ? -- is that leadership is over-glorified .
That , yes , it was the shirtless guy who was first , and he 'll get all the credit , but it was really the first follower that transformed the lone nut into a leader .
So , as we 're told that we should all be leaders , that would be really ineffective .
If you really care about starting a movement , have the courage to follow and show others how to follow .
And when you find a lone nut doing something great , have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in .
And what a perfect place to do that , at TED .
Thanks .
Mark Pagel : How language transformed humanity
Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language . He suggests that language is a piece of " social technology " that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool : cooperation .
Each of you possesses the most powerful , dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised .
It 's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people 's minds .
I 'm talking about your language , of course , because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else 's mind , and they can attempt to do the same to you , without either of you having to perform surgery .
Instead , when you speak , you 're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television .
It 's just that , whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light , your language relies on pulses , discrete pulses , of sound .
And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood , you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else 's brain to suit your interests .
Languages are genes talking , getting things that they want .
And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that , merely by uttering a sound , it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic , and maybe even into its mouth .
Now language 's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship , in books you can 't read , phrases you can 't use and words you can 't say .
In fact , the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language .
According to that story , early humans developed the conceit that , by using their language to work together , they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven .
Now God , angered at this attempt to usurp his power , destroyed the tower , and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt , he scattered the people by giving them different languages -- confused them by giving them different languages .
And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating .
Even today , we know that there are words we cannot use , phrases we cannot say , because if we do so , we might be accosted , jailed , or even killed .
And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths .
Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there 's something worth explaining .
And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve , and why did it evolve only in our species ?
Now it 's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question , we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees .
Now these chimpanzees are using tools , and we take that as a sign of their intelligence .
But if they really were intelligent , why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel ?
And if they really were intelligent , why would they crack open nuts with a rock ?
Why wouldn 't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them ?
Why not ? I mean , that 's what we do .
Now the reason the chimpanzees don 't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning .
They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching .
As a result , they can 't improve on others ' ideas or learn from others ' mistakes -- benefit from others ' wisdom .
And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again .
In fact , we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts .
Now this may sound arrogant , or even full of hubris .
How do we know this ?
Because this is exactly what our ancestors , the Homo erectus , did .
These upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago , and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands .
But if we look at the fossil record , we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years .
You can follow it through the fossil record .
Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived , what their generation time was , that 's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring , and other individuals watching , in which that hand axe didn 't change .
It 's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives , the Neanderthals , had social learning .
Sure enough , their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus , but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species , the Neanderthals , lived in Eurasia .
Okay , so what this tells us is that , contrary to the old adage , " monkey see , monkey do , " the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that -- at least not very much .
And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it -- something from a Barnum & amp ; Bailey circus .
But by comparison , we can learn .
We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do .
We can then choose , from among a range of options , the best one .
We can benefit from others ' ideas .
We can build on their wisdom .
And as a result , our ideas do accumulate , and our technology progresses .
And this cumulative cultural adaptation , as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas , is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives .
I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago .
And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation .
The chairs you 're sitting in , the lights in this auditorium , my microphone , the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you -- all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation .
Now to many commentators , cumulative cultural adaptation , or social learning , is job done , end of story .
Our species can make stuff , therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has .
In fact , we can even make the " stuff of life " -- as I just said , all the stuff around us .
But in fact , it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago , when our species first arose and acquired social learning , that this was really the beginning of our story , not the end of our story .
Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma , the resolution of which , it 's fair to say , would determine not only the future course of our psychology , but the future course of the entire world .
And most importantly for this , it 'll tell us why we have language .
And the reason that dilemma arose is , it turns out , that social learning is visual theft .
If I can learn by watching you , I can steal your best ideas , and I can benefit from your efforts , without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them .
If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish , or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better , or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch , I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills , and maybe even catch that fish before you do .
Social learning really is visual theft .
And in any species that acquired it , it would behoove you to hide your best ideas , lest somebody steal them from you .
And so some time around 200,000 years ago , our species confronted this crisis .
And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring .
One of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups .
Because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives .
Had we chosen this option , sometime around 200,000 years ago , we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago .
And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas , there are fewer innovations .
And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck .
So if we 'd chosen that path , our evolutionary path would have led into the forest -- and been a short one indeed .
The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others .
Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own .
Well , we chose the second option , and language is the result .
Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft .
Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation -- for reaching agreements , for striking deals and for coordinating our activities .
And you can see that , in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language , not having language would be a like a bird without wings .
Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit , language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit .
And we take this utterly for granted , because we 're a species that is so at home with language , but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language .
And to see why , consider two scenarios from early in our evolution .
Let 's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads , but you 're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached .
Two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts , but they 're hopeless at making the arrowheads .
So what you do is -- one of those people has not really acquired language yet .
And let 's pretend the other one is good at language skills .
So what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads , and you walk up to the one that can 't speak very well , and you put the arrowheads down in front of him , hoping that he 'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows .
But he looks at the pile of arrowheads , thinks they 're a gift , picks them up , smiles and walks off .
Now you pursue this guy , gesticulating .
A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads .
Okay , now replay this scene now , and you 're approaching the one who has language .
You put down your arrowheads and say , " I 'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows . I 'll split you 50 / 50 . "
The other one says , " Fine . Looks good to me .
We 'll do that . "
Now the job is done .
Once we have language , we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn 't have before we acquired it .
And this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos , languishing .
That 's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites .
All right , if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true , any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity .
And this is exactly what the archeological record shows .
If you look at our ancestors , the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus , our immediate ancestors , they 're confined to small regions of the world .
But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago , sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world , occupying nearly every habitat on Earth .
Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to , with social learning and language , we could transform the environment to suit our needs .
And so we prospered in a way that no other animal has .
Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved .
It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised .
Language really is the voice of our genes .
Now having evolved language , though , we did something peculiar , even bizarre .
As we spread out around the world , we developed thousands of different languages .
Currently , there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth .
Now you might say , well , this is just natural .
As we diverge , our languages are naturally going to diverge .
But the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together .
If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea , we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages , different human languages , spoken on that island alone .
There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles .
Now , incredible as this sounds , I once met a Papuan man , and I asked him if this could possibly be true .
And he said to me , " Oh no .
They 're far closer together than that . "
And it 's true ; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile .
And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands .
And so it seems that we use our language , not just to cooperate , but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities , and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside .
And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures , we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups .
They slow the flow of technologies .
And they even slow the flow of genes .
Now I can 't speak for you , but it seems to be the case that we don 't have sex with people we can 't talk to .
Now we have to counter that , though , against the evidence we 've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans .
Okay , this tendency we have , this seemingly natural tendency we have , towards isolation , towards keeping to ourselves , crashes head first into our modern world .
This remarkable image is not a map of the world .
In fact , it 's a map of Facebook friendship links .
And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude , it literally draws a map of the world .
Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past .
And that communication , that connectivity around the world , that globalization now raises a burden .
Because these different languages impose a barrier , as we 've just seen , to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom .
And they impose a barrier to cooperation .
And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union , whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages .
The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages .
That 's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone .
Now think of the absurdity of this situation .
If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table , speaking their 23 languages , some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities .
The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators .
And in 2007 alone -- and I 'm sure there are more recent figures -- something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone .
And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft , if language really is the conduit of our cooperation , the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas , in our modern world , we confront a question .
And that question is whether in this modern , globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages .
To put it this way , nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist .
One of them always drives the other extinct .
And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization .
There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things -- weighing them and measuring their length -- but the metric system is winning .
There are lots and lots of ways of measuring time , but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world .
There are many , many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs , but those are all being standardized as well .
And you can probably think of many , many more in your own everyday lives .
And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma .
And it 's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces , who 's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language , and yet he is sitting at his blackboard , converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases .
And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange , and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity , his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language .
Thank you .
Matt Ridley : Mark , one question .
Svante found that the FOXP2 gene , which seems to be associated with language , was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us .
Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language ?
Mark Pagel : This is a very good question .
So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there 's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that 's associated with language .
The reason why I don 't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is -- here 's a simple analogy : Ferraris are cars that have engines .
My car has an engine , but it 's not a Ferrari .
Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don 't , all by themselves , determine the outcome of very complicated things like language .
What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths -- who knows .
But that doesn 't tell us they necessarily had language .
MR : Thank you very much indeed .
Chris Jordan : Turning powerful stats into art
Artist Chris Jordan shows us an arresting view of what Western culture looks like . His supersized images picture some almost unimaginable statistics -- like the astonishing number of paper cups we use every single day .
My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously , on a collective level .
And what I mean by that , it 's the behaviors that we 're in denial about , and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness .
And as individuals , we all do these things , all the time , everyday .
It 's like when you 're mean to your wife because you 're mad at somebody else .
Or when you drink a little too much at a party , just out of anxiety .
Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt , or whatever .
And when we do these kind of things , when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors , then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants , and no one intended .
And that 's what I look at with my photographic work .
This is an image I just recently completed , that is -- when you stand back at a distance , it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic , cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution .
And as you get a little bit closer , it starts looking like lots of pipes , like maybe a chemical plant , or a refinery , or maybe a hellish freeway interchange .
And as you get all the way up close , you realize that it 's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups .
And in fact , this is one million plastic cups , which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours .
We use four million cups a day on airline flights , and virtually none of them are reused or recycled .
They just don 't do that in that industry .
Now , that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day , and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages , most of which is coffee .
I couldn 't fit 40 million cups on a canvas , but I was able to put 410,000 . That 's what 410,000 cups looks like .
That 's 15 minutes of our cup consumption .
And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life , that 's the size it would be .
And there 's an hour 's worth of our cups .
And there 's a day 's worth of our cups .
You can still see the little people way down there .
That 's as high as a 42-story building , and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference .
Speaking of justice , there 's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling , and that is that America , right now , has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth .
One out of four people , one out of four humans in prison are Americans , imprisoned in our country .
And I wanted to show the number .
The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005 .
And that 's gone up since then , but we don 't have the numbers yet .
So , I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms , and in the actual print of this piece , each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge .
They 're tiny . They 're barely visible as a piece of material , and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print .
And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide .
This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York -- those are my parents looking at the piece .
Every time I look at this piece , I always wonder if my mom 's whispering to my dad , " He finally folded his laundry . "
I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction .
And this particular one is about cigarette addiction .
I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking .
More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes .
And so , this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes .
And , as you slowly step back , you see that it 's a painting by Van Gogh , called " Skull with Cigarette . "
It 's a strange thing to think about , that on 9 / 11 , when that tragedy happened , 3,000 Americans died .
And do you remember the response ?
It reverberated around the world , and will continue to reverberate through time .
It will be something that we talk about in 100 years .
And yet on that same day , 1,100 Americans died from smoking .
And the day after that , another 1,100 Americans died from smoking .
And every single day since then , 1,100 Americans have died .
And today , 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking .
And we aren 't talking about it -- we dismiss it .
The tobacco lobby , it 's too strong .
We just dismiss it out of our consciousness .
And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes , we continue to allow our children , our sons and daughters , to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking .
And this is what the next piece is about .
This is just lots and lots of cigarettes : 65,000 cigarettes , which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month , and every month in the U.S.
More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year .
One more strange epidemic in the United States that I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs .
This is an image I 've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin .
Well , actually , I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times .
And so , as you stand back , you see 213,000 Vicodin pills , which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the United States , attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications .
One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. -- and that includes cocaine , heroin , alcohol , everything -- one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications .
A strange phenomenon .
This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon . And that is the phenomenon , this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery .
384,000 women , American women , last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery .
It 's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift , given to young girls who are about to go off to college .
So , I made this image out of Barbie dolls , and so , as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern , and as you get all the way back , you see 32,000 Barbie dolls , which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month .
The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21 .
And strangely enough , the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction , and most of that is being done by men .
Now , I want to emphasize that these are just examples .
I 'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues .
They 're just examples .
And the reason that I do this , it 's because I have this fear that we aren 't feeling enough as a culture right now .
There 's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment .
We 've lost our sense of outrage , our anger and our grief about what 's going on in our culture right now , what 's going on in our country , the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world .
They 've gone missing ; these feelings have gone missing .
Our cultural joy , our national joy is nowhere to be seen .
And one of the causes of this , I think , is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview , this holoptical worldview , this holographic image that we 're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things : the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy ; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers .
As we try to build this view , and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture , the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers : numbers in the millions , in the hundreds of millions , in the billions and now in the trillions .
Bush 's new budget is in the trillions , and these are numbers that our brain just doesn 't have the ability to comprehend .
We can 't make meaning out of these enormous statistics .
And so that 's what I 'm trying to do with my work , is to take these numbers , these statistics from the raw language of data , and to translate them into a more universal visual language , that can be felt .
Because my belief is , if we can feel these issues , if we can feel these things more deeply , then they 'll matter to us more than they do now .
And if we can find that , then we 'll be able to find , within each one of us , what it is that we need to find to face the big question , which is : how do we change ?
That , to me , is the big question that we face as a people right now : how do we change ? How do we change as a culture , and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of , and that is our own behavior ?
My belief is that you don 't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues .
I 'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way .
I 'm simply saying , this is who we are right now .
And if there are things that we see that we don 't like about our culture , then we have a choice .
The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface , to bring to this question , the depth of character that we can summon , as we show up for the question of how do we change -- it 's already defining us as individuals and as a nation , and it will continue to do that , on into the future .
And it will profoundly affect the well-being , the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions .
I 'm not speaking abstractly about this , I 'm speaking -- this is who we are in this room , right now , in this moment .
Thank you and good afternoon .
Seth Berkley : HIV and flu -- the vaccine strategy
Seth Berkley explains how smart advances in vaccine design , production and distribution are bringing us closer than ever to eliminating a host of global threats -- from AIDS to malaria to flu pandemics .
Do you worry about what is going to kill you ?
Heart disease , cancer , a car accident ?
Most of us worry about things we can 't control , like war , terrorism , the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti .
But what really threatens humanity ?
A few years ago , Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history .
He called these , " massively fatal discontinuities , " meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years .
He looked at the odds of another world war , of a massive volcanic eruption , even of an asteroid hitting the Earth .
But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent , and that is a severe flu pandemic .
Now , you might think of flu as just a really bad cold , but it can be a death sentence .
Every year , 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu .
In the developing world , the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher .
You know , the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically , it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic .
In 1918 , a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people .
It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms .
Are we safer today ?
Well , we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared , but this threat could reappear at any time .
The good news is that we 're at a moment in time when science , technology , globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility : the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth .
We can do this .
We 're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines , and if we get these to more people , we can certainly save more lives .
But with new or better vaccines for malaria , TB , HIV , pneumonia , diarrhea , flu , we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time .
So , I 'm here to trumpet vaccines for you .
But first , I have to explain why they 're important because vaccines , the power of them , is really like a whisper .
When they work , they can make history , but after a while you can barely hear them .
Now , some of us are old enough to have a small , circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children .
But when was the last time you worried about smallpox , a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us ?
Or polio ? How many of you remember the iron lung ?
We don 't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines .
Now , it 's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now , but we 're still threatened by things like HIV and flu .
Why is that ?
Well , here 's the dirty little secret .
Until recently , we haven 't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked .
We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error .
You took a pathogen , you modified it , you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened .
This worked well for most pathogens , somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu , but not at all for HIV , for which humans have no natural immunity .
So let 's explore how vaccines work .
They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed .
Now , when you get a viral infection , what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength , and that might be too late .
When you 're pre-immunized , what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes .
So that 's really how vaccines work .
Now , let 's take a look at a video that we 're debuting at TED , for the first time , on how an effective HIV vaccine might work .
A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader .
After HIV penetrates the body 's mucosal barriers , it infects immune cells to replicate .
The invader draws the attention of the immune system 's front-line troops .
Dendritic cells , or macrophages , capture the virus and display pieces of it .
Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops .
These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed .
Memory B cells turn into plasma cells , which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells , while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected .
The virus is defeated .
Without a vaccine , these responses would have taken more than a week .
By that time , the battle against HIV would already have been lost .
Seth Berkley : Really cool video , isn 't it ?
The antibodies you just saw in this video , in action , are the ones that make most vaccines work .
So the real question then is : How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV ?
The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they 're always changing .
So let 's take a look at the flu virus .
In this rendering of the flu virus , these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you .
And also , what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus .
When these mutate , they change their shape , and the antibodies don 't know what they 're looking at anymore .
So that 's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu .
It 's also why in the spring , we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year , put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall .
Even worse , the most common influenza -- influenza A -- also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans , and they can recombine in those particular animals .
In addition , wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza .
So , you 've got this situation : In 2003 , we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent .
Now luckily , that particular virus , although very scary at the time , did not transmit from person to person very easily .
This year 's H1N1 threat was actually a human , avian , swine mixture that arose in Mexico .
It was easily transmitted , but , luckily , was pretty mild .
And so , in a sense , our luck is holding out , but you know , another wild bird could fly over at anytime .
Now let 's take a look at HIV .
As variable as flu is , HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar .
The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted .
It mutates furiously , it has decoys to evade the immune system , it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome .
Here 's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV , a much wilder target .
In the video a moment ago , you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells .
Now realize that in a recently infected person , there are millions of these ships ; each one is just slightly different .
Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder .
Now , in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS , we 've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together .
These drugs aren 't cures , but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV , at least for those who can access them .
The vaccine effort though is really quite different .
Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business .
Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine , but today , evidence tells us otherwise .
In September , we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand .
For the first time , we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans -- albeit , quite modestly -- and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago .
Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models .
But in the past few months , researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual .
Now , what does this mean ?
We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable , that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus .
If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models , they provide full protection from infection .
In addition , these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto , and what 's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates .
It 's like , as many times as the virus changes its clothes , it 's still wearing the same socks , and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks .
So what we 've got is a situation .
The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine , and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that .
This strategy , working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate , has never been done before in vaccine research .
It 's called retro-vaccinology , and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV .
So think of it this way .
We 've got these new antibodies we 've identified , and we know that they latch onto many , many variations of the virus .
We know that they have to latch onto a specific part , so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part , present that through a vaccine , what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies .
And that would create a universal HIV vaccine .
Now , it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site , and as you can imagine , these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on .
And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this , we 'd love to hear about it .
But , you know , the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases .
So for instance , a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza , as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus .
They 're currently making a cocktail -- an antibody cocktail -- that can be used to treat severe , overwhelming cases of flu .
In the longer term , what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine .
Now , retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design .
Let me give you another example .
We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus .
Notice these other , smaller protuberances .
These are largely hidden from the immune system .
Now it turns out that these spots also don 't change much when the virus mutates .
If you can cripple these with specific antibodies , you could cripple all versions of the flu .
So far , animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease , although you might get a mild case .
So if this works in humans , what we 're talking about is a universal flu vaccine , one that doesn 't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death .
We really could think of flu , then , as just a bad cold .
Of course , the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it .
So to do that , we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and , of course , smart delivery methods .
So I want you to think back a few months ago .
In June , the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years .
The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak .
Vaccines were promised to developing countries .
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing .
So what happened ?
Well , we first figured out how to make flu vaccines , how to produce them , in the early 1940s .
It was a slow , cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs , millions of living chicken eggs .
Viruses only grow in living things , and so it turned out that , for flu , chicken eggs worked really well .
For most strains , you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg .
Luckily for us , we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances .
So today , we get our flu vaccines from ...
chicken eggs , hundreds of millions of chicken eggs .
Almost nothing has changed .
The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow .
This year 's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production : basically .6 doses per egg .
So , here 's an alarming thought .
What if that wild bird flies by again ?
You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks , and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines .
So , Dan [ Barber ] , if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm , I know where to get them .
So right now , the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains , and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu .
But this assumes that our factories are humming because , in 2004 , the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant .
And the process still takes more than half a year .
So are we better prepared than we were in 1918 ?
Well , with the new technologies emerging now , I hope we can say definitively , " Yes . "
Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we 're currently spending now in the United States .
With a range of new technologies , we could .
Here 's an example : A company I 'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system .
If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium , which creates a vigorous immune response , they 've created a very powerful flu fighter .
This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria , E. coli .
Now , as you know , bacteria reproduce quickly -- it 's like making yogurt -- and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories , in a few weeks , with no eggs , for a fraction of the cost of current methods .
So here 's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies .
And , aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings -- for example , the E. coli method I just talked about -- look at the time saved : this would be lives saved .
The developing world , mostly left out of the current response , sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they 're leapfrogging the West .
India , Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines , and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use .
Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap , billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them .
Now think of where this leads us .
New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years .
Some day , perhaps soon , we 'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us .
Will we be quick enough to react before millions die ?
Luckily , this year 's flu was relatively mild .
I say , " luckily " in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated .
So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments , we will master these and new tools of vaccinology , and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives .
No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year .
No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year .
No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases , or indeed , anybody .
Instead of having Vaclav Smil 's " massively fatal discontinuity " of life , we can ensure the continuity of life .
What the world needs now are these new vaccines , and we can make it happen .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Thank you .
So , the science is changing .
In your mind , Seth -- I mean , you must dream about this -- what is the kind of time scale on , let 's start with HIV , for a game-changing vaccine that 's actually out there and usable ?
SB : The game change can come at any time , because the problem we have now is we 've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans ; we just need a better one .
And with these types of antibodies , we know humans can make them .
So , if we can figure out how to do that , then we have the vaccine , and what 's interesting is there already is some evidence that we 're beginning to crack that problem .
So , the challenge is full speed ahead .
In your gut , do you think it 's probably going to be at least another five years ?
SB : You know , everybody says it 's 10 years , but it 's been 10 years every 10 years .
So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation , but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends .
And that 's the same with universal flu vaccine , the same kind of thing ?
SB : I think flu is different . I think what happened with flu is we 've got a bunch -- I just showed some of this -- a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now .
They look good . The problem has been that , what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that 's what we were comfortable with .
You also can use adjuvants , which are chemicals you mix .
That 's what Europe is doing , so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available , but , going back to what Michael Specter said , the anti-vaccine crowd didn 't really want that to happen .
And malaria 's even further behind ?
SB : No , malaria , there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now .
It probably isn 't the perfect vaccine , but it 's moving along .
Seth , most of us do work where every month , we produce something ; we get that kind of gratification .
You 've been slaving away at this for more than a decade , and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do .
The world needs people like you . Thank you .
SB : Thank you .
Graham Hawkes : A flight through the ocean
Graham Hawkes takes us aboard his graceful , winged submarines to the depths of planet Ocean . It 's a deep blue world we landlubbers rarely see in 3D .
I think the future of this planet depends on humans , not technology , and we already have the knowledge -- we 're kind of at the endgame with knowledge .
But we 're nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception .
We still have one foot in the dark ages .
And when you listen to some of the presentations here -- and the extraordinary range of human capability , our understandings -- and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet , " Earth : " it 's pretty extraordinary -- we have one foot in the dark ages .
Just quickly : Aristotle , his thing was , " It 's not flat , stupid , it 's round . "
Galileo -- he had the Inquisition , so he had to be a little bit more polite -- his was , " It 's not in the middle , you know . "
And Hawkes : " it 's not earth , stupid , it 's ocean . "
This is an ocean planet .
T.S. Eliot really said it for me -- and this should give you goose bumps : " we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time . "
And the next lines are , " Through the unknown remembered gate , where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning . "
So I have one message .
It seems to me that we 're all pointed in the wrong direction .
For the rocketeers in the audience : I love what you 're doing , I admire the guts , I admire the courage -- but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction .
And it 's all a question of perspective .
Let me try and tell you -- I don 't mean to insult you , but look , if I -- and I 'm not doing this for real because it would be an insult , so I 'm going to pretend , and it softens the blow -- I 'm going to tell you what you 're thinking .
If I held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth , and I held up another square that was the root two square -- so it 's 1.5 times bigger -- and was the color of the oceans ; and I said , what is the relative value of these two things ?
Well , it 's the relative importance .
You would say -- yeah , yeah , yeah , we all know this ; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land .
But it 's a question of perception , and if that 's what you 're thinking , if that 's what you think I mean when I say , " This is an ocean planet stupidly called ' Earth . ' " If you think that that 's the relative importance , two to one , you 're wrong by a factor of ten .
Now , you 're not as thick as two short planks , but you sound like it when you say " Earth , " because that demonstration , if I turned around this way -- that earth plane would be as thin as paper .
It 's a thin film , two-dimensional existence .
The ocean representation would have a depth to it .
And if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1 .
It turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic .
That means that us terrestrials occupy a minority .
The problem we have in believing that is -- you just have to give up this notion that this Earth was created for us .
Because it 's a problem we have .
If this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet , it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks .
Okay . Let me criticize this thing .
I 'm not talking about James Cameron -- although I could , but I won 't .
You really do have to go and see his latest film , " Aliens of the Deep . " It 's incredible .
It features two of these deep rovers , and I can criticize them because these sweet things are mine .
This , I think , represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built .
If you look at that sub , you 'll see a sphere .
This is an acryclic sphere .
It generates all of the buoyancy , all of the payload for the craft , and the batteries are down here hanging underneath , exactly like a balloon .
This is the envelope , and this is the gondola , the payload .
Also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights .
And this one actually carries two great manipulators .
It actually is a very good working sub -- that 's what it was designed for .
The problem with it is -- and the reason I will never build another one like it -- is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking .
It 's what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers ; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups , all our constraints -- importantly , these two-dimensional constraints that we have , and they 're so constrained we don 't even understand it -- and we take them underwater .
You notice that Jim Cameron is sitting in a seat .
A seat works in a two-dimensional world , where gravity blasts down on that seat , OK ?
And in a two-dimensional world , we do know about the third dimension but we don 't use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity .
And then our mothers tell us , " Careful you don 't fall down " -- because you 'll fall over .
Now , go into the real atmosphere of this planet .
This planet has an inner atmosphere of water ; it 's its inner atmosphere . It has two atmospheres -- a lesser , outer gaseous atmosphere , a lighter one .
Most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere .
And that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence , which is alien to us .
Fish do not sit in seats .
They don 't . Their mothers don 't say to little baby fish , " Careful you don 't fall over . "
They don 't fall over . They don 't fall .
They live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way , that way , that way or that way .
It 's truly a three-dimensional space .
And we 're only just beginning to grasp it .
I don 't know of any other submersible , or even remote , that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space .
This is the way we should be going into the oceans .
This is a three-dimensional machine .
What we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals , and move in this three-dimensional space .
OK , this is good stuff .
This is man 's first attempt at flying underwater .
Right now , I 'm just coming down on this gorgeous , big , giant manta ray .
She has twice the wingspan that I do .
There I 'm coming ; she sees me .
And just notice how she rolls under and turns ; she doesn 't sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down -- she just rolls .
And the craft that I 'm in -- this hasn 't been shown before .
Chris asked us to show stuff that hasn 't been shown before .
I wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up .
There I am ; I see her coming back , coming up underneath me .
I put reverse thrust and I try and pull gently down .
I 'm trying to do everything very gently .
We spent about three hours together and she 's beginning to trust me .
And this ballet is controlled by this lady here .
She gets about that close and then she pulls away .
So now I try and go after her , but I 'm practicing flying .
This is the first flying machine . This was the first prototype .
This was a fly by wire . It has wings .
There 're no silly buoyancy tanks -- it 's permanently , positively buoyant .
And then by moving through the water it 's able to take that control .
Now , look at that ; look , it 's -- she just blew me away .
She just rolled right away from underneath .
Really that 's the only real dive I 've ever made in this machine .
It took 10 years to build .
But this lady here taught me , hah , taught me so much .
We just learned so much in three hours in the water there .
I just had to go and build another machine .
But look here . Instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it , it 's a little bit of back pressure , and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water .
This is an internal Sony camera . Thank you , Sony .
I don 't really look that ugly , but the camera is so close that it 's just distorted .
Now , there she goes , right overhead .
This is a wide-angle camera .
She 's just a few inches off the top of my head .
" Aah , ha , oh , he just crossed over the top of my head about , oh , I don 't know , just so close . "
I come back up , not for air .
" This is an incredible encounter with a manta . I 'm speechless .
We 've been just feet apart . I 'm going back down now . "
Okay , can we cut that ? Lights back up please .
Trying to fly and keep up with that animal -- it wasn 't the lack of maneuverability that we had .
It was the fact she was going so slow .
I actually designed that to move faster through the water because I thought that was the thing that we needed to do : to move fast and get range .
But after that encounter I really did want to go back with that animal and dance .
She wanted to dance .
And so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip , develop higher forces .
So the sub that was outside last year -- this is the one .
You see the larger wing area here .
Also , clearly , it was such a powerful thing , we wanted to try and bring other people but we couldn 't figure out how to do it .
So we opened the world 's first flight school .
The rational for the world 's first flight school goes something like : when the coastguards come up to me and say -- they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things , but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous -- they would come up and say , " Do you have a license for that ? "
And then I 'd put my sunglasses on , the beard that would all sprout out , and I would say , " I don 't need no stinking license . "
" I write these stinking license , " which I do .
So Bob Gelfond 's around here -- but somebody in the audience here has license number 20 .
They 're one of the first subsea aviators .
So we 've run two flight schools .
Where the hell that goes , I don 't know , but it 's a lot of fun .
What comes next in 30 seconds ? I can 't tell you .
But the patent for underwater flight -- Karen and I , we were looking at it , some business partners wanted us to patent it -- we weren 't sure about that .
We 've decided we 're just going to let that go .
It just seems wrong to try and patent -- -- the freedom for underwater flight .
So anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us , go for it .
The other thing is that we 've got much lower costs .
We developed some other technology called spider optics , and Craig Ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning : we 're going to be building a beautiful , little , small version of this -- unmanned , super deep -- for his boat to go and get back some deep sea DNA stuff .
Thank you .
Sunitha Krishnan : The fight against sex slavery
Sunitha Krishnan has dedicated her life to rescuing women and children from sex slavery , a multimilion-dollar global market . In this courageous talk , she tells three powerful stories , as well as her own , and calls for a more humane approach to helping these young victims rebuild their lives .
I 'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation , the third-largest organized crime , a $ 10 billion industry .
I 'm talking to you about modern-day slavery .
I 'd like to tell you the story of these three children , Pranitha , Shaheen and Anjali .
Pranitha 's mother was a woman in prostitution , a prostituted person .
She got infected with HIV , and towards the end of her life , when she was in the final stages of AIDS , she could not prostitute , so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker .
By the time we got the information , we reached there , Pranitha was already raped by three men .
Shaheen 's background I don 't even know .
We found her in a railway track , raped by many , many men , I don 't know many .
But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body .
And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body .
We still don 't know who her parents are , who she is .
All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally .
Anjali 's father , a drunkard , sold his child for pornography .
You 're seeing here images of three years , four-year-olds , and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation .
In this country , and across the globe , hundreds and thousands of children , as young as three , as young as four , are sold into sexual slavery .
But that 's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for .
They are sold in the name of adoption .
They are sold in the name of organ trade .
They are sold in the name of forced labor , camel jockeying , anything , everything .
I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation .
And I tell you stories from there .
My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager .
I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men .
I don 't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it .
Yes , there were eight men who defiled me , raped me , but that didn 't go into my consciousness .
I never felt like a victim , then or now .
But what lingered from then till now -- I am 40 today -- is this huge outrageous anger .
Two years , I was ostracized , I was stigmatized , I was isolated , because I was a victim .
And that 's what we do to all traffic survivors .
We , as a society , we have PhDs in victimizing a victim .
Right from the age of 15 , when I started looking around me , I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices , but have absolutely no respite , because we don 't allow them to come in .
Where does their journey begin ?
Most of them come from very optionless families , not just poor .
You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked .
I had this I.S. officer 's daughter , who is 14 years old , studying in ninth standard , who was raped chatting with one individual , and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine , who was trafficked .
I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families , and children from well-to-do families , who are getting trafficked .
These people are deceived , forced .
99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution .
Some pay the price for it .
They 're killed ; we don 't even hear about them .
They are voiceless , [ unclear ] , nameless people .
But the rest , who succumb into it , go through everyday torture .
Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends , or who want to have a family with you .
These are men who buy you for an hour , for a day , and use you , throw you .
Each of the girls that I have rescued -- I have rescued more than 3,200 girls -- each of them tell me one story in common ...
one story about one man , at least , putting chili powder in her vagina , one man taking a cigarette and burning her , one man whipping her .
We are living among those men : they 're our brothers , fathers , uncles , cousins , all around us .
And we are silent about them .
We think it is easy money .
We think it is shortcut .
We think the person likes to do what she 's doing .
But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections , sexually transmitted infections , HIV , AIDS , syphilis , gonorrhea , you name it , substance abuse , drugs , everything under the sun .
And one day she gives up on you and me , because we have no options for her .
And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation .
She believes , " Yes , this is it , this is what my destiny is about . "
And this is normal , to get raped by 100 men a day .
And it 's abnormal to live in a shelter .
It 's abnormal to get rehabilitated .
It 's in that context that I work .
It 's in that context that I rescue children .
I 've rescued children as young as three years , and I 've rescued women as old as 40 years .
When I rescued them , one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin .
Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected .
One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive .
And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain .
And for me , I was my greatest experience .
Understanding my own self , understanding my own pain , my own isolation , was my greatest teacher .
Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential .
You see a girl here who is trained as a welder .
She works for a very big company , a workshop in Hyderabad , making furnitures .
She earns around 12,000 rupees .
She is an illiterate girl , trained , skilled as a welder .
Why welding and why not computers ?
We felt , one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage .
They did not have any pardas inside their body , hijabs inside themselves ; they 've crossed the barrier of it .
And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world , very easily , and not feel very shy about it .
We have trained girls as carpenters , as masons , as security guards , as cab drivers .
And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field , gaining confidence , restoring dignity , and building hopes in their own lives .
These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction , as masons , full-time masons .
What has been my challenge ?
My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up .
I 've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life .
I can 't hear from my right ear .
I 've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue .
My biggest challenge is society .
It 's you and me .
My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own .
A very supportive friend of mine , a well-wisher of mine , used to give me every month , 2,000 rupees for vegetables .
When her mother fell sick she said , " Sunitha , you have so much of contacts .
Can you get somebody in my house to work , so that she can look after my mother ? "
And there is a long pause .
And then she says , " Not one of our girls . "
It 's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking , in this fantastic A-C hall .
It 's very nice for discussion , discourse , making films and everything .
But it is not nice to bring them to our homes .
It 's not nice to give them employment in our factories , our companies .
It 's not nice for our children to study with their children .
There it ends .
That 's my biggest challenge .
If I 'm here today , I 'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan .
I 'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking .
They need your compassion .
They need your empathy .
They need , much more than anything else , your acceptance .
Many times when I talk to people , I keep telling them one thing : don 't tell me hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem .
Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem ?
And that 's what I 'm here for , asking for your support , demanding for your support , requesting for your support .
Can you break your culture of silence ?
Can you speak to at least two persons about this story ?
Tell them this story . Convince them to tell the story to another two persons .
I 'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings , or Medha Patkars , or something like that .
I 'm asking you , in your limited world , can you open your minds ? Can you open your hearts ?
Can you just encompass these people too ?
Because they are also a part of us .
They are also part of this world .
I 'm asking you , for these children , whose faces you see , they 're no more .
They died of AIDS last year .
I 'm asking you to help them , accept as human beings -- not as philanthropy , not as charity , but as human beings who deserve all our support .
I 'm asking you this because no child , no human being , deserves what these children have gone through .
Thank you .
Yasheng Huang : Does democracy stifle economic growth ?
Economist Yasheng Huang compares China to India , and asks how China 's authoritarian rule contributed to its astonishing economic growth -- leading to a big question : Is democracy actually holding India back ? Huang 's answer may surprise you .
My topic is economic growth in China and India .
And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth .
You may say this is not fair , because I 'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy .
Actually , exactly the opposite is what I 'm going to do .
I 'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy , rather than against democracy .
The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India .
Over the last 30 years , in terms of the GDP growth rates , China has grown at twice the rate of India .
In the last five years , the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth .
But over the last 30 years , China undoubtedly has done much better than India .
One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai .
Look at the skyline of Shanghai .
This is the Pudong area .
The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India .
The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law .
It can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process , evict millions of people -- that 's just a small technical issue .
Whereas in India , you cannot do that , because you have to listen to the public .
You 're being constrained by the public 's opinion .
Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view .
In an interview printed in the financial press of India , He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai .
This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values , and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai .
So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth , that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development : infrastructures , airports , highways , bridges , things like that .
And you need a strong government to do that , because you cannot respect private property rights .
You cannot be constrained by the public 's opinion .
You need also state ownership , especially of land assets , in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly .
The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth , rather than a facilitator of economic growth .
Here 's the key question .
Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth ?
This is a key issue .
If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth , then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth .
If you believe that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe , then you will put less emphasis on strong government .
So to illustrate that question , let me give you two countries .
And for the sake of brevity , I 'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2 .
Country 1 has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures .
Country 1 has more telephones , and Country 1 has a longer system of railways .
So if I were to ask you , " Which is China and which is India , and which country has grown faster ? "
if you believe in the infrastructure view , then you will say , " Country 1 must be China .
They must have done better , in terms of economic growth .
And Country 2 is possibly India . "
Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union , and the data referred to 1989 .
After the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones , the country collapsed .
That 's not too good .
The picture there is Khrushchev .
I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union , but that 's the best picture that I can find .
Telephones , infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth .
Country 2 , that has fewer telephones , is China .
Since 1989 , the country has performed at a double-digit rate every year for the last 20 years .
If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones , you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades .
Country 1 , that has a longer system of railways , is actually India .
And Country 2 is China .
This is a very little known fact about the two countries .
Yes , today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India .
But for many years , until the late 1990s , China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India .
In developing countries , the most common mode of transportation is the railways , and the British built a lot of railways in India .
India is the smaller of the two countries , and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s .
So clearly , infrastructure doesn 't explain why China did better before the late 1990s , as compared with India .
In fact , if you look at the evidence worldwide , the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth .
The economy grows , government accumulates more resources , and the government can invest in infrastructure -- rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth .
And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth .
Let me look at this question more directly .
Is democracy bad for economic growth ?
Now let 's turn to two countries , Country A and Country B.
Country A , in 1990 , had about $ 300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B , which had $ 460 in per capita GDP .
By 2008 , Country A has surpassed Country B with $ 700 per capita GDP as compared with $ 650 per capita GDP .
Both countries are in Asia .
If I were to ask you , " Which are the two Asian countries ?
And which one is a democracy ? "
you may argue , " Well , maybe Country A is China and Country B is India . "
In fact , Country A is democratic India , and Country B is Pakistan -- the country that has a long period of military rule .
And it 's very common that we compare India with China .
That 's because the two countries have about the same population size .
But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan .
Those two countries are geographically similar .
They have a complicated , but shared common history .
By that comparison , democracy looks very , very good in terms of economic growth .
So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments ?
One reason is the East Asian Model .
In East Asia , we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea , Taiwan , Hong Kong and Singapore .
Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s .
The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries , " Have you won the lottery ? "
And they all tell you , " Yes , we have won the lottery . "
And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent .
The reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and didn 't end up winning the prize .
For each of these successful authoritarian governments in East Asia , there 's a matched failure .
Korea succeeded , North Korea didn 't .
Taiwan succeeded , China under Mao Zedong didn 't .
Burma didn 't succeed .
The Philippines didn 't succeed .
If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide , there 's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth .
So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias -- it is known as selecting on a dependent variable , something we always tell our students to avoid .
So exactly why did China grow so much faster ?
I will take you to the Cultural Revolution , when China went mad , and compare that country 's performance with India under Indira Gandhi .
The question there is : Which country did better , China or India ?
China was during the Cultural Revolution .
It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution , China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP .
So that 's when China was mad .
The whole country went mad .
It must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the Cultural Revolution .
The advantage the country had was human capital -- nothing else but human capital .
This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s .
And this is the earliest data that I can find .
The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India .
The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women .
I haven 't told you about the definition of literacy .
In China , the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters .
In India , the definition of literacy , operating definition of literacy , is the ability , the grand ability , to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak .
The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated .
If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index , that data series , go back to the early 1970s , you see exactly the same contrast .
China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India .
Life expectancies : as early as 1965 , China had a huge advantage in life expectancy .
On average , as a Chinese in 1965 , you lived 10 years more than an average Indian .
So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian , you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer .
If you made that decision in 1965 , the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution .
So you have to always think carefully about these decisions .
If you cannot chose your nationality , then you will want to become an Indian man .
Because , as an Indian man , you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women .
This is an extremely strange fact .
It 's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern .
It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women .
The good news is , by 2006 , India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy .
Today , Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men .
So India is reverting to the normal .
But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality .
These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India .
In China , it 's all women .
60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country , whereas in India , it 's all men .
Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title , " India Poised to Overtake China in Textile . "
By looking at these two pictures , I say no , it won 't overtake China for a while .
If you look at other East Asian countries , women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off -- in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia .
India still has a long way to go to catch up with China .
Then the issue is , what about the Chinese political system ?
You talk about human capital , you talk about education and public health .
What about the political system ?
Isn 't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China ?
Actually , the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that .
It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system .
Statically , China is a one-party system , authoritarian -- there 's no question about it .
Dynamically , it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic .
When you explain change -- for example , economic growth ; economic growth is about change -- when you explain change , you use other things that have changed to explain change , rather than using the constant to explain change .
Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change , but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change .
In terms of the political changes , they have introduced village elections .
They have increased the security of proprietors .
And they have increased the security with long-term land leases .
There are also financial reforms in rural China .
There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China .
To me , the pace of political changes is too slow , too gradual .
And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges , because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms .
But nevertheless , the system has moved in a more liberal direction , moved in a more democratic direction .
You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India .
In fact , when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth -- about one percent , two percent a year -- that was when India was least democratic .
Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975 .
The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations .
A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms , the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule , privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts .
So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction .
Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster ?
One reason is they are always comparing India with China .
But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth .
If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan , you 're going to look not so impressive .
But that doesn 't mean that you 're a bad basketball player .
Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark .
In fact , if you compare India with the average developing country , even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth -- now India is growing between eight and nine percent -- even before this period , India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies .
This is a very impressive record indeed .
Let 's think about the future : the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant .
Which country has the growth momentum ?
China , I believe , still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals -- mostly the social capital , the public health , the sense of egalitarianism that you don 't find in India .
But I believe that India has the momentum .
It has the improving fundamentals .
The government has invested in basic education , has invested in basic health .
I believe the government should do more , but nevertheless , the direction it is moving in is the right direction .
India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth , whereas China is still struggling with political reforms .
I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth .
And it 's very important to have political reforms , to have widely shared benefits of economic growth .
I don 't know whether that 's going to happen or not , but I 'm an optimist .
Hopefully , five years from now , I 'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China .
Thank you very much .
Yoav Medan : Ultrasound surgery -- healing without cuts
Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved . At TEDMED , Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions , uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths .
Over the last 13 years -- one , three , 13 years -- I 've been part of an exceptional team at InSightec in Israel and partners around the world for taking this idea , this concept , noninvasive surgery , from the research lab to routine clinical use .
And this is what I 'll tell you about .
13 years -- for some of you , you can empathize with that number .
For me , today , on this date , it 's like a second bar mitzvah experience .
So this dream is really enabled by the convergence of two known technologies .
One is the focused ultrasound , and the other one is the vision-enabled magnetic resonance imaging .
So let 's first talk about focused ultrasound .
And I hold in my hand a tissue-mimicking phantom .
It is made out of silicon .
It is transparent , made just for you .
So you see , it 's all intact , completely transparent .
I 'll take you now to the acoustic lab .
You see the phantom within the aquarium .
This is a setup I put in a physics lab .
On the right-hand side , you see an ultrasonic transducer .
So the ultrasonic transducer emits basically an ultrasonic beam that focuses inside the phantom .
Okay , when you hear the click , this is when the energy starts to emit and you see a little lesion form inside the phantom .
Okay , so everything around it is whole and intact .
It 's just a lesion formed inside .
So think about , this is in your brain .
We need to reach a target inside the brain .
We can do it without harming any tissue .
So this is , I think , the first kosher Hippocratic surgical system .
Okay , so let 's talk a little bit about ultrasound , the force of ultrasound .
You know all about imaging , right , ultrasound imaging .
And you know also about lithotripsy -- breaking kidney stones .
But ultrasound can be shaped to be anything in between , because it 's a mechanical force .
Basically , it 's a force acting on a tissue that it transverses .
So you can change the intensity , the frequency , the duration , the pulse shape of the ultrasound to create anything from an airbrush to a hammer .
And I am going to show you multiple applications in the medical field that can be enabled just by focusing , physically focusing .
So this idea of harnessing focused ultrasound to treat lesions in the brain is not new at all .
When I was born , this idea was already conceived by pioneers such as the Fry brothers and Lars Leksell , who is know actually as the inventor of the gammaknife .
But you may not know that he tried to perform lobotomies in the brain , noninvasively , with focused ultrasound in the ' 50s .
He failed , so he then invented the gammaknife .
And it makes you ponder why those pioneers failed .
And there was something fundamental that they were missing .
They were missing the vision .
It wasn 't until the invention of the MR and really the integration of MR with focused ultrasound that we could get the feedback -- both the anatomical and the physiological in order to have a completely noninvasive , closed-loop surgical procedure .
So this is how it looks , you know , the operating room of the future today .
This is an MR suite with a focused ultrasound system .
And I will give you several examples .
So the first one is in the brain .
One of the neurological conditions that can be treated with focused ultrasound are movement disorders , like Parkinson 's or essential tremor .
What is typical to those conditions , to essential tremor for example , is inability to drink or eat cereal or soup without spilling everything all over you , or write legibly so people can understand it , and be really independent in your life without the help of others .
So I 'd like you to meet John .
John is a retired professor of history from Virginia .
So he suffered from essential tremor for many years .
And medication didn 't help him anymore .
And many of those patients refused to undergo surgery to have people cut into their brain .
And about four or five months ago , he underwent an experimental procedure .
It is approved under an FDAIDE at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville using focused ultrasound to ablate a point in his thalamus .
And this is his handwriting .
" On June 20th , " if you can read it , " 2011 . "
This is his handwriting on the morning of the treatment before going into the MR So now I 'll take you through [ what ] a typical procedure like that looks like , [ what ] noninvasive surgery looks like .
So we put the patient on the MR table .
We attach a transducer , in this case , to the brain , but if it will be a different organ , it will be a different transducer attached to the patient .
And the physician will then take a regular MR scan .
And the objective of that ?
I don 't have a pointer here , but you see the green , sort of rectangle or trapezoid ?
This is the sort of general area of the treatment .
It 's a safety boundary around the target .
It 's a target in the thalamus .
So once those pictures are acquired and the physician has drawn all the necessary safety limits and so on , he selects basically a point -- you see the round point in the middle where the cursor is -- and he presses this blue button called " sonicate . "
We call this instance of injecting the energy , we call it sonication .
The only handwork the physician does here is moving a mouse .
This is the only device he needs in this treatment .
So he presses " sonicate , " and this is what happens .
You see the transducer , the light blue .
There 's water in between the skull and the transducer .
And it does this burst of energy .
It elevates the temperature .
We first need to verify that we are on target .
So the first sonication is at lower energy .
It doesn 't do any damage , but it elevates the temperature by a few degrees .
And one of the unique capabilities that we leverage with the MR is the ability to measure temperature noninvasively .
This is really a unique capability of the MR.
It is not being used in regular diagnostic imaging .
But here we can get both the anatomical imaging and the temperature maps in real time .
And you can see the points there on the graph .
The temperature was raised to 43 degrees C temporarily .
This doesn 't cause any damage .
But the point is we are right on target .
So once the physician verifies that the focus spot is on the target he has chosen , then we move to perform a full-energy ablation like you see here .
And you see the temperature rises to like 55 to 60 degrees C.
If you do it for more than a second , it 's enough to basically destroy the proteins of the cells .
This is the outcome from a patient perspective -- same day after the treatment .
This is an immediate relief .
Thank you .
John is one of [ about ] a dozen very heroic , courageous people who volunteered for the study .
And you have to understand what is in people 's mind when they are willing to take the risk .
And this is a quote from John after he wrote it .
He said , " Miraculous . "
And his wife said , " This is the happiest moment of my life . "
And you wonder why .
I mean , one of the messages I like to carry over is , what about defending quality of life ?
I mean , those people lose their independence .
They are dependent on others .
And John today is fully independent .
He returned to a normal life routine .
And he also plays golf , like you do in Virginia when you are retired .
Okay , so you can see here the spot .
It 's like three millimeters in the middle of the brain .
There 's no damage outside .
He suffers from no neurodeficit .
There 's no recovery needed , no nothing .
He 's back to his normal life .
Let 's move now to a more painful subject .
Pain is something that can make your life miserable .
And people are suffering from all kinds of pain like neuropathic pain , lower-back pain and cancer pain from bone metastases , when the metastases get to your bones , sometimes they are very painful .
All those I 've indicated have already been shown to be successfully treated by focused ultrasound relieving the pain , again , very fast .
And I would like to tell you about PJ .
He 's a 78 year-old farmer who suffered from -- how should I say it ? -- it 's called pain in the butt .
He had metastases in his right buttock , and he couldn 't sit even with medication .
He had to forgo all the farm activities .
He was treated with radiation therapy , state-of-the-art radiation therapy , but it didn 't help .
Many patients like that favor radiation therapy .
And again , he volunteered to a pivotal study that we ran worldwide , also in the U.S.
And his wife actually took him .
They drove like three hours from their farm to the hospital .
He had to sit on a cushion , stand still , not move , because it was very painful .
He took the treatment , and on the way back , he drove the truck by himself .
So again , this is an immediate relief .
And you have to understand what those people feel and what their family experiences when it happens .
He returned again to his daily routine on the farm .
He rides his tractor .
He rides his horse to their mountain cabin regularly .
And he has been very happy .
But now , you ask me , but what about war , the war on cancer ?
Show us some primary cancer .
What can be done there ?
So I have good news and bad news .
The good news : there 's a lot that can be done .
And it has been shown actually outside of the U.S.
And doing that in the U.S.
is very painful .
I don 't see , without this nation taking it as some collective will or something that is a national goal to make that happen , it will not happen .
And it 's not just because of regulation ; it 's because of the amount of money needed under the current evidence-based medicine and the size of trials and so on to make it happen .
So the first two applications are breast cancer and prostate cancer .
They were the first to be treated by focused ultrasound .
And we have better-than-surgery results in breasts .
But I have a message for the men here .
We heard here yesterday Quyen talking about the adverse event trait in prostate cancer .
There is a unique opportunity now with focused ultrasound guided by MR , because we can actually think about prostate lumpectomy -- treating just the focal lesion and not removing the whole gland , and by that , avoiding all the issues with potency and incontinence .
Well , there are other cancer tumors in the abdomen -- quite lethal , very lethal actually -- pancreas , liver , kidney .
The challenge there with a breathing and awake patient -- and in all our treatments , the patient is awake and conscious and speaks with the physician -- is you have to teach the MR some tricks how to do it in real time .
And this will take time .
This will take two years .
But I have now a message to the ladies .
And this is , in 2004 , the FDA has approved MR-guided focused ultrasounds for the treatment of symptomatic uterine fibroids .
Women suffer from that disease .
All those tumors have heavy bleeding during periods , abdominal pressure , back pain , frequent urination .
And sometimes , they cannot even conceive and become pregnant because of the fibroid .
This is Frances .
She was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized fibroid .
This is a big fibroid .
She was offered a hysterectomy , but this is an inconceivable proposition for someone who wants to keep her pregnancy option .
So she elected to undergo a focused ultrasound procedure in 2008 .
And in 2010 , she became a first-time mother to a healthy baby .
So new life was born .
So in conclusion , I 'd like to leave you with actually four messages .
One is , think about the amount of suffering that is saved from patients undergoing noninvasive surgery , and also the economical and emotional burden removed from their families and communities and the society at large -- and I think also from their physicians , by the way .
And the other thing I would like you to think about is the new type of relationship between physician and patients when you have a patient on the table [ who ] is awake and can even monitor the treatment .
In all our treatments , the patient holds a stop sonication button .
He can stop the surgery at any moment .
And with that note , I would like to thank you for listening .
Kirk Citron : And now , the real news
How many of today 's headlines will matter in 100 years ? 1000 ? Kirk Citron 's " Long News " project collects stories that not only matter today , but will resonate for decades -- even centuries -- to come . At TED2010 , he highlights recent headlines with the potential to shape our future .
We are drowning in news .
Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year .
That 's just one source .
My question is : How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run ?
That 's the idea behind The Long News .
It 's a project by The Long Now Foundation , which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand .
And what we 're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now .
And when you look at the news through that filter , a lot falls by the wayside .
To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year , is this going to matter in a decade ?
Or this ?
Or this ?
Really ?
Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years ?
Okay , that was kind of cool .
But the top story of this past year was the economy , and I 'm just betting that , sooner or later , this particular recession is going to be old news .
So , what kind of stories might make a difference for the future ?
Well , let 's take science .
Someday , little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things .
That someday is already here if you 're a mouse .
Some recent stories : nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom ; they 're sending genes into the brain ; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body .
What about resources ? How are we going to feed nine billion people ?
We 're having trouble feeding six billion today .
As we heard yesterday , there 's over a billion people hungry .
Britain will starve without genetically modified crops .
Bill Gates , fortunately , has bet a billion on [ agricultural ] research .
What about global politics ?
The world 's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda , and they may .
They 've overtaken the U.S. as the world 's biggest car market , they 've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter , and they 've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers .
We 're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know .
Some recent discoveries : There 's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica ; there 's a self-directed robot scientist that 's made a discovery -- soon , science may no longer need us , and life may no longer need us either ; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years .
It seems that with or without us , life will go on .
But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one : water found on the moon .
Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there .
And if NASA doesn 't do it , China might , or somebody in this room might write a big check .
My point is this : In the long run , some news stories are more important than others .
Tim Jackson : An economic reality check
As the world faces recession , climate change , inequity and more , Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles , explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future .
I want to talk to you today about prosperity , about our hopes for a shared and lasting prosperity .
And not just us , but the two billion people worldwide who are still chronically undernourished .
And hope actually is at the heart of this .
In fact , the Latin word for hope is at the heart of the word prosperity .
" Pro-speras , " " speras , " hope -- in accordance with our hopes and expectations .
The irony is , though , that we have cashed-out prosperity almost literally in terms of money and economic growth .
And we 've grown our economies so much that we now stand in a real danger of undermining hope -- running down resources , cutting down rainforests , spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico , changing the climate -- and the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession .
And recession , of course , isn 't exactly a recipe for hope either , as we 're busy finding out .
So we 're caught in a kind of trap .
It 's a dilemma , a dilemma of growth .
We can 't live with it ; we can 't live without it .
Trash the system or crash the planet -- it 's a tough choice ; it isn 't much of a choice .
And our best avenue of escape from this actually is a kind of blind faith in our own cleverness and technology and efficiency and doing things more efficiently .
Now I haven 't got anything against efficiency .
And I think we are a clever species sometimes .
But I think we should also just check the numbers , take a reality check here .
So I want you to imagine a world , in 2050 , of around nine billion people , all aspiring to Western incomes , Western lifestyles .
And I want to ask the question -- and we 'll give them that two percent hike in income , in salary each year as well , because we believe in growth .
And I want to ask the question : how far and how fast would be have to move ?
How clever would we have to be ?
How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets ?
And here in my chart -- on the left-hand side is where we are now .
This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment .
It 's around about 770 grams of carbon .
In the world I describe to you , we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon .
It 's a 130-fold improvement , and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we 've ever achieved in industrial history .
Maybe we can do it , maybe it 's possible -- who knows ?
Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere , which is what we 're going to need to be doing by the end of the century .
But shouldn 't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement ?
So I want to just spend a couple of minutes on system dynamics .
It 's a bit complex , and I apologize for that .
What I 'll try and do , is I 'll try and paraphrase it is sort of human terms .
So it looks a little bit like this .
Firms produce goods for households -- that 's us -- and provide us with incomes , and that 's even better , because we can spend those incomes on more goods and services .
That 's called the circular flow of the economy .
It looks harmless enough .
I just want to highlight one key feature of this system , which is the role of investment .
Now investment constitutes only about a fifth of the national income in most modern economies , but it plays an absolutely vital role .
And what it does essentially is to stimulate further consumption growth .
It does this in a couple of ways -- chasing productivity , which drives down prices and encourages us to buy more stuff .
But I want to concentrate on the role of investment in seeking out novelty , the production and consumption of novelty .
Joseph Schumpeter called this " the process of creative destruction . "
It 's a process of the production and reproduction of novelty , continually chasing expanding consumer markets , consumer goods , new consumer goods .
And this , this is where it gets interesting , because it turns out that human beings have something of an appetite for novelty .
We love new stuff -- new material stuff for sure -- but also new ideas , new adventures , new experiences .
But the materiality matters too , because in every society that anthropologists have looked at , material stuff operates as a kind of language -- a language of goods , a symbolic language that we use to tell each other stories -- stories , for example , about how important we are .
Status-driven , conspicuous consumption thrives from the language of novelty .
And here , all of a sudden , we have a system that is locking economic structure with social logic -- the economic institutions , and who we are as people , locked together to drive an engine of growth .
And this engine is not just economic value ; it is pulling material resources relentlessly through the system , driven by our own insatiable appetites , driven in fact by a sense of anxiety .
Adam Smith , 200 years ago , spoke about our desire for a life without shame .
A life without shame : in his day , what that meant was a linen shirt , and today , well , you still need the shirt , but you need the hybrid car , the HDTV , two holidays a year in the sun , the netbook and iPad , the list goes on -- an almost inexhaustible supply of goods , driven by this anxiety .
And even if we don 't want them , we need to buy them , because , if we don 't buy them , the system crashes .
And to stop it crashing over the last two to three decades , we 've expanded the money supply , expanded credit and debt , so that people can keep buying stuff .
And of course , that expansion was deeply implicated in the crisis .
But this -- I just want to show you some data here .
This is what it looks like , essentially , this credit and debt system , just for the U.K.
This was the last 15 years before the crash , and you can see there , consumer debt rose dramatically .
It was above the GDP for three years in a row just before the crisis .
And in the mean time , personal savings absolutely plummeted .
The savings ratio , net savings , were below zero in the middle of 2008 , just before the crash .
This is people expanding debt , drawing down their savings , just to stay in the game .
This is a strange , rather perverse , story , just to put it in very simple terms .
It 's a story about us , people , being persuaded to spend money we don 't have on things we don 't need to create impressions that won 't last on people we don 't care about .
But before we consign ourselves to despair , maybe we should just go back and say , " Did we get this right ?
Is this really how people are ?
Is this really how economies behave ? "
And almost straightaway we actually run up against a couple of anomalies .
The first one is in the crisis itself .
In the crisis , in the recession , what do people want to do ?
They want to hunker down , they want to look to the future .
They want to spend less and save more .
But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view .
Keynes called this the " paradox of thrift " -- saving slows down recovery .
And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt , to draw down our own savings even further , just so that we can get the show back on the road , so we can keep this growth-based economy going .
It 's an anomaly , it 's a place where the system actually is at odds with who we are as people .
Here 's another one -- completely different one : Why is it that we don 't do the blindingly obvious things we should do to combat climate change , very , very simple things like buying energy-efficient appliances , putting in efficient lights , turning the lights off occasionally , insulating our homes ?
These things save carbon , they save energy , they save us money .
So is it that , though they make perfect economic sense , we don 't do them ?
Well , I had my own personal insight into this a few years ago .
It was a Sunday evening , Sunday afternoon , and it was just after -- actually , to be honest , too long after -- we had moved into a new house .
And I had finally got around to doing some draft stripping , installing insulation around the windows and doors to keep out the drafts .
And my , then , five year-old daughter was helping me in the way that five year-olds do .
And we 'd been doing this for a while , when she turned to me very solemnly and said , " Will this really keep out the giraffes ? "
" Here they are , the giraffes . "
You can hear the five-year-old mind working .
These ones , interestingly , are 400 miles north of here outside Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria .
Goodness knows what they make of the Lake District weather .
But actually that childish misrepresentation stuck with me , because it suddenly became clear to me why we don 't do the blindingly obvious things .
We 're too busy keeping out the giraffes -- putting the kids on the bus in the morning , getting ourselves to work on time , surviving email overload and shop floor politics , foraging for groceries , throwing together meals , escaping for a couple of precious hours in the evening into prime-time TV or TED online , getting from one end of the day to the other , keeping out the giraffes .
What is the objective ?
" What is the objective of the consumer ? "
Mary Douglas asked in an essay on poverty written 35 years ago .
" It is , " she said , " to help create the social world and find a credible place in it . "
That is a deeply humanizing vision of our lives , and it 's a completely different vision than the one that lies at the heart of this economic model .
So who are we ?
Who are these people ?
Are we these novelty-seeking , hedonistic , selfish individuals ?
Or might we actually occasionally be something like the selfless altruist depicted in Rembrandt 's lovely , lovely sketch here ?
Well psychology actually says there is a tension -- a tension between self-regarding behaviors and other regarding behaviors .
And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots , so selfish behavior is adaptive in certain circumstances -- fight or flight .
But other regarding behaviors are essential to our evolution as social beings .
And perhaps even more interesting from our point of view , another tension between novelty-seeking behaviors and tradition or conservation .
Novelty is adaptive when things are changing and you need to adapt yourself .
Tradition is essential to lay down the stability to raise families and form cohesive social groups .
So here , all of a sudden , we 're looking at a map of the human heart .
And it reveals to us , suddenly , the crux of the matter .
What we 've done is we 've created economies .
We 've created systems , which systematically privilege , encourage , one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded .
And in the same token , the solution becomes clear , because this isn 't , therefore , about changing human nature .
It isn 't , in fact , about curtailing possibilities .
It is about opening up .
It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human , recognizing the depth and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect Rembrandt 's fragile altruist within .
What does all this mean for economics ?
What would economies look like if we took that vision of human nature at their heart and stretched them along these orthogonal dimensions of the human psyche ?
Well , it might look a little bit like the 4,000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States , enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution at their heart -- companies , in fact , like this one , Ecosia .
And I just want to , very quickly , show you this .
Ecosia is an Internet search engine .
Internet search engines work by drawing revenues from sponsored links that appear when you do a search .
And Ecosia works in pretty much the same way .
So we can do that here -- we can just put in a little search term .
There you go , Oxford , that 's where we are . See what comes up .
The difference with Ecosia though is that , in Ecosia 's case , it draws the revenues in the same way , but it allocates 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon .
And we 're going to do it .
We 're just going to click on Naturejobs.uk.
In case anyone out there is looking for a job in a recession , that 's the page to go to .
And what happened then was the sponsor gave revenues to Ecosia , and Ecosia is giving 80 percent of those revenues to a rainforest protection project .
It 's taking profits from one place and allocating them into the protection of ecological resources .
It 's a different kind of enterprise for a new economy .
It 's a form , if you like , of ecological altruism -- perhaps something along those lines . Maybe it 's that .
Whatever it is , whatever this new economy is , what we need the economy to do , in fact , is to put investment back into the heart of the model , to re-conceive investment .
Only now , investment isn 't going to be about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth .
Investment has to be a different beast .
Investment has to be , in the new economy , protecting and nurturing the ecological assets on which our future depends .
It has to be about transition .
It has to be investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures .
We have to invest , in fact , in the idea of a meaningful prosperity , providing capabilities for people to flourish .
And of course , this task has material dimensions .
It would be nonsense to talk about people flourishing if they didn 't have food , clothing and shelter .
But it 's also clear that prosperity goes beyond this .
It has social and psychological aims -- family , friendship , commitments , society , participating in the life of that society .
And this too requires investment , investment -- for example , in places -- places where we can connect , places where we can participate , shared spaces , concert halls , gardens , public parks , libraries , museums , quiet centers , places of joy and celebration , places of tranquility and contemplation , sites for the " cultivation of a common citizenship , " in Michael Sandel 's lovely phrase .
An investment -- investment , after all , is just such a basic economic concept -- is nothing more nor less than a relationship between the present and the future , a shared present and a common future .
And we need that relationship to reflect , to reclaim hope .
So let me come back , with this sense of hope , to the two billion people still trying to live each day on less than the price of a skinny latte from the cafe next door .
What can we offer those people ?
It 's clear that we have a responsibility to help lift them out of poverty .
It 's clear that we have a responsibility to make room for growth where growth really matters in those poorest nations .
And it 's also clear that we will never achieve that unless we 're capable of redefining a meaningful sense of prosperity in the richer nations , a prosperity that is more meaningful and less materialistic than the growth-based model .
So this is not just a Western post-materialist fantasy .
In fact , an African philosopher wrote to me , when " Prosperity Without Growth " was published , pointing out the similarities between this view of prosperity and the traditional African concept of ubuntu .
Ubuntu says , " I am because we are . "
Prosperity is a shared endeavor .
Its roots are long and deep -- its foundations , I 've tried to show , exist already , inside each of us .
So this is not about standing in the way of development .
It 's not about overthrowing capitalism .
It 's not about trying to change human nature .
What we 're doing here is we 're taking a few simple steps towards an economics fit for purpose .
And at the heart of that economics , we 're placing a more credible , more robust , and more realistic vision of what it means to be human .
Thank you very much .
While they 're taking the podium away , just a quick question .
First of all , economists aren 't supposed to be inspiring , so you may need to work on the tone a little .
Can you picture the politicians ever buying into this ?
I mean , can you picture a politician standing up in Britain and saying , " GDP fell two percent this year . Good news !
We 're actually all happier , and a country 's more beautiful , and our lives are better . "
Tim Jackson : Well that 's clearly not what you 're doing .
You 're not making news out of things falling down .
You 're making news out of the things that tell you that we 're flourishing .
Can I picture politicians doing it ?
Actually , I already am seeing a little bit of it .
When we first started this kind of work , politicians would stand up , treasury spokesmen would stand up , and accuse us of wanting to go back and live in caves .
And actually in the period through which we 've been working over the last 18 years -- partly because of the financial crisis and a little bit of humility in the profession of economics -- actually people are engaging in this issue in all sorts of countries around the world .
But is it mainly politicians who are going to have to get their act together , or is it going to be more just civil society and companies ?
TJ : It has to be companies . It has to be civil society .
But it has to have political leadership .
This is a kind of agenda , which actually politicians themselves are kind of caught in that dilemma , because they 're hooked on the growth model themselves .
But actually opening up the space to think about different ways of governing , different kinds of politics , and creating the space for civil society and businesses to operate differently -- absolutely vital .
And if someone could convince you that we actually can make the -- what was it ? -- the 130-fold improvement in efficiency , of reduction of carbon footprint , would you then actually like that picture of economic growth into more knowledge-based goods ?
TJ : I would still want to know that you could do that and get below zero by the end of the century , in terms of taking carbon out of the atmosphere , and solve the problem of biodiversity and reduce the impact on land use and do something about the erosion of topsoils and the quality of water .
If you can convince me we can do all that , then , yes , I would take the two percent .
Tim , thank you for a very important talk . Thank you .
Kiran Bedi : A police chief with a difference
Kiran Bedi has a surprising resume . Before becoming Director General of the Indian Police Service , she managed one of the country 's toughest prisons -- and used a new focus on prevention and education to turn it into a center of learning and meditation . She shares her thoughts on visionary leadership at TEDWomen .
Now I 'm going to give you a story .
It 's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey .
Let me begin with my parents .
I 'm a product of this visionary mother and father .
Many years ago , when I was born in the ' 50s -- ' 50s and ' 60s didn 't belong to girls in India .
They belonged to boys .
They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents , and girls would be dolled up to get married .
My family , in my city , and almost in the country , was unique .
We were four of us , not one , and fortunately no boys .
We were four girls and no boys .
And my parents were part of a landed property family .
My father defied his own grandfather , almost to the point of disinheritance , because he decided to educate all four of us .
He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education .
As I 've said , when we 're born , we don 't choose our parents , and when we go to school , we don 't choose our school .
Children don 't choose a school .
They just get the school which parents choose for them .
So this is the foundation time which I got .
I grew up like this , and so did my other three sisters .
And my father used to say at that time , " I 'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world . "
I don 't know if he really meant [ that ] , but it happened .
I 'm the only one who 's left in India .
One is a British , another is an American and the third is a Canadian .
So we are four of us in four corners of the world .
And since I said they 're my role models , I followed two things which my father and mother gave me .
One , they said , " Life is on an incline .
You either go up , or you come down . "
And the second thing , which has stayed with me , which became my philosophy of life , which made all the difference , is : 100 things happen in your life , good or bad .
Out of 100 , 90 are your creation .
They 're good . They 're your creation . Enjoy it .
If they 're bad , they 're your creation . Learn from it .
Ten are nature-sent over which you can 't do a thing .
It 's like a death of a relative , or a cyclone , or a hurricane , or an earthquake .
You can 't do a thing about it .
You 've got to just respond to the situation .
But that response comes out of those 90 points .
Since I 'm a product of this philosophy , of 90 / 10 , and secondly , " life on an incline , " that 's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got .
I 'm a product of opportunities , rare opportunities in the ' 50s and the ' 60s , which girls didn 't get , and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique .
Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry , and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities .
I thought I must tell you this .
Why I said this , is the background .
This is what comes next .
I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman , a woman with indefatigable stamina , because I used to run for my tennis titles , etc .
But I joined the Indian Police Service , and then it was a new pattern of policing .
For me the policing stood for power to correct , power to prevent and power to detect .
This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India -- the power to prevent .
Because normally it was always said , power to detect , and that 's it , or power to punish .
But I decided no , it 's a power to prevent , because that 's what I learned when I was growing up .
How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10 ?
So this was how it came into my service , and it was different from the men .
I didn 't want to make it different from the men , but it was different , because this was the way I was different .
And I redefined policing concepts in India .
I 'm going to take you on two journeys , my policing journey and my prison journey .
What you see , if you see the title called " PM 's car held . "
This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket .
That 's the first time in India , and I can tell you , that 's the last time you 're hearing about it .
It 'll never happen again in India , because now it was once and forever .
And the rule was , because I was sensitive , I was compassionate , I was very sensitive to injustice , and I was very pro-justice .
That 's the reason , as a woman , I joined the Indian Police Service .
I had other options , but I didn 't choose them .
So I 'm going to move on .
This is about tough policing , equal policing .
Now I was known as " here 's a woman that 's not going to listen . "
So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings , postings which others would say no .
I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer .
Normally police officers don 't want to do prison .
They sent me to prison to lock me up , thinking , " Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to .
Let 's lock her up . "
Here I got a prison assignment .
This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals .
Obviously , it was .
But 10,000 men , of which only 400 were women -- 10,000 -- 9,000 plus about 600 were men .
Terrorists , rapists , burglars , gangsters -- some of them I 'd sent to jail as a police officer outside .
And then how did I deal with them ?
The first day when I went in , I didn 't know how to look at them .
And I said , " Do you pray ? " When I looked at the group , I said , " Do you pray ? "
They saw me as a young , short woman wearing a pathan suit .
I said , " Do you pray ? "
And they didn 't say anything .
I said , " Do you pray ? Do you want to pray ? "
They said , " Yes . " I said , " All right , let 's pray . "
I prayed for them , and things started to change .
This is a visual of education inside the prison .
Friends , this has never happened , where everybody in the prison studies .
I started this with community support .
Government had no budget .
It was one of the finest , largest volunteerism in any prison in the world .
This was initiated in Delhi prison .
You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class .
These are hundreds of classes .
Nine to eleven , every prisoner went into the education program -- the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten .
We converted this into an ashram -- from a prison to an ashram through education .
I think that 's the bigger change .
It was the beginning of a change .
Teachers were prisoners . Teachers were volunteers .
Books came from donated schoolbooks .
Stationery was donated .
Everything was donated , because there was no budget of education for the prison .
Now if I 'd not done that , it would have been a hellhole .
That 's the second landmark .
I want to show you some moments of history in my journey , which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world .
One , the numbers you 'll never get to see .
Secondly , this concept .
This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners .
One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation .
This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor .
And this is what transformed .
You want to know more about this , go and see this film , " Doing Time , Doing Vipassana . "
You will hear about it , and you will love it .
And write to me on KiranBedi.com , and I 'll respond to you .
Let me show you the next slide .
I took the same concept of mindfulness , because , why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison ?
Because crime is a product of a distorted mind .
It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control .
Not by preaching , not by telling , not by reading , but by addressing your mind .
I took the same thing to the police , because police , equally , were prisoners of their minds , and they felt as if it was " we " and " they , " and that the people don 't cooperate .
This worked .
This is a feedback box called a petition box .
This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints , listen to grievances .
This was a magic box .
This was a sensitive box .
This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison .
If you see somebody in the blue -- yeah , this guy -- he was a prisoner , and he was a teacher .
And you see , everybody 's busy . There was no time to waste .
Let me wrap it up .
I 'm currently into movements , movements of education of the under-served children , which is thousands -- India is all about thousands .
Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India .
That 's a big way we , as a small group of activists , have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India .
Friends , you will hear a lot about it .
That 's the movement at the moment I 'm driving , and that 's the movement and ambition of my life .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you very much . Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Paul Conneally : Digital humanitarianism
The disastrous earthquake in Haiti taught humanitarian groups an unexpected lesson : the power of mobile devices to coordinate , inform , and guide relief efforts . At TEDxRC2 , Paul Conneally shows extraordinary examples of social media and other new technologies becoming central to humanitarian aid . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
The humanitarian model has barely changed since the early 20th century .
Its origins are firmly rooted in the analog age .
And there is a major shift coming on the horizon .
The catalyst for this change was the major earthquake that struck Haiti on the 12th of January in 2010 .
Haiti was a game changer .
The earthquake destroyed the capital of Port-au-Prince , claiming the lives of some 320,000 people , rendering homeless about 1.2 million people .
Government institutions were completely decapitated , including the presidential palace .
I remember standing on the roof of the Ministry of Justice in downtown Port-au-Prince .
It was about two meters high , completely squashed by the violence of the earthquake .
For those of us on the ground in those early days , it was clear for even the most disaster-hardened veterans that Haiti was something different .
Haiti was something we hadn 't seen before .
But Haiti provided us with something else unprecedented .
Haiti allowed us to glimpse into a future of what disaster response might look like in a hyper-connected world where people have access to mobile smart devices .
Because out of the urban devastation in Port-au-Prince came a torrent of SMS texts -- people crying for help , beseeching us for assistance , sharing data , offering support , looking for their loved ones .
This was a situation that traditional aid agencies had never before encountered .
We were in one of the poorest countries on the planet , but 80 percent of the people had mobile devices in their hands .
And we were unprepared for this , and they were shaping the aid effort .
Outside Haiti also , things were looking different .
Tens of thousands of so-called digital volunteers were scouring the Internet , converting tweets that had already been converted from texts and putting these into open-source maps , layering them with all sorts of important information -- people like Crisis Mappers and Open Street Map -- and putting these on the Web for everybody -- the media , the aid organizations and the communities themselves -- to participate in and to use .
Back in Haiti , people were increasingly turning to the medium of SMS .
People that were hungry and hurting were signaling their distress , were signaling their need for help .
On street sides all over Port-au-Prince , entrepreneurs sprung up offering mobile phone charging stations .
They understood more than we did people 's innate need to be connected .
Never having been confronted with this type of situation before , we wanted to try and understand how we could tap into this incredible resource , how we could really leverage this incredible use of mobile technology and SMS technology .
We started talking with a local telecom provider called Voilà , which is a subsidiary of Trilogy International .
We had basically three requirements .
We wanted to communicate in a two-way form of communication .
We didn 't want to shout ; we needed to listen as well .
We wanted to be able to target specific geographic communities .
We didn 't need to talk to the whole country at the same time .
And we wanted it to be easy to use .
Out of this rubble of Haiti and from this devastation came something that we call TERA -- the Trilogy Emergency Response Application -- which has been used to support the aid effort ever since .
It has been used to help communities prepare for disasters .
It has been used to signal early warning in advance of weather-related disasters .
It 's used for public health awareness campaigns such as the prevention of cholera .
And it is even used for sensitive issues such as building awareness around gender-based violence .
But does it work ?
We have just published an evaluation of this program , and the evidence that is there for all to see is quite remarkable .
Some 74 percent of people received the data .
Those who were intended to receive the data , 74 percent of them received it .
96 percent of them found it useful .
83 percent of them took action -- evidence that it is indeed empowering .
And 73 percent of them shared it .
The TERA system was developed from Haiti with support of engineers in the region .
It is a user-appropriate technology that has been used for humanitarian good to great effect .
Technology is transformational .
Right across the developing world , citizens and communities are using technology to enable them to bring about change , positive change , in their own communities .
The grassroots has been strengthened through the social power of sharing and they are challenging the old models , the old analog models of control and command .
One illustration of the transformational power of technology is in Kibera .
Kibera is one of Africa 's largest slums .
It 's on the outskirts of Nairobi , the capital city of Kenya .
It 's home to an unknown number of people -- some say between 250,000 and 1.2 million .
If you were to arrive in Nairobi today and pick up a tourist map , Kibera is represented as a lush , green national park devoid of human settlement .
Young people living in Kibera in their community , with simple handheld devices , GPS handheld devices and SMS-enabled mobile phones , have literally put themselves on the map .
They have collated crowd-sourced data and rendered the invisible visible .
People like Josh and Steve are continuing to layer information upon information , real-time information , Tweet it and text it onto these maps for all to use .
You can find out about the latest impromptu music session .
You can find out about the latest security incident .
You can find out about places of worship .
You can find out about the health centers .
You can feel the dynamism of this living , breathing community .
They also have their own news network on YouTube with 36,000 viewers at the moment .
They 're showing us what can be done with mobile , digital technologies .
They 're showing that the magic of technology can bring the invisible visible .
And they are giving a voice to themselves .
They are telling their own story , bypassing the official narrative .
And we 're seeing from all points on the globe similar stories .
In Mongolia for instance , where 30 percent of the people are nomadic , SMS information systems are being used to track migration and weather patterns .
SMS is even used to hold herder summits from remote participation .
And if people are migrating into urban , unfamiliar , concrete environments , they can also be helped in anticipation with social supporters ready and waiting for them based on SMS knowledge .
In Nigeria , open-source SMS tools are being used by the Red Cross community workers to gather information from the local community in an attempt to better understand and mitigate the prevalence of malaria .
My colleague , Jason Peat , who runs this program , tells me it 's 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper than the traditional way of doing things .
And not only is it empowering to the communities , but really importantly , this information stays in the community where it is needed to formulate long-term health polices .
We are on a planet of seven billion people , five billion mobile subscriptions .
By 2015 , there will be three billion smartphones in the world .
The U.N. broadband commission has recently set targets to help broadband access in 50 percent of the Developing World , compared to 20 percent today .
We are hurtling towards a hyper-connected world where citizens from all cultures and all social strata will have access to smart , fast mobile devices .
People are understanding , from Cairo to Oakland , that there are new ways to come together , there are new ways to mobilize , there are new ways to influence .
A transformation is coming which needs to be understood by the humanitarian structures and humanitarian models .
The collective voices of people needs to be more integrated through new technologies into the organizational strategies and plans of actions and not just recycled for fundraising or marketing .
We need to , for example , embrace the big data , the knowledge that is there from market leaders who understand what it means to use and leverage big data .
One idea that I 'd like you to consider , for instance , is to take a look at our IT departments .
They 're normally backroom or basement hardware service providers , but they need to be elevated to software strategists .
We need people in our organizations who know what it 's like to work with big data .
We need technology as a core organizational principle .
We need technological strategists in the boardroom who can ask and answer the question , " What would Amazon or Google do with all of this data ? "
and convert it to humanitarian good .
The possibilities that new digital technologies are bringing can help humanitarian organizations , not only ensure that people 's right to information is met , or that they have their right to communicate , but I think in the future , humanitarian organizations will also have to anticipate the right for people to access critical communication technologies in order to ensure that their voices are heard , that they 're truly participating , that they 're truly empowered in the humanitarian world .
It has always been the elusive ideal to ensure full participation of people affected by disasters in the humanitarian effort .
We now have the tools . We now have the possibilities .
There are no more reasons not to do it .
I believe we need to bring the humanitarian world from analog to digital .
Thank you very much .
Eric Berlow and Sean Gourley : Mapping ideas worth spreading
What do 24,000 ideas look like ? Ecologist Eric Berlow and physicist Sean Gourley apply algorithms to the entire archive of TEDx Talks , taking us on a stimulating visual tour to show how ideas connect globally .
Eric Berlow : I 'm an ecologist , and Sean 's a physicist , and we both study complex networks .
And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war , and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met .
And then we thought , you know , there are thousands of other talks out there , especially TEDx Talks , that are popping up all over the world .
How are they connected , and what does that global conversation look like ?
So Sean 's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that .
Sean Gourley : Exactly . So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world , 147 different countries , and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them .
And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other .
And so , of course , if you 're going to do this kind of stuff , you need a lot of data .
So the data that you 've got is a great thing called YouTube , and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube , all the comments , all the views , who 's watching it , where are they watching it , what are they saying in the comments .
But we can also pull up , using speech-to-text translation , we can pull the entire transcript , and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself .
So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things .
We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer , line by line , extracting key concepts from this .
And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea .
And we call that the meme-ome .
And the meme-ome , you know , quite simply , is the mathematics that underlies an idea , and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it , which I want to share with you now .
So each idea has its own meme-ome , and each idea is unique with that , but of course , ideas , they borrow from each other , they kind of steal sometimes , and they certainly build on each other , and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk , and if there 's a similarity between the two of them , we can create a link and represent that as a graph , just like Eric and I are connected .
So that 's theory , that 's great .
Let 's see how it works in actual practice .
So what we 've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner .
And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these , and we started to see where the connections occurred , where they connected with each other .
Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe .
We 've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East .
And we 've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere .
So from this , we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection , but luckily , computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space .
So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this , and the similar talks kind of smash together , and the different ones fly apart , and what we 're left with is something quite beautiful .
So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk , they 're linked if they share similar ideas , and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts , and then all these topics that pop out , they 're not from tags and keywords .
They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas . Keep going .
SG : Absolutely . So I got a little quick on that , but he 's going to slow me down .
We 've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media .
You 've got , of course , the human brain right next to healthcare , which you might expect , but also you 've got video games , which is sort of adjacent , as those two spaces interface with each other .
But I want to take you into one cluster that 's particularly important to me , and that 's the environment .
And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution .
So as we go in here , what we start to see , apply the physics engine again , we see what 's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones .
The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world .
So you 've got food economy and local food at the top , you 've got greenhouse gases , solar and nuclear waste .
What you 're getting is a range of smaller conversations , each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share , creating a broader concept of the environment .
And of course , from here , we can go and zoom in and see , well , what are young people looking at ?
And they 're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion .
This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment .
If we split along gender lines , we can see females resonating heavily with food economy , but also out there in hope and optimism .
And so there 's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here , and I 'll throw to Eric for the next part .
Yeah , I mean , just to point out here , you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube .
Let 's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment , and look at all the talks together .
Now often , when we 're faced with this amount of content , we do a couple of things to simplify it .
We might just say , well , what are the most popular talks out there ?
And a few rise to the surface .
There 's a talk about gratitude .
There 's another one about personal health and nutrition .
And of course , there 's got to be one about porn , right ?
And so then we might say , well , gratitude , that was last year .
What 's trending now ? What 's the popular talk now ?
And we can see that the new , emerging , top trending topic is about digital privacy .
So this is great . It simplifies things .
But there 's so much creative content that 's just buried at the bottom .
And I hate that . How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that 's maybe really creative and interesting ?
Well , we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that .
Remember , it 's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics , and let 's say we could take two of them , like cities and genetics , and say , well , are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines .
And that 's -- Essentially , this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation .
Well here 's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings .
It 's literally defining a new field .
And we could go back to those topics and say , well , what talks are central to those conversations ?
In the cities cluster , one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities , and in the genetics cluster , we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter .
These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline .
We could go the other direction and say , well , what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields .
We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this .
Like , a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence , very synthetic .
And then , of course , there are talks that are so unique they 're kind of out in the stratosphere , in their own special place , and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index .
And if you don 't know Colleen , she 's an artist , and I asked her , " Well , what 's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space ? "
And apparently it smells like bacon .
I wouldn 't know .
So we 're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique , ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields , ones that are central to their topic , and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields .
Okay ? We never would have found those with our obsession with what 's trending now .
And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity , or the patterns of how things are connected .
SG : So that 's exactly right .
We 've got ourselves in a world that 's massively complex , and we 've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it .
And those algorithms , whilst being kind of useful , are also very , very narrow , and we can do better than that , because we can realize that their complexity is not random .
It has mathematical structure , and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what 's being said , to see what 's not being said , and to be a little bit more human and , hopefully , a little smarter .
Thank you .
Alison Jackson : An unusual glimpse at celebrity
By making photographs that seem to show our favorite celebs doing what we really , secretly , want to see them doing , Alison Jackson explores our desire to get personal with celebs . Contains graphic images .
I 'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums .
I show a number of photographs and films , but I also make television programs , books and some advertising , all with the same concept .
And it 's about our fixation with celebrity and celebrity culture , and the importance of the image : celebrity is born of photography .
I 'm going to start with how I started with this concept seven years ago , when Princess Diana died .
There was a sort of a standstill in Britain the moment of her death , and people decided to mourn her death in a sort of mass way .
I was fascinated by this phenomenon , so I wondered : could one erase the image of Diana , actually quite crudely and physically ?
So , I got a gun and started to shoot at the image of Diana , but I couldn 't erase this from my memory and certainly it was not being erased from the public psyche .
Momentum was being built .
The press wrote about her death in rather , I felt , pornographic ways -- like , " Which bit of artery left which bit of body ? "
and " How did she die in the back of the car ? " -- and I was intrigued by this sort of mass voyeurism , so I made these rather gory images .
I then went on wondering whether I could actually replace her image , so I got a look-alike of Diana and posed her in the right positions and angles and created something that was in , or existed in , the public imagination .
So people were wondering : was she going to marry Dodi ?
Was she in love with him ?
Was she pregnant ? Did she want his baby ?
Was she pregnant when she died ?
So I created this image of Diana , Dodi and their imaginary mixed-race child and this image came out , which caused a huge public outcry at the time .
I then went on to make more comments on the media and press imagery , so I started making reference to media imagery -- made it grainy , shot through doorways and so on and so forth -- to titillate the public or the viewer further in terms of trying to make the viewer more aware of their own voyeurism .
So , this is an image of Diana looking at Camilla kissing her husband , and this was a sequence of images .
And this gets shown in art galleries like this , as a sequence .
And similarly with the Di-Dodian baby imagery -- this is another art gallery installation .
I 'm particularly interested in how you can 't rely on your own perception .
This is Jane Smith and Jo Bloggs , for instance , but you think it 's Camilla and the Queen , and I 'm fascinated how what you think is real isn 't necessarily real .
And the camera can lie , and it makes it very , very easy with the mass bombardment of imagery to tell untruths .
So , I continued to work on this project of how photography seduces us and is more interesting to look at than the actual real subject matter .
And at the same time , it removes us from the real subject matter , and this acts as a sort of titillating thing .
So , the photograph becomes this teaser and incites desire and voyeurism ; what you can 't have , you want more .
In the photograph , the real subject doesn 't exist so it makes you want that person more .
And that is the way , I think , that celebrity magazines work now : the more pictures you see of these celebrities , the more you feel you know them , but you don 't know them and you want to know them further .
Of course , the Queen goes to her stud often to watch her horses ...
watch her horses . .
And then I was sort of making imagery .
In England there 's an expression : " you can 't imagine the Queen on the loo . "
So I 'm trying to penetrate that .
Well , here is the image .
All this imagery was creating a lot of fuss and I was cited as a disgusting artist . The press were writing about this , giving full pages about how terrible this was .
Which I found very interesting that it was going full cycle : I was making comments about the press and about how we know facts and information only by media -- because we don 't know the real people ; very few of us know the real people -- but it was going back into the press and they were publicizing , effectively , my filthy work .
So , these are broadsheets , tabloids , debates were being had all about this work , films were being banned before people had actually had the look at the work , politicians were getting involved -- all sorts of things -- great headlines .
Then suddenly , it started to get on front pages .
I was being asked and paid to do front covers .
Suddenly I was becoming sort of acceptable , which I found also fascinating .
How one moment -- it was disgusting -- journalists would lie to me to get a story or a photograph of me , saying my work was wonderful , and the next minute there were terrible headlines about me .
But then this changed suddenly .
I then started to work for magazines and newspapers .
This was , for example , an image that went into Tatler .
This was another newspaper image .
It was an April fool actually , and to this day some people think it 's real .
I was sitting next to someone at dinner the other day , and they were saying there 's this great image of the Queen sitting outside William Hill .
They thought it was real .
I was exploring , at the time , the hyperbole of icons -- and Diana and Marilyn -- and the importance of celebrity in our lives .
How they wheedle their way into the collective psyche without us even knowing , and how that should happen .
I explored with actually dressing up as the celebrities myself .
There 's me as Diana -- I look like the mass murderer Myra Hindley , I think , in this one . .
And me as the Queen .
I then continued on to make a whole body of work about Marilyn -- the biggest icon of all -- and trying to titillate by shooting through doorways and shutters and so on and so forth , and only showing certain angles to create a reality that , obviously , is completely constructed .
This is the look-alike , so the crafting elements of this is completely enormous .
She looks nothing like Marilyn , but by the time we 've made her up and put wigs and makeup on , she looks exactly like Marilyn , to the extent that her husband couldn 't recognize her -- or recognize this look-alike -- in these photographs , which I find quite interesting .
So , all this work is getting shown in art galleries .
Then I made a book .
I was also making a TV series for the BBC at the time .
Stills from the TV series went into this book .
But there was a real legal problem because it looks real , but how do you get over that ?
Because obviously it 's making a comment about our culture right now : that we can 't tell what 's real .
How do we know when we 're looking at something whether it 's real or not ?
So , from my point of view , it 's important to publish it , but at the same time it does cause a confusion -- intentional on my behalf , but problematic for any outlet that I 'm working with .
So a big disclaimer is put on everything that I do , and I made narratives about all the European or Brit celebrities and comments about our public figures .
You know , what does Tony Blair get up to in private with his fashion guru ?
And also dealing with the perceptions that are put about Bin Laden , Saddam Hussein , the links that were put about pre-Iraq war .
And what is going to happen to the monarchy ?
Because obviously the British public , I think , would prefer William to Charles on the throne .
And it 's that wish , or that desire , that I suppose I 'm dealing with in my work .
I 'm not really interested in the celebrity themselves .
I 'm interested in the perception of the celebrity .
And with some look-alikes , they are so good you don 't know whether they 're real or not .
I did an advertising campaign for Schweppes , which is Coca-Cola , and so that was very interesting in terms of the legalities .
It 's highly commercial .
But it was a difficulty for me -- because this is my artwork ; should I do advertising ? -- at the time .
So I made sure the work was not compromised in any way and that the integrity of the work remained the same .
But the meanings changed in the sense that with the logo on , you 're closing all the lines of interpretation down to selling a product and that 's all you 're doing .
When you take the logo off , you 're opening up the interpretations and making the work inconclusive , opposed to conclusive when you are advertising .
This image is quite interesting , actually , because I think we made it three years ago .
And it 's Camilla in her wedding dress , which , again , nearly got re-used now , recently prior to her wedding .
Tony Blair and Cherie . And again , the legalities -- we had to be very careful .
It 's obviously a very big commercial company , and so this little , " Shh -- it 's not really them , " was put on the side of the imagery .
And Margaret Thatcher visiting Jeffery Archer in jail .
I then was asked by Selfridges to do a series of windows for them , so I built a sauna bath in one of their windows and created little scenes -- live scenes with look-alikes inside the windows , and the windows were all steamed up .
So , it 's Tony Blair reading and practicing his speech ; I 've got them doing yoga inside there with Carole Caplin ; Sven making out with Ulrika Jonsson , who he was having an affair with at that time .
This was a huge success for them because the imagery got shown in the press the day after in every single newspaper , broadsheets and tabloids .
It was a bit of a road stopper , which was problematic because the police kept on trying to clear away the crowds , but huge fun -- it was great for me to do a performance .
Also , people were taking photographs of this , so it was being texted around the world extremely quickly , all this imagery .
And the press were interviewing , and I was signing my book . .
Further imagery . I 'm making a new book now with Taschen that I 'm working on really for a sort of global market -- my previous book was only for the U.K. market -- that I suppose it could be called humorous .
I suppose I come from a sort of non-humorous background with serious intent , and then suddenly my work is funny .
And I think it doesn 't really matter that my work is considered humorous , in a way ; I think it 's a way in for me to deal with the importance of imagery and how we read all our information through imagery .
It 's an extremely fast way of getting information .
It 's extremely difficult if it 's constructed correctly , and there are techniques of constructing iconic imagery .
This image , for example , is sort of spot-on because it exactly sums up what Elton may be doing in private , and also what might be happening with Saddam Hussein , and George Bush reading the Koran upside-down .
For example , George Bush target practice -- shooting at Bin Laden and Michael Moore .
And then you change the photograph he 's shooting at , and it suddenly becomes rather grim and maybe less accessible . .
Tony Blair being used as a mounting block , and Rumsfeld and Bush laughing with some Abu Ghraib photos behind , and the seriousness , or the intellect , of Bush .
And also , commenting on the behind the scenes -- well , as we know now -- what goes on in prisons .
And in fact , George Bush and Tony Blair are having great fun during all of this .
And really commenting , you know , based on the perception we have of the celebrities .
What Jack Nicholson might be up to in his celebrity life , and the fact that he tried to ... he had a bit of road rage and golf-clubbed a driver the other day .
I mean , it 's extremely difficult to find these look-alikes , so I 'm constantly going up to people in the street and trying to ask people to come and be in one of my photographs or films .
And sometimes asking the real celebrity , mistaking them for someone who just looks like the real person , which is highly embarrassing . .
I 've also been working with The Guardian on a topical basis -- a page a week in their newspaper -- which has been very interesting , working topically .
So , Jamie Oliver and school dinners ; Bush and Blair having difficulty getting alongside Muslim culture ; the whole of the hunting issue , and the royal family refusing to stop hunting ; and the tsunami issues ; and obviously Harry ; Blair 's views on Gordon Brown , which I find very interesting ; Condi and Bush .
This image I 've decided to show having a reservation about it .
I made it a year ago . And just how meanings change , and there were a terrible thing that has happened , but the fear is lurking around in our minds prior to that .
That 's why this image was made one year ago , and what it means today .
So , I 'll leave you with these clips to have a look .
Thank you .
James Watson : How we discovered DNA
Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his research partner , Francis Crick , discovered the structure of DNA .
Well , I thought there would be a podium , so I 'm a bit scared .
Chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of DNA .
And since , you know , I follow his orders , I 'll do it .
But it slightly bores me .
And , you know , I wrote a book . So I 'll say something -- -- I 'll say a little about , you know , how the discovery was made , and why Francis and I found it .
And then , I hope maybe I have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now .
In back of me is a picture of me when I was 17 .
I was at the University of Chicago , in my third year , and I was in my third year because the University of Chicago let you in after two years of high school .
So you -- it was fun to get away from high school -- -- because I was very small , and I was no good in sports , or anything like that .
But I should say that my background -- my father was , you know , raised to be an Episcopalian and Republican , but after one year of college , he became an atheist and a Democrat .
And my mother was Irish Catholic , and -- but she didn 't take religion too seriously .
And by the age of 11 , I was no longer going to Sunday Mass , and going on birdwatching walks with my father .
So early on , I heard of Charles Darwin .
I guess , you know , he was the big hero .
And , you know , you understand life as it now exists through evolution .
And at the University of Chicago I was a zoology major , and thought I would end up , you know , if I was bright enough , maybe getting a Ph.D. from Cornell in ornithology .
Then , in the Chicago paper , there was a review of a book called " What is Life ? " by the great physicist , Schrodinger .
And that , of course , had been a question I wanted to know .
You know , Darwin explained life after it got started , but what was the essence of life ?
And Schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes , and it had to be present on a molecule . I 'd never really thought of molecules before .
You know chromosomes , but this was a molecule , and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form . And there was the big question of , how did you copy the information ?
So that was the book . And so , from that moment on , I wanted to be a geneticist -- understand the gene and , through that , understand life .
So I had , you know , a hero at a distance .
It wasn 't a baseball player ; it was Linus Pauling .
And so I applied to Caltech and they turned me down .
So I went to Indiana , which was actually as good as Caltech in genetics , and besides , they had a really good basketball team .
So I had a really quite happy life at Indiana .
And it was at Indiana I got the impression that , you know , the gene was likely to be DNA .
And so when I got my Ph.D. , I should go and search for DNA .
So I first went to Copenhagen because I thought , well , maybe I could become a biochemist , but I discovered biochemistry was very boring .
It wasn 't going anywhere toward , you know , saying what the gene was ; it was just nuclear science . And oh , that 's the book , little book .
You can read it in about two hours .
And -- but then I went to a meeting in Italy .
And there was an unexpected speaker who wasn 't on the program , and he talked about DNA .
And this was Maurice Wilkins . He was trained as a physicist , and after the war he wanted to do biophysics , and he picked DNA because DNA had been determined at the Rockefeller Institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes .
Most people believed it was proteins .
But Wilkins , you know , thought DNA was the best bet , and he showed this x-ray photograph .
Sort of crystalline . So DNA had a structure , even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions .
So there was something universal about the DNA molecule .
So I wanted to work with him , but he didn 't want a former birdwatcher , and I ended up in Cambridge , England .
So I went to Cambridge , because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography . And x-ray crystallography is now a subject in , you know , chemistry departments .
I mean , in those days it was the domain of the physicists .
So the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge .
And there I met Francis Crick .
I went there without knowing him . He was 35 . I was 23 .
And within a day , we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of DNA .
Not solve it like , you know , in rigorous fashion , but build a model , an electro-model , using some coordinates of , you know , length , all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs .
But just ask what the molecule -- how should it fold up ?
And the reason for doing so , at the center of this photograph , is Linus Pauling . About six months before , he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins . And in doing so , he banished the man out on the right , Sir Lawrence Bragg , who was the Cavendish professor .
This is a photograph several years later , when Bragg had cause to smile .
He certainly wasn 't smiling when I got there , because he was somewhat humiliated by Pauling getting the alpha helix , and the Cambridge people failing because they weren 't chemists .
And certainly , neither Crick or I were chemists , so we tried to build a model . And he knew , Francis knew Wilkins .
So Wilkins said he thought it was the helix .
X-ray diagram , he thought was comparable with the helix .
So we built a three-stranded model .
The people from London came up .
Wilkins and this collaborator , or possible collaborator , Rosalind Franklin , came up and sort of laughed at our model .
They said it was lousy , and it was .
So we were told to build no more models ; we were incompetent .
And so we didn 't build any models , and Francis sort of continued to work on proteins .
And basically , I did nothing . And -- except read .
You know , basically , reading is a good thing ; you get facts .
And we kept telling the people in London that Linus Pauling 's going to move on to DNA .
If DNA is that important , Linus will know it .
He 'll build a model , and then we 're going to be scooped .
And , in fact , he 'd written the people in London : Could he see their x-ray photograph ?
And they had the wisdom to say " no . " So he didn 't have it .
But there was ones in the literature .
Actually , Linus didn 't look at them that carefully .
But about , oh , 15 months after I got to Cambridge , a rumor began to appear from Linus Pauling 's son , who was in Cambridge , that his father was now working on DNA .
And so , one day Peter came in and he said he was Peter Pauling , and he gave me a copy of his father 's manuscripts .
And boy , I was scared because I thought , you know , we may be scooped .
I have nothing to do , no qualifications for anything .
And so there was the paper , and he proposed a three-stranded structure .
And I read it , and it was just -- it was crap .
So this was , you know , unexpected from the world 's -- -- and so , it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups .
Well , if the peak pH that cells have is around seven , those hydrogen bonds couldn 't exist .
We rushed over to the chemistry department and said , " Could Pauling be right ? " And Alex Hust said , " No . " So we were happy .
And , you know , we were still in the game , but we were frightened that somebody at Caltech would tell Linus that he was wrong .
And so Bragg said , " Build models . "
And a month after we got the Pauling manuscript -- I should say I took the manuscript to London , and showed the people .
Well , I said , Linus was wrong and that we 're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models .
But Wilkins said " no . " Rosalind Franklin was leaving in about two months , and after she left he would start building models .
And so I came back with that news to Cambridge , and Bragg said , " Build models . "
Well , of course , I wanted to build models .
in one sense she was a chemist , but really she would have been trained -- she didn 't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry .
She was a crystallographer .
And I think part of the reason she didn 't want to build models was , she wasn 't a chemist , whereas Pauling was a chemist .
And so Crick and I , you know , started building models , and I 'd learned a little chemistry , but not enough .
Well , we got the answer on the 28th February ' 53 .
And it was because of a rule , which , to me , is a very good rule : Never be the brightest person in a room , and we weren 't .
We weren 't the best chemists in the room .
I went in and showed them a pairing I 'd done , and Jerry Donohue -- he was a chemist -- he said , it 's wrong .
You 've got -- the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place .
I just put them down like they were in the books .
He said they were wrong .
So the next day , you know , after I thought , " Well , he might be right . "
So I changed the locations , and then we found the base pairing , and Francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions .
And we knew we were right .
So it was a pretty , you know , it all happened in about two hours .
From nothing to thing .
And we knew it was big because , you know , if you just put A next to T and G next to C , you have a copying mechanism .
So we saw how genetic information is carried .
It 's the order of the four bases .
So in a sense , it is a sort of digital-type information .
And you copy it by going from strand-separating .
So , you know , if it didn 't work this way , you might as well believe it , because you didn 't have any other scheme .
But that 's not the way most scientists think .
Most scientists are really rather dull .
They said , we won 't think about it until we know it 's right .
But , you know , we thought , well , it 's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right .
So think about it . The next five years , there were essentially something like five references to our work in " Nature " -- none .
And so we were left by ourselves , and trying to do the last part of the trio : how do you -- what does this genetic information do ?
It was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an RNA molecule , and then how do you go from RNA to protein ?
For about three years we just -- I tried to solve the structure of RNA .
It didn 't yield . It didn 't give good x-ray photographs .
I was decidedly unhappy ; a girl didn 't marry me .
It was really , you know , sort of a shitty time .
So there 's a picture of Francis and I before I met the girl , so I 'm still looking happy .
But there is what we did when we didn 't know where to go forward : we formed a club and called it the RNA Tie Club .
George Gamow , also a great physicist , he designed the tie .
He was one of the members . The question was : How do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins ?
Feynman was a member , and Teller , and friends of Gamow .
But that 's the only -- no , we were only photographed twice .
And on both occasions , you know , one of us was missing the tie .
There 's Francis up on the upper right , and Alex Rich -- the M.D.-turned-crystallographer -- is next to me .
This was taken in Cambridge in September of 1955 .
And I 'm smiling , sort of forced , I think , because the girl I had , boy , she was gone .
And so I didn 't really get happy until 1960 , because then we found out , basically , you know , that there are three forms of RNA .
And we knew , basically , DNA provides the information for RNA .
RNA provides the information for protein .
And that let Marshall Nirenberg , you know , take RNA -- synthetic RNA -- put it in a system making protein . He made polyphenylalanine , polyphenylalanine . So that 's the first cracking of the genetic code , and it was all over by 1966 .
So there , that 's what Chris wanted me to do , it was -- so what happened since then ?
Well , at that time -- I should go back .
When we found the structure of DNA , I gave my first talk at Cold Spring Harbor . The physicist , Leo Szilard , he looked at me and said , " Are you going to patent this ? "
And -- but he knew patent law , and that we couldn 't patent it , because you couldn 't . No use for it .
And so DNA didn 't become a useful molecule , and the lawyers didn 't enter into the equation until 1973 , 20 years later , when Boyer and Cohen in San Francisco and Stanford came up with their method of recombinant DNA , and Stanford patented it and made a lot of money .
At least they patented something which , you know , could do useful things .
And then , they learned how to read the letters for the code .
And , boom , we 've , you know , had a biotech industry . And , but we were still a long ways from , you know , answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood , which is : How do you nature-nurture ?
And so I 'll go on . I 'm already out of time , but this is Michael Wigler , a very , very clever mathematician turned physicist . And he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample DNA and , eventually , a million spots along it .
There 's a chip there , a conventional one . Then there 's one made by a photolithography by a company in Madison called NimbleGen , which is way ahead of Affymetrix .
And we use their technique .
And what you can do is sort of compare DNA of normal segs versus cancer .
And you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions .
So the DNA is really badly mucked up , whereas if you have a chance of surviving , the DNA isn 't so mucked up .
So we think that this will eventually lead to what we call " DNA biopsies . " Before you get treated for cancer , you should really look at this technique , and get a feeling of the face of the enemy .
It 's not a -- it 's only a partial look , but it 's a -- I think it 's going to be very , very useful .
So , we started with breast cancer because there 's lots of money for it , no government money .
And now I have a sort of vested interest : I want to do it for prostate cancer . So , you know , you aren 't treated if it 's not dangerous .
But Wigler , besides looking at cancer cells , looked at normal cells , and made a really sort of surprising observation .
Which is , all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we 've lost a gene or gained another one .
So we 're sort of all imperfect . And the question is well , if we 're around here , you know , these little losses or gains might not be too bad .
But if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene , maybe we 'll feel sick .
So the first disease he looked at is autism .
And the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it .
Looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars . And the parent of a child with Asperger 's disease , the high-intelligence autism , had sent his thing to a conventional company ; they didn 't do it .
Couldn 't do it by conventional genetics , but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism .
And you can see here , there are a lot of them .
So a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of DNA .
I mean , big piece at the molecular level .
We saw one autistic kid , about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes .
We haven 't yet looked at the parents , but the parents probably don 't have that loss , or they wouldn 't be parents .
Now , so , our autism study is just beginning . We got three million dollars .
I think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you 'd be in a position to help parents who 've had an autistic child , or think they may have an autistic child , and can we spot the difference ?
So this same technique should probably look at all .
It 's a wonderful way to find genes .
And so , I 'll conclude by saying we 've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia .
And we thought we 'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture . But as you can see , there 's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high .
And yet , in the controls there were three .
So what 's the meaning of the controls ?
Were they crazy also , and we didn 't know it ?
Or , you know , were they normal ? I would guess they 're normal .
And what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure , and whether this is one that predisposes -- and then there 's only a sub-segment of the population that 's capable of being schizophrenic .
Now , we don 't have really any evidence of it , but I think , to give you a hypothesis , the best guess is that if you 're left-handed , you 're prone to schizophrenia .
30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed , and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics , which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed , but only half of it showed . I don 't have the time to say .
Now , some people who think they 're right-handed are genetically left-handed . OK . I 'm just saying that , if you think , oh , I don 't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my , you know , children won 't be at risk of schizophrenia . You might . OK ?
So it 's , to me , an extraordinarily exciting time .
We ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar ; there 's a relationship .
And if I had enough money , we 'd find them all this year .
I thank you .
Conrad Wolfram : Teaching kids real math with computers
From rockets to stock markets , many of humanity 's most thrilling creations are powered by math . So why do kids lose interest in it ? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn 't just tedious , it 's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world . He presents his radical idea : teaching kids math through computer programming .
We 've got a real problem with math education right now .
Basically , no one 's very happy .
Those learning it think it 's disconnected , uninteresting and hard .
Those trying to employ them think they don 't know enough .
Governments realize that it 's a big deal for our economies , but don 't know how to fix it .
And teachers are also frustrated .
Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history .
So at one end we 've got falling interest in education in math , and at the other end we 've got a more mathematical world , a more quantitative world than we ever have had .
So what 's the problem , why has this chasm opened up , and what can we do to fix it ?
Well actually , I think the answer is staring us right in the face : Use computers .
I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work .
So to explain that , let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education .
See , in the real world math isn 't necessarily done by mathematicians .
It 's done by geologists , engineers , biologists , all sorts of different people -- modeling and simulation .
It 's actually very popular .
But in education it looks very different -- dumbed-down problems , lots of calculating , mostly by hand .
Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world , except if you 're learning it .
And another thing about math : math sometimes looks like math -- like in this example here -- and sometimes it doesn 't -- like " Am I drunk ? "
And then you get an answer that 's quantitative in the modern world .
You wouldn 't have expected that a few years back .
But now you can find out all about -- unfortunately , my weight is a little higher than that , but -- all about what happens .
So let 's zoom out a bit and ask , why are we teaching people math ?
What 's the point of teaching people math ?
And in particular , why are we teaching them math in general ?
Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject ?
Well , I think there are about three reasons : technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies , what I call " everyday living " -- to function in the world today , you 've got to be pretty quantitative , much more so than a few years ago : figure out your mortgages , being skeptical of government statistics , those kinds of things -- and thirdly , what I would call something like logical mind training , logical thinking .
Over the years we 've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically . It 's part of human society .
It 's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that .
So let 's ask another question .
What is math ?
What do we mean when we say we 're doing math , or educating people to do math ?
Well , I think it 's about four steps , roughly speaking , starting with posing the right question .
What is it that we want to ask ? What is it we 're trying to find out here ?
And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world , beyond virtually any other part of doing math .
People ask the wrong question , and surprisingly enough , they get the wrong answer , for that reason , if not for others .
So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem .
That 's stage two .
Once you 've done that , then there 's the computation step .
Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form .
And of course , math is very powerful at doing that .
And then finally , turn it back to the real world .
Did it answer the question ?
And also verify it -- crucial step .
Now here 's the crazy thing right now .
In math education , we 're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand .
Yet , that 's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice .
Instead , we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one , two and four -- conceptualizing problems , applying them , getting the teacher to run them through how to do that .
See , crucial point here : math is not equal to calculating .
Math is a much broader subject than calculating .
Now it 's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years .
There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand .
But in the last few decades that has totally changed .
We 've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers .
Calculating was typically the limiting step , and now often it isn 't .
So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating .
But that math liberation didn 't get into education yet .
See , I think of calculating , in a sense , as the machinery of math .
It 's the chore .
It 's the thing you 'd like to avoid if you can , like to get a machine to do .
It 's a means to an end , not an end in itself , and automation allows us to have that machinery .
Computers allow us to do that -- and this is not a small problem by any means .
I estimated that , just today , across the world , we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand .
That 's an amazing amount of human endeavor .
So we better be damn sure -- and by the way , they didn 't even have fun doing it , most of them -- so we better be damn sure that we know why we 're doing that and it has a real purpose .
I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that .
And I think there are some cases .
For example : mental arithmetic .
I still do a lot of that , mainly for estimating .
People say , " Is such and such true ? "
And I 'll say , " Hmm , not sure . " I 'll think about it roughly .
It 's still quicker to do that and more practical .
So I think practicality is one case where it 's worth teaching people by hand .
And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating , but I think they 're relatively small in number .
One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates .
See , the thing we 're doing right now is we 're forcing people to learn mathematics .
It 's a major subject .
I 'm not for one minute suggesting that , if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre -- they should do that .
That 's absolutely the right thing , for people to follow their self-interest .
I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek , but I don 't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek .
I don 't think it 's warranted .
So I have this distinction between what we 're making people do and the subject that 's sort of mainstream and the subject that , in a sense , people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that .
So what are the issues people bring up with this ?
Well one of them is , they say , you need to get the basics first .
You shouldn 't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject .
So my usual question is , what do you mean by " basics ? "
Basics of what ?
Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it , or design it for that matter ?
Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill ?
I don 't think so .
I think you need to separate the basics of what you 're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation .
A hundred years ago , it 's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things .
But automation in cars allowed that to separate , so driving is now a quite separate subject , so to speak , from engineering of the car or learning how to service it .
So automation allows this separation and also allows -- in the case of driving , and I believe also in the future case of maths -- a democratized way of doing that .
It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that .
So there 's another thing that comes up with basics .
People confuse , in my view , the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching .
So just because paper was invented before computers , it doesn 't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics .
My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this .
She enjoys making what she calls " paper laptops . "
So I asked her one day , " You know , when I was your age , I didn 't make these .
Why do you think that was ? "
And after a second or two , carefully reflecting , she said , " No paper ? "
If you were born after computers and paper , it doesn 't really matter which order you 're taught with them in , you just want to have the best tool .
So another one that comes up is " Computers dumb math down . "
That somehow , if you use a computer , it 's all mindless button-pushing , but if you do it by hand , it 's all intellectual .
This one kind of annoys me , I must say .
Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don 't really understand , for reasons they don 't get ?
I don 't think so .
And what 's worse , what they 're learning there isn 't even practically useful anymore .
Might have been 50 years ago , but it isn 't anymore .
When they 're out of education , they do it on a computer .
Just to be clear , I think computers can really help with this problem , actually make it more conceptual .
Now , of course , like any great tool , they can be used completely mindlessly , like turning everything into a multimedia show , like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand , where the computer was the teacher -- show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand .
This is just nuts .
Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway ?
All backwards .
Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate .
See , normally in school , you do things like solve quadratic equations .
But you see , when you 're using a computer , you can just substitute .
You can make it a quartic equation . Make it kind of harder , calculating-wise .
Same principles applied -- calculations , harder .
And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this .
They 've got hair all over them .
They 're not just simple , dumbed-down things that we see in school math .
And think of the outside world .
Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers ?
I don 't think so -- quite the opposite .
So the problem we 've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down , but that we have dumbed-down problems right now .
Well , another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding .
So if you go through lots of examples , you can get the answer , you can understand how the basics of the system work better .
I think there is one thing that I think very valid here , which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important .
But there 's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world .
It 's called programming .
Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days , and it 's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand .
If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it .
So programming is the way I think we should be doing that .
So to be clear , what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual , simultaneously .
I can 't think of any other subject where that 's recently been possible .
It 's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual .
But I think we can do both at the same time here .
And we open up so many more possibilities .
You can do so many more problems .
What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they 've ever got before .
And experience of harder problems -- being able to play with the math , interact with it , feel it .
We want people who can feel the math instinctively .
That 's what computers allow us to do .
Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum .
Traditionally it 's been by how difficult it is to calculate , but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts , however hard the calculating .
So calculus has traditionally been taught very late .
Why is this ?
Well , it 's damn hard doing the calculations , that 's the problem .
But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group .
This was an example I built for my daughter .
And very , very simple .
We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number .
And of course , it turns into a circle .
And by the way , she was also very insistent on being able to change the color , an important feature for this demonstration .
You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme -- and very small sides and a very large number of sides .
Very simple example .
That 's a view of the world that we don 't usually give people for many , many years after this .
And yet , that 's a really important practical view of the world .
So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams .
In the end , if we test everyone by hand in exams , it 's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters .
And one of the reasons it 's so important -- so it 's very important to get computers in exams .
And then we can ask questions , real questions , questions like , what 's the best life insurance policy to get ? -- real questions that people have in their everyday lives .
And you see , this isn 't some dumbed-down model here .
This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens .
How many years of protection do I need ?
What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth ?
Now I 'm not for one minute suggesting it 's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams , but I think it 's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people 's real understanding .
So I believe [ there is ] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math .
We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward , and also our societies , based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics .
This isn 't some optional extra .
And the country that does this first will , in my view , leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even , an improved economy , an improved outlook .
In fact , I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the " knowledge economy " to what we might call a " computational knowledge economy , " where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is .
We can engage so many more students with this , and they can have a better time doing it .
And let 's understand : this is not an incremental sort of change .
We 're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math .
And you know if you walk across a chasm , you end up making it worse than if you didn 't start at all -- bigger disaster .
No , what I 'm suggesting is that we should leap off , we should increase our velocity so it 's high , and we should leap off one side and go the other -- of course , having calculated our differential equation very carefully .
So I want to see a completely renewed , changed math curriculum built from the ground up , based on computers being there , computers that are now ubiquitous almost .
Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years .
Now I 'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math , but what I am sure is it 's the mainstream subject of the future .
Let 's go for it , and while we 're about it , let 's have a bit of fun , for us , for the students and for TED here .
Thanks .
Jay Bradner : Open-source cancer research
How does cancer know it 's cancer ? At Jay Bradner 's lab , they found a molecule that might hold the answer , JQ1 -- and instead of patenting JQ1 , they published their findings and mailed samples to 40 other labs to work on . An inspiring look at the open-source future of medical research . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I moved to Boston 10 years ago , from Chicago , with an interest in cancer and in chemistry .
You might know that chemistry is the science of making molecules -- or to my taste , new drugs for cancer .
And you might also know that , for science and medicine , Boston is a bit of a candy store .
You can 't roll a stop sign in Cambridge without hitting a graduate student .
The bar is called the Miracle of Science .
The billboards say " Lab Space Available . "
And it 's fair to say that in these 10 years , we 've witnessed absolutely the start of a scientific revolution -- that of genome medicine .
We know more about the patients that enter our clinic now than ever before .
And we 're able , finally , to answer the question that 's been so pressing for so many years : why do I have cancer ?
This information is also pretty staggering .
You might know that , so far in just the dawn of this revolution , we know that there are perhaps 40,000 unique mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes , and that there are 500 of these genes that are bona-fide drivers , causes of cancer .
Yet comparatively , we have about a dozen targeted medications .
And this inadequacy of cancer medicine really hit home when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer .
We didn 't fly him to Boston .
We didn 't sequence his genome .
It 's been known for decades what causes this malignancy .
It 's three proteins -- Ras , Myc and P53 .
This is old information we 've known since about the 80s , yet there 's no medicine I can prescribe to a patient with this or any of the numerous solid tumors caused by these three horsemen of the apocalypse that is cancer .
There 's no Ras , no Myc , no P53 drug .
And you might fairly ask : why is that ?
And the very unsatisfying , yet scientific , answer is it 's too hard .
That for whatever reason , these three proteins have entered a space in the language of our field that 's called the undruggable genome -- which is like calling a computer unsurfable or the Moon unwalkable .
It 's a horrible term of trade .
But what it means is that we fail to identify a greasy pocket in these proteins , into which we , like molecular locksmiths , can fashion an active , small , organic molecule or drug substance .
Now as I was training in clinical medicine and hematology and oncology and stem cell transplantation , what we had instead , cascading through the regulatory network at the FDA , were these substances -- arsenic , thalidomide and this chemical derivative of nitrogen mustard gas .
And this is the 21st century .
And so , I guess you 'd say , dissatisfied with the performance and quality of these medicines , I went back to school in chemistry with the idea that perhaps by learning the trade of discovery chemistry and approaching it in the context of this brave new world of the open-source , the crowd-source , the collaborative network that we have access to within academia , that we might more quickly bring powerful and targeted therapies to our patients .
And so please consider this a work in progress , but I 'd like to tell you today a story about a very rare cancer called midline carcinoma , about the protein target , the undruggable protein target that causes this cancer , called BRD4 , and about a molecule developed at my lab at Dana Farber Cancer Institute called JQ1 , which we affectionately named for Jun Qi , the chemist that made this molecule .
Now BRD4 is an interesting protein .
You might ask yourself , with all the things cancer 's trying to do to kill our patient , how does it remember it 's cancer ?
When it winds up its genome , divides into two cells and unwinds again , why does it not turn into an eye , into a liver , as it has all the genes necessary to do this ?
It remembers that it 's cancer .
And the reason is that cancer , like every cell in the body , places little molecular bookmarks , little Post-it notes , that remind the cell " I 'm cancer ; I should keep growing . "
And those Post-it notes involve this and other proteins of its class -- so-called bromodomains .
So we developed an idea , a rationale , that perhaps , if we made a molecule that prevented the Post-it note from sticking by entering into the little pocket at the base of this spinning protein , then maybe we could convince cancer cells , certainly those addicted to this BRD4 protein , that they 're not cancer .
And so we started to work on this problem .
We developed libraries of compounds and eventually arrived at this and similar substances called JQ1 .
Now not being a drug company , we could do certain things , we had certain flexibilities , that I respect that a pharmaceutical industry doesn 't have .
We just started mailing it to our friends .
I have a small lab .
We thought we 'd just send it to people and see how the molecule behaves .
And we sent it to Oxford , England where a group of talented crystallographers provided this picture , which helped us understand exactly how this molecule is so potent for this protein target .
It 's what we call a perfect fit of shape complimentarity , or hand in glove .
Now this is a very rare cancer , this BRD4-addicted cancer .
And so we worked with samples of material that were collected by young pathologists at Brigham Women 's Hospital .
And as we treated these cells with this molecule , we observed something really striking .
The cancer cells , small , round and rapidly dividing , grew these arms and extensions .
They were changing shape .
In effect , the cancer cell was forgetting it was cancer and becoming a normal cell .
This got us very excited .
The next step would be to put this molecule into mice .
The only problem was there 's no mouse model of this rare cancer .
And so at the time that we were doing this research , I was caring for a 29 year-old firefighter from Connecticut who was very much at the end of life with this incurable cancer .
This BRD4-addicted cancer was growing throughout his left lung , and he had a chest tube in that was draining little bits of debris .
And every nursing shift we would throw this material out .
And so we approached this patient and asked if he would collaborate with us .
Could we take this precious and rare cancerous material from this chest tube and drive it across town and put it into mice and try to do a clinical trial and stage it with a prototype drug ?
Well that would be impossible and , rightly , illegal to do in humans .
And he obliged us .
At the Lurie Family Center for Animal Imaging , my colleague , Andrew Kung , grew this cancer successfully in mice without ever touching plastic .
And you can see this PET scan of a mouse -- what we call a pet PET .
The cancer is growing as this red , huge mass in the hind limb of this animal .
And as we treat it with our compound , this addiction to sugar , this rapid growth , faded .
And on the animal on the right , you see that the cancer was responding .
We 've completed now clinical trials in four mouse models of this disease .
And every time , we see the same thing .
The mice with this cancer that get the drug live , and the ones that don 't rapidly perish .
So we started to wonder , what would a drug company do at this point ?
Well they probably would keep this a secret until they turn a prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance .
And so we did just the opposite .
We published a paper that described this finding at the earliest prototype stage .
We gave the world the chemical identity of this molecule , typically a secret in our discipline .
We told people exactly how to make it .
We gave them our email address , suggesting that , if they write us , we 'll send them a free molecule .
We basically tried to create the most competitive environment for our lab as possible .
And this was , unfortunately , successful .
Because now when we 've shared this molecule , just since December of last year , with 40 laboratories in the United States and 30 more in Europe -- many of them pharmaceutical companies seeking now to enter this space , to target this rare cancer that , thankfully right now , is quite desirable to study in that industry .
But the science that 's coming back from all of these laboratories about the use of this molecule has provided us insights that we might not have had on our own .
Leukemia cells treated with this compound turn into normal white blood cells .
Mice with multiple myeloma , an incurable malignancy of the bone marrow , respond dramatically to the treatment with this drug .
You might know that fat has memory .
Nice to be able to demonstrate that for you .
And in fact , this molecule prevents this adipocyte , this fat stem cell , from remembering how to make fat such that mice on a high fat diet , like the folks in my hometown of Chicago , fail to develop fatty liver , which is a major medical problem .
What this research taught us -- not just my lab , but our institute , and Harvard Medical School more generally -- is that we have unique resources in academia for drug discovery -- that our center that has tested perhaps more cancer molecules in a scientific way than any other , never made one of its own .
For all the reasons you see listed here , we think there 's a great opportunity for academic centers to participate in this earliest , conceptually-tricky and creative discipline of prototype drug discovery .
So what next ?
We have this molecule , but it 's not a pill yet .
It 's not orally available .
We need to fix it , so that we can deliver it to our patients .
And everyone in the lab , especially following the interaction with these patients , feels quite compelled to deliver a drug substance based on this molecule .
It 's here where I have to say that we could use your help and your insights , your collaborative participation .
Unlike a drug company , we don 't have a pipeline that we can deposit these molecules into .
We don 't have a team of salespeople and marketeers that can tell us how to position this drug against the other .
What we do have is the flexibility of an academic center to work with competent , motivated , enthusiastic , hopefully well-funded people to carry these molecules forward into the clinic while preserving our ability to share the prototype drug worldwide .
This molecule will soon leave our benches and go into a small startup company called Tensha Therapeutics .
And really this is the fourth of these molecules to kind of graduate from our little pipeline of drug discovery , two of which -- a topical drug for lymphoma of the skin , an oral substance for the treatment of multiple myeloma -- will actually come to the bedside for first clinical trial in July of this year .
For us , a major and exciting milestone .
I want to leave you with just two ideas .
The first is if anything is unique about this research , it 's less the science than the strategy -- that this for us was a social experiment , an experiment in what would happen if we were as open and honest at the earliest phase of discovery chemistry research as we could be .
This string of letters and numbers and symbols and parentheses that can be texted , I suppose , or Twittered worldwide , is the chemical identity of our pro compound .
It 's the information that we most need from pharmaceutical companies , the information on how these early prototype drugs might work .
Yet this information is largely a secret .
And so we seek really to download from the amazing successes of the computer science industry two principles : that of opensource and that of crowdsourcing to quickly , responsibly accelerate the delivery of targeted therapeutics to patients with cancer .
Now the business model involves all of you .
This research is funded by the public .
It 's funded by foundations .
And one thing I 've learned in Boston is that you people will do anything for cancer -- and I love that .
You bike across the state . You walk up and down the river .
I 've never seen really anywhere this unique support for cancer research .
And so I want to thank you for your participation , your collaboration and most of all for your confidence in our ideas .
Alison Gopnik : What do babies think ?
" Babies and young children are like the R & amp ; D division of the human species , " says psychologist Alison Gopnik . Her research explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play .
What is going on in this baby 's mind ?
If you 'd asked people this 30 years ago , most people , including psychologists , would have said that this baby was irrational , illogical , egocentric -- that he couldn 't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect .
In the last 20 years , developmental science has completely overturned that picture .
So in some ways , we think that this baby 's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists .
Let me give you just one example of this .
One thing that this baby could be thinking about , that could be going on in his mind , is trying to figure out what 's going on in the mind of that other baby .
After all , one of the things that 's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling .
And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn 't actually exactly like what we think and feel .
Anyone who 's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get .
We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people .
Now the question is : How could we ask them ?
Babies , after all , can 't talk , and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks , what you 'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that .
So how do we actually ask them the question ?
Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli .
What we did -- Betty Rapacholi , who was one of my students , and I -- was actually to give the babies two bowls of food : one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers .
Now all of the babies , even in Berkley , like the crackers and don 't like the raw broccoli .
But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl .
And she would act as if she liked it or she didn 't .
So half the time , she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn 't like the broccoli -- just like a baby and any other sane person .
But half the time , what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go , " Mmmmm , broccoli .
I tasted the broccoli . Mmmmm . "
And then she would take a little bit of the crackers , and she 'd go , " Eww , yuck , crackers .
I tasted the crackers . Eww , yuck . "
So she 'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted .
We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies .
And then she would simply put her hand out and say , " Can you give me some ? "
So the question is : What would the baby give her , what they liked or what she liked ?
And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies , just barely walking and talking , would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers , but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli .
On the other hand , 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli , like they couldn 't figure this out .
But then after they stared for a long time , they would just give her the crackers , what they thought everybody must like .
So there are two really remarkable things about this .
The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature , that we don 't always want the same thing .
And what 's more , they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted .
Even more remarkably though , the fact that 15 month-olds didn 't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep , profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old .
So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought .
And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that 's actually demonstrated it .
The question you might ask though is : Why do children learn so much ?
And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time ?
I mean , after all , if you look at babies superficially , they seem pretty useless .
And actually in many ways , they 're worse than useless , because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive .
But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies , it turns out that there 's actually an answer .
If we look across many , many different species of animals , not just us primates , but also including other mammals , birds , even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats , it turns out that there 's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are .
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there .
On one side is a New Caledonian crow .
And crows and other corvidae , ravens , rooks and so forth , are incredibly smart birds .
They 're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects .
And this is a bird on the cover of science who 's learned how to use a tool to get food .
On the other hand , we have our friend the domestic chicken .
And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps .
So they 're very , very good at pecking for grain , and they 're not much good at doing anything else .
Well it turns out that the babies , the New Caledonian crow babies , are fledglings .
They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years , which is a really long time in the life of a bird .
Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months .
So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot .
There 's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning .
Well what kind of explanation could we have for this ?
Well some animals , like the chicken , seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well .
So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment .
Other creatures , like the crows , aren 't very good at doing anything in particular , but they 're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments .
And of course , we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows .
We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal .
We 're smarter , we 're more flexible , we can learn more , we survive in more different environments , we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space .
And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species .
My son is 23 .
And at least until they 're 23 , we 're still popping those worms into those little open mouths .
All right , why would we see this correlation ?
Well an idea is that that strategy , that learning strategy , is an extremely powerful , great strategy for getting on in the world , but it has one big disadvantage .
And that one big disadvantage is that , until you actually do all that learning , you 're going to be helpless .
So you don 't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself , " A slingshot or maybe a spear might work . Which would actually be better ? "
You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up .
And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor .
So the idea is that we have this early period when we 're completely protected .
We don 't have to do anything . All we have to do is learn .
And then as adults , we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world .
So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species .
So they 're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas , and we 're production and marketing .
We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use .
Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups , we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species -- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies -- except that they 're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring , and we 're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow , grownup , adult path .
If this is true , if these babies are designed to learn -- and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning , that 's what they 're for -- we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms .
And in fact , the baby 's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet .
But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better .
And there 's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently .
And it all depends on the ideas of this guy , the Reverend Thomas Bayes , who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century .
And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize , describe , the way that scientists find out about the world .
So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with .
They go out and test it against the evidence .
The evidence makes them change that hypothesis .
Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth .
And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that .
And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now .
And some 10 years ago , I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing .
So if you want to know what 's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes , I think it actually looks something like this .
This is Reverend Bayes 's notebook .
So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they 're revising to figure out how the world works .
All right , now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate .
Because after all , if you ask even grownups about statistics , they look extremely stupid .
How could it be that children are doing statistics ?
So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector .
This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others .
And using this very simple machine , my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world .
Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner , my student .
If I showed you this detector , you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector .
But actually , this detector works in a bit of a strange way .
Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector , something you wouldn 't ever think of to begin with , the detector will actually activate two out of three times .
Whereas , if you do the likely thing , put the block on the detector , it will only activate two out of six times .
So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence .
It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy .
So we did just this ; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence , and we just asked them to make it go .
And sure enough , the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector .
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this .
The first one is , again , remember , these are four year-olds .
They 're just learning how to count .
But unconsciously , they 're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure .
And the other interesting thing is that they 're using that evidence to get to an idea , get to a hypothesis about the world , that seems very unlikely to begin with .
And in studies we 've just been doing in my lab , similar studies , we 've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task .
So in these circumstances , the children are using statistics to find out about the world , but after all , scientists also do experiments , and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments .
When children do experiments we call it " getting into everything " or else " playing . "
And there 's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program .
Here 's one from Cristine Legare 's lab .
What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors .
And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn 't , and then she showed them an anomaly .
And what you 'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes .
Boy : How about this ?
Same as the other side .
Alison Gopnik : Okay , so his first hypothesis has just been falsified .
Boy : This one lighted up , and this one nothing .
AG : Okay , he 's got his experimental notebook out .
Boy : What 's making this light up .
I don 't know .
AG : Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair .
Boy : Oh , it 's because this needs to be like this , and this needs to be like this .
AG : Okay , hypothesis two .
Boy : That 's why .
Oh .
AG : Now this is his next idea .
He told the experimenter to do this , to try putting it out onto the other location .
Not working either .
Boy : Oh , because the light goes only to here , not here .
Oh , the bottom of this box has electricity in here , but this doesn 't have electricity .
AG : Okay , that 's a fourth hypothesis .
Boy : It 's lighting up .
So when you put four .
So you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up .
AG : Okay , there 's his fifth hypothesis .
Now that is a particularly -- that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy , but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical .
If you look at the way children play , when you ask them to explain something , what they really do is do a series of experiments .
This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds .
Well , what 's it like to be this kind of creature ?
What 's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes ?
Well , if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers , a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all .
And I think just the opposite is true .
I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults .
Now here 's what we know about how adult consciousness works .
And adults ' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight .
So what happens for adults is we decide that something 's relevant or important , we should pay attention to it .
Our consciousness of that thing that we 're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid , and everything else sort of goes dark .
And we even know something about the way the brain does this .
So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex , the sort of executive part of our brains , sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible , more plastic , better at learning , and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains .
So we have a very focused , purpose-driven kind of attention .
If we look at babies and young children , we see something very different .
I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness .
So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing .
But they 're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once .
And if you actually look in their brains , you see that they 're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity , and the inhibitory parts haven 't come on yet .
So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention , what we really mean is that they 're bad at not paying attention .
So they 're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that 's important .
That 's the kind of attention , the kind of consciousness , that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn .
Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults , I think the best thing is think about cases where we 're put in a new situation that we 've never been in before -- when we fall in love with someone new , or when we 're in a new city for the first time .
And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts , it expands , so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking , talking , faculty meeting-attending zombie back home .
And by the way , that coffee , that wonderful coffee you 've been drinking downstairs , actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters .
So what 's it like to be a baby ?
It 's like being in love after you 've had three double-espressos .
That 's a fantastic way to be , but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o 'clock in the morning .
Now it 's good to be a grownup .
I don 't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are .
It 's good to be a grownup .
We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves .
And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do .
But if what we want is to be like those butterflies , to have open-mindedness , open learning , imagination , creativity , innovation , maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children .
Eames Demetrios : The design genius of Charles + Ray Eames
The legendary design team Charles and Ray Eames made films , houses and classic midcentury modern furniture . Eames Demetrios , their grandson , shows rarely seen films and archival footage in a lively , loving tribute to their creative process .
Charles and Ray were a team . They were husband and wife .
Despite the New York Times ' and Vanity Fair 's best efforts recently , they 're not brothers .
And they were a lot of fun .
You know , Ray was the one who wore the ampersands in the family .
We are going to focus on Charles today , because it is Charles ' 100th birthday .
But when I speak of him , I 'm really speaking of both of them as a team .
Here 's Charles when he was three . So he would be 100 this June .
We have a lot of cool celebrations that we 're going to do .
The thing about their work is that most people come to the door of furniture -- I suspect you probably recognize this chair and some of the others I 'm going to show you .
But we 're going to first enter through the door of the Big Top .
The whole thing about this , though , is that , you know , why am I showing it ?
Is it because Charles and Ray made this film ?
This is actually a training film for a clown college that they had .
They also practiced a clown act when the future of furniture was not nearly as auspicious as it turned out to be .
There is a picture of Charles . So let 's watch the next clip .
The film that we 're about to see is a film they made for the Moscow World 's Fair .
This is the land .
It has many contrasts .
It is rough and it is flat .
In places it is cold .
In some it is hot .
Too much rain falls on some areas , and not enough on others .
But people live on this land .
And , as in Russia , they are drawn together into towns and cities .
Here is something of the way they live .
Eames Demetrios : Now , this is a film that was hardly ever seen in the United States .
It was on seven screens and it was 200 feet across .
And it was at the height of the Cold War .
The Nixon-Khrushchev Kitchen Debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown .
And yet , how did it start ?
You know , commonality , the first line in Charles ' narration was , " The same stars that shine down on Russia shine down on the United States . From the sky , our cities look much the same . "
It was that human connection that Charles and Ray always found in everything .
And you can imagine , and the thing about it is , that they believed that the human mind could handle this number of images because the important thing was to get the gestalt of what the images were about .
So that was just a little snip .
But the thing about Charles and Ray is that they were always modeling stuff .
They were always trying things out .
I think one of the things I am passionate about , my grandparents work , I 'm passionate about my work , but on top of all that I 'm passionate about a holistic vision of design , where design is a life skill , not a professional skill .
And you know , those of us with kids often want our kids to take music .
I 'm no exception .
But it 's not about them becoming Bono or Tracy Chapman .
It 's about getting that music thing going through their heads and their thinking .
Design is the same way . Design has to become that same way .
And this is a model that they did of that seven-screen presentation .
And Charles just checking it out there .
So now we 're going to go through that door of furniture .
This is an unusual installation of airport seating .
So what we 're going to see is some of the icons of Eames furniture .
And the thing about their furniture is that they said the role of the designer was essentially that of a good host , anticipating the needs of the guest .
So those are cool images . But these are ones I think are really cool .
These are all the prototypes . These are the mistakes , although I don 't think mistakes is the right word in design .
It 's just the things you try out to kind of make it work better .
And you know some of them would probably be terrible chairs .
Some of them are kind of cool looking . It 's like " Hey , why didn 't they try that ? "
It was that hands-on iterative process which is so much like vernacular design and folk design in traditional cultures .
And I think that 's one of the commonalities between modernism and traditional design . I think it may be a real common ground as we kind of figure out what on earth to do in the next 20 or 30 years .
The other thing that 's kind of cool is that you look at this and in the media when people say design , they actually mean style .
And I 'm really here to talk about design .
But you know the object is just a pivot .
It 's a pivot between a process and a system .
And this is a little film I made about the making of the Eames lounge chair .
The design process for Charles and Ray never ended in manufacturing .
It continued . They were always trying to make thing better and better .
Because it 's like as Bill Clinton was saying about Rwandan health clinics .
It 's not enough to create one .
You 've got to create a system that will work better and better .
So I 've always liked this prototype picture .
Because it just kind of , you know , doesn 't get any more basic than that .
You try things out .
This is a relatively famous chair .
Its early version had an " X " base . That 's what the collectors like .
Charles and Ray liked this one because it was better .
It worked better : " H " base , much more practical .
This is something called a splint .
And I was very touched by Dean Kamen 's work for the military , or for the soldiers , because Charles and Ray designed a molded plywood splint . This is it .
And they 'd been working on furniture before .
But doing these splints they learned a lot about the manufacturing process , which was incredibly important to them .
I 'm trying to show you too much , because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images .
This is a house that Charles and Ray designed .
My sister is chasing someone else . It 's not me .
Although I endorse heartily the fact that he stole her diary , it 's not me .
And then this is a film , on the lower left , that Charles and Ray made .
Now look at that plastic chair .
The house is 1949 .
The chair is done in 1949 .
Charles and Ray , they didn 't obsess about style for it 's own sake .
They didn 't say , " Our style is curves . Let 's make the house curvy . "
They didn 't say , " Our style is grids . Let 's make the chair griddy . "
They focused on the need .
They tried to solve the design problem .
Charles used to say , " The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the design problem . "
It 's kind of a brutal quote .
This is the earlier design of that house .
And again , they managed to figure out a way to make a prototype of a house -- architecture , very expensive medium .
Here 's a film we 've been hearing things about .
The " Powers of Ten " is a film they made .
If we watch the next clip , you 're going to see the first version of " Powers of Ten , " upper left .
The familiar one on the lower right .
The Eames ' film Tops , lower left .
And a lamp that Charles designed for a church .
Which in turn belongs to a local group of galaxies .
These form part of a grouping system much as the stars do .
They are so many and so varied that from this distance they appear like the stars from Earth .
ED : You 've seen that film , and what 's so great about this whole conference is that everybody has been talking about scale .
Everybody here is coming at it from a different way .
I want to give you one example .
E.O. Wilson once told me that when he looked at ants -- he loved them , of course , and he wanted to learn more about them -- he consciously looked at them from the standpoint of scale .
So here is the tiny creature .
And yet simply by changing the frame of reference it reveals so much , including what ended up being the TED Prize .
Modeling , they tried modeling all the time . They were always modeling things .
And I think part of that is that they never delegated understanding .
And I think in our family we were very lucky , because we learned about design backwards .
Design was not something other .
It was part of the business of life in general .
It was part of the quality of life .
And here is some family pictures .
And you can see why I 'm down on style , with a haircut like that .
But anyway , I remember the cut grapefruit that we would have at the Eames house when I was a kid .
So we 're going to watch another film .
This is a film , the one called Toys .
You can see me , I have the same haircut , in the upper right corner .
Upper left is a film they did on toy trains .
Lower right is a solar do-nothing toy .
Lower left is Day-of-the-Dead toys .
Charles used to say that toys are not as innocent as they appear .
They are often the precursor to bigger things .
And these ideas -- that train up there , being about the honest use of materials , is totally the same as the honest use of materials in the plywood .
And now I 'm going to test you .
This is a letter that my grandfather sent to my mom when she was five years old .
So can you read it ?
Lucia angel , okay , eye .
Audience : Saw many trains .
ED : Awl , also , good that the leather crafter 's guild is here .
Also , what is he doing ? Row , rowed .
Sun ? No . Well is there another name for a sunrise ?
Dawn , very good .
Also rode on one . I ...
Audience : You had , I hope you had -- ED : Now you 've been to the website Dogs of Saint Louis in the late , in the mid-1930 's , then you 'd know that was a Great Dane .
So , I hope you had a Audience : Nice time , time -- ED : Time at .
Citizen Kane , rose -- Audience : Rosebud .
ED : No , bud . " D " ' s right . At Buddy 's -- Audience : Party . Love .
ED : Okay , good .
So , " I saw many trains and also rode on one .
I hope you had a nice time at Buddy 's party . "
So you guys did pretty good , cool .
So my mom and Charles had this great relationship where they 'd send those sorts of things back and forth to one another .
And it 's all part of the , you know , they used to say , " Take your pleasure seriously . "
These are some images from a project of mine that 's called Kymaerica .
It 's sort of an alternative universe .
It 's kind of a reinterpretation of the landscape .
Those plaques are plaques we 've been installing around North America .
We 're about to do six in the U.K. next week .
And they honor events in the linear world from the fictional world .
So , of course , since it 's bronze it has to be true .
Kymaerica with waterfalls , tumbling through our -- ED : This is one of the traditional Kymaerican songs .
And so we had spelling bees in Paris , Illinois .
Your word is N. Carolina .
Girl : Y-I-N-D-I-A-N-A .
ED : And then Embassy Row is actually a historical site , because in the Kymaerican story this is where the Parisian Diaspora started , where there embassy was .
So you can actually visit and have this three-dimensional fictional experience there .
And the town has really embraced it .
We had the spelling bee in conjunction with the Gwomeus Club .
But what is really cool is that we take our visual environment as inevitable . And it 's not .
Other things could have happened . The Japanese could have discovered Monterey .
And we could have been born 100,000 years ago .
And there are a lot of fun things . This is the Museum of the Bench .
They have trading cards and all sorts of cool things .
And you 're kind of trapped in the texture of Kymaerica .
The Tahatchabe , the great road building culture .
A guy named Nobu Naga , the so-called Japanese Columbus .
But now I 'm going to return you to the real world .
And this is Cranbrook . I 've got a real treat for you , which is the first film that Charles ever made .
So let 's watch that . Nobody 's ever seen it .
Cranbrook is very generous to let us show it for the first time here .
It 's a film about Maya Gretel , a famous ceramicist , and a teacher at Cranbrook .
And he made it for the 1939 faculty exhibition .
Silent . We don 't have a track for it yet .
Very simple . It 's just a start . But it 's that learn-by-doing thing .
You want to learn how to make films ? Go make a movie .
And you try something out .
But here is what 's really great .
See that chair there ? The orange one ? That 's the organic chair . 1940 .
At the same time that Charles was doing that chair , he was doing this film .
So my point is that this scope of vision , this holistic vision of design , was with them from the beginning .
It wasn 't like " Oh , we made some chairs and got successful .
Now we 're going to do some movies . "
It was always part of how they looked at the world . And that 's what 's really powerful .
And I think that all of us in this room , as you move design forward , it 's not about just doing one thing .
It 's about how you approach problems . And there is this huge , beautiful commonality between design , business and the world .
So we 're going to do the last clip .
And I 've shown you some of the images . I just want to focus on sound now .
So this is Charles ' voice .
Charles Eames : In India , those without , and the lowest in caste , eat very often , particularly in southern India , they eat off of a banana leaf .
And those a little bit up the scale eat off of a sort of a low-fired ceramic dish .
And a little bit higher , why they have a glaze on a thing they call a thali .
If you 're up the scale a little bit more , why , a brass thali .
And then things get to be a little questionable .
There are things like silver-plated thalis .
And there is solid silver thalis .
And I suppose some nut has had a gold thali that he 's eaten off of .
But you can go beyond that .
And the guys that have not only means , but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding , go to the next step , and they eat off a banana leaf .
And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup , that somehow or other , the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there , because I 'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of .
But it is that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf .
ED : I 've been looking forward to sharing that quote with you .
Because that 's part of where we 've got to get to .
And I also want to share this one .
" Beyond the age of information is the age of choices . "
And I really think that 's where we are .
And it 's kind of cool for me to be part of a family and a tradition where he was talking about that in 1978 .
And part of why this stuff is important and all the things that we do are important , is that these are the ideas we need .
And I think that this is all part of surrendering to the design journey .
That 's what we all need to do .
Design is not just for designers anymore . It 's a process . It 's not style .
All that great thinking needs to really get about solving pretty key problems .
I really thank you for your time .
Bill Doyle : Treating cancer with electric fields
Surgery , chemotherapy and radiation are the best-known methods for treating cancer . At TEDMED , Bill Doyle presents a new approach , called Tumor Treating Fields , which uses electric fields to interrupt cancer cell division . Still in its infancy -- and approved for only certain types of cancer -- the treatment comes with one big benefit : quality of life .
Everybody in our society 's life is touched by cancer -- if not personally , then through a loved one , a family member , colleague , friend .
And once our lives are touched by cancer , we quickly learn that there are basically three weapons , or three tools , that are available to fight the disease : surgery , radiation and chemotherapy .
And once we get involved in the therapeutic decisions , again either personally or with our loved ones and family members , we also very quickly learn the benefits , the trade-offs and the limitations of these tools .
I 'm very thankful to Jay and to Mark and the TEDMED team for inviting me today to describe a fourth tool , a new tool , that we call Tumor Treating Fields .
Tumor Treating Fields were invented by Dr. Yoram Palti , professor emeritus at the Technion in Israel .
And they use low-intensity electric fields to fight cancer .
To understand how Tumor Treating Fields work , we first need to understand what are electric fields .
Let me first address a few popular misconceptions .
First of all , electric fields are not an electric current that is coursing through the tissue .
Electric fields are not ionizing radiation , like X-rays or proton beams , that bombard tissue to disrupt DNA .
And electric fields are not magnetism .
What electric fields are are a field of forces .
And these forces act on , attract , bodies that have an electrical charge .
The best way to visualize an electric field is to think of gravity .
Gravity is also a field of forces that act on masses .
We can all picture astronauts in space .
They float freely in three dimensions without any forces acting on them .
But as that space shuttle returns to Earth , and as the astronauts enter the Earth 's gravitational field , they begin to see the effects of gravity .
They begin to be attracted towards Earth .
And as they land , they 're fully aligned in the gravitational field .
We 're , of course , all stuck in the Earth 's gravitational field right now .
That 's why you 're all in your chairs .
And that 's why we have to use our muscle energy to stand up , to walk around and to lift things .
In cancer , cells rapidly divide and lead to uncontrolled tumor growth .
We can think of a cell from an electrical perspective as if it 's a mini space station .
And in that space station we have the genetic material , the chromosomes , within a nucleus .
And out in the cytoplasmic soup we have special proteins that are required for cell division that float freely in this soup in three dimensions .
Importantly , those special proteins are among the most highly charged objects in our body .
As cell division begins the nucleus disintegrates , the chromosomes line up in the middle of the cell and those special proteins undergo a three-dimensional sequence whereby they attach and they literally click into place end-on-end to form chains .
These chains then progress and attach to the genetic material and pull the genetic material from one cell into two cells .
And this is exactly how one cancer cell becomes two cancer cells , two cancer cells become four cancer cells , and we have ultimately uncontrolled tumor growth .
Tumor Treating Fields use externally placed transducers attached to a field generator to create an artificial electric field on that space station .
And when that cellular space station is within the electric field , it acts on those highly charged proteins and aligns them .
And it prevents them from forming those chains , those mitotic spindles , that are necessary to pull the genetic material into the daughter cells .
What we see is that the cells will attempt to divide for several hours .
And they will either enter into this so-called cellular suicide , programmed cell death , or they will form unhealthy daughter cells and enter into apoptosis once they have divided .
And we can observe this .
What I 'm going to show you next are two in vitro experiments .
This is cultures , identical cultures , of cervical cancer cells .
And we 've stained these cultures with a green florescent dye so that we can look at these proteins that form these chains .
The first clip shows a normal cell division without the Tumor Treating Fields .
What we see are , first of all , a very active culture , a lot of divisions , and then very clear nuclei once the cells have separated .
And we can see them dividing throughout .
When we apply the fields -- again , in the identical time-scale to the identical culture -- you 're going to see something different .
The cells round up for division , but they 're very static in that position .
We 'll see two cells in the upper part of the screen attempting to divide .
The one within the circle manages .
But see how much of the protein is still throughout the nucleus , even in the dividing cell .
The one up there can 't divide at all .
And then this bubbling , this membrane bubbling , is the hallmark of apoptosis in this cell .
Formation of healthy mitotic spindles is necessary for division in all cell types .
We 've applied Tumor Treating Fields to over 20 different cancers in the lab , and we see this effect in all of them .
Now importantly , these Tumor Treating Fields have no effect on normal undividing cells .
10 years ago , Dr. Palti founded a company called Novocure to develop his discovery into a practical therapy for patients .
In that time , Novocure 's developed two systems -- one system for cancers in the head and another system for cancers in the trunk of the body .
The first cancer that we have focused on is the deadly brain cancer , GBM .
GBM affects about 10,000 people in the U.S. each year .
It 's a death sentence .
The expected five year survival is less than five percent .
And the typical patient with optimal therapy survives just a little over a year , and only about seven months from the time that the cancer is first treated and then comes back and starts growing again .
Novocure conducted its first phase three randomized trial in patients with recurrent GBM .
So these are patients who had received surgery , high dose radiation to the head and first-line chemotherapy , and that had failed and their tumors had grown back .
We divided the patients into two groups .
The first group received second-line chemotherapy , which is expected to double the life expectancy , versus no treatment at all .
And then the second group received only Tumor Treating Field therapy .
What we saw in that trial is that that the life expectancies of both groups -- so the chemotherapy treated group and the Tumor Treating Field group -- was the same .
But importantly , the Tumor Treating Field group suffered none of the side effects typical of chemotherapy patients .
They had no pain , suffered none of the infections .
They had no nausea , diarrhea , constipation , fatigue that would be expected .
Based on this trial , in April of this year , the FDA approved Tumor Treating Fields for the treatment of patients with recurrent GBM .
Importantly , it was the first time ever that the FDA included in their approval of an oncology treatment a quality of life claim .
So I 'm going to show you now one of the patients from this trial .
Robert Dill-Bundi is a famous Swiss cycling champion .
He won the gold medal in Moscow in the 4,000 meter pursuit .
And five years ago , Robert was diagnosed with GBM .
He received the standard treatments .
He received surgery .
He received high dose radiation to the head .
And he received first-line chemotherapy .
A year after this treatment -- in fact , this is his baseline MRI .
You can see that the black regions in the upper right quadrant are the areas where he had surgery .
And a year after that treatment , his tumor grew back with a vengeance .
That cloudy white mass that you see is the recurrence of the tumor .
At this point , he was told by his doctors that he had about 3 months to live .
He entered our trial .
And here we can see him getting the therapy .
First of all , these electrodes are noninvasive .
They 're attached to the skin in the area of the tumor .
Here you can see that a technician is placing them on there much like bandages .
The patients learn to do this themselves And then the patients can undergo all the activities of their daily life .
There 's none of the tiredness .
There 's none of what is called the " chemo head . "
There 's no sensation .
It doesn 't interfere with computers or electrical equipment .
And the therapy is delivered continuously at home , without having to go into the hospital either periodically or continually .
These are Robert 's MRIs , again , under only TTField treatment .
This is a therapy that takes time to work .
It 's a medical device ; it works when it 's on .
But what we can see is , by month six , the tumor has responded and it 's begun to melt away .
It 's still there .
By month 12 , we could argue whether there 's a little bit of material around the edges , but it 's essentially completely gone .
It 's now five years since Robert 's diagnosis , and he 's alive , but importantly , he 's healthy and he 's at work .
I 'm going to let him , in this very short clip , describe his impressions of the therapy in his own words .
Robert Dill-Bundi : My quality of life , I rate what I have today a bit different than what most people would assume .
I am the happiest , the happiest person in the world .
And every single morning I appreciate life .
Every night I fall asleep very well , and I am , I repeat , the happiest man in the world , and I 'm thankful I am alive .
BD : Novocure 's also working on lung cancer as the second target .
We 've run a phase two trial in Switzerland on , again , recurrent patients -- patients who have received standard therapy and whose cancer has come back .
I 'm going to show you another clip of a woman named Lydia .
Lydia 's a 66 year-old farmer in Switzerland .
She was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago .
She underwent four different regimes of chemotherapy over two years , none of which had an effect .
Her cancer continued to grow .
Three years ago , she entered the Novocure lung cancer trial .
You can see , in her case , she 's wearing her transducer arrays , one of the front of her chest , one on the back , and then the second pair side-to-side over the liver .
You can see the Tumor Treating Field field generator , but importantly you can also see that she is living her life .
She is managing her farm .
She 's interacting with her kids and her grand kids .
And when we talked to her , she said that when she was undergoing chemotherapy , she had to go to the hospital every month for her infusions .
Her whole family suffered as her side effect profile came and went .
Now she can run all of the activities of her farm .
It 's only the beginning .
In the lab , we 've observed tremendous synergies between chemotherapy and Tumor Treating Fields .
There 's research underway now at Harvard Medical School to pick the optimum pairs to maximize that benefit .
We also believe that Tumor Treating Fields will work with radiation and interrupt the self-repair mechanisms that we have .
There 's now a new research project underway at the Karolinska in Sweden to prove that hypothesis .
We have more trials planned for lung cancer , pancreatic cancer , ovarian cancer and breast cancer .
And I firmly believe that in the next 10 years Tumor Treating Fields will be a weapon available to doctors and patients for all of these most-difficult-to-treat solid tumors .
I 'm also very hopeful that in the next decades , we will make big strides on reducing that death rate that has been so challenging in this disease .
Thank you .
Yves Rossy : Fly with the Jetman
Strapped to a jet-powered wing , Yves Rossy is the Jetman -- flying free , his body as the rudder , above the Swiss Alps and the Grand Canyon . After a powerful short film shows how it works , Rossy takes the TEDGlobal stage to share the experience and thrill of flying .
Text : Jetman - Yves Rossy Grand Canyon Many of the tests are conducted while Yves is strapped onto the wing , because Yves ' body is an integral part of the aircraft .
Text : Wind tunnel tests The wing has no steering controls , no flaps , no rudder .
Yves uses his body to steer the wing .
Stefan von Bergen : Well he turns by just putting his head on one or the other side .
And sometimes he assists that with his hands , sometimes even with the leg .
He 's acting as a human fuselage , so to say .
And that 's quite unique .
When he arches his back , he gains altitude .
When he pushes his shoulders forward , he goes into a dive .
Text : Swiss Alps Strait of Gibraltar crossing English Channel crossing Commentator : There he goes .
There is Yves Rossy .
And I think the wing is open , the wing is open .
So our first critical moment , it 's open .
He is down . Is he flying ?
Commentator Two : It looks like he 's stabilized .
He 's starting to make his climb .
Commentator : There 's that 90 degree turn you 're talking about , taking him out .
He 's out over the channel .
There is Yves Rossy .
There is no turning back now .
He is over the English Channel and underway .
Ladies and gentlemen , an historic flight has begun .
is pull down on those toggles to flare , slow himself down just a little bit , and then come in for a nice landing .
Commentator : There he is .
Yves Rossy has landed in England .
And now he 's in Edinburgh . Yves Rossy .
And his equipment as well .
Yves , welcome . It is quite amazing .
Those sequences were shot over the last three years in various moments of your activities .
And there were many , many others .
So it 's possible to fly almost like a bird .
What is it [ like ] to be up there ?
Yves Rossy : It 's fun . It 's fun .
I don 't have feathers .
But I feel like a bird sometimes .
It 's really an unreal feeling , because normally you have a big thing , a plane , around you .
And when I strap just these little harnesses , this little wing , I really have the feeling of being a bird .
How did you start to become Jetman ?
YR : It was about 20 years ago when I discovered free falling .
When you go out of an airplane you are almost naked .
You take a position like that .
And especially when you take a tracking position , you have the feeling that you are flying .
And that 's the nearest thing to the dream .
You have no machine around you .
You are just in the element .
It 's very short and only in one direction .
So the idea was , okay , keep that feeling of freedom , but change the vector and increase the time .
So I 'm kind of curious , what 's your top speed ?
YR : It 's about 300 km per hour before looping .
That means about 190 miles per hour .
And what 's the weight of the equipment you 're carrying ?
YR : When I exit full of kerosene , I 'm about 55 kilos .
I have 55 kilos on my back .
And you 're not piloting ?
There is no handle , no steering nothing ?
It is purely your body , and the wings become part of the body and vice versa ?
YR : That 's really the goal , because if you put [ in ] steering , then you reinvent the airplane .
And I wanted to keep this freedom of movement .
And it 's really like the kid playing the airplane .
I want to go down like that .
And up I climb , I turn .
It 's really pure flying .
It 's not steering , it 's flight .
What kind of training do you do , you personally , for that ?
YR : Actually , I try to stay just fit .
I don 't do special physical training .
Just , I try to keep my mobility through new activities .
For example , last winter I began with kite surfing -- so new things .
So you have to adapt .
Because this is -- I 'm quite an experienced manager of systems as a pilot , but this is really -- you need fluidity , you need to be agile and also to adapt really fast .
Somebody in the audience asked me , " How does he breathe up there ? "
because you 're going fast and you 're up 3,000 meters or so .
YR : Okay , up to 3,000 meters , it 's not such a big problem with oxygen .
But for example , bikers , they have the same speed .
Just with the helmet , integral helmet , it 's really no problem to breathe .
Describe for me the equipment since you have it here .
So Breitling 's four engines .
YR : Yeah , two-meter span .
Ultrastable profile .
Four little engines , 22 kilos thrust each , turbines working with kerosene .
Harness , parachute .
My only instruments are [ an ] altimeter and time .
I know I have about eight minutes fuel .
So just check before it 's finished .
And yeah , that 's all .
Two parachutes .
That means , if I have a problem with the first one I pull , I still have the possibility to open the second one .
And this is my life .
That 's the real important thing about safety .
I did use that during these last 15 years about 20 times -- never with that type of wing , but at the beginning .
I can release my wing when I am in a spin or unstable .
We saw the 2009 crossing of the Gibraltar Strait where you lost control and then you dived down into the clouds and in the ocean .
So that was one of those cases where you let the wings go , right ?
YR : Yeah . I did try in [ the ] clouds , but you lose [ orientation completely ] .
So I did try to take , again , a climb altitude .
I thought , okay , I will go out .
But most probably I did something like that .
Something that is not very safe in image .
YR : But you feel great , but you have not the right altitude .
So the next thing I saw was just blue .
It was the sea .
I have also an audible altimeter .
So I was at my minimum altitude in that vector -- fast -- so I pulled that .
And then I did open my chute .
So the wings have their own parachute , and you have your two parachutes .
YR : Exactly . There is a rescue parachute for the wing for two reasons : so I can repair it afterward and especially so nobody takes that , just on his head .
I see . Maybe come back here .
This is risky stuff indeed .
People have died trying to do this kind of thing .
And you don 't look like a crazy guy ; you 're a Swiss airline pilot , so you 're rather a checklist kind of guy .
I assume you have standards .
YR : Yeah . I have no checklist for that .
Let 's not tell you employer .
YR : No , that 's really two worlds .
Civil aviation is something that we know very well .
We have a hundred years of experience .
And you can adapt really precisely .
With that , I have to adapt to something new .
That means improvise .
So it 's really a play between these two approaches .
Something that I know very well -- these principles , for example , we have two engines on an Airbus ; with only one engine , you can fly it .
So plan B , always a plan B.
In a fighter , you have an ejection seat .
That 's my ejection seat .
So I have the approach of a professional pilot with the respect of a pioneer in front of Mother Nature .
It 's well said . It 's well said .
What happens if one of the engines stops ?
YR : I do a roll .
And then I stabilize , and according to my altitude , I continue on two or three engines .
It 's sometimes possible -- it 's quite complicated to explain -- but according to which regime I was , I can continue on two and try to get a nice place to land , and then I open my parachute .
So the beginning of the flight is actually you jump off a plane or a helicopter , and you go on a dive and accelerate the engines , and then you basically take off mid-air somewhere .
And then the landing , as we have seen , arriving on this side of the channel , is through a parachute .
So just as a curiosity , where did you land when you flew over the Grand Canyon ?
Did you land on the rim , down at the bottom ?
YR : It was down on the bottom .
And I came back afterward on the sled of the helicopter back .
But it was too stoney and full of cactus on top .
That 's exactly why I asked the question .
YR : And also the currents are quite funny there .
There is big thermal activity , big difference in altitude also .
So it was much safer for me to land at the bottom .
So I think that right now , many people in the audience are asking , " Okay , when are you developing a double-seater so they can fly with you ? "
YR : I have a standard answer .
Have you ever seen tandem birds ?
Perfect answer .
Yves , one last question .
What 's next for you ? What 's next for Jetman ?
YR : First , to instruct a younger guy .
I want to share it , to do formation flights .
And I plan to start from a cliff , like catapulted from a cliff .
So instead of jumping off a plane , yes ?
YR : Yes , with the final goal to take off , but with initial speed .
Really , I go step by step .
It seems a little bit crazy , but it 's not .
It 's possible to start already now , it 's just too dangerous .
Thanks to the increasing technology , better technology , it will be safe .
And I hope it will be for everybody .
Yves , thank you very much . Yves Rossy .
James B. Glattfelder : Who controls the world ?
James Glattfelder studies complexity : how an interconnected system -- say , a swarm of birds -- is more than the sum of its parts . And complexity theory , it turns out , can reveal a lot about how the economy works . Glattfelder shares a groundbreaking study of how control flows through the global economy , and how concentration of power in the hands of a shockingly small number leaves us all vulnerable .
" When the crisis came , the serious limitations of existing economic and financial models immediately became apparent . "
" There is also a strong belief , which I share , that bad or oversimplistic and overconfident economics helped create the crisis . "
Now , you 've probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism .
But this is different .
This is coming from the heart of finance .
The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank .
The second quote is from the head of the U.K. Financial Services Authority .
Are these people implying that we don 't understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies ?
It gets worse .
" We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe while we still don 't understand the conditions for a stable society , a functioning economy , or peace . "
What 's happening here ? How can this be possible ?
Do we really understand more about the fabric of reality than we do about the fabric which emerges from our human interactions ?
Unfortunately , the answer is yes .
But there 's an intriguing solution which is coming from what is known as the science of complexity .
To explain what this means and what this thing is , please let me quickly take a couple of steps back .
I ended up in physics by accident .
It was a random encounter when I was young , and since then , I 've often wondered about the amazing success of physics in describing the reality we wake up in every day .
In a nutshell , you can think of physics as follows .
So you take a chunk of reality you want to understand and you translate it into mathematics .
You encode it into equations .
Then predictions can be made and tested .
We 're actually really lucky that this works , because no one really knows why the thoughts in our heads should actually relate to the fundamental workings of the universe .
Despite the success , physics has its limits .
As Dirk Helbing pointed out in the last quote , we don 't really understand the complexity that relates to us , that surrounds us .
This paradox is what got me interested in complex systems .
So these are systems which are made up of many interconnected or interacting parts : swarms of birds or fish , ant colonies , ecosystems , brains , financial markets .
These are just a few examples .
Interestingly , complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations , so the usual physics approach doesn 't really work here .
So what do we know about complex systems ?
Well , it turns out that what looks like complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few simple rules of interaction .
This means you can forget about the equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the interactions , so you can actually forget about the equations and you just start to look at the interactions .
And it gets even better , because most complex systems have this amazing property called emergence .
So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking at the components of the system .
So the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts .
And all of this also means that you can forget about the individual parts of the system , how complex they are .
So if it 's a cell or a termite or a bird , you just focus on the rules of interaction .
As a result , networks are ideal representations of complex systems .
The nodes in the network are the system 's components and the links are given by the interactions .
So what equations are for physics , complex networks are for the study of complex systems .
This approach has been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics , biology , computer science , the social sciences , but what about economics ?
Where are economic networks ?
This is a surprising and prominent gap in the literature .
The study we published last year called " The Network of Global Corporate Control " was the first extensive analysis of economic networks .
The study went viral on the Internet and it attracted a lot of attention from the international media .
This is quite remarkable , because , again , why did no one look at this before ?
Similar data has been around for quite some time .
What we looked at in detail was ownership networks .
So here the nodes are companies , people , governments , foundations , etc .
And the links represent the shareholding relations , so Shareholder A has x percent of the shares in Company B.
And we also assign a value to the company given by the operating revenue .
So ownership networks reveal the patterns of shareholding relations .
In this little example , you can see a few financial institutions with some of the many links highlighted .
Now you may think that no one 's looked at this before because ownership networks are really , really boring to study .
Well , as ownership is related to control , as I shall explain later , looking at ownership networks actually can give you answers to questions like , who are the key players ?
How are they organized ? Are they isolated ?
Are they interconnected ?
And what is the overall distribution of control ?
In other words , who controls the world ?
I think this is an interesting question .
And it has implications for systemic risk .
This is a measure of how vulnerable a system is overall .
A high degree of interconnectivity can be bad for stability , because then the stress can spread through the system like an epidemic .
Scientists have sometimes criticized economists who believe ideas and concepts are more important than empirical data , because a foundational guideline in science is : Let the data speak . Okay . Let 's do that .
So we started with a database containing 13 million ownership relations from 2007 .
This is a lot of data , and because we wanted to find out who rules the world , we decided to focus on transnational corporations , or TNCs for short .
These are companies that operate in more than one country , and we found 43,000 .
In the next step , we built the network around these companies , so we took all the TNCs ' shareholders , and the shareholders ' shareholders , etc . , all the way upstream , and we did the same downstream , and ended up with a network containing 600,000 nodes and one million links .
This is the TNC network which we analyzed .
And it turns out to be structured as follows .
So you have a periphery and a center which contains about 75 percent of all the players , and in the center there 's this tiny but dominant core which is made up of highly interconnected companies .
To give you a better picture , think about a metropolitan area .
So you have the suburbs and the periphery , you have a center like a financial district , then the core will be something like the tallest high rise building in the center .
And we already see signs of organization going on here .
Thirty-six percent of the TNCs are in the core only , but they make up 95 percent of the total operating revenue of all TNCs .
Okay , so now we analyzed the structure , so how does this relate to the control ?
Well , ownership gives voting rights to shareholders .
This is the normal notion of control .
And there are different models which allow you to compute the control you get from ownership .
If you have more than 50 percent of the shares in a company , you get control , but usually it depends on the relative distribution of shares .
And the network really matters .
About 10 years ago , Mr. Tronchetti Provera had ownership and control in a small company , which had ownership and control in a bigger company .
You get the idea .
This ended up giving him control in Telecom Italia with a leverage of 26 .
So this means that , with each euro he invested , he was able to move 26 euros of market value through the chain of ownership relations .
Now what we actually computed in our study was the control over the TNCs ' value .
This allowed us to assign a degree of influence to each shareholder .
This is very much in the sense of Max Weber 's idea of potential power , which is the probability of imposing one 's own will despite the opposition of others .
If you want to compute the flow in an ownership network , this is what you have to do .
It 's actually not that hard to understand .
Let me explain by giving you this analogy .
So think about water flowing in pipes where the pipes have different thickness .
So similarly , the control is flowing in the ownership networks and is accumulating at the nodes .
So what did we find after computing all this network control ?
Well , it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to collectively control 80 percent of the TNCs ' value .
Now remember , we started out with 600,000 nodes , so these 737 top players make up a bit more than 0.1 percent .
They 're mostly financial institutions in the U.S. and the U.K.
And it gets even more extreme .
There are 146 top players in the core , and they together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the TNCs ' value .
What should you take home from all of this ?
Well , the high degree of control you saw is very extreme by any standard .
The high degree of interconnectivity of the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to the global economy and we could easily reproduce the TNC network with a few simple rules .
This means that its structure is probably the result of self-organization .
It 's an emergent property which depends on the rules of interaction in the system , so it 's probably not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy .
Our study " is an impression of the moon 's surface .
It 's not a street map . "
So you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt , yet it " gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of finance . "
We hope to have opened the door for more such research in this direction , so the remaining unknown terrain will be charted in the future .
And this is slowly starting .
We 're seeing the emergence of long-term and highly-funded programs which aim at understanding our networked world from a complexity point of view .
But this journey has only just begun , so we will have to wait before we see the first results .
Now there is still a big problem , in my opinion .
Ideas relating to finance , economics , politics , society , are very often tainted by people 's personal ideologies .
I really hope that this complexity perspective allows for some common ground to be found .
It would be really great if it has the power to help end the gridlock created by conflicting ideas , which appears to be paralyzing our globalized world .
Reality is so complex , we need to move away from dogma .
But this is just my own personal ideology .
Thank you .
Zainab Salbi : Women , wartime and the dream of peace
In war we often see only the frontline stories of soldiers and combat . AT TEDGlobal 2010 , Zainab Salbi tells powerful " backline " stories of women who keep everyday life going during conflicts , and calls for women to have a place at the negotiating table once fighting is over .
I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion .
It was deep at night .
I do not remember what time it was .
I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking .
Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart , my windows , my bed , everything .
I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion .
I thought it was just like the movies , but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray , and a full circle of explosion .
And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared .
I went back to my bed , and I prayed , and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family 's home , that it did not kill my family that night .
Thirty years have passed , and I still feel guilty about that prayer , for the next day , I learned that that missile landed on my brother 's friend 's home and killed him and his father , but did not kill his mother or his sister .
His mother showed up the next week at my brother 's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son , for she had lost everything .
This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war , and nameless refugees , whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes , dirty face , scared eyes .
This is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war , who we do not know their hopes , their dreams , their accomplishments , their families , their beliefs , their values .
This is my story .
I was that girl .
I am another image and vision of another survivor of war .
I am that refugee , and I am that girl .
You see , I grew up in war-torn Iraq , and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we 've only seen one side of it .
We only talk about one side of it .
But there 's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it .
I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood , the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile , so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it .
I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire , the wrenching booms of explosions , ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens .
These are the sounds you would expect , but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night , the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous , unbearable silence .
" War , " a friend of mine said , " is not about sound at all .
It is actually about silence , the silence of humanity . "
I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars .
In my travels and in my work , from Congo to Afghanistan , from Sudan to Rwanda , I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same , but the fears of war are the same .
You know , there is a fear of dying , and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid .
It is very scary to go through that feeling of " I am about to die " or " I could die in this explosion . "
But there 's also the fear of losing loved ones , and I think that 's even worse .
It 's too painful . You don 't want to think about it .
But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear -- as Samia , a Bosnian woman , once told me , who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo ; she said , " The fear of losing the ' I ' in me , the fear of losing the ' I ' in me . "
That 's what my mother in Iraq used to tell me .
It 's like dying from inside-out .
A Palestinian woman once told me , " It is not about the fear of one death , " she said , " sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day , " as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets .
She said , " But it 's not fair , because there is only one life , and there should only be one death . "
We have been only seeing one side of war .
We have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels , drawdown timelines , surges and sting operations , when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn , where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going .
We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics , tactics , weapons , dollars and casualties .
This is the language of sterility .
How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic .
This is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities .
Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children . Oh .
Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians .
Seventy-five percent of them are women and children .
How interesting .
Oh , half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days .
Or , as we speak now , hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated .
How interesting .
These just become numbers that we refer to .
The front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space , guiding missiles toward unseen targets , while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist .
It is a chess game .
You learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership .
Checkmate .
We are missing a completely other side of wars .
We are missing my mother 's story , who made sure with every siren , with every raid , with every cut off-of electricity , she played puppet shows for my brothers and I , so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions .
We are missing the story of Fareeda , a music teacher , a piano teacher , in Sarajevo , who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo and walked to that school , despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her , and kept the piano , the violin , the cello playing the whole duration of the war , with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats .
That was her fight .
That was her resistance .
We are missing the story of Nehia , a Palestinian woman in Gaza who , the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year 's war , she left out of home , collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have , in case there is no cease-fire the day after .
We are missing the stories of Violet , who , despite surviving genocide in the church massacre , she kept on going on , burying bodies , cleaning homes , cleaning the streets .
We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars .
Do you know -- do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going ?
And the ones who are keeping that life are women .
There are two sides of war .
There is a side that fights , and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open .
There is a side that is focused on winning battles , and there is a side that is focused on winning life .
There is a side that leads the front-line discussion , and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion .
There is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting , and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs .
There is a side that is led by men , and there is a side that is led by women .
And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace , we must understand war and peace from both sides .
We must have a full picture of what that means .
In order for us to understand what actually peace means , we need to understand , as one Sudanese woman once told me , " Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again . "
She grew up in Sudan , in Southern Sudan , for 20 years of war , where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees .
Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers , as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers .
So that woman walked for 20 years , so she would not be kidnapped again .
And only when there was some sort of peace , her toenails grew back again .
We need to understand peace from a toenail 's perspective .
We need to understand that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table .
I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping , and the group of people who are mostly -- though not exclusively -- who are keeping life going in the midst of war , are not included in the negotiating table .
And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion , but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion .
The doctors who are not fighting , the artists , the students , the men who refuse to pick up the guns , they are , too , excluded from the negotiating tables .
There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace , building of democracy , sustainable economies , any kind of stabilities , if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table .
Not one , but 50 percent .
There is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we don 't start investing in women and girls .
Did you know that one year of the world 's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women ?
If we just reverse that distribution of funds , perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world .
And last , but not least , we need to invest in peace and women , not only because it is the right thing to do , not only because it is the right thing to do , for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today , but it is for the future .
A Congolese woman , who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them , and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them , how they 're doing okay right now .
She got into Women for Women International 's program .
She got a support network .
She learned about her rights .
We taught her vocational and business skills . We helped her get a job .
She was earning 450 dollars . She was doing okay .
She was sending them to school . Have a new home .
She said , " But what I worry about the most is not any of that .
I worry that my children have hate in their hearts , and when they want to grow up , they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother . "
We need to invest in women , because that 's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future .
That mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do .
Are there good news ? Of course , there are good news . There are lots of good news .
To start with , these women that I told you about are dancing and singing every single day , and if they can , who are we not to dance ?
That girl that I told you about ended up starting Women for Women International Group that impacted one million people , sent 80 million dollars , and I started this from zero , nothing , nada , [ unclear ] .
They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances , not because of it .
Think of how the world can be a much better place if , for a change , we have a better equality , we have equality , we have a representation and we understand war , both from the front-line and the back-line discussion .
Rumi , a 13th-century Sufi poet , says , " Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings , there is a field .
I will meet you there .
When the soul lies down in that grass , the world is too full to talk about .
Ideas , language , even the phrase ' each other ' no longer makes any sense . "
I humbly add -- humbly add -- that out beyond the worlds of war and peace , there is a field , and there are many women and men [ who ] are meeting there .
Let us make this field a much bigger place .
Let us all meet in that field .
Thank you .
Jessica Green : Are we filtering the wrong microbes ?
Should we keep the outdoors out of hospitals ? Ecologist and TED Fellow Jessica Green has found that mechanical ventilation does get rid of many types of microbes , but the wrong kinds : the ones left in the hospital are much more likely to be pathogens .
Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors , where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye : microorganisms .
Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us , and some that are bad for us .
What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors ?
Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems .
And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures .
The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans , and with the human-built environment .
And today , architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us .
We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments , like this building here -- environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering , heating and air conditioning .
Given the amount of time that we spend indoors , it 's important to understand how this affects our health .
At the Biology and the Built Environment Center , we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air .
And we looked at three different types of rooms .
We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated , which are the data points in the blue .
We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated , where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable , but they made them operable for our study .
And we also sampled the outdoor air .
If you look at the x-axis of this graph , you 'll see that what we commonly want to do -- which is keeping the outdoors out -- we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation .
So if you look at the green data points , which is air that 's outside , you 'll see that there 's a large amount of microbial diversity , or variety of microbial types .
But if you look at the blue data points , which is mechanically ventilated air , it 's not as diverse .
But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health .
If you look at the y-axis of this graph , you 'll see that , in the mechanically ventilated air , you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen , or germ , than if you 're outdoors .
So to understand why this was the case , we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram , which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples .
The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart .
And the first things that you can see from this graph is , if you look at the blue data points , which are the mechanically ventilated air , they 're not simply a subset of the green data points , which are the outdoor air .
What we 've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans .
It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth , our spit .
And this is because we 're all constantly shedding microbes .
So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another .
And when you 're outdoors , that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt .
Why does this matter ?
It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States .
Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings .
And the model that we 're working with in hospitals , and also with many , many different buildings , is to keep the outdoors out .
And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health .
And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections , or hospital-acquired infections , this is a clue that it 's a good time to reconsider our current practices .
So just as we manage national parks , where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others , we 're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors .
I 've heard somebody say that you 're as healthy as your gut .
And for this reason , many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora .
And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside .
Thank you .
Bill Gates : Teachers need real feedback
Until recently , many teachers only got one word of feedback a year : " satisfactory . " And with no feedback , no coaching , there 's just no way to improve . Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback -- and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom .
Everyone needs a coach .
It doesn 't matter whether you 're a basketball player , a tennis player , a gymnast or a bridge player .
My bridge coach , Sharon Osberg , says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else 's in the world .
Sorry , Sharon . Here you go .
We all need people who will give us feedback .
That 's how we improve .
Unfortunately , there 's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better , and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world .
I 'm talking about teachers .
When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get , we were blown away .
Until recently , over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback : Satisfactory .
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was " satisfactory , " I would have no hope of ever getting better .
How would I know who was the best ?
How would I know what I was doing differently ?
Today , districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers , but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice .
Our teachers deserve better .
The system we have today isn 't fair to them .
It 's not fair to students , and it 's putting America 's global leadership at risk .
So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve .
Let 's start by asking who 's doing well .
Well , unfortunately there 's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems .
So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically , and looked at what they 're doing to help their teachers improve .
Consider the rankings for reading proficiency .
The U.S. isn 't number one .
We 're not even in the top 10 .
We 're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland .
Now , out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading , how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve ?
Eleven out of 14 .
The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading , but we 're 23rd in science and 31st in math .
So there 's really only one area where we 're near the top , and that 's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills .
Let 's look at the best academic performer : the province of Shanghai , China .
Now , they rank number one across the board , in reading , math and science , and one of the keys to Shanghai 's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving .
They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work .
They have weekly study groups , where teachers get together and talk about what 's working .
They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues .
You might ask , why is a system like this so important ?
It 's because there 's so much variation in the teaching profession .
Some teachers are far more effective than others .
In fact , there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains .
If today 's average teacher could become as good as those teachers , our students would be blowing away the rest of the world .
So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best .
What would that system look like ?
Well , to find out , our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching .
We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices .
For example , did they ask their students challenging questions ?
Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea ?
We also had students fill out surveys with questions like , " Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson ? "
" Do you learn to correct your mistakes ? "
And what we found is very exciting .
First , the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes .
So it tells us we 're asking the right questions .
And second , teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools , because they pointed to specific places where they can improve .
I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action .
Sarah Brown Wessling : Good morning everybody .
Let 's talk about what 's going on today .
To get started , we 're doing a peer review day , okay ?
A peer review day , and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays .
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling .
I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston , Iowa .
Turn to somebody next to you .
Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove . I 've talk about -- I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it .
Okay , so I would like you to please bring up your papers .
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality .
You can 't really dispute what you see on the video , and there is a lot to be learned from that , and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this .
I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens .
At the beginning of class , I just perch it in the back of the classroom . It 's not a perfect shot .
It doesn 't catch every little thing that 's going on .
But I can hear the sound . I can see a lot .
And I 'm able to learn a lot from it .
So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection .
All right , let 's take a look at the long one first , okay ?
Once I 'm finished taping , then I put it in my computer , and then I 'll scan it and take a peek at it .
If I don 't write things down , I don 't remember them .
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process , and I discover what I 'm seeing as I 'm writing .
I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management , and just all of those different facets of the classroom .
I 'm glad that we 've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works , what doesn 't .
I think that video exposes so much of what 's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand , and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about .
I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan , things you cannot convey in a standard , things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy .
Alrighty , everybody , have a great weekend .
I 'll see you later .
[ Every classroom could look like that ] Bill Gates : One day , we 'd like every classroom in America to look something like that .
But we still have more work to do .
Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle .
We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis .
If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions , you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions .
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won 't be easy .
For example , I know some teachers aren 't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom .
That 's understandable , but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process , if they collect video in their own classrooms , and they pick the lessons they want to submit , a lot of them will be eager to participate .
Building this system will also require a considerable investment .
Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars .
Now that 's a big number , but to put it in perspective , it 's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries .
The impact for teachers would be phenomenal .
We would finally have a way to give them feedback , as well as the means to act on it .
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country .
It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education , find a career that 's fulfilling and rewarding , and have a chance to live out their dreams .
This wouldn 't just make us a more successful country .
It would also make us a more fair and just one , too .
I 'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve .
I hope you are too .
Thank you .
Pico Iyer : Where is home ?
More and more people worldwide are living in countries not considered their own . Writer Pico Iyer -- who himself has three or four " origins " -- meditates on the meaning of home , the joy of traveling and the serenity of standing still .
Where do you come from ?
It 's such a simple question , but these days , of course , simple questions bring ever more complicated answers .
People are always asking me where I come from , and they 're expecting me to say India , and they 're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India .
Except , I 've never lived one day of my life there .
I can 't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects .
So I don 't think I 've really earned the right to call myself an Indian .
And if " Where do you come from ? "
means " Where were you born and raised and educated ? "
then I 'm entirely of that funny little country known as England , except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education , and all the time I was growing up , I was the only kid in all my classes who didn 't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks .
And if " Where do you come from ? "
means " Where do you pay your taxes ?
Where do you see your doctor and your dentist ? "
then I 'm very much of the United States , and I have been for 48 years now , since I was a really small child .
Except , for many of those years , I 've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien .
I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there .
And if " Where do you come from ? "
means " Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time ? "
then I 'm Japanese , because I 've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan .
Except , all of those years I 've been there on a tourist visa , and I 'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them .
And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is , because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver , most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am .
And they have one home associated with their parents , but another associated with their partners , a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be , a fourth connected with the place they dream of being , and many more besides .
And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole .
Home for them is really a work in progress .
It 's like a project on which they 're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections .
And for more and more of us , home has really less to do with a piece of soil than , you could say , with a piece of soul .
If somebody suddenly asks me , " Where 's your home ? "
I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be .
And I 'd always felt this way , but it really came home to me , as it were , some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents ' house in California , and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames , one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places .
And three hours later , that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash .
And when I woke up the next morning , I was sleeping on a friend 's floor , the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket .
Of course , if anybody asked me then , " Where is your home ? "
I literally couldn 't point to any physical construction .
My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me .
And in so many ways , I think this is a terrific liberation .
Because when my grandparents were born , they pretty much had their sense of home , their sense of community , even their sense of enmity , assigned to them at birth , and didn 't have much chance of stepping outside of that .
And nowadays , at least some of us can choose our sense of home , create our sense of community , fashion our sense of self , and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents ' age .
No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan , partly raised in Indonesia , has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law .
The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million , and that 's an almost unimaginable number , but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number , you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe .
And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly , by 64 million just in the last 12 years , that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans .
Already , we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth .
And in fact , in Canada 's largest city , Toronto , the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner , somebody born in a very different country .
And I 've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake .
You can 't take anything for granted .
Travel , for me , is a little bit like being in love , because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked " on . "
Suddenly you 're alert to the secret patterns of the world .
The real voyage of discovery , as Marcel Proust famously said , consists not in seeing new sights , but in looking with new eyes .
And of course , once you have new eyes , even the old sights , even your home become something different .
Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home .
But for the fortunate among us , I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities .
Certainly when I 'm traveling , especially to the major cities of the world , the typical person I meet today will be , let 's say , a half-Korean , half-German young woman living in Paris .
And as soon as she meets a half-Thai , half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh , she recognizes him as kin .
She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany .
So they become friends . They fall in love .
They move to New York City .
Or Edinburgh .
And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American , but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places .
And potentially , everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world , writes about the world , thinks about the world , could be something different , because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures .
Where you come from now is much less important than where you 're going .
More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past .
And home , we know , is not just the place where you happen to be born .
It 's the place where you become yourself .
And yet , there is one great problem with movement , and that is that it 's really hard to get your bearings when you 're in midair .
Some years ago , I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone .
You all know that crazy system , six days in hell , you get the seventh day free .
And I began to think that really , movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective .
And eight months after my house burned down , I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school , and he said , " I 've got the perfect place for you . "
" Really ? " I said . I 'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that .
" No , honestly , " he went on , " it 's only three hours away by car , and it 's not very expensive , and it 's probably not like anywhere you 've stayed before . "
" Hmm . " I was beginning to get slightly intrigued . " What is it ? "
" Well — " Here my friend hemmed and hawed — " Well , actually it 's a Catholic hermitage . "
This was the wrong answer .
I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools , so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime .
Several lifetimes , actually .
But my friend assured me that he wasn 't Catholic , nor were most of his students , but he took his classes there every spring .
And as he had it , even the most restless , distractible , testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out .
He found himself .
And I thought , " Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me . "
So I got in my car , and I drove three hours north along the coast , and the roads grew emptier and narrower , and then I turned onto an even narrower path , barely paved , that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain .
And when I got out of my car , the air was pulsing .
The whole place was absolutely silent , but the silence wasn 't an absence of noise .
It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening .
And at my feet was the great , still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean .
All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush .
And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping .
Small but eminently comfortable , it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small , private , walled garden , and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea .
And I sat down , and I began to write , and write , and write , even though I 'd gone there really to get away from my desk .
And by the time I got up , four hours had passed .
Night had fallen , and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars , and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south .
And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing .
And the next day , when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops , the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours .
It was really all the freedom I know when I 'm traveling , but it also profoundly felt like coming home .
And I 'm not a religious person , so I didn 't go to the services .
I didn 't consult the monks for guidance .
I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones .
I looked at the clouds , and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually , which is nothing at all .
And I started to go back to this place , and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still , and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment .
And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness , but of course I couldn 't hear it because I was running around so much .
I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can 't see a thing .
And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca , in which he says , " That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more . "
And , of course , I 'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery .
That 's not the point .
But I do think it 's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go .
And it 's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home .
And I 've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices , or go running every evening , or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend .
Movement is a fantastic privilege , and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing .
But movement , ultimately , only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to .
And home , in the end , is of course not just the place where you sleep .
It 's the place where you stand .
Thank you .
Mena Trott : Meet the founder of the blog revolution
The founding mother of the blog revolution , Movable Type 's Mena Trott , talks about the early days of blogging , when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier , more connected world .
Over the past couple of days as I 've been preparing for my speech , I 've become more and more nervous about what I 'm going to say and about being on the same stage as all these fascinating people .
Being on the same stage as Al Gore , who was the first person I ever voted for .
And -- So I was getting pretty nervous and , you know , I didn 't know that Chris sits on the stage , and that 's more nerve wracking .
But then I started thinking about my family .
I started thinking about my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather , and I realized that I had all of these Teds going through my blood stream -- -- that I had to consider this " my element . "
So , who am I ?
Chris kind of mentioned I started a company with my husband .
We have about 125 people internationally .
If you looked in the book , you saw this , which I really was appalled by .
And because I wanted to impress you all with slides , since I saw the great presentations yesterday with graphs , I made a graph that moves , and I talk about the makeup of me .
So , besides this freakish thing , this is my science slide . This is math , and this is science ; this is genetics .
This is my grandmother , and this is where I get this mouth .
I 'm a blogger , which , probably to a lot of you , means different things .
You may have heard about the Kryptonite lock brouhaha , where a blogger talked about how you hack , or break into , a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen , and it spread all over . Kryptonite had to adjust the lock , and they had to address it to avoid too many customer concerns .
You may have heard about Rathergate , which was basically the result of bloggers realizing that the " th " in 111 is not typesetted on an old typewriter ; it 's on Word .
Bloggers exposed this , or they worked hard to expose this .
You know , blogs are scary . This is what you see .
I see this , and I 'm sure scared -- and I swear on stage -- shitless about blogs , because this is not something that 's friendly .
But there are blogs that are changing the way we read news and consume media , and , you know , these are great examples . These people are reaching thousands , if not millions , of readers , and that 's incredibly important .
During the hurricane , you had MSNBC posting about the hurricane on their blog , updating it frequently . This was possible because of the easy nature of blogging tools .
You have my friend , who has a blog on digital -- on PDRs , personal recorders .
He makes enough money , just by running ads , to support his family up in Oregon .
That 's all he does now , and this is something that blogs have made possible .
And then you have something like this , which is Interplast .
It 's a wonderful organization of people and doctors who go to developing nations to offer plastic surgery to those who need it .
Children with cleft palates will get it , and they document their story . This is wonderful .
I am not that caring .
I talk about myself . That 's what I am . I 'm a blogger .
I have always decided that I was going to be an expert on one thing , and I am an expert on this person , and so I write about it .
And -- the short story about my blog : it started in 2001 . I was 23 .
I wasn 't happy with my job , because I was a designer , but I wasn 't being really stimulated .
I was an English major in college . I didn 't have any use for it , but I missed writing . So , I started to write a blog and I started to create things like these little stories .
This was an illustration about my camp experience when I was 11 years old , and how I went to a YMCA camp -- Christian camp -- and basically by the end , I had made my friends hate me so much that I hid in a bunk . They couldn 't find me .
They sent a search party , and I overheard people saying they wish I had killed myself , jumped off Bible Peak .
You can laugh , this is OK .
This is me .
This is what happened to me .
And when I started my blog it was really this one goal -- I said , I am not going to be famous to the world , but I could be famous to people on the Internet .
And I set a goal . I said , " I 'm going to win an award , " because I had never won an award in my entire life .
And I said , " I 'm going to win this award -- the South by Southwest Weblog award . "
And I won it . I reached all of these people , and I had tens of thousands of people reading about my life everyday .
And then I wrote a post about a banjo .
I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo -- a $ 300 banjo , which is a lot of money , and I don 't play instruments ; I don 't know anything about music .
I like music , and I like banjos , and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing , and I said , " I could do that . "
And I said to my husband , I said , " Ben , can I buy a banjo ? " And he 's like , " No . "
And my husband -- this is my husband , who is very hot -- he won an award for being hot -- -- he told me , " You cannot buy a banjo .
You 're just like your dad , " who " collects " instruments .
And I wrote a post about how I was so mad at him ; he was such a tyrant because he would not let me buy this banjo .
And those people who know me understood my joke .
This is Mena , this is how I make a joke at people .
Because the joke in this is that this person is not a tyrant : this person is so loving and so sweet that he lets me dress him up and post pictures of him to my blog .
And if he knew I was showing this right now -- I put this in today -- he would kill me .
But the thing was , I wrote this , and my friends read it , and they 're like , " Oh , that Mena , she wrote a post about , you know , wanting a stupid thing and being stupid . "
But I got emails from people that said , " Oh my God , your husband is such an asshole .
How much money does he spend on beer in a year ?
You could take that money and buy your banjo .
Why don 't you open a separate account ? "
I 've been with him since I was 17 years old . We 've never had a separate bank account .
They said , " Separate your bank account -- spend your money ; spend his money . That 's it . "
And then I got people saying , " Leave him . "
And -- I was like , " OK , what , who are these people ?
And why are they reading this ? "
And I realized : I don 't want to reach these people .
I don 't want to write for this public audience .
And I started to kill my blog slowly .
I 'm like , I don 't want to write this anymore , and I slowly and slowly -- And I did tell personal stories from time to then .
I wrote this one , and I put this up because of Einstein today .
And I 'm going to get choked up , because this is my first pet , and she passed away two years ago .
And I decided to break from , " I don 't really write about my public life , " because I wanted to give her a little memorial .
But anyways .
It 's these sort of personal stories . You know , you read the blogs about politics , or about media , and gossip and all these things .
These are out there , but it 's more of the personal that interests me , and this is -- this is who I am .
You see Norman Rockwell . And you have art critics say , " Norman Rockwell is not art .
Norman Rockwell hangs in living rooms and bathrooms , and this is not something to be considered high art . "
And I think this is one of the most important things to us as humans .
These things resonate with us , and , if you think about blogs , you think of high art blogs , the history paintings about , you know , all biblical stories , and then you have this .
These are the blogs that interest me : the people who just tell stories .
One story is about this baby , and his name is Odin .
His father was a blogger .
And he was writing his blog one day , and his wife gave birth to her baby at 25 weeks .
And he never expected this .
One day it was normal ; the next day it was hell .
And this is a one-pound baby .
So Odin was documented every single day .
Pictures were taken every day : day one , day two ...
You have day nine -- they 're talking about his apnea ; day 39 -- he gets pneumonia .
His baby is so small , and I 've never encountered such a just -- a disturbing image , but just -- just so heartfelt .
You 're reading this as this happens , so on day 55 , everybody reads that he 's having failures : breathing failures and heart failures , and it 's slowing down , and you don 't know what to expect .
But then it gets better . Day 96 he goes home .
And you see this post .
That 's not something that you 're going to see in a paper or a magazine but this is something that this person feels , and people are excited about it .
Twenty-eight comments . That 's not a huge amount of people reading , but 28 people matter .
And today he is a healthy baby , who , if you read his blog -- it 's Snowdeal.org , his father 's blog -- he is taking pictures of him still , because he is still his son and he is , I think , at his age level right now because he had received such great treatment from the hospital .
So , blogs .
So what ? You 've probably heard these things before .
We talked about the WELL , and we talked about all these sort of things throughout our online history .
But I think blogs are basically just an evolution , and that 's where we are today .
It 's this record of who you are , your persona .
You have your Google search where you say , " Hey , what is Mena Trott ? "
And then you find these things and you 're happy or unhappy .
But then you also find people 's blogs , and those are the records of people who are writing daily -- not necessarily about the same topic , but things that interest them .
And we talk about the world flattens as being this panel , and I am very optimistic .
Whenever I think about blogs I 'm like , " Oh , we 've got to reach all these people . "
Millions and hundreds of millions and billions of people .
You know , we 're getting into China , we want to be there , but you know , there are so many people who won 't have the access to write a blog .
But to see something like the $ 100 computer is amazing , because it 's a -- blogging software is simple .
We have a successful company because of timing , and because of perseverance , but it 's simple stuff -- it 's not rocket science .
And so , that 's an amazing thing to consider .
So , the life record of a blog is something that I find incredibly important .
We started with a slide of my Teds , and I had to add this slide , because I knew that the minute I showed this , my mom -- my mom will see this deck somehow , because she does read my blog -- and she 'll say , " Why wasn 't there a picture of me ? "
This is my mom . So , I have all of the people that I know of .
But this is basically the extent of the family that I know in terms of my direct line .
I showed a Norman Rockwell painting before , and this one I grew up with , looking at constantly .
I would spend hours looking at just the connections , saying , " Oh , the little kid up at the top has red hair ; so does that first generation up there . "
And just these little things .
to be really so interested in how we have evolved and how we can trace our line .
So , that has always influenced me .
I have this record , this 1910 census of another Grabowski -- that 's my maiden name -- and there 's a Theodore , because there 's always a Theodore .
This is all I have . I have a couple of facts about somebody .
I have their date of birth , and their age , and what they did in their household , if they spoke English , and that 's it . That 's all I know of these people .
And it 's pretty sad , because I only go back five generations , and then it 's it . I don 't even know what happens on my mom 's side , because she 's from Cuba and I don 't have that many things .
And just doing this I spent time in the archives -- that 's another thing why my husband 's a saint -- I spent time in the Washington archives , just sitting there , looking for these things . Now it 's online , but he sat through that .
And so you have this record and , you know , this is my great-great-grandmother .
This is the only picture I have . And to think of what we have the ability to do with our blogs ; to think about the people who are on those $ 100 computers talking about who they are , sharing these personal stories -- this is an amazing thing .
Another photo that has greatly influenced me , or a series of photos , is this project that 's done by an Argentinean man and his wife .
And he 's basically taking a picture of his family everyday for the past , what is ' 76 -- 20 , oh my God , I 'm ' 77 -- 29 years ? Twenty-nine years .
There was a joke , originally , about my graph that I left out , which is : you see all this math ? I 'm just happy I was able to add it up to 100 , because that 's my skill set .
So you have these people aging , and now this is them today , or last year , and that 's a powerful thing to have , to be able to track this .
I wish that I would have this of my family .
I know that one day my children will be wondering -- or my grandchildren , or my great-grandchildren , if I ever have children -- what I am going to -- who I was , so I do something that 's very narcissistic : I am a blogger -- that is an amazing thing for me , because it captures a moment in time everyday .
I take a picture of myself -- I 've been doing this since last year -- every single day .
And , you know , it 's the same picture ; it 's basically the same person .
Only a couple of people read it . I don 't write this for this audience ; I 'm showing it now , but I would go insane if this was really public .
About four people probably read it , and they tell me , you know , " You haven 't updated " -- I 'm probably going to get people telling me I haven 't updated -- but this is something that 's amazing , because I can go back to a day -- I can go back to April 2005 , and say , what was I doing this day ? I look at it , I know exactly .
It 's this visual cue that is so important to what we do .
I put the bad pictures up too , because there are bad pictures .
And I remember instantly : I am in Germany in this -- I had to go for a one-day trip .
I was sick , and I was in a hotel room , and I wanted not to be there . And so you see these things .
It 's not just always smiling . Now I 've kind of evolved it , so I have this look .
If you look at my driver 's license I have the same look , and it 's -- it 's -- a pretty disturbing thing but it 's something that is really important .
And the last story I really want to tell is this story , because this is probably the one that means the most to me in all of what I 'm doing .
And I 'll probably get choked up , because I tend to when I talk about this .
So , this woman , her name was Emma , and she was a blogger on our service , TypePad . And she was a beta tester , so she was there right when we opened -- you know , there were 100 people -- and she wrote about her life dealing with cancer .
She was writing and writing and writing , and we all started reading it , because we had so few blogs on the service , we could keep track of everyone .
And she was writing one day , and , you know , then she disappeared for a little bit .
And her sister came on , and she said that Emma had passed away . And all of our support staff who had talked to her were really emotional , and it was a very hard day at the company .
And this was one of those instances where I realized how much blogging affects our relationship , and flattening this sort of world .
That this woman is in England , and she lives -- she lived a life where she was talking about what she was doing .
But the big thing that really influenced us was , her sister wrote to me , and she said , you know , and she wrote on this blog , that -- writing her blog during the last couple of months of her life was probably the best thing that had happened to her , and being able to talk to people , being able to share what was going on , and being able to write and receive comments .
And that was amazing -- to be able to know that we had empowered that , and that blogging was something that she felt comfortable doing , and that the idea that blogging doesn 't have to be scary , that we don 't always have to be attack of the blogs , that we can be people who are open , and wanting to help and talk to people .
That was an amazing thing .
And -- and so I printed out her -- or I sent a PDF of her blog to her family , and they passed it out at her memorial service , and even in her obituary , they mentioned her blog because it was such a big part of her life .
And that 's a huge thing .
So , this is her legacy , and I think that my call to action to all of you is : you know , think about blogs , think about what they are , think about what you 've thought of them , and then actually do it , because it 's something that is really going to change our lives .
So , thank you .
James Geary : Metaphorically speaking
Aphorism enthusiast and author James Geary waxes on a fascinating fixture of human language : the metaphor . Friend of scribes from Aristotle to Elvis , metaphor can subtly influence the decisions we make , Geary says .
Metaphor lives a secret life all around us .
We utter about six metaphors a minute .
Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others , how we communicate , learn , discover and invent .
But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words .
Now , to assist me in explaining this , I 've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers , the reigning king of the metaphorians , a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor .
I am , of course , referring to none other than Elvis Presley .
Now , " All Shook Up " is a great love song .
It 's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract -- ideas , emotions , feelings , concepts , thoughts -- we inevitably resort to metaphor .
In " All Shook Up , " a touch is not a touch , but a chill .
Lips are not lips , but volcanoes .
She is not she , but a buttercup .
And love is not love , but being all shook up .
In this , Elvis is following Aristotle 's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else .
This is the mathematics of metaphor .
And fortunately it 's very simple .
X equals Y.
This formula works wherever metaphor is present .
Elvis uses it , but so does Shakespeare in this famous line from " Romeo and Juliet : " Juliet is the sun .
Now , here , Shakespeare gives the thing , Juliet , a name that belongs to something else , the sun .
But whenever we give a thing a name that belongs to something else , we give it a whole network of analogies too .
We mix and match what we know about the metaphor 's source , in this case the sun , with what we know about its target , Juliet .
And metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of Juliet than if Shakespeare had literally described what she looks like .
So , how do we make and understand metaphors ?
This might look familiar .
The first step is pattern recognition .
Look at this image . What do you see ?
Three wayward Pac-Men , and three pointy brackets are actually present .
What we see , however , are two overlapping triangles .
Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns ; it is the creation of patterns .
Second step , conceptual synesthesia .
Now , synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well , such as colored hearing .
People with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters .
We all have synesthetic abilities .
This is the Bouba / Kiki test .
What you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called Bouba , and which is called Kiki .
If you are like 98 percent of other people , you will identify the round , amoeboid shape as Bouba , and the sharp , spiky one as Kiki .
Can we do a quick show of hands ?
Does that correspond ?
Okay , I think 99.9 would about cover it .
Why do we do that ?
Because we instinctively find , or create , a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of Bouba , and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of Kiki .
And many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic .
Silence is sweet .
Neckties are loud .
Sexually attractive people are hot .
Sexually unattractive people leave us cold .
Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia , in which we understand one concept in the context of another .
Third step is cognitive dissonance .
This is the Stroop test .
What you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed .
You can take the test now .
If you 're like most people , you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink .
The test shows that we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer .
Stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well .
The participants had to identify , as quickly as possible , the literally false sentences .
They took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences .
Why ? Because we cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either .
One of the sentences was , " Some jobs are jails . "
Now , unless you 're a prison guard , the sentence " Some jobs are jails " is literally false .
Sadly , it 's metaphorically true .
And the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false .
Metaphor matters because it 's around us every day , all the time .
Metaphor matters because it creates expectations .
Pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news .
Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing , as in , " The NASDAQ climbed higher . "
Object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things , as in , " The Dow fell like a brick . "
Researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries , and then predict the next day 's price trend .
Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue .
And they had those expectations because agent metaphors imply the deliberate action of a living thing pursuing a goal .
If , for example , house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing , higher and higher , people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable .
They may feel confident , say , in taking out mortgages they really can 't afford .
That 's a hypothetical example of course .
But this is how metaphor misleads .
Metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies .
A group of students was told that a small democratic country had been invaded and had asked the U.S. for help .
And they had to make a decision .
What should they do ?
Intervene , appeal to the U.N. , or do nothing ?
They were each then given one of three descriptions of this hypothetical crisis .
Each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy : World War II , Vietnam , and the third was historically neutral .
Those exposed to the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others .
Just as we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words , we cannot ignore the analogies that are triggered by metaphor .
Metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery .
Whenever we solve a problem , or make a discovery , we compare what we know with what we don 't know .
And the only way to find out about the latter is to investigate the ways it might be like the former .
Einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play .
He famously used thought experiments , which are essentially elaborate analogies , to come up with some of his greatest discoveries .
By bringing together what we know and what we don 't know through analogy , metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery .
Now metaphor is ubiquitous , yet it 's hidden .
But you just have to look at the words around you and you 'll find it .
Ralph Waldo Emerson described language as " fossil poetry . "
But before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor .
And these fossils still breathe .
Take the three most famous words in all of Western philosophy : " Cogito ergo sum . "
That 's routinely translated as , " I think , therefore I am . "
But there is a better translation .
The Latin word " cogito " is derived from the prefix " co , " meaning " together , " and the verb " agitare , " meaning " to shake . "
So , the original meaning of " cogito " is to shake together .
And the proper translation of " cogito ergo sum " is " I shake things up , therefore I am . "
Metaphor shakes things up , giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process .
The mind is a plastic snow dome , the most beautiful , most interesting , and most itself , when , as Elvis put it , it 's all shook up .
And metaphor keeps the mind shaking , rattling and rolling , long after Elvis has left the building .
Thank you very much .
Chris Abani : On humanity
Chris Abani tells stories of people : People standing up to soldiers . People being compassionate . People being human and reclaiming their humanity . It 's " ubuntu , " he says : the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me .
My search is always to find ways to chronicle , to share and to document stories about people , just everyday people .
Stories that offer transformation , that lean into transcendence , but that are never sentimental , that never look away from the darkest things about us .
Because I really believe that we 're never more beautiful than when we 're most ugly .
Because that 's really the moment we really know what we 're made of .
As Chris said , I grew up in Nigeria with a whole generation -- in the ' 80s -- of students who were protesting a military dictatorship , which has finally ended .
So it wasn 't just me , there was a whole generation of us .
But what I 've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures , but in the simple accumulation of gentle , soft , almost invisible acts of compassion , everyday acts of compassion .
In South Africa , they have a phrase called Ubuntu .
Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says , the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me .
But if you 're like me , my humanity is more like a window .
I don 't really see it , I don 't pay attention to it until there 's , you know , like a bug that 's dead on the window .
Then suddenly I see it , and usually , it 's never good .
It 's usually when I 'm cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes .
So what Ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people .
It 's really very simple , but really very complicated .
So , I thought I should start with some stories .
I should tell you some stories about remarkable people , so I thought I 'd start with my mother .
And she was dark , too .
My mother was English .
My parents met in Oxford in the ' 50s , and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there .
She was five foot two , very feisty and very English .
This is how English my mother is -- or was , she just passed .
She came out to California , to Los Angeles , to visit me , and we went to Malibu , which she thought was very disappointing .
And then we went to a fish restaurant , and we had Chad , the surfer dude , serving us , and he came up and my mother said , " Do you have any specials , young man ? "
And Chad says , " Sure , like , we have this , like , salmon , that 's , like , rolled in this , like , wasabi , like , crust .
It 's totally rad . "
And my mother turned to me and said , " What language is he speaking ? "
I said , " English , mum . "
And she shook her head and said , " Oh , these Americans . We gave them a language , why don 't they use it ? "
So , this woman , who converted from the Church of England to Catholicism when she married my father -- and there 's no one more rabid than a Catholic convert -- decided to teach in the rural areas in Nigeria , particularly among Igbo women , the Billings ovulation method , which was the only approved birth control by the Catholic Church .
But her Igbo wasn 't too good .
So she took me along to translate .
I was seven .
So , here are these women , who never discuss their period with their husbands , and here I am telling them , " Well , how often do you get your period ? "
And , " Do you notice any discharges ? "
And , " How swollen is your vulva ? "
She never would have thought of herself as a feminist , my mother , but she always used to say , " Anything a man can do , I can fix . "
And when my father complained about this situation , where she 's taking a seven-year-old boy to teach this birth control , you know , he used to say , " Oh , you 're turning him into -- you 're teaching him how to be a woman . "
My mother said , " Someone has to . "
This woman -- during the Biafran war , we were caught in the war .
It was my mother with five little children .
It takes her one year , through refugee camp after refugee camp , to make her way to an airstrip where we can fly out of the country .
At every single refugee camp , she has to face off soldiers who want to take my elder brother Mark , who was nine , and make him a boy soldier .
Can you imagine this five-foot-two woman , standing up to men with guns who want to kill us ?
All through that one year , my mother never cried one time , not once .
But when we were in Lisbon , in the airport , about to fly to England , this woman saw my mother wearing this dress , which had been washed so many times it was basically see through , with five really hungry-looking kids , came over and asked her what had happened .
And she told this woman .
And so this woman emptied out her suitcase and gave all of her clothes to my mother , and to us , and the toys of her kids , who didn 't like that very much , but -- -- that was the only time she cried .
And I remember years later , I was writing about my mother , and I asked her , " Why did you cry then ? "
And she said , " You know , you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble , any kind of horror .
But the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you . "
The old women in my father 's village , after this war had happened , memorized the names of every dead person , and they would sing these dirges , made up of these names .
Dirges so melancholic that they would scorch you .
And they would sing them only when they planted the rice , as though they were seeding the hearts of the dead into the rice .
But when it came for harvest time , they would sing these joyful songs , that were made up of the names of every child who had been born that year .
And then the next planting season , when they sang the dirge , they would remove as many names of the dead that equaled as many people that were born .
And in this way , these women enacted a lot of transformation , beautiful transformation .
Did you know , that before the genocide in Rwanda , the word for rape and the word for marriage was the same one ?
But today , women are rebuilding Rwanda .
Did you also know that after apartheid , when the new government went into the parliament houses , there were no female toilets in the building ?
Which would seem to suggest that apartheid was entirely the business of men .
All of this to say , that despite the horror , and despite the death , women are never really counted .
Their humanity never seems to matter very much to us .
When I was growing up in Nigeria -- and I shouldn 't say Nigeria , because that 's too general , but in Afikpo , the Igbo part of the country where I 'm from -- there were always rites of passage for young men .
Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women , that 's essentially what it is .
And a lot of rituals involved killing , killing little animals , progressing along , so when I turned 13 -- and , I mean , it made sense , it was an agrarian community , somebody had to kill the animals , there was no Whole Foods you could go and get kangaroo steak at -- so when I turned 13 , it was my turn now to kill a goat .
And I was this weird , sensitive kid , who couldn 't really do it , but I had to do it .
And I was supposed to do this alone .
But a friend of mine , called Emmanuel , who was significantly older than me , who 'd been a boy soldier during the Biafran war , decided to come with me .
Which sort of made me feel good , because he 'd seen a lot of things .
Now , when I was growing up , he used to tell me stories about how he used to bayonet people , and their intestines would fall out , but they would keep running .
So , this guy comes with me .
And I don 't know if you 've ever heard a goat , or seen one -- they sound like human beings , that 's why we call tragedies " a song of a goat . "
My friend Brad Kessler says that we didn 't become human until we started keeping goats .
Anyway , a goat 's eyes are like a child 's eyes .
So when I tried to kill this goat and I couldn 't , Emmanuel bent down , he puts his hand over the mouth of the goat , covers its eyes , so I don 't have to look into them , while I kill the goat .
It didn 't seem like a lot , for this guy who 'd seen so much , and to whom the killing of a goat must have seemed such a quotidian experience , still found it in himself to try to protect me .
I was a wimp .
I cried for a very long time .
And afterwards , he didn 't say a word .
He just sat there watching me cry for an hour .
And then afterwards he said to me , " It will always be difficult , but if you cry like this every time , you will die of heartbreak .
Just know that it is enough sometimes to know that it is difficult . "
Of course , talking about goats makes me think of sheep , and not in good ways .
So , I was born two days after Christmas .
So growing up , you know , I had a cake and everything , but I never got any presents , because , born two days after Christmas .
So , I was about nine , and my uncle had just come back from Germany , and we had the Catholic priest over , my mother was entertaining him with tea .
And my uncle suddenly says , " Where are Chris ' presents ? "
And my mother said , " Don 't talk about that in front of guests . "
But he was desperate to show that he 'd just come back , so he summoned me up , and he said , " Go into the bedroom , my bedroom .
Take anything you want out of the suitcase .
It 's your birthday present . "
I 'm sure he thought I 'd take a book or a shirt , but I found an inflatable sheep .
So , I blew it up and ran into the living room , my finger where it shouldn 't have been , I was waving this buzzing sheep around , and my mother looked like she was going to die of shock .
And Father McGetrick was completely unflustered , just stirred his tea and looked at my mother and said , " It 's all right Daphne , I 'm Scottish . "
My last days in prison , the last 18 months , my cellmate -- for the last year , the first year of the last 18 months -- my cellmate was 14 years old .
The name was John James , and in those days , if a family member committed a crime , the military would hold you as ransom till your family turned themselves in .
So , here was this 14-year-old kid on death row .
And not everybody on death row was a political prisoner .
There were some really bad people there .
And he had smuggled in two comics , two comic books -- " Spiderman " and " X-Men . "
He was obsessed .
And when he got tired of reading them , he started to teach the men in death row how to read , with these comic books .
And so , I remember night after night , you 'd hear all these men , these really hardened criminals , huddled around John James , reciting , " Take that , Spidey ! "
It 's incredible .
I was really worried .
He didn 't know what death row meant .
I 'd been there twice , and I was terribly afraid that I was going to die .
And he would always laugh , and say , " Come on , man , we 'll make it out . "
Then I 'd say , " How do you know ? "
And he said , " Oh , I heard it on the grapevine . "
They killed him .
They handcuffed him to a chair , and they tacked his penis to a table with a six-inch nail , then left him there to bleed to death .
That 's how I ended up in solitary , because I let my feelings be known .
All around us , everywhere , there are people like this .
The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods .
They would come together as a community , and they would express a wish .
And their wish would then be brought to a priest , who would find a ritual object , and the appropriate sacrifices would be made , and the shrine would be built for the god .
But if the god became unruly and began to ask for human sacrifice , the Igbos would destroy the god .
They would knock down the shrine , and they would stop saying the god 's name .
This is how they came to reclaim their humanity .
Every day , all of us here , we 're building gods that have gone rampant , and it 's time we started knocking them down and forgetting their names .
It doesn 't require a tremendous thing .
All it requires is to recognize among us , every day -- the few of us that can see -- are surrounded by people like the ones I 've told you .
There are some of you in this room , amazing people , who offer all of us the mirror to our own humanity .
I want to end with a poem by an American poet called Lucille Clifton .
The poem is called " Libation , " and it 's for my friend Vusi who is in the audience here somewhere .
" Libation , North Carolina , 1999 .
I offer to this ground , this gin .
I imagine an old man crying here , out of the sight of the overseer .
He pushes his tongue through a hole where his tooth would be , if he were whole .
It aches in that space where his tooth would be , where his land would be , his house , his wife , his son , his beautiful daughter .
He wipes sorrow from his face , and puts his thirsty finger to his thirsty tongue , and tastes the salt .
I call a name that could be his .
This is for you , old man .
This gin , this salty earth . "
Thank you .
Alexis Ohanian : How to make a splash in social media
In a funny , rapid-fire 4 minutes , Alexis Ohanian of Reddit tells the real-life fable of one humpback whale 's rise to Web stardom . The lesson of Mister Splashy Pants is a shoo-in classic for meme-makers and marketers in the Facebook age .
So , now , there are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money .
In fact , they make their livings on this kind of stuff .
I 'm going to try and save you all the time and all the money and go through it in the next three minutes , so bear with me .
Started a website back in 2005 , with a few friends of mine , called Reddit.com.
That 's what you 'd call a social news website .
Basically all that means is that the democratic front page is the best stuff on the web . You find some interesting content , say a TEDTalk , submit it to Reddit , and the community of your peers will vote it up if they like it , vote it down if they don 't .
And that creates the front page . It 's always rising , falling , always changing .
About a half million people visit every day . But this isn 't about Reddit .
This is actually about discovering new things that pop up on the web .
Because in the last four years we 've seen all kinds of memes , all kinds of trends get born right on our front page .
But this isn 't even about Reddit itself .
It 's actually about humpback whales .
Well , okay , technically it 's actually about Greenpeace , which is an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government on their whaling campaign .
These humpback whales were getting killed .
They wanted to put an end to it . And one of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of these humpback whales .
But to really kind of personify the movement , they wanted to name it .
So , in true web fashion they put together a poll where they had a bunch of very erudite , very thoughtful , cultured names .
I believe this is a Farsi word for " immortal . "
I think this means " divine power of the ocean " in a Polynesian language .
And then there was this : Mister Splashy Pants .
And this , this was special . Mister Pants , or Splashy , to his friends , was very popular on the Internet .
In fact , someone on Reddit thought , " Oh , what a great thing , we should all vote this up . "
And , you know , Redditors responded and all agreed .
So , the voting started and we actually got behind it ourselves .
We changed our logo , for the day , from the alien to a Splashy , to sort of help the cause .
And it wasn 't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying , " Yes ! We love Splashy Pants . "
So , it went from about five percent , which was when this meme started , to 70 percent at the end of voting .
Which is pretty impressive right ? We won ! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen . Hmm , just kidding . Okay .
So , Greenpeace actually wasn 't that crazy about it , because they wanted one of their more thoughtful names to win .
So they said , " No , no , just kidding . We 'll give it another week of voting . "
Well , that got us a little angry .
So , we changed it to Fightin ' Splashy .
And the Reddit community , really , and the rest of the internet , rather , really got behind this .
Facebook groups were getting created . Facebook applications were getting created .
The idea was , " Vote your conscience , " vote for Mister Splashy Pants .
And people were putting up signs in the real world -- -- about this whale .
And this was the final vote . When all was cleared ...
the next highest name pulled in three . Okay ?
So , there was a clear lesson here .
And that was that the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants .
Which is obvious . It 's a great name .
Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say , " Mister Splashy Pants . "
And I think that 's what helped drive this .
But what was cool was that the repercussions now for Greenpeace was , they created an entire marketing campaign around it .
They sell Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins .
They even created an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy .
But what was even more important was the fact that they actually accomplished their mission . The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition . Mission accomplished .
Greenpeace was thrilled . The whales were happy . That 's a quote .
And actually , Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate , but they weren 't whale lovers .
A few of them certainly were . But we 're talking about a lot of people who were just really interested and really caught up in this great meme , and in fact someone from Greenpeace came back on the site and thanked Reddit for its participation .
But this wasn 't really out of altruism . This was just out of interest in doing something cool .
And this is kind of how the Internet works .
This is that great big secret . Because the Internet provides this level playing field .
Your link is just as good as your link , which is just as good as my link . As long as we have a browser , anyone can get to any website no matter how big a budget you have .
That is , as long as you can keep net neutrality in place .
The other important thing is that it costs nothing to get that content online now .
There are so many great publishing tools that are available , it only takes a few minutes of your time now to actually produce something .
And the cost of iteration is so cheap that you might as well give it a go .
And if you do , be genuine about it . Be honest . Be up front .
And one of the great lessons that Greenpeace actually learned was that it 's okay to lose control .
It 's okay to take yourself a little less seriously , given that , even though it 's a very serious cause , you could ultimately achieve your final goal .
And that 's the final message that I want to share with all of you -- that you can do well online .
But no longer is the message going to be coming from just the top down .
If you want to succeed you 've got to be okay to just lose control .
Thank you .

Temple Grandin : The world needs all kinds of minds
Temple Grandin , diagnosed with autism as a child , talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to " think in pictures , " which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss . She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum : visual thinkers , pattern thinkers , verbal thinkers , and all kinds of smart geeky kids .
I think I 'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is .
Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe -- the child remains non-verbal -- all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers .
And I actually feel at home here , because there 's a lot of autism genetics here .
You wouldn 't have any ...
It 's a continuum of traits .
When does a nerd turn into Asperger , which is just mild autism ?
I mean , Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today .
And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things , you know , that Bill Gates talked about this morning .
OK . Now , if you want to understand autism , animals .
And I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking .
You have to get away from verbal language .
I think in pictures , I don 't think in language .
Now , the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details .
OK , this is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters , or pick out the little letters , and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly .
And the thing is , the normal brain ignores the details .
Well , if you 're building a bridge , details are pretty important because it will fall down if you ignore the details .
And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract .
People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff .
I 'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes , because art , and classes like that , those are the classes where I excelled .
In my work with cattle , I noticed a lot of little things that most people don 't notice would make the cattle balk . Like , for example , this flag waving , right in front of the veterinary facility .
This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility ; all they needed to do was move the flag .
Rapid movement , contrast .
In the early ' 70s when I started , I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing .
People thought that was crazy . A coat on a fence would make them balk , shadows would make them balk , a hose on the floor ...
people weren 't noticing these things -- a chain hanging down -- and that 's shown very , very nicely in the movie .
In fact , I loved the movie , how they duplicated all my projects . That 's the geek side .
My drawings got to star in the movie too .
And actually it 's called " Temple Grandin , " not " Thinking In Pictures . "
So , what is thinking in pictures ? It 's literally movies in your head .
My mind works like Google for images .
Now , when I was a young kid I didn 't know my thinking was different .
I thought everybody thought in pictures .
And then when I did my book , " Thinking In Pictures , " I start interviewing people about how they think .
And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different . Like if I say , " Think about a church steeple " most people get this sort of generalized generic one .
Now , maybe that 's not true in this room , but it 's going to be true in a lot of different places .
I see only specific pictures .
They flash up into my memory , just like Google for pictures .
And in the movie , they 've got a great scene in there where the word " shoe " is said , and a whole bunch of ' 50s and ' 60s shoes pop into my imagination .
OK , there is my childhood church , that 's specific . There 's some more , Fort Collins .
OK , how about famous ones ?
And they just kind of come up , kind of like this .
Just really quickly , like Google for pictures .
And they come up one at a time , and then I think , " OK , well maybe we can have it snow , or we can have a thunderstorm , " and I can hold it there and turn them into videos .
Now , visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities .
And I 've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant .
I 'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides .
I 've got that stuff up on YouTube if you want to look at it .
But , one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind , just like a virtual reality computer system .
And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie .
That was like just so super cool .
And there were a lot of kind of Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set too .
But one of the things that really worries me is : Where 's the younger version of those kids going today ?
They 're not ending up in Silicon Valley , where they belong .
Now , one of the things I learned very early on because I wasn 't that social , is I had to sell my work , and not myself .
And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings , I showed off pictures of things .
Another thing that helped me as a little kid is , boy , in the ' 50s , you were taught manners .
You were taught you can 't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around .
Now , when kids get to be in third or fourth grade , you might see that this kid 's going to be a visual thinker , drawing in perspective . Now , I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker .
Now , I had this brain scan done several years ago , and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex .
This is tensor imaging .
And my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the control 's .
The red lines there are me , and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control .
And there I got a gigantic one , and the control over there , the blue one , has got a really small one .
And some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex .
Now , the thing is , the visual thinker 's just one kind of mind .
You see , the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind -- good at one thing , bad at something else .
And where I was bad was algebra . And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig .
Gigantic mistake : I 'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra , go right to geometry and trig .
Now , another kind of mind is the pattern thinker .
More abstract . These are your engineers , your computer programmers .
Now , this is pattern thinking . That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper -- no scotch tape , no cuts .
And there in the background is the pattern for folding it .
Here are the types of thinking : photo-realistic visual thinkers , like me ; pattern thinkers , music and math minds .
Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading .
You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic .
You 'll see these different kinds of minds .
And then there 's a verbal mind , they know every fact about everything .
Now , another thing is the sensory issues .
I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face .
And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it , and they got it bent so it 's not hitting my chin .
But sensory is an issue . Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights ; others have problems with sound sensitivity .
You know , it 's going to be variable .
Now , visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind .
Because think about it : An animal is a sensory-based thinker , not verbal -- thinks in pictures , thinks in sounds , thinks in smells .
Think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant .
He knows who 's been there , when they were there .
Are they friend or foe ? Is there anybody he can go mate with ?
There 's a ton of information on that fire hydrant .
It 's all very detailed information , and , looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals .
Now , the animal mind , and also my mind , puts sensory-based information into categories .
Man on a horse and a man on the ground -- that is viewed as two totally different things .
You could have a horse that 's been abused by a rider .
They 'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer , but you can 't ride him .
You have another horse , where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he 'll be terrible for anything on the ground , with the veterinarian , but a person can ride him .
Cattle are the same way .
Man on a horse , a man on foot -- they 're two different things .
You see , it 's a different picture .
See , I want you to think about just how specific this is .
Now , this ability to put information into categories , I find a lot of people are not very good at this .
When I 'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant , they don 't seem to be able to figure out , " Do I have a training people issue ?
Or do I have something wrong with the equipment ? "
In other words , categorize equipment problem from a people problem .
I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that .
Now , let 's say I figure out it 's an equipment problem .
Is it a minor problem , with something simple I can fix ?
Or is the whole design of the system wrong ?
People have a hard time figuring that out .
Let 's just look at something like , you know , solving problems with making airlines safer .
Yeah , I 'm a million-mile flier .
I do lots and lots of flying , and if I was at the FAA , what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of ?
It would be their airplane tails .
You know , five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years , the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way .
It 's tails , pure and simple .
And when the pilots walk around the plane , guess what ? They can 't see that stuff inside the tail .
You know , now as I think about that , I 'm pulling up all of that specific information .
It 's specific . See , my thinking 's bottom-up .
I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle .
Now , here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats .
He 'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat .
White cowboy hats , that was absolutely fine .
Now , the thing is , the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together .
We 've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds .
And one of the things that is driving me really crazy , as I travel around and I do autism meetings , is I 'm seeing a lot of smart , geeky , nerdy kids , and they just aren 't very social , and nobody 's working on developing their interest in something like science .
And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher .
My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie .
I was a goofball student . When I was in high school I just didn 't care at all about studying , until I had Mr. Carlock 's science class .
He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie .
And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room .
This brings up the whole thing of you 've got to show kids interesting stuff .
You know , one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED , and there 's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on .
Because I 'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids , and the teachers out in the Midwest , and the other parts of the country , when you get away from these tech areas , they don 't know what to do with these kids .
And they 're not going down the right path .
The thing is , you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind , or your mind can be wired to be more social .
And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here , in the really brilliant mind , and we lose a few social circuits here .
It 's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social .
And then you can get into the point where it 's so severe you 're going to have a person that 's going to be non-verbal .
In the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals .
This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller .
And he studied Alzheimer 's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia .
And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain , and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars .
Now , Van Gogh doesn 't know anything about physics , but I think it 's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence , which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head .
And the Wolfram stuff -- I was taking notes and I was writing down all the search words I could use , because I think that 's going to go on in my autism lectures .
We 've got to show these kids interesting stuff .
And they 've taken out the autoshop class and the drafting class and the art class .
I mean art was my best subject in school .
We 've got to think about all these different kinds of minds , and we 've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds , because we absolutely are going to need these kind of people in the future .
And let 's talk about jobs .
OK , my science teacher got me studying because I was a goofball that didn 't want to study .
But you know what ? I was getting work experience .
I 'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven 't learned basic things , like how to be on time .
I was taught that when I was eight years old .
You know , how to have table manners at granny 's Sunday party .
I was taught that when I was very , very young .
And when I was 13 , I had a job at a dressmaker 's shop sewing clothes .
I did internships in college , I was building things , and I also had to learn how to do assignments .
You know , all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little .
My mother said , " Well let 's do a picture of something else . "
They 've got to learn how to do something else .
Let 's say the kid is fixated on Legos .
Let 's get him working on building different things .
The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated .
Like if a kid loves racecars , let 's use racecars for math .
Let 's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance .
In other words , use that fixation in order to motivate that kid , that 's one of the things we need to do .
I really get fed up when they , you know , the teachers , especially when you get away from this part of the country , they don 't know what to do with these smart kids .
It just drives me crazy .
What can visual thinkers do when they grow up ?
They can do graphic design , all kinds of stuff with computers , photography , industrial design .
The pattern thinkers , they 're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians , your software engineers , your computer programmers , all of those kinds of jobs .
And then you 've got the word minds . They make great journalists , and they also make really , really good stage actors .
Because the thing about being autistic is , I had to learn social skills like being in a play .
It 's just kind of -- you just have to learn it .
And we need to be working with these students .
And this brings up mentors .
You know , my science teacher was not an accredited teacher .
He was a NASA space scientist .
Now , some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology , or a degree in chemistry , you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry .
We need to be doing that .
Because what I 'm observing is the good teachers , for a lot of these kids , are out in the community colleges , but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools .
Another thing that can be very , very , very successful is there is a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry , and they can teach your kid .
And it doesn 't matter if what they teach them is old , because what you 're doing is you 're lighting the spark .
You 're getting that kid turned on .
And you get him turned on , then he 'll learn all the new stuff .
Mentors are just essential .
I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me .
And we 've got to mentor them , hire them .
And if you bring them in for internships in your companies , the thing about the autism , Asperger-y kind of mind , you 've got to give them a specific task . Don 't just say , " Design new software . "
You 've got to tell them something a lot more specific : " Well , we 're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing .
And it can only use so much memory . "
That 's the kind of specificity you need .
Well , that 's the end of my talk .
And I just want to thank everybody for coming .
It was great to be here .
Oh , you 've got a question for me ? OK .
Thank you so much for that .
You know , you once wrote , I like this quote , " If by some magic , autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth , then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave . "
Temple Grandin : Because who do you think made the first stone spears ?
The Asperger guy . And if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there would be no more Silicon Valley , and the energy crisis would not be solved .
So , I want to ask you a couple other questions , and if any of these feel inappropriate , it 's okay just to say , " Next question . "
But if there is someone here who has an autistic child , or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them , what advice would you give them ?
TG : Well , first of all , you 've got to look at age .
If you have a two , three or four year old you know , no speech , no social interaction , I can 't emphasize enough : Don 't wait , you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching .
You know , the thing is , autism comes in different degrees .
There 's going to be about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk , and they 're not going to be working Silicon Valley , that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do .
But then you get the smart , geeky kids that have a touch of autism , and that 's where you 've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things .
I got social interaction through shared interest .
I rode horses with other kids , I made model rockets with other kids , did electronics lab with other kids , and in the ' 60s , it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show .
That was like , we considered that super cool .
Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them , as some might , as most , wish ?
TG : Well let me tell you , that child will be loyal , and if your house is burning down , they 're going to get you out of it .
Wow . So , most people , if you ask them what are they most passionate about , they 'd say things like , " My kids " or " My lover . "
What are you most passionate about ?
TG : I 'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place .
When I have a mother of an autistic child say , " My kid went to college because of your book , or one of your lectures , " that makes me happy .
You know , the slaughter plants , I 've worked with them in the ' 80s ; they were absolutely awful .
I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes : How many cattle fell down ?
How many cattle got poked with the prodder ?
How many cattle are mooing their heads off ?
And it 's very , very simple .
You directly observe a few simple things .
It 's worked really well . I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world . We need a lot more of that , and a lot less abstract stuff .
When we were talking on the phone , one of the things you said that really astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was server farms . Tell me about that .
TG : Well the reason why I got really excited when I read about that , it contains knowledge .
It 's libraries .
And to me , knowledge is something that is extremely valuable . So , maybe , over 10 years ago now our library got flooded .
And this is before the Internet got really big .
And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked , because it was knowledge being destroyed .
And server farms , or data centers are great libraries of knowledge .
Temple , can I just say it 's an absolute delight to have you at TED .
TG : Well thank you so much . Thank you .
Wael Ghonim : Inside the Egyptian revolution
Wael Ghonim is the Google executive who helped jumpstart Egypt 's democratic revolution ... with a Facebook page memorializing a victim of the regime 's violence . Speaking at TEDxCairo , he tells the inside story of the past two months , when everyday Egyptians showed that " the power of the people is stronger than the people in power . "
This is Revolution 2.0 .
No one was a hero . No one was a hero .
Because everyone was a hero .
Everyone has done something .
We all use Wikipedia .
If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content , and at the end of the day you 've built the largest encyclopedia in the world .
From just an idea that sounded crazy , you have the largest encyclopedia in the world .
And in the Egyptian revolution , the Revolution 2.0 , everyone has contributed something , small or big . They contributed something -- to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions .
It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing .
If you look at the scene , Egypt , for 30 years , had been in a downhill -- going into a downhill .
Everything was going bad .
Everything was going wrong .
We only ranked high when it comes to poverty , corruption , lack of freedom of speech , lack of political activism .
Those were the achievements of our great regime .
Yet , nothing was happening .
And it 's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated .
In fact , people were extremely frustrated .
But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear .
Everyone was scared .
Not everyone . There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave -- going into protests as a couple of hundred , getting beaten up and arrested .
But in fact , the majority were scared .
Everyone did not want really to get in trouble .
A dictator cannot live without the force .
They want to make people live in fear .
And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years , and here comes the Internet , technology , BlackBerry , SMS .
It 's helping all of us to connect .
Platforms like YouTube , Twitter , Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that , " Wow , I 'm not alone .
There are a lot of people who are frustrated . "
There are lots of people who are frustrated .
There are lots of people who actually share the same dream .
There are lots of people who care about their freedom .
They probably have the best life in the world .
They are living in happiness . They are living in their villas .
They are happy . They don 't have problems .
But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian .
A lot of us , we 're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who 's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country .
The Internet has played a great role , helping these people to speak up their minds , to collaborate together , to start thinking together .
It was an educational campaign .
Khaled Saeed was killed in June 2010 .
I still remember the photo .
I still remember every single detail of that photo .
The photo was horrible .
He was tortured , brutally tortured to death .
But then what was the answer of the regime ?
" He choked on a pile of hash " -- that was their answer : " He 's a criminal .
He 's someone who escaped from all these bad things . "
But people did not relate to this .
People did not believe this .
Because of the Internet , the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth .
And everyone started to think that " this guy could be my brother . "
He was a middle-class guy .
His photo was remembered by all of us .
A page was created .
An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page , and there was no plan .
" What are we going to do ? " " I don 't know . "
In a few days , tens of thousands of people there -- angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs , " Enough .
Get those who killed this guy .
To just bring them to justice . "
But of course , they don 't listen .
It was an amazing story -- how everyone started feeling the ownership .
Everyone was an owner in this page .
People started contributing ideas .
In fact , one of the most ridiculous ideas was , " Hey , let 's have a silent stand .
Let 's get people to go in the street , face the sea , their back to the street , dressed in black , standing up silently for one hour , doing nothing and then just leaving , going back home . "
For some people , that was like , " Wow , silent stand .
And next time it 's going to be vibration . "
People were making fun of the idea .
But actually when people went to the street -- the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria -- it felt like -- it was amazing . It was great because it connected people from the virtual world , bringing them to the real world , sharing the same dream , the same frustration , the same anger , the same desire for freedom .
And they were doing this thing .
But did the regime learn anything ? Not really .
They were actually attacking them .
They were actually abusing them , despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were -- they were not even protesting .
And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution .
This whole page was , again , managed by the people .
In fact , the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas , help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing .
People were taking shots and photos ; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt ; people were suggesting ideas , they were actually voting on ideas , and then they were executing the ideas ; people were creating videos .
Everything was done by the people to the people , and that 's the power of the Internet .
There was no leader .
The leader was everyone on that page .
The Tunisian experiment , as Amir was saying , inspired all of us , showed us that there is a way .
Yes we can . We can do it .
We have the same problems ; we can just go in the streets .
And when I saw the street on the 25th , I went back and said , " Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th .
The revolution is happening .
This is not the end , this is the beginning of the end . "
I was detained on the 27th night .
Thank God I announced the locations and everything .
But they detained me .
And I 'm not going to talk about my experience , because this is not about me .
I was detained for 12 days , blindfolded , handcuffed .
And I did not really hear anything . I did not know anything .
I was not allowed to speak with anyone .
And I went out .
The next day I was in Tahrir .
Seriously , with the amount of change I had noticed in this square , I thought it was 12 years .
I never had in my mind to see this Egyptian , the amazing Egyptian .
The fear is no longer fear .
It 's actually strength -- it 's power .
People were so empowered .
It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights .
Completely opposite .
Extremism became tolerance .
Who would [ have ] imagined before the 25th , if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them , and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them -- this is amazing .
All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda , or mainstream media , are proven wrong .
This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man , the Egyptian woman , how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream .
When I saw that , I went back and I wrote on Facebook .
And that was a personal belief , regardless of what 's going on , regardless of the details .
I said that , " We are going to win .
We are going to win because we don 't understand politics .
We 're going to win because we don 't play their dirty games .
We 're going to win because we don 't have an agenda .
We 're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts .
We 're going to win because we have dreams .
We 're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams . "
And that 's actually what happened . We won .
And that 's not because of anything , but because we believed in our dream .
The winning here is not the whole details of what 's going to happen in the political scene .
The winning is the winning of the dignity of every single Egyptian .
Actually , I had this taxi driver telling me , " Listen , I am breathing freedom .
I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years . "
For me that 's winning , regardless of all the details .
My last word to you is a statement I believe in , which Egyptians have proven to be true , that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power .
Thanks a lot .
Dean Ornish : Healing through diet
Dean Ornish talks about simple , low-tech and low-cost ways to take advantage of the body 's natural desire to heal itself .
This session is on natural wonders , and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness .
I want to try to combine them all , because to me , healing is really the ultimate natural wonder .
Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself , and much more quickly than people had once realized , if you simply stop doing what 's causing the problem .
And so , really , so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet .
I love doing this work , because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they didn 't have before , and it allows us to talk about things that -- not just diet , but that happiness is not -- we 're talking about the pursuit of happiness , but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions , what Aldous Huxley called the " perennial wisdom , " when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people , it 's really about -- our nature is to be happy ; our nature is to be peaceful , our nature is to be healthy .
And so it 's not something -- happiness is not something you get , health is generally not something that you get .
But rather all of these different practices -- you know , the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn 't develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure , unclog your arteries , even though it can do all those things .
They 're powerful tools for transformation , for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy , to be peaceful , to be joyful and to realize that it 's not something that you pursue and get , but rather it 's something that you have already until you disturb it .
I studied yoga for many years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda and people would say , " What are you , a Hindu ? " He 'd say , " No , I 'm an undo . "
And it 's really about identifying what 's causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness , and then to allow that natural healing to occur .
To me , that 's the real natural wonder .
So , within that larger context , we can talk about diet , stress management -- which are really these spiritual practices -- moderate exercise , smoking cessation , support groups and community -- which I 'll talk more about -- and some vitamins and supplements .
And it 's not a diet .
You know , when most people think about the diet I recommend , they think it 's a really strict diet .
For reversing disease , that 's what it takes , but if you 're just trying to be healthy , you have a spectrum of choices .
And to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction , you 're going to live longer , you 're going to feel better , you 're going to lose weight , and so on .
And in our studies , what we 've been able to do is to use very expensive , high-tech , state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost -- and in many ways , ancient -- interventions , can be .
We first began by looking at heart disease , and when I began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago , it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse .
And what we found was that , instead of getting worse and worse , in many cases it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once realized .
This is a representative patient who at the time was 73 -- totally needed to have a bypass , decided to do this instead .
We used quantitative arteriography , showing the narrowing .
This is one of the arteries that feed the heart , one of the main arteries , and you can see the narrowing here .
A year later , it 's not as clogged ; normally , it goes the other direction .
These minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow , and using cardiac positron emission tomography , or " PET , " scans , blue and black is no blood flow , orange and white is maximal .
Huge differences can occur without drugs , without surgery .
Clinically , he literally couldn 't walk across the street without getting severe chest pain ; within a month , like most people , was pain-free , and within a year , climbing more than 100 floors a day on a Stairmaster .
This is not unusual , and it 's part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes , because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life .
Overall , if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients , they got worse and worse , from one year to five years , in the comparison group .
This is the natural history of heart disease , but it 's really not natural because we found it could get better and better , and much more quickly than people had once thought .
We also found that the more people change , the better they got .
It wasn 't a function of how old or how sick they were -- it was mainly how much they changed , and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones .
I got this as a Christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs .
The younger brother is 86 , the older one 's 95 ; they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were .
And the following year they sent me this one , which I thought was kind of funny .
You just never know .
And what we found was that 99 percent of the patients start to reverse the progression of their heart disease .
Now I thought , you know , if we just did good science , that would change medical practice . But , that was a little naive .
It 's important , but not enough .
Because we doctors do what we get paid to do , and we get trained to do what we get paid to do , so if we change insurance , then we change medical practice and medical education .
Insurance will cover the bypass , it 'll cover the angioplasty ; it won 't , until recently , cover diet and lifestyle .
So , we began through our nonprofit institute 's training hospitals around the country , and we found that most people could avoid surgery , and not only was it medically effective , it was also cost effective .
And the insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars per patient , and Medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project where they 're paying for 1,800 people to go through the program on the sites that we train .
The fortuneteller says , " I give smokers a discount because there 's not as much to tell . "
I like this slide , because it 's a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change , and what doesn 't .
And what doesn 't work is fear of dying , and that 's what 's normally used .
Everybody who smokes knows it 's not good for you , and still 30 percent of Americans smoke -- 80 percent in some parts of the world . Why do people do it ?
Well , because it helps them get through the day .
And I 'll talk more about this , but the real epidemic isn 't just heart disease or obesity or smoking -- it 's loneliness and depression .
As one woman said , " I 've got 20 friends in this package of cigarettes , and they 're always there for me and nobody else is .
You 're going to take away my 20 friends ? What are you going to give me ? "
Or they eat when they get depressed , or they use alcohol to numb the pain , or they work too hard , or watch too much TV .
There are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain , but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem .
And the pain is not the problem : it 's the symptom .
And telling people they 're going to die is too scary to think about , or , they 're going to get emphysema or heart attack is too scary , and so they don 't want to think about it , so they don 't .
The most effective anti-smoking ad was this one .
You 'll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth , and " impotence " -- the headline is , " Impotent " -- it 's not emphysema .
What was the biggest selling drug of all time when it was introduced a few years ago ?
Viagra , right ? Why ? Because a lot of guys need it .
It 's not like you say , " Hey Joe , I 'm having erectile dysfunction , how about you ? "
And yet , look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold .
It 's not so much psychological , it 's vascular , and nicotine makes your arteries constrict .
So does cocaine , so does a high fat diet , so does emotional stress .
So the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired , lethargic , depressed and impotent , and that 's not much fun .
But when you change those behaviors , your brain gets more blood , you think more clearly , you have more energy , your heart gets more blood in ways I 've shown you .
Your sexual function improves .
And these things occur within hours . This is a study : a high fat meal , and within one or two hours blood-flow is measurably less -- and you 've all experienced this at Thanksgiving .
When you eat a big fatty meal , how do you feel ?
You feel kind of sleepy afterwards .
On a low-fat meal , the blood flow doesn 't go down -- it even goes up .
Many of you have kids , and you know that 's a big change in your lifestyle , and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they 're worth it .
And the paradox is that when you make big changes , you get big benefits , and you feel so much better so quickly .
For many people , those are choices worth making -- not to live longer , but to live better .
I want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic , because it really is a problem .
Two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese , and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years . It 's no joke : it 's real .
And just to show you this , this is from the CDC .
These are not election returns ; these are the percentage of people who are overweight .
And if you see from ' 85 to ' 86 to ' 87 , ' 88 , ' 89 , ' 90 , ' 91 -- you get a new category , 15 to 20 percent ; ' 92 , ' 93 , ' 94 , ' 95 , ' 96 , ' 97 -- you get a new category ; ' 98 , ' 99 , 2000 , and 2001 .
Mississippi , more than 25 percent of people are overweight .
Why is this ? Well , this is one way to lose weight that works very well ...
but it doesn 't last , which is the problem .
Now , there 's no mystery in how you lose weight ; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories .
Now , one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food , which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food , or if you restrict entire categories of foods .
But the problem is , you get hungry , so it 's hard to keep it off .
The other way is to change the type of food .
And fat has nine calories per gram , whereas protein and carbs only have four .
So , when you eat less fat , you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food .
So you can eat the same amount of food , but you 'll be getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories .
And it 's the volume of food that affects satiety , rather than the type of food .
You know , I don 't like talking about the Atkins diet , but I get asked about it every day , and so I just thought I 'd spend a few minutes on that .
The myth that you hear about is , Americans have been told to eat less fat , the percent of calories from fat is down , Americans are fatter than ever , therefore fat doesn 't make you fat .
It 's a half-truth . Actually , Americans are eating more fat than ever , and even more carbs . And so the percentage is lower , the actual amount is higher , and so the goal is to reduce both .
Dr. Atkins and I debated each other many times before he died , and we agreed that Americans eat too many simple carbs , the " bad carbs , " and these are things like -- -- sugar , white flour , white rice , alcohol . And you get a double whammy : you get all these calories that don 't fill you up because you 've removed the fiber , and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up .
Your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down , which is good .
But insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat .
So , the goal is not to go to pork rinds and bacon and sausages -- these are not health foods -- but to go from " bad carbs " to what are called " good carbs . "
And these are things like whole foods , or unrefined carbs : fruits , vegetables , whole wheat flour , brown rice , in their natural forms , are rich in fiber .
And the fiber fills you up before you get too many calories , and it slows the absorption so you don 't get that rapid rise in blood sugar .
So , and you get all the disease-protective substances .
It 's not just what you exclude from your diet , but also what you include that 's protective .
Just as all carbs are not bad for you , all fats are not bad for you . There are good fats .
And these are predominantly what are called the Omega-3 fatty acids .
You find these , for example , in fish oil .
And the bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats , which we find in meat .
If you don 't remember anything else from this talk , three grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent .
Three grams a day . They come in one-gram capsules ; more than that just gives you extra fat you don 't need .
It also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast , prostate and colon cancer .
Now , the problem with the Atkins diet , everybody knows people who have lost weight on it , but you can lose weight on amphetamines , you know , and fen-phen .
I mean , there are lots of ways of losing weight that aren 't good for you .
You want to lose weight in a way that enhances your health rather than the one that harms it .
And the problem is that it 's based on this half-truth , which is that Americans eat too many simple carbs , so if you eat fewer simple carbs you 're going to lose weight .
You 'll lose even more weight if you go to whole foods and less fat , and you 'll enhance your health rather than harming it .
He says , " I 've got some good news .
While your cholesterol level has remained the same , the research findings have changed . "
Now , what happens to your heart when you go on an Atkins diet ?
The red is good at the beginning , and a year later -- this is from a study done in a peer-reviewed journal called Angiology -- there 's more red after a year on a diet like I would recommend , there 's less red , less blood flow after a year on an Atkins-type diet .
So , yes , you can lose weight , but your heart isn 't happy .
Now , one of the studies funded by the Atkins Center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated , 65 percent had bad breath , 54 percent had headaches – this is not a healthy way to eat .
And so , you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you , but when they get too close it 's going to be a problem .
And more seriously , there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the Atkins diet -- of bone disease , kidney disease , and so on .
And that 's how your body excretes waste , is through your breath , your bowels and your perspiration .
So when you go on these kinds of diet , they begin to smell bad .
So , an optimal diet is low in fat , low in the bad carbs , high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats .
And then , again , it 's a spectrum : when you move in this direction , you 're going to lose weight , you 're going to feel better and you 're going to gain health .
Now , there are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too , whether it 's the deforestation of the Amazon , or making more protein available , to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day -- not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have .
So , there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health .
Now , we 're about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer , and , in collaboration with Sloane-Kettering and with UCSF .
We took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and who had elected , for reasons unrelated to the study , not to have surgery .
We could randomly divide them into two groups , and then we could have one group that is a non-intervention control group to compare to , which we can 't do with , say , breast cancer , because everyone gets treated .
What we found was that , after a year , none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment , whereas six of the control-group patients needed surgery or radiation .
When we looked at their PSA levels -- which is a marker for prostate cancer -- they got worse in the control group , but they actually got better in the experimental group , and these differences were highly significant .
And then I wondered : was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle -- whichever group they were in -- and the changes in PSA ?
And sure enough , we found a dose-response relationship , just like we found in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies .
And in order for the PSA to go down , they had to make pretty big changes .
I then wondered , well , maybe they 're just changing their PSA , but it 's not really affecting the tumor growth .
So we took some of their blood serum and sent it down to UCLA ; they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture , and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group -- 70 versus 9 percent .
And finally , I said , I wonder if there 's any relationship between how much people change and how it inhibited their tumor growth , whichever group they happened to be in .
And this really got me excited because again , we found the same pattern : the more people change , the more it affected the growth of their tumors .
And finally , we did MRI and MR spectroscopy scans on some of these patients , and the tumor activity is shown in red in this patient , and you can see clearly it 's better a year later , along with the PSA going down .
So , if it 's true for prostate cancer , it 'll almost certainly be true for breast cancer as well .
And whether or not you have conventional treatment , in addition , if you make these changes , it may help reduce the risk of recurrence .
The last thing I want to talk about , apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness , is that study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed -- and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture -- are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely , in part because , as we talked about , they 're more likely to smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and so on .
But also , through mechanisms that we don 't fully understand , people who are lonely and depressed are many times -- three to five to ten times , in some studies -- more likely to get sick and die prematurely .
And depression is treatable . We need to do something about that .
Now , on the other hand , anything that promotes intimacy is healing .
It can be sexual intimacy – I happen to think that healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing .
Friendship , altruism , compassion , service – all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures -- once you stop trying to see the differences , these are the things in our own self-interest , because they free us from our suffering and from disease .
And it 's in a sense the most selfish thing that we can do .
Just take a look at one study . This was done by David Spiegel at Stanford .
He took women with metastatic breast cancer , randomly divided them into two groups .
One group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group .
It was a nurturing , loving environment , where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood , because they were going through it too .
They just met once a week for a year .
Five years later , those women lived twice as long , and you can see that the people -- and that was the only difference between the groups .
It was a randomized control study published in The Lancet .
Other studies have shown this as well .
So , these simple things that create intimacy are really healing , and even the word healing , it comes from the root " to make whole . "
The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit , meaning " union , to yoke , to bring together . "
And the last slide I want to show you is from -- I was -- again , this swami that I studied with for so many years , and I did a combined oncology and cardiology Grand Rounds at the University of Virginia medical school a couple of years ago .
And at the end of it , somebody said , " Hey , Swami , what 's the difference between wellness and illness ? "
And so he went up on the board and he wrote the word " illness , " and circled the first letter , and then wrote the word " wellness , " and circled the first two letters ...
To me , it 's just shorthand for what we 're talking about : that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing .
And then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process .
Thank you .
R.A. Mashelkar : Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products
Engineer RA Mashelkar shares three stories of ultra-low-cost design from India that use bottom-up rethinking , and some clever engineering , to bring expensive products into the realm of the possible for everyone .
The big residual is always value for money .
All the time we are trying to get value for money .
What we don 't look for is value for many , while we are generating value for money .
Do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day , the so-called bottom of the pyramid ?
What are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many ?
We have described here in terms of the performance and the price .
If you have money , of course , you can get the value .
You can get a Mercedes for a very high price , very high performance .
But if you don 't have money , what happens ?
Well , you are to ride a bicycle , carrying your own weight and also some other weight , so that you can earn the bread for the day .
Well , poor do not remain poor ; they become lower-middle-class .
And if they do so , then , of course , the conditions improve , and they start riding on scooters .
But the challenge is , again , they don 't get much value , because they can 't afford anything more than the scooter .
The issue is , at that price , can you give them some extra value ?
A super value , in terms of their ability to ride in a car , to get that dignity , to get that safety , looks practically impossible , isn 't it .
Now , this is something that we see on Indian streets all the time .
But many people see the same thing and think things differently , and one of them is here , Ratan Tata .
The great thing about our leaders is that , should they not only have passion in their belly , which practically all of them have , they 're also very innovative .
An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done .
They believe that things can be done .
But great leaders like Ratan have compassion .
And what you said , Lakshmi , is absolutely true : it 's not just Ratan Tata , it 's the house of Tatas over time .
Let me confirm what she said .
Yes , I went barefoot until I was 12 .
I struggled to [ unclear ] day was a huge issue .
And when I finished my SSC , the eleventh standard , I stood eleventh among 125,000 students .
But I was about to leave the school , because my poor mother couldn 't afford schooling .
And it was [ unclear ] Tata Trust , which gave me six rupees per month , almost a dollar per month for six years .
That 's how I 'm standing before you .
So that is the House of Tata .
Innovation , compassion and passion .
They combine all that .
And it was that compassion which bothered them , because when he saw -- in fact , he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car -- he drives his own car by the way -- and he saw in the rain , a family like the one that I showed to you getting drenched with an infant .
And then he said , " Well , I must give them a car that they can afford , one lakh car , $ 2,000 car . "
Of course , as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible , and that 's what was said by Suzuki .
He said , oh , probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney .
And you can see the cartoon here .
Well they didn 't build that . They built a proper car . Nano .
And mind you , I 'm six feet half an inch , Ratan is taller than me , and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car .
And incredible car .
And of course , nothing succeeds like success ; the cynics then turned around , and one after the other they also started saying , " Yes , we also want to make a car in the Nano Segment .
We 'll manufacture a car in the Nano Segment . "
How did this great story unfold , the making of Nano ?
Let me tell you a bit about it .
For example , how we started : Ratan just began with a five-engineer team , young people in their mid-twenties .
And he said , " Well , I won 't define the vehicle for you , but I will define the cost for you .
It is one lakh , 100,000 rupees , and you are to make it within that . "
And he told them , " Question the unquestionable .
Stretch the envelope . "
And at a point in time , he got so engrossed in the whole challenge , that he himself became a member of the team .
Can you believe it ?
I still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated .
Until midnight , he 'd be thinking .
Early morning he 'll be coming back with sort of solutions .
But who was the team leader ?
The team leader was Girish Wagh , a 34 year-old boy in [ unclear ] .
And the Nano team average age was just 27 years .
And they did innovation in design and beyond .
Broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time .
For example , that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft .
Adhesives were replacing the rivets .
There was a co-creation , a huge co-creation , with vendors and suppliers .
All ideas on board were welcome .
100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant , and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed .
Imagine that a fellow who sells cloth , for example , will be selling Nano .
I mean , it was incredible innovation .
Seeking solutions for non-auto sectors .
It was an open innovation , ideas from all over were welcome .
The mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used , by the way , as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers .
The fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers .
And the crux of the matter was , however , getting more from less .
All the time , you have been given an envelope .
You can 't cross that envelope , which is 100,000 rupees , 2,000 dollars .
And therefore , each component had to have a dual functionality .
And the seat riser , for example , serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity .
Half the number of parts are contained in Nano in comparison to a typical passenger car .
The length is smaller by eight percent by the way .
But the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less , but 21 percent more inside space .
And what happened was that -- more from less -- you can see how much more for how much less .
When the Model T was launched -- and this is , by the way , all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices -- Model T was 19,700 by Ford .
Volkswagon was 11,333 .
And British Motor was around 11,000 .
And Nano was , bang , 2,000 dollars .
This is why you started actually a new paradigm shift , where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car , who were carrying their entire family in a scooter , started dreaming of being in a car .
And those dreams are getting fulfilled .
This is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home .
The driver 's name is Naran .
He has bought his own Nano .
And you can see , there is a physical space that has been created for him , parking that car , along with the owner 's car , but more importantly , they 've created a space in their mind that " Yes , my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it . "
And that 's why I call it a transformational innovation .
It is not just technological , it is social innovation that we talk about .
And that is where , ladies and gentlemen , this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important .
I remember talking about this for the first time in Australia , about one and a half years ago , when their academy honored me with a fellowship .
And unbelievably , in 40 years , I was the first Indian to be honored .
And the title of my talk was therefore " Indian innovation from Gandhi to Gandhian engineering . "
And I titled this more from less for more and more people as Gandhian engineering .
And Gandhian engineering , in my judgment , is the one which is going to take the world forward , is going to make a difference , not just for a few , but for everyone .
Let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs .
Here is an American citizen and his son having an artificial foot .
What is its price ? 20,000 dollars .
And of course , these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads .
Unfortunately , that 's not the case in India .
You can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land , sometimes in a marshy land , and so on and so forth .
More importantly , they not only walk far to work , and not only do they cycle to work , but they cycle for work , as you can see here .
And they climb up for their work .
You have to design an artificial foot for such conditions .
A challenge , of course .
Four billion people , their incomes are less then two dollars a day .
And if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe , you 're talking about 10,000 days of income .
You just don 't have it .
And therefore , you ought to look at alternatives .
And that is how Jaipur Foot was created in India .
It had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system , a quick molding and modular components , enabling custom-made , on-the-spot limb fitments .
You could feel it actually in an hour , by the way , whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day , as so on .
Outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes , rather than using heated sheets .
And unique high-ankle design and human-like looks , [ unclear ] and functions .
And I like to show how it looks and how it works .
See , he jumps . You can see what stress it must have .
( Text : ... any person with a below the knee limb could do this .
... above the limb , yes , it would be difficult ...
" Did it hurt ? "
" No ... not at all . "
... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds ... ) One kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds .
So that 's what it is all about .
And therefore Time took notice of this 28-dollar foot , basically .
An incredible story .
Let 's move on to something else .
I 've been talking about getting more from less for more .
Let 's move to health .
We 've talked about mobility and the rest of it , let 's talk about health .
What 's happening in the area of health ?
You know , you have new diseases that require new drugs .
And if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now , what has happened ?
10 years ago , it used to cost about a quarter billion .
Today it costs 1.5 billion dollars .
Time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace , after all the human and animal testing , was 10 years , now it is 15 years .
Are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money ?
No , I 'm sorry .
We used to have 40 , now they have come down to 30 .
So actually we are getting less from more for less and less people .
Why less and less people ? Because it is so expensive , so very few will be able to basically afford that .
Let us just take an example .
Psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin .
The cost of treatment , 20,000 dollars .
1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin , by the way , and 20 of them .
Time for development -- it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars .
Let 's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets .
For example , we don 't want 20,000 dollars ; we don 't have it .
Can we do it [ for ] 100 dollars ?
Time for development , not 10 years .
We are in a hurry . Five years .
Cost of development -- 300 million dollars .
Sorry . I can 't spend more than 10 million dollars .
Looks absolutely audacious .
Looks absolutely ridiculous .
You know something ? This has been achieved in India .
These targets have been achieved in India .
And how they have been achieved ...
Sir Francis Bacon once said , " When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before , it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before . "
And therefore , the standard process , where you develop a molecule , put it into mice , into men , are not yielding those results -- the billions of dollars that have been spent .
The Indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge , however , scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men , not molecule to mice to men , you know .
And that is how this difference has come .
And you can see this blending of traditional medicine , modern medicine , modern science .
I launched a big program [ unclear ] CSIR about nine years ago .
He is giving us not just for Psoriasis , for cancer and a whole range of things , changing the whole paradigm .
And you can see this Indian Psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of [ unclear ] by doing things differently .
You can see before treatment and after treatment .
This is really getting more from less for more and more people , because these are all affordable treatments now .
Let me just remind you of what Mahatma Gandhi had said .
He had said , " Earth provides enough to satisfy every man 's need , but not every man 's greed . "
So the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people , not only the current generation , but the future generations .
And he also said , " I would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all . "
So he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people , not just a few people .
And therefore , ladies and gentlemen , this is the theme , getting more from less for more .
And mind you , it is not getting just a little more for just a little less .
It 's not about low cost .
It 's about ultra-low cost .
You cannot say it 's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars , but because you are poor I 'll give it for 9,000 .
Sorry , it doesn 't work . You have to give it for 100 dollars , 200 dollars .
Is it possible ? It has been made possible , by the way , for certain other different reasons .
So you are not talking about low cost , you are talking about ultra-low cost .
You are not talking about affordability , you are talking about extreme affordability .
Because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day .
You 're not talking exclusive innovation .
You 're talking about inclusive innovation .
And therefore , you 're not talking about incremental innovation , you 're talking about disruptive innovation .
The ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms .
And I would also add , it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people , the whole world working for it .
I was very touched when I saw a breakthrough the other day .
You know , incubators for infants , for example .
They 're not available in Africa .
They 're not available in Indian villages .
And infants die .
And incubator costs 2,000 dollars .
And there 's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created .
And by whom ?
By young students from Standford University on an extreme affordability project that they had , basically .
Their heart is in the right place , like Ratan Tata .
It 's not just innovation , compassion and passion -- compassion in the heart and passion in the belly .
That 's the new world that we want to create .
And that is why the message is that of Gandhian engineering .
Ladies and gentlemen , I 'd like to end before time .
I was also afraid of those 18 minutes .
I 've still one and a half to go .
The message , the final message , is this : India gave a great gift to the world .
What was that ?
[ In the ] 20th century , we gave Gandhi to the world .
The 21st century gift , which is very , very important for the whole world , whether it is global economic meltdown , whether it is climate change -- any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more -- not only the current generations , for the future generations .
And that can come only from Gandhian engineering .
So ladies and gentlemen , I 'm very happy to announce , this gift of the 21st century to the world from India , Gandhian engineering .
Lakshmi Pratury : Thank you , Dr. Mashelkar .
LP : A quick question for you .
Now , when you were a young boy in this school , what were your thoughts , like what did you think you could become ?
What do you think that drove you ?
Was there a vision you had ? What is it that drove you ?
RAM : I 'll tell you a story that drove me , that transformed my life .
I remember , I went to a poor school , because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees , that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time .
It was [ unclear ] high school .
But it was a poor school with rich teachers , honestly .
And one of them was [ unclear ] who taught us physics .
One day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens .
The lens was here . The piece of paper was there . He moved it up and down .
And there was a bright spot up there .
And then he said , " This is the focal length . "
But then he held it for a little while , Lakshmi .
And then the paper burned .
When the paper burned , for some reason he turned to me , and he said , " Mashelkar , like this , if you do not diffuse your energies , if you focus your energies , you can achieve anything in the world . "
That gave me a great message : focus and you can achieve .
I said , " Whoa , science is so wonderful , I have to become a scientist . "
But more importantly , focus and you can achieve .
And that message , very frankly , is valuable for society today .
What does that focal length do ?
It has parallel lines , which are sun rays .
And the property of parallel lines is that they never meet .
What does that convex lens do ?
It makes them meet .
This is convex lens leadership .
You know what today 's leadership is doing ? Concave length .
They divide them farther .
So I learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that .
And when I was at National Chemical Laboratory [ unclear ] .
When I was at Council of Scientific Industry Research -- 40 laboratories -- when two laboratories were not talking to each other , I would [ unclear ] .
And currently I 'm president of Global Research Alliance , 60,000 scientists in nine counties , right from India to the U.S.
I 'm trying to build a global team , which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing .
That was the lesson . That was the inspirational moment .
LP : Thank you very much .
Steven Pinker : What our language habits reveal
In an exclusive preview of his book & lt ; i & gt ; The Stuff of Thought & lt ; / i & gt ; , Steven Pinker looks at language and how it expresses what goes on in our minds -- and how the words we choose communicate much more than we realize .
This is a picture of Maurice Druon , the Honorary Perpetual Secretary of L 'Academie francaise , the French Academy .
He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform , befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language .
The French Academy has two main tasks : it compiles a dictionary of official French .
They 're now working on their ninth edition , which they began in 1930 , and they 've reached the letter P.
They also legislate on correct usage , such as the proper term for what the French call " email , " which ought to be " courriel . "
The World Wide Web , the French are told , ought to be referred to as " la toile d 'araignee mondiale " -- the Global Spider Web -- recommendations that the French gaily ignore .
Now , this is one model of how language comes to be : namely , it 's legislated by an academy .
But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit , that language , rather , emerges from human minds interacting from one another .
And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language -- the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary , it will already be well out of date .
We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon , of the historical change in languages , in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages .
So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature , so much as a window onto human nature .
In a book that I 'm currently working on , I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature , including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction .
And I 'm going to say a few words about each one this morning .
Let me start off with a technical problem in language that I 've worried about for quite some time -- and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they 're used .
The problem is , which verbs go in which constructions ?
The verb is the chassis of the sentence .
It 's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted .
Let me give you a quick reminder of something that you 've long forgotten .
An intransitive verb , such as " dine , " for example , can 't take a direct object .
You have to say , " Sam dined , " not , " Sam dined the pizza . "
A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there : " Sam devoured the pizza . " You can 't just say , " Sam devoured . "
There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type , each of which shapes its sentence .
So , a problem in explaining how children learn language , a problem in teaching language to adults so that they don 't make grammatical errors , and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions .
For example , the dative construction in English .
You can say , " Give a muffin to a mouse , " the prepositional dative .
Or , " Give a mouse a muffin , " the double-object dative .
" Promise anything to her , " " Promise her anything , " and so on .
Hundreds of verbs can go both ways .
for an adult , for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction , " subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient " can also be expressed as " subject-verb-recipient-thing . "
A handy thing to have , because language is infinite , and you can 't just parrot back the sentences that you 've heard .
You 've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences .
This would be an example of how to do that .
Unfortunately , there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions .
You can say , " Biff drove the car to Chicago , " but not , " Biff drove Chicago the car . "
You can say , " Sal gave Jason a headache , " but it 's a bit odd to say , " Sal gave a headache to Jason . "
The solution is that these constructions , despite initial appearance , are not synonymous , that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition , you see that there 's a subtle difference in meaning between them .
So , " give the X to the Y , " that construction corresponds to the thought " cause X to go to Y. " Whereas " give the Y the X " corresponds to the thought " cause Y to have X. "
Now , many events can be subject to either construal , kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions , in which you can either pay attention to the particular object , in which case the space around it recedes from attention , or you can see the faces in the empty space , in which case the object recedes out of consciousness .
How are these construals reflected in language ?
Well , in both cases , the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object , the noun after the verb .
So , when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere -- where you 're doing something to the muffin -- you say , " Give the muffin to the mouse . "
When you construe it as " cause the mouse to have something , " you 're doing something to the mouse , and therefore you express it as , " Give the mouse the muffin . "
So which verbs go in which construction -- the problem with which I began -- depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change .
To give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have .
To drive the car only causes something to go , because Chicago 's not the kind of thing that can possess something .
Only humans can possess things .
And to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache , but it 's not as if you 're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person , and implanting it in them .
You may just be loud or obnoxious , or some other way causing them to have the headache .
So , that 's an example of the kind of thing that I do in my day job .
So why should anyone care ?
Well , there are a number of interesting conclusions , I think , from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs .
First , there 's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure , which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence , that governs our use of language .
You can think of this as the language of thought , or " mentalese . "
It seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts , which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs -- not only in English , but in all other languages -- fundamental concepts such as space , time , causation and human intention , such as , what is the means and what is the ends ?
These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought , and it 's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories .
Doesn 't care about perceptual qualities , such as color , texture , weight and speed , which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions .
An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally , but in a quasi-metaphorical way .
For example , this construction , the dative , is used not only to transfer things , but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas , as when we say , " She told a story to me " or " told me a story , " " Max taught Spanish to the students " or " taught the students Spanish . "
It 's exactly the same construction , but no muffins , no mice , nothing moving at all .
It evokes the container metaphor of communication , in which we conceive of ideas as objects , sentences as containers , and communication as a kind of sending .
As when we say we " gather " our ideas , to " put " them " into " words , and if our words aren 't " empty " or " hollow , " we might get these ideas " across " to a listener , who can " unpack " our words to " extract " their " content . "
And indeed , this kind of verbiage is not the exception , but the rule .
It 's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor .
For example , you can use the verb " go " and the prepositions " to " and " from " in a literal , spatial sense .
" The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul . "
You can also say , " Biff went from sick to well . "
He needn 't go anywhere . He could have been in bed the whole time , but it 's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving .
Or , " The meeting went from three to four , " in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line .
Likewise , we use " force " to indicate not only physical force , as in , " Rose forced the door to open , " but also interpersonal force , as in , " Rose forced Sadie to go , " not necessarily by manhandling her , but by issuing a threat .
Or , " Rose forced herself to go , " as if there were two entities inside Rose 's head , engaged in a tug of a war .
Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways , such as " cause something to go to someone " and " causing someone to have something , " I think is a fundamental feature of human thought , and it 's the basis for much human argumentation , in which people don 't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed .
Just to give you a few examples : " ending a pregnancy " versus " killing a fetus ; " " a ball of cells " versus " an unborn child ; " " invading Iraq " versus " liberating Iraq ; " " redistributing wealth " versus " confiscating earnings . "
And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts -- such as objects , space , time , causation and intention -- which are useful in a social , knowledge-intensive species , whose evolution you can well imagine , and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content -- space , time and force -- and apply them to new abstract domains , therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals , to conceptualize mathematics , physics , law and other abstract domains .
Well , I said I 'd talk about two windows on human nature -- the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world , and now I 'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction , again , as reflected in language .
And I 'll start out with a puzzle , the puzzle of indirect speech acts .
Now , I 'm sure most of you have seen the movie " Fargo . "
And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer , is asked to show his driver 's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet .
And he says , " I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo , " which everyone , including the audience , interprets as a veiled bribe .
This kind of indirect speech is rampant in language .
For example , in polite requests , if someone says , " If you could pass the guacamole , that would be awesome , " we know exactly what he means , even though that 's a rather bizarre concept being expressed .
" Would you like to come up and see my etchings ? "
I think most people understand the intent behind that .
And likewise , if someone says , " Nice store you 've got there . It would be a real shame if something happened to it " -- -- we understand that as a veiled threat , rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities .
So the puzzle is , why are bribes , polite requests , solicitations and threats so often veiled ?
No one 's fooled .
Both parties know exactly what the speaker means , and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows , etc . , etc .
So what 's going on ?
I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships , and human relationships fall into a number of types .
There 's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske , in which relationships can be categorized , more or less , into communality , which works on the principle " what 's mine is thine , what 's thine is mine , " the kind of mindset that operates within a family , for example ; dominance , whose principle is " don 't mess with me ; " reciprocity , " you scratch my back , I 'll scratch yours ; " and sexuality , in the immortal words of Cole Porter , " Let 's do it . "
Now , relationship types can be negotiated .
Even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied , they can be stretched and extended .
For example , communality applies most naturally within family or friends , but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it .
For example , in brotherhoods , fraternal organizations , sororities , locutions like " the family of man , " you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin .
Now , mismatches -- when one person assumes one relationship type , and another assumes a different one -- can be awkward .
If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss ' plate , for example , that would be an awkward situation .
Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal , that would be rather awkward as well .
In less blatant cases , there 's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on .
In the workplace , for example , there 's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss , or refer to him or her on a first-name basis .
If two friends have a reciprocal transaction , like selling a car , it 's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness .
In dating , the transition from friendship to sex can lead to , notoriously , various forms of awkwardness , and as can sex in the workplace , in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship " sexual harassment . "
Well , what does this have to do with language ?
Well , language , as a social interaction , has to satisfy two conditions .
You have to convey the actual content -- here we get back to the container metaphor .
You want to express the bribe , the command , the promise , the solicitation and so on , but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person .
The solution , I think , is that we use language at two levels : the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener , whereas the implicated content -- the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform -- allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context , which possibly initiates a changed relationship .
The simplest example of this is in the polite request .
If you express your request as a conditional -- " if you could open the window , that would be great " -- even though the content is an imperative , the fact that you 're not using the imperative voice means that you 're not acting as if you 're in a relationship of dominance , where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person .
On the other hand , you want the damn guacamole .
By expressing it as an if-then statement , you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around .
And in a more subtle way , I think , this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability : the bribes , threats , propositions , solicitations and so on .
if language -- where it could only be used literally .
And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix .
Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer .
There 's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer .
If you don 't bribe the officer , then you will get a traffic ticket -- or , as is the case of " Fargo , " worse -- whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest .
Nothing ventured , nothing gained .
In that case , the consequences are rather severe .
On the other hand , if you extend the bribe , if the officer is dishonest , you get a huge payoff of going free .
If the officer is honest , you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery .
So this is a rather fraught situation .
On the other hand , with indirect language , if you issue a veiled bribe , then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe , in which case you get the payoff of going free .
The honest officer can 't hold you to it as being a bribe , and therefore , you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket .
So you get the best of both worlds .
And a similar analysis , I think , can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation , and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset .
I think this affirms something that 's long been known by diplomats -- namely , that the vagueness of language , far from being a bug or an imperfection , actually might be a feature of language , one that we use to our advantage in social interactions .
So to sum up : language is a collective human creation , reflecting human nature , how we conceptualize reality , how we relate to one another .
And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language , I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick .
Thank you very much .
Charles Leadbeater : The era of open innovation
In this deceptively casual talk , Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn 't just for professionals anymore . Passionate amateurs , using new tools , are creating products and paradigms that companies can 't .
What I 'm going to do , in the spirit of collaborative creativity , is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made , but do them -- this is called " creative collaboration ; " it 's actually called " borrowing " -- but do it through a particular perspective , and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about .
Let me just ask you , to start with , this simple question : who invented the mountain bike ?
Because traditional economic theory would say , well , the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R & amp ; D lab where they were thinking up new projects , and it came out of there . It didn 't come from there .
Another answer might be , well , it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage , who , working away on different kinds of bikes , comes up with a bike out of thin air .
It didn 't come from there . The mountain bike came from users , came from young users , particularly a group in Northern California , who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes , which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode , or your big brother , and they 're very glamorous .
But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode , which sort of had big handlebars like that , and they were too heavy .
So , they got the frames from these big bikes , put them together with the gears from the racing bikes , got the brakes from motorcycles , and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients .
And for the first , I don 't know , three to five years of their life , mountain bikes were known as " clunkers . "
And they were just made in a community of bikers , mainly in Northern California .
And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business , start selling them to other people , and gradually another company emerged out of that , Marin , and it probably was , I don 't know , 10 , maybe even 15 , years , before the big bike companies realized there was a market .
Thirty years later , mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America .
That 's 58 billion dollars .
This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn 't see the need , the opportunity ; they didn 't have the incentive to innovate .
The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai 's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive .
It 's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers -- who are knowledgeable ; they 've got the incentive to innovate ; they 've got the tools ; they want to -- that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration .
And out of that , you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about , which is our new kinds of organization , or a better way to put it : how do we organize ourselves without organizations ?
That 's now possible ; you don 't need an organization to be organized , to achieve large and complex tasks , like innovating new software programs .
So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about .
The traditional view , still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity -- in organizations , in government -- is that creativity is about special people : wear baseball caps the wrong way round , come to conferences like this , in special places , elite universities , R & amp ; D labs in the forests , water , maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors , you know , bean bags , maybe the odd table-football table .
Special people , special places , think up special ideas , then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers , who are passive .
They can say " yes " or " no " to the invention .
That 's the idea of creativity .
What 's the policy recommendation out of that if you 're in government , or you 're running a large company ?
More special people , more special places .
Build creative clusters in cities ; create more R & amp ; D parks , so on and so forth .
Expand the pipeline down to the consumers .
Well this view , I think , is increasingly wrong .
I think it 's always been wrong , because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative , and it 's probably been largely interactive .
But it 's increasingly wrong , and one of the reasons it 's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline .
The ideas are coming back from the consumers , and they 're often ahead of the producers .
Why is that ?
Well , one issue is that radical innovation , when you 've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people , have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them .
The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest .
And when you get a radical innovation , it 's often very uncertain how it can be applied .
The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty .
The very first landline telephones , the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters .
When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS , they had no idea what it was for ; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use .
So the more radical the innovation , the more the uncertainty , the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for .
All of our patents , our entire approach to patents and invention , is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for ; we can say what it 's for .
More and more , the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance .
It will be worked out in use , in collaboration with users .
We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation : there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea .
The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative ; like Wikipedia , it develops over a long period of time .
The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big , disruptive innovations .
If you want to find the big new ideas , it 's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets , in big organizations .
And just look inside large organizations and you 'll see why that is so .
So , you 're in a big corporation .
You 're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder .
Do you go into your board and say , " Look , I 've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market , with consumers we 've never dealt with before , and I 'm not sure it 's going to have a big payoff , but it could be really , really big in the future ? "
No , what you do , is you go in and you say , " I 've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users , and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years . "
Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success .
They 've got so much sunk in it that it 's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets . Emerging new markets , then , are the breeding grounds for passionate users .
Best example : who in the music industry , 30 years ago , would have said , " Yes , let 's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to .
That sounds like a winner ; we 'll go with it . "
.
So what happens ? Rap music is created by the users .
They do it on their own tapes , with their own recording equipment ; they distribute it themselves .
30 years later , rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture -- would never have come from the big companies .
Had to start -- this is the third point -- with these pro-ams .
This is the phrase that I 've used in some stuff which I 've done with a think tank in London called Demos , where we 've been looking at these people who are amateurs -- i.e. , they do it for the love of it -- but they want to do it to very high standards .
And across a whole range of fields -- from software , astronomy , natural sciences , vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing , so on and so forth -- you find people who want to do things because they love it , but they want to do these things to very high standards .
They work at their leisure , if you like .
They take their leisure very seriously : they acquire skills ; they invest time ; they use technology that 's getting cheaper -- it 's not just the Internet : cameras , design technology , leisure technology , surfboards , so on and so forth .
Largely through globalization , a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper .
More knowledgeable consumers , more educated , more able to connect with one another , more able to do things together .
Consumption , in that sense , is an expression of their productive potential .
Why , we found , people were interested in this , is that at work they don 't feel very expressed .
They don 't feel as if they 're doing something that really matters to them , so they pick up these kinds of activities .
This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life .
Take astronomy as an example , which Yochai has already mentioned .
Twenty years ago , 30 years ago , only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space .
And there 's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank , and when I was a kid , it was amazing , because the moon shots would take off , and this thing would move on rails .
And it was huge -- it was absolutely enormous .
Now , six amateur astronomers , working with the Internet , with Dobsonian digital telescopes -- which are pretty much open source -- with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years , the Internet -- they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago .
So here in astronomy , you have this vast explosion of new productive resources .
The users can be producers .
What does this mean , then , for our organizational landscape ?
Well , just imagine a world , for the moment , divided into two camps .
Over here , you 've got the old , traditional corporate model : special people , special places ; patent it , push it down the pipeline to largely waiting , passive consumers .
Over here , let 's imagine we 've got Wikipedia , Linux , and beyond -- open source .
This is open ; this is closed .
This is new ; this is traditional .
Well , the first thing you can say , I think with certainty , is what Yochai has said already -- is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms .
These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding , because they 're threatened by them .
And so the debates about copyright , digital rights , so on and so forth -- these are all about trying to stifle , in my view , these kinds of organizations .
What we 're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright .
Meant to be a way to incentivize invention , meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge , they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place .
Let me just give you two examples .
The first is : imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying , " I 've got a fantastic idea .
I 've invented this brilliant new program that is much , much better than Microsoft Outlook . "
Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft , with Microsoft Outlook ? No one .
That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come -- will only come -- from an open-source kind of project .
So , there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation , because it 's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly .
There 'll be huge professional arguments as well .
Because the professionals , over here in these closed organizations -- they might be academics ; they might be programmers ; they might be doctors ; they might be journalists -- my former profession -- say , " No , no -- you can 't trust these people over here . "
When I started in journalism -- Financial Times , 20 years ago -- it was very , very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper .
And you 'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article .
Usually they were reading the share prices , and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor , or something like that , and you know , " For heaven 's sake , what are they doing !
They 're not reading my brilliant article ! "
And we allowed users , readers , two places where they could contribute to the paper : the letters page , where they could write a letter in , and we would condescend to them , cut it in half , and print it three days later .
Or the op-ed page , where if they knew the editor -- had been to school with him , slept with his wife -- they could write an article for the op-ed page .
Those were the two places .
Shock , horror : now , the readers want to be writers and publishers .
That 's not their role ; they 're supposed to read what we write .
But they don 't want to be journalists . The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists ; they don 't want to be journalists ; they just want to have a voice .
They want to , as Jimmy said , they want to have a dialogue , a conversation .
They want to be part of that flow of information .
What 's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding .
So , there 's going to be a tremendous struggle .
But , also , there 's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed .
What you 'll see , I think , is two things that are critical , and these , I think , are two challenges for the open movement .
The first is : can we really survive on volunteers ?
If this is so critical , do we not need it funded , organized , supported in much more structured ways ?
I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea , but can we really organize that , just on volunteers ?
What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible ?
What 's the role of the BBC , for instance , in that world ?
What should be the role of public policy ?
And finally , what I think you will see is the intelligent , closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction .
So it 's not going to be a contest between two camps , but , in between them , you 'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy .
New organizational models coming about , mixing closed and open in tricky ways .
It won 't be so clear-cut ; it won 't be Microsoft versus Linux -- there 'll be all sorts of things in between .
And those organizational models , it turns out , are incredibly powerful , and the people who can understand them will be very , very successful .
Let me just give you one final example of what that means .
I was in Shanghai , in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago -- one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they 've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years .
And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan .
Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000 .
Didn 't go into the Internet , kept his money , decided to go into computer games .
He runs a company called Shanda , which is the largest computer games company in China .
Nine thousand servers all over China , has 250 million subscribers .
At any one time , there are four million people playing one of his games .
How many people does he employ to service that population ?
500 people .
Well , how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees ?
Because basically , he doesn 't service them .
He gives them a platform ; he gives them some rules ; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation ; he orchestrates the action .
But actually , a lot of the content is created by the users themselves .
And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really , really powerful .
The best measure of that : so you go into one of his games , you create a character that you develop in the course of the game .
If , for some reason , your credit card bounces , or there 's some other problem , you lose your character .
You 've got two options .
One option : you can create a new character , right from scratch , but with none of the history of your player .
That costs about 100 dollars .
Or you can get on a plane , fly to Shanghai , queue up outside Shanda 's offices -- cost probably 600 , 700 dollars -- and reclaim your character , get your history back .
Every morning , there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters .
So this is about companies built on communities , that provide communities with tools , resources , platforms in which they can share .
He 's not open source , but it 's very , very powerful .
So here is one of the challenges , I think , for people like me , who do a lot of work with government .
If you 're a games company , and you 've got a million players in your game , you only need one percent of them to be co-developers , contributing ideas , and you 've got a development workforce of 10,000 people .
Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain , and one percent of them were co-developers of education .
What would that do to the resources available to the education system ?
Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to , in some sense , be co-producers of health .
The reason why -- despite all the efforts to cut it down , to constrain it , to hold it back -- why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force , is that they multiply our productive resources .
And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers , consumers into designers .
Thank you very much .
Richard Sears : Planning for the end of oil
As the world 's attention focuses on the perils of oil exploration , we present Richard Sears ' talk from early February 2010 . Sears , an expert in developing new energy resources , talks about our inevitable and necessary move away from oil . Toward ... what ?
For the next few minutes we 're going to talk about energy , and it 's going to be a bit of a varied talk .
I 'll try to spin a story about energy , and oil 's a convenient starting place .
The talk will be broadly about energy , but oil 's a good place to start .
And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff .
You take about eight or so carbon atoms , about 20 hydrogen atoms , you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid : very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels .
It 's great stuff .
Now , as far as it goes , there 's a lot of oil out there in the world .
Here 's my little pocket map of where it 's all located .
A bigger one for you to look at .
But this is it , this is the oil in the world .
Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is .
This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today .
Now , that 's just one story about oil , and we could end it there and say , " Well , oil 's going to last forever because , well , there 's just a lot of it . "
But there 's actually more to the story than that .
Oh , by the way , if you think you 're very far from some of this oil , 1000 meters below where you 're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world .
Come talk to me about it , I 'll fill in some of the details if you want .
So , that 's one of the stories of oil ; there 's just a lot of it .
But what about oil ? Where is it in the energy system ?
Here 's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil , and it 's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years .
Now , here 's another little secret I 'm going to tell you about : For the last 25 years , oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems .
There was one kind of peak oil in 1985 , when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply .
Now , it 's about 35 percent .
It 's been declining and I believe it will continue to decline .
Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining .
So oil is playing a less significant role every year .
And so , 25 years ago , there was a peak oil ; just like , in the 1920s , there was a peak coal ; and a hundred years before that , there was a peak wood .
This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems .
And what 's been taking up the slack in the last few decades ?
Well , a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear , for starters .
And what goes on in the future ?
Well , I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas , and beyond that , peak renewables .
Now , I 'll tell you another little , very important story about this picture .
Now , I 'm not pretending that energy use in total isn 't increasing , it is -- that 's another part of the story . Come talk to me about it , we 'll fill in some of the details -- but there 's a very important message here : This is 200 years of history , and for 200 years we 've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system .
Energy systems of the world becoming progressively -- year on year , decade on decade , century on century -- becoming less carbon intense .
And that continues into the future with the renewables that we 're developing today , reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century .
Now that might be the end of the story -- Okay , we just replace it all with conventional renewables -- but I think , actually , there 's more to the story than that .
And to tell the next part of the story -- and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond .
What is the future of truly sustainable , carbon-free energy ?
Well , we have to take a little excursion , and we 'll start in central Texas .
Here 's a piece of limestone .
I picked it up outside of Marble Falls , Texas .
It 's about 400 million years old .
And it 's just limestone , nothing really special about it .
Now , here 's a piece of chalk .
I picked this up at MIT . It 's a little younger .
And it 's different than this limestone , you can see that .
You wouldn 't build a building out of this stuff , and you wouldn 't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this .
Yeah , it 's very different -- no , it 's not different .
It 's not different , it 's the same stuff : calcium carbonate , calcium carbonate .
What 's different is how the molecules are put together .
Now , if you think that 's kind of neat , the story gets really neat right now .
Off the coast of California comes this : It 's an abalone shell .
Now , millions of abalone every year make this shell .
Oh , by the way , just in case you weren 't already guessing , it 's calcium carbonate .
It 's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this .
But it 's not the same stuff ; it 's different .
It 's thousands of times , maybe 3,000 times tougher than this .
And why ? Because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers , making this beautiful , iridescent mother of pearl .
Very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles , millions of abalone , all the time , every day , every year .
This is pretty incredible stuff .
All the same , what 's different ?
How the molecules are put together .
Now , what does this have to do with energy ?
Here 's a piece of coal .
And I 'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk .
Now , whether we 're talking about fuels or energy carriers , or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells , nature hasn 't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature didn 't need to .
Nature didn 't need to because , unlike the abalone shell , the survival of a species didn 't depend on building those materials , until maybe now when it might just matter .
So , when we think about the future of energy , imagine what would it be like if instead of this , we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently .
And so that is my story .
The oil will never run out .
It 's not because we have a lot of it .
It 's not because we 're going to build a bajillion windmills .
It 's because , well , thousands of years ago , people invented ideas -- they had ideas , innovations , technology -- and the Stone Age ended , not because we ran out of stones .
It 's ideas , it 's innovation , it 's technology that will end the age of oil , long before we run out of oil .
Thank you very much .
Kamal Meattle : How to grow fresh air
Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants , used in specific spots in a home or office building , can result in measurably cleaner indoor air .
Some 17 years ago , I became allergic to Delhi 's air .
My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent , and it was killing me .
With the help of IIT , TERI , and learnings from NASA , we discovered that there are three basic green plants , common green plants , with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy .
We 've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building , while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards .
The three plants are Areca palm , Mother-in-Law 's Tongue and money plant .
The botanical names are in front of you .
Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen .
We need four shoulder-high plants per person , and in terms of plant care , we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi , and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities .
We had to grow them in vermi manure , which is sterile , or hydroponics , and take them outdoors every three to four months .
The second plant is Mother-in-law 's Tongue , which is again a very common plant , and we call it a bedroom plant , because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night .
And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person .
The third plant is money plant , and this is again a very common plant ; preferably grows in hydroponics .
And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals .
With these three plants , you can grow all the fresh air you need .
In fact , you could be in a bottle with a cap on top , and you would not die at all , and you would not need any fresh air .
We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi , which is a 50,000-square-feet , 20-year-old building .
And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants .
Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one 's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours .
The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi .
And the study showed that , compared to other buildings , there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent , respiratory systems by 34 percent , headaches by 24 percent , lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent .
And this study has been published on September 8 , 2008 , and it 's available on the government of India website .
Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants .
And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent , because you need less fresh air .
We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building , which will have 60,000 indoor plants .
Why is this important ?
It is also important for the environment , because the world 's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade .
40 percent of the world 's energy is taken up by buildings currently , and 60 percent of the world 's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years .
And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places .
" Be the change you want to see in the world , " said Mahatma Gandhi .
And thank you for listening .
Maz Jobrani : Did you hear the one about the Iranian-American ?
A founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour , standup comic Maz Jobrani riffs on the challenges and conflicts of being Iranian-American -- " like , part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program ; the other part thinks I can 't be trusted ... "
I was one of the founding members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour .
The other founding members included Ahmed Ahmed , who is an Egyptian-American , who actually had the idea to go to the Middle East and try it out .
Before we went out as a tour , he went out solo and did it first .
Then there was Aron Kader , who was the Palestinian-American .
And then there was me , the Iranian-American of the group .
Now , being Iranian-American presents its own set of problems , as you know .
Those two countries aren 't getting along these days .
So it causes a lot of inner conflict , you know , like part of me likes me , part of me hates me .
Part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program , the other part thinks I can 't be trusted with one .
These are dilemmas I have every day .
But I was born in Iran ; I 'm now an American citizen , which means I have the American passport , which means I can travel .
Because if you only have the Iranian passport , you 're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms , you know -- Syria , Venezuela , North Korea .
So anyone who 's gotten their passport in America will tell you , when you get your passport , it still says what country you were born in .
So I remember getting my American passport .
I was like , " Woohoo ! I 'm going to travel . "
And I opened it up , it said , " Born in Iran . " I 'm like , " Oh , come on , man . "
" I 'm trying to go places . "
But what 's interesting is , I 've never had trouble traveling in any other Western countries with my American passport , even though it says , " Born in Iran . " No problems .
Where I 've had some problems is some of the Arab countries , because I guess some of the Arab countries aren 't getting along with Iran either .
And so I was in Kuwait recently , doing a comedy show with some other American comedians .
They all went through , and then the border patrol saw my American passport .
" Ah ha ! American , great . "
Then he opened it up . " Born in Iran ? Wait . "
And he started asking me questions .
He said , " What is your father 's name ? "
I said , " Well , he 's passed away , but his name was Khosro . "
He goes , " What is your grandfather 's name ? "
I said , " He passed away a long time ago .
His name was Jabbar . "
He says , " You wait . I 'll be back , " and he walked away .
And I started freaking out , because I don 't know what kind of crap my grandfather was into .
Thought the guy was going to come back and be like , " We 've been looking for you for 200 years . "
" Your grandfather has a parking violation . It 's way overdue .
You owe us two billion dollars . "
But as you can see , when I talk , I speak with an American accent , which you would think as an Iranian-American actor , I should be able to play any part , good , bad , what have you .
But a lot of times in Hollywood , when casting directors find out you 're of Middle Eastern descent , they go , " Oh , you 're Iranian . Great .
Can you say ' I will kill you in the name of Allah ? ' " " I could say that , but what if I were to say , ' Hello . I 'm your doctor ? ' " They go , " Great . And then you hijack the hospital . "
Like I think you 're missing the point here .
Don 't get me wrong , I don 't mind playing bad guys .
I want to play a bad guy . I want to rob a bank .
I want to rob a bank in a film . I want to rob a bank in a film , but do it with a gun , with a gun , not with a bomb strapped around me , right .
Because I imagine the director : " Maz , I think your character would rob the bank with a bomb around him . "
" Why would I do that ?
If I want the money , why would I kill myself ? "
Right .
" Gimme all your money , or I 'll blow myself up . "
" Well , then blow yourself up .
Just do it outside , please . "
But the fact is , there 's good people everywhere .
That 's what I try and show in my stand-up . There 's good people everywhere .
All it takes in one person to mess it up .
Like a couple months ago in Times Square in New York , there was this Pakistani Muslim guy who tried to blow up a car bomb .
Now , I happened to be in Times Square that night doing a comedy show .
And a few months before that , there was a white American guy in Austin , Texas who flew his airplane into the IRS building , and I happened to be in Austin that day doing a stand-up comedy show .
Now I 'll tell you , as a Middle Eastern male , when you show up around a lot of these activities , you start feeling guilty at one point .
I was watching the news . I 'm like , " Am I involved in this crap ? "
" I didn 't get the memo . What 's going on ? "
But what was interesting was , the Pakistani Muslim guy -- see he gives a bad name to Muslims and Middle Easterners and Pakistanis from all over the world .
And one thing that happened there was also the Pakistani Taliban took credit for that failed car bombing .
My question is : why would you take credit for a failed car bombing ?
" We just wanted to say we tried . "
" And furthermore , it is the thought that counts . "
" And in conclusion , win some , lose some . "
But what happened was , when the white guy flew his plane into the building , I know all my Middle Eastern and Muslim friends in the States were watching TV , going , " Please , don 't be Middle Eastern .
Don 't be Hassan . Don 't be Hussein . "
And the name came out Jack . I 'm like , " Woooo !
That 's not one of us . "
But I kept watching the news in case they came back , they were like , " Before he did it , he converted to Islam . "
" Damn it ! Why Jack ? Why ? "
But the fact is , I 've been lucky to get a chance to perform all over the world , and I did a lot of shows in the Middle East .
I just did a seven-country solo tour .
I was in Oman , and I was in Saudi Arabia .
I was in Dubai .
And it 's great , there 's good people everywhere .
And you learn great things about these places .
I encourage people always to go visit these places .
For example , Dubai -- cool place .
They 're obsessed with having the biggest , tallest , longest , as we all know .
They have a mall there , the Dubai Mall .
It is so big , they have taxis in the mall .
I was walking . I heard " Beep , beep . "
I 'm like , " What are you doing here ? "
He goes , " I 'm going to the Zara store . It 's three miles away .
And what 's crazy -- there 's a recession going on , even in Dubai , but you wouldn 't know by the prices .
Like in the Dubai Mall , they sell frozen yogurt by the gram .
It 's like a drug deal .
I was walking by . The guy goes , " Psst . Habibi , my friend . "
" You want some frozen yogurt ?
Come here . Come here . Come here .
I have one gram , five gram , 10 gram . How many gram do you want ? "
I bought five grams . 10 dollars . 10 dollars ! I said , " What 's in this ? "
He 's like , " Good stuff , man . Columbian . Top of the line . Top of the line . "
The other thing you learn sometimes when you travel to these countries in the Middle East , sometimes in Latin American countries , South American countries -- a lot of times when they build stuff , there 's no rules and regulations .
For example , I took my two year-old son to the playground at the Dubai Mall .
And I 've taken my two year-old son to playgrounds all over the United States .
And when you put your two year-old on a slide in the United States , they put something on the slide to slow the kid down as he comes down the slide .
Not in the Middle East .
I put my two year-old on the slide ; he went frrmrmm ! He took off .
I went down . I go , " Where 's my son ? "
" On the third floor , sir . On the third floor . "
" You take a taxi . You go to Zara . Make a left . "
" Try the yogurt . It 's very good . Little expensive . "
But one of the things I try to do with my stand-up is to break stereotypes .
And I 've been guilty of stereotyping as well .
I was in Dubai . And there 's a lot of Indians who work in Dubai .
And they don 't get paid that well .
And I got it in my head that all the Indians there must be workers .
And I forgot there 's obviously successful Indians in Dubai as well .
I was doing a show , and they said , " We 're going to send a driver to pick you up . "
So I went down to the lobby , and I saw this Indian guy .
I go , " He 's got to be my driver . "
Because he was standing there in like a cheap suit , thin mustache , staring at me .
So I went over , " Excuse me , sir , are you my driver ? "
He goes , " No , sir . I own the hotel . "
I go , " I 'm sorry . Then why were you staring at me ? "
He goes , " I thought you were my driver . "
I 'll leave you guys with this : I try , with my stand-up , to break stereotypes , present Middle Easterners in a positive light -- Muslims in a positive light -- and I hope that in the coming years , more film and television programs come out of Hollywood presenting us in a positive light .
Who knows , maybe one day we 'll even have our own James Bond , right .
" My name is Bond , Jamal Bond . "
Til then , I 'll keep telling jokes . I hope you keep laughing .
Have a good day . Thank you .
Stefana Broadbent : How the Internet enables intimacy
We worry that IM , texting , Facebook are spoiling human intimacy , but Stefana Broadbent 's research shows how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships , bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules .
I believe that there are new , hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions -- institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life : schools , hospitals , workplaces , factories , offices , etc .
And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of " democratization of intimacy . "
And what do I mean by that ?
I mean that what people are doing is , in fact , they are sort of , with their communication channels , they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them .
How are they doing this ? They 're doing it in a very simple way , by calling their mom from work , by IMing from their office to their friends , by texting under the desk .
The pictures that you 're seeing behind me are people that I visited in the last few months .
And I asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most .
And somebody brought a boyfriend , somebody a father .
One young woman brought her grandfather .
For 20 years , I 've been looking at how people use channels such as email , the mobile phone , texting , etc .
What we 're actually going to see is that , fundamentally , people are communicating on a regular basis with five , six , seven of their most intimate sphere .
Now , lets take some data . Facebook .
Recently some sociologists from Facebook -- Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels .
And an average user , said Cameron Marlow , from Facebook , has about 120 friends .
But he actually talks to , has two-way exchanges with , about four to six people on a regular base , depending on his gender .
Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists , but fundamentally people chat with two , three , four -- anyway , less than five .
My own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people . 80 percent .
And when you go to Skype , it 's down to two people .
A lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed .
I mean , I 've been a bit disappointed sometimes when I saw this data and all this deployment , just for five people .
And some sociologists actually feel that it 's a closure , it 's a cocooning , that we 're disengaging from the public .
And I would actually , I would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it , and from where they 're doing it , actually there is an incredible social transformation .
There are three stories that I think are quite good examples .
The first gentleman , he 's a baker .
And so he starts working every morning at four o 'clock in the morning .
And around eight o 'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven , cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife .
He just wants to wish her a good day , because that 's the start of her day .
And I 've heard this story a number of times .
A young factory worker who works night shifts , who manages to sneak away from the factory floor , where there is CCTV by the way , and find a corner , where at 11 o 'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight .
Or a mother who , at four o 'clock , suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home .
Then there is another couple , there is a Brazilian couple .
They 've lived in Italy for a number of years .
They Skype with their families a few times a week .
But once a fortnight , they actually put the computer on their dining table , pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in Sao Paulo . And they have a big event of it .
And I heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from Kosovo in Switzerland .
They had set up a big screen in their living room , and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother .
But Danny Miller , who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines , was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype , and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype .
And then there is the third couple . They are two friends .
They chat to each other every day , a few times a day actually .
And finally , finally , they 've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work .
And now , obviously , they have it open .
Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other .
And this is exactly what we 've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school , under the table , and texting under the table to their friends .
So , none of these cases are unique .
I mean , I could tell you hundreds of them .
But what is really exceptional is the setting .
So , think of the three settings I 've talked to you about : factory , migration , office .
But it could be in a school , it could be an administration , it could be a hospital .
Three settings that , if we just step back 15 years , if you just think back 15 years , when you clocked in , when you clocked in to an office , when you clocked in to a factory , there was no contact for the whole duration of the time , there was no contact with your private sphere .
If you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere .
If you were in management , oh , that was a different story .
Maybe you had a direct line .
If you were not , you maybe had to go through an operator .
But basically , when you walked into those buildings , the private sphere was left behind you .
And this has become such a norm of our professional lives , such a norm and such an expectation .
And it had nothing to do with technical capability .
The phones were there . But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand , fully to the people around you .
That was where the focus had to be .
And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage .
If you think nursery , kindergarten , first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children , to make them used to staying long hours away from their family .
And then the school enacts perfectly well .
It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices : rituals of entry , rituals of exit , the schedules , the uniforms in this country , things that identify you , team-building activities , be with a random group of kids , or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time .
And of course , the major thing : learn to pay attention , This only started about 150 years ago .
It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy , and of industrial revolution .
When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work .
And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach , where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere .
So , until then , basically people were living on top of their trades .
They were living on top of the land they were laboring .
And if you think , it 's permeated our whole culture , even our cities .
If you think of medieval cities , medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there .
Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas .
And actually , over these 150 years , there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged .
So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out , the more removed he would be from his personal sphere .
People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations .
And they are doing it massively .
The Pew Institute , which produces good data on a regular basis on , for instance , in the States , says that -- and I think that this number is conservative -- 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office .
I really think that the number is conservative .
In my own research , we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o 'clock in the morning , whatever the country .
75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones .
100 percent are using text .
The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions .
I 'm always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance , of soldiers in Iraq having daily contact with their families .
But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access .
And every day , every single day , I read news that makes me cringe , like a $ 15 fine to kids in Texas , for using , every time they take out their mobile phone in school .
Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York , if seen with a mobile phone in a hand .
Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook .
Behind issues of security and safety , which have always been the arguments for social control , in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who , in fact , has a right to self determine their attention , to decide , whether they should , or not , be isolated .
And they are actually trying to block , in a certain sense , this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy .
Terry Moore : How to tie your shoes
Terry Moore found out he 'd been tying his shoes the wrong way his whole life . In the spirit of TED , he takes the stage to share a better way .
I 'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective , intelligent , intellectual , savvy , worldly and innovative people in the world .
And I think that 's true .
However , I also have reason to believe that many , if not most , of you are actually tying your shoes incorrectly .
Now I know that seems ludicrous .
I know that seems ludicrous .
And believe me , I lived the same sad life until about three years ago .
And what happened to me was I bought , what was for me , a very expensive pair of shoes .
But those shoes came with round nylon laces , and I couldn 't keep them tied .
So I went back to the store and said to the owner , " I love the shoes , but I hate the laces . "
He took a look and said , " Oh , you 're tying them wrong . "
Now up until that moment , I would have thought that , by age 50 , one of the life skills that I had really nailed was tying my shoes .
But not so -- let me demonstrate .
This is the way that most of us were taught to tie our shoes .
Now as it turns out -- thank you .
Wait , there 's more .
As it turns out , there 's a strong form and a weak form of this knot , and we were taught to tie the weak form .
And here 's how to tell .
If you pull the strands at the base of the knot , you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe .
That 's the weak form of the knot .
But not to worry .
If we start over and simply go the other direction around the bow , we get this , the strong form of the knot .
And if you pull the cords under the knot , you will see that the bow orients itself along the transverse axis of the shoe .
This is a stronger knot . It will come untied less often .
It will let you down less , and not only that , it looks better .
We 're going to do this one more time .
Start as usual , go the other way around the loop .
This is a little hard for children , but I think you can handle it .
Pull the knot .
There it is : the strong form of the shoe knot .
Now , in keeping with today 's theme , I 'd like to point out -- and something you already know -- that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else .
Live long and prosper .
Roger Ebert : Remaking my voice
When film critic Roger Ebert lost his lower jaw to cancer , he lost the ability to eat and speak . But he did not lose his voice . In a moving talk from TED2011 , Ebert and his wife , Chaz , with friends Dean Ornish and John Hunter , come together to tell his remarkable story .
Roger Ebert : These are my words , but this is not my voice .
This is Alex , the best computer voice I 've been able to find , which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh .
For most of my life , I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak .
It was like breathing .
In those days , I was living in a fool 's paradise .
After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak , eat or drink , I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me .
For several days now , we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED .
I used to be able to talk like that .
Maybe I wasn 't as smart , but I was at least as talkative .
I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself , and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one 's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away .
However , I 've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous .
So I 've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me .
I will start with my wife , Chaz .
Chaz Ebert : It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak .
Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006 , I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show , ' Ebert and Roeper at the Movies . ' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation .
The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw .
My tongue , larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected .
CE : I was optimistic , and all was right with the world .
The first surgery was a great success .
I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good .
Two weeks later , I was ready to return home .
I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song ' I 'm Your Man ' for my doctors and nurses .
Suddenly , I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding .
My carotid artery had ruptured .
Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there .
Chaz told me that if that song hadn 't played for so long , I might have already been in the car , on the way home , and would have died right there and then .
So thank you , Leonard Cohen , for saving my life .
There was a second surgery -- which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart .
And then a third attempt , which also patched me back together pretty well , until it failed .
A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture .
And before I left the hospital , after a year of being hospitalized , I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery .
There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again ; it just sort of became obvious .
Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system .
We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds .
Therefore , the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air .
Because I had lost my jaw , I could no longer form a seal , and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless .
Dean Ornish : At first for a long time , I wrote messages in notebooks .
Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice .
This was faster , and nobody had to try to read my handwriting .
I tried out various computer voices that were available online , and for several months I had a British accent , which Chaz called Sir Lawrence . "
" It was the clearest I could find .
Then Apple released the Alex voice , which was the best I 'd heard .
It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark .
When it saw a period , it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air .
There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices , and I 've experimented with them .
For me , they share a fundamental problem : they 're too slow .
When I find myself in a conversational situation , I need to type fast and to jump right in .
People don 't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase .
But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice ?
How does that affect who you are as a person ?
When people hear Alex speaking my words , do they experience a disconnect ?
Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next ?
How did I feel not being able to speak ?
I felt , and I still feel , a lot of distance from the human mainstream .
I 've become uncomfortable when I 'm separated from my laptop .
Even then , I 'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties .
So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years .
At first I was against it .
I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer .
There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own .
But I decided then to just give it a try .
So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices .
They 'd never made one from previously-recorded materials .
All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth .
But they were willing to give it a try .
So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice , including several audio commentary tracks that I 'd made for movies on DVDs .
And it sounded like me , it really did .
There was a reason for that ; it was me .
But it wasn 't that simple .
The tapes from my TV show weren 't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved -- movie soundtracks , for example , or Gene Siskel arguing with me -- and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn 't fit into a sentence well enough .
I 'll let you hear a sample of that voice .
These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program .
And here 's the voice we call Roger Jr .
or Roger 2.0 .
Roger 2.0 : Oprah , I can 't tell you how great it is to be back on your show .
We have been talking for a long time , and now here we are again .
This is the first version of my computer voice .
It still needs improvement , but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000 .
When I heard it the first time , it sent chills down my spine .
When I type anything , this voice will speak whatever I type .
When I read something , it will read in my voice .
I have typed these words in advance , as I didn 't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing .
The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc .
It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on " Casablanca " and " Citizen Kane . "
This is the first voice they 've created for an individual .
There are several very good voices available for computers , but they all sound like somebody else , while this voice sounds like me .
I plan to use it on television , radio and the Internet .
People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems .
Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves .
But I 've got to say , in first grade , they said I talked too much , and now I still can .
Roger Ebert : As you can hear , it sounds like me , but the words jump up and down .
The flow isn 't natural .
The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice , and I 'm optimistic about it .
But so far , the Apple Alex voice is the best one I 've heard .
I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex .
He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice .
A very large sample is needed .
John Hunter : All my life I was a motormouth .
Now I have spoken my last words , and I don 't even remember for sure what they were .
I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled " I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream . "
On Wednesday , David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe .
For almost all of its millions and billions of years , there was no life on Earth at all .
For almost all the years of life on Earth , there was no intelligent life .
Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next , did civilization become possible .
In cosmological terms , that was about 10 minutes ago .
Finally came mankind 's most advanced and mysterious tool , the computer .
That has mostly happened in my lifetime .
Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana , the birthplace of HAL 9000 .
When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday , about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world , I had a flashback .
It was about 1960 .
As a local newspaper reporter still in high school , I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO .
The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations .
This was a computer-assisted instruction system , which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC .
The programmers said it could assist students in their learning .
I doubt , on that day 50 years ago , they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished .
But that 's not the point .
The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago , an instant in time .
It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers , until only five years ago .
I have learned from Wikipedia that , starting with that humble beginning , PLATO established forums , message boards , online testing , email , chat rooms , picture languages , instant messaging , remote screen sharing and multiple-player games .
Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana , it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual , online universe we occupy today .
But I 'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce .
I 'm here as a man who wants to communicate .
All of this has happened in my lifetime .
I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times .
I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100 's .
And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they 'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections , they didn 't know what I was talking about .
When I bought my first desktop , it was a DEC Rainbow .
Does anybody remember that ? "
" The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble .
I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter .
CE : All of this has happened in the blink of an eye .
It is unimaginable what will happen next .
It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history .
Indeed , I am lucky to live in history at all , because without intelligence and memory there is no history .
For billions of years , the universe evolved completely without notice .
Now we live in the age of the Internet , which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness .
And because of it , I can communicate as well as I ever could .
We are born into a box of time and space .
We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others .
For me , the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence .
I cannot speak ; I can only type so fast .
Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated , but with my computer , I can communicate more widely than ever before .
I feel as if my blog , my email , Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation .
They aren 't an improvement , but they 're the best I can do .
They give me a way to speak .
Not everybody has the patience of my wife , Chaz .
But online , everybody speaks at the same speed .
This whole adventure has been a learning experience .
Every time there was a surgery that failed , I was left with a little less flesh and bone .
Now I have no jaw left at all .
While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders , the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily .
Ironic that my legs are fine , and it 's my shoulders that slow up my walk .
When you see me today , I look like the Phantom of the Opera .
But no you don 't .
It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles .
People -- People talk loudly -- I 'm so sorry .
Excuse me .
People talk loudly and slowly to me .
Sometimes they assume I am deaf .
There are people who don 't want to make eye contact .
Believe me , he didn 't mean this as -- anyway , let me just read it .
You should never let your wife read something like this .
It is human nature to look away from illness .
We don 't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality .
That 's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me .
My ability to think and write have not been affected .
And on the Web , my real voice finds expression .
I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way .
One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes .
One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple .
Google him and he will make you laugh .
All of these people are saying , in one way or another , that what you see is not all you get .
So I have not come here to complain .
I have much to make me happy and relieved .
I seem , for the time being , to be cancer-free .
I am writing as well as ever .
I am productive .
If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago , I would be as isolated as a hermit .
I would be trapped inside my head .
Because of the rush of human knowledge , because of the digital revolution , I have a voice , and I do not need to scream .
RE : Wait . I have one more thing to add .
A guy goes into a psychiatrist .
The psychiatrist says , " You 're crazy . "
The guy says , " I want a second opinion . "
The psychiatrist says , " All right , you 're ugly . "
You all know the test for artificial intelligence -- the Turing test .
A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer .
If the judge can 't tell the machine apart from the human , the machine has passed the test .
I now propose a test for computer voices -- the Ebert test .
If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman , then that 's the voice I want .
James Burchfield : Playing invisible turntables
Human beatbox James " AudioPoet " Burchfield performs an intricate three-minute breakdown -- sexy , propulsive hip-hop rhythms and turntable textures -- all using only his voice .
Let 's just get started here .
Okay , just a moment .
All right .
Oh , sorry .
Thank you .
Steven Cowley : Fusion is energy 's future
Physicist Steven Cowley is certain that nuclear fusion is the only truly sustainable solution to the fuel crisis . He explains why fusion will work -- and details the projects that he and many others have devoted their lives to , working against the clock to create a new source of energy .
The key question is , " When are we going to get fusion ? "
It 's really been a long time since we 've known about fusion .
We 've known about fusion since 1920 , when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that 's why the sun shines .
I 've always been very worried about resource .
I don 't know about you , but when my mother gave me food , I always sorted the ones I disliked from the ones I liked .
And I ate the disliked ones first , because the ones you like , you want to save .
And as a child you 're always worried about resource .
And once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world 's resources , I got very upset , about as upset as I did when I realized that the Earth will only last about five billion years before it 's swallowed by the sun .
Big events in my life , a strange child .
Energy , at the moment , is dominated by resource .
The countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them .
Coal-powered industrial revolution in this country -- oil , gas , sorry .
Gas , I 'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when Mister Putin turns off the gas tap , because my budget goes up .
We 're really dominated now by those things that we 're using up faster and faster and faster .
And as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the Third World , in the developing world , we 're using energy faster and faster .
And those resources are going away .
And the way we 'll make energy in the future is not from resource , it 's really from knowledge .
If you look 50 years into the future , the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three , with some wind , with some other things , but these are going to be the base load energy drivers .
Solar can do it , and we certainly have to develop solar .
But we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world .
Fission .
Our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations .
They 're going to put in six new nuclear power stations , and probably more after that .
China is building nuclear power stations . Everybody is .
Because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy .
But if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is , the perfect energy source is one that doesn 't take up much space , has a virtually inexhaustible supply , is safe , doesn 't put any carbon into the atmosphere , doesn 't leave any long-lived radioactive waste : it 's fusion .
But there is a catch . Of course there is always a catch in these cases .
Fusion is very hard to do .
We 've been trying for 50 years .
Okay . What is fusion ? Here comes the nuclear physics .
And sorry about that , but this is what turns me on .
I was a strange child .
Nuclear energy comes for a simple reason .
The most stable nucleus is iron , right in the middle of the periodic table .
It 's a medium-sized nucleus .
And you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy .
So , uranium , which is very big , wants to split .
But small atoms want to join together , small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron .
And you can get energy out this way .
And indeed that 's exactly what stars do .
In the middle of stars , you 're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon , to make oxygen , all the things that you 're made of are made in the middle of stars .
But it 's a hard process to do because , as you know , the middle of a star is quite hot , almost by definition .
And there is one reaction that 's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do .
It 's between two isotopes of hydrogen , two kinds of hydrogen : deuterium , which is heavy hydrogen , which you can get from seawater , and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen .
These two nuclei , when they 're far apart , are charged .
And you push them together and they repel .
But when you get them close enough , something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together .
So , most of the time they repel .
You get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together .
For a moment they become helium 5 , because they 've got five particles inside them .
So , that 's that process there . Deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5 .
Helium splits out , and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out .
If you can get something to about 150 million degrees , things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration , this will happen , and it will release energy .
And that energy is what powers fusion .
And it 's this reaction that we want to do .
There is one trickiness about this reaction .
Well , there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees , It 's pretty hot .
The trickiness about the reaction is that tritium doesn 't exist in nature .
You have to make it from something else .
And you make if from lithium . That reaction at the bottom , that 's lithium 6 , plus a neutron , will give you more helium , plus tritium .
And that 's the way you make your tritium .
But fortunately , if you can do this fusion reaction , you 've got a neutron , so you can make that happen .
Now , why the hell would we bother to do this ?
This is basically why we would bother to do it .
If you just plot how much fuel we 've got left , in units of present world consumption .
And as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil -- the blue line , by the way , is the lowest estimate of existing resources .
And the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate .
And as you go across there you will see that we 've got a few tens of years , and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left .
And god knows we don 't really want to burn all of it , because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air .
And then we get to uranium .
And with current reactor technology we really don 't have very much uranium .
And we will have to extract uranium from sea water , which is the yellow line , to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us .
This is a bit shocking , because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet Kyoto , and do all those kind of things .
To go any further you would have to have breeder technology .
And breeder technology is fast breeders . And that 's pretty dangerous .
The big thing , on the right , is the lithium we have in the world .
And lithium is in sea water . That 's the yellow line .
And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water .
Everybody can get it . That 's why we want to do fusion .
Is it cost-competitive ?
We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant .
And we get within about the same price as current electricity .
So , how would we make it ?
We have to hold something at 150 million degrees .
And , in fact , we 've done this .
We hold it with a magnetic field .
And inside it , right in the middle of this toroidal shape , doughnut shape , right in the middle is 150 million degrees .
It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees .
And in fact we can make fusion happen .
And just down the road , this is JET .
It 's the only machine in the world that 's actually done fusion .
When people say fusion is 30 years away , and always will be , I say , " Yeah , but we 've actually done it . " Right ?
We can do fusion . In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997 .
And in 2013 we 're going to fire it up again and break all those records .
But that 's not really fusion power . That 's just making some fusion happen .
We 've got to take that , we 've got to make that into a fusion reactor .
Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth .
This is the device we 're building now .
It gets very expensive to do this research .
It turns out you can 't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense . Right ?
You can 't . You have to do it in a very big device .
More than half the world 's population is involved in building this device in southern France , which is a nice place to put an experiment .
Seven nations are involved in building this .
It 's going to cost us 10 billion . And we 'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power .
But that 's not electricity yet .
We have to get to this .
We have to get to a power plant .
We have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology .
And I 'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is .
But at the moment , all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s .
I wish this were different . We really need it now .
We 're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country .
So 2030 looks like an infinity away .
But we can 't abandon it now ; we have to push forward , get fusion to happen .
I wish we had more money , I wish we had more resources .
But this is what we 're aiming at , sometime in the 2030s -- real electric power from fusion . Thank you very much .
Camille Seaman : Photos from a storm chaser
Photographer Camille Seaman has been chasing storms for 5 years . In this talk she shows stunning , surreal photos of the heavens in tumult .
Everything is interconnected .
As a Shinnecock Indian , I was raised to know this .
We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York .
When I was a little girl , my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day .
There were no clouds in the sky .
And after a while I began to perspire .
And he pointed up to the sky , and he said , " Look , do you see that ?
That 's part of you up there .
That 's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals . "
In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life , I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said , " Mom , you should do that . "
And so three days later , driving very fast , I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell , capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes , although only two percent actually do .
These clouds can grow so big , up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere .
They can grow so big , blocking all daylight , making it very dark and ominous standing under them .
Storm chasing is a very tactile experience .
There 's a warm , moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth , the wheat , the grass , the charged particles .
And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming , the greens and the turquoise blues .
I 've learned to respect the lightning .
My hair used to be straight .
I 'm just kidding .
What really excites me about these storms is their movement , the way they swirl and spin and undulate , with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds .
They become lovely monsters .
When I 'm photographing them , I cannot help but remember my grandfather 's lesson .
As I stand under them , I see not just a cloud , but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces , the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy , our solar system , our sun and even this very planet .
All my relations . Thank you .
Tony Robbins : Why we do what we do
Tony Robbins discusses the " invisible forces " that motivate everyone 's actions -- and high-fives Al Gore in the front row .
Thank you . I have to tell you I 'm both challenged and excited .
My excitement is : I get a chance to give something back .
My challenge is : the shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours .
I 'm not exaggerating . I do weekends , and what I do -- I do even more than that , obviously , coach people -- but I 'm into immersion . Because how did you learn language ?
You didn 't learn it by just learning principles , you got in it and you did it so often that it became real .
And the bottom line of why I 'm here , besides being a crazy mofo , is that I 'm really in a position -- I 'm not here to motivate you , obviously ; you don 't need that .
And a lot of times that 's what people think I do , and it 's the furthest thing from it . What happens , though , is people say to me , " I don 't need any motivation . "
And I say , " Well , that 's interesting . That 's not what I do . "
I 'm the " Why " guy . I want to know why you do what you do .
What is your motive for action ?
What is it that drives you in your life today ? Not 10 years ago .
Or are you running the same pattern ? Because I believe that the invisible force of internal drive , activated , is the most important thing in the world .
I 'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life .
All of us here have great minds .
You know ? Most of us here have great minds , right ?
I don 't know about another category , but we all know how to think .
And with our minds we can rationalize anything .
We can make anything happen . We can -- I agree with what was described a few days ago , about this idea that people work in their self-interest .
But we all know that that 's bullshit at times .
You don 't work in your self-interest all the time , because when emotion comes into it , the wiring changes in the way it functions .
And so it 's wonderful for us to think intellectually about how the life of the world is , and especially those who are very smart -- we can play this game in our head .
But I really want to know what 's driving you .
And what I would like to maybe invite you to do by the end of this talk is explore where you are today , for two reasons . One : so that you can contribute more . And two : so that hopefully we can not just understand other people more , but maybe appreciate them more , and create the kinds of connections that can stop some of the challenges that we face in our society today .
They 're only going to get magnified by the very technology that 's connecting us , because it 's making us intersect . And that intersection doesn 't always create the view of " everybody now understands everybody , and everybody appreciates everybody . "
So , I 've had an obsession basically for 30 years , and that obsession has been , " What makes the difference in the quality of peoples lives ?
What makes the difference in their performance ? "
Because that 's what I got hired to do .
I 've got to produce the result now .
That 's what I 've done for 30 years . I get the phone call when the athlete is burning down on national television , and they were ahead by five strokes and now they can 't get back on the course .
And I 've got to do something right now to get the result or nothing matters . I get the phone call when the child is going commit suicide , and I 've got to do something right now . And in 29 years -- I 'm very grateful to tell you I 've never lost one in 29 years .
It doesn 't mean I won 't some day . But I haven 't done it , and the reason is an understanding of these human needs that I want to talk to you about .
So , when I get those calls about performance , that 's one thing .
How do you make a change ?
But also , I 'm looking to see what is it that 's shaping that person 's ability to contribute , to do something beyond themselves . So maybe the real question is , you know , I look at life and say , there 's two master lessons .
One is : there 's the science of achievement , which almost everything that 's run is mastered to an amazing extent .
That 's " How do you take the invisible and make it visible , " right ?
How do you take what you 're dreaming of and make it happen ?
Whether it be your business , your contribution to society , money -- whatever it is for you -- your body , your family .
But the other lesson of life that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment .
Because science is easy , right ?
We know the rules . You write the code . You follow the -- and you get the results . Once you know the game you just , you know , you up the ante , don 't you ?
But when it comes to fulfillment -- that 's an art .
And the reason is , it 's about appreciation and it 's about contribution . You can only feel so much by yourself .
So , I 've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the question of the real question , which is what 's the difference in somebody 's life if you look at somebody like those people that you 've given everything to ? Like all the resources they say they need . You gave them not a 100-dollar computer ; you gave them the best computer . You gave them love ; you gave them joy . You were there to comfort them .
And those people very often -- and you know some of them , I 'm sure -- end up the rest of their life with all this love , education , money and background , spending their life going in and out of rehab .
And then you meet people that have been through ultimate pain -- psychologically , sexually , spiritually , emotionally abused -- and not always , but often , they become some of the people that contribute the most to society .
So , the question we 've got to ask ourselves really is , what is it ?
What is it that shapes us ? And we live in a therapy culture .
Most of us don 't do that , but the culture 's a therapy culture .
And what I mean by that is the mindset that we are our past .
And everybody in this room -- you wouldn 't be in this room if you bought that theory -- but the -- most of society thinks biography is destiny .
The past equals the future . And of course it does if you live there .
But what people in this room know , and what we have to remind ourselves , though -- because you can know something intellectually , you can know what to do and then not use it , not apply it .
So really , we 're going to remind ourselves that decision is the ultimate power . That 's what it really is .
Now , when you ask people , you know , have you failed to achieve something ?
How many have ever failed to achieve something significant in your life ? Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
Thanks for the interaction on a high level there .
But if you ask people , why didn 't you achieve something ?
Somebody who 's working for you , you know , or a partner , or even yourself . When you fail to achieve a goal , what 's the reason people say they fail to achieve ?
What do they tell you ? Don 't have the -- didn 't know enough , didn 't have the -- knowledge . Didn 't have the -- money .
Didn 't have the -- time . Didn 't have the -- technology . You know , I didn 't have the right manager . Didn 't have the ...
Supreme Court .
And -- and -- -- what do all those , including the Supreme Court , have in common ?
They are a claim to you missing resources , and they may be accurate .
You may not have the money ; you may not have the Supreme Court ; but that is not the defining factor .
And you correct me if I 'm wrong .
The defining factor is never resources ; it 's resourcefulness .
And what I mean specifically , rather than just some phrase , is if you have emotion , human emotion , something that I experienced from you a day before yesterday at a level that is as profound as I 've ever experienced , and if you 'd communicated with that emotion I believe you would have beat his ass and won .
But , how easy for me to tell him what he should do .
Idiot , Robbins . But I know when we watched the debate at that time , there were emotions that blocked people 's ability to get this man 's intellect and capacity .
And the way that it came across to some people on that day -- because I know people that wanted to vote in your direction and didn 't , and I was upset . But there was emotion that was there .
How many know what I 'm talking about here ? Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
So , emotion is it . And if we get the right emotion , we can get ourselves to do anything . We can get through it .
If you 're creative enough , playful enough , fun enough , can you get through to anybody ? Yes or no ?
Audience : Yes .
If you don 't have the money , but you 're creative and determined enough , you find the way . So this is the ultimate resource .
But this is not the story that people tell us , right ?
The story people tell us is a bunch of different stories .
They tell us we don 't have the resources , but ultimately , if you take a look here -- flip it up , if you would -- they say , what are all the reasons they haven 't accomplished that ?
Next one , please . He 's broken my pattern , that son-of-a-bitch .
But I appreciated the energy , I 'll tell you that .
What determines your resources ? We 've said decisions shape destiny , which is my focus here . If decisions shape destiny , what determines it is three decisions . What are you going to focus on ?
Right now , you have to decide what you 're going to focus on .
In this second , consciously or unconsciously , the minute you decide to focus on something you 've got to give it a meaning , and whatever that meaning is produces emotion .
Is this the end or the beginning ? Is God punishing me or rewarding me , or is this the roll of the dice ?
An emotion , then , creates what we 're going to do or the action .
So , think about your own life , the decisions that have shaped your destiny .
And that sounds really heavy , but in the last five or 10 years , 15 years , how have there been some decisions you 've made that if you 'd made a different decision , your life would be completely different ? How many can think about it ?
Honestly , better or worse ? Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
So the bottom line is , maybe it was where to go to work , and you met the love of your life there .
Maybe it was a career decision . I know the Google geniuses I saw here -- I mean , I understand that their decision was to sell their technology at first . What if they made that decision versus to build their own culture ? How would the world be different ?
How would their lives be different ? Their impact ?
The history of our world is these decisions .
When a woman stands up and says , " No , I won 't go to the back of the bus , " she didn 't just affect her life . That decision shaped our culture .
Or someone standing in front of a tank . Or being in a position like Lance Armstrong , and someone says to you , " You 've got testicular cancer . " That 's pretty tough for any male , especially if you ride a bike .
You 've got it in your brain ; you 've got it in your lungs .
But what was his decision of what to focus on ?
Different than most people . What did it mean ?
It wasn 't the end ; it was the beginning . What am I going to do ?
He goes off and wins seven championships he never once won before the cancer , because he got emotional fitness , psychological strength . That 's the difference in human beings that I 've seen of the three million that I 've been around .
Because that 's about my lab . I 've had three million people from 80 different countries that I 've had a chance to interact with over the last 29 years . And after a while , patterns become obvious .
You see that South America and Africa may be connected in a certain way , right ? Other people say , " Oh , that sounds ridiculous . " It 's simple . So , what shaped Lance ?
What shapes you ? Two invisible forces . Very quickly . One : state .
We all have had time .
So if you had a time you did something , and after you did it you thought to yourself , I can 't believe I said that , I can 't believe I did that , that was so stupid -- who 's been there ?
Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
Have you ever done something , after you did it , you go , " That was me ! "
Right ? It wasn 't your ability ; it was your state .
Your model of the world is what shapes you long term .
Your model of the world is the filter . That 's what 's shaping us .
That 's what makes people make decisions .
When we want to influence somebody , we 've got to know what already influences them .
And it 's made up of three parts , I believe .
First , what 's your target ? What are you after ?
Which , I believe -- it 's not your desires .
You can get your desires or goals . How many have ever got a goal or desire and thought , is this all there is ?
How many have been there ? Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
So , it 's needs we have . I believe there are six human needs .
Second , once you know what the target that 's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth -- you don 't form it ; you uncover it -- then you find out what 's your map , what 's the belief systems that are telling you how to get those needs .
Some people think the way to get those needs is destroy the world , some people is to build something , create something , love someone .
And then there 's the fuel you pick . So very quickly , six needs .
Let me tell you what they are . First one : certainty .
Now , these are not goals or desires , these are universal .
Everyone needs certainty that they can avoid pain and at least be comfortable . Now , how do you get it ?
Control everybody ? Develop a skill ? Give up ? Smoke a cigarette ?
And if you got totally certain , ironically , even though we all need that -- like if you 're not certain about your health , or your children , or money , you don 't think about much .
You 're not sure if the ceiling 's going to hold up , you 're not going to listen to any speaker .
But , while we go for certainty differently , if we get total certainty , we get what ? What do you feel if you 're certain ?
You know what 's going to happen , when it 's going to happen , how it 's going to happen -- what would you feel ?
Bored out of your minds . So , God , in Her infinite wisdom , gave us a second human need , which is uncertainty .
We need variety . We need surprise .
How many of you here love surprises ? Say , " Aye . "
Audience : Aye .
Bullshit . You like the surprises you want .
The ones you don 't want you call problems , but you need them .
So , variety is important . Have you ever rented a video or a film that you 've already seen ? Who 's done this ? Get a fucking life .
All right . Why are you doing it ? You 're certain it 's good because you read it before , saw it before , but you 're hoping it 's been long enough you 've forgotten , that there 's variety .
Third human need , critical : significance . We all need to feel important , special , unique . You can get it by making more money .
You can do it by being more spiritual .
You can do it by getting yourself in a situation where you put more tattoos and earrings in places humans don 't want to know .
Whatever it takes . The fastest way to do this , if you have no background , no culture , no belief and resources or resourcefulness , is violence . If I put a gun to your head and I live in the ' hood , instantly I 'm significant .
Zero to 10 . How high ? 10 . How certain am I that you 're going to respond to me ? 10 . How much uncertainty ?
Who knows what 's going to happen next ? Kind of exciting .
Like climbing up into a cave and doing that stuff all the way down there . Total variety and uncertainty .
And it 's significant , isn 't it ? So you want to risk your life for it .
So that 's why violence has always been around and will be around unless we have a consciousness change as a species .
Now , you can get significance a million ways , but to be significant , you 've got to be unique and different .
Here 's what we really need : connection and love -- fourth need .
We all want it . Most people settle for connection because love 's too scary . Don 't want to get hurt .
Who here has ever been hurt in an intimate relationship ? Say , " Aye . "
If you don 't raise your hand , you 'll have had other shit too , come on .
And you 're going to get hurt again .
Aren 't you glad you came to this positive visit ?
But here 's what 's true -- we need it . We can do it through intimacy , through friendship , through prayer , through walking in nature .
If nothing else works for you , get a dog . Don 't get a cat . Get a dog , because if you leave for two minutes , it 's like you 've been gone for six months when you show back up again five minutes later , right ?
Now , these first four needs , every human finds a way to meet .
Even if you lie to yourself , you need to have split personalities .
But the last two needs -- the first four needs are called the needs of the personalities , is what I call it -- the last two are the needs of the spirit .
And this is where fulfillment comes . You won 't get fulfillment from the first four . You 'll figure a way -- smoke , drink , do whatever -- to meet the first four , but the last two -- number five : you must grow . We all know the answer here .
If you don 't grow , you 're what ? If a relationship 's not growing , if a business is not growing , if you 're not growing , it doesn 't matter how much money you have , how many friends you have , how many people love you , you feel like hell . And the reason we grow , I believe , is so we have something to give of value .
Because the sixth need is to contribute beyond ourselves .
Because we all know , corny as it sounds , the secret to living is giving . We all know life 's not about me ; it 's about we . This culture knows that . This room knows that .
And it 's exciting . When you see Nicholas up here talking about his $ 100 computer , the most passionate exciting thing is : here 's a genius , but he 's got a calling now .
You can feel the difference in him and it 's beautiful .
And that calling can touch other people . In my own life , my life was touched because when I was 11 years old , Thanksgiving , no money , no food -- we 're not going to starve , but my father was totally messed up . My mom was letting him know how bad he messed up . And somebody came to the door and delivered food . My father made three decisions .
I know what they were briefly . His focus was : " This is charity .
What does it mean ? I 'm worthless . What 've I got to do ?
Leave my family . " Which he did . The time was one of the most painful experiences of life . My three decisions gave me a different path .
I said , " Focus on : ' there 's food ' " -- what a concept , you know .
Second -- but this is what changed my life , this is what shaped me as a human being -- " Somebody 's gift .
I don 't even know who it is . " My father always said , " No one gives a shit . " And all of a sudden , somebody I don 't know , they 're not asking for anything , they 're just giving our family food , looking out for us . It made me believe this : " What does it mean that strangers care ? " And what that made me decide is , if strangers care about me and my family , I care about them .
What am I going to do ? I 'm going to do something to make a difference . So , when I was 17 , I went out one day on Thanksgiving . It was my target for years to have enough money to feed two families .
The most fun thing I ever did in my life , the most moving .
Then next year I did four . I didn 't tell anybody what I was doing .
Next year eight . I wasn 't doing it for brownie points , but after eight , I thought , shit , I could use some help .
So sure enough , I went out and what did I do ?
I got my friends involved and I grew companies and then I got 11 companies and I built the foundation .
Now , 18 years later , I 'm proud to tell you , last year we fed two million people in 35 countries through our foundation , all during the holidays : Thanksgiving , Christmas -- -- in all the different countries around the world .
It 's been fantastic .
Thank you .
So , I don 't tell you that to brag ; I tell you because I 'm proud of human beings , because they get excited to contribute once they 've had the chance to experience it , not talk about it .
So , finally -- and I 'm about out of time -- the target that shapes you -- here 's what 's different about people . We have the same needs , but are you a certainty freak ? Is that what you value most , or uncertainty ? This man here couldn 't be a certainty freak if he climbed through those caves . Are you driven by significance or love ? We all need all six , but whatever your lead system is , tilts you in a different direction .
And as you move in a direction , you have a destination or destiny .
The second piece is the map . Think of that as the operating system that tells you how to get there . And some people 's map is : " I 'm going to save lives even if I die for other people , " and they 're firemen . Somebody else is : " I 'm going to kill people to do it . " They 're trying to meet the same needs of significance , right ? They want to honor God or honor their family , but they have a different map .
And there are seven different beliefs . I can 't go through them because I 'm done . The last piece is emotion .
I 'd say one of the parts of the map is like time . Some people 's idea of a long time is 100 years . Somebody else 's is three seconds , which is what I have .
And the last one I 've already mentioned , that fell to you .
If you 've got a target and you 've got a map and let 's say -- I can 't use Google because I love Macs and they haven 't made it good for Macs yet -- so if you use MapQuest -- how many have made this fatal mistake of using MapQuest at some time ?
You use this thing and you don 't get there . Well , imagine if your beliefs guarantee you can never get to where you want to go ?
The last thing is emotion .
Now , here 's what I 'll tell you about emotion . There are 6,000 emotions which is just a linguistic representation , right , that changes by language . But if your dominant emotions -- if I had more time , I have 20,000 people or 1,000 , and I have them write down all the emotions that they experience in an average week , and I gave them as long as they needed , and on one side they write empowering emotions , the other 's disempowering -- guess how many emotions people experience ? Less than 12 .
And half of those make them feel like shit . So they got five or six good frickin ' feelings , right ? It 's like they feel " happy , happy , excited , oh shit , frustrated , frustrated , overwhelmed , depressed . "
How many of you know somebody who no matter what happens finds a way to get pissed off ? How many know somebody like this ?
Or , no matter what happens , they find a way to be happy or excited .
How may know somebody like this ? Come on .
When 9 / 11 happened -- I 'll finish with this -- I was in Hawaii .
I was with 2,000 people from 45 countries . We were translating four languages simultaneously for a program that I was conducting for a week . The night before was called " Emotional Mastering . " I got up , had no plan for the this , and I said -- we had all these fireworks -- I do crazy shit , fun stuff -- and then at the end I stopped -- I had this plan I was going to say but I never do what I 'm going to say . And all of a sudden I said , " When do people really start to live ? When they face death . "
And then I went through this whole thing about , if you weren 't going to get off this island , if nine days from now you were going to die , who would you call , what would you say , what would you do ? One woman -- well , that night is when 9 / 11 happened -- one woman had come to the seminar and when she came there , her previous boyfriend had been kidnapped and murdered .
Her friend , her new boyfriend , wanted to marry her , and she said no .
He said , " If you leave and go to that Hawaii thing , it 's over with us . "
She said , " It 's over . " When I finished that night , she called him and left a message -- true story -- at the top of the World Trade Center where he worked , saying , " Honey , I love you , I just want you to know I want to marry you . It was stupid of me . " She was asleep , because it was 3 a.m. for us , when he called her back from the top and said , " Honey , I can 't tell you what this means . "
He said , " I don 't know how to tell you this , but you gave me the greatest gift because I 'm going to die . "
And she played the recording for us in the room .
She was on Larry King later , and he said , " You 're probably wondering how on Earth this could happen to you twice . " And he said , " All I can say to you is , this must be God 's message to you , honey . From now on , every day give your all , love your all .
Don 't let anything ever stop you . " She finishes , and a man stands up and he says , " I 'm from Pakistan ; I 'm a Muslim .
I 'd love to hold your hand and say I 'm sorry , but , frankly , this is retribution . " I can 't tell you the rest because I 'm out of time .
10 seconds .
10 seconds , that 's all . I want to be respectful . 10 seconds .
All I can tell you is , I brought this man on stage with a man from New York who worked in the World Trade Center , because I had about 200 New Yorkers there . More than 50 lost their entire companies , their friends , marking off their Palm Pilots -- one financial trader , this woman made of steel , bawling -- 30 friends crossing off that all died .
And what I did to people is said , " What are we going to focus on ?
What does this mean and what are we going to do ? "
And I took the group and got people to focus on : if you didn 't lose somebody today , your focus is going to be how to serve somebody else . There are people -- then one woman got up and she was so angry and screaming and yelling .
Then I found out she wasn 't from New York ; she 's not an American ; she doesn 't know anybody here . I said , " Do you always get angry ? "
She said , " Yes . " Guilty people got guilty , sad people got sad .
And I took these two men and did what I call an indirect negotiation .
Jewish man with family in the occupied territory , someone in New York who would have died if he was at work that day , and this man who wanted to be a terrorist and made it very clear .
And the integration that happened is on a film , which I 'll be happy to send you , so you can really see what actually happened instead of my verbalization of it , but the two of them not only came together and changed their beliefs and morals of the world , but they worked together to bring , for almost four years now , through various mosques and synagogues , the idea of how to create peace . And he wrote a book , which is called " My Jihad , My Way of Peace . " So , transformation can happen .
So my invitation to you is this : explore your web , the web in here -- the needs , the beliefs , the emotions that are controlling you , for two reasons : so there 's more of you to give -- and achieve too , we all want to do it -- but I mean give , because that 's what 's going to fill you up . And secondly , so you can appreciate -- not just understand , that 's intellectual , that 's the mind -- but appreciate what 's driving other people .
It 's the only way our world 's going to change . God bless you .
Thank you . I hope this was of service .
Vik Muniz : Art with wire , sugar , chocolate and string
Vik Muniz makes art from pretty much anything , be it shredded paper , wire , clouds or diamonds . Here he describes the thinking behind his work and takes us on a tour of his incredible images .
I was asked to come here and speak about creation .
And I only have 15 minutes , and I see they 're counting already .
And I can -- in 15 minutes , I think I can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation , which I call " creativity . "
Creativity is how we cope with creation .
While creation sometimes seems a bit un-graspable , or even pointless , creativity is always meaningful .
See , for instance , in this picture .
You know , creation is what put that dog in that picture , and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his hindquarters .
When you think about -- you know , creativity has a lot to do with causality too .
You know , when I was a teenager , I was a creator .
I just did things .
Then I became an adult and started knowing who I was , and tried to maintain that persona -- I became creative .
It wasn 't until I actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition , that I could track exactly -- looks like all the craziest things that I had done , all my drinking , all my parties -- they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually I 'm talking to you at this moment .
Though it 's actually true , you know , the reason I 'm talking to you right now is because I was born in Brazil .
If I was born in Monterey , probably would be in Brazil .
You know , I was born in Brazil and grew up in the ' 70s under a climate of political distress , and I was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way -- in a sort of a semiotic black market .
You couldn 't really say what you wanted to say ; you had to invent ways of doing it .
You didn 't trust information very much .
That led me to another step of why I 'm here today , is because I really liked media of all kinds .
I was a media junkie , and eventually got involved with advertising .
My first job in Brazil was actually to develop a way to improve the readability of billboards , and based on speed , angle of approach and actually blocks of text .
It was very -- actually , it was a very good study , and got me a job in an ad agency .
And they also decided that I had to -- to give me a very ugly Plexiglas trophy for it .
And another point -- why I 'm here -- is that the day I went to pick up the Plexiglas trophy , I rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life , picked the thing -- didn 't have any friends .
On my way out , I had to break a fight apart .
Somebody was hitting somebody else with brass knuckles .
They were in tuxedos , and fighting . It was very ugly .
And also -- advertising people do that all the time -- -- and I -- well , what happened is when I went back , it was on the way back to my car , the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun -- I don 't know why he had a gun -- and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor .
The first person was wearing a black tie , a tuxedo . It was me .
Luckily , it wasn 't fatal , as you can all see .
And , even more luckily , the guy said that he was sorry and I bribed him for compensation money , otherwise I press charges .
And that 's how -- with this money I paid for a ticket to come to the United States in 1983 , and that 's very -- the basic reason I 'm talking to you here today : because I got shot .
Well , when I started working with my own work , I decided that I shouldn 't do images .
You know , I became -- I took this very iconoclastic approach .
Because when I decided to go into advertising , I wanted to do -- I wanted to airbrush naked people on ice , for whiskey commercials , that 's what I really wanted to do .
But I -- they didn 't let me do it , so I just -- you know , they would only let me do other things .
But I wasn 't into selling whiskey ; I was into selling ice .
The first works were actually objects .
It was kind of a mixture of found object , product design and advertising .
And I called them relics .
They were displayed first at Stux Gallery in 1983 .
This is the clown skull .
Is a remnant of a race of -- a very evolved race of entertainers .
They lived in Brazil , long time ago .
This is the Ashanti joystick .
Unfortunately , it has become obsolete because it was designed for Atari platform .
A Playstation II is in the works , maybe for the next TED I 'll bring it .
The rocking podium .
This is the pre-Columbian coffeemaker .
Actually , the idea came out of an argument that I had at Starbucks , that I insisted that I wasn 't having Colombian coffee ; the coffee was actually pre-Columbian .
The Bonsai table .
The entire Encyclopedia Britannica bound in a single volume , for travel purposes .
And the half tombstone , for people who are not dead yet .
I wanted to take that into the realm of images , and I decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts .
So I decided to do work with clouds .
Because clouds can mean anything you want .
But now I wanted to work in a very low-tech way , so something that would mean at the same time a lump of cotton , a cloud and Durer 's praying hands -- although this looks a lot more like Mickey Mouse 's praying hands .
But I was still , you know -- this is a kitty cloud .
They 're called " Equivalents , " after Alfred Stieglitz 's work .
" The Snail . "
But I was still working with sculpture , and I was really trying to go flatter and flatter .
" The Teapot . "
I had a chance to go to Florence , in -- I think it was ' 94 , and I saw Ghiberti 's " Door of Paradise . "
And he did something that was very tricky .
He put together two different media from different periods of time .
First , he got an age-old way of making it , which was relief , and he worked this with three-point perspective , which was brand-new technology at the time .
And it 's totally overkill .
And your eye doesn 't know which level to read .
And you become trapped into this kind of representation .
So I decided to make these very simple renderings , that at first they are taken as a line drawing -- you know , something that 's very -- and then I did it with wire .
The idea was to -- because everybody overlooks white -- like pencil drawings , you know ?
And they would look at it -- " Ah , it 's a pencil drawing . "
Then you have this double take and see that it 's actually something that existed in time .
It had a physicality , and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way , towards the image . So this is " Monkey with Leica . "
" Relaxation . "
" Fiat Lux . "
And the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings .
And I wanted to deal with other subjects .
I started taking that into the realm of landscape , which is something that 's almost a picture of nothing .
I made these pictures called " Pictures of Thread , " and I named them after the amount of yards that I used to represent each picture .
These always end up being a photograph at the end , or more like an etching in this case .
So this is a lighthouse .
This is " 6,500 Yards , " after Corot . " 9,000 Yards , " after Gerhard Richter .
And I don 't know how many yards , after John Constable .
Departing from the lines , I decided to tackle the idea of points , like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves .
I had met a group of children in the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts , and I did work and play with them .
I got some photographs from them .
Upon my arrival in New York , I decided -- they were children of sugar plantation workers .
And by manipulating sugar over a black paper , I made portraits of them .
These are -- -- Thank you . This is " Valentina , the Fastest . "
It was just the name of the child , with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly .
" Valicia . "
" Jacynthe . "
But another layer of representation was still introduced .
Because I was doing this while I was making these pictures , I realized that I could add still another thing I was trying to make a subject -- something that would interfere with the themes , so chocolate is very good , because it has -- it brings to mind ideas that go from scatology to romance .
And so I decided to make these pictures , and they were very large , so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them .
So they 're called " Pictures of Chocolate . "
Freud probably could explain chocolate better than I. He was the first subject .
And Jackson Pollock also .
Pictures of crowds are particularly interesting , because , you know , you go to that -- you try to figure out the threshold with something you can define very easily , like a face , goes into becoming just a texture .
" Paparazzi . "
I used the dust at the Whitney Museum to render some pieces of their collection .
And I picked minimalist pieces because they 're about specificity .
And you render this with the most non-specific material , which is dust itself .
Like , you know , you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor .
They do a DNA scan of this , they will come up with a great mailing list .
This is Richard Serra .
I bought a computer , and [ they ] told me it had millions of colors in it .
You know an artist 's first response to this is , who counted it ? You know ?
And I realized that I never worked with color , because I had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors .
But once they 're applied to numeric structure , then you can feel more comfortable .
So the first time I worked with colors was by making these mosaics of Pantone swatches .
They end up being very large pictures , and I photographed with a very large camera -- an 8x10 camera .
So you can see the surface of every single swatch -- like in this picture of Chuck Close .
And you have to walk very far to be able to see it .
Also , the reference to Gerhard Richter 's use of color charts -- and the idea also entering another realm of representation that 's very common to us today , which is the bit map .
I ended up narrowing the subject to Monet 's " Haystacks . "
This is something I used to do as a joke -- you know , make -- the same like -- Robert Smithson 's " Spiral Jetty " -- and then leaving traces , as if it was done on a tabletop .
I tried to prove that he didn 't do that thing in the Salt Lake .
But then , just doing the models , I was trying to explore the relationship between the model and the original .
And I felt that I would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself .
I opt for very simple line drawings -- kind of stupid looking .
And at the same time , I was doing these very large constructions , being 150 meters away .
Now I would do very small ones , which would be like -- but under the same light , and I would show them together , so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking .
I wasn 't interested in the very large things , or in the small things .
I was more interested in the things in between , you know , because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there .
This is like you see -- the size of a person over there .
This is a pipe .
A hanger .
And this is another thing that I did -- you know working -- everybody loves to watch somebody draw , but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in -- a lot of people at the same time , to evidence a single drawing .
And I love this work , because I did these cartoonish clouds over Manhattan for a period of two months .
And it was quite wonderful , because I had an interest -- an early interest -- in theater , that 's justified on this thing .
In theater , you have the character and the actor in the same place , trying to negotiate each other in front of an audience .
And in this , you 'd have like a -- something that looks like a cloud , and it is a cloud at the same time .
So they 're like perfect actors .
My interest in acting , especially bad acting , goes a long way .
Actually , I once paid like 60 dollars to see a very great actor to do a version of " King Lear , " and I felt really robbed , because by the time the actor started being King Lear , he stopped being the great actor that I had paid money to see .
On the other hand , you know , I paid like three dollars , I think -- and I went to a warehouse in Queens to see a version of " Othello " by an amateur group .
And it was quite fascinating , because you know the guy -- his name was Joey Grimaldi -- he impersonated the Moorish general -- you know , for the first three minutes he was really that general , and then he went back into plumber , he worked as a plumber , so -- plumber , general , plumber , general -- so for three dollars , I saw two tragedies for the price of one .
See , I think it 's not really about impression , making people fall for a really perfect illusion , as much as it is to make -- I usually work at the lowest threshold of visual illusion .
Because it 's not about fooling somebody , it 's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief : how much you want to be fooled .
That 's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that .
Well , I think that 's it .
My time is nearly up .
Thank you very much .
Greg Stone : Saving the ocean one island at a time
Aboard Mission Blue , scientist Greg Stone tells the story of how he helped the Republic of Kiribati create an enormous protected area in the middle of the Pacific -- protecting fish , sealife and the island nation itself .
I guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s , when I was seven or eight years old , watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on .
Then after every episode , I had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain , because that 's all there was to look at .
And by the time I turned 16 , I pursued a career in marine science , in exploration and diving , and lived in underwater habitats , like this one off the Florida Keys , for 30 days total .
Brian Skerry took this shot . Thanks , Brian .
And I 've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world .
And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world , operated by the Japanese government .
And Sylvia Earle and I were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in Japan .
And on my dive , I went down 18,000 feet , to an area that I thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor .
But when I got there , I found lots of plastic garbage and other debris .
And it was really a turning point in my life , where I started to realize that I couldn 't just go have fun doing science and exploration .
I needed to put it into a context .
I needed to head towards conservation goals .
So I began to work with National Geographic Society and others and led expeditions to Antarctica .
I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica .
Ten years ago was a seminal trip , where we explored that big iceberg , B-15 , the largest iceberg in history , that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf .
And we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg , such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around , so that , as the blood flowed through our kidneys , it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies .
But after three trips to Antarctica , I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water .
And that same year , 10 years ago , I headed north to the Phoenix Islands .
And I 'm going to tell you that story here in a moment .
But before I do , I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment .
You may have seen this in other forms , but the top line is the amount of protected area on land , globally , and it 's about 12 percent .
And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and ' 70s , and it 's on kind of a nice trajectory right now .
And that 's probably because that 's when everybody got aware of the environment and Earth Day and all the stuff that happened in the ' 60s with the Hippies and everything really did , I think , have an affect on global awareness .
But the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now -- it appears to be ticking up .
And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean .
I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land .
But unfortunately , the ocean is opaque , and we can 't see what 's going on .
And therefore we 're way behind on protection .
But scuba diving , submersibles and all the work that we 're setting about to do here will help rectify that .
So where are the Phoenix Islands ?
They were the world 's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the Chagos Archipelago was declared .
It 's in the mid-Pacific . It 's about five days from anywhere .
If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands , it 's five days from Fiji , it 's five days from Hawaii , it 's five days from Samoa .
It 's out in the middle of the Pacific , right around the Equator .
I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago , nor the country , Kiribati , that owns them , till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji said , " Greg , would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands ?
They 've never been dived . "
And I said , " Yeah .
But tell me where they are and the country that owns them . "
So that 's when I first learned of the Islands and had no idea what I was getting into .
But I was in for the adventure .
Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area .
It 's a very deep-water part of our planet .
The average depths are about 12,000 ft .
There 's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands , which are specifically part of the protected area .
Seamounts are important for biodiversity .
There 's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land .
It 's an interesting fact .
And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts .
So it 's a deep -- think about it in a big three-dimensional space , very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna , whales , all kinds of deep sea marine life like we 've seen here before .
That 's the vessel that we took up there for these studies , early on , and that 's what the Islands look like -- you can see in the background .
They 're very low to the water , and they 're all uninhabited , except one island has about 35 caretakers on it .
And they 've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days , these islands were too far away from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti for those ancient Polynesian mariners that were traversing the Pacific so widely .
But we got up there , and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go , " Okay , where are we going to dive ?
Let 's try there , " and then falling into the water .
Both my personal and my professional life changed .
Suddenly , I saw a world that I had never seen before in the ocean -- schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface , coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful , large fish everywhere , manta rays .
It was an ecosystem . Parrotfish spawning -- this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands .
You can see the fish are balled up and then there 's a little cloudy area there where they 're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction -- events that the ocean is supposed to do , but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity .
The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries , especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here .
Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location .
And sharks -- we had sharks on our early dives , up to 150 sharks at once , which is an indication of a very , very healthy , very strong , system .
So I thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever , but they did finally come to an end .
And we explored the surface of the Islands as well -- very important bird nesting site , some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific , in the world .
And we finished our trip .
And that 's the area again .
You can see the Islands -- there are eight islands -- that pop out of the water .
The peaks that don 't come out of the water are the seamounts .
Remember , a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface .
And what 's the context of the Phoenix Islands ?
Where do these exist ?
Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati , and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific in three island groups .
In the west we have the Gilbert Islands .
In the center we have the Phoenix Islands , which is the subject that I 'm talking about .
And then over to the east we have the Line Islands .
It 's the largest atoll nation in the world .
And they have about 110,000 people spread out over 33 islands .
They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean , and that 's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet .
And when I was first going up there , I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago , and people would ask me , " Why are you going to this place called Kiribati ? "
And it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed , and the reporter yells , " Hey , Willy . Why do you rob banks ? "
And he says , " cause that 's where all the money is . "
And I would tell people , " Why do I go to Kiribati ?
Because that 's where all the ocean is . "
They basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the Central Pacific Ocean .
They 're also a country that is in dire danger .
Sea levels are rising , and Kiribati , along with 42 other nations in the world , will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean .
The Islands rise only one to two meters above the surface .
Some of the islands have already gone under water .
And these nations are faced with a real problem .
We as a world are faced with a problem .
What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet ?
The president of the Maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries .
So it 's something we need to focus on .
But back to the Phoenix Islands , which is the subject of this Talk .
After I got back , I said , okay , this is amazing , what we found .
I 'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati , who are over in Tarawa , the westernmost group .
So I started contacting them -- because they had actually given me a permit to do this -- and I said , " I want to come up and tell you what we found . "
And for some reason they didn 't want me to come , or it was hard to find a time and a place , and it took a while , but finally they said , " Okay , you can come .
But if you come , you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar . "
So I said , " Okay , I 'm happy to buy lunch .
Just get whatever anybody wants . "
So David Obura , a coral reef biologist , and I went to Tarawa , and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands .
And the country never knew this . They never had any data from this area .
They 'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands .
After the talk , the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me and he said , " Greg , do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did ? "
He said , " We often issue these permits to do research in our waters , but usually we get a note two or three years later , or a reprint .
But you 're the first one who 's ever come back and told us what you did .
And we really appreciate that . And we 're buying you lunch today .
And are you free for dinner ? "
And I was free for dinner , and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati .
And over the course of dinner , I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue -- it 's a very poor country -- but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters , because Kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself .
And the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives Kiribati five percent of the landed value .
So if the United States removes a million dollars ' worth of lobsters from a reef , Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars .
And , you know , it didn 't seem like a very good deal to me .
So I asked the Minister over dinner , I said , " Would you consider a situation where you would still get paid -- we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is -- but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water ? "
He stopped , and he said , " Yes , we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem , and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license . "
He coined the term " reverse fishing license . "
So I said , " Yes , a ' reverse fishing license . ' " So we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point .
I went back to the States and started looking around to see if I could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued , and it turned out there were none .
There were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing .
It had occurred on land , in rainforests of South America and Africa , where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down .
And Conservation International had struck some of those deals .
So I went to Conservation International and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource , deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated , what the range of the fishes were , brought in a whole bunch of other partners -- the government of Australia , the government of New Zealand , the World Bank .
The Oak Foundation and National Geographic have been big funders of this as well .
And we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact .
Halfway through this process , I met the president of Kiribati , President Anote Tong .
He 's a really important leader , a real visionary , forward-thinking man , and he told me two things when I approached him .
He said , " Greg , there 's two things I 'd like you to do .
One is , remember I 'm a politician , so you 've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea .
Secondly , I 'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency .
I don 't want to do something like this if it 's going to go away after I 'm voted out of office . "
So we had very strong leadership , very good vision and a lot of science , a lot of lawyers involved .
Many , many steps were taken to pull this off .
And it was primarily because Kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this .
They realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community .
Then in 2002 , when this was all going full-swing , a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands .
Here 's this resource that we 're looking to save , and it turns out it 's the hottest heating event that we can find on record .
The ocean heated up as it does sometimes , and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the Phoenix Islands for six months .
It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral .
So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting , but now it appeared to be dead , at least in the coral areas .
Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine , but the coral , which everybody likes to look at , was in trouble .
Well , the good news is it 's recovered and recovering fast , faster than any reef we 've seen .
This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago when we returned to the Phoenix Islands and discovered that , because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy , the coral is booming , is just booming back .
It 's almost like if a person has multiple diseases , it 's hard to get well , you might die , but if you only have one disease to deal with , you can get better .
And that 's the story with climate-change heating .
It 's the only threat , the only influence that the reef had to deal with .
There was no fishing , there was no pollution , there was no coastal development , and the reef is on a full-bore recovery .
Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner and said , " Well , I think that the conservation community might embrace this idea , Minister . "
He paused and put his hands together and said , " Yes , Greg , but the devil will be in the details , " he said .
And it certainly was .
The last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans , as I said , teams of lawyers , MOUs , creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board .
And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment .
Kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment .
We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago .
So it 's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country .
And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license and pays the country for this .
So it 's a very solid , very well thought-out , very well grounded system , and it was a bottom-up system , and that was very important with this work , from the bottom up to secure this .
So the conditions for success here are listed .
You can read them yourselves .
But I would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation .
And that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world .
And I 'll leave you with one final slide , that is : how do we scale this up ?
How do we realize Sylvia 's dream ?
Where eventually do we take this ?
Here 's the Pacific with large MPAs and large conservation zones on it .
And as you can see , we have a patchwork across this ocean .
I 've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle , the Phoenix Islands , but every other green patch on that has its own story .
And what we need to do now is look at the whole Pacific Ocean in its entirety and make a network of MPAs across the Pacific so that we have our world 's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time .
Thank you very much .
Jake Barton : The museum of you
A third of the world watched live as the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11 , 2001 ; a third more heard about it within 24 hours . So exhibits at the soon-to-open 9 / 11 Memorial Museum will reflect the diversity of the world 's experiences of that day . In a moving talk , designer Jake Barton gives a peek at some of those installations , as well as several other projects that aim to make the observer an active participant in the exhibit .
This is Charley Williams .
He was 94 when this photograph was taken .
In the 1930s , Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels , but he also did something interesting , which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans .
Charley Williams , a poor sharecropper , wouldn 't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview , but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old .
And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories , of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves .
Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there 's a literature inside of each of us , and three generations later , I was part of a project called StoryCorps , which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces .
The idea is very , very simple .
You go into these booths , you interview your grandmother or relative , you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress .
It 's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time .
And the question is , who do you want to remember -- if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother ?
What 's interesting , in conversations with the founder , Dave Isay , we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project , because when you think about it , it 's actually not really about the stories that are being told , it 's about listening , and it 's about the questions that you get to ask , questions that you may not have permission to on any other day .
I 'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project .
[ Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri 's final moments ] Jesus Melendez : We took off , and as we were ascending , before we had leveled off , our level-off point was 45,000 feet , so before we had leveled off , Pedro began leaving us , and the beauty about it is that I believe that there 's something after life .
You can see it in Pedro .
[ Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years ] Danny Perasa : See , the thing of it is , I always feel guilty when I say " I love you " to you , and I say it so often . I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am , it 's coming from me , it 's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio , and it 's nice of you to keep the radio around the house .
[ Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz ] Michael Wolmetz : So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother , and we can leave it there .
And he saved up and he purchased this , and he proposed to my mother with this , and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also .
So I 'm going to share a mic with you right now , Debora .
Where 's the right finger ?
Debora Brakarz : MW : Debora , will you please marry me ?
DB : Yes . Of course . I love you .
MW : So kids , this is how your mother and I got married , in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father 's ring .
My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years .
He used to pick people up here every day .
So it seems right .
Jake Barton : So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry .
The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself .
And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm , Local Projects , is doing with our engagements in general .
So we 're a media design firm , and we 're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces .
Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art , which we 've created an engagement called Gallery One for .
And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive , $ 350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art , and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity , new audiences , at the same time that the museum itself is growing .
Glenn Lowry , the head of MoMA , put it best when he said , " We want visitors to actually cease being visitors .
Visitors are transient . We want people who live here , people who have ownership . "
And so what we 're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries , so you can still have a traditional gallery experience , but if you 're interested , you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it 's from , or manipulate the work itself .
So , for example , you can click on this individual lion head , and this is where it originated from , 1300 B.C.
Or this individual piece here , you can see the actual bedroom . It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting .
This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself .
This is Rodin 's bust . You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity .
And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story .
This is Picasso , of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century .
And so our next interface , which I 'll show you , actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity .
It 's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum 's collection using facial recognition .
So this person 's making different faces , and it 's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she 's looking .
And so you can imagine that , as people are performing inside of the museum itself , you get this sense of this emotional connection , this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years .
This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes .
So more and more we 're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves , to be creative even as they 're looking at other people 's creativity and understanding them .
So in this wall , the collections wall , you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time , and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum , so you can share them , and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin .
But all the while that we 've been working on this engagement for Cleveland , we 've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date , and that 's the 9 / 11 Memorial and Museum .
So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum , and then we 've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production .
So the memorial opened in 2011 , and the museum 's going to open next year in 2014 .
And you can see from these images , the site is so raw and almost archaeological .
And of course the event itself is so recent , somewhere between history and current events , it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this , an event like this , to actually tell that story .
And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution , through a project called Make History , which we launched in 2009 .
So it 's estimated that a third of the world watched 9 / 11 live , and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours , making it really by nature of when it happened , this unprecedented moment of global awareness .
And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world , through video , through photos , through written history , and so people 's experiences on that day , which was , in fact , this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform .
But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth , really the simplest we 've ever made , where you locate yourself on a map .
It 's in six languages , and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day .
And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world -- this is obviously part of the landing gear -- we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself , between the way that people were telling the stories of the event , and how we ourselves needed to tell that story .
This image in particular really captured our attention at the time , because it so much sums up that event .
This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel .
There 's a firefighter that 's stuck , actually , in traffic , and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back .
And we got this amazing email that said , " While viewing the thousands of photos on the site , I unexpectedly found a photo of my son .
It was a shock emotionally , yet a blessing to find this photo , " and he was writing because he said , " I 'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo , as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son . "
And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story .
We can 't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that , when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself .
And so we started imagining the museum , along with the creative team at the museum and the curators , thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors .
And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember .
And I 'll just play you part of a mockup of it , but you get a sense of what it 's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history .
Voice 1 : I was in Honolulu , Hawaii . Voice 2 : I was in Cairo , Egypt .
Voice 3 : Sur les Champs-Élysées , à Paris . Voice 4 : In college , at U.C. Berkeley .
Voice 5 : I was in Times Square . Voice 6 : São Paolo , Brazil .
Voice 7 : It was probably about 11 o 'clock at night .
Voice 8 : I was driving to work at 5 : 45 local time in the morning .
Voice 9 : We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said , " Oh my God , a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center . "
Voice 10 : Trying to frantically get to a radio .
Voice 11 : When I heard it over the radio -- Voice 12 : Heard it on the radio .
Voice 13 : I got a call from my father . Voice 14 : The phone rang , it woke me up .
My business partner told me to turn on the television .
Voice 15 : So I switched on the television .
Voice 16 : All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing .
Voice 17 : The Twin Towers . Voice 18 : The Twin Towers .
JB : And you move from there into that open , cavernous space .
This is the so-called slurry wall .
It 's the original , excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself .
And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity , of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself .
And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage , so you 're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building , or making their way down the stairwells .
And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery , we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself .
And so you can hear oral histories -- so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you 're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment .
And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9 / 11 , we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9 / 11 .
And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable , the types of questions that 9 / 11 itself draws forth for all of us .
And so these are questions like , " How can a democracy balance freedom and security ? "
" How could 9 / 11 have happened ? "
" And how did the world change after 9 / 11 ? "
And so these oral histories , which we 've actually been capturing already for years , are then mixed together with interviews that we 're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld , Bill Clinton , Rudy Giuliani , and you mix together these different players and these different experiences , these different reflection points about 9 / 11 .
And suddenly the institution , once again , turns into a listening experience .
So I 'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices , but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone 's reflection on the event .
Voice 1 : 9 / 11 was not just a New York experience .
Voice 2 : It 's something that we shared , and it 's something that united us .
Voice 3 : And I knew when I saw that , people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through .
Voice 4 : All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever , ever stay with me .
Voice 5 : Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives , and those who gave their lives to help others , but I 'm also reminded of the fabric of this country , the love , the compassIon , the strength , and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy .
JB : And so as people make their way out of the museum , reflecting on the experience , reflecting on their own thoughts of it , they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself , because they 've gone back up to grade , and we actually got involved in the memorial after we 'd done the museum for a few years .
The original designer of the memorial , Michael Arad , had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated , almost random , really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself , but it was a huge challenge for the families , for the foundation , certainly for the first responders , and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology , or in terms of alphabetical , but through what 's called meaningful adjacency .
So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order , and we , along with Jer Thorp , created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves .
So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy , but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights , the two different towers , the first responders , and you can actually see within that different floors , and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves .
And so when you go to the memorial , you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves .
You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial , and you can search for an individual name , or in this case an employer , Cantor Fitzgerald , and see the way in which all of those names , those hundreds of names , are actually organized onto the memorial itself , and use that to navigate the memorial .
And more importantly , when you 're actually at the site of the memorial , you can see those connections .
You can see the relationships between the different names themselves .
So suddenly what is this undifferentiated , anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life .
In this case , Harry Ramos , who was the head trader at an investment bank , who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower .
And Ramos told Wald , according to witnesses , " I 'm not going to leave you . "
And Wald 's widow requested that they be listed next to each other .
Three generations ago , we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people .
Today , of course , there 's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations .
And this is our hope , that 's there 's poetry inside of each of our stories .
Thank you very much .

Stacey Kramer : The best gift I ever survived
Stacey Kramer offers a moving , personal , 3-minute parable that shows how an unwanted experience -- frightening , traumatic , costly -- can turn out to be a priceless gift .
Imagine , if you will -- a gift .
I 'd like for you to picture it in your mind .
It 's not too big -- about the size of a golf ball .
So envision what it looks like all wrapped up .
But before I show you what 's inside , I will tell you , it 's going to do incredible things for you .
It will bring all of your family together .
You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven 't heard from in years .
Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you .
It will recalibrate what 's most important in your life .
It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith .
You 'll have a new understanding and trust in your body .
You 'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy .
You 'll expand your vocabulary , meet new people , and you 'll have a healthier lifestyle .
And get this -- you 'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing .
You 'll eat countless gourmet meals .
Flowers will arrive by the truckload .
People will say to you , " You look great . Have you had any work done ? "
And you 'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs .
You 'll be challenged , inspired , motivated and humbled .
Your life will have new meaning .
Peace , health , serenity , happiness , nirvana .
The price ?
$ 55,000 , and that 's an incredible deal .
By now I know you 're dying to know what it is and where you can get one .
Does Amazon carry it ?
Does it have the Apple logo on it ?
Is there a waiting list ?
Not likely .
This gift came to me about five months ago .
It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up -- not quite so pretty .
And this , and then this .
It was a rare gem -- a brain tumor , hemangioblastoma -- the gift that keeps on giving .
And while I 'm okay now , I wouldn 't wish this gift for you .
I 'm not sure you 'd want it .
But I wouldn 't change my experience .
It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn 't expect in all the ways I just shared with you .
So the next time you 're faced with something that 's unexpected , unwanted and uncertain , consider that it just may be a gift .
Rory Stewart : Time to end the war in Afghanistan
British MP Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan after 9 / 11 , talking with citizens and warlords alike . Now , a decade later , he asks : Why are Western and coalition forces still fighting there ? He shares lessons from past military interventions that worked -- Bosnia , for instance -- and shows that humility and local expertise are the keys to success .
The question today is not : Why did we invade Afghanistan ?
The question is : why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later ?
Why are we spending $ 135 billion ?
Why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground ?
Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict ?
How has this happened ?
The last 20 years has been the age of intervention , and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy .
We came out of the end of the Cold War in despair .
We faced Rwanda ; we faced Bosnia , and then we rediscovered our confidence .
In the third act , we went into Bosnia and Kosovo and we seemed to succeed .
In the fourth act , with our hubris , our overconfidence developing , we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan , and in the fifth act , we plunged into a humiliating mess .
So the question is : What are we doing ?
Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan ?
And the answer , of course , that we keep being given is as follows : we 're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9 / 11 , and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security .
In the words of President Obama , " If the Taliban take over again , they will invite back Al-Qaeda , who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can . "
The story that we 're told is that there was a " light footprint " initially -- in other words , that we ended up in a situation where we didn 't have enough troops , we didn 't have enough resources , that Afghans were frustrated -- they felt there wasn 't enough progress and economic development and security , and therefore the Taliban came back -- that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments , but we still didn 't put enough troops on the ground .
And that it wasn 't until 2009 , when President Obama signed off on a surge , that we finally had , in the words of Secretary Clinton , " the strategy , the leadership and the resources . "
So , as the president now reassures us , we are on track to achieve our goals .
All of this is wrong .
Every one of those statements is wrong .
Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security .
It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country -- extremely unlikely they 'd be able to seize Kabul .
They simply don 't have a conventional military option .
And even if they were able to do so , even if I 'm wrong , it 's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda .
From the Taliban 's point of view , that was their number one mistake last time .
If they hadn 't invited back Al-Qaeda , they would still be in power today .
And even if I 'm wrong about those two things , even if they were able to take back the country , even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda , it 's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe .
Because this isn 't the 1990s anymore .
If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni , we would hit them very hard , and it would be very , very difficult for the Taliban to protect them .
Furthermore , it 's simply not true that what went wrong in Afghanistan is the light footprint .
In my experience , in fact , the light footprint was extremely helpful .
And these troops that we brought in -- it 's a great picture of David Beckham there on the sub-machine gun -- made the situation worse , not better .
When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002 , what I saw was scenes like this .
A girl , if you 're lucky , in the corner of a dark room -- lucky to be able to look at the Koran .
But in those early days when we 're told we didn 't have enough troops and enough resources , we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan .
Within a few months , there were two and a half million more girls in school .
In Sangin where I was sick in 2002 , the nearest health clinic was within three days walk .
Today , there are 14 health clinics in that area alone .
There was amazing improvements .
We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where , almost overnight , three million Afghans had mobile telephones .
And we had progress in the free media .
We had progress in elections -- all of this with the so-called light footprint .
But when we began to bring more money , when we began to invest more resources , things got worse , not better . How ?
Well first see , if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like Afghanistan where the entire revenue of the Afghan state is one billion dollars a year , you drown everything .
It 's not simply corruption and waste that you create ; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government , the elected Afghan government , with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities .
And the same is true for the troops .
When I walked across Afghanistan , I stayed with people like this .
This is Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj .
Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host .
He was very generous , like many of the Afghans I stayed with .
But he was also considerably more conservative , considerably more anti-foreign , considerably more Islamist than we 'd like to acknowledge .
This man , for example , Mullah Mustafa , tried to shoot me .
And the reason I 'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is I was somewhat frightened , and I was too afraid on this occasion to ask him , having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house , why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me .
But 18 months later , I asked him why he had tried to shoot me .
And Mullah Mustafa -- he 's the man with the pen and paper -- explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph , Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn 't hit me .
Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa .
It 's not ; it 's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence .
But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it .
2005 , Anthony Fitzherbert , an agricultural engineer , could travel through Helmand , could stay in Nad Ali , Sangin and Ghoresh , which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place .
Today , he could never do that .
So the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the Taliban insurgency is mistaken .
Rather than preceding the insurgency , the Taliban followed the troop deployment , and as far as I 'm concerned , the troop deployment caused their return .
Now is this a new idea ?
No , there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years .
I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010 , and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently , who 've traveled to almost every district in the country .
Andrew Wilder , for example , born on the Pakistan-Iranian border , served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan .
Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 -- worked for Save the Children , ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit .
These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure , not more secure -- that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work .
And yet , nobody listened to them .
Instead , there was a litany of astonishing optimism .
Beginning in 2004 , every general came in saying , " I 've inherited a dismal situation , but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy , which will deliver , " in General Barno 's word in 2004 , the " decisive year . "
Well guess what ? It didn 't .
But it wasn 't sufficient to prevent General Abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver , in 2005 , the " decisive year . "
Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the " crunch year . "
Or in 2007 , the Norwegian deputy foreign minister , Espen Eide , to say that that would deliver the " decisive year . "
Or in 2008 , Major General Champoux to come in and say he would deliver the " decisive year . "
Or in 2009 , my great friend , General Stanley McChrystal , who said that he was " knee-deep in the decisive year . "
Or in 2010 , the U.K. foreign secretary , David Miliband , who said that at last we would deliver the " decisive year . "
And you 'll be delighted to hear in 2011 , today , that Guido Westerwelle , the German foreign minister , assures us that we are in the " decisive year . "
How do we allow any of this to happen ?
Well the answer , of course , is , if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country , you co-opt almost everybody .
Even the aid agencies , who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics , are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security .
They 're worried , in other words , that if anybody believes that it wasn 't such a threat -- Oxfam , Save the Children wouldn 't get the money to build their hospitals and schools .
It 's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest .
It 's very difficult for a politician , because you 're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain .
You feel deep , deep guilt .
You exaggerate your fears , and you 're terrified about the humiliation of defeat .
What is the solution to this ?
Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple , or those other people , who are telling the truth , who know the country , who 've spent 30 years on the ground -- and most importantly of all , the missing component of this -- Afghans themselves , who understand what is going on .
We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers .
And this is very difficult to do because of our structures .
The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government .
Very , very sadly , our foreign services , the United Nations , the military in these countries have very little idea of what 's going on .
The average British soldier is on a tour of only six months ; Italian soldiers , on tours of four months ; the American military , on tours of 12 months .
Diplomats are locked in embassy compounds .
When they go out , they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour .
In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008 , an embassy of 350 people , there were only three people who could speak Dari , the main language of Afghanistan , at a decent level .
And there was not a single Pashto speaker .
In the Afghan section in London responsible for governing Afghan policy on the ground , I was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in Afghanistan .
So we need to change that institutional culture .
And I could make the same points about the United States and the United Nations .
Secondly , we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals .
We need to make sure that we 're a little bit suspicious , that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military , that we don 't respond to it with quite as much alacrity .
And thirdly , we need to have some humility .
We need to begin from the position that our knowledge , our power , our legitimacy is limited .
This doesn 't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster .
It isn 't .
Bosnia and Kosovo were signal successes , great successes .
Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened .
It 's almost impossible to believe the progress we 've made since 1994 .
Refugee return , which the United Nations High Commission for Refugees thought would be extremely unlikely , has largely happened .
A million properties have been returned .
Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down .
The national army has shrunk .
The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden .
This has been done by an incredible , principled effort by the international community , and , of course , above all , by Bosnians themselves .
But you need to look at context .
And this is what we 've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq .
You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was , firstly , the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement , and then the fact those men went , that the regional situation improved , that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary : the chance to be part of a new thing , a new club , a chance to join something bigger .
And finally , we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo , a lot of the secret of what we did , a lot of the secret of our success , was our humility -- was the tentative nature of our engagement .
We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals .
We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees .
But that slowness , that caution , the fact that President Clinton initially said that American troops would only be deployed for a year , turned out to be a strength , and it helped us to put our priorities right .
One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we 've got our priorities out of sync .
We 're not matching our resources to our priorities .
Because if what we 're interested in is terrorism , Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan .
If what we 're interested in is regional stability , Egypt is far more important .
If what we 're worried about is poverty and development , sub-Saharan Africa is far more important .
This doesn 't mean that Afghanistan doesn 't matter , but that it 's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage .
So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention , what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue .
Why mountain rescue ?
Because when people talk about intervention , they imagine that some scientific theory -- the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population .
This is the wrong way of looking at it .
You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue .
When you 're doing mountain rescue , you don 't take a doctorate in mountain rescue , you look for somebody who knows the terrain .
It 's about context .
You understand that you can prepare , but the amount of preparation you can do is limited -- you can take some water , you can have a map , you can have a pack .
But what really matters is two kinds of problems -- problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn 't anticipate , such as , for example , ice on a slope , but which you can get around , and problems which you couldn 't anticipate and which you can 't get around , like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather .
And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain , in every temperature , at every period -- a guide who , above all , knows when to turn back , who doesn 't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them .
What we look for in firemen , in climbers , in policemen , and what we should look for in intervention , is intelligent risk takers -- not people who plunge blind off a cliff , not people who jump into a burning room , but who weigh their risks , weigh their responsibilities .
Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option .
It makes failure invisible , inconceivable and inevitable .
And if we can resist this crazy slogan , we shall discover -- in Egypt , in Syria , in Libya , and anywhere else we go in the world -- that if we can often do much less than we pretend , we can do much more than we fear .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Rory , you mentioned Libya at the end .
Just briefly , what 's your take on the current events there and the intervention ?
Rory Stewart : Okay , I think Libya poses the classic problem .
The problem in Libya is that we are always pushing for the black or white .
We imagine there are only two choices : either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation .
And we are always being tempted up to our neck .
We put our toes in and we go up to our neck .
What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution .
We should have limited ourselves very , very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi .
We could have done that .
We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours .
Instead of which , we 've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change .
In doing so , we 've destroyed our credibility with the Security Council , which means it 's very difficult to get a resolution on Syria , and we 're setting ourselves up again for failure .
Once more , humility , limits , honesty , realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of .
Rory , thank you very much .
RS : Thank you .
Geoff Mulgan : A short intro to the Studio School
Some kids learn by listening ; others learn by doing . Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School , a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are , as Mulgan puts it , " for real . "
What I want to talk about today is one idea .
It 's an idea for a new kind of school , which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work .
And it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon .
Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation , which , over many decades , has come up with many innovations in education , like the Open University and things like Extended Schools , Schools for Social Entrepreneurs , Summer Universities and the School of Everything .
And about five years ago , we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K.
And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems .
One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn 't like school , couldn 't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs .
And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren 't actually ready for real work , didn 't have the right attitudes and experience .
And so we try to ask : What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in , not fighting to stay out ?
And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia , and looking at some of the academic research , which showed the importance of what 's now called non-cognitive skills -- the skills of motivation , resilience -- and that these are as important as the cognitive skills -- formal academic skills -- we came up with an answer , a very simple answer in a way , which we called the Studio School .
And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated .
You work by learning , and you learn by working .
And the design we came up with had the following characteristics .
First of all , we wanted small schools -- about 300 , 400 pupils -- 14 to 19 year-olds , and critically , about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms , but through real-life , practical projects , working on commission to businesses , NGO 's and others .
That every pupil would have a coach , as well as teachers , who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business .
And all of this will be done within the public system , funded by public money , but independently run .
And all at no extra cost , no selection , and allowing the pupils the route into university , even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well .
Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things , they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real -- all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does .
Now that was a nice idea , so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase .
We tried it out , first in Luton -- famous for its airport and not much else , I fear -- and in Blackpool -- famous for its beaches and leisure .
And what we found -- and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them -- but we found that the young people loved it .
They found it much more motivational , much more exciting than traditional education .
And perhaps most important of all , two years later when the exam results came through , the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top -- in fact , pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of GCSE 's , which is the British marking system .
Now not surprisingly , that influenced some people to think we were onto something .
The minister of education down south in London described himself as a " big fan . "
And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today .
And indeed , the head of the Chambers of Commerce is now the chairman of the Studio Schools Trust and helping it , not just with big businesses , but small businesses all over the country .
We started with two schools .
That 's grown this year to about 10 .
And next year , we 're expecting about 35 schools open across England , and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening -- a pretty rapid spread of this idea .
Interestingly , it 's happened almost entirely without media coverage .
It 's happened almost entirely without big money behind it .
It spread almost entirely through word of mouth , virally , across teachers , parents , people involved in education .
And it spread because of the power of an idea -- so the very , very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal , things like working in teams , doing practical projects , and putting them right at the heart of learning , rather than on the edges .
Now there 's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn .
This is one from Yorkshire where , in fact , my nephew , I hope , will be able to attend it .
And this one is focused on creative and media industries .
Other ones have a focus on health care , tourism , engineering and other fields .
We think we 're onto something .
It 's not perfect yet , but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands , possibly millions , of teenagers who are really bored by schooling .
It doesn 't animate them .
They 're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour .
They want to do things , they want to get their hands dirty , they want education to be for real .
And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us .
We feel we 're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present , not as a universal answer for every child , but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world .
And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen .
Thank you very much .
Jack Horner : Where are the baby dinosaurs ?
In a spellbinding talk , paleontologist Jack Horner tells the story of how iconoclastic thinking revealed a shocking secret about some of our most beloved dinosaurs .
Shall I ask for a show of hands or a clapping of people in different generations ?
I 'm interested in how many are three to 12 years old .
None , huh ?
All right .
I 'm going to talk about dinosaurs .
Do you remember dinosaurs when you were that age ?
Dinosaurs are kind of funny , you know .
We 're going to kind of go in a different direction right now .
I hope you all realize that .
So I 'll just give you my message up front : Try not to go extinct .
That 's it .
People ask me a lot -- in fact , one of the most asked questions I get is , why do children like dinosaurs so much ?
What 's the fascination ?
And I usually just say , " Well dinosaurs were big , different and gone . "
They 're all gone .
Well that 's not true , but we 'll get to the goose in a minute .
So that 's sort of the theme : big , different and gone .
The title of my talk : Shape-shifting Dinosaurs : The Cause of a Premature Extinction .
Now I assume that we remember dinosaurs .
And there 's lots of different shapes .
Lots of different kinds .
A long time ago , back in the early 1900s , museums were out looking for dinosaurs .
They went out and gathered them up .
And this is an interesting story .
Every museum wanted a little bigger or better one than anybody else had .
So if the museum in Toronto went out and collected a Tyrannosaur , a big one , then the museum in Ottawa wanted a bigger one and a better one .
And that happened for all museums .
So everyone was out looking for all these bigger and better dinosaurs .
And this was in the early 1900s .
By about 1970 , some scientists were sitting around and they thought , " What in the world ?
Look at these dinosaurs .
They 're all big .
Where are all the little ones ? "
And they thought about it and they even wrote papers about it : " Where are the little dinosaurs ? "
Well , go to a museum , you 'll see , see how many baby dinosaurs there are .
People assumed -- and this was actually a problem -- people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs , if they had juvenile dinosaurs , they 'd be easy to identify .
You 'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur .
But all they had were big dinosaurs .
And it comes down to a couple of things .
First off , scientists have egos , and scientists like to name dinosaurs .
They like to name anything .
Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named .
And so every time they found something that looked a little different , they named it something different .
And what happened , of course , is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs .
In 1975 , a light went on in somebody 's head .
Dr. Peter Dodson at the University of Pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do , which is different than the way reptiles grow .
And in fact , he used the cassowary as an example .
And it 's kind of cool -- if you look at the cassowary , or any of the birds that have crests on their heads , they actually grow to about 80 percent adult size before the crest starts to grow .
Now think about that .
They 're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny .
So allometric cranial ontogeny is relative skull growth .
So you can see that if you actually found one that was 80 percent grown and you didn 't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary , you would think they were two different animals .
So this was a problem , and Peter Dodson pointed this out using some duck-billed dinosaurs then called Hypacrosaurus .
And he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like , if it grew in sort of a linear fashion , it would have a crest about half the size of the adult .
But the actual sub-adult at 65 percent had no crest at all .
So this was interesting .
So this is where people went astray again .
I mean , if they 'd have just taken that , taken Peter Dodson 's work , and gone on with that , then we would have a lot less dinosaurs than we have .
But scientists have egos ; they like to name things .
And so they went on naming dinosaurs because they were different .
Now we have a way of actually testing to see whether a dinosaur , or any animal , is a young one or an older one .
And that 's by actually cutting into their bones .
But cutting into the bones of a dinosaur is hard to do , as you can imagine , because in museums bones are precious .
You go into a museum and they take really good care of them .
They put them in foam , little containers .
They 're very well taken care of .
They don 't like it if you come in and want to saw them open and look inside .
So they don 't normally let you do that .
But I have a museum and I collect dinosaurs and I can saw mine open .
So that 's what I do .
So if you cut open a little dinosaur , it 's very spongy inside like A.
And if you cut into an older dinosaur , it 's very massive .
You can tell it 's mature bone .
So it 's real easy to tell them apart .
So what I want to do is show you these .
In North America in the Northern Plains of the United States and the Southern Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan , there 's this unit of rock called the Hell Creek Formation that produces the last dinosaurs that lived on Earth .
And there are 12 of them that everyone recognizes -- I mean the 12 primary dinosaurs that went extinct .
And so we will evaluate them .
And that 's sort of what I 've been doing .
So my students , my staff , we 've been cutting them open .
Now as you can imagine , cutting open a leg bone is one thing , but when you go to a museum and say , " You don 't mind if I cut open your dinosaur 's skull do you ? "
they say , " Go away . "
So here are 12 dinosaurs .
And we want to look at these three first .
So these are dinosaurs that are called Pachycephalosaurs .
And everybody knows that these three animals are related .
And the assumption is is that they 're related like cousins or whatever .
But no one ever considered that they might be more closely related .
In other words , people looked at them and they saw the differences .
And you all know that if you are going to determine whether you 're related to your brother or your sister , you can 't do it by looking at differences .
You can only determine relatedness by looking for similarities .
So people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are .
Pachycephalosaurus has a big , thick dome on its head , and it 's got some little bumps on the back of its head , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose .
And then Stygimoloch , another dinosaur from the same age , lived at the same time , has spikes sticking out the back of its head .
It 's got a little , tiny dome , and it 's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose .
And then there 's this thing called Dracorex , Hogwart 's Eye .
Guess where that came from ? Dragon .
So here 's a dinosaur that has spikes sticking out of its head , no dome and gnarly stuff on its nose .
Nobody noticed the gnarly stuff sort of looked alike .
But they did look at these three and they said , " These are three different dinosaurs , and Dracorex is probably the most primitive of them .
And the other one is more primitive than the other .
It 's unclear to me how they actually sorted these three of them out .
But if you line them up , if you just take those three skulls and just line them up , they line up like this .
Dracorex is the littlest one , Stygimoloch is the middle size one , Pachycephalosaurus is the largest one .
And one would think , that should give me a clue .
But it didn 't give them a clue .
Because , well we know why .
Scientists like to name things .
So if we cut open Dracorex -- I cut open our Dracorex -- and look , it was spongy inside , really spongy inside .
I mean , it is a juvenile and it 's growing really fast .
So it is going to get bigger .
If you cut open Stygimoloch , it is doing the same thing .
The dome , that little dome , is growing really fast .
It 's inflating very fast .
What 's interesting is the spike on the back of the Dracorex was growing very fast as well .
The spikes on the back of the Stygimoloch are actually resorbing , which means they 're getting smaller as that dome is getting bigger .
And if we look at Pachycephalosaurus , Pachycephalosaurus has a solid dome and its little bumps on the back of its head were also resorbing .
So just with these three dinosaurs , you can easily -- as a scientist -- we can easily hypothesize that it is just a growth series of the same animal .
Which of course means that Stygimoloch and Dracorex are extinct .
Okay .
Which of course means we have 10 primary dinosaurs to deal with .
So a colleague of mine at Berkley , he and I were looking at Triceratops .
And before the year 2000 -- now remember , Triceratops was first found in the 1800s -- before 2000 , no one had ever seen a juvenile Triceratops .
There 's a Triceratops in every museum in the world , but no one had ever collected a juvenile .
And we know why , right ?
Because everybody wants to have a big one .
So everyone had a big one .
So we went out and collected a whole bunch of stuff and we found a whole bunch of little ones .
They 're everywhere . They 're all over the place .
So we have a whole bunch of them at our museum .
And everybody says it 's because I have a little museum .
When you have a little museum , you have little dinosaurs .
If you look at the Triceratops , you can see it 's changing , it 's shape-shifting .
As the juveniles are growing up , their horns actually curve backwards .
And then as they grow older , the horns grow forward .
And that 's pretty cool .
If you look along the edge of the frill , they have these little triangular bones that actually grow big as triangles and then they flatten against the frill pretty much like the spikes do on the Pachycephalosaurs .
And then , because the juveniles are in my collection , I cut them open and look inside .
And the little one is really spongy .
And the middle size one is really spongy .
But what was interesting was the adult Triceratops was also spongy .
And this is a skull that is two meters long .
It 's a big skull .
But there 's another dinosaur that is found in this formation that looks like a Triceratops , except it 's bigger , and it 's called Torosaurus .
And Torosaurus , when we cut into it , has mature bone .
But it 's got these big holes in its shield .
And everybody says , " A Triceratops and a Torosaurus can 't possibly be the same animal because one of them 's bigger than the other one . "
" And it has holes in its frill . "
And I said , " Well do we have any juvenile Torosauruses ? "
And they said , " Well no , but it has holes in its frill . "
So one of my graduate students , John Scannella , looked through our whole collection and he actually discovered that the hole starting to form in Triceratops and , of course it 's open , in Torosaurus -- so he found the transitional ones between Triceratops and Torosaurus , which was pretty cool .
So now we know that Torosaurus is actually a grownup Triceratops .
Now when we name dinosaurs , when we name anything , the original name gets to stick and the second name is thrown out .
So Torosaurus is extinct .
Triceratops , if you 've heard the news , a lot of the newscasters got it all wrong .
They thought Torosaurus should be kept and Triceratops thrown out , but that 's not going to happen .
All right , so we can do this with a bunch of dinosaurs .
I mean , here 's Edmontosaurus and Anatotitan .
Anatotitan : giant duck .
It 's a giant duck-bill dinosaur .
Here 's another one .
So we look at the bone histology .
The bone histology tells us that Edmontosaurus is a juvenile , or at least a sub-adult , and the other one is an adult and we have an ontogeny .
And we get rid of Anatotitan .
So we can just keep doing this .
And the last one is T. Rex .
So there 's these two dinosaurs , T. Rex and Nanotyrannus .
Again , makes you wonder .
But they had a good question .
They were looking at them and they said , " One 's got 17 teeth , and the biggest one 's got 12 teeth .
And that doesn 't make any sense at all , because we don 't know of any dinosaurs that gain teeth as they get older .
So it must be true -- they must be different . "
So we cut into them .
And sure enough , Nanotyrannus has juvenile bone and the bigger one has more mature bone .
It looks like it could still get bigger .
And at the Museum of the Rockies where we work , I have four T. Rexes , so I can cut a whole bunch of them .
But I didn 't have to cut any of them really , because I just lined up their jaws and it turned out the biggest one had 12 teeth and the next smallest one had 13 and the next smallest had 14 .
And of course , Nano has 17 .
And we just went out and looked at other people 's collections and we found one that has sort of 15 teeth .
So again , real easy to say that Tyrannosaurus ontogeny included Nanotyrannus , and therefore we can take out another dinosaur .
So when it comes down to our end cretaceous , we have seven left .
And that 's a good number .
That 's a good number to go extinct , I think .
Now as you can imagine , this is not very popular with fourth-graders .
Fourth-graders love their dinosaurs , they memorize them .
And they 're not happy with this .
Thank you very much .
Leah Buechley : How to " sketch " with electronics
Designing electronics is generally cumbersome and expensive -- or was , until Leah Buechley and her team at MIT developed tools to treat electronics just like paper and pen . In this talk from TEDYouth 2011 , Buechley shows some of her charming designs , like a paper piano you can sketch and then play .
Today , I 'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics .
I 'm , among several other things , an electrical engineer , and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology , and more specifically designing and building electronics .
And what I 've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways .
So it 's a really slow process , it 's really expensive , and the outcome of that process , namely electronic circuit boards , are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways .
So they 're really small , generally , they 're square and flat and hard , and frankly , most of them just aren 't very attractive , and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics .
And so what if you could design and build electronics like this ? So what if you could do it extremely quickly , extremely inexpensively , and maybe more interestingly , really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally ?
Wouldn 't that be so cool , and that wouldn 't that open up all sorts of new possibilities ?
I 'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines , and we 'll start with this one .
Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper .
A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC .
Sticker templates .
Speed x 4 .
Making a switch .
Music : DJ Shadow .
Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller .
Sketching an interface .
Pretty cool , huh ? We think so .
So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things , we started to realize that , essentially , anything that we can do with paper , anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics .
So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility .
And I 'll kind of let it speak for itself .
So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this , and so the way that we 're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools , and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways .
And so sometime soon , you 'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way .
So thank you very much .
Jared Diamond : Why do societies collapse ?
Why do societies fail ? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland , deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana , Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near , and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it .
I think all of us have been interested , at one time or another , in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed , such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan , the Easter Islanders , the Anasazi , Fertile Crescent society , Angor Wat , Great Zimbabwe and so on . And within the last decade or two , archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses .
But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse , such as Japan , Java , Tonga and Tikopea . So evidently , societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas .
How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies ? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today , because today as well , there are some societies that have already collapsed , such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia . There are also societies today that may be close to collapse , such as Nepal , Indonesia and Columbia .
What about ourselves ?
What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have ?
Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor . If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses , you know right away that they 're an idiot . This is a complex subject .
But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject ?
In analyzing societal collapses , I 've arrived at a five-point framework -- a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses . And I 'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society .
This is a European society with literate records , so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation .
In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland , settled Greenland , and around 1450 they died out -- the society collapsed , and every one of them ended up dead .
Why did they all end up dead ? Well , in my five-point framework , the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment : people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend . And in the case of the Viking Norse , the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation , which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal , to make iron .
So they ended up an Iron Age European society , virtually unable to make their own iron . A second item on my checklist is climate change . Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter .
In the case of the Vikings -- in Greenland , the climate got colder in the late 1300s , and especially in the 1400s . But a cold climate isn 't necessarily fatal , because the Inuit -- the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time -- did better , rather than worse , with cold climates . So why didn 't the Greenland Norse as well ?
The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society . And if that friendly support is pulled away , that may make a society more likely to collapse . In the case of the Greenland Norse , they had trade with the mother country -- Norway -- and that trade dwindled : partly because Norway got weaker , partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway .
The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies .
In the case of Norse Greenland , the hostiles were the Inuit -- the Eskimos sharing Greenland -- with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships . And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and , probably of greater importance , may have blocked access to the outer fjords , on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year .
And then finally , the fifth item on my checklist is the political , economic , social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems . In the case of the Greenland Norse , cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were : their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals ; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society ; and their scorn for the Inuit , from whom they refused to learn . So that 's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse .
What about a society today ?
For the past five years , I 've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana , where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest . And Montana , at first sight , seems like the most pristine environment in the United States .
But scratch the surface , and Montana suffers from serious problems .
Going through the same checklist : human environmental impacts ?
Yes , acute in Montana . Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars .
Problems from weeds , weed control , cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year . Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization , problems of forest management , problems of forest fires . Second item on my checklist : climate change . Yes -- the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier , but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack , and as the snow is melting -- for example , as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing -- that 's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture .
Third thing on my checklist : relations with friendlies that can sustain the society . In Montana today , more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana , but is derived from out of state : transfer payments from social security , investments and so on -- which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States .
Fourth : relations with hostiles . Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans , in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies , and terrorist attacks . And finally , last item on my checklist : question of how political , economic , social , cultural attitudes play into this . Montanans have long-held values , which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems .
Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture , and to no government regulation ; values that worked well in the past , but they don 't seem to be working well today .
So , I 'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies .
Are there any general conclusions that arise ?
In a way , just like Tolstoy 's statement about every unhappy marriage being different , every collapsed or endangered society is different -- they all have different details . But nevertheless , there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today . One interesting common thread has to do with , in many cases , the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak . There are many societies that don 't wind down gradually , but they build up -- get richer and more powerful -- and then within a short time , within a few decades after their peak , they collapse . For example , the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s -- literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments , and Maya population was greatest .
Or again , the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades , maybe within a decade , of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power .
An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish .
These rapid collapses are especially likely where there 's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption , or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential .
In a petri dish , bacteria grow . Say they double every generation , and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15 / 16ths empty , and then the next generation 's 3 / 4ths empty , and the next generation half empty . Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty , it is full . There 's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed .
So , this is a frequent theme : societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power .
What it means to put it mathematically is that , if you 're concerned about a society today , you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function -- the wealth itself -- but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function . That 's one general theme . A second general theme is that there are many , often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others . Many of those factors are not well understood . For example , why is it that in the Pacific , of those hundreds of Pacific islands , why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation ?
It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors -- some , rather subtle ones -- that were working against the Easter Islanders , and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra , latitude , rainfall . Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia .
Easter , of all Pacific islands , has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils . But that 's a factor that we didn 't even appreciate until 1999 .
So , some societies , for subtle environmental reasons , are more fragile than others . And then finally , another generalization . I 'm now teaching a course at UCLA , to UCLA undergraduates , on these collapses of societies . What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is , how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing ?
How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment ?
What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree ?
Didn 't they see what they were doing ? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time ?
And I would expect that , if our human civilization carries on , then maybe in the next century people will be asking , why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action ?
It seems incredible in the past . In the future , it 'll seem incredible what we are doing today . And so I 've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems -- why they fail to perceive the problems or , if they perceive them , why they fail to tackle them . Or , if they tackle them , why do they fail to succeed in solving them ?
I 'll just mention two generalizations in this area .
One blueprint for trouble , making collapse likely , is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole , especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions . Where what 's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole , there 's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run .
For example , among the Greenland Norse -- a competitive rank society -- what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs . And that led the chiefs to do what 's called flogging the land : overstocking the land , forcing tenant farmers into dependency . And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run , but led to the society 's collapse in the long run .
Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today . Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds , by drinking bottled water and so on . And within the last couple of years , it 's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole , such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses . They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term , although bad for society in the long term .
So , that 's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions : conflicts of interest .
And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it 's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances . For example , the Greenland Norse , in this difficult environment , were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion , and by their strong social cohesion . But those two things -- commitment to religion and strong social cohesion -- also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit . Or today -- Australia .
One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity .
But today , their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia . So it 's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength .
What 's going to be the outcome today ?
Well , all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world , time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to -- all of them , not more than 50 years , and any one of which can do us in ; the time bombs of water , of soil , of climate change , invasive species , the photosynthetic ceiling , population problems , toxics , etc . , etc . -- listing about 12 of them . And while these time bombs -- none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years , and most of them have fuses of a few decades -- some of them , in some places , have much shorter fuses . At the rate at which we 're going now , the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years . And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest , which is their major export . And that 's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons . People often ask me , Jared , what 's the most important thing that we need to do about the world 's environmental problems ?
And my answer is , the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do .
Instead , there are a dozen things , any one of which could do us in .
And we 've got to get them all right , because if we solve 11 , we fail to solve the 12th -- we 're in trouble . For example , if we solve our problems of water and soil and population , but don 't solve our problems of toxics , then we are in trouble .
The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course , which means , by definition , that it cannot be maintained .
And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades .
That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved , and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution , but our children and grandchildren certainly will .
The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms : either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action , or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice -- namely , by war , disease or starvation . But what 's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades . In other words , since the theme of this session is choices , we have a choice . Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed ? I draw the reverse conclusion .
The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control . Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us , something we can do nothing about .
Instead , all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making . And since we made the problems , we can also solve the problems . That then means that it 's entirely in our power to deal with these problems .
In particular , what can all of us do ? For those of you who are interested in these choices , there are lots of things you can do . There 's a lot that we don 't understand , and that we need to understand . And there 's a lot that we already do understand , but aren 't doing , and that we need to be doing . Thank you .
Morley : " Women of Hope "
Inspired by Aung San Suu Kyi 's call to action , " If you 're feeling helpless , help someone , " Morley composed this song . She sings it at TEDxWomen in her gorgeous , warm voice . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
They stood together under a tree in tall grass on TV telling the world their story We will be left to wander and fade away Soldiers came and took our husbands at the break of day We will live on then fade away Soldiers came and killed our children at the break of day Women of hope Women of change Women of war and pain I believe I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you by your name Women of hope Women of change Women of love , joy , no shame You 've got something this little life can never take away Running through the darkness of night with a child by her side Oh Lord , won 't you give them a shining armor of light Oh Lord , won 't you give them a shining armor of light Daybreak brings a sign of new life with the power to stand Crossing the border she said , " You will grow free on this land " Women of hope Women of change Women of war and pain I can feel your power in these words she said If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone Nobody really knows how far they will go to keep on living Nobody really knows how far they will go to keep on giving and forgiving Aung San Suu Kyi living under house arrest for her peaceful protest under house arrest for her peaceful protest When her people asked her for a message she said If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone Now we know the words , let 's sing .
If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone If you 're feeling helpless help someone People of hope People of change People of love , joy , no shame I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you by your name Thank you .
Malcolm Gladwell : The unheard story of David and Goliath
It 's a classic underdog tale : David , a young shepherd armed only with a sling , beats Goliath , the mighty warrior . The story has transcended its biblical origins to become a common shorthand for unlikely victory . But , asks Malcolm Gladwell , is that really what the David and Goliath story is about ?
So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book , and it 's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago , when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy .
And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel .
And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it , and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn 't understand it at all .
Ancient Palestine had a -- along its eastern border , there 's a mountain range .
Still same is true of Israel today .
And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region , so Jerusalem , Bethlehem , Hebron .
And then there 's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean , where Tel Aviv is now .
And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah , which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west , and you can follow the Shephelah , go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains .
And the Shephelah , if you 've been to Israel , you 'll know it 's just about the most beautiful part of Israel .
It 's gorgeous , with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards .
But more importantly , though , in the history of that region , it 's served , it 's had a real strategic function , and that is , it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way , get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains .
And 3,000 years ago , that 's exactly what happens .
The Philistines , who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel , are living in the coastal plain .
They 're originally from Crete . They 're a seafaring people .
And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains , because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two .
And the Kingdom of Israel , which is headed by King Saul , obviously catches wind of this , and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah , one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah .
And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge , and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge , and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other , because they 're deadlocked .
Neither can attack the other , because to attack the other side you 've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side , and you 're completely exposed .
So finally , to break the deadlock , the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor , and he calls out and he says to the Israelites , " Send your mightiest warrior down , and we 'll have this out , just the two of us . "
This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat .
It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle .
And the Philistine who is sent down , their mighty warrior , is a giant .
He 's 6 foot 9 .
He 's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor , and he 's got a sword and he 's got a javelin and he 's got his spear . He is absolutely terrifying .
And he 's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him .
It 's a death wish , right ? There 's no way they think they can take him .
And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy , and he goes up to Saul and he says , " I 'll fight him . "
And Saul says , " You can 't fight him . That 's ridiculous .
You 're this kid . This is this mighty warrior . "
But the shepherd is adamant . He says , " No , no , no , you don 't understand , I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years . I think I can do it . "
And Saul has no choice . He 's got no one else who 's come forward .
So he says , " All right . "
And then he turns to the kid , and he says , " But you 've got to wear this armor . You can 't go as you are . "
So he tries to give the shepherd his armor , and the shepherd says , " No . "
He says , " I can 't wear this stuff . "
The Biblical verse is , " I cannot wear this for I have not proved it , " meaning , " I 've never worn armor before . You 've got to be crazy . "
So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd 's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant .
And the giant sees this figure approaching , and calls out , " Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field . "
He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him .
And the shepherd draws closer and closer , and the giant sees that he 's carrying a staff .
That 's all he 's carrying .
Instead of a weapon , just this shepherd 's staff , and he says -- he 's insulted -- " Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks ? "
And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket , puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes -- right here , in his most vulnerable spot -- and he falls down either dead or unconscious , and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head , and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run .
And of course , the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David , and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong .
So David , in that story , is supposed to be the underdog , right ?
In fact , that term , David and Goliath , has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger .
Now why do we call David an underdog ?
Well , we call him an underdog because he 's a kid , a little kid , and Goliath is this big , strong giant .
We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior , and David is just a shepherd .
But most importantly , we call him an underdog because all he has is -- it 's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry , this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear , and all David has is this sling .
Well , let 's start there with the phrase " All David has is this sling , " because that 's the first mistake that we make .
In ancient warfare , there are three kinds of warriors .
There 's cavalry , men on horseback and with chariots .
There 's heavy infantry , which are foot soldiers , armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor .
And there 's artillery , and artillery are archers , but , more importantly , slingers .
And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it , and they put a projectile , either a rock or a lead ball , inside the pouch , and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go , and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target .
That 's what David has , and it 's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot .
It 's not this , right ? It 's not a child 's toy .
It 's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon .
When David rolls it around like this , he 's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second , and that means that when the rock is released , it 's going forward really fast , probably 35 meters per second .
That 's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers .
More than that , the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks . They were barium sulphate , which are rocks twice the density of normal stones .
If you do the calculations on the ballistics , on the stopping power of the rock fired from David 's sling , it 's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [ .45 caliber ] handgun .
This is an incredibly devastating weapon .
Accuracy , we know from historical records that slingers -- experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards .
From medieval tapestries , we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight .
They were incredibly accurate .
When David lines up -- and he 's not 200 yards away from Goliath , he 's quite close to Goliath -- when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath , he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes .
If you go back over the history of ancient warfare , you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another .
So what 's Goliath ? He 's heavy infantry , and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he 's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman .
When he says , " Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field , " the key phrase is " Come to me . "
Come up to me because we 're going to fight , hand to hand , like this .
Saul has the same expectation .
David says , " I want to fight Goliath , " and Saul tries to give him his armor , because Saul is thinking , " Oh , when you say ' fight Goliath , ' you mean ' fight him in hand-to-hand combat , ' infantry on infantry . "
But David has absolutely no expectation .
He 's not going to fight him that way . Why would he ?
He 's a shepherd . He 's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves .
That 's where his strength lies .
So here he is , this shepherd , experienced in the use of a devastating weapon , up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat .
Goliath is a sitting duck . He doesn 't have a chance .
So why do we keep calling David an underdog , and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable ?
There 's a second piece of this that 's important .
It 's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry .
It 's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath .
Goliath is not what he seems to be .
There 's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text , things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don 't square with his image as this mighty warrior .
So to begin with , the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant .
Now that is weird , right ?
Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat .
Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy , presumably , to the point of combat ?
Secondly , the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves , another odd thing to say when you 're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point .
And then there 's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David .
So David 's coming down the mountain , and he 's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat .
There is nothing about him that says , " I am about to fight you like this . "
He 's not even carrying a sword .
Why does Goliath not react to that ?
It 's as if he 's oblivious to what 's going on that day .
And then there 's that strange comment he makes to David : " Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks ? "
Sticks ? David only has one stick .
of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath , an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies .
There have been many articles written .
The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal , and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath 's height .
So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era , and usually when someone is that far out of the norm , there 's an explanation for it .
So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly , and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone .
And throughout history , many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly .
So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11 .
He had acromegaly .
Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant ?
Famous . He had acromegaly .
There 's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly .
Anyone who 's unusually tall , that 's the first explanation we come up with .
And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it , principally having to do with vision .
The pituitary tumor , as it grows , often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain , with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted .
So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath , they 've said , " Wait a minute , he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly . "
And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day .
Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant ?
Because he can 't make his way on his own .
Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn 't understand that David 's not going to fight him until the very last moment ?
Because he can 't see him .
When he says , " Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field , " the phrase " come to me " is a hint also of his vulnerability .
Come to me because I can 't see you .
And then there 's , " Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks ? "
He sees two sticks when David has only one .
So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe .
What they didn 't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness .
And there is , I think , in that , a very important lesson for all of us .
Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem .
And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket .
Thank you .
Bernie Krause : The voice of the natural world
Bernie Krause has been recording wild soundscapes -- the wind in the trees , the chirping of birds , the subtle sounds of insect larvae -- for 45 years . In that time , he has seen many environments radically altered by humans , sometimes even by practices thought to be environmentally safe . A surprising look at what we can learn through nature 's symphonies , from the grunting of a sea anemone to the sad calls of a beaver in mourning .
When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago , I had no idea that ants , insect larvae , sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature .
But they do .
And so does every wild habitat on the planet , like the Amazon rainforest you 're hearing behind me .
In fact , temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra , that instantaneous and organized expression of insects , reptiles , amphibians , birds and mammals .
And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature , one that contains incredible amounts of information , and it 's some of that information I want to share with you today .
The soundscape is made up of three basic sources .
The first is the geophony , or the nonbiological sounds that occur like wind in the trees , water in a stream , waves at the ocean shore , movement of the Earth .
The second of these is the biophony .
The biophony is all of the sound that 's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place .
And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that 's called anthrophony .
Some of it is controlled , like music or theater , but most of it is chaotic and incoherent , which some of us refer to as noise .
There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact .
They were just there , but they had no significance .
Well , I was wrong . What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life .
When I began recording in the late ' 60s , the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly , in the beginning , but later animals like mammals and amphibians .
To me , this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven 's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part .
Fortunately , more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology .
When I began recording over four decades ago , I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material , good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation .
Now , because of global warming , resource extraction , and human noise , among many other factors , it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing .
Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they 're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form .
The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area .
However , by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear , I 'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes .
And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe .
This is Lincoln Meadow .
Lincoln Meadow 's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains , at about 2,000 meters altitude , and I 've been recording there for many years .
In 1988 , a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called " selective logging , " taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area .
With permission granted to record both before and after the operation , I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings , because I wanted a really good baseline .
This is an example of a spectrogram .
A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page -- 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top , lowest to highest .
And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page , while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top .
There were a lot of them .
And here 's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging .
Well , a year later I returned , and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions , I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses , and now this is what we 've got .
This is after selective logging .
You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page , but notice what 's missing in the top two thirds .
Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker .
Well , I 've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years , and I can tell you that the biophony , the density and diversity of that biophony , has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation .
But here 's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after , and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye , hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place , which would confirm the logging company 's contention that there 's nothing of environmental impact .
However , our ears tell us a very different story .
Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying , and really I 've got no idea .
But I can tell you that they do express themselves .
Whether or not we understand it is a different story .
I was walking along the shore in Alaska , and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones , these wonderful eating machines , relatives of coral and jellyfish .
And curious to see if any of them made any noise , I dropped a hydrophone , an underwater microphone covered in rubber , down the mouth part , and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly , and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value .
The static-like sounds that are very low , that you 're going to hear right now .
Yeah , but watch . When it didn 't find anything to eat -- I think that 's an expression that can be understood in any language .
At the end of its breeding cycle , the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West , where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again .
And when there 's enough moisture in the soil in the spring , frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large , vernal pools in great numbers .
And they vocalize in a chorus that 's absolutely in sync with one another .
And they do that for two reasons .
The first is competitive , because they 're looking for mates , and the second is cooperative , because if they 're all vocalizing in sync together , it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes , foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal .
This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it 's in a very healthy pattern .
Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California , and it 's a favorite habitat of these toads , and it 's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots , who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin , very fast , very low , and so loud that the anthrophony , the human noise , even though it 's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago , it masked the sound of the chorusing toads .
You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram , and that there 's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half , four and a half , and six and a half seconds , and then the sound of the jet , the signature , is in yellow at the very bottom of the page .
Now at the end of that flyby , it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity , during which time , and under a full moon , we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers .
The good news is that , with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights , the frog populations , once diminishing during the 1980s and early ' 90s , have pretty much returned to normal .
I want to end with a story told by a beaver .
It 's a very sad story , but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion , a very controversial subject among some older biologists .
A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age .
It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance .
And one afternoon , while he was recording , there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens , who for no apparent reason , walked over to the beaver dam , dropped a stick of dynamite down it , blowing it up , killing the female and her young babies .
Horrified , my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon , and that evening , he captured a remarkable event : the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring .
This is probably the saddest sound I 've ever heard coming from any organism , human or other .
Yeah . Well .
There are many facets to soundscapes , among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing , which I 'll save for another time .
But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world .
You 've heard the impact of resource extraction , human noise and habitat destruction .
And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see , a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear .
Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world , and as we hear them , we 're endowed with a sense of place , the true story of the world we live in .
In a matter of seconds , a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives , from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration .
Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context , while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees , completely enveloping us .
And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words , a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures .
And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives , which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things , especially our own humanity , and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon .
Thank you for listening .
Aparna Rao : High-tech art
Artist and TED Fellow Aparna Rao re-imagines the familiar in surprising , often humorous ways . With her collaborator Soren Pors , Rao creates high-tech art installations -- a typewriter that sends emails , a camera that tracks you through the room only to make you invisible on screen -- that put a playful spin on ordinary objects and interactions .
Hi . Today , I 'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects , done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors .
We call ourselves Pors and Rao , and we live and work in India .
I 'd like to begin with my very first object , which I call " The Uncle Phone . "
And it was inspired by my uncle 's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him , almost like I were an extension of his body -- to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water , a pack of cigarettes .
And as I grew up , it became worse and worse , And I started to think of it as a form of control .
But of course , I could never say anything , because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family .
And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone .
He would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him .
And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle , I made him " The Uncle Phone . "
It 's so long that it requires two people to use it .
It 's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that 's designed for one person .
But the problem is that , when I left home and went to college , I started missing his commands .
And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email .
So what he had to do was take a piece of paper , roll it into the carriage , type his email or command and pull the paper out .
This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email .
So here you can see , we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital .
So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface .
And of course , the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism , the way my uncle likes it .
The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call " The Pygmies . "
And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy , sensitive and sweet creatures .
So how it works is we have these panels , which we have on the wall , and behind them , we have these little creatures which hide .
And as soon as it 's silent , they sort of creep out .
And if it 's even more silent , they stretch their necks out .
And at the slightest sound , they hide back again .
So we had these panels on three walls of a room .
And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them .
So this is how it works .
This is a video prototype .
So when it 's quiet , it 's sort of coming out from behind the panels .
And they hear like humans do , or real creatures do .
So they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile .
And they don 't react to background sounds .
You 'll hear a train in moment that they don 't react to .
But they react to foreground sounds . You 'll hear that in a second .
So we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible .
So each pygmy has its own behavior , psyche , mood swings , personalities and so on .
So this is a very early prototype .
Of course , it got much better after that .
And we made them react to people , but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them .
This is a video installation called " The Missing Person . "
And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility .
How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility ?
So we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance , and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us , using a camera that could look at people in the room , track them and replace one person with the background , rendering them invisible .
So I 'm just going to show you a very early prototype .
On the right side you can see my colleague Soren , who 's actually in the space .
And on the left side , you 'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible .
Soren enters the room . Pop ! He goes invisible .
And you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing .
It 's a very early video , so we haven 't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that , but that got refined pretty soon , later .
So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space , and we had one monitor , one on each wall .
And as people walked into the room , they would see themselves in the monitor , except with one difference : one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room .
So this is a work called " The Sun Shadow . "
And it was almost like a sheet of paper , like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun .
And from the front , this object appeared to be very strong and robust , and from the side , it almost seemed very weak .
So people would walking into the room and they 'd almost ignore it , thinking it was some crap laying around .
But as soon as they passed by , it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion .
And it would get exhausted , and it would collapse every time .
So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man .
His head is so heavy , full of heavy thoughts , that it 's sort of fallen into his hat , and his body 's grown out of him almost like a plant .
Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement .
And it 's kind of constrained by that circle .
Because if that circle weren 't there , and the floor was very even , it would start to wander about in the space .
And there 's no wires .
So I 'll just show you an instance -- so when people enter the room , it activates this object .
And it very slowly , over a few minutes , sort of painfully goes up , and then it gains momentum and it looks like it 's almost about to fall .
And this is an important moment , because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help , or save the subject .
But it doesn 't really need it , because it , again , sort of manages to pull itself up .
So this work was a real technical challenge for us , and we worked very hard , like most of our works , over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics .
And it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall , because if we made it in a way that it would topple over , then it would damage itself , and if it didn 't fall enough , it wouldn 't instill that fatalism , or that sense of wanting to go and help it .
So I 'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario -- it 's much faster .
That 's my colleague . He 's let it go .
Now he 's getting nervous , so he 's going to go catch it .
But he doesn 't need to , because it manages to lift itself up on its own .
So this is a work that we were very intrigued with , working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics , which twinkle like the night sky .
And it 's at the scale of the night sky .
So we wrapped this around a blob-like form , which is in the shape of a teddy bear , which was hanging from the ceiling .
And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear , which is very comforting and intimate .
And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space , and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky .
So this is the last work , and a work in progress , and it 's called " Space Filler . "
Well imagine a small cube that 's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room , and as you approached it , it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that 's twice its height and [ eight ] times its volume .
And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it -- almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something .
So we work with a lot of technology , but we don 't really love technology , because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years .
But we use it because we 're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create .
And once a creature pops into our minds , it 's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move .
Thank you .
Charles Robertson : Africa 's next boom
The past decade has seen slow and steady economic growth across the continent of Africa . But economist Charles Robertson has a bold thesis : Africa 's about to boom . He talks through a few of the indicators -- from rising education levels to expanded global investment -- that lead him to predict rapid growth for a billion people , sooner than you may think .
Africa is booming .
Per capita incomes since the year 2000 have doubled , and this boom is impacting on everyone .
Life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade .
That means if an African child is born today , rather than three days ago , they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan .
It 's that quick .
And HIV infection rates are down 27 percent : 600,000 less people a year are getting HIV in sub-Saharan Africa .
The battle against malaria is being won , with deaths from malaria down 27 percent , according to the latest World Bank data .
And malaria nets actually are playing a role in that .
This shouldn 't surprise us , because actually , everybody grows .
If you go back to Imperial Rome in the Year 1 A.D. , there was admittedly about 1,800 years where there wasn 't an awful lot of growth .
But then the people that the Romans would have called Scottish barbarians , my ancestors , were actually part of the Industrial Revolution , and in the 19th century , growth began to accelerate , and you saw that get quicker and quicker , and it 's been impacting everyone .
It doesn 't matter if this is the jungles of Singapore or the tundra of northern Finland .
Everybody gets involved . It 's just a matter of when the inevitable happens .
Among the reasons I think it 's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across Africa .
I think most of us would agree that in the 1990s , the greatest politician in the world was African , but I 'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time , and they 're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries .
And the West is engaging with that .
The West has given debt forgiveness programs which have halved sub-Saharan debt from about 70 percent of GDP down to about 40 .
At the same time , our debt level 's gone up to 120 and we 're all feeling slightly miserable as a result .
Politics gets weaker when debt is high .
When public sector debt is low , governments don 't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe .
And it 's not just the public sector which is looking so good .
The private sector as well .
Again , in the West , we have private sector debt of 200 percent of GDP in Spain , the U.K. , and the U.S.
That 's an awful lot of debt .
Africa , many African countries , are sitting at 10 to 30 percent of GDP .
If there 's any continent that can do what China has done -- China 's at about 130 percent of GDP on that chart -- if anyone can do what China has done in the last 30 years , it 'll be Africa in the next 30 .
So they 've got great government finances , great private sector debt .
Does anyone recognize this ? In fact , they do .
Foreign direct investment has poured into Africa in the last 15 years .
Back in the ' 70s , no one touched the continent with a barge pole .
And this investment is actually Western-led .
We hear a lot about China , and they do lend a lot of money , but 60 percent of the FDI in the last couple of years has come from Europe , America , Australia , Canada .
Ten percent 's come from India .
And they 're investing in energy .
Africa produces 10 million barrels a day of oil now .
It 's the same as Saudi Arabia or Russia .
And they 're investing in telecoms , shopping malls .
And this very encouraging story , I think , is partly demographic-led .
And it 's not just about African demographics .
I 'm showing you the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world , and the blue line is the one I want you to focus on for a second .
Ten years ago , say you 're Foxconn setting up an iPhone factory , by chance .
You might choose China , which is the bulk of that East Asian blue line , where there 's 200 million young people , and every year until 2010 that 's getting bigger .
Which means you 're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying , " Give us a job , " and , " I don 't need a big pay rise , just please give me a job . "
Now , that 's completely changed now .
This decade , we 're going to see a 20- to 30-percent fall in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in China .
So where do you set up your new factory ?
You look at South Asia , and people are .
They 're looking at Pakistan and Bangladesh , and they 're also looking at Africa .
And they 're looking at Africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young Africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 2050 .
Now , there 's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market , particularly when they 're young men .
A bit dangerous , sometimes .
I think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic ?
If you look at the red line here , what you 're going to see is that in 1975 , just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-Saharan Africa .
Would you set up a factory in sub-Sahara in the mid-1970s ?
Nobody else did .
They chose instead Turkey and Mexico to set up the textiles factories , because their education levels were 25 to 30 percent .
Today , sub-Sahara is at the levels that Turkey and Mexico were at in 1975 .
They will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth .
So what 's Africa looking like today ?
This is how I look at Africa .
It 's a bit odd , because I 'm an economist .
Each little box is about a billion dollars , and you see that I pay an awful lot of attention to Nigeria sitting there in the middle .
South Africa is playing a role .
But when I 'm thinking about the future , I 'm actually most interested in Central , Western and Southern Africa .
If I look at Africa by population , East Africa stands out as so much potential .
And I 'm showing you something else with these maps .
I 'm showing you democracy versus autocracy .
Fragile democracies is the beige color .
Strong democracies are the orange color .
And what you 'll see here is that most Africans are now living in democracies .
Why does that matter ?
Because what people want is what politicians try , they don 't always succeed , but they try and deliver .
And what you 've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on .
In Ghana in the elections , in December 2012 , the battle between the two candidates was over education .
One guy offered free secondary school education to all , not just 30 percent .
The other guy had to say , I 'm going to build 50 new schools .
He won by a margin .
So democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education .
Education is helping growth and investment , and that 's giving budget revenues , which is giving governments more money , which is helping growth through education .
It 's a positive , virtuous circle .
But I get asked this question , and this particular question makes me quite sad : It 's , " But what about corruption ?
How can you invest in Africa when there 's corruption ? "
And what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth .
When you 're poor , corruption is not your biggest priority .
And the countries on the right hand side , you 'll see the per capita GDP , basically every country with a per capita GDP of , say , less than 5,000 dollars , has got a corruption score of roughly , what 's that , about three ?
Three out of 10 . That 's not good .
Every poor country is corrupt .
Every rich country is relatively uncorrupt .
How do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption ?
You see the middle class grow .
And the way to do that is to invest , not to say I 'm not investing in that continent because there 's too much corruption .
Now , I don 't want to be an apologist for corruption .
I 've been arrested because I refused to pay a bribe -- not in Africa , actually .
But what I 'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing .
Now I 'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret .
Economists aren 't great at forecasting .
Because the question really is , what happens next ?
And if you go back to the year 2000 , what you 'll find is The Economist had a very famous cover , " The Hopeless Continent , " and what they 'd done is they 'd looked at growth in Africa over the previous 10 years -- two percent -- and they said , what 's going to happen in the next 10 years ?
They assumed two percent , and that made it a pretty hopeless story , because population growth was two and a half .
People got poorer in Africa in the 1990s .
Now 2012 , The Economist has a new cover , and what does that new cover show ?
That new cover shows , well , Africa rising , because the growth over the last 10 years has been about five and a half percent .
I would like to see if you can all now become economists , because if growth for the last 10 years has been five and a half percent , what do you think the IMF is forecasting for the next five years of growth in Africa ?
Very good . I think you 're secretly saying to your head , probably five and a half percent .
You 're all economists , and I think , like most economists , wrong .
No offense .
What I like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what Africa has already done , and it means that jump from 1,800 years of nothing to whoof , suddenly shooting through the roof .
India is one of those examples .
This is Indian growth from 1960 to 2010 .
Ignore the scale on the bottom for a second .
Actually , for the first 20 years , the ' 60s and ' 70s , India didn 't really grow .
It grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half .
If that 's familiar , that 's exactly what happened in sub-Sahara in the ' 80s and the ' 90s .
And then something happened in 1980 .
Boom ! India began to explode .
It wasn 't a " Hindu rate of growth , " " democracies can 't grow . " Actually India could .
And if I lay sub-Saharan growth on top of the Indian growth story , it 's remarkably similar .
Twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-Saharan African growth is slightly better than India .
And if I then lay developing Asia on top of this , I 'm saying India is 20 years ahead of Africa , I 'm saying developing Asia is 10 years ahead of India , I can draw out some forecasts for the next 30 to 40 years which I think are better than the ones where you 're looking backwards .
And that tells me this : that Africa is going to go from a $ 2 trillion economy today to a $ 29 trillion economy by 2050 .
Now that 's bigger than Europe and America put together in today 's money .
Life expectancy is going to go up by 13 years .
The population 's going to double from one billion to two billion , so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 35 years .
And when I present this in Africa -- Nairobi , Lagos , Accra -- I get one question .
" Charlie , why are you so pessimistic ? "
And you know what ?
Actually , I think they 've got a point .
Am I really saying that there can be nothing learned , yes from the positives in Asia and India , but also the negatives ?
Perhaps Africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made .
Surely , the technologies that we 're talking about here this last week , surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster ?
And I think here we can play a role .
Because technology does let you help .
You can go and download some of the great African literature from the Internet now .
No , not right now , just 30 seconds .
You can go and buy some of the great tunes .
My iPod 's full of them .
Buy African products .
Go on holiday and see for yourself the change that 's happening .
Invest .
Perhaps hire people , give them the skills that they can take back to Africa , and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the West .
And then you and I can help make sure that for Africa , the 21st century is their century .
Thank you very much .
Jimmy Wales : The birth of Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales recalls how he assembled " a ragtag band of volunteers , " gave them tools for collaborating and created Wikipedia , the self-organizing , self-correcting , never-finished online encyclopedia .
In 1962 , Charles Van Doren , who was later a senior editor of Britannica , said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe .
But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962 , it was anything but radical : still a very completely safe , stodgy type of encyclopedia .
Wikipedia , on the other hand , begins with a very radical idea , and that 's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge .
And that 's what we 're doing . So Wikipedia -- you just saw the little demonstration of it -- it 's a freely licensed encyclopedia . It 's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many , many languages .
It 's written using Wiki software -- which is the type of software he just demonstrated -- so anyone can quickly edit and save , and it goes live on the Internet immediately .
And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff .
So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization , he 's exactly describing Wikipedia . And what I 'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside .
So Wikipedia 's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation , which I founded , a nonprofit organization . And our goal , the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation , is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet .
And so if you think about what that means , it means a lot more than just building a cool website .
We 're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide , poverty worldwide , empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions .
And so we 're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet .
And so that 's a big part of why we 've chosen the free licensing model , because that empowers local entrepreneurs -- or anyone who wants to , can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it , redistribute it and you can do it commercially or non-commercially .
So there 's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world .
We 're funded by donations from the public , and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia .
So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was .
And I 'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is , but first I 'll show you how big it is .
So we 've got over 600,000 articles in English .
We 've got two million total articles across many , many different languages .
The biggest languages are German , Japanese , French -- all the Western European languages are quite big .
But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia , which is surprising to a lot of people .
A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet , but for us , we 're truly global . We 're in many , many languages .
How popular we 've gotten to be -- we 're a top 50 website and we 're more popular than the New York Times .
So this is where we get to Yochai 's discussion .
This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we 're the blue line there -- and then this is the New York Times over there .
And what 's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge , enormous corporate operation with -- I have no idea how many hundreds of employees .
We have exactly one employee , and that employee is our lead software developer .
And he 's only been our employee since January 2005 , all the other growth before that .
So the servers are managed by a rag-tag band of volunteers ; all the editing is done by volunteers .
And the way that we 're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine .
People are always asking , " Well , who 's in charge of this ? "
or " Who does that ? " And the answer is : anybody who wants to pitch in .
It 's a very unusual and chaotic thing .
We 've got over 90 servers now in three locations .
These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online .
I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something , anything about the servers .
You could never afford to do this in a company .
You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we 're doing at Wikipedia .
So we 're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly , so it 's really gotten to be a huge thing .
And everything is managed by the volunteers .
And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars .
And that 's essentially our main cost .
We could actually do without the employee . We actually -- we hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia , so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes .
So the big question when you 've got this really chaotic organization is , why isn 't it all rubbish ? Why is the website as good as it is ?
First of all , how good is it ? Well , it 's pretty good . It isn 't perfect , but it 's much , much better than you would expect , given our completely chaotic model .
So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me , you think , oh , this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish .
But when we 've seen quality tests -- and there haven 't been enough of these yet and I 'm really encouraging people to do more , comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down .
So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia , which is really much , much smaller than English , to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus Multimedia , and we won across the board .
They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality , and we were very pleased with that result .
So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy .
The media has covered this somewhat extensively .
It started out with an article in Red Herring .
The reporters called me up and they -- I mean , I have to say they spelled my name right , but they really wanted to say , the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious , it 's tearing apart the Wikipedia community . And so they quote me as saying , " They 're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia . "
What I actually said is , they 're not contentious at all .
So it 's a slight misquote . The articles were edited quite heavily .
And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions .
Time magazine recently reported that " Extreme action sometimes has to be taken , and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004 . "
This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there .
So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all .
Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot , but they don 't cause much controversy within the community .
And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality .
The real struggle is not between the right and the left -- that 's where most people assume -- but it 's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks .
And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities .
The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004 , and it wasn 't because they were contentious ; it was just because there was routine vandalism -- which happens sometimes even on stage , people -- sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalize Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly .
And I said -- you know , I always say , please don 't do that ; that 's not a good thing .
So how do we do this ?
How do we manage the quality control ?
How does it work ?
So there 's a few elements , mostly social policies and some elements of the software .
So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point-of-view policy .
This is something that I set down from the very beginning , as a core principle of the community that 's completely not debatable .
It 's a social concept of cooperation , so we don 't talk a lot about truth and objectivity .
The reason for this is if we say we 're only going to write the " truth " about some topic , that doesn 't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write , because I don 't agree with you about what 's the truth .
But we have this jargon term of neutrality , which has its own long history within the community , which basically says , any time there 's a controversial issue , Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue .
We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it .
So this neutrality policy is really important for us , because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done .
So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political , religious , cultural backgrounds .
By having this firm neutrality policy , which is non-negotiable from the beginning , we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don 't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right .
If you engage in that type of behavior , you 'll be asked to leave the community .
So real-time peer review .
Every single change on the site goes to the recent changes page .
So as soon as he made his change , it went to the recent changes page .
That recent changes page was also fed into IRC channel , which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools .
And people can get RSS feeds -- they can get e-mail notifications of changes .
And then users can set up their own personal watch list .
So my page is on quite a few volunteers ' watch lists , because it is sometimes vandalized .
And therefore , what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly , and then they 'll just simply revert the change .
There 's a new pages feed , for example , so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it 's created .
This is really important , because a lot of new pages that get created are just garbage that have to be deleted , you know , ASDFASDF .
But also that 's some of the most interesting and fun things at Wikipedia , some of the new articles .
People will start an article on some interesting topic , other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better .
So we do have edits by anonymous users , which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia .
So Chris was able to do his change -- he didn 't have to log in or anything ; he just went on the website and made a change .
But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users .
And that 's a really important thing to understand , is that the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication .
And we have over 40 IRC channels , 40 mailing lists .
All these people know each other . They communicate ; we have offline meetings .
These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site , and they are , in a sense , semi-professionals at what they 're doing , that the standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality .
We don 't always meet those standards , but that 's what we 're striving for .
And so that tight community is who really cares for the site , and these are some of the smartest people I 've ever met .
Of course , it 's my job to say that , but it 's actually true .
The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people .
The tools and the software : there 's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us , meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work .
This is an example of a page history on " flat earth , " and you can see some changes that were made .
What 's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see , oh OK , I understand now .
When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone , an anonymous IP number , made an edit to my page -- that sounds suspicious -- who is this person ? Somebody looks at it -- they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place , to see , OK , well , these words have changed , things like this .
So that 's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page .
Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended .
Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software .
All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages .
And so there 's nothing in the software that enforces the rules .
The example I 've got up here is a Votes For Deletion page .
So , I mentioned earlier , people type ASDFASDF -- it needs to be deleted . Cases like that , the administrators just delete it .
There 's no reason to have a big argument about it .
But you can imagine there 's a lot of other areas where the question is , is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia ?
Is the information verifiable ? Is it a hoax ? Is it true ? Is it what ?
So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this .
And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page .
And in the particular example we have here , it 's a film , " Twisted Issues , " and the first person says , " Now this is supposedly a film . It fails the Google test miserably . "
The Google test is , you look in Google and see if it 's there , because if something 's not even in Google , it probably doesn 't exist at all .
It 's not a perfect rule , but it 's a nice starting point for quick research .
So somebody says , " Delete it , please . Delete it -- it 's not notable . "
And then somebody says , " Wait , wait , wait , wait , I found it .
I found it in a book , ' Film Threat Video Guide : the 20 Underground Films You Must See . ' " Oh , OK . So the next persons says , " Clean it up . "
Somebody says , " I 've found it on IMDB . Keep , keep , keep . "
And what 's interesting about this is that the software is -- these votes are just -- they 're just text typed into a page .
This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue .
Now it is true that at the end of the day an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say , OK , 18 deletes , two keeps : we 'll delete it .
But in other cases , this could be 18 deletes and two keeps , and we would keep it , because if those last two keeps say , " Wait a minute , wait a minute .
Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book , and I found a link to a page that describes it , and I 'm going to clean it up tomorrow , so please don 't delete it , " then it would survive .
And it also matters who the people are who are voting .
Like I say , it 's a tight knit community .
Down here at the bottom , " Keep , real movie , " Rick Kay .
Rick Kay is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism , hoaxes and votes for deletion .
His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he 's doing .
So how 's all this governed ?
People really want to know about , OK , administrators , things like that .
So the Wikipedia governance model , the governance of the community , is a very confusing , but a workable mix of consensus -- meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles , because the majority view is not necessarily neutral .
Some amount of democracy , all of the administrators -- these are the people who have the ability to delete pages , that doesn 't mean that they have the right to delete pages ; they still have to follow all the rules -- but they 're elected ; they 're elected by the community . Sometimes people -- random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia .
I always laugh at this , because I have no idea how they 're elected , actually .
There 's a certain amount of aristocracy .
And so you 've got a hint of that when I mentioned , like , Rick Kay 's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don 't know .
I give this talk sometimes with Angela , who was just re-elected to the Board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation , with more than twice the votes of the person who didn 't make it .
And I always embarrass her because I say , well , Angela , for example , could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia , because she 's so admired and so powerful .
But the irony is , of course , that Angela can do this because she 's the one person who you know would never , ever , ever break any rules of Wikipedia .
And I also like to say she 's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia , so ...
And then there 's monarchy and that 's my role on the community , so ...
I was describing this in Berlin once and the next day in the newspaper the headline said , " I am the Queen of England . "
And that 's not exactly what I said , but -- the point is my role in the community -- within the free software world there 's been a longstanding tradition of the " benevolent dictator " model .
So if you look at most of the major free software projects , they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator .
Well , I don 't like the term " benevolent dictator , " and I don 't think that it 's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world .
It just isn 't appropriate .
But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy , a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision , and we don 't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes .
So as an example of why this has been -- or how this can be important : we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia , and they said , " Oh , well , this is horrible , this Jewish conspiracy of a website and we 're going to get certain articles deleted that we don 't like .
And we see they have a voting process , so we 're going to send -- we have 40,000 members and we 're going to send them over and they 're all going to vote and get these pages deleted . "
Well , they managed to get 18 people to show up .
That 's neo-Nazi math for you .
They always think they 've got 40,000 members when they 've got 18 .
But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article .
Of course , the vote ended up being about 85 to 18 , so there was no real danger to our democratic processes .
On the other hand , people said , " But what are we going to do ?
I mean , this could happen and what if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote ? "
Then I said , " Well fuck it , we 'll just change the rules . "
That 's my job in the community : to say we won 't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content .
And so as long as people trust me in my role , then that 's a valid place for me .
Of course , because of the free licensing , if I do a bad job , the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave -- I can 't tell anyone what to do .
So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works , it 's important to understand that our Wiki model is the way we work , but we are not fanatical web anarchists . In fact , we 're very flexible about the social methodology , because it 's ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work , not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it .
Thank you .
Ben Saunders : Yeah , hi , Ben Saunders .
Jimmy , you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia 's success .
It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased .
Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers , and how do you see Wikipedia changing education ?
Jimmy Wales : Yeah , so , a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia .
There 's a media storyline about Wikipedia , which I think is false .
It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers .
And the storyline is , there 's this crazy thing , Wikipedia , but academics hate it and teachers hate it . And that turns out to not be true .
The last time I got an e-mail from a journalist saying , " Why do academics hate Wikipedia ? "
I sent it from my Harvard email address , because I was recently appointed a fellow there .
And I said , " Well , they don 't all hate it . "
But I think there 's going to be huge impacts .
And we actually have a project that I 'm personally really excited about , which is the Wiki books project , which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages .
And that 's a much bigger project ; it 's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition .
But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet .
We don 't mean we 're going to spam them with AOL-style CDs .
We mean we 're going to give them a tool that they can use .
And for a lot of people in the world , if I give you an encyclopedia that 's written at a university level , it doesn 't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it .
And so the Wiki books project is an effort to do that .
And I think that we 're going to really see a huge -- it may not even come from us ; there 's all kinds of innovation going on .
But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education .
Andrew McAfee : What will future jobs look like ?
Economist Andrew McAfee suggests that , yes , probably , droids will take our jobs -- or at least the kinds of jobs we know now . In this far-seeing talk , he thinks through what future jobs might look like , and how to educate coming generations to hold them .
The writer George Eliot cautioned us that , among all forms of mistake , prophesy is the most gratuitous .
The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart , Yogi Berra , agreed .
He said , " It 's tough to make predictions , especially about the future . "
I 'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast .
In the world that we are creating very quickly , we 're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction , and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs .
Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves , which means we 're going to need fewer truck drivers .
We 're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that 's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers , and we 're already taking R2D2 , painting him orange , and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses , which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles .
Now , for about 200 years , people have been saying exactly what I 'm telling you -- the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago , and they have been wrong .
Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment .
Which brings up a critical question : Why is this time different , if it really is ?
The reason it 's different is that , just in the past few years , our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never , ever had before : understanding , speaking , hearing , seeing , answering , writing , and they 're still acquiring new skills .
For example , mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive , but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this , and if the track record is any guide , this competition is going to be successful .
So when I look around , I think the day is not too far off at all when we 're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now .
And we 're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs .
It 's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling " the new machine age . "
The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news .
This is the best economic news on the planet these days .
Not that there 's a lot of competition , right ?
This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons .
The first is , technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we 're on where output goes up over time , while at the same time , prices go down , and volume and quality just continue to explode .
Now , some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism , but that 's absolutely the wrong way to look at it .
This is abundance , which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide .
The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that , once the androids start doing jobs , we don 't have to do them anymore , and we get freed up from drudgery and toil .
Now , when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley , they say , " Fantastic . No more drudgery , no more toil .
This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society , a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues , entertain , enlighten , provoke each other . "
It 's a society really , that looks a lot like the TED Conference .
And there 's actually a huge amount of truth here .
We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place .
In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document , we have amazing new possibilities .
The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers , and they 're responsible for massive amounts of innovation .
And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never , ever possible for them before .
So this is a time of great flourishing , and the more I look around , the more convinced I become that this quote , from the physicist Freeman Dyson , is not hyperbole at all .
This is just a plain statement of the facts .
We are in the middle of an astonishing period .
[ " Technology is a gift of God . After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God 's gifts . It is the mother of civilizations , of arts and of sciences . " — Freeman Dyson ] Which brings up another great question : What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age ?
Right ? Great , hang up , flourish , go home .
We 're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we 're creating .
The first are economic , and they 're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther , who was the head of the auto workers union .
They were touring one of the new modern factories , and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says , " Hey Walter , how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues ? "
And Reuther shoots back , " Hey Henry , how are you going to get them to buy cars ? "
Reuther 's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that 's full of machines , and we see this very clearly in the statistics .
If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words , corporate profits -- we see them going up , and we see that they 're now at an all-time high .
If we look at the returns to labor , in other words total wages paid out in the economy , we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction .
So this is clearly bad news for Reuther .
It looks like it might be great news for Ford , but it 's actually not . If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people , you really want a large , stable , prosperous middle class .
We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period .
But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now .
We all know a lot of the statistics , but just to repeat one of them , median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years , and we 're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time .
The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention .
There are a set of societal challenges that I 'm actually not that worried about , and they 're captured by images like this .
This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about .
There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware , and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us .
I 'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer .
So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about .
To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age , I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers .
And to make them really stereotypical , let 's make them both white guys .
And the first one is a college-educated professional , creative type , manager , engineer , doctor , lawyer , that kind of worker .
We 're going to call him " Ted . "
He 's at the top of the American middle class .
His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer , works as a clerk , does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy .
We 're going to call that guy " Bill . "
And if you go back about 50 years , Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives .
For example , in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs , working at least 40 hours a week .
But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented , as we started to automate the economy , and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses , as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy , the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot .
Over this time frame , Ted has continued to hold a full-time job . Bill hasn 't .
In many cases , Bill has left the economy entirely , and Ted very rarely has .
Over time , Ted 's marriage has stayed quite happy .
Bill 's hasn 't .
And Ted 's kids have grown up in a two-parent home , while Bill 's absolutely have not over time .
Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society ?
He 's decreased his voting in presidential elections , and he 's started to go to prison a lot more often .
So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends , and they don 't show any signs of reversing themselves .
They 're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at , and they 're actually getting so severe that they 're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement .
And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they 're Ted .
They 're living these amazingly busy , productive lives , and they 've got all the benefits to show from that , while Bill is leading a very different life .
They 're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work , and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils .
[ " Work saves a man from three great evils : boredom , vice and need . " — Voltaire ] So with these challenges , what do we do about them ?
The economic playbook is surprisingly clear , surprisingly straightforward , in the short term especially .
The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two , so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine : Encourage entrepreneurship , double down on infrastructure , and make sure we 're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills .
But over the longer term , if we are moving into an economy that 's heavy on technology and light on labor , and we are , then we have to consider some more radical interventions , for example , something like a guaranteed minimum income .
Now , that 's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable , because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth .
I did a little bit of research on this notion , and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek , Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman .
And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent , you might be interested to know that social mobility , one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States , is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets .
So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward .
The societal one is a lot more challenging .
I don 't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life .
I do know that education is a huge part of it .
I witnessed this firsthand .
I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education , and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it .
The school stopped in third grade , so then I entered the public school system , and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag .
With the benefit of hindsight , I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer , but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me .
We have to do better than this .
We cannot keep turning out Bills .
So we see some green shoots that things are getting better .
We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people , from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones .
We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we 've been holding dear for a while .
And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have .
So the green shoots are out there .
I don 't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough .
We 're facing very tough challenges .
To give just one example , there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months .
We 're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori .
And my biggest worry is that we 're creating a world where we 're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity .
But I actually don 't think that 's what we 're going to do .
I think we 're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason : The facts are getting out there .
The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known .
If we wanted to accelerate that process , we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play " Jeopardy ! " against Watson .
We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip .
And if we do enough of these kinds of things , the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different .
And then we 're off to the races , because I don 't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try .
I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century .
Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant .
Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949 , and he said , " If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance , it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production . "
Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient .
He said , " I am a firm believer in the people .
If given the truth , they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis .
The great point is to give them the plain facts . "
So the optimistic note , great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear , and I have every confidence that we 're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging , abundant economy that we 're creating .
Thank you very much .
David Brooks : The social animal
Columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences -- insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge . In a talk full of humor , he shows how you can 't hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness .
When I got my current job , I was given a good piece of advice , which was to interview three politicians every day .
And from that much contact with politicians , I can tell you they 're all emotional freaks of one sort or another .
They have what I called " logorrhea dementia , " which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane .
But what they do have is incredible social skills .
When you meet them , they lock into you , they look you in the eye , they invade your personal space , they massage the back of your head .
I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal -- squeezing it .
I once -- this was years ago -- I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate .
And they were friends , and they hugged each other and they were laughing , and their faces were like this far apart .
And they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other .
And I was like , " Get a room . I don 't want to see this . "
But they have those social skills .
Another case : Last election cycle , I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire , and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons : Bip , Chip , Rip , Zip , Lip and Dip .
And he 's going into a diner .
And he goes into the diner , introduces himself to a family and says , " What village are you from in New Hampshire ? "
And then he describes the home he owned in their village .
And so he goes around the room , and then as he 's leaving the diner , he first-names almost everybody he 's just met .
I was like , " Okay , that 's social skill . "
But the paradox is , when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode , that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants .
So in the course of my career , I have covered a series of failures .
We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up , and what they really lacked was social trust .
We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities .
We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn 't do anything stupid .
For 30 years , I 've been covering school reform and we 've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes -- charters , private schools , vouchers -- but we 've had disappointing results year after year .
And the fact is , people learn from people they love .
And if you 're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student , you 're not talking about that reality .
But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process .
And so that 's led to a question for me : Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy ?
And I came to the conclusion , this is a symptom of a larger problem .
That , for centuries , we 've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we 're divided selves , that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions .
And it 's led to a view of human nature that we 're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives , and it 's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is .
And it 's produced a great amputation , a shallow view of human nature .
We 're really good at talking about material things , but we 're really bad at talking about emotions .
We 're really good at talking about skills and safety and health ; we 're really bad at talking about character .
Alasdair MacIntyre , the famous philosopher , said that , " We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue , honor , goodness , but we no longer have a system by which to connect them . "
And so this has led to a shallow path in politics , but also in a whole range of human endeavors .
You can see it in the way we raise our young kids .
You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out , and they 're wearing these 80-pound backpacks .
If the wind blows them over , they 're like beetles stuck there on the ground .
You see these cars that drive up -- usually it 's Saabs and Audis and Volvos , because in certain neighborhoods it 's socially acceptable to have a luxury car , so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy -- that 's fine .
They get picked up by these creatures I 've called uber-moms , who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard .
And you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children .
So at the moment of conception , they 're doing little butt exercises .
Babies flop out , they 're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things .
Driving them home , and they want them to be enlightened , so they take them to Ben & amp ; Jerry 's ice cream company with its own foreign policy .
In one of my books , I joke that Ben & amp ; Jerry 's should make a pacifist toothpaste -- doesn 't kill germs , just asks them to leave .
It would be a big seller .
And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula , and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they 're on loan from Amnesty International .
They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale , which is for kids who come home and say , " Mom , mom , I want a snack that 'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer . "
And so the kids are raised in a certain way , jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure -- SAT prep , oboe , soccer practice .
They get into competitive colleges , they get good jobs , and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner , and they make a ton of money .
And sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen .
And they 've become elegant and slender -- they don 't really have thighs ; they just have one elegant calve on top of another .
They have kids of their own , and they 've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people , so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein , their daughters looks like Halle Berry -- I don 't know how they 've done that .
They get there and they realize it 's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights .
So they 've got these furry 160-pound dogs -- all look like velociraptors , all named after Jane Austen characters .
And then when they get old , they haven 't really developed a philosophy of life , but they 've decided , " I 've been successful at everything ; I 'm just not going to die . "
And so they hire personal trainers ; they 're popping Cialis like breath mints .
You see them on the mountains up there .
They 're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis .
And as they whiz by you , it 's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet going up the hill .
And so this is part of what life is , but it 's not all of what life is .
And over the past few years , I think we 've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are .
And it 's not based on theology or philosophy , it 's in the study of the mind , across all these spheres of research , from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists , behavioral economists , psychologists , sociology , we 're developing a revolution in consciousness .
And when you synthesize it all , it 's giving us a new view of human nature .
And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature , it 's a new humanism , it 's a new enchantment .
And I think when you synthesize this research , you start with three key insights .
The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species , the unconscious mind does most of the work .
And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute , of which it can be consciously aware of about 40 .
And this leads to oddities .
One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists , people named Lawrence become lawyers , because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar , which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks .
Another finding is that the unconscious , far from being dumb and sexualized , is actually quite smart .
So one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture .
It 's really hard to imagine a sofa , how it 's going to look in your house .
And the way you should do that is study the furniture , let it marinate in your mind , distract yourself , and then a few days later , go with your gut , because unconsciously you 've figured it out .
The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking .
People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart , they 're actually sometimes quite helpless .
And the " giant " in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning -- Antonio Damasio .
And one of the things he 's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason , but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value .
And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom .
Now I 'm a middle-aged guy .
I 'm not exactly comfortable with emotions .
One of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys .
They put them into a brain scan machine -- this is apocryphal by the way , but I don 't care -- and they had them watch a horror movie , and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives .
And the brain scans were identical in both activities .
It was just sheer terror .
So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony , but it is the central organizing process of the way we think .
It tells us what to imprint .
The brain is the record of the feelings of a life .
And the third insight is that we 're not primarily self-contained individuals .
We 're social animals , not rational animals .
We emerge out of relationships , and we are deeply interpenetrated , one with another .
And so when we see another person , we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds .
When we watch a car chase in a movie , it 's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase .
When we watch pornography , it 's a little like having sex , though probably not as good .
And we see this when lovers walk down the street , when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion , the deep interpenetration .
And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing , I think , politics , a different way , most importantly , of seeing human capital .
We are now children of the French Enlightenment .
We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties .
But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment , or the Scottish Enlightenment , with David Hume , Adam Smith , actually had a better handle on who we are -- that reason is often weak , our sentiments are strong , and our sentiments are often trustworthy .
And this work corrects that bias in our culture , that dehumanizing bias .
It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life .
When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily -- things like grades , SAT 's , degrees , the number of years in schooling .
What it really takes to do well , to lead a meaningful life , are things that are deeper , things we don 't really even have words for .
And so let me list just a couple of the things I think this research points us toward trying to understand .
The first gift , or talent , is mindsight -- the ability to enter into other people 's minds and learn what they have to offer .
Babies come with this ability .
Meltzoff , who 's at the University of Washington , leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old .
He wagged his tongue at the baby .
The baby wagged her tongue back .
Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom 's mind and to download what they find -- their models of how to understand reality .
In the United States , 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people .
And those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life .
Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy , at age 18 months , who was going to graduate from high school , based on who had good attachment with mom .
Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships .
They are what we call avoidantly attached .
They have trouble relating to other people .
They go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind -- wanting to get close to people , but not really having the models of how to do that .
And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge , one from another .
A second skill is equal poise , the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind .
So for example , we are overconfidence machines .
Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers .
Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills .
Time magazine asked Americans , " Are you in the top one percent of earners ? "
Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners .
This is a gender-linked trait , by the way .
Men drown at twice the rate of women , because men think they can swim across that lake .
But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases , their own overconfidence .
They have epistemological modesty .
They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity .
They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence .
They are curious .
And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ .
The third trait is metis , what we might call street smarts -- it 's a Greek word .
It 's a sensitivity to the physical environment , the ability to pick out patterns in an environment -- derive a gist .
One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED , a landmine , in the street .
They couldn 't tell you how they did it , but they could feel cold , they felt a coldness , and they were more often right than wrong .
The third is what you might call sympathy , the ability to work within groups .
And that comes in tremendously handy , because groups are smarter than individuals .
And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically , because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal .
And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group ; it 's determined by how well they communicate , how often they take turns in conversation .
Then you could talk about a trait like blending .
Any child can say , " I 'm a tiger , " pretend to be a tiger .
It seems so elementary .
But in fact , it 's phenomenally complicated to take a concept " I " and a concept " tiger " and blend them together .
But this is the source of innovation .
What Picasso did , for example , was take the concept " Western art " and the concept " African masks " and blend them together -- not only the geometry , but the moral systems entailed in them .
And these are skills , again , we can 't count and measure .
And then the final thing I 'll mention is something you might call limerence .
And this is not an ability ; it 's a drive and a motivation .
The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige .
The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence , when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task -- when a craftsman feels lost in his craft , when a naturalist feels at one with nature , when a believer feels at one with God 's love .
That is what the unconscious mind hungers for .
And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused .
And one of the most beautiful descriptions I 've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana .
He was married to a woman named Carol , and they had a wonderful relationship .
When their kids were five and two , Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly .
And Hofstadter wrote a book called " I Am a Strange Loop . "
In the course of that book , he describes a moment -- just months after Carol has died -- he comes across her picture on the mantel , or on a bureau in his bedroom .
And here 's what he wrote : " I looked at her face , and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes .
And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed , ' That 's me . That 's me . ' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before , about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity , about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children , about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes , but were just one hope , one clear thing that defined us both , that welded us into a unit -- the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children .
I realized that , though Carol had died , that core piece of her had not died at all , but had lived on very determinedly in my brain . "
The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom .
Through his suffering , Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are .
Through the policy failures of the last 30 years , we have come to acknowledge , I think , how shallow our view of human nature has been .
And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are , comes this revolution in consciousness -- these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted , this new humanism .
And when Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious , it had a vast effect on the climate of the times .
Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious , of who we are deep inside , and it 's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture .
Thank you .
Barry Schwartz : Our loss of wisdom
Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for " practical wisdom " as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy . He argues powerfully that rules often fail us , incentives often backfire , and practical , everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world .
In his inaugural address , Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis .
But what did he appeal to ?
He did not , happily , follow in the footsteps of his predecessor , and tell us to just go shopping .
Nor did he tell us , " Trust us . Trust your country .
Invest , invest , invest . "
Instead , what he told us was to put aside childish things .
And he appealed to virtue .
Virtue is an old-fashioned word .
It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one .
And besides , some of you might be wondering , what the hell does it mean ?
Let me begin with an example .
This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen .
And all of the items on it are unremarkable .
They 're the things you would expect : mop the floors , sweep them , empty the trash , restock the cabinets .
It may be a little surprising how many things there are , but it 's not surprising what they are .
But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this : even though this is a very long list , there isn 't a single thing on it that involves other human beings .
Not one .
The janitor 's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital .
And yet , when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like , they encountered Mike , who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise , trying to build up his strength , walking slowly up and down the hall .
And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor 's admonition and didn 't vacuum the visitor 's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day , every day who , at this moment , happened to be taking a nap .
And then there was Luke , who washed the floor in a comatose young man 's room twice because the man 's father , who had been keeping a vigil for six months , didn 't see Luke do it the first time , and his father was angry .
And behavior like this from janitors , from technicians , from nurses and , if we 're lucky now and then , from doctors , doesn 't just make people feel a little better , it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well .
Now , not all janitors are like this , of course .
But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness , care and empathy are an essential part of the job .
And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings .
These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people .
And beyond this , they have the moral skill to figure out what " doing right " means .
" Practical wisdom , " Aristotle told us , " is the combination of moral will and moral skill . "
A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule , as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives .
A wise person knows how to improvise , as Luke did when he re-washed the floor .
Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing .
A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page , but dancing around them , inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand .
A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims .
To serve other people , not to manipulate other people .
And finally , perhaps most important , a wise person is made , not born .
Wisdom depends on experience , and not just any experience .
You need the time to get to know the people that you 're serving .
You need permission to be allowed to improvise , try new things , occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures .
And you need to be mentored by wise teachers .
When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job , they tell you that it takes lots of experience .
And they don 't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans .
It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people .
At TED , brilliance is rampant .
It 's scary .
The good news is you don 't need to be brilliant to be wise .
The bad news is that without wisdom , brilliance isn 't enough .
It 's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else .
Now , I hope that we all know this .
There 's a sense in which it 's obvious , and yet , let me tell you a little story .
It 's a story about lemonade .
A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark .
His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it .
All they had was Mike 's Hard Lemonade , which was five percent alcohol .
Dad , being an academic , had no idea that Mike 's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol .
So he brought it back .
And the kid was drinking it , and a security guard spotted it , and called the police , who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark , whisked the kid to the hospital .
The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood .
And they were ready to let the kid go .
But not so fast .
The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no .
And the child was sent to a foster home for three days .
At that point , can the child go home ?
Well , a judge said yes , but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel .
After two weeks , I 'm happy to report , the family was reunited .
But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing : " We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure . "
How do things like this happen ?
Scott Simon , who told this story on NPR , said , " Rules and procedures may be dumb , but they spare you from thinking . "
And , to be fair , rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household .
Fair enough .
When things go wrong , as of course they do , we reach for two tools to try to fix them .
One tool we reach for is rules .
Better ones , more of them .
The second tool we reach for is incentives .
Better ones , more of them .
What else , after all , is there ?
We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis .
Regulate , regulate , regulate .
Fix the incentives , fix the incentives , fix the incentives ...
The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job .
How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did ?
And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic ?
It 's preposterous on its face .
And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules , rules and incentives may make things better in the short run , but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run .
Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations .
And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing .
And without intending it , by appealing to rules and incentives , we are engaging in a war on wisdom .
Let me just give you a few examples , first of rules and the war on moral skill .
The lemonade story is one .
Second , no doubt more familiar to you , is the nature of modern American education : scripted , lock-step curricula .
Here 's an example from Chicago kindergarten .
Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with ' B. ' " The Bath : " Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water .
Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book .
All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city , every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day .
We know why these scripts are there .
We don 't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own .
Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster .
And they prevent disaster .
But what they assure in its place is mediocrity .
Don 't get me wrong . We need rules !
Jazz musicians need some notes -- most of them need some notes on the page .
We need more rules for the bankers , God knows .
But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising .
And as a result , they lose their gifts , or worse , they stop playing altogether .
Now , how about incentives ?
They seem cleverer .
If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing , it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you 're more likely to do it .
Right ?
Well , not always .
Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting , and they make people less likely to do it .
I 'll just give you one example because time is racing .
In Switzerland , back about 15 years ago , they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps .
There was going to be a national referendum .
Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed .
And they said , " Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community ? "
Astonishingly , 50 percent of the citizens said yes .
They knew it was dangerous .
They thought it would reduce their property values .
But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens .
The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question .
They said , " If we paid you six weeks ' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community ? "
Two reasons . It 's my responsibility and I 'm getting paid .
Instead of 50 percent saying yes , 25 percent said yes .
What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking , " What is my responsibility ? "
all we ask is , " What serves my interests ? "
When incentives don 't work , when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses , the response is always the same .
Get smarter incentives .
The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough .
Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will .
We need incentives . People have to make a living .
But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word .
It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality .
Barack Obama said , before he was inaugurated , " We must ask not just ' Is it profitable ? ' but ' Is it right ? ' " And when professions are demoralized , everyone in them becomes dependent on -- addicted to -- incentives and they stop asking " Is it right ? "
We see this in medicine .
And we certainly see it in the world of business .
It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work .
So what can we do ?
A few sources of hope : we ought to try to re-moralize work .
One way not to do it : teach more ethics courses .
There is no better way to show people that you 're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course .
What to do instead ?
One : Celebrate moral exemplars .
Acknowledge , when you go to law school , that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch .
No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions .
People are inspired by moral heroes .
But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can 't acknowledge that you have moral heroes .
Well , acknowledge them .
Be proud that you have them .
Celebrate them .
And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too .
That 's one thing we can do .
I don 't know how many of you remember this : another moral hero , 15 years ago , Aaron Feuerstein , who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts -- they made Polartec -- The factory burned down .
3,000 employees . He kept every one of them on the payroll .
Why ? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go .
" Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street , but I can tell you it 's worth more . We 're doing fine . "
Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes .
Two were particularly inspiring to me .
One was Ray Anderson , who turned -- -- turned , you know , a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint , or almost zero-footprint business .
Why ? Because it was the right thing to do .
And a bonus he 's discovering is he 's actually going to make even more money .
His employees are inspired by the effort .
Why ? Because there happy to be doing something that 's the right thing to do .
Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia .
In many ways this is the perfect example .
Because it took the will to do the right thing .
God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill .
I 'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out .
But most important to make it work -- and he emphasized this -- is that it took knowing the people in the communities .
Unless the people you 're working with are behind you , this will fail .
And there isn 't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you , because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways .
So there 's a lot here at TED , and at other places , to celebrate .
And you don 't have to be a mega-hero .
There are ordinary heroes .
Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too .
As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary , if not extraordinary heroes .
As heads of organizations , we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will .
Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work .
If you run an organization , you should be sure that none of the jobs -- none of the jobs -- have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors .
Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work .
And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom .
And , perhaps most important , as teachers , we should strive to be the ordinary heroes , the moral exemplars , to the people we mentor .
And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers .
One is that we are always teaching .
Someone is always watching .
The camera is always on .
Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and , in particular , the model that KIPP was providing : " Knowledge is power . "
And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college .
I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn 't mention .
That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character .
They need to learn to respect themselves .
They need to learn to respect their schoolmates .
They need to learn to respect their teachers .
And , most important , they need to learn to respect learning .
That 's the principle objective .
If you do that , the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill .
And the teachers : the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day .
Obama appealed to virtue .
And I think he was right .
And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom , because it 's what allows other virtues -- honesty , kindness , courage and so on -- to be displayed at the right time and in the right way .
He also appealed to hope .
Right again .
I think there is reason for hope .
I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous .
In many ways , it 's what TED is all about .
Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons .
This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention .
Paying attention to what we do , to how we do it , and , perhaps most importantly , to the structure of the organizations within which we work , so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
You have to go and stand out here a sec .
Barry Schwartz : Thank you very much .
Hans Rosling : Insights on HIV , in stunning data visuals
Hans Rosling unveils data visuals that untangle the complex risk factors of one of the world 's deadliest diseases : HIV . By following the data , he suggests a surprising key to ending the epidemic .
AIDS was discovered 1981 ; the virus , 1983 .
These Gapminder bubbles show you how the spread of the virus was in 1983 in the world , or how we estimate that it was .
What we are showing here is -- on this axis here , I 'm showing percent of infected adults .
And on this axis , I 'm showing dollars per person in income .
And the size of these bubbles , the size of the bubbles here , that shows how many are infected in each country , and the color is the continent .
Now , you can see United States , in 1983 , had a very low percentage infected , but due to the big population , still a sizable bubble .
There were quite many people infected in the United States .
And , up there , you see Uganda .
They had almost five percent infected , and quite a big bubble in spite of being a small country , then .
And they were probably the most infected country in the world .
Now , what has happened ?
Now you have understood the graph and now , in the next 60 seconds , we will play the HIV epidemic in the world .
But first , I have a new invention here .
I have solidified the beam of the laser pointer .
So , ready , steady , go !
First , we have the fast rise in Uganda and Zimbabwe .
They went upwards like this .
In Asia , the first country to be heavily infected was Thailand -- they reached one to two percent .
Then , Uganda started to turn back , whereas Zimbabwe skyrocketed , and some years later South Africa had a terrible rise of HIV frequency .
Look , India got many infected , but had a low level .
And almost the same happens here .
See , Uganda coming down , Zimbabwe coming down , Russia went to one percent .
In the last two to three years , we have reached a steady state of HIV epidemic in the world .
25 years it took .
But , steady state doesn 't mean that things are getting better , it 's just that they have stopped getting worse .
And it has -- the steady state is , more or less , one percent of the adult world population is HIV-infected .
It means 30 to 40 million people , the whole of California -- every person , that 's more or less what we have today in the world .
Now , let me make a fast replay of Botswana .
Botswana -- upper middle-income country in southern Africa , democratic government , good economy , and this is what happened there .
They started low , they skyrocketed , they peaked up there in 2003 , and now they are down .
But they are falling only slowly , because in Botswana , with good economy and governance , they can manage to treat people .
And if people who are infected are treated , they don 't die of AIDS .
These percentages won 't come down because people can survive 10 to 20 years .
So there 's some problem with these metrics now .
But the poorer countries in Africa , the low-income countries down here , there the rates fall faster , of the percentage infected , because people still die .
In spite of PEPFAR , the generous PEPFAR , all people are not reached by treatment , and of those who are reached by treatment in the poor countries , only 60 percent are left on treatment after two years .
It 's not realistic with lifelong treatment for everyone in the poorest countries .
But it 's very good that what is done is being done .
But focus now is back on prevention .
It is only by stopping the transmission that the world will be able to deal with it .
Drugs is too costly -- had we had the vaccine , or when we will get the vaccine , that 's something more effective -- but the drugs are very costly for the poor .
Not the drug in itself , but the treatment and the care which is needed around it .
So , when we look at the pattern , one thing comes out very clearly : you see the blue bubbles and people say HIV is very high in Africa .
I would say , HIV is very different in Africa .
You 'll find the highest HIV rate in the world in African countries , and yet you 'll find Senegal , down here -- the same rate as United States .
And you 'll find Madagascar , and you 'll find a lot of African countries about as low as the rest of the world .
It 's this terrible simplification that there 's one Africa and things go on in one way in Africa .
We have to stop that .
It 's not respectful , and it 's not very clever to think that way .
I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States .
I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different .
And so it is in Africa -- it 's a lot of difference .
So , why is it so high ? Is it war ?
No , it 's not . Look here .
War-torn Congo is down there -- two , three , four percent .
And this is peaceful Zambia , neighboring country -- 15 percent .
And there 's good studies of the refugees coming out of Congo -- they have two , three percent infected , and peaceful Zambia -- much higher .
There are now studies clearly showing that the wars are terrible , that rapes are terrible , but this is not the driving force for the high levels in Africa .
So , is it poverty ?
Well if you look at the macro level , it seems more money , more HIV .
But that 's very simplistic , so let 's go down and look at Tanzania .
I will split Tanzania in five income groups , from the highest income to the lowest income , and here we go .
The ones with the highest income , the better off -- I wouldn 't say rich -- they have higher HIV .
The difference goes from 11 percent down to four percent , and it is even bigger among women .
There 's a lot of things that we thought , that now , good research , done by African institutions and researchers together with the international researchers , show that that 's not the case .
So , this is the difference within Tanzania .
And , I can 't avoid showing Kenya .
Look here at Kenya .
I 've split Kenya in its provinces .
Here it goes .
See the difference within one African country -- it goes from very low level to very high level , and most of the provinces in Kenya is quite modest .
So , what is it then ?
Why do we see this extremely high levels in some countries ?
Well , it is more common with multiple partners , there is less condom use , and there is age-disparate sex -- that is , older men tend to have sex with younger women .
We see higher rates in younger women than younger men in many of these highly affected countries .
But where are they situated ?
I will swap the bubbles to a map .
Look , the highly infected are four percent of all population and they hold 50 percent of the HIV-infected .
HIV exists all over the world .
Look , you have bubbles all over the world here .
Brazil has many HIV-infected .
Arab countries not so much , but Iran is quite high .
They have heroin addiction and also prostitution in Iran .
India has many because they are many .
Southeast Asia , and so on .
But , there is one part of Africa -- and the difficult thing is , at the same time , not to make a uniform statement about Africa , not to come to simple ideas of why it is like this , on one hand .
On the other hand , try to say that this is not the case , because there is a scientific consensus about this pattern now .
UNAIDS have done good data available , finally , about the spread of HIV .
It could be concurrency .
It could be some virus types .
It could be that there is other things which makes transmission occur in a higher frequency .
After all , if you are completely healthy and you have heterosexual sex , the risk of infection in one intercourse is one in 1,000 .
Don 't jump to conclusions now on how to behave tonight and so on .
But -- and if you are in an unfavorable situation , more sexually transmitted diseases , it can be one in 100 .
But what we think is that it could be concurrency .
And what is concurrency ?
In Sweden , we have no concurrency .
We have serial monogamy .
Vodka , New Year 's Eve -- new partner for the spring .
Vodka , Midsummer 's Eve -- new partner for the fall .
Vodka -- and it goes on like this , you know ?
And you collect a big number of exes .
And we have a terrible chlamydia epidemic -- terrible chlamydia epidemic which sticks around for many years .
HIV has a peak three to six weeks after infection and therefore , having more than one partner in the same month is much more dangerous for HIV than others .
Probably , it 's a combination of this .
And what makes me so happy is that we are moving now towards fact when we look at this .
You can get this chart , free .
We have uploaded UNAIDS data on the Gapminder site .
And we hope that when we act on global problems in the future we will not only have the heart , we will not only have the money , but we will also use the brain .
Thank you very much .
Bob Mankoff : Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon
The New Yorker receives around 1,000 cartoons each week ; it only publishes about 17 of them . In this hilarious , fast-paced , and insightful talk , the magazine 's longstanding cartoon editor and self-proclaimed " humor analyst " Bob Mankoff dissects the comedy within just some of the " idea drawings " featured in the magazine , explaining what works , what doesn 't , and why .
I 'm going to be talking about designing humor , which is sort of an interesting thing , but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints , and how in certain contexts , humor is right , and in other contexts it 's wrong .
Now , I 'm from New York , so it 's 100 percent satisfaction here .
Actually , that 's ridiculous , because when it comes to humor , 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for .
Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman .
Bob Mankoff : That 's my first wife .
That part of the relationship went fine .
Now let 's look at this cartoon .
One of the things I 'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine , that lovely Caslon type , and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context .
It 's making a little bit fun of getting older , and , you know , people might like it .
But like I said , you cannot satisfy everyone .
You couldn 't satisfy this guy .
" Another joke on old white males . Ha ha . The wit .
It 's nice , I 'm sure to be young and rude , but some day you 'll be old , unless you drop dead as I wish . "
The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment , very easy for people to get their nose out of joint .
And one of the things that you realize is it 's an unusual environment .
Here I 'm one person talking to you .
You 're all collective . You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh .
In The New Yorker , it goes out to a wide audience , and when you actually look at that , and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at , and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting .
Let 's look at this cartoon .
" Discouraging data on the antidepressant . "
Indeed , it is discouraging .
Now , you would think , well , look , most of you laughed at that .
Right ? You thought it was funny .
In general , that seems like a funny cartoon , but let 's look what online survey I did .
Generally , about 85 percent of the people liked it .
A hundred and nine voted it a 10 , the highest . Ten voted it one .
But look at the individual responses .
" I like animals ! ! ! ! ! " Look how much they like them .
" I don 't want to hurt them . That doesn 't seem very funny to me . "
This person rated it a two .
" I don 't like to see animals suffer -- even in cartoons . "
To people like this , I point out we use anesthetic ink .
Other people thought it was funny .
That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don 't have the contagion of humor .
Humor is a type of entertainment .
All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger , something that might happen wrong , and yet we like it when there 's protection .
That 's what a zoo is . It 's danger . The tiger is there .
The bars protect us . That 's sort of fun , right ?
That 's a bad zoo .
It 's a very politically correct zoo , but it 's a bad zoo .
But this is a worse one .
So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker , you have to see , where is that tiger going to be ?
Where is the danger going to exist ?
How are you going to manage it ?
My job is to look at 1,000 cartoons a week .
But The New Yorker only can take 16 or 17 cartoons , and we have 1,000 cartoons .
Of course , many , many cartoons must be rejected .
Now , we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles .
But I feel that would be a huge loss , one I could live with , but still huge .
Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week .
The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week .
But they mostly are going to be rejected .
That 's the nature of any creative activity .
Many of them fade away . Some of them stay .
Matt Diffee is one of them .
Here 's one of his cartoons .
Drew Dernavich . " Accounting night at the improv . "
" Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers . "
Paul Noth . " He 's all right . I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel . "
Now I know all about rejection , because when I quit -- actually , I was booted out of -- psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist , a natural segue , from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker , and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker .
At a certain point , this rejection slip , in 1977 -- [ We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material . Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it . ] — magically changed to this .
[ Hey ! You sold one . No shit ! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine . ] Now of course that 's not what happened , but that 's the emotional truth .
And of course , that is not New Yorker humor .
What is New Yorker humor ?
Well , after 1977 , I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons .
Finally , in 1980 , I received the revered New Yorker contract , which I blurred out parts because it 's none of your business .
From 1980 . " Dear Mr. Mankoff , confirming the agreement there of -- " blah blah blah blah -- blur -- " for any idea drawings . "
With respect to idea drawings , nowhere in the contract is the word " cartoon " mentioned .
The word " idea drawings , " and that 's the sine qua non of New Yorker cartoons .
So what is an idea drawing ? An idea drawing is something that requires you to think .
Now that 's not a cartoon . It requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon .
Here are some , generally you get my cast of cartoon mind .
" There is no justice in the world . There is some justice in the world . The world is just . "
This is What Lemmings Believe .
The New Yorker and I , when we made comments , the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is .
What is it , the cartoon ? Is it really about lemmings ?
No . It 's about us .
You know , it 's my view basically about religion , that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend .
And this is my most well-known cartoon .
" No , Thursday 's out . How about never — is never good for you ? "
It 's been reprinted thousands of times , totally ripped off .
It 's even on thongs , but compressed to " How about never — is never good for you ? "
Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity .
In each instance , our expectations are defied .
In each instance , the narrative gets switched .
There 's an incongruity and a contrast .
In " No , Thursday 's out . How about never — is never good for you ? "
what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude .
That really is how humor works . It 's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don 't go together and temporarily in our minds exist .
He is both being polite and rude .
In here , you have the propriety of The New Yorker and the vulgarity of the language .
Basically , that 's the way humor works .
So I 'm a humor analyst , you would say .
Now E.B. White said , analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog .
Nobody is much interested , and the frog dies .
Well , I 'm going to kill a few , but there won 't be any genocide .
But really , it makes me — Let 's look at this picture . This is an interesting picture , The Laughing Audience .
There are the people , fops up there , but everybody is laughing , everybody is laughing except one guy .
This guy . Who is he ? He 's the critic .
He 's the critic of humor , and really I 'm forced to be in that position , when I 'm at The New Yorker , and that 's the danger that I will become this guy .
Now here 's a little video made by Matt Diffee , sort of how they imagine if we really exaggerated that .
Bob Mankoff : " Oooh , no .
Ehhh .
Oooh . Hmm . Too funny .
Normally I would but I 'm in a pissy mood .
I 'll enjoy it on my own . Perhaps .
No . Nah . No .
Overdrawn . Underdrawn .
Drawn just right , still not funny enough .
No . No .
For God 's sake no , a thousand times no .
No . No . No . No . No . [ Four hours later ] Hey , that 's good , yeah , whatcha got there ?
Office worker : Got a ham and swiss on rye ? BM : No .
Office worker : Okay . Pastrami on sourdough ? BM : No .
Office worker : Smoked turkey with bacon ? BM : No .
Office worker : Falafel ? BM : Let me look at it .
Eh , no .
Office worker : Grilled cheese ? BM : No .
Office worker : BLT ? BM : No .
Office worker : Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard ? BM : No .
Office worker : Green bean salad ? BM : No .
No . No .
Definitely no . [ Several hours after lunch ] No . Get out of here .
That 's sort of an exaggeration of what I do .
Now , we do reject , many , many , many cartoons , so many that there are many books called " The Rejection Collection . "
" The Rejection Collection " is not quite New Yorker kind of humor .
And you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his ventriloquist dummy is puking .
See , that 's probably not going to be New Yorker humor .
It 's actually put together by Matt Diffee , one of our cartoonists .
So I 'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor .
" I 'm thinking about having a child . "
There you have an interesting -- the guilty laugh , the laugh against your better judgment .
" Ass-head . Please help . "
Now , in fact , within a context of this book , which says , " Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker , " this humor is perfect .
I 'm going to explain why .
There 's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation .
In other words , for something to be funny , we 've got to think it 's both wrong and also okay at the same time .
If we think it 's completely wrong , we say , " That 's not funny . "
And if it 's completely okay , what 's the joke ? Okay ?
And so , this benign , that 's true of " No , Thursday 's out . How about never — is never good for you ? "
It 's rude . The world really shouldn 't be that way .
Within that context , we feel it 's okay .
So within this context , " Asshead . Please help " is a benign violation .
Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ...
" T-Cell Army : Can the body 's immune response help treat cancer ? " Oh , goodness .
You 're reading about this smart stuff , this intelligent dissection of the immune system .
You glance over at this , and it says , " Asshead . Please help " ? God .
So there the violation is malign . It doesn 't work .
There is no such thing as funny in and of itself .
Everything will be within the context and our expectations .
One way to look at it is this .
It 's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look , a theory about motivation and the mood we 're in and how the mood we 're in determines the things we like or dislike .
When we 're in a playful mood , we want excitement .
We want high arousal . We feel excited then .
If we 're in a purposeful mood , that makes us anxious .
" The Rejection Collection " is absolutely in this field .
You want to be stimulated . You want to be aroused .
You want to be transgressed .
It 's like this , like an amusement park .
Voice : Here we go .
He laughs . He is both in danger and safe , incredibly aroused . There 's no joke . No joke needed .
If you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough , they will laugh at very , very little .
This is another cartoon from " The Rejection Collection . "
" Too snug ? "
That 's a cartoon about terrorism .
The New Yorker occupies a very different space .
It 's a space that is playful in its own way , and also purposeful , and in that space , the cartoons are different .
Now I 'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9 / 11 , a very , very sensitive area when humor could be used .
How would The New Yorker attack it ?
It would not be with a guy with a bomb saying , " Too snug ? "
Or there was another cartoon I didn 't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended .
The great Sam Gross cartoon , this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it 's Muhammad in heaven , the suicide bomber is all in little pieces , and he 's saying to the suicide bomber , " You 'll get the virgins when we find your penis . "
Better left undrawn .
The first week we did no cartoons .
That was a black hole for humor , and correctly so .
It 's not always appropriate every time .
But the next week , this was the first cartoon .
" I thought I 'd never laugh again . Then I saw your jacket . "
It basically was about , if we were alive , we were going to laugh . We were going to breathe .
We were going to exist . Here 's another one .
" I figure if I don 't have that third martini , then the terrorists win . "
These cartoons are not about them . They 're about us .
The humor reflects back on us .
The easiest thing to do with humor , and it 's perfectly legitimate , is a friend makes fun of an enemy .
It 's called dispositional humor .
It 's 95 percent of the humor . It 's not our humor .
Here 's another cartoon .
" I wouldn 't mind living in a fundamentalist Islamic state . "
Humor does need a target .
But interestingly , in The New Yorker , the target is us .
The target is the readership and the people who do it .
The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions .
Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast , the guy reading the obituary .
" Two years younger than you , 12 years older than you , three years your junior , your age on the dot , exactly your age . "
That is a deeply profound cartoon .
And so The New Yorker is also trying to , in some way , make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us . Here 's another one .
" I started my vegetarianism for health reasons , Then it became a moral choice , and now it 's just to annoy people . "
" Excuse me — I think there 's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint . "
So it focuses on our obsessions , our narcissism , our foils and our foibles , really not someone else 's .
The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part , and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler , who wrote " The Act of Creation " about the relationship between humor , art and science , is what 's called bisociation .
You have to bring together ideas from different frames of reference , and you have to do it quickly to understand the cartoon .
If the different frames of reference don 't come together in about .5 seconds , it 's not funny , but I think they will for you here .
Different frames of reference .
" You slept with her , didn 't you ? "
" Lassie ! Get help ! ! "
It 's called French Army Knife .
And this is Einstein in bed . " To you it was fast . "
Now there are some cartoons that are puzzling .
Like , this cartoon would puzzle many people .
How many people know what this cartoon means ?
The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk .
This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog .
That 's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called " I Don 't Get It : The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test . "
The other thing The New Yorker plays around with is incongruity , and incongruity , I 've shown you , is sort of the basis of humor .
Something that 's completely normal or logical isn 't going to be funny .
But the way incongruity works is , observational humor is humor within the realm of reality .
" My boss is always telling me what to do . " Okay ?
That could happen . It 's humor within the realm of reality .
Here , cowboy to a cow : " Very impressive . I 'd like to find 5,000 more like you . "
We understand that . It 's absurd . But we 're putting the two together .
Here , in the nonsense range : " Damn it , Hopkins , didn 't you get yesterday 's memo ? "
Now that 's a little puzzling , right ? It doesn 't quite come together .
In general , people who enjoy more nonsense , enjoy more abstract art , they tend to be liberal , less conservative , that type of stuff .
But for us , and for me , helping design the humor , it doesn 't make any sense to compare one to the other .
It 's sort of a smorgasbord that 's made all interesting .
So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon , and I think this sums up the whole thing , really , about The New Yorker cartoons .
" It sort of makes you stop and think , doesn 't it . "
And now , when you look at New Yorker cartoons , I 'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Robert Full : Learning from the gecko 's tail
Biologist Robert Full studies the amazing gecko , with its supersticky feet and tenacious climbing skill . But high-speed footage reveals that the gecko 's tail harbors perhaps the most surprising talents of all .
Let me share with you today an original discovery .
But I want to tell it to you the way it really happened -- not the way I present it in a scientific meeting , or the way you 'd read it in a scientific paper .
It 's a story about beyond biomimetics , to something I 'm calling biomutualism .
I define that as an association between biology and another discipline , where each discipline reciprocally advances the other , but where the collective discoveries that emerge are beyond any single field .
Now , in terms of biomimetics , as human technologies take on more of the characteristics of nature , nature becomes a much more useful teacher .
Engineering can be inspired by biology by using its principles and analogies when they 're advantageous , but then integrating that with the best human engineering , ultimately to make something actually better than nature .
Now , being a biologist , I was very curious about this .
These are gecko toes .
And we wondered how they use these bizarre toes to climb up a wall so quickly .
We discovered it . And what we found was that they have leaf-like structures on their toes , with millions of tiny hairs that look like a rug , and each of those hairs has the worst case of split-ends possible : about 100 to 1000 split ends that are nano-size .
And the individual has 2 billion of these nano-size split ends .
They don 't stick by Velcro or suction or glue .
They actually stick by intermolecular forces alone , van der Waals forces .
And I 'm really pleased to report to you today that the first synthetic self-cleaning , dry adhesive has been made .
From the simplest version in nature , one branch , my engineering collaborator , Ron Fearing , at Berkeley , had made the first synthetic version .
And so has my other incredible collaborator , Mark Cutkosky , at Stanford -- he made much larger hairs than the gecko , but used the same general principles .
And here is its first test .
That 's Kellar Autumn , my former Ph.D. student , professor now at Lewis and Clark , literally giving his first-born child up for this test .
More recently , this happened .
This the first time someone has actually climbed with it .
Lynn Verinsky , a professional climber , who appeared to be brimming with confidence .
Lynn Verinsky : Honestly , it 's going to be perfectly safe . It will be perfectly safe .
How do you know ?
Lynn Verinsky : Because of liability insurance .
With a mattress below and attached to a safety rope , Lynn began her 60-foot ascent .
Lynn made it to the top in a perfect pairing of Hollywood and science .
So you 're the first human being to officially emulate a gecko .
Lynn Verinsky : Ha ! Wow . And what a privilege that has been .
Robert Full : That 's what she did on rough surfaces .
But she actually used these on smooth surfaces -- two of them -- to climb up , and pull herself up .
And you can try this in the lobby , and look at the gecko-inspired material .
Now the problem with the robots doing this is that they can 't get unstuck , with the material .
This is the gecko 's solution . They actually peel their toes away from the surface , at high rates , as they run up the wall .
Well I 'm really excited today to show you the newest version of a robot , Stickybot , using a new hierarchical dry adhesive .
Here is the actual robot .
And here is what it does .
And if you look , you can see that it uses the toe peeling , just like the gecko does .
If we can show some of the video , you can see it climbing up the wall .
There it is .
And now it can go on other surfaces because of the new adhesive that the Stanford group was able to do in designing this incredible robot .
Oh . One thing I want to point out is , look at Stickybot .
You see something on it . It 's not just to look like a gecko .
It has a tail . And just when you think you 've figured out nature , this kind of thing happens .
The engineers told us , for the climbing robots , that , if they don 't have a tail , they fall off the wall .
So what they did was they asked us an important question .
They said , " Well , it kind of looks like a tail . "
Even though we put a passive bar there .
" Do animals use their tails when they climb up walls ? "
What they were doing was returning the favor , by giving us a hypothesis to test , in biology , that we wouldn 't have thought of .
So of course , in reality , we were then panicked , being the biologists , and we should know this already .
We said , " Well , what do tails do ? "
Well we know that tails store fat , for example .
We know that you can grab onto things with them .
And perhaps it is most well known that they provide static balance .
It can also act as a counterbalance .
So watch this kangaroo .
See that tail ? That 's incredible !
Marc Raibert built a Uniroo hopping robot .
And it was unstable without its tail .
Now mostly tails limit maneuverability , like this human inside this dinosaur suit .
My colleagues actually went on to test this limitation , by increasing the moment of inertia of a student , so they had a tail , and running them through and obstacle course , and found a decrement in performance , like you 'd predict .
But of course , this is a passive tail .
And you can also have active tails .
And when I went back to research this , I realized that one of the great TED moments in the past , from Nathan , we 've talked about an active tail .
Myhrvold thinks tail-cracking dinosaurs were interested in love , not war .
Robert Full : He talked about the tail being a whip for communication .
It can also be used in defense .
Pretty powerful .
So we then went back and looked at the animal .
And we ran it up a surface .
But this time what we did is we put a slippery patch that you see in yellow there .
And watch on the right what the animal is doing with its tail when it slips . This is slowed down 10 times .
So here is normal speed .
And watch it now slip , and see what it does with its tail .
It has an active tail that functions as a fifth leg , and it contributes to stability .
If you make it slip a huge amount , this is what we discovered .
This is incredible .
The engineers had a really good idea .
And then of course we wondered , okay , they have an active tail , but let 's picture them .
They 're climbing up a wall , or a tree .
And they get to the top and let 's say there 's some leaves there .
And what would happen if they climbed on the underside of that leaf , and there was some wind , or we shook it ?
And we did that experiment , that you see here .
And this is what we discovered .
Now that 's real time . You can 't see anything .
But there it is slowed down .
What we discovered was the world 's fastest air-righting response .
For those of you who remember your physics , that 's a zero-angular-momentum righting response . But it 's like a cat .
You know , cats falling . Cats do this . They twist their bodies .
But geckos do it better .
And they do it with their tail .
So they do it with this active tail as they swing around .
And then they always land in the sort of superman skydiving posture .
Okay , now we wondered , if we were right , we should be able to test this in a physical model , in a robot .
So for TED we actually built a robot , over there , a prototype , with the tail .
And we 're going to attempt the first air-righting response in a tail , with a robot .
If we could have the lights on it .
Okay , there it goes .
And show the video .
There it is .
And it works just like it does in the animal .
So all you need is a swing of the tail to right yourself .
Now , of course , we were normally frightened because the animal has no gliding adaptations , so we thought , " Oh that 's okay . We 'll put it in a vertical wind tunnel .
We 'll blow the air up , we 'll give it a landing target , a tree trunk , just outside the plexi-glass enclosure , and see what it does .
So we did . And here is what it does .
So the wind is coming from the bottom . This is slowed down 10 times .
It does an equilibrium glide . Highly controlled .
This is sort of incredible . But actually it 's quite beautiful , when you take a picture of it .
And it 's better than that , it -- just in the slide -- maneuvers in mid-air .
And the way it does it , is it takes its tail and it swings it one way to yaw left , and it swings its other way to yaw right .
So we can maneuver this way .
And then -- we had to film this several times to believe this -- it also does this . Watch this .
It oscillates its tail up and down like a dolphin .
It can actually swim through the air .
But watch its front legs . Can you see what they are doing ?
What does that mean for the origin of flapping flight ?
Maybe it 's evolved from coming down from trees , and trying to control a glide .
Stay tuned for that .
So then we wondered , " Can they actually maneuver with this ? "
So there is the landing target . Could they steer towards it with these capabilities ? Here it is in the wind tunnel .
And it certainly looks like it .
You can see it even better from down on top .
Watch the animal .
Definitely moving towards the landing target .
Watch the whip of its tail as it does it . Look at that .
It 's unbelievable .
So now we were really confused , because there are no reports of it gliding .
So we went , " Oh my god , we have to go to the field , and see if it actually does this . "
Completely opposite of the way you 'd see it on a nature film , of course .
We wondered , " Do they actually glide in nature ? "
Well we went to the forests of Singapore and Southeast Asia .
And the next video you see is the first time we 've showed this .
This is the actual video -- not staged , a real research video -- of animal gliding down . There is a red trajectory line .
Look at the end to see the animal .
But then as it gets closer to the tree , look at the close-up . And see if you can see it land .
So there it comes down . There is a gecko at the end of that trajectory line .
You see it there ? There ? Watch it come down .
Now watch up there and you can see the landing . Did you see it hit ?
It actually uses its tail too , just like we saw in the lab .
So now we can continue this mutualism by suggesting that they can make an active tail .
And here is the first active tail , in the robot , made by Boston Dynamics .
So to conclude , I think we need to build biomutualisms , like I showed , that will increase the pace of basic discovery in their application .
To do this though , we need to redesign education in a major way , to balance depth with interdisciplinary communication , and explicitly train people how to contribute to , and benefit from other disciplines .
And of course you need the organisms and the environment to do it .
That is , whether you care about security , search and rescue or health , we must preserve nature 's designs , otherwise these secrets will be lost forever .
And from what I heard from our new president , I 'm very optimistic . Thank you .
Naomi Klein : Addicted to risk
Days before this talk , journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico , looking at the catastrophic results of BP 's risky pursuit of oil . Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy , new financial instruments and more ... and too often , we 're left to clean up a mess afterward . Klein 's question : What 's the backup plan ?
I just did something I 've never done before .
I spent a week at sea on a research vessel .
Now I 'm not a scientist , but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP 's oil in the Gulf of Mexico .
This is the boat we were on , by the way .
The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff -- the birds , the turtles , the dolphins , the glamorous stuff .
They 're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff .
And what they 're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton , which is very bad news , because so much life depends on it .
So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn 't have to worry about it , this disaster is still unfolding .
It 's still working its way up the food chain .
Now this shouldn 't come as a surprise to us .
Rachel Carson -- the godmother of modern environmentalism -- warned us about this very thing back in 1962 .
She pointed out that the " control men " -- as she called them -- who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT , were only trying to kill the little stuff , the insects , not the birds .
But they forgot this : the fact that birds dine on grubs , that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT .
And so , robin eggs failed to hatch , songbirds died en masse , towns fell silent .
Thus the title " Silent Spring . "
I 've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico , because I 'm Canadian , and I can draw no ancestral ties .
And I think what it is is I don 't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster , with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world , with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV , 24 hours a day , for months .
After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature , suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness , with our lack of control , as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it -- " top hats , " " top kills " and , most memorably , the " junk shot " -- the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world .
But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed -- the carelessness , the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up .
If there is one thing BP 's watery improv act made clear , it is that , as a culture , we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable , and to do so without a back-up plan , without an exit strategy .
And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years .
Our leaders barrel into wars , telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades .
Then , it is years of deadly damage control , Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies , and once again , no exit strategy .
Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence , convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market -- the kind that never goes down .
And when it inevitably does , the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot -- in this case , throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole .
As with BP , the hole does get plugged , at least temporarily , but not before exacting a tremendous price .
We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen , because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all -- deciding what to do , or not to do , about climate change .
Now as you know , a great deal of time is spent , in this country and around the world , inside the climate debate , on the question of , " What if the IPC scientists are all wrong ? "
Now a far more relevant question -- as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it -- is , " What if those scientists are right ? "
Given the stakes , the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle -- the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible , we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty .
Better to err on the side of caution .
More overt , the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed , but rather on the industry that stands to profit .
But climate policy in the wealthy world -- to the extent that such a thing exists -- is not based on precaution , but rather on cost-benefit analysis -- finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP .
So rather than asking , as precaution would demand , what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe , we ask bizarre questions like this : " What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions ?
Can we put this off till 2020 , 2030 , 2050 ? "
Or we ask , " How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive ?
Can we go with two degrees , three degrees , or -- where we 're currently going -- four degrees Celsius ? "
And by the way , the assumption that we can safely control the Earth 's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat , making the planet not too hot , not too cold , but just right -- sort of Goldilocks style -- this is pure fantasy , and it 's not coming from the climate scientists .
It 's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science .
The fact is that we simply don 't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops .
So once again , why do we take these crazy risks with the precious ?
A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now , like " greed . "
This is a popular explanation , and there 's lots of truth to it , because taking big risks , as we all know , pays a lot of money .
Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris .
And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness .
For instance , if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon , then you need a narrative , you need a story that makes that disparity okay .
And you actually don 't have a lot of options .
You 're either an incredibly good scammer , and you 're getting away with it -- you gamed the system -- or you 're some kind of boy genius , the likes of which the world has never seen .
Now both of these options -- the boy genius and the scammer -- are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future .
By the way , Tony Hayward , the former CEO of BP , had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan : " What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail ? "
Now this is actually a popular plaque , and this is a crowd of overachievers , so I 'm betting that some of you have this plaque .
Don 't feel ashamed .
Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you 're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk , but personally , I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall , because -- maybe not that one in particular -- but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time .
So we have greed , we 've got overconfidence / hubris , but since we 're here at TEDWomen , let 's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness .
Now I 'm not going to belabor this point , but studies do show that , as investors , women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men , precisely because , as we 've already heard , women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do .
So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides -- for society at least .
The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted , chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides .
And this problem -- call it the " perils of privilege " -- brings us closer , I think , to the root of our collective recklessness .
Because none of us -- at least in the global North -- neither men nor women , are fully exempt from this message .
Here 's what I 'm talking about .
Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them , our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature -- the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer , the narrative of manifest destiny , the narrative of apocalypse and salvation .
And just when you think these stories are fading into history , and that we 've gotten over them , they pop up in the strangest places .
For instance , I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women 's washroom in the Kansas City airport .
It 's for Motorola 's new Rugged cell phone , and yes , it really does say , " Slap Mother Nature in the face . "
And I 'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola -- that 's just a bonus .
I 'm showing it because -- they 're not a sponsor , are they ? -- because , in its own way , this is a crass version of our founding story .
We slapped Mother Nature around and won , and we always win , because dominating nature is our destiny .
But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature .
There 's another one , equally important , about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance .
Let 's hear from Tony Hayward again .
" The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean .
The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume . "
In other words , the ocean is big ; she can take it .
It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do .
Because this is our real master-narrative : however much we mess up , there will always be more -- more water , more land , more untapped resources .
A new bubble will replace the old one .
A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one .
In a way , that is the story of the settling of the Americas , the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped .
And it 's also the story of modern capitalism , because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system , one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers .
Now the problem is that the story was always a lie .
The Earth always did have limits .
They were just beyond our sights .
And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts .
I believe that we know this , yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop .
Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories , but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that , frankly , verges on camp .
How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin ?
Now on the one hand , exhorting us to " drill , baby , drill , " because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them , and on the other , glorying in the wilderness of Alaska 's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show .
The twin message is as comforting as it is mad .
Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall .
There are still no limits .
There will always be another frontier .
So stop worrying and keep shopping .
Now , would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show .
In environmental circles , we often hear that , rather than shifting to renewables , we are continuing with business as usual .
This assessment , unfortunately , is far too optimistic .
The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era , the era of extreme energy .
So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water , including the icy Arctic seas , where a clean-up may simply be impossible .
It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal , the likes of which we haven 't yet seen .
And most controversially , it means the tar sands .
I 'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands , which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States .
It 's worth taking a moment to understand this practice , because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we 're on like little else .
So this is where the tar sands live , under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests .
The oil is not liquid .
You can 't just drill a hole and pump it out .
Tar sand 's oil is solid , mixed in with the soil .
So to get at it , you first have to get rid of the trees .
Then , you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand .
The process requires a huge amount of water , which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds .
That 's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates .
Now looking at these images , it 's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation , which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England .
I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth , the largest ever built .
That 's a person down there by the wheel .
My point is that this is not oil drilling .
It 's not even mining .
It is terrestrial skinning .
Vast , vivid landscapes are being gutted , left monochromatic gray .
Now I should confess that as [ far as ] I 'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon .
But the truth is that , on average , turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada .
How else to describe this , but as a form of mass insanity ?
Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet , off the power of sun , wind and waves , we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest , highest-emitting stuff imaginable .
This is where our story of endless growth has taken us , to this black hole at the center of my country -- a place of such planetary pain that , like the BP gusher , one can only stand to look at it for so long .
As Jared Diamond and others have shown us , this is how civilizations commit suicide , by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes .
The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too .
At the very last minute , we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie , just like in the Rapture .
But , of course , our secular religion is technology .
Now , you may have noticed more and more headlines like these .
The idea behind this form of " geoengineering " as it 's called , is that , as the planet heats up , we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun 's rays back to space , thereby cooling the planet .
The wackiest plan -- and I 'm not making this up -- would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky , suspended by balloons , to spew sulfur dioxide .
So , solving the problem of pollution with more pollution .
Think of it as the ultimate junk shot .
The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested .
They don 't know if they 'll work , and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash .
Nevertheless , the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles , particularly media circles , with a relief tinged with euphoria .
An escape hatch has been reached .
A new frontier has been found .
Most importantly , we don 't have to change our lifestyles after all .
You see , for some people , their savior is a guy in a flowing robe .
For other people , it 's a guy with a garden hose .
We badly need some new stories .
We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks -- risks that confront recklessness head on , that put the precautionary principle into practice , even if that means through direct action -- like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested , blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining .
We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around .
That this is our only home .
There is no escape hatch .
Call it karma , call it physics , action and reaction , call it precaution -- the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit .
Thank you .
Christoph Adami : Finding life we can 't imagine
How do we search for alien life if it 's nothing like the life that we know ? Christoph Adami shows how he uses his research into artificial life -- self-replicating computer programs -- to find a signature , a ' biomarker , ' that is free of our preconceptions of what life is .
So I have a strange career .
I know it because people come up to me , like colleagues , and say , " Chris , you have a strange career . "
And I can see their point , because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist .
And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions , and I was only 14 years old .
No , no , I wasn 't 14 years old .
But after that , I actually had my own lab in the computational neuroscience department , and I wasn 't doing any neuroscience .
Later , I would work on evolutionary genetics , and I would work on systems biology .
But I 'm going to tell you about something else today .
I 'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life .
And I was actually a rocket scientist .
I wasn 't really a rocket scientist , but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California where it 's warm ; whereas now I 'm in the mid-West , and it 's cold .
But it was an exciting experience .
One day a NASA manager comes into my office , sits down and says , " Can you please tell us , how do we look for life outside Earth ? "
And that came as a surprise to me , because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation .
Yet , I had a very good answer .
I said , " I have no idea . "
And he told me , " Biosignatures , we need to look for a biosignature . "
And I said , " What is that ? "
And he said , " It 's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life . "
And I said , " Really ?
Because isn 't that easy ?
I mean , we have life .
Can 't you apply a definition , like for example , a Supreme Court-like definition of life ? "
And then I thought about it a little bit , and I said , " Well , is it really that easy ?
Because , yes , if you see something like this , then all right , fine , I 'm going to call it life -- no doubt about it .
But here 's something . "
And he goes , " Right , that 's life too . I know that . "
Except , if you think life is also defined by things that die , you 're not in luck with this thing , because that 's actually a very strange organism .
It grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a Benjamin Button phase , and actually goes backwards and backwards until it 's like a little embryo again , and then actually grows back up , and back down and back up -- sort of yo-yo -- and it never dies .
So it 's actually life , but it 's actually not as we thought life would be .
And then you see something like that .
And he was like , " My God , what kind of a life form is that ? "
Anyone know ?
It 's actually not life , it 's a crystal .
So once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things -- so this particular person wrote a whole article and said , " Hey , these are bacteria . "
Except , if you look a little bit closer , you see , in fact , that this thing is way too small to be anything like that .
So he was convinced , but , in fact , most people aren 't .
And then , of course , NASA also had a big announcement , and President Clinton gave a press conference , about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite .
Except that nowadays , it 's heavily disputed .
If you take the lesson of all these pictures , then you realize , well actually maybe it 's not that easy .
Maybe I do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction .
So can life be defined ?
Well how would you go about it ?
Well of course , you 'd go to Encyclopedia Britannica and open at L.
No , of course you don 't do that ; you put it somewhere in Google .
And then you might get something .
And what you might get -- and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to , you throw away .
And then you might come up with something like this .
And it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts .
Who on Earth would write something as convoluted and complex and inane ?
Oh , it 's actually a really , really , important set of concepts .
So I 'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to , but in fact on processes only .
And if you take a look at that , this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life .
And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with .
Because the idea was that , with concepts like that , maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life .
And so if you go and ask yourself , " What on Earth is artificial life ? " , let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about .
And it started out quite a while ago when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses .
And for those of you who aren 't old enough , you have no idea how this infection was working -- namely , through these floppy disks .
But the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that , if you look at the rate at which the infection worked , they show this spiky behavior that you 're used to from a flu virus .
And it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth .
And the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses , a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we 're used to , at least on the viral level .
So is that life ? Not as far as I 'm concerned .
Why ? Because these things don 't evolve by themselves .
In fact , they have hackers writing them .
But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further when a scientist working at the Scientific Institute decided , " Why don 't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve ? "
And this was Steen Rasmussen .
And he designed this system , but it really didn 't work , because his viruses were constantly destroying each other .
But there was another scientist who had been watching this , an ecologist .
And he went home and says , " I know how to fix this . "
And he wrote the Tierra system , and , in my book , is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems -- except for the fact that these programs didn 't really grow in complexity .
So having seen this work , worked a little bit on this , this is where I came in .
And I decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see the evolution of complexity , more and more complex problems constantly evolving .
And of course , since I really don 't know how to write code , I had help in this .
I had two undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology that worked with me .
That 's Charles Offria on the left , Titus Brown on the right .
They are now actually respectable professors at Michigan State University , but I can assure you , back in the day , we were not a respectable team .
And I 'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together .
But what is this system like ?
Well I can 't really go into the details , but what you see here is some of the entrails .
But what I wanted to focus on is this type of population structure .
There 's about 10,000 programs sitting here .
And all different strains are colored in different colors .
And as you see here , there are groups that are growing on top of each other , because they are spreading .
Any time there is a program that 's better at surviving in this world , due to whatever mutation it has acquired , it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction .
So I 'm going to show you a movie where you 're going to see that kind of dynamic .
And these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves .
We write our own stuff , replicate it , and are very proud of ourselves .
And we put them in , and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation .
By the way , this is highly accelerated , so it 's like a thousand generations a second .
But immediately the system goes like , " What kind of dumb piece of code was this ?
This can be improved upon in so many ways so quickly . "
So you see waves of new types taking over the other types .
And this type of activity goes on for quite awhile , until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs .
And then you see sort of like a stasis coming on where the system essentially waits for a new type of innovation , like this one , which is going to spread over all the other innovations that were before and is erasing the genes that it had before , until a new type of higher level of complexity has been achieved .
And this process goes on and on and on .
So what we see here is a system that lives in very much the way we 're used to life [ going . ] But what the NASA people had asked me really was , " Do these guys have a biosignature ?
Can we measure this type of life ?
Because if we can , maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids . "
So I said , " Well , perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process .
In fact , it should perhaps make use of the concepts that I developed just in order to sort of capture what a simple living system might be . "
And the thing I came up with -- I have to first give you an introduction about the idea , and maybe that would be a meaning detector , rather than a life detector .
And the way we would do that -- I would like to find out how I can distinguish text that was written by a million monkeys , as opposed to text that [ is ] in our books .
And I would like to do it in such a way that I don 't actually have to be able to read the language , because I 'm sure I won 't be able to .
As long as I know that there 's some sort of alphabet .
So here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys .
And obviously each of these letters comes off about roughly equally frequent .
But if you now look at the same distribution in English texts , it looks like that .
And I 'm telling you , this is very robust across English texts .
And if I look at French texts , it looks a little bit different , or Italian or German .
They all have their own type of frequency distribution , but it 's robust .
It doesn 't matter whether it writes about politics or about science .
It doesn 't matter whether it 's a poem or whether it 's a mathematical text .
It 's a robust signature , and it 's very stable .
As long as our books are written in English -- because people are rewriting them and recopying them -- it 's going to be there .
So that inspired me to think about , well , what if I try to use this idea in order , not to detect random texts from texts with meaning , but rather detect the fact that there is meaning in the biomolecules that make up life .
But first I have to ask : what are these building blocks , like the alphabet , elements that I showed you ?
Well it turns out , we have many different alternatives for such a set of building blocks .
We could use amino acids , we could use nucleic acids , carboxylic acids , fatty acids .
In fact , chemistry 's extremely rich , and our body uses a lot of them .
So that we actually , to test this idea , first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids .
And here 's the result .
Here is , in fact , what you get if you , for example , look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or , in fact , in a laboratory , where you made very sure that in your primordial soup that there is not living stuff in there .
What you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there 's some trace elements of the other ones .
That is also very robust -- what you find in systems like Earth where there are amino acids , but there is no life .
But suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers , because there 's bacteria all over the place ; or you take water anywhere on Earth , because it 's teaming with life , and you make the same analysis ; the spectrum looks completely different .
Of course , there is still glycine and alanine , but in fact , there are these heavy elements , these heavy amino acids , that are being produced because these are valuable to the organism .
And some other ones that are not used in the set of 20 , they will not appear at all in any type of concentration .
So this also turns out to be extremely robust .
It doesn 't matter what kind of sediment you 're using to grind up , whether it 's bacteria or any other plants or animals .
Anywhere there 's life , you 're going to have this distribution , as opposed to that distribution .
And it is detectable not just in amino acids .
Now you could ask : well , what about these Avidians ?
The Avidians being the denizens of this computer world where they are perfectly happy replicating and growing in complexity .
So this is the distribution that you get if , in fact , there is no life .
They have about 28 of these instructions .
And if you have a system where they 're being replaced one by the other , it 's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter .
Each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency .
But if you now take a set of replicating guys like in the video that you saw , it looks like this .
So there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms , and their frequency is going to be high .
And there 's actually some instructions that you only use once , if ever .
So they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random .
In this case , the frequency is lower .
And so now we can see , is that really a robust signature ?
I can tell you indeed it is , because this type of spectrum , just like what you 've seen in books , and just like what you 've seen in amino acids , it doesn 't really matter how you change the environment , it 's very robust ; it 's going to reflect the environment .
So I 'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did .
And I have to explain to you , the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that I talked about .
Here , in fact , that 's the lifeless environment where each instruction occurs at an equal frequency .
And below there , I show , in fact , the mutation rate in the environment .
And I 'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that , even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world , if you drop it in , it gets mutated to death immediately .
So there is no life possible at that type of mutation rate .
But then I 'm going to slowly turn down the heat , so to speak , and then there 's this viability threshold where now it would be possible for a replicator to actually live .
And indeed , we 're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time .
So let 's see what that looks like .
So first , nothing , nothing , nothing .
Too hot , too hot .
Now the viability threshold is reached , and the frequency distribution has dramatically changed and , in fact , stabilizes .
And now what I did there is , I was being nasty , I just turned up the heat again and again .
And of course , it reaches the viability threshold .
And I 'm just showing this to you again because it 's so nice .
You hit the viability threshold .
The distribution changes to " alive ! "
And then , once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you cannot self-reproduce , you cannot copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes .
And then that signature is lost .
What do we learn from that ?
Well , I think we learn a number of things from that .
One of them is , if we are able to think about life in abstract terms -- and we 're not talking about things like plants , and we 're not talking about amino acids , and we 're not talking about bacteria , but we think in terms of processes -- then we could start to think about life , not as something that is so special to Earth , but that , in fact , could exist anywhere .
Because it really only has to do with these concepts of information , of storing information within physical substrates -- anything : bits , nucleic acids , anything that 's an alphabet -- and make sure that there 's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect the time scales for the deterioration of information .
And if you can do that , then you have life .
So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone , without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear , as far as the type of life on Earth is .
And that in a sense removes us again , like all of our scientific discoveries , or many of them -- it 's this continuous dethroning of man -- of how we think we 're special because we 're alive .
Well we can make life . We can make life in the computer .
Granted , it 's limited , but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it .
And once we have that , then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say , if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate , then we can go out and try other worlds , figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be , figure enough about the normal chemistry , the geochemistry of the planet , so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life , and then look for large deviations from this -- this thing sticking out , which says , " This chemical really shouldn 't be there . "
Now we don 't know that there 's life then , but we could say , " Well at least I 'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from . "
And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it .
And so that 's really the only take-home message that I have for you .
Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets .
And if we remove the mystery of life , then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live , and how perhaps we 're not as special as we always think we are .
And I 'm going to leave you with that .
And thank you very much .
Jonas Gahr Støre : In defense of dialogue
In politics , it seems counterintuitive to engage in dialogue with violent groups , with radicals and terrorists , and with the states that support them . But Jonas Gahr Støre , the foreign minister of Norway , makes a compelling case for open discussion , even when values diverge , in an attempt to build greater security for all . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Amongst all the troubling deficits we struggle with today -- we think of financial and economic primarily -- the ones that concern me most is the deficit of political dialogue -- our ability to address modern conflicts as they are , to go to the source of what they 're all about and to understand the key players and to deal with them .
We who are diplomats , we are trained to deal with conflicts between states and issues between states .
And I can tell you , our agenda is full .
There is trade , there is disarmament , there is cross-border relations .
But the picture is changing , and we are seeing that there are new key players coming onto the scene .
We loosely call them " groups . "
They may represent social , religious , political , economic , military realities .
And we struggle with how to deal with them .
The rules of engagement : how to talk , when to talk , and how to deal with them .
Let me show you a slide here which illustrates the character of conflicts since 1946 until today .
You see the green is a traditional interstate conflict , the ones we used to read about .
The red is modern conflict , conflicts within states .
These are quite different , and they are outside the grasp of modern diplomacy .
And the core of these key actors are groups who represent different interests inside countries .
And the way they deal with their conflicts rapidly spreads to other countries .
So in a way , it is everybody 's business .
Another acknowledgment we 've seen during these years , recent years , is that very few of these domestic interstate , intrastate conflicts can be solved militarily .
They may have to be dealt with with military means , but they cannot be solved by military means .
They need political solutions .
And we , therefore , have a problem , because they escape traditional diplomacy .
And we have among states a reluctance in dealing with them .
Plus , during the last decade , we 've been in the mode where dealing with groups was conceptually and politically dangerous .
After 9 / 11 , either you were with us or against us .
It was black or white .
And groups are very often immediately label terrorists .
And who would talk to terrorists ?
The West , as I would see it , comes out of that decade weakened , because we didn 't understand the group .
So we 've spent more time on focusing on why we should not talk to others than finding out how we talk to others .
Now I 'm not naive .
You cannot talk to everybody all the time .
And there are times you should walk .
And sometimes military intervention is necessary .
I happen to believe that Libya was necessary and that military intervention in Afghanistan was also necessary .
And my country relies on its security through military alliance , that 's clear .
But still we have a large deficit in dealing with and understanding modern conflict .
Let us turn to Afghanistan .
10 years after that military intervention , that country is far from secure .
The situation , to be honest , is very serious .
Now again , the military is necessary , but the military is no problem-solver .
When I first came to Afghanistan in 2005 as a foreign minister , I met the commander of ISAF , the international troops .
And he told me that , " This can be won militarily , minister .
We just have to persevere . "
Now four COM ISAF 's later , we hear a different message : " This cannot be won militarily .
We need military presence , but we need to move to politics .
We can only solve this through a political solution .
And it is not us who will solve it ; Afghans have to solve it . "
But then they need a different political process than the one they were given in 2001 , 2002 .
They need an inclusive process where the real fabric of this very complicated society can deal with their issues .
Everybody seems to agree with that .
It was very controversial to say three , four , five years ago .
Now everybody agrees .
But now , as we prepare to talk , we understand how little we know .
Because we didn 't talk .
We didn 't grasp what was going on .
The International Committee of the Red Cross , the ICRC , is talking to everyone , and it is doing so because it is neutral .
And that 's one reason why that organization probably is the best informed key player to understand modern conflict -- because they talk .
My point is that you don 't have to be neutral to talk .
And you don 't have to agree when you sit down with the other side .
And you can always walk .
But if you don 't talk , you can 't engage the other side .
And the other side which you 're going to engage is the one with whom you profoundly disagree .
Prime Minister Rabin said when he engaged the Oslo process , " You don 't make peace with your friends , you make peace with your enemies . "
It 's hard , but it is necessary .
Let me go one step further .
This is Tahrir Square .
There 's a revolution going on .
The Arab Spring is heading into fall and is moving into winter .
It will last for a long , long time .
And who knows what it will be called in the end .
That 's not the point .
The point is that we are probably seeing , for the first time in the history of the Arab world , a revolution bottom-up -- people 's revolution .
Social groups are taking to the streets .
And we find out in the West that we know very little about what 's happening .
Because we never talk to the people in these countries .
Most governments followed the dictate of the authoritarian leaders to stay away from these different groups , because they were terrorists .
So now that they are emerging in the street and we salute the democratic revolution , we find out how little we know .
Right now , the discussion goes , " Should we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood ?
Should we talk to Hamas ?
If we talk to them , we may legitimize them . "
I think that is wrong .
If you talk in the right way , you make it very clear that talking is not agreeing .
And how can we tell the Muslim Brotherhood , as we should , that they must respect minority rights , if we don 't accept majority rights ?
Because they may turn out to be a majority .
How can we escape [ having ] a double-standard , if we at the same time preach democracy and at the same time don 't want to deal with the groups that are representative ?
How will we ever be interlocutors ?
Now my diplomats are instructed to talk to all these groups .
But talking can be done in different ways .
We make a distinction between talking from a diplomatic level and talking at the political level .
Now talking can be accompanied with aid or not with aid .
Talking can be accompanied with inclusion or not inclusion .
There 's a big array of the ways of dealing with this .
So if we refuse to talk to these new groups that are going to be dominating the news in years to come , we will further radicalization , I believe .
We will make the road from violent activities into politics harder to travel .
And if we cannot demonstrate to these groups that if you move towards democracy , if you move towards taking part in civilized and normal standards among states , there are some rewards on the other side .
The paradox here is that the last decade probably was a lost decade for making progress on this .
And the paradox is that the decade before the last decade was so promising -- and for one reason primarily .
And the reason is what happened in South Africa : Nelson Mandela .
When Mandela came out of prison after 27 years of captivity , if he had told his people , " It 's time to take up the arms , it 's time to fight , " he would have been followed .
And I think the international community would have said , " Fair enough .
It 's their right to fight . "
Now as you know , Mandela didn 't do that .
In his memoirs , " Long Road to Freedom , " he wrote that he survived during those years of captivity because he always decided to look upon his oppressor as also being a human being , also being a human being .
So he engaged a political process of dialogue , not as a strategy of the weak , but as a strategy of the strong .
And he engaged talking profoundly by settling some of the most tricky issues through a truth and reconciliation process where people came and talked .
Now South African friends will know that was very painful .
So what can we learn from all of this ?
Dialogue is not easy -- not between individuals , not between groups , not between governments -- but it is very necessary .
If we 're going to deal with political conflict-solving of conflicts , if we 're going to understand these new groups which are coming from bottom-up , supported by technology , which is available to all , we diplomats cannot be sitting back in the banquets believing that we are doing interstate relations .
We have to connect with these profound changes .
And what is dialogue really about ?
When I enter into dialogue , I really hope that the other side would pick up my points of view , that I would impress upon them my opinions and my values .
I cannot do that unless I send the signals that I will be open to listen to the other side 's signals .
We need a lot more training on how to do that and a lot more practice on how that can take problem-solving forward .
We know from our personal experiences that it 's easy sometimes just to walk , and sometimes you may need to fight .
And I wouldn 't say that is the wrong thing in all circumstances .
Sometimes you have to .
But that strategy seldom takes you very far .
The alternative is a strategy of engagement and principled dialogue .
And I believe we need to strengthen this approach in modern diplomacy , not only between states , but also within states .
We are seeing some new signs .
We could never have done the convention against anti-personnel landmines and the convention that is banning cluster munitions unless we had done diplomacy differently , by engaging with civil society .
All of a sudden , NGOs were not only standing in the streets , crying their slogans , but they were taking [ them ] into the negotiations , partly because they represented the victims of these weapons .
And they brought their knowledge .
And there was an interaction between diplomacy and the power coming bottom-up .
This is perhaps a first element of a change .
In the future , I believe , we should draw examples from these different illustrations , not to have diplomacy which is disconnected from people and civil society .
And we have to go also beyond traditional diplomacy to the survival issue of our times , climate change .
How are we going to solve climate change through negotiations , unless we are able to make civil society and people , not part of the problem , but part of the solution ?
It is going to demand an inclusive process of diplomacy very different from the one we are practicing today as we are heading to new rounds of difficult climate negotiations , but when we move toward something which has to be much more along a broad mobilization .
It 's crucial to understand , I believe , because of technology and because of globalization , societies from bottom-up .
We as diplomats need to know the social capital of communities .
What is it that makes people trust each other , not only between states , but also within states ?
What is the legitimacy of diplomacy , of the the solution we devise as diplomats if they cannot be reflected and understood by also these broader forces of societies that we now very loosely call groups ?
The good thing is that we are not powerless .
We have never had as many means of communication , means of being connected , means of reaching out , means of including .
The diplomatic toolbox is actually full of different tools we can use to strengthen our communication .
But the problem is that we are coming out of a decade where we had a fear of touching it .
Now , I hope , in the coming years , that we are able to demonstrate through some concrete examples that fear is receding and that we can take courage from that alliance with civil society in different countries to support their problem-solving , among the Afghans , inside the Palestinian population , between the peoples of Palestine and Israel .
And as we try to understand this broad movement across the Arab world , we are not powerless .
We need to improve the necessary skills , and we need the courage to use them .
In my country , I have seen how the council of Islamist groups and Christian groups came together , not as a government initiative , but they came together on their own initiative to establish contact and dialogue in times where things were pretty low-key tension .
And when tension increased , they already had that dialogue , and that was a strength to deal with different issues .
Our modern Western societies are more complex than before , in this time of migration .
How are we going to settle and build a bigger " We " to deal with our issues if we don 't improve our skills of communication ?
So there are many reasons , and for all of these reasons , this is time and this is why we must talk .
Thank you for your attention .
Arianna Huffington : How to succeed ? Get more sleep
In this short talk , Arianna Huffington shares a small idea that can awaken much bigger ones : the power of a good night 's sleep . Instead of bragging about our sleep deficits , she urges us to shut our eyes and see the big picture : We can sleep our way to increased productivity and happiness -- and smarter decision-making .
My big idea is a very , very small idea that can unlock billions of big ideas that are at the moment dormant inside us .
And my little idea that will do that is sleep .
This is a room of type-A women .
This is a room of sleep-deprived women .
And I learned the hard way , the value of sleep .
Two-and-a-half years ago , I fainted from exhaustion .
I hit my head on my desk . I broke my cheekbone , I got five stitches on my right eye .
And I began the journey of rediscovering the value of sleep .
And in the course of that , I studied , I met with medical doctors , scientists , and I 'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive , more inspired , more joyful life is getting enough sleep .
And we women are going to lead the way in this new revolution , this new feminist issue .
We are literally going to sleep our way to the top , literally .
Because unfortunately for men , sleep deprivation has become a virility symbol .
I was recently having dinner with a guy who bragged that he had only gotten four hours sleep the night before .
And I felt like saying to him -- but I didn 't say it -- I felt like saying , " You know what ?
If you had gotten five , this dinner would have been a lot more interesting . "
There is now a kind of sleep deprivation one-upmanship .
Especially here in Washington , if you try to make a breakfast date , and you say , " How about eight o 'clock ? "
they 're likely to tell you , " Eight o 'clock is too late for me , but that 's okay , I can get a game of tennis in and do a few conference calls and meet you at eight . "
And they think that means that they are so incredibly busy and productive , but the truth is they 're not , because we , at the moment , have had brilliant leaders in business , in finance , in politics , making terrible decisions .
So a high I.Q.
does not mean that you 're a good leader , because the essence of leadership is being able to see the iceberg before it hits the Titanic .
And we 've had far too many icebergs hitting our Titanics .
In fact , I have a feeling that if Lehman Brothers was Lehman Brothers and Sisters , they might still be around .
While all the brothers were busy just being hyper-connected 24 / 7 , maybe a sister would have noticed the iceberg , because she would have woken up from a seven-and-a-half- or eight-hour sleep and have been able to see the big picture .
So as we are facing all the multiple crises in our world at the moment , what is good for us on a personal level , what 's going to bring more joy , gratitude , effectiveness in our lives and be the best for our own careers is also what is best for the world .
So I urge you to shut your eyes and discover the great ideas that lie inside us , to shut your engines and discover the power of sleep .
Thank you .
Ahn Trio : A modern take on piano , violin , cello
The three Ahn sisters breathe new life into the piano trio with their passionate musicmaking . At TEDWomen , they start with the bright and poppy " Skylife , " by David Balakrishnan , then play a gorgeous , slinky version of " Oblivion , " by Astor Piazzolla .
Angella Ahn : Thank you .
Thank you so much .
We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen , sharing our music with you .
What an exciting and inspiring event .
What you just heard is " Skylife " by David Balakrishnan .
We want to play you one more selection .
It 's by Astor Piazzolla , an Argentine composer .
And we talk about different ideas -- he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart .
This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart , beautiful music , wasn 't the most popular thing in the classical music world .
It was more atonal and twelve-tone .
And he insisted on beautiful music .
So this is " Oblivion " by Astor Piazzolla .
Thank you .
Arthur Benjamin : The magic of Fibonacci numbers
Math is logical , functional and just ... awesome . Mathemagician Arthur Benjamin explores hidden properties of that weird and wonderful set of numbers , the Fibonacci series .
So why do we learn mathematics ?
Essentially , for three reasons : calculation , application , and last , and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it , inspiration .
Mathematics is the science of patterns , and we study it to learn how to think logically , critically and creatively , but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated , and when our students ask , " Why are we learning this ? "
then they often hear that they 'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test .
But wouldn 't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind ?
Now , I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen , so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers , the Fibonacci numbers .
Yeah ! I already have Fibonacci fans here .
That 's great .
Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways .
From the standpoint of calculation , they 're as easy to understand as one plus one , which is two .
Then one plus two is three , two plus three is five , three plus five is eight , and so on .
Indeed , the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa , and these numbers appear in his book " Liber Abaci , " which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today .
In terms of applications , Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often .
The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number , or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well .
In fact , there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers , but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display .
Let me show you one of my favorites .
Suppose you like to square numbers , and frankly , who doesn 't ?
Let 's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers .
So one squared is one , two squared is four , three squared is nine , five squared is 25 , and so on .
Now , it 's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers , you get the next Fibonacci number . Right ?
That 's how they 're created .
But you wouldn 't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together .
But check this out .
One plus one gives us two , and one plus four gives us five .
And four plus nine is 13 , nine plus 25 is 34 , and yes , the pattern continues .
In fact , here 's another one .
Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers .
Let 's see what we get there .
So one plus one plus four is six .
Add nine to that , we get 15 .
Add 25 , we get 40 .
Add 64 , we get 104 .
Now look at those numbers .
Those are not Fibonacci numbers , but if you look at them closely , you 'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them .
Do you see it ? I 'll show it to you .
Six is two times three , 15 is three times five , 40 is five times eight , two , three , five , eight , who do we appreciate ?
Fibonacci ! Of course .
Now , as much fun as it is to discover these patterns , it 's even more satisfying to understand why they are true .
Let 's look at that last equation .
Why should the squares of one , one , two , three , five and eight add up to eight times 13 ?
I 'll show you by drawing a simple picture .
We 'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square .
Together , they form a one-by-two rectangle .
Beneath that , I 'll put a two-by-two square , and next to that , a three-by-three square , beneath that , a five-by-five square , and then an eight-by-eight square , creating one giant rectangle , right ?
Now let me ask you a simple question : what is the area of the rectangle ?
Well , on the one hand , it 's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it , right ?
Just as we created it .
It 's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared . Right ?
That 's the area .
On the other hand , because it 's a rectangle , the area is equal to its height times its base , and the height is clearly eight , and the base is five plus eight , which is the next Fibonacci number , 13 . Right ?
So the area is also eight times 13 .
Since we 've correctly calculated the area two different ways , they have to be the same number , and that 's why the squares of one , one , two , three , five and eight add up to eight times 13 .
Now , if we continue this process , we 'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21 , 21 by 34 , and so on .
Now check this out .
If you divide 13 by eight , you get 1.625 .
And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number , then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618 , known to many people as the Golden Ratio , a number which has fascinated mathematicians , scientists and artists for centuries .
Now , I show all this to you because , like so much of mathematics , there 's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools .
We spend lots of time learning about calculation , but let 's not forget about application , including , perhaps , the most important application of all , learning how to think .
If I could summarize this in one sentence , it would be this : Mathematics is not just solving for x , it 's also figuring out why .
Thank you very much .
Don Tapscott : Four principles for the open world
The recent generations have been bathed in connecting technology from birth , says futurist Don Tapscott , and as a result the world is transforming into one that is far more open and transparent . In this inspiring talk , he lists the four core principles that show how this open world can be a far better place .
Openness . It 's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities .
Open-ended , open hearth , open source , open door policy , open bar .
And everywhere the world is opening up , and it 's a good thing .
Why is this happening ?
The technology revolution is opening the world .
Yesterday 's Internet was a platform for the presentation of content .
The Internet of today is a platform for computation .
The Internet is becoming a giant global computer , and every time you go on it , you upload a video , you do a Google search , you remix something , you 're programming this big global computer that we all share .
Humanity is building a machine , and this enables us to collaborate in new ways .
Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis .
Now a new generation is opening up the world as well .
I started studying kids about 15 years ago , -- so actually 20 years ago now -- and I noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology , and at first I thought , " My children are prodigies ! "
But then I noticed all their friends were like them , so that was a bad theory .
So I 've started working with a few hundred kids , and I came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age , to be bathed in bits .
I call them the Net Generation .
I said , these kids are different .
They have no fear of technology , because it 's not there .
It 's like the air .
It 's sort of like , I have no fear of a refrigerator .
And — And there 's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives .
I 'm a digital immigrant .
I had to learn the language .
The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well .
Our opaque institutions from the Industrial Age , everything from old models of the corporation , government , media , Wall Street , are in various stages of being stalled or frozen or in atrophy or even failing , and this is now creating a burning platform in the world .
I mean , think about Wall Street .
The core modus operandi of Wall Street almost brought down global capitalism .
Now , you know the idea of a burning platform , that you 're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different , perhaps something radically different .
And we need to change and open up all of our institutions .
So this technology push , a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up .
Now , I think , in fact , we 're at a turning point in human history , where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles .
Now , what is openness ?
Well , as it turns out , openness has a number of different meanings , and for each there 's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization .
The first is collaboration .
Now , this is openness in the sense of the boundaries of organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open .
The guy in the picture here , I 'll tell you his story .
His name is Rob McEwen .
I 'd like to say , " I have this think tank , we scour the world for amazing case studies . "
The reason I know this story is because he 's my neighbor .
He actually moved across the street from us , and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors , and he says , " You 're Don Tapscott .
I 've read some of your books . "
I said , " Great . What do you do ? "
And he says , " Well I used to be a banker and now I 'm a gold miner . "
And he tells me this amazing story .
He takes over this gold mine , and his geologists can 't tell him where the gold is .
He gives them more money for geological data , they come back , they can 't tell him where to go into production .
After a few years , he 's so frustrated he 's ready to give up , but he has an epiphany one day .
He wonders , " If my geologists don 't know where the gold is , maybe somebody else does . "
So he does a " radical " thing .
He takes his geological data , he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet called the Goldcorp Challenge .
It 's basically half a million dollars in prize money for anybody who can tell me , do I have any gold , and if so , where is it ?
He gets submissions from all around the world .
They use techniques that he 's never heard of , and for his half a million dollars in prize money , Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold .
The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars , and I can tell you , because he 's my neighbor , he 's a happy camper .
You know , conventional wisdom says talent is inside , right ?
Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night .
He viewed talent differently .
He wondered , who are their peers ?
He should have fired his geology department , but he didn 't .
You know , some of the best submissions didn 't come from geologists .
They came from computer scientists , engineers .
The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is .
He helped us understand that social media 's becoming social production .
It 's not about hooking up online .
This is a new means of production in the making .
And this Ideagora that he created , an open market , agora , for uniquely qualified minds , was part of a change , a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations , and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate , to create goods and services , to engage with the rest of the world , in terms of government , how we create public value .
Openness is about collaboration .
Now secondly , openness is about transparency .
This is different . Here , we 're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations : employees , customers , business partners , shareholders , and so on .
And everywhere , our institutions are becoming naked .
People are all bent out of shape about WikiLeaks , but that 's just the tip of the iceberg .
You see , people at their fingertips now , everybody , not just Julian Assange , have these powerful tools for finding out what 's going on , scrutinizing , informing others , and even organizing collective responses .
Institutions are becoming naked , and if you 're going to be naked , well , there 's some corollaries that flow from that .
I mean , one is , fitness is no longer optional .
You know ? Or if you 're going to be naked , you 'd better get buff .
Now , by buff I mean , you need to have good value , because value is evidenced like never before .
You say you have good products .
They 'd better be good .
But you also need to have values .
You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization , because if you don 't , you 'll be unable to build trust , and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world .
So this is good . It 's not bad .
Sunlight is the best disinfectant .
And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world .
Now , the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing .
Now this is different than transparency .
Transparency is about the communication of information .
Sharing is about giving up assets , intellectual property .
And there are all kinds of famous stories about this .
IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement , and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff .
Now , conventional wisdom says , " Well , hey , our intellectual property belongs to us , and if someone tries to infringe it , we 're going to get out our lawyers and we 're going to sue them . "
Well , it didn 't work so well for the record labels , did it ?
I mean , they took — They had a technology disruption , and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that , they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse .
So we need to think differently about intellectual property .
I 'll give you an example .
The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble .
First of all , there aren 't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline , and this is a big problem for human health , and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem , that they 're about to fall off something called the patent cliff .
Do you know about this ?
They 're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months .
And what are you going to do , like , cut back on paper clips or something ? No .
We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research .
The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons . They need to start sharing precompetitive research .
They need to start sharing clinical trial data , and in doing so , create a rising tide that could lift all boats , not just for the industry but for humanity .
Now , the fourth meaning of openness , and corresponding principle , is about empowerment .
And I 'm not talking about the motherhood sense here .
Knowledge and intelligence is power , and as it becomes more distributed , there 's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that 's underway in the world today .
The open world is bringing freedom .
Now , take the Arab Spring .
The debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled .
You know , one word : Tunisia .
And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too .
But in the Tunisian revolution , the new media didn 't cause the revolution ; it was caused by injustice .
Social media didn 't create the revolution ; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn 't want to be treated as subjects anymore .
But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government , it also drops the cost of dissent , of rebellion , and even insurrection in ways that people didn 't understand .
You know , during the Tunisian revolution , snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street .
So the students would take their mobile devices , take a picture , triangulate the location , send that picture to friendly military units , who 'd come in and take out the snipers .
You think that social media is about hooking up online ?
For these kids , it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers .
It was a tool of self-defense .
You know , as we speak today , young people are being killed in Syria , and up until three months ago , if you were injured on the street , an ambulance would pick you up , take you to the hospital , you 'd go in , say , with a broken leg , and you 'd come out with a bullet in your head .
So these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system , where what they did is they used Twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone 's injured , a car would show up , it would pick them up , take them to a makeshift medical clinic , where you 'd get medical treatment , as opposed to being executed .
So this is a time of great change .
Now , it 's not without its problems .
Up until two years ago , all revolutions in human history had a leadership , and when the old regime fell , the leadership and the organization would take power .
Well , these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum , and politics abhors a vacuum , and unsavory forces can fill that , typically the old regime , or extremists , or fundamentalist forces .
You can see this playing out today in Egypt .
But that doesn 't matter , because this is moving forward .
The train has left the station . The cat is out of the bag .
The horse is out of the barn . Help me out here , okay ?
The toothpaste is out of the tube .
I mean , we 're not putting this one back .
The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom .
I think , at the end of these four days , that you 'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one , and it 's towards openness .
If you go back a few hundred years , all around the world it was a very closed society .
It was agrarian , and the means of production and political system was called feudalism , and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility .
People didn 't know about things .
There was no concept of progress .
You were born , you lived your life and you died .
But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention , and , over time , the society opened up .
People started to learn about things , and when they did , the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled , or frozen , or failing .
It didn 't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge .
So we saw the Protestant Reformation .
Martin Luther called the printing press " God 's highest act of grace . "
The creation of a corporation , science , the university , eventually the Industrial Revolution , and it was all good .
But it came with a cost .
And now , once again , the technology genie is out of the bottle , but this time it 's different .
The printing press gave us access to the written word .
The Internet enables each of us to be a producer .
The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge .
The Internet gives us access , not just to information and knowledge , but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis .
To me , this is not an information age , it 's an age of networked intelligence .
It 's an age of vast promise , an age of collaboration , where the boundaries of our organizations are changing , of transparency , where sunlight is disinfecting civilization , an age of sharing and understanding the new power of the commons , and it 's an age of empowerment and of freedom .
Now , what I 'd like to do is , to close , to share with you some research that I 've been doing .
I 've tried to study all kinds of organizations to understand what the future might look like , but I 've been studying nature recently .
You know , bees come in swarms and fish come in schools .
Starlings , in the area around Edinburgh , in the moors of England , come in something called a murmuration , and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings of the birds , and throughout the day the starlings are out over a 20-mile radius sort of doing their starling thing .
And at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature , and it 's called a murmuration .
And scientists that have studied this have said they 've never seen an accident .
Now , this thing has a function .
It protects the birds .
You can see on the right here , there 's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds , and apparently this is a frightening thing if you 're a predator of starlings .
And there 's leadership , but there 's no one leader .
Now , is this some kind of fanciful analogy , or could we actually learn something from this ?
Well , the murmuration functions to record a number of principles , and they 're basically the principles that I have described to you today .
This is a huge collaboration .
It 's an openness , it 's a sharing of all kinds of information , not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on , but about food sources .
And there 's a real sense of interdependence , that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective .
Perhaps like we should understand that business can 't succeed in a world that 's failing .
Well , I look at this thing , and I get a lot of hope .
Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring , and you see something like this that 's underway .
And imagine , just consider this idea , if you would : What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass ?
Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge ?
Could we start to share our intelligence ?
Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create , perhaps , some kind of consciousness on a global basis ?
Well , if we could do this , we could attack some big problems in the world .
And I look at this thing , and , I don 't know , I get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller , networked , open world that our kids inherit might be a better one , and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited .
Let 's do this . Thank you .
Julian Treasure : The 4 ways sound affects us
Playing sound effects both pleasant and awful , Julian Treasure shows how sound affects us in four significant ways . Listen carefully for a shocking fact about noisy open-plan offices .
Over the next five minutes , my intention is to transform your relationship with sound .
Let me start with the observation that most of the sound around us is accidental , and much of it is unpleasant .
We stand on street corners , shouting over noise like this , and pretending that it doesn 't exist .
Well , this habit of suppressing sound has meant that our relationship with sound has become largely unconscious .
There are four major ways sound is affecting you all the time , and I 'd like to raise them in your consciousness today .
First is physiological .
Sorry about that . I 've just given you a shot of cortisol , your fight / flight hormone .
Sounds are affecting your hormone secretions all the time , but also your breathing , your heart rate -- which I just also did -- and your brainwaves .
It 's not just unpleasant sounds like that that do it .
This is surf .
It has the frequency of roughly 12 cycles per minute .
Most people find that very soothing , and , interestingly , 12 cycles per minute is roughly the frequency of the breathing of a sleeping human .
There is a deep resonance with being at rest .
We also associate it with being stress-free and on holiday .
The second way in which sound affects you is psychological .
Music is the most powerful form of sound that we know that affects our emotional state .
This is guaranteed to make most of you feel pretty sad if I leave it on .
Music is not the only kind of sound , however , which affects your emotions .
Natural sound can do that too .
Birdsong , for example , is a sound which most people find reassuring .
There is a reason for that . Over hundreds of thousands of years we 've learned that when the birds are singing , things are safe .
It 's when they stop you need to be worried .
The third way in which sound affects you is cognitively .
You can 't understand two people talking at once or in this case one person talking twice .
Try and listen to the other one .
We have a very small amount of bandwidth for processing auditory input , which is why noise like this -- -- is extremely damaging for productivity .
If you have to work in an open-plan office like this , your productivity is greatly reduced .
And whatever number you 're thinking of , it probably isn 't as bad as this .
You are one third as productive in open-plan offices as in quiet rooms .
And I have a tip for you . If you have to work in spaces like that , carry headphones with you , with a soothing sound like birdsong .
Put them on and your productivity goes back up to triple what it would be .
The fourth way in which sound affects us is behaviorally .
With all that other stuff going on , it would be amazing if our behavior didn 't change .
So , ask yourself : Is this person ever going to drive at a steady 28 miles per hour ? I don 't think so .
At the simplest , you move away from unpleasant sound and towards pleasant sounds .
So if I were to play this -- -- for more than a few seconds , you 'd feel uncomfortable ; for more than a few minutes , you 'd be leaving the room in droves .
For people who can 't get away from noise like that , it 's extremely damaging for their health .
And that 's not the only thing that bad sound damages .
Most retail sound is inappropriate and accidental , and even hostile , and it has a dramatic effect on sales .
For those of you who are retailers , you may want to look away before I show this slide .
They are losing up to 30 percent of their business with people leaving shops faster , or just turning around on the door .
We all have done it , leaving the area because the sound in there is so dreadful .
I want to spend just a moment talking about the model that we 've developed , which allows us to start at the top and look at the drivers of sound , analyze the soundscape and then predict the four outcomes I 've just talked about .
Or start at the bottom , and say what outcomes do we want , and then design a soundscape to have a desired effect .
At last we 've got some science we can apply .
And we 're in the business of designing soundscapes .
Just a word on music . Music is the most powerful sound there is , often inappropriately deployed .
It 's powerful for two reasons . You recognize it fast , and you associate it very powerfully .
I 'll give you two examples .
Most of you recognize that immediately .
The younger , maybe not .
And most of you associate that with something !
Now , those are one-second samples of music .
Music is very powerful . And unfortunately it 's veneering commercial spaces , often inappropriately .
I hope that 's going to change over the next few years .
Let me just talk about brands for a moment , because some of you run brands . Every brand is out there making sound right now .
There are eight expressions of a brand in sound .
They are all important . And every brand needs to have guidelines at the center .
I 'm glad to say that is starting to happen now .
You all recognize that one . This is the most-played tune in the world today .
1.8 billion times a day , that tune is played .
And it cost Nokia absolutely nothing .
Just leave you with four golden rules , for those of you who run businesses , for commercial sound .
First , make it congruent , pointing in the same direction as your visual communication .
That increases impact by over 1,100 percent .
If your sound is pointing the opposite direction , incongruent , you reduce impact by 86 percent .
That 's an order of magnitude , up or down .
This is important .
Secondly , make it appropriate to the situation .
Thirdly , make it valuable . Give people something with the sound .
Don 't just bombard them with stuff .
And , finally , test and test it again .
Sound is complex . There are many countervailing influences .
It can be a bit like a bowl of spaghetti : sometimes you just have to eat it and see what happens .
So I hope this talk has raised sound in your consciousness .
If you 're listening consciously , you can take control of the sound around you .
It 's good for your health . It 's good for your productivity .
If we all do that we move to a state that I like to think will be sound living in the world .
I 'm going to leave you with a little bit more birdsong .
I recommend at least five minutes a day , but there is no maximum dose .
Thank you for lending me your ears today .
Christopher McDougall : Are we born to run ?
Christopher McDougall explores the mysteries of the human desire to run . How did running help early humans survive -- and what urges from our ancient ancestors spur us on today ? McDougall tells the story of the marathoner with a heart of gold , the unlikely ultra-runner , and the hidden tribe in Mexico that runs to live .
Running -- it 's basically just right , left , right , left -- yeah ?
I mean , we 've been doing it for two million years , so it 's kind of arrogant to assume that I 've got something to say that hasn 't been said and performed better a long time ago .
But the cool thing about running , as I 've discovered , is that something bizarre happens in this activity all the time .
Case in point : A couple months ago , if you saw the New York City Marathon , I guarantee you , you saw something that no one has ever seen before .
An Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu turns up at the starting line .
She 's 37 years old , she hasn 't won a marathon of any kind in eight years , and a few months previously she almost died in childbirth .
Derartu Tulu was ready to hang it up and retire from the sport , but she decided she 'd go for broke and try for one last big payday in the marquee event , the New York City Marathon .
Except -- bad news for Derartu Tulu -- some other people had the same idea , including the Olympic gold medalist and Paula Radcliffe , who is a monster , the fastest woman marathoner in history by far .
Only 10 minutes off the men 's world record , Paula Radcliffe is essentially unbeatable .
That 's her competition .
The gun goes off , and she 's not even an underdog .
She 's under the underdogs .
But the under-underdog hangs tough , and 22 miles into a 26-mile race , there is Derartu Tulu up there with the lead pack .
Now this is when something really bizarre happens .
Paula Radcliffe , the one person who is sure to snatch the big paycheck out of Derartu Tulu 's under-underdog hands , suddenly grabs her leg and starts to fall back .
So we all know what to do in this situation , right ?
You give her a quick crack in the teeth with your elbow and blaze for the finish line .
Derartu Tulu ruins the script .
Instead of taking off , she falls back , and she grabs Paula Radcliffe , says , " Come on . Come with us . You can do it . "
So Paula Radcliffe , unfortunately , does it .
She catches up with the lead pack and is pushing toward the finish line .
But then she falls back again .
And the second time Derartu Tulu grabs her and tries to pull her .
And Paula Radcliffe at that point says , " I 'm done . Go . "
So that 's a fantastic story , and we all know how it ends .
She loses the check , but she goes home with something bigger and more important .
Except Derartu Tulu ruins the script again -- instead of losing , she blazes past the lead pack and wins , wins the New York City Marathon , goes home with a big fat check .
It 's a heartwarming story , but if you drill a little bit deeper , you 've got to sort of wonder about what exactly was going on there .
When you have two outliers in one organism , it 's not a coincidence .
When you have someone who is more competitive and more compassionate than anybody else in the race , again , it 's not a coincidence .
You show me a creature with webbed feet and gills ; somehow water 's involved .
Someone with that kind of heart , there 's some kind of connection there .
And the answer to it , I think , can be found down in the Copper Canyons of Mexico , where there 's a tribe , a reclusive tribe , called the Tarahumara Indians .
Now the Tarahumara are remarkable for three things .
Number one is , they have been living essentially unchanged for the past 400 years .
When the conquistadors arrived in North America you had two choices : you either fight back and engage or you could take off .
The Mayans and Aztecs engaged , which is why there are very few Mayans and Aztecs .
The Tarahumara had a different strategy .
They took off and hid in this labyrinthine , networking , spiderwebbing system of canyons called the Copper Canyons , and there they remained since the 1600s -- essentially the same way they 've always been .
The second thing remarkable about the Tarahumara is , deep into old age -- 70 to 80 years old -- these guys aren 't running marathons ; they 're running mega-marathons .
They 're not doing 26 miles ; they 're doing 100 , 150 miles at a time , and apparently without injury , without problems .
The last thing that 's remarkable about the Tarahumara is that all the things that we 're going to be talking about today , all the things that we 're trying to come up with using all of our technology and brain power to solve -- things like heart disease and cholesterol and cancer and crime and warfare and violence and clinical depression -- all this stuff , the Tarahumara don 't know what you 're talking about .
They are free from all of these modern ailments .
So what 's the connection ?
Again , we 're talking about outliers -- there 's got to be some kind of cause and effect there .
Well , there are teams of scientists at Harvard and the University of Utah that are bending their brains to try to figure out what the Tarahumara have known forever .
They 're trying to solve those same kinds of mysteries .
And once again , a mystery wrapped inside of a mystery -- perhaps the key to Derartu Tulu and the Tarahumara is wrapped in three other mysteries , which go like this : three things -- if you have the answer , come up and take the microphone , because nobody else knows the answer .
And if you know it , then you are smarter than anybody else on planet Earth .
Mystery number one is this : Two million years ago the human brain exploded in size .
Australopithecus had a tiny little pea brain .
Suddenly humans show up -- Homo erectus -- big , old melon-head .
To have a brain of that size , you need to have a source of condensed caloric energy .
In other words , early humans are eating dead animals -- no argument , that 's a fact .
The only problem is , the first edged weapons only appeared about 200,000 years ago .
So , somehow , for nearly two million years , we are killing animals without any weapons .
Now we 're not using our strength because we are the biggest sissies in the jungle .
Every other animal is stronger than we are -- they have fangs , they have claws , they have nimbleness , they have speed .
We think Usain Bolt is fast . Usain Bolt can get his ass kicked by a squirrel .
We 're not fast .
That would be an Olympic event : turn a squirrel loose -- whoever catches the squirrel , you get a gold medal .
So no weapons , no speed , no strength , no fangs , no claws -- how were we killing these animals ? Mystery number one .
Mystery number two : Women have been in the Olympics for quite some time now , but one thing that 's remarkable about all women sprinters -- they all suck ; they 're terrible .
There 's not a fast woman on the planet and there never has been .
The fastest woman to ever run a mile did it in 4 : 15 .
I could throw a rock and hit a high school boy who can run faster than 4 : 15 .
For some reason you guys are just really slow .
But you get to the marathon we were just talking about -- you guys have only been allowed to run the marathon for 20 years .
Because , prior to the 1980s , medical science said that if a woman tried to run 26 miles -- does anyone know what would happen if you tried to run 26 miles , why you were banned from the marathon before the 1980s ?
Her uterus would be torn .
Yes . You would have torn reproductive organs .
The uterus would fall out , literally fall out of the body .
Now I 've been to a lot of marathons , and I 've yet to see any ...
So it 's only been 20 years that women have been allowed to run the marathon .
In that very short learning curve , you guys have gone from broken organs up to the fact that you 're only 10 minutes off the male world record .
Then you go beyond 26 miles , into the distance that medical science also told us would be fatal to humans -- remember Pheidippides died when he ran 26 miles -- you get to 50 and 100 miles , and suddenly it 's a different game .
You can take a runner like Ann Trason , or Nikki Kimball , or Jenn Shelton , you put them in a race of 50 or 100 miles against anybody in the world and it 's a coin toss who 's going to win .
I 'll give you an example .
A couple years ago , Emily Baer signed up for a race called the Hardrock 100 , which tells you all you need to know about the race .
They give you 48 hours to finish this race .
Well Emily Baer -- 500 runners -- she finishes in eighth place , in the top 10 , even though she stopped at all the aid stations to breastfeed her baby during the race -- and yet , beat 492 other people .
So why is it that women get stronger as distances get longer ?
The third mystery is this : At the University of Utah , they started tracking finishing times for people running the marathon .
And what they found is that , if you start running the marathon at age 19 , you will get progressively faster , year by year , until you reach your peak at age 27 .
And then after that , you succumb to the rigors of time .
And you 'll get slower and slower , until eventually you 're back to running the same speed you were at age 19 .
So about seven years , eight years to reach your peak , and then gradually you fall off your peak , until you go back to the starting point .
You would think it might take eight years to go back to the same speed , maybe 10 years -- no , it 's 45 years .
64-year-old men and women are running as fast as they were at age 19 .
Now I defy you to come up with any other physical activity -- and please don 't say golf -- something that actually is hard -- where geriatrics are performing as well as they did as teenagers .
So you have these three mysteries .
Is there one piece in the puzzle which might wrap all these things up ?
You 've got to be really careful any time someone looks back in prehistory and tries to give you some sort of global answer , because , it being prehistory , you can say whatever the hell you want and get away with it .
But I 'll submit this to you : If you put one piece in the middle of this jigsaw puzzle , suddenly it all starts to form a coherent picture .
If you wonder , why it is the Tarahumara don 't fight and don 't die of heart disease , why a poor Ethiopian woman named Derartu Tulu can be the most compassionate and yet the most competitive , and why we somehow were able to find food without weapons , perhaps it 's because humans , as much as we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe , actually evolved as nothing more than a pack of hunting dogs .
Maybe we evolved as a hunting pack animal .
Because the one advantage we have in the wilderness -- again , it 's not our fangs and our claws and our speed -- the only thing we do really , really well is sweat .
We 're really good at being sweaty and smelly .
Better than any other mammal on Earth , we can sweat really well .
But the advantage of that little bit of social discomfort is the fact that , when it comes to running under hot heat for long distances , we 're superb , we 're the best on the planet .
You take a horse on a hot day , and after about five or six miles , that horse has a choice .
It 's either going to breathe or it 's going to cool off , but it ain 't doing both -- we can .
So what if we evolved as hunting pack animals ?
What if the only natural advantage we had in the world was the fact that we could get together as a group , go out there on that African Savannah , pick out an antelope and go out as a pack and run that thing to death ?
That 's all we could do .
We could run really far on a hot day .
Well if that 's true , a couple other things had to be true as well .
The key to being part of a hunting pack is the word " pack . "
If you go out by yourself , and you try to chase an antelope , I guarantee you there 's going to be two cadavers out there in the Savannah .
You need a pack to pull together .
You need to have those 64- , 65-year-olds who have been doing this for a long time to understand which antelope you 're actually trying to catch .
The herd explodes and it gathers back again .
Those expert trackers have got to be part of the pack .
They can 't be 10 miles behind .
You need to have the women and the adolescents there because the two times in your life you most benefit from animal protein is when you are a nursing mother and a developing adolescent .
It makes no sense to have the antelope over there dead and the people who want to eat it 50 miles away .
They need to be part of the pack .
You need to have those 27-year-old studs at the peak of their powers ready to drop the kill , and you need to have those teenagers there who are learning the whole thing all involved .
The pack stays together .
Another thing that has to be true about this pack : this pack cannot be really materialistic .
You can 't be hauling all your crap around , trying to chase the antelope .
You can 't be a pissed-off pack . You can 't be bearing grudges , like , " I 'm not chasing that guy 's antelope .
He pissed me off . Let him go chase his own antelope . "
The pack has got to be able to swallow its ego , be cooperative and pull together .
What you end up with , in other words , is a culture remarkably similar to the Tarahumara -- a tribe that has remained unchanged since the Stone Age .
It 's a really compelling argument that maybe the Tarahumara are doing exactly what all of us had done for two million years , that it 's us in modern times who have sort of gone off the path .
You know , we look at running as this kind of alien , foreign thing , this punishment you 've got to do because you ate pizza the night before .
But maybe it 's something different .
Maybe we 're the ones who have taken this natural advantage we had and we spoiled it .
How do we spoil it ? Well how do we spoil anything ?
We try to cash in on it .
We try to can it and package it and make it " better " and sell it to people .
And what happened was we started creating these fancy cushioned things , which can make running " better , " called running shoes .
The reason I get personally pissed-off about running shoes is because I bought a million of them and I kept getting hurt .
And I think that , if anybody in here runs -- and I just had a conversation with Carol ; we talked for two minutes backstage , and she 's talking about plantar fasciitis .
You talk to a runner , I guarantee , within 30 seconds , the conversation turns to injury .
So if humans evolved as runners , if that 's our one natural advantage , why are we so bad at it ? Why do we keep getting hurt ?
Curious thing about running and running injuries is that the running injury is new to our time .
If you read folklore and mythology , any kind of myths , any kind of tall tales , running is always associated with freedom and vitality and youthfulness and eternal vigor .
It 's only in our lifetime that running has become associated with fear and pain .
Geronimo used to say that , " My only friends are my legs . I only trust my legs . "
That 's because an Apache triathlon used to be you 'd run 50 miles across the desert , engage in hand-to-hand combat , steal a bunch of horses and slap leather for home .
Geronimo was never saying , " Ah , you know something , my achilles -- I 'm tapering . I got to take this week off , " or " I need to cross-train .
I didn 't do yoga . I 'm not ready . "
Humans ran and ran all the time .
We are here today . We have our digital technology .
All of our science comes from the fact that our ancestors were able to do something extraordinary every day , which was just rely on their naked feet and legs to run long distances .
So how do we get back to that again ?
Well , I would submit to you the first thing is get rid of all packaging , all the sales , all the marketing .
Get rid of all the stinking running shoes .
Stop focusing on urban marathons , which , if you do four hours , you suck .
If you do 3 : 59 : 59 , you 're awesome , because you qualified for another race .
We need to get back to that sense of playfulness and joyfulness and , I would say , nakedness , that has made the Tarahumara one of the healthiest and serene cultures in our time .
So what 's the benefit ? So what ?
So you burn off the Haagen-Dazs from the night before ?
But maybe there 's another benefit there as well .
Without getting a little too extreme about this , imagine a world where everybody could go out their door and engage in the kind of exercise that 's going to make them more relaxed , more serene , more healthy , burn off stress -- where you don 't come back into your office a raging maniac anymore , where you don 't go back home with a lot of stress on top of you again .
Maybe there 's something between what we are today and what the Tarahumara have always been .
I don 't say let 's go back to the Copper Canyons and live on corn and maize , which is the Tarahumara 's preferred diet , but maybe there 's somewhere in between .
And if we find that thing , maybe there is a big fat Nobel Prize out there .
Because if somebody could find a way to restore that natural ability that we all enjoyed for most of our existence , up until the 1970s or so , the benefits , social and physical and political and mental , could be astounding .
So what I 've been seeing today is there is a growing subculture of barefoot runners , people who got rid of their shoes .
And what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes , you get rid of the stress , you get rid of the injuries and the ailments .
And what you find is something the Tarahumara have known for a very long time , that this can be a whole lot of fun .
I 've experienced it personally myself .
I was injured all my life , and then in my early 40s I got rid of my shoes and my running ailments have gone away too .
So hopefully it 's something we can all benefit from .
And I appreciate you guys listening to this story . Thanks very much .
Jessa Gamble : Our natural sleep cycle
In today 's world , balancing school , work , kids and more , most of us can only hope for the recommended eight hours of sleep . Examining the science behind our body 's internal clock , Jessa Gamble reveals the surprising and substantial program of rest we should be observing .
Let 's start with day and night .
Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness , light and then darkness .
And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light .
These are chemical clocks , and they 're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell .
I 'll give you an example -- if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach , and you fly it all the way across the continent , and you drop it into a sloped cage , it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores , and it 'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away .
It 'll do this for weeks , until it kind of gradually loses the plot .
And it 's incredible to watch , but there 's nothing psychic or paranormal going on ; it 's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond , usually , with what 's going on around it .
So , we have this ability as well .
And in humans , we call it the " body clock . "
You can see this most clearly when you take away someone 's watch and you shut them into a bunker , deep underground , for a couple of months .
People actually volunteer for this , and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole .
So , no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be , they all show the same thing .
They get up just a little bit later every day -- say 15 minutes or so -- and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks .
And so , in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks , rather than somehow sensing the day outside .
So fine , we have a body clock , and it turns out that it 's incredibly important in our lives .
It 's a huge driver for culture and I think that it 's the most underrated force on our behavior .
We evolved as a species near the equator , and so we 're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness .
But of course , we 've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada , where I live , we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter .
So the culture , the northern aboriginal culture , traditionally has been highly seasonal .
In winter , there 's a lot of sleeping going on ; you enjoy your family life inside .
And in summer , it 's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours , very active .
So , what would our natural rhythm look like ?
What would our sleeping patterns be Well , it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all , they sleep twice every night .
They go to bed around 8 : 00 p.m.
until midnight and then again , they sleep from about 2 : 00 a.m. until sunrise .
And in-between , they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed .
And during this time , there 's a surge of prolactin , the likes of which a modern day never sees .
The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime , that they realize they 're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives .
So , cut to the modern day .
We 're living in a culture of jet lag , global travel , 24-hour business , shift work .
And you know , our modern ways of doing things have their advantages , but I believe we should understand the costs .
Thank you .
Maajid Nawaz : A global culture to fight extremism
Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold ? Maajid Nawaz , a former Islamist extremist , asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia .
Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade ?
Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around ?
Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought , " How could we have predicted that ? "
or " How could we have better prepared for that ? "
Well my personal story , my personal journey , what brings me to the TED stage here today , is a demonstration of exactly what 's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades , at least , and beyond .
I want to share some of that story with you , but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies .
So let me begin by first of all giving a very , very brief history of time , if I may indulge .
In medieval societies there were defined allegiances .
An identity was defined primarily by religion .
And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity .
So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity , and the nation-state reflected that .
In the age of globalization , we moved on .
I call it the era of citizenship -- where people could be from multi-racial , multi-ethnic backgrounds , but all be equal as citizens in a state .
You could be American-Italian ; you could be American-Irish ; you could be British-Pakistani .
But I believe now that we 're moving into a new age , and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as " the age of behavior . "
How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances , where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives .
And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave .
Now this is not all necessarily good news , because it 's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love .
But actually it 's my belief that the people who 've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior , up until now , up until recent times , up until the last six months , the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances , using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies , those who 've been benefiting from this have been extremists .
And that 's something which I 'd like to elaborate on .
If we look at Islamists , if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists , one thing they 've been very good at , one thing that they 've actually been exceeding in , is communicating across borders , using technologies to organize themselves , to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena .
Now I should know , because for 13 years of my life , I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization .
And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders , and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith , and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world .
And my story , my personal story , is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I 'm attempting to elaborate upon here .
I was , by the way -- I 'm an Essex lad , born and raised in Essex in the U.K.
Anyone who 's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex .
But having been born in Essex , at the age of 16 , I joined an organization .
At the age of 17 , I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization .
At the age of 19 , I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K.
At the age of 21 , I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan .
At the age of 22 , I was co-founding this organization in Denmark .
By the age of 24 , I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt , being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments , being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience .
Now that journey , and what took me from Essex all the way across the world -- by the way , we were laughing at democratic activists .
We felt they were from the age of yesteryear .
We felt that they were out of date .
I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used .
I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected .
Eventually I was detected , of course , in Egypt .
But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state .
The age of behavior : where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances .
So as I said , we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it .
And it 's not just Islamist extremists that did this .
But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late , far-right fascism is also on the rise .
A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it 's transnational .
And the consequences that this is having is that it 's affecting the political climate across Europe .
What 's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms , individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another , have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become , or are becoming , mainstream .
Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world .
If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late , you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics , yet the phenomenon is transnational .
In certain countries , mosque minarets are being banned .
In others , headscarves are being banned .
In others , kosher and halal meat are being banned , as we speak .
And on the flip side , we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies .
And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream .
Now that never would have been possible before .
They would have felt isolated , until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon .
Where does that leave democracy aspirants ?
Well I believe they 're getting left far behind .
And I 'll give you an example here at this stage .
If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot : there 's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki .
As an American citizen , ethnically a Yemeni , in hiding currently in Yemen , who inspired a Nigerian , son of the head of Nigeria 's national bank .
This Nigerian student studied in London , trained in Yemen , boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America .
In the meanwhile , the Old mentality with a capital O , was represented by his father , the head of the Nigerian bank , warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack , and this warning fell on deaf ears .
The Old mentality with a capital O , as represented by the nation-state , not yet fully into the age of behavior , not recognizing the power of transnational social movements , got left behind .
And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America .
Again with the example of the far right : that we find , ironically , xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization .
So why are they succeeding ?
And why are democracy aspirants falling behind ?
Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this .
And a social movement is comprised , in my view , it 's comprised of four main characteristics .
It 's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders .
I 'll talk you through one example , and that 's the example that everyone here will be aware of , and that 's the example of Al-Qaeda .
If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda , that 's something that comes to your mind immediately .
If I ask you to think of their narratives -- the West being at war with Islam , the need to defend Islam against the West -- these narratives , they come to your mind immediately .
Incidentally , the difference between ideas and narratives : the idea is the cause that one believes in ; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause -- the propaganda , if you like , of the cause .
So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately .
If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders , they come to your mind immediately .
One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently .
So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately .
And that 's the power of social movements .
They 're transnational , and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders .
However , if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan , and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today , you 'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto .
Which means , by definition , that particular leader no longer exists .
One of the problems we 're facing is , in my view , that there are no globalized , youth-led , grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies .
There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda , without the terrorism , for democracy across Muslim-majority societies .
There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground .
So that begs the next question .
Why is it that extremist organizations , whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism -- Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society -- why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way , whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind ?
And I believe that 's for four reasons .
I believe , number one , it 's complacency .
Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power , or have societies that are leading globalized , powerful societies , powerful countries .
And that level of complacency means they don 't feel the need to advocate for that culture .
The second , I believe , is political correctness .
That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists .
Yet actually , whenever we talk about human rights , we do say that human rights are universal .
But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism .
To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we 've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism .
And the third , democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice , meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party , but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship .
And then you have a third party saying , " Vote for us ; we 'll establish a theocracy . "
So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies .
is , when those parties are elected , and inevitably they fail , or inevitably they make political mistakes , democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes .
And then people say , " We 've tried democracy . It doesn 't really work .
Let 's bring the military back again . "
And the fourth reason , I believe , is what I 've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance .
What I mean by that is , if the world superpower today was a communist , it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism , than it is today with the world superpower being America , occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals .
So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice , not merely as a political choice .
When talking about those reasons , let 's break down certain preconceptions .
Is it just about grievances ?
Is it just about a lack of education ?
Well statistically , the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated .
Statistically , they are educated , on average , above the education levels of Western society .
Anecdotally , we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor , well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia .
His deputy , Ayman al-Zawahiri , was a pediatrician -- not an ill-educated man .
International aid and development has been going on for years , but extremism in those societies , in many of those societies , has been on the rise .
And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground , in addition to international aid , in addition to education , in addition to health .
Not exclusive to these things , but in addition to them , is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground .
And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down .
Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down .
Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations , for decades , have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots .
They 've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots , and we 've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism .
Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy , rather than for a democratic uprising .
Because since pre-partition , they 've been building demand for their ideology on the ground .
And what 's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections .
But without freedom of speech , you can 't have free and fair elections .
Without human rights , you don 't have the protection granted to you to campaign .
Without freedom of belief , you don 't have the right to join organizations .
So what 's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture .
What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier , where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy .
Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level , rather than merely on a political level , a level above politics -- movements that are not political parties , but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture .
What we 'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here -- the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy , not for a democracy .
But to get to that stage , where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric , but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship -- i.e. you 're voting in a democracy , in an existing democracy , and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box .
To get to that stage , we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground .
Now to conclude , how does that happen ?
Well , Egypt is a good starting point .
The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning .
But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me .
What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal , and that was to remove the leader .
We need to move one step beyond that now .
We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions , loosely based political coalitions , to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground .
Because it 's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator .
That doesn 't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values .
But generally , the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region , the Middle East and North Africa region .
So when Arab socialism started in Egypt , it spread across the region .
In the ' 80s and ' 90s when Islamism started in the region , it spread across the MENA region as a whole .
And the aspiration that we have at the moment -- as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism -- is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that .
But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture .
And we 've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi , where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture .
And it 's with that thought that I 'll end .
And my time is up , and thank you for your time .
Susan Lim : Transplant cells , not organs
Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia . But a moral concern with transplants led her to look further , and to ask : Could we be transplanting cells , not whole organs ? At the INK Conference , she talks through her new research , discovering healing cells in some surprising places .
So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers : Thomas Starzl , who performed the world 's first successful liver transplant in 1967 , and Sir Roy Calne , who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K.
in the following year .
I returned to Singapore and , in 1990 , performed Asia 's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure , but against all odds .
Now when I look back , the transplant was actually the easiest part .
Next , raising the money to fund the procedure .
But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators -- a matter which was debated in the parliament -- that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country .
But 20 years on , my patient , Surinder , is Asia 's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date .
And perhaps more important , I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son .
But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate .
The truth is , there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around .
As the demand for donor organs continues to rise , in large part due to the aging population , the supply has remained relatively constant .
In the United States alone , 100,000 men , women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs , and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs .
The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation .
And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living , related donors -- relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ , like a split liver graft , to a relative or loved one .
But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs , the gift of life was then extended from living , related donors to now living , unrelated donors .
And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy .
How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from , for example , a submissive spouse , an in-law , a servant , a slave , an employee ?
Where and how can we draw the line ?
In my part of the world , too many people live below the poverty line .
And in some areas , the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living , unrelated donors .
Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant , I received my next assignment , and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners .
I was also pregnant at the time .
Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman 's life .
But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts -- thoughts of walking through the prison 's high-security death row , as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room .
And at each time , I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners ' eyes follow me .
And for two years , I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4 : 30 am on a Friday morning , driving to the prison , getting down , gloved and scrubbed , ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner , remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon .
No doubt , I was informed , the consent had been obtained .
But , in my life , the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict -- conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk .
In my team , the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience .
Some of us may have been sublimated , but really none of us remained the same .
I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos .
And in my mind , I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence .
It made me wonder if there could be a better way -- a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide .
Now just about that time , the practice of surgery evolved from big to small , from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures , tiny incisions .
And in transplantation , concepts shifted from whole organs to cells .
In 1988 , at the University of Minnesota , I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants .
I witnessed the technical difficulty .
And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells .
I thought to myself , why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas -- the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes -- and transplant these cells ? -- technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ .
And at that time , stem cell research had gained momentum , following the isolation of the world 's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s .
The observation that stem cells , as master cells , could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types -- heart cells , liver cells , pancreatic islet cells -- captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public .
I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology , and this inspired a shift in my mindset , from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells .
And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants .
Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells .
Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage , chiefly because of their pluripotency -- that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types .
But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells -- the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos -- has encouraged research into other types of stem cells .
Now to the ridicule of my colleagues , I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells , adipose tissue , or fat , yes fat -- nowadays available in abundant supply -- you and I , I think , would be very happy to get rid of anyway .
Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells .
And adult stem cells are found in you and me -- in our blood , in our bone marrow , in our fat , our skin and other organs .
And as it turns out , fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells .
But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells .
And here is the limitation : adult stem cells are mature cells , and , like mature human beings , these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types , as embryonic stem cells [ can ] .
But in 2007 , two remarkable individuals , Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States , made an astounding discovery .
They discovered that adult cells , taken from you and me , could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells , which they termed IPS cells , or induced pluripotent stem cells .
And so guess what , scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells -- aging adult cells from you and me -- they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells .
And in our lab , we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells -- cells that we may use to then form other , more specialized , cells , which one day may be used as cell transplants .
If this research is successful , it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos .
Indeed , there is a lot of hype , but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions .
Heart disease , stroke , diabetes , spinal cord injury , muscular dystrophy , retinal eye diseases -- are any of these conditions relevant , personally , to you ?
In May 2006 , something horrible happened to me .
I was about to start a robotic operation , but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room , I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness .
Earlier that week , I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing -- yes , I fell .
And I started to see floaters and stars , which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure .
What happened to me might have been catastrophic , if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access .
And I had my vision restored , but not before a prolonged period of convalescence -- three months -- in a head down position .
This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients , and especially those with retinal diseases .
37 million people worldwide are blind , and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision .
Stem cell-derived retinal transplants , now in a research phase , may one day restore vision , or part vision , to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide .
Indeed , we live in both challenging as well as exciting times .
As the world population ages , scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells .
It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured , our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation .
And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue .
Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body , or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver .
As we speak , there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases .
What lies ahead ?
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide .
1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly .
4.8 million suffer cardiac failure .
Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function .
There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease .
While still in a research phase , stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology .
Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings -- small , incremental steps , cells rather than organs , repair rather than replacement .
Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs .
Powerful new technologies always present enigmas .
As we speak , the world 's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval .
And in the U.K. , neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial .
The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers .
Each one has his story .
My story has been about my journey from organs to cells -- a journey through controversy , inspired by hope -- hope that , as we age , you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life .
Thank you .
Arvind Gupta : Turning trash into toys for learning
At the INK Conference , Arvind Gupta shares simple yet stunning plans for turning trash into seriously entertaining , well-designed toys that kids can build themselves -- while learning basic principles of science and design .
My name is Arvind Gupta , and I 'm a toymaker .
I 've been making toys for the last 30 years .
The early ' 70s , I was in college .
It was a very revolutionary time .
It was a political ferment , so to say -- students out in the streets of Paris , revolting against authority .
America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement , the Civil Rights movement .
In India , we had the Naxalite movement , the [ unclear ] movement .
But you know , when there is a political churning of society , it unleashes a lot of energy .
The National Movement of India was testimony to that .
Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement .
Now in the early ' 70s , one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools .
There was a person , Anil Sadgopal , did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India 's cutting-edge research institute , the TIFR .
At 31 , he was not able to relate the kind of [ unclear ] research , which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people .
So he designed and went and started a village science program .
Many people were inspired by this .
The slogan of the early ' 70s was " Go to the people .
Live with them ; love them .
Start from what they know . Build on what they have . "
This was kind of the defining slogan .
Well I took one year .
I joined Telco , made TATA trucks , pretty close to Pune .
I worked there for two years , and I realized that I was not born to make trucks .
Often one doesn 't know what one wants to do , but it 's good enough to know what you don 't want to do .
So I took one year off , and I went to this village science program .
And it was a turning point .
It was a very small village -- a weekly bazaar where people , just once in a week , they put in all the vats .
So I said , " I 'm going to spend a year over here . "
So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside .
And one thing which I found was this black rubber .
This is called a cycle valve tube .
When you pump in air in a bicycle , you use a bit of this .
And some of these models -- so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube , you can put two matchsticks inside this , and you make a flexible joint .
It 's a joint of tubes . You start by teaching angles -- an acute angle , a right angle , an obtuse angle , a straight angle .
It 's like its own little coupling .
If you have three of them , and you loop them together , well you make a triangle .
With four , you make a square , you make a pentagon , you make a hexagon , you make all these kind of polygons .
And they have some wonderful properties .
If you look at the hexagon , for instance , it 's like an amoeba , which is constantly changing its own profile .
You can just pull this out , this becomes a rectangle .
You give it a push , this becomes a parallelogram .
But this is very shaky .
Look at the pentagon , for instance , pull this out -- it becomes a boat shape trapezium .
Push it and it becomes house shaped .
This becomes an isosceles triangle -- again , very shaky .
This square might look very square and prim .
Give it a little push -- this becomes a rhombus .
It becomes kite-shaped .
But give a child a triangle , he can 't do a thing to it .
Why use triangles ?
Because triangles are the only rigid structures .
We can 't make a bridge with squares because the train would come , it would start doing a jig .
Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India , they might not have gone to engineering college , but no one makes a roof placed like this .
Because if they put tiles on top , it 's just going to crash .
They always make a triangular roof .
Now this is people science .
And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick , you 'll get a T joint .
And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle , I would make a tetrahedron .
So you make all these 3D shapes .
You make a tetrahedron like this .
And once you make these , you make a little house .
Put this on top .
You can make a joint of four . You can make a joint of six .
You just need a ton .
Now this was -- you make a joint of six , you make an icosahedron .
You can play around with it .
This makes an igloo .
Now this is in 1978 .
I was a 24-year-old young engineer .
And I thought this was so much better than making trucks .
If you , as a matter of fact , put four marbles inside , you simulate the molecular structure of methane , CH4 .
Four atoms of hydrogen , the four points of the tetrahedron , which means the little carbon atom .
Well since then , I just thought that I 've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country -- village schools , government schools , municipal schools , Ivy League schools -- I 've been invited by most of them .
And every time I go to a school , I see a gleam in the eyes of the children .
I see hope . I see happiness in their faces .
Children want to make things . Children want to do things .
Now this , we make lots and lots of pumps .
Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon .
It 's a real pump . You could actually pop the balloon .
And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it .
So all you do is -- it 's a very kind of provocative statement -- this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [ unclear ] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube .
And this is how you make a valve .
You put a little sticky tape .
This is one-way traffic .
Well we make lots and lots of pumps .
And this is the other one -- that you just take a straw , and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts .
Now this is what you do , is you bend both these legs into a triangle , and you just wrap some tape around .
And this is the pump .
And now , if you have this pump , it 's like a great , great sprinkler .
It 's like a centrifuge .
If you spin something , it tends to fly out .
Well in terms of -- if you were in Andhra Pradesh , you would make this with the palmyra leaf .
Many of our folk toys have great science principles .
If you spin-top something , it tends to fly out .
If I do it with both hands , you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man .
Right .
This is a toy which is made from paper . It 's amazing .
There are four pictures .
You see insects , you see frogs , snakes , eagles , butterflies , frogs , snakes , eagles .
Here 's a paper which you could [ unclear ] -- designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928 , Arthur Stone , documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books .
But this is great fun for children .
They all study about the food chain .
The insects are eaten by the frogs ; the frogs are eaten by the snakes ; the snakes are eaten by the eagles .
And this can be , if you had a whole photocopy paper -- A4 size paper -- you could be in a municipal school , you could be in a government school -- a paper , a scale and a pencil -- no glue , no scissors .
In three minutes , you just fold this up .
And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination .
If you take a smaller paper , you make a smaller flexagon .
With a bigger one , you make a bigger one .
Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here .
And you put a little fan here .
And this is a hundred-year-old toy .
There have been six major research papers on this .
There 's some grooves over here , you can see .
And if I take a reed -- if I rub this , something very amazing happens .
Six major research papers on this .
As a matter of fact , Feynman , as a child , was very fascinated by this .
He wrote a paper on this .
And you don 't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this .
This is there for every child , and every child can enjoy this .
If you want to put a colored disk , well all these seven colors coalesce .
And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back , that white light 's made of seven colors , just by spinning this around .
This is a straw .
What we 've done , we 've just sealed both the ends with tape , nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner , so there 's holes in the opposite corners , there 's a little hole over here .
This is a kind of a blowing straw .
I just put this inside this .
There 's a hole here , and I shut this .
And this costs very little money to make -- great fun for children to do .
What we do is make a very simple electric motor .
Now this is the simplest motor on Earth .
The most expensive thing is the battery inside this .
If you have a battery , it costs five cents to make it .
This is an old bicycle tube , which gives you a broad rubber band , two safety pins .
This is a permanent magnet .
Whenever current flows through the coil , this becomes an electromagnet .
It 's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin .
We made 30,000 .
Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years , they just muck up the definition and they spit it out .
When teachers make it , children make it .
You can see a gleam in their eye .
They get a thrill of what science is all about .
And this science is not a rich man 's game .
In a democratic country , science must reach to our most oppressed , to the most marginalized children .
This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools .
Over 100,000 children learn science this way .
And we 're just trying to see possibilities .
Look , this is the tetrapak -- awful materials from the point of view of the environment .
There are six layers -- three layers of plastic , aluminum -- which are are sealed together .
They are fused together , so you can 't separate them .
Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron .
So something which is trash , which is choking all the seabirds , you could just recycle this into a very , very joyous -- all the platonic solids can be made with things like this .
This is a little straw , and what you do is you just nip two corners here , and this becomes like a baby crocodile 's mouth .
You put this in your mouth , and you blow .
It 's children 's delight , a teacher 's envy , as they say .
You 're not able to see how the sound is produced , because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth .
I 'm going to keep this outside , to blow out . I 'm going to suck in air .
So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations .
The other is that you keep blowing at it , keep making the sound , and you keep cutting it .
And something very , very nice happens .
And when you get a very small one -- This is what the kids teach you . You can also do this .
Well before I go any further , this is something worth sharing .
This is a touching slate meant for blind children .
This is strips of Velcro , this is my drawing slate , and this is my drawing pen , which is basically a film box .
It 's basically like a fisherman 's line , a fishing line .
And this is wool over here .
If I crank the handle , all the wool goes inside .
And what a blind child can do is to just draw this .
Wool sticks on Velcro .
There are 12 million blind children in our country -- who live in a world of darkness .
And this has come as a great boon to them .
There 's a factory out there making our children blind , not able to provide them with food , not able to provide them with vitamin A.
But this has come as a great boon for them .
There are no patents . Anyone can make it .
This is very , very simple .
You can see , this is the generator . It 's a crank generator .
These are two magnets .
This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs .
Small pulley and two strong magnets .
And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED .
If I spin this pulley , the small one 's going to spin much faster .
There will be a spinning magnetic field .
Lines , of course , would be cut , the force will be generated .
And you can see , this LED is going to glow .
So this is a small crank generator .
Well , this is , again , it 's just a ring , a steel ring with steel nuts .
And what you can do is just , if you give it a twirl , well they just keep going on .
And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on .
And they 'd be absolutely joyous playing with this .
we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps .
This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar .
It 's a great cricket cap .
When first you see Nehru and Gandhi , this is the Nehru cap -- just half a newspaper .
We make lots of toys with newspapers , and this is one of them .
And this is -- you can see -- this is a flapping bird .
All of our old newspapers , we cut them into little squares .
And if you have one of these birds -- children in Japan have been making this bird for many , many years .
And you can see , this is a little fantail bird .
Well in the end , I 'll just end with a story .
This is called " The Captain 's Hat Story . "
The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship .
It goes very slowly .
And there were lots of passengers on the ship , and they were getting bored , so the captain invited them on the deck .
" Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance , and I 'll provide you with good food and drinks . "
And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia .
The first day , it was a huge umbrella cap , like a captain 's cap .
That night , when the passengers would be sleeping , he would give it one more fold , and the second day , he would be wearing a fireman 's cap -- with a little shoot just like a designer cap , because it protects the spinal cord .
And the second night , he would take the same cap and give it another fold .
And the third day , it would be a Shikari cap -- just like an adventurer 's cap .
And the third night , he would give it two more folds -- and this is a very , very famous cap .
If you 've seen any of our Bollywood films , this is what the policeman wears , it 's called a zapalu cap .
It 's been catapulted to international glory .
And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship .
So that 's a ship .
And now the end : everyone was enjoying the journey very much .
They were singing and dancing .
Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves .
And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves .
A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down .
And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down .
And there 's a third one over here .
This swallows the bridge and knocks it down .
And the ship sinks , and the captain has lost everything , but for a life jacket .
Thank you so much .
Jack Andraka : A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager
Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late , when someone has less than two percent chance of survival . How could this be ? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that 's super cheap , effective and non-invasive -- all before his 16th birthday .
Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing that all you wanted to do was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all ?
When I was 13 , a close family friend who was like an uncle to me passed away from pancreatic cancer .
When the disease hit so close to home , I knew I needed to learn more , so I went online to find answers .
Using the Internet , I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer , and what I had found shocked me .
Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late , when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival .
Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer ?
The reason ? Today 's current modern medicine is a 60-year-old technique .
That 's older than my dad .
But also , it 's extremely expensive , costing 800 dollars per test , and it 's grossly inaccurate , missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers .
Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer in order to give you this test .
Learning this , I knew there had to be a better way .
So I set up a scientific criteria as to what a sensor would have to look like in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer .
The sensor would have to be inexpensive , rapid , simple , sensitive , selective , and minimally invasive .
Now , there 's a reason why this test hasn 't been updated in over six decades , and that 's because , when we 're looking for pancreatic cancer , we 're looking at your bloodstream , which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein , and you 're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein , just this one protein .
That 's next to impossible .
However , undeterred due to my teenage optimism -- — I went online to a teenager 's two best friends , Google and Wikipedia .
I got everything for my homework from those two sources .
And what I had found was an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer .
So I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins and see which ones could serve as a biomarker for pancreatic cancer .
And to make it a bit simpler for myself , I decided to map out a scientific criteria . And here it is .
Essentially first , the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers at high levels in the bloodstream in the earliest stages , but also only in cancer .
And so I 'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task , and finally , on the 4,000th try , when I 'm close to losing my sanity , I find the protein .
And the name of the protein I 'd located was called mesothelin , and it 's just your ordinary , run-of-the-mill type protein , unless of course you have pancreatic , ovarian or lung cancer , in which case it 's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream .
But also the key is that it 's found in the earliest stages of the disease , when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival .
So now that I 'd found a reliable protein I could detect , I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein , and , thus , pancreatic cancer .
Now , my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place , possibly the most unlikely place for innovation : my high school biology class , the absolute stifler of innovation .
And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes , and that 's just a long , thin pipe of carbon that 's an atom thick and one 50 thousandth the diameter of your hair .
And despite their extremely small sizes , they have these incredible properties .
They 're kind of like the superheroes of material science .
And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class , we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules called antibodies .
And these are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein , but they 're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes .
And so then , I was sitting in class , and suddenly it hit me : I could combine what I was reading about , carbon nanotubes , with what I was supposed to be thinking about , antibodies .
Essentially , I could weave a bunch of these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein , but also , due to the properties of these nanotubes , it would change its electrical properties based on the amount of protein present .
However , there 's a catch .
These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy , and since they 're so delicate , they need to be supported .
So that 's why I chose to use paper .
Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies , which I love .
You start with some water , pour in some nanotubes , add antibodies , mix it up , take some paper , dip it , dry it , and you can detect cancer .
Then , suddenly , a thought occurred that kind of put a blemish on my amazing plan here .
I can 't really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop .
My mom wouldn 't really like that .
So instead , I decided to go for a lab .
So I typed up a budget , a materials list , a timeline , and a procedure , and I emailed it to 200 different professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health , essentially anyone that had anything to do with pancreatic cancer .
And I sat back waiting for these positive emails to be pouring in , saying , " You 're a genius !
You 're going to save us all ! "
And — Then reality took hold , and over the course of a month , I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails .
One professor even went through my entire procedure , painstakingly -- I 'm not really sure where he got all this time -- and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make .
Clearly , the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did .
However , there was a silver lining .
One professor said , " Maybe I might be able to help you , kid . "
So I went in that direction .
As you can never say no to a kid .
And so then , three months later , I finally nailed down a harsh deadline with this guy , and I get into his lab , I get all excited , and then I sit down , I start opening my mouth and talking , and five seconds later he calls in another Ph.D.
Ph.D. ' s just flock into this little room , and they 're just firing these questions at me , and by the end , I kind of felt like I was in a clown car .
There were 20 Ph.D. ' s plus me and the professor crammed into this tiny office space with them firing these rapid-fire questions at me , trying to sink my procedure .
How unlikely is that ? I mean , pshhh .
However , subjecting myself to that interrogation , I answered all of their questions , and I guessed on quite a few but I got them right , and I finally landed the lab space I needed .
But it was shortly afterwards that I discovered my once brilliant procedure had something like a million holes in it , and over the course of seven months , I painstakingly filled each and every one of those holes .
The result ? One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run .
This makes it 168 times faster , over 26,000 times less expensive , and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection .
One of the best parts of the sensor , though , is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy , and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival .
And so in the next two to five years , this sensor could potentially lift for pancreatic cancer survival rates from a dismal 5.5 percent to close to 100 percent , and it would do similar for ovarian and lung cancer .
But it wouldn 't stop there .
By switching out that antibody , you can look at a different protein , thus , a different disease , potentially any disease in the entire world .
So that ranges from heart disease to malaria , HIV , AIDS , as well as other forms of cancer -- anything .
And so hopefully one day we can all have that one extra uncle , that one mother , that one brother , sister , we can have that one more family member to love , and that our hearts will be rid of that one disease burden that comes from pancreatic , ovarian and lung cancer , and potentially any disease , that through the Internet anything is possible .
Theories can be shared , and you don 't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued .
It 's a neutral space , where what you look like , age or gender , it doesn 't matter .
It 's just your ideas that count .
For me , it 's all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way to realize that there 's so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online .
You could be changing the world .
So if a 15-year-old who didn 't even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer , just imagine what you could do .
Thank you .
Shereen El Feki : Pop culture in the Arab world
Shereen El Feki shows how some Arab cultures are borrowing trademarks of Western pop culture -- music videos , comics , even Barbie -- and adding a culturally appropriate twist . The hybridized media shows how two civilizations , rather than dividing , can dovetail .
Hello , everyone . Because this is my first time at TED , I 've decided to bring along an old friend to help break the ice a bit .
Yes . That 's right . This is Barbie .
She 's 50 years old . And she 's looking as young as ever .
But I 'd also like to introduce you to what may be an unfamiliar face .
This is Fulla . Fulla is the Arab world 's answer to Barbie .
Now , according to proponents of the clash of civilizations , Barbie and Fulla occupy these completely separate spheres .
They have different interests . They have divergent values .
And should they ever come in contact ...
well , I 've got to tell you , it 's just not going to be pretty .
My experience , however , in the Islamic world is very different .
Where I work , in the Arab region , people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western , nor are they traditionally Islamic .
I want to show you two examples .
The first is 4Shbab .
It means " for youth " and it 's a new Arab TV channel .
: Video clips from across the globe .
The USA .
I am not afraid to stand alone I am not afraid to stand alone , if Allah is by my side I am not afraid to stand alone Everything will be all right I am not afraid to stand alone The Arab world .
She was preserved by modesty of the religion She was adorned by the light of the Quran Shereen El Feki : 4Shbab has been dubbed Islamic MTV .
Its creator , who is an Egyptian TV producer called Ahmed Abu Haïba , wants young people to be inspired by Islam to lead better lives .
He reckons the best way to get that message across is to use the enormously popular medium of music videos .
4Shbab was set up as an alternative to existing Arab music channels .
And they look something like this .
That , by the way is Haifa Wehbe . She 's a Lebanese pop star and pan-Arab pin-up girl .
In the world of 4Shbab , it 's not about bump and grind .
But it 's not about fire and brimstone either .
Its videos are intended to show a kinder , gentler face of Islam , for young people to deal with life 's challenges .
Now , my second example is for a slightly younger crowd .
And it 's called " The 99 . "
Now , these are the world 's first Islamic superheroes .
They were created by a Kuwaiti psychologist called Naif Al Mutawa .
And his desire is to rescue Islam from images of intolerance , all in a child-friendly format .
" The 99 . " The characters are meant to embody the 99 attributes of Allah : justice , wisdom , mercy , among others .
So , for example , there is the character of Noora .
She is meant to have the power to look inside people and see the good and bad in everyone .
Another character called Jami has the ability to create fantastic inventions .
Now , " The 99 " is not just a comic book .
It 's now a theme park .
There is an animated series in the works .
And by this time next year , the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman will have joined forces with " The 99 " to beat injustice wherever they find it .
" The 99 " and 4Shbab are just two of many examples of this sort of Islamic cross-cultural hybridization .
We 're not talking here about a clash of civilizations .
Nor is it some sort of indistinguishable mash .
I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations , in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined .
Now , while 4Shbab and " The 99 " may look new and shiny , there is actually a very long tradition of this .
Throughout its history , Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations both ancient and modern .
After all , it 's the Quran which encourages us to do this : " We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another . "
And to my mind , those are pretty wise words , no matter what your creed . Thank you .
Adam Grosser : A mobile fridge for vaccines
Adam Grosser talks about a project to build a refrigerator that works without electricity -- to bring the vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide . Tweaking some old technology , he 's come up with a system that works .
This is a work in process , based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine .
On this planet , 1.6 billion people don 't have access to electricity , refrigeration or stored fuels .
This is a problem .
It impacts : the spread of disease , the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life .
So here 's the plan : inexpensive refrigeration that doesn 't use electricity , propane , gas , kerosene or consumables .
Time for some thermodynamics .
And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator .
Adam Grosser : So 29 years ago , I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration .
It 's one of those things that stuck in my head .
It was a lot like the Stirling engine : it was cool , but you didn 't know what to do with it .
And it was invented in 1858 , by this guy Ferdinand Carre , but he couldn 't actually build anything with it because of the tools of the time .
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall in 1928 , and it was a really neat idea , and I 'll get to why it didn 't work , but here 's how it works .
There 's two spheres and they 're separated in distance .
One has a working fluid , water and ammonia , and the other is a condenser .
You heat up one side , the hot side .
The ammonia evaporates and it re-condenses in the other side .
You let it cool to room temperature , and then , as the ammonia re-evaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side , it creates a powerful cooling effect .
So , it was a great idea that didn 't work at all : it blew up .
Because using ammonia you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong .
It topped 400 psi . The ammonia was toxic . It sprayed everywhere .
But it was kind of an interesting thought .
So , the great thing about 2006 is there 's a lot of really great computational work you can do .
So , we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved -- a lot of computational fluid dynamics .
We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong .
We found some non-toxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures .
Brought in a team from the U.K. -- there 's a lot of great refrigeration people , it turned out , in the U.K. -- and built a test rig , and proved that , in fact , we could make a low pressure , non-toxic refrigerator .
So , this is the way it works .
You put it on a cooking fire .
Most people have cooking fires in the world , whether it 's camel dung or wood .
It heats up for about 30 minutes , cools for an hour .
Put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours .
It looks like this . This is the fifth prototype . It 's not quite done .
Weighs about eight pounds , and this is the way it works .
You put it into a 15-liter vessel , about three gallons , and it 'll cool it down to just above freezing -- three degrees above freezing -- for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment . It 's really cheap .
We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars , in low volumes for about 40 dollars .
And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have .
Thank you .
David Cameron : The next age of government
The leader of Britain 's Conservative Party says we 're entering a new era -- where governments themselves have less power and people empowered by technology have more . Tapping into new ideas on behavioral economics , he explores how these trends could be turned into smarter policy .
Someone once said that politics is , of course , " showbiz for ugly people . "
So , on that basis , I feel like I 've really arrived .
The other thing to think of is what an honor it is , as a politician , to give a TED talk , particularly here in the U.K. , where the reputation of politics , with the expenses scandal , has sunk so low .
There was even a story recently that scientists had thought about actually replacing rats in their experiments with politicians .
And someone asked , " Why ? "
and they said , " Well , there 's no shortage of politicians , no one really minds what happens to them and , after all , there are some things that rats just won 't do . "
Now , I know you all love data , so I 'm starting with a data-rich slide .
This , I think , is the most important fact to bear in mind in British politics or American politics , and that is : We have run out of money .
We have vast budget deficits .
This is my global public debt clock , and , as you can see , it 's 32 trillion and counting .
And I think what this leads to is a very simple recognition , that there 's one question in politics at the moment above all other , and it 's this one : How do we make things better without spending more money ?
Because there isn 't going to be a lot of money to improve public services , or to improve government , or to improve so many of the things that politicians talk about .
So what follows from that is that if you think it 's all about money -- you can only measure success in public services in health care and education and policing by spending more money , you can only measure progress by spending money -- you 're going to have a pretty miserable time .
But if you think a whole lot of other things matter that lead up to well being -- things like your family relationships , friendship , community , values -- then , actually , this is an incredibly exciting time to be in politics .
And the really simple argument I want to make tonight , the really straightforward argument is this : That if we combine the right political philosophy , the right political thinking , with the incredible information revolution that has taken place , and that all of you know so much more about than I do , I think there 's an incredible opportunity to actually remake politics , remake government , remake public services , and achieve what 's up on that slide , which is a big increase in our well-being .
That 's the argument I want to make tonight .
So , starting with the political philosophy .
Now I 'm not saying for a minute that British Conservatives have all the answers .
Of course we don 't .
But there are two things at heart that I think drive a conservative philosophy that are really relevant to this whole debate .
The first is this : We believe that if you give people more power and control over their lives , if you give people more choice , if you put them in the driving seat , then actually , you can create a stronger and better society .
And if you marry this fact with the incredible abundance of information that we have in our world today , I think you can completely , as I 've said , remake politics , remake government , remake your public services .
The second thing we believe is we believe in going with the grain of human nature .
Politics and politicians will only succeed if they actually try and treat with people as they are , rather than as they would like them to be .
Now , if you combine this very simple , very conservative thought -- go with the grain of human nature -- with all the advances in behavioral economics , some of which we were just hearing about , again , I think we can achieve a real increase in well-being , in happiness , in a stronger society without necessarily having to spend a whole lot more money .
Now , why do I think now is the moment to make this argument ?
Well , I 'm afraid you 're going to suffer a short , condensed history lesson about what I would say are the three passages of history : the pre-bureaucratic age , the bureaucratic age and what we now live in , which I think is a post-bureaucratic age .
A simpler way of thinking of it is that we have gone from a world of local control , then we went to a world of central control , and now we 're in a world of people control .
Local power , central power , now , people power .
Now , here is King Cnut , king a thousand years ago .
Thought he could turn back the waves ; couldn 't turn back the waves .
Couldn 't actually turn back very much , because if you were king a thousand years ago , while it still took hours and hours and weeks and weeks to traverse your own country , there wasn 't much you were in charge of .
You weren 't in charge of policing , justice , education , health , welfare .
You could just about go to war and that was about it .
This was the pre-bureaucratic age , an age in which everything had to be local .
You had to have local control because there was no nationally-available information because travel was so restricted .
So this was the pre-bureaucratic age .
Next part of the cold history lesson , the lovely picture of the British Industrial Revolution .
Suddenly , all sorts of transport , travel information were possible , and this gave birth to , what I like to call , the bureaucratic age .
And hopefully this slide is going to morph beautifully . There we are .
Suddenly , you have the big , strong , central state .
It was able -- but only it was able -- to organize health care , education , policing , justice .
And it was a world of , as I say , not local power , but now central power .
It had sucked all that power up from the localities .
It was able to do that itself .
The next great stage , which all of you are so familiar with : the massive information revolution .
Just consider this one fact : One hundred years ago , sending these 10 words cost 50 dollars .
Right now , here we are linked up to Long Beach and everywhere else , and all these secret locations for a fraction of that cost , and we can send and receive huge quantities of information without it costing anything .
So we 're now living in a post-bureaucratic age , where genuine people power is possible .
Now , what does this mean for our politics , for our public services , for our government ?
Well I can 't , in the time I 've got , give huge numbers of examples , but let me just give a few of the ways that life can change .
And this is so obvious , in a way , because you think about how all of you have changed the way we shop , the way we travel , the way that business is done .
That is already happened ; the information and Internet revolution has actually gone all the way through our societies in so many different ways , but it hasn 't , in every way , yet touched our government .
So , how could this happen ?
Well , I think there are three chief ways that it should make an enormous difference : in transparency , in greater choice and in accountability , in giving us that genuine people power .
If we take transparency , here is one of my favorite websites , the Missouri Accountability Portal .
In the old days , only the government could hold the information , and only a few elected people could try and grab that information and question it and challenge it .
Now here , on one website , one state in America , every single dollar spent by that government is searchable , is analyzable , is checkable .
Think of the huge change that means : Any business that wants to bid for a government contract can see what currently is being spent .
Anyone thinking , " I could do that service better , I could deliver it cheaper , " it 's all available there .
We have only , in government and in politics , started to scratch the surface of what people are doing in the commercial world with the information revolution .
So , complete transparency will make a huge difference .
In this country , if we win the election , we are going to make all government spending over 25,000 pounds transparent and available online , searchable for anyone to see .
We 're going to make every contract -- we 're announcing this today -- available on the Internet so anyone can see what the terms are , what the conditions are , driving huge value for money , but also huge increases , I believe , in well-being as well .
Choice . Now you all shop online , compare online , do everything online , and yet this revolution has hardly touched the surface of public services like education , or health care or policing , and you 're going to see this change massively .
We should be making this change with the information revolution in our country , with searchable health sites , so you can see what operations work out properly , what records doctors have , the cleanliness of hospitals , who does best at infection control -- all of the information that would once be locked in the Department of Health is now available for all of us to see .
And the third of these big changes : accountability .
This , I think , is a huge change .
It is a crime map . This is a crime map from Chicago .
So , instead of having a situation where only the police have the information about which crimes are committed where , and we have to employ people in government to try and hold the police to account , suddenly , we 've got this vast opportunity for people power , where we , as citizens , can see what crimes are being committed -- where , when and by whom -- and we can hold the police to account .
And you can see this looks a bit like a chef 's hat , but actually that 's an assault , the one in blue .
You can see what crime is committed where , and you have the opportunity to hold your police force to account .
So those three ways -- transparency , accountability and choice -- will make a huge difference .
Now I also said the other principle that I think we should work on is understanding of people , is recognizing that going with the grain of human nature you can achieve so much more .
Now , we 're got a huge revolution in understanding of why people behave in the way that they do , and a great opportunity to put that knowledge and information to greater use .
We 're working with some of these people .
We 're being advised by some of these people , as was said , to try and bring all the experience to book .
Let me just give you one example that I think is incredibly simple , and I love .
We want to get people to be more energy efficient .
Why ? It cuts fuel poverty , it cuts their bills , and it cuts carbon emissions at the same time .
How do you do it ?
Well , we 've had government information campaigns over the years when they tell you to switch off the lights when you leave the home .
We even had -- one government minister once told us to brush our teeth in the dark .
I don 't think they lasted very long .
Look at what this does . This is a simple piece of behavioral economics .
The best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending , to show them what their neighbors are spending , and then show what an energy conscious neighbor is spending .
That sort of behavioral economics can transform people 's behavior in a way that all the bullying and all the information and all the badgering from a government cannot possibly achieve .
Other examples are recycling .
We all know we need to recycle more .
How do we make it happen ?
All the proof from America is that actually , if you pay people to recycle , if you give them a carrot rather than a stick , you can transform their behavior .
So what does all this add up to ?
Here are my two favorite U.S. speeches of the last 50 years .
Obviously , here we have JFK with that incredibly simple and powerful formulation , " Ask not what your country can do for you ; ask what you can do for your country , " an incredibly noble sentiment .
But when he made that speech , what could you do to build the stronger , better society ?
You could fight for your country , you could die for your country , you could serve in your country 's civil service , but you didn 't really have the information and the knowledge and the ability to help build the stronger society in the way that you do now .
And I think an even more wonderful speech , which I 'm going to read a big chunk of , which sums up what I said at the beginning about believing there is more to life than money , and more that we should try and measure than money .
And it is Robert Kennedy 's beautiful description of why gross national product captures so little : It " does not allow for the health of our children , the quality of their education , or the joy of their play .
It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages , the intelligence of our public debate .
It measures neither our wit nor our courage , neither our wisdom nor our learning , neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country .
It measures everything , in short , except that which makes life worthwhile . "
Again , a sentiment that was so noble and beautifully put 40 years ago , and a beautiful dream 40 years ago , but now with the huge advances in information technology , with the massive changes in behavioral economics , with all that we know about how you advance well-being , that if we combine those insights of giving power to people , and using information to make that possible , and using the insight of going with the grain of human nature , while at the same time , understanding why people behave in the way they do , it is a dream more easy to realize today than it was when it was made in that beautiful speech 40 years ago .
Thank you .
Charles Hazlewood : Trusting the ensemble
Conductor Charles Hazlewood talks about the role of trust in musical leadership -- then shows how it works , as he conducts the Scottish Ensemble onstage . He also shares clips from two musical projects : the opera " U-Carmen eKhayelitsha " and the ParaOrchestra .
I am a conductor , and I 'm here today to talk to you about trust .
My job depends upon it .
There has to be , between me and the orchestra , an unshakable bond of trust , born out of mutual respect , through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in .
Now in the old days , conducting , music making , was less about trust and more , frankly , about coercion .
Up to and around about the Second World War , conductors were invariably dictators -- these tyrannical figures who would rehearse , not just the orchestra as a whole , but individuals within it , within an inch of their lives .
But I 'm happy to say now that the world has moved on , music has moved on with it .
We now have a more democratic view and way of making music -- a two-way street .
I , as the conductor , have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music , within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine .
For myself , of course , I have to completely trust my body language .
That 's all I have at the point of sale .
It 's silent gesture .
I can hardly bark out instructions while we 're playing .
Ladies and gentlemen , the Scottish Ensemble .
So in order for all this to work , obviously I have got to be in a position of trust .
I have to trust the orchestra , and , even more crucially , I have to trust myself .
Think about it : when you 're in a position of not trusting , what do you do ?
You overcompensate .
And in my game , that means you overgesticulate .
You end up like some kind of rabid windmill .
And the bigger your gesture gets , the more ill-defined , blurry and , frankly , useless it is to the orchestra .
You become a figure of fun . There 's no trust anymore , only ridicule .
And I remember at the beginning of my career , again and again , on these dismal outings with orchestras , I would be going completely insane on the podium , trying to engender a small scale crescendo really , just a little upsurge in volume .
Bugger me , they wouldn 't give it to me .
I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms .
And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said , " Conducting , Charles , is like holding a small bird in your hand .
If you hold it too tightly , you crush it .
If you hold it too loosely , it flies away . "
I have to say , in those days , I couldn 't really even find the bird .
Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me , in terms of music , has been my adventures in South Africa , the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view , but a country which , through its musical culture , has taught me one fundamental lesson : that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust .
Back in 2000 , I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company .
So I went out there , and I auditioned , mainly in rural township locations , right around the country .
I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers , the majority of whom were black , but there were a handful of white performers .
Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had , in his previous incarnation , been a member of the South African police force .
And in the last years of the old regime , he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community .
Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room , the general atmosphere .
Let 's be under no illusions .
In South Africa , the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community .
So how do we recover from that , ladies and gentlemen ?
Simply through singing .
We sang , we sang , we sang , and amazingly new trust grew , and indeed friendship blossomed .
And that showed me such a fundamental truth , that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot .
So we got some shows off the ground . We started touring them internationally .
One of them was " Carmen . "
We then thought we 'd make a movie of " Carmen , " which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha .
The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa , which is a beautifully musical language , if you don 't know it .
It 's called " U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha " -- literally " Carmen of Khayelitsha . "
I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making .
Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it 's so free .
South Africans just make music really freely .
And I think , in no small way , that 's due to one fundamental fact : they 're not bound to a system of notation .
They don 't read music .
They trust their ears .
You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat .
And then , as if by magic , they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can .
Now those of us that live in the West , if I can use that term , I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music -- that somehow it 's all about skill and systems .
Therefore it 's the exclusive preserve of an elite , talented body .
And yet , ladies and gentlemen , every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis .
And if I can broaden this out for a second , I 'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity , with total confidence , about movies , probably about literature .
But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music ?
Why is this ?
And what I 'm going to say to you now is I 'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence , to take the plunge , to believe that you can trust your ears , you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue , fiber , DNA , what makes a great piece of music great .
I 've got a little experiment I want to try with you .
Did you know that TED is a tune ?
A very simple tune based on three notes -- T , E , D.
Now hang on a minute .
I know you 're going to say to me , " T doesn 't exist in music . "
Well ladies and gentlemen , there 's a time-honored system , which composers have been using for hundreds of years , which proves actually that it does .
If I sing you a musical scale : A , B , C , D , E , F , G -- and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet , same scale : H , I , J , K , L , M , N , O , P , Q , R , S , T -- there you go .
T , see it 's the same as F in music .
So T is F.
So T , E , D is the same as F , E , D.
Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme , which is TED .
Have a listen .
Do you hear it ?
Or do I smell some doubt in the room ?
Okay , we 'll play it for you again now , and we 're going to highlight , we 're going to poke out the T , E , D.
If you 'll pardon the expression .
Oh my goodness me , there it was loud and clear , surely .
I think we should make this even more explicit .
Ladies and gentlemen , it 's nearly time for tea .
Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea , I think ?
I think we need to sing for our tea .
We 're going to sing those three wonderful notes : T , E , D.
Will you have a go for me ?
Audience : T , E , D.
Charles Hazlewood : Yeah , you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings .
Shall we try that one again ?
And look , if you 're adventurous , you go up the octave .
T , E , D.
Audience : T , E , D.
CH : Once more with vim .
There I am like a bloody windmill again , you see .
Now we 're going to put that in the context of the music .
The music will start , and then at a signal from me , you will sing that .
One more time , with feeling , ladies and gentlemen .
You won 't make the key otherwise .
Well done , ladies and gentlemen .
It wasn 't a bad debut for the TED choir , not a bad debut at all .
Now there 's a project that I 'm initiating at the moment that I 'm very excited about and wanted to share with you , because it is all about changing perceptions , and , indeed , building a new level of trust .
The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy , which as you can imagine , if you don 't have an experience of it yourself , is quite a big thing to take on board .
But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me , aside from her very existence , is that it 's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden , the community of disabled people .
And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology 's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement .
Of course there 's a grimmer side to that truth , which is that it 's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust , to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion .
So I find myself asking : where is music in all of this ?
You can 't tell me that there aren 't millions of disabled people , in the U.K. alone , with massive musical potential .
So I decided to create a platform for that potential .
It 's going to be Britain 's first ever national disabled orchestra .
It 's called Paraorchestra .
I 'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had .
It was a really extraordinary moment .
Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians .
Normally when you improvise -- and I do it all the time around the world -- there 's this initial period of horror , like everyone 's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring , an awful pregnant silence .
Then suddenly , as if by magic , bang ! We 're all in there and it 's complete bedlam . You can 't hear anything .
No one 's listening . No one 's trusting .
No one 's responding to each other .
Now in this room with these four disabled musicians , within five minutes a rapt listening , a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music .
Nicholas : : My name 's Nicholas McCarthy .
I 'm 22 , and I 'm a left-handed pianist .
And I was born without my left hand -- right hand .
Can I do that one again ?
Lyn : When I 'm making music , I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane .
I become alive .
Clarence : I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk .
There 's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing .
It 's removed some of my paralysis .
CH : I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today , so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are .
Paraorchestra is the name of that project .
If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point , please let me know .
Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn , wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century -- spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy , along with his orchestra .
Now this prince loved his music , but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time , which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border , a place called Esterhazy -- a long way from the big city of Vienna .
Now one day in 1772 , the prince decreed that the musicians ' families , the orchestral musicians ' families , were no longer welcome in the castle .
They weren 't allowed to stay there anymore ; they had to be returned to Vienna -- as I say , an unfeasibly long way away in those days .
You can imagine , the musicians were disconsolate .
Haydn remonstrated with the prince , but to no avail .
So given the prince loved his music , Haydn thought he 'd write a symphony to make the point .
And we 're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now .
And you 'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt .
I 'm pleased to say , the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance , and the musicians were reunited with their families .
But I think it sums up my talk rather well , this , that where there is trust , there is music -- by extension life .
Where there is no trust , the music quite simply withers away .
Courtney Martin : This isn 't her mother 's feminism
Blogger Courtney Martin examines the perennially loaded word " feminism " in this personal and heartfelt talk . She talks through the three essential paradoxes of her generation 's quest to define the term for themselves .
So I was born on the last day of the last year of the ' 70s .
I was raised on " Free to be you and me " -- hip-hop -- not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house .
Thank you . Thank you for hip-hop -- and Anita Hill .
My parents were radicals -- who became , well , grown-ups .
My dad facetiously says , " We wanted to save the world , and instead we just got rich . "
We actually just got " middle class " in Colorado Springs , Colorado , but you get the picture .
I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy .
At this ripe old age of 30 , I 've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible , beautiful time , and I 've decided , for me , it 's been a real journey and paradox .
The first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it .
Feminism was the water I grew up in .
When I was just a little girl , my mom started what is now the longest-running women 's film festival in the world .
So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons , I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women .
You can see how this had an influence .
But she was not the only feminist in the house .
My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son , but not his daughter .
He 's actually here today .
The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet , not a businessman , but the intention was really good .
In any case , I didn 't readily claim the feminist label , even though it was all around me , because I associated it with my mom 's women 's groups , her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads -- none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time .
But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing , so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom 's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them -- never , of course , admitting that I was doing so .
I didn 't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time .
They were the co-authors of a book called " Manifesta . "
So what very profound epiphany , you might ask , was responsible for my feminist click moment ?
Fishnet stockings .
Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them .
I thought they were really hot .
I decided , okay , I can claim the feminist label .
Now I tell you this -- I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself , because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics , that beauty , that fun do matter .
There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness .
Anyone heard of these two guys as an example ?
So my feminism is very indebted to my mom 's , but it looks very different .
My mom says , " patriarchy . "
I say , " intersectionality . "
So race , class , gender , ability , all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman .
Pay equity ? Yes . Absolutely a feminist issue .
But for me , so is immigration .
Thank you .
My mom says , " Protest march . "
I say , " Online organizing . "
I co-edit , along with a collective of other super-smart , amazing women , a site called Feministing.com.
We are the most widely read feminist publication ever , and I tell you this because I think it 's really important to see that there 's a continuum .
Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising .
But we also have a straightforward political impact .
Feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of Walmart .
We got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a Big Ten school .
And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say , " I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site .
I realized feminism wasn 't about man-hating and Birkenstocks . "
So we 're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way .
My mom says , " Gloria Steinem . "
I say , " Samhita Mukhopadhyay , Miriam Perez , Ann Friedman , Jessica Valenti , Vanessa Valenti , and on and on and on and on . "
We don 't want one hero .
We don 't want one icon .
We don 't want one face .
We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing , community organizing , changing institutions from the inside out -- all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started .
Thank you .
Which brings me to the second paradox : sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once .
Many in my generation -- because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education -- were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes -- who were going to go out and save the world .
These are three words many of us were raised with .
We walk across graduation stages , high on our overblown expectations , and when we float back down to earth , we realize we don 't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway .
The mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic , and I think it 's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed .
And there 's a lot to be overwhelmed about , to be fair -- an environmental crisis , wealth disparity in this country unlike we 've seen since 1928 , and globally , a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity .
Xenophobia 's on the rise . The trafficking of women and girls .
It 's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed .
I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002 .
I was fired up ; I was ready to make a difference .
I went out and I worked at a non-profit , I went to grad school , I phone-banked , I protested , I volunteered , and none of it seemed to matter .
And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004 , I sat down with my family , and I said that I had become very disillusioned .
I admitted that I 'd actually had a fantasy -- kind of a dark fantasy -- of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps .
My mom took a drink of her signature Sea Breeze , her eyes really welled with tears , and she looked right at me and she said , " I will not stand for your desperation . "
She said , " You are smarter , more creative and more resilient than that . "
Which brings me to my third paradox .
Growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well .
There 's a writer I 've been deeply influenced by , Parker Palmer , and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed " between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves . "
You may have guessed by now , I did not light myself on fire .
I did what I know to do in desperation , which is write .
I wrote the book I needed to read .
I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work .
I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson , the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists , who 's dedicating her life to environmental justice .
I wrote about Emily Apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do , but quickly learned , not only did she not like it , but she wasn 't really good at it .
Instead , what she really wanted to do was make films .
So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact .
I wrote about Maricela Guzman , the daughter of Mexican immigrants , who joined the military so she could afford college .
She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women 's Action Network .
What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn 't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals .
Many of them are working in deeply intractable systems -- the military , congress , the education system , etc .
But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force .
And at the end of the day , what could possibly be more important than that ?
Cornel West says , " Of course it 's a failure .
But how good a failure is it ? "
This isn 't to say we give up our wildest , biggest dreams .
It 's to say we operate on two levels .
On one , we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part .
But on the other , we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person 's day more kind , more just , etc .
So when I was a little girl , I had a couple of very strange habits .
One of them was I used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home , and I would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom 's cold toes with my right hand .
I was listening to her talk on the phone , which she did a lot .
She was talking about board meetings , she was founding peace organizations , she was coordinating carpools , she was consoling friends -- all these daily acts of care and creativity .
And surely , at three and four years old , I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice , but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work .
The activists I interviewed had nothing in common , literally , except for one thing , which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences .
So often , particularly at a young age , we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life , and sometimes they 're in our own kitchens , talking on the phone , making us dinner , doing all that keeps the world going around and around .
My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory , or certainty , or security even .
It 's about embracing the paradox .
It 's about acting in the face of overwhelm .
And it 's about loving people really well .
And at the end of the day , these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward .
Thank you .
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy : Inside a school for suicide bombers
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy takes on a terrifying question : How does the Taliban convince children to become suicide bombers ? Propaganda footage from a training camp is intercut with her interviews of young camp graduates . A shocking vision .
Today , I want you to look at children who become suicide bombers through a completely different lens .
In 2009 , there were 500 bomb blasts across Pakistan .
I spent the year working with children who were training to become suicide bombers and with Taliban recruiters , trying to understand how the Taliban were converting these children into live ammunition and why these children were actively signing up to their cause .
I want you to watch a short video from my latest documentary film , " Children of the Taliban . "
The Taliban now run their own schools .
They target poor families and convince the parents to send their children .
In return , they provide free food and shelter and sometimes pay the families a monthly stipend .
We 've obtained a propaganda video made by the Taliban .
Young boys are taught justifications for suicide attacks and the execution of spies .
I made contact with a child from Swat who studied in a madrassa like this .
Hazrat Ali is from a poor farming family in Swat .
He joined the Taliban a year ago when he was 13 .
How do the Taliban in your area get people to join them ?
Hazrat Ali : They first call us to the mosque and preach to us .
Then they take us to a madrassa and teach us things from the Koran .
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy : He tells me that children are then given months of military training .
H They teach us to use machine guns , Kalashnikov , rocket launchers , grenades , bombs .
They ask us to use them only against the infidels .
Then they teach us to do a suicide attack .
SOC : Would you like to carry out a suicide attack ?
H If God gives me strength .
SOC : I , in my research , have seen that the Taliban have perfected the way in which they recruit and train children , and I think it 's a five-step process .
Step one is that the Taliban prey on families that are large , that are poor , that live in rural areas .
They separate the parents from the children by promising to provide food , clothing , shelter to these children .
Then they ship them off , hundreds of miles away to hard-line schools that run along the Taliban agenda .
Step two : They teach the children the Koran , which is Islam 's holiest book , in Arabic , a language these children do not understand and cannot speak .
They rely very heavily on teachers , who I have personally seen distort the message to these children as and when it suits their purpose to .
These children are explicitly forbidden from reading newspapers , listening to radio , reading any books that the teachers do not prescribe them .
If any child is found violating these rules , he is severely reprimanded .
Effectively , the Taliban create a complete blackout of any other source of information for these children .
Step three : The Taliban want these children to hate the world that they currently live in .
So they beat these children -- I have seen it ; they feed them twice a day dried bread and water ; they rarely allow them to play games ; they tell them that , for eight hours at a time , all they have to do is read the Koran .
The children are virtual prisoners ; they cannot leave , they cannot go home .
Their parents are so poor , they have no resources to get them back .
Step four : The older members of the Taliban , the fighters , start talking to the younger boys about the glories of martyrdom .
They talk to them about how when they die , they will be received up with lakes of honey and milk , how there will be 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise , how there will be unlimited food , and how this glory is going to propel them to become heroes in their neighborhoods .
Effectively , this is the brainwashing process that has begun .
Step five : I believe the Taliban have one of the most effective means of propaganda .
Their videos that they use are intercut with photographs of men and women and children dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Pakistan .
And the basic message is that the Western powers do not care about civilian deaths , so those people who live in areas and support governments that work with Western powers are fair game .
That 's why Pakistani civilians , over 6,000 of whom have been killed in the last two years alone , are fair game .
Now these children are primed to become suicide bombers .
They 're ready to go out and fight because they 've been told that this is effectively their only way to glorify Islam .
I want you to watch another excerpt from the film .
This boy is called Zenola .
He blew himself up , killing six .
This boy is called Sadik .
He killed 22 .
This boy is called Messoud .
He killed 28 .
The Taliban are running suicide schools , preparing a generation of boys for atrocities against civilians .
Do you want to carry out a suicide attack ?
Boy : I would love to .
But only if I get permission from my dad .
When I look at suicide bombers younger than me , or my age , I get so inspired by their terrific attacks .
SOC : What blessing would you get from carrying out a suicide attack ?
Boy : On the day of judgment , God will ask me , " Why did you do that ? "
I will answer , " My Lord ! Only to make you happy !
I have laid down my life fighting the infidels . "
Then God will look at my intention .
If my intention was to eradicate evil for Islam , then I will be rewarded with paradise .
Singer : On the day of judgment My God will call me My body will be put back together And God will ask me why I did this SOC : I leave you all with this thought : If you grew up in these circumstances , faced with these choices , would you choose to live in this world or in the glorious afterlife ?
As one Taliban recruiter told me , " There will always be sacrificial lambs in this war . "
Thank you .
Jennifer Granholm : A clean energy proposal -- race to the top !
Kicking off the TED2013 conference , Jennifer Granholm asks a very American question with worldwide implications : How do we make more jobs ? Her big idea : Invest in new alternative energy sources . And her big challenge : Can it be done with or without our broken Congress ?
Well , I was introduced as the former Governor of Michigan , but actually I 'm a scientist .
All right , a political scientist , it doesn 't really count , but my laboratory was the laboratory of democracy that is Michigan , and , like any good scientist , I was experimenting with policy about what would achieve the greatest good for the greatest number .
But there were three problems , three enigmas that I could not solve , and I want to share with you those problems , but most importantly , I think I figured out a proposal for a solution .
The first problem that not just Michigan , but every state , faces is , how do you create good jobs in America in a global economy ?
So let me share with you some empirical data from my lab .
I was elected in 2002 and , at the end of my first year in office in 2003 , I got a call from one of my staff members , who said , " Gov , we have a big problem .
We have a little tiny community called Greenville , Michigan , population 8,000 , and they are about to lose their major employer , which is a refrigerator factory that 's operated by Electrolux . "
And I said , " Well , how many people work at Electrolux ? "
And he said , " 3,000 of the 8,000 people in Greenville . "
So it is a one-company town .
And Electrolux was going to go to Mexico .
So I said , " Forget that . I 'm the new Governor .
We can fix this . We 're going to go to Greenville with my whole cabinet and we will just make Electrolux an offer they can 't refuse . "
So I brought my whole cabinet , and we met with all of the pooh-bahs of little Greenville -- the mayor , the city manager , the head of the community college -- and we basically emptied our pockets and put all of our chips on the table , incentives , you name it , to convince Electrolux to stay , and as we made our pile of chips , we slid them across the table to the management of Electrolux .
And in the pile were things like zero taxes for 20 years , or that we 'd help to build a new factory for the company , we 'd help to finance it . The UAW , who represented the workers , said they would offer unprecedented concessions , sacrifices to just keep those jobs in Greenville .
So the management of Electrolux took our pile , our list of incentives , and they went outside the room for 17 minutes , and they came back in and they said , " Wow , this is the most generous any community has ever been to try to keep jobs here .
But there 's nothing you can do to compensate for the fact that we can pay $ 1.57 an hour in Juarez , Mexico . So we 're leaving . "
And they did . And when they did , it was like a nuclear bomb went off in little Greenville .
In fact , they did implode the factory .
That 's a guy that is walking on his last day of work .
And on the month that the last refrigerator rolled off the assembly line , the employees of Electrolux in Greenville , Michigan , had a gathering for themselves that they called the last supper .
It was in a big pavilion in Greenville , an indoor pavilion , and I went to it because I was so frustrated as Governor that I couldn 't stop the outflow of these jobs , and I wanted to grieve with them , and as I went into the room-- there 's thousands of people there .
It was a just big thing . People were eating boxed lunches on roundtop tables , and there was a sad band playing music , or a band playing sad music , probably both .
And this guy comes up to me , and he 's got tattoos and his ponytail and his baseball cap on , and he had his two daughters with him , and he said , " Gov , these are my two daughters . "
He said , " I 'm 48 years old , and I have worked at this factory for 30 years .
I went from high school to factory .
My father worked at this factory , " he said .
" My grandfather worked at this factory .
All I know is how to make refrigerators . "
And he looked at his daughters , and he puts his hand on his chest , and he says , " So , Gov , tell me , who is ever going to hire me ?
Who is ever going to hire me ? "
And that was asked not just by that guy but by everyone in the pavilion , and frankly , by every worker at one of the 50,000 factories that closed in the first decade of this century .
Enigma number one : How do you create jobs in America in a global economy ?
Number two , very quickly : How do you solve global climate change when we don 't even have a national energy policy in this country and when gridlock in Congress seems to be the norm ?
In fact , there was a poll that was done recently and the pollster compared Congress 's approval ratings to a number of other unpleasant things , and it was found , in fact , that Congress 's approval rating is worse than cockroaches , lice , Nickelback the band , root canals and Donald Trump .
But wait , the good news is it 's at least better than meth labs and gonorrhea .
We got a problem , folks .
So it got me thinking , what is it ?
What in the laboratory that I see out there , the laboratories of democracy , what has happened ?
What policy prescriptions have happened that actually cause changes to occur and that have been accepted in a bipartisan way ?
So if I asked you , for example , what was the Obama Administration policy that caused massive changes across the country , what would you say ?
You might say Obamacare , except for those were not voluntary changes .
As we know , only half the states have opted in .
We might say the Recovery Act , but those didn 't require policy changes .
The thing that caused massive policy changes to occur was Race to the Top for education .
Why ? The government put a $ 4.5 billion pot and said to the governors across the country , compete for it .
Forty-eight governors competed , convincing 48 state legislatures to essentially raise standards for high schoolers so that they all take a college prep curriculum .
Forty-eight states opted in , creating a national [ education ] policy from the bottom up .
So I thought , well , why can 't we do something like that and create a clean energy jobs race to the top ?
Because after all , if you look at the context , 1.6 trillion dollars has been invested in the past eight years from the private sector globally , and every dollar represents a job , and where are those jobs going ?
Well , they 're going to places that have policy , like China .
In fact , I was in China to see what they were doing , and they were putting on a dog-and-pony show for the group that I was with , and I was standing in the back of the room during one of the demonstrations and standing next to one of the Chinese officials , and we were watching , and he says , " So , Gov , when do you think the U.S. is going to get national energy policy ? "
And I said , " Oh my God -- Congress , gridlock , who knows ? "
And this is what he did , he goes , he says , " Take your time . "
Because they see our passivity as their opportunity .
So what if we decided to create a challenge to the governors of the country , and the price to entry into this competition used the same amount that the bipartisan group approved in Congress for the Race to the Top for education , 4.5 billion , which sounds like a lot , but actually it 's less than one tenth of one percent of federal spending .
It 's a rounding error on the federal side .
But price to entry into that competition would be , you could just , say , use the President 's goal .
He wants Congress to adopt a clean energy standard of 80 percent by 2030 , in other words , that you 'd have to get 80 percent of your energy from clean sources by the year 2030 .
Why not ask all of the states to do that instead ?
And imagine what might happen , because every region has something to offer .
You might take states like Iowa and Ohio -- two very important political states , by the way -- those two governors , and they would say , we 're going to lead the nation in producing the wind turbines and the wind energy .
You might say the solar states , the sun belt , we 're going to be the states that produce solar energy for the country , and maybe Jerry Brown says , " Well , I 'm going to create an industry cluster in California to be able to produce the solar panels so that we 're not buying them from China but we 're buying them from the U.S. "
In fact , every region of the country could do this .
You see , you 've got solar and wind opportunity all across the nation .
In fact , if you look just at the upper and northern states in the West , they could do geothermal , or you could look at Texas and say , we could lead the nation in the solutions to smart grid .
In the middle eastern states which have access to forests and to agricultural waste , they might say , we 're going to lead the nation in biofuels .
In the upper northeast , we 're going to lead the nation in energy efficiency solutions .
Along the eastern seaboard , we 're going to lead the nation in offshore wind .
You might look at Michigan and say , we 're going to lead the nation in producing the guts for the electric vehicle , like the lithium ion battery .
Every region has something to offer , and if you created a competition , it respects the states and it respects federalism .
It 's opt-in . You might even get Texas and South Carolina , who didn 't opt into the education Race to the Top , you might even get them to opt in . Why ?
Because Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons .
We want to bring jobs . I 'm just saying .
And it fosters innovation at the state level in these laboratories of democracy .
Now , any of you who are watching anything about politics lately might say , " Okay , great idea , but really ?
Congress putting four and a half billion dollars on the table ?
They can 't agree to anything . "
So you could wait and go through Congress , although you should be very impatient .
Or , you renegades , we could go around Congress .
Go around Congress .
What if we created a private sector challenge to the governors ?
What if several of the high-net worth companies and individuals who are here at TED decided that they would create , band together , just a couple of them , and create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top and see how the governors respond ?
What if it all started here at TED ?
What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs in America -- -- and get national energy policy and we created a national energy strategy from the bottom up ?
Because , dear TEDsters , if you are impatient like I am , you know that our economic competitors , our other nations , are in the game and are eating us for lunch .
And we can get in the game or not .
We can be at the table or we can be on the table .
And I don 't know about you , but I prefer to dine .
Thank you all so much .
Alex Steffen : The route to a sustainable future
Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity 's ecological footprint is incredibly vital now , as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries .
When I 'm starting talks like this , I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don 't know what that is .
This is a crowd that does know what it is , so I 'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version . Right ?
So just bear with me . We 'll go real fast , you know ?
Fill in the blanks .
So , you know , sustainability , small planet .
Right ? Picture a little Earth , circling around the sun .
You know , about a million years ago , a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees , got a little clever , harnessed fire , invented the printing press , made , you know , luggage with wheels on it .
And , you know , built the society that we now live in .
Unfortunately , while this society is , without a doubt , the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created , it 's got some major , major flaws .
One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint .
It has an amount of impact on the planet that 's measurable .
How much stuff goes through your life , how much waste is left behind you .
And we , at the moment , in our society , have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this .
We 're using up about five planets .
If everybody on the planet lived the way we did , we 'd need between five , six , seven , some people even say 10 planets to make it .
Clearly we don 't have 10 planets .
Again , you know , mental , visual , 10 planets , one planet , 10 planets , one planet . Right ?
We don 't have that . So that 's one problem .
The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways . Right ?
North Americans , such as myself , you know , we 're basically sort of wallowing , gluttonous hogs , and we 're eating all sorts of stuff .
And , you know , then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region , or even more , Africa .
And people simply do not have enough to survive .
This is producing all sorts of tensions , all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing .
And there 's more and more people on the way . Right ?
So , this is what the planet 's going to look like in 20 years .
It 's going to be a pretty crowded place , at least eight billion people .
So to make matters even more difficult , it 's a very young planet .
A third of the people on this planet are kids .
And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did , no matter where they live .
They 've been exposed to this idea of our society , of our prosperity .
And they may not want to live exactly like us .
They may not want to be Americans , or Brits , or Germans , or South Africans , but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous , and more dynamic , and more , you know , enjoyable .
And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet .
And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque , we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable .
Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios .
I don 't need to go into that .
But I will ask the question , what 's the alternative ?
And I would say that , at the moment , the alternative is unimaginable .
You know , so on the one hand we have the unthinkable ; on the other hand we have the unimaginable .
We don 't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable , which is shareable with everybody on the planet , which promotes stability and democracy and human rights , and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face .
We don 't know how to do this yet .
So what 's Worldchanging ?
Well , Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future .
You know , what we 're out there doing is looking for examples of tools , models and ideas , which , if widely adopted , would change the game .
A lot of times , when I do a talk like this , I talk about things that everybody in this room I 'm sure has already heard of , but most people haven 't .
So I thought today I 'd do something a little different , and talk about what we 're looking for , rather than saying , you know , rather than giving you tried-and-true examples .
Talk about the kinds of things we 're scoping out .
Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook .
And given that I have 13 minutes to do this , this is going to go kind of quick .
So , I don 't know , just stick with me . Right ?
So , first of all , what are we looking for ? Bright Green city .
One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities .
We 're already an urban planet ; that 's especially true in the developed world .
And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous , and thus use a lot of stuff .
If we can change the dynamic , by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ...
Here , for example , is Vancouver , which if you haven 't been there , you ought to go for a visit . It 's a fabulous city .
And they are doing density , new density , better than probably anybody else on the planet right now .
They 're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars , which is a pretty great thing .
So you have density . You also have growth management .
You leave aside what is natural to be natural .
This is in Portland . That is an actual development .
That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity .
They 've bounded the city with a line .
Nature , city . Nothing changes .
Once you do those things , you can start making all sorts of investments .
You can start doing things like , you know , transit systems that actually work to transport people , in effective and reasonably comfortable manners .
You can also start to change what you build .
This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London , which is one of the greenest buildings in the world . It 's a fabulous place .
We 're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity , that recycle much of their water , that are much more comfortable than standard buildings , use all-natural light , etc . , and , over time , cost less .
Green roofs . Bill McDonough covered that last night , so I won 't dwell on that too much .
But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other , one of the things you can do is -- as information technologies develop -- you can start to have smart places .
You can start to know where things are .
When you know where things are , it becomes easier to share them .
When you share them , you end up using less .
So one great example is car-share clubs , which are really starting to take off in the U.S. , have already taken off in many places in Europe , and are a great example .
If you 're somebody who drives , you know , one day a week , do you really need your own car ?
Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing , and by monitoring , the amount we 're actually using .
So , here 's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use , which I think is a pretty cool concept , although I think it ought to work the other way around , that it gets brighter the more you don 't use .
But , you know , there may even be a simpler approach .
We could just re-label things .
This light switch that reads , on the one hand , flashfloods , and on the other hand , off .
How we build things can change as well .
This is a bio-morphic building .
It takes its inspiration in form from life .
Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful , and also much more effective .
This is an example of bio-mimicry , which is something we 're really starting to look a lot more for .
In this case , you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan , which is greatly more effective .
There 's a lot of this stuff happening ; it 's really pretty remarkable .
I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you 're into it .
We 're starting to cover this more and more .
There 's also neo-biological design , where more and more we 're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry .
So this , for example , is hydrogen-generating algae .
So we have a model in potential , an emerging model that we 're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in , and turn them into Bright Green cities .
But unfortunately , most of the people on the planet don 't live in the cites we live in .
They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world .
And there 's a statistic I often like to use , which is that we 're adding a city of Seattle every four days , a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days .
I was giving a talk about two months ago , and this guy , who 'd done some work with the U.N. , came up to me and was really flustered , and he said , look , you 've got that totally wrong ; it 's totally wrong .
It 's every seven days .
So , we 're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days , and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in .
Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly .
They don 't have existing infrastructure ; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty , and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways .
So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities ?
Well , the first thing we need is , we need leapfrogging .
And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere .
The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person , or a country , who is stuck in a situation where you don 't have the tools and technologies that you need , there 's no reason for you to invest in last generation 's technologies . Right ?
That you 're much better off , almost universally , looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology .
One place we 're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones . Right ?
All throughout the developing world , people are going directly to cell phones , skipping the whole landline stage .
If there are landlines in many developing world cities , they 're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money .
So I rather like this picture here .
I particularly like the Ganesh in the background , talking on the cell phone .
So what we have , increasingly , is cell phones just permeating out through society .
We 've heard all about this here this week , so I won 't say too much more than that , other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies .
The second thing is tools for collaboration , be they systems of collaboration , or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration . Right ?
When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate , you get different kinds of solutions .
And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don 't have capital . Right ?
So , you know , we have open source software , we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions .
And those things lead to things like this .
This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo .
This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software , cheap , sort of hacked-together machines , and basically sort of abandoned buildings -- has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in , get high-speed internet access , learn computer programming skills for free .
And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo .
And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo .
I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back .
So one of the things that that 's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion .
And one of the things we 're really , really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself , and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room .
So it 's not , you know , Bollywood isn 't just answering Hollywood . Right ?
You know , Brazilian music scene isn 't just answering the major labels .
It 's doing something new . There 's new things happening .
There 's interplay between them . And , you know , you get amazing things .
Like , I don 't know if any of you have seen the movie " City of God ? "
Yeah , it 's a fabulous movie if you haven 't seen it .
And it 's all about this question , in a very artistic and indirect kind of way .
You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out .
These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda .
And who are waving their first books in the air , which , I just think that 's a pretty cool picture . You know ?
So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways , in ways that haven 't happened before .
And as we heard last night , as we 've heard earlier this week , are absolutely , fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions , is we 've got to craft new political realities .
And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities , not only in places like India , Afghanistan , Kenya , Pakistan , what have you , but here at home as well .
Another world is possible .
And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement . Right ?
We tweak that a lot .
We talk about how another world isn 't just possible ; another world 's here .
That it 's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different , vague possibility out there , but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility .
We need to start doing things like Lula , President of Brazil .
How many people knew of Lula before today ?
OK , so , much , much better than the average crowd , I can tell you that .
So Lula , he 's full of problems , full of contradictions , but one of the things that he 's doing is , he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration .
I would keep your eye on this fellow .
Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call " serious play . "
We 're looking a lot at this . This is spreading everywhere .
This is from " A Force More Powerful . " It 's a little screenshot .
" A Force More Powerful " is a video game that , while you 're playing it , it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change .
Here 's another one . This is from a game called " Food Force , " which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp .
These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in , especially in the developing world , in people 's interest in and passion for democracy .
We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer , freer , more democratic , less corrupt .
And , you know , we don 't hear those stories enough .
But it 's happening all over the place , and these tools are part of what 's making it possible .
Now when you add all those things together , when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools , you know , second superpower stuff , etc . , what do you get ?
Well , very quickly , you get a Bright Green future for the developing world .
You get , for example , green power spread throughout the world .
You get -- this is a building in Hyderabad , India .
It 's the greenest building in the world .
You get grassroots solutions , things that work for people who have no capital or limited access .
You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains .
You get access to distance medicine .
These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don 't have access to at home in a distant manner .
You get new tools for people in the developing world .
These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there , for whom nightfall means darkness , to have a new means of operating .
These are refrigerators that require no electricity ; they 're pot within a pot design .
And you get water solutions . Water 's one of the most pressing problems .
Here 's a design for harvesting rainwater that 's super cheap and available to people in the developing world .
Here 's a design for distilling water using sunlight .
Here 's a fog-catcher , which , if you live in a moist , jungle-like area , will distill water from the air that 's clean and drinkable .
Here 's a way of transporting water .
I just love this , you know -- I mean carrying water is such a drag , and somebody just came up with the idea of well , what if you rolled it . Right ?
I mean , that 's a great design .
This is a fabulous invention , LifeStraw .
Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips .
So , you know , people who are in desperate straits can get this .
This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever .
This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout , which pumps water as kids play . You know ?
Seriously -- give that one a hand , it 's pretty great .
And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis . Right ?
We 're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability .
How do we help people like that ?
Well , there 's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet .
Some of those designs include models for acting , such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps .
New models for pedagogy for the displaced .
And we have new tools .
This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere .
Does anyone know what this is ?
Audience : It detects landmines .
Alex Steffen : Exactly , this is a landmine-detecting flower .
If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered , you can fling these seeds out into the field .
And as they grow up , they will grow up around the mines , their roots will detect the chemicals in them , and where the flowers turn red you don 't step .
Yeah , so seeds that could save your life . You know ?
I also love it because it seems to me that the example , the tools we use to change the world , ought to be beautiful in themselves .
You know , that it 's not just enough to survive .
We 've got to make something better than what we 've got .
And I think that we will .
Just to wrap up , in the immortal words of H.G. Wells , I think that better things are on the way .
I think that , in fact , that " all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning .
All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening . "
I hope that that turns out to be true .
The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will .
Thank you very much .
Rives : A story of mixed emoticons
Rives tells a typographical fairy tale that 's short and bittersweet ; )
This means , " I 'm smiling . "
So does that .
This means " mouse . "
" Cat . "
Here we have a story .
The start of the story , where this means guy , and that is a ponytail on a passer-by .
Here 's where it happens .
These are when .
This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player .
She wears it every day .
It 's not considered vintage -- she just likes certain music to sound a certain way .
Look at her posture ; it 's remarkable .
That 's because she dances .
Now he , the guy , takes all of this in , figuring , " Honestly , geez , what are my chances ? "
And he could say , " Oh my God ! "
or " I heart you ! "
" I 'm laughing out loud . "
" I want to give you a hug . "
But he comes up with that , you know .
He tells her , " I 'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug . "
Put a crab inside it .
Add some water .
Seven different salts .
He means he 's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land , but just panhandle at the ocean .
He says , " You look like a mermaid , but you walk like a waltz . "
And the girl goes , " Wha ' ? "
So , the guy replies , " Yeah , I know , I know .
I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate .
At least , that 's how it seems .
I 'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes -- for swearing , awkward silences , and very simple rhyme schemes .
Right now , talking to you , I 'm not even really a guy .
I 'm a monkey -- -- blowing kisses at a butterfly .
But I 'm still suggesting you and I should meet .
First , soon , and then a lot .
I 'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow , but I 'll stay until you show up , ponytail or not .
Hell , ponytail alone .
I don 't know what else to tell you .
I got a pencil you can borrow .
You can put it in your phone . "
But the girl does not budge , does not smile , does not frown .
She just says , " No thank you . "
You know ?
[ " i don 't need 2 write it down . " ]
Pamela Meyer : How to spot a liar
On any given day we 're lied to from 10 to 200 times , and the clues to detect those lie can be subtle and counter-intuitive . Pamela Meyer , author of & lt ; em & gt ; Liespotting , & lt ; / em & gt ; shows the manners and " hotspots " used by those trained to recognize deception -- and she argues honesty is a value worth preserving .
Okay , now I don 't want to alarm anybody in this room , but it 's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar .
Also , the person to your left is a liar .
Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar .
We 're all liars .
What I 'm going to do today is I 'm going to show you what the research says about why we 're all liars , how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking , and ultimately to trust building .
Now speaking of trust , ever since I wrote this book , " Liespotting , " no one wants to meet me in person anymore , no , no , no , no , no .
They say , " It 's okay , we 'll email you . "
I can 't even get a coffee date at Starbucks .
My husband 's like , " Honey , deception ?
Maybe you could have focused on cooking . How about French cooking ? "
So before I get started , what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to clarify my goal for you , which is not to teach a game of Gotcha .
Liespotters aren 't those nitpicky kids , those kids in the back of the room that are shouting , " Gotcha ! Gotcha !
Your eyebrow twitched . You flared your nostril .
I watch that TV show ' Lie To Me . ' I know you 're lying . "
No , liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception .
They use it to get to the truth , and they do what mature leaders do everyday ; they have difficult conversations with difficult people , sometimes during very difficult times .
And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition , Lying is a cooperative act .
Think about it , a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance .
Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie .
So I know it may sound like tough love , but look , if at some point you got lied to , it 's because you agreed to get lied to .
Truth number one about lying : Lying 's a cooperative act .
Now not all lies are harmful .
Sometimes we 're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity , maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret , secret .
We say , " Nice song . "
" Honey , you don 't look fat in that , no . "
Or we say , favorite of the digiratti , " You know , I just fished that email out of my spam folder .
So sorry . "
But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception .
And that can have dramatic costs for us .
Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States .
That 's an eyelash under a trillion dollars .
That 's seven percent of revenues .
Deception can cost billions .
Think Enron , Madoff , the mortgage crisis .
Or in the case of double agents and traitors , like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames , lies can betray our country , they can compromise our security , they can undermine democracy , they can cause the deaths of those that defend us .
Deception is actually serious business .
This con man , Henry Oberlander , he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world .
And you can 't find this guy on Google ; you can 't find him anywhere .
He was interviewed once , and he said the following .
He said , " Look , I 've got one rule . "
And this was Henry 's rule , he said , " Look , everyone is willing to give you something .
They 're ready to give you something for whatever it is they 're hungry for . "
And that 's the crux of it .
If you don 't want to be deceived , you have to know , what is it that you 're hungry for ?
And we all kind of hate to admit it .
We wish we were better husbands , better wives , smarter , more powerful , taller , richer -- the list goes on .
Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap , to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were , how we wish we could be , with what we 're really like .
And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies .
On a given day , studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times .
Now granted , many of those are white lies .
But in another study , it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other .
Now when we first hear this data , we recoil .
We can 't believe how prevalent lying is .
We 're essentially against lying .
But if you look more closely , the plot actually thickens .
We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers .
Extroverts lie more than introverts .
Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people .
Women lie more to protect other people .
If you 're an average married couple , you 're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions .
Now you may think that 's bad .
If you 're unmarried , that number drops to three .
Lying 's complex .
It 's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives .
We 're deeply ambivalent about the truth .
We parse it out on an as-needed basis , sometimes for very good reasons , other times just because we don 't understand the gaps in our lives .
That 's truth number two about lying .
We 're against lying , but we 're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries .
It 's as old as breathing .
It 's part of our culture , it 's part of our history .
Think Dante , Shakespeare , the Bible , News of the World .
Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species .
Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species , the larger the neocortex , the more likely it is to be deceptive .
Now you might remember Koko .
Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language ?
Koko was taught to communicate via sign language .
Here 's Koko with her kitten .
It 's her cute little , fluffy pet kitten .
Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall .
We 're hardwired to become leaders of the pack .
It 's starts really , really early .
How early ?
Well babies will fake a cry , pause , wait to see who 's coming and then go right back to crying .
One-year-olds learn concealment .
Two-year-olds bluff .
Five-year-olds lie outright .
They manipulate via flattery .
Nine-year-olds , masters of the cover up .
By the time you enter college , you 're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions .
By the time we enter this work world and we 're breadwinners , we enter a world that is just cluttered with spam , fake digital friends , partisan media , ingenious identity thieves , world-class Ponzi schemers , a deception epidemic -- in short , what one author calls a post-truth society .
It 's been very confusing for a long time now .
What do you do ?
Well there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass .
Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time .
The rest of us , we 're only 54 percent accurate .
Why is it so easy to learn ?
There are good liars and there are bad liars . There are no real original liars .
We all make the same mistakes . We all use the same techniques .
So what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to show you two patterns of deception .
And then we 're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves .
We 're going to start with speech .
Bill Clinton : I want you to listen to me .
I 'm going to say this again .
I did not have sexual relations with that woman , Miss Lewinsky .
I never told anybody to lie , not a single time , never .
And these allegations are false .
And I need to go back to work for the American people .
Thank you .
Pamela Meyer : Okay , what were the telltale signs ?
Well first we heard what 's known as a non-contracted denial .
Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language .
We also heard distancing language : " that woman . "
We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language as their tool .
Now if Bill Clinton had said , " Well , to tell you the truth ... " or Richard Nixon 's favorite , " In all candor ... " he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter than knows that qualifying language , as it 's called , qualifying language like that , further discredits the subject .
Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety , or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail -- and we 're all really glad he didn 't do that -- he would have further discredited himself .
Freud had it right .
Freud said , look , there 's much more to it than speech : " No mortal can keep a secret .
If his lips are silent , he chatters with his fingertips . "
And we all do it no matter how powerful you are .
We all chatter with our fingertips .
I 'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who 's chattering with his fingertips .
Now this brings us to our next pattern , which is body language .
With body language , here 's what you 've got to do .
You 've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door .
Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit .
Because we think liars fidget all the time .
Well guess what , they 're known to freeze their upper bodies when they 're lying .
We think liars won 't look you in the eyes .
Well guess what , they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth .
We think warmth and smiles convey honesty , sincerity .
But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away .
Can you all spot the fake smile here ?
You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks .
But the real smile 's in the eyes , the crow 's feet of the eyes .
They cannot be consciously contracted , especially if you overdid the Botox .
Don 't overdo the Botox ; nobody will think you 're honest .
Now we 're going to look at the hot spots .
Can you tell what 's happening in a conversation ?
Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone 's words and someone 's actions ?
Now I know it seems really obvious , but when you 're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception , attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators .
An honest person is going to be cooperative .
They 're going to show they 're on your side .
They 're going to be enthusiastic .
They 're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth .
They 're going to be willing to brainstorm , name suspects , provide details .
They 're going to say , " Hey , maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks . "
They 're going to be infuriated if they sense they 're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview , not just in flashes ; they 'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview .
And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks , an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment .
Now let 's say you 're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive .
That person may be withdrawn , look down , lower their voice , pause , be kind of herky-jerky .
Ask a deceptive person to tell their story , they 're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places .
And then they 're going to tell their story in strict chronological order .
And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours , they will ask that person to tell that story backwards , and then they 'll watch them squirm , and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells .
Why do they do that ? Well we all do the same thing .
We rehearse our words , but we rarely rehearse our gestures .
We say " yes , " we shake our heads " no . "
We tell very convincing stories , we slightly shrug our shoulders .
We commit terrible crimes , and we smile at the delight in getting away with it .
Now that smile is known in the trade as " duping delight . "
And we 're going to see that in several videos moving forward , but we 're going to start -- for those of you who don 't know him , this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock .
We 're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test .
See now if you can spot him saying , " yes " while shaking his head " no , " slightly shrugging his shoulders .
John Edwards : I 'd be happy to participate in one .
I know that it 's not possible that this child could be mine , because of the timing of events .
So I know it 's not possible .
Happy to take a paternity test , and would love to see it happen .
Interviewer : Are you going to do that soon ? Is there somebody -- JE : Well , I 'm only one side . I 'm only one side of the test .
But I 'm happy to participate in one .
PM : Okay , those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them .
when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash .
Murderers are known to leak sadness .
Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand , celebrate , go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger .
And we 're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here , but there 's one I can teach you that 's very dangerous , and it 's easy to learn , and that 's the expression of contempt .
Now with anger , you 've got two people on an even playing field .
It 's still somewhat of a healthy relationship .
But when anger turns to contempt , you 've been dismissed .
It 's associated with moral superiority .
And for that reason , it 's very , very hard to recover from .
Here 's what it looks like .
It 's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in .
It 's the only asymmetrical expression .
And in the presence of contempt , whether or not deception follows -- and it doesn 't always follow -- look the other way , go the other direction , reconsider the deal , say , " No thank you . I 'm not coming up for just one more nightcap . Thank you . "
Science has surfaced many , many more indicators .
We know , for example , we know liars will shift their blink rate , point their feet towards an exit .
They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them .
They 'll alter their vocal tone , often making their vocal tone much lower .
Now here 's the deal .
These behaviors are just behaviors .
They 're not proof of deception .
They 're red flags .
We 're human beings .
We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long .
They don 't mean anything in and of themselves .
But when you see clusters of them , that 's your signal .
Look , listen , probe , ask some hard questions , get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing , walk into curiosity mode , ask more questions , have a little dignity , treat the person you 're talking to with rapport .
Don 't try to be like those folks on " Law & amp ; Order " and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission .
Don 't be too aggressive , it doesn 't work .
Now we 've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who 's lying and how to spot a lie .
And as I promised , we 're now going to look at what the truth looks like .
But I 'm going to show you two videos , two mothers -- one is lying , one is telling the truth .
And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California .
And I think they 're an excellent example of what the truth looks like .
This mother , Diane Downs , shot her kids at close range , drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car , claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it .
And you 'll see when you see the video , she can 't even pretend to be an agonizing mother .
What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very , very cool demeanor .
And if you look closely , you 'll see duping delight throughout this video .
Diane Downs : At night when I close my eyes , I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I 'm driving , and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth .
And that -- maybe it 'll fade too with time -- but I don 't think so .
That bothers me the most .
PM : Now I 'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother , Erin Runnion , confronting her daughter 's murderer and torturer in court .
Here you 're going to see no false emotion , just the authentic expression of a mother 's agony .
Erin Runnion : I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby , and you hurt her , and you crushed her , you terrified her until her heart stopped .
And she fought , and I know she fought you .
But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes , and you still wanted to kill her .
And I don 't understand it , and I never will .
PM : Okay , there 's no doubting the veracity of those emotions .
Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on , the science of it .
We know for example that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans , MRI 's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we 're trying to be deceptive .
And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit , and they will prove incredibly useful some day .
But you 've got to ask yourself in the meantime : Who do you want on your side of the meeting , someone who 's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who 's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door ?
Liespotters rely on human tools .
They know , as someone once said , " Character 's who you are in the dark . "
And what 's kind of interesting is that today we have so little darkness .
Our world is lit up 24 hours a day .
It 's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public .
It 's a much more noisy world .
So one challenge we have is to remember , oversharing , that 's not honesty .
Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that 's still what matters , that 's always what 's going to matter .
So in this much noisier world , it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code .
When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking , listening , you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie .
You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit , because you signal to everyone around you , you say , " Hey , my world , our world , it 's going to be an honest one .
My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized . "
And when you do that , the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit .
And that 's the truth . Thank you .
Apollo Robbins : The art of misdirection
Hailed as the greatest pickpocket in the world , Apollo Robbins studies the quirks of human behavior as he steals your watch . In a hilarious demonstration , Robbins samples the buffet of the TEDGlobal 2013 audience , showing how the flaws in our perception make it possible to swipe a wallet and leave it on its owner 's shoulder while they remain clueless .
Do you think it 's possible to control someone 's attention ?
Even more than that , what about predicting human behavior ?
I think those are interesting ideas , if you could .
I mean , for me , that would be the perfect superpower , actually kind of an evil way of approaching it .
But for myself , in the past , I 've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way : picking pockets .
When we think of misdirection , we think of something as looking off to the side , when actually it 's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see , the things that you look at every day that you 're blinded to .
For example , how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now ?
Great . Double-check .
Make sure you still have them on you .
I was doing some shopping beforehand .
Now you 've looked at them probably a few times today , but I 'm going to ask you a question about them .
Without looking at your cell phone directly yet , can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner ?
Bring them out , check , and see how accurate you were .
How 'd you do ? Show of hands . Did we get it ?
Now that you 're done looking at those , close them down , because every phone has something in common .
No matter how you organize the icons , you still have a clock on the front .
So , without looking at your phone , what time was it ?
You just looked at your clock , right ?
It 's an interesting idea . Now , I 'll ask you to take that a step further with a game of trust .
Close your eyes .
I realize I 'm asking you to do that while you just heard there 's a pickpocket in the room , but close your eyes .
Now , you 've been watching me for about 30 seconds .
With your eyes closed , what am I wearing ?
Make your best guess .
What color is my shirt ? What color is my tie ?
Now open your eyes .
By a show of hands , were you right ?
It 's interesting , isn 't it ? Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others . It seems that way .
But I have a different theory about that , that model of attention .
They have fancy models of attention , Posner 's trinity model of attention .
For me , I like to think of it very simple , like a surveillance system .
It 's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors , and inside your brain is a little security guard .
For me , I like to call him Frank .
So Frank is sitting at a desk .
He 's got all sorts of cool information in front of him , high-tech equipment , he 's got cameras , he 's got a little phone that he can pick up , listen to the ears , all these senses , all these perceptions .
But attention is what steers your perceptions , is what controls your reality . It 's the gateway to the mind .
If you don 't attend to something , you can 't be aware of it .
But ironically , you can attend to something without being aware of it .
That 's why there 's the cocktail effect : When you 're in a party , you 're having conversations with someone , and yet you can recognize your name and you didn 't even realize you were listening to that .
Now , for my job , I have to play with techniques to exploit this , to play with your attention as a limited resource .
So if I could control how you spend your attention , if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction .
Now , instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side , instead , what I choose to focus on is Frank , to be able to play with the Frank inside your head , your little security guard , and get you , instead of focusing on your external senses , just to go internal for a second .
So if I ask you to access a memory , like , what is that ?
What just happened ? Do you have a wallet ?
Do you have an American Express in your wallet ?
And when I do that , your Frank turns around .
He accesses the file . He has to rewind the tape .
And what 's interesting is , he can 't rewind the tape at the same time that he 's trying to process new data .
Now , I mean , this sounds like a good theory , but I could talk for a long time and tell you lots of things , and they may be true , a portion of them , but I think it 's better if I tried to show that to you here live .
So if I come down , I 'm going to do a little bit of shopping .
Just hold still where you are .
Hello , how are you ? It 's lovely to see you .
You did a wonderful job onstage .
You have a lovely watch that doesn 't come off very well .
Do you have your ring as well ?
Good . Just taking inventory . You 're like a buffet .
It 's hard to tell where to start , there 's so many great things .
Hi , how are you ? Good to see you .
Hi , sir , could you stand up for me , please ? Just right where you are .
Oh , you 're married . You follow directions well .
That 's nice to meet you , sir .
You don 't have a whole lot inside your pockets . Anything down by the pocket over here ?
Hopefully so . Have a seat . There you go . You 're doing well .
Hi , sir , how are you ?
Good to see you , sir . You have a ring , a watch .
Do you have a wallet on you ? Joe : I don 't .
Apollo Robbins : Well , we 'll find one for you .
Come on up this way , Joe .
Give Joe a round of applause .
Come on up Joe . Let 's play a game .
Pardon me .
I don 't think I need this clicker anymore . You can have that .
Thank you very much . I appreciate that .
Come on up to the stage , Joe . Let 's play a little game now .
Do you have anything in your front pockets ? Joe : Money .
AR : Money . All right , let 's try that .
Can you stand right over this way for me ?
Turn around and , let 's see , if I give you something that belongs to me , this is just something I have , a poker chip .
Hold out your hand for me . Watch it kind of closely .
Now this is a task for you to focus on .
Now you have your money in your front pocket here ? Joe : Yup .
AR : Good . I 'm not going to actually put my hand in your pocket .
I 'm not ready for that kind of commitment .
One time a guy had a hole in his pocket , and that was rather traumatizing for me .
I was looking for his wallet and he gave me his phone number .
It was a big miscommunication .
So let 's do this simply . Squeeze your hand .
Squeeze it tight . Do you feel the poker chip in your hand ? Joe : I do .
AR : Would you be surprised if I could take it out of your hand ? Say yes .
Joe : Very . AR : Good .
Open your hand . Thank you very much .
I 'll cheat if you give me a chance .
Make it harder for me . Just use your hand .
Grab my wrist , but squeeze , squeeze firm .
Did you see it go ?
Joe : No . AR : No , it 's not here . Open your hand .
See , while we 're focused on the hand , it 's sitting on your shoulder right now .
Go ahead and take it off .
Now , let 's try that again .
Hold your hand out flat . Open it up all the way .
Put your hand up a little bit higher , but watch it close there , Joe .
See , if I did it slowly , it 'd be back on your shoulder .
Joe , we 're going to keep doing this till you catch it .
You 're going to get it eventually . I have faith in you .
Squeeze firm . You 're human , you 're not slow .
It 's back on your shoulder .
You were focused on your hand . That 's why you were distracted .
While you were watching this , I couldn 't quite get your watch off . It was difficult .
Yet you had something inside your front pocket .
Do you remember what it was ?
Joe : Money .
AR : Check your pocket . See if it 's still there . Is it still there ?
Oh , that 's where it was . Go ahead and put it away .
We 're just shopping . This trick 's more about the timing , really .
I 'm going to try to push it inside your hand .
Put your other hand on top for me , would you ?
It 's amazingly obvious now , isn 't it ?
It looks a lot like the watch I was wearing , doesn 't it ?
Joe : That 's pretty good . That 's pretty good . AR : Oh , thanks .
But it 's only a start . Let 's try it again , a little bit differently .
Hold your hands together . Put your other hand on top .
Now if you 're watching this little token , this obviously has become a little target . It 's like a red herring .
If we watch this kind of close , it looks like it goes away .
It 's not back on your shoulder .
It falls out of the air , lands right back in the hand .
Did you see it go ?
Yeah , it 's funny . We 've got a little guy . He 's union . He works up there all day .
If I did it slowly , if it goes straightaway , it lands down by your pocket . I believe is it in this pocket , sir ?
No , don 't reach in your pocket . That 's a different show .
So -- -- that 's rather strange . They have shots for that .
Can I show them what that is ? That 's rather bizarre . Is this yours , sir ?
I have no idea how that works . We 'll just send that over there .
That 's great . I need help with this one .
Step over this way for me .
Now don 't run away . You had something down by your pants pocket .
I was checking mine . I couldn 't find everything , but I noticed you had something here .
Can I feel the outside of your pocket for a moment ?
Down here I noticed this . Is this something of yours , sir ?
Is this ? I have no idea . That 's a shrimp .
Joe : Yeah . I 'm saving it for later .
AR : You 've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way , better than you know .
So we 'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift .
Hopefully it matches his taste .
But also , we have a couple of other things , a little bit of cash , and then we have a few other things .
These all belong to you , along with a big round of applause from all your friends .
Joe , thank you very much .
So , same question I asked you before , but this time you don 't have to close your eyes .
What am I wearing ?
Attention is a powerful thing .
Like I said , it shapes your reality .
So , I guess I 'd like to pose that question to you .
If you could control somebody 's attention , what would you do with it ?
Thank you .
Daniel Goldstein : The battle between your present and future self
Every day , we make decisions that have good or bad consequences for our future selves . Daniel Goldstein makes tools that help us imagine ourselves over time , so that we make smart choices for Future Us .
Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school ?
There was this hero , Odysseus , who 's heading back home after the Trojan War .
And he 's standing on the deck of his ship , he 's talking to his first mate , and he 's saying , " Tomorrow , we will sail past those rocks , and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens .
And these women sing an enchanting song , a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die . "
Now you would expect , given that , that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens , but instead Odysseus says , " I want to hear that song .
And so what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men -- stay with me -- so that you can 't hear the song , and then I 'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected . "
So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song .
And I 'd like to think if this was the case , they probably would have rehearsed it a few times .
Odysseus would have said , " Okay , let 's do a dry run .
You tie me to the mast , and I 'm going to beg and plead .
And no matter what I say , you cannot untie me from the mast .
All right , so tie me to the mast . "
And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot .
And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says , " Untie me . Untie me .
I want to hear that song . Untie me . "
And the first mate wisely resists and doesn 't untie Odysseus .
And then Odysseus says , " I see that you can get it .
All right , untie me now and we 'll get some dinner . "
And the first mate hesitates .
He 's like , " Is this still the rehearsal , or should I untie him ? "
And the first mate thinks , " Well , I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end . "
So he unties Odysseus , and Odysseus flips out .
He 's like , " You idiot . You moron .
If you do that tomorrow , I 'll be dead , you 'll be dead , every single one of the men will be dead .
Now just don 't untie me no matter what . "
He throws the first mate to the ground .
This repeats itself through the night -- rehearsal , tying to the mast , conning his way out of it , beating the poor first mate up mercilessly .
Hilarity ensues .
Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device .
A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don 't do something regrettable when you have a hot head .
Because there 's two heads inside one person when you think about it .
Scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation .
There is first , the present self .
This is like Odysseus when he 's hearing the song .
He just wants to get to the front row .
He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification .
But then there 's this other self , the future self .
This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca -- the other one .
So why do we need commitment devices ?
Well resisting temptation is hard , as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said , " To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power , or to seek distant rather than immediate results , are among the most painful exertions of the human will . "
If you set goals for yourself and you 're like a lot of other people , you probably realize it 's not that your goals are physically impossible that 's keeping you from achieving them , it 's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them .
It 's physically possible to lose weight .
It 's physically possible to exercise more .
But resisting temptation is hard .
The other reason that it 's difficult to resist temptation is because it 's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self .
I mean , let 's face it , the present self is present .
It 's in control . It 's in power right now .
It has these strong , heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth .
And the future self is not even around .
It 's off in the future . It 's weak .
It doesn 't even have a lawyer present .
There 's nobody to stick up for the future self .
And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams .
So there 's this battle between the two selves that 's being fought , and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two .
Now I 'm a big fan of commitment devices actually .
Tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one , but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you won 't eat it or unplugging your Internet connection so you can use your computer .
I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were .
So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University , I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career .
I had to write five pages a day towards papers or I would have to give up five dollars .
And when you try to execute these commitment devices , you realize the devil is really in the details .
Because it 's not that easy to get rid of five dollars .
I mean , you can 't burn it ; that 's illegal .
And I thought , well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that .
But then I thought , oh , I 'm sending myself mixed messages .
Because not writing is bad , but giving to charity is good .
So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift .
And then I kind of flipped that around and thought , well I could give it to the neo-Nazis .
But then I was like , that 's more bad than writing is good , and so that wouldn 't work .
So ultimately , I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway .
Sometimes a good person would find it , sometimes a bad person would find it .
On average , it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that I would regret .
Such it is with commitment devices .
But despite my like for them , there 's two nagging concerns that I 've always had about commitment devices , and you might feel this if you use them yourself .
So the first is , when you 've got one of these devices going , such as this contract to write everyday or pay , it 's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control .
You 're just telling yourself , " Without you , commitment device , I am nothing , I have no self-discipline . "
And then when you 're ever in a situation where you don 't have a commitment device in place -- like , " Oh my God , that person 's offering me a doughnut , and I have no defense mechanism , " -- you just eat it .
So I don 't like the way that they take the power away from you .
I think self-discipline is something , it 's like a muscle .
The more you exercise it , the stronger it gets .
The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them .
You say , " Well , of course I can 't write today , because I 'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews , and then I 'm going to a cocktail party and then I 'll be drunk after that .
And so there 's no way that this is going to work . "
So in effect , you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person .
You 're putting yourself , you 're binding yourself , and you 're weaseling your way out of it , and then you 're beating yourself up afterwards .
So I 've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people 's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices .
In particular , I 'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self .
And this is a timely issue .
I 'm talking about the topic of saving .
Now saving is a classic two selves problem .
The present self does not want to save at all .
It wants to consume .
Whereas the future self wants the present self to save .
So this is a timely problem .
We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s .
At the same time , the Retirement Risk Index , the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement , has been increasing .
And we 're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers , the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they 're in retirement .
So what can we do about this ?
There 's a philosopher , Derek Parfit , who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and I.
He said that , " We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination . "
That is to say , we somehow might not believe that we 're going to get old , or we might not be able to imagine that we 're going to get old some day .
On the one hand , it sounds ridiculous .
Of course , we know that we 're going to get old .
But aren 't there things that we believe and don 't believe at the same time ?
So my coauthors and I have used computers , the greatest tool of our time , to assist people 's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future .
And I 'll show you some of these tools right here .
The first is called the distribution builder .
It shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future .
Each outcome is shown by one of these markers , and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement .
Being up at the top means that you 're enjoying a high income in retirement .
Being down at the bottom means that you 're struggling to make ends meet .
When you make an investment , what you 're really saying is , " I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth . "
Now you can try to move your outcomes around .
You can try to manipulate your fate , like this person is doing , but it costs you something to do it .
It means that you have to save more today .
Once you find an investment that you 're happy with , what people do is they click " done " and the markers begin to disappear , slowly , one by one .
It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out .
At the end , there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement .
Yes , this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement .
They 're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working .
If you 're like most people , just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy -- just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before .
However , had you ended up on the very bottom , it might have given you a slight sense of dread and / or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement .
By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome , people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future .
Now people are motivated through emotions , but different people find different things motivating .
This is a simulation that uses graphics , but other people find motivating what money can buy , not just numbers .
So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes , I show people what those outcomes will get you , in particular apartments that you can afford if you 're retiring on 3,000 , 2,500 , 2,000 dollars per month and so on .
As you move down the ladder of apartments , you see that they get worse and worse .
Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student .
And as you get to the very bottom , you 're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don 't save anything for retirement , you won 't be able to afford any housing at all .
Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet .
The last thing I 'll show you , the last behavioral time machine , is something that I created with Hal Hershfield , who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project , Bill Sharpe .
And what it is is an exploration into virtual reality .
So what we do is we take pictures of people -- in this case , college-age people -- and we use software to age them and show these people what they 'll look like when they 're 60 , 70 , 80 years old .
And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior .
So this is one of our experiments .
Here we see the face of the young subject on the left .
He 's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate .
As he moves his savings rate down , it means that he 's saving zero when it 's all the way here at the left .
You can see his current annual income -- this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today -- is quite high , 91 percent , but his retirement income is quite low .
He 's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working .
If he saves the maximum legal amount , his retirement income goes up , but he 's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today .
Other conditions show people the future self .
And from the future self 's point of view , everything is in reverse .
If you save very little , the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income .
Whereas if the present self saves a lot , the future self is delighted , where the income is close up near 100 percent .
To bring this to a wider audience , I 've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine , in which you not only get to see yourself in the future , but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth .
So for instance , here is somebody using the tool .
And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider .
The younger face gets happier and happier , saving nothing .
The older face is miserable .
And slowly , slowly we 're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate .
And then it 's a high savings rate .
The younger face is getting unhappy .
The older face is quite pleased with the decision .
We 're going to see if this has an effect on what people do .
And what 's nice about it is it 's not something that biasing people actually , because as one face smiles , the other face frowns .
It 's not telling you which way to put the slider , it 's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self .
Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being .
And that 's something that 's easy to forget .
This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older .
There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke , if they get too much exposure to the sun , if they gain weight and so on .
And what 's good is , unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith , you don 't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality .
There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing .
This is actually a picture of Hal , my coauthor .
You might recognize him from the previous demos .
And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding , aging and weight gain software to see how he would look .
Hal is here , so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image .
And I 'll close it there .
On behalf of Hal and myself , I wish all the best to your present and future selves .
Thank you .
Hanna Rosin : New data on the rise of women
Hanna Rosin reviews startling new data that shows women actually surpassing men in several important measures , such as college graduation rates . Do these trends , both US-centric and global , signal the " end of men " ? Probably not -- but they point toward an important societal shift worth deep discussion .
We are now going through an amazing and unprecedented moment where the power dynamics between men and women are shifting very rapidly , and in many of the places where it counts the most , women are , in fact , taking control of everything .
In my mother 's day , she didn 't go to college .
Not a lot of women did .
And now , for every two men who get a college degree , three women will do the same .
Women , for the first time this year , became the majority of the American workforce .
And they 're starting to dominate lots of professions -- doctors , lawyers , bankers , accountants .
Over 50 percent of managers are women these days , and in the 15 professions projected to grow the most in the next decade , all but two of them are dominated by women .
So the global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men , believe it or not , and these economic changes are starting to rapidly affect our culture -- what our romantic comedies look like , what our marriages look like , what our dating lives look like , and our new set of superheroes .
For a long time , this is the image of American manhood that dominated -- tough , rugged , in control of his own environment .
A few years ago , the Marlboro Man was retired and replaced by this much less impressive specimen , who is a parody of American manhood , and that 's what we have in our commercials today .
The phrase " first-born son " is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that this statistic alone shocked me .
In American fertility clinics , 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys .
And in places where you wouldn 't think , such as South Korea , India and China , the very strict patriarchal societies are starting to break down a little , and families are no longer strongly preferring first-born sons .
If you think about this , if you just open your eyes to this possibility and start to connect the dots , you can see the evidence everywhere .
You can see it in college graduation patterns , in job projections , in our marriage statistics , you can see it in the Icelandic elections , which you 'll hear about later , and you can see it on South Korean surveys on son preference , that something amazing and unprecedented is happening with women .
Certainly this is not the first time that we 've had great progress with women .
The ' 20s and the ' 60s also come to mind .
But the difference is that , back then , it was driven by a very passionate feminist movement that was trying to project its own desires , whereas this time , it 's not about passion , and it 's not about any kind of movement .
This is really just about the facts of this economic moment that we live in .
The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end , believe it or not , and that 's why I talk about the " end of men . "
Now all you men out there , this is not the moment where you tune out or throw some tomatoes , because the point is that this is happening to all of us .
I myself have a husband and a father and two sons whom I dearly love .
And this is why I like to talk about this , because if we don 't acknowledge it , then the transition will be pretty painful .
But if we do take account of it , then I think it will go much more smoothly .
I first started thinking about this about a year and a half ago .
I was reading headlines about the recession just like anyone else , and I started to notice a distinct pattern -- that the recession was affecting men much more deeply than it was affecting women .
And I remembered back to about 10 years ago when I read a book by Susan Faludi called " Stiffed : The Betrayal of the American Man , " in which she described how hard the recession had hit men , and I started to think about whether it had gotten worse this time around in this recession .
And I realized that two things were different this time around .
The first was that these were no longer just temporary hits that the recession was giving men -- that this was reflecting a deeper underlying shift in our global economy .
And second , that the story was no longer just about the crisis of men , but it was also about what was happening to women .
And now look at this second set of slides .
These are headlines about what 's been going on with women in the next few years .
These are things we never could have imagined a few years ago .
Women , a majority of the workplace .
And labor statistics : women take up most managerial jobs .
This second set of headlines -- you can see that families and marriages are starting to shift .
And look at that last headline -- young women earning more than young men .
That particular headline comes to me from a market research firm .
They were basically asked by one of their clients who was going to buy houses in that neighborhood in the future .
And they expected that it would be young families , or young men , just like it had always been .
But in fact , they found something very surprising .
It was young , single women who were the major purchasers of houses in the neighborhood .
And so they decided , because they were intrigued by this finding , to do a nationwide survey .
So they spread out all the census data , and what they found , the guy described to me as a shocker , which is that in 1,997 out of 2,000 communities , women , young women , were making more money than young men .
So here you have a generation of young women who grow up thinking of themselves as being more powerful earners than the young men around them .
Now , I 've just laid out the picture for you , but I still haven 't explained to you why this is happening .
And in a moment , I 'm going to show you a graph , and what you 'll see on this graph -- it begins in 1973 , just before women start flooding the workforce , and it brings us up to our current day .
And basically what you 'll see is what economists talk about as the polarization of the economy .
Now what does that mean ?
It means that the economy is dividing into high-skill , high-wage jobs and low-skill , low-wage jobs -- and that the middle , the middle-skill jobs , and the middle-earning jobs , are starting to drop out of the economy .
This has been going on for 40 years now .
But this process is affecting men very differently than it 's affecting women .
You 'll see the women in red , and you 'll see the men in blue .
You 'll watch them both drop out of the middle class , but see what happens to women and see what happens to men .
There we go .
So watch that . You see them both drop out of the middle class .
Watch what happens to the women . Watch what happens to the men .
The men sort of stagnate there , while the women zoom up in those high-skill jobs .
So what 's that about ?
It looks like women got some power boost on a video game , or like they snuck in some secret serum into their birth-control pills that lets them shoot up high .
But of course , it 's not about that .
What it 's about is that the economy has changed a lot .
We used to have a manufacturing economy , which was about building goods and products , and now we have a service economy and an information and creative economy .
Those two economies require very different skills , and as it happens , women have been much better at acquiring the new set of skills than men have been .
It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn 't have a college degree , but you had a specific set of skills , and with the help of a union , you could make yourself a pretty good middle-class life .
But that really isn 't true anymore .
This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength , which is what 's helped men along all these years .
What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills .
You basically need intelligence , you need an ability to sit still and focus , to communicate openly , to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be , and those are things that women do extremely well , as we 're seeing .
If you look at management theory these days , it used to be that our ideal leader sounded something like General Patton , right ?
You would be issuing orders from above .
You would be very hierarchical .
You would tell everyone below you what to do .
But that 's not what an ideal leader is like now .
If you read management books now , a leader is somebody who can foster creativity , who can get his -- get the employees -- see , I still say " his " -- who can get the employees to talk to each other , who can basically build teams and get them to be creative .
And those are all things that women do very well .
And then on top of that , that 's created a kind of cascading effect .
Women enter the workplace at the top , and then at the working class , all the new jobs that are created are the kinds of jobs that wives used to do for free at home .
So that 's childcare , elder care and food preparation .
So those are all the jobs that are growing , and those are jobs that women tend to do .
Now one day it might be that mothers will hire an out-of-work , middle-aged , former steelworker guy to watch their children at home , and that would be good for the men , but that hasn 't quite happened yet .
To see what 's going to happen , you can 't just look at the workforce that is now , you have to look at our future workforce .
And here the story is fairly simple .
Women are getting college degrees at a faster rate than men .
Why ? This is a real mystery .
People have asked men , why don 't they just go back to college , to community college , say , and retool themselves , learn a new set of skills ?
Well it turns out that they 're just very uncomfortable doing that .
They 're used to thinking of themselves as providers , and they can 't seem to build the social networks that allow them to get through college .
So for some reason men just don 't end up going back to college .
And what 's even more disturbing is what 's happening with younger boys .
There 's been about a decade of research about what people are calling the " boy crisis . "
Now the boy crisis is this idea that very young boys , for whatever reason , are doing worse in school than very young girls , and people have theories about that .
Is it because we have an excessively verbal curriculum , and little girls are better at that than little boys ?
Or that we require kids to sit still too much , and so boys initially feel like failures ?
And some people say it 's because , in 9th grade , boys start dropping out of school .
Because I 'm writing a book about all this , I 'm still looking into it , so I don 't have the answer .
But in the mean time , I 'm going to call on the worldwide education expert , who 's my 10-year-old daughter , Noa , to talk to you about why the boys in her class do worse .
Noa : The girls are obviously smarter .
I mean they have much larger vocabulary .
They learn much faster .
They are more controlled .
On the board today for losing recess tomorrow , only boys .
Hanna Rosin : And why is that ?
Noa : Why ? They were just not listening to the class while the girls sat there very nicely .
HR : So there you go .
This whole thesis really came home to me when I went to visit a college in Kansas City -- working-class college .
Certainly , when I was in college , I had certain expectations about my life -- that my husband and I would both work , and that we would equally raise the children .
But these college girls had a completely different view of their future .
Basically , the way they said it to me is that they would be working 18 hours a day , that their husband would maybe have a job , but that mostly he would be at home taking care of the kiddies .
And this was kind of a shocker to me .
And then here 's my favorite quote from one of the girls : " Men are the new ball and chain . "
Now you laugh , but that quote has kind of a sting to it , right ?
And I think the reason it has a sting is because thousands of years of history don 't reverse themselves without a lot of pain , and that 's why I talk about us all going through this together .
The night after I talked to these college girls , I also went to a men 's group in Kansas , and these were exactly the kind of victims of the manufacturing economy which I spoke to you about earlier .
They were men who had been contractors , or they had been building houses and they had lost their jobs after the housing boom , and they were in this group because they were failing to pay their child support .
And the instructor was up there in the class explaining to them all the ways in which they had lost their identity in this new age .
He was telling them they no longer had any moral authority , that nobody needed them for emotional support anymore , and they were not really the providers .
So who were they ?
And this was very disheartening for them .
And what he did was he wrote down on the board " $ 85,000 , " and he said , " That 's her salary , " and then he wrote down " $ 12,000 . "
" That 's your salary .
So who 's the man now ? " he asked them .
" Who 's the damn man ?
She 's the man now . "
And that really sent a shudder through the room .
And that 's part of the reason I like to talk about this , because I think it can be pretty painful , and we really have to work through it .
And the other reason it 's kind of urgent is because it 's not just happening in the U.S.
It 's happening all over the world .
In India , poor women are learning English faster than their male counterparts in order to staff the new call centers that are growing in India .
In China , a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses , small businesses , faster than men .
And here 's my favorite example , which is in South Korea .
Over several decades , South Korea built one of the most patriarchal societies we know about .
They basically enshrined the second-class status of women in the civil code .
And if women failed to birth male children , they were basically treated like domestic servants .
And sometimes family would pray to the spirits to kill off a girl child so they could have a male child .
But over the ' 70s and ' 80s , the South Korea government decided they wanted to rapidly industrialize , and so what they did was , they started to push women into the workforce .
Now they 've been asking a question since 1985 : " How strongly do you prefer a first-born son ? "
And now look at the chart .
That 's from 1985 to 2003 .
How much do you prefer a first-born son ?
So you can see that these economic changes really do have a strong effect on our culture .
Now because we haven 't fully processed this information , it 's kind of coming back to us in our pop culture in these kind of weird and exaggerated ways , where you can see that the stereotypes are changing .
And so we have on the male side what one of my colleagues likes to call the " omega males " popping up , who are the males who are romantically challenged losers who can 't find a job .
And they come up in lots of different forms .
So we have the perpetual adolescent .
We have the charmless misanthrope .
Then we have our Bud Light guy who 's the happy couch potato .
And then here 's a shocker : even America 's most sexiest man alive , the sexiest man alive gets romantically played these days in a movie .
And then on the female side , you have the opposite , in which you have these crazy superhero women .
You 've got Lady Gaga .
You 've got our new James Bond , who 's Angelina Jolie .
And it 's not just for the young , right ?
Even Helen Mirren can hold a gun these days .
And so it feels like we have to move from this place where we 've got these uber-exaggerated images into something that feels a little more normal .
So for a long time in the economic sphere , we 've lived with the term " glass ceiling . "
Now I 've never really liked this term .
For one thing , it puts men and women in a really antagonistic relationship with one another , because the men are these devious tricksters up there who 've put up this glass ceiling .
And we 're always below the glass ceiling , the women .
And we have a lot of skill and experience , but it 's a trick , so how are you supposed to prepare to get through that glass ceiling ?
And also , " shattering the glass ceiling " is a terrible phrase .
What crazy person would pop their head through a glass ceiling ?
So the image that I like to think of , instead of glass ceiling , is the high bridge .
It 's definitely terrifying to stand at the foot of a high bridge , but it 's also pretty exhilarating , because it 's beautiful up there , and you 're looking out on a beautiful view .
And the great thing is there 's no trick like with the glass ceiling .
There 's no man or woman standing in the middle about to cut the cables .
There 's no hole in the middle that you 're going to fall through .
And the great thing is that you can take anyone along with you .
You can bring your husband along .
You can bring your friends , or your colleagues , or your babysitter to walk along with you .
And husbands can drag their wives across , if their wives don 't feel ready .
But the point about the high bridge is that you have to have the confidence to know that you deserve to be on that bridge , that you have all the skills and experience you need in order to walk across the high bridge , but you just have to make the decision to take the first step and do it .
Thanks very much .
George Monbiot : For more wonder , rewild the world
Wolves were once native to the US ' Yellowstone National Park -- until hunting wiped them out . But when , in 1995 , the wolves began to come back , something interesting happened : the rest of the park began to find a new , more healthful balance . In a bold thought experiment , George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex , lost natural food chains that once surrounded us .
When I was a young man , I spent six years of wild adventure in the tropics working as an investigative journalist in some of the most bewitching parts of the world .
I was as reckless and foolish as only young men can be .
This is why wars get fought .
But I also felt more alive than I 've ever done since .
And when I came home , I found the scope of my existence gradually diminishing until loading the dishwasher seemed like an interesting challenge .
And I found myself sort of scratching at the walls of life , as if I was trying to find a way out into a wider space beyond .
I was , I believe , ecologically bored .
Now , we evolved in rather more challenging times than these , in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws .
And we still possess the fear and the courage and the aggression required to navigate those times .
But in our comfortable , safe , crowded lands , we have few opportunities to exercise them without harming other people .
And this was the sort of constraint that I found myself bumping up against .
To conquer uncertainty , to know what comes next , that 's almost been the dominant aim of industrialized societies , and having got there , or almost got there , we have just encountered a new set of unmet needs .
We 've privileged safety over experience and we 've gained a lot in doing so , but I think we 've lost something too .
Now , I don 't romanticize evolutionary time .
I 'm already beyond the lifespan of most hunter-gatherers , and the outcome of a mortal combat between me myopically stumbling around with a stone-tipped spear and an enraged giant aurochs isn 't very hard to predict .
Nor was it authenticity that I was looking for .
I don 't find that a useful or even intelligible concept .
I just wanted a richer and rawer life than I 've been able to lead in Britain , or , indeed , that we can lead in most parts of the industrialized world .
And it was only when I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand what I was looking for .
And as soon as I found that word , I realized that I wanted to devote much of the rest of my life to it .
The word is " rewilding , " and even though rewilding is a young word , it already has several definitions .
But there are two in particular that fascinate me .
The first one is the mass restoration of ecosystems .
One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades .
A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom , and the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995 .
Now , we all know that wolves kill various species of animals , but perhaps we 're slightly less aware that they give life to many others .
It sounds strange , but just follow me for a while .
Before the wolves turned up , they 'd been absent for 70 years .
The numbers of deer , because there was nothing to hunt them , had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park , and despite efforts by humans to control them , they 'd managed to reduce much of the vegetation there to almost nothing , they 'd just grazed it away .
But as soon as the wolves arrived , even though they were few in number , they started to have the most remarkable effects .
First , of course , they killed some of the deer , but that wasn 't the major thing .
Much more significantly , they radically changed the behavior of the deer .
The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park , the places where they could be trapped most easily , particularly the valleys and the gorges , and immediately those places started to regenerate .
In some areas , the height of the trees quintupled in just six years .
Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood .
And as soon as that happened , the birds started moving in .
The number of songbirds , of migratory birds , started to increase greatly .
The number of beavers started to increase , because beavers like to eat the trees .
And beavers , like wolves , are ecosystem engineers .
They create niches for other species .
And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians .
The wolves killed coyotes , and as a result of that , the number of rabbits and mice began to rise , which meant more hawks , more weasels , more foxes , more badgers .
Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left .
Bears fed on it too , and their population began to rise as well , partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs , and the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer .
But here 's where it gets really interesting .
The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers .
They began to meander less .
There was less erosion . The channels narrowed .
More pools formed , more riffle sections , all of which were great for wildlife habitats .
The rivers changed in response to the wolves , and the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often , so that the rivers became more fixed in their course .
Similarly , by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides , there was less soil erosion , because the vegetation stabilized that as well .
So the wolves , small in number , transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park , this huge area of land , but also its physical geography .
Whales in the southern oceans have similarly wide-ranging effects .
One of the many post-rational excuses made by the Japanese government for killing whales is that they said , " Well , the number of fish and krill will rise and then there 'll be more for people to eat . "
Well , it 's a stupid excuse , but it sort of kind of makes sense , doesn 't it , because you 'd think that whales eat huge amounts of fish and krill , so obviously take the whales away , there 'll be more fish and krill .
But the opposite happened .
You take the whales away , and the number of krill collapses .
Why would that possibly have happened ?
Well , it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem , and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes , huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters , up in the photic zone , where there 's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place , and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton , the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain , which stimulate the growth of zooplankton , which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it .
The other thing that whales do is that , as they 're plunging up and down through the water column , they 're kicking the phytoplankton back up towards the surface where it can continue to survive and reproduce .
And interestingly , well , we know that plant plankton in the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere -- the more plant plankton there are , the more carbon they absorb -- and eventually they filter down into the abyss and remove that carbon from the atmospheric system .
Well , it seems that when whales were at their historic populations , they were probably responsible for sequestering some tens of millions of tons of carbon every year from the atmosphere .
And when you look at it like that , you think , wait a minute , here are the wolves changing the physical geography of the Yellowstone National Park .
Here are the whales changing the composition of the atmosphere .
You begin to see that possibly , the evidence supporting James Lovelock 's Gaia hypothesis , which conceives of the world as a coherent , self-regulating organism , is beginning , at the ecosystem level , to accumulate .
Trophic cascades tell us that the natural world is even more fascinating and complex than we thought it was .
They tell us that when you take away the large animals , you are left with a radically different ecosystem to one which retains its large animals .
And they make , in my view , a powerful case for the reintroduction of missing species .
Rewilding , to me , means bringing back some of the missing plants and animals .
It means taking down the fences , it means blocking the drainage ditches , it means preventing commercial fishing in some large areas of sea , but otherwise stepping back .
It has no view as to what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of species looks like .
It doesn 't try to produce a heath or a meadow or a rain forest or a kelp garden or a coral reef .
It lets nature decide , and nature , by and large , is pretty good at deciding .
Now , I mentioned that there are two definitions of rewilding that interest me .
The other one is the rewilding of human life .
And I don 't see this as an alternative to civilization .
I believe we can enjoy the benefits of advanced technology , as we 're doing now , but at the same time , if we choose , have access to a richer and wilder life of adventure there would be wonderful , rewilded habitats .
And the opportunities for this are developing more rapidly than you might think possible .
There 's one estimate which suggests that in the United States , two thirds of the land which was once forested and then cleared has become reforested as loggers and farmers have retreated , particularly from the eastern half of the country .
There 's another one which suggests that 30 million hectares of land in Europe , an area the size of Poland , will be vacated by farmers between 2000 and 2030 .
Now , faced with opportunities like that , does it not seem a little unambitious to be thinking only of bringing back wolves , lynx , bears , beavers , bison , boar , moose , and all the other species which are already beginning to move quite rapidly across Europe ?
Perhaps we should also start thinking about the return of some of our lost megafauna .
What megafauna , you say ?
Well , every continent had one , apart from Antarctica .
When Trafalgar Square in London was excavated , the river gravels there were found to be stuffed with the bones of hippopotamus , rhinos , elephants , hyenas , lions .
Yes , ladies and gentlemen , there were lions in Trafalgar Square long before Nelson 's Column was built .
All these species lived here in the last interglacial period , when temperatures were pretty similar to our own .
It 's not climate , largely , which has got rid of the world 's megafaunas .
It 's pressure from the human population hunting and destroying their habitats which has done so .
And even so , you can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems .
Why is it that so many deciduous trees are able to sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken ?
Why is it that they can withstand the loss of so much of their bark ?
Why do understory trees , which are subject to lower sheer forces from the wind and have to carry less weight than the big canopy trees , why are they so much tougher and harder to break Elephants .
They are elephant-adapted .
In Europe , for example , they evolved to resist the straight-tusked elephant , elephas antiquus , which was a great beast .
It was related to the Asian elephant , but it was a temperate animal , a temperate forest creature .
It was a lot bigger than the Asian elephant .
But why is it that some of our common shrubs have spines which seem to be over-engineered to resist browsing by deer ?
Perhaps because they evolved to resist browsing by rhinoceros .
Isn 't it an amazing thought that every time you wander into a park or down an avenue or through a leafy street , you can see the shadows of these great beasts ?
Paleoecology , the study of past ecosystems , crucial to an understanding of our own , feels like a portal through which you may pass into an enchanted kingdom .
And if we really are looking at areas of land of the sort of sizes I 've been talking about becoming available , why not reintroduce some of our lost megafauna , or at least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere ?
Why shouldn 't all of us have a Serengeti on our doorsteps ?
And perhaps this is the most important thing that rewilding offers us , the most important thing that 's missing from our lives : hope .
In motivating people to love and defend the natural world , an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair .
The story rewilding tells us is that ecological change need not always proceed in one direction .
It offers us the hope that our silent spring could be replaced by a raucous summer .
Thank you .
Robert Thurman : We can be Buddhas
In our hyperlinked world , we can know anything , anytime . And this mass enlightenment , says Buddhist scholar Bob Thurman , is our first step toward Buddha nature .
Thank you .
And I feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me .
I feel it 's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra , an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area , Vaishali , and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him .
All the young people , actually , from the city .
The old fogeys don 't come because they 're mad at Buddha , because when he came to their city he accepted -- he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him , from whoever it is , and the local geisha , a movie-star sort of person , raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first .
So he was hanging out with the movie star , and of course they were grumbling : " He 's supposed to be religious and all this .
What 's he doing over there at Amrapali 's house with all his 500 monks , " and so on . They were all grumbling , and so they boycotted him .
They wouldn 't go listen to him .
But the young people all came .
And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol , and they put it on the ground .
And as soon as they had laid all these , all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India , he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium , the wonder of the universe . Everyone looked in that , and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes .
And of course , in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it , and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets .
So they don 't -- when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky -- they don 't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding .
They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that .
He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected .
And then Leilei -- I know his other name -- told us about interconnection , and how we 're all totally interconnected here , and how we 've all known each other . And of course in the Buddhist universe , we 've already done this already billions of times in many , many lifetimes in the past .
And I didn 't give the talk always . You did , and we had to watch you , and so forth .
And we 're all still trying to , I guess we 're all trying to become TEDsters , if that 's a modern form of enlightenment .
I guess so . Because in a way , if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything , it 's the forging of a mass awareness , of where everybody can really know everything that 's going on everywhere in the planet .
And therefore it will become intolerable -- what compassion is , is where it will become intolerable for us , totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is , and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place , or they 're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth .
It just becomes intolerable .
With all of us knowing everything , we 're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something , to become enlightened .
And of course , we all will be deeply disappointed when we do .
Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do , a little bit tired , we do suffer .
We do enjoy our misery in a certain way .
We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere , but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there .
And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other , and each one tries to get out of their own , and ultimately it fails of course , and then we 're back into this thing .
Because our egocentric perception -- from the Buddha 's point of view , misperception -- is that all we are is what is inside our skin .
And it 's inside and outside , self and other , and other is all very different .
And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception , a little bit , right ?
You know , someone sitting next to you in a seat -- that 's OK because you 're in a theater , but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you , you 'd freak out .
What do they want from me ? Like , who 's that ?
And so you wouldn 't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it 's you versus the universe -- that 's all Buddha discovered .
Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone , each of us , and everyone else is different , then that puts us in an impossible situation , doesn 't it ?
Who is it who 's going to get enough attention from the world ?
Who 's going to get enough out of the world ?
Who 's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings -- if you 're different from all the other beings ?
So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way : through art , through meditation , through understanding , through knowledge actually , knowing that you have no such boundary , knowing your interconnectedness with other beings .
You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them .
When you do that , you 're forced to feel what they feel .
Luckily , they say -- I still am not sure -- but luckily , they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature , they say , " Oh who would really want to be compassionate ?
How awful ! I 'm so miserable on my own . My head is aching .
My bones are aching . I go from birth to death . I 'm never satisfied .
I never have enough , even if I 'm a billionaire , I don 't have enough .
I need a hundred billion . " So I 'm like that .
Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people 's suffering .
It would be terrible .
But apparently , this is a strange paradox of life .
When you 're no longer locked in yourself , and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world , that enables you to let your mind spread out , and empathize , and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing , and realizing that you are the other being , somehow by that opening , you can see the deeper nature of life . And you can , you get away from this terrible iron circle of I , me , me , mine , like the Beatles used to sing .
You know , we really learned everything in the ' 60s .
Too bad nobody ever woke up to it , and they 've been trying to suppress it since then .
I , me , me , mine . It 's like a perfect song , that song . A perfect teaching .
But when we 're relieved from that , we somehow then become interested in all the other beings .
And we feel ourselves differently . It 's totally strange .
It 's totally strange .
The Dalai Lama always likes to say -- he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion , it 's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence .
It 's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that , or what , you know -- and the more you focus on how you feel , by the way , the worse it gets .
Like , even when you 're having a good time , when is the good time over ?
The good time is over when you think , how good is it ?
And then it 's never good enough .
I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time , doing it by having a good time .
I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that . I wish he 'd been there to hear that .
He once told me -- he looked kind of sad ; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots .
He looked a little sad , because he said , well , a hundred years ago , they went and took everything away from the haves .
You know , the big communist revolutions , Russia and China and so forth .
They took it all away by violence , saying they were going to give it to everyone , and then they were even worse .
They didn 't help at all .
So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today ?
And so then he looks at me .
So I said , " Well , you know , you 're all in this yourself . You teach : it 's generosity , " was all I could think of . What is virtue ?
But of course , what you said , I think the key to saving the world , the key to compassion is that it is more fun .
It should be done by fun . Generosity is more fun . That 's the key .
Everybody has the wrong idea . They think Buddha was so boring , and they 're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he 's fairly jolly .
Even though his people are being genocided -- and believe me , he feels every blow on every old nun 's head , in every Chinese prison . He feels it .
He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays .
I won 't even say what they do . But he feels it .
And yet he 's very jolly . He 's extremely jolly .
Because when you open up like that , then you can 't just -- what good does it do to add being miserable with others ' misery ?
You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is , how it can be changed .
Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us . She scared us with the lava man .
She scared us with the lava man is coming , then the tsunami is coming , but then finally there were flowers and trees , and it was very beautiful .
It 's really lovely .
So , compassion means to feel the feelings of others , and the human being actually is compassion .
The human being is almost out of time .
The human being is compassion because what is our brain for ?
Now , Jim 's brain is memorizing the almanac .
But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is , he will , he did .
He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings .
And he would have tremendous fun doing that .
So the first person who gets happy , when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of , how happy am I , where you 're always dissatisfied -- as Mick Jagger told us . You never get any satisfaction that way .
So then you decide , " Well , I 'm sick of myself .
I 'm going to think of how other people can be happy .
I 'm going to get up in the morning and think , what can I do for even one other person , even a dog , my dog , my cat , my pet , my butterfly ? "
And the first person who gets happy when you do that , you don 't do anything for anybody else , but you get happier , you yourself , because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it .
And you realize that this -- being with these people -- is the flower garden that Chiho showed us .
It is Nirvana .
And my time is up . And I know the TED commandments .
Thank you .
Claron McFadden : Singing the primal mystery
" The human voice : mysterious , spontaneous , primal . " With these words , soprano Claron McFadden invites us to explore the mysteries of breathing and singing , as she performs the challenging " Aria , " by John Cage . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Folks , you 've just met Claron McFadden .
She is a world-class soprano singer who studied in Rochester , New York .
Her celebrated operatic roles are numerous and varied .
In August 2007 , Claron was awarded the Amsterdam Prize for the Arts , winning praise for her brilliance , her amazing and extensively wide repertoire and her vivid stage personality .
Please welcome Claron McFadden .
Claron McFadden : The human voice : mysterious , spontaneous , primal .
For me , the human voice is the vessel on which all emotions travel -- except perhaps jealousy .
And the breath , the breath is the captain of that vessel .
A child is born , takes its first breath -- and we behold the wondrous beauty of vocal expression -- mysterious , spontaneous and primal .
A few years ago , I did a meditation retreat in Thailand .
I wanted a place that I would have total silence and total solitude .
I spent two weeks at this retreat in my own little hut -- no music , no nothing , sounds of nature -- trying to find the essence of concentration , being in the moment .
On my last day , the woman who looked after the place , she came and we spoke for a minute , and then she said to me , " Would you sing something for me ? "
And I thought , but this is a place of total quiet and silence .
I can 't make noise .
She said , " Please , sing for me . "
So I closed my eyes , I took breath and the first thing that came up and out was " Summertime , " Porgy and Bess .
Summertime and the living is easy Fish are jumping and the cotton is high Oh , your daddy 's rich and your ma is good-looking So hush little baby Don 't you cry And I opened my eyes , and I saw that she had her eyes closed .
And after a moment , she opened her eyes and she looked at me and she said , " It 's like meditation . "
And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for , to search for , I had it already in my singing -- the calm , but alertness , the focus , but awareness , and being totally in the moment .
When you 're totally in the moment , when I 'm totally in the moment , the vessel of expression is open .
The emotions can flow from me to you and back .
Extremely profound experience .
There 's a piece by a composer , an American composer called John Cage .
It 's called " Aria . "
It was written for an amazing singer called Cathy Berberian .
And the thing about this piece that 's so special -- if you see it behind me -- it 's not notated in any way .
No notes , no flats , no sharps .
But it 's a kind of structure , and the singer within this structure has total freedom to be creative , spontaneous .
For example , there are different colors and each color gets a different type of singing -- pop , country and western , opera , jazz -- and you just have to be consistent with that color .
You see there are different lines : you choose in your own tempo in your own way to follow the line , but you must respect it , more or less .
And these little dots , these represent a sort of sound that 's not a vocal , not a lyrical way of expressing the voice .
Using the body -- it could be sneezing , it could be coughing , it could be animals -- exactly -- clapping , whatever .
And there 's different text .
There 's Armenian , Russian , French , English , Italian .
So within this structure one is free .
To me , this piece is an ode to the voice because it 's mysterious -- as we can see -- it 's quite spontaneous , and it 's primal .
So I would like to share this piece with you .
It 's " Aria " of John Cage .
No other way Dans l 'espace , so help To have the fruits
Andrea Ghez : The hunt for a supermassive black hole
With new data from the Keck telescopes , Andrea Ghez shows how state-of-the-art adaptive optics are helping astronomers understand our universe 's most mysterious objects : black holes . She shares evidence that a supermassive black hole may be lurking at the center of the Milky Way .
How do you observe something you can 't see ?
This is the basic question of somebody who 's interested in finding and studying black holes .
Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it , not even light , so you can 't see it directly .
So , my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole .
I 'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive , what we like to call " supermassive " black hole at the center of our galaxy .
And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist .
And second , it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment , and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in .
So , to begin with , we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole .
So , what is a black hole ?
Well , in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object , because there are only three characteristics that you can describe : the mass , the spin , and the charge .
And I 'm going to only talk about the mass .
So , in that sense , it 's a very simple object .
But in another sense , it 's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe , and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe .
But today , the way I want you to understand a black hole , for the proof of a black hole , is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume .
So , despite the fact that I 'm going to talk to you about an object that 's supermassive , and I 'm going to get to what that really means in a moment , it has no finite size .
So , this is a little tricky .
But fortunately there is a finite size that you can see , and that 's known as the Schwarzschild radius .
And that 's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius .
This is a virtual radius , not reality ; the black hole has no size .
So why is it so important ?
It 's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole .
That means you , your neighbor , your cellphone , the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the Schwarzschild radius .
At that point , what 's going to happen ?
At that point gravity wins .
Gravity wins over all other known forces .
And the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object .
And then it 's a black hole .
So , if I were to compress the Earth down to the size of a sugar cube , it would become a black hole , because the size of a sugar cube is its Schwarzschild radius .
Now , the key here is to figure out what that Schwarzschild radius is .
And it turns out that it 's actually pretty simple to figure out .
It depends only on the mass of the object .
Bigger objects have bigger Schwarzschild radii .
Smaller objects have smaller Schwarzschild radii .
So , if I were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the University of Oxford , it would become a black hole .
So , now we know what a Schwarzschild radius is .
And it 's actually quite a useful concept , because it tells us not only when a black hole will form , but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole .
I only need two things .
I need to understand the mass of the object I 'm claiming is a black hole , and what its Schwarzschild radius is .
And since the mass determines the Schwarzschild radius , there is actually only one thing I really need to know .
So , my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that 's confined to within its Schwarzschild radius .
And your job today is to be skeptical .
Okay , so , I 'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole ; I 'm going to talk about supermassive black holes .
So , I wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is , as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole .
An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star 's life .
So , if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the Sun , it 's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here .
And inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the Sun .
On an astronomical scale that 's a very small black hole .
Now , what I want to talk about are the supermassive black holes .
And the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies .
And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes .
There are big ones . There are little ones .
Almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy .
And there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left .
And there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy , just to give you a sense of scale .
And all the light that we see from a typical galaxy , which is the kind of galaxies that we 're seeing here , comes from the light from the stars .
So , we see the galaxy because of the star light .
Now , there are a few relatively exotic galaxies .
I like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world , because they are kind of show offs .
And we call them active galactic nuclei .
And we call them that because their nucleus , or their center , are very active .
So , at the center there , that 's actually where most of the starlight comes out from .
And yet , what we actually see is light that can 't be explained by the starlight .
It 's way more energetic .
In fact , in a few examples it 's like the ones that we 're seeing here .
There are also jets emanating out from the center .
Again , a source of energy that 's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars .
So , what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to .
So , you can 't see the black hole itself , but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see .
So , there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies .
But it 's a kind of indirect argument .
Nonetheless , it 's given rise to the notion that maybe it 's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes , but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers .
And if that 's the case -- and this is an example of a normal galaxy ; what we see is the star light .
And if there is a supermassive black hole , what we need to assume is that it 's a black hole on a diet .
Because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei .
If we 're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies , the best place to look is in our own galaxy , our Milky Way .
And this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the Milky Way .
And what we see is a line of stars .
And that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened , disk-like structure .
And we live in the middle of it , so when we look towards the center , we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy , or line that defines the plane of the galaxy .
Now , the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it 's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we 're ever going to have , because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away .
So , we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else .
And as you 'll see in a moment , the ability to see detail is key to this experiment .
So , how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume ?
Which is the job that I have to show you today .
And the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole .
Stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun .
It 's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit .
If there were no massive objects these things would go flying off , or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit .
So , this is great , because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume .
So , if I know how fast it goes around , I know the mass .
And if I know the scale of the orbit I know the radius .
So , I want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible .
Because I want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible .
So , this means that I want to see a lot of detail .
And that 's the reason that for this experiment we 've used the world 's largest telescope .
This is the Keck observatory . It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters , which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court .
Now , this is wonderful , because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope , the smaller the detail that we can see .
But it turns out these telescopes , or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise .
And that is because of the atmosphere .
Atmosphere is great for us ; it allows us to survive here on Earth .
But it 's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources .
So , to give you a sense of what this is like , it 's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream .
Looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream , the stream is continuously moving and turbulent , and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream .
Very much in the same way , it 's very difficult to see astronomical sources , because of the atmosphere that 's continuously moving by .
So , I 've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere , to give us a cleaner view .
And that buys us about a factor of 20 .
And I think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20 , you 've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot , say your salary , you 'd notice , or your kids , you 'd notice .
And this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use , called adaptive optics .
You 're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you don 't use this technique -- in other words , just a picture that shows the stars -- and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy , where we think the black hole is .
So , without this technology you can 't see the stars .
With this technology all of a sudden you can see it .
This technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that 's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you .
So , it 's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope .
Now , in the next few slides I 'm just going to focus on that little square there .
So , we 're only going to look at the stars inside that small square , although we 've looked at all of them .
So , I want to see how these things have moved .
And over the course of this experiment , these stars have moved a tremendous amount .
So , we 've been doing this experiment for 15 years , and we see the stars go all the way around .
Now , most astronomers have a favorite star , and mine today is a star that 's labeled up there , SO-2 .
Absolutely my favorite star in the world .
And that 's because it goes around in only 15 years .
And to give you a sense of how short that is , the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy .
Stars that we knew about before , that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible , take 500 years .
And this one , this one goes around in a human lifetime .
That 's kind of profound , in a way .
But it 's the key to this experiment . The orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius .
So , next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy .
What we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle .
And as you can see , there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle .
You can see a lot of stars .
So , there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy , because you could put a lot of stuff in there .
But with this experiment , we 've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that 's 10,000 times smaller .
And because of that , we 've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there .
To give you a sense of how small that size is , that 's the size of our solar system .
So , we 're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume .
Now , truth in advertising . Right ?
I have told you my job is to get it down to the Schwarzchild radius .
And the truth is , I 'm not quite there .
But we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass .
And , in fact , it 's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy , but any in our universe .
So , what next ? I actually think this is about as good as we 're going to do with today 's technology , so let 's move on with the problem .
So , what I want to tell you , very briefly , is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy , now that we know that there is , or at least we believe , that there is a supermassive black hole there .
And the fun phase of this experiment is , while we 've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy , almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see .
And that 's the fun .
So , let me give you the two examples .
You can ask , " What do you expect for the old stars , stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time , they 've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole . "
What you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole .
You should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole .
Likewise , for the young stars , or in contrast , the young stars , they just should not be there .
A black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery .
To get a star to form , you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse .
And it 's a very fragile entity .
And what does the big black hole do ?
It strips that gas cloud apart .
It pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart .
In fact , we anticipated that star formation shouldn 't proceed in that environment .
So , you shouldn 't see young stars .
So , what do we see ?
Using observations that are not the ones I 've shown you today , we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young .
The old ones are red .
The young ones are blue . And the yellow ones , we don 't know yet .
So , you can already see the surprise .
There is a dearth of old stars .
There is an abundance of young stars , so it 's the exact opposite of the prediction .
So , this is the fun part .
And in fact , today , this is what we 're trying to figure out , this mystery of how do you get -- how do you resolve this contradiction .
So , in fact , my graduate students are , at this very moment , today , at the telescope , in Hawaii , making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage , where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars , and so few old stars .
To make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away .
To do that we 'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today .
Because , in truth , while I said we 're correcting for the Earth 's atmosphere , we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced .
We do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere , and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest .
So this is what we hope to do in the next few years .
And on a much longer time scale , what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes , because , remember , bigger is better in astronomy .
So , we want to build a 30 meter telescope .
And with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy .
And we hope to be able to test some of Einstein 's theories of general relativity , some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form .
So , we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting .
So , in conclusion , I 'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving , in three dimensions .
And I hope , if nothing else , I 've convinced you that , one , we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy .
And this means that these things do exist in our universe , and we have to contend with this , we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world .
Second , we 've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact , and understand , maybe , the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are , and how they work .
And last but not least , none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that 's been made on the technology front .
And we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast , and holds a lot in store for the future .
Thanks very much .
Ryan Lobo : Photographing the hidden story
Ryan Lobo has traveled the world , taking photographs that tell stories of unusual human lives . In this haunting talk , he reframes controversial subjects with empathy , so that we see the pain of a Liberian war criminal , the quiet strength of UN women peacekeepers and the perseverance of Delhi 's underappreciated firefighters .
My name is Ryan Lobo , and I 've been involved in the documentary filmmaking business all over the world for the last 10 years .
During the process of making these films I found myself taking photographs , often much to the annoyance of the video cameramen .
I found this photography of mine almost compulsive .
And at the end of a shoot , I would sometimes feel that I had photographs that told a better story than a sometimes-sensational documentary .
I felt , when I had my photographs , that I was holding on to something true , regardless of agendas or politics .
In 2007 , I traveled to three war zones .
I traveled to Iraq , Afghanistan and Liberia .
And over there I experienced other people 's suffering , up close and personal , immersed myself in some rather intense and emotional stories , and at times I experienced great fear for my own life .
As always , I would return to Bangalore , and often to animated discussions at friend 's homes , where we would discuss various issues while they complained bitterly about the new pub timings , where a drink often cost more than what they 'd paid their 14-year-old maid .
I would feel very isolated during these discussions .
But at the same time , I questioned myself and my own integrity and purpose in storytelling .
And I decided that I had compromised , just like my friends in those discussions , where we told stories in contexts we made excuses for , rather than taking responsibility for .
I won 't go into details about what led to a decision I made , but let 's just say it involved alcohol , cigarettes , other substances and a woman .
I basically decided that it was I , not the camera or the network , or anything that lay outside myself , that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning .
In my life , when I tried to achieve things like success or recognition , they eluded me .
Paradoxically , when I let go of these objectives , and worked from a place of compassion and purpose , looking for excellence , rather than the results of it , everything arrived on its own , including fulfillment .
Photography transcended culture , including my own .
And it is , for me , a language which expressed the intangible , and gives voice to people and stories without .
I invite you into three recent stories of mine , which are about this way of looking , if you will , which I believe exemplify the tenets of what I like to call compassion in storytelling .
In 2007 I went to Liberia , where a group of my friends and I did an independent , self-funded film , still in progress , on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named General Butt Naked .
His real name is Joshua , and he 's pictured here in a cell where he once used to torture and murder people , including children .
Joshua claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during Liberia 's civil war .
He got his name from fighting stark naked .
And he is probably the most prolific mass murderer alive on Earth today .
This woman witnessed the General murdering her brother .
Joshua commanded his child-soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes , and enforced his command with great brutality .
Today many of these children are addicted to drugs like heroin , and they are destitute , like these young men in the image .
How do you live with yourself if you know you 've committed horrific crimes ?
Today the General is a baptized Christian evangelist .
And he 's on a mission .
We accompanied Joshua , as he walked the Earth , visiting villages where he had once killed and raped .
He seeked forgiveness , and he claims to endeavor to improve the lives of his child-soldiers .
During this expedition I expected him to be killed outright , and us as well .
But what I saw opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness which I never thought possible .
In the midst of incredible poverty and loss , people who had nothing absolved a man who had taken everything from them .
He begs for forgiveness , and receives it from the same woman whose brother he murdered .
Senegalese , the young man seated on the wheelchair here , was once a child soldier , under the General 's command , until he disobeyed orders , and the General shot off both his legs .
He forgives the General in this image .
He risked his life as he walked up to people whose families he 'd murdered .
In this photograph a hostile crowd in a slum surrounds him .
And Joshua remains silent as they vented their rage against him .
This image , to me , is almost like from a Shakespearean play , with a man , surrounded by various influences , desperate to hold on to something true within himself , in a context of great suffering that he has created himself .
I was intensely moved during all this .
But the question is , does forgiveness and redemption replace justice ?
Joshua , in his own words , says that he does not mind standing trial for his crimes , and speaks about them from soapboxes across Monrovia , to an audience that often includes his victims .
A very unlikely spokesperson for the idea of separation of church and state .
The second story I 'm going to tell you about is about a group of very special fighting women with rather unique peace-keeping skills .
Liberia has been devastated by one of Africa 's bloodiest civil wars , which has left more than 200,000 people dead , thousands of women scarred by rape and crime on a spectacular scale .
Liberia is now home to an all-woman United Nations contingent of Indian peacekeepers .
These women , many from small towns in India , help keep the peace , far away from home and family .
They use negotiation and tolerance more often than an armed response .
The commander told me that a woman could gauge a potentially violent situation much better than men .
And that they were definitely capable of diffusing it non-aggressively .
This man was very drunk , and he was very interested in my camera , until he noticed the women , who handled him with smiles , and AK-47s at the ready , of course .
This contingent seems to be quite lucky , and it has not sustained any casualties , even though dozens of peacekeepers have been killed in Liberia .
And yes , all of those people killed were male .
Many of the women are married with children , and they say the hardest part of their deployment was being kept away from their children .
I accompanied these women on their patrols , and watched as they walked past men , many who passed very lewd comments incessantly .
And when I asked one of the women about the shock and awe response , she said , " Don 't worry , same thing back home .
We know how to deal with these fellows , " and ignored them .
In a country ravaged by violence against women , Indian peacekeepers have inspired many local women to join the police force .
Sometimes , when the war is over and all the film crews have left , the most inspiring stories are the ones that float just beneath the radar .
I came back to India and nobody was interested in buying the story .
And one editor told me that she wasn 't interested in doing what she called " manual labor stories . "
In 2007 and 2009 I did stories on the Delhi Fire Service , the DFS , which , during the summer , is probably the world 's most active fire department .
They answer more than 5,000 calls in just two months .
And all this against incredible logistical odds , like heat and traffic jams .
Something amazing happened during this shoot .
Due to a traffic jam , we were late in getting to a slum , a large slum , which had caught fire .
As we neared , angry crowds attacked our trucks and stoned them , by hundreds of people all over the place .
These men were terrified , as the mob attacked our vehicle .
But nonetheless , despite the hostility , firefighters left the vehicle and successfully fought the fire .
Running the gauntlet through hostile crowds , and some wearing motorbike helmets to prevent injury .
Some of the local people forcibly took away the hoses from the firemen to put out the fire in their homes .
Now , hundreds of homes were destroyed .
But the question that lingered in my mind was , what causes people to destroy fire trucks headed to their own homes ?
Where does such rage come from ?
And how are we responsible for this ?
45 percent of the 14 million people who live in Delhi live in unauthorized slums , which are chronically overcrowded .
They lack even the most basic amenities .
And this is something that is common to all our big cities .
Back to the DFS . A huge chemical depot caught fire , thousands of drums filled with petrochemicals were blazing away and exploding all around us .
The heat was so intense , that hoses were used to cool down firefighters fighting extremely close to the fire , and with no protective clothing .
In India we often love to complain about our government bodies .
But over here , the heads of the DFS , Mr. R.C. Sharman , Mr. A.K. Sharman , led the firefight with their men .
Something wonderful in a country where manual labor is often looked down upon .
Over the years , my faith in the power of storytelling has been tested .
And I 've had very serious doubt about its efficacy , and my own faith in humanity .
However , a film we shot still airs on the National Geographic channel .
And when it airs I get calls from all the guys I was with and they tell me that they receive hundreds of calls congratulating them .
Some of the firemen told me that they were also inspired to do better because they were so pleased to get thank-yous rather than brick bats .
It seems that this story helped change perceptions about the DFS , at least in the minds of an audience in part on televisions , read magazines and whose huts aren 't on fire .
Sometimes , focusing on what 's heroic , beautiful and dignified , regardless of the context , can help magnify these intangibles three ways , in the protagonist of the story , in the audience , and also in the storyteller .
And that 's the power of storytelling .
Focus on what 's dignified , courageous and beautiful , and it grows . Thank you .
Lucianne Walkowicz : Finding planets around other stars
How do we find planets -- even habitable planets -- around other stars ? By looking for tiny dimming as a planet passes in front of its sun , TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz and the Kepler mission have found some 1,200 potential new planetary systems . With new techniques , they may even find ones with the right conditions for life .
Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling , but whose streets we can 't walk .
By studying those twinkling lights though , we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life .
In this image of the Tokyo skyline , I 've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block , the Kepler Mission .
Can you see it ?
There we go .
This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at , where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars , all at once , every half hour , and very precisely .
And what we 're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us .
In just over two years of operations , we 've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars .
To give you some perspective , in the previous two decades of searching , we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler .
When we see these little dips in the light , we can determine a number of things .
For one thing , we can determine that there 's a planet there , but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star .
That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall .
And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it 's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire : You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you 're warm , but not so close that you 're too toasty and you get burned .
However , there 's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall .
And I 'll tell you why .
This is our star . This is our Sun .
It 's shown here in visible light .
That 's the light that you can see with your own human eyes .
You 'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball -- that Sun that we all draw when we 're children .
But you 'll notice something else , and that 's that the face of the Sun has freckles .
These freckles are called sunspots , and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun 's magnetic field .
They also cause the light from the star to vary .
And we can measure this very , very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects .
However , these are just the tip of the iceberg .
If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes , we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun 's magnetic activity -- the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well .
Just think , even when it 's cloudy outside , these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time .
So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable , whether it might be amenable to life , we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is , but we want to know about its space weather -- this high-energy radiation , the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation .
And so , we can 't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system .
I 'm showing here Venus , Earth and Mars -- three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size , but only one of which is really a good place to live .
But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe .
Kepler won 't find a planet around every single star it looks at .
But really , every measurement it makes is precious , because it 's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets , and how it 's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe .
While it 's Kepler the telescope , the instrument that stares , it 's we , life , who are searching .
Thank you .
Diébédo Francis Kéré : How to build with clay ... and community
Diébédo Francis Kéré knew exactly what he wanted to do when he got his degree in architecture … He wanted to go home to Gando in Burkina Faso , to help his neighbors reap the benefit of his education . In this charming talk , Kéré shows off some of the beautiful structures he 's helped to build in his small village in the years since then , including an award-winning primary school made from clay by the entire community .
I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope .
I am a native of Burkina Faso .
According to the World Bank , Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world , but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that ?
I am an example of that .
I was born in a little village called Gando .
In Gando , there was no electricity , no access to clean drinking water , and no school .
But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write .
For this reason , I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family .
In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids , and for six years .
In this time , it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died .
Today , not so much has changed .
There is still no electricity in my village .
People still are dying in Burkina Faso , and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem .
I had luck . I was lucky , because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that .
But I was lucky .
I had a scholarship .
I could go to Germany to study .
So now , I suppose , I don 't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today .
From Gando , my home village in Burkina Faso , to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big , big step .
But what to do with this privilege ?
Since I was a student , I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando .
I just wanted to use my skills and build a school .
But how do you do it when you 're still a student and you don 't have money ?
Oh yes , I started to make drawings and asked for money .
Fundraising was not an easy task .
I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes , but to sponsor my school project .
In real wonder , two years later , I was able to collect 50,000 U.S. dollars .
When I came home to Gando to bring the good news , my people were over the moon , but when they realized that I was planning to use clay , they were shocked .
" A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season , and Francis wants us to use it and build a school .
Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us ? "
My people build all the time with clay , but they don 't see any innovation with mud .
So I had to convince everybody .
I started to speak with the community , and I could convince everybody , and we could start to work .
And the women , the men , everybody from the village , was part of this building process .
I was allowed to use even traditional techniques .
So clay floor for example , the young men come and stand like that , beating , hours for hours , and then their mothers came , and they are beating in this position , for hours , giving water and beating .
And then the polishers come .
They start polishing it with a stone for hours .
And then you have this result , very fine , like a baby bottom .
It 's not photoshopped .
This is the school , built with the community .
The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando .
The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete .
And the classroom , the ceiling is made out of both of them used together .
In this school , there was a simple idea : to create comfort in a classroom .
Don 't forget , it can be 45 degrees in Burkina Faso , so with simple ventilation , I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning .
And this is the project today , 12 years old , still in best condition .
And the kids , they love it .
And for me and my community , this project was a huge success .
It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando .
So I could do a lot of projects , and here I am going to share with you only three of them .
The first one is the school extension , of course .
How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write ?
I started to build a prototype like that .
The innovation was to build a clay vault .
So then , I jumped on the top like that , with my team , and it works .
The community is looking . It still works .
So we can build .
And we kept building , and that is the result .
The kids are happy , and they love it .
The community is very proud . We made it .
And even animals , like these donkeys , love our buildings .
The next project is the library in Gando .
And see now , we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings , but we often don 't have so much material .
Something we have in Gando are clay pots .
We wanted to use them to create openings .
So we just bring them like you can see to the building site .
we start cutting them , and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete , and you have this result .
The openings are letting the hot air out and light in .
Very simple .
My most recent project in Gando is a high school project .
I would like to share with you this .
The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete .
How do you cast mud ?
We start making a lot of mortars , like you can see , and when everything is ready , when you know what is the best recipe and the best form , you start working with the community .
And sometimes I can leave .
They will do it themselves .
I came to speak to you like that .
Another factor in Gando is rain .
When the rains come , we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain .
Don 't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude .
It is simply how we protect our walls .
The rain in Burkina comes very fast , and after that , you have floods everywhere in the country .
But for us , the rain is good .
It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build .
We just wait for the rain to go .
We take the sand , we mix it with clay , and we keep building .
That is it .
The Gando project was always connected to training the people , because I just wanted , one day when I fall down and die , that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work .
But you will be surprised . I 'm still alive .
And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves .
Usually , for a young man from Gando to earn money , you have to leave the country to the city , sometimes leave the country and some never come back , making the community weaker .
But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family .
There 's a new quality in this work .
Yes , you know it .
I have won a lot of awards through this work .
For sure , it has opened opportunities .
I have become myself known .
But the reason why I do what I do is my community .
When I was a kid , I was going to school , I was coming back every holiday to Gando .
By the end of every holidays , I had to say goodbye to the community , going from one compound to another one .
All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny .
In my culture , this is a symbol of deep affection .
As a seven-year-old guy , I was impressed .
I just asked my mother one day , " Why do all these women love me so much ? "
She just answered , " They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community . "
I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work , and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community , and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future .
Merci beaucoup .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Joachim de Posada : Don 't eat the marshmallow !
In this short talk from TED U , Joachim de Posada shares a landmark experiment on delayed gratification -- and how it can predict future success . With priceless video of kids trying their hardest not to eat the marshmallow .
I 'm here because I have a very important message : I think we have found the most important factor for success .
And it was found close to here , Stanford .
Psychology professor took kids that were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves .
And he would tell the child , a four-year-old kid , " Johnny , I am going to leave you here with a marshmallow for 15 minutes .
If , after I come back , this marshmallow is here , you will get another one . So you will have two . "
To tell a four-year-old kid to wait 15 minutes for something that they like , is equivalent to telling us , " We 'll bring you coffee in two hours . "
Exact equivalent .
So what happened when the professor left the room ?
As soon as the door closed ...
two out of three ate the marshmallow .
Five seconds , 10 seconds , 40 seconds , 50 seconds , two minutes , four minutes , eight minutes .
Some lasted 14-and-a-half minutes .
Couldn 't do it . Could not wait .
What 's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow and go like this ...
Would look at it .
Put it back .
They would walk around . They would play with their skirts and pants .
That child already , at four , understood the most important principle for success , which is the ability to delay gratification .
Self-discipline : the most important factor for success .
15 years later , 14 or 15 years later , follow-up study .
What did they find ?
They went to look for these kids who were now 18 and 19 .
And they found that 100 percent of the children that had not eaten the marshmallow were successful .
They had good grades . They were doing wonderful .
They were happy . They had their plans .
They had good relationships with the teachers , students .
They were doing fine .
A great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow , they were in trouble .
They did not make it to university .
They had bad grades . Some of them dropped out .
A few were still there with bad grades .
A few had good grades .
I had a question in my mind : Would Hispanic kids react the same way as the American kids ?
So I went to Colombia . And I reproduced the experiment .
And it was very funny . I used four , five and six years old kids .
And let me show you what happened .
So what happened in Colombia ?
Hispanic kids , two out of three ate the marshmallow ; one out of three did not .
This little girl was interesting ; she ate the inside of the marshmallow .
In other words , she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it , so she would get two .
But she ate it .
So we know she 'll be successful . But we have to watch her .
She should not go into banking , for example , or work at a cash register .
But she will be successful .
And this applies for everything . Even in sales .
The sales person that -- the customer says , " I want that . " And the person says , " Okay , here you are . "
That person ate the marshmallow .
If the sales person says , " Wait a second .
Let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice . "
Then you sell a lot more .
So this has applications in all walks of life .
I end with -- the Koreans did this .
You know what ? This is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children .
We did one for children . And now it is all over Korea .
They are teaching these kids exactly this principle .
And we need to learn that principle here in the States , because we have a big debt .
We are eating more marshmallows than we are producing .
Thank you so much .
Gregory Stock : To upgrade is human
In this prophetic 2003 talk -- just days before Dolly the sheep was stuffed -- biotech ethicist Gregory Stock looked forward to new , more meaningful technologies , like customizable babies , whose adoption might drive human evolution .
The future of life , where the unraveling of our biology -- and bring up the lights a little bit . I don 't have any slides .
I 'm just going to talk -- about where that 's likely to carry us .
And you know , I saw all the visions of the first couple of sessions .
It almost made me feel a little bit guilty about having an uplifting talk about the future .
It felt wrong to do that in some way .
And yet , I don 't really think it is because when it comes down to it , it 's this larger trajectory that is really what is going to remain -- what people in the future are going to remember about this period .
I want to talk to you a little bit about why the visions of Jeremy Rivkins , who would like to ban these sorts of technologies , or of the Bill Joys who would like to relinquish them , are actually -- to follow those paths would be such a tragedy for us .
I 'm focusing on biology , the biological sciences .
the areas that are the most significant to us .
It 's because we 're flesh and blood .
We 're biological creatures .
And what we can do with our biology is going to shape our future and that of our children and that of their children -- whether we gain control over aging , whether we learn to protect ourselves from Alzheimer 's , and heart disease , and cancer .
I think that Shakespeare really put it very nicely .
And I 'm actually going to use his words in the same order that he did .
He said , " And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe .
And then from hour to hour we rot and rot .
And thereby hangs a tale . "
Life is short , you know .
And we need to think about planning a little bit .
We 're all going to eventually , even in the developed world , going to have to lose everything that we love .
When you 're beginning to rot a little bit , all of the videos crammed into your head , all of the extensions that extend your various powers , are going to being to seem a little secondary .
And you know , I 'm getting a little bit gray -- so is Ray Kurzweil , so is Eric Drexler .
This is where it 's really central to our lives .
Now I know there 's been a whole lot of hype about our power to control biology .
You just have to look at the Human Genome Project .
It wasn 't two years ago that everybody was talking about -- we 've found the Holy Grail of biology .
We 're deciphering the code of codes .
We 're reading the book of life .
It 's a little bit reminiscent of 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon , and everybody was about to race out toward the stars .
And we 've all seen " 2001 : A Space Odyssey . "
You know it 's 2003 , and there is no HAL .
And there is no odyssey to our own moon , much less the moons of Jupiter .
And we 're still picking up pieces of the Challenger .
So it 's not surprising that some people would wonder whether maybe 30 or 40 years from now , we 'll look back at this instant in time , and all of the sort of talk about the Human Genome Project , and what all this is going to mean to us -- well , it will really mean precious little .
And I just want to say that that is absolutely not going to be the case .
Because when we talk about our genetics and our biology , and modifying and altering and adjusting these things , we 're talking about changing ourselves .
And this is very critical stuff .
If you have any doubts about how technology affects our lives , you just have to go to any major city .
This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors .
What 's happening is we 're taking this technology -- it 's becoming more precise , more potent -- and we 're turning it back upon ourselves .
Before it 's all done we are going to alter ourselves every bit as much as we have changed the world around us .
It 's going to happen a lot sooner than people imagine .
On the way there it 's going to completely revolutionize medicine and health care ; that 's obvious .
It 's going to change the way we have children .
It 's going to change the way we manage and alter our emotions .
It 's going to probably change the human lifespan .
It will really make us question what it is to be a human being .
The larger context of this is that are two unprecedented revolutions that are going on today .
The first of them is the obvious one , the silicon revolution , which you all are very , very familiar with .
It 's changing our lives in so many ways , and it will continue to do that .
What the essence of that is , is that we 're taking the sand at our feet , the inert silicon at our feet , and we 're breathing a level of complexity into it that rivals that of life itself , and may even surpass it .
is the revolution in biology .
The genomics revolution , proteomics , metabolomics , all of these " omics " that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans .
What we 're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future .
I mean we 're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward .
It 's not at all clear where it 's going to take us .
But in five to ten years we 're going to start see some very profound changes .
The most immediate changes that we 'll see are things like in medicine .
There is going to be a big shift towards preventative medicine as we start to be able to identify all of the risk factors that we have as individuals .
But who is going to pay for all this ?
And how are we going to understand all this complex information ?
That is going to be the IT challenge of the next generation , is communicating all this information .
There 's pharmacogenomics , the combination of pharmacology and genetics : tailoring drugs to our individual constitutions that Juan talked about a little bit earlier .
That 's going to have amazing impacts .
And it 's going to be used for diet as well , and nutritional supplements and such .
But it 's going to have a big impact because we 're going to have niche drugs .
And we aren 't going to be able to support the kinds of expenses that we have to create blockbuster drugs today .
The approval process is going to fall apart , actually .
It 's too slow .
It 's too risk-averse .
And it is really not suited for the future that we 're moving into .
Another thing is that we 're just going to have to deal with this knowledge .
It 's really wonderful when we hear , " Oh , 99.9 percent of the letters in the code are the same .
We 're all identical to each other . Isn 't it wonderful ? "
And look around you and know that what we really care about is that little bit of difference .
We look the same to a visitor from another planet , maybe , but not to each other because we compete with each other all time .
And we 're going to have to come to grips with the fact that there are differences between us as individuals that we will know about , and between subpopulations of humans as well .
To deny that that 's the case is not a very good start on that .
A generation or so away there are going to be even more profound things that are going to happen .
That 's when we 're going to begin to use this knowledge to modify ourselves .
Now I don 't mean extra gills or something -- something we care about , like aging .
What if we could unravel aging and understand it -- begin to retard the process or even reverse it ?
It would change absolutely everything .
And it 's obvious to anyone , that if we can do this , we absolutely will do this , whatever the consequences are .
The second is modifying our emotions .
I mean Ritalin , Viagra , things of that sort , Prozac .
You know , this is just clumsy little baby steps .
What if you could take a little concoction of pharmaceuticals that would make you feel really contented , just happy to be you .
Are you going to be able to resist that if it doesn 't have any overt side effects ?
Probably not .
And if you don 't , who are you going to be ?
Why do you do what you do ?
We 're sort of circumventing evolutionary programs that guide our behavior .
It 's going to be very challenging to deal with .
The third area is reproduction .
The idea that we 're going to chose our children 's genes , as we begin to understand what genes say about who we are .
That 's the focus of my book " Redesigning Humans , " where I talk about the kinds of choices we 'll make , and the challenges it 's going to present to society .
The first is cloning .
It didn 't happen .
It 's a total media circus .
It will happen in five to 10 years .
And when it does it 's not going to be that big a deal .
The birth of a delayed identical twin is not going to shake western civilization .
But there are more important things that are already occurring : embryo screening .
You take a six to eight cell embryo , you tease out one of the cells , you run a genetic test on that cell , and depending on the results of that test you either implant that embryo or you discard it .
It 's already done to avoid rare diseases today .
And pretty soon it 's going to be possible to avoid virtually all genetic diseases in that way .
As that becomes possible this is going to move from something that is used by those who have infertility problems and are already doing in vitro fertilization , to the wealthy who want to protect their children , to just about everybody else .
And in that process that 's going to morph from being just for diseases , to being for lesser vulnerabilities , like risk of manic depression or something , to picking personalities , temperaments , traits , these sorts of things .
Of course there is going to be genetic engineering .
Directly going in -- it 's a little bit further away , but not that far away -- going in and altering the genes in the first cell in an embryo .
The way I suspect it will happen is using artificial chromosomes and extra chromosomes , so we go from 46 to 47 or 48 .
And one that is not heritable because who would want to pass on to their children the archaic enhancement modules that they got 25 years earlier from their parents ?
It 's a joke ; of course they wouldn 't want to do that .
They 'll want the new release .
Those kinds of loose analogies with computers , and with programming , are actually much deeper than that .
They are really going to come to operate in this realm .
Now not everything that can be done should be done .
And it won 't be done .
But when something is feasible in thousands of laboratories all over the world , which is going to be the case with these technologies , which is already the case , and when they 're almost impossible to police , it 's not a question of if this is going to happen , it 's when and where and how it 's going to happen .
Humanity is going to go down this path .
And it 's going to do so for two reasons .
The first is that all these technologies are just a spin-off of mainstream medical research that everybody wants to see happen .
It is being funded very very -- in a big way .
The second is , we 're human .
That 's what we do .
We try and use our technology to improve our lives in one way or another .
To imagine that we 're not going to use these technologies when they become available , is as much a denial of who we are as to imagine that we 'll use these technologies and not fret and worry about it a great deal .
The lines are going to blur . And they already are between therapy and enhancement , between treatment and prevention , between need and desire .
That 's really the central one , I believe .
People can try and ban these things .
They undoubtedly will . They have .
But ultimately all this is going to do is just shift development elsewhere .
It 's going to drive these things from view .
It 's going to reserve the technology for the wealthy because they are in the best position to circumvent any of these sorts of laws .
And it 's going to deny us the information that we need to make wise decisions about how to use these technologies .
So , sure , we need to debate these things .
And I think it 's wonderful that we do .
But we shouldn 't kid ourselves and think that we 're going to reach a consensus about these things .
That is simply not going to happen .
They touch us too deeply .
And they depend too much upon history , upon philosophy , upon religion , upon culture , upon politics .
Some people are going to see this as an abomination , as the worst thing , as just awful .
Other people are going to say , " This is great .
This is the flowering of human endeavor . "
The one thing though that is really dangerous about these sorts of technologies , is that it 's easy to become seduced by them .
And to focus too much on all the high-technology possibilities that exist .
And to lose touch with the basic rhythms of our biology and our health .
There are too many people that think that high-technology medicine is going to keep them , save them , from overeating , from eating a lot of fast foods , from not getting any exercise .
It 's not going to happen .
In the midst of all this amazing technology , and all these things that are occurring , it 's really interesting because there is sort of a counter-revolution that is going on : a resurgence of interest in remedies from the past , in nutraceuticals , in all of these sorts of things that some people , in the pharmaceutical industry particularly , like to brand as non-science .
But this whole effort is generated , is driven , by IT as well because that is how we 're gathering all this information , and linking it , and integrating it together .
There is a lot in this rich biota that is going to serve us well .
And that 's where about half of our drugs come .
So we shouldn 't dismiss this because it 's an enormous opportunity to use these sorts of results , or these random loose trials from the last thousand years about what has impacts on our health .
And to use our advanced technologies to pull out what is beneficial from this sea of noise , basically .
In fact this isn 't just abstract .
I just formed a biotechnology company that is using this sort of an approach to develop therapeutics for Alzheimer 's and other diseases of aging , and we 're making some real progress .
So here we are .
If you look forward , I mean future humans , far before the end of this millennium , in a few hundred years , they are going to look back at this moment .
And from the beginning of today 's sessions you 'd think that they 're going to see this as this horrible difficult , painful period that we struggled through .
And I don 't think that 's what 's going to happen .
They 're going to do like everybody does . They are going to forget about all that stuff .
And they are actually going to romanticize this moment in time .
They are going to think about it as this glorious instant when we laid down the very foundations of their lives , of their society , of their future .
You know it 's a little bit like a birth .
Where there is this bloody , awful mess happens .
And then what comes out of it ? New life .
Actually as was pointed out earlier , we forget about all the struggle there was in getting there .
So to me , it 's clear that one of the foundations of that future is going to be the reworking of our biology .
It 's going to come gradually at first . It 's going to pick up speed .
We 're going to make lots of errors .
That 's the way these things work .
To me it 's an incredible privilege to be alive now and to be able to witness this thing .
It is something that is a unique instant in the history of all of life .
It will always be remembered .
And what 's extraordinary is that we 're not just observing this , we are the architects of this .
I think that we should be proud of it .
What is so difficult and challenging is that we are also the objects of these changes .
It 's our health , it 's our lives , it 's our future , it 's our children .
And that is why they are so very troubling to so many people who would pull back in fear .
I think that our choice in the choice of life , is not whether we 're going to go down this path .
We are , definitely .
It 's how we hold it in our hearts .
It 's how we look at it .
I think Thucydides really spoke to us very clearly in 430 B.C. He put it nicely .
Again , I 'll use the words in the same order he did .
" The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them , both glory and danger alike .
And yet notwithstanding , they go out and they meet it . "
Thank you .
Philip Zimbardo : The demise of guys ?
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo asks , " Why are boys struggling ? " He shares some stats and suggests a few reasons -- and challenges the TED community to think about solutions .
So today , I want us to reflect on the demise of guys .
Guys are flaming out academically ; they 're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women .
Other than that , there 's not much of a problem .
So what 's the data ?
So the data on dropping out is amazing .
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school .
In Canada , five boys drop out for every three girls .
Girls outperform boys now at every level , from elementary school to graduate school .
There 's a 10 percent differential between getting BA 's and all graduate programs , with guys falling behind girls .
Two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys .
And as you all know , boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder -- and therefore we drug them with Ritalin .
What 's the evidence of wiping out ?
First , it 's a new fear of intimacy .
Intimacy means physical , emotional connection with somebody else -- and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous , contradictory , phosphorescent signals .
And every year there 's research done on self-reported shyness among college students .
And we 're seeing a steady increase among males .
And this is two kinds .
It 's a social awkwardness .
The old shyness was a fear of rejection .
It 's a social awkwardness like you 're a stranger in a foreign land .
They don 't know what to say , they don 't know what to do , especially one-on-one [ with the ] opposite sex .
They don 't know the language of face contact , the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else , listen to somebody else .
There 's something I 'm developing here called social intensity syndrome , which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating .
It turns out , from earliest childhood , boys , and then men , prefer the company of guys -- physical company .
And there 's actually a cortical arousal we 're looking at , because guys have been with guys in teams , in clubs , in gangs , in fraternities , especially in the military , and then in pubs .
And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers , watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers , rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom .
The problem is they now prefer [ the ] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships .
What are the causes ? Well , it 's an unintended consequence .
I think it 's excessive Internet use in general , excessive video gaming , excessive new access to pornography .
The problem is these are arousal addictions .
Drug addiction , you simply want more .
Arousal addiction , you want different .
Drugs , you want more of the same -- different .
So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained .
And the problem is the industry is supplying it .
Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21 , he 's played 10,000 hours of video games , most of that in isolation .
As you remember , Cindy Gallop said men don 't know the difference between making love and doing porn .
The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week .
And there 's some guy watching a hundred , obviously .
And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America -- 15 billion annually .
For every 400 movies made in Hollywood , there are 11,000 now made porn videos .
So the effect , very quickly , is it 's a new kind of arousal .
Boys ' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change , novelty , excitement and constant arousal .
That means they 're totally out of sync in traditional classes , which are analog , static , interactively passive .
They 're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships , which build gradually and subtly .
So what 's the solution ? It 's not my job .
I 'm here to alarm . It 's your job to solve .
But who should care ? The only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls , educators , gamers , filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to , who can dance , who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs .
No offense to banana slug owners . Thank you .
Ivan Krastev : Can democracy exist without trust ?
It seems the more we know about how democracy works -- through government transparency , better media coverage , even new insights about our brains -- the less we trust democracy itself . Yet it 's still , arguably , the best system of government available . As Ivan Krastev says , " What went right is also what went wrong . " Can democracy survive ?
I 'm afraid I 'm one of those speakers you hope you 're not going to meet at TED .
First , I don 't have a mobile , so I 'm on the safe side .
Secondly , a political theorist who 's going to talk about the crisis of democracy is probably not the most exciting topic you can think about .
And plus , I 'm not going to give you any answers .
I 'm much more trying to add to some of the questions we 're talking about .
And one of the things that I want to question is this very popular hope these days that transparency and openness can restore the trust in democratic institutions .
There is one more reason for you to be suspicious about me .
You people , the Church of TED , are a very optimistic community .
Basically you believe in complexity , but not in ambiguity .
As you have been told , I 'm Bulgarian .
And according to the surveys , we are marked the most pessimistic people in the world .
The Economist magazine recently wrote an article covering one of the recent studies on happiness , and the title was " The Happy , the Unhappy and the Bulgarians . "
So now when you know what to expect , let 's give you the story .
And this is a rainy election day in a small country -- that can be my country , but could be also your country .
And because of the rain until four o 'clock in the afternoon , nobody went to the polling stations .
But then the rain stopped , people went to vote .
And when the votes had been counted , three-fourths of the people have voted with a blank ballot .
The government and the opposition , they have been simply paralyzed .
Because you know what to do about the protests .
You know who to arrest , who to negotiate with .
But what to do about people who are voting with a blank ballot ?
So the government decided to have the elections once again .
And this time even a greater number , 83 percent of the people , voted with blank ballots .
Basically they went to the ballot boxes to tell that they have nobody to vote for .
This is the opening of a beautiful novel by Jose Saramago called " Seeing . "
But in my view it very well captures part of the problem that we have with democracy in Europe these days .
On one level nobody 's questioning that democracy is the best form of government .
Democracy is the only game in town .
The problem is that many people start to believe that it is not a game worth playing .
For the last 30 years , political scientists have observed that there is a constant decline in electoral turnout , and the people who are least interested to vote are the people whom you expect are going to gain most out of voting .
I mean the unemployed , the under-privileged .
And this is a major issue .
Because especially now with the economic crisis , you can see that the trust in politics , that the trust in democratic institutions , was really destroyed .
According to the latest survey being done by the European Commission , 89 percent of the citizens of Europe believe that there is a growing gap between the opinion of the policy-makers and the opinion of the public .
Only 18 percent of Italians and 15 percent of Greeks believe that their vote matters .
Basically people start to understand that they can change governments , but they cannot change policies .
And the question which I want to ask is the following : How did it happen that we are living in societies which are much freer than ever before -- we have more rights , we can travel easier , we have access to more information -- at the same time that trust in our democratic institutions basically has collapsed ?
So basically I want to ask : What went right and what went wrong in these 50 years when we talk about democracy ?
And I 'll start with what went right .
And the first thing that went right was , of course , these five revolutions which , in my view , very much changed the way we 're living and deepened our democratic experience .
And the first was the cultural and social revolution of 1968 and 1970s , which put the individual at the center of politics .
It was the human rights moment .
Basically this was also a major outbreak , a culture of dissent , a culture of basically non-conformism , which was not known before .
So I do believe that even things like that are very much the children of ' 68 -- nevertheless that most of us had been even not born then .
But after that you have the market revolution of the 1980s .
And nevertheless that many people on the left try to hate it , the truth is that it was very much the market revolution that sent the message : " The government does not know better . "
And you have more choice-driven societies .
And of course , you have 1989 -- the end of Communism , the end of the Cold War .
And it was the birth of the global world .
And you have the Internet .
And this is not the audience to which I 'm going to preach to what extent the Internet empowered people .
It has changed the way we are communicating and basically we are viewing politics .
The very idea of political community totally has changed .
And I 'm going to name one more revolution , and this is the revolution in brain sciences , which totally changed the way we understand how people are making decisions .
So this is what went right .
But if we 're going to see what went wrong , we 're going to end up with the same five revolutions .
Because first you have the 1960s and 1970s , cultural and social revolution , which in a certain way destroyed the idea of a collective purpose .
The very idea , all these collective nouns that we have been taught about -- nation , class , family .
We start to like divorcing , if we 're married at all .
All this was very much under attack .
And it is so difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand .
And you have the market revolution of the 1980s and the huge increase of inequality in societies .
Remember , until the 1970s , the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality .
The more democratic our societies have been , the more equal they have been becoming .
Now we have the reverse tendency .
The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality .
And I find this very much disturbing when we 're talking about what 's going on right and wrong with democracy these days .
And if you go to 1989 -- something that basically you don 't expect that anybody 's going to criticize -- but many are going to tell you , " Listen , it was the end of the Cold War that tore the social contract between the elites and the people in Western Europe . "
When the Soviet Union was still there , the rich and the powerful , they needed the people , because they feared them .
Now the elites basically have been liberated .
They 're very mobile . You cannot tax them .
And basically they don 't fear the people .
So as a result of it , you have this very strange situation in which the elites basically got out of the control of the voters .
So this is not by accident that the voters are not interested to vote anymore .
And when we talk about the Internet , yes , it 's true , the Internet connected all of us , but we also know that the Internet created these echo chambers and political ghettos in which for all your life you can stay with the political community you belong to .
And it 's becoming more and more difficult to understand the people who are not like you .
I know that many people here have been splendidly speaking about the digital world and the possibility for cooperation , but [ have you ] seen what the digital world has done to American politics these days ?
This is also partly a result of the Internet revolution .
This is the other side of the things that we like .
And when you go to the brain sciences , what political consultants learned from the brain scientists is don 't talk to me about ideas anymore , don 't talk to me about policy programs .
What really matters is basically to manipulate the emotions of the people .
And you have this very strongly to the extent that , even if you see when we talk about revolutions these days , these revolutions are not named anymore around ideologies or ideas .
Before , revolutions used to have ideological names .
They could be communist , they could be liberal , they could be fascist or Islamic .
Now the revolutions are called under the medium which is most used .
You have Facebook revolutions , Twitter revolutions .
The content doesn 't matter anymore , the problem is the media .
I 'm saying this because one of my major points is what went right is also what went wrong .
And when we 're now trying to see how we can change the situation , when basically we 're trying to see what can be done about democracy , we should keep this ambiguity in mind .
Because probably some of the things that we love most are going to be also the things that can hurt us most .
These days it 's very popular to believe that this push for transparency , this kind of a combination between active citizens , new technologies and much more transparency-friendly legislation can restore trust in politics .
You believe that when you have these new technologies and people who are ready to use this , it can make it much more difficult for the governments to lie , it 's going to be more difficult for them to steal and probably even going to be more difficult for them to kill .
This is probably true .
But I do believe that we should be also very clear that now when we put the transparency at the center of politics where the message is , " It 's transparency , stupid . "
Transparency is not about restoring trust in institutions .
Transparency is politics ' management of mistrust .
We are assuming that our societies are going to be based on mistrust .
And by the way , mistrust was always very important for democracy .
This is why you have checks and balances .
This is why basically you have all this creative mistrust between the representatives and those whom they represent .
But when politics is only management of mistrust , then -- I 'm very glad that " 1984 " has been mentioned -- now we 're going to have " 1984 " in reverse .
It 's not going to be the Big Brother watching you , it 's going to be we being the Big Brother watching the political class .
But is this the idea of a free society ?
For example , can you imagine that decent , civic , talented people are going to run for office if they really do believe that politics is also about managing mistrust ?
Are you not afraid with all these technologies that are going to track down any statement the politicians are going to make on certain issues , are you not afraid that this is going to be a very strong signal to politicians to repeat their positions , even the very wrong positions , because consistency is going to be more important than common sense ?
And the Americans who are in the room , are you not afraid that your presidents are going to govern on the basis of what they said in the primary elections ?
I find this extremely important , because democracy is about people changing their views based on rational arguments and discussions .
And we can lose this with the very noble idea to keep people accountable for showing the people that we 're not going to tolerate politicians the opportunism in politics .
So for me this is extremely important .
And I do believe that when we 're discussing politics these days , probably it makes sense to look also at this type of a story .
But also don 't forget , any unveiling is also veiling .
[ Regardless of ] how transparent our governments want to be , they 're going to be selectively transparent .
In a small country that could be my country , but could be also your country , they took a decision -- it is a real case story -- that all of the governmental decisions , discussions of the council of ministers , were going to be published on the Internet 24 hours after the council discussions took place .
And the public was extremely all for it .
So I had the opportunity to talk to the prime minister , why he made this decision .
He said , " Listen , this is the best way to keep the mouths of my ministers closed .
Because it 's going to be very difficult for them to dissent knowing that 24 hours after this is going to be on the public space , and this is in a certain way going to be a political crisis . "
So when we talk about transparency , when we talk about openness , I really do believe that what we should keep in mind is that what went right is what went wrong .
And this is Goethe , who is neither Bulgarian nor a political scientist , some centuries ago he said , " There is a big shadow where there is much light . "
Thank you very much .
Alanna Shaikh : How I 'm preparing to get Alzheimer 's
When faced with a parent suffering from Alzheimer 's , most of us respond with denial or extreme efforts at prevention . But global health expert and TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh sees it differently . She 's taking three concrete steps to prepare for the moment -- should it arrive -- when she herself gets Alzheimer 's disease .
I 'd like to talk about my dad .
My dad has Alzheimer 's disease .
He started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago , and he was officially diagnosed in 2005 .
Now he 's really pretty sick . He needs help eating , he needs help getting dressed , he doesn 't really know where he is or when it is , and it 's been really , really hard .
My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life , and I 've spent the last decade watching him disappear .
My dad 's not alone . There 's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia , and by 2030 they 're expecting that to double to 70 million .
That 's a lot of people .
Dementia scares us . The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia , the big numbers of people who get it , they frighten us .
And because of that fear , we tend to do one of two things : We go into denial : " It 's not me , it has nothing to do with me , it 's never going to happen to me . "
Or , we decide that we 're going to prevent dementia , and it will never happen to us because we 're going to do everything right and it won 't come and get us .
I 'm looking for a third way : I 'm preparing to get Alzheimer 's disease .
Prevention is good , and I 'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer 's .
I 'm eating right , I 'm exercising every day , I 'm keeping my mind active , that 's what the research says you should do .
But the research also shows that there 's nothing that will 100 percent protect you .
If the monster wants you , the monster 's gonna get you .
That 's what happened with my dad .
My dad was a bilingual college professor . His hobbies were chess , bridge and writing op-eds .
He got dementia anyway .
If the monster wants you , the monster 's gonna get you .
Especially if you 're me , ' cause Alzheimer 's tends to run in families .
So I 'm preparing to get Alzheimer 's disease .
Based on what I 've learned from taking care of my father , and researching what it 's like to live with dementia , I 'm focusing on three things in my preparation : I 'm changing what I do for fun , I 'm working to build my physical strength , and -- this is the hard one -- I 'm trying to become a better person .
Let 's start with the hobbies . When you get dementia , it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself .
You can 't sit and have long talks with your old friends , because you don 't know who they are .
It 's confusing to watch television , and often very frightening .
And reading is just about impossible .
When you care for someone with dementia , and you get training , they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar , hands-on , open-ended .
With my dad , that turned out to be letting him fill out forms .
He was a college professor at a state school ; he knows what paperwork looks like .
He 'll sign his name on every line , he 'll check all the boxes , he 'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers .
But it got me thinking , what would my caregivers do with me ?
I 'm my father 's daughter . I read , I write , I think about global health a lot .
Would they give me academic journals so I could scribble in the margins ?
Would they give me charts and graphs that I could color ?
So I 've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on .
I 've always liked to draw , so I 'm doing it more even though I 'm really very bad at it .
I am learning some basic origami . I can make a really great box .
And I 'm teaching myself to knit , which so far I can knit a blob .
But , you know , it doesn 't matter if I 'm actually good at it . What matters is that my hands know how to do it .
Because the more things that are familiar , the more things my hands know how to do , the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain 's not running the show anymore .
They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier , easier for their caregivers to look after , and it may even slow the progress of the disease .
That all seems like win to me .
I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can .
A lot of people don 't know that Alzheimer 's actually has physical symptoms , as well as cognitive symptoms . You lose your sense of balance , you get muscle tremors , and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile .
They get scared to walk around . They get scared to move .
So I 'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance .
I 'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance , so that when I start to lose it , I 'll still be able to be mobile .
I 'm doing weight-bearing exercise , so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither , I have more time that I can still move around .
Finally , the third thing . I 'm trying to become a better person .
My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer 's , and he 's kind and loving now .
I 've seen him lose his intellect , his sense of humor , his language skills , but I 've also seen this : He loves me , he loves my sons , he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers .
And that love makes us want to be around him , even now .
even when it 's so hard .
When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world , his naked heart still shines .
I was never as kind as my dad , and I was never as loving .
And what I need now is to learn to be like that .
I need a heart so pure that if it 's stripped bare by dementia , it will survive .
I don 't want to get Alzheimer 's disease .
What I want is a cure in the next 20 years , soon enough to protect me .
But if it comes for me , I 'm going to be ready .
Thank you .
Dan Pink : The puzzle of motivation
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation , starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don 't : Traditional rewards aren 't always as effective as we think . Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe , a way forward .
I need to make a confession at the outset here .
A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret , something that I 'm not particularly proud of , something that , in many ways , I wish no one would ever know , but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal .
In the late 1980s , in a moment of youthful indiscretion , I went to law school .
Now , in America law is a professional degree : you get your university degree , then you go on to law school .
And when I got to law school , I didn 't do very well .
To put it mildly , I didn 't do very well .
I , in fact , graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible .
Thank you .
I never practiced law a day in my life ; I pretty much wasn 't allowed to .
But today , against my better judgment , against the advice of my own wife , I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what 's left of those legal skills .
I don 't want to tell you a story .
I want to make a case .
I want to make a hard-headed , evidence-based , dare I say lawyerly case , for rethinking how we run our businesses .
So , ladies and gentlemen of the jury , take a look at this .
This is called the candle problem .
Some of you might have seen this before .
It 's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker .
Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science .
And here 's how it works . Suppose I 'm the experimenter .
I bring you into a room . I give you a candle , some thumbtacks and some matches .
And I say to you , " Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn 't drip onto the table . " Now what would you do ?
Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall .
Doesn 't work .
Somebody , some people -- and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match , melt the side of the candle , try to adhere it to the wall .
It 's an awesome idea . Doesn 't work .
And eventually , after five or 10 minutes , most people figure out the solution , which you can see here .
The key is to overcome what 's called functional fixedness .
You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks .
But it can also have this other function , as a platform for the candle . The candle problem .
Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem , done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg , who is now at Princeton University in the U.S.
This shows the power of incentives .
Here 's what he did . He gathered his participants .
And he said , " I 'm going to time you . How quickly you can solve this problem ? "
To one group he said , " I 'm going to time you to establish norms , averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem . "
To the second group he offered rewards .
He said , " If you 're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times , you get five dollars .
If you 're the fastest of everyone we 're testing here today , you get 20 dollars . "
Now this is several years ago . Adjusted for inflation , it 's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work .
It 's a nice motivator .
Question : How much faster did this group solve the problem ?
Answer : It took them , on average , three and a half minutes longer .
Three and a half minutes longer . Now this makes no sense right ?
I mean , I 'm an American . I believe in free markets .
That 's not how it 's supposed to work . Right ?
If you want people to perform better , you reward them . Right ?
Bonuses , commissions , their own reality show .
Incentivize them . That 's how business works .
But that 's not happening here .
You 've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity , and it does just the opposite .
It dulls thinking and blocks creativity .
And what 's interesting about this experiment is that it 's not an aberration .
This has been replicated over and over and over again , for nearly 40 years .
These contingent motivators -- if you do this , then you get that -- work in some circumstances .
But for a lot of tasks , they actually either don 't work or , often , they do harm .
This is one of the most robust findings in social science , and also one of the most ignored .
I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation , particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators .
And I 'm telling you , it 's not even close .
If you look at the science , there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does .
And what 's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses , how we motivate people , how we apply our human resources -- it 's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators , around carrots and sticks .
That 's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks .
But for 21st century tasks , that mechanistic , reward-and-punishment approach doesn 't work , often doesn 't work , and often does harm .
Let me show you what I mean .
So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way , like this up here . Okay ?
Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn 't drip onto the table .
Same deal . You : we 're timing for norms .
You : we 're incentivizing .
What happened this time ?
This time , the incentivized group kicked the other group 's butt .
Why ? Because when the tacks are out of the box , it 's pretty easy isn 't it ?
If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks , where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to .
Rewards , by their very nature , narrow our focus , concentrate the mind ; that 's why they work in so many cases .
And so , for tasks like this , a narrow focus , where you just see the goal right there , zoom straight ahead to it , they work really well .
But for the real candle problem , you don 't want to be looking like this .
The solution is not over here . The solution is on the periphery .
You want to be looking around .
That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility .
Let me tell you why this is so important .
In western Europe , in many parts of Asia , in North America , in Australia , white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work , and more of this kind of work .
That routine , rule-based , left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting , certain kinds of financial analysis , certain kinds of computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource , fairly easy to automate .
Software can do it faster .
Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper .
So what really matters are the more right-brained creative , conceptual kinds of abilities .
Think about your own work .
Think about your own work .
Are the problems that you face , or even the problems we 've been talking about here , are those kinds of problems -- do they have a clear set of rules , and a single solution ? No .
The rules are mystifying .
The solution , if it exists at all , is surprising and not obvious .
Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem .
And for candle problems of any kind , in any field , those if-then rewards , the things around which we 've built so many of our businesses , don 't work .
Now , I mean it makes me crazy .
And this is not -- here 's the thing .
This is not a feeling .
Okay ? I 'm a lawyer ; I don 't believe in feelings .
This is not a philosophy .
I 'm an American ; I don 't believe in philosophy .
This is a fact -- or , as we say in my hometown of Washington , D.C. , a true fact .
Let me give you an example of what I mean .
Let me marshal the evidence here , because I 'm not telling you a story , I 'm making a case .
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury , some evidence : Dan Ariely , one of the great economists of our time , he and three colleagues , did a study of some MIT students .
They gave these MIT students a bunch of games , games that involved creativity , and motor skills , and concentration .
And the offered them , for performance , three levels of rewards : small reward , medium reward , large reward .
Okay ? If you do really well you get the large reward , on down .
What happened ? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected : the higher the pay , the better the performance .
Okay ? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill , a larger reward led to poorer performance .
Then they said , " Okay let 's see if there 's any cultural bias here .
Lets go to Madurai , India and test this . "
Standard of living is lower .
In Madurai , a reward that is modest in North American standards , is more meaningful there .
Same deal . A bunch of games , three levels of rewards .
What happens ?
People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards .
But this time , people offered the highest rewards , they did the worst of all .
In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments , higher incentives led to worse performance .
Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here ?
No . These are economists from MIT , from Carnegie Mellon , from the University of Chicago .
And do you know who sponsored this research ?
The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States .
That 's the American experience .
Let 's go across the pond to the London School of Economics -- LSE , London School of Economics , alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics .
Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros , and Friedrich Hayek , and Mick Jagger .
Last month , just last month , economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans , inside of companies .
Here 's what the economists there said : " We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance . "
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does .
And what worries me , as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse , is that too many organizations are making their decisions , their policies about talent and people , based on assumptions that are outdated , unexamined , and rooted more in folklore than in science .
And if we really want to get out of this economic mess , and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century , the solution is not to do more of the wrong things , to entice people with a sweeter carrot , or threaten them with a sharper stick .
We need a whole new approach .
And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who 've been studying motivation have given us this new approach .
It 's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation .
Around the desire to do things because they matter , because we like it , because they 're interesting , because they are part of something important .
And to my mind , that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements : autonomy , mastery and purpose .
Autonomy : the urge to direct our own lives .
Mastery : the desire to get better and better at something that matters .
Purpose : the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves .
These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses .
I want to talk today only about autonomy .
In the 20th century , we came up with this idea of management .
Management did not emanate from nature .
Management is like -- it 's not a tree , it 's a television set .
Okay ? Somebody invented it .
And it doesn 't mean it 's going to work forever .
Management is great .
Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance .
But if you want engagement , self-direction works better .
Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction .
What this means -- you don 't see a lot of it , but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on , because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly , absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table , and then giving people lots of autonomy .
Let me give you some examples .
How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian ?
It looks like less than half .
Atlassian is an Australian software company .
And they do something incredibly cool .
A few times a year they tell their engineers , " Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want , as long as it 's not part of your regular job .
Work on anything you want . "
So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code , come up with an elegant hack .
Then they present all of the stuff that they 've developed to their teammates , to the rest of the company , in this wild and wooly all-hands meeting at the end of the day .
And then , being Australians , everybody has a beer .
They call them FedEx Days .
Why ? Because you have to deliver something overnight .
It 's pretty . It 's not bad . It 's a huge trademark violation , but it 's pretty clever .
That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed .
And it 's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time -- done , famously , at Google -- where engineers can work , spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want .
They have autonomy over their time , their task , their team , their technique .
Okay ? Radical amounts of autonomy .
And at Google , as many of you know , about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time : things like Gmail , Orkut , Google News .
Let me give you an even more radical example of it : something called the Results Only Work Environment , the ROWE , created by two American consultants , in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America .
In a ROWE people don 't have schedules .
They show up when they want .
They don 't have to be in the office at a certain time , or any time .
They just have to get their work done .
How they do it , when they do it , where they do it , is totally up to them .
Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional .
What happens ?
Almost across the board , productivity goes up , worker engagement goes up , worker satisfaction goes up , turnover goes down .
Autonomy , mastery and purpose , These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things .
Now some of you might look at this and say , " Hmm , that sounds nice , but it 's Utopian . "
And I say , " Nope . I have proof . "
The mid-1990s , Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta .
They had deployed all the right incentives , all the right incentives . They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles .
Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time .
A few years later another encyclopedia got started .
Different model , right ?
Do it for fun . No one gets paid a cent , or a Euro or a Yen .
Do it because you like to do it .
Now if you had , just 10 years ago , if you had gone to an economist , anywhere , and said , " Hey , I 've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia .
If they went head to head , who would win ? "
10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model .
This is the titanic battle between these two approaches .
This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation . Right ?
This is the Thrilla ' in Manila .
Alright ? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators .
Autonomy , mastery and purpose , versus carrot and sticks . And who wins ?
Intrinsic motivation , autonomy , mastery and purpose , in a knockout . Let me wrap up .
There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does .
And here is what science knows .
One : Those 20th century rewards , those motivators we think are a natural part of business , do work , but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances .
Two : Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity .
Three : The secret to high performance isn 't rewards and punishments , but that unseen intrinsic drive -- the drive to do things for their own sake .
The drive to do things cause they matter .
And here 's the best part . Here 's the best part .
We already know this . The science confirms what we know in our hearts .
So , if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does , if we bring our motivation , notions of motivation into the 21st century , if we get past this lazy , dangerous , ideology of carrots and sticks , we can strengthen our businesses , we can solve a lot of those candle problems , and maybe , maybe , maybe we can change the world .
I rest my case .
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon : Women entrepreneurs , example not exception
Women aren 't micro--so why do they only get micro-loans ? Reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that women running all types of firms-- from home businesses to major factories-- are the overlooked key to economic development .
We do not invest in victims , we invest in survivors .
And in ways both big and small , the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women .
You can 't count what you don 't see .
And we don 't invest in what 's invisible to us .
But this is the face of resilience .
Six years ago , I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict .
I set out to write a compelling economic story , one that had great characters , that no one else was telling , and one that I thought mattered .
And that turned out to be women .
I had left ABC news and a career I loved at the age of 30 for business school , a path I knew almost nothing about .
None of the women I had grown up with in Maryland had graduated from college , let alone considered business school .
But they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent .
And I saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling .
So if you 're going to talk about jobs , then you have to talk about entrepreneurs .
And if you 're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings , then you must talk about women , because they are the population you have left .
Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female .
I want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs I 've met and share with you some of what they 've taught me over the years .
I went to Afghanistan in 2005 to work on a Financial Times piece , and there I met Kamila , a young women who told me she had just turned down a job with the international community that would have paid her nearly $ 2,000 a month -- an astronomical sum in that context .
And she had turned it down , she said , because she was going to start her next business , an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around Afghanistan .
Business , she said , was critical to her country 's future .
Because long after this round of internationals left , business would help keep her country peaceful and secure .
And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women .
So I was amazed .
I mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from " The Apprentice . "
So I asked her , " How in the world do you know this much about business ?
Why are you so passionate ? "
She said , " Oh Gayle , this is actually my third business .
My first business was a dressmaking business I started under the Taliban .
And that was actually an excellent business , because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood .
And that 's really how I became an entrepreneur . "
Think about this : Here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they couldn 't even be on their streets .
And at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive , these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many .
I couldn 't leave the story , and I couldn 't leave the topic either , because everywhere I went I met more of these women who no one seemed to know about , or even wish to .
I went on to Bosnia , and early on in my interviews I met with an IMF official who said , " You know , Gayle , I don 't think we actually have women in business in Bosnia , but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road .
So maybe you could interview her . "
So I went out reporting and within a day I met Narcisa Kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war 's former front lines in Sarajevo .
She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage , sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival .
By the time we met , she had 20 employees , most of them women , who were sending their boys and their girls to school .
And she was just the start .
I met women running essential oils businesses , wineries and even the country 's largest advertising agency .
So these stories together became the Herald Tribune business cover .
And when this story posted , I ran to my computer to send it to the IMF official .
And I said , " Just in case you 're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference , here are a couple of women . "
But think about this .
The IMF official is hardly the only person to automatically file women under micro .
The biases , whether intentional or otherwise , are pervasive , and so are the misleading mental images .
If you see the word " microfinance , " what comes to mind ?
Most people say women .
And if you see the word " entrepreneur , " most people think men .
Why is that ?
Because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women .
Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect , but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women , because they have so much greater hopes for themselves .
They want to move from micro to medium and beyond .
And in many places , they 're there .
In the U.S. , women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018 .
In South Korea and Indonesia , women own nearly half a million firms .
China , women run 20 percent of all small businesses .
And in the developing world overall , That figure is 40 to 50 percent .
Nearly everywhere I go , I meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance , access to markets and established business networks .
They are often ignored because they 're harder to help .
It is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan .
And as the World Bank recently noted , women are stuck in a productivity trap .
Those in small businesses can 't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness can 't grow out of them .
Recently I was at the State Department in Washington and I met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from Ghana .
She sells chocolates .
And she had come to Washington , not seeking a handout and not seeking a microloan .
She had come seeking serious investment dollars so that she could build the factory and buy the equipment she needs to export her chocolates to Africa , Europe , the Middle East and far beyond -- capital that would help her to employ more than the 20 people that she already has working for her , and capital that would fuel her own country 's economic climb .
The great news is we already know what works .
Theory and empirical evidence Have already taught us .
We don 't need to invent solutions because we have them -- cash flow loans based in income rather than assets , loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral , because women often don 't own land .
And Kiva.org , the microlender , is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans .
And that 's just to start .
Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women " the emerging market of the emerging market . "
I think that is terrific .
You know why ?
Because -- and I say this as somebody who worked in finance -- 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade .
Because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth , and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets .
How wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women 's economic potential ?
Just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs , productivity , employment , child nutrition , maternal mortality , literacy and much , much more .
Because , as the World Economic Forum noted , smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness .
And not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap -- not one .
So the great news is this is an incredible opportunity .
We have so much room to grow .
So you see , this is not about doing good , this is about global growth and global employment .
It is about how we invest and it 's about how we see women .
And women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group .
Oftentimes I get into very interesting discussions with reporters who say to me , " Gayle , these are great stories , but you 're really writing about the exceptions . "
Now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons .
First of all , for exceptions , there are a lot of them and they 're important .
Secondly , when we talk about men who are succeeding , we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated .
And when we talk about women , they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored .
And finally , there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional .
So why wouldn 't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them ?
This topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life .
My mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night so that I could have every opportunity possible .
We shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores , and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work , we even applied for food stamps .
And when I would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do , she would say to me , " My dear , on a scale of major world tragedies , yours is not a three . "
And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn 't do it and nobody I knew had done it , I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact .
And she told me , " Never import other people 's limitations . "
And when I complained to my grandmother , a World War II veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13 , that I was terrified that if I turned down a plum assignment at ABC for a fellowship overseas , I would never ever , ever find another job , she said , " Kiddo , I 'm going to tell you two things .
First of all , no one turns down a Fulbright , and secondly , McDonald 's is always hiring . "
" You will find a job . Take the leap . "
The women in my family are not exceptions .
The women in this room and watching in L.A.
and all around the world are not exceptions .
We are not a special interest group .
We are the majority .
And for far too long , we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others .
It is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women , to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world .
We can make a difference , and make a difference , not just for women , but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions .
Together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule .
When we change the way we see ourselves , others will follow .
And it is time for all of us to think bigger .
Thank you very much .
Mitchell Joachim : Don 't build your home , grow it !
TED Fellow and urban designer Mitchell Joachim presents his vision for sustainable , organic architecture : eco-friendly abodes grown from plants and -- wait for it -- meat .
Why grow homes ? Because we can .
Right now , America is in an unremitting state of trauma .
And there 's a cause for that , all right .
We 've got McPeople , McCars , McHouses .
As an architect , I have to confront something like this .
So what 's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses ?
Well , it 's been around for 2,500 years .
It 's called pleaching , or grafting trees together , or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous , vascular system .
And we do something different than what we did in the past ; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that .
We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter , plants , into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab .
It fits into the environment . It is the environment .
It is the landscape , right ?
And you can have a hundred million of these homes , and it 's great because they suck carbon .
They 're perfect .
You can have 100 million families , or take things out of the suburbs , because these are homes that are a part of the environment .
Imagine pre-growing a village -- it takes about seven to 10 years -- and everything is green .
So not only do we do the veggie house , we also do the in-vitro meat habitat , or homes that we 're doing research on now in Brooklyn , where , as an architecture office , we 're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one .
So we 've been doing this for a couple of years , and that 's our lab .
And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs .
We use a modified inkjet printer , and we print geometry .
We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like , you know , shoes , leather belts , handbags , etc . , where no sentient creature is harmed .
It 's victimless . It 's meat from a test tube .
So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes .
So here is a typical stud wall , an architectural construction , and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house , where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation , cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows .
And we know it 's incredibly ugly .
It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial , but we kind of chose this shape .
And there it is kind of grown , at least one particular section of it .
We had a big show in Prague , and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat .
That 's why we grow homes . Thanks very much .
Julie Taymor : Spider-Man , The Lion King and life on the creative edge
Showing spectacular clips from productions such as Frida , The Tempest and The Lion King , director Julie Taymor describes a life spent immersed in theater and the movies . Filmed right as controversy over her Broadway production of Spider- Turn Off the Dark was at its peak , she candidly describes the tensions inherent within her creative process , as she strives both to capture the essence of a story--and produce images and experiences unlike anything else .
[ " Oedipus Rex " ] [ " The Lion King " ] [ " Titus " ] [ " Frida " ] [ " The Magic Flute " ] [ " Across The Universe " ] Julie Taymor : Thank you . Thank you very much .
That 's a few samples of the theater , opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years .
But what I 'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia , which is a seminal moment in my life and , like all myths , these stories need to be retold and told , lest we forget them .
And when I 'm in the turbulent times , as we know , that I am right now , through the crucible and the fire of transformation , which is what all of you do , actually .
Anybody who creates knows there 's that point where it hasn 't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char .
And I am right there on the edge , which I 'll tell you about , another story .
I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21 , 22 years , a long time ago , on a fellowship .
And I found myself , after two years there and performing and learning , on the island of Bali , on the edge of a crater , Gunung Batur .
And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men , a rite of passage .
Little did I know that it was mine as well .
And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree , in the dark , there was no electricity , just the full moon , down in this empty square , and I heard the most beautiful sounds , like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony .
And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree .
And all of a sudden , out of the dark , from the other end of the square , I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon .
And these 20 old men who I 'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears , and no one was in the square , and I was hidden in the shadows .
No one was there , and they came out , and they did this incredible dance .
" Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha . "
And they moved their bodies and they came forward , and the lights bounced off these costumes .
And I 've been in theater since I was 11 years old , and performing , creating , and I went , " Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes , these extraordinary headdresses ? "
And I realized that they were performing for God , whatever that means .
But somehow , it didn 't matter about the publicity .
There was no money involved .
It wasn 't going to be written down . It was no news .
And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed .
The next moment , as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows , a young man with a propane lantern came on , hung it up on a tree , set up a curtain .
The village square was filled with hundreds of people .
And they put on an opera all night long .
Human beings needed the light .
They needed the light to see .
So what I gained and gathered from this incredible , seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through , but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time , and they also need the light .
And it 's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground , that 's trying to do something you 've never seen before , that imaginary world where you actually don 't know where you 're going to end up , that 's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life .
What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work . Let 's take " The Lion King . "
You saw many examples of my work up there , but it 's one that people know .
I start with the notion of the ideograph .
An ideograph is like a brush painting , a Japanese brush painting .
Three strokes , you get the whole bamboo forest .
I go to the concept of " The Lion King " and I say , " What is the essence of it ?
What is the abstraction ?
If I were to reduce this entire story into one image , what would it be ? "
The circle . The circle . It 's so obvious .
The circle of life . The circle of Mufasa 's mask .
The circle that , when we come to Act II and there 's a drought , how do you express drought ?
It 's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor .
The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap .
And you see the mechanics .
And being a theater person , what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief , when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads , you know it 's the savanna .
You don 't question that .
I love the apparent truth of theater .
I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks .
The audience is willing to say , " Oh , I know that 's not a real sun .
You took pieces of sticks .
You added silk to the bottom .
You suspended these pieces . You let it fall flat on the floor .
And as it rises with the strings , I see that it 's a sun .
But the beauty of it is that it 's just silk and sticks .
And in a way , that is what makes it spiritual .
That 's what moves you .
It 's not the actual literal sunrise that 's coming .
It 's the art of it .
So in the theater , as much as the story is critical and the book and the language , the telling of the story , how it 's told , the mechanics , the methods that you use , is equal to the story itself .
And I 'm one who loves high tech and low tech .
So I could go from -- For instance , I 'll show you some " Spider-Man " later , these incredible machines that move people along .
But the fact is , without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires , it 's nothing .
So now I 'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year , " The Tempest . "
It 's a movie . I did " The Tempest " on a stage three times in the theater since 1984 , ' 86 , and I love the play .
I did it always with a male Prospero .
And all of a sudden , I thought , " Well , who am I gonna get to play Prospero ?
Why not Helen Mirren ? She 's a great actor . Why not ? "
And this material really did work for a woman equally as well .
So now , let 's take a look at some of the images from " The Tempest . "
Prospera : Hast thou , spirit , performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee ?
Ariel : I boarded the king 's ship . In every cabin , I flamed amazement .
Prospera : At first sight , they have changed eyes .
Miranda : Do you love me ?
Ferdinand : Beyond all limit .
HM : They are both in either 's powers .
Trinculo : Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows .
Looking for business , governor ?
Caliban : Hast thou not dropped from heaven ?
Stephano : Out of the moon , I do assure thee .
Prospera : Caliban !
Caliban : This island is mine .
Prospera : For this , be sure , tonight thou shalt have cramps .
Antonio : Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon .
Sebastian : Draw thy sword .
And I , the king , shall love thee .
Prospera : I will plague them all , even to roaring .
Ariel : I have made you mad .
Prospera : We are such stuff as dreams are made on .
and our little life is rounded with a sleep .
JT : Okay .
So I went from theater , doing " The Tempest " on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago , and I love the play , and I also think it 's Shakespeare 's last play , and it really lends itself , as you can see , to cinema .
But I 'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema .
The ideograph that I talked to you about before , what is it for " The Tempest " ?
What , if I were to boil it down , would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this ?
And it was the sand castle , the idea of nurture versus nature , that we build these civilizations -- she speaks about it at the end , Helen Mirren 's Prospera -- we build them , but under nature , under the grand tempest , these cloud-capped towers , these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will -- leave not a rack behind .
So in the theater , I started the play , it was a black sand rake , white cyc , and there was a little girl , Miranda , on the horizon , building a drip castle , a sand castle .
And as she was there on the edge of that stage , two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle , and the sand castle started to drip and sink , but before it did , the audience saw the black-clad stagehands .
The medium was apparent . It was banal . We saw it .
But as they started to pour the water , the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing , this rough magic that we do in theater , it focused right on the water itself .
And all of a sudden , the audience 's perspective changes .
It becomes something magically large .
It becomes the rainstorm .
The masked actors , the puppeteers , they disappear , and the audience makes that leap into this world , into this imaginary world of " The Tempest " actually happening .
Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema , I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle , a black sand castle , and what cinema can do is , by using camera , perspective , and also long shots and close-ups , it started on a close-up of the sand castle , and as it pulled away , you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl 's hands .
And so I could play with the medium , and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this .
Now I 'm going to take you to " Spider-Man . "
Peter Parker : Standing on the precipice , I can soar away from this . JT : We 're trying to do everything in live theater that you can 't do in two dimensions in film and television .
PP : Rise above yourself and take control . George Tsypin : We 're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view .
Spider Man is not bound by gravity .
Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either .
PP : Be yourself and rise above it all . Ensemble : Sock ! Pow ! Slam ! Scratch ! Danny Ezralow : I don 't want you to even think there 's a choreographer .
It 's real , what 's happening .
I prefer you to see people moving , and you 're going , " Whoa , what was that ? "
JT : If I give enough movement in the sculpture , and the actor moves their head , you feel like it 's alive .
It 's really comic book live . It 's a comic book coming alive .
Bono : They 're mythologies .
They 're modern myths , these comic book heroes .
PP : They believe . JT : Ohhhh . What was that ?
Circus , rock ' n ' roll , drama .
What the hell are we doing up there on that stage ?
Well , one last story , very quickly .
After I was in that village , I crossed the lake , and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side , Gunung Batur , and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano .
I didn 't think I 'd be swallowed by the volcano , and I am here .
But it 's very easy to climb up , is it not ?
You hold on to the roots , you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there , and you get to the top , and I was with a good friend who was an actor , and we said , " Let 's go up there .
Let 's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano . "
And we climbed up and we got to the very top , and we 're on the edge , on this precipice , Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end , and I 'm up there alone on this incredible precipice .
Did you hear the lyrics ?
I 'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left .
To my right is sheer shale . It 's coming off .
I 'm in thongs and sarongs . It was many years ago .
And no hiking boots .
And he 's disappeared , this mad French gypsy actor , off in the smoke , and I realize , I can 't go back the way that I 've come . I can 't .
So I throw away my camera . I throw away my thongs , and I looked at the line straight in front of me , and I got down on all fours like a cat , and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me , for 30 yards or 30 feet , I don 't know .
The wind was massively blowing , and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me .
I know you 've all been there .
I 'm in the crucible right now .
It 's my trial by fire .
It 's my company 's trials by fire .
We survive because our theme song is " Rise Above . "
Boy falls from the sky , rise above .
It 's right there in the palm of both of our hands , of all of my company 's hands .
I have beautiful collaborators , and we as creators only get there all together .
I know you understand that .
And you just stay going forward , and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes .
Thank you .
Pearl Arredondo : My story , from gangland daughter to star teacher
Pearl Arredondo grew up in East Los Angeles , the daughter of a high-ranking gang member who was in and out of jail . Many teachers wrote her off as having a problem with authority . Now a teacher herself , she 's creating a different kind of school and telling students her story so that they know it 's okay if sometimes homework isn 't the first thing on their minds .
So I grew up in East Los Angeles , not even realizing I was poor .
My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets .
Everyone knew who I was , so I thought I was a pretty big deal , and I was protected , and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail , I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent .
She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean 's office , so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class , for whatever reason , who were waiting to be disciplined .
Man , her office was packed .
So , see , kids like us , we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school , and sometimes we 're just not ready to focus .
But that doesn 't mean that we can 't .
It just takes a little bit more .
Like , I remember one day I found my dad convulsing , foaming at the mouth , OD-ing on the bathroom floor .
Really , do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list ?
Not so much .
But I really needed a support network , a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn 't going to be a victim of my own circumstance , that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do .
I needed teachers , in the classroom , every day , who were going to say , " You can move beyond that . "
And unfortunately , the local junior high was not going to offer that .
It was gang-infested , huge teacher turnover rate .
So my mom said , " You 're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day . "
So for the next two years , that 's what I did .
I took a school bus to the fancy side of town .
And eventually , I ended up at a school where there was a mixture .
There were some people who were really gang-affiliated , and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school .
Well , trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable .
You had to survive .
You just had to do things sometimes .
So there were a lot of teachers who were like , " She 's never going to make it .
She has an issue with authority .
She 's not going to go anywhere . "
Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause .
But then , they were very surprised when I graduated from high school .
I was accepted to Pepperdine University , and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant .
And then I told them , " I want to be a teacher . "
And boy , they were like , " What ? Why ?
Why would you want to do that ? "
So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended , and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me .
And so every year , I share my background with my kids , because they need to know that everyone has a story , everyone has a struggle , and everyone needs help along the way .
And I am going to be their help along the way .
So as a rookie teacher , I created opportunity .
I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before .
I was like , " You need to go to a hospital , the school nurse , something . "
He 's like , " No , Miss , I 'm not going .
I need to be in class because I need to graduate . "
So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance , but we were going to push forward and keep moving on .
And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they 're going through , getting to know their families -- I wanted that , but I couldn 't do it in a school with 1,600 kids , and teachers turning over year after year after year .
How do you get to build those relationships ?
So we created a new school .
And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media .
And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding , for support .
But with that , we were going to gain freedom : freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective ; freedom to control the curriculum so that we 're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five , no ; and freedom to control a budget , to spend money where it matters , not how a district or a state says you have to do it .
We wanted those freedoms .
But now , shifting an entire paradigm , it hasn 't been an easy journey , nor is it even complete .
But we had to do it .
Our community deserved a new way of doing things .
And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District , you better believe there was some opposition .
And it was out of fear -- fear of , well , what if they get it wrong ?
Yeah , what if we get it wrong ?
But what if we get it right ?
And we did .
So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts -- you can 't teach , or you don 't want to teach , you don 't get to be at my school with my kids .
So in our third year , how did we do it ?
Well , we 're making school worth coming to every day .
We make our kids feel like they matter to us .
We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them , and they use all the technology that they 're used to .
Laptops , computers , tablets -- you name it , they have it .
Animation , software , moviemaking software , they have it all .
And because we connect it to what they 're doing — For example , they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society .
These were played in the local trolley system .
Teaching elements of persuasion , it doesn 't get any more real than that .
Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we 've become our own school .
But it 's taken all stakeholders , working together -- teachers and principals on one-year contracts , working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation .
And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say , " Know , the district is trying to impose this , but you have the freedom to do otherwise . "
And it takes an active parent center who is not only there , showing a presence every day , but who is part of our governance , making decisions for their kids , our kids .
Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live ?
They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood , a school that they can be proud to say they attend , and a school that the community can be proud of as well , and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances .
Because it 's time that kids like me stop being the exception , and we become the norm .
Thank you .
Mustafa Akyol : Faith versus tradition in Islam
Journalist Mustafa Akyol talks about the way that some local cultural practices have become linked , in the popular mind , to the articles of faith of Islam . Has the world 's general idea of the Islamic faith focused too much on tradition , and not enough on core beliefs ?
A few weeks ago , I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia .
And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba , the holiest shrine of Islam .
And I did that ; I put on my ritualistic dress ; I went to the holy mosque ; I did my prayers ; I observed all the rituals .
And meanwhile , besides all the spirituality , there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me .
There was no separation of sexes .
In other words , men and women were worshiping all together .
They were together while doing the tawaf , the circular walk around the Kaaba .
They were together while praying .
And if you wonder why this is interesting at all , you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia because it 's a country which is strictly divided between the sexes .
In other words , as men , you are not simply supposed to be in the same physical space with women .
And I noticed this in a very funny way .
I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca .
I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant .
And I went there -- I noticed that there was a male section , which was carefully separated from the female section .
And I had to pay , order and eat at the male section .
" It 's funny , " I said to myself , " You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba , but not at the Burger King . "
Quite ironic .
Ironic , and it 's also , I think , quite telling .
Because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam , that of prophet Muhammad .
And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women , the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly .
But apparently that was not an issue at the time .
So the rituals came that way .
This is also , I think , confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran , the very core of Islam -- the divine core of Islam that all Muslims , and equally myself , believe .
And I think it 's not an accident that you don 't find this idea in the very origin of Islam .
Because many scholars who study the history of Islamic thought -- Muslim scholars or Westerners -- think that actually the practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in Islam , as Muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the Middle East .
Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice , and Muslims adopted that and made that a part of their religion .
And actually this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon .
What we call today Islamic Law , and especially Islamic culture -- and there are many Islamic cultures actually ; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey .
But still , if you 're going to speak about a Muslim culture , this has a core , the divine message , which began the religion , but then many traditions , perceptions , many practices were added on top of it .
And these were traditions of the Middle East -- medieval traditions .
And there are two important messages , or two lessons , to take from that reality .
First of all , Muslims -- pious , conservative , believing Muslims who want to be loyal to their religion -- should not cling onto everything in their culture , thinking that that 's divinely mandated .
Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed .
On the other hand , the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains .
Maybe it 's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam .
There is a practice called female circumcision .
It 's something terrible , horrible .
It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure .
And Westerners , Europeans or Americans , who didn 't know about this before faced this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa .
And they 've thought , " Oh , what a horrible religion that is which ordains something like that . "
But actually when you look at female circumcision , you see that it has nothing to do with Islam , it 's just a North African practice , which predates Islam .
It was there for thousands of years .
And quite tellingly , some Muslims do practice that .
The Muslims in North Africa , not in other places .
But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa -- the Animists , even some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa is known to practice female circumcision .
So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims have subscribed to .
The same thing can be said for honor killings , which is a recurrent theme in the Western media -- and which is , of course , a horrible tradition .
And we see truly in some Muslim communities that tradition .
But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East , such as some Christian communities , Eastern communities , you see the same practice .
We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey 's Armenian community just a few months ago .
Now these are things about general culture , but I 'm also very much interested in political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated , or whether there 's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens .
And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian , and some of the so-called " Islamic regimes " such as Saudi Arabia , Iran and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan -- they are pretty authoritarian . No doubt about that .
For example , in Saudi Arabia there is a phenomenon called the religious police .
And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen , by force -- like women are forced to cover their heads -- wear the hijab , the Islamic head cover .
Now that is pretty authoritarian , and that 's something I 'm very much critical of .
But when I realized that the non-Muslim , or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography , sometimes behaved similarly , I realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region , not just Islam .
Let me give you an example : in Turkey where I come from , which is a very hyper-secular republic , until very recently we used to have what I call secularism police , which would guard the universities against veiled students .
In other words , they would force students to uncover their heads , and I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it .
It should be the citizen 's decision .
But when I saw that , I said , " Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region , and some Muslims have been influenced by that .
But the secular-minded people can be influenced by that .
Maybe it 's a problem of the political culture , and we have to think about how to change that political culture . "
Now these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago when I sat down to write a book .
I said , " Well I will make a research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today , and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken . "
The name of the book is " Islam Without Extremes : A Muslim Case for Liberty . "
And as the subtitle suggests , I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty , and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty .
And there are strengths in Islamic tradition .
Islam actually , as a monotheistic religion , which defined man as a responsible agent by itself , created the idea of the individual in the Middle East and saved it from the communitarianism , the collectivism of the tribe .
You can derive many ideas from that .
But besides that , I also saw problems within Islamic tradition .
But one thing was curious : most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later , not from the very divine core of Islam , the Koran , but from , again , traditions and mentalities , or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages .
The Koran , for example , doesn 't condone stoning .
There is no punishment on apostasy .
There is no punishment on personal things like drinking .
These things which make Islamic Law , the troubling aspects of Islamic Law , were later developed into later interpretations of Islam .
Which means that Muslims can , today , look at those things and say , " Well , the core of our religion is here to stay with us .
It 's our faith , and we will be loyal to it .
But we can change how it was interpreted , because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages .
Now we are living in a different world with different values and different political systems . "
That interpretation is quite possible and feasible .
Now if I were the only person thinking that way , we would be in trouble .
But that 's not the case at all .
Actually , from the 19th century on , there 's a whole revisionist , reformist -- whatever you call it -- tradition , a trend in Islamic thinking .
And these were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century , and later , 20th century , which looked at Europe basically and saw that Europe has many things to admire , like science and technology .
But not just that ; also democracy , parliament , the idea of representation , the idea of equal citizenship .
These Muslim thinkers and intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century looked at Europe , saw these things .
They said , " Why don 't we have these things ? "
And they looked back at Islamic tradition , they saw that there are problematic aspects , but they 're not the core of the religion , so maybe they can be re-understood , and the Koran can be reread in the modern world .
That trend is generally called Islamic modernism , and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen , not just as an intellectual idea though , but also as a political program .
And that 's why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman Empire , which then covered the whole Middle East , made very important reforms -- reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status , accepting a constitution , accepting a representative parliament , advancing the idea of freedom of religion .
And that 's why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades turned into a proto-democracy , a constitutional monarchy , and freedom was a very important political value at the time .
Similarly , in the Arab world , there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as the Liberal Age .
He has a book , " Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age , " and the Liberal Age , he defines as 19th century and early 20th century .
Quite notably , this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians .
But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century , because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line .
And in place of that , what happens is that Islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian , which is quite strident , which is quite anti-Western , and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision .
So Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th century Islamic world .
And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to terrorism in the name of Islam -- which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam , but some , obviously , extremists did not think that way .
But there is a curious question : If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries , why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century ?
And this is a question , I think , which needs to be discussed carefully .
And in my book , I went into that question as well .
And actually you don 't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that .
You just look at the political history of the 20th century , and you see things have changed a lot .
The context has changed .
In the 19th century , when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example , they were independent ; they were more self-confident .
In the early 20th century , with the fall of the Ottoman Empire , the whole Middle East was colonized .
And when you have colonization what do you have ?
You have anti-colonization .
So Europe is not just an example now to emulate ; it 's an enemy to fight and to resist .
So there 's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world , and what you see is more of a defensive , rigid , reactionary strain , which led to Arab socialism , Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology .
And when the colonial period ended , what you had in place of that was , generally , secular dictators , which say they 're a country , but did not bring democracy to the country , and established their own dictatorship .
And I think the West , at least some powers in the West , particularly the United States , made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators , thinking that they were more helpful for their interests .
But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the Islamists much more strident .
So in the 20th century , you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people including the Islamic-pious , and they 're reacting in reactionary ways .
There was one country , though , which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle .
And that 's the country where I come from ; that 's Turkey .
Turkey has never been colonized , so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire .
That 's one thing to remember .
They did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in some other countries in the region .
Secondly , and most importantly , Turkey became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about .
In 1950 , Turkey had the first free and fair elections , which ended the more autocratic secular regime , which was the beginning of Turkey .
And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they can change the political system by voting .
And they realize that democracy is something that is compatible with Islam , compatible with their values , and they 've been supportive of democracy .
That 's an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had until very recently .
Secondly , in the past two decades , thanks to globalization , thanks to the market economy , thanks to the rise of a middle-class , we in Turkey see what I define as a rebirth of Islamic modernism .
Now there 's the more urban middle-class pious Muslims who , again , look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition , and they understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed .
And they look at Europe , and they see an example , again , to follow .
They see an example , at least , to take some inspiration from .
That 's why the E.U. process , Turkey 's effort to join the E.U. , has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic-pious , while some secular nations were against that .
Well that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming -- but that 's another discussion .
But the pro-E.U. sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well , of course .
And thanks to that , Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the democratic game , and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country .
And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world .
You must have all seen the Arab Spring , which began in Tunis and in Egypt .
And Arab masses just revolted against their dictators .
They were asking for democracy ; they were asking for freedom .
And they did not turn out to be the Islamist boogyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime .
They said that " we want freedom ; we want democracy .
We are Muslim believers , but we want to be living as free people in free societies . "
Of course , this is a long road .
Democracy is not an overnight achievement ; it 's a process .
But this is a promising era in the Muslim world .
And I believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century , but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the Muslim world , is having a rebirth .
And I think the getaway message from that would be that Islam , despite some of the skeptics in the West , has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy , create its own way to liberalism , They just should be allowed to work for that .
Thanks so much .
Keller Rinaudo : A mini robot -- powered by your phone
Your smartphone may feel like a friend -- but a true friend would give you a smile once in a while . At TED2013 , Keller Rinaudo demos Romo , the smartphone-powered mini robot who can motor along with you on a walk , slide you a cup of coffee across the table , and react to you with programmable expressions .
So just by a show of hands , how many of you all have a robot at home ?
Not very many of you .
Okay . And actually of those hands , if you don 't include Roomba how many of you have a robot at home ?
So a couple .
That 's okay .
That 's the problem that we 're trying to solve at Romotive -- that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving .
So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use , whether you 're eight or 80 .
And as it turns out , that 's a really hard problem , because you have to build a small , portable robot that 's not only really affordable , but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids .
This robot can 't be creepy or uncanny .
He should be friendly and cute .
So meet Romo .
Romo 's a robot that uses a device you already know and love -- your iPhone -- as his brain .
And by leveraging the power of the iPhone 's processor , we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks , which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past .
When Romo wakes up , he 's in creature mode .
So he 's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face .
If I duck down , he 'll follow me .
He 's wary , so he 'll keep his eyes on me .
If I come over here , he 'll turn to follow me .
If I come over here -- He 's smart .
And if I get too close to him , he gets scared just like any other creature .
So in a lot of ways , Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own .
Thanks , little guy .
Bless you .
And if I want to explore the world -- uh-oh , Romo 's tired -- if I want to explore the world with Romo , I can actually connect him from any other iOS device .
So here 's the iPad .
And Romo will actually stream video to this device .
So I can see everything that Romo sees , and I get a robot 's-eye-view of the world .
Now this is a free app on the App Store , so if any of you guys had this app on your phones , we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together .
So I 'll show you really quickly , Romo actually -- he 's streaming video , so you can see me and the entire TED audience .
If I get in front of Romo here .
And if I want to control him , I can just drive .
So I can drive him around , and I can take pictures of you .
I 've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience .
So I 'll snap a picture .
And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad , I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device .
So there are all of you through Romo 's eyes .
And finally , because Romo is an extension of me , I can express myself through his emotions .
So I can go in and I can say let 's make Romo excited .
But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive .
You do not have to teach someone how to drive Romo .
In fact , who would like to drive a robot ?
Okay . Awesome .
Here you go .
Thank you , Scott .
And even cooler , you actually don 't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him .
So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices .
So you can log in through the browser , and it 's kind of like Skype on wheels .
So we were talking before about telepresence , and this is a really cool example .
You can imagine an eight-year-old girl , for example , who has an iPhone , and her mom buys her a robot .
That girl can take her iPhone , put it on the robot , send an email to Grandma , who lives on the other side of the country .
Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night , when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year .
Thanks , Scott .
So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today .
But I just want to finish by talking about something that we 're working on in the future .
This is actually something that one of our engineers , Dom , built in a weekend .
It 's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly .
This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want .
You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo .
And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser , which is what you see Romo doing on the left .
And then if you have something you like , you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life , run the program in real life .
And then if you have something you 're proud of , you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world .
So all of these wi-fi – enabled robots actually learn from each other .
The reason we 're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal .
They change from person to person .
So we think that if you 're going to have a robot in your home , that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination .
So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like .
To be honest , I have no idea .
But what we do know is that it isn 't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away .
The future of personal robotics is happening today , and it 's going to depend on small , agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves .
So we can 't wait to get you all robots , and we can 't wait to see what you build .
Thank you .
Greg Asner : Ecology from the air
What are our forests really made of ? From the air , ecologist Greg Asner uses a spectrometer and high-powered lasers to map nature in meticulous kaleidoscopic 3D detail -- what he calls " a very high-tech accounting system " of carbon . In this fascinating talk , Asner gives a clear message : To save our ecosystems , we need more data , gathered in new ways .
Technology can change our understanding of nature .
Take for example the case of lions .
For centuries , it 's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna , and male lions do nothing until it 's time for dinner .
You 've heard this too , I can tell .
Well recently , I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa .
Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions , and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air .
The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill , and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed .
That 's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation .
And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be .
They just use a different strategy .
Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances , usually during the day , male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation , and often at night .
This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right .
Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation , and the white are wide open spaces .
And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions .
All of a sudden , you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting .
I bring up this example to begin , because it emphasizes how little we know about nature .
There 's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests , and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate , as shown in red on the slide .
I find it ironic that we 're doing so much , yet these areas are fairly unknown to science .
So how can we save what we don 't understand ?
Now I 'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects , but above all , I 'm obsessed with what we don 't know about our planet .
So I created this , the Carnegie Airborne Observatory , or CAO .
It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job , but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors , computers , and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots .
Two of our instruments are very unique : one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them .
Another one is a set of lasers , very high-powered lasers , that fire out of the bottom of the plane , sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D .
Here 's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco , not far from where I live .
Although we flew straight over this bridge , we imaged it in 3D , captured its color in just a few seconds .
But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems .
This is a small town in the Amazon , imaged with the CAO .
We can slice through our data and see , for example , the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings , or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them .
The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants .
And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined .
This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon .
This is how we see a rainforest , in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another .
But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales , and what that means is that they 're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them .
So our imagery is 3D , it 's chemical , it 's biological , and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy , but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest .
Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point , such as from the ground , or from satellite sensors .
I want to share three of those questions with you today .
The first questions is , how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests ?
Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees , and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we 're going to avoid any further global warming .
Unfortunately , global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector .
That 's all ships , airplanes , trains and automobiles combined .
So it 's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation , but they 're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science .
If you don 't know where the carbon is exactly , in detail , how can you know what you 're losing ?
Basically , we need a high-tech accounting system .
With our system , we 're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail .
The red shows , obviously , closed-canopy tropical forest , and then you see the cookie cutting , or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens .
It 's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep .
And yet , we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time .
And what 's amazing is , even though we flew very high above this forest , later on in analysis , we can go in and actually experience the treetrops , leaf by leaf , branch by branch , just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves .
We 've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America .
What I 'm going to do is I 'm going to take you on a high-resolution , first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama .
The colors are going to be going from red to blue .
Red is extremely high carbon stocks , your largest cathedral forests you can imagine , and blue are very low carbon stocks .
And let me tell you , Peru alone is an amazing place , totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today .
We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red , and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it .
We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue , and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange .
We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system .
And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon .
It 's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron 's " Avatar . "
We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries , Panama , and see also a huge range of carbon variation , from high in red to low in blue .
Unfortunately , most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands , but what you see that 's left , in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds , is the stuff that 's up in the mountains .
One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen .
You 're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal .
That 's in the reds and yellows .
The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce .
This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development .
It 's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change .
My second question : How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest ?
Let me tell you , I spend a lot of time in these places , and we 're seeing the climate changing already .
Temperatures are increasing , and what 's really happening is we 're getting a lot of droughts , recurring droughts .
The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe .
The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially , as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide .
What we found is that in very remote areas , these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests .
For example , these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought .
This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil , totally unexplored , almost totally unknown scientifically .
So what we think , as Earth scientists , is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change .
One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak .
Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners .
You see the forest in green in 3D , and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface .
Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this , obviously .
If you haven 't been to the Amazon , you should go .
It 's an amazing experience every time , no matter where you go .
You 're going to probably see it this way , on a river .
But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what 's really going on back in the forest itself .
We flew over this same river , imaged the system in 3D .
The forest is on the left .
And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what 's going on below the canopy .
And in this case , we found gold mining activity , all of it illegal , set back away from the river 's edge , as you 'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right .
Don 't worry , we 're working with the authorities to deal with this and many , many other problems in the region .
So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique , important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor , we have to start making geographically explicit plans now .
How do we do that if we don 't know the geography of biodiversity in the region , if it 's so unknown to science ?
So what we 've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest .
Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors .
Reds are one type of species , blues are another , and greens are yet another .
And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level , we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work .
This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat , and that 's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts .
And this is the pivotal information that 's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans .
And third and final question is , how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems ?
The example I started out with about lions hunting , that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa .
And the truth is , much of Africa 's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen .
This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management .
They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they 're protecting .
Some of their decisions have really big impacts .
For example , how much and where to use fire as a management tool ?
Or , how to deal with a large species like elephants , which may , if their populations get too large , have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species .
And let me tell you , these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape .
In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants : wide open savanna in blue , and just a few trees .
As we cross this fence line , now we 're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants : dense vegetation , a radically different ecosystem .
And in a place like Kruger , the soaring elephant densities are a real problem .
I know it 's a sensitive issue for many of you , and there are no easy answers with this .
But what 's good is that the technology we 've developed and we 're working with in South Africa , for example , is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna , and then through repeat flights we 're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants , in the red as you see on the screen , and how much that 's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna .
That 's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don 't lead to those extremes that I just showed you .
So really , the way we 're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life , where we have fire management , elephant management , those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem , and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions .
Going forward , I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory .
I 'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this .
Until then , you 're going to find me flying in some remote place that you 've never heard of .
I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet , but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it .
Thank you .
Shukla Bose : Teaching one child at a time
Educating the poor is more than just a numbers game , says Shukla Bose . She tells the story of her groundbreaking Parikrma Humanity Foundation , which brings hope to India 's slums by looking past the daunting statistics and focusing on treating each child as an individual .
I 'm standing in front of you today in all humility , wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education .
And I 'm not a trained academic .
Neither am I a veteran social worker .
I was 26 years in the corporate world , trying to make organizations profitable .
And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table .
The first thing that we did was walk through the slums .
You know , by the way , there are two million people in Bangalore , who live in 800 slums .
We couldn 't go to all the slums , but we tried to cover as much as we could .
We walked through these slums , identified houses where children would never go to school .
We talked to the parents , tried to convince them about sending their children to school .
We played with the children , and came back home really tired , exhausted , but with images of bright faces , twinkling eyes , and went to sleep .
We were all excited to start , but the numbers hit us then : 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school , but do not ; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read ; 125 million who cannot do basic maths .
We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling .
Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers ' salary and administrators ' salary .
And yet , India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world , with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year .
Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling , overwhelming , and we were constantly asked , " When will you start ? How many schools will you start ?
How many children will you get ?
How are you going to scale ?
How are you going to replicate ? "
It was very difficult not to get scared , not to get daunted .
But we dug our heels and said , " We 're not in the number game .
We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school , sent to college , and get them prepared for better living , a high value job . "
So , we started Parikrma .
The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line .
Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums , a second story building , the only second story building inside the slums .
And that rooftop did not have any ceiling , only half a tin sheet .
That was our first school . One hundred sixty-five children .
Indian academic year begins in June .
So , June it rains , so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof , waiting for the rain to stop .
My God ! What a bonding exercise that was .
And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today .
Then came the second school , the third school , the fourth school and a junior college .
In six years now , we have four schools , one junior college , 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages .
Our dream is very simple : to send each of these kids , get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully , contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world .
Now , when you talk global you have to talk English .
And so all our schools are English medium schools .
But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well .
No one in their family has spoken English .
No one in their generation has spoken English .
But how wrong it is .
Girl : I like adventurous books , and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [ unclear ] and Hardy Boys .
Although they are like in different contexts , one is magical , the other two are like investigation , I like those books because they have something special in them .
The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing .
I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book .
Even if it takes me four and a half hours , or three and half hours to finish my book , I do it .
Boy : I did good research and I got the information [ on the ] world 's fastest cars .
I like Ducati ZZ143 , because it is the fastest , the world 's fastest bike , and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India 's fastest bike .
Shukla Bose : Well , that girl that you saw , her father sells flowers on the roadside .
And this little boy has been coming to school for five years .
But isn 't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes ?
He hasn 't seen one , he hasn 't ridden one , of course , but he has done a lot of research through Google search .
You know , when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible , the ICSE curriculum .
And again , there were people who laughed at me and said , " Don 't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students .
They 'll never be able to cope . "
Not only do our children cope very well , but they excel in it .
You should just come across to see how well our children do .
There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school ; they 'd much rather put them to work .
That 's absolute hogwash .
All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves , but they need to believe that change is possible .
SB : We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting .
Sometimes it 's even 100 percent , much more than many privileged schools .
Fathers have started to attend .
It 's very interesting . When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register .
Now they have started writing their signature .
The children have taught them .
It 's amazing how much children can teach .
We have , a few months ago , actually late last year , we had a few mothers who came to us and said , " You know , we want to learn how to read and write .
Can you teach us ? " So , we started an afterschool for our parents , for our mothers .
We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study .
We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools .
Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics .
So , you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from .
We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back , most times sober , we have to find a job for them so that they don 't regress .
We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook .
We have taught them nutrition , hygiene .
We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children .
They do a very good job because their children are eating their food , but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect , and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile .
More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families .
We 've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school .
Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school .
There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream .
Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools , best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad .
Girl : Duke IIMA Camp . Whenever we see that IIMA , it was such a pride for us to go to that camp .
Everybody was very friendly , especially I got a lot of friends .
And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends .
There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset , a totally different society .
I mingled with almost everyone .
They were very friendly .
I had very good friends there , who are from Delhi , who are from Mumbai .
Even now we are in touch through Facebook .
After this Ahmedabad trip I 've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those .
Before that I feel like I wasn 't like this .
I don 't even mingle , or start speaking with someone so quickly .
My accent with English improved a lot .
And I learned football , volleyball , Frisbee , lots of games .
And I wouldn 't want to go to Bangalore . Let me stay here .
Such beautiful food , I enjoyed it . It was so beautiful .
I enjoyed eating food like [ unclear ] would come and ask me , " Yes ma 'am , what you want ? " It was so good to hear !
SB : This girl was working as a maid before she came to school .
And today she wants to be a neurologist .
Our children are doing brilliantly in sports .
They are really excelling .
There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore , where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city .
We 've got the best school award for three years successively .
And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals , with lots of admirers and friends .
Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school .
We also have our very own dream team .
Why is this happening ? Why this confidence ?
Is it the exposure ? We have professors from MIT , Berkeley , Stanford , Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas , experiments , much beyond the classroom .
Art , music are considered therapy and mediums of expression .
We also believe that it 's the content that is more important .
It is not the infrastructure , not the toilets , not the libraries , but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important .
Creating an environment of learning , of inquiry , of exploration is what is true education .
When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking .
We didn 't hire McKinsey to do a business plan .
But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time , not get bogged with numbers , and actually see the child complete the circle of life , and unleash his total potential .
We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality , and scale and numbers will automatically happen .
We have corporates that have stood behind us , and we are able to , now , open more schools .
But we began with the idea of one child at a time .
This is five-year-old Parusharam .
He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago , got picked up and is now in an orphanage , has been coming to school for the last four and a half months .
He 's in kindergarten .
He has learned how to speak English .
We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month 's time .
He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow , of the crocodile and of the giraffe .
And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say , " I like sleeping .
I like eating . I like playing . "
And if you ask him what he wants to do , he will say , " I want to horsing . "
Now , " horsing " is going for a horse ride .
So , Parusharam comes to my office every day .
He comes for a tummy rub , because he believes that will give me luck .
When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world .
But today I have been transformed .
I have been changed with my children .
I 've learned so much from them : love , compassion , imagination and such creativity .
Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go .
I promise you , Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now .
Thank you .
Richard St. John : 8 secrets of success
Why do people succeed ? Is it because they 're smart ? Or are they just lucky ? Neither . Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable 3-minute slideshow on the real secrets of success .
This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students , cut down to three minutes .
And it all started one day on a plane , on my way to TED , seven years ago .
And in the seat next to me was a high school student , a teenager , and she came from a really poor family .
And she wanted to make something of her life , and she asked me a simple little question .
She said , " What leads to success ? "
And I felt really badly , because I couldn 't give her a good answer .
So I get off the plane , and I come to TED .
And I think , jeez , I 'm in the middle of a room of successful people !
So why don 't I ask them what helped them succeed , and pass it on to kids ?
So here we are , seven years , 500 interviews later , and I 'm gonna tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick .
And the first thing is passion .
Freeman Thomas says , " I 'm driven by my passion . "
TEDsters do it for love ; they don 't do it for money .
Carol Coletta says , " I would pay someone to do what I do . "
And the interesting thing is : if you do it for love , the money comes anyway .
Work ! Rupert Murdoch said to me , " It 's all hard work .
Nothing comes easily . But I have a lot of fun . "
Did he say fun ? Rupert ? Yes !
TEDsters do have fun working . And they work hard .
I figured , they 're not workaholics . They 're workafrolics .
Good ! Alex Garden says , " To be successful put your nose down in something and get damn good at it . "
There 's no magic ; it 's practice , practice , practice .
And it 's focus . Norman Jewison said to me , " I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing . "
And push ! David Gallo says , " Push yourself .
Physically , mentally , you 've gotta push , push , push . "
You gotta push through shyness and self-doubt .
Goldie Hawn says , " I always had self-doubts .
I wasn 't good enough ; I wasn 't smart enough .
I didn 't think I 'd make it . "
Now it 's not always easy to push yourself , and that 's why they invented mothers .
Frank Gehry -- Frank Gehry said to me , " My mother pushed me . "
Serve ! Sherwin Nuland says , " It was a privilege to serve as a doctor . "
Now a lot of kids tell me they want to be millionaires .
And the first thing I say to them is : " OK , well you can 't serve yourself ; you gotta serve others something of value .
Because that 's the way people really get rich . "
Ideas ! TEDster Bill Gates says , " I had an idea : founding the first micro-computer software company . "
I 'd say it was a pretty good idea .
And there 's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas -- it 's just doing some very simple things .
And I give lots of evidence .
Persist ! Joe Kraus says , " Persistence is the number one reason for our success . "
You gotta persist through failure . You gotta persist through crap !
Which of course means " Criticism , Rejection , Assholes and Pressure . "
So , the big -- the answer to this question is simple : Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED .
Or failing that , do the eight things -- and trust me , these are the big eight things that lead to success .
Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews !
Annie Lennox : Why I am an HIV / AIDS activist
For the last eight years , pop singer Annie Lennox has devoted the majority of her time to her SING campaign , raising awareness and money to combat HIV / AIDS . She shares the experiences that have inspired her , from working with Nelson Mandela to meeting a little African girl in a desperate situation .
I 'm going to share with you the story as to how I have become an HIV / AIDS campaigner .
And this is the name of my campaign : SING Campaign .
In November of 2003 , I was invited to take part in the launch of Nelson Mandela 's 46664 Foundation -- that is his HIV / AIDS foundation .
And 46664 is the number that Mandela had when he was imprisoned in Robben Island .
And that 's me with Youssou N 'Dour , onstage , having the time of my life .
The next day , all the artists were invited to join Mandela in Robben Island , where he was going to give a conference to the world 's press , standing in front of his former prison cell .
You can see the bars of the window there .
It was quite a momentous occasion for all of us .
In that moment in time , Mandela told the world 's press that there was a virtual genocide taking place in his country ; that post-apartheid Rainbow Nation , a thousand people were dying on a daily basis and that the front line victims , the most vulnerable of all , were women and children .
This was a huge impact on my mind , because I am a woman and I am a mother , and I hadn 't realized that the HIV / AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way .
And so I committed -- when I left South Africa , when I left Capetown , I told myself , " This is going to be something that I have to talk about .
I have to serve . "
And so , subsequently I participated in every single 46664 event that I could take part in and gave news conferences , interviews , talking and using my platform as a musician , with my commitment to Mandela -- out of respect for the tremendous , unbelievable work that he had done .
Everyone in the world respects Nelson Mandela , everyone reveres Nelson Mandela .
But do they all know about what has been taking place in South Africa , his country , the country that had one of the highest incidents of transmission of the virus ?
I think that if I went out into the street now and I told people what was happening there , they would be shocked .
I was very , very fortunate a couple of years later to have met Zackie Achmat , the founder of Treatment Action Campaign , an incredible campaigner and activist .
I met him at a 46664 event .
He was wearing a t-shirt like the one I wear now .
This is a tool -- this tells you I am in solidarity with people who have HIV , people who are living with HIV .
And in a way because of the stigma , by wearing this t-shirt I say , " Yes , we can talk about this issue .
It doesn 't have to be in the closet . "
I became a member of Treatment Action Campaign and I 'm very proud to be a member of that incredible organization .
It 's a grassroots campaign with 80 percent membership being women , most of whom are HIV-positive .
They work in the field .
They have tremendous outreach to the people who are living directly with the effects of the virus .
They have education programs .
They bring out the issues of stigma .
It 's quite extraordinary what they do .
And yes , my SING Campaign has supported Treatment Action Campaign in the way that I have tried to raise awareness and to try to also raise funds .
A lot of the funding that I have managed to raise has gone directly to Treatment Action Campaign and the incredible work that they do , and are still continuing to do in South Africa .
So this is my SING Campaign .
SING Campaign is basically just me and about three or four wonderful people who help to support me .
I 've traveled all over the world in the last two and a half years -- I went to about 12 different countries .
Here I am in Oslo in Norway , getting a nice , fat check ; singing in Hong Kong , trying to get people to raise money .
In Johannesburg , I had the opportunity to play to a mainly white , middle-class South African audience who ended up in tears because I use film clips that really touch the heart , the whole nature , of this terrible tragedy that is taking place , that people are tending to avoid , because they are fatigued , and they really don 't quite know what the solutions are .
Aaron Motsoaledi , the current health minister , attended that concert and I had an opportunity to meet with him , and he gave his absolute commitment to try to making a change , which is absolutely necessary .
This is in the Scottish Parliament .
I 've subsequently become an envoy for Scotland and HIV .
And I was showing them my experiences and trying to , again , raise awareness .
And once again , in Edinburgh with the wonderful African Children 's Choir who I simply adore .
And it 's children like this , many of whom have been orphaned because of their family being affected by the AIDS virus .
I 'm sitting here in New York with Michel Sidibe -- he 's the director of UNAIDS .
And I 'm very honored by the fact that Michel invited me , only a few months ago , to become a UNAIDS ambassador .
And in this way , I 've been strengthening my platform and broadening my outreach .
The message that UNAIDS are currently sending out to the world is that we would like to see the virtual elimination of the transmission of the virus from mother to child by 2015 .
It 's a very ambitious goal but we believe it can be achieved with political will .
This can happen .
And here I am with a pregnant woman , who is HIV positive and we 're smiling , both of us are smiling , because we 're very confident , because we know that that young woman is receiving treatment so her life can be extended to take care of the baby she 's about to give birth to .
And her baby will receive PMTCT , which will mean that that baby can be born free of the virus .
Now that is prevention at the very beginning of life .
It 's one way to start looking at intervention with the AIDS pandemic .
Now , I just would like to finish off to tell you the little story about Avelile .
This is Avelile -- she goes with me wherever I go .
I tell her story to everyone because she represents one of millions of HIV / AIDS orphans .
Avelile 's mother had HIV virus -- she died from AIDS-related illness .
Avelile had the virus , she was born with the virus .
And here she is at seven years old , weighing no more than a one year-old baby .
At this point in her life , she 's suffering with full-blown AIDS and had pneumonia .
We met her in a hospital in the Eastern Cape and spent a whole afternoon with her -- an adorable child .
The doctors and nurses were phenomenal .
They put her on very special nutritious diet and took great care of her .
And we didn 't know when we left the hospital -- because we filmed her story -- we didn 't know if she was going to survive .
So , it was obviously -- it was a very emotional encounter and left us feeling very resonant with this direct experience , this one child , you know , that story .
Five months later , we went back to South Africa to meet Avelile again .
And I 'm getting -- the hairs on my -- I don 't know if you can see the hairs on my arms .
They 're standing up because I know what I 'm going to show you .
This is the transformation that took place .
Isn 't it extraordinary ?
That round of applause is actually for the doctors and nurses of the hospital who took care of Avelile .
And I take it that you appreciate that kind of transformation .
So , I would like to say to you , each one in the audience , if you feel that every mother and every child in the world has the right to have access to good nutrition and good medical care , and you believe that the Millennium Development Goals , specifically five and six , should be absolutely committed to by all governments around the world -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa -- could you please stand up .
I think that 's fair to say , it 's almost everyone in the hall .
Thank you very much .
Annie Murphy Paul : What we learn before we 're born
Pop quiz : When does learning begin ? Answer : Before we are born . Science writer Annie Murphy Paul talks through new research that shows how much we learn in the womb -- from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods .
My subject today is learning .
And in that spirit , I want to spring on you all a pop quiz .
Ready ?
When does learning begin ?
Now as you ponder that question , maybe you 're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten , the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher .
Or maybe you 've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork .
Maybe you 've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement , which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones .
And so your answer to my question would be : Learning begins at birth .
Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible , but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology .
And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we 're born , while we 're still in the womb .
Now I 'm a science reporter .
I write books and magazine articles .
And I 'm also a mother .
And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called " Origins . "
" Origins " is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins .
Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago , and it 's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb .
Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me .
I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book .
And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we 're all learning about the world even before we enter it .
When we hold our babies for the first time , we might imagine that they 're clean slates , unmarked by life , when in fact , they 've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in .
Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they 're still in their mothers ' bellies .
First of all , they learn the sound of their mothers ' voices .
Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother 's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus , the voices fetuses hear , starting around the fourth month of gestation , are muted and muffled .
One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown 's teacher in the old " Peanuts " cartoon .
But the pregnant woman 's own voice reverberates through her body , reaching the fetus much more readily .
And because the fetus is with her all the time , it hears her voice a lot .
Once the baby 's born , it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else 's .
How can we know this ?
Newborn babies can 't do much , but one thing they 're really good at is sucking .
Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples , so that if a baby sucks on one , it hears a recording of its mother 's voice on a pair of headphones , and if it sucks on the other nipple , it hears a recording of a female stranger 's voice .
Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one .
Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored .
This is how researchers discovered that , after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss ' " The Cat in the Hat " while they were pregnant , their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb .
My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born .
So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that 's spoken in the world that they 'll be born into .
A study published last year found that from birth , from the moment of birth , babies cry in the accent of their mother 's native language .
French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note , imitating the melodic contours of those languages .
Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful ?
It may have evolved to aid the baby 's survival .
From the moment of birth , the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother .
It even makes its cries sound like the mother 's language , which may further endear the baby to the mother , and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language .
But it 's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero .
It 's also tastes and smells .
By seven months of gestation , the fetus ' taste buds are fully developed , and its olfactory receptors , which allow it to smell , are functioning .
The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid , which is continuously swallowed by the fetus .
Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they 're out in the world .
In one experiment , a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy , while another group of pregnant women drank only water .
Six months later , the women 's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice , and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it .
The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal , and from the looks of it , they seemed to enjoy it more .
A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon , France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life , and again , when they were tested later , on their fourth day of life .
Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as " yuck . "
What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat .
Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they 'll be joining through one of culture 's most powerful expressions , which is food .
They 're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture 's cuisine even before birth .
Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons .
But before I get to that , I want to address something that you may be wondering about .
The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus -- like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly .
But actually , the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that .
Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes , the food and drink she consumes , the chemicals she 's exposed to , even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus .
They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself .
The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body , makes them part of its flesh and blood .
And often it does something more .
It treats these maternal contributions as information , as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside .
So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart 's " Magic Flute " but answers to questions much more critical to its survival .
Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity ?
Will it be safe and protected , or will it face constant dangers and threats ?
Will it live a long , fruitful life or a short , harried one ?
The pregnant woman 's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind .
The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus ' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility , our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments , from the country to the city , from the tundra to the desert .
To conclude , I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they 're born .
In the autumn of 1944 , the darkest days of World War II , German troops blockaded Western Holland , turning away all shipments of food .
The opening of the Nazi 's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid .
Soon food became scarce , with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war .
As weeks of deprivation stretched into months , some resorted to eating tulip bulbs .
By the beginning of May , the nation 's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted .
The specter of mass starvation loomed .
And then on May 5th , 1945 , the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies .
The " Hunger Winter , " as it came to be known , killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more .
But there was another population that was affected -- the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege .
Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths , birth defects , low birth weights and infant mortality .
But others wouldn 't be discovered for many years .
Decades after the " Hunger Winter , " researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity , more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions .
These individuals ' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways .
They have higher blood pressure , poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance -- a precursor of diabetes .
Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later ?
One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation .
When food is scarce , they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ , the brain , and away from other organs like the heart and liver .
This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term , but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs , deprived early on , become more susceptible to disease .
But that may not be all that 's going on .
It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly .
They 're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb .
The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it .
And the basis of the fetus ' prediction is what its mother eats .
The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story , a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation .
This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems -- an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival .
Faced with severely limited resources , a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will , in fact , have a better chance of living to adulthood .
The real trouble comes when pregnant women are , in a sense , unreliable narrators , when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty .
This is what happened to the children of the Dutch " Hunger Winter . "
And their higher rates of obesity , diabetes and heart disease are the result .
Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet .
The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born .
Here 's another story .
At 8 : 46 a.m. on September 11th , 2001 , there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York -- commuters spilling off trains , waitresses setting tables for the morning rush , brokers already working the phones on Wall Street .
1,700 of these people were pregnant women .
When the planes struck and the towers collapsed , many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster -- the overwhelming chaos and confusion , the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris , the heart-pounding fear for their lives .
About a year after 9 / 11 , researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack .
In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome , or PTSD , following their ordeal , researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester .
In other words , the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero .
Now consider this : post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong , causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering .
But there 's another way of thinking about PTSD .
What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances .
In a particularly dangerous environment , the characteristic manifestations of PTSD -- a hyper-awareness of one 's surroundings , a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone 's life .
The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative , but I find it rather poignant .
It would mean that , even before birth , mothers are warning their children that it 's a wild world out there , telling them , " Be careful . "
Let me be clear .
Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy .
It 's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation .
That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb .
Learning is one of life 's most essential activities , and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined .
Thank you .

Steven Pinker : Human nature and the blank slate
Steven Pinker 's book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits . Here , Pinker talks about his thesis , and why some people found it incredibly upsetting .
A year ago , I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing , that has come out in the interim , and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired .
The book is called " The Blank Slate , " based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate , and that all of its structure comes from socialization , culture , parenting , experience .
The " blank slate " was an influential idea in the 20th century .
Here are a few quotes indicating that : " Man has no nature , " from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset ; " Man has no instincts , " from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu ; " The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none , " from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould .
There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate , and some of them just come from common sense .
As many people have told me over the years , anyone who 's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents ; it doesn 't all come from the outside .
Oh , and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child , exposed to speech , will acquire a human language , whereas the house pet won 't , presumably because of some innate different between them .
And anyone who 's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable .
There are also , I think , increasing results from the scientific study of humans that , indeed , we 're not born blank slates .
One of them , from anthropology , is the study of human universals .
If you 've ever taken anthropology , you know that it 's a -- kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be , and that there are places out there where , supposedly , everything is the opposite to the way it is here .
But if you instead look at what is common to the world 's cultures , you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world 's 6,000-odd cultures .
The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all , and they range from aesthetics , affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning , weapons , weather , attempts to control , the color white and a worldview .
Also , genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured .
This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they -- using MRI -- measured the distribution of gray matter -- that is , the outer layer of the cortex -- in a large sample of pairs of people .
They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme , in which no difference is coded as purple , and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation .
Well , this is what happens when you pair people up at random .
By definition , two people picked at random can 't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex .
This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA -- fraternal twins .
And as you can see , large amounts of the brain are not purple , showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region , so does his fraternal twin .
And here 's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA -- namely , clones or identical twins .
And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter .
Now , these aren 't just differences in anatomy , like the shape of your ear lobes , but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams : " Separated at birth , the Mallifert twins meet accidentally . "
As you can see , there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap , meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney .
Now , the cartoon is not such an exaggeration , because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities .
And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied -- but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth .
My favorite example is a pair of twins , one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany , the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad .
When they walked into the lab in Minnesota , they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulettes ; both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee , both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists , both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after , and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump .
Now -- the story might seem to good to be true , but when you administer batteries of psychological tests , you get the same results -- namely , identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities .
Now , given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question , why should it have been such an appealing notion ?
Well , there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial .
The foremost is that if we 're blank slates , then , by definition , we are equal , because zero equals zero equals zero .
But if something is written on the slate , then some people could have more of it than others , and according to this line of thinking , that would justify discrimination and inequality .
Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates , we can perfect mankind -- the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering .
Whereas , if we 're born with certain instincts , then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness , prejudice and violence .
Well , in the book , I argue that these are , in fact , non sequiturs .
And just to make a long story short : first of all , the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness .
And so when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence , " We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal , " he did not mean " We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are clones . "
Rather , that all men are equal in terms of their rights , and that every person ought to be treated as an individual , and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to .
Also , even if we were born with certain ignoble motives , they don 't automatically lead to ignoble behavior .
That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts , and some of them can inhibit others .
For example , there 's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense , and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history .
So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed , that 's not the only thing in the skull , and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them .
In the book , I go over controversies such as this one , and a number of other hot buttons , hot zones , Chernobyls , third rails , and so on -- including the arts , cloning , crime , free will , education , evolution , gender differences , God , homosexuality , infanticide , inequality , Marxism , morality , Nazism , parenting , politics , race , rape , religion , resource depletion , social engineering , technological risk and war .
And needless to say , there were certain risks in taking on these subjects .
When I wrote a first draft of the book , I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments , and here are some of the reactions that I got : " Better get a security camera for your house . "
" Don 't expect to get any more awards , job offers or positions in scholarly societies . "
" Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio . "
" Do you have tenure ? "
Well , the book came out in October , and nothing terrible has happened .
I -- I like -- There was indeed reason to be nervous , and there were moments in which I did feel nervous , knowing the history of what has happened to people who 've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences .
There are many cases , some of which I talk about in the book , of people who have been slandered , called Nazis , physically assaulted , threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings .
And you never know when you 're going to come across one of these booby traps .
My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers , and published some data showing that left-handers are , on average , more susceptible to disease , more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan .
It 's not clear , by the way , since then , whether that is an accurate generalization , but the data at the time seemed to support that .
Well , pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters , death threats , ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals , coming from irate left-handers and their advocates , and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired .
Well , the night is young , but the book has been out for half a year , and nothing terrible has happened .
None of the dire professional consequences has taken place -- I haven 't been exiled from the city of Cambridge .
But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received .
I 'll just put that list up for a few seconds , and see if you can guess which two -- I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews .
It 's not violence and war , it 's not race , it 's not gender , it 's not Marxism , it 's not Nazism .
They are : the arts and parenting .
So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses , and I 'll let you decide if whether they -- the claims are really that outrageous .
Let me start with the arts .
I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art .
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts .
Visual arts -- decoration of surfaces and bodies -- appears to be a human universal .
The telling of stories , music , dance , poetry -- found in all cultures , and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies : a preference for symmetrical forms , the use of repetition and variation , even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world , you have lines that are very close to three seconds long , separated by pauses .
Now , on the other hand , in the second half of the 20th century , the arts are frequently said to be in decline .
And I have a collection , probably 10 or 15 headlines , from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time .
I 'll give you a couple of representative quotes : " We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline , that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago , and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity . "
That 's a quote from T. S. Eliot , a little more than 50 years ago .
And a more recent one : " The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical .
Serious book stores are losing their franchise , nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory , symphony orchestras are diluting their programs , public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms , classical radio stations are dwindling , museums are resorting to blockbuster shows , dance is dying . "
That 's from Robert Brustein , the famous drama critic and director , in The New Republic about five years ago .
Well , in fact , the arts are not in decline .
I don 't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room , but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent .
There are , of course , entirely new art forms and new media , many of which you 've heard over these few days .
By any economic standard , the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing , as you can tell from the price of opera tickets , by the number of books sold , by the number of books published , the number of musical titles released , the number of new albums and so on .
The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres .
One of them is in elite art since the 1930s -- say , the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras , where most of the repertory is before 1930 , or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums .
In literary criticism and analysis , probably 40 or 50 years ago , literary critics were a kind of cultural hero ; now they 're kind of a national joke .
And the humanities and arts programs in the universities , which by many measures , indeed are in decline .
Students are staying away in droves , universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities .
Well , here 's a diagnosis .
They didn 't ask me , but by their own admission , they need all the help that they can get .
And I would like to suggest that it 's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature .
A famous quotation can be found -- if you look on the web , you can find it in literally scores of English core syllabuses -- " In or about December 1910 , human nature changed . "
A paraphrase of a quote by Virginia Woolf , and there 's some debate as to what she actually meant by that .
But it 's very clear , looking at these syllabuses , that -- it 's used now as a way of saying that all forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries , or millennia , in the 20th century were discarded .
The beauty and pleasure in art -- probably a human universal -- were -- began to be considered saccharine , or kitsch , or commercial .
Barnett Newman had a famous quote that " the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty " -- which was considered bourgeois or tacky .
And here 's just one example .
I mean , this is perhaps a representative example of the visual depiction of the female form in the 15th century ; here is a representative example of the depiction of the female form in the 20th century .
And , as you can see , there -- something has changed in the way the elite arts appeal to the senses .
Indeed , in movements of modernism and post-modernism , there was visual art without beauty , literature without narrative and plot , poetry without meter and rhyme , architecture and planning without ornament , human scale , green space and natural light , music without melody and rhythm , and criticism without clarity , attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition .
Let me give just you an example to back up that last statement .
But here , there -- one of the most famous literary English scholars of our time is the Berkeley professor , Judith Butler .
And here is an example of one of her analyses : " The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition , convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure , and marked a shift from the form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects ... "
Well , you get the idea .
By the way , this is one sentence -- you can actually parse it .
Well , the argument in " The Blank Slate " was that elite art and criticism in the 20th century , although not the arts in general , have disdained beauty , pleasure , clarity , insight and style .
People are staying away from elite art and criticism .
What a puzzle -- I wonder why .
Well , this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book .
Someone asked me whether I stuck it in in order to deflect ire from discussions of gender and Nazism and race and so on . I won 't comment on that .
But it certainly inspired an energetic reaction from many university professors .
Well , the other hot button is parenting .
And the starting point is the -- for that discussion was the fact that we have all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrial complex .
Now , here is -- here is a representative quote from a besieged mother : " I 'm overwhelmed with parenting advice .
I 'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they 'll grow up to be healthy adults .
And I 'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they 'll grow up smart .
And there are all kinds of play -- clay for finger dexterity , word games for reading success , large motor play , small motor play . I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids . "
I think anyone who 's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother .
Well , here 's some sobering facts about parenting .
Most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless . They 're useless because they don 't control for heritability . They measure some correlation between what the parents do , how the children turn out and assume a causal relation : that the parenting shaped the child .
Parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grow up to be articulate , parents who spank their kids have kids who grow up to be violent and so on .
And very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for -- that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on .
Until the studies are redone with adoptive children , who provide an environment but not genes to their kids , we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid .
The genetically controlled studies have some sobering results .
Remember the Mallifert twins : separated at birth , then they meet in the patent office -- remarkably similar .
Well , what would have happened if the Mallifert twins had grown up together ?
You might think , well , then they 'd be even more similar , because not only would they share their genes , but they would also share their environment .
That would make them super-similar , right ?
Wrong . Identical twins , or any siblings , who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together .
Everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect .
A complementary finding , from a completely different methodology , is that adopted siblings reared together -- the mirror image of identical twins reared apart , they share their parents , their home , their neighborhood , don 't share their genes -- end up not similar at all .
OK -- two different bodies of research with a similar finding .
What it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run , but in part -- only in part -- by their genes , in part by their culture -- the culture of the country at large and the children 's own culture , namely their peer group -- as we heard from Jill Sobule earlier today , that 's what kids care about -- and , to a very large extent , larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge , by chance : chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero ; chance events as you live your life .
So let me conclude with just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices .
I think that the sciences of human nature -- behavioral genetics , evolutionary psychology , neuroscience , cognitive science -- are going to , increasingly in the years to come , upset various dogmas , careers and deeply-held political belief systems .
And that presents us with a choice .
The choice is whether certain facts about humans , or topics , are to be considered taboos , forbidden knowledge , where we shouldn 't go there because no good can come from it , or whether we should explore them honestly .
I have my own answer to that question , which comes from a great artist of the 19th century , Anton Chekhov , who said , " Man will become better when you show him what he is like . "
And I think that the argument can 't be put any more eloquently than that .
Thank you very much .
Lewis Pugh : How I swam the North Pole
Lewis Pugh talks about his record-breaking swim across the North Pole . He braved the icy waters to highlight the melting icecap . Watch for astonishing footage -- and some blunt commentary on the realities of supercold-water swims .
Today I want to talk to you about swimming across the North Pole , across the most northern place in the whole world .
And perhaps the best place to start is with my late father .
He was a great storyteller .
He could tell a story about an event , and so you felt you were absolutely there at the moment .
And one of the stories he told me so often when I was a young boy was of the first British atomic bomb test .
He had been there and watched it go off .
And he said that the explosion was so loud and the light was so intense , that he actually had to put his hands in front of his face to protect his eyes .
And he said that he could actually see an x-ray of his fingers , because the light was so bright .
And I know that watching that atomic bomb going off had a very , very big impact on my late father .
Every holiday I had as a young boy was in a national park .
What he was trying to do with me was to inspire me to protect the world , and show me just how fragile the world is .
He also told me about the great explorers .
He loved history . He would tell me about Captain Scott walking all the way to the South Pole and Sir Edmund Hillary climbing up Mount Everest .
And so ever since I think I was just six years old , I dreamed of going to the polar regions .
I really , really wanted to go to the Arctic .
There was something about that place which drew me to it .
And , well , sometimes it takes a long time for a dream to come true .
But seven years ago , I went to the Arctic for the first time .
And it was so beautiful that I 've been back there ever since , for the last seven years .
I love the place .
But I have seen that place change beyond all description , just in that short period of time .
I have seen polar bears walking across very , very thin ice in search of food .
I have swum in front of glaciers which have retreated so much .
And I have also , every year , seen less and less sea ice .
And I wanted the world to know what was happening up there .
In the two years before my swim , 23 percent of the arctic sea ice cover just melted away .
And I wanted to really shake the lapels of world leaders to get them to understand what is happening .
So I decided to do this symbolic swim at the top of the world , in a place which should be frozen over , but which now is rapidly unfreezing .
And the message was very clear : Climate change is for real , and we need to do something about it .
And we need to do something about it right now .
Well , swimming across the North Pole , it 's not an ordinary thing to do .
I mean , just to put it in perspective , 27 degrees is the temperature of a normal indoor swimming pool .
This morning , the temperature of the English Channel was 18 degrees .
The passengers who fell off the Titanic fell into water of just five degrees centigrade .
Fresh water freezes at zero .
And the water at the North Pole is minus 1.7 .
It 's fucking freezing .
I 'm sorry , but there is no other way to describe it .
And so I had to assemble an incredible team around me to help me with this task .
I assembled this team of 29 people from 10 nations .
Some people think that swimming is a very solo sport , you just dive into the sea and off you go .
It couldn 't be further from the truth for me .
And I then went and did a huge amount of training , swimming in icy water , backwards and forwards .
But the most important thing was to train my mind to prepare myself for what was going to happen .
And I had to visualize the swim .
I had to see it from the beginning all the way to the end .
I had to taste the salt water in my mouth .
I had to see my coach screaming for me , " Come on Lewis ! Come on ! Go ! Go ! Go ! Don 't slow down ! "
And so I literally swam across the North Pole hundreds and hundreds of times in my mind .
And then , after a year of training , I felt ready .
I felt confident that I could actually do this swim .
So myself and the five members of the team , we hitched a ride on an icebreaker which was going to the North Pole .
And on day four , we decided to just do a quick five minute test swim .
I had never swum in water of minus 1.7 degrees before , because it 's just impossible to train in those types of conditions .
So we stopped the ship , as you do .
We all got down onto the ice , and I then got into my swimming costume and I dived into the sea .
I have never in my life felt anything like that moment .
I could barely breathe . I was gasping for air .
I was hyperventilating so much , and within seconds my hands were numb .
And it was -- the paradox is that you 're in freezing cold water , but actually you 're on fire .
I swam as hard as I could for five minutes .
I remember just trying to get out of the water .
I climbed out of the ice .
And I remember taking the goggles off my face and looking down at my hands in sheer shock , because my fingers had swollen so much that they were like sausages .
And they were swollen so much , I couldn 't even close them .
What had happened is that we are made partially of water , and when water freezes it expands .
And so what had actually happened is that the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded .
And they had burst . And I was in so much agony .
I immediately got rushed onto the ship and into a hot shower .
And I remember standing underneath the hot shower and trying to defrost my fingers .
And I thought , in two days ' time , I was going to do this swim across the North Pole .
I was going to try and do a 20-minute swim , for one kilometer across the North Pole .
And this dream which I had had ever since I was a young boy with my father , was just going out the window .
There is no possibility that this was going to happen .
And I remember then getting out of the shower and realizing I couldn 't even feel my hands .
And for a swimmer , you need to feel your hands because you need to be able to grab the water and pull it through with you .
The next morning , I woke up and I was in such a state of depression , and all I could think about was Sir Ranulph Fiennes .
For those of you who don 't know him , he 's the great British explorer .
A number of years ago , he tried to ski all the way to the North Pole .
He accidentally fell through the ice into the sea .
And after just three minutes in that water , he was able to get himself out .
And his hands were so badly frostbitten that he had to return to England .
He went to a local hospital and there they said , " Ran , there is no possibility of us being able to save these fingers .
We are going to actually have to take them off . "
And Ran decided to go into his tool shed and take out a saw and do it himself .
And all I could think of was , if that happened to Ran after three minutes , and I can 't feel my hands after five minutes , what on earth is going to happen if I try 20 minutes ?
At the very best , I 'm going to end up losing some fingers .
And at worst , I didn 't even want to think about it .
We carried on sailing through the ice packs towards the North Pole .
And my close friend David , he saw the way I was thinking , and he came up to me and he said , " Lewis , I 've known you since you were 18 years old .
I 've known you , and I know , Lewis , deep down , right deep down here , that you are going to make this swim .
I so believe in you Lewis . I 've seen the way you 've been training .
And I realize the reason why you 're going to do this .
This is such an important swim .
We stand at a very , very important moment in this history , and you 're going to make a symbolic swim here to try to shake the lapels of world leaders .
Lewis , have the courage to go in there , because we are going to look after you every moment of it . "
And I just , I got so much confidence from him saying that , because he knew me so well .
So we carried on sailing and we arrived at the North Pole .
And we stopped the ship , and it was just as the scientists had predicted .
There were open patches of sea everywhere .
And I went down into my cabin and I put on my swimming costume .
And then the doctor strapped on a chest monitor , which measures my core body temperature and my heart rate .
And then we walked out onto the ice .
And I remember looking into the ice , and there were big chunks of white ice in there , and the water was completely black .
I had never seen black water before .
And it is 4,200 meters deep .
And I said to myself , " Lewis , don 't look left , don 't look right .
Just scuttle forward and go for it . "
And so I now want to show you a short video of what happened there on the ice .
Narrator : We 're just sailing out of harbor now , and it 's at this stage when one can have a bit of a wobble mentally .
Everything just looks so gray around here , and looks so cold .
We 've just seen our first polar bears .
It was absolutely magical .
A mother and a cub , such a beautiful sight .
And to think that in 30 , 40 years they could become extinct .
It 's a very frightening , very , very frightening thought .
We 're finally at the North Pole . This is months and months and months of dreaming to get here , years of training and planning and preparation .
Ooh . In a couple of hours ' time I 'm going to get in here and do my swim .
It 's all a little bit frightening , and emotional .
Amundson , you ready ? Amudson : Ready .
Lewis Pugh : Ten seconds to swim . Ten seconds to swim .
Take the goggles off . Take the goggles off !
Take the shoes . Take the shoes .
Well done lad ! You did it ! You did it Lewis !
You did it ! You did it man !
LP : How on earth did we do that ?
Against the current ! You did it against the current !
LP : Thank you very much . Thank you very much .
Thank you so much .
Audience : Encore !
LP : I 'd just like to end off by just saying this : It took me four months again to feel my hands .
But was it worth it ? Yes , absolutely it was .
There are very , very few people who don 't know now about what is happening in the Arctic .
And people ask me , " Lewis , what can we do about climate change ? "
And I say to them , I think we need to do three things .
The first thing we need to do is we need to break this problem down into manageable chunks .
You saw during that video all those flags .
Those flags represented the countries from which my team came from .
And equally , when it comes to climate change , every single country is going to have to make cuts .
Britain , America , Japan , South Africa , the Congo .
All of us together , we 're all on the same ship together .
The second thing we need to do is we need to just look back at how far we have come in such a short period of time .
I remember , just a few years ago , speaking about climate change , and people heckling me in the back and saying it doesn 't even exist .
I 've just come back from giving a series of speeches in some of the poorest townships in South Africa to young children as young as 10 years old .
Four or five children sitting behind a desk , and even in those poorest conditions , they all have a very , very good grasp of climate change .
We need to believe in ourselves .
Now is the time to believe .
We 've come a long way . We 're doing good .
But the most important thing we must do is , I think , we must all walk to the end of our lives and turn around , and ask ourselves a most fundamental question .
And that is , " What type of world do we want to live in , and what decision are we going to make today to ensure that we all live in a sustainable world ? "
Ladies and gentlemen , thank you very , very much .
Dan Ariely : Beware conflicts of interest
In this short talk , psychologist Dan Ariely tells two personal stories that explore scientific conflict of interest : How the pursuit of knowledge and insight can be affected , consciously or not , by shortsighted personal goals . When we 're thinking about the big questions , he reminds us , let 's be aware of our all-too-human brains .
So , I was in the hospital for a long time .
And a few years after I left , I went back , and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me -- said , " Dan , I have a fantastic new treatment for you . "
I was very excited . I walked with him to his office .
And he explained to me that , when I shave , I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is , but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair , and this creates lack of symmetry .
And what 's the brilliant idea he had ?
He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric .
It sounded interesting . He asked me to go and shave .
Let me tell you , this was a strange way to shave , because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life -- because I had to keep the width the same .
When I got back to his office , I wasn 't really sure .
I said , " Can I see some evidence for this ? "
So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots -- not very informative .
I said , " What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white ?
What would happen then ? "
" Oh , don 't worry about it , " he said .
" We have lasers ; we can whiten it out . "
But I was still concerned , so I said , " You know what , I 'm not going to do it . "
And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life .
This is coming from a Jewish guy , all right , so that means a lot .
And he said , " Dan , what 's wrong with you ?
Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric ?
Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this ?
Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently ? "
None of those happened .
And this was very surprising to me , because I 've gone through many treatments -- there were many treatments I decided not to do -- and I never got this guilt trip to this extent .
But I decided not to have this treatment .
And I went to his deputy and asked him , " What was going on ?
Where was this guilt trip coming from ? "
And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already , and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing .
Now you probably think that this guy 's a schmuck .
Right , that 's what he seems like .
But let me give you a different perspective on the same story .
A few years ago , I was running some of my own experiments in the lab .
And when we run experiments , we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another .
So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high , another group that I thought their performance would be very low , and when I got the results , that 's what we got -- I was very happy -- aside from one person .
There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly .
And he pulled the whole mean down , destroying my statistical significance of the test .
So I looked carefully at this guy .
He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample .
And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy .
" Fantastic ! " I thought . " Let 's throw him out .
Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample ? "
But a couple of days later , we thought about it with my students , and we said , " What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition ?
What would have happened if he was in the other group ?
Would we have thrown him out then ? "
We probably wouldn 't have looked at the data at all , and if we did look at the data , we 'd probably have said , " Fantastic ! What a smart guy who is performing this low , " because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower , giving us even stronger statistical results than we could .
So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment .
But you know , these stories , and lots of other experiments that we 've done on conflicts of interest , basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me .
The first one is that in life we encounter many people who , in some way or another , try to tattoo our faces .
They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased .
And I 'm sure that it 's something that we all recognize , and we see that it happens .
Maybe we don 't recognize it every time , but we understand that it happens .
The most difficult thing , of course , is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives .
And that 's a much , much more difficult lesson to take into account .
Because we don 't see how conflicts of interest work on us .
When I was doing these experiments , in my mind , I was helping science .
I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through .
I wasn 't doing something bad .
In my mind , I was actually a knight trying to help science move along .
But this was not the case .
I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions .
And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us , and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it , but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors , because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances .
I do want to leave you with one positive thought .
I mean , this is all very depressing , right -- people have conflicts of interest , we don 't see it , and so on .
The positive perspective , I think , of all of this is that , if we do understand when we go wrong , if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail , we can actually hope to fix things .
And that , I think , is the hope . Thank you very much .
Sebastian Thrun : Google 's driverless car
Sebastian Thrun helped build Google 's amazing driverless car , powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents . Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel , and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go .
As a boy , I loved cars .
When I turned 18 , I lost my best friend to a car accident .
Like this .
And then I decided I 'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year .
Now I haven 't succeeded , so this is just a progress report , but I 'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars .
I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert .
And even though a hundred teams were there , these cars went nowhere .
So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car .
We built the hardware and the software .
We made it learn from us , and we set it free in the desert .
And the unimaginable happened : it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge , winning Stanford 2 million dollars .
Yet I still hadn 't saved a single life .
Since , our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves -- any street in California .
We 've driven 140,000 miles .
Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving .
It 's the perfect driving mechanism .
We 've driven in cities , like in San Francisco here .
We 've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1 .
We 've encountered joggers , busy highways , toll booths , and this is without a person in the loop ; the car just drives itself .
In fact , while we drove 140,000 miles , people didn 't even notice .
Mountain roads , day and night , and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco .
Sometimes our cars get so crazy , they even do little stunts .
Oh , my God .
What ?
Second It 's driving itself .
Sebastian Thrun : Now I can 't get my friend Harold back to life , but I can do something for all the people who died .
Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people ?
And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error , and can therefore be prevented by machines ?
Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn 't rely on human precision on staying in the lane -- improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes , and do away with all traffic jams on highways ?
Do you realize that you , TED users , spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic , wasting your time on your daily commute ?
You could regain this time .
This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone .
And it 's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted .
Now I think there 's a vision here , a new technology , and I 'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars .
Thank you .
Derek Sivers : Keep your goals to yourself
After hitting on a brilliant new life plan , our first instinct is to tell someone , but Derek Sivers says it 's better to keep goals secret . He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their ambitions may be less likely to achieve them .
Everyone , please think of your biggest personal goal .
For real -- you can take a second . You 've got to feel this to learn it .
Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal , okay ?
Imagine deciding right now that you 're going to do it .
Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you 're going to do .
Imagine their congratulations and their high image of you .
Doesn 't it feel good to say it out loud ?
Don 't you feel one step closer already , like it 's already becoming part of your identity ?
Well , bad news : you should have kept your mouth shut , because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it .
Repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen .
Any time you have a goal , there are some steps that need to be done , some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it .
Ideally , you would not be satisfied until you had actually done the work .
But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it , psychologists have found that it 's called a " social reality . "
The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it 's already done .
And then , because you felt that satisfaction , you 're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary .
So this goes against the conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals , right -- so they hold us to it .
So , let 's look at the proof .
1926 , Kurt Lewin , founder of social psychology , called this " substitution . "
1933 , Vera Mahler found , when it was acknowledged by others , it felt real in the mind .
1982 , Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this and in 2009 , he did some new tests that were published .
It goes like this : 163 people across four separate tests -- everyone wrote down their personal goal .
Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room , and half didn 't .
Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal , but they were told that they could stop at any time .
Now , those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes , on average , and when asked afterwards , said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal .
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes , on average , and when asked afterwards , said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal .
So , if this is true , what can we do ?
Well , you could resist the temptation to announce your goal .
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgement brings , and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing .
But if you do need to talk about something , you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction , such as , " I really want to run this marathon , so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don 't , okay ? "
So audience , next time you 're tempted to tell someone your goal , what will you say ?
Exactly , well done .
John Francis : Walk the earth ... my 17-year vow of silence
For almost three decades , John Francis has been a planetwalker , traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility . A funny , thoughtful talk with occasional banjo .
Thank you for being here .
And I say " thank you for being here " because I was silent for 17 years .
And the first words that I spoke were in Washington , D.C. , on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day .
And my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak .
And I said , " Thank you for being here . "
My mother , out in the audience , she jumped up , " Hallelujah , Johnny 's talking ! "
Imagine if you were quiet for 17 years and your mother was out in the audience , say .
My dad said to me , " That 's one " -- I 'll explain that .
But I turned around because I didn 't recognize where my voice was coming from .
I hadn 't heard my voice in 17 years , so I turned around and I looked and I said , " God , who 's saying what I 'm thinking ? "
And then I realized it was me , you know , and I kind of laughed .
And I could see my father : " Yeah , he really is crazy . "
Well , I want to take you on this journey .
And the journey , I believe , is a metaphor for all of our journeys .
Even though this one is kind of unusual , I want you to think about your own journey .
My journey began in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide beneath the Golden Gate , and a half a million gallons of oil spilled into the bay .
It disturbed me so much that I decided that I was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles .
That 's a big thing in California .
And it was a big thing in my little community of Point Reyes Station in Inverness , California , because there were only about 350 people there in the winter – this was back in ' 71 now .
And so when I came in and I started walking around , people -- they just knew what was going on .
And people would drive up next to me and say , " John , what are you doing ? "
And I 'd say , " Well , I 'm walking for the environment . "
And they said , " No , you 're walking to make us look bad , right ?
You 're walking to make us feel bad . "
And maybe there was some truth to that , because I thought that if I started walking , everyone would follow .
Because of the oil , everybody talked about the polllution .
And so I argued with people about that , I argued and I argued .
I called my parents up .
I said , " I 've given up riding and driving in cars . "
My dad said , " Why didn 't you do that when you were 16 ? "
I didn 't know about the environment then .
They 're back in Philadelphia .
And so I told my mother , " I 'm happy though , I 'm really happy . "
She said , " If you were happy , son , you wouldn 't have to say it . "
Mothers are like that .
And so , on my 27th birthday I decided , because I argued so much and I talk so much , that I was going to stop speaking for just one day -- one day -- to give it a rest .
And so I did .
I got up in the morning and I didn 't say a word .
And I have to tell you , it was a very moving experience , because for the first time , I began listening -- in a long time .
And what I heard , it kind of disturbed me .
Because what I used to do , when I thought I was listening , was I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I could -- I knew what they were going to say , and so I stopped listening .
And in my mind , I just kind of raced ahead and thought of what I was going to say back , while they were still finishing up .
And then I would launch in .
Well , that just ended communication .
So on this first day I actually listened .
And it was very sad for me , because I realized that for those many years I had not been learning .
I was 27 . I thought I knew everything .
I didn 't .
And so I decided I 'd better do this for another day , and another day , and another day until finally , I promised myself for a year I would keep quiet because I started learning more and more and I needed to learn more .
So for a year I said I would keep quiet , and then on my birthday I would reassess what I had learned and maybe I would talk again .
Well , that lasted 17 years .
Now during that time -- those 17 years -- I walked and I played the banjo and I painted and I wrote in my journal , and I tried to study the environment by reading books .
And I decided that I was going to go to school . So I did .
I walked up to Ashland , Oregon , where they were offering an environmental studies degree .
It 's only 500 miles .
And I went into the Registrar 's office and -- " What , what , what ? "
I had a newspaper clipping .
" Oh , so you really want to go to school here ?
You don 't … ?
We have a special program for you . " They did .
And in those two years , I graduated with my first degree -- a bachelor 's degree .
And my father came out , he was so proud .
He said , " Listen , we 're really proud of you son , but what are you going to do with a bachelor 's degree ?
You don 't ride in cars , you don 't talk -- you 're going to have to do those things . "
I hunched my shoulder , I picked my backpack up again and I started walking .
I walked all the way up to Port Townsend , Washington , where I built a wooden boat , rode it across Puget Sound and walked across Washington [ to ] Idaho and down to Missoula , Montana .
I had written the University of Montana two years earlier and said I 'd like to go to school there .
I said I 'd be there in about two years .
And I was there . I showed up in two years and they -- I tell this story because they really helped me .
There are two stories in Montana .
The first story is I didn 't have any money -- that 's a sign I used a lot .
And they said , " Don 't worry about that . "
The director of the program said , " Come back tomorrow . "
He gave me 150 dollars , and he said , " Register for one credit .
You 're going to go to South America , aren 't you ? "
And I said -- Rivers and lakes , the hydrological systems , South America .
So I did that .
He came back ; he said to me , " OK John , now that you 've registered for that one credit , you can have a key to an office , you can matriculate -- you 're matriculating , so you can use the library .
And what we 're going to do is , we 're going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class .
They 're going to save your grade , and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money , then you can register for that class and they 'll give you the grade . "
Wow , they don 't do that in graduate schools , I don 't think .
But I use that story because they really wanted to help me .
They saw that I was really interested in the environment , and they really wanted to help me along the way .
And during that time , I actually taught classes without speaking .
I had 13 students when I first walked into the class .
I explained , with a friend who could interpret my sign language , that I was John Francis , I was walking around the world , I didn 't talk and this was the last time this person 's going to be here interpreting for me .
All the students sat around and they went ...
I could see they were looking for the schedule , to see when they could get out .
They had to take that class with me .
Two weeks later , everyone was trying to get into our class .
And I learned in that class -- because I would do things like this ...
and they were all gathered around , going , " What 's he trying to say ? "
" I don 't know , I think he 's talking about clear cutting . " " Yeah , clear cutting . "
" No , no , no , that 's not clear cutting , that 's -- he 's using a handsaw . "
" Well , you can 't clearcut with a ... "
" Yes , you can clear cut ... "
" No , I think he 's talking about selective forestry . "
Now this was a discussion class and we were having a discussion .
I just backed out of that , you know , and I just kind of kept the fists from flying .
But what I learned was that sometimes I would make a sign and they said things that I absolutely did not mean , but I should have .
And so what came to me is , if you were a teacher and you were teaching , if you weren 't learning you probably weren 't teaching very well .
And so I went on .
My dad came out to see me graduate and , you know , I did the deal , and my father said , " We 're really proud of you son , but ... " You know what went on , he said , " You 've got to start riding and driving and start talking .
What are you going to do with a master 's degree ? "
I hunched my shoulder , I got my backpack and I went on to the University of Wisconsin .
I spent two years there writing on oil spills .
No one was interested in oil spills .
But something happened -- Exxon Valdez .
And I was the only one in the United States writing on oil spills .
My dad came out again .
He said , " I don 't know how you do this , son -- I mean , you don 't ride in cars , you don 't talk .
My sister said maybe I should leave you alone , because you seem to be doing a lot better when you 're not saying anything . "
Well , I put on my backpack again .
I put my banjo on and I walked all the way to the East Coast , put my foot in the Atlantic Ocean -- it was seven years and one day it took me to walk across the United States .
And on Earth Day , 1990 -- the 20th anniversary of Earth Day -- that 's when I began to speak .
And that 's why I said , " Thank you for being here . "
Because it 's sort of like that tree in the forest falling ; and if there 's no one there to hear , does it really make a sound ?
And I 'm thanking you , and I 'm thanking my family because they had come to hear me speak .
And that 's communication .
And they also taught me about listening -- that they listened to me .
And it 's one of those things that came out of the silence , the listening to each other .
Really , very important -- we need to listen to each other .
Well , my journey kept going on .
My dad said , " That 's one , " and I still didn 't let that go .
I worked for the Coastguard , was made a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador .
I wrote regulations for the United States -- I mean , I wrote oil spill regulations .
20 years ago , if someone had said to me , " John , do you really want to make a difference ? "
" Yeah , I want to make a difference . "
He said , " You just start walking east ; get out of your car and just start walking east . "
And as I walked off a little bit , they 'd say , " Yeah , and shut up , too . "
" You 're going to make a difference , buddy . "
How could that be , how could that be ?
How could doing such a simple thing like walking and not talking make a difference ?
Well , my time at the Coast Guard was a really good time .
And after that -- I only worked one year -- I said , " That 's enough . One year 's enough for me to do that . "
I got on a sailboat and I sailed down to the Caribbean , and walked through all of the islands , and to Venezuela .
And you know , I forgot the most important thing , which is why I started talking , which I have to tell you .
I started talking because I had studied environment .
I 'd studied environment at this formal level , but there was this informal level .
And the informal level -- I learned about people , and what we do and how we are .
And environment changed from just being about trees and birds and endangered species to being about how we treated each other .
Because if we are the environment , then all we need to do is look around us and see how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other .
And so that 's the message that I had .
And I said , " Well , I 'm going to have to spread that message . "
And I got in my sailboat , sailed all the way through the Caribbean -- it wasn 't really my sailboat , I kind of worked on that boat -- got to Venezuela and I started walking .
This is the last part of this story , because it 's how I got here , because I still didn 't ride in motorized vehicles .
I was walking through El Dorado -- it 's a prison town , famous prison , or infamous prison -- in Venezuela , and I don 't know what possessed me , because this was not like me .
There I am , walking past the guard gate and the guard stops and says , " Pasaporte , pasaporte , " and with an M16 pointed at me .
And I looked at him and I said , " Passport , huh ?
I don 't need to show you my passport . It 's in the back of my pack .
I 'm Dr. Francis ; I 'm a U.N. Ambassador and I 'm walking around the world . "
And I started walking off .
What possessed me to say this thing ?
The road turned into the jungle .
I didn 't get shot .
And I got to -- I start saying , " Free at last -- thank God Almighty , I 'm free at last . "
" What was that about , " I 'm saying . What was that about ?
It took me 100 miles to figure out that , in my heart , in me , I had become a prisoner .
I was a prisoner and I needed to escape .
The prison that I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles .
Now how could that be ?
Because when I started , it seemed very appropriate to me not to use motorized vehicles .
But the thing that was different was that every birthday , I asked myself about silence , but I never asked myself about my decision to just use my feet .
I had no idea I was going to become a U.N. Ambassador .
I had no idea I would have a Ph.D.
And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me , and that I was going to have to change .
You know , we can do it .
I was going to have to change .
And I was afraid to change , because I was so used to the guy who only just walked .
I was so used to that person that I didn 't want to stop .
I didn 't know who I would be if I changed .
But I know I needed to .
I know I needed to change , because it would be the only way that I could be here today .
And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we 've gotten to , but there 's another place for us to go .
And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we 've become , and go to the place of who we are becoming .
And so , I want to encourage you to go to that next place , to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in , as comfortable as it may be , because we have to do something now .
We have to change now .
As our former Vice President said , we have to become activists .
So if my voice can touch you , if my actions can touch you , if my being here can touch you , please let it be .
And I know that all of you have touched me while I 've been here .
So , let 's go out into the world and take this caring , this love , this respect that we 've shown each other right here at TED , and take this out into the world .
Because we are the environment , and how we treat each other is really how we 're going to treat the environment .
So I want to thank you for being here and I want to end this in five seconds of silence .
Thank you .
Arthur Benjamin : Teach statistics before calculus !
Someone always asks the math teacher , " Am I going to use calculus in real life ? " And for most of us , says Arthur Benjamin , the answer is no . He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age .
Now , if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics , then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country .
And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive .
The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra .
And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject .
And at top of that pyramid , it 's calculus .
And I 'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid ...
that the correct summit -- that all of our students , every high school graduate should know -- should be statistics : probability and statistics .
I mean , don 't get me wrong . Calculus is an important subject .
It 's one of the great products of the human mind .
The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus .
And every student who studies math , science , engineering , economics , they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college .
But I 'm here to say , as a professor of mathematics , that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious , meaningful way , in their day-to-day lives .
On the other hand , statistics -- that 's a subject that you could , and should , use on daily basis . Right ?
It 's risk . It 's reward . It 's randomness .
It 's understanding data .
I think if our students , if our high school students -- if all of the American citizens -- knew about probability and statistics , we wouldn 't be in the economic mess that we 're in today .
Not only -- thank you -- not only that ...
but if it 's taught properly , it can be a lot of fun .
I mean , probability and statistics , it 's the mathematics of games and gambling .
It 's analyzing trends . It 's predicting the future .
Look , the world has changed from analog to digital .
And it 's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital , from the more classical , continuous mathematics , to the more modern , discrete mathematics -- the mathematics of uncertainty , of randomness , of data -- that being probability and statistics .
In summary , instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus , I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means . And I mean it .
Thank you very much .
Stephen Wolfram : Computing a theory of all knowledge
Stephen Wolfram , creator of Mathematica , talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched , processed and manipulated . His new search engine , Wolfram Alpha , has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe .
So I want to talk today about an idea . It 's a big idea .
Actually , I think it 'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that 's emerged in the past century .
It 's the idea of computation .
Now , of course , that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on .
But there 's actually a lot more to computation than that .
It 's really a very deep , very powerful , very fundamental idea , whose effects we 've only just begun to see .
Well , I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously .
So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools .
Then , I started drilling down , thinking about the computations I might want to do , trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible .
Eventually , I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica .
And for the past 23 years , at an increasing rate , we 've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica , and I 'm happy to say that that 's led to many good things in R & amp ; D and education , lots of other areas .
Well , I have to admit , actually , that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica : I wanted to use it myself , a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago .
But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe , but at the computational universe .
So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes .
But what about the space of all possible programs ?
Here 's a representation of a really simple program .
So , if we run this program , this is what we get .
Very simple .
So let 's try changing the rule for this program a little bit .
Now we get another result , still very simple .
Try changing it again .
You get something a little bit more complicated .
But if we keep running this for a while , we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate , it has a very regular structure .
So the question is : Can anything else happen ?
Well , we can do a little experiment .
Let 's just do a little mathematical experiment , try and find out .
Let 's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we 're looking at .
They 're called cellular automata .
You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here .
Most of them do very simple things , but if you look along all these different pictures , at rule number 30 , you start to see something interesting going on .
So let 's take a closer look at rule number 30 here .
So here it is .
We 're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here , but we 're getting all this amazing stuff .
It 's not at all what we 're used to , and I must say that , when I first saw this , it came as a huge shock to my intuition .
And , in fact , to understand it , I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science .
This science is different , more general , than the mathematics-based science that we 've had for the past 300 or so years .
You know , it 's always seemed like a big mystery : how nature , seemingly so effortlessly , manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex .
Well , I think we 've found its secret : It 's just sampling what 's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this .
And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science .
It also brings up new issues , though , like computational irreducibility .
I mean , we 're used to having science let us predict things , but something like this is fundamentally irreducible .
The only way to find its outcome is , effectively , just to watch it evolve .
It 's connected to , what I call , the principle of computational equivalence , which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything .
It doesn 't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation ; just something that happens , naturally , all over the place .
Things with rules as simple as these can do it .
Well , this has deep implications about the limits of science , about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies , about intelligence in the universe , about questions like free will and about creating technology .
You know , in working on this science for many years , I kept wondering , " What will be its first killer app ? "
Well , ever since I was a kid , I 'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable .
People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier .
But I 'd always assumed that to make progress , I 'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain .
Well , then I got to thinking : This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different -- and , by the way , I 've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica , and I 'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large , seemingly crazy , projects -- So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that 's out there in the world we could make computable .
So , it 's been a big , very complex project , which I was not sure was going to work at all .
But I 'm happy to say it 's actually going really well .
And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha .
Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions .
So let 's give it a try .
Let 's start off with something really easy .
Hope for the best .
Very good . Okay .
So far so good .
Let 's try something a little bit harder .
Let 's do some mathy thing , and with luck it 'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math .
We could ask it something about the real world .
Let 's say -- I don 't know -- what 's the GDP of Spain ?
And it should be able to tell us that .
Now we could compute something related to this , let 's say ... the GDP of Spain divided by , I don 't know , the -- hmmm ...
let 's say the revenue of Microsoft .
The idea is that we can just type this in , this kind of question in , however we think of it .
So let 's try asking a question , like a health related question .
So let 's say we have a lab finding that ...
you know , we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50 .
So let 's type that in , and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on .
Or let 's try asking about , I don 't know , the International Space Station .
And what 's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something ; it 's computing , in real time , where the International Space Station is right now at this moment , how fast it 's going , and so on .
So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things .
It 's got , by now , pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library .
But the goal is to go much further and , very broadly , to democratize all of this knowledge , and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas .
To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have , not by searching what other people may have written down before , but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions .
Now , of course , Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge , long-term project with lots and lots of challenges .
For a start , one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data , and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this .
But that 's just the beginning .
Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions , one has to compute : one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries .
Well , even starting from Mathematica , this is still a huge amount of work .
So far , there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many , many different fields .
Well , a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language , which means that we 've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them .
And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible .
Two big things happened : First , a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe ; and second , the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language .
And , of course , now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild , we can learn from its actual usage .
And , in fact , there 's been an interesting coevolution that 's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users , and it 's really encouraging .
Right now , if we look at web queries , more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time .
And if you look at things like the iPhone app , the fraction is considerably larger .
So , I 'm pretty pleased with it all .
But , in many ways , we 're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha .
I mean , everything is scaling up very nicely and we 're getting more confident .
You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places , working both with this kind of public data , like on the website , and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on .
You know , I 've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing , in which one 's starting not just from raw computation , but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge .
And when one does that , one really changes the economics of delivering computational things , whether it 's on the web or elsewhere .
You know , we have a fairly interesting situation right now .
On the one hand , we have Mathematica , with its sort of precise , formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines .
Let me show you a couple of examples here .
So here 's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming .
Here 's something where we 're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here .
Here we 'll just create , in this line , a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there .
If you go on , that 's a slightly more complicated program that 's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on .
But it 's something that is very precise stuff .
It 's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here .
Then on the other hand , we have Wolfram Alpha , with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it .
So what happens when you put these things together ?
I think it 's actually rather wonderful .
With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica , you can , for example , make precise programs that call on real world data .
Here 's a real simple example .
You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you 're talking about .
Let 's try this here .
But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming .
I mean , anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language .
Then , the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they 're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger , precise programs .
So , sometimes , Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with .
Here 's a big website where we 've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things .
I 'll show you one example here .
This is just an example of one of these computable documents .
This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that 's able to be run here .
So , given our new kind of science , is there a general way to use it to make technology ?
So , with physical materials , we 're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes .
Well , it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe .
There 's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there .
The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes .
Something like Rule 30 , for example , turns out to be a really good randomness generator .
Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world .
And , for example , Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe .
And , for example , this -- if we go back here -- this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe .
In a sense , we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity .
I 'm hoping we can , for example , use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly , and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with .
Well , so , that leads to kind of an ultimate question : Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe ?
Perhaps there 's even some quite simple rule , some simple program for our universe .
Well , the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated .
But in the computational universe , we 've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior .
So could that be what 's going on with our whole universe ?
If the rules for the universe are simple , it 's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level ; operating , for example , far below the level of space or time , which makes it hard to represent things .
But in at least a large class of cases , one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network , which , when it gets big enough , behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid .
Well , then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network .
And each possible rule , in a sense , corresponds to a candidate universe .
Actually , I haven 't shown these before , but here are a few of the candidate universes that I 've looked at .
Some of these are hopeless universes , completely sterile , with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space , no notion of time , no matter , other problems like that .
But the exciting thing that I 've found in the last few years is that you actually don 't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren 't obviously not our universe .
Here 's the problem : Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility .
Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave , and whether it matches our physical universe .
A few years ago , I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity , and even general relativity and gravitation , and at least give hints of quantum mechanics .
So , will we find the whole of physics ?
I don 't know for sure , but I think at this point it 's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try .
Not an easy project .
One 's got to build a lot of technology .
One 's got to build a structure that 's probably at least as deep as existing physics .
And I 'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is .
Build a team , open it up , offer prizes and so on .
But I 'll tell you , here today , that I 'm committed to seeing this project done , to see if , within this decade , we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes ...
and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha , " the theory of the universe , " and have it tell us .
So I 've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years , building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on .
With every passing year , I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is .
It 's taken us a long way already , but there 's so much more to come .
From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition , I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future .
Thank you .
That was astonishing .
Stay here . I 've got a question .
So , that was , fair to say , an astonishing talk .
Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe ?
Stephen Wolfram : Well , the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true , things like the standard model of physics : what I 'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it 's simply wrong .
The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model , but hasn 't quite gotten there .
My guess is that some great simplifications of what I 'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what 's been done in string theory , but that 's a complicated math thing that I don 't yet know how it 's going to work out .
Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience .
He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start .
Does your work relate to his ?
SW : I think so .
I view Benoit Mandelbrot 's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area .
Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns , in fractals and so on , where the structure is something that 's kind of tree-like , and where there 's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on .
That 's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity .
I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level .
In fact , in a very precise way , they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity I could go on about this at great length , but I won 't .
Stephen Wolfram , thank you .
Aditi Shankardass : A second opinion on developmental disorders
Developmental disorders in children are typically diagnosed by observing behavior , but Aditi Shankardass suggests we should be looking directly at brains . She explains how one EEG technique has revealed mistaken diagnoses and transformed children 's lives .
When I was 10 years old , a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school .
And as a special treat , he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands .
And there it was , the seat of human consciousness , the powerhouse of the human body , sitting in my hands .
And that day I knew that when I grew up , I was going to become a brain doctor , scientist , something or the other .
Years later , when I finally grew up , my dream came true .
And it was while I was doing my Ph.D.
on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that I encountered a startling fact that I 'd like to share with you all today .
It is estimated that one in six children , that 's one in six children , suffer from some developmental disorder .
This is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments .
Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder .
But here 's what really perplexed me .
Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain , most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior .
But diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms , without even doing an ECG or a chest X-ray to look at the heart .
It seemed so intuitive to me .
To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately , it would be necessary to look at the brain directly .
Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete , or even a misleading , picture of the child 's problems .
Yet , despite all the advances in medical technology , the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited .
And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it , instead of in brain research , towards diagnosing brain disorders in children .
Their groundbreaking technology records the EEG , or the electrical activity of the brain , in real time , allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions : vision , attention , language , audition .
A program called Brain Electrical Activity Mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain .
And another program called Statistical Probability Mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant , allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child 's symptoms .
And so I became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team , and we 're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders .
And I 'm happy to say that I 'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in India .
I 'd like to tell you about one such child , whose story was also covered by ABC News .
Seven-year-old Justin Senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism .
Like many autistic children , his mind was locked inside his body .
There were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time .
And the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially , and he would probably never have too much language .
When we used this groundbreaking EEG technology to actually look at Justin 's brain , the results were startling .
It turned out that Justin was almost certainly not autistic .
He was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye , but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism .
After Justin was given anti-seizure medication , the change in him was amazing .
Within a period of 60 days , his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words .
And his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ .
Research shows that 50 percent of children , almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures .
These are the faces of the children that I have tested with stories just like Justin .
All these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism , attention deficit disorder , mental retardation , language problems .
Instead , our EEG scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that couldn 't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments .
So these EEG scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment .
For too long now , children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen .
And for too long , these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation .
But we are now in a new era of neuroscience , one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects , non-invasively , and find the true source of so many disabilities in children .
So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder , then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved .
One more mind will be unlocked .
And one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there 's still time for his or her brain to recover .
And all this by simply watching the child 's brainwaves .
Thank you .
Jonathan Drori : Why we 're storing billions of seeds
In this brief talk from TED U 2009 , Jonathan Drori encourages us to save biodiversity -- one seed at a time . Reminding us that plants support human life , he shares the vision of the Millennium Seed Bank , which has stored over 3 billion seeds to date from dwindling yet essential plant species .
All human life , all life , depends on plants .
Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds .
Just think for a moment .
It doesn 't matter whether you live in a small African village , or you live in a big city , everything comes back to plants in the end : whether it 's for the food , the medicine , the fuel , the construction , the clothing , all the obvious things ; or whether it 's for the spiritual and recreational things that matter to us so much ; or whether it 's soil formation , or the effect on the atmosphere , or primary production .
Damn it , even the books here are made out of plants .
All these things , they come back to plants .
And without them we wouldn 't be here .
Now plants are under threat .
They 're under threat because of changing climate .
And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet with people like us .
And people like us want to do things that destroy plants , and their habitats .
And whether that 's because of food production , or because of the introduction of alien plants into places that they really oughtn 't be , or because of habitats being used for other purposes -- all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt , or die , or move .
And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move because there might be cities and other things in the way .
So if all human life depends on plants , doesn 't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them ?
I think it does .
And I want to tell you about a project to save plants .
is by storing seeds .
Because seeds , in all their diverse glory , are plants ' futures .
All the genetic information for future generations of plants are held in seeds .
So here is the building ; it looks rather unassuming , really .
But it goes down below ground many stories .
And it 's the largest seed bank in the world .
It exists not only in southern England , but distributed around the world . I 'll come to that .
This is a nuclear-proof facility .
God forbid that it should have to withstand that .
So if you 're going to build a seed bank , you have to decide what you 're going to store in it . Right ?
And we decided that what we want to store first of all , are the species that are most under threat .
And those are the dry land species .
So first of all we did deals with 50 different countries .
It means negotiating with heads of state , and with secretaries of state in 50 countries to sign treaties .
We have 120 partner institutions all over the world , in all those countries colored orange .
People come from all over the world to learn , and then they go away and plan exactly how they 're going to collect these seeds .
They have thousands of people all over the world tagging places where those plants are said to exist .
They search for them . They find them in flower .
And they go back when their seeds have arrived .
And they collect the seeds . All over the world .
The seeds -- some of if is very untechnical .
You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off .
You label them . You do some high-tech things here and there , some low-tech things here and there .
And the main thing is that you have to dry them very carefully , at low temperature .
And then you have to store them at about minus 20 degrees C -- that 's about minus four Fahrenheit , I think -- with a very critically low moisture content .
And these seeds will be able to germinate , we believe , with many of the species , in thousands of years , and certainly in hundreds of years .
It 's no good storing the seeds if you don 't know they 're still viable .
So every 10 years we do germination tests on every sample of seeds that we have .
And this is a distributed network .
So all around the world people are doing the same thing .
And that enables us to develop germination protocols .
That means that we know the right combination of heat and cold and the cycles that you have to get to make the seed germinate .
And that is very useful information .
And then we grow these things , and we tell people , back in the countries where these seeds have come from , " Look , actually we 're not just storing this to get the seeds later , but we can give you this information about how to germinate these difficult plants . "
And that 's already happening .
So where have we got to ?
I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed -- that 's three thousand millionth seed -- is now stored .
Ten percent of all plant species on the planet , 24,000 species are safe ; 30,000 species , if we get the funding , by next year .
Twenty-five percent of all the world 's plants , by 2020 .
These are not just crop plants , as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway -- fantastic work there .
This is at least 100 times bigger .
We have thousands of collections that have been sent out all over the world : drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt ; especially photosynthetic-efficient plants come here to the United States ; salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia ; the list goes on and on .
These seeds are used for restoration .
So in habitats that have already been damaged , like the tall grass prairie here in the USA , or in mined land in various countries , restoration is already happening because of these species -- and because of this collection .
Some of these plants , like the ones on the bottom to the left of your screen , they are down to the last few remaining members .
The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck , that is down to about 30 last remaining trees .
Fantastically useful plant , both for protein and for medicine .
We have training going on in China , in the USA , and many other countries .
How much does it cost ?
2,800 dollars per species is the average .
I think that 's cheap , at the price .
And that gets you all the scientific data that goes with it .
The future research is " How can we find the genetic and molecular markers for the viability of seeds , without having to plant them every 10 years ? "
And we 're almost there .
Thank you very much .
Hillel Cooperman : Legos for grownups
Lego blocks : playtime mainstay for industrious kids , obsession for many mature adults . Hillel Cooperman takes us on a trip through the beloved bricks ' colorful , sometimes oddball grownup subculture , featuring CAD , open-source robotics and a little adult behavior .
So , these are the Dark Ages .
And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the Lego for the last time as a kid , and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid 's toy .
Started out with my then four-year-old : " Oh , should buy the kid some Lego .
That stuff 's cool . "
Walked into the Lego store .
Bought him this .
It 's totally appropriate for a four-year-old .
I think the box says -- let 's see here -- " 8 to 12 " on it .
I turn to my wife and said , " Who are we buying this for ? "
She 's like , " Oh , us . " I 'm like , " Okay . All right . That 's cool . "
Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control .
The dining room looked like this .
You walk there , and it hurts .
So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex .
Torture , very funny .
Wow , you guys are great .
And we put down those little floor tiles , and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of Lego -- which is insane .
My daughter -- the day we got it , I was tucking her in -- and I said , " Honey , you 're my treasure . "
And she said , " No , the Lego is the treasure . "
And then she said , " Dad , we 're Lego rich . "
I was like , " Yeah .
I suppose we are . "
So then once you do that you 're like , " Oh , crap . Where am I going to put all this ? "
So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money , and then you start this crazy sorting process that never -- it 's just nuts .
Whatever .
So then you realize there are these conventions .
And you go to one of these conventions , and some dude built the Titanic .
And you 're like , " Holy shit !
He had to come in like a truck , a semi , with this thing . "
And then someone built this -- this is the Smith Tower in Seattle .
Just beautiful .
And there 's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for Lego , because Lego -- the Danish -- no , they 're not into guns .
But the Americans ? Oh , we 'll make some guns for Lego , no problem .
And at a certain point , you look around , you 're like , " Whoa , this is a really nerdy crowd . "
And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd , but that 's like a couple of levels above furries .
The nerds here , they get laid -- except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket -- and you say to yourself at some point , " Am I part of this group ? Like , am I into this ? "
And I was just like , " Yeah , I guess I am .
I 'm coming out .
I 'm kind of into this stuff , and I 'm going to stop being embarrassed . "
So then you really get into it , and you 're like , " Well , the Lego people in Denmark , they 've got all this software to let you build your own virtually . "
And so this is like this CAD program where you build it .
And then whatever you design virtually , you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later .
And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store .
The Lego guys don 't give you any royalties , strangely , but some user made this and then it sold .
And it 's pretty amazing actually .
Then you notice that if that Lego-provided CAD program isn 't enough , there 's an entire open-source , third-party , independent Lego CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make , in fact , movies out of Lego , 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube , and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content -- just beautiful -- and people recreating all sorts of things .
I have to take a moment .
I love the guy who 's like running away with his clasps , his hooks .
Okay . Anyway .
There 's a whole programming language and robotics tool , so if you want to teach someone how to program , kid , adult , whatever it is .
And the guy that made this , he made a slot machine out of Lego .
And I don 't mean he made Lego that looked like a slot machine ; I mean he made a slot machine out of Lego .
The insides were Lego .
There 's people getting drunk building Lego , and you 've got to finish the thing before you puke .
There 's a whole gray market for Lego , thousands of home-based businesses .
And some people will fund their entire Lego habit by selling the little guy , but then you have no guys in your ships .
And then , just some examples . This stuff really is sculpture .
This is amazing what you can do .
And don 't kid yourself : some architectural details , incredible organic shapes and just , even , nature out of , again , little blocks .
This is my house .
And this is my house .
I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys .
Anyway , I 'm out of time .
But just very quickly -- we 'll just see if I can do this quick .
Because there aren 't enough TED logos around here .
Let 's see here .
Okay .
Ta-da .
Ross Lovegrove : Organic design , inspired by nature
Designer Ross Lovegrove expounds his philosophy of " fat-free " design and offers insight into several of his extraordinary products , including the Ty Nant water bottle and the Go chair .
My name is Lovegrove . I only know nine Lovegroves , two of which are my parents .
They are first cousins , and you know what happens when , you know -- so there 's a terribly weird freaky side to me , which I 'm fighting with all the time . So to try and get through today , I 've kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk .
I was hanging on to have a pee .
I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough , that would guide me through the 18 minutes .
Okay . I am known as Captain Organic , and that 's a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position .
But today what I 'd like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people 's soul and emotion .
Not very long ago , not many thousands of years ago , we actually lived in caves , and I don 't think we 've lost that coding system .
We respond so well to form , but I 'm interested in creating intelligent form .
I 'm not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design .
These -- this artificially induced consumerism -- I think it 's atrocious .
My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins , Janine Benyus , James Watson .
I 'm in that world , but I work purely instinctively .
I 'm not a scientist . I could have been , perhaps , but I work in this world where I trust my instincts .
So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with .
And we should be developing things -- we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people 's perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use .
So , the water bottle .
I 'll begin with this concept of what I call DNA .
DN Design , Nature , Art . These are the three things that condition my world .
Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci , 500 years ago , before photography .
It shows how observation , curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art .
Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century .
People like Leonardo -- there have not been many -- had this amazingly instinctive curiosity .
I work from a similar position .
I don 't want to sound pretentious saying that , but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago -- well into the 21st century , 500 years later .
It 's my impression of water .
Impressionism being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it : 100 million dollars , easily , for a Monet .
I use , now , a whole new process .
A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn , Tom Main , Zaha Hadid , Rem Koolhaas -- all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form .
This is all created digitally .
Here you see the machining , the milling of a block of acrylic .
This is what I show to the client to say , " That 's what I want to do . "
At that point , I don 't know if that 's possible at all .
It 's a seductor , but I just feel in my bones that that 's possible .
So we go . We look at the tooling . We look at how that is produced .
These are the invisible things that you never see in your life .
This is the background noise of industrial design .
That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra .
It is more valuable than the product in my eyes . I don 't have one .
When I do make some money , I 'll have one machined for myself .
This is the final product . When they sent it to me , I thought I 'd failed .
It felt like nothing . It has to feel like nothing .
It was when I put the water in that I realized that I 'd put a skin on water itself .
It 's an icon of water itself , and it elevates people 's perception of contemporary design .
Each bottle is different , meaning the water level will give you a different shape .
It 's mass individualism from a single product . It fits the hand .
It fits arthritic hands . It fits children 's hands .
It makes the product strong , the tessellation .
It 's a millefiori of ideas .
In the future they will look like that , because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things , perhaps , in life .
Biopolymers , these new ideas for materials , will come into play in probably a decade .
It doesn 't look as cool , does it ?
But I can live up to that . I don 't have a problem with that .
I design for that condition , biopolymers . It 's the future .
I took this video in Cape Town last year .
This is the freaky side coming out .
I have this special interest in things like this which blow my mind .
I don 't know whether to , you know , drop to my knees , cry ; I don 't know what I think . But I just know that nature improves with ever-greater purpose that which once existed , and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking .
When I look at these things , they look pretty normal to me .
But these things evolved over many years , and now what we 're trying to do -- I get three weeks to design a telephone .
How the hell do I do a telephone in three weeks , when you get these things that take hundreds of million years to evolve ?
How do you condense that ?
It comes back to instinct .
I 'm not talking about designing telephones that look like that , and I 'm not looking at designing architecture like that .
I 'm just interested in natural growth patterns , and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates .
How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I 'm trying to understand .
This is a scan through the human forearm . It 's then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal the cellular structure . I have these in my office .
My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a NASA space lab .
It 's a weird , kind of freaky place .
This is one of my specimens .
This is made -- bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers .
I studied cooking in school for four years , and in that experience , which was called " domestic science , " it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification .
Actually , I put marijuana in everything I cooked -- -- and I had access to all the best girls . It was fabulous .
All the guys in the rugby team couldn 't understand , but anyway -- this is a meringue . This is another sample I have .
A meringue is made exactly the same way , in my estimation , as a bone .
It 's made from polysaccharides and proteins .
If you pour water on that , it dissolves .
Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future ?
Not a bad idea . I don 't know . I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that , but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something , a car -- I don 't know .
I 'm also interested in growth patterns : the unbridled way that nature grows things so you 're not restricted by form at all .
These interrelated forms , they do inspire everything I do although I might end up making something incredibly simple .
This is a detail of a chair that I 've designed in magnesium .
It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of kind of engineering and biological thinking , shown pretty much as a bone structure .
Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object .
It 's the world 's first chair made in magnesium .
It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop . It 's called " Go " by Bernhardt , USA .
It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century .
Boy . For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village , that 's enough .
It shows how you make one holistic form , like the car industry , and then you break up what you need .
This is an absolutely beautiful way of working .
It 's a godly way of working .
It 's organic and it 's essential .
It 's an absolutely fat-free design , and when you look at it , you see human beings . Bless you .
When that moves into polymers , you can change the elasticity , the fluidity of the form .
This is an idea for a gas-injected , one-piece polymer chair .
What nature does is it drills holes in things . It liberates form .
It takes away anything extraneous . That 's what I do .
I make organic things which are essential .
I don 't -- and they look funky too -- but I don 't set out to make funky things because I think that 's an absolute disgrace .
I set out to look at natural forms .
If you took the idea of fractal technology further , take a membrane , shrinking it down constantly like nature does -- that could be a seat for a chair ; it could be a sole for a sports shoe ; it could be a car blending into seats .
Wow . Let 's go for it . That 's the kind of stuff .
This is what exists in nature . Observation now allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day . That 's what I do .
This is a show that 's currently on in Tokyo .
It 's called " Superliquidity . " It 's my sculptural investigation .
It 's like 21st-century Henry Moore . When you see a Henry Moore still , your hair stands up . There 's some amazing spiritual connect .
If he was a car designer , phew , we 'd all be driving one .
In his day , he was the highest taxpayer in Britain .
That is the power of organic design .
It contributes immensely to our sense of being , our sense of relationships with things , our sensuality and , you know , the sort of -- even the sort of socio-erotic side , which is very important .
This is my artwork . This is all my process .
These actually are sold as artwork .
They 're very big prints . But this is how I get to that object .
Ironically , that object was made by the Killarney process , which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century , and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that .
I 'll tell you about that later .
When I look into these data images , I see new things .
I 'm self -- it 's self-inspired . Diatomic structures , radiolaria , the things that we couldn 't see but we can do now -- these , again , are cored out . They 're made virtually from nothing .
They 're made from silica . Why not structures from cars like that ?
Coral , all these natural forces , take away what they don 't need and they deliver maximum beauty .
We need to be in that realm . I want to do stuff like that .
This is a new chair which should come on the market in September .
It 's for a company called Moroso in Italy .
It 's a gas-injected polymer chair .
Those holes you see there are very filtered-down , watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures .
It goes with the flow of the polymer and you 'll see -- there 's an image coming up right now that shows the full thing .
It 's great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming .
If you see the shadows that come through that , they 're actually probably more important than the product , but it 's the minimum it takes .
The coring out of the back lets you breathe .
It takes away any material you don 't need and it actually garners flexure too , so -- I was going to break into a dance then .
This is some current work I 'm doing .
I 'm looking at single-surface structures and how they flow -- how they stretch and flow . It 's based on furniture typologies , but that 's not the end motivation . It 's made from aluminum , as opposed to aluminium , and it 's grown .
It 's grown in my mind , and then it 's grown in terms of the whole process that I go through .
This is two weeks ago in CCP in Coventry , who build parts for Bentleys and so on .
It 's being built as we speak , and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York .
I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers .
When I see these animations , oh Jesus , I 'm blown away .
This is what goes on in my studio everyday . I walk -- I 'm traveling . I come back .
Some guy 's got that on a computer -- there 's this like , oh my goodness .
So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio .
This kind of effervescent , fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas .
Single-surface products . Furniture 's a good one .
How you grow legs out of a surface .
I would love to build this one day , and perhaps I 'd like to build it also out of flour , sugar , polymer , wood chips -- I don 't know , human hair . I don 't know . I 'd love a go at that .
I don 't know . If I just got some time .
That 's the weird side coming out again , and a lot of companies don 't understand that .
Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo . They said , " Give us the dream .
What is our dream ? How do we beat Apple ? "
I said , " Well you don 't copy Apple , that 's for sure . "
I said , " You get into biopolymers . " They looked straight through me .
What a waste . Anyway .
No , it 's true . Fuck ' em . Fuck ' em . You know , I mean .
I 'm delivering ; they 're not taking . I 've had this image 20 years .
I 've had this image of a water droplet for 20 years sitting on a hot bed .
That is an image of a car for me .
That 's the car of the future . It 's a water droplet .
I 've been banging on about this like I can 't believe .
Cars are all wrong .
I 'm going to show you something a bit weird now .
They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this .
The only place that didn 't laugh was Moscow .
Its cars are made from 30,000 components .
How ridiculous is that ? Couldn 't you make that from 300 ?
It 's got a vacuum-formed , carbon-nylon pan . Everything 's holistically integrated .
It opens and closes like a bread bin .
There is no engine . There 's a solar panel on the back , and there are batteries in the wheels .
They 're fitted like Formula One . You take them off your wall .
You plug them in . Off you jolly well go .
A three-wheeled car : slow , feminine , transparent , so you can see the people in there . You drive different .
You see that thing . You do .
You do and not anaesthetized , separated from life .
There 's a hole at the front , and there 's a reason for that .
It 's a city car . You drive along . You get out .
You drive on to a proboscis . You get out . It lifts you up .
It presents the solar panel to the sun , and at night it 's a street lamp .
That 's what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first , and then do the car second . These bubbles -- I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages , floating around on the ground driven by AI .
When I showed this in South Africa , everybody after was going , " Yeah , hey , car on a stick . Like this . "
Can you imagine ? A car on a stick .
If you put it next to contemporary architecture , it feels totally natural to me .
And that 's what I do with my furniture .
I 'm not putting Charles Eames ' furniture in buildings anymore .
Forget that . We move on .
I 'm trying to build furniture that fits architecture .
I 'm trying to build transportation systems .
I work on aircraft for Airbus , the whole thing -- I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural , inspired-by-nature dreams home . I 'm going to finish on two things .
This is the steriolithography of a staircase .
It 's a little bit of a dedication to James , James Watson .
I built this thing for my studio .
It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this .
Most people go and buy the Aston Martin . I built this .
This is the data that goes with that . Incredibly complex .
Took about two years , because I 'm looking for fat-free design .
Lean , efficient things . Healthy products .
This is built by composites . It 's a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element , and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which is only supported in two places .
Modern materials allow us to do modern things .
This is a shot in the studio .
This is how it looks pretty much every day .
You wouldn 't want to have a fear of heights coming down it .
There is virtually no handrail . It doesn 't pass any standards .
Who cares ?
Yeah , and it has an internal handrail which gives it it 's strength . It 's this holistic integration .
That 's my studio . It 's subterranean .
It 's in Notting Hill next to all the crap -- It 's next to David Hockney 's original studio .
It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day .
My guys go out for lunch . The door 's open . They come back in , because it 's normally raining , and they prefer to stay in .
This is my studio . Elephant skull from Oxford University , 1988 .
I bought that last year . They 're very difficult to find .
I would -- if anybody 's got a whale skeleton they want to sell me , I 'll put it in the studio .
So I 'm just going to interject a little bit It 's a homemade video , made it myself at three o 'clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is . You never see that .
You never see architects or designers showing you their real world .
This is called a " Plasnet . "
It 's a bio-polycarbonate new chair I 'm doing in Italy .
World 's first bamboo bike with folding handlebars .
We should all be riding one of these .
As China buys all these crappy cars , we should be riding things like this . Counterbalance .
Like I say , it 's a cross between Natural History Museum and a NASA laboratory . It 's full of prototypes and objects .
It 's self-inspirational again . I mean , the rare times when I 'm there , I do enjoy it . And I get lots of kids coming -- lots and lots of kids coming .
I 'm a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers -- wankers .
This -- sorry -- -- that 's a solar seed . It 's a concept for new architecture .
That thing on the top is the world 's first solar-powered garden lamp -- the first produced . Giles Revell should be talking here today -- amazing photography of things you can 't see .
The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo .
Lots of stuff . There 's a little leaf chair -- that golden looking thing is called " Leaf . "
It 's made from Kevlar .
On the wall is my book called " Supernatural , " which allows me to remember what I 've done , because I forget .
There 's an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year , in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture .
[ Unclear ] , working at three o 'clock in the morning -- and I don 't pay overtime .
Overtime is the passion of design , so join the club or don 't .
No , it 's true . It 's true . People like Tom and Greg -- we 're traveling like you can 't -- we fit it all in . I don 't know how we do it .
Next week I 'm at Electrolux in Sweden , then I 'm in Beijing on Friday . You work that one out .
And when I see Ed 's photographs I think , why the hell am I going to China ? It 's true .
It 's true . Because there 's a soul in this whole thing .
We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century .
We need to combine all this stuff .
If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together , it would be a joy , absolute joy .
So there 's a new X-light system I 'm doing in Japan .
There 's Tuareg shoes from North Africa . There 's a Kifwebe mask .
These are my sculptures .
A copper jelly mold .
It sounds like some quiz show or something , doesn 't it ?
So , it 's going to end .
Thank you , James , for your great inspiration .
Thank you very much .
Beverly + Dereck Joubert : Life lessons from big cats
Beverly + Dereck Joubert live in the bush , filming and photographing lions and leopards in their natural habitat . With stunning footage , they discuss their personal relationships with these majestic animals -- and their quest to save the big cats from human threats .
Beverly Joubert : We are truly passionate about the African wilderness and protecting the African wilderness , and so what we 've done is we 've focused on iconic cats .
And I know , in the light of human suffering and poverty and even climate change , one would wonder , why worry about a few cats ?
Well today we 're here to share with you a message that we have learned from a very important and special character -- this leopard .
Dereck Joubert : Well , our lives have basically been like a super long episode of " CSI " -- something like 28 years .
In essence , what we 've done is we 've studied the science , we 've looked at the behavior , we 've seen over 2,000 kills by these amazing animals .
But one of the things that science really lets us down on is that personality , that individual personality that these animals have .
And here 's a prime example .
We found this leopard in a 2,000-year-old baobab tree in Africa , the same tree that we found her mother in and her grandmother .
And she took us on a journey and revealed something very special to us -- her own daughter , eight days old .
And the minute we found this leopard , we realized that we needed to move in , and so we basically stayed with this leopard for the next four-and-a-half years -- following her every day , getting to know her , that individual personality of hers , and really coming to know her .
Now I 'm destined to spend a lot of time with some unique , very , very special , individualistic and often seductive female characters .
Beverly 's clearly one of them , and this little leopard , Legadema , is another , and she changed our lives .
BJ : Well we certainly did spend a lot of time with her -- in fact , more time than even her mother did .
When her mother would go off hunting , we would stay and film .
And early on , a lightning bolt hit a tree 20 paces away from us .
It was frightening , and it showered us with leaves and a pungent smell .
And of course , we were stunned for a while , but when we managed to get our wits about us , we looked at it and said , " My gosh , what 's going to happen with that little cub ?
She 's probably going to forever associate that deafening crash with us . "
Well , we needn 't have worried .
She came charging out of the thicket straight towards us , sat next to us , shivering , with her back towards Dereck , and looking out .
And actually from that day on , she 's been comfortable with us .
So we felt that that day was the day that she really earned her name .
We called her Legadema , which means , " light from the sky . "
DJ : Now we 've found these individualisms in all sorts of animals , in particular in the cats .
This particular one is called Eetwidomayloh , " he who greets with fire , " and you can just see that about him , you know -- that 's his character .
But only by getting up close to these animals and spending time with them can we actually even reach out and dig out these personal characters that they have .
BJ : But through our investigation , we have to seek the wildest places in Africa .
And right now this is in the Okavango Delta in Botswana .
Yes , it is swamp . We live in the swamp in a tent , but I must tell you , every day is exhilarating .
But also , our hearts are in our throats a huge amount of the time , because we 're driving through water , and it 's an unknown territory .
But we 're really there seeking and searching and filming the iconic cats .
DJ : Now one of the big things , of course , everybody knows that cats hate water , and so this was a real revelation for us .
And we could only find this by pushing ourselves , by going where no sane person should go -- not without some prompting , by the way , from Beverly -- and just pushing the envelope , going out there , pushing our vehicle , pushing ourselves .
But we 've managed to find that these lions are 15 percent bigger than any others , and they specialize in hunting buffalo in the water .
BJ : And then of course , the challenge is knowing when to turn around .
We don 't always get that right , and on this particular day , we seriously underestimated the depth .
We got deeper and deeper , until it was at Dereck 's chest-height .
Well then we hit a deep depression , and we seriously submerged the vehicle .
We actually managed to drown two million dollars ' worth of camera gear .
We drowned our pride , I must tell you , which was really serious , and we seized the engine .
DJ : And of course , one of the rules that we have in the vehicle is that he who drowns the vehicle gets to swim with the crocodiles .
You will notice also that all of these images here are taken from the top angle by Beverly -- the dry top angle , by the way .
But all the places we get stuck in really have great views .
And it wasn 't a moment , and these lions came back towards us , and Beverly was able to get a great photograph .
BJ : But we truly do spend day and night trying to capture unique footage .
And 20 years ago , we did a film called " Eternal Enemies " where we managed to capture this unusual disturbing behavior across two species -- lions and hyenas .
And surprisingly , it became a cult film .
And we can only work that out as people were seeing parallels between the thuggish side of nature and gang warfare .
DJ : It was amazing , because you can see that this lion is doing exactly what his name , Eetwidomayloh , represents .
He 's focused on this hyena , and he is going to get it .
But that 's , I think , what this is all about , is that these individuals have these personalities and characters .
But for us to get them , not only do we push ourselves , but we live by certain rules of engagement , which mean we can 't interfere .
This sort of behavior has been going on for three , four , five million years , and we can 't step in and say , " That 's wrong , and that 's right . "
But that 's not always easy for us .
BJ : So , as Dereck says , we have to work through extremes -- extreme temperatures , push ourselves at night .
Sleep deprivation is extreme .
We 're on the edge through a large part of the time .
But , for 10 years , we tried to capture lions and elephants together -- and never ever managed until this particular night .
And I have to tell you that it was a disturbing night for me .
I had tears rolling down my cheeks .
I was shaking with anxiety , but I knew that [ I had ] to capture something that had never been seen before , had never been documented .
And I do believe you should stay with us .
DJ : The amazing thing about these moments -- and this is probably a highlight of our career -- is that you never know how it 's going to end .
Many people believe , in fact , that death begins in the eyes , not in the heart , not in the lungs , and that 's when people give up hope , or when any life form gives up hope .
And you can see the start of it here .
This elephant , against overwhelming odds , simply gives up hope .
But by the same token , you can get your hope back again .
So just when you think it 's all over , something else happens , some spark gets into you , some sort of will to fight -- that iron will that we all have , that this elephant has , that conservation has , that big cats have .
Everything has that will to survive , to fight , to push through that mental barrier and to keep going .
And for us , in many ways , this elephant has become a symbol of inspiration for us , a symbol of that hope as we go forward in our work .
Now back to the leopard .
We were spending so much time with this leopard and getting to understand her individualism , her personal character , that maybe we were taking it a little bit far .
We were perhaps taking her for granted , and maybe she didn 't like that that much .
This is about couples working together , and so I do need to say that within the vehicle we have quite strict territories , Beverly and I.
Beverly sits on the one side where all her camera gear is , and I 'm on the other side where my space is .
These are precious to us , these divides .
BJ : But when this little cub saw that I had vacated my seat and climbed to the back to get some camera gear , she came in like a curious cat to come and investigate .
It was phenomenal , and we felt grateful that she trusted us to that extent .
But at the same time , we were concerned that if she created this as a habit and jumped into somebody else 's car , it might not turn out the same way -- she might get shot for that .
So we knew we had to react quickly .
And the only way we thought we could without scaring her is to try and simulate a growl like her mother would make -- a hiss and a sound .
So Dereck turned on the heater fan in the car -- very innovative .
DJ : It was the only way for me to save the marriage , because Beverly felt she was being replaced , you see .
But really and truly , this was how this little leopard was displaying her individual personality .
But nothing prepared us for what happened next in our relationship with her , when she started hunting .
BJ : And on this first hunt , we truly were excited .
It was like watching a graduation ceremony .
We felt like we were surrogate parents .
And of course , we knew now that she was going to survive .
But only when we saw the tiny baby baboon clinging to the mother 's fur did we realize that something very unique was taking place here with Legadema .
And of course , the baby baboon was so innocent , it didn 't turn and run .
So what we watched over the next couple of hours was very unique .
It was absolutely amazing when she picked it up to safety , protecting it from the hyena .
And over the next five hours , she took care of it .
We realized that we actually don 't know everything , and that nature is so unpredictable , we have to be open at all times .
DJ : Okay , so she was a little bit rough .
But in fact , what we were seeing here was interesting .
Because she is a cub wanting to play , but she was also a predator needing to kill , and yet conflicted in some way , because she was also an emerging mother .
She had this maternal instinct , much like a young girl on her way to womanhood , and so this really took us to this new level of understanding that personality .
BJ : And of course , through the night , they lay together .
They ended up sleeping for hours .
But I have to tell you -- everybody always asks , " What happened to the baby baboon ? "
It did die , and we suspect it was from the freezing winter nights .
DJ : So at this stage , I guess , we had very , very firm ideas on what conservation meant .
We had to deal with these individual personalities .
We had to deal with them with respect and celebrate them .
And so we , with the National Geographic , formed the Big Cats Initiative to march forward into conservation , taking care of the big cats that we loved -- and then had an opportunity to look back over the last 50 years to see how well we had all collectively been doing .
So when Beverly and I were born , there were 450,000 lions , and today there are 20,000 .
Tigers haven 't fared any better -- 45,000 down to maybe 3,000 .
BJ : And then cheetahs have crashed all the way down to 12,000 .
Leopards have plummeted from 700,000 down to a mere 50,000 .
Now in the extraordinary time that we have worked with Legadema -- which is really over a five-year period -- 10,000 leopards were legally shot by safari hunters .
And that 's not the only leopards that were being killed through that period .
There 's an immense amount of poaching as well , and so possibly the same amount .
It 's simply not sustainable .
We admire them , and we fear them , and yet , as man , we want to steal their power .
It used to be the time where only kings wore a leopard skin , but now throughout rituals and ceremonies , traditional healers and ministers .
And of course , looking at this lion paw that has been skinned , it eerily reminds me of a human hand , and that 's ironic , because their fate is in our hands .
DJ : There 's a burgeoning bone trade .
South Africa just released some lion bones onto the market .
Lion bones and tiger bones look exactly the same , and so in a stroke , the lion bone industry is going to wipe out all the tigers .
So we have a real problem here , no more so than the lions do , the male lions .
So the 20,000 lion figure that you just saw is actually a red herring , because there may be 3,000 or 4,000 male lions , and they all are actually infected with the same disease .
I call it complacency -- our complacency .
Because there 's a sport , there 's an activity going on that we 're all aware of , that we condone .
And that 's probably because we haven 't seen it like we are today .
BJ : And you have to know that , when a male lion is killed , it completely disrupts the whole pride .
A new male comes into the area and takes over the pride , and , of course , first of all kills all the cubs and possibly some of the females that are defending their cubs .
So we 've estimated that between 20 [ and ] 30 lions are killed when one lion is hanging on a wall somewhere in a far-off place .
DJ : So what our investigations have shown is that these lions are essential .
They 're essential to the habitat .
If they disappear , whole ecosystems in Africa disappear .
There 's an 80-billion-dollar-a-year ecotourism revenue stream into Africa .
So this is not just a concern about lions ; it 's a concern about communities in Africa as well .
If they disappear , all of that goes away .
But what I 'm more concerned about in many ways is that , as we de-link ourselves from nature , as we de-link ourselves spiritually from these animals , we lose hope , we lose that spiritual connection , our dignity , that thing within us that keeps us connected to the planet .
BJ : So you have to know , looking into the eyes of lions and leopards right now , it is all about critical awareness .
And so what we are doing , in February , we 're bringing out a film called " The Last Lion , " and " The Last Lion " is exactly what is happening right now .
That is the situation we 're in -- the last lions .
That is , if we don 't take action and do something , these plains will be completely devoid of big cats , and then , in turn , everything else will disappear .
And simply , if we can 't protect them , we 're going to have a job protecting ourselves as well .
DJ : And in fact , that original thing that we spoke about and designed our lives by -- that conservation was all about respect and celebration -- is probably true . That 's really what it needs .
We need it . We respect and celebrate each other as a man and a woman , as a community and as part of this planet , and we need to continue that .
And Legadema ?
Well we can report , in fact , that we 're grandparents .
BJ / DJ : Thank you very much .
BLA My journey to yo-yo mastery
Remember the days you struggled just to make a yo-yo spin , and if you were really fancy , to " walk the dog " ? You ain 't seen nothin ' yet . Japanese yo-yo world champion BLACK tells the inspiring story of finding his life 's passion , and gives an awesome performance that will make you want to pull your yo-yo back out of the closet .
When I was 14 years old , I had low self-esteem .
I felt I was not talented at anything .
One day , I bought a yo-yo .
When I tried my first trick , it looked like this .
I couldn 't even do the simplest trick , but it was very natural for me , because I was not dextrous , and hated all sports .
But after one week of practicing , my throws became more like this .
A bit better .
I thought , the yo-yo is something for me to be good at , for the first time in my life .
I found my passion .
I was spending all my time practicing .
It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level .
And then , four years later , when I was 18 years old , I was standing onstage at the World Yo-Yo Contest .
And I won .
I was so excited . " Yes , I did it ! I became a hero .
I may get many sponsors , a lot of money , tons of interviews , and be on TV ! " I thought .
But after coming back to Japan , totally nothing changed in my life .
I realized society didn 't value my passion .
So I went back to my college and became a typical Japanese worker as a systems engineer .
I felt my passion , heart and soul , had left my body .
I felt I was not alive anymore .
So I started to consider what I should do , and I thought , I wanted to make my performance better , and to show onstage how spectacular the yo-yo could be to change the public 's image of the yo-yo .
So I quit my company and started a career as a professional performer .
I started to learn classic ballet , jazz dance , acrobatics and other things to make my performance better .
As a result of these efforts , and the help of many others , it happened .
I won the World Yo-Yo Contest again in the artistic performance division .
I passed an audition for Cirque du Soleil .
Today , I am standing on the TED stage with the yo-yo in front of you .
What I learned from the yo-yo is , if I make enough effort with huge passion , there is no impossible .
Could you let me share my passion with you through my performance ?
Luca Turin : The science of scent
What 's the science behind a sublime perfume ? With charm and precision , biophysicist Luca Turin explains the molecular makeup -- and the art -- of a scent .
The fragrance that you will smell , you will never be able to smell this way again .
It 's a fragrance called Beyond Paradise , which you can find in any store in the nation .
Except here it 's been split up in parts by Estée Lauder and by the perfumer who did it , Calice Becker , and I 'm most grateful to them for this .
And it 's been split up in successive bits and a chord .
So what you 're smelling now is the top note .
And then will come what they call the heart , the lush heart note .
I will show it to you .
The Eden top note is named after the Eden Project in the U.K.
The lush heart note , Melaleuca bark note -- which does not contain any Melaleuca bark , because it 's totally forbidden .
And after that , the complete fragrance .
Now what you are smelling is a combination of -- I asked how many molecules there were in there , and nobody would tell me .
So I put it through a G.C. , a Gas Chromatograph that I have in my office , and it 's about 400 .
So what you 're smelling is several hundred molecules floating through the air , hitting your nose .
And do not get the impression that this is very subjective .
You are all smelling pretty much the same thing , OK ?
Smell has this reputation of being somewhat different for each person .
It 's not really true .
And perfumery shows you that can 't be true , because if it were like that it wouldn 't be an art , OK ?
Now , while the smell wafts over you , let me tell you the history of an idea .
Everything that you 're smelling in here is made up of atoms that come from what I call the Upper East Side of the periodic table -- a nice , safe neighborhood .
You really don 't want to leave it if you want to have a career in perfumery .
Some people have tried in the 1920s to add things from the bad parts , and it didn 't really work .
These are the five atoms from which just about everything that you 're going to smell in real life , from coffee to fragrance , are made of .
The top note that you smelled at the very beginning , the cut-grass green , what we call in perfumery -- they 're weird terms -- and this would be called a green note , because it smells of something green , like cut grass .
This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol . And I had to learn chemistry on the fly in the last three years . A very expensive high school chemistry education .
This has six carbon atoms , so " hexa , " hexene-1-ol .
It has one double bond , it has an alcohol on the end , so it 's " ol , " and that 's why they call it cis-3-hexene-1-ol .
Once you figure this out , you can really impress people at parties .
This smells of cut grass . Now , this is the skeleton of the molecule .
If you dress it up with atoms , hydrogen atoms -- that 's what it looks like when you have it on your computer -- but actually it 's sort of more like this , in the sense that the atoms have a certain sphere that you cannot penetrate . They repel .
OK , now . Why does this thing smell of cut grass , OK ?
Why doesn 't it smell of potatoes or violets ? Well , there are really two theories .
But the first theory is : it must be the shape .
And that 's a perfectly reasonable theory in the sense that almost everything else in biology works by shape .
Enzymes that chew things up , antibodies , it 's all , you know , the fit between a protein and whatever it is grabbing , in this case a smell .
And I will try and explain to you what 's wrong with this notion .
And the other theory is that we smell molecular vibrations .
Now , this is a totally insane idea .
And when I first came across it in the early ' 90s , I thought my predecessor , Malcolm Dyson and Bob Wright , had really taken leave of their senses , and I 'll explain to you why this was the case .
However , I came to realize gradually that they may be right -- and I have to convince all my colleagues that this is so , but I 'm working on it .
Here 's how shape works in normal receptors .
You have a molecule coming in , it gets into the protein , which is schematic here , and it causes this thing to switch , to turn , to move in some way by binding in certain parts .
And the attraction , the forces , between the molecule and the protein cause the motion . This is a shape-based idea .
Now , what 's wrong with shape is summarized in this slide .
The way --I expect everybody to memorize these compounds .
This is one page of work from a chemist 's workbook , OK ?
Working for a fragrance company .
He 's making 45 molecules , and he 's looking for a sandalwood , something that smells of sandalwood .
Because there 's a lot of money in sandalwoods .
And of these 45 molecules , only 4629 actually smells of sandalwood .
And he puts an exclamation mark , OK ? This is an awful lot of work .
This actually is roughly , in man-years of work , 200,000 dollars roughly , if you keep them on the low salaries with no benefits .
So this is a profoundly inefficient process .
And my definition of a theory is , it 's not just something that you teach people ; it 's labor saving .
A theory is something that enables you to do less work .
I love the idea of doing less work . So let me explain to you why -- a very simple fact that tells you why this shape theory really does not work very well .
This is cis-3-hexene-1-ol . It smells of cut grass .
This is cis-3-hexene-1-thiol , and this smells of rotten eggs , OK ?
Now , you will have noticed that vodka never smells of rotten eggs .
If it does , you put the glass down , you go to a different bar .
This is -- in other words , we never get the O-H -- we never mistake it for an S-H , OK ?
Like , at no concentration , even pure , you know , if you smelt pure ethanol , it doesn 't smell of rotten eggs .
Conversely , there is no concentration at which the sulfur compound will smell like vodka .
It 's very hard to explain this by molecular recognition .
Now , I showed this to a physicist friend of mine who has a profound distaste for biology , and he says , " That 's easy ! The things are a different color ! "
We have to go a little beyond that . Now let me explain why vibrational theory has some sort of interest in it . These molecules , as you saw in the beginning , the building blocks had springs connecting them to each other .
In fact , molecules are able to vibrate at a set of frequencies which are very specific for each molecule and for the bonds connecting them .
So this is the sound of the O-H stretch , translated into the audible range .
S-H , quite a different frequency .
Now , this is kind of interesting , because it tells you that you should be looking for a particular fact , which is this : nothing in the world smells like rotten eggs except S-H , OK ?
Now , Fact B : nothing in the world has that frequency except S-H .
If you look on this , imagine a piano keyboard .
The S-H stretch is in the middle of a part of the keyboard that has been , so to speak , damaged , and there are no neighboring notes , nothing is close to it .
You have a unique smell , a unique vibration .
So I went searching when I started in this game to convince myself that there was any degree of plausibility to this whole crazy story .
I went searching for a type of molecule , any molecule , that would have that vibration and that -- the obvious prediction was that it should absolutely smell of sulfur .
If it didn 't , the whole idea was toast , and I might as well move on to other things .
Now , after searching high and low for several months , I discovered that there was a type of molecule called a Borane which has exactly the same vibration .
Now the good news is , Boranes you can get hold of .
The bad news is they 're rocket fuels .
Most of them explode spontaneously in contact with air , and when you call up the companies , they only give you minimum ten tons , OK ?
So this was not what they call a laboratory-scale experiment , and they wouldn 't have liked it at my college .
However , I managed to get a hold of a Borane eventually , and here is the beast .
if you measure the vibrational frequencies , they are the same as S-H .
Now , does it smell of sulfur ? Well , if you go back in the literature , there 's a man who knew more about Boranes than anyone alive then or since , Alfred Stock , he synthesized all of them .
And in an enormous 40-page paper in German he says , at one point -- my wife is German and she translated it for me -- and at one point he says , " ganz widerlich Geruch , " an " absolutely repulsive smell , " which is good . Reminiscent of hydrogen sulfide .
So this fact that Boranes smell of sulfur had been known since 1910 , and utterly forgotten until 1997 , 1998 .
Now , the slight fly in the ointment is this : that if we smell molecular vibrations , we must have a spectroscope in our nose .
Now , this is a spectroscope , OK , on my laboratory bench .
And it 's fair to say that if you look up somebody 's nose , you 're unlikely to see anything resembling this .
And this is the main objection to the theory .
OK , great , we smell vibrations . How ? All right ?
Now when people ask this kind of question , they neglect something , which is that physicists are really clever , unlike biologists .
This is a joke . I 'm a biologist , OK ?
So it 's a joke against myself .
Bob Jacklovich and John Lamb at Ford Motor Company , in the days when Ford Motor was spending vast amounts of money on fundamental research , discovered a way to build a spectroscope that was intrinsically nano-scale .
In other words , no mirrors , no lasers , no prisms , no nonsense , just a tiny device , and he built this device . And this device uses electron tunneling .
Now , I could do the dance of electron tunneling , but I 've done a video instead , which is much more interesting . Here 's how it works .
Electrons are fuzzy creatures , and they can jump across gaps , but only at equal energy . If the energy differs , they can 't jump .
Unlike us , they won 't fall off the cliff .
OK . Now . If something absorbs the energy , the electron can travel .
So here you have a system , you have something -- and there 's plenty of that stuff in biology -- some substance giving an electron , and the electron tries to jump , and only when a molecule comes along that has the right vibration does the reaction happen , OK ?
This is the basis for the device that these two guys at Ford built .
And every single part of this mechanism is actually plausible in biology .
In other words , I 've taken off-the-shelf components , and I 've made a spectroscope .
What 's nice about this idea , if you have a philosophical bent of mind , is that then it tells you that the nose , the ear and the eye are all vibrational senses .
Of course , it doesn 't matter , because it could also be that they 're not .
But it has a certain -- -- it has a certain ring to it which is attractive to people who read too much 19th-century German literature .
And then a magnificent thing happened : I left academia and joined the real world of business , and a company was created around my ideas to make new molecules using my method , along the lines of , let 's put someone else 's money where your mouth is .
And one of the first things that happened was we started going around to fragrance companies asking for what they needed , because , of course , if you could calculate smell , you don 't need chemists .
You need a computer , a Mac will do it , if you know how to program the thing right , OK ? So you can try a thousand molecules , you can try ten thousand molecules in a weekend , and then you only tell the chemists to make the right one .
And so that 's a direct path to making new odorants .
we went to see some perfumers in France -- and here 's where I do my Charles Fleischer impression -- and one of them says , " You cannot make a coumarin . "
He says to me , " I bet you cannot make a coumarin . "
Now , coumarin is a very common thing , a material , in fragrance which is derived from a bean that comes from South America .
And it is the classic synthetic aroma chemical , OK ?
It 's the molecule that has made men 's fragrances And the problem is it 's a carcinogen .
So nobody likes particularly to -- you know , aftershave with carcinogens .
There are some reckless people , but it 's not worth it , OK ?
So they asked us to make a new coumarin . And so we started doing calculations .
And the first thing you do is you calculate the vibrational spectrum so that you have a nice picture of what the sort of chord , so to speak , of coumarin is .
And then you start cranking the computer to find other molecules , related or unrelated , that have the same vibrations .
And we actually , in this case , I 'm sorry to say , it happened -- it was serendipitous .
Because I got a phone call from our chief chemist and he said , look , I 've just found this such a beautiful reaction , that even if this compound doesn 't smell of coumarin , I want to do it , it 's just such a nifty , one step -- I mean , chemists have weird minds -- one step , 90 percent yield , you know , and you get this lovely crystalline compound . Let us try it .
And I said , first of all , let me do the calculation on that compound , bottom right , which is related to coumarin , but has an extra pentagon inserted into the molecule .
Calculate the vibrations , the purple spectrum is that new fellow , the white one is the old one .
And the prediction is it should smell of coumarin .
They made it ... and it smelled exactly like coumarin .
And this is our new baby , called tonkene .
You see , when you 're a scientist , you 're always selling ideas .
And people are very resistant to ideas , and rightly so .
Why should new ideas be accepted ?
But when you put a little 10-gram vial on the table in front of perfumers and it smells like coumarin , and it isn 't coumarin , and you 've found it in three weeks , this focuses everybody 's mind wonderfully .
And people often ask me , is your theory accepted ?
And I said , well , by whom ? I mean most , you know -- there 's three attitudes : You 're right , and I don 't know why , which is the most rational one at this point .
You 're right , and I don 't care how you do it , in a sense ; you bring me the molecules , you know .
And : You 're completely wrong , and I 'm sure you 're completely wrong .
OK ? Now , we 're dealing with people who only want results , and this is the commercial world .
And they tell us that even if we do it by astrology , they 're happy .
But we 're not actually doing it by astrology .
But for the last three years , I 've had what I consider to be the best job in the entire universe , which is to put my hobby -- which is , you know , fragrance and all the magnificent things -- plus a little bit of biophysics , a small amount of self-taught chemistry at the service of something that actually works .
Thank you very much .
Marvin Minsky : Health and the human mind
Listen closely -- Marvin Minsky 's arch , eclectic , charmingly offhand talk on health , overpopulation and the human mind is packed with subtlety : wit , wisdom and just an ounce of wily , is-he-joking ? advice .
If you ask people about what part of psychology do they think is hard , and you say , " Well , what about thinking and emotions ? "
Most people will say , " Emotions are terribly hard .
They 're incredibly complex . They can 't -- I have no idea of how they work .
But thinking is really very straightforward : it 's just sort of some kind of logical reasoning , or something .
But that 's not the hard part . "
So here 's a list of problems that come up .
One nice problem is , what do we do about health ?
The other day , I was reading something , and the person said probably the largest single cause of disease is handshaking in the West .
And there was a little study about people who don 't handshake , and comparing them with ones who do handshake .
And I haven 't the foggiest idea of where you find the ones that don 't handshake , because they must be hiding .
And the people who avoid that have 30 percent less infectious disease or something .
Or maybe it was 31 and a quarter percent .
So if you really want to solve the problem of epidemics and so forth , let 's start with that . And since I got that idea , I 've had to shake hundreds of hands .
And I think the only way to avoid it is to have some horrible visible disease , and then you don 't have to explain .
Education : how do we improve education ?
Well , the single best way is to get them to understand that what they 're being told is a whole lot of nonsense .
And then , of course , you have to do something about how to moderate that , so that anybody can -- so they 'll listen to you .
Pollution , energy shortage , environmental diversity , poverty .
How do we make stable societies ? Longevity .
Okay , there 're lots of problems to worry about .
Anyway , the question I think people should talk about -- and it 's absolutely taboo -- is , how many people should there be ?
And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million .
And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear .
If you had 100 million people properly spread out , then if there 's some garbage , you throw it away , preferably where you can 't see it , and it will rot .
Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it .
The problem is , how many people should there be ?
And it 's a sort of choice we have to make .
Most people are about 60 inches high or more , and there 's these cube laws . So if you make them this big , by using nanotechnology , I suppose -- -- then you could have a thousand times as many .
That would solve the problem , but I don 't see anybody doing any research on making people smaller .
Now , it 's nice to reduce the population , but a lot of people want to have children .
And there 's one solution that 's probably only a few years off .
You know you have 46 chromosomes . If you 're lucky , you 've got 23 from each parent . Sometimes you get an extra one or drop one out , but -- so you can skip the grandparent and great-grandparent stage and go right to the great-great-grandparent . And you have 46 people and you give them a scanner , or whatever you need , and they look at their chromosomes and each of them says which one he likes best , or she -- no reason to have just two sexes any more , even . So each child has 46 parents , and I suppose you could let each group of 46 parents have 15 children .
Wouldn 't that be enough ? And then the children would get plenty of support , and nurturing , and mentoring , and the world population would decline very rapidly and everybody would be totally happy .
Timesharing is a little further off in the future .
And there 's this great novel that Arthur Clarke wrote twice , called " Against the Fall of Night " and " The City and the Stars . "
They 're both wonderful and largely the same , except that computers happened in between .
And Arthur was looking at this old book , and he said , " Well , that was wrong .
The future must have some computers . "
So in the second version of it , there are 100 billion or 1,000 billion people on Earth , but they 're all stored on hard disks or floppies , or whatever they have in the future .
And you let a few million of them out at a time .
A person comes out , they live for a thousand years doing whatever they do , and then , when it 's time to go back for a billion years -- or a million , I forget , the numbers don 't matter -- but there really aren 't very many people on Earth at a time .
And you get to think about yourself and your memories , and before you go back into suspension , you edit your memories and you change your personality and so forth .
The plot of the book is that there 's not enough diversity , so that the people who designed the city make sure that every now and then an entirely new person is created .
And in the novel , a particular one named Alvin is created . And he says , maybe this isn 't the best way , and wrecks the whole system .
I don 't think the solutions that I proposed are good enough or smart enough .
I think the big problem is that we 're not smart enough to understand which of the problems we 're facing are good enough .
Therefore , we have to build super intelligent machines like HAL .
As you remember , at some point in the book for " 2001 , " HAL realizes that the universe is too big , and grand , and profound for those really stupid astronauts . If you contrast HAL 's behavior with the triviality of the people on the spaceship , you can see what 's written between the lines .
Well , what are we going to do about that ? We could get smarter .
I think that we 're pretty smart , as compared to chimpanzees , but we 're not smart enough to deal with the colossal problems that we face , either in abstract mathematics or in figuring out economies , or balancing the world around .
So one thing we can do is live longer .
And nobody knows how hard that is , but we 'll probably find out in a few years .
You see , there 's two forks in the road . We know that people live twice as long as chimpanzees almost , and nobody lives more than 120 years , for reasons that aren 't very well understood .
But lots of people now live to 90 or 100 , unless they shake hands too much or something like that .
And so maybe if we lived 200 years , we could accumulate enough skills and knowledge to solve some problems .
So that 's one way of going about it .
And as I said , we don 't know how hard that is . It might be -- after all , most other mammals live half as long as the chimpanzee , so we 're sort of three and a half or four times , have four times the longevity of most mammals . And in the case of the primates , we have almost the same genes . We only differ from chimpanzees , in the present state of knowledge , which is absolute hogwash , maybe by just a few hundred genes .
What I think is that the gene counters don 't know what they 're doing yet .
And whatever you do , don 't read anything about genetics that 's published within your lifetime , or something .
The stuff has a very short half-life , same with brain science .
And so it might be that if we just fix four or five genes , we can live 200 years .
Or it might be that it 's just 30 or 40 , and I doubt that it 's several hundred .
So this is something that people will be discussing and lots of ethicists -- you know , an ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind .
And it 's very hard to find an ethicist who considers any change worth making , because he says , what about the consequences ?
And , of course , we 're not responsible for the consequences of what we 're doing now , are we ? Like all this complaint about clones .
And yet two random people will mate and have this child , and both of them have some pretty rotten genes , and the child is likely to come out to be average .
Which , by chimpanzee standards , is very good indeed .
If we do have longevity , then we 'll have to face the population growth problem anyway . Because if people live 200 or 1,000 years , then we can 't let them have a child more than about once every 200 or 1,000 years .
And so there won 't be any workforce .
And one of the things Laurie Garrett pointed out , and others have , is that a society that doesn 't have people of working age is in real trouble . And things are going to get worse , because there 's nobody to educate the children or to feed the old .
And when I 'm talking about a long lifetime , of course , I don 't want somebody who 's 200 years old to be like our image of what a 200-year-old is -- which is dead , actually .
You know , there 's about 400 different parts of the brain which seem to have different functions .
Nobody knows how most of them work in detail , but we do know that there 're lots of different things in there .
And they don 't always work together . I like Freud 's theory that most of them are cancelling each other out .
And so if you think of yourself as a sort of city with a hundred resources , then , when you 're afraid , for example , you may discard your long-range goals , but you may think deeply and focus on exactly how to achieve that particular goal .
You throw everything else away . You become a monomaniac -- all you care about is not stepping out on that platform .
And when you 're hungry , food becomes more attractive , and so forth .
So I see emotions as highly evolved subsets of your capability .
Emotion is not something added to thought . An emotional state is what you get when you remove 100 or 200 of your normally available resources .
So thinking of emotions as the opposite of -- as something less than thinking is immensely productive . And I hope , in the next few years , to show that this will lead to smart machines .
And I guess I better skip all the rest of this , which are some details on how we might make those smart machines and -- -- and the main idea is in fact that the core of a really smart machine is one that recognizes that a certain kind of problem is facing you .
This is a problem of such and such a type , and therefore there 's a certain way or ways of thinking that are good for that problem .
So I think the future , main problem of psychology is to classify types of predicaments , types of situations , types of obstacles and also to classify available and possible ways to think and pair them up .
So you see , it 's almost like a Pavlovian -- we lost the first hundred years of psychology by really trivial theories , where you say , how do people learn how to react to a situation ? What I 'm saying is , after we go through a lot of levels , including designing a huge , messy system with thousands of ports , we 'll end up again with the central problem of psychology .
Saying , not what are the situations , but what are the kinds of problems and what are the kinds of strategies , how do you learn them , how do you connect them up , how does a really creative person invent a new way of thinking out of the available resources and so forth .
So , I think in the next 20 years , if we can get rid of all of the traditional approaches to artificial intelligence , like neural nets and genetic algorithms and rule-based systems , and just turn our sights a little bit higher to say , can we make a system that can use all those things for the right kind of problem ? Some problems are good for neural nets ; we know that others , neural nets are hopeless on them .
Genetic algorithms are great for certain things ; I suspect I know what they 're bad at , and I won 't tell you .
Thank you .
Taylor Wilson : Yup , I built a nuclear fusion reactor
Taylor Wilson believes nuclear fusion is a solution to our future energy needs , and that kids can change the world . And he knows something about both of those : When he was 14 , he built a working fusion reactor in his parents ' garage . Now 17 , he takes the TED stage at short notice to tell his story .
So my name is Taylor Wilson .
I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist , which may be a little hard to believe , but I am .
And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point , that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to .
So nuclear fusion is our energy future .
And the second point , making the case that kids can really change the world .
So you may ask -- You may ask me , well how do you know what our energy future is ?
Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old .
That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor .
I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old .
I decided I wanted to make a star .
Now most of you are probably saying , well there 's no such thing as nuclear fusion .
I don 't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy .
Well it doesn 't break even .
It doesn 't produce more energy out than I put in , but it still does some pretty cool stuff .
And I assembled this in my garage , and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada , Reno .
And it slams together deuterium , which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it .
So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that 's going on inside the Sun .
And I 'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together , and in the process it has some byproducts , and I utilize those byproducts .
So this previous year , I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair .
I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has .
For hundreds of dollars , I 've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars .
I built this in my garage .
And I 've developed a system to produce medical isotopes .
Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I 've developed a device that , on a very small scale , can produce these isotopes .
So that 's my fusion reactor in the background there .
That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor .
Oh , by the way , I make yellowcake in my garage , so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians .
So maybe I don 't want to admit to that .
This is me at CERN in Geneva , Switzerland , which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world .
And this is me with President Obama , showing him my Homeland Security research .
So in about seven years of doing nuclear research , I started out with a dream to make a " star in a jar , " a star in my garage , and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world , and I think other kids can too .
So thank you very much .
Luis von Ahn : Massive-scale online collaboration
After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books , Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good . In this talk , he shares how his ambitious new project , Duolingo , will help millions learn a new language while translating the Web quickly and accurately -- all for free .
How many of you had to fill out some sort of web form where you 've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this ?
How many of you found it really , really annoying ?
Okay , outstanding . So I invented that .
Or I was one of the people who did it .
That thing is called a CAPTCHA .
And the reason it is there is to make sure you , the entity filling out the form , are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times .
The reason it works is because humans , at least non-visually-impaired humans , have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters , whereas computer programs simply can 't do it as well yet .
So for example , in the case of Ticketmaster , the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets , two at a time .
CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet .
And since they 're used so often , a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that is shown to the user is not so fortunate .
So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page .
The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W , A , I , T , which , of course , spell a word .
But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later .
Text : " Help ! I 've been waiting for over 20 minutes , and nothing happens . "
This person thought they needed to wait .
This of course , is not as bad as this poor person .
CAPTCHA Project is something that we did here at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago , and it 's been used everywhere .
Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later , which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA .
This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA , which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon , then we turned it into a startup company .
And then about a year and a half ago , Google actually acquired this company .
So let me tell you what this project started .
So this project started from the following realization : It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world .
When I first heard this , I was quite proud of myself .
I thought , look at the impact that my research has had .
But then I started feeling bad .
See here 's the thing , each time you type a CAPTCHA , essentially you waste 10 seconds of your time .
And if you multiply that by 200 million , you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs .
So then I started feeling bad .
And then I started thinking , well , of course , we can 't just get rid of CAPTCHAs , because the security of the Web sort of depends on them .
But then I started thinking , is there any way we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity ?
While you 're typing a CAPTCHA , during those 10 seconds , your brain is doing something amazing .
Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do .
So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds ?
Another way of putting it is , is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve , yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA they solve a little bit of this problem ?
And the answer to that is " yes , " and this is what we 're doing now .
So what you may not know is that nowadays while you 're typing a CAPTCHA , not only are you authenticating yourself as a human , but in addition you 're actually helping us to digitize books .
So let me explain how this works .
So there 's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books .
Google has one . The Internet Archive has one .
Amazon , now with the Kindle , is trying to digitize books .
Basically the way this works is you start with an old book .
You 've seen those things , right ? Like a book ?
So you start with a book , and then you scan it .
Now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book .
It gives you an image for every page of the book .
This is an image with text for every page of the book .
The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image .
That 's using a technology called OCR , for optical character recognition , which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there .
Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect .
Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow , OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words .
For example , for things that were written more than 50 years ago , the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words .
So what we 're doing now is we 're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we 're getting people to read them for us while they 're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet .
So the next time you type a CAPTCHA , these words that you 're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize .
And now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because , you see , one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book , it didn 't know what it was , and it 's going to present it to you .
But since it doesn 't know the answer for it , it cannot grade it for you .
So what we do is we give you another word , one for which the system does know the answer .
We don 't tell you which one 's which , and we say , please type both .
And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer , it assumes you are human , and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly .
And if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is , then we get one more word digitized accurately .
So this is how the system works .
And basically , since we released it about three or four years ago , a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA where people wasted their time to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books .
So for example , Ticketmaster .
So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster , you help to digitize a book .
Facebook : Every time you add a friend or poke somebody , you help to digitize a book .
Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA .
And in fact , the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words that we 're digitizing per day is really , really large .
It 's about 100 million a day , which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year .
And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet .
Now of course , since we 're doing so many words per day , funny things can happen .
And this is especially true because now we 're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other .
So funny things can happen .
For example , we presented this word .
It 's the word " Christians " ; there 's nothing wrong with it .
But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word , bad things can happen .
So we get this .
But it 's even worse , because the particular website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God .
Oops .
Here 's another really bad one .
JohnEdwards.com So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday .
Now , of course , we 're not just insulting people .
See here 's the thing , since we 're presenting two randomly chosen words , interesting things can happen .
So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in , which is called CAPTCHA art .
I 'm sure some of you have heard about it .
Here 's how it works .
Imagine you 're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar , like this CAPTCHA .
Then what you 're supposed to do is you take a screen shot of it .
Then of course , you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book .
But then , first you take a screen shot , and then you draw something that is related to it .
That 's how it works .
There are tens of thousands of these .
Some of them are very cute .
Some of them are funnier .
And some of them , like paleontological shvisle , they contain Snoop Dogg .
Okay , so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA .
So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project .
This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCH 750 million , which is a little over 10 percent of the world 's population , has helped us digitize human knowledge .
And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda .
So the question that motivates my research is the following : If you look at humanity 's large-scale achievements , these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically -- like for example , building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon -- there is a curious fact about them , and it is that they were all done with about the same number off people .
It 's weird ; they were all done with about 100,000 people .
And the reason for that is because , before the Internet , coordinating more than 100,000 people , let alone paying them , was essentially impossible .
But now with the Internet , I 've just shown you a project where we 've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge .
So the question that motivates my research is , if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 , what can we do with 100 million ?
So based on this question , we 've had a lot of different projects that we 've been working on .
Let me tell you about one that I 'm most excited about .
This is something that we 've been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so .
It hasn 't yet been launched . It 's called Duolingo .
Since it hasn 't been launched , shhhhh !
Yeah , I can trust you 'll do that .
So this is the project . Here 's how it started .
It started with me posing a question to my graduate student , Severin Hacker .
Okay , that 's Severin Hacker .
So I posed the question to my graduate student .
By the way , you did hear me correctly ; his last name is Hacker .
So I posed this question to him : How can we get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free ?
Okay , so there 's a lot of things to say about this question .
First of all , translating the Web .
So right now the Web is partitioned into multiple languages .
A large fraction of it is in English .
If you don 't know any English , you can 't access it .
But there 's large fractions in other different languages , and if you don 't know those languages , you can 't access it .
So I would like to translate all of the Web , or at least most of the Web , into every major language .
So that 's what I would like to do .
Now some of you may say , why can 't we use computers to translate ?
Why can 't we use machine translation ?
Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there .
Why can 't we use it to translate the whole Web ?
Well the problem with that is that it 's not yet good enough and it probably won 't be for the next 15 to 20 years .
It makes a lot of mistakes .
Even when it doesn 't make a mistake , since it makes so many mistakes , you don 't know whether to trust it or not .
So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine .
Actually it was a forum post .
It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript .
It was translated from Japanese into English .
So I 'll just let you read .
This person starts apologizing for the fact that it 's translated with a computer .
So the next sentence is is going to be the preamble to the question .
So he 's just explaining something .
Remember , it 's a question about JavaScript .
Then comes the first part of the question .
Then comes my favorite part of the question .
And then comes the ending , which is my favorite part of the whole thing .
Okay , so computer translation , not yet good enough .
So back to the question .
So we need people to translate the whole Web .
So now the next question you may have is , well why can 't we just pay people to do this ?
We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web .
We could do that .
Unfortunately , it would be extremely expensive .
For example , translating a tiny , tiny fraction of the whole Web , Wikipedia , into one other language , Spanish .
Wikipedia exists in Spanish , but it 's very small compared to the size of English .
It 's about 20 percent of the size of English .
If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish , it would cost at least 50 million dollars -- and this is at even the most exploited , outsourcing country out there .
So it would be very expensive .
So what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free .
Now if this is what you want to do , you pretty quickly realize you 're going to run into two pretty big hurdles , two big obstacles .
The first one is a lack of bilinguals .
So I don 't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the Web who are bilingual enough to help us translate .
That 's a big problem .
The other problem you 're going to run into is a lack of motivation .
How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the Web for free ?
Normally , you have to pay people to do this .
So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free ?
Now when we were starting to think about this , we were blocked by these two things .
But then we realized , there 's actually a way to solve both these problems with the same solution .
There 's a way to kill two birds with one stone .
And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do , and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals , and that is language education .
there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language .
People really , really want to learn a foreign language .
And it 's not just because they 're being forced to do so in school .
For example , in the United States alone , there are over five million people who have paid over $ 500 for software to learn a new language .
So people really , really want to learn a new language .
So what we 've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website -- it 's called Duolingo -- where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web .
And so basically they 're learning by doing .
So the way this works is whenever you 're a just a beginner , we give you very , very simple sentences .
There 's , of course , a lot of very simple sentences on the Web .
We give you very , very simple sentences along with what each word means .
And as you translate them , and as you see how other people translate them , you start learning the language .
And as you get more and more advanced , we give you more and more complex sentences to translate .
But at all times , you 're learning by doing .
Now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works .
First of all , people are really , really learning a language .
We 're mostly done building it , and now we 're testing it .
People really can learn a language with it .
And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software .
So people really do learn a language .
And not only do they learn it as well , but actually it 's way more interesting .
Because you see with Duolingo , people are actually learning with real content .
As opposed to learning with made-up sentences , people are learning with real content , which is inherently interesting .
So people really do learn a language .
But perhaps more surprisingly , the translations that we get from people using the site , even though they 're just beginners , the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators , which is very surprising .
So let me show you one example .
This is a sentence that was translated from German into English .
The top is the German .
The middle is an English translation that was done by somebody who was a professional English translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation .
And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo , none of whom knew any German before they started using the site .
You can see , it 's pretty much perfect .
Now of course , we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators .
We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator .
Now even though we 're combining the translations , the site actually can translate pretty fast .
So let me show you , this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish .
Remember , this is 50 million dollars-worth of value .
So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish , we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users .
And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users .
Since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users , we 're hopeful that we 'll be able to translate extremely fast with this project .
Now the thing that I 'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education .
So here 's the thing : The current business model for language education is the student pays , and in particular , the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars .
That 's the current business model .
The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world 's population doesn 't have 500 dollars .
So it 's extremely unfair towards the poor .
This is totally biased towards the rich .
Now see , in Duolingo , because while you learn you 're actually creating value , you 're translating stuff -- which for example , we could charge somebody for translations .
So this is how we could monetize this .
Since people are creating value while they 're learning , they don 't have to pay their money , they pay with their time .
But the magical thing here is that they 're paying with their time , but that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language .
So the nice thing about Duolingo is I think it provides a fair business model -- one that doesn 't discriminate against poor people .
So here 's the site . Thank you .
So here 's the site .
We haven 't yet launched , but if you go there , you can sign up to be part of our private beta , which is probably going to start in about three or four weeks .
We haven 't yet launched this Duolingo .
By the way , I 'm the one talking here , but actually Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team , some of whom are here .
So thank you .
Denise Herzing : Could we speak the language of dolphins ?
For 28 years , Denise Herzing has spent five months each summer living with a pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins , following three generations of family relationships and behaviors . It 's clear they are communicating with one another -- but is it language ? Could humans use it too ? She shares a fascinating new experiment to test this idea .
Well , now we 're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I 've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years .
Now I 'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild .
And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives , but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence ?
Well , we know a few things .
We know that their brain-to-body ratio , which is a physical measure of intelligence , is second only to humans .
Cognitively , they can understand artificially-created languages .
And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors .
And in some parts of the world , they use tools , like sponges to hunt fish .
But there 's one big question left : do they have a language , and if so , what are they talking about ?
So decades ago , not years ago , I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system .
Now in most parts of the world , the water 's pretty murky , so it 's very hard to observe animals underwater , but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful , clear , shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida .
And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows , but at night , they go off the edge and hunt in deep water .
Now , it 's not a bad place to be a researcher , either .
So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran , and we live , sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time .
My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone , which is an underwater microphone , and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior .
And most of our work 's pretty non-invasive .
We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we 're in the water , since we 're actually observing them physically in the water .
Now , Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons .
They 're born without spots , and they get spots with age , and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases , so that 's fun to track their behavior .
And by about the age of 15 , they 're fully spotted black and white .
Now the mother you see here is Mugsy .
She 's 35 years old in this shot , but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s .
And like all the dolphins in our community , we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin , and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time .
Now , young dolphins learn a lot as they 're growing up , and they use their teenage years to practice social skills , and at about the age of nine , the females become sexually mature , so they can get pregnant , and the males mature quite a bit later , at around 15 years of age .
And dolphins are very promiscuous , and so we have to determine who the fathers are , so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA .
So what that means is , after 28 years , we are tracking three generations , including grandmothers and grandfathers .
Now , dolphins are natural acousticians .
They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do .
But they have other communication signals they use .
They have good vision , so they use body postures to communicate .
They have taste , not smell .
And they have touch .
And sound can actually be felt in the water , because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water 's about the same .
So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance .
Now , we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors .
Now , the signature whistle is a whistle that 's specific to an individual dolphin , and it 's like a name .
And this is the best-studied sound , because it 's easy to measure , really , and you 'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting , for example .
Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks .
This is the dolphin 's sonar .
And they use these clicks to hunt and feed .
But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially .
For example , males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase .
You know , I 've been buzzed in the water .
Don 't tell anyone . It 's a secret .
And you can really feel the sound . That was my point with that .
So dolphins are also political animals , so they have to resolve conflicts .
And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they 're fighting .
And these are very unstudied sounds because they 're hard to measure .
Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight .
So you 're going to see two groups , and you 're going to see the head-to-head posturing , some open mouths , lots of squawking .
There 's a bubble .
And basically , one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine , and it doesn 't really escalate into violence too much .
Now , in the Bahamas , we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins .
For example , they babysit each other 's calves .
The males have dominance displays that they use when they 're chasing each other 's females .
And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they 're chasing sharks away .
And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony .
They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger .
Now , these are bottlenose dolphins , and you 'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds .
You see , they 're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad .
I wish I was that coordinated .
Now , it 's important to remember that you 're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds , and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds , and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds .
Now , researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory , and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages .
But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery .
Now , these are three spectragrams .
Two are human words , and one is a dolphin vocalizing .
So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin .
Now , it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes .
Now , one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean , but it 's a difficult job , and we actually don 't have a Rosetta Stone yet .
But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology , an interface to do two-way communication , and that 's what we 've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time .
Now , scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins .
This underwater keyboard in Orlando , Florida , at the Epcot Center , was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information .
So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas , but in a more natural setting .
And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity .
They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures , and they were also inviting us into dolphin games .
Now , dolphins are social mammals , so they love to play , and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed , or sargassum in this case , around .
And they 're very adept . They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage .
Now in this footage , the adult is Caroh .
She 's 25 years old here , and this is her newborn , Cobalt , and he 's just learning how to play this game .
She 's kind of teasing him and taunting him .
He really wants that sargassum .
Now , when dolphins solicit humans for this game , they 'll often sink vertically in the water , and they 'll have a little sargassum on their flipper , and they 'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it , and then we 'll have a little seaweed keep away game .
But when we don 't dive down and get it , they 'll bring it to the surface and they 'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves , and then we 'll pick it up and have a game .
And so we started thinking , well , wouldn 't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time , their favorite toys ?
So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer , and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other .
But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard .
They 've got better things to do in the wild .
They might do it in captivity , but in the wild -- So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water , and we labeled four objects they like to play with , the scarf , rope , sargassum , and also had a bow ride , which is a fun activity for a dolphin .
And that 's the scarf whistle , which is also associated with a visual symbol .
And these are artificially created whistles .
They 're outside the dolphin 's normal repertoire , but they 're easily mimicked by the dolphins .
And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour , working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching .
And the dolphins could get in on the game .
They could point at the visual object , or they could mimic the whistle .
Now this is video of a session .
The diver here has a rope toy , and I 'm on the keyboard on the left , and I 've just played the rope key , and that 's the request for the toy from the human .
So I 've got the rope , I 'm diving down , and I 'm basically trying to get the dolphin 's attention , because they 're kind of like little kids .
You have to keep their attention .
I 'm going to drop the rope , see if they come over .
Here they come , and then they 're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy .
Now , I 'm at the keyboard on the left , and this is actually the first time that we tried this .
I 'm going to try to request this toy , the rope toy , from the dolphins using the rope sound .
Let 's see if they might actually understand what that means .
That 's the rope whistle .
Up come the dolphins , and drop off the rope , yay . Wow .
So this is only once .
We don 't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles .
Okay , so here 's a second toy in the water .
This is a scarf toy , and I 'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal .
Now this dolphin , we call her " the scarf thief , " because over the years she 's absconded with about 12 scarves .
In fact , we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas .
So I 'm reaching over . She 's got the scarf on her right side .
And we try to not touch the animals too much , we really don 't want to over-habituate them .
And I 'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard .
And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf .
So I try to give her the scarf .
Whoop . Almost lost it .
But this is the moment where everything becomes possible .
The dolphin 's at the keyboard .
You 've got full attention .
And this sometimes went on for hours .
And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs , because they haven 't happened yet , but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have , and interest in the system .
And because of this , we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology .
So we joined forces with Georgia Tech , with Thad Starner 's wearable computing group , to build us an underwater wearable computer that we 're calling CHAT . [ CHAT : Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry ] Now , instead of pushing a keyboard through the water , the diver 's wearing the complete system , and it 's acoustic only , so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm , the sounds go out through an underwater speaker , if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle , the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones .
The computer can localize who requested the toy if there 's a word match .
And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition , so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately .
And we 're at prototype stage , but this is how we hope it will play out .
So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle , the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water , but also as a word through bone conduction .
So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it .
What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle , and if Diver A has the sargassum , if that 's the sound that was played and requested , then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they 'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever .
Now , how far can this kind of communication go ?
Well , CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us .
It 's designed to really be two-way .
Now , will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally ?
We hope so and we think so .
But as we decode their natural sounds , we 're also planning to put those back into the computerized system .
For example , right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin .
Likewise , we can create our own whistles , our own whistle names , and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with .
Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road .
In the case of a dolphin , you know , it 's a species that , well , they 're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now , but they live in quite a different environment , and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems .
I mean , imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet .
Thank you .

Thomas Heatherwick : Building the Seed Cathedral
A future more beautiful ? Architect Thomas Heatherwick shows five recent projects featuring ingenious bio-inspired designs . Some are remakes of the ordinary : a bus , a bridge , a power station ... And one is an extraordinary pavilion , the Seed Cathedral , a celebration of growth and light .
Hello , my name is Thomas Heatherwick .
I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings .
When I was growing up , I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale .
And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold .
And there on the smaller scale , the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument , was a materiality and a soulfulness .
And this influenced me .
The first building I built was 20 years ago .
And since , in the last 20 years , I 've developed a studio in London .
Sorry , this was my mother , by the way , in her bead shop in London .
I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that .
I 'm just going to show , for people who don 't know my studio 's work , a few projects that we 've worked on .
This is a hospital building .
This is a shop for a bag company .
This is studios for artists .
This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball .
And this is a window display .
And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul 's Cathedral in London .
And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk .
And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain .
And just very quickly , something we 've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again .
Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with , which had this open platform at the back -- in fact , I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually .
But they aren 't in London .
And so you 're stuck on a bus .
And if the bus is going to stop and it 's three yards away from the bus stop , you 're just a prisoner .
But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform .
So we 've been working with Transport for London , and that organization hasn 't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years .
And so we 've been very lucky to have a chance to work .
The brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy .
So it 's got hybrid drive .
And we 've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics .
I was going to show four main projects .
And this is a project for a bridge .
And so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open .
And openings seemed -- everyone loves opening bridges , but it 's quite a basic thing .
I think we all kind of stand and watch .
But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed -- I 'm slightly squeamish -- but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball .
And as he was diving , someone had stamped on his knee , and it had broken like this .
And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn 't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken .
And so this is in Paddington in London .
And it 's a very boring bridge , as you can see .
It 's just steel and timber .
But instead of what it is , our focus was on the way it worked .
So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other .
We actually had to halve its speed , because everyone was too scared when we first did it .
So that 's it speeded up .
A project that we 've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station -- so a power station that uses organic waste material .
In the news , the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time .
And we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power .
But recently , any annual report of a power company doesn 't have a power station on it .
It has a child running through a field , or something like that .
And so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station , our condition was that we would work with them and that , whatever we did , we were not just going to decorate a normal power station .
And instead , we had to learn -- we kind of forced them to teach us .
And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements , and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren 't being capitalized on .
That just taking a field and banging all these things out isn 't necessarily the most efficient way that they could work .
So we looked at how we could compose all those elements -- instead of just litter , create one composition .
And what we found -- this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain .
It was voted the worst place in Britain to live .
And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station .
So it felt this has a social dimension .
It has a symbolic importance .
And we should be proud of where our power is coming from , rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of .
So we were looking at how we could make a power station , that , instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside , could be a place that pulls you in .
And it has to be -- I 'm trying to get my -- 250 feet high .
So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in , and using the spare soil that 's there on the site , we could make a power station that was silent as well .
Because just that soil could make the acoustic difference .
And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this .
The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station .
It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top .
And it 's a power park .
So people can come and really experience this and also look out all around the area , and use that height that we have to have for its function .
In Shanghai , we were invited to build -- well we weren 't invited ; what am I talking about .
We won the competition , and it was painful to get there .
So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion .
And an expo is a totally bonkers thing .
There 's 250 pavilions .
It 's the world 's biggest ever expo that had ever happened .
So there are up to a million people there everyday .
And 250 countries all competing .
And the British government saying , " You need to be in the top five . "
And so that became the governmental goal -- is , how do you stand out in this chaos , which is an expo of stimulus ?
So our sense was we had to do one thing , and only one thing , instead of trying to have everything .
And so what we also felt was that whatever we did we couldn 't do a cheesy advert for Britain .
But the thing that was true , the expo was about the future of cities , and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities .
And the world 's first public park of modern times was in Britain .
And the world 's first major botanical institution is in London , and they have this extraordinary project where they 've been collecting 25 percent of all the world 's plant species .
So we suddenly realized that there was this thing .
And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful , and I 've never met anyone who says , " I don 't like trees . "
And the same with flowers .
I 've never met anyone who says , " I don 't like flowers . "
But we realized that seeds -- there 's been this very serious project happening -- but that seeds -- at these major botanical gardens , seeds aren 't on show .
But you just have to go to a garden center , and they 're in little paper packets .
But this phenomenal project 's been happening .
So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds , some kind of seed cathedral .
But how could we show these teeny-weeny things ?
And the film " Jurassic Park " actually really helped us .
Because the DNA of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious , rather than looking like nuts .
So the challenge was , how are we going to bring light and expose these things ?
We didn 't want to make a separate building and have separate content .
So we were trying to think , how could we make a whole thing emanate .
By the way , we had half the budget of the other Western nations .
So that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch .
And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue .
Thomas Heatherwick : Okay , you get the idea .
So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us , and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box , very simple box element , and make it a building that could move in the wind .
So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows .
And inside , the daylight -- each one is an optic and it brings light into the center .
And by night , artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside .
And to make the project affordable , we focused our energy .
Instead of building a building as big as the football pitch , we focused it on this one element .
And the government agreed to do that and not do anything else , and focus our energy on that .
And so the rest of the site was a public space .
And with a million people there a day , it just felt like offering some public space .
We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral , so that , even if you 're partially-sighted , that it was kind of crunchy and soft , that piece of landscape that you see there .
And then , you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur -- in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral , in effect , we 've shaved it .
And inside there 's nothing ; there 's no famous actor 's voice ; there 's no projections ; there 's no televisions ; there 's no color changing .
There 's just silence and a cool temperature .
And if a cloud goes past , you can see a cloud on the tips where it 's letting the light through .
This is the only project that we 've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings .
A key thing was how people would interact .
I mean , in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo .
And I just wanted to show you .
The British government -- any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have .
And there was a lot of terror .
But there was an underlying support .
And so there was a moment when suddenly -- actually , the next thing .
This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment , who was our client , with the Chinese children , using the landscape .
Children : One , two , three , go .
TH : I 'm sorry about my stupid voice there .
So finally , texture is something .
In the projects we 've been working on , these slick buildings , where they might be a fancy shape , but the materiality feels the same , is something that we 've been trying to research really , and explore alternatives .
And the project that we 're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer .
And it 's in a piece of land that 's this site .
And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur said that , if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city , they would give them more gross floor area , buildable .
So there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city .
And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower , and you squeeze a few trees around the edge , and you see cars parked .
It 's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience , and the rest of it is just for postcards .
The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this .
So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom , we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer .
And by linking these together , we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest , instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings .
So we 're building these buildings .
They 're actually identical , so it 's quite cost-effective .
They 're just chopped at different heights .
But the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape , rather than engulf it .
And that 's my final slide .
Thank you .
Thank you .
So thank you . Thank you , Thomas . You 're a delight .
Since we have an extra minute here , I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds , which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building .
TH : These are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure .
So there were 66,000 of these .
This optic was 22 feet long .
And so the daylight was just coming -- it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed .
Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy .
Because it 's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway , but if you say you 're going to drill 66,000 holes in it -- we had quite a time .
There was one person in the contractors who was the right size -- and it wasn 't a child -- who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building .
Thank you , Thomas .
Juan Enriquez : Your online life , permanent as a tattoo
What if Andy Warhol had it wrong , and instead of being famous for 15 minutes , we 're only anonymous for that long ? In this short talk , Juan Enriquez looks at the surprisingly permanent effects of digital sharing on our personal privacy . He shares insight from the ancient Greeks to help us deal with our new " digital tattoos . "
All right , so let 's take four subjects that obviously go together : big data , tattoos , immortality and the Greeks .
Right ?
Now , the issue about tattoos is that , without a word , tattoos really do shout .
[ Beautiful ] [ Intriguing ] So you don 't have to say a lot .
[ Allegiance ] [ Very intimate ] [ Serious mistakes ] And tattoos tell you a lot of stories .
If I can ask an indiscreet question , how many of you have tattoos ?
A few , but not most .
What happens if Facebook , Google , Twitter , LinkedIn , cell phones , GPS , Foursquare , Yelp , Travel Advisor , all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos ?
And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would ?
What 's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting , blogging , following you , watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself .
And electronic tattoos also shout .
And as you 're thinking of the consequences of that , it 's getting really hard to hide from this stuff , among other things , because it 's not just the electronic tattoos , it 's facial recognition that 's getting really good .
So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names , although , again , sometimes it does make mistakes .
But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this , take a picture , say , of this guy right here , get the name , and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody , because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos .
And so there 's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online .
Here 's what happened to this company .
[ Company sold to Facebook , June 18 , 2012 ... ] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture , they tie it to the social media , they figure out you really like to wear black dresses , so maybe the person in the store comes up and says , " Hey , we 've got five black dresses that would just look great on you . "
So what if Andy was wrong ?
Here 's Andy 's theory .
[ In the future , everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes . ] What if we flip this ?
What if you 're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes ?
Well , then , because of electronic tattoos , maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality , because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will .
And if that 's true , then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American .
Why the Greeks ?
Well , the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time .
So lesson number one : Sisyphus .
Remember ? He did a horrible thing , condemned for all time to roll this rock up , it would roll back down , roll back up , roll back down .
It 's a little like your reputation .
Once you get that electronic tattoo , you 're going to be rolling up and down for a long time , so as you go through this stuff , just be careful what you post .
Myth number two : Orpheus , wonderful guy , charming to be around , great partier , great singer , loses his beloved , charms his way into the underworld , only person to charm his way into the underworld , charms the gods of the underworld , they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they 're out .
So he 's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can 't resist . He looks at her , loses her forever .
With all this data out here , it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love .
Lesson number three : Atalanta .
Greatest runner . She would challenge anybody .
If you won , she would marry you .
If you lost , you died .
How did Hippomenes beat her ?
Well , he had all these wonderful little golden apples , and she 'd run ahead , and he 'd roll a little golden apple .
She 'd run ahead , and he 'd roll a little golden apple .
She kept getting distracted . He eventually won the race .
Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message .
And then , of course , there 's Narcissus .
Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus .
But as you 're thinking about Narcissus , just don 't fall in love with your own reflection .
Last lesson , from a Latin American : This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges .
When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta , he came back and said , " Oh , come on , how else can you threaten , other than with death ? "
The interesting thing , the original thing , would be to threaten somebody with immortality .
And that , of course , is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos .
Thank you .
How web video powers global innovation
TED 's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print . But to tap into its power , organizations will need to embrace radical openness . And for TED , it means the dawn of a whole new chapter ...
If nothing else , at least I 've discovered what it is we put our speakers through : sweaty palms , sleepless nights , a wholly unnatural fear of clocks .
I mean , it 's quite brutal .
And I 'm also a little nervous about this .
There are nine billion humans coming our way .
Now , the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet .
But recently , I 've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds , because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool .
It 's a phenomenon that I think any organization or individual can tap into .
It certainly impacted the way we think about TED 's future , and perhaps the world 's future overall .
So , let 's explore .
The story starts with just a single person , a child , behaving a little strangely .
This kid is known online as Lil Demon .
He 's doing tricks here , dance tricks , that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before .
How did he learn them ?
And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken ?
Here 's a clue .
Lil Demon : Step your game up . Oh . Oh . Step your game up . Oh . Oh . So , that was sent to me by this man , a filmmaker , Jonathan Chu , who told me that was the moment he realized the Internet was causing dance to evolve .
This is what he said at TED in February .
In essence , dancers were challenging each other online to get better ; incredible new dance skills were being invented ; even the six-year-olds were joining in .
It felt like a revolution .
And so Jon had a brilliant idea : He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of YouTube to create this dance troupe -- The League of Extraordinary Dancers , the LXD .
I mean , these kids were web-taught , but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year .
And at TED here in February , their passion and brilliance just took our breath away .
So , this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar .
You know , a while after TEDTalks started taking off , we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation .
It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two .
... Months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes , raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers , with the effects that we 've seen this week .
It 's not as if J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying , " Step your game up , " but they might as well have .
So , in both of these cases , you 've got these cycles of improvement , apparently driven by people watching web video .
What is going on here ?
Well , I think it 's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call " crowd-accelerated innovation . "
And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear .
You can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel .
You turn up the dials , the wheel starts to turn .
And the first thing you need is ... a crowd , a group of people who share a common interest .
The bigger the crowd , the more potential innovators there are .
That 's important , but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles .
They 're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges .
The second thing you need is light .
You need clear , open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of , because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate .
And third , you need desire .
You know , innovation 's hard work .
It 's based on hundreds of hours of research , of practice .
Absent desire , not going to happen .
Now , here 's an example -- pre-Internet -- of this machine in action .
Dancers at a street corner -- it 's a crowd , a small one , but they can all obviously see what each other can do .
And the desire part comes , I guess , from social status , right ?
Best dancer walks tall , gets the best date .
There 's probably going to be some innovation happening here .
But on the web , all three dials are ratcheted right up .
The dance community is now global .
There 's millions connected .
And amazingly , you can still see what the best can do , because the crowd itself shines a light on them , either directly , through comments , ratings , email , Facebook , Twitter , or indirectly , through numbers of views , through links that point Google there .
So , it 's easy to find the good stuff , and when you 've found it , you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it .
That 's a lot of light .
But the desire element is really dialed way up .
I mean , you might just be a kid with a webcam , but if you can do something that goes viral , you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people .
You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you .
And even if it 's not that eloquent -- and it 's not -- it can still really make your day .
So , this possibility of a new type of global recognition , I think , is driving huge amounts of effort .
And it 's important to note that it 's not just the stars who are benefiting : because you can see the best , everyone can learn .
Also , the system is self-fueling .
It 's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire , but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd .
So , this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation .
Invite the crowd , let in the light , dial up the desire .
And the hardest part about that is probably the light , because it means you have to open up , you have to show your stuff to the world .
It 's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it .
And , very happily , there 's one class of people who really can 't make use of this tool .
The dark side of the web is allergic to the light .
I don 't think we 're going to see terrorists , for example , publishing their plans online and saying to the world , " Please , could you help us to actually make them work this time ? "
But you can publish your stuff online .
And if you can get that wheel to turn , look out .
So , at TED , we 've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness .
In fact , my colleague , June Cohen , has taken to calling it " radical openness , " because it works for us each time .
We opened up our talks to the world , and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers ' ideas , and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers .
By opening up our translation program , thousands of heroic volunteers -- some of them watching online right now , and thank you ! -- have translated our talks into more than 70 languages , thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries .
By giving away our TEDx brand , we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas .
And these organizers , they 're seeing each other , they 're learning from each other .
We are learning from them .
We 're getting great talks back from them .
The wheel is turning .
Okay , step back a minute .
I mean , it 's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups .
You know , we 've heard that this week -- this romantic notion of the lone genius with the " eureka ! " moment that changes the world is misleading .
Even he said that , and he would know .
We 're a social species .
We spark off each other .
It 's also not news to say that the Internet has accelerated innovation .
For the past 15 years , powerful communities have been connecting online , sparking off each other .
If you take programmers , you know , the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation .
But what 's key here is , the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally -- a picture , a music file , software .
And that 's why what I 'm excited about , and what I think is under-reported , is the significance of the rise of online video .
This is the technology that 's going to allow the rest of the world 's talents to be shared digitally , thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation .
The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free , for this reason : video files are huge ; the web couldn 't handle them .
But in the last 10 years , bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold .
Suddenly , here we are .
Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day .
Cisco actually estimates that , within four years , more than 90 percent of the web 's data will be video .
If it 's all puppies , porn and piracy , we 're doomed .
I don 't think it will be .
Video is high-bandwidth for a reason .
It packs a huge amount of data , and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it .
Here , let me introduce you to Sam Haber .
He 's a unicyclist .
Before YouTube , there was no way for him to discover his sport 's true potential , because you can 't communicate this stuff in words , right ?
But looking at video clips posted by strangers , a world of possibility opens up for him .
Suddenly , he starts to emulate and then to innovate .
And a global community of unicyclists discover each other online , inspire each other to greatness .
And there are thousands of other examples of this happening -- of video-driven evolution of skills , ranging from the physical to the artful .
And I have to tell you , as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines , I find this strangely beautiful .
I mean , there 's a lot of passion right here on this screen .
But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry aren 't quite your cup of tea , how about this .
Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video .
There 's a problem with a traditional scientific paper .
It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print .
Here 's one such frustrated scientist , Moshe Pritsker , the founder of Jove .
He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this .
But look at this video .
I mean , look : if you can show instead of just describing , that problem goes away .
So it 's not far-fetched to say that , at some point , online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance .
Here 's another example that 's close to our hearts at TED , where video is sometimes more powerful than print -- the sharing of an idea .
Why do people like watching TEDTalks ?
All those ideas are already out there in print .
It 's actually faster to read than to view .
Why would someone bother ?
Well , so , there 's some showing as well as telling .
But even leaving the screen out of it , there 's still a lot more being transferred than just words .
And in that non-verbal portion , there 's some serious magic .
Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures , the vocal cadence , the facial expressions , the eye contact , the passion , the kind of awkward , British body language , the sense of how the audience are reacting , there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand , and whether you 're inspired -- light , if you like , and desire .
Incredibly , all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen .
Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions .
Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution .
That 's what 's made it into this mysterious , powerful thing it is .
Someone speaks , there 's resonance in all these receiving brains , the whole group acts together .
I mean , this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action .
It 's probably driven our culture for millennia .
500 years ago , it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage .
It 's right here .
Print scaled .
The world 's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide , and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine .
But now , in the blink of an eye , the game has changed again .
It 's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing , online video can now do for face-to-face communication .
So , that primal medium , which your brain is exquisitely wired for ...
that just went global .
Now , this is big .
We may have to reinvent an ancient art form .
I mean , today , one person speaking can be seen by millions , shedding bright light on potent ideas , creating intense desire for learning and to respond -- and in his case , intense desire to laugh .
For the first time in human history , talented students don 't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers .
They can sit two feet in front of the world 's finest .
Now , TED is just a small part of this .
I mean , the world 's universities are opening up their curricula .
Thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online .
Thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and , crucially , to respond , completing the cycle .
And so , as we 've thought about this , you know , it 's become clear to us what the next stage of TED 's evolution has to be .
TEDTalks can 't be a one-way process , one-to-many .
Our future is many-to-many .
So , we 're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you , the global TED community , to respond to speakers , to contribute your own ideas , maybe even your own TEDTalks , and to help shine a light on the very best of what 's out there .
Because , if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool , this wheel turns .
Now , is it possible to imagine a similar process to this , happening to global education overall ?
I mean , does it have to be this painful , top-down process ?
Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate ?
It 's the participation age , right ?
Schools can 't be silos .
We can 't stop learning at age 21 .
What if , in the coming crowd of nine billion ...
what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors , instead of net plunderers ?
That changes everything , right ?
I mean , that would take more teachers than we 've ever had .
But the good news is they are out there .
They 're in the crowd , and the crowd is switching on lights , and we can see them for the first time , not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers , but as individuals we can learn from .
Who 's the teacher ?
You 're the teacher .
You 're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history , a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter , wiser , more beautiful place .
Here 's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near where I grew up .
Within five years , each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web .
I mean , is it crazy to think that this girl , in the back , at the right , in 15 years , might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren ?
It 's not crazy ; it 's actually happening right now .
I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED who just happens to live in Africa 's biggest shantytown .
Christopher Makau : Hi . My name is Christopher Makau .
I 'm one of the organizers of TEDxKibera .
There are so many good things which are happening right here in Kibera .
There 's a self-help group .
They turned a trash place into a garden .
The same spot , it was a crime spot where people were being robbed .
They used the same trash to form green manure .
The same trash site is feeding more than 30 families .
We have our own film school .
They are using Flip cameras to record , edit , and reporting to their own channel , Kibera TV .
Because of a scarcity of land , we are using the sacks to grow vegetables , and also [ we 're ] able to save on the cost of living .
Change happens when we see things in a different way .
Today , I see Kibera in a different way .
My message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is : Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas .
You know what ?
I bet Chris has always been an inspiring guy .
What 's new -- and it 's huge -- is that , for the first time , we get to see him , and he can see us .
Right now , Chris and Kevin and Dennis and Dickson and their friends are watching us , in Nairobi , right now .
Guys , we 've learned from you today .
Thank you .
And thank you .
Aimee Mullins : My 12 pairs of legs
Athlete , actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she 's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her : speed , beauty , an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply , she redefines what the body can be .
I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids , ages six to eight , at a children 's museum , and I brought with me a bag full of legs , similar to the kinds of things you see up here , and had them laid out on a table for the kids .
And , from my experience , you know , kids are naturally curious about what they don 't know , or don 't understand , or is foreign to them .
They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way , and maybe censors that natural curiosity , or you know , reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids .
So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids , saying , " Now , whatever you do , don 't stare at her legs . "
But , of course , that 's the point .
That 's why I was there , I wanted to invite them to look and explore .
So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own .
The doors open , the kids descend on this table of legs , and they are poking and prodding , and they 're wiggling toes , and they 're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that .
And I said , " Kids , really quickly -- I woke up this morning , I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house -- nothing too big , two or three stories -- but , if you could think of any animal , any superhero , any cartoon character , anything you can dream up right now , what kind of legs would you build me ? "
And immediately a voice shouted , " Kangaroo ! "
" No , no , no ! Should be a frog ! "
" No . It should be Go Go Gadget ! "
" No , no , no ! It should be the Incredibles . "
And other things that I don 't -- aren 't familiar with .
And then , one eight-year-old said , " Hey , why wouldn 't you want to fly too ? "
And the whole room , including me , was like , " Yeah . "
And just like that , I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as " disabled " to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn 't have yet .
Somebody that might even be super-abled .
Interesting .
So some of you actually saw me at TED , 11 years ago .
And there 's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees , and I am no exception .
TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life 's exploration .
At the time , the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics .
I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah , which you may have seen on stage yesterday .
And also these very life-like , intrinsically painted silicone legs .
So at the time , it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs .
So that we can stop compartmentalizing form , function and aesthetic , and assigning them different values .
Well , lucky for me , a lot of people answered that call .
And the journey started , funny enough , with a TED conference attendee -- Chee Pearlman , who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today .
She was the editor then of a magazine called ID , and she gave me a cover story .
This started an incredible journey .
Curious encounters were happening to me at the time ; I 'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world .
And people would come up to me after the conference , after my talk , men and women .
And the conversation would go something like this , " You know Aimee , you 're very attractive .
You don 't look disabled . "
I thought , " Well , that 's amazing , because I don 't feel disabled . "
And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored , about beauty .
What does a beautiful woman have to look like ?
What is a sexy body ?
And interestingly , from an identity standpoint , what does it mean to have a disability ?
I mean , people -- Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do .
Nobody calls her disabled .
So this magazine , through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville , went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen , and photographer Nick Knight , who were also interested in exploring that conversation .
So , three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London , doing my first fashion shoot , which resulted in this cover -- " Fashion-able " ?
Three months after that , I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash .
Nobody knew -- everyone thought they were wooden boots .
Actually , I have them on stage with me : grapevines , magnolias -- truly stunning .
Poetry matters .
Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art .
It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look , and look a little longer , and maybe even understand .
I learned this firsthand with my next adventure .
The artist Matthew Barney , in his film opus called the " The Cremaster Cycle . "
This is where it really hit home for me -- that my legs could be wearable sculpture .
And even at this point , I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal .
So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they 're actually optically clear polyurethane , a.k.a. bowling ball material .
Heavy !
Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them , and beetroots out the top , and a very lovely brass toe .
That 's a good close-up of that one .
Then another character was a half-woman , half-cheetah -- a little homage to my life as an athlete .
14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws , claws and a tail that whipped around , like a gecko .
And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these -- look like jellyfish legs , also polyurethane .
And the only purpose that these legs can serve , outside the context of the film , is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination .
So whimsy matters .
Today , I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me , and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet , and I can change my height -- I have a variable of five different heights .
Today , I 'm 6 ' 1 " .
And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan , my first night out on the town , I went to a very fancy party .
And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5 ' 8 " .
Her mouth dropped open when she saw me , and she went , " But you 're so tall ! "
And I said , " I know . Isn 't it fun ? "
I mean , it 's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts , but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have .
And I was having fun with it .
And she looked at me , and she said , " But , Aimee , that 's not fair . "
And the incredible thing was she really meant it .
It 's not fair that you can change your height , as you want it .
And that 's when I knew -- that 's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade .
It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency .
It 's a conversation about augmentation .
It 's a conversation about potential .
A prosthetic limb doesn 't represent the need to replace loss anymore .
It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space .
So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment .
And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology -- robotics , bionics -- with the age-old poetry , we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity .
I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity , we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have .
I think of Shakespeare 's Shylock : " If you prick us , do we not bleed , and if you tickle us , do we not laugh ? "
It is our humanity , and all the potential within it , that makes us beautiful .
Thank you .
Anna Deavere Smith : Four American characters
Writer and actor Anna Deavere Smith gives life to author Studs Terkel , convict Paulette Jenkins , a Korean shopkeeper and a bull rider , excerpts from her solo show " On the Road : A Search for American Character . "
So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl , " If you say a word often enough , it becomes you . "
And having grown up in a segregated city , Baltimore , Maryland , I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder -- thank God for technology -- to interview people , thinking that if I walked in their words -- which is also why I don 't wear shoes when I perform -- if I walked in their words , that I could sort of absorb America .
I was also inspired by Walt Whitman , who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him .
So these four characters are going to be from that work that I 've been doing for many years now , and well over , I don 't know , a couple of thousand people I 've interviewed .
Anybody out here old enough to know Studs Terkel , that old radio man ?
So I thought he would be the perfect person to go to to ask about a defining moment in American history .
You know , he was " born in 1912 , the year the Titanic sank , greatest ship every built . Hits the tip of an iceberg , and bam , it went down . It went down and I came up . Wow , some century . "
So this is his answer about a defining moment in American history .
" Defining moment in American history , I don 't think there 's one ; you can 't say Hiroshima , that 's a big one -- I can 't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment .
The gradual slippage -- ' slippage ' is the word used by the people in Watergate , moral slippage -- it 's a gradual kind of thing , combination of things .
You see , we also have the technology .
I say , less and less the human touch .
" Oh , let me kind of tell you a funny little play bit .
The Atlanta airport is a modern airport , and they should leave the gate there .
These trains that take you out to a concourse and on to a destination .
And these trains are smooth , and they 're quiet and they 're efficient .
And there 's a voice on the train , you know the voice was a human voice .
You see in the old days we had robots , robots imitated humans .
Now we have humans imitating robots .
So we got this voice on this train : Concourse One : Omaha , Lincoln .
Concourse Two : Dallas , Fort Worth . Same voice .
Just as a train is about to go , a young couple rush in and they 're just about to close the pneumatic doors .
And that voice , without losing a beat , says , ' Because of late entry , we 're delayed 30 seconds . ' Just then , everybody 's looking at this couple with hateful eyes and the couple 's going like this , you know , shrinking .
Well , I 'd happened to have had a couple of drinks before boarding -- I do that to steel my nerves -- and so I imitate a train call , holding my hand on my -- ' George Orwell , your time has come , ' you see .
Well , some of you are laughing . Everybody laughs when I say that , but not on this train . Silence .
And so suddenly they 're looking at me .
So here I am with the couple , the three of us shrinking at the foot of Calvary about to be up , you know .
" Just then I see a baby , a little baby in the lap of a mother .
I know it 's Hispanic because she 's speaking Spanish to her companion .
So I 'm going to talk to the baby . So I say to the baby , holding my hand over my mouth because my breath must be 100 proof , I say to the baby , ' Sir or Madam , what is your considered opinion of the human species ? ' And the baby looks , you know , the way babies look at you clearly , starts laughing , starts busting out with this crazy little laugh .
I say , ' Thank God for a human reaction , we haven 't lost yet . ' " But you see , the human touch , you see , it 's disappearing .
You know , you see , you 've got to question the official truth .
You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain -- you know we honor Mark Twain , but we don 't read him .
We read ' Huck Finn , ' of course , we read ' Huck Finn ' of course .
I mean , Huck , of course , was tremendous .
Remember that great scene on the raft , remember what Huck did ?
You see , here 's Huck ; he 's an illiterate kid ; he 's had no schooling , but there 's something in him .
And the official truth , the truth was , the law was , that a black man was a property , was a thing , you see .
And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim , a slave , see .
And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them , and Huck says , ' Ooh , oh my God , ooh , ooh -- that woman , that woman never did anybody any harm .
Ooh , he 's going to steal ; he 's going to steal ; he 's going to do a terrible thing . ' Just then , two slavers caught up , guys chasing slaves , looking for Jim .
'Anybody up on that raft with you ? ' Huck says , ' Yeah . ' ' Is he black or white ? ' ' White . ' And they go off .
And Huck said , ' Oh my God , oh my God , I lied , I lied , ooh , I did a terrible thing , did a terrible thing -- why do I feel so good ? ' " But it 's the goodness of Huck , that stuff that Huck 's been made of , you see , all been buried ; it 's all been buried .
So the human touch , you see , it 's disappearing .
So you ask about a defining moment -- ain 't no defining moment in American history for me .
It 's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now , where trivia becomes news .
And more and more , less and less awareness of the pain of the other .
Huh . You know , I don 't know if you could use this or not , but I was quoting Wright Morris , a writer from Nebraska , who says , ' We 're more and more into communications and less and less into communication . ' Okay , kids , I got to scram , got to go see my cardiologist . "
And that 's Studs Terkel .
So , talk about risk taking . I 'm going to do somebody that nobody likes .
You know , most actors want to do characters that are likeable -- well , not always , but the notion , especially at a conference like this , I like to inspire people .
But since this was called " risk taking , " I 'm doing somebody who I never do , because she 's so unlikeable that one person actually came backstage and told me to take her out of the show she was in .
And I 'm doing her because I think we think of risk , at a conference like this , as a good thing .
But there are certain other connotations to the word " risk , " and the same thing about the word " nature . " What is nature ?
Maxine Greene , who 's a wonderful philosopher who 's as old as Studs , and was the head of a philosophy -- great , big philosophy kind of an organization -- I went to her and asked her what are the two things that she doesn 't know , that she still wants to know .
And she said , " Well , personally , I still feel like I have to curtsey when I see the president of my university .
And I still feel as though I 've got to get coffee for my male colleagues , even though I 've outlived most of them . "
And she said , " And then intellectually , I don 't know enough about the negative imagination .
And September 11th certainly taught us that that 's a whole area we don 't investigate . "
So this piece is about a negative imagination .
It raises questions about what nature is , what Mother Nature is , and about what a risk can be .
And I got this in the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women .
Everything I do is word for word off a tape .
And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems , and this is called " A Mirror to Her Mouth . "
And this is an inmate named Paulette Jenkins .
" I began to learn how to cover it up , because I didn 't want nobody to know that this was happening in my home .
I want everybody to think we were a normal family .
I mean we had all the materialistic things , but that didn 't make my children pain any less ; that didn 't make their fears subside .
I ran out of excuses about how we got black eyes and busted lips and bruises . I didn 't had no more excuses .
And he beat me too . But that didn 't change the fact that it was a nightmare for my family ; it was a nightmare .
And I failed them dramatically , because I allowed it to go on and on and on .
" But the night that Myesha got killed -- and the intensity just grew and grew and grew , until one night we came home from getting drugs , and he got angry with Myesha , and he started beating her , and he put her in a bathtub . Oh , he would use a belt .
He had a belt because he had this warped perverted thing that Myesha was having sex with her little brother and they was fondling each other -- that would be his reason .
I 'm just talking about the particular night that she died .
And so he put her in the bathtub , and I was in the bedroom with the baby .
" And four months before this happened , four months before Myesha died , I thought I could really fix this man . So I had a baby by him -- insane -- thinking that if I gave him his own kid , he would leave mine alone .
And it didn 't work , didn 't work .
And I ended up with three children , Houston , Myesha and Dominic , who was four months old when I came to jail .
" And I was in the bedroom . Like I said , he had her in the bathroom and he -- he -- every time he hit her , she would fall .
And she would hit her head on the tub . It happened continuously , repeatedly .
I could hear it , but I dared not to move . I didn 't move .
I didn 't even go and see what was happening .
I just sat there and listened .
And then he put her in the hallway .
He told her , just set there . And so she set there for about four or five hours .
And then he told her , get up .
And when she got up , she says she couldn 't see .
Her face was bruised . She had a black eye .
All around her head was just swollen ; her head was about two sizes of its own size .
I told him , ' Let her go to sleep . ' He let her go to sleep .
" The next morning she was dead .
He went in to check on her for school , and he got very excited .
He says , ' She won 't breathe . ' I knew immediately that she was dead .
I didn 't even want to accept the fact that she was dead , so I went in and I put a mirror to her mouth -- there was no thing , nothing , coming out of her mouth .
He said , he said , he said , ' We can 't , we can 't let nobody find out about this . ' He say , ' You 've got to help me . ' I agree . I agree .
" I mean , I 've been keeping a secret for years and years and years , so it just seemed like second hand to me , just to keep on keeping it a secret .
So we went to the mall and we told a police that we had , like , lost her , that she was missing .
We told a security guard that she was missing , though she wasn 't missing .
And we told the security guard what we had put on her and we went home and we dressed her in exactly the same thing that we had told the security guard that we had put on her .
" And then we got the baby and my other child , and we drove out to , like , I-95 .
I was so petrified and so numb , all I could look was in the rear-view mirror .
And he just laid her right on the shoulder of the highway .
My own child , I let that happen to . "
So that 's an investigation of the negative imagination .
When I started this project called " On the Road : A Search For an American Character " with my tape recorder , I thought that I was going to go around America and find it in all its aspects -- bull riders , cowboys , pig farmers , drum majorettes -- but I sort of got tripped on race relations , because my first big show was a show about a race riot .
And so I went to both -- two race riots , one of which was the Los Angeles riot . And this next piece is from that .
Because this is what I would say I 've learned the most about race relations , from this piece .
It 's a kind of an aria , I would say , and in many tapes that I have .
Everybody knows that the Los Angeles riots happened because four cops beat up a black man named Rodney King .
It was captured on videotape -- technology -- and it was played all over the world .
Everybody thought the four cops would go to jail .
They did not , so there were riots .
And what a lot of people forget , is there was a second trial , ordered by George Bush , Sr.
And that trial came back with two cops going to jail and two cops declared innocent . I was at that trial .
And I mean , the people just danced in the streets because they were afraid there was going to be another riot .
Explosion of joy that this verdict had come back this way .
So there was a community that didn 't -- the Korean-Americans , whose stores had been burned to the ground .
And so this woman , Mrs. Young-Soon Han , I suppose will have taught me the most that I have learned about race .
And she asks also a question that Studs talks about : this notion of the " official truth , " to question the " official truth . "
So what she 's questioning here , she 's taking a chance and questioning what justice is in society .
And this is called , " Swallowing the Bitterness . "
" I used to believe America was the best .
I watched in Korea many luxurious Hollywood lifestyle movie .
I never saw any poor man , any black .
Until 1992 , I used to believe America was the best -- I still do ; I don 't deny that because I am a victim .
But at the end of ' 92 , when we were in such turmoil , and having all the financial problems , and all the mental problems , I began to really realize that Koreans are completely left out of this society and we are nothing .
Why ? Why do we have to be left out ?
We didn 't qualify for medical treatment , no food stamp , no GR , no welfare , anything . Many African-Americans who never work got minimum amount of money to survive .
We didn 't get any because we have a car and a house .
And we are high taxpayer . Where do I find justice ?
" OK . OK ? OK . OK .
Many African-Americans probably think that they won by the trial .
I was sitting here watching them the morning after the verdict , and all the day they were having a party , they celebrated , all of South Central , all the churches . And they say , ' Well , finally justice has been done in this society . ' Well , what about victims ' rights ?
They got their rights by destroying innocent Korean merchants .
They have a lot of respect , as I do , for Dr. Martin King .
He is the only model for black community ; I don 't care Jesse Jackson .
He is the model of non-violence , non-violence -- and they would all like to be in his spirit .
" But what about 1992 ? They destroyed innocent people .
And I wonder if that is really justice for them , to get their rights in that way .
I was swallowing the bitterness , sitting here alone and watching them .
They became so hilarious , but I was happy for them .
I was glad for them . At least they got something back , OK .
Let 's just forget about Korean victims and other victims who were destroyed by them .
They fought for their rights for over two centuries , and maybe because they sacrifice other minorities , Hispanic , Asian , we would suffer more in the mainstream .
That 's why I understand ; that 's why I have a mixed feeling about the verdict .
" But I wish that , I wish that , I wish that I could be part of the enjoyment .
I wish that I could live together with black people .
But after the riot , it 's too much difference .
The fire is still there . How do you say it ? [ Unclear ] .
Igniting , igniting , igniting fire . Igniting fire .
It 's still there ; it can burst out anytime . "
Mrs. Young-Soon Han .
The other reason that I don 't wear shoes is just in case I really feel like I have to cuddle up and get into the feet of somebody , walking really in somebody else 's shoes .
And I told you that in -- you know , I didn 't give you the year , but in ' 79 I thought that I was going to go around and find bull riders and pig farmers and people like that , and I got sidetracked on race relations .
Finally , I did find a bull rider , two years ago .
And I 've been going to the rodeos with him , and we 've bonded .
And he 's the lead in an op-ed I did about the Republican Convention .
He 's a Republican -- I won 't say anything about my party affiliation , but anyway -- so this is my dear , dear Brent Williams , and this is on toughness , in case anybody needs to know about being tough for the work that you do . I think there 's a real lesson in this .
And this is called " Toughness . "
" Well , I 'm an optimist . I mean basically I 'm an optimist .
I mean , you know , I mean , it 's like my wife , Jolene , her family 's always saying , you know , you ever think he 's just a born loser ?
It seems like he has so much bad luck , you know .
But then when that bull stepped on my kidney , you know , I didn 't lose my kidney -- I could have lost my kidney , I kept my kidney , so I don 't think I 'm a born loser .
I think that 's good luck .
" And , I mean , funny things like this happen .
I was in a doctor 's office last CAT scan , and there was a Reader 's Digest , October 2002 .
It was like , ' seven ways to get lucky . ' And it says if you want to get lucky , you know , you 've got to be around positive people .
I mean , like even when I told my wife that you want to come out here and talk to me , she 's like , ' She 's just talking ; she 's just being nice to you . She 's not going to do that . ' " And then you called me up and you said you wanted to come out here and interview me and she went and looked you up on the Internet .
She said , ' Look who she is .
You 're not even going to be able to answer her questions . ' And she was saying you 're going to make me look like an idiot because I 've never been to college , and I wouldn 't be talking professional or anything .
I said , ' Well look , the woman talked to me for four hours .
You know , if I wasn 't talking -- you know , like , you know , she wanted me to talk , I don 't think she would even come out here . ' " Confidence ? Well , I think I ride more out of determination than confidence .
I mean , confidence is like , you know , you 've been on that bull before ; you know you can ride him .
I mean , confidence is kind of like being cocky , but in a good way .
But determination , you know , it 's like just , you know , ' Fuck the form , get the horn . ' That 's Tuff Hedeman , in the movie ' 8 Seconds . ' I mean , like , Pat O 'Mealey always said when I was a boy , he say , ' You know , you got more try than any kid I ever seen . ' And try and determination is the same thing .
Determination is , like , you 're going to hang on that bull , even if you 're riding upside down .
Determination 's like , you 're going to ride till your head hits the back of the dirt .
" Freedom ? It would have to be the rodeo .
" Beauty ? I don 't think I know what beauty is .
Well , you know , I guess that 'd have to be the rodeo too .
I mean , look how we are , the roughy family , palling around and shaking hands and wrestling around me .
It 's like , you know , racking up our credit cards on entry fees and gas .
We ride together , we , you know , we , we eat together and we sleep together .
I mean , I can 't even imagine what it 's going to be like the last day I rodeo . I mean , I 'll be alright .
I mean , I have my ranch and everything , but I actually don 't even want to think the day that comes .
I mean , I guess it just be like -- I guess it be like the day my brother died .
" Toughness ? Well , we was in West Jordan , Utah , and this bull shoved my face right through the metal shoots in a -- you know , busted my face all up and had to go to the hospital .
And they had to sew me up and straighten my nose out .
And I had to go and ride in the rodeo that night , so I didn 't want them to put me under anesthesia , or whatever you call it . And so they sewed my face up .
And then they had to straighten out my nose , and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head , and everybody said that it should have killed me , but it didn 't , because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain .
But the good thing was , once they shoved those rods up there and straightened my nose out , I could breathe , and I hadn 't been able to breathe since I broke my nose in the high school rodeo . "
Thank you .

Aaron Koblin : Visualizing ourselves ... with crowd-sourced data
Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations . From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data , from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the " Wilderness Downtown " video that customizes for the user , his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human .
So I think data can actually make us more human .
We 're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we 're living our lives , and it 's enabling us to tell some amazing stories .
Recently , a wise media theorist Tweeted , " The 19th century culture was defined by the novel , the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema , and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface . "
And I believe this is going to prove true .
Our lives are being driven by data , and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories .
So I 'm going to show you a few of the projects that I 've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems .
This is a project called Flight Patterns .
What you 're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period .
As you see , everything starts to fade to black , and you see people going to sleep .
Followed by that , you see on the West coast planes moving across , the red-eye flights to the East coast .
And you 'll see everybody waking up on the East coast , followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner .
Everybody 's moving from the East coast to the West coast .
You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner .
I think it 's one thing to say there 's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time , and it 's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows .
This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data , but I 've color-coded it by type , so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us .
And I started making these , and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there .
So here we can see the white represents low altitudes , and the blue are higher altitudes .
And you can zoom in . This is taking a look at Atlanta .
You can see this is a major shipping airport , and there 's all kinds of activity there .
You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer .
See again , the diversity .
And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have .
This is scrolling up the East coast .
You can see some of the chaos that 's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other .
So zooming back out real quick , we see , again , the U.S. -- you get Florida down in the right-hand corner .
Moving across to the West coast , you see San Francisco and Los Angeles -- big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona .
And that 's us down there in L.A. and Long Beach on the bottom .
I started taking a look as well at different perimeters , because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data .
This is looking at ascending versus descending flights .
And you can see , over time , the ways the airports change .
You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen .
And you can see , eventually the airport actually flips directions .
So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT .
This is visualizing international communications .
So it 's how New York communicates with other international cities .
And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition .
And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset , so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT & amp ; T 's data and revealing itself .
This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org.
And it 's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam .
So you 're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city , until we approach New Year 's Eve , where everybody says , " Happy New Year ! "
So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city .
This is looking at another event . This is called Queen 's Day .
So again , you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city .
And then you 're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before , which happens right here .
And then you can see people celebrating the next day .
And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases .
So now on to something completely different .
Some of you may recognize this .
This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen 's mechanical chess playing machine .
And it 's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well , except for one thing : it 's not a robot at all .
There 's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player .
This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk -- named after this guy .
And it 's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people , but really difficult for computers .
So they made this web service and said , " Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people . "
The nerdy side of me thought , " Wow , this is amazing .
I can tap into thousands of people 's minds . "
And the other nerdy side of me thought , " This is horrible . This is completely bizarre .
What does this mean for the future of mankind , where we 're all plugged into this borg ? "
I was probably being a little extreme .
But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we 're working on , and we 're just doing these little labors ?
So I created this drawing tool .
I asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left .
And I said , " I 'll pay you two cents for your contribution . "
And I started collecting sheep .
And I collected a lot , a lot of different sheep .
Lots of sheep .
I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected , and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep .
You can 't pick individual sheep , but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity .
And juxtaposed against this grid , you see actually , by rolling over each individual one , the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process .
I think there 's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil -- something we can all relate to , this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing .
I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid .
Kind of amazing what some people did .
So here 's a few statistics from the project .
Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour , which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour .
There were 662 rejected sheep that didn 't meet " sheep-like " criteria and were thrown out of the flock .
The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes .
That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication .
And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project , or were unique IP addresses -- so about how many people contributed .
But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this .
Which I was pretty surprised by .
I expected people to be wondering , " Why did I draw a sheep ? "
And I think it 's a pretty valid question .
And there 's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep .
Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts , the first to be selectively bred for production traits , the first animal to be cloned .
Obviously , we think of sheep as followers .
And there 's this reference to " Le Petit Prince " where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep .
He draws sheep after sheep .
The narrator 's only appeased when he draws a box .
And he says , " It 's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep .
It 's about your own interpretation and doing something different . "
And I like that .
So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin 's " Modern Times . "
It 's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution .
So there were no longer shoe makers , but now there are people slapping soles on people 's shoes .
And the whole idea of one 's relationship to their work changed a lot .
So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool .
This basically allowed -- what you see on the left side is the original frame , and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they 're doing .
And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima .
We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for , which is making money .
So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces , and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk .
We asked people to draw what it was that they saw .
But here there was no sheep-like criteria .
People , if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face , it actually made it into the bill .
So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do .
So we took these hundred dollar bills , and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com , where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions .
And you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the Hundred Dollar Laptop Project , which is now known as One Laptop Per Child .
This is again showing all the different contributions .
You see some people did beautiful stipple renderings , like this one on top -- spent a long time making realistic versions .
And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces .
Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing , " $ 0.01 ! ! ! Really ? "
That 's all I 'm getting paid for this ?
So the last Mechanical Turk project I 'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000 .
This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey .
You may recognize these two guys .
This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the ' 60s , where they created the song " Daisy Bell , " which was the world 's first singing computer .
You may recognize it from " 2001 : A Space Odyssey . "
When HAL 's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song , as a reference to when computers became human .
So we resynthesized this song .
This is what that sounded like .
We broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing .
Daisy Bell : Daisy , Daisy ... Aaron Koblin : And we took all of those individual pieces , and we fed them into another Turk request .
This is what it would look like if you went to the site .
You type in your code , but you first test your mic .
You 'd be fed a simple audio clip .
And then you 'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice .
After previewing it and confirming it 's what you submitted , you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context .
And this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions .
Recording : Daisy , Daisy give me your answer do I 'm half crazy all for the love of you It can 't be a stylish marriage I can 't afford a carriage But you 'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two AK : So James Surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds , that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual .
We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative , distributed music making , where nobody has any idea what it is they 're working on .
So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together .
I 'm sorry for this .
Chorus : Daisy , Daisy Give me your answer do I 'm half crazy all for the love of you It can 't be a stylish marriage I can 't afford a carriage But you 'd look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two AK : So stepping back for a quick second , when I was at UCLA going to grad school , I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing .
And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners .
So basically motion through 3D space .
And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said , " Wait a minute .
You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video ? "
So we did exactly that .
We made a music video for one of my favorite bands , Radiohead .
And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers , but we also open sourced it , and we made it released as a Google Code project , where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it .
And people were making some amazing things .
This is actually two of my favorites : the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke .
A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content .
More recently , somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke 's head , which is a little creepy , but pretty cool .
So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on , I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something .
And I met a music video director named Chris Milk .
And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project .
But we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for .
So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months .
And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin , who was finishing up Johnny Cash 's final album called " Ain 't No Grave . "
The lyrics to the leading track are " Ain 't no grave can hold my body down . "
So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash .
So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello , also known as Mr. doob , who 's a much better programmer than I am , and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool .
As you know , an animation is a series of images .
So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash , and at eight frames a second , we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video .
So I don 't have time to play the entire thing for you , but I want to show you two short clips .
One is the beginning of the music video .
And that 's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly .
Johnny Cash : There ain 't no grave can hold my body down There ain 't no grave can hold body down When I hear the trumpet sound I 'm going to ride right out of the ground Ain 't no grave can hold my body ... AK : What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs .
Collaborator : I felt really sad when he died .
And I just thought it 'd be wonderful , it 'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory .
Collaborator Two : It really allows this last recording of his to be a living , breathing memorial .
Collaborator Three : For all of the frames to be drawn by fans , each individual frame , it 's got a very powerful feeling to it .
Collaborator Four : I 've seen everybody from Japan , Venezuela , to the States , to Knoxville , Tennessee .
Collaborator Five : As much as is different from frame to frame , it really is personal .
Collaborator Six : Watching the video in my room , I could see me not understanding at the beginning of it .
And I just worked and worked through problems , until my little wee battles that I was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves .
You can actually see the point when I know what I 'm doing , and a lot of light and dark comes into it .
And in a weird way , that 's what I actually like about Johnny Cash 's music as well .
It 's the sum total of his life , all the things that had happened -- the bad things , the good things .
You 're hearing a person 's life .
AK : So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com , what you 'll see is the video playing above .
And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project .
So this isn 't finished at all , but it 's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate .
If you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails , you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located .
And if you find one that you 're interested in , you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you 're able to rate that frame , which helps it bubble up to the top .
And you can also see the way that it was drawn .
Again , you can get the playback and personal contribution .
In addition to that , it 's listed , the artist 's name , the location , how long they spent drawing it .
And you can pick a style . So this one was tagged " Abstract . "
But there 's a bunch of different styles .
And you can sort the video a number of different ways .
You can say , " I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version .
And then this is , again , the abstract version , which ends up getting a little bit crazy .
So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk .
And this is called " The Wilderness Downtown . "
It 's an online music video for the Arcade Fire .
Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers , where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast .
And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen .
But most importantly , I think , we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project , where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone .
What if we had a very low commitment , but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed ?
So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up .
And you type in the address -- it actually creates a music video specifically for you , pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself .
So this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address , but I 'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect .
Win Butler : Now our lives are changing fast Now our lives are changing fast Hope that something pure can last Hope that something pure can last Ooh we used to wait Ooh we used to wait Ooh we used to wait Sometimes it never came Sometimes it never came Still moving through the pain We used to wait for it We used to wait for it We used to wait for it AK : So I think , if there 's one thing to take away from my talk today , it 's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device .
And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data , we have an opportunity , and maybe even an obligation , to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together .
Thanks a lot .
Donald Sadoway : The missing link to renewable energy
What 's the key to using alternative energy , like solar and wind ? Storage -- so we can have power on tap even when the sun 's not out and the wind 's not blowing . In this accessible , inspiring talk , Donald Sadoway takes to the blackboard to show us the future of large-scale batteries that store renewable energy . As he says : " We need to think about the problem differently . We need to think big . We need to think cheap . "
The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago .
Because the way things stand today , electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply .
If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage , some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid , the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately .
But coal plants , nuclear plants can 't respond fast enough .
A giant battery could .
With a giant battery , we 'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal , gas and nuclear do today .
You see , the battery is the key enabling device here .
With it , we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn 't shine .
And that changes everything .
Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings , here to center stage .
Today I want to tell you about such a device .
It 's called the liquid metal battery .
It 's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs .
Now the theme of this year 's TED Conference is Full Spectrum .
The OED defines spectrum as " The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation , from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part . "
So I 'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world 's great problems .
I want to go full spectrum and tell you how , in the process of developing this new technology , we 've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation , ideas worth spreading .
And you know , if we 're going to get this country out of its current energy situation , we can 't just conserve our way out ; we can 't just drill our way out ; we can 't bomb our way out .
We 're going to do it the old-fashioned American way , we 're going to invent our way out , working together .
Now let 's get started .
The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor , Alessandro Volta , at the University of Padua in Italy .
His invention gave birth to a new field of science , electrochemistry , and new technologies such as electroplating .
Perhaps overlooked , Volta 's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor .
Until Volta , nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use .
Here 's the first battery -- a stack of coins , zinc and silver , separated by cardboard soaked in brine .
This is the starting point for designing a battery -- two electrodes , in this case metals of different composition , and an electrolyte , in this case salt dissolved in water .
The science is that simple .
Admittedly , I 've left out a few details .
Now I 've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling , but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid -- namely uncommonly high power , long service lifetime and super-low cost .
We need to think about the problem differently .
We need to think big , we need to think cheap .
So let 's abandon the paradigm of let 's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we 'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product .
Instead , let 's invent to the price point of the electricity market .
So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits .
This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements .
I say , if you want to make something dirt cheap , make it out of dirt -- preferably dirt that 's locally sourced .
And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don 't cost us a fortune .
So about six years ago , I started thinking about this problem .
And in order to adopt a fresh perspective , I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage .
In fact , I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity , but instead consumes electricity , huge amounts of it .
I 'm talking about the production of aluminum .
The process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds -- Hall in the United States and Heroult in France .
And just a few short years following their discovery , aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material .
You 're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter .
It 's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile -- row after row of cells that , inside , resemble Volta 's battery , with three important differences .
Volta 's battery works at room temperature .
It 's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that 's a solution of salt and water .
The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature , a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid .
The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water , but rather salt that 's melted .
It 's this combination of liquid metal , molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing .
Today , we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound .
That 's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy .
It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale .
And I did .
I made the battery all liquid -- liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte .
I 'll show you how .
So I put low-density liquid metal at the top , put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom , and molten salt in between .
So now , how to choose the metals ?
For me , the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table , enunciated by another professor , Dimitri Mendeleyev .
Everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here .
And that includes our own bodies .
I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance , different , opposite density and high mutual reactivity .
I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I 'd come upon the answer .
Magnesium for the top layer .
And antimony for the bottom layer .
You know , I 've got to tell you , one of the greatest benefits of being a professor : colored chalk .
So to produce current , magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion , which then migrates across the electrolyte , accepts two electrons from the antimony , and then mixes with it to form an alloy .
The electrons go to work in the real world out here , powering our devices .
Now to charge the battery , we connect a source of electricity .
It could be something like a wind farm .
And then we reverse the current .
And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode , restoring the initial constitution of the battery .
And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature .
It 's pretty cool , at least in theory .
But does it really work ?
So what to do next ?
We go to the laboratory .
Now do I hire seasoned professionals ?
No , I hire a student and mentor him , teach him how to think about the problem , to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose .
This is that student , David Bradwell , who , in this image , appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work .
What I didn 't tell David at the time was I myself wasn 't convinced it would work .
But David 's young and he 's smart and he wants a Ph.D. , and he proceeds to build -- He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry .
And based on David 's initial promising results , which were paid with seed funds at MIT , I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government .
And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people , a mix of graduate students , post-docs and even some undergraduates .
And I was able to attract really , really good people , people who share my passion for science and service to society , not science and service for career building .
And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery , their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy 's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said -- and I 'm taking liberties here -- " We choose to work on grid-level storage , not because it is easy , but because it is hard . "
So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery .
We start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell .
I called it the shotglass .
We 've operated over 400 of these , perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries -- not just magnesium and antimony .
Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell .
I call it the hockey puck .
And we got the same remarkable results .
And then it was onto the saucer .
That 's 200 watt-hours .
The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable .
But the pace wasn 't fast enough for us .
So a year and a half ago , David and I , along with another research staff-member , formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product .
So today at LMBC , we 're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour -- 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell .
We call that the pizza .
And then we 've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon .
It 's going to be 36 inches in diameter .
We call that the bistro table , but it 's not ready yet for prime-time viewing .
And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules , aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field .
And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours -- two million watt-hours .
That 's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households .
So here you have it , grid-level storage : silent , emissions-free , no moving parts , remotely controlled , designed to the market price point without subsidy .
So what have we learned from all this ?
So what have we learned from all this ?
Let me share with you some of the surprises , the heterodoxies .
They lie beyond the visible .
Temperature : Conventional wisdom says set it low , at or near room temperature , and then install a control system to keep it there .
Avoid thermal runaway .
Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation .
Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges .
Scaling : Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many .
Liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer , but they 'll be larger .
And finally , human resources : Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts , seasoned professionals , who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge .
To develop liquid metal battery , I hired students and post-docs and mentored them .
In a battery , I strive to maximize electrical potential ; when mentoring , I strive to maximize human potential .
So you see , the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology , it 's a blueprint for inventing inventors , full-spectrum .
Malcolm Gladwell : Choice , happiness and spaghetti sauce
" Tipping Point " author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry 's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness .
I think I was supposed to talk about my new book , which is called " Blink , " and it 's about snap judgments and first impressions .
And it comes out in January , and I hope you all buy it in triplicate .
But I was thinking about this , and I realized that although my new book makes me happy , and I think would make my mother happy , it 's not really about happiness .
So I decided instead , I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years , a man who is a great personal hero of mine : someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz , who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce .
Howard 's about this high , and he 's round , and he 's in his 60s , and he has big huge glasses and thinning grey hair , and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality , and he has a parrot , and he loves the opera , and he 's a great aficionado of medieval history .
And by profession , he 's a psychophysicist .
Now , I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is , although at some point in my life , I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics .
Which should tell you something about that relationship .
As far as I know , psychophysics is about measuring things .
And Howard is very interested in measuring things .
And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard , and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains , New York .
And one of his first clients was -- this is many years ago , back in the early ' 70s -- one of his first clients was Pepsi .
And Pepsi came to Howard and they said , " You know , there 's this new thing called aspartame , and we would like to make Diet Pepsi .
We 'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi , in order to have the perfect drink . " Right ?
Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer , and that 's what Howard thought . Because Pepsi told him , " Look , we 're working with a band between eight and 12 percent .
Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough ; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet .
We want to know : what 's the sweet spot between eight and 12 ? "
Now , if I gave you this problem to do , you would all say , it 's very simple .
What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi , at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent , 8.1 , 8.2 , 8.3 , all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of people , and we plot the results on a curve , and we take the most popular concentration . Right ? Really simple .
Howard does the experiment , and he gets the data back , and he plots it on a curve , and all of a sudden he realizes it 's not a nice bell curve .
In fact , the data doesn 't make any sense .
It 's a mess . It 's all over the place .
Now , most people in that business , in the world of testing food and such , are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess .
They think , well , you know , figuring out what people think about cola 's not that easy .
You know , maybe we made an error somewhere along the way .
You know , let 's just make an educated guess , and they simply point and they go for 10 percent , right in the middle .
Howard is not so easily placated .
Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards .
And this was not good enough for him , and this question bedeviled him for years .
And he would think it through and say , what was wrong ?
Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi ?
And one day , he was sitting in a diner in White Plains , about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafe .
And suddenly , like a bolt of lightning , the answer came to him .
And that is , that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data , they were asking the wrong question .
They were looking for the perfect Pepsi , and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis . Trust me .
This was an enormous revelation .
This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science .
And Howard immediately went on the road , and he would go to conferences around the country , and he would stand up and he would say , " You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi . You 're wrong .
You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis . "
And people would look at him with a blank look , and they would say , " What are you talking about ? This is craziness . "
And they would say , you know , " Move ! Next ! "
Tried to get business , nobody would hire him -- he was obsessed , though , and he talked about it and talked about it and talked about it .
Howard loves the Yiddish expression " To a worm in horseradish , the world is horseradish . "
This was his horseradish . He was obsessed with it !
And finally , he had a breakthrough . Vlasic Pickles came to him , and they said , " Mr. Moskowitz -- Doctor Moskowitz -- we want to make the perfect pickle . " And he said , " There is no perfect pickle ; there are only perfect pickles . "
And he came back to them and he said , " You don 't just need to improve your regular ; you need to create zesty . "
And that 's where we got zesty pickles .
Then the next person came to him , and that was Campbell 's Soup .
And this was even more important . In fact , Campbell 's Soup is where Howard made his reputation .
Campbell 's made Prego , and Prego , in the early ' 80s , was struggling next to Ragu , which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the ' 70s and ' 80s .
Now in the industry -- I don 't know whether you care about this , or how much time I have to go into this .
But it was , technically speaking -- this is an aside -- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragu .
The quality of the tomato paste is much better ; the spice mix is far superior ; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way . In fact , they would do the famous bowl test back in the ' 70s with Ragu and Prego .
You 'd have a plate of spaghetti , and you would pour it on , right ?
And the Ragu would all go to the bottom , and the Prego would sit on top .
That 's called " adherence . "
And , anyway , despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence , and the quality of their tomato paste , Prego was struggling .
So they came to Howard , and they said , fix us .
And Howard looked at their product line , and he said , what you have is a dead tomato society .
So he said , this is what I want to do .
And he got together with the Campbell 's soup kitchen , and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce . And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce : by sweetness , by level of garlic , by tartness , by sourness , by tomatoey-ness , by visible solids -- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business .
Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce , he varied spaghetti sauce .
And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces , and he went on the road .
He went to New York ; he went to Chicago ; he went to Jacksonville ; he went to Los Angeles . And he brought in people by the truckload . Into big halls .
And he sat them down for two hours , and he gave them , over the course of that two hours , ten bowls .
Ten small bowls of pasta , with a different spaghetti sauce on each one .
And after they ate each bowl , they had to rate , from 0 to 100 , how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was .
At the end of that process , after doing it for months and months , he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce .
And then he analyzed the data .
Now , did he look for the most popular brand variety of spaghetti sauce ? No !
Howard doesn 't believe that there is such a thing .
Instead , he looked at the data , and he said , let 's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters .
Let 's see if they congregate around certain ideas .
And sure enough , if you sit down , and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce , you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups .
There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain ; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy ; and there are people who like it extra chunky .
And of those three facts , the third one was the most significant , because at the time , in the early 1980s , if you went to a supermarket , you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce .
And Prego turned to Howard , and they said , " You telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs ? " And he said yes !
And Prego then went back , and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce , and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country .
And over the next 10 years , they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces .
And everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done , and they said , " Oh my god ! We 've been thinking all wrong ! "
And that 's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar , and 14 different kinds of mustard , and 71 different kinds of olive oil -- and then eventually even Ragu hired Howard , and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragu that he did for Prego .
And today , if you go to the supermarket , a really good one , and you look at how many Ragus there are -- do you know how many they are ? 36 !
In six varieties : Cheese , Light , Robusto , Rich & amp ; Hearty , Old World Traditional , Extra-Chunky Garden .
That 's Howard 's doing . That is Howard 's gift to the American people .
Now why is that important ?
It is , in fact , enormously important . I 'll explain to you why .
What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy .
Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat -- what will make people happy -- is to ask them .
And for years and years and years and years , Ragu and Prego would have focus groups , and they would sit all you people down , and they would say , " What do you want in a spaghetti sauce ? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce . "
And for all those years -- 20 , 30 years -- through all those focus group sessions , no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky .
Even though at least a third of them , deep in their hearts , actually did .
People don 't know what they want ! Right ?
As Howard loves to say , " The mind knows not what the tongue wants . "
It 's a mystery !
And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down .
If I asked all of you , for example , in this room , what you want in a coffee , you know what you 'd say ? Every one of you would say , " I want a dark , rich , hearty roast . "
It 's what people always say when you ask them what they want in a coffee .
What do you like ? Dark , rich , hearty roast !
What percentage of you actually like a dark , rich , hearty roast ?
According to Howard , somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you .
Most of you like milky , weak coffee .
But you will never , ever say to someone who asks you what you want that " I want a milky , weak coffee . "
So that 's number one thing that Howard did .
Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it 's another very critical point -- he made us realize in the importance of what he likes to call " horizontal segmentation . "
Why is this critical ? It 's critical because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard . Right ?
What were they obsessed with in the early ' 80s ? They were obsessed with mustard .
In particular , they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon . Right ?
Used to be , there were two mustards . French 's and Gulden 's .
What were they ? Yellow mustard . What 's in yellow mustard ?
Yellow mustard seeds , turmeric , and paprika . That was mustard .
Grey Poupon came along , with a Dijon . Right ?
Much more volatile brown mustard seed , some white wine , a nose hit , much more delicate aromatics . And what do they do ?
They put it in a little tiny glass jar , with a wonderful enameled label on it , made it look French , even though it 's made in Oxnard , California .
And instead of charging a dollar-fifty for the eight-ounce bottle , the way that French 's and Gulden 's did , they decided to charge four dollars .
And then they had those ads , right ? With the guy in the Rolls Royce , and he 's eating the Grey Poupon . The other Rolls Royce pulls up , and he says , do you have any Grey Poupon ?
And the whole thing , after they did that , Grey Poupon takes off !
Takes over the mustard business !
And everyone 's take-home lesson from that was that the way to get to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive , something to aspire to . Right ?
It 's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now , and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy .
A better mustard ! A more expensive mustard !
A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning .
And Howard looked to that and said , that 's wrong !
Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy .
Mustard exists , just like tomato sauce , on a horizontal plane .
There is no good mustard or bad mustard .
There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard .
There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people .
He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste .
And for that , as well , we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks .
Third thing that Howard did , and perhaps the most important , is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish .
What do I mean by that ?
For the longest time in the food industry , there was a sense that there was one way , a perfect way , to make a dish .
You go to Chez Panisse , they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction .
They don 't give you five options on the reduction , right ?
They don 't say , do you want the extra-chunky reduction , or do you want the -- no !
You just get the reduction . Why ? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi .
This is the way it ought to be .
And she serves it that way time and time again , and if you quarrel with her , she will say , " You know what ? You 're wrong ! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant . "
Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well .
They had a notion , a Platonic notion , of what tomato sauce was .
And where did that come from ? It came from Italy .
Italian tomato sauce is what ? It 's blended ; it 's thin .
The culture of tomato sauce was thin .
When we talked about authentic tomato sauce in the 1970s , we talked about Italian tomato sauce . We talked about the earliest ragus , which had no visible solids , right ?
Which were thin , and you just put a little bit over it and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta .
That 's what it was . And why were we attached to that ?
Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce , A ; and B , we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce , then they would embrace it .
And that 's what would please the maximum number of people .
And the reason we thought that -- in other words , people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals .
They were looking for one way to treat all of us .
And it 's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals , because all of science , through the 19th century and much of the 20th , was obsessed with universals .
Psychologists , medical scientists , economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave .
But that changed , right ?
What is the great revolution in science of the last 10 , 15 years ?
It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability .
Now in medical science , we don 't want to know how necessarily -- just how cancer works , we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer .
I guess my cancer different from your cancer .
Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability .
What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying , this same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce .
And for that , we owe him a great vote of thanks .
I 'll give you one last illustration of variability , and that is -- oh , I 'm sorry .
Howard not only believed that , but he took it a second step , which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food , we aren 't just making an error ; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice .
And the example he used was coffee .
And coffee is something he did a lot of work with , with Nescafe .
If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- a type of coffee , a brew -- that made all of you happy , and then I asked you to rate that coffee , the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100 .
If , however , you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters , maybe three or four coffee clusters , and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters , your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78 .
The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince , and coffee that makes you deliriously happy .
That is the final , and I think most beautiful lesson , of Howard Moskowitz : that in embracing the diversity of human beings , we will find a surer way to true happiness .
Thank you .
Joel Selanikio : The surprising seeds of a big-data revolution in healthcare
Collecting global health data was an imperfect science : Workers tramped through villages to knock on doors and ask questions , wrote the answers on paper forms , then input the data -- and from this gappy information , countries would make huge decisions . Data geek Joel Selanikio talks through the sea change in collecting health data in the past decade -- starting with the Palm Pilot and Hotmail , and now moving into the cloud . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
There 's an old joke about a cop who 's walking his beat in the middle of the night , and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who 's looking at the ground and moving from side to side , and the cop asks him what he 's doing .
The guys says he 's looking for his keys .
So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two , three minutes . No keys .
The cop says , " Are you sure ? Hey buddy , are you sure you lost your keys here ? "
And the guy says , " No , no , actually I lost them down at the other end of the street , but the light is better here . "
There 's a concept that people talk about nowadays called big data , and what they 're talking about is all of the information that we 're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet , everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads , movies , streaming , all this kind of stuff , the live streaming of TED .
And the folks who work with big data , for them , they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information , the biggest problem is , how do we organize all that information ?
I can tell you that working in global health , that is not our biggest problem .
Because for us , even though the light is better on the Internet , the data that would help us solve the problems we 're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet .
So we don 't know , for example , how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations .
We don 't know for really basically any of the clinics in the developing world , which ones have medicines and which ones don 't .
We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics .
We don 't know -- and this is really amazing to me -- we don 't know how many children were born , or how many children there are in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan .
We don 't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries .
We don 't know the needs of the elderly , the mentally ill .
For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in , we basically know nothing at all .
And part of the reason why we don 't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here .
And this is about a 5,000-year-old technology .
Some of you may have used it before .
It 's kind of on its way out now , but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff .
This is a paper form , and what you 're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on , I 'm sure , a very hot and humid day , and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months , knocking on the doors and saying , " Excuse me , we 'd like to ask you some questions .
Do you have any children ? Were your children vaccinated ? "
Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia , what percentage were vaccinated , is actually not on the Internet but by going out and knocking on doors , sometimes tens of thousands of doors .
Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this .
You know , a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish .
And the problem , of course , with all of this is that with all those paper forms — and I 'm telling you we have paper forms for every possible thing .
We have paper forms for vaccination surveys .
We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics .
We have paper forms to track drug supplies , blood supplies , all these different paper forms for many different topics , they all have a single common endpoint , and the common endpoint looks something like this .
And what we 're looking at here is a truckful o ' data .
This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago that I participated in .
The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated , and this is the data , collected on paper over weeks from a single district , which is something like a county in the United States .
You can imagine that , for the entire country of Zambia , answering just that single question looks something like this .
Truck after truck after truck filled with stack after stack after stack of data .
And what makes it even worse is that that 's just the beginning , because once you 've collected all that data , of course someone 's going to have to -- some unfortunate person is going to have to type that into a computer .
When I was a graduate student , I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes .
I can tell you , I often wasn 't really paying attention .
I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered , so data quality goes down .
But eventually that data hopefully gets typed into a computer , and someone can begin to analyze it , and once they have an analysis and a report , hopefully then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better .
Because if there 's anything worse in the field of global public health , I don 't know what 's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases , diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar .
And millions of children die of these diseases every year .
And the fact is , millions is a gross estimate because we don 't really know how many kids die each year of this .
What makes it even more frustrating is that the data entry part , the part that I used to do as a grad student , can take sometimes six months .
Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer , and sometimes , actually not infrequently , it actually never happens .
Now try and wrap your head around that for a second .
You just had teams of hundreds of people .
They went out into the field to answer a particular question .
You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem , and then for some reason , momentum is lost or there 's no money left , and all of that comes to nothing because no one actually types it into the computer at all .
The process just stops . Happens all the time .
This is what we base our decisions on in global health : little data , old data , no data .
So back in 1995 , I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process .
Now 1995 , obviously that was quite a long time ago .
It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was .
The top movie of the year was " Die Hard with a Vengeance . "
As you can see , Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then .
I was working in the Centers for Disease Control , and I had a lot more hair back then as well .
But to me , the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this .
Hard for us to imagine , but in 1995 , this was the ultimate elite mobile device .
Right ? It wasn 't an iPhone . It wasn 't a Galaxy phone .
It was a Palm Pilot .
And when I saw the Palm Pilot for the first time , I thought , why can 't we put the forms on these Palm Pilots and go out into the field just carrying one Palm Pilot , which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms ? Why don 't we try to do that ?
Because if we can do that , if we can actually just collect the data electronically , digitally , from the very beginning , we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing , of having somebody type that stuff into the computer .
We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives .
So that 's actually what I began to do .
Working at CDC , I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using Palm Pilots to do data collection instead of using paper .
And it actually worked great .
It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted .
What do you know ? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper .
While I was doing it , my business partner , Rose , who 's here with her husband , Matthew , here in the audience , Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross .
The problem was , after a few years of doing that , I realized I had done -- I had been to maybe six or seven programs , and I thought , you know , if I keep this up at this pace , over my whole career , maybe I 'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs .
But the problem is , 20 or 30 programs , like , training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology , that is a tiny drop in the bucket .
The demand for this , the need for data to run better programs , just within health , not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries , is enormous .
There are millions and millions and millions of programs , millions of clinics that need to track drugs , millions of vaccine programs .
There are schools that need to track attendance .
There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do .
And I realized , if I kept up the way that I was doing , I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career .
And so I began to wrack my brain trying to think about , you know , what was the process that I was doing , how was I training folks , and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently ?
And unfortunately , after thinking about this for some time , I realized -- I identified the main obstacle .
And the main obstacle , it turned out , and this is a sad realization , the main obstacle was me .
So what do I mean by that ?
I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology .
If you wanted to use this technology , you had to get in touch with me .
That means you had to know I existed .
Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate .
So you could be talking about 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 dollars if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn 't on vacation .
The point is that anything , any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings , it just doesn 't scale .
And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology and we need to scale it now .
And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture .
And , you know , I was thinking , how could I take myself out of the picture for quite some time .
You know , I 'd been trained that the way that you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based .
It 's always guys that look pretty much like me flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin .
And you go out there , and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend [ on a ] hotel and you spend all that stuff .
As far as I knew , that was the only way you could distribute technology , and I couldn 't figure out a way around it .
But the miracle that happened , I 'm going to call it Hotmail for short .
Now you may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous , but for me it was miraculous , because I noticed , just as I was wrestling with this problem , I was working in sub-Saharan Africa mostly at the time .
I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account .
And I thought , it struck me , wait a minute , I know that the Hotmail people surely didn 't fly to the Ministry of Health of Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail .
So these guys are distributing technology .
They 're getting software capacity out there but they 're not actually flying around the world .
I need to think about this some more .
While I was thinking about it , people started using even more things just like this , just as we were .
They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps , all these things .
Of course , all of these things are cloud-based and don 't require any training .
They don 't require any programmers .
They don 't require any consultants , because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves with little or no training .
You just have to hear about it and go to the website .
And so I thought , what would happen if we built software to do what I 'd been consulting in ?
Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices , let 's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved ?
And that 's exactly what we did .
So we created software called Magpi , which has an online form creator .
No one has to speak to me .
You just have to hear about it and go to the website .
You can create forms , and once you 've created the forms , you push them to a variety of common mobile phones .
Obviously nowadays , we 've moved past Palm Pilots to mobile phones .
And it doesn 't have to be a smartphone .
It can be a basic phone like the phone on the right there , you know , the basic kind of Symbian phone that 's very common in developing countries .
And the great part about this is , it 's just like Hotmail .
It 's cloud-based , and it doesn 't require any training , programming , consultants .
But there are some additional benefits as well .
Now we knew , when we built this system , the whole point of it , just like with the Palm Pilots , was that you 'd have to , you 'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set .
But what we found , of course , since it 's already on a computer , we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing .
We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes .
Unbelievable improvements in efficiency .
Cloud-based , no training , no consultants , no me .
And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way , going out to each country , we reached about , I don 't know , probably trained about 1,000 people .
What happened after we did this ?
In the second three years , we had 14,000 people find the website , sign up , and start using it to collect data , data for disaster response , Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds , people tracking drug supplies .
One of my favorite examples , the IRC , International Rescue Committee , they have a program where semi-literate midwives using $ 10 mobile phones send a text message using our software once a week with the number of births and the number of deaths , which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had : a near real-time system of counting babies , of knowing how many kids are born , of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone , which is the country where this is happening , and knowing how many children die .
Physicians for Human Rights -- this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they are gathering , they 're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo , where this is an epidemic , a horrible epidemic , and they 're using our software to document the evidence they find , including photographically , so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice .
Camfed , another charity based out of the U.K. , Camfed pays girls ' families to keep them in school .
They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make . They used to track the dispersements , the attendance , the grades , on paper .
The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years .
Now it 's real time , and because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud , it costs , for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in with tens of thousands of girls , the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year .
That 's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation .
So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way , I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket -- 10 , 20 , 30 different programs .
We 've made a lot of progress , but I recognize that right now , even the work that we 've done with 14,000 people using this , is still a drop in the bucket . But something 's changed .
And I think it should be obvious .
What 's changed now is , instead of having a program in which we 're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us , we 've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us .
We 've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school , track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die , to catch criminals and successfully prosecute them , to do all these different things to learn more about what 's going on , to understand more , to see more , and to save lives and improve lives .
Thank you .
Rory Sutherland : Sweat the small stuff
It may seem that big problems require big solutions , but ad man Rory Sutherland says many flashy , expensive fixes are just obscuring better , simpler answers . To illustrate , he uses behavioral economics and hilarious examples .
Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me .
One of them was : Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when , for about 10 percent of that money , you could have top supermodels , male and female , serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey ?
You 'd still have five billion left in change , and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down .
Now , you may remember me asking the question as well , a very interesting observation , that actually those strange little signs that actually flash " 35 " at you , occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown , according to whether you 're within or outside the speed limit -- those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras , which come with the actual threat of real punishment .
So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work , I think , in many areas of human problem solving , particularly those which involve human psychology , which is : The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible , as much compulsion as possible , whereas actually , the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied .
So there seems to be a complete disconnect here .
So what I 'm asking for is the creation of a new job title -- I 'll come to this a little later -- and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language .
Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government , which is , of course , the largest organization of all , have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people .
Let me give you one example of this .
You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger , okay , heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time .
It may still be , for all I know .
Now , all of you in this room , in one form or other , are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged .
Just interested , did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all ?
So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity , you 're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody , okay ?
By contrast , years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do , the most potent things are actually very , very small .
This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class , it 's the cruet salt and pepper set .
Quite nice in itself , they 're little , sort of , airplane things .
What 's really , really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought , which is , " I reckon I can heist these . "
However , you pick them up and underneath , actually engraved in the metal , are the words , " Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class . "
Now , years after you remember the strategic question of whether you 're flying in a 777 or an Airbus , you remember those words and that experience .
Similarly , this is from a hotel in Stockholm , the Lydmar .
Has anybody stayed there ?
It 's the lift , it 's a series of buttons in the lift .
Nothing unusual about that at all , except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor .
It starts with garage at the bottom , I suppose , appropriately , but it doesn 't go up garage , grand floor , mezzanine , one , two , three , four .
It actually says garage , funk , rhythm and blues .
You have a series of buttons . You actually choose your lift music .
My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max .
It 's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we 've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars , in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you 've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life .
Now , these are trivial marketing examples , I accept .
But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo , probably one of the leading experts in , effectively , the eradication of poverty in the developing world , actually spoke .
And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which , in a business context or a government context , would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing .
It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by , not only making it a social event -- I think good use of behavioral economics in that , if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated , your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone .
But secondly , to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated .
It 's a tiny , tiny thing .
If you 're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says , " So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty ? "
you 're not really confident standing up there saying , " I 've got it cracked ; it 's the lentils , " are you ?
Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important , and most of all , expensive solutions attached to them .
And yet , what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there 's a very , very strong disproportionality at work , that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed , or the degree of force that 's applied .
But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality .
So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very , very large budget .
And once you have a very , very large budget , you actually look for expensive things to spend it on .
What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power , but no money at all .
It 's those people I 'd quite like to create in the world going forward .
Now , here 's another thing that happens , which is what I call sometimes " Terminal 5 syndrome , " which is that big , expensive things get big , highly-intelligent attention , and they 're great , and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent , until you get down to the small detail , the usability , which is the signage , which is catastrophic .
You come out of " Arrive " at the airport , and you follow a big yellow sign that says " Trains " and it 's in front of you .
So you walk for another hundred yards , expecting perhaps another sign , that might courteously be yellow , in front of you and saying " Trains . "
No , no , no , the next one is actually blue , to your left , and says " Heathrow Express . "
I mean , it could almost be rather like that scene from the film " Airplane . "
A yellow sign ? That 's exactly what they 'll be expecting .
Actually , what happens in the world increasingly -- now , all credit to the British Airport Authority .
I spoke about this before , and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said , " Okay , what can you do ? "
So I did come up with five suggestions , which they are actually actioning .
One of them also being , although logically it 's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it , if it only serves two floors , it 's actually bloody terrifying , okay ?
Because when the door closes and there 's nothing for you to do , you 've actually just stepped into a Hammer film .
So these questions ... what is happening in the world is the big stuff , actually , is done magnificently well .
But the small stuff , what you might call the user interface , is done spectacularly badly .
But also , there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions .
Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as " strategy " to actually solve them .
I tried this exercise recently , talking about banking .
They said , " Can we do an advertising campaign ?
What can we do and encourage more online banking ? "
I said , " It 's really , really easy . "
I said , " When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they 'd probably quite like to look at .
The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance . "
I 've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there 's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen .
Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news ?
Okay , you simply wouldn 't .
I said , " If you make , actually , ' Tell me my balance . ' If you make that an option rather than the default , you 'll find twice as many people log on to online banking , and they do it three times as often . "
Let 's face it , most of us -- how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine ?
And you 're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large .
Now , interesting that no single person does that , or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it .
But what 's interesting about that suggestion was that , to implement that suggestion wouldn 't cost 10 million pounds ; it wouldn 't involve large amounts of expenditure ; it would actually cost about 50 quid .
And yet , it never happens .
Because there 's a fundamental disconnect , as I said , that actually , the people with the power want to do big expensive things .
And there 's to some extent a big strategy myth that 's prevalent in business now .
And if you think about it , it 's very , very important that the strategy myth is maintained .
Because , if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors , it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company 's success might actually lie somewhere else , in small pieces of tactical activity .
But what is happening is that effectively -- and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn 't helped this ; lots of things haven 't helped this -- business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy .
It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate .
It 's a kind of mechanistic world that we 'd all love to live in where , effectively , it sits very nicely on spreadsheets , everything is numerically expressible , and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success .
That 's the world people actually want .
In truth , we do live in a world that science can understand .
Unfortunately , the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases , very , very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects , and equally , vast areas of activity , enormous mergers , can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all .
But it 's very , very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we 're living in such a world .
But what I 'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach .
That is actually strategy , and I 'm not denying that strategy has a role .
You know , there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot .
And I 'd be wrong to dis that completely .
Moving over , we come , of course , to consultancy .
I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way .
I mean , Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model .
He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services , no longer tied to a single monopoly provider , in many cases , sourcing things locally , and of course , the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing .
So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that , I 'm not sure .
Then there are other things that don 't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing .
That 's called trivia .
But there 's a fourth thing .
And the fundamental problem is we don 't actually have a word for this stuff .
We don 't know what to call it .
And actually we don 't spend nearly enough money looking for those things , looking for those tiny things that may or may not work , but which , if they do work , can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense , their efforts and the disruption they cause .
So the first thing I 'd like is a competition -- to anybody watching this as a film -- is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right .
And the second thing , I think , is that the world needs to have people in charge of that .
That 's why I call for the " Chief Detail Officer . "
Every corporation should have one , and every government should have a Ministry of Detail .
The people who actually have no money , who have no extravagant budget , but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay , but you 'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English .
And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers , then that fourth quadrant , which is so woefully neglected at the moment , might finally get the attention it deserves .
Thank you very much .
Kristen Ashburn : The face of AIDS in Africa
In this moving talk , documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn shares unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa .
When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe , it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive .
It really wasn 't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic .
For instance , this is Herbert with his grandmother .
When I first met him , he was sitting on his grandmother 's lap .
He has been orphaned , as both of his parents died of AIDS , and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS .
He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed .
When she got up to make tea , she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated .
Before I left , I actually asked him if I could get him something .
I thought he would ask for a toy , or candy , and he asked me for slippers , because he said that his feet were cold .
This is Joyce who 's -- in this picture -- 21 .
Single mother , HIV positive .
I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl , Issa .
And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn 't know , but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23 .
Joyce 's mother is now taking care of her daughter , like so many other Zimbabwean children who 've been orphaned by the epidemic .
So a few of the stories .
With every picture , there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told .
All these pictures are from Zimbabwe .
Kirsten , will you just take one minute , just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa ?
Kirsten Ashburn : Mmm , gosh .
Just -- Actually , I was working at the time , doing production for a fashion photographer .
And I was constantly reading the New York Times , and stunned by the statistics , the numbers .
It was just frightening .
So I quit my job and decided that that 's the subject that I wanted to tackle .
And I first actually went to Botswana , where I spent a month -- this is in December 2000 -- then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half , and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe .
That 's an amazing story , thank you .
KB : Thanks for letting me show these .
Alessandro Acquisti : What will a future without secrets look like ?
The line between public and private has blurred in the past decade , both online and in real life , and Alessandro Acquisti is here to explain what this means and why it matters . In this thought-provoking , slightly chilling talk , he shares details of recent and ongoing research -- including a project that shows how easy it is to match a photograph of a stranger with their sensitive personal information .
I would like to tell you a story connecting the notorious privacy incident involving Adam and Eve , and the remarkable shift in the boundaries between public and private which has occurred in the past 10 years .
You know the incident .
Adam and Eve one day in the Garden of Eden realize they are naked .
They freak out .
And the rest is history .
Nowadays , Adam and Eve would probably act differently .
[ @ Adam Last nite was a blast ! loved dat apple LOL ] [ @ Eve yep .. babe , know what happened to my pants tho ? ] We do reveal so much more information about ourselves online than ever before , and so much information about us is being collected by organizations .
Now there is much to gain and benefit from this massive analysis of personal information , or big data , but there are also complex tradeoffs that come from giving away our privacy .
And my story is about these tradeoffs .
We start with an observation which , in my mind , has become clearer and clearer in the past few years , that any personal information can become sensitive information .
Back in the year 2000 , about 100 billion photos were shot worldwide , but only a minuscule proportion of them were actually uploaded online .
In 2010 , only on Facebook , in a single month , 2.5 billion photos were uploaded , most of them identified .
In the same span of time , computers ' ability to recognize people in photos improved by three orders of magnitude .
What happens when you combine these technologies together : increasing availability of facial data ; improving facial recognizing ability by computers ; but also cloud computing , which gives anyone in this theater the kind of computational power which a few years ago was only the domain of three-letter agencies ; and ubiquitous computing , which allows my phone , which is not a supercomputer , to connect to the Internet and do there hundreds of thousands of face metrics in a few seconds ?
Well , we conjecture that the result of this combination of technologies will be a radical change in our very notions of privacy and anonymity .
To test that , we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus .
We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study , and we took a shot with a webcam , and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop .
While they were filling out the survey , we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster , and we started using a facial recognizer to match that shot to a database of some hundreds of thousands of images which we had downloaded from Facebook profiles .
By the time the subject reached the last page on the survey , the page had been dynamically updated with the 10 best matching photos which the recognizer had found , and we asked the subjects to indicate whether he or she found themselves in the photo .
Do you see the subject ?
Well , the computer did , and in fact did so for one out of three subjects .
So essentially , we can start from an anonymous face , offline or online , and we can use facial recognition to give a name to that anonymous face thanks to social media data .
But a few years back , we did something else .
We started from social media data , we combined it statistically with data from U.S. government social security , and we ended up predicting social security numbers , which in the United States are extremely sensitive information .
Do you see where I 'm going with this ?
So if you combine the two studies together , then the question becomes , can you start from a face and , using facial recognition , find a name and publicly available information about that name and that person , and from that publicly available information infer non-publicly available information , much more sensitive ones which you link back to the face ?
And the answer is , yes , we can , and we did .
Of course , the accuracy keeps getting worse .
[ 27 % of subjects ' first 5 SSN digits identified ] But in fact , we even decided to develop an iPhone app which uses the phone 's internal camera to take a shot of a subject and then upload it to a cloud and then do what I just described to you in real time : looking for a match , finding public information , trying to infer sensitive information , and then sending back to the phone so that it is overlaid on the face of the subject , an example of augmented reality , probably a creepy example of augmented reality .
In fact , we didn 't develop the app to make it available , just as a proof of concept .
In fact , take these technologies and push them to their logical extreme .
Imagine a future in which strangers around you will look at you through their Google Glasses or , one day , their contact lenses , and use seven or eight data points about you to infer anything else What will this future without secrets look like ?
And should we care ?
We may like to believe that the future with so much wealth of data would be a future with no more biases , but in fact , having so much information doesn 't mean that we will make decisions which are more objective .
In another experiment , we presented to our subjects information about a potential job candidate .
We included in this information some references to some funny , absolutely legal , but perhaps slightly embarrassing information that the subject had posted online .
Now interestingly , among our subjects , some had posted comparable information , and some had not .
Which group do you think was more likely to judge harshly our subject ?
Paradoxically , it was the group who had posted similar information , an example of moral dissonance .
Now you may be thinking , this does not apply to me , because I have nothing to hide .
But in fact , privacy is not about having something negative to hide .
Imagine that you are the H.R. director of a certain organization , and you receive résumés , and you decide to find more information about the candidates .
Therefore , you Google their names and in a certain universe , you find this information .
Or in a parallel universe , you find this information .
Do you think that you would be equally likely to call either candidate for an interview ?
If you think so , then you are not like the U.S. employers who are , in fact , part of our experiment , meaning we did exactly that .
We created Facebook profiles , manipulating traits , then we started sending out résumés to companies in the U.S. , and we detected , we monitored , whether they were searching for our candidates , and whether they were acting on the information they found on social media . And they were .
Discrimination was happening through social media for equally skilled candidates .
Now marketers like us to believe that all information about us will always be used in a manner which is in our favor .
But think again . Why should that be always the case ?
In a movie which came out a few years ago , " Minority Report , " a famous scene had Tom Cruise walk in a mall and holographic personalized advertising would appear around him .
Now , that movie is set in 2054 , about 40 years from now , and as exciting as that technology looks , it already vastly underestimates the amount of information that organizations can gather about you , and how they can use it to influence you in a way that you will not even detect .
So as an example , this is another experiment actually we are running , not yet completed .
Imagine that an organization has access to your list of Facebook friends , and through some kind of algorithm they can detect the two friends that you like the most .
And then they create , in real time , a facial composite of these two friends .
Now studies prior to ours have shown that people don 't recognize any longer even themselves in facial composites , but they react to those composites in a positive manner .
So next time you are looking for a certain product , and there is an ad suggesting you to buy it , it will not be just a standard spokesperson .
It will be one of your friends , and you will not even know that this is happening .
Now the problem is that the current policy mechanisms we have to protect ourselves from the abuses of personal information are like bringing a knife to a gunfight .
One of these mechanisms is transparency , telling people what you are going to do with their data .
And in principle , that 's a very good thing .
It 's necessary , but it is not sufficient .
Transparency can be misdirected .
You can tell people what you are going to do , and then you still nudge them to disclose arbitrary amounts of personal information .
So in yet another experiment , this one with students , we asked them to provide information about their campus behavior , including pretty sensitive questions , such as this one .
[ Have you ever cheated in an exam ? ] Now to one group of subjects , we told them , " Only other students will see your answers . "
To another group of subjects , we told them , " Students and faculty will see your answers . "
Transparency . Notification . And sure enough , this worked , in the sense that the first group of subjects were much more likely to disclose than the second .
It makes sense , right ?
But then we added the misdirection .
We repeated the experiment with the same two groups , this time adding a delay between the time we told subjects how we would use their data and the time we actually started answering the questions .
How long a delay do you think we had to add in order to nullify the inhibitory effect of knowing that faculty would see your answers ?
Ten minutes ?
Five minutes ?
One minute ?
How about 15 seconds ?
Fifteen seconds were sufficient to have the two groups disclose the same amount of information , as if the second group now no longer cares for faculty reading their answers .
Now I have to admit that this talk so far may sound exceedingly gloomy , but that is not my point .
In fact , I want to share with you the fact that there are alternatives .
The way we are doing things now is not the only way they can done , and certainly not the best way they can be done .
When someone tells you , " People don 't care about privacy , " consider whether the game has been designed and rigged so that they cannot care about privacy , and coming to the realization that these manipulations occur is already halfway through the process of being able to protect yourself .
When someone tells you that privacy is incompatible with the benefits of big data , consider that in the last 20 years , researchers have created technologies to allow virtually any electronic transactions to take place in a more privacy-preserving manner .
We can browse the Internet anonymously .
We can send emails that can only be read by the intended recipient , not even the NSA .
We can have even privacy-preserving data mining .
In other words , we can have the benefits of big data while protecting privacy .
Of course , these technologies imply a shifting of cost and revenues between data holders and data subjects , which is why , perhaps , you don 't hear more about them .
Which brings me back to the Garden of Eden .
There is a second privacy interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden which doesn 't have to do with the issue of Adam and Eve feeling naked and feeling ashamed .
You can find echoes of this interpretation in John Milton 's " Paradise Lost . "
In the garden , Adam and Eve are materially content .
They 're happy . They are satisfied .
However , they also lack knowledge and self-awareness .
The moment they eat the aptly named fruit of knowledge , that 's when they discover themselves .
They become aware . They achieve autonomy .
The price to pay , however , is leaving the garden .
So privacy , in a way , is both the means and the price to pay for freedom .
Again , marketers tell us that big data and social media are not just a paradise of profit for them , but a Garden of Eden for the rest of us .
We get free content .
We get to play Angry Birds . We get targeted apps .
But in fact , in a few years , organizations will know so much about us , they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them , and perhaps buy products on our behalf before we even know we need them .
Now there was one English author who anticipated this kind of future where we would trade away our autonomy and freedom for comfort .
Even more so than George Orwell , the author is , of course , Aldous Huxley .
In " Brave New World , " he imagines a society where technologies that we created originally for freedom end up coercing us .
However , in the book , he also offers us a way out of that society , similar to the path that Adam and Eve had to follow to leave the garden .
In the words of the Savage , regaining autonomy and freedom is possible , although the price to pay is steep .
So I do believe that one of the defining fights of our times will be the fight for the control over personal information , the fight over whether big data will become a force for freedom , rather than a force which will hiddenly manipulate us .
Right now , many of us do not even know that the fight is going on , but it is , whether you like it or not .
And at the risk of playing the serpent , I will tell you that the tools for the fight are here , the awareness of what is going on , and in your hands , just a few clicks away .
Thank you .
May El-Khalil : Making peace is a marathon
In Lebanon there is one gunshot a year that isn 't part of a scene of routine violence : The opening sound of the Beirut International Marathon . In a moving talk , marathon founder May El-Khalil explains why she believed a 26.2-mile running event could bring together a country divided for decades by politics and religion , even if for one day a year .
I come from Lebanon , and I believe that running can change the world .
I know what I have just said is simply not obvious .
You know , Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war .
Honestly , I don 't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it .
With Syria to the north , Israel and Palestine to the south , and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable .
For years , the country has been divided between politics and religion .
However , for one day a year , we truly stand united , and that 's when the marathon takes place .
I used to be a marathon runner .
Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big .
So the longer distances I ran , the bigger my dreams became , until one fateful morning , and while training , I was hit by a bus .
I nearly died , was in a coma , stayed at the hospital for two years , and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again .
As soon as I came out of my coma , I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be , so I decided , if I couldn 't run myself , I wanted to make sure that others could .
So out of my hospital bed , I asked my husband to start taking notes , and a few months later , the marathon was born .
Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange , but at that time , even during my most vulnerable condition , I needed to dream big .
I needed something to take me out of my pain , an objective to look forward to .
I didn 't want to pity myself , nor to be pitied , and I thought by organizing such a marathon , I 'll be able to pay back to my community , build bridges with the outside world , and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace .
Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York .
How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war ?
How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other ?
More than that , how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word " marathon " ?
So we had to start from scratch .
For almost two years , we went all over the country and even visited remote villages .
I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors , NGOs , schoolchildren , politicians , militiamen , people from mosques , churches , the president of the country , even housewives .
I learned one thing : When you walk the talk , people believe you .
Many were touched by my personal story , and they shared their stories in return .
It was honesty and transparency that brought us together .
We spoke one common language to each other , and that was from one human to another .
Once that trust was built , everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony .
In October 2003 , over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line , all determined , and when the gunfire went off , this time it was a signal to run in harmony for a change .
The marathon grew .
So did our political problems .
But for every disaster we had , the marathon found ways to bring people together .
In 2005 , our prime minister was assassinated , and the country came to a complete standstill , so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign .
Over 60,000 people came to the start line , all wearing white t-shirts with no political slogans .
That was a turning point for the marathon , where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity .
Between 2006 up to 2009 , our country , Lebanon , went through unstable years , invasions , and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war .
The country was divided again , so much that our parliament resigned , we had no president for a year , and no prime minister .
But we did have a marathon .
So through the marathon , we learned that political problems can be overcome .
When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center , we negotiated alternative routes .
Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders .
They even hosted juice stations .
You know , the marathon has really become one of a kind .
It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community .
Last November 2012 , over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line , but this time , they challenged very stormy and rainy weather .
The streets were flooded , but people didn 't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day .
BMA has expanded .
We include everyone : the young , the elderly , the disabled , the mentally challenged , the blind , the elite , the amateur runners , even moms with their babies .
Themes have included runs for the environment , breast cancer , for the love of Lebanon , for peace , or just simply to run .
The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment , which is one of its kind in the region , has just taken place only a few weeks ago , with 4,512 women , including the first lady , and this is only the beginning .
Thank you .
BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon , raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give .
The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious .
Stereotypes have been broken .
Change-makers and future leaders have been created .
I believe these are the building blocks for future peace .
BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region like Iraq , Egypt and Syria , have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event .
We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East , but most importantly , it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world .
From Boston to Beirut , we stand as one .
After 10 years in Lebanon , from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races , we 've seen that people want to run for a better future .
After all , peacemaking is not a sprint .
It is more of a marathon .
Thank you .
Sheryl WuDunn : Our century 's greatest injustice
Sheryl WuDunn 's book " Half the Sky " investigates the oppression of women globally . Her stories shock . Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity will we be using all our human resources .
The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages .
It , however , is enormous in both scale and importance .
Look , you all are very well traveled ; this is TEDGlobal after all .
But I do hope to take you to some places you 've never been to before .
So , let 's start off in China .
This photo was taken two weeks ago .
Actually , one indication is that little boy on my husband 's shoulders has just graduated from high school .
But this is Tiananmen Square .
Many of you have been there . It 's not the real China .
Let me take you to the real China .
This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China .
Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts .
She lives with her parents , her two brothers and her great-aunt .
They have a hut that has no electricity , no running water , no wristwatch , no bicycle .
And they share this great splendor with a very large pig .
Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said , " We 're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us .
You 're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies .
Why would we waste this money on you ? "
This is what happens to girls in remote areas .
Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade .
She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors .
We wrote about her in The New York Times .
We got a flood of donations -- mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts but then , we got a money transfer for $ 10,000 -- really nice guy .
We turned the money over to that man there , the principal of the school .
He was delighted .
He thought , " Oh , I can renovate the school .
I can give scholarships to all the girls , you know , if they work hard and stay in school .
So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school .
She went to high school .
She went to vocational school for accounting .
She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south .
She found a job , she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends .
She sent money back to her family .
They built a new house , this time with running water , electricity , a bicycle , no pig .
What we saw was a natural experiment .
It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls ' education .
And over the years , as we followed Dai Manju , we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle .
She not only changed her own dynamic , she changed her household , she changed her family , her village .
The village became a real standout .
Of course , most of China was flourishing at the time , but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China .
And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of " Half the Sky . "
And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity .
In the 19th century , it was slavery .
In the 20th century , it was totalitarianism .
The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender .
So some of you may be thinking , " Gosh , that 's hyperbole .
She 's exaggerating . "
Well , let me ask you this question .
How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world ?
Let me take a poll . How many of you think there are more males in the world ?
Hands up , please .
How many of you think -- a few -- how many of you there are more females in the world ?
Okay , most of you .
Well , you know this latter group , you 're wrong .
There are , true enough , in Europe and the West , when women and men have equal access to food and health care , there are more women , we live longer .
But in most of the rest of the world , that 's not the case .
In fact , demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population .
And , you know , it happens for several reasons .
For instance , in the last half-century , more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century .
Sometimes it 's also because of the sonogram .
Girls get aborted before they 're even born when there are scarce resources .
This girl here , for instance , is in a feeding center in Ethiopia .
The entire center was filled with girls like her .
What 's remarkable is that her brothers , in the same family , were totally fine .
In India , in the first year of life , from zero to one , boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast , and the breast shows no son preference .
From one to five , girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys , in all of India .
The second tenet of " Half the Sky " is that , let 's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all , and just on a purely practical level , we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force .
Poverty , for instance .
There are three reasons why this is the case .
For one , overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty .
And you know , when you educate a boy , his family tends to have fewer kids , but only slightly .
When you educate a girl , she tends to have significantly fewer kids .
The second reason is it has to do with spending .
It 's kind of like the dirty , little secret of poverty , which is that , not only do poor people take in very little income , but also , the income that they take in , they don 't spend it very wisely , and unfortunately , most of that spending is done by men .
So research has shown , if you look at people who live under two dollars a day -- one metric of poverty -- two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here , in education .
alcohol , tobacco , sugary drinks -- and prostitution and festivals .
If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket , you would have a transformative effect .
The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution , not the problem .
You need to use scarce resources .
It 's a waste of resources if you don 't use someone like Dai Manju .
Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia .
He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves .
However , two-thirds of the way there was a barrier .
On this side was men , and then the barrier , and this side was women .
And someone from this side of the room got up and said , " Mr. Gates , we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology .
Do you think we 'll make it ? "
So Bill Gates , as he was staring out at the audience , he said , " If you 're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country , there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10 . "
So here is Bill of Arabia .
So what would some of the specific challenges look like ?
I would say , on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking .
And I 'll just say two things about this .
The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s : there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World .
Now , modern slavery : according to State Department rough statistics , there are about 800,000 -- 10 times the number -- that are trafficked across international borders .
And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders , which is a substantial portion .
And if you look at another factor , another contrast , a slave back then is worth about $ 40,000 in today 's money .
Today , you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars , which means she 's actually more disposable .
But you know , there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand .
We don 't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed .
The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality .
You know , childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event .
In Niger , one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth .
Around the world , one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth .
You know , it 's not as though we don 't have the technological solution , but these women have three strikes against them : they are poor , they are rural and they are female .
You know , for every woman who does die , there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury .
And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula .
It 's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent .
Let me tell you about Mahabuba .
She lives in Ethiopia .
She was married against her will at age 13 .
She got pregnant , ran to the bush to have the baby , but you know , her body was very immature , and she ended up having obstructed labor .
The baby died , and she ended up with a fistula .
So that meant she was incontinent ; she couldn 't control her wastes .
In a word , she stank .
The villagers thought she was cursed ; they didn 't know what to do with her .
So finally , they put her at the edge of the village in a hut .
They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night .
That night , there was a stick in the hut .
She fought off the hyenas with that stick .
And the next morning , she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary , she would be saved .
Because she had some damage to her nerves , she crawled all the way -- 30 miles -- to that doorstep , half dead .
The foreign missionary opened the door , knew exactly what had happened , took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa , and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation .
The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor , she was really clever , and they made her a nurse .
So now , Mahabuba , she is saving the lives of hundreds , thousands , of women .
She has become part of the solution , not the problem .
She 's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle .
I 've talked about some of the challenges , let me talk about some of the solutions , and there are predictable solutions .
I 've hinted at them : education and also economic opportunity .
So of course , when you educate a girl , she tends to get married later on in life , she tends to have kids later on in life , she tends to have fewer kids , and those kids that she does have , she educates them in a more enlightened fashion .
With economic opportunity , it can be transformative .
Let me tell you about Saima .
She lives in a small village outside Lahore , Pakistan .
And at the time , she was miserable .
She was beaten every single day by her husband , who was unemployed .
He was kind of a gambler type -- and unemployable , therefore -- and took his frustrations out on her .
Well , when she had her second daughter , her mother in-law told her son , " I think you 'd better get a second wife .
Saima 's not going to produce you a son . "
This is when she had her second daughter .
At the time , there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan .
Saima took that money , and she started an embroidery business .
The merchants liked her embroidery ; it sold very well , and they kept asking for more .
And when she couldn 't produce enough , she hired other women in the village .
Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business .
And then , when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace , she needed someone to help her do the transport , so she hired her husband .
So now they 're in it together .
He does the transportation and distribution , and she does the production and sourcing .
And now they have a third daughter , and the daughters , all of them , are being tutored in education because Saima knows what 's really important .
Which brings me to the final element , which is education .
Larry Summers , when he was chief economist at the World Bank , once said that , " It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls ' education . "
Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira .
Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border , and like Dai Manju , she didn 't go to school .
Actually , she had never been to school , not to a lick , one day .
Her parents , again , said , " Why should we spend the money on her ?
She 's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth . "
Well , it just so happens , at that time , there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut .
They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International .
Heifer sent two goats to Africa .
One of them ended up with Beatrice 's parents , and that goat had twins .
The twins started producing milk .
They sold the milk for cash .
The cash started accumulating , and pretty soon the parents said , " You know , we 've got enough money . Let 's send Beatrice to school . "
So at nine years of age , Beatrice started in first grade -- after all , she 'd never been to a lick of school -- with a six year-old .
No matter , she was just delighted to be in school .
She rocketed to the top of her class .
She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school , middle school , and then in high school , she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village , ever , to come to the United States on scholarship .
Two years ago , she graduated from Connecticut College .
On the day of her graduation , she said , " I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat . "
And that goat was $ 120 .
So you see how transformative little bits of help can be .
But I want to give you a reality check .
Look : U.S. aid , helping people is not easy , and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid .
There 's Bill Easterly 's book .
There 's a book called " Dead Aid . "
You know , the criticism is fair ; it isn 't easy .
You know , people say how half of all water well projects , a year later , are failed .
When I was in Zimbabwe , we were touring a place with the village chief -- he wanted to raise money for a secondary school -- and there was some construction a few yards away , and I said , " What 's that ? "
He sort of mumbled .
Turns out that it 's a failed irrigation project .
A few yards away was a failed chicken coop .
One year , all the chickens died , and no one wanted to put the chickens in there .
It 's true , but we think that you don 't through the baby out with the bathwater ; you actually improve .
You learn from your mistakes , and you continuously improve .
We also think that individuals can make a difference , and they should , because individuals , together , we can all help create a movement .
And a movement of men and women is what 's needed to bring about social change , change that will address this great moral challenge .
So then , I ask , what 's in it for you ?
You 're probably asking that . Why should you care ?
I will just leave you with two things .
One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of -- which most of us , all of us , here in this room do -- research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness .
One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself .
And the second thing , it 's an anecdote that I 'll leave you with .
And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur .
Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur , seeing things that no human being should see .
Throughout her time there , she was strong , she was steadfast .
She never broke down .
And then she came back to the United States and was on break , Christmas break .
She was in her grandmother 's backyard , and she saw something that made her break down in tears .
What that was was a bird feeder .
And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted , where we not only can feed , clothe and house ourselves , but also provide for wild birds so they don 't go hungry in the winter .
And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility .
And so , like her , you , me , we have all won the lottery of life .
And so the question becomes : how do we discharge that responsibility ?
So , here 's the cause .
Join the movement .
Feel happier and help save the world .
Thank you very much .
Francis Collins : We need better drugs -- now
Today we know the molecular cause of 4,000 diseases , but treatments are available for only 250 of them . So what 's taking so long ? Geneticist and physician Francis Collins explains why systematic drug discovery is imperative , even for rare and complex diseases , and offers a few solutions -- like teaching old drugs new tricks .
So let me ask for a show of hands .
How many people here are over the age of 48 ?
Well , there do seem to be a few .
Well , congratulations , because if you look at this particular slide of U.S. life expectancy , you are now in excess of the average life span of somebody who was born in 1900 .
But look what happened in the course of that century .
If you follow that curve , you 'll see that it starts way down there .
There 's that dip there for the 1918 flu .
And here we are at 2010 , average life expectancy of a child born today , age 79 , and we are not done yet .
Now , that 's the good news .
But there 's still a lot of work to do .
So , for instance , if you ask , how many diseases do we now know the exact molecular basis ?
Turns out it 's about 4,000 , which is pretty amazing , because most of those molecular discoveries have just happened in the last little while .
It 's exciting to see that in terms of what we 've learned , but how many of those 4,000 diseases now have treatments available ?
Only about 250 .
So we have this huge challenge , this huge gap .
You would think this wouldn 't be too hard , that we would simply have the ability to take this fundamental information that we 're learning about how it is that basic biology teaches us about the causes of disease and build a bridge across this yawning gap between what we 've learned about basic science and its application , a bridge that would look maybe something like this , where you 'd have to put together a nice shiny way to get from one side to the other .
Well , wouldn 't it be nice if it was that easy ?
Unfortunately , it 's not .
In reality , trying to go from fundamental knowledge to its application is more like this .
There are no shiny bridges .
You sort of place your bets .
Maybe you 've got a swimmer and a rowboat and a sailboat and a tugboat and you set them off on their way , and the rains come and the lightning flashes , and oh my gosh , there are sharks in the water and the swimmer gets into trouble , and , uh oh , the swimmer drowned and the sailboat capsized , and that tugboat , well , it hit the rocks , and maybe if you 're lucky , somebody gets across .
Well , what does this really look like ?
Well , what is it to make a therapeutic , anyway ?
What 's a drug ? A drug is made up of a small molecule of hydrogen , carbon , oxygen , nitrogen , and a few other atoms all cobbled together in a shape , and it 's those shapes that determine whether , in fact , that particular drug is going to hit its target .
Is it going to land where it 's supposed to ?
So look at this picture here -- a lot of shapes dancing around for you .
Now what you need to do , if you 're trying to develop a new treatment for autism or Alzheimer 's disease or cancer is to find the right shape in that mix that will ultimately provide benefit and will be safe .
And when you look at what happens to that pipeline , you start out maybe with thousands , tens of thousands of compounds .
You weed down through various steps that cause many of these to fail .
Ultimately , maybe you can run a clinical trial with four or five of these , and if all goes well , 14 years after you started , you will get one approval .
And it will cost you upwards of a billion dollars for that one success .
So we have to look at this pipeline the way an engineer would , and say , " How can we do better ? "
And that 's the main theme of what I want to say to you this morning .
How can we make this go faster ?
How can we make it more successful ?
Well , let me tell you about a few examples where this has actually worked .
One that has just happened in the last few months is the successful approval of a drug for cystic fibrosis .
But it 's taken a long time to get there .
Cystic fibrosis had its molecular cause discovered in 1989 by my group working with another group in Toronto , discovering what the mutation was in a particular gene on chromosome 7 .
That picture you see there ?
Here it is . That 's the same kid .
That 's Danny Bessette , 23 years later , because this is the year , and it 's also the year where Danny got married , where we have , for the first time , the approval by the FDA of a drug that precisely targets the defect in cystic fibrosis based upon all this molecular understanding .
That 's the good news .
The bad news is , this drug doesn 't actually treat all cases of cystic fibrosis , and it won 't work for Danny , and we 're still waiting for that next generation to help him .
But it took 23 years to get this far . That 's too long .
How do we go faster ?
Well , one way to go faster is to take advantage of technology , and a very important technology that we depend on for all of this is the human genome , the ability to be able to look at a chromosome , to unzip it , to pull out all the DNA , and to be able to then read out the letters in that DNA code , the A 's , C 's , G 's and T 's that are our instruction book and the instruction book for all living things , and the cost of doing this , which used to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars , has in the course of the last 10 years fallen faster than Moore 's Law , down to the point where it is less than 10,000 dollars today to have your genome sequenced , or mine , and we 're headed for the $ 1,000 genome fairly soon .
Well , that 's exciting .
How does that play out in terms of application to a disease ?
I want to tell you about another disorder .
This one is a disorder which is quite rare .
It 's called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria , and it is the most dramatic form of premature aging .
Only about one in every four million kids has this disease , and in a simple way , what happens is , because of a mutation in a particular gene , a protein is made that 's toxic to the cell and it causes these individuals to age at about seven times the normal rate .
Let me show you a video of what that does to the cell .
The normal cell , if you looked at it under the microscope , would have a nucleus sitting in the middle of the cell , which is nice and round and smooth in its boundaries and it looks kind of like that .
A progeria cell , on the other hand , because of this toxic protein called progerin , has these lumps and bumps in it .
So what we would like to do after discovering this back in 2003 is to come up with a way to try to correct that .
Well again , by knowing something about the molecular pathways , it was possible to pick one of those many , many compounds that might have been useful and try it out .
In an experiment done in cell culture and shown here in a cartoon , if you take that particular compound and you add it to that cell that has progeria , and you watch to see what happened , in just 72 hours , that cell becomes , for all purposes that we can determine , almost like a normal cell .
Well that was exciting , but would it actually work in a real human being ?
This has led , in the space of only four years from the time the gene was discovered to the start of a clinical trial , to a test of that very compound .
And the kids that you see here all volunteered to be part of this , 28 of them , and you can see as soon as the picture comes up that they are in fact a remarkable group of young people all afflicted by this disease , all looking quite similar to each other .
And instead of telling you more about it , I 'm going to invite one of them , Sam Berns from Boston , who 's here this morning , to come up on the stage and tell us about his experience as a child affected with progeria .
Sam is 15 years old . His parents , Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon , both physicians , are here with us this morning as well .
Sam , please have a seat .
So Sam , why don 't you tell these folks what it 's like being affected with this condition called progeria ?
Sam Burns : Well , progeria limits me in some ways .
I cannot play sports or do physical activities , but I have been able to take interest in things that progeria , luckily , does not limit .
But when there is something that I really do want to do that progeria gets in the way of , like marching band or umpiring , we always find a way to do it , and that just shows that progeria isn 't in control of my life .
Francis Collins : So what would you like to say to researchers here in the auditorium and others listening to this ?
What would you say to them both about research on progeria and maybe about other conditions as well ?
SB : Well , research on progeria has come so far in less than 15 years , and that just shows the drive that researchers can have to get this far , and it really means a lot to myself and other kids with progeria , and it shows that if that drive exists , anybody can cure any disease , and hopefully progeria can be cured in the near future , and so we can eliminate those 4,000 diseases that Francis was talking about .
FC : Excellent . So Sam took the day off from school today to be here , and he is — -- He is , by the way , a straight-A + student in the ninth grade in his school in Boston .
Please join me in thanking and welcoming Sam .
SB : Thank you very much . FC : Well done . Well done , buddy .
So I just want to say a couple more things about that particular story , and then try to generalize how could we have stories of success all over the place for these diseases , as Sam says , these 4,000 that are waiting for answers .
You might have noticed that the drug that is now in clinical trial for progeria is not a drug that was designed for that .
It 's such a rare disease , it would be hard for a company to justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate a drug .
This is a drug that was developed for cancer .
Turned out , it didn 't work very well for cancer , but it has exactly the right properties , the right shape , to work for progeria , and that 's what 's happened .
Wouldn 't it be great if we could do that more systematically ?
Could we , in fact , encourage all the companies that are out there that have drugs in their freezers that are known to be safe in humans but have never actually succeeded in terms of being effective for the treatments they were tried for ?
Now we 're learning about all these new molecular pathways -- some of those could be repositioned or repurposed , or whatever word you want to use , for new applications , basically teaching old drugs new tricks .
That could be a phenomenal , valuable activity .
We have many discussions now between NIH and companies about doing this that are looking very promising .
And you could expect quite a lot to come from this .
There are quite a number of success stories one can point to about how this has led to major advances .
The first drug for HIV / AIDS was not developed for HIV / AIDS .
It was developed for cancer . It was AZT .
It didn 't work very well for cancer , but became the first successful antiretroviral , and you can see from the table there are others as well .
So how do we actually make that a more generalizable effort ?
Well , we have to come up with a partnership between academia , government , the private sector , and patient organizations to make that so .
At NIH , we have started this new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences .
It just started last December , and this is one of its goals .
Let me tell you another thing we could do .
Wouldn 't it be nice to be able to a test a drug to see if it 's effective and safe without having to put patients at risk , because that first time you 're never quite sure ?
How do we know , for instance , whether drugs are safe before we give them to people ? We test them on animals .
And it 's not all that reliable , and it 's costly , and it 's time-consuming .
Suppose we could do this instead on human cells .
You probably know , if you 've been paying attention to some of the science literature that you can now take a skin cell and encourage it to become a liver cell or a heart cell or a kidney cell or a brain cell for any of us .
So what if you used those cells as your test for whether a drug is going to work and whether it 's going to be safe ?
Here you see a picture of a lung on a chip .
This is something created by the Wyss Institute in Boston , and what they have done here , if we can run the little video , is to take cells from an individual , turn them into the kinds of cells that are present in the lung , and determine what would happen if you added to this various drug compounds to see if they are toxic or safe .
You can see this chip even breathes .
It has an air channel . It has a blood channel .
And it has cells in between that allow you to see what happens when you add a compound .
Are those cells happy or not ?
You can do this same kind of chip technology for kidneys , for hearts , for muscles , all the places where you want to see whether a drug is going to be a problem , for the liver .
And ultimately , because you can do this for the individual , we could even see this moving to the point where the ability to develop and test medicines will be you on a chip , what we 're trying to say here is the individualizing of the process of developing drugs and testing their safety .
So let me sum up .
We are in a remarkable moment here .
For me , at NIH now for almost 20 years , there has never been a time where there was more excitement about the potential that lies in front of us .
We have made all these discoveries pouring out of laboratories across the world .
What do we need to capitalize on this ? First of all , we need resources .
This is research that 's high-risk , sometimes high-cost .
The payoff is enormous , both in terms of health and in terms of economic growth . We need to support that .
Second , we need new kinds of partnerships between academia and government and the private sector and patient organizations , just like the one I 've been describing here , in terms of the way in which we could go after repurposing new compounds .
And third , and maybe most important , we need talent .
We need the best and the brightest from many different disciplines to come and join this effort -- all ages , all different groups -- because this is the time , folks .
This is the 21st-century biology that you 've been waiting for , and we have the chance to take that and turn it into something which will , in fact , knock out disease . That 's my goal .
I hope that 's your goal .
I think it 'll be the goal of the poets and the muppets and the surfers and the bankers and all the other people who join this stage and think about what we 're trying to do here and why it matters .
It matters for now . It matters as soon as possible .
If you don 't believe me , just ask Sam .
Thank you all very much .
Lucy McRae : How can technology transform the human body ?
TED Fellow Lucy McRae is a body architect -- she imagines ways to merge biology and technology in our own bodies . In this visually stunning talk , she shows her work , from clothes that recreate the body 's insides for a music video with pop-star Robyn , to a pill that , when swallowed , lets you sweat perfume .
I call myself a body architect .
I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion .
As a body architect , I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it .
I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab , looking 20 years into the future .
I explored the human skin , and how technology can transform the body .
I worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo , which is augmented by touch , or dresses that blushed and shivered with light .
I started my own experiments .
These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having .
These are Q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue .
I started a collaboration with a friend of mine , Bart Hess -- he doesn 't normally look like this -- and we used ourselves as models .
We transformed our apartments into our laboratories , and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way .
We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution .
Whilst I was at Philips , we discussed this idea of a maybe technology , something that wasn 't either switched on or off , but in between .
A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid .
And I became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body , so you couldn 't see where the skin ended and the near environment started .
I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing , and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile .
I was introduced to Robyn , the Swedish pop star , and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion .
And she talked about how technology with these new feathers , this new face paint , this punk , the way that we identify with the world , and we made this music video .
I 'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology , and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology , in the future , away from disease and aging .
And I thought about this concept of , imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor , modify and biologically enhance it , and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other ?
Or the way that we attract sexual partners ?
And would we revert back to being more like animals , more primal modes of communication ?
I worked with a synthetic biologist , and I created a swallowable perfume , which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin 's surface when you perspire .
It completely blows apart the way that perfume is , and provides a whole new format .
It 's perfume coming from the inside out .
It redefines the role of skin , and our bodies become an atomizer .
I 've learned that there 's no boundaries , and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense .
But when I look towards the future , the next project is completely unknown and wide open .
I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me , and it 's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas , and they kind of instinctively come out .
As a body architect , I 've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want .
And I feel like I 've just got started .
So here 's to another day at the office .
Thank you !
Thank you !
Sally Kohn : Let 's try emotional correctness
It 's time for liberals and conservatives to transcend their political differences and really listen to each other , says political pundit Sally Kohn . In this optimistic talk , Kohn shares what she learned as a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News . It 's not about political correctness , she says , but rather , emotional correctness .
So when I do my job , people hate me .
In fact , the better I do my job , the more people hate me .
And no , I 'm not a meter maid , and I 'm not an undertaker .
I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News .
So y 'all heard that , right ? Just to make sure , right ?
I am a gay talking head on Fox News .
I am going to tell you how I do it and the most important thing I 've learned .
So I go on television .
I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in , in some cases , who don 't want me and people like me to even exist .
It 's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids , with a live television audience of millions .
It 's totally almost just like that .
And that 's just on air .
The hate mail I get is unbelievable .
Last week alone , I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count .
I was called an idiot , a traitor , a scourge , a cunt , and an ugly man , and that was just in one email .
So what have I realized , being on the receiving end of all this ugliness ?
Well , my biggest takeaway is that for decades , we 've been focused on political correctness , but what matters more is emotional correctness .
Let me give you a small example .
I don 't care if you call me a dyke . I really don 't .
I care about two things .
One , I care that you spell it right .
Just quick refresher , it 's D-Y-K-E .
You 'd totally be surprised .
And second , I don 't care about the word , I care about how you use it .
Are you being friendly ? Are you just being naive ?
Or do you really want to hurt me personally ?
Emotional correctness is the tone , the feeling , how we say what we say , the respect and compassion we show one another .
And what I 've realized is that political persuasion doesn 't begin with ideas or facts or data .
Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct .
So when I first went to go work at Fox News , true confession , I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging .
That , by the way , in case you 're paying attention , is not emotionally correct .
But liberals on my side , we can be self-righteous , we can be condescending , we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn 't agree with us .
In other words , we can be politically right but emotionally wrong .
And incidentally , that means that people don 't like us . Right ?
Now here 's the kicker .
Conservatives are really nice .
I mean , not all of them , and not the ones who send me hate mail , but you would be surprised .
Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I 've ever met .
He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates , and I know that if I ever had a problem , he would do anything he could to help .
Now , I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong , but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive , and that 's why people listen to him .
Because you can 't get anyone to agree with you if they don 't even listen to you first .
We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements , and if we can start to find compassion for one another , then we have a shot at building common ground .
It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here , but when you try to put it in practice , it 's really powerful .
So someone who says they hate immigrants , I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they 've always known .
Or someone who says they don 't like teachers ' unions , I bet they 're really devastated to see their kid 's school going into the gutter , and they 're just looking for someone to blame .
Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us .
That is emotional correctness .
I 'm not saying it 's easy .
An average of , like , 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities .
This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me , and I ain 't the Dalai Lama .
I 'm not perfect , but what I am is optimistic , because I don 't just get hate mail .
I get a lot of really nice letters , lots of them .
And one of my all-time favorites begins , " I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic , but I 'm a big fan of you as a person . "
Now this guy doesn 't agree with me , yet .
But he 's listening , not because of what I said , but because of how I said it , and somehow , even though we 've never met , we 've managed to form a connection .
That 's emotional correctness , and that 's how we start the conversations that really lead to change .
Thank you .
Seth Godin : The tribes we lead
Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past : tribes . Founded on shared ideas and values , tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change . He urges us to do so .
So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks .
I got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events .
Unfortunately I couldn 't go .
But it got me thinking about the fact that these guys , at least most of them , know what it is that they do for a living .
What they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events .
Shortly after that I got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals .
And again , I couldn 't go . But it 's a fascinating group . They make balloon animals .
There is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals , but -- they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons .
Sometimes they get in trouble , but not often .
And the other thing about these guys is , they also know what they do for a living .
They make balloon animals .
But what do we do for a living ?
What exactly to the people watching this do every day ?
And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything .
That we try to find a piece of the status quo -- something that bothers us , something that needs to be improved , something that is itching to be changed -- and we change it .
We try to make big , permanent , important change .
But we don 't think about it that way .
And we haven 't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like .
And I 've been studying it for a couple years .
And I want to share a couple stories with you today .
First , about a guy named Nathan Winograd .
Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA .
And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is , it was founded to kill dogs and cats .
Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them .
In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed , most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street .
Nathan and his boss saw this , and they could not tolerate it .
So they set out to make San Francisco a no-kill city : create an entire city where every dog and cat , unless it was ill or dangerous , would be adopted , not killed .
And everyone said it was impossible .
Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance .
And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them -- to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane .
They persisted . And Nathan went directly to the community .
He connected with people who cared about this : nonprofessionals , people with passion .
And within just a couple years , San Francisco became the first no-kill city , running no deficit , completely supported by the community .
Nathan left and went to Tompkins County , New York -- a place as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be in the United States . And he did it again .
He went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community .
And then he went to North Carolina and did it again .
And he went to Reno and he did it again .
And when I think about what Nathan did , and when I think about what people here do , I think about ideas .
And I think about the idea that creating an idea , spreading an idea has a lot behind it .
I don 't know if you 've ever been to a Jewish wedding , but what they do is , they take a light bulb and they smash it .
Now there is a bunch of reasons for that , and stories about it .
But one reason is because it indicates a change , from before to after .
It is a moment in time .
And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented .
We started with the factory idea : that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change .
We then went to the TV idea , that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece , if you could get on TV enough times , if you could buy enough ads , you could win .
And now we 're in this new model of leadership , where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system , but by leading .
So let me tell you about the three cycles . The first one is the factory cycle .
Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea .
It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day .
Because he 's got an efficient enough factory .
Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars .
You can make a lot of change . You can get roads built .
You can change the fabric of an entire country .
That the essence of what you 're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor , and ever-faster machines .
And the problem we 've run into is , we 're running out of both .
Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines .
So we shift gears for a minute , and say , " I know : television ; advertising . Push push .
Take a good idea and push it on the world .
I have a better mousetrap .
And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people , I 'll sell enough . "
And you can build an entire industry on that .
If necessary you can put babies in your ads .
If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff .
And if babies don 't work , you can use doctors .
But be careful .
Because you don 't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition , where you 're talking about one thing instead of the other .
This model requires you to act like the king , like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back .
That you are in charge , and you 're going to tell people what to do next .
The quick little diagram of it is , you 're up here , and you are pushing it out to the world .
This method -- mass marketing -- requires average ideas , because you 're going to the masses , and plenty of ads .
What we 've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea , hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause , hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate .
And , unfortunately , it doesn 't work so well anymore either .
But there is good news around the corner -- really good news .
I call it the idea of tribes .
What tribes are , is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years .
It 's about leading and connecting people and ideas .
And it 's something that people have wanted forever .
Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe , or a church tribe , having a work tribe , having a community tribe .
But now , thanks to the internet , thanks to the explosion of mass media , thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world , tribes are everywhere .
The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all .
Instead what it 's allowed is silos of interest .
So you 've got the red-hat ladies over here .
You 've got the red-hat triathletes over there .
You 've got the organized armies over here .
You 've got the disorganized rebels over here .
You 've got people in white hats making food .
And people in white hats sailing boats .
The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them , because you want to be connected .
That people on the fringes can find each other , connect and go somewhere .
Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking .
Now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo .
People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon .
And that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down , and they burn it down instead , and practice putting it out .
But they always stop and take a picture .
You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one .
They 've got their own flag . They 've got the eye patches .
You can tell when you 're running into someone in a tribe .
And it turns out that it 's tribes -- not money , not factories -- that can change our world , that can change politics , that can align large numbers of people .
Not because you force them to do something against their will , but because they wanted to connect .
That what we do for a living now , all of us , I think , is find something worth changing , and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea .
And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves , it becomes a movement .
So when Al Gore set out to change the world again , he didn 't do it by himself .
And he didn 't do it by buying a lot of ads .
He did it by creating a movement .
Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him , because he can 't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night .
You don 't need everyone .
What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need , I don 't know , a thousand true fans -- a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round .
And that means that the idea you create , the product you create , the movement you create isn 't for everyone , it 's not a mass thing . That 's not what this is about .
What it 's about instead is finding the true believers .
It 's easy to look at what I 've said so far , and say , " Wait a minute , I don 't have what it takes to be that kind of leader . "
So here are two leaders . They don 't have a lot in common .
They 're about the same age . But that 's about it .
What they did , though , is each in their own way , created a different way of navigating your way through technology .
So some people will go out and get people to be on one team .
And some people will get people to be on the other team .
It also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services .
You know , this is one of my favorite devices .
But what a shame that it 's not organized to help authors create movements .
What would happen if , when you 're using your Kindle , you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment .
Or from your book group . Or from your friends , or from the circle you want .
What would happen if authors , or people with ideas could use version two , which comes out on Monday , and use it to organize people who want to talk about something .
Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here .
But let me just try a couple .
The Beatles did not invent teenagers .
They merely decided to lead them .
That most movements , most leadership that we 're doing is about finding a group that 's disconnected but already has a yearning -- not persuading people to want something they don 't have yet .
When Diane Hatz worked on " The Meatrix , " her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated , she didn 't invent the idea of being a vegan .
She didn 't invent the idea of caring about this issue .
But she helped organize people , and helped turn it into a movement .
Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of Venezuela . He merely led them .
Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians .
He just stepped up and said , " Follow me . "
Derek Sivers invented CD Baby , which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man -- to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to , and connect with each other .
What all these people have in common is that they are heretics .
That heretics look at the status quo and say , " This will not stand . I can 't abide this status quo .
I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward .
I see what the status quo is ; I don 't like it . "
That instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them , that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker -- somebody who 's half asleep , following instructions , keeping their head down , fitting in -- every once in a while someone stands up and says , " Not me . "
Someone stands up and says , " This one is important .
We need to organize around it . "
And not everyone will . But you don 't need everyone .
You just need a few people -- -- who will look at the rules , realize they make no sense , and realize how much they want to be connected .
So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store .
Zappos isn 't a shoe store .
Zappos is the one , the only , the best-there-ever-was place for people who are into shoes to find each other , to talk about their passion , to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow .
It can be something as prosaic as shoes , and something as complicated as overthrowing a government .
It 's exactly the same behavior though .
What it requires , as Geraldine Carter has discovered , is to be able to say , " I can 't do this by myself .
But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride , then together we can get something that we all want .
We 're just waiting for someone to lead us . "
Michelle Kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture .
She doesn 't do it by quietly building one house at a time .
She does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it .
By connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other .
By leading a movement and making change .
And around and around and around it goes .
So three questions I 'd offer you .
The first one is , who exactly are you upsetting ?
Because if you 're not upsetting anyone , you 're not changing the status quo .
The second question is , who are you connecting ?
Because for a lot of people , that 's what they 're in it for : the connections that are being made , one to the other .
And the third one is , who are you leading ?
Because focusing on that part of it -- not the mechanics of what you 're building , but the who , and the leading part -- is where change comes .
So Blake , at Tom 's Shoes , had a very simple idea .
" What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn 't even own a pair of shoes ? "
This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus .
It 's a story of a product that tells a story .
And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says , " What are those ? "
You get to tell the story on Blake 's behalf , on behalf of the people who got the shoes .
And suddenly it 's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes .
It 's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes .
My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes .
Not fighting the organization that 's fighting it -- fighting with them , leading them , connecting them , challenging the status quo because it 's important to him .
And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection .
They need the leadership . It makes a difference .
You don 't need permission from people to lead them .
But in case you do , here it is : they 're waiting , we 're waiting for you to show us where to go next .
So here is what leaders have in common . The first thing is , they challenge the status quo .
They challenge what 's currently there .
The second thing is , they build a culture .
A secret language , a seven-second handshake , a way of knowing that you 're in or out .
They have curiosity . Curiosity about people in the tribe , curiosity about outsiders . They 're asking questions .
They connect people to one another .
Do you know what people want more than anything ?
They want to be missed .
They want to be missed the day they don 't show up .
They want to be missed when they 're gone .
And tribe leaders can do that .
It 's fascinating , because all tribe leaders have charisma , but you don 't need charisma to become a leader .
Being a leader gives you charisma .
If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded , that 's where charisma comes from -- from the leading .
Finally , they commit .
They commit to the cause . They commit to the tribe .
They commit to the people who are there .
So I 'd like you to do something for me .
And I hope you 'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand .
What I want you to do , it only takes 24 hours , is : create a movement .
Something that matters . Start . Do it . We need it .
Thank you very much . I appreciate it .
Lee Hotz : Inside an Antarctic time machine
Science columnist Lee Hotz describes a remarkable project at WAIS Divide , Antarctica , where a hardy team are drilling into ten-thousand-year-old ice to extract vital data on our changing climate .
Come with me to the bottom of the world , Antarctica , the highest , driest , windiest , and yes , coldest region on Earth -- more arid than the Sahara and , in parts , colder than Mars .
The ice of Antarctica glows with a light so dazzling , it blinds the unprotected eye .
Early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain of it .
The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level , beneath its weight .
Yet , the ice of Antarctica is a calendar of climate change .
It records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages .
Nowhere on Earth offers us such a perfect record .
And here , scientists are drilling into the past of our planet to find clues to the future of climate change .
This past January , I traveled to a place called WAIS Divide , about 600 miles from the South Pole .
It is the best place on the planet , many say , to study the history of climate change .
There , about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin , the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming .
What is the exact relationship between levels of greenhouse gases and planetary temperatures ?
It 's urgent work . We know that temperatures are rising .
This past May was the warmest worldwide on record .
And we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too .
What we don 't know is the exact , precise , immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns -- winds , ocean currents , precipitation rates , cloud formation , things that bear on the health and well-being of billions of people .
Their entire camp , every item of gear , was ferried 885 miles from McMurdo Station , the main U.S. supply base on the coast of Antarctica .
WAIS Divide itself though , is a circle of tents in the snow .
In blizzard winds , the crew sling ropes between the tents so that people can feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and to the nearest outhouse .
It snows so heavily there , the installation was almost immediately buried .
Indeed , the researchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulates here 10 times faster than anywhere else in Antarctica .
They have to dig themselves out every day .
It makes for an exotic and chilly commute .
But under the surface is a hive of industrial activity centered around an eight-million-dollar drill assembly .
Periodically , this drill , like a biopsy needle , plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice to extract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis .
Ten times a day , they extract the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals laid down by snow , season after season for thousands of years .
It 's really a time machine .
At the peak of activity earlier this year , the researchers lowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day and another 365 years deeper into the past .
Periodically , they remove a cylinder of ice , like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell from the barrel of a drill .
They inspect it , they check it for cracks , for drill damage , for spalls , for chips .
More importantly , they prepare it for inspection and analysis by 27 independent laboratories in the United States and Europe , who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals related to climate , some in parts per quadrillion .
Yes , I said that with a Q , quadrillion .
They cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easier handling and shipment back to these labs , some 8,000 miles from the drill site .
Each cylinder is a parfait of time .
This ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago , when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint and considering the radical new technology of the alphabet .
Bathed in polarized light and cut in cross-section , this ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors , each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected this material at depths where pressures can reach a ton per square inch .
Every year , it begins with a snowflake , and by digging into fresh snow , we can see how this process is ongoing today .
This wall of undisturbed snow , back-lit by sunlight , shows the striations of winter and summer snow , layer upon layer .
Each storm scours the atmosphere , washing out dust , soot , trace chemicals , and depositing them on the snow pack year after year , millennia after millennia , creating a kind of periodic table of elements that at this point is more than 11,000 feet thick .
From this , we can detect an extraordinary number of things .
We can see the calcium from the world 's deserts , soot from distant wildfires , methane as an indicator of the strength of a Pacific monsoon , all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes to this remote and very cold place .
Most importantly , these cylinders and this snow trap air .
Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air , a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxide -- all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell .
And this is the object of their scrutiny .
But don 't we already know what we need to know about greenhouse gases ?
Why do we need to study this anymore ?
Don 't we already know how they affect temperatures ?
Don 't we already know the consequences of a changing climate on our settled civilization ?
The truth is , we only know the outlines , and what we don 't completely understand , we can 't properly fix .
Indeed , we run the risk of making things worse .
Consider , the single most successful international environmental effort of the 20th century , the Montreal Protocol , in which the nations of Earth banded together to protect the planet from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in air conditioners , refrigerators and other cooling devices .
We banned those chemicals , and we replaced them , unknowingly , with other substances that , molecule per molecule , are a hundred times more potent as heat-trapping , greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide .
This process requires extraordinary precautions .
The scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated .
Moreover , in this 8,000-mile journey , they have to insure this ice doesn 't melt .
Imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics .
They have to , in fact , make sure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees below zero , otherwise , the key gases inside it will dissipate .
So , in the coldest place on Earth , they work inside a refrigerator .
As they handle the ice , in fact , they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven , so that , when their work gloves freeze and their fingers stiffen , they can don a fresh pair .
They work against the clock and against the thermometer .
So far , they 've packed up about 4,500 feet of ice cores for shipment back to the United States .
This past season , they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft .
The 109th Air National Guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of Antarctica , where it was boarded onto a freighter , shipped across the tropics to California , unloaded , put on a truck , driven across the desert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver , Colorado , where , as we speak , scientists are now slicing this material up for samples , for analysis , to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in Europe .
Antarctica was this planet 's last empty quarter -- the blind spot in our expanding vision of the world .
Early explorers sailed off the edge of the map , and they found a place where the normal rules of time and temperature seem suspended .
Here , the ice seems a living presence .
The wind that rubs against it gives it voice .
It is a voice of experience .
It is a voice we should heed .
Thank you .
Bill Ford : A future beyond traffic gridlock
Bill Ford is a car guy -- his great-grandfather was Henry Ford , and he grew up inside the massive Ford Motor Co . So when he worries about cars ' impact on the environment , and about our growing global gridlock problem , it 's worth a listen . His vision for the future of mobility includes " smart roads , " even smarter public transport and going green like never before .
By birth and by choice , I 've been involved with the auto industry my entire life , and for the past 30 years , I 've worked at Ford Motor Company .
And for most of those years , I worried about , how am I going to sell more cars and trucks ?
But today I worry about , what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks ?
What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles , triples , or even quadruples ?
My life is guided by two great passions , and the first is automobiles .
I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company .
I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway .
And I decided about that time , about age 10 , that it would be really cool if I was a test driver .
So my parents would go to dinner .
They 'd sit down ; I 'd sneak out of the house .
I 'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway , and it was a blast .
And that went on for about two years , until -- I think I was about 12 -- my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III .
And it was snowing that day .
So he and mom went to dinner , and I snuck out and thought it 'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow .
My dad finished dinner early that evening .
And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car -- and almost ended up in the front hall .
So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while .
But I really began to love cars then .
And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang .
And even though the color was pretty hideous , I did love the car , and it really cemented my love affair with cars that 's continued on to this day .
But cars are really more than a passion of mine ; they 're quite literally in my blood .
My great grandfather was Henry Ford , and on my mother 's side , my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone .
So when I was born , I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me .
But my great grandfather , Henry Ford , really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people 's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them .
Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress .
And that 's a belief that I share .
My other great passion is the environment .
And as a young boy , I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about .
And it really struck me as the years went by , in a very negative way , when I would go to some stream that I 'd loved , and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies , and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it .
And so even at a young age , that really resonated with me , and the whole notion of environmental preservation , at a very basic level , sunk in with me .
As a high-schooler , I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey , and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world .
But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature .
And that was true until I got to college .
And when I got to college , you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country .
They thought that we were more interested , as an industry , in profits , rather than progress , and that we filled the skies with smog -- and frankly , we were the enemy .
I joined Ford after college , after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do .
But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there .
And as I look back over 30 years ago , it was a little naive to think at that age that I could . But I wanted to .
And I really discovered that my professors weren 't completely wrong .
In fact , when I got back to Detroit , my environmental leanings weren 't exactly embraced by those in my own company , and certainly by those in the industry .
I had some very interesting conversations , as you can imagine .
There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with " environmental wackos . "
I was considered a radical .
And I 'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists .
Of course , I had no intention of doing that , and I kept speaking out about the environment , and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability .
And in time , my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today .
I mean , I think most people in the industry understand that we 've got to get on with it .
And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues , of cars and the environment -- not only at Ford , but really as an industry .
We 're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights .
And with new technology , we 're reducing -- and I believe , someday we 'll eliminate -- CO2 emissions .
We 're starting to sell electric cars , which is great .
We 're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word -- economically , socially and environmentally .
And actually , although we 've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do , I can see the day where my two great passions -- cars and the environment -- actually come into harmony .
But unfortunately , as we 're on our way to solving one monstrous problem -- and as I said , we 're not there yet ; we 've got a lot of work to do , but I can see where we will -- but even as we 're in the process of doing that , another huge problem is looming , and people aren 't noticing .
And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened , just as the environment is .
The problem , put in its simplest terms , is one of mathematics .
Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world , and within our lifetime , that number 's going to grow to about nine billion .
And at that population level , our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth .
And with that growth comes some severe practical problems , one of which is our transportation system simply won 't be able to deal with it .
When we look at the population growth in terms of cars , it becomes even clearer .
Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide .
But with more people and greater prosperity around the world , that number 's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century .
And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before .
Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives .
Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams , and that 's a huge waste of time and resources .
But that 's nothing compared to what 's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest .
Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute .
And last summer -- many of you probably saw this -- there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China .
In the decades to come , 75 percent of the world 's population will live in cities , and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more .
So you can see the size of the issue that we 're facing .
When you factor in population growth , it 's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow .
Frankly , four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars , and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam .
So , if we make no changes today , what does tomorrow look like ?
Well I think you probably already have the picture .
Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge , and they 're really very , very inconvenient , but that 's all they are .
But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care , particularly to people that live in city centers .
And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised .
So what 's going to solve this ?
Well the answer isn 't going to be more of the same .
My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T , " If I had asked people then what they wanted , they would have answered , ' We want faster horses . ' " So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads .
When America began moving west , we didn 't add more wagon trains , we built railroads .
And to connect our country after World War II , we didn 't build more two-lane highways , we built the interstate highway system .
Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future .
We are going to build smart cars , but we also need to build smart roads , smart parking , smart public transportation systems and more .
We don 't want to waste our time sitting in traffic , sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots .
We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers .
And frankly , that 's the kind of system that 's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable .
Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world .
The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another , and they go underneath the city streets .
And up above , you 've got a series of pedestrian walkways .
On New York City 's 34th Street , gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors .
Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created , and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes .
Now if you look at Hong Kong , they have a very interesting system called Octopus there .
It 's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system .
So parking garages , buses , trains , they all operate within the same system .
Now shared car services are also springing up around the world , and these efforts , I think , are great .
They 're relieving congestion , and they 're frankly starting to save some fuel .
These are all really good ideas that will move us forward .
But what really inspires me is what 's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other .
Very soon , the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network .
Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn , Michigan .
And every night I go home , my commute is a total crapshoot .
And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home .
But very soon we 're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other .
So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic , it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way .
And these systems are being tested right now , and frankly they 're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon .
But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless .
So just imagine : one day very soon , you 're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system .
So you get in your car , and as you get in your car , your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive -- no more driving around looking for one , which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today 's cars in urban areas -- is looking for parking spots .
Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don 't have to wait in the cold to hail one .
Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time .
This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system .
So I think it 's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem .
But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues , and also fossil fuels , there is no one silver bullet .
The solution is not going to be more cars , more roads or a new rail system ; it can only be found , I believe , in a global network of interconnected solutions .
Now I know we can develop the technology that 's going to make this work , but we 've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions -- whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven 't even thought of yet ; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options .
We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue .
Companies , entrepreneurs , venture capitalists , they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity , as well as an enormous social problem .
And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge -- and it 's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power , how much money and how much serious thought has , really over the last three years , just poured into the green energy field .
We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock .
But we need people like all of you in this room , leading thinkers .
I mean , frankly , I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue .
And we need people from all walks of life ; not just inventors , we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they 're going to respond to this challenge .
This isn 't going to be solved by any one person or one group .
It 's going to really require a national energy policy , frankly for each country , because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels , traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are .
But we need to get going , and we need to get going today .
And we must have an infrastructure that 's designed to support this flexible future .
You know , we 've come a long way .
Since the Model T , most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime .
And since then , the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live , where we work , where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around .
We don 't want to regress and lose that freedom .
We 're on our way to solving -- and as I said earlier , I know we 've got a long way to go -- the one big issue that we 're all focused on that threatens it , and that 's the environmental issue , but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock .
Because in doing so , we 're going to preserve what we 've really come to take for granted , which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world .
And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this .
Because , if you can envision , as I do , a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today , that 's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow .
I believe we 're at our best when we 're confronted with big issues .
This is a big one , and it won 't wait .
So let 's get started now .
Thank you .
John Hardy : My green school dream
Join John Hardy on a tour of the Green School , his off-the-grid school in Bali that teaches kids how to build , garden , create . The centerpiece of campus is the spiraling Heart of School , perhaps the world 's largest freestanding bamboo building .
I grew up in a very small village in Canada , and I 'm an undiagnosed dyslexic .
I had a really hard time in school .
In fact , my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school .
I ran away .
I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali , and there I met my incredible wife , Cynthia , and together , over 20 years , we built an amazing jewelry business .
It was a fairy tale , and then we retired .
Then she took me to see a film that I really didn 't want to see .
It ruined my life -- " The Inconvenient Truth " and Mr. Gore .
I have four kids , and even if part of what he says is true , they 're not going to have the life that I had .
And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities .
So here 's the world , and here we are in Bali .
It 's a tiny , little island -- 60 miles by 90 miles .
It has an intact Hindu culture .
Cynthia and I were there .
We had had a wonderful life there , and we decided to do something unusual .
We decided to give back locally .
And here it is : it 's called the Green School .
I know it doesn 't look like a school , but it is something we decided to do , and it is extremely , extremely green .
The classrooms have no walls .
The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard .
The desks are not square .
At Green School , the children are smiling -- an unusual thing for school , especially for me .
And we practice holism .
And for me it 's just the idea that , if this little girl graduates as a whole person , chances are she 'll demand a whole world -- a whole world -- to live on .
Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box .
The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials .
So if this gentleman had had a holistic education , would he be sitting there ?
Would he have had more possibilities in his life ?
The classrooms have natural light .
They 're beautiful . They 're bamboo .
The breeze passes through them .
And when the natural breeze isn 't enough , the kids deploy bubbles , but not the kind of bubbles you know .
These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree .
So we basically turned the box into a bubble .
And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future .
We pay the bill at the end of the month , but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren .
We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible .
These kids did a little graffiti on their desks , and then they signed up for two extra courses .
The first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing .
But since that happened , they own those desks .
They know they can control their world .
We 're on the grid . We 're not proud of it .
But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar .
And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world , in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river .
When the turbine drops in , it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity , day and night .
And you know what these are .
There 's nowhere to flush .
And as long as we 're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water -- you 're all really smart , just do the math .
How many people times how much water .
There isn 't enough water .
These are compost toilets , and nobody at the school wanted to know about them , especially the principal .
And they work . People use them . People are okay .
It 's something you should think about doing .
Not many things didn 't work .
The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months .
We had to replace them with recyclable plastic .
The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms .
So we had some good ideas : we took old automobile windshields , put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard .
Green School sits in south-central Bali , and it 's on 20 acres of rolling garden .
There 's an amazing river traveling through it , and you can see there how we manage to get across the river .
I met a father the other day ; he looked a little crazed .
I said , " Welcome to Green School . "
He said , " I 've been on an airplane for 24 hours . "
I asked him , " Why ? "
He said , " I had a dream once about a green school , and I saw a picture of this green school , I got on an airplane .
In August I 'm bringing my sons . "
This was a great thing .
But more than that , people are building green houses around Green School , so their kids can walk to school on the paths .
And people are bringing their green industries , hopefully their green restaurants , to the Green School .
It 's becoming a community .
It 's becoming a green model .
We had to look at everything .
No petrochemicals in the pavement .
No pavement .
These are volcanic stones laid by hand .
There are no sidewalks .
The sidewalks are gravel . They flood when it rains , but they 're green .
This is the school buffalo .
He 's planning to eat that fence for dinner .
All the fences at Green School are green .
And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate , they found out the fence was made out of tapioca .
They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen , sliced them thinly and made delicious chips .
Landscaping .
We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms .
We dropped them gently in .
We made space for these guys who are Bali 's last black pigs .
And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field .
These young ladies are living in a rice culture , but they know something that few people know in a rice culture .
They know how to plant organic rice , they know how to look after it , they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it .
They 're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future .
This young man is picking organic vegetables .
We feed 400 people lunch every day and it 's not a normal lunch . There 's no gas .
Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know .
The food is incredible .
Green School is a place of pioneers , local and global .
And it 's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world .
The kids are from 25 countries .
When I see them together , I know that they 're working out how to live in the future .
Green School is going into its third year with 160 children .
It 's a school where you do learn reading -- one of my favorites -- writing -- I was bad at it -- arithmetic .
But you also learn other things .
You learn bamboo building .
You practice ancient Balinese arts .
This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields .
The kids love it .
The mothers aren 't quite convinced .
We 've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives , and we said , okay , local , what does " local " mean ?
Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese , and this was a really big commitment .
And we were right .
And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund , because these kids will be Bali 's next green leaders .
The teachers are as diverse as the student body , and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up .
A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture .
A woman came from Africa with music .
And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global , green leaders .
The Green School effect -- we don 't know what it is .
We need someone to come and study it .
But what 's happening , our learning-different kids -- dyslexic -- we 've renamed them prolexic -- are doing well in these beautiful , beautiful classrooms .
And all the kids are thriving .
And how did we do all this ?
On giant grass .
It 's bamboo .
It comes out of the ground like a train .
It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this .
It 's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof .
When the architects came , they brought us these things , and you 've probably seen things like this .
The yellow box was called the administration complex .
We squashed it , we rethought it , but mainly we renamed it " the heart of school , " and that changed everything forever .
It 's a double helix .
It has administrators in it and many , many other things .
And the problem of building it -- when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans , they looked at them and said , " What 's this ? "
So we built big models .
We had them engineered by the engineers .
And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers , selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques , mostly by hand .
It was chaos .
And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do , so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down , we realized that we had a cathedral , a cathedral to green , and a cathedral to green education .
The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it .
From the time the foundations were finished , in three months it had roofs and floors .
It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world , but many people believe that it 's the most beautiful .
Is this doable in your community ?
We believe it is .
Green School is a model we built for the world .
It 's a model we built for Bali .
And you just have to follow these simple , simple rules : be local , let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build .
So , Mr. Gore , thank you .
You ruined my life , but you gave me an incredible future .
And if you 're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world , please come and see us .
Thank you .
Guy-Philippe Goldstein : How cyberattacks threaten real-world peace
More and more , nations are waging attacks with cyber weapons -- silent strikes on another country 's computer systems that leave behind no trace . Guy-Philippe Goldstein shows how cyberattacks can leap between the digital and physical worlds to prompt armed conflict -- and how we might avert this global security hazard . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Good afternoon .
If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks , you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S.
regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google .
Many things have been said about this .
Some people have called a cyberwar what may actually be just a spy operation -- and obviously , a quite mishandled one .
However , this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons .
It so happens that these weapons are dangerous .
They 're of a new nature : they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle .
These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world .
In 1982 , in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia , a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons , the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb .
Now we know today -- this was revealed by Thomas Reed , Ronald Reagan 's former U.S. Air Force Secretary -- this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation , in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline .
More recently , the U.S. government revealed that in September 2008 , more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil were plunged into darkness , victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates .
Even more worrying for the Americans , in December 2008 the holiest of holies , the IT systems of CENTCOM , the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these : plain but infected USB keys .
And with these keys , they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM 's systems , to see and hear everything , and maybe even infect some of them .
As a result , the Americans take the threat very seriously .
I 'll quote General James Cartwright , Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction .
Moreover , the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities .
And across the world today , we see a sort of cyber arms race , with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran .
Yet , what you 'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn 't really who 's the enemy , but actually the very nature of cyber weapons .
And to understand why , we must look at how , through the ages , military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace .
For example , if we 'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago , we would have talked about the military innovation of the day -- the massive Vauban-style fortifications -- and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe .
which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750 .
Similarly , if we 'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago , we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons , and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply , prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers .
However , if we 'd had this talk 60 years ago , we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies , which give the advantage to the attacker , make the Blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in Europe .
So military technologies can influence the course of the world , can make or break world peace -- and there lies the issue with cyber weapons .
The first issue : Imagine a potential enemy announcing they 're building a cyberwar unit , but only for their country 's defense .
Okay , but what distinguishes it from an offensive unit ?
It gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous .
Just 3 years ago , both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace , strictly to defend their IT systems .
But today both countries say the best defense is to attack .
And so , they 're joining China , whose doctrine of use for 15 years has been both defensive and offensive .
The second issue : Your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness , and you may not even know who 's attacking you .
Cyber weapons have this peculiar feature : they can be used without leaving traces .
This gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker , because the defender doesn 't know who to fight back against .
And if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary , they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated .
This issue isn 't just theoretical .
In May 2007 , Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks , that damaged its communication and banking systems .
Estonia accused Russia .
But NATO , though it defends Estonia , reacted very prudently . Why ?
Because NATO couldn 't be 100 % sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks .
So to sum up , on the one hand , when a possible enemy announces they 're building a cyberwar unit , you don 't know whether it 's for attack or defense .
On the other hand , we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking .
In a major article published in 1978 , Professor Robert Jervis of Columbia University in New York described a model to understand how conflicts could arise .
In this context , when you don 't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack , and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking , then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict .
This is the environment that 's being created by cyber weapons today , and historically it was the environment in Europe at the onset of World War I.
So cyber weapons are dangerous by nature , but in addition , they 're emerging in a much more unstable environment .
If you remember the Cold War , it was a very hard game , but a stable one played only by two players , which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers .
Today we 're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated , as we have seen at Copenhagen .
And this coordination may become even trickier with the introduction of cyber weapons .
Why ? Because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack .
So nations may live under the threat of what Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the " reciprocal fear of surprise attack , " as I don 't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not -- I may never know -- so I might take the upper hand and attack first .
Just last week , in a New York Times article dated January 26 , 2010 , it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked .
And these preemptive attacks might not just remain in cyberspace .
In May 2009 , General Kevin Chilton , commander of the U.S. nuclear forces , stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the U.S. , all options would be on the table .
Cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons -- they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror .
But in doing so , they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict -- as we 've just seen , a very important risk -- and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us : European allies , NATO members , our American friends and allies , our other Western allies , and maybe , by forcing their hand a little , our Russian and Chinese partners .
The information technologies Joël de Rosnay was talking about , which were historically born from military research , are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction , which could tomorrow , if we 're not careful , completely destroy world peace .
Thank you .
Toby Shapshak : You don 't need an app for that
Are the simplest phones the smartest ? While the rest of the world is updating statuses and playing games on smartphones , Africa is developing useful SMS-based solutions to everyday needs , says journalist Toby Shapshak . In this eye-opening talk , Shapshak explores the frontiers of mobile invention in Africa as he asks us to reconsider our preconceived notions of innovation .
Let me start by asking you a question , just with a show of hands : Who has an iPhone ?
Who has an Android phone ?
Who has a Blackberry ?
Who will admit in public to having a Blackberry ?
And let me guess , how many of you , when you arrived here , like me , went and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card ? Yeah ?
I 'll bet you didn 't even know you 're using African technology .
Pay-as-you-go was a technology , or an idea , pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom a good 15 years ago , and now , like franchising , pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world .
So I 'm going to talk about innovation in Africa , which I think is the purest form , innovation out of necessity .
But first , I 'm going to ask you some other questions .
You don 't have to put your hands up .
These are rhetorical .
Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we 're in ?
Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line to produce these Fords that came in anything as long as they were black ?
And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos ?
Blank stares . That is what a dolos looks like , and in the background , you can see Robben Island .
This is a small dolos , and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor you 've never heard of .
In 1963 , a storm ripped up the harbor in a small South African town called East London , and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse , he had the idea for this .
It 's a bit like a huge jumping jack , and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater .
The global shipping economy would not be possible without African technology like this .
So whenever you talk about Africa , you have to put up this picture of the world from space , and people go , " Look , it 's the Dark Continent . "
Actually , it isn 't .
What it is is a map of innovation .
And it 's really easy to see where innovation 's going on .
All the places with lots of electricity , it isn 't .
And the reason it isn 't is because everybody 's watching television or playing Angry Birds .
So where it 's happening is in Africa .
Now , this is real innovation , not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products .
This is real innovation , and I define it as problem-solving .
People are solving real problems in Africa .
Why ? Because we have to .
Because we have real problems .
And when we solve real problems for people , we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time .
So in California , everybody 's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card , and people say , " We 've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal . "
Fantastic . Why do you even need a credit card ?
In Africa , we 've been doing that for years , and we 've been doing it on phones like this .
This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela , about an hour south of Nairobi , and the thing that 's so remarkable about the payment system that 's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa is that it works on phones like this .
It works on every single phone possible , because it uses SMS .
You can pay bills with it , you can buy your groceries , you can pay your kids ' school fees , and I 'm told you can even bribe customs officials .
Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa .
Forty percent of Kenya 's GDP moves through M-Pesa using phones like this .
And you think this is just a feature phone .
Actually it 's the smartphone of Africa .
It 's also a radio , and it 's also a torch , and more than anything else , it has really superb battery life .
Why ? Because that 's what we need .
We have really severe energy problems in Africa .
By the way , you can update Facebook and send Gmail from a phone like this .
So we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via M-Pesa , which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age .
I come from Johannesburg , which is a mining town .
It 's built on gold .
This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier .
And the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile .
If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked , first came the infrastructure , then came the industry around it , the brothels -- it 's a bit like the Internet today , right ? — and everything else that worked with it : bars , saloons , etc .
The gold of today is mobile , and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible .
So what are some of the things that you can do with it ?
Well , this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana , and what you do is you take medication , something that some people might spend their entire month 's salary on , and you scratch off the code , and you send that to an SMS number , and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it 's expired .
Really simple , really effective , really life-saving .
In Kenya , there 's a service called iCow , which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy .
The dairy business in Kenya is a $ 463 million business , and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day .
And if you can do that , you can rise out of poverty .
Really simple , using a basic phone .
If you don 't have electricity , no problem !
We 'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill , as William Kamkwamba did .
There 's another great African that you 've heard that 's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world .
He 's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in North America , and if he 's lucky , he 'll get us to Mars , hopefully in my lifetime .
He comes from Pretoria , the capital of [ South Africa ] , about 50 kilometers from where I live .
So back to Joburg , which is sometimes called Egoli , which means City of Gold .
And not only is mobile the gold of today , I don 't believe that the gold is under the ground .
I believe we are the gold .
Like you 've heard the other economists say , we are at the point where China was when its boom years began , and that 's where we 're going .
So , you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge .
Well , of course it 's happening at the edge , because in the middle , everybody 's updating Facebook , or worse still , they 're trying to understand Facebook 's privacy settings .
This is not that catchy catchphrase .
This is innovation over the edge .
So , people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent , but actually it 's mobile-only , so while everybody else is doing all of those things , we 're solving the world 's problems .
So there 's only one thing left to say .
[ " You 're welcome " ]
Hans Rosling : The good news of the decade ?
Hans Rosling reframes 10 years of UN data with his spectacular visuals , lighting up an astonishing -- mostly unreported -- piece of front-page-worthy good news : We 're winning the war against child mortality . Along the way , he debunks one flawed approach to stats that blots out such vital stories . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
We are here today because [ the ] United Nations have defined goals for the progress of countries .
They 're called Millennium Development Goals .
And the reason I really like these goals is that there are eight of them .
And by specifying eight different goals , the United Nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people .
Look here -- you have to end poverty , education , gender , child and maternal health , control infections , protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade .
There 's a second reason I like these development goals , and that is because each and every one is measured .
Take child mortality ; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds , from 1990 to 2015 .
That 's a four percent reduction per year -- and this , with measuring .
That 's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing , a better life for people .
And what I 'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in Asia , in the Middle East , in Latin America and East Europe that [ are ] reducing with this rate .
And even mighty Brazil is going down with five percent per year , and Turkey with seven percent per year .
So there 's good news .
But then I hear people saying , " There is no progress in Africa .
And there 's not even statistics on Africa to know what is happening . "
I 'll prove them wrong on both points .
Come with me to the wonderful world of statistics .
I bring you to the webpage , ChildMortality.org , where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries -- it 's done by U.N. specialists .
And I will take Kenya as an example .
Here you see the data .
Don 't panic -- don 't panic now , I 'll help you through this .
It looks nasty , like in college when you didn 't like statistics .
But first thing , when you see dots like this , you have to ask yourself : from where do the data come ?
What is the origin of the data ?
Is it so that in Kenya , there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it 's sent to the statistical office ?
No -- low-income countries like Kenya still don 't have that level of organization .
It exists , but it 's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family , and it 's not registered .
What we rely on is not an incomplete system .
We have interviews , we have surveys .
And this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about [ her ] birth history .
How many children did you have ?
Are they alive ?
If they died , at what age and what year ?
And then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report .
But these surveys are costly , so they can only be done [ in ] three- to five-year intervals .
But they have good quality .
So this is a limitation .
And all these colored lines here are results ; each color is one survey .
But that 's too complicated for today , so I 'll simplify it for you , and I give you one average point for each survey .
This was 1977 , 1988 , 1992 , ' 97 and 2002 .
And when the experts in the U.N.
have got these surveys in place in their database , then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line , and the trend line looks like this .
See here -- it 's the best fit they can get of this point .
But watch out -- they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing .
And they estimated that in 2008 , Kenya had per child mortality of 128 .
And I was sad , because we could see this reversal in Kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s .
It was so tragic .
But in June , I got a mail in my inbox from Demographic Health Surveys , and it showed good news from Kenya .
I was so happy .
This was the estimate of the new survey .
Then it just took another three months for [ the ] U.N. to get it into their server , and on Friday we got the new trend line -- it was down here .
Isn 't it nice -- isn 't it nice , yeah ?
I was actually , on Friday , sitting in front of my computer , and I saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning .
So we celebrated .
But now , when you have this trend line , how do we measure progress ?
I 'm going into some details here , because [ the ] U.N. do it like this .
They start [ in ] 1990 -- they measure to 2009 .
They say , " 0.9 percent , no progress . "
That 's unfair .
As a professor , I think I have the right to propose something differently .
I would say , at least do this -- 10 years is enough to follow the trend .
It 's two surveys , and you can see what 's happening now .
They have 2.4 percent .
Had I been in the Ministry of Health in Kenya , I may have joined these two points .
So what I 'm telling you is that we know the child mortality .
We have a decent trend .
It 's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring MDGs .
And the reason here for Africa is especially important , because ' 90s was a bad decade , not only in Kenya , but across Africa .
The HIV epidemic peaked .
There was resistance for the old malaria drugs , until we got the new drugs .
We got , later , the mosquito netting .
And there was socio-economic problems , which are now being solved at a much better scale .
So look at the average here -- this is the average for all of sub-Saharan Africa .
And [ the ] U.N. says it 's a reduction with 1.8 percent .
Now this sounds a little theoretical , but it 's not so theoretical .
You know , these economists , they love money , they want more and more of it , they want it to grow .
So they calculate the percent annual growth rate of [ the ] economy .
We in public health , we hate child death , so we want less and less and less of child deaths .
So we calculate the percent reduction per year , but it 's sort of the same percentage .
If your economy grows with four percent , you ought to reduce child mortality four percent ; if it 's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it .
So is this fair now to measure this over 19 years ?
An economist would never do that .
I have just divided it into two periods .
In the 90s , only 1.2 percent , only 1.2 percent .
Whereas now , second gear -- it 's like Africa had first gear , now they go into second gear .
But even this is not a fair representation of Africa , because it 's an average , it 's an average speed of reduction in Africa .
And look here when I take you into my bubble graphs .
Still here , child death per 1,000 on that axis .
Here we have [ the ] year .
And I 'm now giving you a wider picture than the MDG .
I start 50 years ago when Africa celebrated independence in most countries .
I give you Congo , which was high , Ghana -- lower . And Kenya -- even lower .
And what has happened over the years since then ? Here we go .
You can see , with independence , literacy improved and vaccinations started , smallpox was eradicated , hygiene was improved , and things got better .
But then , in the ' 80s , watch out here .
Congo got into civil war , and they leveled off here .
Ghana got very ahead , fast .
This was the backlash in Kenya , and Ghana bypassed , but then Kenya and Ghana go down together -- still a standstill in Congo .
That 's where we are today .
You can see it doesn 't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement .
Time has come to stop thinking about sub-Saharan Africa as one place .
Their countries are so different , and they merit to be recognized in the same way , as we don 't talk about Europe as one place .
I can tell you that the economy in Greece and Sweden are very different -- everyone knows that .
And they are judged , each country , on how they are doing .
So let me show the wider picture .
My country , Sweden : 1800 , we were up there .
What a strange personality disorder we must have , counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate .
It 's very strange . It 's sort of embarrassing .
But we had that habit in Sweden , you know , that we counted all the child deaths , even if we didn 't do anything about it .
And then , you see , these were famine years .
These were bad years , and people got fed up with Sweden .
My ancestors moved to the United States .
And eventually , soon they started to get better and better here .
And here we got better education , and we got health service , and child mortality came down .
We never had a war ; Sweden was in peace all this time .
But look , the rate of lowering in Sweden was not fast .
Sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early .
We had primary school actually started in 1842 .
And then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later .
You have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments .
It 's not about just five years -- it 's long-term investments .
And Sweden never reached [ the ] Millennium Development Goal rate , 3.1 percent when I calculated .
So we are off track -- that 's what Sweden is .
But you don 't talk about it so much .
We want others to be better than we were , and indeed , others have been better .
Let me show you Thailand , see what a success story , Thailand from the 1960s -- how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as Sweden .
And I 'll give you another story -- Egypt , the most hidden , glorious success in public health .
Egypt was up here in 1960 , higher than Congo .
The Nile Delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems .
And then they got the Aswan Dam . They got electricity in their homes , they increased education and they got primary health care .
And down they went , you know .
And they got safer water , they eradicated malaria .
And isn 't it a success story .
Millennium Development Goal rates for child mortality is fully possible .
And the good thing is that Ghana today is going with the same rate as Egypt did at its fastest .
Kenya is now speeding up .
Here we have a problem .
We have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill .
Now , let me now bring you to a wider picture , a wider picture of child mortality .
I 'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here -- this axis here is child mortality -- and here I have the family size .
The relationship between child mortality and family size .
One , two , three , four children per woman : six , seven , eight children per woman .
This is , once again , 1960 -- 50 years ago .
Each bubble is a country -- the color , you can see , a continent .
The dark blue here is sub-Saharan Africa .
And the size of the bubble is the population .
And these are the so-called " developing " countries .
They had high , or very high , child mortality and family size , six to eight .
And the ones over there , they were so-called Western countries .
They had low child mortality and small families .
What has happened ?
What I want you [ to do ] now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size .
I just want not to have any room for doubt -- you have to see that for yourself .
This is what happened . Now I start the world .
Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox , better education , health service .
It got down there -- China comes into the Western box here .
And here Brazil is in the Western Box .
India is approaching . The first African countries coming into the Western box , and we get a lot a new neighbors .
Welcome to a decent life .
Come on . We want everyone down there .
This is the vision we have , isn 't it .
And look now , the first African countries here are coming in .
There we are today .
There is no such thing as a " Western world " and " developing world . "
This is the report from [ the ] U.N. , which came out on Friday .
It 's very good -- " Levels and Trends in Child Mortality " -- except this page .
This page is very bad ; it 's a categorization of countries .
It labels " developing countries , " -- I can read from the list here -- developing countries : Republic of Korea -- South Korea .
Huh ?
They get Samsung , how can they be [ a ] developing country ?
They have here Singapore .
They have the lowest child mortality in the world , Singapore .
They bypassed Sweden five years ago , and they are labeled a developing country .
They have here Qatar .
It 's the richest country in the world with Al Jazeera .
How the heck could they be [ a ] developing country ?
This is crap .
The rest here is good -- the rest is good .
We have to have a modern concept , which fits to the data .
And we have to realize that we are all going to into this , down to here .
What is the importance now with the relations here .
Look -- even if we look in Africa -- these are the African countries .
You can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size , even within Africa .
It 's very clear that this is what happens .
And a very important piece of research came out on Friday from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education .
That is , when we get girls in school , we 'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later , which is a secular trend which is very strong .
That 's why we must have that long-term perspective , but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods .
It 's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together .
And of course , lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects .
It 's a decent life for children , we are talking about .
But it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind , because it 's about the environment .
We will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we don 't stabilize the world population .
Let 's be clear about that .
And the way to do that , that is to get child mortality down , get access to family planning and behind that drive female education .
And that is fully possible . Let 's do it .
Thank you very much .
Drew Curtis : How I beat a patent troll
Drew Curtis , the founder of fark.com , tells the story of how he fought a lawsuit from a company that had a patent , " ... for the creation and distribution of news releases via email . " Along the way he shares some nutty statistics about the growing legal problem of frivolous patents .
Last January , my company , Fark.com , was sued along with Yahoo , MSN , Reddit , AOL , TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources .
Gooseberry owned a patent for the creation and distribution of news releases via email .
Now it may seem kind of strange that such a thing can actually be patented , but it does happen all the time .
Take something already being done and patent it for an emerging technology -- like phone calls on the internet or video listings for TV shows or radio but for cellphones , and so on .
The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system is dysfunctional , and as a result , most of these lawsuits end in settlements .
And because these settlements are under a non-disclosure agreement , no one knows what the terms were .
And as a result , the patent troll can claim that they won the case .
In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources , this patent on emailing news releases had sort of a fatal flaw as it pertained to myself , and that was that in the mainstream media world there is only one definition for news release , and it turns out that is press release -- as in P.R.
Now my company , Fark , deals with news , ostensibly , and as a result we were not in violation of this patent .
So case closed , right ?
Wrong .
One of the major problems with patent law is that , in the case that when you are sued by a patent troll , the burden of proof that you did not infringe on the patent is actually on the defendant , which means you have to prove that you do not infringe on the patent they 're suing you on .
And this can take quite a while .
You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win .
That is your best case outcome when you get sued by a patent troll .
Now I had hoped to team up with some of these larger companies in order to defend against this lawsuit , but one-by-one they settled out of the case , even though -- and this is important -- none of these companies infringed on this patent -- not a one of them .
And they started settling out .
The reason they settled out is because it 's cheaper to settle than to fight the lawsuit -- clearly , two million dollars cheaper in some cases , and much worse if you actually lose .
It would also constitute a massive distraction for management of a company , especially a small eight-man shop like my company .
Six months into the lawsuit , we finally reached the discovery phase .
And in discovery phase , we asked the patent troll to please provide screenshots of Fark where the infringement of their patent was actually occurring .
Now perhaps it 's because no such screenshots actually existed , but suddenly Gooseberry wanted to settle .
Their attorney : " Ah , yes . My company 's having a reorganization on our end . "
Never mind the fact that the address led to a strip mall somewhere in Northern L.A.
with no employees .
" And we 'd like to go ahead and close this out .
So would you mind giving us your best and final offer ? "
My response : " How about nothing ? ! "
We didn 't have high hopes for that outcome .
But they settled .
No counter offer .
Now , as mentioned before , one of the reasons I can talk to you about this is because there 's no non-disclosure agreement on this case .
Now how did that happen ?
Well during the settlement process , when we received our copy , I struck it .
My attorney said , " Nah , no chance of that working . "
It came back signed .
Now why ? You can call them .
They 're not under NDA either .
Now what did I learn from this case ? Well , three things .
First of all , if you can , don 't fight the patent , fight the infringement .
Patents are very difficult to overturn .
Infringement is a lot easier to disprove .
Secondly , make it clear from the beginning that either you have no money at all or that you would rather spend money with your attorney fighting the troll than actually giving them the money .
Now the reason this works is because patent trolls are paid a percentage of what they 're able to recover in settlements .
If it becomes clear to them that they cannot recover any money , they become less interested in pursuing the case .
Finally , make sure that you can tell them that you will make this process as annoying and as painful and as difficult as possible for them .
Now this is a tactic that patent trolls are supposed to use on people to get their way .
It turns out , because they 're paid on contingency , it works really , really well in reverse .
Don 't forget that .
So what does all this mean ?
Well to sum up , it boils down to one thing : Don 't negotiate with terrorists .
Patent trolls have done more damage to the United States economy than any domestic or foreign terrorist organization in history every year .
And what do they do with that money ?
They plow it right back into filing more troll lawsuits .
Now this is the point in the Talk where I 'm supposed to come up with some kind of a solution for the patent system .
And the problem with that is that there are two very large industry groups that have different outcomes in mind for the patent system .
The health care industry would like stronger protections for inventors .
The hi-tech industry would like stronger protections for producers .
And these goals aren 't necessarily diametrically opposed , but they are at odds .
And as a result , patent trolls can kind of live in the space in between .
So unfortunately I 'm not smart enough to have a solution for the patent troll problem .
However , I did have this idea , and it was kind of good .
And I thought , " I should patent this . "
Behold , patent infringement via mobile device -- defined as a computer which is not stationary .
My solution : award me this patent and I will troll them out of existence .
Thank you .
Clay Shirky : Why SOPA is a bad idea
What does a bill like PIPA / SOPA mean to our shareable world ? At the TED offices , Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create , discuss , link and share , rather than passively consume .
I 'm going to start here .
This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago .
The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar .
And kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake .
But unfortunately , one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters .
They liked to draw the Little Mermaid , they 'd like to draw a smurf , they 'd like to draw Micky Mouse .
But it turns out to be illegal to print a child 's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar .
And it 's a copyright violation .
And policing copyright violations for children 's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the College Bakery said , " You know what , we 're getting out of that business .
If you 're an amateur , you don 't have access to our machine anymore .
If you want a printed sugar birthday cake , you have to use one of our prefab images -- only for professionals . "
So there 's two bills in Congress right now .
One is called SOPA , the other is called PIPA .
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act .
It 's from the Senate .
PIPA is short for PROTECTIP , which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property -- because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands .
And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this .
They want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs .
Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright -- although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills -- and then they want to remove them from the domain name system .
They want to take them out of the domain name system .
Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names , like Google.com , into the kinds of addresses machines expect -- 74.125.226.212 .
Now the problem with this model of censorship , of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system , is that it won 't work .
And you 'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law , but Congress seems not to have let that bother them too much .
Now the reason it won 't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you 'll still go to Google .
So the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act .
Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won 't accomplish its stated goals , but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects , you have to understand a little bit about the back story .
And the back story is this : SOPA and PIPA , as legislation , were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century .
The 20th century was a great time to be a media company , because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity .
If you were making a TV show , it didn 't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made ; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time -- which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty .
Which meant that if you fielded average content , you got a third of the U.S. public for free -- tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn 't too terrible .
This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink .
But technology moved on , as technology is wont to do .
And slowly , slowly , at the end of the 20th century , that scarcity started to get eroded -- and I don 't mean by digital technology ; I mean by analog technology .
Cassette tapes , video cassette recorders , even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business .
Because it turned out we 're not really couch potatoes .
We don 't really like to only consume .
We do like to consume , but every time one of these new tools came along , it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share .
And this freaked the media businesses out -- it freaked them out every time .
Jack Valenti , who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America , once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor , helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone .
That was the level of rhetoric .
And so the media industries begged , insisted , demanded that Congress do something .
And Congress did something .
By the early 90s , Congress passed the law that changed everything .
And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 .
What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was , look , if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends , that is not a crime . That 's okay .
Taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay .
If you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them , that 's not okay .
But this taping business , fine , let it go .
And they thought that they clarified the issue , because they 'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying .
But that wasn 't what the media businesses wanted .
They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop .
So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed , the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework , they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment .
So they went for plan B.
It took them a while to formulate plan B.
Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 -- something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act .
It was a complicated piece of legislation , a lot of moving parts .
But the main thrust of the DMCA was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material -- except that there 's no such things as uncopyable digital material .
It would be , as Ed Felton once famously said , " Like handing out water that wasn 't wet . "
Bits are copyable . That 's what computers do .
That is a side effect of their ordinary operation .
So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits , the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices .
Every DVD player and game player and television and computer you brought home -- no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it -- could be broken by the content industries , if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content .
And to make sure you didn 't realize , or didn 't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices , they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content .
The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means .
Now the DMCA had , and is continuing to have , a lot of complicated effects , but in this one domain , limiting sharing , it has mostly not worked .
And the main reason it hasn 't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined .
The mixtape , the fanzine , that was nothing compared to what we 're seeing now with the Internet .
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online .
We share written things , we share images , we share audio , we share video .
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've made .
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've found .
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we 've made out of what we 've found , and all of it horrifies those industries .
So PIPA and SOPA are round two .
But where the DMCA was surgical -- we want to go down into your computer , we want to go down into your television set , down into your game machine , and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store -- PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they 're saying , we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content .
Now the mechanism , as I said , for doing this , is you need to take out anybody pointing to those IP addresses .
You need to take them out of search engines , you need to take them out of online directories , you need to take them out of user lists .
And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo , they 're us , we 're the people getting policed .
Because in the end , the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another .
So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept , innocent until proven guilty , and reversing it -- guilty until proven innocent .
You can 't share until you show us that you 're not sharing something we don 't like .
Suddenly , the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities .
And if it costs even a dime to police a user , that will crush a service with a hundred million users .
So this is the Internet they have in mind .
Imagine this sign everywhere -- except imagine it doesn 't say College Bakery , imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter .
Imagine it says TED , because the comments can 't be policed at any acceptable cost .
The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects .
The threat , in fact , is this inversion of the burden of proof , where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we 're given the freedom to create , to produce or to share .
And the people who provide those capabilities to us -- the YouTubes , the Facebooks , the Twitters and TEDs -- are in the business of having to police us , or being on the hook for contributory infringement .
There 's two things you can do to help stop this -- a simple thing and a complicated thing , an easy thing and a hard thing .
The simple thing , the easy thing , is this : if you 're an American citizen , call your representative , call your senator .
When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill , people who 've co-signed on PIPA , what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries .
You don 't have millions and millions of dollars , but you can call your representatives , and you can remind them that you vote , and you can ask not to be treated like a thief , and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken .
And if you 're not an American citizen , you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same .
Because this seems like a national issue , but it is not .
These industries will not be content with breaking our Internet .
If they break it , they will break it for everybody .
That 's the easy thing .
That 's the simple thing .
The hard thing is this : get ready , because more is coming .
SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA , which was purposed last year , which did not pass .
And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means .
And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act , which horrified those industries .
Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that , that turns out to be really inconvenient .
" We 'd prefer not to do that , " says the content industries .
And what they want is not to have to do that .
They don 't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing .
They just want the sharing to go away .
PIPA and SOPA are not oddities , they 're not anomalies , they 're not events .
They 're the next turn of this particular screw , which has been going on 20 years now .
And if we defeat these , as I hope we do , more is coming .
Because until we convince Congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with Napster , with YouTube , which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies .
That 's the way to handle this .
In the meantime , the hard thing to do is to be ready .
Because that 's the real message of PIPA and SOPA .
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch , just consuming -- not producing , not sharing -- and we should say , " No . "
Thank you .
Jonathan Drori : What we think we know
Starting with four basic questions , Jonathan Drori looks at the gaps in our knowledge -- and specifically , what we don 't about science that we might think we do .
I 'm going to try and explain why it is that perhaps we don 't understand as much as we think we do .
I 'd like to begin with four questions .
This is not some sort of cultural thing for the time of year .
That 's an in-joke , by the way .
But these four questions , actually , are ones that people who even know quite a lot about science find quite hard .
And they 're questions that I 've asked of science television producers , of audiences of science educators -- so that 's science teachers -- and also of seven-year-olds , and I find that the seven-year-olds do marginally better than the other audiences , which is somewhat surprising .
So the first question , and you might want to write this down , either on a bit of paper , physically , or a virtual piece of paper in your head . And , for viewers at home , you can try this as well .
A little seed weighs next to nothing and a tree weighs a lot , right ?
I think we agree on that . Where does the tree get the stuff that makes up this chair , right ? Where does all this stuff come from ?
And your next question is , can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery , a bulb and one piece of wire ?
And would you be able to , kind of , draw a -- you don 't have to draw if you had to do it ? Or would you just say , that 's actually not possible ?
The third question is , why is it hotter in summer than in winter ?
I think we can probably agree that it is hotter in summer than in winter , but why ? And finally , would you be able to -- and you can sort of scribble it , if you like -- scribble a plan diagram of the solar system , showing the shape of the planets ' orbits ?
Would you be able to do that ?
And if you can , just scribble a pattern .
OK . Now , children get their ideas not from teachers , as teachers often think , but actually from common sense , from experience of the world around them , from all the things that go on between them and their peers , and their carers , and their parents , and all of that . Experience .
And one of the great experts in this field , of course , was , bless him , Cardinal Wolsey . Be very careful what you get into people 's heads because it 's virtually impossible to shift it afterwards , right ?
I 'm not quite sure how he died , actually .
Was he beheaded in the end , or hung ?
Now , those questions , which , of course , you 've got right , and you haven 't been conferring , and so on .
And I -- you know , normally , I would pick people out and humiliate , but maybe not in this instance .
A little seed weighs a lot and , basically , all this stuff , 99 percent of this stuff , came out of the air .
Now , I guarantee that about 85 percent of you , or maybe it 's fewer at TED , will have said it comes out of the ground . And some people , probably two of you , will come up and argue with me afterwards , and say that actually , it comes out of the ground .
Now , if that was true , we 'd have trucks going round the country , filling people 's gardens in with soil , it 'd be a fantastic business .
But , actually , we don 't do that .
The mass of this comes out of the air .
Now , I passed all my biology exams in Britain .
I passed them really well , but I still came out of school thinking that that stuff came out of the ground .
Second one : can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery bulb and one piece of wire ?
Yes , you can , and I 'll show you in a second how to do that .
Now , I have some rather bad news , which is that I had a piece of video that I was about to show you , which unfortunately -- the sound doesn 't work in this room , so I 'm going to describe to you , in true " Monty Python " fashion , what happens in the video . And in the video , a group of researchers go to MIT on graduation day .
We chose MIT because , obviously , that 's a very long way away from here , and you wouldn 't mind too much , but it sort of works the same way in Britain and in the West Coast of the USA .
And we asked them these questions , and we asked those questions of science graduates , and they couldn 't answer them .
And so , there 's a whole lot of people saying , " I 'd be very surprised if you told me that this came out of the air .
That 's very surprising to me . " And those are science graduates .
And we intercut it with , " We are the premier science university in the world , " because of British-like hubris .
And when we gave graduate engineers that question , they said it couldn 't be done .
And when we gave them a battery , and a piece of wire , and a bulb , and said , " Can you do it ? " They couldn 't do it . Right ?
And that 's no different from Imperial College in London , by the way , it 's not some sort of anti-American thing going on .
As if . Now , the reason this matters is we pay lots and lots of money for teaching people -- we might as well get it right .
And there are also some societal reasons why we might want people to understand what it is that 's happening in photosynthesis . For example , one half of the carbon equation is how much we emit , and the other half of the carbon equation , as I 'm very conscious as a trustee of Kew , is how much things soak up , and they soak up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere .
That 's what plants actually do for a living .
And , for any Finnish people in the audience , this is a Finnish pun : we are , both literally and metaphorically , skating on thin ice if we don 't understand that kind of thing .
Now , here 's how you do the battery and the bulb .
It 's so easy , isn 't it ? Of course , you all knew that .
But if you haven 't played with a battery and a bulb , if you 've only seen a circuit diagram , you might not be able to do that , and that 's one of the problems .
So , why is it hotter in summer than in winter ?
We learn , as children , that you get closer to something that 's hot , and it burns you . It 's a very powerful bit of learning , and it happens pretty early on .
By extension , we think to ourselves , " Why it 's hotter in summer than in winter must be because we 're closer to the Sun . "
I promise you that most of you will have got that .
Oh , you 're all shaking your heads , but only a few of you are shaking your heads very firmly .
Other ones are kind of going like this . All right .
It 's hotter in summer than in winter because the rays from the Sun are spread out more , right , because of the tilt of the Earth .
And if you think the tilt is tilting us closer , no , it isn 't .
The Sun is 93 million miles away , and we 're tilting like this , right ?
It makes no odds . In fact , in the Northern Hemisphere , we 're further from the Sun in summer , as it happens , but it makes no odds , the difference .
OK , now , the scribble of the diagram of the solar system .
If you believe , as most of you probably do , that it 's hotter in summer than in winter because we 're closer to the Sun , you must have drawn an ellipse .
Right ? That would explain it , right ?
Except , in your -- you 're nodding -- now , in your ellipse , have you thought , " Well , what happens during the night ? "
Between Australia and here , right , they 've got summer and we 've got winter , and what -- does the Earth kind of rush towards the Sun at night , and then rush back again ? I mean , it 's a very strange thing going on , and we hold these two models in our head , of what 's right and what isn 't right , and we do that , as human beings , in all sorts of fields .
So , here 's Copernicus ' view of what the solar system looked like as a plan .
That 's pretty much what you should have on your piece of paper . Right ?
And this is NASA 's view . They 're stunningly similar .
I hope you notice the coincidence here .
What would you do if you knew that people had this misconception , right , in their heads , of elliptical orbits caused by our experiences as children ?
What sort of diagram would you show them of the solar system , to show that it 's not really like that ?
You 'd show them something like this , wouldn 't you ?
It 's a plan , looking down from above .
But , no , look what I found in the textbooks .
That 's what you show people , right ? These are from textbooks , from websites , educational websites -- and almost anything you pick up is like that .
And the reason it 's like that is because it 's dead boring to have a load of concentric circles , whereas that 's much more exciting , to look at something at that angle , isn 't it ? Right ? And by doing it at that angle , if you 've got that misconception in your head , then that two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional thing will be ellipses .
So you 've -- it 's crap , isn 't it really ? As we say .
So , these mental models -- we look for evidence that reinforces our models .
We do this , of course , with matters of race , and politics , and everything else , and we do it in science as well . So we look , just look -- and scientists do it , constantly -- we look for evidence that reinforces our models , and some folks are just all too able and willing to provide the evidence that reinforces the models .
So , being I 'm in the United States , I 'll have a dig at the Europeans .
These are examples of what I would say is bad practice in science teaching centers . These pictures are from La Villette in France and the welcome wing of the Science Museum in London .
And , if you look at the , kind of the way these things are constructed , there 's a lot of mediation by glass , and it 's very blue , and kind of professional -- in that way that , you know , Woody Allen comes up from under the sheets in that scene in " Annie Hall , " and said , " God , that 's so professional . " And that you don 't -- there 's no passion in it , and it 's not hands on , right , and , you know , pun intended . Whereas good interpretation -- I 'll use an example from nearby -- is San Francisco Exploratorium , where all the things that -- the demonstrations , and so on , are made out of everyday objects that children can understand , it 's very hands-on , and they can engage with , and experiment with .
And I know that if the graduates at MIT and in the Imperial College in London had had the battery and the wire and the bit of stuff , and you know , been able to do it , they would have learned how it actually works , rather than thinking that they follow circuit diagrams and can 't do it .
So good interpretation is more about things that are bodged and stuffed and of my world , right ?
And things that -- where there isn 't an extra barrier of a piece of glass or machined titanium , and it all looks fantastic , OK ?
And the Exploratorium does that really , really well .
And it 's amateur , but amateur in the best sense , in other words , the root of the word being of love and passion .
So , children are not empty vessels , OK ?
So , as " Monty Python " would have it , this is a bit Lord Privy Seal to say so , but this is -- children are not empty vessels .
They come with their own ideas and their own theories , and unless you work with those , then you won 't be able to shift them , right ? And I probably haven 't shifted your ideas of how the world and universe operates , either .
But this applies , equally , to matters of trying to sell new technology .
For example , we are , in Britain , we 're trying to do a digital switchover of the whole population into digital technology [ for television ] .
And it 's one of the difficult things is that when people have preconceptions of how it all works , it 's quite difficult to shift those .
So we 're not empty vessels ; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood .
Poor teaching actually does more harm than good .
In this country and in Britain , magnetism is understood better by children before they 've been to school than afterwards , OK ?
Same for gravity , two concepts , so it 's -- which is quite humbling , as a , you know , if you 're a teacher , and you look before and after , that 's quite worrying . They do worse in tests afterwards , after the teaching .
And we collude . We design tests , or at least in Britain , so that people pass them . Right ?
And governments do very well . They pat themselves on the back .
OK ? We collude , and actually if you -- if someone had designed a test for me when I was doing my biology exams , to really understand , to see whether I 'd understood more than just kind of putting starch and iodine together and seeing it go blue , and really understood that plants took their mass out of the air , then I might have done better at science .
So the most important thing is to get people to articulate their models .
Your homework is -- you know , how does an aircraft 's wing create lift ?
An obvious question , and you 'll have an answer now in your heads .
And the second question to that then is , ensure you 've explained how it is that planes can fly upside down .
Ah ha , right . Second question is , why is the sea blue ? All right ?
And you 've all got an idea in your head of the answer .
So , why is it blue on cloudy days ? Ah , see .
I 've always wanted to say that in this country .
Finally , my plea to you is to allow yourselves , and your children , and anyone you know , to kind of fiddle with stuff , because it 's by fiddling with things that you , you know , you complement your other learning . It 's not a replacement , it 's just part of learning that 's important .
Thank you very much .
Now -- oh , oh yeah , go on then , go on .

Vilayanur Ramachandran : The neurons that shaped civilization
Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons . Only recently discovered , these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors , some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it .
I 'd like to talk to you today about the human brain , which is what we do research on at the University of California .
Just think about this problem for a second .
Here is a lump of flesh , about three pounds , which you can hold in the palm of your hand .
But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space .
It can contemplate the meaning of infinity , ask questions about the meaning of its own existence , about the nature of God .
And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world .
It 's the greatest mystery confronting human beings : How does this all come about ?
Well , the brain , as you know , is made up of neurons .
We 're looking at neurons here .
There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain .
And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain .
And based on this , people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe .
So , how do you go about studying the brain ?
One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain , and study changes in their behavior .
This is what I spoke about in the last TED .
Today I 'll talk about a different approach , which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain , and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain .
Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain .
Now , one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy , in Parma , by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues , is a group of neurons called mirror neurons , which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes .
Now , it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain , which have been known for over 50 years .
These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action .
For example , if I do that , and reach and grab an apple , a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire .
If I reach out and pull an object , another neuron will fire , commanding me to pull that object .
These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time .
But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons , maybe about 20 percent of them , will also fire when I 'm looking at somebody else performing the same action .
So , here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something , but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something .
And this is truly astonishing .
Because it 's as though this neuron is adopting the other person 's point of view .
It 's almost as though it 's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person 's action .
Now , what is the significance of these mirror neurons ?
For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation .
Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person 's point of view .
So , this is important for imitation and emulation .
Well , why is that important ?
Well , let 's take a look at the next slide .
So , how do you do imitation ? Why is imitation important ?
Mirror neurons and imitation , emulation .
Now , let 's look at culture , the phenomenon of human culture .
If you go back in time about [ 75,000 ] to 100,000 years ago , let 's look at human evolution , it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago .
And that is , there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use , the use of fire , the use of shelters , and , of course , language , and the ability to read somebody else 's mind and interpret that person 's behavior .
All of that happened relatively quickly .
Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago , 100,000 years ago all of this happened very , very quickly .
And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system , which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people 's actions .
So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group , say the use of fire , or a particular type of tool , instead of dying out , this spread rapidly , horizontally across the population , or was transmitted vertically , down the generations .
So , this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian , instead of Darwinian .
Darwinian evolution is slow ; it takes hundreds of thousands of years .
A polar bear , to evolve a coat , will take thousands of generations , maybe 100,000 years .
A human being , a child , can just watch its parent kill another polar bear , and skin it and put the skin on its body , fur on the body , and learn it in one step . What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn , it can learn in five minutes , maybe 10 minutes .
And then once it 's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population .
This is the basis . The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization .
Now there is another kind of mirror neuron , which is involved in something quite different .
And that is , there are mirror neurons , just as there are mirror neurons for action , there are mirror neurons for touch .
In other words , if somebody touches me , my hand , neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires .
But the same neuron , in some cases , will fire when I simply watch another person being touched .
So , it 's empathizing the other person being touched .
So , most of them will fire when I 'm touched in different locations . Different neurons for different locations .
But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location .
So , here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy .
Now , the question then arises : If I simply watch another person being touched , why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched ?
I mean , I empathize with that person but I don 't literally feel the touch .
Well , that 's because you 've got receptors in your skin , touch and pain receptors , going back into your brain and saying " Don 't worry , you 're not being touched .
So , empathize , by all means , with the other person , but do not actually experience the touch , otherwise you 'll get confused and muddled . "
Okay , so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch .
But if you remove the arm , you simply anesthetize my arm , so you put an injection into my arm , anesthetize the brachial plexus , so the arm is numb , and there is no sensations coming in , if I now watch you being touched , I literally feel it in my hand .
In other words , you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings .
So , I call them Gandhi neurons , or empathy neurons .
And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense .
All that 's separating you from him , from the other person , is your skin .
Remove the skin , you experience that person 's touch in your mind .
You 've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings .
And this , of course , is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy , and that is there is no real independent self , aloof from other human beings , inspecting the world , inspecting other people .
You are , in fact , connected not just via Facebook and Internet , you 're actually quite literally connected by your neurons .
And there is whole chains of neurons around this room , talking to each other .
And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else 's consciousness .
And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy .
It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience .
So , you have a patient with a phantom limb . If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom , and you watch somebody else being touched , you feel it in your phantom .
Now the astonishing thing is , if you have pain in your phantom limb , you squeeze the other person 's hand , massage the other person 's hand , that relieves the pain in your phantom hand , almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged .
So , here you have my last slide .
For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct .
C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures : science on the one hand , humanities on the other ; never the twain shall meet .
So , I 'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness , representation of self , what separates you from other human beings , what allows you to empathize with other human beings , and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization , which is unique to human beings . Thank you .
Fahad Al-Attiya : A country with no water
Imagine a country with abundant power -- oil and gas , sunshine , wind -- but missing one key essential for life : water . Infrastructure engineer Fahad Al-Attiya talks about the unexpected ways that the small Middle Eastern nation of Qatar creates its water supply .
Salaam alaikum .
Welcome to Doha .
I am in charge of making this country 's food secure .
That is my job for the next two years , to design an entire master plan , and then for the next 10 years to implement it -- of course , with so many other people .
But first , I need to talk to you about a story , which is my story , about the story of this country that you 're all here in today .
And of course , most of you have had three meals today , and probably will continue to have after this event .
So going in , what was Qatar in the 1940s ?
We were about 11,000 people living here .
There was no water . There was no energy , no oil , no cars , none of that .
Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages , fishing , or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water .
None of the glamour that you see today existed .
No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh .
It wasn 't that they couldn 't develop cities .
Resources weren 't there to develop them .
And you can see that life expectancy was also short .
Most people died around the age of 50 .
So let 's move to chapter two : the oil era .
1939 , that 's when they discovered oil .
But unfortunately , it wasn 't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War .
What did it do ?
It changed the face of this country , as you can see today and witness .
It also made all those people who roamed around the desert -- looking for water , looking for food , trying to take care of their livestock -- urbanize .
You might find this strange , but in my family we have different accents .
My mother has an accent that is so different to my father , and we 're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country .
There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak .
Someone says , " How so ? How could this happen ? "
Because we lived scattered .
We couldn 't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources .
And when the resources came , be it oil , we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration .
People started to get to know each other .
And we realized that there are some differences in accents .
So that is the chapter two : the oil era .
Let 's look at today .
This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha .
So what 's the population today ?
It 's 1.7 million people .
That is in less than 60 years .
The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years .
Lifespan has increased to 78 .
Water consumption has increased to 430 liters .
And this is amongst the highest worldwide .
From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree , higher than any other nation .
I don 't know if this was a reaction to lack of water .
But what is interesting about the story that I 've just said ?
The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water .
Now that is historic . It 's never happened before in history .
Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water .
This is history being made in this region .
Not only cities that we 're building , but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists , doctors .
Build a nice home , bring the architect , design my house .
These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn 't .
But of course , with the use of technology .
So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain .
Qatar has 74 , and we have that growth rate .
The question is how .
How could we survive that ?
We have no water whatsoever .
Simply because of this gigantic , mammoth machine called desalination .
Energy is the key factor here . It changed everything .
It is that thing that we pump out of the ground , we burn tons of , probably most of you used it coming to Doha .
So that is our lake , if you can see it .
That is our river .
That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water .
This is the best technology that this region could ever have : desalination .
So what are the risks ?
Do you worry much ?
I would say , perhaps if you look at the global facts , you will realize , of course I have to worry .
There is growing demand , growing population .
We 've turned seven billion only a few months ago .
And so that number also demands food .
And there 's predictions that we 'll be nine billion by 2050 .
So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders .
There 's also changing diets .
By elevating to a higher socio-economic level , they also change their diet .
They start eating more meat and so on and so forth .
On the other hand , there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors .
And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen .
This is the situation in Qatar , for those who don 't know .
We only have two days of water reserve .
We import 90 percent of our food , and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land .
The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions , etc . , etc .
So we also face risks .
These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity .
The question is , is there a solution ?
Is there a sustainable solution ?
Indeed there is .
This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we 've been working on over the past two years .
Let 's start with the water .
So we know very well -- I showed you earlier -- that we need this energy .
So if we 're going to need energy , what sort of energy ?
A depletable energy ? Fossil fuel ?
Or should we use something else ?
Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy ?
I guess most of you by now realize that we do : 300 days of sun .
And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need .
And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water .
And that is a lot of water .
That water will go then to the farmers , and the farmers will be able to water their plants , and they will be able then to supply society with food .
But in order to sustain the horizontal line -- because these are the projects , these are the systems that we will deliver -- we need to also develop the vertical line : system sustenance , high-level education , research and development , industries , technologies , to produce these technologies for application , and finally markets .
But what gels all of it , what enables it , is legislation , policies , regulations .
Without it we can 't do anything .
So that 's what we are planning to do .
Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation .
Our objective is to be a millennium city , just like many millennium cities around : Istanbul , Rome , London , Paris , Damascus , Cairo .
We are only 60 years old , but we want to live forever as a city , to live in peace .
Thank you very much .
Bill Clinton : My wish : Rebuilding Rwanda
Accepting the 2007 TED Prize , Bill Clinton asks for help in bringing health care to Rwanda -- and the rest of the world .
I thought in getting up to my TED wish I would try to begin by putting in perspective what I try to do and how it fits with what they try to do .
We live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent , but insufficient in three major ways .
It is , first of all , profoundly unequal : half the world 's people still living on less than two dollars a day ; a billion people with no access to clean water ; two and a half billion no access to sanitation ; a billion going to bed hungry every night ; one in four deaths every year from AIDS , TB , malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water -- 80 percent of them under five years of age .
Even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing .
In the United States , since 2001 we 've had five years of economic growth , five years of productivity growth in the workplace , but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent .
The percentage of working families without health care up by four percent .
So this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us -- which is why we 're all here in Northern California doing what we do for a living , enjoying this evening -- is profoundly unequal .
It is also unstable .
Unstable because of the threats of terror , weapons of mass destruction , the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we weren 't not so many years ago .
And perhaps most important of all , it is unsustainable because of climate change , resource depletion and species destruction .
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have , it is a world that moves away from unequal , unstable , unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities -- locally , nationally and globally -- that share the characteristics of all successful communities : a broadly shared , accessible set of opportunities , a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging .
All easier said than done .
When the terrorist incidents occurred in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago , I think even though they didn 't claim as many lives as we lost in the United States on 9 / 11 , I think the thing that troubled the British most was that the perpetrators were not invaders , but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with , went to school with , worked with , shared weekends with , shared meals with .
In other words , they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity .
It is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century .
Into this mix , people like us , who are not in public office , have more power to do good than at any time in history , because more than half the world 's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out .
And even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion .
Because primarily of the power of the Internet , people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree .
When the tsunami hit South Asia , the United States contributed 1.2 billion dollars .
30 percent of our households gave .
Half of them gave over the Internet .
The median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars .
And thirdly , because of the rise of non-governmental organizations .
They , businesses , other citizens ' groups , have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings .
When I became president in 1993 , there were none of these organizations in Russia .
There are now a couple of hundred thousand .
None in India . There are now at least a half a million active .
None in China . There are now 250,000 registered with the government , probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons .
When I organized my foundation , and I thought about the world as it is and the world that I hope to leave to the next generation , and I tried to be realistic about what I had cared about all my life that I could still have an impact on .
I wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty , fight disease , combat climate change , bridge the religious , racial and other divides that torment the world , but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more .
You saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with AIDS drugs .
And I want to say that the head of our AIDS effort , and the person who also is primarily active in the wish I 'll make tonight , Ira Magaziner , is here with me and I want to thank him for everything he 's done .
He 's over there .
When I got out of office and was asked to work , first in the Caribbean , to try to help deal with the AIDS crisis , generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year .
If you bought them in vast bulks , you could get them at a little under 400 dollars .
The first country we went to work in , the Bahamas , was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs .
The market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold .
So the very first week we were working , we got the price down to 500 dollars .
And all of a sudden , they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money .
Then we went to work with the manufacturers of AIDS medicines , one of whom was cited in the film , and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy , because even at 500 dollars , these drugs were being sold on a high-margin , low-volume , uncertain-payment basis .
So we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain , and went to a low-margin , high-volume , absolutely certain-payment business .
I joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against AIDS was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy .
But the price went to 140 dollars from 500 .
And pretty soon , the average price was 192 dollars .
Now we can get it for about 100 dollars .
Children 's medicine was 600 dollars , because nobody could afford to buy any of it .
We negotiated it down to 190 .
Then , the French imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called UNITAID , got a bunch of other countries to help .
That children 's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year .
The only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose , treat and care for people and deliver this medicine .
We started a childhood obesity initiative with the Heart Association in America .
We tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools .
We just reorganized the markets .
And it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world , somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets .
And that is now what we 're trying to do , and working with this large cities group to fight climate change , to negotiate huge , big , volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world 's greenhouse gases , to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics .
And this whole discussion as if it 's some sort of economic burden , is a mystery to me .
I think it 's a bird 's nest on the ground .
When Al Gore won his well-deserved Oscar for the " Inconvenient Truth " movie , I was thrilled , but I had urged him to make a second movie quickly .
For those of you who saw " An Inconvenient Truth , " the most important slide in the Gore lecture is the last one , which shows here 's where greenhouse gases are going if we don 't do anything , here 's where they could go .
And then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory .
We need a movie on those six categories .
And all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it .
So we 're trying to do that .
So organizing these markets is one thing we try to do .
Now we have taken on a second thing , and this gets to my wish .
It has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be -- the pessimistic headlines may say , well , we can 't do this , that or the other thing because of corruption -- I think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption , and feeds corruption .
We now have the money , given these low prices , to distribute AIDS drugs all over the world to people we cannot presently reach .
Today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work , and in a total of 62 countries , and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them .
But the money is there to reach others .
The systems are not there to reach the people .
So what we have been trying to do , working first in Rwanda and then in Malawi and other places -- but I want to talk about Rwanda tonight -- is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS , TB , malaria , other infectious diseases , maternal and child health , and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world , that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda , and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world .
And the test is : one , will it do the job ?
Will it provide high quality care ?
And two , will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years ?
Because the longer I deal with these problems , the more convinced I am that we have to -- whether it 's economics , health , education , whatever -- we have to build systems .
And the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight .
You think about whatever your life has been , however many obstacles you have faced in your life , at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved .
In a world with no systems , with chaos , everything becomes a guerilla struggle , and this predictability is not there .
And it becomes almost impossible to save lives , educate kids , develop economies , whatever .
The person , in my view , who has done the best job of this in the health care area , of building a system in a very poor area , is Dr. Paul Farmer , who , many of you know , has worked for now 20 years with his group , Partners in Health , primarily in Haiti where he started , but they 've also worked in Russia , in Peru and other places around the world .
As poor as Haiti is , in the area where Farmer 's clinic is active -- and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve -- since 1988 , they have not lost one person to tuberculosis , not one .
And they 've achieved a lot of other amazing health results .
So when we decided to work in Rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the AIDS problem , we wanted to build a healthcare network , because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994 , and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day .
So I rang up , asked Paul Farmer if he would help .
Because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in Haiti and a model in Rwanda that we could then take all over the country , number one , it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on Earth in the last 15 years , and number two , we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world .
And so we have set about doing that .
Now , we started working together 18 months ago .
And we 're working in an area called Southern Kayonza , which is one of the poorest areas in Rwanda , with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people .
We 're essentially implementing what Paul Farmer did in Haiti : he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems , ensure that people who have AIDS or TB are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly , who work on bringing about health education , clean water and sanitation , providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it .
The procedures that make this work have been perfected , as I said , by Paul Farmer and his team in their work in rural Haiti over the last 20 years .
Recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in Rwanda .
And the results were so good that the Rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country , and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it .
I 'll tell you a little bit about our team because it 's indicative of what we do .
We have about 500 people around the world working in our AIDS program , some of them for nothing -- just for transportation , room and board .
And then we have others working in these other related programs .
Our business plan in Rwanda was put together under the leadership of Diana Noble , who is an unusually gifted woman , but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work .
She was the youngest partner at Schroder Ventures in London in her 20s .
She was CEO of a successful e-venture -- she started and built Reed Elsevier Ventures -- and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life .
So she now works full-time on this for very little pay .
She and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country .
And it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it .
When we came to this rural area , 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition .
23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five .
Mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent .
Over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation -- all entirely preventable and treatable .
Over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses -- again , all preventable and treatable .
And not a single soul in this area was being treated for AIDS or tuberculosis .
Within the first 18 months , the following things happened : we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for AIDS .
That 's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area .
Listen to this : less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment .
That 's lower than the figure in the United States .
Less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs .
400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system .
That 's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies .
About 40 percent of all the people -- I said 400,000 . I meant 40,000 .
About 40 percent of all the people who need TB treatment are now getting it -- in just 18 months , up from zero when we started .
43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow .
We 've started the first malaria treatment programs they 've ever had there .
Patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics , complete with solar power generators , good lab technology .
We now are treating 325 people a month , despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the AIDS patients are now treated at home .
And the most important thing is because we 've implemented Paul Farmer 's model , using community health workers , we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of Rwanda for between five and six percent of GDP , and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years .
And for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of GDP on health care , except for the United States , we spend 16 -- but that 's a story for another day .
We 're now working with Partners in Health and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and our Foundation folks to scale this system up .
We 're also beginning to do this in Malawi and Lesotho .
And we have similar projects in Tanzania , Mozambique , Kenya and Ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing : to save as many lives as quickly as we can , but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world .
We need initial upfront investment to train doctors , nurses , health administration and community health workers throughout the country , to set up the information technology , the solar energy , the water and sanitation , the transportation infrastructure .
But over a five- to 10-year period , we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out .
My wish is that TED assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country , Rwanda , that can be a model for Africa , and indeed , for any poor country anywhere in the world .
My belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists , with more productive citizens and fewer haters , a place we 'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in .
It has been an honor for me , particularly , to work in Rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with Sir Tom Hunter , the Scottish philanthropist , where last year we , using the same thing with AIDS drugs , cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers .
These people have been through a lot and none of us , most of all me , helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other .
We 're undoing that now , and they are so over it and so into their future .
We 're doing this in an environmentally responsible way .
I 'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access , but to do it with clean energy . To have responsible reforestation projects , the Rwandans , interestingly enough , have been quite good , Mr. Wilson , in preserving their topsoil .
There 's a couple of guys from southern farming families -- the first thing I did when I went out to this place and see what they 'd done with it .
We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation , reorganize itself , focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive , quality health care with minimal outside help .
I am grateful for this prize , and I will use it to that end .
We could use some more help to do this , but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in Rwanda -- in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income , one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on Earth .
It 's worth a try and I believe it would succeed .
Thank you and God bless you .
Chade-Meng Tan : Everyday compassion at Google
Google 's " Jolly Good Fellow , " Chade-Meng Tan , talks about how the company practices compassion in its everyday business -- and its bold side projects .
So what does the happiest man in the world look like ?
He certainly doesn 't look like me .
He looks like this .
His name is Matthieu Ricard .
So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world ?
Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain .
And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI , versus the right prefrontal cortex .
And Matthieu 's happiness measure is off the charts .
He 's by far the happiest man ever measured by science .
Which leads us to a question : What was he thinking when he was being measured ?
Perhaps something very naughty .
Actually , he was meditating on compassion .
Matthieu 's own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever .
Reading about Matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life .
My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime -- and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale .
And learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work .
Matthieu 's brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore .
Compassion is something that creates happiness .
Compassion is fun .
And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game .
Because if compassion was a chore , nobody 's going to do it , except maybe the Dalai Lama or something .
But if compassion was fun , everybody 's going to do it .
Therefore , to create the conditions for global compassion , all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun .
But fun is not enough .
What if compassion is also profitable ?
What if compassion is also good for business ?
Then , every boss , every manager in the world , will want to have compassion -- like this .
That would create the conditions for world peace .
So , I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting .
Fortunately , I didn 't have to look very far .
Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes -- in Google , my company .
I know there are other compassionate companies in the world , but Google is the place I 'm familiar with because I 've been there for 10 years , so I 'll use Google as the case study .
Google is a company born of idealism .
It 's a company that thrives on idealism .
And maybe because of that , compassion is organic and widespread company-wide .
In Google , expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern .
It 's sort of a funny pattern .
It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something .
And they don 't usually ask for permission ; they just go ahead and do it , and then other Googlers join in , and it just gets bigger and bigger .
And sometimes it gets big enough to become official .
So in other words , it almost always starts from the bottom up .
And let me give you some examples .
The first example is the largest annual community event -- where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities -- was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official , because it just became too big .
Another example , three Googlers -- a chef , an engineer and , most funny , a massage therapist -- three of them , they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility .
So what do they do ?
They just go ahead and start a fundraiser .
And they raise enough money to build this hospital -- the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people .
During the Haiti earthquake , a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones .
And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices .
In China for example , one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China , involving more than 1,000 schools in China , working on issues such as education , poverty , health care and the environment .
There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts .
And this idea , again , came from the grassroots , from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job .
And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy .
It was two persons saying , " Let 's do this , " and the company said , " Yes . "
So it turns out that Google is a compassionate company , because Googlers found compassion to be fun .
But again , fun is not enough .
There are also real business benefits .
So what are they ?
The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders .
What does that mean ?
There are three components of compassion .
There is the affective component , which is , " I feel for you . "
There is the cognitive component , which is , " I understand you . "
And there is a motivational component , which is , " I want to help you . "
So what has this got to do with business leadership ?
According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins , and documented in the book " Good to Great , " it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness .
And he calls them " Level 5 leaders . "
These are leaders who , in addition to being highly capable , possess two important qualities , and they are humility and ambition .
These are leaders who are highly ambitious for the greater good .
And because they 're ambitious for a greater good , they feel no need to inflate their own egos .
And they , according to the research , make the best business leaders .
And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion , we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion -- understanding people and empathizing with people -- inhibits , tones down , what I call the excessive self-obsession that 's in us , therefore creating the conditions for humility .
The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good .
In other words , compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders .
And this is the first compelling business benefit .
The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce .
Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good .
It creates a vibrant , energetic community where people admire and respect each other .
I mean , you come to work in the morning , and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India .
It 's like how can you not be inspired by those people -- your own coworkers ?
So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration , initiative and creativity .
It makes us a highly effective company .
So , having said all that , what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting ?
In our experience , there are three ingredients .
The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good .
So always think : how is your company and your job serving the greater good ?
Or , how can you further serve the greater good ?
This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in .
That 's one .
The second ingredient is autonomy .
So in Google , there 's a lot of autonomy .
And one of our most popular managers jokes that , this is what he says , " Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum . "
And he considers himself one of the inmates .
If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free , they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way .
The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth .
Leadership training in Google , for example , places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities , such as self-awareness , self-mastery , empathy and compassion , because we believe that leadership begins with character .
We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence , which we jokingly call " Searching Inside Yourself . "
It 's less naughty than it sounds .
So I 'm an engineer by training , but I 'm one of the creators and instructors of this course , which I find kind of funny , because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence .
What a company .
So " Search Inside Yourself " -- how does it work ?
It works in three steps .
The first step is attention training .
Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities .
Therefore , any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training .
The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time .
And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence .
The second step follows the first step .
The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery .
So using the supercharged attention from step one , we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes .
What does that mean ?
It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity , objectivity and from a third-person perspective .
And once you can do that , you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery .
The third step , following the second step , is to create new mental habits .
What does that mean ? Imagine this .
Imagine whenever you meet any other person , any time you meet a person , your habitual , instinctive first thought is , " I want you to be happy .
I want you to be happy . "
Imagine you can do that .
Having this habit , this mental habit , changes everything at work .
Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people , and it creates trust , and trust creates a lot of good working relationships .
And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace .
Someday , we hope to open-source " Search Inside Yourself " so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference .
And in closing , I want to end the same place I started , with happiness .
I want to quote this guy -- the guy in robes , not the other guy -- the Dalai Lama , who said , " If you want others to be happy , practice compassion .
If you want to be happy , practice compassion . "
I found this to be true , both on the individual level and at a corporate level .
And I hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too .
Thank you .
Stephen Lawler : Tour Microsoft 's Virtual Earth
Microsoft 's Stephen Lawler gives a whirlwind tour of Virtual Earth , moving up , down and through its hyper-real cityscapes with dazzlingly fluidity , a remarkable feat that requires staggering amounts of data to bring into focus .
What I want to talk to you about today is virtual worlds , digital globes , the 3-D Web , the Metaverse .
What does this all mean for us ?
What it means is the Web is going to become an exciting place again .
It 's going to become super exciting as we transform to this highly immersive and interactive world .
With graphics , computing power , low latencies , these types of applications and possibilities are going to stream rich data into your lives .
So the Virtual Earth initiative , and other types of these initiatives , are all about extending our current search metaphor .
When you think about it , we 're so constrained by browsing the Web , remembering URLs , saving favorites .
As we move to search , we rely on the relevance rankings , the Web matching , the index crawling .
But we want to use our brain !
We want to navigate , explore , discover information .
In order to do that , we have to put you as a user back in the driver 's seat .
We need cooperation between you and the computing network and the computer .
So what better way to put you back in the driver 's seat than to put you in the real world that you interact in every day ?
Why not leverage the learnings that you 've been learning your entire life ?
So Virtual Earth is about starting off creating the first digital representation , comprehensive , of the entire world .
What we want to do is mix in all types of data .
Tag it . Attribute it . Metadata . Get the community to add local depth , global perspective , local knowledge .
So when you think about this problem , what an enormous undertaking . Where do you begin ?
Well , we collect data from satellites , from airplanes , from ground vehicles , from people .
This process is an engineering problem , a mechanical problem , a logistical problem , an operational problem .
Here is an example of our aerial camera .
This is panchromatic . It 's actually four color cones .
In addition , it 's multi-spectral .
We collect four gigabits per second of data , if you can imagine that kind of data stream coming down .
That 's equivalent to a constellation of 12 satellites at highest res capacity .
We fly these airplanes at 5,000 feet in the air .
You can see the camera on the front . We collect multiple viewpoints , vantage points , angles , textures . We bring all that data back in .
We sit here -- you know , think about the ground vehicles , the human scale -- what do you see in person ? We need to capture that up close to establish that what it 's like-type experience .
I bet many of you have seen the Apple commercials , kind of poking at the PC for their brilliance and simplicity .
So a little unknown secret is -- did you see the one with the guy , he 's got the Web cam ?
The poor PC guy . They 're duct taping his head . They 're just wrapping it on him .
Well , a little unknown secret is his brother actually works on the Virtual Earth team .
. So they 've got a little bit of a sibling rivalry thing going on here .
But let me tell you -- it doesn 't affect his day job .
We think a lot of good can come from this technology .
This was after Katrina . We were the first commercial fleet of airplanes to be cleared into the disaster impact zone .
We flew the area . We imaged it . We sent in people . We took pictures of interiors , disaster areas . We helped with the first responders , the search and rescue .
Often the first time anyone saw what happened to their house was on Virtual Earth .
We made it all freely available on the Web , just to -- it was obviously our chance of helping out with the cause .
When we think about how all this comes together , it 's all about software , algorithms and math .
You know , we capture this imagery but to build the 3-D models we need to do geo-positioning . We need to do geo-registering of the images .
We have to bundle adjust them . Find tie points .
Extract geometry from the images .
This process is a very calculated process .
In fact , it was always done manual .
Hollywood would spend millions of dollars to do a small urban corridor for a movie because they 'd have to do it manually .
They 'd drive the streets with lasers called LIDAR .
They 'd collected information with photos . They 'd manually build each building .
We do this all through software , algorithms and math -- a highly automated pipeline creating these cities .
We took a decimal point off what it cost to build these cities , and that 's how we 're going to be able to scale this out and make this reality a dream .
We think about the user interface .
What does it mean to look at it from multiple perspectives ?
An ortho-view , a nadir-view . How do you keep the precision of the fidelity of the imagery while maintaining the fluidity of the model ?
I 'll wrap up by showing you the -- this is a brand-new peek I haven 't really shown into the lab area of Virtual Earth .
What we 're doing is -- people like this a lot , this bird 's eye imagery we work with . It 's this high resolution data .
But what we 've found is they like the fluidity of the 3-D model .
A child can navigate with an Xbox controller or a game controller .
So here what we 're trying to do is we bring the picture and project it into the 3-D model space .
You can see all types of resolution . From here , I can slowly pan the image over .
I can get the next image . I can blend and transition .
By doing this I don 't lose the original detail . In fact , I might be recording history .
The freshness , the capacity . I can turn this image .
I can look at it from multiple viewpoints and angles .
What we 're trying to do is build a virtual world .
We hope that we can make computing a user model you 're familiar with , and really derive insights from you , from all different directions .
I thank you very much for your time .
Allan Jones : A map of the brain
How can we begin to understand the way the brain works ? The same way we begin to understand a city : by making a map . In this visually stunning talk , Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region , and how it all connects up .
Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain .
We chart it , we 've described it , we 've drawn it , we 've mapped it .
Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology -- think Google Maps , think GPS -- the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation .
So let 's take a look at the brain .
Most people , when they first look at a fresh human brain , they say , " It doesn 't look what you 're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain . "
Typically , what you 're looking at is a fixed brain . It 's gray .
And this outer layer , this is the vasculature , which is incredible , around a human brain .
This is the blood vessels .
20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs , 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart , is servicing this one organ .
That 's basically , if you hold two fists together , it 's just slightly larger than the two fists .
Scientists , sort of at the end of the 20th century , learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain .
So for example , they can see in the back part of the brain , which is just turning around there .
There 's the cerebellum ; that 's keeping you upright right now .
It 's keeping me standing . It 's involved in coordinated movement .
On the side here , this is temporal cortex .
This is the area where primary auditory processing -- so you 're hearing my words , you 're sending it up into higher language processing centers .
Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought , decision making -- it 's the last to mature in late adulthood .
This is where all your decision-making processes are going on .
It 's the place where you 're deciding right now you probably aren 't going to order the steak for dinner .
So if you take a deeper look at the brain , one of the things , if you look at it in cross-section , what you can see is that you can 't really see a whole lot of structure there .
But there 's actually a lot of structure there .
It 's cells and it 's wires all wired together .
So about a hundred years ago , some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells .
And that 's shown here in the the very light blue .
You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained .
And what you can see is it 's very non-uniform . You see a lot more structure there .
So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex .
It 's one continuous processing unit , if you will .
But you can also see things underneath there as well .
And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through .
They 're probably less cell dense .
So there 's about 86 billion neurons in our brain .
And as you can see , they 're very non-uniformly distributed .
And how they 're distributed really contributes to their underlying function .
And of course , as I mentioned before , since we can now start to map brain function , we can start to tie these into the individual cells .
So let 's take a deeper look .
Let 's look at neurons .
So as I mentioned , there are 86 billion neurons .
There are also these smaller cells as you 'll see .
These are support cells -- astrocytes glia .
And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input .
They 're storing it , they 're processing it .
Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain .
And each neuron itself is largely unique .
The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry .
These are proteins .
They 're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement .
They 're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with .
And they 're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do .
So if we zoom in to an even deeper level , all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes .
We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes .
We get one from mom , one from dad .
And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes .
They 're encoded in the DNA .
And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they 're turned on .
And so our project is seeking to look at this readout , understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on .
So in order to undertake such a project , we obviously need brains .
So we sent our lab technician out .
We were seeking normal human brains .
What we actually start with is a medical examiner 's office .
This a place where the dead are brought in .
We are seeking normal human brains .
There 's a lot of criteria by which we 're selecting these brains .
We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60 , they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain , no history of psychiatric disease , no drugs on board -- we do a toxicology workup .
And we 're very careful about the brains that we do take .
We 're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue , we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death .
Because what we 're trying to measure , the RNA -- which is the readout from our genes -- is very labile , and so we have to move very quickly .
One side note on the collection of brains : because of the way that we collect , and because we require consent , we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains .
Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life .
And men are much more likely to have their significant other , spouse , give consent than the other way around .
So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what 's called an MR.
This is magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI .
It 's a standard template by which we 're going to hang the rest of this data .
So we collect this MR.
And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map .
The next thing we do is we collect what 's called a diffusion tensor imaging .
This maps the large cabling in the brain .
And again , you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways , if you will .
The brain is removed from the skull , and then it 's sliced into one-centimeter slices .
And those are frozen solid , and they 're shipped to Seattle .
And in Seattle , we take these -- this is a whole human hemisphere -- and we put them into what 's basically a glorified meat slicer .
There 's a blade here that 's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide .
We 're going to then apply one of those stains to it , and we scan it .
And then what we get is our first mapping .
So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments .
You could consider this state boundaries , if you will , those pretty broad outlines .
From this , we 're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces , which then we can put on a smaller cryostat .
And this is just showing this here -- this frozen tissue , and it 's being cut .
This is 20 microns thin , so this is about a baby hair 's width .
And remember , it 's frozen .
And so you can see here , old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied .
We take a microscope slide .
Then we very carefully melt onto the slide .
This will then go onto a robot that 's going to apply one of those stains to it .
And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this .
So again this is what they can see under the microscope .
You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places .
And from there it 's routine . They understand where to make these assignments .
And they can make basically what 's a reference atlas .
This is a more detailed map .
Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what 's called laser scanning microdissection .
So the technician takes the instructions .
They scribe along a place there .
And then the laser actually cuts .
You can see that blue dot there cutting . And that tissue falls off .
You can see on the microscope slide here , that 's what 's happening in real time .
There 's a container underneath that 's collecting that tissue .
We take that tissue , we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology , and then we put a florescent tag on it .
We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray .
Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you , but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass .
This has roughly 60,000 elements on it , so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome .
And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it , we get a unique fingerprint , if you will , quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample .
Now we do this over and over again , this process for any given brain .
We 're taking over a thousand samples for each brain .
This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus .
It 's involved in learning and memory .
And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples .
So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements , a thousand samples .
So roughly , we have 50 million data points for a given human brain .
We 've done right now two human brains-worth of data .
We 've put all of that together into one thing , and I 'll show you what that synthesis looks like .
It 's basically a large data set of information that 's all freely available to any scientist around the world .
They don 't even have to log in to come use this tool , mine this data , find interesting things out with this .
So here 's the modalities that we put together .
You 'll start to recognize these things from what we 've collected before .
Here 's the MR. It provides the framework .
There 's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn , it allows you to zoom in , it allows you to highlight individual structures .
But most importantly , we 're now mapping into this anatomic framework , which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on .
So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree .
Green is the sort of cool areas where it 's not turned on .
And each gene gives us a fingerprint .
And remember that we 've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available .
So what can scientists learn about this data ?
We 're just starting to look at this data ourselves .
There 's some basic things that you would want to understand .
Two great examples are drugs , Prozac and Wellbutrin .
These are commonly prescribed antidepressants .
Now remember , we 're assaying genes .
Genes send the instructions to make proteins .
Proteins are targets for drugs .
So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off , etc .
So if you want to understand the action of drugs , you want to understand how they 're acting in the ways you want them to , and also in the ways you don 't want them to .
In the side effect profile , etc . , you want to see where those genes are turned on .
And for the first time , we can actually do that .
We can do that in multiple individuals that we 've assayed too .
So now we can look throughout the brain .
We can see this unique fingerprint .
And we get confirmation .
We get confirmation that , indeed , the gene is turned on -- for something like Prozac , in serotonergic structures , things that are already known be affected -- but we also get to see the whole thing .
We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before , and we see these genes turned on there .
It 's as interesting a side effect as it could be .
One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can , because it 's a pattern matching exercise , because there 's unique fingerprint , we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint .
So if you 're in drug discovery , for example , you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize .
Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying , " Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X. "
And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they 're great . They analyze large populations .
They look at their entire genomes , and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes .
But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes .
It tells you the what , but it doesn 't tell you the where .
And so it 's very important for those researchers that we 've created this resource .
Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity .
They can start to look at common pathways -- other things that they simply haven 't been able to do before .
So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality .
And I think every human , we all have different genetic backgrounds , we all have lived separate lives .
But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar .
We 're similar at the genetic level .
And what we 're finding is actually , even at the brain biochemical level , we are quite similar .
And so this shows it 's not 99 percent , but it 's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff , so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated .
And then we find some outliers , some things that lie beyond the cloud .
And those genes are interesting , but they 're very subtle .
So I think it 's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences , we are quite similar even at the brain level .
Now what do those differences look like ?
This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were -- and they 're quite subtle .
These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type .
These are two genes that we found as good examples .
One is called RELN -- it 's involved in early developmental cues .
DISC1 is a gene that 's deleted in schizophrenia .
These aren 't schizophrenic individuals , but they do show some population variation .
And so what you 're looking at here in donor one and donor four , which are the exceptions to the other two , that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells .
It 's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that 's telling us a gene is turned on there .
Whether or not that 's due to an individual 's genetic background or their experiences , we don 't know .
Those kinds of studies require much larger populations .
So I 'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go .
I think these resources are incredibly valuable .
They give researchers a handle on where to go .
But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point .
We 're certainly going to be looking at more .
I 'll just close by saying that the tools are there , and this is truly an unexplored , undiscovered continent .
This is the new frontier , if you will .
And so for those who are undaunted , but humbled by the complexity of the brain , the future awaits .
Thanks .
Rose George : Inside the secret shipping industry
Almost everything we own and use , at some point , travels to us by container ship , through a vast network of ocean routes and ports that most of us know almost nothing about . Journalist Rose George tours us through the world of shipping , the underpinning of consumer civilization .
A couple of years ago , Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year .
It chose Somali piracy .
Pretty much around the same time , I discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships , often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight .
And I learned these two facts , and I thought , what 's going on in shipping ?
And I thought , would that happen in any other industry ?
Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months , or a year ?
Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers ?
It wouldn 't happen .
So I started to get intrigued .
And I discovered another fact , which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn 't known it before at the age of 42 , 43 .
That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping .
Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry , something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows .
But shipping isn 't that .
Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been .
Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade .
Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970 .
We are more dependent on it now than ever .
And yet , for such an enormous industry -- there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — it 's become pretty much invisible .
Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that , because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel .
But elsewhere in the world , if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea , you will get essentially a blank face .
You will ask someone on the street if they 've heard of Microsoft .
I should think they 'll say yes , because they 'll know that they make software that goes on computers , and occasionally works .
But if you ask them if they 've heard of Maersk , I doubt you 'd get the same response , even though Maersk , which is just one shipping company amongst many , has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft .
[ $ 60.2 billion ] Now why is this ?
A few years ago , the first sea lord of the British admiralty -- he is called the first sea lord , although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — he said that we , and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West , that we suffer from sea blindness .
We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work .
It 's just something we fly over , a patch of blue on an airline map .
Nothing to see , move along .
So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness , so I ran away to sea .
A couple of years ago , I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal , a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes , and I departed from Felixstowe , on the south coast of England , and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later , considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now .
And it was a revelation .
We traveled through five seas , two oceans , nine ports , and I learned a lot about shipping .
And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was , where are all the people ?
I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time , but on Kendal there were only 21 crew .
Now that 's because shipping is very efficient .
Containerization has made it very efficient .
Ships have automation now .
They can operate with small crews .
But it also means that , in the words of a port chaplain I once met , the average seafarer you 're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted , because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element , a strange phrase which they don 't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman .
So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time .
They don 't have time to relax .
They 're at sea for months at a time , and even when they 're on board , they don 't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted , the Internet .
And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to -- Not the queen ; I can 't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait -- But around that dining table in the officer 's saloon , I was sitting next to a Burmese guy , I was opposite a Romanian , a Moldavian , an Indian .
On the next table was a Chinese guy , and in the crew room , it was entirely Filipinos .
So that was a normal working ship .
Now how is that possible ?
Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years , when most of the general public stopped noticing it , was something called an open registry , or a flag of convenience .
Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry .
You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia , or Mongolia , or North Korea , though that 's not very popular .
So we have these very multinational , global , mobile crews on ships .
And that was a surprise to me .
And when we got to pirate waters , down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean , the ship changed .
And that was also shocking , because suddenly , I realized , as the captain said to me , that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship .
We were no longer allowed on deck .
There were double pirate watches .
And at that time , there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage , and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience .
Not all of them , but some of them were , because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners , it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience .
What else does our sea blindness mask ?
Well , if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship , and look up to the funnel , you 'll see very black smoke .
And that 's because shipping has very tight margins , and they want cheap fuel , so they use something called bunker fuel , which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery , or just one step up from asphalt .
And shipping is the greenest method of transport .
In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile , it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking .
But it 's not benign , because there 's so much of it .
So shipping emissions are about three to four percent , almost the same as aviation 's .
And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries ' carbon emissions , it would come in about sixth , somewhere near Germany .
It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world .
And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping .
There are interesting initiatives going on .
But why has it taken so long ?
When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles ?
I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale , because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea , and what it made me think about .
We know about man 's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing , but we don 't really know much about what 's happening underneath the water .
And in fact , shipping has a role to play here , because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures .
Light doesn 't penetrate beneath the surface of the water , so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound .
And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles .
A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean .
But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean , and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use , then it can damage their acoustic habitat , and they need this for breeding , for finding feeding grounds , for finding mates .
And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent .
But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet .
And when I arrived in Singapore , and I apologize for this , but I didn 't want to get off my ship .
I 'd really loved being on board Kendal .
I 'd been well treated by the crew , I 'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain , and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks , something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about .
But I wasn 't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers , who , when I asked them to describe their job to me , called it " dollar for homesickness . "
They had good salaries , but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element .
But when I get to this part , I 'm in two minds , because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it .
I want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work , coming in and out every day , bringing us what we need .
But I also want to see shipping , and us , the general public , who know so little about it , to have a bit more scrutiny , to be a bit more transparent , to have 90 percent transparency .
Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple , which is learning to see the sea .
Thank you .
Charity Tillemann-Dick : Singing after a double lung transplant
You 'll never sing again , said her doctor . But in a story from the very edge of medical possibility , operatic soprano Charity Tillemann-Dick tells a double story of survival -- of her body , from a double lung transplant , and of her spirit , fueled by an unwavering will to sing . A powerful story from TEDMED 2010 .
You may not know this , but you are celebrating an anniversary with me .
I 'm not married , but one year ago today , I woke up from a month-long coma , following a double lung transplant .
Crazy , I know . Insane .
Thank you .
Six years before that , I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe , when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension -- also known as PH .
It happens when there 's a thickening in the pulmonary veins , making the right side of the heart work overtime , and causing what I call the reverse-Grinch effect .
My heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big .
Physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition , and usually after two to five years , you die .
I went to see this specialist , and she was top-of-the-field and told me I had to stop singing .
She said , " Those high notes are going to kill you . "
While she didn 't have any medical evidence to back up her claim that there was a relationship between operatic arias and pulmonary hypertension , she was absolutely emphatic I was singing my own obituary .
I was very limited by my condition , physically .
But I was not limited when I sang , and as air came up from my lungs , through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound , it was the closest thing I had ever come to transcendence .
And just because of someone 's hunch , I wasn 't going to give it up .
Thankfully , I met Reda Girgis , who is dry as toast , but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn 't just want me to survive , they wanted me to live a meaningful life .
This meant making trade-offs .
I come from Colorado .
It 's a mile high , and I grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents .
Well , the altitude exacerbated my symptoms .
So I moved to Baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby .
I couldn 't walk as much as I used to , so I opted for five-inch heels .
And I gave up salt , I went vegan , and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil , also known as Viagra .
My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH , but after six months , I couldn 't walk up a small hill . I couldn 't climb a flight of stairs .
I could barely stand up without feeling like I was going to faint .
I had a heart catheterization , where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure , which is supposed to be between 15 and 20 .
Mine was 146 .
I like to do things big , and it meant one thing : there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called Flolan , and it 's not just a drug ; it 's a way of life .
Doctors insert a catheter into your chest , which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds .
Every day , 24 hours , that pump is at your side , administering medicine directly to your heart , and it 's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses .
This is a list of the side effects : if you eat too much salt , like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich , you 'll probably end up in the ICU .
If you go through a metal detector , you 'll probably die .
If you get a bubble in your medicine -- because you have to mix it every morning -- and it stays in there , you probably die .
If you run out of medicine , you definitely die .
No one wants to go on Flolan .
But when I needed it , it was a godsend .
Within a few days , I could walk again .
Within a few weeks , I was performing , and in a few months , I debuted at the Kennedy Center .
The pump was a little bit problematic when performing , so I 'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ACE bandage .
Literally hundreds of elevator rides were spent with me alone stuffing the pump into my Spanx , hoping the doors wouldn 't open unexpectedly .
And the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers .
I graduated from graduate school in 2006 , and I got a fellowship to go back to Europe .
A few days after arriving , I met this wonderful , old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles .
And before long , I was commuting between Budapest , Milan and Florence .
Though I was attached to this ugly , unwanted , high-maintenance , mechanical pet , my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera -- very complicated , but in a good way .
Then in February of 2008 , my grandfather passed away .
He was a big figure in all of our lives , and we loved him very much .
It certainly didn 't prepare me for what came next .
Seven weeks later , I got a call from my family .
My father had been in a catastrophic car accident , and he died .
At 24 , my death would have been entirely expected .
But his -- well , the only way I can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline .
Against my doctors ' and family 's wishes , I needed to go back for the funeral .
I had to say goodbye in some way , shape or form .
But soon I was showing signs of right-heart failure , and I had to return to sea level , doing so knowing that I probably would never see my home again .
I canceled most of my engagements that summer , but I had one left in Tel Aviv , so I went .
After one performance , I could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab .
I sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face , and in the heat of the desert , I was freezing cold .
My fingers started turning blue , and I was like , " What is going on here ? "
I heard my heart 's valves snapping open and closed .
The cab stopped , and I pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as I walked to the elevator .
I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem : I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine .
I was dying , and if I didn 't mix that stuff up fast , I would never leave that apartment alive .
I started mixing , and I felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another , but I just kept on going .
Finally , with the last bottle in and the last bubble out , I attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough .
If it didn 't , I 'd probably see my father sooner than I anticipated .
Thankfully , in a few minutes , I saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs , which is a side effect of the medication , and I knew I 'd be okay .
We 're not big on fear in my family , but I was scared .
I went back to the States , anticipating I 'd return to Europe , but the heart catheterization showed that I wasn 't going anywhere further that a flight-for-life from Johns Hopkins Hospital .
I performed here and there , but as my condition deteriorated , so did my voice .
My doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant .
I didn 't .
I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries .
I knew another young man , though , who had PH who died while waiting for one .
I wanted to live .
I thought stem cells were a good option , but they hadn 't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet .
I officially took a break from singing , and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years , for transplant .
I was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon , and I asked him if I needed a transplant , what I could do to prepare .
He said , " Be happy .
A happy patient is a healthy patient . "
It was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and Confucius .
I still didn 't want a transplant , but in a month , I was back in the hospital with some severely edemic kankles -- very attractive .
And it was right-heart failure .
I finally decided it was time to take my doctor 's advice .
It was time for me to go to Cleveland and to start the agonizing wait for a match .
But the next morning , while I was still in the hospital , I got a telephone call .
It was my doctor in Cleveland , Marie Budev .
And they had lungs .
It was a match .
They were from Texas .
And everybody was really happy for me , but me .
Because , despite their problems , I had spent my whole life training my lungs , and I was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up .
I flew to Cleveland , and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye .
But organs don 't wait , and I went into surgery before I could say goodbye .
The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket , telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again , and to please try and save my voice .
I fell into this apocalyptic dream world .
During the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery , I flatlined twice , 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body .
And in my surgeon 's 20-year career , he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he 's ever performed .
They left my chest open for two weeks .
You could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it .
I was on a dozen machines that were keeping me alive .
An infection ravaged my skin .
I had hoped my voice would be saved , but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it .
If they stayed in , there was no way I would ever sing again .
So my doctor got the ENT , the top guy at the clinic , to come down and give me surgery to move the tubes around my voice box .
He said it would kill me .
So my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice .
Though my mom couldn 't say goodbye to me before the surgery , she didn 't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed .
And if you want an example of perseverance , grit and strength in a beautiful , little package , it is her .
One year ago to this very day , I woke up .
I was 95 lbs .
There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body .
I couldn 't walk , I couldn 't talk , I couldn 't eat , I couldn 't move , I certainly couldn 't sing , I couldn 't even breathe , but when I looked up and I saw my mother , I couldn 't help but smile .
Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs , death happens .
But life isn 't really just about avoiding death , is it ?
It 's about living .
Medical conditions don 't negate the human condition .
And when people are allowed to pursue their passions , doctors will find they have better , happier and healthier patients .
My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place , but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time .
And I 'm so grateful they did .
This past summer , when I was running and singing and dancing and playing with my nieces and my nephews and my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my grandmother in the Colorado Rockies , I couldn 't help but think of that doctor who told me that I couldn 't sing .
And I wanted to tell her , and I want to tell you , we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams .
When we do , we will find that patients don 't just survive ; we thrive .
And some of us might even sing .
[ Singing : French ] Thank you .
Thank you .
And I 'd like to thank my pianist , Monica Lee .
Thank you so much .
Thank you .
Bill Stone : I 'm going to the moon . Who 's with me ?
Bill Stone , a maverick cave explorer who has plumbed Earth 's deepest abysses , discusses his efforts to mine lunar ice for space fuel and to build an autonomous robot for studying Jupiter 's moon Europa .
First place I 'd like to take you is what many believe will be the world 's deepest natural abyss .
And I say believe because this process is still ongoing .
Right now there are major expeditions being planned for next year that I 'll talk a little bit about .
One of the things that 's changed here , in the last 150 years since Jules Verne had great science-fiction concepts of what the underworld was like , is that technology has enabled us to go to these places that were previously completely unknown and speculated about .
We can now descend thousands of meters into the Earth with relative impunity .
Along the way we 've discovered fantastic abysses and chambers so large that you can see for hundreds of meters without a break in the line of sight .
When you go on a thing like this , we can usually be in the field for anywhere from two to four months , with a team as small as 20 or 30 , to as big as 150 .
And a lot of people ask me , you know , what kind of people do you get for a project like this ?
While our selection process is not as rigorous as NASA , it 's nonetheless thorough .
We 're looking for competence , discipline , endurance , and strength .
In case you 're wondering , this is our strength test .
But we also value esprit de corps and the ability to diplomatically resolve inter-personal conflict while under great stress in remote locations .
We have already gone far beyond the limits of human endurance .
From the entrance , this is nothing like a commercial cave .
You 're looking at Camp Two in a place called J2 , not K2 , but J2 .
We 're roughly two days from the entrance at that point .
And it 's kind of like a high altitude mountaineering trip in reverse , except that you 're now running a string of these things down .
The idea is to try to provide some measure of physical comfort while you 're down there , otherwise in damp , moist , cold conditions in utterly dark places .
I should mention that everything you 're seeing here , by the way , is artificially illuminated at great effort .
Otherwise it is completely dark in these places .
The deeper you go , the more you run into a conflict with water .
It 's basically like a tree collecting water coming down .
And eventually you get to places where it is formidable and dangerous and unfortunately slides just don 't do justice .
So I 've got a very brief clip here that was taken in the late 1980s .
So descend into Huautla Plateau in Mexico .
Now I have to tell you that the techniques being shown here are obsolete and dangerous .
We would not do this today unless we were doing it for film .
Along that same line , I have to tell you that with the spate of Hollywood movies that came out last year , we have never seen monsters underground -- at least the kind that eat you .
If there is a monster underground , it is the crushing psychological remoteness that begins to hit every member of the team once you cross about three days inbound from the nearest entrance .
Next year I 'll be leading an international team to J2 .
We 're going to be shooting from minus 2,600 meters -- that 's a little over 8,600 feet down -- at 30 kilometers from the entrance .
The lead crews will be underground for pushing 30 days straight .
I don 't think there 's been a mission like that in a long time .
Eventually , if you keep going down in these things , probability says that you 're going to run into a place like this .
It 's a place where there 's a fold in the geologic stratum that collects water and fills to the roof .
And when you used to find these things , they would put a label on a map that said terminal siphon .
Now I remember that term really well for two reasons .
Number one , it 's the name of my rock band , and second , is because the confrontation of these things forced me to become an inventor .
And we 've since gone on to develop many generations of gadgets for exploring places like this .
This is some life-support equipment closed-cycle .
And you can use that now to go for many kilometers horizontally underwater and to depths of 200 meters straight down underwater .
When you do this kind of stuff it 's like doing EVA .
It 's like doing extra-vehicular activity in space , but at much greater distances , and at much greater physical peril .
So it makes you think about how to design your equipment for long range , away from a safe haven .
Here 's a clip from a National Geographic movie that came out in 1999 .
Exploration is a physical process of putting your foot in places where humans have never stepped before .
This is where the last little nugget of totally unknown territory remains on this planet .
To experience it is a privilege .
Bill Stone : That was taken in Wakulla Springs , Florida .
Couple of things to note about that movie . Every piece of equipment that you saw in there did not exist before 1999 .
It was developed within a two-year period and used on actual exploratory projects .
This gadget you see right here was called the digital wall mapper , and it produced the first three-dimensional map anybody has ever done of a cave , and it happened to be underwater in Wakulla Springs .
It was that gadget that serendipitously opened a door to another unexplored world .
This is Europa .
Carolyn Porco mentioned another one called Enceladus the other day .
This is one of the places where planetary scientists believe there is a highest probability of the detection of the first life off earth in the ocean that exists below there .
For those who have never seen this story , Jim Cameron produced a really wonderful IMAX movie couple of years ago , called " Aliens of the Deep . "
There was a brief clip -- A mission to explore under the ice of Europa would be the ultimate robotic challenge .
Europa is so far away that even at the speed of light , it would take more than an hour for the command just to reach the vehicle .
It has to be smart enough to avoid terrain hazards and to find a good landing site on the ice .
Now we have to get through the ice .
You need a melt probe .
It 's basically a nuclear-heated torpedo .
The ice could be anywhere from three to 16 miles deep .
Week after week , the melt probe will sink of its own weight through the ancient ice , until finally -- Now , what are you going to do when you reach the surface of that ocean ?
You need an AUV , an autonomous underwater vehicle .
It needs to be one smart puppy , able to navigate and make decisions on its own in an alien ocean .
What Jim didn 't know when he released that movie was that six months earlier NASA had funded a team I assembled to develop a prototype for the Europa AUV .
I mean , I cut through three years of engineering meetings , design and system integration , and introduced DEPTHX -- Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer .
And as the movie says , this is one smart puppy .
It 's got 96 sensors , 36 onboard computers , 100,000 lines of behavioral autonomy code , packs more than 10 kilos of TNT in electrical onboard equivalent .
This is the target site , the world 's deepest hydrothermal spring at Cenote Zacaton in northern Mexico .
It 's been explored to a depth of 292 meters and beyond that nobody knows anything .
This is part of DEPTHX 's mission .
There are two primary targets we 're doing here .
One is , how do you do science autonomy underground ?
How do you take a robot and turn it into a field microbiologist ?
There are more stages involved here than I 've got time to tell you about , but basically we drive through the space , we populate it with environmental variables -- sulphide , halide , things like that .
We calculate gradient surfaces , and drive the bot over to a wall where there 's a high probability of life .
We move along the wall , in what 's called proximity operations , looking for changes in color .
If we see something that looks interesting , we pull it into a microscope .
If it passes the microscopic test , we go for a collection .
We either draw in a liquid sample , or we can actually take a solid core from the wall .
No hands at the wheel .
This is all behavioral autonomy here that 's being conducted by the robot on its own .
The real hat trick for this vehicle , though , is a disruptive new navigation system we 've developed , known as 3D SLAM , for simultaneous localization and mapping .
DEPTHX is an all-seeing eyeball .
Its sensor beams look both forward and backward at the same time , allowing it to do new exploration while it 's still achieving geometric sensor-lock on what it 's gone through already .
What I 'm going to show you next is the first fully autonomous robotic exploration underground that 's ever been done .
This May , we 're going to go from minus 1,000 meters in Zacaton , and if we 're very lucky , DEPTHX will bring back the first robotically-discovered division of bacteria .
The next step after that is to test it in Antartica and then , if the funding continues and NASA has the resolution to go , we could potentially launch by 2016 , and by 2019 we may have the first evidence of life off this planet .
What then of manned space exploration ?
The government recently announced plans to return to the moon by 2024 .
The successful conclusion of that mission will result in infrequent visitation of the moon by a small number of government scientists and pilots .
It will leave us no further along in the general expansion of humanity into space than we were 50 years ago .
Something fundamental has to change if we are to see common access to space in our lifetime .
What I 'm going to show you next are a couple of controversial ideas .
And I hope you 'll bear with me and have some faith that there 's credibility behind what we 're going to say here .
There are three underpinnings of working in space privately .
One of them is the requirement for economical earth-to-space transport .
The Bert Rutans and Richard Bransons of this world have got this in their sights and I salute them .
Go , go , go .
The next thing we need are places to stay on orbit .
Orbital hotels to start with , but workshops for the rest of us later on .
The final missing piece , the real paradigm-buster , is this : a gas station on orbit .
It 's not going to look like that .
If it existed , it would change all future spacecraft design and space mission planning .
Now , to give you a chance to understand why there is power in that statement , I 've got to give you the basics of Space 101 .
And the first thing is everything you do in space you pay by the kilogram .
Anybody drink one of these here this week ?
You 'd pay 10,000 dollars for that in orbit .
That 's more than you pay for TED , if Google dropped their sponsorship .
The second is more than 90 percent of the weight of a vehicle is in propellant .
Thus , every time you 'd want to do anything in space , you are literally blowing away enormous sums of money every time you hit the accelerator .
Not even the guys at Tesla can fight that physics .
So , what if you could get your gas at a 10th the price ?
There is a place where you can .
In fact , you can get it better -- you can get it at 14 times lower if you can find propellant on the moon .
There is a little-known mission that was launched by the Pentagon , 13 years ago now , called Clementine .
And the most amazing thing that came out of that mission was a strong hydrogen signature at Shackleton crater on the south pole of the moon .
That signal was so strong , it could only have been produced by 10 trillion tons of water buried in the sediment , collected over millions and billions of years by the impact of asteroids and comet material .
If we 're going to get that , and make that gas station possible , we have to figure out ways to move large volumes of payload through space .
We can 't do that right now .
The way you normally build a system right now is you have a tube stack that has to be launched from the ground , and resist all kinds of aerodynamic forces .
We have to beat that .
We can do it because in space there are no aerodynamics .
We can go and use inflatable systems for almost everything .
This is an idea that , again , came out of Livermore back in 1989 , with Dr. Lowell Wood 's group .
And we can extend that now to just about everything .
Bob Bigelow currently has a test article in the orbit .
We can go much further .
We can build space tugs , orbiting platforms for holding cryogens and water .
There 's another thing .
When you 're coming back from the moon , you have to deal with orbital mechanics .
It says you 're moving 10,000 feet per second faster than you really want to be to get back to your gas station .
You got two choices .
You can burn rocket fuel to get there , or you can do something really incredible .
You can dive into the stratosphere , and precisely dissipate that velocity , and come back out to the space station .
It has never been done .
It 's risky and it 's going to be one hell of a ride -- better than Disney .
The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency .
If you try to do that for the moon , you 're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there .
But if you send a mining team there , without the return propellant , first -- Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez ?
This is not like that . I 'm much more like Scotty .
I like this equipment , you know , and I really value it so we 're not going to burn the gear .
But , if you were truly bold you could get it there , manufacture it , and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done .
There 's a myth that you can 't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and 20 years .
That 's not true .
In seven years , we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit .
We 're living in one of the most exciting times in history .
We 're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space .
The orbital refueling stations I 've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to the general exploration .
To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed .
We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Lewis and Clark expedition to Shackleton crater , to mine the moon for resources , and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit .
Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing .
I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED .
I intend to lead that expedition .
It can be done in seven years with the right backing .
Those who join me in making it happen will become a part of history and join other bold individuals from time past who , had they been here today , would have heartily approved .
There was once a time when people did bold things to open the frontier .
We have collectively forgotten that lesson .
Now we 're at a time when boldness is required to move forward .
100 years after Sir Ernest Shackleton wrote these words , I intend to plant an industrial flag on the moon and complete the final piece that will open the space frontier , in our time , for all of us .
Thank you .
Allison Hunt : How to get hip
When Allison Hunt found out that she needed a new hip -- and that Canada 's national health care system would require her to spend nearly 2 years on a waiting list -- she took matters into her own hands .
Allison Hunt : My three minutes hasn 't started yet , has it ?
No , you can 't start the three minutes .
Reset the three minutes , that 's just not fair .
AH : Oh my God , it 's harsh up here .
I mean I 'm nervous enough as it is .
But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago .
Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery .
Do you know that surgery ?
Electric saw , power drill , totally disgusting unless you 're David Bolinsky , in which case it 's all truth and beauty .
Sure David , if it 's not your hip , it 's truth and beauty .
Anyway , I did have a really big epiphany around the situation , so Chris invited me to tell you about it .
But first you need to know two things about me .
Just two things .
I 'm Canadian , and I 'm the youngest of seven kids .
Now , in Canada , we have that great healthcare system .
That means we get our new hips for free .
And being the youngest of seven , I have never been at the front of the line for anything . OK ?
So my hip had been hurting me for years .
I finally went to the doctor , which was free .
And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon , also free .
Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting -- almost a year .
That is what free gets you .
I met the surgeon , and he took some free X-rays , and I got a good look at them . And you know , even I could tell my hip was bad , and I actually work in marketing .
So he said , " Allison , we 've got to get you on the table .
I 'm going to replace your hip -- it 's about an 18-month wait . "
18 more months .
I 'd already waited 10 months , and I had to wait 18 more months .
You know , it 's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs .
I wouldn 't have my new hip for this TED .
I wouldn 't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa .
I would not have my new hip for TED2008 .
I would still be on my bad hip . That was so disappointing .
So , I left his office and I was walking through the hospital , and that 's when I had my epiphany .
This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line .
Oh yeah .
Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is ?
We do not think that way .
We don 't talk about it . It 's not even a consideration .
In fact , when we 're traveling abroad , it 's how we identify fellow Canadians .
" After you . " " Oh , no , no . After you . "
Hey , are you from Canada ? " Oh , me too ! Hi ! "
" Great ! Excellent ! "
So no , suddenly I wasn 't averse to butting any geezer off the list .
Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing , or gardening .
No , no . Front of the line .
So by now I was walking the lobby , and of course , that hurt , because of my hip , and I kind of needed a sign .
And I saw a sign .
In the window of the hospital 's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said , " Volunteers Needed . " Hmm .
Well , they signed me up immediately .
No reference checks . None of the usual background stuff , no .
They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75 .
Yeah . They needed some young blood .
So , next thing you know , I had my bright blue volunteer vest , I had my photo ID , and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss .
I worked alone .
Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop .
While ringing in hospital staff 's Tic Tacs , I 'd casually ask , " What do you do ? "
Then I 'd tell them , " Well , I 'm getting my hip replaced -- in 18 months .
It 's gonna be so great when the pain stops . Ow ! "
All the staff got to know the plucky , young volunteer .
My next surgeon 's appointment was , coincidentally , right after a shift at the gift shop .
So , naturally , I had my vest and my identification .
I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor 's office .
And you know , when he walked in , I could just tell that he saw them .
Moments later , I had a surgery date just weeks away , and a big fat prescription for Percocet .
Now , word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line .
And , you know , I 'm not even ashamed of that .
Two reasons .
First of all , I am going to take such good care of this new hip .
But also I intend to stick with the volunteering , which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all .
Even when a Canadian cheats the system , they do it in a way that benefits society .
Derek Sivers : Weird , or just different ?
" There 's a flip side to everything , " the saying goes , and in 2 minutes , Derek Sivers shows this is true in a few ways you might not expect .
So , imagine you 're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says , " Excuse me , what is the name of this block ? "
And you say , " I 'm sorry , well , this is Oak Street , that 's Elm Street .
This is 26th , that 's 27th . "
He says , " OK , but what is the name of that block ? "
You say , " Well , blocks don 't have names .
Streets have names ; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets . "
He leaves , a little confused and disappointed .
So , now imagine you 're standing on a street , anywhere in Japan , you turn to a person next to you and say , " Excuse me , what is the name of this street ? "
They say , " Oh , well that 's Block 17 and this is Block 16 . "
And you say , " OK , but what is the name of this street ? "
And they say , " Well , streets don 't have names .
Blocks have names .
Just look at Google Maps here . There 's Block 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 .
All of these blocks have names , and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks .
And you say then , " OK , then how do you know your home address ? "
He said , " Well , easy , this is District Eight .
There 's Block 17 , house number one . "
You say , " OK , but walking around the neighborhood , I noticed that the house numbers don 't go in order . "
He says , " Of course they do . They go in the order in which they were built .
The first house ever built on a block is house number one .
The second house ever built is house number two .
Third is house number three . It 's easy . It 's obvious . "
So , I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn 't even know we had , and realize that the opposite of them may also be true .
So , for example , there are doctors in China who believe that it 's their job to keep you healthy .
So , any month you are healthy you pay them , and when you 're sick you don 't have to pay them because they failed at their job . They get rich when you 're healthy , not sick .
In most music , we think of the " one " as the downbeat , the beginning of the musical phrase : one , two , three , four .
But in West African music , the " one " is thought of as the end of the phrase , like the period at the end of a sentence .
So , you can hear it not just in the phrasing , but the way they count off their music : two , three , four , one .
And this map is also accurate .
There 's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India , the opposite is also true .
So , let 's never forget , whether at TED , or anywhere else , that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear , that the opposite may also be true .
Domo arigato gozaimashita .
Nina Tandon : Caring for engineered tissue
Tissue engineer and TED Fellow Nina Tandon is growing artificial hearts and bones . To do that , she needs new ways of caring for artificially grown cells -- techniques she 's developed by the simple but powerful method of copying their natural environments .
Good morning everybody .
I work with really amazing , little , itty-bitty creatures called cells .
And let me tell you what it 's like to grow these cells in the lab .
I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment .
We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes .
And we feed them -- sterilely of course -- with what we call cell culture media -- which is like their food -- and we grow them in incubators .
Why do I do this ?
We observe the cells in a plate , and they 're just on the surface .
But what we 're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them .
What does that even mean ?
Well it means growing an actual heart , let 's say , or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body .
Not only that , but they can also be used for disease models .
And for this purpose , traditional cell culture techniques just really aren 't enough .
The cells are kind of homesick ; the dish doesn 't feel like their home .
And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive .
We call this the biomimetic paradigm -- copying nature in the lab .
Let 's take the example of the heart , What makes the heart unique ?
Well , the heart beats , rhythmically , tirelessly , faithfully .
We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes .
These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab .
What else do we know about the heart ?
Well , heart cells are pretty greedy .
Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very , very dense blood supply .
In the lab , we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells , and this allows us to flow the cell culture media , the cells ' food , through the scaffolds where we 're growing the cells -- a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart .
So this brings me to lesson number one : life can do a lot with very little .
Let 's take the example of electrical stimulation .
Let 's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be .
On the left , we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab .
It 's about the size of a mini marshmallow .
And after one week , it 's beating .
You can see it in the upper left-hand corner .
But don 't worry if you can 't see it so well .
It 's amazing that these cells beat at all .
But what 's really amazing is that the cells , when we electrically stimulate them , like with a pacemaker , that they beat so much more .
But that brings me to lesson number two : cells do all the work .
In a sense , tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here , because structural engineers build bridges and big things , computer engineers , computers , but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves .
What does this mean for us ?
Let 's do something really simple .
Let 's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept .
Let 's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way .
" We are what we eat , " could easily be described as , " We are what our cells eat . "
And in the case of the flora in our gut , these cells may not even be human .
But it 's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life .
Behind every sound , sight , touch , taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us .
It begs the question : shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies ?
I invite you to talk about this with me further , and in the meantime , I wish you luck .
May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species .
Thank you .
Matt Mills : Image recognition that triggers augmented reality
Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrate Aurasma , a new augmented reality tool that can seamlessly animate the world as seen through a smartphone . Going beyond previous augmented reality , their " auras " can do everything from making a painting talk to overlaying live news onto a printed newspaper .
So wouldn 't it be amazing if our phones could see the world in the same way that we do , as we 're walking around being able to point a phone at anything , and then have it actually recognize images and objects like the human brain , and then be able to pull in information from an almost infinite library of knowledge and experiences and ideas .
Well , traditionally that was seen as science fiction , but now we 've moved to a world where actually this has become possible .
So the best way of explaining it is to just show it .
What you can see over here is Tamara , who is holding my phone that 's now plugged in .
So let me start with this .
What we have here is a painting of the great poet Rabbie Burns , and it 's just a normal image , but if we now switch inputs over to the phone , running our technology , you can see effectively what Tamara 's seeing on the screen , and when she points at this image , something magical happens .
Voice : Now simmer blinks on flowery braes ...
Matt Mills : Now , what 's great about this is , there 's no trickery here .
There 's nothing done to this image .
And what 's great about this is the technology 's actually allowing the phone to start to see and understand much like how the human brain does .
Not only that , but as I move the object around , it 's going to track it and overlay that content seamlessly .
Again , the thing that 's incredible about this is this is how advanced these devices have become .
All the processing to do that was actually done on the device itself .
Now , this has applications everywhere , whether in things like art in museums , like you just saw , or in the world of , say , advertising , or print journalism .
So a newspaper becomes out of date as soon as it 's printed .
And here is this morning 's newspaper , and we have some Wimbledon news , which is great .
Now what we can do is point at the front of the newspaper and immediately get the bulletin .
Voice : ... To the grass , and it 's very important that you adapt and you , you have to be flexible , you have to be willing to change direction at a split second , and she does all that . She 's won this title .
MM : And that linking of the digital content to something that 's physical is what we call an aura , and I 'll be using that term a little bit as we go through the talk .
So , what 's great about this is it isn 't just a faster , more convenient way to get information in the real world , but there are times when actually using this medium allows you to be able to display information in a way that was never before possible .
So what I have here is a wireless router .
My American colleagues have told me I 've got to call it a router , so that everyone here understands — — but nonetheless , here is the device .
So now what I can do is , rather than getting the instructions for the device online , I can simply point at it , the device is recognized , and then -- Voice : Begin by plugging in the grey ADSL cable .
Then connect the power . Finally , the yellow ethernet cable .
Congratulations . You have now completed setup .
MM : Awesome . Thank you .
The incredible work that made that possible was done here in the U.K. by scientists at Cambridge , and they work in our offices , and I 've got a lovely picture of them here .
They couldn 't all be on stage , but we 're going to bring their aura to the stage , so here they are .
They 're not very animated .
This was the fourth take , I 'm told .
Okay . So , as we 're talking about Cambridge , let 's now move on to technical advancements , because since we started putting this technology on mobile phones less than 12 months ago , the speed and the processing in these devices has grown at a really phenomenal rate , and that means that I can now take cinema-quality 3D models and place them in the world around me , so I have one over here .
Tamara , would you like to jump in ?
MM : I should leap in .
So then , after the fun , comes the more emotional side of what we do , because effectively , this technology allows you to see the world through someone 's eyes , and for that person to be able to take a moment in time and effectively store it and tag it to something physical that exists in the real world .
What 's great about this is , the tools to do this are free .
They 're open , they 're available to everyone within our application , and educators have really got on board with the classrooms .
So we have teachers who 've tagged up textbooks , teachers who 've tagged up school classrooms , and a great example of this is a school in the U.K.
I have a picture here from a video , and we 're now going to play it .
Teacher : See what happens . Keep going .
TV .
Oh my God .
Teacher : Now move it either side . See what happens .
Move away from it and come back to it .
Oh , that is so cool .
Teacher : And then , have you got it again ?
Oh my God ! How did you do that ?
Second child : It 's magic .
MM : So , it 's not magic .
It 's available for everyone to do , and actually I 'm going to show you how easy it is to do by doing one right now .
So , as sort of — I 'm told it 's called a stadium wave , so we 're going to start from this side of the room on the count of three , and go over to here .
Tamara , are you recording ?
Okay , so are you all ready ?
One , two , three . Go !
Audience : Whooooooo !
MM : Fellows are really good at that .
Okay . Now we 're going to switch back into the Aurasma application , and what Tamara 's going to do is tag that video that we just took onto my badge , so that I can remember it forever .
Now , we have lots of people who are doing this already , and we 've talked a little bit about the educational side .
On the emotional side , we have people who 've done things like send postcards and Christmas cards back to their family with little messages on them .
We have people who have , for example , taken the inside of the engine bay of an old car and tagged up different components within an engine , so that if you 're stuck and you want to find out more , you can point and discover the information .
We 're all very , very familiar with the Internet .
In the last 20 years , it 's really changed the way that we live and work , and the way that we see the world , and what 's great is , we sort of think this is the next paradigm shift , because now we can literally take the content that we share , we discover , and that we enjoy and make it a part of the world around us .
It 's completely free to download this application .
If you have a good Wi-Fi connection or 3G , this process is very , very quick .
Oh , there we are . We can save it now .
It 's just going to do a tiny bit of processing to convert that image that we just took into a sort of digital fingerprint , and the great thing is , if you 're a professional user , -- so , a newspaper -- the tools are pretty much identical to what we 've just used to create this demonstration .
The only difference is that you 've got the ability to add in links and slightly more content . Are you now ready ?
Tamara Roukaerts : We 're ready to go .
MM : Okay . So , I 'm told we 're ready , which means we can now point at the image , and there you all are .
MM on One , two , three . Go !
MM : Well done . We 've been Aurasma . Thank you .
Paul Gilding : The Earth is full
Have we used up all our resources ? Have we filled up all the livable space on Earth ? Paul Gilding suggests we have , and the possibility of devastating consequences , in a talk that 's equal parts terrifying and , oddly , hopeful .
Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week , four words that will come to define this century .
Here they are : The Earth is full .
It 's full of us , it 's full of our stuff , full of our waste , full of our demands .
Yes , we are a brilliant and creative species , but we 've created a little too much stuff -- so much that our economy is now bigger than its host , our planet .
This is not a philosophical statement , this is just science based in physics , chemistry and biology .
There are many science-based analyses of this , but they all draw the same conclusion -- that we 're living beyond our means .
The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network , for example , calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy .
In other words , to keep operating at our current level , we need 50 percent more Earth than we 've got .
In financial terms , this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn , going further into debt every year .
But of course , you can 't borrow natural resources , so we 're burning through our capital , or stealing from the future .
So when I say full , I mean really full -- well past any margin for error , well past any dispute about methodology .
What this means is our economy is unsustainable .
I 'm not saying it 's not nice or pleasant or that it 's bad for polar bears or forests , though it certainly is .
What I 'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable .
In other words , thanks to those pesky laws of physics , when things aren 't sustainable , they stop .
But that 's not possible , you might think .
We can 't stop economic growth .
Because that 's what will stop : economic growth .
It will stop because of the end of trade resources .
It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources , all the capacity , all the systems of the Earth , which is now having economic damage .
When we think about economic growth stopping , we go , " That 's not possible , " because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned .
Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits , it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around .
Even though it has delivered many benefits , it is based on a crazy idea -- the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet .
And I 'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes .
That the crazy idea is just that , it is crazy , and with the Earth full , it 's game over .
Come on , you 're thinking .
That 's not possible .
Technology is amazing . People are innovative .
There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things .
We can surely sort this out .
That 's all true .
Well , it 's mostly true .
We are certainly amazing , and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity .
So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth 's capacity , we could do that .
The problem is we 're just warming up this growth engine .
We plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big -- not in some distant future , but in less than 40 years , in the life time of most of you .
China plans to be there in just 20 years .
The only problem with this plan is that it 's not possible .
In response , some people argue , but we need growth , we need it to solve poverty .
We need it to develop technology .
We need it to keep social stability .
I find this argument fascinating , as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs .
It 's like the Earth doesn 't care what we need .
Mother nature doesn 't negotiate ; she just sets rules and describes consequences .
And these are not esoteric limits .
This is about food and water , soil and climate , the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives .
So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient , solar-powered , knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion .
It 's not that it 's not possible to feed , clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives .
It certainly is .
But the idea that we can gently grow there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong , and it 's dangerously wrong , because it means we 're not getting ready for what 's really going to happen .
See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down .
And that 's what will happen to us .
Many of you will be thinking , but surely we can still stop this .
If it 's that bad , we 'll react .
Let 's just think through that idea .
Now we 've had 50 years of warnings .
We 've had science proving the urgency of change .
We 've had economic analysis pointing out that , not only can we afford it , it 's cheaper to act early .
And yet , the reality is we 've done pretty much nothing to change course .
We 're not even slowing down .
Last year on climate , for example , we had the highest global emissions ever .
The story on food , on water , on soil , on climate is all much the same .
I actually don 't say this in despair .
I 've done my grieving about the loss .
I accept where we are .
It is sad , but it is what it is .
But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we 're not acting , we 're not close to acting and we 're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy .
And that 's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for .
So when does this transition begin ?
When does this breakdown begin ?
In my view , it is well underway .
I know most people don 't see it that way .
We tend to look at the world , not as the integrated system that it is , but as a series of individual issues .
We see the Occupy protests , we see spiraling debt crises , we see growing inequality , we see money 's influence on politics , we see resource constraint , food and oil prices .
But we see , mistakenly , each of these issues as individual problems to be solved .
In fact , it 's the system in the painful process of breaking down -- our system , of debt-fueled economic growth , of ineffective democracy , of overloading planet Earth , is eating itself alive .
I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this , but I won 't because , if you want to see it , that evidence is all around you .
I want to talk to you about fear .
I want to do so because , in my view , the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question .
The crisis is now inevitable .
This issue is , how will we react ?
Of course , we can 't know what will happen .
The future is inherently uncertain .
But let 's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen .
Imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts , when the financial markets recognize that , to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control , the oil and coal industries are finished .
Imagine China , India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water .
Imagine the Middle East without oil income , but with collapsing governments .
Imagine our highly-tuned , just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying .
Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty .
Now imagine what that means for you , your family , your friends , your personal financial security .
Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen .
Imagine what you 'll tell your children when they ask you , " So , in 2012 , Mom and Dad , what was it like when you 'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row , when every scientific body in the world was saying you 've got a major problem , when the oceans were acidifying , when oil and food prices were spiking , when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street ?
When the system was so clearly breaking down , Mom and Dad , what did you do , what were you thinking ? "
So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind , when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges ?
Just take a moment and take a breath and think , what do you feel at this point ?
Perhaps denial .
Perhaps anger .
Maybe fear .
Of course , we can 't know what 's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty .
But when we think about the kind of possibilities I paint , we should feel a bit of fear .
We are in danger , all of us , and we 've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response , to help us bravely face a threat .
But this time it 's not a tiger at the cave mouth .
You can 't see the danger at your door .
But if you look , you can see it at the door of your civilization .
That 's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on , because if we wait until the crisis takes hold , we may panic and hide .
If we feel it now and think it through , we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself .
Yes , things will get ugly , and it will happen soon -- certainly in our lifetime -- but we are more than capable of getting through everything that 's coming .
You see , those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem , that technology is limitless , that markets can be a force for good , are in fact right .
The only thing they 're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going .
When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things .
Think about war .
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor , it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry , and from there to rationing of food and energy .
Think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done .
Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy .
We are smart , in fact , we really are quite amazing , but we do love a good crisis .
And the good news , this one 's a monster .
Sure , if we get it wrong , we could face the end of this civilization , but if we get it right , it could be the beginning of civilization instead .
And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that ?
There 's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way .
Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades .
I wanted to know what that would take , so I worked with professor Jorgen Randers from Norway to find the answer .
We developed a plan called " The One Degree War Plan " -- so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required .
To my surprise , eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap , not very cheap , but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization .
We didn 't calculate that precisely , but we understand that 's very expensive .
You can read the details , but in summary , we can transform our economy .
We can do it with proven technology .
We can do it at an affordable cost .
We can do it with existing political structures .
The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel .
And this is where you come in .
When we think about the future I paint , of course we should feel a bit of fear .
But fear can be paralyzing or motivating .
We need to accept the fear and then we need to act .
We need to act like the future depends on it .
We need to act like we only have one planet .
We can do this .
I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth , more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do .
They 're wrong .
We can be more , we can be much more .
We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago .
We 've built a powerful foundation of science , knowledge and technology -- more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent , meaningful and satisfying lives .
The Earth can support that if we choose the right path .
We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society 's evolution -- like , what do we want to be when we grow up , when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality ?
Well it 's time to grow up , to be wiser , to be calmer , to be more considered .
Like generations before us , we 'll be growing up in war -- not a war between civilizations , but a war for civilization , for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age .
We can choose life over fear .
We can do what we need to do , but it will take every entrepreneur , every artist , every scientist , every communicator , every mother , every father , every child , every one of us .
This could be our finest hour .
Thank you .
Markus Fischer : A robot that flies like a bird
Plenty of robots can fly -- but none can fly like a real bird . That is , until Markus Fischer and his team at Festo built SmartBird , a large , lightweight robot , modeled on a seagull , that flies by flapping its wings . A soaring demo fresh from TEDGlobal 2011 .
It is a dream of mankind to fly like a bird .
Birds are very agile .
They fly , not with rotating components , so they fly only by flapping their wings .
So we looked at the birds , and we tried to make a model that is powerful , ultralight , and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings .
So what would be better [ than ] to use the Herring Gull , in its freedom , circling and swooping over the sea , and [ to ] use this as a role model ?
So we bring a team together .
There are generalists and also specialists in the field of aerodynamics in the field of building gliders .
And the task was to build an ultralight indoor-flying model that is able to fly over your heads .
So be careful later on .
And this was one issue : to build it that lightweight that no one would be hurt if it fell down .
So why do we do all this ?
We are a company in the field of automation , and we 'd like to do very lightweight structures because that 's energy efficient , and we 'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena .
So I now would like you to [ put ] your seat belts on and put your hats [ on ] .
So maybe we 'll try it once -- to fly a SmartBird .
Thank you .
So we can now look at the SmartBird .
So here is one without a skin .
We have a wingspan of about two meters .
The length is one meter and six , and the weight , it is only 450 grams .
And it is all out of carbon fiber .
In the middle we have a motor , and we also have a gear in it , and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor .
So within the motor , we have three Hall sensors , so we know exactly where the wing is .
And if we now beat up and down ...
we have the possibility to fly like a bird .
So if you go down , you have the large area of propulsion , and if you go up , the wings are not that large , and it is easier to get up .
So , the next thing we did , or the challenges we did , was to coordinate this movement .
We have to turn it , go up and go down .
We have a split wing .
With a split wing we get the lift at the upper wing , and we get the propulsion at the lower wing .
Also , we see how we measure the aerodynamic efficiency .
We had knowledge about the electromechanical efficiency and then we can calculate the aerodynamic efficiency .
So therefore , it rises up from passive torsion to active torsion , from 30 percent up to 80 percent .
Next thing we have to do , we have to control and regulate the whole structure .
Only if you control and regulate it , you will get that aerodynamic efficiency .
So the overall consumption of energy is about 25 watts at takeoff and 16 to 18 watts in flight .
Thank you .
Markus , I think that we should fly it once more .
Markus Fischer : Yeah , sure .
Geoffrey West : The surprising math of cities and corporations
Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple , mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth , crime rate , walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number : the city 's population . In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations .
Cities are the crucible of civilization .
They have been expanding , urbanization has been expanding , at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century , the planet will be completely dominated by cities .
Cities are the origins of global warming , impact on the environment , health , pollution , disease , finance , economies , energy -- they 're all problems that are confronted by having cities .
That 's where all these problems come from .
And the tsunami of problems that we feel we 're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet .
Here 's some numbers .
Two hundred years ago , the United States was less than a few percent urbanized .
It 's now more than 82 percent .
The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago .
China 's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years .
Now listen to this : Every week for the foreseeable future , until 2050 , every week more than a million people are being added to our cities .
This is going to affect everything .
Everybody in this room , if you stay alive , is going to be affected by what 's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon .
However , cities , despite having this negative aspect to them , are also the solution .
Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people , creating ideas , innovation , wealth and so on .
So we have this kind of dual nature .
And so there 's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities .
Now these are my comrades in arms .
This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people , and they 've done all the work , and I 'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together .
So here 's the problem : This is what we all want .
The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this , having things like this , doing things like this , with economies that are growing like this , not realizing that entropy produces things like this , this , this and this .
And the question is : Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050 , or is it going to be this ?
That 's the question .
I must say , many of the indicators look like this is what it 's going to look like , but let 's talk about it .
So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities .
And scientific theory means quantifiable -- relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework .
That 's the quest .
Is that conceivable ?
Are there universal laws ?
So here 's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem .
The first is : Are cities part of biology ?
Is London a great big whale ?
Is Edinburgh a horse ?
Is Microsoft a great big anthill ?
What do we learn from that ?
We use them metaphorically -- the DNA of a company , the metabolism of a city , and so on -- is that just bullshit , metaphorical bullshit , or is there serious substance to it ?
And if that is the case , how come that it 's very hard to kill a city ?
You could drop an atom bomb on a city , and 30 years later it 's surviving .
Very few cities fail .
All companies die , all companies .
And if you have a serious theory , you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust .
So is that just another version of this ?
Well we understand this very well .
That is , you ask any generic question about this -- how many trees of a given size , how many branches of a given size does a tree have , how many leaves , what is the energy flowing through each branch , what is the size of the canopy , what is its growth , what is its mortality ?
We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions .
And the idea is can we do the same for this ?
So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life , is that it is scalable , it works over an extraordinary range .
This is just a tiny range actually : It 's us mammals ; we 're one of these .
The same principles , the same dynamics , the same organization is at work in all of these , including us , and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size .
And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust -- scalability .
We 're going to discuss that in a moment more .
But you know , at a local level , you scale ; everybody in this room is scaled .
That 's called growth .
Here 's how you grew .
Rat , that 's a rat -- could have been you .
We 're all pretty much the same .
And you see , you 're very familiar with this .
You grow very quickly and then you stop .
And that line there is a prediction from the same theory , based on the same principles , that describes that forest .
And here it is for the growth of a rat , and those points on there are data points .
This is just the weight versus the age .
And you see , it stops growing .
Very , very good for biology -- also one of the reasons for its great resilience .
Very , very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm .
This is what we believe .
This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us , particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner : hockey sticks .
This is a bunch of software companies -- and what it is is their revenue versus their age -- all zooming away , and everybody making millions and billions of dollars .
Okay , so how do we understand this ?
So let 's first talk about biology .
This is explicitly showing you how things scale , and this is a truly remarkable graph .
What is plotted here is metabolic rate -- how much energy you need per day to stay alive -- versus your weight , your mass , for all of us bunch of organisms .
And it 's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10 , otherwise you couldn 't get everything on the graph .
And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line .
Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe , there 's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this .
It 's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms , each subsystem , each cell type , each gene , has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history .
And yet , despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection , they 've been constrained to lie on a line .
Something else is going on .
Before I talk about that , I 've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve , this straight line .
It 's three-quarters , roughly , which is less than one -- and we call that sublinear .
And here 's the point of that .
It says that , if it were linear , the steepest slope , then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy .
But it 's sublinear , and what that translates into is that , if you double the size of the organism , you actually only need 75 percent more energy .
So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale .
The bigger you are systematically , according to very well-defined rules , less energy per capita .
Now any physiological variable you can think of , any life history event you can think of , if you plot it this way , looks like this .
There is an extraordinary regularity .
So you tell me the size of a mammal , I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology , life history , etc .
And the reason for this is because of networks .
All of life is controlled by networks -- from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level .
And you 're very familiar with these networks .
That 's a little thing that lives inside an elephant .
And here 's the summary of what I 'm saying .
If you take those networks , this idea of networks , and you apply universal principles , mathematizable , universal principles , all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow , including the description of the forest , the description of your circulatory system , the description within cells .
One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that , systematically , the pace of life decreases as you get bigger .
Heart rates are slower ; you live longer ; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower , etc .
The question is : Is any of this true for cities and companies ?
So is London a scaled up Birmingham , which is a scaled up Brighton , etc . , etc . ?
Is New York a scaled up San Francisco , which is a scaled up Santa Fe ?
Don 't know . We will discuss that .
But they are networks , and the most important network of cities is you .
Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions , our interactions , and the clustering and grouping of individuals .
Here 's just a symbolic picture of that .
And here 's scaling of cities .
This shows that in this very simple example , which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size -- plotted in the same way as the biology -- you see exactly the same kind of thing .
There is a scaling .
That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size .
The slope of that is less than linear .
There is an economy of scale .
Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are -- not surprising .
But here 's what 's surprising .
It scales in the same way everywhere .
This is just European countries , but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia , always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree .
And any infrastructure you look at -- whether it 's the length of roads , length of electrical lines -- anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way .
It 's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on .
But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities , quantities that have no analog in biology , that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago .
The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way .
And the bottom one is you lot -- super-creatives plotted in the same way .
And what you see is a scaling phenomenon .
But most important in this , the exponent , the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate , is bigger than one -- it 's about 1.15 to 1.2 .
Here it is , which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita , unlike biology -- higher wages , more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger , more patents per capita , more crime per capita .
And we 've looked at everything : more AIDS cases , flu , etc .
And here , they 're all plotted together .
Just to show you what we plotted , here is income , GDP -- GDP of the city -- crime and patents all on one graph .
And you can see , they all follow the same line .
And here 's the statement .
If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000 , from a million to two million , 10 to 20 million , it doesn 't matter , then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages , wealth , number of AIDS cases , number of police , anything you can think of .
It goes up by 15 percent , and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure .
This , no doubt , is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities .
Because they think that all those wonderful things -- like creative people , wealth , income -- is what attracts them , forgetting about the ugly and the bad .
What is the reason for this ?
Well I don 't have time to tell you about all the mathematics , but underlying this is the social networks , because this is a universal phenomenon .
This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet -- Japan , Chile , Portugal , Scotland , doesn 't matter .
Always , all the data shows it 's the same , despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently .
Something universal is going on .
The universality , to repeat , is us -- that we are the city .
And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions .
So there it is , I 've said it again .
So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure , unlike biology , which had sublinear scaling , economies of scale , you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger .
If it 's social networks with super-linear scaling -- more per capita -- then the theory says that you increase the pace of life .
The bigger you are , life gets faster .
On the left is the heart rate showing biology .
On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities , showing that increase .
Lastly , I want to talk about growth .
This is what we had in biology , just to repeat .
Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior .
You grow fast and then stop -- part of our resilience .
That would be bad for economies and cities .
And indeed , one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation , then indeed you get , from the same theory , a beautiful rising exponential curve -- lovely .
And in fact , if you compare it to data , it fits very well with the development of cities and economies .
But it has a terrible catch , and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse .
And it 's destined to collapse for many reasons -- kind of Malthusian reasons -- that you run out of resources .
And how do you avoid that ? Well we 've done it before .
What we do is , as we grow and we approach the collapse , a major innovation takes place and we start over again , and we start over again as we approach the next one , and so on .
So there 's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse .
The catch , however , to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster .
So the image is that we 're not only on a treadmill that 's going faster , but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster .
We have to accelerate on a continuous basis .
And the question is : Can we , as socio-economic beings , avoid a heart attack ?
So lastly , I 'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies .
See companies , they scale .
The top one , in fact , is Walmart on the right .
It 's the same plot .
This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees .
We could use sales , anything you like .
There it is : after some little fluctuations at the beginning , when companies are innovating , they scale beautifully .
And we 've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States , may I say .
And I 'm only showing you a little bit of this .
What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology , indicating that they 're dominated , not by super-linear innovation and ideas ; they become dominated by economies of scale .
In that interpretation , by bureaucracy and administration , and they do it beautifully , may I say .
So if you tell me the size of some company , some small company , I could have predicted the size of Walmart .
If it has this sublinear scaling , the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth .
There 's Walmart . Doesn 't look very sigmoidal .
That 's what we like , hockey sticks .
But you notice , I 've cheated , because I 've only gone up to ' 94 .
Let 's go up to 2008 .
That red line is from the theory .
So if I 'd have done this in 1994 , I could have predicted what Walmart would be now .
And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies .
There they are . That 's 23,000 companies .
They all start looking like hockey sticks , they all bend over , and they all die like you and me .
Thank you .
David Bismark : E-voting without fraud
David Bismark demos a new system for voting that contains a simple , verifiable way to prevent fraud and miscounting -- while keeping each person 's vote secret .
So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does .
We stand in elections ; we vote in elections ; we observe elections .
Our democracies rely on elections .
We all understand why we have elections , and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote .
We cherish the opportunity to have our say , to help decide the future of the country .
The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us , to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all .
Without that mandate , they would be corrupt .
Well unfortunately , power corrupts , and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power , including doing bad things to elections .
You see , even if the idea of the election is perfect , running a countrywide election is a big project , and big projects are messy .
Whenever there is an election , it seems like something always goes wrong , someone tries to cheat , or something goes accidentally awry -- a ballot box goes missing here , chads are left hanging over here .
To make sure as few things as possible go wrong , we have all these procedures around the election .
So for example , you come to the polling station , and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote .
When you come back out , you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes , so that no one knows how you voted .
Well , what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that , after you drop your vote into the ballot box .
And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted , because they trust that the election system works .
They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly .
The ballot boxes go to counting places .
They 're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted .
Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote , and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election .
So we have to trust a lot of people .
We have to trust a lot of procedures .
And sometimes we even have to trust computers .
So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes , all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines , and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better .
Well in the face of all these bad headlines , researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently .
They 've zoomed out and looked at the big picture .
And the big picture is this : elections should be verifiable .
Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly , without breaking election secrecy , which is so very important .
And that 's the tough part .
How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret ?
Well , the way we 've come up with uses computers but doesn 't depend on them .
And the secret is the ballot form .
And if you look closely at these ballot forms , you 'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one .
And that means , if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list , I won 't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for .
And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right .
And there 's some complicated cryptography going on in there , but what 's not complicated is voting with one of these forms .
So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us , and then we 'll use the paper for verification .
So this is how you vote .
You get one of these ballot forms at random , and then you go into the voting booth , and you mark your choices , and you tear along a perforation .
And you shred the candidate list .
And the bit that remains , the one with your marks -- this is your encrypted vote .
So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote .
And because it 's encrypted , it can be submitted , stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see , including you .
So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt .
And after the close of the election , you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website .
And remember , the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth , so if an election official wants to find out how you voted , they will not be able to .
If the government wants to find out how you voted , they won 't be able to .
No hacker can break in and find out how you voted .
No hacker can break in and change your vote , because then it won 't match your receipt .
Votes can 't go missing because then you won 't find yours when you look for it .
But the election magic doesn 't stop there .
Instead , we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves .
They can check that all the votes were counted correctly .
They can check that the announced result of the election is the correct one .
And these are elections by the people , for the people .
So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections .
Thank you .
Grégoire Courtine : The paralyzed rat that walked
A spinal cord injury can sever the communication between your brain and your body , leading to paralysis . Fresh from his lab , Grégoire Courtine shows a new method -- combining drugs , electrical stimulation and a robot -- that could re-awaken the neural pathways and help the body learn again to move on its own . See how it works , as a paralyzed rat becomes able to run and navigate stairs .
I am a neuroscientist with a mixed background in physics and medicine .
My lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focuses on spinal cord injury , which affects more than 50,000 people around the world every year , with dramatic consequences for affected individuals , whose life literally shatters in a matter of a handful of seconds .
And for me , the Man of Steel , Christopher Reeve , has best raised the awareness on the distress of spinal cord injured people .
And this is how I started my own personal journey in this field of research , working with the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation .
I still remember this decisive moment .
It was just at the end of a regular day of work with the foundation .
Chris addressed us , the scientists and experts , " You have to be more pragmatic .
When leaving your laboratory tomorrow , I want you to stop by the rehabilitation center to watch injured people fighting to take a step , struggling to maintain their trunk .
And when you go home , think of what you are going to change in your research on the following day to make their lives better . "
These words , they stuck with me .
This was more than 10 years ago , but ever since , my laboratory has followed the pragmatic approach to recovery after spinal cord injury .
And my first step in this direction was to develop a new model of spinal cord injury that would more closely mimic some of the key features of human injury while offering well-controlled experimental conditions .
And for this purpose , we placed two hemisections on opposite sides of the body .
They completely interrupt the communication between the brain and the spinal cord , thus leading to complete and permanent paralysis of the leg .
But , as observed , after most injuries in humans , there is this intervening gap of intact neural tissue through which recovery can occur .
But how to make it happen ?
Well , the classical approach consists of applying intervention that would promote the growth of the severed fiber to the original target .
And while this certainly remained the key for a cure , this seemed extraordinarily complicated to me .
To reach clinical fruition rapidly , it was obvious : I had to think about the problem differently .
It turned out that more than 100 years of research on spinal cord physiology , starting with the Nobel Prize Sherrington , had shown that the spinal cord , below most injuries , contained all the necessary and sufficient neural networks to coordinate locomotion , but because input from the brain is interrupted , they are in a nonfunctional state , like kind of dormant .
My idea : We awaken this network .
And at the time , I was a post-doctoral fellow in Los Angeles , after completing my Ph.D. in France , where independent thinking is not necessarily promoted .
I was afraid to talk to my new boss , but decided to muster up my courage .
I knocked at the door of my wonderful advisor , Reggie Edgerton , to share my new idea .
He listened to me carefully , and responded with a grin .
" Why don 't you try ? "
And I promise to you , this was such an important moment in my career , when I realized that the great leader believed in young people and new ideas .
And this was the idea : I 'm going to use a simplistic metaphor to explain to you this complicated concept .
Imagine that the locomotor system is a car .
The engine is the spinal cord .
The transmission is interrupted . The engine is turned off .
How could we re-engage the engine ?
First , we have to provide the fuel ; second , press the accelerator pedal ; third , steer the car .
It turned out that there are known neural pathways coming from the brain that play this very function during locomotion .
My idea : Replace this missing input to provide the spinal cord with the kind of intervention that the brain would deliver naturally in order to walk .
For this , I leveraged 20 years of past research in neuroscience , first to replace the missing fuel with pharmacological agents that prepare the neurons in the spinal cord to fire , and second , to mimic the accelerator pedal with electrical stimulation .
So here imagine an electrode implanted on the back of the spinal cord to deliver painless stimulation .
It took many years , but eventually we developed an electrochemical neuroprosthesis that transformed the neural network in the spinal cord from dormant to a highly functional state .
Immediately , the paralyzed rat can stand .
As soon as the treadmill belt starts moving , the animal shows coordinated movement of the leg , but without the brain .
Here what I call " the spinal brain " cognitively processes sensory information arising from the moving leg and makes decisions as to how to activate the muscle in order to stand , to walk , to run , and even here , while sprinting , instantly stand if the treadmill stops moving .
This was amazing .
I was completely fascinated by this locomotion without the brain , but at the same time so frustrated .
This locomotion was completely involuntary .
The animal had virtually no control over the legs .
Clearly , the steering system was missing .
And it then became obvious from me that we had to move away from the classical rehabilitation paradigm , stepping on a treadmill , and develop conditions that would encourage the brain to begin voluntary control over the leg .
With this in mind , we developed a completely new robotic system to support the rat in any direction of space .
Imagine , this is really cool .
So imagine the little 200-gram rat attached at the extremity of this 200-kilo robot , but the rat does not feel the robot .
The robot is transparent , just like you would hold a young child during the first insecure steps .
Let me summarize : The rat received a paralyzing lesion of the spinal cord .
The electrochemical neuroprosthesis enabled a highly functional state of the spinal locomotor networks .
The robot provided the safe environment to allow the rat to attempt anything to engage the paralyzed legs .
And for motivation , we used what I think is the most powerful pharmacology of Switzerland : fine Swiss chocolate .
Actually , the first results were very , very , very disappointing .
Here is my best physical therapist completely failing to encourage the rat to take a single step , whereas the same rat , five minutes earlier , walked beautifully on the treadmill .
We were so frustrated .
But you know , one of the most essential qualities of a scientist is perseverance .
We insisted . We refined our paradigm , and after several months of training , the otherwise paralyzed rat could stand , and whenever she decided , initiated full weight-bearing locomotion to sprint towards the rewards .
This is the first recovery ever observed of voluntary leg movement after an experimental lesion of the spinal cord leading to complete and permanent paralysis .
In fact -- Thank you .
In fact , not only could the rat initiate and sustain locomotion on the ground , they could even adjust leg movement , for example , to resist gravity in order to climb a staircase .
I can promise you this was such an emotional moment in my laboratory .
It took us 10 years of hard work to reach this goal .
But the remaining question was , how ?
I mean , how is it possible ?
And here , what we found was completely unexpected .
This novel training paradigm encouraged the brain to create new connections , some relay circuits that relay information from the brain past the injury and restore cortical control over the locomotor networks below the injury .
And here , you can see one such example , where we label the fibers coming from the brain in red .
This blue neuron is connected with the locomotor center , and what this constellation of synaptic contacts means is that the brain is reconnected with the locomotor center with only one relay neuron .
But the remodeling was not restricted to the lesion area .
It occurred throughout the central nervous system , including in the brain stem , where we observed up to 300-percent increase in the density of fibers coming from the brain .
We did not aim to repair the spinal cord , yet we were able to promote one of the more extensive remodeling of axonal projections ever observed in the central nervous system of adult mammal after an injury .
And there is a very important message hidden behind this discovery .
They are the result of a young team of very talented people : physical therapists , neurobiologists , neurosurgeons , engineers of all kinds , who have achieved together what would have been impossible by single individuals .
This is truly a trans-disciplinary team .
They are working so close to each other that there is horizontal transfer of DNA .
We are creating the next generation of M.D. ' s and engineers capable of translating discoveries all the way from bench to bedside .
And me ?
I am only the maestro who orchestrated this beautiful symphony .
Now , I am sure you are all wondering , aren 't you , will this help injured people ?
Me too , every day .
The truth is that we don 't know enough yet .
This is certainly not a cure for spinal cord injury , but I begin to believe that this may lead to an intervention to improve recovery and people 's quality of life .
I would like you all to take a moment and dream with me .
Imagine a person just suffered a spinal cord injury .
After a few weeks of recovery , we will implant a programmable pump to deliver a personalized pharmacological cocktail directly to the spinal cord .
At the same time , we will implant an electrode array , a sort of second skin covering the area of the spinal cord controlling leg movement , and this array is attached to an electrical pulse generator that delivers stimulations that are tailored to the person 's needs .
This defines a personalized electrochemical neuroprosthesis that will enable locomotion during training with a newly designed supporting system .
And my hope is that after several months of training , there may be enough remodeling of residual connection to allow locomotion without the robot , maybe even without pharmacology or stimulation .
My hope here is to be able to create the personalized condition to boost the plasticity of the brain and the spinal cord .
And this is a radically new concept that may apply to other neurological disorders , what I termed " personalized neuroprosthetics , " where by sensing and stimulating neural interfaces , I implanted throughout the nervous system , in the brain , in the spinal cord , even in peripheral nerves , based on patient-specific impairments .
But not to replace the lost function , no -- to help the brain help itself .
And I hope this enticed your imagination , because I can promise to you this is not a matter of whether this revolution will occur , but when .
And remember , we are only as great as our imagination , as big as our dream .
Thank you .
Alain de Botton : A kinder , gentler philosophy of success
Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments . Is success always earned ? Is failure ? He makes an eloquent , witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work .
For me they normally happen , these career crises , often , actually , on a Sunday evening , just as the sun is starting to set , and the gap between my hopes for myself , and the reality of my life , start to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow .
I 'm mentioning all this , I 'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem .
You may think I 'm wrong in this , but I think that we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises , by moments when what we thought we knew , about our lives , about our careers , comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality .
It 's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living .
It 's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm , to be free of career anxiety .
I want to look now , if I may , at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers .
Why we might be victims of these career crises , as we 're weeping softly into our pillows .
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs .
In a way , I 've got some bad news , particularly to anybody who 's come to Oxford from abroad .
There is a real problem with snobbery .
Because sometimes people from outside the U.K.
imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon fixated on country houses and titles .
The bad news is that 's not true .
Snobbery is a global phenomenon .
We are a global organization . This is a global phenomenon .
It exists . What is a snob ?
A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are .
That is snobbery .
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery .
You encounter it within minutes at a party , when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century , " What do you do ? "
And according to how you answer that question , people are either incredibly delighted to see you , or look at their watch and make their excuses .
Now , the opposite of a snob is your mother .
Not necessarily your mother , or indeed mine , but , as it were , the ideal mother , somebody who doesn 't care about your achievements .
But unfortunately , most people are not our mothers .
Most people make a strict correlation between how much time , and if you like , love -- not romantic love , though that may be something -- but love in general , respect , they are willing to accord us , that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy .
And that 's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods .
You know , we 're often told that we live in very materialistic times , that we 're all greedy people .
I don 't think we are particularly materialistic .
I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods .
It 's not the material goods we want . It 's the rewards we want .
And that 's a new way of looking at luxury goods .
The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari don 't think , " This is somebody who is greedy . "
Think , " This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love . "
In other words -- feel sympathy , rather than contempt .
There are other reasons -- there are other reasons why it 's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before .
One of these , and it 's paradoxical because it 's linked to something that 's rather nice , is the hope we all have for our careers .
Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan .
We 're told , from many sources , that anyone can achieve anything .
We 've done away with the caste system .
We are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please .
And it 's a beautiful idea .
Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality . We 're all basically equal .
There are no strictly defined kind of hierarchies .
There is one really big problem with this , and that problem is envy .
Envy , it 's a real taboo to mention envy , but if there is one dominant emotion in modern society , that is envy .
And it 's linked to the spirit of equality . Let me explain .
I think it would be very unusual for anyone here , or anyone watching , to be envious of the Queen of England .
Even though she is much richer than any of you are .
And she 's got a very large house .
The reason why we don 't envy her is because she 's too weird .
She 's simply too strange .
We can 't relate to her . She speaks in a funny way .
She comes from an odd place .
So we can 't relate to her . And when you can 't relate to somebody , you don 't envy them .
The closer two people are , in age , in background , in the process of identification , the more there is a danger of envy -- which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion -- because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with .
But the problem , generally , of modern society , is that it turns the whole world into a school . Everybody is wearing jeans , everybody is the same .
And yet , they 're not .
So there is a spirit of equality , combined with deep inequalities .
Which makes for a very -- can make for a very stressful situation .
It 's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates , as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy .
But the point is , it doesn 't feel that way .
It 's made to feel , by magazines and other media outlets , that if you 've got energy , a few bright ideas about technology , a garage , you too could start a major thing .
And the consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops .
When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections , as I sometimes do , if you analyze self-help books that are produced in the world today , there are basically two kinds .
The first kind tells you , " You can do it ! You can make it ! Anything is possible ! "
And the other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call " low self-esteem , " or impolitely call " feeling very bad about yourself . "
There is a real correlationship , a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything and the existence of low self-esteem .
So that 's another way in which something that is quite positive can have a nasty kickback .
There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious , about our careers , about our status in the world today , than ever before .
And it is , again , linked to something nice , and that nice thing is called meritocracy .
Everybody , all politicians on Left and Right , agree that meritocracy is a great thing , and we should all be trying to make our societies really , really meritocratic .
In other words , what is a meritocratic society ?
A meritocratic society is one in which if you 've got talent and energy and skill , you will get to the top . Nothing should hold you back .
It 's a beautiful idea . The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top , get to the top , you 'll also , by implication , and in a far more nasty way , believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there .
In other words , your position in life comes to seem not accidental , but merited and deserved .
And that makes failure seem much more crushing .
You know , in the Middle Ages , in England , when you met a very poor person , that person would be described as an " unfortunate " -- literally , somebody who had not been blessed by fortune , an unfortunate .
Nowadays , particularly in the United States , if you meet someone at the bottom of society , they may unkindly be described as a " loser . "
There is a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser , and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives .
It 's no longer the gods , it 's us . We 're in the driving seat .
That 's exhilarating if you 're doing well , and very crushing if you 're not .
It leads , in the worst cases , in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim , it leads to increased rates of suicide .
There are more suicides in developed individualistic countries than in any other part of the world .
And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally .
They own their success . But they also own their failure .
Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I 've just been outlining ?
I think there is . I just want to turn to a few of them .
Let 's take meritocracy .
This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to , I think it 's a crazy idea , completely crazy .
I will support any politician of Left and Right , with any halfway decent meritocratic idea .
I am a meritocrat in that sense .
But I think it 's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic . It 's an impossible dream .
The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded , the good at the top , and the bad at the bottom , and it 's exactly done as it should be , is impossible .
There are simply too many random factors : accidents , accidents of birth , accidents of things dropping on people 's heads , illnesses , etc .
We will never get to grade them , never get to grade people as they should .
I 'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in " The City of God , " where he says , " It 's a sin to judge any man by his post . "
In modern English that would mean it 's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to dependent on their business card .
It 's not the post that should count .
According to St. Augustine , it 's only God who can really put everybody in their place .
And he 's going to do that on the Day of Judgment with angels and trumpets , and the skies will open .
Insane idea , if you 're a secularist person , like me .
But something very valuable in that idea , nevertheless .
In other words , hold your horses when you 're coming to judge people .
You don 't necessarily know what someone 's true value is .
That is an unknown part of them .
And we shouldn 't behave as though it is known .
There is another source of solace and comfort for all this .
When we think about failing in life , when we think about failure , one of the reasons why we fear failing is not just a loss of income , a loss of status .
What we fear is the judgment and ridicule of others . And it exists .
You know , the number one organ of ridicule nowadays , is the newspaper .
And if you open the newspaper any day of the week , it 's full of people who 've messed up their lives .
They 've slept with the wrong person . They 've taken the wrong substance .
They 've passed the wrong piece of legislation . Whatever it is .
And then are fit for ridicule .
In other words , they have failed . And they are described as " losers . "
Now is there any alternative to this ?
I think the Western tradition shows us one glorious alternative , and that is tragedy .
Tragic art , as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece , in the fifth century B.C. , was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail , and also according them a level of sympathy , which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them .
I remember a few years ago , I was thinking about all this , and I went to see " The Sunday Sport , " a tabloid newspaper that I don 't recommend you to start reading if you 're not familiar with it already .
I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art .
I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon .
So I told them about Othello . They had not heard of it but were fascinated by it .
And I asked them to write the headline for the story of Othello .
They came up with " Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator 's Daughter " splashed across the headline .
I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary .
Again , a book they were enchanted to discover .
And they wrote " Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud . "
And then my favorite .
They really do have a kind of genius all of their own , these guys .
My favorite is Sophocles ' Oedipus the King : " Sex With Mum Was Blinding " In a way , if you like , at one end of the spectrum of sympathy , you 've got the tabloid newspaper .
At the other end of the spectrum you 've got tragedy and tragic art , and I suppose I 'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what 's happening in tragic art .
It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser .
He is not a loser , though he has lost .
And I think that is the message of tragedy to us , and why it 's so very , very important , I think .
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human .
We are the first society to be living in a world where we don 't worship anything other than ourselves .
We think very highly of ourselves , and so we should .
We 've put people on the moon . We 've done all sorts of extraordinary things .
And so we tend to worship ourselves .
Our heroes are human heroes .
That 's a very new situation .
Most other societies have had , right at their center , the worship of something transcendent : a god , a spirit , a natural force , the universe , whatever it is , something else that is being worshiped .
We 've slightly lost the habit of doing that , which is , I think , why we 're particularly drawn to nature .
Not for the sake of our health , though it 's often presented that way , but because it 's an escape from the human anthill .
It 's an escape from our own competition , and our own dramas .
And that 's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans , and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters , etc .
We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human , and that is so deeply important to us .
What I think I 've been talking about really is success and failure .
And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means .
If I said to you that there is somebody behind the screen who is very very successful , certain ideas would immediately come to mind .
You would think that person might have made a lot of money , achieved renown in some field .
My own theory of success -- and I 'm somebody who is very interested in success . I really want to be successful .
I 'm always thinking , " How could I be more successful ? "
But as I get older , I 'm also very nuanced about what that word " success " might mean .
Here 's an insight that I 've had about success .
You can 't be successful at everything .
We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance .
Nonsense . You can 't have it all . You can 't .
So any vision of success has to admit what it 's losing out on , where the element of loss is .
I think any wise life will accept , as I say , that there is going to be an element where we are not succeeding .
Thing about a successful life is , a lot of the time , our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own .
They are sucked in from other people : chiefly , if you 're a man , your father , and if you 're a woman , your mother .
Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years .
No one is quite listening hard enough , but I very much believe that that 's true .
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television , to advertising , to marketing , etc .
These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves .
When we 're told that banking is a very respectable profession a lot of us want to go into banking .
When banking is no longer so respectable , we lose interest in banking .
We are highly open to suggestion .
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success , but we should make sure that they are our own .
We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them , that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions .
Because it 's bad enough , not getting what you want , but it 's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of a journey , that it isn 't , in fact , what you wanted all along .
So I 'm going to end it there .
But what I really want to stress is by all means , success , yes .
But let 's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas .
Let 's probe away at our notions of success .
Let 's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own .
Thank you very much .
That was fascinating . How do you reconcile this idea of someone being -- it being bad to think of someone as a loser with the idea , that a lot of people like , of seizing control of your life .
And that a society that encourages that perhaps has to have some winners and losers .
Alain de Botton : Yes . I think it 's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I wanted to stress .
Because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything , and politicians always talk about justice .
Now I am a firm believer in justice , I just think that it is impossible .
So we should do everything we can , we should do everything we can to pursue it .
But at the end of the day we should always remember that whoever is facing us , whatever has happened in their lives , there will be a strong element of the haphazard .
And it 's that that I 'm trying to leave room for .
Because otherwise it can get quite claustrophobic .
I mean , do you believe that you can combine your kind of kinder , gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy ?
Or do you think that you can 't ?
But it doesn 't matter that much that we 're putting too much emphasis on that ?
The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them , and that somehow the crueler the environment the more people will rise to the challenge .
You want to think , who would you like as your ideal dad ?
And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle .
And it 's a very hard line to make .
We need fathers , as it were , the exemplary father figures in society , avoiding the two extremes , which is the authoritarian , disciplinarian , on the one hand , and on the other , the lax , no rules option .
Alain de Botton .
Thank you very much .
David Pogue : 10 top time-saving tech tips
Tech columnist David Pogue shares 10 simple , clever tips for computer , web , smartphone and camera users . And yes , you may know a few of these already -- but there 's probably at least one you don 't .
I 've noticed something interesting about society and culture .
Everything risky requires a license , so learning to drive , owning a gun , getting married .
That 's true in everything risky except technology .
For some reason , there 's no standard syllabus , there 's no basic course .
They just sort of give you your computer and then kick you out of the nest .
You 're supposed to learn this stuff how ?
Just by osmosis . Nobody ever sits down and tells you , " This is how it works . "
So today I 'm going to tell you 10 things that you thought everybody knew , but it turns out they don 't .
All right , first of all , on the web , when you 're on the web and you want to scroll down , don 't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar . That 's a terrible waste of time .
Do that only if you 're paid by the hour .
Instead , hit the space bar .
The space bar scrolls down one page .
Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again .
So space bar to scroll down one page .
It works in every browser on every kind of computer .
Also on the web , when you 're filling in one of these forms like your addresses , I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box .
But what about the pop-up menu where you put in your state ?
Don 't open the pop-up menu . That 's a terrible waste of calories .
Type the first letter of your state over and over and over .
So if you want Connecticut , go , C , C , C.
If you want Texas , go T , T , and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu .
Also on the web , when the text is too small , what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus , plus , plus .
You make the text larger with each tap .
It works on every computer , every web browser , or minus , minus , minus to get smaller again .
If you 're on the Mac , it might be Command instead .
When you 're typing on your Blackberry , Android , iPhone , don 't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space and then try to capitalize the next letter .
Just hit the space bar twice .
The phone puts the period , the space , and the capital for you .
Go space , space . It is totally amazing .
Also when it comes to cell phones , on all phones , if you want to redial somebody that you 've dialed before , all you have to do is hit the call button , and it puts the last phone number into the box for you , and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it .
So you don 't need to go into the recent calls list , so if you 're trying to get through to somebody , just hit the call button again .
Here 's something that drives me crazy .
When I call you and leave a message on your voicemail , I hear you saying , " Leave a message , " and then I get these 15 seconds of frickin ' instructions , like we haven 't had answering machines for 45 years !
I 'm not bitter .
So it turns out there 's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this .
Answering machine : At the tone , please — BEEP .
David Pogue : Unfortunately , the carriers didn 't adopt the same keystroke , so it 's different by carrier , so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you 're calling .
I didn 't say these were going to be perfect .
Okay , so most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a webpage , but it is also a dictionary .
Type the word " define " and then the word you want to know .
You don 't even have to click anything .
There 's the definition as you type .
It 's also a complete FAA database .
Type the name of the airline and the flight .
It shows you where the flight is , the gate , the terminal , how long till it lands . You don 't need an app for that .
It 's also a unit and currency conversion .
Again , you don 't have to click one of the results .
Just type it into the box , and there 's your answer .
While we 're talking about text , when you want to highlight -- this is just an example .
When you want to highlight a word , please don 't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie .
Double click the word . Watch 200 . I go double click .
It neatly selects just that word .
Also , don 't delete what you 've highlighted .
You can just type over it . This is in every program .
Also , you can go double click , drag to highlight in one-word increments as you drag .
Much more precise . Again , don 't bother deleting .
Just type over it .
Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps .
It 's extremely frustrating on any camera under 1,000 dollars .
So that 's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and the exposure , but if you pre-focus with a half-press , leave your finger down , no shutter lag !
You get it every time .
I 've just turned your $ 50 camera into a $ 1,000 camera with that trick .
And finally , it often happens that you 're giving a talk , and for some reason the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you !
So when that happens , this works in Keynote , PowerPoint , it works in every program , all you do is hit the letter B key , B for blackout , to black out the slide and make everybody look at you , and then when you 're ready to go on , you hit B again , and if you 're really on a roll , you can hit the W key for whiteout , and you white out the slide , and then you can hit W again to unblank it .
So I know I went super fast . If you missed anything , I 'll be happy to send you the list of these tips .
In the meantime , congratulations .
You all get your California technology license .
Have a great day .

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala : Want to help Africa ? Do business here
We know the negative images of Africa -- famine and disease , conflict and corruption . But , says Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala , there 's another , less-told story happening in many African nations : one of reform , economic growth and business opportunity .
Thank you very much , Chris . Everybody who came up here said they were scared . I don 't know if I 'm scared , but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this .
And I don 't have any smart technology for you to look at .
There are no slides , so you 'll just have to be content with me .
What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa .
Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time : the Africa of HIV / AIDS , the Africa of malaria , the Africa of poverty , the Africa of conflict , and the Africa of disasters .
While it is true that those things are going on , there 's an Africa that you don 't hear about very much .
And sometimes I 'm puzzled , and I ask myself why .
This is the Africa that is changing , that Chris alluded to .
This is the Africa of opportunity .
This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies .
And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this . That 's what I want to talk about today .
And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa .
On 15th of September 2005 , Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha , a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria , was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London .
He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family .
This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria -- led by one of our most able and courageous people : Mr. Nuhu Ribadu .
Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London .
Due to some slip-ups , he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where , according to our constitution , those in office as governors , president -- as in many countries -- have immunity and cannot be prosecuted . But what happened : people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office .
Today , Alams -- as we call him for short -- is in jail .
This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders .
This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good , and not taken out to places where they 'll benefit just a few of the elite .
And therefore , when you hear about the corrupt Africa -- corruption all the time -- I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries , and that some successes are emerging .
Does it mean the problem is over ? The answer is no .
There 's still a long way to go , but that there 's a will there .
And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight .
So when you hear about corruption , don 't just feel that nothing is being done about this -- that you can 't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption . That is not the case .
There 's a will to fight , and in many countries , that fight is ongoing and is being won . In others , like mine , where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria , the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go .
But the truth of the matter is that this is going on .
The results are showing : independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption , and governance is improving .
A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries .
And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance .
That is that people talk about corruption , corruption .
All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa .
That 's the image : African countries . But let me say this : if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London -- if the other people who had taken money , estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries ' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries -- if they 're able to do this , what is that ? Is that not corruption ?
In this country , if you receive stolen goods , are you not prosecuted ?
So when we talk about this kind of corruption , let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe -- where the money 's going and what can be done to stop it .
I 'm working on an initiative now , along with the World Bank , on asset recovery , trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad -- developing countries ' moneys -- to get that sent back .
Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back , it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together .
The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform .
Africans , after -- they 're tired , we 're tired of being the subject of everybody 's charity and care .
We are grateful , but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform .
And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us . We have to do it .
We can invite partners who can support us , but we have to start .
We have to reform our economies , change our leadership , become more democratic , be more open to change and to information .
And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent , Nigeria .
In fact , if you 're not in Nigeria , you 're not in Africa .
I want to tell you that .
One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian , and it has 140 million dynamic people -- chaotic people -- but very interesting people . You 'll never be bored .
What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves .
And with the support of a leader who was willing , at the time , to do the reforms , we put forward a comprehensive reform program , which we developed ourselves .
Not the International Monetary Fund . Not the World Bank , where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president .
No one can do it for you . You have to do it for yourself .
We put together a program that would , one : get the state out of businesses it had nothing -- it had no business being in .
The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it 's inefficient and incompetent .
So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises .
We -- as a result , we decided to liberalize many of our markets .
Can you believe that prior to this reform -- which started at the end of 2003 , when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister -- we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history ?
Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury .
You couldn 't get it . You had to bribe .
You had to do everything to get your phone .
When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector , we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines , and counting .
Nigeria 's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world , after China . We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms . And nobody knows , except a few smart people .
The smartest one , first to come in , was the MTN company of South Africa .
And in the three years that I was Finance Minister , they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year .
360 million in a market -- in a country that is a poor country , with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita .
So the market is there .
When they kept this under wraps , but soon others got to know .
Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies , and three or four others have come in .
But there 's a huge market out there , and people don 't know about it , or they don 't want to know .
So privatization is one of the things we 've done .
The other thing we 've also done is to manage our finances better .
Because nobody 's going to help you and support you if you 're not managing your own finances well .
And Nigeria , with the oil sector , had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well .
So what did we try to do ? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price .
Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in , because oil is the biggest , most revenue-earning sector in the economy : 70 percent of our revenues come from oil .
We de-linked that , and once we did it , we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price .
We didn 't know we could pull it off ; it was very controversial .
But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development -- where , even if oil prices were high , we would grow very fast .
When they crashed , we crashed .
And we could hardly even pay anything , any salaries , in the economy .
That smoothened out . We were able to save , just before I left , 27 billion dollars . Whereas -- and this went to our reserves -- when I arrived in 2003 , we had seven billion dollars in reserves .
By the time I left , we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars . And as we speak now , we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances .
And that shores up our economy , makes it stable .
Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy .
We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent .
And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now .
So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy .
And what is more important , because we want to get away from oil and diversify -- and there are so many opportunities in this one big country , as in many countries in Africa -- what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone , but from non-oil .
Agriculture grew at better than eight percent .
As telecoms sector grew , housing and construction , and I could go on and on . And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out , the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous .
We have opportunities in agriculture , like I said .
We have opportunities in solid minerals . We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored . And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible , that wouldn 't happen . So we 've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world .
We have opportunities in housing and real estate .
There was nothing in a country of 140 million people -- no shopping malls as you know them here .
This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people .
And now , we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected .
So , huge things in construction , real estate , mortgage markets . Financial services : we had 89 banks . Too many not doing their real business .
We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital -- share capital .
And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars .
The banks -- these banks are now consolidated , and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside .
Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million .
Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million .
And I can go on . Dollars , on and on , into the system .
We are doing the same with the insurance sector .
So in financial services , a great deal of opportunity .
In tourism , in many African countries , a great opportunity .
And that 's what many people know East Africa for : the wildlife , the elephants , and so on .
But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important .
So what am I trying to say ? I 'm trying to tell you that there 's a new wave on the continent .
A new wave of openness and democratization in which , since 2000 , more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections .
Not all of them have been perfect , or will be , but the trend is very clear .
I 'm trying to tell you that since the past three years , the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum .
This is better than the performance of many OECD countries .
So it 's clear that things are changing .
Conflicts are down on the continent ; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago , we are down to three or four conflicts -- one of the most terrible , of course , of which is Darfur .
And , you know , you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent , it looks like the entire continent is affected .
But you should know that this continent is not -- is a continent of many countries , not one country .
And if we are down to three or four conflicts , it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable , growing , exciting economies where there 's plenty of opportunity .
And I want to just make one point about this investment .
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet .
And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs .
There 's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children 's lives . That 's not what I 'm saying . That is fine .
But imagine the impact on a family : if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school , that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves .
If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet , isn 't that a wonderful opportunity ? Isn 't that the way to go ?
And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women .
I have a CD here . I 'm sorry that I didn 't say anything on time .
Otherwise , I would have liked you to have seen this .
It says , " Africa : Open for Business . "
And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year .
Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania , where they 're having the session in June .
But it shows you Africans , and particularly African women , who against all odds have developed businesses , some of them world-class .
One of the women in this video , Adenike Ogunlesi , making children 's clothes -- which she started as a hobby and grew into a business .
Mixing African materials , such as we have , with materials from elsewhere .
So , she 'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys , with African material mixed in . Very creative designs , has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart .
For 10,000 pieces .
So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing .
And the women are diligent . They are focused ; they work hard .
I could go on giving examples : Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda , who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her .
However , many of these are starved for capital to expand , because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary . Nobody thinks in terms of a market .
Nobody thinks there 's opportunity .
But I 'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now , will miss it forever .
So if you want to be in Africa , think about investing .
Think about the Beatrices , think about the Adenikes of this world , who are doing incredible things , that are bringing them into the global economy , whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed , and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income .
So I invite you to explore the opportunities .
When you go to Tanzania , listen carefully , because I 'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent , for the people and for yourselves .
Thank you very much .
Bobby Ghosh : Why global jihad is losing
Throughout the history of Islam , says journalist Bobby Ghosh , there have been two sides to jihad : one , internal , a personal struggle to be better , the other external . A small minority has appropriated the second meaning , using it as an excuse for deadly global violence against " the West . " Ghosh suggests it 's time to reclaim the word .
I 'm going to talk about the power of a word : jihad .
To the vast majority of practicing Muslims , jihad is an internal struggle for the faith .
It is a struggle within , a struggle against vice , sin , temptation , lust , greed .
It is a struggle to try and live a life that is set by the moral codes written in the Koran .
In that original idea , the concept of jihad is as important to Muslims as the idea of grace is to Christians .
It 's a very powerful word , jihad , if you look at it in that respect , and there 's a certain almost mystical resonance to it .
And that 's the reason why , for hundreds of years , Muslims everywhere have named their children Jihad , their daughters as much as their sons , in the same way that , say , Christians name their daughters Grace , and Hindus , my people , name our daughters Bhakti , which means , in Sanskrit , spiritual worship .
But there have always been , in Islam , a small group , a minority , who believe that jihad is not only an internal struggle but also an external struggle against forces that would threaten the faith , or the faithul .
And some of these people believe that in that struggle , it is sometimes okay to take up arms .
And so the thousands of young Muslim men who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight against the Soviet occupation of a Muslim country , in their minds they were fighting a jihad , they were doing jihad , and they named themselves the Mujahideen , which is a word that comes from the same root as jihad .
And we forget this now , but back then the Mujahideen were celebrated in this country , in America .
We thought of them as holy warriors who were taking the good fight to the ungodly communists .
America gave them weapons , gave them money , gave them support , encouragement .
But within that group , a tiny , smaller group , a minority within a minority within a minority , were coming up with a new and dangerous conception of jihad , and in time this group would come to be led by Osama bin Laden , and he refined the idea .
His idea of jihad was a global war of terror , primarily targeted at the far enemy , at the crusaders from the West , against America .
And the things he did in the pursuit of this jihad were so horrendous , so monstrous , and had such great impact , that his definition was the one that stuck , not just here in the West .
We didn 't know any better . We didn 't pause to ask .
We just assumed that if this insane man and his psychopathic followers were calling what they did jihad , then that 's what jihad must mean .
But it wasn 't just us . Even in the Muslim world , his definition of jihad began to gain acceptance .
A year ago I was in Tunis , and I met the imam of a very small mosque , an old man .
Fifteen years ago , he named his granddaughter Jihad , after the old meaning . He hoped that a name like that would inspire her to live a spiritual life .
But he told me that after 9 / 11 , he began to have second thoughts .
He worried that if he called her by that name , especially outdoors , outside in public , he might be seen as endorsing bin Laden 's idea of jihad .
On Fridays in his mosque , he gave sermons trying to reclaim the meaning of the word , but his congregants , the people who came to his mosque , they had seen the videos . They had seen pictures of the planes going into the towers , the towers coming down .
They had heard bin Laden say that that was jihad , and claimed victory for it . And so the old imam worried that his words were falling on deaf ears . No one was paying attention .
He was wrong . Some people were paying attention , but for the wrong reasons .
The United States , at this point , was putting pressure on all its Arab allies , including Tunisia , to stamp out extremism in their societies , and this imam found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of the Tunisian intelligence service .
They had never paid him any attention before -- old man , small mosque -- but now they began to pay visits , and sometimes they would drag him in for questions , and always the same question : " Why did you name your granddaughter Jihad ?
Why do you keep using the word jihad in your Friday sermons ?
Do you hate Americans ?
What is your connection to Osama bin Laden ? "
So to the Tunisian intelligence agency , and organizations like it all over the Arab world , jihad equaled extremism , Bin Laden 's definition had become institutionalized .
That was the power of that word that he was able to do .
And it filled this old imam , it filled him with great sadness .
He told me that , of bin Laden 's many crimes , this was , in his mind , one that didn 't get enough attention , that he took this word , this beautiful idea .
He didn 't so much appropriate it as kidnapped it and debased it and corrupted it and turned it into something it was never meant to be , and then persuaded all of us that it always was a global jihad .
But the good news is that the global jihad is almost over , as bin Laden defined it .
It was dying well before he did , and now it 's on its last legs .
Opinion polls from all over the Muslim world show that there is very little interest among Muslims in a global holy war against the West , against the far enemy .
The supply of young men willing to fight and die for this cause is dwindling .
The supply of money — just as important , more important perhaps — the supply of money to this activity is also dwindling .
The wealthy fanatics who were previously sponsoring this kind of activity are now less generous .
What does that mean for us in the West ?
Does it mean we can break out the champagne , wash our hands of it , disengage , sleep easy at night ?
No . Disengagement is not an option , because if you let local jihad survive , it becomes international jihad .
And so there 's now a lot of different violent jihads all over the world .
In Somalia , in Mali , in Nigeria , in Iraq , in Afghanistan , Pakistan , there are groups that claim to be the inheritors of the legacy of Osama bin Laden .
They use his rhetoric .
They even use the brand name he created for his jihad .
So there is now an al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb , there 's an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula , there is an al Qaeda in Mesopotamia .
There are other groups -- in Nigeria , Boko Haram , in Somalia , al Shabaab -- and they all pay homage to Osama bin Laden .
But if you look closely , they 're not fighting a global jihad .
They 're fighting battles over much narrower issues .
Usually it has to do with ethnicity or race or sectarianism , or it 's a power struggle .
More often than not , it 's a power struggle in one country , or even a small region within one country .
Occasionally they will go across a border , from Iraq to Syria , from Mali to Algeria , from Somalia to Kenya , but they 're not fighting a global jihad against some far enemy .
But that doesn 't mean that we can relax .
I was in Yemen recently , where -- it 's the home of the last al Qaeda franchise that still aspires to attack America , attack the West .
It 's old school al Qaeda .
You may remember these guys .
They are the ones who tried to send the underwear bomber here , and they were using the Internet to try and instigate violence among American Muslims .
But they have been distracted recently .
Last year , they took control over a portion of southern Yemen , and ran it , Taliban-style .
And then the Yemeni military got its act together , and ordinary people rose up against these guys and drove them out , and since then , most of their activities , most of their attacks have been directed at Yemenis .
So I think we 've come to a point now where we can say that , just like all politics , all jihad is local .
But that 's still not reason for us to disengage , because we 've seen that movie before , in Afghanistan .
When those Mujahideen defeated the Soviet Union , we disengaged .
And even before the fizz had gone out of our celebratory champagne , the Taliban had taken over in Kabul , and we said , " Local jihad , not our problem . "
And then the Taliban gave the keys of Kandahar to Osama bin Laden . He made it our problem .
Local jihad , if you ignore it , becomes global jihad again .
The good news is that it doesn 't have to be .
We know how to fight it now .
We have the tools . We have the knowhow , and we can take the lessons we 've learned from the fight against global jihad , the victory against global jihad , and apply those to local jihad .
What are those lessons ? We know who killed bin Laden : SEAL Team Six .
Do we know , do we understand , who killed bin Ladenism ?
Who ended the global jihad ?
There lie the answers to the solution to local jihad .
Who killed bin Ladenism ? Let 's start with bin Laden himself .
He probably thought 9 / 11 was his greatest achievement .
In reality , it was the beginning of the end for him .
He killed 3,000 innocent people , and that filled the Muslim world with horror and revulsion , and what that meant was that his idea of jihad could never become mainstream .
He condemned himself to operating on the lunatic fringes of his own community .
9 / 11 didn 't empower him ; it doomed him .
Who killed bin Ladenism ? Abu Musab al-Zarqawi killed it .
He was the especially sadistic head of al Qaeda in Iraq who sent hundreds of suicide bombers to attack not Americans but Iraqis . Muslims . Sunni as well as Shiites .
Any claim that al Qaeda had to being protectors of Islam against the Western crusaders was drowned in the blood of Iraqi Muslims .
Who killed Osama bin Laden ? The SEAL Team Six .
Who killed bin Ladenism ? Al Jazeera did , Al Jazeera and half a dozen other satellite news stations in Arabic , because they circumvented the old , state-owned television stations in a lot of these countries which were designed to keep information from people .
Al Jazeera brought information to them , showed them what was being said and done in the name of their religion , exposed the hypocrisy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda , and allowed them , gave them the information that allowed them to come to their own conclusions .
Who killed bin Ladenism ? The Arab Spring did , because it showed a way for young Muslims to bring about change in a manner that Osama bin Laden , with his limited imagination , could never have conceived .
Who defeated the global jihad ? The American military did , the American soldiers did , with their allies , fighting in faraway battlefields .
And perhaps , a time will come when they get the rightful credit for it .
So all these factors , and many more besides , we don 't even fully understand some of them yet , these came together to defeat a monstrosity as big as bin Ladenism , the global jihad , you needed this group effort .
Now , not all of these things will work in local jihad .
The American military is not going to march into Nigeria to take on Boko Haram , and it 's unlikely that SEAL Team Six will rappel into the homes of al Shabaab 's leaders and take them out .
But many of these other factors that were in play are now even stronger than before . Half the work is already done .
We don 't have to reinvent the wheel .
The notion of violent jihad in which more Muslims are killed than any other kind of people is already thoroughly discredited .
We don 't have to go back to that .
Satellite television and the Internet are informing and empowering young Muslims in exciting new ways .
And the Arab Spring has produced governments , many of them Islamist governments , who know that , for their own self-preservation , they need to take on the extremists in their midsts .
We don 't need to persuade them , but we do need to help them , because they haven 't really come to this place before .
The good news , again , is that a lot of the things they need we already have , and we are very good at giving : economic assistance , not just money , but expertise , technology , knowhow , private investment , fair terms of trade , medicine , education , technical support for training for their police forces to become more effective , for their anti-terror forces to become more efficient .
We 've got plenty of these things .
Some of the other things that they need we 're not very good at giving . Maybe nobody is .
Time , patience , subtlety , understanding -- these are harder to give .
I live in New York now . Just this week , posters have gone up in subway stations in New York that describe jihad as savage .
But in all the many years that I have covered the Middle East , I have never been as optimistic as I am today that the gap between the Muslim world and the West is narrowing fast , and one of the many reasons for my optimism is that , because I know there are millions , hundreds of millions of people , Muslims like that old imam in Tunis , who are reclaiming this word and restoring to its original , beautiful purpose .
Bin Laden is dead . Bin Ladenism has been defeated .
His definition of jihad can now be expunged .
To that jihad we can say , " Goodbye . Good riddance . "
To the real jihad we can say , " Welcome back . Good luck . "
Thank you .
Kenichi Ebina : My magic moves
Kenichi Ebina moves his body in a manner that appears to defy the limits imposed by the human skeleton . He combines breakdancing and hip-hop with mime using movements that are simultaneously precise and fluid .
Martin Villeneuve : How I made an impossible film
Filmmaker Martin Villeneuve talks about & lt ; em & gt ; Mars et Avril & lt ; / em & gt ; , the Canadian sci-fi spectacular he made with virtually no money . In a charming talk , he explains the various ways he overcame financial and logistical constraints to produce his unique and inventive vision of the future .
I made a film that was impossible to make , but I didn 't know it was impossible , and that 's how I was able to do it .
" Mars et Avril " is a science fiction film .
It 's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future .
No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it 's expensive , it 's set in the future , and it 's got tons of visual effects , and it 's shot on green screen .
Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid , really , back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be .
When American producers see my film , they think that I had a big budget to do it , like 23 million .
But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget .
I did " Mars et Avril " for only 2.3 million .
So you might wonder , what 's the deal here ?
How did I do this ?
Well , it 's two things . First , it 's time .
When you don 't have money , you must take time , and it took me seven years to do " Mars et Avril . "
The second aspect is love .
I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved .
And it seems like every department had nothing , so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity .
And that brings me to the point of my talk , actually , how constraints , big creative constraints , can boost creativity .
But let me go back in time a bit .
In my early 20s , I did some graphic novels , but they weren 't your usual graphic novels .
They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text , and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation , they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental , theatrical , simplistic way .
And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage .
And I just love this guy .
I 've been in love with this guy since I was a kid .
His career I admire a lot .
And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project , and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak , who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time , space , love , music and women .
And he was a perfect fit for the part , and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance .
He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film , and to write , direct , and produce the film myself .
And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity .
Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet .
I mean , his agenda is booked until 2042 , and he 's really hard to get , and I wanted him to be in the movie , to reprise his role in the movie .
But the thing is , had I waited for him until 2042 , my film wouldn 't be a futuristic film anymore , so I just couldn 't do that . Right ?
But that 's kind of a big problem .
How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie ?
Well , I said as a joke in a production meeting -- and this is a true story , by the way — I said , " Why don 't we turn this guy into a hologram ?
Because , you know , he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time , and he 's an illuminated being in my mind , and he 's in between reality and virtual reality , so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram . "
Everybody around the table laughed , but the joke was kind of a good solution , so that 's what we ended up doing .
Here 's how we did it . We shot Robert with six cameras .
He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium .
Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head , so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed , and we shot only his head .
Six months later there was a guy on set , a mime portraying the body , the vehicle for the head .
And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage 's head .
So he became like a renaissance man , and here 's what it looks like in the movie .
Robert Lepage : [ As usual , Arthur 's drawing didn 't account for the technical challenges .
I welded the breech , but the valve is still gaping .
I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box , but I might have hit a heartstring .
It still sounds too low . ] Jacques Languirand : [ That 's normal .
The instrument always ends up resembling its model . ] Martin Villeneuve : Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt , they 're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity , because I desperately needed these objects in my movie .
They are objects of desire .
They are imaginary musical instruments .
And they carry a nice story with them .
Actually , I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many , many years .
But my problem was , I didn 't have the money to pay for them . I couldn 't afford them .
So that 's kind of a big problem too .
How do you get something that you can 't afford ?
And , you know , I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea .
I said , " What if I have somebody else pay for them ? "
But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women 's bodies ?
And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal , because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen ?
So I found my way to Guy Laliberté , Cirque du Soleil 's CEO , and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references , and something pretty amazing happened .
Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money , but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy .
It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price , because they weren 't even made .
He took a leap of faith .
And the artist , Dominique Engel , brilliant guy , he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year .
And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free , which was kind of what I tried to do .
So here they are .
And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green , because this is a weird color , a crazy color , and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later .
And I had , again , pretty much , ideas in my mind as to what the world would be , but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium .
And this guy is another guy I admire a lot , and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer .
But people told me , you know , Martin , it 's impossible , the guy is too busy and he will say no .
Well , I said , you know what , instead of mimicking his style , I might as well call the real guy and ask him , and I sent him my books , and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium .
In other words , there was space for him to dream with me .
So here I was with one of my childhood heroes , drawing every single frame that 's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future .
And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire .
But then , you know , eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality .
So , again , my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of .
And there 's this guy in Montreal , another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon , and he 's a very good VFX artist .
This guy had been lead compositor on such films as " Avatar " and " Star Trek " and " Transformers , " and other unknown projects like this , and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job , and I had to convince him , and , instead of working on the next Spielberg movie , he accepted to work on mine .
Why ? Because I offered him a space to dream .
So if you don 't have money to offer to people , you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of .
So this is what happened on this movie , and that 's how it got made , and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale , and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film .
So I want to tell you that , if you have some crazy ideas in your mind , and that people tell you that it 's impossible to make , well , that 's an even better reason to want to do it , because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result , whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents , life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way .
I have experienced it .
And you might end up doing some crazy projects , and who knows , you might even end up going to Mars .
Thank you .
Paul Collier : New rules for rebuilding a broken nation
Long conflict can wreck a country , leaving behind poverty and chaos . But what 's the right way to help war-torn countries rebuild ? At TED @ State , Paul Collier explains the problems with current post-conflict aid plans , and suggests 3 ideas for a better approach .
I 'm going to talk about post-conflict recovery and how we might do post-conflict recovery better .
The record on post-conflict recovery is not very impressive .
40 percent of all post-conflict situations , historically , have reverted back to conflict within a decade .
In fact , they 've accounted for half of all civil wars .
Why has the record been so poor ?
Well , the conventional approach to post-conflict situations has rested on , on kind of , three principles .
The first principle is : it 's the politics that matters .
So , the first thing that is prioritized is politics .
Try and build a political settlement first .
And then the second step is to say , " The situation is admittedly dangerous , but only for a short time . "
So get peacekeepers there , but get them home as soon as possible .
So , short-term peacekeepers .
And thirdly , what is the exit strategy for the peacekeepers ?
It 's an election .
That will produce a legitimate and accountable government .
So that 's the conventional approach .
I think that approach denies reality .
We see that there is no quick fix .
There 's certainly no quick security fix .
I 've tried to look at the risks of reversion to conflict , during our post-conflict decade .
And the risks stay high throughout the decade .
And they stay high regardless of the political innovations .
Does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government ?
What an election produces is a winner and a loser .
And the loser is unreconciled .
The reality is that we need to reverse the sequence .
It 's not the politics first ; it 's actually the politics last .
The politics become easier as the decade progresses if you 're building on a foundation of security and economic development -- the rebuilding of prosperity .
Why does the politics get easier ?
And why is it so difficult initially ?
Because after years of stagnation and decline , the mentality of politics is that it 's a zero-sum game .
If the reality is stagnation , I can only go up if you go down .
And that doesn 't produce a productive politics .
And so the mentality has to shift from zero-sum to positive-sum before you can get a productive politics .
You can only get positive , that mental shift , if the reality is that prosperity is being built .
And in order to build prosperity , we need security in place .
So that is what you get when you face reality .
But the objective of facing reality is to change reality .
And so now let me suggest two complimentary approaches to changing the reality of the situations .
The first is to recognize the interdependence of three key actors , who are different actors , and at the moment are uncoordinated .
The first actor is the Security Council .
The Security Council typically has the responsibility for providing the peacekeepers who build the security .
And that needs to be recognized , first of all , that peacekeeping works .
It is a cost-effective approach .
It does increase security .
But it needs to be done long-term .
It needs to be a decade-long approach , rather than just a couple of years .
That 's one actor , the Security Council .
The second actor , different cast of guys , is the donors .
The donors provide post-conflict aid .
Typically in the past , the donors have been interested in the first couple of years , and then they got bored .
They moved on to some other situation .
Post-conflict economic recovery is a slow process .
There are no quick processes in economics except decline .
You can do that quite fast .
So the donors have to stick with this situation for at least a decade .
And then the third key actor is the post-conflict government .
And there are two key things it 's got to do .
One is it 's got to do economic reform , not fuss about the political constitution .
It 's got to reform economic policy .
Why ? Because during conflict economic policy typically deteriorates .
Governments snatch short-term opportunities and , by the end of the conflict , the chickens have come home to roost .
So this legacy of conflict is really bad economic policy .
So there is a reform agenda , and there is an inclusion agenda .
The inclusion agenda doesn 't come from elections .
Elections produce a loser , who is then excluded .
So the inclusion agenda means genuinely bringing people inside the tent .
So those three actors .
And they are interdependent over a long term .
If the Security Council doesn 't commit to security over the course of a decade , you don 't get the reassurance which produces private investment .
If you don 't get the policy reform and the aid , you don 't get the economic recovery , which is the true exit strategy for the peacekeepers .
So we should recognize that interdependence , by formal , mutual commitments .
The United Nations actually has a language for these mutual commitments , the recognition of mutual commitments ; it 's called the language of compact .
And so we need a post-conflict compact .
The United Nations even has an agency which could broker these compacts ; it 's called the Peace Building Commission .
It would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where , when we got to a post-conflict situation , there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties .
So that 's idea one : recognize interdependence .
And now let me turn to the second approach , which is complimentary .
And that is to focus on a few critical objectives .
Typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities .
And indeed , unfortunately , if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda , because in these situations , needs are everywhere , but the capacity to implement change is very limited .
So we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical .
And I want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situation three things are critical .
One is jobs .
One is improvements in basic services -- especially health , which is a disaster during conflict .
So jobs , health , and clean government .
Those are the three critical priorities .
So I 'm going to talk a little about each of them .
Jobs .
What is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations ?
And why are jobs so important ?
Jobs for whom ? Especially jobs for young men .
In post-conflict situations , the reason that they so often revert to conflict , is not because elderly women get upset .
It 's because young men get upset .
And why are they upset ? Because they have nothing to do .
And so we need a process of generating jobs , for ordinary young men , fast .
Now , that is difficult .
Governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service .
That is not a good idea .
It 's not sustainable .
In fact , you 're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service .
But getting the private sector to expand is also difficult , because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation .
These are not environments where you can build export manufacturing .
There 's one sector which isn 't exposed to international trade , and which can generate a lot of jobs , and which is , in any case , a sensible sector to expand , post-conflict , and that is the construction sector .
The construction sector has a vital role , obviously , in reconstruction .
But typically that sector has withered away during conflict .
During conflict people are doing destruction .
There isn 't any construction going on . And so the sector shrivels away .
And then when you try and expand it , because it 's shriveled away , you encounter a lot of bottlenecks .
Basically , prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector , but it doesn 't generate any jobs .
And so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector .
What might the bottlenecks be ?
Just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure , using a lot of labor .
First you need access to land .
Often the legal system is broken down so you can 't even get access to land .
Secondly you need skills , the mundane skills of the construction sector .
In post-conflict situations we don 't just need Doctors Without Borders , we need Bricklayers Without Borders , to rebuild the skill set .
We need firms . The firms have gone away .
So we need to encourage the growth of local firms .
If we do that , we not only get the jobs , we get the improvements in public infrastructure , the restoration of public infrastructure .
Let me turn from jobs to the second objective , which is improving basic social services .
And to date , there has been a sort of a schizophrenia in the donor community , as to how to build basic services in post-conflict sectors .
On the one hand it pays lip service to the idea of rebuild an effective state in the image of Scandinavia in the 1950s .
Lets develop line ministries of this , that , and the other , that deliver these services .
And it 's schizophrenic because in their hearts donors know that 's not a realistic agenda , and so what they also do is the total bypass : just fund NGOs .
Neither of those approaches is sensible .
And so what I 'd suggest is what I call Independent Service Authorities .
It 's to split the functions of a monopoly line ministry up into three .
The planning function and policy function stays with the ministry ; the delivery of services on the ground , you should use whatever works -- churches , NGOs , local communities , whatever works .
And in between , there should be a public agency , the Independent Service Authority , which channels public money , and especially donor money , to the retail providers .
So the NGOs become part of a public government system , rather than independent of it .
One advantage of that is that you can allocate money coherently .
Another is , you can make NGOs accountable .
You can use yardstick competition , so they have to compete against each other for the resources .
The good NGOs , like Oxfam , are very keen on this idea .
They want to have the discipline and accountability .
So that 's a way to get basic services scaled up .
And because the government would be funding it , it would be co-branding these services .
So they wouldn 't be provided thanks to the United States government and some NGO .
They would be co-branded as being done by the post-conflict government , in the country .
So , jobs , basic services , finally , clean government .
Clean means follow their money .
The typical post-conflict government is so short of money that it needs our money just to be on a life-support system .
You can 't get the basic functions of the state done unless we put money into the core budget of these countries .
But , if we put money into the core budget , we know that there aren 't the budget systems with integrity that mean that money will be well spent .
And if all we do is put money in and close our eyes it 's not just that the money is wasted -- that 's the least of the problems -- it 's that the money is captured .
It 's captured by the crooks who are at the heart of the political problem .
And so inadvertently we empower the people who are the problem .
So building clean government means , yes , provide money to the budget , but also provide a lot of scrutiny , which means a lot of technical assistance that follows the money .
Paddy Ashdown , who was the grand high nabob of Bosnia to the United Nations , in his book about his experience , he said , " I realize what I needed was accountants without borders , to follow that money . "
So that 's the -- let me wrap up , this is the package .
What 's the goal ?
If we follow this , what would we hope to achieve ?
That after 10 years , the focus on the construction sector would have produced both jobs and , hence , security -- because young people would have jobs -- and it would have reconstructed the infrastructure .
So that 's the focus on the construction sector .
The focus on the basic service delivery through these independent service authorities would have rescued basic services from their catastrophic levels , and it would have given ordinary people the sense that the government was doing something useful .
The emphasis on clean government would have gradually squeezed out the political crooks , because there wouldn 't be any money in taking part in the politics .
And so gradually the selection , the composition of politicians , would shift from the crooked to the honest .
Where would that leave us ?
Gradually it would shift from a politics of plunder to a politics of hope . Thank you .
George Whitesides : Toward a science of simplicity
Simplicity : We know it when we see it -- but what is it , exactly ? In this funny , philosophical talk , George Whitesides chisels out an answer .
Most of the talks that you 've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something , they are experts , they know what 's going on .
All of you know about the topic that I 'm supposed to talk about .
That is , you know what simplicity is , you know what complexity is .
The trouble is , I don 't .
And what I 'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject .
I want you to read this , because we 're going to come back to it in a moment .
The quote is from the fabled Potter Stewart opinion on pornography .
And let me just read it , the important details here : " Shorthand description , [ ' hardcore pornography ' ] ; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining it .
But I know it when I see it . "
I 'm going to come back to that in a moment .
So , what is simplicity ?
It 's good to start with some examples .
A coffee cup -- we don 't think about coffee cups , but it 's much more interesting than one might think -- a coffee cup is a device , which has a container and a handle .
The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid .
Why is that important ?
Well , it enables you to drink coffee .
But also , by the way , the coffee is hot , the liquid is sterile ; you 're not likely to get cholera that way .
So the coffee cup , or the cup with a handle , is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health .
Scissors are your clothes , glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles , and books are , after all , your education .
But there 's another class of simple things , which are also very important .
Simple in function , but not at all simple in how they 're constructed .
And the two here are just examples .
One is the cellphone , which we use every day .
And it rests on a complexity , which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend Benoit Mandelbrot discussed , but are very interesting .
And the other , of course , is a birth control pill , which , in a very simple way , fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices .
So , there are two ways of thinking about this word , I think .
And here I 've corrupted the Potter Stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something -- which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone , Internet and birth control pills -- by saying that they 're simple , the functions are simple , and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it .
Or there may be another way of doing it , which is to think about the problem in terms of what -- if you associate with moral philosophers -- is called the teapot problem .
The teapot problem I 'll pose this way .
Suppose you see a teapot , and the teapot is filled with hot water .
And you then ask the question : Why is the water hot ?
And that 's a simple question .
It 's like , what is simplicity ?
One answer would be : because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly -- that 's a kind of physical science argument .
A second argument would be : because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on -- that 's an historical argument .
A third is that I wanted hot water for tea -- that 's an intentional argument .
And , since this is coming from a moral philosopher , the fourth would be that it 's part of God 's plan for the universe .
All of these are possibilities .
The point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer , in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings , but with the same words .
Asking , " What is simplicity ? " I think falls in that category .
What is the state of science ?
And , interestingly , complexity is very highly evolved .
We have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is .
Simplicity , for reasons that are a little bit obscure , is almost not pursued , at least in the academic world .
We academics -- I am an academic -- we love complexity .
You can write papers about complexity , and the nice thing about complexity is it 's fundamentally intractable in many ways , so you 're not responsible for outcomes .
Simplicity -- all of you really would like your Waring Blender in the morning to make whatever a Waring Blender does , but not explode or play Beethoven .
You 're not interested in the limits of these things .
So what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system .
And there 's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence , not so much in thinking about simplicity .
One of the things I want to do is to help you with a very important task -- which you may not know that you have very often -- which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation .
And the words that I would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence , because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things .
All right , what is complexity in this view of things , and what is emergence ?
We have , actually , a pretty good working definition of complexity .
It is a system , like traffic , which has components .
The components interact with one another .
These are cars and drivers . They dissipate energy .
It turns out that , whenever you have that system , weird stuff happens , and you in Los Angeles probably know this better than anyone .
Here 's another example , which I put up because it 's an example of really important current science .
You can 't possibly read that . It 's not intended that you read it , but that 's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment .
And it 's like the traffic that you see .
The amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells , but we don 't know why .
Anyone who tells you that we understand life , walk away .
And let me reduce this to the simplest level .
We 've heard from Bill Gates recently .
All of us , to some extent , study this thing called a Bill Gates .
Terrific . You learn everything you can about that .
And then there 's another kind of thing that you might study , and you study that hard .
That 's a Bono , this is a Bono .
But then , if you know everything you can know about those two things , and you put them together , what can you say about this combination ?
The answer is , not a lot .
And that 's complexity .
Now , imagine building that up to a city , or to a society , and you 've got , obviously , an interesting problem .
All right , so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind .
And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful , which is stacking .
And I 'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it .
Or I 'm going to use simple to mean reliable , predictable , repeatable .
And I 'm going to use as an example the Internet , because it 's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity .
We call it a complex system , which it is , but it 's also something else .
The Internet starts with mathematics , it starts with binary .
And if you look at the list of things on the bottom , we are familiar with the Arabic numbers one to 10 and so on .
In binary , one is 0001 , seven is 0111 .
The question is : Why is binary simpler than Arabic ?
And the answer is , simply , that if I hold up three fingers , you can count that easily , but if I hold up this , it 's sort of hard to say that I just did seven .
The virtue of binary is that it 's the simplest possible way of representing numbers .
Anything else is more complicated .
You can catch errors with it , it 's unambiguous in its reading , there are lots of good things about binary .
So it is very , very simple once you learn how to read it .
Now , if you like to represent this zero and one of binary , you need a device .
And think of things in your life that are binary , one of them is light switches .
They can be on and off . That 's binary .
Now wall switches , we all know , fail .
But our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up , some 50 years ago , with a very nice device , shown under that bell jar , which is a transistor .
A transistor is nothing more than a wall switch .
It turns things on and off , but it does so without moving parts and it doesn 't fail , basically , for a very long period of time .
So the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the Internet .
So , since the transistor is so simple , you can put lots of them together .
And you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits .
And a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors , all of which have to work perfectly every time .
So that 's the next layer of simplicity , and , in fact , integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they , in general , work really well .
With integrated circuits , you can build cellphones .
You all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time .
In Boston ... Boston is a little bit like Namibia in its cell phone coverage , so that we 're not accustomed to that all the time , but some of the time .
But , in fact , if you have cell phones , you can now go to this nice lady who 's somewhere like Namibia , and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master 's degree in electrical engineering from MIT , she 's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way .
And from that comes the Internet .
And this is a map of bitflows across the continent .
The two blobs that are light in the middle there are the United States and Europe .
And then back to simplicity again .
So here we have what I think is one of the great ideas , which is Google .
Which , in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world 's information .
But the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple , in the sense that it is completely reliable .
All right , let me then finish off with four general statements , an example and two aphorisms .
The characteristics , which I think are useful to think about for simple things : First , they are predictable .
Their behavior is predictable .
Now , one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it 's going to do , in general .
So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things .
The second is , and this is a real world statement , they 're cheap .
If you have things that are cheap enough , people will find uses for them , even if they seem very primitive .
So , for example , stones .
You can build cathedrals out of stones , you just have to know what it does .
You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another , and they support weight .
So there has to be function , the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low .
What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost .
And then I would propose as this last component that they serve , or have the potential to serve , as building blocks .
That is , you can stack them .
And stack can mean this way , or it can mean this way , or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space .
But if you have something that has a function , and it 's really cheap , people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things .
Cheap , functional , reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine .
There 's no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor .
It just is not possible .
So these are the components .
Now , the example is something that I want to give you from the work that we ourselves do .
We are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world , and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage .
So , how does one do that ?
This is a world in which there 's no electricity , there 's no money , there 's no medical competence .
And I don 't want to spend your time in going through the details , but in the lower right-hand corner , you see an example of the kind of thing that we have .
It 's a little paper chip .
It has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books , which was the inspiration for this particular idea .
And you put a drop , in this case , of urine at the bottom .
It wicks its way up into these little branches .
You know , no power required .
It turns colors . In this particular case , you 're reading kidney function .
And , since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an AK-47 , who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing , he can take a picture of it with his cellphone , send the picture back to where there is a doctor , and the doctor can look at it .
So what you 've done is to take a technology , which is available everywhere , make a device , which is extremely cheap , and make it in such a fashion that it is very , very reliable .
If we can pull this off , if we can build more function , it will be stackable .
That is to say , if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work , it will be applicable to a very , very large variety of human conditions , and hence , extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions .
Part of my interest in this , I have to say , is that I would like to -- how do I put this politely ? -- change the way , or maybe eviscerate , the capital structure of the U.S. health care system , which I think is fundamentally broken .
So , let me close -- Let me close with my two aphorisms .
One of them is from Mr. Einstein , and he says , " Everything should be made as simple as possible , but not simpler . "
And I think that 's a very good way of thinking about the problem .
If you take too much out of something that 's simple , you lose function .
You have to have low cost , but you also have to have a function .
So you can 't make it too simple .
And the second is a design issue , and it 's not directly relevant , but it 's a nice statement .
This is by de Saint-Exupery .
And he says , " You know you 've achieved perfection in design , not when you have nothing more to add , but when you have nothing more to take away . "
And that certainly is going in the right direction .
So , what I think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity , which doesn 't cover Brancusi , it doesn 't answer the question of why Mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than Van Gogh , and certainly doesn 't address the question of whether Mozart is simpler than Bach .
But it does make a point -- which is one which , in a sense , differentiates the real world of people who make things , and the world of people who think about things , which is , there is an intellectual merit to asking : How do we make things as simple as we can , as cheap as we can , as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can ?
If we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys , you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it .
Thank you very much .
Quick question .
So can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems -- say a financial system or a legal system , health system -- and say , " That has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons , and this is how we might simplify it " ?
George Whitesides : Yes , I think you could . Because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility , or their stability , you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis .
Have you started to do that ?
I mean , with the health system , you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side , but in terms of the system itself ?
GW : Well , no .
How do I put that simply ? No .
That was a simple , powerful answer . GW : Yes .
So , in terms of that diagnostic technology that you 've got , where is that , and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale .
GW : That 's coming out soon . I mean , the systems work , and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind , but the basic technology works .
You 've got a company set up to ...
GW : A foundation , a foundation . Not-for-profit .
All right . Well , thank you so much for your talk . Thank you .
Rachel Botsman : The case for collaborative consumption
In her talk , Rachel Botsman says we 're " wired to share " -- and shows how websites like Zipcar and Swaptree are changing the rules of human behavior .
So today I 'm going to talk to you about the rise of collaborative consumption .
I 'm going to explain what it is and try and convince you -- in just 15 minutes -- that this isn 't a flimsy idea , or a short-term trend , but a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume , but how we consume .
Now I 'm going to start with a deceptively simple example .
Hands up -- how many of you have books , CDs , DVDs , or videos lying around your house that you probably won 't use again , but you can 't quite bring yourself to throw away ?
Can 't see all the hands , but it looks like all of you , right ?
On our shelves at home , we have a box set of the DVD series " 24 , " season six to be precise .
I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present .
Now my husband , Chris , and I love this show .
But let 's face it , when you 've watched it once maybe , or twice , you don 't really want to watch it again , because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists .
So there it sits on our shelves obsolete to us , but with immediate latent value to someone else .
Now before we go on , I have a confession to make .
I lived in New York for 10 years , and I am a big fan of " Sex and the City . "
Now I 'd love to watch the first movie again as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week .
So how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of " 24 " for a wanted copy of " Sex and the City ? "
Now you may have noticed there 's a new sector emerging called swap-trading .
Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like an online dating service for all your unwanted media .
What it does is use the Internet to create an infinite marketplace to match person A 's " haves " with person C 's " wants , " whatever they may be .
The other week , I went on one of these sites , appropriately called Swaptree , and there were over 59,300 items that I could instantly swap for my copy of " 24 . "
Lo and behold , there in Reseda , CA was Rondoron who wanted swap his or her " like new " copy of " Sex and the City " for my copy of " 24 . "
So in other words , what 's happening here is that Swaptree solves my carrying company 's sugar rush problem , a problem the economists call " the coincidence of wants , " in approximately 60 seconds .
What 's even more amazing is it will print out a purchase label on the spot , because it knows the weight of the item .
Now there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree , but that 's not my interest , and nor is swap trading , per se .
My passion , and what I 've spent the last few years dedicated to researching , is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics inherent in these systems .
When you think about it , it would have seemed like a crazy idea , even a few years ago , that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn 't know and without any money changing hands .
Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree happen successfully , and the one percent that receive a negative rating , it 's for relatively minor reasons , like the item didn 't arrive on time .
So what 's happening here ?
An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play .
Namely , that technology is enabling trust between strangers .
We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face to face , but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before .
So what 's actually happening is that social networks and real-time technologies are taking us back .
We 're bartering , trading , swapping , sharing , but they 're being reinvented into dynamic and appealing forms .
What I find fascinating is that we 've actually wired our world to share , whether that 's our neighborhood , our school , our office , or our Facebook network , and that 's creating an economy of " what 's mine is yours . "
From the mighty eBay , the grandfather of exchange marketplaces , to car-sharing companies such as GoGet , where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour , to social lending platforms such as Zopa , that will take anyone in this audience with 100 dollars to lend , and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world , we 're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe are more hip than hippie .
I call this " groundswell collaborative consumption . "
Now before I dig into the different systems of collaborative consumption , I 'd like to try and answer the question that every author rightfully gets asked , which is , where did this idea come from ?
Now I 'd like to say I woke up one morning and said , " I 'm going to write about collaborative consumption , " but actually it was a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas .
Over the next minute , you 're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots that went on in my head .
The first thing I began to notice : how many big concepts were emerging -- from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs -- around how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose .
And linked to this crowd mania were examples all around the world -- from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia , and everything in between -- on what the power of numbers could achieve .
Now , you know when you learn a new word , and then you start to see that word everywhere ?
That 's what happened to me when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers to creators , to highly enabled collaborators .
What 's happening is the Internet is removing the middleman , so that anyone from a T-shirt designer to a knitter can make a living selling peer-to-peer .
And the ubiquitous force of this peer-to-peer revolution means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates .
I mean , it 's amazing to think that , in every single minute of this speech , 25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded .
Now what I find fascinating about these examples is how they 're actually tapping into our primate instincts .
I mean , we 're monkeys , and we 're born and bred to share and cooperate .
And we were doing so for thousands of years , whether it 's when we hunted in packs , or farmed in cooperatives , before this big system called hyper-consumption came along and we built these fences and created out own little fiefdoms .
But things are changing , and one of the reasons why is the digital natives , or Gen-Y .
They 're growing up sharing -- files , video games , knowledge .
It 's second nature to them .
So we , the millennials -- I am just a millennial -- are like foot soldiers , moving us from a culture of " me " to a culture of " we . "
The reason why it 's happening so fast is because of mobile collaboration .
We now live in a connected age where we can locate anyone , anytime , in real-time , from a small device in our hands .
All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008 , when , of course , the great financial crash happened .
Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists , and he poignantly commented that 2008 is when we hit a wall , when Mother Nature and the market both said , " No more . "
Now we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption is a Ponzi scheme . It 's a house of cards .
Yet , it 's hard for us to individually know what to do .
So all of this is a lot of twittering , right ?
Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head , until actually I realized it was happening because of four key drivers .
One , a renewed belief in the importance of community , and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means .
A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies , fundamentally changing the way we behave .
Three , pressing unresolved environmental concerns .
And four , a global recession that has fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors .
These four drivers are fusing together and creating the big shift -- away from the 20th century , defined by hyper-consumption , towards the 21st century , defined by collaborative consumption .
I generally believe we 're at an inflection point where the sharing behaviors -- through sites such as Flickr and Twitter that are becoming second nature online -- are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives .
From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed to the way we grow food , we are consuming and collaborating once again .
So my co-author , Roo Rogers , and I have actually gathered thousands of examples from all around the world of collaborative consumption .
And although they vary enormously in scale , maturity and purpose , when we dived into them , we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems .
The first is redistribution markets .
Redistribution markets , just like Swaptree , are when you take a used , or pre-owned , item and move it from where it 's not needed to somewhere , or someone , where it is .
They 're increasingly thought of as the fifth ' R ' -- reduce , reuse , recycle , repair and redistribute -- because they stretch the life cycle of a product and thereby reduce waste .
The second is collaborative lifestyles .
This is the sharing of resources of things like money , skills and time .
I bet , in a couple of years , that phrases like " coworking " and " couchsurfing " and " time banks " are going to become a part of everyday vernacular .
One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles is called Landshare .
It 's a scheme in the U.K.
that matches Mr. Jones , with some spare space in his back garden , with Mrs. Smith , a would-be grower .
Together they grow their own food .
It 's one of those ideas that 's so simple , yet brilliant , you wonder why it 's never been done before .
Now , the third system is product-service systems .
This is where you pay for the benefit of the product -- what it does for you -- without needing to own the product outright .
This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high-idling capacity .
And that can be anything from baby goods to fashions to -- how many of you have a power drill , own a power drill ? Right .
That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime .
It 's kind of ridiculous , right ?
Because what you need is the hole , not the drill .
So why don 't you rent the drill , or , even better , rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it ?
These three systems are coming together , allowing people to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles , or their cherished personal freedoms .
I 'm not asking people to share nicely in the sandpit .
So I want to just give you an example of how powerful collaborative consumption can be to change behaviors .
The average car costs 8,000 dollars a year to run .
Yet , that car sits idle for 23 hours a day .
So when you consider these two facts , it starts to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright .
So this is where car-sharing companies such as Zipcar and GoGet come in .
In 2009 , Zipcar took 250 participants from across 13 cities -- and they 're all self-confessed car addicts and car-sharing rookies -- and got them to surrender their keys for a month .
Instead , these people had to walk , bike , take the train , or other forms of public transport .
They could only use their Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary .
The results of this challenge after just one month was staggering .
It 's amazing that 413 lbs were lost just from the extra exercise .
But my favorite statistic is that 100 out of the 250 participants did not want their keys back .
In other words , the car addicts had lost their urge to own .
Now products-service systems have been around for years .
Just think of libraries and laundrettes .
But I think they 're entering a new age , because technology makes sharing frictionless and fun .
There 's a great quote that was written in the New York Times that said , " Sharing is to ownership what the iPod is to the 8-track , what solar power is to the coal mine . "
I believe also , our generation , our relationship to satisfying what we want is far less tangible than any other previous generation .
I don 't want the DVD ; I want the movie it carries .
I don 't want a clunky answering machine ; I want the message it saves .
I don 't want a CD ; I want the music it plays .
In other words , I don 't want stuff ; I want the needs or experiences it fulfills .
This is fueling a massive shift from where usage trumps possessions -- or as Kevin Kelly , the editor of Wired magazine , puts it , " where access is better than ownership . "
Now as our possessions dematerialize into the cloud , a blurry line is appearing between what 's mine , what 's yours , and what 's ours .
I want to give you one example that shows how fast this evolution is happening .
This represents an eight-year time span .
We 've gone from traditional car-ownership to car-sharing companies , such as Zipcar and GoGet , to ride-sharing platforms that match rides to the newest entry , which is peer-to-peer car rental , where you can actually make money out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day to your neighbor .
Now all of these systems require a degree of trust , and the cornerstone to this working is reputation .
Now in the old consumer system , our reputation didn 't matter so much , because our credit history was far more important that any kind of peer-to-peer review .
But now with the Web , we leave a trail .
With every spammer we flag , with every idea we post , comment we share , we 're actually signaling how well we collaborate , and whether we can or can 't be trusted .
Let 's go back to my first example , Swaptree .
I can see that Rondoron has completed 553 trades with a 100 percent success rate .
In other words , I can trust him or her .
Now mark my words , it 's only a matter of time before we 're going to be able to perform a Google-like search and see a cumulative picture of our reputation capital .
And this reputation capital will determine our access to collaborative consumption .
It 's a new social currency , so to speak , that could become as powerful as our credit rating .
Now as a closing thought , I believe we 're actually in a period where we 're waking up from this humongous hangover of emptiness and waste , and we 're taking a leap to create a more sustainable system built to serve our innate needs for community and individual identity .
I believe it will be referred to as a revolution , so to speak -- when society , faced with great challenges , made a seismic shift from individual getting and spending towards a rediscovery of collective good .
I 'm on a mission to make sharing cool .
I 'm on a mission to make sharing hip .
Because I really believe it can disrupt outdated modes of business , help us leapfrog over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption and teach us when enough really is enough .
Thank you very much .
Malcolm London : " High School Training Ground "
Young poet , educator and activist Malcom London performs his stirring poem about life on the front lines of high school . He tells of the " oceans of adolescence " who come to school " but never learn to swim , " of " masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers . " Beautiful , lyrical , chilling .
At 7 : 45 a.m. , I open the doors to a building dedicated to building , yet only breaks me down .
I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors , but I never have the decency to honor their names .
Lockers left open like teenage boys ' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else .
Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers , camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs .
Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here .
Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim , part like the Red Sea when the bell rings .
This is a training ground .
My high school is Chicago , diverse and segregated on purpose .
Social lines are barbed wire .
Labels like " Regulars " and " Honors " resonate .
I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them .
This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors , a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system .
Trained at a young age to capitalize , letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there .
This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow .
No wonder so many of my people spit bars , because the truth is hard to swallow .
The need for degrees has left so many people frozen .
Homework is stressful , but when you go home every day and your home is work , you don 't want to pick up any assignments .
Reading textbooks is stressful , but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written , either dead or getting booked .
Taking tests is stressful , but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting .
I hear education systems are failing , but I believe they 're succeeding at what they 're built to do -- to train you , to keep you on track , to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all .

Omar Ahmad : Political change with pen and paper
Want your local politician to pay attention to an issue you care about ? Take this tip from Omar Ahmad , the beloved former mayor of San Carlos , California : Send a monthly handwritten letter . Old-fashioned correspondence , he shows , is more effective than email , phone -- or even writing a check . Listen for his four simple steps to writing a letter that works .
One of the things that defines a TEDster is you 've taken your passion , and you 've turned it into stewardship .
You actually put action to the issues you care about .
But what you 're going to find eventually is you may need to actually get elected officials to help you out .
So , how do you do that ?
One of the things I should probably tell you is , I worked for the Discovery Channel early in my career , and that sort of warped my framework .
So , when you start to think about politicians , you 've got to realize these are strange creatures .
Other than the fact that they can 't tell directions , and they have very strange breeding habits , how do you actually work with these things ?
What we need to understand is : What drives the political creature ?
And there are two things that are primary in a politician 's heart : One is reputation and influence .
These are the primary tools by which a politician can do his job .
The second one -- unlike most animals , which is survival of the species -- this is preservation of self .
Now you may think it 's money , but that 's actually sort of a proxy to what I can do to preserve myself .
Now , the challenge with you moving your issue forward is these animals are getting broadcast to all the time .
So , what doesn 't work , in terms of getting your issue to be important ?
You can send them an email .
Well , unfortunately , I 've got so many Viagra ads coming at me , your email is lost .
It doesn 't matter , it 's spam .
How about you get on the phone ?
Well , chances are I 've got a droid who 's picking up the phone , " Yes , they called , and they said they didn 't like it . "
That doesn 't move .
Face to face would work , but it 's hard to set it up .
It 's hard to get the context and actually get the communication to work .
Yes , contributions actually do make a difference and they set a context for having a conversation , but it takes some time to build up .
So what actually works ?
And the answer is rather strange .
It 's a letter .
We live in a digital world , but we 're fairly analog creatures .
Letters actually work .
Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff .
I can tell you that every official that I 've ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean .
So , how are you going to write your letter ?
First of all , you 're going to pick up an analog device : a pen .
I know these are tough , and you may have a hard time getting your hand bent around it , but this is actually critical .
And it is critical that you actually handwrite your letter .
It is so novel to see this , that somebody actually picked up an analog device and has written to me .
Second of all , I 'm going to recommend that you get into a proactive stance and write to your elected officials at least once a month .
Here 's my promise to you : If you are consistent and do this , within three months the elected official will start calling you when that issue comes up and say , " What do you think ? "
Now , I 'm going to give you a four paragraph format to work with .
Now , when you approach these animals , you need to understand there 's a dangerous end to them , and you also need to approach them with some level of respect and a little bit of wariness .
So in paragraph number one , what I 'm going to tell you to do is very simply this : You appreciate them .
You may not appreciate the person , you may not appreciate anything else , but maybe you appreciate the fact that they 've got a tough gig .
When animals are going to make a point , they make the point .
They don 't spend a lot of time dicking around .
So , here you go .
Paragraph number two : You may actually have to just get very blunt and say what 's really on your mind .
When you do this , don 't attack people ; you attack tactics .
Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere .
Paragraph number three : When animals are attacked or cornered , they will fight to the death , so you have to give them an exit .
Most of the time , if they have an exit strategy , they should take it .
" Obviously , you 're intelligent .
If you had the right information , you would have done the right thing . "
Lastly , you want to be the nurturing agent .
You 're the safe place to come in to .
So , in paragraph number four , you 're going to tell people , " If no one is providing you with this information , let me help . "
Animals do displays . They do two things : They warn you or they try to attract you and say , " We need to mate . "
You 're going to do that by the way you sign your letter .
You do a number of things : you 're a vice president , you volunteer , you do something else .
Why is is this important ?
Because this establishes the two primary criteria for the political creature : that you have influence in a large sphere , and that my preservation depends on you .
Here is one very quick hack , especially for the feds in the audience .
Here 's how you mail your letter .
First of all , you send the original to the district office .
So , you send the copy to the main office .
If they follow protocol , they 'll pick up the phone and say , " Hey , do you have the original ? "
Then some droid in the back puts the name on a tickler and says , " Oh , this is an important letter . "
And you actually get into the folder that the elected official actually has to read .
So , what your letter means : I 've got to tell you , we are all in a party , and political officials are the pinatas .
We are harangued , lectured to , sold , marketed , but a letter is actually one of the few times that we have honest communication .
I got this letter when I was first elected , and I still carry it to every council meeting I go to .
This is an opportunity at real dialogue , and if you have stewardship and want to communicate , that dialogue is incredibly powerful .
So when you do that , here 's what I can promise : You 're going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the forest .
Get writing .
Damian Palin : Mining minerals from seawater
The world needs clean water , and more and more , we 're pulling it from the oceans , desalinating it , and drinking it . But what to do with the salty brine left behind ? In this intriguing short talk , TED Fellow Damian Palin proposes an idea : Mine it for other minerals we need , with the help of some collaborative metal-munching bacteria .
I collaborate with bacteria .
And I 'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you 'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour .
So what you 're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing , and as they do so they create an electrical charge .
And this attracts metals from their local environment .
And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria .
One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water .
And the desalination process is one where we take out salts .
We can use it for drinking and agriculture .
Removing the salts from water -- particularly seawater -- through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe .
So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology .
We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure .
And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane .
This takes energy , producing clean water .
But we 're also left with a concentrated salt solution , or brine .
But the process is very expensive and it 's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe .
And also , the brine that 's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea .
And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it 's pumped back out into .
So I work in Singapore at the moment , and this is a place that 's really a leading place for desalination technology .
And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [ 900 ] million liters per day of desalinated water .
But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine .
And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play .
So what we 're doing at the moment is we 're accumulating metals like calcium , potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine .
And this , in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned , equates to a $ 4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore -- a place that doesn 't have any natural resources .
So I 'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn 't existed before ; imagine a mining industry that doesn 't mean defiling the Earth ; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine .
And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube , a mining industry that is in harmony with nature .
Thank you .
Drew Dudley : Everyday leadership
We have all changed someone 's life -- usually without even realizing it . In this funny talk , Drew Dudley calls on all of us to celebrate leadership as the everyday act of improving each other 's lives .
How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader ?
See , I 've asked that question all the way across the country , and everywhere I ask it , no matter where , there 's always a huge portion of the audience that won 't put up their hand .
And I 've come to realize that we have made leadership into something bigger than us .
We 've made into something beyond us .
We 've made it about changing the world .
And we 've taken this title of leader , and we treat it as if it 's something that one day we 're going to deserve , but to give it to ourselves right now means a level of arrogance or cockiness that we 're not comfortable with .
And I worry sometimes that we spend so much time celebrating amazing things that hardly anybody can do that we 've convinced ourselves that those are the only things worth celebrating , and we start to devalue the things that we can do every day , and we start to take moments where we truly are a leader and we don 't let ourselves take credit for it , and we don 't let ourselves feel good about it .
And I 've been lucky enough over the last 10 years to work with some amazing people who have helped me redefine leadership in a way that I think has made me happier .
And with my short time today , I just want to share with you the one story that is probably most responsible for that redefinition .
I went to school in a little school called Mount Allison University in Sackville , New Brunswick , and on my last day there , a girl came up to me and she said , " I remember the first time that I met you . "
And then she told me a story that had happened four years earlier .
She said , " On the day before I started university , I was in the hotel room with my mom and my dad , and I was so scared and so convinced that I couldn 't do this , that I wasn 't ready for university , that I just burst into tears .
And my mom and my dad were amazing . They were like , ' Look , we know you 're scared , but let 's just go tomorrow .
Let 's go to the first day , and if at any point you feel as if you can 't do this , that 's fine , just tell us , we will take you home . We love you no matter what . ' " And she says , " So I went the next day and I was standing in line getting ready for registration , and I looked around and I just knew I couldn 't do it .
I knew I wasn 't ready . I knew I had to quit . "
And she says , " I made that decision , and as soon as I made it , there was this incredible feeling of peace that came over me .
And I turned to my mom and my dad to tell them that we needed to go home , and just at that moment , you came out of the Student Union building wearing the stupidest hat I have ever seen in my life . "
" It was awesome .
And you had a big sign promoting Shinerama , which is Students Fighting Cystic Fibrosis , " — a charity I 've worked with for years — " and you had a bucketful of lollipops .
And you were walking along and you were handing the lollipops out to people in line and talking about Shinerama .
And all of a sudden , you got to me , and you just stopped , and you stared . It was creepy . "
This girl right here knows exactly what I 'm talking about .
" And then you looked at the guy next to me , and you smiled , and you reached in your bucket , and you pulled out a lollipop , and you held it out to him , and you said , ' You need to give a lollipop to the beautiful woman standing next to you . ' " And she said , " I have never seen anyone get more embarrassed faster in my life .
He turned beet red , and he wouldn 't even look at me .
He just kind of held the lollipop out like this . "
" And I felt so bad for this dude that I took the lollipop , and as soon as I did , you got this incredibly severe look on your face and you looked at my mom and my dad , and you said , ' Look at that . Look at that .
First day away from home , and already she 's taking candy from a stranger ? ! ' " And she said , " Everybody lost it . Twenty feet in every direction , everyone started to howl .
And I know this is cheesy , and I don 't know why I 'm telling you this , but in that moment when everyone was laughing , I knew that I shouldn 't quit .
I knew that I was where I was supposed to be , and I knew that I was home , and I haven 't spoken to you once in the four years since that day , but I heard that you were leaving , and I had to come up and tell you that you 've been an incredibly important person in my life , and I 'm going to miss you . Good luck . "
And she walks away , and I 'm flattened .
And she gets about six feet away , she turns around and smiles , and goes , " You should probably know this , too .
I 'm still dating that guy four years later . "
A year and a half after I moved to Toronto , I got an invitation to their wedding .
Here 's the kicker . I don 't remember that .
I have no recollection of that moment , and I 've searched my memory banks , because that is funny and I should remember doing it , and I don 't remember it .
And that was such an eye-opening , transformative moment for me to think that maybe the biggest impact I 'd ever had on anyone 's life , a moment that had a woman walk up to a stranger four years later and say , " You 've been an incredibly important person in my life , " was a moment that I didn 't even remember .
How many of you guys have a lollipop moment , a moment where someone said something or did something that you feel fundamentally made your life better ?
All right . How many of you have told that person they did it ?
See , why not ? We celebrate birthdays , where all you have to do is not die for 365 days — — and yet we let people who have made our lives better walk around without knowing it .
And every single one of you , every single one of you has been the catalyst for a lollipop moment .
You have made someone 's life better by something that you said or that you did , and if you think you haven 't , think about all the hands that didn 't go back up when I asked that question .
You 're just one of the people who hasn 't been told .
But it is so scary to think of ourselves as that powerful .
It can be frightening to think that we can matter that much to other people , because as long as we make leadership something bigger than us , as long as we keep leadership something beyond us , as long as we make it about changing the world , we give ourselves an excuse not to expect it every day from ourselves and from each other .
Marianne Williamson said , " Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate .
Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure .
It is our light , and not our darkness , that frightens us . "
And my call to action today is that we need to get over that .
We need to get over our fear of how extraordinarily powerful we can be in each other 's lives .
We need to get over it so we can move beyond it , and our little brothers and our little sisters , and one day our kids -- or our kids right now -- can watch and start to value the impact we can have on each other 's lives more than money and power and titles and influence .
We need to redefine leadership as being about lollipop moments , how many of them we create , how many of them we acknowledge , how many of them we pay forward , and how many of them we say thank you for .
Because we 've made leadership about changing the world , and there is no world . There 's only six billion understandings of it , and if you change one person 's understanding of it , one person 's understanding of what they 're capable of , one person 's understanding of how much people care about them , one person 's understanding of how powerful an agent for change they can be in this world , you 've changed the whole thing .
And if we can understand leadership like that , I think if we can redefine leadership like that , I think we can change everything .
And it 's a simple idea , but I don 't think it 's a small one , and I want to thank you all so much for letting me share it with you today .
Shane Koyczan : To This Day ... for the bullied and beautiful
By turn hilarious and haunting , poet Shane Koyczan puts his finger on the pulse of what it 's like to be young and … different . " To This Day , " his spoken-word poem about bullying , captivated millions as a viral video . Here , he gives a glorious , live reprise with backstory and violin accompaniment by Hannah Epperson .
There 's so many of you .
When I was a kid , I hid my heart under the bed , because my mother said , " If you 're not careful , someday someone 's going to break it . "
Take it from me . Under the bed is not a good hiding spot .
I know because I 've been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself .
But that 's what we were told .
Stand up for yourself .
And that 's hard to do if you don 't know who you are .
We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age , and if we didn 't do it , others did it for us .
Geek . Fatty . Slut . Fag .
And at the same time we were being told what we were , we were being asked , " What do you want to be when you grow up ? "
I always thought that was an unfair question .
It presupposes that we can 't be what we already are .
We were kids .
When I was a kid , I wanted to be a man .
I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet .
When I was a kid , I wanted to shave .
Now , not so much .
When I was eight , I wanted to be a marine biologist .
When I was nine , I saw the movie " Jaws , " and thought to myself , " No , thank you . "
And when I was 10 , I was told that my parents left because they didn 't want me .
When I was 11 , I wanted to be left alone .
When I was 12 , I wanted to die . When I was 13 , I wanted to kill a kid .
When I was 14 , I was asked to seriously consider a career path .
I said , " I 'd like to be a writer . "
And they said , " Choose something realistic . "
So I said , " Professional wrestler . "
And they said , " Don 't be stupid . "
See , they asked me what I wanted to be , then told me what not to be .
And I wasn 't the only one .
We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not , sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be .
I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me .
And I wondered , what made my dreams so easy to dismiss ?
Granted , my dreams are shy , because they 're Canadian .
My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic .
They 're standing alone at the high school dance , and they 've never been kissed .
See , my dreams got called names too .
Silly . Foolish . Impossible .
But I kept dreaming .
I was going to be a wrestler . I had it all figured out .
I was going to be The Garbage Man .
My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor .
My saying was going to be , " I 'm taking out the trash ! "
And then this guy , Duke " The Dumpster " Droese , stole my entire shtick .
I was crushed , as if by a trash compactor .
I thought to myself , " What now ? Where do I turn ? "
Poetry .
Like a boomerang , the thing I loved came back to me .
One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself .
From age 15 to 18 , I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed : a bully .
When I was 19 , I wrote , " I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite . "
Standing up for yourself doesn 't have to mean embracing violence .
When I was a kid , I traded in homework assignments for friendship , then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time , and in most cases not at all .
I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise .
And I remember this plan , born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me " Yogi , " then pointed at my tummy and said , " Too many picnic baskets . "
Turns out it 's not that hard to trick someone , and one day before class , I said , " Yeah , you can copy my homework , " and I gave him all the wrong answers that I 'd written down the night before .
He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score , and couldn 't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero .
I knew I didn 't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30 , but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me , puzzled , and I thought to myself , " Smarter than the average bear , motherfucker . "
This is who I am .
This is how I stand up for myself .
When I was a kid , I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing .
I thought they were both pork chops .
And because my grandmother thought it was cute , and because they were my favorite , she let me keep doing it .
Not really a big deal .
One day , before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees , I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body .
I didn 't want to tell my grandmother about it because I was scared I 'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn 't have been .
A few days later , the gym teacher noticed the bruise , and I got sent to the principal 's office .
From there , I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home .
I saw no reason to lie .
As far as I was concerned , life was pretty good .
I told her , whenever I 'm sad , my grandmother gives me karate chops .
This led to a full-scale investigation , and I was removed from the house for three days , until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises .
News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school , and I earned my first nickname : Porkchop .
To this day , I hate pork chops .
I 'm not the only kid who grew up this way , surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones , as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called , and we got called them all .
So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us , that we 'd be lonely forever , that we 'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed .
So broken heartstrings bled the blues , and we tried to empty ourselves so we 'd feel nothing .
Don 't tell me that hurt less than a broken bone , that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away , that there 's no way for it to metastasize ; it does .
She was eight years old , our first day of grade three when she got called ugly .
We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs .
But the school halls were a battleground .
We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day .
We used to stay inside for recess , because outside was worse .
Outside , we 'd have to rehearse running away , or learn to stay still like statues , giving no clues that we were there .
In grade five , they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read , " Beware of dog . "
To this day , despite a loving husband , she doesn 't think she 's beautiful because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face .
Kids used to say , " She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase , but couldn 't quite get the job done . "
And they 'll never understand that she 's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word " Mom , " because they see her heart before they see her skin , because she 's only ever always been amazing .
He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree , adopted , not because his parents opted for a different destiny .
He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy , started therapy in eighth grade , had a personality made up of tests and pills , lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs , four fifths suicidal , a tidal wave of antidepressants , and an adolescence being called " Popper , " one part because of the pills , 99 parts because of the cruelty .
He tried to kill himself in grade 10 when a kid who could still go home to Mom and Dad had the audacity to tell him , " Get over it . "
As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first aid kit .
To this day , he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends , could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it 's about to fall , and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration , he remains a conversation piece between people who can 't understand sometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity .
We weren 't the only kids who grew up this way .
To this day , kids are still being called names .
The classics were , " Hey stupid , " " Hey spaz . "
Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year , and if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear , do they make a sound ?
Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat when people say things like , " Kids can be cruel . "
Every school was a big top circus tent , and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers , from clowns to carnies , all of these miles ahead of who we were .
We were freaks -- lobster claw boys and bearded ladies , oddities juggling depression and loneliness , playing solitaire , spin the bottle , trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal , but at night , while the others slept , we kept walking the tightrope .
It was practice , and yes , some of us fell .
But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be , and if you can 't see anything beautiful about yourself , get a better mirror , look a little closer , stare a little longer , because there 's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit .
You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself .
You signed it , " They were wrong . "
Because maybe you didn 't belong to a group or a clique .
Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything .
Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell , but never told , because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it ?
You have to believe that they were wrong .
They have to be wrong .
Why else would we still be here ?
We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them .
We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called .
We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway , and if in some way we are , don 't worry .
We only got out to walk and get gas .
We are graduating members from the class of We Made It , not the faded echoes of voices crying out , " Names will never hurt me . "
Of course they did .
But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty .
Raffaello D 'Andrea : The astounding athletic power of quadcopters
In a robot lab at TEDGlobal , Raffaello D 'Andrea demos his flying quadcopters : robots that think like athletes , solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn . In a series of nifty demos , D 'Andrea show drones that play catch , balance and make decisions together -- and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads .
So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic ?
We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters , or quads , for short .
Quads have been around for a long time .
The reason that they 're so popular these days is because they 're mechanically simple .
By controlling the speeds of these four propellers , these machines can roll , pitch , yaw , and accelerate along their common orientation .
On board are also a battery , a computer , various sensors and wireless radios .
Quads are extremely agile , but this agility comes at a cost .
They are inherently unstable , and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly .
So , how did it just do that ?
Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system .
It 's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them .
This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms , which in turn sends commands to the quad , which is also running estimation and control algorithms .
The bulk of our research is algorithms .
It 's the magic that brings these machines to life .
So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete ?
We use something broadly called model-based design .
We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave .
We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them .
For example , that 's how we can make the quad hover .
We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations .
We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad .
Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach .
Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole .
With a little bit of practice , it 's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this , although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands .
It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don 't use my hands .
Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top , which means that it can be located in the space .
You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced .
How did we design the algorithms to do this ?
We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad .
Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system , we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it .
Here , you see that it 's stable , and even if I give it little nudges , it goes back to the nice , balanced position .
We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space .
Using this pointer , made out of reflective markers , I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me .
The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms , designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory .
Let 's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop , and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world .
Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it .
Unlike the balancing pole , I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system .
In fact , the system doesn 't even know that the glass of water is there .
Like before , I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space .
Okay , you should be asking yourself , why doesn 't the water fall out of the glass ?
Two facts : The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way .
The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass , pointing up .
You put these two things together , the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects , which as these speeds are negligible .
And that 's why you don 't need to model the glass .
It naturally doesn 't spill no matter what the quad does .
The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others , and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard .
In this instance , carrying a glass of water is easy .
Balancing a pole is hard .
We 've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured .
Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage ?
Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly , because there are four degrees of freedom to control : roll , pitch , yaw and acceleration .
Hexacopters and octocopters , with six and eight propellers , can provide redundancy , but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs : four .
Or do they ?
If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers , we discover that there 's an unconventional way to fly it .
We relinquish control of yaw , but roll , pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration .
Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible .
In this instance , this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage , just like human athletes do , instead of building machines with redundancy .
We can 't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water , or when a vaulter is twisting in the air , the ground fast approaching .
Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry ?
Will the vaulter stick the landing ?
Suppose we want this quad here to perform a triple flip and finish off at the exact same spot that it started .
This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can 't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution .
There simply isn 't enough time .
Instead , what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly , observe how it finishes the maneuver , and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better .
Similar to the diver and the vaulter , it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard .
Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports .
How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort ?
This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple , so not too large .
The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds , or 50 times per second .
We first figure out where the ball is going .
We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from .
Third , a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball .
Fourth , we only execute 20 milliseconds ' worth of that strategy .
Twenty milliseconds later , the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball .
Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own , they can do it collectively .
These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net .
They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me .
Notice that , at full extension , these quads are vertical .
In fact , when fully extended , this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch .
The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me .
Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second .
Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities .
What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being ?
What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming .
It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time .
Similar to the pointer that I used earlier , we can use this as inputs to the system .
We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures .
Interaction doesn 't have to be virtual . It can be physical .
Take this quad , for example .
It 's trying to stay at a fixed point in space .
If I try to move it out of the way , it fights me , and moves back to where it wants to be .
We can change this behavior , however .
We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I 'm applying to the quad .
Once we know this force , we can also change the laws of physics , as far as the quad is concerned , of course .
Here the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid .
We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine .
I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration .
So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics .
Let 's have a little bit of fun with this .
For what you will see next , these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto .
As time goes on , gravity will be increased until we 're all back on planet Earth , but I assure you we won 't get there .
Okay , here goes .
Whew !
You 're all thinking now , these guys are having way too much fun , and you 're probably also asking yourself , why exactly are they building machine athletes ?
Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities .
Others think that it has more of a social role , that it 's used to bind the group .
Similarly , we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits .
What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life ?
Like all our past creations and innovations , they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused .
This is not a technical choice we are faced with ; it 's a social one .
Let 's make the right choice , the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines , just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us .
Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain .
They 're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team .
Federico Augugliaro , Dario Brescianini , Markus Hehn , Sergei Lupashin , Mark Muller and Robin Ritz .
Look out for them . They 're destined for great things .
Thank you .
Thomas Goetz : It 's time to redesign medical data
Your medical chart : it 's hard to access , impossible to read -- and full of information that could make you healthier if you just knew how to use it . At TEDMED , Thomas Goetz looks at medical data , making a bold call to redesign it and get more insight from it .
I 'm going to be talking to you about how we can tap a really underutilized resource in health care , which is the patient , or , as I like to use the scientific term , people .
Because we are all patients , we are all people .
Even doctors are patients at some point .
So I want to talk about that as an opportunity that we really have failed to engage with very well in this country and , in fact , worldwide .
If you want to get at the big part -- I mean from a public health level , where my training is -- you 're looking at behavioral issues .
You 're looking at things where people are actually given information , and they 're not following through with it .
It 's a problem that manifests itself in diabetes , obesity , many forms of heart disease , even some forms of cancer -- when you think of smoking .
Those are all behaviors where people know what they 're supposed to do .
They know what they 're supposed to be doing , but they 're not doing it .
Now behavior change is something that is a long-standing problem in medicine .
It goes all the way back to Aristotle .
And doctors hate it , right ?
I mean , they complain about it all the time .
We talk about it in terms of engagement , or non-compliance .
When people don 't take their pills , when people don 't follow doctors ' orders -- these are behavior problems .
But for as much as clinical medicine agonizes over behavior change , there 's not a lot of work done in terms of trying to fix that problem .
So the crux of it comes down to this notion of decision-making -- giving information to people in a form that doesn 't just educate them or inform them , but actually leads them to make better decisions , better choices in their lives .
One part of medicine , though , has faced the problem of behavior change pretty well , and that 's dentistry .
Dentistry might seem -- and I think it is -- many dentists would have to acknowledge it 's somewhat of a mundane backwater of medicine .
Not a lot of cool , sexy stuff happening in dentistry .
But they have really taken this problem of behavior change and solved it .
It 's the one great preventive health success we have in our health care system .
People brush and floss their teeth .
They don 't do it as much as they should , but they do it .
So I 'm going to talk about one experiment that a few dentists in Connecticut cooked up about 30 years ago .
So this is an old experiment , but it 's a really good one , because it was very simple , so it 's an easy story to tell .
So these Connecticut dentists decided that they wanted to get people to brush their teeth and floss their teeth more often , and they were going to use one variable : they wanted to scare them .
They wanted to tell them how bad it would be if they didn 't brush and floss their teeth .
They had a big patient population .
They divided them up into two groups .
They had a low-fear population , where they basically gave them a 13-minute presentation , all based in science , but told them that , if you didn 't brush and floss your teeth , you could get gum disease . If you get gum disease , you will lose your teeth , but you 'll get dentures , and it won 't be that bad .
So that was the low-fear group .
The high-fear group , they laid it on really thick .
They showed bloody gums .
They showed puss oozing out from between their teeth .
They told them that their teeth were going to fall out .
They said that they could have infections that would spread from their jaws to other parts of their bodies , and ultimately , yes , they would lose their teeth .
They would get dentures , and if you got dentures , you weren 't going to be able to eat corn-on-the-cob , you weren 't going to be able to eat apples , you weren 't going to be able to eat steak .
You 'll eat mush for the rest of your life .
So go brush and floss your teeth .
That was the message . That was the experiment .
Now they measured one other variable .
They wanted to capture one other variable , which was the patients ' sense of efficacy .
This was the notion of whether the patients felt that they actually would go ahead and brush and floss their teeth .
So they asked them at the beginning , " Do you think you 'll actually be able to stick with this program ? "
And the people who said , " Yeah , yeah . I 'm pretty good about that , " they were characterized as high efficacy , and the people who said , " Eh , I never get around to brushing and flossing as much as I should , " they were characterized as low efficacy .
So the upshot was this .
The upshot of this experiment was that fear was not really a primary driver of the behavior at all .
The people who brushed and flossed their teeth were not necessarily the people who were really scared about what would happen -- it 's the people who simply felt that they had the capacity to change their behavior .
So fear showed up as not really the driver .
It was the sense of efficacy .
So I want to isolate this , because it was a great observation -- 30 years ago , right , 30 years ago -- and it 's one that 's laid fallow in research .
It was a notion that really came out of Albert Bandura 's work , who studied whether people could get a sense of empowerment .
The notion of efficacy basically boils down to one -- that if somebody believes that they have the capacity to change their behavior .
In health care terms , you could characterize this as whether or not somebody feels that they see a path towards better health , that they can actually see their way towards getting better health , and that 's a very important notion .
It 's an amazing notion .
We don 't really know how to manipulate it , though , that well .
Except , maybe we do .
So fear doesn 't work , right ? Fear doesn 't work .
And this is a great example of how we haven 't learned that lesson at all .
This is a campaign from the American Diabetes Association .
This is still the way we 're communicating messages about health .
I mean , I showed my three-year-old this slide last night , and he 's like , " Papa , why is an ambulance in these people 's homes ? "
And I had to explain , " They 're trying to scare people . "
And I don 't know if it works .
Now here 's what does work : personalized information works .
Again , Bandura recognized this years ago , decades ago .
When you give people specific information about their health , where they stand , and where they want to get to , where they might get to , that path , that notion of a path -- that tends to work for behavior change .
So let me just spool it out a little bit .
So you start with personalized data , personalized information that comes from an individual , and then you need to connect it to their lives .
You need to connect it to their lives , hopefully not in a fear-based way , but one that they understand .
Okay , I know where I sit . I know where I 'm situated .
And that doesn 't just work for me in terms of abstract numbers -- this overload of health information that we 're inundated with .
But it actually hits home .
It 's not just hitting us in our heads ; it 's hitting us in our hearts .
There 's an emotional connection to information because it 's from us .
That information then needs to be connected to choices , needs to be connected to a range of options , directions that we might go to -- trade-offs , benefits .
Finally , we need to be presented with a clear point of action .
We need to connect the information always with the action , and then that action feeds back into different information , and it creates , of course , a feedback loop .
Now this is a very well-observed and well-established notion for behavior change .
But the problem is that things -- in the upper-right corner there -- personalized data , it 's been pretty hard to come by .
It 's a difficult and expensive commodity , until now .
So I 'm going to give you an example , a very simple example of how this works .
So we 've all seen these . These are the " your speed limit " signs .
You 've seen them all around , especially these days as radars are cheaper .
And here 's how they work in the feedback loop .
So you start with the personalized data where the speed limit on the road that you are at that point is 25 , and , of course , you 're going faster than that .
We always are . We 're always going above the speed limit .
The choice in this case is pretty simple .
We either keep going fast , or we slow down .
We should probably slow down , and that point of action is probably now .
We should take our foot off the pedal right now , and generally we do . These things are shown to be pretty effective in terms of getting people to slow down .
They reduce speeds by about five to 10 percent .
They last for about five miles , in which case we put our foot back on the pedal .
But it works , and it even has some health repercussions .
Your blood pressure might drop a little bit .
Maybe there 's fewer accidents , so there 's public health benefits .
But by and large , this is a feedback loop that 's so nifty and too rare .
Because in health care , most health care , the data is very removed from the action .
It 's very difficult to line things up so neatly .
But we have an opportunity .
So I want to talk about , I want to shift now to think about how we deliver health information in this country , how we actually get information .
This is a pharmaceutical ad .
Actually , it 's a spoof . It 's not a real pharmaceutical ad .
Nobody 's had the brilliant idea of calling their drug Havidol quite yet .
But it looks completely right .
So it 's exactly the way we get health information and pharmaceutical information , and it just sounds perfect .
And then we turn the page of the magazine , and we see this -- now this is the page the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to put into their ads , or to follow their ads , and to me , this is one of the most cynical exercises in medicine .
Because we know .
Who among us would actually say that people read this ?
And who among us would actually say that people who do try to read this actually get anything out of it ?
This is a bankrupt effort at communicating health information .
There is no good faith in this .
So this is a different approach .
This is an approach that has been developed by a couple researchers at Dartmouth Medical School , Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin .
And they created this thing called the " drug facts box . "
They took inspiration from , of all things , Cap 'n Crunch .
They went to the nutritional information box and saw that what works for cereal , works for our food , actually helps people understand what 's in their food .
God forbid we should use that same standard that we make Cap 'n Crunch live by and bring it to drug companies .
So let me just walk through this quickly .
It says very clearly what the drug is for , specifically who it is good for , so you can start to personalize your understanding of whether the information is relevant to you or whether the drug is relevant to you .
You can understand exactly what the benefits are .
It isn 't this kind of vague promise that it 's going to work no matter what , but you get the statistics for how effective it is .
And finally , you understand what those choices are .
You can start to unpack the choices involved because of the side effects .
Every time you take a drug , you 're walking into a possible side effect .
So it spells those out in very clean terms , and that works .
So I love this . I love that drug facts box .
And so I was thinking about , what 's an opportunity that I could have to help people understand information ?
What 's another latent body of information that 's out there that people are really not putting to use ?
And so I came up with this : lab test results .
Blood test results are this great source of information .
They 're packed with information .
They 're just not for us . They 're not for people . They 're not for patients .
They go right to doctors .
And God forbid -- I think many doctors , if you really asked them , they don 't really understand all this stuff either .
This is the worst presented information .
You ask Tufte , and he would say , " Yes , this is the absolute worst presentation of information possible . "
What we did at Wired was we went , and I got our graphic design department to re-imagine these lab reports .
So that 's what I want to walk you through .
So this is the general blood work before , and this is the after , this is what we came up with .
The after takes what was four pages -- that previous slide was actually the first of four pages of data that 's just the general blood work .
It goes on and on and on , all these values , all these numbers you don 't know .
This is our one-page summary .
We use the notion of color .
It 's an amazing notion that color could be used .
So on the top-level you have your overall results , the things that might jump out at you from the fine print .
Then you can drill down and understand how actually we put your level in context , and we use color to illustrate exactly where your value falls .
In this case , this patient is slightly at risk of diabetes because of their glucose level .
Likewise , you can go over your lipids and , again , understand what your overall cholesterol level is and then break down into the HDL and the LDL if you so choose .
But again , always using color and personalized proximity to that information .
All those other values , all those pages and pages of values that are full of nothing , we summarize .
We tell you that you 're okay , you 're normal .
But you don 't have to wade through it . You don 't have to go through the junk .
And then we do two other very important things that kind of help fill in this feedback loop : we help people understand in a little more detail what these values are and what they might indicate .
And then we go a further step -- we tell them what they can do .
We give them some insight into what choices they can make , what actions they can take .
So that 's our general blood work test .
Then we went to CRP test .
In this case , it 's a sin of omission .
They have this huge amount of space , and they don 't use it for anything , so we do .
Now the CRP test is often done following a cholesterol test , or in conjunction with a cholesterol test .
So we take the bold step of putting the cholesterol information on the same page , which is the way the doctor is going to evaluate it .
So we thought the patient might actually want to know the context as well .
It 's a protein that shows up when your blood vessels might be inflamed , which might be a risk for heart disease .
What you 're actually measuring is spelled out in clean language .
Then we use the information that 's already in the lab report .
We use the person 's age and their gender to start to fill in the personalized risks .
So we start to use the data we have to run a very simple calculation that 's on all sorts of online calculators to get a sense of what the actual risk is .
The last one I 'll show you is a PSA test .
Here 's the before , and here 's the after .
Now a lot of our effort on this one -- as many of you probably know , a PSA test is a very controversial test .
It 's used to test for prostate cancer , but there are all sorts of reasons why your prostate might be enlarged .
And so we spent a good deal of our time indicating that .
We again personalized the risks .
So this patient is in their 50s , so we can actually give them a very precise estimate of what their risk for prostate cancer is .
In this case it 's about 25 percent , based on that .
And then again , the follow-up actions .
So our cost for this was less than 10,000 dollars , all right .
That 's what Wired magazine spent on this .
Why is Wired magazine doing this ?
Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp , the two largest lab testing companies -- last year , they made profits of over 700 million dollars and over 500 million dollars respectively .
Now this is not a problem of resources ; this is a problem of incentives .
We need to recognize that the target of this information should not be the doctor , should not be the insurance company .
It should be the patient .
It 's the person who actually , in the end , is going to be having to change their lives and then start adopting new behaviors .
This is information that is incredibly powerful .
It 's an incredibly powerful catalyst to change .
But we 're not using it . It 's just sitting there .
It 's being lost .
So I want to just offer four questions that every patient should ask , because I don 't actually expect people to start developing these lab test reports .
But you can create your own feedback loop .
Anybody can create their feedback loop by asking these simple questions : Can I have my results ?
And the only acceptable answer is -- -- yes .
What does this mean ? Help me understand what the data is .
What are my options ? What choices are now on the table ?
And then , what 's next ?
How do I integrate this information into the longer course of my life ?
So I want to wind up by just showing that people have the capacity to understand this information .
This is not beyond the grasp of ordinary people .
You do not need to have the education level of people in this room .
Ordinary people are capable of understanding this information , if we only go to the effort of presenting it to them in a form that they can engage with .
And engagement is essential here , because it 's not just giving them information ; it 's giving them an opportunity to act .
That 's what engagement is . It 's different from compliance .
It works totally different from the way we talk about behavior in medicine today .
And this information is out there .
I 've been talking today about latent information , all this information that exists in the system that we 're not putting to use .
But there are all sorts of other bodies of information that are coming online , and we need to recognize the capacity of this information to engage people , to help people and to change the course of their lives .
Thank you very much .

Kate Orff : Reviving New York 's rivers -- with oysters !
Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change . Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers , oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in " oyster-tecture . " Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit .
I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land , from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan , has really shaped our history and our character .
But one thing is clear .
In the last 100 years alone , our country -- and this is a sprawl map of America -- our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we 've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet .
And so , how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them .
This graph represents what we 're dealing with now in the built environment .
And it 's really a conflux of urban population rising , biodiversity plummeting and also , of course , sea levels rising and climate changing .
So when I also think about design , I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way .
And you can see from the arrow here indicating " you are here , " I 'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology , and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way .
So the era of big infrastructure is over .
I mean , these sort of top-down , mono-functional , capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it .
We need new tools and new approaches .
Similarly , the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field , devoid of context , is really not the -- excuse me , it 's fairly blatant -- is really not the approach that we need to take .
So we need new stories , new heroes and new tools .
So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war , and that is the eastern oyster .
So , albeit a very small creature and very modest , this creature is incredible , because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures .
It can grow ; you can grow it ; and -- did I mention ? -- it 's quite tasty .
So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called " oyster-tecture . "
And the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels , eelgrass and oysters -- species that live in the harbor -- and , at the same time , harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now .
Here 's a map of my city , New York City , showing inundation in red .
And what 's circled is the site that I 'm going to talk about , the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island .
If you look here at this map , showing everything in blue is out in the water , and everything in yellow is upland .
But you can see , even just intuit , from this map , that the harbor has dredged and flattened , and went from a rich , three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years .
Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself .
Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly -- I will admit it .
There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination , but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition , and it 's a condition that we 're all facing .
And here 's a map of that condition , showing the contaminants in yellow and green , exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise .
So we really had a lot to deal with .
When we started this project , one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there .
And you can see from this map , there 's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement .
We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself .
So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept , harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern .
And the idea has two core stages .
One is to develop a new artificial ecology , a reef out in the harbor , that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus .
Because if you have cleaner water and slower water , you can imagine a new way of living with that water .
So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way , I think .
Here we are , back to our hero , the oyster .
And again , it 's this incredibly exciting animal .
It accepts algae and detritus in one end , and through this beautiful , glamorous set of stomach organs , out the other end comes cleaner water .
And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day .
Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days .
They were key in our culture and our economy .
Basically , New York was built on the backs of oystermen , and our streets were literally built over oyster shells .
This image is an image of an oyster cart , which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today .
So again , we got the short end of the deal there .
Finally , oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures .
They really become nature 's wave attenuators .
And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem .
Many , many species depend on them .
So we were inspired by the oyster , but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster .
It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat , which is when they 're floating through the water , and when they 're ready to attach onto another oyster , to an adult male oyster or female oyster , in a number of weeks .
We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus , then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef .
And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive .
How does the reef work ? Well , it 's very , very simple .
A core concept here is that climate change isn 't something that -- the answers won 't land down from the Moon .
And with a $ 20 billion price tag , we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what 's in front of us .
So this image is simply showing -- it 's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope .
What is fuzzy rope , you ask ?
It 's just that ; it 's this very inexpensive thing , available practically at your hardware store , and it 's very cheap .
So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project .
So in the studio , rather than drawing , we began to learn how to knit .
The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on .
You can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space .
And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change .
It also creates this incredibly interesting , I think , new amphibious public space , where you can imagine working , you can imagine recreating in a new way .
In the end , what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century -- an amphibious park , if you will .
So get your Tevas on .
So you can imagine scuba diving here .
This is an image of high school students , scuba divers that we worked with on our team .
So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water , and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring .
Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world : this is the word " flupsy " -- it 's short for " floating upwelling system . "
And this glorious , readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below .
So the water is churned through this raft .
You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them .
So rather than having 10 oysters , you have 10,000 oysters .
And then those spat are then seeded .
Here 's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines -- the flupsification of the Gowanus .
New word .
And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges .
And finally , how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef .
I get asked two questions about this project .
One is : why isn 't it happening now ?
And the second one is : when can we eat the oysters ?
And the answer is : not yet , they 're working .
But we imagine , with our calculations , that by 2050 , you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster .
To conclude , this is just one cross-section of one piece of city , but my dream is , my hope is , that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable , a more livable and a more delicious future .
Thank you .
Stephen Cave : The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death
Philosopher Stephen Cave begins with a dark but compelling question : When did you first realize you were going to die ? And even more interesting : Why do we humans so often resist the inevitability of death ? Cave explores four narratives -- common across civilizations -- that we tell ourselves " in order to help us manage the terror of death . "
I have a question : Who here remembers when they first realized they were going to die ?
I do . I was a young boy , and my grandfather had just died , and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of what had happened .
What did it mean that he was dead ?
Where had he gone ?
It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him .
But then the really shocking question occurred to me : If he could die , could it happen to me too ?
Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me ?
Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I slept ?
Well , at some point , all children become aware of death .
It can happen in different ways , of course , and usually comes in stages .
Our idea of death develops as we grow older .
And if you reach back into the dark corners of your memory , you might remember something like what I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to me too , that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting .
And this development in childhood reflects the development of our species .
Just as there was a point in your development as a child when your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to realize you were mortal , so at some point in the evolution of our species , some early human 's sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for them to become the first human to realize , " I 'm going to die . "
This is , if you like , our curse .
It 's the price we pay for being so damn clever .
We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen one day surely will , the end of all our projects , our hopes , our dreams , of our individual world .
We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse .
And that 's frightening . It 's terrifying .
And so we look for a way out .
And in my case , as I was about five years old , this meant asking my mum .
Now when I first started asking what happens when we die , the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity , and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now " up there looking down on us , " and if I should die too , which wouldn 't happen of course , then I too would go up there , which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator .
Now this didn 't sound very plausible .
I used to watch a children 's news program at the time , and this was the era of space exploration .
There were always rockets going up into the sky , up into space , going up there .
But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having met my granddad or any other dead people .
But I was scared , and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept .
And so I believed it anyway , even though it didn 't make much sense .
And this thought process that I went through as a child , and have been through many times since , including as a grown-up , is a product of what psychologists call a bias .
Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong , ways in which we miscalculate , misjudge , distort reality , or see what we want to see , and the bias I 'm talking about works like this : Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn 't true and they can , instead , live forever , even if it means taking the existential elevator .
Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all .
It has been demonstrated in over 400 empirical studies .
Now these studies are ingenious , but they 're simple .
They work like this .
You take two groups of people who are similar in all relevant respects , and you remind one group that they 're going to die but not the other , then you compare their behavior .
So you 're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware of their mortality .
And every time , you get the same result : People who are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that tell them they can escape death and live forever .
So here 's an example : One recent study took two groups of agnostics , that is people who are undecided in their religious beliefs .
Now , one group was asked to think about being dead .
The other group was asked to think about being lonely .
They were then asked again about their religious beliefs .
Those who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as likely to express faith in God and Jesus .
Twice as likely .
Even though the before they were all equally agnostic .
But put the fear of death in them , and they run to Jesus .
Now , this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe , regardless of the evidence , and it works not just for religion , but for any kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form , whether it 's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism , which promises you can live on as part of a greater whole .
This is a bias that has shaped the course of human history .
Now , the theory behind this bias in the over 400 studies is called terror management theory , and the idea is simple . It 's just this .
We develop our worldviews , that is , the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it , in order to help us manage the terror of death .
And these immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations , but I believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four basic forms that these immortality stories can take .
And we can see them repeating themselves throughout history , just with slight variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day .
Now I 'm going to briefly introduce these four basic forms of immortality story , and I want to try to give you some sense of the way in which they 're retold by each culture or generation using the vocabulary of their day .
Now , the first story is the simplest .
We want to avoid death , and the dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and simplest kind of immortality story , and it might at first sound implausible , but actually , almost every culture in human history has had some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or something that promises to keep us going forever .
Ancient Egypt had such myths , ancient Babylon , ancient India .
Throughout European history , we find them in the work of the alchemists , and of course we still believe this today , only we tell this story using the vocabulary of science .
So 100 years ago , hormones had just been discovered , and people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and disease , and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells , genetic engineering , and nanotechnology .
But the idea that science can cure death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir , a story that is as old as civilization .
But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy .
When we look back through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past , the one thing they now have in common is that they 're all dead .
So we need a backup plan , and exactly this kind of plan B is what the second kind of immortality story offers , and that 's resurrection .
And it stays with the idea that I am this body , I am this physical organism .
It accepts that I 'm going to have to die but says , despite that , I can rise up and I can live again .
In other words , I can do what Jesus did .
Jesus died , he was three days in the [ tomb ] , and then he rose up and lived again .
And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox believe , not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims .
But our desire to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it again for the scientific age , for example , with the idea of cryonics .
That 's the idea that when you die , you can have yourself frozen , and then , at some point when technology has advanced enough , you can be thawed out and repaired and revived and so resurrected .
And so some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again , and other people believe an omnipotent scientist will do it .
But for others , the whole idea of resurrection , of climbing out of the grave , it 's just too much like a bad zombie movie .
They find the body too messy , too unreliable to guarantee eternal life , and so they set their hopes on the third , more spiritual immortality story , the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul .
Now , the majority of people on Earth believe they have a soul , and the idea is central to many religions .
But even though , in its current form , in its traditional form , the idea of the soul is still hugely popular , nonetheless we are again reinventing it for the digital age , for example with the idea that you can leave your body behind by uploading your mind , your essence , the real you , onto a computer , and so live on as an avatar in the ether .
But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of science , particularly neuroscience , it suggests that your mind , your essence , the real you , is very much dependent on a particular part of your body , that is , your brain .
And such skeptics can find comfort in the fourth kind of immortality story , and that is legacy , the idea that you can live on through the echo you leave in the world , like the great Greek warrior Achilles , who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might win immortal fame .
And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and popular now as it ever was , and in our digital age , it 's even easier to achieve .
You don 't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king or hero .
All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat .
But some people prefer to leave a more tangible , biological legacy -- children , for example .
Or they like , they hope , to live on as part of some greater whole , a nation or a family or a tribe , their gene pool .
But again , there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality .
Woody Allen , for example , who said , " I don 't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen .
I want to live on in my apartment . "
So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories , and I 've tried to give just some sense of how they 're retold by each generation with just slight variations to fit the fashions of the day .
And the fact that they recur in this way , in such a similar form but in such different belief systems , suggests , I think , that we should be skeptical of the truth of any particular version of these stories .
The fact that some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence .
Rather , we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them , and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death .
So the question is , are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial , or can we overcome this bias ?
Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could .
He argued that the fear of death is natural , but it is not rational .
" Death , " he said , " is nothing to us , because when we are here , death is not , and when death is here , we are gone . "
Now this is often quoted , but it 's difficult to really grasp , to really internalize , because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine .
So 2,000 years later , another philosopher , Ludwig Wittgenstein , put it like this : " Death is not an event in life : We do not live to experience death .
And so , " he added , " in this sense , life has no end . "
So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void , but it wasn 't rational , because being swallowed by the void is not something that any of us will ever live to experience .
Now , overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us , yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational , and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us , then we can at least start to try to minimize the influence it has on our lives .
Now , I find it helps to see life as being like a book : Just as a book is bounded by its covers , by beginning and end , so our lives are bounded by birth and death , and even though a book is limited by beginning and end , it can encompass distant landscapes , exotic figures , fantastic adventures .
And even though a book is limited by beginning and end , the characters within it know no horizons .
They only know the moments that make up their story , even when the book is closed .
And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page .
Long John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of " Treasure Island . "
And so it should be with us .
Imagine the book of your life , its covers , its beginning and end , and your birth and your death .
You can only know the moments in between , the moments that make up your life .
It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers , whether before your birth or after your death .
And you needn 't worry how long the book is , or whether it 's a comic strip or an epic .
The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story .
Thank you .
Richard Resnick : Welcome to the genomic revolution
In this accessible talk from TEDxBoston , Richard Resnick shows how cheap and fast genome sequencing is about to turn health care upside down . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Ladies and gentlemen , I present to you the human genome .
Chromosome one , top left .
Bottom right are the sex chromosomes .
Women have two copies of that big X chromosome ; men have the X and , of course , that small copy of the Y.
Sorry boys , but it 's just a tiny little thing that makes you different .
So if you zoom in on this genome , then what you see , of course , is this double helix structure -- the code of life spelled out with these four biochemical letters , or we call them bases , right : A , C , G and T.
How many are there in the human genome ? Three billion .
Is that a big number ?
Well , everybody can throw around big numbers .
But in fact , if I were to place one base on each pixel of this 1280 by 800 resolution screen , we would need 3,000 screens to take a look at the genome .
So it 's really quite big .
And perhaps because of its size , a group of people -- all , by the way , with Y chromosomes -- decided they would want to sequence it .
And so 15 years , actually , and about four billion dollars later , the genome was sequenced and published .
In 2003 , the final version was published , and they keep working on it .
That was all done on a machine that looks like this .
It costs about a dollar for each base -- a very slow way of doing it .
Well folks , I 'm here to tell you that the world has completely changed and none of you know about it .
So now what we do is we take a genome , we make maybe 50 copies of it , we cut all those copies up into little 50-base reads , and then we sequence them , massively parallel .
And then we bring that into software , and we reassemble it and we tell you what the story is .
And so just to give you a picture of what this looks like , the Human Genome Project : 3 gigabases , right .
One run on one of these machines : 200 gigabases in a week .
And that 200 is going to change to 600 this summer , and there 's no sign of this pace slowing .
So the price of a base , to sequence a base , has fallen 100 million times .
That 's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998 , waiting until 2011 , and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice .
World population , PC placements , the archive of all the medical literature , Moore 's law , the old way of sequencing , and here 's all the new stuff .
Guys , this is a log scale ; you don 't typically see lines that go up like that .
So the worldwide capacity to sequence human genomes is something like 50,000 to 100,000 human genomes this year .
And we know this based on the machines that are being placed .
This is expected to double , triple or maybe quadruple year over year for the foreseeable future .
In fact , there 's one lab in particular that represents 20 percent of all that capacity .
It 's called the Beijing Genomics Institute .
The Chinese are absolutely winning this race to the new Moon , by the way .
What does this mean for medicine ?
So a woman is age 37 .
She presents with stage 2 estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer .
She is treated with surgery , chemotherapy and radiation .
She goes home .
Two years later , she comes back with stage three C ovarian cancer .
Unfortunately , treated again with surgery and chemotherapy .
She comes back three years later at age 42 with more ovarian cancer , more chemotherapy .
Six months later , she comes back with acute myeloid leukemia .
She goes into respiratory failure and dies eight days later .
So first , the way in which this woman was treated , in as little as 10 years , will look like bloodletting .
And it 's because of people like my colleague , Rick Wilson , at the Genome Institute at Washington University , who decided to take a look at this woman postmortem .
And he sequenced , he took skin cells , healthy skin , and cancerous bone marrow , and he sequenced the whole genomes of both of them in a couple of weeks , no big deal .
And then he compared those two genomes in software , and what he found , among other things , was a deletion , a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53 .
If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene , you 're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life .
So unfortunately , this doesn 't help this woman , but it does have severe , profound if you will , implications to her family .
I mean , if they have the same mutation , and they get this genetic test , and they understand it , then they can go and get regular screens , and they can catch cancer early and potentially live a significantly longer life .
Let me introduce you now to the Beery twins , diagnosed with cerebral palsy at the age of two .
Their mom is a very brave woman who didn 't believe that the symptoms weren 't matching up , and through some heroic efforts and a lot of Internet searching , she was able to convince the medical community that , in fact , they had something else .
What they had was dopa-responsive dystonia .
And so they were given L-Dopa , and their symptoms did improve , but they weren 't totally asymptomatic .
Significant problems remained .
Turns out the gentleman in this picture is a guy named Joe Beery , who was lucky enough to be the CIO of a company called Life Technologies .
They 're one of the two companies that makes these massive whole genome sequencing tools .
And so what he did was he got his kids sequenced .
And what they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR , which is responsible for producing serotonin , among other things .
So on top of L-Dopa , they gave these kids a serotonin precursor drug , and they 're effectively normal now .
Guys , this would never have happened without whole genome sequencing .
And at the time -- this was a few years ago -- it cost $ 100,000 .
Today it 's $ 10,000 . Next year it 's $ 1,000 .
The year after it 's $ 100 , give or take a year .
That 's how fast this is moving .
So here 's little Nick -- likes Batman and squirt guns .
And it turns out Nick shows up at the children 's hospital with this distended belly like a famine victim .
And it 's not that he 's not eating , it 's that when he eats , his intestine basically opens up and feces spill out into his gut .
So a hundred surgeries later , he looks at his mom and says , " Mom , please pray for me . I 'm in so much pain . "
His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what 's going on , but he says , " Let 's get this kid 's genome sequenced . "
And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death .
So the theory is that he 's having some immunological reaction to what 's going on to the food essentially , and that 's a natural reaction , which causes some programmed cell death .
But the gene that regulates that down is broken .
And so this informs , among other things , of course , a treatment for bone marrow transplant , which he undertakes .
And after nine months of grueling recovery , he 's now eating steak with A1 sauce .
The prospect of using the genome as a universal diagnostic is upon us today .
Today , it 's here .
And what it means for all of us is that everybody in this room could live an extra five , 10 , 20 years just because of this one thing .
Which is a fantastic story , unless you think about humanity 's footprint on the planet and our ability to keep up food production .
So it turns out that the very same technology is also being used to grow new lines of corn , wheat , soybean and other crops that are highly tolerant of drought , of flood , of pests and pesticides .
Now look , as long as we continue to increase the population , we 're going to have to continue to grow and eat genetically modified foods , and that 's the only position that I 'll take today .
Unless there 's anybody in the audience that would like to volunteer to stop eating ?
None , not one .
This is a typewriter , a staple of every desktop for decades .
And in fact , the typewriter was essentially deleted by this thing .
And then more general versions of word processors came about .
But ultimately , it was a disruption on top of a disruption .
It was Bob Metcalfe inventing the Ethernet and the connection of all these computers that fundamentally changed everything .
And suddenly we had Netscape , and we had Yahoo and we had , indeed , the entire dotcom bubble .
Not to worry though , that was quickly rescued by the iPod , Facebook and , indeed , angry birds .
Look , this is where we are today .
This is the genomic revolution today . This is where we are .
So what I 'd like you to consider is : What does it mean when these dots don 't represent the individual bases of your genome , but they connect to genomes all across the planet ?
So I just recently had to buy life insurance .
And I was required to answer : A. I have never had a genetic test , B. I 've had one , here you go , and C. I 've had one and I 'm not telling .
Thankfully , I was able to answer A , and I say that honestly in case my life insurance agent is listening .
But what would have happened if I had said C ?
Consumer applications for genomics , they will flourish .
Do you want to see whether you 're genetically compatible with your girlfriend ? Sure .
DNA sequencing on your iPhone ? There 's an app for that .
Personalized genomic massage anyone ?
There 's already a lab today that tests for allele 334 of the AVPR1 gene , the so-called cheating gene .
So anybody who 's here today with your significant other , just turn over to them and swab their mouth , send it to the lab and you 'll know for sure .
Do you really want to elect a president whose genome suggests cardiomyopathy ?
Now think of it , it 's 2016 and the leading candidate releases not only her four years of back tax returns , but also her personal genome .
And it looks really good .
And then she challenges all of her competitors to do the same .
Do you think that 's not going to happen ?
Do you think it would have helped John McCain ?
How many people in the audience have the last name Resnick like me ? Raise your hand .
Anybody ? Nobody .
Typically , there 's one or two .
So my father 's father was one of 10 Resnick brothers .
They all hated each other .
And they all moved to different parts of the planet .
So it 's likely that I 'm related to every Resnick that I ever meet , but I don 't know .
But imagine if my genome were deidentified , sitting in software , and a third cousin 's genome was also sitting there , and there was software that could compare these two and make these associations .
Not hard to imagine . My company has software that does this right now .
And so imagine one more thing : that that software is able to ask both parties for mutual consents , " Would you be willing to meet your third cousin ? "
And if we both say yes , voila ! Welcome to chromosomally LinkedIn .
Now this is probably a good thing , right ?
You have bigger clan gatherings and so on .
But maybe it 's a bad thing as well .
How many fathers in the room ? Raise your hands .
Okay , so experts think that one to three percent of you are not actually the father of your child .
Look -- These genomes , these 23 chromosomes , they don 't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society -- at least not yet .
And like any new technology , it 's really in humanity 's hands to wield it for the betterment of mankind , or not .
And so I urge you all to wake up and to tune in and to influence the genomic revolution that 's happening all around you .
Thank you .
Alain de Botton : Atheism 2.0
What aspects of religion should atheists adopt ? Alain de Botton suggests a " religion for atheists " -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection , ritual and transcendence .
One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don 't -- into the religious and the atheists .
And for the last decade or so , it 's been quite clear what being an atheist means .
There have been some very vocal atheists who 've pointed out , not just that religion is wrong , but that it 's ridiculous .
These people , many of whom have lived in North Oxford , have argued -- they 've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game .
Now I think it 's too easy .
I think it 's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way .
And what I 'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist -- if you like , a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0 .
Now what is Atheism 2.0 ?
Well it starts from a very basic premise : of course , there 's no God .
Of course , there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels , etc .
Now let 's move on ; that 's not the end of the story , that 's the very , very beginning .
I 'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines : that thinks , " I can 't believe in any of this stuff .
I can 't believe in the doctrines .
I don 't think these doctrines are right .
But , " a very important but , " I love Christmas carols .
I really like the art of Mantegna .
I really like looking at old churches .
I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament . "
Whatever it may be , you know the kind of thing I 'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side , the moralistic , communal side of religion , but can 't bear the doctrine .
Until now , these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice .
It 's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff , or you reject the doctrine and you 're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart .
So that 's a sort of tough choice .
I don 't think we have to make that choice .
I think there is an alternative .
I think there are ways -- and I 'm being both very respectful and completely impious -- of stealing from religions .
If you don 't believe in a religion , there 's nothing wrong with picking and mixing , with taking out the best sides of religion .
And for me , atheism 2.0 is about both , as I say , a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying , " What here could we use ? "
The secular world is full of holes .
We have secularized badly , I would argue .
And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well .
And I 'd like to run through a few of these today .
I 'd like to kick off by looking at education .
Now education is a field the secular world really believes in .
When we think about how we 're going to make the world a better place , we think education ; that 's where we put a lot of money .
Education is going to give us , not only commercial skills , industrial skills , it 's also going to make us better people .
You know the kind of thing a commencement address is , and graduation ceremonies , those lyrical claims that education , the process of education -- particularly higher education -- will make us into nobler and better human beings .
That 's a lovely idea .
Interesting where it came from .
In the early 19th century , church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very , very sharply , and people panicked .
They asked themselves the following question .
They said , where are people going to find the morality , where are they going to find guidance , and where are they going to find sources of consolation ?
And influential voices came up with one answer .
They said culture .
It 's to culture that we should look for guidance , for consolation , for morality .
Let 's look to the plays of Shakespeare , the dialogues of Plato , the novels of Jane Austen .
In there , we 'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John .
Now I think that 's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea .
They wanted to replace scripture with culture .
And that 's a very plausible idea .
It 's also an idea that we have forgotten .
If you went to a top university -- let 's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge -- and you said , " I 've come here because I 'm in search of morality , guidance and consolation ; I want to know how to live , " they would show you the way to the insane asylum .
This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of .
Why ? They don 't think we need it .
They don 't think we are in an urgent need of assistance .
They see us as adults , rational adults .
What we need is information .
We need data , we don 't need help .
Now religions start from a very different place indeed .
All religions , all major religions , at various points call us children .
And like children , they believe that we are in severe need of assistance .
We 're only just holding it together .
Perhaps this is just me , maybe you .
But anyway , we 're only just holding it together .
And we need help . Of course , we need help .
And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning .
You know , in the 18th century in the U.K. , the greatest preacher , greatest religious preacher , was a man called John Wesley , who went up and down this country delivering sermons , advising people how they could live .
He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents , the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich .
He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons , the classic medium of delivery of religions .
Now we 've given up with the idea of sermons .
If you said to a modern liberal individualist , " Hey , how about a sermon ? "
they 'd go , " No , no . I don 't need one of those .
I 'm an independent , individual person . "
What 's the difference between a sermon and our modern , secular mode of delivery , the lecture ?
Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information .
And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition .
The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable , because we are in need of guidance , morality and consolation -- and religions know that .
Another point about education : we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once , they 'll remember it .
Sit them in a classroom , tell them about Plato at the age of 20 , send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years , and that lesson will stick with them .
Religions go , " Nonsense .
You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day .
So get on your knees and repeat it . "
That 's what all religions tell us : " Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day . "
Otherwise our minds are like sieves .
So religions are cultures of repetition .
They circle the great truths again and again and again .
We associate repetition with boredom .
" Give us the new , " we 're always saying .
" The new is better than the old . "
If I said to you , " Okay , we 're not going to have new TED .
We 're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they 're so true .
We 're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever , " you 'd feel cheated .
Not so if you 're adopting a religious mindset .
The other things that religions do is to arrange time .
All the major religions give us calendars .
What is a calendar ?
A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas .
In the Catholic chronology , Catholic calendar , at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor .
You won 't do that by accident ; you will do that because you are guided to do that .
Now we don 't think that way .
In the secular world we think , " If an idea is important , I 'll bump into it .
I 'll just come across it . "
Nonsense , says the religious world view .
Religious view says we need calendars , we need to structure time , we need to synchronize encounters .
This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings .
Take the Moon . It 's really important to look at the Moon .
You know , when you look at the Moon , you think , " I 'm really small . What are my problems ? "
It sets things into perspective , etc . , etc .
We should all look at the Moon a bit more often . We don 't .
Why don 't we ? Well there 's nothing to tell us , " Look at the Moon . "
But if you 're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September , you will be ordered out of your home , made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi , where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of .
You 'll be handed rice cakes .
And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart .
That 's very good .
The other thing that religions are really aware of is : speak well -- I 'm not doing a very good job of this here -- but oratory , oratory is absolutely key to religions .
In the secular world , you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career .
But the religious world doesn 't think that way .
What you 're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it .
So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk , my goodness , they talk well .
After every convincing point , people will go , " Amen , amen , amen . "
At the end of a really rousing paragraph , they 'll all stand up , and they 'll go , " Thank you Jesus , thank you Christ , thank you Savior . "
If we were doing it like they do it -- let 's not do it , but if we were to do it -- I would tell you something like , " Culture should replace scripture . "
And you would go , " Amen , amen , amen . "
And at the end of my talk , you would all stand up and you would go , " Thank you Plato , thank you Shakespeare , thank you Jane Austen . "
And we 'd know that we had a real rhythm going .
All right , all right . We 're getting there . We 're getting there .
The other thing that religions know is we 're not just brains , we are also bodies .
And when they teach us a lesson , they do it via the body .
So for example , take the Jewish idea of forgiveness .
Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh .
They don 't just deliver us sermons on this .
They don 't just give us books or words about this .
They tell us to have a bath .
So in Orthodox Jewish communities , every Friday you go to a Mikveh .
You immerse yourself in the water , and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea .
We don 't tend to do that .
Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another .
Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two .
Let 's look at art now .
Now art is something that in the secular world , we think very highly of . We think art is really , really important .
A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums , etc .
We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals , or our new churches .
You 've heard that saying .
Now I think that the potential is there , but we 've completely let ourselves down .
And the reason we 've let ourselves down is that we 're not properly studying how religions handle art .
The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art : The first idea is that art should be for art 's sake -- a ridiculous idea -- an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world .
I couldn 't disagree more .
The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn 't explain itself , that artists shouldn 't say what they 're up to , because if they said it , it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy .
That 's why a very common feeling when you 're in a museum -- let 's admit it -- is , " I don 't know what this is about . "
But if we 're serious people , we don 't admit to that .
But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art .
Now religions have a much saner attitude to art .
They have no trouble telling us what art is about .
Art is about two things in all the major faiths .
Firstly , it 's trying to remind you of what there is to love .
And secondly , it 's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate .
And that 's what art is .
Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith .
So as you walk around a church , or a mosque or a cathedral , what you 're trying to imbibe , what you 're imbibing is , through your eyes , through your senses , truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind .
Essentially it 's propaganda .
Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view .
Now the word " propaganda " sets off alarm bells .
We think of Hitler , we think of Stalin . Don 't , necessarily .
Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something .
And if that thing is good , there 's no problem with it at all .
My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions .
And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum -- if I was a museum curator , I would make a room for love , a room for generosity .
All works of art are talking to us about things .
And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told , use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind , we would get a lot more out of art .
Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we 've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas .
Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society .
Art should be didactic .
Let 's think of something else .
The people in the modern world , in the secular world , who are interested in matters of the spirit , in matters of the mind , in higher soul-like concerns , tend to be isolated individuals .
They 're poets , they 're philosophers , they 're photographers , they 're filmmakers .
And they tend to be on their own .
They 're our cottage industries . They are vulnerable , single people .
And they get depressed and they get sad on their own .
And they don 't really change much .
Now think about religions , think about organized religions .
What do organized religions do ?
They group together , they form institutions .
And that has all sorts of advantages .
First of all , scale , might .
The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal .
These are massive machines .
They 're collaborative , they 're branded , they 're multinational , and they 're highly disciplined .
These are all very good qualities .
We recognize them in relation to corporations .
And corporations are very like religions in many ways , except they 're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs .
They 're selling us shoes and cars .
Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff -- the therapists , the poets -- are on their own and they have no power , they have no might .
So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind .
Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us , but we can admire the institutional way in which they 're doing it .
Books alone , books written by lone individuals , are not going to change anything .
We need to group together .
If you want to change the world , you have to group together , you have to be collaborative .
And that 's what religions do .
They are multinational , as I say , they are branded , they have a clear identity , so they don 't get lost in a busy world .
That 's something we can learn from .
I want to conclude .
Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields , there is something to learn from the example of religion -- even if you don 't believe any of it .
If you 're involved in anything that 's communal , that involves lots of people getting together , there are things for you in religion .
If you 're involved , say , in a travel industry in any way , look at pilgrimage .
Look very closely at pilgrimage .
We haven 't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven 't looked at what religions do with travel .
If you 're in the art world , look at the example of what religions are doing with art .
And if you 're an educator in any way , again , look at how religions are spreading ideas .
You may not agree with the ideas , but my goodness , they 're highly effective mechanisms for doing so .
So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion , but at the end of the day , religions are so subtle , so complicated , so intelligent in many ways that they 're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone ; they 're for all of us .
Thank you very much .
Now this is actually a courageous talk , because you 're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters .
You can get shot by both sides .
You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists , and you can get shot by those who fully believe .
Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment .
Indeed .
But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from , which is this sense -- that 's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who 's religious -- of spiritual experience , of some kind of connection with something that 's bigger than you are .
Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0 ?
Absolutely . I , like many of you , meet people who say things like , " But isn 't there something bigger than us , something else ? "
And I say , " Of course . " And they say , " So aren 't you sort of religious ? "
And I go , " No . " Why does that sense of mystery , that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe , need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling ?
Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it , so I don 't feel the need .
The universe is large and we are tiny , without the need for further religious superstructure .
So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit .
Actually , let me just ask a question .
How many people here would say that religion is important to them ?
Is there an equivalent process by which there 's a sort of bridge between what you 're talking about and what you would say to them ?
I would say that there are many , many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged .
It 's not as though , as I try to suggest , it 's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things , or you don 't have religion and then you 're cut off from all these very good things .
It 's so sad that we constantly say , " I don 't believe so I can 't have community , so I 'm cut off from morality , so I can 't go on a pilgrimage . "
One wants to say , " Nonsense . Why not ? "
And that 's really the spirit of my talk .
There 's so much we can absorb .
Atheism shouldn 't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion .
It seems to me that there 's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists .
But probably most people in the community certainly don 't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common .
Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where , instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war , that there could be bridging ?
No , we need to be polite about differences .
Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue .
It 's seen as hypocrisy .
But we need to get to a stage when you 're an atheist and someone says , " Well you know , I did pray the other day , " you politely ignore it .
You move on .
Because you 've agreed on 90 percent of things , because you have a shared view on so many things , and you politely differ .
And I think that 's what the religious wars of late have ignored .
They 've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement .
And finally , does this new thing that you 're proposing that 's not a religion but something else , does it need a leader , and are you volunteering to be the pope ?
Well , one thing that we 're all very suspicious of is individual leaders .
It doesn 't need it .
What I 've tried to lay out is a framework and I 'm hoping that people can just fill it in .
I 've sketched a sort of broad framework .
But wherever you are , as I say , if you 're in the travel industry , do that travel bit .
If you 're in the communal industry , look at religion and do the communal bit .
So it 's a wiki project .
Alain , thank you for sparking many conversations later .

Jane McGonigal : The game that can give you 10 extra years of life
When game designer Jane McGonigal found herself bedridden and suicidal following a severe concussion , she had a fascinating idea for how to get better . She dove into the scientific research and created the healing game , SuperBetter . In this moving talk , McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience -- and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life .
I 'm a gamer , so I like to have goals .
I like special missions and secret objectives .
So here 's my special mission for this talk : I 'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes .
Literally , you will live seven and half minutes longer than you would have otherwise , just because you watched this talk .
Okay , some of you are looking a little bit skeptical .
That 's okay , because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible .
And it won 't make a lot of sense now .
I 'll explain it all later , just pay attention to the number at the bottom : plus-7.68245837 minutes that will be my gift to you if I 'm successful in my mission .
Now , you have a secret mission too .
Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes .
And I think you should do something unusual with them , because these are bonus minutes . You weren 't going to have them anyway .
Now , because I 'm a game designer , you might be thinking to yourself , I know what she wants us to do with those minutes , she wants us to spend them playing games .
Now this is a totally reasonable assumption , given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games .
For example , in my first TEDTalk , I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week as a planet playing video games .
Now , 21 billion hours , it 's a lot of time .
It 's so much time , in fact , that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk , is this : Jane , games are great and all , but on your deathbed , are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds ?
This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go .
For example , true story : Just a few weeks ago , this cab driver , upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developer 's conference , turned around and said -- and I quote -- " I hate games . Waste of life . Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time . "
Now , I want to take this problem seriously .
I mean , I want games to be a force for good in the world .
I don 't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing , time that I encouraged them to spend .
So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately .
When we 're on our deathbeds , will we regret the time we spent playing games ?
Now , this may surprise you , but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question .
It 's true . Hospice workers , the people who take care of us at the end of our lives , recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds .
And that 's what I want to share with you today -- the top five regrets of the dying .
Number one : I wish I hadn 't worked so hard .
Number two : I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends .
Number three : I wish I had let myself be happier .
Number four : I wish I 'd had the courage to express my true self .
And number five : I wish I 'd lived a life true to my dreams , instead of what others expected of me .
Now , as far as I know , no one ever told one of the hospice workers , I wish I 'd spent more time playing video games , but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying , I can 't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill .
For example , I wish I hadn 't worked so hard .
For many people , this means , I wish I 'd spent more time with my family , with my kids when they were growing up .
Well , we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits .
A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them .
I wish I 'd stayed in touch with my friends .
Well , hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family .
A recent study from [ University of Michigan ] showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools .
They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from , if we weren 't playing games together .
I wish I 'd let myself be happier .
Well , here I can 't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression .
Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness .
I wish I 'd had the courage to express my true self .
Well , avatars are a way to express our true selves , our most heroic , idealized version of who we might become .
You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar .
And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life , making us more courageous , more ambitious , more committed to our goals .
I wish I 'd led a life true to my dreams , and not what others expected of me .
Are games doing this yet ? I 'm not sure , so I 've left a question mark , a Super Mario question mark .
And we 're going to come back to this one .
But in the mean time , perhaps you 're wondering , who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets ?
And it 's true , I 've never worked in a hospice , I 've never been on my deathbed .
But recently I did spend three months in bed , wanting to die .
Really wanting to die .
Now let me tell you that story .
It started two years ago , when I hit my head and got a concussion .
Now the concussion didn 't heal properly , and after 30 days I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches , nausea , vertigo , memory loss , mental fog .
My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain , I had to rest it .
So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms .
For me that meant no reading , no writing , no video games , no work or email , no running , no alcohol , no caffeine .
In other words -- and I think you see where this is going -- no reason to live .
Of course it 's meant to be funny , but in all seriousness , suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries .
It happens to one in three , and it happened to me .
My brain started telling me , Jane , you want to die .
It said , you 're never going to get better .
It said , the pain will never end .
And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life , which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said , I am either going to kill myself or I 'm going to turn this into a game .
Now , why a game ?
I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity , more determination , more optimism , and we 're more likely to reach out to others for help .
And I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge , so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer .
Now this became my new secret identity , and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her , I 'm playing a game to heal my brain , and I want you to play with me .
This was an easier way to ask for help .
She became my first ally in the game , my husband Kiyash joined next , and together we identified and battled the bad guys .
Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process , things like bright lights and crowded spaces .
We also collected and activated power-ups .
This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good , just a little bit productive .
Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes , or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once .
Now the game was that simple : Adopt a secret identity , recruit your allies , battle the bad guys , activate the power-ups .
But even with a game so simple , within just a couple days of starting to play , that fog of depression and anxiety went away . It just vanished . It felt like a miracle .
Now it wasn 't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms .
That lasted for more than a year , and it was the hardest year of my life by far .
But even when I still had the symptoms , even while I was still in pain , I stopped suffering .
Now what happened next with the game surprised me .
I put up some blog posts and videos online , explaining how to play .
But not everybody has a concussion , obviously , not everyone wants to be " the slayer , " so I renamed the game SuperBetter .
And soon I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity , recruiting their own allies , and they were getting " super better " facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain , depression and Crohn 's disease .
Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS .
And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me .
They talked about feeling stronger and braver .
They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family .
And they even talked about feeling happier , even though they were in pain , even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives .
Now at the time , I 'm thinking to myself , what is going on here ?
I mean , how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious , and in some cases life-and-death , circumstances ?
I mean , if it hadn 't worked for me , there 's no way I would have believed it was possible .
Well , it turns out there 's some science here too .
Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event .
And that 's what was happening to us .
The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth , which is not something we usually hear about .
We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder .
But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn 't doom us to suffer indefinitely .
Instead , we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives .
Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say : My priorities have changed . I 'm not afraid to do what makes me happy .
I feel closer to my friends and family .
I understand myself better . I know who I really am now .
I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life .
I 'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams .
Now , does this sound familiar ?
It should , because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying .
Now this is interesting , right ?
It seems that somehow , a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets .
But how does it work ?
How do you get from trauma to growth ?
Or better yet , is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma , without having to hit your head in the first place ?
That would be good , right ?
I wanted to understand the phenomenon better , so I devoured the scientific literature , and here 's what I learned .
There are four kinds of strength , or resilience , that contribute to post-traumatic growth , and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience , and you don 't need a trauma to do it .
Now , I could tell you what these four types of strength are , but I 'd rather you experience them firsthand .
I 'd rather we all start building them up together right now .
So here 's what we 're going to do .
We 're going to play a quick game together .
This is where you earn those seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier .
All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests .
And I feel like you can do it . I have confidence in you .
So , everybody ready ? This is your first quest . Here we go .
Pick one : Stand up and take three steps , or make your hands into fists , raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds . Go !
All right , I like the people doing both . You are overachievers .
Very good .
Well done , everyone . Now that is worth plus-one physical resilience , which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster .
Now we know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still .
That 's all it takes .
Every single second that you are not sitting still , you are actively improving the health of your heart , and your lungs and brains .
Everybody ready for your next quest ?
I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times , or count backwards from 100 by seven , like this : 100 , 93 ...
Go !
Don 't give up .
Don 't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50 .
Nice . Wow . That 's the first time I 've ever seen that .
Bonus physical resilience . Well done , everyone .
Now that 's worth plus-one mental resilience , which means you have more mental focus , more discipline , determination and willpower .
We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle .
It gets stronger the more you exercise it .
So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up , even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower .
So good job . Quest number three .
Pick one : Now because of the room we 're in , fate 's really determined this for you , but here are the two options .
If you 're inside , find a window and look out of it .
If you 're outside , find a window and look in .
Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for " baby [ your favorite animal . ] " Now , you could do this on your phones , or you could just shout out some baby animals , I 'm going to find some and put them on the screen for us .
So , what do we want to see ?
Sloth , giraffe , elephant , snake . Okay , let 's see what we got .
Baby dolphin and baby llamas . Everybody look .
Got that ?
Okay , one more . Baby elephant .
We 're clapping for that ?
That 's amazing .
All right , now what we 're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience , which means you have the ability to provoke powerful , positive emotions like curiosity or love , which we feel when we look at baby animals , when you need them most .
And here 's a secret from the scientific literature for you .
If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour , a day , a week , you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you 're facing .
And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio .
It 's my favorite SuperBetter trick , so keep it up .
All right , pick one , last quest : Shake someone 's hand for six seconds , or send someone a quick thank you by text , email , Facebook or Twitter . Go !
Looking good , looking good .
Nice , nice .
Keep it up . I love it !
All right , everybody , that is plus-one social resilience , which means you actually get more strength from your friends , your neighbors , your family , your community .
Now , a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude .
Touch is even better .
Here 's one more secret for you : Shaking someone 's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream , now that 's the trust hormone .
That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other .
This will linger during the break , so take advantage of the networking opportunities .
Okay , well you have successfully completed your four quests , so let 's see if I 've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life .
And here 's where I get to share one more little bit of science with you .
It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical , mental , emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else .
So this is true .
If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio , if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time , if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day , if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower , you will live 10 years longer than everyone else , and here 's where that math I showed you earlier comes in .
So , the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years , but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life to that by boosting your four types of resilience .
So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience , you 're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life , or 67,298 more minutes of life , which means every single day , you are earning 184 minutes of life , or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience , like we just did together , you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life .
Congratulations , those seven and a half minutes are all yours . You totally earned them .
Yeah ! Awesome .
Wait , wait , wait .
You still have your special mission , your secret mission .
How are you going to spend these seven and a half minutes of bonus life ?
Well , here 's my suggestion .
These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie 's wishes .
You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes .
Pretty clever , right ?
So , if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy , or that gets you physically active , or puts you in touch with someone you care about , or even just tackling a tiny challenge , you are going to boost your resilience , so you 're going to earn more minutes .
And the good news is , you can keep going like that .
Every hour of the day , every day of your life , all the way to your deathbed , which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise .
And when you get there , more than likely , you will not have any of those top five regrets , because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams .
And with 10 extra years , you might even have enough time to play a few more games .
Thank you .
Caroline Phillips : Hurdy-gurdy for beginners
Caroline Phillips cranks out tunes on a seldom-heard folk instrument : the hurdy-gurdy , a.k.a. the wheel fiddle . A searching , Basque melody follows her fun lesson on its unique anatomy and 1,000-year history .
Now , since this is TEDGlobal , who can tell me what this is called in French ?
I see you 're all up on the history of hurdy-gurdy -- " vielle à roue . "
And in Spanish , " zanfona . "
And in Italian , " ghironda , " okay ?
Hurdy-gurdy , or wheel fiddle .
So , these are the different kinds and shapes of the hurdy-gurdy .
The hurdy-gurdy is the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings , like the bow of a violin , to produce music .
It has three different kinds of strings .
The first string is the drone string , which plays a continuous sound like the bagpipe .
The second string is a melody string , which is played with a wooden keyboard tuned like a piano .
And the third string is pretty innovative .
It 's also the only instrument that uses this kind of technique .
It activates what 's called the buzzing bridge , or the dog .
When I turn the crank and I apply pressure , it makes a sound like a barking dog .
So all of this is pretty innovative , if you consider that the hurdy-gurdy appeared about a thousand years ago and it took two people to play it ; one to turn the crank , and another person -- yes -- to play the melody by physically pulling up large wooden pegs .
Luckily , all of this changed a couple of centuries later .
So , one person could actually play and almost -- this is pretty heavy -- carry the hurdy-gurdy .
The hurdy-gurdy has been used , historically , through the centuries in mostly dance music because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boombox here .
And today , the hurdy-gurdy is used in all sorts of music -- traditional folk music , dance , contemporary and world music -- in the U.K. , in France , in Spain and in Italy .
And this kind of hurdy-gurdy takes anywhere from three to five years [ to order and receive it ] .
It 's made by specialized luthiers , also in Europe .
And it 's very difficult to tune .
So without further ado , would you like to hear it ?
Caroline Phillips : I didn 't hear you . Would you like to hear it ?
CP : Okay .
There I go .
I 'd like to sing in Basque , which is the language spoken in the Basque Country where I live , in the region in France and Spain .
[ Basque ] Thank you .
This is a song that I wrote based on traditional Basque rhythms .
And this is a song that has a kind of a Celtic feel .
Thank you . Thank you .
Lauren Zalaznick : The conscience of television
TV executive Lauren Zalaznick thinks deeply about pop television . Sharing results of a bold study that tracks attitudes against TV ratings over five decades , she makes a case that television reflects who we truly are -- in ways we might not have expected .
I want to say that really and truly , after these incredible speeches and ideas that are being spread , I am in the awkward position of being here to talk to you today about television .
So most everyone watches TV .
We like it . We like some parts of it .
Here in America , people actually love TV .
The average American watches TV for almost 5 hours a day .
Okay ?
Now I happen to make my living these days in television , so for me , that 's a good thing .
But a lot of people don 't love it so much .
They , in fact , berate it .
They call it stupid , and worse , believe me .
My mother , growing up , she called it the " idiot box . "
But my idea today is not to debate whether there 's such a thing as good TV or bad TV ; my idea today is to tell you that I believe television has a conscience .
So why I believe that television has a conscience is that I actually believe that television directly reflects the moral , political , social and emotional need states of our nation -- that television is how we actually disseminate our entire value system .
So all these things are uniquely human , and they all add up to our idea of conscience .
Now today , we 're not talking about good and bad TV .
We 're talking about popular TV .
We 're talking about top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over the course of 50 years .
How do these Nielsen ratings reflect not just what you 've heard about , which is the idea of our social , collective unconscious , but how do these top-10 Nielsen-rated shows over 50 years reflect the idea of our social conscience ?
How does television evolve over time , and what does this say about our society ?
Now speaking of evolution , from basic biology , you probably remember that the animal kingdom , including humans , have four basic primal instincts .
You have hunger ; you have sex ; you have power ; and you have the urge for acquisitiveness .
As humans , what 's important to remember is that we 've developed , we 've evolved over time to temper , or tame , these basic animal instincts .
We have the capacity to laugh and cry .
We feel awe , we feel pity .
That is separate and apart from the animal kingdom .
The other thing about human beings is that we love to be entertained .
We love to watch TV .
This is something that clearly separates us from the animal kingdom .
Animals might love to play , but they don 't love to watch .
So I had an ambition to discover what could be understood from this uniquely human relationship between television programs and the human conscious .
Why has television entertainment evolved the way it has ?
I kind of think of it as this cartoon devil or angel sitting on our shoulders .
Is television literally functioning as our conscience , tempting us and rewarding us at the same time ?
So to begin to answer these questions , we did a research study .
We went back 50 years to the 1959 / 1960 television season .
We surveyed the top-20 Nielsen shows every year for 50 years -- a thousand shows .
We talked to over 3,000 individuals -- almost 3,600 -- aged 18 to 70 , and we asked them how they felt emotionally .
How did you feel watching every single one of these shows ?
Did you feel a sense of moral ambiguity ?
Did you feel outrage ? Did you laugh ?
What did this mean for you ?
So to our global TED audiences , I want to say that this was a U.S. sample .
But as you can see , these emotional need states are truly universal .
And on a factual basis , over 80 percent of the U.S. ' s most popular shows are exported around the world .
So I really hope our global audiences can relate .
Two acknowledgments before our first data slide : For inspiring me to even think about the idea of conscience and the tricks that conscience can play on us on a daily basis , I thank legendary rabbi , Jack Stern .
And for the way in which I 'm going to present the data , I want to thank TED community superstar Hans Rosling , who you may have just seen .
Okay , here we go .
So here you see , from 1960 to 2010 , the 50 years of our study .
Two things we 're going to start with -- the inspiration state and the moral ambiguity state , which , for this purpose , we defined inspiration as television shows that uplift me , that make me feel much more positive about the world .
Moral ambiguity are televisions shows in which I don 't understand the difference between right and wrong .
As we start , you see in 1960 inspiration is holding steady .
That 's what we 're watching TV for .
Moral ambiguity starts to climb .
Right at the end of the 60s , moral ambiguity is going up , inspiration is kind of on the wane .
Why ?
The Cuban Missile Crisis , JFK is shot , the Civil Rights movement , race riots , the Vietnam War , MLK is shot , Bobby Kennedy is shot , Watergate .
Look what happens .
In 1970 , inspiration plummets .
Moral ambiguity takes off .
They cross , but Ronald Reagan , a telegenic president , is in office .
It 's trying to recover .
But look , it can 't : AIDS , Iran-Contra , the Challenger disaster , Chernobyl .
Moral ambiguity becomes the dominant meme in television from 1990 for the next 20 years .
Take a look at this .
This chart is going to document a very similar trend .
But in this case , we have comfort -- the bubble in red -- social commentary and irreverence in blue and green .
Now this time on TV you have " Bonanza , " don 't forget , you have " Gunsmoke , " you have " Andy Griffith , " you have domestic shows all about comfort .
This is rising . Comfort stays whole .
Irreverence starts to rise .
Social commentary is all of a sudden spiking up .
You get to 1969 , and look what happens .
You have comfort , irreverence , and social commentary , not only battling it out in our society , but you literally have two establishment shows -- " Gunsmoke " and " Gomer Pyle " -- in 1969 are the number-two- and number-three-rated television shows .
What 's number one ?
The socially irreverent hippie show , " Rowan and Martin 's Laugh-In . "
They 're all living together , right .
Viewers had responded dramatically .
Look at this green spike in 1966 to a bellwether show .
When you guys hear this industry term , a breakout hit , what does that mean ?
It means in the 1966 television season , The " Smothers Brothers " came out of nowhere .
This was the first show that allowed viewers to say , " My God , I can comment on how I feel about the Vietnam War , about the presidency , through television ? "
That 's what we mean by a breakout show .
So then , just like the last chart , look what happens .
In 1970 , the dam bursts . The dam bursts .
Comfort is no longer why we watch television .
Social commentary and irreverence rise throughout the 70s .
Now look at this .
The 70s means who ? Norman Lear .
You have " All in the Family , " " Sanford and Son , " and the dominant show -- in the top-10 for the entire 70s -- " MAS * H. "
In the entire 50 years of television that we studied , seven of 10 shows ranked most highly for irreverence appeared on air during the Vietnam War , five of the top-10 during the Nixon administration .
Only one generation , 20 years in , and we discovered , Wow ! TV can do that ?
It can make me feel this ?
It can change us ?
So to this very , very savvy crowd , I also want to note the digital folks did not invent disruptive .
Archie Bunker was shoved out of his easy chair along with the rest of us 40 years ago .
This is a quick chart . Here 's another attribute : fantasy and imagination , which are shows defined as , " takes me out of my everyday realm " and " makes me feel better . "
That 's mapped against the red dot , unemployment , which is a simple Bureau of Labor Department statistic .
You 'll see that every time fantasy and imagination shows rise , it maps to a spike in unemployment .
Do we want to see shows about people saving money and being unemployed ?
No . In the 70s you have the bellwether show " The Bionic Woman " that rocketed into the top-10 in 1973 , followed by the " Six Million-Dollar Man " and " Charlie 's Angels . "
Another spike in the 1980s -- another spike in shows about control and power .
What were those shows ?
Glamorous and rich .
" Dallas , " " Fantasy Island . "
Incredible mapping of our national psyche with some hard and fast facts : unemployment .
So here you are , in my favorite chart , because this is our last 20 years .
Whether or not you 're in my business , you have surely heard or read of the decline of the thing called the three-camera sitcom and the rise of reality TV .
Well , as we say in the business , X marks the spot .
The 90s -- the big bubbles of humor -- we 're watching " Friends , " " Frasier , " " Cheers " and " Seinfeld . "
Everything 's good , low unemployment .
But look : X marks the spot .
In 2001 , the September 2001 television season , humor succumbs to judgment once and for all .
Why not ?
We had a 2000 presidential election decided by the Supreme Court .
We had the bursting of the tech bubble .
We had 9 / 11 .
Anthrax becomes part of the social lexicon .
Look what happens when we keep going .
At the turn of the century , the Internet takes off , reality television has taken hold .
What do people want in their TV then ?
I would have thought revenge or nostalgia .
Give me some comfort ; my world is falling apart .
No , they want judgment .
I can vote you off the island .
I can keep Sarah Palin 's daughter dancing .
I can choose the next American Idol . You 're fired .
That 's all great , right ?
So as dramatically different as these television shows , pure entertainment , have been over the last 50 years -- what did I start with ? -- one basic instinct remains .
We 're animals , we need our moms .
There has not been a decade of television without a definitive , dominant TV mom .
The 1950s : June Cleever in the original comfort show , " Leave it to Beaver . "
Lucille Ball kept us laughing through the rise of social consciousness in the 60s .
Maude Findlay , the epitome of the irreverent 1970s , who tackled abortion , divorce , even menopause on TV .
The 1980s , our first cougar was given to us in the form of Alexis Carrington .
Murphy Brown took on a vice president when she took on the idea of single parenthood .
This era 's mom , Bree Van de Kamp .
Now I don 't know if this is the devil or the angel sitting on our conscience , sitting on television 's shoulders , but I do know that I absolutely love this image .
So to you all , the women of TEDWomen , the men of TEDWomen , the global audiences of TEDWomen , thank you for letting me present my idea about the conscience of television .
But let me also thank the incredible creators who get up everyday to put their ideas on our television screens throughout all these ages of television .
They give it life on television , for sure , but it 's you as viewers , through your collective social consciences , that give it life , longevity , power or not .
So thanks very much .
Ze Frank : Nerdcore comedy
Performer and web toymaker Ze Frank delivers a hilarious nerdcore standup routine , then tells us what he 's seriously passionate about : helping people create and interact using simple , addictive web tools .
You know , when Chris first approached me to speak at TED , I said no , because I felt like I wasn 't going to be able to make that personal connection , you know , that I wanted to .
It 's such a large conference .
But he explained to me that he was in a bind , and that he was having trouble finding the kind of sex appeal and star power that the conference was known for -- so I said fine , Ted -- I mean Chris . I 'll come on two conditions .
One -- I want to speak as early in the morning as possible .
And two -- I want to pick the theme for TED 2006 .
And luckily he agreed . And the theme , in two years , is going to be " Cute Pictures Of Puppies . "
I invented the Placebo Camera .
It doesn 't actually take pictures , but it 's a hell of a lot cheaper , and you still feel like you were there .
" Dear Sir , Good day , compliments of the day , and my best wishes to you and family . I know this letter will come to you surprisingly , but let it not be a surprise to you , for nature has a way of arriving unannounced , and , as an adage says , originals are very hard to find , but their echoes sound louder . So I decided to contact you myself , for you to assure me of safety and honesty , if I have to entrust any amount of money under your custody .
I am Mister Michael Bangoora , the son of late Mister Tiamu Bangoora -- who was the Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone -- but was killed during a civil war .
Knowing your country to be economical conducive for investment , and your people as transparent and trustworthy to engage in business , on which premise I write you .
Before my father death , he had the sum of 23 million United States dollars , which he kept away from the rebel leaders during the course of the war .
This fund was supposed to be used for the rehabilitation of water reserves all over the country , before the outbreak of war . When the war broke out , the rebel leader demanded that the fund be given to him , my father insisted it was not in his possession , and he was killed because of his refusal to release the fund .
Meanwhile , my mother and I is the only person who knows about the fund because my father always confide in me .
I quickly made an arrangement with a Red Cross relief worker , who used his official van to transport the money to Lungi Airport , Freetown , although he did not know the real contents of the box .
The fund was deposited as a family reassure , in a safe , reliable security company in Dakar , Senegal , where I was only given temporary asylum .
I do not wish to invest the money in Senegal due to unfavorable economic climate , and so close to my country .
The only assistance I need from you , which I know you would do for me , are the following : one , be a silent partner and receive the funds in your account in trust ; two , provide a bank account under your control to which the funds will be remitted ; three , receive the funds into your account in trust ; take out your commission ; and leave the rest of the money until I arrive , after the transfer is complete .
Sincerely , Mister Michael Bangoora . "
This is really embarrassing .
I was told backstage that I have 18 minutes .
I only prepared 15 .
So if it 's cool , I 'd like to just wait for three .
I 'm really sorry .
What 's your name ?
Mark Serfaas . It 's pretty cool , huh ? Pursuing happiness .
Are you a virgin ? Virgin ?
I mean -- no , I mean like in the TED sense ?
Are you ? Oh , yeah . So what are you , like , a thousand , two thousand , somewhere in there ? Huh ? Oh ?
You don 't know what I 'm talking about ?
Ah , Mark -- Serfaas .
1,860 -- am I good ?
And that 's nothing to be ashamed of .
That 's nothing to be ashamed of .
Yeah , I was hanging out with some Google guys last night .
Really cool , we were getting wasted .
And they were telling me that Google software has gotten so advanced that , based on your interaction with Google over your lifetime , they can actually predict what you are going to say next .
And I was like , " Get the fuck out of here . That 's crazy . "
But they said , " No , but don 't show anyone , " but they slipped up .
And they said that I could just type in " What was I going to say next ? "
and my name , and it would tell me . And I have to tell you , right now , this is an unadulterated piece of software , this is a real Internet browser and this is an actual Google site , and we 're going to test it out live today .
What was I going to say next ? And " Ze Frank " -- that 's me .
Am I feeling lucky ?
Am I feeling lucky ?
Audience : Yes .
Ze Frank : Oh . Amazing .
In March of 2001 -- I filmed myself dancing to Madonna 's " Justify My Love . "
On a Thursday , I sent out a link to a website that featured those clips to 17 of my closest friends , as part of my -- an invitation to my -- an invitation to my th -- th -- 26th birthday party .
By Monday , over a million people were coming to this site a day .
Within a week , I received a call from Earthlink that said , due to a 10 cents per megabyte overage charge , I owed them 30,000 dollars .
Needless to say , I was able to leave my job .
And , finally , you know , become freelance .
But some people refer to me more of -- as , like , an Internet guru or -- swami .
I -- I knew I had something .
I 'd basically distilled a very difficult-to-explain and complex philosophy , which I won 't get into here , because it 's a little too deep for all of you , but -- it 's about what makes websites popular , and , you know , it 's -- it 's unfortunate that I don 't have more time .
Maybe I can come back next year , or something like that .
I 'm obsessed with email . I get a lot of it .
Four years later , I still get probably two or three hundred emails a day from people I don 't know , and it 's been an amazing opportunity to kind of get to know different cultures , you know ?
It 's like a microscope to the rest of the world .
You can kind of peer into other people 's lives , and I also feel like I get a lot of inspiration from the average user .
For example , somebody wrote me .
They said , " Hey Ze , if you ever come to Boulder , you should rock out with us , " and I said , " Why wait ? "
And they said , " Hey Ze , thanks for rocking out , but I meant the kind of rocking out where we 'd be naked . "
And that was embarrassing .
But you know , it 's kind of a collaboration between me and the fans , so I said , " Sure . "
I hear a lot of you whispering .
And I know what you 're saying . You 're saying , " Holy crap , how is his presentation so smooth ? "
And I have to say that it 's not all me this year .
I guess Chris has to take some credit here , because in years past , I guess there 's been some sort of subpar speakers at TED . I don 't know .
And so , this year , Chris sent us a TED Conference simulator .
Which really allowed us as speakers to get there , in the trenches , and practice at home so that we would be ready for this experience .
And I gotta say that , you know , it 's really , really great to be here .
I 'd like to tell all of you a little joke . Not just the good stuff , though .
You can do heckler mode .
Voice : Hey , moron , get off the stage .
ZF : You get off the stage .
Voice : We want Malcolm Gladwell .
In case you run over time .
I 'd -- just one last thing I 'd like to say , I 'd , really -- like to thank all of you for being here .
And frog mode .
" Ah , the first time that I made love to a rock shrimp ... "
It 's true . Some people say to me , they say , " Ze , you 're doing all this stuff , this Internet stuff , and you 're not making any money .
" Why ? " And I say , " Mom , Dad -- " I 'm trying . " You know , I don 't know if you 're all aware of this , but the video -- the video game market , kids are playing these video games , oh , but , supposedly , there 's tons of money .
I mean , like , I think , 100,000 dollars or so a year is being spent on these things . So I decided to try my hand .
I came up with a few games .
This is called " Atheist . "
I figured it 'd be popular with the young kids .
Look , I 'll move around and say some things .
So that didn 't go over so well .
I don 't really understand why you 're laughing .
Should have done this before I tried to pitch it .
" Buddhist , " of course , looks very , very similar to " Atheist . "
But you come back as a duck .
And this is great because , you know , for a quarter , you can play this for a long time .
And Chris had said in an email that , you know , we should really bring something new to TED , something that we haven 't shown anyone .
So , I made this for TED . It 's " Christian . "
It 's the third in the series .
I 'm hoping it 's going to do well this year .
Do you have a preference ? Good choice .
So you can wait for the Second Coming -- which is -- a random number between one and 500 million .
So really , what are we talking about here ? Oh , tech joy .
Tech joy , to me , means something , because I get a lot of joy out of tech .
And in fact , making things using technology -- and I 'm being serious here , even though I 'm using my sarcastic voice -- I won 't -- hold on . Making things , you know -- making things actually does give me a lot of joy .
It 's the process of creation that keeps me sort of a bubble and a half above perpetual anxiety in my life , and it 's that feeling of being about 80 percent complete on a project -- where you know you still have something to do , but it 's not finished , and you 're not starting something -- that really fills my entire life .
And so , what I 've done is , I started getting interested in creating online social spaces to share that feeling with people who don 't consider themselves artists .
We 're in a culture of guru-ship . It 's so hard to use some software because , you know , it 's unapproachable , people feel like they have to read the manual .
So I try to -- -- I try to create these very minimal activities that allow people to express themselves , and , hopefully -- whoa , I 'm like -- on the page , but it doesn 't exist .
It 's , like -- seriously , though -- I try to create meaningful environments for people to express themselves .
Here I created a contest called , " When Office Supplies Attack , " which , I think , really resonated with the -- working population .
Over 500 entries in three weeks , toilet paper fashion .
Again , people from all over the country doing -- the watch is particularly incredible .
Online drawing tools -- you 've probably seen a lot of them .
I think they 're wonderful .
I think it 's a chance for people to get to play with crayons and all that kind of stuff . But I 'm interested in the process , the process of creating , as the real event that I 'm interested in .
And the problem is that a lot of people suck at drawing , and they get bummed out at this , sort of , you know , stick figure , awful little thing that they created .
And eventually , it just makes them stop playing with it , or draw , you know , they draw penises and things like that .
So , the Scribbler is an attempt to create a generative tool .
In other words , it 's a helping tool .
You can draw your simple stick figure , and then it collaborates with you to create , sort of , like , a post-war German etching .
So you can -- in fact , it 's tuned to be better at drawing things that look worse . So , we go ahead , and we start scribbling , and -- so the idea is that you can really , you know , partake in this process , but watch something really crappy look beautiful .
And here are some of my favorites . This is the little trap marionette that was submitted to me . Here we are , very cool .
Darling . Beautiful stuff .
I mean this is incredible . This is an 11-year-old girl -- drew this and submitted it . It 's just gorgeous .
I 'm -- I 'm dead serious here . I 'm actually -- this is not a joke .
But , I think , it 's a -- it 's a really fun and wonderful thing .
So this is called the " Fiction Project . " This is an online space , which is -- it 's basically a refurbished message board that encourages collaborative fiction writing .
These are haikus .
None of the haikus were written by the same person , and in fact , no line was -- you know , each line is contributed by a different person at a different -- at a different time .
I think that the " now tied up , tied down , mistress cruel approaches me , now tied down , it 's up . "
It 's -- it 's an amazing way , and I 'll tell you , if you come home , and your spouse , or whoever it is , says , " Let 's talk " -- that , like , chills you to the very core .
But it 's peripheral activities , like these , that allow people to get together , doing fun things .
They actually get to know each other , and it 's sort of like low-threshold peripheral activities that I think are the key to bringing up some of our bonding social capital that we 're lacking . And very , very quickly -- I love puppets . Here 's a puppet .
It dances to music . Lotte Reiniger , an amazing shadow puppeteer in the ' 20s , that started doing more elaborate things .
I became interested in puppets , and I just want to show one last thing to you .
Oh , this is how you make puppets .
Ladies and gentlemen , Mr. Ze Frank .
Yann Dall 'Aglio : Love -- you 're doing it wrong
In this delightful talk , philosopher Yann Dall 'Aglio explores the universal search for tenderness and connection in a world that 's ever more focused on the individual . As it turns out , it 's easier than you think . A wise and witty reflection on the state of love in the modern age . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / I & gt ;
What is love ?
It 's a hard term to define in so far as it has a very wide application .
I can love jogging .
I can love a book , a movie .
I can love escalopes .
I can love my wife .
But there 's a great difference between an escalope and my wife , for instance .
That is , if I value the escalope , the escalope , on the other hand , it doesn 't value me back .
Whereas my wife , she calls me the star of her life .
Therefore , only another desiring conscience can conceive me as a desirable being .
I know this , that 's why love can be defined in a more accurate way as the desire of being desired .
Hence the eternal problem of love : how to become and remain desirable ?
The individual used to find an answer to this problem by submitting his life to community rules .
You had a specific part to play according to your sex , your age , your social status , and you only had to play your part to be valued and loved by the whole community .
Think about the young woman who must remain chaste before marriage .
Think about the youngest son who must obey the eldest son , who in turn must obey the patriarch .
But a phenomenon started in the 13th century , mainly in the Renaissance , in the West , that caused the biggest identity crisis in the history of humankind .
This phenomenon is modernity .
We can basically summarize it through a triple process .
First , a process of rationalization of scientific research , which has accelerated technical progress .
Next , a process of political democratization , which has fostered individual rights .
And finally , a process of rationalization of economic production and of trade liberalization .
These three intertwined processes have completely annihilated all the traditional bearings of Western societies , with radical consequences for the individual .
Now individuals are free to value or disvalue any attitude , any choice , any object .
But as a result , they are themselves confronted with this same freedom that others have to value or disvalue them .
In other words , my value was once ensured by submitting myself to the traditional authorities .
Now it is quoted in the stock exchange .
On the free market of individual desires , I negotiate my value every day .
Hence the anxiety of contemporary man .
He is obsessed : " Am I desirable ? How desirable ?
How many people are going to love me ? "
And how does he respond to this anxiety ?
Well , by hysterically collecting symbols of desirability .
I call this act of collecting , along with others , seduction capital .
Indeed , our consumer society is largely based on seduction capital .
It is said about this consumption that our age is materialistic .
But it 's not true ! We only accumulate objects in order to communicate with other minds .
We do it to make them love us , to seduce them .
Nothing could be less materialistic , or more sentimental , than a teenager buying brand new jeans and tearing them at the knees , because he wants to please Jennifer .
Consumerism is not materialism .
It is rather what is swallowed up and sacrificed in the name of the god of love , or rather in the name of seduction capital .
In light of this observation on contemporary love , how can we think of love in the years to come ?
We can envision two hypotheses : The first one consists of betting that this process of narcissistic capitalization will intensify .
It is hard to say what shape this intensification will take , because it largely depends on social and technical innovations , which are by definition difficult to predict .
But we can , for instance , imagine a dating website which , a bit like those loyalty points programs , uses seduction capital points that vary according to my age , my height / weight ratio , my degree , my salary , or the number of clicks on my profile .
We can also imagine a chemical treatment for breakups that weakens the feelings of attachment .
By the way , there 's a program on MTV already in which seduction teachers treat heartache as a disease .
These teachers call themselves " pick-up artists . "
" Artist " in French is easy , it means " artiste . "
" Pick-up " is to pick someone up , but not just any picking up -- it 's picking up chicks .
So they are artists of picking up chicks .
And they call heartache " one-itis . "
In English , " itis " is a suffix that signifies infection .
One-itis can be translated as " an infection from one . "
It 's a bit disgusting . Indeed , for the pick-up artists , falling in love with someone is a waste of time , it 's squandering your seduction capital , so it must be eliminated like a disease , like an infection .
We can also envision a romantic use of the genome .
Everyone would carry it around and present it like a business card to verify if seduction can progress to reproduction .
Of course , this race for seduction , like every fierce competition , will create huge disparities in narcissistic satisfaction , and therefore a lot of loneliness and frustration too .
So we can expect that modernity itself , which is the origin of seduction capital , would be called into question .
I 'm thinking particularly of the reaction of neo-fascist or religious communes .
But such a future doesn 't have to be .
Another path to thinking about love may be possible .
But how ?
How to renounce the hysterical need to be valued ?
Well , by becoming aware of my uselessness .
Yes , I 'm useless .
But rest assured : so are you .
We are all useless .
This uselessness is easily demonstrated , because in order to be valued I need another to desire me , which shows that I do not have any value of my own .
I don 't have any inherent value .
We all pretend to have an idol ; we all pretend to be an idol for someone else , but actually we are all impostors , a bit like a man on the street who appears totally cool and indifferent , while he has actually anticipated and calculated so that all eyes are on him .
I think that becoming aware of this general imposture that concerns all of us would ease our love relationships .
It is because I want to be loved from head to toe , justified in my every choice , that the seduction hysteria exists .
And therefore I want to seem perfect so that another can love me .
I want them to be perfect so that I can be reassured of my value .
It leads to couples obsessed with performance who will break up , just like that , at the slightest underachievement .
In contrast to this attitude , I call upon tenderness -- love as tenderness .
What is tenderness ?
To be tender is to accept the loved one 's weaknesses .
It 's not about becoming a sad couple of orderlies .
That 's pretty bad .
On the contrary , there 's plenty of charm and happiness in tenderness .
I refer specifically to a kind of humor that is unfortunately underused .
It is a sort of poetry of deliberate awkwardness .
I refer to self-mockery .
For a couple who is no longer sustained , supported by the constraints of tradition , I believe that self-mockery is one of the best means for the relationship to endure .
Bjarke Ingels : 3 warp-speed architecture tales
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels rockets through photo / video-mingled stories of his eco-flashy designs . His buildings not only look like nature -- they act like nature : blocking the wind , collecting solar energy -- and creating stunning views .
The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result , the architectural object .
Is the latest tower in London a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool ?
So recently , we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects , maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture .
And we discovered that we didn 't have to invent it , it already existed in the form of a comic book .
So we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes , how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation .
Sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world .
We call this comic book " Yes is More , " which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes .
In this case it 's Mies van der Rohe 's Less is More .
He triggered the modernist revolution .
After him followed the post-modern counter-revolution , Robert Venturi saying , " Less is a bore . "
After him , Philip Johnson sort of introduced you could say promiscuity , or at least openness to new ideas with , " I am a whore . "
Recently , Obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis .
And what we 'd like to say with " Yes is More " is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined , as who or what we are against .
The cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment .
Or this idea of the misunderstood genius , frustrated that the world doesn 't fit in with his or her ideas .
Rather than revolution , we 're much more interested in evolution , this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world .
In fact , I actually think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process .
His famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work .
As you can see , a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings .
At each meeting , there 's way too many ideas .
Only the best ones can survive .
And through a process of architectural selection , we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model .
We mate them . They have sort of mutant offspring .
And through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design .
A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in Copenhagen .
The design process was really tough , almost like a struggle for survival , but gradually an idea evolved : this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city , sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome , but sort of public on the outside , as well as on the inside , with the library .
But Darwin doesn 't only explain the evolution of a single idea .
As you can see , sometimes a subspecies branches off .
And quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea .
It doesn 't really work in this context .
But for another client in another culture , it could really be the right answer to a different question .
So as a result , we never throw anything out .
We keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity .
You never know when you might need it .
And what I 'd like to do now , in an act of warp-speed storytelling , is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world .
The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010 .
And we saw this guy , Haibao .
He 's the mascot of the expo , and he looks strangely familiar .
In fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden .
When we submitted it for the Swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme , but it didn 't exactly look like something from the north of Sweden .
The Swedish jury didn 't think so either . So we lost .
But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman who saw our design and said , " Wow , that 's the Chinese character for the word ' people . ' " So , apparently this is how you write " people , " as in the People 's Republic of China .
We even double checked .
And at the same time , we got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai Creative Industry Week .
So we thought like , this is too much of an opportunity , so we hired a feng shui master .
We scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions , and went to China .
So the People 's Building , as we called it .
This is our two interpreters , sort of reading the architecture .
It went on the cover of the Wen Wei Po newspaper , which got Mr. Liangyu Chen , the mayor of Shanghai , to visit the exhibition .
And we had the chance to explain the project .
And he said , " Shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers , " but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over .
And with the People 's Building , he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China .
So we obviously profoundly agreed with him .
Unfortunately , Mr. Chen is now in prison for corruption .
But like I said , Haibao looked very familiar , because he is actually the Chinese character for " people . "
And they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is " Better City , Better Life . "
Sustainability .
And we thought , sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good .
You know , you 're not supposed to take long , warm showers .
You 're not supposed to fly on holidays because it 's bad for the environment .
Gradually , you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life .
So we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life .
We also asked ourselves , what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant ?
You know , it 's one of the biggest countries in the world , one of the smallest .
China symbolized by the dragon .
Denmark , we have a national bird , the swan .
China has many great poets , but we discovered that in the People 's Republic public school curriculum , they have three fairy tales by An Tu Sheng , or Hans Christian Anderson , as we call him .
So that means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with " The Emperor 's New Clothes , " " The Matchstick Girl " and " The Little Mermaid . "
It 's almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture .
The biggest tourist attraction in China is the Great Wall .
The Great Wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon .
The big tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little Mermaid .
That can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours .
And it sort of shows the difference between these two cities .
Copenhagen , Shanghai , modern , European .
But then we looked at recent urban development , and we noticed that this is like a Shanghai street , 30 years ago . All bikes , no cars .
This is how it looks today ; all traffic jam .
Bicycles have become forbidden many places .
Meanwhile , in Copenhagen we 're actually expanding the bicycle lanes .
A third of all the people commute by bike .
We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city .
So we thought , why don 't we reintroduce the bicycle in China ?
We donate 1,000 bikes to Shanghai .
So if you come to the expo , go straight to the Danish pavilion , get a Danish bike , and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions .
Like I said , Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities , but in Copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it .
One of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in Copenhagen , sort of continuing the public realm into the water .
So we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda , images , statements , but no real experience .
So just like with a bike , we don 't talk about it .
You can try it .
Like with the water , instead of talking about it , we 're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai , so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is .
This is where people normally object that it doesn 't sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China .
But in fact , the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark , and then they sail empty back .
So quite often you load water for ballast .
So we can actually hitch a ride for free .
And in the middle of this sort of harbor bath , we 're actually going to put the actual Little Mermaid .
So the real Mermaid , the real water , and the real bikes .
And when she 's gone , we 're going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her .
The architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes .
When you go to the exhibition , you 'll see the Mermaid and the pool .
You 'll walk around , start looking for a bicycle on the roof , jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo .
So when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project .
And to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese state censorship .
The first thing , the China map missed Taiwan .
It 's a very serious political issue in China . We will add on .
The second thing , we had compared the swan to the dragon , and then the Chinese state said , " Suggest change to panda . "
So , when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument , the National People 's Party sort of rebelled against it .
They tried to pass a law against moving the Mermaid .
So for the first time , I got invited to speak at the National Parliament .
It was kind of interesting because in the morning , from 9 to 11 , they were discussing the bailout package -- how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy .
And then at 11 o 'clock they stopped talking about these little issues .
And then from 11 to 1 , they were debating whether or not to send the Mermaid to China .
But to conclude , if you want to see the Mermaid from May to December next year , don 't come to Copenhagen , because she 's going to be in Shanghai .
If you do come to Copenhagen , you will probably see an installation by Ai Weiwei , the Chinese artist .
But if the Chinese government intervenes , it might even be a panda .
So the second story that I 'd like to tell is , actually starts in my own house .
This is my apartment .
This is the view from my apartment , over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the Leonardo DiCaprio balcony .
And they form this sort of vertical backyard where , on a nice summer day , you 'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters .
The house is sort of a distortion of a square block .
Trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views , instead of into each other .
Until recently , this was the view from my apartment , onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site .
And he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure .
And we thought , rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars , why don 't we turn all the apartments into penthouses , put them on a podium of cars .
And because Copenhagen is completely flat , if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view , you basically have to do it yourself .
Then we sort of cut up the volume , so we wouldn 't block the view from my apartment .
And essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments .
And up in the sun , you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle , like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view , and a sort of dense urban location .
This is our first architectural model .
This is an aerial photo taken last summer .
And essentially , the apartments cover the parking .
They are accessed through this diagonal elevator .
It 's actually a stand-up product from Switzerland , because in Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators .
And the facade of the parking , we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated , so we needed to perforate it .
And we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes , we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic , naturally ventilated , rasterized image .
And since we always refer to the project as The Mountain , we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest , making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork .
So if you go back into the parking , into the corridors , it 's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors , into this sort of south-facing urban oasis .
The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades .
If you go even further , it turns into this green garden .
And all the rainwater that drops on the Mountain is actually accumulated .
And there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens , in one or two years it will sort of transform into a Cambodian temple ruin , completely covered in green .
So , the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy .
This idea that you can actually create , if not gold , then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients , like normal apartments and normal parking , and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don 't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city .
They can actually have both .
As an architect , it 's really hard to set the agenda .
You can 't just say that now I 'd like to do a sustainable city in central Asia , because that 's not really how you get commissions .
You always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen , and the sort of turmoil of the world .
One last example is that recently we , like last summer , we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank .
This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling .
It was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity .
Unfortunately , it was the national bank of Iceland .
At the same time , we actually had a visitor -- a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office .
We took him to see the Mountain . And he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture , because Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia .
So he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan .
So we took the commission .
And we made this small movie that I 'd like to show .
We quite often make little movies .
We always argue a lot about the soundtrack , but in this case it was really easy to choose the song .
So basically , Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira , the island that we are planning -- almost like the diagram of their flag .
And our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures , inhabitable of human life .
Then we place these mountains on the island , surrounding this sort of central green valley , almost like a central park .
And what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert . It has no vegetation .
It has no water . It has no energy , no resources .
So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem , exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants , and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings .
And all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape , gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green , lush landscape .
So , you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature , in this case it 's actually creating nature .
And the buildings , they don 't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains , they also operate like mountains .
They create shelter from the wind .
They accumulate the solar energy .
They accumulate the water .
So they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem .
So we recently presented the master plan , and it has gotten approved .
And this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains , in what 's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia .
Yes , maybe just to round off .
So in a way you can see how the Mountain in Copenhagen sort of evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan .
With a little luck and some more evolution , maybe in 10 years it could be the Five Mountains on Mars .
Thank you .
Joseph Lekuton : A parable for Kenya
Joseph Lekuton , a member of parliament in Kenya , starts with the story of his remarkable education , then offers a parable of how Africa can grow . His message of hope has never been more relevant .
My name is Joseph , a Member of Parliament in Kenya .
Picture a Maasai village , and one evening , government soldiers come , surround the village and ask each elder to bring one boy to school .
That 's how I went to school -- pretty much a government guy pointing a gun and told my father , " You have to make a choice . "
So , I walked very comfortably to this missionary school that was run by an American missionary , and the first thing the American missionary gave me was a candy .
I had never in my life ever tasted candy .
So I said to myself , with all these hundred other boys , this is where I belong .
Stayed when everybody else was dropping out .
My family moved ; we 're nomads .
Every time school closed -- it was a boarding school and I was seven -- you had to travel until you find them .
Fifty miles , 40 miles , it doesn 't matter .
You slept in the bush , but you kept going .
And I stayed . I don 't know why I stayed , but I stayed .
And all of a sudden I passed the national examination , found myself in a very beautiful high school in Kenya .
And I finished high school . And just walking , I found a man who gave me a full scholarship to the United States .
My mother still lives in a cow-dung hut , none of my brothers are going to school , and this man told me , " Here , go . "
So I got a scholarship to St. Lawrence University , Upstate New York ; finished that . And then after that I went to Harvard Graduate School ; finished that . And then I worked in DC a little bit : I wrote a book for National Geographic and taught history , U.S. history .
And every time , I kept going back home listening to the problems of these people -- sick people , people with no water , all this stuff -- and every time I go back to America , I kept thinking about them .
Then one day , an elder gave me a story and this story went like this : long time ago , there was a big war between tribes .
And there was this specific tribe that was really afraid of this other Luhya tribe .
And every time , they sent scouts out there to make sure no one attacked them .
So one day , the scouts came running and told the villagers , " The enemies are coming . Only half an hour away , they 'll be here . "
So people scrambled , took their things and ready to go , move out .
But there were two men : one man was blind , one man had no legs -- he was born like that .
The leader of the chiefs said , " No , sorry . We can 't take you . You 'll slow us down .
We have to flee our women and children , we have to run . "
And they were left behind , waiting to die .
But these two people worked something out .
The blind man said , " Look , I 'm a very strong man but I can 't see . "
The man with no legs says , " I can see as far as the end of the world , but I can 't save myself from a cat , or whatever animals . "
So the blind man went down on his knees , down like this , and told the man with no legs to go over his back , and stood up .
The man on top can see , the blind man can walk .
And these guys took off , followed the footsteps of the villagers until they found and passed them .
So , this was told to me in a setup of elders .
And it 's a really poor area . I represent Northern Kenya : the most nomadic , remote areas you can even find .
And that man told me , " So , here you are .
You 've got a good education from America , you have a good life in America ; what are you going to do for us ?
We want you to be our eyes , we 'll give you the legs .
We 'll walk you , you lead us . "
So the opportunity came , and I was always thinking about that : " what can I do to help my people ?
Every time you go to an area where for 43 years of independence , we still don 't have basic health facilities .
A man has to be transported in a wheelbarrow 20 , 30 kilometers for a hospital . No clean drinking water .
So I said , " I 'm going to dedicate myself .
I 'm leaving America . I 'm going to run for office . "
So last July ... I moved from America in June , ran in July election and won .
And I came for them , and that 's my goal .
And right now I have in place , for the last nine months , a plan that in five years , every nomad will have clean drinking water .
We 're building dispensaries across that constituency .
I 'm asking my friends from America to help with bringing nurses or doctors to help us out .
I 'm trying to improve infrastructure .
I 'm using the knowledge I received from the United States and from my community to move them forward .
I 'm trying to develop homegrown solutions to our issues because we realize that people from outside can come and help us , but if we don 't help ourselves , there 's nothing we can do .
So my plan right now as I continue with introducing students to different fields -- some become doctors , some lawyers -- we want to produce a comprehensive group of people , students , who can come back and help us see a community grow that is in the middle of a huge economic recession .
So as I continue to be a Member of Parliament and as I continue listening to all of you talking about botany , talking about health , talking about democracy , talking about new inventions , I 'm hoping that one day in my own little community -- which is 26,000 square kilometers , maybe five times the size of Rhode Island -- with no roads , we 'll be able to become a model to help others develop .
Thank you very much .
Liz Diller : A new museum wing ... in a giant bubble
How do you make a great public space inside a not-so-great building ? Liz Diller shares the story of creating a welcoming , lighthearted addition to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington , DC . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
We conventionally divide space into private and public realms , and we know these legal distinctions very well because we 've become experts at protecting our private property and private space .
But we 're less attuned to the nuances of the public .
What translates generic public space into qualitative space ?
I mean , this is something that our studio has been working on for the past decade .
And we 're doing this through some case studies .
A large chunk of our work has been put into transforming this neglected industrial ruin into a viable post-industrial space that looks forward and backward at the same time .
And another huge chunk of our work has gone into making relevant a site that 's grown out of sync with its time .
We 've been working on democratizing Lincoln Center for a public that doesn 't usually have $ 300 to spend on an opera ticket .
So we 've been eating , drinking , thinking , living public space for quite a long time .
And it 's taught us really one thing , and that is to truly make good public space , you have to erase the distinctions between architecture , urbanism , landscape , media design and so on .
It really goes beyond distinction .
Now we 're moving onto Washington , D.C.
and we 're working on another transformation , and that is for the existing Hirshhorn Museum that 's sited on the most revered public space in America , the National Mall .
The Mall is a symbol of American democracy .
And what 's fantastic is that this symbol is not a thing , it 's not an image , it 's not an artifact , actually it 's a space , and it 's kind of just defined by a line of buildings on either side .
It 's a space where citizens can voice their discontent and show their power .
It 's a place where pivotal moments in American history have taken place .
And they 're inscribed in there forever -- like the march on Washington for jobs and freedom and the great speech that Martin Luther King gave there .
The Vietnam protests , the commemoration of all that died in the pandemic of AIDS , the march for women 's reproductive rights , right up until almost the present .
The Mall is the greatest civic stage in this country for dissent .
And it 's synonymous with free speech , even if you 're not sure what it is that you have to say .
It may just be a place for civic commiseration .
There is a huge disconnect , we believe , between the communicative and discursive space of the Mall and the museums that line it to either side .
And that is that those museums are usually passive , they have passive relationships between the museum as the presenter and the audience , as the receiver of information .
And so you can see dinosaurs and insects and collections of locomotives and all of that , but you 're really not involved ; you 're being talked to .
When Richard Koshalek took over as director of the Hirshhorn in 2009 , he was determined to take advantage of the fact that this museum was sited at the most unique place : at the seat of power in the U.S.
And while art and politics are inherently and implicitly together always and all the time , there could be some very special relationship that could be forged here in its uniqueness .
The question is , is it possible ultimately for art to insert itself into the dialogue of national and world affairs ?
And could the museum be an agent of cultural diplomacy ?
There are over 180 embassies in Washington D.C.
There are over 500 think tanks .
There should be a way of harnessing all of that intellectual and global energy into , and somehow through , the museum .
There should be some kind of brain trust .
So the Hirshhorn , as we began to think about it , and as we evolved the mission , with Richard and his team -- it 's really his life blood .
But beyond exhibiting contemporary art , the Hirshhorn will become a public forum , a place of discourse for issues around arts , culture , politics and policy .
It would have the global reach of the World Economic Forum .
It would have the interdisciplinarity of the TED Conference .
It would have the informality of the town square .
And for this new initiative , the Hirshhorn would have to expand or appropriate a site for a contemporary , deployable structure .
This is it . This is the Hirshhorn -- so a 230-foot-diameter concrete doughnut designed in the early ' 70s by Gordon Bunshaft .
It 's hulking , it 's silent , it 's cloistered , it 's arrogant , it 's a design challenge .
Architects love to hate it .
One redeeming feature is it 's lifted up off the ground and it 's got this void , and it 's got an empty core kind of in the spirit and that facade very much corporate and federal style .
And around that space , the ring is actually galleries .
Very , very difficult to mount shows in there .
When the Hirshhorn opened , Ada Louise Huxstable , the New York Times critic , had some choice words : " Neo-penitentiary modern . "
" A maimed monument and a maimed Mall for a maimed collection . "
Almost four decades later , how will this building expand for a new progressive program ?
Where would it go ?
It can 't go in the Mall .
There is no space there .
It can 't go in the courtyard .
It 's already taken up by landscape and by sculptures .
Well there 's always the hole .
But how could it take the space of that hole and not be buried in it invisibly ?
How could it become iconic ?
And what language would it take ?
The Hirshhorn sits among the Mall 's momumental institutions .
Most are neoclassical , heavy and opaque , made of stone or concrete .
And the question is , if one inhabits that space , what is the material of the Mall ?
It has to be different from the buildings there .
It has to be something entirely different .
It has to be air .
In our imagination , it has to be light .
It has to be ephemeral . It has to be formless .
And it has to be free .
So this is the big idea .
It 's a giant airbag .
The expansion takes the shape of its container and it oozes out wherever it can -- the top and sides .
But more poetically , we like to think of the structure as inhaling the democratic air of the Mall , bringing it into itself .
The before and the after .
It was dubbed " the bubble " by the press .
That was the lounge .
It 's basically one big volume of air that just oozes out in every direction .
The membrane is translucent .
It 's made of silcon-coated glass fiber .
And it 's inflated twice a year for one month at a time .
This is the view from the inside .
So you might have been wondering how in the world did we get this approved by the federal government .
It had to be approved by actually two agencies .
And one is there to preserve the dignity and sanctity of the Mall .
I blush whenever I show this .
It is yours to interpret .
But one thing I can say is that it 's a combination of iconoclasm and adoration .
There was also some creative interpretation involved .
The Congressional Buildings Act of 1910 limits the height of buildings in D.C.
to 130 feet , except for spires , towers , domes and minarettes .
This pretty much exempts monuments of the church and state .
And the bubble is 153 ft .
That 's the Pantheon next to it .
It 's about 1.2 million cubic feet of compressed air .
And so we argued it on the merits of being a dome .
So there it is , very stately , among all the stately buildings in the Mall .
And while this Hirshhorn is not landmarked , it 's very , very historically sensitive .
And so we couldn 't really touch its surfaces .
We couldn 't leave any traces behind .
So we strained it from the edges , and we held it by cables .
It 's a study of some bondage techniques , which are actually very , very important because it 's hit by wind all the time .
There 's one permanent steel ring at the top , but it can 't be seen from any vantage point on the Mall .
There are also some restrictions about how much it could be lit .
It glows from within , it 's translucent .
But it can 't be more lit than the Capitol or some of the monuments .
So it 's down the hierarchy on lighting .
So it comes to the site twice a year .
It 's taken off the delivery truck .
It 's hoisted .
And then it 's inflated with this low-pressure air .
And then it 's restrained with the cables .
And then it 's ballasted with water at the very bottom .
This is a very strange moment where we were asked by the bureaucracy at the Mall how much time would it take to install .
And we said , well the first erection would take one week .
And they really connected with that idea .
And then it was really easy all the way through .
So we didn 't really have that many hurdles , I have to say , with the government and all the authorities .
But some of the toughest hurdles have been the technical ones .
This is the warp and weft .
This is a point cloud .
There are extreme pressures .
This is a very , very unusual building in that there 's no gravity load , but there 's load in every direction .
And I 'm just going to zip through these slides .
And this is the space in action .
So flexible interior for discussions , just like this , but in the round -- luminous and reconfigurable .
Could be used for anything , for performances , films , for installations .
And the very first program will be one of cultural dialogue and diplomacy organized in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations .
Form and content are together here .
The bubble is an anti-monument .
The ideals of participatory democracy are represented through suppleness rather than rigidity .
Art and politics occupy an ambiguous site outside the museum walls , but inside of the museum 's core , blending its air with the democratic air of the Mall .
And the bubble will inflate hopefully for the first time at the end of 2013 .
Thank you .
Tim Ferriss : Smash fear , learn anything
From the EG conference : Productivity guru Tim Ferriss ' fun , encouraging anecdotes show how one simple question -- " What 's the worst that could happen ? " -- is all you need to learn to do anything .
This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two .
You can tell by the power squat , I was a very confident boy -- and not without reason .
I had a very charming routine at the time , which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day 's work , doing their crossword puzzles , watching television .
I would run into the living room , jump up on the couch , rip the cushions off , throw them on the floor , scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk .
Obviously , you see the resemblance .
And this routine went on for some time .
When I was seven I went to summer camp .
My parents found it necessary for peace of mind .
And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond , where they had floating docks .
You could jump off the end into the deep end .
I was born premature . I was always very small .
My left lung had collapsed when I was born .
And I 've always had buoyancy problems .
So water was something that scared me to begin with .
But I would go in on occasion .
And on one particular day , the campers were jumping through inner tubes , They were diving through inner tubes . And I thought this would be great fun .
So I dove through the inner tube , and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles .
And I tried to come up for air , and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube .
And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die .
A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us .
From that point onward I was terrified of swimming .
That is something that I did not get over .
My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments .
That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk .
But there is a happy ending to this story .
At age 31 -- that 's my age now -- in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming , and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming .
And went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey , at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- I measured it -- to going to Montauk on Long Island , close to where I grew up , and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water , getting out and feeling better than when I went in .
And I came out , in my Speedos , European style , feeling like the Incredible Hulk .
And that 's what I want everyone in here to feel like , the Incredible Hulk , at the end of this presentation .
More specifically , I want you to feel like you 're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer , a world-class language learner , and a tango champion .
And I would like to share my art .
If I have an art , it 's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me .
So , moving onward .
Swimming , first principles .
First principles , this is very important .
I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions .
And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said , " I will go a year without any stimulants " -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- " if you can complete a one kilometer open water race . "
So the clock started ticking .
I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn 't teach what they did .
I tried kickboards .
My feet would slice through the water like razors , I wouldn 't even move . I would leave demoralized , staring at my feet .
Hand paddles , everything .
Even did lessons with Olympians -- nothing helped .
And then Chris Sacca , who is now a dear friend mine , had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature , said , " I have the answer to your prayers . "
And he introduced me to who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming .
That set me on the road to examining biomechanics .
So here are the new rules of swimming , if any of you are afraid of swimming , or not good at it .
The first is , forget about kicking . Very counterintuitive .
So it turns out that propulsion isn 't really the problem .
Kicking harder doesn 't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion .
The problem is hydrodynamics .
So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body , much like a small car behind a big car on the highway .
And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position .
The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water .
The body is denser than water . 95 percent of it would be , at least , submerged naturally .
not swimming , in the case of freestyle , on your stomach , as many people think , reaching on top of the water .
But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left , maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible .
So let 's look at some examples . This is Terry .
And you can see that he 's extending his right arm below his head and far in front .
And so his entire body really is underwater .
The arm is extended below the head .
The head is held in line with the spine , so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important , especially for people with lower body fat .
Here is an example of the stroke .
So you don 't kick . But you do use a small flick .
You can see this is the left extension .
Then you see his left leg .
Small flick , and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side .
And the entry point for his right hand -- notice this , he 's not reaching in front and catching the water .
Rather , he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm , and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important .
Incorrect , above , which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you .
Not their fault , honestly .
And I 'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment .
Below is what most swimmers which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach , no video monitoring .
And now I love swimming . I can 't wait to go swimming .
I 'll be doing a swimming lesson later , for myself , if anyone wants to join me .
Last thing , breathing . A problem a lot of us have , certainly , when you 're swimming .
In freestyle , easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll , and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water .
And that will get you very far .
That 's it . That 's really all you need to know .
Languages . Material versus method .
I , like many people , came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages .
I suffered through Spanish for junior high , first year of high school , and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much , " Donde esta el bano ? "
And I wouldn 't even catch the response . A sad state of affairs .
Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year , and I had a choice of other languages . Most of my friends were taking Japanese .
So I thought why not punish myself ? I 'll do Japanese .
Six months later I had the chance to go to Japan .
My teachers assured me , they said , " Don 't worry .
You 'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope .
It will be an amazing experience . " My first overseas experience in fact .
So my parents encouraged me to do it . I left .
I arrived in Tokyo . Amazing .
I couldn 't believe I was on the other side of the world .
I met my host family . Things went quite well I think , all things considered .
My first evening , before my first day of school , I said to my mother , very politely , " Please wake me up at eight a.m. "
So , But I didn 't say . I said , . Pretty close .
But I said , " Please rape me at eight a.m. "
You 've never seen a more confused Japanese woman .
I walked in to school .
And a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper .
I couldn 't read any of it -- hieroglyphics , it could have been -- because it was Kanji , Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language .
Asked him what this said .
And he goes , " Ahh , okay okay , eehto , World History , ehh , Calculus , Traditional Japanese . " And so on .
And so it came to me in waves .
There had been something lost in translation .
The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes , per se .
They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students -- the other 4,999 students in the school , who were Japanese , besides the American .
And that 's pretty much my response .
And that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method .
I tried everything . I went to Kinokuniya .
I tried every possible book , every possible CD .
Nothing worked until I found this .
This is the Joyo Kanji . This is a Tablet rather , or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981 .
Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters , to facilitate literacy -- some are required to .
And this became my Holy Grail , my Rosetta Stone .
As soon as I focused on this material , I took off .
I ended up being able to read Asahi Shinbu , Asahi newspaper , about six months later -- so a total of 11 months later -- and went from Japanese I to Japanese VI .
Ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the U.S. , and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now .
Someone who was terrible at languages , and at any given time , speak , read and write five or six .
This brings us to the point , which is , it 's oftentimes what you do , not how you do it , that is the determining factor .
This is the difference between being effective -- doing the right things -- and being efficient -- doing things well whether or not they 're important .
You can also do this with grammar .
I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation .
Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar , by translating these sentences into past , present , future , will show you subject , object , verb , placement of indirect , direct objects , gender and so forth .
From that point , you can then , if you want to , acquire multiple languages , alternate them so there is no interference .
We can talk about that if anyone in interested .
And now I love languages .
So ballroom dancing , implicit versus explicit -- very important .
You might look at me and say , " That guy must be a ballroom dancer . "
But no , you 'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things -- pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps .
I used to be much bigger , much more muscular .
And so I ended up walking like this .
I looked a lot like an orangutan , our close cousins , or the Incredible Hulk .
Not very good for ballroom dancing .
I found myself in Argentina in 2005 , decided to watch a tango class -- had no intention of participating .
Went in , paid my ten pesos , walked up -- 10 women two guys , usually a good ratio .
The instructor says , " You are participating . "
Immediately : death sweat .
Fight-or-flight fear sweat , because I tried ballroom dancing in college -- stepped on the girl 's foot with my heel . She screamed .
I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing , that it exploded in my face , never to return to the ballroom dancing club .
She comes up , and this was her approach , the teacher .
" Okay , come on , grab me . "
Gorgeous assistant instructor .
She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice .
So I did my best . I didn 't know where to put my hands .
And she pulled back , threw down her arms , put them on her hips , turned around and yelled across the room , " This guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle , and he 's grabbing me like a fucking Frenchman , " which I found encouraging .
Everyone burst into laughter . I was humiliated .
She came back . She goes , " Come on . I don 't have all day . "
As someone who wrestled since age eight , I proceeded to crush her , " Of Mice and Men " style .
And she looked up and said , " Now that 's better . "
So I bought a month 's worth of classes .
And proceeded to look at -- I wanted to set competition so I 'd have a deadline -- Parkinson 's Law , the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it .
So I had a very short deadline for a competition .
I got a female instructor first , to teach me the female role , the follow , because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop , so I wouldn 't have a repeat of college .
And then I took an inventory of the characteristics , along with her , of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who 'd won championships .
I interviewed these people because they all taught in Buenos Aires .
I compared the two lists , and what you find is that there is explicitly , expertise they recommended , certain training methods .
Then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing .
Now the protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside , I found this very interesting . So I decided to focus on three of those commonalities .
Long steps . So a lot of milongueros -- the tango dancers will use very short steps .
I found that longer steps were much more elegant .
So you can have -- and you can do it in a very small space in fact .
Secondly , different types of pivots .
Thirdly , variation in tempo .
These seemed to be the three areas that I could exploit to compete if I wanted to comptete against people who 'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years .
That photo is of the semi-finals of the Buenos Aires championships , four months later .
Then one month later , went to the world championships , made it to the semi-final . And then set a world record , following that , two weeks later .
I want you to see part of what I practiced .
I 'm going to jump forward here .
This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead .
His name is Gabriel Misse .
One of the most elegant dancers of his generation , known for his long steps , and his tempo changes and his pivots .
Alicia , in her own right , very famous .
So I think you 'll agree , they look quite good together .
Now what I like about this video is it 's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead . He had a strong lead .
He didn 't lead with his chest , which requires you lean forward .
I couldn 't develop the attributes in my toes , the strength in my feet , to do that .
So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm .
So he can lift the woman to break her , for example .
That 's just one benefit of that .
So then we broke it down .
This would be an example of one pivot .
This is a back step pivot .
There are many different types .
I have hundreds of hours of footage -- all categorized , much like George Carlin categorized his comedy .
So using my arch-nemesis , Spanish , no less , to learn tango .
So fear is your friend . Fear is an indicator .
Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn 't do .
More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do .
And the best results that I 've had in life , the most enjoyable times , have all been from asking a simple question : what 's the worst that can happen ?
Especially with fears you gained when you were a child .
Take the analytical frameworks , the capabilities you have , apply them to old fears .
Apply them to very big dreams .
And when I think of what I fear now , it 's very simple .
When I imagine my life , what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had , it makes me wonder .
I 've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system , to either fix it or replace it .
And have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far -- built , I 'd say , about a half dozen schools , my readers , at this point .
And if any of you are interested in that , I would love to speak with you .
I know nothing . I 'm a beginner .
But I ask a lot of questions , and I would love your advice .
Thank you very much .
Bill Gross : A solar energy system that tracks the sun
Bill Gross , the founder of Idealab , talks about his life as an inventor , starting with his high-school company selling solar energy plans and kits . Learn here about a groundbreaking system for solar cells -- and some questions we haven 't yet solved .
Right when I was 15 was when I first got interested in solar energy .
My family had moved from Fort Lee , New Jersey to California , and we moved from the snow to lots of heat , and gas lines .
There was gas rationing in 1973 .
The energy crisis was in full bore .
I started reading Popular Science magazine , and I got really excited about the potential of solar energy to try and solve that crisis .
I had just taken trigonometry in high school , I learned about the parabola and how it could concentrate rays of light to a single focus .
That got me very excited .
And I really felt that there would be potential to build some kind of thing that could concentrate light .
So , I started this company called Solar Devices .
And this was a company where I built parabolas , I took metal shop , and I remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and Stirling engines .
And I was building this Stirling engine over on the lathe , and all the biker guys -- motorcycle guys -- came over and said , " You 're building a bong , aren 't you ? "
And I said , " No , it 's a Stirling engine . It really is . "
But they didn 't believe me .
I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of Popular Science magazine , for four dollars each .
And I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech .
It was a really big excitement for me to get into Caltech .
And my first year at Caltech , I continued the business .
But then , in the second year of Caltech , they started grading .
The whole first year was pass / fail , but the second year was graded .
I wasn 't able to keep up with the business , and I ended up with a 25-year detour .
My dream had been to convert solar energy at a very practical cost , but then I had this big detour .
First , the coursework at Caltech .
Then , when I graduated from Caltech , the IBM P.C. came out , and I got addicted to the IBM P.C. in 1981 .
And then in 1983 , Lotus 1-2-3 came out , and I was completely blown away by Lotus 1-2-3 .
I began operating my business with 1-2-3 , began writing add-ins for 1-2-3 , wrote a natural language interface to 1-2-3 .
I started an educational software company after I joined Lotus , and then I started Idealab so I could have a roof under which I could build multiple companies in succession Then , much much later -- in 2000 , very recently -- the new California energy crisis -- or what was purported to be a big energy crisis -- was coming .
And I was trying to figure if there was some way and try and get people back-up energy , in case the crisis really came .
And I started looking at how we could build battery back-up systems that could give people five hours , 10 hours , maybe even a full day , or three days ' worth of back-up power .
I 'm glad you heard earlier today , batteries are unbelievably energy -- lack of density compared to fuel .
So much more energy can be stored with fuel than with batteries .
You 'd have to fill your entire parking space of one garage space just to give yourself four hours of battery back-up .
And I concluded , after researching every other technology that we could deploy for storing energy -- flywheels , different formulations of batteries -- it just wasn 't practical to store energy .
So what about making energy ?
Maybe we could make energy .
I tried to figure out -- maybe solar 's become attractive .
It 's been 25 years since I was doing this , let me go back and look at what 's been happening with solar cells .
And the price had gone down from 10 dollars a watt to about four or five dollars a watt , but it stabilized .
And it really needed to get much lower than that to be cost effective .
I studied all the new things that had happened in solar cells , and was trying to look for ways we could innovate and make solar cells more inexpensively .
There are a lot of new things that are happening to do that , but fundamentally the process requires a tremendous amount of energy .
Some people even say it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it will give out in its entire life .
Hopefully , if we can reduce the amount of energy it takes to make the cells , that will become more practical .
But right now , you pretty much have to take silicon , put it in an oven at 1600 degrees Fahrenheit for 17 hours , to make the cells .
A lot of people are working on things to try and reduce that , but I didn 't have anything to contribute in that area .
So I tried to figure out what other way could we try and make cost-effective solar electricity .
So I thought of an idea -- what if we collect the sun with a large reflector -- like I had been thinking about way back when , when I was in high school -- but maybe with modern technology we could make a cheaper , large collector , concentrate it to a small converter , and then the conversion device wouldn 't have to be as expensive , because it 's much smaller , rather than solar cells , which have to be covering the entire surface area that you want to gather sun from .
This seemed practical now , because a lot of new technologies had come in the 25 years since I had last looked at it .
First of all , there was a lot of new manufacturing techniques , not to mention really cheap miniature motors -- brushless motors , servo motors , stepper motors , that are used in printers and scanners and things like that .
So , that 's a breakthrough .
Of course , inexpensive microprocessors and then a very important breakthrough -- genetic algorithms .
I 'll be very short on genetic algorithms .
It 's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection .
You take a problem that you can 't solve with a pure mathematical answer , you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing , you add sex -- where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations -- and you use natural selection to kill off not as good solutions .
Usually , with a genetic algorithm on a computer today , with a three gigahertz processor you can solve many , many formerly intractable problems in just a matter of minutes .
We tried to come up with a way to use genetic algorithms to create a new type of concentrator .
And I 'll show you what we came up with .
Traditionally , concentrators look like this .
Those shapes are parabolas .
They take all the parallel incoming rays and focus it to a single spot .
They have to track the sun , because they have to be pointing directly at the sun .
They usually have about a one degree acceptance angle , meaning once they 're more than about a degree off , none of the sunlight rays will hit the focus .
So we tried to come up with a way of making a non-tracking collector , a collector that would gather much more than one degree of light , with no moving parts .
So we created this genetic algorithm to try this out , we made a model in XL of a multi-surface reflector , and an amazing thing evolved , literally evolved , from trying a billion cycles , a billion different attempts , with a fitness function that defined how can you collect the most light , from the most angles , over a day , from the sun .
And this is the shape that evolved .
It 's this non-tracking collector with these six tuba-like horns , and each of them collect light in the following way -- if the sunlight strikes right here , it might bounce right to the center , the hot spot , directly , but if the sun is off-axis and comes from the side , it might hit two places and take two bounces .
So for direct light , it takes only one bounce , for off-axis light it might take two , and for extreme off-axis , it might take three .
Your efficiency goes down with more bounces , because you lose about 10 percent with each bounce , but this allowed us to collect light from a plus or minus 25 degree angle .
So , about two and a half hours of the day we could collect with a stationary component .
Solar cells collect light for four and a half hours though .
On an average adjusted day , a solar cell -- because the sun 's moving across the sky , the solar cell is going down with a sine wave function of performance at the off-axis angles .
It collects about four and a half average hours of sunlight a day .
So , even this , although it was great with no moving parts -- we could achieve high temperatures -- wasn 't enough .
We needed to beat solar cells .
So we took a look at another idea .
We looked at a way to break up a parabola into individual petals that would track .
So what you see here is 12 separate petals , that each could be controlled with individual microprocessors You can buy a two megahertz microprocessor for a dollar now .
And you can buy stepper motors that pretty much never wear out because they have no brushes , for a dollar .
We can control all 12 of these petals for under 50 dollars and what this would allow us to do is not have to move the focus any more , but only move the petals .
The whole system would have a much lower profile , but also we could gather sunlight for six and a half to seven hours a day .
Now that we have concentrated sunlight , what are we going to put at the center to convert sunlight to electricity ?
So we tried to look at all the different heat engines that have been used in history to try and convert sunlight to electricity , or heat to electricity .
And one of the great ones of all time , James Watt 's steam engine of 1788 was a major , major breakthrough .
James Watt didn 't actually invent the steam engine , he just refined it .
But , his refinements were incredible .
He added new linear motion guides to the pistons , he added a condenser to cool the steam outside the cylinder , he made the engine double-acting so it had double the power .
Those were major breakthroughs .
I mean , all of the improvements he made -- and it 's justifiable that our measure of energy , the watt , today is named after him .
So we looked at this engine , and this had some potential .
Steam engines are dangerous , and they had tremendous impact on the world , as you know -- industrial revolution and ships and locomotives .
But they 're usually good to be large , so they 're not good for distributed power generation .
But they 're also very high pressure , so they 're dangerous .
Another type of engine is the hot air engine .
And the hot air engine also was not invented by Robert Stirling , but Robert Stirling came along in 1816 and radically improved it .
This engine , because it was so interesting -- it only worked on air , no steam -- has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the Stirling engine principle .
But after the Stirling engine , Otto came along , and also , he didn 't invent the internal combustion engine , he just refined it .
He showed it in Paris in 1867 , and it was a major achievement because it brought the power density of the engine way up .
You could now get a lot more power in a lot smaller space , and that allowed the engine to be used for mobile applications .
So , once you have mobility , now you 're making a lot of engines because you 've got lots of units , as opposed to steam ships or big factories where you 're not making as many units , so this was the engine that ended up benefiting from mass production where all the other engines didn 't benefit .
So , because it went into mass production , costs were reduced , 100 years of refinement , emissions were reduced , tremendous production value .
There have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built , compared to thousands of Stirling engines built .
And not nearly as many small steam engines being built anymore , only large ones for big operations .
So after looking at these three , and 47 others , we concluded that the Stirling engine would be the best one to use .
I want to give you a brief explanation of how we looked at it and how it works .
So we tried to look at the Stirling engine in a new way , because it was practical -- weight no longer mattered for our application The internal combustion engine took off because weight mattered because you were moving around .
But if you 're trying to generate solar energy in a static place the weight doesn 't matter so much .
The other thing we discovered is that efficiency doesn 't matter so much if your energy source is free .
Normally , efficiency is crucial because the fuel cost of your engine over its life dwarfs the cost of the engine .
But if your fuel source is free , then the only thing that matters is the up-front capital cost of the engine .
So you don 't want to optimize for efficiency , you want to optimize for power per dollar .
So using that new twist , with the new criteria , we thought we could re-look at the Stirling engine , and also bring genetic algorithms in .
Basically , Robert Stirling didn 't have Gordon Moore before him to get us three gigahertz of processor power .
So we took the same genetic algorithm that we used earlier to make that concentrator , which didn 't work out for us , to optimize the Stirling engine , and make its design sizes and all of its dimensions the exact optimum to get the most power per dollar , irrespective of weight , irrespective of size , to get the most conversion of solar energy , because the sun is free .
And that 's the process we took -- let me show you how the engine works .
The simplest heat engine , or hot air engine , of all time would be this -- take a box , a steel canister , with a piston .
Put a flame under it , the piston moves up .
Take it off the flame and pour water on it , or let it cool down , the piston moves down .
That 's a heat engine .
That 's basically the most fundamental heat engine you could possibly have .
The problem is the efficiency is one hundredth of one percent , because you 're heating all the metal of the chamber and then cooling all the metal of the chamber each time .
And you 're only getting power from the air that 's heating at the same time , but you 're wasting all the energy heating the metal and cooling the metal .
So someone came up with a very clever idea , to -- instead of heating the whole cylinder and cooling the whole cylinder , what about if you put a displacer inside -- a little thing that shuttles the air back and forth .
You move that up and down with a little bit of energy but now you 're only shifting the air down to the hot end and up to the cold end , down to the hot end and up to the cold end .
So , now you 're not alternately heating and cooling the metal , you 're just alternately heating and cooling the air .
That allows you to get the efficiency up from a hundredth of a percent to about two percent .
And then Robert Stirling came along with this genius idea , which was , well I 'm still not heating the metal now , with this kind of engine , but I 'm still reheating all the air .
I 'm still heating the air every time and cooling the air every time .
What about if I put a thermal sponge in the middle , in the passageway between where the air has to move between hot and cold ?
So he made fine wires , and cracked glass , and all different kinds of materials to be a heat sponge .
So when the air pushes up to go from the hot end to the cold end , it puts some heat into the sponge .
And then when the air comes back after it 's been cooled it picks up that heat again .
So you 're reusing your energy five or six times , and that brings the efficiency up between 30 and 40 percent It 's a little known , but brilliant , genius invention of Robert Stirling that takes the hot air engine from being somewhat impractical -- like I found out when I made the real simple version in high school -- to very potentially possible , once you get the efficiency up , if you can design this to be low enough cost .
So we really set out on a path to try and make the lowest cost possible .
We built a huge mathematical model of how a Stirling engine works .
We applied the genetic algorithm .
We got the results from that for the optimal engine .
We built engines -- so we built 100 different engines over the last two years .
We measured each one , we readjusted the model to what we measured , and then we led that to the current prototype .
It led to a very compact , inexpensive engine , and this is what the engine looks like .
Let me show you what it looks like in real life .
So this is the engine .
It 's just a small cylinder down here which holds the generator inside and all the linkage and it 's the hot cap -- the hot cylinder on the top -- this part gets hot , this part is cool , and electricity comes out .
The exact converse is also true .
If you put electricity in , this will get hot and this will get cold , you get refrigeration .
So it 's a complete reversible cycle , a very efficient cycle , and quite a simple thing to make .
So now you put the two things together .
So you have the engine , now what if you combine the petals and the engine in the center ?
The petals track and the engine gets the concentrated sunlight , take that heat and turn it into electricity .
This is what the first prototype of our system looked like together with the petals and the engine in the center .
This is being run out in the sun , and now I want to show you what the actual thing looks like .
Thank you .
So this is a unit with the 12 petals These petals cost about a dollar each -- they 're lightweight , injection molded plastic , aluminized .
The mechanism to control each petal is below there with a microprocessor on each one .
There are thermocouples on the engine -- little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them .
Each petal adjusts itself separately to keep the highest temperature on it .
When the sun comes out in the morning , the petals will seek the sun , find it by searching for the highest temperature About a minute and a half or two minutes after the rays are striking the hot cap the engine will be warm enough to start and then the engine will generate electricity for about six and a half hours a day -- six and a half to seven hours as the sun moves across the sky A critical part that we can take advantage of is that we have these inexpensive microprocessors and each one of these petals are autonomous , and each one of these petals figures out where the sun is with no user set-up .
So you don 't have to tell what latitude , longitude you 're at , you don 't have to tell what your roof slope angle is , you don 't have to tell what orientation .
It doesn 't really care .
What it does is it searches to find the hottest spot , it searches again a half an hour later , it searches again a day later , it searches again a month later .
It basically figures out where on Earth you are by watching the direction the sun moves , so you don 't have to actually enter anything about that .
The way the unit works is , when the sun comes out the engine will start and you get power out here .
We have A.C. and D.C. , get 12 volts D.C. , so that could be used for certain applications .
We have an inverter in there , so you get 117 volts A.C.
and you also get hot water .
The hot water 's optional .
You don 't have to use the hot water , it will cool itself .
But you can use it to optionally heat hot water and that brings the efficiency up even higher because some of the heat that you would normally be rejecting , you can now use as useful energy , whether it 's for a pool or hot water .
Let me show you a quick movie of what this looks like running .
So this is the first test where we took it outside and each of the petals were individually seeking .
And what they do is step , very coarsely at first , and then very finely afterward .
Once they get a temperature reading on the thermocouple indicating they found the sun , then they slow down and do a fine search , then all the petals will move into position , and then the engine will start .
So , we 've been working on this for the last two years .
We 're very excited about the progress , we do have a very long way to go though still , and let me tell you a little bit more about that .
This is how we envision it would be in a residential installation : you 'd probably have more than one unit on your roof .
It could be on your roof , or in your backyard , or somewhere else .
You don 't have to have enough units to power your entire house , you just save money with each incremental one you add .
So you 're still using the grid potentially , in this type of application , to be your back-up supply -- of course , you can 't use these at night , and you can 't use these on cloudy days .
But by reducing your energy use , pretty much at the peak times -- usually when you have you air conditioning on , or other times like that -- this generates the peak power at the peak usage time , so it 's very complementary in that sense .
This is how we would envision a residential application .
We also think there 's very big potential for energy farms , especially in remote land where there happens to be a lot of sun .
It 's a really good combination of those two factors .
It turns out there 's a lot of powerful sun all around the world , obviously , but in special places where it happens to be relatively inexpensive to place these and also in many more places where there is high wind power .
So an example of that is , here 's the map of the United States .
Pretty much everywhere that 's not green or blue is a really ideal place , but even the green or blue areas are good , just not as good as the places that are red , orange and yellow .
But the hot sport right around Las Vegas and Death Valley and that area is very , very good .
And all this does is affect the payback period , it doesn 't mean that you couldn 't use solar energy ; you could use solar energy anywhere on Earth .
It just affects the payback period if you 're comparing to grid-supplied electricity .
But if you don 't have grid-supplied electricity , then the whole question of payback is a different one entirely .
It 's just how many watts do you get per dollar , and how could you benefit from that using that power to change your life in some way .
This is the map of the United States .
This is the map of the whole Earth and again , you can see a huge swathe in the middle of pretty much where a large part of the population is , there 's tremendous chances for solar energy .
And of course , look at Africa .
It 's just unbelievable what the potential is to take advantage of solar energy there , and I 'm really excited to talk more about finding ways we can help with that .
So , in conclusion , I would say my journey has shown me that you can revisit old ideas in a new light , and sometimes ideas that have been discarded in the past can be practical now if you apply some new technology or new twists .
We believe we 're getting very close to something practical and affordable .
Our short-term goal for this is to be half the price of solar cells and our longer-term goal is to be less than a five-year payback .
And at less than a five-year payback , all of a sudden this becomes very economic So you don 't have to just want to have a feel-good attitude about energy to want to have one of these .
It just makes economic sense .
Right now , solar paybacks are between 30 and 50 years .
If you get it down below five years then it becomes almost a no-brainer because the interest to own it -- someone else will finance it for you and you can just make money , basically from day one .
So that 's our real powerful goal that we 're really shooting for in the company .
Two other things that I learned that were very surprising to me -- one was how casual we are about energy .
I was walking from the elevator over here , and even just looking at the stage right now -- so there 's probably 20 500 watt lights right now .
There 's 10,000 watts of light pouring on the stage , one horsepower is 756 watts , at full power .
So there 's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit .
Not to mention the 200 horses that are probably running right now to keep the airconditioning going .
And it 's just amazing , walk in the elevator and there 's lights on in the elevator .
Of course , now I 'm very sensitive at home when we leave the lights on by mistake .
But , everywhere around us we have insatiable use for energy because it 's so cheap .
And it 's cheap because we 've been subsidized by energy that 's been concentrated by the sun .
Basically , oil is solar energy concentrate .
It 's been pounded for a billion years with a lot of energy to make it have all that energy contained in it .
And we don 't have a birthright to just use that up as fast as we are , I think .
And it would be great if we could find a way to make our energy usage renewable , where as we 're using the energy we 're creating it at the same pace , and I really hope we can get there .
Thank you very much , you 've been a great audience .
Marc Pachter : The art of the interview
Marc Pachter has conducted live interviews with some of the most intriguing characters in recent American history as part of a remarkable series created for the Smithsonian 's National Portrait Gallery . He reveals the secret to a great interview and shares extraordinary stories of talking with Steve Martin , Clare Booth Luce and more .
The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives , amazing people .
And that 's what it 's about .
We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives , but that 's it .
And so I 'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today .
I 'm going to talk about a program I started there , which , from my point of view , is the proudest thing I did .
I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don 't get their portraits painted anymore , and they 're amazing people , and we want to deliver them to future generations .
So , how do we do that ?
And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series .
And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview .
And so what I 'm going to do is , not so much give you the great hits of that program , as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation , what you try to find out about them , and when people deliver and when they don 't and why .
Now , I had two preconditions .
One was that they be American .
That 's just because , in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery , it 's created to look at American lives .
That was easy , but then I made the decision , maybe arbitrary , that they needed to be people of a certain age , which at that point , when I created this program , seemed really old .
Sixties , seventies , eighties and nineties .
For obvious reasons , it doesn 't seem that old anymore to me .
And why did I do that ?
Well , for one thing , we 're a youth-obsessed culture .
And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk .
But the second part of it -- and the older I get , the more convinced I am that that 's true .
It 's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out .
That 's the one advantage that older people have .
Well , they have other , little bit of advantage , but they also have some disadvantages , but the one thing they or we have is that we 've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out .
So , we can then go back in our lives , if we 've got an interviewer who gets that , and begin to reflect on how we got there .
All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited .
So , I thought okay , now , what is it going to take to make this work ?
There are many kinds of interviews . We know them .
There are the journalist interviews , which are the interrogation that is expected .
This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee .
Then there 's the celebrity interview , where it 's more important who 's asking the question than who answers .
That 's Barbara Walters and others like that , and we like that .
That 's Frost-Nixon , where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process .
Fair enough .
But I wanted interviews that were different .
I wanted to be , as I later thought of it , empathic , which is to say , to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation .
By the way , this was always done in public .
This was not an oral history program .
This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual , and having me be the brush in their self-portrait .
Now , it turns out that I was pretty good at that .
I didn 't know it coming into it .
And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright , and that was six months after he 'd had a stroke .
And he had never appeared in public since that point .
This was not a devastating stroke , but it did affect his speaking and so forth .
And I thought it was worth a chance , he thought it was worth a chance , and so we got up on the stage , and we had an hour conversation about his life , and after that a woman rushed up to me , essentially did , and she said , " Where did you train as a doctor ? "
And I said , " I have no training as a doctor . I never claimed that . "
And she said , " Well , something very weird was happening .
When he started a sentence , particularly in the early parts of the interview , and paused , you gave him the word , the bridge to get to the end of the sentence , and by the end of it , he was speaking complete sentences on his own . "
I didn 't know what was going on , but I was so part of the process of getting that out .
So I thought , okay , fine , I 've got empathy , or empathy , at any rate , is what 's critical to this kind of interview .
But then I began to think of other things .
Who makes a great interview in this context ?
It had nothing to do with their intellect , the quality of their intellect .
Some of them were very brilliant , some of them were , you know , ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals , but it was never about that .
It was about their energy .
It 's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives .
I 'm convinced of it .
And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young .
These were people through their 90s .
In fact , the first person I interviewed was George Abbott , who was 97 , and Abbott was filled with the life force -- I guess that 's the way I think about it -- filled with it .
And so he filled the room , and we had an extraordinary conversation .
He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent , for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two .
And , in fact , he did wind up opening up -- by the way , his energy is evidenced in other ways .
He subsequently got married again at 102 , so he , you know , he had a lot of the life force in him .
But after the interview , I got a call , very gruff voice , from a woman .
I didn 't know who she was , and she said , " Did you get George Abbott to talk ? "
And I said , " Yeah . Apparently I did . "
And she said , " I 'm his old girlfriend , Maureen Stapleton , and I could never do it . "
And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk .
So , you know , you want energy , you want the life force , but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing .
The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest .
Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who 's modest , because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them , and they sit there and they say , " Aw , shucks , it was an accident . "
There 's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them .
The worst interview I ever did : William L. Shirer .
The journalist who did " The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . "
This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months , and every time I 'd ask him about it , he 'd say , " Oh , I just happened to be there .
Didn 't matter . " Whatever .
Awful .
I never would ever agree to interview a modest person .
They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you .
But it comes down , in the end , to how do you get through all the barriers we have .
All of us are public and private beings , and if all you 're going to get from the interviewee is their public self , there 's no point in it .
It 's pre-programmed . It 's infomercial , and we all have infomercials about our lives .
We know the great lines , we know the great moments , we know what we 're not going to share , and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody .
This wasn 't -- and some of you will remember Mike Wallace 's old interviews -- tough , aggressive and so forth . They have their place .
I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say , to break out of their own cocoon of the public self , and the more public they had been , the more entrenched that person , that outer person was .
And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series .
It all has to do with that shell that most of us have , and particularly certain people .
There 's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce .
It 'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you .
She did so much . She was a playwright .
She did an extraordinary play called " The Women . "
She was a congresswoman when there weren 't very many congresswomen .
She was editor of Vanity Fair , one of the great phenomenal women of her day .
And , incidentally , I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right .
She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left .
And , in fact , when we did the interview -- I did the living self-portrait with her -- there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet , just enjoying her presence .
And I thought , this is going to be a piece of cake , because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes .
We never talk before that because if you talk before , you don 't get it on the stage .
So she and I had a delightful conversation .
We were on the stage and then -- by the way , spectacular .
It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce 's look .
She was in a great evening gown .
She was 80 , almost that day of the interview , and there she was and there I was , and I just proceeded into the questions .
And she stonewalled me . It was unbelievable .
Anything that I would ask , she would turn around , dismiss , and I was basically up there -- any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage .
And I was dying . She was absolutely not giving me a thing .
And I began to wonder what was going on , and you think while you talk , and basically , I thought , I got it .
When we were alone , I was her audience .
Now I 'm her competitor for the audience .
That 's the problem here , and she 's fighting me for that , and so then I asked her a question -- I didn 't know how I was going to get out of it -- I asked her a question about her days as a playwright , and again , characteristically , instead of saying , " Oh yes , I was a playwright , and this is what blah blah blah , " she said , " Oh , playwright . Everybody knows I was a playwright .
Most people think that I was an actress . I was never an actress . "
But I hadn 't asked that , and then she went off on a tear , and she said , " Oh , well , there was that one time that I was an actress .
It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman , and I got up there , " and she went on and on , " And then I got on the stage . "
And then she turned to me and said , " And you know what those young actors did ?
They upstaged me . " And she said , " Do you know what that is ? "
Just withering in her contempt .
And I said , " I 'm learning . "
And she looked at me , and it was like the successful arm-wrestle , and then , after that , she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like .
I have to end that one . This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce .
Again , a remarkable person .
I 'm not politically attracted to her , but through her life force , I 'm attracted to her .
And the way she died -- she had , toward the end , a brain tumor .
That 's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine , and very few of us were invited to a dinner party .
And she was in horrible pain .
We all knew that .
She stayed in her room .
Everybody came . The butler passed around canapes .
The usual sort of thing .
Then at a certain moment , the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed , completely composed .
The public self , the beauty , the intellect , and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again .
She wanted the control of her final moment , and she did it amazingly .
Now , there are other ways that you get somebody to open up , and this is just a brief reference .
It wasn 't this arm-wrestle , but it was a little surprising for the person involved .
I interviewed Steve Martin . It wasn 't all that long ago .
And we were sitting there , and almost toward the beginning of the interview , I turned to him and I said , " Steve , " or " Mr. Martin , it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods .
Was yours unhappy ? "
And he looked at me , you know , as if to say , " This is how you 're going to start this thing , right off ? "
And then he turned to me , not stupidly , and he said , " What was your childhood like ? "
And I said -- these are all arm wrestles , but they 're affectionate -- and I said , " My father was loving and supportive , which is why I 'm not funny . "
And he looked at me , and then we heard the big sad story .
His father was an SOB , and , in fact , he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood , but then we were off and running .
So the question is : What is the key that 's going to allow this to proceed ?
Now , these are arm wrestle questions , but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really , very often , are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked .
And I 'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints .
One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers .
Again , some of you will know him , most of you won 't , Dumas Malone .
He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson , spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson , and by the way , at one point I asked him , " Would you like to have met him ? "
And he said , " Well , of course , but actually , I know him better than anyone who ever met him , because I got to read all of his letters . "
So , he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years .
And I asked him one question .
I said , " Did Jefferson ever disappoint you ? "
And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him , and he said , " Well ... " -- I 'm going to do a bad southern accent .
Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally .
But he said , " Well , " he said , " I 'm afraid so . "
He said , " You know , I 've read everything , and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit . "
And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had , because he saw the letters .
He said , " But I understand that . " He said , " I understand that . "
He said , " We southerners do like a smooth surface , so that there were times when he just didn 't want the confrontation . "
And he said , " Now , John Adams was too honest . "
And he started to talk about that , and later on he invited me to his house , and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts , and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams .
She was the New Englander and abrasive , and he was this courtly fellow .
But really the most important question I ever asked , and most of the times when I talk about it , people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity , or cruelty , but I promise you it was the right question .
This was to Agnes de Mille .
Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history .
She basically created the dances in " Oklahoma , " transforming the American theater .
An amazing woman .
At the time that I proposed to her that -- by the way , I would have proposed to her ; she was extraordinary -- but proposed to her that she come on .
She said , " Come to my apartment . "
She lived in New York .
" Come to my apartment and we 'll talk for those 15 minutes , and then we 'll decide whether we proceed . "
And so I showed up in this dark , rambling New York apartment , and she called out to me , and she was in bed .
I had known that she had had a stroke , and that was some 10 years before .
And so she spent almost all of her life in bed , but -- I speak of the life force -- her hair was askew .
She wasn 't about to make up for this occasion .
And she was sitting there surrounded by books , and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will , which she had by her side .
She wasn 't unhappy about this . She was resigned .
She said , " I keep this will by my bed , memento mori , and I change it all the time just because I want to . "
And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life .
I thought , this is somebody I 've got to get in this series .
She agreed .
She came on . Of course she was wheelchaired on .
Half of her body was stricken , the other half not .
She was , of course , done up for the occasion , but this was a woman in great physical distress .
And we had a conversation , and then I asked her this unthinkable question .
I said , " Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful ? "
And the audience just -- you know , they 're always on the side of the interviewee , and they felt that this was a kind of assault , but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life .
And she began to talk about her childhood , when she was beautiful , and she literally turned -- here she was , in this broken body -- and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth , and then she said , " And then puberty hit . "
And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face , and how she could no longer count on her beauty , and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given .
And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company , and in that process , she made a number of decisions .
First of all , was that dance , even though it hadn 't been offered to her , was her life .
And secondly , she had better be , although she did dance for a while , a choreographer because then her looks didn 't matter .
But she was thrilled to get that out as a real , real fact in her life .
It was an amazing privilege to do this series .
There were other moments like that , very few moments of silence .
The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions , so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are , and I commend that to you , even if you 're not doing interviews .
Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family .
Thank you very much .
Elyn Saks : A tale of mental illness -- from the inside
" Is it okay if I totally trash your office ? " It 's a question Elyn Saks once asked her doctor , and it wasn 't a joke . A legal scholar , in 2007 Saks came forward with her own story of schizophrenia , controlled by drugs and therapy but ever-present . In this powerful talk , she asks us to see people with mental illness clearly , honestly and compassionately .
So I 'm a woman with chronic schizophrenia .
I 've spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals .
I might have ended up spending most of my life on the back ward of a hospital , but that isn 't how my life turned out .
In fact , I 've managed to stay clear of hospitals for almost three decades , perhaps my proudest accomplishment .
That 's not to say that I 've remained clear of all psychiatric struggles .
After I graduated from the Yale Law School and got my first law job , my New Haven analyst , Dr. White , announced to me that he was going to close his practice in three months , several years before I had planned to leave New Haven .
White had been enormously helpful to me , and the thought of his leaving shattered me .
My best friend Steve , sensing that something was terribly wrong , flew out to New Haven to be with me .
Now I 'm going to quote from some of my writings : " I opened the door to my studio apartment .
Steve would later tell me that , for all the times he had seen me psychotic , nothing could have prepared him for what he saw that day .
For a week or more , I had barely eaten .
I was gaunt . I walked as though my legs were wooden .
My face looked and felt like a mask .
I had closed all the curtains in the apartment , so in the middle of the day the apartment was in near total darkness .
The air was fetid , the room a shambles .
Steve , both a lawyer and a psychologist , has treated many patients with severe mental illness , and to this day he 'll say I was as bad as any he had ever seen .
'Hi , ' I said , and then I returned to the couch , where I sat in silence for several moments .
'Thank you for coming , Steve .
Crumbling world , word , voice .
Tell the clocks to stop .
Time is . Time has come . ' ' White is leaving , ' Steve said somberly .
'I 'm being pushed into a grave . The situation is grave , ' I moan .
'Gravity is pulling me down .
I 'm scared . Tell them to get away . ' " As a young woman , I was in a psychiatric hospital on three different occasions for lengthy periods .
My doctors diagnosed me with chronic schizophrenia , and gave me a prognosis of " grave . "
That is , at best , I was expected to live in a board and care , and work at menial jobs .
Fortunately , I did not actually enact that grave prognosis .
Instead , I 'm a chaired Professor of Law , Psychology and Psychiatry at the USC Gould School of Law , I have many close friends and I have a beloved husband , Will , who 's here with us today .
Thank you .
He 's definitely the star of my show .
I 'd like to share with you how that happened , and also describe my experience of being psychotic .
I hasten to add that it 's my experience , because everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own way .
Let 's start with the definition of schizophrenia .
Schizophrenia is a brain disease .
Its defining feature is psychosis , or being out of touch with reality .
Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness .
Delusions are fixed and false beliefs that aren 't responsive to evidence , and hallucinations are false sensory experiences .
For example , when I 'm psychotic I often have the delusion that I 've killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts .
I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain .
Occasionally , I have hallucinations , like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife .
Imagine having a nightmare while you 're awake .
Often , speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence .
Loose associations involves putting together words that may sound a lot alike but don 't make sense , and if the words get jumbled up enough , it 's called " word salad . "
Contrary to what many people think , schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder or split personality .
The schizophrenic mind is not split , but shattered .
Everyone has seen a street person , unkempt , probably ill-fed , standing outside of an office building muttering to himself or shouting .
This person is likely to have some form of schizophrenia .
But schizophrenia presents itself across a wide array of socioeconomic status , and there are people with the illness who are full-time professionals with major responsibilities .
Several years ago , I decided to write down my experiences and my personal journey , and I want to share some more of that story with you today to convey the inside view .
So the following episode happened the seventh week of my first semester of my first year at Yale Law School .
Quoting from my writings : " My two classmates , Rebel and Val , and I had made the date to meet in the law school library on Friday night to work on our memo assignment together .
But we didn 't get far before I was talking in ways that made no sense .
'Memos are visitations , ' I informed them .
'They make certain points . The point is on your head .
Pat used to say that . Have you killed you anyone ? ' Rebel and Val looked at me as if they or I had been splashed in the face with cold water .
'What are you talking about , Elyn ? ' ' Oh , you know , the usual . Who 's what , what 's who , heaven and hell . Let 's go out on the roof .
It 's a flat surface . It 's safe . ' Rebel and Val followed and they asked what had gotten into me .
'This is the real me , ' I announced , waving my arms above my head .
And then , late on a Friday night , on the roof of the Yale Law School , I began to sing , and not quietly either .
'Come to the Florida sunshine bush .
Do you want to dance ? ' ' Are you on drugs ? ' one asked . ' Are you high ? ' ' High ? Me ? No way , no drugs .
Come to the Florida sunshine bush , where there are lemons , where they make demons . ' ' You 're frightening me , ' one of them said , and Rebel and Val headed back into the library .
I shrugged and followed them .
Back inside , I asked my classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around our cases as I was .
'I think someone 's infiltrated my copies of the cases , ' I said .
'We 've got to case the joint .
I don 't believe in joints , but they do hold your body together . ' " -- It 's an example of loose associations . -- " Eventually I made my way back to my dorm room , and once there , I couldn 't settle down .
My head was too full of noise , too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for .
Sitting on my bed , I rocked back and forth , moaning in fear and isolation . "
This episode led to my first hospitalization in America .
I had two earlier in England .
Continuing with the writings : " The next morning I went to my professor 's office to ask for an extension on the memo assignment , and I began gibbering unintelligably as I had the night before , and he eventually brought me to the emergency room .
Once there , someone I 'll just call ' The Doctor ' and his whole team of goons swooped down , lifted me high into the air , and slammed me down on a metal bed with such force that I saw stars .
Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps .
A sound came out of my mouth that I 'd never heard before : half groan , half scream , barely human and pure terror .
Then the sound came again , forced from somewhere deep inside my belly and scraping my throat raw . "
This incident resulted in my involuntary hospitalization .
One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was " gravely disabled . "
To support this view , they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework .
I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven .
During the next year , I would spend five months in a psychiatric hospital .
At times , I spent up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints , arms tied , arms and legs tied down , arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across my chest .
I never struck anyone .
I never harmed anyone . I never made any direct threats .
If you 've never been restrained yourself , you may have a benign image of the experience .
There 's nothing benign about it .
Every week in the United States , it 's been estimated that one to three people die in restraints .
They strangle , they aspirate their vomit , they suffocate , they have a heart attack .
It 's unclear whether using mechanical restraints is actually saving lives or costing lives .
While I was preparing to write my student note for the Yale Law Journal on mechanical restraints , I consulted an eminent law professor who was also a psychiatrist , and said surely he would agree that restraints must be degrading , painful and frightening .
He looked at me in a knowing way , and said , " Elyn , you don 't really understand : These people are psychotic .
They 're different from me and you .
They wouldn 't experience restraints as we would . "
I didn 't have the courage to tell him in that moment that , no , we 're not that different from him .
We don 't like to be strapped down to a bed and left to suffer for hours any more than he would .
In fact , until very recently , and I 'm sure some people still hold it as a view , that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe .
I 've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed with that view .
Today , I 'd like to say I 'm very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force .
I don 't think force is effective as treatment , and I think using force is a terrible thing to do to another person with a terrible illness .
Eventually , I came to Los Angeles to teach at the University of Southern California Law School .
For years , I had resisted medication , making many , many efforts to get off .
I felt that if I could manage without medication , I could prove that , after all , I wasn 't really mentally ill , it was some terrible mistake .
My motto was the less medicine , the less defective .
My L.A. analyst , Dr. Kaplan , was urging me just to stay on medication and get on with my life , but I decided I wanted to make one last college try to get off .
Quoting from the text : " I started the reduction of my meds , and within a short time I began feeling the effects .
After returning from a trip to Oxford , I marched into Kaplan 's office , headed straight for the corner , crouched down , covered my face , and began shaking .
All around me I sensed evil beings poised with daggers .
They 'd slice me up in thin slices or make me swallow hot coals .
Kaplan would later describe me as ' writhing in agony . ' Even in this state , what he accurately described as acutely and forwardly psychotic , I refused to take more medication .
The mission is not yet complete .
Immediately after the appointment with Kaplan , I went to see Dr. Marder , a schizophrenia expert who was following me for medication side effects .
He was under the impression that I had a mild psychotic illness .
Once in his office , I sat on his couch , folded over , and began muttering .
'Head explosions and people trying to kill .
Is it okay if I totally trash your office ? ' ' You need to leave if you think you 're going to do that , ' said Marder .
'Okay . Small . Fire on ice . Tell them not to kill me .
Tell them not to kill me . What have I done wrong ?
Hundreds of thousands with thoughts , interdiction . ' ' Elyn , do you feel like you 're dangerous to yourself or others ?
I think you need to be in the hospital .
I could get you admitted right away , and the whole thing could be very discrete . ' ' Ha , ha , ha .
You 're offering to put me in hospitals ?
Hospitals are bad , they 're mad , they 're sad .
One must stay away . I 'm God , or I used to be . ' " At that point in the text , where I said " I 'm God , or I used to be , " my husband made a marginal note .
He said , " Did you quit or were you fired ? "
" ' I give life and I take it away .
Forgive me , for I know not what I do . ' Eventually , I broke down in front of friends , and everybody convinced me to take more medication .
I could no longer deny the truth , and I could not change it .
The wall that kept me , Elyn , Professor Saks , separate from that insane woman hospitalized years past , lay smashed and in ruins . "
Everything about this illness says I shouldn 't be here , but I am . And I am , I think , for three reasons : First , I 've had excellent treatment .
Four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalytic psychotherapy for decades and continuing , and excellent psychopharmacology .
Second , I have many close family members and friends who know me and know my illness .
These relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth , and they also helped me navigate my life in the face of symptoms .
Third , I work at an enormously supportive workplace at USC Law School .
This is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them .
It 's also a very intellectually stimulating place , and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness .
Even with all that — excellent treatment , wonderful family and friends , supportive work environment — I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life , and that 's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn 't feel safe with people knowing .
If you hear nothing else today , please hear this : There are not " schizophrenics . "
There are people with schizophrenia , and these people may be your spouse , they may be your child , they may be your neighbor , they may be your friend , they may be your coworker .
So let me share some final thoughts .
We need to invest more resources into research and treatment of mental illness .
The better we understand these illnesses , the better the treatments we can provide , and the better the treatments we can provide , the more we can offer people care , and not have to use force .
Also , we must stop criminalizing mental illness .
It 's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States .
American prisons and jails are filled with people who suffer from severe mental illness , and many of them are there because they never received adequate treatment .
I could have easily ended up there or on the streets myself .
A message to the entertainment industry and to the press : On the whole , you 've done a wonderful job fighting stigma and prejudice of many kinds .
Please , continue to let us see characters in your movies , your plays , your columns , who suffer with severe mental illness .
Portray them sympathetically , and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people and not as diagnoses .
Recently , a friend posed a question : If there were a pill I could take that would instantly cure me , would I take it ?
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was offered psychoanalysis .
He declined , saying , " Don 't take my devils away , because my angels may flee too . "
My psychosis , on the other hand , is a waking nightmare in which my devils are so terrifying that all my angels have already fled .
So would I take the pill ? In an instant .
That said , I don 't wish to be seen as regretting the life I could have had if I 'd not been mentally ill , nor am I asking anyone for their pity .
What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not .
What those of us who suffer with mental illness want is what everybody wants : in the words of Sigmund Freud , " to work and to love . "
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you . You 're very kind .
Thank you .
Liz Coleman : A call to reinvent liberal arts education
Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education . Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study , she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education -- one that dynamically combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day .
College presidents are not the first people who come to mind when the subject is the uses of the creative imagination .
So I thought I 'd start by telling you how I got here .
The story begins in the late ' 90s .
I was invited to meet with leading educators from the newly free Eastern Europe and Russia .
They were trying to figure out how to rebuild their universities .
Since education under the Soviet Union was essentially propaganda serving the purposes of a state ideology , they appreciated that it would take wholesale transformations if they were to provide an education worthy of free men and women .
Given this rare opportunity to start fresh , they chose liberal arts as the most compelling model because of its historic commitment to furthering its students ' broadest intellectual , and deepest ethical potential .
Having made that decision they came to the United States , home of liberal arts education , to talk with some of us most closely identified with that kind of education .
They spoke with a passion , an urgency , an intellectual conviction that , for me , was a voice I had not heard in decades , a dream long forgotten .
For , in truth , we had moved light years from the passions that animated them .
But for me , unlike them , in my world , the slate was not clean , and what was written on it was not encouraging .
In truth , liberal arts education no longer exists -- at least genuine liberal arts education -- in this country .
We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature .
Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment .
Expertise has for sure had its moments .
But the price of its dominance is enormous .
Subject matters are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces , with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure .
We have even managed to make the study of literature arcane .
You may think you know what is going on in that Jane Austen novel -- that is , until your first encounter with postmodern deconstructionism .
The progression of today 's college student is to jettison every interest except one .
And within that one , to continually narrow the focus , learning more and more about less and less ; this , despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things .
Lest you think I exaggerate , here are the beginnings of the A-B-Cs of anthropology .
As one moves up the ladder , values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion .
Questions such as , " What kind of a world are we making ?
What kind of a world should we be making ?
What kind of a world can we be making ? "
are treated with more and more skepticism , and move off the table .
In so doing , the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists , who , you can be sure , have no compunctions about using education to further their values : the absolutes of a theocracy .
Meanwhile , the values and voices of democracy are silent .
Either we have lost touch with those values or , no better , believe they need not or cannot be taught .
This aversion to social values may seem at odds with the explosion of community service programs .
But despite the attention paid to these efforts , they remain emphatically extracurricular .
In effect , civic-mindedness is treated as outside the realm of what purports to be serious thinking and adult purposes .
Simply put , when the impulse is to change the world , the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment .
This brew -- oversimplification of civic engagement , idealization of the expert , fragmentation of knowledge , emphasis on technical mastery , neutrality as a condition of academic integrity -- is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good , between intellectual integrity and human freedom , which were at the heart -- -- of the challenge posed to and by my European colleagues .
When the astronomical distance between the realities of the academy and the visionary intensity of this challenge were more than enough , I can assure you , to give one pause , what was happening outside higher education made backing off unthinkable .
Whether it was threats to the environment , inequities in the distribution of wealth , lack of a sane policy or a sustainable policy with respect to the continuing uses of energy , we were in desperate straits .
And that was only the beginning .
The corrupting of our political life had become a living nightmare ; nothing was exempt -- separation of powers , civil liberties , the rule of law , the relationship of church and state .
Accompanied by a squandering of the nation 's material wealth that defied credulity .
A harrowing predilection for the uses of force had become commonplace , with an equal distaste for the alternative forms of influence .
At the same time , all of our firepower was impotent when it came to halting or even stemming the slaughter in Rwanda , Darfur , Myanmar .
Our public education , once a model for the world , has become most noteworthy for its failures .
Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students .
Despite having a research establishment that is the envy of the world , more than half of the American public don 't believe in evolution .
And don 't press your luck about how much those who do believe in it actually understand it .
Incredibly , this nation , with all its material , intellectual and spiritual resources , seems utterly helpless to reverse the freefall in any of these areas .
Equally startling , from my point of view , is the fact that no one was drawing any connections between what is happening to the body politic , and what is happening in our leading educational institutions .
We may be at the top of the list when it comes to influencing access to personal wealth .
We are not even on the list when it comes to our responsibility for the health of this democracy .
We are playing with fire .
You can be sure Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said , " If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization , it expects what never was , and never will be . "
On a more personal note , this betrayal of our principles , our decency , our hope , made it impossible for me to avoid the question , " What will I say , years from now , when people ask , ' Where were you ? ' " As president of a leading liberal arts college , famous for its innovative history , there were no excuses .
So the conversation began at Bennington .
Knowing that if we were to regain the integrity of liberal education , it would take radical rethinking of basic assumptions , beginning with our priorities .
Enhancing the public good becomes a primary objective .
The accomplishment of civic virtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging .
Our ways of approaching agency and authority turn inside out to reflect the reality that no one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century , and everyone has the responsibility for trying and participating in finding them .
Bennington would continue to teach the arts and sciences as areas of immersion that acknowledge differences in personal and professional objectives .
But the balances redressed , our shared purposes assume an equal if not greater importance .
When the design emerged it was surprisingly simple and straightforward .
The idea is to make the political-social challenges themselves -- from health and education to the uses of force -- the organizers of the curriculum .
They would assume the commanding role of traditional disciplines .
But structures designed to connect , rather than divide mutually dependent circles , rather than isolating triangles .
And the point is not to treat these topics as topics of study , but as frameworks of action .
The challenge : to figure out what it will take to actually do something that makes a significant and sustainable difference .
Contrary to widely held assumptions , an emphasis on action provides a special urgency to thinking .
The importance of coming to grips with values like justice , equity , truth , becomes increasingly evident as students discover that interest alone cannot tell them what they need to know when the issue is rethinking education , our approach to health , or strategies for achieving an economics of equity .
The value of the past also comes alive ; it provides a lot of company .
You are not the first to try to figure this out , just as you are unlikely to be the last .
Even more valuable , history provides a laboratory in which we see played out the actual , as well as the intended consequences of ideas .
In the language of my students , " Deep thought matters when you 're contemplating what to do about things that matter . "
A new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge .
Rhetoric , the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect .
Design , the art of organizing the world of things .
Mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon .
Quantitative reasoning attains its proper position at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurement is crucial .
As is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery .
And when making connections is of the essence , the power of technology emerges with special intensity .
But so does the importance of content .
The more powerful our reach , the more important the question " About what ? "
When improvisation , resourcefulness , imagination are key , artists , at long last , take their place at the table , when strategies of action are in the process of being designed .
In this dramatically expanded ideal of a liberal arts education where the continuum of thought and action is its life 's blood , knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential .
Social activists , business leaders , lawyers , politicians , professionals will join the faculty as active and ongoing participants in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good .
Students , in turn , continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly .
And of course , this new wine needs new bottles if we are to capture the liveliness and dynamism of this idea .
The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil , but between competing goods .
This discovery is transforming .
It undercuts self-righteousness , radically alters the tone and character of controversy , and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground .
Ideology , zealotry , unsubstantiated opinions simply won 't do .
This is a political education , to be sure .
But it is a politics of principle , not of partisanship .
So the challenge for Bennington is to do it .
On the cover of Bennington 's 2008 holiday card is the architect 's sketch of a building opening in 2010 that is to be a center for the advancement of public action .
The center will embody and sustain this new educational commitment .
Think of it as a kind of secular church .
The words on the card describe what will happen inside .
We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power , passion and boldness of our students , faculty and staff to developing strategies for acting on the critical challenges of our time .
So we are doing our job .
While these past weeks have been a time of national exhilaration in this country , it would be tragic if you thought this meant your job was done .
The glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution , the unraveling of our public institutions , the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities .
We the people have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance , beyond waiting another four years .
We persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only one capable of coming up with answers , despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary .
The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts , zealots , politicians and spectators .
People will continue and should continue to learn everything there is to know about something or other .
We actually do it all the time .
And there will be and should be those who spend a lifetime pursuing a very highly defined area of inquiry .
But this single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind , the multiplicity of perspectives , the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs .
That is where you come in .
What is certain is that the individual talent exhibited in such abundance here , needs to turn its attention to that collaborative , messy , frustrating , contentious and impossible world of politics and public policy .
President Obama and his team simply cannot do it alone .
If the question of where to start seems overwhelming you are at the beginning , not the end of this adventure .
Being overwhelmed is the first step if you are serious about trying to get at things that really matter , on a scale that makes a difference .
So what do you do when you feel overwhelmed ?
Well , you have two things .
You have a mind . And you have other people .
Start with those , and change the world .
Onyx Ashanti : This is beatjazz
Musician and inventor Onyx Ashanti demonstrates " beatjazz " -- his music created with two handheld controllers , an iPhone and a mouthpiece , and played with the entire body . At TED 's Full Spectrum Auditions , after locking in his beats and loops , he plays a 3-minute song that shares his vision for the future of music .
Text : BeatJazz .
BeatJazz is : 1 . Live looping , 2 . Jazz improvisation And 3 . " Gestural " sound design .
Accelerometers on each hand read hand position .
The color of the lights indicates which sound I am playing .
Red = Drums , Blue = Bass , Green = Chords , Orange = Leads , Purple = Pads The mouthpiece consists of ...
a button , two guitar picks and lots of hot glue .
The heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters .
Why ?
To atomize music culture so that ALL past , present and future genres can be studied and abstracted , live .
And " BeatJazzers " become as common as D.J. ' s .
But mostly ...
to MAKE the future rather than wait for it .
Jane Fonda : Life 's third act
Within this generation , an extra 30 years have been added to our life expectancy -- and these years aren 't just a footnote or a pathology . In this talk , Jane Fonda asks how we can think about this new phase of our lives . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
There have been many revolutions over the last century , but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution .
We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did .
Think about that .
That 's an entire second adult lifetime that 's been added to our lifespan .
And yet , for the most part , our culture has not come to terms with what this means .
We 're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch .
That 's the metaphor , the old metaphor .
You 're born , you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude .
Age as pathology .
But many people today -- philosophers , artists , doctors , scientists -- are taking a new look at what I call the third act , the last three decades of life .
They realize that this is actually a developmental stage of life with its own significance -- as different from midlife as adolescence is from childhood .
And they are asking -- we should all be asking -- how do we use this time ?
How do we live it successfully ?
What is the appropriate new metaphor for aging ?
I 've spent the last year researching and writing about this subject .
And I have come to find that a more appropriate metaphor for aging is a staircase -- the upward ascension of the human spirit , bringing us into wisdom , wholeness and authenticity .
Age not at all as pathology ; age as potential .
And guess what ?
This potential is not for the lucky few .
It turns out , most people over 50 feel better , are less stressed , are less hostile , less anxious .
We tend to see commonalities more than differences .
Some of the studies even say we 're happier .
This is not what I expected , trust me .
I come from a long line of depressives .
As I was approaching my late 40s , when I would wake up in the morning my first six thoughts would all be negative .
And I got scared .
I thought , oh my gosh .
I 'm going to become a crotchety old lady .
But now that I am actually smack-dab in the middle of my own third act , I realize I 've never been happier .
I have such a powerful feeling of well-being .
And I 've discovered that when you 're inside oldness , as opposed to looking at it from the outside , fear subsides .
You realize , you 're still yourself -- maybe even more so .
Picasso once said , " It takes a long time to become young . "
I don 't want to romanticize aging .
Obviously , there 's no guarantee that it can be a time of fruition and growth .
Some of it is a matter of luck .
Some of it , obviously , is genetic .
One third of it , in fact , is genetic .
And there isn 't much we can do about that .
But that means that two-thirds of how well we do in the third act , we can do something about .
We 're going to discuss what we can do to make these added years really successful and use them to make a difference .
Now let me say something about the staircase , which may seem like an odd metaphor for seniors given the fact that many seniors are challenged by stairs .
Myself included .
As you may know , the entire world operates on a universal law : entropy , the second law of thermodynamics .
Entropy means that everything in the world , everything , is in a state of decline and decay , the arch .
There 's only one exception to this universal law , and that is the human spirit , which can continue to evolve upwards -- the staircase -- bringing us into wholeness , authenticity and wisdom .
And here 's an example of what I mean .
This upward ascension can happen even in the face of extreme physical challenges .
About three years ago , I read an article in the New York Times .
It was about a man named Neil Selinger -- 57 years old , a retired lawyer -- who had joined the writers group at Sarah Lawrence where he found his writer 's voice .
Two years later , he was diagnosed with ALS , commonly known as Lou Gehrig 's disease .
It 's a terrible disease . It 's fatal .
It wastes the body , but the mind remains intact .
In this article , Mr. Selinger wrote the following to describe what was happening to him .
And I quote , " As my muscles weakened , my writing became stronger .
As I slowly lost my speech , I gained my voice .
As I diminished , I grew .
As I lost so much , I finally started to find myself . "
Neil Selinger , to me , is the embodiment of mounting the staircase in his third act .
Now we 're all born with spirit , all of us , but sometimes it gets tamped down beneath the challenges of life , violence , abuse , neglect .
Perhaps our parents suffered from depression .
Perhaps they weren 't able to love us beyond how we performed in the world .
Perhaps we still suffer from a psychic pain , a wound .
Perhaps we feel that many of our relationships have not had closure .
And so we can feel unfinished .
Perhaps the task of the third act is to finish up the task of finishing ourselves .
For me , it began as I was approaching my third act , my 60th birthday .
How was I supposed to live it ?
What was I supposed to accomplish in this final act ?
And I realized that , in order to know where I was going , I had to know where I 'd been .
And so I went back and I studied my first two acts , trying to see who I was then , who I really was -- not who my parents or other people told me I was , or treated me like I was .
But who was I ? Who were my parents -- not as parents , but as people ?
Who were my grandparents ?
How did they treat my parents ?
These kinds of things .
I discovered a couple of years later that this process that I had gone through is called by psychologists " doing a life review . "
And they say it can give new significance and clarity and meaning to a person 's life .
You may discover , as I did , that a lot of things that you used to think were your fault , a lot of things you used to think about yourself , really had nothing to do with you .
It wasn 't your fault ; you 're just fine .
And you 're able to go back and forgive them and forgive yourself .
You 're able to free yourself from your past .
You can work to change your relationship to your past .
Now while I was writing about this , I came upon a book called " Man 's Search for Meaning " by Viktor Frankl .
Viktor Frankl was a German psychiatrist who 'd spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp .
And he wrote that , while he was in the camp , he could tell , should they ever be released , which of the people would be okay and which would not .
And he wrote this : " Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing , your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation .
This is what determines the quality of the life we 've lived -- not whether we 've been rich or poor , famous or unknown , healthy or suffering .
What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities , what kind of meaning we assign them , what kind of attitude we cling to about them , what state of mind we allow them to trigger . "
Perhaps the central purpose of the third act is to go back and to try , if appropriate , to change our relationship to the past .
It turns out that cognitive research shows when we are able to do this , it manifests neurologically -- neural pathways are created in the brain .
You see , if you have , over time , reacted negatively to past events and people , neural pathways are laid down by chemical and electrical signals that are sent through the brain .
And over time , these neural pathways become hardwired , they become the norm -- even if it 's bad for us because it causes us stress and anxiety .
If however , we can go back and alter our relationship , re-vision our relationship to past people and events , neural pathways can change .
And if we can maintain the more positive feelings about the past , that becomes the new norm .
It 's like resetting a thermostat .
It 's not having experiences that make us wise , it 's reflecting on the experiences that we 've had that makes us wise -- and that helps us become whole , brings wisdom and authenticity .
It helps us become what we might have been .
Women start off whole , don 't we ?
I mean , as girls , we start off feisty -- " Yeah , who says ? "
We have agency .
We are the subjects of our own lives .
But very often , many , if not most of us , when we hit puberty , we start worrying about fitting in and being popular .
And we become the subjects and objects of other people 's lives .
But now , in our third acts , it may be possible for us to circle back to where we started and know it for the first time .
And if we can do that , it will not just be for ourselves .
Older women are the largest demographic in the world .
If we can go back and redefine ourselves and become whole , this will create a cultural shift in the world , and it will give an example to younger generations so that they can reconceive their own lifespan .
Thank you very much .
Kartick Satyanarayan : How we rescued the " dancing " bears "
Traditionally , the Kalandar community of India has survived by capturing sloth bear cubs and training them to " dance " through extreme cruelty . Kartick Satyanarayan has been able to put an end to this centuries-old practice , and in so doing discovered a lesson of wider significance : make the practitioners part of the solution .
Hi . For those of you who haven 't seen dancing bears , these are the dancing bears .
In 1995 , we started working on a two-year investigative research project to try and find out what was going on .
Because the sloth bears in the wild were obviously getting depleted because of this .
This is the Qalandar community . They are a marginalized Islamic community who live across India , and have been in India since the 13th century .
We went about getting evidence of what was going on .
And this is footage from a hidden camera in a button .
And we went in , pretending to be buyers .
And we found this right in this very state , in Karnataka .
And the bear cubs were being harvested from across the country and being sold and traded .
These were being sold for about 2,000 dollars each , and they are used for bear paw soup , and also being trained , later on , to become dancing bears like the one you just saw .
Sadly , the family of Qalandars depended on this bear .
The couple are barely 18 years old .
They already have four children beside them . You can see them .
And the economy of the family and their livelihood depended on those animals .
So , we had to deal with it in a very practical and sustainable manner .
Now , when we started working deeper and digging deeper , we found that it 's an illegal act .
These guys could go to jail for up to seven years if they were caught by authorities .
And what they were doing to the bears was really appalling .
It was unacceptable .
The mother bears are usually killed .
The cubs , which are taken , are separated .
Their teeth are basically bashed out with a metal rod .
And they use a red hot iron needle to make a hole through the muzzle .
Now we had to start changing these people and converting them from using that for a livelihood , to getting something else .
So , this is Bitu Qalandar , who was our first experiment .
And we were so unsure that this would work .
We weren 't sure at all . And we managed to convince him .
And we said , " Okay , here is some seed fund .
Let 's see if you can get something else . " And we got the bear surrendered to -- we set up a sanctuary . We have four sanctuaries in India .
And now he sells cool drinks , he 's by the highway .
He has a telephone booth .
And then it started , there was no turning back after that .
This is Sadua who came and surrendered his bear .
And now he runs a cattle fodder store and a grain store near Agra .
Then there was no looking back at all for us .
We gave cycle rickshaws .
We set up carpet-weaving units , vocational training for the women .
The women were just not allowed to come out of the community and work with mainstream society . So , we were able to address that .
Education . The kids never went to school .
They only had Islamic education , very little of it .
And they were never allowed to go to school because they were an extra earning hand at home . So we managed to get education .
So , we sponsor 600 children education programs today .
We were able to ensure brighter futures for these people .
Of course we also had to get the bears in .
This is what happens to the bears when they come in .
And this is what we turn them into .
We have a veterinary facility in our rescue centers .
So , basically in 2002 there were 1,200 dancing bears .
We rescued over 550 dancing bears .
We 've been able to ensure better futures for the people and the bears .
The big news that I want to announce today is that next month we will be bringing in the very last bear of India , into our rescue center .
And India will no longer have to witness this cruel barbaric practice which has been here for centuries .
And the people can hold their heads up high .
And the Qalandar people will rise above all this cruel barbaric past that they 've lived all their lives .
And the beautiful bears can of course live in the wild again .
And there will be no more removing of these bears .
And the children , both humans and bear cubs can live peacefully . Thank you .
Marla Spivak : Why bees are disappearing
Honeybees have thrived for 50 million years , each colony 40 to 50,000 individuals coordinated in amazing harmony . So why , seven years ago , did colonies start dying en masse ? Marla Spivak reveals four reasons which are interacting with tragic consequences . This is not simply a problem because bees pollinate a third of the world 's crops . Could this incredible species be holding up a mirror for us ?
This is our life with bees , and this is our life without bees .
Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals .
More than one third of the world 's crop production is dependent on bee pollination .
But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally .
They 're out there because they need to eat .
Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar .
They 're flower-feeders , and as they move from flower to flower , basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart , they end up providing this valuable pollination service .
In parts of the world where there are no bees , or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees , people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand .
These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush .
Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon .
Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator .
Now this one 's the tomato tickler .
Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower , the anther , and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it .
So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it , and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C.
So they vibrate the flower , they sonicate it , and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh , and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee 's body , and she takes it home as food .
Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it 's done naturally and they get better quality tomatoes .
So there 's other , maybe more personal reasons , to care about bees .
There 's over 20,000 species of bees in the world , and they 're absolutely gorgeous .
These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees .
Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there 's something about honeybees that draws people into their world .
Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history , mostly to harvest their honey , which is an amazing natural sweetener .
I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke .
I was 18 years old and bored , and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it .
I had never thought about insects living in complex societies .
It was like the best of science fiction come true .
And even stranger , there were these people , these beekeepers , that loved their bees like they were family , and when I put down the book , I knew I had to see this for myself .
So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper , a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico .
And I was permanently hooked .
Honeybees can be considered a super-organism , where the colony is the organism and it 's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms .
Now this society has no central authority .
Nobody 's in charge .
So how they come to collective decisions , and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor , how they communicate where the flowers are , all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing .
My personal favorite , and one that I 've studied for many years , is their system of healthcare .
So bees have social healthcare .
So in my lab , we study how bees keep themselves healthy .
For example , we study hygiene , where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest , from the colony , and it keeps the colony healthy .
And more recently , we 've been studying resins that bees collect from plants .
So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very , very sticky resins off the leaves , and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis .
We 've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant .
It 's a natural antibiotic .
It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony , and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity .
Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times .
We 've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine , but we didn 't know how good it was for the bees .
So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years .
So seven years ago , when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse , first in the United States , it was clear that there was something really , really wrong .
In our collective conscience , in a really primal way , we know we can 't afford to lose bees .
So what 's going on ?
Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes , and I 'll go through each of these .
The bottom line is , bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system .
Now we have the best data on honeybees , so I 'll use them as an example .
In the United States , bees in fact have been in decline since World War II .
We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945 .
We 're down to about two million hives of bees , we think .
And the reason is , after World War II , we changed our farming practices .
We stopped planting cover crops .
We stopped planting clover and alfalfa , which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil , and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers .
Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees .
And after World War II , we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms .
Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival .
And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures .
Now we talk about food deserts , places in our cities , neighborhoods that have no grocery stores .
The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts , dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans .
Since World War II , we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival .
And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees , like almonds .
Fifty years ago , beekeepers would take a few colonies , hives of bees into the almond orchards , for pollination , and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein . It 's really good for bees .
Now , the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation 's bees , over 1.5 million hives of bees , be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop .
And they 're trucked in in semi-loads , and they must be trucked out , because after bloom , the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape .
Bees have been dying over the last 50 years , and we 're planting more crops that need them .
There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination .
And then there 's pesticides .
After World War II , we started using pesticides on a large scale , and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests .
Recently , researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food , and they 've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it , and this includes every class of insecticides , herbicides , fungicides , and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient .
This small bee is holding up a large mirror .
How much is it going to take to contaminate humans ?
One of these class of insecticides , the neonicontinoids , is making headlines around the world right now .
You 've probably heard about it .
This is a new class of insecticides .
It moves through the plant so that a crop pest , a leaf-eating insect , would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die .
If one of these neonics , we call them , is applied in a high concentration , such as in this ground application , enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar , where a bee can consume , in this case , a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die .
In most agricultural settings , on most of our farms , it 's only the seed that 's coated with the insecticide , and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar , and if a bee consumes this lower dose , either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home .
And on top of everything else , bees have their own set of diseases and parasites .
Public enemy number one for bees is this thing .
It 's called varroa destructor .
It 's aptly named .
It 's this big , blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee 's immune system and circulates viruses .
Let me put this all together for you .
I don 't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big , bloodsucking parasite running around on it , and I don 't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus , but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus , the flu , and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition .
But what if I lived in a food desert ?
And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store , and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed , in my food , enough of a pesticide , a neurotoxin , that I couldn 't find my way home ?
And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death .
And it 's not just our honeybees .
All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk , including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees .
These bees are providing backup for our honeybees .
They 're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees .
We need all of our bees .
So what are we going to do ?
What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we 've created ?
It turns out , it 's hopeful . It 's hopeful .
Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways .
Plant bee-friendly flowers , and don 't contaminate these flowers , this bee food , with pesticides .
So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them .
Plant them in a pot on your doorstep .
Plant them in your front yard , in your lawns , in your boulevards .
Campaign to have them planted in public gardens , community spaces , meadows .
Set aside farmland .
We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season , from spring to fall .
We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees , but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife .
And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees .
And we need to diversify our farms .
We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we 've created .
So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big , huge problem -- just go plant flowers -- but when bees have access to good nutrition , we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services .
And when bees have access to good nutrition , they 're better able to engage their own natural defenses , their healthcare , that they have relied on for millions of years .
So the beauty of helping bees this way , for me , is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society , an insect society , where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution , an emergent property , that 's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions .
So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change .
On behalf of the bees , thank you .
Thank you . Just a quick question .
The latest numbers on the die-off of bees , is there any sign of things bottoming out ?
What 's your hope / depression level on this ?
Maria Spivak : Yeah .
At least in the United States , an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter .
About 20 years ago , we were at a 15-percent loss .
So it 's getting precarious .
That 's not 30 percent a year , that 's -- Yes , thirty percent a year .
Thirty percent a year . But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number , they can recuperate some of their loss .
We 're kind of at a tipping point .
We can 't really afford to lose that many more .
We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there . Plant flowers .
Thank you .
Tom Wujec : 3 ways the brain creates meaning
Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words , images , feelings , connections . In this short talk from TEDU , he asks : How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas ?
Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called Big Viz .
And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists .
David Sibbet from The Grove , and Kevin Richards , from Autodesk , made 650 sketches that strive to capture the essence of each presenter 's ideas .
And the consensus was : it really worked .
These sketches brought to life the key ideas , the portraits , the magic moments that we all experienced last year .
This year we were thinking , " Why does it work ? "
What is it about animation , graphics , illustrations , that create meaning ?
And this is an important question to ask and answer because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning , the better we can communicate , and , I also think , the better we can think and collaborate together .
So this year we 're going to visualize how the brain visualizes .
Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn 't actually see the world as it is , but instead , creates a series of mental models through a collection of " Ah-ha moments , " or moments of discovery , through various processes .
The processing , of course , begins with the eyes .
Light enters , hits the back of the retina , and is circulated , most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain , at the primary visual cortex .
And primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry , just the simplest of shapes .
But it also acts like a kind of relay station that re-radiates and redirects information to many other parts of the brain .
As many as 30 other parts that selectively make more sense , create more meaning through the kind of " Ah-ha " experiences .
We 're only going to talk about three of them .
So the first one is called the ventral stream .
It 's on this side of the brain .
And this is the part of the brain that will recognize what something is .
It 's the " what " detector .
Look at a hand . Look at a remote control . Chair . Book .
So that 's the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something .
A second part of the brain is called the dorsal stream .
And what it does is locates the object in physical body space .
So if you look around the stage here you 'll create a kind of mental map of the stage .
And if you closed your eyes you 'd be able to mentally navigate it .
You 'd be activating the dorsal stream if you did that .
The third part that I 'd like to talk about is the limbic system .
And this is deep inside of the brain . It 's very old , evolutionarily .
And it 's the part that feels .
It 's the kind of gut center , where you see an image and you go , " Oh ! I have a strong or emotional reaction to whatever I 'm seeing . "
So the combination of these processing centers help us make meaning in very different ways .
So what can we learn about this ? How can we apply this insight ?
Well , again , the schematic view is that the eye visually interrogates what we look at .
The brain processes this in parallel , the figments of information asking a whole bunch of questions to create a unified mental model .
So , for example , when you look at this image a good graphic invites the eye to dart around , to selectively create a visual logic .
So the act of engaging , and looking at the image creates the meaning .
It 's the selective logic .
Now we 've augmented this and spatialized this information .
Many of you may remember the magic wall that we built in conjunction with Perceptive Pixel where we quite literally create an infinite wall .
And so we can compare and contrast the big ideas .
So the act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning .
It activates a different part of the brain .
And then the limbic system is activated when we see motion , when we see color , and there are primary shapes and pattern detectors that we 've heard about before .
So the point of this is what ?
We make meaning by seeing , by an act of visual interrogation .
The lessons for us are three-fold .
First , use images to clarify what we 're trying to communicate .
Secondly make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully .
And the third is to augment memory by creating a visual persistence .
These are techniques that can be used to be -- that can be applied in a wide range of problem solving .
So the low-tech version looks like this .
And , by the way , this is the way in which we develop and formulate strategy within Autodesk , in some of our organizations and some of our divisions .
What we literally do is have the teams draw out the entire strategic plan on one giant wall .
And it 's very powerful because everyone gets to see everything else .
There 's always a room , always a place to be able to make sense of all of the components in the strategic plan .
This is a time-lapse view of it .
You can ask the question , " Who 's the boss ? "
You 'll be able to figure that out .
So the act of collectively and collaboratively building the image transforms the collaboration .
No Powerpoint is used in two days .
But instead the entire team creates a shared mental model that they can all agree on and move forward on .
And this can be enhanced and augmented with some emerging digital technology .
And this is our great unveiling for today .
And this is an emerging set of technologies that use large-screen displays with intelligent calculation in the background to make the invisible visible .
Here what we can do is look at sustainability , quite literally .
So a team can actually look at all the key components that heat the structure and make choices and then see the end result that is visualized on this screen .
So making images meaningful has three components .
The first again , is making ideas clear by visualizing them .
Secondly , making them interactive .
And then thirdly , making them persistent .
And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today . Thanks so much .
Janet Echelman : Taking imagination seriously
Janet Echelman found her true voice as an artist when her paints went missing -- which forced her to look to an unorthodox new art material . Now she makes billowing , flowing , building-sized sculpture with a surprisingly geeky edge . A transporting 10 minutes of pure creativity .
This story is about taking imagination seriously .
Fourteen years ago , I first encountered this ordinary material , fishnet , used the same way for centuries .
Today , I 'm using it to create permanent , billowing , voluptuous forms the scale of hard-edged buildings in cities around the world .
I was an unlikely person to be doing this .
I never studied sculpture , engineering or architecture .
In fact , after college I applied to seven art schools and was rejected by all seven .
I went off on my own to become an artist , and I painted for 10 years , when I was offered a Fulbright to India .
Promising to give exhibitions of paintings , I shipped my paints and arrived in Mahabalipuram .
The deadline for the show arrived -- my paints didn 't .
I had to do something .
This fishing village was famous for sculpture .
So I tried bronze casting .
But to make large forms was too heavy and expensive .
I went for a walk on the beach , watching the fishermen bundle their nets into mounds on the sand .
I 'd seen it every day , but this time I saw it differently -- a new approach to sculpture , a way to make volumetric form without heavy solid materials .
My first satisfying sculpture was made in collaboration with these fishermen .
It 's a self-portrait titled " Wide Hips . "
We hoisted them on poles to photograph .
I discovered their soft surfaces revealed every ripple of wind in constantly changing patterns .
I was mesmerized .
I continued studying craft traditions and collaborating with artisans , next in Lithuania with lace makers .
I liked the fine detail it gave my work , but I wanted to make them larger -- to shift from being an object you look at to something you could get lost in .
Returning to India to work with those fishermen , we made a net of a million and a half hand-tied knots -- installed briefly in Madrid .
Thousands of people saw it , and one of them was the urbanist Manual Sola-Morales who was redesigning the waterfront in Porto , Portugal .
He asked if I could build this as a permanent piece for the city .
I didn 't know if I could do that and preserve my art .
Durable , engineered , permanent -- those are in opposition to idiosyncratic , delicate and ephemeral .
For two years , I searched for a fiber that could survive ultraviolet rays , salt , air , pollution , and at the same time remain soft enough to move fluidly in the wind .
We needed something to hold the net up out there in the middle of the traffic circle .
So we raised this 45,000-pound steel ring .
We had to engineer it to move gracefully in an average breeze and survive in hurricane winds .
But there was no engineering software to model something porous and moving .
I found a brilliant aeronautical engineer who designs sails for America 's Cup racing yachts named Peter Heppel .
He helped me tackle the twin challenges of precise shape and gentle movement .
I couldn 't build this the way I knew because hand-tied knots weren 't going to withstand a hurricane .
So I developed a relationship with an industrial fishnet factory , learned the variables of their machines , and figured out a way to make lace with them .
There was no language to translate this ancient , idiosyncratic handcraft into something machine operators could produce .
So we had to create one .
Three years and two children later , we raised this 50,000-square-foot lace net .
It was hard to believe that what I had imagined was now built , permanent and had lost nothing in translation .
This intersection had been bland and anonymous .
Now it had a sense of place .
I walked underneath it for the first time .
As I watched the wind 's choreography unfold , I felt sheltered and , at the same time , connected to limitless sky .
My life was not going to be the same .
I want to create these oases of sculpture in spaces of cities around the world .
I 'm going to share two directions that are new in my work .
Historic Philadelphia City Hall : its plaza , I felt , needed a material for sculpture that was lighter than netting .
So we experimented with tiny atomized water particles to create a dry mist that is shaped by the wind and in testing , discovered that it can be shaped by people who can interact and move through it without getting wet .
I 'm using this sculpture material to trace the paths of subway trains above ground in real time -- like an X-ray of the city 's circulatory system unfolding .
Next challenge , the Biennial of the Americas in Denver asked , could I represent the 35 nations of the Western hemisphere and their interconnectedness in a sculpture ?
I didn 't know where to begin , but I said yes .
I read about the recent earthquake in Chile and the tsunami that rippled across the entire Pacific Ocean .
It shifted the Earth 's tectonic plates , sped up the planet 's rotation and literally shortened the length of the day .
So I contacted NOAA , and I asked if they 'd share their data on the tsunami , and translated it into this .
Its title : " 1.26 " refers to the number of microseconds that the Earth 's day was shortened .
I couldn 't build this with a steel ring , the way I knew .
Its shape was too complex now .
So I replaced the metal armature with a soft , fine mesh of a fiber 15 times stronger than steel .
The sculpture could now be entirely soft , which made it so light it could tie in to existing buildings -- literally becoming part of the fabric of the city .
There was no software that could extrude these complex net forms and model them with gravity .
So we had to create it .
Then I got a call from New York City asking if I could adapt these concepts to Times Square or the High Line .
This new soft structural method enables me to model these and build these sculptures at the scale of skyscrapers .
They don 't have funding yet , but I dream now of bringing these to cities around the world where they 're most needed .
Fourteen years ago , I searched for beauty in the traditional things , in craft forms .
Now I combine them with hi-tech materials and engineering to create voluptuous , billowing forms the scale of buildings .
My artistic horizons continue to grow .
I 'll leave you with this story .
I got a call from a friend in Phoenix .
An attorney in the office who 'd never been interested in art , never visited the local art museum , dragged everyone she could from the building and got them outside to lie down underneath the sculpture .
There they were in their business suits , laying in the grass , noticing the changing patterns of wind beside people they didn 't know , sharing the rediscovery of wonder .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Shimon Steinberg : Natural pest control ... using bugs !
Shimon Steinberg looks at the difference between pests and bugs -- and makes the case for using good bugs to fight bad bugs , avoiding chemicals in our quest for perfect produce . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 'm a bug lover , myself -- not from childhood , by the way , but rather late .
When I bachelored , majoring in zoology in Tel Aviv University , I kind of fell in love with bugs .
And then , within zoology , I took the course or the discipline of entomology , the science of insects .
And then I thought , myself , how can I be practical or help in the science of entomology ?
And then I moved to the world of plant protection -- plant protection from insects , from bad bugs .
And then within plant protection , I came into the discipline of biological pest control which we actually define as the use of living organisms to reduce populations of noxious plant pests .
So it 's a whole discipline in plant protection that 's aiming at the reduction of chemicals .
And biological pest control , by the way , or these good bugs that we are talking about , they 've existed in the world for thousands and thousands of years , for a long , long time .
But only in the last 120 years people started , or people knew more and more how to exploit , or how to use , this biological control phenomenon , or in fact , natural control phenomenon , to their own needs .
Because biological control phenomenon , you can see it in your backyard .
Just take a magnifying glass . You see what I have here ?
That 's a magnifier times 10 .
Yeah , times 10 .
Just open it .
You just twist leaves , and you see a whole new world of minute insects , or little spiders of one millimeter , one and a half , two millimeters long , and you can distinguish between the good ones and the bad ones .
So this phenomenon of natural control exists literally everywhere .
Here , in front of this building , I 'm sure .
Just have a look at the plants .
So it 's everywhere , and we need to know how to exploit it .
Well let us go hand by hand and browse through just a few examples .
What is a pest ?
What damage [ does ] it actually inflict on the plant ?
And what is the natural enemy , the biologically controlled agent , or the good bug , that we are talking about ?
In general , I 'm going to talk about insects and spiders , or mites , let us call them .
Insects , those six-legged organisms and spiders or mites , the eight-legged organisms .
Let 's have a look at that .
Here is a pest , devastating pest , a spider mite , because it does a lot of webbing like a spider .
You see the mother in between and two daughters , probably on the left and right , and a single egg on the right-hand side .
And then you see what kind of damage it can inflict .
On your right-hand side you can see a cucumber leaf , and on the middle , cotton leaf , and on the left a tomato leaf with these little stipplings .
They can literally turn from green to white because of the sucking , piercing mouthparts of those spiders .
But here comes nature that provides us with a good spider .
This is a predatory mite -- just as small as a spider mite , by the way , one millimeter , two millimeters long , not more than that , running quickly , hunting , chasing the spider mites .
And here you can see this lady in action on your left-hand side -- just pierces , sucks the body fluids on the left-hand side of the pest mite .
And after five minutes , this is what you see : just a typical dead corpse , shriveled , sucked-out , dead corpse of the spider mite , and next to it , two satiated individuals of predatory mites , a mother on the left-hand side , a young nymph on the right-hand side .
By the way , a meal for them for 24 hours is about five individuals of the spider mites , of the bad mites , or 15 to 20 eggs of the pest mites .
By the way , they are hungry always .
And there is another example : aphids .
By the way , it 's springtime now in Israel .
When temperature rises sharply , you can see those bad ones , those aphids , all over the plants , in your hibiscus , in your lantana , in the young , fresh foliage of the spring flush , so-called .
By the way , with aphids you have only females , like Amazons .
Females giving rise to females giving rise to other females .
No males at all .
Parthenogenesis , [ as it ] was so called .
And they are very happy with that , apparently .
Here we can see the damage .
Those aphids secrete some sticky , sugary liquid called honeydew , and this just globs the upper parts of the plant .
Here you see a typical cucumber leaf that turned actually from green to black because of a black fungus , sooty mold , which is covering it .
And here comes the salvation through this parasitic wasp .
Here we are not talking about a predator .
Here we are talking a parasite -- not a two-legged parasite , but an eight-legged parasite , of course .
This is a parasitic wasp , again , two millimeters long , slender , a very quick and sharp flier .
And here you can see this parasite in action , like in an acrobatic maneuver .
She stands vis-a-vis in front of the victim at the right-hand side , bending its abdomen and inserting a single egg , a single egg into the body fluids of the aphid .
By the way , the aphid tries to escape .
She kicks and bites and secretes different liquids , but nothing will happen , in fact .
Only the egg of the parasite will be inserted into the body fluids of the aphid .
And after a few days , depending upon temperature , the egg will hatch and the larva of this parasite will eat the aphid from the inside .
This is all natural . This is all natural .
This is not fiction , nothing at all .
Again , in your backyard , in your backyard .
But this is the end result .
This is the end result : Mummies -- M-U-M-M-Y .
This is the visual result of a dead aphid encompassing inside , in fact , a developing parasitoid that after a few minutes you see halfway out .
The birth is almost complete .
You can see , by the way , in different movies , etc . , it takes just a few minutes .
And if this is a female , she 'll immediately mate with a male and off she goes because time is very short .
This female can live only three to four days , and she needs to give rise to around 400 eggs .
That means she has 400 bad aphids to put her eggs into their body fluids .
And this is of course not the end of it .
There is a whole wealth of other natural enemies and this is just the last example .
Again , we 'll start first with the pest : the thrips .
By the way , all these weird names -- I didn 't bother you with the Latin names of these creatures , okay , just the popular names .
But this is a nice , slender , very bad pest .
If you can see this , sweet peppers .
This is not just an exotic , ornamental sweet pepper .
This is a sweet pepper which is not consumable because it is suffering from a viral disease transmitted by those thrip adults .
And here comes the natural enemy , minute pirate bug , " minute " because it is rather small .
Here you can see the adult , black , and two young ones .
And again , in action .
This adult pierces the thrips , sucking it within just several minutes , just going to the other prey , continuing all over the place .
And if we spread those minute pirate bugs , the good ones , for example , in a sweet pepper plot , they go to the flowers .
And look , this flower is flooded with predatory bugs , with the good ones after wiping out the bad ones , the thrips .
So this is a very positive situation , by the way .
No harm to the developing fruit . No harm to the fruit set .
Everything is just fine under these circumstances .
But again , the question is , here you saw them on a one-to-one basis -- the pest , the natural enemy .
What we do is actually this .
In Northeast Israel , in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu , there is a facility that mass-produces those natural enemies .
In other words , what we do there , we amplify , we amplify the natural control , or the biological control phenomenon .
And in 30,000 square meters of state-of-the-art greenhouses , there , we are mass-producing those predatory mites , those minute pirate bugs , those parasitic wasps , etc . , etc .
Many different parts .
By the way , they have a very nice landscape -- you see the Jordanian Mountains on the one hand and the Jordan Valley on the other hand , and a good , mild winter and a nice , hot summer , which is an excellent condition to mass-produce those creatures .
And by the way , mass-production -- it is not genetic manipulation .
There are no GMOs -- Genetically Modified Organisms -- whatsoever .
We take them from nature , and the only thing that we do , we give them the optimal conditions , under the greenhouses or in the climate rooms , in order to proliferate , multiply and reproduce .
And that 's what we get , in fact .
You see under a microscope .
You see in the upper left corner , you see a single predatory mite .
And this is the whole bunch of predatory mites .
You see this ampoule . You see this one .
I have one gram of those predatory mites .
One gram 's 80,000 individuals , 80,000 individuals are good enough to control one acre , 4,000 square meters , of a strawberry plot against spider mites for the whole season of almost one year .
And we can produce from this , believe you me , several dozens of kilograms on an annual basis .
So this is what I call amplification of the phenomenon .
And no , we do not disrupt the balance .
On the contrary , because we bring it to every cultural plot where the balance was already disrupted by the chemicals .
Here we come with those natural enemies in order to reverse a little bit of the wheel and to bring more natural balance to the agricultural plot by reducing those chemicals .
That 's the whole idea .
And what is the impact ?
In this table , you can actually see what is an impact of a successful biological control by good bugs .
For example , in Israel , where we employ more than 1,000 hectares -- 10,000 dunams in Israeli terms -- of biological pest controlling sweet pepper under protection , 75 percent of the pesticides were actually reduced .
And Israeli strawberries , even more -- 80 percent of the pesticides , especially those aimed against pest mites in strawberries .
So the impact is very strong .
And there goes the question , especially if you ask growers , agriculturists : Why biological control ?
Why good bugs ?
By the way , the number of answers you get equals the number of people you ask .
But if we go , for example , to this place , Southeast Israel , the Arava area above the Great Rift Valley , where the really top-notch -- the pearl of the Israeli agriculture is located , especially under greenhouse conditions , or under screenhouse conditions -- just in the middle of the desert .
And if you zoom in , you can definitely watch this , grandparents with their grandchildren , distributing the natural enemies , the good bugs , instead of wearing special clothes and gas masks and applying chemicals .
So safety , with respect to the application , this is the number one answer that we get from growers , why biological control .
Number two , many growers are in fact petrified from the idea of resistance , that the pests will become resistant to the chemicals , just in our case that bacteria becomes resistant to antibiotics .
It 's the same , and it can happen very quickly .
Fortunately , in either biological control or even natural control , resistance is extremely rare .
It hardly happens .
Because this is evolution , this is the natural ratio , unlike resistance , which happens in the case of chemicals .
And thirdly , public demand .
Public demand -- the more the public demands the reduction of chemicals , the more growers become aware of the fact they should , wherever they can and wherever possible , replace the chemical control with biological control .
Even here , there is another grower , you see , very interested in the bugs , the bad ones and the good ones , wearing this magnifier already on her head , just walking safely in her crop .
Finally , I want to get actually to my vision , or in fact , to my dream .
Because , you see , this is the reality .
Have a look at the gap .
If we take the overall turnover of the biocontrol industry worldwide , it 's 250 million dollars .
And look at the overall pesticide industry in all the crops throughout the world .
I think it 's times 100 or something like that .
Twenty-five billion .
So there is a huge gap to bridge .
So actually , how can we do it ?
How can we bridge , or let 's say , narrow , this gap in the course of the years ?
First of all , we need to find more robust , good and reliable biological solutions , more good bugs that we can either mass-produce or actually conserve in the field .
Secondly , to create even more intensive and strict public demand to reduction of chemicals in the agricultural fresh produce .
And thirdly , also to increase awareness by the growers to the potential of this industry .
And this gap really narrows .
Step by step , it does narrow .
So I think my last slide is : All we are saying , we can actually sing it : Give nature a chance .
So I 'm saying it on behalf of all the biocontrol petitioners and implementers , in Israel and abroad , really give nature a chance .
Thank you .
Carl Safina : The oil spill 's unseen culprits , victims
The Gulf oil spill dwarfs comprehension , but we know this much : it 's bad . Carl Safina scrapes out the facts in this blood-boiling cross-examination , arguing that the consequences will stretch far beyond the Gulf -- and many so-called solutions are making the situation worse . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
This is the ocean as I used to know it .
And I find that since I 've been in the Gulf a couple of times , I really kind of am traumatized because whenever I look at the ocean now , no matter where I am , even where I know none of the oil has gone , I sort of see slicks , and I 'm finding that I 'm very much haunted by it .
But what I want to talk to you about today is a lot of things that try to put all of this in context , not just about the oil eruption , but what it means and why it has happened .
First , just a little bit about me .
I 'm basically just a guy that likes to go fishing ever since I was a little kid , and because I did , I wound up studying sea birds to try to stay in the coastal habitats that I so loved .
And now I mainly write books about how the ocean is changing , and the ocean is certainly changing very rapidly .
Now we saw this kind of graphic earlier on , that we really live on a hard marble that has just a slight bit of wetness to it .
It 's like you dipped a marble in water .
And the same thing with the atmosphere : If you took all the atmosphere and rolled it up in a ball , you would get that little sphere of gas on the right .
So we live on the most fragile , little soap bubble you can imagine , a very sacred soap bubble , but one that is very , very easy to affect .
And all the burning of oil and coal and gas , all the fossil fuels , have changed the atmosphere greatly .
Carbon dioxide level has gone up and up and up .
We 're warming the climate .
So the blowout in the Gulf is just a little piece of a much larger problem that we have with the energy that we use to run civilization .
Beyond warming , we have the problem of the oceans getting more acidified -- and already measurably so , and already affecting animals .
Now in the laboratory , if you take a clam and you put it in the pH that is -- not 8.1 , which is the normal pH of seawater -- but 7.5 , it dissolves in about three days .
If you take a sea urchin larva from 8.1 , put it in a pH of 7.7 -- not a huge change -- it becomes deformed and dies .
And already , commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places .
Coral reefs are growing slower in some places because of this problem .
So this really matters .
Now , let 's take a little tour around the Gulf a little bit .
One of the things that really impresses me about the people in the Gulf : They are really , really aquatic people .
And they can handle water .
They can handle a hurricane that comes and goes .
When the water goes down , they know what to do .
But when it 's something other than water , and their water habitat changes , they don 't have many options .
In fact , those entire communities really don 't have many options .
They don 't have another thing they can do .
They can 't go and work in the local hotel business because there isn 't one in their community .
If you go to the Gulf and you look around , you do see a lot of oil .
You see a lot of oil on the ocean .
You see a lot of oil on the shoreline .
If you go to the site of the blowout , it looks pretty unbelievable .
It looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car , and you just dumped it in the ocean .
And one of the really most incredible things , I think , is that there 's nobody out there trying to collect it at the site where it is densest .
Parts of the ocean there look just absolutely apocalyptic .
You go in along the shore , you can find it everywhere .
It 's really messy .
If you go to the places where it 's just arriving , like the eastern part of the Gulf , in Alabama , there 's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach .
And they have a very strange way of cleaning up the beach .
They 're not allowed to put more than 10 pounds of sand in a 50-gallon plastic bag .
They have thousands and thousands of plastic bags .
I don 't know what they 're going to do with all that stuff .
Meanwhile , there are still people trying to use the beach .
They don 't see the little , tiny sign that says : " Stay out of the water . "
Their kids are in the water ; they 're getting tar all over their clothes and their sandals . It 's a mess .
If you go to the place where the oil has been a while , it 's an even bigger mess .
And there 's basically nobody there anymore , a few people trying to keep using it .
You see people who are really shell-shocked .
They are very hardworking people .
All they know about life is they get up in the morning , and if their engine starts , they go to work .
They always felt that they could rely on the assurances that nature brought them through the ecosystem of the Gulf .
They 're finding that their world is really collapsing .
And so you can see , literally , signs of their shock , signs of their outrage , signs of their anger , and signs of their grief .
These are the things that you can see .
There 's a lot you can 't see , also , underwater .
What 's going on underwater ?
Well , some people say there are oil plumes .
Some people say there are not oil plumes .
And Congressman Markey asks , you know , " Is it going to take a submarine ride to see if there are really oil plumes ? "
But I couldn 't take a submarine ride -- especially between the time I knew I was coming here and today -- so I had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the Gulf of Mexico .
So this is the Gulf of Mexico , sparkling place full of fish .
I created a little oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico .
And I learned -- in fact , I confirmed -- the hypothesis that oil and water don 't mix until you add a dispersant , and then they start mixing .
And you add a little energy from the wind and the waves , and you get a big mess , a big mess that you can 't possibly clean , you can 't touch , you can 't extract and , I think most importantly -- this is what I think -- you can 't see it .
I think it 's being hidden on purpose .
Now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess , that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream .
But as many people have said , there 's a large attempt to suppress what 's going on .
Personally , I think that the dispersants are a major strategy to hide the body , because we put the murderer in charge of the crime scene .
But you can see it .
You can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface , and then it is attacked , because they don 't want the evidence , in my opinion .
Okay .
We heard that bacteria eat oil ?
So do sea turtles .
When it breaks up , it has a long way to go before it gets down to bacteria .
Turtles eat it . It gets in the gills of fish .
These guys have to swim around through it .
I heard the most incredible story today when I was on the train coming here .
A writer named Ted Williams called me , and he was asking me a couple of questions about what I saw , because he 's writing an article for Audubon magazine .
He said that he had been in the Gulf a little while ago -- like about a week ago -- and a guy who had been a recreational fishing guide took him out to show him what 's going on .
That guide 's entire calendar year is canceled bookings .
He has no bookings left .
Everybody wanted their deposit back . Everybody is fleeing .
That 's the story of thousands of people .
But he told Ted that on the last day he went out , a bottlenose dolphin suddenly appeared next to the boat , and it was splattering oil out its blowhole .
And he moved away because it was his last fishing trip , and he knew that the dolphins scare fish .
So he moved away from it , turned around a few minutes later , it was right next to the side of the boat again .
He said that in 30 years of fishing he had never seen a dolphin do that .
And he felt that -- he felt that it was coming to ask for help . Sorry .
Now , in the Exxon Valdez spill , about 30 percent of the killer whales died in the first few months .
Their numbers have never recovered .
So the recovery rate of all this stuff is going to be variable .
It 's going to take longer for some things .
And some things , I think , will probably come back a little faster .
The other thing about the Gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the Gulf at certain parts of the year .
So the Gulf is a really important piece of water -- more important than a similar volume of water in the open Atlantic Ocean .
These tuna swim the entire ocean .
They get in the Gulf Stream . They go all the way to Europe .
When it comes time to spawn , they come inside , and these two tuna that were tagged , you can see them on the spawning grounds very much right in the area of the slick .
They 're probably having , at the very least , a catastrophic spawning season this year .
I 'm hoping that maybe the adults are avoiding that dirty water .
They don 't usually like to go into water that is very cloudy anyway .
But these are really high-performance athletic animals .
I don 't know what this kind of stuff will do in their gills .
I don 't know if it 'll affect the adults .
If it 's not , it 's certainly affecting their eggs and larvae , I would certainly think .
But if you look at that graph that goes down and down and down , that 's what we 've done to this species through overfishing over many decades .
So while the oil spill , the leak , the eruption , is a catastrophe , I think it 's important to keep in mind that we 've done a lot to affect what 's in the ocean for a very , very long time .
It 's not like we 're starting with something that 's been okay .
We 're starting with something that 's had a lot of stresses and a lot of problems to begin with .
If you look around at the birds , there are a lot of birds in the Gulf that concentrate in the Gulf at certain times of the year , but then leave .
And they populate much larger areas .
So for instance , most of the birds in this picture are migratory birds .
They were all on the Gulf in May , while oil was starting to come ashore in certain places .
Down on the lower left there are Ruddy Turnstones and Sanderlings .
They breed in the high arctic , and they winter down in southern South America .
But they concentrate in the Gulf and then fan out all across the arctic .
I saw birds that breed in Greenland in the Gulf , so this is a hemispheric issue .
The economic effects go at least nationally in many ways .
The biological effects are certainly hemispheric .
I think that this is one of the most absolutely mind-boggling examples of total unpreparedness that I can even think of .
Even when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor , at least they shot back .
And we just seem to be unable to figure out what to do .
There was nothing ready , and , you know , as we can see by what they 're doing .
Mainly what they 're doing is booms and dispersants .
The booms are absolutely not made for open water .
They don 't even attempt to corral the oil where it is most concentrated .
They get near shore . Look at these two boats .
That one on the right is called Fishing Fool .
And I think , you know , that 's a great name for boats that think that they 're going to do anything to make a dent in this by dragging a boom between them when there are literally hundreds of thousands of square miles in the Gulf right now with oil at the surface .
The dispersants make the oil go right under the booms .
The booms are only about 13 inches in diameter .
So it 's just absolutely crazy .
Here are shrimp boats employed .
There are hundreds of shrimp boats employed to drag booms instead of nets .
Here they are working .
You can see easily that all the oily water just goes over the back of the boom .
All they 're doing is stirring it .
It 's just ridiculous .
Also , for all the shoreline that has booms -- hundreds and hundreds of miles of shoreline -- there 's adjacent shoreline that doesn 't have any booms .
There is ample opportunity for oil and dirty water to get in behind them .
And that lower photo , that 's a bird colony that has been boomed .
Everybody 's trying to protect the bird colonies there .
Well , as an ornithologist , I can tell you that birds fly , and that -- and that booming a bird colony doesn 't do it ; it doesn 't do it .
These birds make a living by diving into the water .
In fact , really what I think they should do , if anything -- they 're trying so hard to protect those nests -- actually , if they destroyed every single nest some of the birds would leave , and that would be better for them this year .
As far as cleaning them , I don 't mean to cast any aspersion on people cleaning birds .
It 's really , really important that we express our compassion .
I think that 's the most important thing that people have , is compassion .
It 's really important to get those images and to show it .
But really , where are those birds going to get released to ?
It 's like taking somebody out of a burning building , treating them for smoke inhalation and sending them back into the building , because the oil is still gushing .
I refuse to acknowledge this as anything like an accident .
I think that this is the result of gross negligence .
Not just B.P.
B.P. operated very sloppily and very recklessly because they could .
And they were allowed to do so because of the absolute failure of oversight of the government that 's supposed to be our government , protecting us .
It turns out that -- you see this sign on almost every commercial vessel in the United States -- you know , if you spilled a couple of gallons of oil , you would be in big trouble .
And you have to really wonder who are the laws made for , and who has gotten above the laws .
Now there are things that we can do in the future .
We could have the kinds of equipment that we would really need .
It would not take an awful lot to anticipate that after making 30,000 holes in the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico looking for oil , oil might start coming out of one of them .
And you 'd have some idea of what to do .
That 's certainly one of the things we need to do .
But I think we have to understand where this leak really started from .
It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it 's our government , meant to protect the larger public interest .
So I think that the oil blowout , the bank bailout , the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause .
We still seem to understand that at least we need the police to protect us from a few bad people .
And even though the police can be a little annoying at times -- giving us tickets and stuff like that -- nobody says that we should just get rid of them .
But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years , there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from , buying the government out from under us .
Now this has been a problem for a very , very long time .
You can see that corporations were illegal at the founding of America , and even Thomas Jefferson complained that they were already bidding defiance to the laws of our country .
Okay , people who say they 're conservative , if they really wanted to be really conservative and really patriotic , they would tell these corporations to go to hell .
That 's what it would really mean to be conservative .
So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it 's our government safeguarding our interests and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost .
I think there are signs of hope .
We seem to be waking up a little bit .
The Glass-Steagall Act -- which was really to protect us from the kind of thing that caused the recession to happen , and the bank meltdown and all that stuff that required the bailouts -- that was put in effect in 1933 , was systematically destroyed .
Now there 's a mood to put some of that stuff back in place , but the lobbyists are already there trying to weaken the regulations after the legislation has just passed .
So it 's a continued fight .
It 's a historic moment right now .
We 're either going to have an absolutely unmitigated catastrophe of this oil leak in the Gulf , or we will make the moment we need out of this , as many people have noted today .
There 's certainly a common theme about needing to make the moment out of this .
We 've been through this before with other ways of offshore drilling .
The first offshore wells were called whales .
The first offshore drills were called harpoons .
We emptied the ocean of the whales at that time .
Now are we stuck with this ?
Ever since we lived in caves , every time we wanted any energy , we lit something on fire , and that is still what we 're doing .
We 're still lighting something on fire every time we want energy .
And people say we can 't have clean energy because it 's too expensive .
Who says it 's too expensive ?
People who sell us fossil fuels .
We 've been here before with energy , and people saying the economy cannot withstand a switch , because the cheapest energy was slavery .
Energy is always a moral issue .
It 's an issue that is moral right now .
It 's a matter of right and wrong .
Thank you very much .
Martin Jacques : Understanding the rise of China
Speaking at a TED Salon in London , Martin Jacques asks : How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise ? The author of " When China Rules the World , " he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy , and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become .
The world is changing with really remarkable speed .
If you look at the chart at the top here , you 'll see that in 2025 , these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy .
And if you look at the chart for 2050 , it 's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy , and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy .
And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis .
A couple of weeks ago , I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States .
Goldman Sachs projected 2027 .
The post-crisis projection is 2020 .
That 's just a decade away .
China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects .
First of all , it 's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people , which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year .
And within a decade , it will have the largest economy in the world .
Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country , rather than a developed country .
Secondly , for the first time in the modern era , the dominant country in the world -- which I think is what China will become -- will be not from the West and from very , very different civilizational roots .
Now , I know it 's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize , they also westernize .
This is an illusion .
It 's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition , markets and technology .
It is not . It is also shaped equally by history and culture .
China is not like the West , and it will not become like the West .
It will remain in very fundamental respects very different .
Now the big question here is obviously , how do we make sense of China ?
How do we try to understand what China is ?
And the problem we have in the West at the moment , by and large , is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms , using Western ideas .
We can 't .
Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like , just as a beginning .
The first is this : that China is not really a nation-state .
Okay , it 's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years , but everyone who knows anything about China knows it 's a lot older than this .
This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period -- the birth of modern China .
And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China .
Or immediately afterward , the Han Dynasty , still 2,000 years ago .
And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China , which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now .
Now what is extraordinary about this is , what gives China its sense of being China , what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese , comes not from the last hundred years , not from the nation-state period , which is what happened in the West , but from the period , if you like , of the civilization-state .
I 'm thinking here , for example , of customs like ancestral worship , of a very distinctive notion of the state , likewise , a very distinctive notion of the family , social relationships like guanxi , Confucian values and so on .
These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state .
In other words , China , unlike the Western states and most countries in the world , is shaped by its sense of civilization , its existence as a civilization-state , rather than as a nation-state .
And there 's one other thing to add to this , and that is this : Of course we know China 's big , huge , demographically and geographically , with a population of 1.3 billion people .
What we often aren 't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic , and in many ways very decentralized .
You can 't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing , even though we think this to be the case .
It 's never been the case .
So this is China , a civilization-state , rather than a nation-state .
And what does it mean ?
Well , I think it has all sorts of profound implications .
I 'll give you two quick ones .
The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity , is the maintenance of Chinese civilization .
You know , 2,000 years ago , Europe : breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire .
It divided , and it 's remained divided ever since .
China , over the same time period , went in exactly the opposite direction , very painfully holding this huge civilization , civilization-state , together .
The second is maybe more prosaic , which is Hong Kong .
Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997 ?
You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was .
One country , two systems .
And I 'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them .
" Window dressing .
When China gets its hands on Hong Kong , that won 't be the case . "
Thirteen years on , the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997 .
We were wrong . Why were we wrong ?
We were wrong because we thought , naturally enough , in nation-state ways .
Think of German unification , 1990 .
What happened ?
Well , basically the East was swallowed by the West .
One nation , one system .
That is the nation-state mentality .
But you can 't run a country like China , a civilization-state , on the basis of one civilization , one system .
It doesn 't work .
So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response : one civilization , many systems .
Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one .
The Chinese have a very , very different conception of race to most other countries .
Do you know , of the 1.3 billion Chinese , over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race , the Han ?
Now , this is completely different from the world 's [ other ] most populous countries .
India , the United States , Indonesia , Brazil -- all of them are multiracial .
The Chinese don 't feel like that .
China is only multiracial really at the margins .
So the question is , why ?
Well the reason , I think , essentially is , again , back to the civilization-state .
A history of at least 2,000 years , a history of conquest , occupation , absorption , assimilation and so on , led to the process by which , over time , this notion of the Han emerged -- of course , nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity .
Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that , without the Han , China could never have held together .
The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together .
The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference .
They really believe in their own superiority , and they are disrespectful of those who are not .
Hence their attitude , for example , to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans .
Or let me give you my third building block , the Chinese state .
Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West .
Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy .
The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state .
And the reason for this is because -- well , there are two reasons , I think .
And it 's obviously got nothing to do with democracy , because in our terms the Chinese certainly don 't have a democracy .
And the reason for this is , firstly , because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative , the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization , of the civilization-state .
This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role .
And the second reason is because , whereas in Europe and North America , the state 's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition , historically against the church , against other sectors of the aristocracy , against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years , the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged .
It 's had no serious rivals .
So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history .
The result , by the way , is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state .
Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder , a stranger , certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained , the Chinese don 't see the state like that at all .
The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually , as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family , but as the head of the family , the patriarch of the family .
This is the Chinese view of the state -- very , very different to ours .
It 's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West .
And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here , in the Chinese context , is a new kind of paradigm , which is different from anything we 've had to think about in the past .
Know that China believes in the market and the state .
I mean , Adam Smith , already writing in the late 18th century , said , " The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe . "
And , apart from the Mao period , that has remained more or less the case ever since .
But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state .
The state is everywhere in China .
I mean , it 's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned .
Private firms , however large they are , like Lenovo , depend in many ways on state patronage .
Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state .
And the state , of course , its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy .
Moreover , this is a very old state tradition , a very old tradition of statecraft .
I mean , if you want an illustration of this , the Great Wall is one .
But this is another , this is the Grand Canal , which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C.
and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D.
It went for 1,114 miles , linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai .
So there 's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China , which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today , which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China .
So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization-state , the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society .
And yet we still insist , by and large , in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience , looking at it through Western eyes , using Western concepts .
If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what 's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason .
Unfortunately , I think , I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality .
It 's kind of arrogant .
It 's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best , and therefore we have the universal measure .
And secondly , it 's ignorant .
We refuse to really address the issue of difference .
You know , there 's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen , the American historian .
And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures .
But it 's not .
In many ways , it 's the most parochial , because for 200 years , the West has been so dominant in the world that it 's not really needed to understand other cultures , other civilizations .
Because , at the end of the day , it could , if necessary by force , get its own way .
Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world , in fact , which have been in a far weaker position , vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West , because of the West 's presence in those societies .
And therefore , they are , as a result , more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West .
I mean , take the question of East Asia .
East Asia : Japan , Korea , China , etc . -- a third of the world 's population lives there .
Now the largest economic region in the world .
And I 'll tell you now , that East Asianers , people from East Asia , are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia .
Now this point is very germane , I 'm afraid , to the present .
Because what 's happening ? Back to that chart at the beginning , the Goldman Sachs chart .
What is happening is that , very rapidly in historical terms , the world is being driven and shaped , not by the old developed countries , but by the developing world .
We 've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7 , or the G8 .
And there are two consequences of this .
First , the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world .
There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen , climate change conference .
Europe was not at the final negotiating table .
When did that last happen ?
I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago .
And that is what is going to happen in the future .
And the second implication is that the world will inevitably , as a consequence , become increasingly unfamiliar to us , because it 'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with , or conversant with .
And at last , I 'm afraid -- take Europe ; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large , I have to say , are ignorant , are unaware about the way the world is changing .
Some people -- I 've got an English friend in China , and he said , " The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion . "
Well , maybe that 's true , maybe that 's an exaggeration .
But there 's another problem which goes along with this -- that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world -- and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future .
I mean , Europe once , of course , once commanded the future in its confidence .
Take the 19th century , for example .
But this , alas , is no longer true .
If you want to feel the future , if you want to taste the future , try China -- there 's old Confucius .
This is a railway station the likes of which you 've never seen before .
It doesn 't even look like a railway station .
This is the new [ Wuhan ] railway station for the high-speed trains .
China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together .
Or take this : now this is an idea , but it 's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing .
Here you have a megabus , on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people .
It travels on rails down a suburban road , and the cars travel underneath it .
And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour .
Now this is the way things are going to move , because China has a very specific problem , which is different from Europe and different from the United States : China has huge numbers of people and no space .
So this is a solution to a situation where China 's going to have many , many , many cities over 20 million people .
Okay , so how would I like to finish ?
Well , what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us ?
I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it .
But I want to argue , above all , a big-picture positive for this world .
For 200 years , the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population .
That 's what Europe and North America represented .
The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world 's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on , represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years .
Civilizations and cultures , which had been ignored , which had no voice , which were not listened to , which were not known about , will have a different sort of representation in this world .
As humanists , we must welcome , surely , this transformation , and we will have to learn about these civilizations .
This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea , the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa .
The little boat in front of it was the one in which , 80 years later , Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic .
Or , look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368 .
I think they 're playing golf .
Christ , the Chinese even invented golf .
Welcome to the future . Thank you .
Philip K. Howard : Four ways to fix a broken legal system
The land of the free has become a legal minefield , says Philip K. Howard -- especially for teachers and doctors , whose work has been paralyzed by fear of suits . What 's the answer ? A lawyer himself , Howard has four propositions for simplifying US law .
I 've always been interested in the relationship of formal structures and human behavior .
If you build a wide road out to the outskirts of town , people will move there .
Well , law is also a powerful driver of human behavior .
And what I 'd like to discuss today is the need to overhaul and simplify the law to release the energy and passion of Americans , so that we can begin to address the challenges of our society .
You might have noticed that law has grown progressively denser in your lives over the last decade or two .
If you run a business , it 's hard to do much of anything without calling your general counsel .
Indeed , there is this phenomenon now where the general counsels are becoming the CEOs .
It 's a little bit like the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers .
You need a lawyer to run the company , because there 's so much law .
But it 's not just business that 's affected by this , it 's actually pressed down into the daily activities of ordinary people .
A couple of years ago I was hiking near Cody , Wyoming .
It was in a grizzly bear preserve , although no one told me that before we went .
And our guide was a local science teacher .
She was wholly unconcerned about the bears , but she was terrified of lawyers .
The stories started pouring out .
She 'd just been involved in an episode where a parent had threatened to sue the school because she lowered the grade of the student by 10 percent when he turned the paper in late .
The principal didn 't want to stand up to the parent because he didn 't want to get dragged into some legal proceedings .
So , she had to go to meeting after meeting , same arguments made over and over again .
After 30 days of sleepless nights , she finally capitulated and raised the grade .
She said , " Life 's too short , I just can 't keep going with this . "
About the same time , she was going to take two students to a leadership conference in Laramie , which is a couple of hours away , and she was going to drive them in her car , but the school said , " No , you can 't drive them in the car for liability reasons .
You have to go in a school bus . "
So , they provided a bus that held 60 people and drove the three of them back and forth several hours to Laramie .
Her husband is also a science teacher , and he takes his biology class on a hike in the nearby national park .
But he was told he couldn 't go on the hike this year because one of the students in the class was disabled , so the other 25 students didn 't get to go on the hike either .
At the end of this day I could have filled a book just with stories about law from this one teacher .
Now , we 've been taught to believe that law is the foundation of freedom .
But somehow or another , in the last couple of decades , the land of the free has become a legal minefield .
It 's really changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible ; and yet , when you pull back , you see it all the time .
It 's changed the way we talk . I was talking to a pediatrician friend in North Carolina . He said , " Well you know , I don 't deal with patients the same way anymore .
You wouldn 't want to say something off-the-cuff that might be used against you . "
This is a doctor , whose life is caring for people .
My own law firm has a list of questions that I 'm not allowed to ask when interviewing candidates , such as the sinister question , bulging with hidden motives and innuendo , " Where are you from ? "
Now for 20 years , tort reformers have been sounding the alarm that lawsuits are out of control .
And we read every once in while about these crazy lawsuits , like the guy in the District of Columbia who sued his dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost his pair of pants .
The case went on for two years ; I think he 's still appealing the case .
But the reality is , these crazy cases are relatively rare . They don 't usually win .
And the total of direct tort cost in this country is about two percent , which is twice as much as in other countries but , as taxes go , hardly crippling .
But the direct costs are really only the tip of the iceberg .
What 's happened here , again , almost without our knowing , is our culture has changed .
People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment .
So , what do we do about it ?
We certainly don 't want to give up the rights , when people do something wrong , to seek redress in the courts .
We need regulation to make sure people don 't pollute and such .
We lack even a vocabulary to deal with this problem , and that 's because we have the wrong frame of reference .
We 've been trained to think that the way to look at every dispute , every issue , is a matter of kind of individual rights .
And so we peer through a legal microscope , and look at everything .
Is it possible that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why Johnny turned his paper in late in Cody , Wyoming ?
Is it possible that the doctor might have done something differently when the sick person gets sicker ?
And of course the hindsight bias is perfect .
There 's always a different scenario that you can sketch out where it 's possible that something could have been done differently .
And yet , we 've been trained to squint into this legal microscope , hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society , where everyone will agree what 's fair , and where accidents will be extinct , risk will be no more .
Of course , this is Utopia ; it 's a formula for paralysis , not freedom .
It 's not the basis of the rule of law , it 's not the basis of a free society .
So , now I have the first of four propositions I 'm going to leave with you about how you simplify the law : You 've got to judge law mainly by its effect on the broader society , not individual disputes .
Absolutely vital .
So , let 's pull back from the anecdotes for a second and look at our society from high above .
Is it working ?
What does the macro-data show us ?
Well , the healthcare system has been transformed : a culture pervaded with defensiveness , universal distrust of the system of justice , universal practice of defensive medicine .
It 's very hard to measure because there are mixed motives .
Doctors can make more on ordering tests sometimes , and also they no longer even know what 's right or wrong .
But reliable estimates range between 60 billion and 200 billion dollars per year .
That 's enough to provide care to all the people in America who don 't have it .
The trial lawyers say , " Well , this legal fear makes doctors practice better medicine . "
Well that 's been studied too , by the Institute of Medicine and others . Turns out that 's not the case .
The fear has chilled professional interaction so thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors are afraid to speak up : " Are you sure that 's the right dosage ? "
Because they 're not sure , and they don 't want to take legal responsibility .
Let 's go to schools .
As we saw with the teacher in Cody , Wyoming , she seems to be affected by the law .
Well it turns out the schools are literally drowning in law .
You could have a separate section of a law library around each of the following legal concepts : due process , special education , no child left behind , zero tolerance , work rules ...
it goes on . We did a study of all the rules that affect one school in New York . The Board of Ed. had no idea .
Tens of thousands of discreet rules , 60 steps to suspend a student from school : It 's a formula for paralysis .
What 's the effect of that ? One is a decline in order .
Again , studies have shown it 's directly attributable to the rise of due process .
Public agenda did a survey for us a couple of years ago where they found that 43 percent of the high school teachers in America say that they spend at least half of their time maintaining order in the classroom .
That means those students are getting half the learning they 're supposed to , because if one child is disrupting the class no one can learn .
And what happens when the teacher tries to assert order ?
They 're threatened with a legal claim .
We also surveyed that . Seventy-eight percent of the middle and high school teachers in America have been threatened by their students with violating their rights , with lawsuits by their students . They are threatening , their students .
It 's not that they usually sue , it 's not that they would win , but it 's an indication of the corrosion of authority .
And how has this system of law worked for government ?
It doesn 't seem to be working very well does it ?
Neither in Sacramento nor in Washington .
The other day at the State of the Union speech , President Obama said , and I think we could all agree with this goal , " From the first railroads to the interstate highway system , our nation has always been the first to compete .
There is no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains . "
Well , actually there is a reason : Environmental review has evolved into a process of no pebble left unturned for any major project taking the better part of a decade , then followed by years of litigation by anybody who doesn 't like the project .
Then , just staying above the Earth for one more second , people are acting like idiots , all across the country .
Idiots . A couple of years ago , Broward County , Florida , banned running at recess .
That means all the boys are going to be ADD .
I mean it 's just absolutely a formula for failure .
My favorite , though , are all the warning labels .
" Caution : Contents are hot , " on billions of coffee cups .
Archeologists will dig us up in a thousand years and they won 't know about defensive medicine and stuff , but they 'll see all these labels , " Contents are extremely hot . "
They 'll think it was some kind of aphrodisiac .
That 's the only explanation . Because why would you have to tell people that something was actually hot ?
My favorite warning was one on a five-inch fishing lure .
I grew up in the South and whiled away the summers fishing .
Five-inch fishing lure , it 's a big fishing lure , with a three pronged hook in the back , and outside it said , " Harmful if swallowed . "
So , none of these people are doing what they think is right .
And why not ? They don 't trust the law . Why don 't they trust the law ?
Because it gives us the worst of both worlds : It 's random -- anybody can sue for almost anything and take it to a jury , not even an effort at consistency -- and it 's also too detailed .
In the areas that are regulated , there are so many rules no human could possibly know it .
Well how do you fix it ? We could spend 10,000 lifetimes trying to prune this legal jungle .
But the challenge here is not one of just amending the law , because the hurdle for success is trust .
People -- for law to be the platform for freedom , people have to trust it .
So , that 's my second proposition : Trust is an essential condition to a free society .
Life is complicated enough without legal fear .
But law is different than other kinds of uncertainties , because it carries with it the power of state .
And so the state can come in .
It actually changes the way people think .
It 's like having a little lawyer on your shoulders all day long , whispering in your ear , " Could that go wrong ? Might that go wrong ? "
It drives people from the smart part of the brain -- that dark , deep well of the subconscious , where instincts and experience , and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are -- it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic .
Pretty soon the doctor 's saying , " Well , I doubt if that headache could be a tumor , but who would protect me if it were ? So maybe I 'll just order the MRI . "
Then you 've wasted 200 billion dollars in unnecessary tests .
If you make people self-conscious about their judgments , studies show you will make them make worse judgments .
If you tell the pianist to think about how she 's hitting the notes when she 's playing the piece , she can 't play the piece .
Self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment .
Edison stated it best . He said , " Hell , we ain 't got no rules around here , we 're trying to accomplish something . "
So , how do you restore trust ?
Tweaking the law 's clearly not good enough , and tort reform , which is a great idea , lowers your cost if you 're a businessperson , but it 's like a Band-Aid on this gaping wound of distrust .
States with extensive tort reform still suffer all these pathologies .
So , what 's needed is not just to limit claims , but actually create a dry ground of freedom .
It turns out that freedom actually has a formal structure .
And it is this : Law sets boundaries , and on one side of those boundaries are all the things you can 't do or must do -- you can 't steal , you 've got to pay your taxes -- but those same boundaries are supposed to define and protect a dry ground of freedom .
Isaiah Berlin put it this way : " Law sets frontiers , not artificially drawn , within which men shall be inviolable . "
We 've forgotten that second part .
Those dikes have burst . People wade through law all day long .
So , what 's needed now is to rebuild these boundaries .
And it 's especially important to rebuild them for lawsuits .
Because what people can sue for establishes the boundaries for everybody else 's freedom .
If someone brings a lawsuit over , " A kid fell off the seesaw , " it doesn 't matter what happens in the lawsuit , all the seesaws will disappear .
Because no one will want to take the risk of a lawsuit .
And that 's what 's happened . There are no seesaws , jungle gyms , merry-go-rounds , climbing ropes , nothing that would interest a kid over the age of four , because there 's no risk associated with it .
So , how do we rebuild it ?
Life is too complex for ...
Life is too complex for a software program .
All these choices involve value judgments and social norms , not objective facts .
And so here is the fourth proposition .
This is what we have , the philosophy we have to change to .
And there are two essential elements of it : We have to simplify the law .
We have to migrate from all this complexity towards general principles and goals .
The constitution is only 16 pages long .
Worked pretty well for 200 years .
Law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices .
If they can 't internalize it , they won 't trust it .
And how do you make it simple ?
Because life is complex , and here is the hardest and biggest change : We have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law .
We have to rehumanize the law .
To make law simple so that you feel free , the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to interpret and apply the law in accord with reasonable social norms .
As you 're going down , and walking down the sidewalk during the day , you have to think that if there is a dispute , there 's somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you 're acting reasonably .
That person doesn 't exist today .
This is the hardest hurdle .
It 's actually not very hard . Ninety-eight percent of cases , this is a piece of cake .
Maybe you 've got a claim in small claims court for your lost pair of pants for $ 100 , but not in a court of general jurisdiction for millions of dollars .
Case dismissed without prejudice or refiling in small claims court .
Takes five minutes . That 's it , it 's not that hard .
But it 's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values : racism , gender discrimination , pollution -- they were bad values . And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore .
The problem is , we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values .
It doesn 't mean that people in authority can do whatever they want .
They 're still bounded by legal goals and principles : The teacher is accountable to the principal , the judge is accountable to an appellate court , the president is accountable to voters .
But the accountability 's up the line judging the decision against the effect on everybody , not just on the disgruntled person .
You can 't run a society by the lowest common denominator .
So , what 's needed is a basic shift in philosophy .
We can pull the plug on a lot of this stuff if we shift our philosophy .
We 've been taught that authority is the enemy of freedom .
It 's not true . Authority , in fact , is essential to freedom .
Law is a human institution ; responsibility is a human institution .
If teachers don 't have authority to run the classroom , to maintain order , everybody 's learning suffers .
If the judge doesn 't have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims , then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders .
If the environmental agency can 't decide that the power lines are good for the environment , then there 's no way to bring the power from the wind farms to the city .
A free society requires red lights and green lights , otherwise it soon descends into gridlock .
That 's what 's happened to America . Look around .
What the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices .
It 's the only way to get our freedom back , and it 's the only way to release the energy and passion needed so that we can meet the challenges of our time . Thank you .
Alastair Parvin : Architecture for the people by the people
Designer Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea : what if , instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them , regular citizens could design and build their own houses ? The concept is at the heart of WikiHouse , an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house , anywhere .
When we use the word " architect " or " designer , " what we usually mean is a professional , someone who gets paid , and we tend to assume that it 's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big , systemic design challenges that we face like climate change , urbanization and social inequality .
That 's our kind of working presumption .
And I think it 's wrong , actually .
In 2008 , I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years , and go out and get a job , and this happened .
The economy ran out of jobs .
And a couple of things struck me about this .
One , don 't listen to career advisers .
And two , actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture , which is that , as a society , we 've never needed design thinking more , and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed .
It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design , but actually there 's an economics behind architecture that we don 't talk about , and I think we need to .
And a good place to start is your own paycheck .
So , as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate , I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds .
That 's about 36,000 , 37,000 dollars .
Now in terms of the whole world 's population , that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people , which raises the question of , who is it I 'm working for ?
The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world 's population , and it always has been .
The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when , actually , the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent , for various different reasons , whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century , communism in the early 20th , the welfare state , and most recently , of course , through this inflated real estate bubble .
And all of those booms , in their own various ways , have now kicked the bucket , and we 're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population .
Now it 's not just that that 's bad for democracy , though I think it probably is , it 's actually not a very clever business strategy , actually .
I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is , how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent ?
And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done .
The first is , I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings .
Actually , a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem .
And fundamentally , design should be much , much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions .
So here 's a story .
The office was working with a school , and they had an old Victorian school building .
And they said to the architects , " Look , our corridors are an absolute nightmare .
They 're far too small . They get congested between classes .
There 's bullying . We can 't control them .
So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building , and we know it 's going to cost several million pounds , but we 're reconciled to the fact . "
And the team thought about this , and they went away , and they said , " Actually , don 't do that .
Instead , get rid of the school bell .
And instead of having one school bell that goes off once , have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times , distribute the traffic through the corridors . "
It solves the same problem , but instead of spending several million pounds , you spend several hundred pounds .
Now , it looks like you 're doing yourself out of a job , but you 're not . You 're actually making yourself more useful .
Architects are actually really , really good at this kind of resourceful , strategic thinking .
And the problem is that , like a lot of design professions , we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product , and I don 't think that needs to be the case anymore .
The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big -- big buildings and big finance .
Actually , we 've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf , procuring whole neighborhoods in single , monolithic projects , and of course , form follows finance .
So what you end up with are single , monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model .
And a lot of people can 't even afford them .
But what if , actually , it 's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit ?
And when they do , they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live .
And it raises really interesting questions about , how will we plan cities ? How will finance development ?
How will we sell design services ?
What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build ?
And in a way it should be kind of obvious , right , that in the 21st century , maybe cities can be developed by citizens .
And thirdly , we need to remember that , from a strictly economic point of view , design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly -- mostly it 's done by amateurs .
And that 's a good thing .
Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what 's called the social economy or the core economy , which is people doing it for themselves .
And the problem is that , up until now , it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools .
So the challenge we face is , how are we going to build the tools , the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture 's social economy ?
And that began with open-source software .
And over the last few years , it 's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware , which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves .
And that 's where 3D printing gets really , really interesting .
Right ? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source , the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer .
Or the same idea here , which is for a CNC machine , which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood .
What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill .
They 're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it 's got to be one-size-fits-all .
And they 're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities .
We 're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere , and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone .
That really is an industrial revolution .
And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production , and these technologies are coming back with a solution : actually , maybe no one . All of us .
And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture .
So about a year and a half ago , we started working on a project called WikiHouse , and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system .
And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online , access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in , at the moment , SketchUp , because it 's free , and it 's easy to use , and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them , in effect , to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood .
And the parts are all numbered , and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit .
And it goes together without any bolts .
It uses wedge and peg connections .
And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well .
And a team of about two or three people , working together , can build this .
They don 't need any traditional construction skills .
They don 't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that , and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day .
And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what 's cheap and what 's available .
Of course , the house is never finished .
We 're shifting our heads here , so the house is not a finished product .
With the CNC machine , you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door .
So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source , citizen-led urban development model , potentially .
And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now , and some really interesting lessons here .
One of them is that it 's always incredibly sociable .
People get confused between construction work and having fun .
But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane , physical details .
Like , never designing a piece that can 't be lifted up .
Or , when you 're designing a piece , make sure you either can 't put it in the wrong way round , or , if you do , it doesn 't matter , because it 's symmetrical .
Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds , the open-source pioneer , which was that idea of , " Be lazy like a fox . "
Don 't reinvent the wheel every time .
Take what already works , and adapt it for your own needs .
Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school , copying is good .
Which is appropriate , because actually , this approach is not innovative .
It 's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings .
The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection , but it 's a really , really big difference .
We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license , and now what 's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it , and it 's amazing .
There 's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing , and thanks to the TED city Prize , we 're working with an awesome group in one of Rio 's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university .
These are very , very small beginnings , and actually there 's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they 're not even on this map .
I hope next time you see it , you won 't even be able to see the map .
We 're aware that WikiHouse is a very , very small answer , but it 's a small answer to a really , really big question , which is that globally , right now , the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities .
They 're self-made cities in one form or another .
If we 're talking about the 21st-century city , these are the guys who are going to be making it .
You know , like it or not , welcome to the world 's biggest design team .
So if we 're serious about problems like climate change , urbanization and health , actually , our existing development models aren 't going to do it .
As I think Robert Neuwirth said , there isn 't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who 's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers .
How extraordinary would it be , though , if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we 've been working on , but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning , off-grid energy , off-grid sanitation -- low-cost , open-source , high-performance solutions that anyone can very , very easily make , and to put them all into a commons where they 're owned by everyone and they 're accessible by everyone ?
A kind of Wikipedia for stuff ?
And once something 's in the commons , it will always be there .
How much would that change the rules ?
And I think the technology 's on our side .
If design 's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption -- that was Henry Ford , Levittown , Coca-Cola , IKEA — I think design 's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production .
And when it comes to architecture in cities , that really matters .
Thank you very much .
David Keith : A critical look at geoengineering against climate change
Environmental scientist David Keith proposes a cheap , effective , shocking means to address climate change : What if we injected a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight and heat ?
You 've all seen lots of articles on climate change , and here 's yet another New York Times article , just like every other darn one you 've seen .
It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you 've seen .
It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you 've seen .
What 's unusual about this one , maybe , is that it 's from 1953 .
And the reason I 'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent .
That people have just sort of figured out about it , and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something , we may be on the road to a solution .
The fact is -- uh-uh .
We 've known about this problem for 50 years , depending on how you count it .
We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so .
And we 've accomplished close to zip .
This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere .
You 've seen this in various forms , but maybe you haven 't seen this one .
What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating .
And that it 's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back .
So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible , that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line .
But in fact , they 're growing faster .
Here 's some data from actually just 10 days ago , which shows this year 's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice , and it 's the lowest by far .
And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models .
So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel , and politicians signing treaties -- in fact , you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative , because it 's just consumed a lot of jet fuel .
No , no ! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing -- our big economy -- we 've really hardly started .
Really , we 're doing this , basically . Really , not very much .
I don 't want to depress you too much .
The problem is absolutely soluble , and even soluble in a way that 's reasonably cheap .
Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military , not the cost of medical care .
Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP .
No , this is really important to have this sense of scale .
So the problem is soluble , and the way we should go about solving it is , say , dealing with electricity production , which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions .
And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation , and wind power , nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture , which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment , and work .
All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place .
Instead , we spend our time talking .
But nevertheless , that 's not what I 'm going to talk to you about tonight .
What I 'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing .
And it 's this stuff in the middle here , which is what you do if you don 't stop the emissions quickly enough .
And you need to deal -- somehow break the link between human actions that change climate , and the climate change itself . And that 's particularly important because , of course , while we can adapt to climate change -- and it 's important to be honest here , there will be some benefits to climate change .
Oh , yes , I think it 's bad . I 've spent my whole life working to stop it .
But one of the reasons it 's politically hard is there are winners and losers -- not all losers .
But , of course , the natural world , polar bears .
I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic .
They will completely lose .
And there 's no adaption .
So this problem is absolutely soluble .
This geo-engineering idea , in it 's simplest form , is basically the following .
You could put signed particles , say sulfuric acid particles -- sulfates -- into the upper atmosphere , the stratosphere , where they 'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet .
And I know for certain that that will work .
Not that there aren 't side effects , but I know for certain it will work .
And the reason is , it 's been done .
And it was done not by us , not by me , but by nature .
Here 's Mount Pinatubo in the early ' 90s . That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud .
The result of that was pretty dramatic .
After that , and some previous volcanoes we have , you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere .
So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere , the stratosphere , and it heats up after these volcanoes .
But you 'll notice that in the upper bar , which is the lower atmosphere and the surface , it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit .
There 's no big mystery about it .
There 's lots of mystery in the details , and there 's some bad side effects , like it partially destroys the ozone layer -- and I 'll get to that in a minute .
But it clearly cools down .
And one other thing : it 's fast .
It 's really important to say . So much of the other things that we ought to do , like slowing emissions , are intrinsically slow , because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions .
And not only that , when you cut emissions , you don 't cut concentrations , because concentrations , the amount of CO2 in the air , is the sum of emissions over time .
So you can 't step on the brakes very quickly .
But if you do this , it 's quick .
And there are times you might like to do something quick .
Another thing you might wonder about is , does it work ?
Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2 , and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally ?
And the answer seems to be yes .
So here are the graphs you 've seen lots of times before .
That 's what the world looks like , under one particular climate model 's view , with twice the amount of CO2 in the air .
The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight , and you 're back to the original climate .
And this graph from Ken Caldeira . It 's important to say came , because Ken -- at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid- ' 90s -- Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said , " Geo-engineering won 't work . "
And to the person who was promoting it said , " The atmosphere 's much more complicated . "
Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn 't do a very good compensation .
Ken went and ran his models , and found that it did .
This topic is also old .
That report that landed on President Johnson 's desk when I was two years old -- 1965 .
That report , in fact , which had all the modern climate science -- the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering .
It didn 't even talk about cutting emissions , which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem .
I 'm not saying we shouldn 't cut emissions .
We should , but it made exactly this point .
So , in a sense , there 's not much new .
The one new thing is this essay .
So I should say , I guess , that since the time of that original President Johnson report , and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy -- 1977 , 1982 , 1990 -- people always talked about this idea .
Not as something that was foolproof , but as an idea to think about .
But when climate became , politically , a hot topic -- if I may make the pun -- in the last 15 years , this became so un-PC , we couldn 't talk about it .
It just sunk below the surface . We weren 't allowed to speak about it .
But in the last year , Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what 's all been said before : that maybe , given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts , we should think about things like this .
He said roughly what 's been said before .
The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry .
And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this , even though there will be some ozone impacts .
And in fact , he had some ideas to make them go away .
There was all sorts of press coverage , all over the world , going right down to " Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth , " from the Economist .
And that got me thinking . I 've worked on this topic on and off , but not so much technically . And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night .
And I thought about this child 's toy -- hence , the title of my talk -- and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin ' round in the child 's radiometer , to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there .
One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly .
The other problem is they 're right in the ozone layer , and I 'd prefer them above the ozone layer .
And it turns out , I woke up the next morning , and I started to calculate this .
It was very hard to calculate from first principles . I was stumped .
But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere .
So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere , about 100 kilometers up , that already have this effect .
I 'll tell you very quickly how the effect works .
There are a lot of fun complexities that I 'd love to spend the whole evening on , but I won 't .
But let 's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it 's unevenly heated .
So the side facing the sun is warmer ; the side away , cooler .
Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it 's warm .
And so you see a net force away from the sun .
That 's called the photophoretic force .
There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit .
And of course , we may be wrong -- this hasn 't all been peer reviewed , we 're in the middle of thinking about it -- but so far , it seems good .
But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes -- much longer than before -- because they 're levitated .
We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere , in principle solving the ozone problem .
I 'm sure there will be other problems that arise .
Finally , we could make the particles migrate to over the poles , so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles .
Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet , where we live , and do the maximum job of what we might need to do , which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency , if you like .
This is a new idea that 's crept up that may be , essentially , a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in .
Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right , I think it 's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in .
That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this , it 's amazing how we can affect the planet .
The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage .
This improved science and engineering will , whether we like it or not , give us more and more leverage to affect the planet , to control the planet , to give us weather and climate control -- not because we plan it , not because we want it , just because science delivers it to us bit by bit , with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it .
Now , suppose that space aliens arrived .
Maybe they 're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here , or maybe they 'll pick a smarter spot -- but suppose they arrive and they give you a box .
And the box has two knobs .
One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature .
Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations .
You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box .
Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs .
We have no global governance .
And different people will have different places they want it set .
Now , I don 't think that 's going to happen . It 's not very likely .
But we 're building that box .
The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece , in their labs .
Even when they 're doing it for other reasons .
Even when they 're thinking they 're just working on protecting the environment .
They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet .
They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do .
And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it -- I do not -- but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously .
Because sooner or later , we 'll be confronted with decisions about this , and it 's better if we think hard about it , even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it .
I 'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it .
But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this .
We need a broader debate .
A debate that involves musicians , scientists , philosophers , writers , who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are .
So here 's one way to think about it , which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it 's cheaper .
I guess the thing I haven 't said about this is , it is absurdly cheap .
It 's conceivable that , say , using the sulfates method or this method I 've come up with , you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP .
It 's very cheap . We have a lot of leverage .
It 's not a good idea , but it 's just important .
I 'll tell you how big the lever is : the lever is that big .
And that calculation isn 't much in dispute .
You might argue about the sanity of it , but the leverage is real .
So because of this , we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions , and just as the concentrations go up , we can increase the amount of geo-engineering .
I don 't think anybody takes that seriously .
Because under this scenario , we walk further and further away from the current climate .
We have all sorts of other problems , like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere , anyway .
Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this .
But here 's a case which is harder to reject .
Let 's say that we don 't do geo-engineering , we do what we ought to do , which is get serious about cutting emissions .
But we don 't really know how quickly we have to cut them .
There 's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much .
So let 's say that we work hard , and we actually don 't just tap the brakes , but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations .
And maybe someday -- like 2075 , October 23 -- we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side .
And we have global celebrations , and we 've actually started to -- you know , we 've seen the worst of it .
But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast , fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years , and remove some of the biggest cities from the map .
That 's an absolutely possible scenario .
We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy , that it 's a lot better than not geo-engineering .
And that 's a very different way to look at the problem .
It 's using this as risk control , not instead of action .
It 's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off , not that you 'd use it as a substitute for action .
But there is a problem with that view .
And the problem is the following : knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome , and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today .
This is what economists call a moral hazard .
And that 's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about , and , in general , I think it 's the underlying reason that it 's been politically unacceptable to talk about this .
But you don 't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer .
I 'll leave you with three questions , and then one final quote .
Should we do serious research on this topic ?
Should we have a national research program that looks at this ?
Not just at how you would do it better , but also what all the risks and downsides of it are .
Right now , you have a few enthusiasts talking about it , some in a positive side , some in a negative side -- but that 's a dangerous state to be in because there 's very little depth of knowledge on this topic .
A very small amount of money would get us some .
Many of us -- maybe now me -- think we should do that .
But I have a lot of reservations .
My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem , and I don 't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard .
I think there is a serious problem : as you talk about this , people begin to think they don 't need to work so hard to cut emissions .
Another thing is , maybe we need a treaty .
A treaty that decides who gets to do this .
Right now we may think of a big , rich country like the U.S. doing this .
But it might well be that , in fact , if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable , they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this , and they may just decide they 'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world .
And we 'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision .
So here 's one last thought , which was said much , much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today .
And I think it really summarizes where we are here .
That the CO2 problem , the climate problem that we 've heard about , is driving lots of things -- innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions -- but also , I think , inevitably , it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control , whether we like it or not .
And it 's time to begin thinking about it , even if the reason we 're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn 't do it .
Thank you very much .
Nellie McKay : " Clonie "
Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay performs the semi-serious song " Clonie " -- about creating the ultimate companion .
But anyway , this is about the evils of science , so I think it 's perfect .
My oh my , walking by , who 's the apple of my eye ? Why , it 's my very own Clonie . Oh , if I should stroll the hood , who knew I could look so good just talking on the phone to Clonie . We are pals , it 's cool , ' cause we 're not lonely , shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie . Me and you , hustling through , holding on through thick and thin , just day by day , our DNA , so the Olson twins got nothing on us . We 'll survive , side by side . Mother Nature , don 't you call her phony , she 's my Clonie . Was wealthy , but not healthy , had no one to dwell with me , so look who I got born -- Clonie . Far from broke , bored , rich folk , we don 't need no natural yolk -- our babies come full-formed , Clonie . We 'll be huggable , get a publicist and show them , be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem . Oh my friend , multiply , we 're a franchise , like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter . We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector . We 'll survive side by side , should have signed with Verve instead of Sony . You 're my Clonie . " Oh Clonie , how I love you . "
" Ha , I 'm the only person I ever loved . "
Gee , that 's swell . I guess you 're just my fatal attraction-ie . You 're my Clonie . Thank you .
Dan Dennett : Cute , sexy , sweet , funny
Why are babies cute ? Why is cake sweet ? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn 't expect , as he shares evolution 's counterintuitive reasoning on cute , sweet and sexy things .
I 'm going around the world giving talks about Darwin , and usually what I 'm talking about is Darwin 's strange inversion of reasoning .
Now that title , that phrase , comes from a critic , an early critic , and this is a passage that I just love , and would like to read for you .
" In the theory with which we have to deal , Absolute Ignorance is the artificer ; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system , that , in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine , it is not requisite to know how to make it .
This proposition will be found on careful examination to express , in condensed form , the essential purport of the Theory , and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin 's meaning ; who , by a strange inversion of reasoning , seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill . "
Exactly . Exactly . And it is a strange inversion .
A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it : " Test Two : Do you know of any building that didn 't have a builder ? Yes / No .
Do you know of any painting that didn 't have a painter ? Yes / No .
Do you know of any car that didn 't have a maker ? Yes / No .
If you answered ' Yes ' for any of the above , give details . "
A-ha ! I mean , it really is a strange inversion of reasoning .
You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer .
But Darwin shows that it 's just false .
Today , though , I 'm going to talk about Darwin 's other strange inversion , which is equally puzzling at first , but in some ways just as important .
It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet .
Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy .
We adore babies because they 're so cute .
And , of course , we are amused by jokes because they are funny .
This is all backwards . It is . And Darwin shows us why .
Let 's start with sweet . Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector , because sugar is high energy , and it 's just been wired up to the preferer , to put it very crudely , and that 's why we like sugar .
Honey is sweet because we like it , not " we like it because honey is sweet . "
There 's nothing intrinsically sweet about honey .
If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind , you wouldn 't see why they tasted sweet .
You have to look in our brains to understand why they 're sweet .
So if you think first there was sweetness , and then we evolved to like sweetness , you 've got it backwards ; that 's just wrong . It 's the other way round .
Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved .
And there 's nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies .
And it 's a good thing that there isn 't , because if there were , then Mother Nature would have a problem : How on earth do you get chimps to mate ?
Now you might think , ah , there 's a solution : hallucinations .
That would be one way of doing it , but there 's a quicker way .
Just wire the chimps up to love that look , and apparently they do .
That 's all there is to it .
Over six million years , we and the chimps evolved our different ways .
We became bald-bodied , oddly enough ; for one reason or another , they didn 't .
If we hadn 't , then probably this would be the height of sexiness .
Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food .
It wasn 't designed for chocolate cake .
Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus .
The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen , who did his famous experiments with gulls , where he found that that orange spot on the gull 's beak -- if he made a bigger , oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder .
It was a hyperstimulus for them , and they loved it .
What we see with , say , chocolate cake is it 's a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring .
And there are lots of supernormal stimuli ; chocolate cake is one .
There 's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness .
And there 's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness . Here 's a pretty good example .
It 's important that we love babies , and that we not be put off by , say , messy diapers .
So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing , and they do .
And , by the way , a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby .
So nature works on many levels here .
But now , if babies didn 't look the way they do -- if babies looked like this , that 's what we would find adorable , that 's what we would find -- we would think , oh my goodness , do I ever want to hug that .
This is the strange inversion .
Well now , finally what about funny . My answer is , it 's the same story , the same story .
This is the hard one , the one that isn 't obvious . That 's why I leave it to the end .
And I won 't be able to say too much about it .
But you have to think evolutionarily , you have to think , what hard job that has to be done -- it 's dirty work , somebody 's got to do it -- is so important to give us such a powerful , inbuilt reward for it when we succeed .
Now , I think we 've found the answer -- I and a few of my colleagues .
It 's a neural system that 's wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job .
Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging .
Now I 'm not going to have time to spell it all out , but I 'll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward .
And what we 're doing is we 're using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off , by turning the knob on a joke -- now it 's not funny ... oh , now it 's funnier ...
now we 'll turn a little bit more ... now it 's not funny -- in this way , we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain , the functional architecture of the brain .
Matthew Hurley is the first author of this . We call it the Hurley Model .
He 's a computer scientist , Reginald Adams a psychologist , and there I am , and we 're putting this together into a book .
Thank you very much .
Freeman Dyson : Let 's look for life in the outer solar system
Physicist Freeman Dyson suggests that we start looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and out past Neptune , in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud . He talks about what such life would be like -- and how we might find it .
How will we be remembered in 200 years ?
I happen to live in a little town , Princeton , in New Jersey , which every year celebrates the great event in Princeton history : the Battle of Princeton , which was , in fact , a very important battle .
It was the first battle that George Washington won , in fact , and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence .
It happened 225 years ago .
It was actually a terrible disaster for Princeton .
The town was burned down ; it was in the middle of winter , and it was a very , very severe winter .
And about a quarter of all the people in Princeton died that winter from hunger and cold , but nobody remembers that .
What they remember is , of course , the great triumph , that the Brits were beaten , and we won , and that the country was born .
And so I agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered .
It 's the child that 's remembered .
And that 's what we 're going through at this time .
I wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology , because I think I know very little about that -- I 'm not a biologist -- so everything I know about it can be said in one minute .
What I 'm saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry , that what really turned computers into a great success , in the world as a whole , is toys . As soon as computers became toys , when kids could come home and play with them , then the industry really took off . And that has to happen with biotech .
There 's a huge -- -- there 's a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists , who are dog breeders , pigeon breeders , orchid breeders , rose breeders , people who handle biology with their hands , and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things , beautiful creatures , plants , animals , pets . These people will be empowered with biotech , and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology .
That will blow away a lot of the opposition .
When people have this technology in their hands , you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit , grow your own -- grow your dog , grow your own cat .
Just buy the software , you design it . I won 't say anymore , you can take it on from there . It 's going to happen , and I think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural , becomes part of the human condition , something that everybody 's familiar with and everybody accepts .
So , let 's leave that aside .
I want to talk about something quite different , which is what I know about , and that is astronomy .
And I 'm interested in searching for life in the universe .
And it 's open to us to introduce a new way of doing that , and that 's what I 'll talk about for 10 minutes , or whatever the time remains .
The important fact is , that most of the real estate that 's accessible to us -- I 'm not talking about the stars , I 'm talking about the solar system , the stuff that 's within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes -- most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the Sun .
If you look at the solar system , as we know it today , it has a few planets close to the Sun . That 's where we live .
It has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the Earth out through -- to the orbit of Jupiter .
The asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate , but not very large . And it 's not very promising for life , since most of it consists of rock and metal , mostly rock .
It 's not only cold , but very dry .
So the asteroids we don 't have much hope for .
There stand some interesting places a little further out : the moons of Jupiter and Saturn .
Particularly , there 's a place called Europa , which is -- Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter , where we see a very level ice surface , which looks as if it 's floating on top of an ocean .
So , we believe that on Europa there is , in fact , a deep ocean .
And that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore .
Ocean -- probably the most likely place for life to originate , just as it originated on the Earth . So we would love to explore Europa , to go down through the ice , find out who is swimming around in the ocean , whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters -- whatever there may be that 's exciting --- or cephalopods .
But that 's hard to do . Unfortunately , the ice is thick .
We don 't know just how thick it is , probably miles thick , so it 's very expensive and very difficult to go down there -- send down your submarine or whatever it is -- and explore .
That 's something we don 't yet know how to do .
There are plans to do it , but it 's hard .
Go out a bit further , you 'll find that beyond the orbit of Neptune , way out , far from the Sun , that 's where the real estate really begins .
You 'll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which , in what we call the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud -- these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the Sun . Mostly , they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system , but they are biologically very interesting indeed , because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals , which are just the right ones for developing life .
So if life could be established out there , it would have all the essentials -- chemistry and sunlight -- everything that 's needed .
So , what I 'm proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life , rather than on Mars , although Mars is , of course , also a very promising and interesting place .
But we can look outside , very cheaply and in a simple fashion .
And that 's what I 'm going to talk about .
There is a -- imagine that life originated on Europa , and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years .
It 's quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface , just as it did on the Earth .
Staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years , finally came out onto the land . And then of course it had great -- much greater freedom , and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean .
And the step from the ocean to the land was not easy , but it happened .
Now , if life had originated on Europa in the ocean , it could also have moved out onto the surface .
There wouldn 't have been any air there -- it 's a vacuum .
It is out in the cold , but it still could have come .
You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice , growing on the surface .
What would they need in order to grow on the surface ?
They 'd need , first of all , to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin .
So they would have to have something like a reptilian skin .
But better -- what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight .
The sunlight in Jupiter , on the satellites of Jupiter , is 25 times fainter than it is here , since Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun .
So they would have to have -- these creatures , which I call sunflowers , which I imagine living on the surface of Europa , would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight , so they could keep themselves warm on the surface .
Otherwise , they would be at a temperature of minus 150 , which is certainly not favorable for developing life , at least of the kind we know .
But if they just simply could grow , like leaves , little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight , then they could keep warm on the surface .
They could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean ; life then could flourish much more .
So , why not look ? Of course , it 's not very likely that there 's life on the surface of Europa .
None of these things is likely , but my , my philosophy is , look for what 's detectable , not for what 's probable .
There 's a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there . And I mean , the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole .
This was -- originally , when radio astronomy began , Mr. Jansky , at the Bell labs , detected radio waves coming from the sky .
And the regular astronomers were scornful about this .
They said , " It 's all right , you can detect radio waves from the Sun , but the Sun is the only object in the universe that 's close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable . You can easily calculate that radio waves from the Sun are fairly faint , and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away , so it certainly will not be detectable .
So there 's no point in looking . "
And that , of course , that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years .
Since there was nothing there , you might as well not look .
Well , of course , as soon as anybody did look , which was after about 20 years , when radio astronomy really took off . Because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum , much brighter than the Sun .
So , the same thing could be true for this kind of life , which I 'm talking about , on cold objects : that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe , and it 's not been detected just because we haven 't taken the trouble to look .
So , the last thing I want to talk about is how to detect it .
There is something called pit lamping .
That 's the phrase which I learned from my son George , who is there in the audience .
You take -- that 's a Canadian expression .
If you happen to want to hunt animals at night , you take a miner 's lamp , which is a pit lamp .
You strap it onto your forehead , so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal . So , if you go out at night , you shine a flashlight , the animals are bright .
You see the red glow in their eyes , which is the reflection of the flashlight .
And then , if you 're one of these unsporting characters , you shoot the animals and take them home .
And of course , that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime , so in Canada that 's illegal . In New Zealand , it 's legal , because the New Zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits , because the rabbits compete with the sheep in New Zealand .
So , the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps , and shine the headlights , and anything that doesn 't look like a sheep , you shoot .
So I have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe .
That if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces -- either on Europa , or further out , anywhere where you can live on a cold surface -- those creatures must be provided with reflectors .
In order to concentrate sunlight , they have to have lenses and mirrors -- in order to keep themselves warm .
And then , when you shine sunlight at them , the sunlight will be reflected back , just as it is in the eyes of an animal .
So these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings .
And the further out you go in this , away from the Sun , the more powerful this reflection will be . So actually , this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away , because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background .
So as you go further away from the Sun , this becomes more and more powerful .
So , in fact , you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth .
Why aren 't we doing it ? Simply because nobody thought of it yet .
But I hope that we shall look , and with any -- we probably won 't find anything , none of these speculations may have any basis in fact .
But still , it 's a good chance . And of course , if it happens , it will transform our view of life altogether .
Because it means that -- the way life can live out there , it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet .
It 's extremely hard to move from one planet to another .
We 're having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck .
Especially if you breathe air , it 's very hard to get from planet A to planet B , because there 's no air in between . But if you breathe air -- -- you 're dead -- -- as soon as you 're off the planet , unless you have a spaceship .
But if you live in a vacuum , if you live on the surface of one of these objects , say , in the Kuiper Belt , this -- an object like Pluto , or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of Pluto , and you happened -- if you 're living on the surface there , and you get knocked off the surface by a collision , then it doesn 't change anything all that much .
You still are on a piece of ice , you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you 're traveling from one place to another .
And then if you run into another object , you can stay there and colonize the other object . So life will spread , then , from one object to another . So if it exists at all in the Kuiper Belt , it 's likely to be very widespread . And you will have then a great competition amongst species -- Darwinian evolution -- so there 'll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision . And there 'll be advantages for spreading out long , sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation .
I call these creatures sunflowers .
They look like , maybe like sunflowers .
They have to be all the time pointing toward the Sun , and they will be able to spread out in space , because gravity on these objects is weak .
So they can collect sunlight from a big area .
So they will , in fact , be quite easy for us to detect .
So , I hope in the next 10 years , we 'll find these creatures , and then , of course , our whole view of life in the universe will change .
If we don 't find them , then we can create them ourselves .
That 's another wonderful opportunity that 's opening .
We can -- as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering , one of the things you can do with your take-it-home , do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit -- -- is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite , a place like Europa , so we could colonize Europa with our own creatures .
That would be a fun thing to do .
In the long run , of course , it would also make it possible for us to move out there .
What 's going to happen in the end , it 's not going to be just humans colonizing space , it 's going to be life moving out from the Earth , moving it into its kingdom . And the kingdom of life , of course , is going to be the universe . And if life is already there , it makes it much more exciting , in the short run .
But in the long run , if there 's no life there , we create it ourselves .
We transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today .
So again , we have a big and wonderful future to look forward .
Thank you .
Seyi Oyesola : A hospital tour in Nigeria
Dr. Seyi Oyesola takes a searing look at health care in underdeveloped countries . His photo tour of a Nigerian teaching hospital -- all low-tech hacks and donated supplies -- drives home the challenge of doing basic health care there .
Just to put everything in context , and to kind of give you a background to where I 'm coming from , so that a lot of the things I 'm going to say , and the things I 'm going to do -- or things I 'm going to tell you I 've done -- you will understand exactly why and how I got motivated to be where I am .
I graduated high school in Cleveland , Ohio , 1975 .
And just like my parents did when they finished studying abroad , we went back home .
Finished university education , got a medical degree , 1986 .
And by the time I was an intern house officer , I could barely afford to maintain my mother 's 13-year-old car -- and I was a paid doctor .
This brings us to why a lot of us , who are professionals , are now , as they say , in diaspora .
Now , are we going to make that a permanent thing , where we all get trained , and we leave , and we don 't go back ?
Perhaps not , I should certainly hope not -- because that is not my vision .
All right , for good measure , that 's where Nigeria is on the African map , and just there is the Delta region that I 'm sure everybody 's heard of .
People getting kidnapped , where the oil comes from , the oil that sometimes I think has driven us all crazy in Nigeria .
But , critical poverty : this slide is from a presentation I gave not that long ago . Gapminder.org tells the story of the gap between Africa and the rest of the world in terms of health care .
Very interesting .
How many people do you think are on that taxi ?
And believe it or not , that is a taxi in Nigeria .
And the capital -- well , what used to be the capital of Nigeria -- Lagos , that 's a taxi , and you have police on them .
So , tell me , how many policemen do you think are on this taxi ? And now ? Three .
So , when these kind of people -- and , believe me , it 's not just the police that use these taxis in Lagos . We all do . I 've been on one of these , and I didn 't have a helmet , either .
And it just reminds me of the thought of what happens when one of us on a taxi like this falls off , has an accident and needs a hospital .
Believe it or not , some of us do survive .
Some of us do survive malaria ; we do survive AIDS .
And like I tell my family , and my wife reminds me every time , " You 're risking your life , you know , every time you go to that country . "
And she 's right . Every time you go there , you know that if you actually need critical care -- critical care of any sort -- if you have an accident -- of which there are many , there are accidents everywhere -- where do they go ?
Where do they go when they need help for this kind of stuff ?
I 'm not saying instead of , I 'm saying as well as , AIDS , TB , malaria , typhoid -- the list goes on .
I 'm saying , where do they go when they 're like me ?
When I go back home -- and I do all kinds of things , I teach , I train -- but I catch one of these things , or I 'm chronically ill with one of those , where do they go ?
What 's the economic impact when one of them dies or becomes disabled ?
I think it 's quite significant . This is where they go .
These are not old pictures and these are not from some downtrodden -- this is a major hospital . In fact , it 's from a major teaching hospital in Nigeria .
Now that is less than a year old , in an operating room .
That 's sterilizing equipment in Nigeria .
You remember all that oil ?
Yes , I 'm sorry if it upsets some of you , but I think you need to see this . That 's the floor , OK ?
You can say some of this is education .
You can say it 's hygiene . I 'm not pleading poverty .
I 'm saying we need more than just , you know , vaccination , malaria , AIDS , because I want to be treated in a proper hospital if something happens to me out there .
In fact , when I start running around saying , " Hey , boys and girls , you 're cardiologists in the U.S. , can you come home with me and do a mission ? "
I want them to think , " Well there 's some hope . "
Now , have a look at that . That 's the anesthesiology machine .
And that 's my specialty , right ?
Anesthesiology and critical care -- look at that bag .
It 's been taped with tape that we even stopped using in the U.K.
And believe me , these are current pictures .
Now , if something like this , which has happened in the U.K. , that 's where they go . This is the intensive care unit in which I work .
All right , this is a slide from a talk I gave about intensive care units in Nigeria , and jokingly we refer to it as " Expensive Scare . "
Because it 's scary and it 's expensive , but we need to have it , OK ?
So , these are the problems .
There are no prizes for telling us what the problems are , are there ?
I think we all know . And several speakers before and speakers after me are going to tell us even more problems .
These are a few of them . So , what did I do ?
There we go -- we 're going on a mission .
We 're going to do some open-heart surgery . I was the only Brit , on a team of about nine American cardiac surgeons , cardiac nurse , intensive care nurse .
We all went out and did a mission and we 've done three of them so far .
Just so you know , I do believe in missions , I do believe in aid and I do believe in charity . They have their place , but where do they go for those things we talked about earlier ?
Because it 's not everyone that 's going to benefit from a mission .
Health is wealth , in the words of Hans Rosling .
You get wealthier faster if you are healthy first .
So , here we are , mission . Big trouble .
Open-heart surgery in Nigeria -- big trouble .
That 's Mike , Mike comes out from Mississippi .
Does he look like he 's happy ?
It took us two days just to organize the place , but hey , you know , we worked on it . Does he look happy ?
Yes , that 's the medical advice the committee chairman says , " Yes , I told you , you weren 't going to be able to , you can 't do this , I just know it . "
Look , that 's the technician we had . So yes , you go on , all right ?
I got him to come with me -- anesthesia tech -- come with me from the U.K.
Yes , let 's just go work this thing out .
See , that 's one of the problems we have in Nigeria and in Africa generally .
We get a lot of donated equipment .
Equipment that 's obsolete , equipment that doesn 't quite work , or it works and you can 't fix it . And there 's nothing wrong with that , so long as we use it and we move on .
But we had problems with it . We had severe problems there .
He had to get on the phone . This guy was always on the phone .
So what we going to do now ?
It looks like all these Americans are here and yes , one Brit , and he 's not going to do anything -- he thinks he 's British actually , and he 's actually Nigerian , I just thought about that .
We eventually got it working , is the truth , but it was one of these . Even older than the one you saw .
The reason I have this picture here , this X-ray , it 's just to tell you where and how we were viewing X-rays .
Do you figure where that is ? It was on a window .
I mean , what 's an X-ray viewing box ? Please .
Well , nowadays everything 's on PAX anyway .
You look at your X-rays on a screen and you do stuff with them , you email them . But we were still using X-rays , but we didn 't even have a viewing box !
And we were doing open-heart surgery .
OK , I know it 's not AIDS , I know it 's not malaria , but we still need this stuff . Oh yeah , echo -- this was just to get the children ready and the adults ready .
People still believe in Voodoo . Heart disease , VSD , hole in the heart , tetralogies .
You still get people who believe in it and they came .
At 67 percent oxygen saturation , the normal is about 97 .
Her condition , open-heart surgery that as she required , would have been treated when she was a child .
We had to do these for adults . So , we did succeed and we still do .
We 've done three . We 're planning another one in July in the north of the country . So , we certainly still do open-heart , but you can see the contrast between everything that was shipped in -- we ship everything , instruments . We had explosions because the kit was designed and installed by people who weren 't used to it .
The oxygen tanks didn 't quite work right .
But how many did we do the first one ? 12 .
We did 12 open-heart surgical patients successfully .
Here is our very first patient , out of intensive care , and just watch that chair , all right ?
This is what I mean about appropriate technology .
That 's what he was doing , propping up the bed because the bed simply didn 't work .
Have you seen one of those before ?
No ? Yes ? Doesn 't matter , it worked .
I 'm sure you 've all seen or heard this before : " We , the willing , have been doing so much with so little for so long -- -- we are now qualified to do anything with nothing . "
Thank you . Sustainable Solutions -- this was my first company .
This one 's sole aim is to provide the very things that I think are missing .
So , we put my hand in my pocket and say , " Guys , let 's just buy stuff .
Let 's go set up a company that teaches people , educates them , gives them the tools they need to keep going . "
And that 's a perfect example of one .
Usually when you buy a ventilator in a hospital , you buy a different one for children , you buy a different one for transport . This one will do everything , and it will do it at half the price and doesn 't need compressed air .
If you 're in America and you don 't know about this one , we do , because we make it our duty to find out what 's appropriate technology for Africa -- what 's appropriately priced , does the job , and we move on . Anesthesia machine : multi-parameter monitor , operating lights , suction .
This little unit here -- remember your little 12-volt plug in the car , that charges your , whatever , Game Boy , telephone ?
That 's exactly how the outlets are designed .
Yes , it will take a solar panel . Yes a solar panel will charge it .
And guess what ? We have a little pedal charger too , just in case .
And guess what , if it all fails , if you can find a car that 's still got a live battery and you stick it in , it will still work . Then you can customize it .
Is it dental surgery you want ? General surgery you want ?
Decide which instruments , stock it up with consumables .
And currently we 're working on oxygen -- oxygen delivery on-site .
The technology for oxygen delivery is not new .
Oxygen concentrators are very old technology . What is new , and what we will have in a few months , I hope , is that ability to use this same renewable energy system to provide and produce oxygen on site . Zeolite -- it 's not new -- zeolite removes nitrogen from air and nitrogen is 78 percent of air .
If you take nitrogen out , what 's left ? Oxygen , pretty much .
So that 's not new . What we 're doing is applying this technology to it .
These are the basic features of my device , or our device .
This is what makes it so special .
Apart from the awards it 's won , it 's portable and it 's certified . It 's registered , the MHRA -- and the CE mark , for those who don 't know , for Europe , is the equivalent of the FDA in the U.S.
If you compare it with what 's on the market , price-wise , size-wise , ease of use , complexity ...
This picture was taken last year .
These are members of my graduating class , 1986 .
It was in this gentleman 's house in the Potomac , for those of you who are familiar with Maryland .
There are too many of us outside and everybody , if the size of the text represents what gets the most attention , it 's the problems . But what we really need are African solutions that are appropriate for Africa -- looking at the culture , looking at the people , looking at how much money they 've got .
African people , because they will do it with a passion , I hope .
You have to do it . Africans have to do it , in conjunction with everyone else .
Thank you .
Dan Pallotta : The way we think about charity is dead wrong
Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta calls out the double standard that drives our broken relationship to charities . Too many nonprofits , he says , are rewarded for how little they spend -- not for what they get done . Instead of equating frugality with morality , he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments . In this bold talk , he says : Let 's change the way we think about changing the world .
I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship .
I happen to have triplets .
They 're little . They 're five years old .
Sometimes I tell people I have triplets .
They say , " Really ? How many ? "
Here 's a picture of the kids .
That 's Sage and Annalisa and Rider .
Now , I also happen to be gay .
Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative , socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done .
The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity .
I want to talk about how the things we 've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world .
But before I do that , I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world .
A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies , and social business will take care of the rest .
And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward .
But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky .
And social business needs markets , and there are some issues for which you just can 't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market .
I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled , and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love .
How do you monetize that ?
And that 's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in .
Philanthropy is the market for love .
It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming .
And so if we really want , like Buckminster Fuller said , a world that works for everyone , with no one and nothing left out , then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation .
But it doesn 't seem to be working .
Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer , or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city ?
Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years ?
And the answer is , these social problems are massive in scale , our organizations are tiny up against them , and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny .
We have two rulebooks .
We have one for the nonprofit sector and one for the rest of the economic world .
It 's an apartheid , and it discriminates against the [ nonprofit ] sector in five different areas , the first being compensation .
So in the for-profit sector , the more value you produce , the more money you can make .
But we don 't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service .
We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people .
Interesting that we don 't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people .
You know , you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids , go for it .
We 'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine .
But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria , and you 're considered a parasite yourself .
And we think of this as our system of ethics , but what we don 't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect , which is , it gives a really stark , mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities , and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they 're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice .
Businessweek did a survey , looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years of business school , and the median compensation for a Stanford MBA , with bonus , at the age of 38 , was 400,000 dollars .
Meanwhile , for the same year , the average salary for the CEO of a $ 5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S.
was 232,000 dollars , and for a hunger charity , 84,000 dollars .
Now , there 's no way you 're going to get a lot of people with $ 400,000 talent to make a $ 316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity .
Some people say , " Well , that 's just because those MBA types are greedy . "
Not necessarily . They might be smart .
It 's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity , save 50,000 dollars on their taxes , so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game , now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity , probably sit on the board of the hunger charity , indeed , probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity , and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them .
The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing .
So we tell the for-profit sector , " Spend , spend , spend on advertising until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value . "
But we don 't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity .
Our attitude is , " Well , look , if you can get the advertising donated , you know , at four o 'clock in the morning , I 'm okay with that .
But I don 't want my donations spent on advertising .
I want it go to the needy . "
As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy .
In the 1990s , my company created the long distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys and the 60-mile-long breast cancer three-day walks , and over the course of nine years , we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate , and they raised a total of 581 million dollars .
They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history , all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do .
People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply .
But they have to be asked .
We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times , in The Boston Globe , in primetime radio and TV advertising .
Do you know how many people we would have gotten if we put up flyers in the laundromat ?
Charitable giving has remained stuck , in the U.S. , at two percent of GDP ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s .
That 's an important fact , because it tells us that in 40 years , the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector .
And if you think about it , how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn 't really allowed to market ?
And if we tell the consumer brands , " You may advertise all the benefits of your product , " but we tell charities , " You cannot advertise all the good that you do , " where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow ?
The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue .
So Disney can make a new $ 200 million movie that flops , and nobody calls the attorney general .
But you do a little $ 1 million community fundraiser for the poor , and it doesn 't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months , and your character is called into question .
So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave , daring , giant-scale new fundraising endeavors for fear that if the thing fails , their reputations will be dragged through the mud .
Well , you and I know when you prohibit failure , you kill innovation .
If you kill innovation in fundraising , you can 't raise more revenue .
If you can 't raise more revenue , you can 't grow .
And if you can 't grow , you can 't possibly solve large social problems .
The fourth area is time .
So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors , and people had patience .
They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line of building market dominance .
But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years , no money was going to go to the needy , it was all going to be invested in building this scale , we would expect a crucifixion .
And the last area is profit itself .
So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas , but you can 't pay profits in a nonprofit sector , so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets , and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital .
Well , you put those five things together -- you can 't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector , you can 't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers , you can 't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes , you don 't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector , and you don 't have a stock market with which to fund any of this , even if you could do it in the first place , and you 've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level .
If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book , this statistic is sobering : From 1970 to 2009 , the number of nonprofits that really grew , that crossed the $ 50 million annual revenue barrier , is 144 .
In the same time , the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136 .
So we 're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale , and our organizations can 't generate any scale .
All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King .
So why do we think this way ?
Well , like most fanatical dogma in America , these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs .
The Puritans came here for religious reasons , or so they said , but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money .
They were pious people but they were also really aggressive capitalists , and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies compared to the other colonists .
But at the same time , the Puritans were Calvinists , so they were taught literally to hate themselves .
They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation .
Well , this created a real problem for these people , right ?
Here they 've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money .
Making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell .
What were they to do about this ?
Well , charity became their answer .
It became this economic sanctuary where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies at five cents on the dollar .
So of course , how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money ?
Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself , and in 400 years , nothing has intervened to say , " That 's counterproductive and that 's unfair . "
Now this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question , which is , " What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead ? "
There are a lot of problems with this question .
I 'm going to just focus on two .
First , it makes us think that overhead is a negative , that it is somehow not part of the cause .
But it absolutely is , especially if it 's being used for growth .
Now , this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second , much larger problem , which is , it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow in the interest of keeping overhead low .
So we 've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that , well , the less money you spend on fundraising , the more money there is available for the cause .
Well , that 's true if it 's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger .
But if it 's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger , then we have it precisely backwards , and we should be investing more money , not less , in fundraising , because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply .
I 'll give you two examples . We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital .
Within nine years , we had multiplied that 1,982 times into 108 million dollars after all expenses for AIDS services .
We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital .
Within just five years , we had multiplied that 554 times into 194 million dollars after all expenses for breast cancer research .
Now , if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer , what would make more sense : go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research , or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research ?
2002 was our most successful year ever .
We netted for breast cancer alone , that year alone , 71 million dollars after all expenses .
And then we went out of business , suddenly and traumatically .
Why ? Well , the short story is , our sponsor split on us .
They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future , other than this demonic label of overhead .
So on one day , all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs because they were labeled overhead .
Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own .
The overhead went up .
Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent , or 60 million dollars in one year .
This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality .
We 've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead , but we 're missing the most important piece of information , which is , what is the actual size of these pies ?
Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it 's tiny ?
What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did ?
Now which pie would we prefer , and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer ?
Here 's how all of this impacts the big picture .
I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States .
That 's about 300 billion dollars a year .
But only about 20 percent of that , or 60 billion dollars , goes to health and human services causes .
The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems .
But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP up just one step to three percent of GDP , by investing in that growth , that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions , and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities , because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth , that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector .
Now we 're talking scale .
Now we 're talking the potential for real change .
But it 's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low .
Our generation does not want its epitaph to read , " We kept charity overhead low . "
We want it to read that we changed the world , and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things .
So the next time you 're looking at a charity , don 't ask about the rate of their overhead .
Ask about the scale of their dreams , their Apple- , Google- , Amazon-scale dreams , how they measure their progress toward those dreams , and what resources they need to make them come true regardless of what the overhead is .
Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved ?
If we can have that kind of generosity , a generosity of thought , then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change .
And if that can be our generation 's enduring legacy , that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us , that we revisited it , we revised it , and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things , forever , for everyone , well , I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be .
Annalisa Smith-Pallotta : That would be -- Sage Smith-Pallotta : -- a real social -- Rider Smith-Pallotta : -- innovation .
Dan Pallotta : Thank you very much . Thank you .
Thank you .
Jamil Abu-Wardeh : The Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour
Jamil Abu-Wardeh jump-started the comedy scene in the Arab world by founding the Axis of Evil Middle East Comedy Tour , which brings standup comedians to laughing audiences all over the region . He 's found that , by respecting the " three B 's " , the Axis of Evil comics find plenty of cross-border laughs .
This talk is about righting writing wrongs .
No , the sound 's not faulty -- righting writing wrongs .
The Middle East is huge , and with all our problems , one thing 's for sure : we love to laugh .
I think humor is a great way to celebrate our differences .
We need to take our responsibilities seriously , but not ourselves .
Don 't get me wrong : it 's not like we don 't have comedy in the Middle East .
I grew up at a time when iconic actors from Kuwait , Syria , Egypt used laughter to unite the region , just as football can .
Now is the time for us to laugh at ourselves , before others can laugh with us .
This is the story of the rise and rise of stand-up comedy in the Middle East -- a stand-up uprising , if you will .
Working in London as TV maker and writer , I quickly realized that comedy connects audiences .
Now , the best breeding ground for good comic writing is the stand-up comedy circuit , where they just happen to say that you kill when you do well and you bomb when you do badly .
An unfortunate connection for us maybe , but it reminds me that we 'd like to thank one man for , over the past decade , working tirelessly to support comedians all around the world , specifically comedians with a Middle Eastern background .
Like my good friends , Dean and Maysoon , at the bottom of the screen , who , two years after 9 / 11 , started a festival to change the way Middle Easterners are perceived in the world .
It 's still going strong , with positive press to die for .
Also , three guys working for years in Los Angeles , an Iranian , a Palestinian and an Egyptian , created the aptly named Axis of Evil comedy act .
And wherever they went , they killed .
Now , I didn 't start this fire , but I did pour petrol on it .
I moved to Dubai as the head of original content for a Western TV network .
My job was to connect the brand with a Middle Eastern audience .
Now , the American head of programming wanted new local Arabic comedy .
In a thick Arabic accent , my brain went , " Berfect . "
Now , I had friends in the U.S.
who had started a successful new tribe .
And I had every intention of taking this tribe from being outliers in the Middle East and pushing them over the tipping point towards success .
Now , as with any new idea , it wasn 't easy .
I had four phases to this plan .
First , we 'd need to buy content from the West and air it .
Then I 'd bring my friends , and we 'd show local amateurs how it 's done .
We would film that and air it , and then I could work with the local amateurs and write new comedy .
I excitedly presented this to the big boss , and his reaction was , " Um , I don 't get it . "
So I retreated back to my cave and continued to support and produce comedy and let my friends use my couch as a regional operations hub .
Now , fast forward two years , to early 2007 .
The earth rotated , as did our management , and as if by divine intervention , things came together to help this revolution take shape .
Here 's how the dots connected .
First , the Axis guys recorded a Comedy Central special that aired in the States , and it was getting great hits on YouTube .
Our new French CEO believed in the power of positive PR ...
and ideas du bon marche .
Let 's just say " value for money . "
I produced in Dubai a show for Ahmed Ahmed to showcase his new Axis special to a packed room .
I invited our new CEO , and as soon as he realized we had a room packed full of laughing infidels , his reaction was very simple : " Let 's make this happen .
And one more thing : No , don 't F it up . "
So I quickly went to work with a great team around me .
I happened to find a funny guy to present it in Arabic , who is originally Korean , a perfect fit for the Axis of Evil .
This is all true .
Now , while preparing for the tour , I had to remind the guys to be culturally sensitive .
I used the three Bs of stand-up don 'ts as I call them in the Middle East : blue content , keep it clean ; beliefs , not religion ; and the third B , bolitics .
Stay away from bolitics in the Middle East .
Oh course , you might think , what 's left without bolitics , sex and religion , how can you make people laugh ?
I 'd say , watch any successful well-written , family-friendly sitcom in the West for your answers .
Now , were the Axis successful ?
In five countries , in just under a month , we had thousands of fanatical fans come and see them live .
We had millions see them on TV and on TV news .
In Jordan , we had His Majesty the King come and see them .
In fact , they were so successful that you could buy a pirated copy of their DVD , even before it was released in the Middle East .
Anywhere you go .
So everywhere we went , we auditioned amateurs .
We filmed that process and aired a documentary .
I called it " Three Guys and Wonho . "
It really is his name .
And all this TV and Internet exposure has led to a great many recruits to our cause .
In Dubai this year , we 've just had the first all-women 's , homegrown stand-up show .
And notice two of them are wearing headscarves , and yes , even they can laugh .
Dubai , to me , is like a hand that supports anyone who wants to make things happen .
20 years ago , no one had heard of it .
Look at it now .
With an inspirational leader , I think this year , the opening of the tallest tower in the world is like adding a finger to that hand , that points at all those who spread fallacious stories about us .
Now , in three short years , we 've come a long way with stand-up comedy shows happening even in Saudi Arabia .
These comics are now going to the New York festival .
And the Lebanese , brilliant Lebanese , Nemr Abou Nassar , we featured in our first tour , has just been performing in L.A. ' s legendary comedy clubs .
So clearly , from the inside , we are doing our best to change our image , and it 's exploding .
So , as for the outsiders looking in , watch the CNN report on the second Amman Comedy Festival .
The reporter did a great job , and I thank her , but somebody forgot to send the positive PR email to the person operating the automatic news ticker that appears at the bottom .
For example , when Dean talks , the ticker says , " U.S. : Suspect gave ' actionable intel . "
Well , if you 're used to listening to comedians , then I 'm not surprised .
Sadly , this leads me to another three Bs that represents how the media in the West talks about us as bombers , billionaires and belly dancers .
Enough .
We 're not all angry fanatics who want to kill the infidel .
We have a positive story to tell and image to sell .
In fact , one thing 's for sure , in my experience , we love to laugh like hell .
Here are three questions that I like to use to test the truthiness of our representation in any media story .
One : Is the Middle East being shown in a current time and correct context ?
Two : Do the Middle Eastern characters laugh or smile without showing the whites of their eyes ?
Three : Is the Middle Eastern character being played by one ?
Clearly , there are wrongs that need to be righted .
We 've started in our region .
My challenge to the rest of the world is please , start using positive Middle Eastern images in your stories .
For inspiration , go to one of our festivals , go online , drop us a line .
Let 's change the narrative together and let 's start righting writing wrongs .
I 'd like to end , before going back to the Middle East , with a quote from one of the greatest Sheikhs to put quill to parchment .
As my father likes to call him , " Asheikh Azubare ; " as my mother would say , " Shakespeare . "
" And now we go in content to liberty and not to banishment . "
Thank you .
Saki Mafundikwa : Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets
From simple alphabets to secret symbolic languages , graphic designer Saki Mafundikwa celebrates the many forms of written communication across the continent of Africa . He highlights the history and legacy that are embodied in written words and symbols , and urges African designers to draw on these graphic forms for fresh inspiration . It 's summed up in his favorite Ghanaian glyph , Sankofa , which means " return and get it " -- or " learn from the past . "
I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States , and Africa called me back .
And I founded my country 's first graphic design and new media college .
And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts .
The idea , the dream , was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated , the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage .
We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education .
And typography 's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence .
Here 's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme " Education is a right . "
Some logos designed by my students .
Africa has had a long tradition of writing , but this is not such a well-known fact , and I wrote the book " Afrikan Alphabets " to address that .
The different types of writing in Africa , first was proto-writing , as illustrated by Nsibidi , which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria .
So it 's a special-interest writing system .
The Akan of people of Ghana and [ Cote d 'Ivoire ] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago , and these are proverbs , historical sayings , objects , animals , plants , and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left .
It 's called Sankofa .
It means , " Return and get it . " Learn from the past .
This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world .
At the top is God , at the bottom is man , mankind , and on the left is the sun , on the right is the moon .
All the paths lead to and from God .
These secret societies of the Yoruba , Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria , Congo and Angola respectively , developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba , Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti .
In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo , in the Ituri society , the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree , and the women , who are also the praise singers , paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing -- a sort of a musical score , if you may .
In South Africa , Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors , and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces .
Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing , with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D.
and is used to write Amharic , which is spoken by over 24 million people .
King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25 .
Shü-mom is a writing system .
It 's a syllabary . It 's not exactly an alphabet .
And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years .
The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s .
It 's a syllabary and reads from left to right .
Next door , in Sierra Leone , the Mende also developed a syllabary , but theirs reads from right to left .
Africa has had a long tradition of design , a well-defined design sensibility , but the problem in Africa has been that , especially today , designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration .
The creative spirit in Africa , the creative tradition , is as potent as it has always been , if only designers could look within .
This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established : that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals .
Africans of antiquity created civilization , and their monuments , which still stand today , are a true testimony of their greatness .
Most probably , one of humanity 's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet , and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC , followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt , and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact .
That is , until 1998 , when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt , and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C. , centuries before Mesopotamia .
Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered , these inscriptions -- research is still going on , a few of them have been deciphered , but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity 's first alphabet .
Over here , you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far , starting with the letter A , " ālep , " at the top , and " bêt , " in the middle , and so forth .
It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop , Senegal 's Cheikh Anta Diop , whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery .
The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa , which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children .
It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside .
They 've been looking outward for a long time , yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp , right within them .
Thank you very much .
Mark Roth : Suspended animation is within our grasp
Mark Roth studies suspended animation : the art of shutting down life processes and then starting them up again . It 's wild stuff , but it 's not science fiction . Induced by careful use of an otherwise toxic gas , suspended animation can potentially help trauma and heart attack victims survive long enough to be treated .
I 'm going to talk to you today about my work on suspended animation .
Now , usually when I mention suspended animation , people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh .
But now , I 'm not talking about gorking people out to fly to Mars or even Pandora , as much fun as that may be .
I 'm talking about the concept of using suspended animation to help people out in trauma .
So what do I mean when I say " suspended animation " ?
It is the process by which animals de-animate , appear dead and then can wake up again without being harmed .
OK , so here is the sort of big idea : If you look out at nature , you find that as you tend to see suspended animation , you tend to see immortality .
And so , what I 'm going to tell you about is a way to tell a person who 's in trauma -- find a way to de-animate them a bit so they 're a little more immortal when they have that heart attack .
An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores .
These creatures are some of the most immortal life forms on our planet , and they tend to spend most of their time in suspended animation .
Bacterial spores are thought now by scientists to exist as individual cells that are alive , but in suspended animation for as long as 250 million years .
To suggest that this all , sort of , about little , tiny creatures , I want to bring it close to home .
In the immortal germ line of human beings -- that is , the eggs that sit in the ovaries -- they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman .
So then there 's also my favorite example of suspended animation .
This is Sea-Monkeys .
Those of you with children , you know about them .
You go to the pet store or the toy store , and you can buy these things .
You just open the bag , and you just dump them into the plastic aquarium , and in about a week or so , you 'll have little shrimps swimming around .
Well , I wasn 't so interested in the swimming .
I was interested in what was going on in the bag , the bag on the toy store shelf where those shrimp sat in suspended animation indefinitely .
So these ideas of suspended animation are not just about cells and weird , little organisms .
Occasionally , human beings are briefly de-animated , and the stories of people who are briefly de-animated that interest me the most are those having to do with the cold .
Ten years ago , there was a skier in Norway that was trapped in an icy waterfall , and she was there for two hours before they extracted her .
She was extremely cold , and she had no heartbeat -- for all intents and purposes she was dead , frozen .
Seven hours later , still without a heartbeat , they brought her back to life , and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her .
A couple of years later -- so I get really excited about these things -- about a couple of years later , there was a 13-month-old , she was from Canada .
Her father had gone out in the wintertime ; he was working night shift , and she followed him outside in nothing but a diaper .
And they found her hours later , frozen , lifeless , and they brought her back to life .
There was a 65-year-old woman in Duluth , Minnesota last year that was found frozen and without a pulse in her front yard one morning in the winter , and they brought her back to life .
The next day , she was doing so well , they wanted to run tests on her .
She got cranky and just went home .
So , these are miracles , right ?
These are truly miraculous things that happen .
Doctors have a saying that , in fact , " You 're not dead until you 're warm and dead . "
And it 's true . It 's true .
In the New England Journal of Medicine , there was a study published that showed that with appropriate rewarming , people who had suffered without a heartbeat for three hours could be brought back to life without any neurologic problems .
That 's over 50 percent .
So what I was trying to do is think of a way that we could study suspended animation to think about a way to reproduce , maybe , what happened to the skier .
Well , I have to tell you something very odd , and that is that being exposed to low oxygen does not always kill .
So , in this room , there 's 20 percent oxygen or so , and if we reduce the oxygen concentration , we will all be dead .
And , in fact , the animals we were working with in the lab -- these little garden worms , nematodes -- they were also dead when we exposed them to low oxygen .
And here 's the thing that should freak you out .
And that is that , when we lower the oxygen concentration further by 100 times , to 10 parts per million , they were not dead , they were in suspended animation , and we could bring them back to life without any harm .
And this precise oxygen concentration , 10 parts per million , that caused suspended animation , is conserved .
We can see it in a variety of different organisms .
One of the creatures we see it in is a fish .
And we can turn its heartbeat on and off by going in and out of suspended animation like you would a light switch .
So this was pretty shocking to me , that we could do this .
And so I was wondering , when we were trying to reproduce the work with the skier , that we noticed that , of course , she had no oxygen consumption , and so maybe she was in a similar state of suspended animation .
But , of course , she was also extremely cold .
So we wondered what would happen if we took our suspended animals and exposed them to the cold .
And so , what we found out was that , if you take animals that are animated like you and I , and you make them cold -- that is , these were the garden worms -- now they 're dead .
But if you have them in suspended animation , and move them into the cold , they 're all alive .
And there 's the very important thing there : If you want to survive the cold , you ought to be suspended . Right ?
It 's a really good thing .
And so , we were thinking about that , about this relationship between these things , and thinking about whether or not that 's what happened to the skier .
And so we wondered : Might there be some agent that is in us , something that we make ourselves , that we might be able to regulate our own metabolic flexibility in such a way as to be able to survive when we got extremely cold , and might otherwise pass away ?
I thought it might be interesting to sort of hunt for such things .
You know ?
I should mention briefly here that physiology textbooks that you can read about will tell you that this is a kind of heretical thing to suggest .
We have , from the time we are slapped on the butt until we take our last dying breath -- that 's when we 're newborn to when we 're dead -- we cannot reduce our metabolic rate below what 's called a standard , or basal metabolic rate .
But I knew that there were examples of creatures , also mammals , that do reduce their metabolic rate such as ground squirrels and bears , they reduce their metabolic rate in the wintertime when they hibernate .
So I wondered : Might we be able to find some agent or trigger that might induce such a state in us ?
And so , we went looking for such things .
And this was a period of time when we failed tremendously .
Ken Robinson is here . He talked about the glories of failure .
Well , we had a lot of them .
We tried many different chemicals and agents , and we failed over and over again .
So , one time , I was at home watching television on the couch while my wife was putting our child to bed , and I was watching a television show .
It was a television show -- it was a NOVA show on PBS -- about caves in New Mexico .
And this particular cave was Lechuguilla , and this cave is incredibly toxic to humans .
The researchers had to suit up just to enter it .
It 's filled with this toxic gas , hydrogen sulfide .
Now , hydrogen sulfide is curiously present in us .
We make it ourselves .
The highest concentration is in our brains .
Yet , it was used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I.
It 's an extraordinarily toxic thing .
In fact , in chemical accidents , hydrogen sulfide is known to -- if you breathe too much of it , you collapse to the ground , you appear dead , but if you were brought out into room air , you can be reanimated without harm , if they do that quickly .
So , I thought , " Wow , I have to get some of this . "
Now , it 's post-9 / 11 America , and when you go into the research institute , and you say , " Hi .
I 'd like to buy some concentrated , compressed gas cylinders of a lethal gas because I have these ideas , see , about wanting to suspend people .
It 's really going to be OK . "
So that 's kind of a tough day , but I said , " There really is some basis for thinking why you might want to do this . "
As I said , this agent is in us , and , in fact , here 's a curious thing , it binds to the very place inside of your cells where oxygen binds , and where you burn it , and that you do this burning to live .
And so we thought , like in a game of musical chairs , might we be able to give a person some hydrogen sulfide , and might it be able to occupy that place like in a game of musical chairs where oxygen might bind ?
And because you can 't bind the oxygen , maybe you wouldn 't consume it , and then maybe it would reduce your demand for oxygen .
I mean , who knows ?
So -- So , there 's the bit about the dopamine and being a little bit , what do you call it , delusional , and you might suggest that was it .
And so , we wanted to find out might we be able to use hydrogen sulfide in the presence of cold , and we wanted to see whether we could reproduce this skier in a mammal .
Now , mammals are warm-blooded creatures , and when we get cold , we shake and we shiver , right ?
We try to keep our core temperature at 37 degrees by actually burning more oxygen .
So , it was interesting for us when we applied hydrogen sulfide to a mouse when it was also cold because what happened is the core temperature of the mouse got cold .
It stopped moving .
It appeared dead .
Its oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold .
And here 's the really important point .
I told you hydrogen sulfide is in us .
It 's rapidly metabolized , and all you have to do after six hours of being in this state of de-animation is simply put the thing out in room air , and it warms up , and it 's none the worse for wear .
Now , this was cosmic .
Really . Because we had found a way to de-animate a mammal , and it didn 't hurt it .
Now , we 'd found a way to reduce its oxygen consumption to rock-bottom levels , and it was fine .
Now , in this state of de-animation , it could not go out dancing , but it was not dead , and it was not harmed .
So we started to think : Is this the agent that might have been present in the skier , and might have she had more of it than someone else , and might that have been able to reduce her demand for oxygen before she got so cold that she otherwise would have died , as we found out with our worm experiments ?
So , we wondered : Can we do anything useful with this capacity to control metabolic flexibility ?
And one of the things we wondered -- I 'm sure some of you out there are economists , and you know all about supply and demand .
And when supply is equal to demand , everything 's fine , but when supply falls , in this case of oxygen , and demand stays high , you 're dead .
So , what I just told you is we can now reduce demand .
We ought to be able to lower supply to unprecedented low levels without killing the animal .
And with money we got from DARPA , we could show just that .
If you give mice hydrogen sulfide , you can lower their demand for oxygen , and you can put them into oxygen concentrations that are as low as 5,000 feet above the top of Mt . Everest , and they can sit there for hours , and there 's no problem .
Well this was really cool .
We also found out that we could subject animals to otherwise lethal blood loss , and we could save them if we gave them hydrogen sulfide .
So these proof of concept experiments led me to say " I should found a company , and we should take this out to a wider playing field . "
I founded a company called Ikaria with others ' help .
And this company , the first thing it did was make a liquid formulation of hydrogen sulfide an injectable form that we could put in and send it out to physician scientists all over the world who work on models of critical care medicine , and the results are incredibly positive .
In one model of heart attack , animals given hydrogen sulfide showed a 70 percent reduction in heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I would receive if we were to have a heart attack here today .
Same is true for organ failure , when you have loss of function owing to poor perfusion of kidney , of liver , acute respiratory distress syndrome and damage suffered in cardiac-bypass surgery .
So , these are the thought leaders in trauma medicine all over the world saying this is true , so it seems that exposure to hydrogen sulfide decreases damage that you receive from being exposed to otherwise lethal-low oxygen .
And I should say that the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide required to get this benefit are low , incredibly low .
In fact , so low that physicians will not have to lower or dim the metabolism of people much at all to see the benefit I just mentioned , which is a wonderful thing , if you 're thinking about adopting this .
You don 't want to be gorking people out just to save them , it 's really confusing .
So , I want to say that we 're in human trials .
Now , and so -- Thank you . The Phase 1 safety studies are over , and we 're doing fine , we 're now moved on .
We have to get to Phase 2 and Phase 3 . It 's going to take us a few years .
This has all moved very quickly , and the mouse experiments of hibernating mice happened in 2005 ; the first human studies were done in 2008 , and we should know in a couple of years whether it works or not .
And this all happened really quickly because of a lot of help from a lot of people .
I want to mention that , first of all , my wife , without whom this talk and my work would not be possible , so thank you very much .
Also , the brilliant scientists who work at my lab and also others on staff , the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle , Washington -- wonderful place to work .
And also the wonderful scientists and businesspeople at Ikaria .
One thing those people did out there was take this technology of hydrogen sulfide , which is this start-up company that 's burning venture capital very quickly , and they fused it with another company that sells another toxic gas that 's more toxic than hydrogen sulfide , and they give it to newborn babies who would otherwise die from a failure to be able to oxygenate their tissues properly .
And this gas that is delivered in over a thousand critical care hospitals worldwide , now is approved , on label , and saves thousands of babies a year from certain death .
So it 's really incredible for me to be a part of this .
And I want to say that I think we 're on the path of understanding metabolic flexibility in a fundamental way , and that in the not too distant future , an EMT might give an injection of hydrogen sulfide , or some related compound , to a person suffering severe injuries , and that person might de-animate a bit , they might become a little more immortal .
Their metabolism will fall as though you were dimming a switch on a lamp at home .
And then , they will have the time , that will buy them the time , to be transported to the hospital to get the care they need .
And then , after they get that care -- like the mouse , like the skier , like the 65-year-old woman -- they 'll wake up .
A miracle ?
We hope not , or maybe we just hope to make miracles a little more common .
Thank you very much .
Rufus Griscom + Alisa Volkman : Let 's talk parenting taboos
Babble.com publishers Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman , in a lively tag-team , expose 4 facts that parents never , ever admit -- and why they should . Funny and honest , for parents and nonparents alike .
Alisa Volkman : So this is where our story begins -- the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son , Declan .
Obviously a really profound moment , and it changed our lives in many ways .
It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways , and those unexpected ways we later reflected on , that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us , and a year later , we launched Babble , a website for parents .
Rufus Griscom : Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier . AV : That 's true .
RG : You may remember , we fell head over heels in love .
AV : We did .
RG : We were at the time running a very different kind of website .
It was a website called Nerve.com , the tagline of which was " literate smut . "
It was in theory , and hopefully in practice , a smart online magazine about sex and culture .
AV : That spawned a dating site .
But you can understand the jokes that we get . Sex begets babies .
You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble , which we did .
And we might launch a geriatric site as our third . We 'll see .
RG : But for us , the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just the life stage thing , which is , of course , relevant , but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about .
It seems to us that when people start dissembling , people start lying about things , that 's when it gets really interesting .
That 's a subject that we want to dive into .
And we 've been surprised to find , as young parents , that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex .
AV : It 's true . So like we said , the early years were really wonderful , but they were also really difficult .
And we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting .
We subscribed to a lot of magazines , did our homework , but really everywhere you look around , we were surrounded by images like this .
And we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this .
The sun was always streaming in , and our children would never be crying .
I would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested , and in fact , it was not like that at all .
RG : When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at , with these beautiful images , and looked at the scene in our actual living room , it looked a little bit more like this .
These are our three sons .
And of course , they 're not always crying and screaming , but with three boys , there 's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should .
AV : Yes , you can see where the disconnect was happening for us .
We really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing , and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight .
We really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way .
RG : So today , what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos .
And of course , there are many more than four things you can 't say about parenting , but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally .
So the first , taboo number one : you can 't say you didn 't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute .
I remember vividly , sitting there in the hospital .
We were in the process of giving birth to our first child .
AV : We , or I ?
RG : I 'm sorry .
Misuse of the pronoun .
Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child -- -- and I was there with a catcher 's mitt .
And I was there with my arms open .
The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful , beautiful child , and I remember , as she was approaching me , the voices of friends saying , " The moment they put the baby in your hands , you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [ on ] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you 've ever experienced in your entire life . "
So I was bracing myself for the moment .
The baby was coming , and I was ready for this Mack truck of love to just knock me off my feet .
And instead , when the baby was placed in my hands , it was an extraordinary moment .
This picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over .
And you can see , our eyes were glistening .
I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife , with deep , deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child .
And it was also , of course , surreal .
I mean , I had to check the tags and make sure .
I was incredulous , " Are you sure this is our child ? "
And this was all quite remarkable .
But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection , but nothing like what I feel for him now , five years later .
And so we 've done something here that is heretical .
We have charted our love for our child over time .
This , as you know , is an act of heresy .
You 're not allowed to chart love .
The reason you 're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing .
You 're either in love , or you 're not in love .
You love , or you don 't love .
And I think the reality is that love is a process , and I think the problem with thinking of love as something that 's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent , or inadequate , or what have you .
And I think I 'm speaking obviously here to the father 's experience .
But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months , maybe their first year , that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion .
AV : Well , I 'm glad Rufus is bringing this up , because you can notice where he dips in the first years where I think I was doing most of the work .
But we like to joke , in the first few months of all of our children 's lives , this is Uncle Rufus .
RG : I 'm a very affectionate uncle , very affectionate uncle .
AV : Yes , and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I 'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies .
So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus .
RG : Uh oh .
AV : I don 't want to embarrass him too much . But I am going to give him three seconds .
RG : That is not fair . This is a trick question . He 's not up there , is he ?
AV : Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here , and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him .
RG : The far left . AV : No !
RG : Cruel .
AV : Nothing more to be said .
I 'll move on to taboo number two .
You can 't talk about how lonely having a baby can be .
I enjoyed being pregnant . I loved it .
I felt incredibly connected to the community around me .
I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy , all around me , tracking it down till the actual due-date .
I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity .
That continued into the the hospital . It was really exhilarating .
I was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors .
It was a really wonderful experience , but when I got home , I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out , and I was really surprised by those feelings .
I did expect it to be difficult , have sleepless nights , constant feedings , but I did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness that I experienced , and I was really surprised that no one had talked to me , that I was going to be feeling this way .
And I called my sister whom I 'm very close to -- and had three children -- and I asked her , " Why didn 't you tell me I was going to be feeling this way , that I was going to have these -- feeling incredibly isolated ? "
And she said -- I 'll never forget -- " It 's just not something you want to say to a mother that 's having a baby for the first time . "
RG : And of course , we think it 's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time .
And that this , of course , one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents .
And it 's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world .
So Alisa 's experience is not isolated .
So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness .
Of those , 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five -- probably really zero to two .
In the process of preparing this , we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time , because here in the Western world , less than 50 percent of us live near our family members , which I think is part of why this is such a tough period .
So to take one example among many : in Southern India there 's a practice known as jholabhari , in which the pregnant woman , when she 's seven or eight months pregnant , moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies , give birth and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born .
And this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period .
AV : So taboo number three : you can 't talk about your miscarriage -- but today I 'll talk about mine .
So after we had Declan , we kind of recalibrated our expectations .
We thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against .
And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant , and I soon learned that we were having a boy , and then when I was five months , we learned that we had lost our child .
This is actually the last little image we have of him .
And it was obviously a very difficult time -- really painful .
As I was working through that mourning process , I was amazed that I didn 't want to see anybody .
I really wanted to crawl into a hole , and I didn 't really know how I was going to work my way back into my surrounding community .
And I realize , I think , the way I was feeling that way , is on a really deep gut level , I was feeling a lot of shame and embarrassed , frankly , that , in some respects , I had failed at delivering what I 'm genetically engineered to do .
And of course , it made me question , if I wasn 't able to have another child , what would that mean for my marriage , and just me as a woman .
So it was a very difficult time .
As I started working through it more , I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people .
I was really amazed by all the stories that started flooding in .
People I interacted with daily , worked with , was friends with , family members that I had known a long time , had never shared with me their own stories .
And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork , and I felt like I happened upon this secret society of women that I now was a part of , which was reassuring and also really concerning .
And I think , miscarriage is an invisible loss .
There 's not really a lot of community support around it .
There 's really no ceremony , rituals , or rites .
And I think , with a death , you have a funeral , you celebrate the life , and there 's a lot of community support , and it 's something women don 't have with miscarriage .
RG : Which is too bad because , of course , it 's a very common and very traumatic experience .
Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage , and I find this astounding .
In a survey , 74 percent of women said that miscarriage , they felt , was partly their fault , which is awful .
And astoundingly , 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse .
So taboo number four : you can 't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child .
The party line is that every single aspect of my life has just gotten dramatically better ever since I participated in the miracle that is childbirth and family .
I 'll never forget , I remember vividly to this day , our first son , Declan , was nine months old , and I was sitting there on the couch , and I was reading Daniel Gilbert 's wonderful book , " Stumbling on Happiness . "
And I got about two-thirds of the way through , and there was a chart on the right-hand side -- on the right-hand page -- that we 've labeled here " The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable for a New Parent . "
This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies .
Basically , there 's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction , which is closely aligned , we all know , with broader happiness , that doesn 't rise again until your first child goes to college .
So I 'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life , this chasm of happiness that we 're driving our proverbial convertible straight into .
We were despondent .
AV : So you can imagine , I mean again , the first few months were difficult , but we 'd come out of it , and were really shocked to see this study .
So we really wanted to take a deeper look at it in hopes that we would find a silver lining .
RG : And that 's when it 's great to be running a website for parents , because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies .
We said , something is wrong here .
There 's something missing from these studies .
It can 't possibly be that bad .
So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece , and she interviewed four scientists , and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert , and we did indeed find a silver lining .
So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life .
Average happiness is , of course , inadequate , because it doesn 't speak to the moment-by-moment experience , and so this is what we think it looks like when you layer in moment-to-moment experience .
And so we all remember as children , the tiniest little thing -- and we see it on the faces of our children -- the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation , and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair .
And it 's just extraordinary to watch , and we remember it ourselves .
And then , of course , as you get older , it 's almost like age is a form of lithium .
As you get older , you become more stable .
And part of what happens , I think , in your ' 20s and ' 30s , is you start to learn to hedge your happiness .
You start to realize that " Hey , I could go to this live music event and have an utterly transforming experience that will cover my entire body with goosebumps , but it 's more likely that I 'll feel claustrophobic and I won 't be able to get a beer .
So I 'm not going to go .
I 've got a good stereo at home . So , I 'm not going to go . "
So your average happiness goes up , but you lose those transcendent moments .
AV : Yeah , and then you have your first child , and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows -- the highs being the first steps , the first smile , your child reading to you for the first time -- the lows being , our house , any time from six to seven every night .
But you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way , which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying .
RG : And so in effect , we trade average happiness .
We trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments .
So where does that leave the two of us as a family with our three little boys in the thick of all this ?
There 's another factor in our case .
We have violated yet another taboo in our own lives , and this is a bonus taboo .
AV : A quick bonus taboo for you , that we should not be working together , especially with three children -- and we are .
RG : And we had reservations about this on the front end .
Everybody knows , you should absolutely not work with your spouse .
In fact , when we first went out to raise money to start Babble , the venture capitalists said , " We categorically don 't invest in companies founded by husbands and wives , because there 's an extra point of failure .
It 's a bad idea . Don 't do it . "
And we obviously went forward . We did .
We raised the money , and we 're thrilled that we did , because in this phase of one 's life , the incredibly scarce resource is time .
And if you 're really passionate about what you do every day -- which we are -- and you 're also passionate about your relationship , this is the only way we know how to do it .
And so the final question that we would ask is : can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards ?
It 's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy , but they 're sometimes pretty quick .
And so how about that average baseline of happiness ?
Can we move that up a little bit ?
AV : And we kind of feel that the happiness gap , which we talked about , is really the result of walking into parenting -- and really any long-term partnership for that matter -- with the wrong expectations .
And if you have the right expectations and expectation management , we feel like it 's going to be a pretty gratifying experience .
RG : And so this is what -- And we think that a lot of parents , when you get in there -- in our case anyway -- you pack your bags for a trip to Europe , and you 're really excited to go .
Get out of the airplane , it turns out you 're trekking in Nepal .
And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience , particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you 're getting in for and you 're psyched .
So the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty , but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences , that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit .
RG + AV : Thank you .
Steve Jurvetson : Model rocketry
Moneyman Steve Jurvetson takes TEDsters inside his awesome hobby -- launching model rockets – - by sharing some gorgeous photos , his infectious glee and just a whiff of danger .
By day , I 'm a venture capitalist . On weekends , I love rockets .
I love photography , I love rockets , and I 'm going to talk to you about a hobby that can scale and show you some photos that I 've taken over the years with kids like these ; kids that hopefully will grow up to love rocketry and eventually become maybe another Richard Branson or Diamandis .
My son designed a rocket that became stable , a golf ball rocket -- I thought it was quite an interesting experiment in the principles of rocket science -- and it flies straight as an arrow .
Baking soda and vinegar .
Night shots are beautiful , piercing the Big Dipper and the Milky Way .
Two stage rockets , rockets with video cameras on them , on-board computers logging their flights , rocket gliders that fly back to Earth .
I use RockSim to simulate flights before they go to see if they 'll break supersonic or not , and then fly them with on-board computers to verify their performance .
But to launch the really big stuff , you go to the middle of nowhere : Black Rock Desert , where dangerous things happen .
And the boys get bigger , and the rockets get bigger .
And they use motors that literally are used on cruise missile boosters .
They rumble the belly and leave even photographers in awe watching the spectacle .
These rockets use experimental motors like nitrous oxide .
They use solid propellant most frequently .
It 's a strange kind of love .
We have a RocketMavericks.com website with my photos if you want to learn more about this , participate , be a spectator .
Mavericks : we had to call it Rocket Mavericks .
This one was great : it went to 100,000 feet , but didn 't quite . Actually , it went 11 feet into the solid clay ; and it became a bunker-buster , drilling down into the clay . It had to be dug out .
Rockets often spiral out of control if you put too much propellant in them .
Here was a drag race .
At night you can see what happened in a second ; in daytime , we call them land sharks .
Sometimes they just explode before your eyes or come down supersonic .
To take this shot , I do what I often do , which is go way beyond the pads where none of the other spectators are .
And if we can run the video , I 'll show you what it took to get this DreamWorks shot .
Voices : Woohoo ! Yeah . Nice .
Steve Jurvetson : This is rare . Here 's where they realized the computer 's failed .
They 're yelling deploy . Voices : Oh shit .
SJ : This is when they realize everything on board 's gone haywire .
Voices : It 's going ballistic . Oh shit .
SJ : And I 'll just be quiet .
Voices : No .
Up , up , up .
SJ : And that 's me over there , taking photos the whole way .
Things often go wrong .
Some people watch this event because of a NASCAR-like fascination with things bumping and grinding . Burning the parachute as it fell -- that was last weekend .
This guy went up , went supersonic , ripped the fin can off -- yard sale in the sky -- and a burning metal hunk coming back .
These things would drop down from above all through the weekend of rocket launch after rocket launch after rocket launch .
It 's a cadence you can 't quite imagine .
And in many ways , I try to capture the mishaps ; it 's the challenge in photography when these things all take place in a fraction of a second .
Why do they do it ? It 's for things like this : Gene from Alabama drives out there with this rocket that he 's built with X-ray sensors , video cameras , festooned with electronics , and he succeeds getting to 100,000 feet , leaving the atmosphere , seeing a thin blue line of space .
It is this breathtaking image -- success , of course -- that motivates us and motivates kids to follow and understand rocket science : to understand the importance of physics and math and , in many ways , to sort of have that awe at exploration of the frontiers of the unknown .
Thank you .
Sebastian Wernicke : Lies , damned lies and statistics
In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis , Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks , to come up with a metric for creating " the optimum TEDTalk " based on user ratings . How do you rate it ? " Jaw-dropping " ? " Unconvincing " ? Or just plain " Funny " ?
If you go on the TED website , you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos , over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings .
And that 's a huge amount of data .
And it got me wondering : If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis , could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk ?
Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk ?
And also , could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with ?
To find this out , I looked at three things : I looked at the topic that you should choose , I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage .
Now , with the topic : There 's a whole range of topics you can choose , but you should choose wisely , because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk .
Now , to make this more concrete , let 's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks .
So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains , that 's a go .
Whereas , if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen , girls , aircraft -- actually , I would like to hear that talk , but statistics say it 's not so good .
Oh , well .
If you generalize this , the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with , both easily and deeply , such as happiness , our own body , food , emotions .
And the more technical topics , such as architecture , materials and , strangely enough , men , those are not good topics to talk about .
How should you deliver your talk ?
TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock , so they 're going to hate me for revealing this , because , actually , you should talk as long as they will let you .
Because the most favorite TEDTalks are , on average , over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones .
And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that 's beautiful , inspiring or funny .
Then , you should be brief . But other than that , talk until they drag you off the stage .
Now , while ...
While you 're pushing the clock , there 's a few rules to obey .
I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks .
I 'll give you three examples .
First of all , I must , as a speaker , provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you , instead of saying what I can 't have .
Secondly , it 's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times .
And finally , it 's okay for the speaker -- that 's the good news -- to fake intellectual capacity .
If I don 't understand something , I can just say , " etc . , etc . "
You 'll all stay with me .
It 's perfectly fine .
Now , let 's go to the visuals .
The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker .
And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers , you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average , make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker .
Slides are okay , though you might consider going for props .
And now the most important thing , that is the mood onstage .
Color plays a very important role .
Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website .
For example , fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color , much more than the average TEDTalk .
Ingenious TEDTalks , much more this green color , etc . , et .
Now , personally , I think I 'm not the first one who has done this analysis , but I 'll leave this to your good judgment .
So , now it 's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk .
Now , since this is TEDActive , and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something , I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you , but rather give you a tool to create your own .
And I call this tool the TEDPad .
And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected , highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk .
You only have to make one decision , and that is : Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks , about creativity , human genius ?
Or are you going to go with a black version , which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks , mostly about blogs , politics and stuff ?
So , download it and have fun with it .
Now I hope you enjoy the session .
I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks .
And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this , which I really want to see .
Freeman Hrabowski : 4 pillars of college success in science
At age 12 , Freeman Hrabowski marched with Martin Luther King . Now he 's president of the University of Maryland , Baltimore County , where he works to create an environment that helps under-represented students -- specifically African-American , Latino and low-income learners -- get degrees in math and science . He shares the four pillars of UMBC 's approach .
So I 'll be talking about the success of my campus , the University of Maryland , Baltimore County , UMBC , in educating students of all types , across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas .
What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder -- students of color , students underrepresented in selected areas .
And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students , Latino students , students from low-income backgrounds , to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering .
And so I begin with a story about my childhood .
We all are products of our childhood experiences .
It 's hard for me to believe that it 's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham , Alabama , a kid who loved getting A 's , a kid who loved math , who loved to read , a kid who would say to the teacher -- when the teacher said , " Here are 10 problems , " to the class , this little fat kid would say , " Give us 10 more . "
And the whole class would say , " Shut up , Freeman . "
And there was a designated kicker every day .
And so I was always asking this question : " Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn ? "
And amazingly , one week in church , when I really didn 't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems , I heard this man say this : " If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham , we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education . "
And I looked up and said , " Who is that man ? "
And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King .
And I said to my parents , " I 've got to go .
I want to go . I want to be a part of this . "
And they said , " Absolutely not . "
And we had a rough go of it .
And at that time , quite frankly , you really did not talk back to your parents .
And somehow I said , " You know , you guys are hypocrites .
You make me go to this . You make me listen .
The man wants me to go , and now you say no . "
And they thought about it all night .
And they came into my room the next morning .
They had not slept .
They had been literally crying and praying and thinking , " Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail ? "
And they decided to do it .
And when they came in to tell me , I was at first elated .
And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses , and I got really scared , I really did .
And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous , it doesn 't really mean that they 're that courageous .
It simply means that they believe it 's important to do it .
I wanted a better education .
I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books .
I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers , but the resources we needed .
And as a result of that experience , in the middle of the week , while I was there in jail , Dr. King came and said with our parents , " What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born . "
I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963 .
And so for them , when they hear about the Children 's Crusade in Birmingham , in many ways , if they see it on TV , it 's like our looking at the 1863 " Lincoln " movie : It 's history .
And the real question is , what lessons did we learn ?
Well amazingly , the most important for me was this : That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education .
They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions .
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead , the University of Maryland , Baltimore County , UMBC , was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King , in 1963 .
And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South , as you know , and , quite frankly , it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there .
And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend .
And it has been for 50 years an experiment .
The experiment is this : Is it possible to have institutions in our country , universities , where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience ?
Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this : We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences .
And so we began to work on that , for years in the ' 60s .
And we produced a number of people in law , all the way to the humanities .
We produced great artists . Beckett is our muse .
A lot of our students get into theater .
It 's great work .
The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face -- that students in the sciences and engineering , black students were not succeeding .
But when I looked at the data , what I found was that , quite frankly , students in general , large numbers were not making it .
And as a result of that , we decided to do something that would help , first of all , the group at the bottom , African-American students , and then Hispanic students .
And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff , philanthropists , said , " We 'd like to help . "
Robert Meyerhoff said , " Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys , if it 's not about basketball , is not positive ?
I 'd like to make a difference , to do something that 's positive . "
We married those ideas , and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program .
And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things .
And the question is this : How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D. ' s in science and engineering and M.D. / Ph.D. ' s ?
That 's a big deal . Give me a hand for that . That 's a big deal .
That 's a big deal . It really is .
You see , most people don 't realize that it 's not just minorities who don 't do well in science and engineering .
Quite frankly , you 're talking about Americans .
If you don 't know it , while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering , only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas , and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans .
And so , the real question is , what is the challenge ?
Well a part of it , of course , is K-12 .
We need to strengthen K-12 .
But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses .
Whether you know it or not , large numbers of students with high SAT 's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering , and they end up changing their majors .
And the number one reason , we find , quite frankly , is they did not do well in first year science courses .
In fact , we call first year science and engineering , typically around America , weed-out courses or barrier courses .
How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two ?
It 's an American challenge . Half of you in the room .
I know . I know . I know .
And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it .
We need to find ways of making it happen .
So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general ?
Number one : high expectations .
It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students -- their grades , the rigor of the course work , their test-taking skills , their attitude , the fire in their belly , the passion for the work , to make it .
And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position , very important .
But equally important , it takes an understanding that it 's hard work that makes the difference .
I don 't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are .
Smart simply means you 're ready to learn .
You 're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions .
I. I. Rabi , a Nobel laureate , said that when he was growing up in New York , all of his friends ' parents would ask them " What did you learn in school ? " at the end of a day .
And he said , in contrast , his Jewish mother would say , " Izzy , did you ask a good question today ? "
And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious .
And as a result of those high expectations , we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them , not simply to survive in science and engineering , but to become the very best , to excel .
Interestingly enough , an example : One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school , we said , " We need to have you retake the course , because you need a strong foundation if you 're going to move to the next level . "
Every foundation makes the difference in the next level .
He retook the course .
That young man went on to graduate from UMBC , to become the first black to get the M.D. / Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania .
He now works at Harvard .
Nice story . Give him a hand for that too .
Secondly , it 's not about test scores only .
Test scores are important , but they 're not the most important thing .
One young woman had great grades , but test scores were not as high .
But she had a factor that was very important .
She never missed a day of school , K-12 .
There was fire in that belly .
That young woman went on , and she is today with an M.D. / Ph.D. from Hopkins .
She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients .
Big hand for her . Big hand for her .
And so high expectations , very important .
Secondly , the idea of building community among the students .
You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat .
Students are not taught to work in groups .
And that 's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other , to build trust among them , to support each other , to learn how to ask good questions , but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity .
As you know , it 's one thing to earn an A yourself , it 's another thing to help someone else do well .
And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world .
So building community among those students , very important .
Third , the idea of , it takes researchers to produce researchers .
Whether you 're talking about artists producing artists or you 're talking about people getting into the social sciences , whatever the discipline -- and especially in science and engineering , as in art , for example -- you need scientists to pull the students into the work .
And so our students are working in labs regularly .
And one great example that you 'll appreciate : During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago , the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days , and all these students had refused to leave the lab .
They had food they had packed out .
They were in the lab working , and they saw the work , not as schoolwork , but as their lives .
They knew they were working on AIDS research .
They were looking at this amazing protein design .
And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work .
And he said , " It doesn 't get any better than that . "
And then finally , if you 've got the community and you 've got the high expectations and you 've got researchers producing researchers , you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students , even in the classroom .
I 'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying , " I 've got this young man in class , a young black guy , and he seems like he 's just not excited about the work .
He 's not taking notes . We need to talk to him . "
What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying , " Let me see how I can work with them .
Let me get the staff to help me out . "
It was that connecting .
That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D. / Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke .
Give him a big hand for that .
And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us , not only finally with evaluation , assessing what works .
And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses .
And so we redesigned chemistry , we redesigned physics .
But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences .
Because so many students are bored in class .
Do you know that ?
Many students , K-12 and in universities , don 't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk .
They need to be engaged .
And so we have done -- if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center , you 'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses , having an emphasis on collaboration , use of technology , using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus , and not giving students the theories , but having them struggle with those theories .
And it 's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland , more and more courses are being redesigned .
It 's called academic innovation .
And what does all of that mean ?
It means that now , not just in science and engineering , we now have programs in the arts , in the humanities , in the social sciences , in teacher education , even particularly for women in I.T.
If you don 't know it , there 's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000 .
And what I 'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students , telling young women , young minority students and students in general , you can do this work .
And most important , giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work .
Most important , if a student has a sense of self , it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world .
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham , I kept thinking , " I wonder what my future could be . "
I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries , where students are not there just to survive , where they love learning , where they enjoy being the best , where they will one day change the world .
Aristotle said , " Excellence is never an accident .
It is the result of high intention , sincere effort and intelligent execution .
It represents the wisest option among many alternatives . "
And then he said something that gives me goosebumps .
He said , " Choice , not chance , determines your destiny . "
Choice , not chance , determines your destiny , dreams and values .
Thank you all very much .
Thomas Thwaites : How I built a toaster -- from scratch
It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster . Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way , by attempting to build one from scratch : mining ore for steel , deriving plastic from oil ... it 's frankly amazing he got as far as he got . A parable of our interconnected society , for designers and consumers alike .
If we look around us , much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world .
But , of course , they don 't look like rocks and sludge now .
They look like TV cameras , monitors , annoying radio mics .
And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project , which became known as the Toaster Project .
And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams , and the situation is from " The Hitchhiker 's Guide to the Galaxy . "
And the situation it describes is the hero of the book -- he 's a 20th-century man -- finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people .
And he kind of assumes that , yes , he 'll become -- these villagers -- he 'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements , but , of course , realizes that without the rest of human society , he can barely make a sandwich , let alone a toaster .
But he didn 't have Wikipedia .
So I thought , okay , I 'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch .
And , working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer , I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find , took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that , inside this object , which I 'd bought for just 3.49 pounds , there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials .
I didn 't have the rest of my life to do this project .
I had maybe nine months .
So I thought , okay , I 'll start with five .
And these were steel , mica , plastic , copper and nickel .
So , starting with steel : how do you make steel ?
I went and knocked on the door of the Rio Tinto Chair of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines and said , " How do you make steel ? "
And Professor Cilliers was very kind and talked me through it .
And my vague rememberings from GCSE science -- well , steel comes from iron , so I phoned up an iron mine .
And said , " Hi , I 'm trying to make a toaster .
Can I come up and get some iron ? "
Unfortunately , when I got there -- emerges Ray .
He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster , and so wasn 't prepared to take me into the mines .
But after some nagging , I got him to do that .
Ray : It was Crease Limestone , and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice , warm , sunny atmosphere .
When you study geology , you can see what 's happened in the past , and there were terrific changes in the earth .
Thomas Thwaites : As you can see , they had the Christmas decorations up .
And of course , it wasn 't actually a working mine anymore , because , though Ray was a miner there , the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction , because , of course , it can 't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America , Australia , wherever .
But anyway , I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train , and then was faced with the problem : Okay , how do you make this rock into components for a toaster ?
So I went back to Professor Cilliers , and he said , " Go to the library . "
So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy -- completely useless for what I was trying to do .
Because , of course , they don 't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don 't have a smelting plant .
So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book .
This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West , at least .
And there you can see that woodcut is basically what I ended up doing .
But instead of a bellows , I had a leaf blower .
And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project , was , the smaller the scale you want to work on , the further back in time you have to go .
And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron .
I dragged out this stuff , and it wasn 't iron .
But luckily , I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves , and at 30 minutes at full power , and I was able to finish off the process .
So , my next -- The next thing I was trying to get was copper .
Again , this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world .
It 's not anymore , but I found a retired geology professor to take me down , and he said , " Okay , I 'll let you have some water from the mine . "
And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up , dissolving the minerals from the mine .
And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto , which is in Portugal .
As you can see , it 's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it .
So many such that it 's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic , toxic conditions .
But anyway , the water I dragged back from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was -- there was enough copper in it such that I could cast the pins of my metal electric plug .
So my next thing : I was off to Scotland to get mica .
And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity .
That 's me getting mica .
And the last material I 'm going to talk about today is plastic , and , of course , my toaster had to have a plastic case .
Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods .
And so plastic comes from oil , so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil .
BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now .
But even then they weren 't convinced and said , " Okay , we 'll phone you back " -- never did .
So I looked at other ways of making plastic .
And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants , but also from starches .
So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic .
And for a while that was looking really good .
I poured it into the mold , which you can see there , which I 've made from a tree trunk .
And it was looking good for a while , but I left it outside , because you had to leave it outside to dry , and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato .
So kind of out of desperation , I decided that I could think laterally .
And geologists have actually christened -- well , they 're debating whether to christen -- the age that we 're living in -- they 're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene , the age of Man .
And that 's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now .
So suddenly , it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945 .
And there 'd also be an extinction event -- like fossils would suddenly disappear .
And also , I thought that there would be synthetic polymers , plastics , embedded in the rock .
So I looked up a plastic -- so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock .
And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling .
And they 're at the sharp end of what 's called the WEEE , which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive .
And that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill .
But this is it .
So there 's a picture of my toaster .
That 's it without the case on .
And there it is on the shelves .
Thanks .
I 'm told you did plug it in once .
TT : Yeah , I did plug it in .
I don 't know if you could see , but I was never able to make insulation for the wires .
Kew Gardens were insistent that I couldn 't come and hack into their rubber tree .
So the wires were uninsulated .
So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires , homemade plug .
And for about five seconds , the toaster toasted , but then , unfortunately , the element kind of melted itself .
But I considered it a partial success , to be honest .
Thomas Thwaites . TT : Thanks .
Jane Chen : A warm embrace that saves lives
In the developing world , access to incubators is limited by cost and distance , and millions of premature babies die each year . TED Fellow Jane Chen shows an invention that could keep millions of these infants warm -- a design that 's safe , portable , low-cost and life-saving .
Please close your eyes , and open your hands .
Now imagine what you could place in your hands : an apple , maybe your wallet .
Now open your eyes .
What about a life ?
What you see here is a premature baby .
He looks like he 's resting peacefully , but in fact he 's struggling to stay alive because he can 't regulate his own body temperature .
This baby is so tiny he doesn 't have enough fat on his body to stay warm .
Sadly , 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world .
Four million of these babies die annually .
But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe , long-term health problems .
The reason is because in the first month of a baby 's life , its only job is to grow .
If it 's battling hypothermia , its organs can 't develop normally , resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes , to heart disease , to low I.Q.
Imagine : Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm .
That is the primary function of an incubator .
But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars .
So , you 're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries .
As a result , parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies ' bodies , or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here -- methods that are both ineffective and unsafe .
I 've seen this firsthand over and over again .
On one of my first trips to India , I met this young woman , Sevitha , who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby , Rani .
She took her baby to the nearest village clinic , and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator .
But that hospital was over four hours away , and Sevitha didn 't have the means to get there , so her baby died .
Inspired by this story , and dozens of other similar stories like this , my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution , something that could work without electricity , that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use , given that the majority of births still take place in the home .
We needed something that was portable , something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost , compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs .
So , this is what we came up with .
What you see here looks nothing like an incubator .
It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby .
You can open it up completely . It 's waterproof .
There 's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily .
But the magic is in this pouch of wax .
This is a phase-change material .
It 's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature , 37 degrees Celsius .
You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it 's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time , after which you simply reheat the pouch .
So , you then place it into this little pocket back here , and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby .
Looks simple , but we 've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors , moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities .
We plan to launch this product in India in 2010 , and the target price point will be 25 dollars , less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator .
Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies .
But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth .
This seems counterintuitive , but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced , population sizes also decrease , because parents don 't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die .
We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology : simple , localized , affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact .
In designing this we followed a few basic principles .
We really tried to understand the end user , in this case , people like Sevitha .
We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists .
And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem .
In doing this , I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses .
And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace .
James Lyne : Everyday cybercrime -- and what you can do about it
How do you pick up a malicious online virus , the kind of malware that snoops on your data and taps your bank account ? Often , it 's through simple things you do each day without thinking twice . James Lyne reminds us that it 's not only the NSA that 's watching us , but ever-more-sophisticated cybercriminals , who exploit both weak code and trusting human nature .
I 'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals ' latest and nastiest creations .
So basically , please don 't go and download any of the viruses that I show you .
Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like , and I thought I 'd give you a quick insight into my career so far .
It 's a pretty accurate description .
This is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like .
So today , computer viruses and trojans , designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars .
Some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power , utilities and infrastructure .
Let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today .
Right now , every second , eight new users are joining the Internet .
Today , we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses .
We will see 30,000 new infected websites .
And , just to kind of tear down a myth here , lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus , it 's because you went to a porn site .
Right ? Well , actually , statistically speaking , if you only visit porn sites , you 're safer .
People normally write that down , by the way .
Actually , about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected .
Today 's cybercriminal , what do they look like ?
Well , many of you have the image , don 't you , of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement , hacking away for notoriety .
But actually today , cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized .
In fact , they have product adverts .
You can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline .
Check out this one I found .
So you 're here for one reason , and that reason is because you need your business competitors , rivals , haters , or whatever the reason is , or who , they are to go down .
Well you , my friend , you 've came to the right place .
If you want your business competitors to go down , well , they can .
If you want your rivals to go offline , well , they will .
Not only that , we are providing a short-term-to-long-term DDOS service or scheduled attack , starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour .
James Lyne : Now , I did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website .
Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company .
Turns out that 's not cool .
But regardless , it 's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals .
For example , this testing platform , which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world .
For a small fee , they can upload it and make sure everything is good .
But it goes further .
Cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code .
This is the market leader in malware distribution , the Black Hole Exploit Pack , responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters .
It comes with technical installation guides , video setup routines , and get this , technical support .
You can email the cybercriminals and they 'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server .
So let me show you what malicious code looks like today .
What I 've got here is two systems , an attacker , which I 've made look all Matrix-y and scary , and a victim , which you might recognize from home or work .
Now normally , these would be on different sides of the planet or of the Internet , but I 've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting .
Now , there are many ways you can get infected .
You will have come in contact with some of them .
Maybe some of you have received an email that says something like , " Hi , I 'm a Nigerian banker , and I 'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because I like your face . "
Or funnycats.exe , which rumor has it was quite successful in China 's recent campaign against America .
Now there are many ways you can get infected .
I want to show you a couple of my favorites .
This is a little USB key .
Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business ?
Well , you could try looking really cute .
Awww .
Or , in my case , awkward and pathetic .
So imagine this scenario : I walk into one of your businesses , looking very awkward and pathetic , with a copy of my C.V.
which I 've covered in coffee , and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key and print me a new one .
So let 's have a look here on my victim computer .
What I 'm going to do is plug in the USB key .
After a couple of seconds , things start to happen on the computer on their own , usually a bad sign .
This would , of course , normally happen in a couple of seconds , really , really quickly , but I 've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring .
Malware is very boring otherwise .
So this is writing out the malicious code , and a few seconds later , on the left-hand side , you 'll see the attacker 's screen get some interesting new text .
Now if I place the mouse cursor over it , this is what we call a command prompt , and using this we can navigate around the computer .
We can access your documents , your data .
You can turn on the webcam .
That can be very embarrassing .
Or just to really prove a point , we can launch programs like my personal favorite , the Windows Calculator .
So isn 't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation ?
Let me show you how most malware is now distributed today .
What I 'm going to do is open up a website that I wrote .
It 's a terrible website . It 's got really awful graphics .
And it 's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website .
Many of you will have used something a bit like this before .
Unfortunately , when this was implemented , the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned .
So let 's imagine that our attacker , called Evil Hacker just for comedy value , inserts something a little nasty .
This is a script .
It 's code which will be interpreted on the webpage .
So I 'm going to submit this post , and then , on my victim computer , I 'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website , www.incrediblyhacked.com.
Notice that after a couple of seconds , I get redirected .
That website address at the top there , the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs , and up pops fake antivirus .
This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software , and it will go through and it will scan the system , have a look at what its popping up here .
It creates some very serious alerts .
Oh look , a child porn proxy server .
We really should clean that up .
What 's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data , but when the scan finishes , they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses , you have to register the product .
Now I liked it better when viruses were free .
People now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses , which I find utterly bizarre .
So anyway , let me change pace a little bit .
Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge , and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line , you 'll note here .
So I want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found -- and this is a rare treat in our job .
Now this was a cross-industry collaboration , people from Facebook , independent researchers , guys from Sophos .
So here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service , kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive , like many of you might use .
At the top , you 'll notice a section of source code .
What this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they 'd made that day , so a kind of cybercriminal billings report , if you will .
If you look closely , you 'll notice a series of what are Russian telephone numbers .
Now that 's obviously interesting , because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals .
Down below , highlighted in red , in the other section of source code , is this bit " leded : leded . "
That 's a username , kind of like you might have on Twitter .
So let 's take this a little further .
There are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded .
Lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference .
An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo , it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken .
In fact , I 've been spending a lot of time on Internet dating sites recently , obviously for research purposes , and I 've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken , which is kind of scary because you wouldn 't give out your home address to lots of strangers , but we 're happy to give away our GPS coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters .
And our cybercriminals had done the same thing .
So here 's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg .
We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool .
We used Google .
Using the email address , the telephone number and the GPS data , on the left you see an advert for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling , on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens .
One of these was more stereotypical for me .
A little more searching , and here 's our cybercriminal .
Imagine , these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely .
Imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room .
A bit more searching through the profile and there 's a photo of their office .
They were working on the third floor .
And you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image .
It turns out he 's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation .
But this is where our investigation starts to slow down .
The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well .
And herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now .
Our friends , our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things .
This is MobSoft , one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned , and an interesting thing about MobSoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert , and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier .
This woman was Maria , and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals .
And it 's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really , really insecure .
By the end of the investigation , where you can read the full 27-page report at that link , we had photos of the cybercriminals , even the office Christmas party when they were out on an outing .
That 's right , cybercriminals do have Christmas parties , as it turns out .
Now you 're probably wondering what happened to these guys .
Let me come back to that in just a minute .
I want to change pace to one last little demonstration , a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic , but is interesting in exposing how much information we 're all giving away , and it 's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience .
This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately .
Many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks .
You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry and connect to something like TEDAttendees .
But what you might not know is that you 're also beaming out a list of networks you 've previously connected to , even when you 're not using wireless actively .
So I ran a little scan .
I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals , who wouldn 't be so concerned by law , and here you can see my mobile device .
Okay ? So you can see a list of wireless networks .
TEDAttendees , HyattLB . Where do you think I 'm staying ?
My home network , PrettyFlyForAWifi , which I think is a great name .
Sophos _ Visitors , SANSEMEA , companies I work with .
Loganwifi , that 's in Boston . HiltonLondon .
CIASurveillanceVan .
We called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out , which is quite fun .
This is how geeks party .
So let 's make this a little bit more interesting .
Let 's talk about you .
Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks recently and used the wireless network .
Things get more interesting .
Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business , XYZ Employee network .
This isn 't an exact science , but it gets pretty accurate .
Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you 'd been to recently , absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe .
Two hundred and thirty-four of you , well , I know where you live .
Your wireless network name is so unique that I was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the Internet with no hacking or clever , clever tricks .
And I should mention as well that some of you do use your names , " James Lyne 's iPhone , " for example .
And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity .
So something for you to think about : As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices , as we play with these shiny new toys , how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security ?
Next time you install something , look at the settings and ask yourself , " Is this information that I want to share ?
Would someone be able to abuse it ? "
We also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool .
You see , technology 's changing at a staggering rate , and that 250,000 pieces of malware won 't stay the same for long .
There 's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy , they know how to use technology , fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers .
In the U.K. , a 60 percent reduction since 2003 , and there are similar statistics all over the world .
We also need to think about the legal issues in this area .
The cybercriminals I talked about , despite theft of millions of dollars , actually still haven 't been arrested , and at this point possibly never will .
Most laws are national in their implementation , despite cybercrime conventions , where the Internet is borderless and international by definition .
Countries do not agree , which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective .
But my biggest ask is this : You see , you 're going to leave here and you 're going to see some astonishing stories in the news .
You 're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying , scary things .
However , 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics .
So my ask is this : Go online , find these simple best practices , find out how to update and patch your computer .
Get a secure password .
Make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online .
Find these resources . Apply them .
The Internet is a fantastic resource for business , for political expression , for art and for learning .
Help me and the security community make life much , much more difficult for cybercriminals .
Thank you .
Raul Midon : " Peace on Earth "
Guitarist and singer Raul Midon plays " Everybody " and " Peace on Earth " during his 2007 set at TED .
Picture yourself in a world where there 's no one else , nobody anywhere . A moment ago , there were voices and faces to look upon , you can 't see them anywhere . Nothing more to say and no one left to say it to , anyway . Oh , listen to what I say . Everybody can be somebody and everybody is free to make a difference . Everybody can be somebody . Everybody is free to make a difference in this world . Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth . Children are everywhere . Now there is a reason for everyone 's time on Earth . Wondering why you should care , yeah . Nothing more to say and only love can see us through , anyway . Oh , listen what I say , yeah . Everybody can be somebody and everybody is free to make a difference . Everybody can be somebody . Everybody is free to make a difference . You don 't have to be a big celebrity to feel the power , the power in your soul , no . You don 't have to be a big star on MTV to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see . Everybody can be somebody . Everybody is free to make a difference in this world . You can make a little difference in this world . I can make a little difference in this world . She can make a little difference in this world . He can make a little difference in this world . You can , I can , she can , he can , we can make a little bit of difference in this world . Everybody gonna make a little little difference , yeah . Talking ' bout everybody gonna make a little difference . Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world , oh yeah . Thank you so much .
This is a song that came about because I think it 's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what 's going on , and the wars and so forth .
This song kind of came out of all of that .
And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record , which I still stand by , but this has got something else in it .
It 's called " Peace on Earth . "
There is no hope . There is no future . No faith in God to save the day . There is no reason , no understanding no sacred place to hide away . There is no earnest conversation . No words of wisdom from the wise . There is no reconciliation and no collective compromise . Peace on Earth , that 's what we want . Peace on Earth , that 's what we all say . Peace on Earth . Yet , there in the hallway lurks the ghost of war . He wants more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more . There is no darkness , no sunshine . There is no great society . There is no freedom without conviction . There is no freedom to be free . There is no heaven , no fire and brimstone . There is no brotherhood of man . There is no country , no one religion . There is no universal plan . Peace on Earth , that 's what we want . Peace on Earth , that 's what we all say . Peace on Earth . Yet , there in the hallway lurks the ghost of war . He wants more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more , and more . The answer is mutual-assured destruction , a balance of power , a weapon for everyone . Mutual-assured destruction bringing peace to everyone . Peace on Earth , that 's what we want . Peace on Earth , that 's what we all say . Peace on Earth . There in the hallway , peace on Earth . Peace on Earth . Peace on Earth .
Ryan Holladay : To hear this music you have to be there . Literally
The music industry has sometimes struggled to find its feet in the digital world . In this lovely talk , TED Fellow Ryan Holladay tells us why he is experimenting with what he describes as " location-aware music . " This programming and musical feat involves hundreds of geotagged segments of sounds that only play when a listener is physically nearby .
For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City , these shots might start to look familiar .
This is Central Park , one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America .
But to anyone who hasn 't visited , these images can 't really fully convey .
To really understand Central Park , you have to physically be there .
Well , the same is true of the music , which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park .
I 'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing -- That 's us there . That 's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we 've been developing over the last few years , this idea of location-aware music .
Now , my brother and I , we 're musicians and music producers .
We 've been working together since , well , since we were kids , really .
But recently , we 've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect , from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts .
But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space .
But before I go too much further into that , let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea .
My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation , The Gates , in Central Park .
Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks , and unlike work that 's exhibited in a more neutral space , like on the walls of a gallery or a museum , this was work that was really in dialogue with this place , and in a lot of ways , The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted 's incredible design .
This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time , and years later , my brother and I moved back to Washington , D.C. , and we started to ask the question , would it be possible , in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park , to compose music for a landscape ?
Which brought us to this .
On Memorial Day , we released " The National Mall , " a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device 's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington , D.C.
Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape , a musical score is actually unfolding around them .
So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park , but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener 's chosen trajectory .
So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album .
Let 's take a closer look .
Let 's look at one example here .
So using the app , as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument , you hear the sounds of instruments warming up , which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody .
This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins .
Keep walking , and a full choir joins in , until you finally reach the top of the hill and you 're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness , as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park .
But were you to walk in the opposite direction , this entire sequence happens in reverse .
And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park , the music would fade to silence , and the play button would disappear .
We 're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can 't travel to the United States , but would like to hear this record .
Well , unlike a normal album , we haven 't been able to accommodate this request .
When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version , we just can 't make that happen , and the reason is because this isn 't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record .
In this case , the app is the work itself , and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience .
Six months later , we did a location-aware album for Central Park , a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall , with music spanning from the Sheep 's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir .
Currently , my brother and I are working on projects all over the country , but last spring we started a project , here actually at Stanford 's Experimental Media Art Department , where we 're creating our largest location-aware album to date , one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast .
But what we 're doing , integrating GPS with music , is really just one idea .
But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that 's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age , that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model , but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music .
Thank you .
Marco Tempest : The electric rise and fall of Nikola Tesla
Combining projection mapping and a pop-up book , Marco Tempest tells the visually arresting story of Nikola Tesla -- called " the greatest geek who ever lived " -- from his triumphant invention of alternating current to his penniless last days .
As a magician , I 'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion .
And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater , which was popular in the early part of the 20th century .
It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage . Now , I won 't use mirrors , but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater .
So let the story begin .
On a dark and stormy night -- really ! -- it was the 10th of July , 1856 .
Lightning lit the sky , and a baby was born .
His name was Nikola , Nikola Tesla .
Now the baby grew into a very smart guy .
Let me show you .
Tesla , what is 236 multiplied by 501 ?
Nikola Tesla : The result is 118,236 .
Marco Tempest : Now Tesla 's brain worked in the most extraordinary way .
When a word was mentioned , an image of it instantly appeared in his mind .
Tree . Chair . Girl .
They were hallucinations , which vanished the moment he touched them .
Probably a form of synesthesia .
But it was something he later turned to his advantage .
Where other scientists would play in their laboratory , Tesla created his inventions in his mind .
NT : To my delight , I discovered I could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility .
MT : And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination , he would build them in his workshop .
NT : I needed no models , drawings or experiments .
I could picture them as real in my mind , and there I run it , test it and improve it .
Only then do I construct it .
MT : His great idea was alternating current .
But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe ?
To sell his idea , he became a showman .
NT : We are at the dawn of a new age , the age of electricity .
I have been able , through careful invention , to transmit , with the mere flick of a switch , electricity across the ether .
It is the magic of science .
Tesla has over 700 patents to his name : radio , wireless telegraphy , remote control , robotics .
He even photographed the bones of the human body .
But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream : harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls , and bringing light to the city .
But Tesla 's success didn 't last .
NT : I had bigger ideas .
Illuminating the city was only the beginning .
A world telegraphy center -- imagine news , messages , sounds , images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly .
MT : It 's a great idea ; it was a huge project . Expensive , too .
NT : They wouldn 't give me the money .
MT : Well , maybe you shouldn 't have told them it could be used to contact other planets .
NT : Yes , that was a big mistake .
MT : Tesla 's career as an inventor never recovered .
He became a recluse .
Dodged by death , he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria .
NT : Everything I did , I did for mankind , for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich , where products of intellect , science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life .
MT : Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January , 1943 .
His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade .
His legacy is with us still .
Tesla became the man who lit the world , but this was only the beginning .
Tesla 's insight was profound .
NT : Tell me , what will man do when the forests disappear , and the coal deposits are exhausted ?
MT : Tesla thought he had the answer .
We are still asking the question .
Thank you .
Michelle Obama : A plea for education
Speaking at a London girls ' school , Michelle Obama makes a passionate , personal case for each student to take education seriously . It is this new , brilliant generation , she says , that will close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be .
This is my first trip , my first foreign trip as a first lady .
Can you believe that ?
And while this is not my first visit to the U.K. , I have to say that I am glad that this is my first official visit .
The special relationship between the United States and the U.K.
is based not only on the relationship between governments , but the common language and the values that we share , and I 'm reminded of that by watching you all today .
During my visit I 've been especially honored to meet some of Britain 's most extraordinary women -- women who are paving the way for all of you .
And I 'm honored to meet you , the future leaders of Great Britain and this world .
And although the circumstances of our lives may seem very distant , with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America , and you , just getting through school , I want you to know that we have very much in common .
For nothing in my life 's path would have predicted that I 'd be standing here as the first African-American First Lady of the United States of America .
There is nothing in my story that would land me here .
I wasn 't raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of .
I was raised on the South Side of Chicago .
That 's the real part of Chicago .
And I was the product of a working-class community .
My father was a city worker all of his life , and my mother was a stay-at-home mom .
And she stayed at home to take care of me and my older brother .
Neither of them attended university .
My dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the prime of his life .
But even as it got harder for him to walk and get dressed in the morning -- I saw him struggle more and more -- my father never complained about his struggle .
He was grateful for what he had .
He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder .
And my brother and I were raised with all that you really need : love , strong values and a belief that with a good education and a whole lot of hard work , that there was nothing that we could not do .
I am an example of what 's possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by the people around them .
I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life : grandmothers , teachers , aunts , cousins , neighbors , who taught me about quiet strength and dignity .
And my mother , the most important role model in my life , who lives with us at the White House and helps to care for our two little daughters , Malia and Sasha .
She 's an active presence in their lives , as well as mine , and is instilling in them the same values that she taught me and my brother : things like compassion , and integrity , and confidence , and perseverance -- all of that wrapped up in an unconditional love that only a grandmother can give .
I was also fortunate enough to be cherished and encouraged by some strong male role models as well , including my father , my brother , uncles and grandfathers .
The men in my life taught me some important things , as well .
They taught me about what a respectful relationship should look like between men and women .
They taught me about what a strong marriage feels like : that it 's built on faith and commitment and an admiration for each other 's unique gifts .
They taught me about what it means to be a father and to raise a family .
And not only to invest in your own home but to reach out and help raise kids in the broader community .
And these were the same qualities that I looked for in my own husband , Barack Obama .
And when we first met , one of the things that I remember is that he took me out on a date .
And his date was to go with him to a community meeting .
I know , how romantic .
But when we met , Barack was a community organizer .
He worked , helping people to find jobs and to try to bring resources into struggling neighborhoods .
As he talked to the residents in that community center , he talked about two concepts .
He talked about " the world as it is " and " the world as it should be . "
And I talked about this throughout the entire campaign .
What he said , that all too often , is that we accept the distance between those two ideas .
And sometimes we settle for the world as it is , even when it doesn 't reflect our values and aspirations .
But Barack reminded us on that day , all of us in that room , that we all know what our world should look like .
We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like .
We all know .
And he urged the people in that meeting , in that community , to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas , to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be , one and the same .
And I think about that today because I am reminded and convinced that all of you in this school are very important parts of closing that gap .
You are the women who will build the world as it should be .
You 're going to write the next chapter in history .
Not just for yourselves , but for your generation and generations to come .
And that 's why getting a good education is so important .
That 's why all of this that you 're going through -- the ups and the downs , the teachers that you love and the teachers that you don 't -- why it 's so important .
Because communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women .
And that 's important to keep in mind .
Part of that health includes an outstanding education .
The difference between a struggling family and a healthy one is often the presence of an empowered woman or women at the center of that family .
The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is often the healthy respect between men and women who appreciate the contributions each other makes to society .
The difference between a languishing nation and one that will flourish is the recognition that we need equal access to education for both boys and girls .
And this school , named after the U.K. ' s first female doctor , and the surrounding buildings named for Mexican artist Frida Kahlo , Mary Seacole , the Jamaican nurse known as the " black Florence Nightingale , " and the English author , Emily Bronte , honor women who fought sexism , racism and ignorance , to pursue their passions to feed their own souls .
They allowed for no obstacles .
As the sign said back there , " without limitations . "
They knew no other way to live than to follow their dreams .
And having done so , these women moved many obstacles .
And they opened many new doors for millions of female doctors and nurses and artists and authors , all of whom have followed them .
And by getting a good education , you too can control your own destiny .
Please remember that .
If you want to know the reason why I 'm standing here , it 's because of education .
I never cut class . Sorry , I don 't know if anybody is cutting class .
I never did it .
I loved getting As .
I liked being smart .
I liked being on time . I liked getting my work done .
I thought being smart was cooler than anything in the world .
And you too , with these same values , can control your own destiny .
You too can pave the way .
You too can realize your dreams , and then your job is to reach back and to help someone just like you do the same thing .
History proves that it doesn 't matter whether you come from a council estate or a country estate .
Your success will be determined by your own fortitude , your own confidence , your own individual hard work .
That is true . That is the reality of the world that we live in .
You now have control over your own destiny .
And it won 't be easy -- that 's for sure .
But you have everything you need .
Everything you need to succeed , you already have , right here .
My husband works in this big office .
They call it the Oval Office .
In the White House , there 's the desk that he sits at -- it 's called the Resolute desk .
It was built by the timber of Her Majesty 's Ship Resolute and given by Queen Victoria .
It 's an enduring symbol of the friendship between our two nations .
And its name , Resolute , is a reminder of the strength of character that 's required not only to lead a country , but to live a life of purpose , as well .
And I hope in pursuing your dreams , you all remain resolute , that you go forward without limits , and that you use your talents -- because there are many ; we 've seen them ; it 's there -- that you use them to create the world as it should be .
Because we are counting on you .
We are counting on every single one of you to be the very best that you can be .
Because the world is big .
And it 's full of challenges .
And we need strong , smart , confident young women to stand up and take the reins .
We know you can do it . We love you . Thank you so much .
Chrystia Freeland : The rise of the new global super-rich
Technology is advancing in leaps and bounds -- and so is economic inequality , says writer Chrystia Freeland . In an impassioned talk , she charts the rise of a new class of plutocrats , and suggests that globalization and new technology are actually fueling , rather than closing , the global income gap . Freeland lays out three problems with plutocracy … and one glimmer of hope .
So here 's the most important economic fact of our time .
We are living in an age of surging income inequality , particularly between those at the very top and everyone else .
This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K. , but it 's a global phenomenon .
It 's happening in communist China , in formerly communist Russia , it 's happening in India , in my own native Canada .
We 're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden , Finland and Germany .
Let me give you a few numbers to place what 's happening .
In the 1970s , the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States .
Today , their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent .
But what 's even more striking is what 's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution .
The 0.1 percent in the U.S.
today account for more than eight percent of the national income .
They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago .
Let me give you another number to put that in perspective , and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich , the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration .
Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men , Bill Gates and Warren Buffett , and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population , 120 million people .
Now , as it happens , Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat , he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon , and he has his own favorite number .
Buffett likes to point out that in 1992 , the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list -- and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans -- was 300 billion dollars .
Just think about it .
You didn 't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992 .
Well , today , that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion , and I probably don 't need to tell you that we haven 't seen anything similar happen to the middle class , whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased .
So we 're living in the age of the global plutocracy , but we 've been slow to notice it .
One of the reasons , I think , is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon .
Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic .
Think about what happened , after all , to the poor frog .
But I think there 's something else going on .
Talking about income inequality , even if you 're not on the Forbes 400 list , can make us feel uncomfortable .
It feels less positive , less optimistic , to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger .
And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list , talking about income distribution , and inevitably its cousin , income redistribution , can be downright threatening .
So we 're living in the age of surging income inequality , especially at the top .
What 's driving it , and what can we do about it ?
One set of causes is political : lower taxes , deregulation , particularly of financial services , privatization , weaker legal protections for trade unions , all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very , very top .
A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of " crony capitalism , " political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don 't actually do much good for the rest of us .
In practice , getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult .
Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia , for instance , or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression , or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies , including those whose motto might be " don 't do evil , " to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class .
But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really , really hard , at least intellectually , it 's an easy problem .
After all , no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism .
Indeed , this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right .
A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street .
But if crony capitalism is , intellectually at least , the easy part of the problem , things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality .
In and of themselves , these aren 't too mysterious .
Globalization and the technology revolution , the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy , are also powering the rise of the super-rich .
Just think about it .
For the first time in history , if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product , you have almost instant , almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people .
As a result , if you are very , very smart and very , very lucky , you can get very , very rich very , very quickly .
The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp .
The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars .
Think about that for a minute : 1.1 billion dollars , 26 years old .
It 's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields , like sports and entertainment .
We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before .
But today , that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy .
We have superstar technologists .
We have superstar bankers .
We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects .
There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers .
There are even , and this is my personal favorite example , superstar dentists , the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati , the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg .
But while it 's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy , what 's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it .
And that 's because , in contrast with crony capitalism , so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive .
Let 's start with technology .
I love the Internet . I love my mobile devices .
I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium .
I 'm even more of a fan of globalization .
This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world 's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class , and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world , it 's made many new products affordable -- who do you think built your iPhone ? — and things that we 've relied on for a long time much cheaper .
Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt .
So what 's not to like ?
Well , a few things .
One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy .
Imagine you 're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process .
It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor .
And that 's no mere hypothetical example .
Think about Amazon , Apple , Google , Starbucks .
These are among the world 's most admired , most beloved , most innovative companies .
They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very , very significantly .
And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage ?
Once you have the tremendous economic power that we 're seeing at the very , very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails , it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor .
Again , this is no mere hypothetical .
It 's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia 's natural resources .
It 's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K.
A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy .
One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks , and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today 's economy .
That 's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children .
The middle class is spending more on schooling too , but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard , Stanford or MIT , the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent .
The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve .
As income inequality increases , social mobility decreases .
The plutocracy may be a meritocracy , but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race .
The third thing , and this is what worries me the most , is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies .
Let 's start with technology .
Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs .
When 's the last time you used a travel agent ?
And in contrast with the industrial revolution , the titans of our new economy aren 't creating that many new jobs .
At its zenith , G.M. employed hundreds of thousands , Facebook fewer than 10,000 .
The same is true of globalization .
For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets , it 's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies .
The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity .
That 's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time .
Since the late 1990s , increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment .
That means that our countries are getting richer , our companies are getting more efficient , but we 're not creating more jobs and we 're not paying people , as a whole , more .
One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment .
What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario .
After all , in a totally free labor market , we could find jobs for pretty much everyone .
The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages .
So when I get really depressed about all of this , I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution .
After all , for all its grim , satanic mills , it worked out pretty well , didn 't it ?
After all , all of us here are richer , healthier , taller -- well , there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century .
But it 's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society , we had to go through two depressions , the Great Depression of the 1930s , the Long Depression of the 1870s , two world wars , communist revolutions in Russia and in China , and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West .
We also , not coincidentally , went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions .
We created the modern welfare state .
We created public education .
We created public health care .
We created public pensions .
We created unions .
Today , we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution .
To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats , we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change .
We need a new New Deal .
Anna Mracek Dietrich : A plane you can drive
A flying car -- it 's an iconic image of the future . But after 100 years of flight and automotive engineering , no one has really cracked the problem . Pilot Anna Mracek Dietrich and her team flipped the question , asking : Why not build a plane that you can drive ?
What is it about flying cars ?
We 've wanted to do this for about a hundred years .
And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success .
But we haven 't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really , truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we 're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us -- that , I don 't know about you , but I really enjoy spending time in .
We looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that , despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that weren 't available previously -- we have modern composite materials , we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available , we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit -- but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective , we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting for the last hundred years , which isn 't where we want to be right now .
So instead of trying to make a car that can fly , we decided to try to make a plane that could drive .
And the result is the Terrafugia Transition .
It 's a two-seat , single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane .
You take off and land at a local airport .
Then once you 're on the ground , you fold up the wings , drive it home , park it in your garage .
And it works .
After two years of an innovative design and construction process , the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008 .
Now like with anything that 's really different from the status quo , it didn 't always go so well testing that aircraft .
And we discovered that it 's a very good thing that , when you go home with something that 's been broken , you 've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through .
Still , we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we 'd all helped build in the air , off the ground , like it was supposed to be .
And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York , we got to do that for the first time .
The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time .
And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over .
The flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it , but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market , the general aviation community , and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft , particularly in the States .
The FAA , about a year ago , gave us an exemption for the Transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs .
within the light sport aircraft category .
Now that doesn 't sound like a lot , but it 's very important , because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it , but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it .
A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time .
And at 110 lbs . , driving .
It turns out that driving , with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles , is actually a harder problem to solve than flying .
For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground , this may be counter-intuitive , but driving has potholes , cobblestones , pedestrians , other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with .
Fortunately , necessity remains the mother of invention , and a lot of the design work that we 're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground -- everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic , to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you 're flying or the wheels on the ground , to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we 'll see in a moment , to crash safety features .
We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants Now this also , as good as it is , wasn 't quite enough .
The regulations for vehicles on the road weren 't written with an airplane in mind .
So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration .
Now you may have seen in the news recently , they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks .
As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle , it is now officially " designed for occasional off-road use . "
Now let 's see it in action .
You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane .
You 're not powering the propeller , you 're powering the wheels .
And it is under seven feet tall , so it will fit in a standard construction garage .
And that 's the automated wing-folding mechanism .
That 's real time .
You just push a few buttons in the cockpit , and the wings come out .
Once they 're fully deployed , there 's a mechanical lock that goes into place , again , from inside the cockpit .
And they 're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight -- just like putting down your convertible top .
And you 're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that .
Test Pilot : Until the vehicle flies , 75 percent of your risk is that first flight .
Radio : It actually flew . Yes .
Radio 2 : That was gorgeous .
Radio : What did you think of that ?
That was beautiful from up here , I tell you .
AMD : See , we 're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop .
And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight , which was that it was " remarkably unremarkable . "
He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he 'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot .
So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary , we really focused on doing as little new as possible .
We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing .
When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box , we use an incremental design , build , test , redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps .
Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago , we 've had a lot of those baby steps .
We 've gone from being three of us working in the basement at MIT while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of Boston .
We 've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that I talked about , figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you , " But that won 't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended -- to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground .
Still , if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we 're working on right now , those first deliveries to the , about a hundred , people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year .
The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes .
And I 'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy , but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane .
Here 's why .
While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports , there is a huge underutilized resource out there .
There are thousands of local airstrips that don 't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could .
On average , there 's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States .
The Transition gives you a safer , more convenient and more fun way of using this resource .
For those of you who aren 't yet pilots , there 's four main reasons why those of us who are don 't fly as much as we 'd like to : the weather , primarily , cost , long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination .
Now , bad weather comes in , just land , fold up the wings , drive home .
Doesn 't matter if it rains a little , you have a windshield wiper .
Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger , park it in your garage .
And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas .
Door-to-door travel time is reduced , because now , instead of lugging bags , finding a parking space , taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger , you 're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go .
And mobility to your destination is clearly solved .
Just fold up the wings and keep going .
The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller , more accessible place .
It also continues to be a fabulous adventure .
I hope you 'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world , and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun .
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you .
Devdutt Pattanaik : East vs. West -- the myths that mystify
Devdutt Pattanaik takes an eye-opening look at the myths of India and of the West -- and shows how these two fundamentally different sets of beliefs about God , death and heaven help us consistently misunderstand one another .
To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do , you have to hear a story of Ganesha , the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers , and his brother , the athletic warlord of the gods , Kartikeya .
The two brothers one day decided to go on a race , three times around the world .
Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans .
He went around once , he went around twice , he went around thrice .
But his brother , Ganesha , simply walked around his parents once , twice , thrice , and said , " I won . "
" How come ? " said Kartikeya .
And Ganesha said , " You went around ' the world . ' I went around ' my world . ' " What matters more ?
If you understand the difference between ' the world ' and ' my world , ' you understand the difference between logos and mythos .
'The world ' is objective , logical , universal , factual , scientific .
'My world ' is subjective .
It 's emotional . It 's personal .
It 's perceptions , thoughts , feelings , dreams .
It is the belief system that we carry .
It 's the myth that we live in .
'The world ' tells us how the world functions , how the sun rises , how we are born .
'My world ' tells us why the sun rises , why we were born .
Every culture is trying to understand itself : " Why do we exist ? "
And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life , its own customized version of mythology .
Culture is a reaction to nature , and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories , symbols and rituals , which are always indifferent to rationality .
And so , when you study it , you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world .
Different people see things differently -- different viewpoints .
There is my world and there is your world , and my world is always better than your world , because my world , you see , is rational and yours is superstition .
Yours is faith .
Yours is illogical .
This is the root of the clash of civilizations .
It took place , once , in 326 B.C.
on the banks of a river called the Indus , now in Pakistan .
This river lends itself to India 's name .
India . Indus .
Alexander , a young Macedonian , met there what he called a " gymnosophist , " which means " the naked , wise man . "
We don 't know who he was .
Perhaps he was a Jain monk , like Bahubali over here , the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore .
Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock , staring at the sky and the sun and the moon .
Alexander asked , " What are you doing ? "
and the gymnosophist answered , " I 'm experiencing nothingness . "
Then the gymnosophist asked , " What are you doing ? "
and Alexander said , " I am conquering the world . "
And they both laughed .
Each one thought that the other was a fool .
The gymnosophist said , " Why is he conquering the world ?
It 's pointless . "
And Alexander thought , " Why is he sitting around , doing nothing ?
What a waste of a life . "
To understand this difference in viewpoints , we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander -- his myth , and the mythology that constructed it .
Alexander 's mother , his parents , his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer 's " Iliad . "
They told him of a great hero called Achilles , who , when he participated in battle , victory was assured , but when he withdrew from the battle , defeat was inevitable .
" Achilles was a man who could shape history , a man of destiny , and this is what you should be , Alexander . "
That 's what he heard .
" What should you not be ?
You should not be Sisyphus , who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night .
Don 't live a life which is monotonous , mediocre , meaningless .
Be spectacular ! -- like the Greek heroes , like Jason , who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece .
Be spectacular like Theseus , who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur .
When you play in a race , win ! -- because when you win , the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods . "
Because , you see , the Greeks believed you live only once , and when you die , you have to cross the River Styx .
And if you have lived an extraordinary life , you will be welcomed to Elysium , or what the French call " Champs-Élysées " -- -- the heaven of the heroes .
But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard .
He heard a very different story .
He heard of a man called Bharat , after whom India is called Bhārata .
Bharat also conquered the world .
And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru .
And he wanted to hoist his flag to say , " I was here first . "
But when he reached the mountain peak , he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him , each one claiming " ' I was here first ' ...
that 's what I thought until I came here . "
And suddenly , in this canvas of infinity , Bharat felt insignificant .
This was the mythology of the gymnosophist .
You see , he had heroes , like Ram -- Raghupati Ram and Krishna , Govinda Hari .
But they were not two characters on two different adventures .
They were two lifetimes of the same hero .
When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins .
When Ram dies , Krishna is born .
When Krishna dies , eventually he will be back as Ram .
You see , the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead .
But you don 't cross it once .
You go to and fro endlessly .
It was called the Vaitarani .
You go again and again and again .
Because , you see , nothing lasts forever in India , not even death .
And so , you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days ...
And what do you do at the end of 10 days ?
You dunk it in the river .
Because it has to end .
And next year , she will come back .
What goes around always comes around , and this rule applies not just to man , but also the gods .
You see , the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram , as Krishna .
Not only do they live infinite lives , but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all .
" Groundhog Day . "
Two different mythologies .
Which is right ?
Two different mythologies , two different ways of looking at the world .
One linear , one cyclical .
One believes this is the one and only life .
The other believes this is one of many lives .
And so , the denominator of Alexander 's life was one .
So , the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements .
The denominator of the gymnosophist 's life was infinity .
So , no matter what he did , it was always zero .
And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero .
Who knows ?
And that brings us to the mythology of business .
If Alexander 's belief influenced his behavior , if the gymnosophist 's belief influences his behavior , then it was bound to influence the business they were in .
You see , what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves ?
And if you look at cultures around the world , all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business .
Take a look .
If you live only once , in one-life cultures around the world , you will see an obsession with binary logic , absolute truth , standardization , absoluteness , linear patterns in design .
But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives , you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic , with opinion , with contextual thinking , with everything is relative , sort of -- mostly .
You look at art . Look at the ballerina , how linear she is in her performance .
And then look at the Indian classical dancer , the Kuchipudi dancer , the Bharatanatyam dancer , curvaceous .
And then look at business .
Standard business model : vision , mission , values , processes .
Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land , with the commandments held by the leader .
And if you comply , you will go to heaven .
But in India there is no " the " promised land .
There are many promised lands , depending on your station in society , depending on your stage of life .
You see , businesses are not run as institutions , by the idiosyncrasies of individuals .
It 's always about taste .
It 's always about my taste .
You see , Indian music , for example , does not have the concept of harmony .
There is no orchestra conductor .
There is one performer standing there , and everybody follows .
And you can never replicate that performance twice .
It is not about documentation and contract .
It 's about conversation and faith .
It 's not about compliance . It 's about setting , getting the job done , by bending or breaking the rules -- just look at your Indian people around here , you 'll see them smile ; they know what it is .
And then look at people who have done business in India , you 'll see the exasperation on their faces .
You see , this is what India is today . The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view .
So , it 's rapidly changing , highly diverse , chaotic , ambiguous , unpredictable .
And people are okay with it .
And then globalization is taking place .
The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in .
Which is rooted in one-life culture .
And a clash is going to take place , like on the banks of the Indus .
It is bound to happen .
I have personally experienced it . I 'm trained as a medical doctor .
I did not want to study surgery . Don 't ask me why .
I love mythology too much .
I wanted to learn mythology . But there is nowhere you can study .
So , I had to teach it to myself .
And mythology does not pay , well , until now .
So , I had to take up a job . And I worked in the pharma industry .
And I worked in the healthcare industry .
And I worked as a marketing guy , and a sales guy , and a knowledge guy , and a content guy , and a training guy .
I even was a business consultant , doing strategies and tactics .
And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues , when they were dealing with India .
Example : Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals .
Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly .
How do you parameterize " mostly " ?
How do you put it in a nice little software ? You can 't .
I would give my viewpoints to people .
But nobody was interested in listening to it , you see , until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group .
You see , he has established the largest retail chain , called Big Bazaar .
And there are more than 200 formats , across 50 cities and towns of India .
And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets .
And he knew very intuitively , that best practices , developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India .
He knew that institutional thinking doesn 't work in India . Individual thinking does .
He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India .
So , he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer , and said , " All I want to do is align belief . "
Sounds so simple .
But belief is not measurable .
You can 't measure it . You can 't manage it .
So , how do you construct belief ?
How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness .
Even if you are Indian , it is not very explicit , it is not very obvious .
So , I tried to work on the standard model of culture , which is , develop stories , symbols and rituals .
And I will share one of the rituals with you .
You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan .
Hindus don 't have the concept of commandments .
So , there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life .
So , you 're not really sure how you stand in front of God .
So , when you go to the temple , all you seek is an audience with God .
You want to see God .
And you want God to see you , and hence the gods have very large eyes , large unblinking eyes , sometimes made of silver , so they look at you .
Because you don 't know whether you 're right or wrong , and so all you seek is divine empathy .
" Just know where I came from , why I did the Jugaad . "
" Why did I do the setting , why I don 't care for the processes . Just understand me , please . "
And based on this , we created a ritual for leaders .
After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store , we blindfold him , we surround him with the stakeholders , the customer , his family , his team , his boss .
You read out his KRA , his KPI , you give him the keys , and then you remove the blindfold .
And invariably , you see a tear , because the penny has dropped .
He realizes that to succeed , he does not have to be a " professional , " he does not have to cut out his emotions , he has to include all these people in his world to succeed , to make them happy , to make the boss happy , to make everyone happy .
The customer is happy , because the customer is God .
That sensitivity is what we need . Once this belief enters , behavior will happen , business will happen .
And it has .
So , then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist .
And everybody asks me , " Which is the better way , this way or that way ? "
And it 's a very dangerous question , because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence .
So , I will not answer the question .
What I will give you is an Indian answer , the Indian head-shake .
Depending on the context , depending on the outcome , choose your paradigm .
You see , because both the paradigms are human constructions .
They are cultural creations , not natural phenomena .
And so the next time you meet someone , a stranger , one request : Understand that you live in the subjective truth , and so does he .
Understand it .
And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular .
You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth .
Who sees it all ?
Varuna has but a thousand eyes .
Indra , a hundred .
You and I , only two .
Thank you . Namaste .
Renata Salecl : Our unhealthy obsession with choice
We face an endless string of choices , which leads us to feel anxiety , guilt and pangs of inadequacy that we are perhaps making the wrong ones . But philosopher Renata Salecl asks : Could individual choices be distracting us from something bigger — our power as social thinkers ? A bold call for us to stop taking personal choice so seriously and focus on the choices we 're making collectively .
When I was preparing for this talk , I went to search for a couple of quotes that I can share with you .
Good news : I found three that I particularly liked , the first by Samuel Johnson , who said , " When making your choice in life , do not forget to live , " the second by Aeschylus , who reminded us that " happiness is a choice that requires effort , " and the third is one by Groucho Marx who said , " I wouldn 't want to choose to belong to any club that would have me as a member . "
Now , bad news : I didn 't know which one of these quotes to choose and share with you .
The sweet anxiety of choice .
In today 's times of post-industrial capitalism , choice , together with individual freedom and the idea of self-making , has been elevated to an ideal .
Now , together with this , we also have a belief in endless progress .
But the underside of this ideology has been an increase of anxiety , feelings of guilt , feelings of being inadequate , feeling that we are failing in our choices .
Sadly , this ideology of individual choice has prevented us from thinking about social changes .
It appears that this ideology was actually very efficient in pacifying us as political and social thinkers .
Instead of making social critiques , we are more and more engaging in self-critique , sometimes to the point of self-destruction .
Now , how come that ideology of choice is still so powerful , even among people who have not many things to choose among ?
How come that even people who are poor very much still identify with the idea of choice , the kind of rational idea of choice which we embrace ?
Now , the ideology of choice is very successful in opening for us a space to think about some imagined future .
Let me give you an example .
My friend Manya , when she was a student at university in California , was earning money by working for a car dealer .
Now , Manya , when she encountered the typical customer , would debate with him about his lifestyle , how much he wants to spend , how many children he has , what does he need the car for ?
They would usually come to a good conclusion what would be a perfect car .
Now , before Manya 's customer would go home and think things through , she would say to him , " The car that you are buying now is perfect , but in a few year 's time , when your kids will be already out of the house , when you will have a little bit more money , that other car will be ideal .
But what you are buying now is great . "
Now , the majority of Manya 's customers who came back the next day bought that other car , the car they did not need , the car that cost far too much money .
Now , Manya became so successful in selling cars that soon she moved on to selling airplanes .
And knowing so much about the psychology of people prepared her well for her current job , which is that of a psychoanalyst .
Now , why were Manya 's customers so irrational ?
Manya 's success was that she was able to open in their heads an image of an idealized future , an image of themselves when they are already more successful , freer , and for them , choosing that other car was as if they are coming closer to this ideal in which it was as if Manya already saw them .
Now , we rarely make really totally rational choices .
Choices are influenced by our unconscious , by our community .
We 're often choosing by guessing , what would other people think about our choice ?
Also we are choosing by looking at what others are choosing .
We 're also guessing what is socially acceptable choice .
Now , because of this , we actually even after we have already chosen , like bought a car , endlessly read reviews about cars , as if we still want to convince ourselves that we made the right choice .
Now , choices are anxiety-provoking .
They are linked to risks , losses .
They are highly unpredictable .
Now , because of this , people have now more and more problems that they are not choosing anything .
Not long ago , I was at a wedding reception , and I met a young , beautiful woman who immediately started telling me about her anxiety over choice .
She said to me , " I needed one month to decide which dress to wear . "
Then she said , " For weeks I was researching which hotel to stay for this one night .
And now , I need to choose a sperm donor . "
I looked at this woman in shock .
" Sperm donor ? What 's the rush ? "
She said , " I 'm turning 40 at the end of this year , and I 've been so bad in choosing men in my life . "
Now choice , because it 's linked to risk , is anxiety-provoking , and it was already the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who pointed out that anxiety is linked to the possibility of possibility .
Now , we think today that we can prevent these risks .
We have endless market analysis , projections of the future earnings .
Even with market , which is about chance , randomness , we think we can predict rationally where it 's going .
Now , chance is actually becoming very traumatic .
Last year , my friend Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago organized an event , a conference on the idea of chance .
He and I were together on the panel , and just before delivering our papers — we didn 't know each other 's papers — we decided to take chance seriously .
So we informed our audience that what they will just now hear will be a random paper , a mixture of the two papers which we didn 't know what each was writing .
Now , we delivered the conference in such a way .
Bernard read his first paragraph , I read my first paragraph , Bernard read his second paragraph , I read my second paragraph , in this way towards the end of our papers .
Now , you will be surprised that a majority of our audience did not think that what they 'd just listened to was a completely random paper .
They couldn 't believe that speaking from the position of authority like two professors we were , we would take chance seriously .
They thought we prepared the papers together and were just joking that it 's random .
Now , we live in times with a lot of information , big data , a lot of knowledge about the insides of our bodies .
We decoded our genome .
We know about our brains more than before .
But surprisingly , people are more and more turning a blind eye in front of this knowledge .
Ignorance and denial are on the rise .
Now , in regard to the current economic crisis , we think that we will just wake up again and everything will be the same as before , and no political or social changes are needed .
In regard to ecological crisis , we think nothing needs to be done just now , or others need to act before us .
Or even when ecological crisis already happens , like a catastrophe in Fukushima , often we have people living in the same environment with the same amount of information , and half of them will be anxious about radiation and half of them will ignore it .
Now , psychoanalysts know very well that people surprisingly don 't have passion for knowledge but passion for ignorance .
Now , what does that mean ?
Let 's say when we are facing a life-threatening illness , a lot of people don 't want to know that .
They 'd rather prefer denying the illness , which is why it 's not so wise to inform them if they don 't ask .
Surprisingly , research shows that sometimes people who deny their illness live longer than those who are rationally choosing the best treatment .
Now , this ignorance , however , is not very helpful on the level of the social .
When we are ignorant about where we are heading , a lot of social damage can be caused .
Now , on top of facing ignorance , we are also facing today some kind of an obviousness .
Now , it was French philosopher Louis Althusser who pointed out that ideology functions in such a way that it creates a veil of obviousness .
Before we do any social critique , it is necessary really to lift that veil of obviousness and to think through a little bit differently .
If we go back to this ideology of individual , rational choice we often embrace , it 's necessary precisely here to lift this obviousness and to think a little bit differently .
Now for me , a question often is why we still embrace this idea of a self-made man on which capitalism relied from its beginning ?
Why do we think that we are really such masters of our lives that we can rationally make the best ideal choices , that we don 't accept losses and risks ?
And for me , it 's very shocking to see sometimes very poor people , for example , not supporting the idea of the rich being taxed more .
Quite often here they still identify with a certain kind of a lottery mentality .
Okay , maybe they don 't think that they will make it in the future , but maybe they think , my son might become the next Bill Gates .
And who would want to tax one 's son ?
Or , a question for me is also , why would people who have no health insurance not embrace universal healthcare ?
Sometimes they don 't embrace it , again identifying with the idea of choice , but they have nothing to choose from .
Now , Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is nothing like a society .
Society doesn 't exist , it is only individuals and their families .
Sadly , this ideology still functions very well , which is why people who are poor might feel ashamed for their poverty .
We might endlessly feel guilty that we are not making the right choices , and that 's why we didn 't succeed .
We are anxious that we are not good enough .
That 's why we work very hard , long hours at the workplace and equally long hours on remaking ourselves .
Now , when we are anxious over choices , sometimes we easily give our power of choice away .
We identify with the guru who tells us what to do , self-help therapist , or we embrace a totalitarian leader who appears to have no doubts about choices , who sort of knows .
Now , often people ask me , " What did you learn by studying choice ? "
And there is an important message that I did learn .
When thinking about choices , I stopped taking choices too seriously , personally .
First , I realized a lot of choice I make is not rational .
It 's linked to my unconscious , my guesses of what others are choosing , or what is a socially embraced choice .
I also embrace the idea that we should go beyond thinking about individual choices , that it 's very important to rethink social choices , since this ideology of individual choice has pacified us .
It really prevented us to think about social change .
We spend so much time choosing things for ourselves and barely reflect on communal choices we can make .
Now , we should not forget that choice is always linked to change .
We can make individual changes , but we can make social changes .
We can choose to have more wolves .
We can choose to change our environment to have more bees .
We can choose to have different rating agencies .
We can choose to control corporations instead of allowing corporations to control us .
We have a possibility to make changes .
Now , I started with a quote from Samuel Johnson , who said that when we make choice in life , we shouldn 't forget to live .
Finally , you can see I did have a choice to choose one of the three quotes with which I wanted to start my lecture .
I did have a choice , such as nations , as people , we have choices too to rethink in what kind of society we want to live in the future .
Thank you .
Kent Larson : Brilliant designs to fit more people in every city
How can we fit more people into cities without overcrowding ? Kent Larson shows off folding cars , quick-change apartments and other innovations that could make the city of the future work a lot like a small village of the past .
I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities .
Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well , and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head .
In fact , if you fly over Germany , for example , and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages , they 're all about a mile apart .
You needed easy access to the fields .
And for hundreds , even thousands of years , the home was really the center of life .
Life was very small for most people .
It was the center of entertainment , of energy production , of work , the center of health care .
That 's where babies were born and people died .
Then , with industrialization , everything started to become centralized .
You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities .
Production was centralized in assembly plants .
You had centralized energy production .
Learning took place in schools . Health care took place in hospitals .
And then you had networks that developed .
You had water , sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion .
You had separated functions , increasingly .
You had rail networks that connected residential , industrial , commercial areas . You had auto networks .
In fact , the model was really , give everybody a car , build roads to everything , and give people a place to park when they get there . It was not a very functional model .
And we still live in that world , and this is what we end up with .
So you have the sprawl of LA , the sprawl of Mexico City .
You have these unbelievable new cities in China which you might call tower sprawl .
They 're all building cities on the model that we invented in the ' 50s and ' 60s , which is really obsolete , I would argue , and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world .
In China alone , 300 million people , some say 400 million people , will move to the city over the next 15 years .
That means building the entire , the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the U.S. in 15 years .
Imagine that .
And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not .
Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth , 80 percent of the global CO2 , 75 percent of energy use , but at the same time it 's where people want to be , increasingly .
More than half the people now in the world live in cities , and that will just continue to escalate .
Cities are places of celebration , personal expression .
You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that — I 've been to a couple . They 're quite fun .
You have — Cities are where most of the wealth is created , and particularly in the developing world , it 's where women find opportunities . That 's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly .
Now there 's some trends that will impact cities .
First of all , work is becoming distributed and mobile .
The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work .
The home , once again , because of distributed computation -- communication , is becoming a center of life , so it 's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home .
And increasingly , everything that people buy , every consumer product , in one way or another , can be personalized .
And that 's a very important trend to think about .
So this is my image of the city of the future .
In that it 's a place for people , you know .
Maybe not the way people dress , but -- You know , the question now is , how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things ?
This is Bangalore . It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year .
So with cities , you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things .
How can we have the good stuff without the bad ?
So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars .
Paris was a series of these little villages that came together , and you still see that structure today .
The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods .
Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk .
And if you look at the data , when you have that kind of a structure , you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris .
And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile , and it 's not that kind of a pattern .
There 's very little that 's within a five minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh .
Not to pick on Pittsburgh , but most American cities really have evolved this way .
So we said , we 'll , let 's look at new cities , and we 're involved in a couple of new city projects in China .
So we said , let 's start with that neighborhood cell .
We think of it as a compact urban cell .
So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk .
This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid , community heating , power , communication networks , etc . , can be concentrated there .
Stewart Brand would put a micro-nuclear reactor right in the center , probably .
And he might be right .
And then we can form , in effect , a mesh network .
It 's something of an Internet typology pattern , so you can have a series of these neighborhoods .
You can dial up the density -- about 20,000 people per cell if it 's Cambridge . Go up to 50,000 if it 's Manhattan density . You connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood .
You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them . I won 't go through all of them . I 'll just show one .
This is Boulder . It 's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway , a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street , and they also have bike-sharing , which I 'll get into in a minute .
This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul , Korea .
They took the elevated highway , they got rid of it , they reclaimed the street , the river down below , below the street , and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars .
The Highline in Manhattan is very similar .
You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world . I lived in Manhattan for 15 years .
I went back a couple of weekends ago , took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed .
They 're still not to where Copenhagen is , where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle . It 's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there .
We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston .
We -- the Big Dig -- So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island and it 's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars .
Mobility on demand is something we 've been thinking about , so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit .
These are some of the vehicles that we 've been working on .
But shared use is really key . If you share a vehicle , you can have at least four people use one vehicle , as opposed to one .
We have Hubway here in Boston , the Vélib ' system in Paris .
We 've been developing at the Media Lab this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities .
We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions . We moved everything to the wheels , so you have the drive motor , the steering motor , the breaking all in the wheel .
That left the chassis unencumbered , so you can do things like fold , so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint .
This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle , and when it 's folded , it can spin .
You don 't need reverse . You don 't need parallel parking .
You just spin and go directly in .
So we 've been working with a company to commercialize this . My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference .
So what 's interesting is , then if you begin to add new things to it , like autonomy , you get out of the car , you park at your destination , you pat it on the butt , it goes and it parks itself , it charges itself , and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars , and we think this is the future . Actually we could do this today .
It 's not really a problem .
We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy and we get something like 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy .
One of our graduate students then says , well , how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians ?
You have nobody to make eye contact with .
You don 't know if it 's going to run you over .
So he 's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians , so -- So the headlights are eyeballs , the pupils can dilate , we have directional audio , we can throw sound directly at people .
What I love about this project is he solved a problem that hasn 't , that doesn 't exist yet , so -- We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes .
You know , bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants , you know . So -- We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes , accessible to elderly and disabled , women in skirts , businesspeople , and address the issues of energy congestion , mobility , aging and obesity simultaneously . That 's our challenge .
This is an early design for this little three-wheel , it 's an electronic bike . You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane , but if you 're an older person , that 's a switch . If you 're a healthy person , you might have to work really hard to go fast .
You can dial in 40 calories going into work and 500 going home , when you can take a shower .
We hope to have that built this fall .
Housing is another area where we can really improve .
Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces .
Developers say , okay , we 'll build little teeny apartments .
People say , we don 't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment .
So we 're saying let 's build a standardized chassis , much like our car . Let 's bring advanced technology into the apartment , technology-enabled infill , give people the tools within this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needs and values and activities are , and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly of integrated infill components , furniture , and cabinetry , that are personalized to that individual , and they give them the tools to go through the process and to refine it , and it 's something like working with an architect , where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative to a person to react to .
Now , the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls , so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace , if you run a virtual company .
You have guests over , you have two guestrooms that are developed .
You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement when you need it . Maybe that 's most of the time .
You have a dinner party . The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom , or maybe you want a dance studio .
I mean , architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time . What we need to do now , develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city , and very comfortably .
We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it 's twice as big by utilizing these strategies . I don 't believe in smart homes .
That 's sort of a bogus concept .
I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it .
And so we 've been working on a chassis of the wall itself .
You know , standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates , little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power .
We think this can all be standardized , and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall , and like the car , we can integrate all kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity , so if there 's a baby or a puppy in the way , you won 't have a problem .
So the developers say , well this is great . Okay , so if we have a conventional building , we have a fixed envelope , maybe we can put in 14 units .
If they function as if they 're twice as big , we can get 28 units in .
That means twice as much parking , though .
Parking 's really expensive . It 's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building .
So if you can have folding and autonomy , you can do that in one seventh of the space .
That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car , just for the cost of the parking .
You add shared use , and you can even go further .
We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process . There 's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home .
In this case , a project we 're doing with Siemens , we have sensors on all the furniture , all the infill , that understands where people are and what they 're doing .
Blue light is very efficient , so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures .
It recognizes where the person is , what they 're doing , fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light , and saves maybe 30 , 40 percent in energy consumption , we think , over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems .
This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture .
We don 't really believe in cameras to do things in homes .
We think these little wireless sensors are more effective .
We think we can also personalize sunlight .
That 's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways .
So we , we 've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space , therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today .
In this case , she picks up her phone , she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight . An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she 's engaged in that activity .
This can be combined with LED lighting as well .
We think workplaces should be shared .
I mean , this is really the workplace of the future , I think .
This is Starbucks , you know .
Maybe a third — And you see everybody has their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they 're in their own little personal bubble .
We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration .
We 're not doing a very good job with that .
At the Cambridge Innovation Center , you can have shared desks . I 've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University , where the they have a shared shop and shared Fablab , shared quiet spaces , electronics spaces , recreation places .
We think ultimately all of this stuff can come together , a new model for mobility , a new model for housing , a new model for how we live and work , a path to market for advanced technologies , but in the end the main thing we need to focus on are people . Cities are all about people .
They 're places for people .
There 's no reason why we can 't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they 've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy .
It 's a global imperative . We have to get this right .
Thank you .
Clay Shirky : How the Internet will transform government
The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new , oftentimes divergent , ideas using hosting services like GitHub -- so why can 't governments ? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet , to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens .
I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy , but before that , a little preamble .
Let 's start here .
This is Martha Payne . Martha 's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute .
A couple months ago , Payne started a food blog called NeverSeconds , and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches .
Can you spot the vegetable ?
And , as sometimes happens , this blog acquired first dozens of readers , and then hundreds of readers , and then thousands of readers , as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches , including on my favorite category , " Pieces of hair found in food . "
This was a zero day . That 's good .
And then two weeks ago yesterday , she posted this .
A post that read : " Goodbye . "
And she said , " I 'm very sorry to tell you this , but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me I 'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore .
I really enjoyed doing this .
Thank you for reading . Goodbye . "
You can guess what happened next , right ?
The outrage was so swift , so voluminous , so unanimous , that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves the same day and said , " We would , we would never censor a nine-year-old . "
Except , of course , this morning .
And this brings up the question , what made them think they could get away with something like that ?
And the answer is , all of human history prior to now .
So , what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation ?
Now , this isn 't just a contemporaneous question .
This is something we 've faced several times over the last few centuries .
When the telegraph came along , it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry .
What would this lead to ?
Well , obviously , it would lead to world peace .
The television , a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see , literally see , what was going on elsewhere in the world , what would this lead to ?
World peace .
The telephone ?
You guessed it : world peace .
Sorry for the spoiler alert , but no world peace . Not yet .
Even the printing press , even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe .
Instead , what we got was Martin Luther 's 95 Theses , the Protestant Reformation , and , you know , the Thirty Years ' War . All right , so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation , it changes society .
What they got exactly wrong was what happens next .
The more ideas there are in circulation , the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with .
More media always means more arguing .
That 's what happens when the media 's space expands .
And yet , when we look back on the printing press in the early years , we like what happened .
We are a pro-printing press society .
So how do we square those two things , that it leads to more arguing , but we think it was good ?
And the answer , I think , can be found in things like this .
This is the cover of " Philosophical Transactions , " the first scientific journal ever published in English in the middle of the 1600s , and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves " The Invisible College , " a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists , and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other , and they needed to do two things for this .
They needed openness . They needed to create a norm which said , when you do an experiment , you have to publish not just your claims , but how you did the experiment .
If you don 't tell us how you did it , we won 't trust you .
But the other thing they needed was speed .
They had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew . Otherwise , you couldn 't get the right kind of argument going .
The printing press was clearly the right medium for this , but the book was the wrong tool . It was too slow .
And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists .
The scientific revolution wasn 't created by the printing press .
It was created by scientists , but it couldn 't have been created if they didn 't have a printing press as a tool .
So what about us ? What about our generation , and our media revolution , the Internet ?
Well , predictions of world peace ? Check .
More arguing ? Gold star on that one .
I mean , YouTube is just a gold mine .
Better arguing ? That 's the question .
So I study social media , which means , to a first approximation , I watch people argue .
And if I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College , is our generation 's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service , not for more arguments , but for better arguments , I 'd pick the open-source programmers .
Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer , some source code , and the computer it 's meant to run on , but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it 's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute , and that 's if one person is writing it .
Once you get more than one person writing it , it 's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other 's work if they 're working on the same file , or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke , and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved .
To a first approximation , the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay .
Now , for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem , which is to use something called a " version control system , " and a version control system does what is says on the tin .
It provides a canonical copy of the software on a server somewhere .
The only programmers who can change it are people who 've specifically been given permission to access it , and they 're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change .
And when people draw diagrams of version control systems , the diagrams always look something like this .
All right . They look like org charts .
And you don 't have to squint very hard to see the political ramifications of a system like this .
This is feudalism : one owner , many workers .
Now , that 's fine for the commercial software industry .
It really is Microsoft 's Office . It 's Adobe 's Photoshop .
The corporation owns the software .
The programmers come and go .
But there was one programmer who decided that this wasn 't the way to work .
This is Linus Torvalds .
Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer , created Linux , obviously , and Torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem .
Open-source software , the core promise of the open-source license , is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time , but of course , this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working .
So most open-source projects just held their noses and adopted the feudal management systems .
But Torvalds said , " No , I 'm not going to do that . "
His point of view on this was very clear .
When you adopt a tool , you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool , and he wasn 't going to adopt anything that didn 't work the way the Linux community worked .
And to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was , this is a map of the internal dependencies within Linux , within the Linux operating system , which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going .
This is a tremendously complicated process .
This is a tremendously complicated program , and yet , for years , Torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box .
People would literally mail him changes that they 'd agreed on , and he would merge them by hand .
And then , 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked , he said , " I think I know how to write a version control system for free people . "
And he called it " Git . " Git is distributed version control .
It has two big differences with traditional version control systems .
The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source . Everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time .
And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow , they use drawings that look like this .
And you don 't have to understand what the circles and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more complicated way of working than is supported by ordinary version control systems .
But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back , and this is Git 's second big innovation .
This is a screenshot from GitHub , the premier Git hosting service , and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all , creating a new file , modifying an existing one , merging two files , Git creates this kind of signature .
This long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change , but without any central coordination .
Every Git system generates this number the same way , which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change .
This has the following effect : A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software .
Each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they didn 't know of each other 's existence beforehand .
This is cooperation without coordination .
This is the big change .
Now , I tell you all of this not to convince you that it 's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working , although I think that is great .
I tell you all of this because of what I think it means for the way communities come together .
Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination , you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex .
This is a graph of the Ruby community .
It 's an open-source programming language , and all of the interconnections between the people -- this is now not a software graph , but a people graph , all of the interconnections among the people working on that project — and this doesn 't look like an org chart .
This looks like a dis-org chart , and yet , out of this community , but using these tools , they can now create something together .
So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law .
When you make the claim , in fact , that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy , you often get this reaction .
Which is , are you talking about the thing with the singing cats ? Like , is that the thing you think is going to be good for society ?
To which I have to say , here 's the thing with the singing cats . That always happens .
And I don 't just mean that always happens with the Internet , I mean that always happens with media , full stop .
It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea .
You don 't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says , " Hey , you know what I bet people would pay for ? "
It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal , right ? So -- So the harnessing by the Invisible College of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important , but it didn 't happen big , and it didn 't happen quick , and it didn 't happen fast , so if you 're going to look for where the change is happening , you have to look on the margins .
So , the law is also dependency-related .
This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code , and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect .
So there 's that as a site for source code management .
But there 's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation , but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy , and when you go onto GitHub , and you look around , there are millions and millions of projects , almost all of which are source code , but if you look around the edges , you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that .
Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables from the State Department , along with software used to interpret them , including my favorite use ever of the Cablegate cables , which is a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose .
Right .
The New York Senate has put up something called Open Legislation , also hosting it on GitHub , again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity .
You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see a list of bills they have sponsored .
Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code , the laws of the state of Utah , and they 've put it up there not just to distribute the code , but with the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation .
Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate last year in the Senate , saying , " It 's strange that Hollywood has more access to Canadian legislators than Canadian citizens do . Why don 't we use GitHub to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like ? "
And it includes this very evocative screenshot .
This is a called a " diff , " this thing on the right here .
This shows you , for text that many people are editing , when a change was made , who made it , and what the change is .
The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted .
The stuff in green is the stuff that got added .
Programmers take this capability for granted .
No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets , even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money .
Now , I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale , distributed , cheap , and in sync with the ideals of democracy , I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place , the innovation is inevitable . But it 's not .
Part of the problem , of course , is just a lack of information .
Somebody put a question up on Quora saying , " Why is it that lawmakers don 't use distributed version control ? "
This , graphically , was the answer .
And that is indeed part of the problem , but only part .
The bigger problem , of course , is power .
The people experimenting with participation don 't have legislative power , and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation .
They are experimenting with openness .
There 's no democracy worth the name that doesn 't have a transparency move , but transparency is openness in only one direction , and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens .
So consider this .
The thing that got Martha Payne 's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology , but the thing that kept them there was political will .
It was the expectation of the citizens that she would not be censored .
That 's now the state we 're in with these collaboration tools .
We have them . We 've seen them . They work .
Can we use them ?
Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this ?
T.S. Eliot once said , " One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose . "
I think that 's wrong , but -- I think it 's right for argumentation . Right ?
A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing : trial by jury , voting , peer review , now this . Right ?
A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes , in the last decade , in fact .
It 's large , it 's distributed , it 's low-cost , and it 's compatible with the ideals of democracy .
The question for us now is , are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves ?
Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large ?
Thank you for listening .
Thank you . Thank you .
Esther Duflo : Social experiments to fight poverty
Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science , and lack of data on aid 's impact raises questions about how to provide it . But Clark Medal-winner Esther Duflo says it 's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt -- by testing solutions with randomized trials .
So here it is . You can check : I am short , I 'm French , I have a pretty strong French accent , so that 's going to be clear in a moment .
Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about .
And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year .
And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know .
That is , every day , 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes .
That 's a Haiti earthquake every eight days .
And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well , but somehow it doesn 't happen with the same intensity .
So why is that ?
Well , here is a thought experiment for you .
Imagine you have a few million dollars that you 've raised -- maybe you 're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend . You want to spend it on the poor : How do you go about it ?
Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money ?
That we know how to eradicate poverty , we just need to do more ?
Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help , on the contrary it might hurt , it might exacerbate corruption , dependence , etc . ?
Or maybe you turn to the past .
After all , we have spent billions of dollars on aid .
Maybe you look at the past and see .
Has it done any good ?
And , sadly , we don 't know .
And worst of all , we will never know .
And the reason is that -- take Africa for example .
Africans have already got a lot of aid .
These are the blue bars .
And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress .
Okay , fine . How do you know what would have happened without the aid ?
Maybe it would have been much worse , or maybe it would have been better .
We have no idea . We don 't know what the counterfactual is .
There 's only one Africa .
So what do you do ?
To give the aid , and hope and pray that something comes out of it ?
Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen ?
The thing is , if we don 't know whether we are doing any good , we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches .
Sometimes the patient gets better , sometimes the patient dies .
Is it the leeches ? Is it something else ?
We don 't know .
So here are some other questions .
They 're smaller questions , but they are not that small .
Immunization , that 's the cheapest way to save a child 's life .
And the world has spent a lot of money on it : The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it , and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort .
And yet , every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get .
So this is what you call a " last mile problem . "
The technology is there , the infrastructure is there , and yet it doesn 't happen .
So you have your million .
How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem ?
And here 's another question : Malaria . Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year , most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa , most of them under five .
In fact , that is the leading cause of under-five mortality .
We already know how to kill malaria , but some people come to you and say , " You have your millions . How about bed nets ? "
Bed nets are very cheap .
For 10 dollars , you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them .
And , not only do they protect the people who sleep under them , but they have these great contagion benefits .
If half of a community sleeps under a net , the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread .
And yet , only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net .
Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net , give them for free , or , for that matter , pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits .
" Not so fast , " say other people .
" If you give the nets for free , people are not going to value them .
They 're not going to use them , or at least they 're not going to use them as bed nets , maybe as fishing nets . "
So , what do you do ?
Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage , or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them ?
How do you know ?
And a third question : Education .
Maybe that 's the solution , maybe we should send kids to school .
But how do you do that ?
Do you hire teachers ? Do you build more schools ?
Do you provide school lunch ?
How do you know ?
So here is the thing .
I cannot answer the big question , whether aid did any good or not .
But these three questions , I can answer them .
It 's not the Middle Ages anymore , it 's the 21st century .
And in the 20th century , randomized , controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don 't work .
And you can do the same randomized , controlled trial for social policy .
You can put social innovation to the same rigorous , scientific tests that we use for drugs .
And in this way , you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works , what doesn 't work and why .
And I 'll give you some examples with those three questions .
So I start with immunization .
Here 's Udaipur District , Rajasthan . Beautiful .
Well , when I started working there , about one percent of children were fully immunized .
That 's bad , but there are places like that .
Now , it 's not because the vaccines are not there -- they are there and they are free -- and it 's not because parents do not care about their kids .
The same child that is not immunized against measles , if they do get measles , parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them .
So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals .
So what is the problem ?
Well , part of the problem , surely , is people do not fully understand .
After all , in this country as well , all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization .
So if that 's the case , that 's difficult , because persuasion is really difficult .
But maybe there is another problem as well .
It 's going from intention to action .
Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District , Rajasthan .
You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized .
And maybe when you get there , what you find is this : The subcenter is closed . Ao you have to come back , and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do , you will always tend to postpone and postpone , and eventually it gets too late .
Well , if that 's the problem , then that 's much easier .
Because A , we can make it easy , and B , we can maybe give people a reason to act today , rather than wait till tomorrow .
So these are simple ideas , but we didn 't know .
So let 's try them .
So what we did is we did a randomized , controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts .
So the blue dots are selected randomly .
We made it easy -- I 'll tell you how in a moment .
In the red dots , we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now .
The white dots are comparisons , nothing changed .
So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized .
And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization .
Now , a kilo of lentils is tiny .
It 's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don 't want to do .
On the other hand , if your problem is you tend to postpone , then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later .
So what do we find ?
Well , beforehand , everything is the same .
That 's the beauty of randomization .
Afterwards , the camp -- just having the camp -- increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent .
That 's full immunization .
That 's not bad , that 's a good improvement .
Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent .
So here you 've got your answer .
Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils , you multiply immunization rate by six .
Now , you might say , " Well , but it 's not sustainable .
We cannot keep giving lentils to people . "
Well , it turns out it 's wrong economics , because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them .
Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway , the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don 't .
How about bed nets ?
Should you give them for free , or should you ask people to pay for them ?
So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions .
One is : If people must pay for a bed net , are they going to purchase them ?
The second one is : If I give bed nets for free , are people going to use them ?
And the third one is : Do free bed nets discourage future purchase ?
The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts , it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets .
Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric .
It 's more ideological than practical , but it turns out it 's an easy question .
We can know the answer to this question .
We can just run an experiment .
And many experiments have been run , and they all have the same results , so I 'm just going to talk to you about one .
And this one that was in Kenya , they went around and distributed to people vouchers , discount vouchers .
So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy .
And some people get 100 percent discount , and some people get 20 percent discounts , and some people get 50 percent discount , etc .
And now we can see what happens .
So , how about the purchasing ?
Well , what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets , the coverage rate really falls down a lot .
So even with partial subsidy , three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net , and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets , you lose the health immunity , that 's not great .
Second thing is , how about the use ?
Well , the good news is , people , if they have the bed nets , will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it .
If they get it for free , they use it .
If they have to pay for it , they use it .
How about the long term ?
In the long term , people who got the free bed nets , one year later , were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars .
And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn 't get a free one .
So people do not get used to handouts ; they get used to nets .
Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit .
So , that 's for bed nets . So you will think , " That 's great .
You know how to immunize kids , you know how to give bed nets . "
But what politicians need is a range of options .
They need to know : Out of all the things I could do , what is the best way to achieve my goals ?
So suppose your goal is to get kids into school .
There are so many things you could do . You could pay for uniforms , you could eliminate fees , you could build latrines , you could give girls sanitary pads , etc . , etc .
So what 's the best ?
Well , at some level , we think all of these things should work .
So , is that sufficient ? If we think they should work intuitively , should we go for them ?
Well , in business , that 's certainly not the way we would go about it .
Consider for example transporting goods .
Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution , goods used to go on horse carts .
And then canals were built , and with the same horseman and the same horse , you could carry ten times as much cargo .
So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts , on the ground , that they would eventually get there ?
Well , if that had been the case , there would have been no Industrial Revolution .
So why shouldn 't we do the same with social policy ?
In technology , we spend so much time experimenting , fine-tuning , getting the absolute cheapest way to do something , so why aren 't we doing that with social policy ?
Well , with experiments , what you can do is answer a simple question .
Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions .
How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars ?
Now I 'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions .
So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects , hire teachers , school meals , school uniforms , scholarships .
And that 's not bad . For your hundred dollars , you get between one and three extra years of education .
Things that don 't work so well is bribing parents , just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money .
And here are the most surprising results .
Tell people the benefits of education , that 's very cheap to do .
So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that , you get 40 extra years of education .
And , in places where there are worms , intestinal worms , cure the kids of their worms .
And for every hundred dollars , you get almost 30 extra years of education .
So this is not your intuition , this is not what people would have gone for , and yet , these are the programs that work .
We need that kind of information , we need more of it , and then we need to guide policy .
So now , I started from the big problem , and I couldn 't answer it .
And I cut it into smaller questions , and I have the answer to these smaller questions .
And they are good , scientific , robust answers .
So let 's go back to Haiti for a moment .
In Haiti , about 200,000 people died -- actually , a bit more by the latest estimate .
And the response of the world was great : Two billion dollars got pledged just last month , so that 's about 10,000 dollars per death .
That doesn 't sound like that much when you think about it .
But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies , that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem .
And yet it doesn 't happen .
So , why is that ?
Well , I think what part of the problem is that , in Haiti , although the problem is huge , somehow we understand it , it 's localized .
You give your money to Doctors Without Borders , you give your money to Partners In Health , and they 'll send in the doctors , and they 'll send in the lumber , and they 'll helicopter things out and in .
And the problem of poverty is not like that .
So , first , it 's mostly invisible ; second , it 's huge ; and third , we don 't know whether we are doing the right thing .
There 's no silver bullet .
You cannot helicopter people out of poverty .
And that 's very frustrating .
But look what we just did today .
I gave you three simple answers to three questions : Give lentils to immunize people , provide free bed nets , deworm children .
With immunization or bed nets , you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved .
With deworming , you can get an extra year of education for three dollars .
So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet , but we can get started .
And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective .
Here 's an example of how this can be powerful .
Deworming .
Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines .
They are not beautiful and don 't kill anybody .
And yet , when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you , they started Deworm the World .
And thanks to Deworm the World , and the effort of many country governments and foundations , 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009 .
So this evidence is powerful .
It can prompt action .
So we should get started now .
It 's not going to be easy .
It 's a very slow process .
You have to keep experimenting , and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality .
And sometimes what works somewhere doesn 't work elsewhere .
So it 's a slow process , but there is no other way .
These economics I 'm proposing , it 's like 20th century medicine .
It 's a slow , deliberative process of discovery .
There is no miracle cure , but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year , and we can do the same thing .
And now , maybe , we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning .
I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference , but can we come back here in 30 years and say , " What we have done , it really prompted a change for the better . "
I believe we can and I hope we will .
Thank you .
Parag Khanna : Mapping the future of countries
Many people think the lines on the map no longer matter , but Parag Khanna says they do . Using maps of the past and present , he explains the root causes of border conflicts worldwide and proposes simple yet cunning solutions for each .
Do we live in a borderless world ?
Before you answer that , have a look at this map .
Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today .
That 's probably more than at any time in centuries .
Now , many of you will object .
For you this would be a more appropriate map .
You could call it TEDistan .
In TEDistan , there are no borders , just connected spaces and unconnected spaces .
Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen , of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy .
But let 's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born .
For them , nations , countries , boundaries , borders still matter a great deal , and often violently .
Now here at TED , we 're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe .
Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved : our basic political geography .
How do we distribute ourselves around the world ?
Now this is important , because border conflicts justify so much of the world 's military-industrial complex .
Border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here .
So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people , money , power , religion , culture , technology interact to change the map of the world .
And we can try to anticipate those changes , and shape them in a more constructive direction .
So we 're going to look at some maps of the past , the present and some maps you haven 't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going .
Let 's start with the world of 1945 .
1945 there were just 100 countries in the world .
After World War II , Europe was devastated , but still held large overseas colonies : French West Africa , British East Africa , South Asia , and so forth .
Then over the late ' 40s , ' 50s , ' 60s , ' 70s and ' 80s , waves of decolonization took place .
Over 50 new countries were born .
You can see that Africa has been fragmented .
India , Pakistan , Bangladesh , South East Asian nations created .
Then came the end of the Cold War .
The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union .
You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe , the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans , and the ' stans of central Asia .
Today we have 200 countries in the world .
The entire planet is covered by sovereign , independent nation-states .
Does that mean that someone 's gain has to be someone else 's loss ?
Let 's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world , Eastern Eurasia .
As you can see on this map , Russia is still the largest country in the world .
And as you know , China is the most populous .
And they share a lengthy land border .
What you don 't see on this map is that most of Russia 's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe .
And only 30 million people are in its eastern areas .
In fact , the World Bank predicts that Russia 's population is declining towards about 120 million people And there is another thing that you don 't see on this map .
Stalin , Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags , labor camps , nuclear cities , whatever the case was .
But as oil prices rose , Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country , east and west .
But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia 's demographic distribution , because the people in the east , who never wanted to be there anyway , have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west .
As a result , in the Russian far east today , which is twice the size of India , you have exactly six million Russians .
So let 's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world .
We can start with Mongolia , or as some call it , Mine-golia .
Why do they call it that ?
Because in Mine-golia , Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines -- copper , zinc , gold -- and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China .
China isn 't conquering Mongolia .
It 's buying it .
Colonies were once conquered . Today countries are bought .
So let 's apply this principle to Siberia .
Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold , desolate , unlivable place .
But in fact , with global warming and rising temperatures , all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness , and grain being produced in Siberia .
But who is it going to feed ?
Well , just on the other side of the Amo River , in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China , you have over 100 million people .
That 's larger than the entire population of Russia .
Every single year , for at least a decade or more , [ 60,000 ] of them have been voting with their feet , crossing , moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain .
They set up their own bazaars and medical clinics .
They 've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east , back into China .
Again , like Mongolia , China isn 't conquering Russia . It 's just leasing it .
That 's what I call globalization Chinese style .
Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years .
But hold on . This map is 700 years old .
This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty , led by Kublai Khan , the grandson of Genghis Khan .
So history doesn 't necessarily repeat itself , but it does rhyme .
This is just to give you a taste of what 's happening in this part of the world .
Again , globalization Chinese style .
Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography .
So , the history of East Asia in fact , people don 't think about nations and borders .
They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies , usually Chinese or Japanese .
Well it 's China 's turn again .
So let 's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East .
It starts with the global hubs .
Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy ?
East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world .
Tokyo , Seoul , Beijing , Shanghai , Hong Kong , Singapore and Sidney .
These are the filters and funnels of global capital .
Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region , so much of it being invested into China .
Then there is trade .
These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region .
Specifically , it targets Japan and Korea and Australia , countries that are strong allies of the United States .
Australia , for example , is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to China .
For poorer countries , China reduces tariffs so that Laos and Cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to China as well .
And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound , the economic rebound , not just in Asia , but potentially for the world .
The Asian free trade zone , almost free trade zone , that 's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific .
So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region .
Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy .
China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region .
It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community .
Some of these organizations don 't even have the United States as a member .
There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries , such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States , most countries vow to just sit it out , including American allies like Korea and Australia .
Another pillar of the strategy , like Russia , is demographic .
China exports business people , nannies , students , teachers to teach Chinese around the region , to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies .
Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia , Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there .
Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result .
Singapore , for example , used to ban Chinese language education .
Now it encourages it .
If you add it all up what do you get ?
Well , if you remember before World War II , Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere .
What 's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere .
So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders , what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures , but in a much more fluid , imperial zone .
All of this is happening without firing a shot .
That 's most certainly not the case in the Middle East where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by European colonialists .
So what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world ?
What lines on the map should we focus on ?
What I want to present to you is what I call state building , day by day .
Let 's start with Iraq .
Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq , the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality .
Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together ; now it is the most significant cause of the country 's disintegration .
The reason is Kurdistan .
The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence , and now is their chance to finally have it .
These are pipeline routes , which emerge from Kurdistan , which is an oil-rich region .
And today , if you go to Kurdistan , you 'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army .
But what are they guarding ?
Is it really a border on the map ?
No . It 's the pipelines .
If the Kurds can control their pipelines , they can set the terms of their own statehood .
Now should we be upset about this , about the potential disintegration of Iraq ?
I don 't believe we should .
Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world , behind Saudi Arabia .
And we 'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute .
Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked .
It has no choice but to behave .
In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria , and other countries , and Iraq itself .
And therefore it has to have amicable relations with them .
Now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region .
That is , of course , in Palestine .
Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it 's two parts Palestinian , one part Israel .
30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict .
What might ? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure .
Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this .
These two arrows are an arc , an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza .
If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank , you can have a viable Palestinian state , Palestinian economy .
That , I believe , is going to bring peace to this particular conflict .
The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone , without infrastructure , is futile .
Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders , when the insecurities might abate ?
The last time that was the case was actually a century ago , during the Ottoman Empire .
This is the Hejaz Railway .
The Hejaz Railway ran from Istanbul to Medina via Damascus .
It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel , on the Mediterranean Sea .
But today the Hejaz Railway lies in tatters , ruins .
If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map , infrastructure , that cross the straight lines , the borders , I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region .
Now let 's look at another part of the world , the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia , the ' stans .
These countries ' borders originate from Stalin 's decrees .
He purposely did not want these countries to make sense .
He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule .
Fortunately for them , most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the Soviet Union collapsed .
Now I know some of you may be thinking , " Oil , oil , oil .
Why is it all he 's talking about is oil ? "
Well , there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we 're talking about it now .
Before it was , how do we control their oil ?
Now it 's their oil for their own purposes .
And I assure you it 's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists .
Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades .
A great deal of them .
For a number of countries in this part of the world , having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves .
Just take Azerbaijan .
Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses , but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey , it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west .
Then there is Turkmenistan , which most people think of as a frozen basket case .
But now it 's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe , and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well .
Then there is Kazakhstan , which didn 't even have a name before .
It was more considered South Siberia during the Soviet Union .
Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player . Why ?
Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian , north through Russia , and even east to China .
More pipelines means more silk roads , instead of the Great Game .
The Great Game connotes dominance of one over the other .
Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust .
The more pipelines we have , the more silk roads we 'll have , and the less of a dominant Great Game competition we 'll have in the 21st century .
Now let 's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders , and how that has enhanced its strength .
And that is , of course , Europe .
The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries , and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way .
But then eventually it grew into 12 countries , and those are the 12 stars on the European flag .
The E.U. also became a currency block , and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world .
On average , the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War .
In fact most of that happened on just one day .
In 2004 , 15 new countries joined the E.U.
and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people .
So what is next ? What is the future of the European Union ?
Well in light blue , you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment .
What does that tell us ? Trade and investment tell us that Europe is putting its money where its mouth is .
Even if these regions aren 't part of the E.U. , they are becoming part of its sphere of influence .
Just take the Balkans . Croatia , Serbia Bosnia , they 're not members of the E.U. yet .
But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania .
In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already , and that 's the only currency they 're probably ever going to have .
So , looking at other parts of Europe 's periphery , such as North Africa .
On average , every year or two , a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean , connecting North Africa to Europe .
That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy , but if you travel to North Africa today , you 'll hear more and more people saying that they don 't really think of their region as the Middle East .
So in other words , I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union .
Now let 's look at Turkey and the Caucasus .
I mentioned Azerbaijan before .
That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe 's energy supply .
So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union ?
I don 't think it does . I think it 's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower .
So what 's next ? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born ?
Well , South Central Asia , South West Asia is a very good place to start .
Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability .
Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism .
This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border .
Let 's not neglect the insurgency just to the south , Balochistan . Two weeks ago , Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison , and this was the flag that they raised over it .
The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating , and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment .
Of course , we can 't forget Africa .
53 countries , and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map .
If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more , tribal divisions and so forth .
But let 's just look at Sudan , the second-largest country in Africa .
It has three ongoing civil wars , the genocide in Darfur , which you all know about , the civil war in the east of the country , and south Sudan .
South Sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence .
Now let 's go up to the Arctic Circle .
There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed .
Who will win ? Canada ? Russia ? The United States ?
Actually Greenland .
Several weeks ago Greenland 's [ 60,000 ] people voted themselves self-governance rights from Denmark .
So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller .
What is the lesson from all of this ?
Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline .
It 's constantly morphing and changing the world , like climate change .
And like our relationship with the ecosystem we 're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet .
Now we fear changes on the map .
We fear civil wars , death tolls , having to learn the names of new countries .
But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent .
The question is how do we change those borders , and what lines do we focus on ?
I believe we focus on the lines that cross borders , the infrastructure lines .
Then we 'll wind up with the world we want , a borderless one .
Thank you .
Elizabeth Lesser : Take " the Other " to lunch
There 's an angry divisive tension in the air that threatens to make modern politics impossible . Elizabeth Lesser explores the two sides of human nature within us that can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other . She shares a simple way to begin real dialogue -- by going to lunch with someone who doesn 't agree with you , and asking them three questions to find out what 's really in their hearts .
This room may appear to be holding 600 people , but there 's actually so many more , because in each one of us there is a multitude of personalities .
I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl .
I call them " the mystic " and " the warrior . "
I was born into a family of politically active , intellectual atheists .
There was this equation in my family that went something like this : if you are intelligent , you therefore are not spiritual .
I was the freak of the family .
I was this weird little kid who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist beyond the ones that we perceive with our senses .
I wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality .
So , looking for answers , I went to Catholic mass .
I tagged along with my neighbors .
I read Sartre and Socrates .
And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school : Gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America .
And I said to myself , " I wanna get me one of them . "
And ever since , I 've been walking the mystic path , trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called " the optical delusion of everyday consciousness . "
So what did he mean by this ? I 'll show you .
Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room .
Now , see this strange , underwater , coral reef-looking thing ?
It 's actually a person 's trachea , and those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now , all around us .
If we 're blind to this simple biology , imagine what we 're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels .
My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions .
They 've made me a proud I-don 't-know-it-all .
Now when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this , the warrior rolls her eyes .
She 's concerned about what 's happening in this world right now .
She 's worried .
She says , " Excuse me , I 'm pissed off , and I know a few things , and we better get busy about them right now . "
I 've spent my life as a warrior , working for women 's issues , working on political campaigns , being an activist for the environment .
And it can be sort of crazy-making , housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body .
I 've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off , who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic -- people like Martin Luther King , Jr . , who wrote , " I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be .
This , " he wrote , " is the interrelated structure of reality . "
Then Mother Teresa , another mystic warrior , who said , " The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small . "
And Nelson Mandela , who lives by the African concept of " ubuntu , " which means " I need you in order to be me , and you need me in order to be you . "
Now we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with the saint gene .
But we all actually have the same capacity that they do , and we need to do their work now .
I 'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing " the Other " by the voice we 're giving to the most divisive among us .
Listen to these titles of some of the bestselling books from both sides of the political divide here in the U.S.
" Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder , " " Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot , " " Pinheads and Patriots , " " Arguing With Idiots . "
They 're supposedly tongue-in-cheek , but they 're actually dangerous .
Now here 's a title that may sound familiar , but whose author may surprise you : " Four-and-a-Half-Years of Struggle Against Lies , Stupidity and Cowardice . "
Who wrote that ?
That was Adolf Hitler 's first title for " Mein Kampf " -- " My Struggle " -- the book that launched the Nazi party .
The worst eras in human history , whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda , they start like this , with negative other-izing .
And then they morph into violent extremism .
This is why I 'm launching a new initiative .
And it 's to help all of us , myself included , to counteract the tendency to " otherize . "
And I realize we 're all busy people , so don 't worry , you can do this on a lunch break .
I 'm calling my initiative , " Take the Other to Lunch . "
If you are a Republican , you can take a Democrat to lunch , or if you 're a Democrat , think of it as taking a Republican to lunch .
makes you lose your appetite , I suggest you start more local , because there is no shortage of the Other right in your own neighborhood .
Maybe that person who worships at the mosque , or the church or the synagogue , down the street .
Or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict .
Or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn 't believe in global warming .
Anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you , or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears .
A couple of weeks ago , I took a Conservative Tea Party woman to lunch .
Now on paper , she passed my smoking ears test .
She 's an activist from the Right , and I 'm an activist from the Left .
And we used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated , and you can use them too , because I know you 're all going to take an Other to lunch .
So first of all , decide on a goal : to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped .
And then , before you get together , agree on some ground rules .
My Tea Party lunchmate and I came up with these : don 't persuade , defend or interrupt .
Be curious ; be conversational ; be real .
And listen .
From there , we dove in .
And we used these questions : Share some of your life experiences with me .
What issues deeply concern you ?
And what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side ?
My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights , and I 'm going to share just one with you .
I think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere .
I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side .
" What ? " she wanted to know .
" Like we 're a bunch of elitist , morally-corrupt terrorist-lovers . "
Well , she was shocked .
She thought my side beat up on her side way more often , that we called them brainless , gun-toting racists , and we both marveled at the labels that fit none of the people we actually know .
And since we had established some trust , we believed in each other 's sincerity .
We agreed we 'd speak up in our own communities when we witnessed the kind of " otherizing " talk that can wound and fester into paranoia and then be used by those on the fringes to incite .
By the end of our lunch , we acknowledged each other 's openness .
Neither of us had tried to change the other .
But we also hadn 't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch .
Instead , we had taken first steps together , past our knee-jerk reactions , to the ubuntu place , which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found .
Who should you invite to lunch ?
Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing , that will be your clue .
And what might happen at your lunch ?
Will the heavens open and " We Are the World " play over the restaurant sound system ?
Probably not .
Because ubuntu work is slow , and it 's difficult .
It 's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls .
It 's two people , two warriors , dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other .
Here 's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it : " Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing , there is a field .
I 'll meet you there . "
Alwar Balasubramaniam : Art of substance and absence
Alwar Balasubramaniam 's sculpture plays with time , shape , shadow , perspective : four tricky sensations that can reveal -- or conceal -- what 's really out there . At TEDIndia , the artist shows slides of his extraordinary installations .
The moment I say " school , " so many memories come back to me .
It 's like after every exam , when I walk out , the teacher would say , " Hey , come .
How did you do ? "
I would say with a great smile , " I will definitely pass . "
And I didn 't understand why , in one hand they say , " Speak the truth , " in the other hand , when you say the truth , they hated you .
So it went on like that , and I didn 't know where else to find myself .
So I remember those nights with asking help from [ the ] Unknown because , for some reason , I couldn 't believe what my father and mother hanged in the Puja room as a god , because my friend 's family had something else as a god .
So I thought , " I guess I 'll pray to [ the ] Unknown and ask help , " and started getting help from everywhere , each and every corner of my life at that time .
My brothers started giving me a few tips about drawing and painting .
Then , when I was in eighth standard around 13 years old , I started working in a part-time job in one of the signboard artists called Putu .
And then school also started supporting me .
" Oh , he 's bad at studies , but let him send to the drawing competitions . "
So it was good to survive with that little tool that I found to find my own place in school .
And one of those competitions , I just won a small , little transistor Philips radio .
And I didn 't have the patience to wait until I reached home .
So I just switched on in the train , loudly .
If you travel in Indian trains , you can see people listening to radio and , you know , even from their mobiles .
So at that time -- and I was 13 -- and I was listening to just radio , and someone happened to sit next to me , like these three people are sitting here .
You know , like just adjacent to me .
He just started asking , " Where did you buy the radio ? How much is it ? "
I said , " It 's a prize from [ an ] art competition . "
And he said , " Oh , I teach at a college of arts .
I think you should study in a school of art .
You just quit school and come there . "
So , why I 'm telling you this , you know , maybe , you know , whoever is sitting next to you can change your whole life -- it 's possible .
It is that we need we need to be open and fine-tuned .
So that 's what made me enter [ the ] college of arts after three attempts and just continue to inquire what I really want to do with art work , or art and finally I 'm here in front of you .
When I look back , you know , on what happened between that time and now here -- the last 10 / 15 years -- I can see that most of the works revolve around three subjects , but it was not intentional .
And I just start out with a trace because I was thinking , " What really makes us ? " -- you know , it 's actually [ the ] past , what makes a person .
So I was thinking , but when you look at the past , the way to understand the past is only by the traces available , because we cannot go back [ to ] the past .
It can be ruins , or it can be music , or it can be painting or drawing or writing , whatever it is .
But it is just a kind of trace of that time .
And that fascinated me , to explore that territory .
So I was working on the line , but instead of working about traces , I started capturing traces .
So here are some of the works I would like to show you .
So this is called " Self In Progress . "
It 's just a trace of being in this body .
So here , what happened then , you know -- what I really enjoyed the most is that this sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself .
It 's almost like a 3D photograph .
So there is an element of performance , and there is an element of sculpture , and there is an element of feeling one 's self , so close to one 's self .
So it 's almost like fossils for the future .
And then moved slowly to explore the other possibilities of capturing traces .
So this is what I was talking about , while molding , it 's such a great experience , because we have freedom of like walking , or moving my hand or , moving around in the space , but the moment this becomes solid , when you cannot move even an inch , because this is plaster of Paris , so the moment you pour it it 's like liquid ; but after 20 minutes , it 's almost like a hard stone .
So this is capturing the trace of a thumbprint because , knowingly or unknowingly , whatever we do , you know , we leave our traces here .
So I just thought , " I 'm going to capture thumbprint , footprint , or whatever traces we leave as humans . "
This is the trace of fire , this is the trace of sun .
Because when I was capturing traces , you know , this thought comes to me always : is it , only when the object touches the thing and it leaves the trace , or is there other ways to capture it ? "
So this work is nothing but like -- because of the focal length of the lens , it just shows what is on the other side .
So I just put the paper on the focal length , which was an etching print , then I got the portrait of [ the ] sun from sunlight .
This is called " Dawn to Dawn . "
What I did here , I just put like 10 feet [ of ] paper then put a coconut rope , and just burnt it .
So it took about 24 hours to get this line .
So wherever the fire is eating the paper , that 's what becomes the work -- detail .
Even though we have traces when we try to understand them , the perception and context play a major role to understand it .
So do we really understand what it is , or are we trying to get what we think it is ?
Then move towards questioning the perception because , even though there are traces , when you try to understand them , you know you play a major role .
So like let 's say even a simple act .
How many of you saw a cow crossing in India while you were coming from Bangalore to Mysore ?
Can you just raise the hand ?
If you just ask an opinion of how , everyone can interpret it .
Like , let 's say , if a schoolteacher says , she 'll simply say , " To get to the other side . "
Why the cow was crossing the road , you know .
The answer can be so different if Potter said it .
He would say , " For the greater good . "
Martin Luther King would say , " I imagine a world where all cows will be free to cross the road , without having their motives called into question . "
Imagine Moses comes now , and he sees the same cow walking around the street .
He would definitely say , " God came down from heaven , and he said unto the cow , ' Thou shalt cross the road . ' And cow crossed the road , and there was much rejoicing as a holy cow . "
Freud would say , " The fact that you 're at all concerned reveals your underlying sexual insecurity . "
If we ask Einstein , he would say , " Whether the cow crossed the road , or the road moved underneath the cow , depends on your frame of reference . "
Or Buddha -- if he saw the same cow , he would say , " Asking this question denies your own nature [ as a ] cow . "
So , what we see is just what we think often , and most of the time , we don 't see what it is .
It just all depends on one 's perception .
And context , what is really context ?
You know , I could just show you this little piece of paper .
Because I always think meaning doesn 't really exist .
The meaning of what we create in this world doesn 't exist .
It 's just created by the mind .
If you look at this piece of paper , this is the breadth and this is called length .
This is how we 've been taught in school .
But if you tear it in the middle -- now , I didn 't touch this breadth , but still , the meaning of this changes .
So what we conceive as a meaning is always not there ; it 's on the other side , even when we say dark , light , good , bad , tall , short -- all meaning it doesn 't exist in reality .
It 's just that being a human , the way we train to perceive the reality creates this meaning .
So this work from this period is mostly like -- you know , this is a work called " Light Makes Dark . "
It 's just captured through from the lamp .
So the lamp is not just giving a light , it 's also giving a darkness .
So this is a work of art , which is just trying to explore that .
This is called " Limit Out . "
This shows how limited our eye or hearing sense or touch -- do we really see ?
This is an exact negative .
It 's about six inches deep in the wall , but it just appears like it 's coming out of the wall .
You know the wall is almost like -- this is the first skin , and this is the second , and there 's a third , and each creates a meaning .
And we 're just pulling the wall off the gallery .
Again , " Inward Out . "
It 's a full-figure cast from myself .
It 's about eight inches deep .
When I was doing that , I always wondered since I 've worked with creators -- and now you know , I 've moved to questioning the perception -- whenever I see the bird flying in the sky , it just makes me feel like : is there anything behind , are there any traces up there , which as a human , we don 't see them ?
Is there any way to capture the thought into visual art ?
I couldn 't find it .
But a solution arrived after being quiet and not working for about six , seven months , in the restroom , when I was changing the air freshener that goes from solid substance to vapor .
It 's called Odonil .
This is the work I made out of that material .
The process to get to make the sculpture was interesting , because I wrote to Balsara , who produces that air freshener called Odonil , saying , " Dear Sir , I am an artist . This is my catalogue .
Will you help me to make this sculpture ? "
They never wrote back to me .
Then I thought , " I will go to the Small Scale Industries Facilitating Unit and ask help . "
So I told them , " I 'd like to start an air freshener company . "
They said , " Of course .
This is the fee for the project report , and we will give you all the details , " and they gave .
Finally , I went back to them and said , " It 's not for starting the company , it 's just to make my own work .
Please come for the show . "
And they did .
And this work is in the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi .
In India , nobody really talks about works of art ; they always talk about the appreciation of art .
You buy this for 3,000 rupees , it 'll become 30,000 in two months .
This is the craft that was going on , but there are a few collectors who also collect art which can depreciate .
And this was collected by Anapum -- which is like , finally in the end , he will not have anything , because it will evaporate .
So this is after a few weeks , this is after a few months .
It 's just all about questioning the preconceptions .
So if someone says , " Oh , I see the portrait , " it may not be the portrait after a few months .
And if they say it 's solid , it will not be solid , it will evaporate .
And if they say they don 't get it , that 's also not true , because it 's in the air .
It 's in the same gallery or in the same museum .
So they inhaled it , but they are not aware of it .
While I was doing that work , my mom and my dad , they were looking at it and they said , " Why do you deal with negative subjects all the time ? "
And I was like , " What do you mean ? "
" Light makes dark and now evaporating self .
Don 't you think it remained something about death , " they said .
" Of course not . For me , " I 'm thinking , " this is tucked in some small solid , but the moment it evaporates , it 's merged with the whole . "
But she said , " No . Still , I don 't like it .
Can you make something from nothing as a sculptor ? "
I said , " No , mom . It can 't be .
Because we can create a sculpture by gathering dust together , or we can break the sculpture and get the dust , but there is nowhere that we can bring dust into the universe . "
So , I did this work for her .
It 's called " Emerging Angel . "
This is the first day -- it just gives the appearance that one is becoming the other .
So , the same sculpture after a few days .
This is after 15 / 20 days .
Through that small little slit between the glass box and the wood , the air goes underneath the sculpture and creates the other one .
This gave me a greater faith .
That evaporating sculpture gave me a greater faith that maybe there is many more possibilities to capture [ the ] invisible .
So what you see now is called " Shadow Foreshadow . "
And what I 'd like to tell you is we don 't see shadow , and we don 't see light too ; we see the source of the light .
We see where it 's bouncing , but we don 't see [ them ] as they exist .
You know , that 's why the night sky , we see the sky as dark , but it 's filled with light all the time .
When it 's bounced on the moon , we see it .
The same thing in the darkroom .
The little dust particle will again , reflect the light , and we realize the existence of light .
So we don 't see dark , we don 't see light , we don 't see gravity , we don 't see electricity .
So , I just started doing this work to inquire further about how to sculpt the space between this object and there .
Because , as a visual artist , if I 'm seeing this and I 'm seeing that -- but how to sculpt this , you know ?
If we sculpt this , this has two reference points .
The skin of this is also representing this .
And skin at the other end also represents the floor .
I did this as an experiment of casting the shadow .
So this is a corrugated box and its shadow .
Then the second one -- the moment you bring any invisible into the visible world it will have all the characteristics of the visible existence .
So that produced a shadow .
Then I thought , okay , let me sculpt that .
Then , again , that becomes an object .
Again , throwing light , then the third one .
So what you see is nothing but shadow of a shadow of a shadow .
And then again , at that point , there is no shadow .
I thought , " Oh , good . Work is finished . "
You can see the detail .
This is called " Gravity . "
It 's called " Breath . " It 's just two holes on the gallery wall .
It 's a false wall , which contains like 110 cubic feet .
So that hole actually makes the air come out and go in .
So where it 's happening , we can see , but what is happening will remain invisible only .
This is from the show called " Invisible , " at Talwar Gallery .
This is called " Kaayam . "
Detail .
And what I 'd like to tell you , our senses are so limited -- we cannot hear everything , we cannot see everything .
We don 't feel , " I am touching the air , " but if the breeze is a little more faster , then I can feel it .
So all of our construction of reality is through these limited senses .
So my recourse was like , is there any way to use all this as just a symbol or a sign ?
And to really get to the point , we should move beyond , you know , go to the other side of the wall , like in logic , like are invisible .
Because when we see someone walks , we see the footprint .
But if we 're just cutting that footprint from the whole thing and trying to analyze it , you will miss the point because the actual journey happens between those footprints , and the footprints are nothing but passing time .
Thank you .
Bandi Mbubi : Demand a fair trade cell phone
Your mobile phone , computer and game console have a bloody past — tied to tantalum mining , which funds the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . Drawing on his personal story , activist and refugee Bandi Mbubi gives a stirring call to action .
I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me , and closer than you might realize to you .
I came to the U.K. 21 years ago as an asylum-seeker .
I was 21 .
I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo , my home , where I was a student activist .
I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo .
But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you .
But first of all , I want you to do me a favor .
Can you all please reach into your pockets and take out your mobile phone ?
Feel that familiar weight , how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons .
Can you imagine your world without it ?
It connects us to our loved ones , our family , friends and colleagues , at home and overseas .
It is a symbol of an interconnected world .
But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail , and it all boils down to a mineral : tantalum , mined in the Congo as coltan .
It is an anticorrosive heat conductor .
It stores energy in our mobile phones , Playstations and laptops .
It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as alloys .
It is so powerful that we only need tiny amounts .
It would be great if the story ended there .
Unfortunately , what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion , but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering .
Since 1996 , over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo .
Countless women , men and children have been raped , tortured or enslaved .
Rape is used as a weapon of war , instilling fear and depopulating whole areas .
The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided , but it has fueled , the ongoing war in the Congo .
But don 't throw away your phones yet .
Thirty thousand children are enlisted and are made to fight in armed groups .
The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings .
But remarkably , the U.N. Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars .
The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed , and control over mines has splintered .
Coltan is easily controlled by armed groups .
One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda , where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan .
But don 't throw away your phones yet , because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable , devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention .
We only know so much about the situation in the Congo and in the mines because of the kind of communication the mobile phone allows .
As with the Arab Spring , during the recent elections in the Congo , voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital , Kinshasa , and in the wake of the result , the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center , the Catholic Church and other observers to draw attention to the undemocratic result .
The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom .
It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet .
It has allowed momentous political change to take place .
So we are faced with a paradox .
The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression .
TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us , technology in its finished form .
It is time to be asking questions about technology .
Where does it come from ?
Who makes it ?
And for what ?
Here I am speaking directly to you , the TED community , and to all those who might be watching on a screen , on your phone , across the world , in the Congo .
All the technology is in place for us to communicate , and all the technology is in place to communicate this .
At the moment , there is no clear fair trade solution , but there has been a huge amount of progress .
The U.S. has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo .
Recent U.K. legislation could be used in the same way .
In February , Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo , and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone .
There are campaigns spreading across university campuses to make their colleges conflict-free .
But we 're not there yet .
We need to continue mounting pressure on phone companies to change their sourcing processes .
When I first came to the U.K. 21 years ago , I was homesick .
I missed my family and the friends I left behind .
Communication was extremely difficult .
Sending and receiving letters took months , if you were lucky . Often they never arrived .
Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home , like most people in the Congo , my parents did not own a phone line .
Today , my two sons David and Daniel can talk to my parents and get to know them .
Why should we allow such a wonderful , brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings ?
We demand fair trade food and fair trade clothes .
It is time to demand fair trade phones .
This is an idea worth spreading . Thank you .
Kathryn Schulz : Don 't regret regret
We 're taught to try to live life without regret . But why ? Using her own tattoo as an example , Kathryn Schulz makes a powerful and moving case for embracing our regrets .
So that 's Johnny Depp , of course .
And that 's Johnny Depp 's shoulder .
And that 's Johnny Depp 's famous shoulder tattoo .
Some of you might know that , in 1990 , Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder , and he had tattooed on his right shoulder " Winona forever . "
And then three years later -- which in fairness , kind of is forever by Hollywood standards -- they broke up , and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done .
And now his shoulder says , " Wino forever . "
So like Johnny Depp , and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50 , I have a tattoo .
I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s , but I deliberately waited a really long time .
Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30 .
That didn 't happen to me .
I got my tattoo when I was 29 , and I regretted it instantly .
And by " regretted it , " I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place -- this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side -- and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street .
Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares .
And then I went home that night , and I had an even larger emotional meltdown , which I 'll say more about in a minute .
And this was all actually quite shocking to me , because prior to this moment , I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets .
I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions , of course .
I do that hourly .
But I had always felt like , look , you know , I made the best choice I could make given who I was then , given the information I had on hand .
I learned a lesson from it .
It somehow got me to where I am in life right now .
And okay , I wouldn 't change it .
In other words , I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret , which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time , that we should always look forward and not backward , and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets .
This idea is nicely captured by this quote : " Things without all remedy should be without regard ; what 's done is done . "
And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first -- something we might all agree to sign onto ...
until I tell you who said it .
Right , so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people .
And as it happens , Shakespeare was onto something here , as he generally was .
Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths .
It 's also , by the way , a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage .
So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions .
So if , in fact , you want to live a life free of regret , there is an option open to you .
It 's called a lobotomy .
But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane , I think you need to learn to live , not without regret , but with it .
So let 's start off by defining some terms .
What is regret ?
Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past .
So in other words , regret requires two things .
It requires , first of all , agency -- we had to make a decision in the first place .
And second of all , it requires imagination .
We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice , and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present .
And in fact , the more we have of either of these things -- the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret , the more acute that regret will be .
So let 's say for instance that you 're on your way to your best friend 's wedding and you 're trying to get to the airport and you 're stuck in terrible traffic , and you finally arrive at your gate and you 've missed your flight .
You 're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20 .
Why ?
Well because , if you miss your flight by three minutes , it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome .
" I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel .
I should have gone through that yellow light . "
These are the classic conditions that create regret .
We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly , but almost came out well .
Now within that framework , we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things .
This session today is about behavioral economics .
And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain .
We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them -- buyer 's remorse , basically .
But then finally , it occurred to some researchers to step back and say , well okay , but overall , what do we regret most in life ?
Here 's what the answers turn out to look like .
So top six regrets -- the things we regret most in life : Number one by far , education .
33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education .
We wish we 'd gotten more of it .
We wish we 'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have .
We wish we 'd chosen to study a different topic .
Others very high on our list of regrets include career , romance , parenting , various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time -- or actually more specifically , how we fail to spend our leisure time .
The remaining regrets pertain to these things : finance , family issues unrelated to romance or parenting , health , friends , spirituality and community .
So in other words , we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance .
But it turns out , when you look overall at what people regret in life , you know what , our financial decisions don 't even rank .
They account for less than three percent of our total regrets .
So if you 're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap , or company A versus company B , or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius , you know what , let it go .
Odds are , you 're not going to care in five years .
But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around , what does that experience feel like ?
We all know the short answer .
It feels terrible . Regret feels awful .
But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways .
So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial .
When I went home that night after getting my tattoo , I basically stayed up all night .
And for the first several hours , there was exactly one thought in my head .
And the thought was , " Make it go away ! "
This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response .
I mean , it 's right up there with , " I want my mommy ! "
We 're not trying to solve the problem .
We 're not trying to understand how the problem came about .
We just want it to vanish .
The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment .
So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was , " How could I have done that ?
What was I thinking ? "
This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret .
We can 't identify with that part .
We don 't understand that part .
And we certainly don 't have any empathy for that part -- which explains the third consistent component of regret , which is an intense desire to punish ourselves .
That 's why , in the face of our regret , the thing we consistently say is , " I could have kicked myself . "
The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative .
To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing .
Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop .
So it 's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night , thinking , " Make it go away . "
It 's that I sat there and I thought , " Make it go away . Make it go away .
Make it go away . Make it go away . "
So if you look at the psychological literature , these are the four consistent defining components of regret .
But I want to suggest that there 's also a fifth one .
And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call .
That night in my apartment , after I got done kicking myself and so forth , I lay in bed for a long time , and I thought about skin grafts .
And then I thought about how , much as travel insurance doesn 't cover acts of God , probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy .
In point of fact , no insurance covers acts of idiocy .
The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured ; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of , frankly , a fairly indifferent universe .
This is obviously an incredibly painful experience .
And I think it 's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture -- Control-Z like the computer command , undo .
We 're incredibly used to not having to face life 's hard realities , in a certain sense .
We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem -- we can undo and unfriend and unfollow .
And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot .
Sometimes instead of Control-Z , we actually have zero control .
And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists -- and I know where of I speak -- this is really hard , because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right .
Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos , and I 'm going to return to that point in a few minutes .
But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we 're feeling regretful about .
So for instance , here 's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life .
Text : Relpy to all .
And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing , we can experience a huge range of regret .
You can accidentally hit " reply all " to an email and torpedo a relationship .
Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work .
Or you can have your last day at work .
And this doesn 't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life .
Because of course , sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences , either for our own or for other people 's health and happiness and livelihoods , and in the very worst case scenario , even their lives .
Now obviously , those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring .
I mean , even the stupid " reply all " regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days .
So how are we supposed to live with this ?
I want to suggest that there 's three things that help us to make our peace with regret .
And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality .
If you Google regret and tattoo , you will get 11.5 million hits .
The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos , 17 percent of us regret getting them .
That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends .
And that 's just regret about tattoos .
We are all in this together .
The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves .
Now in my case , this really wasn 't a problem , because it 's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you 're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don 't like your new tattoo .
But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets .
I don 't think that 's the case though .
All of us who 've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive .
It connects the poles of our lives back together , the positive and the negative , and it sends a little current of life back into us .
The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time , which , as we know , heals all wounds -- except for tattoos , which are permanent .
So it 's been several years since I got my own tattoo .
And do you guys just want to see it ?
All right .
Actually , you know what , I should warn you , you 're going to be disappointed .
Because it 's actually not that hideous .
I didn 't tattoo Marilyn Manson 's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something .
When other people see my tattoo , for the most part they like how it looks .
It 's just that I don 't like how it looks .
And as I said earlier , I 'm a perfectionist .
But I 'll let you see it anyway .
This is my tattoo .
I can guess what some of you are thinking .
So let me reassure you about something .
Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are .
I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling .
And when I came and settled in New York afterward , I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time .
Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn 't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and , simultaneously , how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north .
And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image .
And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device .
Well it did .
But it turns out , it doesn 't remind me of the thing I thought it would ; it reminds me constantly of something else instead .
It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us , which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us .
And ironically , I think it 's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body -- partly as a writer , but also just as a human being .
Here 's the thing , if we have goals and dreams , and we want to do our best , and if we love people and we don 't want to hurt them or lose them , we should feel pain when things go wrong .
The point isn 't to live without any regrets .
The point is to not hate ourselves for having them .
The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this : We need to learn to love the flawed , imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them .
Regret doesn 't remind us that we did badly .
It reminds us that we know we can do better .
Thank you .
Jeff Han : The radical promise of the multi-touch interface
Jeff Han shows off a cheap , scalable multi-touch and pressure-sensitive computer screen interface that may spell the end of point-and-click .
I 'm really , really excited to be here today , because I 'm about to show you some stuff that 's just ready to come out of the lab , literally , and I 'm really glad that you guys are going to be amongst the first to be able to see it in person , because I really , really think this is going to change -- really change -- the way we interact with machines from this point on .
Now , this is a rear-projected drafting table . It 's about 36 inches wide and it 's equipped with a multi-touch sensor . Now , normal touch sensors that you see , like on a kiosk or interactive whiteboards , can only register one point of contact at a time .
This thing allows you to have multiple points at the same time .
They can use both my hands ; I can use chording actions ; I can just go right up and use all 10 fingers if I wanted to .
You know , like that .
Now , multi-touch sensing isn 't completely new .
I mean , people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the ' 80s .
However , the approach I built here is actually high-resolution , low-cost , and probably most importantly , very scalable .
So , the technology , you know , isn 't the most exciting thing here right now , other than probably its newfound accessibility .
What 's really interesting here is what you can do with it and the kind of interfaces you can build on top of it . So let 's see .
So , for instance , we have a lava lamp application here . Now , you can see , I can use both of my hands to kind of squeeze together and put the blobs together . I can inject heat into the system here , or I can pull it apart with two of my fingers .
It 's completely intuitive ; there 's no instruction manual .
The interface just kind of disappears .
This started out as kind of a screensaver app that one of the Ph.D. students in our lab , Ilya Rosenberg , made . But I think its true identity comes out here .
Now what 's great about a multi-touch sensor is that , you know , I could be doing this with as many fingers here , but of course multi-touch also inherently means multi-user .
So Chris could be out here interacting with another part of Lava , while I kind of play around with it here . You can imagine a new kind of sculpting tool , where I 'm kind of warming something up , making it malleable , and then letting it cool down and solidifying in a certain state .
Google should have something like this in their lobby .
I 'll show you something -- a little more of a concrete example here , as this thing loads .
This is a photographer 's light box application .
Again , I can use both of my hands to interact and move photos around .
But what 's even cooler is that if I have two fingers , I can actually grab a photo and then stretch it out like that really easily .
I can pan , zoom and rotate it effortlessly .
I can do that grossly with both of my hands , or I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together .
If I grab the canvas , I can kind of do the same thing -- stretch it out .
I can do it simultaneously , where I 'm holding this down , and gripping on another one , stretching this out like this .
Again , the interface just disappears here .
There 's no manual . This is exactly what you expect , especially if you haven 't interacted with a computer before .
Now , when you have initiatives like the $ 100 laptop , I kind of cringe at the idea that we 're going to introduce a whole new generation of people to computing with this standard mouse-and-windows-pointer interface .
This is something that I think is really the way we should be interacting with machines from this point on .
Now , of course , I can bring up a keyboard .
And I can bring that around , put that up there .
Now , obviously , this is kind of a standard keyboard , but of course I can rescale it to make it work well for my hands .
And that 's really important , because there 's no reason in this day and age that we should be conforming to a physical device .
That leads to bad things , like RSI .
We have so much technology nowadays that these interfaces should start conforming to us .
There 's so little applied now to actually improving the way we interact with interfaces from this point on .
This keyboard is probably actually the really wrong direction to go .
You can imagine , in the future , as we develop this kind of technology , a keyboard that kind of automatically drifts as your hand moves away , and really intelligently anticipates which key you 're trying to stroke with your hands .
So -- again , isn 't this great ?
Audience : Where 's your lab ?
Jeff Han : I 'm a research scientist at NYU in New York .
Here 's an example of another kind of app . I can make these little fuzz balls .
It 'll remember the strokes I 'm making . Of course I can do it with all my hands .
It 's pressure-sensitive , you can notice .
But what 's neat about that is , again , I showed you that two-finger gesture that allows you to zoom in really quickly . Because you don 't have to switch to a hand tool or the magnifying glass tool , you can just continuously make things in real multiple scales , all at the same time .
I can create big things out here , but I can go back and really quickly go back to where I started , and make even smaller things here .
Now this is going to be really important as we start getting to things like data visualization . For instance , I think we all really enjoyed Hans Rosling 's talk , and he really emphasized the fact that I 've been thinking about for a long time too : we have all this great data , but for some reason , it 's just sitting there .
We 're not really accessing it . And one of the reasons why I think that is , is because -- we 'll be helped by things like graphics and visualization and inference tools , but I also think a big part of it is going to be starting to be able to have better interfaces , to be able to drill down into this kind of data , while still thinking about the big picture here .
Let me show you another app here . This is something called WorldWind .
It 's done by NASA . It 's a kind of -- we 've all seen Google Earth ; this is an open-source version of that . There are plug-ins to be able to load in different data sets that NASA 's collected over the years .
But as you can see , I can use the same two-fingered gestures to go down and go in really seamlessly . There 's no interface , again .
It really allows anybody to kind of go in -- and , it just does what you 'd expect , you know ? Again , there 's just no interface here . The interface just disappears .
I can switch to different data views . That 's what 's neat about this app here .
There you go . NASA 's really cool . They have these hyper-spectral images that are false-colored so you can -- it 's really good for determining vegetative use . Well , let 's go back to this .
Now , the great thing about mapping applications -- it 's not really 2D , it 's kind of 3D . So , again , with a multi-point interface , you can do a gesture like this -- so you can be able to tilt around like that , you know . It 's not just simply relegated to a kind of 2D panning and motion .
Now , this gesture that we 've developed , again , is just putting two fingers down -- it 's defining an axis of tilt -- and I can tilt up and down that way .
That 's something we just came up with on the spot , you know ; it 's probably not the right thing to do , but there 's such interesting things you can do with this kind of interface .
It 's just so much fun playing around with too .
And so the last thing I want to show you is -- you know , I 'm sure we can all think of a lot of entertainment apps that you can do with this thing .
I 'm a little more interested in the kind of creative applications we can do with this .
Now , here 's a simple application here -- I can draw out a curve .
And when I close it , it becomes a character .
But the neat thing about it is I can add control points .
And then what I can do is manipulate them with both of my fingers at the same time .
And you notice what it does .
It 's kind of a puppeteering thing , where I can use as many fingers as I have to draw and make -- Now , there 's a lot of actual math going on under here for this to control this mesh and do the right thing .
I mean , this technique of being able to manipulate a mesh here , with multiple control points , is actually something that 's state of the art .
It was just released at Siggraph last year , but it 's a great example of the kind of research I really love : all this compute power to apply to make things do the right things , intuitive things , to do exactly what you expect .
So , multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI .
I 'm not the only one doing it ; there are a lot of other people getting into it .
This kind of technology is going to let even more people get into it , and I 'm really looking forward to interacting with all you guys over the next few days and seeing how it can apply to your respective fields .
Thank you .
James Nachtwey : Moving photos of extreme drug-resistant TB
Photojournalist James Nachtwey sees his TED Prize wish come true , as we share his powerful photographs of XDR-TB , a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis that 's touching off a global medical crisis .
I was a student in the ' 60s , a time of social upheaval and questioning , and -- on a personal level -- an awakening sense of idealism .
The war in Vietnam was raging , the Civil Rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me .
Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another .
I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans .
Their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism .
They not only recorded history -- they helped change the course of history .
Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and , as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience , change became not only possible , but inevitable .
It puts a human face on issues which , from afar , can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact .
What happens at ground level , far from the halls of power , happens to ordinary citizens one by one .
And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view .
It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice .
My TED wish . There 's a vital story that needs to be told and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era .
Thank you very much .
[ 10.3.08 -- The story breaks . ] [ " I have been a witness , and these pictures are my testimony . " ] [ South Africa ] [ This is happening now . ] [ Cambodia ] [ Swaziland ] [ One person dies every 20 seconds . ] [ Thailand ] [ An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form . ] [ Siberia ] [ Lesotho ] [ Tuberculosis : the next pandemic ? ] [ India ] [ TB is preventable and curable , ] [ but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment . ] [ XDR-TB : ] [ extreme drug resistant tuberculosis . ] [ There is no reliable cure . ] [ Patients often die within weeks of diagnosis . ] [ 49 countries have reported XDR-TB . ] [ XDR-TB is a critical threat to global health . ] [ Extreme outbreak , suffering , affliction ] [ Extreme loss , pain , pandemic ] [ Extremely preventable . ] [ XDR-TB . ] [ We can stop this now . ] [ Spread the story . Stop the disease . ] [ Go to XDRTB.org now . ] [ XDRTB.org : we are the treatment . ] [ We are the treatment . ] [ Made possible through the kind support of BD . ]
Toby Eccles : Invest in social change
Here 's a stat worth knowing : In the UK , 63 % of men who finish short-term prison sentences are back inside within a year for another crime . Helping them stay outside involves job training , classes , therapy . And it would pay off handsomely -- but the government can 't find the funds . Toby Eccles shares an imaginative idea for how to change that : the Social Impact Bond . It 's an unusual bond that helps fund initiatives with a social goal through private money -- with the government paying back the investors if the initiatives work .
I 'm here today to talk about social change , not a new therapy or a new intervention or a new way of working with kids or something like that , but a new business model for social change , a new way of tackling the problem .
In Britain , 63 percent of all men who come out of short sentences from prison re-offend again within a year .
Now how many previous offenses do you think they have on average managed to commit ?
Forty-three .
And how many previous times do you think they 've been in prison ?
Seven .
So we went to talk to the Ministry of Justice , and we said to the Ministry of Justice , what 's it worth to you if fewer of these guys re-offend ?
It 's got to be worth something , right ?
I mean , there 's prison costs , there 's police costs , there 's court costs , all these things that you 're spending money on to deal with these guys . What 's it worth ?
Now , of course , we care about the social value .
Social Finance , the organization I helped set up , cares about social stuff .
But we wanted to make the economic case , because if we could make the economic case , then the value of doing this would be completely compelling .
And if we can agree on both a value and a way of measuring whether we 've been successful at reducing that re-offending , then we can do something we think rather interesting .
The idea is called the social impact bond .
Now , the social impact bond is simply saying , if we can get the government to agree , that we can create a contract where they only pay if it worked .
So that means that they can try out new stuff without the embarrassment of having to pay if it didn 't work , which for still quite a lot of bits of government , that 's a serious issue .
Now , many of you may have noticed there 's a problem at this point , and that is that it takes a long time to measure whether those outcomes have happened .
So we have to raise some money .
We use the contract to raise money from socially motivated investors .
Socially motivated investors : there 's an interesting idea , right ?
But actually , there 's a lot of people who , if they 're given the chance , would love to invest in something that does social good .
And here 's the opportunity .
Do you want to also help government find whether there 's a better economic model , not just leaving these guys to come out of prison and waiting till they re-offend and putting them back in again , but actually working with them to move to a different path to end up with fewer crimes and fewer victims ?
So we find some investors , and they pay for a set of services , and if those services are successful , then they improve outcomes , and with those measured reductions in re-offending , government saves money , and with those savings , they can pay outcomes .
And the investors do not just get their money back , but they make a return .
So in March 2010 , we signed the first social impact bond with the Ministry of Justice around Peterborough Prison .
It was to work with 3,000 offenders split into three cohorts of 1,000 each .
Now , each of those cohorts would get measured over the two years that they were coming out of prison .
They 've got to have a year to commit their crimes , six months to get through the court system , and then they would be compared to a group taken from the police national computer , as similar as possible , and we would get paid providing we achieved a hurdle rate of 10-percent reduction , for every conviction event that didn 't happen .
So we get paid for crimes saved .
Now if we achieved that 10-percent reduction across all three cohorts , then the investors get a seven and a half percent annualized return on their investment , and if we do better than that , they can get up to 13 percent annualized return on their investment , which is okay .
So everyone wins here , right ?
The Ministry of Justice can try out a new program and they only pay if it works .
Investors get two opportunities : for the first time , they can invest in social change .
Also , they make a reasonable return , and they also know that first investors in these kinds of things , they 're going to have to believers .
They 're going to have to care in the social program , but if this builds a track record over five or 10 years , then you can widen that investor community as more people have confidence in the product .
The service providers , well , for the first time , they 've got an opportunity to provide services and grow the evidence for what they 're doing in a really constructive way and learn and demonstrate the value of what they 're doing over five or six years , not just one or two as often happens at the moment .
Society wins : fewer crimes , fewer victims .
Now , the offenders , they also benefit .
Instead of just coming out of the prison with 46 pounds in their pocket , half of them not knowing where they 're spending their first night out of jail , actually , someone meets them in prison , learns about their issues , meets them at the gate , takes them through to somewhere to stay , connects them to benefits , connects them to employment , drug rehabilitation , mental health , whatever 's needed .
So let 's think of another example : working with children in care .
Social impact bonds work great for any area where there is at the moment very expensive provision that produces poor outcomes for people .
So children in the state care tend to do very badly .
Only 13 percent achieve a reasonable level of five GCSEs at 16 , against 58 percent of the wider population .
More troublingly , 27 percent of offenders in prison have spent some time in care .
And even more worryingly , and this is a Home Office statistic , 70 percent of prostitutes have spent some time in care .
The state is not a great parent .
But there are great programs for adolescents who are on the edge of care , and 30 percent of kids going into care are adolescents .
So we set up a program with Essex County Council to test out intensive family therapeutic support for those families with adolescents on the edge of the care system .
Essex only pays in the event that it 's saving them care costs .
Investors have put in 3.1 million pounds .
That program started last month .
Others , around homelessness in London , around youth and employment and education elsewhere in the country .
There are now 13 social impact bonds in Britain , and amazing levels of interest in this idea all over the world .
So David Cameron 's put 20 million pounds into a social outcomes fund to support this idea .
Obama has suggested 300 million dollars in the U.S. budget for these kinds of ideas and structures to move it forward , and a lot of other countries are demonstrating considerable interest .
So what 's caused this excitement ?
Why is this so different for people ?
Well , the first piece , which we 've talked about , is innovation .
It enables testing of new ideas in a way that 's less difficult for everybody .
The second piece it brings is rigor .
By working to outcomes , people really have to test and bring data into the situation that one 's dealing with .
So taking Peterborough as an example , we add case management across all of the different organizations that we 're working with so they know what actually has been done with different prisoners , and at the same time they learn from the Ministry of Justice , and we learn , because we pushed for the data , what actually happens , whether they get re-arrested or not .
And we learn and adapt the program accordingly .
And this leads to the third element , which is new , and that 's flexibility .
Because normal contracting for things , when you 're spending government money , you 're spending our money , tax money , and the people who are in charge of that are very aware of it so the temptation is to control exactly how you spend it .
Now any entrepreneur in the room knows that version 1.0 , the business plan , is not the one that generally works .
So when you 're trying to do something like this , you need the flexibility to adapt the program .
And again , in Peterborough , we started off with a program , but we also collected data , and over the period of time , we nuanced and changed that program to add a range of other elements , so that the service adapts and we meet the needs of the long term as well as the short term : greater engagement from the prisoners , longer-term engagement as well .
The last element is partnership .
There is , at the moment , a stale debate going on very often : state 's better , public sector 's better , private sector 's better , social sector 's better , for a lot of these programs .
Actually , for creating social change , we need to bring in the expertise from all of those parties in order to make this work .
And this creates a structure through which they can combine .
So where does this leave us ?
This leaves us with a way that people can invest in social change .
We 've met thousands , possibly millions of people , who want the opportunity to invest in social change .
We 've met champions all over the public sector keen to make these kinds of differences .
With this kind of model , we can help bring them together .
Thank you .
Alisa Miller : The news about the news
Alisa Miller , head of Public Radio International , talks about why -- though we want to know more about the world than ever -- the US media is actually showing less . Eye-opening stats and graphs .
How does the news shape the way we see the world ?
Here 's the world based on the way it looks -- based on landmass .
And here 's how news shapes what Americans see .
This map -- -- this map shows the number of seconds that American network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories , by country , in February of 2007 -- just one year ago .
Now , this was a month when North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities .
There was massive flooding in Indonesia .
And in Paris , the IPCC released its study confirming man 's impact on global warming .
The U.S. accounted for 79 percent of total news coverage .
And when we take out the U.S. and look at the remaining 21 percent , we see a lot of Iraq -- that 's that big green thing there -- and little else .
The combined coverage of Russia , China and India , for example , reached just one percent .
When we analyzed all the news stories and removed just one story , here 's how the world looked .
What was that story ? The death of Anna Nicole Smith .
This story eclipsed every country except Iraq , and received 10 times the coverage of the IPCC report .
And the cycle continues ; as we all know , Britney has loomed pretty large lately .
So , why don 't we hear more about the world ?
One reason is that news networks have reduced the number of their foreign bureaus by half .
Aside from one-person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi , New Delhi and Mumbai , there are no network news bureaus in all of Africa , India or South America -- places that are home to more than two billion people .
The reality is that covering Britney is cheaper .
And this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news .
Local TV news looms large , and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news .
And what about the web ?
The most popular news sites don 't do much better .
Last year , Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News ' front page .
And they , in fact , covered the same 24 news events .
Similarly , a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters , and don 't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it .
So , if you put it all together , this could help explain why today 's college graduates , as well as less educated Americans , know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago .
And if you think it 's simply because we are not interested , you would be wrong .
In recent years , Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent .
The real question : is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world ?
I know we can do better .
And can we afford not to ? Thank you .
Frederic Kaplan : How to build an information time machine
Imagine if you could surf Facebook ... from the Middle Ages . Well , it may not be as far off as it sounds . In a fun and interesting talk , researcher and engineer Frederic Kaplan shows off the Venice Time Machine , a project to digitize 80 kilometers of books to create a historical and geographical simulation of Venice across 1000 years . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
This is an image of the planet Earth .
It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known .
There is something different ; you can click on it , and if you click on it , you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth .
For instance , this is a bird 's-eye view of the EPFL campus .
In many cases , you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street .
This is pretty amazing .
But there 's something missing in this wonderful tour : It 's time .
i 'm not really sure when this picture was taken .
I 'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird 's-eye view .
In my lab , we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time .
The kind of question we 're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past ?
Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year , seeing how it was 100 years before , 1,000 years before ?
Is that possible ?
Can I reconstruct social networks of the past ?
Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages ?
So , can I build time machines ?
Maybe we can just say , " No , it 's not possible . "
Or , maybe , we can think of it from an information point of view .
This is what I call the information mushroom .
Vertically , you have the time .
and horizontally , the amount of digital information available .
Obviously , in the last 10 years , we have much information .
And obviously the more we go in the past , the less information we have .
If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past , or Facebook of the past , we need to enlarge this space , we need to make that like a rectangle .
How do we do that ?
One way is digitization .
There 's a lot of material available -- newspaper , printed books , thousands of printed books .
I can digitize all these .
I can extract information from these .
Of course , the more you go in the past , the less information you will have .
So , it might not be enough .
So , I can do what historians do .
I can extrapolate .
This is what we call , in computer science , simulation .
If I take a log book , I can consider , it 's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey .
I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period .
I 'm extrapolating .
If I have a painting of a facade , I can consider it 's not just that particular building , but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information .
So if we want to construct a time machine , we need two things .
We need very large archives , and we need excellent specialists .
The Venice Time Machine , the project I 'm going to talk to you about , is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca 'Foscari .
There 's something very peculiar about Venice , that its administration has been very , very bureaucratic .
They 've been keeping track of everything , almost like Google today .
At the Archivio di Stato , you have 80 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 1,000 years .
You have every boat that goes out , every boat that comes in .
You have every change that was made in the city .
This is all there .
We are setting up a 10-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system .
The type of objective we want to reach is 450 books a day that can be digitized .
Of course , when you digitize , that 's not enough , because these documents , most of them are in Latin , in Tuscan , in Venetian dialect , so you need to transcribe them , to translate them in some cases , to index them , and this is obviously not easy .
In particular , traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts , they do not work well on the handwritten document .
So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain : speech recognition .
This is a domain of something that seems impossible , which can actually be done , simply by putting additional constraints .
If you have a very good model of a language which is used , if you have a very good model of a document , how well they are structured .
And these are administrative documents .
They are well structured in many cases .
If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features , then there 's a chance of success .
If we reach that stage , then there 's something else : we can extract from this document events .
Actually probably 10 billion events can be extracted from this archive .
And this giant information system can be searched in many ways .
You can ask questions like , " Who lived in this palazzo in 1323 ? "
" How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 1434 ? "
" What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade ? "
You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded .
And then what you can do is put that in space , because much of this information is spatial .
And from that , you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years , managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment .
You can reconstruct that journey , visualize it in many different ways .
But of course , you cannot understand Venice if you just look at the city .
You have to put it in a larger European context .
So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level .
We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire , how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea , how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time , controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south .
But you can even do other things , because in these maritime routes , there are regular patterns .
You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system , create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing , which would enable us to have questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner .
" If I am in Corfu in June 1323 and want to go to Constantinople , where can I take a boat ? "
Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days ' precision .
" How much will it cost ? "
" What are the chance of encountering pirates ? "
Of course , you understand , the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying , quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process .
There are errors everywhere , errors in the document , it 's the wrong name of the captain , some of the boats never actually took to sea .
There are errors in translation , interpretative biases , and on top of that , if you add algorithmic processes , you 're going to have errors in recognition , errors in extraction , so you have very , very uncertain data .
So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies ?
How can we represent that form of uncertainty ?
It 's difficult . One thing you can do is document each step of the process , not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information , how is historical knowledge constructed , documenting each step .
That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice , but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice .
Maybe there 's not a single map .
Maybe there are several maps .
The system should allow for that , because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty , which is really new for this type of giant databases .
And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience ?
Again , Venice is extraordinary for that .
With the millions of visitors that come every year , it 's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future .
Imagine , horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year , and vertically , you see the document that served the reconstruction , paintings , for instance .
Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year , some experience you could share within a group .
On the contrary , imagine actually that you start from a document , a Venetian manuscript , and you show , actually , what you can construct out of it , how it is decoded , how the context of that document can be recreated .
This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system .
So to conclude , we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago .
It 's really a question of scale .
We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do , and this is really new for the humanities , which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers .
When you visit the Archivio di Stato , you feel this is beyond what any single team can do , and that should be a joint and common effort .
So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of " digital humanists " that are going to be ready for this shift .
I thank you very much .
Shyam Sankar : The rise of human-computer cooperation
Brute computing force alone can 't solve the world 's problems . Data mining innovator Shyam Sankar explains why solving big problems is not a question of finding the right algorithm , but rather the right symbiotic relationship between computation and human creativity .
I 'd like to tell you about two games of chess .
The first happened in 1997 , in which Garry Kasparov , a human , lost to Deep Blue , a machine .
To many , this was the dawn of a new era , one where man would be dominated by machine .
But here we are , 20 years on , and the greatest change in how we relate to computers is the iPad , not HAL .
The second game was a freestyle chess tournament in 2005 , in which man and machine could enter together as partners , rather than adversaries , if they so chose .
At first , the results were predictable .
Even a supercomputer was beaten by a grandmaster with a relatively weak laptop .
The surprise came at the end . Who won ?
Not a grandmaster with a supercomputer , but actually two American amateurs using three relatively weak laptops .
Their ability to coach and manipulate their computers to deeply explore specific positions effectively counteracted the superior chess knowledge of the grandmasters and the superior computational power of other adversaries .
This is an astonishing result : average men , average machines beating the best man , the best machine .
And anyways , isn 't it supposed to be man versus machine ?
Instead , it 's about cooperation , and the right type of cooperation .
We 've been paying a lot of attention to Marvin Minsky 's vision for artificial intelligence over the last 50 years .
It 's a sexy vision , for sure . Many have embraced it .
It 's become the dominant school of thought in computer science .
But as we enter the era of big data , of network systems , of open platforms , and embedded technology , I 'd like to suggest it 's time to reevaluate an alternative vision that was actually developed around the same time .
I 'm talking about J.C.R. Licklider 's human-computer symbiosis , perhaps better termed " intelligence augmentation , " I.A.
Licklider was a computer science titan who had a profound effect on the development of technology and the Internet .
His vision was to enable man and machine to cooperate in making decisions , controlling complex situations without the inflexible dependence on predetermined programs .
Note that word " cooperate . "
Licklider encourages us not to take a toaster and make it Data from " Star Trek , " but to take a human and make her more capable .
Humans are so amazing -- how we think , our non-linear approaches , our creativity , iterative hypotheses , all very difficult if possible at all for computers to do .
Licklider intuitively realized this , contemplating humans setting the goals , formulating the hypotheses , determining the criteria , and performing the evaluation .
Of course , in other ways , humans are so limited .
We 're terrible at scale , computation and volume .
We require high-end talent management to keep the rock band together and playing .
Licklider foresaw computers doing all the routinizable work that was required to prepare the way for insights and decision making .
Silently , without much fanfare , this approach has been compiling victories beyond chess .
Protein folding , a topic that shares the incredible expansiveness of chess — there are more ways of folding a protein than there are atoms in the universe .
This is a world-changing problem with huge implications for our ability to understand and treat disease .
And for this task , supercomputer field brute force simply isn 't enough .
Foldit , a game created by computer scientists , illustrates the value of the approach .
Non-technical , non-biologist amateurs play a video game in which they visually rearrange the structure of the protein , allowing the computer to manage the atomic forces and interactions and identify structural issues .
This approach beat supercomputers 50 percent of the time and tied 30 percent of the time .
Foldit recently made a notable and major scientific discovery by deciphering the structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus .
A protease that had eluded determination for over 10 years was solved was by three players in a matter of days , perhaps the first major scientific advance to come from playing a video game .
Last year , on the site of the Twin Towers , the 9 / 11 memorial opened .
It displays the names of the thousands of victims using a beautiful concept called " meaningful adjacency . "
It places the names next to each other based on their relationships to one another : friends , families , coworkers .
When you put it all together , it 's quite a computational challenge : 3,500 victims , 1,800 adjacency requests , the importance of the overall physical specifications and the final aesthetics .
When first reported by the media , full credit for such a feat was given to an algorithm from the New York City design firm Local Projects . The truth is a bit more nuanced .
While an algorithm was used to develop the underlying framework , humans used that framework to design the final result .
So in this case , a computer had evaluated millions of possible layouts , managed a complex relational system , and kept track of a very large set of measurements and variables , allowing the humans to focus on design and compositional choices .
So the more you look around you , the more you see Licklider 's vision everywhere .
Whether it 's augmented reality in your iPhone or GPS in your car , human-computer symbiosis is making us more capable .
So if you want to improve human-computer symbiosis , what can you do ?
You can start by designing the human into the process .
Instead of thinking about what a computer will do to solve the problem , design the solution around what the human will do as well .
When you do this , you 'll quickly realize that you spent all of your time on the interface between man and machine , specifically on designing away the friction in the interaction .
In fact , this friction is more important than the power of the man or the power of the machine in determining overall capability .
That 's why two amateurs with a few laptops handily beat a supercomputer and a grandmaster .
What Kasparov calls process is a byproduct of friction .
The better the process , the less the friction .
And minimizing friction turns out to be the decisive variable .
Or take another example : big data .
Every interaction we have in the world is recorded by an ever growing array of sensors : your phone , your credit card , your computer . The result is big data , and it actually presents us with an opportunity to more deeply understand the human condition .
The major emphasis of most approaches to big data focus on , " How do I store this data ? How do I search this data ? How do I process this data ? "
These are necessary but insufficient questions .
The imperative is not to figure out how to compute , but what to compute . How do you impose human intuition on data at this scale ?
Again , we start by designing the human into the process .
When PayPal was first starting as a business , their biggest challenge was not , " How do I send money back and forth online ? "
It was , " How do I do that without being defrauded by organized crime ? "
Why so challenging ? Because while computers can learn to detect and identify fraud based on patterns , they can 't learn to do that based on patterns they 've never seen before , and organized crime has a lot in common with this audience : brilliant people , relentlessly resourceful , entrepreneurial spirit — — and one huge and important difference : purpose .
And so while computers alone can catch all but the cleverest fraudsters , catching the cleverest is the difference between success and failure .
There 's a whole class of problems like this , ones with adaptive adversaries . They rarely if ever present with a repeatable pattern that 's discernable to computers .
Instead , there 's some inherent component of innovation or disruption , and increasingly these problems are buried in big data .
For example , terrorism . Terrorists are always adapting in minor and major ways to new circumstances , and despite what you might see on TV , these adaptations , and the detection of them , are fundamentally human .
Computers don 't detect novel patterns and new behaviors , but humans do . Humans , using technology , testing hypotheses , searching for insight by asking machines to do things for them .
Osama bin Laden was not caught by artificial intelligence .
He was caught by dedicated , resourceful , brilliant people in partnerships with various technologies .
As appealing as it might sound , you cannot algorithmically data mine your way to the answer .
There is no " Find Terrorist " button , and the more data we integrate from a vast variety of sources across a wide variety of data formats from very disparate systems , the less effective data mining can be .
Instead , people will have to look at data and search for insight , and as Licklider foresaw long ago , the key to great results here is the right type of cooperation , and as Kasparov realized , that means minimizing friction at the interface .
Now this approach makes possible things like combing through all available data from very different sources , identifying key relationships and putting them in one place , something that 's been nearly impossible to do before .
To some , this has terrifying privacy and civil liberties implications . To others it foretells of an era of greater privacy and civil liberties protections , but privacy and civil liberties are of fundamental importance .
That must be acknowledged , and they can 't be swept aside , even with the best of intents .
So let 's explore , through a couple of examples , the impact that technologies built to drive human-computer symbiosis have had in recent time .
In October , 2007 , U.S. and coalition forces raided an al Qaeda safe house in the city of Sinjar on the Syrian border of Iraq .
They found a treasure trove of documents : 700 biographical sketches of foreign fighters .
These foreign fighters had left their families in the Gulf , the Levant and North Africa to join al Qaeda in Iraq .
These records were human resource forms .
The foreign fighters filled them out as they joined the organization .
It turns out that al Qaeda , too , is not without its bureaucracy .
They answered questions like , " Who recruited you ? "
" What 's your hometown ? " " What occupation do you seek ? "
In that last question , a surprising insight was revealed .
The vast majority of foreign fighters were seeking to become suicide bombers for martyrdom -- hugely important , since between 2003 and 2007 , Iraq had 1,382 suicide bombings , a major source of instability .
Analyzing this data was hard . The originals were sheets of paper in Arabic that had to be scanned and translated .
The friction in the process did not allow for meaningful results in an operational time frame using humans , PDFs and tenacity alone .
The researchers had to lever up their human minds with technology to dive deeper , to explore non-obvious hypotheses , and in fact , insights emerged .
Twenty percent of the foreign fighters were from Libya , 50 percent of those from a single town in Libya , hugely important since prior statistics put that figure at three percent . It also helped to hone in on a figure of rising importance in al Qaeda , Abu Yahya al-Libi , a senior cleric in the Libyan Islamic fighting group .
In March of 2007 , he gave a speech , after which there was a surge in participation amongst Libyan foreign fighters .
Perhaps most clever of all , though , and least obvious , by flipping the data on its head , the researchers were able to deeply explore the coordination networks in Syria that were ultimately responsible for receiving and transporting the foreign fighters to the border .
These were networks of mercenaries , not ideologues , who were in the coordination business for profit .
For example , they charged Saudi foreign fighters substantially more than Libyans , money that would have otherwise gone to al Qaeda .
Perhaps the adversary would disrupt their own network if they knew they cheating would-be jihadists .
In January , 2010 , a devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti , third deadliest earthquake of all time , left one million people , 10 percent of the population , homeless .
One seemingly small aspect of the overall relief effort became increasingly important as the delivery of food and water started rolling .
January and February are the dry months in Haiti , yet many of the camps had developed standing water .
The only institution with detailed knowledge of Haiti 's floodplains had been leveled in the earthquake , leadership inside .
So the question is , which camps are at risk , how many people are in these camps , what 's the timeline for flooding , and given very limited resources and infrastructure , how do we prioritize the relocation ?
The data was incredibly disparate . The U.S. Army had detailed knowledge for only a small section of the country .
There was data online from a 2006 environmental risk conference , other geospatial data , none of it integrated .
The human goal here was to identify camps for relocation based on priority need .
The computer had to integrate a vast amount of geospacial information , social media data and relief organization information to answer this question .
By implementing a superior process , what was otherwise a task for 40 people over three months became a simple job for three people in 40 hours , all victories for human-computer symbiosis .
We 're more than 50 years into Licklider 's vision for the future , and the data suggests that we should be quite excited about tackling this century 's hardest problems , man and machine in cooperation together .
Thank you .
Ian Goldin : Navigating our global future
As globalization and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new integrated future , Ian Goldin warns that not all people may benefit equally . But , he says , if we can recognize this danger , we might yet realize the possibility of improved life for everyone .
The future , as we know it , is very unpredictable .
The best minds in the best institutions generally get it wrong .
This is in technology . This is in the area of politics , where pundits , the CIA , MI6 always get it wrong .
And it 's clearly in the area of finance .
With institutions established to think about the future , the IMF , the BIS , the Financial Stability Forum , couldn 't see what was coming .
Over 20,000 economists whose job it is , competitive entry to get there , couldn 't see what was happening .
Globalization is getting more complex .
And this change is getting more rapid .
The future will be more unpredictable .
Urbanization , integration , coming together , leads to a new renaissance .
It did this a thousand years ago .
The last 40 years have been extraordinary times .
Life expectancy has gone up by about 25 years .
It took from the Stone Age to achieve that .
Income has gone up for a majority of the world 's population , despite the population going up by about two billion people over this period .
And illiteracy has gone down , from a half to about a quarter of the people on Earth .
A huge opportunity , unleashing of new potential for innovation , for development .
But there is an underbelly .
There are two Achilles ' heels of globalization .
There is the Achilles ' heel of growing inequality -- those that are left out , those that feel angry , those that are not participating . Globalization has not been inclusive .
The second Achilles ' heel is complexity -- a growing fragility , a growing brittleness .
What happens in one place very quickly affects everything else .
This is a systemic risk , systemic shock .
We 've seen it in the financial crisis . We 've seen it in the pandemic flu .
It will become virulent and it 's something we have to build resilience against .
A lot of this is driven by what 's happening in technology .
There have been huge leaps . There will be a million-fold improvement in what you can get for the same price in computing by 2030 .
That 's what the experience of the last 20 years has been .
It will continue .
Our computers , our systems will be as primitive as the Apollo 's are for today .
Our mobile phones are more powerful than the total Apollo space engine .
Our mobile phones are more powerful than some of the strongest computers of 20 years ago .
So what will this do ?
It will create huge opportunities in technology .
Miniaturization as well .
There will be invisible capacity . Invisible capacity in our bodies , in our brains , and in the air .
This is a dust mite on a nanoreplica .
This sort of ability to do everything in new ways unleashes potential , not least in the area of medicine .
This is a stem cell that we 've developed here in Oxford , from an embryonic stem cell .
We can develop any part of the body .
Increasingly , over time , this will be possible from our own skin -- able to replicate parts of the body .
Fantastic potential for regenerative medicine .
I don 't think there will be a Special Olympics long after 2030 , because of this capacity to regenerate parts of the body .
But the question is , " Who will have it ? "
The other major development is going to be in the area of what can happen in genetics .
The capacity to create , as this mouse has been genetically modified , something which goes three times faster , lasts for three times longer , we could produce , as this mouse can , to the age of our equivalent of 80 years , using about the same amount of food .
But will this only be available for the super rich , for those that can afford it ? Are we headed for a new eugenics ?
Will only those that are able to afford it be able to be this super race of the future ?
So the big question for us is , " How do we manage this technological change ? "
How do we ensure that it creates a more inclusive technology , a technology which means that not only as we grow older , that we can also grow wiser , and that we 're able to support the populations of the future ?
One of the most dramatic manifestations of these improvements will be moving from population pyramids to what we might term population coffins .
There is unlikely to be a pension or a retirement age in 2030 .
These will be redundant concepts . And this isn 't only something of the West .
The most dramatic changes will be the skyscraper type of new pyramids that will take place in China and in many other countries .
So forget about retirements if you 're young .
Forget about pensions . Think about life and where it 's going to be going .
Of course , migration will become even more important .
The war on talent , the need to attract people at all skill ranges , to push us around in our wheelchairs , but also to drive our economies . Our innovation will be vital .
The employment in the rich countries will go down from about 800 to about 700 million of these people .
This would imply a massive leap in migration .
So the concerns , the xenophobic concerns of today , of migration , will be turned on their head , as we search for people to help us sort out our pensions and our economies in the future .
And then , the systemic risks .
We understand that these will become much more virulent , that what we see today is this interweaving of societies , of systems , fastened by technologies and hastened by just-in-time management systems .
Small levels of stock push resilience into other people 's responsibility .
The collapse in biodiversity , climate change , pandemics , financial crises : these will be the currency that we will think about .
And so a new awareness will have to arise , of how we deal with these , how we mobilize ourselves , in a new way , and come together as a community to manage systemic risk .
It 's going to require innovation .
It 's going to require an understanding that the glory of globalization could also be its downfall .
This could be our best century ever because of the achievements , or it could be our worst .
And of course we need to worry about the individuals , particularly the individuals that feel that they 've been left out in one way or another .
An individual , for the first time in the history of humanity , will have the capacity , by 2030 , to destroy the planet , to wreck everything , through the creation , for example , of a biopathogen .
How do we begin to weave these tapestries together ?
How do we think about complex systems in new ways ?
That will be the challenge of the scholars , and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future .
The rest of our lives will be in the future . We need to prepare for it now .
We need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized .
It cannot begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring .
We have to develop a new way of managing the planet , collectively , through collective wisdom .
We know , and I know from my own experience , that amazing things can happen , when individuals and societies come together to change their future .
I left South Africa , and 15 years later , after thinking I would never go back , I had the privilege and the honor to work in the government of Nelson Mandela .
This was a miracle . We can create miracles , collectively , in our lifetime .
It is vital that we do so .
It is vital that the ideas that are nurtured in TED , that the ideas that we think about look forward , and make sure that this will be the most glorious century , and not one of eco-disaster and eco-collapse .
Thank you .
Paul Piff : Does money make you mean ?
It 's amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal . In this entertaining but sobering talk , social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy . But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge , there 's good news too .
I want you to , for a moment , think about playing a game of Monopoly , except in this game , that combination of skill , talent and luck that help earn you success in games , as in life , has been rendered irrelevant , because this game 's been rigged , and you 've got the upper hand .
You 've got more money , more opportunities to move around the board , and more access to resources .
And as you think about that experience , I want you to ask yourself , how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player ?
So we ran a study on the U.C. Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question .
We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab , and with the flip of a coin randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game .
They got two times as much money .
When they passed Go , they collected twice the salary , and they got to roll both dice instead of one , so they got to move around the board a lot more .
And over the course of 15 minutes , we watched through hidden cameras what happened .
And what I want to do today , for the first time , is show you a little bit of what we saw .
You 're going to have to pardon the sound quality , in some cases , because again , these were hidden cameras .
So we 've provided subtitles .
Rich Player : How many 500s did you have ?
Poor Player : Just one .
Rich Player : Are you serious . Poor Player : Yeah .
Rich Player : I have three .
I don 't know why they gave me so much .
Paul Piff : Okay , so it was quickly apparent to players that something was up .
One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person , and yet , as the game unfolded , we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players .
The rich player started to move around the board louder , literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around .
We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs , displays of power and celebration among the rich players .
We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side .
It 's on the bottom right corner there .
That allowed us to watch participants ' consummatory behavior .
So we 're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat .
Rich Player : Are those pretzels a trick ?
Poor Player : I don 't know .
PP : Okay , so no surprises , people are onto us .
They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place .
One even asks , like you just saw , is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick ?
And yet , despite that , the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate , and those rich players start to eat more pretzels .
Rich Player : I love pretzels .
PP : And as the game went on , one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person , less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor , poor players , and more and more demonstrative of their material success , more likely to showcase how well they 're doing .
Rich Player : I have money for everything .
Poor Player : How much is that ?
Rich Player : You owe me 24 dollars .
You 're going to lose all your money soon .
I 'll buy it . I have so much money .
I have so much money , it takes me forever .
Rich Player 2 : I 'm going to buy out this whole board .
Rich Player 3 : You 're going to run out of money soon .
I 'm pretty much untouchable at this point .
PP : Okay , and here 's what I think was really , really interesting , is that at the end of the 15 minutes , we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game .
And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly -- — they talked about what they 'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game , and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation , including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place .
And that 's a really , really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage .
Now this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure , wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status , and a lot of people don 't .
They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources .
And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies .
What we 've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person 's levels of wealth increase , their feelings of compassion and empathy go down , and their feelings of entitlement , of deservingness , and their ideology of self-interest increases .
In surveys , we found that it 's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good , and that the pursuit of self-interest is favorable and moral .
Now what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self-interest , talk about why we should care about those implications , and end with what might be done .
Some of the first studies that we ran in this area looked at helping behavior , something social psychologists call pro-social behavior .
And we were really interested in who 's more likely to offer help to another person , someone who 's rich or someone who 's poor .
In one of the studies , we bring in rich and poor members of the community into the lab and give each of them the equivalent of 10 dollars .
We told the participants that they could keep these 10 dollars for themselves , or they could share a portion of it , if they wanted to , with a stranger who is totally anonymous .
They 'll never meet that stranger and the stranger will never meet them .
And we just monitor how much people give .
Individuals who made 25,000 sometimes under 15,000 dollars a year , gave 44 percent more of their money to the stranger than did individuals making 150,000 or 200,000 dollars a year .
We 've had people play games to see who 's more or less likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize .
In one of the games , we actually rigged a computer so that die rolls over a certain score were impossible .
You couldn 't get above 12 in this game , and yet , the richer you were , the more likely you were to cheat in this game to earn credits toward a $ 50 cash prize , sometimes by three to four times as much .
We ran another study where we looked at whether people would be inclined to take candy from a jar of candy that we explicitly identified as being reserved for children -- — participating -- I 'm not kidding .
I know it sounds like I 'm making a joke .
We explicitly told participants this jar of candy 's for children participating in a developmental lab nearby .
They 're in studies . This is for them .
And we just monitored how much candy participants took .
Participants who felt rich took two times as much candy as participants who felt poor .
We 've even studied cars , not just any cars , but whether drivers of different kinds of cars are more or less inclined to break the law .
In one of these studies , we looked at whether drivers would stop for a pedestrian that we had posed waiting to cross at a crosswalk .
Now in California , as you all know , because I 'm sure we all do this , it 's the law to stop for a pedestrian who 's waiting to cross .
So here 's an example of how we did it .
That 's our confederate off to the left posing as a pedestrian .
He approaches as the red truck successfully stops .
In typical California fashion , it 's overtaken by the bus who almost runs our pedestrian over .
Now here 's an example of a more expensive car , a Prius , driving through , and a BMW doing the same .
So we did this for hundreds of vehicles on several days , just tracking who stops and who doesn 't .
What we found was that as the expensiveness of a car increased , the driver 's tendencies to break the law increased as well .
None of the cars , none of the cars in our least expensive car category broke the law .
Close to 50 percent of the cars in our most expensive vehicle category broke the law .
We 've run other studies finding that wealthier individuals are more likely to lie in negotiations , to endorse unethical behavior at work like stealing cash from the cash register , taking bribes , lying to customers .
Now I don 't mean to suggest that it 's only wealthy people who show these patterns of behavior .
Not at all . In fact , I think that we all , in our day-to-day , minute-by-minute lives , struggle with these competing motivations of when , or if , to put our own interests above the interests of other people .
And that 's understandable because the American dream is an idea in which we all have an equal opportunity to succeed and prosper , as long as we apply ourselves and work hard , and a piece of that means that sometimes , you need to put your own interests above the interests and well-being of other people around you .
But what we 're finding is that , the wealthier you are , the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success , of achievement and accomplishment , to the detriment of others around you .
Here I 've plotted for you the mean household income received by each fifth and top five percent of the population over the last 20 years .
In 1993 , the differences between the different quintiles of the population , in terms of income , are fairly egregious .
It 's not difficult to discern that there are differences .
But over the last 20 years , that significant difference has become a grand canyon of sorts between those at the top and everyone else .
In fact , the top 20 percent of our population own close to 90 percent of the total wealth in this country .
We 're at unprecedented levels of economic inequality .
What that means is that wealth is not only becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a select group of individuals , but the American dream is becoming increasingly unattainable for an increasing majority of us .
And if it 's the case , as we 've been finding , that the wealthier you are , the more entitled you feel to that wealth , and the more likely you are to prioritize your own interests above the interests of other people , and be willing to do things to serve that self-interest , well then there 's no reason to think that those patterns will change .
In fact , there 's every reason to think that they 'll only get worse , and that 's what it would look like if things just stayed the same , at the same linear rate , over the next 20 years .
Now , inequality , economic inequality , is something we should all be concerned about , and not just because of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy , but because individuals and groups with lots of economic inequality do worse , not just the people at the bottom , everyone .
There 's a lot of really compelling research coming out from top labs all over the world showcasing the range of things that are undermined as economic inequality gets worse .
Social mobility , things we really care about , physical health , social trust , all go down as inequality goes up .
Similarly , negative things in social collectives and societies , things like obesity , and violence , imprisonment , and punishment , are exacerbated as economic inequality increases .
Again , these are outcomes not just experienced by a few , but that resound across all strata of society .
Even people at the top experience these outcomes .
So what do we do ?
This cascade of self-perpetuating , pernicious , negative effects could seem like something that 's spun out of control , and there 's nothing we can do about it , certainly nothing we as individuals could do .
But in fact , we 've been finding in our own laboratory research that small psychological interventions , small changes to people 's values , small nudges in certain directions , can restore levels of egalitarianism and empathy .
For instance , reminding people of the benefits of cooperation , or the advantages of community , cause wealthier individuals to be just as egalitarian as poor people .
In one study , we had people watch a brief video , just 46 seconds long , about childhood poverty that served as a reminder of the needs of others in the world around them , and after watching that , we looked at how willing people were to offer up their own time to a stranger presented to them in the lab who was in distress .
After watching this video , an hour later , rich people became just as generous of their own time to help out this other person , a stranger , as someone who 's poor , suggesting that these differences are not innate or categorical , but are so malleable to slight changes in people 's values , and little nudges of compassion and bumps of empathy .
And beyond the walls of our lab , we 're even beginning to see signs of change in society .
Bill Gates , one of our nation 's wealthiest individuals , in his Harvard commencement speech , talked about the problem facing society of inequality as being the most daunting challenge , and talked about what must be done to combat it , saying , " Humanity 's greatest advances are not in its discoveries , but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity . "
And there 's the Giving Pledge , in which more than 100 of our nation 's wealthiest individuals are pledging half of their fortunes to charity .
And there 's the emergence of dozens of grassroots movements , like We are the One Percent , the Resource Generation , or Wealth for Common Good , in which the most privileged members of the population , members of the one percent and elsewhere , people who are wealthy , are using their own economic resources , adults and youth alike , that 's what 's most striking to me , leveraging their own privilege , their own economic resources , to combat inequality by advocating for social policies , changes in social values , and changes in people 's behavior , that work against their own economic interests but that may ultimately restore the American dream .
Thank you .
Jean-Baptiste Michel : The mathematics of history
What can mathematics say about history ? According to TED Fellow Jean-Baptiste Michel , quite a lot . From changes to language to the deadliness of wars , he shows how digitized history is just starting to reveal deep underlying patterns .
So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language .
It has generated considerable insight in physics , in biology and economics , but not that much in the humanities and in history .
I think there 's a belief that it 's just impossible , that you cannot quantify the doings of mankind , that you cannot measure history .
But I don 't think that 's right .
I want to show you a couple of examples why .
So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact : that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language .
That 's a powerful historical force .
So the king of England , Alfred the Great , will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop , Jay-Z .
Now it 's just the way it is .
Language changes over time , and it 's a powerful force .
So Erez and I wanted to know more about that .
So we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule , past-tense conjugation .
So you just add " ed " to a verb at the end to signify the past .
" Today I walk . Yesterday I walked . "
But some verbs are irregular .
" Yesterday I thought . "
Now what 's interesting about that is irregular verbs between Alfred and Jay-Z have become more regular .
Like the verb " to wed " that you see here has become regular .
So Erez and I followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of English language , and we saw that there 's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change , namely , if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another , it regularizes 10 times slower .
That 's a piece of history , but it comes in a mathematical wrapping .
Now in some cases math can even help explain , or propose explanations for , historical forces .
So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries .
There 's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller .
So there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the Six Days War , but there 's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier -- like World War I.
So what kind of historical mechanism can produce that ?
What 's the origin of this ?
So Steve and I , through mathematical analysis , propose that there 's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this , which lies in our brains .
This is a very well-known feature in which we perceive quantities in relative ways -- quantities like the intensity of light or the loudness of a sound .
For instance , committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot .
It 's relatively enormous if you 've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously .
But it doesn 't sound so much , it 's not relatively enough , it won 't make a difference if you 've already committed 100,000 soldiers previously .
So you see that because of the way we perceive quantities , as the war drags on , the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly -- like 10,000 , 11,000 , 12,000 -- but exponentially -- 10,000 , later 20,000 , later 40,000 .
And so that explains this pattern that we 've seen before .
So here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents .
So these types of examples , today there are just a few of them , but I think in the next decade they will become commonplace .
The reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace .
So there 's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time .
Companies like Google have digitized many of them -- above 20 million actually .
And when the stuff of history is available in digital form , it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture .
So I think in the next decade , the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind .
And I think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that .
It will be able to reveal new trends in our history , sometimes to explain them , and maybe even in the future to predict what 's going to happen .
Thank you very much .
Olafur Eliasson : Playing with space and light
In the spectacular large-scale projects he 's famous for , Olafur Eliasson creates art from a palette of space , distance , color and light . This idea-packed talk begins with an experiment in the nature of perception .
I have a studio in Berlin -- let me cue on here -- which is down there in this snow , just last weekend .
In the studio we do a lot of experiments .
I would consider the studio more like a laboratory .
I have occasional meetings with scientists .
And I have an academy , a part of the University of Fine Arts in Berlin .
We have an annual gathering of people , and that is called Life in Space .
Life in Space is really not necessarily about how we do things , but why we do things .
Do you mind looking , with me , at that little cross in the center there ?
So just keep looking . Don 't mind me .
So you will have a yellow circle , and we will do an after-image experiment .
When the circle goes away you will have another color , the complementary color .
I am saying something . And your eyes and your brain are saying something back .
This whole idea of sharing , the idea of constituting reality by overlapping what I say and what you say -- think of a movie .
Since two years now , with some stipends from the science ministry in Berlin , I 've been working on these films where we produce the film together .
I don 't necessarily think the film is so interesting .
Obviously this is not interesting at all in the sense of the narrative .
But nevertheless , what the potential is -- and just keep looking there -- what the potential is , obviously , is to kind of move the border of who is the author , and who is the receiver .
Who is the consumer , if you want , and who has responsibility for what one sees ?
I think there is a socializing dimension in , kind of , moving that border .
Who decides what reality is ?
This is the Tate Modern in London .
The show was , in a sense , about that .
It was about a space in which I put half a semi-circular yellow disk .
I also put a mirror in the ceiling , and some fog , some haze .
And my idea was to make the space tangible .
With such a big space , the problem is obviously that there is a discrepancy between what your body can embrace , and what the space , in that sense , is .
So here I had the hope that by inserting some natural elements , if you want -- some fog -- I could make the space tangible .
And what happens is that people , they start to see themselves in this space .
So look at this . Look at the girl .
Of course they have to look through a bloody camera in a museum . Right ? That 's how museums are working today .
But look at her face there , as she 's checking out , looking at herself in the mirror .
" Oh ! That was my foot there ! "
She wasn 't really sure whether she was seeing herself or not .
And in that whole idea , how do we configure the relationship between our body and the space ?
How do we reconfigure it ?
How do we know that being in a space makes a difference ?
Do you see when I said in the beginning , it 's about why , rather than how ?
The why meant really , " What consequences does it have when I take a step ? "
" What does it matter ? "
" Does it matter if I am in the world or not ? "
" And does it matter whether the kind of actions I take filter into a sense of responsibility ? "
Is art about that ?
I would say yes . It is obviously about not just about decorating the world , and making it look even better , or even worse , if you ask me .
It 's obviously also about taking responsibility , like I did here when throwing some green dye in the river in L.A. , Stockholm , Norway and Tokyo , among other places .
The green dye is not environmentally dangerous , but it obviously looks really rather frightening .
And it 's on the other side also , I think , quite beautiful , as it somehow shows the turbulence in these kind of downtown areas , in these different places of the world .
The " Green river , " as a kind of activist idea , not a part of an exhibition , it was really about showing people , in this city , as they walk by , that space has dimensions . A space has time .
And the water flows through the city with time .
The water has an ability to make the city negotiable , tangible .
Negotiable meaning that it makes a difference whether you do something or not .
It makes a difference whether you say , " I 'm a part of this city .
And if I vote it makes a difference .
If I take a stand , it makes a difference . "
This whole idea of a city not being a picture is , I think , something that art , in a sense , always was working with .
The idea that art can actually evaluate the relationship between what it means to be in a picture , and what it means to be in a space . What is the difference ?
The difference between thinking and doing .
So these are different experiments with that . I won 't go into them .
Iceland , lower right corner , my favorite place .
These kinds of experiments , they filter into architectural models .
These are ongoing experiments .
One is an experiment I did for BMW , an attempt to make a car .
It 's made out of ice .
A crystalline stackable principle in the center on the top , which I am trying to turn into a concert hall in Iceland .
A sort of a run track , or a walk track , on the top of a museum in Denmark , which is made of colored glass , going all around .
So the movement with your legs will change the color of your horizon .
And two summers ago at the Hyde Park in London , with the Serpentine Gallery : a kind of a temporal pavilion where moving was the only way you could see the pavilion .
This summer , in New York : there is one thing about falling water which is very much about the time it takes for water to fall .
It 's quite simple and fundamental .
I 've walked a lot in the mountains in Iceland .
And as you come to a new valley , as you come to a new landscape , you have a certain view .
If you stand still , the landscape doesn 't necessarily tell you how big it is .
It doesn 't really tell you what you 're looking at .
The moment you start to move , the mountain starts to move .
The big mountains far away , they move less .
The small mountains in the foreground , they move more .
And if you stop again , you wonder , " Is that a one-hour valley ?
Or is that a three-hour hike , or is that a whole day I 'm looking at ? "
If you have a waterfall in there , right out there at the horizon ; you look at the waterfall and you go , " Oh , the water is falling really slowly . "
And you go , " My god it 's really far away and it 's a giant waterfall . "
If a waterfall is falling faster , it 's a smaller waterfall which is closer by -- because the speed of falling water is pretty constant everywhere .
And your body somehow knows that .
So this means a waterfall is a way of measuring space .
Of course being an iconic city like New York , playing around with the sense of space , you could say that New York wants to seem as big as possible .
Adding a measurement to that is interesting : the falling water suddenly gives you a sense of , " Oh , Brooklyn is exactly this much -- the distance between Brooklyn and Manhattan , in this case the lower East River is this big . "
So it was not just necessarily about putting nature into the cities .
It was also about giving the city a sense of dimension .
And why would we want to do that ?
Because I think it makes a difference whether you have a body that feels a part of a space , rather than having a body which is just in front of a picture .
And " Ha-ha , there is a picture and here is I. And what does it matter ? "
Is there a sense of consequences ?
So if I have a sense of the space , if I feel that the space is tangible , if I feel there is time , if there is a dimension I could call time , I also feel that I can change the space .
And suddenly it makes a difference in terms of making space accessible .
One could say this is about community , collectivity .
It 's about being together .
How do we create public space ?
What does the word " public " mean today anyway ?
So , asked in that way , I think it raises great things about parliamentary ideas , democracy , public space , being together , being individual .
How do we create an idea which is both tolerant to individuality , and also to collectivity , without polarizing the two into two different opposites ?
Of course the political agendas in the world has been very obsessed , polarizing the two against each other into different , very normative ideas .
I would claim that art and culture , and this is why art and culture are so incredibly interesting in the times we 're living in now , have proven that one can create a kind of a space which is both sensitive to individuality and to collectivity .
It 's very much about this causality , consequences .
It 's very much about the way we link thinking and doing .
So what is between thinking and doing ?
And right in-between thinking and doing , I would say , there is experience .
And experience is not just a kind of entertainment in a non-casual way .
Experience is about responsibility .
Having an experience is taking part in the world .
Taking part in the world is really about sharing responsibility .
So art , in that sense , I think holds an incredible relevance in the world in which we 're moving into , particularly right now .
That 's all I have . Thank you very much .
Baba Shiv : Sometimes it 's good to give up the driver 's seat
Over the years , research has shown a counterintuitive fact about human nature : That sometimes , having too much choice makes us less happy . This may even be true when it comes to medical treatment . Baba Shiv shares a fascinating study that measures why choice opens the door to doubt , and suggests that ceding control -- especially on life-or-death decisions -- may be the best thing for us . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I want to start on a slightly somber note .
Two thousand and seven , five years ago , my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer , stage IIB .
Now , looking back , the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits -- these were very painful for my wife , understandably so .
It was not even the initial shock of knowing that she had breast cancer , just 39 years old , absolutely no history of cancer in her family .
The most horrifying and agonizing part of the whole experience was we were making decisions after decisions after decisions that were being thrust upon us .
Should it be a mastectomy ? Should it be a lumpectomy ?
Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment , given that it was stage IIB ?
With all the side effects ?
Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment ?
And these were being pressed upon us by the doctors .
Now , you could ask this question , why were the doctors doing this ?
Now , a simplistic answer would be , the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally .
I think that is too simplistic .
These are well-meaning doctors , some of them have gone on to become very good friends .
They probably were simply following the wisdom that has come down the ages , this adage that when you 're making decisions , especially decisions of importance , it 's best to be in charge , it 's best to be in control , it 's best to be in the driver 's seat .
And we were certainly in the driver 's seat , making all these decisions , and let me tell you , if some of you had been there , it was a most agonizing and harrowing experience .
Which got me thinking .
I said , is there any validity to this whole adage that when you 're making decisions , it 's best to take the driver 's seat , be in charge , be in control ?
Or are there contexts where we 're far better off taking the passenger 's seat and have someone else drive ?
For example , a trusted financial advisor , could be a trusted doctor , etc .
And since I study human decision making , I said , I 'm going to run some studies to find some answers .
And I 'm going to share one of these studies with you today .
So , imagine that all of you are participants in the study .
I want to tell you that what you 're going to do in the study is you 're going to drink a cup of tea .
If you 're wondering why , I 'll tell you why in a few seconds from now .
You are going to solve a series of puzzles , and I 'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily .
And the more puzzles you solve , the greater the chances that you 'll win some prizes .
Now , why do you have to consume the tea ?
Why ? Because it makes a lot of sense .
In order to solve these puzzles effectively , if you think about it , your mind needs to be in two states simultaneously .
Right ? It needs to be alert , for which caffeine is very good .
Simultaneously , it needs to be calm .
Not agitated , calm . For which chamomile is very good .
Now comes the between-subjects design , the AB design , the AB testing .
So what I 'm going to do is randomly assign you to one of two groups .
So imagine that there is an imaginary line out here , so everyone here will be group A , everyone out here will be group B.
Now , for you folks , what I 'm going to do is I 'm going to show you these two teas , and I 'm asking you , I 'll go ahead and ask you , to choose your tea . So you can choose which of the two tea you want .
You can decide , what is your mental state : Okay , I 'm going to choose the caffeinated tea , I 'm going to choose the chamomile tea .
So you 're going to be in charge , you 're going to be in control , you 're going to be in the driver 's seat .
You folks , I 'm going to show you these two teas , but you don 't have a choice .
I 'm going to give you one of these two teas , and keep in mind , I 'm going to pick one of these two teas at random for you .
And you know that .
So if you think about it , this is an extreme case scenario , because in the real world , whenever you are taking passenger 's seat , very often the driver is going to be someone you trust , an expert , etc . So this is an extreme case scenario .
Now , you 're all going to consume the tea .
So imagine that you are taking the tea now , we 'll wait for you to finish the tea .
We 'll give another five minutes for the ingredient to have its effects .
Now you 're going to have 30 minutes to solve 15 puzzles .
Here 's an example of the puzzle you 're going to solve .
Anyone in the audience want to take a stab ?
Baba Shiv : Whoa !
Okay , that 's cool .
Yeah , so what we do if we had you , who will get the answer , as a participant , we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise .
Because we want these puzzles to be difficult .
These are tricky puzzles because your first instinct is to say " tulip , " and then you have to unstick yourself .
Right ? So these have been calibrated to your level of expertise .
Because we want this to be difficult , and I 'll tell you why momentarily .
Now , here 's another example .
Anyone ? It 's much more difficult .
Yeah , wow . Okay .
So , yeah , so this is again difficult .
You will say " kambar , " then you will have to go , " maker , " and all that , and then you can unstick yourself .
Okay , so you have 30 minutes now to solve these 15 puzzles .
Now , the question we 're asking here is in terms of the outcome , in terms of the number of puzzles solved , will you in the driver 's seat end up solving more puzzles , because you are in control , you could decide which tea you will choose , or would you be better off , in terms of the number of puzzles solved ?
And systemically what we will show , across a series of studies , is that you , the passengers , even though the tea was picked for you at random , will end up solving more puzzles than you , the drivers .
We also observe another thing , and that is , you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles , you 're also putting less juice into the task .
Less effort , you 're less persistent , and so on .
How do you know that ?
Well we have two objective measures .
One is , what is the time , on average , you 're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles ?
You will spend less time compared to you .
Second , you have 30 minutes to solve these , are you taking the entire 30 minutes , or are you giving up before the 30 minutes elapse ?
You will be more likely to give up before the 30 minutes elapse compared to you .
So , you 're putting in less juice , and therefore the outcome : fewer puzzles solved .
Now , that brings us now to , why does this happen ?
And under what situations , when would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better , more favorable outcomes compared to the driver ?
It all has to do with when you face what I call the INCA .
It 's an acronym that stands for the nature of the feedback you 're getting after you 've made the decision .
So , if you think about it , in this particular puzzle task , it could happen in investing in the stock market , very volatile out there , it could be the medical situation -- the feedback here is immediate .
You know the feedback , whether you 're solving the puzzles or not .
Right ? Second , it is negative .
Remember , the deck was stacked against you .
In terms of the difficulty level of these puzzles .
And this can happen in the medical domain .
For example , very early on in the treatment , things are negative , the feedback , before things become positive .
Right ? It can happen in the stock market .
Volatile stock market , getting negative feedback that 's also immediate .
And the feedback in all these cases is concrete .
It 's not ambiguous ; you know if you 've solved the puzzles or not .
Now , the added one , apart from this immediacy , negative , this concreteness , now you have a sense of agency .
You were responsible for your decision .
So what do you do ?
You focus on the foregone option .
You say , you know what ? I should have chosen the other tea .
That casts your decision in doubt , reduces the confidence you have in the decision , reduces the confidence you have in the performance , the performance in terms of solving the puzzles .
And therefore less juice into the task , fewer puzzles solved , a less favorable outcome compared to you folks .
And this can happen in the medical domain , if you think about it .
Right ? A patient in the driver 's seat , for example .
Less juice , which means keeping herself or himself less physically fit , physically active to hasten the recovery process , which is what is often advocated . You probably wouldn 't do that .
And therefore , there are times when you 're facing the INCA , when the feedback is going to be immediate , negative , concrete , and you have the sense of agency , where you 're far better off taking the passenger 's seat and have someone else drive .
Now , I started off on the somber note .
I want to finish up on a more upbeat note .
It has now been five years , slightly more than five years , and the good news , thank God , is that the cancer is still in remission .
So it all ends well , but one thing I didn 't mention was that very early on into her treatment , my wife and I decided that we will take the passenger 's seat .
And that made so much of a difference in terms of the peace of mind that came with that , we could focus on her recovery .
We let the doctors make all the decisions , take the driver 's seat .
Thank you .
Avi Rubin : All your devices can be hacked
Could someone hack your pacemaker ? At TEDxMidAtlantic , Avi Rubin explains how hackers are compromising cars , smartphones and medical devices , and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 'm a computer science professor , and my area of expertise is computer and information security .
When I was in graduate school , I had the opportunity to overhear my grandmother describing to one of her fellow senior citizens what I did for a living .
Apparently , I was in charge of making sure that no one stole the computers from the university .
And , you know , that 's a perfectly reasonable thing for her to think , because I told her I was working in computer security , and it was interesting to get her perspective .
But that 's not the most ridiculous thing I 've ever heard anyone say about my work .
The most ridiculous thing I ever heard is , I was at a dinner party , and a woman heard that I work in computer security , and she asked me if -- she said her computer had been infected by a virus , and she was very concerned that she might get sick from it , that she could get this virus .
And I 'm not a doctor , but I reassured her that it was very , very unlikely that this would happen , but if she felt more comfortable , she could be free to use latex gloves when she was on the computer , and there would be no harm whatsoever in that .
I 'm going to get back to this notion of being able to get a virus from your computer , in a serious way .
What I 'm going to talk to you about today are some hacks , some real world cyberattacks that people in my community , the academic research community , have performed , which I don 't think most people know about , and I think they 're very interesting and scary , and this talk is kind of a greatest hits of the academic security community 's hacks .
None of the work is my work . It 's all work that my colleagues have done , and I actually asked them for their slides and incorporated them into this talk .
So the first one I 'm going to talk about are implanted medical devices .
Now medical devices have come a long way technologically .
You can see in 1926 the first pacemaker was invented .
1960 , the first internal pacemaker was implanted , hopefully a little smaller than that one that you see there , and the technology has continued to move forward .
In 2006 , we hit an important milestone from the perspective of computer security .
And why do I say that ?
Because that 's when implanted devices inside of people started to have networking capabilities .
One thing that brings us close to home is we look at Dick Cheney 's device , he had a device that pumped blood from an aorta to another part of the heart , and as you can see at the bottom there , it was controlled by a computer controller , and if you ever thought that software liability was very important , get one of these inside of you .
Now what a research team did was they got their hands on what 's called an ICD .
This is a defibrillator , and this is a device that goes into a person to control their heart rhythm , and these have saved many lives .
Well , in order to not have to open up the person every time you want to reprogram their device or do some diagnostics on it , they made the thing be able to communicate wirelessly , and what this research team did is they reverse engineered the wireless protocol , and they built the device you see pictured here , with a little antenna , that could talk the protocol to the device , and thus control it .
In order to make their experience real -- they were unable to find any volunteers , and so they went and they got some ground beef and some bacon and they wrapped it all up to about the size of a human being 's area where the device would go , and they stuck the device inside it to perform their experiment somewhat realistically .
They launched many , many successful attacks .
One that I 'll highlight here is changing the patient 's name .
I don 't know why you would want to do that , but I sure wouldn 't want that done to me .
And they were able to change therapies , including disabling the device -- and this is with a real , commercial , off-the-shelf device -- simply by performing reverse engineering and sending wireless signals to it .
There was a piece on NPR that some of these ICDs could actually have their performance disrupted simply by holding a pair of headphones onto them .
Now , wireless and the Internet can improve health care greatly .
There 's several examples up on the screen of situations where doctors are looking to implant devices inside of people , and all of these devices now , it 's standard that they communicate wirelessly , and I think this is great , but without a full understanding of trustworthy computing , and without understanding what attackers can do and the security risks from the beginning , there 's a lot of danger in this .
Okay , let me shift gears and show you another target .
I 'm going to show you a few different targets like this , and that 's my talk . So we 'll look at automobiles .
This is a car , and it has a lot of components , a lot of electronics in it today .
In fact , it 's got many , many different computers inside of it , more Pentiums than my lab did when I was in college , and they 're connected by a wired network .
There 's also a wireless network in the car , which can be reached from many different ways .
So there 's Bluetooth , there 's the FM and XM radio , there 's actually wi-fi , there 's sensors in the wheels that wirelessly communicate the tire pressure to a controller on board .
The modern car is a sophisticated multi-computer device .
And what happens if somebody wanted to attack this ?
Well , that 's what the researchers that I 'm going to talk about today did .
They basically stuck an attacker on the wired network and on the wireless network .
Now , they have two areas they can attack .
One is short-range wireless , where you can actually communicate with the device from nearby , either through Bluetooth or wi-fi , and the other is long-range , where you can communicate with the car through the cellular network , or through one of the radio stations .
Think about it . When a car receives a radio signal , it 's processed by software .
That software has to receive and decode the radio signal , and then figure out what to do with it , even if it 's just music that it needs to play on the radio , and that software that does that decoding , if it has any bugs in it , could create a vulnerability for somebody to hack the car .
The way that the researchers did this work is , they read the software in the computer chips that were in the car , and then they used sophisticated reverse engineering tools to figure out what that software did , and then they found vulnerabilities in that software , and then they built exploits to exploit those .
They actually carried out their attack in real life .
They bought two cars , and I guess they have better budgets than I do .
The first threat model was to see what someone could do if an attacker actually got access to the internal network on the car .
Okay , so think of that as , someone gets to go to your car , they get to mess around with it , and then they leave , and now , what kind of trouble are you in ?
The other threat model is that they contact you in real time over one of the wireless networks like the cellular , or something like that , never having actually gotten physical access to your car .
This is what their setup looks like for the first model , where you get to have access to the car .
They put a laptop , and they connected to the diagnostic unit on the in-car network , and they did all kinds of silly things , like here 's a picture of the speedometer showing 140 miles an hour when the car 's in park .
Once you have control of the car 's computers , you can do anything .
Now you might say , " Okay , that 's silly . "
Well , what if you make the car always say it 's going 20 miles an hour slower than it 's actually going ?
You might produce a lot of speeding tickets .
Then they went out to an abandoned airstrip with two cars , the target victim car and the chase car , and they launched a bunch of other attacks .
One of the things they were able to do from the chase car is apply the brakes on the other car , simply by hacking the computer .
They were able to disable the brakes .
They also were able to install malware that wouldn 't kick in and wouldn 't trigger until the car was doing something like going over 20 miles an hour , or something like that .
The results are astonishing , and when they gave this talk , even though they gave this talk at a conference to a bunch of computer security researchers , everybody was gasping .
They were able to take over a bunch of critical computers inside the car : the brakes computer , the lighting computer , the engine , the dash , the radio , etc . , and they were able to perform these on real commercial cars that they purchased using the radio network .
They were able to compromise every single one of the pieces of software that controlled every single one of the wireless capabilities of the car .
All of these were implemented successfully .
How would you steal a car in this model ?
Well , you compromise the car by a buffer overflow of vulnerability in the software , something like that .
You use the GPS in the car to locate it .
You remotely unlock the doors through the computer that controls that , start the engine , bypass anti-theft , and you 've got yourself a car .
Surveillance was really interesting .
The authors of the study have a video where they show themselves taking over a car and then turning on the microphone in the car , and listening in on the car while tracking it via GPS on a map , and so that 's something that the drivers of the car would never know was happening .
Am I scaring you yet ?
I 've got a few more of these interesting ones .
These are ones where I went to a conference , and my mind was just blown , and I said , " I have to share this with other people . "
This was Fabian Monrose 's lab at the University of North Carolina , and what they did was something intuitive once you see it , but kind of surprising .
They videotaped people on a bus , and then they post-processed the video .
What you see here in number one is a reflection in somebody 's glasses of the smartphone that they 're typing in .
They wrote software to stabilize -- even though they were on a bus and maybe someone 's holding their phone at an angle -- to stabilize the phone , process it , and you may know on your smartphone , when you type a password , the keys pop out a little bit , and they were able to use that to reconstruct what the person was typing , and had a language model for detecting typing .
What was interesting is , by videotaping on a bus , they were able to produce exactly what people on their smartphones were typing , and then they had a surprising result , which is that their software had not only done it for their target , but other people who accidentally happened to be in the picture , they were able to produce what those people had been typing , and that was kind of an accidental artifact of what their software was doing .
I 'll show you two more . One is P25 radios .
P25 radios are used by law enforcement and all kinds of government agencies and people in combat to communicate , and there 's an encryption option on these phones .
This is what the phone looks like . It 's not really a phone .
It 's more of a two-way radio .
Motorola makes the most widely used one , and you can see that they 're used by Secret Service , they 're used in combat , it 's a very , very common standard in the U.S. and elsewhere .
So one question the researchers asked themselves is , could you block this thing , right ?
Could you run a denial-of-service , because these are first responders ?
So , would a terrorist organization want to black out the ability of police and fire to communicate at an emergency ?
They found that there 's this GirlTech device used for texting that happens to operate at the same exact frequency as the P25 , and they built what they called My First Jammer .
If you look closely at this device , it 's got a switch for encryption or cleartext .
Let me advance the slide , and now I 'll go back .
You see the difference ?
This is plain text . This is encrypted .
There 's one little dot that shows up on the screen , and one little tiny turn of the switch .
And so the researchers asked themselves , " I wonder how many times very secure , important , sensitive conversations are happening on these two-way radios where they forget to encrypt and they don 't notice that they didn 't encrypt ? "
So they bought a scanner . These are perfectly legal and they run at the frequency of the P25 , and what they did is they hopped around frequencies and they wrote software to listen in .
If they found encrypted communication , they stayed on that channel and they wrote down , that 's a channel that these people communicate in , these law enforcement agencies , and they went to 20 metropolitan areas and listened in on conversations that were happening at those frequencies .
They found that in every metropolitan area , they would capture over 20 minutes a day of cleartext communication .
And what kind of things were people talking about ?
Well , they found the names and information about confidential informants . They found information that was being recorded in wiretaps , a bunch of crimes that were being discussed , sensitive information .
It was mostly law enforcement and criminal .
They went and reported this to the law enforcement agencies , after anonymizing it , and the vulnerability here is simply the user interface wasn 't good enough . If you 're talking about something really secure and sensitive , it should be really clear to you that this conversation is encrypted .
That one 's pretty easy to fix .
The last one I thought was really , really cool , and I just had to show it to you , it 's probably not something that you 're going to lose sleep over like the cars or the defibrillators , but it 's stealing keystrokes .
Now , we 've all looked at smartphones upside down .
Every security expert wants to hack a smartphone , and we tend to look at the USB port , the GPS for tracking , the camera , the microphone , but no one up till this point had looked at the accelerometer .
The accelerometer is the thing that determines the vertical orientation of the smartphone .
And so they had a simple setup .
They put a smartphone next to a keyboard , and they had people type , and then their goal was to use the vibrations that were created by typing to measure the change in the accelerometer reading to determine what the person had been typing .
Now , when they tried this on an iPhone 3GS , this is a graph of the perturbations that were created by the typing , and you can see that it 's very difficult to tell when somebody was typing or what they were typing , but the iPhone 4 greatly improved the accelerometer , and so the same measurement produced this graph .
Now that gave you a lot of information while someone was typing , and what they did then is used advanced artificial intelligence techniques called machine learning to have a training phase , and so they got most likely grad students to type in a whole lot of things , and to learn , to have the system use the machine learning tools that were available to learn what it is that the people were typing and to match that up with the measurements in the accelerometer .
And then there 's the attack phase , where you get somebody to type something in , you don 't know what it was , but you use your model that you created in the training phase to figure out what they were typing .
They had pretty good success . This is an article from the USA Today .
They typed in , " The Illinois Supreme Court has ruled that Rahm Emanuel is eligible to run for Mayor of Chicago " — see , I tied it in to the last talk — " and ordered him to stay on the ballot . "
Now , the system is interesting , because it produced " Illinois Supreme " and then it wasn 't sure .
The model produced a bunch of options , and this is the beauty of some of the A.I. techniques , is that computers are good at some things , humans are good at other things , take the best of both and let the humans solve this one .
Don 't waste computer cycles .
A human 's not going to think it 's the Supreme might .
It 's the Supreme Court , right ?
And so , together we 're able to reproduce typing simply by measuring the accelerometer .
Why does this matter ? Well , in the Android platform , for example , the developers have a manifest where every device on there , the microphone , etc . , has to register if you 're going to use it so that hackers can 't take over it , but nobody controls the accelerometer .
So what 's the point ? You can leave your iPhone next to someone 's keyboard , and just leave the room , and then later recover what they did , even without using the microphone .
If someone is able to put malware on your iPhone , they could then maybe get the typing that you do whenever you put your iPhone next to your keyboard .
There 's several other notable attacks that unfortunately I don 't have time to go into , but the one that I wanted to point out was a group from the University of Michigan which was able to take voting machines , the Sequoia AVC Edge DREs that were going to be used in New Jersey in the election that were left in a hallway , and put Pac-Man on it .
So they ran the Pac-Man game .
What does this all mean ?
Well , I think that society tends to adopt technology really quickly . I love the next coolest gadget .
But it 's very important , and these researchers are showing , that the developers of these things need to take security into account from the very beginning , and need to realize that they may have a threat model , but the attackers may not be nice enough to limit themselves to that threat model , and so you need to think outside of the box .
What we can do is be aware that devices can be compromised , and anything that has software in it is going to be vulnerable . It 's going to have bugs .
Thank you very much .
Sarah Kay : If I should have a daughter ...
" If I should have a daughter , instead of Mom , she 's gonna call me Point B ... " began spoken word poet Sarah Kay , in a talk that inspired two standing ovations at TED2011 . She tells the story of her metamorphosis -- from a wide-eyed teenager soaking in verse at New York 's Bowery Poetry Club to a teacher connecting kids with the power of self-expression through Project V.O.I.C.E. -- and gives two breathtaking performances of " B " and " Hiroshima . "
If I should have a daughter , instead of " Mom , " she 's gonna call me " Point B , " because that way she knows that no matter what happens , at least she can always find her way to me .
And I 'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say , " Oh , I know that like the back of my hand . "
And she 's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face , wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach .
But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air .
There is hurt , here , that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry .
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn 't coming , I 'll make sure she knows she doesn 't have to wear the cape all by herself because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers , your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal .
Believe me , I 've tried .
" And , baby , " I 'll tell her , don 't keep your nose up in the air like that .
I know that trick ; I 've done it a million times .
You 're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house , so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him .
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place , to see if you can change him . "
But I know she will anyway , so instead I 'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby , because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can 't fix .
Okay , there 's a few heartbreaks that chocolate can 't fix .
But that 's what the rain boots are for , because rain will wash away everything , if you let it .
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat , to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind , because that 's the way my mom taught me .
That there 'll be days like this .
There 'll be days like this , my momma said . When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises ; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape ; when your boots will fill with rain , and you 'll be up to your knees in disappointment .
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you .
Because there 's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline , no matter how many times it 's sent away .
You will put the wind in winsome , lose some .
You will put the star in starting over , and over .
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute , be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life .
And yes , on a scale from one to over-trusting , I am pretty damn naive .
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar .
It can crumble so easily , but don 't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it .
" Baby , " I 'll tell her , " remember , your momma is a worrier , and your poppa is a warrior , and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more . "
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things .
And always apologize when you 've done something wrong , but don 't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining .
Your voice is small , but don 't ever stop singing .
And when they finally hand you heartache , when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat , you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Thanks .
Thank you .
All right , so I want you to take a moment , and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true .
They can be about whatever you want -- technology , entertainment , design , your family , what you had for breakfast .
The only rule is don 't think too hard .
Okay , ready ? Go .
Okay .
So here are three things I know to be true .
I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that , " a good story has a beginning , a middle and an end , although not necessarily in that order . "
I know that I 'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here , which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool .
And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke .
Why was the scarecrow invited to TED ?
Because he was out standing in his field .
I 'm sorry .
Okay , so these are three things I know to be true .
But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding .
So I write poems to figure things out .
Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem .
And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go , " Oh , that 's what this is all about , " and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven 't solved anything , but at least I have a new poem out of it .
Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry .
I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn 't just want to sit on paper , that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person .
When I was a freshman in high school , I was a live wire of nervous hormones .
And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable .
And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long , I was fascinated by the idea of spoken word poetry .
I felt that my two secret loves , poetry and theatre , had come together , had a baby , a baby I needed to get to know .
So I decided to give it a try .
My first spoken word poem , packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old , was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine .
The poem was very indignant , and mainly exaggerated , but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant , so I thought that that 's what was expected of me .
The first time that I performed , the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy , and when I came off the stage I was shaking .
I felt this tap on my shoulder , and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd .
She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand , but instead she just nodded at me and said , " Hey , I really felt that . Thanks . "
And lightning struck .
I was hooked .
I discovered this bar on Manhattan 's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open mic , and my bewildered , but supportive , parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could .
I was the youngest by at least a decade , but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn 't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about -- if fact , they welcomed me .
And it was here , listening to these poets share their stories , that I learned that spoken word poetry didn 't have to be indignant , it could be fun or painful or serious or silly .
The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home , and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well .
Never mind the fact that I was 14 -- they told me , " Write about being 14 . "
So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant , grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me , " Hey , I really felt that too . "
Now I can divide my spoken word journey into three steps .
Step one was the moment I said , " I can . I can do this . "
And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie .
Step two was the moment I said , " I will . I will continue .
I love spoken word . I will keep coming back week after week . "
And step three began when I realized that I didn 't have to write poems that were indignant , if that 's not what I was .
There were things that were specific to me , and the more that I focused on those things , the weirder my poetry got , but the more that it felt like mine .
It 's not just the adage " write what you know . "
It 's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you 've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don 't know .
I use poetry to help me work through what I don 't understand , but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I 've been .
When I got to university , I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken word poetry .
And actually , Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name .
When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E.
as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me .
But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E. -- this time changing the mission to using spoken word poetry as a way to entertain , educate and inspire .
We stayed full-time students , but in between we traveled , performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates , from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus .
And we saw over and over the way that spoken word poetry cracks open locks .
But it turns out sometimes , poetry can be really scary .
Turns out sometimes , you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry .
So I came up with lists . Everyone can write lists .
And the first list that I assign is " 10 Things I Know to be True . "
And here 's what happens , and here 's what you would discover too if we all started sharing our lists out loud .
At a certain point , you would realize that someone has the exact same thing , or one thing very similar , to something on your list .
And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours .
Third , someone has something you 've never even heard of before .
And fourth , someone has something you thought you knew everything about , but they 're introducing a new angle of looking at it .
And I tell people that this is where great stories start from -- these four intersections of what you 're passionate about and what others might be invested in .
And most people respond really well to this exercise .
But one of my students , a freshman named Charlotte , was not convinced .
Charlotte was very good at writing lists , but she refused to write any poems .
" Miss , " she 'd say , " I 'm just not interesting .
I don 't have anything interesting to say . "
So I assigned her list after list , and one day I assigned the list " 10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now . "
Number three on Charlotte 's list was , " I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age . "
I asked her what that meant , and she said , " Miss , it 's kind of a long story . "
And I said , " Charlotte , it sounds pretty interesting to me . "
And so she wrote her first poem , a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before .
And the poem began , " Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man . "
" Did you see him on 60 Minutes , racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water , determined to beat this swimming champion ?
After the race , he tossed his wet , cloud-white hair and said , ' You 're a god . ' No , Anderson , you 're the god . "
Now I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed , to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you .
Somebody once told me it 's like walking through life like this .
You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up .
But I try to walk through life like this .
And yes , that means catching all of those miseries and hurt , but it also means that when beautiful , amazing things just fall out of the sky , I 'm ready to catch them .
I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder , to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and , instead , actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them , so that they can reinterpret and create something from it .
It 's not that I think that spoken word poetry is the ideal art form .
I 'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story .
I write musicals ; I make short films alongside my poems .
But I teach spoken word poetry because it 's accessible .
Not everyone can read music or owns a camera , but everyone can communicate in some way , and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from .
Plus , spoken word poetry allows for immediate connections .
It 's not uncommon for people to feel like they 're alone or that nobody understands them , but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions , you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers , or your community , who will listen .
And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie will connect with what you 've shared .
And that is an amazing realization to have , especially when you 're 14 .
Plus , now with YouTube , that connection 's not even limited to the room we 're in .
I 'm so lucky that there 's this archive of performances that I can share with my students .
It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to .
It is tempting -- once you 've figured this out -- it is tempting to keep writing the same poem , or keep telling the same story , over and over , once you 've figured out that it will gain you applause .
It 's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself .
You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself .
And that is step three : infusing the work you 're doing with the specific things that make you you , even while those things are always changing .
Because step three never ends .
But you don 't get to start on step three , until you take step one first : I can .
I travel a lot while I 'm teaching , and I don 't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three , but I was very lucky with Charlotte , that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did .
I watched her realize that , by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she 's doing , she can create poems that only Charlotte can write -- about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer .
And I 'm trying to tell stories only I can tell -- like this story .
I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story , and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint or a short film -- and where exactly was the beginning or the middle or the end ?
And I wondered whether I 'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out , or not .
And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club , but it 's possible that it was much earlier .
In preparing for TED , I discovered this diary page in an old journal .
I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th .
It 's clear that when I was a child , I definitely walked through life like this .
I think that we all did .
I would like to help others rediscover that wonder -- to want to engage with it , to want to learn , to want to share what they 've learned , what they 've figured out to be true and what they 're still figuring out .
So I 'd like to close with this poem .
When they bombed Hiroshima , the explosion formed a mini-supernova so every living animal , human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash .
And what was left of the city soon followed .
The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder .
When I was born , my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said , " This ? I 've done this before . "
She says I have old eyes .
When my Grandpa Genji died , I was only five years old , but I took my mom by the hand and told her , " Don 't worry , he 'll come back as a baby . "
And yet , for someone who 's apparently done this already , I still haven 't figured anything out yet .
My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage .
My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry , and it still always tastes funny in my mouth .
But in Hiroshima , some people were wiped clean away , leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page .
So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets , I keep trying , hoping that one day I 'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed .
My parents named me Sarah , which is a biblical name .
In the original story , God told Sarah she could do something impossible and she laughed , because the first Sarah , she didn 't know what to do with impossible .
And me ? Well , neither do I , but I see the impossible every day .
Impossible is trying to connect in this world , trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you , knowing that while you 're speaking , they aren 't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you .
They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it .
It 's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection .
There 's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation .
But on the front step , a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone .
The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light .
After the A-bomb , specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again .
But that spring , there were new buds popping up from the earth .
When I meet you , in that moment , I 'm no longer a part of your future .
I start quickly becoming part of your past .
But in that instant , I get to share your present .
And you , you get to share mine .
And that is the greatest present of all .
So if you tell me I can do the impossible , I 'll probably laugh at you .
I don 't know if I can change the world yet , because I don 't know that much about it -- and I don 't know that much about reincarnation either , but if you make me laugh hard enough , sometimes I forget what century I 'm in .
This isn 't my first time here . This isn 't my last time here .
These aren 't the last words I 'll share .
But just in case , I 'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .

Miru Kim : My underground art explorations
At the 2008 EG Conference , artist Miru Kim talks about her work . Kim explores industrial ruins underneath New York and then photographs herself in them , nude -- to bring these massive , dangerous , hidden spaces into sharp focus .
I was raised in Seoul , Korea , and moved to New York City in 1999 to attend college .
I was pre-med at the time , and I thought I would become a surgeon because I was interested in anatomy and dissecting animals really piqued my curiosity .
At the same time , I fell in love with New York City .
I started to realize that I could look at the whole city as a living organism .
I wanted to dissect it and look into its unseen layers .
And the way to it , for me , was through artistic means .
So , eventually I decided to pursue an MFA instead of an M.D.
and in grad school I became interested in creatures that dwell in the hidden corners of the city .
In New York City , rats are part of commuters ' daily lives .
Most people ignore them or are frightened of them .
But I took a liking to them because they dwell on the fringes of society .
And even though they 're used in labs to promote human lives , they 're also considered pests .
I also started looking around in the city and trying to photograph them .
One day , in the subway , I was snapping pictures of the tracks hoping to catch a rat or two , and a man came up to me and said , " You can 't take photographs here .
The MTA will confiscate your camera . "
I was quite shocked by that , and thought to myself , " Well , OK then .
I 'll follow the rats . "
Then I started going into the tunnels , which made me realize that there 's a whole new dimension to the city that I never saw before and most people don 't get to see .
Around the same time , I met like-minded individuals who call themselves urban explorers , adventurers , spelunkers , guerrilla historians , etc .
I was welcomed into this loose , Internet-based network of people who regularly explore urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations , tunnels , sewers , aqueducts , factories , hospitals , shipyards and so on .
When I took photographs in these locations , I felt there was something missing in the pictures .
Simply documenting these soon-to-be-demolished structures wasn 't enough for me .
So I wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces , and the simplest way to do it , at the time , was to model myself .
I decided against clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements .
I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying , derelict spaces .
This was taken in the Riviera Sugar Factory in Red Hook , Brooklyn .
It 's now an empty , six-acre lot waiting for a shopping mall right across from the new Ikea .
I was very fond of this space because it 's the first massive industrial complex I found on my own that is abandoned .
When I first went in , I was scared , because I heard dogs barking and I thought they were guard dogs .
But they happened to be wild dogs living there , and it was right by the water , so there were swans and ducks swimming around and trees growing everywhere and bees nesting in the sugar barrels .
The nature had really reclaimed the whole complex .
And , in a way , I wanted the human figure in the picture to become a part of that nature .
When I got comfortable in the space , it also felt like a big playground .
I would climb up the tanks and hop across exposed beams as if I went back in time and became a child again .
This was taken in the old Croton Aqueduct , which supplied fresh water to New York City for the first time .
The construction began in 1837 .
It lasted about five years .
It got abandoned when the new Croton Aqueducts opened in 1890 .
When you go into spaces like this , you 're directly accessing the past , because they sit untouched for decades .
I love feeling the aura of a space that has so much history .
Instead of looking at reproductions of it at home , you 're actually feeling the hand-laid bricks and shimmying up and down narrow cracks and getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight .
This is a tunnel underneath Riverside Park .
It was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses .
The murals were done by a graffiti artist to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people that got relocated from the tunnel in 1991 when the tunnel reopened for trains .
Walking in this tunnel is very peaceful .
There 's nobody around you , and you hear the kids playing in the park above you , completely unaware of what 's underneath .
When I was going out a lot to these places , I was feeling a lot of anxiety and isolation because I was in a solitary phase in my life , and I decided to title my series " Naked City Spleen , " which references Charles Baudelaire .
" Naked City " is a nickname for New York , and " Spleen " embodies the melancholia and inertia that come from feeling alienated in an urban environment .
This is the same tunnel .
You see the sunbeams coming from the ventilation ducts and the train approaching .
This is a tunnel that 's abandoned in Hell 's Kitchen .
I was there alone , setting up , and a homeless man approached .
I was basically intruding in his living space .
I was really frightened at first , but I calmly explained to him that I was working on an art project and he didn 't seem to mind and so I went ahead and put my camera on self-timer and ran back and forth .
And when I was done , he actually offered me his shirt to wipe off my feet and kindly walked me out .
It must have been a very unusual day for him .
One thing that struck me , after this incident , was that a space like that holds so many deleted memories of the city .
That homeless man , to me , really represented an element of the unconscious of the city .
He told me that he was abused above ground and was once in Riker 's Island , and at last he found peace and quiet in that space .
The tunnel was once built for the prosperity of the city , but is now a sanctuary for outcasts , who are completely forgotten in the average urban dweller 's everyday life .
This is underneath my alma mater , Columbia University .
The tunnels are famous for having been used during the development of the Manhattan Project .
This particular tunnel is interesting because it shows the original foundations of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum , which was demolished in 1890 when Columbia moved in .
This is the New York City Farm Colony , which was a poorhouse in Staten Island from the 1890s to the 1930s .
Most of my photos are set in places that have been abandoned for decades , but this is an exception .
This children 's hospital was closed in 1997 ; it 's located in Newark .
When I was there three years ago , the windows were broken and the walls were peeling , but everything was left there as it was .
You see the autopsy table , morgue trays , x-ray machines and even used utensils , which you see on the autopsy table .
After exploring recently-abandoned buildings , I felt that everything could fall into ruins very fast : your home , your office , a shopping mall , a church -- any man-made structures around you .
I was reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are .
I love to travel , and Berlin has become one of my favorite cities .
It 's full of history , and also full of underground bunkers and ruins from the war .
This was taken under a homeless asylum built in 1885 to house 1,100 people .
I saw the structure while I was on the train , and I got off at the next station and met people there that gave me access to their catacomb-like basement , which was used for ammunition storage during the war and also , at some point , to hide groups of Jewish refugees .
This is the actual catacombs in Paris .
I explored there extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away .
There are more than 185 miles of tunnels , and only about a mile is open to the public as a museum .
The first tunnels date back to 60 B.C.
They were consistently dug as limestone quarries and by the 18th century , the caving-in of some of these quarries posed safety threats , so the government ordered reinforcing of the existing quarries and dug new observation tunnels in order to monitor and map the whole place .
As you can see , the system is very complex and vast .
It 's very dangerous to get lost in there .
And at the same time , there was a problem in the city with overflowing cemeteries .
So the bones were moved from the cemeteries into the quarries , making them into the catacombs .
The remains of over six million people are housed in there , some over 1,300 years old .
This was taken under the Montparnasse Cemetery where most of the ossuaries are located .
There are also phone cables that were used in the ' 50s and many bunkers from the World War II era .
This is a German bunker .
Nearby there 's a French bunker , and the whole tunnel system is so complex that the two parties never met .
The tunnels are famous for having been used by the Resistance , which Victor Hugo wrote about in " Les Miserables . "
And I saw a lot of graffiti from the 1800s , like this one .
After exploring the underground of Paris , I decided to climb up , and I climbed a Gothic monument that 's right in the middle of Paris .
This is the Tower of Saint Jacques .
It was built in the early 1500s .
I don 't recommend sitting on a gargoyle in the middle of January , naked .
It was not very comfortable .
And all this time , I never saw a single rat in any of these places , until recently , when I was in the London sewers .
This was probably the toughest place to explore .
I had to wear a gas mask because of the toxic fumes -- I guess , except for in this picture .
And when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you .
This is a still from a film I worked on recently , called " Blind Door . "
I 've become more interested in capturing movement and texture .
And the 16mm black-and-white film gave a different feel to it .
And this is the first theater project I worked on .
I adapted and produced " A Dream Play " by August Strindberg .
It was performed last September one time only in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn , which is considered to be the oldest underground train tunnel in the world , built in 1844 .
I 've been leaning towards more collaborative projects like these , lately .
But whenever I get a chance I still work on my series .
The last place I visited was the Mayan ruins of Copan , Honduras .
This was taken inside an archaeological tunnel in the main temple .
I like doing more than just exploring these spaces .
I feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way -- before they 're lost forever .
Thank you .
Ben Kacyra : Ancient wonders captured in 3D
Ancient monuments give us clues to astonishing past civilizations -- but they 're under threat from pollution , war , neglect . Ben Kacyra , who invented a groundbreaking 3D scanning system , is using his invention to scan and preserve the world 's heritage in archival detail .
I 'd like to start with a short story .
It 's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp .
They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis , and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls , but at the same time they excited him .
And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work .
Let 's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later , where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system .
Let me show you how it works .
Female Voice : Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that 's a laser beam of light .
The system measures the beam 's time of flight , recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return .
With two mirrors , the scanner calculates the beam 's horizontal and vertical angles , giving accurate x , y , and z coordinates .
The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program .
All of this happens in seconds .
Ben Kacyra : You can see here , these systems are extremely fast .
They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution .
A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day .
These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second .
So , as you can imagine , this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry .
Approximately ten years ago , my wife and I started a foundation to do good , and right about that time , the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas , hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan , were blown up by the Taliban .
They were gone in an instant .
And unfortunately , there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas .
This clearly devastated me , and I couldn 't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends , the winged bulls , and the fate of the many , many heritage sites all over the world .
Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites .
We called the project CyArk , which stands for Cyber Archive .
To date , with the help of a global network of partners , we 've completed close to fifty projects .
Let me show you some of them : Chichen Itza , Rapa Nui -- and what you 're seeing here are the cloud of points -- Babylon , Rosslyn Chapel , Pompeii , and our latest project , Mt . Rushmore , which happened to be one of our most challenging projects .
As you see here , we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal .
The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers .
We also produce media for dissemination to the public -- free through the CyArk website .
These would be used for education , cultural tourism , etc .
What you 're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [ the ] cloud of points in real time , cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions .
This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal .
In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that 's used for preservation , and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs .
And here , this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal , and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site .
And so this is not a video .
This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy .
And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed .
And here you 're looking at a model that 's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle .
It 's used for studies , for visualization , as well as for education .
And finally , we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools .
The more I got involved in the heritage field , the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them .
Of course , earthquakes and all the natural phenomena -- floods , tornadoes , etc . -- take their toll .
However , what occurred to me was human-caused destruction , which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction , but actually it was accelerating .
This includes arson , urban sprawl , acid rain , not to mention terrorism and wars .
It was getting more and more apparent that we 're fighting a losing battle .
We 're losing our sites and the stories , and basically we 're losing a piece -- and a significant piece -- of our collective memory .
Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from .
Luckily , in the last two or three decades , digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we 've brought to bear in the digital preservation , in our digital preservation war .
This includes , for example , the 3D laser scanning systems , ever more powerful personal computers , 3D graphics , high-definition digital photography , not to mention the Internet .
Because of this accelerated pace of destruction , it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work .
And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge -- and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years .
We do have the technology that 's scaleable , and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate , so we 're comfortable that this task can be accomplished .
However , to me , the 500 is really just the first 500 .
In order to sustain our work into the future , we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them , whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites , and at the same time , it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future .
Let me close with another short story .
Two years ago , we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site , a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda , the Royal Kasubi Tombs .
The work was done successfully in the field , and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website .
Last March , we received very sad news .
The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson .
A few days later , we received a call : " Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction ? "
Our answer , of course , was yes .
Let me leave you with a final thought .
Our heritage is much more than our collective memory -- it 's our collective treasure .
We owe it to our children , our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Well , I 'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you the power of this technology and so , while I 've been speaking , you have been scanned .
The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen .
This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points .
You can look at it from on top , from the ceiling .
You can look from different vantage points , but I 'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd , just to show the amount of detail that we can create .
So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes .
I 'd like to thank the wizards here .
We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this : the Historic Scotland , and the Glasgow School of Art .
I 'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell , who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland .
David .
And Doug Pritchard , who 's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art .
Let 's give them a hand .
Thank you .
New thinking on the climate crisis
In this brand-new slideshow , Al Gore presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists recently predicted . He challenges us to act .
I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times .
I 'm giving a short slide show this morning that I 'm giving for the very first time , so -- well it 's -- I don 't want or need to raise the bar , I 'm actually trying to lower the bar .
Because I 've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session .
And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong 's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief , but about behavior .
Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism .
How dare we be optimistic ?
Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief , an intellectual posture .
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said , " You must become the change you wish to see in the world . "
And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone , except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior . But the word " behavior " is also , I think , sometimes misunderstood in this context .
I 'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids , and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house , and dug the geothermal wells , and did all of that other stuff .
But , as important as it is to change the lightbulbs , it is more important to change the laws .
And when we change our behavior in our daily lives , we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part . In order to be optimistic about this , we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy .
In order to solve the climate crisis , we have to solve the democracy crisis .
And we have one .
I have been trying to tell this story for a long time .
I was reminded of that recently , by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at , just staring at me as she walked past . She was in her 70s , looked like she had a kind face . I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction , also just staring at me . And so I said , " How do you do ? "
And she said , " You know , if you dyed your hair black , you would look just like Al Gore . "
Many years ago , when I was a young congressman , I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control -- the nuclear arms race .
And the military historians taught me , during that quest , that military conflicts are typically put into three categories : local battles , regional or theater wars , and the rare but all-important global , world war -- strategic conflicts .
And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources , a different approach , a different organizational model .
Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories , and most of what we think about are local environmental problems : air pollution , water pollution , hazardous waste dumps . But there are also regional environmental problems , like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast , and from Western Europe to the Arctic , and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico .
And there are lots of those . But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global , or strategic , conflict .
Everything is affected . And we have to organize our response appropriately . We need a worldwide , global mobilization for renewable energy , conservation , efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy .
We have work to do . And we can mobilize resources and political will . But the political will has to be mobilized , in order to mobilize the resources .
Let me show you these slides here .
I thought I would start with the logo . What 's missing here , of course , is the North Polar ice cap .
Greenland remains . Twenty-eight years ago , this is what the polar ice cap -- the North Polar ice cap -- looked like at the end of the summer , at the fall equinox .
This last fall , I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder , Colorado , and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory .
This is what 's happened in the last 28 years .
To put it in perspective , 2005 was the previous record .
Here 's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers .
The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically -- doesn 't look quite the same size -- but it is exactly the same size as the United States , minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona .
The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi .
The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much . It comes back in the winter , but not as permanent ice , as thin ice -- vulnerable . The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years .
That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland .
Already , around the Arctic Circle -- this is a famous village in Alaska . This is a town in Newfoundland . Antarctica . Latest studies from NASA .
The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California .
" They were the best of times , they were the worst of times " : the most famous opening sentence in English literature . I want to share briefly a tale of two planets . Earth and Venus are exactly the same size . Earth 's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger , but essentially the same size .
They have exactly the same amount of carbon .
But the difference is , on Earth , most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere , deposited in the ground as coal , oil , natural gas , etc . On Venus , most of it is in the atmosphere . The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average . On Venus , it 's 855 . This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible , and putting it into the atmosphere .
It 's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun .
It 's three times hotter than Mercury , which is right next to the Sun . Now , briefly , here 's an image you 've seen , as one of the only old images , but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI : Climate .
The global scientific community says : man-made global warming pollution , put into the atmosphere , thickening this , is trapping more of the outgoing infrared .
You all know that . At the last IPCC summary , the scientists wanted to say , " How certain are you ? " They wanted to answer that " 99 percent . "
The Chinese objected , and so the compromise was " more than 90 percent . "
Now , the skeptics say , " Oh , wait a minute , this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun . " If that were true , the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere , if it 's more coming in .
If it 's more being trapped on the way out , then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here . Here is the lower atmosphere .
Here 's the stratosphere : cooler .
CSI : Climate .
Now , here 's the good news . Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming . Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way . There has been progress , but here is the key : when given a list of challenges to confront , global warming is still listed at near the bottom .
What is missing is a sense of urgency .
If you agree with the factual analysis , but you don 't feel the sense of urgency , where does that leave you ?
Well , the Alliance for Climate Protection , which I head in conjunction with Current TV -- who did this pro bono -- did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this .
This is the winner .
NBC -- I 'll show all of the networks here -- the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates : two of them were about the climate crisis . ABC : 844 questions , two about the climate crisis .
Fox : two . CNN : two . C zero .
From laughs to tears -- this is one of the older tobacco commercials .
So here 's what we 're doing .
This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries . And us .
But it 's not just the developed nations .
The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace . And actually , their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965 . And they 're catching up very dramatically . The total concentrations : by 2025 , they will be essentially where we were in 1985 .
If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture , we would still have this crisis .
But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis . This is in Bolivia -- over thirty years .
This is peak fishing in a few seconds . The ' 60s .
'70s . ' 80s . ' 90s . We have to stop this . And the good news is that we can .
We have the technologies .
We have to have a unified view of how to go about this : the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions , all has a single , very simple solution .
People say , " What 's the solution ? " Here it is .
Put a price on carbon . We need a CO2 tax , revenue neutral , to replace taxation on employment , which was invented by Bismarck -- and some things have changed since the 19th century .
In the poor world , we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis .
Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted , if we do not solve the climate crisis .
But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries . This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe .
This was from Nature magazine . These are concentrating solar , renewable energy plants , linked in a so-called " supergrid " to supply all of the electrical power to Europe , largely from developing countries -- high-voltage DC currents .
This is not pie in the sky ; this can be done .
We need to do it for our own economy .
The latest figures show that the old model is not working . There are a lot of great investments that you can make . If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil , then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets .
And it is based on an old model .
Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse . Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent . Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense .
I have a stake in these , so I 'll have a disclaimer there .
But geothermal , concentrating solar , advanced photovoltaics , efficiency and conservation .
You 've seen this slide before , but there 's a change .
The only two countries that didn 't ratify -- and now there 's only one . Australia had an election .
And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there .
And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia .
Lot of other things contributed to it , but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia 's position on Kyoto , and he has . Now , they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had .
This is Lake Lanier . My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names , we 'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina , and we would say it 's headed toward Atlanta .
We can 't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture .
Here 's more good news . The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S.
are up to 780 -- and I thought I saw one go by there , just to localize this -- which is good news .
Now , to close , we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine .
What we need is another hero generation . Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially , but also the rest of the world , have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice -- just as Jill [ Bolte ] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through .
We now have a culture of distraction .
But we have a planetary emergency .
And we have to find a way to create , in the generation of those alive today , a sense of generational mission .
I wish I could find the words to convey this .
This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet .
Another that ended slavery . And that gave women the right to vote .
We can do this . Don 't tell me that we don 't have the capacity to do it .
If we had just one week 's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War , we could be well on the way to solving this challenge .
We have the capacity to do it .
One final point : I 'm optimistic , because I believe we have the capacity , at moments of great challenge , to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us .
Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying , " Oh , this is so terrible .
What a burden we have . " I would like to ask you to reframe that . How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts ?
A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do ? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which , a thousand years from now , philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying , they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future .
Let 's do that . Thank you very much .
For so many people at TED , there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form -- one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn 't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true .
That hurts .
You have no idea .
When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now -- I mean , there 's -- are you excited by their plans on global warming ?
AG : The answer to the question is hard for me because , on the one hand , I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee -- certain nominee -- John McCain , and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination -- all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis . All three have offered leadership , and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration . And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals . But the campaign dialogue that -- as illustrated by the questions -- that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters , by the way , the analysis of all the questions -- and , by the way , the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label , " Clean Coal . " Has anybody noticed that ?
Every single debate has been sponsored by " Clean Coal . "
" Now , even lower emissions ! "
The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed .
So they 're saying the right things and they may -- whichever of them is elected -- may do the right thing , but let me tell you : when I came back from Kyoto in 1997 , with a feeling of great happiness that we 'd gotten that breakthrough there , and then confronted the United States Senate , only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm , to ratify that treaty . Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say .
This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization .
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization , literally .
And now we mechanized that process . Changing that pattern requires a scope , a scale , a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past .
So that 's why I began by saying , be optimistic in what you do , but be an active citizen .
Demand -- change the light bulbs , but change the laws . Change the global treaties .
We have to speak up . We have to solve this democracy -- this -- We have sclerosis in our democracy . And we have to change that .
Use the Internet . Go on the Internet .
Connect with people . Become very active as citizens .
Have a moratorium -- we shouldn 't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren 't able to capture and store CO2 , which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources .
Now , nobody is talking on that scale . But I do believe that between now and November , it is possible .
This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign -- grassroots mobilization , television ads , Internet ads , radio , newspaper -- with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen .
We need help . We need help .
In terms of your own personal role going forward , Al , is there something more than that you would like to be doing ?
AG : I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question . What can I do ?
Buckminster Fuller once wrote , " If the future of all human civilization depended on me , what would I do ?
How would I be ? " It does depend on all of us , but again , not just with the light bulbs .
We , most of us here , are Americans . We have a democracy .
We can change things , but we have to actively change .
What 's needed really is a higher level of consciousness .
And that 's hard to -- that 's hard to create -- but it is coming .
There 's an old African proverb that some of you know that says , " If you want to go quickly , go alone ; if you want to go far , go together . " We have to go far , quickly .
So we have to have a change in consciousness .
A change in commitment . A new sense of urgency .
A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge .
Al Gore , thank you so much for coming to TED .
AG : Thank you . Thank you very much .
Amy Cuddy : Your body language shapes who you are
Body language affects how others see us , but it may also change how we see ourselves . Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how " power posing " -- standing in a posture of confidence , even when we don 't feel confident -- can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain , and might even have an impact on our chances for success .
So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack , and all it requires of you is this : that you change your posture for two minutes .
But before I give it away , I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you 're doing with your body .
So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller ?
Maybe you 're hunching , crossing your legs , maybe wrapping your ankles .
Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this .
Sometimes we spread out .
I see you .
So I want you to pay attention to what you 're doing right now .
We 're going to come back to that in a few minutes , and I 'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit , it could significantly change the way your life unfolds .
So , we 're really fascinated with body language , and we 're particularly interested in other people 's body language .
You know , we 're interested in , like , you know — — an awkward interaction , or a smile , or a contemptuous glance , or maybe a very awkward wink , or maybe even something like a handshake .
Here they are arriving at Number 10 , and look at this lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States . Oh , and here comes the Prime Minister of the — ? No .
Amy Cuddy : So a handshake , or the lack of a handshake , can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks .
Even the BBC and The New York Times .
So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior , or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it 's language , so we think about communication .
When we think about communication , we think about interactions .
So what is your body language communicating to me ?
What 's mine communicating to you ?
And there 's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this . So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language , or other people 's body language , on judgments .
And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language .
And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote , who we ask out on a date .
For example , Nalini Ambady , a researcher at Tufts University , shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions , their judgments of the physician 's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued .
So it doesn 't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent , but do we like that person and how they interacted ?
Even more dramatic , Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates ' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes , and even , let 's go digital , emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation .
If you use them poorly , bad idea . Right ?
So when we think of nonverbals , we think of how we judge others , how they judge us and what the outcomes are .
We tend to forget , though , the other audience that 's influenced by our nonverbals , and that 's ourselves .
We are also influenced by our nonverbals , our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology .
So what nonverbals am I talking about ?
I 'm a social psychologist . I study prejudice , and I teach at a competitive business school , so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics .
I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance .
And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance ?
Well , this is what they are .
So in the animal kingdom , they are about expanding .
So you make yourself big , you stretch out , you take up space , you 're basically opening up .
It 's about opening up . And this is true across the animal kingdom . It 's not just limited to primates .
And humans do the same thing .
So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically , and also when they 're feeling powerful in the moment .
And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are .
This expression , which is known as pride , Jessica Tracy has studied . She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition .
So when they cross the finish line and they 've won , it doesn 't matter if they 've never seen anyone do it .
They do this .
So the arms up in the V , the chin is slightly lifted .
What do we do when we feel powerless ? We do exactly the opposite . We close up . We wrap ourselves up .
We make ourselves small . We don 't want to bump into the person next to us .
So again , both animals and humans do the same thing .
And this is what happens when you put together high and low power . So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other 's nonverbals .
So if someone is being really powerful with us , we tend to make ourselves smaller . We don 't mirror them .
We do the opposite of them .
So I 'm watching this behavior in the classroom , and what do I notice ? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals .
So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas , really coming into the room , they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts , like they really want to occupy space .
When they sit down , they 're sort of spread out .
They raise their hands like this .
You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in . As soon they come in , you see it .
You see it on their faces and their bodies , and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny , and they go like this when they raise their hand .
I notice a couple of things about this .
One , you 're not going to be surprised .
It seems to be related to gender .
So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men .
Women feel chronically less powerful than men , so this is not surprising . But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating , and how well they were participating .
And this is really important in the MBA classroom , because participation counts for half the grade .
So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap .
You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades , and it seems to be partly attributable to participation .
So I started to wonder , you know , okay , so you have these people coming in like this , and they 're participating . Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more ?
So my main collaborator Dana Carney , who 's at Berkeley , and I really wanted to know , can you fake it till you make it ?
Like , can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful ?
So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us . There 's a lot of evidence .
But our question really was , do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves ?
There 's some evidence that they do .
So , for example , we smile when we feel happy , but also , when we 're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this , it makes us feel happy .
So it goes both ways . When it comes to power , it also goes both ways . So when you feel powerful , you 're more likely to do this , but it 's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful , you are more likely to actually feel powerful .
So the second question really was , you know , so we know that our minds change our bodies , but is it also true that our bodies change our minds ?
And when I say minds , in the case of the powerful , what am I talking about ?
So I 'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings , and in my case , that 's hormones . I look at hormones .
So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like ?
So powerful people tend to be , not surprisingly , more assertive and more confident , more optimistic .
They actually feel that they 're going to win even at games of chance .
They also tend to be able to think more abstractly .
So there are a lot of differences . They take more risks .
There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people .
Physiologically , there also are differences on two key hormones : testosterone , which is the dominance hormone , and cortisol , which is the stress hormone .
So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol , and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol .
So what does that mean ? When you think about power , people tended to think only about testosterone , because that was about dominance .
But really , power is also about how you react to stress .
So do you want the high-power leader that 's dominant , high on testosterone , but really stress reactive ?
Probably not , right ? You want the person who 's powerful and assertive and dominant , but not very stress reactive , the person who 's laid back .
So we know that in primate hierarchies , if an alpha needs to take over , if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly , within a few days , that individual 's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly .
So we have this evidence , both that the body can shape the mind , at least at the facial level , and also that role changes can shape the mind .
So what happens , okay , you take a role change , what happens if you do that at a really minimal level , like this tiny manipulation , this tiny intervention ?
" For two minutes , " you say , " I want you to stand like this , and it 's going to make you feel more powerful . "
So this is what we did . We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment , and these people adopted , for two minutes , either high-power poses or low-power poses , and I 'm just going to show you five of the poses , although they took on only two .
So here 's one .
A couple more .
This one has been dubbed the " Wonder Woman " by the media .
Here are a couple more .
So you can be standing or you can be sitting .
And here are the low-power poses .
So you 're folding up , you 're making yourself small .
This one is very low-power .
When you 're touching your neck , you 're really protecting yourself .
So this is what happens . They come in , they spit into a vial , we for two minutes say , " You need to do this or this . "
They don 't look at pictures of the poses . We don 't want to prime them with a concept of power . We want them to be feeling power , right ? So two minutes they do this .
We then ask them , " How powerful do you feel ? " on a series of items , and then we give them an opportunity to gamble , and then we take another saliva sample .
That 's it . That 's the whole experiment .
So this is what we find . Risk tolerance , which is the gambling , what we find is that when you 're in the high-power pose condition , 86 percent of you will gamble .
When you 're in the low-power pose condition , only 60 percent , and that 's a pretty whopping significant difference .
Here 's what we find on testosterone .
From their baseline when they come in , high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase , and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease .
So again , two minutes , and you get these changes .
Here 's what you get on cortisol . High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease , and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase .
So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive , confident and comfortable , or really stress-reactive , and , you know , feeling sort of shut down . And we 've all had the feeling , right ?
So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves , so it 's not just others , but it 's also ourselves .
Also , our bodies change our minds .
But the next question , of course , is can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways ?
So this is in the lab . It 's this little task , you know , it 's just a couple of minutes . Where can you actually apply this ? Which we cared about , of course .
And so we think it 's really , what matters , I mean , where you want to use this is evaluative situations like social threat situations . Where are you being evaluated , either by your friends ? Like for teenagers it 's at the lunchroom table .
It could be , you know , for some people it 's speaking at a school board meeting . It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview .
We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through was the job interview .
So we published these findings , and the media are all over it , and they say , Okay , so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview , right ?
You know , so we were of course horrified , and said , Oh my God , no , no , no , that 's not what we meant at all .
For numerous reasons , no , no , no , don 't do that .
Again , this is not about you talking to other people .
It 's you talking to yourself . What do you do before you go into a job interview ? You do this .
Right ? You 're sitting down . You 're looking at your iPhone -- or your Android , not trying to leave anyone out .
You are , you know , you 're looking at your notes , you 're hunching up , making yourself small , when really what you should be doing maybe is this , like , in the bathroom , right ? Do that . Find two minutes .
So that 's what we want to test . Okay ?
So we bring people into a lab , and they do either high- or low-power poses again , they go through a very stressful job interview .
It 's five minutes long . They are being recorded .
They 're being judged also , and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback , so they look like this . Like , imagine this is the person interviewing you .
So for five minutes , nothing , and this is worse than being heckled .
People hate this . It 's what Marianne LaFrance calls " standing in social quicksand . "
So this really spikes your cortisol .
So this is the job interview we put them through , because we really wanted to see what happened .
We then have these coders look at these tapes , four of them .
They 're blind to the hypothesis . They 're blind to the conditions .
They have no idea who 's been posing in what pose , and they end up looking at these sets of tapes , and they say , " Oh , we want to hire these people , " -- all the high-power posers -- " we don 't want to hire these people .
We also evaluate these people much more positively overall . "
But what 's driving it ? It 's not about the content of the speech .
It 's about the presence that they 're bringing to the speech .
We also , because we rate them on all these variables related to competence , like , how well-structured is the speech ? How good is it ? What are their qualifications ?
No effect on those things . This is what 's affected .
These kinds of things . People are bringing their true selves , basically . They 're bringing themselves .
They bring their ideas , but as themselves , with no , you know , residue over them .
So this is what 's driving the effect , or mediating the effect .
So when I tell people about this , that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior , and our behavior can change our outcomes , they say to me , " I don 't -- It feels fake . " Right ?
So I said , fake it till you make it . I don 't -- It 's not me .
I don 't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud .
I don 't want to feel like an impostor .
I don 't want to get there only to feel like I 'm not supposed to be here .
And that really resonated with me , because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I 'm not supposed to be here .
When I was 19 , I was in a really bad car accident .
I was thrown out of a car , rolled several times .
I was thrown from the car . And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward , and I had been withdrawn from college , and I learned that my I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations , which was very traumatic .
I knew my I.Q. because I had identified with being smart , and I had been called gifted as a child .
So I 'm taken out of college , I keep trying to go back .
They say , " You 're not going to finish college .
Just , you know , there are other things for you to do , but that 's not going to work out for you . "
So I really struggled with this , and I have to say , having your identity taken from you , your core identity , and for me it was being smart , having that taken from you , there 's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that .
So I felt entirely powerless . I worked and worked and worked , and I got lucky , and worked , and got lucky , and worked .
Eventually I graduated from college .
It took me four years longer than my peers , and I convinced someone , my angel advisor , Susan Fiske , to take me on , and so I ended up at Princeton , and I was like , I am not supposed to be here .
I am an impostor .
And the night before my first-year talk , and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people . That 's it .
I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said , " I 'm quitting . "
She was like , " You are not quitting , because I took a gamble on you , and you 're staying .
You 're going to stay , and this is what you 're going to do .
You are going to fake it .
You 're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do .
You 're just going to do it and do it and do it , even if you 're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience , until you have this moment where you say , ' Oh my gosh , I 'm doing it .
Like , I have become this . I am actually doing this . ' " So that 's what I did . Five years in grad school , a few years , you know , I 'm at Northwestern , I moved to Harvard , I 'm at Harvard , I 'm not really thinking about it anymore , but for a long time I had been thinking , " Not supposed to be here . Not supposed to be here . "
So at the end of my first year at Harvard , a student who had not talked in class the entire semester , who I had said , " Look , you 've gotta participate or else you 're going to fail , " came into my office . I really didn 't know her at all .
And she said , she came in totally defeated , and she said , " I 'm not supposed to be here . "
And that was the moment for me . Because two things happened .
One was that I realized , oh my gosh , I don 't feel like that anymore . You know .
I don 't feel that anymore , but she does , and I get that feeling .
And the second was , she is supposed to be here !
Like , she can fake it , she can become it .
So I was like , " Yes , you are ! You are supposed to be here !
And tomorrow you 're going to fake it , you 're going to make yourself powerful , and , you know , you 're gonna — " " And you 're going to go into the classroom , and you are going to give the best comment ever . "
You know ? And she gave the best comment ever , and people turned around and they were like , oh my God , I didn 't even notice her sitting there , you know ?
She comes back to me months later , and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it , she had actually faked it till she became it .
So she had changed .
And so I want to say to you , don 't fake it till you make it .
Fake it till you become it . You know ? It 's not — Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize .
The last thing I 'm going to leave you with is this .
Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes .
So this is two minutes .
Two minutes , two minutes , two minutes .
Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation , for two minutes , try doing this , in the elevator , in a bathroom stall , at your desk behind closed doors .
That 's what you want to do . Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation .
Get your testosterone up . Get your cortisol down .
Don 't leave that situation feeling like , oh , I didn 't show them who I am .
Leave that situation feeling like , oh , I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am .
So I want to ask you first , you know , both to try power posing , and also I want to ask you to share the science , because this is simple .
I don 't have ego involved in this .
Give it away . Share it with people , because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power . Give it to them because they can do it in private .
They need their bodies , privacy and two minutes , and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life .
Thank you .
Lee Smolin : Science and democracy
Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works : as he puts it , " we fight and argue as hard as we can , " but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who 's right . And , he says , that 's how democracy works , too .
So , about three years ago I was in London , and somebody called Howard Burton came to me and said , I represent a group of people , and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics .
We have about 120 million dollars , and we want to do it well .
We want to be in the forefront fields , and we want to do it differently .
We want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas , and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done .
It took me about 25 seconds to decide that that was a good idea .
Three years later , we have the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo , Ontario . It 's the most exciting job I 've ever had .
And it 's the first time I 've had a job where I 'm afraid to go away because of everything that 's going to happen in this week when I 'm here .
But in any case , what I 'm going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about .
So , we think a lot about what really makes science work ?
The first thing that anybody who knows science , and has been around science , is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong . There is no method .
On the other hand , somehow we manage to reason together as a community , from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about .
And this is , by the way , something that a democratic society also has to do .
So how does it work ?
Well , my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics .
And here are some of the ethical principles .
I 'm not going to read them all to you because I 'm not in teacher mode .
I 'm in entertain , amaze mode .
But one of the principles is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe .
But we 're all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide , you know , whether I 'm right or somebody else is right , are the people in our community in the next generation , in 30 and 50 years .
So it 's this combination of respect for the tradition and community we 're in , and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere , that makes science work .
And being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions , I believe , teaches us about democracy .
Not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy , but there has been , historically , a relationship between how people think about space and time , and what the cosmos is , and how people think about the society that they live in .
And I want to talk about three stages in that evolution .
The first science of cosmology that was anything like science was Aristotelian science , and that was hierarchical .
The earth is in the center , then there are these crystal spheres , the sun , the moon , the planets and finally the celestial sphere , where the stars are . And everything in this universe has a place .
And Aristotle 's law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place , which was of course , the rule of the society that Aristotle lived in , and more importantly , the medieval society that , through Christianity , embraced Aristotle and blessed it .
And the idea is that everything is defined .
Where something is , is defined with respect to this last sphere , the celestial sphere , outside of which is this eternal , perfect realm , where lives God , who is the ultimate judge of everything .
So that is both Aristotelian cosmology , and in a certain sense , medieval society .
Now , in the 17th century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of Newton .
And at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of John Locke and his collaborators .
And they were very closely associated .
In fact , Newton and Locke were friends .
Their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand , and a society on the other hand , were closely related .
And let me show you .
In a Newtonian universe , there 's no center -- thank you .
There are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed , absolute framework of space and time .
It 's meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space , because that 's defined , not with respect to say , where other things are , but with respect to this absolute notion of space , which for Newton was God .
Now , similarly , in Locke 's society there are individuals who have certain rights , properties in a formal sense , and those are defined with respect to some absolute , abstract notions of rights and justice , and so forth , which are independent of what else has happened in the society .
Of who else there is , of the history and so forth .
There is also an omniscient observer who knows everything , who is God , who is in a certain sense outside the universe , because he has no role in anything that happens , but is in a certain sense everywhere , because space is just the way that God knows where everything is , according to Newton , OK ?
So this is the foundations of what 's called , traditionally , liberal political theory and Newtonian physics .
Now , in the 20th century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century , and which is still going on .
It was begun with the invention of relativity theory and quantum theory .
And merging them together to make the final quantum theory of space and time and gravity , is the culmination of that , something that 's going on right now .
And in this universe there 's nothing fixed and absolute . Zilch , OK .
This universe is described by being a network of relationships .
Space is just one aspect , so there 's no meaning to say absolutely where something is .
There 's only where it is relative to everything else that is .
And this network of relations is ever-evolving .
So we call it a relational universe .
All properties of things are about these kinds of relationships .
And also , if you 're embedded in such a network of relationships , your view of the world has to do with what information comes to you through the network of relations .
And there 's no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything .
So this is general relativity , this is quantum theory .
This is also , if you talk to legal scholars , the foundations of new ideas in legal thought .
They 're thinking about the same things .
And not only that , they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often .
So there 's an interesting discussion going on there .
This last view of cosmology is called the relational view .
So the main slogan here is that there 's nothing outside the universe , which means that there 's no place to put an explanation for something outside .
So in such a relational universe , if you come upon something that 's ordered and structured , like this device here , or that device there , or something beautiful , like all the living things , all of you guys in the room -- " guys " in physics , by the way , is a generic term : men and women .
Then you want to know , you 're a person , you want to know how is it made .
And in a relational universe the only possible explanation was , somehow it made itself .
There must be mechanisms of self-organization inside the universe that make things .
Because there 's no place to put a maker outside , as there was in the Aristotelian and the Newtonian universe .
So in a relational universe we must have processes of self-organization .
Now , Darwin taught us that there are processes of self-organization that suffice to explain all of us and everything we see .
So it works . But not only that , if you think about how natural selection works , then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe .
That is , natural selection works on properties , like fitness , which are about relationships of some species to some other species .
Darwin wouldn 't make sense in an Aristotelian universe , and wouldn 't really make sense in a Newtonian universe .
So a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems .
And if you push that all the way down , really , it makes the best sense in a relational universe where all properties are relational .
Now , not only that , but Einstein taught us that gravity is the result of the world being relational .
If it wasn 't for gravity , there wouldn 't be life , because gravity causes stars to form and live for a very long time , keeping pieces of the world , like the surface of the Earth , out of thermal equilibrium for billions of years so life can evolve .
In the 20th century , we saw the independent development of two big themes in science .
In the biological sciences , they explored the implications of the notion that order and complexity and structure arise in a self-organized way .
That was the triumph of Neo-Darwinism and so forth .
And slowly , that idea is leaking out to the cognitive sciences , the human sciences , economics , et cetera .
At the same time , we physicists have been busy trying to make sense of and build on and integrate the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity .
And what we 've been working out is the implications , really , of the idea that the universe is made up of relations .
21st-century science is going to be driven by the integration of these two ideas : the triumph of relational ways of thinking about the world , on the one hand , and self-organization or Darwinian ways of thinking about the world , on the other hand .
And also , is that in the 21st century our thinking about space and time and cosmology , and our thinking about society are both going to continue to evolve .
And what they 're evolving towards is the union of these two big ideas , Darwinism and relationalism .
Now , if you think about democracy from this perspective , a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests , many different agendas , many different individuals , many different points of view .
Each one is incomplete , because you 're embedded in a network of relationships .
Any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships .
And you understand some things better than other things , and because of that there 's a continual jostling and give and take , which is politics .
And politics is , in the ideal sense , the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society .
And I also think that science will never go away and -- I 'm finishing on this line .
In fact , I 'm finished . Science will never go away .
Noel Bairey Merz : The single biggest health threat women face
Surprising , but true : More women now die of heart disease than men , yet cardiovascular research has long focused on men . Pioneering doctor C. Noel Bairey Merz shares what we know and don 't know about women 's heart health -- including the remarkably different symptoms women present during a heart attack . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
One out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime .
So this is the leading killer of women .
It 's a closely held secret for reasons I don 't know .
In addition to making this personal -- so we 're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women 's relationship with their heart -- we 're going to wax into the politics .
Because the personal , as you know , is political .
And not enough is being done about this .
And as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign , this is what we need to do now with heart .
Since 1984 , more women die in the U.S. than men .
So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man 's problem primarily -- which that was never true , but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and ' 60s , and it was in all the textbooks .
It 's certainly what I learned when I was training .
If we were to remain sexist , and that was not right , but if we were going to go forward and be sexist , it 's actually a woman 's disease .
So it 's a woman 's disease now .
And one of the things that you see is that male line , the mortality is going down , down , down , down , down .
And you see the female line since 1984 , the gap is widening .
More and more women , two , three , four times more women , dying of heart disease than men .
And that 's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change .
So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies , which had been developed in men , by men , for men for the last 50 years -- and they work pretty well in men , don 't they ? -- weren 't working so well for women .
So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980 's .
Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer .
And the breast cancer campaign -- again , this is not a competition .
We 're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign .
We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis .
Now sometimes when people see this , I hear this gasp .
We can all think of someone , often a young woman , who has been impacted by breast cancer .
We often can 't think of a young woman who has heart disease .
I 'm going to tell you why .
Heart disease kills people , often very quickly .
So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men , half of the time it 's sudden cardiac death -- no opportunity to say good-bye , no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy , no opportunity to help her pick out a wig .
Breast cancer , mortality is down to four percent .
And that is the 40 years that women have advocated .
Betty Ford , Nancy Reagan stood up and said , " I 'm a breast cancer survivor , " and it was okay to talk about it .
And then physicians have gone to bat .
We 've done the research .
We have effective therapies now .
Women are living longer than ever .
That has to happen in heart disease , and it 's time .
It 's not happening , and it 's time .
We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women .
As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies , " Yentl , " she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education .
And she wanted to study the Talmud .
And so how did she get educated then ?
She had to impersonate a man .
She had to look like a man .
She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had .
Bernadine Healy , Dr. Healy , was a cardiologist .
And right around that time , in the 1980 's , that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up , up , up , up , up , she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said , the Yentl syndrome .
Women are dying of heart disease , two , three , four times more than men .
Mortality is not going down , it 's going up .
And she questioned , she hypothesized , is this a Yentl syndrome ?
And here 's what the story is .
Is it because women don 't look like men , they don 't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we 've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics , and therefore , they 're not recognized for their heart disease .
And they 're just passed .
They don 't get treated , they don 't get detected , they don 't get the benefit of all the modern medicines .
Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health .
And this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world .
And it funds a lot of my research .
It funds research all over the place .
It was a very big deal for her to become director .
And she started , in the face of a lot of controversy , the Women 's Health Initiative .
And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women 's Health Initiative .
It told us about hormone replacement therapy .
It 's informed us about osteoporosis .
It informed us about breast cancer , colon cancer in women .
So a tremendous fund of knowledge despite , again , that so many people told her not to do it , it was too expensive .
And the under-reading was women aren 't worth it .
She was like , " Nope . Sorry . Women are worth it . "
Well there was a little piece of that Women 's Health Initiative that went to National Heart , Lung , and Blood Institute , which is the cardiology part of the NIH .
And we got to do the WISE study -- and the WISE stands for Women 's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation -- and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years .
It was a study to specifically ask , what 's going on with women ?
Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease ?
So in the WISE , 15 years ago , we started out and said , " Well wow , there 's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that . "
And our colleagues in Washington , D.C.
had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die , compared to men who have heart attacks and die -- and again , this is millions of people , happening every day -- women , in their fatty plaque -- and this is their coronary artery , so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle -- women erode , men explode .
You 're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology .
So I 'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first .
Hollywood heart attack . Ughhhh .
Horrible chest pain .
EKG goes pbbrrhh , so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal EKG .
There 's a big clot in the middle of the artery .
And they go up to the cath lab and boom , boom , boom get rid of the clot .
That 's a man heart attack .
Some women have those heart attacks , but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack , where it erodes , doesn 't completely fill with clot , symptoms are subtle , EKG findings are different -- female-pattern .
So what do you think happens to these gals ?
They 're often not recognized , sent home .
I 'm not sure what it was . Might have been gas .
So we picked up on that and we said , " You know , we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS : intravascular ultrasound . "
And we said , " We 're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different , and deposited differently , than men . "
And because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat .
When we watch people become obese , where do men get fat ?
Right here , it 's just a focal -- right there .
Where do women get fat ?
All over .
Cellulite here , cellulite here .
So we said , " Look , women look like they 're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away , smoothly putting it away .
Men just have to dump it in a single area . "
So we said , " Let 's look at these . "
And so the yellow is the fatty plaque , and panel A is a man .
And you can see , it 's lumpy bumpy .
He 's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries .
Panel B is the woman , very smooth .
She 's just laid it down nice and tidy .
And if you did that angiogram , which is the red , you can see the man 's disease .
So 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms , we easily recognize male-pattern disease .
Kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease .
So that was a discovery .
Now what are the implications of that ?
Well once again , women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem .
So we are working now on a non-invasive -- again , these are all invasive studies .
Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively .
And again , 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing , we 're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests .
So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging .
We 're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women 's Heart Center .
We selected this for the research .
This is not in your community hospital , but we would hope to translate this .
And we 're about two and a half years into a five-year study .
This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart .
And if you look carefully , you can see that there 's a black blush right there .
And that is microvascular obstruction .
The syndrome , the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction , or obstruction .
The second reason we really liked MRI is that there 's no radiation .
So unlike the CAT scans , X-rays , thalliums , for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart , every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation , we say , " Do we really need that test ? "
So we 're very excited about M.R.
You can 't go and order it yet , but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men .
What are the downstream consequences then , when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized ?
This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer .
And it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease , despite these good treatments that we know and we have work .
And when the woman has male-pattern disease -- so she looks like Barbara in the movie -- they get treated .
And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman , as Barbara does here with her husband , they don 't get the treatment .
These are our life-saving treatments .
And those little red boxes are deaths .
So those are the consequences .
And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps .
There 's been wonderful news also about studying women , finally , in heart disease .
And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we 're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy .
If you ask , what is the big difference between women and men physiologically ?
Why are there women and men ?
Because women bring new life into the world .
That 's all stem cells .
So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury , doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs , which is one of the things that we 're trying to do with stem cell therapy .
These are female and male stem cells .
And if you had an injured organ , if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area , do you want those robust , plentiful stem cells on the top ?
Or do you want these guys , that look like they 're out to lunch ?
And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells -- and this is in animals and increasingly we 're showing this in humans -- that female stem cells , when put even into a male body , do better than male stem cells going into a male body .
One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology -- because again , as much as we 're talking about women and heart disease , women do , on average , have better longevity than men -- is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women .
So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway .
Okay , so here 's where we started .
And remember , paths crossed in 1984 , and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease .
What has happened in the last 15 years with this work ?
We are bending the curve .
We 're bending the curve .
So just like the breast cancer story , doing research , getting awareness going , it works , you just have to get it going .
Now are we happy with this ?
We still have two to three more women dying for every man .
And I would propose , with the better longevity that women have overall , that women probably should theoretically do better , if we could just get treated .
So this is where we are , but we have a long row to hoe .
We 've worked on this for 15 years .
And I 've told you , we 've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years .
So we 're 35 years behind .
And we 'd like to think it 's not going to take 35 years .
And in fact , it probably won 't .
But we cannot stop now .
Too many lives are at stake .
So what do we need to do ?
You now , hopefully , have a more personal relationship with your heart .
Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns .
The women are very good about getting mammograms now .
And women do fundraising .
Women participate .
They have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns .
This is what we need to do with heart disease now .
And it 's political .
Women 's health , from a federal funding standpoint , sometimes it 's popular , sometimes it 's not so popular .
So we have these feast and famine cycles .
So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising .
Breast cancer , as we said , kills women , but heart disease kills a whole bunch more .
So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge , we have a lot of lives to save .
So thank you for your attention .
David Blaine : How I held my breath for 17 minutes
In this highly personal talk from TEDMED , magician and stuntman David Blaine describes what it took to hold his breath underwater for 17 minutes -- a world record -- and what his often death-defying work means to him . Warning : do NOT try this at home .
As a magician , I try to create images that make people stop and think .
I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible .
I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin , buried alive in a coffin in April , 1999 , for a week .
I lived there with nothing but water .
And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things .
The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City .
That one was way more difficult than I had expected .
The one after that , I stood on top of a hundred foot pillar for 36 hours .
I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads .
So , next I went to London .
In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water .
It was , for me , one of the most difficult things I 'd ever done , but it was also the most beautiful .
There was so many skeptics , especially the press in London , that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me .
So , I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science .
My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing , like how long I could survive with nothing , not even air .
I didn 't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life .
As a young magician I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges .
So , I began , early on , competing against the other kids , seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe , you know , five times , while I stayed under on one breath .
By the time I was a teenager I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds .
I would later find out that was Houdini 's personal record .
In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river .
He was underneath , not breathing for 45 minutes .
When the rescue workers came they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage .
His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees .
As a magician , I think everything is possible .
And I think if something is done by one person it can be done by others .
I started to think , if the boy could survive without breathing for that long , there must be a way that I could do it .
So , I met with a top neurosurgeon .
And I asked him , how long is it possible to go without breathing , like how long could I go without air ?
And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage .
So , I took that as a challenge , basically .
My first try , I figured that I could do something similar , and I created a water tank , and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water .
And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop .
And I was shivering . In my first attempt to hold my breath I couldn 't even last a minute .
So , I realized that was completely not going to work .
So , I went to talk to a doctor friend , and I asked him how could I do that ?
" I want to hold my breath for a really long time . How could it be done ? "
And he said , " David , you 're a magician , create the illusion of not breathing , it will be much easier . "
So , he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather , with a CO2 scrubber , which was basically a tube from Home Depot , with a balloon duct-taped to it , that he thought we could put inside of me , and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me .
This is a little hard to watch .
But this is that attempt .
So , that clearly wasn 't going to work .
Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing .
There is a chemical that 's called perflubron .
And it 's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it .
So , I got my hands on that chemical , filled the sink up with it , and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in , which was really impossible .
It 's basically like trying to breathe , as a doctor said , while having an elephant standing on your chest .
So , that idea disappeared .
Then I started thinking , would it be possible to hook up a heart / lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery , and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood ?
Which was another insane idea , obviously .
Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas : to actually do it .
To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead .
So , I started researching into pearl divers .
You know , because they go down for four minutes on one breath .
And when I was researching pearl divers , I found the world of free-diving .
It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered , pretty much .
There is many different aspects to free-diving .
There is depth records , where people go as deep as they can .
And then there is static apnea .
That 's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving .
That was the one that I studied .
The first thing that I learned is when you 're holding your breath you should never move at all ; that wastes energy .
And that depletes oxygen , and it builds up CO2 in your blood . So , I learned never to move .
And I learned how to slow my heart rate down .
I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn 't in my body , and just control that .
And then I learned how to purge .
Purging is basically hyperventilating .
You blow in and out ...
You do that , you get lightheaded , you get tingling .
And you 're really ridding your body of CO2 .
So , when you hold your breath it 's infinitely easier .
Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath , and just hold and relax and never let any air out , and just hold and relax through all the pain .
Every morning , this is for months , I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for , out of 52 minutes , I would hold my breath for 44 minutes .
So , basically what that means is I would purge , I 'd breath really hard for a minute .
And I would hold , immediately after , for five and half minutes .
Then I would breath again for a minute , purging as hard as I can , then immediately after that I would hold again for five and half minutes .
I would repeat this process eight times in a row .
Out of 52 minutes you 're only breathing for eight minutes .
At the end of that you 're completely fried , your brain .
You feel like you 're walking around in a daze .
And you have these awful headaches .
Basically , I 'm not the best person to talk to when I 'm doing that stuff .
I started learning about the world-record holder .
His name is Tom Sietas .
And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath .
He 's six foot four . He 's 160 pounds .
And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person .
I 'm six foot one , and fat .
We 'll say big-boned .
I had to drop 50 pounds in three months .
So , everything that I put into my body I considered as medicine .
Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value .
I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day .
And I started to really adapt my body .
The thinner I was , the longer I was able to hold my breath .
And by eating so well and training so hard , my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute .
Which is lower than most Olympic athletes .
In four months of training I was able to hold my breath for over seven minutes .
I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere .
I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress .
I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television .
The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds , held by Tom Sietas , that guy with the whale lungs I told you about .
I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln center and if I stayed there a week not eating , I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism , which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it .
I was completely wrong .
I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air date .
And I thought everything seemed to be on track .
Two days before my big breath hold attempt , for the record , the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath , and almost drowning , is too boring for television .
So , I had to add handcuffs , while holding my breath , to escape from .
This was a critical mistake .
Because of the movement I was wasting oxygen .
And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions .
By 7 : 08 I started to black out .
And by seven minutes and 30 seconds they had to pull my body out and bring me back .
I had failed on every level .
So , naturally , the only way out of the slump that I could think of was , I decided to call Oprah .
I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had .
This was a different record . This was a pure O2 static apnea record that Guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes .
So , basically you breath pure O2 first , oxygenating your body , flushing out CO2 , and you are able to hold much longer .
I realized that my real competition was the beaver .
In January of ' 08 Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train .
So , I would sleep in a hypoxic tent every night .
A hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet .
So , it 's like base camp Everest .
What that does is , you start building up the red blood cell count in your body , which helps you carry oxygen better .
Every morning , again , after getting out of that tent your brain is completely wiped out .
My first attempt on pure O2 , I was able to go up to 15 minutes .
So , it was a pretty big success .
The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind , at 15 minutes your brain is done , you 're brain dead .
So , he pulled me up , and I was fine .
There was one person there that was definitely not impressed .
It was my ex-girlfriend . While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time , she was sifting through my Blackberry , checking all my messages .
My brother had a picture of it . It is really ...
I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas ' record , publicly .
And what he did in response , is he went on Regis and Kelly , and broke his old record .
Then his main competitor went out and broke his record .
So , he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds .
Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared .
You know , it was longer than the record .
Now , I wanted to get the Science Times to document this .
I wanted to get them to do a piece on it .
So , I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do .
I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody .
So , I don 't know if it was the magic or the lore of the Cayman islands , but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding .
While he was there I tried to impress him , of course .
And I did a dive down to 160 feet , which is basically the height of a 16 story building , and as I was coming up , I blacked out underwater , which is really dangerous ; that 's how you drown .
Luckily Kirk had seen me and he swam over and pulled me up .
So , I started full focus .
I completely trained to get my breath hold time up for what I needed to do .
But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it , being on Oprah .
But in practice , I would do it face down , floating on the pool .
But for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face , basically .
The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up .
So , I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose , which was a real problem for me .
That made me extremely nervous , raising the heart rate .
Then , what they also did was , which we never did before , is there was a heart-rate monitor .
And it was right next to the sphere .
So , every time my heart would beat I 'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep , you know , the ticking , really loud .
Which was making me more nervous .
And there is no way to slow my heart rate down .
So , normally I would start at 38 beats per minute , and while holding my breath it would drop to 12 beats per minute , which is pretty unusual .
This time it started at 120 beats , and it never went down .
I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down .
I was just sitting there thinking , " I 've got to slow this down .
I 'm going to fail , I 'm going to fail . "
And I was getting more nervous .
And the heart rate just kept going up and up , all the way up to 150 beats .
Basically it 's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center .
It was a waste of O2 .
When I made it to the halfway mark , at eight minutes , I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this .
There was no way for me to do it .
So , I figured , Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath hold thing , if I had cracked early it would be a whole show about how depressed I am .
So , I figured I 'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out , at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that .
I kept pushing to 10 minutes . At 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes .
And I knew that that was blood shunting , when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs .
At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs , and my lips started to feel really strange .
At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears , and I started to feel my arm going numb .
And I 'm a hypochondriac , and I remember arm numb means heart attack .
So , I started to really get really paranoid .
Then at 13 minutes , maybe because of the hypochondria .
I started feeling pains all over my chest .
It was awful .
At 14 minutes , I had these awful contractions , like this urge to breathe .
At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart .
And I started having ischemia to the heart .
My heartbeat would go from 120 , to 50 , to 150 , to 40 , to 20 , to 150 again .
It would skip a beat .
It would start . It would stop . And I felt all this .
And I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack .
So , at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out , if I did have a heart attack , they 'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up . So , I was really nervous .
So , I let my feet out , and I started floating to the top .
And I didn 't take my head out .
But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop , just waiting .
They had doctors with the " Pst , " you know , so , sitting there waiting .
And then suddenly I hear screaming .
And I think that there is some weird thing -- that I had died or something had happened .
And then I realized that I had made it to 16 : 32 .
So , with the energy of everybody that was there I decided to keep pushing .
And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds .
As though that wasn 't enough , what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were , so the doctors could use it , once again .
I also didn 't want anybody to question it .
I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate .
So , I get to New York City the next day , and this kid walks up to me -- I 'm walking out of the Apple store -- this kid walks up to me he 's like , " Yo , D ! "
I 'm like " Yeah ? "
He said , " If you really held your breath that long , why 'd you come out of the water dry ? "
I was like " What ? "
And that 's my life . So ...
As a magician I try to show things to people that seem impossible .
And I think magic , whether I 'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards , is pretty simple .
It 's practice , it 's training , and it 's -- It 's practice , it 's training and experimenting , while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be .
And that 's what magic is to me , so , thank you .
Hans Rosling : Religions and babies
Hans Rosling had a question : Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth ? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha , Qatar , he graphs data over time and across religions . With his trademark humor and sharp insight , Hans reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates .
I 'm going to talk about religion .
But it 's a broad and very delicate subject , so I have to limit myself .
And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality .
This is a very serious talk .
So I will talk of what I remember as the most wonderful .
It 's when the young couple whisper , " Tonight we are going to make a baby . "
My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman .
This is indeed important , because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet .
And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this -- three billion in 1960 , seven billion just last year -- and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies , and it may continue like this .
To what extent are these people right ?
When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world , and today , 2000 , there 's almost two billion .
What has happened since , and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century ?
This is a quiz . What do you think ?
Do you think it will decrease to one billion ?
Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century ?
Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years , or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there ?
I will tell you by the end of my speech .
But now , what does religion have to do with it ?
When you want to classify religion , it 's more difficult than you think .
You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this .
It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion , but that 's not detailed enough .
So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia , we found this map .
But that subdivides Christianity , Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups , which was too detailed .
Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map , and it looks like this .
Each country 's a bubble .
The size is the population -- big China , big India here .
And the color now is the majority religion .
It 's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong .
It 's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries .
Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East , Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia .
That 's where we find Islamic majority .
And Christian majority religions , we see in these countries . They are blue .
And that is most countries in America and Europe , many countries in Africa and a few in Asia .
The white here are countries which cannot be classified , because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there 's some other reason .
So we were careful with that .
So bear with our simplicity now when I take you over to this shot .
This is in 1960 .
And now I show the number of babies per woman here : two , four or six -- many babies , few babies .
And here the income per person in comparable dollars .
The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies .
So low income here , high income there .
And indeed in 1960 , you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies .
The exception was Japan .
Japan here was regarded as an exception .
Otherwise it was only Christian countries .
But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman .
But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa .
And countries with Islam as the majority religion , all of them almost had six to seven children per woman , irregardless of the income level .
And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level .
Now let 's see what has happened in the world .
I start the world , and here we go .
Now 1962 -- can you see they 're getting a little richer , but the number of babies per woman is falling ?
Look at China . They 're falling fairly fast .
And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down , as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range .
And when we enter into this century , you 'll find more than half of mankind down here .
And by 2010 , we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman .
It 's a quite amazing development which has happened .
And these are countries from United States here , with $ 40,000 per capita , France , Russia , Iran , Mexico , Turkey , Algeria , Indonesia , India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam , which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman .
I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries .
We get that from the census data .
It 's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful .
So what we can conclude is you don 't have to get rich to have few children .
It has happened across the world .
And then when we look at religions , we can see that the Eastern religions , indeed there 's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children .
Whereas with Islam as a majority religion and Christianity , you see countries all the way .
But there 's no major difference .
There 's no major difference between these religions .
There is a difference with income .
The countries which have many babies per woman here , they have quite low income .
Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa .
But there are also countries here like Guatemala , like Papua New Guinea , like Yemen and Afghanistan .
Many think that Afghanistan here and Congo , which have suffered severe conflicts , that they don 't have fast population growth .
It 's the other way around .
In the world today , it 's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth .
Because the death of a child is compensated by one more child .
These countries have six children per woman .
They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman .
But 30 years from now , Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million .
Congo will go from 60 to 120 .
That 's where we have the fast population growth .
And many think that these countries are stagnant , but they are not .
Let me compare Senegal , a Muslim dominated country , with a Christian dominated country , Ghana .
I take them backwards here to their independence , when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s .
Just look what they have done .
It 's an amazing improvement , from seven children per woman , they 've gone all the way down to between four and five .
It 's a tremendous improvement .
So what does it take ?
Well we know quite well what is needed in these countries .
You need to have children to survive .
You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family .
You need to have access to some family planning .
And you need the fourth factor , which perhaps is the most important factor .
But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar .
Here we have Qatar today , and there we have Bangladesh today .
If I take these countries back to the years of their independence , which is almost the same year -- ' 71 , ' 72 -- it 's a quite amazing development which had happened .
Look at Bangladesh and Qatar .
With so different incomes , it 's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman .
And what is the reason in Qatar ?
Well I do as I always do .
I went to the statistical authority of Qatar , to their webpage -- It 's a very good webpage . I recommend it -- and I looked up -- oh yeah , you can have lots of fun here -- and provided free of charge , I found Qatar 's social trends .
Very interesting . Lots to read .
I found fertility at birth , and I looked at total fertility rate per woman .
These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar , and they say the most important factors are : " Increased age at first marriage , increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force . "
I couldn 't agree more . Science couldn 't agree more .
This is a country that indeed has gone through a very , very interesting modernization .
So what it is , is these four : Children should survive , children shouldn 't be needed for work , women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible .
Now look again at this .
The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia -- it 's 2.4 today .
There are countries up here which are very poor .
And that 's where family planning , better child survival is needed .
I strongly recommend Melinda Gates ' last TEDTalk .
And here , down , there are many countries which are less than two children per woman .
So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz , it 's two .
We have reached peak child .
The number of children is not growing any longer in the world .
We are still debating peak oil , but we have definitely reached peak child .
And the world population will stop growing .
The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion .
But why do they grow if the number of children doesn 't grow ?
Well I will show you here .
I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came .
They are quite useful for educational purposes .
Each card box is one billion people .
And there are two billion children in the world .
There are two billion young people between 15 and 30 .
These are rounded numbers .
Then there is one billion between 30 and 45 , almost one between 45 and 60 .
And then it 's my box .
This is me : 60-plus .
We are here on top .
So what will happen now is what we call " the big fill-up . "
You can see that it 's like three billion missing here .
They are not missing because they 've died ; they were never born .
Because before 1980 , there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years .
So what will happen now is quite straightforward .
The old , sadly , we will die .
The rest of you , you will grow older and you will get two billion children .
Then the old will die .
The rest will grow older and get two billion children .
And then again the old will die and you will get two billion children .
This is the great fill-up .
It 's inevitable .
And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children ?
Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman .
All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world .
And we will be just 10 billion in this world , if the poorest people get out of poverty , their children survive , they get access to family planning .
That is needed .
But it 's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more .
So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future , for human beings on this planet , you have to plan for 10 billion .
Thank you very much .
Joel Levine : Why we need to go back to Mars
In this talk , planetary scientist Joel Levine shows some intriguing -- and puzzling -- new discoveries about Mars : craters full of ice , traces of ancient oceans , and compelling hints at the presence , sometime in the past , of life . He makes the case for going back to Mars to find out more . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes .
That 's 300 million years per minute .
Let 's start with the first photograph NASA obtained of planet Mars .
This is fly-by , Mariner IV .
It was taken in 1965 .
When this picture appeared , that well-known scientific journal , The New York Times , wrote in its editorial , " Mars is uninteresting .
It 's a dead world . NASA should not spend any time or effort studying Mars anymore . "
Fortunately , our leaders in Washington at NASA headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet .
One of the key questions in all of science , " Is there life outside of Earth ? "
I believe that Mars is the most likely target for life outside the Earth .
I 'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on Mars .
But let me start with a Viking photograph .
This is a composite taken by Viking in 1976 .
Viking was developed and managed at the NASA Langley Research Center .
We sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976 .
We had four spacecraft , two around Mars , two on the surface -- an amazing accomplishment .
This is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet .
This is a Viking Lander photograph of the surface of Mars .
And yes , the red planet is red .
Mars is half the size of the Earth , but because two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water , the land area on Mars is comparable to the land area on Earth .
So , Mars is a pretty big place even though it 's half the size .
We have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of Mars . We understand the elevation differences .
We know a lot about Mars .
Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system , Olympus Mons .
Mars has the Grand Canyon of the solar system , Valles Marineris .
Very , very interesting planet .
Mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system , Hellas Basin .
This is 2,000 miles across .
If you happened to be on Mars when this impactor hit , it was a really bad day on Mars .
This is Olympus Mons .
This is bigger than the state of Arizona .
Volcanoes are important , because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans .
We 're looking at Valles Marineris , the largest canyon in the solar system , superimposed on a map of the United States , 3,000 miles across .
One of the most intriguing features about Mars , the National Academy of Science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age , is why certain areas of Mars are so highly magnetized .
We call this crustal magnetism .
There are regions on Mars , where , for some reason -- we don 't understand why at this point -- the surface is very , very highly magnetized .
Is there water on Mars ?
The answer is no , there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today .
But there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of Mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water .
Today Mars is very very dry .
We believe there 's some water in the polar caps , there are polar caps of North Pole and South Pole .
Here are some recent images .
This is from Spirit and Opportunity .
These images that show at one time , there was very fast flowing water on the surface of Mars .
Why is water important ? Water is important because if you want life you have to have water .
Water is the key ingredient in the evolution , the origin of life on a planet .
Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons , very similar features , glaciers .
So , this is frozen water .
This is ice water on Mars .
This is my favorite picture . This was just taken a few weeks ago .
It has not been seen publicly .
This is European space agency Mars Express , image of a crater on Mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water , we have ice .
Very intriguing photograph .
We now believe that in the early history of Mars , which is 4.6 billion years ago , 4.6 billion years ago , Mars was very Earth-like .
Mars had rivers , Mars had lakes , but more important Mars had planetary-scale oceans .
We believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere , and this area in blue , which shows a depression of about four miles , was the ancient ocean area on the surface of Mars .
Where did the ocean 's worth of water on Mars go ?
Well , we have an idea .
This is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a Mars-orbiting satellite called Odyssey .
Sub-surface water on Mars , And this shows the percent . If it 's a blueish color , it means 16 percent by weight .
Sixteen percent , by weight , of the interior contains frozen water , or ice .
So , there is a lot of water below the surface .
The most intriguing and puzzling measurement , in my opinion , we 've obtained of Mars , was released earlier this year in the magazine Science .
And what we 're looking at is the presence of the gas methane , CH4 , in the atmosphere of Mars .
And you can see there are three distinct regions of methane .
Why is methane important ?
Because on Earth , almost all -- 99.9 percent -- of the methane is produced by living systems , not little green men , but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface .
We now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of Mars , a gas that , on Earth , is biogenic in origin , produced by living systems .
These are the three plumes : A , B1 , B2 .
And this is the terrain it appears over , and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars .
In fact , the Earth and Mars are both 4.6 billion years old .
The oldest rock on Earth is only 3.6 billion .
The reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics , The crust of the Earth has been recycled .
We have no geological record prior for the first billion years .
That record exists on Mars .
And this terrain that we 're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when Earth and Mars were formed .
It was a Tuesday .
This is a map that shows where we 've put our spacecraft on the surface of Mars .
Here is Viking I , Viking II .
This is Opportunity . This is Spirit .
This is Mars Pathfinder . This is Phoenix , we just put two years ago .
Notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere .
That 's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin .
There aren 't many craters .
And that 's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites .
But look in the southern hemisphere .
In the southern hemisphere there are impact craters , there are volcanic craters .
Here 's Hellas Basin , a very very different place , geologically .
Look where the methane is , the methane is in a very rough terrain area .
What is the best way to unravel the mysteries on Mars that exist ?
We asked this question 10 years ago .
We invited 10 of the top Mars scientists to the Langley Research Center for two days .
We addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered .
And we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question .
And the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ARES .
It 's an Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor .
There 's a model of ARES here .
This is a 20-percent scale model .
This airplane was designed at the Langley Research Center .
If any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on Mars , it 's the Langley Research Center , for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world .
We fly about a mile above the surface .
We cover hundreds of miles , and we fly about 450 miles an hour .
We can do things that rovers can 't do and landers can 't do : We can fly above mountains , volcanoes , impact craters ; we fly over valleys ; we can fly over surface magnetism , the polar caps , subsurface water ; and we can search for life on Mars .
But , of equal importance , as we fly through the atmosphere of Mars , we transmit that journey , the first flight of an airplane outside of the Earth , we transmit those images back to Earth .
And our goal is to inspire the American public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars .
But more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists , technologists , engineers and mathematicians .
And that 's a critical area of national security and economic vitality , to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists , engineers , mathematicians and technologists .
This is what ARES looks like as it flies over Mars .
We preprogram it .
We will fly where the methane is .
We will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample , every three minutes , the atmosphere of Mars .
We will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems .
We will pinpoint where these gases emanate from , because we can measure the gradient where it comes from , and there , we can direct the next mission to land right in that area .
How do we transport an airplane to Mars ?
In two words , very carefully .
The problem is we don 't fly it to Mars , we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to Mars .
The problem is the spacecraft 's largest diameter is nine feet ; ARES is 21-foot wingspan , 17 feet long .
How do we get it to Mars ?
We fold it , and we transport it in a spacecraft .
And we have it in something called an aeroshell .
This is how we do it .
And we have a little video that describes the sequence .
Seven , six . Green board . Five , four , three , two , one .
Main engine start , and liftoff .
Joel Levine : This is a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida .
This is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to Mars .
It enters the atmosphere of Mars .
A lot of heating , frictional heating . It 's going 18 thousand miles an hour .
A parachute opens up to slow it down .
The thermal tiles fall off .
The airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time .
It unfolds .
The rocket engine begins .
We believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on Mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere , looking for gases of biogenic origin , looking for gases of volcanic origin , studying the surface , studying the magnetism on the surface , which we don 't understand , as well as about a dozen other areas .
Practice makes perfect .
How do we know we can do it ?
Because we have tested ARES model , several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center for eight years , under Mars conditions .
And , of equal importance is , we test ARES in the Earth 's atmosphere , at 100,000 feet , which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on Mars where we 'll fly .
Now , 100,000 feet , if you fly cross-country to Los Angeles , you fly 37,000 feet .
We do our tests at 100,000 feet .
And I want to show you one of our tests .
This is a half-scale model .
This is a high-altitude helium balloon .
This is over Tilamook , Oregon .
We put the folded airplane on the balloon -- it took about three hours to get up there -- and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet , and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly .
And we 've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests , just to perfect this technique .
We 're ready to go .
I have a scale model here .
But we have a full-scale model in storage at the NASA Langley Research Center .
We 're ready to go . All we need is a check from NASA headquarters to cover the costs .
I 'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today 's talk for this mission .
There 's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing .
This is the ARES team ; we have about 150 scientists , engineers ; where we 're working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory , Goddard Space Flight Center , Ames Research Center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this .
It 's a large effort . It 's all at NASA Langley Research Center .
And let me conclude by saying not too far from here , right down the road in Kittyhawk , North Carolina , a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on Earth .
We are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the Earth 's atmosphere .
We are prepared to fly this on Mars , rewrite the textbook about Mars .
If you 're interested in more information , we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission , and why we want to do it .
Thank you very much .
Yann Arthus-Bertrand : A wide-angle view of fragile Earth
In this image-filled talk , Yann Arthus-Bertrand displays his three most recent projects on humanity and our habitat -- stunning aerial photographs in his series " The Earth From Above , " personal interviews from around the globe featured in his web project " 6 billion Others , " and his soon-to-be-released movie , " Home , " which documents human impact on the environment through breathtaking video .
I have a big impact on the planet to travel here by plane .
I emitted , in the atmosphere , nine tons of CO2 ; that is the weight of two elephants .
I came here to speak about ecology , and I emitted as much CO2 as a Frenchman in one year .
So what do I have to do ?
I have to kill a Frenchman when I come back at home ?
I have to do my carbon offset in another way , like I do every time .
In fact my work is to show our impact on our planet .
I 'm going to show you some examples of the last pictures I 've done in the last year .
Alberta sand oil , a lot of pollution .
You know the problem ; we don 't want to believe what we know .
In Alberta people work nonstop , 24 hours by seven to extract as much oil as they can .
We know about the end of oil .
Oil sand is not a long-term solution .
But we use three times more oil than we find every year .
We don 't want to believe what we know .
Deny .
Coral reef in New Caledonia .
100 percent of the coral may be wiped out before 2050 because of global warming .
And you know how coral are very sensitive to temperature , and are very important for the biodiversity of the sea .
North Pole . I 've done this picture last summer .
It was impossible to do this picture 15 years ago .
Now there is a new way open between Atlantic and Pacific .
The thickness of the Arctic decreased more than 40 percent since 1960 .
There is a new face of Kilimanjaro without ice .
Sad picture .
It lost 80 percent of its ice .
According to scientists , in 100 years all the mountain glacier will be gone .
Glaciers are very important for the life on earth .
Like Al Gore told you , two billion people live on the water from the glacier of Himalaya .
Return of fish men .
One fifth of human kind depend on fish to live .
Today now 70 percent of the fish stock are over-exploited .
According to FAO , if we don 't change our system of fishing the main sea resources will be gone in 2050 .
We don 't want to believe what we know .
The beautiful picture , by [ unclear ] in Africa .
One human of six have not enough to eat in the world .
One billion people have not enough to eat .
In Africa , corn is one of the main foods in many places .
Here in America , 90 percent of the corn cultivated is used to feed animals or to do oil .
Palm tree plantation in Borneo .
Every year we lose 50 thousand square miles in deforestation .
Refugee camp in Darfur .
Today we have 20 million refugees in the world .
According to the U.N. , we speak about 250 million refugees in 2050 .
I always show my pictures in the street .
We have done already 100 exhibitions in the cities .
But how to understand the world without the voice of people ?
Landscape was not enough .
It was obvious to me to do another work .
I launched a project named Six Billion Others .
I sent around the world six cameramen asking the same question , the same crucial question , about life .
We have done five thousand interviews .
I 'm going to show you this .
The most beautiful thing that has happened to me in life ?
It 's when my dad told me , " Here , I give you this girl as your fiance . "
Love ? Love is nice if you can have it .
Second Romeo and Juliet , Sassi and Panno , Dodi and Diana , Heer and Ranjha , this is love ! Third My greatest fear is ...
You 're asking me a hard question .
Fourth I live happily because what else should I do ?
Fifth The first thing I remember ...
Fifth ... from my childhood , Fifth we were having fun , biking .
Seventh We invented stories , we flew around the world , while remaining in our attic .
Eighth I had a big laugh today .
Ninth You see , family is ... it 's awful .
10th In the word life , you have the life .
11th Who am I ? Isn 't that the biggest question ?
12th If I was to go back to Iraq and speak to the people , I 'd have to bow down and kiss their feet .
Just as that woman tried to kiss my feet when we were taking her sons .
I feel ashamed .
And I feel humbled by their strength .
And I will forever feel a need to make reparations to Iraq .
Second Dad , Mom , I grew up .
You shouldn 't worry about me . Dad doesn 't need to go to work .
My family ... What can I say ?
At the moment , my family is very poor , my life here in Shenzhen is just about showing myself that I can earn more and to let my parents stay and have something to live on .
I don 't want them to spend their whole lives in poverty .
If someday I can achieve something , I would like to say thank you daddy and mommy .
Thank you .
Thank you for having fed me and raised me , and for making my life of today . Thank you .
13th After seven years now of being in a wheelchair , I 've done more in life being in a chair than out of a chair .
I still surf . I sail the world . I freedive .
After many people said I couldn 't do that .
And I think that comes from connecting with nature , connecting with the energy of life , because we 're all disabled in some way on the planet -- spiritually , mentally or physically .
I got the easy part .
14th Let 's say that you and me like each other .
You come from elsewhere .
You don 't know me . I don 't know you .
We talk without lying .
If I do like you , I give you one cow and many other things and we become friends .
How can we make it all by ourselves ?
Y You can also go to the website , answer -- respond to the questions also .
Forty crucial questions .
Now I am going to speak to you about my movie .
For the last three years , I was shooting the earth for the movie .
The name of the movie is " Home " -- " Maison . "
It is about the state of the planet .
It 's a fantastic story of life on the earth .
I 'm very proud to show you the teaser .
This Earth is four and a half billion years old .
These plants , several hundred million years old .
And we humans have been walking upright for only 200 thousand years .
We 've managed to adapt , and have conquered the whole planet .
For generations , we 've been raising our children , not unlike millions of other species living beside us .
For the past 30 years I 've been closely watching the earth and its dwellers from high up in the sky .
Our life is tied to the well-being of our planet .
We depend on water , forests , deserts , oceans .
Fishing , breeding , farming are still the world 's foremost human occupations .
And what binds us together is far greater than what divides us .
We all share the same need for the earth 's gifts -- the same wish to rise above ourselves , and become better .
And yet we carry on raising walls to keep us apart .
Today our greatest battle is to protect the natural offerings of our planet .
In less than 50 years we 've altered it more thoroughly than in the entire history of mankind .
Half of the world 's forests have vanished .
Water resources are running low .
Intensive farming is depleting soils .
Our energy sources are not sustainable .
The climate is changing .
We are endangering ourselves .
We 're only trying to improve our lives .
But the wealth gaps are growing wider .
We haven 't yet understood that we 're going at a much faster pace than the planet can sustain .
We know that solutions are available today .
We all have the power to change this trend for the better .
So what are we waiting for ?
Y Luc Besson is the producer of the movie .
But it is not a normal movie .
The film is going to be distributed free .
This film has no copyright .
On the five of June , the environment day , everybody can download the movie on Internet .
The film is given for free to the distributor for TV and theater to show it the fifth of June .
There is no business on this movie .
It is also available for school , cities , NGOs and you .
We have to believe what we know .
Let me tell you something .
It 's too late to be pessimistic -- really too late .
We have all a part of the solutions .
To finish , I would like to welcome the 4,700th baby born since the beginning of this talk .
Merci beaucoup . I love you .
Benjamin Zander : The transformative power of classical music
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions : classical music , and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension , our untapped love for all new possibilities , new experiences , new connections .
Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s .
They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes , and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester .
And one of them wrote , " Situation hopeless . Stop .
They don 't wear shoes . "
And the other one wrote , " Glorious opportunity .
They don 't have any shoes yet . "
Now , there 's a similar situation in the classical music world , because there are some people who think that classical music is dying .
And there are some of us who think you ain 't seen nothing yet .
And rather than go into statistics and trends , and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing , and the record companies that are folding , I thought we should do an experiment tonight -- an experiment .
Actually , it 's not really an experiment , because I know the outcome .
But it 's like an experiment . Now , before we -- -- before we start , I need to do two things .
One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano .
Maybe you have this child at home .
He sounds something like this .
I see some of you recognize this child .
Now , if he practices for a year and takes lessons , he 's now eight and he sounds like this .
Then he practices for another year and takes lessons -- now he 's nine .
Then he practices for another and takes lessons -- now he 's 10 .
At that point , they usually give up .
Now , if you 'd waited , if you 'd waited for one more year , you would have heard this .
Now , what happened was not maybe what you thought , which is , he suddenly became passionate , engaged , involved , got a new teacher , he hit puberty , or whatever it is .
What actually happened was the impulses were reduced .
You see , the first time , he was playing with an impulse on every note .
And the second , with an impulse every other note .
You can see it by looking at my head .
The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes .
And the 10-year-old , on every eight notes .
And the 11-year-old , one impulse on the whole phrase .
I know -- I don 't know how we got into this position .
I didn 't say , " I 'm going to move my shoulder over , move my body . "
No , the music pushed me over , which is why I call it one-buttock playing .
It can be the other buttock .
You know , a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing , when I was working with a young pianist .
He was the president of a corporation in Ohio .
And I was working with this young pianist and I said , " The trouble with you is you 're a two-buttock player .
You should be a one-buttock player . "
And I moved his body like that , while he was playing .
And suddenly , the music took off . It took flight .
There was a gasp in the audience when they heard the difference .
And then I got a letter from this gentleman .
He said , " I was so moved .
I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company . "
Now , the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you .
There are 1,600 people , I believe .
My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music .
You adore classical music . Your FM is always on that classical dial .
And you have CDs in your car , and you go to the symphony .
And your children are playing instruments .
You can 't imagine your life without classical music .
That 's the first group ; it 's quite a small group .
Then there 's another group , bigger group .
These are the people who don 't mind classical music .
You know , you 've come home from a long day , and you take a glass of wine , and you put your feet up .
A little Vivaldi in the background doesn 't do any harm .
That 's the second group .
Now comes the third group .
These are the people who never listen to classical music .
It 's just simply not part of your life .
You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport , but -- -- and maybe a little bit of a march from " Aida " when you come into the hall . But otherwise , you never hear it .
That 's probably the largest group of all .
And then there 's a very small group .
These are the people who think they 're tone-deaf .
Amazing number of people think they 're tone-deaf .
Actually , I hear a lot , " My husband is tone-deaf . "
Actually , you cannot be tone-deaf . Nobody is tone-deaf .
If you were tone-deaf , you couldn 't change the gears on your car , in a stick shift car .
You couldn 't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome .
And the telephone . The telephone . If your mother calls on the miserable telephone , she calls and says , " Hello , " you not only know who it is , you know what mood she 's in .
You have a fantastic ear . Everybody has a fantastic ear .
So nobody is tone-deaf .
But I tell you what . It doesn 't work for me to go on with this thing , with such a wide gulf between those who understand , love and [ are ] passionate about classical music , and those who have no relationship to it at all .
The tone-deaf people , they 're no longer here .
But even between those three categories , it 's too wide a gulf .
So I 'm not going to go on until every single person in this room , downstairs and in Aspen , and everybody else looking , will come to love and understand classical music .
So that 's what we 're going to do .
Now , you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work if you look at my face , right ?
It 's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he 's leading to realize whatever he 's dreaming .
Imagine if Martin Luther King had said , " I have a dream .
Of course , I 'm not sure they 'll be up to it . "
All right . So I 'm going to take a piece of Chopin .
This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin . Some of you will know it .
Do you know what I think probably happened in this room ?
When I started , you thought , " How beautiful that sounds . "
" I don 't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year . "
It 's funny , isn 't it ? It 's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head .
And of course -- -- and of course , if the piece is long and you 've had a long day , you might actually drift off .
Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say , " Wake up ! It 's culture ! " And then you feel even worse .
But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you , but because of us ?
Did anybody think while I was playing , " Why is he using so many impulses ? "
If I 'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it .
And for the rest of your life , every time you hear classical music , you 'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses .
So let 's see what 's really going on here .
We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C.
And the job of the C is to make the B sad . And it does , doesn 't it ?
Composers know that . If they want sad music , they just play those two notes .
But basically , it 's just a B , with four sads .
Now , it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F.
So we have B , A , G , F. And if we have B , A , G , F , what do we expect next ? Oh , that might have been a fluke .
Let 's try it again . Ooh , the TED choir .
And you notice nobody is tone-deaf , right ? Nobody is .
You know , every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China -- everybody knows : da , da , da , da -- da . Everybody knows , who 's expecting that E.
Now , Chopin didn 't want to reach the E there , because what will have happened ? It will be over , like Hamlet .
Do you remember Hamlet ? Act one , scene three , he finds out that his uncle killed his father .
You remember , he keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him . And then he backs away , and he goes up to him again and almost kills him .
And the critics , all of whom are sitting in the back row there , they have to have an opinion , so they say , " Hamlet is a procrastinator . "
Or they say , " Hamlet has an Oedipus complex . "
No , otherwise the play would be over , stupid .
That 's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet -- you know , Ophelia going mad and the play within the play , and Yorick 's skull , and the gravediggers .
That 's in order to delay -- until act five , he can kill him .
It 's the same with the Chopin . He 's just about to reach the E , and he says , " Oops , better go back up and do it again . "
So he does it again .
Now , he gets excited . That 's excitement , Now , he gets to F-sharp , and finally he goes down to E , but it 's the wrong chord -- because the chord he 's looking for is this one , and instead he does ...
Now , we call that a deceptive cadence , because it deceives us .
I always tell my students , " If you have a deceptive cadence , be sure to raise your eyebrows . Then everybody will know . "
Right . So , he gets to E , but it 's the wrong chord .
Now , he tries E again . That chord doesn 't work .
Now , he tries the E again . That chord doesn 't work .
Now , he tries E again , and that doesn 't work .
And then finally ...
There was a gentleman in the front row who went , " Mmm . "
It 's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day , turns off the key in his car and says , " Aah , I 'm home . " Because we all know where home is .
So this is a piece which goes from away to home .
And I 'm going to play it all the way through and you 're going to follow . B , C , B , C , B , C , B -- down to A , down to G , down to F.
Almost goes to E , but otherwise the play would be over .
He goes back up to B. He gets very excited . Goes to F-sharp . Goes to E.
It 's the wrong chord . It 's the wrong chord . It 's the wrong chord .
And finally goes to E , and it 's home .
And what you 're going to see is one-buttock playing .
Because for me , to join the B to the E , I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way , and start thinking about the long , long line from B to E.
You know , we were just in South Africa , and you can 't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years .
What was he thinking about ? Lunch ?
No , he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings . That 's what kept -- this is about vision . This is about the long line .
Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn 't care about the fences underneath , all right ?
So now , you 're going to follow the line all the way from B to E.
And I 've one last request before I play this piece all the way through .
Would you think of somebody who you adore , who 's no longer there ?
A beloved grandmother , a lover -- somebody in your life who you love with all your heart , but that person is no longer with you .
Bring that person into your mind , and at the same time follow the line all the way from B to E , and you 'll hear everything that Chopin had to say .
Now , you may be wondering , you may be wondering why I 'm clapping .
Well , I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders , 12-year-olds .
And I did exactly what I did with you , and I told them and explained them and the whole thing .
And at the end , they went crazy , clapping . They were clapping .
I was clapping . They were clapping .
Finally , I said , " Why am I clapping ? "
And one of the little kids said , " Because we were listening . "
Think of it . 1,600 people , busy people , involved in all sorts of different things , listening , understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin .
Now that is something .
Now , am I sure that every single person followed that , understood it , was moved by it ? Of course , I can 't be sure .
But I tell you what happened to me .
I was in Ireland during the Troubles , 10 years ago , and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution . And I did this with them -- a risky thing to do , because they were street kids .
And one of them came to me the next morning and he said , " You know , I 've never listened to classical music in my life , but when you played that shopping piece ... " He said , " My brother was shot last year and I didn 't cry for him .
But last night , when you played that piece , he was the one I was thinking about .
And I felt the tears streaming down my face .
And you know , it felt really good to cry for my brother . "
So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody . Everybody .
Now , how would you walk -- because you know , my profession , the music profession doesn 't see it that way .
They say three percent of the population likes classical music .
If only we could move it to four percent , our problems would be over .
I say , " How would you walk ? How would you talk ? How would you be ?
If you thought , three percent of the population likes classical music , if only we could move it to four percent . How would you walk ?
How would you talk ? How would you be ?
If you thought , everybody loves classical music -- they just haven 't found out about it yet . "
See , these are totally different worlds .
Now , I had an amazing experience . I was 45 years old , I 'd been conducting for 20 years , and I suddenly had a realization .
The conductor of an orchestra doesn 't make a sound .
My picture appears on the front of the CD -- -- but the conductor doesn 't make a sound .
He depends , for his power , on his ability to make other people powerful .
And that changed everything for me . It was totally life changing .
People in my orchestra came up to me and said , " Ben , what happened ? " That 's what happened .
I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people .
And of course , I wanted to know whether I was doing that .
And you know how you find out ? You look at their eyes .
If their eyes are shining , you know you 're doing it .
You could light up a village with this guy 's eyes .
Right . So if the eyes are shining , you know you 're doing it .
If the eyes are not shining , you get to ask a question .
And this is the question : who am I being , that my players ' eyes are not shining ?
We can do that with our children , too .
Who am I being , that my children 's eyes are not shining ?
That 's a totally different world .
Now , we 're all about to end this magical , on-the-mountain week , and we 're going back into the world .
And I say , it 's appropriate for us to ask the question , who are we being as we go back out into the world ?
And you know , I have a definition of success .
For me , it 's very simple . It 's not about wealth and fame and power .
It 's about how many shining eyes I have around me .
So now , I have one last thought , which is that it really makes a difference what we say -- the words that come out of our mouth .
I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz , one of the rare survivors .
She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old , and her brother was eight , and the parents were lost .
And she told me this , she said , " We were in the train going to Auschwitz , and I looked down and saw my brother 's shoes were missing .
And I said , ' Why are you so stupid , can 't you keep your things together for goodness ' sake ? ' " The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother .
Unfortunately , it was the last thing she ever said to him , because she never saw him again . He did not survive .
And so when she came out of Auschwitz , she made a vow .
She told me this . She said , " I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow . And the vow was , I will never say anything that couldn 't stand as the last thing I ever say . "
Now , can we do that ? No . And we 'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong . But it is a possibility to live into . Thank you .
Shining eyes , shining eyes .
Thank you , thank you .
Charles Leadbeater : Education innovation in the slums
Charles Leadbeater went looking for radical new forms of education -- and found them in the slums of Rio and Kibera , where some of the world 's poorest kids are finding transformative new ways to learn . And this informal , disruptive new kind of school , he says , is what all schools need to become .
It 's a great pleasure to be here .
It 's a great pleasure to speak after Brian Cox from CERN .
I think CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider .
What ever happened to the Small Hadron Collider ?
Where is the Small Hadron Collider ?
Because the Small Hadron Collider once was the big thing .
Now , the Small Hadron Collider is in a cupboard , overlooked and neglected .
You know when the Large Hadron Collider started , and it didn 't work , and people tried to work out why , it was the Small Hadron Collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous .
The whole Hadron Collider family needs unlocking .
The lesson of Brian 's presentation , in a way -- all those fantastic pictures -- is this really : that vantage point determines everything that you see .
What Brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves , and that 's why it 's so valuable .
So the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see .
The question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get .
And so if you ask this question : Where would you look to see the future of education ?
The answer that we 've traditionally given to that is very straightforward , at least in the last 20 years : You go to Finland .
Finland is the best place in the world to see school systems .
The Finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there 's a very high suicide rate , but by golly , they are qualified .
And they have absolutely amazing education systems .
So we all troop off to Finland , and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of Finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it , and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back .
Well , so , for this last year , with the help of Cisco who sponsored me , for some balmy reason , to do this , I 've been looking somewhere else .
Because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best , but it often comes from places where you have huge need -- unmet , latent demand -- and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work -- traditional , high-cost solutions , which depend on professionals , which is what schools and hospitals are .
So I ended up in places like this .
This is a place called Monkey Hill .
It 's one of the hundreds of favelas in Rio .
Most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities .
We 'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years .
Almost all of that growth will be in the developed world .
Almost all of that growth will be in places like Monkey Hill .
This is where you 'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world .
So if you want recipes to work -- for virtually anything -- health , education , government politics and education -- you have to go to these places .
And if you go to these places , you meet people like this .
This is a guy called Juanderson .
At the age of 14 , in common with many 14-year-olds in the Brazilian education system , he dropped out of school .
It was boring .
And Juanderson , instead , went into what provided kind of opportunity and hope in the place that he lived , which was the drugs trade .
And by the age of 16 , with rapid promotion , he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas .
He was turning over 200,000 dollars a week .
He employed 200 people .
He was going to be dead by the age of 25 .
And luckily , he met this guy , who is Rodrigo Baggio , the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in Brazil .
1994 , Rodrigo started something called CDI , which took computers donated by corporations , put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this .
What turned Juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible .
Or you can go to places like this .
This is Kibera , which is the largest slum in East Africa .
Millions of people living here , stretched over many kilometers .
And there I met these two , Azra on the left , Maureen on the right .
They just finished their Kenyan certificate of secondary education .
That name should tell you that the Kenyan education system borrows almost everything from Britain , circa 1950 , but has managed to make it even worse .
So there are schools in slums like this .
They 're places like this .
That 's where Maureen went to school .
They 're private schools . There are no state schools in slums .
And the education they got was pitiful .
It was in places like this . This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru .
Half the children in this classroom have no parents because they 've died through AIDS .
The other half have one parent because the other parent has died through AIDS .
So the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of Kenya or Britain .
They are to stay alive , to earn a living , to not become HIV positive .
The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology .
It 's not to do with electricity or water .
It 's the mobile phone .
If you want to design from scratch virtually any service in Africa , you would start now with the mobile phone .
Or you could go to places like this .
This is a place called the Madangiri Settlement Colony , which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside New Delhi , where I met these characters who showed me around for the day .
The remarkable thing about these girls , and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married .
Ten years ago , they certainly would have been married .
Now they 're not married , and they want to go on to study further , to have a career .
They 've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate , who have never ever done homework .
All across the developing world there are millions of parents -- tens , hundreds of millions -- who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams .
And the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this .
This is a private school .
This is a fee-pay school . This is a good school .
This is the best you can get in Hyderabad in Indian education .
The reason they went on studying was this .
This is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called Sugata Mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments , showing that children , in the right conditions , can learn on their own with the help of computers .
Those girls have never touched Google .
They know nothing about Wikipedia .
Imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them .
So if you look , as I did , through this tour , and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions , look at the recipes that they come up with for learning , they look nothing like school .
What do they look like ?
Well , education is a global religion .
And education , plus technology , is a great source of hope .
You can go to places like this .
This is a school three hours outside of Sao Paulo .
Most of the children there have parents who are illiterate .
Many of them don 't have electricity at home .
But they find it completely obvious to use computers , websites , make videos , so on and so forth .
When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull , not push .
Most of our education system is push .
I was literally pushed to school .
When you get to school , things are pushed at you : knowledge , exams , systems , timetables .
If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could , for instance , buy guns , wear jewelry , ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade , and you want to attract him into education , having a compulsory curriculum doesn 't really make sense .
That isn 't really going to attract him .
You need to pull him .
And so education needs to work by pull , not push .
And so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this .
You need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings .
What does that ?
Well , the key is motivation , and there are two aspects to it .
One is to deliver extrinsic motivation , that education has a payoff .
Our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff , but you have to wait quite a long time .
That 's too long if you 're poor .
Waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs , when you 've got siblings to look after or a business to help with .
So you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then , often .
And you also need to make it intrinsically interesting .
So time and again , I found people like this .
This is an amazing guy , Sebastiao Rocha , in Belo Horizonte , in the third largest city in Brazil .
He 's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun .
In the schools and communities that Taio works in , the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question .
Imagine an education system that started from questions , not from knowledge to be imparted , or started from a game , not from a lesson , or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them .
Our education systems , you do all that stuff afterward , if you 're lucky , sport , drama , music .
These things , they teach through .
They attract people to learning because it 's really a dance project or a circus project or , the best example of all -- El Sistema in Venezuela -- it 's a music project .
And so you attract people through that into learning , not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you 've eaten your cognitive greens .
So El Sistema in Venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning .
Taio Rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning .
And what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways .
Masses of peer learning .
How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers , when teachers won 't come , when you can 't afford them , and even if you do get teachers , what they teach isn 't relevant to the communities that they serve ?
Well , you create your own teachers .
You create peer-to-peer learning , or you create para-teachers , or you bring in specialist skills .
But you find ways to get learning that 's relevant to people through technology , people and places that are different .
So this is a school in a bus on a building site in Pune , the fastest growing city in Asia .
Pune has 5,000 building sites .
It has 30,000 children on those building sites .
That 's one city .
Imagine that urban explosion that 's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites .
Well , this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus .
And they all treat learning , not as some sort of academic , analytical activity , but as that 's something that 's productive , something you make , something that you can do , perhaps earn a living from .
So I met this character , Steven .
He 'd spent three years in Nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of AIDS .
And he was finally brought back into school , not by the offer of GCSEs , but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter , a practical making skill .
So the trendiest schools in the world , High Tech High and others , they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity .
Here , there isn 't really an option .
Learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense .
And finally , they have a different model of scale , and it 's a Chinese restaurant model of how to scale .
And I learned it from this guy , who is an amazing character .
He 's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world .
His name is Madhav Chavan , and he created something called Pratham .
And Pratham runs preschool play groups for , now , 21 million children in India .
It 's the largest NGO in education in the world .
And it also supports working-class kids going into Indian schools .
He 's a complete revolutionary .
He 's actually a trade union organizer by background , and that 's how he learned the skills to build his organization .
When they got to a certain stage , Pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from McKinsey .
McKinsey came along and looked at his model and said , " You know what you should do with this , Madhav ?
You should turn it into McDonald 's .
And what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise .
And it 's the same wherever you go .
It 's reliable and people know exactly where they are .
And there will be no mistakes . "
And Madhav said , " Why do we have to do it that way ?
Why can 't we do it more like the Chinese restaurants ? "
There are Chinese restaurants everywhere , but there is no Chinese restaurant chain .
Yet , everyone knows what is a Chinese restaurant .
They know what to expect , even though it 'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different .
You know a Chinese restaurant when you see it .
These people work with the Chinese restaurant model -- same principles , different applications and different settings -- not the McDonald 's model .
The McDonald 's model scales .
The Chinese restaurant model spreads .
So mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century .
And that 's desperately what we need again on a global scale .
And what can we learn from all of that ?
Well , we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways .
They fail to reach the people they most need to serve .
They often hit their target but miss the point .
Improvement is increasingly difficult to organize ; our faith in these systems , incredibly fraught .
And this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation , what kind of different design we need .
There are two basic types of innovation .
There 's sustaining innovation , which will sustain an existing institution or an organization , and disruptive innovation that will break it apart , create some different way of doing it .
There are formal settings -- schools , colleges , hospitals -- in which innovation can take place , and informal settings -- communities , families , social networks .
Almost all our effort goes in this box , sustaining innovation in formal settings , getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century .
And as I said , the trouble with this is that , in the developing world there just aren 't teachers to make this model work .
You 'd need millions and millions of teachers in China , India , Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need .
And in our system , we know that simply doing more of this won 't eat into deep educational inequalities , especially in inner cities and former industrial areas .
So that 's why we need three more kinds of innovation .
We need more reinvention .
And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves .
They 're recognizably schools , but they look different .
There are Big Picture schools in the U.S. and Australia .
There are Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden .
Of 14 of them , only two of them are in schools .
Most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools .
There is an amazing school in Northen Queensland called Jaringan .
And they all have the same kind of features : highly collaborative , very personalized , often pervasive technology , learning that starts from questions and problems and projects , not from knowledge and curriculum .
So we certainly need more of that .
But because so many of the issues in education aren 't just in school , they 're in family and community , what you also need , definitely , is more on the right hand side .
You need efforts to supplement schools .
The most famous of these is Reggio Emilia in Italy , the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools .
The most exciting is the Harlem Children 's Zone , which over 10 years , led by Geoffrey Canada , has , through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects , attempted to transform not just education in schools , but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem .
We need more of that completely new and radical thinking .
You can go to places an hour away , less , from this room , just down the road , which need that , which need radicalism of a kind that we haven 't imagined .
And finally , you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways .
So we are on the verge , 2015 , of an amazing achievement , the schoolification of the world .
Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015 .
It 's an amazing thing .
But it is , unlike cars , which have developed so rapidly and orderly , actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century , from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers , and often by religious missionaries , taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion , and then in Japan and South Korea as they developed .
It 's recognizably 19th century in its roots .
And of course it 's a huge achievement .
And of course it will bring great things .
It will bring skills and learning and reading .
But it will also lay waste to imagination .
It will lay waste to appetite . It will lay waste to social confidence .
It will stratify society as much as it liberates it .
And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform .
That is why we need really radical thinking , and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn .
Thank you .
Dean Kamen : Luke , a new prosthetic arm for soldiers
Inventor Dean Kamen previews the prosthetic arm he 's developing at the request of the US Department of Defense . His quiet commitment to using technology to solve problems -- while honoring the human spirit -- has never been more clear .
I got a visit almost exactly a year ago , a little over a year ago , from a very senior person at the Department of Defense .
Came to see me and said , " 1,600 of the kids that we 've sent out have come back missing at least one full arm .
Whole arm . Shoulder disarticulation .
And we 're doing the same thing we did for -- more or less , that we 've done since the Civil War , a stick and a hook .
And they deserve more than that . "
And literally , this guy sat in my office in New Hampshire and said , " I want you to give me something that we can put on these kids that 'll pick up a raisin or a grape off a table , they 'll be able to put it in their mouth without destroying either one , and they 'll be able to know the difference without looking at it . "
You know , had efferent , afferent , and haptic response .
He finishes explaining that , and I 'm waiting for the big 300 pound paper proposal , and he said , " That 's what I want from you . "
I said , " Look , you 're nuts . That technology 's just not available right now .
And it can 't be done .
Not in an envelope of a human arm , with 21 degrees of freedom , from your shoulder to your fingertips . "
He said , " About two dozen of these 1,600 kids have come back bilateral .
You think it 's bad to lose one arm ?
That 's an inconvenience compared to having both of them gone . "
I got a day job , and my nights and weekends are already filled up with things like , let 's supply water to the world , and power to the world , and educate all the kids , which , Chris , I will not talk about . I don 't need another mission .
I keep thinking about these kids with no arms .
He says to me , " We 've done some work around the country .
We 've got some pretty amazing neurology and other people . "
I said , " I 'll take a field trip , I 'll go see what you got . "
Over the next month I visited lots of places , some out here , around the country , found the best of the best .
I went down to Washington . I saw these guys , and said , " I did what you asked me . I looked at what 's out there .
I still think you 're nuts . But not as nuts as I thought . "
I put a team together , a little over 13 months ago , got up to 20 some-odd people .
We said , we 're going to build a device that does what he wants .
We have 14 out of the 21 degrees of freedom ; you don 't need the ones in the last two fingers .
We put this thing together .
A couple of weeks ago we took it down to Walter Reed , which is unfortunately more in the news these days .
We showed it to a bunch of guys .
One guy who described himself as being lucky , because he lost his left arm , and he 's a righty .
He sat at a table with seven or eight of these other guys .
Said he was lucky , because he had his good arm , and then he pushed himself back from the table . He had no legs .
These kids have attitudes that you just can 't believe .
So I 'm going to show you now , without the skin on it , a 30-second piece , and then I 'm done .
But understand what you 're looking at we made small enough to fit on a 50th percentile female , so that we could put it in any of these people .
It 's going to go inside something that we use in CAT scans and MRIs of whatever is their good arm , to make silicon rubber , then coat it , and paint it in 3D -- exact mirror image of their other limb .
So , you won 't see all the really cool stuff that 's in this series elastic set of 14 actuators , each one which has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure .
It also has a pneumatic cuff that holds it on , so the more they put themselves under load , the more it attaches .
They take the load off , and it becomes , again , compliant .
I 'm going to show you a guy doing a couple of simple things with this that we demonstrated in Washington . Can we look at this thing ?
Watch the fingers grab . The thumb comes up . Wrist .
This weighs 6.9 pounds .
Going to scratch his nose .
It 's got 14 active degrees of freedom .
Now he 's going to pick up a pen with his opposed thumb and index finger .
Now he 's going to put that down , pick up a piece of paper , rotate all the degrees of freedom in his hand and wrist , and read it .
Deborah Gordon : What ants teach us about the brain , cancer and the Internet
Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them -- in the desert , in the tropics , in her kitchen ... In this fascinating talk , she explains her obsession with insects most of us would happily swat away without a second thought . She argues that ant life provides a useful model for learning about many other topics , including disease , technology and the human brain .
I study ants in the desert , in the tropical forest and in my kitchen , and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live .
I 've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments , and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems , like brains and data networks that we engineer , and even cancer .
So what all these systems have in common is that there 's no central control .
An ant colony consists of sterile female workers -- those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more reproductive females who just lay the eggs .
They don 't give any instructions .
Even though they 're called queens , they don 't tell anybody what to do .
So in an ant colony , there 's no one in charge , and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions .
Ants interact using smell .
They smell with their antennae , and they interact with their antennae , so when one ant touches another with its antennae , it can tell , for example , if the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been doing .
So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that 's connected by tubes to two other arenas .
So when one ant meets another , it doesn 't matter which ant it meets , and they 're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated signal or message .
All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it meets other ants .
And all of these interactions , taken together , produce a network .
So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena , and it 's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony , like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest , or how many are going out to forage .
A brain actually works in the same way , but what 's great about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens .
There are more than 12,000 species of ants , in every conceivable environment , and they 're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges .
So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs , just what it takes to run the system .
And another environmental challenge is resources , finding them and collecting them .
In the desert , operating costs are high because water is scarce , and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water .
So an ant outside foraging , searching for seeds in the hot sun , just loses water into the air .
But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat .
So in this environment , interactions are used to activate foraging .
An outgoing forager doesn 't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers , and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel , into the nest , and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out .
This makes sense for the ant colony , because the more food there is out there , the more quickly the foragers find it , the faster they come back , and the more foragers they send out .
The system works to stay stopped , unless something positive happens .
So interactions function to activate foragers .
And we 've been studying the evolution of this system .
First of all , there 's variation .
It turns out that colonies are different .
On dry days , some colonies forage less , so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds .
And we 're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons , using models from neuroscience .
So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire , an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage .
And what we 're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it 's willing to go out and forage , because a colony like that would forage less .
And this raises an analogous question about brains .
We talk about the brain , but of course every brain is slightly different , and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire , and that would lead to differences in brain function .
So in order to ask evolutionary questions , we need to know about reproductive success .
This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years , which is about as long as a colony lives .
Each symbol is a colony , and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had , because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies , that is , to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony .
And this was amazing for me , after all these years , to find out , for example , that colony 154 , whom I 've known well for many years , is a great-grandmother .
Here 's her daughter colony , here 's her granddaughter colony , and these are her great-granddaughter colonies .
And by doing this , I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don 't forage , and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet , so the ants of the offspring colony can 't be learning this from the parent colony .
And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance .
So then I was able to ask , okay , who 's doing better ?
Over the time of the study , and especially in the past 10 years , there 's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S. , and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water , that stay in when it 's really hot outside , and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible , are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies .
So all this time , I thought that colony 154 was a loser , because on really dry days , there 'd be just this trickle of foraging , while the other colonies were out foraging , getting lots of food , but in fact , colony 154 is a huge success .
She 's a matriarch .
She 's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site .
To my knowledge , this is the first time that we 've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what 's actually working best .
Now , the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that 's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers .
And guess what we call this analogy ?
The anternet is coming .
So data doesn 't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there 's enough bandwidth for it to travel on .
In the early days of the Internet , when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data , then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data .
It 's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that 's so similar to the one that we recently invented , but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about , and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones , and I think it 's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven 't even thought of yet .
So what happens when operating costs are low ?
Operating costs are low in the tropics , because it 's very humid , and it 's easy for the ants to be outside walking around .
But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there 's a lot of competition .
Whatever resource one species is using , another species is likely to be using that at the same time .
So in this environment , interactions are used in the opposite way .
The system keeps going unless something negative happens , and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back , just round and round , unless something negative happens , like an interaction with ants of another species .
So here 's an example of ant security .
In the middle , there 's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species .
Those are the little ones running around with their abdomens up in the air .
But as soon as the threat is passed , the entrance is open again , and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat , and then open it again , instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress .
So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal with is resources , finding and collecting them .
And to do this , ants solve the problem of collective search , and this is a problem that 's of great interest right now in robotics , because we 've understood that , rather than sending a single , sophisticated , expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building , that instead , it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information , and that 's the way that ants do it .
So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search networks .
They 're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search , which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground .
And what they do is , when there are many ants in a small space , then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there , but when there are a few ants in a large space , then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground .
I think they use interactions to assess density , so when they 're really crowded , they meet more often , and they search more thoroughly .
Different ant species must use different algorithms , because they 've evolved to deal with different resources , and it could be really useful to know about this , and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station .
When I first saw this picture , I thought , Oh no , they 've mounted the habitat vertically , but then I realized that , of course , it doesn 't matter .
So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they 're less likely to interact , and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up .
We 're still analyzing the data .
I don 't have the results yet .
But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth , and so we 're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species .
It 's very simple .
It can be done with cheap materials .
And that way , we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms .
And I think it 's pretty likely that the invasive species , the ones that come into our buildings , are going to be really good at this , because they 're in your kitchen because they 're really good at finding food and water .
So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic , and this is a clustered resource .
When there 's one piece of fruit , there 's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby , and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment .
So when one ant meets another , or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another , then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction , and that 's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic .
Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer .
I mean , first , it 's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies , but I don 't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies .
But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer .
There are many different kinds of cancer .
Each one originates in a particular part of the body , and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need .
So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they 're out searching around for the resources that they need , if those resources are clustered , they 're likely to use interactions for recruitment , and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting , then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established .
So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments , and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control .
Using only simple interactions , ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years .
We have a lot to learn from them .
Thank you .
John Hockenberry : We are all designers
Journalist John Hockenberry tells a personal story inspired by a pair of flashy wheels in a wheelchair-parts catalogue -- and how they showed him the value of designing a life of intent . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
I am no designer , nope , no way .
My dad was , which is kind of an interesting way to grow up .
I had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important .
Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up , you know , " Bad design is just people not thinking , John , " he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or , say , a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen .
You know , " Design -- bad design , there 's just no excuse for it .
It 's letting stuff happen without thinking about it .
Every object should be about something , John .
It should imagine a user .
It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object .
Good design , " my dad said , " is about supplying intent . "
That 's what he said .
Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer .
That was a big deal ; that was important . He worked for Kodak for a while ; that was important .
He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase ; that was important .
I knew design was important in my house because , for heaven 's sake , it put food on our table , right ?
And design was in everything my dad did .
He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up , and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes .
And I would ask him every once in a while , " Dad , do you want it to sound like the record ? "
We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house .
And he said , " No , never , John , never .
The song is just a given , that 's how you have to think about it .
You gotta make it your own . You gotta design it .
Show everyone what you intend , " is what he said .
" Doing that , acting by design , is what we all should be doing .
It 's where we all belong . "
All of us ? Designers ?
Oh , oh , Dad . Oh , Dad .
The song is just a given .
It 's how you cover it that matters .
Well , let 's hold on to that thought for just a minute .
It 's kind of like this wheelchair I 'm in , right ?
The original tune ? It 's a little scary .
" Ooh , what happened to that dude ?
He can 't walk . Anybody know the story ?
Anybody ? "
I don 't like to talk about this very much , but I 'll tell you guys the story today .
All right , exactly 36 years ago this week , that 's right , I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania , and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car .
But ever since then , the wheelchair has been a given in my life .
My life , at the mercy of good design and bad design .
Think about it . Now , in design terms , a wheelchair is a very difficult object .
It mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune , and it projects that message , that story , so strongly that it almost blots out anything else .
I roll swiftly through an airport , right ?
And moms grab their kids out of the way and say , " Don 't stare ! "
The poor kid , you know , has this terrified look on his face , God knows what they think .
And for decades , I 'm going , why does this happen ? What can I do about it ? How can I change this ? I mean there must be something .
So I would roll , I 'd make no eye contact -- just kinda frown , right ?
Or I 'd dress up really , really sharply or something .
Or I 'd make eye contact with everyone -- that was really creepy ; that didn 't work at all .
You know anything , I 'd try . I wouldn 't shower for a week -- nothing worked .
Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago , my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had , and they said , " Oh , Dad ! Dad ! Look , you gotta get these , these flashy wheels -- you gotta get ' em ! "
And I said , " Oh , girls , Dad is a very important journalist , that just wouldn 't do at all . "
And of course , they immediately concluded , " Oh , what a bummer , Dad . Journalists aren 't allowed to have flashy wheels .
I mean , how important could you be then ? " they said .
I went , " Wait a minute , all right , right -- I 'll get the wheels . " Purely out of protest , I got the flashy wheels , and I installed them and -- check this out . Could I have my special light cue please ?
Look at that !
Now ... look at , look at this ! Look at this !
So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life , I mean totally changed my life .
Instead of blank stares and awkwardness , now it is pointing and smiling !
People going , " Awesome wheels , dude ! Those are awesome !
I mean , I want some of those wheels ! " Little kids say , " Can I have a ride ? "
And of course there 's the occasional person -- usually a middle-aged male who will say , " Oh , those wheels are great !
I guess they 're for safety , right ? "
No ! They 're not for safety .
No , no , no , no , no .
What 's the difference here , the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights ?
The difference is intent .
That 's right , that 's right ; I 'm no longer a victim .
I chose to change the situation -- I 'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front . Right ?
Intent changes the picture completely .
I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element .
Acting with intent .
It conveys authorship .
It suggests that someone is driving .
It 's reassuring ; people are drawn to it .
Someone making the experience their own .
Covering the tragic tune with something different , something radically different .
People respond to that .
Now it seems simple , but actually I think in our society and culture in general , we have a huge problem with intent .
Now go with me here . Look at this guy . You know who this is ?
It 's Anders Breivik . Now , if he intended to kill in Olso , Norway last year , dozens and dozens of young people -- if he intended to do that , he 's a vicious criminal . We punish him .
Life in prison . Death penalty in the United States , not so much in Norway .
But , if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy , if he was motivated by some random mental illness , he 's in a completely different category .
We may put him away for life , but we watch him clinically .
It 's a completely different domain .
As an intentional murderer , Anders Breivik is merely evil .
But as a dysfunctional , as a dysfunctional murderer / psychotic , he 's something much more complicated .
He 's the breath of some primitive , ancient chaos .
He 's the random state of nature we emerged from .
He 's something very , very different .
It 's as though intent is an essential component for humanity .
It 's what we 're supposed to do somehow .
We 're supposed to act with intent .
We 're supposed to do things by design .
Intent is a marker for civilization .
Now here 's an example a little closer to home : My family is all about intent .
You can probably tell there are two sets of twins , the result of IVF technology , in vitro fertilization technology , due to some physical limitations I won 't go into .
Anyway , in vitro technology , IVF , is about as intentional as agriculture .
Let me tell you , some of you may have the experience .
In fact , the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian .
I met the dude . He 's a great guy .
He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he 'd worked with , all the different animals .
Probes he designed , and in fact , he was really , really proud of these probes .
He would say , " You 're right between horse and squirrel , John . "
But anyway , so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age -- we had four kids , after all -- with a little different technology that I won 't explain in too much detail here -- my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about .
" No need for birth control , Doc , are you sure about that ? "
" John , John , I looked at your chart .
From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you 're basically a form of birth control . "
Well !
What a liberating thought ! Yes !
And after a couple very liberating weekends , my wife and I , utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won 't get into it now , we noticed some familiar , if unexpected , symptoms .
I wasn 't exactly a form of birth control .
Look at that font there . My wife was so pissed .
I mean , did a designer come up with that ?
No , I don 't think a designer did come up with that .
In fact , maybe that 's the problem .
And so , little Ajax was born .
He 's like our other children , but the experience is completely different .
It 's something like my accident , right ?
He came out of nowhere .
But we all had to change , but not just react to the given ; we bend to this new experience with intent .
We 're five now . Five .
Facing the given with intent . Doing things by design .
Hey , the name Ajax -- you can 't get much more intentional than that , right ?
We 're really hoping he thanks us for that later on .
But I never became a designer . No , no , no , no . Never attempted . Never even close .
I did love some great designs as I was growing up : The HP 35S calculator -- God , I loved that thing . Oh God , I wish I had one .
Man , I love that thing .
I could afford that .
Other designs I really couldn 't afford , like the 1974 911 Targa .
In school , I studied nothing close to design or engineering ; I studied useless things like the Classics , but there were some lessons even there -- this guy , Plato , it turns out he 's a designer .
He designed a state in " The Republic , " a design never implemented .
Listen to one of the design features of Plato 's Government 4.0 : " The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed , and the State in which they are most eager , the worst . "
Well , got that wrong , didn 't we ?
But look at that statement ; it 's all about intent . That 's what I love about it .
But consider what Plato is doing here . What is he doing ?
It 's a grand idea of design -- a huge idea of design , common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period .
What was going on then ?
They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive ?
As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos , a confrontation with random , brutal nature , they suddenly had a moment to think -- and there was a lot to think about .
All of a sudden , human existence needed an intent .
Human life needed a reason .
Reality itself needed a designer .
The given was replaced by various aspects of intent , by various designs , by various gods .
Gods we 're still fighting about . Oh yeah .
Today we don 't confront the chaos of nature .
Today it is the chaos of humanity 's impact on the Earth itself that we confront .
This young discipline called design , I think , is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question : What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created ?
What shall we do ?
How shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create , on all the circumstances we create , on all the places we change ?
The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting .
That 's the tune we 're all covering today , all of us .
And we can 't just imitate the past . No .
That won 't do .
That won 't do at all .
Here 's my favorite design moment : In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s , I was working for ABC News , and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko , the dictator , the brutal dictator in Zaire , who raped and pillaged that country .
There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa .
The place was falling apart ; it was a horrible , horrible place , and I needed to go and explore the center of Kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting .
People were carrying off vehicles , carrying off pieces of buildings .
Soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests .
In the middle of this chaos , I 'm rolling around in a wheelchair , and I was completely invisible . Completely .
I was in a wheelchair ; I didn 't look like a looter .
I was in a wheelchair ; I didn 't look like a journalist , particularly , at least from their perspective .
And I didn 't look like a soldier , that 's for sure .
I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire , completely invisible .
And all of a sudden , from around a corner , comes this young man , paralyzed , just like me , in this metal and wood and leather pedal , three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device , and he pedals up to me as fast as he can .
He goes , " Hey , mister ! Mister ! "
And I looked at him -- he didn 't know any other English than that , but we didn 't need English , no , no , no , no , no .
We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes .
And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism ; he was full of pride over his design .
I wish I could show you that contraption .
His smile , our glow as we talked a universal language of design , invisible to the chaos around us .
His machine : homemade , bolted , rusty , comical .
My machine : American-made , confident , sleek .
He was particularly proud of the comfortable seat , really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge .
Oh , I wish I 'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him , man !
He would have loved those ! Oh yeah .
He would have understood those ; a chariot of pure intent -- think about it -- in a city out of control .
Design blew it all away for a moment .
We spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos .
He went back to the streets of Kinshasa ; I went to my hotel . And I think of him now , now ...
And I pose this question .
An object imbued with intent -- it has power , it 's treasure , we 're drawn to it .
An object devoid of intent -- it 's random , it 's imitative , it repels us . It 's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away .
This is what we must demand of our lives , of our objects , of our things , of our circumstances : living with intent .
And I have to say that on that score , I have a very unfair advantage over all of you .
And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day .
Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment , a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question , but the nurse was already there with an answer .
" You 've had a terrible accident , young man . You 've broken your back .
You 'll never walk again . "
I said , " I know all that -- what day is it ? "
You see , I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February , and I knew that 1976 was a leap year .
" Nurse ! Is this the 28th or the 29th ? "
And she looked at me and said , " It 's March 1st . "
And I went , " Oh my God .
I 've got some catching up to do ! "
And from that moment , I knew the given was that accident ; I had no option but to make up this new life without walking .
Intent -- a life with intent -- lived by design , covering the original with something better .
It 's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times .
To get back to this , to get back to design , and as my daddy suggested a long time ago , " Make the song your own , John .
Show everybody what you intend . "
Daddy , this one 's for you .
Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner but he was another man . Jo Jo left his home in Tucson , Arizona to attend a California bash . Get back , get back , get back to where you once belonged . Get back , get back , get back to where you once belonged .
Charmian Gooch : Meet global corruption 's hidden players
When the son of the president of a desperately poor country starts buying mansions and sportscars on an official monthly salary of $ 7,000 , Charmian Gooch suggests , corruption is probably somewhere in the picture . In a blistering , eye-opening talk , she details how global corruption trackers follow the money -- to some surprisingly familiar faces .
When we talk about corruption , there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind .
There 's the former Soviet megalomaniacs .
Saparmurat Niyazov , he was one of them .
Until his death in 2006 , he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan , a Central Asian country rich in natural gas .
Now , he really loved to issue presidential decrees .
And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother .
He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult , and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital 's central square and rotated to follow the sun .
He was a slightly unusual guy .
And then there 's that cliché , the African dictator or minister or official .
There 's Teodorín Obiang .
So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea , a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record .
The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that 's on a par with that of Portugal .
So Obiang junior , well , he buys himself a $ 30 million mansion in Malibu , California .
I 've been up to its front gates .
I can tell you it 's a magnificent spread .
He bought an € 18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent , a stack of fabulous sports cars , some costing a million dollars apiece -- oh , and a Gulfstream jet , too .
Now get this : Until recently , he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars .
And there 's Dan Etete .
Well , he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha , and it just so happens he 's a convicted money launderer too .
We 've spent a great deal of time investigating a $ 1 billion -- that 's right , a $ 1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with , and what we found was pretty shocking , but more about that later .
So it 's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there , carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we , personally , may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on .
But does it just happen over there ?
Well , at 22 , I was very lucky .
My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory .
And that 's how my relationship with corruption really began .
In 1993 , with two friends who were colleagues , Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley , we set up an organization called Global Witness .
Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia .
So a few years later , and it 's now 1997 , and I 'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds .
Perhaps you saw the film , the Hollywood film " Blood Diamond , " the one with Leonardo DiCaprio .
Well , some of that sprang from our work .
Luanda , it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets , and a tiny , very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal .
And it was a slightly crazy place .
So I 'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed .
But it wasn 't about blood diamonds .
Because I 'd been speaking to lots of people there who , well , they talked about a different problem : that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing .
And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people , trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge .
And in the years that I 've been , and we 've all been campaigning and investigating , I 've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global , massive scale possible , well it isn 't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase " weak governance . "
I mean , yes , it 's all of those , but corruption , it 's made possible by the actions of global facilitators .
So let 's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier .
Now , they 're all people we 've investigated , and they 're all people who couldn 't do what they do alone .
Take Obiang junior . Well , he didn 't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help .
He did business with global banks .
A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him , one of which was used to buy the art , and American banks , well , they funneled 73 million dollars into the States , some of which was used to buy that California mansion .
And he didn 't do all of this in his own name either .
He used shell companies .
He used one to buy the property , and another , which was in somebody else 's name , to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place .
And then there 's Dan Etete .
Well , when he was oil minister , he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that , guess what , yeah , he was the hidden owner of .
Now , it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government -- now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni , two of the biggest oil companies around .
So the reality is , is that the engine of corruption , well , it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan .
This engine , well , it 's driven by our international banking system , by the problem of anonymous shell companies , and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil , gas and mining operations , and , most of all , by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff .
Now let 's take the banks first .
Well , it 's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money , but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too .
For example , in Sarawak , Malaysia .
Now this region , it has just five percent of its forests left intact . Five percent .
So how did that happen ?
Well , because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years .
So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite , and the resulting footage , well , it made some people very angry , and you can see that on YouTube , but it proved what we had long suspected , because it showed how the state 's chief minister , despite his later denials , used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family .
And HSBC , well , we know that HSBC bankrolled the region 's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere .
The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process , but it earned around 130 million dollars .
Now shortly after our exposé , very shortly after our exposé earlier this year , the bank announced a policy review on this .
And is this progress ? Maybe , but we 're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case .
And then there 's the problem of anonymous shell companies .
Well , we 've all heard about what they are , I think , and we all know they 're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society , also known as taxes .
But what doesn 't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money , transformational sums of money , from poor countries .
In virtually every case of corruption that we 've investigated , shell companies have appeared , and sometimes it 's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal .
A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption .
It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies , totaling almost 56 billion dollars .
Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom , its overseas territories and Crown dependencies , and so it 's not just an offshore problem , it 's an on-shore one too .
You see , shell companies , they 're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens .
One striking recent case that we 've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable , state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands .
So we spoke to sources in country , trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal .
And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London .
Now , the Africa Progress Panel , led by Kofi Annan , they 've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals .
That 's almost twice the country 's annual health and education budget combined .
And will the people of Congo , will they ever get their money back ?
Well , the answer to that question , and who was really involved and what really happened , well that 's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it .
And how about the oil , gas and mining companies ?
Okay , maybe it 's a bit of a cliché to talk about them .
Corruption in that sector , no surprise .
There 's corruption everywhere , so why focus on that sector ?
Well , because there 's a lot at stake .
In 2011 , natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa , Asia and Latin America . Nineteen to one .
Now that 's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups , many of which haven 't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away .
Now let 's go back to the oil and mining companies , and let 's go back to Dan Etete and that $ 1 billion deal .
And now forgive me , I 'm going to read the next bit because it 's a very live issue , and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right .
Now , on the surface , the deal appeared straightforward .
Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block .
The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount , to the very dollar , to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete .
Now , that 's not bad going for a convicted money launderer .
And here 's the thing .
After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents , we found evidence that , in fact , Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company , and frankly , it 's hard to believe they didn 't know who they were really dealing with there .
Now , it just shouldn 't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went .
I mean , these are state assets .
They 're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country .
But in some countries , citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so .
And finally , well , there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable .
It 's just how some business is done .
It 's too complex and difficult to change .
So in effect , what ? We just accept it .
But as a campaigner and investigator , I have a different view , because I 've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum .
In the oil and mining sector , for example , there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems .
In 1999 , when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent , well , some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea .
But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency , and now it 's fast becoming the norm and the law .
Two thirds of the value of the world 's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws . Two thirds .
So this is change happening .
This is progress .
But we 're not there yet , by far .
Because it really isn 't about corruption somewhere over there , is it ?
In a globalized world , corruption is a truly globalized business , and one that needs global solutions , supported and pushed by us all , as global citizens , right here .
Thank you .
Kwabena Boahen : A computer that works like the brain
Researcher Kwabena Boahen is looking for ways to mimic the brain 's supercomputing powers in silicon -- because the messy , redundant processes inside our heads actually make for a small , light , superfast computer .
I got my first computer when I was a teenager growing up in Accra , and it was a really cool device .
You could play games with it . You could program it in BASIC .
And I was fascinated .
So I went into the library to figure out how did this thing work .
I read about how the CPU is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory , the RAM and the ALU , the arithmetic and logic unit .
And I thought to myself , this CPU really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system .
But nobody was really worried about this .
When computers were first introduced , they were said to be a million times faster than neurons .
People were really excited . They thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain .
This is a quote , actually , from Alan Turing : " In 30 years , it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person . "
This was in 1946 . And now , in 2007 , it 's still not true .
And so , the question is , why aren 't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain ?
What people didn 't realize , and I 'm just beginning to realize right now , is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers .
Let 's take a look at some numbers .
This is Blue Gene , the fastest computer in the world .
It 's got 120,000 processors ; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second .
That 's 10 to the sixteenth . And they consume one and a half megawatts of power .
So that would be really great , if you could add that to the production capacity in Tanzania .
It would really boost the economy .
Just to go back to the States , if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the States , you get 1,200 households in the U.S.
That 's how much power this computer uses .
Now , let 's compare this with the brain .
This is a picture of , actually Rory Sayres ' girlfriend 's brain .
Rory is a graduate student at Stanford .
He studies the brain using MRI , and he claims that this is the most beautiful brain that he has ever scanned .
So that 's true love , right there .
Now , how much computation does the brain do ?
I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second , which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does .
So that 's the question . The question is , how much -- they are doing a similar amount of processing , similar amount of data -- the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use ?
And it 's actually as much as your laptop computer : it 's just 10 watts .
So what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses , the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop .
So the question is , how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency ?
And let me just summarize . So the bottom line : the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have .
How is the brain able to do this ?
Let 's just take a look about how the brain works , and then I 'll compare that with how computers work .
So , this clip is from the PBS series , " The Secret Life of the Brain . "
It shows you these cells that process information .
They are called neurons .
They send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other , and where they contact each other , those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other .
That process is called a synapse .
You 've got this huge network of cells interacting with each other -- about 100 million of them , sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second .
And that 's basically what 's going on in your brain right now as you 're watching this .
How does that compare with the way computers work ?
In the computer , you have all the data going through the central processing unit , and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck , whereas in the brain , what you have is these neurons , and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons . There 's no bottleneck here .
It 's really a network in the literal sense of the word .
The net is doing the work in the brain .
If you just look at these two pictures , these kind of words pop into your mind .
This is serial and it 's rigid -- it 's like cars on a freeway , everything has to happen in lockstep -- whereas this is parallel and it 's fluid .
Information processing is very dynamic and adaptive .
So I 'm not the first to figure this out . This is a quote from Brian Eno : " the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them . "
Brian actually said this in 1995 .
And nobody was listening then , but now people are beginning to listen because there 's a pressing , technological problem that we face .
And I 'll just take you through that a little bit in the next few slides .
This is -- it 's actually really this remarkable convergence between the devices that we use to compute in computers , and the devices that our brains use to compute .
The devices that computers use are what 's called a transistor .
This electrode here , called the gate , controls the flow of current from the source to the drain -- these two electrodes .
And that current , electrical current , is carried by electrons , just like in your house and so on .
And what you have here is , when you actually turn on the gate , you get an increase in the amount of current , and you get a steady flow of current .
And when you turn off the gate , there 's no current flowing through the device .
Your computer uses this presence of current to represent a one , and the absence of current to represent a zero .
Now , what 's happening is that as transistors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller , they no longer behave like this .
In fact , they are starting to behave like the device that neurons use to compute , which is called an ion channel .
And this is a little protein molecule .
I mean , neurons have thousands of these .
And it sits in the membrane of the cell and it 's got a pore in it .
And these are individual potassium ions that are flowing through that pore .
Now , this pore can open and close .
But , when it 's open , because these ions have to line up and flow through , one at a time , you get a kind of sporadic , not steady -- it 's a sporadic flow of current .
And even when you close the pore -- which neurons can do , they can open and close these pores to generate electrical activity -- even when it 's closed , because these ions are so small , they can actually sneak through , a few can sneak through at a time .
you get some current sometimes .
These are your ones , but you 've got a few zeros thrown in .
And when it 's closed , you have a zero , but you have a few ones thrown in .
Now , this is starting to happen in transistors .
And the reason why that 's happening is that , right now , in 2007 -- the technology that we are using -- a transistor is big enough that several electrons can flow through the channel simultaneously , side by side .
In fact , there 's about 12 electrons can all be flowing this way .
And that means that a transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels in parallel .
Now , in a few years time , by 2015 , we will shrink transistors so much .
This is what Intel does to keep adding more cores onto the chip .
Or your memory sticks that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them -- before , it was 256 .
Transistors are getting smaller to allow this to happen , and technology has really benefitted from that .
But what 's happening now is that in 2015 , the transistor is going to become so small , that it corresponds to only one electron at a time can flow through that channel , and that corresponds to a single ion channel .
And you start having the same kind of traffic jams that you have in the ion channel .
The current will turn on and off at random , even when it 's supposed to be on .
And that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up , and that 's going to crash your machine .
So , we are at the stage where we don 't really know how to compute with these kinds of devices .
And the only kind of thing -- the only thing we know right now that can compute with these kinds of devices are the brain .
OK , so a computer picks a specific item of data from memory , it sends it into the processor or the ALU , and then it puts the result back into memory .
That 's the red path that 's highlighted .
The way brains work , I told you all , you have got all these neurons .
And the way they represent information is they break up that data into little pieces that are represented by pulses and different neurons .
So you have all these pieces of data distributed throughout the network .
And then the way that you process that data to get a result is that you translate this pattern of activity into a new pattern of activity , just by it flowing through the network .
So you set up these connections such that the input pattern just flows and generates the output pattern .
What you see here is that there 's these redundant connections .
So if this piece of data or this piece of the data gets clobbered , it doesn 't show up over here , these two pieces can activate the missing part with these redundant connections .
So even when you go to these crappy devices where sometimes you want a one and you get a zero , and it doesn 't show up , there 's redundancy in the network that can actually recover the missing information .
It makes the brain inherently robust .
What you have here is a system where you store data locally .
And it 's brittle , because each of these steps has to be flawless , otherwise you lose that data , whereas in the brain , you have a system that stores data in a distributed way , and it 's robust .
What I want to basically talk about is my dream , which is to build a computer that works like the brain .
This is something that we 've been working on for the last couple of years .
And I 'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina , which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball .
We didn 't do this by actually writing code , like you do in a computer .
In fact , the processing that happens in that little piece of brain is very similar to the kind of processing that computers do when they stream video over the Internet .
They want to compress the information -- they just want to send the changes , what 's new in the image , and so on -- and that is how your eyeball is able to squeeze all that information down to your optic nerve , to send to the rest of the brain .
Instead of doing this in software , or doing those kinds of algorithms , we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that 's called the retina .
And they figured out all the different cells , and they figured out the network , and we just took that network and we used it as the blueprint for the design of a silicon chip .
So now the neurons are represented by little nodes or circuits on the chip , and the connections among the neurons are represented , actually modeled by transistors .
And these transistors are behaving essentially just like ion channels behave in the brain .
It will give you the same kind of robust architecture that I described .
Here is actually what our artificial eye looks like .
The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here .
And the chip -- I 'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at Kareem Zaghloul , who 's the student who designed this chip .
Let me explain what you 're going to see , OK , because it 's putting out different kinds of information , it 's not as straightforward as a camera .
The retina chip extracts four different kinds of information .
It extracts regions with dark contrast , which will show up on the video as red .
And it extracts regions with white or light contrast , which will show up on the video as green .
This is Kareem 's dark eyes and that 's the white background that you see here .
And then it also extracts movement .
When Kareem moves his head to the right , you will see this blue activity there ; it represents regions where the contrast is increasing in the image , that 's where it 's going from dark to light .
And you also see this yellow activity , which represents regions where contrast is decreasing ; it 's going from light to dark .
And these four types of information -- your optic nerve has about a million fibers in it , and 900,000 of those fibers send these four types of information .
So we are really duplicating the kind of signals that you have on the optic nerve .
What you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse , right ?
It doesn 't light up green everywhere in the background , only on the edges , and then in the hair , and so on .
And this is the same thing you see when people compress video to send : they want to make it very sparse , because that file is smaller . And this is what the retina is doing , and it 's doing it just with the circuitry , and how this network of neurons that are interacting in there , which we 've captured on the chip .
But the point that I want to make -- I 'll show you up here .
So this image here is going to look like these ones , but here I 'll show you that we can reconstruct the image , so , you know , you can almost recognize Kareem in that top part there .
And so , here you go .
Yes , so that 's the idea .
When you stand still , you just see the light and dark contrasts .
But when it 's moving back and forth , the retina picks up these changes .
And that 's why , you know , when you 're sitting here and something happens in your background , you merely move your eyes to it .
There are these cells that detect change and you move your attention to it .
So those are very important for catching somebody who 's trying to sneak up on you .
Let me just end by saying that this is what happens when you put Africa in a piano , OK .
This is a steel drum here that has been modified , and that 's what happens when you put Africa in a piano .
And what I would like us to do is put Africa in the computer , and come up with a new kind of computer that will generate thought , imagination , be creative and things like that .
Thank you .
Question for you , Kwabena .
Do you put together in your mind the work you 're doing , the future of Africa , this conference -- what connections can we make , if any , between them ?
Kwabena Boahen : Yes , like I said at the beginning , I got my first computer when I was a teenager , growing up in Accra .
And I had this gut reaction that this was the wrong way to do it .
It was very brute force ; it was very inelegant .
I don 't think that I would 've had that reaction , if I 'd grown up reading all this science fiction , hearing about RD2D2 , whatever it was called , and just -- you know , buying into this hype about computers .
I was coming at it from a different perspective , where I was bringing that different perspective to bear on the problem .
And I think a lot of people in Africa have this different perspective , and I think that 's going to impact technology .
And that 's going to impact how it 's going to evolve .
And I think you 're going to be able to see , use that infusion , to come up with new things , because you 're coming from a different perspective .
I think we can contribute . We can dream like everybody else .
Thanks Kwabena , that was really interesting .
Thank you .

David Griffin : How photography connects us
The photo director for National Geographic , David Griffin knows the power of photography to connect us to our world . In a talk filled with glorious images , he talks about how we all use photos to tell our stories .
Let 's just start by looking at some great photographs .
This is an icon of National Geographic , an Afghan refugee taken by Steve McCurry .
But the Harvard Lampoon is about to come out with a parody of National Geographic , and I shudder to think what they 're going to do to this photograph .
Oh , the wrath of Photoshop .
This is a jet landing at San Francisco , by Bruce Dale .
He mounted a camera on the tail .
A poetic image for a story on Tolstoy , by Sam Abell .
Pygmies in the DRC , by Randy Olson .
I love this photograph because it reminds me of Degas ' bronze sculptures of the little dancer .
A polar bear swimming in the Arctic , by Paul Nicklen .
Polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth -- they 're not very good swimmers -- and we know what 's happening to the ice .
These are camels moving across the Rift Valley in Africa , photographed by Chris Johns .
Shot straight down , so these are the shadows of the camels .
This is a rancher in Texas , by William Albert Allard , a great portraitist .
And Jane Goodall , making her own special connection , photographed by Nick Nichols .
This is a soap disco in Spain , photographed by David Alan Harvey .
And David said that there was lot of weird stuff happening on the dance floor .
But , hey , at least it 's hygienic .
These are sea lions in Australia doing their own dance , by David Doubilet .
And this is a comet , captured by Dr. Euan Mason .
And finally , the bow of the Titanic , without movie stars , photographed by Emory Kristof .
Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today 's saturated , media world , because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment .
Here 's an example .
Four years ago , I was at the beach with my son , and he was learning how to swim in this relatively soft surf of the Delaware beaches .
But I turned away for a moment , and he got caught into a riptide and started to be pulled out towards the jetty .
I can stand here right now and see , as I go tearing into the water after him , the moments slowing down and freezing into this arrangement .
I can see the rocks are over here .
There 's a wave about to crash onto him .
I can see his hands reaching out , and I can see his face in terror , looking at me , saying , " Help me , Dad . "
I got him . The wave broke over us .
We got back on shore ; he was fine .
We were a little bit rattled .
But this flashbulb memory , as it 's called , is when all the elements came together to define not just the event , but my emotional connection to it .
And this is what a photograph taps into when it makes its own powerful connection to a viewer .
Now I have to tell you , I was talking to Kyle last week about this , that I was going to tell this story .
And he said , " Oh , yeah , I remember that too !
I remember my image of you was that you were up on the shore yelling at me . "
I thought I was a hero .
So , this represents -- this is a cross-sample of some remarkable images taken by some of the world 's greatest photojournalists , working at the very top of their craft -- except one .
This photograph was taken by Dr. Euan Mason in New Zealand last year , and it was submitted and published in National Geographic .
Last year , we added a section to our website called " Your Shot , " where anyone can submit photographs for possible publication .
And it has become a wild success , tapping into the enthusiast photography community .
The quality of these amateur photographs can , at times , be amazing .
And seeing this reinforces , for me , that every one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them .
But to be a great photojournalist , you have to have more than just one or two great photographs in you .
You 've got to be able to make them all the time .
But even more importantly , you need to know how to create a visual narrative .
You need to know how to tell a story .
So I 'm going to share with you some coverages that I feel demonstrate the storytelling power of photography .
Photographer Nick Nichols went to document a very small and relatively unknown wildlife sanctuary in Chad , called Zakouma .
The original intent was to travel there and bring back a classic story of diverse species , of an exotic locale .
And that is what Nick did , up to a point .
This is a serval cat .
He 's actually taking his own picture , shot with what 's called a camera trap .
There 's an infrared beam that 's going across , and he has stepped into the beam and taken his photograph .
These are baboons at a watering hole .
Nick -- the camera , again , an automatic camera took thousands of pictures of this .
And Nick ended up with a lot of pictures of the rear ends of baboons .
A lion having a late night snack -- notice he 's got a broken tooth .
And a crocodile walks up a riverbank toward its den .
I love this little bit of water that comes off the back of his tail .
But the centerpiece species of Zakouma are the elephants .
It 's one of the largest intact herds in this part of Africa .
Here 's a photograph shot in moonlight , something that digital photography has made a big difference for .
It was with the elephants that this story pivoted .
Nick , along with researcher Dr. Michael Fay , collared the matriarch of the herd .
They named her Annie , and they began tracking her movements .
The herd was safe within the confines of the park , because of this dedicated group of park rangers .
But once the annual rains began , the herd would begin migrating to feeding grounds outside the park .
And that 's when they ran into trouble .
For outside the safety of the park were poachers , who would hunt them down only for the value of their ivory tusks .
The matriarch that they were radio tracking , after weeks of moving back and forth , in and out of the park , came to a halt outside the park .
Annie had been killed , along with 20 members of her herd .
And they only came for the ivory .
This is actually one of the rangers .
They were able to chase off one of the poachers and recover this ivory , because they couldn 't leave it there , because it 's still valuable .
a story that went beyond the old-school method of just straight , " Isn 't this an amazing world ? "
And instead , created a story that touched our audiences deeply .
Instead of just knowledge of this park , he created an understanding and an empathy for the elephants , the rangers and the many issues surrounding human-wildlife conflicts .
Now let 's go over to India .
Sometimes you can tell a broad story in a focused way .
We were looking at the same issue that Richard Wurman touches upon in his new world population project .
For the first time in history , more people live in urban , rather than rural , environments .
And most of that growth is not in the cities , but in the slums that surround them .
Jonas Bendiksen , a very energetic photographer , came to me and said , " We need to document this , and here 's my proposal .
Let 's go all over the world and photograph every single slum around the world . "
And I said , " Well , you know , that might be a bit ambitious for our budget . "
So instead , what we did was we decided to , instead of going out and doing what would result in what we 'd consider sort of a survey story -- where you just go in and see just a little bit of everything -- we put Jonas into Dharavi , which is part of Mumbai , India , and let him stay there , and really get into the heart and soul of this really major part of the city .
What Jonas did was not just go and do a surface look at the awful conditions that exist in such places .
He saw that this was a living and breathing and vital part of how the entire urban area functioned .
By staying tightly focused in one place , Jonas tapped into the soul and the enduring human spirit that underlies this community .
And he did it in a beautiful way .
Sometimes , though , the only way to tell a story is with a sweeping picture .
We teamed up underwater photographer Brian Skerry and photojournalist Randy Olson to document the depletion of the world 's fisheries .
We weren 't the only ones to tackle this subject , but the photographs that Brian and Randy created are among the best to capture both the human and natural devastation of overfishing .
Here , in a photo by Brian , a seemingly crucified shark is caught up in a gill net off of Baja .
I 've seen sort of OK pictures of bycatch , the animals accidentally scooped up while fishing for a specific species .
But here , Brian captured a unique view by positioning himself underneath the boat when they threw the waste overboard .
And Brian then went on to even greater risk to get this never-before-made photograph of a trawl net scraping the ocean bottom .
Back on land , Randy Olson photographed a makeshift fish market in Africa , where the remains of filleted fish were sold to the locals , the main parts having already been sent to Europe .
And here in China , Randy shot a jellyfish market .
As prime food sources are depleted , the harvest goes deeper into the oceans and brings in more such sources of protein .
This is called fishing down the food chain .
But there are also glimmers of hope , and I think anytime we 're doing a big , big story on this , we don 't really want to go and just look at all the problems .
We also want to look for solutions .
Brian photographed a marine sanctuary in New Zealand , where commercial fishing had been banned -- the result being that the overfished species have been restored , and with them a possible solution for sustainable fisheries .
Photography can also compel us to confront issues that are potentially distressing and controversial .
James Nachtwey , who was honored at last year 's TED , took a look at the sweep of the medical system that is utilized to handle the American wounded coming out of Iraq .
It is like a tube where a wounded soldier enters on one end and exits back home , on the other .
Jim started in the battlefield .
Here , a medical technician tends to a wounded soldier on the helicopter ride back to the field hospital .
Here is in the field hospital .
The soldier on the right has the name of his daughter tattooed across his chest , as a reminder of home .
From here , the more severely wounded are transported back to Germany , where they meet up with their families for the first time .
And then back to the States to recuperate at veterans ' hospitals , such as here in Walter Reed .
And finally , often fitted with high-tech prosthesis , they exit the medical system and attempt to regain their pre-war lives .
Jim took what could have been a straight-up medical science story and gave it a human dimension that touched our readers deeply .
Now , these stories are great examples of how photography can be used to address some of our most important topics .
But there are also times when photographers simply encounter things that are , when it comes down to it , just plain fun .
Photographer Paul Nicklin traveled to Antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals .
They have been rarely photographed , partly because they are considered one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean .
In fact , a year earlier , a researcher had been grabbed by one and pulled down to depth and killed .
So you can imagine Paul was maybe a little bit hesitant about getting into the water .
Now , what leopard seals do mostly is , they eat penguins .
You know of " The March of the Penguins . "
This is sort of the munch of the penguins .
Here a penguin goes up to the edge and looks out to see if the coast is clear .
And then everybody kind of runs out and goes out .
But then Paul got in the water .
And he said he was never really afraid of this .
Well , this one female came up to him .
She 's probably -- it 's a shame you can 't see it in the photograph , but she 's 12 feet long .
So , she is pretty significant in size .
And Paul said he was never really afraid , because she was more curious about him than threatened .
This mouthing behavior , on the right , was really her way of saying to him , " Hey , look how big I am ! "
Or you know , " My , what big teeth you have . "
Then Paul thinks that she simply took pity on him .
To her , here was this big , goofy creature in the water that for some reason didn 't seem to be interested in chasing penguins .
So what she did was she started to bring penguins to him , alive , and put them in front of him .
She dropped them off , and then they would swim away .
She 'd kind of look at him , like " What are you doing ? "
Go back and get them , and then bring them back and drop them in front of him .
And she did this over the course of a couple of days , until the point where she got so frustrated with him that she started putting them directly on top of his head .
Which just resulted in a fantastic photograph .
Eventually , though , Paul thinks that she just figured that he was never going to survive .
This is her just puffing out , you know , snorting out in disgust .
And lost interest with him , and went back to what she does best .
Paul set out to photograph a relatively mysterious and unknown creature , and came back with not just a collection of photographs , but an amazing experience and a great story .
It is these kinds of stories , ones that go beyond the immediate or just the superficial that demonstrate the power of photojournalism .
I believe that photography can make a real connection to people , and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today .
Thank you .
Paul Debevec : Animating a photo-real digital face
Computer graphics trailblazer Paul Debevec explains the scene-stealing technology behind Digital Emily , a digitally constructed human face so realistic it stands up to multiple takes .
One of the biggest challenges in computer graphics has been being able to create a photo-real , digital human face .
And one of the reasons it is so difficult is that , unlike aliens and dinosaurs , we look at human faces every day .
They are very important to how we communicate with each other .
As a result , we 're tuned in to the subtlest things that could possibly be wrong with a computer rendering , in order to believe whether these things are realistic .
And what I 'm going to do in the next five minutes is take you through a process where we tried to create a reasonably photo-realistic computer-generated face , using some computer graphics technology we 've developed , and also some collaborators at a company called Image Metrics .
And we 're going to try to do a photo-real face of an actress named Emily O 'Brien , who is right there .
And that 's actually a completely computer-generated rendering of her face .
By the end of the talk , we 're going to see it move .
The way that we did this is we tried to start with Emily herself , who was gracious enough to come to our laboratory in Marina Del Rey , and sit for a session in Light Stage 5 .
This is a face-scanning sphere , with 156 white LEDs all around that allow us to photograph her in a series of very controlled illumination conditions .
And the lighting that we use these days looks something like this .
We shoot all of these photographs in about three seconds .
And we basically capture enough information with video projector patterns that drape over the contours of her face , and different principle directions of light from the light stage , to figure out both the coarse-scale and the fine-scale detail of her face .
If we zoom in on this photograph right here , we can see it 's a really nice photograph to have of her , because she is lit from absolutely everywhere at the same time to get a nice image of her facial texture .
And in addition , we 've actually used polarizers on all the lights -- just like polarized sunglasses can block the glare off of the road , polarizers can block the shine off of the skin , so we don 't get all those specular reflections to take this map .
Now , if we turn the polarizers around just a little bit , we can actually bring that specular reflection of the skin back in , and you can see she looks kind of shiny and oily at this point .
If you take the difference between these two images here , you can get an image lit from the entire sphere of light of just the shine off of Emily 's skin .
I don 't think any photograph like this had ever been taken before we had done this .
And this is very important light to capture , because this is the light that reflects off the first surface of the skin .
It doesn 't get underneath the translucent layers of the skin and blur out .
And , as a result , it 's a very good cue to the detailed shape of the skin-pore structure and all of the fine wrinkles that all of us have , the things that actually make us look like real humans .
So , if we use information that comes off of this specular reflection , we can go from a traditional face scan that might have the gross contours of the face and the basic shape , and augment it with information that puts in all of that skin pore structure and fine wrinkles .
And , even more importantly , since this is a photometric process that only takes three seconds to capture , we can shoot Emily in just part of an afternoon , in many different facial poses and facial expressions .
So , here you can see her moving her eyes around , moving her mouth around .
And these we 're actually going to use to create a photo-real digital character .
If you take a look at these scans that we have of Emily , you can see that the human face does an enormous amount of amazing things as it goes into different facial expressions .
You can see things . Not only the face shape changes , but all sorts of different skin buckling and skin wrinkling occurs .
You can see that the skin pore structure changes enormously from stretched skin pores to the regular skin texture .
You can see the furrows in the brow and how the microstructure changes there .
You can see muscles pulling down at flesh to bring her eyebrows down .
Her muscles bulging in her forehead when she winces like that .
In addition to this kind of high-resolution geometry , since it 's all captured with cameras , we 've got a great texture map to use for the face .
And by looking at how the different color channels of the illumination , the red and the green and the blue , diffuse the light differently , we can come up with a way of shading the skin on the computer .
Then , instead of looking like a plaster mannequin , it actually looks like it 's made out of living human flesh .
And this is what we used to give to the company Image Metrics to create a rigged , digital version of Emily .
We 're just seeing the coarse-scale geometry here .
But they basically created a digital puppet of her , where you can pull on these various strings , and it actually moves her face in ways that are completely consistent with the scans that we took .
And , in addition to the coarse-scale geometry , they also used all of that detail to create a set of what are called " displacement maps " that animate as well .
These are the displacement maps here .
And you can see those different wrinkles actually show up as she animates .
So the next process was then to animate her .
We actually used one of her own performances to provide the source data .
So , by analyzing this video with computer vision techniques , they were able to drive the facial rig with the computer-generated performance .
So what you 're going to see now , after this , is a completely photo-real digital face .
We can turn the volume up a little bit if that 's available .
Emily : Image Metrics is a markerless , performance-driven animation company .
We specialize in high-quality facial animation for video games and films .
Image Metrics is a markerless , performance-driven animation company .
We specialize in high quality facial animation for video games and films .
Paul Debevec : So , if we break that down into layers , here 's that diffuse component we saw in the first slide .
Here is the specular component animating .
You can see all the wrinkles happening there .
And there is the underlying wireframe mesh .
And that is Emily herself .
Now , where are we going with this here ?
We 've gone a little bit beyond Light Stage 5 . This is Light Stage 6 , and we 're looking at taking this technology and applying it to whole human bodies .
This is Bruce Lawmen , one of our researchers in the group , who graciously agreed to get captured running in the Light Stage .
And let 's take a look at a computer-generated version of Bruce , running in a new environment .
And thank you very much .
Gavin Pretor-Pinney : Cloudy with a chance of joy
You don 't need to plan an exotic trip to find creative inspiration . Just look up , says Gavin Pretor-Pinney , founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society . As he shares charming photos of nature 's finest aerial architecture , Pretor-Pinney calls for us all to take a step off the digital treadmill , lie back and admire the beauty in the sky above .
Clouds .
Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them ?
They get a bad rap .
If you think about it , the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds .
Someone who 's down or depressed , they 're under a cloud .
And when there 's bad news in store , there 's a cloud on the horizon .
I saw an article the other day .
It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet .
" A cloud over the cloud , " was the headline .
It seems like they 're everyone 's default doom-and-gloom metaphor .
But I think they 're beautiful , don 't you ?
It 's just that their beauty is missed because they 're so omnipresent , so , I don 't know , commonplace , that people don 't notice them .
They don 't notice the beauty , but they don 't even notice the clouds unless they get in the way of the sun .
And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way .
They think of them as the annoying , frustrating obstructions , and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking .
But most people , when you stop to ask them , will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds .
It 's like a nostalgic fondness , and they make them think of their youth .
Who here can 't remember thinking , well , looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids ?
You know , when you were masters of daydreaming ?
Aristophanes , the ancient Greek playwright , he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago , and you can see what he means .
It 's just that these days , us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze , and I think that 's a pity .
I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it .
I think we should be a bit more willing , perhaps , to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go , " Wait a minute , that 's two cats dancing the salsa ! "
Or seeing the big , white , puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank .
They 're like nature 's version of those inkblot images , you know , that shrinks used to show their patients in the ' 60s , and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds , you 'll save money on psychoanalysis bills .
Let 's say you 're in love . All right ?
And you look up and what do you see ?
Right ? Or maybe the opposite .
You 've just been dumped by your partner , and everywhere you look , it 's kissing couples .
Perhaps you 're having a moment of existential angst .
You know , you 're thinking about your own mortality .
And there , on the horizon , it 's the Grim Reaper .
Or maybe you see a topless sunbather .
What would that mean ?
What would that mean ? I have no idea .
But one thing I do know is this : The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair .
I think we should stand up for them , which is why , a few years ago , I started the Cloud Appreciation Society .
Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world .
And all these photographs that I 'm showing , they were sent in by members .
And the society exists to remind people of this : Clouds are not something to moan about .
Far from it . They are , in fact , the most diverse , evocative , poetic aspect of nature .
I think , if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then , it helps you keep your feet on the ground .
And I want to show you why , with the help of some of my favorite types of clouds .
Let 's start with this one . It 's the cirrus cloud , named after the Latin for a lock of hair .
It 's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere , and as these ice crystals fall , they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down , giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances , these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks .
And these winds up there can be very , very fierce .
They can be 200 miles an hour , 300 miles an hour .
These clouds are bombing along , but from all the way down here , they appear to be moving gracefully , slowly , like most clouds .
And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down , to calm down .
It 's like a bit of everyday meditation .
Those are common clouds .
What about rarer ones , like the lenticularis , the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud ?
These clouds form in the region of mountains .
When the wind passes , rises to pass over the mountain , it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak , with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air , these flying saucer-like forms , and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds . It 's true .
A little rarer are the fallstreak holes . All right ?
This is when a layer is made up of very , very cold water droplets , and in one region they start to freeze , and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below , giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below .
Rarer still , the Kelvin – Helmholtz cloud .
Not a very snappy name . Needs a rebrand .
This looks like a series of breaking waves , and it 's caused by shearing winds -- the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly , and in the middle , in between , you get this undulating of the air , and if the difference in those speeds is just right , the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices .
All right . Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus , but they 're not that rare .
If you look up , and you pay attention to the sky , you 'll see them sooner or later , maybe not quite as dramatic as these , but you 'll see them .
And you 'll see them around where you live .
Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature 's displays , because we all have a good , fantastic view of the sky .
And these clouds , these rarer clouds , remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday .
Nothing is more nourishing , more stimulating to an active , inquiring mind than being surprised , being amazed . It 's why we 're all here at TED , right ?
But you don 't need to rush off away from the familiar , across the world to be surprised .
You just need to step outside , pay attention to what 's so commonplace , so everyday , so mundane that everybody else misses it .
One cloud that people rarely miss is this one : the cumulonimbus storm cloud .
It 's what 's produces thunder and lightning and hail .
These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere .
They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere .
But from down below , they are the embodiment of the powerful , elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere .
To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail , to feel connected to our atmosphere .
It 's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air .
We don 't live beneath the sky . We live within it .
And that connection , that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote .
It 's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen , you know , when we 're in a wi-fi zone .
But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one , the cumulus cloud .
Right ? It forms on a sunny day .
If you close your eyes and think of a cloud , it 's probably one of these that comes to mind .
All those cloud shapes at the beginning , those were cumulus clouds .
The sharp , crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in .
And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting , what an aimless activity it is .
You 're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky , are you ?
It 's pointless . It 's a pointless activity , which is precisely why it 's so important .
The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy , perpetually busy .
You know , when you 're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table , raising a family , writing thank you letters , you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails , updating a Facebook page , feeding your Twitter feed .
And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing .
And sometimes we need — Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing .
We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present , not thinking about what you 've got to do and what you should have done , but just being here , letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present , it 's good for you , and it 's good for the way you feel .
It 's good for your ideas . It 's good for your creativity .
It 's good for your soul .
So keep looking up , marvel at the ephemeral beauty , and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds .
Thank you very much .
Ken Jennings : Watson , Jeopardy and me , the obsolete know-it-all
Trivia whiz Ken Jennings has made a career as a keeper of facts ; he holds the longest winning streak in history on the U.S. game show & lt ; em & gt ; Jeopardy & lt ; / em & gt ; . But in 2011 , he played a challenge match against supercomputer Watson -- and lost . With humor and humility , Jennings tells us how it felt to have a computer literally beat him at his own game , and also makes the case for good old-fashioned human knowledge . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
In two weeks time , that 's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed " Jeopardy " set .
I mean , nine years is a long time .
And given " Jeopardy 's " average demographics , is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead .
But not all , a few are still alive .
Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever .
And when I do , it 's as a bit of a know-it-all .
I think that ship has sailed , it 's too late for me .
For better or for worse , that 's what I 'm going to be known as , as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff .
And I can 't complain about this .
I feel like that was always sort of my destiny , although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet .
If nothing else , you realize very quickly as a teenager , it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk 's middle name .
And as a result , I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years .
But if you go further back , if you look at it , it 's all there .
I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about -- Haley 's comet or giant squids or the size of the world 's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was .
I now have a 10-year-old of my own who 's exactly the same .
And I know how deeply annoying it is , so karma does work .
And I loved game shows , fascinated with game shows .
I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me , as badly as I wanted to go to school , that I was also going to miss " Hollywood Squares " and " Family Feud . "
I was going to miss my game shows .
And later , in the mid- ' 80s , when " Jeopardy " came back on the air , I remember running home from school every day to watch the show .
It was my favorite show , even before it paid for my house .
And we lived overseas , we lived in South Korea where my dad was working , where there was only one English language TV channel .
There was Armed Forces TV , and if you didn 't speak Korean , that 's what you were watching .
So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch " Jeopardy . "
I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid .
I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the ' 80s and holding my own , back when that was a fad .
There 's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don 't know .
You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn 't know .
And you think , ah hah , knowledge really is power -- the right fact deployed at exactly the right place .
I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path , that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant .
And so I sold out way too young .
I didn 't try to figure out what one does with that .
I studied computers because I heard that was the thing , and I became a computer programmer -- not an especially good one , not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on " Jeopardy " in 2004 .
But that 's what I was doing .
And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background -- a few years later , I think 2009 or so , when I got another phone call from " Jeopardy " saying , " It 's early days yet , but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at ' Jeopardy . ' Are you up for this ? "
This was the first I 'd heard of it .
And of course I said yes , for several reasons .
One , because playing " Jeopardy " is a great time .
It 's fun . It 's the most fun you can have with your pants on .
And I would do it for nothing .
I don 't think they know that , luckily , but I would go back and play for Arby 's coupons .
I just love " Jeopardy , " and I always have .
And second of all , because I 'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future .
People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future , and now I could be on the stage with it .
I was not going to say no .
The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win .
I had taken some artificial intelligence classes .
I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on " Jeopardy . "
People don 't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a " Jeopardy " clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings , the puns , the red herrings , unpack the meaning of the clue .
The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human , little kid could do , very hard for a computer .
And I thought , well this is going to be child 's play .
Yes , I will come destroy the computer and defend my species .
But as the years went on , as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this , I started to get occasional updates from them , and I started to get a little more worried .
I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph .
It was a scatter chart showing performance on " Jeopardy , " tens of thousands of dots representing " Jeopardy " champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of -- I was going to say questions answered , but answers questioned , I guess , clues responded to -- versus the accuracy of those answers .
So there 's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to .
And at first , it was very low .
There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena .
But then you see the line start to go up .
And it 's getting very close to what they call the winner 's cloud .
And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots , some black dots , that were a different color .
And thought , what are these ?
" The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time ' Jeopardy ' champion Ken Jennings . "
And I saw this line coming for me .
And I realized , this is it .
This is what it looks like when the future comes for you .
It 's not the Terminator 's gun sight ; it 's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do , the only thing that makes you special , the thing you 're best at .
And when the game eventually happened about a year later , it was very different than the " Jeopardy " games I 'd been used to .
We were not playing in L.A. on the regular " Jeopardy " set .
Watson does not travel .
Watson 's actually huge .
It 's thousands of processors , a terabyte of memory , trillions of bytes of memory .
We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room .
The only other " Jeopardy " contestant to this day I 've ever been inside .
And so Watson does not travel .
You must come to it ; you must make the pilgrimage .
So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer .
And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage .
There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage .
Like you 're going to play the Chicago Bulls , and there 's the thing in the middle of their court .
And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling , having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up , and holding up " Go Watson " signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right .
I think guys had " W-A-T-S-O-N " written on their bellies in grease paint .
If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters " W-A-T-S-O-N " written on their gut , it 's an unpleasant sight .
But they were right . They were exactly right .
I don 't want to spoil it , if you still have this sitting on your DVR , but Watson won handily .
And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking .
It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer .
And you could hear that little tick , tick , tick , tick .
And I remember thinking , this is it .
I felt obsolete .
I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the ' 80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line .
I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers .
And it hasn 't been the last .
If you watch the news , you 'll see occasionally -- and I see this all the time -- that pharmacists now , there 's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist .
And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there 's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions .
You don 't need human assistants for that anymore .
I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it .
And obviously these new technologies can 't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they 're replacing , but they 're faster , and crucially , they 're much , much cheaper .
So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be .
I 've read economists saying that , as a result of these new technologies , we 'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we 'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren .
I 've heard other people say quite the opposite , that this is yet another tier of the middle class that 's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous , something that we should worry about .
I 'm not an economist myself .
All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work .
And it was friggin ' demoralizing . It was terrible .
Here 's the one thing that I was ever good at , and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing .
They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV , and " I 'm sorry , Ken . We don 't need you anymore . "
And it made me think , what does this mean , if we 're going to be able to start outsourcing , not just lower unimportant brain functions .
I 'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers , when we knew our friends ' phone numbers .
And suddenly there was a machine that did that , and now we don 't need to remember that anymore .
I have read that there 's now actually evidence that the hippocampus , the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships , physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS , because we 're not exercising our sense of direction anymore .
We 're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard .
And as a result , a part of our brain that 's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber .
And it made me think , what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are ?
Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that ?
Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less ?
As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know , this was a terrifying idea to me .
The more I thought about it , I realized , no , it 's still important .
The things we know are still important .
that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says , " Oh , yeah . I can Google that . Hold on a second . "
There 's an advantage of volume , and there 's an advantage of time .
The advantage of volume , first , just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays .
There 's so much information out there .
Being a Renaissance man or woman , that 's something that was only possible in the Renaissance .
Now it 's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor .
There 's just too much .
They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so , the sum total of human information .
That means between now and late 2014 , we will generate as much information , in terms of gigabytes , as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together .
It 's doubling every 18 months now .
This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts .
A decision like where do I go to school ? What should I major in ?
Who do I vote for ?
Do I take this job or that one ?
These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts .
If we have those facts at our mental fingertips , we 're going to be able to make informed decisions .
If , on the other hand , we need to look them all up , we may be in trouble .
According to a National Geographic survey I just saw , somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map .
If you can 't do that first step , are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you 're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy ?
Quite probably not .
At some point you 're just going to be like , " You know what ? There 's too much to know . Screw it . "
And you 'll make a less informed decision .
The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips .
I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith .
She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey , England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket , Thailand .
She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says , " Mom , Dad , we 've got to get off the beach . "
And they say , " What do you mean ? We just got here . "
And she said , " In Mr. Kearney 's geography class last month , he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there , that 's the sign of a tsunami , and you need to clear the beach . "
What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this ?
Her parents thought about it , and they finally , to their credit , decided to believe her .
They told the lifeguard , they went back to the hotel , and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach , luckily , because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami , the day after Christmas , 2004 , that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean .
But not on that beach , not on Mai Khao Beach , because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before .
Now when facts come in handy like that -- I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact , one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- normally something that 's easier to see on game shows than in real life .
But in this case it happened in real life .
And it happens in real life all the time .
It 's not always a tsunami , often it 's a social situation .
It 's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge .
You say where you 're from , and I say , " Oh , yeah . "
Or your alma mater or your job , and I know just a little something about it , enough to get the ball rolling .
People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you .
It 's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met .
That 's often the advantage of time .
And it 's not effective if you say , " Well , hold on .
You 're from Fargo , North Dakota . Let me see what comes up .
Oh , yeah . Roger Maris was from Fargo . "
That doesn 't work . That 's just annoying .
The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker , friend of Dr. Johnson , Samuel Parr once said , " It 's always better to know a thing than not to know it . "
And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed , it 's probably that .
I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good , that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are , as individuals and as a species .
I don 't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete .
I don 't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty , so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together .
I don 't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere , reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of " Simpsons " episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs .
I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices , to our search engines and our smartphones .
In the movies , when computers like Watson start to think , things don 't always end well .
Those movies are never about beautiful utopias .
It 's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in " 2001 . "
Things always go terribly wrong .
And I feel like we 're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in .
This is a question of leadership , because it becomes a question of who leads the future .
On the one hand , we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it 's ever been in human history , where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips .
And on the other hand , we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we 've all decided it 's not important what we know anymore , that knowledge isn 't valuable because it 's all out there in the cloud , and why would we ever bother learning anything new .
Those are the two choices we have . I know which future I would rather be living in .
And we can all make that choice .
We make that choice by being curious , inquisitive people who like to learn , I don 't have to learn anymore , " or " Thank goodness I have my diploma . I 'm done learning for a lifetime .
I don 't have to learn new things anymore . "
No , every day we should be striving to learn something new .
We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us .
That 's where the people you see on " Jeopardy " come from .
These know-it-alls , they 're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book .
I 've met a lot of them .
For the most part , they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them , curious about everything , thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject .
We can live in one of these two worlds .
We can live in a world where our brains , the things that we know , continue to be the thing that makes us special , or a world in which we 've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson .
Ladies and gentlemen , the choice is yours .
Thank you very much .
Feisal Abdul Rauf : Lose your ego , find your compassion
Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf combines the teachings of the Qur 'an , the stories of Rumi , and the examples of Muhammad and Jesus , to demonstrate that only one obstacle stands between each of us and absolute compassion -- ourselves .
I 'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view , and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion .
The truth of the matter is otherwise .
Our holy book , the Koran , consists of 114 chapters , and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala , the saying of " In the name of God , the all compassionate , the all merciful , " or , as Sir Richard Burton -- not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor , but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature -- translates it . " In the name of God , the compassionating , the compassionate . "
And in a saying of the Koran , which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity , God says to his prophet Muhammad -- whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets , beginning with Adam , including Noah , including Moses , including Abraham , including Jesus Christ , and ending with Muhammad -- that , " We have not sent you , O Muhammad , except as a ' rahmah , ' except as a source of compassion to humanity . "
For us human beings , and certainly for us as Muslims , whose mission , and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet .
And the prophet , in one of his sayings , said , " Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God . "
And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion -- in fact , the Koran says that " God decreed upon himself compassion , " or , " reigned himself in by compassion " -- therefore , our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion , activators of compassion , actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion .
That is all well and good , but where do we go wrong , and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world ?
For the answer to this , we turn to our spiritual path .
In every religious tradition , there is the outer path and the inner path , or the exoteric path and the esoteric path .
The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism , or " tasawwuf " in Arabic .
And these doctors or these masters , these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition , refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies .
In one of the battles that the prophet waged , he told his followers , " We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war , to the greater battle . "
And they said , " Messenger of God , we are battle-weary .
How can we go to a greater battle ? "
He said , " That is the battle of the self , the battle of the ego . "
The sources of human problems have to do with egotism , " I. "
The famous Sufi master Rumi , who is very well known to most of you , has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend , and he knocks on the door , and a voice answers , " Who 's there ? "
" It 's me , " or , more grammatically correctly , " It is I , " as we might say in English .
The voice says , " Go away . "
After many years of training , of disciplining , of search and struggle , he comes back .
With much greater humility , he knocks again on the door .
The voice asks , " Who is there ? "
He said , " It is you , O heartbreaker . "
The door swings open , and the voice says , " Come in , for there is no room in this house for two I 's , " -- two capital I 's , not these eyes -- " for two egos . "
And Rumi 's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path .
In the presence of God , there is no room for more than one " I , " and that is the " I " of divinity .
In a teaching -- called a " hadith qudsi " in our tradition -- God says that , " My servant , " or " My creature , my human creature , does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do . "
And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean .
You want your employees to do what you ask them to do , and if they 've done that , then they can do extra .
But don 't ignore what you 've asked them to do .
" And , " God says , " my servant continues to get nearer to me , by doing more of what I 've asked them to do " -- extra credit , we might call it -- " until I love him or love her .
And when I love my servant , " God says , " I become the eyes by which he or she sees , the ears by which he or she listens , the hand by which he or she grasps , and the foot by which he or she walks , and the heart by which he or she understands . "
It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions .
Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism , the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path .
When he says , " I am the spirit , and I am the way , " and when the prophet Muhammad said , " Whoever has seen me has seen God , " it is because they became so much an instrument of God , they became part of God 's team -- so that God 's will was manifest through them , and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos .
Compassion on earth is given , it is in us .
All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way , get our egotism out of the way .
I 'm sure , probably all of you here , or certainly the very vast majority of you , have had what you might call a spiritual experience , a moment in your lives when , for a few seconds , a minute perhaps , the boundaries of your ego dissolved .
And at that minute , you felt at one with the universe -- one with that jug of water , one with every human being , one with the Creator -- and you felt you were in the presence of power , of awe , of the deepest love , the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives .
That is a moment which is a gift of God to us -- a gift when , for a moment , he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on " I , I , I , me , me , me , " and instead , like the person in Rumi 's story , we say , " Oh , this is all you .
This is all you . And this is all us .
And us , and I , and us are all part of you .
O , Creator ! O , the Objective ! The source of our being and the end of our journey , you are also the breaker of our hearts .
You are the one whom we should all be towards , for whose purpose we live , and for whose purpose we shall die , and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings . "
Our message today , and our purpose today , and those of you who are here today , and the purpose of this charter of compassion , is to remind .
For the Koran always urges us to remember , to remind each other , because the knowledge of truth is within every human being .
We know it all .
We have access to it all .
Jung may have called it " the subconscious . "
Through our subconscious , in your dreams -- the Koran calls our state of sleep " the lesser death , " " the temporary death " -- in our state of sleep we have dreams , we have visions , we travel even outside of our bodies , for many of us , and we see wonderful things .
We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it , and beyond the limitations of time as we know it .
But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating , the compassionate .
God , Bokh , whatever name you want to call him with , Allah , Ram , Om , whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity , it is the locus of absolute being , absolute love and mercy and compassion , and absolute knowledge and wisdom , what Hindus call " satchidananda . "
The language differs , but the objective is the same .
Rumi has another story about three men , a Turk , an Arab and -- and I forget the third person , but for my sake , it could be a Malay .
One is asking for angur -- one is , say , an Englishman -- one is asking for eneb , and one is asking for grapes .
And they have a fight and an argument because -- " I want grapes . " " I want eneb . " I want angur . " -- not knowing that the word that they 're using refers to the same reality in different languages .
There 's only one absolute reality by definition , one absolute being by definition , because absolute is , by definition , single , and absolute and singular .
There 's this absolute concentration of being , the absolute concentration of consciousness , awareness , an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity .
And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human .
For what defines humanity , perhaps biologically , is our physiology , but God defines humanity by our spirituality , by our nature .
And the Koran says , He speaks to the angels and says , " When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay , and breathed into him of my spirit , then , fall in prostration to him . "
The angels prostrate , not before the human body , but before the human soul .
Why ? Because the soul , the human soul , embodies a piece of the divine breath , a piece of the divine soul .
This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image .
What is the imagery of God ?
The imagery of God is absolute being , absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love .
And therefore , for us to be human -- in the greatest sense of what it means to be human , in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human -- means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us , and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being , of being alive , of beingness ; the attribute of wisdom , of consciousness , of awareness ; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings .
This is what I understand from my faith tradition , and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions , and this is the common platform on which we must all stand , and when we stand on this platform as such , I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world .
And I believe , personally , that we 're on the verge and that , with the presence and help of people like you here , we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah .
For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore .
We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option : we must , we must lower our egos , control our egos -- whether it is individual ego , personal ego , family ego , national ego -- and let all be for the glorification of the one .
Thank you , and God bless you .
Sherry Turkle : Connected , but alone ?
As we expect more from technology , do we expect less from each other ? Sherry Turkle studies how our devices and online personas are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connection we want to have .
Just a moment ago , my daughter Rebecca texted me for good luck .
Her text said , " Mom , you will rock . "
I love this .
Getting that text was like getting a hug .
And so there you have it .
I embody the central paradox .
I 'm a woman who loves getting texts who 's going to tell you that too many of them can be a problem .
Actually that reminder of my daughter brings me to the beginning of my story .
1996 , when I gave my first TEDTalk , Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row .
I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the internet and I was about to be on the cover of Wired magazine .
In those heady days , we were experimenting with chat rooms and online virtual communities .
We were exploring different aspects of ourselves .
And then we unplugged .
I was excited .
And , as a psychologist , what excited me most was the idea that we would use what we learned in the virtual world about ourselves , about our identity , to live better lives in the real world .
Now fast-forward to 2012 .
I 'm back here on the TED stage again .
My daughter 's 20 . She 's a college student .
She sleeps with her cellphone , so do I.
And I 've just written a new book , but this time it 's not one that will get me on the cover of Wired magazine .
So what happened ?
I 'm still excited by technology , but I believe , and I 'm here to make the case , that we 're letting it take us places that we don 't want to go .
Over the past 15 years , I 've studied technologies of mobile communication and I 've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people , young and old , about their plugged in lives .
And what I 've found is that our little devices , those little devices in our pockets , are so psychologically powerful that they don 't only change what we do , they change who we are .
Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that , only a few years ago , we would have found odd or disturbing , but they 've quickly come to seem familiar , just how we do things .
So just to take some quick examples : People text or do email during corporate board meetings .
They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes , during presentations , actually during all meetings .
People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you 're texting .
People explain to me that it 's hard , but that it can be done .
Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents ' full attention .
But then these same children deny each other their full attention .
This is a recent shot of my daughter and her friends being together while not being together .
And we even text at funerals .
I study this .
We remove ourselves from our grief or from our revery and we go into our phones .
Why does this matter ?
It matters to me because I think we 're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other , but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection .
We 're getting used to a new way of being alone together .
People want to be with each other , but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be .
People want to customize their lives .
They want to go in and out of all the places they are because the thing that matters most to them is control over where they put their attention .
So you want to go to that board meeting , but you only want to pay attention to the bits that interest you .
And some people think that 's a good thing .
But you can end up hiding from each other , even as we 're all constantly connected to each other .
A 50-year-old business man lamented to me that he feels he doesn 't have colleagues anymore at work .
When he goes to work , he doesn 't stop by to talk to anybody , he doesn 't call .
And he says he doesn 't want to interrupt his colleagues because , he says , " They 're too busy on their email . "
But then he stops himself and he says , " You know , I 'm not telling you the truth .
I 'm the one who doesn 't want to be interrupted .
I think I should want to , but actually I 'd rather just do things on my Blackberry . "
Across the generations , I see that people can 't get enough of each other , if and only if they can have each other at a distance , in amounts they can control .
I call it the Goldilocks effect : not too close , not too far , just right .
But what might feel just right for that middle-aged executive can be a problem for an adolescent who needs to develop face-to-face relationships .
An 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me wistfully , " Someday , someday , but certainly not now , I 'd like to learn how to have a conversation . "
When I ask people " What 's wrong with having a conversation ? "
People say , " I 'll tell you what 's wrong with having a conversation .
It takes place in real time and you can 't control what you 're going to say . "
So that 's the bottom line .
Texting , email , posting , all of these things let us present the self as we want to be .
We get to edit , and that means we get to delete , and that means we get to retouch , the face , the voice , the flesh , the body -- not too little , not too much , just right .
Human relationships are rich and they 're messy and they 're demanding .
And we clean them up with technology .
And when we do , one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection .
We short-change ourselves .
And over time , we seem to forget this , or we seem to stop caring .
I was caught off guard when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question , a profound question .
He said , " Don 't all those little tweets , don 't all those little sips of online communication , add up to one big gulp of real conversation ? "
My answer was no , they don 't add up .
Connecting in sips may work for gathering discreet bits of information , they may work for saying , " I 'm thinking about you , " or even for saying , " I love you , " -- I mean , look at how I felt when I got that text from my daughter -- but they don 't really work for learning about each other , for really coming to know and understand each other .
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves .
So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection .
For kids growing up , that skill is the bedrock of development .
Over and over I hear , " I would rather text than talk . "
And what I 'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation , so used to getting by with less , that they 've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether .
So for example , many people share with me this wish , that some day a more advanced version of Siri , the digital assistant on Apple 's iPhone , will be more like a best friend , someone who will listen when others won 't .
I believe this wish reflects a painful truth that I 've learned in the past 15 years .
That feeling that no one is listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology .
That 's why it 's so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -- so many automatic listeners .
And the feeling that no one is listening to me make us want to spend time with machines that seem to care about us .
We 're developing robots , they call them sociable robots , that are specifically designed to be companions -- to the elderly , to our children , to us .
Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for each other ?
During my research I worked in nursing homes , and I brought in these sociable robots that were designed to give the elderly the feeling that they were understood .
And one day I came in and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot in the shape of a baby seal .
It seemed to be looking in her eyes .
It seemed to be following the conversation .
It comforted her .
And many people found this amazing .
But that woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of a human life .
That robot put on a great show .
And we 're vulnerable .
People experience pretend empathy as though it were the real thing .
So during that moment when that woman was experiencing that pretend empathy , I was thinking , " That robot can 't empathize .
It doesn 't face death .
It doesn 't know life . "
And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion , I didn 't find it amazing ; I found it one of the most wrenching , complicated moments in my 15 years of work .
But when I stepped back , I felt myself at the cold , hard center of a perfect storm .
We expect more from technology and less from each other .
And I ask myself , " Why have things come to this ? "
And I believe it 's because technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable .
And we are vulnerable .
We 're lonely , but we 're afraid of intimacy .
And so from social networks to sociable robots , we 're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship .
We turn to technology to help us feel connected in ways we can comfortably control .
But we 're not so comfortable .
We are not so much in control .
These days , those phones in our pockets are changing our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasies .
One , that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be ; two , that we will always be heard ; and three , that we will never have to be alone .
And that third idea , that we will never have to be alone , is central to changing our psyches .
Because the moment that people are alone , even for a few seconds , they become anxious , they panic , they fidget , they reach for a device .
Just think of people at a checkout line or at a red light .
Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved .
And so people try to solve it by connecting .
But here , connection is more like a symptom than a cure .
It expresses , but it doesn 't solve , an underlying problem .
But more than a symptom , constant connection is changing the way people think of themselves .
It 's shaping a new way of being .
The best way to describe it is , I share therefore I am .
We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we 're having them .
So before it was : I have a feeling , I want to make a call .
Now it 's : I want to have a feeling , I need to send a text .
The problem with this new regime of " I share therefore I am " is that , if we don 't have connection , we don 't feel like ourselves .
We almost don 't feel ourselves .
So what do we do ? We connect more and more .
But in the process , we set ourselves up to be isolated .
How do you get from connection to isolation ?
You end up isolated if you don 't cultivate the capacity for solitude , the ability to be separate , to gather yourself .
Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments .
When we don 't have the capacity for solitude , we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive .
When this happens , we 're not able to appreciate who they are .
It 's as though we 're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self .
We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone .
But we 're at risk , because actually it 's the opposite that 's true .
If we 're not able to be alone , we 're going to be more lonely .
And if we don 't teach our children to be alone , they 're only going to know how to be lonely .
When I spoke at TED in 1996 , reporting on my studies of the early virtual communities , I said , " Those who make the most of their lives on the screen come to it in a spirit of self-reflection . "
And that 's what I 'm calling for here , now : reflection and , more than that , a conversation about where our current use of technology may be taking us , what it might be costing us .
We 're smitten with technology .
And we 're afraid , like young lovers , that too much talking might spoil the romance .
But it 's time to talk .
We grew up with digital technology and so we see it as all grown up .
But it 's not , it 's early days .
There 's plenty of time for us to reconsider how we use it , how we build it .
I 'm not suggesting that we turn away from our devices , just that we develop a more self-aware relationship with them , with each other and with ourselves .
I see some first steps .
Start thinking of solitude as a good thing .
Make room for it .
Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children .
Create sacred spaces at home -- the kitchen , the dining room -- and reclaim them for conversation .
Do the same thing at work .
At work , we 're so busy communicating that we often don 't have time to think , we don 't have time to talk , about the things that really matter .
Change that .
Most important , we all really need to listen to each other , including to the boring bits .
Because it 's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other .
Technology is making a bid to redefine human connection -- how we care for each other , how we care for ourselves -- but it 's also giving us the opportunity to affirm our values and our direction .
I 'm optimistic .
We have everything we need to start .
We have each other .
And we have the greatest chance of success if we recognize our vulnerability .
That we listen when technology says it will take something complicated and promises something simpler .
So in my work , I hear that life is hard , relationships are filled with risk .
And then there 's technology -- simpler , hopeful , optimistic , ever-young .
It 's like calling in the cavalry .
An ad campaign promises that online and with avatars , you can " Finally , love your friends love your body , love your life , online and with avatars . "
We 're drawn to virtual romance , to computer games that seem like worlds , to the idea that robots , robots , will someday be our true companions .
We spend an evening on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends .
But our fantasies of substitution have cost us .
Now we all need to focus on the many , many ways technology can lead us back to our real lives , our own bodies , our own communities , our own politics , our own planet .
They need us .
Let 's talk about how we can use digital technology , the technology of our dreams , to make this life the life we can love .
Thank you .
John McWhorter : Txtng is killing language . JK ! ! !
Does texting mean the death of good writing skills ? John McWhorter posits that there 's much more to texting -- linguistically , culturally -- than it seems , and it 's all good news .
We always hear that texting is a scourge .
The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy , or at least writing ability , among young people in the United States and now the whole world today .
The fact of the matter is that it just isn 't true , and it 's easy to think that it is true , but in order to see it in another way , in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing , not just energetic , but a miraculous thing , a kind of emergent complexity that we 're seeing happening right now , we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is , in which case , one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all .
What do I mean by that ?
Basically , if we think about language , language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years , at least 80,000 years , and what it arose as is speech . People talked .
That 's what we 're probably genetically specified for .
That 's how we use language most .
Writing is something that came along much later , and as we saw in the last talk , there 's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened , but according to traditional estimates , if humanity had existed for 24 hours , then writing only came along at about 11 : 07 p.m.
That 's how much of a latterly thing writing is .
So first there 's speech , and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice .
Now don 't get me wrong , writing has certain advantages .
When you write , because it 's a conscious process , because you can look backwards , you can do things with language that are much less likely if you 're just talking .
For example , imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon 's " The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire : " " The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours , till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight , of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself . "
That 's beautiful , but let 's face it , nobody talks that way .
Or at least , they shouldn 't if they 're interested in reproducing . That -- is not the way any human being speaks casually .
Casual speech is something quite different .
Linguists have actually shown that when we 're speaking casually in an unmonitored way , we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words .
You 'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking .
That 's what speech is like .
Speech is much looser . It 's much more telegraphic .
It 's much less reflective -- very different from writing .
So we naturally tend to think , because we see language written so often , that that 's what language is , but actually what language is , is speech . They are two things .
Now of course , as history has gone by , it 's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing .
So , for example , in a distant era now , it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing .
So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat , and they go , " Ahem , ladies and gentlemen , " and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech .
It 's formal . It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one .
It 's basically talking like you write , and so , for example , we 're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie .
The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event .
For two hours before that , Edward Everett spoke on a topic that , frankly , cannot engage us today and barely did then .
The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing .
Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours .
It was perfectly natural .
That 's what people did then , speaking like writing .
Well , if you can speak like writing , then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak .
The problem was just that in the material , mechanical sense , that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don 't lend themselves to it .
It 's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand , and then communication is limited .
On a manual typewriter it was very difficult , and even when we had electric typewriters , or then computer keyboards , the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech , more or less , you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly .
Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message , then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak .
And that 's where texting comes in .
And so , texting is very loose in its structure .
No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts , but then again , do you think about those things when you talk ?
No , and so therefore why would you when you were texting ?
What texting is , despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing , is fingered speech . That 's what texting is .
Now we can write the way we talk .
And it 's a very interesting thing , but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline .
We see this general bagginess of the structure , the lack of concern with rules and the way that we 're used to learning on the blackboard , and so we think that something has gone wrong .
It 's a very natural sense .
But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity .
That 's what we 're seeing in this fingered speech .
And in order to understand it , what we want to see is the way , in this new kind of language , there is new structure coming up .
And so , for example , there is in texting a convention , which is LOL .
Now LOL , we generally think of as meaning " laughing out loud . "
And of course , theoretically , it does , and if you look at older texts , then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud .
But if you text now , or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it 's become , you 'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore .
It 's evolved into something that is much subtler .
This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago .
" I love the font you 're using , btw . "
Julie : " lol thanks gmail is being slow right now " Now if you think about it , that 's not funny .
No one 's laughing .
And yet , there it is , so you assume there 's been some kind of hiccup .
Then Susan says " lol , I know , " again more guffawing than we 're used to when you 're talking about these inconveniences .
So Julie says , " I just sent you an email . "
Susan : " lol , I see it . "
Very funny people , if that 's what LOL means .
This Julie says , " So what 's up ? "
Susan : " lol , I have to write a 10 page paper . "
She 's not amused . Let 's think about it .
LOL is being used in a very particular way .
It 's a marker of empathy . It 's a marker of accommodation .
We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles .
Any spoken language that 's used by real people has them .
If you happen to speak Japanese , think about that little word " ne " that you use at the end of a lot of sentences .
If you listen to the way black youth today speak , think about the use of the word " yo . "
Whole dissertations could be written about it , and probably are being written about it .
A pragmatic particle , that 's what LOL has gradually become .
It 's a way of using the language between actual people .
Another example is " slash . "
Now , we can use slash in the way that we 're used to , along the lines of , " We 're going to have a party-slash-networking session . "
That 's kind of like what we 're at .
Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today .
It 's used to change the scene .
So for example , this Sally person says , " So I need to find people to chill with " and Jake says , " Haha " -- you could write a dissertation about " Haha " too , but we don 't have time for that — " Haha so you 're going by yourself ? Why ? "
Sally : " For this summer program at NYU . "
Jake : " Haha . Slash I 'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye . "
The slash is interesting .
I don 't really even know what Jake is talking about after that , but you notice that he 's changing the topic .
Now that seems kind of mundane , but think about how in real life , if we 're having a conversation and we want to change the topic , there are ways of doing it gracefully .
You don 't just zip right into it .
You 'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance , or you 'll say something like , " Hmm , makes you think -- " when it really didn 't , but what you 're really -- — what you 're really trying to do is change the topic .
You can 't do that while you 're texting , and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium .
All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker -- or two , or three .
Texting has developed one from this slash .
So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing , and yet it 's easy to think , well , something is still wrong .
There 's a lack of structure of some sort .
It 's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal .
Well , the fact of the matter is , look at this person in 1956 , and this is when texting doesn 't exist , " I Love Lucy " is still on the air .
" Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table , cannot write grammatically -- " We 've heard that sort of thing before , not just in 1956 . 1917 , Connecticut schoolteacher .
1917 . This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on " Downton Abbey " are articulate , or something like that .
So , " From every college in the country goes up the cry , ' Our freshmen can 't spell , can 't punctuate . ' " And so on . You can go even further back than this .
It 's the President of Harvard . It 's 1871 .
There 's no electricity . People have three names .
" Bad spelling , incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing . "
And he 's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies .
You can go even further back .
1841 , some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time " noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original " blah blah blah blah blah .
Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. -- -- and there 's this poor man who doesn 't like the way people are speaking Latin .
As it happens , he was writing about what had become French .
And so , there are always — — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning .
And so , the way I 'm thinking of texting these days is that what we 're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing , which they 're using alongside their ordinary writing skills , and that means that they 're able to do two things .
Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial .
That 's also true of being bidialectal .
That 's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing .
And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today , not consciously , of course , but it 's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire .
It 's very simple .
If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993 , the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of " Love Story , " but they would understand what was on that message board .
Take that person from 1993 -- not that long ago , this is " Bill and Ted 's Excellent Adventure " -- those people .
Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today .
Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they 're batting around on their little devices .
So in closing , if I could go into the future , if I could go into 2033 , the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to " The Wire . " I would want to know .
And — I really would ask that — and then I 'd want to know actually what was going on on " Downton Abbey . "
That 'd be the second thing .
And then the third thing would be , please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls , because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times , and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Yves Behar : A supercharged motorcycle design
Yves Behar and Forrest North unveil Mission One , a sleek , powerful electric motorcycle . They share slides from distant childhoods that show how collaboration kick-started their friendship -- and shared dreams .
Forrest North : The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation .
And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with .
I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands .
Yves Behar : And in scenic Switzerland for me .
FN : I always had a passion for alternative vehicles .
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada .
YB : Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there .
FN : And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions .
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom , much to the dismay of my mother .
YB : To the dismay of my mother , this is dangerous teenage fashion right there .
FN : And I brought this all together , this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia -- also the U.S. and Japan .
YB : So , wind power , solar power -- we had a lot to talk about .
We had a lot that got us excited .
So we decided to do a special project together .
To combine engineering and design and ...
FN : Really make a fully integrated product , something beautiful .
YB : And we made a baby .
FN : Can you bring out our baby ?
This baby is fully electric .
It goes 150 miles an hour .
It 's twice the range of any electric motorcycle .
Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design .
It 's got an amazing user experience .
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar .
He came up with our name and logo . We 're Mission Motors .
And we 've only got three minutes , but we could talk about it for hours .
YB : Thank you .
FN : Thank you TED . And thank you Chris , for having us .
Ron McCallum : How technology allowed me to read
Months after he was born , in 1948 , Ron McCallum became blind . In this charming , moving talk , he shows how he is able to read -- and celebrates the progression of clever tools and adaptive computer technologies that make it possible . With their help , and that of generous volunteers , he 's become a lawyer , an academic , and , most of all , a voracious reader . Welcome to the blind reading revolution .
When I was about three or four years old , I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers , and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book , to feel the picture they were discussing .
And my mum said , " Darling , remember that you can 't see and you can 't feel the picture and you can 't feel the print on the page . "
And I thought to myself , " But that 's what I want to do .
I love stories . I want to read . "
Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true .
I was born premature by about 10 weeks , which resulted in my blindness , some 64 years ago .
The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia , and it 's now very rare in the developed world .
Little did I know , lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I 'd been born at the right place and the right time , that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution .
There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet , but those of us who 've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America , Europe , Japan and other developed parts of the world .
Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world , but I think they 've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group .
And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today .
It 's an interaction between volunteers , passionate inventors and technology , and it 's a story that many other blind people could tell .
But let me tell you a bit about it today .
When I was five , I went to school and I learned braille .
It 's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper , and I can feel them with my fingers .
In fact , I think they 're putting up my grade six report .
I don 't know where Julian Morrow got that from .
I was pretty good in reading , but religion and musical appreciation needed more work .
When you leave the opera house , you 'll find there 's braille signage in the lifts .
Look for it . Have you noticed it ?
I do . I look for it all the time .
When I was at school , the books were transcribed by transcribers , voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I 'd have volumes to read , and that had been going on , mainly by women , since the late 19th century in this country , but it was the only way I could read .
When I was in high school , I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder , and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning .
I could have family and friends read me material , and I could then read it back as many times as I needed .
And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers .
For example , when I studied at graduate school at Queen 's University in Canada , the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me .
I gave them a tape recorder , and they read into it .
As one of them said to me , " Ron , we ain 't going anywhere at the moment . "
But think of it . These men , who hadn 't had the educational opportunities I 'd had , helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help .
Well , I went back and became an academic at Melbourne 's Monash University , and for those 25 years , tape recorders were everything to me .
In fact , in my office in 1990 , I had 18 miles of tape .
Students , family and friends all read me material .
Mrs. Lois Doery , whom I later came to call my surrogate mum , read me many thousands of hours onto tape .
One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her .
But sadly , her health hasn 't permitted her to come today .
But I thank you here , Lois , from this platform .
I saw my first Apple computer in 1984 , and I thought to myself , " This thing 's got a glass screen , not much use to me . "
How very wrong I was .
In 1987 , in the month our eldest son Gerard was born , I got my first blind computer , and it 's actually here .
See it up there ?
And you see it has no , what do you call it , no screen .
It 's a blind computer .
It 's a Keynote Gold 84k , and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory .
Don 't laugh , it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time .
I think there 's more memory in my watch .
It was invented by Russell Smith , a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people .
Sadly , he died in a light plane crash in 2005 , but his memory lives on in my heart .
It meant , for the first time , I could read back what I had typed into it .
It had a speech synthesizer .
I 'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory .
This now allowed me to read back what I 'd written and to enter the computer world , even with its 84k of memory .
In 1974 , the great Ray Kurzweil , the American inventor , worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech .
Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font , but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers , he developed a machine that could read any font .
And his machine , which was as big as a washing machine , was launched on the 13th of January , 1976 .
I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989 , and it blew me away , and in September 1989 , the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced , the law school got one , and I could use it .
For the first time , I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner .
I didn 't have to be nice to people !
I no longer would be censored .
For example , I was too shy then , and I 'm actually too shy now , to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material .
But , you know , I could pop a book on in the middle of the night , and -- Now , the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop .
That 's what it 's shrunk to .
And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries .
I can keep up with my friends .
There are many people who have helped me in my life , and many that I haven 't met .
One is another American inventor Ted Henter .
Ted was a motorcycle racer , but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight , which is devastating if you 're trying to ride motorbikes .
He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier .
But in 1989 , he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer .
It 's called JAWS , Job Access With Speech , and it sounds like this .
Ron McCallum : Isn 't that slow ?
You see , if I read like that , I 'd fall asleep .
I slowed it down for you .
I 'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it .
Can we play that one ?
RM : You know , when you 're marking student essays , you want to get through them fairly quickly .
This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well .
But , you know , I find reading with machines a very lonely process .
I grew up with family , friends , reading to me , and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading .
Do you love being read to ?
And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999 , Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach " Harry Potter and the Philosopher 's Stone . "
Isn 't that a great book ?
I still love being close to someone reading to me .
But I wouldn 't give up the technology , because it 's allowed me to lead a great life .
Of course , talking books for the blind predated all this technology .
After all , the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s , and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY .
But when I 'm reading with synthetic voices , I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice .
Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities .
Many websites we can 't read using JAWS and the other technologies .
Websites are often very visual , and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren 't labeled and buttons that aren 't labeled , and that 's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3 , known as W3C , has developed worldwide standards for the Internet .
And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field .
There are other barriers brought about by our laws .
For example , Australia , like about one third of the world 's countries , has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons .
But those books can 't travel across borders .
For example , in Spain , there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish .
In Argentina , there are 50,000 .
In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand .
But it 's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America .
There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States , Britain , Canada , Australia , etc . , but they can 't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language .
And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter .
Well , because we can 't transport books across borders , there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries : Britain , United States , Canada , Australia , and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter .
And that 's why , next month in Morocco , a meeting is taking place between all the countries .
It 's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating , a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception , we can transport those books across borders and give life to people , particularly in developing countries , blind people who don 't have the books to read .
I want that to happen .
My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do , whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School , where I served a term as dean , or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities , in Geneva .
I 've indeed been a very fortunate human being .
I wonder what the future will hold .
The technology will advance even further , but I can still remember my mum saying , 60 years ago , " Remember , darling , you 'll never be able to read the print with your fingers . "
I 'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers , volunteer readers and passionate inventors , has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world .
I 'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin , who is my slide clicker , who clicks the slides , and my wife , Professor Mary Crock , who 's the light of my life , is coming on to collect me .
I want to thank her too .
I think I have to say goodbye now .
Bless you . Thank you very much .
Yay !
Okay . Okay . Okay . Okay . Okay .
Nicholas Christakis : How social networks predict epidemics
After mapping humans ' intricate social networks , Nicholas Christakis and colleague James Fowler began investigating how this information could better our lives . Now , he reveals his hot-off-the-press findings : These networks can be used to detect epidemics earlier than ever , from the spread of innovative ideas to risky behaviors to viruses .
For the last 10 years , I 've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks .
And the kind of social network I 'm talking about is not the recent online variety , but rather , the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years , ever since we emerged from the African savannah .
So , I form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people .
And this spreads on out endlessly into a distance .
And you get a network that looks like this .
Every dot is a person .
Every line between them is a relationship between two people -- different kinds of relationships .
And you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity , in which we 're all embedded .
And my colleague , James Fowler and I have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical , social , biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate , how they affect our lives .
But recently , we 've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight , to actually find ways to improve the world , to do something better , to actually fix things , not just understand things .
So one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics .
And the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic -- if you 're the CDC or some other national body -- is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions .
So , so and so patients have been diagnosed with something , or other patients have been diagnosed , and all these data are fed into a central repository , with some delay .
And if everything goes smoothly , one to two weeks from now you 'll know where the epidemic was today .
And actually , about a year or so ago , there was this promulgation of the idea of Google Flu Trends , with respect to the flu , where by looking at people 's searching behavior today , we could know where the flu -- what the status of the epidemic was today , what 's the prevalence of the epidemic today .
But what I 'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic , but also actually early detection of an epidemic .
And , in fact , this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs , but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds .
For example , anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way , from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism , or altruism , or religion to practices like dieting behavior , or book purchasing , or drinking , or bicycle-helmet [ and ] other safety practices , or products that people might buy , purchases of electronic goods , anything in which there 's kind of an interpersonal spread .
A kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism I 'm going to show you now .
So , as all of you probably know , the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation , or the adoption curve .
So here on the Y-axis , we have the percent of the people affected , and on the X-axis , we have time .
And at the very beginning , not too many people are affected , and you get this classic sigmoidal , or S-shaped , curve .
And the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning , let 's say one or two people are infected , or affected by the thing and then they affect , or infect , two people , who in turn affect four , eight , 16 and so forth , and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve .
And eventually , you saturate the population .
There are fewer and fewer people and then you get the plateau of the curve , and you get this classic sigmoidal curve .
And this holds for germs , ideas , product adoption , behaviors , and the like .
But things don 't just diffuse in human populations at random .
They actually diffuse through networks .
Because , as I said , we live our lives in networks , and these networks have a particular kind of a structure .
Now if you look at a network like this -- this is 105 people .
And the lines represent -- the dots are the people , and the lines represent friendship relationships .
You might see that people occupy different locations within the network .
And there are different kinds of relationships between the people .
You could have friendship relationships , sibling relationships , spousal relationships , co-worker relationships , neighbor relationships and the like .
And different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties .
For instance , sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties .
Or , for instance , people 's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends .
Or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers , or by their neighbors .
But not all positions in the network are the same .
So if you look at this , you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections .
Some people have one connection , some have two , some have six , some have 10 connections .
And this is called the " degree " of a node , or the number of connections that a node has .
But in addition , there 's something else .
So , if you look at nodes A and B , they both have six connections .
But if you can see this image [ of the network ] from a bird 's eye view , you can appreciate that there 's something very different about nodes A and B.
So , let me ask you this -- I can cultivate this intuition by asking a question -- who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network , A or B ?
Nicholas Christakis : B , it 's obvious .
B is located on the edge of the network .
Now , who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network ?
A. And you have an immediate appreciation to get the thing that 's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network .
A , in fact , is more central , and this can be formalized mathematically .
So , if we want to track something that was spreading through a network , what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network , including node A , monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network , and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network .
So if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information , you would know that , soon enough , everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information .
And this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people , without reference to the structure of the population .
And in fact , if you could do that , what you would see is something like this .
On the left-hand panel , again , we have the S-shaped curve of adoption .
In the dotted red line , we show what the adoption would be in the random people , and in the left-hand line , shifted to the left , we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network .
On the Y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion , and on the X-axis is the time .
And on the right-hand side , we show the same data , but here with daily incidence .
And what we show here is -- like , here -- very few people are affected , more and more and more and up to here , and here 's the peak of the epidemic .
But shifted to the left is what 's occurring in the central individuals .
And this difference in time between the two is the early detection , the early warning we can get , about an impending epidemic in the human population .
The problem , however , is that mapping human social networks is not always possible .
It can be expensive , not feasible , unethical , or , frankly , just not possible to do such a thing .
So , how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network ?
What we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact , or a known fact , about social networks , which goes like this : Do you know that your friends have more friends than you do ?
Your friends have more friends than you do , and this is known as the friendship paradox .
Imagine a very popular person in the social network -- like a party host who has hundreds of friends -- and a misanthrope who has just one friend , and you pick someone at random from the population ; they were much more likely to know the party host .
And if they nominate the party host as their friend , that party host has a hundred friends , therefore , has more friends than they do .
And this , in essence , is what 's known as the friendship paradox .
The friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree , and are more central than the random people themselves .
And you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network .
If you pick this person , the only friend they have to nominate is this person , who , by construction , must have at least two and typically more friends .
And that happens at every peripheral node .
And in fact , it happens throughout the network as you move in , everyone you pick , when they nominate a random -- when a random person nominates a friend of theirs , you move closer to the center of the network .
So , we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks .
Because now , with this idea we can take a random sample of people , have them nominate their friends , those friends would be more central , and we could do this without having to map the network .
And we tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009 , just a few months ago .
We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates , we had them nominate their friends , and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic .
And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they 'd gone to university health services .
And also , we had them [ actively ] email us a couple of times a week .
Exactly what we predicted happened .
So the random group is in the red line .
The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left , over here .
And the difference in the two is 16 days .
By monitoring the friends group , we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population .
Now , in addition to that , if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product , for example , what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population , also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends .
Among the friends , the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation , for example , would be evidence of an impending epidemic .
Or you could see the first time the two curves diverged , as shown on the left .
When did the randoms -- when did the friends take off and leave the randoms , and [ when did ] their curve start shifting ?
And that , as indicated by the white line , occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic .
So this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population .
I should say that depends on a host of factors .
It could depend on the nature of the pathogen -- different pathogens , using this technique , you 'd get different warning -- or other phenomena that are spreading , or frankly , on the structure of the human network .
Now in our case , although it wasn 't necessary , we could also actually map the network of the students .
So , this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties .
And in a minute now , I 'm going to put this map into motion .
We 're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days .
The red dots are going to be cases of the flu , and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu .
And the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu .
So bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu .
And if you look at this image -- here we are now in September the 13th -- you 're going to see a few cases light up .
You 're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle .
Here we are on October the 19th .
The slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now , in November .
Bang , bang , bang , bang , bang -- you 're going to see lots of blooming in the middle , and then you 're going to see a sort of leveling off , fewer and fewer cases towards the end of December .
And this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first , before they affect others .
Now , as I 've been suggesting , this method is not restricted to germs , but actually to anything that spreads in populations .
Information spreads in populations , norms can spread in populations , behaviors can spread in populations .
And by behaviors , I can mean things like criminal behavior , or voting behavior , or health care behavior , like smoking , or vaccination , or product adoption , or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence .
If I 'm likely to do something that affects others around me , this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population .
The key thing is that for it to work , there has to be interpersonal influence .
It cannot be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly .
Now the same insights can also be exploited -- with respect to networks -- can also be exploited in other ways , for example , in the use of targeting specific people for interventions .
So , for example , most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity .
So , if we have a population of a thousand people , and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen , we don 't have to immunize every single person .
If we immunize 960 of them , it 's as if we had immunized a hundred [ percent ] of them .
Because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected , there 's no one for them to infect .
They are surrounded by immunized people .
So 96 percent is as good as 100 percent .
Well , some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people , 300 people and immunized them .
Would you get any population-level immunity ?
And the answer is no .
But if you took this 30 percent , these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 -- the 300 friends -- you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency , with a strict budget constraint .
And similar ideas can be used , for instance , to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world .
If we could understand the structure of networks in villages , we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads .
Or , frankly , for advertising with all kinds of products .
If we could understand how to target , it could affect the efficiency of what we 're trying to achieve .
And in fact , we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays [ to do this ] .
This is a map of eight million phone users in a European country .
Every dot is a person , and every line represents a volume of calls between the people .
And we can use such data , that 's being passively obtained , to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network .
Without actually having to query them at all , we can get this kind of a structural insight .
And other sources of information , as you 're no doubt aware are available about such features , from email interactions , online interactions , online social networks and so forth .
And in fact , we are in the era of what I would call " massive-passive " data collection efforts .
They 're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population , understand what 's happening in the population , and intervene in the population for the better .
Because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom , but where everyone is , and what they 're thinking based on what they 're uploading on the Internet , and what they 're buying based on their purchases .
And all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before .
So , for example , we could use truckers ' purchases of fuel .
So the truckers are just going about their business , and they 're buying fuel .
And we see a blip up in the truckers ' purchases of fuel , and we know that a recession is about to end .
Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway , and the phone company can see , as the velocity is slowing down , that there 's a traffic jam .
And they can feed that information back to their subscribers , but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam !
Or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors , passively , and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within [ networks of ] doctors .
Or again , we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations .
And there are three ways , I think , that these massive-passive data can be used .
One is fully passive , like I just described -- as in , for instance , the trucker example , where we don 't actually intervene in the population in any way .
One is quasi-active , like the flu example I gave , where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends -- do they have the flu , or not ? -- and then get warning .
Or another example would be , if you 're a phone company , you figure out who 's central in the network and you ask those people , " Look , will you just text us your fever every day ?
Just text us your temperature . "
And collect vast amounts of information about people 's temperature , but from centrally located individuals .
And be able , on a large scale , to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people .
Or , finally , it can be more fully active -- as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today -- where people might globally participate in wikis , or photographing , or monitoring elections , and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena .
In fact , the availability of these data , I think , heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call " computational social science . "
It 's sort of like when Galileo invented -- or , didn 't invent -- came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way , or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope -- or actually invented -- and could see biology in a new way .
But now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible .
And with this science , we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts .
And actually , we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being .
Thank you .
Peter Doolittle : How your " working memory " makes sense of the world
" Life comes at us very quickly , and what we need to do is take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it . " In this funny , enlightening talk , educational psychologist Peter Doolittle details the importance -- and limitations -- of your " working memory , " that part of the brain that allows us to make sense of what 's happening right now .
So yesterday , I was out in the street in front of this building , and I was walking down the sidewalk , and I had company , several of us , and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks .
We 're not talking each other . We 're facing forward .
We 're moving .
When the person in front of me slows down .
And so I 'm watching him , and he slows down , and finally he stops .
Well , that wasn 't fast enough for me , so I put on my turn signal , and I walked around him , and as I walked , I looked to see what he was doing , and he was doing this .
He was texting , and he couldn 't text and walk at the same time .
Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective .
We 're going to do working memory today .
Now , working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day .
You 're going it right now .
It 's not something we can turn off .
If you turn it off , that 's called a coma , okay ?
So right now , you 're doing just fine .
Now working memory has four basic components .
It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge .
It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it , mixes it , processes it in light of whatever our current goal is .
Now the current goal isn 't something like , I want to be president or the best surfer in the world .
It 's more mundane . I 'd like that cookie , or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room .
Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that , our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal .
Now working memory capacity has a fairly long history , and it 's associated with a lot of positive effects .
People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers .
They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests , however important that is .
They 're able to have high levels of writing ability .
They 're also able to reason at high levels .
So what we 're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that .
So I 'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks , and we 're going to take your working memory out for a ride .
You up for that ? Okay .
I 'm going to give you five words , and I just want you to hang on to them .
Don 't write them down . Just hang on to them .
Five words .
While you 're hanging on to them , I 'm going to ask you to answer three questions .
I want to see what happens with those words .
So here 's the words : tree , highway , mirror , Saturn and electrode .
So far so good ?
Okay . What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight .
Just shout it out .
In fact it 's -- -- exactly .
All right . I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go , " One , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 . "
It 's a neurological test , just in case you were wondering .
All right , now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards .
You should have started with Z.
All right . How many people here are still pretty sure you 've got all five words ?
Okay . Typically we end up with about less than half , right , which is normal . There will be a range .
Some people can hang on to five .
Some people can hang on to 10 .
Some will be down to two or three .
What we know is this is really important to the way we function , right ?
And it 's going to be really important here at TED because you 're going to be exposed to so many different ideas .
Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us , and it comes at us very quickly , and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that 's about the size of a pea .
Now don 't get me wrong , working memory is awesome .
Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward .
It allows us to make sense of the world around us .
But it does have certain limits .
Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate .
We can have a conversation , and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we 've been and where we 're going and how to contribute to this conversation .
It allows us to problem-solve , critical think .
We can be in the middle of a meeting , listen to somebody 's presentation , evaluate it , decide whether or not we like it , ask follow-up questions .
All of that occurs within working memory .
It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we 're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon .
Gotta make sure we 're getting what we 're looking for .
Now , a central issue with working memory is that it 's limited .
It 's limited in capacity , limited in duration , limited in focus .
We tend to remember about four things .
Okay ? It used to be seven , but with functional MRIs , apparently it 's four , and we were overachieving .
Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it , unless we process it , unless we apply it to something , unless we talk to somebody about it .
When we think about working memory , we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us .
Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you 're there ?
You do know the solution to that , right ?
You go back to that original room .
Have you ever forgotten your keys ?
You ever forgotten your car ?
You ever forgotten your kids ?
Have you ever been involved in a conversation , and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting ?
So you 're nodding and you 're smiling , but you 're really paying attention to this one over here , until you hear that last word go up , and you realize , you 've been asked a question .
And you 're really hoping the answer is no , because that 's what you 're about to say .
All of that talks about working memory , what we can do and what we can 't do .
We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity , and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that .
We negotiate that through strategies .
So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here , and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days .
Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence , our life , immediately and repeatedly .
We need to process what 's going on the moment it happens , not 10 minutes later , not a week later , at the moment .
So we need to think about , well , do I agree with him ?
What 's missing ? What would I like to know ?
Do I agree with the assumptions ?
How can I apply this in my life ?
It 's a way of processing what 's going on so that we can use it later .
Now we also need to repeat it . We need to practice .
So we need to think about it here .
In between , we want to talk to people about it .
We 're going to write it down , and when you get home , pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time .
Practice for some reason became a very negative thing .
It 's very positive .
The next thing is , we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively .
Oftentimes , we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge .
What we want to do is spin that around .
We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful .
We also want to use imagery . We are built for images .
We need to take advantage of that .
Think about things in images , write things down that way .
If you read a book , pull things up .
I just got through reading " The Great Gatsby , " and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head , so my own version .
The last one is organization and support .
We are meaning-making machines . It 's what we do .
We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us .
Organization helps , so we need to structure what we 're doing in ways that make sense .
If we are providing knowledge and experience , we need to structure that .
And the last one is support .
We all started as novices .
Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication .
We should expect it to change over time . We have to support that .
The support may come in asking people questions , giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images , but we need to support it .
Now , the final piece of this , the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this : what we process , we learn .
If we 're not processing life , we 're not living it .
Live life . Thank you .
Jonathan Haidt : The moral roots of liberals and conservatives
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices , whether we 're left , right or center . In this eye-opening talk , he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most .
Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy .
They go to see Michelangelo 's " David , " and when they finally come face to face with the statue , they both freeze dead in their tracks .
The first guy -- we 'll call him Adam -- is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form .
The second guy -- we 'll call him Bill -- is transfixed by embarrassment , at staring at the thing there in the center .
So here 's my question for you : which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush , which for Al Gore ?
I don 't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes .
We all know that it 's Bill .
And in this case , the stereotype corresponds to reality .
It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience .
People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty , variety , diversity , new ideas , travel .
People low on it like things that are familiar , that are safe and dependable .
If you know about this trait , you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior .
You can understand why artists are so different from accountants .
You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read , what kinds of places they like to travel to , and what kinds of food they like to eat .
Once you understand this trait , you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee 's , but not anybody that you know .
This trait also tells us a lot about politics .
The main researcher of this trait , Robert McCrae says that , " Open individuals have an affinity for liberal , progressive , left-wing political views " -- they like a society which is open and changing -- " whereas closed individuals prefer conservative , traditional , right-wing views . "
This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join .
So here 's the description of a group I found on the Web .
What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture , who seek a deeper understanding of the world , and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all ?
This is from some guy named Ted .
Well , let 's see now , if openness predicts who becomes liberal , and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster , then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal ?
Let 's find out .
I 'm going to ask you to raise your hand , whether you are liberal , left of center -- on social issues , we 're talking about , primarily -- or conservative , and I 'll give a third option , because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience .
So , right now , please raise your hand -- down in the simulcast rooms , too , let 's let everybody see who 's here -- please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center .
Please raise your hand high right now . OK .
Please raise your hand if you 'd say you 're libertarian .
OK , about a -- two dozen .
And please raise your hand if you 'd say you are right of center or conservative .
One , two , three , four , five -- about eight or 10 .
OK . This is a bit of a problem .
Because if our goal is to understand the world , to seek a deeper understanding of the world , our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder .
Because when people all share values , when people all share morals , they become a team , and once you engage the psychology of teams , it shuts down open-minded thinking .
When the liberal team loses , as it did in 2004 , and as it almost did in 2000 , we comfort ourselves .
We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team .
We think they must be blinded by religion , or by simple stupidity .
So , if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way , then my message to you is that you 're trapped in a moral matrix , in a particular moral matrix .
And by the matrix , I mean literally the matrix , like the movie " The Matrix . "
But I 'm here today to give you a choice .
You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions , or you can take the red pill , learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix .
Now , because I know -- -- OK , I assume that answers my question .
I was going to ask you which one you picked , but no need .
You 're all high in openness to experience , and besides , it looks like it might even taste good , and you 're all epicures .
So anyway , let 's go with the red pill .
Let 's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us .
Let 's start at the beginning .
What is morality and where does it come from ?
The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth .
Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds , and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others .
The best definition of innateness I 've ever seen -- this just clarifies so many things for me -- is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus .
He says , " The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience .
Nature provides a first draft , which experience then revises .
Built-in doesn 't mean unmalleable ; it means organized in advance of experience . "
OK , so what 's on the first draft of the moral mind ?
To find out , my colleague , Craig Joseph , and I read through the literature on anthropology , on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology , looking for matches .
What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines ?
That you find across cultures and even across species ?
We found five -- five best matches , which we call the five foundations of morality .
The first one is harm / care .
We 're all mammals here , we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others , care for others , feel compassion for others , especially the weak and vulnerable .
It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm .
This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I 've heard here at TED .
The second foundation is fairness / reciprocity .
There 's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals , but the evidence for people could not be clearer .
This Norman Rockwell painting is called " The Golden Rule , " and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong , of course , as the foundation of so many religions .
That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I 've heard here at TED .
The third foundation is in-group / loyalty .
You do find groups in the animal kingdom -- you do find cooperative groups -- but these groups are always either very small or they 're all siblings .
It 's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate , join together into groups , but in this case , groups that are united to fight other groups .
This probably comes from our long history of tribal living , of tribal psychology .
And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don 't have tribes , we go ahead and make them , because it 's fun .
Sports is to war as pornography is to sex .
We get to exercise some ancient , ancient drives .
The fourth foundation is authority / respect .
Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species .
But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality , as it is in other primates .
It 's based on more voluntary deference , and even elements of love , at times .
The fifth foundation is purity / sanctity .
This painting is called " The Allegory Of Chastity , " but purity 's not just about suppressing female sexuality .
It 's about any kind of ideology , any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body , by controlling what you put into your body .
And while the political right may moralize sex much more , the political left is really doing a lot of it with food .
Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays , and a lot of it is ideas about purity , about what you 're willing to touch , or put into your body .
I believe these are the five best candidates for what 's written on the first draft of the moral mind .
I think this is what we come with , at least a preparedness to learn all of these things .
But as my son , Max , grows up in a liberal college town , how is this first draft going to get revised ?
And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg , Virginia ?
To think about culture variation , let 's try a different metaphor .
If there really are five systems at work in the mind -- five sources of intuitions and emotions -- then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels , where you can set it to a different setting on every channel .
And my colleagues , Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham , and I , made a questionnaire , which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals.org.
And so far , 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire , and you can too .
Here are the results .
Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens .
On the left , I 've plotted the scores for liberals ; on the right , those for conservatives ; in the middle , the moderates .
The blue line shows you people 's responses on the average of all the harm questions .
So , as you see , people care about harm and care issues .
They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board , but as you also see , liberals care about it a little more than conservatives -- the line slopes down .
Same story for fairness .
But look at the other three lines .
For liberals , the scores are very low .
Liberals are basically saying , " No , this is not morality .
In-group , authority , purity -- this stuff has nothing to do with morality . I reject it . "
But as people get more conservative , the values rise .
We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel , or two-foundation morality .
Conservatives have more of a five-foundation , or five-channel morality .
We find this in every country we look at .
Here 's the data for 1,100 Canadians .
I 'll just flip through a few other slides .
The U.K. , Australia , New Zealand , Western Europe , Eastern Europe , Latin America , the Middle East , East Asia and South Asia .
Notice also that on all of these graphs , the slope is steeper on in-group , authority , purity .
Which shows that within any country , the disagreement isn 't over harm and fairness .
Everybody -- I mean , we debate over what 's fair -- but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter .
Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group , authority , purity .
This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question .
In one recent study , we asked people to suppose you 're about to get a dog .
You picked a particular breed , you learned some new information about the breed .
Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded , and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal ?
Well , if you are a liberal , you say , " Hey , that 's great ! "
Because liberals like to say , " Fetch , please . "
But if you 're conservative , that 's not so attractive .
If you 're conservative , and you learn that a dog 's extremely loyal to its home and family , and doesn 't warm up quickly to strangers , for conservatives , well , loyalty is good -- dogs ought to be loyal .
But to a liberal , it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination .
So , you might say , OK , there are these differences between liberals and conservatives , but what makes those three other foundations moral ?
Aren 't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism ?
What makes them moral ?
The answer , I think , is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch , " The Garden of Earthly Delights . "
In the first panel , we see the moment of creation .
All is ordered , all is beautiful , all the people and animals are doing what they 're supposed to be doing , where they 're supposed to be .
But then , given the way of the world , things change .
We get every person doing whatever he wants , with every aperture of every other person and every other animal .
Some of you might recognize this as the ' 60s .
But the ' 60s inevitably gives way to the ' 70s , where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more .
Of course , Bosch called this hell .
So this triptych , these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay .
The truth of social entropy .
But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure , here 's the same story , the same progression , told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago , in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma .
A game in which you give people money , and then , on each round of the game , they can put money into a common pot , and then the experimenter doubles what 's in there , and then it 's all divided among the players .
So it 's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues , where we 're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don 't really benefit from their own sacrifice .
But you really want everybody else to sacrifice , but everybody has a temptation to a free ride .
And what happens is that , at first , people start off reasonably cooperative -- and this is all played anonymously .
On the first round , people give about half of the money that they can .
But they quickly see , " You know what , other people aren 't doing so much though .
I don 't want to be a sucker . I 'm not going to cooperate . "
And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good , down to close to zero .
But then -- and here 's the trick -- Fehr and Gachter said , on the seventh round , they told people , " You know what ? New rule .
If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren 't contributing , you can do that . "
And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on , cooperation shoots up .
It shoots up and it keeps going up .
There 's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems , it really helps .
It 's not enough to just appeal to people 's good motives .
It really helps to have some sort of punishment .
Even if it 's just shame or embarrassment or gossip , you need some sort of punishment to bring people , when they 're in large groups , to cooperate .
There 's even some recent research suggesting that religion -- priming God , making people think about God -- often , in some situations , leads to more cooperative , more pro-social behavior .
Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere , in part for the purpose of trusting each other , and then being more effective at competing with other groups .
I think that 's probably right , although this is a controversial issue .
But I 'm particularly interested in religion , and the origin of religion , and in what it does to us and for us .
Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon .
The Grand Canyon is really simple .
It 's just a lot of rock , and then a lot of water and wind , and a lot of time , and you get the Grand Canyon .
It 's not that complicated .
This is what 's really complicated , that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon , cooperating with each other , or on the savannahs of Africa , or on the frozen shores of Alaska , and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon , and Rome , and Tenochtitlan .
How did this happen ?
This is an absolute miracle , much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon .
The answer , I think , is that they used every tool in the toolbox .
It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups .
Yes , you do need to be concerned about harm , you do need a psychology of justice .
But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups , and if those sub-groups have some internal structure , and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality , to pursue higher , nobler ends .
And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives .
Because liberals reject three of these foundations .
They say " No , let 's celebrate diversity , not common in-group membership . "
They say , " Let 's question authority . "
And they say , " Keep your laws off my body . "
Liberals have very noble motives for doing this .
Traditional authority , traditional morality can be quite repressive , and restrictive to those at the bottom , to women , to people that don 't fit in .
So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed .
They want change and justice , even at the risk of chaos .
This guy 's shirt says , " Stop bitching , start a revolution . "
If you 're high in openness to experience , revolution is good , it 's change , it 's fun .
Conservatives , on the other hand , speak for institutions and traditions .
They want order , even at some cost to those at the bottom .
The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve .
It 's really precious , and it 's really easy to lose .
So as Edmund Burke said , " The restraints on men , as well as their liberties , are to be reckoned among their rights . "
This was after the chaos of the French Revolution .
So once you see this -- once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute , that they form a balance on change versus stability -- then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix .
This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained .
Think about yin and yang .
Yin and yang aren 't enemies . Yin and yang don 't hate each other .
Yin and yang are both necessary , like night and day , for the functioning of the world .
You find the same thing in Hinduism .
There are many high gods in Hinduism .
Two of them are Vishnu , the preserver , and Shiva , the destroyer .
This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body .
You have the markings of Vishnu on the left , so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god .
You have the markings of Shiva on the right , Shiva 's the liberal god . And they work together .
You find the same thing in Buddhism .
These two stanzas contain , I think , the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology .
From the Zen master Seng-ts 'an : " If you want the truth to stand clear before you , never be for or against .
The struggle between for and against is the mind 's worst disease . "
Now unfortunately , it 's a disease that has been caught by many of the world 's leaders .
But before you feel superior to George Bush , before you throw a stone , ask yourself , do you accept this ?
Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil ?
Can you be not for or against anything ?
So , what 's the point ? What should you do ?
Well , if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions , and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology , I think you come to these conclusions : that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams , to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth .
So what should you do ? Am I telling you to not strive ?
Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts 'an and stop , stop with this struggle of for and against ?
No , absolutely not . I 'm not saying that .
This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much , using so much of their talent , their brilliance , their energy , their money , to make the world a better place , to fight -- to fight wrongs , to solve problems .
But as we learned from Samantha Power , in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello , you can 't just go charging in , saying , " You 're wrong , and I 'm right . "
Because , as we just heard , everybody thinks they are right .
A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people .
And if you want to change other people , a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are -- understand our moral psychology , understand that we all think we 're right -- and then step out , even if it 's just for a moment , step out -- check in with Seng-ts 'an .
Step out of the moral matrix , just try to see it as a struggle playing out , in which everybody does think they 're right , and everybody , at least , has some reasons -- even if you disagree with them -- everybody has some reasons for what they 're doing .
Step out .
And if you do that , that 's the essential move to cultivate moral humility , to get yourself out of this self-righteousness , which is the normal human condition .
Think about the Dalai Lama .
Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama -- and it comes from his moral humility .
So I think the point -- the point of my talk , and I think the point of TED -- is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better .
People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place .
But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth .
And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all .
Thank you .
Suzana Herculano-Houzel : What is so special about the human brain ?
The human brain is puzzling -- it is curiously large given the size of our bodies , uses a tremendous amount of energy for its weight and has a bizarrely dense cerebral cortex . But : why ? Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel puts on her detective 's cap and leads us through this mystery . By making " brain soup , " she arrives at a startling conclusion .
What is so special about the human brain ?
Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us ?
What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does ?
When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago , scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of .
Though it was based on very little evidence , many scientists thought that all mammalian brains , including the human brain , were made in the same way , with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain .
This means that two brains of the same size , like these two , with a respectable 400 grams , should have similar numbers of neurons .
Now , if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain , then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities .
And yet , one is a chimp , and the other is a cow .
Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it , but we eat them .
I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex , elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are .
So this is a first indication that the " all brains are made the same way " scenario is not quite right .
But let 's play along .
If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes , larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains , and the larger the brain , the more cognitively able its owner should be .
So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able .
And here comes the bad news : Our brain , not the largest one around .
It seems quite vexing .
Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos , but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos , and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos , which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities .
It must be really extraordinary , an exception to the rule .
Theirs may be bigger , but ours is better , and it could be better , for example , in that it seems larger than it should be , with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies .
So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body .
That 's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body .
So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes .
Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are , so their brains should also be larger than ours , but instead it 's the other way around .
Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain .
The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses .
Although it weighs only two percent of the body , it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day .
That 's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories , just to keep your brain working .
So the human brain is larger than it should be , it uses much more energy than it should , so it 's special .
And this is where the story started to bother me .
In biology , we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general , so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us ?
Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way .
Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons .
Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain .
Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain , regardless of its size , especially in the cerebral cortex .
So this to me became the important question to answer : how many neurons does the human brain have , and how does that compare to other animals ?
Now , you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons , so 10 years ago , I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from .
But nobody did .
I 've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number , and I could never find it .
It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain , or in any other brain for that matter .
So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain , and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup .
It works like this : You take a brain , or parts of that brain , and you dissolve it in detergent , which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact , so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this , like a clear soup .
This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain .
Now , the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup , you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid , so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution , you can count nuclei , and therefore tell how many cells that brain had .
It 's simple , it 's straightforward , and it 's really fast .
So we 've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far , and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way .
Take rodents and primates , for instance : In larger rodent brains , the average size of the neuron increases , so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons .
But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger , which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain .
The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size , and the larger the brain , the larger this difference will be .
Well , what about our brain then ?
We found that we have , on average , 86 billion neurons , 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex , and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning , and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has , I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities .
But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean .
Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically , we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain .
So , a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos .
That 's not possible .
A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight , and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons .
I don 't think it looks like us .
So this brings us to a very important conclusion already , which is that we are not rodents .
The human brain is not a large rat brain .
Compared to a rat , we might seem special , yes , but that 's not a fair comparison to make , given that we know that we are not rodents .
We are primates , so the correct comparison is to other primates .
And there , if you do the math , you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos , which seems just right , in a body of some 66 kilos , which in my case is exactly right , which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion : I am a primate .
And all of you are primates .
And so was Darwin .
I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this .
His brain , like ours , was made in the image of other primate brains .
So the human brain may be remarkable , yes , but it is not special in its number of neurons .
It is just a large primate brain .
I think that 's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature .
Why does it cost so much energy , then ?
Well , other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs , and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of , we could do the math .
And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same , an average of six calories per billion neurons per day .
So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple , linear function of its number of neurons , and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect .
So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons , and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal , the relative cost of our brain is large , but just because we 're primates , not because we 're special .
Last question , then : how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons , and in particular , if great apes are larger than we are , why don 't they have a larger brain than we do , with more neurons ?
When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain , I figured , maybe there 's a simple reason .
They just can 't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons .
So we did the math .
We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods , and on the other hand , how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs , and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day .
And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive , there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons .
So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons , but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos .
To weigh any more than that , it has to give up neurons .
So it 's either a large body or a large number of neurons .
When you eat like a primate , you can 't afford both .
One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating , but that gets dangerous , and past a certain point , it 's just not possible .
Gorillas and orangutans , for instance , afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating , and that seems to be about as much as they can do .
Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate .
What about us ?
With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass , we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding , which is just not feasible .
If we ate like a primate , we should not be here .
How did we get here , then ?
Well , if our brain costs just as much energy as it should , and if we can 't spend every waking hour of the day feeding , then the only alternative , really , is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods .
And remarkably , that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago , when they invented cooking .
To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body .
Cooked foods are softer , so they 're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth , so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut , which makes them yield much more energy in much less time .
So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food , looking for food , and gobbling down food all day long .
So because of cooking , what once was a major liability , this large , dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons , could now become a major asset , now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them .
So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution , all of the while remaining just a primate brain .
With this large brain now affordable by cooking , we went rapidly from raw foods to culture , agriculture , civilization , grocery stores , electricity , refrigerators , all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint .
So what once was a solution now became the problem , and ironically , we look for the solution in raw food .
So what is the human advantage ?
What is it that we have that no other animal has ?
My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex , and I think that 's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities .
And what is it that we do that no other animal does , and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large , largest number of neurons in the cortex ?
In two words , we cook .
No other animal cooks its food . Only humans do .
And I think that 's how we got to become human .
Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food .
I now look at my kitchen , and I bow to it , and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans .
Thank you very much .
Philip Zimbardo : The psychology of time
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard : the way we orient toward the past , present and future . He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives .
I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time , in a very short time .
All right , start the clock please . 30 seconds studio .
Keep it quiet please . Settle down .
It 's about time . End sequence . Take one .
15 seconds studio .
10 , nine , eight , seven , six , five , four , three , two ...
Philip Zimbardo : Let 's tune into the conversation of the principals in Adam 's temptation .
" Come on Adam , don 't be so wishy-washy . Take a bite . " " I did . "
" One bite , Adam . Don 't abandon Eve . "
" I don 't know , guys .
I don 't want to get in trouble . "
" Okay . One bite . What the hell ? "
Life is temptation . It 's all about yielding , resisting , yes , no , now , later , impulsive , reflective , present focus and future focus .
Promised virtues fall prey to the passions of the moment .
Of teenage girls who pledged sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage -- thank you George Bush -- the majority , 60 percent , yielded to sexual temptations within one year .
And most of them did so without using birth control .
So much for promises .
Now lets tempt four-year-olds , giving them a treat .
They can have one marshmallow now . But if they wait until the experimenter comes back , they can have two .
Of course it pays , if you like marshmallows , to wait .
What happens is two-thirds of the kids give in to temptation .
They cannot wait . The others , of course , wait .
They resist the temptation . They delay the now for later .
Walter Mischel , my colleague at Stanford , went back 14 years later , to try to discover what was different about those kids .
There were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded , in many ways .
The kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the SAT .
That 's enormous . That 's like a whole set of different IQ points .
They didn 't get in as much trouble . They were better students .
They were self-confident and determined . And the key for me today , the key for you , is , they were future-focused rather than present-focused .
So what is time perspective ? That 's what I 'm going to talk about today .
Time perspective is the study of how individuals , all of us , divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories .
And you do it automatically and non-consciously .
They vary between cultures , between nations , between individuals , between social classes , between education levels .
And the problem is that they can become biased , because you learn to over-use some of them and under-use the others .
What determines any decision you make ?
You make a decision on which you 're going to base an action .
For some people it 's only about what is in the immediate situation , what other people are doing and what you 're feeling .
And those people , when they make their decisions in that format -- we 're going to call them " present-oriented , " because their focus is what is now .
For others , the present is irrelevant .
It 's always about " What is this situation like that I 've experienced in the past ? "
So that their decisions are based on past memories .
And we 're going to call those people " past-oriented , " because they focus on what was .
For others it 's not the past , it 's not the present , it 's only about the future .
Their focus is always about anticipated consequences .
Cost-benefit analysis .
We 're going to call them " future-oriented . " Their focus is on what will be .
So , time paradox , I want to argue , the paradox of time perspective , is something that influences every decision you make , you 're totally unaware of .
Namely , the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives .
Well there is actually six of them . There are two ways to be present-oriented .
There is two ways to be past-oriented , two ways to be future .
You can focus on past-positive , or past-negative .
You can be present-hedonistic , namely you focus on the joys of life , or present-fatalist -- it doesn 't matter , your life is controlled .
You can be future-oriented , setting goals .
Or you can be transcendental future : namely , life begins after death .
Developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspectives fluidly depending on the demands of the situation , that 's what you 've got to learn to do .
So , very quickly , what is the optimal time profile ?
High on past-positive . Moderately high on future .
And moderate on present-hedonism .
And always low on past-negative and present-fatalism .
So the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past -- past-positive gives you roots . You connect your family , identity and your self .
What you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations , new challenges .
What you get from the present hedonism is the energy , the energy to explore yourself , places , people , sensuality .
Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives .
What do futures sacrifice for success ?
They sacrifice family time . They sacrifice friend time .
They sacrifice fun time . They sacrifice personal indulgence .
They sacrifice hobbies . And they sacrifice sleep . So it affects their health .
And they live for work , achievement and control .
I 'm sure that resonates with some of the TEDsters .
And it resonated for me . I grew up as a poor kid in the South Bronx ghetto , a Sicilian family -- everyone lived in the past and present .
I 'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top , who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened , and made me future oriented .
Told me don 't eat that marshmallow , because if you wait you 're going to get two of them , until I learned to balance out .
I 've added present-hedonism , I 've added a focus on the past-positive , so , at 76 years old , I am more energetic than ever , more productive , and I 'm happier than I have ever been .
I just want to say that we are applying this to many world problems : changing the drop-out rates of school kids , combating addictions , enhancing teen health , curing vets ' PTSD with time metaphors -- getting miracle cures -- promoting sustainability and conservation , reducing physical rehabilitation where there is a 50-percent drop out rate , altering appeals to suicidal terrorists , and modifying family conflicts as time-zone clashes .
So I want to end by saying : many of life 's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others .
And the idea is so simple , so obvious , but I think the consequences are really profound .
Thank you so much .
Becky Blanton : The year I was homeless
Becky Blanton planned to live in her van for a year and see the country , but when depression set in and her freelance job ended , her camping trip turned into homelessness . In this intimate talk , she describes her experience of becoming one of America 's working homeless .
I 'm a writer and a journalist , and I 'm also an insanely curious person , so in 22 years as a journalist , I 've learned how to do a lot of new things .
And three years ago , one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible .
I became one of the working homeless .
I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year , and decided to travel .
His death hit me pretty hard .
And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that .
I 've camped my whole life . And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip .
So I packed my cat , my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van , and drove off into the sunset , having fully failed to realize three critical things .
One : that society equates living in a permanent structure , even a shack , with having value as a person .
Two : I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality , if we let it .
Three : I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude , not a lifestyle .
At first , living in the van was great .
I showered in campgrounds . I ate out regularly .
And I had time to relax and to grieve .
But then the anger and the depression about my father 's death set in .
My freelance job ended . And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills .
What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer .
And it became impossible to park anywhere -- -- without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me , and it was really hot .
The cat came and went through an open window in the van .
The doggy went into doggy day care .
And I sweated .
Whenever I could , I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops .
Or I washed up in public rest rooms .
Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit , making it difficult or impossible to sleep .
Food rotted in the heat .
Ice in my ice chest melted within hours , and it was pretty miserable .
I couldn 't afford to find an apartment , or couldn 't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat .
And I refused to give them up , so I stayed in the van .
And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night , I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet .
When winter weather set in , the temperatures dropped below freezing . And they stayed there .
And I faced a whole new set of challenges .
I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police .
I didn 't always succeed .
But I felt out of control of my life .
And I don 't know when or how it happened , but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman , living in a van , took my breath away .
I hadn 't changed . My I.Q. hadn 't dropped .
My talent , my integrity , my values , everything about me remained the same .
But I had changed somehow .
I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression .
And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic .
And I went . I hadn 't bathed in three days .
I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line .
I just wasn 't drunk or high .
And when several of the homeless men realized that , including a former university professor , they said , " You aren 't homeless . Why are you really here ? "
Other homeless people didn 't see me as homeless , but I did .
Then the professor listened to my story and he said , " You have a job . You have hope .
The real homeless don 't have hope . "
A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal . And I remember thinking , " If I killed myself , no one would notice . "
A friend told me , shortly after that , that she had heard that Tim Russert , a nationally renowned journalist , had been talking about me on national T.V.
An essay I 'd written about my father , the year before he died , was in Tim 's new book .
And he was doing the talk show circuit . And he was talking about my writing .
And when I realized that Tim Russert , former moderator of " Meet the Press , " was talking about my writing , while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot , I started laughing .
You should too .
I started laughing because it got to the point where , was I a writer , or was I a homeless woman ?
So I went in the bookstore . And I found Tim 's book .
And I stood there . And I reread my essay .
And I cried .
Because I was a writer .
I was a writer .
Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee .
I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends .
And I started writing again .
By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist .
I was winning awards . I was living in my own apartment .
I was no longer homeless .
And I was no longer invisible .
Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs , and live in their cars .
But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets .
So the homeless , the working homeless , primarily remain invisible .
But if you ever meet one , engage them , encourage them , and offer them hope .
The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope .
And I 'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless .
I 'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet .
But I am here to tell you that , based on my experience , people are not where they live , where they sleep , or what their life situation is at any given time .
Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot , and today I 'm speaking at TED .
Hope always , always finds a way . Thank you .
Béatrice Coron : Stories cut from paper
With scissors and paper , artist Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds , cities and countries , heavens and hells . Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek , she describes her creative process and the way her stories develop from snips and slices .
I am a papercutter .
I cut stories .
So my process is very straightforward .
I take a piece of paper , I visualize my story , sometimes I sketch , sometimes I don 't .
And as my image is already inside the paper , I just have to remove what 's not from that story .
So I didn 't come to papercutting in a straight line .
In fact , I see it more as a spiral .
I was not born with a blade in my hand .
And I don 't remember papercutting as a child .
As a teenager , I was sketching , drawing , and I wanted to be an artist .
But I was also a rebel .
And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs .
So among them , I have been a shepherdess , a truck driver , a factory worker , a cleaning lady .
I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico , one year in Egypt .
I moved for two years in Taiwan .
And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide .
And I still worked as a tour leader , traveled back and forth in China , Tibet and Central Asia .
So of course , it took time , and I was nearly 40 , and I decided it 's time to start as an artist .
I chose papercutting because paper is cheap , it 's light , and you can use it in a lot of different ways .
And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it 's very efficient .
And it 's also just getting to the essential of things .
So the word " silhouette " comes from a minister of finance , Etienne de Silhouette .
And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn 't afford paintings anymore , and they needed to have their portrait " a la silhouette . "
So I made series of images , cuttings , and I assembled them in portfolios .
And people told me -- like these 36 views of the Empire State building -- they told me , " You 're making artist books . "
So artist books have a lot of definitions .
They come in a lot of different shapes .
But to me , they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story .
They can be with words or without words .
And I have a passion for images and for words .
I love pun and the relation to the unconscious .
I love oddities of languages .
And everywhere I lived , I learned the languages , but never mastered them .
So I 'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages .
So as you can guess , my mother tongue is French .
And my daily language is English .
So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English .
So one of these works is the " Spelling Spider . "
So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee .
But it 's much more connected to the Web .
And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet .
So you can read " architecture active " or " active architecture . "
So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives .
So if you don 't know one of these languages , it 's instant learning .
And one ancient form of the book is scrolls .
So scrolls are very convenient , because you can create a large image on a very small table .
So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image , so it makes a very freestyle architecture .
And I 'm making all those kinds of windows .
So it 's to look beyond the surface .
It 's to have a look at different worlds .
And very often I 've been an outsider .
So I want to see how things work and what 's happening .
So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit .
And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do , and what are the words , colloquialisms , that we have with the expressions .
It 's all if .
So what if we were living in balloon houses ?
It would make a very uplifting world .
And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet .
It would be so light .
So sometimes I view from the inside , like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles .
Sometimes it 's a global view , to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams .
And we can use them also as a safety net .
And my inspirations are very eclectic .
I 'm influenced by everything I read , everything I see .
I have some stories that are humorous , like " Dead Beats . "
Other ones are historical .
Here it 's " CandyCity . "
It 's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar .
It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between .
And sometimes I have an emotional response to news , such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake .
Other times , it 's not even my stories .
People tell me their lives , their memories , their aspirations , and I create a mindscape .
I channel their history [ so that ] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities .
I call them Freudian cities .
I cannot speak for all my images , so I 'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title .
" ModiCity . "
" ElectriCity . "
" MAD Growth on Columbus Circle . "
" ReefCity . "
" A Web of Time . "
" Chaos City . "
" Daily Battles . "
" FeliCity . "
" Floating Islands . "
And at one point , I had to do " The Whole Nine Yards . "
So it 's actually a papercut that 's nine yards long .
So in life and in papercutting , everything is connected .
One story leads to another .
I was also interested in the physicality of this format , because you have to walk to see it .
And parallel to my cutting is my running .
I started with small images , I started with a few miles .
Larger images , I started to run marathons .
Then I went to run 50K , then 60K .
Then I ran 50 miles -- ultramarathons .
And I still feel I 'm running , it 's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter .
And running gives me a lot of energy .
Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City .
The result is " Hells and Heavens . "
It 's two panels 13 ft. high .
They were installed in the museum on two floors , but in fact , it 's a continuous image .
And I call it " Hells and Heavens " because it 's daily hells and daily heavens .
There is no border in between .
Some people are born in hells , and against all odds , they make it to heavens .
Other people make the opposite trip .
That 's the border .
You have sweatshops in hells .
You have people renting their wings in the heavens .
And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action , and the result puts you in hells or in heavens .
So the whole " Hells and Heavens " is about free will and determinism .
And in papercutting , you have the drawing as the structure itself .
So you can take it off the wall .
Here it 's an artist book installation called " Identity Project . "
It 's not autobiographical identities .
They are more our social identities .
And then you can just walk behind them and try them on .
So it 's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity .
That 's another artist book project .
In fact , in the picture , you have two of them .
It 's one I 'm wearing and one that 's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City .
Why do I call it a book ?
It 's called " Fashion Statement , " and there are quotes about fashion , so you can read it , and also , because the definition of artist book is very generous .
So artist books , you take them off the wall .
You take them for a walk .
You can also install them as public art .
Here it 's in Scottsdale , Arizona , and it 's called " Floating Memories . "
So it 's regional memories , and they are just randomly moved by the wind .
I love public art .
And I entered competitions for a long time .
After eight years of rejection , I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City .
It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen .
I made an artist book that 's in stainless steel instead of paper .
I called it " Working in the Same Direction . "
But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions .
With public art , I could also make cut glass .
Here it 's faceted glass in the Bronx .
And each time I make public art , I want something that 's really relevant to the place it 's installed .
So for the subway in New York , I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading .
It is travel in time , travel on time .
And Bronx literature , it 's all about Bronx writers and their stories .
Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose , California .
So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose .
So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization .
Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers .
And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today .
And it 's still growing .
So the technique , it 's cut , sandblasted , etched and printed glass into architectural glass .
And outside the library , I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind .
I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge .
I also planted the bibliotree .
So it 's a tree , and in its trunk you have the roots of languages .
And it 's all about international writing systems .
And on the branches you have library material growing .
You can also have function and form with public art .
So in Aurora , Colorado it 's a bench .
But you have a bonus with this bench .
Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts , you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs .
Another functional work , it 's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station .
And it 's called " Seeds of the Future are Planted Today . "
It 's a story about transformation and connections .
So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter , and not to have objects falling on the rails .
To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers , it 's fantastic .
And here I 've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing .
So each building has its own personality .
And sometimes it 's about a legacy of the neighborhood , like in Morrisania , about the jazz history .
And for other projects , like in Paris , it 's about the name of the street .
It 's called Rue des Prairies -- Prairie Street .
So I brought back the rabbit , the dragonfly , to stay in that street .
And in 2009 , I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year .
So that was a very captive audience .
And I wanted to give them an escape .
I created " All Around Town . "
It is a papercutting , and then after , I added color on the computer .
So I can call it techno-crafted .
And along the way , I 'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques .
But the result is always to have stories .
So the stories , they have a lot of possibilities .
They have a lot of scenarios .
I don 't know the stories .
I take images from our global imagination , from cliché , from things we are thinking about , from history .
And everybody 's a narrator , because everybody has a story to tell .
But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world .
And in all these universes , it 's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with , but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic .
And it 's what story cutting is all about .
Sergey Brin + Larry Page : The genesis of Google
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offer a peek inside the Google machine , sharing tidbits about international search patterns , the philanthropic Google Foundation , and the company 's dedication to innovation and employee happiness .
Sergey Brin : I want to discuss a question I know that 's been pressing on many of your minds .
We spoke to you last several years ago .
And before I get started today , since many of you are wondering , I just wanted to get it out of the way .
The answer is boxers .
Now I hope all of you feel better .
Do you know what this might be ? Does anyone know what that is ?
Audience : Yes .
SB : What is it ?
Audience : It 's people logging on to Google around the world .
SB : Wow , OK . I didn 't really realize what it was when I first saw it .
But this is what helped me see it .
This is what we run at the office , that actually runs real time .
Here it 's slightly logged .
But here you can see around the world how people are using Google .
And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20 , 30 searches , or something like that .
And they 're labeled by color right now , by language .
So you can see : here we are in the U.S. , and they 're all coming up red .
There we are in Monterey -- hopefully I can get it right .
You can see that Japan is busy at night , right there .
We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese .
There 's a lot of activity in China .
There 's a lot of activity in India .
There 's some in the Middle East , the little pockets .
And Europe , which is right now in the middle of the day , is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages .
Now you can also see , if I turn this around here -- hopefully I won 't shake the world too much .
But you can also see , there are places where there 's not so much .
Australia , because there just aren 't very many people there .
And this is something that we should really work on , which is Africa , which is just a few trickles , basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities .
But basically , what we 've noticed is these queries , which come in at thousands per second , are available everywhere there is power .
And pretty much everywhere there is power , there is the Internet .
And even in Antarctica -- well , at least this time of year -- we from time to time will see a query rising up .
And if we had it plotted correctly , I think the International Space Station would have it , too .
So this is some of the challenge that we have here , is you can see that it 's actually kind of hard to get the -- there we go .
This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions .
You can see that there 's a lot of data running around .
It has to go all over the world : through fibers , through satellites , through all kinds of connections .
And it 's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to . Hopefully your experience is good .
But you can see also , once again -- so some places are much more wired than others , and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S. , going up over to Asia , Europe in the other direction , and so forth .
Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like .
And if we can switch to slides -- all right , here we go .
So this is slowed down .
This is what one second looks like .
And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing , is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load .
Now , each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own .
I mean , it could be somebody 's health , it could be somebody 's career , something important to them .
And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce , or in this case , ketchup .
So this is a query that we had -- I guess it 's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others .
You can see that it got started right here .
In the U.S. and Spain , it was popular at the same time .
But it didn 't have quite the same pickup in the U.S.
as it did in Spain .
And then from Spain , it went to Italy , and then Germany got excited , and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it .
And so I guess the U.S. finally , finally started to like it , too .
And I just wanted to play it for you .
Anyway , you can all enjoy it for yourselves -- hopefully that search will work .
As a part of -- you know , part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches .
And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated .
More animals , if they start doing searches as well .
But partly , we want to make the world a better place , and so one thing that we 're embarking upon is the Google Foundation , and we 're in the process of setting that up .
We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world , and these are some of the charities that are on there .
And it 's something I 'm very excited to be a part of .
In fact , many of the organizations that are here -- the Acumen Fund , I think ApproTEC we have running , I 'm not sure if that one 's up yet -- and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants .
They run Google ads , and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know .
One of the earlier results that we got -- we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education , and that was one of the earliest results . And as I said , now there have been many , many stories that have come in , because we do have hundreds of charities in there , and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor .
Now does anybody know who this is ?
A-ha !
Audience : Orkut .
SB : Yes ! Somebody got it .
This is Orkut . Is anybody here on Orkut ?
Do we have any ?
Okay , not very many people know about it .
I 'll explain it in a second .
This is one of our engineers .
We find that they work better when they 're submerged and covered with leaves .
That 's how we churn those products out .
Orkut had a vision to create a social network .
I know all of you are thinking , " Yet another social network . "
But it was a dream of his , and we , basically , when people really want to do something , well , we generally let them .
So this is what he built .
We just released it in a test phase last month , and it 's been taking off .
This is our VP of Engineering .
You can see the red hair , and I don 't know if you can see the nose ring there .
And these are all of his friends .
So this is how -- we just deployed it -- we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service , and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out .
And now we 've grown to over 100,000 members .
And they spread , actually , very quickly , even outside the U.S.
You can see , even though the U.S. is still the majority here -- though , by the way , search-wise , it 's only about 30 percent of our traffic -- but it 's already going to Japan , and the U.K. , and Europe , and all the rest of the countries .
So it 's a fun little project .
There are a variety of demographics . I won 't bore you with these .
But it 's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes .
And -- well , I 'll leave you in suspense .
Larry , you can explain this one .
Larry Page : Thank you , Sergey .
So one of the things -- both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school , and I think , for some reason , this has been incorporated in Google .
And Sergey mentioned Orkut , which is something that , you know , Orkut wanted to do in his time , and we call this -- at Google , we 've embodied this as " the 20 percent time , " and the idea is , for 20 percent of your time , if you 're working at Google , you can do what you think is the best thing to do .
And many , many things at Google have come out of that , such as Orkut and also Google News .
And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this .
Mendel , who was supposed to be teaching high-school students , actually , you know , discovered the laws of genetics -- as a hobby , basically .
So many , many useful things come out of this .
And News , which I just mentioned , was started by a researcher .
And he just -- he -- after 9 / 11 , he got really interested in the news .
And he said , " Why don 't I look at the news better ? "
And so he started clustering it by category , and then he started using it , and then his friends started using it .
And then , besides just looking cute on a baby 's bottom , we made it a Googlette , which is basically a small project at Google .
and they would try to make a product .
And we wouldn 't really be sure if it 's going to work or not .
And in News ' case , you know , they had a couple of people working on it for a while , and then more and more people started using it , and then we put it out on the Internet , and more and more people started using it .
And now it 's a real , full-blown project with more people on it .
And this is how we keep our innovation running .
I think usually , as companies get bigger , they find it really hard to have small , innovative projects .
And we had this problem , too , for a while , and we said , " Oh , we really need a new concept . "
You know , the Googlettes -- that 's a small project that we 're not quite sure if it 's going to work or not , but we hope it will , and if we do enough of them , some of them will really work and turn out , such as News .
But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects .
And I don 't know about all of you , but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once .
And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them -- and these are kind of made up .
Don 't really pay attention to them .
For example , the " Buy Iceland " was from a media article .
We would never do such a crazy thing , but -- in any case , we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them , that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be .
And this was kind of a surprise to me , but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head , which you did by writing them down , that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources .
And so that 's basically what we 've done since we instituted that a few years ago , and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized .
The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important , and so naturally , people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities .
I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new , or you might not know about .
And the top thing , actually , is the Deskbar .
So this is a new -- how many of you use the Google Toolbar ?
Raise your hands .
How many of you use the Deskbar ?
All right , see ? You guys should try it out .
But if you go to our site and search for " Deskbar , " you 'll get this .
And the idea is , instead of a toolbar , it 's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom , and you can do searches really easily .
And it 's sort of like a better version of the toolbar .
Thank you , Sergey .
This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about , and they just , they got going , and it 's really , really a great product , and really taking off .
Google Answers is something we started , which is really cool , which lets you -- for five to 100 dollars , you can type a question in , and then there 's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you , and it 's guaranteed and all that , and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself .
Froogle lets you search shopping information , and Blogger lets you publish things .
But all of these -- well , these were all sort of innovative things that we did that -- you know , we try many , many different things in our company .
We also like to innovate in our physical space , and we noticed in meetings , you know , you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off , and they 're noisy , so people shut them off .
And we didn 't like that , so we actually , in maybe a couple of weeks , we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors , and so we can leave them on all the time and they 're completely silent .
And as a result , we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting , so when you walk into a meeting room now , it lists all the meetings that are happening , you can very easily take notes , and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting .
And as we become more of a global company , we find these things really affect us -- you know , can we work effectively with people who aren 't in the room ?
And things like that . And simple things like this can really make a big difference .
We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings , and they don 't always do their laundry as much as they should .
And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines , for our younger employees especially , and ...
we also allow dogs and things like that , and we 've had , I think , a really fun culture at our company , which helps people work and enjoy what they 're doing .
This is actually our " cult picture . "
I just wanted to show quickly .
We had this on our website for a while , but we found that after we put it on our website , we didn 't get any job applications anymore .
But anyway , every year we 've taken the whole company on a ski trip .
A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other , and informally .
And I think we 've done a good job encouraging that .
It makes it a really fun place to work .
Along with our logos , too , which I think really embody our culture when we change things .
In the early days , we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand , you know , because , you know , you 'd never want to change your logo .
You want it to be consistent .
And we said , " Well , that doesn 't sound so much fun .
Why don 't we try changing it every day ? "
One of the things that really excites me about what we 're doing now and this is a little bit foreshadowing -- this is from before Dean dropped out .
But the idea is , like , on a newspaper , for example , we show you relevant ads .
And this is hard to read , but this says " Battle for New Hampshire : Howard Dean for President " -- articles on Howard Dean .
And these ads are generated automatically -- like in this case , on the Washington Post -- from the content on the site .
And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements , so we pick the one that 's most relevant to what you 're actually looking at , much as we do on search .
So the idea is we can make advertising useful , not just annoying , right ?
And the nice thing about this , we have a self-serve program , and many thousands of websites have signed up , and this let 's them really make money . And I -- you know , there 's a number of people I met -- I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party , and he said , " You know , I wasn 't making any money .
I just put this thing on my site and I 'm making 10,000 dollars a month .
And , you know , thank you .
I don 't have to do my other job now . "
And I think this is really important for us , because it makes the Internet work better .
It makes content get better , it makes searching work better , when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content .
So this session is supposed to be about the future , so I 'd thought I 'd talk at least briefly about it .
And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search , you really have to be smart .
Because you can type , you know , any kind of thing into Google , and you expect an answer back , right ?
But finding things is tricky , and so you really want intelligence .
And in fact , the ultimate search engine would be smart .
It would be artificial intelligence .
And so that 's something we work on , and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now , and that 's really their goal .
So we always hope that Google will be smart , but we 're always surprised when other people think that it is .
And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this .
This is a blog from Iraq , and it 's not really what I 'm going to talk about , but I just wanted to show you an example .
Maybe , Sergey , you can highlight this .
So we decided -- actually , the highlight 's right there . Oh , thank you .
So , " related searches , " right there . You can 't see it that well , but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads , called " related searches . "
And so we 'd say , you know , " Did you mean ' search for ' " -- what is this , in this case , " Saddam Hussein , " because this blog is about Iraq -- and you know , in addition to the ads , and we thought this would be a great idea .
And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed , and he said , " You know , I 'm sleeping a lot . "
He was just kind of writing about his life .
And our algorithms -- not a person , of course , but our algorithms , our computers -- read his blog and decided that the related search was , " I am bored . "
And he read this , and he thought a person had decided that he was boring , and it was very unfortunate , and he said , " You know , what are these , you know , bastards at Google doing ?
Why don 't they like my blog ? "
And so then we read his blog , which was getting -- you know , sort of going from bad to worse , and we said the related search was , " Retards . "
And then , you know , he got even more mad , and he wrote -- like , started swearing and so on .
And then we produced " You suck . "
And finally , it ended with " Kiss my ass . "
And so basically , he thought he was dealing with something smart , and of course , you know , we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out , and it didn 't quite work , and we don 't have this feature anymore .
So with that , maybe I can switch back to the world .
I wanted to end just by saying that there 's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google , and one of those is that we 're able to make money largely through advertising , and one of the benefits that I didn 't expect from that was that we 're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about , you know , places that don 't have as much money .
So we don 't have to worry about our products being sold , for example , for less money in places that are poor , and then they get re-imported into the U.S. -- for example , with the drug industry .
And I think we 're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search , and I think that 's a tremendous , tremendous benefit .
The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information , and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine -- that we should provide very objective information .
And so in our search results , we never accept payment for our search results .
We accept payment for advertising , and we mark it as such .
And that 's unlike many of our competitors .
And I think decisions we 're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world , and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google .
So thank you .
Rita Pierson : Every kid needs a champion
Rita Pierson , a teacher for 40 years , once heard a colleague say , " They don 't pay me to like the kids . " Her response : " Kids don 't learn from people they don 't like . ' " A rousing call to educators to believe in their students and actually connect with them on a real , human , personal level .
I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse , on the way to the schoolhouse , or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse .
Both my parents were educators , my maternal grandparents were educators , and for the past 40 years I 've done the same thing .
And so , needless to say , over those years I 've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives .
Some of those reforms have been good .
Some of them have been not so good .
And we know why kids drop out .
We know why kids don 't learn .
It 's either poverty , low attendance , negative peer influences . We know why .
But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection , relationships .
James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship .
George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships .
Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult .
For years , I have watched people teach .
I have looked at the best and I 've look at some of the worst .
A colleague said to me one time , " They don 't pay me to like the kids .
They pay me to teach a lesson .
The kids should learn it .
I should teach it . They should learn it . Case closed . "
Well , I said to her , " You know , kids don 't learn from people they don 't like . "
She said , " That 's just a bunch of hooey . "
And I said to her , " Well , your year is going to be long and arduous , dear . "
Needless to say it was . Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship or you don 't .
I think Stephen Covey had the right idea .
He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things , like seeking first to understand as opposed to being understood , simple things like apologizing .
You ever thought about that ?
Tell a kid you 're sorry , they 're in shock .
I taught a lesson once on ratios .
I 'm not real good with math , but I was working on it .
And I got back and looked at that teacher edition .
I 'd taught the whole lesson wrong .
So I came back to class the next day , and I said , " Look , guys , I need to apologize .
I taught the whole lesson wrong . I 'm so sorry . "
They said , " That 's okay , Ms. Pierson .
You were so excited , we just let you go . "
I have had classes that were so low , so academically deficient that I cried .
I wondered , how am I going to take this group in nine months from where they are to where they need to be ?
And it was difficult . It was awfully hard .
How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time ?
One year I came up with a bright idea .
I told all my students , " You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students , they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it . "
One of the students said , " Really ? "
I said , " Really . We have to show the other classes how to do it , so when we walk down the hall , people will notice us , so you can 't make noise .
You just have to strut . "
And I gave them a saying to say : " I am somebody .
I was somebody when I came .
I 'll be a better somebody when I leave .
I am powerful , and I am strong .
I deserve the education that I get here .
I have things to do , people to impress , and places to go . "
And they said , " Yeah ! "
You say it long enough , it starts to be a part of you .
And so — I gave a quiz , 20 questions .
A student missed 18 .
I put a " + 2 " on his paper and a big smiley face .
He said , " Ms. Pierson , is this an F ? "
I said , " Yes . "
He said , " Then why 'd you put a smiley face ? "
I said , " Because you 're on a roll .
You got two right . You didn 't miss them all . "
I said , " And when we review this , won 't you do better ? "
He said , " Yes , ma 'am , I can do better . "
You see , " -18 " sucks all the life out of you .
" + 2 " said , " I ain 't all bad . "
For years I watched my mother take the time at recess to review , go on home visits in the afternoon , buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat , and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn 't smell so good .
See , it 's hard to teach kids who stink .
And kids can be cruel .
And so she kept those things in her desk , and years later , after she retired , I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her , " You know , Ms. Walker , you made a difference in my life .
You made it work for me .
You made me feel like I was somebody , when I knew , at the bottom , I wasn 't .
And I want you to just see what I 've become . "
And when my mama died two years ago at 92 , there were so many former students at her funeral , it brought tears to my eyes , not because she was gone , but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear .
Can we stand to have more relationships ? Absolutely .
Will you like all your children ? Of course not .
And you know your toughest kids are never absent .
Never . You won 't like them all , and the tough ones show up for a reason .
It 's the connection . It 's the relationships .
And while you won 't like them all , the key is , they can never , ever know it .
So teachers become great actors and great actresses , and we come to work when we don 't feel like it , and we 're listening to policy that doesn 't make sense , and we teach anyway .
We teach anyway , because that 's what we do .
Teaching and learning should bring joy .
How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks , who were not afraid to think , and who had a champion ?
Every child deserves a champion , an adult who will never give up on them , who understands the power of connection , and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be .
Is this job tough ? You betcha . Oh God , you betcha .
But it is not impossible .
We can do this . We 're educators .
We 're born to make a difference .
Thank you so much .
Richard Weller : Could the sun be good for your heart ?
Our bodies get Vitamin D from the sun , but as dermatologist Richard Weller suggests , sunlight may confer another surprising benefit too . New research by his team shows that nitric oxide , a chemical transmitter stored in huge reserves in the skin , can be released by UV light , to great benefit for blood pressure and the cardiovascular system . What does it mean ? Well , it might begin to explain why Scots get sick more than Australians ...
So , before I became a dermatologist , I started in general medicine , as most dermatologists do in Britain .
At the end of that time , I went off to Australia , about 20 years ago .
What you learn when you go to Australia is the Australians are very competitive .
And they are not magnanimous in victory .
And that happened a lot : " You pommies , you can 't play cricket , rugby . "
I could accept that .
But moving into work -- and we have each week what 's called a journal club , when you 'd sit down with the other doctors and you 'd study a scientific paper in relation to medicine .
And after week one , it was about cardiovascular mortality , a dry subject -- how many people die of heart disease , what the rates are .
And they were competitive about this : " You pommies , your rates of heart disease are shocking . "
And of course , they were right .
Australians have about a third less heart disease than we do -- less deaths from heart attacks , heart failure , less strokes -- they 're generally a healthier bunch .
And of course they said this was because of their fine moral standing , their exercise , because they 're Australians and we 're weedy pommies , and so on .
But it 's not just Australia that has better health than Britain .
Within Britain , there is a gradient of health -- and this is what 's called standardized mortality , basically your chances of dying .
This is looking at data from the paper about 20 years ago , but it 's true today .
Comparing your rates of dying 50 degrees north -- that 's the South , that 's London and places -- by latitude , and 55 degrees -- the bad news is that 's here , Glasgow .
I 'm from Edinburgh . Worse news , that 's even Edinburgh .
So what accounts for this horrible space here between us up here in southern Scotland and the South ?
Now , we know about smoking , deep-fried Mars bars , chips -- the Glasgow diet .
All of these things .
But this graph is after taking into account all of these known risk factors .
This is after accounting for smoking , social class , diet , all those other known risk factors .
We are left with this missing space of increased deaths the further north you go .
Now , sunlight , of course , comes into this .
And vitamin D has had a great deal of press , and a lot of people get concerned about it .
And we need vitamin D. It 's now a requirement that children have a certain amount .
My grandmother grew up in Glasgow , back in the 1920s and ' 30s when rickets was a real problem and cod liver oil was brought in .
And that really prevented the rickets that used to be common in this city .
And I as a child was fed cod liver oil by my grandmother .
I distinctly -- nobody forgets cod liver oil .
But an association : The higher people 's blood levels of vitamin D are , the less heart disease they have , the less cancer .
There seems to be a lot of data suggesting that vitamin D is very good for you .
And it is , to prevent rickets and so on .
But if you give people vitamin D supplements , you don 't change that high rate of heart disease .
And the evidence for it preventing cancers is not yet great .
So what I 'm going to suggest is that vitamin D is not the only story in town .
It 's not the only reason preventing heart disease .
High vitamin D levels , I think , are a marker for sunlight exposure , and sunlight exposure , in methods I 'm going to show , is good for heart disease .
Anyway , I came back from Australia , and despite the obvious risks to my health , I moved to Aberdeen .
Now , in Aberdeen , I started my dermatology training .
But I also became interested in research , and in particular I became interested in this substance , nitric oxide .
Now these three guys up here , Furchgott , Ignarro and Murad , won the Nobel Prize for medicine back in 1998 .
And they were the first people to describe this new chemical transmitter , nitric oxide .
What nitric oxide does is it dilates blood vessels , so it lowers your blood pressure .
It also dilates the coronary arteries , so it stops angina .
And what was remarkable about it was in the past when we think of chemical messengers within the body , we thought of complicated things like estrogen and insulin , or nerve transmission .
Very complex processes with very complex chemicals that fit into very complex receptors .
And here 's this incredibly simple molecule , a nitrogen and an oxygen that are stuck together , and yet these are hugely important for [ unclear ] our low blood pressure , for neurotransmission , for many , many things , but particularly cardiovascular health .
And I started doing research , and we found , very excitingly , that the skin produces nitric oxide .
So it 's not just in the cardiovascular system it arises .
It arises in the skin .
Well , having found that and published that , I thought , well , what 's it doing ?
How do you have low blood pressure in your skin ?
It 's not the heart . What do you do ?
So I went off to the States , as many people do if they 're going to do research , and I spent a few years in Pittsburgh . This is Pittsburgh .
And I was interested in these really complex systems .
We thought that maybe nitric oxide affected cell death , and how cells survive , and their resistance to other things .
And I first off started work in cell culture , growing cells , and then I was using knockout mouse models -- mice that couldn 't make the gene .
We worked out a mechanism , which -- NO was helping cells survive .
And I then moved back to Edinburgh .
And in Edinburgh , the experimental animal we use is the medical student .
It 's a species close to human , with several advantages over mice : They 're free , you don 't shave them , they feed themselves , and nobody pickets your office saying , " Save the lab medical student . "
So they 're really an ideal model .
But what we found was that we couldn 't reproduce in man the data we had shown in mice .
It seemed we couldn 't turn off the production of nitric oxide in the skin of humans .
We put on creams that blocked the enzyme that made it , we injected things . We couldn 't turn off the nitric oxide .
And the reason for this , it turned out , after two or three years ' work , was that in the skin we have huge stores not of nitric oxide , because nitric oxide is a gas , and it 's released -- -- and in a few seconds it 's away , but it can be turned into these forms of nitric oxide -- nitrate , NO3 ; nitrite , NO2 ; nitrosothiols .
And these are more stable , and your skin has got really large stores of NO .
And we then thought to ourselves , with those big stores , I wonder if sunlight might activate those stores and release them from the skin , where the stores are about 10 times as big as what 's in the circulation .
Could the sun activate those stores into the circulation , and there in the circulation do its good things for your cardiovascular system ?
Well , I 'm an experimental dermatologist , so what we did was we thought we 'd have to expose our experimental animals to sunlight .
And so what we did was we took a bunch of volunteers and we exposed them to ultraviolet light .
So these are kind of sunlamps .
Now , what we were careful to do was , vitamin D is made by ultraviolet B rays and we wanted to separate our story from the vitamin D story .
So we used ultraviolet A , which doesn 't make vitamin D.
When we put people under a lamp for the equivalent of about 30 minutes of sunshine in summer in Edinburgh , what we produced was , we produced a rise in circulating nitric oxide .
So we put patients with these subjects under the UV , and their NO levels do go up , and their blood pressure goes down .
Not by much , as an individual level , but enough at a population level to shift the rates of heart disease in a whole population .
And when we shone UV at them , or when we warmed them up to the same level as the lamps , but didn 't actually let the rays hit the skin , this didn 't happen .
So this seems to be a feature of ultraviolet rays hitting the skin .
Now , we 're still collecting data .
A few good things here : This appeared to be more marked in older people .
I 'm not sure exactly how much .
One of the subjects here was my mother-in-law , and clearly I do not know her age .
But certainly in people older than my wife , this appears to be a more marked effect .
And the other thing I should mention was there was no change in vitamin D.
This is separate from vitamin D.
So vitamin D is good for you -- it stops rickets , it prevents calcium metabolism , important stuff .
But this is a separate mechanism from vitamin D.
Now , one of the problems with looking at blood pressure is your body does everything it can to keep your blood pressure at the same place .
If your leg is chopped off and you lose blood , your body will clamp down , increase the heart rate , do everything it can to keep your blood pressure up .
That is an absolutely fundamental physiological principle .
So what we 've next done is we 've moved on to looking at blood vessel dilatation .
So we 've measured -- this is again , notice no tail and hairless , this is a medical student .
In the arm , you can measure blood flow in the arm by how much it swells up as some blood flows into it .
And what we 've shown is that doing a sham irradiation -- this is the thick line here -- this is shining UV on the arm so it warms up but keeping it covered so the rays don 't hit the skin .
There is no change in blood flow , in dilatation of the blood vessels .
But the active irradiation , during the UV and for an hour after it , there is dilation of the blood vessels .
This is the mechanism by which you lower blood pressure , by which you dilate the coronary arteries also , to let the blood be supplied with the heart .
So here , further data that ultraviolet -- that 's sunlight -- has benefits on the blood flow and the cardiovascular system .
So we thought we 'd just kind of model -- Different amounts of UV hit different parts of the Earth at different times of year , so you can actually work out those stores of nitric oxide -- the nitrates , nitrites , nitrosothiols in the skin -- cleave to release NO .
Different wavelengths of light have different activities of doing that .
So you can look at the wavelengths of light that do that .
And you can look -- So , if you live on the equator , the sun comes straight overhead , it comes through a very thin bit of atmosphere .
In winter or summer , it 's the same amount of light .
If you live up here , in summer the sun is coming fairly directly down , but in winter it 's coming through a huge amount of atmosphere , and much of the ultraviolet is weeded out , and the range of wavelengths that hit the Earth are different from summer to winter .
So what you can do is you can multiply those data by the NO that 's released and you can calculate how much nitric oxide would be released from the skin into the circulation .
Now , if you 're on the equator here -- that 's these two lines here , the red line and the purple line -- the amount of nitric oxide that 's released is the area under the curve , it 's the area in this space here .
So if you 're on the equator , December or June , you 've got masses of NO being released from the skin .
So Ventura is in southern California .
In summer , you might as well be at the equator .
It 's great . Lots of NO is released .
Ventura mid-winter , well , there 's still a decent amount .
Edinburgh in summer , the area beneath the curve is pretty good , but Edinburgh in winter , the amount of NO that can be released is next to nothing , tiny amounts .
So what do we think ?
We 're still working at this story , we 're still developing it , we 're still expanding it .
We think it 's very important .
We think it probably accounts for a lot of the north-south health divide within Britain , It 's of relevance to us .
We think that the skin -- well , we know that the skin has got very large stores of nitric oxide as these various other forms .
We suspect a lot of these come from diet , green leafy vegetables , beetroot , lettuce has a lot of these nitric oxides that we think go to the skin .
We think they 're then stored in the skin , and we think the sunlight releases this where it has generally beneficial effects .
And this is ongoing work , but dermatologists -- I mean , I 'm a dermatologist .
My day job is saying to people , " You 've got skin cancer , it 's caused by sunlight , don 't go in the sun . "
I actually think a far more important message is that there are benefits as well as risks to sunlight .
Yes , sunlight is the major alterable risk factor for skin cancer , but deaths from heart disease are a hundred times higher than deaths from skin cancer .
And I think that we need to be more aware of , and we need to find the risk-benefit ratio .
How much sunlight is safe , and how can we finesse this best for our general health ?
So , thank you very much indeed .
Anne Milgram : Why smart statistics are the key to fighting crime
When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007 , Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts : not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail , but they had no way of understanding if their decisions were actually making the public safer . And so began her ongoing , inspirational quest to bring data analytics and statistical analysis to the US criminal justice system .
In 2007 , I became the attorney general of the state of New Jersey .
Before that , I 'd been a criminal prosecutor , first in the Manhattan district attorney 's office , and then at the United States Department of Justice .
But when I became the attorney general , two things happened that changed the way I see criminal justice .
The first is that I asked what I thought were really basic questions .
I wanted to understand who we were arresting , who we were charging , and who we were putting in our nation 's jails and prisons .
I also wanted to understand if we were making decisions in a way that made us safer .
And I couldn 't get this information out .
It turned out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn 't track the things that matter .
So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated , I walked down into a conference room that was filled with detectives and stacks and stacks of case files , and the detectives were sitting there with yellow legal pads taking notes .
They were trying to get the information I was looking for by going through case by case for the past five years .
And as you can imagine , when we finally got the results , they weren 't good .
It turned out that we were doing a lot of low-level drug cases on the streets just around the corner from our office in Trenton .
The second thing that happened is that I spent the day in the Camden , New Jersey police department .
Now , at that time , Camden , New Jersey , was the most dangerous city in America .
I ran the Camden Police Department because of that .
I spent the day in the police department , and I was taken into a room with senior police officials , all of whom were working hard and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden .
And what I saw in that room , as we talked about how to reduce crime , were a series of officers with a lot of little yellow sticky notes .
And they would take a yellow sticky and they would write something on it and they would put it up on a board .
And one of them said , " We had a robbery two weeks ago .
We have no suspects . "
And another said , " We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week . We have no suspects . "
We weren 't using data-driven policing .
We were essentially trying to fight crime with yellow Post-it notes .
Now , both of these things made me realize fundamentally that we were failing .
We didn 't even know who was in our criminal justice system , we didn 't have any data about the things that mattered , and we didn 't share data or use analytics or tools to help us make better decisions and to reduce crime .
And for the first time , I started to think about how we made decisions .
When I was an assistant D.A. , and when I was a federal prosecutor , I looked at the cases in front of me , and I generally made decisions based on my instinct and my experience .
When I became attorney general , I could look at the system as a whole , and what surprised me is that I found that that was exactly how we were doing it across the entire system -- in police departments , in prosecutors 's offices , in courts and in jails .
And what I learned very quickly is that we weren 't doing a good job .
So I wanted to do things differently .
I wanted to introduce data and analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into our work .
In short , I wanted to moneyball criminal justice .
Now , moneyball , as many of you know , is what the Oakland A 's did , where they used smart data and statistics to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games , and they went from a system that was based on baseball scouts who used to go out and watch players and use their instinct and experience , the scouts ' instincts and experience , to pick players , from one to use smart data and rigorous statistical analysis to figure out how to pick players that would help them win games .
It worked for the Oakland A 's , and it worked in the state of New Jersey .
We took Camden off the top of the list as the most dangerous city in America .
We reduced murders there by 41 percent , which actually means 37 lives were saved .
And we reduced all crime in the city by 26 percent .
We also changed the way we did criminal prosecutions .
So we went from doing low-level drug crimes that were outside our building to doing cases of statewide importance , on things like reducing violence with the most violent offenders , prosecuting street gangs , gun and drug trafficking , and political corruption .
And all of this matters greatly , because public safety to me is the most important function of government .
If we 're not safe , we can 't be educated , we can 't be healthy , we can 't do any of the other things we want to do in our lives .
And we live in a country today where we face serious criminal justice problems .
We have 12 million arrests every single year .
The vast majority of those arrests are for low-level crimes , like misdemeanors , 70 to 80 percent .
Less than five percent of all arrests are for violent crime .
Yet we spend 75 billion , that 's b for billion , dollars a year on state and local corrections costs .
Right now , today , we have 2.3 million people in our jails and prisons .
And we face unbelievable public safety challenges because we have a situation in which two thirds of the people in our jails are there waiting for trial .
They haven 't yet been convicted of a crime .
They 're just waiting for their day in court .
And 67 percent of people come back .
Our recidivism rate is amongst the highest in the world .
Almost seven in 10 people who are released from prison will be rearrested in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration .
So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation , I came back to looking at a lot of these questions , and I came back to thinking about how we had used data and analytics to transform the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey .
And when I look at the criminal justice system in the United States today , I feel the exact same way that I did about the state of New Jersey when I started there , which is that we absolutely have to do better , and I know that we can do better .
So I decided to focus on using data and analytics to help make the most critical decision in public safety , and that decision is the determination of whether , when someone has been arrested , whether they pose a risk to public safety and should be detained , or whether they don 't pose a risk to public safety and should be released .
Everything that happens in criminal cases comes out of this one decision .
It impacts everything .
It impacts sentencing .
It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment .
It impacts crime and violence .
And when I talk to judges around the United States , which I do all the time now , they all say the same thing , which is that we put dangerous people in jail , and we let non-dangerous , nonviolent people out .
They mean it and they believe it .
But when you start to look at the data , which , by the way , the judges don 't have , when we start to look at the data , what we find time and time again , is that this isn 't the case .
We find low-risk offenders , which makes up 50 percent of our entire criminal justice population , we find that they 're in jail .
Take Leslie Chew , who was a Texas man who stole four blankets on a cold winter night .
He was arrested , and he was kept in jail on 3,500 dollars bail , an amount that he could not afford to pay .
And he stayed in jail for eight months until his case came up for trial , at a cost to taxpayers of more than 9,000 dollars .
And at the other end of the spectrum , we 're doing an equally terrible job .
The people who we find are the highest-risk offenders , the people who we think have the highest likelihood of committing a new crime if they 're released , we see nationally that 50 percent of those people are being released .
The reason for this is the way we make decisions .
Judges have the best intentions when they make these decisions about risk , but they 're making them subjectively .
They 're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago who were using their instinct and their experience to try to decide what risk someone poses .
They 're being subjective , and we know what happens with subjective decision making , which is that we are often wrong .
What we need in this space are strong data and analytics .
What I decided to look for was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool , something that would let judges actually understand with a scientific and objective way what the risk was that was posed by someone in front of them .
I looked all over the country , and I found that between five and 10 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions actually use any type of risk assessment tool , and when I looked at these tools , I quickly realized why .
They were unbelievably expensive to administer , they were time-consuming , they were limited to the local jurisdiction in which they 'd been created .
So basically , they couldn 't be scaled or transferred to other places .
So I went out and built a phenomenal team of data scientists and researchers and statisticians to build a universal risk assessment tool , so that every single judge in the United States of America can have an objective , scientific measure of risk .
In the tool that we 've built , what we did was we collected 1.5 million cases from all around the United States , from cities , from counties , from every single state in the country , the federal districts .
And with those 1.5 million cases , which is the largest data set on pretrial in the United States today , we were able to basically find that there were 900-plus risk factors that we could look at to try to figure out what mattered most .
And we found that there were nine specific things that mattered all across the country and that were the most highly predictive of risk .
And so we built a universal risk assessment tool .
And it looks like this .
As you 'll see , we put some information in , but most of it is incredibly simple , it 's easy to use , it focuses on things like the defendant 's prior convictions , whether they 've been sentenced to incarceration , whether they 've engaged in violence before , whether they 've even failed to come back to court .
And with this tool , we can predict three things .
First , whether or not someone will commit a new crime if they 're released .
Second , for the first time , and I think this is incredibly important , we can predict whether someone will commit an act of violence if they 're released .
And that 's the single most important thing that judges say when you talk to them .
And third , we can predict whether someone will come back to court .
And every single judge in the United States of America can use it , because it 's been created on a universal data set .
What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool is this -- it 's a dashboard .
At the top , you see the New Criminal Activity Score , six of course being the highest , and then in the middle you see , " Elevated risk of violence . "
What that says is that this person is someone who has an elevated risk of violence that the judge should look twice at .
And then , towards the bottom , you see the Failure to Appear Score , which again is the likelihood that someone will come back to court .
Now I want to say something really important .
It 's not that I think we should be eliminating the judge 's instinct and experience from this process .
I don 't .
I actually believe the problem that we see and the reason that we have these incredible system errors , where we 're incarcerating low-level , nonviolent people and we 're releasing high-risk , dangerous people , is that we don 't have an objective measure of risk .
But what I believe should happen is that we should take that data-driven risk assessment and combine that with the judge 's instinct and experience to lead us to better decision making .
The tool went statewide in Kentucky on July 1 , and we 're about to go up in a number of other U.S. jurisdictions .
Our goal , quite simply , is that every single judge in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool within the next five years .
We 're now working on risk tools for prosecutors and for police officers as well , to try to take a system that runs today in America the same way it did 50 years ago , based on instinct and experience , and make it into one that runs on data and analytics .
Now , the great news about all this , and we have a ton of work left to do , and we have a lot of culture to change , but the great news about all of it is that we know it works .
It 's why Google is Google , and it 's why all these baseball teams use moneyball to win games .
The great news for us as well is that it 's the way that we can transform the American criminal justice system .
It 's how we can make our streets safer , we can reduce our prison costs , and we can make our system much fairer and more just .
Some people call it data science .
I call it moneyballing criminal justice .
Thank you .
Stefano Mancuso : The roots of plant intelligence
Plants behave in some oddly intelligent ways : fighting predators , maximizing food opportunities ... But can we think of them as actually having a form of intelligence of their own ? Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso presents intriguing evidence .
Sometimes I go browsing [ through ] a very old magazine .
I found this observation test about the story of the ark .
And the artist that drew this observation test did some errors , had some mistakes -- there are more or less 12 mistakes .
Some of them are very easy .
There is a funnel , an aerial part , a lamp and clockwork key on the ark .
Some of them are about the animals , the number .
But there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that 's not reported here .
And this problem is : where are the plants ?
So now we have God that is going to submerge Earth permanently or at least for a very long period , and no one is taking care of plants .
Noah needed to take two of every kind of bird , of every kind of animal , of every kind of creature that moves , but no mention about plants .
Why ?
In another part of the same story , all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark , so birds , livestock and wild animals .
Plants are not living creatures -- this is the point .
That is a point that is not coming out from the Bible , but it 's something that really accompanied humanity .
Let 's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book .
Here we have the description of the order of nature .
It 's a nice description because it 's starting from left -- you have the stones -- immediately after the stones , the plants that are just able to live .
We have the animals that are able to live and to sense , and on the top of the pyramid , there is the man .
This is not the common man .
The " Homo studiosus " -- the studying man .
This is quite comforting for people like me -- I 'm a professor -- this to be over there on the top of creation .
But it 's something completely wrong .
You know very well about professors .
But it 's also wrong about plants , because plants are not just able to live ; they are able to sense .
They are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals .
Just to give you an example , every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters .
And they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence .
Well , but this is something -- this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us .
Let 's have a look at this short movie now .
We have David Attenborough .
Now David Attenborough is really a plant lover ; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior .
Now , when he speaks about plants , everything is correct .
When he speaks about animals , [ he ] tends to remove the fact that plants exist .
The blue whale , the biggest creature that exists on the planet -- that is wrong , completely wrong .
The blue whale , it 's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet -- that is , this wonderful , magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum .
And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons .
Now , the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by Aristotle , that in " De Anima " -- that is a very influential book for the Western civilization -- wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living .
They have just a kind of very low-level soul .
It 's called the vegetative soul , because they lack movement , and so they don 't need to sense .
Let 's see .
Okay , some of the movements of the plants are very well-known .
This is a very fast movement .
This is a Dionaea , a Venus fly trap hunting snails -- sorry for the snail .
This has been something that has been refused for centuries , despite the evidence .
No one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal , because it was against the order of nature .
But plants are also able to show a lot of movement .
Some of them are very well known , like the flowering .
It 's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse .
Some of them are much more sophisticated .
Look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time .
And it 's really so graceful ; it 's like a dancing angel .
They are also able to play -- they are really playing .
These are young sunflowers , and what they are doing cannot be described with any other terms than playing .
They are training themselves , as many young animals do , to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day .
They are able to respond to gravity , of course , so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity .
But they are also able to sleep .
This is one , Mimosa pudica .
So during the night , they curl the leaves and reduce the movement , and during the day , you have the opening of the leaves -- there is much more movement .
This is interesting because this sleeping machinery , it 's perfectly conserved .
It 's the same in plants , in insects and in animals .
And so if you need to study this sleeping problem , it 's easy to study on plants , for example , than in animals and it 's much more easy even ethically .
It 's a kind of vegetarian experimentation .
Plants are even able to communicate -- they are extraordinary communicators .
They communicate with other plants .
They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin .
They communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles , for example , during the pollination .
Now with the pollination , it 's a very serious issue for plants , because they move the pollen from one flower to the other , yet they cannot move from one flower to the other .
So they need a vector -- and this vector , it 's normally an animal .
Many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination , but not just insects ; even birds , reptiles , and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen .
This is a serious business .
We have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance -- very energizing -- having in change this transportation of the pollen .
But some plants are manipulating animals , like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen .
Now , there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen .
How is it possible to do this without a brain ?
We need to wait until 1880 , when this big man , Charles Darwin , publishes a wonderful , astonishing book that starts a revolution .
The title is " The Power of Movement in Plants . "
before Charles Darwin .
In his book , assisted by his son , Francis -- who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world , in Cambridge -- they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages .
And in the last paragraph of the book , it 's a kind of stylistic mark , because normally Charles Darwin stored , in the last paragraph of a book , the most important message .
He wrote that , " It 's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals . "
This is not a metaphor .
He wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was J.D. Hooker , or at that time , president of the Royal Society , so the maximum scientific authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants .
Now , this is a root apex growing against a slope .
So you can recognize this kind of movement , the same movement that worms , snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display .
And it 's not an easy movement because , to have this kind of movement , you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain .
So we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here , depicted in blue -- that is called the " transition zone . "
And this region , it 's a very small region -- it 's less than one millimeter .
And in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important , you have these kinds of signals here .
The signals that you are seeing here are action potential , are the same signals that the neurons of my brain , of our brain , use to exchange information .
Now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature , but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant , like a plant of rye .
We have almost 14 million roots .
We have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area .
Now let 's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others .
Here were have on the left , the Internet and on the right , the root apparatus .
They work in the same way .
They are a network of small computing machines , working in networks .
And why are they so similar ?
Because they evolved for the same reason : to survive predation .
They work in the same way .
So you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants [ continue ] to work .
You can remove 90 percent of the Internet and it is [ continuing ] to work .
So , a suggestion for the people working with networks : plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks .
And another possibility is a technological possibility .
Let 's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants .
Until now , the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot .
We have the animaloid -- and the normal robots inspired by animals , insectoid , so on .
We have the androids that are inspired by man .
But why have we not any plantoid ?
Well , if you want to fly , it 's good that you look at birds -- to be inspired by birds .
But if you want to explore soils , or if you want to colonize new territory , to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this .
We have another possibility we are working [ on ] in our lab , [ which ] is to build hybrids .
It 's much more easy to build hybrids .
Hybrid means it 's something that 's half living and half machine .
It 's much more easy to work with plants than with animals .
They have computing power , they have electrical signals .
The connection with the machine is much more easy , much more even ethically possible .
And these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids , driven by algae or by the leaves at the end , by the most , most powerful parts of the plants , by the roots .
Well , thank you for your attention .
And before I finish , I would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation .
Thank you .
Liu Bolin : The invisible man
Can a person disappear in plain sight ? That 's the question Liu Bolin 's remarkable work seems to ask . The Beijing-based artist is sometimes called " The Invisible Man " because in nearly all his art , Bolin is front and center — and completely unseen . He aims to draw attention to social and political issues by dissolving into the background .
Liu Bolin : By making myself invisible , I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development .
Interpreter : By making myself invisible , I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development .
LB : This is my first work , created in November 2005 .
And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection .
I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom .
In the meantime , from the beginning , this series has a protesting , reflective and uncompromising spirit .
When applying makeup , I borrow a sniper 's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy , as he did .
After finishing this series of protests , I started questioning why my fate was like this , and I realized that it 's not just me -- all Chinese are as confused as I am .
As you can see , these works are about family planning , election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People 's Congress .
This work is called Xia Gang .
" Xia Gang " is a Chinese euphemism for " laid off " .
It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China 's transition from a planned economy to a market economy .
From 1998 to 2000 , 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China .
The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers .
I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives .
On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution : " The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party . "
For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work .
We can only see six men in this picture , but in fact , those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off . They have just been made invisible .
This piece is called The Studio .
This spring , I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 -- I picked the news photos of the day .
One is about the war in the Middle East , and another one is about a public demonstration in France .
I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions .
This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR .
Interpreter : This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR .
LB : I tried to disappear into JR 's eye , but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes .
So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers .
But still they are not big enough for JR , unfortunately .
Interpreter : So I tried to disappear into JR 's eye , but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes .
So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture .
But it doesn 't work , my eyes are still small .
LB : This one is about 9 / 11 memories .
This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River .
Kenny Scharf 's graffiti .
This is Venice , Italy .
Because global temperatures rise , the sea level rises , and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades .
This is the ancient city of Pompeii .
Interpreter : This is the ancient city of Pompeii .
LB : This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome .
When I work on a new piece , I pay more attention to the expression of ideas .
For instance , why would I make myself invisible ?
What will making myself invisible here cause people to think ?
This one is called Instant Noodles .
Interpreter : This one is called Instant Noodles .
LB : Since August 2012 , harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China 's supermarkets .
These phosphors can even cause cancer .
To create this artwork , I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio , making it look like a supermarket .
And my task is to stand there , trying to be still , setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body . If the background is simple , I usually have to stand for three to four hours .
The background of this piece is more complex , so I need three to four days in advance for preparation .
This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot .
There is no Photoshop involved .
Interpreter : This is the suit I [ was ] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot .
There is no Photoshop involved .
LB : These works are on China 's cultural memories .
And this one , this is about food safety in China .
Unsafe food can harm people 's health , and a deluge of magazines can confuse people 's minds .
The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages , in different countries and at different times .
I think that in art , an artist 's attitude is the most important element .
If an artwork is to touch someone , it must be the result of not only technique , but also the artist 's thinking and struggle in life .
And the repeated struggles in life create artwork , no matter in what form .
That 's all I want to say .
Thank you .
Yossi Vardi : We 're worried about local warming ... in your lap
Investor and prankster Yossi Vardi delivers a ballsy lecture on the dangers of blogging . Specifically , for men .
We are going to talk today about the sequel of " Inconvenient Truth . "
It 's time again to talk about " Inconvenient Truth , " a truth that everyone is concerned about , but nobody is willing to talk about .
Somebody has to take the lead , and I decided to do it .
If you are scared by global warming , wait until we learn about local warming .
We will talk today about local warming .
Important health message : blogging may be hazardous to your health , especially if you are a male .
This message is given as a public service .
Blogging affects your posture . We start with the posture .
This is the posture of ladies who are not blogging ; this is the posture of ladies who are blogging .
This is the natural posture of a man sitting , squatting for ventilation purposes .
And this is the natural posture of a standing man , and I think this picture inspired Chris to insert me into the lateral thinking session .
This is male blogging posture sitting , and the result is , " For greater comfort , men naturally sit with their legs farther apart than women , when working on laptop .
However , they will adopt a less natural posture in order to balance it on their laps , which resulted in a significant rise of body heat between their thighs . " This is the issue of local warming .
This is a very serious newspaper ; it 's Times of England -- very serious . This is a very -- -- gentlemen and ladies , be serious .
This is a very serious research , that you should read the underline .
And be careful , your genes are in danger .
Will geeks become endangered species ?
The fact : population growth in countries with high laptop -- I need Hans Rosling to give me a graph .
Global warming fun .
But let 's keep things in proportion .
How to take care in five easy steps : first of all , you can use natural ventilation . You can use body breath .
You should stay cool with the appropriate clothing .
You should care about your posture -- this is not right .
Can you extract from Chris another minute and a half for me , because I have a video I have to show you .
You are great . This is the correct posture .
Another benefit of Wi-Fi , we learned yesterday about the benefits of Wi-Fi .
Wi-Fi enables you to avoid the processor . And there are some enhanced protection measures , which I would like to share with you , and I would like , in a minute , to thank Philips for helping .
This is a research which was done in ' 86 , but it 's still valid .
Scrotal temperature reflects intratesticular temperature and is lowered by shaving .
By the way , I must admit , my English is not so good , I didn 't know what is scrotal ; I understand it 's a scrotum .
I guess in plural it 's scrotal , like medium and media .
Digital scrotum , digital media .
And only last year I recognized that I 'm a proud scrotum owner .
And this research is being precipitated by the U.S. government , so you can see that your tax man is working for good causes .
The Philips Bodygroom has a sleek , ergonomic design for a safe and easy way to trim those scruffy underarm hairs , the untidy curls on and around your [ bleep ] , as well as the hard to reach locks on the underside of your [ bleep ] and [ bleep ] . Once you use the Bodygroom , the world looks different .
And so does your [ bleep ] . These days , with a hair-free back , well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my [ bleep ] , well , let 's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy .
Yossi Vardi : This is one of the most popular viral advertisement of last year , known as the optical inch by Philips . Let 's applaud Philips -- -- for this gesture for humanity .
And this is how they are promoting the product . This is -- I didn 't touch it , this is original .
Laptop use to solve overpopulation . And if everything failed , there are some secondary uses .
And then our next talk , our next TED if you invite me will be why you should not carry a cell phone in your pocket .
And this is what the young generation says .
And I just want to show you that I 'm not just preaching , but I also practice .
4 am in the morning .
You cannot use this picture .
Now , I have some mini TED Prizes , this is the Philips Bodygroom , one for our leader .
Anybody feels threatened , anybody really need it ?
Any lady , any lady ? Thank you very much .
Joe Smith : How to use a paper towel
You use paper towels to dry your hands every day , but chances are , you 're doing it wrong . In this enlightening and funny short talk , Joe Smith reveals the trick to perfect paper towel technique . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by Americans every year .
If we could -- correction , wrong figure -- 13 billion used every year .
If we could reduce the usage of paper towels , one paper towel per person per day , 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used .
We can do that .
Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers .
There 's the tri-fold . People typically take two or three .
There 's the one that cuts it , that you have to tear off .
People go one , two , three , four , tear .
This much , right ?
There 's the one that cuts itself .
People go , one , two , three , four .
Or there 's the same thing , but recycled paper , you have to get five of those because they 're not as absorbant , of course .
The fact is , you can do it all with one towel .
The key , two words : This half of the room , your word is " shake . "
Let 's hear it . Shake . Louder .
Audience : Shake .
Joe Smith : Your word is " fold . "
Audience : Fold .
JS : Again .
Audience : Fold . JS : Really loud .
Audience : Shake . Fold .
JS : Okay . Wet hands .
Shake -- one , two , three , four , five , six , seven , eight , nine , 10 , 11 , 12 .
Why 12 ? Twelve apostles , twelve tribes , twelve zodiac signs , twelve months . The one I like the best : It 's the biggest number with one syllable .
Tri-fold . Fold ...
Dry .
Audience : Shake .
Fold .
JS : Cuts itself . Fold . The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension .
You don 't have to remember that part , but trust me .
Audience : Shake . Fold .
JS : Cuts itself .
You know the funny thing is , I get my hands drier than people do with three or four , because they can 't get in between the cracks .
If you think this isn 't as good ...
Audience : Shake . Fold .
JS : Now , there 's now a real fancy invention , it 's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out .
It 's way too big a towel .
Let me tell you a secret .
If you 're really quick , if you 're really quick -- and I can prove this -- this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building .
How ? As soon as it starts , you just tear it off .
It 's smart enough to stop .
And you get half a towel .
Audience : Shake . Fold .
JS : Now , let 's all say it together . Shake . Fold .
You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel .
And remember , one towel per person for one year -- 571,230,000 pounds of paper . No small thing .
And next year , toilet paper .
Michael Sandel : The lost art of democratic debate
Democracy thrives on civil debate , Michael Sandel says -- but we 're shamefully out of practice . He leads a fun refresher , with TEDsters sparring over a recent Supreme Court case whose outcome reveals the critical ingredient in justice .
One thing the world needs , one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates .
We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument .
If you think about the arguments we have , most of the time it 's shouting matches on cable television , ideological food fights on the floor of Congress .
I have a suggestion .
Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care , over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street , over the gap between rich and poor , over affirmative action and same-sex marriage .
Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments , with passions raging on all sides , are big questions of moral philosophy , big questions of justice .
But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics .
So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion .
First , let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality , give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens , Aristotle 's theory of justice , and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle 's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today .
So , are you ready for the lecture ?
According to Aristotle , justice means giving people what they deserve .
That 's it ; that 's the lecture .
Now , you may say , well , that 's obvious enough .
The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why .
Take the example of flutes .
Suppose we 're distributing flutes .
Who should get the best ones ?
Let 's see what people -- What would you say ?
Who should get the best flute ?
You can just call it out .
Michael Sandel : At random . You would do it by lottery .
Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them .
Who else ?
The best flute players .
The worst flute players .
How many say the best flute players ?
Why ?
Actually , that was Aristotle 's answer too .
But here 's a harder question .
Why do you think , those of you who voted this way , that the best flutes should go to the best flute players ?
Peter : The greatest benefit to all .
The greatest benefit to all .
We 'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players .
That 's Peter ?
All right .
Well , it 's a good reason .
We 'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music .
But Peter , Aristotle doesn 't agree with you that that 's the reason .
That 's all right .
Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players .
He said , that 's what flutes are for -- to be played well .
He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing , we have to reason about , and sometimes argue about , the purpose of the thing , or the social activity -- in this case , musical performance .
And the point , the essential nature , of musical performance is to produce excellent music .
It 'll be a happy byproduct that we 'll all benefit .
But when we think about justice , Aristotle says , what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing .
One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy , but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians .
Now , flutes may seem ... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case .
Let 's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice .
It had to do with golf .
Casey Martin -- a few years ago , Casey Martin -- did any of you hear about him ?
He was a very good golfer , but he had a disability .
He had a bad leg , a circulatory problem , that made it very painful for him to walk the course .
In fact , it carried risk of injury .
He asked the PGA , the Professional Golfers ' Association , for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments .
They said , " No .
Now that would give you an unfair advantage . "
He sued , and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court , believe it or not , the case over the golf cart , because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated , provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity .
He says , " I 'm a great golfer .
I want to compete .
But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next . "
Suppose you were on the Supreme Court .
Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case .
How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart ?
And how many say , no , he doesn 't ?
All right , let 's take a poll , show of hands .
How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin ?
And how many would not ? How many would say he doesn 't ?
All right , we have a good division of opinion here .
Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart , what would be your reason ?
Raise your hand , and we 'll try to get you a microphone .
What would be your reason ?
It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart .
All right , those of you , I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage .
What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart ?
How would you answer the objection ?
Yes , all right .
Audience : The cart 's not part of the game .
What 's your name ?
Charlie says -- We 'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply .
Tell us , Charlie , why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart ?
Charlie : The cart 's not part of the game .
But what about walking from hole to hole ?
Charlie : It doesn 't matter ; it 's not part of the game .
Walking the course is not part of the game of golf ?
Charlie : Not in my book , it isn 't .
All right . Stay there , Charlie .
Who has an answer for Charlie ?
All right , who has an answer for Charlie ?
What would you say ?
Audience : The endurance element is a very important part of the game , walking all those holes .
Walking all those holes ?
That 's part of the game of golf ?
What 's your name ?
Warren .
Charlie , what do you say to Warren ?
Charley : I 'll stick to my original thesis .
Warren , are you a golfer ?
Warren : I am not a golfer .
Charley : And I am .
You know , it 's interesting .
In the case , in the lower court , they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue .
Is walking the course essential to the game ?
And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer .
And what do you suppose they all said ?
Yes . They agreed with Warren .
They said , yes , walking the course is strenuous physical exercise .
The fatigue factor is an important part of golf .
And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart .
Now , notice , something interesting -- Well , I should tell you about the Supreme Court first .
The Supreme Court decided .
What do you suppose they said ?
They said yes , that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart .
Seven to two , they ruled .
What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we 've just had is that the discussion about the right , the justice , of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf .
And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question .
And Justice Stevens , writing for the majority , said he had read all about the history of golf , and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible , and that walking was not essential , but incidental .
Now , there were two dissenters , one of whom was Justice Scalia .
He wouldn 't have granted the cart , and he had a very interesting dissent .
It 's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority 's opinion .
He said it 's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf .
Here 's how he put it .
" To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object .
But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement , that is , what distinguishes games from productive activity , it is quite impossible to say that any of a game 's arbitrary rules is essential . "
So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority 's opinion .
Justice Scalia 's opinion is questionable for two reasons .
First , no real sports fan would talk that way .
If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary , rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring , we wouldn 't care about the outcome of the game .
It 's also objectionable on a second ground .
On the face of it , it seemed to be -- this debate about the golf cart -- an argument about fairness , what 's an unfair advantage .
But if fairness were the only thing at stake , there would have been an easy and obvious solution .
What would it be ?
Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to .
Then the fairness objection goes away .
But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been , I suspect , more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA , even than making an exception for Casey Martin .
Why ?
Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf , but , relatedly , the question : What abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents ?
Let me put the point as delicately as possible : Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game .
After all , there 's no running or jumping , and the ball stands still .
So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart , it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer , the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes .
That illustrates that with golf , as with flutes , it 's hard to decide the question of what justice requires , without grappling with the question , " What is the essential nature of the activity in question , and what qualities , what excellences connected with that activity , are worthy of honor and recognition ? "
Let 's take a final example that 's prominent in contemporary political debate : same-sex marriage .
There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman , and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage .
How many here favor the first policy : the state should recognize traditional marriage only ?
And how many favor the second , same-sex marriage ?
Now , put it this way : What ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage ?
The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage , fundamentally , is procreation , and that 's what 's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging .
And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no , procreation is not the only purpose of marriage ; what about a lifelong , mutual , loving commitment ?
That 's really what marriage is about .
So with flutes , with golf carts , and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage , Aristotle has a point .
Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition .
So let 's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve , elevate , the terms of political discourse in the United States , and for that matter , around the world .
There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics , that 's a recipe for disagreement , and for that matter , a recipe for intolerance and coercion .
So better to shy away from , to ignore , the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life .
It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite , that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life , rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter .
That , it seems to me , is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Thanks . Thank you .
Chris .
Thanks , Chris .
From flutes to golf courses to same-sex marriage -- that was a genius link .
Now look , you 're a pioneer of open education .
Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big .
What 's your vision for the next phase of this ?
Well , I think that it is possible .
In the classroom , we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions .
And I think we can do that in public life more generally .
And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we 've created of the course -- it 's available now , online , free for everyone anywhere in the world -- and to see whether we can partner with institutions , at universities in China , in India , in Africa , around the world , to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate .
So you picture , at some point , live , in real time , you could have this kind of conversation , inviting questions , but with people from China and India joining in ?
Right . We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach , and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students .
Wouldn 't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing , engaging seriously with big moral questions , exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup , students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge , Massachusetts and create a global classroom .
That 's what I would love to do .
So , I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor .
Michael Sandel . Thank you so much .
Vikram Patel : Mental health for all by involving all
Nearly 450 million people are affected by mental illness worldwide . In wealthy nations , just half receive appropriate care , but in developing countries , close to 90 percent go untreated because psychiatrists are in such short supply . Vikram Patel outlines a highly promising approach -- training members of communities to give mental health interventions , empowering ordinary people to care for others .
I want you to imagine this for a moment .
Two men , Rahul and Rajiv , living in the same neighborhood , from the same educational background , similar occupation , and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain .
Rahul is offered a cardiac procedure , but Rajiv is sent home .
What might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men ?
Rajiv suffers from a mental illness .
The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness .
Even in the best-resourced countries in the world , this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years .
In the developing countries of the world , this gap is even larger .
But of course , mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well . The most obvious example is suicide .
It might surprise some of you here , as it did me , when I discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world , including the poorest countries of the world .
But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy , we 're also concerned about the quality of life lived .
Now , in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived , we need to use a metric called the DALY , which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year .
Now when we do that , we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective .
We discover that , for example , mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world .
Depression , for example , is the third-leading cause of disability , alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children .
When you put all the mental illnesses together , they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease .
Indeed , mental illnesses are also very damaging to people 's lives , but beyond just the burden of disease , let us consider the absolute numbers .
The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness .
Now some of you here look a bit astonished by that number , but consider for a moment the incredible diversity of mental illnesses , from autism and intellectual disability in childhood , through to depression and anxiety , substance misuse and psychosis in adulthood , all the way through to dementia in old age , and I 'm pretty sure that each and every one us present here today can think of at least one person , at least one person , who 's affected by mental illness in our most intimate social networks .
I see some nodding heads there .
But beyond the staggering numbers , what 's truly important from a global health point of view , what 's truly worrying from a global health point of view , is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives , and remember , we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions , medicines , psychological interventions , and social interventions , can make a vast difference .
And yet , even in the best-resourced countries , for example here in Europe , roughly 50 percent of affected people don 't receive these interventions .
In the sorts of countries I work in , that so-called treatment gap approaches an astonishing 90 percent .
It isn 't surprising , then , that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness , the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering , shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives .
But perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights , such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day , sadly , even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses , the mental hospitals .
It 's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness , and a particularly critical action that I focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives , the knowledge of effective treatments , and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world .
And an especially important challenge that I 've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals , such as psychiatrists and psychologists , particularly in the developing world .
Now I trained in medicine in India , and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty , much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son .
Any case , I went on , I soldiered on with psychiatry , and found myself training in Britain in some of the best hospitals in this country . I was very privileged .
I worked in a team of incredibly talented , compassionate , but most importantly , highly trained , specialized mental health professionals .
Soon after my training , I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India , and I was confronted by an altogether new reality .
This was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all .
In Zimbabwe , for example , there were just about a dozen psychiatrists , most of whom lived and worked in Harare city , leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside .
In India , I found the situation was not a lot better .
To give you a perspective , if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India , one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India .
In reality , take a guess .
The actual number is about 3,000 , about two percent of that number .
It became quickly apparent to me that I couldn 't follow the sorts of mental health care models that I had been trained in , one that relied heavily on specialized , expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like India and Zimbabwe .
I had to think out of the box about some other model of care .
It was then that I came across these books , and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health .
The idea is actually quite simple . The idea is , when you 're short of specialized health care professionals , use whoever is available in the community , train them to provide a range of health care interventions , and in these books I read inspiring examples , for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies , diagnose and treat early pneumonia , to great effect .
And it struck me that if you could train ordinary people to deliver such complex health care interventions , then perhaps they could also do the same with mental health care .
Well today , I 'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade , and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments , all three of which focused on depression , the most common of all mental illnesses .
In rural Uganda , Paul Bolton and his colleagues , using villagers , demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and , using a randomized control design , showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages .
Similarly , using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan , Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors , who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan 's health care system , could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed , again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates . Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages .
And in my own trial in Goa , in India , we again showed that lay counselors drawn from local communities could be trained to deliver psychosocial interventions for depression , anxiety , leading to 70 percent recovery rates as compared to 50 percent in the comparison primary health centers .
Now , if I had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting , and there have of course been many other examples , and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation , I have coined this particular acronym , SUNDAR .
What SUNDAR stands for , in Hindi , is " attractive . "
It seems to me that there are five key lessons that I 've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting .
The first is that we need to simplify the message that we 're using , stripping away all the jargon that medicine has invented around itself .
We need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals .
We need to deliver health care , not in large institutions , but close to people 's homes , and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities .
And importantly , we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision .
Now for me , task shifting is an idea with truly global significance , because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries , I think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well . Why is that ?
Well , in part , because health care in the developed world , the health care costs in the [ developed ] world , are rapidly spiraling out of control , and a huge chunk of those costs are human resource costs .
But equally important is because health care has become so incredibly professionalized that it 's become very remote and removed from local communities .
For me , what 's truly sundar about the idea of task shifting , though , isn 't that it simply makes health care more accessible and affordable but that it is also fundamentally empowering .
It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community , and in doing so , to become better guardians of their own health . Indeed , for me , task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge , and therefore , medical power .
Just over 30 years ago , the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration .
Well , I think all of you can guess that 12 years on , we 're still nowhere near that goal .
Still , today , armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and , with sufficient supervision and support , can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively , perhaps that promise is within reach now .
Indeed , to implement the slogan of Health for All , we will need to involve all in that particular journey , and in the case of mental health , in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers .
It is for this reason that , some years ago , the Movement for Global Mental Health was founded as a sort of a virtual platform upon which professionals like myself and people affected by mental illness could stand together , shoulder-to-shoulder , and advocate for the rights of people with mental illness to receive the care that we know can transform their lives , and to live a life with dignity .
And in closing , when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards , spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness , or persons that you thought about who have mental illness , and dare to care for them . Thank you .
Shea Hembrey : How I became 100 artists
How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists ? If you 're Shea Hembrey , you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush . Watch this funny , mind-bending talk to see the explosion of creativity and diversity of skills a single artist is capable of .
I 'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background .
I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum .
I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas , an hour from the nearest movie theater .
And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky , colorful characters who were great at making with their hands .
And my childhood is more hick than I could ever possibly relate to you , and also more intellectual than you would ever expect .
For instance , me and my sister , when we were little , we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains .
But on the other side of that , though , we were big readers in our house .
And if the TV was on , we were watching a documentary .
And my dad is the most voracious reader I know .
He can read a novel or two a day .
But when I was little , I remember , he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun .
And what was so amazing to me about that -- well he would be in his recliner , would holler for me to fetch the BB gun , and I 'd go get it .
And what was amazing to me -- well it was pretty kickass ; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun -- but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it .
And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on .
So I should talk about art .
Or we 'll be here all day with my childhood stories .
I love contemporary art , but I 'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene .
A few years ago , I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world .
And I was struck by going to so many , one after the other , with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for .
And I was longing for several things that I wasn 't getting , or not getting enough of .
But two of the main things : one of it , I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public , that was accessible .
And the second thing that I was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique .
So I started thinking and listing what all it was that I thought would make a perfect biennial .
So I decided , I 'm going to start my own biennial .
I 'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world .
So I thought , okay , I have to have some criteria of how to choose work .
So amongst all the criteria I have , there 's two main things .
One of them , I call my Mimaw 's Test .
And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes , and if I can 't explain it in five minutes , then it 's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn 't been refined enough yet .
It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently .
And then my other second set of rules -- I hate to say " rules " because it 's art -- my criteria would be the three H 's , which is head , heart and hands .
And great art would have " head " : it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts .
It would have " heart " in that it would have passion and heart and soul .
And it would have " hand " in that it would be greatly crafted .
So I started thinking about how am I going to do this biennial , how am I going to travel the world and find these artists ?
And then I realized one day , there 's an easier solution to this .
I 'm just going to make the whole thing myself .
And so this is what I did .
So I thought , a biennial needs artists .
I 'm going to do an international biennial ; I need artists from all around the world .
So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world .
I figured out their bios , their passions in life and their art styles , and I started making their work .
I felt , oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing .
So I decided , I 'm going to make this a real biennial .
It 's going to be two years of studio work .
And I 'm going to create this in two years , and I have .
So I should start to talk about these guys .
Well the range is quite a bit .
And I 'm such a technician , so I loved this project , getting to play with all the techniques .
So for example , in realist paintings , it ranges from this , which is kind of old masters style , to really realistic still-life , to this type of painting where I 'm painting with a single hair .
And then at the other end , there 's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one , and outdoor installations like this one and this one .
I know I should mention : I 'm making all these things .
This isn 't Photoshopped .
I 'm under the river with those fish .
So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you .
This is Nell Remmel .
Nell is interested in agricultural processes , and her work is based in these practices .
This piece , which is called " Flipped Earth " -- she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground .
And by taking giant mirrors -- and here she 's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt .
And this is 22 feet long .
And what I loved about her work is , when I would walk around it and look down into the sky , looking down to watch the sky , and it unfolded in a new way .
And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground 's dark , but there 's still the light above , bright above .
And so you 're standing there and everything else is dark , but there 's this portal that you want to jump in .
This piece was great . This is in my parents ' backyard in Arkansas .
And I love to dig a hole .
So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt .
The next artist is Kay Overstry , and she 's interested in ephemerality and transience .
And in her most recent project , it 's called " Weather I Made . "
And she 's making weather on her body 's scale .
And this piece is " Frost . "
And what she did was she went out on a cold , dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave -- to leave her life 's mark , the mark of her life .
And so this is five-foot , five-inches of frost that she left behind .
The sun rises , and it melts away .
And that was played by my mom .
So the next artist , this is a group of Japanese artists , a collective of Japanese artists -- in Tokyo .
And they were interested in developing a new , alternative art space , and they needed funding for it , so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects .
One of these is scratch-off masterpieces .
And so what they 're doing -- each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card , which they sell for 10 bucks , they drew original works of art .
And you buy one , and maybe you get a real piece , and maybe not .
Well this has sparked a craze in Japan , because everyone 's wanting a masterpiece .
And the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off .
And all these works , in some way , talk about luck or fate or chance .
Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win .
And in this one it 's called " Drawing the Short Stick . "
I love this piece because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me -- which I think is such a great introduction -- to a friend one day as , " This is my cousin Shea .
He draws sticks real good . "
Which is one of the best compliments ever .
This artist is Gus Weinmueller , and he 's doing a project , a large project , called " Art for the Peoples . "
And within this project , he 's doing a smaller project called " Artists in Residence . "
And what he does is -- he spends a week at a time with a family .
And he shows up on their porch , their doorstep , with a toothbrush and pajamas , and he 's ready to spend the week with them .
And using only what 's present , he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of .
And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is .
He has all these discussions with their family , and he digs through everything they have , and he finds materials to make work .
And he makes a work that answers what they think great art is .
For this family , he made this still-life painting .
And whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property .
This next project , this is by Jaochim Parisvega , and he 's interested in -- he believes art is everywhere waiting -- that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen .
And he provides this push by harnessing natural forces , like in his series where he used rain to make paintings .
This project is called " Love Nests . "
What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him .
So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them , and they crafted his nests for him .
And this one 's called " Lovelock 's Nest . "
This one 's called " Mixtape Love Song 's Nest . "
And this one 's called " Lovemaking Nest . "
Next is Sylvia Slater .
Sylvia 's interested in art training .
She 's a very serious Swiss artist .
And she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries , and she was thinking , what can I make that would be of value to them , in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman ?
And so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them .
And you would carry this around with you , and if everything went to hell , you could make payments and buy your life .
So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director .
So hopefully what happens is you never use it , and it 's an heirloom that you pass down .
And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments , or they could be like these , which are leaves that can be payments .
And so they 're valuable . This is precious metals and gemstones .
And this one had to get broken up .
He had to break off a piece to get out of Egypt recently .
This is by a duo , Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland .
And they 're interested in creating culture , just tradition .
So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area .
So this is in Eastern Tennessee , and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death .
So they came up with " dig jigs . "
And a dig jig -- a dig jig is where , for a milestone anniversary or a birthday , you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you 're going to be buried .
And we got a lot of attention when we did it .
I talked my family into doing this , and they didn 't know what I was doing .
And I was like , " Get dressed for a funeral . We 're going to go do some work . "
And so we got to the grave and made this , which was hilarious -- the attention that we got .
So what happens is you dance on the grave , and after you 've done your dance , everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are .
And you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for .
That 's my mom and dad .
This is by Jason Birdsong .
He is interested in how we see as an animal , how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage .
You know , we look down a dark alley or a jungle path , trying to make out a face or a creature .
We just have that natural way of seeing .
And he plays with this idea .
And this piece : those aren 't actually leaves .
They 're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage .
So he pairs these up .
There 's another pile of leaves .
Those are actually all real butterfly specimens .
And he pairs these up with paintings .
Like this is a painting of a snake in a box .
So you open the box and you think , " Whoa , there 's a snake in there . "
But it 's actually a painting .
So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage .
The next artist is Hazel Clausen .
Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided , " You know , I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn 't exist from scratch . "
So that 's what she did .
She created the Swiss people named the Uvulites , and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for .
And also they reference how the uvula -- everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit .
And that 's the symbol of their culture .
And this is from a documentary called " Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites . "
This is a typical angora embroidery for them .
This is one of their founders , Gert Schaeffer .
And actually this is my Aunt Irene .
It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things .
And I crack up at this piece , because when I see it I know that 's French angora and all antique German ribbons and wool that I got in a Nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique Chinese skirts .
The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans , and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time .
And they 're really interested in how over-coddled we 've become .
So this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we 've become .
And what they 've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence .
And this is called " Horse Sense Fence . "
The next artist is K. M. Yoon , a really interesting South Korean artist .
And he 's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones .
Next is Maynard Sipes .
And I love Maynard Sipes , but he 's off in his own world , and , bless his heart , he 's so paranoid .
Next is Roy Penig , a really interesting Kentucky artist , and he 's the nicest guy .
He even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly .
Next is an Australian artist , Janeen Jackson , and this is from a project of hers called " What an Artwork Does When We 're Not Watching . "
Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller , Jurgi Petrauskas .
Next is Ginger Cheshire .
This is from a short film of hers called " The Last Person . "
And that 's my cousin and my sister 's dog , Gabby .
The next , this is by Sam Sandy .
He 's an Australian Aboriginal elder , and he 's also an artist .
And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he 's doing .
This is from Estelle Willoughsby .
She heals with color .
And she 's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists , even though she 's going to be 90 next year .
This is by Z. Zhou , and he 's interested in stasis .
Next is by Hilda Singh , and she 's doing a whole project called " Social Outfits . "
Next is by Vera Sokolova .
And I have to say , Vera kind of scares me .
You can 't look her directly in the eyes because she 's kind of scary .
And it 's good that she 's not real ; she 'd be mad that I said that .
And she 's an optometrist in St. Petersburg , and she plays with optics .
Next , this is by Thomas Swifton .
This is from a short film , " Adventures with Skinny . "
And this is by Cicily Bennett , and it 's from a series of short films .
And after this one , there 's 77 other artists .
And all together with those other 77 you 're not seeing , that 's my biennial .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thanks .
Thank you . Thanks .
Joan Halifax : Compassion and the true meaning of empathy
Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life . She shares what she 's learned about compassion in the face of death and dying , and a deep insight into the nature of empathy .
I want to address the issue of compassion .
Compassion has many faces .
Some of them are fierce ; some of them are wrathful ; some of them are tender ; some of them are wise .
A line that the Dalai Lama once said , he said , " Love and compassion are necessities .
They are not luxuries .
Without them , humanity cannot survive . "
And I would suggest , it is not only humanity that won 't survive , but it is all species on the planet , as we 've heard today .
It is the big cats , and it 's the plankton .
Two weeks ago , I was in Bangalore in India .
I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore .
And early in the morning , I went into the ward .
In that hospice , there were 31 men and women who were actively dying .
And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly , fragile , obviously in the latter phase of active dying .
I looked into her face .
I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her , and his face was just riven with grief and confusion .
And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata , the great Indian epic : " What is the most wondrous thing in the world , Yudhisthira ? "
And Yudhisthira replied , " The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don 't realize it can happen to us . "
I looked up .
Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore .
I looked into the face of one of these women , and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present .
I watched her hands as she bathed an old man .
My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person .
And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for .
Every year or so , I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau .
And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there 's no medical care whatsoever .
And on the first day at Simikot in Humla , far west of Nepal , the most impoverished region of Nepal , an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags .
And he walked in , and somebody said something to him , we realized he was deaf , and we looked into the rags , and there was this pair of eyes .
The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned .
Again , the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara .
It was the young women , the health aids , who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds .
I know those hands and eyes ; they touched me as well .
They touched me at that time .
They have touched me throughout my 68 years .
They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed .
And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me .
And that woman did not have sentimental compassion .
She had phenomenal strength .
And it was really her strength , I believe , that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life .
So we can ask : What is compassion comprised of ?
And there are various facets .
And there 's referential and non-referential compassion .
But first , compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering .
It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I 'm not separate from this suffering .
But that is not enough , because compassion , which activates the motor cortex , means that we aspire , we actually aspire to transform suffering .
And if we 're so blessed , we engage in activities that transform suffering .
But compassion has another component , and that component is really essential .
That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome .
Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years .
I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [ prison ] for six years .
And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience , from working with dying people and training caregivers , that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe .
And when I worked in the prison system , it was so clear to me , this : that many of us in this room , and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row , the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered .
That compassion is actually an inherent human quality .
It is there within every human being .
But the conditions for compassion to be activated , to be aroused , are particular conditions .
I had that condition , to a certain extent , from my own childhood illness .
Eve Ensler , whom you 'll hear later , has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through .
And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies , and those enemies are things like pity , moral outrage , fear .
And you know , we have a society , a world , that is paralyzed by fear .
And in that paralysis , of course , our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed .
The very word terror is global .
The very feeling of terror is global .
So our work , in a certain way , is to address this imago , this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe .
Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities .
For example : A person who is cultivating compassion , when they are in the presence of suffering , they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do .
However , they return to baseline a lot sooner .
This is called resilience .
Many of us think that compassion drains us , but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us .
Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what 's called neural integration .
It hooks up all parts of the brain .
Another , which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on , is that compassion enhances our immune system .
Hey , we live in a very noxious world .
Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons , of the toxins of our world .
But compassion , the generation of compassion , actually mobilizes our immunity .
You know , if compassion is so good for us , I have a question .
Why don 't we train our children in compassion ?
If compassion is so good for us , why don 't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they 're supposed to do , which is to really transform suffering ?
And if compassion is so good for us , why don 't we vote on compassion ?
Why don 't we vote for people in our government based on compassion , so that we can have a more caring world ?
In Buddhism , we say , " it takes a strong back and a soft front . "
It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions .
And that is the mental quality of equanimity .
But it also takes a soft front -- the capacity to really be open to the world as it is , to have an undefended heart .
And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara , Kuan-Yin .
It 's a female archetype : she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world .
She stands with 10,000 arms , and in every hand , there is an instrument of liberation , and in the palm of every hand , there are eyes , and these are the eyes of wisdom .
I say that , for thousands of years , women have lived , exemplified , met in intimacy , the archetype of Avalokitesvara , of Kuan-Yin , she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world .
Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered , unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is .
They have infused societies with kindness , and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half .
And they have actualized compassion through direct action .
Jody Williams called it : It 's good to meditate .
I 'm sorry , you 've got to do a little bit of that , Jody .
Step back , give your mother a break , okay .
But the other side of the equation is you 've got to come out of your cave .
You have to come into the world like Asanga did , who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave .
He said , " I 'm out of here . "
He 's going down the path .
He sees something in the path .
He looks , it 's a dog , he drops to his knees .
He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg .
The wound is just filled with maggots .
He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots , so as not to harm them .
And at that moment , the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness .
I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men -- with their fathers , with their sons , with their brothers , with the plumbers , the road builders , the caregivers , the doctors , the lawyers , with our president , and with all beings .
The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire .
May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere .
Thank you .
Jeff Hawkins : How brain science will change computing
Treo creator Jeff Hawkins urges us to take a new look at the brain -- to see it not as a fast processor , but as a memory system that stores and plays back experiences to help us predict , intelligently , what will happen next .
I do two things : I design mobile computers and I study brains .
And today 's talk is about brains and , yay , somewhere I have a brain fan out there .
I 'm going to , if I can have my first slide up here , and you 'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations .
So what I 'm going to talk about is why we don 't have a good brain theory , why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it .
And I 'll try to do all that in 20 minutes . I have two affiliations .
Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days , but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park , and we study theoretical neuroscience , and we study how the neocortex works .
I 'm going to talk all about that .
I have one slide on my other life , the computer life , and that 's the slide here .
These are some of the products I 've worked on over the last 20 years , starting back from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on , and ending up most recently with the Treo , and we 're continuing to do this .
And I 've done this because I really believe that mobile computing is the future of personal computing , and I 'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things .
But this was , I have to admit , all an accident .
I really didn 't want to do any of these products and very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry .
And before I tell you about that , I just have to tell you this one little picture of graffiti there I picked off the web the other day .
I was looking for a picture of graffiti , little text input language , and I found the website dedicated to teachers who want to make these , you know , the script writing things across the top of their blackboard , and they had added graffiti to it , and I 'm sorry about that .
So what happened was , when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in ' 79 , I decided -- I went to work for Intel and I was in the computer industry -- and three months into that , I fell in love with something else , and I said , " I made the wrong career choice here , " and I fell in love with brains .
This is not a real brain . This is a picture of one , a line drawing .
But I don 't remember exactly how it happened , but I have one recollection , which was pretty strong in my mind .
In September 1979 , Scientific American came out with a single topic issue about the brain . And it was quite good .
It was one of the best issues ever . And they talked about the neuron and development and disease and vision and all the things you might want to know about brains . It was really quite impressive .
And one might have the impression that we really knew a lot about brains .
But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame .
Today is , I think , the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA .
And he wrote a story basically saying , well , this is all well and good , but you know what , we don 't know diddley squat about brains and no one has a clue how these things work , so don 't believe what anyone tells you .
This is a quote from that article . He said , " What is conspicuously lacking , " he 's a very proper British gentleman so , " What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches . "
I thought the word framework was great .
He didn 't say we didn 't even have a theory . He says , we don 't even know how to begin to think about it -- we don 't even have a framework .
We are in the pre-paradigm days , if you want to use Thomas Kuhn .
And so I fell in love with this , and said look , we have all this knowledge about brains . How hard can it be ?
And this is something we can work on my lifetime . I felt I could make a difference , and so I tried to get out of the computer business , into the brain business .
First , I went to MIT , the AI lab was there , and I said , well , I want to build intelligent machines , too , but the way I want to do it is to study how brains work first .
And they said , oh , you don 't need to do that .
We 're just going to program computers ; that 's all we need to do .
And I said , no , you really ought to study brains . They said , oh , you know , you 're wrong . And I said , no , you 're wrong , and I didn 't get in .
But I was a little disappointed -- pretty young -- but I went back again a few years later and this time was in California , and I went to Berkeley .
And I said , I 'll go in from the biological side .
So I got in -- in the Ph.D. program in biophysics , and I was , all right , I 'm studying brains now , and I said , well , I want to study theory .
And they said , oh no , you can 't study theory about brains .
That 's not something you do . You can 't get funded for that .
And as a graduate student , you can 't do that . So I said , oh my gosh .
I was very depressed . I said , but I can make a difference in this field .
So what I did is I went back in the computer industry and said , well , I 'll have to work here for a while , do something .
That 's when I designed all those computer products .
And I said , I want to do this for four years , make some money , like I was having a family , and I would mature a bit , and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit .
Well , it took longer than four years . It 's been about 16 years .
But I 'm doing it now , and I 'm going to tell you about it .
So why should we have a good brain theory ?
Well , there 's lots of reasons people do science .
One is -- the most basic one is -- people like to know things .
We 're curious , and we just go out and get knowledge , you know ?
Why do we study ants ? Well , it 's interesting .
Maybe we 'll learn something really useful about it , but it 's interesting and fascinating .
But sometimes , a science has some other attributes which makes it really , really interesting .
Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves , it 'll tell us who we are .
Rarely , you know : evolution did this and Copernicus did this , where we have a new understanding of who we are .
And after all , we are our brains . My brain is talking to your brain .
Our bodies are hanging along for the ride , but my brain is talking to your brain .
And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive , we really understand what brains are .
Another thing is sometimes science leads to really big societal benefits and technologies , or businesses , or whatever , that come out of it . And this is one , too , because when we understand how brains work , we 're going to be able to build intelligent machines , and I think that 's actually a good thing on the whole , and it 's going to have tremendous benefits to society , just like a fundamental technology .
So why don 't we have a good theory of brains ?
And people have been working on it for 100 years .
Well , let 's first take a look at what normal science looks like .
This is normal science .
Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists .
And so the theorist guys say , well , I think this is what 's going on , and the experimentalist says , no , you 're wrong .
And it goes back and forth , you know ?
This works in physics . This works in geology . But if this is normal science , what does neuroscience look like ? This is what neuroscience looks like .
We have this mountain of data , which is anatomy , physiology and behavior .
You can 't imagine how much detail we know about brains .
There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year , and every one of them is doing research in brains .
A lot of data . But there 's no theory . There 's a little , wimpy box on top there .
And theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way in the neurosciences .
And it 's a real shame . Now why has this come about ?
If you ask neuroscientists , why is this the state of affair , they 'll first of all admit it . But if you ask them , they 'll say , well , there 's various reasons we don 't have a good brain theory .
Some people say , well , we don 't still have enough data , we need to get more information , there 's all these things we don 't know .
Well , I just told you there 's so much data coming out your ears .
We have so much information , we don 't even know how to begin to organize it .
What good is more going to do ?
Maybe we 'll be lucky and discover some magic thing , but I don 't think so .
This is actually a symptom of the fact that we just don 't have a theory .
We don 't need more data -- we need a good theory about it .
Another one is sometimes people say , well , brains are so complex , it 'll take another 50 years .
I even think Chris said something like this yesterday .
I 'm not sure what you said , Chris , but something like , well , it 's one of the most complicated things in the universe . That 's not true .
You 're more complicated than your brain . You 've got a brain .
And it 's also , although the brain looks very complicated , things look complicated until you understand them .
That 's always been the case . And so all we can say , well , my neocortex , which is the part of the brain I 'm interested in , has 30 billion cells .
But , you know what ? It 's very , very regular .
In fact , it looks like it 's the same thing repeated over and over and over again .
It 's not as complex as it looks . That 's not the issue .
Some people say , brains can 't understand brains .
Very Zen-like . Whoo .
You know , it sounds good , but why ? I mean , what 's the point ?
It 's just a bunch of cells . You understand your liver .
It 's got a lot of cells in it too , right ?
So , you know , I don 't think there 's anything to that .
And finally , some people say , well , you know , I don 't feel like a bunch of cells , you know . I 'm conscious .
I 've got this experience , I 'm in the world , you know .
I can 't be just a bunch of cells . Well , you know , people used to believe there was a life force to be living , and we now know that 's really not true at all .
And there 's really no evidence that says -- well , other than people just have disbelief that cells can do what they do .
And so , if some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism , some really smart people , too , but we can reject all that .
No , I 'm going to tell you there 's something else , and it 's really fundamental , and this is what it is : there 's another reason why we don 't have a good brain theory , and it 's because we have an intuitive , strongly-held , but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer .
There 's something we believe that just , it 's obvious , but it 's wrong .
Now , there 's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is , I 'm going to tell you a bit about the history of it in science .
You look at some other scientific revolutions , and this case , I 'm talking about the solar system , that 's Copernicus , Darwin 's evolution , and tectonic plates , that 's Wegener .
They all have a lot in common with brain science .
First of all , they had a lot of unexplained data . A lot of it .
But it got more manageable once they had a theory .
The best minds were stumped -- really , really smart people .
We 're not smarter now than they were then .
It just turns out it 's really hard to think of things , but once you 've thought of them , it 's kind of easy to understand it .
My daughters understood these three theories in their basic framework by the time they were in kindergarten .
And now it 's not that hard , you know , here 's the apple , here 's the orange , you know , the Earth goes around , that kind of stuff .
Finally , another thing is the answer was there all along , but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing , and that 's the thing .
It was an intuitive , strong-held belief that was wrong .
In the case of the solar system , the idea that the Earth is spinning and the surface of the Earth is going like a thousand miles an hour , and the Earth is going through the solar system about a million miles an hour .
This is lunacy . We all know the Earth isn 't moving .
Do you feel like you 're moving a thousand miles an hour ?
Of course not . You know , and someone who said , well , it was spinning around in space and it 's so huge , they would lock you up , and that 's what they did back then .
So it was intuitive and obvious . Now what about evolution ?
Evolution 's the same thing . We taught our kids , well , the Bible says , you know , God created all these species , cats are cats , dogs are dogs , people are people , plants are plants , they don 't change .
Noah put them on the Ark in that order , blah , blah , blah . And , you know , the fact is , if you believe in evolution , we all have a common ancestor , and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby .
This is what evolution tells us . And , it 's true . It 's kind of unbelievable .
And the same thing about tectonic plates , you know ?
All the mountains and the continents are kind of floating around on top of the Earth , you know ? It 's like , it doesn 't make any sense .
So what is the intuitive , but incorrect assumption , that 's kept us from understanding brains ?
Now I 'm going to tell it to you , and it 's going to seem obvious that that is correct , and that 's the point , right ? Then I 'm going to have to make an argument why you 're incorrect about the other assumption .
The intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior , that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently , and I 'm going to tell you that 's wrong .
What it is is intelligence is defined by prediction .
And I 'm going to work you through this in a few slides here , give you an example of what this means . Here 's a system .
Engineers like to look at systems like this . Scientists like to look at systems like this .
They say , well , we have a thing in a box , and we have its inputs and its outputs .
The AI people said , well , the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that 's equivalent to a brain , and we 'll feed it some inputs and we 'll get it to do something , have some behavior .
And Alan Turing defined the Turing test , which is essentially saying , we 'll know if something 's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human .
A behavioral metric of what intelligence is , and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time .
Reality though , I call it real intelligence .
Real intelligence is built on something else .
We experience the world through a sequence of patterns , and we store them , and we recall them . And when we recall them , we match them up against reality , and we 're making predictions all the time .
It 's an eternal metric . There 's an eternal metric about us sort of saying , do we understand the world ? Am I making predictions ? And so on .
You 're all being intelligent right now , but you 're not doing anything .
Maybe you 're scratching yourself , or picking your nose , I don 't know , but you 're not doing anything right now , but you 're being intelligent ; you 're understanding what I 'm saying .
Because you 're intelligent and you speak English , you know what word is at the end of this -- sentence .
The word came into you , and you 're making these predictions all the time .
And then , what I 'm saying is , is that the eternal prediction is the output in the neocortex .
And that somehow , prediction leads to intelligent behavior .
And here 's how that happens . Let 's start with a non-intelligent brain .
Well I 'll argue a non-intelligent brain , we got hold of an old brain , and we 're going to say it 's like a non-mammal , like a reptile , so I 'll say , an alligator ; we have an alligator .
And the alligator has some very sophisticated senses .
It 's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on , a mouth and a nose . It has very complex behavior .
It can run and hide . It has fears and emotions . It can eat you , you know .
It can attack . It can do all kinds of stuff .
But we don 't consider the alligator very intelligent , not like in a human sort of way .
But it has all this complex behavior already .
Now , in evolution , what happened ?
First thing that happened in evolution with mammals , we started to develop a thing called the neocortex .
And I 'm going to represent the neocortex here , by this box that 's sticking on top of the old brain .
Neocortex means new layer . It is a new layer on top of your brain .
If you don 't know it , it 's the wrinkly thing on the top of your head that , it 's got wrinkly because it got shoved in there and doesn 't fit .
No , really , that 's what it is . It 's about the size of a table napkin .
And it doesn 't fit , so it gets all wrinkly . Now look at how I 've drawn this here .
The old brain is still there . You still have that alligator brain .
You do . It 's your emotional brain .
It 's all those things , and all those gut reactions you have .
And on top of it , we have this memory system called the neocortex .
And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain .
And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain , it also goes up into the neocortex . And the neocortex is just memorizing .
It 's sitting there saying , ah , I 'm going to memorize all the things that are going on : where I 've been , people I 've seen , things I 've heard , and so on .
And in the future , when it sees something similar to that again , so in a similar environment , or the exact same environment , it 'll play it back . It 'll start playing it back .
Oh , I 've been here before . And when you 've been here before , this happened next . It allows you to predict the future .
It allows you to , literally it feeds back the signals into your brain ; they 'll let you see what 's going to happen next , will let you hear the word " sentence " before I said it .
And it 's this feeding back into the old brain that 'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions .
This is the most important slide of my talk , so I 'll dwell on it a little bit .
And so , all the time you say , oh , I can predict the things .
And if you 're a rat and you go through a maze , and then you learn the maze , the next time you 're in a maze , you have the same behavior , but all of a sudden , you 're smarter because you say , oh , I recognize this maze , I know which way to go , I 've been here before , I can envision the future . And that 's what it 's doing .
In humans -- by the way , this is true for all mammals ; it 's true for other mammals -- and in humans , it got a lot worse .
In humans , we actually developed the front part of the neocortex called the anterior part of the neocortex . And nature did a little trick .
It copied the posterior part , the back part , which is sensory , and put it in the front part .
And humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front , but we use it for motor control .
So we are now able to make very sophisticated motor planning , things like that .
I don 't have time to get into all this , but if you want to understand how a brain works , you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works , how it is we store patterns and make predictions .
So let me give you a few examples of predictions .
I already said the word " sentence . " In music , if you 've heard a song before , if you heard Jill sing those songs before , when she sings them , the next note pops into your head already -- you anticipate it as you 're going . If it was an album of music , the end of one album , the next song pops into your head .
And these things happen all the time . You 're making these predictions .
I have this thing called the altered door thought experiment .
And the altered door thought experiment says , you have a door at home , and when you 're here , I 'm changing it , I 've got a guy back at your house right now , moving the door around , and they 're going to take your doorknob and move it over two inches .
And when you go home tonight , you 're going to put your hand out there , and you 're going to reach for the doorknob and you 're going to notice it 's in the wrong spot , and you 'll go , whoa , something happened .
It may take a second to figure out what it was , but something happened .
Now I could change your doorknob in other ways .
I can make it larger or smaller , I can change its brass to silver , I could make it a lever . I can change your door , put colors on ; I can put windows in . I can change a thousand things about your door , and in the two seconds you take to open your door , you 're going to notice that something has changed .
Now , the engineering approach to this , the AI approach to this , is to build a door database . It has all the door attributes .
And as you go up to the door , you know , let 's check them off one at time .
Door , door , door , you know , color , you know what I 'm saying .
We don 't do that . Your brain doesn 't do that .
What your brain is doing is making constant predictions all the time about what is going to happen in your environment .
As I put my hand on this table , I expect to feel it stop .
When I walk , every step , if I missed it by an eighth of an inch , I 'll know something has changed .
You 're constantly making predictions about your environment .
I 'll talk about vision here briefly . This is a picture of a woman .
And when you look at people , your eyes are caught over at two to three times a second .
You 're not aware of this , but your eyes are always moving .
And so when you look at someone 's face , you 'd typically go from eye to eye to eye to nose to mouth .
Now , when your eye moves from eye to eye , if there was something else there like , a nose , you 'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be , and you 'd go , oh shit , you know -- There 's something wrong about this person .
And that 's because you 're making a prediction .
It 's not like you just look over there and say , what am I seeing now ?
A nose , that 's okay . No , you have an expectation of what you 're going to see .
Every single moment . And finally , let 's think about how we test intelligence .
We test it by prediction . What is the next word in this , you know ?
This is to this as this is to this . What is the next number in this sentence ?
Here 's three visions of an object .
What 's the fourth one ? That 's how we test it . It 's all about prediction .
So what is the recipe for brain theory ?
First of all , we have to have the right framework .
And the framework is a memory framework , not a computation or behavior framework . It 's a memory framework .
How do you store and recall these sequences or patterns ? It 's spatio-temporal patterns .
Then , if in that framework , you take a bunch of theoreticians .
Now biologists generally are not good theoreticians .
It 's not always true , but in general , there 's not a good history of theory in biology .
So I found the best people to work with are physicists , engineers and mathematicians , who tend to think algorithmically .
Then they have to learn the anatomy , and they 've got to learn the physiology .
You have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms .
Anyone who gets up and tells you their theory about how the brain works and doesn 't tell you exactly how it 's working in the brain and how the wiring works in the brain , it is not a theory .
And that 's what we 're doing at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute .
I would love to have more time to tell you we 're making fantastic progress in this thing , and I expect to be back up on this stage , maybe this will be some other time in the not too distant future and tell you about it .
I 'm really , really excited . This is not going to take 50 years at all .
So what will brain theory look like ?
First of all , it 's going to be a theory about memory .
Not like computer memory . It 's not at all like computer memory .
It 's very , very different . And it 's a memory of these very high-dimensional patterns , like the things that come from your eyes .
It 's also memory of sequences .
You cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence .
A song must be heard in sequence over time , and you must play it back in sequence over time .
And these sequences are auto-associatively recalled , so if I see something , I hear something , it reminds me of it , and then it plays back automatically .
It 's an automatic playback . And prediction of future inputs is the desired output .
And as I said , the theory must be biologically accurate , it must be testable , and you must be able to build it .
If you don 't build it , you don 't understand it . So , one more slide here .
What is this going to result in ? Are we going to really build intelligent machines ?
Absolutely . And it 's going to be different than people think .
No doubt that it 's going to happen , in my mind .
First of all , it 's going to be built up , we 're going to build the stuff out of silicon .
The same techniques we use for building silicon computer memories , we can use for here .
But they 're very different types of memories .
And we 're going to attach these memories to sensors , and the sensors will experience real-live , real-world data , and these things are going to learn about their environment .
Now it 's very unlikely the first things you 're going to see are like robots .
Not that robots aren 't useful and people can build robots .
But the robotics part is the hardest part . That 's the old brain . That 's really hard .
The new brain is actually kind of easier than the old brain .
So the first thing we 're going to do are the things that don 't require a lot of robotics .
So you 're not going to see C-3PO .
You 're going to more see things like , you know , intelligent cars that really understand what traffic is and what driving is and have learned that certain types of cars with the blinkers on for half a minute probably aren 't going to turn , things like that .
We can also do intelligent security systems .
Anywhere where we 're basically using our brain , but not doing a lot of mechanics .
Those are the things that are going to happen first .
But ultimately , the world 's the limit here .
I don 't know how this is going to turn out .
I know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor and if you talk to them , they knew what they were doing was really significant , but they didn 't really know what was going to happen .
They couldn 't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff .
They just knew like , hey , they were going to build calculators and traffic light controllers . But it 's going to be big .
In the same way , this is like brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology , and it 's going to lead to very unbelievable changes in the next 100 years .
And I 'm most excited about how we 're going to use them in science .
So I think that 's all my time , I 'm over it , and I 'm going to end my talk right there .
John Bohannon : Dance vs. powerpoint , a modest proposal
Use dancers instead of powerpoint . That 's science writer John Bohannon 's " modest proposal . " In this spellbinding choreographed talk he makes his case by example , aided by dancers from Black Label Movement . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Good afternoon .
As you 're all aware , we face difficult economic times .
I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden .
This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT .
He was struggling to explain something to me : a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter .
Now he confused me from the very start , because light doesn 't cool things down .
It makes it hotter . It 's happening right now .
The reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons , and they 're moving randomly through the space , near the speed of light .
All of them are different colors , they 're rippling with different frequencies , and they 're bouncing off every surface , including me , and some of those are flying directly into your eyes , and that 's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here .
Now a laser is different .
It also uses photons , but they 're all synchronized , and if you focus them into a beam , what you have is an incredibly useful tool .
The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye , you can use it to store massive amounts of data , and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain .
First you trap atoms in a special bottle .
It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment .
And the atoms themselves are quite violent , but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency , an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down .
Little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero .
Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough , something truly bizarre happens .
It 's no longer a solid , a liquid or a gas .
It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid .
The atoms lose their individual identity , and the rules from the quantum world take over , and that 's what gives superfluids such spooky properties .
For example , if you shine light through a superfluid , it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour .
Another spooky property is that it flows with absolutely no viscosity or friction , so if you were to take the lid off that bottle , it won 't stay inside .
A thin film will creep up the inside wall , flow over the top and right out the outside .
Now of course , the moment that it does hit the outside environment , and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree , it immediately turns back into normal matter .
Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we 've ever discovered .
And this is the great pleasure of science : the defeat of our intuition through experimentation .
But the experiment is not the end of the story , because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people .
I have a Ph.D in molecular biology .
I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about .
So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment , it seemed like the more he said , the less I understood .
Because if you 're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea , to really capture its essence , the fewer words you use , the better .
In fact , the ideal may be to use no words at all .
I remember thinking , my friend could have explained that entire experiment with a dance .
Of course , there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them .
Now , the idea is not as crazy as it sounds .
I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D.
Instead of explaining their research with words , scientists have to explain it with dance .
Now surprisingly , it seems to work .
Dance really can make science easier to understand .
But don 't take my word for it .
Go on the Internet and search for " Dance Your Ph.D. "
There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you .
The most surprising thing that I 've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research .
For example , at the University of Minnesota , there 's a biomedical engineer named David Odde , and he works with dancers to study how cells move .
They do it by changing their shape .
When a chemical signal washes up on one side , it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side , because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment .
So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions .
But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside , because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers , and those fibers are constantly falling apart .
But just as quickly as they explode , more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer , so it 's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same .
Now , David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab , but before he does that , he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place .
It 's basically efficient brainstorming , and when I visited David to learn about his research , he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method : PowerPoint .
And this brings me to my modest proposal .
I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy .
Now it does depend on how you measure it , of course , but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day .
Now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars , and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time , and given that there are some apparently 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day , that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars .
Of course , that 's just the time we 're losing sitting through presentations .
There are other costs , because PowerPoint is a tool , and like any tool , it can and will be abused .
To borrow a concept from my country 's CIA , it helps you to soften up your audience .
It distracts them with pretty pictures , irrelevant data .
It allows you to create the illusion of competence , the illusion of simplicity , and most destructively , the illusion of understanding .
So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt .
Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money .
One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts .
For example , our National Endowment for the Arts , with its $ 150 million budget , slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent .
One certainly can 't argue with those numbers .
However , once we eliminate public funding for the arts , there will be some drawbacks .
The artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed .
Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution , and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods .
All of this could wipe out the savings we 're hoping to make in the first place .
I shall now , therefore , humbly propose my own thoughts , which I hope will not be liable to the least objection .
Once we eliminate public funding for the artists , let 's put them back to work by using them instead of PowerPoint .
As a test case , I propose we start with American dancers .
After all , they are the most perishable of their kind , prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system .
Rather than dancing our Ph.Ds , we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems .
Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank .
It 's sure to help .
Of course someday , in the deep future , a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented , rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric .
However , I trust that by that day , we shall have passed this present financial calamity .
Perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury of just sitting in an audience with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion .
Cynthia Breazeal : The rise of personal robots
Cynthia Breazeal wonders : Why can we use robots on Mars , but not in our living rooms ? The key , she says , is in training robots to interact with people . Now she dreams up and builds robots that teach , learn -- and play . Watch for amazing demo footage of a new interactive game for kids .
Ever since I was a little girl seeing " Star Wars " for the first time , I 've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots .
And as a little girl , I loved the idea of a robot that interacted with us much more like a helpful , trusted sidekick -- something that would delight us , enrich our lives and help us save a galaxy or two .
I knew robots like that didn 't really exist , but I knew I wanted to build them .
So 20 years pass -- I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence , the year is 1997 , and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars .
But robots are still not in our home , ironically .
And I remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case .
But one really struck me .
Robotics had really been about interacting with things , not with people -- certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives .
For me , that was the white space ; that 's what robots could not do yet .
And so that year , I started to build this robot , Kismet , the world 's first social robot .
Three years later -- a lot of programming , working with other graduate students in the lab -- Kismet was ready to start interacting with people .
Scientist : I want to show you something .
Kismet : Scientist : This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me .
Kismet : Scientist : Yeah , look , it 's got a little blue light in it too .
I almost lost it this week .
Cynthia Breazeal : So Kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child , which I assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind .
It didn 't speak language , but it didn 't matter .
This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us -- and with that , the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots .
So over the past several years I 've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots , now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students .
And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo .
We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio .
And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo .
This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo , introducing Leo to a new object .
And because it 's new , Leo doesn 't really know what to make of it .
But sort of like us , he can actually learn about it from watching Matt 's reaction .
Matt Berlin : Hello , Leo .
Leo , this is Cookie Monster .
Can you find Cookie Monster ?
Leo , Cookie Monster is very bad .
He 's very bad , Leo .
Cookie Monster is very , very bad .
He 's a scary monster .
He wants to get your cookies .
CB : All right , so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start , but they get along great now .
So what I 've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology , where it 's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality .
And with that shift in thinking , we can now start to imagine new questions , new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise .
But what do I mean when I say " push our social buttons ? "
Well , one of the things that we 've learned is that , if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language , the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use -- like Nexi , our humanoid robot , is doing here -- what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people .
People use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is , how likable , how engaging , how trustworthy .
It turns out it 's the same for robots .
It 's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior .
To answer questions like , how is it that , from a brief encounter , we 're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is ?
Mimicry 's believed to play a role , but how ?
Is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters ?
It turns out it 's really hard to learn this or understand this from watching people because when we interact we do all of these cues automatically .
We can 't carefully control them because they 're subconscious for us .
But with the robot , you can .
And so in this video here -- this is a video taken from David DeSteno 's lab at Northeastern University .
He 's a psychologist we 've been collaborating with .
There 's actually a scientist carefully controlling Nexi 's cues to be able to study this question .
And the bottom line is -- the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot .
So given that key insight , we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots .
For instance , if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues , maybe they would be a cool , new communication technology .
So imagine this : What about a robot accessory for your cellphone ?
You call your friend , she puts her handset in a robot , and , bam ! You 're a MeBot -- you can make eye contact , you can talk with your friends , you can move around , you can gesture -- maybe the next best thing to really being there , or is it ?
To explore this question , my student , Siggy Adalgeirsson , did a study where we brought human participants , people , into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator .
The task involved things like looking at a set of objects on the table , discussing them in terms of their importance and relevance to performing a certain task -- this ended up being a survival task -- and then rating them in terms of how valuable and important they thought they were .
The remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants .
The first was just the screen .
This is just like video conferencing today .
The next was to add mobility -- so , have the screen on a mobile base .
This is like , if you 're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today -- this is mirroring that situation .
And then the fully expressive MeBot .
So after the interaction , we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology , with a remote collaborator through this technology , in a number of different ways .
We looked at psychological involvement -- how much empathy did you feel for the other person ?
We looked at overall engagement .
We looked at their desire to cooperate .
And this is what we see when they use just the screen .
It turns out , when you add mobility -- the ability to roll around the table -- you get a little more of a boost .
And you get even more of a boost when you add the full expression .
So it seems like this physical , social embodiment actually really makes a difference .
Now let 's try to put this into a little bit of context .
Today we know that families are living further and further apart , and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance .
For me , I have three young boys , and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents .
But my parents live thousands of miles away , so they just don 't get to see each other that often .
We try Skype , we try phone calls , but my boys are little -- they don 't really want to talk ; they want to play .
So I love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology .
I imagine a time not too far from now -- my mom can go to her computer , open up a browser and jack into a little robot .
And as grandma-bot , she can now play , really play , with my sons , with her grandsons , in the real world with his real toys .
I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters , with their friends , and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house , like sharing a bedtime story .
And through this technology , being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren 's lives in a way that 's not possible today .
Let 's think about some other domains , like maybe health .
So in the United States today , over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese , and now it 's a big problem with our children as well .
And we know that as you get older in life , if you 're obese when you 're younger , that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life , but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system .
But if robots can be engaging , if we like to cooperate with robots , if robots are persuasive , maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program , maybe they can help you manage your weight .
Sort of like a digital Jiminy -- as in the well-known fairy tale -- a kind of friendly , supportive presence that 's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits .
So we actually explored this idea in our lab .
This is a robot , Autom .
Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work .
And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach .
It had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do .
It could make eye contact with you .
It could share information looking down at a screen .
You 'd use a screen interface to enter information , like how many calories you ate that day , how much exercise you got .
And then it could help track that for you .
And the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth .
And it would build a working alliance with you through that dialogue .
It could help you set goals and track your progress , and it would help motivate you .
So an interesting question is , does the social embodiment really matter ? Does it matter that it 's a robot ?
Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters ?
To explore that question , we did a study in the Boston area where we put one of three interventions in people 's homes for a period of several weeks .
One case was the robot you saw there , Autom .
Another was a computer that ran the same touch-screen interface , ran exactly the same dialogues .
The quality of advice was identical .
And the third was just a pen and paper log , because that 's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program .
So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost , but really how long they interacted with the robot .
Because the challenge is not losing weight , it 's actually keeping it off .
And the longer you could interact with one of these interventions , well that 's indicative , potentially , of longer-term success .
So the first thing I want to look at is how long , how long did people interact with these systems .
It turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more , even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer .
When it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance , people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more .
And when you look at emotional engagement , it was completely different .
People would name the robots .
They would dress the robots .
And even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study , they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots .
They didn 't do this with a computer .
The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children 's media .
We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today , whether it 's television or computer games or whatnot .
My sons , they love the screen . They love the screen .
But I want them to play ; as a mom , I want them to play , like , real-world play .
And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing what 's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child , where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play .
So here 's the first exploration of this idea , where characters can be physical or virtual , and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back .
I like to think of this as the Atari Pong of this blended-reality play .
But we can push this idea further .
What if -- Nathan : Here it comes . Yay !
CB : -- the character itself could come into your world ?
It turns out that kids love it when the character becomes real and enters into their world .
And when it 's in their world , they can relate to it and play with it in a way that 's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen .
Another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities .
So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world .
So here , Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2 .
You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world .
So they are now sending the character back into that world .
And now it 's got number power .
And then finally , what I 've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids , where they really feel like they are part of that story , a part of that experience .
And I really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching " Star Wars . "
But I want to do more than that .
I actually want them to create those experiences .
I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own .
So we 've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them .
I really want to come up with new ways of children 's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation .
I think that 's very , very important .
So this is a new project .
We 've invited a lot of kids into this space , and they think it 's pretty cool .
But I can tell you , the thing that they love the most is the robot .
What they care about is the robot .
Robots touch something deeply human within us .
And so whether they 're helping us to become creative and innovative , or whether they 're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance , or whether they are our trusted sidekick who 's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves , for me , robots are all about people .
Thank you .
Charles Limb : Building the musical muscle
Charles Limb performs cochlear implantation , a surgery that treats hearing loss and can restore the ability to hear speech . But as a musician too , Limb thinks about what the implants lack : They don 't let you fully experience music yet . At TEDMED , Limb reviews the state of the art and the way forward .
Now when we think of our senses , we don 't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved , from a biological perspective .
We don 't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses , but that 's probably why our senses really evolved -- to keep us safe , to allow us to live .
Really when we think of our senses , or when we think of the loss of the sense , we really think about something more like this : the ability to touch something luxurious , to taste something delicious , to smell something fragrant , to see something beautiful .
This is what we want out of our senses .
We want beauty ; we don 't just want function .
And when it comes to sensory restoration , we 're still very far away from being able to provide beauty .
And that 's what I 'd like to talk to you a little bit about today .
Likewise for hearing .
When we think about why we hear , we don 't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren , although clearly that 's an important thing .
Really what we want to hear is music .
So many of you know that that 's Beethoven 's Seventh Symphony .
Many of you know that he was deaf , or near profoundly deaf , when he wrote that .
Now I 'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music .
Music is just one of the strangest things that there is .
It 's acoustic vibrations in the air , little waves of energy in the air that tickle our eardrum .
Somehow in tickling our eardrum that transmits energy down our hearing bones , which get converted to a fluid impulse inside the cochlea and then somehow converted into an electrical signal in our auditory nerves that somehow wind up in our brains as a perception of a song or a beautiful piece of music .
That process is entirely abstract and very , very unusual .
And we could discuss that topic alone for days to really try to figure out , how is it that we hear something that 's emotional from something that starts out as a vibration in the air ?
Turns out that if you have hearing loss , most people that lose their hearing lose it at what 's called the cochlea , the inner ear .
And it 's at the hair cell level that they do this .
Now if you had to pick a sense to lose , I have to be very honest with you and say , we 're better at restoring hearing than we are at restoring any sense that there is .
In fact , nothing even actually comes close to our ability to restore hearing .
And as a physician and a surgeon , I can confidently tell my patients that if you had to pick a sense to lose , we are the furthest along medically and surgically with hearing .
As a musician , I can tell you that if I had to have a cochlear implant , I 'd be heartbroken . I 'd just be plainly heartbroken , because I know that music would never sound the same to me .
Now this is a video that I 'm going to show you of a girl who 's born deaf .
She 's in a very supportive environment .
Her mother 's doing everything she can .
Okay , play that video please .
Mother : That 's an owl .
Owl , yeah .
Owl . Owl .
Yeah .
Baby . Baby .
You want it ?
Charles Limb : Now despite everything going for this child in terms of family support and simple infused learning , there is a limitation to what a child who 's deaf , an infant who was born deaf , has in this world in terms of social , educational , vocational opportunities .
I 'm not saying that they can 't live a beautiful , wonderful life .
I 'm saying that they 're going to face obstacles that most people who have normal hearing will not have to face .
Now hearing loss and the treatment for hearing loss has really evolved in the past 200 years .
I mean literally , they used to do things like stick ear-shaped objects onto your ears and stick funnels in .
And that was the best you could do for hearing loss .
Back then you couldn 't even look at the eardrum .
So it 's not too surprising that there were no good treatments for hearing loss .
And now today we have the modern multi-channel cochlear implant , which is an outpatient procedure .
It 's surgically placed inside the inner ear .
It takes about an hour and a half to two hours , depending on where it 's done , under general anesthesia .
And in the end , you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea .
Now actually , this is quite crude in comparison to our regular inner ear .
But here is that same girl who is implanted now .
This is her 10 years later .
And this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor , Dr. John Niparko , who implanted her .
If we could play this video please .
John Niparko : So you 've written two books ?
Girl : I have written two books .
Girl : No , the other one was a book .
JN : Well this book has seven chapters , and the last chapter is entitled " The Good Things About Being Deaf . "
Do you remember writing that chapter ?
Girl : Yes I do . I remember writing every chapter .
JN : Yeah .
Girl : Well sometimes my sister can be kind of annoying .
So it comes in handy to not be annoyed by her .
JN : I see . And who is that ?
Girl : Holly .
Mother : Her sister . Girl : My sister .
JN : And how can you avoid being annoyed by her ?
Girl : I just take off my CI , and I don 't hear anything .
It comes in handy .
JN : So you don 't want to hear everything that 's out there ?
Girl : No .
CL : And so she 's phenomenal .
And there 's no way that you can 't look at that as an overwhelming success .
It is . It 's a huge success story in modern medicine .
However , despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language , you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can 't hear music almost at all .
In fact , most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad .
And so when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody 's life , we have a long way to go when it comes to audition .
Now there are a lot of reasons for that .
I mentioned earlier the fact that music is a different capacity because it 's abstract .
Language is very different . Language is very precise .
In fact , the whole reason we use it is because it has semantic-specificity .
When you say a word , what you care is that word was perceived correctly .
You don 't care that the word sounded pretty when it was spoken .
Music is entirely different .
When you hear music , if it doesn 't sound good , what 's the point ?
There 's really very little point in listening to music when it doesn 't sound good to you .
The acoustics of music are much harder than those of language .
And you can see on this figure , that the frequency range and the decibel range , the dynamic range of music is far more heterogeneous .
So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant , what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission .
Because I always view music as the pinnacle of hearing .
If you can hear music , you should be able to hear anything .
Now the problems begin first with pitch perception .
I mean , most of us know that pitch is a fundamental building block of music .
And without the ability to perceive pitch well , music and melody is a very difficult thing to do -- forget about a harmony and things like that .
Now this is a MIDI arrangement of Rachmaninoff 's Prelude .
Now if we could just play this .
Okay , now if we consider that in a cochlear implant patient pitch perception could be off as much as two octaves , let 's see what happens here when we randomize this to within one semitone .
We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users .
Go ahead and play this one .
Now my goal in showing you that is to show you that music is not robust to degradation .
You distort it a little bit , especially in terms of pitch , and you 've changed it .
And it might be that you kind of like that .
That 's kind of hypnotic .
But it certainly wasn 't the way the music was intended .
And you 're not hearing the same thing that most people who have normal hearing are hearing .
Now the other issue comes with , not just the ability to tell pitches apart , but the ability to tell sounds apart .
Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument .
If we could play these two sound clips in succession .
The trumpet .
And the second one .
That 's a violin .
These have similar wave forms . They 're both sustained instruments .
Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments .
The sound quality , or the sound of the sound is how I like to describe timbre , tone color -- they cannot tell these things whatsoever .
This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth .
Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech , have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody , what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech .
You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech , they were designed for speech .
But actually if you look at melody , what you find is that there 's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls .
So for whatever reason , this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception .
Now the next question is , well how does it really sound ?
Now we 've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users .
I 'm going to play you two clips of Usher , one which is normal and one which has almost no high frequencies , almost no low frequencies and not even that many mid frequencies .
Go ahead and play that .
I had patients tell me that those sound the same .
They cannot differentiate sound quality differences between those two clips .
Again , we are very , very far away in just getting to where we want to get to .
Now the question comes to mind : Is there any hope ?
And yes , there is hope .
Now I don 't know if anybody knows who this is .
This is ... does somebody know ?
This is Beethoven .
Now why would we know what Beethoven 's skull looks like ?
Because his grave was exhumed .
And it turns out that his temporal bones were harvested when he died to try to look at the cause of his deafness , which is why he has molding clay and his skull is bulging out on the side there .
But Beethoven composed music long after he lost his hearing .
What that suggests is that , even in the case of hearing loss , the capacity for music remains .
The brains remain hardwired for music .
I 've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I 've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants .
This is a cat that 's been trained to respond to a trumpet for food .
Text : Beethoven doesn 't excite her .
The " 1812 Overture " isn 't worth waking for .
But she jumps to action when called to duty !
CL : Now I 'm not suggesting that the cat is hearing that trumpet the way we 're hearing it .
I 'm suggesting that with training you can imbue a musical sound with significance , even in a cat .
If we were to direct efforts towards training cochlear implant users to hear music -- because right now there 's virtually no effort put towards that , no rehabilitative strategies , very little in the way of technological advances to actually improve music -- we would come a long way .
Now I want to show you one last video .
And this is of a student of mine named Joseph who I had the good fortune to work with for three years in my lab .
He 's deaf , and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant .
And here 's a video of Joseph .
Joseph : I was born in 1986 .
And at about four months old , I was diagnosed with profoundly severe hearing loss .
Not long after , I was fitted with hearing aids .
But although these hearing aids were the most powerful hearing aids on the market at the time , they weren 't very helpful .
So as a result , I had to rely on lip reading a lot , and I couldn 't really hear what people were saying .
When I was 12 years old , I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation .
And not long after I got my cochlear implant , I started learning how to play piano .
And it was absolutely wonderful .
Since then , I 've never looked back .
CL : Joseph is phenomenal . He 's brilliant .
He is now a medical student at Yale University , and he 's contemplating a surgical career -- one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery .
There are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere .
And this is really unheard of stuff , and this is all because of this technology .
And the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain .
Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant , because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time .
You don 't actually have to hear it .
I know he doesn 't hear well , because I 've heard him do Karaoke .
And it 's one of the most awful things -- heartwarming , but awful .
And so there is certainly a lot of hope , but there 's a lot more that needs to be done .
So I just want to conclude with the following words .
When it comes to restoration of hearing , we have certainly come a long way , a remarkably long way .
And we have a much longer way to go when it comes to the idea of restoring perfect hearing .
And let me tell you right now , it 's fine that we would all be very happy with speech .
But I tell you , if we lost our hearing , if anyone here suddenly lost your hearing , you would want perfect hearing back .
You wouldn 't want decent hearing , you would want perfect hearing .
Restoration of basic sensory function is critical .
And I don 't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function .
But it 's really restoration of the ability to perceive beauty where we can get inspiring .
And I don 't think that we should give up on beauty .
And I want to thank you for your time .
Michael Green : Why we should build wooden skyscrapers
Building a skyscraper ? Forget about steel and concrete , says architect Michael Green , and build it out of … wood . As he details in this intriguing talk , it 's not only possible to build safe wooden structures up to 30 stories tall , it 's necessary .
This is my grandfather .
And this is my son .
My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy , and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something , honor that tree 's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can .
My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world , sometimes just a small block of wood , if you stack it up tall , actually is an incredibly inspiring thing .
These are my buildings .
I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York .
And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials , depending on where we are .
But wood is the material that I love the most , and I 'm going to tell you the story about wood .
And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood , I notice they react completely differently .
I 've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column , but I 've actually seen that happen in a wood building .
I 've actually seen how people touch the wood , and I think there 's a reason for it .
Just like snowflakes , no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth .
That 's a wonderful thing .
I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings .
It 's Mother Nature 's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment .
Now , I live in Vancouver , near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall .
Down the coast here in California , the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall .
But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth .
Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places , and that 's true here in the United States .
Now there are exceptions , but there needs to be some exceptions , and things are going to change , I 'm hoping .
And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities , and that number is going to grow to 75 percent .
Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big , and I think there 's a role for wood to play in cities .
And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today , over the next 20 years , will need a new home .
That 's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years .
Now , one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum .
That 's one billion people in the world live in slums .
A hundred million people in the world are homeless .
The scale of the challenge for architects is to find a solution to house these people .
But the challenge is , as we move to cities , cities are built in these two materials , steel and concrete , and they 're great materials .
They 're the materials of the last century .
But they 're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process .
Steel represents about three percent of man 's greenhouse gas emissions , and concrete is over five percent .
So if you think about that , eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone .
We don 't think about it a lot , and unfortunately , we actually don 't even think about buildings , I think , as much as we should .
This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases .
Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry , and if we look at energy , it 's the same story .
You 'll notice that transportation 's sort of second down that list , but that 's the conversation we mostly hear about .
And although a lot of that is about energy , it 's also so much about carbon .
The problem I see is that , ultimately , the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home , and climate change , are a head-on collision about to happen , or already happening .
That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways , and I think wood is going to be part of that solution , and I 'm going to tell you the story of why .
As an architect , wood is the only material , big material , that I can build with that 's already grown by the power of the sun .
When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide , and it dies and it falls to the forest floor , it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground .
If it burns in a forest fire , it 's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well .
But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy , it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration .
One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide .
Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage .
Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things .
So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food , and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes .
Now , how are we going to do that when we 're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories ?
We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger , and what we 've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood .
We 've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it , and we 've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use , and we call them mass timber panels .
These are panels made with young trees , small growth trees , small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous : eight feet wide , 64 feet long , and of various thicknesses .
The way I describe this best , I 've found , is to say that we 're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood .
That 's what people jump to as a conclusion .
Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids , and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size , and out of two-by-fours .
But do remember when you were a kid , and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement , and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego , and you were kind of like , " Cool , this is awesome . I can build something really big , and this is going to be great . "
That 's the change .
Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks .
They 're changing the scale of what we can do , and what we 've developed is something we call FFTT , which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to .
This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way , but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world , different architectural styles and characters .
In order for us to build safely , we 've engineered these buildings , actually , to work in a Vancouver context , where we 're a high seismic zone , even at 30 stories tall .
Now obviously , every time I bring this up , people even , you know , here at the conference , say , " Are you serious ? Thirty stories ? How 's that going to happen ? "
And there 's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report .
I 'm just going to focus on a few of them , and let 's start with fire , because I think fire is probably the first one that you 're all thinking about right now .
Fair enough .
And the way I describe it is this .
If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire , it doesn 't happen , right ? We all know that .
But to build a fire , you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up , and eventually you can add the log to the fire , and when you do add the log to the fire , of course , it burns , but it burns slowly .
Well , mass timber panels , these new products that we 're using , are much like the log .
It 's hard to start them on fire , and when they do , they actually burn extraordinarily predictably , and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel .
The next big issue , deforestation .
Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation .
The last thing we want to do is cut down trees .
Or , the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees .
There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly , and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems .
Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation .
In countries with deforestation issues , we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles -- 10- , 12- , 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale .
We 've calculated a 20-story building : We 'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes .
That 's how much it takes .
The carbon story here is a really good one .
If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete , the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide .
If we did it in wood , in this solution , we 'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes , for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes .
That 's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year .
Think back to that three billion people that need a new home , and maybe this is a contributor to reducing .
We 're at the beginning of a revolution , I hope , in the way we build , because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more .
But the challenge is changing society 's perception of possibility , and it 's a huge challenge .
The engineering is , truthfully , the easy part of this .
And the way I describe it is this .
The first skyscraper , technically -- and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall , believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago , and people were terrified to walk underneath this building .
But only four years after it was built , Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower , and as he built the Eiffel Tower , he changed the skylines of the cities of the world , changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago , where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering .
We built this model in New York , actually , as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come , and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like , because the exterior can change .
It 's really just the structure that we 're talking about .
The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university , and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with .
It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent , and we don 't really feel comfortable with it .
But that 's the way it should be , nature 's fingerprints in the built environment .
I 'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment , we call it .
Buildings are starting to go up around the world .
There 's a building in London that 's nine stories , a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11 .
We 're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings , and we 're hoping , and I 'm hoping , that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world 's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future .
That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling , these arbitrary ceilings of height , and allow wood buildings to join the competition .
And I believe the race is ultimately on .
Thank you .
Beardyman : The polyphonic me
Frustrated by not being able to sing two notes at the same time , musical inventor Beardyman built a machine to allow him to create loops and layers from just the sounds he makes with his voice . Given that he can effortlessly conjure the sound of everything from crying babies to buzzing flies , not to mention mimic pretty much any musical instrument imaginable , that 's a lot of different sounds . Sit back and let the wall of sound of this dazzling performance wash over you .
I 'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before : What is possible with the human voice ?
What is possible with the human voice ?
Ooh baby baby baby baby baby baby Yeah .
It was coming straight for me . I had to . It was , yeah .
As you can probably well imagine , I was a strange child .
Because the thing is , I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be .
I was constantly experimenting with these noises .
And I 'm still on that mission .
I 'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make .
And the thing is , I 'm a bit older and wiser now , and I know that there 's some noises I 'll never be able to make because I 'm hemmed in by my physical body , and there 's things it can 't do .
And there 's things that no one 's voice can do .
For example , no one can do two notes at the same time .
You can do two-tone singing , which monks can do , which is like ...
But that 's cheating .
And it hurts your throat .
So there 's things you can 't do , and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me , because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world , but they 're sketches at best , which is what 's annoyed me .
If only , if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it .
So I 've been working with these guys , and we 've made a machine .
We 've made a system which is basically a live production machine , a real-time music production machine , and it enables me to , using nothing but my voice , create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me .
And I 'm going to show you what it can do .
And before I start making noises with it , and using it to manipulate my voice , I want to reiterate that everything that you 're about to hear is being made by my voice .
This system has -- thank you , beautiful assistant -- this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it , so there 's no prerecorded samples of any kind .
So once this thing really gets going , and it really starts to mangle the audio I 'm putting into it , it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice , but it is , so I 'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple .
So the polyphony problem : I 've only got one voice .
How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices The simplest way to do it is something like this .
By dancing . It 's like this .
Thanks .
So that 's probably the easiest way .
But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate , something that you can 't achieve with live looping , there 's other ways to layer your voice up .
There 's things like pitch-shifting , which are awesome , and I 'm going to show you now what that sounds like .
There 's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start , because it 's just fun , so you can clap along if you want .
You don 't have to . It 's fine . Check it out .
I 'm going to lay down a bass sound now .
And now , a rockabilly guitar .
Which is nice . But what if I want to make , say , a -- -- Thanks . What if I want to make , say , a rock organ ?
Is that possible ? Yes , it is , by recording myself like this .
And now I have that , I have that recorded .
Assign it to a keyboard .
So that 's cool .
But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd ?
Impossible , you say . No .
using this machine . It 's really fantastic . Check it out .
So every noise you can hear there is my voice .
I didn 't just trigger something which sounds like that .
There 's no samples . There 's no synthesizers .
That is literally all my voice being manipulated , and when you get to that point , you have to ask , don 't you , what 's the point ?
Why do this ?
Because it 's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd , I suppose , is the easy answer .
But in actual fact , I haven 't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist .
I 've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine .
So with your permission , I 'm going to do some things that are in my mind , and I hope you enjoy them , because they 're rather unusual , especially when you 're doing things which are as unusual as this , it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice , you see .
Like this .
So , loosely defined , that is what 's possible with the human voice .
Thank you very much , ladies and gentlemen .
Lee Cronin : Making matter come alive
Before life existed on Earth , there was just matter , inorganic dead " stuff . " How improbable is it that life arose ? And -- could it use a different type of chemistry ? Using an elegant definition of life , chemist Lee Cronin is exploring this question by attempting to create a fully inorganic cell using a " Lego kit " of inorganic molecules -- no carbon -- that can assemble , replicate and compete .
What I 'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we 're going to make matter come alive .
Now this may seem a bit ambitious , but when you look at yourself , you look at your hands , you realize that you 're alive .
So this is a start .
Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth .
There 's been four billion years of organic , biological life .
And as an inorganic chemist , my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic , living world and the inorganic , dead world .
And what I 'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic , dead matter into living matter , into inorganic biology .
Before we do that , I want to kind of put biology in its place .
And I 'm absolutely enthralled by biology .
I love to do synthetic biology .
I love things that are alive .
I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology .
But within that infrastructure , we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution .
And evolution , although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people , evolution still is a little bit intangible .
And when I talk about Darwinian evolution , I mean one thing and one thing only , and that is survival of the fittest .
And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way .
Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing , and some winning .
So bearing that in mind , as a chemist , I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology : What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution ?
And this seems quite a profound question .
And as a chemist , we 're not used to profound questions every day .
So when I thought about it , then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer .
And in fact , the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is , in fact , a single cell -- a bacteria .
So this raises three really important questions : What is life ?
Is biology special ?
Biologists seem to think so .
Is matter evolvable ?
Now if we answer those questions in reverse order , the third question -- is matter evolvable ? -- if we can answer that , then we 're going to know how special biology is , and maybe , just maybe , we 'll have some idea of what life really is .
So here 's some inorganic life .
This is a dead crystal , and I 'm going to do something to it , and it 's going to become alive .
And you can see , it 's kind of pollinating , germinating , growing .
This is an inorganic tube .
And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago , and they look alive .
Of course , they 're not alive .
It 's a chemistry experiment where I 've made a crystal garden .
But when I saw this , I was really fascinated , because it seemed lifelike .
And as I pause for a few seconds , have a look at the screen .
You can see there 's architecture growing , filling the void .
And this is dead .
So I was positive that , if somehow we can make things mimic life , let 's go one step further .
Let 's see if we can actually make life .
But there 's a problem , because up until maybe a decade ago , we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe .
In fact , we were the only people in the universe .
Now , that 's a bit boring .
So as a chemist , I wanted to say , " Hang on . What is going on here ?
Is life that improbable ? "
And this is really the question .
I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars .
And in fact , let 's take that one step further .
Let 's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe , maybe the physics of life is as well .
And so the problem with chemists -- and this is a massive advantage as well -- is we like to focus on our elements .
In biology , carbon takes center stage .
And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology , then we have all this wonderful diversity of life .
In fact , we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate .
We 're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards .
Well what about matter ?
If we can make matter alive , would we have a matterhazard ?
So think , this is a serious question .
If your pen could replicate , that would be a bit of a problem .
So we have to think differently if we 're going to make stuff come alive .
And we also have to be aware of the issues .
But before we can make life , let 's think for a second what life really is characterized by .
And forgive the complicated diagram .
This is just a collection of pathways in the cell .
And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing .
Synthetic biologists are manipulating it .
Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease .
And you have all these pathways going on at the same time .
You have regulation ; information is transcribed ; catalysts are made ; stuff is happening .
But what does a cell do ?
Well it divides , it competes , it survives .
And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life .
But what else is life characterized by ?
Well , I like think of it as a flame in a bottle .
And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating , metabolizing , burning through chemistries .
And so we have to understand that if we 're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life , we need to power it somehow .
So before we can really start to make life , we have to really think about where it came from .
And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere -- maybe not in Scotland , maybe in Africa , maybe somewhere else .
But the real honest answer is , we just don 't know , because there is a problem with the origin .
Imagine way back , four and a half billion years ago , there is a vast chemical soup of stuff .
And from this stuff we came .
So when you think about the improbable nature of what I 'm going to tell you in the next few minutes , just remember , we came from stuff on planet Earth .
And we went through a variety of worlds .
The RNA people would talk about the RNA world .
We somehow got to proteins and DNA .
We then got to the last ancestor .
Evolution kicked in -- and that 's the cool bit .
And here we are .
But there 's a roadblock that you can 't get past .
You can decode the genome , you can look back , you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA , but we can 't get further than the last ancestor , the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history .
So we don 't know how we got here .
So there are two options : intelligent design , direct and indirect -- so God , or my friend .
Now talking about E.T. putting us there , or some other life , just pushes the problem further on .
I 'm not a politician , I 'm a scientist .
The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity .
This seems most likely .
So we have some kind of primordial soup .
And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids .
And somehow these amino acids are combined , and life begins .
But life begins , what does that mean ?
What is life ? What is this stuff of life ?
So in the 1950s , Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment , where they did the equivalent in the chemical world .
They took the basic ingredients , put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through .
And they had a look at what was in the soup , and they found amino acids , but nothing came out , there was no cell .
So the whole area 's been stuck for a while , and it got reignited in the ' 80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on .
In my own laboratory , the way we 're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats .
So what we 're trying to do is do reactions -- not in one flask , but in tens of flasks , and connect them together , as you can see with this flow system , all these pipes .
We can do it microfluidically , we can do it lithographically , we can do it in a 3D printer , we can do it in droplets for colleagues .
And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away .
But that 's probably going to end in failure , so we need to be a bit more focused .
And the answer , of course , lies with mice .
This is how I remember what I need as a chemist .
I say , " Well I want molecules . "
But I need a metabolism , I need some energy .
I need some information , and I need a container .
Because if I want evolution , I need containers to compete .
So if you have a container , it 's like getting in your car .
" This is my car , and I 'm going to drive around and show off my car . "
And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life .
So these things together give us evolution , perhaps .
And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal .
So what we 're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules .
And so forgive the molecules on the screen , but these are a very simple kit .
There 's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present .
And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins , but there 's no carbon in sight .
Carbon is banned .
And so with this Lego kit , we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA .
But we need to make some containers .
And just a few months ago in my lab , we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them .
And you can see on the screen a cell being made .
And we 're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell .
And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes , in real cells , and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism , a molecular survival of the fittest .
And this movie here shows this competition between molecules .
Molecules are competing for stuff .
They 're all made of the same stuff , but they want their shape to win .
They want their shape to persist .
And that is the key .
If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete , they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete .
If we manage to do that , forget the molecular detail .
Let 's zoom out to what that could mean .
So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology , to us .
If we could get evolution into the material world , then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution .
And that 's really worth thinking about .
Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe ?
Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete ?
So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution .
So you imagine , if we 're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form , not only will this tell us about the origin of life -- that it 's possible that the universe doesn 't need carbon to be alive ; it can use anything -- we can then take [ it ] one step further and develop new technologies , because we can then use software control for evolution to code in .
So imagine we make a little cell .
We want to put it out in the environment , and we want it to be powered by the Sun .
What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on .
And we don 't use design anymore . We find what works .
We should take our inspiration from biology .
Biology doesn 't care about the design unless it works .
So this will reorganize the way we design things .
But not only just that , we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology .
Wouldn 't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn 't really deal with ?
The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything , because it 's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution .
Evolution cannot be cut apart .
You need to somehow find the fitness function .
And the profound realization for me is that , if this works , the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level , and we really start talking about selfish matter .
And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff ?
You 're sitting on chairs .
They 're inanimate , they 're not alive .
But you are made of stuff , and you are using stuff , and you enslave stuff .
So using evolution in biology , and in inorganic biology , for me is quite appealing , quite exciting .
And we 're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive .
And again , when you 're thinking about how improbable this is , remember , five billion years ago , we were not here , and there was no life .
So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life ?
But perhaps , for me as a chemist , I want to keep away from general terms ; I want to think about specifics .
So what does it mean about defining life ?
We really struggle to do this .
And I think , if we can make inorganic biology , and we can make matter become evolvable , that will in fact define life .
I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive , and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter .
Thank you very much .
Just a quick question on timeline .
You believe you 're going to be successful in this project ?
When ?
Lee Cronin : So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in .
We 're proposing to do it in just a few hours , once we 've set up the right chemistry .
And when do you think that will happen ?
LC : Hopefully within the next two years .
That would be a big story .
In your own mind , what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life , walking or oozing or something ?
LC : I think it 's 100 percent .
Because the thing is , we are so chauvinistic to biology , if you take away carbon , there 's other things that can happen .
So the other thing that if we were able to create life that 's not based on carbon , maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for .
Don 't go and look for carbon , go and look for evolvable stuff .
Lee Cronin , good luck .
Helen Fisher : The brain in love
Why do we crave love so much , even to the point that we would die for it ? To learn more about our very real , very physical need for romantic love , Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love -- and people who had just been dumped .
I and my colleagues Art Aron and Lucy Brown and others , have put 37 people who are madly in love into a functional MRI brain scanner .
17 who were happily in love , 15 who had just been dumped , and we 're just starting our third experiment : studying people who report that they 're still in love after 10 to 25 years of marriage .
So , this is the short story of that research .
In the jungles of Guatemala , in Tikal , stands a temple .
It was built by the grandest Sun King , of the grandest city-state , of the grandest civilization of the Americas , the Mayas .
His name was Jasaw Chan K 'awiil .
He stood over six feet tall .
He lived into his 80s , and he was buried beneath this monument in 720 AD .
And Mayan inscriptions proclaim that he was deeply in love with his wife .
So , he built a temple in her honor , facing his .
And every spring and autumn , exactly at the equinox , the sun rises behind his temple , and perfectly bathes her temple with his shadow .
And as the sun sets behind her temple in the afternoon , it perfectly bathes his temple with her shadow .
After 1,300 years , these two lovers still touch and kiss from their tomb .
Around the world , people love .
They sing for love , they dance for love , they compose poems and stories about love .
They tell myths and legends about love .
They pine for love , they live for love , they kill for love , and they die for love .
As Walt Whitman once said , he said , " Oh , I would stake all for you . "
Anthropologists have found evidence of romantic love in 170 societies .
They 've never found a society that did not have it .
But love isn 't always a happy experience .
In one study of college students , they asked a lot of questions about love , but the two that stood out to me the most were , " Have you ever been rejected by somebody who you really loved ? "
And the second question was , " Have you ever dumped somebody who really loved you ? "
And almost 95 percent of both men and women said yes to both .
Almost nobody gets out of love alive .
So , before I start telling you about the brain , I want to read for you what I think is the most powerful love poem on Earth .
There 's other love poems that are , of course , just as good , but I don 't think this one can be surpassed .
It was told by an anonymous Kwakiutl Indian of southern Alaska to a missionary in 1896 , and here it is .
I 've never had the opportunity to say it before .
" Fire runs through my body with the pain of loving you .
Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you .
Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you , consumed by fire with my love for you .
I remember what you said to me .
I am thinking of your love for me .
I am torn by your love for me .
Pain and more pain -- where are you going with my love ?
I am told you will go from here .
I am told you will leave me here .
My body is numb with grief .
Remember what I said , my love .
Goodbye , my love , goodbye . "
Emily Dickinson once wrote , " Parting is all we need to know of hell . "
How many people have suffered in all the millions of years of human evolution ?
How many people around the world are dancing with elation at this very minute ?
Romantic love is one of the most powerful sensations on Earth .
So , several years ago , I decided to look into the brain and study this madness .
Our first study of people who were happily in love has been widely publicized , so I 'm only going to say a very little about it .
We found activity in a tiny , little factory near the base of the brain called the ventral tegmental area .
We found activity in some cells called the A10 cells , cells that actually make dopamine , a natural stimulant , and spray it to many brain regions .
Indeed , this part , the VTA , is part of the brain 's reward system .
It 's way below your cognitive thinking process .
It 's below your emotions .
It 's part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain , associated with wanting , with motivation , with focus and with craving .
In fact , the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine .
But romantic love is much more than a cocaine high -- at least you come down from cocaine .
Romantic love is an obsession . It possesses you .
You lose your sense of self .
You can 't stop thinking about another human being .
Somebody is camping in your head .
As an eighth-century Japanese poet said , " My longing had no time when it ceases . "
Wild is love .
And the obsession can get worse when you 've been rejected .
So , right now , Lucy Brown and I , the neuroscientist on our project , are looking at the data of the people who were put into the machine after they had just been dumped .
It was very difficult actually , putting these people in the machine , because they were in such bad shape .
So anyway , we found activity in three brain regions .
We found activity in the brain region , in exactly the same brain region associated with intense romantic love .
What a bad deal .
You know , when you 've been dumped , the one thing you love to do is just forget about this human being , and then go on with your life -- but no , you just love them harder .
As the poet Terence , the Roman poet once said , he said , " The less my hope , the hotter my love . "
And indeed , we now know why .
Two thousand years later , we can explain this in the brain .
That brain system -- the reward system for wanting , for motivation , for craving , for focus -- becomes more active when you can 't get what you want .
In this case , life 's greatest prize : an appropriate mating partner .
We found activity in other brain regions also -- in a brain region associated with calculating gains and losses .
You know , you 're lying there , you 're looking at the picture , and you 're in this machine , and you 're calculating , you know , what went wrong .
How , you know , what have I lost ?
As a matter of fact , Lucy and I have a little joke about this .
It comes from a David Mamet play , and there 's two con artists in the play , and the woman is conning the man , and the man looks at the woman and says , " Oh , you 're a bad pony , I 'm not going to bet on you . "
And indeed , it 's this part of the brain , the core of the nucleus accumbens , actually , that is becoming active as you 're measuring your gains and losses .
It 's also the brain region that becomes active when you 're willing to take enormous risks for huge gains and huge losses .
Last but not least , we found activity in a brain region associated with deep attachment to another individual .
No wonder people suffer around the world , and we have so many crimes of passion .
When you 've been rejected in love , not only are you engulfed with feelings of romantic love , but you 're feeling deep attachment to this individual .
Moreover , this brain circuit for reward is working , and you 're feeling intense energy , intense focus , intense motivation and the willingness to risk it all to win life 's greatest prize .
So , what have I learned from this experiment that I would like to tell the world ?
Foremost , I have come to think that romantic love is a drive , a basic mating drive .
Not the sex drive -- the sex drive gets you out there , looking for a whole range of partners .
Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time , conserve your mating energy , and start the mating process with this single individual .
I think of all the poetry that I 've read about romantic love , what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato , over 2,000 years ago .
He said , " The god of love lives in a state of need .
It is a need . It is an urge .
It is a homeostatic imbalance .
Like hunger and thirst , it 's almost impossible to stamp out . "
I 've also come to believe that romantic love is an addiction : a perfectly wonderful addiction when it 's going well , and a perfectly horrible addiction when it 's going poorly .
And indeed , it has all of the characteristics of addiction .
You focus on the person , you obsessively think about them , you crave them , you distort reality , your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person .
And it 's got the three main characteristics of addiction : tolerance , you need to see them more , and more , and more ; withdrawals ; and last , relapse .
I 've got a girlfriend who 's just getting over a terrible love affair .
It 's been about eight months , she 's beginning to feel better .
And she was driving along in her car the other day , and suddenly she heard a song on the car radio that reminded her of this man .
And she -- not only did the instant craving come back , but she had to pull over So , one thing I would like the medical community , and the legal community , and even the college community , to see if they can understand , that indeed , romantic love is one of the most addictive substances on Earth .
I would also like to tell the world that animals love .
There 's not an animal on this planet that will copulate with anything that comes along .
Too old , too young , too scruffy , too stupid , and they won 't do it .
Unless you 're stuck in a laboratory cage -- and you know , if you spend your entire life in a little box , you 're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with -- but I 've looked in a hundred species , and everywhere in the wild , animals have favorites .
As a matter of fact ethologists know this .
There are over eight words for what they call " animal favoritism : " selective proceptivity , mate choice , female choice , sexual choice .
And indeed , there are now three academic articles in which they 've looked at this attraction , which may only last for a second , but it 's a definite attraction , and either this same brain region , this reward system , or the chemicals of that reward system are involved .
In fact , I think animal attraction can be instant -- you can see an elephant instantly go for another elephant .
And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call " love at first sight . "
People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me .
And I just simply say , " Hardly . "
You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake , and then when you sit down and eat that cake , you can still feel that joy .
And certainly , I make all the same mistakes that everybody else does too , but it 's really deepened my understanding and compassion , really , for all human life .
As a matter of fact , in New York , I often catch myself looking in baby carriages and feeling a little sorry for the tot .
And in fact , sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate , when I think of how intense this brain system is .
Our newest experiment has been hatched by my colleague , Art Aron -- putting people who are reporting that they are still in love , in a long-term relationship , into the functional MRI .
We 've put five people in so far , and indeed , we found exactly the same thing . They 're not lying .
The brain areas associated with intense romantic love still become active , 25 years later .
There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love .
The question that I 'm working on right this minute -- and I 'm only going to say it for a second , and then end -- is , why do you fall in love with one person , rather than another ?
I never would have even thought to think of this , but Match.com , the Internet-dating site , came to me three years ago and asked me that question .
And I said , I don 't know .
I know what happens in the brain , when you do become in love , but I don 't know why you fall in love with one person rather than another .
And so , I 've spent the last three years on this .
And there are many reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another , that psychologists can tell you .
And we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socioeconomic background , the same general level of intelligence , the same general level of good looks , the same religious values .
Your childhood certainly plays a role , but nobody knows how .
And that 's about it , that 's all they know .
No , they 've never found the way two personalities fit together to make a good relationship .
So , it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another .
And I have concocted a questionnaire to see to what degree you express dopamine , serotonin , estrogen and testosterone .
I think we 've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain .
And on this dating site that I have created , called Chemistry.com , I ask you first a series of questions to see to what degree you express these chemicals , and I 'm watching who chooses who to love .
And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America .
About 600,000 people have taken it in 33 other countries .
I 'm putting the data together now , and at some point -- there will always be magic to love , but I think I will come closer to understanding why it is you can walk into a room and everybody is from your background , your same general level of intelligence , your same general level of good looks , and you don 't feel pulled towards all of them .
I think there 's biology to that .
I think we 're going to end up , in the next few years , to understand all kinds of brain mechanisms that pull us to one person rather than another .
So , I will close with this . These are my older people .
Faulkner once said , " The past is not dead , it 's not even the past . "
Indeed , we carry a lot of luggage from our yesteryear in the human brain .
And so , there 's one thing that makes me pursue my understanding of human nature , and this reminds me of it .
These are two women .
Women tend to get intimacy differently than men do .
Women get intimacy from face-to-face talking .
We swivel towards each other , we do what we call the " anchoring gaze " and we talk .
This is intimacy to women .
I think it comes from millions of years of holding that baby in front of your face , cajoling it , reprimanding it , educating it with words .
Men tend to get intimacy from side-by-side doing .
As soon as one guy looks up , the other guy will look away .
I think it comes from millions of years of standing behind that -- sitting behind the bush , looking straight ahead , trying to hit that buffalo on the head with a rock .
I think , for millions of years , men faced their enemies , they sat side by side with friends .
So my final statement is : love is in us .
It 's deeply embedded in the brain .
Our challenge is to understand each other . Thank you .
Pete Alcorn : The world in 2200
In this short , optimistic talk from TED2009 , Pete Alcorn shares a vision of the world of two centuries from now -- when declining populations and growing opportunity prove Malthus was wrong .
I used to be a Malthusian .
This was my mental model of the world : exploding population , small planet ; it 's going to lead to ugly things .
But I 'm moving past Malthus , because I think that we just might be about 150 years from a kind of new enlightenment .
Here 's why .
This is the U.N. ' s population data , you may have seen , for the world .
And the world 's population expected to top out at something hopefully a bit less than 10 billion , late this century .
And after that , most likely it 's going to begin to decline .
So what then ?
Most of the economic models are built around scarcity and growth .
So a lot of economists look at declining population and expect to see stagnation , maybe depression .
But a declining population is going to have at least two very beneficial economic effects .
One : fewer people on a fixed amount of land make investing in property a bad bet .
In the cities , a lot of the cost of property is actually wrapped up in its speculative value .
Take away land speculation , price of land drops .
And that begins to lift a heavy burden off the world 's poor .
Number two : a declining population means scarce labor .
Scarce labor drives wages .
As wages increase that also lifts the burden on the poor and the working class .
Now I 'm not talking about a radical drop in population like we saw in the Black Death .
But look what happened in Europe after the plague : rising wages , land reform , technological innovation , birth of the middle class ; and after that , forward-looking social movements like the Renaissance , and later the Enlightenment .
Most of our cultural heritage has tended to look backward , romanticizing the past .
All of the Western religions begin with the notion of Eden , and descend through a kind of profligate present to a very ugly future .
So human history is viewed as sort of this downhill slide from the good old days .
But I think we 're in for another change , about two generations after the top of that curve , once the effects of a declining population start to settle in .
At that point , we 'll start romanticizing the future again , instead of the nasty , brutish past .
So why does this matter ?
Why talk about social-economic movements that may be more than a century away ?
Because transitions are dangerous times .
When land owners start to lose money , and labor demands more pay , there are some powerful interests that are going to fear for the future .
Fear for the future leads to some rash decisions .
If we have a positive view about the future then we may be able to accelerate through that turn , instead of careening off a cliff .
If we can make it through the next 150 years , I think that your great great grandchildren will forget all about Malthus .
And instead , they 'll be planning for the future and starting to build the 22nd Century Enlightenment .
Thank you .
Nathan Myhrvold : Could this laser zap malaria ?
Nathan Myhrvold and team 's latest inventions -- as brilliant as they are bold -- remind us that the world needs wild creativity to tackle big problems like malaria . And just as that idea sinks in , he rolls out a live demo of a new , mosquito-zapping gizmo you have to see to believe .
We invent .
My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas .
And we do that for a couple of reasons .
We invent for fun -- invention is a lot of fun to do -- and we also invent for profit .
The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn 't fun , you wouldn 't have the time to do it .
So we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do , but we also have a program where we invent for humanity -- where we take some of our best inventors , and we say , " Are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has ? " -- and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems , which is with dramatic , crazy , out-of-the-box solutions .
Bill Gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work , so thank you .
So I 'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we 've got some solutions underway .
Vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health , a fantastic thing .
But in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they 're administered , and that 's because they need to be kept cold .
Almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures .
They go bad very quickly if you don 't , and if you don 't have stable power grid , this doesn 't happen , so kids die .
It 's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters ; it 's the fact that those kids don 't get vaccinated .
This is one of the ways that vaccines are carried : These are Styrofoam chests . These are being carried by people , but they 're also put on the backs of pickup trucks .
We 've got a different solution .
Now , one of these Styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it .
And we thought , well , that 's not really good enough .
So we made this thing .
This lasts six months with no power ; absolutely zero power , because it loses less than a half a watt .
Now , this is our second generations prototype .
The third generation prototype is , right now , in Uganda being tested .
Now , the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas : One is that this is similar to a cryogenic Dewar , something you 'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in .
They have incredible insulation , so let 's put some incredible insulation here .
The other idea is kind of interesting , which is , you can 't reach inside anymore .
Because if you open it up and reach inside , you 'd let the heat in , the game would be over .
So the inside of this thing actually looks like a Coke machine .
It vends out little individual vials .
So a simple idea , which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in Africa and around the world .
We 'll move on to malaria .
Malaria is one of the great public health problems .
Esther Duflo talked a little bit about this .
Two hundred million people a year .
Every 43 seconds a child in Africa dies ; 27 will die during my talk .
And there 's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved .
Another comment of Esther 's was that we react when there 's a tragedy like Haiti , but that tragedy is ongoing .
So what can we do about it ?
Well , there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria .
You can spray ; the problem is there are environmental issues .
You can try to treat people and create awareness .
That 's great , except the places that have malaria really bad , they don 't have health care systems .
A vaccine would be a terrific thing , only they don 't work yet .
People have tried for a long time . There are a couple of interesting candidates .
It 's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for .
You can distribute bed nets , and bed nets are very effective if you use them .
You don 't always use them for that . People fish with them .
They don 't always get to everyone .
And bed nets have an effect on the epidemic , but you 're never going to make it extinct with bed nets .
Now , malaria is an incredibly complicated disease .
We could spend hours going over this .
It 's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle ; they have sex , they burrow into your liver , they tunnel into your blood cells ...
it 's an incredibly complicated disease , but that 's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria : There 's a lot of potential ways in .
One of those ways might be better diagnosis .
So we hope this year to prototype each of these devices .
One does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic 's glucose meter works : You take a drop of blood , you put it in there and it automatically tells you .
Today , you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure , create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it .
And if you look through the eye , or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye , in fact , you may be able to do this directly , without drawing any blood at all , or through your nail beds .
Because if you actually look through your fingernails , you can see blood vessels , and once you see blood vessels , we think we can see the malaria .
We can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin .
It 's produced by the malaria parasite and it 's a very interesting crystalline substance .
Interesting , anyway , if you 're a solid-state physicist .
There 's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it .
This is our femtosecond laser lab .
So this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond .
That 's really , really , really short .
This is a pulse of light that 's only about one wavelength of light long , so it 's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously .
It creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things ; in particular , it lets you find hemozoin .
So here 's an image of red blood cells , and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells .
And using both this technique and other optical techniques , we think we can make those diagnostics .
We also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria : a way , in acute cases , to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system .
Sort of like doing dialysis , but for relieving the parasite load .
This is our thousand-core supercomputer .
We 're kind of software guys , and so nearly any problem that you pose , we like to try to solve with some software .
One of the problems that you have if you 're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you don 't know what 's the most effective thing to do .
Okay , we heard about bed nets earlier .
You spend a certain amount per bed net .
Or you could spray .
You can give drug administration .
There 's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness .
How can you tell ?
So we 've created , using our supercomputer , the world 's best computer model of malaria , which we 'll show you now .
We picked Madagascar .
We have every road , every village , every , almost , square inch of Madagascar .
We have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data .
That 's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you 've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed .
So that sets the stage on which you do this .
You then have to introduce the mosquitoes , and you have to model that and how they come and go .
Ultimately , it gives you this .
This is malaria spreading across Madagascar .
And this is this latter part of the rainy season .
We 're going to the dry season now .
It nearly goes away in the dry season , because there 's no place for the mosquitoes to breed .
And then , of course , the next year it comes roaring back .
By doing these kinds of simulations , we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life ; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs -- how many bed nets versus how much spraying ? -- or the social trade-offs -- what happens if unrest breaks out ?
We also try to study our foe .
This is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito .
And , in a moment , we 're going to see a view of the airflow .
Here , we 're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we 're illuminating with a laser .
By understanding how mosquitoes fly , we hope to understand how to make them not fly .
Now , one of the ways you can make them not fly is with DDT .
This is a real ad .
This is one of those things you just can 't make up .
Once upon a time , this was the primary technique , and , in fact , many countries got rid of malaria through DDT .
The United States did .
In 1935 , there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the United States , but DDT and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it .
So we thought , " Well , we 've done all these things that are focused on the Plasmodium , the parasite involved .
What can we do to the mosquito ?
Well , let 's try to kill it with consumer electronics . "
Now , that sounds silly , but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use .
Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser .
Your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that 's used to steer a laser beam very accurately ; that 's what makes those little dots on the page .
And , of course , there 's signal processing and digital cameras .
So what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers ?
Now , in our company , this is what we call " the pinky-suck moment . "
What if we could do that ?
Now , just suspend disbelief for a moment , and let 's think of what could happen if we could do that .
Well , we could protect very high-value targets like clinics .
Clinics are full of people that have malaria .
They 're sick , and so they 're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes .
You really want to protect them .
Of course , if you do that , you could also protect your backyard .
And farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to Whole Foods because our photons are 100 percent organic .
They 're completely natural .
Now , it actually gets better than this .
You could , if you 're really smart , you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it , and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size .
And then you could decide : " Is this an insect I want to kill , Moore 's law made computing cheap ; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down .
Now , it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes .
They 're the only ones that are dangerous .
Mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs .
Mosquitoes actually live ... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar , from flowers -- in fact , in the lab , we feed ours raisins -- but the female needs the blood meal .
So , this sounds really crazy , right ?
Would you like to see it ?
Nathan Myhrvold : Okay , so our legal department prepared a disclaimer , and here it is .
Now , after thinking about this a little bit we thought , you know , it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser .
So , Eric Johanson , who built the device , actually , with parts from eBay ; and Pablos Holman over here , he 's got mosquitoes in the tank .
We have the device over here .
And we 're going to show you , instead of the kill laser , which will be a very brief , instantaneous pulse , we 're going to have a green laser pointer that 's going to stay on the mosquito for , actually , quite a long period of time ; otherwise , you can 't see it very well .
Take it away Eric .
Eric Johanson : What we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage .
And we have ... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around .
And Pablos , if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around .
Now , that 's a fairly straightforward image processing routine , and let me show you how it works .
Here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they 're flying around , which is kind of fun .
Next we can actually light them up with a laser .
Now , this is a low powered laser , and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency .
So you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around .
NM : That 's a mosquito wing beat you 're hearing .
EJ : Finally , let 's see what this looks like .
There you can see mosquitoes as they fly around , being lit up .
This is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what 's happening .
Here we have it running at high-speed mode .
So this system that was built for TED is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this , and we 're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like Africa and other parts of the world .
NM : So it wouldn 't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit ' em .
This is very satisfying .
This is one of the first ones we did .
The energy 's a little bit high here .
We 'll loop around here in just a second , and you 'll see another one .
Here 's another one . Bang .
An interesting thing is , we kill them all the time ; we 've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair .
The wing motor is very resilient .
I mean , here we 're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down .
So , that 's what I have . Thanks very much .
Marco Annunziata : Welcome to the age of the industrial internet
Everyone 's talking about the " Internet of Things , " but what exactly does that mean for our future ? In this thoughtful talk , economist Marco Annunziata looks at how technology is transforming the industrial sector , creating machines that can see , feel , sense and react -- so they can be operated far more efficiently . Think : airplane parts that send an alert when they need to be serviced , or wind turbines that communicate with one another to generate more electricity . It 's a future with exciting implications for us all .
Einstein said that " I never think about the future — it comes soon enough . "
And he was right , of course .
So today , I 'm here to ask you to think of how the future is happening now .
Over the past 200 years , the world has experienced two major waves of innovation .
First , the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories , railways , electricity , air travel , and our lives have never been the same .
Then the Internet revolution brought us computing power , data networks , unprecedented access to information and communication , and our lives have never been the same .
Now we are experiencing another metamorphic change : the industrial Internet .
It brings together intelligent machines , advanced analytics , and the creativity of people at work .
It 's the marriage of minds and machines .
And our lives will never be the same .
In my current role , I see up close how technology is beginning to transform industrial sectors that play a huge role in our economy and in our lives : energy , aviation , transportation , health care .
For an economist , this is highly unusual , and it 's extremely exciting , because this is a transformation as powerful as the Industrial Revolution and more , and before the Industrial Revolution , there was no economic growth to speak of .
So what is this industrial Internet ?
Industrial machines are being equipped with a growing number of electronic sensors that allow them to see , hear , feel a lot more than ever before , generating prodigious amounts of data .
Increasingly sophisticated analytics then sift through the data , providing insights that allow us to operate the machines in entirely new ways , a lot more efficiently .
And not just individual machines , but fleets of locomotives , airplanes , entire systems like power grids , hospitals .
It is asset optimization and system optimization .
Of course , electronic sensors have been around for some time , but something has changed : a sharp decline in the cost of sensors and , thanks to advances in cloud computing , a rapid decrease in the cost of storing and processing data .
So we are moving to a world where the machines we work with are not just intelligent ; they are brilliant .
They are self-aware , they are predictive , reactive and social .
It 's jet engines , locomotives , gas turbines , medical devices , communicating seamlessly with each other and with us .
It 's a world where information itself becomes intelligent and comes to us automatically when we need it without having to look for it .
We are beginning to deploy throughout the industrial system embedded virtualization , multi-core processor technology , advanced cloud-based communications , a new software-defined machine infrastructure which allows machine functionality to become virtualized in software , decoupling machine software from hardware , and allowing us to remotely and automatically monitor , manage and upgrade industrial assets .
Why does any of this matter at all ?
Well first of all , it 's already allowing us to shift towards preventive , condition-based maintenance , which means fixing machines just before they break , without wasting time servicing them on a fixed schedule .
And this , in turn , is pushing us towards zero unplanned downtime , which means there will be no more power outages , no more flight delays .
So let me give you a few examples of how these brilliant machines work , and some of the examples may seem trivial , some are clearly more profound , but all of them are going to have a very powerful impact .
Let 's start with aviation .
Today , 10 percent of all flights cancellations and delays are due to unscheduled maintenance events .
Something goes wrong unexpectedly .
This results in eight billion dollars in costs for the airline industry globally every year , not to mention the impact on all of us : stress , inconvenience , missed meetings as we sit helplessly in an airport terminal .
So how can the industrial Internet help here ?
We 've developed a preventive maintenance system which can be installed on any aircraft .
It 's self-learning and able to predict issues that a human operator would miss .
The aircraft , while in flight , will communicate with technicians on the ground .
By the time it lands , they will already know if anything needs to be serviced .
Just in the U.S. , a system like this can prevent over 60,000 delays and cancellations every year , helping seven million passengers get to their destinations on time .
Or take healthcare .
Today , nurses spend an average of 21 minutes per shift looking for medical equipment .
That seems trivial , but it 's less time spent caring for patients .
St. Luke 's Medical Center in Houston , Texas , which has deployed industrial Internet technology to electronically monitor and connect patients , staff and medical equipment , has reduced bed turnaround times by nearly one hour .
If you need surgery , one hour matters .
It means more patients can be treated , more lives can be saved .
Another medical center , in Washington state , is piloting an application that allows medical images from city scanners and MRIs to be analyzed in the cloud , developing better analytics at a lower cost .
Imagine a patient who has suffered a severe trauma , and needs the attention of several specialists : a neurologist , a cardiologist , an orthopedic surgeon .
If all of them can have instantaneous and simultaneous access to scans and images as they are taken , they will be able to deliver better healthcare faster .
So all of this translates into better health outcomes , but it can also deliver substantial economic benefits .
Just a one-percent reduction in existing inefficiencies could yield savings of over 60 billion dollars to the healthcare industry worldwide , and that is just a drop in the sea compared to what we need to do to make healthcare affordable on a sustainable basis .
Similar advances are happening in energy , including renewable energy .
Wind farms equipped with new remote monitorings and diagnostics that allow wind turbines to talk to each other and adjust the pitch of their blades in a coordinated way , depending on how the wind is blowing , can now produce electricity at a cost of less than five cents per kilowatt / hour .
Ten years ago , that cost was 30 cents , six times as much .
The list goes on , and it will grow fast , because industrial data are now growing exponentially .
By 2020 , they will account for over 50 percent of all digital information .
But this is not just about data , so let me switch gears and tell you how this is impacting already the jobs we do every day , because this new wave of innovation is bringing about new tools and applications that will allow us to collaborate in a smarter and faster way , making our jobs not just more efficient but more rewarding .
Imagine a field engineer arriving at the wind farm with a handheld device telling her which turbines need servicing .
She already has all the spare parts , because the problems were diagnosed in advanced .
And if she faces an unexpected issue , the same handheld device will allow her to communicate with colleagues at the service center , let them see what she sees , transmit data that they can run through diagnostics , and they can stream videos that will guide her , step by step , through whatever complex procedure is needed to get the machines back up and running .
And their interaction gets documented and stored in a searchable database .
Let 's stop and think about this for a minute , because this is a very important point .
This new wave of innovation is fundamentally changing the way we work .
And I know that many of you will be concerned about the impact that innovation might have on jobs .
Unemployment is already high , and there is always a fear that innovation will destroy jobs .
And innovation is disruptive .
But let me stress two things here .
First , we 've already lived through mechanization of agriculture , automation of industry , and employment has gone up , because innovation is fundamentally about growth .
It makes products more affordable .
It creates new demand , new jobs .
Second , there is a concern that in the future , there will only be room for engineers , data scientists , and other highly-specialized workers .
And believe me , as an economist , I am also scared .
But think about it : Just as a child can easily figure out how to operate an iPad , so a new generation of mobile and intuitive industrial applications will make life easier for workers of all skill levels .
The worker of the future will be more like Iron Man than the Charlie Chaplin of " Modern Times . "
And to be sure , new high-skilled jobs will be created : mechanical digital engineers who understand both the machines and the data ; managers who understand their industry and the analytics and can reorganize the business to take full advantage of the technology .
But now let 's take a step back .
Let 's look at the big picture .
There are people who argue that today 's innovation is all about social media and silly games , with nowhere near the transformational power of the Industrial Revolution .
They say that all the growth-enhancing innovations are behind us .
And every time I hear this , I can 't help thinking that even back in the Stone Age , there must have been a group of cavemen sitting around a fire one day looking very grumpy , and looking disapprovingly at another group of cavemen rolling a stone wheel up and down a hill , and saying to each other , " Yeah , this wheel thing , cool toy , sure , but compared to fire , it will have no impact .
The big discoveries are all behind us . "
This technological revolution is as inspiring and transformational as anything we have ever seen .
Human creativity and innovation have always propelled us forward .
They 've created jobs .
They 've raised living standards .
They 've made our lives healthier and more rewarding .
And the new wave of innovation which is beginning to sweep through industry is no different .
In the U.S. alone , the industrial Internet could raise average income by 25 to 40 percent over the next 15 years , boosting growth to rates we haven 't seen in a long time , and adding between 10 and 15 trillion dollars to global GDP .
That is the size of the entire U.S. economy today .
But this is not a foregone conclusion .
We are just at the beginning of this transformation , and there will be barriers to break , obstacles to overcome .
We will need to invest in the new technologies .
We will need to adapt organizations and managerial practices .
We will need a robust cybersecurity approach that protects sensitive information and intellectual property and safeguards critical infrastructure from cyberattacks .
And the education system will need to evolve to ensure students are equipped with the right skills .
It 's not going to be easy , but it is going to be worth it .
The economic challenges facing us are hard , but when I walk the factory floor , and I see how humans and brilliant machines are becoming interconnected , and I see the difference this makes in a hospital , in an airport , in a power generation plant , I 'm not just optimistic , I 'm enthusiastic .
This new technological revolution is upon us .
So think about the future — it will be here soon enough .
Thank you .

Adam Davidson : What we learned from teetering on the fiscal cliff
At the end of 2012 , the US political system was headed for the " fiscal cliff " -- a budget impasse that could only be solved with bipartisan agreement . Adam Davidson , cohost of " Planet Money , " shares surprising data on how bipartisan we truly are -- and hints at the disconnect between representatives and the people they represent .
So a friend of mine who 's a political scientist , he told me several months ago exactly what this month would be like .
He said , you know , there 's this fiscal cliff coming , it 's going to come at the beginning of 2013 .
Both parties absolutely need to resolve it , but neither party wants to be seen as the first to resolve it .
Neither party has any incentive to solve it a second before it 's due , so he said , December , you 're just going to see lots of angry negotiations , negotiations breaking apart , reports of phone calls that aren 't going well , people saying nothing 's happening at all , and then sometime around Christmas or New Year 's , we 're going to hear , " Okay , they resolved everything . "
He told me that a few months ago . He said he 's 98 percent positive they 're going to resolve it , and I got an email from him today saying , all right , we 're basically on track , but now I 'm 80 percent positive that they 're going to resolve it .
And it made me think . I love studying these moments in American history when there was this frenzy of partisan anger , that the economy was on the verge of total collapse .
The most famous early battle was Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson over what the dollar would be and how it would be backed up , with Alexander Hamilton saying , " We need a central bank , the First Bank of the United States , or else the dollar will have no value .
This economy won 't work , " and Thomas Jefferson saying , " The people won 't trust that .
They just fought off a king . They 're not going to accept some central authority . "
This battle defined the first 150 years of the U.S. economy , and at every moment , different partisans saying , " Oh my God , the economy 's about to collapse , " and the rest of us just going about , spending our bucks on whatever it is we wanted to buy .
To give you a quick primer on where we are , a quick refresher on where we are .
So the fiscal cliff , I was told that that 's too partisan a thing to say , although I can 't remember which party it 's supporting or attacking .
People say we should call it the fiscal slope , or we should call it an austerity crisis , but then other people say , no , that 's even more partisan .
So I just call it the self-imposed , self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem .
And this is what the inevitable problem looks like .
So this is a projection of U.S. debt as a percentage of our overall economy , of GDP .
The light blue dotted line represents the Congressional Budget Office 's best guess of what will happen if Congress really doesn 't do anything , and as you can see , sometime around 2027 , we reach Greek levels of debt , somewhere around 130 percent of GDP , which tells you that some time in the next 20 years , if Congress does absolutely nothing , we 're going to hit a moment where the world 's investors , the world 's bond buyers , are going to say , " We don 't trust America anymore . We 're not going to lend them any money , except at really high interest rates . "
And at that moment our economy collapses .
But remember , Greece is there today .
We 're there in 20 years . We have lots and lots of time to avoid that crisis , and the fiscal cliff was just one more attempt at trying to force the two sides to resolve the crisis .
Here 's another way to look at exactly the same problem .
The dark blue line is how much the government spends .
The light blue line is how much the government gets in .
And as you can see , for most of recent history , except for a brief period , we have consistently spent more than we take in . Thus the national debt .
But as you can also see , projected going forward , the gap widens a bit and raises a bit , and this graph is only through 2021 .
It gets really , really ugly out towards 2030 .
And this graph sort of sums up what the problem is .
The Democrats , they say , well , this isn 't a big deal .
We can just raise taxes a bit and close that gap , especially if we raise taxes on the rich .
The Republicans say , hey , no , no , we 've got a better idea .
Why don 't we lower both lines ?
Why don 't we lower government spending and lower government taxes , and then we 'll be on an even more favorable long-term deficit trajectory ?
And behind this powerful disagreement between how to close that gap , there 's the worst kind of cynical party politics , the worst kind of insider baseball , lobbying , all of that stuff , but there 's also this powerfully interesting , respectful disagreement between two fundamentally different economic philosophies .
And I like to think , when I picture how Republicans see the economy , what I picture is just some amazingly well-engineered machine , some perfect machine .
Unfortunately , I picture it made in Germany or Japan , but this amazing machine that 's constantly scouring every bit of human endeavor and taking resources , money , labor , capital , machinery , away from the least productive parts and towards the more productive parts , and while this might cause temporary dislocation , what it does is it builds up the more productive areas and lets the less productive areas fade away and die , and as a result the whole system is so much more efficient , so much richer for everybody .
And this view generally believes that there is a role for government , a small role , to set the rules so people aren 't lying and cheating and hurting each other , maybe , you know , have a police force and a fire department and an army , but to have a very limited reach into the mechanisms of this machinery .
And when I picture how Democrats and Democratic-leaning economists picture this economy , most Democratic economists are , you know , they 're capitalists , they believe , yes , that 's a good system a lot of the time .
It 's good to let markets move resources to their more productive use .
But that system has tons of problems .
Wealth piles up in the wrong places .
Wealth is ripped away from people who shouldn 't be called unproductive .
That 's not going to create an equitable , fair society .
That machine doesn 't care about the environment , about racism , about all these issues that make this life worse for all of us , and so the government does have a role to take resources from more productive uses , or from richer sources , and give them to other sources .
And when you think about the economy through these two different lenses , you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve , because the worse the crisis gets , the higher the stakes are , the more each side thinks they know the answer and the other side is just going to ruin everything .
And I can get really despairing . I 've spent a lot of the last few years really depressed about this , until this year , I learned something that I felt really excited about . I feel like it 's really good news , and it 's so shocking , I don 't like saying it , because I think people won 't believe me .
But here 's what I learned .
The American people , taken as a whole , when it comes to these issues , to fiscal issues , are moderate , pragmatic centrists .
And I know that 's hard to believe , that the American people are moderate , pragmatic centrists .
But let me explain what I 'm thinking .
When you look at how the federal government spends money , so this is the battle right here , 55 percent , more than half , is on Social Security , Medicare , Medicaid , a few other health programs , 20 percent defense , 19 percent discretionary , and six percent interest .
So when we 're talking about cutting government spending , this is the pie we 're talking about , and Americans overwhelmingly , and it doesn 't matter what party they 're in , overwhelmingly like that big 55 percent chunk .
They like Social Security . They like Medicare .
They even like Medicaid , even though that goes to the poor and indigent , which you might think would have less support .
And they do not want it fundamentally touched , although the American people are remarkably comfortable , and Democrats roughly equal to Republicans , with some minor tweaks to make the system more stable .
Social Security is fairly easy to fix .
The rumors of its demise are always greatly exaggerated .
So gradually raise Social Security retirement age , maybe only on people not yet born .
Americans are about 50 / 50 , whether they 're Democrats or Republicans .
Reduce Medicare for very wealthy seniors , seniors who make a lot of money . Don 't even eliminate it . Just reduce it .
People generally are comfortable with it , Democrats and Republicans .
Raise medical health care contributions ?
Everyone hates that equally , but Republicans and Democrats hate that together .
And so what this tells me is , when you look at the discussion of how to resolve our fiscal problems , we are not a nation that 's powerfully divided on the major , major issue .
We 're comfortable with it needing some tweaks , but we want to keep it .
We 're not open to a discussion of eliminating it .
Now there is one issue that is hyper-partisan , and where there is one party that is just spend , spend , spend , we don 't care , spend some more , and that of course is Republicans when it comes to military defense spending .
They way outweigh Democrats .
The vast majority want to protect military defense spending .
That 's 20 percent of the budget , and that presents a more difficult issue .
I should also note that the [ discretionary ] spending , which is about 19 percent of the budget , that is Democratic and Republican issues , so you do have welfare , food stamps , other programs that tend to be popular among Democrats , but you also have the farm bill and all sorts of Department of Interior inducements for oil drilling and other things , which tend to be popular among Republicans .
Now when it comes to taxes , there is more disagreement .
That 's a more partisan area .
You have Democrats overwhelmingly supportive of raising the income tax on people who make 250,000 dollars a year , Republicans sort of against it , although if you break it out by income , Republicans who make less than 75,000 dollars a year like this idea .
So basically Republicans who make more than 250,000 dollars a year don 't want to be taxed .
Raising taxes on investment income , you also see about two thirds of Democrats but only one third of Republicans are comfortable with that idea .
This brings up a really important point , which is that we tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans and think there 's this little group over there called independents that 's , what , two percent ?
If you add Democrats , you add Republicans , you 've got the American people .
But that is not the case at all .
And it has not been the case for most of modern American history .
Roughly a third of Americans say that they are Democrats .
Around a quarter say that they are Republicans .
A tiny little sliver call themselves libertarians , or socialists , or some other small third party , and the largest block , 40 percent , say they 're independents .
So most Americans are not partisan , and most of the people in the independent camp fall somewhere in between , so even though we have tremendous overlap between the views on these fiscal issues of Democrats and Republicans , we have even more overlap when you add in the independents .
Now we get to fight about all sorts of other issues .
We get to hate each other on gun control and abortion and the environment , but on these fiscal issues , these important fiscal issues , we just are not anywhere nearly as divided as people say .
And in fact , there 's this other group of people who are not as divided as people might think , and that group is economists .
I talk to a lot of economists , and back in the ' 70s and ' 80s it was ugly being an economist .
You were in what they called the saltwater camp , meaning Harvard , Princeton , MIT , Stanford , Berkeley , or you were in the freshwater camp , University of Chicago , University of Rochester .
You were a free market capitalist economist or you were a Keynesian liberal economist , and these people didn 't go to each other 's weddings , they snubbed each other at conferences .
It 's still ugly to this day , but in my experience , it is really , really hard to find an economist under 40 who still has that kind of way of seeing the world .
The vast majority of economists -- it is so uncool to call yourself an ideologue of either camp .
The phrase that you want , if you 're a graduate student or a postdoc or you 're a professor , a 38-year-old economics professor , is , " I 'm an empiricist .
I go by the data . "
And the data is very clear .
None of these major theories have been completely successful .
The 20th century , the last hundred years , is riddled with disastrous examples of times that one school or the other tried to explain the past or predict the future and just did an awful , awful job , so the economics profession has acquired some degree of modesty .
They still are an awfully arrogant group of people , I will assure you , but they 're now arrogant about their impartiality , and they , too , see a tremendous range of potential outcomes .
And this nonpartisanship is something that exists , that has existed in secret in America for years and years and years .
I 've spent a lot of the fall talking to the three major organizations that survey American political attitudes : Pew Research , the University of Chicago 's National Opinion Research Center , and the most important but the least known is the American National Election Studies group that is the world 's longest , most respected poll of political attitudes .
They 've been doing it since 1948 , and what they show consistently throughout is that it 's almost impossible to find Americans who are consistent ideologically , who consistently support , " No we mustn 't tax , and we must limit the size of government , " or , " No , we must encourage government to play a larger role in redistribution and correcting the ills of capitalism . "
Those groups are very , very small .
The vast majority of people , they pick and choose , they see compromise and they change over time when they hear a better argument or a worse argument .
And that part of it has not changed .
What has changed is how people respond to vague questions .
If you ask people vague questions , like , " Do you think there should be more government or less government ? "
" Do you think government should " — especially if you use loaded language -- " Do you think the government should provide handouts ? "
Or , " Do you think the government should redistribute ? "
Then you can see radical partisan change .
But when you get specific , when you actually ask about the actual taxing and spending issues under consideration , people are remarkably centrist , they 're remarkably open to compromise .
So what we have , then , when you think about the fiscal cliff , don 't think of it as the American people fundamentally can 't stand each other on these issues and that we must be ripped apart into two separate warring nations .
Think of it as a tiny , tiny number of ancient economists and misrepresentative ideologues have captured the process .
And they 've captured the process through familiar ways , through a primary system which encourages that small group of people 's voices , because that small group of people , the people who answer all yeses or all noes on those ideological questions , they might be small but every one of them has a blog , every one of them has been on Fox or MSNBC in the last week .
Every one of them becomes a louder and louder voice , but they don 't represent us .
They don 't represent what our views are .
And that gets me back to the dollar , and it gets me back to reminding myself that we know this experience .
We know what it 's like to have these people on TV , in Congress , yelling about how the end of the world is coming if we don 't adopt their view completely , because it 's happened about the dollar ever since there 's been a dollar .
We had the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton .
In 1913 , we had this ugly battle over the Federal Reserve , when it was created , with vicious , angry arguments over how it would be constituted , and a general agreement that the way it was constituted was the worst possible compromise , a compromise guaranteed to destroy this valuable thing , this dollar , but then everyone agreeing , okay , so long as we 're on the gold standard , it should be okay .
The Fed can 't mess it up so badly .
But then we got off the gold standard for individuals during the Depression and we got off the gold standard as a source of international currency coordination during Richard Nixon 's presidency .
Each of those times , we were on the verge of complete collapse .
And nothing happened at all .
Throughout it all , the dollar has been one of the most long-standing , stable , reasonable currencies , and we all use it every single day , no matter what the people screaming about tell us , no matter how scared we 're supposed to be .
And this long-term fiscal picture that we 're in right now , I think what is most maddening about it is , if Congress were simply able to show not that they agree with each other , not that they 're able to come up with the best possible compromise , but that they are able to just begin the process towards compromise , we all instantly are better off .
The fear is that the world is watching .
The fear is that the longer we delay any solution , the more the world will look to the U.S.
not as the bedrock of stability in the global economy , but as a place that can 't resolve its own fights , and the longer we put that off , the more we make the world nervous , the higher interest rates are going to be , the quicker we 're going to have to face a day of horrible calamity .
And so just the act of compromise itself , and sustained , real compromise , would give us even more time , would allow both sides even longer to spread out the pain and reach even more compromise down the road .
So I 'm in the media . I feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise , to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us , but to just talk about it like what it is , not an existential crisis , not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views , but a math problem , a really solvable math problem , one where we 're not all going to get what we want and one where , you know , there 's going to be a little pain to spread around .
But the more we address it as a practical concern , the sooner we can resolve it , and the more time we have to resolve it , paradoxically .
Thank you .
Alberto Cairo : There are no scraps of men
Alberto Cairo 's clinics in Afghanistan used to close down during active fighting . Now , they stay open . In this powerful talk , Cairo tells the moving story of why -- and how he found humanity and dignity in the midst of war . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 've been in Afghanistan for 21 years .
I work for the Red Cross and I 'm a physical therapist .
My job is to make arms and legs -- well it 's not completely true .
We do more than that .
We provide the patients , the Afghan disabled , first with the physical rehabilitation then with the social reintegration .
It 's a very logical plan , but it was not always like this .
For many years , we were just providing them with artificial limbs .
It took quite many years for the program to become what it is now .
Today , I would like to tell you a story , the story of a big change , and the story of the people who made this change possible .
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1990 to work in a hospital for war victims .
And then , not only for war victims , but it was for any kind of patient .
I was also working in the orthopedic center , we call it .
This is the place where we make the legs .
At that time I found myself in a strange situation .
I felt not quite ready for that job .
There was so much to learn .
There were so many things new to me .
But it was a terrific job .
But as soon as the fighting intensified , the physical rehabilitation was suspended .
There were many other things to do .
So the orthopedic center was closed because physical rehabilitation was not considered a priority .
It was a strange sensation .
Anyway , you know every time I make this speech -- it 's not the first time -- but it 's an emotion .
It 's something that comes out from the past .
It 's 21 years , but they are still all there .
Anyway , in 1992 , the Mujahideen took all Afghanistan .
And the orthopedic center was closed .
I was assigned to work for the homeless , for the internally displaced people .
But one day , something happened .
I was coming back from a big food distribution in a mosque where tens and tens of people were squatting in terrible conditions .
I wanted to go home . I was driving .
You know , when you want to forget , you don 't want to see things , so you just want to go to your room , to lock yourself inside and say , " That 's enough . "
A bomb fell not far from my car -- well , far enough , but big noise .
And everybody disappeared from the street .
The cars disappeared as well .
I ducked .
And only one figure remained in the middle of the road .
It was a man in a wheelchair desperately trying to move away .
Well I 'm not a particularly brave person , I have to confess it , but I could not just ignore him .
So I stopped the car and I went to help .
The man was without legs and only with one arm .
Behind him there was a child , his son , red in the face in an effort to push the father .
So I took him into a safe place .
And I ask , " What are you doing out in the street in this situation ? "
" I work , " he said .
I wondered , what work ?
And then I ask an even more stupid question : " Why don 't you have the prostheses ?
Why don 't you have the artificial legs ? "
And he said , " The Red Cross has closed . "
Well without thinking , I told him " Come tomorrow .
We will provide you with a pair of legs . "
The man , his name was Mahmoud , and the child , whose name was Rafi , left .
And then I said , " Oh , my God . What did I say ?
The center is closed , no staff around .
Maybe the machinery is broken .
Who is going to make the legs for him ? "
So I hoped that he would not come .
This is the streets of Kabul in those days .
So I said , " Well I will give him some money . "
And so the following day , I went to the orthopedic center .
And I spoke with a gatekeeper .
I was ready to tell him , " Listen , if someone such-and-such comes tomorrow , please tell him that it was a mistake .
Nothing can be done .
Give him some money . "
But Mahmoud and his son were already there .
And they were not alone .
There were 15 , maybe 20 , people like him waiting .
And there was some staff too .
Among them there was my right-hand man , Najmuddin .
And the gatekeeper told me , " They come everyday to see if the center will open . "
I said , " No .
We have to go away . We cannot stay here . "
They were bombing -- not very close -- but you could hear the noise of the bombs .
So , " We cannot stay here , it 's dangerous .
It 's not a priority . "
But Najmuddin told me , " Listen now , we 're here . "
At least we can start repairing the prostheses , the broken prostheses of the people and maybe try to do something for people like Mahmoud . "
I said , " No , please . We cannot do that .
It 's really dangerous .
We have other things to do . "
But they insisted .
When you have 20 people in front of you , looking at you and you are the one who has to decide ...
So we started doing some repairs .
Also one of the physical therapists reported that Mahmoud could be provided with a leg , but not immediately .
The legs were swollen and the knees were stiff , so he needed a long preparation .
Believe me , I was worried because I was breaking the rules .
I was doing something that I was not supposed to do .
In the evening , I went to speak with the bosses at the headquarters , and I told them -- I lied -- I told them , " Listen , we are going to start a couple of hours per day , just a few repairs . "
Maybe some of them are here now .
So we started .
I was working , I was going everyday to work for the homeless .
And Najmuddin was staying there , doing everything and reporting on the patients .
He was telling me , " Patients are coming . "
We knew that many more patients could not come , prevented by the fighting .
But people were coming .
And Mahmoud was coming every day .
And slowly , slowly week after week his legs were improving .
The stump or cast prosthesis was made , and he was starting the real physical rehabilitation .
He was coming every day , crossing the front line .
A couple of times I crossed the front line in the very place where Mahmoud and his son were crossing .
I tell you , it was something so sinister that I was astonished he could do it every day .
But finally , the great day arrived .
Mahmoud was going to be discharged with his new legs .
It was April , I remember , a very beautiful day .
April in Kabul is beautiful , full of roses , full of flowers .
We could not possibly stay indoors , with all these sandbags at the windows .
Very sad , dark .
So we chose a small spot in the garden .
And Mahmoud put on his prostheses , the other patients did the same , and they started practicing for the last time before being discharged .
Suddenly , they started fighting .
Two groups of Mujahideen started fighting .
We could hear in the air the bullets passing .
So we dashed , all of us , towards the shelter .
Mahmoud grabbed his son , I grabbed someone else .
Everybody was grabbing something .
And we ran .
You know , 50 meters can be a long distance if you are totally exposed , but we managed to reach the shelter .
Inside , all of us panting , I sat a moment and I heard Rafi telling his father , " Father , you can run faster than me . "
And Mahmoud , " Of course I can .
I can run , and now you can go to school .
No need of staying with me all the day pushing my wheelchair . "
Later on , we took them home .
And I will never forget Mahmoud and his son walking together pushing the empty wheelchair .
And then I understood , physical rehabilitation is a priority .
Dignity cannot wait for better times .
From that day on , we never closed a single day .
Well sometimes we were suspended for a few hours , but we never , we never closed it again .
I met Mahmoud one year later .
He was in good shape -- a bit thinner .
He needed to change his prostheses -- a new pair of prostheses .
I asked about his son .
He told me , " He 's at school . He 'd doing quite well . "
But I understood he wanted to tell me something .
So I asked him , " What is that ? "
He was sweating .
He was clearly embarrassed .
And he was standing in front of me , his head down .
He said , " You have taught me to walk .
Thank you very much .
Now help me not to be a beggar anymore . "
That was the job .
" My children are growing .
I feel ashamed .
I don 't want them to be teased at school by the other students . "
I said , " Okay . "
I thought , how much money do I have in my pocket ?
Just to give him some money .
It was the easiest way .
He read my mind , and he said , " I ask for a job . "
And then he added something I will never forget for the rest of my life .
He said , " I am a scrap of a man , but if you help me , I 'm ready to do anything , even if I have to crawl on the ground . "
And then he sat down .
I sat down too with goosebumps everywhere .
Legless , with only one arm , illiterate , unskilled -- what job for him ?
Najmuddin told me , " Well we have a vacancy in the carpentry shop . "
" What ? " I said , " Stop . "
" Well yes , we need to increase the production of feet .
We need to employ someone to glue and to screw the sole of the feet .
We need to increase the production . "
" Excuse me ? "
I could not believe .
And then he said , " No , we can modify the workbench maybe to put a special stool , a special anvil , special vice , and maybe an electric screwdriver . "
I said , " Listen , it 's insane .
And it 's even cruel to think of anything like this .
That 's a production line and a very fast one .
It 's cruel to offer him a job knowing that he 's going to fail . "
But with Najmuddin , we cannot discuss .
So the only things I could manage to obtain was a kind of a compromise .
Only one week -- one week try and not a single day more .
One week later , Mahmoud was the fastest in the production line .
I told Najmuddin , " That 's a trick .
I can 't believe it . "
The production was up 20 percent .
" It 's a trick , it 's a trick , " I said .
And then I asked for verification .
It was true .
The comment of Najmuddin was Mahmoud has something to prove .
I understood that I was wrong again .
Mahmoud had looked taller .
I remember him sitting behind the workbench smiling .
He was a new man , taller again .
Of course , I understood that what made him stand tall -- yeah they were the legs , thank you very much -- but as a first step , it was the dignity .
He has regained his full dignity thanks to that job .
So of course , I understood .
And then we started a new policy -- a new policy completely different .
We decided to employ as many disabled as possible to train them in any possible job .
It became a policy of " positive discrimination , " we call it now .
And you know what ?
It 's good for everybody .
Everybody benefits from that -- those employed , of course , because they get a job and dignity .
But also for the newcomers .
They are 7,000 every year -- people coming for the first time .
And you should see the faces of these people when they realize that those assisting them are like them .
Sometimes you see them , they look , " Oh . "
And you see the faces .
And then the surprise turns into hope .
And it 's easy for me as well to train someone who has already passed through the experience of disability .
Poof , they learn much faster -- the motivation , the empathy they can establish with the patient is completely different , completely .
Scraps of men do not exist .
People like Mahmoud are agents of change .
And when you start changing , you cannot stop .
So employing people , yes , but also we started programming projects of microfinance , education .
And when you start , you cannot stop .
So you do vocational training , home education for those who cannot go to school .
Physical therapies can be done , not only in the orthopedic center , but also in the houses of the people .
There is always a better way to do things .
That 's Najmuddin , the one with the white coat .
Terrible Najmuddin , is that one .
I have learned a lot from people like Najmuddin , Mahmoud , Rafi .
They are my teachers .
I have a wish , a big wish , that this way of working , this way of thinking , is going to be implemented in other countries .
There are plenty of countries at war like Afghanistan .
It is possible and it is not difficult .
All we have to do is to listen to the people that we are supposed assist , to make them part of the decision-making process and then , of course , to adapt .
This is my big wish .
Well don 't think that the changes in Afghanistan are over ; not at all . We are going on .
Recently we have just started a program , a sport program -- basketball for wheelchair users .
We transport the wheelchairs everywhere .
We have several teams in the main part of Afghanistan .
At the beginning , when Anajulina told me , " We would like to start it , " I hesitated .
I said , " No , " you can imagine .
I said , " No , no , no , no , we can 't . "
And then I asked the usual question : " Is it a priority ?
Is it really necessary ? "
Well now you should see me .
I never miss a single training session .
The night before a match I 'm very nervous .
And you should see me during the match .
I shout like a true Italian .
What 's next ? What is going to be the next change ?
Well I don 't know yet , but I 'm sure Najmuddin and his friends , they have it already in mind .
That was my story . Thank you very much .
Pavan Sukhdev : Put a value on nature !
Every day , we use materials from the earth without thinking , for free . But what if we had to pay for their true value : would it make us more careful about what we use and what we waste ? Think of Pavan Sukhdev as nature 's banker -- assessing the value of the Earth 's assets . Eye-opening charts will make you think differently about the cost of air , water , trees ...
I 'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature .
The bad news is that mother nature 's back office isn 't working yet , so those invoices don 't get issued .
But we need to do something about this problem .
I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest , but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature , and which doesn 't get priced by the markets .
A project called TEEB was started in 2007 , and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8 + 5 .
And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern .
They asked themselves a question : If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change , well why can 't the same be done for conservation ?
Why can 't an equivalent case be made for nature ?
And the answer is : Yeah , it can .
But it 's not that straightforward .
Biodiversity , the living fabric of this planet , is not a gas .
It exists in many layers , ecosystems , species and genes across many scales -- international , national , local , community -- and doing for nature And yet , we began .
We began the project with an interim report , which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many , many researchers .
And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that , in fact , we were losing natural capital -- the benefits that flow from nature to us .
We were losing it at an extraordinary rate -- in fact , of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital .
This came out in 2008 , which was , of course , around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars .
So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss .
We then have gone on since to present for [ the ] international community , for governments , for local governments and for business and for people , for you and me , a whole slew of reports , which were presented at the U.N. last year , which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it .
What is this about ?
A picture that you 're familiar with -- the Amazon rainforests .
It 's a massive store of carbon , it 's an amazing store of biodiversity , but what people don 't really know is this also is a rain factory .
Because the northeastern trade winds , as they go over the Amazonas , effectively gather the water vapor .
Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds , and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin .
This rainfall cycle , this rainfall factory , effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America .
But the question arises : Okay , so how much do Uruguay , Paraguay , Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas , which produces that rainfall ?
And the answer is zilch , exactly zero .
That 's the economic invisibility of nature .
That can 't keep going on , because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful .
Economics has become the currency of policy .
And unless we address this invisibility , we are going to get the results that we are seeing , which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset .
It 's not just about the Amazonas , or indeed about rainforests .
No matter what level you look at , whether it 's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level , we see the same problem again and again .
So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level .
At the species level , it 's been estimated that insect-based pollination , bees pollinating fruit and so on , is something like 190 billion dollars-worth .
That 's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally .
It completely passes below the radar screen .
But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice ?
Or for that matter , if you look at the genetic level , 60 percent of medicines were prospected , were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef .
Once again , most of that doesn 't get paid .
And that brings me to another aspect of this , which is , to whom should this get paid ?
That genetic material probably belonged , if it could belong to anyone , to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule , which then became the medicine .
They were the ones that didn 't get paid .
And if you look at the species level , you saw about fish .
Today , the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor , the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods , to feed their families .
Something like a billion people depend on fish , the quantity of fish in the oceans .
A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein .
And at this rate at which we are losing fish , it is a human problem of enormous dimensions , a health problem of a kind we haven 't seen before .
And finally , at the ecosystem level , whether it 's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests , or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats , or whether it 's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest , it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services .
We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil , India and Indonesia , even though ecosystem services -- these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free -- they 're not very big in percentage terms of GDP -- two , four , eight , 10 , 15 percent -- but in these countries , if we measure how much they 're worth to the poor , the answers are more like 45 percent , 75 percent , 90 percent .
That 's the difference .
Because these are important benefits for the poor .
And you can 't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you 're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset , the most important asset , which is your development asset , that is ecological infrastructure .
How bad can things get ?
Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance .
It 's basically a measure of how many tigers , toads , ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around .
The green represents the percentage .
If you start green , it 's like 80 to 100 percent .
If it 's yellow , it 's 40 to 60 percent .
And these are percentages versus the original state , so to speak , the pre-industrial era , 1750 .
Now I 'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this .
And just watch the change in colors in India , China , Europe , sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us .
See that again .
The only places that remain green -- and that 's not good news -- is , in fact , places like the Gobi Desert , like the tundra and like the Sahara .
But that doesn 't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place .
This is the challenge .
The reason this is happening boils down , in my mind , to one basic problem , which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits .
We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth , it 's common goods .
And here 's an example from Thailand where we found that , because the value of a mangrove is not that much -- it 's about $ 600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured -- compared to its value as a shrimp farm , which is more like $ 9,600 , there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms .
But of course , if you look at exactly what those profits are , almost 8,000 of those dollars are , in fact , subsidies .
So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it 's more like 1,200 to 600 .
That 's not that hard .
But on the other hand , if you start measuring , how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use ?
Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects , that answer is more like $ 12,000 of cost .
And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries , the fish nurseries , that provide fish for the poor , that answer is more like $ 11,000 .
So now look at the different lens .
If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits , you get a completely different answer , which is clearly conservation makes more sense , and not destruction .
So is this just a story from South Thailand ?
Sorry , this is a global story .
And here 's what the same calculation looks like , which was done recently -- well I say recently , over the last 10 years -- by a group called TRUCOST .
And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations , what are the externalities ?
In other words , what are the costs of doing business as usual ?
This is not illegal stuff , this is basically business as usual , which causes climate-changing emissions , which have an economic cost .
It causes pollutants being issued , which have an economic cost , health cost and so on .
Use of freshwater .
If you drill water to make coke near a village farm , that 's not illegal , but yes , it costs the community .
Can we stop this , and how ?
I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital .
Basically the stuff of life is natural capital , and we need to recognize and build that into our systems .
When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level , we don 't include our biggest asset at the country level .
When we measure corporate performances , we don 't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society .
That has to stop .
In fact , this was what really inspired my interest in this phase .
I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project .
That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward -- looking at China with its stellar growths of eight , nine , 10 percent and wondering , why can we do the same ?
And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn 't make sense .
This is going to create more cost to society and more losses .
So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states .
That 's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project .
Calculating this at the national level is one thing , and it has begun .
And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they 've started a project called WAVES -- Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services .
But calculating this at the next level , that means at the business sector level , is important .
And actually we 've done this with the TEEB project .
We 've done this for a very difficult case , which was for deforestation in China .
This is important , because in China in 1997 , the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society .
Just a year later the Yangtze flooded , causing something like 5,500 deaths .
So clearly there was a problem with deforestation .
It was associated largely with the construction industry .
And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling .
A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs -- the cost of loss of topsoil , the cost of loss of waterways , the lost productivity , the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors , desertification and so on -- those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber .
So in fact , the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China .
Of course , after the event one can be wise .
The way to do this is to do it on a company basis , to take leadership forward , and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost , and to disclose these answers .
Someone once asked me , " Who is better or worse , is it Unilever or is it P & amp ; G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia ? "
And I couldn 't answer because neither of these companies , good though they are and professional though they are , do not calculate or disclose their externalities .
But if we look at companies like PUMA -- Jochen Zeitz , their CEO and chairman , once challenged me at a function , saying that he 's going to implement my project before I finish it .
Well I think we kind of did it at the same time , but he 's done it .
He 's basically worked the cost to PUMA .
PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover , 300 million dollars of profits , 200 million dollars after tax , 94 million dollars of externalities , cost to business .
Now that 's not a happy situation for them , but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say , " Here 's what we are measuring .
We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure . "
That 's an example , I think , for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from .
If more companies did this , and if more sectors engaged this as sectors , you could have analysts , business analysts , and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies .
Today we can 't yet do that , but I think the path is laid out .
This can be done .
And I 'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K.
has already set up a coalition to do this , an international coalition .
The other favorite , if you like , solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets .
And by the way , these are my favorites -- externalities calculation and green carbon markets .
TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it , but these are the favorites .
What 's green carbon ?
Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace .
It 's about energy emissions .
The European Union ETS is the main marketplace .
It 's not doing too well . We 've over-issued .
A bit like inflation : you over-issue currency , you get what you see , declining prices .
But that 's all about energy and industry .
But what we 're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon , that is soot .
What we 're also missing is blue carbon , which , by the way , is the largest store of carbon -- more than 55 percent .
Thankfully , the flux , in other words , the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa , is more or less balanced .
In fact , what 's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions , which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans .
More of that in a minute .
And finally , there 's deforestation , and there 's emission of methane from agriculture .
Green carbon , which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions , and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions .
We have the means already in our hands , through a structure , through a mechanism , called REDD Plus -- a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation .
And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme .
So we actually have some movement forward .
But the thing is to do a lot more of that .
Will this solve the problem ? Will economics solve everything ?
Well I 'm afraid not .
There is an area that is the oceans , coral reefs .
As you can see , they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia , Malaysia , India , Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean .
These red dots , these red areas , basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people .
So that 's almost an eighth of society .
And the sad thing is that , as these coral reefs are lost -- and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs -- we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species , the warm water corals , we 're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans , but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries .
So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations , what we have done is we 've made an ethical choice .
We 've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs .
Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that .
Let 's think about it and what it means , but please , let 's not do more of that .
Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital .
I don 't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices .
Thank you .
His Holiness the Karmapa : The technology of the heart
His Holiness the Karmapa talks about how he was discovered to be the reincarnation of a revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism . In telling his story , he urges us to work on not just technology and design , but the technology and design of the heart . He is translated onstage by Tyler Dewar .
Tyler Dewar : The way I feel right now is that all of the other speakers have said exactly what I wanted to say .
And it seems that the only thing left for me to say is to thank you all for your kindness .
TD : But maybe in the spirit of appreciating the kindness of you all , I could share with you a little story about myself .
TD : From the time I was very young , onward , I was given a lot of different responsibilities , and it always seemed to me , when I was young , that everything was laid out before me .
All of the plans for me were already made .
I was given the clothes that I needed to wear and told where I needed to be , given these very precious and holy looking robes to wear , with the understanding that it was something sacred or important .
TD : But before that kind of formal lifestyle happened for me , I was living in eastern Tibet with my family .
And when I was seven years old , all of a sudden , a search party arrived at my home .
They were looking the next Karmapa , and I noticed they were talking to my mom and dad , that I was the Karmapa .
And these days , people ask me a lot , how did that feel .
How did that feel when they came and whisked you away , and your lifestyle completely changed ?
And what I mostly say is that , at that time , it was a pretty interesting idea to me .
I thought that things would be pretty fun and there would be more things to play with .
TD : But it didn 't turn out to be so fun and entertaining , as I thought it would have been .
I was placed in a pretty strictly controlled environment .
And immediately , a lot of different responsibilities , in terms of my education and so forth , were heaped upon me .
I was separated , largely , from my family , including my mother and father .
I didn 't have have many personal friends to spend time with , but I was expected to perform these prescribed duties .
So it turned out that my fantasy about an entertaining life of being the Karmapa wasn 't going to come true .
It more felt to be the case to me that I was being treated like a statue , and I was to sit in one place like a statue would .
TD : Nevertheless , I felt that , even though I 've been separated from my loved ones -- and , of course , now I 'm even further away .
When I was 14 , I escaped from Tibet and became even further removed from my mother and father , my relatives , my friends and my homeland .
But nevertheless , there 's no real sense of separation from me in my heart , in terms of the love that I feel for these people .
I feel , still , a very strong connection of love for all of these people and for the land .
TD : And I still do get to keep in touch with my mother and father , albeit infrequently .
I talk to my mother once in a blue moon on the telephone .
And my experience is that , when I 'm talking to her , with every second that passes during our conversation , the feeling of love that binds us is bringing us closer and closer together .
TD : So those were just a few remarks about my personal background .
And in terms of other things that I wanted to share with you , in terms of ideas , I think it 's wonderful to have a situation like this , where so many people from different backgrounds and places can come together , exchange their ideas and form relationships of friendship with each other .
And I think that 's symbolic of what we 're seeing in the world in general , that the world is becoming smaller and smaller , and that all of the peoples in the world are enjoying more opportunities for connection .
That 's wonderful , but we should also remember that we should have a similar process happening on the inside .
Along with outward development and increase of opportunity , there should be inward development and deepening of our heart connections as well as our outward connections .
So we spoke and we heard some about design this week .
I think that it 's important for us to remember that we need to keep pushing forward on the endeavor of the design of the heart .
We heard a lot about technology this week , and it 's important for us to remember to invest a lot of our energy in improving the technology of the heart .
TD : So , even though I 'm somewhat happy about the wonderful developments that are happening in the world , still , I feel a sense of impediment , when it comes to the ability that we have to connect with each other on a heart-to-heart , or a mind-to-mind , level .
I feel that there are some things that are getting in the way .
TC : My relationship to this concept of heart-to-heart connection , or mind-to-mind connection , is an interesting one , because , as a spiritual leader , I 'm always attempting to open my heart to others and offer myself up for heart-to-heart and mind-to-mind connections in a genuine way with other people , but at the same time , I 've always been advised that I need to emphasize intelligence over the heart-to-heart connections , because , being someone in a position like mine , if I don 't rely primarily on intelligence , then something dangerous may happen to me .
So it 's an interesting paradox at play there .
But I had a really striking experience once , when a group from Afghanistan came to visit me , and we had a really interesting conversation .
TD : So we ended up talking about the Bamiyan Buddhas , which , as you know , were destroyed some years ago in Afghanistan .
But the basis of our conversation was the different approach to spirituality on the part of the Muslim and Buddhist traditions .
Of course , in Muslim , because of the teachings around the concept of idolatry , you don 't find as many physical representations of divinity or of spiritual liberation as you do in the Buddhist tradition , where , of course , there are many statues of the Buddha that are highly revered .
So , we were talking about the differences between the traditions and what many people perceived as the tragedy of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas , but I offered the suggestion that perhaps we could look at this in a positive way .
What we saw in the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was the depletion of matter , some solid substance falling down and disintegrating .
Maybe we could look at that to be more similar to the falling of the Berlin Wall , where a divide that had kept two types of people apart had collapsed and opened up a door for further communication .
So I think that , in this way , it 's always possible for us to derive something positive that can help us understand one another better .
TD : So , with regard to the development that we 've been talking about here at this conference , I really feel that the development that we make shouldn 't create a further burden for us as human beings , but should be used to improve our fundamental lifestyle TD : Of course , I rejoice in the development and the growth and the rise of the noble land of India , the great country of India , but at the same time , I think , as some of us have acknowledged , we need to be aware that some aspects of this rise are coming at the cost of the very ground on which we stand .
So , as we are climbing the tree , some of the things that we 're doing in order to climb the tree are actually undermining the tree 's very root .
And so , what I think it comes down to is a question of , not only having information of what 's going on , but paying attention to that and letting that shift our motivation to become more sincere and genuinely positive .
We have hear , this week , about the horrible sufferings , for example , that so many women of the world are enduring day-to-day .
We have that information , but what often happens to us is that we don 't really choose to pay attention to it .
We don 't really choose to allow that to cause there to be a shift in our hearts .
So I think the way forward for the world -- in harmony with the real root of happiness -- is that we allow the information that we have to really make a change in our heart .
TD : So I think that sincere motivation is very important for our future well-being , or deep sense of well-being as humans , and I think that means sinking in to whatever it is you 're doing now .
Whatever work you 're trying to do now to benefit the world , sink into that , get a full taste of that .
TD : So , since we 've been here this week , we 've taken millions of breaths , collectively , and perhaps we haven 't witnessed any course changes happening in our lives , but we often miss the very subtle changes .
And I think that sometimes we develop grand concepts of what happiness might look like for us , but that , if we pay attention , we can see that there are little symbols of happiness in every breath that we take .
TD : So , every one of you who has come here is so talented , and you have so much to offer to the world , I think it would be a good note to conclude on then to just take a moment to appreciate how fortunate we are to have come together in this way and exchanged ideas and really form a strong aspiration and energy within ourselves that we will take the good that has come from this conference , the momentum , the positivity , and we will spread that and plant it in all of the corners of the world .
His Holiness the Karmapa : Tomorrow is my Talk .
TD : Lakshmi has worked incredibly hard , even in inviting me , let alone everything else that she has done to make this happen , and I was somewhat resistant at times , and I was also very nervous throughout this week .
I was feeling under the weather and dizzy and so forth , and people would ask me , why .
I would tell them , " It 's because I have to talk tomorrow . "
And so Lakshmi had to put up with me through all of that , but I very much appreciate the opportunity she 's given me to be here .
And to you , everyone , thank you very much .
HH : Thank you very much .
Garth Lenz : The true cost of oil
What does environmental devastation actually look like ? At TEDxVictoria , photographer Garth Lenz shares shocking photos of the Alberta Tar Sands mining project -- and the beautiful ecosystems under threat . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
The world 's largest and most devastating environmental and industrial project is situated in the heart of the largest and most intact forest in the world , Canada 's boreal forest .
It stretches right across northern Canada , in Labrador , it 's home to the largest remaining wild caribou herd in the world , the George River caribou herd , numbering approximately 400,000 animals .
Unfortunately , when I was there I couldn 't find one of them , but you have the antlers as proof .
All across the boreal , we 're blessed with this incredible abundance of wetlands .
Wetlands globally are one of the most endangered ecosystems .
They 're absolutely critical ecosystems , they clean air , they clean water , they sequester large amounts of greenhouse gases , and they 're home to a huge diversity of species .
In the boreal , they are also the home where almost 50 percent of the 800 bird species found in North America migrate north to breed and raise their young .
In Ontario , the boreal marches down south to the north shore of Lake Superior .
And these incredibly beautiful boreal forests were the inspiration for some of the most famous art in Canadian history , the Group of Seven were very inspired by this landscape , and so the boreal is not just a really key part of our natural heritage , but also an important part of our cultural heritage .
In Manitoba , this is an image from the east side of Lake Winnipeg , and this is the home of the newly designated UNESCO Cultural Heritage site .
In Saskatchewan , as across all of the boreal , home to some of our most famous rivers , an incredible network of rivers and lakes that every school-age child learns about , the Peace , the Athabasca , the Churchill here , the Mackenzie , and these networks were the historical routes for the voyageur and the coureur des bois , the first non-Aboriginal explorers of northern Canada that , taking from the First Nations people , used canoes and paddled to explore for a trade route , a Northwest Passage for the fur trade .
In the North , the boreal is bordered by the tundra , and just below that , in Yukon , we have this incredible valley , the Tombstone Valley .
And the Tombstone Valley is home to the Porcupine caribou herd .
Now you 've probably heard about the Porcupine caribou herd in the context of its breeding ground in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge .
Well , the wintering ground is also critical and it also is not protected , and is potentially , could be potentially , exploited for gas and mineral rights .
The western border of the boreal in British Columbia is marked by the Coast Mountains , and on the other side of those mountains is the greatest remaining temperate rainforest in the world , the Great Bear Rainforest , and we 'll discuss that in a few minutes in a bit more detail .
All across the boreal , it 's home for a huge incredible range of indigenous peoples , and a rich and varied culture .
And I think that one of the reasons why so many of these groups have retained a link to the past , know their native languages , the songs , the dances , the traditions , I think part of that reason is because of the remoteness , the span and the wilderness of this almost 95 percent intact ecosystem .
And I think particularly now , as we see ourselves in a time of environmental crisis , we can learn so much from these people who have lived so sustainably in this ecosystem for over 10,000 years .
In the heart of this ecosystem is the very antithesis of all of these values that we 've been talking about , and I think these are some of the core values that make us proud to be Canadians .
This is the Alberta tar sands , the largest oil reserves on the planet outside of Saudi Arabia .
Trapped underneath the boreal forest and wetlands of northern Alberta are these vast reserves of this sticky , tar-like bitumen .
And the mining and the exploitation of that is creating devastation on a scale that the planet has never seen before .
I want to try to convey some sort of a sense of the size of this .
If you look at that truck there , it is the largest truck of its kind of the planet .
It is a 400-ton-capacity dump truck and its dimensions are 45 feet long by 35 feet wide and 25 feet high .
If I stand beside that truck , my head comes to around the bottom of the yellow part of that hubcap .
Within the dimensions of that truck , you could build a 3,000-square-foot two-story home quite easily . I did the math .
So instead of thinking of that as a truck , think of that as a 3,000-square-foot home .
That 's not a bad size home .
And line those trucks / homes back and forth across there from the bottom all the way to the top .
And then think of how large that very small section of one mine is .
Now , you can apply that same kind of thinking here as well .
Now , here you see -- of course , as you go further on , these trucks become like a pixel .
Again , imagine those all back and forth there .
How large is that one portion of a mine ?
That would be a huge , vast metropolitan area , probably much larger than the city of Victoria .
And this is just one of a number of mines , 10 mines so far right now .
This is one section of one mining complex , and there are about another 40 or 50 in the approval process .
No tar sands mine has actually ever been denied approval , so it is essentially a rubber stamp .
The other method of extraction is what 's called the in-situ .
And here , massive amounts of water are super-heated and pumped through the ground , through these vasts networks of pipelines , seismic lines , drill paths , compressor stations .
And even though this looks maybe not quite as repugnant as the mines , it 's even more damaging in some ways .
It impacts and fragments a larger part of the wilderness , where there is 90 percent reduction of key species , like woodland caribou and grizzly bears , and it consumes even more energy , more water , and produces at least as much greenhouse gas .
So these in-situ developments are at least as ecologically damaging as the mines .
The oil produced from either method produces more greenhouse gas emissions than any other oil .
This is one of the reasons why it 's called the world 's dirtiest oil .
It 's also one of the reasons why it is the largest and fastest-growing single source of carbon in Canada , and it is also a reason why Canada is now number three in terms of producing carbon per person .
The tailings ponds are the largest toxic impoundments on the planet .
Oil sands -- or rather I should say tar sands -- " oil sands " is a P.R.-created term so that the oil companies wouldn 't be trying to promote something that sounds like a sticky tar-like substance that 's the world 's dirtiest oil .
So they decided to call it oil sands .
The tar sands consume more water than any other oil process , three to five barrels of water are taken , polluted and then returned into tailings ponds , the largest toxic impoundments on the planet .
SemCrude , just one of the licensees , in just one of their tailings ponds , dumps 250,000 tons of this toxic gunk every single day .
That 's creating the largest toxic impoundments in the history of the planet .
So far , this is enough toxin to cover the face of Lake Eerie a foot deep .
And the tailings ponds range in size up to 9,000 acres .
That 's two-thirds the size of the entire island of Manhattan .
That 's like from Wall Street at the southern edge of Manhattan up to maybe 120th Street .
So this is an absolutely -- this is one of the larger tailings ponds .
This might be , what ? I don 't know , half the size of Manhattan .
And you can see in the context , it 's just a relatively small section of one of 10 mining complexes and another 40 to 50 on stream to be approved soon .
And of course , these tailings ponds -- well , you can 't see many ponds from outer space and you can see these , so maybe we should stop calling them ponds -- these massive toxic wastelands are built unlined and on the banks of the Athabasca River .
And the Athabasca River drains downstream to a range of Aboriginal communities .
In Fort Chippewa , the 800 people there , are finding toxins in the food chain , this has been scientifically proven .
The tar sands toxins are in the food chain , and this is causing cancer rates up to 10 times what they are in the rest of Canada .
In spite of that , people have to live , have to eat this food in order to survive .
The incredibly high price of flying food into these remote Northern Aboriginal communities and the high rate of unemployment makes this an absolute necessity for survival .
And not that many years ago , I was lent a boat by a First Nations man .
And he said , " When you go out on the river , do not under any circumstances eat the fish .
It 's carcinogenic . "
And yet , on the front porch of that man 's cabin , I saw four fish . He had to feed his family to survive .
And as a parent , I just can 't imagine what that does to your soul .
And that 's what we 're doing .
The boreal forest is also perhaps our best defense against global warming and climate change .
The boreal forest sequesters more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem .
And this is absolutely key .
So what we 're doing is , we 're taking the most concentrated greenhouse gas sink , twice as much greenhouse gases are sequestered in the boreal per acre than the tropical rainforests .
And what we 're doing is we 're destroying this carbon sink , turning it into a carbon bomb .
And we 're replacing that with the largest industrial project in the history of the world , which is producing the most high-carbon greenhouse gas emitting oil in the world .
And we 're doing this on the second largest oil reserves on the planet .
This is one of the reasons why Canada , originally a climate change hero -- we were one of the first signatories of the Kyoto Accord .
Now we 're the country that has full-time lobbyists in the European Union and Washington , D.C.
threatening trade wars when these countries talk about wanting to bring in positive legislation to limit the import of high-carbon fuels , of greenhouse gas emissions , anything like this , at international conferences , whether they 're in Copenhagen or Cancun , international conferences on climate change , we 're the country that gets the dinosaur award every single day as being the biggest obstacle to progress on this issue .
Just 70 miles downstream is the world 's largest freshwater delta , the Peace-Athabasca Delta , the only one at the juncture of all four migratory flyways .
This is a globally significant wetland , perhaps the greatest on the planet .
Incredible habitat for half the bird species you find in North America , migrating here .
And also the last refuge for the largest herd of wild bison , and also , of course , critical habitat for another whole range of other species .
But it too is being threatened by the massive amount of water being drawn from the Athabasca , which feeds these wetlands , and also the incredible toxic burden of the largest toxic unlined impoundments on the planet , which are leaching in to the food chain for all the species downstream .
So as bad as all that is , things are going to get much worse , much , much worse .
This is the infrastructure as we see it about now .
This is what 's planned for 2015 .
And you can see here the Keystone Pipeline , which would take tar sands raw down to the Gulf Coast , punching a pipeline through the heart , the agricultural heart of North America , of the United States , and securing the contract with the dirtiest fuel in the world by consumption of the United States , and promoting a huge disincentive to a sustainable clean energy future for America .
Here you see the route down the Mackenzie Valley .
This would put a pipeline to take natural gas from the Beaufort Sea through the heart of the third largest watershed basin in the world , and the only one which is 95 percent intact .
And building a pipeline with an industrial highway would change forever this incredible wilderness , which is a true rarity on the planet today .
So the Great Bear Rainforest is just over the hill there , within a few miles we go from these dry boreal forests of 100-year-old trees , maybe 10 inches across , and soon we 're in the coastal temperate rainforest , rain-drenched , 1,000-year-old trees , 20 feet across , a completely different ecosystem .
And the Great Bear Rainforest is generally considered to be the largest coastal temperate rainforest ecosystem in the world .
Some of the greatest densities of , some of the most iconic and threatened species on the planet , and yet there 's a proposal , of course , to build a pipeline to take huge tankers , 10 times the size of the Exxon Valdez , through some of the most difficult to navigate waters in the world , where only just a few years ago , a B.C. ferry ran aground .
When one of these tar sands tankers , carrying the dirtiest oil , 10 times as much as the Exxon Valdez , eventually hits a rock and goes down , we 're going to have one of the worst ecological disasters this planet has ever seen .
And here we have the plan out to 2030 .
What they 're proposing is an almost four-times increase in production , and that would industrialize an area the size of Florida .
In doing so , we 'll be removing a large part of our greatest carbon sink and replacing it with the most high greenhouse gas emission oil in the future .
The world does not need any more tar mines .
The world does not need any more pipelines to wed our addiction to fossil fuels .
And the world certainly does not need the largest toxic impoundments to grow and multiply and further threaten the downstream communities .
And let 's face it , we all live downstream in an era of global warming and climate change .
What we need , is we all need to act to ensure that Canada respects the massive amounts of freshwater that we hold in this country .
We need to ensure that these wetlands and forests that are our best and greatest and most critical defense against global warming are protected , and we are not releasing that carbon bomb into the atmosphere .
And we need to all gather together and say no to the tar sands .
And we can do that . There is a huge network all over the world fighting to stop this project .
And I quite simply think that this is not something that should be decided just in Canada .
Everyone in this room , everyone across Canada , everyone listening to this presentation has a role to play and , I think , a responsibility .
Because what we do here is going to change our history , it 's going to color our possibility to survive , and for our children to survive and have a rich future .
We have an incredible gift in the boreal , an incredible opportunity to preserve our best defense against global warming , but we could let that slip away .
The tar sands could threaten not just a large section of the boreal .
It compromises the life and the health of some of our most underprivileged and vulnerable people , the Aboriginal communities that have so much to teach us .
It could destroy the Athabasca Delta , the largest and possibly greatest freshwater delta in the planet .
It could destroy the Great Bear Rainforest , the largest temperate rainforest in the world .
And it could have huge impacts on the future of the agricultural heartland of North America .
I hope that you will all , if you 've been moved by this presentation , join with the growing international community to get Canada to step up to its responsibilities , to convince Canada to go back to being a climate change champion instead of a climate change villain , and to say no to the tar sands , and yes to a clean energy future for all .
Thank you so much .
Marco Tempest : The magic of truth and lies
Using three iPods like magical props , Marco Tempest spins a clever , surprisingly heartfelt meditation on truth and lies , art and emotion .
So the type of magic I like , and I 'm a magician , is a magic that uses technology to create illusions .
So I would like to show you something I 've been working on .
It 's an application that I think will be useful for artists -- multimedia artists in particular .
It synchronizes videos across multiple screens of mobile devices .
And I borrowed these three iPods from people here in the audience to show you what I mean .
And I 'm going to use them to tell you a little bit about my favorite subject : deception .
One of my favorite magicians is Karl Germain .
He had this wonderful trick where a rosebush would bloom right in front of your eyes .
But it was his production of a butterfly that was the most beautiful .
Ladies and gentlemen , the creation of life .
Marco Tempest : When asked about deception , he said this : Magic is the only honest profession .
A magician promises to deceive you -- and he does .
MT : I like to think of myself as an honest magician .
I use a lot of tricks , which means that sometimes I have to lie to you .
Now I feel bad about that .
But people lie every day .
Hold on .
Girl in Phone : Hey , where are you ?
MT : Stuck in traffic . I 'll be there soon .
You 've all done it .
Lady : I 'll be ready in just a minute , darling .
It 's just what I 've always wanted .
You were great .
MT : Deception , it 's a fundamental part of life .
Now polls show that men tell twice as many lies as women -- assuming the women they ask told the truth .
We deceive to gain advantage and to hide our weaknesses .
The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception .
Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance .
Some people deceive for money .
Let 's play a game .
Three cards , three chances .
One five will get you 10 , 10 will get you 20 .
Now where 's the lady ?
Where is the queen ?
MT : This one ?
Sorry . You lose .
Well , I didn 't deceive you .
You deceived yourself .
Self-deception .
That 's when we convince ourselves that a lie is the truth .
Sometimes it 's hard to tell the two apart .
Compulsive gamblers are experts at self-deception .
They believe they can win .
They forget the times they lose .
The brain is very good at forgetting .
Bad experiences are quickly forgotten .
Bad experiences quickly disappear .
Which is why in this vast and lonely cosmos , we are so wonderfully optimistic .
Our self-deception becomes a positive illusion -- why movies are able to take us onto extraordinary adventures ; why we believe Romeo when he says he loves Juliet ; and why single notes of music , when played together , become a sonata and conjure up meaning .
That 's " Clair de Lune . "
Its composer called Debussy said that art was the greatest deception of all .
Art is a deception that creates real emotions -- a lie that creates a truth .
And when you give yourself over to that deception , it becomes magic .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Thelma Golden : How art gives shape to cultural change
Thelma Golden , curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem , talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture . The " post-black " artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture -- and about the meaning of art itself .
The brilliant playwright , Adrienne Kennedy , wrote a volume called " People Who Led to My Plays . "
And if I were to write a volume , it would be called , " Artists Who Have Led My Exhibitions " because my work , in understanding art and in understanding culture , has come by following artists , by looking at what artists mean and what they do and who they are .
J.J. from " Good Times , " significant to many people of course because of " Dy-no-mite , " but perhaps more significant as the first , really , black artist on primetime TV .
Jean-Michel Basquiat , important to me because [ he was ] the first black artist in real time that showed me the possibility of who and what I was about to enter into .
My overall project is about art -- specifically , about black artists -- very generally about the way in which art can change the way we think about culture and ourselves .
My interest is in artists who understand and rewrite history , who think about themselves within the narrative of the larger world of art , but who have created new places for us to see and understand .
I 'm showing two artists here , Glenn Ligon and Carol Walker , two of many who really form for me the essential questions that I wanted to bring as a curator to the world .
I was interested in the idea of why and how I could create a new story , a new narrative in art history and a new narrative in the world .
And to do this , I knew that I had to see the way in which artists work , understand the artist 's studio as a laboratory , imagine , then , reinventing the museum as a think tank and looking at the exhibition as the ultimate white paper -- asking questions , providing the space to look and to think about answers .
In 1994 , when I was a curator at the Whitney Museum , I made an exhibition called Black Male .
It looked at the intersection of race and gender in contemporary American art .
It sought to express the ways in which art could provide a space for dialogue -- complicated dialogue , dialogue with many , many points of entry -- and how the museum could be the space for this contest of ideas .
This exhibition included over 20 artists of various ages and races , but all looking at black masculinity from a very particular point of view .
What was significant about this exhibition is the way in which it engaged me in my role as a curator , as a catalyst , for this dialogue .
One of the things that happened very distinctly in the course of this exhibition is I was confronted with idea of how powerful images can be and people 's understanding of themselves and each other .
I 'm showing you two works , one on the right by Leon Golub , one on the left by Robert Colescott .
And in the course of the exhibition -- which was contentious , controversial and ultimately , for me , life-changing in my sense of what art could be -- a woman came up to me on the gallery floor to express her concern about the nature of how powerful images could be and how we understood each other .
And she pointed to the work on the left to tell me how problematic this image was , as it related , for her , to the idea of how black people had been represented .
And she pointed to the image on the right as an example , to me , of the kind of dignity that needed to be portrayed to work against those images in the media .
She then assigned these works racial identities , basically saying to me that the work on the right , clearly , was made by a black artist , the work on the left , clearly , by a white artist , when , in effect , that was the opposite case : Bob Colescott , African-American artist ; Leon Golub , a white artist .
The point of that for me was to say -- in that space , in that moment -- that I really , more than anything , wanted to understand how images could work , how images did work , and how artists provided a space bigger than one that we could imagine in our day-to-day lives to work through these images .
Fast-forward and I end up in Harlem ; home for many of black America , very much the psychic heart of the black experience , really the place where the Harlem Renaissance existed .
Harlem now , sort of explaining and thinking of itself in this part of the century , looking both backwards and forwards ...
I always say Harlem is an interesting community because , unlike many other places , it thinks of itself in the past , present and the future simultaneously ; no one speaks of it just in the now .
It 's always what it was and what it can be .
And , in thinking about that , then my second project , the second question I ask is : Can a museum be a catalyst in a community ?
Can a museum house artists and allow them to be change agents as communities rethink themselves ?
This is Harlem , actually , on January 20th , thinking about itself in a very wonderful way .
So I work now at The Studio Museum in Harlem , thinking about exhibitions there , thinking about what it means to discover art 's possibility .
Now , what does this mean to some of you ?
In some cases , I know that many of you are involved in cross-cultural dialogues , you 're involved in ideas of creativity and innovation .
Think about the place that artists can play in that -- that is the kind of incubation and advocacy that I work towards , in working with young , black artists .
Think about artists , not as content providers , though they can be brilliant at that , but , again , as real catalysts .
The Studio Museum was founded in the late 60s .
And I bring this up because it 's important to locate this practice in history .
To look at 1968 , in the incredible historic moment that it is , and think of the arc that has happened since then , to think of the possibilities that we are all privileged to stand in today and imagine that this museum that came out of a moment of great protest and one that was so much about examining the history and the legacy of important African-American artists to the history of art in this country like Jacob Lawrence , Norman Lewis , Romare Bearden .
And then , of course , to bring us to today .
In 1975 , Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University .
After his lecture , a student got up and said to him , " Give us a poem . "
And Mohammed Ali said , " Me , we . "
A profound statement about the individual and the community .
The space in which now , in my project of discovery , of thinking about artists , of trying to define what might be black art cultural movement of the 21st century .
What that might mean for cultural movements all over this moment , the " me , we " seems incredibly prescient totally important .
To this end , the specific project that has made this possible for me is a series of exhibitions , all titled with an F -- Freestyle , Frequency and Flow -- which have set out to discover and define the young , black artists working in this moment who I feel strongly will continue to work over the next many years .
This series of exhibitions was made specifically to try and question the idea of what it would mean now , at this point in history , to see art as a catalyst ; what it means now , at this point in history , as we define and redefine culture , black culture specifically in my case , but culture generally .
I named this group of artists around an idea , which I put out there called post-black , really meant to define them as artists who came and start their work now , looking back at history but start in this moment , historically .
It is really in this sense of discovery that I have a new set of questions that I 'm asking .
This new set of questions is : What does it mean , right now , to be African-American in America ?
What can artwork say about this ?
Where can a museum exist as the place for us all to have this conversation ?
Really , most exciting about this is thinking about the energy and the excitement that young artists can bring .
Their works for me are about , not always just simply about the aesthetic innovation that their minds imagine , that their visions create and put out there in the world , but more , perhaps , importantly , through the excitement of the community that they create as important voices that would allow us right now to understand our situation , as well as in the future .
I am continually amazed by the way in which the subject of race can take itself in many places that we don 't imagine it should be .
I am always amazed by the way in which artists are willing to do that in their work .
It is why I look to art .
It 's why I ask questions of art .
It is why I make exhibitions .
Now , this exhibition , as I said , 40 young artists done over the course of eight years , and for me it 's about considering the implications .
It 's considering the implications of what this generation has to say to the rest of us .
It 's considering what it means for these artists to be both out in the world as their work travels , but in their communities as people who are seeing and thinking about the issues that face us .
It 's also about thinking about the creative spirit and nurturing it , and imagining , particularly in urban America , about the nurturing of the spirit .
Now , where , perhaps , does this end up right now ?
this cultural discourse in an international context .
So the last iteration of this project has been called Flow , with the idea now of creating a real network of artists around the world ; really looking , not so much from Harlem and out , but looking across , and Flow looked at artists all born on the continent of Africa .
And as many of us think about that continent and think about what if means to us all in the 21st century , I have begun that looking through artists , through artworks , and imagining what they can tell us about the future , what they tell us about our future , and what they create in their sense of offering us this great possibility of watching that continent emerge as part of our bigger dialogue .
So , what do I discover when I look at artworks ?
What do I think about when I think about art ?
I feel like the privilege I 've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works , the discovery of exciting works .
But , really , it has been what I 've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition , to talk about beauty , to talk about power , to talk about ourselves , and to talk and speak to each other .
That 's what makes me get up every day and want to think about this generation of black artists and artists around the world .
Thank you .
Isabel Allende : Tales of passion
Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women , creativity , the definition of feminism -- and , of course , passion -- in this talk .
Thank you so much . It 's really scary to be here among the smartest of the smart .
I 'm here to tell you a few tales of passion .
There 's a Jewish saying that I love .
What is truer than truth ? Answer : The story .
I 'm a storyteller . I want to convey something that is truer than truth about our common humanity .
All stories interest me , and some haunt me until I end up writing them .
Certain themes keep coming up : justice , loyalty , violence , death , political and social issues , freedom .
I 'm aware of the mystery around us , so I write about coincidences , premonitions , emotions , dreams , the power of nature , magic .
In the last 20 years I have published a few books , but I have lived in anonymity until February of 2006 , when I carried the Olympic flag in the Winter Olympics in Italy .
That made me a celebrity . Now people recognize me in Macy 's , and my grandchildren think that I 'm cool .
Allow me to tell you about my four minutes of fame .
One of the organizers of the Olympic ceremony , of the opening ceremony , called me and said that I had been selected to be one of the flag-bearers .
I replied that surely this was a case of mistaken identity because I 'm as far as you can get from being an athlete .
Actually , I wasn 't even sure that I could go around the stadium without a walker .
I was told that this was no laughing matter .
This would be the first time that only women would carry the Olympic flag .
Five women , representing five continents , and three Olympic gold medal winners .
My first question was , naturally , what was I going to wear ?
A uniform , she said , and asked for my measurements .
My measurements .
I had a vision of myself in a fluffy anorak , looking like the Michelin Man .
By the middle of February , I found myself in Turin , where enthusiastic crowds cheered when any of the 80 Olympic teams was in the street .
Those athletes had sacrificed everything to compete in the games .
They all deserved to win , but there 's the element of luck .
A speck of snow , an inch of ice , the force of the wind , can determine the result of a race or a game .
However , what matters most -- more than training or luck -- is the heart .
Only a fearless and determined heart will get the gold medal .
It is all about passion .
The streets of Turin were covered with red posters announcing the slogan of the Olympics .
Passion lives here . Isn 't it always true ?
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate .
That is what I need for my characters in my books : a passionate heart .
I need mavericks , dissidents , adventurers , outsiders and rebels , who ask questions , bend the rules and take risks .
People like all of you in this room .
Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters .
They only make good former spouses .
In the green room of the stadium , I met the other flag bearers : three athletes , and the actresses Susan Sarandon and Sophia Loren .
Also , two women with passionate hearts : Wangari Maathai , the Nobel prizewinner from Kenya who has planted 30 million trees . And by doing so , she has changed the soil , the weather , in some places in Africa , and of course the economic conditions in many villages .
And Somaly Mam , a Cambodian activist who fights passionately against child prostitution .
When she was 14 years old , her grandfather sold her to a brothel .
She told us of little girls raped by men who believe that having sex with a very young virgin will cure them from AIDS .
And of brothels where children are forced to receive five , 15 clients per day , and if they rebel , they are tortured with electricity .
In the green room I received my uniform .
It was not the kind of outfit that I normally wear , but it was far from the Michelin Man suit that I had anticipated . Not bad , really .
I looked like a refrigerator .
But so did most of the flag-bearers , except Sophia Loren , the universal symbol of beauty and passion .
Sophia is over 70 and she looks great .
She 's sexy , slim and tall , with a deep tan .
Now , how can you have a deep tan and have no wrinkles ?
I don 't know .
When asked in a TV interview , " How could she look so good ? "
She replied , " Posture . My back is always straight , and I don 't make old people 's noises . "
So , there you have some free advice from one of the most beautiful women on earth .
No grunting , no coughing , no wheezing , no talking to yourselves , no farting .
Well , she didn 't say that exactly .
At some point around midnight , we were summoned to the wings of the stadium , and the loudspeakers announced the Olympic flag , and the music started -- by the way , the same music that starts here , the Aida March .
Sophia Loren was right in front of me -- she 's a foot taller than I am , not counting the poofy hair .
She walked elegantly , like a giraffe on the African savannah , holding the flag on her shoulder . I jogged behind -- on my tiptoes -- holding the flag on my extended arm , so that my head was actually under the damn flag .
All the cameras were , of course , on Sophia .
That was fortunate for me , because in most press photos I appear too , although often between Sophia 's legs .
A place where most men would love to be .
The best four minutes of my entire life were those in the Olympic stadium .
My husband is offended when I say this -- although I have explained to him that what we do in private usually takes less than four minutes -- -- so he shouldn 't take it personally .
I have all the press clippings of those four magnificent minutes , because I don 't want to forget them when old age destroys my brain cells .
I want to carry in my heart forever the key word of the Olympics -- passion .
So here 's a tale of passion .
The year is 1998 , the place is a prison camp for Tutsi refugees in Congo .
By the way , 80 percent of all refugees and displaced people in the world are women and girls .
We can call this place in Congo a death camp , because those who are not killed will die of disease or starvation .
The protagonists of this story are a young woman , Rose Mapendo , and her children .
She 's pregnant and a widow .
Soldiers have forced her to watch as her husband was tortured and killed .
Somehow she manages to keep her seven children alive , and a few months later , she gives birth to premature twins .
Two tiny little boys .
She cuts the umbilical cord with a stick , and ties it with her own hair .
She names the twins after the camp 's commanders to gain their favor , and feeds them with black tea because her milk cannot sustain them .
When the soldiers burst in her cell to rape her oldest daughter , she grabs hold of her and refuses to let go , even when they hold a gun to her head .
Somehow , the family survives for 16 months , and then , by extraordinary luck , and the passionate heart of a young American man , Sasha Chanoff , who manages to put her in a U.S. rescue plane , Rose Mapendo and her nine children end up in Phoenix , Arizona , where they 're now living and thriving .
Mapendo , in Swahili , means great love .
The protagonists of my books are strong and passionate women like Rose Mapendo .
I don 't make them up . There 's no need for that .
I look around and I see them everywhere .
I have worked with women and for women all my life .
I know them well .
I was born in ancient times , at the end of the world , in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family .
No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist -- although the term had not reached Chile yet , so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me .
I would soon find out that there was a high price to pay for my freedom , and for questioning the patriarchy .
But I was happy to pay it , because for every blow that I received , I was able to deliver two .
Once , when my daughter Paula was in her twenties , she said to me that feminism was dated , that I should move on .
We had a memorable fight . Feminism is dated ?
Yes , for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today , but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage , prostitution , forced labor -- they have children that they don 't want or they cannot feed .
They have no control over their bodies or their lives .
They have no education and no freedom .
They are raped , beaten up and sometimes killed with impunity .
For most Western young women of today , being called a feminist is an insult .
Feminism has never been sexy , but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting , and I have seldom suffered from lack of men .
Feminism is not dead , by no means .
It has evolved . If you don 't like the term , change it , for Goddess ' sake .
Call it Aphrodite , or Venus , or bimbo , or whatever you want ; the name doesn 't matter , as long as we understand what it is about , and we support it .
So here 's another tale of passion , and this is a sad one .
The place is a small women 's clinic in a village in Bangladesh .
The year is 2005 .
Jenny is a young American dental hygienist who has gone to the clinic as a volunteer during her three-week vacation .
She 's prepared to clean teeth , but when she gets there , she finds out that there are no doctors , no dentists , and the clinic is just a hut full of flies .
Outside , there is a line of women who have waited several hours to be treated .
The first patient is in excruciating pain because she has several rotten molars .
Jenny realizes that the only solution is to pull out the bad teeth .
She 's not licensed for that ; she has never done it .
She risks a lot and she 's terrified .
She doesn 't even have the proper instruments , but fortunately she has brought some Novocaine .
Jenny has a brave and passionate heart .
She murmurs a prayer and she goes ahead with the operation .
At the end , the relieved patient kisses her hands .
That day the hygienist pulls out many more teeth .
The next morning , when she comes again to the so-called clinic , her first patient is waiting for her with her husband .
The woman 's face looks like a watermelon .
It is so swollen that you can 't even see the eyes .
The husband , furious , threatens to kill the American .
Jenny is horrified at what she has done , but then the translator explains that the patient 's condition has nothing to do with the operation .
The day before , her husband beat her up because she was not home in time to prepare dinner for him .
Millions of women live like this today .
They are the poorest of the poor .
Although women do two-thirds of the world 's labor , they own less than one percent of the world 's assets .
They are paid less than men for the same work if they 're paid at all , and they remain vulnerable because they have no economic independence , and they are constantly threatened by exploitation , violence and abuse .
It is a fact that giving women education , work , the ability to control their own income , inherit and own property , benefits the society .
If a woman is empowered , her children and her family will be better off .
If families prosper , the village prospers , and eventually so does the whole country .
Wangari Maathai goes to a village in Kenya .
She talks with the women and explains that the land is barren because they have cut and sold the trees .
She gets the women to plant new trees and water them , drop by drop .
In a matter of five or six years , they have a forest , the soil is enriched , and the village is saved .
The poorest and most backward societies are always those that put women down .
Yet this obvious truth is ignored by governments and also by philanthropy .
For every dollar given to a women 's program , 20 dollars are given to men 's programs .
Women are 51 percent of humankind .
Empowering them will change everything -- more than technology and design and entertainment .
I can promise you that women working together -- linked , informed and educated -- can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet .
In any war today , most of the casualties are civilians , mainly women and children . They are collateral damage .
Men run the world , and look at the mess we have .
What kind of world do we want ?
This is a fundamental question that most of us are asking .
Does it make sense to participate in the existing world order ?
We want a world where life is preserved and the quality of life is enriched for everybody , not only for the privileged .
In January I saw an exhibit of Fernando Botero 's paintings at the UC Berkeley library .
No museum or gallery in the United States , except for the New York gallery that carries Botero 's work , has dared to show the paintings because the theme is the Abu Ghraib prison .
They are huge paintings of torture and abuse of power , in the voluminous Botero style .
I have not been able to get those images out of my mind or my heart .
What I fear most is power with impunity .
I fear abuse of power , and the power to abuse .
In our species , the alpha males define reality , and force the rest of the pack to accept that reality and follow the rules .
The rules change all the time , but they always benefit them , and in this case , the trickle-down effect , which does not work in economics , works perfectly .
Abuse trickles down from the top of the ladder to the bottom .
Women and children , especially the poor , are at the bottom .
Even the most destitute of men have someone they can abuse -- a woman or a child .
I 'm fed up with the power that a few exert over the many through gender , income , race , and class .
I think that the time is ripe to make fundamental changes in our civilization .
But for real change , we need feminine energy in the management of the world .
We need a critical number of women in positions of power , and we need to nurture the feminine energy in men .
I 'm talking about men with young minds , of course .
Old guys are hopeless ; we have to wait for them to die off .
Yes , I would love to have Sophia Loren 's long legs and legendary breasts .
But given a choice , I would rather have the warrior hearts of Wangari Maathai , Somaly Mam , Jenny and Rose Mapendo .
I want to make this world good .
Not better , but to make it good .
Why not ? It is possible . Look around in this room -- all this knowledge , energy , talent and technology .
Let 's get off our fannies , roll up our sleeves and get to work , passionately , in creating an almost perfect world .
Thank you .
Conception to birth -- visualized
Image-maker Alexander Tsiaras shares a powerful medical visualization , showing human development from conception to birth and beyond .
I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine .
And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep spaceflight , so they could be kept in robotic pods .
One of the fascinating things about what we were actually working on is that we were seeing , using new kinds of scanning technologies , things that had just never been seen before -- I mean , not only in disease management , but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel .
I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen .
And your entire body , everything -- your hair , skin , bone , nails -- everything is made of collagen .
And it 's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this .
And the only place that collagen changes its structure is in the cornea of your eye .
In your eye , it becomes a grid formation , and therefore , it becomes transparent , as opposed to opaque .
So perfectly organized a structure , it was hard not to attribute divinity to it .
Because we kept on seeing this over and over and over again in different parts of the body .
One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH .
And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these kinds of new technologies .
So I wrote the algorithms in code , and he built the hardware -- Paul Lauterbur -- then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI .
I got the data .
And I 'm going to show you a sample of the piece , " From Conception to Birth . "
Video text : " From Conception to Birth " Oocyte Sperm Egg Inseminated 24 Hours : Baby 's first division The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion ...
And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours .
Early Embryo Yolk sack still feeding Baby .
25 Days : Heart chamber developing 32 Days : Arms & amp ; hands are developing 36 Days : Beginning of the primitive vertabrae These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus .
If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire nine months , it would be 1.5 tons at birth .
45 Days Embryo 's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother 's .
51 Days 52 Days : Developing retina , nose and fingers The fetus ' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth .
12 Weeks : Indifferent penis -- girl or boy yet to be determined 8 Months Delivery : the expulsion stage The moment of birth Thank you .
But as you can see , when you actually start working on this data , it 's pretty spectacular .
And as we kept on scanning more and more , working on this project , looking at these two simple cells that have this kind of unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you .
And as we kept on working on this data , looking at small clusters of the body , these little pieces of tissue that were a trophoblast coming off of a blastocyst , all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus , saying , " I 'm here to stay . "
All of a sudden having conversation and communications with the estrogens , the progesterones , saying , " I 'm here to stay , plant me , " building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes , within 44 days , something that you can recognize , and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being .
The marvel of this information : How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information ?
I 'm going to show you something pretty unique .
Here 's a human heart at 25 [ weeks ] .
It 's just basically two strands .
And like this magnificent origami , cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks , as it 's just folding on itself .
Within five weeks , you can start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles .
Six weeks , these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart -- and then basically the development of the entire human body .
The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go -- the complexity of these mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension .
Even though I am a mathematician , I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us ?
It 's a mystery , it 's magic , it 's divinity .
Then you start to take a look at adult life .
Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries .
It 's just a tiny sub-substructure , microscopic .
But basically by the time you 're nine months and you 're given birth , you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body .
I mean , and only one mile is visible .
59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away .
The complexity of building that within a single system is , again , beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today .
And that instruction set , from the brain to every other part of the body -- look at the complexity of the folding .
Where does this intelligence of knowing that a fold can actually hold more information , so as you actually watch the baby 's brain grow -- and this is one of the things that we 're doing right now .
We 're actually doing the launch of two new studies of actually scanning babies ' brains from the moment they 're born .
Every six months until they 're six years old -- we 're going to be doing actually to about 250 children -- watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us .
And it 's not just our own existence , but how does the woman 's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own , but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological , cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture , treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond , again , our comprehension -- the magic that is existence , that is us ?
Thank you .
Lemon Andersen : Please don 't take my Air Jordans
Would you kill for a pair of Air Jordans ? Lemon Andersen spins a tale of someone who did , reciting a poem by Reg E. Gaines . These verses taught Lemon that poetry could be about more than self-expression , and could sound like music when given rhythm and infused with the grit of the New York streets around him .
" My Air Jordans cost a hundred with tax .
My suede Starters jacket says Raiders on the back .
I 'm stylin ' , smilin ' , lookin ' real mean , because it ain 't about being heard , just being seen .
My leather Adidas baseball cap matches my fake Gucci backpack .
Ain 't nobody who looks as good as me , but this costs money , it sure ain 't free , and I gots no job , no money at all , but it 's easy to steal all this from the mall .
Parents say I shouldn 't , but I knows I should .
Got to do what I can to make sure I look good , and the reason I have to look real good , well , to tell you the truth , man , I don 't know why . Guess it makes me feel special inside .
When I 'm wearing fresh gear I don 't have to hide , and I really must get some new gear soon or my ego will pop like a 10-cent balloon .
But security is tight at all the shops . Every day there are more and more cops .
My crew is laughing at me because I 'm wearing old gear .
School 's almost over . Summer is near .
And I 'm sportin ' torn Jordans .
I need something new . Only one thing left to do .
Cut school Friday , catch the subway downtown , check out my victims hangin ' around .
Maybe I 'll get lucky and find easy prey .
Got to get some new gear . There 's no other way .
I 'm ready and willing . I 'm packing my gun .
This is serious business . This ain 't no fun .
And I can 't have my posse laughin ' at me .
I 'mma cop something dope , just wait , you 'll see .
Come out of the station , West 4th near the park , brothers shooting hoops and someone remarks , ' Hey homes , where you get them Nik 's ? ' I says to myself , ' Yeah . I likes ' em , I likes . ' They were Q-tip white , bright and blinding my eyes .
The red emblem of Michael looked as if it could fly .
Not one spot of dirt . The Airs were brand new .
Had my pistol and knew just what to do .
Waited until it was just the right time , followed him very closely behind .
He made a left turn on Houston , I pulled out my gun , and I said , ' Gimme them Jordans ! ' And the punk tried to run .
Took off fast , didn 't get far . I fired , ' Pow ! ' Fool fell between two parked cars .
He was coughing , crying , blood spilled on the street .
And I snatched them Air Jordans off of his feet .
While laying there dying , all he could say was , " Please man , don 't take my Air Jordans away . "
You 'd think he 'd be worried about staying alive .
As I took off with his sneakers , there was tears in his eyes .
Very next day , I bopped into school with my brand new Air Jordans , man , I was cool .
I killed to get ' em , but hey , I don 't care , because now I needs a new jacket to wear . "
Thank you .
For the last 15 years that I have been performing , all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world .
See , it wasn 't enough for me to write a book .
It wasn 't enough for me to join a slam competition , and while those things hold weight , it wasn 't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad .
The hunger and thirst was , and still remains : How do I get people who hate poetry to love me ?
Because I 'm an extension of my work , and if they love me , then they will love my work , and if they love my work , then they will love poetry , and if they love poetry , then I will have done my job , which is to transcend it to the world .
And in 1996 , I found the answer in principles in a master spoken-word artist named Reg E. Gaines , who wrote the famous poem , " Please Don 't Take My Air Jordans . "
And I followed this guy everywhere until I had him in the room , and I read him one of my pieces , and you know what he told me ?
" Yo ' wack .
You know what the problem is with you , homie ?
You don 't read other people 's poetry , and you don 't got any subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration . "
Now he kept on rambling about poetry and styles and Nuyorican Friday nights .
Now I could have quit . I should have quit .
I mean , I thought poetry was just self-expression .
I didn 't know you actually have to have creative control .
So instead of quitting , I followed him everywhere .
When he was writing a Broadway show , I would be outside of the door .
I would wake him up at , like , 6 : 30 in the morning to ask him who 's the best poet .
I remember eating the eyes of a fish right out of the sea because he told me it was brain food .
Then one day I told him , " Reg E. , what is subordination for verbal measures to tonal consideration ? "
And he handed me a black-and-white printed out thesis on a poet named Etheridge Knight and the oral nature of poetry , and from that point , Reggie stopped becoming the best to me , because what Etheridge Knight taught me was that I could make my words sound like music , even my small ones , the monosyllables , the ifs , ands , buts , whats , the gangsta in my slang could fall right on the ear , and from then on , I started chasing Etheridge Knight .
I wanted to know which poet he read , and I landed on a poem called [ " Dark Prophecy : Sing of Shine " ] , a toast signifying that got me on the biggest stage a poet could ever be : Broadway , baby .
And from that point , I learned how to pull the mic away and attack the poetry with my body .
But that wasn 't the biggest lesson I ever learned .
The biggest lesson I learned was many years later when I went to Beverly Hills and I ran into a talent agent who looked at me up and down and said I don 't look like I have any experience to be working in this business .
And I said to him , " Listen , punk fool , you 're a failed actor who became an agent , and you know why you failed as an actor ?
Because people like me took your job .
I 've traveled all the way from Cleveland and Essex in East New York , took the local 6 line up to the hookers of Hunt 's Point who were in my way on my way to master the art of space , and the one-to-infinite amount of man , woman and child you can fit in there only so I can push them to the back of the wall with my experience .
People have bought tickets to my experience and used them as refrigerator magnets to let them know that the revolution is near , so stock up .
I 'm so experienced that when you went to a privileged school to learn a Shakespearean sonnet , I was getting those beats kicked and shoved into me .
I can master shock of " The Crying Game " with the awe of a child being called an AIDS victim by a bully who didn 't know that it was his father who gave it to my mother , and that 's a double entendre .
I 'm so experienced that when you went to the Fell School and all the rich little fairy boys decided to sponsor a child in it , that was me , but kicked me out when I was caught teaching the fairy boys how to rob the PATS off a pair of Lee Jeans and bring them to VIM . Let me see Chekhov pull that off .
Sanford Meisner was my Uncle Artie yelling silently to himself , " Something 's always wrong when nothing 's always right . "
Method acting is nothing but a mixture of multiple personalities , believing your own lies are reality , like in high school cool Kenny telling me he wanted to be a cop .
Dude , you go to Riker 's Island Academy .
I could make David Mamet psychoanalyze my attack on dialogue , Stanislavski be as if he were Bruce Lee kicking your roster of talentless students up and down Crenshaw .
So what , your actors studied guerrilla theater at the London Rep ?
Let me tell you an ancient Chinese Saturday afternoon kung fu secret .
Boards don 't hit back .
You think black entertainers have it hard finding work in this business ? I 'm a suspicious mulatto , which means I 'm too black to be white and too white to be doing it right .
Forget the American ghetto . I 've cracked stages in Soweto , buried abortion babies in potter 's field and still managed to keep a smile on my face , so whatever you curse at me to your caddyshack go-for-this , go-for-that assistant when I walk out that door , whatever slander you send my way , your mother .
Thank you .
Richard St. John : Success is a continuous journey
In his typically candid style , Richard St. John reminds us that success is not a one-way street , but a constant journey . He uses the story of his business ' rise and fall to illustrate a valuable lesson -- when we stop trying , we fail .
Why do so many people reach success and then fail ?
One of the big reasons is , we think success is a one-way street .
So we do everything that leads up to success , but then we get there . We figure we 've made it , we sit back in our comfort zone , and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful .
And it doesn 't take long to go downhill .
And I can tell you this happens , because it happened to me .
Reaching success , I worked hard , I pushed myself .
But then I stopped , because I figured , " Oh , you know , I made it .
I can just sit back and relax . "
Reaching success , I always tried to improve and do good work .
But then I stopped because I figured , " Hey , I 'm good enough .
I don 't need to improve any more . "
Reaching success , I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas .
Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas .
But then I stopped , because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn 't have to work at ideas , they should just come like magic .
And the only thing that came was creative block .
I couldn 't come up with any ideas .
Reaching success , I always focused on clients and projects , and ignored the money . Then all this money started pouring in .
And I got distracted by it .
And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent , when I should have been talking to my clients .
And reaching success , I always did what I loved .
But then I got into stuff that I didn 't love , like management . I am the world 's worst manager , but I figured I should be doing it , because I was , after all , the president of the company .
Well , soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was , outwardly very successful , but inwardly very depressed .
But I 'm a guy ; I knew how to fix it .
I bought a fast car .
It didn 't help .
I was faster but just as depressed .
So I went to my doctor . I said , " Doc , I can buy anything I want . But I 'm not happy . I 'm depressed .
It 's true what they say , and I didn 't believe it until it happened to me .
But money can 't buy happiness . "
He said , " No . But it can buy Prozac . "
And he put me on anti-depressants .
And yeah , the black cloud faded a little bit , but so did all the work , because I was just floating along . I couldn 't care less if clients ever called .
And clients didn 't call .
Because they could see I was no longer serving them , I was only serving myself .
So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better .
Well , it didn 't take long for business to drop like a rock .
My partner and I , Thom , we had to let all our employees go .
It was down to just the two of us , and we were about to go under .
And that was great .
Because with no employees , there was nobody for me to manage .
So I went back to doing the projects I loved .
I had fun again , I worked harder and , to cut a long story short , did all the things that took me back up to success .
But it wasn 't a quick trip .
It took seven years .
But in the end , business grew bigger than ever .
And when I went back to following these eight principles , the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether .
And I woke up one day and I said , " I don 't need Prozac anymore . "
And I threw it away and haven 't needed it since .
I learned that success isn 't a one-way street .
It doesn 't look like this ; it really looks more like this .
It 's a continuous journey .
And if we want to avoid " success-to-failure-syndrome , " we just keep following these eight principles , because that is not only how we achieve success , it 's how we sustain it .
So here is to your continued success .
Thank you very much .
Todd Humphreys : How to fool a GPS
Todd Humphreys forecasts the near-future of geolocation when millimeter-accurate GPS " dots " will enable you to find pin-point locations , index-search your physical possessions ... or to track people without their knowledge . And the response to the sinister side of this technology may have unintended consequences of its own . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2nd , 2000 , that had a profound effect on the way our society operates .
Ironically , hardly anyone noticed at the time .
The change was silent , imperceptible , unless you knew exactly what to look for .
On that morning , U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System .
Instantaneously , every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room .
It 's hard to overstate the effect that this change in accuracy has had on us .
Before this switch was thrown , we didn 't have in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions , because back then , GPS couldn 't tell you what block you were on , let alone what street .
For geolocation , accuracy matters , and things have only improved over the last 10 years .
With more base stations , more ground stations , better receivers and better algorithms , GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on , but what part of the street .
This level of accuracy has unleashed a firestorm of innovation .
In fact , many of you navigated here today with the help of your TomTom or your smartphone .
Paper maps are becoming obsolete .
But we now stand on the verge of another revolution in geolocation accuracy .
What if I told you that the two-meter positioning that our current cell phones and our TomToms give us is pathetic compared to what we could be getting ?
For some time now , it 's been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signal , and if you have an Internet connection , then you can go from meter level to centimeter level , even millimeter-level positioning .
So why don 't we have this capability on our phones ?
Only , I believe , for a lack of imagination .
Manufacturers haven 't built this carrier phase technique into their cheap GPS chips because they 're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so accurate that you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand .
But you and I and other innovators , we can see the potential in this next leap in accuracy .
Imagine , for example , an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on top of the physical world .
I could build for you a structure up here in 3D , millimeter accurate , that only you could see , or my friends at home .
So this level of positioning , this is what we 're looking for , and I believe that , within the next few years , I predict , that this kind of hyper-precise , carrier phase-based positioning will become cheap and ubiquitous , and the consequences will be fantastic .
The Holy Grail , of course , is the GPS dot .
Do you remember the movie " The Da Vinci Code ? "
Here 's Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot , which his accomplice tells him is a tracking device accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe , but we know that in the world of nonfiction , the GPS dot is impossible , right ?
For one thing , GPS doesn 't work indoors , and for another , they don 't make devices quite this small , especially when those devices have to relay their measurements back over a network .
Well , these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago , but things have changed .
There 's been a strong trend toward miniaturization , better sensitivity , so much so that , a few years ago , a GPS tracking device looked like this clunky box to the left of the keys .
Compare that with the device released just months ago that 's now packaged into something the size of a key fob , and if you take a look at the state of the art for a complete GPS receiver , which is only a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever , you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to nonfiction .
Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots .
It 's not just that you 'll never lose your wallet or your keys anymore , or your child when you 're at Disneyland .
You 'll buy GPS dots in bulk , and you 'll stick them on everything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars .
I couldn 't find my shoes one recent morning , and , as usual , had to ask my wife if she had seen them .
But I shouldn 't have to bother my wife with that kind of triviality .
I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are .
Those of you who have made the switch to Gmail , remember how refreshing it was to go from organizing all of your email to simply searching it .
The GPS dot will do the same for our possessions .
Now , of course , there is a flip side to the GPS dot .
I was in my office some months back and got a telephone call .
The woman on the other end of the line , we 'll call her Carol , was panicked .
Apparently , an ex-boyfriend of Carol 's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around .
So you might ask at this point why she 's calling you .
Well , so did I.
But it turned out there was a technical twist to Carol 's case .
Every time her ex-boyfriend would show up , at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations , he was carrying an open laptop , and over time Carol realized that he had planted a GPS tracking device on her car , so she was calling me for help to disable it .
" Well , you should go to a good mechanic and have him look at your car , " I said .
" I already have , " she told me .
" He didn 't see anything obvious , and he said he 'd have to take the car apart piece by piece . "
" Well then , you 'd better go to the police , " I said .
" I already have , " she replied .
" They 're not sure this rises to the level of harassment , and they 're not set up technically to find the device . "
" Okay , what about the FBI ? "
" I 've talked to them too , and same story . "
We then talked about her coming to my lab and us performing a radio sweep of her car , but I wasn 't even sure that would work , given that some of these devices are configured to only transmit when they 're inside safe zones or when the car is moving .
So , there we were .
Carol isn 't the first , and certainly won 't be the last , to find herself in this kind of fearsome environment , worrisome situation caused by GPS tracking .
In fact , as I looked into her case , I discovered to my surprise that it 's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else 's car .
The Supreme Court ruled last month that a policeman has to get a warrant if he wants to do prolonged tracking , but the law isn 't clear about civilians doing this to one another , so it 's not just Big Brother we have to worry about , but Big Neighbor .
There is one alternative that Carol could have taken , very effective . It 's called the Wave Bubble .
It 's an open-source GPS jammer , developed by Limor Fried , a graduate student at MIT , and Limor calls it " a tool for reclaiming our personal space . "
With a flip of the switch you create a bubble around you within which GPS signals can 't reside .
They get drowned out by the bubble .
And Limor designed this , in part , because , like Carol , she felt threatened by GPS tracking .
Then she posted her design to the web , and if you don 't have time to build your own , you can buy one .
Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet .
So you might be thinking , the Wave Bubble sounds great .
I should have one . Might come in handy if somebody ever puts a tracking device on my car .
But you should be aware that its use is very much illegal in the United States .
And why is that ?
Well , because it 's not a bubble at all .
Its jamming signals don 't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car .
They go on to jam innocent GPS receivers for miles around you .
Now , if you 're Carol or Limor , or someone who feels threatened by GPS tracking , it might not feel wrong to turn on a Wave Bubble , but in fact , the results can be disastrous .
Imagine , for example , you 're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble .
All of a sudden your GPS readout goes blank , and now it 's just you and the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar system if you remember how to work it .
They -- in fact , they don 't update or upkeep lighthouses anymore , and LORAN , the only backup to GPS , was discontinued last year .
Our modern society has a special relationship with GPS .
We 're almost blindly reliant on it .
It 's built deeply into our systems and infrastructure .
Some call it " the invisible utility . "
So , turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience .
It might be deadly .
But as it turns out , for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability , there 's something even more potent and more subversive than a Wave Bubble , and that is a GPS spoofer .
The idea behind the GPS spoofer is simple .
Instead of jamming the GPS signals , you fake them .
You imitate them , and if you do it right , the device you 're attacking doesn 't even know it 's being spoofed .
So let me show you how this works .
In any GPS receiver , there 's a peak inside that corresponds to the authentic signals .
These three red dots represent the tracking points that try to keep themselves centered on that peak .
But if you send in a fake GPS signal , another peak pops up , and if you can get these two peaks perfectly aligned , the tracking points can 't tell the difference , and they get hijacked by the stronger counterfeit signal , with the authentic peak getting forced off .
At this point , the game is over .
The fake signals now completely control this GPS receiver .
So is this really possible ?
Can someone really manipulate the timing and positioning of a GPS receiver just like that , with a spoofer ?
Well , the short answer is yes .
The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open .
They have no encryption . They have no authentication .
They 're wide open , vulnerable to a kind of spoofing attack .
Even so , up until very recently , nobody worried about GPS spoofers .
People figured that it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one .
But I , and a friend of mine from graduate school , we didn 't see it that way .
We knew it wasn 't going to be so hard , and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against GPS spoofing .
I remember vividly the week it all came together .
We built it at my home , which means that I got a little extra help from my three-year-old son Ramon .
Here 's Ramon — — looking for a little attention from Dad that week .
At first , the spoofer was just a jumble of cables and computers , though we eventually got it packaged into a small box .
Now , the Dr. Frankenstein moment , when the spoofer finally came alive and I glimpsed its awful potential , came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone .
Let me show you some actual footage from that very first experiment .
I had come to completely trust this little blue dot and its reassuring blue halo .
They seemed to speak to me .
They 'd say , " Here you are . Here you are . "
And " you can trust us . "
So something felt very wrong about the world .
It was a sense , almost , of betrayal , when this little blue dot started at my house , and went running off toward the north leaving me behind . I wasn 't moving .
What I then saw in this little moving blue dot was the potential for chaos .
I saw airplanes and ships veering off course , with the captain learning only too late that something was wrong .
I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers .
You can scarcely imagine the kind of havoc you could cause if you knew what you were doing with a GPS spoofer .
There is , though , one redeeming feature of the GPS spoofer .
It 's the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots .
Imagine , for example , you 're being tracked .
Well , you can play the tracker for a fool , pretending to be at work when you 're really on vacation .
Or , if you 're Carol , you could lure your ex-boyfriend into some empty parking lot where the police are waiting for him .
So I 'm fascinated by this conflict , a looming conflict , between privacy on the one hand and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other .
We simply cannot tolerate GPS jammers and spoofers , and yet , given the lack of effective legal means for protecting our privacy from the GPS dot , can you really blame people for wanting to turn them on , for wanting to use them ?
I hold out hope that we 'll be able to reconcile this conflict with some sort of , some yet uninvented technology .
But meanwhile , grab some popcorn , because things are going to get interesting .
Within the next few years , many of you will be the proud owner of a GPS dot .
Maybe you 'll have a whole bag full of them .
You 'll never lose track of your things again .
The GPS dot will fundamentally reorder your life .
But will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man ?
Or will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy ?
So , as usual , what we see just beyond the horizon is full of promise and peril .
It 'll be fascinating to see how this all turns out .
Thanks .
Phil Borges : Photos of endangered cultures
Photographer Phil Borges shows rarely seen images of people from the mountains of Dharamsala , India , and the jungles of the Ecuadorean Amazon . In documenting these endangered cultures , he intends to help preserve them .
A fact came out of MIT , couple of years ago . Ken Hale , who 's a linguist , said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now , 3,000 aren 't spoken by the children .
So that in one generation , we 're going to halve our cultural diversity .
He went on to say that every two weeks , an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture .
So an entire philosophy , a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries , goes away .
And this happens every two weeks .
So for the last 20 years , since my dental experience , I have been traveling the world and coming back with stories about some of these people .
What I 'd like to do right now is share some of those stories with you .
This is Tamdin .
She is a 69-year-old nun .
She was thrown in prison in Tibet for two years for putting up a little tiny placard protesting the occupation of her country .
And when I met her , she had just taken a walk over the Himalayas from Lhasa , the capital of Tibet , into Nepal , across to India -- 30 days -- to meet her leader , the Dalai Lama .
The Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala , India .
So I took this picture three days after she arrived , and she had this beat-up pair of tennis shoes on , with her toes sticking out .
And she crossed in March , and there 's a lot of snow at 18,500 feet in March .
This is Paldin .
Paldin is a 62-year-old monk .
And he spent 33 years in prison .
His whole monastery was thrown into prison at the time of the uprising , when the Dalai Lama had to leave Tibet .
And he was beaten , starved , tortured -- lost all his teeth while in prison .
And when I met him , he was a kind gentle old man .
And it really impressed me -- I met him two weeks after he got out of prison -- that he went through that experience , and ended up with the demeanor that he had .
So I was in Dharamsala meeting these people , and I 'd spent about five weeks there , and I was hearing these similar stories of these refugees that had poured out of Tibet into Dharamsala .
And it just so happened , on the fifth week , there was a public teaching by the Dalai Lama .
And I was watching this crowd of monks and nuns , many of which I had just interviewed , and heard their stories , and I watched their faces , and they gave us a little FM radio , and we could listen to the translation of his teachings .
And what he said was : treat your enemies as if they were precious jewels , because it 's your enemies that build your tolerance and patience on the road to your enlightenment .
That hit me so hard , telling these people that had been through this experience .
So , two months later , I went into Tibet , and I started interviewing the people there , taking my photographs . That 's what I do .
I interview and do portraits .
And this is a little girl .
I took her portrait up on top of the Jokhang Temple .
And I 'd snuck in -- because it 's totally illegal to have a picture of the Dalai Lama in Tibet -- it 's the quickest way you can get arrested .
So I snuck in a bunch of little wallet-sized pictures of the Dalai Lama , and I would hand them out .
And when I gave them to the people , they 'd either hold them to their heart , or they 'd hold them up to their head and just stay there .
And this is -- well , at the time -- I did this 10 years ago -- that was 36 years after the Dalai Lama had left .
So I was going in , interviewing these people and doing their portraits .
This is Jigme and her sister , Sonam .
And they live up on the Chang Tang , the Tibetan Plateau , way in the western part of the country .
This is at 17,000 feet .
And they had just come down from the high pastures , at 18,000 feet .
Same thing : gave her a picture , she held it up to her forehead .
And I usually hand out Polaroids when I do these , because I 'm setting up lights , and checking my lights , and when I showed her her Polaroid , she screamed and ran into her tent .
This is Tenzin Gyatso ; he was found to be the Buddha of Compassion at the age of two , out in a peasant 's house , way out in the middle of nowhere .
At the age of four , he was installed as the 14th Dalai Lama .
As a teenager , he faced the invasion of his country , and had to deal with it -- he was the leader of the country .
Eight years later , when they discovered there was a plot to kill him , they dressed him up like a beggar and snuck him out of the country on horseback , and took the same trip that Tamdin did .
And he 's never been back to his country since .
And if you think about this man , 46 years later , still sticking to this non-violent response to a severe political and human rights issue .
And the young people , young Tibetans , are starting to say , listen , this doesn 't work .
You know , violence as a political tool is all the rage right now .
And he still is holding this line .
So this is our icon to non-violence in our world -- one of our living icons .
This is another leader of his people .
This is Moi . This is in the Ecuadorian Amazon .
And Moi is 35 years old .
And this area of the Ecuadorian Amazon -- oil was discovered in 1972 .
And in this period of time -- since that time -- as much oil , or twice as much oil as was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident , was spilled in this little area of the Amazon , and the tribes in this area have constantly had to move .
And Moi belongs to the Huaorani tribe , and they 're known as very fierce , they 're known as " auca . "
And they 've managed to keep out the seismologists and the oil workers with spears and blowguns .
And we spent -- I was with a team -- two weeks with these guys out in the jungle watching them hunt .
This was on a monkey hunt , hunting with curare-tipped darts .
And the knowledge that these people have about the natural environment is incredible .
They could hear things , smell things , see things I couldn 't see .
And I couldn 't even see the monkeys that they were getting with these darts .
This is Yadira , and Yadira is five years old . She 's in a tribe that 's neighboring the Huaorani .
And her tribe has had to move three times in the last 10 years because of the oil spills .
And we never hear about that . And the latest infraction against these people is , as part of Plan Colombia , we 're spraying Paraquat or Round Up , whatever it is -- we 're defoliating thousands of acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon in our war on drugs .
And these people are the people who take the brunt of it .
This is Mengatoue .
He 's the shaman of the Huaorani , and he said to us , you know , I 'm an older man now ; I 'm getting tired , you know ; I 'm tired of spearing these oil workers .
I wish they would just go away .
And I was -- I usually travel alone when I do my work , but I did this -- I hosted a program for Discovery , and when I went down with the team , I was quite concerned about going in with a whole bunch of people , especially into the Huaorani , deep into the Huaorani tribe .
And as it turned out , these guys really taught me a thing or two about blending in with the locals .
One of the things I did just before 9 / 11 -- August of 2001 -- I took my son , Dax , who was 16 at the time , and I took him to Pakistan .
Because at first I wanted -- you know , I 've taken him on a couple of trips , but I wanted him to see people that live on a dollar a day or less .
I wanted him to get an experience in the Islamic world and I also wanted him to -- I was going there to work with a group , do a story on a group called the Kalash , that are a group of animists , 3,000 animists , that live -- very small area -- surrounded by Islam -- there 's 3,000 of these Kalash left ; they 're incredible people .
So it was a great experience for him . He stayed up all night with them , drumming and dancing .
And he brought a soccer ball , and we had soccer every night in this little village .
And then we went up and met their shaman .
By the way , Mengatoue was the shaman of his tribe as well .
And this is John Doolikahn , who 's the shaman of the Kalash .
And he 's up in the mountains , right on the border with Afghanistan .
In fact , on that other side is the area , Tora Bora , the area where Osama bin Laden 's supposed to be . This is the tribal area .
And we watched and stayed with John Doolikahn .
And the shaman -- I did a whole series on shamanism , which is an interesting phenomenon .
But around the world , they go into trance in different ways , and in Pakistan , the way they do it is they burn juniper leaves and they sacrifice an animal , pour the blood of the animal on the leaves and then inhale the smoke .
And they 're all praying to the mountain gods as they go into trance .
You know , getting kids used to different realities , I think , is so important . What Dan Dennett said the other day -- having a curriculum where they study different religions , just to make a mental flexibility , give them a mental flexibility in different belief systems -- I think this is so necessary in our world today as you see these clash of beliefs taking place .
And all the security issues they cause us .
So , one thing we did five years ago : we started a program that links kids in indigenous communities with kids in the United States .
So we first hooked up a spot in the Navajo Nation with a classroom in Seattle .
We now have 15 sites .
We have one in Kathmandu , Nepal ; Dharamsala , India ; Takaungu , Kenya -- Takaungu is one-third Christian , one-third Muslim and one-third animist , the community is -- Ollantaytambo , Peru , and Arctic Village , Alaska .
This is Daniel ; he 's one of our students in Arctic Village , Alaska .
He lives in this log cabin -- no running water , no heat other than -- no windows and high-speed Internet connection .
And this is -- I see this rolling out all over -- this is our site in Ollantaytambo , Peru , four years ago , where they first saw their first computers ; now they have computers in their classrooms .
And the way we 've done this -- we teach digital storytelling to these kids .
And we have them tell stories about issues in their community in their community that they care about .
And this is in Peru , where the kids told the story about a river that they cleaned up .
And the way we do it is , we do it in workshops , and we bring people who want to learn digital workflow and storytelling , and have them work with the kids .
And just this last year we 've taken a group of teenagers in , and this has worked the best .
So our dream is to bring teenagers together , so they 'll have a community service experience as well as a cross-cultural experience , as they teach kids in these areas and help them build their communication infrastructure .
This is teaching Photoshop in the Tibetan children 's village in Dharamsala .
We have the website , where the kids all get their homepage .
This is all their movies . We 've got about 60 movies that these kids have made , and they 're quite incredible .
The one I want to show you -- after we get them to make the movies , we have a night where we show the movies to the community .
And this is in Takaungu -- we 've got a generator and a digital projector , and we 're projecting it up against a barn , and showing one of the movies that they made .
And if you get a chance , you can go to our website , and you 'll see the incredible work these kids do .
The other thing : I wanted to give indigenous people a voice .
That was one of the big motivating factors .
But the other motivating factor is the insular nature of our country .
National Geographic just did a Roper Study of 18 to 26 year olds in our country and in nine other industrialized countries .
It was a two million dollar study .
United States came in second to last in geographic knowledge .
70 percent of the kids couldn 't find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map ; 60 percent couldn 't find India ; 30 percent couldn 't find the Pacific Ocean .
And this is a study that was just done a couple of years ago .
So what I 'd like to show you now , in the couple of minutes I have left , is a film that a student made in Guatemala .
We just had a workshop in Guatemala .
A week before we got to the workshop , a massive landslide , caused by Hurricane Stan , last October , came in and buried 600 people alive in their village .
And this kid lived in the village -- he wasn 't there at the time -- and this is the little movie he put together about that .
And he hadn 't seen a computer before we did this movie . We taught him Photoshop and -- yeah , we can play it .
This is an old Mayan funeral chant that he got from his grandfather .
Thank you very much .
Bart Knols : Cheese , dogs and a pill to kill mosquitoes and end malaria
We can use a mosquito 's own instincts against her . At TEDxMaastricht speaker Bart Knols demos the imaginative solutions his team is developing to fight malaria -- including limburger cheese and a deadly pill . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Gotcha .
Mosquitos . I hate them .
Don 't you ?
That awful buzzing sound at night around your ears that drives you absolutely crazy ?
Knowing that she wants to stick a needle in your skin and suck out your blood ? That 's awful , right ?
In fact , there 's only one good thing I can think of when it gets to mosquitos .
When they fly into our bedroom at night , they prefer to bite my wife .
But that 's fascinating , right ?
Why does she receive more bites than I do ?
And the answer is smell , the smell of her body .
And since we all smell different and produce chemicals on our skin that either attract or repel mosquitos , some of us are just more attractive than others .
So my wife smells nicer than I do , or I just stink more than she does .
Either way , mosquitos find us in the dark by sniffing us out . They smell us .
And during my Ph.D , I wanted to know exactly what chemicals from our skin mosquitos used , African malarial mosquitos use to track us down at night .
And there 's a whole range of compounds that they do use .
And this was not going to be an easy task .
And therefore , we set up various experiments .
Because half the world 's population runs the risk of contracting a killer disease like malaria through a simple mosquito bite .
Every 30 seconds , somewhere on this planet , a child dies of malaria , and Paul Levy this morning , he was talking about the metaphor of the 727 crashing into the United States .
Well , in Africa , we have the equivalent of seven jumbo 747s crashing every day .
But perhaps if we can attract these mosquitos to traps , bait it with our smell , we may be able to stop transmission of disease .
Now solving this puzzle was not an easy thing , because we produce hundreds of different chemicals on the skin , but we undertook some remarkable experiments that managed us to resolve this puzzle very quickly indeed .
First , we observed that not all mosquito species bite on the same part of the body . Strange .
So we set up an experiment whereby we put a naked volunteer in a large cage , and in that cage we released mosquitos to see where they were biting on the body of that person .
And we found some remarkable differences .
On the left here you see the bites by the Dutch malarial mosquito on this person .
They had a very strong preference for biting on the face .
In contrast , the African malarial mosquito had a very strong preference for biting the ankles and feet of this person , and that of course we should have known all along because they 're called mosqui-toes , you see ?
That 's right .
And so we started focusing on the smell of feet , on the smell of human feet , until we came across a remarkable statement in the literature that said that cheese smells after feet rather than the reverse . Think of it .
And this triggered us to do a remarkable experiment .
We tried , with a tiny little piece of Limburger cheese , which smells badly after feet , to attract African malaria mosquitos .
And you know what ? It worked .
In fact , it worked so well that now we have a synthetic mixture of the aroma of Limburger cheese that we 're using in Tanzania and has been shown there to be two to three times more attractive to mosquitos than humans .
Limburg , be proud of your cheese , as it is now used in the fight against malaria .
That 's the cheese , just to show you .
My second story is remarkable as well .
It 's about man 's best friend . It 's about dogs .
And I will show you how we can use dogs in the fight against malaria .
One of the best ways of killing mosquitos is not to wait until they fly around like adults and bite people and transmit disease .
It 's to kill them when they 're still in the water as larvae .
Why ? Because they are just like the CIA .
In that pool of water , these larvae are concentrated .
They 're all together there . They are immobile .
They can 't escape from that water . They can 't fly .
And they 're accessible . You can actually walk up to that pool and you can kill them there , right ?
So the problem that we face with this is that , throughout the landscape , all these pools of water with the larvae , they are scattered all over the place , which makes it very hard for an inspector like this to actually find all these breeding sites and treat them with insecticides .
And last year we thought very , very hard , how can we resolve this problem ? Until we realized that just like us , we have a unique smell , that mosquito larvae also have a very unique smell .
And so we set up another crazy experiment , because we collected the smell of these larvae , put it on pieces of cloth , and then did something very remarkable .
Here we have a bar with four holes , and we put the smell of these larvae in the left hole .
Ooh , that was very quick .
And then you see the dog . It 's called Tweed . It 's a border collie .
He 's examining these holes , and now he 's got it already .
He 's going back to check the control holes again , but he 's coming back to the first one , and now he 's locking into that smell , which means that now we can use dogs with these inspectors to much better find the breeding sites of mosquitos in the field , and therefore have a much bigger impact on malaria .
This lady is Ellen van der Zweep . She 's one of the best dog-trainers in the world , and she believes that we can do a lot more .
Since we also know that people that carry malaria parasites smell different compared to people that are uninfected , she 's convinced that we can train dogs to find people that carry the parasite .
That means that in a population where malaria has gone down all the way , and there 's few people remaining with parasites , that the dogs can find these people , we can treat them with anti-malarial drugs , and give the final blow to malaria .
Man 's best friend in the fight against malaria .
My third story is perhaps even more remarkable , and , I should say , has never been shown to the public until today .
Yeah .
It 's a crazy story , but I believe it 's perhaps the best and ultimate revenge against mosquitos ever .
In fact , people have told me that now they will enjoy being bitten by mosquitos .
And the question of course is , what would make someone enjoy being bitten by mosquitos ?
And the answer I have right here in my pocket , if I get it .
It 's a tablet , a simple tablet , and when I take it with water , it does miracles .
Thank you .
Now let me show you how this works .
Here in this box I have a cage with several hundred hungry female mosquitos that I 'm just about to release .
Just kidding , just kidding .
What I 'm going to show you is I 'm gonna stick my arm into it and I will show you how quickly they will bite .
Here we go .
Don 't worry , I do this all the time in the lab .
There we go . Okay .
Now , on the video , on the video here , I 'm going to show you exactly the same thing , except that what I 'm showing you on the video happened one hour after I took the tablet .
Have a look . That doesn 't work . Okay . Sorry about that .
I 'm sticking in my arm , I 'm giving them a big juicy blood meal , I 'm shaking them off , and we follow them through time to see these mosquitos get very , very sick indeed , here shown in fast motion , and three hours later what we see at the bottom of the cage is dead mosquitos , very dead mosquitos , and I 'm going to say , ladies and gentlemen , we have swapped the cards with mosquitos .
They don 't kill us . We kill them .
Now — — Maastricht , be prepared .
Now think of what we can do with this .
We can actually use this to contain outbreaks of mosquito-born diseases , of epidemics , right ?
And better still , imagine what would happen if , in a very large area , everyone would take these drugs , this drug , for just three weeks .
That would give us an opportunity to actually eliminate malaria as a disease .
So cheese , dogs and a pill to kill mosquitos .
That 's the kind of out-of-the-box science that I love doing , for the betterment of mankind , but especially for her , so that she can grow up in a world without malaria . Thank you .
Hasan Elahi : FBI , here I am !
After he ended up on a watch list by accident , Hasan Elahi was advised by his local FBI agents to let them know when he was traveling . He did that and more ... much more .
Hi there . I 'm Hasan . I 'm an artist .
And usually when I tell people I 'm an artist , they just look at me and say , " Do you paint ? "
or " What kind of medium do you work in ? "
Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique .
So what I 'm really interested in is creative problem solving .
And I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago .
So let me show you a little of that .
So it started over here .
And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002 .
I was flying back to the U.S. from an exhibition overseas .
And as I was coming back , well I was taken by the FBI , met by an FBI agent , and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions -- " Where were you ? What were you doing ? Who were you talking with ?
Why were you there ? Who pays for your trips ? " -- all these little details .
And then literally just out of nowhere , the guy asks me , " Where were you September 12th ? "
And when most of us get asked , " Where were you September 12th ? "
or any date for that fact , it 's like , " I don 't exactly remember , but I can look it up for you . "
So I pulled out my little PDA , and I said , " Okay , let 's look up my appointments for September 12th . "
I had September 12th -- from 10 : 00 a.m. to 10 : 30 a.m. , I paid my storage bill .
From 10 : 30 a.m. to 12 : 00 p.m. , I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time .
From 12 : 00 p.m. to 3 : 00 p.m. , I taught my intro class , 3 : 00 p.m. to 6 : 00 p.m. , I taught my advanced class .
" Where were you the 11th ? " " Where were you the 10th ? "
" Where were you the 29th ? the 30th ? "
" Where were you October 5th ? "
We read about six months of my calendar .
And I don 't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did .
But good thing I did , because I don 't look good in orange .
So he asked me -- " So this storage unit that you paid the rent on , what did you have in it ? "
This was in Tampa , Florida , so I was like , " Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida .
Furniture that I can 't fit in my ratty apartment .
Just assorted garage sale junk , because I 'm a pack rat . "
And he looks at me really confused and says , " No explosives ? "
I was like , " No , no . I 'm pretty certain there were no explosives .
And if there were , I would have remembered that one . "
And he 's still a little confused , but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I 'm not exactly a terrorist threat .
And so we 're sitting there , and eventually after about an hour , hour and a half of just going back and forth , he says , " Okay , I have enough information here .
I 'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office . They 're the ones who initiated this .
They 'll follow up with you , and we 'll take care of it . "
I was like , " Great . "
So I got home and the phone rings , and a man introduced himself .
Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life -- back and forth , not six months continuously .
By the way , you folks know that in the United States , you can 't take photographs of federal buildings , but Google can do it for you .
So to the folks from Google , thank you .
So I spent a lot of time in this building .
Questions like : " Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation ? "
And you also have to consider the state of mind you 're in when you 're doing this .
You 're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death .
Or questions such as -- actually , during the polygraph , which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them -- one of the polygraph questions was ...
well the first one was , " Is your name Hasan ? " " Yes . "
" Are we in Florida ? " " Yes . " " Is today Tuesday ? " " Yes . "
Because you have to base it on a yes or no .
Then , of course , the next question is : " Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States ? "
I work at a university .
So I was like , " Maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly . "
But they said , " Okay , aside from what we had discussed , do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States ? "
I was like , " No . "
So at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs , they said , " Hey , everything 's fine . "
I was like , " I know . That 's what I 've been trying to tell you guys all along .
I know everything 's fine . "
So they 're looking at me really odd .
And it 's like , " Guys , I travel a lot . "
This is with the FBI .
And I was like , " All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo , and here we go all over again . "
And there was a sincere concern there .
And he was like , " You know , if you get into trouble , give us a call -- we 'll take care of it . "
So ever since then , before I would go anywhere , I would call the FBI .
I would tell them , " Hey guys , this is where I 'm going . This is my flight .
Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th " or whatever .
A couple weeks later , I 'd call again , let them know .
It wasn 't that I had to , but I chose to .
Just wanted to say , " Hey guys .
Don 't want to make it look like I 'm making any sudden moves . "
" I don 't want you guys to think that I 'm about to flee .
Just letting you know . Heads up . "
And so I just kept doing this over and over and over .
And then the phone calls turned into emails , and the emails got longer and longer and longer ...
with pictures , with travel tips .
Then I 'd make websites .
And then I built this over here . Let me go back to it over here .
So I actually designed this back in 2003 .
So this kind of tracks me at any given moment .
I wrote some code for my mobile phone .
Basically , what I decided is okay guys , you want to watch me , that 's cool .
But I 'll watch myself . It 's okay .
You don 't have to waste your energy or your resources .
And I 'll help you out .
So in the process , I start thinking , well what else might they know about me ?
Well they probably have all my flight records , so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online .
So you can see , Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta .
And then you see , these are some of the meals that I 've been fed on the planes .
This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco .
See that ? They won 't let me on a plane with that , but they 'll give it to me on the plane .
These are the airports that I hang out in , because I like airports .
That 's Kennedy airport , May 19th , Tuesday .
This is in Warsaw .
Singapore . You can see , they 're kind of empty .
These images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone .
But if you can cross-reference this with the other data , then you 're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together .
And when you 're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence , you 're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner .
At the time that this was going on , the last thing on my mind was " art project . "
I was certainly not thinking , hey , I got new work here .
But after going through this , after realizing , well what just happened ?
And after piecing together this , this and this , this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this , and it actually became this project .
So these are the stores that I shop in -- some of them -- because they need to know .
This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday , November 15th .
At Coreana Supermarket buying my kimchi because I like kimchi .
And I bought some crabs too right around there , and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville .
And laundry too . Laundry detergent at West Oakland -- East Oakland , sorry .
And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick .
Now if you go to my bank records , it 'll actually show something from there , so you know that , on May 9th , that I bought $ 14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo .
So not only that I 'm giving this information here and there , but now there 's a third party , an independent third party , my bank , that 's verifying that , yes indeed , I was there at this time .
So there 's points , and these points are actually being cross-referenced .
And there 's a verification taking place .
Sometimes they 're really small purchases .
So 34 cents foreign transaction fee .
All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts , and everything pops up right away .
Sometimes there 's a lot of information .
This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was .
And then sometimes you get this .
Sometimes you just get this , just an empty hallway in Salt Lake City , January 22nd .
And I can tell you exactly who I was with , where I was , because this is what I had to do with the FBI .
I had to tell them every little detail of everything .
I spend a lot of time on the road .
This is a parking lot in Elko , Nevada off of Route 80 at 8 : 01 p.m. on August 19th .
I spend a lot of time in gas stations too -- empty train stations .
So there 's multiple databases .
And there 's thousands and thousands and thousands of images .
There 's actually 46,000 images right now on my site , and the FBI has seen all of them -- at least I trust they 've seen all of them .
And then sometimes you don 't get much information at all , you just get this empty bed .
And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information .
So you get something like this .
This , by the way , is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California -- Vietnamese sandwich .
So there 's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations , empty gas stations .
These are some of the meals that I 've been cooking at home .
So how do you know these are meals eaten at home ?
Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times .
So again , you have to do some detective work here .
So sometimes the databases get so specific .
These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth .
At 11 : 39 a.m. was this one .
At 1 : 56 p.m. was this one . At 4 : 59 p.m. was this one .
So I time-stamp my life every few moments .
Every few moments I shoot the image .
Now it 's all done on my iPhone , and it all goes straight up to my server , and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together .
They need to know where I 'm doing my business , because they want to know about my business .
So on December 4th , I went here .
And on Sunday , June 14th at 2009 -- this was actually about two o 'clock in the afternoon in Skowhegan , Maine -- this was my apartment there .
So what you 're basically seeing here is all bits and pieces and all this information .
If you go to my site , there 's tons of things .
And really , it 's not the most user-friendly interface .
It 's actually quite user-unfriendly .
And one of the reasons , also being part of the user-unfriendliness , is that everything is there , but you have to really work through it .
So by me putting all this information out there , what I 'm basically telling you is I 'm telling you everything .
But in this barrage of noise that I 'm putting out , I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life .
And you know very little about me actually .
And really so I 've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy , particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded , there 's no need to delete information anymore .
So what do you do when everything is out there ?
Well you have to take control over it .
And if I give you this information directly , it 's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces .
The other thing that 's also interesting that 's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies -- and it doesn 't matter who they are -- they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information , or restricted access to information .
And the reason their information has any value is , well , because no one else has access to it .
And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you , the information that the FBI has has no value , so thus devaluing their currency .
And I understand that , on an individual level , it 's purely symbolic .
But if 300 million people in the U.S.
started doing this , we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up .
Because it just wouldn 't work if everybody was sharing everything .
And we 're getting to that .
When I first started this project , people were looking at me and saying , " Why would you want to tell everybody what you 're doing , where you 're at ?
Why are you posting these photos ? "
This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people .
So in a way , I 'm glad that I 'm completely obsolete .
I 'm still doing this project , but it is obsolete , because you 're all doing it .
This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis , whether we 're aware of it or not .
So we 're creating our own archives and so on .
And you know , some of my friends have always said , " Hey , you 're just paranoid . Why are you doing this ?
Because no one 's really watching .
No one 's really going to bother you . "
So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully .
Because it 's about surveillance .
I 'm watching who 's watching me .
And I came up with these .
So these are some of my sample logs .
And just little bits and pieces , and you can see some of the things there .
And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see .
So you can see that the Homeland Security likes to come by -- Department of Homeland Security .
You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by .
I actually moved very close to them . I live right down the street from them now .
Central Intelligence Agency .
Executive Office of the President .
Not really sure why they show up , but they do .
I think they kind of like to look at art .
And I 'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields .
So thank you very much . I appreciate it .
Hasan , just curious .
You said , " Now everything automatically goes from my iPhone , " but actually you do take the pictures and put on information .
So how many hours of the day does that take ?
HE : Almost none .
It 's no different than sending a text .
It 's no different than checking an email .
It 's one of those things , we got by just fine before we had to do any of those .
So it 's just become another day .
I mean , when we update a status message , we don 't really think about how long that 's going to take .
So it 's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks , send , and then it 's done .
And everything 's automated at the other end .
On the day you are in a place where there is no coverage , the FBI gets crazy ?
HE : Well it goes to the last point that I was at .
So it holds onto the very last point .
So if I 'm on a 12-hour flight , you 'll see the last airport that I departed from .
Hasan , thank you very much .
Joseph Nye : Global power shifts
Historian and diplomat Joseph Nye gives us the 30,000-foot view of the shifts in power between China and the US , and the global implications as economic , political and " soft " power shifts and moves around the globe .
I 'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century .
And basically , what I 'd like to tell you is that power is changing , and there are two types of changes I want to discuss .
One is power transition , which is change of power amongst states .
And there the simple version of the message is it 's moving from West to East .
The other is power diffusion , the way power is moving from all states West or East to non-state actors .
Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century .
And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why , in the end , there may be some good news .
When we talk about power transition , we often talk about the rise of Asia .
It really should be called the recovery or return of Asia .
If we looked at the world in 1800 , you 'd find that more than half of the world 's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world 's product .
Now fast forward to 1900 : half the world 's people -- more than half -- still live in Asia , but they 're now making only a fifth of the world 's product .
What happened ? The Industrial Revolution , Europe and America became the dominant center of the world .
What we 're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world 's population and more than half of the world 's product .
That 's important and it 's an important shift .
But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I 'm talking about , which is power diffusion .
To understand power diffusion put this in your mind : computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century .
Now that 's a big abstract number .
But to make it more real , if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power , you could buy a car today for five dollars .
Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically , the barriers to entry go down .
Anybody can play in the game .
So in 1970 , if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously , you could do it .
The technology was there .
But to be able to do it , you had to be very rich -- a government , a multinational corporation , maybe the Catholic Church -- but you had to be pretty wealthy .
Now , anybody has that capacity , which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors .
If they have the price of entry into an Internet cafe -- the last time I looked , it was something like a pound an hour -- and if you have Skype , it 's free .
So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone .
And what that means is not that the age of the State is over .
The State still matters .
But the stage is crowded .
The State 's not alone . There are many , many actors .
Some of that 's good : Oxfam , a great non-governmental actor .
Some of it 's bad : Al Qaeda , another non-governmental actor .
But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts .
We think in terms of war and interstate war .
And you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor .
It 's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941 .
You might think of that as the privatization of war .
So we 're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power .
Now the problem is that we 're not thinking about it in very innovative ways .
So let me step back and ask : what 's power ?
Power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want , and you can do it in three ways .
You can do it with threats of coercion , " sticks , " you can do it with payments , " carrots , " or you can do it by getting others to want what you want .
And that ability to get others to want what you want , to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment , is what I call soft power .
And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood , and yet it 's tremendously important .
Indeed , if you can learn to use more soft power , you can save a lot on carrots and sticks .
Traditionally , the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power .
For example , the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university , A.J.P. Taylor , defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war .
But we need a new narrative if we 're to understand power in the 21st century .
It 's not just prevailing at war , though war still persists .
It 's not whose army wins ; it 's also whose story wins .
And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective .
Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what 's happening there .
the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers .
And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States .
Indeed , with the 2008 financial crisis , many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power .
The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting .
And president Medvedev of Russia , for example , pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power .
But in fact , this metaphor of decline is often very misleading .
If you look at history , in recent history , you 'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so .
In 1958 , after the Soviets put up Sputnik , it was " That 's the end of America . "
In 1973 , with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window , that was the end of America .
In the 1980s , as America went through a transition in the Reagan period , between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California , that was the end of America .
But in fact , what we 've seen is none of those were true .
Indeed , people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s , thinking America could do anything , which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures , and now we 're back to decline again .
The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality .
If we try to focus on the reality , then what we need to focus on is what 's really happening in terms of China and the United States .
Goldman Sachs has projected that China , the Chinese economy , will surpass that of the U.S.
by 2027 .
So we 've got , what , 17 more years to go or so before China 's bigger .
Now someday , with a billion point three people getting richer , they are going to be bigger than the United States .
But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century .
Let me mention three reasons why it 's too simple .
First of all , it 's a linear projection .
You know , everything says , here 's the growth rate of China , here 's the growth rate of the U.S. , here it goes -- straight line .
History is not linear .
There are often bumps along the road , accidents along the way .
The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in , let 's say , 2030 , which it may it , that will be a measure of total economic size , but not of per capita income -- won 't tell you about the composition of the economy .
China still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy .
And that the Chinese won 't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part , after 2050 , of this century .
The other point that 's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is .
You know , it looks at economic power measured by GDP .
Doesn 't tell you much about military power , doesn 't tell you very much about soft power .
It 's all very one-dimensional .
And also , when we think about the rise of Asia , or return of Asia as I called it a little bit earlier , it 's worth remembering Asia 's not one thing .
If you 're sitting in Japan , or in New Delhi , or in Hanoi , your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you 're sitting in Beijing .
Indeed , one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China .
It 's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States , which they 're not .
So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition .
But you might ask , well so what in any case ?
Why does it matter ? Who cares ?
Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play ?
The answer is it matters quite a lot .
Because , if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this , the facts , not the myths , you may have policies which are very dangerous .
Let me give you an example from history .
The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago .
What caused it ?
Thucydides , the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War , said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta .
Notice both halves of that explanation .
Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century , in which World War One , the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world , that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain .
So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today , that what we 're going to see is the same thing now in this century .
No , I think that 's wrong .
It 's bad history .
For one thing , Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial strength by 1900 .
And as I said earlier , China has not passed the United States .
But also , if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear , it leads to overreaction .
And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear .
To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context , the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself .
We don 't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia .
And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective , we 're going to be able to manage this process .
Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together .
If you ask how is power distributed in the world today , it 's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game .
Top board : military power among states .
The United States is the only superpower , and it 's likely to remain that way for two or three decades .
China 's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board .
economic power among states .
Power is multi-polar .
There are balancers -- the U.S. , Europe , China , Japan can balance each other .
the board of transnational relations , things that cross borders outside the control of governments , things like climate change , drug trade , financial flows , pandemics , all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments , there nobody 's in charge .
It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar .
Power is chaotically distributed .
And the only way you can solve these problems -- and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century -- is through cooperation , through working together , which means that soft power becomes more important , that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation .
Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century , we want to get away from the idea that power 's always zero sum -- my gain is your loss and vice versa .
Power can also be positive sum , where your gain can be my gain .
If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions , that 's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else .
So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody , and it 's not a zero sum , I win , you lose .
It 's one in which we can all gain .
So as we think about power in this century , we want to get away from this view that it 's all I win , you lose .
Now I don 't mean to be Pollyannaish about this .
Wars persist . Power persists .
Military power is important .
Keeping balances is important .
All this still persists .
Hard power is there , and it will remain .
But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power , you 're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we 're facing .
So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods , things from which all of us can benefit ?
How do we define our national interests but positive sum .
In that sense , if we define our interests , for example , for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century , keeping an open trading system , keeping a monetary stability , keeping freedom of the seas -- those were good for Britain , they were good for others as well .
And in the 21st century , you have to do an analog to that .
How do we produce global public goods , which are good for us , but good for everyone at the same time ?
And that 's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century .
There are ways to define our interests in which , while protecting ourselves with hard power , we can organize with others in networks to produce , not only public goods , but ways that will enhance our soft power .
So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this , I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration , she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power , as she put it , " using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box . "
And if we 're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I 've described , the power shift represented by transition among states , the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states , we 're going to have to develop a new narrative of power in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power .
And that 's the good news I have . We can do that .
Thank you very much .
David Lang : My underwater robot
David Lang is a maker who taught himself to become an amateur oceanographer -- or , he taught a robot to be one for him . In a charming talk Lang , a TED Fellow , shows how he and a network of ocean lovers teamed up to build open-sourced , low-cost underwater explorers .
So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo , about 60 feet below the surface .
NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts , and last year , they invited us along for the ride .
All the footage was taken from our open ROV , which is a robot that we built in our garage .
So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle , which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside .
It 's open source , meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online , allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design .
It 's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic .
So ROVs aren 't new .
They 've been around for decades .
Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans .
Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction .
What we 've built isn 't unique .
It 's how we 've built it that 's really unique .
So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started .
So a few years ago , my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras .
We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery , and we wanted to go up there .
Unfortunately , we didn 't have any money and we didn 't have any tools to do it .
So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot , but we didn 't have all the parts figured out , so we did what anybody would do in our situation : we asked the Internet for help .
More specifically , we created this website , openROV.com , and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months , it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums , but pretty soon , we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists , and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do .
We kept working on it . We learned a lot .
We kept prototyping , and eventually , we decided we wanted to go to the cave . We were ready .
So about that time , our little expedition became quite a story , and it got picked up in The New York Times .
And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves .
So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter , and when we did , we raised our funding goal in about two hours , and all of a sudden , had this money to make these kits .
But then we had to learn how to make them .
I mean , we had to learn small batch manufacturing .
So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation .
But we were able to do it , we got all the kits made , thanks a lot to TechShop , which was a big help to us , and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year , so it was just a few months ago .
But we 're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world , including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica .
We 've also learned the penguins love robots .
So we 're still publishing all the designs online , encouraging anyone to build these themselves .
That 's the only way that we could have done this .
By being open source , we 've created this distributed R & amp ; D network , and we 're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart .
But the actual robot is really only half the story .
The real potential , the long term potential , is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe .
What can we discover when there 's thousands of these devices roaming the seas ?
So you 're probably all wondering : the cave .
Did you find the gold ?
Well , we didn 't find any gold , but we decided that what we found was much more valuable .
It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration .
It 's something that 's not limited to the James Camerons of the world , but something that we 're all participating in .
It 's an underwater world we 're all exploring together .
Thank you .
Daphne Bavelier : Your brain on video games
How do fast-paced video games affect the brain ? Step into the lab with cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier to hear surprising news about how video games , even action-packed shooter games , can help us learn , focus and , fascinatingly , multitask . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 'm a brain scientist , and as a brain scientist , I 'm actually interested in how the brain learns , and I 'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter , better and faster .
This is in this context I 'm going to tell you about video games . When we say video games , most of you think about children .
It 's true . Ninety percent of children do play video games .
But let 's be frank .
When the kids are in bed , who is in front of the PlayStation ?
Most of you . The average age of a gamer is 33 years old , not eight years old , and in fact , if we look at the projected demographics of video game play , the video game players of tomorrow are older adults .
So video [ gaming ] is pervasive throughout our society .
It is clearly here to stay . It has an amazing impact on our everyday life . Consider these statistics released by Activision . After one month of release of the game " Call Of Duty : Black Ops , " it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide , right ?
Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra ?
So what we are asking in the lab is , how can we leverage that power ?
Now I want to step back a bit .
I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games .
The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you , right ?
And I 'm almost sure most of you have thought , " Oh , come on , can 't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies ? "
I 'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare . Right ?
Most parents would find that great .
Well , I 'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health .
It 's not , and binging is never good .
But I 'm going to argue that in reasonable doses , actually the very game I showed you at the beginning , those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior .
There 's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you , right ? You 're all bombarded with that .
I 'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab .
What we do in the lab is actually measure directly , in a quantitative fashion , what is the impact of video games on the brain .
And so I 'm going to take a few examples from our work .
One first saying that I 'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse .
That 's a statement about vision .
There may be vision scientists among you .
We actually know how to test that statement .
We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is .
Well , guess what ? People that don 't play a lot of action games , that don 't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens , have normal , or what we call corrective-to-normal vision . That 's okay .
The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week , 10 hours per week , 15 hours per week .
By that statement , their vision should be really bad , right ?
Guess what ? Their vision is really , really good .
It 's better than those that don 't play .
And it 's better in two different ways .
The first way is that they 're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter , and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses , you can actually do it with just your eyesight .
The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray .
Imagine you 're driving in a fog . That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident , or getting into an accident .
So we 're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision , and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better .
Clearly , when it comes to action video games , screen time doesn 't make your eyesight worse .
Another saying that I 'm sure you have all heard around : Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability .
Okay , we know how to measure attention in the lab .
I 'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so .
I 'm going to ask you to participate , so you 're going to have to actually play the game with me . I 'm going to show you colored words . I want you to shout out the color of the ink .
Right ? So this is the first example .
[ " Chair " ] Orange , good . [ " Table " ] Green .
[ " Board " ] Audience : Red.Daphne Bavelier : Red .
[ " Horse " ] DB : Yellow . Audience : Yellow .
[ " Yellow " ] DB : Red . Audience : Yellow .
[ " Blue " ] DB : Yellow .
Okay , you get my point , right ?
You 're getting better , but it 's hard . Why is it hard ?
Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color .
How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict , so the young guys here at the top of their game probably , like , did a little better than some of us that are older .
What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games , they actually resolve the conflict faster .
So clearly playing those action games doesn 't lead to attention problems .
Actually , those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention , and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world .
This is something we use all the time . When you 're driving , you 're tracking , keeping track of the cars around you .
You 're also keeping track of the pedestrian , the running dog , and that 's how you can actually be safe driving , right ?
In the lab , we get people to come to the lab , sit in front of a computer screen , and we give them little tasks that I 'm going to get you to do again .
You 're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces . These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter . Most kids are happy . It 's actually recess .
But a few kids are sad and blue because they 've forgotten their coat .
Everybody begins to move around , and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn 't . So I 'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid . It 's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes . You can track , you can track , and then when it stops , and there is a question mark , and I ask you , did this kid have a coat or not ?
Was it yellow initially or blue ?
I hear a few yellow . Good . So most of you have a brain .
I 'm now going to ask you to do the task , but now with a little more challenging task . There are going to be three of them that are blue . Don 't move your eyes .
Please don 't move your eyes . Keep your eyes fixated and expand , pull your attention . That 's the only way you can actually do it . If you move your eyes , you 're doomed .
Yellow or blue ?
Audience : Yellow.DB : Good .
So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention .
That 's what we just did . Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention , which is what is shown in this video here .
That 's for you guys , action video game players .
A bit more challenging , right ?
Yellow or blue ? Blue . We have some people that are serious out there . Yeah .
Good . So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people 's behavior , we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain , and we do find many changes , but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention . So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention .
The other one is the frontal lobe , which controls how we sustain attention , and another one is the anterior cingulate , which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict .
Now , when we do brain imaging , we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games .
This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain .
You all know about multitasking . You all have been faulty of multitasking when you 're driving and you pick up your cellphone . Bad idea . Very bad idea .
Why ? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone , you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you , and so you 're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident .
Now , we can measure that kind of skills in the lab .
We obviously don 't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have . That would be a little costly proposition . But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure , to millisecond accuracy , how good they are at switching from one task to another .
When we do that , we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really , really good .
They switch really fast , very swiftly . They pay a very small cost .
Now I 'd like you to remember that result , and put it in the context of another group of technology users , a group which is actually much revered by society , which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking .
What is multimedia-tasking ? It 's the fact that most of us , most of our children , are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they 're doing search on the web at the same time as they 're chatting on Facebook with their friends .
That 's a multimedia-tasker .
There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking .
When we measure them in the lab , they 're really bad .
Right ? So these kinds of results really makes two main points .
The first one is that not all media are created equal .
You can 't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games . They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition , perception and attention .
Even within video games , I 'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games .
Different video games have a different effect on your brains .
So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game .
The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight .
I showed that to you already , like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time , those action gamers have a lot of very good vision , etc .
Here , what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test .
So you show them their data , you show them they are bad and they 're like , " Not possible . " You know , they have this sort of gut feeling that , really , they are doing really , really good .
That 's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain .
Now in a sense , when we think about the effect of video games on the brain , it 's very similar to the effect of wine on the health .
There are some very poor uses of wine . There are some very poor uses of video games . But when consumed in reasonable doses , and at the right age , wine can be very good for health . There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy .
So it 's the same way , like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity , learning , attention , vision , etc . , and so we need and we 're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games , either for education or for rehabilitation of patients .
Now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients , we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform .
I 'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game , I can actually change your vision for the better , whether you want to play that action game or not , right ?
That 's the point of rehabilitation or education .
Most of the kids don 't go to school saying , " Great , two hours of math ! "
So that 's really the crux of the research , and to do that , we need to go one more step .
And one more step is to do training studies .
So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation .
Mental rotation is a task where I 'm going to ask you , and again you 're going to do the task , to look at this shape . Study it , it 's a target shape , and I 'm going to present to you four different shapes .
One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape . I want you to tell me which one : the first one , second one , third one or fourth one ?
Okay , I 'll help you . Fourth one .
One more . Get those brains working . Come on .
That 's our target shape .
Third . Good ! This is hard , right ?
Like , the reason that I asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing , right ?
It doesn 't really feel like playing mindless action video games .
Well , what we do in these training studies is , people come to the lab , they do tasks like this one , we then force them to play 10 hours of action games .
They don 't play 10 hours of action games in a row .
They do distributed practice , so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks .
Then , once they are done with the training , they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task . So this is work from a colleague in Toronto . What they showed is that , initially , you know , subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age . After two weeks of training on action video games , they actually perform better , and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training . That 's really , really important .
Why ? Because I told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation . We need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting .
Now , at this point , a number of you are probably wondering well , what are you waiting for , to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy , or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia , for example ?
Well , we 're working on it , but here is a challenge .
There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects , and that 's what I 'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation .
There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can 't resist .
That 's the chocolate side of the equation .
The issue is we need to put the two together , and it 's a little bit like with food .
Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli ?
None of you . And you probably have had that feeling , right , picking up an education game and sort of feeling , hmm , you know , it 's not really fun , it 's not really engaging . So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate , a brand of chocolate that is irresistible , that you really want to play , but that has all the ingredients , the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can 't recognize but are still working on your brains . And we 're working on it , but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together , people that work in the entertainment software industry , and publishers , so these are not people that usually meet every day , but it 's actually doable , and we are on the right track .
I 'd like to leave you with that thought , and thank you for your attention .
Einstein the Parrot : A talking , squawking parrot
This whimsical wrap-up of TED2006 -- presented by Einstein , the African grey parrot , and her trainer , Stephanie White -- simply tickles . Watch for the moment when Einstein has a moment with Al Gore .
Stephanie White : I 'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody .
Can you tell everybody your name ?
Einstein : Einstein .
SW : This is Einstein . Can you tell everyone " hi " ?
E : Hello .
SW : That 's nice . Can you be polite ?
E : Hi , sweetheart .
SW : Much better . Well , Einstein is very honored to be here at TED 2006 , amongst all you modern-day Einsteins . In fact , she 's very excited .
E : Woo .
SW : Yeah .
Since we 've arrived , there 's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference .
This morning we 've heard a lot of whispers about Tom Reilly 's wrap-up on Saturday . Einstein , did you hear whispers ?
E : [ Squawks ] SW : Yeah .
Einstein 's especially interested in Penelope 's talk .
A lot of her research goes on in caves , which can get pretty dusty .
E : Achoo !
SW : It could make her sneeze . But more importantly , her research could help Einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat .
Einstein : [ Coughs ] SW : Yeah .
Well , Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level .
Well , that 's really cool , but what Einstein 's really hoping is that maybe he 'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut .
E : Oh , my God ! My God ! My God !
SW : Yeah . She would get really , really excited .
That is one big peanut . Since Einstein is a bird , she 's very interested in things that fly .
She thinks Burt Rutan is very impressive .
E : Ooh .
SW : Yeah . She especially likes his latest achievement , SpaceShipOne .
Einstein , would you like to ride in Burt 's spaceship ?
E : [ Spaceship noise ] SW : Even if it doesn 't have a laser ?
E : [ Laser noise ] SW : Yeah , yeah . That was pretty funny , Einstein .
Now , Einstein also thinks , you know , working in caves and travelling through space -- it 's all very dangerous jobs .
It would be very dangerous if you fell down .
E : Wheeeeeee ! [ Splat ] SW : Yeah .
Little splat at the end there . Einstein , did that hurt ?
E : Ow , ow , ow .
SW : Yeah . It 's all a lot of hard work .
E : [ Squawks ] SW : Yeah . It can get a bird like Einstein frustrated .
E : [ Squawks ] SW : Yeah , it sure can . But when Einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public , she loves to take in the arts .
If the children of the Uganda need another dance partner , Einstein could sure fit the bill , because she loves to dance .
Can you get down ?
E : [ Bobbing head ] SW : Let 's get down for everybody . Come on now .
She 's going to make me do it , too . Ooh , ooh .
Einstein : Ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh .
SW : Do your head now .
E : Ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh .
SW : Or maybe Sirena Huang would like to learn some arias on her violin , and Einstein can sing along with some opera ?
E : [ Operatic squawk ] SW : Very good .
Or maybe Stu just needs another backup singer ?
Einstein , can you also sing ?
I know , you need to get rid of that seed first . Can you sing ?
E : La , la .
SW : There you go . And , of course , if all else fails , you can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta .
E : [ Squawks ] SW : All right . Well , Einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier , but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem .
E : What 's the matter ?
SW : No , I don 't have a problem . You have the problem , remember ?
You were saying that you were really embarrassed , because you 're in love with a pirate ?
E : Yar .
SW : There you go . And what do pirates like to drink ?
E : Beer .
SW : Yeah , that 's right . But you don 't like to drink beer , Einstein .
You like to drink water .
E : [ Water sound ] SW : Very good . Now , really , she is pretty nervous .
Because one of her favorite folks from back home is here , and she 's pretty nervous to meet him .
She thinks Al Gore is a really good-looking man .
What do you say to a good-looking man ?
E : Hey , baby .
SW : And so do all the folks back home in Tennessee .
E : Yee haw .
SW : And since she 's such a big fan , she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of March .
And we didn 't think he 'd be in town then , so Einstein wanted to do something special for him .
So let 's see if Einstein will sing " Happy Birthday " to Al Gore .
Can you sing " Happy Birthday " to him ?
E : Happy birthday to you .
SW : Again .
E : Happy birthday to you .
SW : Again .
E : Happy birthday to you .
SW : Big finish .
E : Happy birthday to you .
SW : Good job !
Well , before we wrap it up , she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the Knoxville Zoo .
Einstein , do you want to say " hi " to all the owls ?
E : Woo , woo , woo .
SW : What about the other birds ?
E : Tweet , tweet , tweet .
SW : And the penguin ?
E : Quack , quack , quack .
SW : There we go .
Let 's get that one out of there . How about a chimpanzee ?
E : Ooh , ooh , ooh . Aah , aah , aah .
SW : Very good .
What about a wolf ?
E : Ooooowww .
SW : And a pig ?
E : Oink , oink , oink .
SW : And the rooster ?
E : Cock-a-doodle-doo !
SW : And how about those cats ?
E : Meow .
SW : At the zoo we have big cats from the jungle .
E : Grrrrr .
SW : What about a skunk ?
E : Stinker .
SW : She 's a comedian . I suppose you think you 're famous ? Are you famous ?
E : Superstar .
SW : Yeah . You are a superstar .
Well , we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect Einstein 's animal friends , and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live [ in ] .
Now , Einstein does say it best when we ask her .
Why do we want to protect your home ?
E : I 'm special .
SW : You are very special . What would you like to say to all these nice people ?
E : I love you .
SW : That 's good . Can you blow them a kiss ?
E : [ Kissing noise ] SW : And what do you say when it 's time to go ?
E : Goodbye .
SW : Good job . Thank you all .
Jacek Utko : Can design save newspapers ?
Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards , but increase circulation by up to 100 % . Can good design save the newspaper ? It just might .
Newspapers are dying for a few reasons .
Readers don 't want to pay for yesterday 's news , and advertisers follow them .
Your iPhone , your laptop , is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday .
And we should save trees in the end .
So it 's enough to bury any industry .
So , should we rather ask , " Can anything save newspapers ? "
There are several scenarios for the future newspaper .
Some people say it should be free ; it should be tabloid , or even smaller : A4 ; it should be local , run by communities , or niche , for some smaller groups like business -- but then it 's not free ; it 's very expensive .
It should be opinion-driven ; less news , more views .
And we 'd rather read it during breakfast , because later we listen to radio in a car , check your mail at work and in the evening you watch TV .
Sounds nice , but this can only buy time .
Because in the long run , I think there is no reason , no practical reason for newspapers to survive .
So what can we do ?
Let me tell you my story .
20 years ago , Bonnier , Swedish publisher , started to set newspapers in the former Soviet Bloc .
After a few years , they had several newspapers in central and eastern Europe .
They were run by an inexperienced staff , with no visual culture , no budgets for visuals -- in many places there were not even art directors .
I decided to be -- to work for them as an art director .
Before , I was an architect , and my grandmother asked me once , " What are you doing for a living ? "
I said , " I 'm designing newspapers . "
" What ? There 's nothing to design there . It 's just boring letters " And she was right . I was very frustrated , until one day .
I came to London , and I 've seen performance by Cirque du Soleil .
And I had a revelation . I thought , " These guys took some creepy , run-down entertainment , and put it to the highest possible level of performance art . "
I thought " Oh my God , maybe I can do the same with these boring newspapers . "
And I did . We started to redesign them , one by one .
The front page became our signature .
It was my personal intimate channel to talk to the readers .
I 'm not going to tell you stories about teamwork or cooperation .
My approach was very egotistic .
I wanted my artistic statement , my interpretation of reality .
I wanted to make posters , not newspapers .
Not even magazines : posters .
We were experimenting with type , with illustration , with photos . And we had fun .
Soon it started to bring results .
In Poland , our pages were named " Covers of the Year " three times in a row .
Other examples you can see here are from Latvia , Lithuania , Estonia -- the central European countries .
But it 's not only about the front page .
The secret is that we were treating the whole newspaper as one piece , as one composition -- like music .
And music has a rhythm , has ups and downs .
And design is responsible for this experience .
Flipping through pages is readers experience , and I 'm responsible for this experience .
We treated two pages , both spreads , as a one page , because that 's how readers perceive it .
You can see some Russian pages here which got many awards on biggest infographic competition in Spain .
But the real award came from Society for Newspaper Design .
Just a year after redesigning this newspaper in Poland , they name it the World 's Best-Designed Newspaper .
And two years later , the same award came to Estonia .
Isn 't amazing ?
What really makes it amazing : that the circulation of these newspapers were growing too .
Just some examples : in Russia , plus 11 after one year , plus 29 after three years of the redesign .
Same in Poland : plus 13 , up to 35 percent raise of circulation after three years .
You can see on a graph , after years of stagnation , the paper started to grow , just after redesign .
But the real hit was in Bulgaria .
And that is really amazing .
Did design do this ?
Design was just a part of the process .
And the process we made was not about changing the look , it was about improving the product completely .
I took an architectural rule about function and form and translated it into newspaper content and design .
And I put strategy at the top of it .
So first you ask a big question : why we do it ? What is the goal ?
Then we adjust the content accordingly .
And then , usually after two months , we start designing .
My bosses , in the beginning , were very surprised .
Why am I asking all of these business questions , instead of just showing them pages ?
But soon they realized that this is the new role of designer : to be in this process from the very beginning to the very end .
So what is the lesson behind it ?
The first lesson is about that design can change not just your product .
It can change your workflow -- actually , it can change everything in your company ; it can turn your company upside down .
It can even change you .
And who 's responsible ? Designers .
Give power to designers .
But the second is even more important .
You can live in a small poor country , like me .
You can work for a small company , in a boring branch .
You can have no budgets , no people -- but still can put your work to the highest possible level .
And everybody can do it .
You just need inspiration , vision and determination .
And you need to remember that to be good is not enough .
Thank you .
Shaka Senghor : Why your worst deeds don 't define you
In 1991 , Shaka Senghor shot and killed a man . He was , he says , " a drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol . " Jailed for second degree murder , that could very well have been the end of the story . But it wasn 't . Instead , it was the beginning of a years-long journey to redemption , one with humbling and sobering lessons for us all .
Twenty-three years ago , at the age of 19 , I shot and killed a man .
I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol .
But that wasn 't the end of my story .
In fact , it was beginning , and the 23 years since is a story of acknowledgment , apology and atonement .
But it didn 't happen in the way that you might imagine or think .
These things occurred in my life in a way that was surprising , especially to me .
See , like many of you , growing up , I was an honor roll student , a scholarship student , with dreams of becoming a doctor .
But things went dramatically wrong when my parents separated and eventually divorced .
The actual events are pretty straightforward .
At the age of 17 , I got shot three times standing on the corner of my block in Detroit .
My friend rushed me to the hospital .
Doctors pulled the bullets out , patched me up , and sent me back to the same neighborhood where I got shot .
Throughout this ordeal , no one hugged me , no one counseled me , no one told me I would be okay .
No one told me that I would live in fear , that I would become paranoid , or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot .
No one told me that one day , I would become the person behind the trigger .
Fourteen months later , at 2 a.m. , I fired the shots that caused a man 's death .
When I entered prison , I was bitter , I was angry , I was hurt .
I didn 't want to take responsibility .
I blamed everybody from my parents to the system .
I rationalized my decision to shoot because in the hood where I come from , it 's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot .
As I sat in my cold cell , I felt helpless , unloved and abandoned .
I felt like nobody cared , and I reacted with hostility to my confinement .
And I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble .
I ran black market stores , I loan sharked , and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled into the prison .
I had in fact become what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called " the worst of the worst . "
And because of my activity , I landed in solitary confinement for seven and a half years out of my incarceration .
Now as I see it , solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane and barbaric places you can find yourself , but find myself I did .
One day , I was pacing my cell , when an officer came and delivered mail .
I looked at a couple of letters before I looked at the letter that had my son 's squiggly handwriting on it .
And anytime I would get a letter from my son , it was like a ray of light in the darkest place you can imagine .
And on this particular day , I opened this letter , and in capital letters , he wrote , " My mama told me why you was in prison : murder . "
He said , " Dad , don 't kill .
Jesus watches what you do . Pray to Him . "
Now , I wasn 't religious at that time , nor am I religious now , but it was something so profound about my son 's words .
They made me examine things about my life that I hadn 't considered .
It was the first time in my life that I had actually thought about the fact that my son would see me as a murderer .
I sat back on my bunk and I reflected on something I had read in [ Plato ] , where Socrates stated in " Apology " that the unexamined life isn 't worth living .
At that point is when the transformation began .
But it didn 't come easy .
One of the things I realized , which was part of the transformation , was that there were four key things .
The first thing was , I had great mentors .
Now , I know some of you all are probably thinking , how did you find a great mentor in prison ?
But in my case , some of my mentors who are serving life sentences were some of the best people to ever come into my life , because they forced me to look at my life honestly , and they forced me to challenge myself about my decision making .
The second thing was literature .
Prior to going to prison , I didn 't know that there were so many brilliant black poets , authors and philosophers , and then I had the great fortune of encountering Malcolm X 's autobiography , and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself .
The third thing was family .
For 19 years , my father stood by my side with an unshakable faith , because he believed that I had what it took to turn my life around .
I also met an amazing woman who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou , and she taught me how to love myself in a healthy way .
The final thing was writing .
When I got that letter from my son , I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison , and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement .
Earlier in my incarceration , I had received a letter from one of the relatives of my victim , and in that letter , she told me she forgave me , because she realized I was a young child who had been abused and had been through some hardships and just made a series of poor decisions .
It was the first time in my life that I ever felt open to forgiving myself .
One of the things that happened after that experience is that I thought about the other men who were incarcerated alongside of me , and how much I wanted to share this with them .
And so I started talking to them about some of their experiences , and I was devastated to realize that most of them came from the same abusive environments , And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around , but unfortunately the system that currently holds 2.5 million people in prison is designed to warehouse as opposed to rehabilitate or transform .
So I made it up in my mind that if I was ever released from prison that I would do everything in my power to help change that .
In 2010 , I walked out of prison for the first time after two decades .
Now imagine , if you will , Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of " The Jetsons . "
That was pretty much what my life was like .
For the first time , I was exposed to the Internet , social media , cars that talk like KITT from " Knight Rider . "
But the thing that fascinated me the most was phone technology .
See , when I went to prison , our car phones were this big and required two people to carry them .
So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed my little Blackberry and I started learning how to text .
But the thing is , the people around me , they didn 't realize that I had no idea what all these abbreviated texts meant , like LOL , OMG , LMAO , until one day I was having a conversation with one of my friends via text , and I asked him to do something , and he responded back , " K. "
And I was like , " What is K ? "
And he was like , " K is okay . "
So in my head , I was like , " Well what the hell is wrong with K ? "
And so I text him a question mark .
And he said , " K = okay . "
And so I tap back , " FU . "
And then he texts back , and he asks me why was I cussing him out .
And I said , " LOL FU , " as in , I finally understand .
And so fast forward three years , I 'm doing relatively good .
I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab , I work for an amazing company called BMe , I teach at the University of Michigan , but it 's been a struggle because I realize that there are more men and women coming home who are not going to be afforded those opportunities .
I 've been blessed to work with some amazing men and women , helping others reenter society , and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans .
He served 24 years for a crime he didn 't commit .
He 's 45 years old . He 's currently enrolled in college .
And one of the things that we talked about is the three things that I found important in my personal transformation , the first being acknowledgment .
I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others .
I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt .
The second thing was apologizing .
I had to apologize to the people I had hurt .
Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it , it was important to do because it was the right thing .
But I also had to apologize to myself .
The third thing was atoning .
For me , atoning meant going back into my community and working with at-risk youth who were on the same path , but also becoming at one with myself .
Through my experience of being locked up , one of the things I discovered is this : the majority of men and women who are incarcerated are redeemable , and the fact is , 90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to the community , and we have a role in determining what kind of men and women return to our community .
My wish today is that we will embrace a more empathetic approach toward how we deal with mass incarceration , that we will do away with the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality , because it 's proven it doesn 't work .
My journey is a unique journey , but it doesn 't have to be that way .
Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen .
So what I 'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren 't held hostage to their pasts , where misdeeds and mistakes don 't define you for the rest of your life .
I think collectively , we can create that reality , and I hope you do too .
Thank you .
Joseph Kim : The family I lost in North Korea . And the family I gained .
A refugee now living in the US , Joseph Kim tells the story of his life in North Korea during the famine years . He 's begun to create a new life -- but he still searches for the family he lost .
I was born and raised in North Korea .
Although my family constantly struggled against poverty , I was always loved and cared for first , because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family .
But then the great famine began in 1994 .
I was four years old .
My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight .
I would wander the streets searching for food , and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother 's back eating chips , and wanting to steal them from him .
Hunger is humiliation . Hunger is hopelessness .
For a hungry child , politics and freedom are not even thought of .
On my ninth birthday , my parents couldn 't give me any food to eat .
But even as a child , I could feel the heaviness in their hearts .
Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time , and in 2003 , when I was 13 years old , my father became one of them .
I saw my father wither away and die .
In the same year , my mother disappeared one day , and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money , but that she would return with money and food soon .
Since we had never been separated , and I thought we would be together forever , I didn 't even give her a hug when she left .
It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life .
But again , I didn 't know it was going to be a long goodbye .
I have not seen my mom or my sister since then .
Suddenly , I became an orphan and homeless .
My daily life became very hard , but very simple .
My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash .
But that is no way to survive .
I started to realize , begging would not be the solution .
So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets .
Sometimes , I found small jobs in exchange for food .
Once , I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine , 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day .
I was not uncommon .
Many other orphans survived this way , or worse .
When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains , I hoped that , the next morning , my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food .
That hope kept me alive .
I don 't mean big , grand hope .
I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread , even though it usually didn 't .
But if I didn 't believe it , I wouldn 't even try , and then I would die .
Hope kept me alive .
Every day , I told myself , no matter how hard things got , still I must live .
After three years of waiting for my sister 's return , I decided to go to China to look for her myself .
I realized I couldn 't survive much longer this way .
I knew the journey would be risky , but I would be risking my life either way .
I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea , or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China .
I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen .
North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission .
Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans , where they face severe punishment .
I decided to cross during the day , first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark , second because I knew I was already taking a risk , and since not many people tried to cross during the day , I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone .
I made it to China on February 15 , 2006 .
I was 16 years old .
I thought things in China would be easier , since there was more food .
I thought more people would help me .
But it was harder than living in North Korea , because I was not free .
I was always worried about being caught and sent back .
By a miracle , some months later , I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans , and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years .
Later that year , an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee .
I went to America without knowing a word of English , yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school .
Even in North Korea , I was an F student .
And I barely finished elementary school .
And I remember I fought in school more than once a day .
Textbooks and the library were not my playground .
My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying , but it didn 't work .
At one point , my father gave up on me .
He said , " You 're not my son anymore . "
I was only 11 or 12 , but it hurt me deeply .
But nevertheless , my level of motivation still didn 't change before he died .
So in America , it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school .
I didn 't even go to middle school .
I decided to go , just because they told me to , without trying much .
But one day , I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner .
And during dinner , I wanted to have one more wing , but I realized there were not enough for everyone , so I decided against it .
When I looked down at my plate , I saw the last chicken wing , that my foster father had given me his .
I was so happy .
I looked at him sitting next to me .
He just looked back at me very warmly , but said no words .
Suddenly I remembered my biological father .
My foster father 's small act of love reminded me of my father , who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry , even if he was starving .
I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America , yet my father died of starvation .
My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him , and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him .
And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice .
I took school seriously , and for the first time ever in my life , I received an academic award for excellence , and made dean 's list from the first semester in high school .
That chicken wing changed my life .
Hope is personal . Hope is something that no one can give to you .
You have to choose to believe in hope .
You have to make it yourself .
In North Korea , I made it myself .
Hope brought me to America .
But in America , I didn 't know what to do , because I had this overwhelming freedom .
My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction , and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America .
I did not come here by myself .
I had hope , but hope by itself is not enough .
Many people helped me along the way to get here .
North Koreans are fighting hard to survive .
They have to force themselves to survive , have hope to survive , but they cannot make it without help .
This is my message to you .
Have hope for yourself , but also help each other .
Life can be hard for everyone , wherever you live .
My foster father didn 't intend to change my life .
In the same way , you may also change someone 's life with even the smallest act of love .
A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger , and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive .
But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph 's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive .
Thank you .
Adrian Hong : Joseph , thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us .
I know you haven 't seen your sister for , you said , it was almost exactly a decade , and in the off chance that she may be able to see this , we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message .
Joseph Kim : In Korean ?
AH : You can do English , then Korean as well .
JK : Okay , I 'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don 't think I can make it without tearing up .
Nuna , it has been already 10 years that I haven 't seen you .
I just wanted to say that I miss you , and I love you , and please come back to me and stay alive .
And I -- oh , gosh .
I still haven 't given up my hope to see you .
I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you , and I promise I will not cry again .
Yes , I 'm just looking forward to seeing you , and if you can 't find me , I will also look for you , and I hope to see you one day .
And can I also make a small message to my mom ?
AH : Sure , please .
JK : I haven 't spent much time with you , but I know that you still love me , and you probably still pray for me and think about me .
I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world .
Thank you .
Sleepy Man Banjo Boys : Teen wonders play bluegrass
Brothers Jonny , Robbie and Tommy Mizzone are The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys , a trio of virtuoso bluegrass musicians who play with dazzling vivacity . Did we mention they 're all under 16 ?
Tommy Mizzone : Tonight we 're going to play you two songs .
We 're three brothers from New Jersey , and the funny thing is that , believe it or not , we are hooked on bluegrass and we 're excited to play it for you tonight .
TM : Thank you , thank you .
Robbie Mizzone : Thank you .
I 'm Robbie Mizzone . I 'm 13 , and I play the fiddle .
This is my brother , Jonny . He 's 10 , and he plays the banjo .
And on guitar is my 14-year-old brother , Tommy .
We call ourselves the Sleepy Man Banjo Boys .
TM : Thank you .
JM : Thank you all .
TM : Thank you very much .
David Perry : Are games better than life ?
Game designer David Perry says tomorrow 's videogames will be more than mere fun to the next generation of gamers . They 'll be lush , complex , emotional experiences -- more involving and meaningful to some than real life . With an excerpt from Michael Highland 's film " As Real as Your Life . "
I grew up in Northern Ireland , right up in the very , very north end of it there , where it 's absolutely freezing cold .
This was me running around in the back garden mid-summer .
I couldn 't pick a career .
In Ireland the obvious choice is the military , but to be honest it actually kind of sucks .
My mother wanted me to be a dentist .
But the problem was that people kept blowing everything up .
So I actually went to school in Belfast , which was where all the action happened .
And this was a pretty common sight .
The school I went to was pretty boring .
They forced us to learn things like Latin .
The school teachers weren 't having much fun , the sports were very dirty or very painful .
So I cleverly chose rowing , which I got very good at .
And I was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day , and I flipped over right in front of the entire school .
And that was the finishing post right there .
So this was extremely embarrassing .
But our school at that time got a grant from the government , and they got an incredible computer -- the research machine 3DZ -- and they left the programming manuals lying around .
And so students like myself with nothing to do , we would learn how to program it .
Also around this time , at home , this was the computer that people were buying .
It was called the Sinclair ZX80 . This was a 1K computer , and you 'd buy your programs on cassette tape .
Actually I 'm just going to pause for one second , because I heard that there 's a prerequisite to speak here at TED -- you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair .
So I brought a picture with big hair .
I just want to get that out of the way .
So after the Sinclair ZX80 came along the very cleverly named Sinclair ZX81 .
And -- you see the picture at the bottom ?
There 's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son .
That 's what they thought they had built it for .
The reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it .
We were programming in BASIC , which is a pretty awful language for games , so we ended up learning Assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware .
This is the guy that invented it , Sir Clive Sinclair , and he 's showing his machine .
You had this same thing in America , it was called the Timex Sinclair1000 .
To play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing " Battlestar Galactica . "
The graphics were just horrible .
You had to have an even better imagination to play this game , " Death Rider . "
But of course the scientists couldn 't help themselves .
They started making their own video games .
This is one of my favorite ones here , where they have rabbit breeding , so males choose the lucky rabbit .
It was around this time we went from 1K to 16K , which was quite the leap .
And if you 're wondering how much 16K is , this eBay logo here is 16K .
And in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program .
And that 's what it looked like .
I spent ages flying this flight simulator , and I honestly believed I could fly airplanes by the end of it .
Here 's Clive Sinclair now launching his color computer .
He 's recognized as being the father of video games in Europe .
He 's a multi-millionaire , and I think that 's why he 's smiling in this photograph .
So I went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games .
Some of the highlights were things like " The Terminator , " " Aladdin , " the " Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles . "
Because I was from the United Kingdom , they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children , so they decided to call it hero instead .
I personally preferred the Spanish version , which was " Tortugas Ninja . "
That was much better .
Then the last game I did was based on trying to get the video game industry and Hollywood to actually work together on something -- instead of licensing from each other , to actually work .
Now , Chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me , so I 've done that .
The video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business .
It grows every year .
Last year was the biggest year .
By 2008 , we 're going to kick the butt of the music industry .
By 2010 , we 're going to hit 42 billion .
43 percent of gamers are female .
So there 's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware .
The average age of gamers ?
Well , obviously it 's for children , right ?
Well , no , actually it 's 30 years old .
And interestingly , the people who buy the most games are 37 .
So 37 is our target audience .
All video games are violent .
Of course the newspapers love to beat on this .
But 83 percent of games don 't have any mature content whatsoever , so it 's just not true .
Online gaming statistics .
I brought some stuff on " World of Warcraft . " It 's 5.5 million players .
It makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions .
It costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer , making the publisher about another 275 million .
The game costs about 80 million dollars to make , so basically it pays for itself in about a month .
A player in a game called " Project Entropia " actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars .
You have to remember that this is not a real island .
He didn 't actually buy anything , just some data .
But he got great terms on it .
This purchase included mining and hunting rights , ownership of all land on the island , and a castle with no furniture included .
This market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually .
And what 's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves .
They found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games .
I dove onto eBay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on , typed in World of Warcraft , got 6,000 items .
I liked this one the best : a level 60 Warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars .
It 's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it .
So as far as popularity of games , what do you think these people are doing here ?
It turns out they 're actually in Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles listening to the L.A. Philharmonic playing video game music .
That 's what the show looks like .
You would expect it to be cheesy , but it 's not .
It 's very , very epic and a very beautiful concert .
And the people that went there absolutely loved it .
What do you think these people are doing ?
They 're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other .
And this is happening in every city around the world .
This is happening in your local cities too , you 're probably just not aware of it .
Now , Chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving .
I wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it .
But what I want you to do is to try to understand it .
We 're on this curve , and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better .
And I 'm going to show you up to maybe 2007 .
But I want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now .
So we 're going to start that video .
Throughout human history people have played games .
As man 's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays .
David Perry : The thing again I want you to think about is , don 't look at these graphics and think of that 's the way it is .
Think about that 's where we are right now , and the curve that we 're on means that this is going to continue to get better .
This is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today .
You need to be really an incredible artist .
And once we get enough of those guys , we 're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we 've never been to before , or characters that we 've just never seen before .
So the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio .
But if you were to go to a game developers conference , what they 're all talking about is emotion , purpose , meaning , understanding and feeling .
You 'll hear about talks like , can a video game make you cry ?
And these are the kind of topics we really actually care about .
I came across a student who 's absolutely excellent at expressing himself , and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at TED had seen it .
So I 'd like to play this video .
So this is a student 's opinion on what his experience of games are .
I , like many of you , live somewhere between reality and video games .
Some part of me -- a true living , breathing person -- has become programmed , electronic and virtual .
The boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble .
I 'm a video game addict and this is my story .
In the year of my birth the Nintendo Entertainment System also went into development .
I played in the backyard , learned to read , and even ate some of my vegetables .
Most of my childhood was spent playing with Legos .
But as was the case for most of my generation , I spent a lot of time in front of the TV .
Mr. Rogers , Walt Disney , Nick Junior , and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me .
When my parents bought my sister and I our first Nintendo , whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me .
At some point something clicked .
With the combination of simple , interactive stories and the warmth of the TV set , my simple 16-bit Nintendo became more than just an escape .
It became an alternate existence , my virtual reality .
I 'm a video game addict , and it 's not because of a certain number of hours I have spent playing , or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level .
It is because I have had life-altering experiences in virtual space , and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not .
I 'm addicted , because even though I know I 'm losing my grip on reality , I still crave more .
From an early age I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen .
Today , after 20 years of watching TV geared to make me emotional , even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes .
I am just one of a new generation that is growing up .
A generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world .
Video games are nearing an evolutionary leap , a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres , or the news we watch on TV .
And while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited , what I do learn applies to my real life .
Play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard , fly a plane , drive a nine-second quarter mile , or kill a man .
I know I can .
Unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it , video games actually allow us to become part of the machine .
They allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive , downloaded , streaming , HD reality .
We are interacting with our entertainment .
I have come to expect this level of interaction .
Without it , the problems faced in the real world -- poverty , war , disease and genocide -- lack the levity they should .
Their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time TV .
But the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics , the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound .
It lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional .
I have fought in wars , feared for my own survival , watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story .
The people who create these games are smart .
They know what makes me scared , excited , panicked , proud or sad .
Then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create .
A well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience .
As one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away .
I know what I want and I do it .
No buttons to push , no triggers to pull , just me and the game .
My fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands .
I know violent video games make my mother worry .
What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence , but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game .
These are all troubles outside of myself .
I , however , have a problem very close to home .
Something has happened to my brain .
Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts , the things we know to do before we even think .
While some of these instincts may be innate , most are learned , and all of them are hardwired into our brains .
These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds .
Only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli .
As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life , only virtually .
Consider this -- my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it .
In all my driving games , I 've driven a total of 31,459 miles .
To some degree I 've learned how to drive from the game .
The sensory cues are very similar .
It 's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the TV than you have in real life .
When I am driving down a road at sunset all I can think is , this is almost as beautiful as my games are .
For my virtual worlds are perfect .
More beautiful and rich than the real world around us .
I 'm not sure what the implications of my experience are , but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me .
Today I believe Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply TVs .
Video games are fun , engaging , and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming .
But maybe brainwashing isn 't always bad .
Imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other , or helps us to understand the problems we 're all facing in the real world .
There is a potential to do good as well .
It is critical , as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in , that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them .
I 'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization .
But as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way I do .
What I have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics , sound , game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me .
I know that I am losing my grip .
Part of me is just waiting to let go .
I know though , that no matter how amazing video games may become , or how flat the real world may seem to us , that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug .
DP : Wow .
I found that video very , very thought provoking , and that 's why I wanted to bring it here for you guys to see .
And what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio .
But as you heard , Michael talked about all these other elements as well .
Video games give an awful lot of other things too , and that 's why people get so addicted .
The most important one being fun .
The name of this track is " The Magic To Come . "
Who is that going to come from ?
Is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would ?
I don 't think so .
I think it 's going to come from the children who are growing up now that aren 't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past .
They 're going to do it their way , using the tools that we 've created .
The same with students or highly creative people , writers and people like that .
As far as colleges go , there 's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses .
That means there 's literally thousands of new ideas .
Some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great .
There 's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea .
You 're off , you 're off . That 's it .
He 's out of time .
DP : I 've just got a little tiny bit more if you 'll indulge me .
Go ahead . I 'm going to stay right here though .
DP : This is just a cool shot , because this is students coming to school after class .
The school is closed ; they 're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas .
I 'm sitting at the front of the class , and they 're actually pitching their ideas .
So it 's hard to get students to come back to class , but it is possible .
This is my daughter , her name 's Emma , she 's 17 months old .
And I 've been asking myself , what is Emma going to experience in the video game world ?
And as I 've shown here , we have the audience .
She 's never going to know a world where you can 't press a button and have millions of people ready to play .
You know , we have the technology .
She 's never going to know a world where the graphics just aren 't stunning and really immersive .
And as the student video showed , we can impact and move .
She 's never going to know a world where video games aren 't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry .
I just hope she likes video games .
So , my closing thought .
Games on the surface seem simple entertainment , but for those that like to look a little deeper , the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big .
Where better to challenge those minds than here at TED ?
Thank you .
David Perry . That was awesome .
Hans Rosling : The magic washing machine
What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution ? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine . With newly designed graphics from Gapminder , Rosling shows us the magic that pops up when economic growth and electricity turn a boring wash day into an intellectual day of reading .
I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life .
That was a great day for my mother .
My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine , and the first day it was going to be used , even Grandma was invited to see the machine .
And Grandma was even more excited .
Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood , and she had hand washed laundry for seven children .
And now she was going to watch electricity do that work .
My mother carefully opened the door , and she loaded the laundry into the machine , like this .
And then , when she closed the door , Grandma said , " No , no , no , no .
Let me , let me push the button . "
And Grandma pushed the button , and she said , " Oh , fantastic !
I want to see this ! Give me a chair !
Give me a chair ! I want to see it , " and she sat down in front of the machine , and she watched the entire washing program .
She was mesmerized .
To my grandmother , the washing machine was a miracle .
Today , in Sweden and other rich countries , people are using so many different machines .
Look , the homes are full of machines .
I can 't even name them all .
And they also , when they want to travel , they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations .
And yet , in the world , there are so many people who still heat the water on fire , and they cook their food on fire .
Sometimes they don 't even have enough food , and they live below the poverty line .
There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day .
And the richest people over there -- there 's one billion people -- and they live above what I call the " air line , " because they spend more than $ 80 a day on their consumption .
But this is just one , two , three billion people , and obviously there are seven billion people in the world , so there must be one , two , three , four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line .
They have electricity , but the question is , how many have washing machines ?
I 've done the scrutiny of market data , and I 've found that , indeed , the washing machine has penetrated below the air line , and today there 's an additional one billion people out there who live above the " wash line . "
And they consume more than $ 40 per day .
So two billion have access to washing machines .
And the remaining five billion , how do they wash ?
Or , to be more precise , how do most of the women in the world wash ?
Because it remains hard work for women to wash .
They wash like this : by hand .
It 's a hard , time-consuming labor , which they have to do for hours every week .
And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home , or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off .
And they want the washing machine .
They don 't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity .
And there 's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma .
Look here , two generations ago in Sweden -- picking water from the stream , heating with firewood and washing like that .
They want the washing machine in exactly the same way .
But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students , they tell me , " No , everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines . "
How can we tell this woman that she ain 't going to have a washing machine ?
And then I ask my students , I 've asked them -- over the last two years I 've asked , " How many of you doesn 't use a car ? "
And some of them proudly raise their hand and say , " I don 't use a car . "
And then I put the really tough question : " How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bed sheets ? "
And no one raised their hand .
Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines .
So how come [ this is ] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it ? What is special with this ?
I had to do an analysis about the energy used in the world .
Here we are .
Look here , you see the seven billion people up there : the air people , the wash people , the bulb people and the fire people .
One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel -- oil , coal or gas .
That 's what most of electricity and the energy in the world is .
And it 's 12 units used in the entire world , and the richest one billion , they use six of them .
Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world 's population .
And these ones who have washing machines , but not a house full of other machines , they use two .
This group uses three , one each .
And they also have electricity .
And over there they don 't even use one each .
That makes 12 of them .
But the main concern for the environmentally-interested students -- and they are right -- is about the future .
What are the trends ? If we just prolong the trends , without any real advanced analysis , to 2050 , there are two things that can increase the energy use .
First , population growth .
Second , economic growth .
Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman .
And [ with ] that you will get two extra , but that won 't change the energy use very much .
What will happen is economic growth .
The best of here in the emerging economies -- I call them the New East -- they will jump the air line .
" Wopp ! " they will say .
And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already .
And these people , they want the washing machine .
I told you . They 'll go there .
And they will double their energy use .
And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light .
And they 'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth .
But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units .
And these 22 units -- still the richest people use most of it .
So what needs to be done ?
Because the risk , the high probability of climate change is real .
It 's real .
Of course they must be more energy-efficient .
They must change behavior in some way .
They must also start to produce green energy , much more green energy .
But until they have the same energy consumption per person , they shouldn 't give advice to others -- what to do and what not to do .
Here we can get more green energy all over .
This is what we hope may happen .
It 's a real challenge in the future .
But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio , she wants a washing machine .
She 's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone -- so happy that she even voted for her .
And she became Dilma Rousseff , the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world -- moving from minister of energy to president .
If you have democracy , people will vote for washing machines .
They love them .
And what 's the magic with them ?
My mother explained the magic with this machine the very , very first day .
She said , " Now Hans , we have loaded the laundry .
The machine will make the work .
And now we can go to the library . "
Because this is the magic : you load the laundry , and what do you get out of the machine ?
You get books out of the machines , children 's books .
And mother got time to read for me .
She loved this . I got the " ABC 's " -- this is where I started my career as a professor , when my mother had time to read for me .
And she also got books for herself .
She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language .
And she read so many novels , so many different novels here .
And we really , we really loved this machine .
And what we said , my mother and me , " Thank you industrialization .
Thank you steel mill .
Thank you power station .
And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books . "
Thank you very much .
Jon Ronson : Strange answers to the psychopath test
Is there a definitive line that divides crazy from sane ? With a hair-raising delivery , Jon Ronson , author of & lt ; em & gt ; The Psychopath Test & lt ; / em & gt ; , illuminates the gray areas between the two . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
This story starts : I was at a friend 's house , and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual , which is the manual of mental disorders .
It lists every known mental disorder .
And it used to be , back in the ' 50s , a very slim pamphlet .
And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger , and now it 's 886 pages long .
And it lists currently 374 mental disorders .
So I was leafing through it , wondering if I had any mental disorders , and it turns out I 've got 12 .
I 've got generalized anxiety disorder , which is a given .
I 've got nightmare disorder , which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure -- and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going , " You 're a failure . "
I 've got parent-child relational problems , which I blame my parents for .
I 'm kidding . I 'm not kidding .
I 'm kidding .
And I 've got malingering .
And I think it 's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder , because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious .
Anyway I was looking through this book , wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was , or maybe it 's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you 're not a trained professional , or maybe the psychiatry profession has a strange desire to label what 's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder .
I didn 't know which of these things was true , but I thought it was kind of interesting .
And I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view .
Which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists .
It was a man called Brian who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies .
They 're called the CCHR .
And I said to him , " Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can 't be trusted ? "
And he said , " Yes , we can prove it to you . "
And I said , " How ? "
And he said , " We 're going to introduce you to Tony . "
And I said , " Who 's Tony ? "
And he said , " Tony 's in Broadmoor . "
Now Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital .
It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane .
It 's where they send the serial killers and the people who can 't help themselves .
And I said to Brian , " What did Tony do ? "
And he said , " Hardly anything .
He beat someone up or something , and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence .
But he faked it too well , and now he 's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he 's sane .
Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony ? "
So I said , " Yes , please . "
So I got the train to Broadmoor .
I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park , which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious -- they yawn uncontrollably .
And we got to Broadmoor .
And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center , which is where you get to meet the patients .
It looks like a giant Hampton Inn .
It 's all peach and pine and calming colors .
And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons .
And the patients started drifting in .
And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants and quite docile looking .
And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me , " They 're medicated , " which to the Scientologists is like the worst evil in the world , but I 'm thinking it 's probably a good idea .
And then Brian said , " Here 's Tony . "
And a man was walking in .
And he wasn 't overweight , he was in very good physical shape .
And he wasn 't wearing sweatpants , he was wearing a pinstriped suit .
And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice .
He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane .
And he sat down .
And I said , " So is it true that you faked your way in here ? "
And he said , " Yep . Yep . Absolutely . I beat someone up when I was 17 .
And I was in prison awaiting trial , and my cellmate said to me , ' You know what you have to do ?
Fake madness .
Tell them you 're mad . You 'll get sent to some cushy hospital .
Nurses will bring you pizzas .
You 'll have your own Playstation . ' " So I said , " Well how did you do it ? "
He said , " I asked to see the prison psychiatrist .
And I 'd just seen a film called ' Crash ' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls .
So I said to the psychiatrist , ' I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls . ' " And I said , " What else ? "
He said , " Oh , yeah . I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died because it would make me feel more normal . "
And I said , " Where 'd you get that from ? "
He said , " Oh , from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library . "
Anyway he faked madness too well , he said .
And they didn 't send him to some cushy hospital .
They sent him to Broadmoor .
And the minute he got there , he said he took one look at the place , asked to see the psychiatrist , said , " There 's been a terrible misunderstanding .
I 'm not mentally ill . "
I said , " How long have you been here for ? "
He said , " Well , if I 'd just done my time in prison for the original crime , I 'd have got five years .
I 've been in Broadmoor for 12 years . "
Tony said that it 's a lot harder to convince people you 're sane than it is to convince them you 're crazy .
He said , " I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what 's on TV .
I subscribe to New Scientist , and recently it had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives .
So I said to a nurse , ' Did you know that the U.S. army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives ? ' When I read my medical notes , I saw they 'd written : ' Believes bees can sniff out explosives . ' " He said , " You know , they 're always looking out for non-verbal clues to my mental state .
But how do you sit in a sane way ?
How do you cross your legs in a sane way ?
It 's just impossible . "
And when Tony said that to me , I thought to myself , " Am I sitting like a journalist ?
Am I crossing my legs like a journalist ? "
He said , " You know , I 've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me and I 've got the ' Tiptoe Through the Tulips ' rapist on the other side of me .
So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening .
And they take that as a sign of madness .
They say it proves that I 'm aloof and grandiose . "
So only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness .
Anyway he seemed completely normal to me -- but what did I know ?
And when I got home I emailed his clinician , Anthony Maden .
I said , " What 's the story ? "
And he said , " Yep . We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence because his hallucinations that had seemed quite cliché to begin with just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor .
However , we have assessed him .
And we have determined that what he is is a psychopath . "
And in fact , faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath .
It 's on the checklist : cunning and manipulative .
So faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong .
And I spoke to other experts , and they said the pinstriped suit -- classic psychopath .
Speaks to items one and two on the checklist -- glibness , superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth .
And I said , " Well , what , he didn 't want to hang out with the other patients ? "
Classic psychopath -- it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy .
So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence , according to his clinician , that he was mad in this new way .
He was a psychopath .
And his clinician said to me , " If you want to know more about psychopaths , you can go on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare who invented the psychopath checklist . "
So I did .
I went on a psychopath spotting course , and I am now a certified -- and I have to say , extremely adept -- psychopath spotter .
So here 's the statistics : One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath .
So there 's 1,500 people in his room .
Fifteen of you are psychopaths .
Although that figure rises to four percent of CEO 's and business leaders .
So I think there 's a very good chance there 's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room .
It could be carnage by the end of the night .
Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior -- the lack of empathy , the glibness , cunning , manipulative .
In fact , capitalism , perhaps at its most remorseless , is a physical manifestation of psychopathy .
It 's like a form of psychopathy that 's come down to affect us all .
And Hare said to me , " You know what ? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness .
Who cares ? That 's not a big story .
The big story , " he said , " is corporate psychopathy .
You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths . "
So I gave it a try . I wrote to the Enron people .
I said , " Could I come and interview you in prison to find out it you 're psychopaths ? "
And they didn 't reply .
So I changed tack .
I emailed " Chainsaw Al " Dunlap , the asset stripper from the 1990s .
He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce , just turn American towns into ghost towns .
And I emailed him and I said , " I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you special and interested in the predatory spirit and fearless .
Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly ? "
And he said , " Come on over . "
So I went to Al Dunlap 's grand Florida mansion that was filled with sculptures of predatory animals .
There were lions and tigers .
He was taking me through the garden .
There were falcons and eagles .
He was saying to me , " Over there you 've got sharks . "
He was saying this in a less effeminate way .
" You 've got more sharks and you 've got tigers . "
It was like Narnia .
And then we went into his kitchen .
Now Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies .
He 'd close down 30 percent of the workforce .
And he 'd quite often fire people with a joke .
For instance , one famous story about him , somebody came up to him and said , " I 've just bought myself a new car . "
And he said , " You may have a new car , but I 'll tell you what you don 't have , a job . "
So in his kitchen -- he was standing there with his wife , Judy , and his bodyguard Sean -- and I said , " You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special ? "
He said , " Yeah , it 's an amazing theory .
It 's like Star Trek . You 're going where no man has gone before . "
And I said , " Well , some psychologists might say that this makes you ... " And he said , " What ? "
And I said , " A psychopath . "
And I said , " I 've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket .
Can I go through them with you ? "
And he looked intrigued despite himself , and he said , " Okay , go on . "
And I said , " Okay . Grandiose sense of self-worth . "
Which , I have to say , would have been hard for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself .
He said , " Well , you 've got to believe in you ! "
And I said , " Manipulative . "
He said , " That 's leadership . "
And I said , " Shallow affect : an inability to experience a range of emotions . "
He said , " Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions ? "
So he was going down the psychopathic checklist , basically turning it into " Who Moved My Cheese ? "
But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap .
Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal -- like he said no to juvenile delinquency .
He said he got accepted into West Point , and they don 't let delinquents in West Point .
He said no to many short-term marital relationships .
He 's only ever been married twice .
Admittedly , his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like , but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument and his second marriage has lasted 41 years .
So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic , I thought to myself , well I 'm not going to put that in my book .
And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had turned me a little bit psychopathic .
Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked psychopath .
I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges .
And I realized , oh my God . This is what I 've been doing for 20 years .
It 's what all journalists do .
We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands , and we wait for the gems .
And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee 's personality .
And we stitch them together like medieval monks .
And we leave the normal stuff on the floor .
And this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely .
Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums , which scores them high on their bipolar checklist .
When I got back to London , Tony phoned me .
He said , " Why haven 't you been returning my calls ? "
I said , " Well they say that you 're a psychopath . "
And he said , " I 'm not a psychopath . "
He said , " You know what , one of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse , but another item on the checklist is cunning , manipulative .
So when you say you feel remorse for your crime , they say , ' Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn 't . ' It 's like witchcraft . They turn everything upside-down . "
He said , " I 've got a tribunal coming up .
Will you come to it ? "
So I said okay .
So I went to his tribunal .
And after 14 years in Broadmoor , they let him go .
They decided that he shouldn 't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism .
So they let him go .
And outside in the corridor he said to me , " You know what , Jon ?
Everyone 's a bit psychopathic . "
He said , " You are . I am . Well obviously I am . "
I said , " What are you going to do now ? "
He said , " I 'm going to go to Belgium because there 's a woman there that I fancy .
But she 's married , so I 'm going to have to get her split up from her husband . "
Anyway , that was two years ago , and that 's where my book ended .
And for the last 20 months everything was fine .
Nothing bad happened .
He was living with a girl outside London .
He was , according to Brian the Scientologist , making up for lost time -- which I know sounds ominous , but isn 't necessarily ominous .
Unfortunately , after 20 months , he did go back to jail for a month .
He got into a fracas in a bar , he called it -- ended up going to jail for a month , which I know is bad , but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was , it wasn 't too bad .
And then he phoned me .
And you know what , I think it 's right that Tony is out .
Because you shouldn 't define people by their maddest edges .
And what Tony is , is he 's a semi-psychopath .
He 's a gray area in a world that doesn 't like gray areas .
But the gray areas are where you find the complexity , it 's where you find the humanity and it 's where you find the truth .
And Tony said to me , " Jon , could I buy you a drink in a bar ?
I just want to thank you for everything you 've done for me . "
And I didn 't go . What would you have done ?
Thank you .
Jessica Green : We 're covered in germs . Let 's design for that .
Our bodies and homes are covered in microbes -- some good for us , some bad for us . As we learn more about the germs and microbes who share our living spaces , TED Fellow Jessica Green asks : Can we design buildings that encourage happy , healthy microbial environments ?
Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms : bacteria , viruses and fungi .
Our desks , our computers , our pencils , our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes .
As we design these things , we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds , and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems .
Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes , and these creatures define who we are .
The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods .
The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system .
The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath , or not , and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch .
So , for example , when you touch a pencil , microbial exchange happens .
If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings , this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways .
I get asked all of the time from people , " Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems ? "
And I believe the answer is yes .
I think we 're doing it right now , but we 're doing it unconsciously .
I 'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how , through both conscious and unconscious design , we 're impacting these invisible worlds .
This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon , and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building .
We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building , and to do this , we sampled dust .
From the dust , we pulled out bacterial cells , broke them open , and compared their gene sequences .
This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project .
This is a picture of Tim , who , right when I snapped this picture , reminded me , he said , " Jessica , the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest , and things have changed dramatically for me . "
So I 'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices , and we 're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I 've been working on in partnership with Autodesk .
The way that you look at this data is , first , look around the outside of the circle .
You 'll see broad bacterial groups , and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe , it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group .
So at 12 o 'clock , you 'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria , and at one o 'clock you 'll see that bacilli are relatively rare .
Let 's take a look at what 's going on in different space types in this building .
If you look inside the restrooms , they all have really similar ecosystems , and if you were to look inside the classrooms , those also have similar ecosystems .
But if you look across these space types , you can see that they 're fundamentally different from one another .
I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest .
I told Tim , " If you could just see the microbes , it 's kind of like being in Costa Rica . Kind of . "
And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland .
This perspective is a really powerful one for designers , because you can bring on principles of ecology , and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal , the way organisms move around .
We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air .
So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system .
Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable , that the air flow and temperature is just right .
They do this using principles of physics and chemistry , but they could also be using biology .
If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building , you 'll see that they 're all very similar to one another .
And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit , you 'll see that they 're fundamentally different .
The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago , and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers , and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to .
Another facet of how microbes get around is by people , and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people , or the sharing of ideas , like in labs and in offices .
Given that microbes travel around with people , you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes .
And that is exactly what we found .
If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another , they have very similar ecosystems , but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away , the ecosystem is fundamentally different .
And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns , it makes me think that it 's possible to tackle really challenging problems , like hospital-acquired infections .
I believe this has got to be , in part , a building ecology problem .
All right , I 'm going to tell you one more story about this building .
I am collaborating with Charlie Brown .
He 's an architect , and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change .
He 's dedicated his life to sustainable design .
When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building , he got really excited , because it added a new dimension to what he did .
He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health .
He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated .
So what I 'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building .
What you 're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air , and how they vary over time .
Next I 'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms .
We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation .
A lot of buildings are operated this way , probably where you work , and companies do this to save money on their energy bill .
What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday , when we opened the vents up again .
When you walked into those rooms , they smelled really bad , and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before .
Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers .
In these rooms , the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well , and when Charlie saw this , he got really excited .
He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building 's resident microbial landscape .
The examples that I just gave you are about architecture , but they 're relevant to the design of anything .
Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone .
There 's a new microbe , I just discovered it .
It 's called BLIS , and it 's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath .
Wouldn 't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones ?
A conscious approach to design , I 'm calling it bioinformed design , and I think it 's possible .
Thank you .
Philippe Starck : Design and destiny
Designer Philippe Starck -- with no pretty slides to show -- spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question " Why design ? " Listen carefully for one perfect mantra for all of us , genius or not .
You will understand nothing with my type of English .
It 's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people .
I must tell you I am like that , not very comfortable , because usually , in life , I think my job is absolutely useless .
I mean , I feel useless .
Now after Carolyn , and all the other guys , I feel like shit .
And definitively , I don 't know why I am here , but -- you know the nightmare you can have , like you are an impostor , you arrive at the opera , and they push you , " You must sing ! "
I don 't know .
So , so , because I have nothing to show , nothing to say , we shall try to speak about something else .
We can start , if you want , by understanding -- it 's just to start , it 's not interesting , but -- how I work .
When somebody comes to me and ask for what I am known , I mean , yes , lemon squeezer , toilet brush , toothpick , beautiful toilet seats , and why not -- a toothbrush ?
I don 't try to design the toothbrush .
I don 't try to say , " Oh , that will be a beautiful object , " or something like that .
That doesn 't interest me .
Because there is different types of design .
The one , we can call it the cynical design , that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the ' 50s , who said , what is ugly is a bad sale , la laideur se vend mal , which is terrible .
It means the design must be just the weapon for marketing , for producer to make product more sexy , like that , they sell more : it 's shit , it 's obsolete , it 's ridiculous .
I call that the cynical design .
After , there is the narcissistic design : it 's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers .
After , there is people like me , who try to deserve to exist , and who are so ashamed to make this useless job , who try to do it in another way , and they try , I try , to not make the object for the object but for the result , for the profit for the human being , the person who will use it .
If we take the toothbrush -- I don 't think about the toothbrush .
I think , " What will be the effect of the brush in the mouth ? "
And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth , I must imagine : Who owns this mouth ?
What is the life of the owner of this mouth ? In what society [ does ] this guy live ?
What civilization creates this society ?
What animal species creates this civilization ?
When I arrive -- and I take one minute , I am not so intelligent -- when I arrive at the level of animal species , that becomes real interesting .
Me , I have strictly no power to change anything .
But when I come back , I can understand why I shall not do it , because today to not do it , it 's more positive than do it , or how I shall do it .
But to come back , where I am at the animal species , there is things to see .
There is things to see , there is the big challenge .
The big challenge in front of us .
Because there is not a human production which exists outside of what I call " the big image . "
The big image is our story , our poetry , our romanticism .
Our poetry is our mutation , our life .
We must remember , and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old , that life appears four billion years ago , around -- four billion point two ?
Voice offstage : Four point five .
Yes , point five , OK , OK , OK ! I 'm a designer , that 's all , of Christmas gifts .
And before , there was this soup , called " soupe primordiale , " this first soup -- bloop bloop bloop -- sort of dirty mud , no life , nothing .
So then -- pshoo-shoo -- lightning -- pshoo -- arrive -- pshoo-shoo -- makes life -- bloop bloop -- and that dies .
Some million years after -- pshoo-shoo , bloop-bloop -- ah , wake up !
At the end , finally , that succeeds , and life appears .
We was so , so stupid . The most stupid bacteria .
Even , I think , we copy our way to reproduce , you know what I mean , and something of -- oh no , forget it .
After , we become a fish ; after , we become a frog ; after , we become a monkey ; after , we become what we are today : a super-monkey , and the fun is , the super-monkey we are today , is at half of the story .
Can you imagine ? From that stupid bacteria to us , with a microphone , with a computer , with an iPod : four billion years .
And we know , and especially Carolyn knows , that when the sun will implode , the earth will burn , explode , I don 't know what , and this is scheduled for four , four billion years ?
Yes , she said , something like that . OK , that means we are at half of the story .
Fantastic ! It 's a beauty !
Can you imagine ? It 's very symbolic .
Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today .
And today , we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years .
And this territory is fantastic .
That is our poetry . That is our beautiful story .
It 's our romanticism . Mu-ta-tion . We are mutants .
And if we don 't deeply understand , if we don 't integrate that we are mutants , we completely miss the story .
Because every generation thinks we are the final one .
We have a way to look at Earth like that , you know , " I am the man . The final man .
You know , we mutate during four billion years before , but now , because it 's me , we stop . Fin .
For the end , for the eternity , it is one with a red jacket . "
Something like that . I am not sure of that .
Because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that .
There is so many things to do ; it 's so fresh .
And here is something : nobody is obliged to be a genius , but everybody is obliged to participate .
And to participate , for a mutant , there is a minimum of exercise , a minimum of sport .
We can say that .
The first , if you want -- there is so many -- but one which is very easy to do , is the duty of vision .
I can explain you . I shall try .
If you walk like that , it 's OK , it 's OK , you can walk , but perhaps , because you walk with the eyes like that , you will not see , oh , there is a hole .
And you will fall , and you will die . Dangerous .
That 's why , perhaps , you will try to have this angle of vision .
OK , I can see , if I found something , up , up , and they continue , up up up .
I raise the angle of vision , but it 's still very -- selfish , selfish , egoiste -- yes , selfish .
You , you survive . It 's OK .
If you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go , " I see you , oh my God you are here , how are you , I can help you , I can design for you a new toothbrush , new toilet brush , " something like that .
I live in society ; I live in community .
It 's OK . You start to be in the territory of intelligence , we can say .
From this level , the more you can raise this angle of view , the more you will be important for the society .
The more you will rise , the more you will be important for the civilization .
The more you will rise , to see far and high , like that , the more you will be important for the story of our mutation .
That means intelligent people are in this angle . That is intelligence .
From this to here , that , it 's genius .
Ptolemy , Eratosthenes , Einstein , things like that .
Nobody 's obliged to be a genius .
It 's better , but nobody .
Take care , in this training , to be a good mutant .
There is some danger , there is some trap . One trap : the vertical .
Because at the vertical of us , if you look like that , " Ah ! my God , there is God . Ah ! God ! "
God is a trap . God is the answer when we don 't know the answer .
That means , when your brain is not enough big , when you don 't understand , you go , " Ah , it 's God , it 's God . " That 's ridiculous .
That 's why -- jump , like that ? No , don 't jump .
Come back . Because , after , there is another trap .
If you look like that , you look to the past , or you look inside if you are very flexible , inside yourself .
It 's called schizophrenia , and you are dead also .
That 's why every morning , now , because you are a good mutant , you will raise your angle of view .
Out , more of the horizontal . You are an intelligence .
Never forget -- like that , like that .
It 's very , very , very important .
What , what else we can say about that ? Why do that ?
It 's because we -- if we look from far , we see our line of evolution .
This line of evolution is clearly positive .
From far , this line looks very smooth , like that .
But if you take a lens , like that , this line is ack , ack , ack , ack , ack . Like that .
It 's made of light and shadow .
We can say light is civilization , shadow is barbaria .
And it 's very important to know where we are .
Because some cycle , there is a spot in the cycle , and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle .
That means , we can imagine -- I don 't say it was fantastic , but in the ' 80s , there was not too much war , like that , it was -- we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized .
In this case , people like me are acceptable .
We can say , " It 's luxurious time . "
We have time to think , we have time to I don 't know what , speak about art and things like that .
It 's OK . We are in the light .
But sometimes , like today , we fall , we fall so fast , so fast to shadow , we fall so fast to barbaria .
With many , many , many , many face of barbaria .
Because it 's not , the barbaria we have today , it 's perhaps not the barbaria we think .
There is different type of barbaria .
That 's why we must adapt .
That means , when barbaria is back , forget the beautiful chairs , forget the beautiful hotel , forget design , even -- I 'm sorry to say -- forget art .
Forget all that . There is priority ; there is urgency .
You must go back to politics , you must go back to radicalization , I 'm sorry if that 's not very English .
You must go back to fight , to battle .
That 's why today I 'm so ashamed to make this job .
That 's why I am here , to try to do it the best possible .
But I know that even I do it the best possible -- that 's why I 'm the best -- it 's nothing .
Because it 's not the right time .
That 's why I say that . I say that , because , I repeat , nothing exist if it 's not in the good reason , the reason of our beautiful dream , of this civilization .
And because we must all work to finish this story .
Because the scenario of this civilization -- about love , progress , and things like that -- it 's OK , but there is so many different , other scenarios of other civilizations .
This scenario , of this civilization , was about becoming powerful , intelligent , like this idea we have invented , this concept of God .
We are God now . We are . It 's almost done .
We have just to finish the story .
That is very , very important .
And when you don 't understand really what 's happened , you cannot go and fight and work and build and things like that .
You go to the future back , back , back , back , like that .
And you can fall , and it 's very dangerous .
No , you must really understand that .
Because we have almost finished , I 'll repeat this story .
And the beauty of this , in perhaps 50 years , 60 years , we can finish completely this civilization , and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story , a new poetry , a new romanticism .
With billions of people who have been born , worked , lived and died before us , these people who have worked so much , we have now bring beautiful things , beautiful gifts , we know so many things .
We can say to our children , OK , done , that was our story . That passed .
Now you have a duty : invent a new story . Invent a new poetry .
The only rule is , we have not to have any idea about the next story .
We give you white pages . Invent .
We give you the best tools , the best tools , and now , do it .
That 's why I continue to work , even if it 's for toilet brush .
Cesar Kuriyama : One second every day
There are so many tiny , beautiful , funny , tragic moments in your life -- how are you going to remember them all ? Director Cesar Kuriyama shoots one second of video every day as part of an ongoing project to collect all the special bits of his life .
So , I 'm an artist .
I live in New York , and I 've been working in advertising for -- ever since I left school , so about seven , eight years now , and it was draining .
I worked a lot of late nights . I worked a lot of weekends , and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own .
And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED , and it was called " The power of time off , " and he spoke about how every seven years , he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects , and I was instantly inspired , and I just said , " I have to do that . I have to take a year off .
I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas . "
So the first of those projects ended up being something I called " One Second Every Day . "
Basically I 'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life , chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until , you know , I can 't record them anymore .
The purpose of this project is , one : I hate not remembering things that I 've done in the past .
There 's all these things that I 've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up , and sometimes I think , " Oh yeah , that 's something that I did . "
And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn 't doing anything interesting , I would probably forget to record the video .
So the day -- the first time that I forgot , it really hurt me , because it 's something that I really wanted to -- from the moment that I turned 30 , I wanted to keep this project going until forever , and having missed that one second , I realized , it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again .
So if I live to see 80 years of age , I 'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life .
When I turn 40 , I 'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s .
This has really invigorated me day-to-day , when I wake up , to try and do something interesting with my day .
Now , one of the things that I have issues with is that , as the days and weeks and months go by , time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and , you know , I hated that , and visualization is the way to trigger memory .
You know , this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I 've done .
Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day .
It 's difficult , sometimes , to pick that one second .
On a good day , I 'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose , but I 'll just have to narrow it down to one , but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway .
It 's also kind of a protest , a personal protest , against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert , and they 're disturbing you .
They 're not even enjoying the show .
They 're watching the concert through their cell phone .
I hate that . I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit , back in the day , and I 've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person , is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of , " Yeah , that concert was amazing . I really loved that concert . "
And it just takes a quick , quick second .
I was on a three-month road trip this summer .
It was something that I 've been dreaming about doing my whole life , just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day , and it was kind of outstanding .
I actually ran out , I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off , so I had to , I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project .
One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family , and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law , her intestine suddenly strangled one day , and we took her to the emergency room , and she was , she was in really bad shape .
We almost lost her a couple of times , and I was there with my brother every day .
It helped me realize something else during this project , is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult .
It 's not -- we tend to take our cameras out when we 're doing awesome things .
Or we 're , " Oh , yeah , this party , let me take a picture . "
But we rarely do that when we 're having a bad day , and something horrible is happening .
And I found that it 's actually been very , very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment .
It really helps you appreciate the good times .
It 's not always a good day , so when you have a bad one , I think it 's important to remember it , just as much as it is important to remember the [ good ] days .
Now one of the things that I do is I don 't use any filters , I don 't use anything to -- I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes .
I started a rule of first person perspective .
Early on , I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it , but I realized that wasn 't the way to go .
The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it .
Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are , wouldn 't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this ?
I turned 31 last week , which is there .
I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this .
I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it .
I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day .
Personally , I 'm tired of forgetting , and this is a really easy thing to do .
I mean , we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now -- most people in this room , I bet -- and it 's something that 's -- I never want to forget another day that I 've ever lived , and this is my way of doing that , and it 'd be really interesting also to see , if you could just type in on a website , " June 18 , 2018 , " and you would just see a stream of people 's lives on that particular day from all over the world .
And I don 't know , I think this project has a lot of possibilities , and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day , so you can never forget that that day , you lived .
Thank you .

Sean Carroll : Distant time and the hint of a multiverse
Cosmologist Sean Carroll attacks -- in an entertaining and thought-provoking tour through the nature of time and the universe -- a deceptively simple question : Why does time exist at all ? The potential answers point to a surprising view of the nature of the universe , and our place in it .
The universe is really big .
We live in a galaxy , the Milky Way Galaxy .
There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy .
And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky , and you just keep the shutter open , as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope , it will see something like this .
Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way -- a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs .
There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe .
100 billion is the only number you need to know .
The age of the universe , between now and the Big Bang , is a hundred billion in dog years .
Which tells you something about our place in the universe .
One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it .
It 's extremely beautiful .
I 've often wondered , what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn 't have any .
But we would also like to understand it .
As a cosmologist , I want to ask , why is the universe like this ?
One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time .
If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity , it would be moving away from you .
And if you look at a galaxy even farther away , it would be moving away faster .
So we say the universe is expanding .
What that means , of course , is that , in the past , things were closer together .
In the past , the universe was more dense , and it was also hotter .
If you squeeze things together , the temperature goes up .
That kind of makes sense to us .
is that the universe , at early times , near the Big Bang , was also very , very smooth .
You might think that that 's not a surprise .
The air in this room is very smooth .
You might say , " Well , maybe things just smoothed themselves out . "
But the conditions near the Big Bang are very , very different than the conditions of the air in this room .
In particular , things were a lot denser .
The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang .
What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies , a hundred billion stars each .
At early times , those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big -- literally -- at early times .
And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections , without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else .
Because if there had been , they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole .
Keeping the universe very , very smooth at early times is not easy ; it 's a delicate arrangement .
It 's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly .
There is something that made it that way .
We would like to know what .
So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann , an Austrian physicist in the 19th century .
And Boltzmann 's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy .
You 've heard of entropy .
It 's the randomness , the disorder , the chaoticness of some systems .
Boltzmann gave us a formula -- engraved on his tombstone now -- that really quantifies what entropy is .
And it 's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don 't notice , so that macroscopically it looks the same .
If you have the air in this room , you don 't notice each individual atom .
A low entropy configuration is one in which there 's only a few arrangements that look that way .
A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way .
This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that says that entropy increases in the universe , or in some isolated bit of the universe .
The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy .
That 's a wonderful insight , but it leaves something out .
This insight that entropy increases , by the way , is what 's behind what we call the arrow of time , the difference between the past and the future .
Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing -- the fact that you can remember the past , but not the future .
The fact that you are born , and then you live , and then you die , always in that order , that 's because entropy is increasing .
Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy , it 's very natural for it to increase because there 's more ways to be high entropy .
What he didn 't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place .
The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very , very smooth .
We 'd like to understand that .
That 's our job as cosmologists .
Unfortunately , it 's actually not a problem that we 've been giving enough attention to .
It 's not one of the first things people would say , if you asked a modern cosmologist , " What are the problems we 're trying to address ? "
One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman .
50 years ago , he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures .
He gave the popular lectures that became " The Character of Physical Law . "
He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became " The Feynman Lectures on Physics . "
He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became " The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation . "
In every one of these books , every one of these sets of lectures , he emphasized this puzzle : Why did the early universe have such a small entropy ?
So he says -- I 'm not going to do the accent -- he says , " For some reason , the universe , at one time , had a very low entropy for its energy content , and since then the entropy has increased .
The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding . "
So that 's our job .
We want to know -- this is 50 years ago , " Surely , " you 're thinking , " we 've figured it out by now . "
It 's not true that we 've figured it out by now .
The reason the problem has gotten worse , rather than better , is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn 't know before .
We learned that it 's accelerating .
The universe is not only expanding .
If you look at the galaxy , it 's moving away .
If you come back a billion years later and look at it again , it will be moving away faster .
Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating .
Unlike the low entropy of the early universe , even though we don 't know the answer for this , we at least have a good theory that can explain it , if that theory is right , and that 's the theory of dark energy .
It 's just the idea that empty space itself has energy .
In every little cubic centimeter of space , whether or not there 's stuff , whether or not there 's particles , matter , radiation or whatever , there 's still energy , even in the space itself .
And this energy , according to Einstein , exerts a push on the universe .
It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other .
Because dark energy , unlike matter or radiation , does not dilute away as the universe expands .
The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same , even as the universe gets bigger and bigger .
This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future .
For one thing , the universe will expand forever .
Back when I was your age , we didn 't know what the universe was going to do .
Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future .
Einstein was fond of this idea .
But if there 's dark energy , and the dark energy does not go away , the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever .
14 billion years in the past , 100 billion dog years , but an infinite number of years into the future .
Meanwhile , for all intents and purposes , space looks finite to us .
Space may be finite or infinite , but because the universe is accelerating , there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see .
There 's a finite region of space that we have access to , surrounded by a horizon .
So even though time goes on forever , space is limited to us .
Finally , empty space has a temperature .
In the 1970s , Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole , even though you think it 's black , it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics .
The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation , and the black hole radiates .
A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space , then the whole universe radiates .
The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations .
And so even though the universe will last forever , and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away , there will always be some radiation , some thermal fluctuations , even in empty space .
So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever .
Well what is the implication of that ?
That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century .
He said , well , entropy increases because there are many , many more ways for the universe to be high entropy , rather than low entropy .
But that 's a probabilistic statement .
It will probably increase , and the probability is enormously huge .
It 's not something you have to worry about -- the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us .
It 's very , very unlikely .
Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever , that would happen .
Everything that is allowed , every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room , would eventually be obtained .
So Boltzmann says , look , you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium .
He didn 't know about the Big Bang . He didn 't know about the expansion of the universe .
He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton -- they were absolute ; they just stuck there forever .
So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere -- the everything molecules .
But if you 're Boltzmann , you know that if you wait long enough , the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations .
And then , of course , in the natural course of things , they will expand back .
So it 's not that entropy must always increase -- you can get fluctuations into lower entropy , more organized situations .
Well if that 's true , Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas -- the multiverse and the anthropic principle .
He says , the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can 't live there .
Remember , life itself depends on the arrow of time .
We would not be able to process information , metabolize , walk and talk , if we lived in thermal equilibrium .
So if you imagine a very , very big universe , an infinitely big universe , with randomly bumping into each other particles , there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states , and then they relax back .
But there will also be large fluctuations .
Occasionally , you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies .
So Boltzmann says , we will only live in the part of the multiverse , in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles , where life is possible .
That 's the region where entropy is low .
Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time .
Now your homework assignment is to really think about this , to contemplate what it means .
Carl Sagan once famously said that " in order to make an apple pie , you must first invent the universe . "
But he was not right .
In Boltzmann 's scenario , if you want to make an apple pie , you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie .
That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven , and then making you an apple pie .
So this scenario makes predictions .
And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal .
Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are , and we have , not only our memories , but our impression that outside there 's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy , it 's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech , the United States and the galaxy .
The good news is that , therefore , this scenario does not work ; it is not right .
This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation .
Even if you left our galaxy out , you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies .
And Feynman also understood this .
Feynman says , " From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation , all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we 've never seen before , we will find it mixed up , and not like the piece we 've just looked at -- high entropy .
If our order were due to a fluctuation , we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it .
We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation . "
So that 's good . The question is then what is the right answer ?
If the universe is not a fluctuation , why did the early universe have a low entropy ?
And I would love to tell you the answer , but I 'm running out of time .
Here is the universe that we tell you about , versus the universe that really exists .
I just showed you this picture .
The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so .
It 's cooling off .
But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more .
If the dark energy remains around , the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel , they will stop burning .
They will fall into black holes .
We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes .
That universe will last 10 to the 100 years -- a lot longer than our little universe has lived .
The future is much longer than the past .
But even black holes don 't last forever .
They will evaporate , and we will be left with nothing but empty space .
That empty space lasts essentially forever .
However , you notice , since empty space gives off radiation , there 's actually thermal fluctuations , and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space .
So even though the universe lasts forever , there 's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe .
They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years .
So here 's two questions for you .
Number one : If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years , why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it , in the warm , comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang ?
Why aren 't we in empty space ?
You might say , " Well there 's nothing there to be living , " but that 's not right .
You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness .
Why aren 't you ?
More homework assignment for you .
So like I said , I don 't actually know the answer .
I 'm going to give you my favorite scenario .
Either it 's just like that . There is no explanation .
This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions .
Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe .
An egg , an unbroken egg , is a low entropy configuration , and yet , when we open our refrigerator , we do not go , " Hah , how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator . "
That 's because an egg is not a closed system ; it comes out of a chicken .
Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken .
Maybe there is something that naturally , through the growth of the laws of physics , gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations .
If that 's true , it would happen more than once ; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse .
That 's my favorite scenario .
So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation .
My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history .
And 50 years from now , all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities .
We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse .
And even better , we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations .
This is a prediction . I might be wrong .
But we 've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like , why it came to be in the way it did for many , many years .
It 's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday .
Thank you .
Al Seckel : Visual illusions that show how we think
Al Seckel , a cognitive neuroscientist , explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains . Loads of eye tricks help him prove that not only are we easily fooled , we kind of like it .
We 're going to talk -- my -- a new lecture , just for TED -- and I 'm going show you some illusions that we 've created for TED , and I 'm going to try to relate this to happiness . What I was thinking about with happiness is , what gives happiness -- or happiness , which I equate with joy in my particular area , and I think there 's something very fundamental . And I was thinking about this . And it 's in terms of both illusions and movies that we go see and jokes and magic shows is that there 's something about these things where our expectations are violated in some sort of pleasing way . You go see a movie . And it has an unexpected twist -- something that you didn 't expect -- and you find a joyful experience . You look at those sort of illusions in my book and it 's not as what you 'd expect . And there 's something joyful about it . And it 's the same thing with jokes and all these sorts of things . So , what I 'm going to try and do in my lecture is go a little bit further and see if I can violate your expectations in a pleasing way . I mean , sometimes expectations that are violated are not pleasant , but I 'm going to try to do it in a pleasant way , in a very primal way , so I can make the audience here happy .
So I 'm going to show you some ways that we can violate your expectations . First of all , I want to show you the particular illusion here . I want you first of all when it pops up on the screen to notice that the two holes are perpendicular to each other . These are all perceptual tricks . These are real objects that I 'm going to show you . Now I 'm going to show you how it is done . I 've looped the film here so you can get a very interesting experience . I want you to see how this illusion is constructed , and it 's going to rotate so you see that it 's inside out . Now watch , as it rotates back , how quickly your perception snaps . OK now .
Watch it as it rotates back again . And this is a very bright audience , all right ? See if you can stop it from happening , even though you know 100 percent it 's true that -- bam ! You can 't undo it . What does that tell you about yourselves ? We 're going to do it again . No doubt about it . See if you can stop it from happening . No . It 's difficult .
And we can violate your expectations in a whole variety of ways about representation , about shape , about color and so forth and it 's very primal . And it 's an interesting question to ponder , why these things -- we find these things joyful . Why would we find them joyful ? So , here 's something that Lionel did a while ago . I like these sort of little things like this .
Again , this is not an optical trick . This is what you would see . In other words , it 's not a camera cut . It 's a perceptual trick .
OK . We can violate your expectations about shape .
We can violate your expectations on representation -- what an image represents . What do you see here ?
How many of you here see dolphins ? Raise your hand if you see dolphins . OK , those people who raised their hands , afterwards , the rest of the audience , go talk to them , all right ? Actually , this is the best example of priming by experience that I know .
If you are a child under the age of 10 who haven 't been ruined yet , you will look at this image and see dolphins . Now , some of you adults here are saying , " What dolphins ? What dolphins ? "
But in fact , if you reversed the figure ground -- in other words , the dark areas here -- I forgot to ask for a pointer -- but if you reverse it , you 'll see a whole series of little dolphins . By the way , if you 're also a student at CalTech -- they also tend to just see the dolphins . It 's based on experience .
Now , something like this can be used because this is after all talk about design , too . This was done by Saatchi and Saatchi , and they actually got away with this ad in Australia . So , if you look at this ad for beer , all those people are in sort of provocative positions . But they got it passed , and actually won the Clio awards , so it 's funny how you can do these things .
Remember that sort of , um . This is the joke I did when the Florida ballot was going around . You know , count the dots for Gore ; count the dots for Bush ; count ' em again ...
You can violate your expectations about experience . Here is an outside water fountain that I created with some friends of mine , but you can stop the water in drops and -- actually make all the drops levitate . This is something we 're building for , you know , amusement parks and that kind of stuff .
Now let 's take a static image . Can you see this ?
Do you see the middle section moving down and the outer sections moving up ? It 's completely static .
It 's a static image . How many people see this illusion ? It 's completely static .
Right . Now , when -- it 's interesting that when we look at an image we see , you know , color , depth , texture . And you can look at this whole scene and analyze it . You can see the woman is in closer than the wall and so forth . But the whole thing is actually flat . It 's painted . It 's trompe l 'oeil .
And it was such a good trompe l 'oeil that people got irritated when they tried to talk to the woman and she wouldn 't respond .
Now , you can make design mistakes . Like this building in New York . So that when you see it from this side , it looks like the balconies tilt up , and when you walk around to the other side it looks like the balconies go down . So there are cases where you have mistakes in design that incorporate illusions .
Or , you take this particular un-retouched photograph . Now , interestingly enough , I get a lot of emails from people who say , " Is there any perceptual difference between males and females ? "
And I really say , " No . " I mean , women can navigate through the world just as well as males can -- and why wouldn 't they ? However , this is the one illusion that women can consistently do better than males : in matching which head because they rely on fashion cues . They can match the hat .
Okay , now getting to a part -- I want to show design in illusions . I believe that the first example of illusions being used purposely was by da Vinci in this anamorphic image of an eye . So that when you saw from one little angle was like this . And this little technique got popular in the 16th century and the 17th century to disguise hidden meanings , where you could flip the image and see it from one little point of view like this .
But these are early incorporations of illusions brought to -- sort of high point with Hans Holbein 's " Ambassadors . " And Hans Holbein worked for Henry VIII . This was hung on a wall where you could walk down from the stair and you can see this hidden skull .
All right , now I 'm going to show you some designers who work with illusions to give that element of surprise . One of my favorites is Scott Kim . I worked with Scott to create some illusions for TED that I hope you will enjoy . We have one here on TED and happiness .
OK now . Arthur [ Ganson ] hasn 't talked yet , but his is going to be a delightful talk and he has some of his really fantastic machines outside . And so , we -- Scott created this wonderful tribute to Arthur Ganson .
Well , there 's analog and digital . Thought that was appropriate here .
And figure goes to ground .
And for the musicians .
And of course , since happiness -- we want " joy to the world . "
Now , another great designer -- he 's very well known in Japan -- Shigeo Fukuda . And he just builds some fantastic things . This is simply amazing . This is a pile of junk that when you view it from one particular angle , you see its reflection in the mirror as a perfect piano .
Pianist transforms to violinist .
This is really wild . This assemblage of forks , knives and spoons and various cutlery , welded together . It gives a shadow of a motorcycle . You learn something in the sort of thing that I do , which is there are people out there with a lot of time on their hands .
Ken Knowlton does wonderful composite images , like creating Jacques Cousteau out of seashells -- un-retouched seashells , but just by rearranging them . He did Einstein out of dice because , after all , Einstein said , " God does not play dice with the universe . " Bert Herzog out of un-retouched keyboards . Will Shortz , crossword puzzle . John Cederquist does these wonderful trompe l 'oeil cabinets .
Now , I 'm going to skip ahead since I 'm sort of running [ behind ] . I want to show you quickly what I 've created , some new type of illusions . I 've done something with taking the Pixar-type illusions . So you see these kids the same size here , running down the hall . The two table tops of the same size .
They 're looking out two directions at once . You have a larger piece fitting in with a smaller . And that 's something for you to think about , all right ? So you see larger pieces fitting in within smaller pieces here . Does everyone see that ? Which is impossible . You can see the two kids are looking out simultaneously out of two different directions at once . Now can you believe these two table tops are the same size and shape ? They are .
So , if you measured them , they would be . And as I say , those two figures are identical in size and shape .
And it 's interesting , by doing this in this sort of rendered fashion , how much stronger the illusions are . Any case , I hope this has brought you a little joy and happiness , and if you 're interested in seeing more cool effects , see me outside . I 'd be happy to show you lots of things .
William Kamkwamba : How I built a windmill
When he was just 14 years old , Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts , working from rough plans he found in a library book .
William , hi . Good to see you .
William Kamkwamba : Thanks .
So , we 've got a picture , I think ? Where is this ?
WK : This is my home . This is where I live .
Where ? What country ?
WK : In Malawi , Kasungu . In Kasungu . Yeah , Mala .
OK . Now , you 're 19 now ?
WK : Yeah . I 'm 19 years now .
Five years ago you had an idea . What was that ?
WK : I wanted to make a windmill .
A windmill ?
WK : Yeah .
What , to power -- for lighting and stuff ?
WK : Yeah .
So what did you do ? How did you realize that ?
WK : After I dropped out of school , I went to library , and I read a book that would -- " Using Energy , " and I get information about doing the mill .
And I tried , and I made it .
So you copied -- you exactly copied the design in the book .
WK : Ah , no . I just -- What happened ?
WK : In fact , a design of the windmill that was in the book , it has got four -- ah -- three blades , and mine has got four blades .
The book had three , yours had four .
WK : Yeah .
And you made it out of what ?
WK : I made four blades , just because I want to increase power .
OK .
WK : Yeah .
You tested three , and found that four worked better ?
WK : Yeah . I test .
And what did you make the windmill out of ?
What materials did you use ?
WK : I use a bicycle frame , and a pulley , and plastic pipe , what then pulls -- Do we have a picture of that ? Can we have the next slide ?
WK : Yeah . The windmill .
And so , and that windmill , what -- it worked ?
WK : When the wind blows , it rotates and generates .
How much electricity ?
WK : 12 watts .
And so , that lit a light for the house ? How many lights ?
WK : Four bulbs and two radios .
Wow .
WK : Yeah .
Next slide -- so who 's that ?
WK : This is my parents , holding the radio .
So what did they make of -- that you were 14 , 15 at the time -- what did they make of this ? They were impressed ?
WK : Yeah .
And so what 's your -- what are you going to do with this ?
WK : Um -- What do you -- I mean -- do you want to build another one ?
WK : Yeah , I want to build another one -- to pump water and irrigation for crops .
So this one would have to be bigger ?
WK : Yeah .
How big ?
WK : I think it will produce more than 20 the watts .
So that would produce irrigation for the entire village ?
WK : Yeah .
Wow . And so you 're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream ?
WK : Yeah , if they can help me with materials , yeah .
And as you think of your life going forward , you 're 19 now , do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy ?
WK : Yeah . I 'm still thinking to work on energy .
Wow . William , it 's a real honor to have you at the TED conference .
Thank you so much for coming .
WK : Thank you .

Jack Choi : On the virtual dissection table
Onstage at TED2012 , Jack Choi demonstrates a powerful tool for training medical students : a stretcher-sized multi-touch screen of the human body that lets you explore , dissect and understand the body 's parts and systems .
You know , cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy .
For students , it 's quite an experience , but for a school , it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain .
So we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught , they do not have a cadaver dissection lab .
Maybe those reasons , or depending on where you are , cadavers may not be easily available .
So to address this , we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford : virtual dissection table .
So we call this Anatomage Table .
So with this Anatomage Table , students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver .
And the table form is important , and since it 's touch-interactive , just like the way they do dissections in the lab , or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table .
Our digital body is one-to-one life size , so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy .
I 'm going to do some demonstrations .
As you can see , I use my finger to interact with my digital body .
I 'm going to do some cuts .
I can cut any way I want to , so I cut right here .
Then it 's going to show inside .
And I can change my cut to see different parts .
Maybe I can cut there , see the brain , and I can change my cut .
You can see some internal organs .
So we call this the slicer mode .
OK , I 'm going to do another cut .
Right there .
This shows a lot of internal structures .
So if I want to see the back side , I can flip and see from behind .
Like this .
So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you , that means we did the right job .
So our doctors said these are eye candies .
So instead of just butchering the body , I 'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections .
What I 'm going to do is I 'm going to peel off all the skin , muscles and bones , just to see a few internal organs .
Right here .
the liver right here .
OK .
Let 's say I 'm interested in looking at the heart .
I 'm going to do some surgery here .
I 'm going to cut some veins , arteries .
Oops ! ...
You don 't want to hear " oops " in real surgery .
But fortunately , our digital man has " undo . "
Okay .
All right then .
Let me zoom in .
I 'm going to make a cut right there .
And then you can see the inside of the heart .
You can see the atrium and the ventricles , how blood flows to our arteries and veins .
Just like this , students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to .
It doesn 't have to be always dissection .
Since it 's digital , we can do reverse dissection .
So let me show you , I 'm going to start with the skeletal structure , and I can add a few internal organs .
Yep .
Maybe I can add quickly this way .
And I can build muscles gradually , just like that .
We can see tendons and muscles .
Wish I could build my muscle this fast .
And this is another way to learn anatomy .
Another thing I can show you is , more often than not , doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form .
So , Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray .
You can also interact with your X-ray , and also if you want , you can compare with how anatomy would appear in X-ray , too .
So when you are done , just bring back the body and then it 's ready for another session .
It looks like our table also can transform gender , too .
It 's a female now .
So this is Anatomage Table . Thank you .
Helen Fisher : Why we love , why we cheat
Anthropologist Helen Fisher takes on a tricky topic – love – and explains its evolution , its biochemical foundations and its social importance . She closes with a warning about the potential disaster inherent in antidepressant abuse .
I 'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century , and perhaps in the next 10,000 years .
But I want to start with my work on romantic love , because that 's my most recent work .
What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people , who were madly in love , into a functional MRI brain scanner .
17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted ; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped .
And so I want to tell you about that first , and then go on into where I think love is going .
" What ' tis to love ? " Shakespeare said .
I think our ancestors -- I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago .
I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of research on -- just the psychological research -- and as it turns out , there 's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love .
The first thing that happens is what I call -- a person begins to take on what I call , " special meaning . "
As a truck driver once said to me , he said , " The world had a new center , and that center was Mary Anne . "
George Bernard Shaw said it a little differently .
He said , " Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another . "
And indeed , that 's what we do .
And then you just focus on this person .
You can list what you don 't like about them , but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do .
As Chaucer said , " Love is blind . "
In trying to understand romantic love , I decided I would read poetry from all over the world , and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China , because it 's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman .
It 's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot -- their car is different from every other car in the parking lot .
Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party .
And in this case , a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat .
And it goes like this . It 's by a guy called Yuan Chen : " I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat .
The night I brought you home , I watched you roll it out . "
He became hooked on a sleeping mat , probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain , just like with you and me .
But anyway , not only does this person take on special meaning , you focus your attention on them .
You aggrandize them . But you have intense energy .
As one Polynesian said , he said , " I felt like jumping in the sky . "
You 're up all night . You 're walking till dawn .
You feel intense elation when things are going well ; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly .
Real dependence on this person .
As one businessman in New York said to me , he said , " Anything she liked , I liked . "
Simple . Romantic love is very simple .
You become extremely sexually possessive .
You know , if you 're just sleeping with somebody casually , you don 't really care if they 're sleeping with somebody else .
But the moment you fall in love , you become extremely sexually possessive of them .
I think that that is a Darwinian -- there 's a Darwinian purpose to this .
The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team .
But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving : an intense craving to be with a particular person , not just sexually , but emotionally .
You 'd much rather -- it would be nice to go to bed with them , but you want them to call you on the telephone , to invite you out , etc . , to tell you that they love you .
The other main characteristic is motivation .
The motor in your brain begins to crank , and you want this person .
And last but not least , it is an obsession .
When I put these people in the machine , before I put them in the MRI machine , I would ask them all kinds of questions .
But my most important question was always the same .
It was : " What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person ? "
And indeed , they would say , " All day . All night . I can never stop thinking about him or her . "
And then , the very last question I would ask them -- I would always have to work myself up to this question , because I am not a psychologist .
I don 't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation .
And my final question was always the same .
I would say , " Would you die for him or her ? "
And , indeed , these people would say " Yes ! "
as if I had asked them to pass the salt .
I was just staggered by it .
So we scanned their brains , looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph , with a distraction task in between .
So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state .
And we found activity in a lot of brain regions .
In fact , one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine .
And indeed , that 's exactly what happens .
I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion .
In fact , I had always thought it was a series of emotions , from very high to very low .
But actually , it 's a drive . It comes from the motor of the mind , the wanting part of the mind , the craving part of the mind .
The kind of mind -- part of the mind -- when you 're reaching for that piece of chocolate , when you want to win that promotion at work .
The motor of the brain . It 's a drive .
And in fact , I think it 's more powerful than the sex drive .
You know , if you ask somebody to go to bed with you , and they say , " No , thank you , " you certainly don 't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression .
But certainly , around the world , people who are rejected in love will kill for it .
People live for love . They kill for love . They die for love .
They have songs , poems , novels , sculptures , paintings , myths , legends .
In over 175 societies , people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system .
I have come to think it 's one of the most powerful brain systems on earth for both great joy and great sorrow .
And I 've also come to think that it 's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction .
One is the sex drive : the craving for sexual gratification .
W.H. Auden called it an " intolerable neural itch , " and indeed , that 's what it is .
It keeps bothering you a little bit , like being hungry .
The second of these three brain systems is romantic love : that elation , obsession of early love .
And the third brain system is attachment : that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner .
And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there , looking for a whole range of partners .
You know , you can feel it when you 're just driving along in your car .
It can be focused on nobody .
I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time , thereby conserving mating time and energy .
And I think that attachment , the third brain system , evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being -- -- at least long enough to raise a child together as a team .
So with that preamble , I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends .
One of the last 10,000 years and the other , certainly of the last 25 years , that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems : lust , romantic love and deep attachment to a partner .
The first is women working , moving into the workforce .
I 've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations .
And everywhere in the world , 129 out of 130 of them , women are not only moving into the job market -- sometimes very , very slowly , but they are moving into the job market -- and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power , health and education .
It 's very slow .
For every trend on this planet , there 's a counter-trend .
We all know of them , but nevertheless -- the Arabs say , " The dogs may bark , but the caravan moves on . "
And , indeed , that caravan is moving on .
Women are moving back into the job market .
And I say back into the job market , because this is not new .
For millions of years , on the grasslands of Africa , women commuted to work to gather their vegetables .
They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal .
The double income family was the standard .
And women were regarded as just as economically , socially and sexually powerful as men .
In short , we 're really moving forward to the past .
Then , women 's worst invention was the plow .
With the beginning of plow agriculture , men 's roles became extremely powerful .
Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors , but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they 're moving back into the job market .
In short , they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago , 10,000 years ago , 100,000 years ago .
We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal .
And it 's going to have an impact .
I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community .
I 'll only just say a couple of things , and then go on to sex and love .
There 's a lot of gender differences ; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child .
I don 't know why it is that they want to think that men and women are alike .
There 's much we have in common , but there 's a whole lot that we do not have in common .
We are -- in the words of Ted Hughes , " I think that we were built to be -- we 're like two feet . We need each other to get ahead . "
But we did not evolve to have the same brain .
And we 're finding more and more and more gender differences in the brain .
I 'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love .
One of them is women 's verbal ability . Women can talk .
Women 's ability to find the right word rapidly , basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle , when estrogen levels peak .
But even at menstruation , they 're better than the average man .
Women can talk .
They 've been doing it for a million years ; words were women 's tools .
They held that baby in front of their face , cajoling it , reprimanding it , educating it with words .
And , indeed , they 're becoming a very powerful force .
Even in places like India and Japan , where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market , they 're moving into journalism .
And I think that the television is like the global campfire .
We sit around it and it shapes our minds .
Almost always , when I 'm on TV , the producers who call me , who negotiate what we 're going to say , is a woman .
In fact , Solzhenitsyn once said , " To have a great writer is to have another government . "
Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women .
It 's one of many , many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market .
They 've got incredible people skills , negotiating skills .
They 're highly imaginative .
We now know the brain circuitry of imagination , of long-term planning .
They tend to be web thinkers .
Because the female parts of the brain are better connected , they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think , put them into more complex patterns , see more options and outcomes .
They tend to be contextual , holistic thinkers , what I call web thinkers .
Men tend to -- and these are averages -- tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous , focus on what they do , and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern .
They 're both perfectly good ways of thinking .
We need both of them to get ahead .
In fact , there 's many more male geniuses in the world .
When the -- and there 's also many more male idiots in the world .
When the male brain works well , it works extremely well .
And what I really think that we 're doing is , we 're moving towards a collaborative society , a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed .
But in fact , women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life .
Foremost , women are starting to express their sexuality .
I 'm always astonished when people come to me and say , " Why is it that men are so adulterous ? "
And I say , " Why do you think more men are adulterous than women ? "
" Oh , well -- men are more adulterous ! "
And I say , " Who do you think these men are sleeping with ? "
And -- basic math !
Anyway .
In the Western world , women start sooner at sex , have more partners , express less remorse for the partners that they do , marry later , have fewer children , leave bad marriages in order to get good ones .
We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression .
And , indeed , once again we 're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago , because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today .
We 're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality .
They 're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the " symmetrical marriage , " or the " pure marriage , " or the " companionate marriage . "
This is a marriage between equals , moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit .
We 're also seeing a rise of romantic love .
91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner , if they were not in love with that person .
People around the world , in a study of 37 societies , want to be in love with the person that they marry .
Indeed , arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life .
I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend .
The first one being women moving into the job market , the second one being the aging world population .
They 're now saying that in America , that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85 .
Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85 , as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them .
So we 're seeing there 's a real extension of middle age .
And I looked -- for one of my books , I looked at divorce data in 58 societies .
And as it turns out , the older you get , the less likely you are to divorce .
So the divorce rate right now is stable in America , and it 's actually beginning to decline .
It may decline some more .
I would even say that with Viagra , estrogen replacement , hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women -- women have never been as interesting as they are now .
Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated , so interesting , so capable .
And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages , that time is now .
However , there 's always kinds of complications in this .
In these three brain systems : lust , romantic love and attachment -- don 't always go together .
They can go together , by the way .
That 's why casual sex isn 't so casual .
With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine .
Dopamine 's associated with romantic love , and you can just fall in love with somebody who you 're just having casual sex with .
With orgasm , then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin -- those are associated with attachment .
This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you 've made love to them .
But these three brain systems : lust , romantic love and attachment , aren 't always connected to each other .
You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else , while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners .
In short , we 're capable of loving more than one person at a time .
In fact , you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else .
It 's as if there 's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do .
So I don 't think , honestly , we 're an animal that was built to be happy ; we are an animal that was built to reproduce .
I think the happiness we find , we make .
And I think , however , we can make good relationships with each other .
So I want to conclude with two things .
I want to conclude with a worry -- I have a worry -- and with a wonderful story .
The worry is about antidepressants .
Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States .
And these drugs are going generic .
They are seeping around the world .
I know one girl who 's been on these antidepressants , serotonin-enhancing -- SSRI , serotonin-enhancing antidepressants -- since she was 13 .
I 've got nothing against people who take them short term , when they 're going through something perfectly horrible .
They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else .
I would recommend it .
But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term .
And indeed , what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin .
And by raising levels of serotonin , you suppress the dopamine circuit .
Everybody knows that .
Dopamine is associated with romantic love .
Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit , but they kill the sex drive .
And when you kill the sex drive , you kill orgasm .
And when you kill orgasm , you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment .
The things are connected in the brain .
And when you tamper with one brain system , you 're going to tamper with another .
I 'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place .
So now -- -- thank you .
I want to end with a story . And then , just a comment .
I 've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years .
I 'm an identical twin ; I am interested in why we 're all alike .
Why you and I are alike , why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike .
And about a year ago , an Internet dating service , Match.com , came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them .
I said , " I don 't know anything about personality . You know ?
I don 't know . Do you think you 've got the right person ? "
They said , " Yes . "
It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another .
That 's my current project ; it will be my next book .
There 's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another .
Timing is important . Proximity is important .
Mystery is important . You fall in love with somebody who 's somewhat mysterious , in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain , probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love .
You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your " love map , " an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up .
And I also think that you gravitate to certain people , actually , with somewhat complementary brain systems .
And that 's what I 'm now contributing to this .
But I want to tell you a story about -- to illustrate .
I 've been carrying on here about the biology of love .
I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it , too -- the magic of it .
It 's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one of the -- probably a true story .
It was a graduate student at -- I 'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues -- Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook .
That 's where we put our people in the MRI machine .
And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student , and she was not in love with him .
And they were all at a conference in Beijing .
And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody , you can drive up the dopamine in the brain , and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love .
So he decided he 'd put science to work , and he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him .
And sure enough -- I 've never been in one , but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it 's crazy and it 's noisy and it 's exciting .
And he figured that this would drive up the dopamine , and she would fall in love with him .
So off they go and she 's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time .
An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw , and she throws her hands up and she says , " Wasn 't that wonderful ? "
And , " Wasn 't that rickshaw driver handsome ! "
There 's magic to love !
But I will end by saying that millions of years ago , we evolved three basic drives : the sex drive , romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner .
These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain .
They 're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called " this mortal coil . "
Thank you .
Brian Skerry : The ocean 's glory -- and horror
Photographer Brian Skerry shoots life above and below the waves -- as he puts it , both the horror and the magic of the ocean . Sharing amazing , intimate shots of undersea creatures , he shows how powerful images can help make change .
I would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for National Geographic magazine .
I guess I became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because I fell in love with the sea as a child .
And I wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater , incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors .
And after even 30 years of doing this , after 30 years of exploring the ocean , I never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I 'm at sea .
But more and more frequently these days I 'm seeing terrible things underwater as well , things that I don 't think most people realize .
And I 've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story .
I want people to see what 's happening underwater , both the horror and the magic .
The first story that I did for National Geographic , where I recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage , was a story I proposed on harp seals .
The story I wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to engage in courtship , mating and to have their pups .
And all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide .
And because I 'm an underwater photographer , I wanted to do this story from both above and below , to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water .
But as I got more involved in the story , I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn 't ignore .
The first was that these animals continue to be hunted , killed with hakapiks at about eight , 15 days old .
It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet , with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year .
But as disturbing as that is , I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming .
This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season .
And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture , there 's a lot of water as well , which wasn 't there historically .
And the ice that is there is quite thin .
The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms .
They only need 12 days from the moment they 're born until they 're on their own .
But if they don 't get 12 days , they can fall into the ocean and die .
This is a photo that I made showing one of these pups that 's only about five or seven days old -- still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly -- that has fallen in because of the thin ice , and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase .
This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there .
I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence .
So , clearly , this species has a lot of problems going forward .
This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic .
And it received quite a bit of attention .
And with that , I saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems .
So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis , in part because I had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years , but also because I read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years .
These are the tuna , the billfish and the sharks .
When I read that , I was blown away by those numbers .
I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet , but it really wasn 't , so I wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story .
I wanted it to be more like war photography , where I was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet .
The first component of the story that I thought was essential , however , was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating .
You know , I think people go into a restaurant , and somebody orders a steak , and we all know where steak comes from , and somebody orders a chicken , and we know what a chicken is , but when they 're eating bluefin sushi , do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they 're consuming ?
These are the lions and tigers of the sea .
In reality , these animals have no terrestrial counterpart ; they 're unique in the world .
These are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year .
If we weren 't so efficient at catching them , because they grow their entire life , would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton .
But the truth is we 're way too efficient at catching them , and their stocks have collapsed worldwide .
This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market that I photographed a couple years ago .
And every single day these tuna , bluefin like this , are stacked up like cordwood , just warehouse after warehouse .
As I wandered around and made these pictures , it sort of occurred to me that the ocean 's not a grocery store , you know .
We can 't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result .
I also , with the story , wanted to show readers how fish are caught , some of the methods that are used to catch fish , like a bottom trawler , which is one of the most common methods in the world .
This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp , but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world .
You have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end .
And as this assembly is towed through the water , the doors meet resistance with the ocean , and it opens the mouth of the net , and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom .
And this just drags over the bottom , in this case to catch shrimp .
But as you can imagine , it 's catching everything else in its path as well .
And it 's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom , things like sponges and corals , that critical habitat for other animals .
This photograph I made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour .
So he had a handful of shrimp , maybe seven or eight shrimp , and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch .
These are animals that died in the process , but have no commercial value .
So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner , maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process .
And to make that point even more visual , I swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death , you know , animals like guitarfish , bat rays , flounder , pufferfish , that only an hour before , were on the bottom of the ocean , alive , but now being thrown back as trash .
I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because , currently on planet Earth , we 're killing over 100 million sharks every single year .
But before I went out to photograph this component , I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers You know , I think there 's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark .
But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net .
And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible , it struck me as sort of a crucifixion , if you will .
This ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in National Geographic .
And I hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks .
And because I love sharks -- I 'm somewhat obsessed with sharks -- I wanted to do another , more celebratory , story about sharks , as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation .
So I went to the Bahamas because there 're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days , but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy , largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago .
And I wanted to show several species that we hadn 't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations .
One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach , in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water .
This is a low-altitude photograph that I made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind .
But the one thing I definitely didn 't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters .
I didn 't want them to be overly threatening or scary .
And with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet , probably 14-feet , I guess , female tiger shark , I sort of think I got to that goal , where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose , and my strobe created a shadow on her face .
And I think it 's a gentler picture , a little less threatening , a little more respectful of the species .
I also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead , an animal that really hadn 't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago .
It 's a very solitary creature .
But this is an animal that 's considered data deficient by science in both Florida and in the Bahamas .
You know , we know almost nothing about them .
We don 't know where they migrate to or from , where they mate , where they have their pups , and yet , hammerhead populations in the Atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years .
You know , we 're losing them faster than we can possibly find them .
This is the oceanic whitetip shark , an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species , if you pay attention to such lists .
But it 's an animal that 's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range .
Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water , and because we weren 't working on the bottom , I brought along a shark cage here , and my friend , shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage .
You 'll see that the photographer , of course , was not inside the cage here , so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess .
And lastly with this story , I also wanted to focus on baby sharks , shark nurseries .
And I went to the island of Bimini , in the Bahamas , to work with lemon shark pups .
This is a photo of a lemon shark pup , and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves .
This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph .
It 's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture .
But , you know , here we see a shark that 's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water .
But this is crucial habitat and it 's where they spend the first two , three years of their lives , until they 're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef .
After I left Bimini , I actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort .
And other recent stories have looked at single , flagship species , if you will , that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats .
One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle .
This is the largest , widest-ranging , deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species .
Here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of Trinidad .
These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years .
And there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by .
And today , they crawl out and see condominiums .
But despite this amazing longevity , they 're now considered critically endangered .
In the Pacific , where I made this photograph , their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years .
This is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey .
Only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity .
But that 's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore .
Nature has learned to compensate with that , and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds .
But what they can 't deal with is anthropogenic stresses , human things , like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net .
I actually jumped in and photographed this , and with the fisherman 's permission , I cut the turtle out , and it was able to swim free .
But , you know , thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate , and the species ' future is in great danger .
Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with is the story I did on the right whale .
And essentially , the story is this with right whales , that about a million years ago , there was one species of right whale on the planet , but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated , the species sort of separated , and today we have essentially two distinct stocks .
We have the Southern right whale that we see here and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida .
Now , both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers , but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they 're located in places farther away from human activity .
The North Atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales ; they live along the east coast of North America , United States and Canada , and they have to deal with all these urban ills .
This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida .
You can see the coal burning plant in the background .
They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean , and maybe even affecting their reproduction .
They also get entangled in fishing gear .
This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale .
And those white markings are not natural markings .
These are entanglement scars .
72 percent of the population has such scars , but most don 't shed the gear , things like lobster traps and crab pots .
They hold on to them , and it eventually kills them .
And the other problem is they get hit by ships .
And this was an animal that was struck by a ship in Nova Scotia , Canada being towed in , where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death , which was indeed a ship strike .
So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low .
And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population , I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand , a place called the Auckland Islands .
I went down there in the winter time .
And these are animals that had never seen humans before , and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen .
And I got in the water with them , and I was amazed at how curious they were .
This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful , 45-foot , 70-ton whales , like a city bus just swimming up , you know .
They were in perfect condition , very fat and healthy , robust , no entanglement scars , the way they 're supposed to look .
You know , I read that the pilgrims , when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620 , wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales .
And we can 't go back and see that today , but maybe we can preserve what we have left .
And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope , a story I did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing , the global fish crisis story .
I settled on working in the country of New Zealand because New Zealand was rather progressive , and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean .
And I really wanted this story to be about three things : I wanted it to be about abundance , about diversity and about resilience .
And one of the first places I worked was a reserve called Goat Island in Leigh of New Zealand .
What the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975 , they hoped and expected that certain things might happen .
For example , they hoped that certain species of fish like the New Zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction .
And they did come back . What they couldn 't predict was that other things would happen .
For example , these fish predate on sea urchins , and when the fish were all gone , all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins .
But when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population , low and behold , kelp forests emerged in shallow water .
And that 's because the urchins eat kelp .
So when the fish control the urchin population , the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium .
You know , this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago , but nobody was around to tell us .
I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well , in beautiful , fragile , protected areas like in Fiordland , where this sea pen colony was found .
Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color .
In the northern part of New Zealand , I dove in the blue water , where the water 's a little warmer , and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon .
Every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy , from tiny , little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold .
And I wanted to finish with this photograph , a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand when I just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me .
And I was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago .
And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years , and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s .
And that 's because it 's been protected , that it has come back .
So I think the message is clear .
The ocean is , indeed , resilient and tolerant to a point , but we must be good custodians .
I became an underwater photographer because I fell in love with the sea , and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it , and I don 't think it 's too late .
Thank you very much .
Nathalie Miebach : Art made of storms
Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time . These sculptures then become musical scores for a string quartet to play .
What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure , wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007 .
The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this .
Every single bead , every single colored band , represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note .
I find weather extremely fascinating .
Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us .
So I use sculpture and music to make it , not just visible , but also tactile and audible .
All of my work begins very simple .
I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices -- generally anything I can find in the hardware store .
I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet -- satellite images , weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys .
That 's both historical as well as real data .
And then I compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here .
These clipboards are filled with numbers .
And from all of these numbers , I start with only two or three variables .
That begins my translation process .
My translation medium is a very simple basket .
A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements .
When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements , I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form .
I use natural reed , because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control .
That means that it is the numbers that control the form , not me .
What I come up with are forms like these .
These forms are completely made up of weather data or science data .
Every colored bead , every colored string , represents a weather element .
And together , these elements , not only construct the form , but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph .
When you step closer , you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers .
The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day .
So all the way around , you have a 24-hour timeline .
But it 's also used to assign a temperature range .
On that grid , I can then weave the high tide readings , water temperature , air temperature and Moon phases .
I also translate weather data into musical scores .
And musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it .
So all of these scores are made up of weather data .
Every single color , dot , every single line , is a weather element .
And together , these variables construct a score .
I use these scores to collaborate with musicians .
This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum .
Meanwhile , I use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this , that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization , but now they 're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score , so it can actually be read as a musical score .
What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art , versus science .
This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it .
You place it in an art museum , it becomes a sculpture .
You place it in a science museum , it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data .
You place it in a music hall , it all of a sudden becomes a musical score .
And I really like that , because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music .
The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science .
And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science .
So for me , that was my way into it .
Thank you .
David Hoffman : What happens when you lose everything
Nine days before TED2008 , filmmaker David Hoffman lost almost everything he owned in a fire that destroyed his home , office and 30 years of passionate collecting . He looks back at a life that 's been wiped clean in an instant -- and looks forward .
I had a fire nine days ago .
My archive : 175 films , my 16-millimeter negative , all my books , my dad 's books , my photographs .
I 'd collected -- I was a collector , major , big-time .
It 's gone .
I just looked at it , and I didn 't know what to do .
I mean , this was -- was I my things ?
I always live in the present -- I love the present .
I cherish the future .
And I was taught some strange thing as a kid , like , you 've got to make something good out of something bad .
You 've got to make something good out of something bad .
This was bad ! Man , I was -- I cough . I was sick .
That 's my camera lens . The first one -- the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago .
That 's my feature film . " King , Murray " won Cannes Film Festival 1970 -- the only print I had .
That 's my papers .
That was in minutes -- 20 minutes .
Epiphany hit me . Something hit me .
" You 've got to make something good out of something bad , " I started to say to my friends , neighbors , my sister .
By the way , that 's " Sputnik . " I ran it last year .
" Sputnik " was downtown , the negative . It wasn 't touched .
These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film , which opens in New York in two weeks downtown .
I called my sister . I called my neighbors . I said , " Come dig . "
That 's me at my desk .
That was a desk took 40-some years to build .
You know -- all the stuff .
That 's my daughter , Jean .
She came . She 's a nurse in San Francisco .
" Dig it up , " I said . " Pieces .
I want pieces . Bits and pieces . "
I came up with this idea : a life of bits and pieces , which I 'm just starting to work on -- my next project .
That 's my sister . She took care of pictures , because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot .
And those are some of the pictures that -- something was good about the burnt pictures .
I didn 't know . I looked at that -- I said , " Wow , is that better than the -- " That 's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle . I made that movie for television .
It 's the only copy I had . Pieces of it .
Idea about women .
So I started to say , " Hey , man , you are too much !
You could cry about this . " I really didn 't .
I just instead said , " I 'm going to make something out of it , and maybe next year ... " And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who 've already given me so much solace , and just say to TEDsters : I 'm proud of me . That I take something bad , I turn it , and I 'm going to make something good out of this , all these pieces .
That 's Arthur Leipzig 's original photograph I loved .
I was a big record collector -- the records didn 't make it . Boy , I tell you , film burns . Film burns .
I mean , this was 16-millimeter safety film .
The negatives are gone .
That 's my father 's letter to me , telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20 .
That 's my daughter and me .
She 's still there . She 's there this morning , actually .
That 's my house .
My family 's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley .
That 's my wife , Heidi , who didn 't take it as well as I did .
My children , Davey and Henry .
My son , Davey , in the hotel two nights ago .
So , my message to you folks , from my three minutes , is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you . I will be back . I love being at TED .
I came to live it , and I am living it .
That 's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz , in Bonny Doon , just 35 miles from here .
Thank you everybody .
Geraldine Hamilton : Body parts on a chip
It 's relatively easy to imagine a new medicine , a better cure for some disease . The hard part , though , is testing it , and that can delay promising new cures for years . In this well-explained talk , Geraldine Hamilton shows how her lab creates organs and body parts on a chip , simple structures with all the pieces essential to testing new medications -- even custom cures for one specific person . & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
We have a global health challenge in our hands today , and that is that the way we currently discover and develop new drugs is too costly , takes far too long , and it fails more often than it succeeds .
It really just isn 't working , and that means that patients that badly need new therapies are not getting them , and diseases are going untreated .
We seem to be spending more and more money .
So for every billion dollars we spend in R & amp ; D , we 're getting less drugs approved into the market .
More money , less drugs . Hmm .
So what 's going on here ?
Well , there 's a multitude of factors at play , but I think one of the key factors is that the tools that we currently have available to test whether a drug is going to work , whether it has efficacy , or whether it 's going to be safe before we get it into human clinical trials , are failing us . They 're not predicting what 's going to happen in humans .
And we have two main tools available at our disposal .
They are cells in dishes and animal testing .
Now let 's talk about the first one , cells in dishes .
So , cells are happily functioning in our bodies .
We take them and rip them out of their native environment , throw them in one of these dishes , and expect them to work .
Guess what . They don 't .
They don 't like that environment because it 's nothing like what they have in the body .
What about animal testing ?
Well , animals do and can provide extremely useful information .
They teach us about what happens in the complex organism .
We learn more about the biology itself .
However , more often than not , animal models fail to predict what will happen in humans when they 're treated with a particular drug .
So we need better tools .
We need human cells , but we need to find a way to keep them happy outside the body .
Our bodies are dynamic environments .
We 're in constant motion .
Our cells experience that .
They 're in dynamic environments in our body .
They 're under constant mechanical forces .
So if we want to make cells happy outside our bodies , we need to become cell architects .
We need to design , build and engineer a home away from home for the cells .
And at the Wyss Institute , we 've done just that .
We call it an organ-on-a-chip .
And I have one right here .
It 's beautiful , isn 't it ? But it 's pretty incredible .
Right here in my hand is a breathing , living human lung on a chip .
And it 's not just beautiful .
It can do a tremendous amount of things .
We have living cells in that little chip , cells that are in a dynamic environment interacting with different cell types .
There 's been many people trying to grow cells in the lab .
They 've tried many different approaches .
They 've even tried to grow little mini-organs in the lab .
We 're not trying to do that here .
We 're simply trying to recreate in this tiny chip the smallest functional unit that represents the biochemistry , the function and the mechanical strain that the cells experience in our bodies .
So how does it work ? Let me show you .
We use techniques from the computer chip manufacturing industry to make these structures at a scale relevant to both the cells and their environment .
We have three fluidic channels .
In the center , we have a porous , flexible membrane on which we can add human cells from , say , our lungs , and then underneath , they had capillary cells , the cells in our blood vessels .
And we can then apply mechanical forces to the chip that stretch and contract the membrane , so the cells experience the same mechanical forces that they did when we breathe .
And they experience them how they did in the body .
There 's air flowing through the top channel , and then we flow a liquid that contains nutrients through the blood channel .
Now the chip is really beautiful , but what can we do with it ?
We can get incredible functionality inside these little chips .
Let me show you .
We could , for example , mimic infection , where we add bacterial cells into the lung .
then we can add human white blood cells .
White blood cells are our body 's defense against bacterial invaders , and when they sense this inflammation due to infection , they will enter from the blood into the lung and engulf the bacteria .
Well now you 're going to see this happening live in an actual human lung on a chip .
We 've labeled the white blood cells so you can see them flowing through , and when they detect that infection , they begin to stick .
They stick , and then they try to go into the lung side from blood channel .
And you can see here , we can actually visualize a single white blood cell .
It sticks , it wiggles its way through between the cell layers , through the pore , comes out on the other side of the membrane , and right there , it 's going to engulf the bacteria labeled in green .
In that tiny chip , you just witnessed one of the most fundamental responses our body has to an infection .
It 's the way we respond to -- an immune response .
It 's pretty exciting .
Now I want to share this picture with you , not just because it 's so beautiful , but because it tells us an enormous amount of information about what the cells are doing within the chips .
It tells us that these cells from the small airways in our lungs , actually have these hairlike structures that you would expect to see in the lung .
These structures are called cilia , and they actually move the mucus out of the lung .
Yeah . Mucus . Yuck .
But mucus is actually very important .
Mucus traps particulates , viruses , potential allergens , and these little cilia move and clear the mucus out .
When they get damaged , say , by cigarette smoke for example , they don 't work properly , and they can 't clear that mucus out .
And that can lead to diseases such as bronchitis .
Cilia and the clearance of mucus are also involved in awful diseases like cystic fibrosis .
But now , with the functionality that we get in these chips , we can begin to look for potential new treatments .
We didn 't stop with the lung on a chip .
We have a gut on a chip .
You can see one right here .
And we 've put intestinal human cells in a gut on a chip , and they 're under constant peristaltic motion , this trickling flow through the cells , and we can mimic many of the functions that you actually would expect to see in the human intestine .
Now we can begin to create models of diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome .
This is a disease that affects a large number of individuals .
It 's really debilitating , and there aren 't really many good treatments for it .
Now we have a whole pipeline of different organ chips that we are currently working on in our labs .
Now , the true power of this technology , however , really comes from the fact that we can fluidically link them .
There 's fluid flowing across these cells , so we can begin to interconnect multiple different chips together to form what we call a virtual human on a chip .
Now we 're really getting excited .
We 're not going to ever recreate a whole human in these chips , but what our goal is is to be able to recreate sufficient functionality so that we can make better predictions of what 's going to happen in humans .
For example , now we can begin to explore what happens when we put a drug like an aerosol drug .
Those of you like me who have asthma , when you take your inhaler , we can explore how that drug comes into your lungs , how it enters the body , how it might affect , say , your heart .
Does it change the beating of your heart ?
Does it have a toxicity ?
Does it get cleared by the liver ?
Is it metabolized in the liver ?
Is it excreted in your kidneys ?
We can begin to study the dynamic response of the body to a drug .
This could really revolutionize and be a game changer for not only the pharmaceutical industry , but a whole host of different industries , including the cosmetics industry .
We can potentially use the skin on a chip that we 're currently developing in the lab to test whether the ingredients in those products that you 're using are actually safe to put on your skin without the need for animal testing .
We could test the safety of chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis in our environment , such as chemicals in regular household cleaners .
We could also use the organs on chips for applications in bioterrorism or radiation exposure .
We could use them to learn more about diseases such as ebola or other deadly diseases such as SARS .
Organs on chips could also change the way we do clinical trials in the future .
Right now , the average participant in a clinical trial is that : average .
Tends to be middle aged , tends to be female .
You won 't find many clinical trials in which children are involved , yet every day , we give children medications , and the only safety data we have on that drug is one that we obtained from adults .
Children are not adults .
They may not respond in the same way adults do .
There are other things like genetic differences in populations that may lead to at-risk populations that are at risk of having an adverse drug reaction .
Now imagine if we could take cells from all those different populations , put them on chips , and create populations on a chip .
This could really change the way we do clinical trials .
And this is the team and the people that are doing this .
We have engineers , we have cell biologists , we have clinicians , all working together .
We 're really seeing something quite incredible at the Wyss Institute .
It 's really a convergence of disciplines , where biology is influencing the way we design , the way we engineer , the way we build .
It 's pretty exciting .
We 're establishing important industry collaborations such as the one we have with a company that has expertise in large-scale digital manufacturing .
They 're going to help us make , instead of one of these , millions of these chips , so that we can get them into the hands of as many researchers as possible .
And this is key to the potential of that technology .
Now let me show you our instrument .
This is an instrument that our engineers are actually prototyping right now in the lab , and this instrument is going to give us the engineering controls that we 're going to require in order to link 10 or more organ chips together .
It does something else that 's very important .
It creates an easy user interface .
So a cell biologist like me can come in , take a chip , put it in a cartridge like the prototype you see there , put the cartridge into the machine just like you would a C.D. , and away you go .
Plug and play . Easy .
Now , let 's imagine a little bit what the future might look like if I could take your stem cells and put them on a chip , or your stem cells and put them on a chip .
It would be a personalized chip just for you .
Now all of us in here are individuals , and those individual differences mean that we could react very differently and sometimes in unpredictable ways to drugs .
I myself , a couple of years back , had a really bad headache , just couldn 't shake it , thought , " Well , I 'll try something different . "
I took some Advil . Fifteen minutes later , I was on my way to the emergency room with a full-blown asthma attack .
Now , obviously it wasn 't fatal , but unfortunately , some of these adverse drug reactions can be fatal .
So how do we prevent them ?
Well , we could imagine one day having Geraldine on a chip , having Danielle on a chip , having you on a chip .
Personalized medicine . Thank you .
Dale Dougherty : We are makers
America was built by makers -- curious , enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries . At TED @ MotorCity , MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we 're all makers at heart , and shows cool new tools to tinker with , like Arduinos , affordable 3D printers , even DIY satellites .
I 'm going to have a pretty simple idea that I 'm just going to tell you over and over until I get you to believe it , and that is all of us are makers .
I really believe that .
All of us are makers .
We 're born makers .
We have this ability to make things , to grasp things with our hands .
We use words like " grasp " metaphorically to also think about understanding things .
We don 't just live , but we make .
We create things .
Well I 'm going to show you a group of makers from Maker Faire and various places .
It doesn 't come out particularly well , but that 's a particularly tall bicycle .
It 's a scraper bike ; it 's called -- from Oakland .
And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size .
But he 's trying to power it , or motorize it , with a drill .
And the question he had is , " Can I do it ? Can it be done ? "
Apparently it can .
So makers are enthusiasts ; they 're amateurs ; they 're people who love doing what they do .
They don 't always even know why they 're doing it .
We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire .
There was one held in Detroit here last summer , and it will be held again next summer , at the Henry Ford .
But we hold them in San Francisco -- -- and in New York .
And it 's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation .
I might get one of those .
Dale Dougherty : These are electric muffins .
Where did you guys get those ?
Muffin : Will you glide with us ?
DD : I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out .
We got there first .
Lady : Will you glide with us ?
DD : This is something I call " swinging in the rain . "
And you can barely see it , but it 's -- a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc .
So imagine a kid : " Am I going to get wet ? Am I going to get wet ?
No , I didn 't get wet . Am I going to get wet ? Am I going to get wet ? "
That 's the experience of a clever ride .
And of course , we have fashion .
People are remaking things into fashion .
I don 't know if this is called a basket-bra , but it ought to be something like that .
We have art students getting together , taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it .
They did that in the summer , and it was very warm .
Now this one takes a little bit of explaining .
You know what those are , right ?
Billy-Bob , or Billy Bass , or something like that .
Now the background is -- the guy who did this is a physicist .
And here he 'll explain a little bit about what it does .
Richard Carter : I 'm Richard Carter , and this is the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir .
Choir : When you hold me in your arms DD : This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo .
Choir : I 'm hooked on a feelin ' I 'm high on believin ' That you 're in love with me DD : So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir .
So , are you a maker ?
How many people here would say you 're a maker , if you raise your hand ?
That 's a pretty good -- but there 's some of you out there that won 't admit that you 're makers .
And again , think about it .
You 're makers of food ; you 're makers of shelter ; you 're makers of lots of different things , and partly what interests me today is you 're makers of your own world , and particularly the role that technology has in your life .
You 're really a driver or a passenger -- to use a Volkswagen phrase .
Makers are in control .
That 's what fascinates them . That 's why they do what they do .
They want to figure out how things work ; they want to get access to it ; and they want to control it .
They want to use it to their own purpose .
Makers today , to some degree , are out on the edge .
They 're not mainstream .
They 're a little bit radical .
They 're a bit subversive in what they do .
But at one time , it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker .
It was not something you 'd even remark upon .
And I found this old video .
And I 'll tell you more about it , but just ...
Of all things Americans are , we are makers .
With our strengths and our minds and spirit , we gather , we form , and we fashion .
Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers .
DD : So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood , a grandfather making a ship in a bottle , a woman making a pie -- somewhat standard fare of the day .
But it was a sense of pride that we made things , that the world around us was made by us .
It didn 't just exist .
We made it , and we were connected to it that way .
And I think that 's tremendously important .
Now I 'm going to tell you one funny thing about this .
This particular reel -- it 's an industrial video -- but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 -- in the Detroit area , in fact -- and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock 's " Psycho . "
So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this , plus " Psycho . "
This is Andrew Archer .
I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire .
Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth , Minnesota .
And I talked to his mom , and I ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called Kidrobot .
He 's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys .
He liked to take things apart .
His mother gave him a part of the garage , and he collected things from yard sales , and he made stuff .
And then he didn 't particularly like school that much , but he got involved in robotics competitions , and he realized he had a talent , and , more importantly , he had a real passion for it .
And he began building robots .
And when I sat down next to him , he was telling me about a company he formed , and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor .
And that 's why he moved to Michigan .
But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he 's doing .
And this kind of gets to this important idea today .
This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace .
And there 's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit .
And there 's probably even some new ones since I 've been here last .
But these are like clubs -- they 're sharing tools , sharing space , sharing expertise in what to make .
And so it 's a very interesting phenomenon that 's going across the world .
But essentially these are people that are playing with technology .
Let me say that again : playing .
They don 't necessarily know what they 're doing or why they 're doing it .
They 're playing to discover what the technology can do , and probably to discover what they can do themselves , what their own capabilities are .
Now the other thing that I think is taking off , another reason making is taking off today , is there 's some great new tools out there .
And you can 't see this very well on the screen , but Arduino -- Arduino is an open-source hardware platform .
It 's a micro-controller .
If you don 't know what those are , they 're just the " brains . "
So they 're the brains of maker projects , and here 's an example of one .
And I don 't know if you can see it that well , but that 's a mailbox -- so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino .
So you figure out how to program this , and you put this in your mailbox .
And when someone opens your mailbox , you get a notification , an alert message goes to your iPhone .
Now that could be a dog door , it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn 't , like a little brother into a little sister 's room .
There 's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that .
Now here 's something -- a 3D printer .
That 's another tool that 's really taken off -- really , really interesting .
This is Makerbot .
And there are industrial versions of this -- about 20,000 dollars .
These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars , and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers .
Now they don 't know what they want to do with it , but they 're going to figure it out .
They will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it .
One of the coolest things is , Makerbot sent out an upgrade , some new brackets for the box .
Well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones .
Isn 't that cool ?
So makers harvest technology from all the places around us .
This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy .
And they do interesting things .
They 're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think -- the military is doing drones -- well , there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes , or vehicles -- something that you could program to fly on its own , without a stick or anything , to figure out what path it 's going .
Fascinating work they 're doing .
We just had an issue on space exploration , DIY space exploration .
This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space .
You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars .
Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space .
In fact , these guys actually work for NASA , and they 're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components , cheap things that aren 't specialized that they can combine and send up into space .
Makers are a source of innovation , and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry .
This is Steve Wozniak . Where does he learn about computers ?
It 's the Homebrew Computer Club -- just like a hackerspace .
And he says , " I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free . "
Well he did a little bit better than free .
But it 's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries -- even like Henry Ford -- come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups .
Well , if I haven 't convinced you that you 're a maker , I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers , that kids are particularly interested in this , in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots .
And we 've got to get this into schools , or into communities in many , many ways -- the ability to tinker , to shape and reshape the world around us .
There 's a great opportunity today -- and that 's what I really care about the most .
An the answer to the question : what will America make ?
It 's more makers .
Thank you very much .
Michael Pawlyn : Using nature 's genius in architecture
How can architects build a new world of sustainable beauty ? By learning from nature . At TEDSalon in London , Michael Pawlyn describes three habits of nature that could transform architecture and society : radical resource efficiency , closed loops , and drawing energy from the sun .
I 'd like to start with a couple of quick examples .
These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider .
They produce six different types of silk , which is spun together into a fiber , tougher than any fiber humans have ever made .
The nearest we 've come is with aramid fiber .
And to make that , it involves extremes of temperature , extremes of pressure and loads of pollution .
And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water .
It does suggest we 've still got a bit to learn .
This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away .
That 's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors .
And what 's more , this guy doesn 't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels .
So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver .
If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does , we could achieve factor 10 , factor 100 , maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use .
And if we 're to make progress with the sustainability revolution , I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about .
Firstly , radical increases in resource efficiency .
Secondly , shifting from a linear , wasteful , polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model .
And thirdly , changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy .
And for all three of these , I believe , biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we 're going to need .
You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products , and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period .
And given that level of investment , it makes sense to use it .
So I 'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas .
And let 's start with radical increases in resource efficiency .
When we were working on the Eden Project , we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular , but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried .
It was a hell of a challenge , and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues .
So for instance , it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels .
Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons .
The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons .
And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass , which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes .
And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes .
So we started exploring this material called ETFE .
It 's a high-strength polymer .
And what you do is you put it together in three layers , you weld it around the edge , and then you inflate it .
And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass , and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing .
So that was a factor-100 saving .
And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another .
So with such large , lightweight pillows , we had much less steel .
With less steel we were getting more sunlight in , which meant we didn 't have to put as much extra heat in winter .
And with less overall weight in the superstructure , there were big savings in the foundations .
And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building .
So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency -- delivering the same function , but with a fraction of the resource input .
And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions .
So for instance , you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies , whole buildings inspired by abalone shells , super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells .
There 's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool .
So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea .
The way we tend to use resources is we extract them , we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them .
Nature works very differently .
In ecosystems , the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system .
And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems .
And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles .
And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food , cardboard and plastic waste .
It was ending up in landfills .
Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste .
And I 'm just going to talk through this animation .
So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants .
They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding .
When that was soiled , they were paid again to collect it .
They put it into worm recomposting systems , which produced a lot of worms , which they fed to Siberian sturgeon , which produced caviar , which they sold back to the restaurants .
So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model , and it created more value in the process .
Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this , turning waste streams into schemes that create value .
And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time , there 's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing .
And I know it 's a quirky example , but I think the implications of this are quite radical , because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem -- waste -- into a massive opportunity .
And particularly in cities -- we could look at the whole metabolism of cities , and look at those as opportunities .
And that 's what we 're doing on the next project I 'm going to talk about , the Mobius Project , where we 're trying to bring together a number of activities , all within one building , so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another .
And the kind of elements I 'm talking about are , firstly , we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse , a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas .
Then we would have an anaerobic digester , which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area , turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid .
We 'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater , turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms .
We 'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant .
And we 'd also have a coffee shop , and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms .
So you can see that we 're bringing together cycles of food , energy and water and waste all within one building .
And just for fun , we 've proposed this for a roundabout in central London , which at the moment is a complete eyesore .
Some of you may recognize this .
And with just a little bit of planning , we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people , reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities .
So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project , which we 're working on at the moment .
It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago .
So for instance , when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa , huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests .
And during the evolution of life on the Earth , it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy .
The converse is also true .
The more vegetation we lose , the more that 's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification .
And this animation , this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years , and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot , and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt , or maybe even reverse , desertification .
And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts , there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity .
This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle , and it 's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert .
The way it does this is it comes out at night , crawls to the top of a sand dune , and because it 's got a matte black shell , is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings .
So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea , you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle 's shell .
Just before sunrise , he tips his shell up , the water runs down into his mouth , has a good drink , goes off and hides for the rest of the day .
And the ingenuity , if you could call it that , goes even further .
Because if you look closely at the beetle 's shell , there are lots of little bumps on that shell .
And those bumps are hydrophilic ; they attract water .
Between them there 's a waxy finish which repels water .
And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps , they stay in tight , spherical beads , which means they 're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle 's shell .
So even when there 's only a small amount of moisture in the air , it 's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth .
So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment -- and in that sense , very relevant to the kind of challenges we 're going to be facing over the next few years , next few decades .
We 're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse .
This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions , and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills , and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through , it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process .
So inside it 's cool and humid , which means the plants need less water to grow .
And then at the back of the greenhouse , it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle .
And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside .
So they just started spreading this on the land around , and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area .
This photograph was taken on completion day , and just one year later , it looked like that .
So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land -- and in that sense , going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design .
So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits .
And when you think about nature , often you think about it as being all about competition .
But actually in mature ecosystems , you 're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships .
So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters .
And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power , which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun 's heat to create electricity .
And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP , consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms -- 10,000 times .
So our energy problems are not intractable .
It 's a challenge to our ingenuity .
And the kind of synergies I 'm talking about are , firstly , both these technologies work very well in hot , sunny deserts .
CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater .
That 's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces .
CSP produces a lot of waste heat .
We 'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits .
And finally , in the shade under the mirrors , it 's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight .
So this is how this scheme would look .
The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind .
We 'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way .
Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts .
And with biomimicry , if you 've got an underutilized resource , you don 't think , " How am I going to dispose of this ? "
You think , " What can I add to the system to create more value ? "
And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages .
When you evaporate seawater , the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate .
And that builds up on the evaporators -- and that 's what that image on the left is -- gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate .
So after a while , we could take that out , use it as a lightweight building block .
And if you think about the carbon in that , that would have come out of the atmosphere , into the sea and then locked away in a building product .
The next thing is sodium chloride .
You can also compress that into a building block , as they did here .
This is a hotel in Bolivia .
And then after that , there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract , like phosphates , that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them .
And there 's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater .
So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries .
And in parts of the Arabian Gulf , the seawater , the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants .
And it 's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse .
Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine .
We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts , transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity .
Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food , abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas .
So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning : radical increases in resource efficiency , closing loops and a solar economy .
They 're not just possible ; they 're critical .
And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions .
But perhaps more than anything , what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design .
Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language .
But here it 's about synergies and abundance and optimizing .
And this is an important point .
Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said , " If you want to build a flotilla of ships , you don 't sit around talking about carpentry .
No , you need to set people 's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores . "
And that 's what we need to do , so let 's be positive , and let 's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we 've ever seen .
Thank you .
Neil Pasricha : The 3 A 's of awesome
Neil Pasricha 's blog 1000 Awesome Things savors life 's simple pleasures , from free refills to clean sheets . In this heartfelt talk , he reveals the 3 secrets to leading a life that 's truly awesome . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So the Awesome story : It begins about 40 years ago , when my mom and my dad came to Canada .
My mom left Nairobi , Kenya .
My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar , India .
And they got here in the late 1960s .
They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto , and they settled into a new life .
They saw their first dentist , they ate their first hamburger , and they had their first kids .
My sister and I grew up here , and we had quiet , happy childhoods .
We had close family , good friends , a quiet street .
We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn 't take for granted when they grew up -- things like power always on in our houses , things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard .
We grew up , and we grew older .
I went to high school .
I graduated .
I moved out of the house , I got a job , I found a girl , I settled down -- and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens ' song -- but life was pretty good .
Life was pretty good .
2006 was a great year .
Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario , I got married , surrounded by 150 family and friends .
2007 was a great year .
I graduated from school , and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends .
Here 's a picture of me and my friend , Chris , on the coast of the Pacific Ocean .
We actually saw seals out of our car window , and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads .
So you can 't actually see them , but it was breathtaking , believe me .
2008 and 2009 were a little tougher .
I know that they were tougher for a lot of people , not just me .
First of all , the news was so heavy .
It 's still heavy now , and it was heavy before that , but when you flipped open a newspaper , when you turned on the TV , it was about ice caps melting , wars going on around the world , earthquakes , hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse , and then eventually did collapse , and so many of us losing our homes , or our jobs , or our retirements , or our livelihoods .
2008 , 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason , too .
I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time .
My marriage wasn 't going well , and we just were growing further and further apart .
One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage , through a lot of tears , to have a very honest conversation .
And she said , " I don 't love you anymore , " and it was one of the most painful things I 'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing I 'd ever heard , until only a month later , when I heard something even more heartbreaking .
My friend Chris , who I just showed you a picture of , had been battling mental illness for some time .
And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness , you know how challenging it can be .
I spoke to him on the phone at 10 : 30 p.m.
on a Sunday night .
We talked about the TV show we watched that evening .
And Monday morning , I found out that he disappeared .
Very sadly , he took his own life .
And it was a really heavy time .
And as these dark clouds were circling me , and I was finding it really , really difficult to think of anything good , I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow .
So I came home from work one night , and I logged onto the computer , and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com.
I was trying to remind myself of the simple , universal , little pleasures that we all love , but we just don 't talk about enough -- things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking , being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding , wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer , or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line -- even if you were last at the other line , swoop right in there .
And slowly over time , I started putting myself in a better mood .
I mean , 50,000 blogs are started a day , and so my blog was just one of those 50,000 .
And nobody read it except for my mom .
Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad .
And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits , and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions .
It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger .
And then I got a phone call , and the voice at the other end of the line said , " You 've just won the Best Blog In the World award . "
I was like , that sounds totally fake .
Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to ?
But it turns out , I jumped on a plane , and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart .
And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog .
And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto , when , in my inbox , 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book .
Flash-forward to the next year and " The Book of Awesome " has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks .
But look , I said I wanted to do three things with you today .
I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story , I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome , and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought .
So let 's talk about those three As .
Over the last few years , I haven 't had that much time to really think .
But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself : " What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website , but also grow myself ? "
And I 've summarized those things , for me personally , as three As .
They are Attitude , Awareness and Authenticity .
I 'd love to just talk about each one briefly .
So Attitude : Look , we 're all going to get lumps , and we 're all going to get bumps .
None of us can predict the future , but we do know one thing about it and that 's that it ain 't gonna go according to plan .
We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages , father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room , but between those high highs , we may also have some lumps and some bumps too .
It 's sad , and it 's not pleasant to talk about , but your husband might leave you , your girlfriend could cheat , your headaches might be more serious than you thought , or your dog could get hit by a car on the street .
It 's not a happy thought , but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes .
Your mom could get cancer , your dad could get mean .
And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well , too , with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart , and when that bad news washes over you , and when that pain sponges and soaks in , I just really hope you feel like you 've always got two choices .
One , you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever , or two , you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes .
Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two , and choosing , no matter how difficult it is , no matter what pain hits you , choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future .
The second " A " is Awareness .
I love hanging out with three year-olds .
I love the way that they see the world , because they 're seeing the world for the first time .
I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk .
I love the way that they 'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand , soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs .
I love the way that they 'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner .
I love the way that they see the world , because they 're seeing the world for the first time .
Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old .
Because you all used to be three years old .
That three-year-old boy is still part of you .
That three-year-old girl is still part of you .
They 're in there .
And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you 've seen for the first time once , too .
So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work .
There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air , or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said , " Found money . "
The last " A " is Authenticity .
And for this one , I want to tell you a quick story .
Let 's go all the way back to 1932 when , on a peanut farm in Georgia , a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born .
Roosevelt Grier , or Rosey Grier , as people used to call him , grew up and grew into a 300-pound , six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL .
He 's number 76 in the picture .
Here he is pictured with the " fearsome foursome . "
These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against .
They were tough football players doing what they love , which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field .
But Rosey Grier also had another passion .
In his deeply authentic self , he also loved needlepoint .
He loved knitting .
He said that it calmed him down , it relaxed him , it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks .
That 's what he said .
I mean , he loved it so much that , after he retired from the NFL , he started joining clubs .
And he even put out a book called " Rosey Grier 's Needlepoint for Men . "
It 's a great cover .
If you notice , he 's actually needlepointing his own face .
And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person , and that 's what authenticity is all about .
It 's just about being you and being cool with that .
And I think when you 're authentic , you end up following your heart , and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy .
You meet people that you like talking to .
You go places you 've dreamt about .
And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled .
So those are the three A 's .
For the closing thought , I want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to Canada .
I don 't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you 're in your mid-20s .
I don 't know , because I never did it , but I would imagine that it would take a great attitude .
I would imagine that you 'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you 're starting to see in your new world .
And I think you 'd have to be really authentic , you 'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you 're being exposed to .
I 'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now , because you don 't get many opportunities in life to do something like this , and my parents are sitting in the front row .
So I wanted to ask them to , if they don 't mind , stand up .
And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys .
When I was growing up , my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada .
And it 's a great story , because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport , and he was welcomed by a non-profit group , which I 'm sure someone in this room runs .
And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada .
And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread .
There was bread , there was those little , mini dill pickles , there was olives , those little white onions .
There was rolled up turkey cold cuts , and little cubes of cheese .
There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches .
There was lasagna , there was casseroles , there was brownies , there was butter tarts , and there was pies , lots and lots of pies .
And when my dad tells the story , he says , " The craziest thing was , I 'd never seen any of that before , except bread .
I didn 't know what was meat , what was vegetarian .
I was eating olives with pie .
I just couldn 't believe how many things you can get here . "
When I was five years old , my dad used to take me grocery shopping , and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables .
He would say , " Look , can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico ?
They 've got an apple here from South Africa .
Can you believe they 've got a date from Morocco ? "
He 's like , " Do you know where Morocco even is ? "
And I 'd say , " I 'm five . I don 't even know where I am .
Is this A & amp ; P ? "
And he 'd say , " I don 't know where Morocco is either , but let 's find out . "
And so we 'd buy the date , and we 'd go home .
And we 'd actually take an atlas off the shelf , and we 'd flip through until we found this mysterious country .
And when we did , my dad would say , " Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there , picked this thing off it , put it in a truck , drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house , so they could sell it to us for 25 cents ? "
And I 'd say , " I don 't believe that . "
And he 's like , " I don 't believe it either .
Things are amazing . There 's just so many things to be happy about . "
When I stop to think about it , he 's absolutely right .
There are so many things to be happy about .
We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we 've ever seen , capable of experiencing so many of these things .
I mean , we 're the only ones with architecture and agriculture .
We 're the only ones with jewelry and democracy .
We 've got airplanes , highway lanes , interior design and horoscope signs .
We 've got fashion magazines , house party scenes .
You can watch a horror movie with monsters .
You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming .
We 've got books , buffets and radio waves , wedding brides and rollercoaster rides .
You can sleep in clean sheets .
You can go to the movies and get good seats .
You can smell bakery air , walk around with rain hair , pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap .
We 've got all that , but we 've only got 100 years to enjoy it .
And that 's the sad part .
The cashiers at your grocery store , the foreman at your plant , the guy tailgating you home on the highway , the telemarketer calling you during dinner , every teacher you 've ever had , everyone that 's ever woken up beside you , every politician in every country , every actor in every movie , every single person in your family , everyone you love , everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years .
Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet .
And that moment is right now , and those moments are counting down , and those moments are always , always , always fleeting .
You will never be as young as you are right now .
And that 's why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude , choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow , living with a sense of awareness of the world around you , embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself , being you and being cool with that , letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you , then I think you 'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying , and I think you 'll live a life that is truly awesome .
Thank you .
Natalie MacMaster : Cape Breton fiddling in reel time
Violinist Natalie MacMaster and TED Musical Director Thomas Dolby play Dolby 's original song " Blue Is a River " in this ethereal duet -- with a little dancing .
Like the heather on the hillside as they drove us from the Highlands Like the ice flow from the Arctic where we landed in Newfoundland There 's a color to my sorrow There 's a name for all this sadness Like the ocean in between us I am blue Blue is a river Blue remembered Blue water running clear Blue like a planet to a spaceman Blue river of my tears So I came here to the city where the dream burns like a furnace And I dazzled in these dark streets like a diamond in a coalface Then the cold wind from the islands blew a storm cloud across the new moon Like the gun smoke above the houses in my home Blue is a river Blue remembered Blue water running clear Blue like a planet to a spaceman Blue river of my tears Blue river of my tears
Matt Cutts : Try something new for 30 days
Is there something you 've always meant to do , wanted to do , but just ... haven 't ? Matt Cutts suggests : Try it for 30 days . This short , lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals .
A few years ago , I felt like I was stuck in a rut , so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher , Morgan Spurlock , and try something new for 30 days .
The idea is actually pretty simple .
Think about something you 've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days .
It turns out , 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life .
There 's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges .
The first was , instead of the months flying by , forgotten , the time was much more memorable .
This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month .
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day .
I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges , my self-confidence grew .
I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work -- for fun .
Even last year , I ended up hiking up Mt . Kilimanjaro , the highest mountain in Africa .
I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges .
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough , you can do anything for 30 days .
Have you ever wanted to write a novel ?
Every November , tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel from scratch in 30 days .
It turns out , all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month .
So I did .
By the way , the secret is not to go to sleep until you 've written your words for the day .
You might be sleep-deprived , but you 'll finish your novel .
Now is my book the next great American novel ?
No . I wrote it in a month .
It 's awful .
But for the rest of my life , if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party , I don 't have to say , " I 'm a computer scientist . "
No , no , if I want to , I can say , " I 'm a novelist . "
So here 's one last thing I 'd like to mention .
I learned that when I made small , sustainable changes , things I could keep doing , they were more likely to stick .
There 's nothing wrong with big , crazy challenges .
In fact , they 're a ton of fun .
But they 're less likely to stick .
When I gave up sugar for 30 days , day 31 looked like this .
So here 's my question to you : What are you waiting for ?
I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not , so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot for the next 30 days .
Thanks .
Emily Pilloton : Teaching design for change
Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural Bertie County , in North Carolina , to engage in a bold experiment of design-led community transformation . She 's teaching a design-build class called Studio H that engages high schoolers ' minds and bodies while bringing smart design and new opportunities to the poorest county in the state .
So this is a story of a place that I now call home .
It 's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both .
So this is Bertie County , North Carolina , USA .
To give you an idea of the " where : " So here 's North Carolina , and if we zoom in , Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state .
It 's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh .
And it 's very flat . It 's very swampy .
It 's mostly farmland .
The entire county is home to just 20,000 people , and they 're very sparsely distributed .
So there 's only 27 people per square mile , which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer .
Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America .
We 've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders .
We know the symptoms .
It 's the hollowing out of small towns .
It 's downtowns becoming ghost towns .
The brain drain -- where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back .
It 's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban .
And Bertie County is no exception to this .
Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with , like many communities similar to it , is that there 's no shared , collective investment in the future of rural communities .
Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities , and yet 20 percent of our population lives there .
So Bertie County is not only very rural ; it 's incredibly poor .
It is the poorest county in the state .
It has one in three of its children living in poverty , and it 's what is referred to as a " rural ghetto . "
The economy is mostly agricultural .
The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco , and we 're very proud of our Bertie County peanut .
The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant .
The county seat is Windsor .
This is like Times Square of Windsor that you 're looking at right now .
It 's home to only 2,000 people , and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years .
There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use .
You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand -- Bunn 's Barbecue being my absolute favorite .
But in the whole county there is no coffee shop , there 's no Internet cafe , there 's no movie theater , there 's no bookstore .
There isn 't even a Walmart .
Racially , the county is about 60 percent African-American , but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy .
So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American .
And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class , and you can see the difference is pretty stark .
So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement .
There 's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from , and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor 's degree or higher .
So there isn 't a big legacy in the pride of education .
In fact , two years ago , only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math .
So it sounds like I 'm painting a really bleak picture of this place , but I promise there is good news .
The biggest asset , in my opinion , one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man : This is Dr. Chip Zullinger , fondly known as Dr. Z.
He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system .
And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston , South Carolina and then in Denver , Colorado .
He started some of the country 's first charter schools in the late ' 80s in the U.S.
And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary , and he is the reason that I now live and work there .
So in February of 2009 , Dr. Zullinger invited us , Project H Design -- which is a non-profit design firm that I founded -- to come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district .
And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process -- one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don 't usually have access to design services or creative capital .
Specifically , we use these six design directives , probably the most important being number two : we design with , not for -- in that , when we 're doing humanitarian-focused design , it 's not about designing for clients anymore .
It 's about designing with people , and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within .
So at the time of being invited down there , we were based in San Francisco , and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009 , spending about half our time in Bertie County .
And when I say we , I mean Project H , but more specifically , I mean myself and my partner , Matthew Miller , who 's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder .
So fast-forward to today , and we now live there .
I have strategically cut Matt 's head out of this photo , because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits .
But this is our front porch . We live there .
We now call this place home .
Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth , we realized we had fallen in love with the place .
We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we 're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County , that , as designers and builders , you can 't do everywhere .
There 's space to experiment and to weld and to test things .
We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger .
There 's a nobility of real , hands-on , dirt-under-your-fingernails work .
But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there , there is a huge need .
There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County .
There isn 't a single licensed architect in the whole county .
And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool , something that Bertie County didn 't otherwise have , and to be sort of the -- to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit .
The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger -- that was why we were there .
But beyond that , we recognized that Bertie County , as a community , was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking .
So the goal became , yes , to apply design within education , but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development .
So in order to do this , we 've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education .
And I should say that these are three things that we 've done in Bertie County , but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond .
So the first of the three is design for education .
This is the most kind of direct , obvious intersection of the two things .
It 's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students .
This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we 're building schools out of these days .
And so this played out for us in a couple different ways .
The first was a series of renovations of computer labs .
So traditionally , the computer labs , particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County , where they have to benchmark test every other week , the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility .
You come in , you face the wall , you take your test and you leave .
So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology , to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging , more accessible , and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction .
So this is the lab at the high school , and the principal there is in love with this room .
Every time he has visitors , it 's the first place that he takes them .
And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape .
It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid .
So this game that the kids are playing here -- in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me .
And in Match Me , you take the class , divide it into two teams , one team on each side of the playground , and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires .
And then she 'll call out a math problem -- so let 's say four times four -- and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it .
So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins .
And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing .
Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores , a greater comfort level with the material , especially with the boys , that in going outside and playing , they aren 't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem -- and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material .
So with design for education , I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers , so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them .
So this is Mr. Perry . He 's the assistant superintendent .
He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself .
So the second approach is redesigning education itself .
This is the most complex .
It 's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom .
So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change , which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities .
So for us , this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie .
There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county .
And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system .
Right now I should say , there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection .
And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings , or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint , which I find myself squatting outside of a lot .
Aside from , you know , getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place , it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community .
It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community 's development .
So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer , and we 're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day .
And then the third approach , which is what I 'm most excited about , which is where we are now , is : design as education .
So " design as education " means that we could actually teach design within public schools , and not design-based learning -- not like " let 's learn physics by building a rocket , " but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose .
It also means that designers are no longer consultants , but we 're teachers , and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation .
And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring , rigid , verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by .
It 's hands-on , it 's in-your-face , it requires an active engagement , and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways .
So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class -- wood and metal shop class in particular -- historically , has been something intended for kids who aren 't going to go to college .
It 's a vocational training path .
It 's working-class ; it 's blue-collar .
The projects are things like , let 's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas .
And in recent decades , a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely .
So we thought , what if you could bring back shop class , but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed , and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process .
So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class .
And so this starts in four weeks , at the end of the summer , and my partner and I , Matthew and I , just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it .
And this is what it looks like .
So over the course of two semesters , the Fall and the Spring , the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio / shop space .
And during that time , they 're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding , coming back into the studio , doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work , and then moving into the shop and actually testing them , building them , prototyping them , figuring out if they are going to work and refining that .
And then over the summer , they 're offered a summer job .
They 're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community .
So the first project , which will be built next summer , is an open-air farmers ' market downtown , followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year .
So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say , " I built that , and I 'm proud of it . "
So I want you to meet three of our students .
This is Ryan .
She is 15 years old .
She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher .
She wants to go to college , but she wants to come back to Bertie County , because that 's where her family is from , where she calls home , and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she 's been fairly fortunate in .
So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way .
This is Eric . He plays for the football team .
He is really into dirtbike racing , and he wants to be an architect .
So for him , Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect , everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client .
And then this is Anthony .
He is 16 years old , loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands , and so for him , Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement .
He 's interested in forestry , but he isn 't sure , so if he ends up not going to college , he will have developed some industry-relevant skills .
What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom .
So this building downtown , which may very well become the site of our future farmers ' market , is now the classroom .
And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why -- that 's a homework assignment .
And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers ' market and it 's open to the public -- that 's the final exam .
And for the community , what design and building offers is real , visible , built progress .
It 's one project per year , and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future .
So we recognize that Studio H , especially in its first year , is a small story -- 13 students , it 's two teachers , it 's one project in one place .
But we feel like this could work in other places .
And I really , strongly believe in the power of the small story , because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale .
Because , when you zoom out that far , you lose the ability to view people as humans .
Ultimately , design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers .
And let 's face it , designers , we need to reinvent ourselves .
We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter , we need to work outside of our comfort zones more , and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard .
So while this is a very small story , we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design .
Thank you .
David Christian : The history of our world in 18 minutes
Backed by stunning illustrations , David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe , from the Big Bang to the Internet , in a riveting 18 minutes . This is " Big History " : an enlightening , wide-angle look at complexity , life and humanity , set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline .
First , a video .
Yes , it is a scrambled egg .
But as you look at it , I hope you 'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy .
Because you may notice that what 's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself .
And you 'll now see the yolk and the white have separated .
And now they 're going to be poured back into the egg .
And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works .
A scrambled egg is mush -- tasty mush -- but it 's mush .
An egg is a beautiful , sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things , such as chickens .
And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity .
In fact , this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics , the second law of thermodynamics , or the law of entropy .
What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order , lack of structure -- in fact , to mush .
And that 's why that video feels a bit strange .
And yet , look around us .
What we see around us is staggering complexity .
Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone , there are some 10 billion SKUs , or distinct commodities , being traded .
That 's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth .
And they 're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals , who are linked by trade , travel , and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity .
So here 's a great puzzle : in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics , how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I 've described , the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center ?
Well , the answer seems to be , the universe can create complexity , but with great difficulty .
In pockets , there appear what my colleague , Fred Spier , calls " Goldilocks conditions " -- not too hot , not too cold , just right for the creation of complexity .
And slightly more complex things appear .
And where you have slightly more complex things , you can get slightly more complex things .
And in this way , complexity builds stage by stage .
Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe .
We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments .
And at each threshold , the going gets tougher .
The complex things get more fragile , more vulnerable ; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent , and it 's more difficult to create complexity .
Now , we , as extremely complex creatures , desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law , and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility .
And that 's the story that we tell in big history .
But to do it , you have do something that may , at first sight , seem completely impossible .
You have to survey the whole history of the universe .
So let 's do it .
Let 's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years , to the beginning of time .
Around us , there 's nothing .
There 's not even time or space .
Imagine the darkest , emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that 's where we are .
And then suddenly , bang ! A universe appears , an entire universe .
And we 've crossed our first threshold .
The universe is tiny ; it 's smaller than an atom .
It 's incredibly hot .
It contains everything that 's in today 's universe , so you can imagine , it 's busting .
And it 's expanding at incredible speed .
And at first , it 's just a blur , but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur .
Within the first second , energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity .
And energy does something else quite magical : it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons .
And all of that happens in the first second .
Now we move forward 380,000 years .
That 's twice as long as humans have been on this planet .
And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium .
Now I want to pause for a moment , 380,000 years after the origins of the universe , because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage .
We know above all that it was extremely simple .
It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms , and they have no structure .
They 're really a sort of cosmic mush .
But that 's not completely true .
Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that , in fact , there are just tiny differences in that background .
What you see here , the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas .
These are tiny differences , but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity .
And this is how it works .
Gravity is more powerful where there 's more stuff .
So where you get slightly denser areas , gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms .
So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds .
And each cloud is compacted , gravity gets more powerful as density increases , the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud , and then , at the center of each cloud , the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees , protons start to fuse , there 's a huge release of energy , and , bam !
We have our first stars .
From about 200 million years after the Big Bang , stars begin to appear all through the universe , billions of them .
And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex .
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds .
When very large stars die , they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations , to form all the elements of the periodic table .
If , like me , you 're wearing a gold ring , it was forged in a supernova explosion .
So now the universe is chemically more complex .
And in a chemically more complex universe , it 's possible to make more things .
And what starts happening is that , around young suns , young stars , all these elements combine , they swirl around , the energy of the star stirs them around , they form particles , they form snowflakes , they form little dust motes , they form rocks , they form asteroids , and eventually , they form planets and moons .
And that is how our solar system was formed , four and a half billion years ago .
Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials .
So we 've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity .
Now , the going gets tougher .
The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile , significantly more vulnerable , but they 're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity .
I 'm talking , of course , about living organisms .
Living organisms are created by chemistry .
We are huge packages of chemicals .
So , chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force .
That operates over smaller scales than gravity , which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets .
Now , what are the ideal conditions for chemistry ?
What are the Goldilocks conditions ?
Well , first , you need energy , but not too much .
In the center of a star , there 's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again .
But not too little .
In intergalactic space , there 's so little energy that atoms can 't combine .
What you want is just the right amount , and planets , it turns out , are just right , because they 're close to stars , but not too close .
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements , and you need liquid such as water .
Why ?
Well , in gasses , atoms move past each other so fast that they can 't hitch up .
In solids , atoms are stuck together , they can 't move .
In liquids , they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules .
Now , where do you find such Goldilocks conditions ?
Well , planets are great , and our early Earth was almost perfect .
It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water .
And deep beneath those oceans , at cracks in the Earth 's crust , you 've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth , and you 've got a great diversity of elements .
So at those deep oceanic vents , fantastic chemistry began to happen , and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations .
But of course , life is more than just exotic chemistry .
How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable ?
Well , it 's here that life introduces an entirely new trick .
You don 't stabilize the individual ; you stabilize the template , the thing that carries information , and you allow the template to copy itself .
And DNA , of course , is the beautiful molecule that contains that information .
You 'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA .
Each rung contains information .
So , DNA contains information about how to make living organisms .
And DNA also copies itself .
So , it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean .
So the information spreads .
Notice that information has become part of our story .
The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections .
As it copies itself , once in every billion rungs , there tends to be an error .
And what that means is that DNA is , in effect , learning .
It 's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work .
So DNA 's learning and it 's building greater diversity and greater complexity .
And we can see this happening over the last four billion years .
For most of that time of life on Earth , living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells .
But they had great diversity , and , inside , great complexity .
Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago , multi-celled organisms appear .
You get fungi , you get fish , you get plants , you get amphibia , you get reptiles , and then , of course , you get the dinosaurs .
And occasionally , there are disasters .
Sixty-five million years ago , an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula , creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war , and the dinosaurs were wiped out .
Terrible news for the dinosaurs , but great news for our mammalian ancestors , who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs .
And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid .
Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago .
And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story .
Let me explain why .
We 've seen that DNA learns in a sense , it accumulates information .
But it is so slow .
DNA accumulates information through random errors , some of which just happen to work .
But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning : it had produced organisms with brains , and those organisms can learn in real time .
They accumulate information , they learn .
The sad thing is , when they die , the information dies with them .
Now what makes humans different is human language .
We are blessed with a language , a system of communication , so powerful and so precise that we can share what we 've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory .
And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information , and it can accumulate from generation to generation .
And that 's why , as a species , we 're so creative and so powerful , and that 's why we have a history .
We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift .
I call this ability collective learning .
It 's what makes us different .
We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history .
We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa , but then you see humans migrating into new environments , into desert lands , into jungles , into the ice age tundra of Siberia -- tough , tough environment -- into the Americas , into Australasia .
Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment , new ways of dealing with their surroundings .
Then 10,000 years ago , exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age , humans learned to farm .
Farming was an energy bonanza .
And exploiting that energy , human populations multiplied .
Human societies got larger , denser , more interconnected .
And then from about 500 years ago , humans began to link up globally through shipping , through trains , through telegraph , through the Internet , until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals .
And that brain is learning at warp speed .
And in the last 200 years , something else has happened .
We 've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels .
So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us .
So , here we are , back at the convention center .
We 've been on a journey , a return journey , of 13.7 billion years .
I hope you agree that this is a powerful story .
And it 's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role .
But it also contains warnings .
Collective learning is a very , very powerful force , and it 's not clear that we humans are in charge of it .
I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England , living through the Cuban Missile Crisis .
For a few days , the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction .
And the same weapons are still here , and they are still armed .
If we avoid that trap , others are waiting for us .
We 're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years .
So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us , but it can also show us our power with collective learning .
And now , finally , this is what I want .
I want my grandson , Daniel , and his friends and his generation , throughout the world , to know the story of big history , and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us .
And that 's why a group of us are building a free , online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world .
We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them , as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet .
I thank you for your attention .
Stefan Sagmeister : Designing with slogans
Rockstar designer Stefan Sagmeister delivers a short , witty talk on life lessons , expressed through surprising modes of design .
I was here about four years ago , talking about the relationship of design and happiness .
At the very end of it , I showed a list under that title .
I learned very few things in addition since -- but made a whole number of them into projects since .
These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland : " Everybody always thinks they are right . "
They were combined in the media .
" Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on . "
We 're doing changing media .
This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by .
You can 't help but actually ripping that spider web apart .
All of these things are pieces of graphic design .
We do them for our clients .
They are commissioned .
I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these , so there 's always a client attached to them .
These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that 's lined with fashion stores .
" Worrying solves nothing . "
" Money does not make me happy " appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine .
The printer lost the file , didn 't tell us .
When the magazine -- actually , when I got the subscription -- it was 12 following pages .
It said , " Money does does make me happy . "
And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building .
So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz .
It just says " Money , " and if you look down the side street , it says , " does not make me happy . "
We had a show that just came down last week in New York .
We steamed up the windows permanently , and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they 've learned into the steam in the window .
Everybody participated -- Milton Glaser , Massimo Vignelli .
Singapore was quite in discussion .
This is a little spot that we filmed there that 's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore .
And , of course , it 's one that 's dear to my heart , because all of these sentiments -- some banal , some a bit more profound -- all originally had come out of my diary .
And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation .
If it 's -- see it for a long enough time , I actually do something about it .
And the very last one is a billboard .
This is our roof in New York , the roof of the studio .
This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint .
We let that lie around in the sun .
As you all know , newsprint yellows significantly in the sun .
After a week , we took the stencils and the leaves off , shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot , so on day one the billboard said , " Complaining is silly . Either act or forget . "
Three days later it faded , and a week later , no more complaining anywhere .
Thank you so much .
Janine di Giovanni : What I saw in the war
Reporter Janine di Giovanni has been to the worst places on Earth to bring back stories from Bosnia , Sierra Leone and most recently Syria . She tells stories of human moments within large conflicts -- and explores that shocking transition when a familiar city street becomes a bombed-out battleground .
This is how war starts .
One day you 're living your ordinary life , you 're planning to go to a party , you 're taking your children to school , you 're making a dentist appointment .
The next thing , the telephones go out , the TVs go out , there 's armed men on the street , there 's roadblocks .
Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation .
It stops .
I 'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine , a Bosnian friend , about what happened to her , because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like .
She was walking to work one day in April , 1992 , in a miniskirt and high heels . She worked in a bank .
She was a young mother . She was someone who liked to party .
Great person .
And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path .
She thinks she 's dreaming , but she 's not .
And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover , and she hides behind a trash bin , in her high heels and her miniskirt .
And as she 's hiding there , she 's feeling ridiculous , but she 's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks , " I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole , down , down , down into chaos , and my life will never be the same again . "
A few weeks later , my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus , which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe .
And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front , crowds and crowds of people , " Take my child ! Take my child ! "
and passing her son to someone through a window .
And she didn 't see him for years .
The siege went on for three and a half years , and it was a siege without water , without power , without electricity , without heat , without food , in the middle of Europe , in the middle of the 20th century .
I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege , and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it 's taught me everything , not just about being a reporter , but about being a human being .
I learned about compassion .
I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes .
I learned about sharing . I learned about camaraderie .
Most of all , I learned about love .
Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos , I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors , share food , raise their children , drag someone who 's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life , helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals .
I learned so much about myself .
Martha Gellhorn , who 's one of my heroes , once said , " You can only love one war . The rest is responsibility . "
I went on to cover many , many , many wars after that , so many that I lost count , but there was nothing like Sarajevo .
Last April , I went back to a very strange -- what I called a deranged high school reunion .
What it was , was the 20th anniversary of the siege , the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo , and I don 't like the word " anniversary , " because it sounds like a party , and this was not a party .
It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war , humanitarian aid workers , and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves .
And the thing that struck me the most , that broke my heart , was walking down the main street of Sarajevo , where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago , and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs , empty , and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege , just in Sarajevo , not in all of Bosnia , and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it , and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children .
I now cover Syria , and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done .
I believe a story there has to be told .
I see , again , a template of the war in Bosnia .
And when I first arrived in Damascus , I saw this strange moment where people didn 't seem to believe that war was going to descend , and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I 've seen where war comes .
People don 't want to believe it 's coming , so they don 't leave , they don 't leave before they can .
They don 't get their money out .
They stay because you want to stay in your home .
And then war and chaos descend .
Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot .
In 1994 , I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda .
Between April and August , 1994 , one million people were slaughtered .
Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number , I want you just for a second to think of a million people .
And to give you some example , I remember standing and looking down a road as far as I could see , at least a mile , and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead .
And that was just a small percentage of the dead .
And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes .
So we learn a lot from war , and I mention Rwanda because it is one place , like South Africa , where nearly 20 years on , there is healing .
Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women , which is fantastic , and there 's also within the national constitution now , you 're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi .
You 're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity , which is , of course , what started the slaughter in the first place .
And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story , or I find it beautiful .
There was a group of children , mixed Hutus and Tutsis , and a group of women who were adopting them , and they lined up and one was just given to the next .
There was no kind of compensation for , you 're a Tutsi , you 're a Hutu , you might have killed my mother , you might have killed my father .
They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation , and I find this remarkable .
So when people ask me how I continue to cover war , and why I continue to do it , this is why .
When I go back to Syria , next week in fact , what I see is incredibly heroic people , some of them fighting for democracy , for things we take for granted every single day .
And that 's pretty much why I do it .
In 2004 , I had a little baby boy , and I call him my miracle child , because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life , this ray of hope was born .
And I called him Luca , which means " The bringer of light , " because he does bring light to my life .
But I 'm talking about him because when he was four months old , my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards , and I remember getting on the plane in tears , crying to be separated from my son , and while I was there , a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me , " What are you doing here ?
Why aren 't you home with Luca ? "
And I said , " Well , I have to see . " It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq , " I have to see , I have to see what is happening here .
I have to report it . "
And he said , " Go home , because if you miss his first tooth , if you miss his first step , you 'll never forgive yourself .
But there will always be another war . "
And there , sadly , will always be wars .
And I am deluding myself if I think , as a journalist , as a reporter , as a writer , what I do can stop them . I can 't .
I 'm not Kofi Annan . He can 't stop a war .
He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn 't do it .
I 'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person .
I 'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor , and I can 't tell you the times of how helpless I 've felt to have people dying in front of me , and I couldn 't save them .
All I am is a witness .
My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless .
A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world .
And that 's what I try to do .
I 'm not always successful , and sometimes it 's incredibly frustrating , because you feel like you 're writing into a void , or you feel like no one cares .
Who cares about Syria ? Who cares about Bosnia ?
Who cares about the Congo , the Ivory Coast , Liberia , Sierra Leone , all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life ?
But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux , the heart of the matter , for us reporters who do this .
And all I can really do is hope , not to policymakers or politicians , because as much as I 'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something , I don 't delude myself .
But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast , if you can remember the story of Sarajevo , or the story of Rwanda , then I 've done my job .
Thank you very much .
Arthur Benjamin : A performance of " Mathemagic "
In a lively show , mathemagician Arthur Benjamin races a team of calculators to figure out 3-digit squares , solves another massive mental equation and guesses a few birthdays . How does he do it ? He 'll tell you .
Well , good morning ladies and gentlemen .
My name is Art Benjamin , and I am a " mathemagician . "
What that means is , I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call " mathemagics . "
But before I get started , I have a quick question for the audience .
By any chance , did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator ?
Seriously , if you have a calculator with you , raise your hand , raise your hand .
I -- was -- your hand go up ?
Now bring it out , bring it out . Anybody else ?
I see , I see one way in the back .
You sir , that 's three , And anybody on this side here ?
OK , you over there on the aisle . Would the four of you with calculators please bring out your calculators , then join me up on stage .
And let 's give these volunteers a nice round of applause .
That 's right . Now , since I haven 't had the chance to work with these calculators , I need to make sure that they are all working properly .
Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number please ?
How about a two-digit number ?
Audience : 22 .
Arthur Benjamin : 22 . And another two-digit number , Sir ?
Audience : 47 .
Multiply 22 times 47 , make sure you get 1,034 , or the calculators are not working . Do all of you get 1,034 ? 1,034 ?
No .
594 . Let 's give three of them a nice round of applause there .
Would you like to try a more standard calculator , just in case ?
OK , great .
What I 'm going to try and do then -- I notice that took some of you a little bit of time to get your answer .
That 's OK . I 'll give you a shortcut for multiplying even faster on the calculator .
There is something called the square of a number , which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself .
For instance , five squared would be ?
Audience : 25 .
25 . Now , the way we can square on most calculators -- let me demonstrate with this one -- is by taking the number , such as five , hitting " times " and then " equals , " and on most calculators that will give you the square .
On some of these ancient RPN calculators , you 've got an " x squared " button on it , will allow you to do the calculation even faster .
What I 'm going to try and do now is to square , in my head , four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators , even using the shortcut method .
What I 'll use is the second row this time , and I 'll get four of you -- one , two , three , four -- to each yell out a two-digit number , and if you would square the first number , and if you would square the second , the third and the fourth , I will try and race you to the answer . OK ?
So quickly , a two-digit number please .
Audience : 37 .
37 squared , OK .
Audience : 23 .
23 squared , OK .
Audience : 59 .
59 squared , OK , and finally ?
Audience : 93 .
93 squared . Would you call out your answers , please ?
1369 . 1369 .
529 .
529 .
3481 .
3481 .
8649 .
Thank you very much .
Let me try to take this one step further .
I 'm going to try to square some three-digit numbers this time .
I won 't even write these down -- I 'll just call them out as they 're called out to me .
Anyone I point to , call out a three-digit number .
Anyone on our panel , verify the answer .
Just give some indication if it 's right .
A three-digit number , sir , yes ?
Audience : 987 .
987 squared is 974,169 .
Yes ? Good .
Another , another three-digit -- -- another three-digit number , sir ?
Audience : 457 .
457 squared is 205,849 .
205,849 ?
Yes ?
OK , another , another three-digit number , sir ?
Audience : 321 .
321 is 103,041 . 103,041 .
Yes ? One more three-digit number please .
Audience : Oh , 722 .
722 is 500 -- ooh , that 's a harder one .
Is that 513,284 ?
Yes .
Yes ? Oh , one more , one more three-digit number please .
Audience : 162 .
162 squared is 26,244 .
Thank you very much .
Let me try to take this one step further .
I 'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time .
Now you can all take your time on this ; I will not beat you to the answer on this one , but I will try to get the answer right .
To make this a little bit more random , let 's take the fourth row this time , let 's say , one , two , three , four .
If each of you would call out a single digit between zero and nine , that will be the four-digit number that I 'll square .
Audience : Nine .
Nine .
Audience : Seven . Seven .
Audience : Five . Five .
Audience : Eight . Eight .
9,758 , this will take me a little bit of time , so bear with me .
95,218,564 ?
Yes .
Thank you very much .
Now , I would attempt to square a five-digit number -- and I can -- but unfortunately most calculators cannot .
Eight-digit capacity -- don 't you hate that ?
So , since we 've reached the limits of our calculators -- what 's that ? Does yours go -- I don 't know .
Does yours go higher ?
Oh -- yours does ?
I can probably do it .
I 'll talk to you later .
In the meanwhile , let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier .
Let 's take the largest number on the board here , 8649 .
Would you each enter that on your calculator ?
And instead of squaring it this time , I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want , but don 't tell me what you 're multiplying by -- just multiply it by any random three-digit number .
So you should have as an answer either a six-digit or probably a seven-digit number .
How many digits do you have , six or seven ?
Seven , and yours ? Seven .
Seven ? Seven ?
And , uncertain .
Yeah .
Seven . Is there any possible way that I could know what seven digit numbers you have ? Say " No . "
Good . Then I shall attempt the impossible -- or at least the improbable .
What I 'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits , any six of them , in any order you 'd like .
One digit at a time , I shall try and determine the digit you 've left out .
So , starting with your seven-digit number , call out any six of them please .
One , OK , 197042 .
Did you leave out the number 6 ?
Yes , Good , OK , that 's one .
You have a seven-digit number , call out any six of them please .
44875 .
I think I only heard five numbers . I -- wait -- 44875 -- did you leave out the number 6 ?
Yes . Same as she did , OK . You 've got a seven-digit number -- call out any six of them loud and clear .
079044 .
I think you left out the number 3 ?
That 's three . The odds of me getting all four of these right by random guessing would be one in 10,000 : 10 to the fourth power .
OK , any six of them .
Really scramble them up this time , please .
263972 .
Did you leave out the number 7 ?
And let 's give all four of these people a nice round of applause .
Thank you very much .
For my next number -- while I mentally recharge my batteries , I have one more question for the audience .
By any chance , does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on ?
If you think you know your birth day , raise your hand .
Let 's see , starting with -- let 's start with a gentleman first , OK sir , what year was it , first of all ? That 's why I start with a gentleman first .
What year ?
Audience : 1953 .
1953 , and the month ?
Audience : November . November what ?
Audience : 23rd .
23rd -- was that a Monday ? Audience : Yes .
Yes , good . Somebody else ? Who else would like -- see I don 't -- haven 't seen any women 's hands up .
OK , it 's -- how about you , what year ?
Audience : 1949 . 1949 , and the month ?
Audience : October . October what ?
Audience : Fifth .
Fifth -- was that a Wednesday ?
Yes , my -- I 'll go way to the back right now , how about you ?
Yell it out , what year ? Audience : 1959 .
1959 , OK -- and the month ?
Audience : February .
February what ? Audience : Sixth .
Sixth -- was that a Friday ? Audience : Yes .
Good , how about the person behind her ?
Call -- call -- what year was it ?
Audience : 1947 . 1947 , and the month ?
Audience : May . May what ?
Audience : Seventh . Seventh -- would that be a Wednesday ?
Audience : Yes .
Thank you very much .
Anybody here who 'd like to know the day of the week they were born ?
We can do it that way .
Of course , I could just make up an answer and you wouldn 't know , so I come prepared for that .
I brought with me a book of calendars .
It goes as far back into the past as 1800 , ' cause you never know .
I didn 't mean to look at you , sir -- you were just sitting there .
Anyway , Chris , you can help me out here , if you wouldn 't mind .
This is a book of calendars , and I 'll ask -- who was it that wanted to know their birth day ? You sir ? OK .
What year was it , first of all ?
Audience : 1966 .
'66 -- turn to the calendar with 1966 -- and what month ?
Audience : April . April what ?
Audience : 17th . 17th -- I believe that was a Sunday .
Can you confirm , Chris ?
Yes . Yeah , OK . I 'll tell you what , Chris : as long as you have that book in front of you , do me a favor , turn to a year outside of the 1900s , either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s -- that 'll be a much greater challenge for me .
What year , Chris , would you like ?
1824 .
1824 , OK .
And what month ? June .
June what ? Sixth .
Sixth -- was that a Sunday ?
It was . And it was cloudy .
Good , thank you very much .
But I 'd like to wrap things up now by alluding to something from earlier in the presentation .
There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator .
Where is he , would you stand up , 10-digit guy ?
OK , well stand up for me just for a second , so I can see where you are .
OK , oh , OK -- you have a 10-digit calculator , sir , as well ?
OK , what I 'm going to try and do , is to square in my head a five-digit number requiring a 10-digit calculator .
But to make my job more interesting for you , as well as for me , I 'm going to do this problem thinking out loud .
So you can actually , honestly hear what 's going on in my mind while I do a calculation of this size .
Now , I have to apologize to our magician friend Lennart Green .
I know as a magician we 're not supposed to reveal our secrets , but I 'm not too afraid that people are going to start doing my show next week , so -- I think we 're OK .
So , let 's see , let 's take a -- let 's take a different row of people , starting with you .
I 'll get five digits : one , two , three , four -- oh , I did this row already . Let 's do the row before you , starting with you sir : one , two , three , four , five .
Call out a single digit -- that will be the five-digit number that I will try to square . Go ahead .
Audience : Five . Five .
Audience : Seven . Seven .
Audience : Six . Six .
Audience : Eight . Eight .
Audience : Three . Three .
57,683 squared . Yuck .
Let me explain to you how I 'm going to attempt this problem .
I 'm going to break the problem down into three parts .
I 'll do 57,000 squared , plus 683 squared , plus 57,000 times 683 times two .
Add all those numbers together , and with any luck , arrive at the answer .
Now , let me recap .
Thank you .
While I explain something else -- -- I know , that you can use , right ?
While I do these calculation [ s ] , you might hear certain words , as opposed to numbers , creep into the calculation .
Let me explain what that is .
This is a phonetic code , a mnemonic device that I use , that allows me to convert numbers into words .
I store them as words , and later on retrieve them as numbers .
I know it sounds complicated ; it 's not -- I just don 't want you to think you 're seeing something out of " Rain Man " here .
There 's definitely a method to my madness -- definitely , definitely . Sorry .
If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards , you can talk to me then . All right -- by the way , one last instruction , for my judges with the calculators -- OK , you know who you are -- there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here .
If I do , don 't tell me what the mistake is ; just say , " you 're close , " or something like that , and I 'll try and figure out the answer -- which could be pretty entertaining in itself .
If , however , I am right , whatever you do , don 't keep it to yourself , OK ?
Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right , because this is my big finish , OK .
So , without any more stalling , here we go .
I 'll start the problem in the middle , with 57 times 683 .
Now , 57 times 68 is 3,400 , plus 476 is 3876 , that 's 38,760 plus 171 , 38,760 plus 171 is 38,931 .
38,931 ; double that to get 77,862 .
77,862 becomes cookie fission , cookie fission is 77,822 .
That seems right , I 'll go on . Cookie fission , OK .
Next , I do 57 squared , which is 3,249 , so I can say , three billion . Take the 249 , add that to cookie , 249 , oops , but I see a carry coming -- 249 -- add that to cookie , 250 plus 77 , is 327 million -- fission , fission , OK , finally , we do 683 squared , that 's 700 times 666 , plus 17 squared is 466,489 , rev up if I need it , rev up , take the 466 , add that to fission , to get , oh gee -- 328,489 .
Audience : Yeah !
Good .
Thank you very much .
I hope you enjoyed mathemagics . Thank you .
Erik Brynjolfsson : The key to growth ? Race with the machines
As machines take on more jobs , many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed . Is this the end of growth ? No , says Erik Brynjolfsson -- it 's simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy . A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers as our teammates . Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon .
Growth is not dead .
Let 's start the story 120 years ago , when American factories began to electrify their operations , igniting the Second Industrial Revolution .
The amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for 30 years . Thirty years .
That 's long enough for a generation of managers to retire .
You see , the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors , but they didn 't redesign the factories to take advantage of electricity 's flexibility .
It fell to the next generation to invent new work processes , and then productivity soared , often doubling or even tripling in those factories .
Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology , like the steam engine before it .
General purpose technologies drive most economic growth , because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations , like lightbulbs and , yes , factory redesign .
Is there a general purpose technology of our era ?
Sure . It 's the computer .
But technology alone is not enough .
Technology is not destiny .
We shape our destiny , and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories , we 're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system .
We 're not doing as well at that job as we should be .
As we 'll see in a moment , productivity is actually doing all right , but it has become decoupled from jobs , and the income of the typical worker is stagnating .
These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation , but they are actually the growing pains of what Andrew McAfee and I call the new machine age .
Let 's look at some data .
So here 's GDP per person in America .
There 's some bumps along the way , but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it .
This is a log scale , so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms .
And here 's productivity .
You can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the mid- ' 70s , but it matches up pretty well with the Second Industrial Revolution , when factories were learning how to electrify their operations .
After a lag , productivity accelerated again .
So maybe " history doesn 't repeat itself , but sometimes it rhymes . "
Today , productivity is at an all-time high , and despite the Great Recession , it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s , the roaring 1990s , and that was faster than the ' 70s or ' 80s .
It 's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution .
And that 's just the United States .
The global news is even better .
Worldwide incomes have grown at a faster rate in the past decade than ever in history .
If anything , all these numbers actually understate our progress , because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production .
It 's mind not matter , brain not brawn , ideas not things .
That creates a problem for standard metrics , because we 're getting more and more stuff for free , like Wikipedia , Google , Skype , and if they post it on the web , even this TED Talk .
Now getting stuff for free is a good thing , right ?
Sure , of course it is .
But that 's not how economists measure GDP .
Zero price means zero weight in the GDP statistics .
According to the numbers , the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago , but I 'm listening to more and better music than ever .
You know , I bet you are too .
In total , my research estimates that the GDP numbers miss over 300 billion dollars per year in free goods and services on the Internet .
Now let 's look to the future .
There are some super smart people who are arguing that we 've reached the end of growth , but to understand the future of growth , we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth .
I 'm optimistic , because the new machine age is digital , exponential and combinatorial .
When goods are digital , they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost , and they can be delivered almost instantaneously .
Welcome to the economics of abundance .
But there 's a subtler benefit to the digitization of the world .
Measurement is the lifeblood of science and progress .
In the age of big data , we can measure the world in ways we never could before .
Secondly , the new machine age is exponential .
Computers get better faster than anything else ever .
A child 's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996 .
But our brains are wired for a linear world .
As a result , exponential trends take us by surprise .
I used to teach my students that there are some things , you know , computers just aren 't good at , like driving a car through traffic .
That 's right , here 's Andy and me grinning like madmen because we just rode down Route 101 in , yes , a driverless car .
Thirdly , the new machine age is combinatorial .
The stagnationist view is that ideas get used up , like low-hanging fruit , but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations .
Here 's an example . In just a matter of a few weeks , an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users .
He was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of Facebook , and Facebook was built on top of the web , and that was built on top of the Internet , and so on and so forth .
Now individually , digital , exponential and combinatorial would each be game-changers .
Put them together , and we 're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs , like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound .
You know , robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation .
But perhaps the most important invention , the most important invention is machine learning .
Consider one project : IBM 's Watson .
These little dots here , those are all the champions on the quiz show " Jeopardy . "
At first , Watson wasn 't very good , but it improved at a rate faster than any human could , and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT , Watson beat the world " Jeopardy " champion .
At age seven , Watson is still kind of in its childhood .
Recently , its teachers let it surf the Internet unsupervised .
The next day , it started answering questions with profanities .
Damn .
But you know , Watson is growing up fast .
It 's being tested for jobs in call centers , and it 's getting them .
It 's applying for legal , banking and medical jobs , and getting some of them .
Isn 't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines , perhaps the most important invention in human history , some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating ?
Like the first two industrial revolutions , the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out , but they are staggering .
So does that mean we have nothing to worry about ?
No . Technology is not destiny .
Productivity is at an all time high , but fewer people now have jobs .
We have created more wealth in the past decade than ever , but for a majority of Americans , their income has fallen .
This is the great decoupling of productivity from employment , of wealth from work .
You know , it 's not surprising that millions of people have become disillusioned by the great decoupling , but like too many others , they misunderstand its basic causes .
Technology is racing ahead , but it 's leaving more and more people behind .
Today , we can take a routine job , codify it in a set of machine-readable instructions , and then replicate it a million times .
You know , I recently overheard a conversation that epitomizes these new economics .
This guy says , " Nah , I don 't use H & amp ; R Block anymore .
TurboTax does everything that my tax preparer did , but it 's faster , cheaper and more accurate . "
How can a skilled worker compete with a $ 39 piece of software ?
She can 't .
Today , millions of Americans do have faster , cheaper , more accurate tax preparation , and the founders of Intuit have done very well for themselves .
But 17 percent of tax preparers no longer have jobs .
That is a microcosm of what 's happening , not just in software and services , but in media and music , in finance and manufacturing , in retailing and trade -- in short , in every industry .
People are racing against the machine , and many of them are losing that race .
What can we do to create shared prosperity ?
The answer is not to try to slow down technology .
Instead of racing against the machine , we need to learn to race with the machine .
That is our grand challenge .
The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov , the world chess champion , played Deep Blue , a supercomputer .
The machine won that day , and today , a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster .
It got so bad that , when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer , Jan Donner , the Dutch grandmaster , replied , " I 'd bring a hammer . "
But today a computer is no longer the world chess champion .
Neither is a human , because Kasparov organized a freestyle tournament where teams of humans and computers could work together , and the winning team had no grandmaster , and it had no supercomputer .
What they had was better teamwork , and they showed that a team of humans and computers , working together , could beat any computer or any human working alone .
Racing with the machine beats racing against the machine .
Technology is not destiny .
We shape our destiny .
Thank you .
Jonas Eliasson : How to solve traffic jams
It 's an unfortunate reality in nearly every major city — road congestion , especially during rush hours . Jonas Eliasson reveals how subtly nudging just a small percentage of drivers to stay off major roads can make traffic jams a thing of the past .
Hi . I 'm here to talk about congestion , namely road congestion .
Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon .
It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world , which is a little bit surprising when you think about it .
I mean , think about how different cities are , actually .
I mean , you have the typical European cities , with a dense urban core , good public transportation mostly , not a lot of road capacity .
But then , on the other hand , you have the American cities .
It 's moving by itself , okay .
Anyway , the American cities : lots of roads dispersed over large areas , almost no public transportation .
And then you have the emerging world cities , with a mixed variety of vehicles , mixed land-use patterns , also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core .
And traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures : dense cities or dispersed cities , lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information , or lots of different things , but nothing seems to work .
But all of these attempts have one thing in common .
They 're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving .
They 're essentially , to a point , attempts at planning what other people should do , planning their life for them .
Now , planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do , and let me tell you a story .
Back in 1989 , when the Berlin Wall fell , an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying , basically , " Hi , this is Vladimir . I 'd like to know , who 's in charge of London 's bread supply ? "
And the urban planner in London goes , " What do you mean , who 's in charge of London 's — I mean , no one is in charge . "
" Oh , but surely someone must be in charge .
I mean , it 's a very complicated system . Someone must control all of this . "
" No . No . No one is in charge .
I mean , it basically -- I haven 't really thought of it .
It basically organizes itself . "
It organizes itself .
That 's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing , and this is a very deep insight .
When you try to solve really complex social problems , the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives .
You don 't plan the details , and people will figure out what to do , how to adapt to this new framework .
And let 's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion .
This is a map of Stockholm , my hometown .
Now , Stockholm is a medium-sized city , roughly two million people , but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges -- narrow bridges , old bridges -- which means lots of road congestion .
And these red dots show the most congested parts , which are the bridges that lead into the inner city .
And then someone came up with the idea that , apart from good public transport , apart from spending money on roads , let 's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks .
Now , one or two euros , that isn 't really a lot of money , I mean compared to parking charges and running costs , etc . , so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn 't really react to this fairly small charge .
You would be wrong .
One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours .
Now , 20 percent , well , that 's a fairly huge figure , you might think , but you 've still got 80 percent left of the problem , right ?
Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic .
Now , that 's also wrong , because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon , meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really , really rapidly .
But fortunately , it also works the other way around .
If you can reduce traffic even somewhat , then congestion will go down much faster than you might think .
Now , congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3 , 2006 , and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm , one of the typical streets , January 2 .
The first day with the congestion charges looked like this .
This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets .
You really reduce congestion quite substantially .
But , well , as I said , I mean , car drivers adapt , right ?
So after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges .
Wrong again . It 's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm , and we basically have the same low traffic levels still .
But you see , there 's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007 .
Well , the thing is that , the congestion charges , they were introduced first as a trial , so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July , followed by a referendum , and then they were reintroduced again in 2007 , which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity .
I mean , this was a really fun experiment to start with , and we actually got to do it twice .
And personally , I would like to do this every once a year or so , but they won 't let me do that .
But it was fun anyway .
So , we followed up . What happened ?
This is the last day with the congestion charges , July 31 , and you see the same street but now it 's summer , and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year , and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this .
All the cars were back again , and you even have to admire the car drivers . They adapt so extremely quickly .
The first day they all came back .
And this effect hanged on . So 2007 figures looked like this .
Now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know , but I would say that the most surprising slide here I 'm going to show you today is not this one . It 's this one .
This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm , and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006 , people were fiercely against it .
Seventy percent of the population didn 't want this .
But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect , that people hated it more and more .
No , on the contrary , they changed , up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges , meaning that -- I mean , let me repeat that : 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free .
Okay . So why can that be ? Why is that ?
Well , think about it this way . Who changed ?
I mean , the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared , surely they must be discontent in a way .
And where did they go ? If we can understand this , then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this .
Well , so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services , and tried to figure out who changed , and where did they go ?
And it turned out that they don 't know themselves .
For some reason , the car drivers are -- they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do .
And why is that ? It 's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think .
Each day , people make new decisions , and people change and the world changes around them , and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don 't even notice .
They 're not even aware of this themselves .
And the other question , who changed their mind ?
Who changed their opinion , and why ?
So we did another interview survey , tried to figure out why people changed their mind , and what type of group changed their minds ?
And after analyzing the answers , it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven 't changed their minds .
They 're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along .
Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent , and reduced congestion by enormous numbers , and people aren 't even aware that they have changed , and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along .
This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems , and when you do that , you shouldn 't try to tell people how to adapt .
You should just nudge them in the right direction .
And if you do it right , people will actually embrace the change , and if you do it right , people will actually even like it .
Thank you .
Sheena Iyengar : The art of choosing
Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices -- and how we feel about the choices we make . At TEDGlobal , she talks about both trivial choices and profound ones , and shares her groundbreaking research that has uncovered some surprising attitudes about our decisions .
Today , I 'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes .
My base of operations is in the U.S. , but let 's start at the other end of the map , in Kyoto , Japan , where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago .
I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings , but they popped up when I least expected it .
On my first day , I went to a restaurant , and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar .
After a pause , the waiter said , " One does not put sugar in green tea . "
" I know , " I said . " I 'm aware of this custom .
But I really like my tea sweet . "
In response , he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation .
" One does not put sugar in green tea . "
" I understand , " I said , " that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea , but I 'd like to put some sugar in my green tea . "
Surprised by my insistence , the waiter took up the issue with the manager .
Pretty soon , a lengthy discussion ensued , and finally the manager came over to me and said , " I am very sorry . We do not have sugar . "
Well , since I couldn 't have my tea the way I wanted it , I ordered a cup of coffee , which the waiter brought over promptly .
Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar .
My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet , green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding .
This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice .
From my American perspective , when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences , she has every right to have that request met .
The American way , to quote Burger King , is to " have it your way , " because , as Starbucks says , " happiness is in your choices . "
But from the Japanese perspective , it 's their duty to protect those who don 't know any better -- in this case , the ignorant gaijin -- from making the wrong choice .
Let 's face it : the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards , and they were doing their best to help me save face .
Americans tend to believe that they 've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice .
They think that choice , as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans .
Unfortunately , these beliefs are based on assumptions that don 't always hold true in many countries , in many cultures .
At times they don 't even hold true at America 's own borders .
I 'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them .
As I do so , I hope you 'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds .
First assumption : if a choice affects you , then you should be the one to make it .
This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for .
It is essential for success .
In America , the primary locus of choice is the individual .
People must choose for themselves , sometimes sticking to their guns , regardless of what other people want or recommend .
It 's called " being true to yourself . "
But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice ?
Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question .
In one study , which we ran in Japantown , San Francisco , we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory , and we divided them up into three groups .
The first group came in , and they were greeted by Miss Smith , who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles .
The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do , and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with .
When the second group of children came in , they were brought to the same room , shown the same anagrams , but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with .
Now when the third group came in , they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers .
In reality , the kids who were told what to do , whether by Miss Smith or their mothers , were actually given the very same activity , which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen .
With this procedure , we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity , making it easier for us to compare performance .
Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed .
Anglo-Americans , they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them , as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers .
It didn 't matter who did the choosing , if the task was dictated by another , their performance suffered .
In fact , some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted .
One girl named Mary said , " You asked my mother ? "
In contrast , Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice , second best when they chose for themselves , and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith .
A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked , " Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said ? "
The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents ' approach to choice .
For them , choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality , but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected .
If they had a concept of being true to one 's self , then that self , most likely , [ was ] composed , not of an individual , but of a collective .
Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one 's own preferences .
Or , you could say that the individual 's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others .
The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others .
When , in contrast , two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected , then they may amplify one another 's success by turning choosing into a collective act .
To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships .
Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands .
It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility .
It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act .
People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating , but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone .
The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this .
The more choices you have , the more likely you are to make the best choice .
So bring it on , Walmart , with 100,000 different products , and Amazon , with 27 million books and Match.com with -- what is it ? -- 15 million date possibilities now .
You will surely find the perfect match .
Let 's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe .
Here , I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries , who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society .
One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question , but from a simple gesture of hospitality .
When the participants arrived for their interview , I offered them a set of drinks : Coke , Diet Coke , Sprite -- seven , to be exact .
During the very first session , which was run in Russia , one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard .
" Oh , but it doesn 't matter .
It 's all just soda . That 's just one choice . "
I was so struck by this comment that from then on , I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas , and I asked them , " How many choices are these ? "
Again and again , they perceived these seven different sodas , not as seven choices , but as one choice : soda or no soda .
When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas , now they perceived it as only three choices -- juice , water and soda .
Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans , not just to a particular flavor of soda , but to a particular brand .
You know , research shows repeatedly that we can 't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi .
Of course , you and I know that Coke is the better choice .
For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world , choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is .
Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better , and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters .
But for Eastern Europeans , the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge .
They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn 't know how to swim .
When asked , " What words and images do you associate with choice ? "
Grzegorz from Warsaw said , " Ah , for me it is fear .
There are some dilemmas you see .
I am used to no choice . "
Bohdan from Kiev said , in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace , " It is too much .
We do not need everything that is there . "
A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained , " The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them .
They were never given a chance to learn how to react . "
And Tomasz , a young Polish man said , " I don 't need twenty kinds of chewing gum .
I don 't mean to say that I want no choice , In reality , many choices are between things that are not that much different .
The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options .
Americans train their whole lives to play " spot the difference . "
They practice this from such an early age that they 've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability .
In fact , though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice , we don 't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent .
When someone can 't see how one choice is unlike another , or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast , the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating .
Instead of making better choices , we become overwhelmed by choice , sometimes even afraid of it .
Choice no longer offers opportunities , but imposes constraints .
It 's not a marker of liberation , but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae .
In other words , choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it .
But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice .
Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice .
We all have physical , mental and emotional limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter , even in the grocery store , let alone over the course of our entire lives .
A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they 're making a choice , they make poorer decisions , whether it be health care , investment , other critical areas .
Yet still , many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them .
This brings me to the third , and perhaps most problematic , assumption : " You must never say no to choice . "
To examine this , let 's go back to the U.S.
and then hop across the pond to France .
Right outside Chicago , a young couple , Susan and Daniel Mitchell , were about to have their first baby .
They 'd already picked out a name for her , Barbara , after her grandmother .
One night , when Susan was seven months pregnant , she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room .
The baby was delivered through a C-section , but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia , Unable to breathe on her own , she was put on a ventilator .
Two days later , the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice : They could either remove Barbara off the life support , in which case she would die within a matter of hours , or they could keep her on life support , in which case she might still die within a matter of days .
If she survived , she would remain in a permanent vegetative state , never able to walk , talk or interact with others .
What do they do ?
What do any parent do ?
In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali , American and French parents were interviewed .
They had all suffered the same tragedy .
In all cases , the life support was removed , and the infants had died .
But there was a big difference .
In France , the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed , while in the United States , the final decision rested with the parents .
We wondered : does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one ?
We found that it did .
Even up to a year later , American parents were more likely to express negative emotions , as compared to their French counterparts .
French parents were more likely to say things like , " Noah was here for so little time , but he taught us so much .
He gave us a new perspective on life . "
American parents were more likely to say things like , " What if ? What if ? "
Another parent complained , " I feel as if they purposefully tortured me .
How did they get me to do that ? "
And another parent said , " I feel as if I 've played a role in an execution . "
But when the American parents were asked the doctors make the decision , they all said , " No . "
They could not imagine turning that choice over to another , even though having made that choice made them feel trapped , guilty , angry .
In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed .
These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice , because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice .
In her essay , " The White Album , " Joan Didion writes , " We tell ourselves stories in order to live .
We interpret what we see , select the most workable of the multiple choices .
We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images , by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria , which is our actual experience . "
The story Americans tell , the story upon which the American dream depends , is the story of limitless choice .
This narrative promises so much : freedom , happiness , success .
It lays the world at your feet and says , " You can have anything , everything . "
It 's a great story , and it 's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it .
But when you take a close look , you start to see the holes , and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways .
Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice , believing that they will be , or ought to be , welcomed with open hearts and minds .
But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn 't always work out that way .
The phantasmagoria , the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative , varies from place to place .
No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere .
Moreover , Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative , which has been driving their choices for so long .
Robert Frost once said that , " It is poetry that is lost in translation . "
This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving , whatever gives us a new way to see , cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language .
But Joseph Brodsky said that , " It is poetry that is gained in translation , " suggesting that translation can be a creative , transformative act .
When it comes to choice , we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives .
Instead of replacing one story with another , we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written .
No matter where we 're from and what your narrative is , we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do , and what it can represent .
And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism .
Rather , it teaches us when and how to act .
It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice , to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn 't always deliver .
If we learn to speak to one another , albeit through translation , then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness , complexity and compelling beauty .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Sheena , there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book .
But by now it 's evident to everyone in this room . You 're blind .
And I guess one of the questions on everybody 's mind is : How does that influence your study of choosing because that 's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on ?
Sheena Iyengar : Well , it 's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that 's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices .
And as you just mentioned , there 's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days .
Yeah , I -- as you would expect -- get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest .
And I can 't decide .
And so one time I was in a beauty salon , and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink .
And one was called " Ballet Slippers . "
And the other one was called " Adorable . "
And so I asked these two ladies , and the one lady told me , " Well , you should definitely wear ' Ballet Slippers . ' " " Well , what does it look like ? "
" Well , it 's a very elegant shade of pink . "
" Okay , great . "
The other lady tells me to wear " Adorable . "
" What does it look like ? "
" It 's a glamorous shade of pink . "
And so I asked them , " Well , how do I tell them apart ?
What 's different about them ? "
And they said , " Well , one is elegant , the other one 's glamorous . "
Okay , we got that .
And the only thing they had consensus on : well , if I could see them , I would clearly be able to tell them apart .
And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color , so I decided to do a little experiment .
So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory , and I stripped the labels off .
And I brought women into the laboratory , and I asked them , " Which one would you pick ? "
50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick , of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles .
At which point you start to wonder who the trick 's really played on .
Now , of the women that could tell them apart , when the labels were off , they picked " Adorable , " and when the labels were on , they picked " Ballet Slippers . "
So as far as I can tell , a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different .
Thank you . Sheena Iyengar . Thank you Sheena .
Abigail Washburn : Building US-China relations ... by banjo
TED Fellow Abigail Washburn wanted to be a lawyer improving US-China relations -- until she picked up a banjo . She tells a moving story of the remarkable connections she 's formed touring across the United States and China while playing that banjo and singing in Chinese .
If you had caught me straight out of college in the halls of the Vermont State House where I was a lobbyist in training and asked me what I was going to do with my life , I would have told you that I 'd just passed the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi , the Chinese equivalency exam , and I was going to go study law in Beijing , and I was going to improve U.S.-China relations through top-down policy changes and judicial system reforms .
I had a plan , and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo .
Little did I know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when I was at a party and I heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room .
And it was Doc Watson singing and playing " Shady Grove . "
Shady Grove , my little love Shady Grove , my darlin ' Shady Grove , my little love Going back to Harlan That sound was just so beautiful , the sound of Doc 's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo .
And after being totally and completely obsessed with the mammoth richness and history of Chinese culture , it was like this total relief to hear something so truly American and so truly awesome .
I knew I had to take a banjo with me to China .
So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo , I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs , and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention .
And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me .
And they said , " Hey , do you want to jam ? "
And I was like , " Sure . "
So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them .
And a record executive walked up to me and invited me to Nashville , Tennessee to make a record .
It 's been eight years , and I can tell you that I didn 't go to China to become a lawyer .
In fact , I went to Nashville .
And after a few months I was writing songs .
And the first song I wrote was in English , and the second one was in Chinese .
[ Chinese ] Outside your door the world is waiting .
Inside your heart a voice is calling .
The four corners of the world are watching , so travel daughter , travel .
Go get it , girl .
It 's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky .
And I 've played thousands of shows .
And I 've collaborated with so many incredible , inspirational musicians around the world .
And I see the power of music .
I see the power of music to connect cultures .
I see it when I stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east Virginia and I look out at the sea of lawn chairs and I bust out into a song in Chinese .
[ Chinese ] And everybody 's eyes just pop wide open like it 's going to fall out of their heads .
And they 're like , " What 's that girl doing ? "
And then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story .
They all come up and they 're like , " You know , my aunt 's sister 's babysitter 's dog 's chicken went to China and adopted a girl . "
And I tell you what , it like everybody 's got a story .
It 's just incredible .
And then I go to China and I stand on a stage at a university and I bust out into a song in Chinese and everybody sings along and they roar with delight at this girl with the hair and the instrument , and she 's singing their music .
And I see , even more importantly , the power of music to connect hearts .
Like the time I was in Sichuan Province and I was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone .
And this little girl comes up to me .
[ Chinese ] " Big sister Wong , " Washburn , Wong , same difference .
" Big sister Wong , can I sing you a song that my mom sang for me before she was swallowed in the earthquake ? "
And I sat down , she sat on my lap .
She started singing her song .
And the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks , and I started to cry .
And the light that shone off of her eyes was a place I could have stayed forever .
And in that moment , we weren 't our American selves , we weren 't our Chinese selves , we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here .
I want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone .
And I know U.S.-China relations doesn 't need another lawyer .
Thank you .
Kevin Kelly : How technology evolves
Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks " What does technology want ? " and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life .
I don 't know about you , but I haven 't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life .
I 've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about .
Should I be pro-technology ? Should I embrace it full arms ?
Should I be wary ? Like you , I 'm very tempted by the latest thing .
But at the other hand , a couple of years ago I gave up all of my possessions , sold all my technology -- except for a bicycle -- and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body , fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food .
And I 've since then tried to keep technology at arm 's length in many ways , so it doesn 't master my life .
At the same time , I run a website on cool tools , where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology .
So I 'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity , as it relates to nature , as it relates to the spiritual .
And I 'm not even sure we know what technology is .
And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded .
This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find .
It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829 .
Before that , obviously , technology didn 't exist . But obviously it did .
I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology .
He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born .
So it sums up a lot of what we 're talking about .
Danny Hillis actually has an update on that -- he says technology is anything that doesn 't quite work yet .
Which also , I think , gets into a little bit of our current idea .
But I was interested in another definition of technology .
Something , again , that went back to something more fundamental .
Something that was deeper . And as I struggled to understand that , I came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations .
And I 'm , this morning , going to talk about this for the first time .
So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud .
The question that I came up with was this question : what does technology want ? And by that , I don 't mean , does it want chocolate or vanilla ? By what it wants , I mean , what are its inherent trends and biases ?
What are its tendencies over time ? One way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms , which we 've heard a lot about .
And the trick that Richard Dawkins does , which is to say , to look at them as simply as genes , as vehicles for genes .
So he 's saying , what do genes want ? The selfish gene .
And I 'm applying a similar trick to say , what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology ? What does technology want ?
Obviously , this in an incomplete question , just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it .
But it 's still very , very productive . So I 'm attempting to say , if we take technology 's view of the world , what does it want ?
And I think once we ask that question we have to go back , actually , to life . Because obviously , if we keep extending the origins of technology far back , I think we come back to life at some point .
So that 's where I want to begin my little exploration , is in life .
And like you heard from the previous speakers , we don 't really know what life there is on Earth right now .
We have really no idea .
Craig Venter 's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great .
Brian Farrell 's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on Earth .
And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects , just to see what 's on life . And if we did that with our little Martian probe , which we have not done on Earth , we would begin to see some incredible species .
This is not on another planet . These are things that are hidden away on our planet .
This is an ant that stores its colleagues ' honey in its abdomen .
Each one of these organisms that we 've described -- that you 've seen from Jamie and others , these magnificent things -- what they 're doing , each one of them , is they 're hacking the rules of life .
I can 't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism .
Every single thing that we can think of -- and if you heard Olivia 's talk about the sexual habits , you 'll realize that there isn 't anything we can say that 's true for all life , because every single one of them is hacking something about it .
This is a solar-powered sea slug . It 's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy .
This is another version of that . This is a sea dragon , and the one on the bottom , the blue one , is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid , has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy .
These are hacks , and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are , current consensus , six kingdoms . Six different broad approaches : the plants , the animals , the fungi , the protests -- the little things -- the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria . The Archaeas .
Those are the general approaches to life . That 's one way to look at life on Earth today .
But a more interesting way , the current way to take the long view , is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective .
And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time , we have it coming out from the center .
So in the center is the most primitive , and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth . This is all the same six kingdoms .
You see 4,000 representative species , and you can see where we are .
But what I like about this is it shows that every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved .
Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans .
They 've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here .
But we see that each one of these is actually hacking , and has a different way of finding out how to do life .
And if we take the long-term trends of life , if we begin to say , what does evolution want ? There 's several things that we see .
One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth have we ever been where we don 't find life .
We find life at the bottom of every long-term , long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up -- and there 's bacteria in the pores of that rock .
And wherever life is , it never retreats . It 's ubiquitous and it wants to be more .
More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life .
The second thing is is we see diversity . We also see specialization .
We see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized .
And we see a drift towards complexity that 's very intuitive .
And actually , we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time .
And the last thing , I bring back this nudibranch .
One of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability . And by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life .
Like those chloroplast cells -- they 're completely surrounded by other life .
They never touch the inner matter . There is more and more co-evolution .
And so the general , long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five : ubiquity , diversity , specialization , complexity and socialization . Now , I took that and said , OK , what are the long-term trends in technology ?
And again , my question is , what does technology want ?
And so , remarkably , I discovered that there 's also a drift toward specialization .
That we see there 's a general hammer , and hammers become more and more specific over time .
There 's obviously diversity . Huge numbers of things .
This is all the contents of a Japanese home .
I actually had my daughter -- gave her a tally counter , and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household .
And it came up with 6,000 different species of products .
I did some research and found out that the King of England , Henry VIII , had only about 7,000 items in his household .
And he was the King of England , and that was the entire wealth of England at the time .
So we 're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things .
This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out and he sees machines making machines . How depraved !
Well , this is actually what we 're headed towards : world machines .
And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies .
Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology , or even life .
And thirdly , the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche . And I 'm happy to say , I was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological , but that 's pretty evident .
So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution . The same drives that we see towards ubiquity , towards diversity , towards socialization , towards complexity . That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out , say , the evolution of armor , you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree .
I suggest that , in fact , technology is the seventh kingdom of life .
That its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom .
And so it would be sort of approximately up there , coming out of the animal kingdom . And if we were to do that , we would find out -- we could actually approach technology in this way .
This is Niles Eldredge . He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium .
But as a sideline , he happens to collect cornets .
He has one of the world 's largest collections -- about 500 of them .
And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites , or snails , and to do a morphological analysis , and try to derive their genealogical history over time .
This is his chart , which is not quite published yet .
But the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom , those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made . That does not happen in biology .
When something is extinct , you can 't have it as your parent .
But that does happen in technology . And it turns out that that 's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree , and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system .
In fact , this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that I began to think about what happens with old technology .
And it turns out that , in fact , technologies don 't die .
So I suggested this to an historian of science , and he said , " Well , what about , you know , come on , what about steam cars ?
They 're not around anymore . " Well actually , they are .
In fact , they 're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile .
And this is a website of a guy who 's selling brand new parts for the Stanley automobile . And the thing that I liked is sort of this one-click , add-to-your-cart button -- -- for buying steam valves . I mean , it was just -- it was really there .
And so , I began to think about , well , maybe that 's just a random sample .
Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way .
So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward 's catalog and I randomly went through it . And I took a page -- not quite a random page -- I took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made . But I took this page and I said , how many of these things are still being made ?
And not antiques . I want to know how many of these things are still in production .
And the answer is : all of them .
All of them are still being produced . So you 've got corn shellers .
I don 't know who needs a corn sheller .
Be it corn shellers -- you 've got ploughs ; you 've got fan mills ; all these things -- and these are not , again , antiques . These are -- you can order these . You can go to the web and you can buy them now , brand-new made . So in a certain sense , technologies don 't die .
In fact , you can buy , for 50 bucks , a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago .
It 's short , bone handle , 50 bucks . And in fact , what 's important is that this information actually never died out .
It 's not just that it was resurrected . It 's continued all along .
And in Papua New Guinea , they were making stone axes until two decades ago , just as a course of practical matters .
Even when we try to get rid of a technology , it 's actually very hard .
So we 've all heard about the Amish giving up cars .
We 've heard about the Japanese giving up guns .
We 've heard about this and that . But I actually went back and took what I could find , the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology , and then I tried to find out when they came back in , because they always came back in . And it turns out that the time , the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited , is decreasing over time . And that basically , you can delay technology , but you can 't kill it . So this makes sense , because in a certain sense what culture is , is the accumulation of ideas .
That 's what it 's for . It 's so that ideas don 't die out .
And when we take that , we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory -- again , in life 's evolution -- we find that each case -- each of the major transitions in life -- what they 're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens .
They 're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated .
So all these steps in evolution are increasing , basically , the evolution of evolvability .
So what 's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas , these new hacks , are increasing . And the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring .
And then what we see in the singularity , that prophesized by Kurzweil and others -- his idea that technology is accelerating evolution .
It 's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas .
So if you have life hacking -- life means hacking , the game of survival -- then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game .
And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve .
That is what we call an " infinite game . "
That 's the definition of " infinite game . " A finite game is play to win , and an infinite game is played to keep playing .
And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force .
The origins of technology was not in 1829 , but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang , and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed . The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot , and it was so tight in there , there was no room for any difference at all .
That 's the definition . There was no temperature .
There was no difference whatsoever . And at the Big Bang , what it expanded was the potential for difference .
So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences , diversity , options , choices , opportunities , possibilities and freedoms .
Those are all basically the same thing .
And those are the things that technology brings us .
That 's what technology is bringing us : choices , possibilities , freedoms .
That 's what it 's about . It 's this expansion of room to make differences .
And so a hammer , when we grab a hammer , that 's what we 're grabbing .
And that 's why we continue to grab technology -- because we want those things . Those things are good .
Differences , freedom , choices , possibilities .
And each time we make a new opportunity place , we 're allowing a platform to make new ones .
And I think it 's really important . Because if you can imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented -- what a loss to society there would be .
Imagine Van Gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints .
Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film .
Somewhere , today , there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented .
We have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference .
We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals .
That 's what technology really wants .
I 'm going to skip through some of the objections because I don 't have answers to why there 's deforestation .
I don 't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies . I don 't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity , other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom , because it 's so close to what life is about , maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life .
Maybe in some ways the fact that what we 're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it .
It 's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields , but it 's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village .
Our humanity is actually defined by technology .
All the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology . This is the infinite game .
That 's what we 're talking about .
You see , technology is a way to evolve the evolution .
It 's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more .
And it 's actually a way of playing the game , of playing all the games .
That 's what technology wants .
And so when I think about what technology wants , I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here -- and I really believe this -- every person here has an assignment . And your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is .
That recursive nature is the infinite game .
And if you play that well , you 'll have other people involved , so even that game extends and continues even when you 're gone .
That is the infinite game . And what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game .
And so I think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are .
Thank you .
Paolo Cardini : Forget multitasking , try monotasking
People aren 't just cooking anymore -- they 're cooking , texting , talking on the phone , watching YouTube and uploading photos of the awesome meal they just made . Designer Paolo Cardini questions the efficiency of our multitasking world and makes the case for -- gasp -- " monotasking . " His & lt ; a href = " http : / / www.thingiverse.com / thing : 26578 " target = " _ blank " & gt ; charming 3D-printed smartphone covers & lt ; / a & gt ; just might help .
I 'm a designer and an educator .
I 'm a multitasking person , and I push my students to fly through a very creative , multitasking design process .
But how efficient is , really , this multitasking ?
Let 's consider for a while the option of monotasking .
A couple of examples .
Look at that .
This is my multitasking activity result .
So trying to cook , answering the phone , writing SMS , and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue .
So someone tells us the story about supertaskers , so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment .
But what about ourselves , and what about our reality ?
When 's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend ?
So this is a project I 'm working on , and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super , hyper — to downgrade our super , hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function .
Another example : Have you ever been to Venice ?
How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island .
But our multitasking reality is pretty different , and full of tons of information .
So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure ?
I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge , but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task , or maybe turning your digital senses totally off .
So nowadays , everyone could produce his mono product .
Why not ? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world .
Thank you .

Diana Laufenberg : How to learn ? From mistakes
Diana Laufenberg shares 3 surprising things she has learned about teaching -- including a key insight about learning from mistakes . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I have been teaching for a long time , and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students .
In 1931 , my grandmother -- bottom left for you guys over here -- graduated from the eighth grade .
She went to school to get the information because that 's where the information lived .
It was in the books ; it was inside the teacher 's head ; and she needed to go there to get the information , because that 's how you learned .
Fast-forward a generation : this is the one-room schoolhouse , Oak Grove , where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse .
And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher , stored it in the only portable memory he has , which is inside his own head , and take it with him , because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world .
When I was a kid , we had a set of encyclopedias at my house .
It was purchased the year I was born , and it was extraordinary , because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information .
The information was inside my house and it was awesome .
This was different than either generation had experienced before , and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level .
But the information was closer to me .
I could get access to it .
In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching , we really see the advent of the Internet .
Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool , I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas , small town Kansas , where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely , small-town , rural Kansas school district , where I was teaching my favorite subject , American government .
My first year -- super gung-ho -- going to teach American government , loved the political system .
Kids in the 12th grade : not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system .
Year two : learned a few things -- had to change my tactic .
And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves .
I didn 't tell them what to do or how to do it .
I posed a problem in front of them , which was to put on an election forum for their own community .
They produced flyers . They called offices .
They checked schedules . They were meeting with secretaries .
They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates .
They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well , and really had this robust experiential learning .
The older teachers -- more experienced -- looked at me and went , " Oh , there she is . That 's so cute . She 's trying to get that done . "
" She doesn 't know what she 's in for . "
But I knew that the kids would show up , and I believed it , and I told them every week what I expected out of them .
And that night , all 90 kids -- dressed appropriately , doing their job , owning it .
I had to just sit and watch .
It was theirs . It was experiential . It was authentic .
It meant something to them .
And they will step up .
From Kansas , I moved on to lovely Arizona , where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years , this time with middle school students .
Luckily , I didn 't have to teach them American government .
Could teach them the more exciting topic of geography .
Again , " thrilled " to learn .
But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona , was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school , and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities .
And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina , which is the gentleman that the movie " Hotel Rwanda " is based after .
And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us .
We could walk there . We didn 't even have to pay for the buses .
There was no expense cost . Perfect field trip .
The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful , and they know what to do with it .
And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive .
I then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life , or in their own story , or in their own world , that they could identify that had done a similar thing .
I asked them to produce a little movie about it .
It 's the first time we 'd done this .
Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer , but they were into it . And I asked them to put their own voice over it .
It was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves , what they 're willing to share .
The last question of the assignment is : how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people ?
The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary .
Fast-forward to Pennsylvania , where I find myself today .
I teach at the Science Leadership Academy , which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia .
We are a nine through 12 public school , but we do school quite differently .
I moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that I knew that kids learned , and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past , of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when I was in school , and to a moment when we have information surplus .
So what do you do when the information is all around you ?
Why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information ?
In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program , so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday , taking them home , getting access to information .
And here 's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you 've given the tool to acquire information to students , is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process .
We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test , and I am here to share with you : it is not learning .
That is the absolute wrong thing to ask , to tell kids to never be wrong .
To ask them to always have the right answer doesn 't allow them to learn .
So we did this project , and this is one of the artifacts of the project .
I almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure .
My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill .
I asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media , and take a look at what were the interesting components of it , and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from American history .
And they had certain criteria to do it .
They were a little uncomfortable with it , because we 'd never done this before , and they didn 't know exactly how to do it .
They can talk -- they 're very smooth , and they can write very , very well , but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them .
But I gave them the room to just do the thing .
Go create . Go figure it out .
Let 's see what we can do .
And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint .
This was done in like two or three days .
And this is the work of the student that consistently did it .
And when I sat the students down , I said , " Who 's got the best one ? "
And they immediately went , " There it is . "
Didn 't read anything . " There it is . "
And I said , " Well what makes it great ? "
And they 're like , " Oh , the design 's good , and he 's using good color .
And there 's some ... " And they went through all that we processed out loud .
And I said , " Go read it . "
And they 're like , " Oh , that one wasn 't so awesome . "
And then we went to another one -- it didn 't have great visuals , but it had great information -- and spent an hour talking about the learning process , because it wasn 't about whether or not it was perfect , or whether or not it was what I could create .
It asked them to create for themselves , and it allowed them to fail , process , learn from .
And when we do another round of this in my class this year , they will do better this time , because learning has to include an amount of failure , because failure is instructional in the process .
There are a million pictures that I could click through here , and had to choose carefully -- this is one of my favorites -- of students learning , of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information , but instead , ask them what they can do with it .
Ask them really interesting questions .
They will not disappoint .
Ask them to go to places , to see things for themselves , to actually experience the learning , to play , to inquire .
This is one of my favorite photos , because this was taken on Tuesday , when I asked the students to go to the polls .
This is Robbie , and this was his first day of voting , and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that .
But this is learning too , because we asked them to go out into real spaces .
The main point is that , if we continue to look at education as if it 's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning , empowering student voice and embracing failure , we 're missing the mark .
And everything that everybody is talking about today isn 't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities , because we won 't get there with a standardized test , and we won 't get there with a culture of one right answer .
We know how to do this better , and it 's time to do better .
Technology 's long tail
Chris Anderson , then the editor of Wired , explores the four key stages of any viable technology : setting the right price , gaining market share , displacing an established technology and , finally , becoming ubiquitous .
I 'd like to speak about technology trends , which is something that many of you follow -- but we also follow , for related reasons .
Obviously , being a technology magazine , technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about .
But also it 's part of being any monthly magazine -- you live in the future . And we have a long lead-time .
We have to plan issues many months in advance ; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months , nine months down the road . So we 're in the forecasting business .
We also , like a lot of companies , create a product that 's based on technology trends .
In this case , ours is about ideas and information , and , if we 're lucky , some entertainment . But the concept 's quite the same .
And so we have to understand not only why tech 's important , where it 's going , but also , very importantly , when -- the timing is everything .
And it 's interesting , when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s , about e-commerce , or Internet traffic , or broadband adoption , or Internet advertising , they were all right -- they were just wrong in time .
Almost every one of those has come true just a few years later .
But the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme . And that 's why timing is everything .
You 've probably seen something like this before .
This is the classic Gartner Hype Curve , which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology 's lifespan .
And just for fun , we put a bunch of technologies on it , to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak , or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment , or rise back in the slope of enlightenment , etc .
And this is one way to do technology forecasting : get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn .
We tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important ; we 'll typically do it twice . Once , we want to do it first .
We want to be the first to do it , for the geeks who appreciate that , we 'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger .
You can see in 1997 , we put Linux on the cover .
But then it comes back . And sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream , and they 're going to burst out .
And then it 's time to do it again . Last year .
And that 's one way that we try to time technology trends .
I 'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that I call my " grand unified theory of predicting the future , " but it 's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future .
It 's based on the presumption , the observation even , that all important technologies go through four stages in their life -- at least one of the four stages , sometimes all four of the stages .
And at each one of these stages , can be seen as a collision -- a collision with something else -- for example , a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world . It 's an inflection point .
And these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology 's life is going to be , and maybe how you can do something about it .
The first is the critical price .
The first stage in a technology 's advance is that it 'll fall below a critical price .
After it falls below a critical price , it will tend , if it 's successful , to rise above a critical mass , a penetration .
Many technologies , at that point , displace another technology , and that 's another important point .
And then finally , a lot of technologies commoditize .
Towards the end of their life , they become nearly free .
Each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it ; it 's an opportunity for the technology to change .
And even if you missed , you know , the first boom of Wi-Fi -- you know , Wi-Fi did the critical price , it did the critical mass , but hasn 't done displacement yet , and hasn 't done free yet -- there 's still more opportunity in that .
I 'd like to demonstrate what I mean by this by telling the story of the DVD , which is a technology which has done all of these .
The DVD , as you know , was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive . But you can see that by 1998 , it had fallen below 400 dollars , and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold .
And it started to take off . And you can see that the units started to trend up , the hidden inflection point -- it was taking off .
The next thing it hit , a year later , was critical mass . In this case , 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household .
And what 's interesting here is that something else took off along with it : home-theater units .
Suddenly you have a DVD in the house ; you 've got high-quality digital video ; you have a reason to have a big-screen television ; you have a reason for Dolby 5.1 surround-sound .
And maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them , and bring the rest of your entertainment in .
What 's interesting also is -- note that Netflix was founded in 1999 .
Reed Hastings is here . He clearly saw that that was a moment , that was an inflection point that he could do something with .
The next phase it hit was displacement .
You can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the VCR .
And here too , you can see the implications in the world at large .
Netflix was right -- the Netflix model could capitalize on the DVD in a way that the video-rental stores couldn 't .
Among the DVD 's many assets is that it 's very small ; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply .
That gave an advantage ; that was an implication of the technology 's rise that wasn 't obvious to everybody .
And then finally , DVDs are approaching free .
There 's a company called Apex , a no-name Chinese firm , who has , several times in the past year , been the number-one DVD seller in America . Their average price , for last year , was 48 dollars .
You 're aware of the perhaps apocryphal Wal-Mart stampede over the 30-dollar DVD .
But they 're getting very , very cheap , and look at the interesting implication of it . As they get cheaper , the premium brands , the Sonys and such , are losing market share , and the no-names , the Apexes , are gaining them .
They 're being commodified , and that 's what happens when things go to zero . It 's a tough market out there .
Now they 've introduced these four ways of looking at technology , these four stages of technology 's life .
I 'd like to talk about some other technologies out there , just technologies on our radar -- and I 'll use this lens , these four , as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development .
They 're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there -- they 're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods .
But I think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers , these intersections , are interesting to think about .
Start with gene sequencing .
As you probably know , gene sequencing -- in a large part , because it 's built on computers -- is falling in price at a kind of a Moore 's Law-like level .
It is now possible -- will be possible , and if Craig Venter indeed comes today , he may tell you something about this -- to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year .
That 's as opposed to billions just a few years ago .
You know , our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer .
What 's interesting is that at the same time , the number of genes that we 're discovering is rising very quickly .
Each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test .
There will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done , very cheaply , if you want to know . You can learn about your own mosaic .
Here 's another technology that 's approaching a critical price .
This is a fascinating research from WHO that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails .
In January 2000 , the price was 10,000 dollars , or 27 dollars a day .
The generics came in , first in Brazil and elsewhere , and the effect was just dramatic on pricing .
Today it 's less than 50 cents a day .
And what 's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity , if you look at the correlation between these two , as the anti-retrovirals come down , the number of people you can treat goes radically up . And the Clinton Foundation and WHO believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 -- two million in sub-Saharan Africa .
And the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that .
Linux is another good example .
Now we 've switched to critical mass .
These are now technologies that are hitting critical mass .
If you look here , here 's Linux in red , and it 's hit 20 percent .
Interestingly , it 's done a crossover before , but not the crossovers that matter .
The crossover that 's going to matter is the one with the blue .
But you can look and see the direction those lines are going , you can see that at the 20 percent , it 's now taken seriously .
It 's not just for the geeks any more .
That is , I imagine , what people in Redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about .
Another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars .
I don 't know whether anybody has a Prius 2004 , but they 're fantastic .
And if you look at the trends here , by about 2008 -- and I don 't think this is a crazy forecast -- they 'll be two percent of auto sales .
Two percent isn 't 20 percent , but in the car business , which is slow moving , that 's huge ; that 's arrival .
At two percent , you start seeing them on the roads everywhere .
And what 's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you 've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry .
It 's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years .
And once you have electric motors , you can do anything : you can change the structure of the car in any way you want .
You can have regenerative braking ; you can have drive-by-wire ; you can have replaceable body shapes -- it 's a little thing that starts with a hybrid , but it can lead to a whole new era of the car .
Voice Over IP is something you may have heard something about .
Again , it 's kind of coming out of nowhere ; it 's a little hard to use right now .
There 's a company created by the Kazaa founders called Skype .
Look at these numbers . They launched it in August of last year ; they already have nearly four million registered users -- that 's critical mass .
And the same thing 's happening on the carrier side .
You 're looking at IP taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards . This is a tipping point -- if Malcolm 's here , forgive me -- and it 's going to change the economics , and the speed , and the players in the industry .
It 's going to look a little bit like that .
And finally , free . Free is really , really interesting .
Free is something that comes with digital , because the reproduction costs are essentially free . It comes with IP , because it 's such an efficient protocol . It comes with fiber optics , because there 's so much bandwidth .
Free is really , you know , the gift of Silicon Valley to the world .
It 's an economic force ; it 's a technical force .
It 's a deflationary force , if not handled right .
It is abundance , as opposed to scarcity .
Free is probably the most interesting thing .
And here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive .
You know , there could be a film 's [ unclear ] there , but it 's basically , every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008 . It takes that entire element , the physical element , of songs off the table .
And you 've seen the numbers .
I mean , you know , the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes , and Hollywood 's worried as well .
They 're facing a force that they haven 't faced before .
And their response is draconian , and not necessarily the one that 's going to get them out of this .
And finally , I 'll give you one last example of free -- perhaps the most powerful of all . I mentioned fiber optics -- their abundance tends to make things free .
This is the price of a phone call to India per minute .
And what 's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute .
India had , still has , a regulated phone system and so did we .
It was surprisingly non-innovative , moved very slowly , but then there was just so much fiber out there , you couldn 't hold back , and look how quickly the price fell .
It 's seven cents a minute , in many cases .
And the consequence of cheap phone calling , free phone calling , to India , is the pissed-off programmer , is the outsourcing .
It is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we 're seeing in our world today .
The force of India , and then China , and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies -- because the communications are free -- is just beginning to be felt .
And I think that 's probably one of the most important technology trends that we 're looking at today .
Thank you .
George Papandreou : Imagine a European democracy without borders
Greece has been the poster child for European economic crisis , but former Prime Minister George Papandreou wonders if it 's just a preview of what 's to come . " Our democracies , " he says , " are trapped by systems that are too big to fail , or more accurately , too big to control " -- while " politicians like me have lost the trust of their peoples . " How to solve it ? Have citizens re-engage more directly in a new democratic bargain .
This will not be a speech like any one I have ever given .
I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy .
And I won 't provide some feel-good , ready-made solutions .
But I will in the end urge you to rethink , actually take risks , and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy .
Failure of leadership .
What is the failure of leadership today ?
And why is our democracy not working ?
Well , I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process .
So let me , from my personal experiences , give you an insight , so that you can step back and maybe understand why it is so difficult to cope with the challenges of today and why politics is going down a blind alley .
Let 's start from the beginning .
Let 's start from democracy .
Well , if you go back to the Ancient Greeks , it was a revelation , a discovery , that we had the potential , together , to be masters of our own fate , to be able to examine , to learn , to imagine , and then to design a better life .
And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom , because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact , whether they be despots or dogmas , could be the protagonists .
Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power , whether it was of tyrants or of high priests , their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth .
Well , I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old .
I used to , to try to avoid homework , sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly .
You see , then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country , and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece , to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where , maybe , the people , the citizens , could actually rule their own country .
I used to join him in many of the campaigns , and you can see me here next to him .
I 'm the younger one there , to the side .
You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there .
So in 1967 , elections were coming , things were going well in the campaign , the house was electric .
We really could sense that there was going to be a major progressive change in Greece .
Then one night , military trucks drive up to our house .
Soldiers storm the door .
They find me up on the top terrace .
A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun , puts it to my head , and says , " Tell me where your father is or I will kill you . "
My father , hiding nearby , reveals himself , and was summarily taken to prison .
Well , we survived , but democracy did not .
Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile .
Now , today , our democracies are again facing a moment of truth .
Let me tell you a story .
Sunday evening , Brussels , April 2010 .
I 'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union .
I had just been elected prime minister , but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent , as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government , but actually 15.6 percent .
But the deficit was only the symptom of much deeper problems that Greece was facing , and I had been elected on a mandate , a mission , actually , to tackle these problems , whether it was lack of transparency and accountability in governance , or whether it was a clientelistic state offering favors to the powerful -- tax avoidance abetted and aided by a global tax evasion system , politics and media captured by special interests .
But despite our electoral mandate , the markets mistrusted us .
Our borrowing costs were skyrocketing , and we were facing possible default .
So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response , one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms .
But time we didn 't get .
Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels .
Negotiations are difficult , the tensions are high , progress is slow , and then , 10 minutes to 2 , a prime minister shouts out , " We have to finish in 10 minutes . "
I said , " Why ? These are important decisions .
Let 's deliberate a little bit longer . "
Another prime minister comes in and says , " No , we have to have an agreement now , because in 10 minutes , the markets are opening up in Japan , and there will be havoc in the global economy . "
We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes .
This time it was not the military , but the markets , that put a gun to our collective heads .
What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life , painful to me , painful to my countrymen , imposing cuts , austerity , often on those not to blame for the crisis .
With these sacrifices , Greece did avoid bankruptcy and the eurozone avoided a collapse .
Greece , yes , triggered the Euro crisis , and some people blame me for pulling the trigger .
But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone , vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system , vulnerabilities of our democracies .
Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail , or , more accurately , too big to control .
Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws , evade taxes , evade environmental or labor standards .
Our democracies are undermined by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth , lobbies , corruption , the speed of the markets or simply the fact that we sometimes fear an impending disaster , have constrained our democracies , and they have constrained our capacity to imagine and actually use the potential , your potential , in finding solutions .
Greece , you see , was only a preview of what is in store for us all .
I , overly optimistically , had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece , for Europe , for the world , to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions .
Instead , I had a very humbling experience .
In Brussels , when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions , I realized that not one , not one of us , had ever dealt with a similar crisis .
But worse , we were trapped by our collective ignorance .
We were led by our fears .
And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity .
Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies , investing in it to find more creative solutions , we reverted to political posturing .
And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn 't bring an end to the crisis , and of course that made it very easy to look for a whipping boy for our collective European failure , and of course that was Greece .
Those profligate , idle , ouzo-swilling , Zorba-dancing Greeks , they are the problem . Punish them !
Well , a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself .
But let me warn you , this is not just about Greece .
This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex , cross-border problems , whether it 's climate change , whether it 's migration , whether it 's the financial system .
That is , abandoning our collective power to imagine our potential , falling victims to our fears , our stereotypes , our dogmas , taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens .
And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens , of our peoples , even more in the democratic process .
It 's no wonder that many political leaders , and I don 't exclude myself , have lost the trust of our people .
When riot police have to protect parliaments , a scene which is increasingly common around the world , then there 's something deeply wrong with our democracies .
That 's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package .
My European counterparts , some of them , at least , said , " You can 't do this .
There will be havoc in the markets again . "
I said , " We need to , before we restore confidence in the markets , we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people . "
Since leaving office , I have had time to reflect .
We have weathered the storm , in Greece and in Europe , but we remain challenged .
If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential , well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece , and in other countries , certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion .
So far , we 've thrown economics at the problem , actually mostly austerity , and certainly we could have designed alternatives , a different strategy , a green stimulus for green jobs , or mutualized debt , Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures , these would have been much more viable alternatives .
Yet I have come to believe that the problem is not so much one of economics as it is one of democracy .
So let 's try something else .
Let 's see how we can bring people back to the process .
Let 's throw democracy at the problem .
Again , the Ancient Greeks , with all their shortcomings , believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments . In people we trust .
Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating , debating , taking on public responsibilities for public affairs .
Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day .
Science , theater , research , philosophy , games of the mind and the body , they were daily exercises .
Actually they were an education for participation , for the potential , for growing the potential of our citizens .
And those who shunned politics , well , they were idiots .
You see , in Ancient Greece , in ancient Athens , that term originated there .
" Idiot " comes from the root " idio , " oneself .
A person who is self-centered , secluded , excluded , someone who doesn 't participate or even examine public affairs .
And participation took place in the agora , the agora having two meanings , both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation .
You see , markets and politics then were one , unified , accessible , transparent , because they gave power to the people .
They serve the demos , democracy .
Above government , above markets was the direct rule of the people .
Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions .
So our politicians are limited to local politics , while our citizens , even though they see a great potential , are prey to forces beyond their control .
So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora ?
How do we democratize globalization ?
And I 'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20 .
I 'm talking about , how do we secure the space , the demos , the platform of values , so that we can tap into all of your potential ?
Well , this is exactly where I think Europe fits in .
Europe , despite its recent failures , is the world 's most successful cross-border peace experiment .
So let 's see if it can 't be an experiment in global democracy , a new kind of democracy .
Let 's see if we can 't design a European agora , not simply for products and services , but for our citizens , where they can work together , deliberate , learn from each other , exchange between art and cultures , where they can come up with creative solutions .
Let 's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president , or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues , a European-wide referendum where our citizens , as the lawmakers , vote on future treaties .
And here 's an idea : Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants , not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship , but a European citizenship ?
And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe .
Where our common identity is democracy , where our education is through participation , and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia .
Europe of and by the people , a Europe , an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders .
Now , some might accuse me of being naive , putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people .
Well , after decades in politics , I am also a pragmatist .
Believe me , I have been , I am , part of today 's political system , and I know things must change .
We must revive politics as the power to imagine , reimagine , and redesign for a better world .
But I also know that this disruptive force of change won 't be driven by the politics of today .
The revival of democratic politics will come from you , and I mean all of you .
Everyone who participates in this global exchange of ideas , whether it 's here in this room or just outside this room or online or locally , where everybody lives , everyone who stands up to injustice and inequality , everybody who stands up to those who preach racism rather than empathy , dogma rather than critical thinking , technocracy rather than democracy , everyone who stands up to the unchecked power , whether it 's authoritarian leaders , plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens , or powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few .
It is in their interest that all of us are idiots .
Let 's not be .
Thank you .
You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets , and that scene in Brussels that you describe , to me , as a citizen , is terrifying .
Help us understand how you felt after the decision .
It was not a good decision , clearly , but how do you feel after that , not as the prime minister , but as George ?
George Papandreou : Well , obviously there were constraints which didn 't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted , and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem .
And that hurt . That hurt because that , first of all , hurt the younger generation , and not only , many of them are demonstrating outside , but I think this is one of our problems .
When we face these crises , we have kept the potential , the huge potential of our society out of this process , and we are closing in on ourselves in politics , and I think we need to change that , to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology , the minds that we have , and I think we can find solutions which are much better , but we have to be open .
You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe , and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries .
It 's rather the other way -- more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction .
How do you reconcile that ?
GP : Well , I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game .
And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders , go beyond our conflicts and work together .
And the paradox is that , because we have this blame game , we have less the potential to convince our citizens that we should work together , while now is the time when we really need to bring our powers together .
Now , more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels .
It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe , that is , really making Europe a project of the people .
So that , I think , would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society .
George , thank you for coming to TED .
GP : Thank you very much . Thank you .
JR : One year of turning the world inside out
Street artist JR made a wish in 2011 : Join me in a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face . Now , a year after his TED Prize wish , he shows how giant posters of human faces , pasted in public , are connecting communities , making change , and turning the world inside out . You can join in at & lt ; a href = " http : / / www.insideoutproject.net / " & gt ; insideoutproject.net & lt ; / a & gt ;
Twelve years ago , I was in the street writing my name to say , " I exist . "
Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say , " They exist . "
From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine , the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio , paper and glue -- as easy as that .
I asked a question last year : Can art change the world ?
Well let me tell you , in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year , because the Arab Spring is still spreading , the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else ?
The Occupy movement found a voice , and I still have to speak English constantly .
So there has been a lot of change .
So when I had my TED wish last year , I said , look , I 'm going to switch my concept .
You are going to take the photos .
You 're going to send them to me .
I 'm going to print them and send them back to you .
Then you 're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement .
This is Inside Out .
One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year .
Those are the kind of posters , let me show you .
And we keep sending more every day .
This is the size .
Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it .
This one was from Haiti .
When I launched my wish last year , hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us .
But I say it has to be under the conditions I 've always worked : no credit , no logos , no sponsoring .
A week later , a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world .
These are the people I want to talk about to you today .
Two weeks after my speech , in Tunisia , hundreds of portraits were made .
And they pasted [ over ] every single portrait of the dictator [ with ] their own photos .
Boom ! This is what happened .
Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country .
They really make Inside Out their own project .
Actually , that photo was pasted in a police station , and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police .
Russia . Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia .
He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say , " We have rights . "
They used Inside Out as a platform for protest .
Karachi , Pakistan .
Sharmeen is actually here .
She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town .
And I want to thank her today .
North Dakota . Standing Rock Nation , in this Turtle Island , [ unclear name ] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here .
The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights .
He pasted up portraits all over his reservation .
And he 's here also today .
Each time I get a wall in New York , I use his photos to continue spreading the project .
Juarez : You 've heard of the border -- one of the most dangerous borders in the world .
Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border .
Do you know what it takes to do this ?
People , energy , make the glue , organize the team .
It was amazing .
While in Iran at the same time Abololo -- of course a nickname -- has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government .
I don 't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action .
There are tons of school projects .
Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools .
Education is so essential .
Kids just make photos in a class , the teacher receives them , they paste them on the school .
Here they even got the help of the firemen .
There should be even more schools doing this kind of project .
Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine .
So we went there with a truck . This is a photobooth truck .
You go on the back of that truck , it takes your photo , 30 seconds later take it from the side , you 're ready to rock .
Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street .
This is march , the 450,000 march -- beginning of September .
They were all holding their photo as a statement .
On the other side , people were wrapping up streets , buildings .
It 's everywhere .
Come on , don 't tell me that people aren 't ready for peace out there .
These projects took thousands of actions in one year , making hundreds of thousands of people participating , creating millions of views .
This is the biggest global art participatory project that 's going on .
So back to the question , " Can art change the world ? "
Maybe not in one year . That 's the beginning .
But maybe we should change the question .
Can art change people 's lives ?
From what I 've seen this year , yes .
And you know what ? It 's just the beginning .
Let 's turn the world inside out together .
Thank you .
Scilla Elworthy : Fighting with nonviolence
How do you deal with a bully without becoming a thug ? In this wise and soulful talk , peace activist Scilla Elworthy maps out the skills we need -- as nations and individuals -- to fight extreme force without using force in return . To answer the question of why and how nonviolence works , she evokes historical heroes -- Aung San Suu Kyi , Mahatma Gandhi , Nelson Mandela -- and the personal philosophies that powered their peaceful protests .
In half a century of trying to help prevent wars , there 's one question that never leaves me : How do we deal with extreme violence without using force in return ?
When you 're faced with brutality , whether it 's a child facing a bully on a playground or domestic violence -- or , on the streets of Syria today , facing tanks and shrapnel , what 's the most effective thing to do ?
Fight back ? Give in ?
Use more force ?
This question : " How do I deal with a bully without becoming a thug in return ? "
has been with me ever since I was a child .
I remember I was about 13 , glued to a grainy black and white television in my parents ' living room as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest , and kids not much older than me were throwing themselves at the tanks and getting mown down .
And I rushed upstairs and started packing my suitcase .
And my mother came up and said , " What on Earth are you doing ? "
And I said , " I 'm going to Budapest . "
And she said , " What on Earth for ? "
And I said , " Kids are getting killed there .
There 's something terrible happening . "
And she said , " Don 't be so silly . "
And I started to cry .
And she got it , she said , " Okay , I see it 's serious .
You 're much too young to help .
You need training . I 'll help you .
But just unpack your suitcase . "
And so I got some training and went and worked in Africa during most of my 20s .
But I realized that what I really needed to know I couldn 't get from training courses .
I wanted to understand how violence , how oppression , works .
And what I 've discovered since is this : Bullies use violence in three ways .
They use political violence to intimidate , physical violence to terrorize and mental or emotional violence to undermine .
And only very rarely in very few cases does it work to use more violence .
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence , and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills , the incredible skills , that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy .
And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence .
They realized that using force against force doesn 't work .
So what does work ?
Over time I 've collected about a half-dozen methods that do work -- of course there are many more -- that do work and that are effective .
And the first is that the change that has to take place has to take place here , inside me .
It 's my response , my attitude , to oppression that I 've got control over , and that I can do something about .
And what I need to develop is self-knowledge to do that .
That means I need to know how I tick , when I collapse , where my formidable points are , where my weaker points are .
When do I give in ?
What will I stand up for ?
And meditation or self-inspection is one of the ways -- again it 's not the only one -- it 's one of the ways of gaining this kind of inner power .
And my heroine here -- like Satish 's -- is Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma .
She was leading a group of students on a protest in the streets of Rangoon .
They came around a corner faced with a row of machine guns .
And she realized straight away that the soldiers with their fingers shaking on the triggers were more scared than the student protesters behind her .
But she told the students to sit down .
And she walked forward with such calm and such clarity and such total lack of fear that she could walk right up to the first gun , put her hand on it and lower it .
And no one got killed .
So that 's what the mastery of fear can do -- not only faced with machine guns , but if you meet a knife fight in the street .
But we have to practice .
So what about our fear ?
I have a little mantra .
My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it .
And if it grows very big it probably happens .
So we all know the three o 'clock in the morning syndrome , when something you 've been worrying about wakes you up -- I see a lot of people -- and for an hour you toss and turn , it gets worse and worse , and by four o 'clock you 're pinned to the pillow by a monster this big .
The only thing to do is to get up , make a cup of tea and sit down with the fear like a child beside you .
You 're the adult .
The fear is the child .
And you talk to the fear and you ask it what it wants , what it needs .
How can this be made better ?
How can the child feel stronger ?
And you make a plan .
And you say , " Okay , now we 're going back to sleep .
Half-past seven , we 're getting up and that 's what we 're going to do . "
I had one of these 3 a.m. episodes on Sunday -- paralyzed with fear at coming to talk to you .
So I did the thing .
I got up , made the cup of tea , sat down with it , did it all and I 'm here -- still partly paralyzed , but I 'm here .
So that 's fear . What about anger ?
Wherever there is injustice there 's anger .
But anger is like gasoline , and if you spray it around and somebody lights a match , you 've got an inferno .
But anger as an engine -- in an engine -- is powerful .
If we can put our anger inside an engine , it can drive us forward , it can get us through the dreadful moments and it can give us real inner power .
And I learned this in my work with nuclear weapon policy-makers .
Because at the beginning I was so outraged at the dangers they were exposing us to that I just wanted to argue and blame and make them wrong .
Totally ineffective .
In order to develop a dialogue for change we have to deal with our anger .
It 's okay to be angry with the thing -- the nuclear weapons in this case -- but it is hopeless to be angry with the people .
They are human beings just like us .
And they 're doing what they think is best .
And that 's the basis on which we have to talk with them .
So that 's the third one , anger .
And it brings me to the crux of what 's going on , or what I perceive as going on , in the world today , which is that last century was top-down power .
It was still governments telling people what to do .
This century there 's a shift .
It 's bottom-up or grassroots power .
It 's like mushrooms coming through concrete .
It 's people joining up with people , as Bundy just said , miles away to bring about change .
And Peace Direct spotted quite early on that local people in areas of very hot conflict know what to do .
They know best what to do .
So Peace Direct gets behind them to do that .
And the kind of thing they 're doing is demobilizing militias , rebuilding economies , resettling refugees , even liberating child soldiers .
And they have to risk their lives almost every day to do this .
And what they 've realized is that using violence in the situations they operate in is not only less humane , but it 's less effective than using methods that connect people with people , that rebuild .
And I think that the U.S. military is finally beginning to get this .
Up to now their counter-terrorism policy has been to kill insurgents at almost any cost , and if civilians get in the way , that 's written as " collateral damage . "
And this is so infuriating and humiliating for the population of Afghanistan , that it makes the recruitment for al-Qaeda very easy , when people are so disgusted by , for example , the burning of the Koran .
So the training of the troops has to change .
And I think there are signs that it is beginning to change .
The British military have always been much better at this .
But there is one magnificent example for them to take their cue from , and that 's a brilliant U.S. lieutenant colonel called Chris Hughes .
And he was leading his men down the streets of Najaf -- in Iraq actually -- and suddenly people were pouring out of the houses on either side of the road , screaming , yelling , furiously angry , and surrounded these very young troops who were completely terrified , didn 't know what was going on , couldn 't speak Arabic .
And Chris Hughes strode into the middle of the throng with his weapon above his head , pointing at the ground , and he said , " Kneel . "
And these huge soldiers with their backpacks and their body armor , wobbled to the ground .
And complete silence fell .
And after about two minutes , everybody moved aside and went home .
Now that to me is wisdom in action .
In the moment , that 's what he did .
And it 's happening everywhere now .
You don 't believe me ?
Have you asked yourselves why and how so many dictatorships have collapsed over the last 30 years ?
Dictatorships in Czechoslovakia , East Germany , Estonia , Latvia , Lithuania , Mali , Madagascar , Poland , the Philippines , Serbia , Slovenia , I could go on , and now Tunisia and Egypt .
And this hasn 't just happened .
A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80-year-old man in Boston , Gene Sharp .
He wrote a book called " From Dictatorship to Democracy " with 81 methodologies for non-violent resistance .
And it 's been translated into 26 languages .
It 's flown around the world .
And it 's being used by young people and older people everywhere , because it works and it 's effective .
So this is what gives me hope -- not just hope , this is what makes me feel very positive right now .
Because finally human beings are getting it .
We 're getting practical , doable methodologies to answer my question : How do we deal with a bully without becoming a thug ?
We 're using the kind of skills that I 've outlined : inner power -- the development of inner power -- through self-knowledge , recognizing and working with our fear , using anger as a fuel , cooperating with others , banding together with others , courage , and most importantly , commitment to active non-violence .
Now I don 't just believe in non-violence .
I don 't have to believe in it .
I see evidence everywhere of how it works .
And I see that we , ordinary people , can do what Aung San Suu Kyi and Ghandi and Mandela did .
We can bring to an end the bloodiest century that humanity has ever known .
And we can organize to overcome oppression by opening our hearts as well as strengthening this incredible resolve .
And this open-heartedness is exactly what I 've experienced in the entire organization of this gathering since I got here yesterday .
Thank you .
Gever Tulley : 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do
At TED U , Gever Tulley , founder of the Tinkering School , spells out 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do -- and why a little danger is good for both kids and grownups .
Welcome to " Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do . "
I don 't have children .
I borrow my friends ' children , so take all this advice with a grain of salt .
I 'm Gever Tulley .
I 'm a contract computer scientist by trade , but I 'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School .
It 's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of .
So we build a lot of things .
And I do put power tools into the hands of second-graders .
So if you 're thinking about sending your kid to Tinkering School , they do come back bruised , scraped and bloody .
So , you know , we live in a world that 's subjected to ever more stringent child safety regulations .
There doesn 't seem to be any limit on how crazy child safety regulations can get .
We put suffocation warnings on all the -- on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States or for sale with an item in the United States .
We put warnings on coffee cups to tell us that the contents may be hot .
And we seem to think that any item sharper than a golf ball is too sharp for children under the age of 10 .
So where does this trend stop ?
When we round every corner and eliminate every sharp object , every pokey bit in the world , then the first time that kids come in contact with anything sharp or not made out of round plastic , they 'll hurt themselves with it .
So , as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller , we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them .
And despite all of our best efforts and intentions , kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can , in whatever environment they can .
So despite the provocative title , this presentation is really about safety and about some simple things that we can do to raise our kids to be creative , confident and in control of the environment around them .
And what I now present to you is an excerpt from a book in progress .
The book is called " 50 Dangerous Things . "
This is five dangerous things .
Thing number one -- play with fire .
Learning to control one of the most elemental forces in nature is a pivotal moment in any child 's personal history .
Whether we remember it or not , it 's a -- it 's the first time we really get control of one of these mysterious things .
These mysteries are only revealed to those who get the opportunity to play with it .
So , playing with fire .
This is like one of the great things we ever discovered , fire .
From playing with it , they learn some basic principles about fire , about intake , about combustion , about exhaust .
These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have to have a good controlled fire .
And you can think of the open-pit fire as a laboratory .
You don 't know what they 're going to learn from playing with it .
You know , let them fool around with it on their own terms and trust me , they 're going to learn things that you can 't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys .
Number two -- own a pocketknife .
Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness , which I think is a terrible thing .
Your first -- your first pocketknife is like the first universal tool that you 're given .
You know , it 's a spatula , it 's a pry bar , it 's a screwdriver and it 's a blade .
And it 's a -- it 's a powerful and empowering tool .
And in a lot of cultures they give knives -- like , as soon as they 're toddlers they have knives .
These are Inuit children cutting whale blubber .
I first saw this in a Canadian Film Board film when I was 10 , and it left a lasting impression , to see babies playing with knives .
And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age .
You lay down a couple of very simple rules -- always cut away from your body , keep the blade sharp , never force it -- and these are things kids can understand and practice with .
And yeah , they 're going to cut themselves .
I have some terrible scars on my legs from where I stabbed myself .
But you know , they 're young . They heal fast .
Number three -- throw a spear .
It turns out that our brains are actually wired for throwing things and , like muscles , if you don 't use parts of your brain , they tend to atrophy over time .
But when you exercise them , any given muscle adds strength to the whole system and that applies to your brain too .
So practicing throwing things has been shown to stimulate the frontal and parietal lobes , which have to do with visual acuity , 3D understanding , and structural problem solving , so it gives a sense -- it helps develop their visualization skills and their predictive ability .
And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill , so it 's very good for that kind of whole-body training .
These kinds of target-based practice also helps kids develop attention and concentration skills .
So those are great .
Number four -- deconstruct appliances .
There is a world of interesting things inside your dishwasher .
Next time you 're about to throw out an appliance , don 't throw it out .
Take it apart with your kid , or send him to my school and we 'll take it apart with them .
Even if you don 't know what the parts are , puzzling out what they might be for is a really good practice for the kids to get sort of the sense that they can take things apart , and no matter how complex they are , they can understand parts of them and that means that eventually , they can understand all of them .
It 's a sense of knowability , that something is knowable .
So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people and you can understand them .
Number five -- two-parter .
Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act .
There are laws beyond safety regulations that attempt to limit how we can interact with the things that we own -- in this case , digital media .
It 's a very simple exercise -- buy a song on ITunes , write it to a CD , then rip the CD to an MP3 and play it on your very same computer .
You 've just broken a law .
Technically the RIAA can come and persecute you .
It 's an important lesson for kids to understand -- that some of these laws get broken by accident and that laws have to be interpreted .
And it 's something we often talk about with the kids when we 're fooling around with things and breaking them open and taking them apart and using them for other things -- and also when we go out and drive a car .
Driving a car is a -- is a really empowering act for a young child , so this is the ultimate .
For those of you who aren 't comfortable actually breaking the law , you can drive a car with your child .
This is -- this is a great stage for a kid .
This happens about the same time that they get latched onto things like dinosaurs , these big things in the outside world that they 're trying to get a grip on .
A car is a similar object , and they can get in a car and drive it .
And that 's a really , like -- it gives them a handle on a world in a way that they wouldn 't -- that they don 't often have access to .
So -- and it 's perfectly legal .
Find a big empty lot , make sure there 's nothing in it and it 's on private property , and let them drive your car .
It 's very safe actually .
And it 's fun for the whole family .
So , let 's see .
I think that 's it . That 's number five and a half . OK .
Mike Matas : A next-generation digital book
Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever , swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with . The book is " Our Choice , " Al Gore 's sequel to " An Inconvenient Truth . "
So for the past year and a half , my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book .
It 's called " Our Choice " and the author is Al Gore .
It 's the sequel to " An Inconvenient Truth , " and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis .
The book starts like this . This is the cover .
As the globe spins , we can see our location , and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book .
Or , we can scroll through the pages at the bottom .
And if we wanted to zoom into a page , we can just open it up .
And anything you see in the book , you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up .
And if you want to go back and read the book again , you just fold it back up and put it back on the page .
And so this works the same way ; you pick it up and pop it open .
I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they 're a beautiful addition to the landscape .
Mike Matas : And so throughout the whole book , Al Gore will walk you through and explain the photos .
This photo , you can you can even see on an interactive map .
Zoom into it and see where it was taken .
And throughout the book , there 's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations .
So you can open this one .
AG : Most modern wind turbines consist of a large ...
MM : It starts playing immediately .
And while it 's playing , we can pinch and peak back at the page , and the movie keeps playing .
Or we can zoom out to the table of contents , and the video keeps playing .
But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics .
This one shows the wind potential all around the United States .
But instead of just showing us the information , we can take our finger and explore , and see , state by state , exactly how much wind potential there is .
We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power .
This is one of my favorites .
So this shows ...
When the wind is blowing , any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery .
And as the wind starts dying down , any excess energy will be diverted back into the house -- the lights never go out .
And this whole book , it doesn 't just run on the iPad .
It also runs on the iPhone .
And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone .
And it works the exact same way .
You can pinch into any page .
Open it up .
So that 's Push Pop Press ' first title , Al Gore 's " Our Choice . "
Thank you .
That 's spectacular .
Do you want to be a publisher , a technology licenser ?
What is the business here ?
Is this something that other people can do ?
MM : Yeah , we 're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content .
So Melcher Media 's team , who 's on the East coast -- and we 're on the West coast , building the software -- takes our tool and , every day , drags in images and text .
So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that ?
All right . Mike , thanks so much .
MM : Thank you .
Mark Kendall : Demo : A needle-free vaccine patch that 's safer and way cheaper
One hundred sixty years after the invention of the needle and syringe , we 're still using them to deliver vaccines ; it 's time to evolve . Biomedical engineer Mark Kendall demos the Nanopatch , a one-centimeter-by-one-centimeter square vaccine that can be applied painlessly to the skin . He shows how this tiny piece of silicon can overcome four major shortcomings of the modern needle and syringe , at a fraction of the cost .
It 's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh , Scotland , the birthplace of the needle and syringe .
Less than a mile from here in this direction , in 1853 a Scotsman filed his very first patent on the needle and syringe .
His name was Alexander Wood , and it was at the Royal College of Physicians .
This is the patent .
What blows my mind when I look at it even today is that it looks almost identical to the needle in use today .
Yet , it 's 160 years old .
So we turn to the field of vaccines .
Most vaccines are delivered with the needle and syringe , this 160-year-old technology .
And credit where it 's due -- on many levels , vaccines are a successful technology .
After clean water and sanitation , vaccines are the one technology that has increased our life span the most .
That 's a pretty hard act to beat .
But just like any other technology , vaccines have their shortcomings , and the needle and syringe is a key part within that narrative -- this old technology .
So let 's start with the obvious : Many of us don 't like the needle and syringe .
I share that view .
However , 20 percent of the population have a thing called needle phobia .
That 's more than disliking the needle ; that is actively avoiding being vaccinated because of needle phobia .
And that 's problematic in terms of the rollout of vaccines .
Now , related to this is another key issue , which is needlestick injuries .
And the WHO has figures that suggest about 1.3 million deaths per year take place due to cross-contamination with needlestick injuries .
These are early deaths that take place .
Now , these are two things that you probably may have heard of , but there are two other shortcomings of the needle and syringe you may not have heard about .
One is it could be holding back the next generation of vaccines in terms of their immune responses .
And the second is that it could be responsible for the problem of the cold chain that I 'll tell you about as well .
I 'm going to tell you about some work that my team and I are doing in Australia at the University of Queensland And that technology is called the Nanopatch .
Now , this is a specimen of the Nanopatch .
To the naked eye it just looks like a square smaller than a postage stamp , but under a microscope what you see are thousands of tiny projections that are invisible to the human eye .
And there 's about 4,000 projections on this particular square compared to the needle .
And I 've designed those projections to serve a key role , which is to work with the skin 's immune system .
So that 's a very important function tied in with the Nanopatch .
Now we make the Nanopatch with a technique called deep reactive ion etching .
And this particular technique is one that 's been borrowed from the semiconductor industry , and therefore is low cost and can be rolled out in large numbers .
Now we dry-coat vaccines to the projections of the Nanopatch and apply it to the skin .
Now , the simplest form of application is using our finger , but our finger has some limitations , so we 've devised an applicator .
And it 's a very simple device -- you could call it a sophisticated finger .
It 's a spring-operated device .
What we do is when we apply the Nanopatch to the skin as so -- -- immediately a few things happen .
So firstly , the projections on the Nanopatch breach through the tough outer layer and the vaccine is very quickly released -- within less than a minute , in fact .
Then we can take the Nanopatch off and discard it .
And indeed we can make a reuse of the applicator itself .
So that gives you an idea of the Nanopatch , and immediately you can see some key advantages .
We 've talked about it being needle-free -- these are projections that you can 't even see -- and , of course , we get around the needle phobia issue as well .
Now , if we take a step back and think about these other two really important advantages : One is improved immune responses through delivery , and the second is getting rid of the cold chain .
So let 's start with the first one , this immunogenicity idea .
It takes a little while to get our heads around , but I 'll try to explain it in simple terms .
So I 'll take a step back and explain to you how vaccines work in a simple way .
So vaccines work by introducing into our body a thing called an antigen which is a safe form of a germ .
Now that safe germ , that antigen , tricks our body into mounting an immune response , learning and remembering how to deal with intruders .
When the real intruder comes along the body quickly mounts an immune response to deal with that vaccine and neutralizes the infection .
So it does that well .
Now , the way it 's done today with the needle and syringe , most vaccines are delivered that way -- with this old technology and the needle .
But it could be argued that the needle is holding back our immune responses ; it 's missing our immune sweet spot in the skin .
To describe this idea , we need to take a journey through the skin , starting with one of those projections and applying the Nanopatch to the skin .
And we see this kind of data .
Now , this is real data -- that thing that we can see there is one projection from the Nanopatch that 's been applied to the skin and those colors are different layers .
Now , to give you an idea of scale , if the needle was shown here , it would be too big .
It would be 10 times bigger than the size of that screen , going 10 times deeper as well .
It 's off the grid entirely .
You can see immediately that we have those projections in the skin .
That red layer is a tough outer layer of dead skin , but the brown layer and the magenta layer are jammed full of immune cells .
As one example , in the brown layer there 's a certain type of cell called a Langerhans cell -- every square millimeter of our body is jammed full of those Langerhans cells , those immune cells , and there 's others shown as well that we haven 't stained in this image .
But you can immediately see that the Nanopatch achieves that penetration indeed .
We target thousands upon thousands of these particular cells of the surface of the skin .
Now , as the guy that 's invented this thing and designed it to do that , I found that exciting . But so what ?
So what if you 've targeted cells ?
In the world of vaccines , what does that mean ?
The world of vaccines is getting better .
It 's getting more systematic .
However , you still don 't really know if a vaccine is going to work until you roll your sleeves up and vaccinate and wait .
It 's a gambler 's game even today .
So , we had to do that gamble .
We obtained an influenza vaccine , we applied it to our Nanopatches and we applied the Nanopatches to the skin , and we waited -- and this is in the live animal .
We waited a month , and this is what we found out .
This is a data slide showing the immune responses that we 've generated with a Nanopatch compared to the needle and syringe into muscle .
So on the horizontal axis we have the dose shown in nanograms .
On the vertical axis we have the immune response generated , and that dashed line indicates the protection threshold .
If we 're above that line it 's considered protective ; if we 're below that line it 's not .
So the red line is mostly below that curve and indeed there 's only one point that is achieved with the needle that 's protective , and that 's with a high dose of 6,000 nanograms .
But notice immediately the distinctly different curve that we achieve with the blue line .
That 's what 's achieved with the Nanopatch ; the delivered dose of the Nanopatch is a completely different immunogenicity curve .
That 's a real fresh opportunity .
Suddenly we have a brand new lever in the world of vaccines .
We can push it one way , where we can take a vaccine that works but is too expensive and can get protection with a hundredth of the dose compared to the needle .
That can take a vaccine that 's suddenly 10 dollars down to 10 cents , and that 's particularly important within the developing world .
But there 's another angle to this as well -- you can take vaccines that currently don 't work and get them over that line and get them protective .
And certainly in the world of vaccines that can be important .
Let 's consider the big three : HIV , malaria , tuberculosis .
They 're responsible for about 7 million deaths per year , and there is no adequate vaccination method for any of those .
So potentially , with this new lever that we have with the Nanopatch , we can help make that happen .
We can push that lever to help get those candidate vaccines over the line .
Now , of course , we 've worked within my lab with many other vaccines that have attained similar responses and similar curves to this , what we 've achieved with influenza .
I 'd like to now switch to talk about another key shortcoming of today 's vaccines , and that is the need to maintain the cold chain .
As the name suggests -- the cold chain -- it 's the requirements of keeping a vaccine right from production all the way through to when the vaccine is applied , to keep it refrigerated .
Now , that presents some logistical challenges but we have ways to do it .
This is a slightly extreme case in point but it helps illustrate the logistical challenges , in particular in resource-poor settings , of what 's required to get vaccines refrigerated and maintain the cold chain .
If the vaccine is too warm the vaccine breaks down , but interestingly it can be too cold and the vaccine can break down as well .
Now , the stakes are very high .
The WHO estimates that within Africa , up to half the vaccines used there are considered to not be working properly because at some point the cold chain has fallen over .
So it 's a big problem , and it 's tied in with the needle and syringe because it 's a liquid form vaccine , and when it 's liquid it needs the refrigeration .
A key attribute of our Nanopatch is that the vaccine is dry , and when it 's dry it doesn 't need refrigeration .
Within my lab we 've shown that we can keep the vaccine stored at 23 degrees Celsius for more than a year without any loss in activity at all .
That 's an important improvement .
We 're delighted about it as well .
And the thing about it is that we have well and truly proven the Nanopatch within the laboratory setting .
And as a scientist , I love that and I love science .
However , as an engineer , as a biomedical engineer and also as a human being , I 'm not going to be satisfied until we 've rolled this thing out , taken it out of the lab and got it to people in large numbers and particularly the people that need it the most .
So we 've commenced this particular journey , and we 've commenced this journey in an unusual way .
We 've started with Papua New Guinea .
Now , Papua New Guinea is an example of a developing world country .
It 's about the same size as France , but it suffers from many of the key barriers existing within the world of today 's vaccines .
There 's the logistics : Within this country there are only 800 refrigerators to keep vaccines chilled .
Many of them are old , like this one in Port Moresby , many of them are breaking down and many are not in the Highlands where they are required .
That 's a challenge .
But also , Papua New Guinea has the world 's highest incidence of HPV , human papillomavirus , the cervical cancer [ risk factor ] .
Yet , that vaccine is not available in large numbers because it 's too expensive .
So for those two reasons , with the attributes of the Nanopatch , we 've got into the field and worked with the Nanopatch , and taken it to Papua New Guinea and we 'll be following that up shortly .
Now , doing this kind of work is not easy .
It 's challenging , but there 's nothing else in the world I 'd rather be doing .
And as we look ahead I 'd like to share with you a thought : It 's the thought of a future where the 17 million deaths per year that we currently have due to infectious disease is a historical footnote .
And it 's a historical footnote that has been achieved by improved , radically improved vaccines .
Now standing here today in front of you at the birthplace of the needle and syringe , I 'm presenting to you an alternative approach that could really help make that happen -- and it 's the Nanopatch with its attributes of being needle-free , pain-free , the ability for removing the cold chain and improving the immunogenicity .
Thank you .
Julie Burstein : 4 lessons in creativity
Radio host Julie Burstein talks with creative people for a living -- and shares four lessons about how to create in the face of challenge , self-doubt and loss . Hear insights from filmmaker Mira Nair , writer Richard Ford , sculptor Richard Serra and photographer Joel Meyerowitz .
On my desk in my office , I keep a small clay pot that I made in college . It 's raku , which is a kind of pottery that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony .
This one is more than 400 years old .
Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay , and it was the imperfections that people cherished .
Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire .
I just took this out of the kiln last week , and the kiln itself takes another day or two to cool down , but raku is really fast . You do it outside , and you take the kiln up to temperature . In 15 minutes , it goes to 1,500 degrees , and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside , you can see that faint sheen , you turn the kiln off , and you reach in with these long metal tongs , you grab the pot , and in Japan , this red-hot pot would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea , and you can imagine what that steam would smell like .
But here in the United States , we ramp up the drama a little bit , and we drop our pots into sawdust , which catches on fire , and you take a garbage pail , and you put it on top , and smoke starts pouring out .
I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke .
I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements .
I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze , but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke , and what 's wonderful is the surprises that happen , like this crackle pattern , because it 's really stressful on these pots . They go from 1,500 degrees to room temperature in the space of just a minute .
Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity .
I find in so many things that tension between what I can control and what I have to let go happens all the time , whether I 'm creating a new radio show or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons .
When I sat down to write a book about creativity , I realized that the steps were reversed .
I had to let go at the very beginning , and I had to immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers , and as I listened to these stories , I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you might think , including letting go .
It was supposed to break , but that 's okay .
That 's part of the letting go , is sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn 't , because creativity also grows from the broken places .
The best way to learn about anything is through stories , and so I want to tell you a story about work and play and about four aspects of life that we need to embrace in order for our own creativity to flourish .
The first embrace is something that we think , " Oh , this is very easy , " but it 's actually getting harder , and that 's paying attention to the world around us .
So many artists speak about needing to be open , to embrace experience , and that 's hard to do when you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that takes all of your focus .
The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up in a small town in India . Its name is Bhubaneswar , and here 's a picture of one of the temples in her town .
Mira Nair : In this little town , there were like 2,000 temples .
We played cricket all the time . We kind of grew up in the rubble . The major thing that inspired me , that led me on this path , that made me a filmmaker eventually , was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of , you know , passion , and hashish as well , and it was amazing .
You know , the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana , the two holy books , the epics that everything comes out of in India , they say . After seeing that Jatra , the folk theater , I knew I wanted to get on , you know , and perform .
Julie Burstein : Isn 't that a wonderful story ?
You can see the sort of break in the everyday .
There they are in the school fields , but it 's good and evil , and passion and hashish . And Mira Nair was a young girl with thousands of other people watching this performance , but she was ready . She was ready to open up to what it sparked in her , and it led her , an award-winning filmmaker .
So being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace .
Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult .
The novelist Richard Ford speaks about a childhood challenge that continues to be something he wrestles with today . He 's severely dyslexic .
Richard Ford : I was slow to learn to read , went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum , and still to this day can 't read silently much faster than I can read aloud , but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it , then I think I came very slowly into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects of language : the syncopations , the sounds of words , what words look like , where paragraphs break , where lines break . I mean , I wasn 't so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading . I just had to do it really slowly , and as I did , lingering on those sentences as I had to linger , I fell heir to language 's other qualities , which I think has helped me write sentences .
JB : It 's so powerful . Richard Ford , who 's won the Pulitzer Prize , says that dyslexia helped him write sentences .
He had to embrace this challenge , and I use that word intentionally . He didn 't have to overcome dyslexia .
He had to learn from it . He had to learn to hear the music in language .
Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do , sometimes pushing into what they can 't do , helps them focus on finding their own voice .
The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how , as a young artist , he thought he was a painter , and he lived in Florence after graduate school .
While he was there , he traveled to Madrid , where he went to the Prado to see this picture by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez .
It 's from 1656 , and it 's called " Las Meninas , " and it 's the picture of a little princess and her ladies-in-waiting , and if you look over that little blonde princess 's shoulder , you 'll see a mirror , and reflected in it are her parents , the King and Queen of Spain , who would be standing where you might stand to look at the picture .
As he often did , Velázquez put himself in this painting too .
He 's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand and his palette in the other .
Richard Serra : I was standing there looking at it , and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me , and I thought , " Oh . I 'm the subject of the painting . "
And I thought , " I 'm not going to be able to do that painting . "
I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch and painting squares out of randomness , and I wasn 't getting anywhere . So I went back and dumped all my paintings in the Arno , and I thought , I 'm going to just start playing around .
JB : Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly , you might have missed it . He went and saw this painting by a guy who 'd been dead for 300 years , and realized , " I can 't do that , " and so Richard Serra went back to his studio in Florence , picked up all of his work up to that point , and threw it in a river .
Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment , but he didn 't let go of art . He moved to New York City , and he put together a list of verbs more than a hundred of them , and as he said , he just started playing around . He did these things to all kinds of material . He would take a huge sheet of lead and roll it up and unroll it . He would do the same thing to rubber , and when he got to the direction " to lift , " he created this , which is in the Museum of Modern Art .
Richard Serra had to let go of painting in order to embark on this playful exploration that led him to the work that he 's known for today : huge curves of steel that require our time and motion to experience . In sculpture , Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn 't do in painting .
He makes us the subject of his art .
So experience and challenge and limitations are all things we need to embrace for creativity to flourish .
There 's a fourth embrace , and it 's the hardest .
It 's the embrace of loss , the oldest and most constant of human experiences .
In order to create , we have to stand in that space between what we see in the world and what we hope for , looking squarely at rejection , at heartbreak , at war , at death .
That 's a tough space to stand in .
The educator Parker Palmer calls it " the tragic gap , " tragic not because it 's sad but because it 's inevitable , and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say , " You can hold that tension like a violin string and make something beautiful . "
That tension resonates in the work of the photographer Joel Meyerowitz , who at the beginning of his career was known for his street photography , for capturing a moment on the street , and also for his beautiful photographs of landscapes -- of Tuscany , of Cape Cod , of light .
Joel is a New Yorker , and his studio for many years was in Chelsea , with a straight view downtown to the World Trade Center , and he photographed those buildings in every sort of light .
You know where this story goes .
On 9 / 11 , Joel wasn 't in New York . He was out of town , but he raced back to the city , and raced down to the site of the destruction .
Joel Meyerowitz : And like all the other passersby , I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers and Greenwich , and all I could see was the smoke and a little bit of rubble , and I raised my camera to take a peek , just to see if there was something to see , and some cop , a lady cop , hit me on my shoulder , and said , " Hey , no pictures ! "
And it was such a blow that it woke me up , in the way that it was meant to be , I guess .
And when I asked her why no pictures , she said , " It 's a crime scene . No photographs allowed . "
And I asked her , " What would happen if I was a member of the press ? " And she told me , " Oh , look back there , " and back a block was the press corps tied up in a little penned-in area , and I said , " Well , when do they go in ? "
and she said , " Probably never . "
And as I walked away from that , I had this crystallization , probably from the blow , because it was an insult in a way .
I thought , " Oh , if there 's no pictures , then there 'll be no record . We need a record . "
And I thought , " I 'm gonna make that record .
I 'll find a way to get in , because I don 't want to see this history disappear . "
JB : He did . He pulled in every favor he could , and got a pass into the World Trade Center site , where he photographed for nine months almost every day .
Looking at these photographs today brings back the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes when I went home to my family at night .
My office was just a few blocks away .
But some of these photographs are beautiful , and we wondered , was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz to make such beauty out of such devastation ?
JM : Well , you know , ugly , I mean , powerful and tragic and horrific and everything , but it was also as , in nature , an enormous event that was transformed after the fact into this residue , and like many other ruins — you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace — and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather .
I mean , there were afternoons I was down there , and the light goes pink and there 's a mist in the air and you 're standing in the rubble , and I found myself recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature and the fact that nature , as time , is erasing this wound .
Time is unstoppable , and it transforms the event .
It gets further and further away from the day , and light and seasons temper it in some way , and it 's not that I 'm a romantic . I 'm really a realist .
The reality is , there 's the Woolworth Building in a veil of smoke from the site , but it 's now like a scrim across a theater , and it 's turning pink , you know , and down below there are hoses spraying , and the lights have come on for the evening , and the water is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on , and I 'm thinking , " My God , who could dream this up ? "
But the fact is , I 'm there , it looks like that , you have to take a picture .
JB : You have to take a picture . That sense of urgency , of the need to get to work , is so powerful in Joel 's story .
When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently , I told him how much I admired his passionate obstinacy , his determination to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work , and he laughed , and he said , " I 'm stubborn , but I think what 's more important is my passionate optimism . "
The first time I told these stories , a man in the audience raised his hand and said , " All these artists talk about their work , not their art , which has got me thinking about my work and where the creativity is there , and I 'm not an artist . " He 's right . We all wrestle with experience and challenge , limits and loss .
Creativity is essential to all of us , whether we 're scientists or teachers , parents or entrepreneurs .
I want to leave you with another image of a Japanese tea bowl . This one is at the Freer Gallery in Washington , D.C.
It 's more than a hundred years old and you can still see the fingermarks where the potter pinched it .
But as you can also see , this one did break at some point in its hundred years .
But the person who put it back together , instead of hiding the cracks , decided to emphasize them , using gold lacquer to repair it .
This bowl is more beautiful now , having been broken , than it was when it was first made , and we can look at those cracks , because they tell the story that we all live , of the cycle of creation and destruction , of control and letting go , of picking up the pieces and making something new .
Thank you .
Justin Hall-Tipping : Freeing energy from the grid
What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes ? In this moving talk , entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible , and how questioning our notion of ' normal ' can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs .
Why can 't we solve these problems ?
We know what they are .
Something always seems to stop us .
Why ?
I remember March the 15th , 2000 .
The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf .
In the newspaper it said " it was all part of a normal process . "
A little bit further on in the article it said " a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace . "
That same word , " normal , " had two different , almost opposite meanings .
If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today , we 're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall , 76 miles long , 17 miles wide , and it 's going to weigh two gigatons .
I 'm sorry , there 's nothing normal about this .
And yet I think it 's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions .
Only 90 days after this , arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred .
It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome .
This is the code that 's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are .
And if we just take one cell 's worth of this code and unwind it , it 's a meter long , two nanometers thick .
Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness .
And I wondered , what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places , where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms ?
And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy , the electron ?
So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there , and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas .
Six and a half years later , a hundred and eighty researchers , they have some amazing developments in the lab , and I will show you three of those today , such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead , we can generate all the energy we need right where we are , cleanly , safely , and cheaply .
Think of the space that we spend most of our time .
A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun .
We like the light that comes into the room , but in the middle of summer , all that heat is coming into the room that we 're trying to keep cool .
In winter , exactly the opposite is happening .
We 're trying to heat up the space that we 're in , and all that is trying to get out through the window .
Wouldn 't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in ?
One of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material , carbon , that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor , and when the vaporized carbon condenses , it condenses back into a different form : chickenwire rolled up .
But this chickenwire carbon , called a carbon nanotube , is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs .
It 's a thousand times more conductive than copper .
How is that possible ?
One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently .
You think of carbon as black .
Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible .
And when it 's in this form , if I combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it 's in its colored state , it will reflect away all heat and light , and when it 's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between .
To change its state , by the way , takes two volts from a millisecond pulse .
And once you 've changed its state , it stays there until you change its state again .
As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida , we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist , and he was working on a pretty incredible thing .
Imagine if we didn 't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night .
We 'd have to see at night , right ?
This lets you do it .
It 's a nanomaterial , two nanomaterials , a detector and an imager .
The total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place .
And it takes all the infrared available at night , converts it into an electron in the space of two small films , and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through .
I 'm going to show to TEDsters , the first time , this operating .
Firstly I 'm going to show you the transparency .
Transparency is key .
It 's a film that you can look through .
And then I 'm going to turn the lights out .
And you can see , off a tiny film , incredible clarity .
As we were working on this , it dawned on us : this is taking infrared radiation , wavelengths , and converting it into electrons .
What if we combined it with this ?
Suddenly you 've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window .
But because it 's flexible , it can be on any surface whatsoever .
The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant .
We talked about generating and using .
We want to talk about storing energy , and unfortunately the best thing we 've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago , the lead acid battery .
In terms of dollars per what 's stored , it 's simply the best .
Knowing that we 're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power , we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas , and we gave them this diagram .
It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas / Fort Worth Airport .
We said , " Could you build this ? "
And these scientists , instead of laughing at us , said , " Yeah . "
And what they built was eBox .
EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside , hold it until you need it , and then be able to release it and pass it off .
Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly , efficiently and cheaply right where I am .
It 's my energy .
And if I don 't need it , I can convert it back up on the window to energy , light , and beam it , line of site , to your place .
And for that I do not need an electric grid between us .
The grid of tomorrow is no grid , and energy , clean efficient energy , will one day be free .
If you do this , you get the last puzzle piece , which is water .
Each of us , every day , need just eight glasses of this , because we 're human .
When we run out of water , as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world , we 're going to have to get this from the sea , and that 's going to require us to build desalination plants .
19 trillion dollars is what we 're going to have to spend .
These also require tremendous amounts of energy .
In fact , it 's going to require twice the world 's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water .
We 're simply not going to do that .
But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply , we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need .
I 'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists , no kinder than many of the people in the world , but they have a magic look at the world .
And I 'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world .
It 's been a long time in coming for me .
18 years ago , I saw a photograph in the paper .
It was taken by Kevin Carter who went to the Sudan to document their famine there .
I 've carried this photograph with me every day since then .
It 's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst .
By any standard this is wrong .
It 's just wrong .
We can do better than this .
We should do better than this .
And whenever I go round to somebody who says , " You know what , you 're working on something that 's too difficult .
It 'll never happen . You don 't have enough money .
You don 't have enough time .
There 's something much more interesting around the corner , " I say , " Try saying that to her . "
That 's what I say in my mind . And I just say " thank you , " and I go on to the next one .
This is why we have to solve our problems , and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature , the stuff of life : the simple electron .
Thank you .
Damon Horowitz : We need a " moral operating system "
Damon Horowitz reviews the enormous new powers that technology gives us : to know more -- and more about each other -- than ever before . Drawing the audience into a philosophical discussion , Horowitz invites us to pay new attention to the basic philosophy -- the ethical principles -- behind the burst of invention remaking our world . Where 's the moral operating system that allows us to make sense of it ? & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Power .
That is the word that comes to mind .
We 're the new technologists .
We have a lot of data , so we have a lot of power .
How much power do we have ?
Scene from a movie : " Apocalypse Now " -- great movie .
We 've got to get our hero , Captain Willard , to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz .
The way we 're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off .
So the scene : the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in .
And there 's this loud , thrilling music in the background , this wild music .
Dum da ta da dum Dum da ta da dum Da ta da da That 's a lot of power .
That 's the kind of power I feel in this room .
That 's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have .
Let 's take an example .
What can we do with just one person 's data ?
What can we do with that guy 's data ?
I can look at your financial records .
I can tell if you pay your bills on time .
I know if you 're good to give a loan to .
I can look at your medical records ; I can see if your pump is still pumping -- see if you 're good to offer insurance to .
I can look at your clicking patterns .
When you come to my website , I actually know what you 're going to do already because I 've seen you visit millions of websites before .
And I 'm sorry to tell you , you 're like a poker player , you have a tell .
I can tell with data analysis what you 're going to do before you even do it .
I know what you like . I know who you are , and that 's even before I look at your mail or your phone .
Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have .
But I 'm not actually here to talk about what we can do .
I 'm here to talk about what we should do .
What 's the right thing to do ?
Now I see some puzzled looks like , " Why are you asking us what 's the right thing to do ?
We 're just building this stuff . Somebody else is using it . "
Fair enough .
But it brings me back .
I think about World War II -- some of our great technologists then , some of our great physicists , studying nuclear fission and fusion -- just nuclear stuff .
We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they 'll build .
We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology .
So what should we be doing with that guy 's data ?
Should we be collecting it , gathering it , so we can make his online experience better ?
So we can make money ?
So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good ?
Or should we respect his privacy , protect his dignity and leave him alone ?
Which one is it ?
How should we figure it out ?
I know : crowdsource . Let 's crowdsource this .
So to get people warmed up , let 's start with an easy question -- something I 'm sure everybody here has an opinion about : iPhone versus Android .
Let 's do a show of hands -- iPhone .
Uh huh .
Android .
You 'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn 't be such suckers just for the pretty phones .
Next question , a little bit harder .
Should we be collecting all of that guy 's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he 's up to no good ?
Or should we leave him alone ?
Collect his data .
Leave him alone .
You 're safe . It 's fine .
Okay , last question -- harder question -- when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case , should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework , or should we use a Millian consequentialist one ?
Kant .
Mill .
Not as many votes .
Yeah , that 's a terrifying result .
Terrifying , because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions .
How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don 't have a moral framework ?
We know more about mobile operating systems , but what we really need is a moral operating system .
What 's a moral operating system ?
We all know right and wrong , right ?
You feel good when you do something right , you feel bad when you do something wrong .
Our parents teach us that : praise with the good , scold with the bad .
But how do we figure out what 's right and wrong ?
And from day to day , we have the techniques that we use .
Maybe we just follow our gut .
Maybe we take a vote -- we crowdsource .
Or maybe we punt -- ask the legal department , see what they say .
In other words , it 's kind of random , kind of ad hoc , how we figure out what we should do .
And maybe , if we want to be on surer footing , what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there , that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place , and how would we know in a given situation what to do .
So let 's get a moral framework .
We 're numbers people , living by numbers .
How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework ?
I know a guy who did exactly that .
A brilliant guy -- he 's been dead 2,500 years .
Plato , that 's right .
Remember him -- old philosopher ?
You were sleeping during that class .
And Plato , he had a lot of the same concerns that we did .
He was worried about right and wrong .
He wanted to know what is just .
But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this .
He says something 's just . She says something else is just .
It 's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too .
I 'm just going back and forth ; I 'm not getting anywhere .
I don 't want opinions ; I want knowledge .
I want to know the truth about justice -- like we have truths in math .
In math , we know the objective facts .
Take a number , any number -- two .
Favorite number . I love that number .
There are truths about two .
If you 've got two of something , you add two more , you get four .
That 's true no matter what thing you 're talking about .
It 's an objective truth about the form of two , the abstract form .
When you have two of anything -- two eyes , two ears , two noses , just two protrusions -- those all partake of the form of two .
They all participate in the truths that two has .
They all have two-ness in them .
And therefore , it 's not a matter of opinion .
What if , Plato thought , ethics was like math ?
What if there were a pure form of justice ?
What if there are truths about justice , and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated , partook of that form of justice ?
Then you would know what was really just and what wasn 't .
It wouldn 't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances .
That 's a stunning vision .
I mean , think about that . How grand . How ambitious .
That 's as ambitious as we are .
He wants to solve ethics .
He wants objective truths .
If you think that way , you have a Platonist moral framework .
If you don 't think that way , well , you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy , because the tidy idea , you know , people criticized it .
Aristotle , in particular , he was not amused .
He thought it was impractical .
Aristotle said , " We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows . "
Aristotle thought ethics wasn 't a lot like math .
He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path .
If you think that , Plato 's not your guy .
But don 't give up .
Maybe there 's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework .
How about this : What if in any situation you could just calculate , look at the choices , measure out which one 's better and know what to do ?
That sound familiar ?
That 's a utilitarian moral framework .
John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this -- nice guy besides -- and only been dead 200 years .
So basis of utilitarianism -- I 'm sure you 're familiar at least .
The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this .
But here 's the way it works .
What if morals , what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain ?
It does something intrinsic to the act .
It 's not like its relation to some abstract form .
It 's just a matter of the consequences .
You just look at the consequences and see if , overall , it 's for the good or for the worse .
That would be simple . Then we know what to do .
Let 's take an example .
Suppose I go up and I say , " I 'm going to take your phone . "
Not just because it rang earlier , but I 'm going to take it because I made a little calculation .
I thought , that guy looks suspicious .
And what if he 's been sending little messages to Bin Laden 's hideout -- or whoever took over after Bin Laden -- and he 's actually like a terrorist , a sleeper cell .
I 'm going to find that out , and when I find that out , I 'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause .
That has a very high utility to prevent that damage .
And compared to the little pain that it 's going to cause -- because it 's going to be embarrassing when I 'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit -- that 's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone .
If you feel that way , that 's a utilitarian choice .
But maybe you don 't feel that way either .
Maybe you think , it 's his phone .
It 's wrong to take his phone because he 's a person and he has rights and he has dignity , and we can 't just interfere with that .
He has autonomy .
It doesn 't matter what the calculations are .
There are things that are intrinsically wrong -- like lying is wrong , like torturing innocent children is wrong .
Kant was very good on this point , and he said it a little better than I 'll say it .
He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct , and then it is our duty to follow those rules .
It 's not a matter of calculation .
So let 's stop .
We 're right in the thick of it , this philosophical thicket .
And this goes on for thousands of years , because these are hard questions , and I 've only got 15 minutes .
So let 's cut to the chase .
How should we be making our decisions ?
Is it Plato , is it Aristotle , is it Kant , is it Mill ?
What should we be doing ? What 's the answer ?
What 's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do , whether we should use that guy 's data or not ?
What 's the formula ?
There 's not a formula .
There 's not a simple answer .
Ethics is hard .
Ethics requires thinking .
And that 's uncomfortable .
I know ; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence , trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us , that could give us answers .
But they can 't .
You can 't just take human thinking and put it into a machine .
We 're the ones who have to do it .
Happily , we 're not machines , and we can do it .
Not only can we think , we must .
Hannah Arendt said , " The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil .
It arises from not thinking . "
That 's what she called the " banality of evil . "
And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person .
So let 's do that . Let 's think .
In fact , let 's start right now .
Every person in this room do this : think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing , where you wondered , " What should I be doing ? "
Bring that to mind , and now reflect on that and say , " How did I come up that decision ?
What did I do ? Did I follow my gut ?
Did I have somebody vote on it ? Or did I punt to legal ? "
Or now we have a few more choices .
" Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would ?
Or like Kant , did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right ? "
Think about it . Really bring it to mind . This is important .
It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this .
Are you ready ? Go .
Stop . Good work .
What you just did , that 's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power .
Now the next step -- try this .
Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision .
Not right now . Wait till I finish talking .
Do it over lunch .
And don 't just find another technologist friend ; find somebody different than you .
Find an artist or a writer -- or , heaven forbid , find a philosopher and talk to them .
In fact , find somebody from the humanities .
Why ? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists .
Just a few days ago , right across the street from here , there was hundreds of people gathered together .
It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference .
And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective .
You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature .
You 're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater -- how does that bear upon venture capital ?
Well that 's interesting . That 's a different way of thinking .
And when you think in that way , you become more sensitive to the human considerations , which are crucial to making ethical decisions .
So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend .
And you 're telling him what we 're talking about , about our whole data revolution and all this -- maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music .
Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum Well , your musician friend will stop you and say , " You know , the theme music for your data revolution , that 's an opera , that 's Wagner .
It 's based on Norse legend .
It 's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry . "
That 's interesting .
Now it 's also a beautiful opera , and we 're moved by that opera .
We 're moved because it 's about the battle between good and evil , about right and wrong .
And we care about right and wrong .
We care what happens in that opera .
We care what happens in " Apocalypse Now . "
And we certainly care what happens with our technologies .
We have so much power today , it is up to us to figure out what to do , and that 's the good news .
We 're the ones writing this opera .
This is our movie .
We figure out what will happen with this technology .
We determine how this will all end .
Thank you .
Herbie Hancock : An all-star set
Legendary jazz musician Herbie Hancock delivers a stunning performance alongside two old friends -- past drummer for the Headhunters , Harvey Mason , and bassist Marcus Miller . Listen to the end to hear them sweeten the classic " Watermelon Man . "
Herbie Hancock : Thank you .
Marcus Miller .
Harvey Mason .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Mary Roach : 10 things you didn 't know about orgasm
" Bonk " author Mary Roach delves into obscure scientific research , some of it centuries old , to make 10 surprising claims about sexual climax , ranging from the bizarre to the hilarious .
Alright . I 'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine .
I 'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine .
The title is " Observations of In-Utero Masturbation . "
Okay . Now on the left you can see the hand -- that 's the big arrow -- and the penis on the right . The hand hovering .
And over here we have , in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner , " The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements . "
Bear in mind this was an ultrasound , so it would have been moving images .
Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system .
Now this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don 't consciously control , like digestion , heart rate and sexual arousal .
And the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input .
Genital stimulation . Duh .
But also Kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow .
People with spinal cord injuries , like paraplegias , quadriplegias , will often develop a very , very sensitive area right above the level of their injury , wherever that is .
There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature .
I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth .
This was something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm .
And she went to a neurologist who was fascinated .
He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste , but no -- it happened with any brand .
They stimulated her gums with a toothpick , to see if that was doing it .
No . It was the whole , you know , motion .
And the amazing thing to me is that now you would think this woman would like have excellent oral hygiene .
Sadly she -- this is what it said in the journal paper -- " She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care . "
It 's so sad .
I interviewed , when I was working on the book , I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm .
She was part of a study at Rutgers University .
You gotta love that . Rutgers .
So I interviewed her in Oakland , in a sushi restaurant .
And I said , " So , could you do it right here ? "
And she said , " Yeah , but you know I 'd rather finish my meal if you don 't mind . "
But afterwards she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside .
It was remarkable . It took about one minute .
And I said to her , " Are you just doing this all the time ? "
She said , " No . Honestly when I get home I 'm usually too tired . "
She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram .
The headquarters for orgasm , along the spinal nerve , is something called the sacral nerve root , which is back here .
And if you trigger , if you stimulate with an electrode , the precise spot , you will trigger an orgasm .
And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people -- a certain kind of dead person , a beating-heart cadaver .
Now this is somebody who is brain-dead , legally dead , definitely checked out , but is being kept alive on a respirator , so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation .
Now in one of these brain-dead people , if you trigger the right spot , you will see something every now and then .
There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex .
And this is -- I 'll demonstrate as best I can , not being dead .
It 's like this . You trigger the spot .
The dead guy , or gal , goes ... like that .
Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs .
Now if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person , why not the orgasm reflex ?
I asked this question to a brain death expert , Stephanie Mann , who was foolish enough to return my emails .
I said , " So , could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person ? "
She said , " Yes , if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated , you conceivably could . "
Obviously it wouldn 't be as much fun for the person .
But it would be an orgasm -- nonetheless .
I actually suggested to -- there is a researcher at the University of Alabama who does orgasm research .
I said to her , " You should do an experiment .
You know ? You can get cadavers if you work at a university . "
I said , " You should actually do this . "
She said , " You get the human subjects review board approval for this one . "
According to 1930s marriage manual author , Theodoor van de Velde , a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse .
Theodoor van de Velde was something of a semen connoisseur .
This is a guy writing a book , " Ideal Marriage , " you know .
Very heavy hetero guy .
But he wrote in this book , " Ideal Marriage " -- he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man , which he said had a fresh , exhilarating smell , and the semen of mature men , whose semen smelled quote , " Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut .
Sometimes quite freshly floral , and then again sometimes extremely pungent . "
Okay . In 1999 , in the state of Israel , a man began hiccupping .
And this was one of those cases that went on and on .
He tried everything his friends suggested .
Nothing seemed to help .
Days went by . At a certain point , the man , still hiccupping , had sex with his wife .
And lo and behold , the hiccups went away .
He told his doctor , who published a case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title , " Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups . "
I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation .
I love that because there is like a whole demographic : unattached hiccuppers .
Married , single , unattached hiccupper .
In the 1900s , early 1900s gynecologists , a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg , thereby upping the odds of conception .
It was called the " upsuck " theory .
If you go all the way back to Hippocrates , physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for conception , but necessary .
Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives .
Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van de Velde -- has a line in his book .
I loved this guy . I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van de Velde .
He had this line in his book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy , where there was an empress Maria Theresa , who was having trouble conceiving .
And apparently the royal court physician said to her , " I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse . "
It 's apparently , I don 't know , on the record somewhere .
Masters and Johnson : now we 're moving forward to the 1950s .
Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics , which is also really fun to say .
They didn 't buy it .
And they decided , being Masters and Johnson , that they would get to the bottom of it .
They brought women into the lab -- I think it was five women -- and outfitted them with cervical caps containing artificial semen .
And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance , such that it would show up on an X-ray .
This is the 1950s .
Anyway these women sat in front of an X-ray device .
And they masturbated .
And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up .
Did not find any evidence of upsuck .
You may be wondering , " How do you make artificial semen ? "
I have an answer for you . I have two answers .
You can use flour and water , or cornstarch and water .
I actually found three separate recipes in the literature .
My favorite being the one that says -- you know , they have the ingredients listed , and then in a recipe it will say , for example , " Yield : two dozen cupcakes . "
This one said , " Yield : one ejaculate . "
There 's another way that orgasm might boost fertility .
This one involves men .
Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg .
British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators .
He said , " If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made . "
Which I thought was an interesting idea , theory .
So now you have an evolutionary excuse .
Okay .
Alrighty . There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom -- pigs , for instance .
In Denmark , the Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially inseminate her , you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate , which is the number of piglets produced .
So they came up with this plan , this five-point stimulation plan for the sows .
And they had the farmers -- there is posters they put in the barn , and they have a DVD .
And I got a copy of this DVD .
This is my unveiling , because I am going to show you a clip .
So uh , okay .
Now here we go in to the -- la la la , off to work .
It all looks very innocent .
He 's going to be doing things with his hands that the boar would use his snout , lacking hands . Okay .
This is it . The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire .
This is to mimic the weight of the boar .
You should know , the clitoris of the pig , inside the vagina .
So this may be sort of titillating for her . Here we go .
And the happy result .
I love this video .
There is a point in this video , towards the beginning where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring , as if to say , " It 's okay , it 's just his job . He really does like women . "
Okay . Now I said -- when I was in Denmark , my host was named Anne Marie .
And I said , " So why don 't you just stimulate the clitoris of the pig ?
Why don 't you have the farmers do that ?
That 's not one of your five steps . "
She said -- I have to read you what she said , because I love it .
She said , " It was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva .
So we thought , let 's not mention the clitoris right now . "
Shy but ambitious pig farmers , however , can purchase a -- this is true -- a sow vibrator , that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate .
Because , as I mentioned , the clitoris is inside the vagina .
So possibly , you know , a little more arousing than it looks .
And I also said to her , " Now these sows . I mean , you may have noticed there , The sow doesn 't look to be in the throes of ecstasy . "
And she said , you can 't make that conclusion , because animals don 't register pain or pleasure on their faces in the same way that we do .
They tend to -- pigs , for example , are more like dogs .
They use the upper half of the face ; the ears are very expressive .
So you 're not really sure what 's going on with the pig .
Primates , on the other hand , we use our mouths more .
This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque .
And , interestingly , this has been observed in female macaques , but only when mounting another female .
Masters and Johnson , in the 1950s , they decided , okay , we 're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle , from arousal , all the way through orgasm , in men and women -- everything that happens in the human body .
Okay , with women , a lot of this is happening inside .
This did not stop Masters and Johnson .
They developed an artificial coition machine .
This is basically a penis camera on a motor .
There is a phallus , clear acrylic phallus , with a camera and a light source , attached to a motor that is kind of going like this .
And the woman would have sex with it .
That is what they would do . Pretty amazing .
Sadly , this device has been dismantled .
This just kills me , not because I wanted to use it -- I wanted to see it .
One fine day Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen .
This was not idle curiosity .
Doctor Kinsey had heard -- and there was a theory kind of going around at the time , this being the 1940s -- that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility .
Kinsey thought it was bunk , so he got to work .
He got together in his lab 300 men , a measuring tape , and a movie camera .
And in fact he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out .
It wasn 't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force .
However , the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark , which is impressive .
Yes . Exactly .
Sadly , he 's anonymous . His name is not mentioned .
In his write-up , in his write-up of this experiment in his book , Kinsey wrote , " Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets . "
Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey .
My favorite being , " Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female , but not the male . "
Thank you very much .
Thanks !
David Byrne , Ethel + Thomas Dolby : " Flowers " with string quartet
David Byrne sings the Talking Heads ' 1988 hit , " Flowers . " He 's accompanied by Thomas Dolby and string quartet Ethel , who made up the TED2010 house band .
Here we stand Like an Adam and an Eve Waterfalls The Garden of Eden Two fools in love So beautiful and strong Birds in the trees Are smiling upon them From the age of the dinosaurs Cars would run on gasoline Where ? Where have they gone ? Now , there 's nothing but flowers This was a factory Now there are mountains and rivers You got it , you got it We caught a rattlesnake Now we 've got something for dinner You got it , you got it This was a parking lot Now it 's all covered with flowers You got it , you got it If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower You got it , you got it This was a shopping mall Now it 's turned into corn field You got it , you got it Don 't leave me stranded here I can 't get used to this lifestyle Thomas Dolby : David Byrne .
Rachel Sussman : The world 's oldest living things
Rachel Sussman shows photographs of the world 's oldest continuously living organisms -- from 2,000-year-old brain coral off Tobago 's coast to an " underground forest " in South Africa that has lived since before the dawn of agriculture .
This strange-looking plant is called the Llareta .
What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches , each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it .
This individual lives in the Atacama Desert in Chile , and it happens to be 3,000 years old .
It also happens to be a relative of parsley .
For the past five years , I 've been researching , working with biologists and traveling all over the world to find continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older .
The project is part art and part science .
There 's an environmental component .
And I 'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale .
I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because I wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work backward from there .
What you 're looking at now is a tree called Jomon Sugi , living on the remote island of Yakushima .
The tree was in part a catalyst for the project .
I 'd been traveling in Japan without an agenda other than to photograph , and then I heard about this tree that is 2,180 years old and knew that I had to go visit it .
It wasn 't until later , when I was actually back home in New York that I got the idea for the project .
So it was the slow churn , if you will .
I think it was my longstanding desire to bring together my interest in art , science and philosophy that allowed me to be ready when the proverbial light bulb went on .
So I started researching , and to my surprise , this project had never been done before in the arts or the sciences .
And -- perhaps naively -- I was surprised to find that there isn 't even an area in the sciences that deals with this idea of global species longevity .
So what you 're looking at here is the rhizocarpon geographicum , or map lichen , and this is around 3,000 years old and lives in Greenland , which is a long way to go for some lichens .
Visiting Greenland was more like traveling back in time than just traveling very far north .
It was very primal and more remote than anything I 'd ever experienced before .
And this is heightened by a couple of particular experiences .
One was when I had been dropped off by boat on a remote fjord , only to find that the archeologists I was supposed to meet were nowhere to be found .
And it 's not like you could send them a text or shoot them an e-mail , so I was literally left to my own devices .
But luckily , it worked out obviously , but it was a humbling experience to feel so disconnected .
And then a few days later , we had the opportunity to go fishing in a glacial stream near our campsite , where the fish were so abundant that you could literally reach into the stream and grab out a foot-long trout with your bare hands .
It was like visiting a more innocent time on the planet .
And then , of course , there 's the lichens .
These lichens grow only one centimeter every hundred years .
I think that really puts human lifespans into a different perspective .
And what you 're looking at here is an aerial photo take over eastern Oregon .
And if the title " Searching for Armillaria Death Rings , " sounds ominous , it is .
The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus , killing certain species of trees in the forest .
It 's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the " humongous fungus " because it happens to be one of the world 's largest organisms as well .
So with the help of some biologists studying the fungus , I got some maps and some GPS coordinates and chartered a plane and started looking for the death rings , the circular patterns in which the fungus kills the trees .
So I 'm not sure if there are any in this photo , but I do know the fungus is down there .
And then this back down on the ground and you can see that the fungus is actually invading this tree .
So that white material that you see in between the bark and the wood is the mycelial felt of the fungus , slowly strangling the tree to death by preventing the flow of water and nutrients .
So this strategy has served it pretty well -- it 's 2,400 years old .
And then from underground to underwater .
This is a Brain Coral living in Tobago that 's around 2,000 years old .
And I had to overcome my fear of deep water to find this one .
This is at about 60 feet And you 'll see , there 's some damage to the surface of the coral .
That was actually caused by a school of parrot fish that had started eating it , though luckily , they lost interest before killing it .
Luckily still , it seems to be out of harm 's way of the recent oil spill .
But that being said , we just as easily could have lost one of the oldest living things on the planet , and the full impact of that disaster is still yet to be seen .
Now this is something that I think is one of the most quietly resilient things on the planet .
This is clonal colony of Quaking Aspen trees , living in Utah , that is literally 80,000 years old .
What looks like a forest is actually only one tree .
Imagine that it 's one giant root system and each tree is a stem coming up from that system .
So what you have is one giant , interconnected , genetically identical individual that 's been living for 80,000 years .
It also happens to be male and , in theory immortal .
This is a clonal tree as well .
This is the spruce Gran Picea , which at 9,550 years is a mere babe in the woods .
The location of this tree is actually kept secret for its own protection .
I spoke to the biologist who discovered this tree , and he told me that that spindly growth you see there in the center is most likely a product of climate change .
As it 's gotten warmer on the top of the mountain , the vegetation zone is actually changing .
So we don 't even necessarily have to have direct contact with these organisms to have a very real impact on them .
This is the Fortingall Yew -- no , I 'm just kidding -- this is the Fortingall Yew .
But I put that slide in there because I 'm often asked if there are any animals in the project .
And aside from coral , the answer is no .
Does anybody know how old the oldest tortoise is -- any guesses ?
Rachel Sussman : 300 ? No , 175 is the oldest living tortoise , so nowhere near 2,000 .
And then , you might have heard of this giant clam that was discovered off the coast of northern Iceland that reached 405 years old .
However , it died in the lab as they were determining its age .
The most interesting discovery of late , I think is the so-called immortal jellyfish , which has actually been observed in the lab to be able to be able to revert back to the polyp state after reaching full maturity .
So that being said , it 's highly unlikely that any jellyfish would survive that long in the wild .
And back to the yew here .
So as you can see , it 's in a churchyard ; it 's in Scotland . It 's behind a protective wall .
And there are actually a number or ancient yews in churchyards around the U.K. , but if you do the math , you 'll remember it 's actually the yew trees that were there first , then the churches .
And now down to another part of the world .
I had the opportunity to travel around the Limpopo Province in South Africa with an expert in Baobab trees .
And we saw a number of them , and this is most likely the oldest .
It 's around 2,000 , and it 's called the Sagole Baobab .
And you know , I think of all of these organisms as palimpsests .
They contain thousands of years of their own histories within themselves , and they also contain records of natural and human events .
And the Baobabs in particular are a great example of this .
You can see that this one has names carved into its trunk , but it also records some natural events .
So the Baobabs , as they get older , tend to get pulpy in their centers and hollow out .
And this can create great natural shelters for animals , but they 've also been appropriated for some rather dubious human uses , including a bar , a prison and even a toilet inside of a tree .
And this brings me to another favorite of mine -- I think , because it is just so unusual .
This plant is called the Welwitschia , and it lives only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola , where it 's uniquely adapted to collect moisture from mist coming off the sea .
And what 's more , it 's actually a tree .
It 's a primitive conifer .
You 'll notice that it 's bearing cones down the center .
And what looks like two big heaps of leaves , is actually two single leaves that get shredded up by the harsh desert conditions over time .
And it actually never sheds those leaves , so it also bears the distinction of having the longest leaves in the plant kingdom .
I spoke to a biologist at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from , and his thought was that if you travel around Namibia , you see that there are a number of petrified forests , and the logs are all -- the logs are all giant coniferous trees , and yet there 's no sign of where they might have come from .
So his thought was that flooding in the north of Africa actually brought those coniferous trees down tens of thousands of years ago , and what resulted was this remarkable adaptation to this unique desert environment .
This is what I think is the most poetic of the oldest living things .
This is something called an underground forest .
So , I spoke to a botanist at the Pretoria Botanical Garden , who explained that certain species of trees have adapted to this region .
It 's bushfelt region , which is dry and prone to a lot of fires , as so what these trees have done is , if you can imagine that this is the crown of the tree , and that this is ground level , imagine that the whole thing , that whole bulk of the tree , migrated underground , and you just have those leaves peeping up above the surface .
That way , when a fire roars through , it 's the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed .
The tree can easily recover .
These also tend to grow clonally , the oldest of which is 13,000 years old .
Back in the U.S. , there 's a couple plants of similar age .
This is the clonal Creosote bush , which is around 12,000 years old .
If you 've been in the American West , you know the Creosote bush is pretty ubiquitous , but that being said , you see that this has this unique , circular form .
And what 's happening is it 's expanding slowly outwards from that original shape .
And it 's one -- again , that interconnected root system , making it one genetically identical individual .
It also has a friend nearby -- well , I think they 're friends .
This is the clonal Mojave yucca , it 's about a mile away , and it 's a little bit older than 12,000 years .
And you see it has that similar circular form .
And there 's some younger clones dotting the landscape behind it .
And both of these , the yucca and the Creosote bush , live on Bureau of Land Management land , and that 's very different from being protected in a national park .
In fact , this land is designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use .
So , now I want to show what very well might be the oldest living thing on the planet .
This is Siberian Actinobacteria , which is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old .
This bacteria was discovered several years ago by a team of planetary biologists hoping to find clues to life on other planets by looking at one of the harshest conditions on ours .
And what they found , by doing research into the permafrost , was this bacteria .
But what 's unique about it is that it 's doing DNA repair below freezing .
And what that means is that it 's not dormant -- it 's actually been living and growing for half a million years .
It 's also probably one the most vulnerable of the oldest living things , because if the permafrost melts , it won 't survive .
This is a map that I 've put together of the oldest living things , so you can get a sense of where they are ; you see they 're all over the world .
The blue flags represent things that I 've already photographed , and the reds are places that I 'm still trying to get to .
You 'll see also , there 's a flag on Antarctica .
I 'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year-old moss , which lives on the Antarctic Peninsula .
So , I probably have about two more years left on this project -- on this phase of the project , but after five years , I really feel like I know what 's at the heart of this work .
The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past , a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future .
They 've survived for millennia in desert , in the permafrost , at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean .
They 've withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments , but now some of them are in jeopardy , and they can 't just get up and get out of the way .
It 's my hope that , by going to find these organisms , that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future .
Thank you .
Daniel Suarez : The kill decision shouldn 't belong to a robot
As a novelist , Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future . But on the TEDGlobal stage , he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about : the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war . Advanced drones , automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools , he suggests , could take the decision to make war out of the hands of humans .
I write fiction sci-fi thrillers , so if I say " killer robots , " you 'd probably think something like this .
But I 'm actually not here to talk about fiction .
I 'm here to talk about very real killer robots , autonomous combat drones .
Now , I 'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones , which have a human making targeting decisions .
I 'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own .
There 's actually a technical term for this : lethal autonomy .
Now , lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms -- flying , driving , or just lying in wait .
And actually , they 're very quickly becoming a reality .
These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea .
Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it , the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer .
Now , in both cases , there 's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision , but it 's not a technological requirement . It 's a choice .
And it 's that choice that I want to focus on , because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software , we risk not only taking the humanity out of war , but also changing our social landscape entirely , far from the battlefield .
That 's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape .
And this has always been the case , throughout history .
For example , these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D.
Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain , but with these you could dominate the populace , and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that .
Power was focused at the very top .
And what changed ? Technological innovation .
Gunpowder , cannon .
And pretty soon , armor and castles were obsolete , and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield .
And as armies grew in size , the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense .
And as leaders had to rely on more of their populace , they began to share power .
Representative government began to form .
So again , the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape .
Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool , except that , by requiring very few people to go to war , they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands , possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy .
Now , I think , knowing this , we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions , to do what humans do best , which is adapt .
But time is a factor .
Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own , and as you 'll see , remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons .
That 's because once you 've deployed remotely-piloted drones , there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself .
The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce .
For example , in 2004 , the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis .
By 2011 , this had gone up to 300,000 hours , outstripping human ability to review it all , but even that number is about to go up drastically .
The Pentagon 's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform , and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it .
And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest .
And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at , not the other way around .
But there 's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines , and that 's electromagnetic jamming , severing the connection between the drone and its operator .
Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack , but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack , and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making .
They 'll know their mission objective , and they 'll react to new circumstances without human guidance .
They 'll ignore external radio signals and send very few of their own .
Which brings us to , really , the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons : plausible deniability .
Now we live in a global economy .
High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents .
Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown , and in that environment , it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories , proliferate in the gray market .
And in that situation , sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack , it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon .
This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war .
This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head , make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker , and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense .
It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations , but criminal organizations , private enterprise , even powerful individuals .
It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society .
Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government , autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both .
Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war , that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable , particularly against developing nations .
But I think the truth is the exact opposite .
I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons , and the reason can be summed up in one word : data .
Data powers high-tech societies .
Cell phone geolocation , telecom metadata , social media , email , text , financial transaction data , transportation data , it 's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people .
In short , we are more visible to machines than any people in history , and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons .
What you 're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group .
Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals .
And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind .
Now it 's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics , but it 's a dual-use technology , because targeting is used in another context .
Notice that certain individuals are highlighted .
These are the hubs of social networks .
These are organizers , opinion-makers , leaders , and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns .
Now , if you 're a marketer , you might then target them with product samples , try to spread your brand through their social group .
But if you 're a repressive government searching for political enemies , you might instead remove them , eliminate them , disrupt their social group , and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization .
Now in a world of cheap , proliferating robotic weapons , borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations .
Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass .
And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about .
Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests .
And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action , the very heart of democracy .
And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons , and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots .
Now we already have international treaties on nuclear and biological weapons , and , while imperfect , these have largely worked .
But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous , because they will almost certainly be used , and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions .
Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions .
This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military , but that directive needs to be made permanent .
And it could set the stage for global action .
Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons .
And we need it now , before there 's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences .
Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands , and they would imperil democracy itself .
Now , don 't get me wrong , I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones : environmental monitoring , search and rescue , logistics .
If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons , how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons ?
I think the secret will be transparency .
No robot should have an expectation of privacy in a public place .
Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement through public spaces .
We have license plates on cars , tail numbers on aircraft .
This is no different .
And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them , both right now and historically .
And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones , and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down , they should notify humans to their presence .
And in certain very high-security areas , perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility .
But notice , this is more an immune system than a weapons system .
It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open , civil society .
We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots .
Let 's not succumb to the temptation to automate war .
Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will , but let 's not join them .
Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands , and that would be corrosive to representative government .
Let 's make sure , for democracies at least , killer robots remain fiction .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Rory Stewart : Why democracy matters
The public is losing faith in democracy , says British MP Rory Stewart . Iraq and Afghanistan 's new democracies are deeply corrupt ; meanwhile , 84 percent of people in Britain say politics is broken . In this important talk , Stewart sounds a call to action to rebuild democracy , starting with recognizing why democracy is important -- not as a tool , but as an ideal .
So little Billy goes to school , and he sits down and the teacher says , " What does your father do ? "
And little Billy says , " My father plays the piano in an opium den . "
So the teacher rings up the parents , and says , " Very shocking story from little Billy today .
Just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den . "
And the father says , " I 'm very sorry . Yes , it 's true , I lied .
But how can I tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician ? "
Now , as a politician myself , standing in front of you , or indeed , meeting any stranger anywhere in the world , when I eventually reveal the nature of my profession , they look at me as though I 'm somewhere between a snake , a monkey and an iguana , and through all of this , I feel , strongly , that something is going wrong .
Four hundred years of maturing democracy , colleagues in Parliament who seem to me , as individuals , reasonably impressive , an increasingly educated , energetic , informed population , and yet a deep , deep sense of disappointment .
My colleagues in Parliament include , in my new intake , family doctors , businesspeople , professors , distinguished economists , historians , writers , army officers ranging from colonels down to regimental sergeant majors .
All of them , however , including myself , as we walk underneath those strange stone gargoyles just down the road , feel that we 've become less than the sum of our parts , feel as though we have become profoundly diminished .
And this isn 't just a problem in Britain .
It 's a problem across the developing world , and in middle income countries too . In Jamaica , for example -- look at Jamaican members of Parliament , you meet them , and they 're often people who are Rhodes Scholars , who 've studied at Harvard or at Princeton , and yet , you go down to downtown Kingston , and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world : a dismal , depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings .
And this has been true for 30 years , and the handover in 1979 , 1980 , between one Jamaican leader who was the son of a Rhodes Scholar and a Q.C. to another who 'd done an economics doctorate at Harvard , over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence .
Ten years ago , however , the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary . George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world . He said , because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors , freedom will bring peace .
Distinguished academics at the same time argued that democracies had this incredible range of side benefits .
They would bring prosperity , security , overcome sectarian violence , ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists .
Since then , what 's happened ?
Well , what we 've seen is the creation , in places like Iraq and Afghanistan , of democratic systems of government which haven 't had any of those side benefits .
In Afghanistan , for example , we haven 't just had one election or two elections . We 've gone through three elections , presidential and parliamentary . And what do we find ?
Do we find a flourishing civil society , a vigorous rule of law and good security ? No . What we find in Afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt , a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective , a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that 's deeply unpopular , perceived as being deeply corrupt , and security that is shocking , security that 's terrible .
In Pakistan , in lots of sub-Saharan Africa , again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments , with states that are unstable and dangerous .
And when I have conversations with people , I remember having a conversation , for example , in Iraq , with a community that asked me whether the riot we were seeing in front of us , this was a huge mob ransacking a provincial council building , was a sign of the new democracy .
The same , I felt , was true in almost every single one of the middle and developing countries that I went to , and to some extent the same is true of us .
Well , what is the answer to this ? Is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy ?
Well , obviously not . It would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in , in Iraq and Afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system .
Anything else would run contrary to our values , it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground , it would run contrary to our interests .
I remember in Iraq , for example , that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy .
We went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from Bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence , enshrined extremist parties , so in Iraq in 2003 the decision was made , let 's not have elections for two years . Let 's invest in voter education . Let 's invest in democratization .
The result was that I found stuck outside my office a huge crowd of people , this is actually a photograph taken in Libya but I saw the same scene in Iraq of people standing outside screaming for the elections , and when I went out and said , " What is wrong with the interim provincial council ?
What is wrong with the people that we have chosen ?
There is a Sunni sheikh , there 's a Shiite sheikh , there 's the seven -- leaders of the seven major tribes , there 's a Christian , there 's a Sabian , there are female representatives , there 's every political party in this council , what 's wrong with the people that we chose ? "
The answer came , " The problem isn 't the people that you chose . The problem is that you chose them . "
I have not met , in Afghanistan , in even the most remote community , anybody who does not want a say in who governs them .
Most remote community , I have never met a villager who does not want a vote .
So we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics , despite the fact that 84 percent of people in Britain feel politics is broken , despite the fact that when I was in Iraq , we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred , and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the United States , five percent wanted France , three percent wanted Britain , and nearly 40 percent wanted Dubai , which is , after all , not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy , democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting . But in order to do so we need to get away from instrumental arguments .
We need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings .
We need to get away from feeling , in the same way , human rights matters because of the other things it brings , or women 's rights matters for the other things it brings .
Why should we get away from those arguments ?
Because they 're very dangerous . If we set about saying , for example , torture is wrong because it doesn 't extract good information , or we say , you need women 's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force , you leave yourself open to the position where the government of North Korea can turn around and say , " Well actually , we 're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment , " or the government of Saudi Arabia to say , " Well , our economic growth 's okay , thank you very much , considerably better than yours , so maybe we don 't need to go ahead with this program on women 's rights . "
The point about democracy is not instrumental .
It 's not about the things that it brings .
The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate , effective , prosperous rule of law .
It 's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors .
The point about democracy is intrinsic .
Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty . It reflects an idea of dignity , the dignity of the individual , the idea that each individual should have an equal vote , an equal say , in the formation of their government .
But if we 're really to make democracy vigorous again , if we 're ready to revivify it , we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians .
Democracy is not simply a question of structures .
It is a state of mind . It is an activity .
And part of that activity is honesty .
After I speak to you today , I 'm going on a radio program called " Any Questions , " and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never , ever say that they don 't know the answer to a question . It doesn 't matter what it is .
If you ask about child tax credits , the future of the penguins in the south Antarctic , asked to hold forth on whether or not the developments in Chongqing contribute to sustainable development in carbon capture , and we will have an answer for you .
We need to stop that , to stop pretending to be omniscient beings .
Politicians also need to learn , occasionally , to say that certain things that voters want , certain things that voters have been promised , may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver .
And the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies .
Our societies have never been so educated , have never been so energized , have never been so healthy , have never known so much , cared so much , or wanted to do so much , and it is a genius of the local .
One of the reasons why we 're moving away from banqueting halls such as the one in which we stand , banqueting halls with extraordinary images on the ceiling of kings enthroned , the entire drama played out here on this space , where the King of England had his head lopped off , why we 've moved from spaces like this , thrones like that , towards the town hall , is we 're moving more and more towards the energies of our people , and we need to tap that .
That can mean different things in different countries .
In Britain , it could mean looking to the French , learning from the French , getting directly elected mayors in place in a French commune system .
In Afghanistan , it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections , we should have done what was in the Afghan constitution from the very beginning , which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people 's provincial governors .
But for any of these things to work , the honesty in language , the local democracy , it 's not just a question of what politicians do .
It 's a question of what the citizens do .
For politicians to be honest , the public needs to allow them to be honest , and the media , which mediates between the politicians and the public , needs to allow those politicians to be honest .
If local democracy is to flourish , it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen .
In other words , if democracy is to be rebuilt , is to become again vigorous and vibrant , it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians , but for the politicians to learn to trust the public .
Thank you very much indeed .
Christien Meindertsma : How pig parts make the world turn
Christien Meindertsma , author of " Pig 05049 " looks at the astonishing afterlife of the ordinary pig , parts of which make their way into at least 185 non-pork products , from bullets to artificial hearts .
Hello . I would like to start my talk with actually two questions , and the first one is : How many people here actually eat pig meat ?
Please raise your hand -- oh , that 's a lot .
And how many people have actually seen a live pig producing this meat ?
In the last year ?
In the Netherlands -- where I come from -- you actually never see a pig , which is really strange , because , on a population of 16 million people , we have 12 million pigs .
And well , of course , the Dutch can 't eat all these pigs .
They eat about one-third , and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world .
A lot goes to the U.K. , Germany .
And what I was curious about -- because historically , the whole pig would be used up until the last bit so nothing would be wasted -- and I was curious to find out if this was actually still the case .
And I spent about three years researching .
And I followed this one pig with number " 05049 , " all the way up until the end and to what products it 's made of .
And in these years , I met all kinds people like , for instance , farmers and butchers , which seems logical .
But I also met aluminum mold makers , ammunition producers and all kinds of people .
And what was striking to me is that the farmers actually had no clue what was made of their pigs , but the consumers -- as in us -- had also no idea of the pigs being in all these products .
So what I did is , I took all this research and I made it into a -- well , basically it 's a product catalog of this one pig , and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag on the back .
And it consists of seven chapters -- the chapters are skin , bones , meat , internal organs , blood , fat and miscellaneous .
In total , they weigh 103.7 kilograms .
And to show you how often you actually meet part of this pig in a regular day , I want to show you some images of the book .
You probably start the day with a shower .
So , in soap , fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent , but also for giving it a pearl-like effect .
Then if you look around you in the bathroom , you see lots more products like shampoo , conditioner , anti-wrinkle cream , body lotion , but also toothpaste .
Then , so , before breakfast , you 've already met the pig so many times .
Then , at breakfast , the pig that I followed , the hairs off the pig or proteins from the hairs off the pig were used as an improver of dough .
Well , that 's what the producer says : it 's " improving the dough , of course . "
In low-fat butter , or actually in many low-fat products , when you take the fat out , you actually take the taste and the texture out .
So what they do is they put gelatin back in , in order to retain the texture .
Well , when you 're off to work , under the road or under the buildings that you see , there might very well be cellular concrete , which is a very light kind of concrete that 's actually got proteins from bones inside and it 's also fully reusable .
In the train brakes -- at least in the German train brakes -- there 's this part of the brake that 's made of bone ash .
And in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts , like chocolate mousse , tiramisu , vanilla pudding , everything that 's cooled in the supermarket , there 's gelatin to make it look good .
Fine bone china -- this is a real classic .
Of course , the bone in fine-bone china gives it its translucency and also its strength , in order to make these really fine shapes , like this deer .
In interior decorating , the pig 's actually quite there .
It 's used in paint for the texture , but also for the glossiness .
In sandpaper , bone glue is actually the glue between the sand and the paper .
And then in paintbrushes , hairs are used because , apparently , they 're very suitable for making paintbrushes because of their hard-wearing nature .
I was not planning on showing you any meat because , of course , half the book 's meat and you probably all know what meats they are .
But I didn 't want you to miss out on this one , because this , well , it 's called " portion-controlled meat cuts . "
And this is actually sold in the frozen area of the supermarket .
And what it is -- it 's actually steak .
So , this is sold as cow , but what happens when you slaughter a cow -- at least in industrial factory farming -- they have all these little bits of steak left that they can 't actually sell as steak , so what they do is they glue them all together with fibrin from pig blood into this really large sausage , then freeze the sausage , cut it in little slices and sell those as steak again .
And this also actually happens with tuna and scallops .
So , with the steak , you might drink a beer .
In the brewing process , there 's lots of cloudy elements in the beer , so to get rid of these cloudy elements , what some companies do is they pour the beer through a sort of gelatin sieve in order to get rid of that cloudiness .
This actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice .
There 's actually a company in Greece that produces these cigarettes that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter .
And according to them , this creates an artificial lung in the filter .
So , this is actually a healthier cigarette .
Injectable collagen -- or , since the ' 70s , collagen from pigs -- has been used for injecting into wrinkles .
And the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings , so the collagen is as well .
Well , this must be the strangest thing I found .
This is a bullet coming from a very large ammunition company in the United States .
And while I was making the book , I contacted all the producers of products because I wanted them to send me the real samples and the real specimens .
So I sent this company an email saying , " Hello . I 'm Christien . I 'm doing this research .
And can you send me a bullet ? "
And well , I didn 't expect them to even answer my email .
But they answered and they said , " Why , thank you for your email . What an interesting story .
Are you in anyway related to the Dutch government ? "
I thought that was really weird , as if the Dutch government sends emails to anyone .
So , the most beautiful thing I found -- at least what I think is the most beautiful -- in the book , is this heart valve .
It 's actually a very low-tech and very high-tech product at the same time .
The low-tech bit is that it 's literally a pig 's heart valve mounted in the high-tech bit , which is a memory metal casing .
And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery .
And once it 's in the right spot , they remove the outer shell , and the heart valve , well , it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating , instantly .
It 's really a sort of magical moment .
So this is actually a Dutch company , so I called them up , and I asked , " Can I borrow a heart valve from you ? "
And the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic .
So they were like , " Okay , we 'll put it in a jar for you with formalin , and you can borrow it . "
Great -- and then I didn 't hear from them for weeks , so I called , and I asked , " What 's going on with the heart valve ? "
And they said , " Well the director of the company decided not to let you borrow this heart valve , because want his product to be associated with pigs . "
Well , the last product from the book that I 'm showing you is renewable energy -- actually , to show that my first question , if pigs are still used up until the last bit , was still true .
Well it is , because everything that can 't be used for anything else is made into a fuel that can be used as renewable energy source .
In total , I found 185 products .
And what they showed me is that , well , firstly , it 's at least to say odd that we don 't treat these pigs as absolute kings and queens .
And the second , is that we actually don 't have a clue of what all these products that surround us are made of .
And you might think I 'm very fond of pigs , but actually -- well , I am a little bit -- but I 'm more fond of raw materials in general .
And I think that , in order to take better care of what 's behind our products -- so , the livestock , the crops , the plants , the non-renewable materials , but also the people that produce these products -- the first step would actually be to know that they are there .
Thank you very much .
Malcolm Gladwell : The strange tale of the Norden bombsight
Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell tells the tale of the Norden bombsight , a groundbreaking piece of World War II technology with a deeply unexpected result .
Thank you .
It 's a real pleasure to be here .
I last did a TEDTalk I think about seven years ago or so .
I talked about spaghetti sauce .
And so many people , I guess , watch those videos .
People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce , which is a wonderful thing in the short term -- but it 's proven to be less than ideal over seven years .
And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me .
The theme of this morning 's session is Things We Make .
And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era .
And the man 's name is Carl Norden .
Carl Norden was born in 1880 .
And he was Swiss .
And of course , the Swiss can be divided into two general categories : those who make small , exquisite , expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small , exquisite , expensive objects .
And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp .
He 's an engineer .
He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich .
In fact , one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small , expensive , exquisite objects .
And he 's a Swiss engineer , Carl .
And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word .
He wears three-piece suits ; and he has a very , very small , important mustache ; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego ; and he works 16-hour days ; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current ; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness ; and he drinks lots of coffee ; and he does his best work sitting in his mother 's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule .
In any case , Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan .
And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane .
Now if you think about it , in the age before GPS and radar , that was obviously a really difficult problem .
It 's a complicated physics problem .
You 've got a plane that 's thousands of feet up in the air , going at hundreds of miles an hour , and you 're trying to drop an object , a bomb , towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments .
And all sorts of people , moving up to the First World War and between the wars , tried to solve this problem , and nearly everybody came up short .
The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude .
But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code .
And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device .
It weighs about 50 lbs .
It 's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight .
And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges .
And he makes this complicated thing .
And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object , visually sight the target , because they 're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber , and then they plug in the altitude of the plane , the speed of the plane , the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target .
And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb .
And as Norden famously says , " Before that bombsight came along , bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more . "
But he said , with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight , he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft .
Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight .
It was like manna from heaven .
Here was an army that had just had experience in the First World War , where millions of men fought each other in the trenches , getting nowhere , making no progress , and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy .
And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars -- billion dollars in 1940 dollars -- developing the Norden bombsight .
And to put that in perspective , the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars .
Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era .
And there were people , strategists , within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese .
And for Norden as well , this device had incredible moral importance , because Norden was a committed Christian .
In fact , he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention , because in his eyes , only God could invent things .
He was simple the instrument of God 's will .
And what was God 's will ?
Well God 's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible .
And what did the Norden bombsight do ?
Well it allowed you to do that .
It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb .
So in the years leading up to the Second World War , the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $ 14,000 each -- again , in 1940 dollars , that 's a lot of money .
And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them -- long extensive , months-long training sessions -- because these things are essentially analog computers ; they 're not easy to use .
And they make everyone of those bombardiers take an oath , to swear that if they 're ever captured , they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy , because it 's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology .
And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane , it 's escorted there by a series of armed guards .
And it 's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it .
And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards .
It 's never allowed to be photographed .
And there 's a little incendiary device inside of it , so that , if the plane ever crashes , it will be destroyed and there 's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it .
The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail .
So what happens during the Second World War ?
Well , it turns out it 's not the Holy Grail .
In practice , the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft . , but that 's under perfect conditions .
And of course , in wartime , conditions aren 't perfect .
First of all , it 's really hard to use -- really hard to use .
And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer .
Secondly , it breaks down a lot .
It 's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings , and they don 't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle .
Thirdly , when Norden was making his calculations , he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes .
Well in a real war , you can 't do that ; you 'll get shot down .
So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds .
And the Norden bombsight doesn 't work as well under those conditions .
But most of all , the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target .
But of course , what happens in real life ?
There are clouds , right .
It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate .
Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945 ?
Not a lot .
And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was , there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna , Germany .
And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres .
And over the course of 22 bombing missions , the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant , using the Norden bombsight .
Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant ?
10 percent . 10 percent .
And of those 10 percent that landed , 16 percent didn 't even go off ; they were duds .
The Leuna chemical plant , after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war , was up and running within weeks .
And by the way , all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis ?
Well it turns out that Carl Norden , as a proper Swiss , was very enamored of German engineers .
So in the 1930s , he hired a whole bunch of them , including a man named Hermann Long who , in 1938 , gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis .
So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war -- which also , by the way , didn 't work very well .
So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight ?
Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights .
We live in a time where there are all kinds of really , really smart people running around , saying that they 've invented gadgets that will forever change our world .
They 've invented websites that will allow people to be free .
They 've invented some kind of this thing , or this thing , or this thing that will make our world forever better .
If you go into the military , you 'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well .
If you go to the Pentagon , they will say , " You know what , now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft . "
And you know what , it 's true ; they actually can do that now .
But we need to be very clear about how little that means .
In the Iraq War , at the beginning of the first Iraq War , the U.S. military , the air force , sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor .
And their mission was to find and to destroy -- remember the Scud missile launchers , those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis ?
The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers .
And so they flew missions day and night , and they dropped thousands of bombs , and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge .
And after the war was over , there was an audit done -- as the army always does , the air force always does -- and they asked the question : how many Scuds did we actually destroy ?
You know what the answer was ?
Zero , not a single one .
Now why is that ?
Is it because their weapons weren 't accurate ?
Oh no , they were brilliantly accurate .
They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft .
The issue was they didn 't know where the Scud launchers were .
The problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel , it 's knowing how to find the pickle barrel .
That 's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars .
Or take the battle in Afghanistan .
What is the signature weapon of the CIA 's war in Northwest Pakistan ?
It 's the drone . What is the drone ?
Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight .
It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision .
And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan , the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles , and it 's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants .
Now what is the accuracy of those drones ?
Well it 's extraordinary .
We think we 're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes .
95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed , right ?
That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare .
But do you know what the crucial thing is ?
In that exact same period that we 've been using these drones with devastating accuracy , the number of attacks , of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks , against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold .
As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them , they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us .
I have not described to you a success story .
I 've described to you the opposite of a success story .
And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make .
We think the things we make can solve our problems , but our problems are much more complex than that .
The issue isn 't the accuracy of the bombs you have , it 's how you use the bombs you have , and more importantly , whether you ought to use bombs at all .
There 's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight .
And that is , on August 6th , 1945 , a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and , using a Norden bombsight , dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima .
And as was typical with the Norden bombsight , the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft .
But of course , it didn 't matter .
And that 's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight .
the air force 's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb , which didn 't need a bombsight at all .
Meanwhile , back in New York , no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima .
He was a committed Christian .
He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war .
It would have broken his heart .
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore : The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain
Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive , so much less self-aware than grown-ups ? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults , to show us how typically " teenage " behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain .
Fifteen years ago , it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life .
Back then , 15 years ago , we didn 't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan .
In the past decade or so , mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging , or MRI , neuroscientists have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages , and to track changes in brain structure and brain function , so we use structural MRI if you 'd like to take a snapshot , a photograph , at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain , and we can ask questions like , how much gray matter does the brain contain , and how does that change with age ?
And we also use functional MRI , called fMRI , to take a video , a movie , of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something .
So many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research , and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops , and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it 's not all over in early childhood , and instead , the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the ' 20s and ' 30s .
So adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological , hormonal , physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable , independent role in society .
It can go on a long time .
One of the brain regions that changes most dramatically during adolescence is called prefrontal cortex .
So this is a model of the human brain , and this is prefrontal cortex , right at the front .
Prefrontal cortex is an interesting brain area .
It 's proportionally much bigger in humans than in any other species , and it 's involved in a whole range of high level cognitive functions , things like decision-making , planning , planning what you 're going to do tomorrow or next week or next year , inhibiting inappropriate behavior , so stopping yourself saying something really rude or doing something really stupid .
It 's also involved in social interaction , understanding other people , and self-awareness .
So MRI studies looking at the development of this region have shown that it really undergoes dramatic development during the period of adolescence .
So if you look at gray matter volume , for example , gray matter volume across age from age four to 22 years increases during childhood , which is what you can see on this graph . It peaks in early adolescence .
The arrows indicate peak gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex . You can see that that peak happens a couple of years later in boys relative to girls , and that 's probably because boys go through puberty a couple of years later than girls on average , and then during adolescence , there 's a significant decline in gray matter volume in prefrontal cortex .
Now that might sound bad , but actually this is a really important developmental process , because gray matter contains cell bodies and connections between cells , the synapses , and this decline in gray matter volume during prefrontal cortex is thought to correspond to synaptic pruning , the elimination of unwanted synapses .
This is a really important process . It 's partly dependent on the environment that the animal or the human is in , and the synapses that are being used are strengthened , and synapses that aren 't being used in that particular environment are pruned away .
You can think of it a bit like pruning a rosebush .
You prune away the weaker branches so that the remaining , important branches , can grow stronger , and this process , which effectively fine-tunes brain tissue according to the species-specific environment , is happening in prefrontal cortex and in other brain regions during the period of human adolescence .
So a second line of inquiry that we use to track changes in the adolescent brain is using functional MRI to look at changes in brain activity across age .
So I 'll just give you an example from my lab .
So in my lab , we 're interested in the social brain , that is the network of brain regions that we use to understand other people and to interact with other people .
So I like to show a photograph of a soccer game to illustrate two aspects of how your social brains work .
So this is a soccer game .
Michael Owen has just missed a goal , and he 's lying on the ground , and the first aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates is how automatic and instinctive social emotional responses are , so within a split second of Michael Owen missing this goal , everyone is doing the same thing with their arms and the same thing with their face , even Michael Owen as he slides along the grass , is doing the same thing with his arms , and presumably has a similar facial expression , and the only people who don 't are the guys in yellow at the back — — and I think they 're on the wrong end of the stadium , and they 're doing another social emotional response that we all instantly recognize , and that 's the second aspect of the social brain that this picture really nicely illustrates , how good we are at reading other people 's behavior , their actions , their gestures , their facial expressions , in terms of their underlying emotions and mental states .
So you don 't have to ask any of these guys .
You have a pretty good idea of what they 're feeling and thinking at this precise moment in time .
So that 's what we 're interested in looking at in my lab .
So in my lab , we bring adolescents and adults into the lab to have a brain scan , we give them some kind of task that involves thinking about other people , their minds , their mental states , their emotions , and one of the findings that we 've found several times now , as have other labs around the world , is part of the prefrontal cortex called medial prefrontal cortex , which is shown in blue on the slide , and it 's right in the middle of prefrontal cortex in the midline of your head .
This region is more active in adolescents when they make these social decisions and think about other people than it is in adults , and this is actually a meta-analysis of nine different studies in this area from labs around the world , and they all show the same thing , that activity in this medial prefrontal cortex area decreases during the period of adolescence .
And we think that might be because adolescents and adults use a different mental approach , a different cognitive strategy , to make social decisions , and one way of looking at that is to do behavioral studies whereby we bring people into the lab and we give them some kind of behavioral task , and I 'll just give you another example of the kind of task that we use in my lab .
So imagine that you 're the participant in one of our experiments . You come into the lab , you see this computerized task .
In this task , you see a set of shelves .
Now , there are objects on these shelves , on some of them , and you 'll notice there 's a guy standing behind the set of shelves , and there are some objects that he can 't see .
They 're occluded , from his point of view , with a kind of gray piece of wood .
This is the same set of shelves from his point of view .
Notice that there are only some objects that he can see , whereas there are many more objects that you can see .
Now your task is to move objects around .
The director , standing behind the set of shelves , is going to direct you to move objects around , but remember , he 's not going to ask you to move objects that he can 't see . This introduces a really interesting condition whereby there 's a kind of conflict between your perspective and the director 's perspective .
So imagine he tells you to move the top truck left .
There are three trucks there . You 're going to instinctively go for the white truck , because that 's the top truck from your perspective , but then you have to remember , " Oh , he can 't see that truck , so he must mean me to move the blue truck , " which is the top truck from his perspective . Now believe it or not , normal , healthy , intelligent adults like you make errors about 50 percent of the time on that kind of trial .
They move the white truck instead of the blue truck .
So we give this kind of task to adolescents and adults , and we also have a control condition where there 's no director and instead we give people a rule .
We tell them , okay , we 're going to do exactly the same thing but this time there 's no director . Instead you 've got to ignore objects with the dark gray background .
You 'll see that this is exactly the same condition , only in the no-director condition they just have to remember to apply this somewhat arbitrary rule , whereas in the director condition , they have to remember to take into account the director 's perspective in order to guide their ongoing behavior .
Okay , so if I just show you the percentage errors in a large developmental study we did , this is in a study ranging from age seven to adulthood , and what you 're going to see is the percentage errors in the adult group in both conditions , so the gray is the director condition , and you see that our intelligent adults are making errors about 50 percent of the time , whereas they make far fewer errors when there 's no director present , when they just have to remember that rule of ignoring the gray background .
Developmentally , these two conditions develop in exactly the same way . Between late childhood and mid-adolescence , there 's an improvement , in other words a reduction of errors , in both of these trials , in both of these conditions .
But it 's when you compare the last two groups , the mid-adolescent group and the adult group where things get really interesting , because there , there is no continued improvement in the no-director condition .
In other words , everything you need to do in order to remember the rule and apply it seems to be fully developed by mid-adolescence , whereas in contrast , if you look at the last two gray bars , there 's still a significant improvement in the director condition between mid-adolescence and adulthood , and what this means is that the ability to take into account someone else 's perspective in order to guide ongoing behavior , which is something , by the way , that we do in everyday life all the time , is still developing in mid-to-late adolescence .
So if you have a teenage son or a daughter and you sometimes think they have problems taking other people 's perspectives , you 're right . They do . And this is why .
So we sometimes laugh about teenagers .
They 're parodied , sometimes even demonized in the media for their kind of typical teenage behavior . They take risks , they 're sometimes moody , they 're very self-conscious .
I have a really nice anecdote from a friend of mine who said that the thing he noticed most about his teenage daughters before and after puberty was their level of embarrassment in front of him .
So , he said , " Before puberty , if my two daughters were messing around in a shop , I 'd say , ' Hey , stop messing around and I 'll sing your favorite song , ' and instantly they 'd stop messing around and he 'd sing their favorite song . After puberty , that became the threat .
The very notion of their dad singing in public was enough to make them behave .
So people often ask , " Well , is adolescence a kind of recent phenomenon ?
Is it something we 've invented recently in the West ? "
And actually , the answer is probably not . There are lots of descriptions of adolescence in history that sound very similar to the descriptions we use today .
So there 's a famous quote by Shakespeare from " The Winter 's Tale " where he describes adolescence as follows : " I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty , or that youth would sleep out the rest ; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child , wronging the ancientry , stealing , fighting . "
He then goes on to say , " Having said that , would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather ? "
So almost 400 years ago , Shakespeare was portraying adolescents in a very similar light to the light that we portray them in today , but today we try to understand their behavior in terms of the underlying changes that are going on in their brain .
So for example , take risk-taking . We know that adolescents have a tendency to take risks . They do .
They take more risks than children or adults , and they are particularly prone to taking risks when they 're with their friends . There 's an important drive to become independent from one 's parents and to impress one 's friends in adolescence .
But now we try to understand that in terms of the development of a part of their brain called the limbic system , so I 'm going to show you the limbic system in red in the slide behind me , and also on this brain .
So the limbic system is right deep inside the brain , and it 's involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing . It gives you the rewarding feeling out of doing fun things , including taking risks .
It gives you the kick out of taking risks .
And this region , the regions within the limbic system , have been found to be hypersensitive to the rewarding feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults , and at the very same time , the prefrontal cortex , which you can see in blue in the slide here , which stops us taking excessive risks , is still very much in development in adolescents .
So brain research has shown that the adolescent brain undergoes really quite profound development , and this has implications for education , for rehabilitation , and intervention . The environment , including teaching , can and does shape the developing adolescent brain , and yet it 's only relatively recently that we have been routinely educating teenagers in the West .
All four of my grandparents , for example , left school in their early adolescence . They had no choice .
And that 's still the case for many , many teenagers around the world today . Forty percent of teenagers don 't have access to secondary school education .
And yet , this is a period of life where the brain is particularly adaptable and malleable .
It 's a fantastic opportunity for learning and creativity .
So what 's sometimes seen as the problem with adolescents — heightened risk-taking , poor impulse control , self-consciousness — shouldn 't be stigmatized .
It actually reflects changes in the brain that provide an excellent opportunity for education and social development . Thank you .
Paul Rothemund : Playing with DNA that self-assembles
Paul Rothemund writes code that causes DNA to arrange itself into a star , a smiley face and more . Sure , it 's a stunt , but it 's also a demonstration of self-assembly at the smallest of scales -- with vast implications for the future of making things .
There 's an ancient and universal concept that words have power , that spells exist , and that if we could only pronounce the right words , then -- whooosh -- you know , an avalanche would come and wipe out the hobbits , right ? So this is a very attractive idea because we 're very lazy , like the sorcerer 's apprentice , or the world 's greatest computer programmer .
And so this idea has a lot of traction with us .
We love the idea that words , when pronounced -- they 're just little more than pure information , but they evoke some physical action in the real world that helps us do work .
And so , of course , with lots of programmable computers and robots around this is an easy thing to picture .
So how many of you know what I 'm talking about ?
Raise your right hand . OK . How many of you don 't know what I 'm talking about ? Raise your left hand .
So that 's great . So that was too easy .
You guys have very insecure computers , OK ?
So now , the thing is that this is a different kind of spell .
This is a computer program made of zeros and ones .
It can be pronounced on a computer . It does something like this .
The important thing is we can write it in a high-level language .
A computer magician can write this thing .
It can be compiled into this -- into zeros and ones -- and pronounced by a computer .
And that 's what makes computers powerful : these high-level languages that can be compiled .
And so , I 'm here to tell you , you don 't need a computer to actually have a spell . In fact , what you can do at the molecular level is that if you encode information -- you encode a spell or program as molecules -- then physics can actually directly interpret that information and run a program . That 's what happens in proteins .
When this amino acid sequence gets pronounced as atoms , these little letters are sticky for each other .
It collapses into a three-dimensional shape that turns it into a nanomachine that actually cuts DNA .
And the interesting thing is that if you change the sequence , you change the three-dimensional folding .
You get now a DNA stapler instead . These are the kind of molecular programs that we want to be able to write , but the problem is , we don 't know the machine language of proteins . We don 't have a compiler for proteins .
So I 've joined a growing band of people that try to make molecular spells using DNA . We use DNA because it 's cheaper .
It 's easier to handle . It 's something that we understand really well .
We understand it so well , in fact , that we think we can actually write programming languages for DNA and have molecular compilers .
So then , we think we can do that . And my first question doing this -- or one of my questions doing this -- was how can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of DNA ? And I decided to use a type of DNA origami , where you take a long strand of DNA and fold it into whatever shape or pattern you might want .
So here 's a shape . I actually spent about a year in my home , in my underwear , coding , like Linus [ Torvalds ] , in that picture before .
And this program takes a shape , spits out 250 DNA sequences .
These short DNA sequences are what are going to fold the long strand into this shape that we want to make . So you send an e-mail with these sequences in it to a company , and what it does -- the company pronounces them on a DNA synthesizer .
It 's a machine about the size of a photocopier . And what happens is , they take your e-mail and every letter in your e-mail , they replace with 30-atom cluster -- one for each letter , A , T , C , and G in DNA . They string them up in the right sequence , and then they send them back to you via FedEx .
So you get 250 of these in the mail in little tubes .
I mix them together , add a little bit of salt water , and then add this long strand I was telling you about , that I 've stolen from a virus . And then what happens is , you heat this whole thing up to about boiling . You cool it down to room temperature , and as you do , what happens is those short strands , they do the following thing : each one of them binds that long strand in one place , and then has a second half that binds that long strand in a distant place , and brings those two parts of the long strand close together so that they stick together .
And so the net effect of all 250 of these strands is to fold the long strand into the shape that you 're looking for .
It 'll approximate that shape . We do this for real in the test tube .
In each little drop of water you get 50 billion of these guys .
You can look with a microscope and see them on a surface .
And the neat thing is that if you change the sequence and change the spell , you just change the sequence of the staples .
You can make a molecule that looks like this , and , you know , he likes to hang out with his buddies , right .
And a lot of them are actually pretty good .
If you change the spell again , you change the sequence again .
You get really nice 130 nanometer triangles . If you do it again , you can get arbitrary patterns . So on a rectangle you can paint patterns of North and South America , or the words , " DNA . "
So that 's DNA origami . That 's one way . There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA .
What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so that we can build anything , right ?
We want to be able to build technological artifacts that are maybe good for the world . We want to learn how to build biological artifacts , like people and whales and trees .
And if it 's the case that we can reach that level of complexity , if our ability to program molecules gets to be that good , then that will truly be magic . Thank you very much .
Monika Bulaj : The hidden light of Afghanistan
Photographer Monika Bulaj shares powerful , intimate images of Afghanistan -- of home life , of ritual , of men and women . Behind the headlines , what does the world truly know about this place ?
My travels to Afghanistan began many , many years ago on the eastern border of my country , my homeland , Poland .
I was walking through the forests of my grandmother 's tales .
A land where every field hides a grave , where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century .
Behind the destruction , I found a soul of places .
I met humble people .
I heard their prayer and ate their bread .
Then I have been walking East for 20 years -- from Eastern Europe to Central Asia -- through the Caucasus Mountains , Middle East , North Africa , Russia .
And I ever met more humble people .
And I shared their bread and their prayer .
This is why I went to Afghanistan .
One day , I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River .
I was alone on foot .
And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport .
But he gave me a cup of tea .
And I understood that his surprise was my protection .
So I have been walking and traveling , by horses , by yak , by truck , by hitchhiking , from Iran 's border to the bottom , to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor .
And in this way I could find noor , the hidden light of Afghanistan .
My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica .
I heard prayers of the Sufi -- humble Muslims , hated by the Taliban .
Hidden river , interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India .
The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears , and welcomed as a gift .
What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect , about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium ?
These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war .
These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen .
What do we know about the women 10 years after the war ?
Clothed in this nylon bag , made in China , with the name of burqa .
I saw one day , the largest school in Afghanistan , a girls ' school .
13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground , full of scorpions .
And their love [ for studying ] was so big that I cried .
What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh ?
The region is not secure , but full of the Taliban , and they did it .
My aim is to give a voice to the silent people , to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game , the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict .
Thanks .
Sheryl Sandberg : Why we have too few women leaders
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looks at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offers 3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite .
So for any of us in this room today , let 's start out by admitting we 're lucky .
We don 't live in the world our mothers lived in , our grandmothers lived in , where career choices for women were so limited .
And if you 're in this room today , most of us grew up in a world where we had basic civil rights , and amazingly , we still live in a world where some women don 't have them .
But all that aside , we still have a problem , and it 's a real problem .
And the problem is this : Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world .
The numbers tell the story quite clearly .
190 heads of state -- nine are women .
Of all the people in parliament in the world , 13 percent are women .
In the corporate sector , women at the top , C-level jobs , board seats -- tops out at 15 , 16 percent .
The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction .
And even in the non-profit world , a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women , women at the top : 20 percent .
We also have another problem , which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment .
A recent study in the U.S.
showed that , of married senior managers , two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children .
A couple of years ago , I was in New York , and I was pitching a deal , and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture .
And I 'm in the meeting -- it 's about a three-hour meeting -- and two hours in , there kind of needs to be that bio break , and everyone stands up , and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed .
And I realized he doesn 't know where the women 's room is in his office .
So I start looking around for moving boxes , figuring they just moved in , but I don 't see any .
And so I said , " Did you just move into this office ? "
And he said , " No , we 've been here about a year . "
And I said , " Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year ? "
And he looked at me , and he said , " Yeah . Or maybe you 're the only one who had to go to the bathroom . "
So the question is , how are we going to fix this ?
How do we change these numbers at the top ?
How do we make this different ?
I want to start out by saying , I talk about this -- about keeping women in the workforce -- because I really think that 's the answer .
In the high-income part of our workforce , in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs , or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem , I am convinced , is that women are dropping out .
Now people talk about this a lot , and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women .
I want to talk about none of that today , even though that 's all really important .
Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals .
What are the messages we need to tell ourselves ?
What are the messages we tell the women who work with and for us ?
What are the messages we tell our daughters ?
Now , at the outset , I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments .
I don 't have the right answer .
I don 't even have it for myself .
I left San Francisco , where I live , on Monday , and I was getting on the plane for this conference .
And my daughter , who 's three , when I dropped her off at preschool , did that whole hugging-the-leg , crying , " Mommy , don 't get on the plane " thing .
This is hard . I feel guilty sometimes .
I know no women , whether they 're at home or whether they 're in the workforce , who don 't feel that sometimes .
So I 'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone .
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce , and I think there are three .
One , sit at the table .
Two , make your partner a real partner .
And three , don 't leave before you leave .
Number one : sit at the table .
Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook , we hosted a very senior government official , and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley .
And everyone kind of sat at the table .
And then he had these two women who were traveling with him who were pretty senior in his department , and I kind of said to them , " Sit at the table . Come on , sit at the table , " and they sat on the side of the room .
When I was in college my senior year , I took a course called European Intellectual History .
Don 't you love that kind of thing from college ?
I wish I could do that now .
And I took it with my roommate , Carrie , who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy , but a water-polo-playing pre-med , who was a sophomore .
The three of us take this class together .
And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin , goes to all the lectures .
I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures .
My brother is kind of busy .
He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures , marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored .
The three of us go to the exam together , and we sit down .
And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes , I 'm that old .
And we walk out , and we look at each other , and we say , " How did you do ? "
And Carrie says , " Boy , I feel like I didn 't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic . "
And I say , " God , I really wish I had really connected John Locke 's theory of property with the philosophers who follow . "
And my brother says , " I got the top grade in the class . "
" You got the top grade in the class ?
You don 't know anything . "
The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows : women systematically underestimate their own abilities .
If you test men and women , and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs , men get it wrong slightly high , and women get it wrong slightly low .
Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce .
A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering , or men , I guess , are negotiating their first salary , and only seven percent of women .
And most importantly , men attribute their success to themselves , and women attribute it to other external factors .
If you ask men why they did a good job , they 'll say , " I 'm awesome .
Obviously . Why are you even asking ? "
If you ask women why they did a good job , what they 'll say is someone helped them , they got lucky , they worked really hard .
Why does this matter ?
Boy , it matters a lot because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side , not at the table , and no one gets the promotion if they don 't think they deserve their success , or they don 't even understand their own success .
I wish the answer were easy .
I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work for , all these fabulous women , " Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself .
Own your own success . "
I wish I could tell that to my daughter .
But it 's not that simple .
Because what the data shows , above all else , is one thing , which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women .
And everyone 's nodding , because we all know this to be true .
There 's a really good study that shows this really well .
There 's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen .
And she 's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley , and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist .
In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it Howard Roizen .
And he gave the case out , both of them , to two groups of students .
He changed exactly one word : " Heidi " to " Howard . "
But that one word made a really big difference .
He then surveyed the students , and the good news was the students , both men and women , thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent , and that 's good .
The bad news was that everyone liked Howard .
He 's a great guy . You want to work for him .
You want to spend the day fishing with him .
But Heidi ? Not so sure .
She 's a little out for herself . She 's a little political .
You 're not sure you 'd want to work for her .
This is the complication .
We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues , we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A , to reach for the promotion , to sit at the table , and we have to do it in a world where , for them , there are sacrifices they will make for that , even though for their brothers , there are not .
The saddest thing about all of this is that it 's really hard to remember this .
And I 'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me , but I think important .
I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees , and a couple hours later , there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk , and she wanted to talk to me .
I said , okay , and she sat down , and we talked .
And she said , " I learned something today .
I learned that I need to keep my hand up . "
I said , " What do you mean ? "
She said , " Well , you 're giving this talk , and you said you were going to take two more questions .
And I had my hand up with lots of other people , and you took two more questions .
And I put my hand down , and I noticed all the women put their hand down , and then you took more questions , only from the men . "
And I thought to myself , wow , if it 's me -- who cares about this , obviously -- giving this talk -- and during this talk , I can 't even notice that the men 's hands are still raised , and the women 's hands are still raised , how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women ?
We 've got to get women to sit at the table .
Message number two : make your partner a real partner .
I 've become convinced that we 've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home .
The data shows this very clearly .
If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child , the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does , and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does .
So she 's got three jobs or two jobs , and he 's got one .
Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more ?
The causes of this are really complicated , and I don 't have time to go into them .
And I don 't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause .
I think the cause is more complicated .
I think , as a society , we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls .
I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers , and it 's hard .
When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there , I notice that the other mommies don 't play with him .
And that 's a problem , because we have to make it as important a job , because it 's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home , for people of both genders , if we 're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce .
Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate .
And if that wasn 't good enough motivation for everyone out there , they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage ? -- they know each other more in the biblical sense as well .
Message number three : don 't leave before you leave .
I think there 's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving .
Here 's what happens : We 're all busy . Everyone 's busy . A woman 's busy .
And she starts thinking about having a child , and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child , she starts thinking about making room for that child .
" How am I going to fit this into everything else I 'm doing ? "
And literally from that moment , she doesn 't raise her hand anymore , she doesn 't look for a promotion , she doesn 't take on the new project , she doesn 't say , " Me . I want to do that . "
She starts leaning back .
The problem is that -- let 's say she got pregnant that day , that day -- nine months of pregnancy , three months of maternity leave , six months to catch your breath -- fast-forward two years , more often -- and as I 've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged , when they get married , when they start thinking about trying to have a child , which can take a long time .
One woman came to see me about this , and I kind of looked at her -- she looked a little young .
And I said , " So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby ? "
And she said , " Oh no , I 'm not married . "
She didn 't even have a boyfriend .
I said , " You 're thinking about this just way too early . "
But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back ?
Everyone who 's been through this -- and I 'm here to tell you , once you have a child at home , your job better be really good to go back , because it 's hard to leave that kid at home -- your job needs to be challenging .
It needs to be rewarding .
You need to feel like you 're making a difference .
And if two years ago you didn 't take a promotion and some guy next to you did , if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities , you 're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal .
Don 't leave before you leave .
Stay in .
Keep your foot on the gas pedal , until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions .
Don 't make decisions too far in advance , particularly ones you 're not even conscious you 're making .
My generation really , sadly , is not going to change the numbers at the top .
They 're just not moving .
We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation , there will not be 50 percent of [ women ] at the top of any industry .
But I 'm hopeful that future generations can .
I think a world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women , would be a better world .
And it 's not just because people would know where the women 's bathrooms are , even though that would be very helpful .
I think it would be a better world .
I have two children .
I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter .
I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home , and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed , but to be liked for her accomplishments .
Thank you .
Daniel H. Cohen : For argument 's sake
Why do we argue ? To out-reason our opponents , prove them wrong , and , most of all , to win ! ... Right ? Philosopher Daniel H. Cohen shows how our most common form of argument -- a war in which one person must win and the other must lose -- misses out on the real benefits of engaging in active disagreement . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
My name is Dan Cohen , and I am academic , as he said .
And what that means is that I argue .
It 's an important part of my life , and I like to argue .
And I 'm not just an academic , I 'm a philosopher , so I like to think that I 'm actually pretty good at arguing .
But I also like to think a lot about arguing .
And thinking about arguing , I 've come across some puzzles , and one of the puzzles is that as I 've been thinking about arguing over the years , and it 's been decades now , I 've gotten better at arguing , but the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing , the more that I lose . And that 's a puzzle .
And the other puzzle is that I 'm actually okay with that .
Why is it that I 'm okay with losing and why is it that I think that good arguers are actually better at losing ?
Well , there 's some other puzzles .
One is , why do we argue ? Who benefits from arguments ?
And when I think about arguments now , I 'm talking about , let 's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments , where something cognitive is at stake .
Is this proposition true ? Is this theory a good theory ?
Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text ?
And so on . I 'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage .
Yeah , we have those arguments too .
I tend to win those arguments , because I know the tricks .
But those aren 't the important arguments .
I 'm interested in academic arguments today , and here are the things that puzzle me .
First , what do good arguers win when they win an argument ?
What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn 't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories ?
So what do we win when we win an argument ?
Even before that , what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant 's theory works or Mill 's the right ethicist to follow ?
It 's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind .
So why do we even try to argue ?
Why do we try to convince other people to believe things that they don 't want to believe ?
And is that even a nice thing to do ? Is that a nice way to treat another human being , try and make them think something they don 't want to think ?
Well , my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments .
The first model , let 's call this the dialectical model , is that we think of arguments as war , and you know what that 's like .
There 's a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing , and that 's not really a very helpful model for arguing but it 's a pretty common and entrenched model for arguing .
But there 's a second model for arguing : arguments as proofs .
Think of a mathematician 's argument .
Here 's my argument . Does it work ? Is it any good ?
Are the premises warranted ? Are the inferences valid ?
Does the conclusion follow from the premises ?
No opposition , no adversariality , not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense .
But there 's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful , and that is arguments as performances , arguments as being in front of an audience .
We can think of a politician trying to present a position , trying to convince the audience of something .
But there 's another twist on this model that I really think is important , namely that when we argue before an audience , sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument , that is , arguments are also audiences in front of juries who make a judgment and decide the case .
Let 's call this the rhetorical model , where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand .
You know , presenting a sound , well-argued , tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn 't going to work .
So we have these models -- argument as war , argument as proof , and argument as performance .
Of those three , the argument as war is the dominant one .
It dominates how we talk about arguments , it dominates how we think about arguments , and because of that , it shapes how we argue , our actual conduct in arguments .
Now , when we talk about arguments , yeah , we talk in a very militaristic language .
We want strong arguments , arguments that have a lot of punch , arguments that are right on target .
We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order .
We want killer arguments .
That 's the kind of argument we want .
It is the dominant way of thinking about arguments .
When I 'm talking about arguments , that 's probably what you thought of , the adversarial model .
But the war metaphor , the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments , has , I think , deforming effects on how we argue .
First it elevates tactics over substance .
You can take a class in logic , argumentation .
You learn all about the subterfuges that people use to try and win arguments , the false steps .
It magnifies the us-versus-them aspect of it .
It makes it adversarial . It 's polarizing .
And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph , glorious triumph , or abject , ignominious defeat .
I think those are deforming effects , and worst of all , it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration .
Think about that one . Have you ever entered an argument thinking , " Let 's see if we can hash something out rather than fight it out . What can we work out together ? "
And I think the argument-as-war metaphor inhibits those other kinds of resolutions to argumentation .
And finally , this is really the worst thing , arguments don 't seem to get us anywhere .
They 're dead ends . They are roundabouts or traffic jams or gridlock in conversation .
We don 't get anywhere .
Oh , and one more thing , and as an educator , this is the one that really bothers me : If argument is war , then there 's an implicit equation of learning with losing .
And let me explain what I mean .
Suppose you and I have an argument .
You believe a proposition , P , and I don 't .
And I say , " Well why do you believe P ? "
And you give me your reasons .
And I object and say , " Well , what about ... ? "
And you answer my objection .
And I have a question : " Well , what do you mean ?
How does it apply over here ? " And you answer my question .
Now , suppose at the end of the day , I 've objected , I 've questioned , I 've raised all sorts of counter-considerations , and in every case you 've responded to my satisfaction .
And so at the end of the day , I say , " You know what ? I guess you 're right . P. "
So I have a new belief . And it 's not just any belief , but it 's a well-articulated , examined , it 's a battle-tested belief .
Great cognitive gain . Okay . Who won that argument ?
Well , the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won , even though I 'm the only one who made any cognitive gain .
What did you gain cognitively from convincing me ?
Sure , you got some pleasure out of it , maybe your ego stroked , maybe you get some professional status in the field .
This guy 's a good arguer .
But cognitively , now -- just from a cognitive point of view -- who was the winner ?
The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you 're the winner and I lost , even though I gained .
And there 's something wrong with that picture .
And that 's the picture I really want to change if we can .
So how can we find ways to make arguments yield something positive ?
What we need is new exit strategies for arguments .
But we 're not going to have new exit strategies for arguments until we have new entry approaches to arguments .
We need to think of new kinds of arguments .
In order to do that , well , I don 't know how to do that .
That 's the bad news .
The argument-as-war metaphor is just , it 's a monster .
It 's just taken up habitation in our mind , and there 's no magic bullet that 's going to kill it .
There 's no magic wand that 's going to make it disappear .
I don 't have an answer .
But I have some suggestions , and here 's my suggestion .
If we want to think of new kinds of arguments , what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers .
So try this .
Think of all the roles that people play in arguments .
There 's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial , dialectical argument .
There 's the audience in rhetorical arguments .
There 's the reasoner in arguments as proofs .
All these different roles . Now , can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer , but you 're also in the audience watching yourself argue ?
Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue , losing the argument , and yet still , at the end of the argument , say , " Wow , that was a good argument . "
Can you do that ? I think you can .
And I think , if you can imagine that kind of argument where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say , " Yeah , that was a good argument , " then you have imagined a good argument .
And more than that , I think you 've imagined a good arguer , an arguer that 's worthy of the kind of arguer you should try to be .
Now , I lose a lot of arguments .
It takes practice to become a good arguer in the sense of being able to benefit from losing , but fortunately , I 've had many , many colleagues who have been willing to step up and provide that practice for me .
Thank you .
Raghava KK : Shake up your story
Artist Raghava KK demos his new children 's book for iPad with a fun feature : when you shake it , the story -- and your perspective -- changes . In this charming short talk , he invites all of us to shake up our perspective a little bit .
Hi everyone .
I 'm an artist and a dad -- second time around .
Thank you .
And I want to share with you my latest art project .
It 's a children 's book for the iPad .
It 's a little quirky and silly .
It 's called " Pop-It , " And it 's about the things little kids do with their parents .
So this is about potty training -- as most of you , I hope , know .
You can tickle the rug .
You can make the baby poop .
You can do all those fun things .
You can burst bubbles .
You can draw , as everyone should .
But you know , I have a problem with children 's books : I think they 're full of propaganda .
At least an Indian trying to get one of these American books in Park Slope , forget it .
It 's not the way I was brought up .
So I said , " I 'm going to counter this with my own propaganda . "
If you notice carefully , it 's a homosexual couple bringing up a child .
You don 't like it ?
Shake it , and you have a lesbian couple .
Shake it , and you have a heterosexual couple .
You know , I don 't even believe in the concept of an ideal family .
I have to tell you about my childhood .
I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns , fathers , brothers , sisters .
Basically , I was brought up to be a good Samaritan , and I am .
And I 'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house , which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood .
Basically , I celebrated every religious function .
In fact , when there was a wedding in our neighborhood , all of us would paint our houses for the wedding .
I remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani .
We all had to fast during Ramadan .
It was a very beautiful time .
But I must say , I 'll never forget , when I was 13 years old , this happened .
Babri Masjid -- one of the most beautiful mosques in India , built by King Babur , I think , in the 16th century -- was demolished by Hindu activists .
This caused major riots in my city .
And for the first time , I was affected by this communal unrest .
My little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in , and he says , " Rags , Rags .
You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims . Be careful . "
I 'm like , " Dude , I 'm Hindu . "
He 's like , " Huh ! "
You know , my work is inspired by events such as this .
Even in my gallery shows , I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid , distill only its emotional residue and image my own life .
Imagine history being taught differently .
Remember that children 's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change ?
I have another idea .
It 's a children 's book about Indian independence -- very patriotic .
But when you shake it , you get Pakistan 's perspective .
Shake it again , and you get the British perspective .
You have to separate fact from bias , right .
Even my books on children have cute , fuzzy animals .
But they 're playing geopolitics .
They 're playing out Israel-Palestine , India-Pakistan .
You know , I 'm making a very important argument .
And my argument [ is ] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage .
After all , children 's books are manuals on parenting , so you better give them children 's books that teach them perspectives .
And conversely , only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them .
I 'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy .
You know , I can 't promise my child a life without bias -- we 're all biased -- but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives .
Thank you very much .
Margaret Heffernan : Dare to disagree
Most people instinctively avoid conflict , but as Margaret Heffernan shows us , good disagreement is central to progress . She illustrates how the best partners aren 't echo chambers -- and how great research teams , relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree .
In Oxford in the 1950s , there was a fantastic doctor , who was very unusual , named Alice Stewart .
And Alice was unusual partly because , of course , she was a woman , which was pretty rare in the 1950s .
And she was brilliant , she was one of the , at the time , the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians .
She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married , after she had kids , and even after she got divorced and was a single parent , she continued her medical work .
And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science , the emerging field of epidemiology , the study of patterns in disease .
But like every scientist , she appreciated that to make her mark , what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it .
The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers .
Most disease is correlated with poverty , but in the case of childhood cancers , the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families .
So , what , she wanted to know , could explain this anomaly ?
Now , Alice had trouble getting funding for her research .
In the end , she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize .
And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data .
Now , she had no idea what to look for .
This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search , so she asked everything she could think of .
Had the children eaten boiled sweets ?
Had they consumed colored drinks ?
Did they eat fish and chips ?
Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing ?
What time of life had they started school ?
And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back , one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of .
By a rate of two to one , the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant .
Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom .
Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point , a threshold .
It flew in the face of conventional wisdom , which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age , which was the X-ray machine .
And it flew in the face of doctors ' idea of themselves , which was as people who helped patients , they didn 't harm them .
Nevertheless , Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956 .
People got very excited , there was talk of the Nobel Prize , and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared .
In fact , she need not have hurried .
It was fully 25 years before the British and medical -- British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women .
The data was out there , it was open , it was freely available , but nobody wanted to know .
A child a week was dying , but nothing changed .
Openness alone can 't drive change .
So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands .
So , how did she know that she was right ?
Well , she had a fantastic model for thinking .
She worked with a statistician named George Kneale , and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn 't .
So , Alice was very outgoing and sociable , and George was a recluse .
Alice was very warm , very empathetic with her patients .
George frankly preferred numbers to people .
But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship .
He said , " My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong . "
He actively sought disconfirmation .
Different ways of looking at her models , at her statistics , different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her .
He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories .
Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong , that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right .
It 's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren 't echo chambers .
I wonder how many of us have , or dare to have , such collaborators .
Alice and George were very good at conflict .
They saw it as thinking .
So what does that kind of constructive conflict require ?
Well , first of all , it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves .
That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive , which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves , and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds , different disciplines , different ways of thinking and different experience , and find ways to engage with them .
That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy .
And the more I 've thought about this , the more I think , really , that that 's a kind of love .
Because you simply won 't commit that kind of energy and time if you don 't really care .
And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds .
Alice 's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist , they made her think and think and think again .
" My mother , " she said , " My mother didn 't enjoy a fight , but she was really good at them . "
So it 's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship .
But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face , many of the biggest disasters that we 've experienced , mostly haven 't come from individuals , they 've come from organizations , some of them bigger than countries , many of them capable of affecting hundreds , thousands , even millions of lives .
So how do organizations think ?
Well , for the most part , they don 't .
And that isn 't because they don 't want to , it 's really because they can 't .
And they can 't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict .
In surveys of European and American executives , fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise .
Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke , afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage , and felt that they were bound to lose .
Eighty-five percent is a really big number .
It means that organizations mostly can 't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did .
They can 't think together .
And it means that people like many of us , who have run organizations , and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can , mostly fail to get the best out of them .
So how do we develop the skills that we need ?
Because it does take skill and practice , too .
If we aren 't going to be afraid of conflict , we have to see it as thinking , and then we have to get really good at it .
So , recently , I worked with an executive named Joe , and Joe worked for a medical device company .
And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on .
He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people .
He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help .
But when he looked around his organization , nobody else seemed to be at all worried .
So , he didn 't really want to say anything .
After all , maybe they knew something he didn 't .
Maybe he 'd look stupid .
But he kept worrying about it , and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved .
In the end , Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns .
And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation .
It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts .
So now Joe had allies . They could think together .
And yes , there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument , but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative , to solve the problem , and to change the device .
Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower , except that like almost all whistle-blowers , he wasn 't a crank at all , he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served .
But he had been so afraid of conflict , until finally he became more afraid of the silence .
And when he dared to speak , he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined .
And his colleagues don 't think of him as a crank .
They think of him as a leader .
So , how do we have these conversations more easily and more often ?
Well , the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they 're prepared to defend .
It doesn 't really matter what the statements are about , what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority .
I think it 's a fantastic system , but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people , and way too late in life .
I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development , if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society .
The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we 've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden .
It comes from information that is freely available and out there , but that we are willfully blind to , because we can 't handle , don 't want to handle , the conflict that it provokes .
But when we dare to break that silence , or when we dare to see , and we create conflict , we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking .
Open information is fantastic , open networks are essential .
But the truth won 't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it .
Openness isn 't the end .
It 's the beginning .
Karen Bass : Unseen footage , untamed nature
At TED2012 , filmmaker Karen Bass shares some of the astonishing nature footage she 's shot for the BBC and National Geographic -- including brand-new , previously unseen footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat , who feeds in a rather unusual way …
I 'm a very lucky person .
I 've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful Earth and the people and creatures that live on it .
And my passion was inspired at the age of seven , when my parents first took me to Morocco , at the edge of the Sahara Desert .
Now imagine a little Brit somewhere that wasn 't cold and damp like home .
What an amazing experience .
And it made me want to explore more .
So as a filmmaker , I 've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before .
And what 's more , I 'm really lucky , because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide .
Now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step .
You might think that it 's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects , but new technology is changing the way we can film .
It 's enabling us to get fresh , new images and tell brand new stories .
In Nature 's Great Events , a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough , we wanted to do just that .
Images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar .
You see them all the time , you think .
But there 's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed .
So what we did , we went to Alaska , which is where the grizzlies rely on really high , almost inaccessible , mountain slopes for their denning .
And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air .
David Attenborough : Throughout Alaska and British Columbia , thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep .
There is nothing to eat up here , but the conditions were ideal for hibernation .
Lots of snow in which to dig a den .
To find food , mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast , where the snow will already be melting .
But getting down can be a challenge for small cubs .
These mountains are dangerous places , but ultimately the fate of these bear families , and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific , depends on the salmon .
KB : I love that shot .
I always get goosebumps every time I see it .
That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera .
And it 's a wonderful bit of gear , because it 's like having a flying tripod , crane and dolly all rolled into one .
But technology alone isn 't enough .
To really get the money shots , it 's down to being in the right place at the right time .
And that sequence was especially difficult .
The first year we got nothing .
We had to go back the following year , all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska .
And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks .
And eventually we got lucky .
The cloud lifted , the wind was still , and even the bear showed up .
And we managed to get that magic moment .
For a filmmaker , new technology is an amazing tool , but the other thing that really , really excites me is when new species are discovered .
Now , when I heard about one animal , I knew we had to get it for my next series , Untamed Americas , for National Geographic .
In 2005 , a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador .
And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower .
It depends solely on the bat .
Now , the series hasn 't even aired yet , so you 're the very first to see this .
See what you think .
The tube-lipped nectar bat .
A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower 's long flute .
But how to reach it ?
Necessity is the mother of evolution .
This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue , the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world .
If human , he 'd have a nine-foot tongue .
KB : What a tongue .
We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times .
So imagine how quick that thing is in real life .
Now people often ask me , " Where 's your favorite place on the planet ? "
And the truth is I just don 't have one .
There are so many wonderful places .
But some locations draw you back time and time again .
And one remote location -- I first went there as a backpacker ; I 've been back several times for filming , most recently for Untamed Americas -- it 's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America , and it 's the most otherworldly place I know .
But at 15,000 feet , it 's tough .
It 's freezing cold , and that thin air really gets you .
Sometimes it 's hard to breathe , especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment .
And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover .
But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity .
Have a look .
Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics , between Chile and Bolivia , the Andes completely change .
It 's called the Altiplano , or " high plains " -- a place of extremes and extreme contrasts .
Where deserts freeze and waters boil .
More like Mars than Earth , it seems just as hostile to life .
The stars themselves -- at 12,000 feet , the dry , thin air makes for perfect stargazing .
Some of the world 's astronomers have telescopes nearby .
But just looking up with the naked eye , you really don 't need one .
KB : Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent , wonderful Earth .
Thank you for letting me share that with you .
Dan Buettner : How to live to be 100 +
To find the path to long life and health , Dan Buettner and team study the world 's " Blue Zones , " communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age . In his talk , he shares the 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100 .
Something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 10 percent of how long the average person lives , within certain biological limits , is dictated by our genes .
The other 90 percent is dictated by our lifestyle .
So the premise of Blue Zones : if we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity we can come up with a de facto formula for longevity .
But if you ask the average American what the optimal formula of longevity is , they probably couldn 't tell you .
They 've probably heard of the South Beach Diet , or the Atkins Diet .
You have the USDA food pyramid .
There is what Oprah tells us .
There is what Doctor Oz tells us .
The fact of the matter is there is a lot of confusion around what really helps us live longer better .
Should you be running marathons or doing yoga ?
Should you eat organic meats or should you be eating tofu ?
When it comes to supplements , should you be taking them ?
How about these hormones or resveratrol ?
And does purpose play into it ?
Spirituality ? And how about how we socialize ?
Well , our approach to finding longevity was to team up with National Geographic , and the National Institute on Aging , to find the four demographically confirmed areas that are geographically defined .
And then bring a team of experts in there to methodically go through exactly what these people do , to distill down the cross-cultural distillation .
And at the end of this I 'm going to tell you what that distillation is .
But first I 'd like to debunk some common myths when it comes to longevity .
And the first myth is if you try really hard you can live to be 100 .
False .
The problem is , only about one out of 5,000 people in America live to be 100 .
Your chances are very low .
Even though it 's the fastest growing demographic in America , it 's hard to reach 100 .
The problem is that we 're not programmed for longevity .
We are programmed for something called procreative success .
I love that word .
It reminds me of my college days .
Biologists term procreative success to mean the age where you have children and then another generation , the age when your children have children .
After that the effect of evolution completely dissipates .
If you 're a mammal , if you 're a rat or an elephant , or a human , in between , it 's the same story .
So to make it to age 100 , you not only have to have had a very good lifestyle , you also have to have won the genetic lottery .
The second myth is , there are treatments that can help slow , reverse , or even stop aging .
False .
When you think of it , there is 99 things that can age us .
Deprive your brain of oxygen for just a few minutes , those brain cells die , they never come back .
Play tennis too hard , on your knees , ruin your cartilage , the cartilage never comes back .
Our arteries can clog . Our brains can gunk up with plaque , and we can get Alzheimer 's .
There is just too many things to go wrong .
Our bodies have 35 trillion cells , trillion with a " T. " We 're talking national debt numbers here .
Those cells turn themselves over once every eight years .
And every time they turn themselves over there is some damage . And that damage builds up .
And it builds up exponentially .
It 's a little bit like the days when we all had Beatles albums or Eagles albums and we 'd make a copy of that on a cassette tape , and let our friends copy that cassette tape , and pretty soon , with successive generations that tape sounds like garbage .
Well , the same things happen to our cells .
That 's why a 65-year-old person is aging at a rate of about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old person .
So , if there is nothing you can do to slow your aging or stop your aging , what am I doing here ?
Well , the fact of the matter is the best science tells us that the capacity of the human body , my body , your body , is about 90 years , a little bit more for women .
But life expectancy in this country is only 78 .
So somewhere along the line , we 're leaving about 12 good years on the table .
These are years that we could get .
And research shows that they would be years largely free of chronic disease , heart disease , cancer and diabetes .
We think the best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world that are actually experiencing them , areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than we are , areas where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years , the rate of middle age mortality is a fraction of what it is in this country .
We found our first Blue Zone about 125 miles off the coast of Italy , on the island of Sardinia .
And not the entire island , the island is about 1.4 million people , but only up in the highlands , an area called the Nuoro province .
And here we have this area where men live the longest , about 10 times more centenarians than we have here in America .
And this is a place where people not only reach age 100 , they do so with extraordinary vigor .
Places where 102 year olds still ride their bike to work , chop wood , and can beat a guy 60 years younger than them .
Their history actually goes back to about the time of Christ .
It 's actually a Bronze Age culture that 's been isolated .
Because the land is so infertile , they largely are shepherds , which occasions regular , low-intensity physical activity .
Their diet is mostly plant-based , accentuated with foods that they can carry into the fields .
They came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat , a type of cheese made from grass-fed animals so the cheese is high in Omega-3 fatty acids instead of Omega-6 fatty acids from corn-fed animals , and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world .
It 's called Cannonau .
But the real secret I think lies more in the way that they organize their society .
And one of the most salient elements of the Sardinian society is how they treat older people .
You ever notice here in America , social equity seems to peak at about age 24 ?
Just look at the advertisements .
Here in Sardinia , the older you get the more equity you have , the more wisdom you 're celebrated for .
You go into the bars in Sardinia , instead of seeing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar , you see the centenarian of the month calendar .
This , as it turns out , is not only good for your aging parents to keep them close to the family -- it imparts about four to six years of extra life expectancy -- research shows it 's also good for the children of those families , who have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease .
That 's called the grandmother effect .
We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet , about 800 miles south of Tokyo , on the archipelago of Okinawa .
Okinawa is actually 161 small islands .
And in the northern part of the main island , this is ground zero for world longevity .
This is a place where the oldest living female population is found .
It 's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world .
They have what we want .
They live a long time , and tend to die in their sleep , very quickly , and often , I can tell you , after sex .
They live about seven good years longer than the average American .
Five times as many centenarians as we have in America .
One fifth the rate of colon and breast cancer , big killers here in America .
And one sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease .
And the fact that this culture has yielded these numbers suggests strongly they have something to teach us .
What do they do ?
Once again , a plant-based diet , full of vegetables with lots of color in them .
And they eat about eight times as much tofu as Americans do .
More significant than what they eat is how they eat it .
They have all kinds of little strategies to keep from overeating , which , as you know , is a big problem here in America .
A few of the strategies we observed : they eat off of smaller plates , so they tend to eat fewer calories at every sitting .
Instead of serving family style , where you can sort of mindlessly eat as you 're talking , they serve at the counter , put the food away , and then bring it to the table .
They also have a 3,000-year-old adage , which I think is the greatest sort of diet suggestion ever invented .
It was invented by Confucius .
And that diet is known as the Hara , Hatchi , Bu diet .
It 's simply a little saying these people say before their meal to remind them to stop eating when their stomach is [ 80 ] percent full .
It takes about a half hour for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain .
And by remembering to stop at 80 percent it helps keep you from doing that very thing .
But , like Sardinia , Okinawa has a few social constructs that we can associate with longevity .
We know that isolation kills .
Fifteen years ago , the average American had three good friends .
We 're down to one and half right now .
If you were lucky enough to be born in Okinawa , you were born into a system where you automatically have a half a dozen friends with whom you travel through life .
They call it a Moai . And if you 're in a Moai you 're expected to share the bounty if you encounter luck , and if things go bad , child gets sick , parent dies , you always have somebody who has your back .
This particular Moai , these five ladies have been together for 97 years .
Their average age is 102 .
Typically in America we 've divided our adult life up into two sections .
There is our work life , where we 're productive .
And then one day , boom , we retire .
And typically that has meant retiring to the easy chair , or going down to Arizona to play golf .
In the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement .
Instead there is one word that imbues your entire life , and that word is " ikigai . "
And , roughly translated , it means " the reason for which you wake up in the morning . "
For this 102-year-old karate master , his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art .
For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week .
And this is a question . The National Institute on Aging actually gave us a questionnaire to give these centenarians .
And one of the questions , they were very culturally astute , the people who put the questionnaire .
One of the questions was , " What is your ikigai ? "
They instantly knew why they woke up in the morning .
For this 102 year old woman , her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter .
Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years .
And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great-great-great-granddaughter .
And she put her head back and she said , " It feels like leaping into heaven . "
I thought that was a wonderful thought .
My editor at Geographic wanted me to find America 's Blue Zone .
And for a while we looked on the prairies of Minnesota , where actually there is a very high proportion of centenarians .
But that 's because all the young people left .
So , we turned to the data again .
And we found America 's longest-lived population among the Seventh-Day Adventists concentrated in and around Loma Linda , California .
Adventists are conservative Methodists .
They celebrate their Sabbath from sunset on Friday till sunset on Saturday .
A " 24-hour sanctuary in time , " they call it .
And they follow five little habits that conveys to them extraordinary longevity , comparatively speaking .
In America here , life expectancy for the average woman is 80 .
But for an Adventist woman , their life expectancy is 89 .
And the difference is even more pronounced among men , who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts .
Now , this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years .
Sterling study . And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project .
This is a heterogeneous community .
It 's white , black , Hispanic , Asian .
The only thing that they have in common are a set of very small lifestyle habits that they follow ritualistically for most of their lives .
They take their diet directly from the Bible .
Genesis : Chapter one , Verse [ 29 ] , where God talks about legumes and seeds , and on one more stanza about green plants , ostensibly missing is meat .
They take this sanctuary in time very serious .
For 24 hours every week , no matter how busy they are , how stressed out they are at work , where the kids need to be driven , they stop everything and they focus on their God , their social network , and then , hardwired right in the religion , are nature walks .
And the power of this is not that it 's done occasionally , the power is it 's done every week for a lifetime .
None of it 's hard . None of it costs money .
Adventists also tend to hang out with other Adventists .
So , if you go to an Adventist 's party you don 't see people swilling Jim Beam or rolling a joint .
Instead they 're talking about their next nature walk , exchanging recipes , and yes , they pray .
But they influence each other in profound and measurable ways .
This is a culture that has yielded Ellsworth Whareham .
Ellsworth Whareham is 97 years old .
He 's a multimillionaire , yet when a contractor wanted 6,000 dollars to build a privacy fence , he said , " For that kind of money I 'll do it myself . "
So for the next three days he was out shoveling cement , and hauling poles around .
And predictably , perhaps , on the fourth day he ended up in the operating room .
But not as the guy on the table ; the guy doing open-heart surgery .
At 97 he still does 20 open-heart surgeries every month .
Ed Rawlings , 103 years old now , an active cowboy , starts his morning with a swim .
And on weekends he likes to put on the boards , throw up rooster tails .
And then Marge Deton .
Marge is 104 .
Her grandson actually lives in the Twin Cities here .
She starts her day with lifting weights .
She rides her bicycle .
And then she gets in her root-beer colored 1994 Cadillac Seville , and tears down the San Bernardino freeway , where she still volunteers for seven different organizations .
I 've been on 19 hardcore expeditions .
I 'm probably the only person you 'll ever meet who rode his bicycle across the Sahara desert without sunscreen .
But I 'll tell you , there is no adventure more harrowing than riding shotgun with Marge Deton .
" A stranger is a friend I haven 't met yet ! " she 'd say to me .
So , what are the common denominators in these three cultures ?
What are the things that they all do ?
And we managed to boil it down to nine .
In fact we 've done two more Blue Zone expeditions since this and these common denominators hold true .
And the first one , and I 'm about to utter a heresy here , none of them exercise , at least the way we think of exercise .
Instead , they set up their lives so that they are constantly nudged into physical activity .
These 100-year-old Okinawan women are getting up and down off the ground , they sit on the floor , 30 or 40 times a day .
Sardinians live in vertical houses , up and down the stairs .
Every trip to the store , or to church or to a friend 's house occasions a walk .
They don 't have any conveniences .
There is not a button to push to do yard work or house work .
If they want to mix up a cake , they 're doing it by hand .
That 's physical activity .
That burns calories just as much as going on the treadmill does .
When they do do intentional physical activity , it 's the things they enjoy . They tend to walk , the only proven way to stave off cognitive decline , and they all tend to have a garden .
They know how to set up their life in the right way so they have the right outlook .
Each of these cultures take time to downshift .
The Sardinians pray . The Seventh-Day Adventists pray .
The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration .
But when you 're in a hurry or stressed out , that triggers something called the inflammatory response , which is associated with everything from Alzheimer 's disease to cardiovascular disease .
When you slow down for 15 minutes a day you turn that inflammatory state into a more anti-inflammatory state .
They have vocabulary for sense of purpose , ikigai , like the Okinawans .
You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you 're born , because of infant mortality , and the year you retire .
These people know their sense of purpose , and they activate in their life , that 's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy .
There 's no longevity diet .
Instead , these people drink a little bit every day , not a hard sell to the American population .
They tend to eat a plant-based diet .
Doesn 't mean they don 't eat meat , but lots of beans and nuts .
And they have strategies to keep from overeating , little things that nudge them away from the table at the right time .
And then the foundation of all this is how they connect .
They put their families first , take care of their children and their aging parents .
They all tend to belong to a faith-based community , which is worth between four and 14 extra years of life expectancy if you do it four times a month .
And the biggest thing here is they also belong to the right tribe .
They were either born into or they proactively surrounded themselves with the right people .
We know from the Framingham studies , that if your three best friends are obese there is a 50 percent better chance that you 'll be overweight .
So , if you hang out with unhealthy people , that 's going to have a measurable impact over time .
Instead , if your friend 's idea of recreation is physical activity , bowling , or playing hockey , biking or gardening , if your friends drink a little , but not too much , and they eat right , and they 're engaged , and they 're trusting and trustworthy , that is going to have the biggest impact over time .
Diets don 't work . No diet in the history of the world has ever worked for more than two percent of the population .
Exercise programs usually start in January ; they 're usually done by October .
When it comes to longevity there is no short term fix in a pill or anything else .
But when you think about it , your friends are long-term adventures , and therefore , perhaps the most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life , and life to your years . Thank you very much .
Murray Gell- The ancestor of language
After speaking at TED2007 on elegance in physics , the amazing Murray Gell-Mann gives a quick overview of another passionate interest : finding the common ancestry of our modern languages .
Well , I 'm involved in other things , besides physics .
In fact , mostly now in other things .
One thing is distant relationships among human languages .
And the professional , historical linguists in the U.S.
and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships , big groupings , groupings that go back a long time , longer than the familiar families .
They don 't like that . They think it 's crank . I don 't think it 's crank .
And there are some brilliant linguists , mostly Russians , who are working on that , at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow , and I would love to see where that leads .
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20 , 25,000 years ago ?
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor , when there was presumably a competition among many languages ?
How far back does that go ? How far back does modern language go ?
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back ?
Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is ?
Murray Gell- Well , I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe , in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago , or earlier .
I can 't believe they did all those things and didn 't also have a modern language .
So , I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further .
But that doesn 't mean that all , or many , or most of today 's attested languages couldn 't descend perhaps from one that 's much younger than that , like say 20,000 years , or something of that kind . It 's what we call a bottleneck .
Well , Philip Anderson may have been right .
You may just know more about everything than anyone .
So , it 's been an honor . Thank you Murray Gell-Mann .
Paul Kemp-Robertson : Bitcoin . Sweat . Tide . Meet the future of branded currency .
Currency -- the bills and coins you carry in your wallet and in your bank account -- is founded on marketing , on the belief that banks and governments are trustworthy . Now , Paul Kemp-Robertson walks us through a new generation of currency , supported by that same marketing … but on behalf of a private brand . From Nike Sweat Points to bottles of Tide , meet the non-bank future of currencies .
So if I was to ask you what the connection between a bottle of Tide detergent and sweat was , you 'd probably think that 's the easiest question that you 're going to be asked in Edinburgh all week .
But if I was to say that they 're both examples of alternative or new forms of currency in a hyperconnected , data-driven global economy , you 'd probably think I was a little bit bonkers .
But trust me , I work in advertising .
And I am going to tell you the answer , but obviously after this short break .
So a more challenging question is one that I was asked , actually , by one of our writers a couple of weeks ago , and I didn 't know the answer : What 's the world 's best performing currency ?
It 's actually Bitcoin .
Now , for those of you who may not be familiar , Bitcoin is a crypto-currency , a virtual currency , synthetic currency .
It was founded in 2008 by this anonymous programmer using a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto .
No one knows who or what he is .
He 's almost like the Banksy of the Internet .
And I 'm probably not going to do it proper service here , but my interpretation of how it works is that Bitcoins are released through this process of mining .
So there 's a network of computers that are challenged to solve a very complex mathematical problem and the person that manages to solve it first gets the Bitcoins .
And the Bitcoins are released , they 're put into a public ledger called the Blockchain , and then they float , so they become a currency , and completely decentralized , that 's the sort of scary thing about this , which is why it 's so popular .
So it 's not run by the authorities or the state .
It 's actually managed by the network .
And the reason that it 's proved very successful is it 's private , it 's anonymous , it 's fast , and it 's cheap .
And you do get to the point where there 's some wild fluctuations with Bitcoin .
So in one level it went from something like 13 dollars to 266 , literally in the space of four months , and then crashed and lost half of its value in six hours .
And it 's currently around that kind of 110 dollar mark in value .
But what it does show is that it 's sort of gaining ground , it 's gaining respectability .
You get services , like Reddit and Wordpress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now .
And that 's showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology , and it 's started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money .
And that 's not surprising , if you think about the basket case that is the E.U.
I think there was a Gallup survey out recently that said something like , in America , trust in banks is at an all-time low , it 's something like 21 percent .
And you can see here some photographs from London where Barclays sponsored the city bike scheme , and some activists have done some nice piece of guerrilla marketing here and doctored the slogans .
" Sub-prime pedaling . " " Barclays takes you for a ride . "
These are the more polite ones I could share with you today .
But you get the gist , so people have really started to sort of lose faith in institutions .
There 's a P.R. company called Edelman , they do this very interesting survey every year precisely around trust and what people are thinking .
And this is a global survey , so these numbers are global .
And what 's interesting is that you can see that hierarchy is having a bit of a wobble , and it 's all about heterarchical now , so people trust people like themselves more than they trust corporations and governments .
And if you look at these figures for the more developed markets like U.K. , Germany , and so on , they 're actually much lower .
And I find that sort of scary .
People are actually trusting businesspeople more than they 're trusting governments and leaders .
So what 's starting to happen , if you think about money , if you sort of boil money down to an essence , it is literally just an expression of value , an agreed value .
So what 's happening now , in the digital age , is that we can quantify value in lots of different ways and do it more easily , and sometimes the way that we quantify those values , it makes it much easier to create new forms and valid forms of currency .
In that context , you can see that networks like Bitcoin suddenly start to make a bit more sense .
So if you think we 're starting to question and disrupt and interrogate what money means , what our relationship with it is , what defines money , then the ultimate extension of that is , is there a reason for the government to be in charge of money anymore ?
So obviously I 'm looking at this through a marketing prism , so from a brand perspective , brands literally stand or fall on their reputations .
And if you think about it , reputation has now become a currency .
You know , reputations are built on trust , consistency , transparency .
So if you 've actually decided that you trust a brand , you want a relationship , you want to engage with the brand , you 're already kind of participating in lots of new forms of currency .
So you think about loyalty .
Loyalty essentially is a micro-economy .
You think about rewards schemes , air miles .
The Economist said a few years ago that there are actually more unredeemed air miles in the world than there are dollar bills in circulation .
You know , when you are standing in line in Starbucks , 30 percent of transactions in Starbucks on any one day are actually being made with Starbucks Star points .
So that 's a sort of Starbucks currency staying within its ecosystem .
And what I find interesting is that Amazon has recently launched Amazon coins .
So admittedly it 's a currency at the moment that 's purely for the Kindle .
So you can buy apps and make purchases within those apps , but you think about Amazon , you look at the trust barometer that I showed you where people are starting to trust businesses , especially businesses that they believe in and trust more than governments .
So suddenly , you start thinking , well Amazon potentially could push this .
It could become a natural extension , that as well as buying stuff -- take it out of the Kindle -- you could buy books , music , real-life products , appliances and goods and so on .
And suddenly you 're getting Amazon , as a brand , is going head to head with the Federal Reserve in terms of how you want to spend your money , what money is , what constitutes money .
And I 'll get you back to Tide , the detergent now , as I promised .
This is a fantastic article I came across in New York Magazine , where it was saying that drug users across America are actually purchasing drugs with bottles of Tide detergent .
So they 're going into convenience stores , stealing Tide , and a $ 20 bottle of Tide is equal to 10 dollars of crack cocaine or weed .
And what they 're saying , so some criminologists have looked at this and they 're saying , well , okay , Tide as a product sells at a premium .
It 's 50 percent above the category average .
It 's infused with a very complex cocktail of chemicals , so it smells very luxurious and very distinctive , and , being a Procter and Gamble brand , it 's been supported by a lot of mass media advertising .
So what they 're saying is that drug users are consumers too , so they have this in their neural pathways .
When they spot Tide , there 's a shortcut .
They say , that is trust . I trust that . That 's quality .
So it becomes this unit of currency , which the New York Magazine described as a very oddly loyal crime wave , brand-loyal crime wave , and criminals are actually calling Tide " liquid gold . "
Now , what I thought was funny was the reaction from the P & amp ; G spokesperson .
They said , obviously tried to dissociate themselves from drugs , but said , " It reminds me of one thing and that 's the value of the brand has stayed consistent . "
Which backs up my point and shows he didn 't even break a sweat when he said that .
So that brings me back to the connection with sweat .
In Mexico , Nike has run a campaign recently called , literally , Bid Your Sweat .
So you think about , these Nike shoes have got sensors in them , or you 're using a Nike FuelBand that basically tracks your movement , your energy , your calorie consumption .
And what 's happening here , this is where you 've actually elected to join that Nike community . You 've bought into it .
They 're not advertising loud messages at you , and that 's where advertising has started to shift now is into things like services , tools and applications .
So Nike is literally acting as a well-being partner , a health and fitness partner and service provider .
So what happens with this is they 're saying , " Right , you have a data dashboard . We know how far you 've run , how far you 've moved , what your calorie intake , all that sort of stuff .
What you can do is , the more you run , the more points you get , and we have an auction where you can buy Nike stuff but only by proving that you 've actually used the product to do stuff . "
And you can 't come into this . This is purely for the community that are sweating using Nike products . You can 't buy stuff with pesos .
This is literally a closed environment , a closed auction space .
In Africa , you know , airtime has become literally a currency in its own right .
People are used to , because mobile is king , they 're very , very used to transferring money , making payments via mobile .
And one of my favorite examples from a brand perspective going on is Vodafone , where , in Egypt , lots of people make purchases in markets and very small independent stores .
Loose change , small change is a real problem , and what tends to happen is you buy a bunch of stuff , you 're due , say , 10 cents , 20 cents in change .
The shopkeepers tend to give you things like an onion or an aspirin , or a piece of gum , because they don 't have small change .
So when Vodafone came in and saw this problem , this consumer pain point , they created some small change which they call Fakka , which literally sits and is given by the shopkeepers to people , and it 's credit that goes straight onto their mobile phone .
So this currency becomes credit , which again , is really , really interesting .
And we did a survey that backs up the fact that , you know , 45 percent of people in this very crucial demographic in the U.S.
were saying that they 're comfortable using an independent or branded currency .
So that 's getting really interesting here , a really interesting dynamic going on .
And you think , corporations should start taking their assets and thinking of them in a different way and trading them .
And you think , is it much of a leap ?
It seems farfetched , but when you think about it , in America in 1860 , there were 1,600 corporations issuing banknotes .
There were 8,000 kinds of notes in America .
And the only thing that stopped that , the government controlled four percent of the supply , and the only thing that stopped it was the Civil War breaking out , and the government suddenly wanted to take control of the money .
So government , money , war , nothing changes there , then .
So what I 'm going to ask is , basically , is history repeating itself ?
Is technology making paper money feel outmoded ?
Are we decoupling money from the government ?
You know , you think about , brands are starting to fill the gaps .
Corporations are filling gaps that governments can 't afford to fill .
So I think , you know , will we be standing on stage buying a coffee -- organic , fair trade coffee -- next year using TED florins or TED shillings ?
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Maya Beiser : A cello with many voices
Cellist Maya Beiser plays a gorgeous eight-part modern etude with seven copies of herself , and segues into a meditative music / video hybrid -- using tech to create endless possibilities for transformative sound . Music is Steve Reich 's " Cello Counterpoint , " with video from Bill Morrison , then David Lang 's " World to Come , " with video by Irit Batsry .
Thank you .
Imagining a solo cello concert , one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites .
As a child studying these eternal masterpieces , Bach 's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up .
Late at night , after hours of practicing , I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents ' stereo .
It all became music to me .
I didn 't hear the boundaries .
I still start every day practicing playing Bach .
His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me .
But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression , I realized that with today 's technological resources , there 's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument .
The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing , perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience .
The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept .
The excitement from using multi-tracking , the way I did in the piece you will hear next , comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers , all generated from a single source .
My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas .
When composers write music for me , I ask them to forget what they know about the cello .
I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before .
I want to create endless possibilities with this cello .
I become the medium through which the music is being channeled , and in the process , when all is right , the music is transformed and so am I.
Skylar Tibbits : The emergence of " 4D printing "
3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s ; TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development , which he calls 4D printing , where the fourth dimension is time . This emerging technology will allow us to print objects that then reshape themselves or self-assemble over time . Think : a printed cube that folds before your eyes , or a printed pipe able to sense the need to expand or contract .
This is me building a prototype for six hours straight .
This is slave labor to my own project .
This is what the DIY and maker movements really look like .
And this is an analogy for today 's construction and manufacturing world with brute-force assembly techniques .
And this is exactly why I started studying how to program physical materials to build themselves .
But there is another world .
Today at the micro- and nanoscales , there 's an unprecedented revolution happening .
And this is the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape , change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter .
There 's even a software called cadnano that allows us to design three-dimensional shapes like nano robots or drug delivery systems and use DNA to self-assemble those functional structures .
But if we look at the human scale , there 's massive problems that aren 't being addressed by those nanoscale technologies .
If we look at construction and manufacturing , there 's major inefficiencies , energy consumption and excessive labor techniques .
In infrastructure , let 's just take one example .
Take piping .
In water pipes , we have fixed-capacity water pipes that have fixed flow rates , except for expensive pumps and valves .
We bury them in the ground .
If anything changes -- if the environment changes , the ground moves , or demand changes -- we have to start from scratch and take them out and replace them .
So I 'd like to propose that we can combine those two worlds , that we can combine the world of the nanoscale programmable adaptive materials and the built environment .
And I don 't mean automated machines .
I don 't just mean smart machines that replace humans .
But I mean programmable materials that build themselves .
And that 's called self-assembly , which is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through only local interaction .
So what do we need if we want to do this at the human scale ?
We need a few simple ingredients .
The first ingredient is materials and geometry , and that needs to be tightly coupled with the energy source .
And you can use passive energy -- so heat , shaking , pneumatics , gravity , magnetics .
And then you need smartly designed interactions .
And those interactions allow for error correction , and they allow the shapes to go from one state to another state .
So now I 'm going to show you a number of projects that we 've built , from one-dimensional , two-dimensional , three-dimensional and even four-dimensional systems .
So in one-dimensional systems -- this is a project called the self-folding proteins .
And the idea is that you take the three-dimensional structure of a protein -- in this case it 's the crambin protein -- you take the backbone -- so no cross-linking , no environmental interactions -- and you break that down into a series of components .
And then we embed elastic .
And when I throw this up into the air and catch it , it has the full three-dimensional structure of the protein , all of the intricacies .
And this gives us a tangible model of the three-dimensional protein and how it folds and all of the intricacies of the geometry .
So we can study this as a physical , intuitive model .
And we 're also translating that into two-dimensional systems -- so flat sheets that can self-fold into three-dimensional structures .
In three dimensions , we did a project last year at TEDGlobal with Autodesk and Arthur Olson where we looked at autonomous parts -- so individual parts not pre-connected that can come together on their own .
And we built 500 of these glass beakers .
They had different molecular structures inside and different colors that could be mixed and matched .
And we gave them away to all the TEDsters .
And so these became intuitive models to understand how molecular self-assembly works at the human scale .
This is the polio virus .
You shake it hard and it breaks apart .
And then you shake it randomly and it starts to error correct and built the structure on its own .
And this is demonstrating that through random energy , we can build non-random shapes .
We even demonstrated that we can do this at a much larger scale .
Last year at TED Long Beach , we built an installation that builds installations .
The idea was , could we self-assemble furniture-scale objects ?
So we built a large rotating chamber , and people would come up and spin the chamber faster or slower , adding energy to the system and getting an intuitive understanding of how self-assembly works and how we could use this as a macroscale construction or manufacturing technique for products .
So remember , I said 4D .
So today for the first time , we 're unveiling a new project , which is a collaboration with Stratasys , and it 's called 4D printing .
The idea behind 4D printing is that you take multi-material 3D printing -- so you can deposit multiple materials -- and you add a new capability , which is transformation , that right off the bed , the parts can transform from one shape to another shape directly on their own .
And this is like robotics without wires or motors .
So you completely print this part , and it can transform into something else .
We also worked with Autodesk on a software they 're developing called Project Cyborg .
And this allows us to simulate this self-assembly behavior and try to optimize which parts are folding when .
But most importantly , we can use this same software for the design of nanoscale self-assembly systems and human scale self-assembly systems .
These are parts being printed with multi-material properties .
Here 's the first demonstration .
A single strand dipped in water that completely self-folds on its own into the letters M I T.
I 'm biased .
This is another part , single strand , dipped in a bigger tank that self-folds into a cube , a three-dimensional structure , on its own .
So no human interaction .
And we think this is the first time that a program and transformation has been embedded directly into the materials themselves .
And it also might just be the manufacturing technique that allows us to produce more adaptive infrastructure in the future .
So I know you 're probably thinking , okay , that 's cool , but how do we use any of this stuff for the built environment ?
So I 've started a lab at MIT , and it 's called the Self-Assembly Lab .
And we 're dedicated to trying to develop programmable materials for the built environment .
And we think there 's a few key sectors that have fairly near-term applications .
One of those is in extreme environments .
These are scenarios where it 's difficult to build , our current construction techniques don 't work , it 's too large , it 's too dangerous , it 's expensive , too many parts .
And space is a great example of that .
We 're trying to design new scenarios for space that have fully reconfigurable and self-assembly structures that can go from highly functional systems from one to another .
Let 's go back to infrastructure .
In infrastructure , we 're working with a company out of Boston called Geosyntec .
And we 're developing a new paradigm for piping .
Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate , or maybe even undulate like peristaltics to move the water themselves .
So this isn 't expensive pumps or valves .
This is a completely programmable and adaptive pipe on its own .
So I want to remind you today of the harsh realities of assembly in our world .
These are complex things built with complex parts that come together in complex ways .
So I would like to invite you from whatever industry you 're from to join us in reinventing and reimagining the world , how things come together from the nanoscale to the human scale , so that we can go from a world like this to a world that 's more like this .
Thank you .
Arthur Ganson : Moving sculpture
Sculptor and engineer Arthur Ganson talks about his work -- kinetic art that explores deep philosophical ideas and is gee-whiz fun to look at .
A few words about how I got started , and it has a lot to do with happiness , actually .
When I was a very young child , I was extremely introverted and very much to myself .
And , kind of as a way of surviving , I would go into my own very personal space , and I would make things .
I would make things for people as a way of , you know , giving , showing them my love .
I would go into these private places , and I would put my ideas and my passions into objects -- and sort of learning how to speak with my hands .
So , the whole activity of working with my hands and creating objects is very much connected with not only the idea realm , but also with very much the feeling realm .
And the ideas are very disparate .
I 'm going to show you many different kinds of pieces , and there 's no real connection between one or the other , except that they sort of come out of my brain , and they 're all different sort of thoughts that are triggered by looking at life , and seeing nature and seeing objects , and just having kind of playful random thoughts about things .
When I was a child , I started to explore motion .
I fell in love with the way things moved , so I started to explore motion by making little flipbooks .
And this is one that I did , probably like when I was around seventh grade , and I remember when I was doing this , I was thinking about that little rock there , and the pathway of the vehicles as they would fly through the air , and how the characters -- -- would come shooting out of the car , so , on my mind , I was thinking about the trajectory of the vehicles .
And of course , when you 're a little kid , there 's always destruction .
So , it has to end with this -- -- gratuitous violence .
So that was how I first started to explore the way things moved , and expressed it .
Now , when I went to college , I found myself making fairly complicated , fragile machines .
And this really came about from having many different kinds of interests .
When I was in high school , I loved to program computers , so I sort of liked the logical flow of events .
I was also very interested in perhaps going into surgery and becoming a surgeon , because it meant working with my hands in a very focused , intense way .
So , I started taking art courses , and I found a way to make sculpture that brought together my love for being very precise with my hands , with coming up with different kinds of logical flows of energy through a system .
And also , working with wire -- everything that I did was both a visual and a mechanical engineering decision at the same time .
So , I was able to sort of exercise all of that .
Now , this kind of machine is as close as I can get to painting .
And it 's full of many little trivial end points , like there 's a little foot here that just drags around in circles and it doesn 't really mean anything .
It 's really just for the sort of joy of its own triviality .
The connection I have with engineering is the same as any other engineer , in that I love to solve problems .
I love to figure things out , but the end result of what I 'm doing is really completely ambiguous .
That 's pretty ambiguous .
The next piece that is going to come up is an example of a kind of machine that is fairly complex .
I gave myself the problem .
Since I 'm always liking to solve problems , I gave myself the problem of turning a crank in one direction , and solving all of the mechanical problems for getting this little man to walk back and forth .
So , when I started this , I didn 't have an overall plan for the machine , but I did have a sense of the gesture , and a sense of the shape and how it would occupy space .
And then it was a matter of starting from one point and sort of building to that final point .
That little gear there switches back and forth to change direction .
And that 's a little found object .
So a lot of the pieces that I 've made , they involve found objects .
And it really -- it 's almost like doing visual puns all the time .
When I see objects , I imagine them in motion .
I imagine what can be said with them .
This next one here , " Machine with Wishbone , " it came about from playing with this wishbone after dinner .
You know , they say , never play with your food -- but I always play with things .
So , I had this wishbone , and I thought , it 's kind of like a cowboy who 's been on his horse for too long .
And I started to make him walk across the table , and I thought , " Oh , I can make a little machine that will do that . "
So , I made this device , linked it up , and the wishbone walks .
And because the wishbone is bone -- it 's animal -- it 's sort of a point where I think we can enter into it .
And that 's the whole piece .
That 's about that big .
This kind of work is also very much like puppetry , where the found object is , in a sense , the puppet , and I 'm the puppeteer at first , because I 'm playing with an object .
But then I make the machine , which is sort of the stand-in for me , and it is able to achieve the action that I want .
The next piece I 'll show you is a much more conceptual thought , and it 's a little piece called " Cory 's Yellow Chair . "
I had this image in my mind , when I saw my son 's little chair , and I saw it explode up and out .
And -- so the way I saw this in my mind at first , was that the pieces would explode up and out with infinite speed , and the pieces would move far out , and then they would begin to be pulled back with a kind of a gravitational feel , to the point where they would approach infinite speed back to the center .
And they would coalesce for just a moment , so you could perceive that there was a chair there .
For me , it 's kind of a feeling about the fleetingness of the present moment , and I wanted to express that .
Now , the machine is -- in this case , it 's a real approximation of that , because obviously you can 't move physical matter infinitely with infinite speed and have it stop instantaneously .
This whole thing is about four feet wide , and the chair itself is only about a few inches .
Now , this is a funny sort of conceptual thing , and yesterday we were talking about Danny Hillis ' " 10,000 Year Clock . "
So , we have a motor here on the left , and it goes through a gear train .
There are 12 pairs of 50 : 1 reductions , so that means that the final speed of that gear on the end is so slow that it would take two trillion years to turn once .
So I 've invented it in concrete , because it doesn 't really matter .
Because it could run all the time .
Now , a completely different thought .
I 'm always imagining myself in different situations .
I 'm imagining myself as a machine .
What would I love ?
I would love to be bathed in oil .
So , this machine does nothing but just bathe itself in oil .
And it 's really , just sort of -- for me , it was just really about the lusciousness of oil .
And then , I got a call from a friend who wanted to have a show of erotic art , and I didn 't have any pieces .
But when she suggested to be in the show , this piece came to mind .
So , it 's sort of related , but you can see it 's much more overtly erotic .
And this one I call " Machine with Grease . "
It 's just continually ejaculating , and it 's -- -- this is a happy machine , I 'll tell you .
It 's definitely happy .
From an engineering point of view , this is just a little four-bar linkage .
And then again , this is a found object , a little fan that I found .
And I thought , what about the gesture of opening the fan , and how simply could I state something .
And , in a case like this , I 'm trying to make something which is clear but also not suggestive of any particular kind of animal or plant .
For me , the process is very important , because I 'm inventing machines , but I 'm also inventing tools to make machines , and the whole thing is all sort of wrapped up from the beginning .
So this is a little wire-bending tool .
After many years of bending gears with a pair of pliers , I made that tool , and then I made this other tool for sort of centering gears very quickly -- sort of developing my own little world of technology .
My life completely changed when I found a spot welder .
And that was that tool .
It completely changed what I could do .
Now here , I 'm going to do a very poor job of silver soldering .
This is not the way they teach you to silver solder when you 're in school .
I just like , throw it in .
I mean , real jewelers put little bits of solder in .
So , that 's a finished gear .
When I moved to Boston , I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society .
And the idea , their premise was that we wanted to show pieces of sculpture on the street , and there 'd be no subjective decision about what was the best .
It would be -- whatever came across the finish line first would be the winner .
So I made -- this is my first racing sculpture , and I thought , " Oh , I 'm going to make a cart , and I 'm going to have it -- I 'm going to have my hand writing ' faster , ' so as I run down the street , the cart 's going to talk to me and it 's going to go , ' Faster , faster ! ' " So , that 's what it does .
But then in the end , what I decided was every time you finish writing the word , I would stop and I would give the card to somebody on the side of the road .
So I would never win the race because I 'm always stopping .
But I had a lot of fun .
Now , I only have two and a half minutes -- I 'm going to play this .
This is a piece that , for me , is in some ways the most complete kind of piece .
Because when I was a kid , I also played a lot of guitar .
And when I had this thought , I was imagining that I would make -- I would have a whole machine theater evening , where I would -- you would have an audience , the curtain would open , and you 'd be entertained by machines on stage .
So , I imagined a very simple gestural dance that would be between a machine and just a very simple chair , and ...
When I 'm making these pieces , I 'm always trying to find a point where I 'm saying something very clearly and it 's very simple , but also at the same time it 's very ambiguous .
And I think there 's a point between simplicity and ambiguity which can allow a viewer to perhaps take something from it .
And that leads me to the thought that all of these pieces start off in my own mind , in my heart , and I do my best at finding ways to express them with materials , and it always feels really crude .
It 's always a struggle , but somehow I manage to sort of get this thought out into an object , and then it 's there , OK .
It means nothing at all .
The object itself just means nothing .
Once it 's perceived , and someone brings it into their own mind , then there 's a cycle that has been completed .
And to me , that 's the most important thing because , ever since being a kid , I 've wanted to communicate my passion and love .
And that means the complete cycle of coming from inside , out to the physical , to someone perceiving it .
So I 'll just let this chair come down .
Thank you .
Hetain Patel : Who am I ? Think again
How do we decide who we are ? Hetain Patel 's surprising performance plays with identity , language and accent -- and challenges you to think deeper than surface appearances . A delightful meditation on self , with performer Yuyu Rau , and inspired by Bruce Lee .
Hetain Patel : Yuyu Rau : Hi , I 'm Hetain . I 'm an artist .
And this is Yuyu , who is a dancer I have been working with .
I have asked her to translate for me .
HP : YR : If I may , I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork .
HP : YR : I was born and raised near Manchester , in England , but I 'm not going to say it in English to you , because I 'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent .
HP : YR : The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph , which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China .
So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won 't notice .
HP : YR : Needless to say , I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience .
As a child , I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama , because I didn 't think it was very cool .
It felt a bit girly to me , like a dress , and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down .
My dad never wore it , so I didn 't see why I had to .
Also , it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable , that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it , because that 's not how I feel .
HP : YR : Actually , the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film , " Crouching Tiger , Hidden Dragon . "
Okay .
So my artwork is about identity and language , challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from , gender , race , class .
What makes us who we are anyway ?
HP : YR : I used to read Spider-Man comics , watch kung fu movies , take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee .
He would say things like -- HP : Empty your mind .
Be formless , shapeless , like water .
Now you put water into a cup .
It becomes the cup .
You put water into a bottle , it becomes the bottle .
Put it in a teapot , it becomes the teapot .
Now , water can flow or it can crash .
Be water , my friend .
YR : This year , I am 32 years old , the same age Bruce Lee was when he died .
I have been wondering recently , if he were alive today , what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk .
HP : Don 't imitate my voice .
It offends me .
YR : Good advice , but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others .
Who here hasn 't imitated their childhood hero in the playground , or mum or father ?
I have .
HP : A few years ago , in order to make this video for my artwork , I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s .
He had a side parting and a neat mustache .
At first , it was going very well .
I even started to get discounts in Indian shops .
But then very quickly , I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability , and it got way too big .
It didn 't look Indian anymore .
Instead , people from across the road , they would shout things like -- HP and YR : Arriba ! Arriba ! Ándale ! Ándale !
HP : Actually , I don 't know why I am even talking like this .
My dad doesn 't even have an Indian accent anymore .
He talks like this now .
So it 's not just my father that I 've imitated .
A few years ago I went to China for a few months , and I couldn 't speak Chinese , and this frustrated me , so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese , and then I learned this by heart , like music , I guess .
YR : This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card , so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently .
When I had learned this phrase , I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded .
I spoke the phrase , and then he laughed and told me , " Oh yeah , that 's great , only it kind of sounds like a woman . "
I said , " What ? "
He said , " Yeah , you learned from a woman ? "
I said , " Yes . So ? "
He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct , and that I had learned it very well , but in a woman 's voice .
HP : Okay . So this imitation business does come with risk .
It doesn 't always go as you plan it , even with a talented translator .
But I am going to stick with it , because contrary to what we might usually assume , imitating somebody can reveal something unique .
So every time I fail to become more like my father , I become more like myself .
Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee , I become more authentically me .
This is my art .
I strive for authenticity , even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect .
It 's only recently that I 've started to understand that I didn 't learn to sit like this through being Indian .
I learned this from Spider-Man .
Thank you .
Jill Bolte Taylor : My stroke of insight
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for : She had a massive stroke , and watched as her brain functions -- motion , speech , self-awareness -- shut down one by one . An astonishing story .
I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder : schizophrenia . And as a sister and later , as a scientist , I wanted to understand , why is it that I can take my dreams , I can connect them to my reality , and I can make my dreams come true ?
What is it about my brother 's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality , so they instead become delusion ?
So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses . And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston , where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes , in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry . And in the lab , we were asking the question , " What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control , as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia , schizoaffective or bipolar disorder ? "
So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain : which cells are communicating with which cells , with which chemicals , and then in what quantities of those chemicals ?
So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day .
But then in the evenings and on the weekends , I traveled as an advocate for NAMI , the National Alliance on Mental Illness .
But on the morning of December 10 , 1996 , I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own .
A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain .
And in the course of four hours , I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information . On the morning of the hemorrhage , I could not walk , talk , read , write or recall any of my life .
I essentially became an infant in a woman 's body .
If you 've ever seen a human brain , it 's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another .
And I have brought for you a real human brain .
So this is a real human brain .
This is the front of the brain , the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down , and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head .
And when you look at the brain , it 's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another .
For those of you who understand computers , our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor , while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor .
The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum , which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers .
But other than that , the two hemispheres are completely separate .
Because they process information differently , each of our hemispheres think about different things , they care about different things , and , dare I say , they have very different personalities .
Excuse me . Thank you . It 's been a joy . Assistant : It has been .
Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment .
It 's all about " right here , right now . "
Our right hemisphere , it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies .
Information , in the form of energy , streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like , what this present moment smells like and tastes like , what it feels like and what it sounds like .
I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere .
We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family .
And right here , right now , we are brothers and sisters on this planet , here to make the world a better place .
And in this moment we are perfect , we are whole and we are beautiful .
My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place .
Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically .
Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it 's all about the future .
Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details , details and more details about those details .
It then categorizes and organizes all that information , associates it with everything in the past we 've ever learned , and projects into the future all of our possibilities .
And our left hemisphere thinks in language .
It 's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world .
It 's that little voice that says to me , " Hey , you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home .
I need them in the morning . "
It 's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry . But perhaps most important , it 's that little voice that says to me , " I am . I am . " And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me " I am , " I become separate .
I become a single solid individual , separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you .
And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke .
On the morning of the stroke , I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye . And it was the kind of pain -- caustic pain -- that you get when you bite into ice cream . And it just gripped me -- and then it released me . And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me . And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain , so I thought , " OK , I 'll just start my normal routine . "
So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider , which is a full-body , full-exercise machine .
And I 'm jamming away on this thing , and I 'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar . And I thought , " That 's very peculiar . "
And I looked down at my body and I thought , " Whoa , I 'm a weird-looking thing . " And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality , where I 'm the person on the machine having the experience , to some esoteric space where I 'm witnessing myself having this experience .
And it was all very peculiar , and my headache was just getting worse . So I get off the machine , and I 'm walking across my living room floor , and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down . And every step is very rigid and very deliberate . There 's no fluidity to my pace , and there 's this constriction in my area of perceptions , so I 'm just focused on internal systems .
And I 'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower , and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body . I heard a little voice saying , " OK . You muscles , you gotta contract .
You muscles , you relax . "
And then I lost my balance , and I 'm propped up against the wall .
And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body .
I can 't define where I begin and where I end , because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall .
And all I could detect was this energy -- energy .
And I 'm asking myself , " What is wrong with me ?
What is going on ? " And in that moment , my brain chatter -- my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent .
Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button . Total silence .
And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind . But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me .
And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body , I felt enormous and expansive .
I felt at one with all the energy that was , and it was beautiful there .
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online , and it says to me , " Hey ! We got a problem !
We got a problem ! We gotta get some help . "
And I 'm going , " Ahh ! I got a problem .
I got a problem . " So it 's like , " OK . OK . I got a problem . "
But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land .
But it was beautiful there . Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world .
So here I am in this space , and my job -- and any stress related to my job -- it was gone .
And I felt lighter in my body . And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone .
And I felt this sense of peacefulness .
And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage !
Oh ! I felt euphoria -- euphoria . It was beautiful .
And then , again , my left hemisphere comes online and it says , " Hey ! You 've got to pay attention .
We 've got to get help . " And I 'm thinking , " I got to get help .
I gotta focus . "
So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I 'm walking around my apartment , and I 'm thinking , " I gotta get to work . I gotta get to work .
Can I drive ? Can I drive ? "
And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side . Then I realized , " Oh my gosh ! I 'm having a stroke ! I 'm having a stroke ! "
And the next thing my brain says to me is , " Wow !
This is so cool . " " This is so cool !
How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out ? "
And then it crosses my mind , " But I 'm a very busy woman ! "
" I don 't have time for a stroke ! "
So I 'm like , " OK , I can 't stop the stroke from happening , so I 'll do this for a week or two , and then I 'll get back to my routine . OK .
So I gotta call help . I gotta call work . "
I couldn 't remember the number at work , so I remembered , in my office I had a business card with my number on it . So I go into my business room , I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards .
And I 'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind 's eye what my business card looked like , I couldn 't tell if this was my card or not , because all I could see were pixels .
And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols , and I just couldn 't tell .
And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity .
And in that moment , I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that 's not the card ... that 's not the card ... that 's not the card .
It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards .
In the meantime , for 45 minutes , the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere .
I do not understand numbers , I do not understand the telephone , but it 's the only plan I have .
So I take the phone pad and I put it right here . I take the business card , I put it right here , and I 'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad .
But then I would drift back out into La La Land , and not remember when I came back if I 'd already dialed those numbers .
So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them , so that as I would come back to normal reality , I 'd be able to tell , " Yes , I 've already dialed that number . "
Eventually , the whole number gets dialed and I 'm listening to the phone , and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me , " Woo woo woo woo . " And I think to myself , " Oh my gosh , he sounds like a Golden Retriever ! "
And so I say to him -- clear in my mind , I say to him : " This is Jill ! I need help ! "
And what comes out of my voice is , " Woo woo woo woo woo . "
I 'm thinking , " Oh my gosh , I sound like a Golden Retriever . "
So I couldn 't know -- I didn 't know that I couldn 't speak or understand language until I tried .
So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help .
And a little while later , I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [ Massachusetts ] General Hospital .
And I curl up into a little fetal ball .
And just like a balloon with the last bit of air , just , just right out of the balloon , I just felt my energy lift and just -- I felt my spirit surrender .
And in that moment , I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life .
And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life , or this was perhaps my moment of transition .
When I woke later that afternoon , I was shocked to discover that I was still alive . When I felt my spirit surrender , I said goodbye to my life .
And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality . Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain .
Light burned my brain like wildfire , and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise , and I just wanted to escape . Because I could not identify the position of my body in space , I felt enormous and expansive , like a genie just liberated from her bottle .
And my spirit soared free , like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria .
Nirvana . I found Nirvana . And I remember thinking , there 's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body .
But then I realized , " But I 'm still alive ! I 'm still alive , and I have found Nirvana . And if I have found Nirvana and I 'm still alive , then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana . " And I pictured a world filled with beautiful , peaceful , compassionate , loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time . And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace . And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be , what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives . And it motivated me to recover .
Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage , the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers .
Here I am with my mama , who is a true angel in my life . It took me eight years to completely recover .
So who are we ? We are the life-force power of the universe , with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds .
And we have the power to choose , moment by moment , who and how we want to be in the world .
Right here , right now , I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere , where we are .
I am the life-force power of the universe .
I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form , at one with all that is .
Or , I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere , where I become a single individual , a solid . Separate from the flow , separate from you . I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor : intellectual , neuroanatomist . These are the " we " inside of me .
Which would you choose ? Which do you choose ? And when ?
I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres , the more peace we will project into the world , and the more peaceful our planet will be .
And I thought that was an idea worth spreading .
Tim Leberecht : 3 ways to lose control of your brand
The days are past when a person , company or brand could tightly control their reputation -- online chatter and spin mean that if you 're relevant , there 's a constant , free-form conversation happening about you that you have no control over . Tim Leberecht offers three big ideas about accepting that loss of control , even designing for it -- and using it as an impetus to recommit to your values .
Companies are losing control .
What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street .
What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube .
Reputations are volatile . Loyalties are fickle .
Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff .
A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm .
However , in the same survey , only four percent of employees agreed .
Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees .
But are they really ?
I 'm a marketer , and as a marketer , I know that I 've never really been in control .
Your brand is what other people say about you when you 're not in the room , the saying goes .
Hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now , 24 / 7 .
They can listen and join the conversation .
In fact , they have more control over the loss of control than ever before .
They can design for it . But how ?
First of all , they can give employees and customers more control .
They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas , knowledge , content , designs and product .
They can give them more control over pricing , which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album " In Rainbows . " Buyers could determine the price , but the offer was exclusive , and only stood for a limited period of time .
The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band .
The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called " generous store " in Copenhagen .
It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones .
It turned transactions into interactions , and generosity into a currency .
Companies can even give control to hackers .
When Microsoft Kinect came out , the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console , it immediately drew the attention of hackers .
Microsoft first fought off the hacks , but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits .
The sense of co-ownership , the free publicity , the added value , all helped drive sales .
The ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy .
Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones .
In an even more radical stance against consumerism , the company placed a " Don 't Buy This Jacket " advertisement during the peak of shopping season .
It may have jeopardized short-term sales , but it builds lasting , long-term loyalty based on shared values .
Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive .
The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries .
Hulu and Netflix , among other companies , have open vacation policies .
Companies can give people more control , but they can also give them less control .
Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior , but when everything is consistent and standardized , how do you create meaningful experiences ?
Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier .
Take the travel service Nextpedition .
Nextpedition turns the trip into a game , with surprising twists and turns along the way .
It does not tell the traveler where she 's going until the very last minute , and information is provided just in time . Similarly , Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign , seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination .
U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day , and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers .
Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time ? Yes .
Force them to help others .
A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity .
At Frog , the company I work for , we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees , helping them get to know each other fast .
By applying a strict process , we give them less control , less choice , but we enable more and richer social interactions .
Companies are the makers of their fortunes , and like all of us , they are utterly exposed to serendipity .
That should make them more humble , more vulnerable and more human .
At the end of the day , as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies ' behavior in broad daylight , staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition .
Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said , " What 's interesting about you is you . "
For the true selves of companies to come through , openness is paramount , but radical openness is not a solution , because when everything is open , nothing is open .
" A smile is a door that is half open and half closed , " the author Jennifer Egan wrote .
Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less . They can worry about how much openness is good for them , and what needs to stay closed .
Or they can simply smile , and remain open to all possibilities .
Thank you .
Jacqueline Novogratz : Inspiring a life of immersion
We each want to live a life of purpose , but where to start ? In this luminous , wide-ranging talk , Jacqueline Novogratz introduces us to people she 's met in her work in " patient capital " -- people who have immersed themselves in a cause , a community , a passion for justice . These human stories carry powerful moments of inspiration .
I 've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days , talking to groups of students and professionals , and everywhere I 'm finding that I hear similar themes .
On the one hand , people say , " The time for change is now . "
They want to be part of it .
They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning .
But on the other hand , I hear people talking about fear , a sense of risk-aversion .
They say , " I really want to follow a life of purpose , but I don 't know where to start .
I don 't want to disappoint my family or friends . "
I work in global poverty .
And they say , " I want to work in global poverty , but what will it mean about my career ?
Will I be marginalized ?
Will I not make enough money ?
Will I never get married or have children ? "
And as a woman who didn 't get married until I was a lot older -- and I 'm glad I waited -- -- and has no children , I look at these young people and I say , " Your job is not to be perfect .
Your job is only to be human .
And nothing important happens in life without a cost . "
These conversations really reflect what 's happening at the national and international level .
Our leaders and ourselves want everything , but we don 't talk about the costs .
We don 't talk about the sacrifice .
One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen , the great American writer from the South .
In a short story called " Oh Yes , " she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl , and she looks at her child with a sense of pride , but she also wonders , what price will she pay ?
" Better immersion than to live untouched . "
But the real question is , what is the cost of not daring ?
What is the cost of not trying ?
I 've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion .
One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok .
She was a leader of the Menominee tribe , a Native American peoples .
And when we would gather as fellows , she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions .
And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future , looking at them from the Earth , and they would look at them , holding them as stewards for that future .
Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other , not only as human beings , but to every living thing on the planet .
And tragically , in 1999 , when she was in Colombia working with the U 'wa people , focused on preserving their culture and language , she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC .
And whenever we would gather the fellows after that , we would leave a chair empty for her spirit .
And more than a decade later , when I talk to NGO fellows , whether in Trenton , New Jersey or the office of the White House , and we talk about Ingrid , they all say that they 're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life 's mission .
And when we think about legacy , I can think of no more powerful one , despite how short her life was .
And I 've been touched by Cambodian women -- beautiful women , women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia .
And I met them in the early ' 90s .
In the 1970s , under the Pol Pot regime , the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people , and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals , the artists , the dancers .
And at the end of the war , there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living .
And the women , who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors , told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps .
They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance , hoping that others were alive and doing the same .
And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage , her hands at her side , and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was .
And these big tears fell down her face , but she never lifted her hands to move them .
And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls , because they had grown too old already , but the next generation .
And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands -- beautiful rhythms -- as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them , wearing these beautiful silk colors .
And I thought , after all this atrocity , this is how human beings really pray .
Because they 're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future .
And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure .
I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership .
And I have learned that power , particularly in its absolute form , is an equal opportunity provider .
In 1986 , I moved to Rwanda , and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country 's first microfinance bank .
And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda , and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda .
We built this institution based on social justice , gender equity , this idea of empowering women .
But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end .
And though she had been part of building a liberal party , a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance , about three months before the genocide , she switched parties and joined the extremist party , Hutu Power , and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women .
She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide .
And I would visit her in the prisons , sitting side-by-side , knees touching , and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us , but that maybe it 's not monsters so much , but the broken parts of ourselves , sadnesses , secret shame , and that ultimately it 's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts , those fragments , if you will , and to make us look at other beings , human beings , as lesser than ourselves -- and in the extreme , to do terrible things .
And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men .
I 've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male .
And so in a gathering where we 're focused on women , while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them , we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered , unable to provide .
And that , when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job , no education , no possibility , well then it 's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun .
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous , infinite potential that exists in all of us .
One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization , Suraj Sudhakar , has what we call moral imagination -- the ability to put yourself in another person 's shoes and lead from that perspective .
And he 's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world , Kibera .
And they 're incredible guys .
And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums , and they 're reading many TED authors and liking it .
And then they created a business plan competition .
Then they decided that they would do TEDx 's .
And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men .
Alex , in some ways , said it best .
He said , " We used to feel like nobodies , but now we feel like somebodies . "
And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link .
What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other .
And the reason these young guys told me that they 're doing these TEDx 's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV , or at best , microfinance .
And they wanted to celebrate what 's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare -- the photojournalists and the creatives , the graffiti artists , the teachers and the entrepreneurs .
And they 're doing it .
And my hat 's off to you in Kibera .
My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive .
At Acumen Fund , we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital -- money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity , but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions .
We leave our money for 10 to 15 years , and when we get it back , we invest in other innovations that focus on change .
I know it works .
We 've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies , and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets .
This year alone , they 've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing , emergency services , solar energy , so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems .
Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions , easy categories , because we don 't see profit as a blunt instrument .
But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit .
And ultimately , we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact , measuring what is most important to us .
And my dream is we 'll have a world one day where we don 't just honor those who take money and make more money from it , but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways .
And it 's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change .
Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side -- one based on violence and the other on transcendence .
I happened to be in Lahore , Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers .
And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don 't believe are fully Muslim .
And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives , but they did more , because they created more hatred , more rage , more fear and certainly despair .
But less than 24 hours , I was 13 miles away from those mosques , visiting one of our Acumen investees , an incredible man , Jawad Aslam , who dares to live a life of immersion .
Born and raised in Baltimore , he studied real estate , worked in commercial real estate , and after 9 / 11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference .
For two years , he hardly made any money , a tiny stipend , but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui .
And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital , but he continued to pay a price .
He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes .
It took almost two years just to register the land .
But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person 's action .
Today , 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community .
And there 's schools and clinics and shops .
But there 's only one mosque .
And so I asked Jawad , " How do you guys navigate ? This is a really diverse community .
Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays ? "
He said , " Long story .
It was hard , it was a difficult road , but ultimately the leaders of the community came together , realizing we only have each other .
And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams , and those imams would take turns , they would rotate who would say Friday prayer .
But the whole community , all the different sects , including Shi 'a and Sunni , would sit together and pray . "
We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds .
We face huge issues as a world -- the financial crisis , global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness .
And every day we have a choice .
We can take the easier road , the more cynical road , sometimes dreams of a past that never really was , a fear of each other , distancing and blame .
Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation , transcendence , compassion and love , but also accountability and justice .
I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles , who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States .
And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges , the first child to desegregate schools in the South -- in this case , New Orleans .
And he said that every day this six-year-old , dressed in her beautiful dress , would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily , calling her a monster , threatening to poison her -- distorted faces .
And every day he would watch her , and it looked like she was talking to the people .
And he would say , " Ruby , what are you saying ? "
And she 'd say , " I 'm not talking . "
And finally he said , " Ruby , I see that you 're talking .
What are you saying ? "
And she said , " Dr. Coles , I am not talking ; I 'm praying . "
And he said , " Well , what are you praying ? "
And she said , " I 'm praying , ' Father , forgive them , for they know not what they are doing . ' " At age six , this child was living a life of immersion , and her family paid a price for it .
But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education .
My final story is about a young , beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga , who was another Acumen Fund fellow , who hails from Uganda , a farming community .
And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya , just 200 miles away .
And he said to me at the end of his year , " Jacqueline , it was so humbling , because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture .
But especially when I was talking to the African women , I sometimes made these mistakes -- it was so hard for me to learn how to listen . "
And he said , " So I conclude that , in many ways , leadership is like a panicle of rice .
Because at the height of the season , at the height of its powers , it 's beautiful , it 's green , it nourishes the world , it reaches to the heavens . "
And he said , " But right before the harvest , it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came . "
We need leaders .
We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can , ourselves , extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man , woman and child on this planet .
And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone .
Robert Kennedy once said that " few of us have the greatness to bend history itself , but each of us can work to change a small portion of events . "
And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written .
Our lives are so short , and our time on this planet is so precious , and all we have is each other .
So may each of you live lives of immersion .
They won 't necessarily be easy lives , but in the end , it is all that will sustain us .
Thank you .
Aimee Mullins : Changing my legs - and my mindset
In this TED archive video from 1998 , paralympic sprinter Aimee Mullins talks about her record-setting career as a runner , and about the amazing carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that helped her cross the finish line .
Sheryl Shade : Hi , Aimee . Aimee Mullins : Hi .
SS : Aimee and I thought we 'd just talk a little bit , and I wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete .
AM : Well , for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio -- it might have given it away -- I 'm a double amputee , and I was born without fibulas in both legs .
I was amputated at age one , and I 've been running like hell ever since , all over the place .
SS : Well , why don 't you tell them how you got to Georgetown -- why don 't we start there ?
Why don 't we start there ?
AM : I 'm a senior in Georgetown in the Foreign Service program .
I won a full academic scholarship out of high school .
They pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs , and so I won a full ride to Georgetown and I 've been there for four years . Love it .
SS : When Aimee got there , she decided that she 's , kind of , curious about track and field , so she decided to call someone and start asking about it .
So , why don 't you tell that story ?
AM : Yeah . Well , I guess I 've always been involved in sports .
I played softball for five years growing up .
I skied competitively throughout high school , and I got a little restless in college because I wasn 't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise .
And I 'd never competed on a disabled level , you know -- I 'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes .
That 's all I 'd ever known .
In fact , I 'd never even met another amputee until I was 17 .
And I heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners , and I figured , " Oh , I don 't know about this , but before I judge it , let me go see what it 's all about . "
So , I booked myself a flight to Boston in ' 95 , 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race . I 'd never done it before .
I went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far I could run , and about 50 meters was enough for me , panting and heaving .
And I had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound , attached with Velcro straps -- big , thick , five-ply wool socks on -- you know , not the most comfortable things , but all I 'd ever known .
And I 'm up there in Boston against people wearing legs made of all things -- carbon graphite and , you know , shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things -- and they 're all looking at me like , OK , we know who 's not going to win this race .
And , I mean , I went up there expecting -- I don 't know what I was expecting -- but , you know , when I saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump , hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet , two inches ...
Dan O 'Brien jumped 5 ' 11 " in ' 96 in Atlanta , I mean , if it just gives you a comparison of -- these are truly accomplished athletes , without qualifying that word " athlete . "
And so I decided to give this a shot : heart pounding , I ran my first race and I beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second , and became the new national record-holder on my first try out .
And , you know , people said , " Aimee , you know , you 've got speed -- you 've got natural speed -- but you don 't have any skill or finesse going down that track .
You were all over the place .
We all saw how hard you were working . "
And so I decided to call the track coach at Georgetown .
And I thank god I didn 't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world .
He 's coached five Olympians , and the man 's office is lined from floor to ceiling with All America certificates of all these athletes he 's coached .
He 's just a rather intimidating figure .
And I called him up and said , " Listen , I ran one race and I won ... "
" I want to see if I can , you know -- I need to just see if I can sit in on some of your practices , see what drills you do and whatever . "
That 's all I wanted -- just two practices .
" Can I just sit in and see what you do ? "
And he said , " Well , we should meet first , before we decide anything . "
You know , he 's thinking , " What am I getting myself into ? "
So , I met the man , walked in his office , and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached .
And we got to talking , and it turned out to be a great partnership because he 'd never coached a disabled athlete , so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what I was or wasn 't capable of , and I 'd never been coached before .
So this was like , " Here we go -- let 's start on this trip . "
So he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break , his free time , and I would come up to the track and train with him .
So that 's how I met Frank .
That was fall of ' 95 . But then , by the time that winter was rolling around , he said , " You know , you 're good enough .
You can run on our women 's track team here . "
And I said , " No , come on . "
And he said , " No , no , really . You can .
You can run with our women 's track team . "
In the spring of 1996 , with my goal of making the U.S. Paralympic team that May coming up full speed , I joined the women 's track team .
And no disabled person had ever done that -- run at a collegiate level .
So I don 't know , it started to become an interesting mix .
SS : Well , on your way to the Olympics , a couple of memorable events happened at Georgetown .
Why don 't you just tell them ?
AM : Yes , well , you know , I 'd won everything as far as the disabled meets -- everything I competed in -- and , you know , training in Georgetown and knowing that I was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women 's shirts -- you know , I 'm running against the next Flo-Jo -- and they 're all looking at me like , " Hmm , what 's , you know , what 's going on here ? "
And putting on my Georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that , you know , in order to become better -- and I 'm already the best in the country -- you know , you have to train with people who are inherently better than you .
And I went out there and made it to the Big East , which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season .
It was really , really hot .
And it 's the first -- I had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio , and I didn 't realize at that time that the amount of sweating I would be doing in the sock -- it actually acted like a lubricant and I 'd be , kind of , pistoning in the socket .
And at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint , in all my glory , I came out of my leg .
Like , I almost came out of it , in front of , like , 5,000 people .
And I , I mean , was just mortified -- because I was signed up for the 200 , you know , which went off in a half hour .
I went to my coach : " Please , don 't make me do this . "
I can 't do this in front of all those people . My legs will come off .
And if it came off at 85 there 's no way I 'm going 200 meters .
And he just sat there like this .
My pleas fell on deaf ears , thank god .
Because you know , the man is from Brooklyn ; he 's a big man . He says , " Aimee , so what if your leg falls off ?
You pick it up , you put the damn thing back on , and finish the goddamn race ! "
And I did . So , he kept me in line .
He kept me on the right track .
SS : So , then Aimee makes it to the 1996 Paralympics , and she 's all excited . Her family 's coming down -- it 's a big deal .
It 's now two years that you 've been running ?
AM : No , a year .
SS : A year . And why don 't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race ?
AM : Okay , well , Atlanta .
The Paralympics , just for a little bit of clarification , are the Olympics for people with physical disabilities -- amputees , persons with cerebral palsy , and wheelchair athletes -- as opposed to the Special Olympics , which deals with people with mental disabilities .
So , here we are , a week after the Olympics and down at Atlanta , and I 'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago , I got out on a gravel track and couldn 't run 50 meters .
And so , here I am -- never lost .
I set new records at the U.S. Nationals -- the Olympic trials -- that May , and was sure that I was coming home with the gold .
I was also the only , what they call " bilateral BK " -- below the knee .
I was the only woman who would be doing the long jump .
I had just done the long jump , and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says , " How do you do that ? You know , we 're supposed to have a planar foot , so we can 't get off on the springboard . "
I said , " Well , I just did it . No one told me that . "
So , it 's funny -- I 'm three inches within the world record -- and kept on from that point , you know , so I 'm signed up in the long jump -- signed up ?
No , I made it for the long jump and the 100-meter .
And I 'm sure of it , you know ?
I made the front page of my hometown paper that I delivered for six years , you know ?
It was , like , this is my time for shine .
And we 're at the trainee warm-up track , which is a few blocks away from the Olympic stadium .
These legs that I was on , which I 'll take out right now -- I was the first person in the world on these legs .
I was the guinea pig . , I 'm telling you , this was , like -- talk about a tourist attraction .
Everyone was taking pictures -- " What is this girl running on ? "
And I 'm always looking around , like , where is my competition ?
It 's my first international meet .
I tried to get it out of anybody I could , you know , " Who am I running against here ? "
" Oh , Aimee , we 'll have to get back to you on that one . "
I wanted to find out times .
" Don 't worry , you 're doing great . "
This is 20 minutes before my race in the Olympic stadium , and they post the heat sheets . And I go over and look .
And my fastest time , which was the world record , was 15.77 .
Then I 'm looking : the next lane , lane two , is 12.8 .
Lane three is 12.5 . Lane four is 12.2 . I said , " What 's going on ? "
And they shove us all into the shuttle bus , and all the women there are missing a hand .
So , I 'm just , like -- they 're all looking at me like ' which one of these is not like the other , ' you know ?
I 'm sitting there , like , " Oh , my god . Oh , my god . "
You know , I 'd never lost anything , like , whether it would be the scholarship or , you know , I 'd won five golds when I skied . In everything , I came in first .
And Georgetown -- that was great .
I was losing , but it was the best training because this was Atlanta .
Here we are , like , crème de la crème , and there is no doubt about it , that I 'm going to lose big .
And , you know , I 'm just thinking , " Oh , my god , my whole family got in a van and drove down here from Pennsylvania . "
And , you know , I was the only female U.S. sprinter .
So they call us out and , you know -- " Ladies , you have one minute . "
And I remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd , like , the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see .
And I 'm like , " I know ! Look ! This isn 't right . "
And I 'm thinking that 's my last card to play here ; if I 'm not going to beat these girls , I 'm going to mess their heads a little , you know ?
I mean , it was definitely the " Rocky IV " sensation of me versus Germany , and everyone else -- Estonia and Poland -- was in this heat .
And the gun went off , and all I remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible -- incredible -- this feeling of just being overwhelmed .
And I had to think , " Why did I do this ? "
If I had won everything -- but it was like , what was the point ?
All this training -- I had transformed my life .
I became a collegiate athlete , you know . I became an Olympic athlete .
And it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there .
I mean , the fact that I set my sights , just a year and three months before , on becoming an Olympic athlete and saying , " Here 's my life going in this direction -- and I want to take it here for a while , and just seeing how far I could push it . "
And the fact that I asked for help -- how many people jumped on board ?
How many people gave of their time and their expertise , and their patience , to deal with me ?
And that was this collective glory -- that there was , you know , 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to Atlanta .
So , I apply this sort of philosophy now to everything I do : sitting back and realizing the progression , how far you 've come at this day to this goal , you know .
It 's important to focus on a goal , I think , but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you 've grown as a person .
That 's the achievement , I think . That 's the real achievement .
SS : Why don 't you show them your legs ?
AM : Oh , sure .
SS : You know , show us more than one set of legs .
AM : Well , these are my pretty legs .
No , these are my cosmetic legs , actually , and they 're absolutely beautiful .
You 've got to come up and see them .
There are hair follicles on them , and I can paint my toenails .
And , seriously , like , I can wear heels .
Like , you guys don 't understand what that 's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want .
SS : You got to pick your height ?
AM : I got to pick my height , exactly .
Patrick Ewing , who played for Georgetown in the ' 80s , comes back every summer .
And I had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he 'd come in with foot injuries .
I 'm like , " Get it off ! Don 't worry about it , you know .
You can be eight feet tall . Just take them off . "
He didn 't find it as humorous as I did , anyway .
OK , now , these are my sprinting legs , made of carbon graphite , like I said , and I 've got to make sure I 've got the right socket .
No , I 've got so many legs in here .
These are -- do you want to hold that actually ?
That 's another leg I have for , like , tennis and softball .
It has a shock absorber in it so it , like , " Shhhh , " makes this neat sound when you jump around on it . All right .
And then this is the silicon sheath I roll over , to keep it on . Which , when I sweat , you know , I 'm pistoning out of it .
SS : Are you a different height ?
AM : In these ?
SS : In these .
AM : I don 't know . I don 't think so .
I may be a little taller . I actually can put both of them on .
SS : She can 't really stand on these legs . She has to be moving , so ...
AM : Yeah , I definitely have to be moving , and balance is a little bit of an art in them .
But without having the silicon sock , I 'm just going to try slip in it .
And so , I run on these , and have shocked half the world on these .
These are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run .
If you ever watch a sprinter , the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track .
So when I stand in these legs , my hamstring and my glutes are contracted , as they would be had I had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet .
AM : It 's a company in San Diego called Flex-Foot .
And I was a guinea pig , as I hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out .
But actually these , like I said , are still the actual prototype .
I need to get some new ones because the last meet I was at , they were everywhere . You know , it 's like a big -- it 's come full circle .
Moderator : Aimee and the designer of them will be at TEDMED 2 , and we 'll talk about the design of them .
AM : Yes , we 'll do that .
SS : Yes , there you go .
AM : So , these are the sprint legs , and I can put my other ...
SS : Can you tell about who designed your other legs ?
AM : Yes . These I got in a place called Bournemouth , England , about two hours south of London , and I 'm the only person in the United States with these , which is a crime because they are so beautiful .
And I don 't even mean , like , because of the toes and everything .
For me , while I 'm such a serious athlete on the track , I want to be feminine off the track , and I think it 's so important not to be limited in any capacity , whether it 's , you know , your mobility or even fashion .
I mean , I love the fact that I can go in anywhere and pick out what I want -- the shoes I want , the skirts I want -- and I 'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people .
They 're also silicon .
This is a really basic , basic prosthetic limb under here .
It 's like a Barbie foot under this .
It is . It 's just stuck in this position , so I have to wear a two-inch heel .
And , I mean , it 's really -- let me take this off so you can see it .
I don 't know how good you can see it , but , like , it really is .
There 're veins on the feet , and then my heel is pink , and my Achilles ' tendon -- that moves a little bit .
And it 's really an amazing store . I got them a year and two weeks ago .
And this is just a silicon piece of skin .
I mean , what happened was , two years ago this man in Belgium was saying , " God , if I can go to Madame Tussauds ' wax museum and see Jerry Hall replicated down to the color of her eyes , looking so real as if she breathed , why can 't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg , or an arm , or a hand ? "
I mean , they make ears for burn victims .
They do amazing stuff with silicon .
SS : Two weeks ago , Aimee was up for the Arthur Ashe award at the ESPYs .
And she came into town and she rushed around and she said , " I have to buy some new shoes ! "
We 're an hour before the ESPYs , and she thought she 'd gotten a two-inch heel but she 'd actually bought a three-inch heel .
AM : And this poses a problem for me , because it means I 'm walking like that all night long .
SS : For 45 minutes . Luckily , the hotel was terrific .
They got someone to come in and saw off the shoes .
AM : I said to the receptionist -- I mean , I am just harried , and Sheryl 's at my side -- I said , " Look , do you have anybody here who could help me ?
Because I have this problem ... " You know , at first they were just going to write me off , like , " If you don 't like your shoes , sorry . It 's too late . "
" No , no , no , no . I 've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel . I have a three-inch heel .
I need a little bit off . "
They didn 't even want to go there .
They didn 't even want to touch that one . They just did it .
No , these legs are great .
I 'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements .
I want to get legs like these made for flat feet so I can wear sneakers , because I can 't with these ones .
So ... Moderator : That 's it .
SS : That 's Aimee Mullins .
Joshua Walters : On being just crazy enough
At TED 's Full Spectrum Auditions , comedian Joshua Walters , who 's bipolar , walks the line between mental illness and mental " skillness . " In this funny , thought-provoking talk , he asks : What 's the right balance between medicating craziness away and riding the manic edge of creativity and drive ?
My name is Joshua Walters .
I 'm a performer .
But as far as being a performer , I 'm also diagnosed bipolar .
I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage , the more entertaining I become .
When I was 16 in San Francisco , I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ .
Maybe you thought that was scary , but actually there 's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you 're Jesus Christ .
I was sent to a place , a psych ward , and in the psych ward , everyone is doing their own one-man show .
There 's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time .
They 're just practicing .
One day they 'll get here .
Now when I got out , I was diagnosed by a psychiatrist .
" Okay , Josh , why don 't we give you some -- why don 't we give you some Zyprexa .
Okay ? Mmhmm ?
At least that 's what it says on my pen . "
Some of you are in the field , I can see .
I can feel your noise .
The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode , and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs , where I was sleeping through high school .
The second half was just one big nap , pretty much , in class .
When I got out I had a choice .
I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness .
There 's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive -- at least the hypomanic edge part of it .
Now if you don 't know what hypomania is , it 's like an engine that 's out of control , maybe a Ferrari engine , with no breaks .
Many of the speakers here , many of you in the audience , have that creative edge , if you know what I 'm talking about .
You 're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible .
And there 's a book -- John Gartner .
John Gartner wrote this book called " The Hypomanic Edge " in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete .
A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called " Touched With Fire " by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with .
Some of them committed suicide .
So it wasn 't all the good side of the illness .
Now recently , there 's been development in this field .
And there was an article written in the New York Times , September 2010 , that stated : " Just Manic Enough . "
Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum -- you know what I 'm talking about -- not maybe full bipolar , but they 're in the bipolar spectrum -- where on one side , maybe you think you 're Jesus , and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money .
Your call . Your call .
And everyone 's somewhere in the middle .
Everyone 's somewhere in the middle .
So maybe , you know , there 's no such thing as crazy , and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn 't mean you 're crazy .
But maybe it just means you 're more sensitive to what most people can 't see or feel .
Maybe no one 's really crazy .
Everyone is just a little bit mad .
How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum .
How much depends on how lucky you are .
Thank you .
Rebecca MacKinnon : Let 's take back the Internet !
In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal , Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace , and asks : How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core , rather than control ? She believes the internet is headed for a " Magna Carta " moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection .
So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984 .
Big Brother : We are one people with one will , one resolve , one cause .
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death , and we will fight them with their own confusion .
We shall prevail .
On January 24th , Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh .
And you 'll see why 1984 won 't be like " 1984 . "
Rebecca MacKinnon : So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today .
Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free .
Fast-forward more than two decades : Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store .
The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple 's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups .
His app wasn 't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize .
The German magazine Stern , a news magazine , had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users , and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany .
And more controversially , recently , Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks .
So here 's the thing .
We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies .
Or they 're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed .
Or they 're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many , or most , of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question .
So here 's the situation .
In a pre-Internet world , sovereignty over our physical freedoms , or lack thereof , was controlled almost entirely by nation-states .
But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace .
And their decisions about software coding , engineering , design , terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives .
And their sovereignties , cross-cutting , globally interlinked , can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways , but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world .
After all , even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year .
And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond .
As Wael Ghonim , the Google-Egyptian-executive by day , secret-Facebook-activist by night , famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down , " If you want to liberate a society , just give them the Internet . "
But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated .
On the left there 's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March .
And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles .
But some of the files were left behind intact , and activists , some of them , found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges , their cellphone text message exchanges , even Skype conversations .
And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces .
And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there .
And in Tunisia , censorship actually began to return in May -- not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali .
But you 'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence .
In protest over this , blogger Slim Amamou , who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution , he resigned in protest from the cabinet .
But there 's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem .
In fact , on Twitter , there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said , " Well actually , we do want democracy and free expression , but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it 's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy .
But the problem is , how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power ?
As Riadh Guerfali , the veteran digital activist from Tunisia , remarked over this incident , " Before , things were simple : you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other .
Today , things are a lot more subtle . "
Welcome to democracy , our Tunisian and Egyptian friends .
The reality is that even in democratic societies today , we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks .
In fact , in the United States , whatever you may think of Julian Assange , even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks .
Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman , despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged , let alone convicted , of any crime .
So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology .
This is a map of social networks worldwide , and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world -- which is either a good or a bad thing , depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service .
But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace .
In Brazil and Japan , it 's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons .
But if you look at China , Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states , what 's happening there is more troubling .
You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where , effectively , the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government .
Now in China , you have the " great firewall , " as it 's well-known , that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google + and many of the other overseas websites .
And that 's done in part with the help from Western technology .
But that 's only half of the story .
The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet , known as a system of self-discipline .
In plain English , that means censorship and surveillance of their users .
And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline -- i.e. policing their content .
And Robin Li , CEO of Baidu , China 's dominant search engine , was one of the recipients .
In Russia , they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites .
But this is a website called Rospil that 's an anti-corruption site .
And earlier this year , there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money .
This has a chilling effect on people 's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable .
So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet , which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services .
So the important question , I think , is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys .
Of course , it 's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is .
The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner .
Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens , and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives , not to manipulate or enslave us .
So the question is , we know how to hold government accountable .
We don 't necessarily always do it very well , but we have a sense of what the models are , politically and institutionally , to do that .
How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO 's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit ?
And government regulation often isn 't helping all that much .
You have situations , for instance , in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO 's of Internet companies , " We 're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest . "
But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous " three-strikes " law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing , which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens ' right to communications , and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens .
And here in the United Kingdom there 's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that 's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior .
So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future , we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement .
After all , companies didn 't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course , or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course , just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do .
It was the result of decades of sustained activism , shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy .
Similarly , governments don 't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day .
It 's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations , and that you get the right corporate behavior .
We need to make the same approach with the Internet .
We also are going to need political innovation .
Eight hundred years ago , approximately , the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well , and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta , which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules .
This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation , which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed -- which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond .
So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked .
And what does that look like ?
At the moment , we still don 't know .
But it 's going to require innovation that 's not only going to need to focus on politics , on geopolitics , but it 's also going to need to deal with questions of business management , investor behavior , consumer choice and even software design and engineering .
Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world 's people and not the other way around .
Thank you very much .
Sugata Mitra : Build a School in the Cloud
Onstage at TED2013 , Sugata Mitra makes his bold TED Prize wish : Help me design the School in the Cloud , a learning lab in India , where children can explore and learn from each other -- using resources and mentoring from the cloud . Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments , and learn more at ted.com / prize .
What is going to be the future of learning ?
I do have a plan , but in order for me to tell you what that plan is , I need to tell you a little story , which kind of sets the stage .
I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools , where did it come from ?
And you can look far back into the past , but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is , it 's quite easy to figure out where it came from .
It came from about 300 years ago , and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet . [ " The British Empire " ] Imagine trying to run the show , trying to run the entire planet , without computers , without telephones , with data handwritten on pieces of paper , and traveling by ships .
But the Victorians actually did it .
What they did was amazing .
They created a global computer made up of people .
It 's still with us today .
It 's called the bureaucratic administrative machine .
In order to have that machine running , you need lots and lots of people .
They made another machine to produce those people : the school .
The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine .
They must be identical to each other .
They must know three things : They must have good handwriting , because the data is handwritten ; they must be able to read ; and they must be able to do multiplication , division , addition and subtraction in their head .
They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional .
The Victorians were great engineers .
They engineered a system that was so robust that it 's still with us today , continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists .
The empire is gone , so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people , and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it ?
[ " Schools as we know them are obsolete " ] So that 's a pretty strong comment there .
I said schools as we know them now , they 're obsolete .
I 'm not saying they 're broken .
It 's quite fashionable to say that the education system 's broken .
It 's not broken . It 's wonderfully constructed .
It 's just that we don 't need it anymore . It 's outdated .
What are the kind of jobs that we have today ?
Well , the clerks are the computers .
They 're there in thousands in every office .
And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs .
Those people don 't need to be able to write beautifully by hand .
They don 't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads .
They do need to be able to read .
In fact , they need to be able to read discerningly .
Well , that 's today , but we don 't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like .
We know that people will work from wherever they want , whenever they want , in whatever way they want .
How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world ?
Well , I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident .
I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi , 14 years ago .
And right next to where I used to work , there was a slum .
And I used to think , how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs ?
Or should they not ?
At the same time , we also had lots of parents , rich people , who had computers , and who used to tell me , " You know , my son , I think he 's gifted , because he does wonderful things with computers .
And my daughter -- oh , surely she is extra-intelligent . "
And so on . So I suddenly figured that , how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children ?
What did the poor do wrong ?
I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office , and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one , didn 't know any English , didn 't know what the Internet was .
The children came running in .
It was three feet off the ground , and they said , " What is this ? "
And I said , " Yeah , it 's , I don 't know . "
They said , " Why have you put it there ? "
I said , " Just like that . "
And they said , " Can we touch it ? " I said , " If you wish to . "
And I went away .
About eight hours later , we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse .
So I said , " Well that 's impossible , because -- How is it possible ? They don 't know anything . "
My colleagues said , " No , it 's a simple solution .
One of your students must have been passing by , showed them how to use the mouse . "
So I said , " Yeah , that 's possible . "
So I repeated the experiment . I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little .
I repeated the experiment there .
There was no place to stay , so I stuck my computer in , I went away , came back after a couple of months , found kids playing games on it .
When they saw me , they said , " We want a faster processor and a better mouse . "
So I said , " How on Earth do you know all this ? "
And they said something very interesting to me .
In an irritated voice , they said , " You 've given us a machine that works only in English , so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it . "
That 's the first time , as a teacher , that I had heard the word " teach ourselves " said so casually .
Here 's a short glimpse from those years .
That 's the first day at the Hole in the Wall .
On your right is an eight-year-old .
To his left is his student . She 's six .
And he 's teaching her how to browse .
Then onto other parts of the country , I repeated this over and over again , getting exactly the same results that we were .
[ " Hole in the wall film - 1999 " ] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do .
And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is , and said , " There 's a processor inside . "
So I started publishing .
I published everywhere . I wrote down and measured everything , and I said , in nine months , a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West .
I 'd seen it happen over and over and over again .
But I was curious to know , what else would they do if they could do this much ?
I started experimenting with other subjects , among them , for example , pronunciation .
There 's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad , and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs .
I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer , and I said , " Keep talking into it until it types what you say . "
They did that , and watch a little bit of this .
Computer : Nice to meet you . Nice to meet you .
Sugata Mitra : The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her .
She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent .
So then people said , well , how far will it go ?
Where does it stop ?
I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition .
I made a hypothesis , a ridiculous hypothesis .
Tamil is a south Indian language , and I said , can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer ?
And I said , I 'll measure them . They 'll get a zero .
I 'll spend a couple of months , I 'll leave it for a couple of months , I 'll go back , they 'll get another zero .
I 'll go back to the lab and say , we need teachers .
I found a village . It was called Kallikuppam in southern India .
I put in Hole in the Wall computers there , downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication , most of which I didn 't understand .
The children came rushing , said , " What 's all this ? "
So I said , " It 's very topical , very important . But it 's all in English . "
So they said , " How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry ? "
So by now , I had developed a new pedagogical method , so I applied that . I said , " I haven 't the foggiest idea . "
" And anyway , I am going away . "
So I left them for a couple of months .
They 'd got a zero . I gave them a test .
I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said , " We 've understood nothing . "
So I said , " Well , what did I expect ? "
So I said , " Okay , but how long did it take you before you decided that you can 't understand anything ? "
So they said , " We haven 't given up .
We look at it every single day . "
So I said , " What ? You don 't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months ? What for ? "
So a little girl who you see just now , she raised her hand , and she says to me in broken Tamil and English , she said , " Well , apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease , we haven 't understood anything else . "
So I tested them .
I got an educational impossibility , zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn 't know doing something that 's a decade ahead of their time .
Absurd . But I had to follow the Victorian norm .
Thirty percent is a fail .
How do I get them to pass ? I have to get them 20 more marks .
I couldn 't find a teacher . What I did find was a friend that they had , a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time .
So I asked this girl , " Can you help them ? "
So she says , " Absolutely not .
I didn 't have science in school . I have no idea what they 're doing under that tree all day long . I can 't help you . "
I said , " I 'll tell you what . Use the method of the grandmother . "
So she says , " What 's that ? "
I said , " Stand behind them .
Whenever they do anything , you just say , ' Well , wow , I mean , how did you do that ?
What 's the next page ? Gosh , when I was your age , I could have never done that . ' You know what grannies do . "
So she did that for two more months .
The scores jumped to 50 percent .
Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi , a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher .
When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field .
Here 's Kallikuppam .
Neurons ... communication .
I got the camera angle wrong . That one is just amateur stuff , but what she was saying , as you could make out , was about neurons , with her hands were like that , and she was saying neurons communicate .
At 12 .
So what are jobs going to be like ?
Well , we know what they 're like today .
What 's learning going to be like ? We know what it 's like today , children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand .
What will it be tomorrow ?
Could it be that we don 't need to go to school at all ?
Could it be that , at the point in time when you need to know something , you can find out in two minutes ?
Could it be -- a devastating question , a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte -- could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete ?
But that 's terrible . We are homo sapiens .
Knowing , that 's what distinguishes us from the apes .
But look at it this way .
It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens .
It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete .
What an achievement that is .
But we have to integrate that into our own future .
Encouragement seems to be the key .
If you look at Kuppam , if you look at all of the experiments that I did , it was simply saying , " Wow , " saluting learning .
There is evidence from neuroscience .
The reptilian part of our brain , which sits in the center of our brain , when it 's threatened , it shuts down everything else , it shuts down the prefrontal cortex , the parts which learn , it shuts all of that down .
Punishment and examinations are seen as threats .
We take our children , we make them shut their brains down , and then we say , " Perform . "
Why did they create a system like that ?
Because it was needed .
There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat .
When you 're standing in a trench all alone , if you could have survived , you 're okay , you 've passed .
If you didn 't , you failed .
But the Age of Empires is gone .
What happens to creativity in our age ?
We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure .
I came back to England looking for British grandmothers .
I put out notices in papers saying , if you are a British grandmother , if you have broadband and a web camera , can you give me one hour of your time per week for free ?
I got 200 in the first two weeks .
I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe .
They 're called the Granny Cloud .
The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet .
If there 's a child in trouble , we beam a Gran .
She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out .
I 've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England , deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu , India , 6,000 miles away .
She does it with only one age-old gesture .
" Shhh . "
Okay ?
Watch this .
Grandmother : You can 't catch me . You say it .
You can 't catch me .
Children : You can 't catch me .
Grandmother : I 'm the Gingerbread Man.Children : I 'm the Gingerbread Man .
Grandmother : Well done ! Very good .
SM : So what 's happening here ?
I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization .
If you allow the educational process to self-organize , then learning emerges .
It 's not about making learning happen .
It 's about letting it happen .
The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens .
I think that 's what all this is pointing at .
But how will we know ? How will we come to know ?
Well , I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments .
They are basically broadband , collaboration and encouragement put together .
I 've tried this in many , many schools .
It 's been tried all over the world , and teachers sort of stand back and say , " It just happens by itself ? "
And I said , " Yeah , it happens by itself . " " How did you know that ? "
I said , " You won 't believe the children who told me and where they 're from . "
Here 's a SOLE in action .
This one is in England .
He maintains law and order , because remember , there 's no teacher around .
Girl : The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons -- SM : Australia Girl : -- giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge .
The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons .
SM : A decade ahead of her time .
So SOLEs , I think we need a curriculum of big questions .
You already heard about that . You know what that means .
There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say , " What are those twinkling lights ? "
They built the first curriculum , but we 've lost sight of those wondrous questions .
We 've brought it down to the tangent of an angle .
But that 's not sexy enough .
The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say , " If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth , how would you figure out if it was going to or not ? "
And if he says , " Well , what ? how ? "
you say , " There 's a magic word . It 's called the tangent of an angle , " and leave him alone . He 'll figure it out .
So here are a couple of images from SOLEs .
I 've tried incredible , incredible questions -- " When did the world begin ? How will it end ? " — to nine-year-olds .
This one is about what happens to the air we breathe .
This is done by children without the help of any teacher .
The teacher only raises the question , and then stands back and admires the answer .
So what 's my wish ?
My wish is that we design the future of learning .
We don 't want to be spare parts for a great human computer , do we ?
So we need to design a future for learning .
And I 've got to -- hang on , I 've got to get this wording exactly right , because , you know , it 's very important .
My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together .
Help me build this school .
It will be called the School in the Cloud .
It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in .
The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this .
It 's a facility which is practically unmanned .
There 's only one granny who manages health and safety .
The rest of it 's from the cloud .
The lights are turned on and off by the cloud , etc . , etc . , everything 's done from the cloud .
But I want you for another purpose .
You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home , in the school , outside of school , in clubs .
It 's very easy to do . There 's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it .
If you would please , please do it across all five continents and send me the data , then I 'll put it all together , move it into the School of Clouds , and create the future of learning .
That 's my wish .
And just one last thing .
I 'll take you to the top of the Himalayas .
At 12,000 feet , where the air is thin , I once built two Hole in the Wall computers , and the children flocked there .
And there was this little girl who was following me around .
And I said to her , " You know , I want to give a computer to everybody , every child .
I don 't know , what should I do ? "
And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly .
She suddenly raised her hand like this , and said to me , " Get on with it . "
I think it was good advice .
I 'll follow her advice . I 'll stop talking .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you very much . Wow .
Nathan Wolfe : What 's left to explore ?
We 've been to the moon , we 've mapped the continents , we 've even been to the deepest point in the ocean -- twice . What 's left for the next generation to explore ? Biologist and explorer Nathan Wolfe suggests this answer : Almost everything . And we can start , he says , with the world of the unseeably small .
Recently I visited Beloit , Wisconsin .
And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer , Roy Chapman Andrews .
During his time at the American Museum of Natural History , Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions , like here in the Gobi Desert .
He was quite a figure .
He was later , it 's said , the basis of the Indiana Jones character .
And when I was in Beloit , Wisconsin , I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students .
And I 'm here to tell you , if there 's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED , it 'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture .
Don 't try that one .
At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions , but there was one that 's really stuck with me since then .
There was a young girl who stood up , and she asked the question : " Where should we explore ? "
I think there 's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over , that for the next generation they 're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore .
But is that really the case ?
Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on Earth ?
It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology .
This is an explorer of the unseen world , Martinus Beijerinck .
So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease .
What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters .
And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known -- bacteria , at the time .
He came up with a name for his mystery agent .
He called it the virus -- Latin for " poison . "
And in uncovering viruses , Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us .
We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet , more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined .
And obviously there 's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world -- things like the eradication of smallpox , the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer , which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus .
And Beijerinck 's discovery , this was not something that occurred 500 years ago .
It was a little over 100 years ago that Beijerinck discovered viruses .
So basically we had automobiles , but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet .
We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world -- things like deep sequencing , which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species , but to look at entire metagenomes , the communities of teeming microorganisms in , on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species .
We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between .
In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them .
And just to give you a sense of how this works , imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you .
And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza .
The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information .
And if we started looking into that genetic information , we 'd see a number of usual suspects out there -- of course , a lot of human genetic information , but also bacterial and viral information , mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose .
But we 'd also see something very , very surprising .
As we started to look at this information , we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn 't match anything that we 've ever seen before -- no plant , animal , fungus , virus or bacteria .
Basically we have no clue what this is .
And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data , a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter .
We know it 's not anything that we 've seen before ; it 's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information .
And there 's a lot of it .
If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter , if we looked at your gut , up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter .
And even in the relatively sterile blood , around one to two percent of this information is dark matter -- can 't be classified , can 't be typed or matched with anything we 've seen before .
At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact .
These deep sequencing tools are relatively new .
But as they become more and more accurate , we 've determined that this information is a form of life , or at least some of it is a form of life .
And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy , there 's a very , very exciting possibility that exists : that buried in this life , in this genetic information , are signatures of as of yet unidentified life .
That as we explore these strings of A 's , T 's , C 's and G 's , we may uncover a completely new class of life that , like Beijerinck , will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology .
That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren 't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology .
I 'm pleased to announce that , along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF , we 're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life .
A little over a hundred years ago , people were unaware of viruses , the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet .
A hundred years from now , people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses .
It 's true , we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there , but that doesn 't mean that there 's nothing left to explore on Earth .
Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers -- people like that young girl from Beloit , Wisconsin .
And I think if we phrase that lesson , it 's something like this : Don 't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story .
Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore .
There are unknowns all around us and they 're just waiting to be discovered .
Thank you .
Daniel Tammet : Different ways of knowing
Daniel Tammet has linguistic , numerical and visual synesthesia -- meaning that his perception of words , numbers and colors are woven together into a new way of perceiving and understanding the world . The author of " Born on a Blue Day , " Tammet shares his art and his passion for languages in this glimpse into his beautiful mind .
I 'm a savant , or more precisely , a high-functioning autistic savant .
It 's a rare condition .
And rarer still when accompanied , as in my case , by self-awareness and a mastery of language .
Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me , there 's a certain kind of awkwardness .
I can see it in their eyes .
They want to ask me something .
And in the end , quite often , the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out : " If I give you my date of birth , can you tell me what day of the week I was born on ? "
Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text .
I hope you 'll forgive me if I don 't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today .
I 'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer , to my mind , than work .
I want to talk to you briefly about perception .
When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name , Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss .
Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life , I 'm reminded of why I too became a writer .
In my books , I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding .
Here are three questions drawn from my work .
Rather than try to figure them out , I 'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them .
For example , the calculation : can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall ?
Or look at the foreign word and the sounds : can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it 's pointing you towards ?
And in terms of the line of poetry , why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit ?
I 'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions , you see , are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge .
Aesthetic judgments , rather than abstract reasoning , guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know .
I 'm an extreme example of this .
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color , emotion and personality .
As Juan said , it 's the condition that scientists call synesthesia , an unusual cross-talk between the senses .
Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them -- every number with its own shape and character .
One is a flash of white light .
Six is a tiny and very sad black hole .
The sketches are in black and white here , but in my mind they have colors .
Three is green .
Four is blue .
Five is yellow .
I paint as well .
And here is one of my paintings .
It 's a multiplication of two prime numbers .
Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape , the answer to the sum .
What about bigger numbers ?
Well you can 't get much bigger than Pi , the mathematical constant .
It 's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever .
In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi , I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape .
But it 's not only numbers that I see in colors .
Words too , for me , have colors and emotions and textures .
And this is an opening phrase from the novel " Lolita . "
And Nabokov was himself synesthetic .
And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out .
Another example : a little bit more mathematical .
And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from " The Great Gatsby . "
There is a procession of syllables -- wheat , one ; prairies , two ; lost Swede towns , three -- one , two , three .
And this effect is very pleasant on the mind , and it helps the sentence to feel right .
Let 's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago .
64 multiplied by 75 .
If some of you play chess , you 'll know that 64 is a square number , and that 's why chessboards , eight by eight , have 64 squares .
So that gives us a form that we can picture , that we can perceive .
What about 75 ?
Well if 100 , if we think of 100 as being like a square , 75 would look like this .
So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind -- something like this .
64 becomes 6,400 .
And in the right-hand corner , you don 't have to calculate anything .
Four across , four up and down -- it 's 16 .
So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16 , 16 , 16 .
That 's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math , I 'm sure .
It 's 16 , 16 , 16 , 48 , 4,800 -- 4,800 , the answer to the sum .
Easy when you know how .
The second question was an Icelandic word .
I 'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic .
So let me narrow the choices down to two .
is it a happy word , or a sad word ?
What do you say ?
Okay .
Some people say it 's happy .
Most people , a majority of people , say sad .
And it actually means sad .
Why do , statistically , a majority of people say that a word is sad , in this case , heavy in other cases ?
In my theory , language evolves in such a way that sounds match , correspond with , the subjective , with the personal , intuitive experience of the listener .
Let 's have a look at the third question .
It 's a line from a poem by John Keats .
Words , like numbers , express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world .
It stands to reason that we , existing in this world , should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships .
And poets , like other artists , play with those intuitive understandings .
In the case of hare , it 's an ambiguous sound in English .
It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head .
And if we think of that -- let me put the picture up -- the fibers represent vulnerability .
They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion .
So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension .
The hare itself , the animal -- not a cat , not a dog , a hare -- why a hare ?
Because think of the picture -- not the word , the picture .
The overlong ears , the overlarge feet , helps us to picture , to feel intuitively , what it means to limp and to tremble .
So in these few minutes , I hope I 've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions , numbers , shapes and personalities .
The world is richer , vaster than it too often seems to be .
I hope that I 've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes .
Thank you .
Kees Moeliker : How a dead duck changed my life
One afternoon , Kees Moeliker got a research opportunity few ornithologists would wish for : A flying duck slammed into his glass office building , died , and then … what happened next would change his life . [ Note : Contains graphic images and descriptions of sexual behavior in animals . ]
This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam , where I work as a curator .
It 's my job to make sure the collection stays okay , and that it grows , and basically it means I collect dead animals .
Back in 1995 , we got a new wing next to the museum .
It was made of glass , and this building really helped me to do my job good .
The building was a true bird-killer .
You may know that birds don 't understand the concept of glass . They don 't see it , so they fly into the windows and get killed .
The only thing I had to do was go out , pick them up , and have them stuffed for the collection .
And in those days , I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass .
And it was on June 5 , 1995 , that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck .
And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window .
This is the dead duck . It flew against the window .
It 's laying dead on its belly .
But next to the dead duck is a live duck , and please pay attention .
Both are of the male sex .
And then this happened .
The live duck mounted the dead duck , and started to copulate .
Well , I 'm a biologist . I 'm an ornithologist .
I said , " Something 's wrong here . "
One is dead , one is alive . That must be necrophilia .
I look . Both are of the male sex .
Homosexual necrophilia .
So I -- I took my camera , I took my notebook , took a chair , and started to observe this behavior .
After 75 minutes — — I had seen enough , and I got hungry , and I wanted to go home .
So I went out , collected the duck , and before I put it in the freezer , I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex .
And here 's a rare picture of a duck 's penis , so it was indeed of the male sex .
It 's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis .
[ The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos ] I knew I 'd seen something special , but it took me six years to decide to publish it .
I mean , it 's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine , but to share this among your peers is something different .
I didn 't have the framework .
So after six years , my friends and colleagues urged me to publish , so I published " The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard . "
And here 's the situation again .
A is my office , B is the place where the duck hit the glass , and C is from where I watched it .
And here are the ducks again .
As you probably know , in science , when you write a kind of special paper , only six or seven people read it .
But then something good happened .
I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams , and he told me , " You 've won a prize with your duck paper : the Ig Nobel Prize . "
And the Ig Nobel Prize — — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh , and then makes them think , with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science .
That 's a good thing , so I accepted the prize .
I went -- let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn 't call me from Stockholm .
He called me from Cambridge , Massachusetts .
So I traveled to Boston , to Cambridge , and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University , and this ceremony is a very nice experience .
Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize .
That 's the first thing .
And there are nine other winners who get prizes .
Here 's one of my fellow winners . That 's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper , " Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain . "
And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room .
Dan , where are you ? Dan Ariely ?
Applause for Dan .
Dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine .
So here 's my one minute of fame , my acceptance speech , and here 's the duck .
This is its first time on the U.S. West Coast .
I 'm going to pass it around .
Yeah ?
You can pass it around .
Please note it 's a museum specimen , but there 's no chance you 'll get the avian flu .
After winning this prize , my life changed .
In the first place , people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things , and I got a real nice collection .
More importantly , people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior , and believe me , if there 's an animal misbehaving on this planet , I know about it .
This is a moose .
It 's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison .
This is in Montana , 2008 .
This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish .
This is the Netherlands , 2011 .
These are cane toads in Australia .
This is roadkill .
Please note that this is necrophilia .
It 's remarkable : the position .
The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom .
These are pigeons in Rotterdam .
Barn swallows in Hong Kong , 2004 .
This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution .
It took all day , and the prisoners had a great time .
So what does this mean ?
I mean , the question I ask myself , why does this happen in nature ?
Well , what I concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation .
At least , I thought it was till I got these slides .
And here you see a dead duck .
It 's been there for three days , and it 's laying on its back .
So there goes my theory of necrophilia .
Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds .
This is Mad Max , a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam .
The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008 , day in and day out .
Here he goes , and here 's a short video .
So what this bird does is fight his own image .
He sees an intruder in his territory , and it 's coming all the time and he 's there , so there is no end to it .
And I thought , in the beginning -- I studied this bird for a couple of years -- that , well , shouldn 't the brain of this bird be damaged ?
It 's not . I show you here some slides , some frames from the video , and at the last moment before he hits the glass , he puts his feet in front , and then he bangs against the glass .
So I 'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day .
That 's on June 5 every year .
At five minutes to six in the afternoon , we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam , the duck comes out of the museum , and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows .
And as you know , or as you may not know , this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world .
In the U.S. alone , a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings .
And when it 's over , we go to a Chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner .
So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam , the Netherlands , for Dead Duck Day .
Thank you .
Oh , sorry .
May I have my duck back , please ?
Thank you .
Dennis Hong : Making a car for blind drivers
Using robotics , laser rangefinders , GPS and smart feedback tools , Dennis Hong is building a car for drivers who are blind . It 's not a " self-driving " car , he 's careful to note , but a car in which a non-sighted driver can determine speed , proximity and route -- and drive independently .
Many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see .
A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task , until now .
Hello , my name is Dennis Hong , and we 're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired .
So before I talk about this car for the blind , let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge .
Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself .
You press start , nobody touches anything , and it can reach its destination fully autonomously .
So in 2007 , our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition .
So about that time , the National Federation of the Blind , or NFB , challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently .
We decided to give it a try , because we thought , " Hey , how hard could it be ? "
We have already an autonomous vehicle .
We just put a blind person in it and we 're done , right ?
We couldn 't have been more wrong .
What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around , but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive .
So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch .
So to test this crazy idea , we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility .
And in the summer of 2009 , we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin .
It was an absolutely amazing experience .
But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment , in a flat , closed-off parking lot -- even the lanes defined by red traffic cones .
So with this success , we decided to take the next big step , to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads .
So how does it work ?
Well , it 's a rather complex system , but let me try to explain it , maybe simplify it .
So we have three steps .
We have perception , computation and non-visual interfaces .
Now obviously the driver cannot see , so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver .
For that , we use an initial measurement unit .
So it measures acceleration , angular acceleration -- like a human ear , inner ear .
We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car .
We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road .
And we also use three laser range finders .
The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles -- a car approaching from the front , the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads , any obstacles around the vehicle .
So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer , and the computer can do two things .
One is , first of all , process this information to have an understanding of the environment -- these are the lanes of the road , there 's the obstacles -- and convey this information to the driver .
The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car .
So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle .
But the problem is this : How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive ?
So for this , we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology .
So starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system , a vibrating vest , a click wheel with voice commands , a leg strip , even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot .
But today we 're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces .
Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip .
So these are a pair of gloves , and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer -- the direction and the intensity .
Another device is called SpeedStrip .
So this is a chair -- as a matter of fact , it 's actually a massage chair .
We gut it out , and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns , and we actuate them to convey information about the speed , and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal .
So over here , you can see how the computer understands the environment , and because you cannot see the vibration , we actually put red LED 's on the driver so that you can see what 's happening .
This is the sensory data , and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer .
So these two devices , DriveGrip and SpeedStrip , are very effective .
But the problem is these are instructional cue devices .
So this is not really freedom , right ?
The computer tells you how to drive -- turn left , turn right , speed up , stop .
We call this the " backseat-driver problem . "
So we 're moving away from the instructional cue devices , and we 're now focusing more on the informational devices .
A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix .
So think of it as a monitor for the blind .
So it 's a small tablet , has many holes in it , and compressed air comes out , so it can actually draw images .
So even though you are blind , you can put your hand over it , you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles .
Actually , you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature .
So it 's actually a multi-dimensional user interface .
So here you can see the left camera , the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix .
For this , we 're showing a simulator , a blind person driving using the AirPix .
This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces .
So basically that 's how it works .
So just a month ago , on January 29th , we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event .
We also had some surprises . Let 's take a look .
This is an historic day in January .
He 's coming up to the grandstand , fellow Federationists .
There 's the grandstand now .
And he 's [ unclear ] following that van that 's out in front of him .
Well there comes the first box .
Now let 's see if Mark avoids it .
He does . He passes it on the right .
Third box is out . The fourth box is out .
And he 's perfectly making his way between the two .
He 's closing in on the van to make the moving pass .
Well this is what it 's all about , this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity .
He 's approaching the end of the run , makes his way between the barrels that are set up there .
Dennis Hong : I 'm so happy for you .
Mark 's going to give me a ride back to the hotel .
Mark Riccobono : Yes .
DH : So since we started this project , we 've been getting hundreds of letters , emails , phone calls from people from all around the world .
Letters thanking us , but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one : " Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine . "
But sometimes -- But sometimes I also do get -- I wouldn 't call it hate mail -- but letters of really strong concern : " Dr. Hong , are you insane , trying to put blind people on the road ?
You must be out of your mind . "
But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle , and it 's not going to be on the road until it 's proven as safe as , or safer than , today 's vehicle .
And I truly believe that this can happen .
But still , will the society , would they accept such a radical idea ?
How are we going to handle insurance ?
How are we going to issue driver 's licenses ?
There 's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality .
Of course , the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind .
But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project .
The sensors that are used can see through the dark , the fog and rain .
And together with this new type of interfaces , we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people .
Or for the blind , everyday home appliances -- in the educational setting , in the office setting .
Just imagine , in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what 's written and read using these non-visual interfaces .
This is priceless .
So today , the things I 've showed you today , is just the beginning .
Thank you very much .
Quyen Nguyen : Color-coded surgery
Surgeons are taught from textbooks which conveniently color-code the types of tissues , but that 's not what it looks like in real life -- until now . At TEDMED Quyen Nguyen demonstrates how a molecular marker can make tumors light up in neon green , showing surgeons exactly where to cut .
I want to talk to you about one of the biggest myths in medicine , and that is the idea that all we need are more medical breakthroughs and then all of our problems will be solved .
Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single , solo inventor who , working late in the lab one night , makes an earthshaking discovery , and voila , overnight everything 's changed .
That 's a very appealing picture , however , it 's just not true .
In fact , medicine today is a team sport .
And in many ways , it always has been .
I 'd like to share with you a story about how I 've experienced this very dramatically in my own work .
I 'm a surgeon , and we surgeons have always had this special relationship with light .
When I make an incision inside a patient 's body , it 's dark .
We need to shine light to see what we 're doing .
And this is why , traditionally , surgeries have always started so early in the morning -- to take advantage of daylight hours .
And if you look at historical pictures of the early operating rooms , they have been on top of buildings .
For example , this is the oldest operating room in the Western world , in London , where the operating room is actually on top of a church with a skylight coming in .
And then this is a picture of one of the most famous hospitals in America .
This is Mass General in Boston .
And do you know where the operating room is ?
Here it is on the top of the building with plenty of windows to let light in .
So nowadays in the operating room , we no longer need to use sunlight .
And because we no longer need to use sunlight , we have very specialized lights that are made for the operating room .
We have an opportunity to bring in other kinds of lights -- lights that can allow us to see what we currently don 't see .
And this is what I think is the magic of fluorescence .
So let me back up a little bit .
When we are in medical school , we learn our anatomy from illustrations such as this where everything 's color-coded .
Nerves are yellow , arteries are red , veins are blue .
That 's so easy anybody could become a surgeon , right ?
However , when we have a real patient on the table , this is the same neck dissection -- not so easy to tell the difference between different structures .
We heard over the last couple days what an urgent problem cancer still is in our society , what a pressing need it is for us to not have one person die every minute .
Well if cancer can be caught early , enough such that someone can have their cancer taken out , excised with surgery , I don 't care if it has this gene or that gene , or if it has this protein or that protein , it 's in the jar .
It 's done , it 's out , you 're cured of cancer .
This is how we excise cancers .
We do our best , based upon our training and the way the cancer looks and the way it feels and its relationship to other structures and all of our experience , we say , you know what , the cancer 's gone .
We 've made a good job . We 've taken it out .
That 's what the surgeon is saying in the operating room when the patient 's on the table .
But then we actually don 't know that it 's all out .
We actually have to take samples from the surgical bed , what 's left behind in the patient , and then send those bits to the pathology lab .
In the meanwhile , the patient 's on the operating room table .
The nurses , anesthesiologist , the surgeon , all the assistants are waiting around .
And we wait .
The pathologist takes that sample , freezes it , cuts it , looks in the microscope one by one and then calls back into the room .
And that may be 20 minutes later per piece .
So if you 've sent three specimens , it 's an hour later .
And very often they say , " You know what , points A and B are okay , but point C , you still have some residual cancer there .
Please go cut that piece out . "
So we go back and we do that again , and again .
And this whole process : " Okay you 're done .
We think the entire tumor is out . "
But very often several days later , the patient 's gone home , we get a phone call : " I 'm sorry , once we looked at the final pathology , once we looked at the final specimen , we actually found that there 's a couple other spots where the margins are positive .
There 's still cancer in your patient . "
So now you 're faced with telling your patient , first of all , that they may need another surgery , or that they need additional therapy such as radiation or chemotherapy .
So wouldn 't it be better if we could really tell , if the surgeon could really tell , whether or not there 's still cancer on the surgical field ?
I mean , in many ways , the way that we 're doing it , we 're still operating in the dark .
So in 2004 , during my surgical residency , I had the great fortune to meet Dr. Roger Tsien , who went on to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2008 .
Roger and his team were working on a way to detect cancer , and they had a very clever molecule that they had come up with .
The molecule they had developed had three parts .
The main part of it is the blue part , polycation , and it 's basically very sticky to every tissue in your body .
So imagine that you make a solution full of this sticky material and inject it into the veins of someone who has cancer , everything 's going to get lit up .
Nothing will be specific .
There 's no specificity there .
So they added two additional components .
The first one is a polyanionic segment , which basically acts as a non-stick backing like the back of a sticker .
So when those two are together , the molecule is neutral and nothing gets stuck down .
And the two pieces are then linked by something that can only be cut if you have the right molecular scissors -- for example , the kind of protease enzymes that tumors make .
So here in this situation , if you make a solution full of this three-part molecule along with the dye , which is shown in green , and you inject it into the vein of someone who has cancer , normal tissue can 't cut it .
The molecule passes through and gets excreted .
However , in the presence of the tumor , now there are molecular scissors that can break this molecule apart right there at the cleavable site .
And now , boom , the tumor labels itself and it gets fluorescent .
So here 's an example of a nerve that has tumor surrounding it .
Can you tell where the tumor is ?
I couldn 't when I was working on this .
But here it is . It 's fluorescent .
Now it 's green .
See , so every single one in the audience now can tell where the cancer is .
We can tell in the operating room , in the field , at a molecular level , where is the cancer and what the surgeon needs to do and how much more work they need to do to cut that out .
And the cool thing about fluorescence is that it 's not only bright , it actually can shine through tissue .
The light that the fluorescence emits can go through tissue .
So even if the tumor is not right on the surface , you 'll still be able to see it .
In this movie , you can see that the tumor is green .
There 's actually normal muscle on top of it . See that ?
And I 'm peeling that muscle away .
But even before I peel that muscle away , you saw that there was a tumor underneath .
that 's labeled with fluorescent molecules .
That you can , not only see the margins right there on a molecular level , but you can see it even if it 's not right on the top -- even if it 's beyond your field of view .
And this works for metastatic lymph nodes also .
Sentinel lymph node dissection has really changed the way that we manage breast cancer , melanoma .
Women used to get really debilitating surgeries to excise all of the axillary lymph nodes .
But when sentinel lymph node came into our treatment protocol , the surgeon basically looks for the single node that is the first draining lymph node of the cancer .
And then if that node has cancer , the woman would go on to get the axillary lymph node dissection .
So what that means is if the lymph node did not have cancer , the woman would be saved from having unnecessary surgery .
But sentinel lymph node , the way that we do it today , is kind of like having a road map just to know where to go .
So if you 're driving on the freeway and you want to know where 's the next gas station , you have a map to tell you that that gas station is down the road .
the gas station has gas .
You have to cut it out , bring it back home , cut it up , look inside and say , " Oh yes , it does have gas . "
So that takes more time .
Patients are still on the operating room table .
Anesthesiologists , surgeons are waiting around .
That takes time .
So with our technology , we can tell right away .
You see a lot of little , roundish bumps there .
Some of these are swollen lymph nodes that look a little larger than others .
Who amongst us hasn 't had swollen lymph nodes with a cold ?
That doesn 't mean that there 's cancer inside .
Well with our technology , the surgeon is able to tell immediately which nodes have cancer .
I won 't go into this very much , but our technology , besides being able to tag tumor and metastatic lymph nodes with fluorescence , we can also use the same smart three-part molecule to tag gadolinium onto the system so you can do this noninvasively .
The patient has cancer , you want to know if the lymph nodes have cancer even before you go in .
Well you can see this on an MRI .
So in surgery , it 's important to know what to cut out .
But equally important is to preserve things that are important for function .
So it 's very important to avoid inadvertent injury .
And what I 'm talking about are nerves .
Nerves , if they are injured , can cause paralysis , can cause pain .
In the setting of prostate cancer , up to 60 percent of men after prostate cancer surgery may have urinary incontinence and erectile disfunction .
That 's a lot of people to have a lot of problems -- and this is even in so-called nerve-sparing surgery , which means that the surgeon is aware of the problem , and they are trying to avoid the nerves .
But you know what , these little nerves are so small , in the context of prostate cancer , that they are actually never seen .
They are traced just by their known anatomical path along vasculature .
And they 're known because somebody has decided to study them , which means that we 're still learning about where they are .
Crazy to think that we 're having surgery , we 're trying to excise cancer , we don 't know where the cancer is .
We 're trying to preserve nerves ; we can 't see where they are .
So I said , wouldn 't it be great if we could find a way to see nerves with fluorescence ?
And at first this didn 't get a lot of support .
People said , " We 've been doing it this way for all these years .
What 's the problem ?
We haven 't had that many complications . "
But I went ahead anyway .
And Roger helped me .
And he brought his whole team with him .
So there 's that teamwork thing again .
And we eventually discovered molecules that were specifically labeling nerves .
And when we made a solution of this , tagged with the fluorescence and injected in the body of a mouse , their nerves literally glowed .
You can see where they are .
Here you 're looking at a sciatic nerve of a mouse , and you can see that that big , fat portion you can see very easily .
But in fact , at the tip of that where I 'm dissecting now , there 's actually very fine arborizations that can 't really be seen .
You see what looks like little Medusa heads coming out .
We have been able to see nerves for facial expression , for facial movement , for breathing -- every single nerve -- nerves for urinary function around the prostate .
We 've been able to see every single nerve .
When we put these two probes together ...
So here 's a tumor .
Do you guys know where the margins of this tumor is ?
Now you do .
What about the nerve that 's going into this tumor ?
That white portion there is easy to see .
But what about the part that goes into the tumor ?
Do you know where it 's going ?
Now you do .
Basically , we 've come up with a way to stain tissue and color-code the surgical field .
This was a bit of a breakthrough .
I think that it 'll change the way that we do surgery .
We published our results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature Biotechnology .
We received commentary in Discover magazine , in The Economist .
And we showed it to a lot of my surgical colleagues .
They said , " Wow !
I have patients who would benefit from this .
I think that this will result in my surgeries with a better outcome and fewer complications . "
What needs to happen now is further development of our technology along with development of the instrumentation that allows us to see this sort of fluorescence in the operating room .
The eventual goal is that we 'll get this into patients .
However , we 've discovered that there 's actually no straightforward mechanism to develop a molecule for one-time use .
Understandably , the majority of the medical industry is focused on multiple-use drugs , such as long-term daily medications .
We are focused on making this technology better .
We 're focused on adding drugs , adding growth factors , killing nerves that are causing problems and not the surrounding tissue .
We know that this can be done and we 're committed to doing it .
I 'd like to leave you with this final thought .
Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough .
It is not a sprint .
It is not an event for the solo runner .
Successful innovation is a team sport , it 's a relay race .
It requires one team for the breakthrough and another team to get the breakthrough accepted and adopted .
And this takes the long-term steady courage of the day-in day-out struggle to educate , to persuade and to win acceptance .
And that is the light that I want to shine on health and medicine today .
Thank you very much .
Johanna Blakley : Lessons from fashion 's free culture
Copyright law 's grip on film , music and software barely touches the fashion industry ... and fashion benefits in both innovation and sales , says Johanna Blakley . In her talk , she talks about what all creative industries can learn from fashion 's free culture .
I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada .
She 's an Italian fashion designer .
She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers .
She 's rooting around , she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga -- she loves it .
She 's turning it inside out .
She 's looking at the seams . She 's looking at the construction .
Her friend says , " Buy it already . "
She said , " I 'll buy it , but I 'm also going to replicate it . "
Now , the academics in this audience may think , " Well , that sounds like plagiarism . "
But to a fashionista , what it really is is a sign of Prada 's genius : that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn 't need to be changed by one iota , and to be current and to be now .
You might also be asking whether it 's possible that this is illegal for her to do this .
Well , it turns out that it 's actually not illegal .
In the fashion industry , there 's very little intellectual property protection .
They have trademark protection , but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of .
All they have , really , is trademark protection , and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design .
The only thing that they can 't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel .
That 's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products .
It 's because it 's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can 't knock off the logo .
But if you go to Santee Alley , yeah .
Well , yeah .
Canal Street , I know .
And sometimes these are fun , right ?
Now , the reason for this , the reason that the fashion industry doesn 't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection .
They didn 't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing .
And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it .
But too utilitarian ? I mean is that the way you think of fashion ?
This is Vivienne Westwood . No !
We think of it as maybe too silly , too unnecessary .
Now , those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection -- which is that without ownership , there is no incentive to innovate -- might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry .
What I 'm going to argue today is that because there 's no copyright protection in the fashion industry , fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design , things to cover our naked bodies , into something that we consider art .
Because there 's no copyright protection in this industry , there 's a very open and creative ecology of creativity .
Unlike their creative brothers and sisters , who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians , fashion designers can sample from all their peers ' designs .
They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design .
They 're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist .
And here , I suspect , they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar .
Maybe just a little .
Can 't copyright a costume either .
Now , fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry .
This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks , and this dress is actually made of aluminum .
I 've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through .
So , one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying , which is really what it is , is the establishment of trends .
People think this is a magical thing . How does it happen ?
Well , it 's because it 's legal for people to copy one another .
Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we 're all going to wear , but if you talk to any designer at any level , including these high-end designers , they always say their main inspiration comes from the street : where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks .
And that 's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration , so it 's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry .
Now , the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry .
They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices .
And they 've been faced with a lot of lawsuits , but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers .
The courts have said over and over again , " You don 't need any more intellectual property protection . "
When you look at copies like this , you wonder : How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business ?
If you can get it for 200 bucks , why pay a thousand ?
Well , that 's one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago .
We invited Tom Ford to come -- the conference was called , " Ready to Share : Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity " -- and we asked him exactly this question .
Here 's what he had to say .
He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci , in case you didn 't know .
Tom Ford : And we found after much research that -- actually not much research , quite simple research -- that the counterfeit customer was not our customer .
Johanna Blakley : Imagine that .
The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci .
This is a very different demographic .
And , you know , a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design , at least in terms of the materials ; they 're always made of cheaper materials .
But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects , can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend .
There 's lots of virtues of copying .
One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before , and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry , actually .
And this is a good thing . We need lots of options .
Fashion , whether you like it or not , helps you project who you are to the world .
Because of fast fashion , global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to .
And this , actually , is good news to trendsetters ; they want trends to be set so that they can move product .
For fashionistas , they want to stay ahead of the curve .
They don 't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing .
And so , they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible .
I tell you , there is no rest for the fashionable .
Every season , these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody 's going to love .
And this , let me tell you , is very good for the bottom line .
Now of course , there 's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process .
And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer .
He has complained a lot about people copying him , but in one interview I read , he said it has really forced him to up his game .
He had to come up with new ideas , new things that would be hard to copy .
He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium ; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material , it 'll actually crack in two .
It forced him to be a little more innovative .
And that actually reminded me of jazz great , Charlie Parker .
I don 't know if you 've heard this anecdote , but I have .
He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn 't be able to replicate the sound .
He wanted to make it too difficult to copy , and that 's what fashion designers are doing all the time .
They 're trying to put together a signature look , an aesthetic that reflects who they are .
When people knock it off , everybody knows because they 've put that look out on the runway , and it 's a coherent aesthetic .
I love these Gallianos .
Okay , we 'll move on .
This is not unlike the world of comedy .
I don 't know if you know that jokes also can 't be copyright protected .
So when one-liners were really popular , everybody stole them from one another .
But now , we have a different kind of comic .
They develop a persona , a signature style , much like fashion designers .
And their jokes , much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer , really only work within that aesthetic .
If somebody steals a joke from Larry David , for instance , it 's not as funny .
Now , the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they 've learned how to copy themselves .
They knock themselves off .
They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic : the Santee Alley demographic .
Now , some fashion designers will say , " It 's only in the United States that we don 't have any respect .
In other countries there is protection for our artful designs . "
But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world , it turns out that the protection that 's offered is really ineffectual .
In Japan , for instance , which I think is the third largest market , they have a design law ; it protects apparel , but the novelty standard is so high , you have to prove that your garment has never existed before , it 's totally unique .
And that 's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent , which fashion designers never get -- rarely get here in the states .
In the European Union , they went in the other direction .
Very low novelty standard , anybody can register anything .
But even though it 's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there , they don 't register their garments , generally , and there 's not a lot of litigation .
It turns out it 's because the novelty standard is too low .
A person can come in and take somebody else 's gown , cut off three inches from the bottom , go to the E.U. and register it as a new , original design .
So , that does not stop the knock-off artists .
If you look at the registry , actually , a lot of the registered things in the E.U.
are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another .
But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg .
She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America , and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs .
The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though .
I don 't think the legislation is going anywhere , because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that 's just part of a global trend .
Who owns a look ?
That is a very difficult question to answer .
It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time , and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive .
You know , it 's not just the fashion industry that doesn 't have copyright protection .
There 's a bunch of other industries that don 't have copyright protection , including the food industry .
You cannot copyright a recipe because it 's a set of instructions , it 's fact , and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish .
Same with automobiles .
It doesn 't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look , you cannot copyright the sculptural design .
It 's a utilitarian article , that 's why .
Same with furniture , it 's too utilitarian .
Magic tricks , I think they 're instructions , sort of like recipes : no copyright protection .
Hairdos , no copyright protection .
Open source software , these guys decided they didn 't want copyright protection .
They thought it 'd be more innovative without it .
It 's really hard to get copyright for databases .
Tattoo artists , they don 't want it ; it 's not cool .
They share their designs .
Jokes , no copyright protection .
Fireworks displays , the rules of games , the smell of perfume : no .
And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you , but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries , industries with very little copyright protection , and there 's the gross sales of films and books .
It ain 't pretty .
So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they 're like , " Shhh !
Don 't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other 's designs .
It 's embarrassing . "
But you know what ? It 's revolutionary , and it 's a model that a lot of other industries -- like the ones we just saw with the really small bars -- they might have to think about this .
Because right now , those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it 's as if they don 't have any protection , and they don 't know what to do .
When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn 't have copyright protection , I thought , " What exactly is the underlying logic ?
I want a picture . " And the lawyers do not provide a picture , so I made one .
These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law .
It is more complex than this , but this will do .
First : Is something an artistic object ?
Then it deserves protection .
Is it a utilitarian object ?
Then no , it does not deserve protection .
This is a difficult , unstable binary .
The other one is : Is it an idea ?
Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society ?
No protection .
Or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea : something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it ?
The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed , expression versus idea concept .
Nowadays , we don 't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold .
It 's a digital file .
It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds .
And these things , because we can copy and transmit them so easily , actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects .
Now , the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and , let me tell you , we don 't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out .
They 're smart .
I 'm with one . He 's my boyfriend , he 's okay .
He 's smart , he 's smart .
But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out , trying to figure out : What is the kind of ownership model , in a digital world , that 's going to lead to the most innovation ?
And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future .
If you want more information about this research project , please visit our website : it 's ReadyToShare.org.
And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation .
Thank you so much .
Rory Sutherland : Life lessons from an ad man
Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception , rather than the product itself . Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider " real " value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life .
This is my first time at TED . Normally , as an advertising man , I actually speak at TED Evil , which is TED 's secret sister that pays all the bills .
It 's held every two years in Burma .
And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again .
But , actually , it 's suddenly come to me after years working in the business , that what we create in advertising , which is intangible value -- you might call it perceived value , you might call it badge value , subjective value , intangible value of some kind -- gets rather a bad rap .
If you think about it , if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods , you basically have two choices .
You can either live in a world which is poorer , which people in general don 't like .
Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value , that actually intangible value , in many ways is a very , very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things .
Here is one example . This is a train which goes from London to Paris .
The question was given to a bunch of engineers , about 15 years ago , " How do we make the journey to Paris better ? "
And they came up with a very good engineering solution , which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast , and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time .
Now , call me Mister Picky . I 'm just an ad man ...
... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter .
Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks ?
Here is my naive advertising man 's suggestion .
What you should in fact do is employ all of the world 's top male and female supermodels , pay them to walk the length of the train , handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey .
Now , you 'll still have about three billion pounds left in change , and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down .
Now , here is another naive advertising man 's question again .
And this shows that engineers , medical people , scientific people , have an obsession with solving the problems of reality , when actually most problems , once you reach a basic level of wealth in society , most problems are actually problems of perception .
So I 'll ask you another question .
What on earth is wrong with placebos ?
They seem fantastic to me . They cost very little to develop .
They work extraordinarily well .
They have no side effects , or if they do , they 're imaginary , so you can safely ignore them .
So I was discussing this . And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen . I don 't know if anybody knows it .
Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further , and actually produce placebo education .
The point is that education doesn 't actually work by teaching you things .
It actually works by giving you the impression that you 've had a very good education , which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence , which then makes you very , very successful in later life .
So , welcome to Oxford , ladies and gentlemen .
But , actually , the point of placebo education is interesting .
How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception , rather than that tedious , hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality ?
Here 's a great example from history . I 've heard this attributed to several other kings , but doing a bit of historical research , it seems to be Fredrick the Great .
Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very , very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it , because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate , wheat and potatoes , you get less price volatility in bread .
And you get a far lower risk of famine , because you actually had two crops to fall back on , not one .
The only problem is : potatoes , if you think about it , look pretty disgusting .
And also , 18th century Prussians ate very , very few vegetables -- rather like contemporary Scottish people .
So , actually , he tried making it compulsory .
The Prussian peasantry said , " We can 't even get the dogs to eat these damn things .
They are absolutely disgusting and they 're good for nothing . "
There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes .
So he tried plan B.
He tried the marketing solution , which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable , and none but the royal family could consume it .
And he planted it in a royal potato patch , with guards who had instructions to guard over it , night and day , but with secret instructions not to guard it very well .
Now , 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life , which is if something is worth guarding , it 's worth stealing .
Before long , there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany .
What he 'd effectively done is he 'd re-branded the potato .
It was an absolute masterpiece .
I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said , " Very , very good marketer , Fredrick the Great . But not a patch on Ataturk . "
Ataturk , rather like Nicolas Sarkozy , was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil , in Turkey , to modernize it .
Now , boring people would have just simply banned the veil .
But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance .
Ataturk was a lateral thinker .
He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil .
I can 't verify that fully , but it does not matter .
There is your environmental problem solved , by the way , guys : All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne .
What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things .
all value is actually relative .
All value is perceived value .
For those of you who don 't speak Spanish , jugo de naranja -- it 's actually the Spanish for " orange juice . "
Because actually it 's not the dollar . It 's actually the peso in Buenos Aires . Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists .
As an advertising man , I have to admire that .
But the first thing is that all value is subjective .
Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion .
These funny signs that flash your speed at you , some of the new ones , on the bottom right , now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face , to act as an emotional trigger .
What 's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera , but they prevent twice as many accidents .
So , the bizarre thing , which is baffling to conventional , classically trained economists , is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £ 60 fine and three penalty points .
Tiny little behavioral economics detail : in Italy , penalty points go backwards .
You start with 12 and they take them away .
Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people 's behavior .
In Britain we tend to feel , " Whoa ! Got another three ! "
Not so in Italy .
Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value , which remember , is what , after all , the environmental movement needs to be about : This again is from Prussia , from , I think , about 1812 , 1813 .
The wealthy Prussians , to help in the war against the French , were encouraged to give in all their jewelry .
And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron .
Here 's one : " Gold gab ich für Eisen , 1813 . "
The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence , the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn 't made of gold or diamonds .
It was made of cast iron .
Because actually , never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry . This actually had symbolic value , badge value .
It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past .
So , the modern equivalent would of course be this .
But , actually , there is a thing , just as there are Veblen goods , where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare -- there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous , classless and minimalistic .
If you think about it , Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement .
Adam Smith talks about 18th century America , where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great , it was almost a block in the economy in New England , because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors .
It 's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies .
What 's also interesting , if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value , a high component of intangible value , versus their intrinsic value : They are often quite egalitarian .
In terms of dress , denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value .
Coca-Cola . A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos , and you may not like the Coca-Cola company , but it 's worth remembering Andy Warhol 's point about Coke .
What Warhol said about Coke is , he said , " What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can 't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street . "
Now , that is , actually , when you think about it -- we take it for granted -- it 's actually a remarkable achievement , to produce something that 's that democratic .
Now , we basically have to change our views slightly .
There is a basic view that real value involves making things , involves labor . It involves engineering .
It involves limited raw materials .
And that what we add on top is kind of false . It 's a fake version .
And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it .
It patently veers toward propaganda .
However , what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value , and it 's much fairer .
When I grew up , this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food .
You had a monopoly supplier . On the left , you have Rupert Murdoch , or the BBC .
And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it .
Nowadays , the user is actually involved .
This is actually what 's called , in the digital world , " user-generated content . "
Although it 's called agriculture in the world of food .
This is actually called a mash-up , where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it .
In the world of food we call it cooking .
This is food 2.0 , which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people .
This is mobile food . British are very good at that .
Fish and chips in newspaper , the Cornish Pasty , the pie , the sandwich .
We invented the whole lot of them .
We 're not very good at food in general . Italians do great food , but it 's not very portable , generally .
I only learned this the other day . The Earl of Sandwich didn 't invent the sandwich .
He actually invented the toasty . But then , the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name .
Finally , we have contextual communication .
Now , the reason I show you Pernod -- it 's only one example .
Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink . In France it 's Pernod .
It tastes great within the borders of that country , but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else .
Unicum in Hungary , for example .
The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina , which even tastes shite when you 're in Greece .
But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people , for giving them better information -- B.J. Fogg , at the University of Stanford , makes the point that actually the mobile phone is -- He 's invented the phrase , " persuasive technologies . "
He believes the mobile phone , by being location-specific , contextual , timely and immediate , is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented .
Now , if we have all these tools at our disposal , we simply have to ask the question , and Thaler and Sunstein have , of how we can use these more intelligently .
I 'll give you one example .
If you had a large red button of this kind , on the wall of your home , and every time you pressed it , it saved 50 dollars for you , put 50 dollars into your pension , you would save a lot more .
The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior . Okay ?
Now , marketing has done a very , very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying .
Yet we 've never created the opportunity for impulse saving .
If you did this , more people would save more .
It 's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions , and the very nature of the decisions changes .
Obviously , I don 't want people to do this , because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed .
But if anybody did want to do that , that 's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about , actually : fundamental opportunities to change human behavior .
Now , I 've got an example here from Canada .
There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville , who was working in improv in Toronto , and got a part-time job in advertising , and was given the job of advertising Shreddies .
Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible , added value , without changing the product in the slightest .
Shreddies is a strange , square , whole-grain cereal , only available in New Zealand , Canada and Britain .
It 's Kraft 's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown .
In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies , he came up with this .
Shreddies is supposed to be square .
Have any of these diamond shapes gone out ?
Voiceover : New Diamond Shreddies cereal .
Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape .
Rory Sutherland : I 'm not sure this isn 't the most perfect example of intangible value creation . All it requires is photons , neurons , and a great idea to create this thing .
I would say it 's a work of genius .
But , naturally , you can 't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research .
So , Shreddies is actually producing a new product , which is something very exciting for them .
So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies .
So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that , when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there .
Weren 't they square ?
Woman # 2 : I 'm a little bit confused . Woman # 3 : They look like the squares to me .
They -- Yeah , it 's all in the appearance .
But it 's kind of like flipping a six or a nine . Like a six , if you flip it over it looks like a nine .
But a six is very different from a nine .
Woman # 3 : Or an " M " and a " W " . An " M " and a " W " , exactly .
[ unclear ] You just looked like you turned it on its end . But when you see it like that it 's more interesting looking .
Just try both of them .
Take a square one there , first .
Which one did you prefer ? The first one .
The first one ?
Rory Sutherland : Now , naturally , a debate raged .
There were conservative elements in Canada , unsurprisingly , who actually resented this intrusion .
So , eventually , the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise , which was the combo pack .
If you think it 's funny , bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics , which actually does extensive research into perception of things , and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people , there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine , except when you tell the people how expensive it is , in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more .
So drink your wine blind in the future .
But this is both hysterically funny -- but I think an important philosophical point , which is , going forward , we need more of this kind of value .
We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists , and less time agonizing over what else we can do .
Two quotations to more or less end with .
One of them is , " Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new . "
Which isn 't a bad definition of what our job is , to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar , but also to gain a greater appreciation , and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing .
There is some evidence , by the way , that things like social networking help do that .
Because they help people share news .
They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities .
So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display , and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest , simplest things in life . Which is magic .
The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session , which is , " We are perishing for want of wonder , not for want of wonders , " which I think for anybody involved in technology , is perfectly true .
And a final thing : When you place a value on things like health , love , sex and other things , and learn to place a material value on what you 've previously discounted for being merely intangible , a thing not seen , you realize you 're much , much wealthier than you ever imagined .
Thank you very much indeed .
Diane Benscoter : How cults rewire the brain
Diane Benscoter spent five years as a " Moonie . " She shares an insider 's perspective on the mind of a cult member , and proposes a new way to think about today 's most troubling conflicts and extremist movements .
My journey to coming here today started in 1974 .
That 's me with the funny gloves .
I was 17 and going on a peace walk .
What I didn 't know though , was most of those people , standing there with me , were Moonies .
And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred , that it was Sun Myung Moon , and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple .
Now as cool as that sounds , my family was not that thrilled with this .
And they tried everything they could to get me out of there .
There was an underground railroad of sorts that was going on during those years . Maybe some of you remember it .
They were called deprogrammers .
And after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed .
And I then became a deprogrammer .
I started going out on cases .
And after about five years of doing this , I was arrested for kidnapping .
Most of the cases I went out on were called involuntary .
What happened was that the family had to get their loved ones some safe place somehow .
And so they took them to some safe place .
And we would come in and talk to them , usually for about a week .
And so after this happened , I decided it was a good time to turn my back on this work .
And about 20 years went by .
There was a burning question though that would not leave me .
And that was , " How did this happen to me ? "
And in fact , what did happen to my brain ?
Because something did .
And so I decided to write a book , a memoir , about this decade of my life .
And toward the end of writing that book there was a documentary that came out .
It was on Jonestown .
And it had a chilling effect on me .
These are the dead in Jonestown .
About 900 people died that day , most of them taking their own lives .
Women gave poison to their babies , and watched foam come from their mouths as they died .
The top picture is a group of Moonies that have been blessed by their messiah .
Their mates were chosen for them .
The bottom picture is Hitler youth .
This is the leg of a suicide bomber .
The thing I had to admit to myself , with great repulsion , was that I get it .
I understand how this could happen .
I understand how someone 's brain , how someone 's mind can come to the place where it makes sense -- in fact it would be wrong , when your brain is working like that -- not to try to save the world through genocide .
And so what is this ? How does this work ?
And how I 've come to view what happened to me is a viral , memetic infection .
For those of you who aren 't familiar with memetics , a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus , much like a virus . The way a virus works is -- it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system .
In 1974 , I was young , I was naive , and I was pretty lost in my world .
I was really idealistic .
These easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable .
What happens is that circular logic takes over .
" Moon is one with God .
God is going to fix all the problems in the world .
All I have to do is humbly follow .
Because God is going to stop war and hunger -- all these things I wanted to do -- all I have to do is humbly follow .
Because after all , God is [ working through ] the messiah . He 's going to fix all this . "
It becomes impenetrable .
And the most dangerous part of this is that is creates " us " and " them , " " right " and " wrong , " " good " and " evil . "
And it makes anything possible , makes anything rationalizable .
And the thing is , though , if you looked at my brain during those years in the Moonies -- neuroscience is expanding exponentially , as Ray Kurzweil said yesterday . Science is expanding .
We 're beginning to look inside the brain .
And so if you looked at my brain , or any brain that 's infected with a viral memetic infection like this , and compared it to anyone in this room , or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis , I am convinced it would look very , very different .
And that , strange as it may sound , gives me hope .
And the reason that gives me hope is that the first thing is to admit that we have a problem .
But it 's a human problem . It 's a scientific problem , if you will .
It happens in the human brain . There is no evil force out there to get us .
And so this is something that , through research and education , I believe that we can solve .
And so the first step is to realize that we can do this together , and that there is no " us " and " them . "
Thank you very much .
Ramona Pierson : An unexpected place of healing
When Ramona Pierson was 22 , she was hit by a drunk driver and spent 18 months in a coma . In this talk , she tells the remarkable story of her recovery -- drawing on the collective skills and wisdom of a senior citizens ' home . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 'm actually going to share something with you I haven 't talked about probably in more than 10 years .
So bear with me as I take you through this journey .
When I was 22 years old , I came home from work , put a leash on my dog and went for my usual run .
I had no idea that at that moment my life was going to change forever .
While I was preparing my dog for the run , a man was finishing drinking at a bar , picked up his car keys , got into a car and headed south , or wherever he was .
I was running across the street , and the only thing that I actually remember is feeling like a grenade went off in my head .
And I remember putting my hands on the ground and feeling my life 's blood emptying out of my neck and my mouth .
What had happened is he ran a red light and hit me and my dog .
She ended up underneath the car .
I flew out in front of the car , and then he ran over my legs .
My left leg got caught up in the wheel well -- spun it around .
The bumper of the car hit my throat , slicing it open .
I ended up with blunt chest trauma .
Your aorta comes up behind your heart .
It 's your major artery , and it was severed , so my blood was gurgling out of my mouth .
It foamed , and horrible things were happening to me .
I had no idea what was going on , but strangers intervened , kept my heart moving , beating .
I say moving because it was quivering and they were trying to put a beat back into it .
Somebody was smart and put a Bic pen in my neck to open up my airway so that I could get some air in there .
And my lung collapsed , so somebody cut me open and put a pin in there as well to stop that catastrophic event from happening .
Somehow I ended up at the hospital .
I was wrapped in ice and then eventually put into a drug-induced coma .
18 months later I woke up .
I was blind , I couldn 't speak , and I couldn 't walk .
I was 64 lbs .
The hospital really has no idea what to do with people like that .
And in fact , they started to call me a Gomer .
That 's another story we won 't even get into .
I had so many surgeries to put my neck back together , to repair my heart a few times .
Some things worked , some things didn 't .
I had lots of titanium put in me , cadaver bones to try to get my feet moving the right way .
And I ended up with a plastic nose , porcelain teeth and all kinds of other things .
But eventually I started to look human again .
But it 's hard sometimes to talk about these things , so bear with me .
I had more than 50 surgeries .
But who 's counting ?
So eventually , the hospital decided it was time for me to go .
They needed to open up space for somebody else that they thought could come back from whatever they were going through .
Everybody lost faith in me being able to recover .
So they basically put a map up on the wall , threw a dart , and it landed at a senior home here in Colorado .
And I know all of you are scratching your head : " A senior citizens ' home ? What in the world are you going to do there ? "
But if you think about all of the skills and talent that are in this room right now , that 's what a senior home has .
So there were all these skills and talents that these seniors had .
The one advantage that they had over most of you is wisdom , because they had a long life .
And I needed that wisdom at that moment in my life .
But imagine what it was like for them when I showed up at their doorstep ?
At that point , I had gained four pounds , so I was 68 lbs .
I was bald .
I was wearing hospital scrubs .
And somebody donated tennis shoes for me .
And I had a white cane in one hand and a suitcase full of medical records in another hand .
And so the senior citizens realized that they needed to have an emergency meeting .
So they pulled back and they were looking at each other , and they were going , " Okay , what skills do we have in this room ?
This kid needs a lot of work . "
So they eventually started matching their talents and skills to all of my needs .
But one of the first things they needed to do was assess what I needed right away .
I needed to figure out how to eat like a normal human being , since I 'd been eating through a tube in my chest and through my veins .
So I had to go through trying to eat again .
And they went through that process .
And then they had to figure out : " Well she needs furniture .
She is sleeping in the corner of this apartment . "
So they went to their storage lockers and all gathered their extra furniture -- gave me pots and pans , blankets , everything .
And then the next thing that I needed was a makeover .
So out went the green scrubs and in came the polyester and floral prints .
We 're not going to talk about the hairstyles that they tried to force on me once my hair grew back .
But I did say no to the blue hair .
So eventually what went on is they decided that , well I need to learn to speak .
So you can 't be an independent person if you 're not able to speak and can 't see .
So they figured not being able to see is one thing , but they need to get me to talk .
So while Sally , the office manager , was teaching me to speak in the day -- it 's hard , because when you 're a kid , you take things for granted .
You learn things unconsciously .
But for me , I was an adult and it was embarrassing , and I had to learn how to coordinate my new throat with my tongue and my new teeth and my lips , and capture the air and get the word out .
So I acted like a two-year-old and refused to work .
But the men had a better idea .
They were going to make it fun for me .
So they were teaching me cuss word Scrabble at night , and then , secretly , how to swear like a sailor .
So I 'm going to just leave it to your imagination as to what my first words were when Sally finally got my confidence built .
So I moved on from there .
And a former teacher who happened to have Alzheimer 's took on the task of teaching me to write .
The redundancy was actually good for me .
So we 'll just keep moving on .
One of the pivotal times for me was actually learning to cross a street again as a blind person .
So close your eyes .
Now imagine you have to cross a street .
You don 't know how far that street is and you don 't know if you 're going straight and you hear cars whizzing back and forth , and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation .
So there were two obstacles I had to get through .
One was post-traumatic stress disorder .
And every time I approached the corner or the curb I would panic .
And the second one was actually trying to figure out how to cross that street .
So one of the seniors just came up to me , and she pushed me up to the corner and she said , " When you think it 's time to go , just stick the cane out there .
If it 's hit , don 't cross the street . "
Made perfect sense .
But by the third cane that went whizzing across the road , they realized that they needed to put the resources together , and they raised funds so that I could go to the Braille Institute and actually gain the skills to be a blind person , and also to go get a guide dog who transformed my life .
And I was able to return to college because of the senior citizens who invested in me , and also the guide dog and skill set I had gained .
10 years later I gained my sight back .
Not magically .
I opted in for three surgeries , and one of them was experimental .
It was actually robotic surgery .
They removed a hematoma from behind my eye .
The biggest change for me was that the world moved forward , that there were innovations and all kinds of new things -- cellphones , laptops , all these things that I had never seen before .
And as a blind person , your visual memory fades and is replaced with how you feel about things and how things sound and how things smell .
So one day I was in my room and I saw this thing sitting in my room and I thought it was a monster .
So I was walking around it .
And I go , " I 'm just going to touch it . "
And I touched it and I went , " Oh my God , it 's a laundry basket . "
So everything is different when you 're a sighted person because you take that for granted .
But when you 're blind , you have the tactile memory for things .
The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands and seeing that I 'd lost 10 years of my life .
I thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends .
But when I looked down , I realized that time marched on for me too and that I needed to get caught up , so I got going on it .
We didn 't have words like crowd-sourcing and radical collaboration when I had my accident .
But the concept held true -- people working with people to rebuild me ; people working with people to re-educate me .
I wouldn 't be standing here today if it wasn 't for extreme radical collaboration .
Thank you so much .
Asher Hasan : My message of peace from Pakistan
One of a dozen Pakistanis who came to TEDIndia despite security hassles entering the country , TED Fellow Asher Hasan shows photos of ordinary Pakistanis that drive home a profound message for citizens of all nations : look beyond disputes , and see the humanity we share .
Namaste . Salaam .
Shalom . Sat Sri Akal .
Greetings to all of you from Pakistan .
It is often said that we fear that which we do not know .
And Pakistan , in this particular vein , is very similar .
Because it has provoked , and does provoke , a visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul , especially when viewed through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil .
But there are many other dimensions to Pakistan .
And what follows is a stream of images , a series of images captured by some of Pakistan 's most dynamic and young photographers , that aims to give you an alternative glimpse , a look inside the hearts and minds of some ordinary Pakistani citizens .
Here are some of the stories they wanted us to share with you .
My name is Abdul Khan . I come from Peshawar .
I hope that you will be able to see not just my Taliban-like beard , but also the richness and color of my perceptions , aspirations and dreams , as rich and colorful as the satchels that I sell .
My name is Meher and this is my friend Irim .
I hope to become a vet when I grow up so that I can take care of stray cats and dogs who wander around the streets of the village that I live near Gilgit , northern Pakistan .
My name is Kailash . And I like to enrich lives through technicolored glass .
Madame , would you like some of those orange bangles with the pink polka dots ?
My name is Zamin .
And I 'm an IDP , an internally displaced person , from Swat .
Do you see me on the other side of this fence ?
Do I matter , or really exist for you ?
My name is Iman . I am a fashion model , an up-and-coming model from Lahore .
Do you see me simply smothered in cloth ?
Or can you move beyond my veil and see me for who I truly am inside ?
My name is Ahmed . I am an Afghan refugee from the Khyber agency .
I have come from a place of intense darkness .
And that is why I want to illuminate the world .
My name is Papusay .
My heart and drum beat as one .
If religion is the opium of the masses , then for me , music is my one and only ganja .
A rising tide lifts all boats .
And the rising tide of India 's spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a buoyant middle class .
But there are still over 650 million Indians , Pakistanis , Sri Lankans , Bangladeshis , Nepalese , who remain washed up on the shores of poverty .
Therefore as India and Pakistan , as you and I , it behooves us to transcend our differences , to celebrate our diversity , to leverage our common humanity .
Our collective vision at Naya Jeevan , which for many of you , as you all recognize , means " new life " in Urdu and Hindi , is to rejuvenate the lives of millions of low income families by providing them with affordable access to catastrophic health care .
Indeed it is the emerging world 's first HMO for the urban working poor .
Why should we do this as Indians and Pakistanis ?
We are but two threads cut from the same cloth .
And if our fates are intertwined , then we believe that it is good karma , it is good fortune .
And for many of us , our fortunes do indeed lie at the bottom of the pyramid . Thank you .
Fantastic . Just stay up here .
That was fantastic .
I found that really moving .
You know , we fought hard to get at least a small Pakistani contingent to come .
It felt like it was really important .
They went through a lot to get here .
Would the Pakistanis please just stand up please ?
I just really wanted to acknowledge you .
Thank you so much .
Ben Dunlap : The life-long learner
Wofford College president Ben Dunlap tells the story of Sandor Teszler , a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who taught him about passionate living and lifelong learning .
" Yo napot , pacak ! " Which , as somebody here must surely know , means " What 's up , guys ? " in Magyar , that peculiar non-Indo-European language spoken by Hungarians for which , given the fact that cognitive diversity is at least as threatened as biodiversity on this planet , few would have imagined much of a future even a century or two ago .
But there it is : " Yo napot , pacak ! "
I said somebody here must surely know , because despite the fact that there aren 't that many Hungarians to begin with , and the further fact that , so far as I know , there 's not a drop of Hungarian blood in my veins , at every critical juncture of my life there has been a Hungarian friend or mentor there beside me .
I even have dreams that take place in landscapes I recognize as the landscapes of Hungarian films , especially the early movies of Miklos Jancso .
So , how do I explain this mysterious affinity ?
Maybe it 's because my native state of South Carolina , which is not much smaller than present-day Hungary , once imagined a future for itself as an independent country .
And as a consequence of that presumption , my hometown was burned to the ground by an invading army , an experience that has befallen many a Hungarian town and village throughout its long and troubled history .
Or maybe it 's because when I was a teenager back in the ' 50s , my uncle Henry -- having denounced the Ku Klux Klan and been bombed for his trouble and had crosses burned in his yard , living under death threat -- took his wife and children to Massachusetts for safety and went back to South Carolina to face down the Klan alone .
That was a very Hungarian thing to do , as anyone will attest who remembers 1956 .
And of course , from time to time Hungarians have invented their own equivalent of the Klan .
Well , it seems to me that this Hungarian presence in my life is difficult to account for , but ultimately I ascribe it to an admiration for people with a complex moral awareness , with a heritage of guilt and defeat matched by defiance and bravado .
It 's not a typical mindset for most Americans , but it is perforce typical of virtually all Hungarians .
So , " Yo napot , pacak ! "
I went back to South Carolina after some 15 years amid the alien corn at the tail end of the 1960s , with the reckless condescension of that era thinking I would save my people .
Never mind the fact that they were slow to acknowledge they needed saving .
I labored in that vineyard for a quarter century before making my way to a little kingdom of the just in upstate South Carolina , a Methodist-affiliated institution of higher learning called Wofford College .
I knew nothing about Wofford and even less about Methodism , but I was reassured on the first day that I taught at Wofford College to find , among the auditors in my classroom , a 90-year-old Hungarian , surrounded by a bevy of middle-aged European women who seemed to function as an entourage of Rhinemaidens .
His name was Sandor Teszler .
He was a puckish widower whose wife and children were dead and whose grandchildren lived far away .
In appearance , he resembled Mahatma Gandhi , minus the loincloth , plus orthopedic boots .
He had been born in 1903 in the provinces of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire , in what later would become Yugoslavia .
He was ostracized as a child , not because he was a Jew -- his parents weren 't very religious anyhow -- but because he had been born with two club feet , a condition which , in those days , required institutionalization and a succession of painful operations between the ages of one and 11 .
He went to the commercial business high school as a young man in Budapest , and there he was as smart as he was modest and he enjoyed a considerable success . And after graduation when he went into textile engineering , the success continued .
He built one plant after another .
He married and had two sons . He had friends in high places who assured him that he was of great value to the economy .
Once , as he had left instructions to have done , he was summoned in the middle of the night by the night watchman at one of his plants .
The night watchman had caught an employee who was stealing socks -- it was a hosiery mill , and he simply backed a truck up to the loading dock and was shoveling in mountains of socks .
Mr. Teszler went down to the plant and confronted the thief and said , " But why do you steal from me ? If you need money you have only to ask . "
The night watchman , seeing how things were going and waxing indignant , said , " Well , we 're going to call the police , aren 't we ? "
But Mr. Teszler answered , " No , that will not be necessary .
He will not steal from us again . "
Well , maybe he was too trusting , because he stayed where he was long after the Nazi Anschluss in Austria and even after the arrests and deportations began in Budapest .
He took the simple precaution of having cyanide capsules placed in lockets that could be worn about the necks of himself and his family .
And then one day , it happened : he and his family were arrested and they were taken to a death house on the Danube .
In those early days of the Final Solution , it was handcrafted brutality ; people were beaten to death and their bodies tossed into the river .
But none who entered that death house had ever come out alive .
And in a twist you would not believe in a Steven Spielberg film -- the Gauleiter who was overseeing this brutal beating was the very same thief who had stolen socks from Mr. Teszler 's hosiery mill .
It was a brutal beating . And midway through that brutality , one of Mr. Teszler 's sons , Andrew , looked up and said , " Is it time to take the capsule now , Papa ? "
And the Gauleiter , who afterwards vanishes from this story , leaned down and whispered into Mr. Teszler 's ear , " No , do not take the capsule . Help is on the way . "
And then resumed the beating .
But help was on the way , and shortly afterwards a car arrived from the Swiss Embassy .
They were spirited to safety . They were reclassified as Yugoslav citizens and they managed to stay one step ahead of their pursuers for the duration of the War , surviving burnings and bombings and , at the end of the War , arrest by the Soviets .
Probably , Mr. Teszler had gotten some money into Swiss bank accounts because he managed to take his family first to Great Britain , then to Long Island and then to the center of the textile industry in the American South .
Which , as chance would have it , was Spartanburg , South Carolina , the location of Wofford College .
And there , Mr. Teszler began all over again and once again achieved immense success , especially after he invented the process for manufacturing a new fabric called double-knit .
And then in the late 1950s , in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education , when the Klan was resurgent all over the South , Mr. Teszler said , " I have heard this talk before . "
And he called his top assistant to him and asked , " Where would you say , in this region , racism is most virulent ? "
" Well , I don 't rightly know , Mr. Teszler . I reckon that would be Kings Mountain . "
" Good . Buy us some land in Kings Mountain and announce we are going to build a major plant there . "
The man did as he was told , and shortly afterwards , Mr. Teszler received a visit from the white mayor of Kings Mountain .
Now , you should know that at that time , the textile industry in the South was notoriously segregated .
The white mayor visited Mr. Teszler and said , " Mr. Teszler , I trust you 're going to be hiring a lot of white workers . "
Mr. Teszler told him , " You bring me the best workers that you can find , and if they are good enough , I will hire them . "
He also received a visit from the leader of the black community , a minister , who said , " Mr. Teszler , I sure hope you 're going to hire some black workers for this new plant of yours . "
He got the same answer : " You bring the best workers that you can find , and if they are good enough , I will hire them . "
As it happens , the black minister did his job better than the white mayor , but that 's neither here or there .
Mr. Teszler hired 16 men : eight white , eight black .
They were to be his seed group , his future foremen .
He had installed the heavy equipment for his new process in an abandoned store in the vicinity of Kings Mountain , and for two months these 16 men would live and work together , mastering the new process .
He gathered them together after an initial tour of that facility and he asked if there were any questions .
There was hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet , and then one of the white workers stepped forward and said , " Well , yeah . We 've looked at this place and there 's only one place to sleep , there 's only one place to eat , there 's only one bathroom , there 's only one water fountain . Is this plant going to be integrated or what ? "
Mr. Teszler said , " You are being paid twice the wages of any other textile workers in this region and this is how we do business . Do you have any other questions ? "
" No , I reckon I don 't . "
And two months later when the main plant opened and hundreds of new workers , white and black , poured in to see the facility for the first time , they were met by the 16 foremen , white and black , standing shoulder to shoulder .
They toured the facility and were asked if there were any questions , and inevitably the same question arose : " Is this plant integrated or what ? "
And one of the white foremen stepped forward and said , " You are being paid twice the wages of any other workers in this industry in this region and this is how we do business .
Do you have any other questions ? "
And there were none . In one fell swoop , Mr. Teszler had integrated the textile industry in that part of the South .
It was an achievement worthy of Mahatma Gandhi , conducted with the shrewdness of a lawyer and the idealism of a saint .
In his eighties , Mr. Teszler , having retired from the textile industry , adopted Wofford College , auditing courses every semester , and because he had a tendency to kiss anything that moved , becoming affectionately known as " Opi " -- which is Magyar for grandfather -- by all and sundry . Before I got there , the library of the college had been named for Mr. Teszler , and after I arrived in 1993 , the faculty decided to honor itself by naming Mr. Teszler Professor of the College -- partly because at that point he had already taken all of the courses in the catalog , but mainly because he was so conspicuously wiser than any one of us .
To me , it was immensely reassuring that the presiding spirit of this little Methodist college in upstate South Carolina was a Holocaust survivor from Central Europe .
Wise he was , indeed , but he also had a wonderful sense of humor .
And once for an interdisciplinary class , I was screening the opening segment of Ingmar Bergman 's " The Seventh Seal . "
As the medieval knight Antonius Block returns from the wild goose chase of the Crusades and arrives on the rocky shore of Sweden , only to find the specter of death waiting for him , Mr. Teszler sat in the dark with his fellow students . And as death opened his cloak to embrace the knight in a ghastly embrace , I heard Mr. Teszler 's tremulous voice : " Uh oh , " he said , " This doesn 't look so good . "
But it was music that was his greatest passion , especially opera .
And on the first occasion that I visited his house , he gave me honor of deciding what piece of music we would listen to .
And I delighted him by rejecting " Cavalleria Rusticana " in favor of Bela Bartok 's " Bluebeard 's Castle . "
I love Bartok 's music , as did Mr. Teszler , and he had virtually every recording of Bartok 's music ever issued .
And it was at his house that I heard for the first time Bartok 's Third Piano Concerto and learned from Mr. Teszler that it had been composed in nearby Asheville , North Carolina in the last year of the composer 's life .
He was dying of leukemia and he knew it , and he dedicated this concerto to his wife , Dita , who was herself a concert pianist .
And into the slow , second movement , marked " adagio religioso , " he incorporated the sounds of birdsong that he heard outside his window in what he knew would be his last spring ; he was imagining a future for her in which he would play no part .
And clearly this composition is his final statement to her -- it was first performed after his death -- and through her to the world .
And just as clearly , it is saying , " It 's okay . It was all so beautiful .
Whenever you hear this , I will be there . "
It was only after Mr. Teszler 's death that I learned that the marker on the grave of Bela Bartok in Hartsdale , New York was paid for by Sandor Teszler . " Yo napot , Bela ! "
Not long before Mr. Teszler 's own death at the age of 97 , he heard me hold forth on human iniquity .
I delivered a lecture in which I described history as , on the whole , a tidal wave of human suffering and brutality , and Mr. Teszler came up to me afterwards with gentle reproach and said , " You know , Doctor , human beings are fundamentally good . "
And I made a vow to myself , then and there , that if this man who had such cause to think otherwise had reached that conclusion , I would not presume to differ until he released me from my vow .
And now he 's dead , so I 'm stuck with my vow .
" Yo napot , Sandor ! "
I thought my skein of Hungarian mentors had come to an end , but almost immediately I met Francis Robicsek , a Hungarian doctor -- actually a heart surgeon in Charlotte , North Carolina , then in his late seventies -- who had been a pioneer in open-heart surgery , and , tinkering away in his garage behind his house , had invented many of the devices that are standard parts of those procedures .
He 's also a prodigious art collector , beginning as an intern in Budapest by collecting 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art and Hungarian painting , and when he came to this country moving on to Spanish colonial art , Russian icons and finally Mayan ceramics .
He 's the author of seven books , six of them on Mayan ceramics .
It was he who broke the Mayan codex , enabling scholars to relate the pictographs on Mayan ceramics to the hieroglyphs of the Mayan script .
On the occasion of my first visit , we toured his house and we saw hundreds of works of museum quality , and then we paused in front of a closed door and Dr. Robicsek said , with obvious pride , " Now for the piece de resistance . "
And he opened the door and we walked into a windowless 20-by-20-foot room with shelves from floor to ceiling , and crammed on every shelf his collection of Mayan ceramics .
Now , I know absolutely nothing about Mayan ceramics , but I wanted to be as ingratiating as possible so I said , " But Dr. Robicsek , this is absolutely dazzling . "
" Yes , " he said . " That is what the Louvre said .
They would not leave me alone until I let them have a piece , but it was not a good one . "
Well , it occurred to me that I should invite Dr. Robicsek to lecture at Wofford College on -- what else ?
-- Leonardo da Vinci . And further , I should invite him to meet my oldest trustee , who had majored in French history at Yale some 70-odd years before and , at 89 , still ruled the world 's largest privately owned textile empire with an iron hand .
His name is Roger Milliken . And Mr. Milliken agreed , and Dr. Robicsek agreed . And Dr. Robicsek visited and delivered the lecture and it was a dazzling success .
And afterwards we convened at the President 's House with Dr. Robicsek on one hand , Mr. Milliken on the other .
And it was only at that moment , as we were sitting down to dinner , that I recognized the enormity of the risk I had created , because to bring these two titans , these two masters of the universe together -- it was like introducing Mothra to Godzilla over the skyline of Tokyo .
If they didn 't like each other , we could all get trampled to death .
But they did , they did like each other .
They got along famously until the very end of the meal , and then they got into a furious argument .
And what they were arguing about was this : whether the second Harry Potter movie was as good as the first .
Mr. Milliken said it was not . Dr. Robicsek disagreed .
I was still trying to take in the notion that these titans , these masters of the universe , in their spare time watch Harry Potter movies , when Mr. Milliken thought he would win the argument by saying , " You just think it 's so good because you didn 't read the book . "
And Dr. Robicsek reeled back in his chair , but quickly gathered his wits , leaned forward and said , " Well , that is true , but I 'll bet you went to the movie with a grandchild . " " Well , yes , I did , " conceded Mr. Milliken .
" Aha ! " said Dr. Robicsek . " I went to the movie all by myself . "
And I realized , in this moment of revelation , that what these two men were revealing was the secret of their extraordinary success , each in his own right .
And it lay precisely in that insatiable curiosity , that irrepressible desire to know , no matter what the subject , no matter what the cost , even at a time when the keepers of the Doomsday Clock are willing to bet even money that the human race won 't be around to imagine anything in the year 2100 , a scant 93 years from now .
" Live each day as if it is your last , " said Mahatma Gandhi .
" Learn as if you 'll live forever . "
This is what I 'm passionate about . It is precisely this .
It is this inextinguishable , undaunted appetite for learning and experience , no matter how risible , no matter how esoteric , no matter how seditious it might seem .
This defines the imagined futures of our fellow Hungarians -- Robicsek , Teszler and Bartok -- as it does my own .
As it does , I suspect , that of everybody here .
To which I need only add , " Ez a mi munkank ; es nem is keves . "
This is our task ; we know it will be hard .
" Ez a mi munkank ; es nem is keves . Yo napot , pacak ! "
Sunni Brown : Doodlers , unite !
Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension -- and our creative thinking . So why do we still feel embarrassed when we 're caught doodling in a meeting ? Sunni Brown says : Doodlers , unite ! She makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen .
So I just want to tell you my story .
I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace .
And naturally , I encounter a lot of resistance , because it 's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning .
But I have a problem with that belief , because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems .
So I was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is .
So I discovered some very interesting things .
For example , there 's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle .
In the 17th century , a doodle was a simpleton or a fool -- as in Yankee Doodle .
In the 18th century , it became a verb , and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone .
In the 19th century , it was a corrupt politician .
And today , we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition , at least to me , which is the following : To doodle officially means to dawdle , to dilly dally , to monkey around , to make meaningless marks , to do something of little value , substance or import , and -- my personal favorite -- to do nothing .
No wonder people are averse to doodling at work .
Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work ; it 's totally inappropriate .
Additionally , I 've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them , of course , for doodling in classrooms .
And they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom .
There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something .
And unfortunately , the press tends to reinforce this norm when they 're reporting on a doodling scene -- of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like -- they typically use words like " discovered " or " caught " or " found out , " as if there 's some sort of criminal act being committed .
And additionally , there is a psychological aversion to doodling -- thank you , Freud .
In the 1930s , Freud told us all that you could analyze people 's psyches based on their doodles .
This is not accurate , but it did happen to Tony Blair at the Davos Forum in 2005 , when his doodles were , of course , " discovered " and he was labeled the following things .
Now it turned out to be Bill Gates ' doodle .
And Bill , if you 're here , nobody thinks you 're megalomaniacal .
But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles .
And here is the real deal . Here 's what I believe .
I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we 're almost blinded to the value of doodling .
And I 'm not comfortable with that .
And so because of that belief that I think needs to be burst , I 'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth .
And here 's the truth : doodling is an incredibly powerful tool , and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn .
So here 's a new definition for doodling .
And I hope there 's someone in here from The Oxford English Dictionary , because I want to talk to you later .
Here 's the real definition : Doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think .
That is why millions of people doodle .
Here 's another interesting truth about the doodle : People who doodle when they 're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts .
We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus , but in reality , it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus .
Additionally , it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing .
There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions .
They are visual , auditory , reading and writing and kinesthetic .
Now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it , we have to engage at least two of those modalities , or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience .
The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience .
That is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing .
This is so nerdy , but this made me cry when I discovered this .
So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children , and they found that , across space and time , all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow .
In other words , they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order .
And I think that is incredible .
I think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct .
And finally , a lot a people aren 't privy to this , but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets .
This is but one : this is Frank Gehry the architect 's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi .
So here is my point : Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room .
On the contrary , doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high .
And I will go you one further .
Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form , it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy .
My friends , the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought .
In reality , it is one of its greatest allies .
Thank you .
Hans Rosling : Let my dataset change your mindset
Talking at the US State Department this summer , Hans Rosling uses his fascinating data-bubble software to burst myths about the developing world . Look for new analysis on China and the post-bailout world , mixed with classic data shows .
I 'm going to talk about your mindset .
Does your mindset correspond to my dataset ?
If not , one or the other needs upgrading , isn 't it ?
When I talk to my students about global issues , and I listen to them in the coffee break , they always talk about " we " and " them . "
And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them , " What do you mean with " we " and " them " ?
" Oh , it 's very easy . It 's the western world and it 's the developing world , " they say .
" We learned it in college . "
And what is the definition then ? " The definition ?
Everyone knows , " they say .
But then you know , I press them like this .
So one girl said , very cleverly , " It 's very easy .
Western world is a long life in a small family .
Developing world is a short life in a large family . "
And I like that definition , because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset .
And here you have the dataset .
So , you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family . One , two , three , four , five children per woman on this axis .
And here , length of life , life expectancy , 30 , 40 , 50 .
Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world .
And really this is about the bedroom .
Whether the man and woman decide to have small family , and take care of their kids , and how long they will live .
It 's about the bathroom and the kitchen . If you have soap , water and food , you know , you can live long .
And the students were right . It wasn 't that the world consisted -- the world consisted here , of one set of countries over here , which had large families and short life . Developing world .
And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world .
They had small families and long life .
And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime .
Then the developing countries applied soap and water , vaccination .
And all the developing world started to apply family planning .
And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment .
And you see all the world moves over to a two child family , and a life with 60 to 70 years .
But some countries remain back in this area here .
And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here .
We have Liberia . We have Congo .
So we have countries living there .
So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born .
And we , in fact , when we have played this over the world .
I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week , and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had , that they didn 't realize the improvement of Mexico there , and China , in relation to United States .
Look here when I move them forward .
Here we go .
They catch up . There 's Mexico .
It 's on par with United States in these two social dimensions .
There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this .
This great nation , Mexico , has the problem that arms are coming from North , across the borders , so they had to stop that , because they have this strange relationship to the United States , you know .
But if I would change this axis here , I would instead put income per person .
Income per person . I can put that here .
And we will then see a completely different picture .
By the way , I 'm teaching you how to use our website , Gapminder World , while I 'm correcting this , because this is a free utility on the net .
I can go back 200 years in history .
And I can find United States up there .
And I can let the other countries be shown .
And now I have income per person on this axis .
And United States only had some , one , two thousand dollars at that time .
And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years , on par with Afghanistan today .
And what has happened in the world , I will show now .
This is instead of studying history for one year at university .
You can watch me for one minute now and you 'll see the whole thing .
You can see how the brown bubbles , which is west Europe , and the yellow one , which is the United States , they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier .
And this is now 100 years ago , where the rest of the world remains behind .
Here we come . And that was the influenza .
That 's why we are so scared about flu , isn 't it ?
It 's still remembered . The fall of life expectancy .
And then we come up . Not until independence started .
Look here You have China over there , you have India over there , and this is what has happened .
Did you note there , that we have Mexico up there ?
Mexico is not at all on par with the United States , but they are quite close .
And especially , it 's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years , because I have my oldest son now working for Google , after Google acquired this software .
Because in fact , this is child labor . My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this .
And my youngest son , who studied Chinese in Beijing .
So they come in with the two perspectives I have , you know ?
And my son , youngest son who studied in Beijing , in China , he got a long-term perspective .
Whereas when my oldest son , who works for Google , he should develop by quarter , or by half-year .
Or Google is quite generous , so he can have one or two years to go .
But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period , for 100 years , when they went backwards .
And then they would remember the first part of last century , which was really bad , and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward .
But this was 1963 .
Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China , and then he died , and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward .
Isn 't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy , and then gradually got rich ?
Whereas China could get healthy much earlier , because they applied the knowledge of education , nutrition , and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning .
And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development .
So to me , as a public health professor , it 's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now .
Because what you see here , what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman , isn 't it .
It 's not really , really flat .
But the middle income countries -- and this is where I suggest to my students , stop using the concept " developing world . "
Because after all , talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States .
The last chapter is about present , and president Obama , and the other is about the past , where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower .
Because Washington to Eisenhower , that is what we find in the developing world .
We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower , and that would be put together into a developing world , which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way , which have great entrepreneurs , but also have the collapsing countries .
So , how could we make better sense about this ?
Well , one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution .
This is the income distribution of peoples in the world , from $ 1 . This is where you have food to eat .
These people go to bed hungry .
And this is the number of people .
This is $ 10 , whether you have a public or a private health service system . This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children , and this is OECD countries : Green , Latin America , East Europe .
This is East Asia , and the light blue there is South Asia .
And this is how the world changed .
It changed like this .
Can you see how it 's growing ? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia ?
And it goes over here ?
And I come now , into projections , but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there , you know , because -- that 's where the projections are not valid any longer .
Probably the world will do this .
and then it will continue forward like this .
But more or less , this is what will happen , and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided .
We have the high income countries here , with the United States as a leading power ; we have the emerging economies in the middle , which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout ; and we have the low income countries here .
Yeah , this is a fact that from where the money comes , they have been saving , you know , over the last decade .
And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are .
And here we have the countries in collapse and war , like Afghanistan , Somalia , parts of Congo , Darfur .
We have all this at the same time .
That 's why it 's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world .
Because it 's so different , what has happened there .
And that 's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it .
And you have huge differences within countries also .
I heard that your departments here were by regions .
Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa , South Asia , East Asia , Arab states , East Europe , Latin America , and OECD .
And on this axis , GDP .
And on this , heath , child survival , and it doesn 't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom .
But when I split it , when I split it into country bubbles , the size of the bubbles here is the population .
Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius , completely different .
There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa .
And I can split the others . Here is the South Asian , Arab world .
Now all your different departments .
East Europe , Latin America , and OECD countries .
And here were are . We have a continuum in the world .
We cannot put it into two parts .
It is Mayflower down here . It is Washington here , building , building countries .
It 's Lincoln here , advancing them .
It 's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries .
And then it 's United States today , up here .
And we have countries all this way .
Now , this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed .
At this point I decided to make a pause .
And it is my task , on behalf of the rest of the world , to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers , for Demographic Health Survey .
Many are not aware of -- no , this is not a joke .
This is very serious .
It is due to USA 's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what 's happening in the world .
And it is U.S. government at its best , without advocacy , providing facts , that it 's useful for the society .
And providing data free of charge on the internet , for the world to use . Thank you very much .
Quite the opposite of the World Bank , who compiled data with government money , tax money , and then they sell it to add a little profit , in a very inefficient , Gutenberg way .
But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world .
And they are highly skilled professionals .
It 's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way , as we do .
And when it comes to free data and transparency , United States of America is one of the best .
And that doesn 't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor .
And I 'm not paid to come here , no .
I would like to show you what happens with the data , what we can show with this data .
Look here . This is the world .
With income down there and child mortality .
And what has happened in the world ?
Since 1950 , during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality .
And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this .
And we had an increase in income .
And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world .
We have a continuum . But we still have , of course , Congo , up there . We still have as poor countries as we have had , always , in history .
And that 's the bottom billion , where we 've heard today about a completely new approach to do it .
And how fast has this happened ?
Well , MDG 4 .
The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4 .
But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it , because it 's the only child mortality that we can measure .
And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year .
Let 's see what Sweden has done .
We used to boast about fast social progress .
That 's where we were , 1900 .
1900 , Sweden was there .
Same child mortality as Bangladesh had , 1990 , though they had lower income .
They started very well . They used the aid well .
They vaccinated the kids . They get better water .
And they reduced child mortality , with an amazing 4.7 percent per year . They beat Sweden .
I run Sweden the same 16 year period .
Second round , it 's Sweden , 1916 , against Egypt , 1990 .
Here we go . Once again the USA is part of the reason here .
They get safe water , they get food for the poor , and they get malaria eradicated .
5.5 percent . They are faster than the millennium development goal .
And third chance for Sweden , against Brazil here .
Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years , and they go faster than Sweden .
This means that the world is converging .
The middle income countries , the emerging economy , they are catching up .
They are moving to cities , where they also get better assistance for that .
Well the Swedish students protest at this point .
They say , " This is not fair , because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden .
We have to do real-time competition . "
Okay . I give you Singapore , the year I was born .
Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden .
It 's the most tropical country in the world , a marshland on the equator .
And here we go . It took a little time for them to get independent .
But then they started to grow their economy .
And they made the social investment . They got away malaria .
They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden .
We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden !
All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals .
These yellow are just about to be doing this .
These red are the countries that doesn 't do it , and the policy has to be improved .
Not simplistic extrapolation .
We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way .
We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing .
And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world .
This is dollar per person . This is HIV in the countries .
The blue is Africa .
The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected .
You see the tragedy in South Africa there .
About 20 percent of the adult population are infected .
And in spite of them having quite a high income , they have a huge number of HIV infected .
But you also see that there are African countries down here .
There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa .
There 's a number , five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States .
And there are others who are extremely high .
And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries , with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance , Botswana .
They have a very high level . It 's coming down .
But now it 's not falling , because there , with help from PEPFAR , it 's working with treatment . And people are not dying .
And you can see it 's not that easy , that it is war which caused this .
Because here , in Congo , there is war .
And here , in Zambia , there is peace .
And it 's not the economy . Richer country has a little higher .
If I split Tanzania in its income , the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one .
And it 's really different within each country .
Look at the provinces of Kenya . They are very different .
And this is the situation you see .
It 's not deep poverty . It 's the special situation , probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries , or some parts of countries , in south and eastern Africa .
Don 't make it Africa . Don 't make it a race issue .
Make it a local issue . And do prevention at each place , in the way it can be done there .
So to just end up , there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest , which we don 't know .
Those who live beyond the cellphone , those who have yet to see a computer , those who have no electricity at home .
This is the disease , Konzo , I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa .
It 's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation .
It 's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the ' 30s .
It 's similar to other nutritional diseases .
It will never affect a rich person .
We have seen it here in Mozambique .
This is the epidemic in Mozambique . This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania .
You never heard about the disease .
But it 's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease .
Cause crippling throughout the world .
And over the last two years , 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region .
That used to be the illegal diamond trade , from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola .
That has now disappeared , and they are now in great economic problem .
And one week ago , for the first time , there were four lines on the Internet .
Don 't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries .
There is still mystery in one billion .
And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world .
We need a new mindset . The world is converging , but -- but -- but not the bottom billion .
They are still as poor as they 've ever been .
It 's not sustainable , and it will not happen around one superpower .
But you will remain one of the most important superpowers , and the most hopeful superpower , for the time to be .
And this institution will have a very crucial role , not for United States , but for the world .
So you have a very bad name , State Department . This is not the State Department .
It 's the World Department .
And we have a high hope in you . Thank you very much .
Jarreth Merz : Filming democracy in Ghana
Jarreth Merz , a Swiss-Ghanaian filmmaker , came to Ghana in 2008 to film the national elections . What he saw there taught him new lessons about democracy -- and about himself .
I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana , West Africa .
Ghana felt safe to me as a child .
I was free , I was happy .
The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana .
But then by the end of the decade , the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement .
In 1979 , I witnessed my first military coup .
We the children had gathered at a friend 's house .
It was a dimly lit shack .
There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background , and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole .
The firing squad aimed , fired -- the general was dead .
Now this was being broadcast live .
And shortly after , we left the country , and we returned to Switzerland .
Now Europe came as a shock to me , and I think I started feeling the need to shed my skin in order to fit in .
I wanted to blend in like a chameleon .
I think it was a tactic of survival .
And it worked , or so I believed .
So here I was in 2008 wondering where I was in my life .
And I felt I was being typecast as an actor .
I was always playing the exotic African .
I was playing the violent African , the African terrorist .
And I was thinking , how many terrorists could I possibly play before turning into one myself ?
And I had become ashamed of the other , the African in me .
And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana , after 28 years of absence .
I wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections .
And there , I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood .
And before I even knew it , I was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally .
And I realized that , when I 'd left the country , free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream .
And now that I 'd returned , that dream had become reality , though a fragile reality .
And I was thinking , was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity ?
Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me ?
And it was as if through the standards of my Western life , I hadn 't lived up to my full potential .
I mean , nor had Ghana , even though we had been trying very hard .
Now in 1957 , Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence .
In the late 50s , Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP .
I mean , today , Singapore is a First World country and Ghana is not .
But maybe it was time to prove to myself , yes , it 's important to understand the past , it is important to look at it in a different light , but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present .
So here I was , December 7th , 2008 .
The polling stations opened to the voters at 7 : 00 AM , but voters , eager to take their own political fate into their hands , were starting to line up at 4 : 00 AM in the morning .
And they had traveled from near , they had traveled from far , because they wanted to make their voices heard .
And I asked one of the voters , I said , " Whom are you going to vote for ? "
And he said , " I 'm sorry , I can 't tell you . "
He said that his vote was in his heart .
And I understood , this was their election , and they weren 't going to let anyone take it away from them .
Now the first round of the voting didn 't bring forth a clear winner -- so nobody had achieved the absolute majority -- so voting went into a second round three weeks later .
The candidates were back on the road ; they were campaigning .
The rhetoric of the candidates , of course , changed .
The heat was on .
And then the cliche came to haunt us .
There were claims of intimidation at the polling stations , of ballot boxes being stolen .
Inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control .
We witnessed the eruption of violence in the streets .
People were being beaten brutally .
The army started firing their guns . People were scrambling .
It was complete chaos .
And my heart sank , because I thought , here we are again .
Here is another proof that the African is not capable of governing himself .
And not only that , I am documenting it -- documenting my own cultural shortcomings .
So when the echo of the gunshots had lingered , it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob , and I didn 't believe what I was hearing .
They were chanting , " We want peace .
We want peace . "
And I realized it had to come from the people .
After all , they decide , and they did .
So the sounds that were before distorted and loud , were suddenly a melody .
The sounds of the voices were harmonious .
So it could happen .
A democracy could be upheld peacefully .
It could be , by the will of the masses who were now urgently pressing with all their heart and all their will for peace .
Now here 's an interesting comparison .
We in the West , we preach the values , the golden light of democracy , that we are the shining example of how it 's done .
But when it comes down to it , Ghana found itself in the same place in which the U.S. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections -- Bush versus Gore .
But instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide , Ghana honored democracy and its people .
It didn 't leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide ; the people did .
Now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either .
I mean , it was so incredibly close .
The electoral commissioner declared , with the consent of the parties , to run an unprecedented second re-run .
So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president , not the legal system .
And guess what , it worked .
The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle .
I mean , at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy , they did not abuse their power .
The belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep , proving that the African is capable of governing himself .
Now the uphill battle for Ghana and for Africa is not over , but I have proof that the other side of democracy exists , and that we must not take it for granted .
Now I have learned that my place is not just in the West or in Africa , and I 'm still searching for my identity , but I saw Ghana create democracy better .
Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently .
And yes , we Africans can .
Thank you .
Johnny Lee : Free or cheap Wii Remote hacks
Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts , Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks , which turn the $ 40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard , a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer .
So , as researchers , something that we often do is use immense resources to achieve certain capabilities , or achieve certain goals .
And this is essential to the progress of science , or exploration of what is possible .
But it sort of creates this unfortunate situation where a tiny , tiny fraction of the world can actually participate in this exploration or can benefit from that technology .
And something that motivates me , and what gets me really excited about my research , is when I see simple opportunities to drastically change that distribution and make the technology accessible to a much wider percentage of the population .
And I 'm going to show you two videos that have gotten a lot of attention recently that I think embody this philosophy .
And they actually use the Nintendo Wii remote .
Now , for those of you who aren 't familiar with this device , it 's a $ 40 video game controller .
And it 's mostly advertised for its motion sensor capabilities : so you can swing a tennis racket , or hit a baseball bat .
But what actually interests me a lot more is the fact that in the tip of each controller is a relatively high-performing infrared camera .
And I 'm going to show you two demos of why this is useful .
So here , I have my computer set up with the projector , and I have a Wii remote sitting on top of it .
And , for example , if you 're in a school that doesn 't have a lot money , which is probably a lot of schools , or if you 're in an office environment , and you want an interactive whiteboard , normally these cost about two to three thousand dollars .
So what I 'm going to show you how to do is how to create one with a Wii remote .
Now , this requires another piece of hardware , which is this infrared pen .
You can probably make this yourself for about five dollars with a quick trip to the Radio Shack .
It 's essentially got a battery , a button and an infrared LED , and it turns on -- you guys can 't see it -- but it turns on whenever I push the button .
Now , what this means is that if I run this piece of software , the camera sees the infrared dot , and I can register the location of the camera pixels to the projector pixels . And now this is like a whiteboard surface .
So for about $ 50 of hardware , you can have your own whiteboard .
This is Adobe Photoshop .
Thank you .
Now , the software for this I 've actually put on my website and have let people download it for free .
And in the three months that this project has been public , it 's been downloaded over half a million times .
So teachers and students all around the world are already using this .
I want to quickly say that although it does do it for 50 dollars , there are some limitations of this approach .
But you get about 80 percent of the way there , for about one percent of the cost .
Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots , so this is actually a multi-touch , interactive whiteboard system as well .
For the second demo , I have this Wii remote that 's actually next to the TV .
So it 's pointing away from the display , rather than pointing at the display .
And why this is interesting is that if you put on , say , a pair of safety glasses , that have two infrared dots in them , what these two dots are essentially going to give you is , give the computer an approximation of your head location .
And why this is interesting is I have this sort of application running on the computer monitor , which has a 3D room , with some targets floating in it .
And you can see that it looks like a 3D room -- if you can see -- kind of like a video game , it sort of looks 3D , but for the most part , the image looks pretty flat , and bound to the surface of the screen .
But if we turn on head tracking , the computer can change the image that 's on the screen and make it respond to the head movements .
So let 's switch back to that .
So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game development community .
Because this is about 10 dollars of additional hardware if you already have a Nintendo Wii .
So I 'm looking forward to seeing some games , and actually Louis Castle , that 's him down there , last week announced that Electronic Arts , one of the largest game publishers , is releasing a game in May that has a little Easter egg feature for supporting this type of head tracking .
So -- and that 's from less than five months from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product .
Thank you .
But actually , to me , what 's almost more interesting than either of these two products is how people actually found out about them .
YouTube has really changed the way , or changed the speed , in which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world .
You know , I 'm doing some research in my lab with a video camera , and within the first week , a million people had seen this work , and literally within days , engineers , teachers and students from around the world , were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives of this work .
So I hope to see more of that in the future , and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community .
So thank you very much .
Wes Moore : How to talk to veterans about the war
Wes Moore joined the US Army to pay for college , but the experience became core to who he is . In this heartfelt talk , the paratrooper and captain — who went on to write " The Other Wes Moore " — explains the shock of returning home from Afghanistan . He shares the single phrase he heard from civilians on repeat , and shows why it 's just not sufficient . It 's a call for all of us to ask veterans to tell their stories — and listen .
I 'm excited to be here to speak about vets , because I didn 't join the Army because I wanted to go to war .
I didn 't join the Army because I had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight .
Frankly , I joined the Army because college is really damn expensive , and they were going to help with that , and I joined the Army because it was what I knew , and it was what I knew that I thought I could do well .
I didn 't come from a military family .
I 'm not a military brat .
No one in my family ever had joined the military at all , and how I first got introduced to the military was when I was 13 years old and I got sent away to military school , because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since I was eight years old .
I had some issues when I was coming up , and my mother would always tell me , she 's like , " You know , if you don 't get this together , I 'm going to send you to military school . "
And I 'd look at her , and I 'd say , " Mommy , I 'll work harder . "
And then when I was nine years old , she started giving me brochures to show me she wasn 't playing around , so I 'd look at the brochures , and I 'm like , " Okay , Mommy , I can see you 're serious , and I 'll work harder . "
And then when I was 10 and 11 , my behavior just kept on getting worse .
I was on academic and disciplinary probation before I hit double digits , and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old .
And so when I was 13 years old , my mother came up to me , and she was like , " I 'm not going to do this anymore .
I 'm going to send you to military school . "
And I looked at her , and I said , " Mommy , I can see you 're upset , and I 'm going to work harder . "
And she was like , " No , you 're going next week . "
And that was how I first got introduced because she thought this was a good idea .
I had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when I first showed up there , because literally in the first four days , I had already run away five times from this school .
They had these big black gates that surrounded the school , and every time they would turn their backs , I would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don 't want to be there , we can leave at any time .
So I just said , " Well , if that 's the case , then I 'd like to leave . "
And it never worked .
And I kept on getting lost .
But then eventually , after staying there for a little while , and after the end of that first year at this military school , I realized that I actually was growing up .
I realized the things that I enjoyed about this school and the thing that I enjoyed about the structure was something that I 'd never found before : the fact that I finally felt like I was part of something bigger , part of a team , and it actually mattered to people that I was there , the fact that leadership wasn 't just a punchline there , but that it was a real , actually core part of the entire experience .
And so when it was time for me to actually finish up high school , I started thinking about what I wanted to do , and just like probably most students , had no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do .
And I thought about the people who I respected and admired .
I thought about a lot of the people , in particular a lot of the men , in my life who I looked up to .
They all happened to wear the uniform of the United States of America , so for me , the question and the answer really became pretty easy .
The question of what I wanted to do was filled in very quickly with saying , I guess I 'll be an Army officer .
So the Army then went through this process and they trained me up , and when I say I didn 't join the Army because I wanted to go to war , the truth is , I joined in 1996 .
There really wasn 't a whole lot going on .
I didn 't ever feel like I was in danger .
When I went to my mom , I first joined the Army when I was 17 years old , so I literally needed parental permission to join the Army , so I kind of gave the paperwork to my mom , and she just assumed it was kind of like military school .
She was like , " Well , it was good for him before , so I guess I 'll just let him keep doing it , " having no idea that the paperwork that she was signing was actually signing her son up to become an Army officer .
And I went through the process , and again the whole time still just thinking , this is great , maybe I 'll serve on a weekend , or two weeks during the year , do drill , and then a couple years after I signed up , a couple years after my mother signed those papers , the whole world changed .
And after 9 / 11 , there was an entirely new context about the occupation that I chose .
When I first joined , I never joined to fight , but now that I was in , this is exactly what was now going to happen .
And I thought about so much about the soldiers who I eventually had to end up leading .
I remember when we first , right after 9 / 11 , three weeks after 9 / 11 , I was on a plane heading overseas , but I wasn 't heading overseas with the military , I was heading overseas because I got a scholarship to go overseas .
I received the scholarship to go overseas and to go study and live overseas , and I was living in England and that was interesting , but at the same time , the same people who I was training with , the same soldiers that I went through all my training with , and we prepared for war , they were now actually heading over to it .
They were now about to find themselves the vast majority of people , the vast majority of us as we were training , couldn 't even point out on a map .
I spent a couple years finishing graduate school , and the whole entire time while I 'm sitting there in buildings at Oxford that were literally built hundreds of years before the United States was even founded , and I 'm sitting there talking to dons about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand , and how that influenced the start of World War I , where the entire time my heart and my head were on my soldiers who were now throwing on Kevlars and grabbing their flak vests and figuring out how exactly do I change around or how exactly do I clean a machine gun in the darkness .
That was the new reality .
By the time I finished that up and I rejoined my military unit and we were getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan , there were soldiers in my unit who were now on their second and third deployments before I even had my first .
I remember walking out with my unit for the first time , and when you join the Army and you go through a combat tour , everyone looks at your shoulder , because on your shoulder is your combat patch .
And so immediately as you meet people , you shake their hand , and then your eyes go to their shoulder , because you want to see where did they serve , or what unit did they serve with ?
And I was the only person walking around with a bare shoulder , and it burned every time someone stared at it .
But you get a chance to talk to your soldiers , and you ask them why did they sign up .
I signed up because college was expensive .
A lot of my soldiers signed up for completely different reasons .
They signed up because of a sense of obligation .
They signed up because they were angry and they wanted to do something about it .
They signed up because their family said this was important .
They signed up because they wanted some form of revenge .
They signed for a whole collection of different reasons .
And now we all found ourselves overseas fighting in these conflicts .
And what was amazing to me was that I very naively started hearing this statement that I never fully understood , because right after 9 / 11 , you start hearing this idea where people come up to you and they say , " Well , thank you for your service . "
And I just kind of followed in and started saying the same things to all my soldiers .
This is even before I deployed .
But I really had no idea what that even meant .
I just said it because it sounded right .
I said it because it sounded like the right thing to say to people who had served overseas .
" Thank you for your service . "
But I had no idea what the context was or what that even , what it even meant to the people who heard it .
When I first came back from Afghanistan , I thought that if you make it back from conflict , then the dangers were all over .
I thought that if you made it back from a conflict zone that somehow you could kind of wipe the sweat off your brow and say , " Whew , I 'm glad I dodged that one , " without understanding that for so many people , as they come back home , the war keeps going .
It keeps playing out in all of our minds .
It plays out in all of our memories .
It plays out in all of our emotions .
Please forgive us if we don 't like being in big crowds .
Please forgive us when we spend one week in a place that has 100 percent light discipline , because you 're not allowed to walk around with white lights , because if anything has a white light , it can be seen from miles away , versus if you use little green or little blue lights , they cannot be seen from far away .
So please forgive us if out of nowhere , we go from having 100 percent light discipline to then a week later being back in the middle of Times Square , and we have a difficult time adjusting to that .
Please forgive us when you transition back to a family who has completely been maneuvering without you , and now when you come back , it 's not that easy to fall back into a sense of normality , because the whole normal has changed .
I remember when I came back , I wanted to talk to people .
I wanted people to ask me about my experiences .
I wanted people to come up to me and tell me , " What did you do ? "
I wanted people to come up to me and tell me , " What was it like ? What was the food like ?
What was the experience like ? How are you doing ? "
And the only questions I got from people was , " Did you shoot anybody ? "
And those were the ones who were even curious enough to say anything .
Because sometimes there 's this fear and there 's this apprehension that if I say anything , I 'm afraid I 'll offend , or I 'm afraid I 'll trigger something , so the common default is just saying nothing .
The problem with that is then it feels like your service was not even acknowledged , like no one even cared .
" Thank you for your service , " and we move on .
What I wanted to better understand was what 's behind that , and why " thank you for your service " isn 't enough .
The fact is , we have literally 2.6 million men and women who are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are all amongst us .
Sometimes we know who they are , sometimes we don 't , but there is that feeling , the shared experience , the shared bond where we know that that experience and that chapter of our life , while it might be closed , it 's still not over .
We think about " thank you for your service , " and people say , " So what does ' thank you for your service ' mean to you ? "
Well , " Thank you for your service " means to me , it means acknowledging our stories , asking us who we are , understanding the strength that so many people , so many people who we serve with , have , and why that service means so much .
" Thank you for your service " means acknowledging the fact that just because we 've now come home and we 've taken off the uniform does not mean our larger service to this country is somehow over .
The fact is , there 's still a tremendous amount that can be offered and can be given .
When I look at people like our friend Taylor Urruela , who in Iraq loses his leg , had two big dreams in his life .
One was to be a soldier . The other was to be a baseball player .
He loses his leg in Iraq .
He comes back and instead of deciding that , well , now since I 've lost my leg , that second dream is over , he decides that he still has that dream of playing baseball , and he starts this group called VETSports , which now works with veterans all over the country and uses sports as a way of healing .
People like Tammy Duckworth , who was a helicopter pilot and with the helicopter that she was flying , you need to use both your hands and also your legs to steer , and her helicopter gets hit , and she 's trying to steer the chopper , but the chopper 's not reacting to her instructions and to her commands .
She 's trying to land the chopper safely , but the chopper doesn 't land safely , and the reason it 's not landing safely is because it 's not responding to the commands that her legs are giving because her legs were blown off .
She barely survives .
Medics come and they save her life , but then as she 's doing her recuperation back at home , she realizes that , " My job 's still not done . "
And now she uses her voice as a Congresswoman from Illinois to fight and advocate for a collection of issues to include veterans issues .
We signed up because we love this country we represent .
We signed up because we believe in the idea and we believe in the people to our left and to our right .
And the only thing we then ask is that " thank you for your service " needs to be more than just a quote break , that " thank you for your service " means honestly digging in to the people who have stepped up simply because they were asked to , and what that means for us not just now , not just during combat operations , but long after the last vehicle has left and after the last shot has been taken .
These are the people who I served with , and these are the people who I honor .
So thank you for your service .
Michael Metcalfe : We need money for aid . So let 's print it .
During the financial crisis , the central banks of the United States , United Kingdom and Japan created $ 3.7 trillion in order to buy assets and encourage investors to do the same . Michael Metcalfe offers a shocking idea : could these same central banks print money to ensure they stay on track with their goals for global aid ? Without risking inflation ?
Thirteen years ago , we set ourselves a goal to end poverty .
After some success , we 've hit a big hurdle .
The aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments , which have fallen for two consecutive years .
My question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions .
Can we simply print money for aid ?
" Surely not . "
It 's a common reaction .
It 's a quick talk .
Others channel John McEnroe .
" You cannot be serious ! "
Now , I can 't do the accent , but I am serious , thanks to these two children , who , as you 'll learn , are very much at the heart of my talk .
On the left , we have Pia .
She lives in England .
She has two loving parents , one of whom is standing right here .
Dorothy , on the right , lives in rural Kenya .
She 's one of 13,000 orphans and vulnerable children who are assisted by a charity that I support .
I do that because I believe that Dorothy , like Pia , deserves the best life chances that we can afford to give her .
You 'll all agree with me , I 'm sure .
The U.N. agrees too .
Their overriding aim for international aid is to strive for a life of dignity for all .
But -- and here 's that hurdle -- can we afford our aid aspirations ?
History suggests not .
In 1970 , governments set themselves a target to increase overseas aid payments to 0.7 percent of their national income .
As you can see , a big gap opens up between actual aid and that target .
But then come the Millennium Development Goals , eight ambitious targets to be met by 2015 .
If I tell you that just one of those targets is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty , you get a sense of the ambition .
There 's also been some success .
The number of people living on less than $ 1.25 a day has halved .
But a lot remains to be done in two years .
One in eight remain hungry .
In the context of this auditorium , the front two rows aren 't going to get any food .
We can 't settle for that , which is why the concern about the eighth goal , which relates to funding , which I said at the beginning is falling , is so troubling .
So what can be done ?
Well , I work in financial markets , not development .
I study the behavior of investors , how they react to policy and the economy .
It gives me a different angle on the aid issue .
But it took an innocent question from my then-four-year-old daughter to make me appreciate that .
Pia and I were on the way to a local cafe and we passed a man collecting for charity .
I didn 't have any change to give him , and she was disappointed .
Once in the cafe , Pia takes out her coloring book and starts scribbling .
After a little while , I ask her what she 's doing , and she shows me a drawing of a £ 5 note to give to the man outside .
It 's so sweet , and more generous than Dad would have been .
But of course I explained to her , " You can 't do that ; it 's not allowed . "
To which I get the classic four-year-old response : " Why not ? "
Now I 'm excited , because I actually think I can answer this time .
So I launch into an explanation of how an unlimited supply of money chasing a limited number of goods sends prices to the moon .
Something about that exchange stuck with me , not because of the look of relief on Pia 's face when I finally finished , but because it related to the sanctity of the money supply , a sanctity that had been challenged and questioned by the reaction of central banks to the financial crisis .
To reassure investors , central banks began buying assets to try and encourage investors to do the same .
They funded these purchases with money they created themselves .
The money wasn 't actually physically printed .
It 's still sort of locked away in the banking system today .
But the amount created was unprecedented .
Together , the central banks of the U.S. , U.K and Japan increased the stock of money in their economies by 3.7 trillion dollars .
That 's three times , in fact that 's more than three times , the total physical stock of dollar notes in circulation .
Three times !
Before the crisis , this would have been utterly unthinkable , yet it was accepted remarkably quickly .
The price of gold , an asset thought to protect against inflation , did jump , but investors bought other assets that offered little protection from inflation .
They bought fixed income securities , bonds .
They bought equities too .
For all the scare stories , the actual actions of investors spoke of rapid acceptance and confidence .
That confidence was based on two pillars .
The first was that , after years of keeping inflation under control , central banks were trusted to take the money-printing away if inflation became a threat .
Secondly , inflation simply never became a threat .
As you can see , in the United States , inflation for most of this period remained below average .
It was the same elsewhere .
So how does all this relate to aid ?
Well , this is where Dorothy and the Mango Tree charity that supports her comes in .
I was at one of their fundraising events earlier this year , and I was inspired to give a one-off donation when I remembered that my firm offers to match the charitable contributions its employees make .
So think of this : Instead of just being able to help Dorothy and four of her classmates to go through secondary school for a few years , I was able to double my contribution .
Brilliant .
So following that conversation with my daughter , and seeing the absence of inflation in the face of money-printing , and knowing that international aid payments were falling at just the wrong time , this made me wonder : Could we match but just on a much grander scale ?
Let 's call this scheme " Print Aid . "
And here 's how it might work .
Provided it saw little inflation risk from doing so , the central bank would be mandated to match the government 's overseas aid payments up to a certain limit .
Governments have been aiming to get aid to 0.7 percent for years , so let 's set the limit at half of that , 0.35 percent of their income .
So it would work like this : If in a given year the government gave 0.2 percent of its income to overseas aid , the central bank would simply top it up with a further 0.2 percent .
So far so good .
How risky is this ?
Well , this involves the creation of money to buy goods , not assets .
It sounds more inflationary already , doesn 't it .
But there are two important mitigating factors here .
The first is that by definition , this money printed would be spent overseas .
So it 's not obvious how it leads to inflation in the country doing the actual printing unless it leads to a currency depreciation of that country .
That is unlikely for the second reason : the scale of the money that would be printed under this scheme .
So let 's think of an example where Print Aid was in place in the U.S. , U.K. and Japan .
To match the aid payments made by those governments over the last four years , Print Aid would have generated 200 billion dollars ' worth of extra aid .
What would that look like in the context of the increase in the money stock that had already happened in those countries to save the financial system ?
Are you read for this ?
You might struggle to see that at the back , because the gap is quite small .
So what we 're saying here is that we took a $ 3.7 trillion gamble to save our financial systems , and you know what , it paid off .
There was no inflation .
Are we really saying that it 's not worth the risk to print an extra 200 billion for aid ?
Would the risks really be that different ?
To me , it 's not that clear .
What is clear is the impact on aid .
Even though this is the printing of just three central banks , the global aid that 's given over this period is up by almost 40 percent .
Aid as a proportion of national income all of a sudden is at a 40-year high .
Now , we don 't get to 0.7 percent .
Governments are still incentivized to give .
But you know what , that 's the point of a matching scheme .
So I think what we 've learned is that the risks from this money creation scheme are quite modest , but the benefits are potentially huge .
Imagine what we could do with 40 percent more funding .
We might be able to feed the front row .
The thing that I fear , the only thing that I fear , apart from the fact that I 've run out of time , is that the window of opportunity for this idea is a short one .
Today , money creation by central banks is an accepted policy tool .
That may not always be the case .
Today there are universally agreed aims for international aid .
That may not always be the case .
Today might be the only time that these two things coincide , such that we can afford the aid that we 've always aspired to give .
So , can we print money for international aid ?
I seriously believe the question should be , why not ?
Thank you very much .
Martin Hanczyc : The line between life and not-life
In his lab , Martin Hanczyc makes " protocells , " experimental blobs of chemicals that behave like living cells . His work demonstrates how life might have first occurred on Earth ... and perhaps elsewhere too .
So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side , and living systems on the other side .
So we go from , say , this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life , and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side .
Over the last hundred and fifty years or so , science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems , and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two .
We 'll just take one example here : a virus is a natural system , right ?
But it 's very simple . It 's very simplistic .
It doesn 't really satisfy all the requirements , it doesn 't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to , say , reproduce and evolve .
But what we 're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum -- so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory , mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures , and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems .
Really what I 'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life .
So what are these characteristics that I 'm talking about ? These are them .
We consider first that life has a body .
Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment .
Life also has a metabolism . Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself .
Life also has a kind of inheritable information .
Now we , as humans , we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring .
If we couple the first two -- the body and the metabolism -- we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate , and if we coupled these now to inheritable information , we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike , and would perhaps evolve .
And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab , make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life .
So how do we do this ? Well , we use a model system that we term a protocell .
You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell . It is a simple chemical model of a living cell , and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together , play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive .
In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same , but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules -- so a drastic reduction in complexity , but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike .
And so what we do is , we start simple and we work our way up to living systems .
Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc , a hundred years ago , considering a kind of synthetic biology : " The synthesis of life , should it ever occur , will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea . "
That 's his first statement . So if we actually create life in the laboratories , it 's probably not going to impact our lives at all .
" If we accept the theory of evolution , then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world , or between the non-living and living world , forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life " -- so , the ones I just discussed -- " to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment . "
So we start simple , we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life , and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike .
This is how we can start to make a protocell .
We use this idea called self-assembly .
What that means is , I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab , and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures .
So say on the order of tens of thousands , hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn 't exist before .
And in this particular example , what I took is some membrane molecules , mixed those together in the right environment , and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here .
These membranes are also quite similar , morphologically and functionally , to the membranes in your body , and we can use these , as they say , to form the body of our protocell .
Likewise , we can work with oil and water systems .
As you know , when you put oil and water together , they don 't mix , but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form , and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell , as you will see later .
So that 's just forming some body stuff , right ?
Some architectures .
What about the other aspects of living systems ?
So we came up with this protocell model here that I 'm showing .
We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite .
This is natural from the environment , this clay .
It forms a surface that is , say , chemically active .
It could run a metabolism on it .
Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay . For example , in this case , RNA , shown in red -- this is a relative of DNA , it 's an informational molecule -- it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay .
This structure , then , can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself , so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself , and that 's shown in green here on this micrograph .
So just through self-assembly , mixing things together in the lab , we can come up with , say , a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body , right ?
So we 're on a road towards living systems .
But if you saw this protocell , you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive .
It 's actually quite lifeless . Once it forms , it doesn 't really do anything .
So , something is missing .
Some things are missing .
So some things that are missing is , for example , if you had a flow of energy through a system , what we 'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself , much like living systems do .
So we came up with a different protocell model , and this is actually simpler than the previous one .
In this protocell model , it 's just an oil droplet , but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something , to actually become dynamic , as we 'll see here .
You add the droplet to the system .
It 's a pool of water , and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system .
Okay ? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly , has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy , and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment .
As we heard earlier , movement is very important in these kinds of living systems .
It is moving around , exploring its environment , and remodeling its environment , as you see , by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell .
So it 's acting , in a sense , like a living system trying to preserve itself .
We take this same moving protocell here , and we put it in another experiment , get it moving . Then I 'm going to add some food to the system , and you 'll see that in blue here , right ?
So I add some food source to the system .
The protocell moves . It encounters the food .
It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there .
Alright ? So not only do we have this system that has a body , it has a metabolism , it can use energy , it moves around .
It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself .
Now , this doesn 't have a brain , it doesn 't have a neural system . This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior .
If we count the number of chemicals in that system , actually , including the water that 's in the dish , we have five chemicals that can do this .
So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do , and depending on the conditions , we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment .
On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other , and they form a kind of a dance , a complex dance with each other .
Right ? So not only do individual protocells have behavior , what we 've interpreted as behavior in this system , but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have .
So now that you 're all experts on protocells , we 're going to play a game with these protocells .
We 're going to make two different kinds .
Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that , when activated , the protocell starts to vibrate around , just dancing .
So remember , these are primitive things , so dancing protocells , that 's very interesting to us .
The second protocell has a different chemistry inside , and when activated , the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one . Right ?
And we just put these two together in the same system .
So there 's population A , there 's population B , and then we activate the system , and protocell Bs , they 're the blue ones , they all come together . They fuse together to form one big blob , and the other protocell just dances around . And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up , and then , game over .
So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times , and one time something very interesting happened .
So , I added these protocells together to the system , and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB .
That didn 't happen before . There it goes .
There 's a protocell AB now in this system .
Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit , while protocell B does the fusing , okay ?
But then something even more interesting happens .
Watch when these two large protocells , the hybrid ones , fuse together .
Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event . Right .
Just with blobs of chemicals , again .
So the way this works is , you have a simple system of five chemicals here , a simple system here . When they hybridize , you then form something that 's different than before , it 's more complex than before , and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication .
So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like , interesting colors and interesting behaviors , and they 're very easy to make , and they have interesting lifelike properties , perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth . Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step , one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth .
Certainly , there were molecules present on the early Earth , but they wouldn 't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments .
Rather , they 'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff , because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds .
Think of it like a primordial ooze , okay ?
And it 's a pool that 's too difficult to fully characterize , even by modern methods , and the product looks brown , like this tar here on the left . A pure compound is shown on the right , for contrast .
So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen , you put them in a pan , and you apply energy .
You turn up the heat , you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar , forming a brownish caramel , right ?
If you let that go unregulated , you 'll continue to make and break chemical bonds , forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan , right , that 's difficult to wash out . So that 's what the origin of life would have looked like .
You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth , four , 4.5 billion years ago .
So the challenge then is , throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab , and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze .
So we 're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we 've seen previously , and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar -- this diverse , very complex , organic black tar .
And we put them into one of these experiments , as you 've seen earlier , and then we watch lively movement that comes out .
They look really good , very nice movement , and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other , similar to what we 've seen before -- but again , working with just primordial conditions , no pure chemicals .
These are also , these tar-fueled protocells , are also able to locate resources in their environment .
I 'm going to add some resource from the left , here , that defuses into the system , and you can see , they really like that .
They become very energetic , and able to find the resource in the environment , similar to what we saw before .
But again , these are done in these primordial conditions , really messy conditions , not sort of sterile laboratory conditions .
These are very dirty little protocells , as a matter of fact .
But they have lifelike properties , is the point .
So , doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems .
And not only that , but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there -- life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth .
And that leads me to the next term , which is " weird life . "
This is a term by Steve Benner .
This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States , wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe , okay , especially if that life is very different from life on Earth . If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there , how could we even recognize it as life ?
Well , they came up with three very general criteria . First is -- and they 're listed here .
The first is , the system has to be in non-equilibrium . That means the system cannot be dead , in a matter of fact .
Basically what that means is , you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself .
This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth , driving photosynthesis , driving the ecosystem .
Without the Sun , there 's likely to be no life on this planet .
Secondly , life needs to be in liquid form , so that means even if we had some interesting structures , interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid , then this is not a good place for life .
And thirdly , we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds . And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself .
Now today , I told you about very strange and weird protocells -- some that contain clay , some that have primordial ooze in them , some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them .
Most of these don 't contain DNA , but yet they have lifelike properties .
But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems .
So by making these chemical , artificial life experiments , we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet , but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe . Thank you .
Cameron Sinclair : My wish : A call for open-source architecture
Accepting his 2006 TED Prize , Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises . He unveils his TED Prize wish for a network to improve global living standards through collaborative design .
I 'm going to take you on a journey very quickly .
To explain the wish , I 'm going to have to take you somewhere which many people haven 't been , and that 's around the world .
When I was about 24 years old , Kate Store and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work .
Not only about responding to natural disasters , but involved in systemic issues .
We believed that where the resources and expertise are scarce , innovative , sustainable design can really make a difference in people 's lives .
So I started my life as an architect , or training as an architect , and I was always interested in socially responsible design , and how you can really make an impact .
But when I went to architectural school , it seemed that I was the black sheep in the family .
Many architects seemed to think that when you design , you design a jewel , and it 's a jewel that you try and crave for .
Whereas I felt that when you design , you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you 're designing in .
So you 're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it , but for the community as a whole .
And in 1999 , we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo and I didn 't know what I was doing ; like I say , mid-20s , and I 'm the , I 'm the Internet generation , so we started a website .
We put a call out there , and to my surprise in a couple of months we had hundreds of entries from around the world .
That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas .
Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa , responding to the HIV / AIDS pandemic .
That led to 550 entries from 53 countries .
We also have designers from around the world that participate .
And we had an exhibit of work that followed that .
2004 was the tipping point for us .
We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran and Bam , also following up on our work in Africa .
Working within the United States , most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner , but go live -- I live in Bozeman , Montana -- go up to the north plains on the reservations , or go down to Alabama or Mississippi pre-Katrina , and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries I 've been to .
So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere .
And then also I will go into some more projects .
2005 Mother Nature kicked our arse .
I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters .
And because of the Internet , and because of connections to blogs and so forth , within literally hours of the tsunami , we were already raising funds , getting involved , working with people on the ground .
We run from a couple of laptops in the first couple of days , I had 4,000 emails from people needing help .
So we began to get involved in projects there , and I 'll talk about some others .
And then of course , this year we 've been responding to Katrina , as well as following up on our reconstruction works .
So this is a brief overview .
In 2004 , I really couldn 't manage the number of people who wanted to help , or the number of requests that I was getting .
It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone .
So we decided to embrace an open source model of business -- that anyone , anywhere in the world , could start a local chapter , and they can get involved in local problems .
Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia .
All problems are local . All solutions are local .
So , and that means , you know , somebody who is based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do . So what happened is , we used MeetUp and all these other kind of Internet tools , and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up , thousands of architects in 104 countries .
So the bullet point -- sorry , I never do a suit , so I knew that I was going to take this off .
OK , because I 'm going to do it very quick .
So in the past seven years -- this isn 't just about nonprofit .
What it showed me is that there 's a grassroots movement going on of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller , and that we have the opportunity -- not the responsibility , but the opportunity -- to really get involved in making change .
I 'm adding that to my time .
So what you don 't know is , we 've got these thousands of designers working around the world , connected basically by a website , and we have a staff of three .
By doing something , the fact that nobody told us we couldn 't do it , we did it . And so there 's something to be said about naivete .
So seven years later , we 've developed so that we 've got advocacy , instigation and implementation . We advocate for good design , not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums , op-eds ; we have a book on humanitarian work ; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy .
We can talk about FEMA , but that 's another talk .
Instigation , developing ideas with communities and NGOs doing open-source design competitions .
Referring , matchmaking with communities and then implementing -- actually going out there and doing the work , because when you invent , it 's never a reality until it 's built .
So it 's really important that if we 're designing and trying to create change , we build that change .
So here 's a select number of projects .
Kosovo . This is Kosovo in ' 99 . We did an open design competition , like I said . It led to a whole variety of ideas , and this wasn 't about emergency shelter , but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years , that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in , and that they would rebuild their own home .
This wasn 't imposing an architecture on a community ; this was giving them the tools and , and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to .
We have from the sublime to the ridiculous , but they worked .
This is an inflatable hemp house . It was built ; it works .
This is a shipping container . Built and works .
And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building , but also the issues of governance and the idea of creating communities through complex networks .
So we 've engaged not just designers , but also , you know , a whole variety of technology-based professionals .
Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes .
Using straw bale construction , creating heat walls .
And then something remarkable happened in ' 99 .
We went to Africa , originally to look at the housing issue .
Within three days , we realized the problem was not housing ; it was the growing pandemic of HIV / AIDS .
And it wasn 't doctors telling us this ; it was actual villagers that we were staying with .
And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10 , 15 kilometers to see doctors , you get the doctors to the people .
And we started engaging the medical community .
And I thought , you know , we thought we were real bright , you know , sparks -- we 've come up with this great idea , mobile health clinics widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa .
And the community , the medical community there said , " We 've said this for the last decade . We know this .
We just don 't know how to show this . "
So in a way , we had taken a pre-existing need and shown solutions .
And so again , we had a whole variety of ideas that came in .
This one I personally love , because the idea that architecture is not just about solutions , but about raising awareness .
This is a kenaf clinic . You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land , and then once -- and it grows 14 feet in a month .
And on the fourth week , the doctors come and they mow out an area , put a tensile structure on the top and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers , you cut down the clinic and you eat it . It 's an Eat Your Own Clinic .
So it 's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS , you also need to have nutrition rates , and the idea that the idea of nutrition is as important as getting anti-retrovirals out there .
So you know , this is a serious solution .
This one I love . The idea is it 's not just a clinic -- it 's a community center .
This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community , so it can be a self-sustaining project .
Every one of these projects is sustainable .
That 's not because I 'm a tree-hugging green person .
It 's because when you live on four dollars a day , you 're living on survival and you have to be sustainable .
You have to know where your energy is coming from .
You have to know where your resource is coming from .
And you have to keep the maintenance down .
So this is about getting an economic engine , and then at night it turns into a movie theater .
So it 's not an AIDS clinic . It 's a community center .
So you can see ideas . And these ideas developed into prototypes , and they were eventually built . And currently , as of this year , there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya .
From that we also developed Siyathemba , which was a project -- the community came to us and said , the problem is that the girls don 't have education .
And we 're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV / AIDS rate .
And that 's not because they 're promiscuous , it 's because there 's no knowledge .
And so we decided to look at the idea of sports and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV / AIDS outreach center , and the coaches of the girls ' team were also trained doctors .
So that there would be a very slow way of developing kind of confidence in health care .
And we picked nine finalists , and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region , and then the community picked their design .
They said , this is our design , because it 's not only about engaging a community ; it 's about empowering a community and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process .
So the winning design is here , and then of course , we actually go and work with the community and the clients .
So this is the designer . He 's out there working with the first ever women 's soccer team in Kwa-Zulu Natal , Siyathemba , and they can tell it better .
Well , my name is Sisi , because I work at the African center .
I 'm a consultant and I 'm also the national football player for South Africa , Bafana Bafana , and I also play in the Vodacom League for the team called Tembisa , which has now changed to Siyathemba .
This is our home ground .
Cameron Sinclair : So I 'm going to show that later because I 'm running out of time .
I can see Chris looking at me slyly .
This was a connection , just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa 's first telemedicine center , in Tanzania .
And we met , literally , a couple of months ago . We 've already developed a design , and the team is over there , working in partnership .
This was a matchmaking thanks to a couple of TEDsters : [ unclear ] Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli , who connected me with this amazing African woman .
And we start construction in June , and it will be opened by TEDGlobal .
So when you come to TEDGlobal , you can check it out .
But what we 're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development , and we 've been involved in a lot of issues , such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina .
This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled .
This is a community-designed community center .
And what that means is we actually live and work with the community , and they 're part of the design process .
The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be , and then eventually , the community is actually , through skills training , end up building the building with us .
Here is another school .
This is what the U.N. gave these guys for six months -- 12 plastic tarps .
This was in August . This was the replacement , and it 's supposed to last for two years .
When the rain comes down , you can 't hear a thing , and in the summer it 's about 140 degrees inside .
So we said , if the rain 's coming down , let 's get fresh water .
So every one of our schools have rain water collection systems , very low cost .
A class , three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars .
This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta .
It 's built by the parents of the kids .
The kids are out there on-site , building the buildings .
And it opened a couple of weeks ago , and there 's 600 kids that are now using the schools .
So , disaster hits home .
We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that , but we don 't see the good stories .
Here is a community that got together and they said no to waiting .
They formed a partnership , a diverse partnership of players to actually map out East Biloxi , to figure out who is getting involved .
We 've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding , rehabbing homes .
Figuring out what FEMA regulations are , not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild .
Working with residents , getting them out of their homes , so they don 't get ill . This is what they 're cleaning up on their own .
Designing housing . This house is going to go in in a couple of weeks .
This is a rehabbed home , done in four days .
This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker .
She 's 70 years old . This is what FEMA gave her .
600 bucks , happened two days ago .
We put together very quickly a washroom .
It 's built ; it 's running and she just started a business today , where she 's washing other peoples clothes .
This is Shandra and the Calhouns . They 're photographers who have documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years .
That was their home , and these are the photographs they took .
And we 're helping , working with them to create a new building .
Projects we 've done . Projects we 've been a part of , support .
Why don 't aid agencies do this ? This is the U.N. tent .
This is the new U.N. tent , just introduced this year .
Quick to assemble . It 's got a flap , that 's the invention .
It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field .
I was 12 years old . There 's a problem here .
Luckily , we 're not alone .
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work .
More hemp houses -- it 's a theme in Japan apparently .
I 'm not sure what they 're smoking .
This is a grip clip designed by somebody who said , all you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams .
This guy designed for NASA , is now doing housing .
I 'm going to whip through this quickly , because I know I 've got only a couple of minutes .
So this is all done in the last two years .
I showed you something that took 20 years to do .
And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years .
From Brazil to India , Mexico , Alabama , China , Israel , Palestine , Vietnam .
The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 -- that 's how old I am . So it 's a young -- I just have to stop here , because Arup is in the room and this is the best-designed toilet in the world .
If you 're ever , ever in India , go use this toilet .
Chris Luebkeman will tell you why .
But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York , but this . And when you look at this , you see crisis .
What I see is many , many inventors .
One billion people live in abject poverty .
We hear about them all the time .
Four billion live in growing but fragile economies .
One in seven live in unplanned settlements .
If we do nothing about the housing crisis that 's about to happen , in 20 years , one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp . Look left , look right : one of you will be there .
How do we improve the living standards of five billion people ?
With 10 million solutions .
So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone .
Wait a second . Wait a second . That 's your wish ?
CS : That 's my wish .
That 's his wish !
CS : We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website .
So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000 .
So why not this many people ?
Open-source architecture is the way to go .
You have a diverse community of participants -- and we 're not just talking about inventors and designers , but we 're talking about the funding model .
My role is not as a designer ; it 's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world .
And what we need is something that replicates me globally , because I haven 't slept in seven years .
Secondly , what will this thing be ?
Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis , but they don 't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it .
So Creative Commons has developed the developing nations license .
And what that means is that a designer can -- the Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it .
As soon as that is built , anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free .
So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this , but still protecting their rights here ?
We want to have a community where you can upload ideas , and those ideas can be tested in earthquake , in flood , in all sorts of austere environments . The reason that 's important is I don 't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works .
That 's too late . We need to do it now .
So doing that globally .
And I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually .
When you look at the face of an architect , most people think a gray-haired white guy .
I don 't see that . I see the face of the world .
So I want everyone from all over the planet , to be able to be a part of this design and development .
The idea of needs-based competitions -- X-Prize for the other 98 percent , if you want to call it that .
We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together .
And the idea of integrating manufacturers -- fab labs in every country .
When I hear about the $ 100 laptop and it 's going to educate every child -- educate every designer in the world . Put one in every favela , every slum settlement , because you know what , innovation will happen .
And I need to know that . It 's called the leap-back .
We talk about leapfrog technologies . I write with Worldchanging , and the one thing we 've been talking about is , I learn more on the ground than I 've ever learned here .
So let 's take those ideas , adapt them and we can use them .
These ideas are supposed to have adaptable ; they should have the potential for evolution ; they should be developed by every nation on the world and useful for every nation on the world . What will it take ?
There should be a sheet . I don 't have time to read this , because I 'm going to be yanked off .
Just leave it up there for a sec .
CS : Well , what will it take ? You guys are smart .
So it 's going to take a lot of computing power , because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs , but utilize the designs . Also , a process of reviewing the designs .
I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we 're doing stuff that 's standing , because those guys are the best in the world . Plug .
And so you know , I want these -- and I just should note , I have two laptops and one of them there , is there and that has 3000 designs on it . If I drop that laptop , what happens ?
So it 's important to have these proven ideas put up there , easy to use , easy to get a hold of .
My mom once said , there 's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers .
I 'm fed up of talking about making change .
You only make it by doing it .
We 've changed FEMA guidelines . We 've changed public policy .
We 've changed international response -- based on building things .
So for me , it 's important that we create a real conduit for innovation , and that it 's free innovation .
Think of free culture -- this is free innovation .
Somebody said this a couple of years back .
I will give points for those who know it .
I think the man was maybe 25 years too early , so let 's do it .
Thank you .
David Bolinsky : Visualizing the wonder of a living cell
Medical animator David Bolinsky presents 3 minutes of stunning animation that show the bustling life inside a cell .
I 'm a medical illustrator , and I come from a slightly different point of view .
I 've been watching , since I grew up , the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences .
And while these are both wonderful things in their own right -- they both have very wonderful things going for them -- truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date .
These are expressions of truth as awe-full things , by meaning they are things you can worship .
They are ideals that are powerful . They are irreducible .
They are unique . They are useful -- sometimes , often a long time after the fact .
And you can actually roll some of the pictures now , because I don 't want to look at me on the screen .
Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences .
They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed .
If you look at the math , E = mc squared , if you look at the cosmological constant , where there 's an anthropic ideal , where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe -- these are things that are really difficult to understand .
And what I 've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator -- since I was taught animation by my father , who was a sculptor and my visual mentor -- I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation , by using pictures , by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth , and can be taught , and can be understood .
Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them , but the way they 're taught is compartmentalized and it 's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident .
It 's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone .
We don 't want to do that to our students .
So we have an opportunity to really open up education .
And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard , in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department , a couple of years ago . He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard .
So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell -- that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on .
They could have a mental image of the cell as a large , bustling , hugely complicated city that 's occupied by micro-machines .
And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life .
These micro-machines , which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over , are self-directed , powerful , precise , accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids .
And these micro-machines power how a cell moves .
They power how a cell replicates . They power our hearts .
They power our minds .
And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard , which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will -- in addition to all the textual information , in addition to all the didactic stuff -- put everything together visually , so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty , and be able to study with this view in mind , so that their imaginations would be sparked , so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out , really , how life works .
So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together .
We worked with a theme , which is , you 've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary , and they 're touching the surface of the capillary wall , and they 're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall , and they are given this information that there 's an inflammation somewhere outside , where they can 't see and sense .
But they get the information that causes them to stop , causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape , and try to get out of this capillary and find out what 's going on .
So these molecular motors -- we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved , and figure out what they did .
And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on , but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening .
And so what I 'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader 's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced . It 's an ongoing project that 's going to go another four or five years .
And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures -- these little walking machines , they 're called kinesins -- that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size .
Run the movie , please .
But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing , and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other .
They pass information to each other .
They cause different things to happen inside the cell .
And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly , from information that 's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes .
No life , from the smallest life to everybody here , would be possible without these little micro-machines .
In fact , it would really , in the absence of these machines , have made the attendance here , Chris , really quite sparse .
This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell .
This little guy is called the kinesin , and he pulls a sack that 's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it 's needed in the cell -- whether it 's to a membrane , whether it 's to an organelle , whether it 's to build something or repair something .
And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around , right now , inside each one of your 100 trillion cells .
So no matter how lazy you feel , you 're not really intrinsically doing nothing .
So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this , and think about how powerful our cells are .
And think about some of the things that we 're learning about cellular mechanics .
Once we figure out all that 's going on -- and believe me , we know almost a percent of what 's going on -- once we figure out what 's going on , we 're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health , with what we do with future generations , and how long we 're going to live .
And hopefully we 'll be able to use this to discover more truth , and more beauty .
But it 's really quite amazing that these cells , these micro-machines , are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding .
They work together . They make the cell do what it needs to do .
And their working together helps our bodies -- huge entities that they will never see -- function properly .
Enjoy the rest of the show . Thank you .
Nature . Beauty . Gratitude .
Nature 's beauty can be easily missed -- but not through Louie Schwartzberg 's lens . His stunning time-lapse photography , accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast , serves as a meditation on being grateful for every day . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
When I graduated UCLA , I moved to northern California , and I lived in a little town called Elk on the Mendocino coast , and I didn 't have a phone or TV , but I had U.S. mail , and life was good back then , if you could remember it .
I 'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie , and I 'd ship my film to San Francisco , and lo and behold , two days later , it would end up on my front door , which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood .
I didn 't have much money , but I had time and a sense of wonder .
So I started shooting time-lapse photography .
It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film , because that 's all I could afford .
I 've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously , non-stop , 24 hours a day , seven days a week , for over 30 years , and to see them move is a dance I 'll never get tired of .
Their beauty immerses us with color , taste , touch .
It also provides a third of the food we eat .
Beauty and seduction is nature 's tools for survival , because we protect what we fall in love with .
It opens our hearts , and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we 're not separate from it .
When we see ourselves in nature , it also connects us to every one of us , because it 's clear that it 's all connected in one .
When people see my images , a lot of times they 'll say , " Oh my God . " Have you ever wondered what that meant ?
The " oh " means it caught your attention , makes you present , makes you mindful .
The " my " means it connects with something deep inside your soul .
It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard . And " God " ?
God is that personal journey we all want to be on , to be inspired , to feel like we 're connected to a universe that celebrates life .
Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes ?
And if you compare light energy to musical scales , it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see , which is right in the middle ?
And aren 't we grateful for our brains that can , you know , take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world ?
And aren 't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature ?
Nature 's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude .
So I have a gift I want to share with you today , a project I 'm working on called Happiness Revealed , and it 'll give us a glimpse into that perspective from the point of view of a child and an elderly man of that world .
When I watch TV , it 's just some shows that you just -- that are pretend , and when you explore , you get more imagination than you already had , and when you get more imagination , it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things , like the path , if it 's a path , it could lead you to a beach , or something , and it could be beautiful .
You think this is just another day in your life ?
It 's not just another day . It 's the one day that is given to you today .
It 's given to you . It 's a gift .
It 's the only gift that you have right now , and the only appropriate response is gratefulness .
If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is , if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day , then you will have spent this day very well .
Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open , that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment .
Look at the sky .
We so rarely look at the sky .
We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment , with clouds coming and going .
We just think of the weather , and even with the weather , we don 't think of all the many nuances of weather .
We just think of good weather and bad weather .
This day , right now , has unique weather , maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again .
That formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now .
Open your eyes . Look at that .
Look at the faces of people whom you meet .
Each one has an incredible story behind their face , a story that you could never fully fathom , not only their own story , but the story of their ancestors .
We all go back so far , and in this present moment , on this day , all the people you meet , all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water , if you only open your heart and drink .
Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us .
You flip a switch and there is electric light .
You turn a faucet and there is warm water and cold water , and drinkable water .
It 's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience .
So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart .
And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings , and let them flow through you , that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you , just by your eyes , by your smile , by your touch , just by your presence .
Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you , and then it will really be a good day .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Eddy Cartaya : My glacier cave discoveries
Snow Dragon . Pure Imagination . Frozen Minotaur . These are the names Eddy Cartaya and his climbing partner Brent McGregor gave three glacier caves that they were the first to explore . As the Sandy Glacier slowly slides down Mount Hood in Oregon , the caves and tunnels inside it morph annually thanks to warm water from above and warm air from below . At TEDYouth , Cartaya takes us inside these magical spaces where the ice glows in bright blues and greens , and where artifacts rain from the ceiling .
So how many of you have ever been in a cave before ?
Okay , a few of you .
When you think of a cave , most of you think of a tunnel going through solid rock , and in fact , that 's how most caves are .
Around this half of the country , most of your caves are made of limestone .
Back where I 'm from , most of our caves are made of lava rock , because we have a lot of volcanoes out there .
But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice , specifically glacier ice that 's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon , called Mount Hood .
Now Mount Hood 's only one hour 's drive from Portland , the largest city in Oregon , where over two million people live .
Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it .
The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave .
Now these days , with so many people hiking around , it 's pretty hard to find a new cave , so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon 's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before .
It was kind of like being an astronaut , because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before .
So what is a glacier ?
Well , those of you who have ever seen or touched snow , you know that it 's really light , because it 's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together , and it 's mostly air .
If you squish a handful of snow to make a snowball , it gets really small , hard and dense .
Well , on a mountain like Hood , where it snows over 20 feet a year , it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice .
Now each year , more and more ice stacks up on top of it , and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight , forming a slow-moving river of ice .
When ice packed like that starts to move , we call it a glacier , and we give it a name .
The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier .
Now each year , as new snow lands on the glacier , it melts in the summer sun , and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice , and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier , forming big networks of caves , sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock .
Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year , new tunnels form .
Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave .
Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down , and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up , gets into the cave , and melts the ceilings back taller and taller .
But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving , because it 's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that 's slowly sliding down the mountain .
Now this is Brent McGregor , my cave exploration partner .
He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we 've been climbing mountains a long time , but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before .
Back in 2011 , Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves .
There were no GPS coordinates for it , and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier .
So in July of that year , we went out on the glacier , and we found a big crack in the ice .
We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole .
This is me looking into the entrance crevasse .
At the end of this hole , we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice .
We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end , and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out .
So how do you map a cave ?
Well , cave maps aren 't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels .
To make a cave map , you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave , and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations .
Then you use a compass and an inclinometer to measure the direction the cave is headed and measure the slope of the floor and the ceilings .
Now those of you taking trigonometry , that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there .
In fact , the more I mapped and studied caves , the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be .
So when you 're done surveying , you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well , and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this , and it 'll show you both a bird 's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage , kind of like an ant farm view .
We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow .
Now later this summer , as more snow melted off the glacier , we found more caves , and we realized they were all connected .
Not long after we mapped Snow Dragon , Brent discovered this new cave not very far away .
The inside of it was coated with ice , so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping .
This cave was amazing .
The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up .
And we couldn 't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why .
There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier .
Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave , freezing everything inside of it .
And we were so excited about finding this new pit , we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it .
It was so cold outside , we actually had to sleep inside the cave .
There 's our camp on the left side of this entrance room .
The next morning , we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier , where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time .
Brent named this cave Pure Imagination , I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined .
So besides really cool ice , what else is inside these caves ?
Well not too much lives in them because they 're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year .
But there are some really cool things in there .
There 's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice .
In fact , this past summer , scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles , tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions , might be living under the ice , kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday .
Another really cool things is that , as seeds and birds land on the surface of the glacier and die , they get buried in the snow and gradually become part of the glacier , sinking deeper and deeper into the ice .
As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice , they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor , where we end up finding them .
For example , this is a noble fir seed we found .
It 's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years , and it 's just now starting to sprout .
This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave .
This duck died on the surface of the glacier long , long ago , and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave .
And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon .
Even now , Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard , hidden away , just waiting to be found .
Like I said earlier , the idea of discovering in this busy world we live in kind of seems like something you can only do with space travel now , but that 's not true .
Every year , new caves get discovered that no one has ever been in before .
So it 's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself .
You just have to be willing to look and go where people don 't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it , because it might be in your own backyard .
Thank you very much .
Dan Cobley : What physics taught me about marketing
Physics and marketing don 't seem to have much in common , but Dan Cobley is passionate about both . He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton 's second law , Heisenberg 's uncertainty principle , the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding .
So I work in marketing , which I love , but my first passion was physics , a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher , when I had a little less gray hair .
So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us .
And I 'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing .
So quick show of hands -- who studied some marketing in university ?
Who studied some physics in university ?
Pretty good . And at school ?
Okay , lots of you .
So , hopefully this will bring back some happy , or possibly some slightly disturbing memories .
So , physics and marketing .
We 'll start with something very simple -- Newton 's Law : " The force equals mass times acceleration . "
This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign .
But if we rearrange this formula quickly , we can get to acceleration equals force over mass , which means that for a larger particle -- a larger mass -- it requires more force to change its direction .
It 's the same with brands : the more massive a brand , the more baggage it has , the more force is needed to change its positioning .
And that 's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen 's could stand for something other than accountancy .
It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners , and why companies like Unilever and P & amp ; G keep brands separate , like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand .
So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction .
The marketing is , the bigger a brand , the more difficult it is to reposition it .
So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures .
Now , who remembers Heisenberg 's uncertainty principle ?
Getting a little more technical now .
So this says that it 's impossible , by definition , to measure exactly the state -- i.e. , the position -- and the momentum of a particle , because the act of measuring it , by definition , changes it .
So to explain that -- if you 've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it , then the photon of light has momentum , which knocks the particle , so you don 't know where it was before you looked at it .
By measuring it , the act of measurement changes it .
The act of observation changes it .
It 's the same in marketing .
So with the act of observing consumers , changes their behavior .
Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group , and almost none of them buy lots of junk food .
And yet , McDonald 's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year .
Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets , who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit , but don 't shop like that any other day .
And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web , it 's very few .
Yet , at Google , we know it 's the number-one searched for category .
So luckily , the science -- no , sorry -- the marketing is getting easier .
Luckily , with now better point-of-sale tracking , more digital media consumption , you can measure more what consumers actually do , rather than what they say they do .
So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle , because the observation changes it .
The marketing is -- the message for marketing is -- that try to measure what consumers actually do , rather than what they say they 'll do or anticipate they 'll do .
So next , the scientific method -- an axiom of physics , of all science -- says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation , you can only disprove it .
What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning , and it will strengthen it , but it will not conclusively prove it .
And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water .
So if we take an example -- Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth .
It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water .
And there are parallels for marketing -- you can invest for a long time in a brand , but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers ' belief .
Take BP -- they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand , but then one little accident .
Think about Toyota .
It was , for a long time , revered as the most reliable of cars , and then they had the big recall incident .
And Tiger Woods , for a long time , the perfect brand ambassador .
Well , you know the story .
So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis , but it 's easy to disprove it -- any hypothesis is shaky .
And the marketing is that not matter how much you 've invested in your brand , one bad week can undermine decades of good work .
So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand .
And lastly , to the slightly obscure world of entropy -- the second law of thermodynamics .
This says that entropy , which is a measure of the disorder of a system , will always increase .
The same is true of marketing .
If we go back 20 years , the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand .
But where we are today , things have changed .
You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster .
But then you lose control of it .
With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer , it 's impossible to control where it goes .
Your brand starts being dispersed , it gets more chaotic .
It 's out of your control .
I actually saw him speak -- he did a good job .
But while this may be unsettling for marketers , it 's actually a good thing .
This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people , more in with the people .
It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force , which is ultimately good for your brand .
So , the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase ; it 's a fundamental law .
The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed .
You can 't fight it , so embrace it and find a way to work with it .
So to close , my teacher , Mr. Vutter , told me that physics is cool , and hopefully , I 've convinced you that physics can teach all of us , even in the world of marketing , something special .
Thank you .
Birke Baehr : What 's wrong with our food system
11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food -- far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms . Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy , unreal picture of big-box agriculture , he argues , as he outlines the case to green and localize food production . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Hello . My name is Birke Baehr , and I 'm 11 years old .
I came here today to talk about what 's wrong with our food system .
First of all , I would like to say that I 'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV , at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look .
It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids , like me , to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn 't good for us or the planet .
Little kids , especially , are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys .
I must admit , I used to be one of them .
I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy , little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day .
What I discovered was this is not true .
I began to look into this stuff on the Internet , in books and in documentary films , in my travels with my family .
I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system .
First , there 's genetically engineered seeds and organisms .
That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature -- like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato . Yuck .
Don 't get me wrong , I like fish and tomatoes , but this is just creepy .
The seeds are then planted , then grown .
The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals , and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s .
And most folks don 't even know they exist .
Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity ?
These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight .
Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way .
And let me tell you , corn is in everything .
And don 't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS .
Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow .
They do this because they 've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again .
Next , more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables , like pesticides and herbicides , to kill weeds and bugs .
When it rains , these chemicals seep into the ground , or run off into our waterways , poisoning our water too .
Then they irradiate our food , trying to make it last longer , so it can travel thousands of miles from where it 's grown to the supermarkets .
So I ask myself , how can I change ? How can I change these things ?
This is what I found out .
I discovered that there 's a movement for a better way .
Now a while back , I wanted to be an NFL football player .
I decided that I 'd rather be an organic farmer instead .
Thank you .
And that way I can have a greater impact on the world .
This man , Joel Salatin , they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system .
Since I 'm home-schooled , I went to go hear him speak one day .
This man , this " lunatic farmer , " doesn 't use any pesticides , herbicides , or genetically modified seeds .
And so for that , he 's called crazy by the system .
I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices , by buying our food directly from local farmers , or our neighbors who we know in real life .
Some people say organic or local food is more expensive , but is it really ?
With all these things I 've been learning about the food system , it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer , or we can pay the hospital .
Now I know definitely which one I would choose .
I want you to know that there are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud , just like I thought .
Sometimes I go to Bill 's farm and volunteer , so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from .
I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from .
I want you to know that there are farmers ' markets in every community popping up .
I want you to know that me , my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips .
I try to share this everywhere I go .
Not too long ago , my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal .
He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O 's or the sugarcoated flakes -- you know , the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front .
My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O 's cereal because Birke said he shouldn 't eat sparkly cereal .
And that , my friends , is how we can make a difference one kid at a time .
So next time you 're at the grocery store , think local , choose organic , know your farmer and know your food .
Thank you .
Brenda Laurel : Games for girls
A TED archive gem . At TED in 1998 , Brenda Laurel asks : Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys ? She spent two years researching the world of girls to create a game that girls would love .
Back in 1992 , I started working for a company called Interval Research , which was just then being founded by David Lidell and Paul Allen as a for-profit research enterprise in Silicon Valley .
I met with David to talk about what I might do in his company .
I was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting myself by being on the speaking circuit and writing books -- after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn 't think they could sell .
And David and I discovered that we had a question in common , that we really wanted the answer to , and that was , " Why hasn 't anybody built any computer games for little girls ? "
Why is that ?
It can 't just be a giant sexist conspiracy .
These people aren 't that smart .
There 's six billion dollars on the table .
They would go for it if they could figure out how .
So , what is the deal here ?
And as we thought about our goals -- I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution , in the classical sense that humanism , at its best , finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people .
The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life ; that we can do good things , that there are things worth doing because they 're good things to do , and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them .
So , contrary to popular belief , there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values .
And Interval Research is kind of the living example of how that can be true .
So David and I decided to go find out , through the best research we could muster , what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer , to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games .
We spent two and a half years conducting research ; we spent another year and a half in advance development .
Then we formed a spin-off company .
In the research phase of the project at Interval , we partnered with a company called Cheskin Research , and these people -- Davis Masten and Christopher Ireland -- changed my mind entirely about what market research was and what it could be .
They taught me how to look and see , and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child , " Of all these things we already make you , which do you like best ? " -- which gives you zero answers that are usable .
So , what we did for the first two and a half years was four things : We did an extensive review of the literature in related fields , like cognitive psychology , spatial cognition , gender studies , play theory , sociology , primatology .
Thank you Frans de Waal , wherever you are , I love you and I 'd give anything to meet you .
After we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing -- because , after all , that 's really what this is about -- we moved to the second phase of our work , where we interviewed adult experts in academia , some of the people who 'd produced the literature that we found relevant .
Also , we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day , like playground supervisors . We talked to them , confirmed some hypotheses and identified some serious questions about gender difference and play .
Then we did what I consider to be the heart of the work : interviewed 1,100 children , boys and girls , ages seven to 12 , all over the United States -- except for Silicon Valley , Boston and Austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they wouldn 't be a representative sample .
And at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the United States , after two years , we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children , drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research , and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics , for designing computer-based products -- and , in fact , any kind of products -- for little girls , ages eight to 12 .
And we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls .
In 1996 , in November , we formed the company Purple Moon which was a spinoff of Interval Research , and our chief investors were Interval Research , Vulcan Northwest , Institutional Venture Partners and Allen and Company .
We launched a website on September 2nd that has now served 25 million pages , and has 42,000 registered young girl users .
They visit an average of one and a half times a day , spend an average of 35 minutes a visit , and look at 50 pages a visit .
So we feel that we 've formed a successful online community with girls .
We launched two titles in October -- " Rockett 's New School " -- the first of a series of products -- is about a character called Rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place , with a blank slate , which allows girls to play with the question of , " What will I be like when I 'm older ? "
" What 's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school ?
Who are my friends ? " ; to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior ; and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves .
The other title that we launched is called " Secret Paths in the Forest , " which addresses the more fantasy-oriented , inner lives of girls .
These two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in PC Data -- entertainment titles in PC Data in December , right up there with " John Madden Football , " which thrills me to death .
So , we 're real , and we 've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls .
We 've made half-a-billion impressions with marketing and PR for this brand , Purple Moon .
Ninety-six percent of them , roughly , have been positive ; four percent of them have been " other . "
I want to talk about the other , because the politics of this enterprise , in a way , have been the most fascinating part of it , for me .
There are really two kinds of negative reviews that we 've received .
One kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be , and won 't show the product to little girls .
The other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be .
And so it 's funny to me that these interesting , odd bedfellows have one thing in common : they don 't listen to little girls .
They haven 't looked at children and they 're certainly not demonstrating any love for them .
I 'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two-and-a-half years of research that we did -- actually , some of the voices are more recent .
And these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives , of the things that they value and care about .
These are pictures the girls themselves never saw , but they gave to us This is the stuff those reviewers don 't know about and aren 't listening to and this is the kind of research I recommend to those who want to do humanistic work .
Girl 1 : Yeah , my character is usually a tomboy .
Hers is more into boys .
Girl 2 : Uh , yeah .
Girl 1 : We have -- in the very beginning of the whole game , always we do this : we each have a piece of paper ; we write down our name , our age -- are we rich , very rich , not rich , poor , medium , wealthy , boyfriends , dogs , pets -- what else -- sisters , brothers , and all those .
Girl 2 : Divorced -- parents divorced , maybe .
Girl 3 : This is my pretend [ unclear ] one .
Girl 4 : We make a school newspaper on the computer .
Girl 5 : For a girl 's game also usually they 'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers .
Girl 6 : Like , if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy , you would think that girls ' games were kinda sissy .
Girl 7 : I run track , I played soccer , I play basketball , and I love a lot of things to do .
And sometimes I feel like I can 't really enjoy myself unless it 's like a vacation , like when I get Mondays and all those days off .
Girl 8 : Well , sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because I have music lessons and I 'm on swim team -- all this different stuff that I have to do , and sometimes it gets overwhelming .
Girl 9 : My friend Justine kinda took my friend Kelly , and now they 're being mean to me .
Girl 10 : Well , sometimes it gets annoying when your brothers and sisters , or brother or sister , when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves .
Girl 11 : Because my older sister , she gets everything and , like , when I ask my mom for something , she 'll say , " No " -- all the time .
But she gives my sister everything .
Brenda Laurel : I want to show you , real quickly , just a minute of " Rockett 's Tricky Decision , " which went gold two days ago .
Let 's hope it 's really stable .
This is the second day in Rockett 's life .
The reason I 'm showing you this is I 'm hoping that the scene that I 'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar , now that you 've listened to some girls ' voices .
And you can see how we 've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we 've created .
Miko : Hey Rockett ! C 'mere !
Rockett : Hi Miko ! What 's going on ?
Miko : Did you hear about Nakilia 's big Halloween party this weekend ?
She asked me to make sure you knew about it .
Nakilia invited Reuben too , but -- Rockett : But what ? Isn 't he coming ?
Miko : I don 't think so .
I mean , I heard his band is playing at another party the same night .
Rockett : Really ? What other party ?
Girl : Max 's party is going to be so cool , Whitney .
He 's invited all the best people .
I 'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because I know I don 't have a lot of time .
After this awful event occurs , Rocket gets to decide how she feels about it .
Rockett : Who 'd want to show up at that party anyway ?
I could get invited to that party any day if I wanted to .
Gee , I doubt I 'll make Max 's best people list .
OK , so we 're going to emotionally navigate .
If we were playing the game , that 's what we 'd do .
If at any time during the game we want to learn more about the characters , we can go into this hidden hallway , and I 'll quickly just show you the interface .
We can , for example , go find Miko 's locker and get some more information about her .
Oops , I turned the wrong way .
But you get the general idea of the product .
I wanted to show you the ways , innocuous as they seem , in which we 're incorporating what we 've learned about girls -- their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility , and to play around with the social complexity of their lives .
I want to make the point that what we 're giving girls , I think , through this effort , is a kind of validation , a sense of being seen .
And a sense of the choices that are available in their lives .
We love them .
We see them .
We 're not trying to tell them who they ought to be .
But we 're really , really happy about who they are .
It turns out they 're really great .
I want to close by showing you a videotape that 's a version of a future game in the Rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together , that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers .
" Rockett 28 ! "
Rockett : It 's like I 'm just waking up , you know ?
Thanks .
Sue Austin : Deep sea diving ... in a wheelchair
When Sue Austin got a power chair 16 years ago , she felt a tremendous sense of freedom -- yet others looked at her as though she had lost something . In her art , she aims to convey the spirit of wonder she feels wheeling through the world . Includes thrilling footage of an underwater wheelchair that lets her explore ocean beds , drifting through schools of fish , floating free in 360 degrees .
It 's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey , to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me .
I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world .
When I started using the wheelchair , it was a tremendous new freedom .
I 'd seen my life slip away and become restricted .
It was like having an enormous new toy .
I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again .
Just being out on the street was exhilarating .
But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom , people 's reaction completely changed towards me .
It was as if they couldn 't see me anymore , as if an invisibility cloak had descended .
They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair .
When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair , they used words like " limitation , " " fear , " " pity " and " restriction . "
I realized I 'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level .
A part of me had become alienated from myself .
I was seeing myself not from my perspective , but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people 's responses to me .
As a result , I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience , new narratives to reclaim my identity .
[ " Finding Freedom : ' By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do ' official ' narratives . ' — Davis 2009 , TEDx Women " ] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair -- a power chair -- to negotiate the world .
I was working to transform these internalized responses , to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair , by creating unexpected images .
The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with .
When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom , it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people .
It seemed to open up new perspectives , and therein lay the paradigm shift .
It showed that an arts practice can remake one 's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar .
So when I began to dive , in 2005 , I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does , but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure , completely different to people 's responses to the wheelchair .
So I thought , " I wonder what 'll happen if I put the two together ? "
And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years .
So to give you an idea of what that 's like , I 'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle , and show you what an amazing journey it 's taken me on .
It is the most amazing experience , beyond most other things I 've experienced in life .
I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom .
And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too .
Their eyes literally light up , and they say things like , " I want one of those , " or , " If you can do that , I can do anything . "
And I 'm thinking , it 's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for , or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair , they have to think in a completely new way .
And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people 's lives .
For me , this means that they 're seeing the value of difference , the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation , we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives .
For me , the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation .
In fact , I now call the underwater wheelchair " Portal , " because it 's literally pushed me through into a new way of being , into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness .
And the other thing is , that because nobody 's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before , and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing , being and knowing , now you have this concept in your mind .
You 're all part of the artwork too .
Patrick Chappatte : The power of cartoons
In a series of witty punchlines , Patrick Chappatte makes a poignant case for the power of the humble cartoon . His projects in Lebanon , West Africa and Gaza show how , in the right hands , the pencil can illuminate serious issues and bring the most unlikely people together .
So yeah , I 'm a newspaper cartoonist -- political cartoonist .
I don 't know if you 've heard about it -- newspapers ?
It 's a sort of paper-based reader .
It 's lighter than an iPad , it 's a bit cheaper .
You know what they say ?
They say the print media is dying -- who says that ? Well , the media .
But this is no news , right ?
You 've read about it already .
Ladies and gentlemen , the world has gotten smaller .
I know it 's a cliche , but look , look how small , how tiny it has gotten .
And you know the reason why , of course .
This is because of technology -- yeah .
Any computer designers in the room ?
Yeah well , you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round , a nice round shape .
That makes a good cartoon .
But what are you going to do with a flat track pad , those square things ?
There 's nothing I can do as a cartoonist .
Well , I know the world is flat now .
That 's true .
And the Internet has reached every corner of the world , the poorest , the remotest places .
Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe .
Don 't go asking for a Frappuccino there .
So we are bridging the digital divide .
The Third World is connected , we are connected .
And what happens next ?
Well , you 've got mail .
Yeah .
Well , the Internet has empowered us .
It has empowered you , it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well .
You know , these last two cartoons -- I did them live during a conference in Hanoi .
And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam .
So I was cartooning live on a wide screen -- it was quite a sensation -- and then this guy came to me .
He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches , and I thought , " This is great , a Vietnamese fan . "
And as he came the second day , I thought , " Wow , that 's really a cartoon lover . "
And on the third day , I finally understood , the guy was actually on duty .
So by now , there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police .
No , but it 's true : the Internet has changed the world .
It has rocked the music industry ; it has changed the way we consume music .
For those of you old enough to remember , we used to have to go to the store to steal it .
And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application .
So be careful with that Facebook account -- your momma told you , be careful .
And technology has set us free -- this is free WiFi .
But yeah , it has liberated us from the office desk .
This is your life , enjoy it .
In short , technology , the internet , they have changed our lifestyle .
Tech guru , like this man -- that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century -- they are shaping the way we do things .
They are shaping the way we consume .
They are shaping our very desires .
You will not like it .
And technology has even changed our relationship to God .
Now I shouldn 't get into this .
Religion and political cartoons , as you may have heard , make a difficult couple , ever since that day of 2005 , when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world -- demonstrations , fatwa , they provoked violence . People died in the violence .
This was so sickening ; people died because of cartoons .
I mean -- I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides , actually .
They were used first by a Danish newspaper , which wanted to make a point on Islam .
A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet -- 12 of them refused . Did you know that ?
He told me , " Nobody has to tell me what I should draw .
This is not how it works . "
And then , of course , they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side .
They wanted to stir up controversy .
You know the story .
We know that cartoons can be used as weapons .
History tells us , they 've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews .
And here we are now .
In the United Nations , half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion -- they call it the defamation of religion -- while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech .
So the clash of civilizations is here , and cartoons are at the middle of it ?
This got me thinking .
Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table , and since you 're in my kitchen , please meet my wife .
In 2006 , a few months after , I went Ivory Coast -- Western Africa .
Now , talk of a divided place -- the country was cut in two .
You had a rebellion in the North , the government in the South -- the capital , Abidjan -- and in the middle , the French army .
This looks like a giant hamburger .
You don 't want to be the ham in the middle .
I was there to report on that story in cartoons .
I 've been doing this for the last 15 years ; it 's my side job , if you want .
So you see the style is different .
This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning .
I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009 .
So this is really journalism in cartoons .
You 'll hear more and more about it .
This is the future of journalism , I think .
And of course , I went to see the rebels in the north .
Those were poor guys fighting for their rights .
There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa .
And I went to see the Dozo .
The Dozo , they are the traditional hunters of West Africa .
People fear them -- they help the rebellion a lot .
They are believed to have magical powers .
They can disappear and escape bullets .
I went to see a Dozo chief ; he told me about his magical powers .
He said , " I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life . "
I said , " Well , maybe we don 't have time for this right now . "
" Another time . "
So back in Abidjan , I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and I thought , yes , in a context like this , cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side .
I mean , the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided -- it was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide -- so imagine .
And what can a cartoonist do ?
Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see , and the guy has to feed his family , right ?
So the idea was pretty simple .
We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast .
We took them away from their newspaper for three days .
And I asked them to do a project together , tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons , yes , in cartoons .
Show the positive power of cartoons .
It 's a great tool of communication for bad or for good .
And cartoons can cross boundaries , as you have seen .
And humor is a good way , I think , to address serious issues .
And I 'm very proud of what they did .
I mean , they didn 't agree with each other -- that was not the point .
And I didn 't ask them to do nice cartoons .
The first day , they were even shouting at each other .
But they came up with a book , looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast .
So the idea was there .
And I 've been doing projects like this , in 2009 in Lebanon , this year in Kenya , back in January .
In Lebanon , it was not a book .
The idea was to have -- the same principal , a divided country -- take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together .
So in Lebanon , we enrolled the newspaper editors , and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page , addressing the issue affecting Lebanon , like religion in politics and everyday life .
And it worked .
For three days , almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together -- anti-government , pro-government , Christian , Muslim , of course , English-speaking , well , you name it .
So this was a great project .
And then in Kenya , what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity , which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa .
And we did video clips -- you can see them if you go to YouTube / Kenyatoons .
So , preaching for freedom of speech is easy here , but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division , again , what can a cartoonist do ?
He has to keep his job .
Well I believe that in any context anywhere , he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred .
And that 's the message I try to convey to them .
I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing .
But we need to support these [ unclear ] , critical and responsible voices in Africa , in Lebanon , in your local newspaper , in the Apple store .
Today , tech companies are the world 's largest editors .
They decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see .
So really , it 's not about the freedom of cartoonists ; it 's about your freedoms .
And for dictators all over the world , the good news is when cartoonists , journalists and activists shut up .
Thank you .
Heather Brooke : My battle to expose government corruption
Our leaders need to be held accountable , says journalist Heather Brooke . And she should know : Brooke uncovered the British Parliamentary financial expenses that led to a major political scandal in 2009 . She urges us to ask our leaders questions through platforms like Freedom of Information requests -- and to finally get some answers .
Once upon a time , the world was a big , dysfunctional family .
It was run by the great and powerful parents , and the people were helpless and hopeless naughty children .
If any of the more rowdier children questioned the authority of the parents , they were scolded .
If they went exploring into the parents ' rooms , or even into the secret filing cabinets , they were punished , and told that for their own good they must never go in there again .
Then one day , a man came to town with boxes and boxes of secret documents stolen from the parents ' rooms .
" Look what they 've been hiding from you , " he said .
The children looked and were amazed .
There were maps and minutes from meetings where the parents were slagging each other off .
They behaved just like the children .
And they made mistakes , too , just like the children .
The only difference was , their mistakes were in the secret filing cabinets .
Well , there was a girl in the town , and she didn 't think they should be in the secret filing cabinets , or if they were , there ought to be a law to allow the children access .
And so she set about to make it so .
Well , I 'm the girl in that story , and the secret documents that I was interested in were located in this building , the British Parliament , and the data that I wanted to get my hands on were the expense receipts of members of Parliament .
I thought this was a basic question to ask in a democracy .
It wasn 't like I was asking for the code to a nuclear bunker , or anything like that , but the amount of resistance I got from this Freedom of Information request , you would have thought I 'd asked something like this .
So I fought for about five years doing this , and it was one of many hundreds of requests that I made , not -- I didn 't -- Hey , look , I didn 't set out , honestly , to revolutionize the British Parliament .
That was not my intention . I was just making these requests as part of research for my first book .
But it ended up in this very long , protracted legal battle and there I was after five years fighting against Parliament in front of three of Britain 's most eminent High Court judges waiting for their ruling about whether or not Parliament had to release this data .
And I 've got to tell you , I wasn 't that hopeful , because I 'd seen the establishment . I thought , it always sticks together . I am out of luck .
Well , guess what ? I won . Hooray .
Well , that 's not exactly the story , because the problem was that Parliament delayed and delayed releasing that data , and then they tried to retrospectively change the law so that it would no longer apply to them .
The transparency law they 'd passed earlier that applied to everybody else , they tried to keep it so it didn 't apply to them .
What they hadn 't counted on was digitization , because that meant that all those paper receipts had been scanned in electronically , and it was very easy for somebody to just copy that entire database , put it on a disk , and then just saunter outside of Parliament , which they did , and then they shopped that disk to the highest bidder , which was the Daily Telegraph , and then , you all remember , there was weeks and weeks of revelations , everything from porn movies and bath plugs and new kitchens and mortgages that had never been paid off .
The end result was six ministers resigned , the first speaker of the house in 300 years was forced to resign , a new government was elected on a mandate of transparency , 120 MPs stepped down at that election , and so far , four MPs and two lords have done jail time for fraud .
So , thank you .
Well , I tell you that story because it wasn 't unique to Britain .
It was an example of a culture clash that 's happening all over the world between bewigged and bestockinged officials who think that they can rule over us without very much prying from the public , and then suddenly confronted with a public who is no longer content with that arrangement , and not only not content with it , now , more often , armed with official data itself .
So we are moving to this democratization of information , and I 've been in this field for quite a while .
Slightly embarrassing admission : Even when I was a kid , I used to have these little spy books , and I would , like , see what everybody was doing in my neighborhood and log it down .
I think that was a pretty good indication about my future career as an investigative journalist , and what I 've seen from being in this access to information field for so long is that it used to be quite a niche interest , and it 's gone mainstream . Everybody , increasingly , around the world , wants to know about what people in power are doing .
They want a say in decisions that are made in their name and with their money . It 's this democratization of information that I think is an information enlightenment , and it has many of the same principles of the first Enlightenment .
It 's about searching for the truth , not because somebody says it 's true , " because I say so . "
No , it 's about trying to find the truth based on what you can see and what can be tested .
That , in the first Enlightenment , led to questions about the right of kings , the divine right of kings to rule over people , or that women should be subordinate to men , or that the Church was the official word of God .
Obviously the Church weren 't very happy about this , and they tried to suppress it , but what they hadn 't counted on was technology , and then they had the printing press , which suddenly enabled these ideas to spread cheaply , far and fast , and people would come together in coffee houses , discuss the ideas , plot revolution .
In our day , we have digitization . That strips all the physical mass out of information , so now it 's almost zero cost to copy and share information .
Our printing press is the Internet . Our coffee houses are social networks .
We 're moving to what I would think of as a fully connected system , and we have global decisions to make in this system , decisions about climate , about finance systems , about resources . And think about it -- if we want to make an important decision about buying a house , we don 't just go off . I mean , I don 't know about you , but I want to see a lot of houses before I put that much money into it .
And if we 're thinking about a finance system , we need a lot of information to take in . It 's just not possible for one person to take in the amount , the volume of information , and analyze it to make good decisions .
So that 's why we 're seeing increasingly this demand for access to information .
That 's why we 're starting to see more disclosure laws come out , so for example , on the environment , there 's the Aarhus Convention , which is a European directive that gives people a very strong right to know , so if your water company is dumping water into your river , sewage water into your river , you have a right to know about it .
In the finance industry , you now have more of a right to know about what 's going on , so we have different anti-bribery laws , money regulations , increased corporate disclosure , so you can now track assets across borders .
And it 's getting harder to hide assets , tax avoidance , pay inequality . So that 's great . We 're starting to find out more and more about these systems .
And they 're all moving to this central system , this fully connected system , all of them except one . Can you guess which one ?
It 's the system which underpins all these other systems .
It 's the system by which we organize and exercise power , and there I 'm talking about politics , because in politics , we 're back to this system , this top-down hierarchy .
And how is it possible that the volume of information can be processed that needs to in this system ?
Well , it just can 't . That 's it .
And I think this is largely what 's behind the crisis of legitimacy in our different governments right now .
So I 've told you a bit about what I did to try and drag Parliament , kicking and screaming , into the 21st century , and I 'm just going to give you a couple of examples of what a few other people I know are doing .
So this is a guy called Seb Bacon . He 's a computer programmer , and he built a site called Alaveteli , and what it is , it 's a Freedom of Information platform .
It 's open-source , with documentation , and it allows you to make a Freedom of Information request , to ask your public body a question , so it takes all the hassle out of it , and I can tell you that there is a lot of hassle making these requests , so it takes all of that hassle out , and you just type in your question , for example , how many police officers have a criminal record ?
It zooms it off to the appropriate person , it tells you when the time limit is coming to an end , it keeps track of all the correspondence , it posts it up there , and it becomes an archive of public knowledge .
So that 's open-source and it can be used in any country where there is some kind of Freedom of Information law .
So there 's a list there of the different countries that have it , and then there 's a few more coming on board .
So if any of you out there like the sound of that and have a law like that in your country , I know that Seb would love to hear from you about collaborating and getting that into your country .
This is Birgitta Jónsdóttir . She 's an Icelandic MP .
And quite an unusual MP . In Iceland , she was one of the protesters who was outside of Parliament when the country 's economy collapsed , and then she was elected on a reform mandate , and she 's now spearheading this project .
It 's the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative , and they 've just got funding to make it an international modern media project , and this is taking all of the best laws around the world about freedom of expression , protection of whistleblowers , protection from libel , source protection , and trying to make Iceland a publishing haven .
It 's a place where your data can be free , so when we think about , increasingly , how governments want to access user data , what they 're trying to do in Iceland is make this safe haven where it can happen .
In my own field of investigative journalism , we 're also having to start thinking globally , so this is a site called Investigative Dashboard . And if you 're trying to track a dictator 's assets , for example , Hosni Mubarak , you know , he 's just funneling out cash from his country when he knows he 's in trouble , and what you want to do to investigate that is , you need to have access to all of the world 's , as many as you can , companies ' house registrations databases .
So this is a website that tries to agglomerate all of those databases into one place so you can start searching for , you know , his relatives , his friends , the head of his security services .
You can try and find out how he 's moving out assets from that country .
But again , when it comes to the decisions which are impacting us the most , perhaps , the most important decisions that are being made about war and so forth , again we can 't just make a Freedom of Information request .
It 's really difficult . So we 're still having to rely on illegitimate ways of getting information , through leaks .
So when the Guardian did this investigation about the Afghan War , you know , they can 't walk into the Department of Defense and ask for all the information .
You know , they 're just not going to get it .
So this came from leaks of tens of thousands of dispatches that were written by American soldiers about the Afghan War , and leaked , and then they 're able to do this investigation .
Another rather large investigation is around world diplomacy .
Again , this is all based around leaks , 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables , and I was involved in this investigation because I got this leak through a leak from a disgruntled WikiLeaker and ended up going to work at the Guardian .
So I can tell you firsthand what it was like to have access to this leak . It was amazing . I mean , it was amazing .
It reminded me of that scene in " The Wizard of Oz . "
Do you know the one I mean ? Where the little dog Toto runs across to where the wizard [ is ] , and he pulls back , the dog 's pulling back the curtain , and -- " Don 't look behind the screen . Don 't look at the man behind the screen . "
It was just like that , because what you started to see is that all of these grand statesmen , these very pompous politicians , they were just like us .
They all bitched about each other . I mean , quite gossipy , those cables . Okay , but I thought it was a very important point for all of us to grasp , these are human beings just like us . They don 't have special powers .
They 're not magic . They are not our parents .
Beyond that , what I found most fascinating was the level of endemic corruption that I saw across all different countries , and particularly centered around the heart of power , around public officials who were embezzling the public 's money for their own personal enrichment , and allowed to do that because of official secrecy .
So I 've mentioned WikiLeaks , because surely what could be more open than publishing all the material ?
Because that is what Julian Assange did .
He wasn 't content with the way the newspapers published it to be safe and legal . He threw it all out there .
That did end up with vulnerable people in Afghanistan being exposed . It also meant that the Belarussian dictator was given a handy list of all the pro-democracy campaigners in that country who had spoken to the U.S. government .
Is that radical openness ? I say it 's not , because for me , what it means , it doesn 't mean abdicating power , responsibility , accountability , it 's actually being a partner with power . It 's about sharing responsibility , sharing accountability . Also , the fact that he threatened to sue me because I got a leak of his leaks , I thought that showed a remarkable sort of inconsistency in ideology , to be honest , as well .
The other thing is that power is incredibly seductive , and you must have two real qualities , I think , when you come to the table , when you 're dealing with power , talking about power , because of its seductive capacity .
You 've got to have skepticism and humility .
Skepticism , because you must always be challenging .
I want to see why do you -- you just say so ? That 's not good enough .
I want to see the evidence behind why that 's so .
And humility because we are all human . We all make mistakes .
And if you don 't have skepticism and humility , then it 's a really short journey to go from reformer to autocrat , and I think you only have to read " Animal Farm " to get that message about how power corrupts people .
So what is the solution ? It is , I believe , to embody within the rule of law rights to information .
At the moment our rights are incredibly weak .
In a lot of countries , we have Official Secrets Acts , including in Britain here . We have an Official Secrets Act with no public interest test . So that means it 's a crime , people are punished , quite severely in a lot of cases , for publishing or giving away official information .
Now wouldn 't it be amazing , and really , this is what I want all of you to think about , if we had an Official Disclosure Act where officials were punished if they were found to have suppressed or hidden information that was in the public interest ?
So that -- yes . Yes ! My power pose .
I would like us to work towards that .
So it 's not all bad news . I mean , there definitely is progress on the line , but I think what we find is that the closer that we get right into the heart of power , the more opaque , closed it becomes .
So it was only just the other week that I heard London 's Metropolitan Police Commissioner talking about why the police need access to all of our communications , spying on us without any judicial oversight , and he said it was a matter of life and death .
He actually said that , it was a matter of life and death .
There was no evidence . He presented no evidence of that .
It was just , " Because I say so .
You have to trust me . Take it on faith . "
Well , I 'm sorry , people , but we are back to the pre-Enlightenment Church , and we need to fight against that .
So he was talking about the law in Britain which is the Communications Data Bill , an absolutely outrageous piece of legislation .
In America , you have the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act .
You 've got drones now being considered for domestic surveillance .
You have the National Security Agency building the world 's giantest spy center . It 's just this colossal -- it 's five times bigger than the U.S. Capitol , in which they 're going to intercept and analyze communications , traffic and personal data to try and figure out who 's the troublemaker in society .
Well , to go back to our original story , the parents have panicked . They 've locked all the doors .
They 've kidded out the house with CCTV cameras .
They 're watching all of us . They 've dug a basement , and they 've built a spy center to try and run algorithms and figure out which ones of us are troublesome , and if any of us complain about that , we 're arrested for terrorism .
Well , is that a fairy tale or a living nightmare ?
Some fairy tales have happy endings . Some don 't .
I think we 've all read the Grimms ' fairy tales , which are , indeed , very grim .
But the world isn 't a fairy tale , and it could be more brutal than we want to acknowledge .
Equally , it could be better than we 've been led to believe , but either way , we have to start seeing it exactly as it is , with all of its problems , because it 's only by seeing it with all of its problems that we 'll be able to fix them and live in a world in which we can all be happily ever after . Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Skylar Tibbits : Can we make things that make themselves ?
MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits works on self-assembly -- the idea that instead of building something , we can create materials that build themselves , much the way a strand of DNA zips itself together . It 's a big concept at early stages ; Tibbits shows us three in-the-lab projects that hint at what a self-assembling future might look like .
Today I 'd like to show you the future of the way we make things .
I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling , replicating and repairing themselves .
So I 'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing , and then compare that to some natural systems .
So in the current state of manufacturing , we have skyscrapers -- two and a half years [ of assembly time ] , 500,000 to a million parts , fairly complex , new , exciting technologies in steel , concrete , glass .
We have exciting machines that can take us into space -- five years [ of assembly time ] , 2.5 million parts .
But on the other side , if you look at the natural systems , we have proteins that have two million types , can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds , or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour .
So there 's all of this complexity in our natural systems , but they 're extremely efficient , far more efficient than anything we can build , far more complex than anything we can build .
They 're far more efficient in terms of energy .
They hardly ever make mistakes .
And they can repair themselves for longevity .
So there 's something super interesting about natural systems .
And if we can translate that into our built environment , then there 's some exciting potential for the way that we build things .
And I think the key to that is self-assembly .
So if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment , I think there 's four key factors .
The first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build -- so our buildings and machines .
And we need to decode that into simple sequences -- basically the DNA of how our buildings work .
Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up , or reconfigure .
We need some energy that 's going to allow that to activate , And we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want .
So I 'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future .
The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot .
So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots -- 8 ft . , 12 ft. long proteins .
They 're embedded with mechanical electrical devices , sensors .
You decode what you want to fold up into , into a sequence of angles -- so negative 120 , negative 120 , 0 , 0 , 120 , negative 120 -- something like that ; so a sequence of angles , or turns , and you send that sequence through the string .
Each unit takes its message -- so negative 120 -- it rotates to that , checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor .
So these are the brilliant scientists , engineers , designers that worked on this project .
And I think it really brings to light : Is this really scalable ?
I mean , thousands of dollars , lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot .
Can we really scale this up ? Can we really embed robotics into every part ?
The next one questions that and looks at passive nature , or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability .
But it goes a step further , and it tries to have actual computation .
It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing , the digital logic gate , directly into your parts .
So this is a NAND gate .
You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that 's going to do your computing , and you have two input tetrahedrons .
One of them is the input from the user , as you 're building your bricks .
The other one is from the previous brick that was placed .
And then it gives you an output in 3D space .
So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do .
It computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do .
And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space -- so up or down .
So on the left-hand side , [ 1,1 ] input equals 0 output , which goes down .
On the right-hand side , [ 0,0 ] input is a 1 output , which goes up .
And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build .
So they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed .
So that means that we can have some form of self-replication .
In this case I call it self-guided replication , because your structure contains the exact blueprints .
If you have errors , you can replace a part .
All the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it .
So you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one .
It 's directly embedded ; there 's no external instructions .
So the last project I 'll show is called Biased Chains , and it 's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems .
So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system .
So basically you have a chain of elements .
Each element is completely identical , and they 're biased .
So each chain , or each element , wants to turn right or left .
So as you assemble the chain , you 're basically programming it .
You 're telling each unit if it should turn right or left .
So when you shake the chain , it then folds up into any configuration that you 've programmed in -- so in this case , a spiral , or in this case , two cubes next to each other .
So you can basically program any three-dimensional shape -- or one-dimensional , two-dimensional -- up into this chain completely passively .
So what does this tell us about the future ?
I think that it 's telling us that there 's new possibilities for self-assembly , replication , repair in our physical structures , our buildings , machines .
There 's new programmability in these parts .
And from that you have new possibilities for computing .
We 'll have spatial computing .
Imagine if our buildings , our bridges , machines , all of our bricks could actually compute .
That 's amazing parallel and distributed computing power , new design possibilities .
So it 's exciting potential for this .
So I think these projects I 've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future , if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world .
Thank you .
Leyla Acaroglu : Paper beats plastic ? How to rethink environmental folklore
Most of us want to do the right thing when it comes to the environment . But things aren 't as simple as opting for the paper bag , says sustainability strategist Leyla Acaroglu . A bold call for us to let go of tightly-held green myths and think bigger in order to create systems and products that ease strain on the planet .
So imagine , you 're in the supermarket , you 're buying some groceries , and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag .
Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment ?
Most people do pick the paper .
Okay , let 's think of why .
It 's brown to start with .
Therefore , it must be good for the environment .
It 's biodegradable . It 's reusable .
In some cases , it 's recyclable .
So when people are looking at the plastic bag , it 's likely they 're thinking of something like this , which we all know is absolutely terrible , and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages .
But people are often not thinking of something like this , which is the other end of the spectrum .
When we produce materials , we need to extract them from the environment , and we need a whole bunch of environmental impacts .
You see , what happens is , when we need to make complex choices , us humans like really simple solutions , and so we often ask for simple solutions .
And I work in design .
I advise designers and innovators around sustainability , and everyone always says to me , " Oh Leyla , I just want the eco-materials . "
And I say , " Well , that 's very complex , and we 'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means , because everything at some point comes from nature , and it 's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact .
So what happens is , we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions .
So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore .
It 's either the little voice at the back of your head , or it 's that gut feeling you get when you 've done the right thing , so when you 've picked the paper bag or when you 've bought a fuel-efficient car .
And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we 're trying to do the right thing .
But how do we know if we 're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment ?
So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences , the things we 've heard from other people .
It doesn 't tend to be based on any scientific framework .
And this is really hard , because we live in incredibly complex systems .
We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society , We have the industrial systems , which is essentially the entire economy , and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system , and , I would argue , the most important , the ecosystem .
And you see , the choices that we make as an individual , but the choices that we make no matter how high or low you are in the pecking order , has an impact on all of these systems .
And the thing is that we have to find ways if we 're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains .
What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less .
We have an increasing population , and everybody likes their mobile phones , especially in this situation here .
So we need to find innovative ways of solving some of these problems that we face .
And that 's where this process called life cycle thinking comes in .
So essentially , everything that is created goes through a series of life cycle stages , and we use this scientific process called life cycle assessment , or in America , you guys say life cycle analysis , in order to have a clearer picture of how everything that we do in the technical part of those systems affects the natural environment .
So we go all the way back to the extraction of raw materials , and then we look at manufacturing , we look at packaging and transportation , use , and end of life , and at every single one of these stages , the things that we do have an interaction with the natural environment , and we can monitor how that interaction is actually affecting the systems and services that make life on Earth possible .
And through doing this , we 've learned some absolutely fascinating things .
And we 've busted a bunch of myths .
So to start with , there 's a word that 's used a lot .
It 's used a lot in marketing , and it 's used a lot , I think , in our conversation when we 're talking about sustainability , and that 's the word biodegradability .
Now biodegradability is a material property ; it is not a definition of environmental benefits .
Allow me to explain .
When something natural , something that 's made from a cellulose fiber like a piece of bread , even , or any food waste , or even a piece of paper , when something natural ends up in the natural environment , it degrades normally .
Its little carbon molecules that it stored up as it was growing are naturally released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide , but this is a net situation .
Most natural things don 't actually end up in nature .
Most of the things , the waste that we produce , end up in landfill .
Landfill is a different environment .
In landfill , those same carbon molecules degrade in a different way , because a landfill is anaerobic .
It 's got no oxygen . It 's tightly compacted and hot .
Those same molecules , they become methane , and methane is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide .
So our old lettuces and products that we have thrown out that are made out of biodegradable materials , if they end up in landfill , contribute to climate change .
You see , there are facilities now that can actually capture that methane and generate power , displacing the need for fossil fuel power , but we need to be smart about this .
We need to identify how we can start to leverage these types of things that are already happening and start to design systems and services that alleviate these problems .
Because right now , what people do is they turn around and they say , " Let 's ban plastic bags . We 'll give people paper because that is better for the environment . "
But if you 're throwing it in the bin , and your local landfill facility is just a normal one , then we 're having what 's called a double negative .
I 'm a product designer by trade .
I then did social science .
And so I 'm absolutely fascinated by consumer goods and how the consumer goods that we have kind of become immune to that fill our lives have an impact on the natural environment .
And these guys are , like , serial offenders , and I 'm pretty sure everyone in this room has a refrigerator .
Now America has this amazing ability to keep growing refrigerators .
In the last few years , they 've grown one cubic foot on average , the standard size of a refrigerator .
And the problem is , they 're so big now , it 's easier for us to buy more food that we can 't eat or find .
I mean , I have things at the back of my refrigerator that have been there for years , all right ?
And so what happens is , we waste more food .
And as I was just explaining , food waste is a problem .
In fact , here in the U.S. , 40 percent of food purchased for the home is wasted .
Half of the world 's produced food is wasted .
That 's the latest U.N. stats . Up to half of the food .
It 's insane . It 's 1.3 billion tons of food per annum .
And I blame it on the refrigerator , well , especially in Western cultures , because it makes it easier .
I mean , there 's a lot of complex systems going on here .
I don 't want to make it so simplistic .
But the refrigerator is a serious contributor to this , and one of the features of it is the crisper drawer .
You all got crisper drawers ?
The drawer that you put your lettuces in ?
Lettuces have a habit of going soggy in the crisper drawers , don 't they ?
Yeah ? Soggy lettuces ?
In the U.K. , this is such a problem that there was a government report a few years ago that actually said the second biggest offender of wasted food in the U.K. is the soggy lettuce .
It was called the Soggy Lettuce Report .
Okay ? So this is a problem , people .
These poor little lettuces are getting thrown out left , right and center because the crisper drawers are not designed to actually keep things crisp .
Okay . You need a tight environment .
You need , like , an airless environment to prevent the degrading that would happen naturally .
But the crisper drawers , they 're just a drawer with a slightly better seal .
Anyway , I 'm clearly obsessed .
Don 't ever invite me over because I 'll just start going through your refrigerator and looking at all sorts of things like that .
But essentially , this is a big problem .
Because when we lose something like the lettuce from the system , not only do we have that impact I just explained at the end of life , but we actually have had to grow that lettuce .
The life cycle impact of that lettuce is astronomical .
We 've had to clear land .
We 've had to plant seeds , phosphorus , fertilizers , nutrients , water , sunlight .
All of the embodied impacts in that lettuce get lost from the system , which makes it a far bigger environmental impact than the loss of the energy from the fridge .
So we need to design things like this far better if we 're going to start addressing serious environmental problems .
We could start with the crisper drawer and the size .
For those of you in the room who do design fridges , that would be great .
The problem is , imagine if we actually started to reconsider how we designed things .
So I look at the refrigerator as a sign of modernity , but we actually haven 't really changed the design of them that much since the 1950s .
A little bit , but essentially they 're still big boxes , cold boxes that we store stuff in .
So imagine if we actually really started to identify these problems and use that as the foundation for finding innovative and elegant design solutions that will solve those problems .
This is design-led system change , design dictating the way in which the system can be far more sustainable .
Forty percent food waste is a major problem .
Imagine if we designed fridges that halved that .
Another item that I find fascinating is the electric tea kettle , which I found out that you don 't do tea kettles in this country , really , do you ?
But that 's really big in the U.K.
Ninety-seven percent of households in the United Kingdom own an electric tea kettle .
So they 're very popular .
And , I mean , if I were to work with a design firm or a designer , and they were designing one of these , and they wanted to do it eco , they 'd usually ask me two things .
They 'd say , " Leyla , how do I make it technically efficient ? "
Because obviously energy 's a problem with this product .
Or , " How do I make it green materials ?
How do I make the materials green in the manufacturing ? "
Would you ask me those questions ?
They seem logical , right ? Yeah .
Well I 'd say , " You 're looking at the wrong problems . "
Because the problem is with use .
It 's with how people use the product .
Sixty-five percent of Brits admit to over-filling their kettle when they only need one cup of tea .
All of this extra water that 's being boiled requires energy , and it 's been calculated that in one day of extra energy use from boiling kettles is enough to light all of the streetlights in England for a night .
But this is the thing .
This is what I call a product-person failure .
But we 've got a product-system failure going on with these little guys , and they 're so ubiquitous , you don 't even notice they 're there .
And this guy over here , though , he does . He 's named Simon .
Simon works for the national electricity company in the U.K.
He has a very important job of monitoring all of the electricity coming into the system to make sure there is enough so it powers everybody 's homes .
He 's also watching television .
The reason is because there 's a unique phenomenon that happens in the U.K.
the moment that very popular TV shows end .
The minute the ad break comes on , this man has to rush to buy nuclear power from France , because everybody turns their kettles on at the same time .
1.5 million kettles , seriously problematic .
So imagine if you designed kettles , you actually found a way to solve these system failures , because this is a huge amount of pressure on the system , just because the product hasn 't thought about the problem that it 's going to have when it exists in the world .
Now , I looked at a number of kettles available on the market , and found the minimum fill lines , so the little piece of information that tells you how much you need to put in there , was between two and a five-and-a-half cups of water just to make one cup of tea .
So this kettle here is an example of one where it actually has two reservoirs .
One 's a boiling chamber , and one 's the water holder .
The user actually has to push that button to get their hot water boiled , which means , because we 're all lazy , you only fill exactly what you need .
And this is what I call behavior-changing products : products , systems or services that intervene and solve these problems up front .
Now , this is a technology arena , so obviously these things are quite popular , but I think if we 're going to keep designing , buying and using and throwing out these kinds of products at the rate we currently do , which is astronomically high , there are seven billion people who live in the world right now .
There are six billion mobile phone subscriptions as of last year .
Every single year , 1.5 billion mobile phones roll off production lines , and some companies report their production rate as being greater than the human birth rate .
One hundred fifty-two million phones were thrown out in the U.S. last year ; only 11 percent were recycled .
I 'm from Australia . We have a population of 22 million -- don 't laugh -- and it 's been reported that 22 million phones are in people 's drawers .
We need to find ways of solving the problems around this , because these things are so complicated .
They have so much locked up inside them .
Gold ! Did you know that it 's actually cheaper now to get gold out of a ton of old mobile phones than it is out of a ton of gold ore ?
There 's a number of highly complex and valuable materials embodied inside these things , so we need to find ways of encouraging disassembly , because this is otherwise what happens .
This is a community in Ghana , and e-waste is reported , or electronic waste is reported by the U.N.
as being up to 50 million tons trafficked .
This is how they get the gold and the other valuable materials out .
They burn the electronic waste in open spaces .
These are communities , and this is happening all over the world .
And because we don 't see the ramifications of the choices that we make as designers , as businesspeople , as consumers , then these kinds of externalities happen , and these are people 's lives .
So we need to find smarter , more systems-based , innovative solutions to these problems , if we 're going to start to live sustainably within this world .
So imagine if , when you bought your mobile phone , your new one because you replaced your old one -- after 15 to 18 months is the average time that people replace their phones , by the way — so if we 're going to keep this kind of expedient mobile phone replacing , then we should be looking at closing the loop on these systems .
The people who produce these phones , and some of which I 'm sure are in the room right now , could potentially look at doing what we call closed-loop systems , or product system services , so identifying that there is a market demand and that market demand 's not going to go anywhere , so you design the product to solve the problem .
Design for disassembly , design for light-weighting .
We heard some of those kinds of strategies being used in the Tesla Motors car today .
These kinds of approaches are not hard , but understanding the system and then looking for viable , market-driven consumer demand alternatives is how we can start radically altering the sustainability agenda , because I hate to break it to you all : Consumption is the biggest problem .
But design is one of the best solutions .
These kinds of products are everywhere .
By identifying alternative ways of doing things , we can actually start to innovate , and I say actually start to innovate .
I 'm sure everyone in this room is very innovative .
But in the regards to using sustainability as a parameter , as a criteria for fueling systems-based solutions , because as I 've just demonstrated with these simple products , they 're participating in these major problems .
So we need to look across the entire life of the things that we do .
If you just had paper or plastic -- obviously reusable is far more beneficial -- then the paper is worse , and the paper is worse because it weighs four to 10 times more than the plastic , and when we actually compare , from a life cycle perspective , a kilo of plastic and a kilo of paper , the paper is far better , but the functionality of a plastic or a paper bag to carry your groceries home is not done with a kilo of each material .
It 's done with a very small amount of plastic and quite a lot more paper .
Because functionality defines environmental impact , and I said earlier that the designers always ask me for the eco-materials .
I say , there 's only a few materials that you should completely avoid .
The rest of them , it 's all about application , and at the end of the day , everything we design and produce in the economy or buy as consumers is done so for function .
We want something , therefore we buy it .
So breaking things back down and delivering smartly , elegantly , sophisticated solutions that take into consideration the entire system and the entire life of the thing , everything , all the way back to the extraction through to the end of life , we can start to actually find really innovative solutions .
And I 'll just leave you with one very quick thing that a designer said to me recently who I work with , a senior designer .
I said , " How come you 're not doing sustainability ? I know you know this . "
And he said , " Well , recently I pitched a sustainability project to a client , and turned and he said to me , ' I know it 's going to cost less , I know it 's going to sell more , but we 're not pioneers , because pioneers have arrows in their backs . ' " I think we 've got a roomful of pioneers , and I hope there are far more pioneers out there , because we need to solve these problems .
Thank you .
Benoit Mandelbrot : Fractals and the art of roughness
At TED2010 , mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 -- the extreme complexity of roughness , and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated .
Thank you very much .
Please excuse me for sitting ; I 'm very old .
Well , the topic I 'm going to discuss is one which is , in a certain sense , very peculiar because it 's very old .
Roughness is part of human life forever and forever , and ancient authors have written about it .
It was very much uncontrollable , and in a certain sense , it seemed to be the extreme of complexity , just a mess , a mess and a mess .
There are many different kinds of mess .
Now , in fact , by a complete fluke , I got involved many years ago in a study of this form of complexity , and to my utter amazement , I found traces -- very strong traces , I must say -- of order in that roughness .
And so today , I would like to present to you a few examples of what this represents .
I prefer the word roughness to the word irregularity because irregularity -- to someone who had Latin in my long-past youth -- means the contrary of regularity .
But it is not so .
Regularity is the contrary of roughness because the basic aspect of the world is very rough .
So let me show you a few objects .
Some of them are artificial .
Others of them are very real , in a certain sense .
Now this is the real . It 's a cauliflower .
Now why do I show a cauliflower , a very ordinary and ancient vegetable ?
Because old and ancient as it may be , it 's very complicated and it 's very simple , both at the same time .
If you try to weigh it -- of course it 's very easy to weigh it , and when you eat it , the weight matters -- but suppose you try to measure its surface .
Well , it 's very interesting .
If you cut , with a sharp knife , one of the florets of a cauliflower and look at it separately , you think of a whole cauliflower , but smaller .
And then you cut again , again , again , again , again , again , again , again , again , and you still get small cauliflowers .
So the experience of humanity has always been that there are some shapes which have this peculiar property , that each part is like the whole , but smaller .
Now , what did humanity do with that ?
Very , very little .
So what I did actually is to study this problem , and I found something quite surprising .
That one can measure roughness by a number , a number , 2.3 , 1.2 and sometimes much more .
One day , a friend of mine , to bug me , brought a picture and said , " What is the roughness of this curve ? "
I said , " Well , just short of 1.5 . "
It was 1.48 .
Now , it didn 't take me any time .
I 've been looking at these things for so long .
So these numbers are the numbers which denote the roughness of these surfaces .
I hasten to say that these surfaces are completely artificial .
They were done on a computer , and the only input is a number , and that number is roughness .
So on the left , I took the roughness copied from many landscapes .
To the right , I took a higher roughness .
So the eye , after a while , can distinguish these two very well .
Humanity had to learn about measuring roughness .
This is very rough , and this is sort of smooth , and this perfectly smooth .
Very few things are very smooth .
So then if you try to ask questions : " What 's the surface of a cauliflower ? "
Well , you measure and measure and measure .
Each time you 're closer , it gets bigger , down to very , very small distances .
What 's the length of the coastline of these lakes ?
The closer you measure , the longer it is .
The concept of length of coastline , which seems to be so natural because it 's given in many cases , is , in fact , complete fallacy ; there 's no such thing .
You must do it differently .
What good is that , to know these things ?
Well , surprisingly enough , it 's good in many ways .
To begin with , artificial landscapes , which I invented sort of , are used in cinema all the time .
We see mountains in the distance .
They may be mountains , but they may be just formulae , just cranked on .
Now it 's very easy to do .
It used to be very time-consuming , but now it 's nothing .
Now look at that . That 's a real lung .
Now a lung is something very strange .
If you take this thing , you know very well it weighs very little .
The volume of a lung is very small , but what about the area of the lung ?
Anatomists were arguing very much about that .
Some say that a normal male 's lung has an area of the inside of a basketball [ court ] .
And the others say , no , five basketball [ courts ] .
Enormous disagreements .
Why so ? Because , in fact , the area of the lung is something very ill-defined .
The bronchi branch , branch , branch and they stop branching , not because of any matter of principle , but because of physical considerations : the mucus , which is in the lung .
So what happens is that in a way you have a much bigger lung , but it branches and branches down to distances about the same for a whale , for a man and for a little rodent .
Now , what good is it to have that ?
Well , surprisingly enough , amazingly enough , the anatomists had a very poor idea of the structure of the lung until very recently .
And I think that my mathematics , surprisingly enough , has been of great help to the surgeons studying lung illnesses and also kidney illnesses , all these branching systems , for which there was no geometry .
So I found myself , in other words , constructing a geometry , a geometry of things which had no geometry .
And a surprising aspect of it is that very often , the rules of this geometry are extremely short .
You have formulas that long .
And you crank it several times .
Sometimes repeatedly : again , again , again , the same repetition .
And at the end , you get things like that .
This cloud is completely , 100 percent artificial .
Well , 99.9 .
And the only part which is natural is a number , the roughness of the cloud , which is taken from nature .
Something so complicated like a cloud , so unstable , so varying , should have a simple rule behind it .
Now this simple rule is not an explanation of clouds .
The seer of clouds had to take account of it .
I don 't know how much advanced these pictures are . They 're old .
I was very much involved in it , but then turned my attention to other phenomena .
Now , here is another thing which is rather interesting .
One of the shattering events in the history of mathematics , which is not appreciated by many people , occurred about 130 years ago , 145 years ago .
Mathematicians began to create shapes that didn 't exist .
Mathematicians got into self-praise to an extent which was absolutely amazing , that man can invent things that nature did not know .
In particular , it could invent things like a curve which fills the plane .
A curve 's a curve , a plane 's a plane , and the two won 't mix .
Well , they do mix .
A man named Peano did define such curves , and it became an object of extraordinary interest .
It was very important , but mostly interesting because a kind of break , a separation between the mathematics coming from reality , on the one hand , and new mathematics coming from pure man 's mind .
Well , I was very sorry to point out that the pure man 's mind has , in fact , seen at long last what had been seen for a long time .
And so here I introduce something , the set of rivers of a plane-filling curve .
And well , it 's a story unto itself .
So it was in 1875 to 1925 , an extraordinary period in which mathematics prepared itself to break out from the world .
And the objects which were used as examples , when I was a child and a student , as examples of the break between mathematics and visible reality -- those objects , I turned them completely around .
I used them for describing some of the aspects of the complexity of nature .
Well , a man named Hausdorff in 1919 introduced a number which was just a mathematical joke , and I found that this number was a good measurement of roughness .
When I first told it to my friends in mathematics they said , " Don 't be silly . It 's just something [ silly ] . "
Well actually , I was not silly .
The great painter Hokusai knew it very well .
The things on the ground are algae .
He did not know the mathematics ; it didn 't yet exist .
And he was Japanese who had no contact with the West .
But painting for a long time had a fractal side .
I could speak of that for a long time .
The Eiffel Tower has a fractal aspect .
I read the book that Mr. Eiffel wrote about his tower , and indeed it was astonishing how much he understood .
This is a mess , mess , mess , Brownian loop .
One day I decided -- halfway through my career , I was held by so many things in my work -- I decided to test myself .
Could I just look at something which everybody had been looking at for a long time and find something dramatically new ?
Well , so I looked at these things called Brownian motion -- just goes around .
I played with it for a while , and I made it return to the origin .
Then I was telling my assistant , " I don 't see anything . Can you paint it ? "
So he painted it , which means he put inside everything . He said : " Well , this thing came out ... " And I said , " Stop ! Stop ! Stop !
I see ; it 's an island . "
And amazing .
So Brownian motion , which happens to have a roughness number of two , goes around .
I measured it , 1.33 .
Again , again , again .
Long measurements , big Brownian motions , 1.33 .
Mathematical problem : how to prove it ?
It took my friends 20 years .
Three of them were having incomplete proofs .
They got together , and together they had the proof .
So they got the big [ Fields ] medal in mathematics , one of the three medals that people have received for proving things which I 've seen without being able to prove them .
Now everybody asks me at one point or another , " How did it all start ?
What got you in that strange business ? "
What got you to be , at the same time , a mechanical engineer , a geographer and a mathematician and so on , a physicist ?
Well actually I started , oddly enough , studying stock market prices .
And so here I had this theory , and I wrote books about it -- financial prices increments .
To the left you see data over a long period .
To the right , on top , you see a theory which is very , very fashionable .
It was very easy , and you can write many books very fast about it .
There are thousands of books on that .
Now compare that with real price increments .
Where are real price increments ?
Well , these other lines include some real price increments and some forgery which I did .
So the idea there was that one must be able to -- how do you say ? -- model price variation .
And it went really well 50 years ago .
For 50 years , people were sort of pooh-poohing me because they could do it much , much easier .
But I tell you , at this point , people listened to me .
These two curves are averages : Standard & amp ; Poor , the blue one ; and the red one is Standard & amp ; Poor 's from which the five biggest discontinuities are taken out .
Now discontinuities are a nuisance , so in many studies of prices , one puts them aside .
" Well , acts of God .
Acts of God . " In this picture , five acts of God are as important as everything else .
In other words , it is not acts of God that we should put aside .
That is the meat , the problem .
If you master these , you master price , and if you don 't master these , you can master the little noise as well as you can , but it 's not important .
Well , here are the curves for it .
Now , I get to the final thing , which is the set of which my name is attached .
In a way , it 's the story of my life .
My adolescence was spent during the German occupation of France .
Since I thought that I might vanish within a day or a week , I had very big dreams .
And after the war , I saw an uncle again .
My uncle was a very prominent mathematician , and he told me , " Look , there 's a problem which I could not solve 25 years ago , and which nobody can solve .
This is a construction of a man named [ Gaston ] Julia and [ Pierre ] Fatou .
If you could find something new , anything , you will get your career made . "
Very simple .
So I looked , and like the thousands of people that had tried before , I found nothing .
But then the computer came , and I decided to apply the computer , not to new problems in mathematics -- like this wiggle wiggle , that 's a new problem -- but to old problems .
And I went from what 's called real numbers , which are points on a line , to imaginary , complex numbers , which are points on a plane , which is what one should do there , and this shape came out .
This shape is of an extraordinary complication .
The equation is hidden there , z goes into z squared , plus c .
It 's so simple , so dry .
It 's so uninteresting .
Now you turn the crank once , twice : twice , marvels come out .
I mean this comes out .
I don 't want to explain these things .
This comes out . This comes out .
Shapes which are of such complication , such harmony and such beauty .
This comes out repeatedly , again , again , again .
And that was one of my major discoveries , to find that these islands were the same as the whole big thing , more or less .
And then you get these extraordinary baroque decorations all over the place .
All that from this little formula , which has whatever , five symbols in it .
And then this one .
The color was added for two reasons .
First of all , because these shapes are so complicated that one couldn 't make any sense of the numbers .
And if you plot them , you must choose some system .
And so my principle has been to always present the shapes with different colorings because some colorings emphasize that , and others it is that or that .
It 's so complicated .
In 1990 , I was in Cambridge , U.K.
to receive a prize from the university , and three days later , a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing .
So where did this come from ?
Obviously , from extraterrestrials .
Well , so the newspaper in Cambridge published an article about that " discovery " and received the next day 5,000 letters from people saying , " But that 's simply a Mandelbrot set very big . "
Well , let me finish .
This shape here just came out of an exercise in pure mathematics .
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules , which are repeated without end .
Thank you very much .
Sebastian Junger : Why veterans miss war
Civilians don 't miss war . But soldiers often do . Journalist Sebastian Junger shares his experience embedded with American soldiers at Restrepo , an outpost in Afghanistan 's Korengal Valley that saw heavy combat . Giving a look at the " altered state of mind " that comes with war , he shows how combat gives soldiers an intense experience of connection . In the end , could it actually be " the opposite of war " that soldiers miss ?
I 'm going to ask and try to answer , in some ways , kind of an uncomfortable question .
Both civilians , obviously , and soldiers suffer in war ; I don 't think any civilian has ever missed the war that they were subjected to .
I 've been covering wars for almost 20 years , and one of the remarkable things for me is how many soldiers find themselves missing it .
How is it someone can go through the worst experience imaginable , and come home , back to their home , and their family , their country , and miss the war ?
How does that work ? What does it mean ?
We have to answer that question , because if we don 't , it 'll be impossible to bring soldiers back to a place in society where they belong , and I think it 'll also be impossible to stop war , if we don 't understand how that mechanism works .
The problem is that war does not have a simple , neat truth , one simple , neat truth .
Any sane person hates war , hates the idea of war , wouldn 't want to have anything to do with it , doesn 't want to be near it , doesn 't want to know about it .
That 's a sane response to war .
But if I asked all of you in this room , who here has paid money to go to a cinema and be entertained by a Hollywood war movie , most of you would probably raise your hands .
That 's what 's so complicated about war .
And trust me , if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war , so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it , I promise you .
That 's the thing that has to be understood .
I 've covered war for about 20 years , as I said , but my most intense experiences in combat were with American soldiers in Afghanistan .
I 've been in Africa , the Middle East , Afghanistan in the ' 90s , but it was with American soldiers in 2007 , 2008 , that I was confronted with very intense combat .
I was in a small valley called the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan .
It was six miles long .
There were 150 men of Battle Company in that valley , and for a while , while I was there , almost 20 percent of all the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening in those six miles .
A hundred and fifty men were absorbing almost a fifth of the combat for all of NATO forces in the country , for a couple months .
It was very intense .
I spent most of my time at a small outpost called Restrepo .
It was named after the platoon medic that had been killed about two months into the deployment .
It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge , and sandbags , bunkers , gun positions , and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon , Battle Company .
I spent most of my time up there .
There was no running water .
There was no way to bathe .
The guys were up there for a month at a time .
They never even got out of their clothes .
They fought . The worked .
They slept in the same clothes .
They never took them off , and at the end of the month , they went back down to the company headquarters , and by then , their clothes were unwearable .
They burned them and got a new set .
There was no Internet . There was no phone .
There was no communication with the outside world up there .
There was no cooked food .
There was nothing up there that young men typically like : no cars , no girls , no television , nothing except combat .
Combat they did learn to like .
I remember one day , it was a very hot day in the spring , and we hadn 't been in a fight in a couple of weeks , maybe .
Usually , the outpost was attacked , and we hadn 't seen any combat in a couple of weeks , and everyone was just stunned with boredom and heat .
And I remember the lieutenant walking past me sort of stripped to the waist .
It was incredibly hot .
Stripped to the waist , walked past me muttering , " Oh God , please someone attack us today . "
That 's how bored they were .
That 's war too , is a lieutenant saying , " Please make something happen because we 're going crazy . "
To understand that , you have to , for a moment , think about combat not morally -- that 's an important job to do — but for a moment , don 't think about it morally , think about it neurologically .
Let 's think about what happens in your brain when you 're in combat .
First of all , the experience is very bizarre , it 's a very bizarre one .
It 's not what I had expected .
Usually , you 're not scared .
I 've been very scared in combat , but most of the time when I was out there , I wasn 't scared .
I was very scared beforehand and incredibly scared afterwards , and that fear that comes afterwards can last years .
I haven 't been shot at in six years , and I was woken up very abruptly this morning by a nightmare that I was being strafed by aircraft , six years later .
I 've never even been strafed by aircraft , and I was having nightmares about it .
Time slows down .
You get this weird tunnel vision .
You notice some details very , very , very accurately and other things drop out .
It 's almost a slightly altered state of mind .
What 's happening in your brain is you 're getting an enormous amount of adrenaline pumped through your system .
Young men will go to great lengths to have that experience .
It 's wired into us .
It 's hormonally supported .
The mortality rate for young men in society is six times what it is for young women from violence and from accidents , just the stupid stuff that young men do : jumping off of things they shouldn 't jump off of , lighting things on fire they shouldn 't light on fire , I mean , you know what I 'm talking about .
They die at six times the rate that young women do .
Statistically , you are safer as a teenage boy , you would be safer in the fire department or the police department in most American cities than just walking around the streets of your hometown looking for something to do , statistically .
You can imagine how that plays out in combat .
At Restrepo , every guy up there was almost killed , including me , including my good friend Tim Hetherington , who was later killed in Libya .
There were guys walking around with bullet holes in their uniforms , rounds that had cut through the fabric and didn 't touch their bodies .
I was leaning against some sandbags one morning , not much going on , sort of spacing out , and some sand was kicked into the side of , sort of hit the side of my face .
Something hit the side of my face , and I didn 't know what it was .
You have to understand about bullets that they go a lot faster than sound , so if someone shoots at you from a few hundred meters , the bullet goes by you , or hits you obviously , half a second or so before the sound catches up to it .
So I had some sand sprayed in the side of my face .
Half a second later , I heard dut-dut-dut-dut-duh .
It was machine gun fire .
It was the first round , the first burst of an hour-long firefight .
What had happened was the bullet hit , a bullet hit three or four inches from the side of my head .
Imagine , just think about it , because I certainly did , think about the angle of deviation that saved my life .
At 400 meters , it missed me by three inches .
Just think about the math on that .
Every guy up there had some experience like that , at least once , if not many times .
The boys are up there for a year .
They got back .
Some of them got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home .
Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less okay , psychologically .
I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O 'Byrne .
I 'm still very good friends with him .
He came back to the States . He got out of the Army .
I had a dinner party one night .
I invited him , and he started talking with a woman , one of my friends , and she knew how bad it had been out there , and she said , " Brendan , is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan , about the war ? "
And he thought about it quite a long time , and finally he said , " Ma 'am , I miss almost all of it . "
And he 's one of the most traumatized people I 've seen from that war .
" Ma 'am , I miss almost all of it . "
What is he talking about ?
He 's not a psychopath .
He doesn 't miss killing people .
He 's not crazy . He doesn 't miss getting shot at and seeing his friends get killed .
What is it that he misses ? We have to answer that .
If we 're going to stop war , we have to answer that question .
I think what he missed is brotherhood .
He missed , in some ways , the opposite of killing .
What he missed was connection to the other men he was with .
Now , brotherhood is different from friendship .
Friendship happens in society , obviously .
The more you like someone , the more you 'd be willing to do for them .
Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person .
It 's a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group , you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own .
In effect , you 're saying , " I love these other people more than I love myself . "
Brendan was a team leader in command of three men , and the worst day in Afghanistan — He was almost killed so many times .
It didn 't bother him .
The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet , knocked him over .
They thought he was dead .
It was in the middle of a huge firefight .
No one could deal with it , and a minute later , Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead , as it were , because he 'd come back to consciousness .
The bullet had just knocked him out .
It glanced off the helmet .
He remembers people saying , as he was sort of half-conscious , he remembers people saying , " Steiner 's been hit in the head . Steiner 's dead . "
And he was thinking , " I 'm not dead . "
And he sat up .
And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men , and that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan , was realizing that .
That 's brotherhood .
This wasn 't invented recently .
Many of you have probably read " The Iliad . "
Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus .
In World War II , there were many stories of soldiers who were wounded , were brought to a rear base hospital , who went AWOL , crawled out of windows , slipped out doors , went AWOL , wounded , to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there .
So you think about Brendan , you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that , a bond like that , in a small group , where they loved 20 other people in some ways more than they loved themselves , you think about how good that would feel , imagine it , and they are blessed with that experience for a year , and then they come home , and they are just back in society like the rest of us are , not knowing who they can count on , not knowing who loves them , who they can love , not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it .
That is terrifying .
Compared to that , war , psychologically , in some ways , is easy , compared to that kind of alienation .
That 's why they miss it , and that 's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society .
Thank you very much .
Jake Wood : A new mission for veterans -- disaster relief
After fighting overseas , 92 percent of American veterans say they want to continue their service . Meanwhile , one after another , natural disasters continue to wreak havoc worldwide . What do these two challenges have in common ? In telling the story of his friend Clay Hunt , Jake Wood from Team Rubicon reveals how veterans can contribute to disaster response -- and regain their sense of purpose , community and self-worth ..
Two years ago , after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan , I found myself in Port-au-Prince , leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city , three days after the earthquake .
We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go , the places nobody else could go , and after three weeks , we realized something . Military veterans are very , very good at disaster response .
And coming home , my cofounder and I , we looked at it , and we said , there are two problems .
The first problem is there 's inadequate disaster response .
It 's slow . It 's antiquated . It 's not using the best technology , and it 's not using the best people .
The second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration , and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan , and they 're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life .
And we sat here and we looked at these two problems , and finally we came to a realization . These aren 't problems .
These are actually solutions . And what do I mean by that ?
Well , we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home .
Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform .
And we can use veterans to improve disaster response .
Now on the surface , this makes a lot of sense , and in 2010 , we responded to the tsunami in Chile , the floods in Pakistan , we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border .
But it was earlier this year , when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization .
This is Clay Hunt . Clay was a Marine with me .
We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan .
Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince . He was also with us in Chile .
Earlier this year , in March , Clay took his own life .
This was a tragedy , but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing .
You know , Clay didn 't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan . Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home .
He lost purpose . He lost his community .
And perhaps most tragically , he lost his self-worth .
And so , as we evaluated , and as the dust settled from this tragedy , we realized that , of those two problems -- in the initial iteration of our organization , we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service . We had a lot of success , and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm .
But after Clay , we shifted that focus , and suddenly , now moving forward , we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that 's using disaster response .
Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran .
And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin , and then later Hurricane Irene , gave us an opportunity to look at that .
Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City , Missouri .
He joins the Army . The Army gives him a rifle .
They send him to Iraq .
Every day he leaves the wire with a mission .
That mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home .
It 's to keep the men around him alive .
It 's to pacify the village that he works in .
He 's got a purpose . But he comes home [ to ] Kansas City , Missouri , maybe he goes to college , maybe he 's got a job , but he doesn 't have that same sense of purpose .
You give him a chainsaw . You send him to Joplin , Missouri after a tornado , he regains that .
Going back , that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City , Missouri , joins the Army , the Army gives him a rifle , they send him to Iraq .
Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him .
He leaves the wire . He knows that those people have his back .
He 's slept in the same sand . They 've lived together .
They 've eaten together . They 've bled together .
He goes home to Kansas City , Missouri .
He gets out of the military . He takes his uniform off .
He doesn 't have that community anymore .
But you drop 25 of those veterans in Joplin , Missouri , they get that sense of community back .
Again , you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City .
He joins the Army . The Army gives him a rifle .
They send him to Iraq .
They pin a medal on his chest . He goes home to a ticker tape parade .
He takes the uniform off . He 's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community . He 's now Dave from Kansas City .
He doesn 't have that same self-worth .
But you send him to Joplin after a tornado , and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service , now they have self-worth again .
I think it 's very important , because right now somebody needs to step up , and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance .
Thank you very much .
Janine Shepherd : A broken body isn 't a broken person
Cross-country skier Janine Shepherd hoped for an Olympic medal -- until she was hit by a truck during a training bike ride . She shares a powerful story about the human potential for recovery . Her message : you are not your body , and giving up old dreams can allow new ones to soar .
Life is about opportunities , creating them and embracing them , and for me , that was the Olympic dream .
That 's what defined me . That was my bliss .
As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team , headed towards the Winter Olympics , I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates .
As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney , it was the perfect autumn day : sunshine , the smell of eucalypt and a dream .
Life was good .
We 'd been on our bikes for around five and half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved , and that was the hills , because I loved the hills .
And I got up off the seat of my bike , and I started pumping my legs , and as I sucked in the cold mountain air , I could feel it burning my lungs , and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face .
And then everything went black .
Where was I ? What was happening ?
My body was consumed by pain .
I 'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride .
I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney .
I had extensive and life-threatening injuries .
I 'd broken my neck and my back in six places .
I broke five ribs on my left side .
I broke my right arm . I broke my collarbone .
I broke some bones in my feet .
My whole right side was ripped open , filled with gravel .
My head was cut open across the front , lifted back , exposing the skull underneath .
I had head injures . I had internal injuries .
I had massive blood loss . In fact , I lost about five liters of blood , which is all someone my size would actually hold .
By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney , my blood pressure was 40 over nothing .
I was having a really bad day .
For over 10 days , I drifted between two dimensions .
I had an awareness of being in my body , but also being out of my body , somewhere else , watching from above as if it was happening to someone else .
Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken ?
But this voice kept calling me : " Come on , stay with me . "
" No . It 's too hard . "
" Come on . This is our opportunity . "
" No . That body is broken . It can no longer serve me . "
" Come on . Stay with me . We can do it . We can do it together . "
I was at a crossroads .
I knew if I didn 't return to my body , I 'd have to leave this world forever .
It was the fight of my life .
After 10 days , I made the decision to return to my body , and the internal bleeding stopped .
The next concern was whether I would walk again , because I was paralyzed from the waist down .
They said to my parents , the neck break was a stable fracture , but the back was completely crushed .
The vertebra at L1 was like you 'd dropped a peanut , stepped on it , smashed it into thousands of pieces .
They 'd have to operate .
They went in . They put me on a beanbag . They cut me , literally cut me in half , I have a scar that wraps around my entire body .
They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord .
They took out two of my broken ribs , and they rebuilt my back , L1 , they rebuilt it , they took out another broken rib , they fused T12 , L1 and L2 together .
Then they stitched me up . They took an entire hour to stitch me up .
I woke up in intensive care , and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success because at that stage I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes , and I thought , " Great , because I 'm going to the Olympics ! "
I had no idea . That 's the sort of thing that happens to someone else , not me , surely .
But then the doctor came over to me , and she said , " Janine , the operation was a success , and we 've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could , but the damage is permanent .
The central nervous system nerves , there is no cure .
You 're what we call a partial paraplegic , and you 'll have all of the injuries that go along with that .
You have no feeling from the waist down , and at most , you might get 10- or 20-percent return .
You 'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life .
You 'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life .
And if you walk again , it will be with calipers and a walking frame . "
And then she said , " Janine , you 'll have to rethink everything you do in your life , because you 're never going to be able to do the things you did before . "
I tried to grasp what she was saying .
I was an athlete . That 's all I knew . That 's all I 'd done .
If I couldn 't do that , then what could I do ?
And the question I asked myself is , if I couldn 't do that , then who was I ?
They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal .
I was lying on a thin , hard spinal bed .
I had no movement in my legs . I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots .
I had one arm in plaster , one arm tied down by drips .
I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head .
I shared the ward with five other people , and the amazing thing is that because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward , we didn 't know what each other looked like .
How amazing is that ? How often in life do you get to make friendships , judgment-free , purely based on spirit ?
And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts , our fears , and our hopes for life after the spinal ward .
I remember one night , one of the nurses came in , Jonathan , with a whole lot of plastic straws .
He put a pile on top of each of us , and he said , " Start threading them together . "
Well , there wasn 't much else to do in the spinal ward , so we did .
And when we 'd finished , he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward , and then he said , " Okay , everybody , hold on to your straws . "
And we did . And he said , " Right . Now we 're all connected . "
And as we held on , and we breathed as one , we knew we weren 't on this journey alone .
And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward , there were moments of incredible depth and richness , of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before .
And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward we would never be the same .
After six months , it was time to go home .
I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair , wrapped in a plaster body cast , and feeling the sun on my face for the first time .
I soaked it up and I thought , how could I ever have taken this for granted ?
I felt so incredibly grateful for my life .
But before I left the hospital , the head nurse had said to me , " Janine , I want you to be ready , because when you get home , something 's going to happen . "
And I said , " What ? " And she said , " You 're going to get depressed . "
And I said , " Not me , not Janine the Machine , " which was my nickname .
She said , " You are , because , see , it happens to everyone .
In the spinal ward , that 's normal .
You 're in a wheelchair . That 's normal .
But you 're going to get home and realize how different life is . "
And I got home and something happened .
I realized Sister Sam was right .
I did get depressed .
I was in my wheelchair . I had no feeling from the waist down , attached to a catheter bottle . I couldn 't walk .
I 'd lost so much weight in the hospital I now weighed about 80 pounds .
And I wanted to give up .
All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door .
I wanted my old life back . I wanted my body back .
And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed , and saying , " I wonder if life will ever be good again . "
And I thought , " How could it ? Because I 've lost everything that I valued , everything that I 'd worked towards .
Gone . "
And the question I asked was , " Why me ? Why me ? "
And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward , particularly Maria .
Maria was in a car accident , and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic , had no movement from the neck down , had damage to her vocal chords , and she couldn 't talk .
They told me , " We 're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her . "
I was worried . I didn 't know how I 'd react to being next to her .
I knew it would be challenging , but it was actually a blessing , because Maria always smiled .
She was always happy , and even when she began to talk again , albeit difficult to understand , she never complained , not once .
And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance .
And I realized that this wasn 't just my life .
It was life itself . I realized that this wasn 't just my pain .
It was everybody 's pain . And then I knew , just like before , that I had a choice . I could keep fighting this or I could let go and accept not only my body but the circumstances of my life .
And then I stopped asking , " Why me ? "
And I started to ask , " Why not me ? "
And then I thought to myself , maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start .
I had never before thought of myself as a creative person .
I was an athlete . My body was a machine .
But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do : that of rebuilding a life .
And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do , in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom .
I was no longer tied to a set path .
I was free to explore life 's infinite possibilities .
And that realization was about to change my life .
Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast , an airplane flew overhead , and I looked up , and I thought to myself , " That 's it !
If I can 't walk , then I might as well fly . "
I said , " Mom , I 'm going to learn how to fly . "
She said , " That 's nice , dear . "
I said , " Pass me the yellow pages . "
She passed me the phone book , I rang up the flying school , I made a booking , said I 'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight .
They said , " You know , when do you want to come out ? "
I said , " Well , I have to get a friend to drive me out because I can 't drive . Sort of can 't walk either .
Is that a problem ? "
I made a booking , and weeks later my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport , all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls .
I can tell you , I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot 's license .
I 'm holding on to the counter because I can 't stand .
I said , " Hi , I 'm here for a flying lesson . "
And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws .
" You get her . " " No , no , you take her . "
Finally this guy comes out . He goes , " Hi , I 'm Andrew , and I 'm going to take you flying . "
I go , " Great . " And so they drive me down , they get me out on the tarmac , and there was this red , white and blue airplane .
It was beautiful . They lifted me into the cockpit .
They had to slide me up on the wing , put me in the cockpit .
They sat me down . There are buttons and dials everywhere .
I 'm going , " Wow , how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do ? "
Andrew the instructor got in the front , started the airplane up .
He said , " Would you like to have a go at taxiing ? "
That 's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground .
I said , " No , I can 't use my legs . "
He went , " Oh . "
I said , " But I can use my hands , " and he said , " Okay . "
So he got over to the runway , and he applied the power .
And as we took off down the runway , and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac , and we became airborne , I had the most incredible sense of freedom .
And Andrew said to me , as we got over the training area , " You see that mountain over there ? "
And I said , " Yeah . "
And he said , " Well , you take the controls , and you fly towards that mountain . "
And as I looked up , I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains where the journey had begun .
And I took the controls , and I was flying .
And I was a long , long way from that spinal ward , and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot .
Didn 't know how on Earth I 'd ever pass a medical .
But I 'd worry about that later , because right now I had a dream .
So I went home , I got a training diary out , and I had a plan .
And I practiced my walking as much as I could , and I went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn 't too far apart .
And then I made great progression to the point where I could walk around the house , holding onto the walls , like this , and Mom said she was forever following me , wiping off my fingerprints .
But at least she always knew where I was .
So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again , I went on with my theory study , and then eventually , and amazingly , I passed my pilot 's medical , and that was my green light to fly .
And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school , way out of my comfort zone , all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots , you know , and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast , and then my steel brace , my baggy overalls , my bag of medication and catheters and my limp , and they used to look at me and think , " Oh , who is she kidding ? She 's never going to be able to do this . "
And sometimes I thought that too .
But that didn 't matter , because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries .
And little goals kept me going along the way , and eventually I got my private pilot 's license , and then I learned to navigate , and I flew my friends around Australia .
And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin engine rating .
And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather and got my instrument rating .
And then I got my commercial pilot 's license .
And then I got my instructor rating .
And then I found myself back at that same school where I 'd gone for that very first flight , teaching other people how to fly , just under 18 months after I 'd left the spinal ward .
And then I thought , " Why stop there ?
Why not learn to fly upside down ? "
And I did , and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor .
And Mom and Dad ? Never been up .
But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited , it was my spirit that was unstoppable .
The philosopher Lao Tzu once said , " When you let go of what you are , you become what you might be . "
I now know that it wasn 't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life .
It wasn 't until I let go of the life I thought I should have that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me .
I now know that my real strength never came from my body , and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically , who I am is unchanged .
The pilot light inside of me was still a light , just as it is in each and every one of us .
I know that I 'm not my body , and I also know that you 're not yours .
And then it no longer matters what you look like , where you come from , or what you do for a living .
All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are , because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws , and it 's time to join those up and to hang on .
And if we are to move towards our collective bliss , it 's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart .
So raise your straws if you 'll join me .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Hans Rosling : The best stats you 've ever seen
You 've never seen data presented like this . With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster , statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called " developing world . "
About 10 years ago , I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students . That was after having spent about 20 years together with African institutions studying hunger in Africa , so I was sort of expected to know a little about the world .
And I started in our medical university , Karolinska Institute , an undergraduate course called Global Health . But when you get that opportunity , you get a little nervous . I thought , these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in Swedish college systems -- so , I thought , maybe they know everything I 'm going to teach them about . So I did a pre-test when they came .
And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one : " Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs ? "
And I put them together , so that in each pair of country , one has twice the child mortality of the other . And this means that it 's much bigger a difference than the uncertainty of the data .
I won 't put you at a test here , but it 's Turkey , which is highest there , Poland , Russia , Pakistan and South Africa .
And these were the results of the Swedish students . I did it so I got the confidence interval , which is pretty narrow , and I got happy , of course : a 1.8 right answer out of five possible . That means that there was a place for a professor of international health -- and for my course .
But one late night , when I was compiling the report I really realized my discovery . I have shown that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees .
Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey . They would be right half of the cases .
But the students are not there . The problem for me was not ignorance ; it was preconceived ideas .
I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute -- that hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine , and they are on par with the chimpanzee there .
This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate , because the data of what 's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware .
We did this software which displays it like this : every bubble here is a country .
This country over here is China . This is India .
The size of the bubble is the population , and on this axis here I put fertility rate .
Because my students , what they said when they looked upon the world , and I asked them , " What do you really think about the world ? "
Well , I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin , mainly .
And they said , " The world is still ' we ' and ' them . ' And we is Western world and them is Third World . "
" And what do you mean with Western world ? " I said .
" Well , that 's long life and small family , and Third World is short life and large family . "
So this is what I could display here . I put fertility rate here : number of children per woman : one , two , three , four , up to about eight children per woman .
We have very good data since 1962 -- 1960 about -- on the size of families in all countries .
The error margin is narrow . Here I put life expectancy at birth , from 30 years in some countries up to about 70 years .
And 1962 , there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries , and they had small families and long lives .
And these were the developing countries : they had large families and they had relatively short lives .
Now what has happened since 1962 ? We want to see the change .
Are the students right ? Is it still two types of countries ?
Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here ?
Or have they got longer lives and live up there ?
Let 's see . We stopped the world then . This is all U.N. statistics that have been available . Here we go . Can you see there ?
It 's China there , moving against better health there , improving there .
All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families .
Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries , and they get larger families , but they -- no , longer life , but not larger families .
The Africans are the green down here . They still remain here .
This is India . Indonesia 's moving on pretty fast .
And in the ' 80s here , you have Bangladesh still among the African countries there .
But now , Bangladesh -- it 's a miracle that happens in the ' 80s : the imams start to promote family planning .
They move up into that corner . And in ' 90s , we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner , where we have long lives and small family , and we have a completely new world .
Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam .
1964 : America had small families and long life ; Vietnam had large families and short lives . And this is what happens : the data during the war indicate that even with all the death , there was an improvement of life expectancy . By the end of the year , the family planning started in Vietnam and they went for smaller families .
And the United States up there is getting for longer life , keeping family size . And in the ' 80s now , they give up communist planning and they go for market economy , and it moves faster even than social life . And today , we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam , 2003 , as in United States , 1974 , by the end of the war .
I think we all -- if we don 't look in the data -- we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia , which was in social change before we saw the economical change .
Let 's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income . This is the world distribution of income of people .
One dollar , 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day .
There 's no gap between rich and poor any longer . This is a myth .
There 's a little hump here . But there are people all the way .
And if we look where the income ends up -- the income -- this is 100 percent the world 's annual income . And the richest 20 percent , they take out of that about 74 percent . And the poorest 20 percent , they take about two percent . And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful . We think about aid , like these people here giving aid to these people here . But in the middle , we have most the world population , and they have now 24 percent of the income .
We heard it in other forms . And who are these ?
Where are the different countries ? I can show you Africa .
This is Africa . 10 percent the world population , most in poverty .
This is OECD . The rich country . The country club of the U.N.
And they are over here on this side . Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD .
And this is Latin America . It has everything on this Earth , from the poorest to the richest , in Latin America .
And on top of that , we can put East Europe , we can put East Asia , and we put South Asia . And how did it look like if we go back in time , to about 1970 ? Then there was more of a hump .
And we have most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians .
The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia . And if I now let the world move forward , you will see that while population increase , there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty , and this is the pattern we have today .
And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen , and we will not have a divided world . We 'll have most people in the middle .
Of course it 's a logarithmic scale here , but our concept of economy is growth with percent . We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase . If I change this , and I take GDP per capita instead of family income , and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product , and I take the regions down here , the size of the bubble is still the population .
And you have the OECD there , and you have sub-Saharan Africa there , and we take off the Arab states there , coming both from Africa and from Asia , and we put them separately , and we can expand this axis , and I can give it a new dimension here , by adding the social values there , child survival .
Now I have money on that axis , and I have the possibility of children to survive there .
In some countries , 99.7 percent of children survive to five years of age ; others , only 70 . And here it seems there is a gap between OECD , Latin America , East Europe , East Asia , Arab states , South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa .
The linearity is very strong between child survival and money .
But let me split sub-Saharan Africa . Health is there and better health is up there .
I can go here and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries .
And when it burst , the size of its country bubble is the size of the population .
Sierra Leone down there . Mauritius is up there . Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers , and they could sell their sugar -- they could sell their textiles -- on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America .
There 's a huge difference between Africa . And Ghana is here in the middle .
In Sierra Leone , humanitarian aid .
Here in Uganda , development aid . Here , time to invest ; there , you can go for a holiday . It 's a tremendous variation within Africa which we rarely often make -- that it 's equal everything .
I can split South Asia here . India 's the big bubble in the middle .
But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka .
I can split Arab states . How are they ? Same climate , same culture , same religion -- huge difference . Even between neighbors .
Yemen , civil war . United Arab Emirate , money which was quite equally and well used .
Not as the myth is . And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country .
Data is often better than you think . Many people say data is bad .
There is an uncertainty margin , but we can see the difference here : Cambodia , Singapore . The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data . East Europe : Soviet economy for a long time , but they come out after 10 years very , very differently . And there is Latin America .
Today , we don 't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America .
Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now .
And here we have high-income countries in the OECD .
And we get the whole pattern here of the world , which is more or less like this . And if we look at it , how it looks -- the world , in 1960 , it starts to move . 1960 .
This is Mao Tse-tung . He brought health to China . And then he died .
And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China , and brought them into the mainstream again .
And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this , so it 's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world .
But I would like to bring you back to about here at 1960 .
I would like to compare South Korea , which is this one , with Brazil , which is this one . The label went away for me here . And I would like to compare Uganda , which is there . And I can run it forward , like this .
And you can see how South Korea is making a very , very fast advancement , whereas Brazil is much slower .
And if we move back again , here , and we put on trails on them , like this , you can see again that the speed of development is very , very different , and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health , but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first .
And to show that , you can put on the way of United Arab Emirate .
They came from here , a mineral country . They cached all the oil ; they got all the money ; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket .
You have to invest in health . You have to get kids into schooling .
You have to train health staff . You have to educate the population .
And Sheikh Sayed did that in a fairly good way .
In spite of falling oil prices , he brought this country up here .
So we 've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world , where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past . Now , this is , more or less , if you look at the average data of the countries -- they are like this .
Now that 's dangerous , to use average data , because there is such a lot of difference within countries . So if I go and look here , we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was 1960 . If I split Uganda , there 's quite a difference within Uganda . These are the quintiles of Uganda .
The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there .
The poorest are down there . If I split South Africa , it 's like this .
And if I go down and look at Niger , where there was such a terrible famine , lastly , it 's like this . The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here , and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there , and yet we tend to discuss on what solutions there should be in Africa .
Everything in this world exists in Africa . And you can 't discuss universal access to HIV [ medicine ] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here . The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized , and it 's not relevant to have it on regional level . We must be much more detailed .
We find that students get very excited when they can use this .
And even more policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing . Now , why doesn 't this take place ?
Why are we not using the data we have ? We have data in the United Nations , in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other non-governmental organizations .
Because the data is hidden down in the databases .
And the public is there , and the Internet is there , but we have still not used it effectively .
All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics . There are some web pages like this , you know , but they take some nourishment down from the databases , but people put prices on them , stupid passwords and boring statistics .
And this won 't work . So what is needed ? We have the databases .
It 's not the new database you need . We have wonderful design tools , and more and more are added up here . So we started a nonprofit venture which we called -- linking data to design -- we call it Gapminder , from the London underground , where they warn you , " mind the gap . " So we thought Gapminder was appropriate .
And we started to write software which could link the data like this .
And it wasn 't that difficult . It took some person years , and we have produced animations .
You can take a data set and put it there .
We are liberating U.N. data , some few U.N. organization .
Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world , but what we really need is , of course , a search function .
A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world . And what do we hear when we go around ?
I 've done anthropology on the main statistical units . Everyone says , " It 's impossible . This can 't be done . Our information is so peculiar in detail , so that cannot be searched as others can be searched .
We cannot give the data free to the students , free to the entrepreneurs of the world . "
But this is what we would like to see , isn 't it ?
The publicly-funded data is down here .
And we would like flowers to grow out on the Net .
And one of the crucial points is to make them searchable , and then people can use the different design tool to animate it there .
And I have a pretty good news for you . I have a good news that the present , new Head of U.N. Statistics , he doesn 't say it 's impossible .
He only says , " We can 't do it . "
And that 's a quite clever guy , huh ?
So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years .
We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways .
This is the income distribution of China , 1970 .
the income distribution of the United States , 1970 .
Almost no overlap . Almost no overlap . And what has happened ?
What has happened is this : that China is growing , it 's not so equal any longer , and it 's appearing here , overlooking the United States .
Almost like a ghost , isn 't it , huh ?
It 's pretty scary . But I think it 's very important to have all this information .
We need really to see it . And instead of looking at this , I would like to end up by showing the Internet users per 1,000 .
In this software , we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily .
It takes some time to change for this , but on the axises , you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have .
And the thing would be to get up the databases free , to get them searchable , and with a second click , to get them into the graphic formats , where you can instantly understand them .
Now , statisticians doesn 't like it , because they say that this will not show the reality ; we have to have statistical , analytical methods .
But this is hypothesis-generating .
I end now with the world . There , the Internet is coming .
The number of Internet users are going up like this . This is the GDP per capita .
And it 's a new technology coming in , but then amazingly , how well it fits to the economy of the countries . That 's why the 100 dollar computer will be so important . But it 's a nice tendency .
It 's as if the world is flattening off , isn 't it ? These countries are lifting more than the economy and will be very interesting to follow this over the year , as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data . Thank you very much .

Paddy Ashdown : The global power shift
Paddy Ashdown claims that we are living in a moment in history where power is changing in ways it never has before . In a spellbinding talk he outlines the three major global shifts that he sees coming . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
There 's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century .
It was said to echo in Churchill 's brain in the 1930s .
And the poem goes : " On the idle hill of summer , lazy with the flow of streams , hark I hear a distant drummer , drumming like a sound in dreams , far and near and low and louder on the roads of earth go by , dear to friend and food to powder , soldiers marching , soon to die . "
Those who are interested in poetry , the poem is " A Shropshire Lad " written by A.E. Housman .
But what Housman understood , and you hear it in the symphonies of Nielsen too , was that the long , hot , silvan summers of stability of the 19th century were coming to a close , and that we were about to move into one of those terrifying periods of history when power changes .
And these are always periods , ladies and gentlemen , accompanied by turbulence , and all too often by blood .
And my message for you is that I believe we are condemned , if you like , to live at just one of those moments in history when the gimbals upon which the established order of power is beginning to change and the new look of the world , the new powers that exist in the world , are beginning to take form .
And these are -- and we see it very clearly today -- nearly always highly turbulent times , highly difficult times , and all too often very bloody times .
By the way , it happens about once every century .
You might argue that the last time it happened -- and that 's what Housman felt coming and what Churchill felt too -- was that when power passed from the old nations , the old powers of Europe , across the Atlantic to the new emerging power of the United States of America -- the beginning of the American century .
And of course , into the vacuum where the too-old European powers used to be were played the two bloody catastrophes of the last century -- the one in the first part and the one in the second part : the two great World Wars .
Mao Zedong used to refer to them as the European civil wars , and it 's probably a more accurate way of describing them .
Well , ladies and gentlemen , we live at one of those times .
But for us , I want to talk about three factors today .
And the first of these , the first two of these , is about a shift in power .
And the second is about some new dimension which I want to refer to , which has never quite happened in the way it 's happening now .
But let 's talk about the shifts of power that are occurring to the world .
And what is happening today is , in one sense , frightening because it 's never happened before .
We have seen lateral shifts of power -- the power of Greece passed to Rome and the power shifts that occurred during the European civilizations -- but we are seeing something slightly different .
For power is not just moving laterally from nation to nation .
It 's also moving vertically .
What 's happening today is that the power that was encased , held to accountability , held to the rule of law , within the institution of the nation state has now migrated in very large measure onto the global stage .
The globalization of power -- we talk about the globalization of markets , but actually it 's the globalization of real power .
And where , at the nation state level that power is held to accountability subject to the rule of law , on the international stage it is not .
The international stage and the global stage where power now resides : the power of the Internet , the power of the satellite broadcasters , the power of the money changers -- this vast money-go-round that circulates now 32 times the amount of money necessary for the trade it 's supposed to be there to finance -- the money changers , if you like , the financial speculators that have brought us all to our knees quite recently , the power of the multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries .
These live in a global space which is largely unregulated , not subject to the rule of law , and in which people may act free of constraint .
Now that suits the powerful up to a moment .
It 's always suitable for those who have the most power to operate in spaces without constraint , but the lesson of history is that , sooner or later , unregulated space -- space not subject to the rule of law -- becomes populated , not just by the things you wanted -- international trade , the Internet , etc . -- but also by the things you don 't want -- international criminality , international terrorism .
The revelation of 9 / 11 is that even if you are the most powerful nation on earth , nevertheless , those who inhabit that space can attack you even in your most iconic of cities one bright September morning .
It 's said that something like 60 percent of the four million dollars that was taken to fund 9 / 11 actually passed through the institutions of the Twin Towers which 9 / 11 destroyed .
You see , our enemies also use this space -- the space of mass travel , the Internet , satellite broadcasters -- to be able to get around their poison , which is about destroying our systems and our ways .
Sooner or later , sooner or later , the rule of history is that where power goes governance must follow .
And if it is therefore the case , as I believe it is , that one of the phenomenon of our time is the globalization of power , then it follows that one of the challenges of our time is to bring governance to the global space .
And I believe that the decades ahead of us now will be to a greater or lesser extent turbulent the more or less we are able to achieve that aim : to bring governance to the global space .
Now notice , I 'm not talking about government .
I 'm not talking about setting up some global democratic institution .
My own view , by the way , ladies and gentlemen , is that this is unlikely to be done by spawning more U.N. institutions .
If we didn 't have the U.N. , we 'd have to invent it .
The world needs an international forum .
It needs a means by which you can legitimize international action .
But when it comes to governance of the global space , my guess is this won 't happen through the creation of more U.N. institutions .
It will actually happen by the powerful coming together and making treaty-based systems , treaty-based agreements , to govern that global space .
And if you look , you can see them happening , already beginning to emerge .
The World Trade Organization : treaty-based organization , entirely treaty-based , and yet , powerful enough to hold even the most powerful , the United States , to account if necessary .
Kyoto : the beginnings of struggling to create a treaty-based organization .
The G20 : we know now that we have to put together an institution which is capable of bringing governance to that financial space for financial speculation .
And that 's what the G20 is , a treaty-based institution .
Now there 's a problem there , and we 'll come back to it in a minute , which is that if you bring the most powerful together to make the rules in treaty-based institutions , to fill that governance space , then what happens to the weak who are left out ?
And that 's a big problem , and we 'll return to it in just a second .
So there 's my first message , that if you are to pass through these turbulent times more or less turbulently , then our success in doing that will in large measure depend on our capacity to bring sensible governance to the global space .
And watch that beginning to happen .
My second point is , and I know I don 't have to talk to an audience like this about such a thing , but power is not just shifting vertically , it 's also shifting horizontally .
You might argue that the story , the history of civilizations , has been civilizations gathered around seas -- with the first ones around the Mediterranean , the more recent ones in the ascendents of Western power around the Atlantic .
Well it seems to me that we 're now seeing a fundamental shift of power , broadly speaking , away from nations gathered around the Atlantic [ seaboard ] to the nations gathered around the Pacific rim .
Now that begins with economic power , but that 's the way it always begins .
You already begin to see the development of foreign policies , the augmentation of military budgets occurring in the other growing powers in the world .
I think actually this is not so much a shift from the West to the East ; something different is happening .
My guess is , for what it 's worth , is that the United States will remain the most powerful nation on earth for the next 10 years , 15 , but the context in which she holds her power has now radically altered ; it has radically changed .
We are coming out of 50 years , most unusual years , of history in which we have had a totally mono-polar world , in which every compass needle for or against has to be referenced by its position to Washington -- a world bestrode by a single colossus .
But that 's not a usual case in history .
In fact , what 's now emerging is the much more normal case of history .
You 're beginning to see the emergence of a multi-polar world .
Up until now , the United States has been the dominant feature of our world .
They will remain the most powerful nation , but they will be the most powerful nation in an increasingly multi-polar world .
And you begin to see the alternative centers of power building up -- in China , of course , though my own guess is that China 's ascent to greatness is not smooth .
It 's going to be quite grumpy as China begins to democratize her society after liberalizing her economy .
But that 's a subject of a different discussion .
You see India , you see Brazil .
You see increasingly that the world now looks actually , for us Europeans , much more like Europe in the 19th century .
Europe in the 19th century : a great British foreign secretary , Lord Canning , used to describe it as the " European concert of powers . "
There was a balance , a five-sided balance .
Britain always played to the balance .
If Paris got together with Berlin , Britain got together with Vienna and Rome to provide a counterbalance .
Now notice , in a period which is dominated by a mono-polar world , you have fixed alliances -- NATO , the Warsaw Pact .
A fixed polarity of power means fixed alliances .
But a multiple polarity of power means shifting and changing alliances .
And that 's the world we 're coming into , in which we will increasingly see that our alliances are not fixed .
Canning , the great British foreign secretary once said , " Britain has a common interest , but no common allies . "
And we will see increasingly that even we in the West will reach out , have to reach out , beyond the cozy circle of the Atlantic powers to make alliances with others if we want to get things done in the world .
Note , that when we went into Libya , it was not good enough for the West to do it alone ; we had to bring others in .
We had to bring , in this case , the Arab League in .
My guess is Iraq and Afghanistan are the last times when the West has tried to do it themselves , and we haven 't succeeded .
My guess is that we 're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years -- I say 400 years because it 's the end of the Ottoman Empire -- of the hegemony of Western power , Western institutions and Western values .
You know , up until now , if the West got its act together , it could propose and dispose in every corner of the world .
But that 's no longer true .
Take the last financial crisis after the Second World War .
The West got together -- the Bretton Woods Institution , World Bank , International Monetary Fund -- the problem solved .
Now we have to call in others .
Now we have to create the G20 .
Now we have to reach beyond the cozy circle of our Western friends .
Let me make a prediction for you , which is probably even more startling .
I suspect we are now reaching the end of 400 years when Western power was enough .
People say to me , " The Chinese , of course , they 'll never get themselves involved in peace-making , multilateral peace-making around the world . "
Oh yes ? Why not ?
How many Chinese troops are serving under the blue beret , serving under the blue flag , serving under the U.N. command in the world today ?
3,700 .
How many Americans ? 11 .
What is the largest naval contingent tackling the issue of Somali pirates ?
The Chinese naval contingent .
Of course they are , they are a mercantilist nation .
They want to keep the sea lanes open .
Increasingly , we are going to have to do business with people with whom we do not share values , but with whom , for the moment , we share common interests .
It 's a whole new different way of looking at the world that is now emerging .
And here 's the third factor , which is totally different .
Today in our modern world , because of the Internet , because of the kinds of things people have been talking about here , everything is connected to everything .
We are now interdependent .
We are now interlocked , as nations , as individuals , in a way which has never been the case before , never been the case before .
The interrelationship of nations , well it 's always existed .
Diplomacy is about managing the interrelationship of nations .
But now we are intimately locked together .
You get swine flu in Mexico , it 's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later .
Lehman Brothers goes down , the whole lot collapses .
There are fires in the steppes of Russia , food riots in Africa .
We are all now deeply , deeply , deeply interconnected .
And what that means is the idea of a nation state acting alone , not connected with others , not working with others , is no longer a viable proposition .
Because the actions of a nation state are neither confined to itself , nor is it sufficient for the nation state itself to control its own territory , because the effects outside the nation state are now beginning to affect what happens inside them .
I was a young soldier in the last of the small empire wars of Britain .
At that time , the defense of my country was about one thing and one thing only : how strong was our army , how strong was our air force , how strong was our navy and how strong were our allies .
That was when the enemy was outside the walls .
Now the enemy is inside the walls .
Now if I want to talk about the defense of my country , I have to speak to the Minister of Health because pandemic disease is a threat to my security , I have to speak to the Minister of Agriculture because food security is a threat to my security , I have to speak to the Minister of Industry because the fragility of our hi-tech infrastructure is now a point of attack for our enemies -- as we see from cyber warfare -- I have to speak to the Minister of Home Affairs because who has entered my country , who lives in that terraced house in that inner city has a direct effect on what happens in my country -- as we in London saw in the 7 / 7 bombings .
It 's no longer the case that the security of a country is simply a matter for its soldiers and its ministry of defense .
It 's its capacity to lock together its institutions .
And this tells you something very important .
It tells you that , in fact , our governments , vertically constructed , constructed on the economic model of the Industrial Revolution -- vertical hierarchy , specialization of tasks , command structures -- have got the wrong structures completely .
You in business know that the paradigm structure of our time , ladies and gentlemen , is the network .
It 's your capacity to network that matters , both within your governments and externally .
So here is Ashdown 's third law .
By the way , don 't ask me about Ashdown 's first law and second law because I haven 't invented those yet ; it always sounds better if there 's a third law , doesn 't it ?
Ashdown 's third law is that in the modern age , where everything is connected to everything , the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others .
The most important bit about your structure -- whether you 're a government , whether you 're an army regiment , whether you 're a business -- is your docking points , your interconnectors , your capacity to network with others .
You understand that in industry ; governments don 't .
But now one final thing .
If it is the case , ladies and gentlemen -- and it is -- that we are now locked together in a way that has never been quite the same before , then it 's also the case that we share a destiny with each other .
Suddenly and for the very first time , collective defense , the thing that has dominated us as the concept of securing our nations , is no longer enough .
It used to be the case that if my tribe was more powerful than their tribe , I was safe ; if my country was more powerful than their country , I was safe ; my alliance , like NATO , was more powerful than their alliance , I was safe .
It is no longer the case .
The advent of the interconnectedness and of the weapons of mass destruction means that , increasingly , I share a destiny with my enemy .
When I was a diplomat negotiating the disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union in Geneva in the 1970s , we succeeded because we understood we shared a destiny with them .
Collective security is not enough .
Peace has come to Northern Ireland because both sides realized that the zero-sum game couldn 't work .
They shared a destiny with their enemies .
One of the great barriers to peace in the Middle East is that both sides , both Israel and , I think , the Palestinians , do not understand that they share a collective destiny .
And so suddenly , ladies and gentlemen , what has been the proposition of visionaries and poets down the ages becomes something we have to take seriously as a matter of public policy .
I started with a poem , I 'll end with one .
The great poem of John Donne 's .
" Send not for whom the bell tolls . "
The poem is called " No Man is an Island . "
And it goes : " Every man 's death affected me , for I am involved in mankind , send not to ask for whom the bell tolls , it tolls for thee . "
For John Donne , a recommendation of morality .
For us , I think , part of the equation for our survival .
Thank you very much .
Stewart Brand : What squatter cities can teach us
Rural villages worldwide are being deserted , as billions of people flock to cities to live in teeming squatter camps and slums . Stewart Brand says this is a good thing . Why ? It 'll take you 3 minutes to find out .
Basically , there 's a major demographic event going on .
And it may be that passing the 50 percent urban point is an economic tipping point . So the world now is a map of connectivity .
It used to be that Paris and London and New York were the largest cities .
What we have now is the end of the rise of the West . That 's over .
The aggregate numbers are overwhelming .
So what 's really going on ? Well , villages of the world are emptying out .
The question is , why ?
And here 's the unromantic truth -- and the city air makes you free , they said in Renaissance Germany . So some people go to places like Shanghai but most go to the squatter cities where aesthetics rule .
And these are not really a people oppressed by poverty .
They 're people getting out of poverty as fast as they can .
They 're the dominant builders and to a large extent , the dominant designers .
They have home-brewed infrastructure and vibrant urban life .
One-sixth of the GDP in India is coming out of Mumbai .
They are constantly upgrading , and in a few cases , the government helps .
Education is the main event that can happen in cities .
What 's going on in the street in Mumbai ?
Al Gore knows . It 's basically everything .
There 's no unemployment in squatter cities . Everyone works .
One-sixth of humanity is there . It 's soon going to be more than that .
So here 's the first punch line : cities have defused the population bomb .
And here 's the second punch line .
That 's the news from downtown . Here it is in perspective .
Stars have shined down on earth 's life for billions of years .
Now we 're shining right back up .
Thank you .
Mark Ronson : How sampling transformed music
Sampling isn 't about " hijacking nostalgia wholesale , " says Mark Ronson . It 's about inserting yourself into the narrative of a song while also pushing that story forward . In this mind-blowingly original talk , watch the DJ scramble 15 TED Talks into an audio-visual omelette , and trace the evolution of " La Di Da Di , " Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick 's 1984 hit that has been reimagined for every generation since .
I 'm assuming everyone here has watched a TED Talk online at one time or another , right ?
So what I 'm going to do is play this .
This is the song from the TED Talks online .
And I 'm going to slow it down because things sound cooler when they 're slower .
Ken Robinson : Good morning . How are you ?
Mark Applebaum : I 'm going to -- Kate Stone : -- mix some music .
I 'm going to do so in a way that tells a story .
Tod Machover : Something nobody 's ever heard before .
I have a crossfader .
Julian Treasure : I call this the mixer .
Two D.J. decks .
You turn up the dials , the wheel starts to turn .
Dan Ellsey : I have always loved music .
Michael Tilson Thomas : Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude ?
Daniel Wolpert : Feeling everything that 's going on inside my body .
Adam Ockelford : In your brain is this amazing musical computer .
MTT : Using computers and synthesizers to create works . It 's a language that 's still evolving .
And the 21st century .
KR : Turn on the radio . Pop into the discotheque .
You will know what this person is doing : moving to the music .
Mark Ronson : This is my favorite part .
You gotta have doorstops . That 's important .
TM : We all love music a great deal .
MTT : Anthems , dance crazes , ballads and marches .
Kirby Ferguson and JT : The remix : It is new music created from old music .
Ryan Holladay : Blend seamlessly .
Kathryn Schulz : And that 's how it goes .
MTT : What happens when the music stops ?
Yay !
MR : Obviously , I 've been watching a lot of TED Talks .
When I was first asked to speak at TED , I wasn 't quite sure what my angle was , at first , so yeah , I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks , which is pretty much absolutely the worst thing that you can do because you start to go into panic mode , thinking , I haven 't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet .
Neither have I provided electricity to my village through sheer ingenuity .
In fact , I 've pretty much wasted most of my life DJing in night clubs and producing pop records .
But I still kept watching the videos , because I 'm a masochist , and eventually , things like Michael Tilson Thomas and Tod Machover , and seeing their visceral passion talking about music , it definitely stirred something in me , and I 'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly about the power of music .
And I started to write down on these little note cards every time I heard something that struck a chord in me , pardon the pun , or something that I thought I could use , and pretty soon , my studio looked like this , kind of like a John Nash , " Beautiful Mind " vibe .
The other good thing about watching TED Talks , when you see a really good one , you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker was your best friend , don 't you ? Like , just for a day .
They seem like a nice person .
You 'd take a bike ride , maybe share an ice cream .
You 'd certainly learn a lot .
And every now and then they 'd chide you , when they got frustrated that you couldn 't really keep up with half of the technical things they 're banging on about all the time .
But then they 'd remember that you 're but a mere human of ordinary , mortal intelligence that didn 't finish university , and they 'd kind of forgive you , and pet you like the dog .
Man , yeah , back to the real world , probably Sir Ken Robinson and I are not going to end up being best of friends .
He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy , but through the tools available to me -- technology and the innate way that I approach making music -- I can sort of bully our existences into a shared event , which is sort of what you saw .
I can hear something that I love in a piece of media and I can co-opt it and insert myself in that narrative , or alter it , even .
In a nutshell , that 's what I was trying to do with these things , but more importantly , that 's what the past 30 years of music has been .
That 's the major thread .
See , 30 years ago , you had the first digital samplers , and they changed everything overnight .
All of a sudden , artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them , from a snare drum from the Funky Meters , to a Ron Carter bassline , the theme to " The Price Is Right . "
Albums like De La Soul 's " 3 Feet High and Rising " and the Beastie Boys ' " Paul 's Boutique " looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic , layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day .
And they weren 't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music .
They weren 't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff .
To be honest , it was all about sampling really obscure things , except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and " doo doo doo da da doo doo " that we know about .
But the thing is , they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music .
They heard it , they wanted to be a part of it , and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so , not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton , and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day .
You know , in music we take something that we love and we build on it .
I 'd like to play a song for you .
That 's " La Di Da Di " and it 's the fifth-most sampled song of all time .
It 's been sampled 547 times .
It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop , Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh , and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong .
I do hope that comes back soon .
Anyway , this predated the sampling era .
There were no samples in this record , although I did look up on the Internet last night , I mean several months ago , that " La Di Da Di " means , it 's an old Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England , so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore from " Downton Abbey " coming soon , or that 's for another day .
Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box .
Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record , and because of Slick Rick 's sing-songy , super-catchy vocals , it provides endless sound bites and samples for future pop records .
That was 1984 .
This is me in 1984 , in case you were wondering how I was doing , thank you for asking .
It 's Throwback Thursday already .
I was involved in a heavy love affair with the music of Duran Duran , as you can probably tell from my outfit .
I was in the middle .
And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play " Wild Boys " at the school talent show .
So that 's what we did , and long story short , we were booed off the stage , and if you ever have a chance to live your life escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium full of second- and third-graders booing , I would highly recommend it . It 's not really fun .
But it didn 't really matter , because what I wanted somehow was to just be in the history of that song for a minute .
I didn 't care who liked it .
I just loved it , and I thought I could put myself in there .
Over the next 10 years , " La Di Da Di " continues to be sampled by countless records , ending up on massive hits like " Here Comes the Hotstepper " and " I Wanna Sex You Up . "
Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song on his debut album " Doggystyle " and calls it " Lodi Dodi . "
Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point .
And then you fast forward to 1997 , and the Notorious B.I.G. , or Biggie , reinterprets " La Di Da Di " on his number one hit called " Hypnotize , " which I will play a little bit of and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick to show you where they got it from .
So Biggie was killed weeks before that song made it to number one , in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era , but he would have been 13 years old and very much alive when " La Di Da Di " first came out , and as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn , it 's hard not to think that that song probably held some fond memories for him .
But the way he interpreted it , as you hear , is completely his own .
He flips it , makes it , there 's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it .
It 's thoroughly modern Biggie .
I had to make that joke in this room , because you would be the only people that I 'd ever have a chance of getting it .
And so , it 's a groaner .
Elsewhere in the pop and rap world , we 're going a little bit sample-crazy .
We 're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing , and all of a sudden everyone 's taking these massive ' 80s tunes like Bowie , " Let 's Dance , " and all these disco records , and just rapping on them .
These records don 't really age that well .
You don 't hear them now , because they borrowed from an era that was too steeped in its own connotation .
You can 't just hijack nostalgia wholesale .
It leaves the listener feeling sickly .
You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it , which was something that I learned when I was working with the late , amazing Amy Winehouse on her album " Back to Black . "
A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album that myself and Salaam Remi , the other producer , achieved , how we captured this long-lost sound , but without the very , very 21st-century personality and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore and even a mention of Slick Rick , the whole thing would have run the risk of being very pastiche , to be honest .
Imagine any other singer from that era over it singing the same old lyrics .
It runs a risk of being completely bland .
I mean , there was no doubt that Amy and I and Salaam all had this love for this gospel , soul and blues and jazz that was evident listening to the musical arrangements .
She brought the ingredients that made it urgent and of the time .
So if we come all the way up to the present day now , the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus , she reinterprets " La Di Da Di " completely for her generation , and we 'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part and then see how she sort of flipped it .
So Miley Cyrus , who wasn 't even born yet when " La Di Da Di " was made , and neither were any of the co-writers on the song , has found this song that somehow etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music , and now , with its timeless playfulness of the original , has kind of translated to a whole new generation who will probably co-opt it as their own .
Since the dawn of the sampling era , there 's been endless debate about the validity of music that contains samples .
You know , the Grammy committee says that if your song contains some kind of pre-written or pre-existing music , you 're ineligible for song of the year .
Rockists , who are racist but only about rock music , constantly use the argument to — That 's a real word . That is a real word .
They constantly use the argument to devalue rap and modern pop , and these arguments completely miss the point , because the dam has burst .
We live in the post-sampling era .
We take the things that we love and we build on them .
That 's just how it goes .
And when we really add something significant and original and we merge our musical journey with this , then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again .
So I would like to do one more piece that I put together for you tonight , and it takes place with two pretty inspiring TED performances that I 've seen .
One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini , who happens to be a blind , autistic genius at the piano , and Emmanuel Jal , who is an ex-child soldier from the South Sudan , who is a spoken word poet and rapper .
And once again I found a way to annoyingly me-me-me myself into the musical history of these songs , but I can 't help it , because they 're these things that I love , and I want to mess around with them .
So I hope you enjoy this . Here we go .
Let 's hear that TED sound again , right ?
Thank you very much . Thank you .
Markham Nolan : How to separate fact and fiction online
By the end of this talk , there will be 864 more hours of video on YouTube and 2.5 million more photos on Facebook and Instagram . So how do we sort through the deluge ? At the TEDSalon in London , Markham Nolan shares the investigative techniques he and his team use to verify information in real-time , to let you know if that Statue of Liberty image has been doctored or if that video leaked from Syria is legitimate .
I 've been a journalist now since I was about 17 , and it 's an interesting industry to be in at the moment , because as you all know , there 's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media , and most of you probably know this from the business angle , which is that the business model is pretty screwed , and as my grandfather would say , the profits have all been gobbled up by Google .
So it 's a really interesting time to be a journalist , but the upheaval that I 'm interested in is not on the output side .
It 's on the input side . It 's concern with how we get information and how we gather the news .
And that 's changed , because we 've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience .
And the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn 't have any way of affecting news or making any change . They couldn 't really connect .
And that 's changed irrevocably .
My first connection with the news media was in 1984 , the BBC had a one-day strike .
I wasn 't happy . I was angry . I couldn 't see my cartoons .
So I wrote a letter .
And it 's a very effective way of ending your hate mail : " Love Markham , Aged 4 . " Still works .
I 'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike , but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me .
And that was the round journey . It took that long for anyone to have any impact and get some feedback .
And that 's changed now because , as journalists , we interact in real time . We 're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news .
We 're reacting to the audience , and we 're actually relying on them .
They 're helping us find the news . They 're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear .
So it 's a real-time thing . It 's much quicker . It 's happening on a constant basis , and the journalist is always playing catch up .
To give an example of how we rely on the audience , on the 5th of September in Costa Rica , an earthquake hit .
It was a 7.6 magnitude . It was fairly big .
And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua .
So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter .
Thirty seconds later , the first message went onto Twitter , and this was someone saying " temblor , " which means earthquake .
So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel .
Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world , instantly . Everyone in the world , hypothetically , had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua .
And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct , which was to post a status update , which is what we all do now , so if something happens , we put our status update , or we post a photo , we post a video , and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream .
And what that means is just constant , huge volumes of data going up .
It 's actually staggering . When you look at the numbers , every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube .
So that 's , every second , more than an hour of video gets uploaded .
And in photos , Instagram , 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second .
More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook .
So by the time I 'm finished talking here , there 'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started , and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started .
So it 's an interesting position to be in as a journalist , because we should have access to everything .
Any event that happens anywhere in the world , I should be able to know about it pretty much instantaneously , as it happens , for free .
And that goes for every single person in this room .
The only problem is , when you have that much information , you have to find the good stuff , and that can be incredibly difficult when you 're dealing with those volumes .
And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy . So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm , the likes of which we hadn 't seen for a long time , hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- -- and you got volumes of media like we 'd never seen before .
And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes , so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted .
We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms .
We had to deal with images from films like " The Day After Tomorrow . "
And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all .
But joking aside , there were images like this one from Instagram which was subjected to a grilling by journalists .
They weren 't really sure . It was filtered in Instagram .
The lighting was questioned . Everything was questioned about it .
And it turned out to be true . It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan , which was flooded .
And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source , and in this case , these guys were New York food bloggers .
They were well respected . They were known .
So this one wasn 't a debunk , it was actually something that they could prove .
And that was the job of the journalist . It was filtering all this stuff .
And you were , instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader , you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging .
And finding the source becomes more and more important -- finding the good source -- and Twitter is where most journalists now go .
It 's like the de facto real-time newswire , if you know how to use it , because there is so much on Twitter .
And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011 .
As a non-Arabic speaker , as someone who was looking from the outside , from Dublin , Twitter lists , and lists of good sources , people we could establish were credible , were really important .
And how do you build a list like that from scratch ?
Well , it can be quite difficult , but you have to know what to look for .
This visualization was done by an Italian academic .
He 's called André Pannison , and he basically took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign , and the dots you can see are retweets , so when someone retweets a message , a connection is made between two dots , and the more times that message is retweeted by other people , the more you get to see these nodes , these connections being made .
And it 's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation , but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating .
And as the conversation grew and grew , it became more and more lively , and eventually you were left with this huge , big , rhythmic pointer of this conversation .
You could find the nodes , though , and then you went , and you go , " Right , I 've got to investigate these people .
These are the ones that are obviously making sense .
Let 's see who they are . "
Now in the deluge of information , this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself , because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation .
And when you start digging into the sources , you can go further and further than you ever could before .
Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling , you want to use it , you 're dying to use it , but you 're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don 't know if the source is credible .
You don 't know if it 's a scrape . You don 't know if it 's a re-upload .
And you have to do that investigative work .
And this video , which I 'm going to let run through , was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago .
Getting real windy in just a second .
Oh , shit !
Markham Nolan : Okay , so now if you 're a news producer , this is something you 'd love to run with , because obviously , this is gold .
You know ? This is a fantastic reaction from someone , very genuine video that they 've shot in their back garden .
But how do you find if this person , if it 's true , if it 's faked , or if it 's something that 's old and that 's been reposted ?
So we set about going to work on this video , and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account .
There was only one video posted to that account , and the username was Rita Krill .
And we didn 't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name .
But we started looking , and we used free Internet tools to do so .
The first one was called Spokeo , which allowed us to look for Rita Krills .
So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York , we found them in Pennsylvania , Nevada and Florida .
So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha , and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded , and when we went through all those various cities , we found that in Florida , there were thunderstorms and rain on the day .
So we went to the white pages , and we found , we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook , and we looked through a couple of different addresses , and that took us to Google Maps , where we found a house .
And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita 's . So we went back to the video , and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference .
So if you look in the video , there 's the big umbrella , there 's a white lilo in the pool , there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool , and there 's two trees in the background .
And we went back to Google Maps , and we looked a little bit closer , and sure enough , there 's the white lilo , there are the two trees , there 's the umbrella . It 's actually folded in this photo .
Little bit of trickery . And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool .
So we were able to call Rita , clear the video , make sure that it had been shot , and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried .
Sometimes the search for truth , though , is a little bit less flippant , and it has much greater consequences .
Syria has been really interesting for us , because obviously a lot of the time you 're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence , so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what 's going on in the world .
So this video , I 'm not going to show you the whole thing , because it 's quite gruesome , but you 'll hear some of the sounds .
This is from Hama .
And what this video shows , when you watch the whole thing through , is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge .
The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood and they were throwing Syrian Army officers ' bodies off the bridge , and they were cursing and using blasphemous language , and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were , and whether or not they were what the video said it was .
So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter , and we asked them about this , and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify .
Three different sources said three different things about the bridge .
They said , one , the bridge doesn 't exist .
Another one said the bridge does exist , but it 's not in Hama . It 's somewhere else .
And the third one said , " I think the bridge does exist , but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed , so the river should actually have been dry , so this doesn 't make sense . "
So that was the only one that gave us a clue .
We looked through the video for other clues .
We saw the distinctive railings , which we could use .
We looked at the curbs . The curbs were throwing shadows south , so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river .
It had black-and-white curbs .
As we looked at the river itself , you could see there 's a concrete stone on the west side . There 's a cloud of blood .
That 's blood in the river . So the river is flowing south to north . That 's what that tells me .
And also , as you look away from the bridge , there 's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank , and the river narrows .
So onto Google Maps we go , and we start looking through literally every single bridge .
We go to the dam that we talked about , we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river , crossing off the bridges that don 't match .
We 're looking for one that crosses east-west .
And we get to Hama . We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there 's no bridge .
So we go a bit further . We switch to the satellite view , and we find another bridge , and everything starts to line up .
The bridge looks like it 's crossing the river east to west .
So this could be our bridge . And we zoom right in .
We start to see that it 's got a median , so it 's a two-lane bridge .
And it 's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video , and as we click through it , you can see someone 's uploaded photos to go with the map , which is very handy , so we click into the photos . And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video .
The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing , which is handy because we 've seen that before .
We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys throwing the bodies over .
And we keep going through it until we 're certain that this is our bridge .
So what does that tell me ? I 've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me : the one who said the bridge didn 't exist , the one who said the bridge wasn 't in Hama , and the one guy who said , " Yes , the bridge does exist , but I 'm not sure about the water levels . "
Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden , and we 've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin in the space of 20 minutes .
And that 's part of the joy of this . Although the web is running like a torrent , there 's so much information there that it 's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day , if you use them intelligently , you can find out incredible information .
Given a couple of clues , I could probably find out a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out .
But what it tells me is that , at a time when there 's more -- there 's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been , it 's harder to filter , we have greater tools .
We have free Internet tools that allow us , help us do this kind of investigation .
We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before , and computers that are quicker than ever before .
But here 's the thing . Algorithms are rules . They 're binary .
They 're yes or no , they 're black or white .
Truth is never binary . Truth is a value .
Truth is emotional , it 's fluid , and above all , it 's human .
No matter how quick we get with computers , no matter how much information we have , you 'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise , because in the end , it is a uniquely human trait .
Thanks very much .
Thandie Newton : Embracing otherness , embracing myself
Actor Thandie Newton tells the story of finding her " otherness " -- first , as a child growing up in two distinct cultures , and then as an actor playing with many different selves . A warm , wise talk , fresh from stage at TEDGlobal 2011 .
Embracing otherness .
When I first heard this theme , I thought , well , embracing otherness is embracing myself .
And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me , and it 's given me an insight into the whole notion of self , which I think is worth sharing with you today .
We each have a self , but I don 't think that we 're born with one .
You know how newborn babies believe they 're part of everything ; they 're not separate ?
Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly .
It 's like that initial stage is over -- oneness : infancy , unformed , primitive .
It 's no longer valid or real .
What is real is separateness , and at some point in early babyhood , the idea of self starts to form .
Our little portion of oneness is given a name , is told all kinds of things about itself , and these details , opinions and ideas become facts , which go towards building ourselves , our identity .
And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world .
But the self is a projection based on other people 's projections .
Is it who we really are ?
Or who we really want to be , or should be ?
So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up .
The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again .
And my panic at not having a self that fit , and the confusion that came from my self being rejected , created anxiety , shame and hopelessness , which kind of defined me for a long time .
But in retrospect , the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern .
The self changed , got affected , broken , destroyed , but another one would evolve -- sometimes stronger , sometimes hateful , sometimes not wanting to be there at all .
The self was not constant .
And how many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place ?
I grew up on the coast of England in the ' 70s .
My dad is white from Cornwall , and my mom is black from Zimbabwe .
Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people .
But nature had its wicked way , and brown babies were born .
But from about the age of five , I was aware that I didn 't fit .
I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns .
I was an anomaly , and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in .
Because the self likes to fit , to see itself replicated , to belong .
That confirms its existence and its importance .
And it is important .
It has an extremely important function .
Without it , we literally can 't interface with others .
We can 't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity , of success .
But my skin color wasn 't right .
My hair wasn 't right .
My history wasn 't right .
My self became defined by otherness , which meant that , in that social world , I didn 't really exist .
And I was " other " before being anything else -- even before being a girl .
I was a noticeable nobody .
Another world was opening up around this time : performance and dancing .
That nagging dread of self-hood didn 't exist when I was dancing .
I 'd literally lose myself .
And I was a really good dancer .
I would put all my emotional expression into my dancing .
I could be in the movement in my real life , in myself .
And at 16 , I stumbled across another opportunity , and I earned my first acting role in a film .
I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting .
My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self , not my own , and it felt so good .
It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self -- one that I controlled , that I steered , that I gave life to .
But the shooting day would end , and I 'd return to my gnarly , awkward self .
By 19 , I was a fully-fledged movie actor , but still searching for definition .
I applied to read anthropology at university .
Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview , and she asked me , " How would you define race ? "
Well , I thought I had the answer to that one , and I said , " Skin color . "
" So biology , genetics ? " she said .
" Because , Thandie , that 's not accurate .
Because there 's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and , say , a white Norwegian .
Because we all stem from Africa .
So in Africa , there 's been more time to create genetic diversity . "
In other words , race has no basis in biological or scientific fact .
On the one hand , result .
Right ?
On the other hand , my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility .
But what was credible , what is biological and scientific fact , is that we all stem from Africa -- in fact , from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago .
And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance .
Strangely , these revelations didn 't cure my low self-esteem , that feeling of otherness .
My desire to disappear was still very powerful .
I had a degree from Cambridge ; I had a thriving career , but my self was a car crash , and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist 's couch .
And of course I did .
I still believed my self was all I was .
I still valued self-worth above all other worth , and what was there to suggest otherwise ?
We 've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self .
Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates , the revenue it turns over .
We 'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing .
But it 's not . It 's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death .
But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection -- and that thing is oneness , our essence .
The self 's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it 's connected to its creator -- to you and to me .
And that can happen with awareness -- awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood .
For a start , we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves .
It happens when I dance , when I 'm acting .
I 'm earthed in my essence , and my self is suspended .
In those moments , I 'm connected to everything -- the ground , the air , the sounds , the energy from the audience .
All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel -- that feeling of oneness .
And when I 'm acting a role , I inhabit another self , and I give it life for awhile , because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment .
And I 've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004 .
And no matter how other they 're all related in me .
And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure .
I always wondered why I could feel others ' pain so deeply , why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody .
It 's because I didn 't have a self to get in the way .
I thought I lacked substance , and the fact that I could feel others ' meant that I had nothing of myself to feel .
The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment .
And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function , a funny thing happened .
I stopped giving it so much authority .
I give it its due .
I take it to therapy .
I 've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior .
But I 'm not ashamed of my self .
In fact , I respect my self and its function .
And over time and with practice , I 've tried to live more and more from my essence .
And if you can do that , incredible things happen .
I was in Congo in February , dancing and celebrating with women who 've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways -- destroyed because other brutalized , psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves ' addiction to iPods , Pads , and bling , which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain , their suffering , their death .
Because , hey , if we 're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life , then we 're devaluing and desensitizing life .
And in that disconnected state , yeah , we can build factory farms with no windows , destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war .
So here 's a note to self : The cracks have started to show in our constructed world , and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks , and oil and blood , rivers of it .
Crucially , we haven 't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing .
We 've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other -- billions of each other .
Only we 're not living with each other ; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection .
Let 's live with each other and take it a breath at a time .
If we can get under that heavy self , light a torch of awareness , and find our essence , our connection to the infinite and every other living thing .
We knew it from the day we were born .
Let 's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness .
It 's more a reality than the ones our selves have created .
Imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self , appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next .
Simple awareness is where it begins .
Thank you for listening .
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie : The danger of a single story
Our lives , our cultures , are composed of many overlapping stories . Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country , we risk a critical misunderstanding .
I 'm a storyteller .
And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call " the danger of the single story . "
I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria .
My mother says that I started reading at the age of two , although I think four is probably close to the truth .
So I was an early reader , and what I read were British and American children 's books .
I was also an early writer , and when I began to write , at about the age of seven , stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read , I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading : All my characters were white and blue-eyed , they played in the snow , they ate apples , how lovely it was that the sun had come out .
Now , this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria .
I had never been outside Nigeria .
We didn 't have snow , we ate mangoes , and we never talked about the weather , because there was no need to .
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer .
Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was .
And for many years afterwards , I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer .
But that is another story .
What this demonstrates , I think , is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story , particularly as children .
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign , I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify .
Things changed when I discovered African books .
There weren 't many of them available , and they weren 't quite as easy to find as the foreign books .
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature .
I realized that people like me , girls with skin the color of chocolate , whose kinky hair could not form ponytails , could also exist in literature .
I started to write about things I recognized .
Now , I loved those American and British books I read .
They stirred my imagination . They opened up new worlds for me .
But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature .
So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this : It saved me from having a single story of what books are .
I come from a conventional , middle-class Nigerian family .
My father was a professor .
My mother was an administrator .
And so we had , as was the norm , live-in domestic help , who would often come from nearby rural villages .
So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy .
His name was Fide .
The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor .
My mother sent yams and rice , and our old clothes , to his family .
And when I didn 't finish my dinner my mother would say , " Finish your food ! Don 't you know ? People like Fide 's family have nothing . "
So I felt enormous pity for Fide 's family .
Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit , and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made .
I was startled .
It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something .
All I had heard about them was how poor they were , so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor .
Their poverty was my single story of them .
Years later , I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States .
I was 19 .
My American roommate was shocked by me .
She asked where I had learned to speak English so well , and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language .
She asked if she could listen to what she called my " tribal music , " and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey .
She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove .
What struck me was this : She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me .
Her default position toward me , as an African , was a kind of patronizing , well-meaning pity .
My roommate had a single story of Africa : a single story of catastrophe .
In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way , no possibility of feelings more complex than pity , no possibility of a connection as human equals .
I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn 't consciously identify as African .
But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me .
Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia .
But I did come to embrace this new identity , and in many ways I think of myself now as African .
Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country , the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago , in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in " India , Africa and other countries . "
So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African , I began to understand my roommate 's response to me .
If I had not grown up in Nigeria , and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images , I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes , beautiful animals , and incomprehensible people , fighting senseless wars , dying of poverty and AIDS , unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind , white foreigner .
I would see Africans in the same way that I , as a child , had seen Fide 's family .
This single story of Africa ultimately comes , I think , from Western literature .
Now , here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke , who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage .
After referring to the black Africans as " beasts who have no houses , " he writes , " They are also people without heads , having their mouth and eyes in their breasts . "
Now , I 've laughed every time I 've read this .
And one must admire the imagination of John Locke .
But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West : A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives , of difference , of darkness , of people who , in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling , are " half devil , half child . "
And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story , as had a professor , who once told me that my novel was not " authentically African . "
Now , I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel , that it had failed in a number of places , but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity .
In fact I did not know what African authenticity was .
The professor told me that my characters were too much like him , an educated and middle-class man .
My characters drove cars .
They were not starving .
Therefore they were not authentically African .
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story .
A few years ago , I visited Mexico from the U.S.
The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense , and there were debates going on about immigration .
And , as often happens in America , immigration became synonymous with Mexicans .
There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system , sneaking across the border , being arrested at the border , that sort of thing .
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara , watching the people going to work , rolling up tortillas in the marketplace , smoking , laughing .
I remember first feeling slight surprise .
And then I was overwhelmed with shame .
I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind , the abject immigrant .
I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself .
So that is how to create a single story , show a people as one thing , as only one thing , over and over again , and that is what they become .
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power .
There is a word , an Igbo word , that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world , and it is " nkali . "
It 's a noun that loosely translates to " to be greater than another . "
Like our economic and political worlds , stories too are defined by the principle of nkali : How they are told , who tells them , when they 're told , how many stories are told , are really dependent on power .
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person , but to make it the definitive story of that person .
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people , the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with , " secondly . "
Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans , and not with the arrival of the British , and you have an entirely different story .
Start the story with the failure of the African state , and not with the colonial creation of the African state , and you have an entirely different story .
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel .
I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho -- -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers .
Now , obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation .
But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans .
This is not because I am a better person than that student , but because of America 's cultural and economic power , I had many stories of America .
I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill .
I did not have a single story of America .
When I learned , some years ago , that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful , I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me .
But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood , full of laughter and love , in a very close-knit family .
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps .
My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare .
One of my closest friends , Okoloma , died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water .
I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education , so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries .
And so , as a child , I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table , then margarine disappeared , then bread became too expensive , then milk became rationed .
And most of all , a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives .
All of these stories make me who I am .
But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me .
The single story creates stereotypes , and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue , but that they are incomplete .
They make one story become the only story .
Of course , Africa is a continent full of catastrophes : There are immense ones , such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones , such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria .
But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe , and it is very important , it is just as important , to talk about them .
I 've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person .
The consequence of the single story is this : It robs people of dignity .
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult .
It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar .
So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides , the U.S. and the Mexican ?
What if my mother had told us that Fide 's family was poor and hardworking ?
What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world ?
What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls " a balance of stories . "
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher , Mukta Bakaray , a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house ?
Now , the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don 't read literature .
He disagreed . He felt that people who could read , would read , if you made literature affordable and available to them .
Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview , and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said , " I really liked your novel . I didn 't like the ending .
Now you must write a sequel , and this is what will happen ... "
And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel .
I was not only charmed , I was very moved .
Here was a woman , part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians , who were not supposed to be readers .
She had not only read the book , but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel .
Now , what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda , a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos , and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget ?
What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week ?
What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music , talented people singing in English and Pidgin , and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo , mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers .
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband 's consent before renewing their passports ?
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood , full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds , films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce ?
What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider , who has just started her own business selling hair extensions ?
Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail , but continue to nurse ambition ?
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians : our failed infrastructure , our failed government , but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government , rather than because of it .
I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer , and it is amazing to me how many people apply , how many people are eager to write , to tell stories .
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust , and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don 't have anything in their libraries , and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops , in reading and writing , for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories .
Stories matter .
Many stories matter .
Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign , but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize .
Stories can break the dignity of a people , but stories can also repair that broken dignity .
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North .
She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind : " They sat around , reading the book themselves , listening to me read the book , and a kind of paradise was regained . "
I would like to end with this thought : That when we reject the single story , when we realize that there is never a single story about any place , we regain a kind of paradise .
Thank you .
Don Levy : A cinematic journey through visual effects
It 's been 110 years since Georges Méliès sent a spaceship slamming into the eye of the man on the moon . So how far have visual effects come since then ? Working closely with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , Don Levy takes us on a visual journey through special effects , from the fakery of early technology to the seamless marvels of modern filmmaking .
The filmmaker Georges Méliès was first a magician .
Now movies proved to be the ultimate medium for magic .
With complete control of everything the audience can see , moviemakers had developed an arsenal of techniques to further their deceptions .
Motion pictures are themselves an illusion of life , produced by the sequential projection of still frames , and they astonished the Lumière brothers ' early audiences .
Even today 's sophisticated moviegoers still lose themselves to the screen , and filmmakers leverage this separation from reality to great effect .
Now imaginative people have been having fun with this for over 400 years .
Giambattista della Porta , a Neapolitan scholar in the 16th century , examined and studied the natural world and saw how it could be manipulated .
Playing with the world , and our perception of it , really is the essence of visual effects .
So digging deeper into this with the Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reveals some truth behind the trickery .
Visual effects are based on the principles of all illusions : assumption , things are as we know them ; presumption , things will behave as we expect ; and context in reality , our knowledge of the world as we know it , such as scale .
Now a fourth factor really becomes an obsession , which is , never betray the illusion .
And that last point has made visual effects a constant quest for perfection .
So from the hand-cranked jump cut early days of cinema to last Sunday 's Oscar winner , what follows are some steps and a few repeats in the evolution of visual effects .
I hope you will enjoy .
Isabelle : " The filmmaker Georges Méliès was one of the first to realize that films had the power to capture dreams . "
[ " ' A Trip to the Moon ' " ] [ " 2011 Restoration of the Original Hand-Tinted Color " ] [ " ' 2001 : A Space Odyssey ' " ] [ " Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' Avatar ' " ] First doctor : How are you feeling , Jake ?
Jake : Hey guys .
[ " Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects " ] Second doctor : Welcome to your new body , Jake.First doctor : Good .
Second doctor : We 're gonna take this nice and easy , Jake.First doctor : Well , do you want to sit up ? That 's fine .
Second doctor : And good , just take it nice and slow , Jake .
Well , no truncal ataxia , that 's good.First doctor : You feeling light-headed or dizzy at all ?
Oh , you 're wiggling your toes .
[ " ' Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland ' " ] Alice : What 's happening to me ?
[ " ' Alice in Wonderland ' " ] [ " Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' The Lost World ' " ] [ " Stop Motion Animation " ] [ " ' Jurassic Park ' " ] [ Dinosaur roars ] [ " CG Animation " ] [ " Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' The Smurfs ' " ] [ " Autodesk Maya Software - Key Frame Animation " ] [ " ' Rise of the Planet of the Apes ' " ] Chimpanzee : No ! [ " Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' Metropolis ' " ] [ " ' Blade Runner ' " ] [ " Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' The Rains Came ' " ] Rama Safti : Well , it 's all over .
Maharaja : Nothing to worry about , not a thing .
[ ' Academy Award for Special Effects - " ] [ " ' 2012 ' " ] Governor : It seems to me that the worst is over .
[ " CG Destruction " ] [ " ' Lord of the Rings : The Return of the King ' " ] [ " Massive Software - Crowd Generation " ] [ " Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' Ben Hur : A Tale of the Christ ' " ] [ " Miniatures and Puppets Bring the Crowd to Life " ] [ " ' Gladiator ' " ] [ " CG Coliseum and Digital Crowds " ] [ " Academy Award Winner for Visual Effects " ] [ " ' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 ' " ] [ " Academy Award Nominee for Visual Effects " ] [ " Produced in conjunction with the Academy 's Science and Technology Council . " ] [ " ' It is today possible to realize the most impossible and improbable things . ' — Georges Méliès " ] Don Levy : Thank you .
Hannah Brencher : Love letters to strangers
Hannah Brencher 's mother always wrote her letters . So when she felt herself bottom into depression after college , she did what felt natural -- she wrote love letters and left them for strangers to find . The act has become a global initiative , The World Needs More Love Letters , which rushes handwritten letters to those in need of a boost .
I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day , and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email , in Facebook , in texting or cell phones in general .
And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents , I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone , which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital , but I was just looking for some sort of scribble , some unkempt cursive from my mother .
And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression , I did the only thing I could think of at the time .
I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers , and tucked them all throughout the city , dozens and dozens of them . I left them everywhere , in cafes and in libraries , at the U.N. , everywhere .
I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary , and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet : that if you asked me for a hand-written letter , I would write you one , no questions asked .
Overnight , my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak -- a single mother in Sacramento , a girl being bullied in rural Kansas , all asking me , a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order , to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox .
Well , today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox , fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most , but most of all , fueled by crates of mail like this one , my trusty mail crate , filled with the scriptings of ordinary people , strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they 're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee , but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing .
But , you know , the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper .
They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters .
They 're the ones from my generation , the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless , and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen .
We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook , and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less .
But what if it 's not about efficiency this time ?
I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate , which is a conversation starter , let me tell you .
If you ever need one , just carry one of these .
And a man just stared at me , and he was like , " Well , why don 't you use the Internet ? "
And I thought , " Well , sir , I am not a strategist , nor am I specialist . I am merely a storyteller . "
And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan , and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation , and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say , " Come back to me .
Find me when you can . "
Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque , Iowa , only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees , tucked in the bushes and the benches .
Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life , uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family .
Well , tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow , scripted by strangers who were there for him when .
These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency , because she is an art form now , all the parts of her , the signing , the scripting , the mailing , the doodles in the margins .
The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down , pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through , with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we 've got six conversations rolling in at once , that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of " get faster , " no matter how many social networks we might join .
We still clutch close these letters to our chest , to the words that speak louder than loud , when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say , the words that we have needed to write , to sisters and brothers and even to strangers , for far too long .
Thank you .
Imogen Heap : " Wait It Out "
Imogen Heap plays a powerful stripped-down version of " Wait It Out , " from her new record , Ellipse .
Where do we go from here ? How do we carry on ? I can 't get beyond the questions Clambering for the scraps in the shatter of us , collapsed It cuts me with every could have been Pain on pain on play , repeating With the backup , makeshift life in waiting Everybody says time heals everything What of the wretched hollow ? The endless in between ? Are we just going to wait it out ? There is nothing to see here now Turning the sign around We 're closed to the Earth ' til further notice A crumbling cliche case crumpled and puffy faced caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles All I want , only one street level miracle I 'll be an out and out born again from none more cynical Everybody says that time heals everything But what of the wretched hollow ? The endless in between ? Are we just going to wait it out ? And sit here cold ? We will be long gone by then In lackluster In dust we lay around old magazines Fluorescent lighting sets the scene for all we could and should be being in the one life that we 've got Everybody says time heals everything And what of the wretched hollow ? The endless in between ? Are we just going to wait it out ? Just going to sweat it out ? Just going to sweat it out ? Wait it out
Hadyn Parry : Re-engineering mosquitos to fight disease
In a single year , there are 200-300 million cases of malaria and 50-100 million cases of dengue fever worldwide . So : Why haven 't we found a way to effectively kill mosquitos yet ? Hadyn Parry presents a fascinating solution : genetically engineering male mosquitos to make them sterile , and releasing the insects into the wild , to cut down on disease-carrying species .
So I 'd like to start by focusing on the world 's most dangerous animal .
Now , when you talk about dangerous animals , most people might think of lions or tigers or sharks .
But of course the most dangerous animal is the mosquito .
The mosquito has killed more humans than any other creature in human history .
In fact , probably adding them all together , the mosquito has killed more humans .
And the mosquito has killed more humans than wars and plague .
And you would think , would you not , that with all our science , with all our advances in society , with better towns , better civilizations , better sanitation , wealth , that we would get better at controlling mosquitos , and hence reduce this disease .
And that 's not really the case .
If it was the case , we wouldn 't have between 200 and 300 million cases of malaria every year , and we wouldn 't have a million and a half deaths from malaria , and we wouldn 't have a disease that was relatively unknown 50 years ago now suddenly turned into the largest mosquito-borne virus threat that we have , and that 's called dengue fever .
So 50 years ago , pretty much no one had heard of it , no one certainly in the European environment .
But dengue fever now , according to the World Health Organization , infects between 50 and 100 million people every year , so that 's equivalent to the whole of the population of the U.K. being infected every year .
Other estimates put that number at roughly double that number of infections .
And dengue fever has grown in speed quite phenomenally .
In the last 50 years , the incidence of dengue has grown thirtyfold .
Now let me tell you a little bit about what dengue fever is , for those who don 't know .
Now let 's assume you go on holiday .
Let 's assume you go to the Caribbean , or you might go to Mexico . You might go to Latin America , Asia , Africa , anywhere in Saudi Arabia .
You might go to India , the Far East .
It doesn 't really matter . It 's the same mosquito , and it 's the same disease . You 're at risk .
And let 's assume you 're bitten by a mosquito that 's carrying that virus .
Well , you could develop flu-like symptoms .
They could be quite mild .
You could develop nausea , headache , your muscles could feel like they 're contracting , and you could actually feel like your bones are breaking .
And that 's the nickname given to this disease .
It 's called breakbone fever , because that 's how you can feel .
Now the odd thing is , is that once you 've been bitten by this mosquito , and you 've had this disease , your body develops antibodies , so if you 're bitten again with that strain , it doesn 't affect you .
But it 's not one virus , it 's four , and the same protection that gives you the antibodies and protects you from the same virus that you had before actually makes you much more susceptible to the other three .
So the next time you get dengue fever , if it 's a different strain , you 're more susceptible , you 're likely to get worse symptoms , and you 're more likely to get the more severe forms , hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome .
So you don 't want dengue once , and you certainly don 't want it again .
So why is it spreading so fast ?
And the answer is this thing .
This is Aedes aegypti .
Now this is a mosquito that came , like its name suggests , out of North Africa , and it 's spread round the world .
Now , in fact , a single mosquito will only travel about 200 yards in its entire life . They don 't travel very far .
What they 're very good at doing is hitchhiking , particularly the eggs .
They will lay their eggs in clear water , any pool , any puddle , any birdbath , any flower pot , anywhere there 's clear water , they 'll lay their eggs , and if that clear water is near freight , it 's near a port , if it 's anywhere near transport , those eggs will then get transported around the world .
And that 's what 's happened . Mankind has transported these eggs all the way around the world , and these insects have infested over 100 countries , and there 's now 2.5 billion people living in countries where this mosquito resides .
To give you just a couple of examples how fast this has happened , in the mid- ' 70s , Brazil declared , " We have no Aedes aegypti , " and currently they spend about a billion dollars now a year trying to get rid of it , trying to control it , just one species of mosquito .
Two days ago , or yesterday , I can 't remember which , I saw a Reuters report that said Madeira had had their first cases of dengue , about 52 cases , with about 400 probable cases .
That 's two days ago .
Interestingly , Madeira first got the insect in 2005 , and here we are , a few years later , first cases of dengue .
So the one thing you 'll find is that where the mosquito goes , dengue will follow .
Once you 've got the mosquito in your area , anyone coming into that area with dengue , mosquito will bite them , mosquito will bite somewhere else , somewhere else , somewhere else , and you 'll get an epidemic .
So we must be good at killing mosquitos .
I mean , that can 't be very difficult .
Well , there 's two principle ways .
The first way is that you use larvicides .
You use chemicals . You put them into water where they breed .
Now in an urban environment , that 's extraordinarily difficult .
You 've got to get your chemical into every puddle , every birdbath , every tree trunk .
It 's just not practical .
The second way you can do it is actually trying to kill the insects as they fly around .
This is a picture of fogging .
Here what someone is doing is mixing up chemical in a smoke and basically spreading that through the environment .
You could do the same with a space spray .
This is really unpleasant stuff , and if it was any good , we wouldn 't have this massive increase in mosquitos and we wouldn 't have this massive increase in dengue fever .
So it 's not very effective , but it 's probably the best thing we 've got at the moment .
Having said that , actually , your best form of protection and my best form of protection is a long-sleeve shirt and a little bit of DEET to go with it .
So let 's start again . Let 's design a product , right from the word go , and decide what we want .
Well we clearly need something that is effective at reducing the mosquito population .
There 's no point in just killing the odd mosquito here and there .
We want something that gets that population right the way down so it can 't get the disease transmission .
Clearly the product you 've got has got to be safe to humans .
We are going to use it in and around humans .
It has to be safe .
We don 't want to have a lasting impact on the environment .
We don 't want to do anything that you can 't undo .
Maybe a better product comes along in 20 , 30 years .
Fine . We don 't want a lasting environmental impact .
We want something that 's relatively cheap , or cost-effective , because there 's an awful lot of countries involved , and some of them are emerging markets , some of them emerging countries , low-income .
And finally , you want something that 's species-specific .
You want to get rid of this mosquito that spreads dengue , but you don 't really want to get all the other insects .
Some are quite beneficial . Some are important to your ecosystem .
This one 's not . It 's invaded you .
But you don 't want to get all of the insects .
You just want to get this one .
And most of the time , you 'll find this insect lives in and around your home , so this -- whatever we do has got to get to that insect .
It 's got to get into people 's houses , into the bedrooms , into the kitchens .
Now there are two features of mosquito biology that really help us in this project , and that is , firstly , males don 't bite .
It 's only the female mosquito that will actually bite you .
The male can 't bite you , won 't bite you , doesn 't have the mouth parts to bite you .
It 's just the female .
And the second is a phenomenon that males are very , very good at finding females .
If there 's a male mosquito that you release , and if there 's a female around , that male will find the female .
So basically , we 've used those two factors .
So here 's a typical situation , male meets female , lots of offspring .
A single female will lay about up to 100 eggs at a time , up to about 500 in her lifetime .
Now if that male is carrying a gene which causes the death of the offspring , then the offspring don 't survive , and instead of having 500 mosquitos running around , you have none .
And if you can put more , I 'll call them sterile , that the offspring will actually die at different stages , but I 'll call them sterile for now .
If you put more sterile males out into the environment , then the females are more likely to find a sterile male than a fertile one , and you will bring that population down .
So the males will go out , they 'll look for females , they 'll mate . If they mate successfully , then no offspring .
If they don 't find a female , then they 'll die anyway .
They only live a few days .
And that 's exactly where we are .
So this is technology that was developed in Oxford University a few years ago .
The company itself , Oxitec , we 've been working for the last 10 years , very much on a sort of similar development pathway that you 'd get with a pharmaceutical company .
So about 10 years of internal evaluation , testing , to get this to a state where we think it 's actually ready .
And then we 've gone out into the big outdoors , always with local community consent , always with the necessary permits .
So we 've done field trials now in the Cayman Islands , a small one in Malaysia , and two more now in Brazil .
And what 's the result ?
Well , the result has been very good .
In about four months of release , we 've brought that population of mosquitos — in most cases we 're dealing with villages here of about 2,000 , 3,000 people , that sort of size , starting small — we 've taken that mosquito population down by about 85 percent in about four months .
And in fact , the numbers after that get , those get very difficult to count , because there just aren 't any left .
So that 's been what we 've seen in Cayman , it 's been what we 've seen in Brazil in those trials .
And now what we 're doing is we 're going through a process to scale up to a town of about 50,000 , so we can see this work at big scale .
And we 've got a production unit in Oxford , or just south of Oxford , where we actually produce these mosquitos .
We can produce them , in a space a bit more than this red carpet , I can produce about 20 million a week .
We can transport them around the world .
It 's not very expensive , because it 's a coffee cup -- something the size of a coffee cup will hold about three million eggs .
So freight costs aren 't our biggest problem .
So we 've got that . You could call it a mosquito factory .
And for Brazil , where we 've been doing some trials , the Brazilian government themselves have now built their own mosquito factory , far bigger than ours , and we 'll use that for scaling up in Brazil .
There you are . We 've sent mosquito eggs .
We 've separated the males from the females .
The males have been put in little pots and the truck is going down the road and they are releasing males as they go .
It 's actually a little bit more precise than that .
You want to release them so that you get good coverage of your area .
So you take a Google Map , you divide it up , work out how far they can fly , and make sure you 're releasing such that you get coverage of the area , and then you go back , and within a very short space of time , you 're bringing that population right the way down .
We 've also done this in agriculture .
We 've got several different species of agriculture coming along , and I 'm hoping that soon we 'll be able to get some funding together so we can get back and start looking at malaria .
So that 's where we stand at the moment , and I 've just got a few final thoughts , which is that this is another way in which biology is now coming in to supplement chemistry in some of our societal advances in this area , and these biological approaches are coming in in very different forms , and when you think about genetic engineering , we 've now got enzymes for industrial processing , enzymes , genetically engineered enzymes in food .
We have G.M. crops , we have pharmaceuticals , we have new vaccines , all using roughly the same technology , but with very different outcomes .
And I 'm in favor , actually . Of course I am .
I 'm in favor of particularly where the older technologies don 't work well or have become unacceptable .
And although the techniques are similar , the outcomes are very , very different , and if you take our approach , for example , and you compare it to , say , G.M. crops , both techniques are trying to produce a massive benefit .
Both have a side benefit , which is that we reduce pesticide use tremendously .
But whereas a G.M. crop is trying to protect the plant , for example , and give it an advantage , what we 're actually doing is taking the mosquito and giving it the biggest disadvantage it can possibly have , rendering it unable to reproduce effectively .
So for the mosquito , it 's a dead end .
Thank you very much .
Gero Miesenboeck : Re-engineering the brain
In the quest to map the brain , many scientists have attempted the incredibly daunting task of recording the activity of each neuron . Gero Miesenboeck works backward -- manipulating specific neurons to figure out exactly what they do , through a series of stunning experiments that reengineer the way fruit flies percieve light .
I have a doppelganger .
Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the " Dragonball Z : Android Saga . "
If you look very carefully , you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light .
That 's exactly what I do -- optical mind control .
But in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination , my motives are not sinister .
I control the brain in order to understand how it works .
Now wait a minute , you may say , how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first ?
Isn 't that putting the cart before the horse ?
Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis .
They say , " If we could record the activity of our neurons , we would understand the brain . "
But think for a moment what that means .
Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times , we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns , and that 's so difficult , chances are we 'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them .
Take a look at what brain activity might look like .
In this simulation , each black dot is one nerve cell .
The dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse .
There 's 10,000 neurons here .
So you 're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach .
Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated .
Somewhere , in a pattern like this , is you , your perceptions , your emotions , your memories , your plans for the future .
But we don 't know where , since we don 't know how to read the pattern .
We don 't understand the code used by the brain .
To make progress , we need to break the code .
But how ?
An experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order to figure out what the symbols in a code mean , it 's essential to be able to play with them , to rearrange them at will .
So in this situation too , to decode the information contained in patterns like this , watching alone won 't do .
We need to rearrange the pattern .
In other words , instead of recording the activity of neurons , we need to control it .
It 's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain , just some .
The more targeted our interventions , the better .
And I 'll show you in a moment how we can achieve the necessary precision .
And since I 'm realistic , rather than grandiose , I don 't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries .
But we 'll certainly learn a lot .
Now , I 'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is .
The history of attempts to tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious .
It dates back at least 200 years , to Galvani 's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond .
Galvani showed that a frog 's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current .
This experiment revealed the first , and perhaps most fundamental , nugget of the neural code : that information is written in the form of electrical impulses .
Galvani 's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today , despite a number of drawbacks .
Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude .
It 's hard to do in animals that run around , and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously .
So around the turn of the last century , I started to think , " Wouldn 't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down ? "
So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain , re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light .
Such an approach would literally , in a flash of light , overcome many of the obstacles to discovery .
First , it 's clearly a non-invasive , wireless form of communication .
And second , just as in a radio broadcast , you can communicate with many receivers at once .
You don 't need to know where these receivers are , and it doesn 't matter if these receivers move -- just think of the stereo in your car .
It gets even better , for it turns out that we can fabricate the receivers out of materials that are encoded in DNA .
So each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us to control its function .
I hope you 'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept .
There 's no high-tech gizmos here , just biology revealed through biology .
Now let 's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close .
As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons , we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores .
Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system .
But these pores here are special .
They are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes .
Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor , the pore opens , an electrical current is switched on , and the neuron fires electrical impulses .
Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA , we can achieve incredible precision .
This is because , although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes , different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells .
You can exploit this to make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others don 't .
So in this cartoon , the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore .
The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain .
In this example , each electrical impulse , each deflection on the trace , is caused by a brief pulse of light .
And the approach , of course , also works in moving , behaving animals .
This is the first ever such experiment , sort of the optical equivalent of Galvani 's .
It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student , Susana Lima .
Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore .
You 're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try to swat the fly .
They trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position .
And you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect .
The animal jumps , it spreads its wings , it vibrates them , but it can 't actually take off because the fly is sandwiched between two glass plates .
Now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see , Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment .
She cut the heads off of her flies .
These headless bodies can live for about a day , but they don 't do much .
They just stand around and groom excessively .
So it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity .
Anyway , as you 'll see in a moment , Susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what 's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away .
They didn 't get very far , obviously .
Since we took these first steps , the field of optogenetics has exploded .
And there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches .
And we 've come a long way since Galvani 's and Susana 's first successes in making animals twitch or jump .
We can now actually interfere with their psychology in rather profound ways , as I 'll show you in my last example , which is directed at a familiar question .
Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next .
We cope with this pressure by having brains , and within our brains , decision-making centers that I 've called here the " Actor . "
The Actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate .
Our actions change the environment , or context , and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop .
Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model , we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject , fruit flies .
Each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly .
The left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors , and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them .
Here 's some such CCTV footage .
Whenever a fly reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odor streams meet , it has to make a decision .
It has to decide whether to turn around and stay in the same odor , or whether to cross the midline and try something new .
These decisions are clearly a reflection of the Actor 's policy .
Now for an intelligent being like our fly , this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience .
We can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly 's brain contains not only an Actor , but a different group of cells , a " Critic , " that provides a running commentary on the Actor 's choices .
You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain 's equivalent of the Catholic Church , if you 're an Austrian like me , or the super-ego , if you 're Freudian , or your mother , if you 're Jewish .
Now obviously , the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent .
So we set out to identify the cells in the fly 's brain that played the role of the Critic .
And the logic of our experiment was simple .
We thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the Critic , we should be able , artificially , to nag the Actor into changing its policy .
In other words , the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but , in reality , it had not made .
So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable .
And then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices .
And whenever they made one of the two choices , chose one odor , in this case the blue one over the orange one , we switched on the lights .
If the Critic was among the optically activated cells , the result of this intervention should be a change in policy .
The fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor .
Here 's what happened in two instances : We 're comparing two strains of flies , each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains , shown here in green on the left and on the right .
What 's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine .
But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right .
Optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences .
If you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right , you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet , it marches straight through , as it did before .
Its behavior is completely unchanged .
But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different .
Whenever it comes up to the midpoint , it pauses , it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment , and then it turns around .
This means that the policy that the Actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that 's in the right half of the chamber .
This means that the Critic must have spoken in that animal , and that the Critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left , but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right .
Through many such experiments , we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells .
These 12 cells , as shown here in green , send the output to a brain structure called the " mushroom body , " which is shown here in gray .
We know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the Critic 's commentary is the Actor .
So this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice .
Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies , this makes perfect sense .
In fact , it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly .
In this electronic toy circuit , the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board .
These LED 's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air .
Each odor activates a different combination of sensors , which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body .
So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly , the Actor , can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up .
What the Actor does with this information depends on its policy , which is stored in the strengths of the connection , between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly 's evasive actions .
If the connection is weak , the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course .
If the connection is strong , the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn .
Now consider a situation in which the motors stay off , the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped .
In a situation like this , we would expect the Critic to speak up and to tell the Actor to change its policy .
We have created such a situation , artificially , by turning on the critic with a flash of light .
That caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors .
So the next time the fly finds itself facing the same odor again , the connection is strong enough to turn on the motors and to trigger an evasive maneuver .
I don 't know about you , but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical , mechanistic understanding of the mind , even if it 's the mind of the fly .
This is one piece of good news .
The other piece of good news , for a scientist at least , is that much remains to be discovered .
In the experiments I told you about , we have lifted the identity of the Critic , but we still have no idea how the Critic does its job .
Come to think of it , knowing when you 're wrong without a teacher , or your mother , telling you , is a very hard problem .
There are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done , but we still haven 't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter .
I think we 'll get there in the not too distant future .
Thank you .

Ramsey Musallam : 3 rules to spark learning
It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of " pseudo-teaching " to understand the true role of the educator : to cultivate curiosity . In a fun and personal talk , Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning , and get students excited about how the world works .
I teach chemistry .
All right , all right .
So more than just explosions , chemistry is everywhere .
Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over ?
Some people nodding yes .
Recently , I showed this to my students , and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened .
The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating .
Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening .
Now obviously , as Maddie 's chemistry teacher , I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class .
But what fascinated me more is that Maddie 's curiosity took her to a new level .
If you look inside that beaker , you might see a candle .
Maddie 's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario .
You know , questions and curiosity like Maddie 's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers , and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education .
But if we place these technologies before student inquiry , we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers : our students ' questions .
For example , flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time , but if it is the focus of our students ' experience , it 's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing .
But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students , perplex them , and evoke real questions , through those questions , we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction .
So , 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside , the truth is , I 've been teaching for 13 years now , and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning , not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information .
In May of 2010 , at 35 years old , with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way , I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta .
This led to open-heart surgery . This is the actual real email from my doctor right there .
Now , when I got this , I was -- press Caps Lock -- absolutely freaked out , okay ?
But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied .
Where did this guy get this confidence , the audacity of it ?
So when I asked him , he told me three things .
He said first , his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure , about what worked and what didn 't work .
Second , he embraced , and didn 't fear , the messy process of trial and error , the inevitable process of trial and error .
And third , through intense reflection , he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure , and then , with a steady hand , he saved my life .
Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom , and before I went back into the classroom that fall , I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today .
Rule number one : Curiosity comes first .
Questions can be windows to great instruction , but not the other way around .
Rule number two : Embrace the mess .
We 're all teachers . We know learning is ugly .
And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip , okay , trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206 .
And rule number three : Practice reflection .
What we do is important . It deserves our care , but it also deserves our revision .
Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms ?
As if what we are doing one day will save lives .
Our students our worth it .
And each case is different .
All right . Sorry .
The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on .
So these are my daughters .
On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family .
And , on the left , Riley .
Now Riley 's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here .
She 's going to be four years old , and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask , " Why ? "
Yeah . Why .
I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything .
We all were at that age .
But the challenge is really for Riley 's future teachers , the ones she has yet to meet .
How will they grow this curiosity ?
You see , I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids , and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms -- to the senior who 's checked out before the year 's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school 's classroom .
But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry , we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day , and spark their imagination .
Thank you very much .
Magnus Larsson : Turning dunes into architecture
Architecture student Magnus Larsson details his bold plan to transform the harsh Sahara desert using bacteria and a surprising construction material : the sand itself .
It 's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen , and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire African continent .
About the size of the Great Wall of China , this would hardly be an invisible structure .
And yet it 's made from parts that are invisible , or near-invisible , to the naked eye : bacteria and grains of sand .
Now , as architects we 're trained to solve problems .
But I don 't really believe in architectural problems ; I only believe in opportunities .
Which is why I 'll show you a threat , and an architectural response .
The threat is desertification .
My response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand , stretching across the desert .
Now , sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions .
It is simple and complex .
It is peaceful and violent .
It is always the same , never the same , endlessly fascinating .
One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second .
That 's a cyclical process .
As rocks and mountains die , grains of sand are born .
Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone .
And as the sandstone weathers , new grains break free .
Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale , into a sand dune .
In a way , the static , stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand .
But , moving mountains can be dangerous . Let me try and explain why .
Dry areas cover more than one third of the Earth 's land surfaces .
Some are already deserts ; others are being seriously degraded by the sand .
Just south of the Sahara we find the Sahel .
The name means " edge of the desert . "
And this is the region most closely associated with desertification .
It was here in the late ' 60s and early ' 70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid , with about up to 250,000 dying .
This is a catastrophe waiting to happen again .
And it 's one that gets very little attention .
In our accelerated media culture , desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines .
It 's nothing like a tsunami or a Katrina : too few crying children and smashed up houses .
And yet desertification is a major threat on all continents , affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world 's agricultural drylands .
It seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people , and especially in Africa and China .
And it is largely an issue that we 've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources .
So , we get climate change .
We get droughts , increased desertification , crashing food systems , water scarcity , famine , forced migration , political instability , warfare , crisis .
That 's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously .
But , how far away is it ?
I went to Sokoto in northern Nigeria to try and find out how far away it is .
The dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year .
That 's the Sahara eating up almost [ two meters ] a day of the arable land , physically pushing people away from their homes .
Here I am -- I 'm the second person on the left -- with the elders in Gidan-Kara , a tiny village outside of Sokoto .
They had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it .
So , they moved the entire village , hut by hut .
This is where the village used to be .
It took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune , which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location .
That 's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to .
If you happen to live close to the desert border , you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away , and abandon your home and your life as you know it .
Now , sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts .
And still , those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands .
Four years ago , 23 African countries came together to create the Great Green Wall Sahara .
A fantastic project , the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the African continent , from Mauritania in the west , all the way to Djibouti in the east .
If you want to stop a sand dune from moving , what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest .
And a good way of doing that , the most efficient way , is to use some kind of sand catcher .
Trees or cacti are good for this .
But , one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood .
Now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they won 't get chopped down .
This sandstone wall that I 'm proposing essentially does three things .
It adds roughness to the dune 's surface , to the texture of the dune 's surface , binding the grains .
It provides a physical support structure for the trees , and it creates physical spaces , habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes .
If people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees , protect them from humans , and from some of the forces of nature .
Inside of the dunes we find shade .
We can start harvesting condensation , and start greening the desert from within .
Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way .
All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid , and then excavate the sand , and we have our architecture .
We can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us .
So , the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us .
But , by now , you 're probably asking , how am I planning to solidify a sand dune ?
How do we glue those grains of sand together ?
And the answer is , perhaps , that you use these guys , Bacillus pasteurii , a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes , and does precisely that .
It takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it .
These images from the American Society for Microbiology show us the process .
What happens is , you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand , and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains .
A chemical process produces calcite , which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together .
The whole cementation process takes about 24 hours .
I learned about this from a professor at U.C. Davis called Jason DeJong .
He managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes .
Here I am , playing the part of the mad scientist , working with the bugs at UCL in London , trying to solidify them .
So , how much would this cost ?
I 'm not an economist , very much not , but I did , quite literally , a back of the envelope calculation -- -- and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars .
And , after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria , which you 'll never have to pay again , one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars .
How do we construct something like this ?
Well , I 'll quickly show you two options .
The first is to create a kind of balloon structure , fill it with bacteria , then allow the sand to wash over the balloon , pop the balloon , as it were , disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it .
Then , a few years afterwards , using permacultural strategies , we green that part of the desert .
The second alternative would be to use injection piles .
So , we pushed the piles down through the dune , and we create an initial bacterial surface .
We then pull the piles up through the dune and we 're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up .
So , we have a way of turning sand into sandstone , and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes .
But , what should they look like ?
Well , I was inspired , for my architectural form , by tafoni , which look a little bit like this , this is a model representation of it .
These are cavernous rock structures that I found on the site in Sokoto .
And I realized that if I scaled them up , they would provide me with good spatial qualities , for ventilation , for thermal comfort , and for other things .
Now , part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature , obviously , as the bacteria do their work .
And I think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually .
I think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice .
We see the result , the traces , if you like , of the Bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments .
Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably , and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way .
That 's not true at all .
It 's a natural process . It goes on in nature today , and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them .
So , there it is -- architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself .
Sand-stopping devices , made from sand .
The world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century .
In a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands , this could prove disastrous .
And quite frankly , we 're putting our heads in the sand .
If nothing else , I would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion .
But , if I had something like a TED wish , it would be to actually get it built , to start building this habitable wall , this very , very long , but very narrow city in the desert , built into the dunescape itself .
It 's not only something that supports trees , but something that connects people and countries together .
I would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure , and leave you with a sentence by Jorge Luis Borges .
Borges said that " nothing is built on stone , everything is built on sand , but we must build as if the sand were stone . "
Now , there are many details left to explore in this scheme -- political , practical , ethical , financial .
My design , as it takes you down the rabbit hole , is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world .
But , it 's a beginning , it 's a vision .
As Borges would have it , it 's the sand .
And I think now is really the time to turn it into stone . Thank you .
Rob Harmon : How the market can keep streams flowing
With streams and rivers drying up because of over-usage , Rob Harmon has implemented an ingenious market mechanism to bring back the water . Farmers and beer companies find their fates intertwined in the intriguing century-old tale of Prickly Pear Creek . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
This is a river .
This is a stream .
This is a river .
This is happening all over the country .
There are tens of thousands of miles of dewatered streams in the United States .
On this map , the colored areas represent water conflicts .
Similar problems are emerging in the east as well .
The reasons vary state to state , but mostly in the details .
There are 4,000 miles of dewatered streams in Montana alone .
They would ordinarily support fish and other wildlife .
They 're the veins of the ecosystem , and they 're often empty veins .
I want to tell you the story of just one of these streams because it 's an archetype for the larger story .
This is Prickly Pear Creek .
It runs through a populated area from East Helena to Lake Helena .
It supports wild fish including cutthroat , brown and rainbow trout .
Nearly every year for more than a hundred years , it 's looked like this in the summer .
How did we get here ?
Well , it started back in the late 1800s when people started settling in places like Montana .
In short , there was a lot of water and there weren 't very many people .
But as more people showed up wanting water , the folks who were there first got a little concerned , and in 1865 , Montana passed its first water law .
It basically said , everybody near the stream can share in the stream .
Oddly , a lot of people showed up wanting to share the stream , and the folks who were there first got concerned enough to bring out their lawyers .
There were precedent-setting suits in 1870 and 1872 , both involving Prickly Pear Creek .
And in 1921 , the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first , or " senior water rights . "
These senior water rights are key .
The problem is that all over the west now it looks like this .
Some of these creeks have claims for 50 to 100 times more water than is actually in the stream .
And the senior water rights holders , if they don 't use their water right , they risk losing their water right , along with the economic value that goes with it .
So they have no incentive to conserve .
So it 's not just about the number of people ; the system itself creates a disincentive to conserve because you can lose your water right if you don 't use it .
So after decades of lawsuits and 140 years , now , of experience , we still have this .
It 's a broken system .
There 's a disincentive to conserve , because , if you don 't use your water right , you can lose your water right .
And I 'm sure you all know , this has created significant conflicts between the agricultural and environmental communities .
Okay . Now I 'm going to change gears here .
Most of you will be happy to know that the rest of the presentation 's free , and some of you 'll be happy to know that it involves beer .
There 's another thing happening around the country , which is that companies are starting to get concerned about their water footprint .
They 're concerned about securing an adequate supply of water , they 're trying to be really efficient with their water use , and they 're concerned about how their water use affects the image of their brand .
Well , it 's a national problem , but I 'm going to tell you another story from Montana , and it involves beer .
I bet you didn 't know , it takes about 5 pints of water to make a pint of beer .
If you include all the drain , it takes more than a hundred pints of water to make a pint of beer .
Now the brewers in Montana have already done a lot to reduce their water consumption , but they still use millions of gallons of water .
I mean , there 's water in beer .
So what can they do about this remaining water footprint that can have serious effects on the ecosystem ?
These ecosystems are really important to the Montana brewers and their customers .
After all , there 's a strong correlation between water and fishing , and for some , there 's a strong correlation between fishing and beer .
So the Montana brewers and their customers are concerned , and they 're looking for some way to address the problem .
So how can they address this remaining water footprint ?
Remember Prickly Pear .
Up until now , business water stewardship has been limited to measuring and reducing , and we 're suggesting that the next step is to restore .
Remember Prickly Pear .
It 's a broken system .
You 've got a disincentive to conserve , because if you don 't use your water right , you risk losing your water right .
Well , we decided to connect these two worlds -- the world of the companies with their water footprints and the world of the farmers with their senior water rights on these creeks .
In some states , senior water rights holders can leave their water in-stream while legally protecting it from others and maintaining their water right .
After all , it is their water right , and if they want to use that water right to help the fish grow in the stream , it 's their right to do so .
But they have no incentive to do so .
So , working with local water trusts , we created an incentive to do so .
We pay them to leave their water in-stream .
That 's what 's happening here .
This individual has made the choice and is closing this water diversion , leaving the water in the stream .
He doesn 't lose the water right , he just chooses to apply that right , or some portion of it , to the stream , instead of to the land .
Because he 's the senior water rights holder , he can protect the water from other users in the stream .
Okay ?
He gets paid to leave the water in the stream .
This guy 's measuring the water that this leaves in the stream .
We then take the measured water , we divide it into thousand-gallon increments .
Each increment gets a serial number and a certificate , and then the brewers and others buy those certificates as a way to return water to these degraded ecosystems .
The brewers pay to restore water to the stream .
It provides a simple , inexpensive and measurable way to return water to these degraded ecosystems , while giving farmers an economic choice and giving businesses concerned about their water footprints an easy way to deal with them .
After 140 years of conflict and 100 years of dry streams , a circumstance that litigation and regulation has not solved , we put together a market-based , willing buyer , willing seller solution -- a solution that does not require litigation .
It 's about giving folks concerned about their water footprints a real opportunity to put water where it 's critically needed , into these degraded ecosystems , while at the same time providing farmers a meaningful economic choice about how their water is used .
These transactions create allies , not enemies .
They connect people rather than dividing them .
And they provide needed economic support for rural communities .
And most importantly , it 's working .
We 've returned more than four billion gallons of water to degraded ecosystems .
We 've connected senior water rights holders with brewers in Montana , with hotels and tea companies in Oregon and with high-tech companies that use a lot of water in the Southwest .
And when we make these connections , we can and we do turn this into this .
Thank you very much .
Robert Lang : The math and magic of origami
Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami -- using math and engineering principles to fold mind-blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and , sometimes , very useful .
My talk is " Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes . "
And you would think that should have nothing to do with one another , but I hope by the end of these 18 minutes , you 'll see a little bit of a relation .
It ties to origami . So let me start .
What is origami ?
Most people think they know what origami is . It 's this : flapping birds , toys , cootie catchers , that sort of thing .
And that is what origami used to be .
But it 's become something else .
It 's become an art form , a form of sculpture .
The common theme -- what makes it origami -- is folding is how we create the form .
You know , it 's very old . This is a plate from 1797 .
It shows these women playing with these toys .
If you look close , it 's this shape , called a crane .
Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane .
So this art has been around for hundreds of years , and you would think something that 's been around that long -- so restrictive , folding only -- everything that could be done has been done a long time ago .
And that might have been the case .
But in the twentieth century , a Japanese folder named Yoshizawa came along , and he created tens of thousands of new designs .
But even more importantly , he created a language , a way we could communicate , a code of dots , dashes and arrows .
Harkening back to Susan Blackmore 's talk , we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection , and we know where that leads .
And where it has led in origami is to things like this .
This is an origami figure -- one sheet , no cuts , folding only , hundreds of folds .
This , too , is origami , and this shows where we 've gone in the modern world .
Naturalism . Detail .
You can get horns , antlers -- even , if you look close , cloven hooves .
And it raises a question : what changed ?
And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art , which is math .
That is , people applied mathematical principles to the art , to discover the underlying laws .
And that leads to a very powerful tool .
The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you .
Because what you can do is take your problem , and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved , and use their solutions .
And I want to tell you how we did that in origami .
Origami revolves around crease patterns .
The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure .
And you can 't just draw them arbitrarily .
They have to obey four simple laws .
And they 're very simple , easy to understand .
The first law is two-colorability . You can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting .
The directions of the folds at any vertex -- the number of mountain folds , the number of valley folds -- always differs by two . Two more or two less .
Nothing else .
If you look at the angles around the fold , you find that if you number the angles in a circle , all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line , all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line .
And if you look at how the layers stack , you 'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets , a sheet can never penetrate a fold .
So that 's four simple laws . That 's all you need in origami .
All of origami comes from that .
And you 'd think , " Can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity ? "
But indeed , the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin , and yet they govern all of chemistry , all of life , all of history .
If we obey these laws , we can do amazing things .
So in origami , to obey these laws , we can take simple patterns -- like this repeating pattern of folds , called textures -- and by itself it 's nothing .
But if we follow the laws of origami , we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very , very simple , but when we put it together , we get something a little different .
This fish , 400 scales -- again , it is one uncut square , only folding .
And if you don 't want to fold 400 scales , you can back off and just do a few things , and add plates to the back of a turtle , or toes .
Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag , with 13 stripes .
And if you want to go really crazy , 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake .
And this guy 's on display downstairs , so take a look if you get a chance .
The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures .
And I can put it in this simple equation .
We take an idea , combine it with a square , and you get an origami figure .
What matters is what we mean by those symbols .
And you might say , " Can you really be that specific ?
I mean , a stag beetle -- it 's got two points for jaws , it 's got antennae . Can you be that specific in the detail ? "
And yeah , you really can .
So how do we do that ? Well , we break it down into a few smaller steps .
So let me stretch out that equation .
I start with my idea . I abstract it .
What 's the most abstract form ? It 's a stick figure .
And from that stick figure , I somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject , a flap for every leg .
And then once I have that folded shape that we call the base , you can make the legs narrower , you can bend them , you can turn it into the finished shape .
Now the first step , pretty easy .
Take an idea , draw a stick figure .
The last step is not so hard , but that middle step -- going from the abstract description to the folded shape -- that 's hard .
But that 's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump .
And I 'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something .
But we 're going to start small .
This base has a lot of flaps in it .
We 're going to learn how to make one flap .
How would you make a single flap ?
Take a square . Fold it in half , fold it in half , fold it again , until it gets long and narrow , and then we 'll say at the end of that , that 's a flap .
I could use that for a leg , an arm , anything like that .
What paper went into that flap ?
Well , if I unfold it and go back to the crease pattern , you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap .
So that 's the flap , and all the rest of the paper 's left over .
I can use it for something else .
Well , there are other ways of making a flap .
There are other dimensions for flaps .
If I make the flaps skinnier , I can use a bit less paper .
If I make the flap as skinny as possible , I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed .
And you can see there , it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap .
There 's other ways of making flaps .
If I put the flap on the edge , it uses a half circle of paper .
And if I make the flap from the middle , it uses a full circle .
So , no matter how I make a flap , it needs some part of a circular region of paper .
So now we 're ready to scale up .
What if I want to make something that has a lot of flaps ?
What do I need ? I need a lot of circles .
And in the 1990s , origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles .
And here 's where the dead people start to help us out , because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles .
I can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements .
And I can use those patterns now to create origami shapes .
So we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles , you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules . That gives you the folds .
Those folds fold into a base . You shape the base .
You get a folded shape -- in this case , a cockroach .
And it 's so simple .
It 's so simple that a computer could do it .
And you say , " Well , you know , how simple is that ? "
But computers -- you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms , and with this , we could .
So I wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called TreeMaker , and you can download it from my website .
It 's free . It runs on all the major platforms -- even Windows .
And you just draw a stick figure , and it calculates the crease pattern .
It does the circle packing , calculates the crease pattern , and if you use that stick figure that I just showed -- which you can kind of tell , it 's a deer , it 's got antlers -- you 'll get this crease pattern .
And if you take this crease pattern , you fold on the dotted lines , you 'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer , with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted .
And if you want a different deer , not a white-tailed deer , but you want a mule deer , or an elk , you change the packing , and you can do an elk .
Or you could do a moose .
Or , really , any other kind of deer .
These techniques revolutionized this art .
We found we could do insects , spiders , which are close , things with legs , things with legs and wings , things with legs and antennae .
And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn 't interesting enough , then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square .
She 's eating him .
I call it " Snack Time . "
And you can do more than just insects .
This -- you can put details , toes and claws . A grizzly bear has claws .
This tree frog has toes .
Actually , lots of people in origami now put toes into their models .
Toes have become an origami meme , because everyone 's doing it .
You can make multiple subjects .
So these are a couple of instrumentalists .
The guitar player from a single square , the bass player from a single square .
And if you say , " Well , but the guitar , bass -- that 's not so hot .
Do a little more complicated instrument . "
Well , then you could do an organ .
And what this has allowed is the creation of origami-on-demand .
So now people can say , " I want exactly this and this and this , " and you can go out and fold it .
And sometimes you create high art , and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work .
But I want to show you some examples .
Everything you 'll see here , except the car , is origami .
Just to show you , this really was folded paper .
Computers made things move , but these were all real , folded objects that we made .
And we can use this not just for visuals , but it turns out to be useful even in the real world .
Surprisingly , origami and the structures that we 've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine , in science , in space , in the body , consumer electronics and more .
And I want to show you some of these examples .
One of the earliest was this pattern , this folded pattern , studied by Koryo Miura , a Japanese engineer .
He studied a folding pattern , and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure .
And he used it to design this solar array .
It 's an artist 's rendition , but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995 .
Now , there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope , but it 's very simple .
The telescope , going up in space , it unfolds in two places .
It folds in thirds . It 's a very simple pattern -- you wouldn 't even call that origami .
They certainly didn 't need to talk to origami artists .
But if you want to go higher and go larger than this , then you might need some origami .
Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab had an idea for a telescope much larger .
They called it the Eyeglass .
The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up , 100-meter diameter lens .
So , imagine a lens the size of a football field .
There were two groups of people who were interested in this : planetary scientists , who want to look up , and then other people , who wanted to look down .
Whether you look up or look down , how do you get it up in space ? You 've got to get it up there in a rocket .
And rockets are small . So you have to make it smaller .
How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller ?
Well , about the only way is to fold it up somehow .
So you have to do something like this .
This was a small model .
Folded lens , you divide up the panels , you add flexures .
But this pattern 's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters .
So the Livermore engineers , wanting to make use of the work of dead people , or perhaps live origamists , said , " Let 's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing . "
So they looked into the origami community , we got in touch with them , and I started working with them .
And we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size , but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat , compact cylinder .
And they adopted that for their first generation , which was not 100 meters -- it was a five-meter .
But this is a five-meter telescope -- has about a quarter-mile focal length .
And it works perfectly on its test range , and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle .
Now , there is other origami in space .
Japan Aerospace [ Exploration ] Agency flew a solar sail , and you can see here that the sail expands out , and you can still see the fold lines .
The problem that 's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination , but needs to be small for the journey .
And that works whether you 're going into space , or whether you 're just going into a body .
And this example is the latter .
This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University .
It holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination , but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there , through your blood vessels .
And this stent folds down using an origami pattern , based on a model called the water bomb base .
Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space .
And they want to do their design by simulation .
So they need to figure out how , in a computer , to flatten an airbag .
And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation .
And so they can do a simulation like this .
Those are the origami creases forming , and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out , does it work ?
And that leads to a really interesting idea .
You know , where did these things come from ?
Well , the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school .
It 's the same pattern , called the water bomb base .
The airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects -- things with legs .
The thing is , that this often happens in math and science .
When you get math involved , problems that you solve for aesthetic value only , or to create something beautiful , turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world .
And as weird and surprising as it may sound , origami may someday even save a life .
Thanks .
Barry Schwartz : Using our practical wisdom
In an intimate talk , Barry Schwartz dives into the question " How do we do the right thing ? " With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe , he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely .
The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you .
The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher .
Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years .
That 's Ken Sharpe over there .
So there is among many people -- certainly me and most of the people I talk to -- a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working , with the way our institutions run .
Our kids ' teachers seem to be failing them .
Our doctors don 't know who the hell we are , and they don 't have enough time for us .
We certainly can 't trust the bankers , and we certainly can 't trust the brokers .
They almost brought the entire financial system down .
And even as we do our own work , all too often , we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing , or the required thing , or the profitable thing .
So everywhere we look , pretty much across the board , we worry that the people we depend on don 't really have our interests at heart .
Or if they do have our interests at heart , we worry that they don 't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests .
They don 't understand us .
They don 't have the time to get to know us .
There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction .
If things aren 't going right , the first response is : let 's make more rules , let 's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing .
Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom , so even if they don 't know what they 're doing and don 't care about the welfare of our kids , as long as they follow the scripts , our kids will get educated .
Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes , so that you don 't need to rely on judges using their judgment .
Instead , all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime .
Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees .
More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent , uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with .
Or -- or maybe and -- in addition to rules , let 's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that , even if the people we deal with don 't particularly want to serve our interests , it is in their interest to serve our interest -- the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness .
So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems .
Rules and incentives -- " sticks " and " carrots . "
We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse .
There 's the Dodd-Frank Act , there 's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren .
Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave .
We 'll see .
In addition , we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies , rather than securing short-term profits .
So if we find just the right incentives , they 'll do the right thing -- as I said -- selfishly , and if we come up with the right rules and regulations , they won 't drive us all over a cliff .
And Ken [ Sharpe ] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers .
If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that .
But what we believe , and what we argue in the book , is that there is no set of rules , no matter how detailed , no matter how specific , no matter how carefully monitored and enforced , there is no set of rules that will get us what we need .
Why ? Because bankers are smart people .
And , like water , they will find cracks in any set of rules .
You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system " almost-collapse " can 't happen again .
It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse , you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse .
So it 's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that .
What we desperately need , beyond , or along with , better rules and reasonably smart incentives , is we need virtue .
We need character .
We need people who want to do the right thing .
And in particular , the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called " practical wisdom . "
Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is .
So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked .
And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems -- problems that they hadn 't anticipated .
So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos , and they need to measure out round columns .
Well if you think about it , it 's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler .
So what do they do ?
They fashion a novel solution to the problem .
They created a ruler that bends , what we would call these days a tape measure -- a flexible rule , a rule that bends .
And Aristotle said , " Hah , they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns , you need to bend the rule . "
And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people , we need to bend the rules .
Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass .
Wise people know when and how to bend the rules .
Wise people know how to improvise .
The way my co-author , Ken , and I talk about it , they are kind of like jazz musicians .
The rules are like the notes on the page , and that gets you started , but then you dance around the notes on the page , coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players .
So for Aristotle , the kind of rule-bending , rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman .
And in interactions with people , almost all the time , it is this kind of flexibility that is required .
A wise person knows when to bend the rules .
A wise person knows when to improvise .
And most important , a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims .
If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself , what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people .
So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself .
And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding .
Together they comprise practical wisdom , which Aristotle thought was the master virtue .
So I 'll give you an example of wise practice in action .
It 's the case of Michael .
Michael 's a young guy .
He had a pretty low-wage job .
He was supporting his wife and a child , and the child was going to parochial school .
Then he lost his job .
He panicked about being able to support his family .
One night , he drank a little too much , and he robbed a cab driver -- stole 50 dollars .
He robbed him at gunpoint .
It was a toy gun .
He got caught . He got tried .
He got convicted .
The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years , 24 months .
The judge on the case , Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense .
He had never committed a crime before .
He was a responsible husband and father .
He had been faced with desperate circumstances .
All this would do is wreck a family .
And so she improvised a sentence -- 11 months , and not only that , but release every day to go to work .
Spend your night in jail , spend your day holding down a job .
He did . He served out his sentence .
He made restitution and found himself a new job .
And the family was united .
And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life -- a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge .
But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own , and so he appealed .
And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery .
He did after all have a toy gun .
The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years .
He won the appeal .
Michael was sentenced to five years in prison .
Judge Forer had to follow the law .
And by the way , this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence , so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail .
Judge Forer did what she was required to do , and then she quit the bench .
And Michael disappeared .
So that is an example , both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant , of course , to make things better .
Now consider Ms. Dewey .
Ms. Dewey 's a teacher in a Texas elementary school .
She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids , so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests .
All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones , and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools .
So here was the consultant 's advice : first , don 't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do .
Second , don 't waste your time on kids who can 't pass the test no matter what you do .
Third , don 't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted .
Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble , the so-called " bubble kids " -- kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing .
So Ms. Dewey heard this , and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly .
It 's like they were about to go play a football game .
For Ms. Dewey , this isn 't why she became a teacher .
Now Ken and I are not naive , and we understand that you need to have rules .
You need to have incentives .
People have to make a living .
But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity , and they demoralize professional activity in two senses .
First , they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity .
Judge Forer quits , and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened .
And second , they demoralize the activity itself .
The very practice is demoralized , and the practitioners are demoralized .
It creates people -- when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing -- it creates people who are addicted to incentives .
That is to say , it creates people who only do things for incentives .
Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years .
Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years .
We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures , they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward .
If you reward kids for reading books , they stop caring about what 's in the books and only care about how long they are .
If you reward teachers for kids ' test scores , they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation .
If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures -- which is the current system -- they would do more .
If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures , they will do fewer .
What we want , of course , is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason -- namely , to serve the welfare of their patients .
Psychologists have known this for decades , and it 's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit , instead of economists .
And it doesn 't have to be this way .
We think , Ken and I , that there are real sources of hope .
We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws .
These are people who , being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives , find away around the rules , find a way to subvert the rules .
So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow , and they know that if they follow these scripts , the kids will learn nothing .
And so what they do is they follow the scripts , but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective .
So these are little ordinary , everyday heroes , and they 're incredibly admirable , but there 's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down .
So canny outlaws are better than nothing , but it 's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time .
More hopeful are people we call system-changers .
These are people who are looking not to dodge the system 's rules and regulations , but to transform the system , and we talk about several .
One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell .
And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill .
Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career , but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq , and that forced him to take a medical discharge .
He was married , he had a third kid on the way , he suffered from PTSD , in addition to the bad back , and recurrent nightmares , and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms .
He was only able to get part-time work because of his back , and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family .
So he started selling marijuana .
He was busted in a drug sweep .
His family was kicked out of their apartment , and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids .
Under normal sentencing procedures , Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon .
But Judge Russell did have an alternative .
And that 's because he was in a special court .
He was in a court called the Veterans ' Court .
In the Veterans ' Court -- this was the first of its kind in the United States .
Judge Russell created the Veterans ' Court .
It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law .
And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging .
No one wanted non-violent offenders -- and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot -- to be thrown into prison .
They wanted to do something about what we all know , namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system .
And what the Veterans ' Court did , was it treated each criminal as an individual , tried to get inside their problems , tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves , and didn 't forget about them once the judgment was made .
Stayed with them , followed up on them , made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump .
There are now 22 cities that have Veterans ' Courts like this .
Why has the idea spread ?
Well , one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans ' Court as of February of this year , and out of 108 , guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison .
None . None .
Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record .
So here 's is a system-changer , and it seems to be catching .
There 's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers -- I know this is hard to believe -- encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients .
The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community .
Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards , the default rate was extremely low .
The bank was profitable .
The bankers stayed with their loan recipients .
They didn 't make loans and then sell the loans .
They serviced the loans .
They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments .
Banking hasn 't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers .
Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients , before it turned into an institution that serves only itself .
Banking wasn 't always this way , and it doesn 't have to be this way .
So there are examples like this in medicine -- doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education , so that you don 't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy , which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training .
And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year .
So the patients are not organ systems , and they 're not diseases ; they 're people , people with lives .
And in order to be an effective doctor , you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease .
In addition to which there 's an enormous amount of back and forth , mentoring of one student by another , of all the students by the doctors , and the result is a generation -- we hope -- of doctors who do have time for the people they treat .
We 'll see .
So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about .
Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission -- what Aristotle would have called its proper telos .
And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want .
People want to be allowed to be virtuous .
They want to have permission to do the right thing .
They don 't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work .
Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness , and he was right .
There 's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy , and the two things that jump out in study after study -- I know this will come as a shock to all of you -- the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work .
Love : managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part .
Work : engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying .
If you have that , good close relations with other people , work that 's meaningful and fulfilling , you don 't much need anything else .
Well , to love well and to work well , you need wisdom .
Rules and incentives don 't tell you how to be a good friend , how to be a good parent , how to be a good spouse , or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher .
Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom .
Indeed , we argue , there is no substitute for wisdom .
And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners .
In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing -- to do right by others -- practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves .
Thanks .
Brian Greene : Making sense of string theory
Physicist Brian Greene explains superstring theory , the idea that minscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe .
In the year 1919 , a virtually unknown German mathematician , named Theodor Kaluza suggested a very bold and , in some ways , a very bizarre idea .
He proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of .
That is in addition to left , right , back , forth and up , down , Kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we don 't yet see .
Now , when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea , sometimes that 's all it is -- bold and bizarre , but it has nothing to do with the world around us .
This particular idea , however -- although we don 't yet know whether it 's right or wrong , and at the end I 'll discuss experiments which , in the next few years , may tell us whether it 's right or wrong -- this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research .
So , I 'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions .
So where do we go ?
To begin we need a little bit of back story . Go to 1907 .
This is a year when Einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project , to try to understand fully the grand , pervasive force of gravity .
And in that moment , there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved .
Newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well , describes the motion of planets , the motion of the moon and so forth , the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees , hitting people on the head .
All of that could be described using Newton 's work .
But Einstein realized that Newton had left something out of the story , because even Newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity , he 'd been unable to figure out how it really works .
How is it that the Sun , 93 million miles away , [ that ] somehow it affects the motion of the Earth ?
How does the Sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence ?
And that is a task to which Einstein set himself -- to figure out how gravity works .
And let me show you what it is that he found .
So Einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself .
The idea goes like this : imagine space is a substrate of all there is .
Einstein said space is nice and flat , if there 's no matter present .
But if there is matter in the environment , such as the Sun , it causes the fabric of space to warp , to curve .
And that communicates the force of gravity .
Even the Earth warps space around it .
Now look at the Moon .
The Moon is kept in orbit , according to these ideas , because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the Sun and the Moon and the Earth can all create by virtue of their presence .
We go to a full-frame view of this .
The Earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that 's curved because of the Sun 's presence .
That is this new idea about how gravity actually works .
Now , this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations .
It really works . It describes the data .
And this gained Einstein prominence around the world .
And that is what got Kaluza thinking .
He , like Einstein , was in search of what we call a unified theory .
That 's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature 's forces from one set of ideas , one set of principles , one master equation , if you will .
So Kaluza said to himself , Einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space -- in fact , space and time , to be more precise .
Maybe I can play the same game with the other known force , which was , at that time , known as the electromagnetic force -- we know of others today , but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about .
You know , the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth .
So Kaluza says , maybe I can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves .
That raised a question : warps and curves in what ?
Einstein had already used up space and time , warps and curves , to describe gravity .
There didn 't seem to be anything else to warp or curve .
So Kaluza said , well , maybe there are more dimensions of space .
He said , if I want to describe one more force , maybe I need one more dimension .
So he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space , not three , and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension . Now here 's the thing : when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions , not three , he found the old equations that Einstein had already derived in three dimensions -- those were for gravity -- but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension .
And when he looked at that equation , it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force .
Amazing -- it just popped out .
He was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming , " Victory ! " -- that he had found the unified theory .
Now clearly , Kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously .
He , in fact -- there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim , he read a book , a treatise on swimming -- -- then dove into the ocean .
This is a man who would risk his life on theory .
Now , but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded , two questions immediately arise from his observation .
Number one : if there are more dimensions in space , where are they ?
We don 't seem to see them .
And number two : does this theory really work in detail , when you try to apply it to the world around us ?
Now , the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named Oskar Klein .
He suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties -- there might be big , easy-to-see dimensions , but there might also be tiny , curled-up dimensions , curled up so small , even though they 're all around us , that we don 't see them .
Let me show you that one visually .
So , imagine you 're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light .
It 's in Manhattan . You 're in Central Park -- it 's kind of irrelevant -- but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint , but you and I all know that it does have some thickness .
It 's very hard to see it , though , from far away .
But if we zoom in and take the perspective of , say , a little ant walking around -- little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions -- the long dimension , but also this clockwise , counter-clockwise direction .
And I hope you appreciate this .
It took so long to get these ants to do this .
But this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts : big and small . And the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see , but there might be additional dimensions curled up , sort of like the circular part of that cable , so small that they have so far remained invisible .
Let me show you what that would look like .
So , if we take a look , say , at space itself -- I can only show , of course , two dimensions on a screen .
Some of you guys will fix that one day , but anything that 's not flat on a screen is a new dimension , goes smaller , smaller , smaller , and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself , this is the idea , you could have additional curled up dimensions -- here is a little shape of a circle -- so small that we don 't see them .
But if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around , you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about -- that 's like the grid part -- but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that 's so small that we can 't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment .
But deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself , the idea is there could be more dimensions , as we see there .
Now that 's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see .
But what about the second question that I asked : does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world ?
Well , it turns out that Einstein and Kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time , and , in detail , it didn 't work .
In detail , for instance , they couldn 't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory .
So many people worked on it , but by the ' 40s , certainly by the ' 50s , this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away .
Until something wonderful happened in our age .
In our era , a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself , many others around the world , it 's called superstring theory , as you were indicating .
And the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions , but when we study superstring theory , we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling , new form .
So , let me just tell you how that goes .
Superstring theory -- what is it ?
Well , it 's a theory that tries to answer the question : what are the basic , fundamental , indivisible , uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us ?
The idea is like this .
So , imagine we look at a familiar object , just a candle in a holder , and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of .
So we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents .
So deep inside -- we all know , you go sufficiently far down , you have atoms .
We also all know that atoms are not the end of the story .
They have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons .
Even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks .
That is where conventional ideas stop .
Here is the new idea of string theory .
Deep inside any of these particles , there is something else .
This something else is this dancing filament of energy .
It looks like a vibrating string -- that 's where the idea , string theory comes from .
And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns , these can also vibrate in different patterns .
They don 't produce different musical notes .
Rather , they produce the different particles making up the world around us .
So if these ideas are correct , this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like .
It 's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy , vibrating in different frequencies .
The different frequencies produce the different particles .
The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us .
And there you see unification , because matter particles , electrons and quarks , radiation particles , photons , gravitons , are all built up from one entity .
So matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings .
And that 's what we mean by a unified theory .
Now here is the catch .
When you study the mathematics of string theory , you find that it doesn 't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space .
It doesn 't work in a universe with four dimensions of space , nor five , nor six .
Finally , you can study the equations , and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time .
It leads us right back to this idea of Kaluza and Klein -- that our world , when appropriately described , has more dimensions than the ones that we see .
Now you might think about that and say , well , OK , you know , if you have extra dimensions , and they 're really tightly curled up , yeah , perhaps we won 't see them , if they 're small enough .
But if there 's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there , and you make them small enough , and we won 't see them either . That is true .
One of the other predictions of string theory -- no , that 's not one of the other predictions of string theory .
But it raises the question : are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions , or do they tell us something about the world ?
In the remaining time , I 'd like to tell you two features of them .
First is , many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics , theoretical science .
And that question is this : when we look around the world , as scientists have done for the last hundred years , there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe .
These are numbers like the mass of the particles , like electrons and quarks , the strength of gravity , the strength of the electromagnetic force -- a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision , but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do .
Now , does string theory offer an answer ?
Not yet .
But we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions .
And the wonderful thing is , if those numbers had any other values than the known ones , the universe , as we know it , wouldn 't exist .
This is a deep question .
Why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form , when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers -- if I had 20 dials up here and I let you come up and fiddle with those numbers , almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear .
So can we explain those 20 numbers ?
And string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions .
Let me show you how .
So when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory , it 's not one extra dimension , as in the older ideas of Kaluza and Klein .
This is what string theory says about the extra dimensions .
They have a very rich , intertwined geometry .
This is an example of something known as a Calabi-Yau shape -- name isn 't all that important .
But , as you can see , the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape , interesting structure .
And the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like , then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales .
When you swing your hand , you 'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again , but they 're so small that we wouldn 't know it .
So what is the physical implication , though , relevant to those 20 numbers ?
Consider this . If you look at the instrument , a French horn , notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument .
Now in string theory , all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate .
So just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument , strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving .
So let me bring some strings into the story .
And if you watch these little fellows vibrating around -- they 'll be there in a second -- right there , notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions .
So , if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like -- we don 't yet , but if we did -- we should be able to calculate the allowed notes , the allowed vibrational patterns .
And if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns , we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers .
And if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation , this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is .
Now , the second issue that I want to finish up with is : how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly ?
Is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world , or can we actually test for these extra dimensions ?
And we think -- and this is , I think , very exciting -- that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions .
Here 's how it goes . In CERN , Geneva , Switzerland , a machine is being built called the Large Hadron Collider .
It 's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel , opposite directions , near the speed of light .
Every so often those particles will be aimed at each other , so there 's a head-on collision .
The hope is that if the collision has enough energy , it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions , forcing it to enter into the other dimensions .
How would we know it ?
Well , we 'll measure the amount of energy after the collision , compare it to the amount of energy before , and if there 's less energy after the collision than before , this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away .
And if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate , this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there .
Let me show you that idea visually .
So , imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton -- that 's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out , if the extra dimensions are real .
But here 's how the experiment will go .
You take these particles . You slam them together .
You slam them together , and if we are right , some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions .
So this is the kind of experiment that we 'll be looking at in the next five , seven to 10 years or so .
And if this experiment bears fruit , if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there 's less energy in our dimensions than when we began , this will show that the extra dimensions are real .
And to me this is a really remarkable story , and a remarkable opportunity . Going back to Newton with absolute space -- didn 't provide anything but an arena , a stage in which the events of the universe take place .
Einstein comes along and says , well , space and time can warp and curve -- that 's what gravity is .
And now string theory comes along and says , yes , gravity , quantum mechanics , electromagnetism , all together in one package , but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see .
And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime .
Amazing possibility .
Thank you very much .
AJ Jacobs : My year of living biblically
Author , philosopher , prankster and journalist AJ Jacobs talks about the year he spent living biblically -- following the rules in the Bible as literally as possible .
I thought I 'd tell you a little about what I like to write .
And I like to immerse myself in my topics .
I just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig .
And I see my life as a series of experiments .
So , I work for Esquire magazine , and a couple of years ago , I wrote an article called " My Outsourced Life , " where I hired a team of people in Bangalore , India , to live my life for me .
So , they answered my emails .
They answered my phone .
They argued with my wife for me , and they read my son bedtime stories .
It was the best month of my life , because I just sat back and I read books and watched movies .
It was a wonderful experience .
More recently , I wrote an article for Esquire called -- about radical honesty .
And this is a movement where -- this is started by a psychologist in Virginia , who says that you should never , ever lie , except maybe during poker and golf , his only exceptions .
And , more than that , whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth .
So , I decided I would try this for a month .
This was the worst month of my life .
I do not recommend this at all .
To give you a sense of the experience , the article was called , " I Think You 're Fat . "
So , that was hard .
My most recent book -- my previous book was called " The Know-It-All , " and it was about the year I spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in my quest to learn everything in the world , or more precisely from Aak , which is a type of East Asian music , all the way to Zwyiec , which is -- well , I don 't want to ruin the ending .
It 's a very exciting twist ending , like an O. Henry novel , so I won 't ruin it .
But I love that one , because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb .
Although , listening to Kevin Kelly , you don 't have to remember anything .
You can just Google it .
So , I wasted some time there .
I love those experiments , but I think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that I 've done is my most recent experiment , where I spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible , " The Year of Living Biblically . "
And I undertook this for two reasons .
The first was that I grew up with no religion at all .
As I say in my book , I 'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian .
So , not very .
But I 've become increasingly interested in religion .
I do think it 's the defining issue of our time , or one of the main ones .
And I have a son . I want to know what to teach him .
So , I decided to dive in head first , and try to live the Bible .
The second reason I undertook this is because I 'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism , religious fundamentalism , and people who say they take the Bible literally , which is , according to some polls , as high as 45 or 50 percent of America .
So I decided , what if you really did take the Bible literally ?
I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally , without picking and choosing .
The first thing I did was I got a stack of bibles .
I had Christian bibles .
I had Jewish bibles .
A friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible , where the twenty-third Psalm is rendered as , " The Lord is all that , " as opposed to what I knew it as , " The Lord is my shepherd . "
Then I went down and I read several versions , and I wrote down every single law that I could find .
And this was a very long list -- over 700 rules .
And they range from the famous ones that I had heard of -- The Ten Commandments , love your neighbor , be fruitful and multiply .
So I wanted to follow those .
And actually , I take my projects very seriously , because I had twins during my year , so I definitely take my projects seriously .
But I also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the Bible .
There is the law in Leviticus , " You cannot shave the corners of your beard . "
I didn 't know where my corners were , so I decided to let the whole thing grow , and this is what I looked like by the end .
As you can imagine , I spent a lot of time at airport security .
My wife wouldn 't kiss me for the last two months .
So , certainly the challenge was there .
The Bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers , so I thought , " Sounds strange , but I 'll try it . "
You only know if you try it .
I got rid of all my poly-cotton T-shirts .
The Bible says that if two men are in a fight , and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man , then her hand shall be cut off .
So , I wanted to follow that rule .
That one I followed by default , by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby , looking like she had a strong grip .
So -- oh , there 's another shot of my beard .
I will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing , and incredibly challenging .
And there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging .
The first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day .
You know , I could spend a year not killing , but spending a year not gossiping , not coveting , not lying -- you know , I live in New York , and I work as a journalist , so this was 75 , 80 percent of my day I had to do it .
But it was really interesting , because I was able to make some progress , because I couldn 't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts .
This was one of the huge lessons of the year , is that I almost pretended to be a better person , and I became a little bit of a better person .
So I had always thought , you know , " You change your mind , and you change your behavior , " but it 's often the other way around .
You change your behavior , and you change your mind .
So , you know , if you want to become more compassionate , you visit sick people in the hospital , and you will become more compassionate .
You donate money to a cause , and you become emotionally involved in that cause .
So , it really was cognitive psychology -- you know , cognitive dissonance -- that I was experiencing .
The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology , very primitive cognitive psychology .
In the Proverbs , it says that if you smile , you will become happier , which , as we know , is actually true .
The second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century America .
And perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers .
But it 's a big part of the Bible , so I figured I had to address it .
So , I was able to stone one adulterer .
It happened -- I was in the park , and I was dressed in my biblical clothing , so sandals and sort of a white robe , you know , because again , the outer affects the inner .
I wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind .
And this man came up to me and he said , " Why are you dressed like that ? "
And I explained my project , and he said , " Well , I am an adulterer , are you going to stone me ? "
And I said , " Well , that would be great ! "
And I actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that I had been carrying around for weeks , hoping for just this interaction -- and , you know , they were pebbles -- but he grabbed them out of my hand .
He was actually an elderly man , mid-70s , just so you know .
But he 's still an adulterer , and still quite angry .
He grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face , and I felt that I could -- eye for an eye -- I could retaliate , and throw one back at him .
So that was my experience stoning , and it did allow me to talk about , in a more serious way , these big issues .
How can the Bible be so barbaric in some places , and yet so incredibly wise in others ?
How should we view the Bible ?
Should we view it , you know , as original intent , like a sort of a Scalia version of the Bible ?
How was the Bible written ?
And actually , since this is a tech crowd , I talk in the book about how the Bible actually reminds me of the Wikipedia , because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years .
And it 's sort of evolved .
It 's not a book that was written and came down from on high .
So I thought I would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways , the bigger lessons that I learned from my year .
The first is , thou shalt not take the Bible literally .
This became very , very clear , early on .
Because if you do , then you end up acting like a crazy person , and stoning adulterers , or -- here 's another example .
Well , that 's another . I did spend some time shepherding .
It 's a very relaxing vocation . I recommend it .
But this one is -- the Bible says that you cannot touch women during certain times of the month , and more than that , you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat .
And my wife thought this was very offensive , so she sat in every seat in our apartment , and I had to spend much of the year standing until I bought my own seat and carried it around .
So , you know , I met with creationists .
I went to the creationists ' museum .
And these are the ultimate literalists .
And it was fascinating , because they were not stupid people at all .
I would wager that their IQ is exactly the same as the average evolutionist .
It 's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the Bible that they distort all the data to fit their model .
And they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this .
And I will say , though , the museum is gorgeous .
They really did a fantastic job .
If you 're ever in Kentucky , there 's , you can see a movie of the flood , and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes .
So , whatever you think of creationism -- and I think it 's crazy -- they did a great job .
Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks .
And this one was a big lesson because I was praying , giving these prayers of thanksgiving , which was odd for an agnostic .
But I was saying thanks all the time , every day , and I started to change my perspective .
And I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day , that I didn 't even notice , that I took for granted , as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong .
So , this is actually a key to happiness for me , is to just remember when I came over here , the car didn 't flip over , and I didn 't trip coming up the stairs .
It 's a remarkable thing .
Third , that thou shall have reverence .
This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic , and by the end of the year , I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic , which I love .
And I 'm trying to start it as a movement .
So , if anyone wants to join , the basic idea is , whether or not there is a God , there 's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness , and that our rituals can be sacred .
The Sabbath can be sacred .
This was one of the great things about my year , doing the Sabbath , because I am a workaholic , so having this one day where you cannot work , it really , that changed my life .
So , this idea of sacredness , whether or not there is a God .
Thou shall not stereotype .
This one happened because I spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout America because I wanted it to be more than about my journey .
I wanted it to be about religion in America .
So , I spent time with evangelical Christians , and Hasidic Jews , and the Amish .
I 'm very proud because I think I 'm the only person in America to out Bible-talk a Jehovah 's Witness .
After three and a half hours , he looked at his watch , he 's like , " I gotta go . "
Oh , thank you very much .
Thank you . Bless you , bless you .
But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about , for instance , evangelical Christianity , and I found that it 's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it .
There 's a group I met with called the Red Letter Christians , and they focus on the red words in the Bible , which are the ones that Jesus spoke .
That 's how they printed them in the old Bibles .
And their argument is that Jesus never talked about homosexuality .
They have a pamphlet that says , " Here 's what Jesus said about homosexuality , " and you open it up , and there 's nothing in it .
So , they say Jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts , helping poor people .
So , this was very inspiring to me .
I recommend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo .
They 're very inspiring leaders , even though I disagree with much of what they say .
Also , thou shalt not disregard the irrational .
This one was very unexpected because , you know , I grew up with the scientific worldview , and I was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces .
And the thing is , if they 're not harmful , they 're not to be completely dismissed .
Because I learned that -- I was thinking , I was doing all these rituals , these biblical rituals , separating my wool and linen , and I would ask these religious people " Why would the Bible possibly tell us to do this ? Why would God care ? "
And they said , " We don 't know , but it 's just rituals that give us meaning . "
And I would say , " But that 's crazy . "
And they would say , " Well , what about you ?
You blow out candles on top of a birthday cake .
If a guy from Mars came down and saw , here 's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics , would the Martians say , ' Well , that guy , he makes sense , but that guy 's crazy ? ' " So no , I think that rituals are , by nature , irrational .
So the key is to choose the right rituals , the ones that are not harmful -- but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed .
And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose .
And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible .
And I failed miserably .
Because you can 't .
You have to pick and choose . And anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing .
The key is to pick and choose the right parts .
There 's the phrase called cafeteria religion , and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way , and they 'll say , " Oh , it 's just cafeteria religion .
You 're just picking and choosing . "
But my argument is , " What 's wrong with cafeterias ? "
I 've had some great meals at cafeterias .
I 've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave .
So , it 's about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion , about tolerance , about loving your neighbor , as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin , or intolerance , or violence , which are very much in the Bible as well .
So if we are to find any meaning in this book , then we have to really engage it , and wrestle with it .
And I thought I 'd end with just a couple more .
There 's me reading the Bible .
That 's how I hailed taxicabs .
Seriously , and it worked . And yes , that was actually a rented sheep , so I had to return that in the morning , but it served well for a day .
So , anyway , thank you so much for letting me speak .
Kate Stone : DJ decks made of ... paper
" I love paper , and I love technology , " says physicist and former sheep herder Kate Stone , who 's spent the past decade working to unite the two . Her experiments combine regular paper with conductive inks and tiny circuit boards to offer a unique , magical experience . To date , applications include a newspaper embedded with audio and video , posters that display energy usage in real time , and the extremely nifty paper drumkit and set of DJ decks she demonstrates onstage .
I love paper , and I love technology , and what I do is I make paper interactive .
And that 's what I say when people ask me what I do , but it really confuses most people , so really , the best way for me to convey it is to take the technology and be creative and create experiences .
So I tried to think what I could use for here , and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea that I wanted to print two DJ decks and to try and mix some music .
And I 'm going to try and show that at the end , and the suspense will be as much mine if it works .
And I 'm not a DJ , and I 'm not a musician , so I 'm a little bit scared of that .
So I think , I found the best way to describe my journey is just to mention a few little things that have happened to me throughout my life .
There 's three particular things that I 've done , and I 'll just describe those first , and then talk about some of my work .
So when I was a kid , I was obsessed with wires , and I used to thread them under my carpet and thread them behind the walls and have little switches and little speakers , and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive but kind of all hidden away .
And I was also really interested in wireless as well .
So I bought one of those little kits that you could get to make a radio transmitter , and I got an old book and I carved out the inside and I hid it inside there , and then I placed it next to my dad and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio so I could eavesdrop .
I was not at all interested in what he was saying .
It 's more that I just liked the idea of an everyday object having something inside and doing something different .
Several year later , I managed to successfully fail all of my exams and didn 't really leave school with much to show for at all , and my parents , maybe as a reward , bought me what turned out to be a one-way ticket to Australia , and I came back home about four years later .
I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere .
It was in far western New South Wales .
And this farm was 120,000 acres .
There were 22,000 sheep , and it was about 40 degrees , or 100 or so Fahrenheit .
And on this farm there was the farmer , his wife , and there was the four-year-old daughter .
And they kind of took me into the farm and showed me what it was like to live and work .
Obviously , one of the most important things was the sheep , and so my job was , well , pretty much to do everything , but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead .
And we 'd do that by building fences , using motorbikes and horses , and the sheep would make their way all the way back to the shearing shed for the different seasons .
And what I learned was , although at the time , like everyone else , I thought sheep were pretty stupid because they didn 't do what we wanted them to do , what I realize now , probably only just in the last few weeks looking back , is the sheep weren 't stupid at all .
We 'd put them in an environment where they didn 't want to be , and they didn 't want to do what we wanted them to do .
So the challenge was to try and get them to do what we wanted them to do by listening to the weather , the lay of the land , and creating things that would let the sheep flow and go where we wanted them to go .
Another bunch of years later , I ended up at Cambridge University at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K.
doing a Ph.D. in physics .
My Ph.D. was to move electrons around , one at a time .
And I realize — again , it 's kind of these realizations looking back as to what I did — I realize now that it was pretty much the same as moving sheep around .
It really is .
It 's just you do it by changing an environment .
And that 's kind of been a big lesson to me , that you can 't act on any object .
You change its environment , and the object will flow .
So we made it very small , so things were about 30 nanometers in size ; making it very cold , so at liquid helium temperatures ; and changing environment by changing the voltage , and the electrons could make flow around a loop one at a time , on and off , a little memory node .
And I wanted to go one step further , and I wanted to move one electron on and one electron off .
And I was told that I wouldn 't be able to do this , which , you know , as we 've heard from other people , that 's the thing that makes you do it .
And I was determined , and I managed to show that I could do that .
And a lot of that learning , I think , came from being on that farm , because when I was working on the farm , we 'd have to use what was around us , we 'd have to use the environment , and there was no such thing as something can 't be done , because you 're in an environment where , if you can 't do what you need to do , you can die , and , you know , I had seen that sort of thing happen .
So now my obsession is printing , and I 'm really fascinated by the idea of using conventional printing processes , so the types of print that are used to create many of the things around us to make paper and card interactive .
When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this and told them what I wanted to do , which was to print conductive inks onto paper , they told me it couldn 't be done , again , that kind of favorite thing .
So I got about 10 credit cards and loans and got myself very close to bankruptcy , really , and bought myself this huge printing press , which I had no idea how to use at all .
It was about five meters long , and I covered myself and the floor with ink and made a massive mess , but I learned to print .
And then I took it back to the printers and showed them what I 've done , and they were like , " Of course you can do that .
Why didn 't you come here in the first place ? "
That 's always the case .
So what we do is we take conventional printing presses , we make conductive inks , and run those through a press , and basically just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow through pieces of paper so we can make that paper interactive .
And it 's pretty simple , really .
It 's just a collection of things that have been done before , but bringing them together in a different way .
So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on , and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips , one to run some capacitive touch software , so we know where we 've touched it , and the other to run , quite often , some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect .
So I 'll just describe a couple of things that we 've created .
There 's lots of different things we 've created .
This is one of them , because I love cake .
And this one , it 's a large poster , and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it , and the poster talks to you when you touch it and asks you a series of questions , and it works out your perfect cake .
But it doesn 't tell you the cake there and then .
It uploads a picture , and the reason why it chose that cake for you , to our Facebook page and to Twitter .
So we 're trying to create that connection between the physical and the digital , but have it not looking on a screen , and just looking like a regular poster .
We 've worked with a bunch of universities on a project looking at interactive newsprint .
So for example , we 've created a newspaper , a regular newspaper .
You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly , and when you touch it , you can hear the music that 's described on the top , which is something you can 't read .
You can hear a press conference as well as reading what the editor has determined that press conference was about .
And you can press a Facebook " like " button or you can vote on something as well .
Something else that we created , and this was an idea that I had a couple of years ago , and so we 've done a project on this .
It was for funding from the government for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings , difficult to say , and something I had no idea what it was when I went into the workshop , but quickly learned .
And we wanted to try and encourage people to use energy better .
And I really liked the idea that , instead of looking at dials and reading things to say -- looking at your energy usage , I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected and had color-changing inks on it , and so if your energy usage was trending better , than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear and all would be good .
And if it wasn 't , then there 'd be graffiti and the leaves would fall off the trees .
So it was trying to make you look after something in your immediate environment , which you don 't want to see not looking so good , rather than expecting people to do things in the local environment because of the effect that it has a long way off .
And I think , kind of like going back to the farm , it 's about how to let people do what you want them to do rather than making people do what you want them to do .
Okay .
So this is the bit I 'm really scared of .
So a couple of things I 've created are , there 's a poster over here that you can play drums on .
And I am not a musician . It seemed like a good idea at the time .
If anyone wants to try and play drums , then they can .
I 'll just describe how this works .
This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone , and when you touch it , it connects to the app .
And it has really good response time .
It 's using Bluetooth 4 , so it 's pretty instantaneous .
Okay . Thanks .
And there 's a couple of other things .
So this one is like a sound board , so you can touch it , and I just love these horrible noises .
Okay , and this is a D.J. turntable .
So it 's wirelessly linked to my iPad , and this is a software that 's running on the iPad .
Oh , yes . I just love doing that .
I 'm not a D.J. , though , but I just always wanted to do that .
So I have a crossfader , and I have the two decks .
So I 've made some new technology , and I love things being creative , and I love working with creative people .
So my 15-year-old niece , she 's amazing , and she 's called Charlotte , and I asked her to record something , and I worked with a friend called Elliot to put some beats together .
So this is my niece , Charlotte .
Yay !
So that 's pretty much what I do .
I just love bringing technology together , having a lot of fun , being creative .
But it 's not about the technology .
It 's just about , I want to create some great experiences .
So thank you very much .
Robert Hammond : Building a park in the sky
New York was planning to tear down the High Line , an abandoned elevated railroad in Manhattan , when Robert Hammond and a few friends suggested : Why not make it a park ? He shares how it happened in this tale of local cultural activism .
The Highline is an old , elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan .
And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave .
And it became known as " Death Avenue " because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front , and he became known as the " West Side Cowboy . "
But even with a cowboy , about one person a month was killed and run over .
So they elevated it .
They built it 30 ft. in the air , right through the middle of the city .
But with the rise of interstate trucking , it was used less and less .
And by 1980 , the last train rode .
It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys -- they say , at Thanksgiving -- from the meatpacking district .
And then it was abandoned .
And I live in the neighborhood , and I first read about it in the New York Times , in an article that said it was going to be demolished .
And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer , but I realized no one was doing anything .
I went to my first community board meeting -- which I 'd never been to one before -- and sat next to another guy named Joshua David , who 's a travel writer .
And at the end of the meeting , we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project ; most people wanted to tear it down .
So we exchanged business cards , and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization , Friends of the High Line .
And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition , but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it .
And what first attracted me , or interested me , was this view from the street -- which is this steel structure , sort of rusty , this industrial relic .
But when I went up on top , it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River .
And that 's really where we started , the idea coalesced around , let 's make this a park , and let 's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape .
At the time , there was a lot of opposition .
Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down .
I 'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement .
Mayor Bloomberg came in office , he was very supportive , but we still had to make the economic case .
This was after 9 / 11 ; the city was in tough times .
So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case .
And it turns out , we got those numbers wrong .
We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build .
So far it 's cost about 150 million .
And the main case was , this is going to make good economic sense for the city .
So we said over a 20-year time period , the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million .
That was enough . It really got the city behind it .
It turns out we were wrong on that .
Now people estimate it 's created about a half a billion dollars , or will create about a half a billion dollars , in tax revenues for the city .
We did a design competition , selected a design team .
We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape .
There 's three sections .
We opened the fist section in 2009 .
It 's been successful beyond our dreams .
Last year we had about two million people , which is about 10 times what we ever estimated .
This is one of my favorite features in section one .
It 's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave .
And the first section ends at 20th St. right now .
The other thing , it 's generated , obviously , a lot of economic value ; it 's also inspired , I think , a lot of great architecture .
There 's a point , you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry , Jean Nouvel , Shigeru Ban , Neil Denari .
And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line .
And this has been designed by Renzo Piano .
And they 're going to break ground in May .
And we 've already started construction on section two .
This is one of my favorite features , this flyover where you 're eight feet off the surface of the High Line , running through a canopy of trees .
The High Line used to be covered in billboards , and so we 've taken a playful take where , instead of framing advertisements , it 's going to frame people in views of the city .
This was just installed last month .
And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards , which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan .
And the city has planned -- for better or for worse -- 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around .
But what really , I think , makes the High Line special is the people .
And honestly , even though I love the designs that we were building , I was always frightened that I wouldn 't really love it , because I fell in love with that wildscape -- and how could you recreate that magic ?
But what I found is it 's in the people and how they use it that , to me , makes it so special .
Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line .
And I realized New Yorkers don 't hold hands ; we just don 't do that outside .
But you see that happening on the High Line , and I think that 's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other .
Thanks .
Misha Glenny : How global crime networks work
Journalist Misha Glenny spent several years in a courageous investigation of organized crime networks worldwide , which have grown to an estimated 15 % of the global economy . From the Russian mafia , to giant drug cartels , his sources include not just intelligence and law enforcement officials but criminal insiders .
These are grim economic times , fellow TEDsters , grim economic times indeed .
And so , I would like to cheer you up with one of the great , albeit largely unknown , commercial success stories of the past 20 years .
Comparable , in its own very peculiar way , to the achievements of Microsoft or Google .
And it 's an industry which has bucked the current recession with equanimity .
I refer to organized crime .
Now organized crime has been around for a very long time , I hear you say , and these would be wise words , indeed .
But in the last two decades , it has experienced an unprecedented expansion , now accounting for roughly 15 percent of the world 's GDP .
I like to call it the Global Shadow Economy , or McMafia , for short .
So what triggered this extraordinary growth in cross-border crime ?
Well , of course , there is globalization , technology , communications , all that stuff , which we 'll talk about a little bit later .
But first , I would like to take you back to this event : the collapse of communism .
All across Eastern Europe , a most momentous episode in our post-war history .
Now it 's time for full disclosure .
This event meant a great deal to me personally .
I had started smuggling books across the Iron Curtain to Democratic opposition groups in Eastern Europe , like Solidarity in Poland , when I was in my teens .
I then started writing about Eastern Europe , and eventually I became the BBC 's chief correspondent for the region , which is what I was doing in 1989 .
And so when 425 million people finally won the right to choose their own governments , I was ecstatic , but I was also a touch worried about some of the nastier things lurking behind the wall .
It wasn 't long , for example , before ethnic nationalism reared its bloody head in Yugoslavia .
And amongst the chaos , amidst the euphoria , it took me a little while to understand that some of the people who had wielded power before 1989 , in Eastern Europe , continued to do so after the revolutions there .
Obviously there were characters like this .
But there were also some more unexpected people who played a critical role in what was going on in Eastern Europe .
Like this character . Remember these guys ?
They used to win the gold medals in weightlifting and wrestling , every four years in the Olympics , and they were the great celebrities of communism , with a fabulous lifestyle to go with it .
They used to get great apartments in the center of town , casual sex on tap , and they could travel to the West very freely , which was a great luxury at the time .
It may come as a surprise , but they played a critical role in the emergence of the market economy in Eastern Europe .
Or as I like to call them , they are the midwives of capitalism .
Here are some of those same weightlifters after their 1989 makeover .
Now in Bulgaria -- this photograph was taken in Bulgaria -- when communism collapsed all over Eastern Europe , it wasn 't just communism ; it was the state that collapsed as well .
That means your police force wasn 't working .
The court system wasn 't functioning properly .
So what was a business man in the brave new world of East European capitalism going to do to make sure that his contracts would be honored ?
Well , he would turn to people who were called , rather prosaically by sociologists , privatized law enforcement agencies .
We prefer to know them as the mafia .
And in Bulgaria , the mafia was soon joined with 14,000 people who were sacked from their jobs in the security services between 1989 and 1991 .
Now , when your state is collapsing , your economy is heading south at a rate of knots , the last people you want coming on to the labor market are 14,000 men and women whose chief skills are surveillance , are smuggling , building underground networks and killing people .
But that 's what happened all over Eastern Europe .
Now , when I was working in the 1990s , I spent most of the time covering the appalling conflict in Yugoslavia .
And I couldn 't help notice that the people who were perpetrating the appalling atrocities , the paramilitary organizations , were actually the same people running the organized criminal syndicates .
And I came to think that behind the violence lay a sinister criminal enterprise .
And so I resolved to travel around the world examining this global criminal underworld by talking to policemen , by talking to victims , by talking to consumers of illicit goods and services .
But above all else , by talking to the gangsters themselves .
And the Balkans was a fabulous place to start .
Why ? Well of course there was the issue of law and order collapsing , but also , as they say in the retail trade , it 's location , location , location .
And what I noticed at the beginning of my research that the Balkans had turned into a vast transit zone for illicit goods and services coming from all over the world .
Heroin , cocaine , women being trafficked into prostitution and precious minerals .
And where were they heading ?
The European Union , which by now was beginning to reap the benefits of globalization , transforming it into the most affluent consumer market in history , eventually comprising some 500 million people .
And a significant minority of those 500 million people like to spend some of their leisure time and spare cash sleeping with prostitutes , sticking 50 Euro notes up their nose and employing illegal migrant laborers .
Now , organized crime in a globalizing world operates in the same way as any other business .
It has zones of production , like Afghanistan and Columbia .
It has zones of distribution , like Mexico and the Balkans .
And then , of course , it has zones of consumption , like the European Union , Japan and of course , the United States .
The zones of production and distribution tend to lie in the developing world , and they are often threatened by appalling violence and bloodshed .
Take Mexico , for example .
Six thousand people killed there in the last 18 months as a direct consequence of the cocaine trade .
But what about the Democratic Republic of Congo ?
Since 1998 , five million people have died there .
It 's not a conflict you read about much in the newspapers , but it 's the biggest conflict on this planet since the Second World War .
And why is it ? Because mafias from all around the world cooperate with local paramilitaries in order to seize the supplies of the rich mineral resources of the region .
In the year 2000 , 80 percent of the world 's coltan was sourced to the killing fields of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo .
Now , coltan you will find in almost every mobile phone , in almost every laptop and games console .
The Congolese war lords were selling this stuff to the mafia in exchange for weapons , and the mafia would then sell it on to Western markets .
And it is this Western desire to consume that is the primary driver of international organized crime .
Now , let me show you some of my friends in action , caught conveniently on film by the Italian police , and smuggling duty-not-paid cigarettes .
Now , cigarettes out the factory gate are very cheap .
The European Union then imposes the highest taxes on them in the world .
So if you can smuggle them into the E.U. , there are very handsome profits to be made , and I want to show you this to demonstrate the type of resources available to these groups .
This boat is worth one million Euros when it 's new .
And it 's the fastest thing on European waters .
From 1994 , for seven years , 20 of these boats made the trip across the Adriatic , from Montenegro to Italy , every single night .
And as a consequence of this trade , Britain alone lost eight billion dollars in revenue .
And instead that money went to underwrite the wars in Yugoslavia and line the pockets of unscrupulous individuals .
Now Italian police , when this trade started , had just two boats which could go at the same speed .
And this is very important , because the only way you can catch these guys is if they run out of gas .
Sometimes the gangsters would bring with them women being trafficked into prostitution , and if the police intervened , they would hurl the women into the sea so that the police had to go and save them from drowning , rather than chasing the bad guys .
So I have shown you this to demonstrate how many boats , how many vessels it takes to catch one of these guys .
And the answer is six vessels .
And remember , 20 of these speed boats were coming across the Adriatic every single night .
So what were these guys doing with all the money they were making ?
Well , this is where we come to globalization , because that was not just the deregulation of global trade .
It was the liberalization of international financial markets .
for the money launderers .
The last two decades have been the champagne era for dirty lucre .
In the 1990s , we saw financial centers around the world competing for their business , and there was simply no effective mechanism to prevent money laundering .
And a lot of licit banks were also happy to accept deposits from very dubious sources without questions being asked .
But at the heart of this , is the offshore banking network .
Now these things are an essential part of the money laundering parade , and if you want to do something about illegal tax evasion and transnational organized crime , money laundering , you have to get rid of them .
On a positive note , we at last have someone in the White House who has consistently spoken out against these corrosive entities .
And if anyone is concerned about what I believe is the necessity for new legislation , regulation , effective regulation , I say , let 's take a look at Bernie Madoff , who is now going to be spending the rest of his life in jail .
Bernie Madoff stole 65 billion dollars .
That puts him up there on the Olympus of gangsters with the Colombian cartels and the major Russian crime syndicates , but he did this for decades in the very heart of Wall Street , and no regulator picked up on it .
So how many other Madoffs are there on Wall Street or in the city of London , fleecing ordinary folk and money laundering ?
Well I can tell you , it 's quite a few of them .
Let me go on to the 101 of international organized crime now .
And that is narcotics . Our second marijuana farm photograph for the morning .
This one , however , is in central British Columbia where I photographed it .
It 's one of the tens of thousands of mom-and-pop grow-ops in B.C.
which ensure that over five percent of the province 's GDP is accounted for by this trade .
Now , I was taken by inspector Brian Cantera , of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police , to a cavernous warehouse east of Vancouver to see some of the goods which are regularly confiscated by the RCMP from the smugglers who are sending it , of course , down south to the United States where there is an insatiable market for B.C. Bud , as it 's called , in part because it 's marketed as organic , which of course goes down very well in California .
Now , even by the police 's admission , this makes not a dent in the profits , really , of the major exporters .
Since the beginning of globalization , the global narcotics market has expanded enormously .
There has , however , been no concomitant increase in the resources available to police forces .
This , however , may all be about to change , because something very strange is going on .
The United Nations recognized earlier this -- it was last month actually -- that Canada has become a key area of distribution and production of ecstasy and other synthetic drugs .
Interestingly , the market share of heroin and cocaine is going down , because the pills are getting ever better at reproducing their highs .
Now that is a game changer , because it shifts production away from the developing world and into the Western world .
When that happens , it is a trend which is set to overwhelm our policing capacity in the West .
The drugs policy which we 've had in place for 40 years is long overdue for a very serious rethink , in my opinion .
Now , the recession .
Well , organized crime has already adapted very well to the recession .
Not surprising , the most opportunistic industry in the whole world .
And it has no rules to its regulatory system .
Except , of course , it has two business risks : arrest by law enforcement , which is , frankly , the least of their worries , and competition from other groups , i.e. a bullet in the back of the head .
What they 've done is they 've shifted their operations .
People don 't smoke as much dope , or visit prostitutes quite so frequently during a recession .
And so instead , they have invaded financial and corporate crime in a big way , but above all , two sectors , and that is counterfeit goods and cybercrime .
And it 's been terribly successful .
I would like to introduce you to Mr. Pringle .
Or perhaps I should say , more accurately , Señor Pringle .
I was introduced to this bit of kit by a Brazilian cybercriminal .
We sat in a car on the Avenue Paulista in São Paulo , together .
Hooked it up to my laptop , and within about five minutes he had penetrated the computer security system of a major Brazilian bank .
It 's really not that difficult .
And it 's actually much easier because the fascinating thing about cybercrime is that it 's not so much the technology .
The key to cybercrime is what we call social engineering .
Or to use the technical term for it , there 's one born every minute .
You would not believe how easy it is to persuade people to do things with their computers which are objectively not in their interest .
And it was very soon when the cybercriminals learned that the quickest way to do this , of course , the quickest way to a person 's wallet is through the promise of sex and love .
I expect some of you remember the ILOVEYOU virus , one of the very great worldwide viruses that came .
I was very fortunate when the ILOVEYOU virus came out , because the first person I received it from was an ex-girlfriend of mine .
Now , she harbored all sorts of sentiments and emotions towards me at the time , but love was not amongst them .
And so as soon as I saw this drop into my inbox , I dispatched it hastily to the recycle bin and spared myself a very nasty infection .
So , cybercrime , do watch out for it .
One thing that we do know that the Internet is doing is the Internet is assisting these guys .
These are mosquitos who carry the malarial parasite which infests our blood when the mosy has had a free meal at our expense .
Now , Artesunate is a very effective drug at destroying the parasite in the early days of infection .
But over the past year or so , researchers in Cambodia have discovered that what 's happening is the malarial parasite is developing a resistance .
And they fear that the reason why it 's developing a resistance is because Cambodians can 't afford the drugs on the commercial market , and so they buy it from the Internet .
And these pills contain only low doses of the active ingredient .
Which is why the parasite is beginning to develop a resistance .
The reason I say this is because we have to know that organized crime impacts all sorts of areas of our lives .
You don 't have to sleep with prostitutes or take drugs in order to have a relationship with organized crime .
They affect our bank accounts .
They affect our communications , our pension funds .
They even affect the food that we eat and our governments .
This is no longer an issue of Sicilians from Palermo and New York .
There is no romance involved with gangsters in the 21st Century .
This is a mighty industry , and it creates instability and violence wherever it goes .
It is a major economic force and we need to take it very , very seriously .
It 's been a privilege talking to you .
Thank you very much .

Larry Burns : The future of cars
General Motors veep Larry Burns previews cool next-gen car design : sleek , customizable vehicles that run clean on hydrogen -- and pump energy back into the electrical grid when they 're idle .
People love their automobiles .
They allow us to go where we want to when we want to .
They 're a form of entertainment , they 're a form of art , a pride of ownership .
Songs are written about cars .
Prince wrote a great song : " Little Red Corvette . "
He didn 't write " Little Red Laptop Computer " or " Little Red Dirt Devil . "
He wrote about a car .
And one of my favorites has always been , " Make love to your man in a Chevy van , " because that was my vehicle when I was in college .
The fact is , when we do our market research around the world , we see that there 's nearly a universal aspiration on the part of people to own an automobile .
And 750 million people in the world today own a car .
And you say , boy , that 's a lot .
But you know what ?
That 's just 12 percent of the population .
We really have to ask the question : Can the world sustain that number of automobiles ?
And if you look at projections over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years , it looks like the world car park could grow to on the order of 1.1 billion vehicles .
Now , if you parked those end to end and wrapped them around the Earth , that would stretch around the Earth 125 times .
Now , we 've made great progress with automobile technology over the last 100 years .
Cars are dramatically cleaner , dramatically safer , more efficient and radically more affordable than they were 100 years ago .
But the fact remains : the fundamental DNA of the automobile has stayed pretty much the same .
If we are going to reinvent the automobile today , rather than 100 years ago , knowing what we know about the issues associated with our product and about the technologies that exist today , what would we do ?
We wanted something that was really affordable .
The fuel cell looked great : one-tenth as many moving parts and a fuel-cell propulsion system as an internal combustion engine -- and it emits just water .
And we wanted to take advantage of Moore 's Law with electronic controls and software , and we absolutely wanted our car to be connected .
So we embarked upon the reinvention around an electrochemical engine , the fuel cell , hydrogen as the energy carrier .
First was Autonomy .
Autonomy really set the vision for where we wanted to head .
We embodied all of the key components of a fuel cell propulsion system .
We then had Autonomy drivable with Hy-Wire , and we showed Hy-Wire here at this conference last year .
Hy-Wire is the world 's first drivable fuel cell , and we have followed up that now with Sequel .
And Sequel truly is a real car .
So if we would run the video -- But the real key question I 'm sure that 's on your mind : where 's the hydrogen going to come from ?
And secondly , when are these kinds of cars going to be available ?
So let me talk about hydrogen first .
The beauty of hydrogen is it can come from so many different sources : it can come from fossil fuels , it can come from any way that you can create electricity , including renewables .
And it can come from biofuels .
And that 's quite exciting .
The vision here is to have each local community play to its natural strength in creating the hydrogen .
A lot of hydrogen 's produced today in the world .
It 's produced to get sulfur out of gasoline -- which I find is somewhat ironic .
It 's produced in the fertilizer industry ; it 's produced in the chemical manufacturing industry .
That hydrogen 's being made because there 's a good business reason for its use .
But it tells us that we know how to create it , we know how to create it cost effectively , we know how to handle it safely .
We did an analysis where you would have a station in each city with each of the 100 largest cities in the United States , and located the stations so you 'd be no more than two miles from a station at any time .
We put one every 25 miles on the freeway , and it turns out that translates into about 12,000 stations .
And at a million dollars each , that would be about 12 billion dollars .
Now that 's a lot of money .
But if you built the Alaskan pipeline today , that 's half of what the Alaskan pipeline would cost .
But the real exciting vision that we see truly is home refueling , much like recharging your laptop or recharging your cellphone .
So we 're pretty excited about the future of hydrogen .
We think it 's a question of not whether , but a question of when .
What we 've targeted for ourselves -- and we 're making great progress for this goal -- is to have a propulsion system based on hydrogen and fuel cells , designed and validated , that can go head-to-head with the internal combustion engine -- we 're talking about obsoleting the internal combustion engine -- and do it in terms of its affordability , add skill volumes , its performance and its durability .
So that 's what we 're driving to for 2010 .
We haven 't seen anything yet in our development work that says that isn 't possible .
We actually think the future 's going to be event-driven .
So since we can 't predict the future , we want to spend a lot of our time trying to create that future .
I 'm very , very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time : they 're parked , they 're parked all around us .
They 're usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them .
Now , if you take the power-generating capability of an automobile and you compare that to the electric grid in the United States , it turns out that four percent of the automobiles , the power in four percent of the automobiles , equals that of the electric grid of the US .
that 's a huge power-generating capability , a mobile power-generating capability .
And hydrogen and fuel cells give us that opportunity to actually use our cars and trucks when they 're parked to generate electricity for the grid .
And we talked about swarm networks earlier .
And talking about the ultimate swarm , about having all of the processors and all of the cars when they 're sitting idle being part of a global grid for computing capability .
We find that premise quite exciting .
The automobile becomes , then , an appliance , not in a commodity sense , but an appliance , mobile power , mobile platform for information and computing and communication , as well as a form of transportation .
And the key to all of this is to make it affordable , to make it exciting , to get it on a pathway where there 's a way to make money doing it .
And again , this is a pretty big march to take here .
And a lot of people say , how do you sleep at night when you 're rustling with a problem of that magnitude ?
And I tell them I sleep like a baby : I wake up crying every two hours .
Actually the theme of this conference , I think , has hit on really one of the major keys to pull that off -- and that 's relationships and working together .
Thank you very much .
.
Larry , Larry , wait , wait , wait , wait , Larry , wait , wait one sec .
Just -- I 've got so many questions I could ask you .
I just want to ask one .
You know , I could be wrong about this , but my sense is that in the public mind , today , that GM is not viewed as serious about some of these environmental ideas as some of your Japanese competitors , maybe even as Ford .
Are you serious about it , and not just , you know , when the consumers want it , when the regulators force us to do it we will go there ?
Are you guys going to really try and show leadership on this ?
Larry Burns : Yeah , we 're absolutely serious .
We 're into this over a billion dollars already , so I would hope people would think we 're serious when we 're spending that kind of money .
And secondly , it 's a fundamental business proposition .
I 'll be honest with you : we 're into it because of business growth opportunities .
We can 't grow our business unless we solve these problems .
The growth of the auto industry will be capped by sustainability issues if we don 't solve the problems .
And there 's a simple principle of strategy that says : Do unto yourself before others do unto you .
If we can see this possible future , others can too .
And we want to be the first one to create it , Chris .
Drew Berry : Animations of unseeable biology
We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that . In this talk , he shows his scientifically accurate animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
What I 'm going to show you are the astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of your body .
Now molecules are really , really tiny .
And by tiny , I mean really .
They 're smaller than a wavelength of light , so we have no way to directly observe them .
But through science , we do have a fairly good idea of what 's going on down at the molecular scale .
So what we can do is actually tell you about the molecules , but we don 't really have a direct way of showing you the molecules .
One way around this is to draw pictures .
And this idea is actually nothing new .
Scientists have always created pictures as part of their thinking and discovery process .
They draw pictures of what they 're observing with their eyes , through technology like telescopes and microscopes , and also what they 're thinking about in their minds .
I picked two well-known examples , because they 're very well-known for expressing science through art .
And I start with Galileo who used the world 's first telescope to look at the Moon .
And he transformed our understanding of the Moon .
The perception in the 17th century was the Moon was a perfect heavenly sphere .
But what Galileo saw was a rocky , barren world , which he expressed through his watercolor painting .
Another scientist with very big ideas , the superstar of biology , is Charles Darwin .
And with this famous entry in his notebook , he begins in the top left-hand corner with , " I think , " and then sketches out the first tree of life , which is his perception of how all the species , all living things on Earth , are connected through evolutionary history -- the origin of species through natural selection and divergence from an ancestral population .
Even as a scientist , I used to go to lectures by molecular biologists and find them completely incomprehensible , with all the fancy technical language and jargon that they would use in describing their work , until I encountered the artworks of David Goodsell , who is a molecular biologist at the Scripps Institute .
And his pictures , everything 's accurate and it 's all to scale .
And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like .
So this is a transection through blood .
In the top left-hand corner , you 've got this yellow-green area .
The yellow-green area is the fluids of blood , which is mostly water , but it 's also antibodies , sugars , hormones , that kind of thing .
And the red region is a slice into a red blood cell .
And those red molecules are hemoglobin .
They are actually red ; that 's what gives blood its color .
And hemoglobin acts as a molecular sponge to soak up the oxygen in your lungs and then carry it to other parts of the body .
I was very much inspired by this image many years ago , and I wondered whether we could use computer graphics to represent the molecular world .
What would it look like ?
And that 's how I really began . So let 's begin .
This is DNA in its classic double helix form .
And it 's from X-ray crystallography , so it 's an accurate model of DNA .
If we unwind the double helix and unzip the two strands , you see these things that look like teeth .
Those are the letters of genetic code , the 25,000 genes you 've got written in your DNA .
This is what they typically talk about -- the genetic code -- this is what they 're talking about .
But I want to talk about a different aspect of DNA science , and that is the physical nature of DNA .
It 's these two strands that run in opposite directions for reasons I can 't go into right now .
But they physically run in opposite directions , which creates a number of complications for your living cells , as you 're about to see , most particularly when DNA is being copied .
And so what I 'm about to show you is an accurate representation of the actual DNA replication machine that 's occurring right now inside your body , at least 2002 biology .
So DNA 's entering the production line from the left-hand side , and it hits this collection , these miniature biochemical machines , that are pulling apart the DNA strand and making an exact copy .
So DNA comes in and hits this blue , doughnut-shaped structure and it 's ripped apart into its two strands .
One strand can be copied directly , and you can see these things spooling off to the bottom there .
But things aren 't so simple for the other strand because it must be copied backwards .
So it 's thrown out repeatedly in these loops and copied one section at a time , creating two new DNA molecules .
Now you have billions of this machine right now working away inside you , copying your DNA with exquisite fidelity .
It 's an accurate representation , and it 's pretty much at the correct speed for what is occurring inside you .
I 've left out error correction and a bunch of other things .
This was work from a number of years ago .
Thank you .
This is work from a number of years ago , but what I 'll show you next is updated science , it 's updated technology .
So again , we begin with DNA .
And it 's jiggling and wiggling there because of the surrounding soup of molecules , which I 've stripped away so you can see something .
DNA is about two nanometers across , which is really quite tiny .
But in each one of your cells , each strand of DNA is about 30 to 40 million nanometers long .
So to keep the DNA organized and regulate access to the genetic code , it 's wrapped around these purple proteins -- or I 've labeled them purple here .
It 's packaged up and bundled up .
All this field of view is a single strand of DNA .
This huge package of DNA is called a chromosome .
And we 'll come back to chromosomes in a minute .
We 're pulling out , we 're zooming out , out through a nuclear pore , which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA called the nucleus .
All of this field of view is about a semester 's worth of biology , and I 've got seven minutes .
So we 're not going to be able to do that today ?
No , I 'm being told , " No . "
This is the way a living cell looks down a light microscope .
And it 's been filmed under time-lapse , which is why you can see it moving .
The nuclear envelope breaks down .
These sausage-shaped things are the chromosomes , and we 'll focus on them .
They go through this very striking motion that is focused on these little red spots .
When the cell feels it 's ready to go , it rips apart the chromosome .
One set of DNA goes to one side , the other side gets the other set of DNA -- identical copies of DNA .
And then the cell splits down the middle .
And again , you have billions of cells undergoing this process right now inside of you .
Now we 're going to rewind and just focus on the chromosomes and look at its structure and describe it .
So again , here we are at that equator moment .
The chromosomes line up .
And if we isolate just one chromosome , we 're going to pull it out and have a look at its structure .
So this is one of the biggest molecular structures that you have , at least as far as we 've discovered so far inside of us .
So this is a single chromosome .
And you have two strands of DNA in each chromosome .
One is bundled up into one sausage .
The other strand is bundled up into the other sausage .
These things that look like whiskers that are sticking out from either side are the dynamic scaffolding of the cell .
They 're called mircrotubules . That name 's not important .
But what we 're going to focus on is this red region -- I 've labeled it red here -- and it 's the interface between the dynamic scaffolding and the chromosomes .
It is obviously central to the movement of the chromosomes .
We have no idea really as to how it 's achieving that movement .
We 've been studying this thing they call the kinetochore for over a hundred years with intense study , and we 're still just beginning to discover what it 's all about .
It is made up of about 200 different types of proteins , thousands of proteins in total .
It is a signal broadcasting system .
It broadcasts through chemical signals telling the rest of the cell when it 's ready , when it feels that everything is aligned and ready to go for the separation of the chromosomes .
It is able to couple onto the growing and shrinking microtubules .
It 's involved with the growing of the microtubules , and it 's able to transiently couple onto them .
It 's also an attention sensing system .
It 's able to feel when the cell is ready , when the chromosome is correctly positioned .
It 's turning green here because it feels that everything is just right .
And you 'll see , there 's this one little last bit that 's still remaining red .
And it 's walked away down the microtubules .
That is the signal broadcasting system sending out the stop signal .
And it 's walked away . I mean , it 's that mechanical .
It 's molecular clockwork .
This is how you work at the molecular scale .
So with a little bit of molecular eye candy , we 've got kinesins , which are the orange ones .
They 're little molecular courier molecules walking one way .
And here are the dynein . They 're carrying that broadcasting system .
And they 've got their long legs so they can step around obstacles and so on .
So again , this is all derived accurately from the science .
The problem is we can 't show it to you any other way .
Exploring at the frontier of science , at the frontier of human understanding , is mind-blowing .
Discovering this stuff is certainly a pleasurable incentive to work in science .
But most medical researchers -- discovering the stuff is simply steps along the path to the big goals , which are to eradicate disease , to eliminate the suffering and the misery that disease causes and to lift people out of poverty .
Thank you .
Mechai Viravaidya : How Mr. Condom made Thailand a better place
Thailand 's " Mr. Condom , " Mechai Viravaidya , walks us through the country 's bold plan to raise its standard of living , starting in the 1970s . First step : population control . And that means a lot of frank , funny -- and very effective -- talk about condoms . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Welcome to Thailand .
Now , when I was a young man -- 40 years ago , the country was very , very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty .
We decided to do something about it , but we didn 't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program .
But we began with a family-planning program , following a very successful maternal child health activity , sets of activities .
So basically , no one would accept family planning if their children didn 't survive .
So the first step : get to the children , get to the mothers , and then follow up with family planning .
Not just child mortality alone , you need also family planning .
Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it .
In my country , that was the case in 1974 .
Seven children per family -- tremendous growth at 3.3 percent .
There was just no future .
We needed to reduce the population growth rate .
So we said , " Let 's do it . "
The women said , " We agree . We 'll use pills , but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills , " and we had very , very few doctors .
We didn 't take no as an answer ; we took no as a question .
We went to the nurses and the midwives , who were also women , and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill .
That was wonderful , but it covered only 20 percent of the country .
What do we do for the other 80 percent -- leave them alone and say , " Well , they 're not medical personnel . "
No , we decided to do a bit more .
So we went to the ordinary people that you saw .
Actually , below that yellow sign -- I wish they hadn 't wiped that , because there was " Coca-Cola " there .
We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days .
And no difference , the people they chose were the people we chose .
They were well-known in the community , they knew that customers were always right , and they were terrific , and they practiced their family planning themselves .
So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country , in every village of the country .
So there we are . We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution .
Wherever there were people -- and you can see boats with the women , selling things -- here 's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives -- wherever you find people , you 'll find contraceptives in Thailand .
And then we decided , why not get to religion because in the Philippines , the Catholic Church was pretty strong , and Thai people were Buddhist .
We went to them and they said , " Look , could you help us ? "
I 'm there -- the one in blue , not the yellow -- holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family .
And this picture was sent throughout the country .
So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves .
And the women were saying , " No wonder we have no side-effects .
It 's been blessed . "
That was their perception .
And then we went to teachers .
You need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place .
So we went to the teachers .
Over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet -- A , B for birth , C for condom , I for IUD , V for vasectomy .
And then we had a snakes and ladders game , where you throw dice .
If you land on anything pro-family planning , you move ahead .
Like , " Mother takes the pill every night .
Very good , mother . Move ahead .
Uncle buys a condom . Very good , uncle . Move ahead .
Uncle gets drunk , doesn 't use condom . Come back , start again . "
Again , education , class entertainment .
And the kids were doing it in school too .
We had relay races with condoms , we had children 's condom-blowing championship .
And before long , the condom was know as the girl 's best friend .
In Thailand , for poor people , diamonds don 't make it -- so the condom is the girl 's best friend .
We introduced our first microcredit program in 1975 , and the women who organized it said , " We only want to lend to women who practice family planning .
If you 're pregnant , take care of your pregnancy .
If you 're not pregnant , you can take a loan out from us . "
And that was run by them .
And after 35 / 36 years , it 's still going on .
It 's a part of the Village Development Bank ; it 's not a real bank , but it 's a fund -- microcredit .
And we didn 't need a big organization to run it -- it was run by the villagers themselves .
And you probably hardly see a Thai man there , it 's always women , women , women , women .
And then we thought we 'd help America , because America 's been helping everyone , whether they want help or not .
And this is on the Fourth of July .
We decided to provide vasectomy to all men , but in particular , American men to the front of the queue , during his [ unclear ] .
And the hotel gave us the ballroom for it -- very appropriate room .
And since it was near lunch time , they said , " All right , we 'll give you some lunch .
Of course , it must be American cola .
You get two brands , Coke and Pepsi .
And then the food is either hamburger or hotdog . "
And I thought a hotdog will be more symbolic .
And here is this , then , young man called Willy Bohm who worked for the USAID .
Obviously , he 's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten , and he was very happy .
It made a lot of news in America , and it angered some people also .
I said , " Don 't worry . Come over and I 'll do the whole lot of you . "
And what happened ?
In all this thing , from seven children to 1.5 children , population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5 .
You could call it the Coca-Cola approach if you like -- it was exactly the same thing .
I 'm not sure whether Coca-Cola followed us , or we followed Coca-Cola , but we 're good friends .
And so that 's the case of everyone joining in .
We didn 't have a strong government . We didn 't have lots of doctors .
But it 's everybody 's job who can change attitude and behavior .
Then AIDS came along and hit Thailand , and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight AIDS .
But unfortunately , the government was in denial , denial , denial .
So our work wasn 't affected .
So I thought , " Well , if you can 't go to the government , go to the military . "
So I went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations .
They have more than the government , and they 've got more guns than the government .
So I asked them , could they help us in our fight against HIV .
And after I gave them statistics , they said , " Yes . Okay . You can use all the radio stations , television stations . "
And that 's when we went onto the airwaves .
And then we got a new prime minister soon after that .
And he said , " Mechai , could you come and join ? "
He asked me in because he liked my wife a lot .
So I said , " Okay . "
He became the chairman of the National AIDS Committee and increased the budget fifty-fold .
Every ministry , even judges , had to be involved in AIDS education -- everyone -- and we said the public , institutions , religious institutions , schools -- everyone was involved .
And here , every media person had to be trained for HIV .
And we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money .
So they were happy with that .
And then AIDS education in all schools , starting from university .
And these are high school kids teaching high school kids .
And the best teachers were the girls , not the boys , and they were terrific .
And these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and HIV were known as Mother Theresa .
And then we went down one more step .
These are primary school kids -- third , fourth grade -- going to every household in the village , every household in the whole of Thailand , giving AIDS information and a condom to every household , given by these young kids .
And no parents objected , because we were trying to save lives , and this was a lifesaver .
And we said , " Everyone needs to be involved . "
So you have the companies also realizing that sick staff don 't work , and dead customers don 't buy .
So they all trained .
And then we have this Captain Condom , with his Harvard MBA , going to schools and night spots .
And they loved him . You need a symbol of something .
In every country , every program , you need a symbol , and this is probably the best thing he 's ever done with his MBA .
And then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets -- everywhere , everywhere .
In taxis , you get condoms .
And also , in traffic , the policemen give you condoms -- our " cops and rubbers " programs .
So , can you imagine New York policemen giving out condoms ?
Of course I can . And they 'd enjoy it immensely ; I see them standing around right now , everywhere .
Imagine if they had condoms , giving out to all sorts of people .
And then , new change , we had hair bands , clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season .
And these were the condoms that we introduced .
One says , " Weapon of mass protection . "
We found -- you know -- somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction , but we have found the weapon of mass protection : the condom .
And then it says here , with the American flag , " Don 't leave home without it . "
But I have some to give out afterward .
But let me warn you , these are Thai-sized , so be very careful .
And so you can see that condoms can do so many things .
Look at this -- I gave this to Al Gore and to Bill Senior also .
Stop global warming ; use condoms .
And then this is the picture I mentioned to you -- the weapon of mass protection .
And let the next Olympics save some lives .
Why just run around ?
And then finally , in Thailand we 're Buddhist , we don 't have a God , so instead , we say , " In rubber we trust . "
So you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people .
We had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools , because alcohol impairs judgment .
And then what happened ?
After all this time , everybody joined in .
According to the U.N. , new cases of HIV declined by 90 percent , and according to the World Bank , 7.7 million lives were saved .
Otherwise there wouldn 't be many Thais walking around today .
So it just showed you , you could do something about it .
90 percent of the funding came from Thailand .
There was political commitment , some financial commitment , and everybody joined in the fight .
So just don 't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses .
We all need to help .
And then we decided to help people out of poverty , now that we got AIDS somewhat out of the way -- this time , not with government alone , but in cooperation with the business community .
Because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit .
Those are the things to be provided by the business community .
We 're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs , little business people .
The only way out of poverty is through business enterprise .
So , that was done .
The money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting .
It 's not a free gift .
They plant the trees , and the money goes into their microcredit fund , which we call the Village Development Bank .
Everybody joins in , and they feel they own the bank , because they have brought the money in .
And before you can borrow the money , you need to be trained .
And we believe if you want to help the poor , those who are living in poverty , access to credit must be a human right .
Access to credit must be a human right .
Otherwise they 'll never get out of poverty .
And then before getting a loan , you must be trained .
Here 's what we call a " barefoot MBA , " teaching people how to do business so that , when they borrow money , they 'll succeed with the business .
These are some of the businesses : mushrooms , crabs , vegetables , trees , fruits , and this is very interesting -- Nike ice cream and Nike biscuits ; this is a village sponsored by Nike .
They said , " They should stop making shoes and clothes .
Make these better , because we can afford them . "
And then we have silk , Thai silk .
Now we 're making Scottish tartans , as you can see on the left , to sell to all people of Scottish ancestors .
So anyone sitting in and watching TV , get in touch with me .
And then this is our answer to Starbucks in Thailand -- " Coffee and Condoms . "
See , Starbucks you awake , we keep you awake and alive .
That 's the difference .
Can you imagine , at every Starbucks that you can also get condoms ?
You can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino .
And then now , finally in education , we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it 's a lifelong learning center for everyone .
We call this our School-Based Integrated Rural Development .
And it 's a center , a focal point for economic and social development .
Re-do the school , make it serve the community needs .
And here is a bamboo building -- all of them are bamboo .
This is a geodesic dome made of bamboo .
And I 'm sure Buckminster Fuller would be very , very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome .
And we use vegetables around the school ground , so they raise their own vegetables .
And then , finally , I firmly believe , if we want the MDGs to work -- the Millennium Development Goals -- we need to add family planning to it .
Of course , child mortality first and then family planning -- everyone needs family planning service -- it 's underutilized .
So we have now found the weapon of mass protection .
And we also ask the next Olympics to be involved in saving lives .
And then , finally , that is our network .
And these are our Thai tulips .
Thank you very much indeed .
Krista Tippett : Reconnecting with compassion
The term " compassion " -- typically reserved for the saintly or the sappy -- has fallen out of touch with reality . At a special TEDPrize @ UN , journalist Krista Tippett deconstructs the meaning of compassion through several moving stories , and proposes a new , more attainable definition for the word .
We 're here to celebrate compassion .
But compassion , from my vantage point , has a problem .
As essential as it is across our traditions , as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives , the word " compassion " is hollowed out in our culture , and it is suspect in my field of journalism .
It 's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing , or it 's seen as potentially depressing .
Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and , after the fact , the word " compassion " was translated as " pity . "
Now compassion , when it enters the news , too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time .
Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images .
And so what I 'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection .
And I hope you 'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter , that they shape the way we understand ourselves , the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others .
When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s , we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that .
Now the word " tolerance , " if you look at it in the dictionary , connotes " allowing , " " indulging " and " enduring . "
it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment .
Tolerance is not really a lived virtue ; it 's more of a cerebral ascent .
And it 's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough .
And the going is pretty rough right now .
I think that without perhaps being able to name it , we are collectively experiencing that we 've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue .
Compassion is a worthy successor .
It is organic , across our religious , spiritual and ethical traditions , and yet it transcends them .
Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others , both in our private and in our civic spaces .
So what is it , three-dimensionally ?
What are its kindred and component parts ?
What 's in its universe of attendant virtues ?
To start simply , I want to say that compassion is kind .
Now " kindness " might sound like a very mild word , and it 's prone to its own abundant cliche .
But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues .
And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification .
Compassion is also curious .
Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity .
I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles , Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi .
They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims , and as they do that , they cultivate what they call " curiosity without assumptions . "
Well that 's going to be a breeding ground for compassion .
Compassion can be synonymous with empathy .
It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation , but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence .
It 's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there , just showing up .
I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty -- and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other , not just what it is about them that might need helping .
I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value .
And in that light , for the religious , compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery -- encouraging us not just to see beauty , but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering , in the face of a stranger , in the face of the vibrant religious other .
I 'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like , but I can show you what compassion looks like -- because it is visible .
When we see it , we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable , what is possible .
It is so important when we 're communicating big ideas -- but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion -- to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood -- the color and complexity of life .
And compassion does seek physicality .
I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford .
And I don 't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him , but he 's paraplegic .
He 's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13 , in a car crash that killed his father and his sister .
Matthew 's legs don 't work , and he 'll never walk again , and -- and he does experience this as an " and " rather than a " but " -- and he experiences himself to be healed and whole .
And as a teacher of yoga , he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability , health , illness and aging .
He says that he 's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we 're all on .
He 's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan .
And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I 'm just going to offer you and let it sit .
I can 't quite explain it , and he can 't either .
But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body , in all its frailty and its grace , without , at the same time , becoming more compassionate towards all of life .
Compassion also looks like this .
This is Jean Vanier .
Jean Vanier helped found the L 'Arche communities , which you can now find all over the world , communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities -- mostly Down syndrome .
The communities that Jean Vanier founded , like Jean Vanier himself , exude tenderness .
" Tender " is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting .
We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive , and I spend a lot of time being those things too .
And compassion can also have those qualities .
But again and again , lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness .
Jean Vanier says that his work , like the work of other people -- his great , beloved , late friend Mother Teresa -- is never in the first instance about changing the world ; it 's in the first instance about changing ourselves .
He 's says that what they do with L 'Arche is not a solution , but a sign .
Compassion is rarely a solution , but it is always a sign of a deeper reality , of deeper human possibilities .
And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories , never by statistics and strategies .
We need those things too , but we 're also bumping up against their limits .
And at the same time that we are doing that , I think we are rediscovering the power of story -- that as human beings , we need stories to survive , to flourish , to change .
Our traditions have always known this , and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us .
There is , of course , a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world -- tikkun olam .
And I 'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen , who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her , that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces .
It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation .
And that the highest human calling is to look for this light , to point at it when we see it , to gather it up , and in so doing , to repair the world .
Now this might sound like a fanciful tale .
Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way .
Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time , because this story insists that each and every one of us , frail and flawed as we may be , inadequate as we may feel , has exactly what 's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch .
Stories like this , signs like this , are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us .
Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors .
And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing , how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine -- the work Fred Luskin is doing -- I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century -- that science , in fact , is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism .
This is going to change science , I believe , and it will change religion .
But here 's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion .
We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2 .
We don 't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer , Marian Anderson , to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn 't have her .
We don 't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South .
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions .
But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century .
He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old .
And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced , we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more , not less .
He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages .
Some of his favorites were Moses , Jesus , Buddha , St. Francis of Assisi , Gandhi -- he adored his contemporary , Gandhi .
And Einstein said -- and I think this is a quote , again , that has not been passed down in his legacy -- that " these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living , more necessary to the dignity , security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge . "
Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us , but actually it is .
I want to show you the rest of this photograph , because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word " compassion " in our culture -- we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life , which is messy .
So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral -- it 's not .
This is the full photograph , and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket , smoking a cigar .
And by the look of that paunch , he hasn 't been doing enough yoga .
We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website , and someone said , " When I look at the first photo , I ask myself , what was he thinking ?
And when I look at the second , I ask , what kind of person was he ? What kind of man is this ? "
Well , he was complicated .
He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others .
And it is much harder , often , to be compassionate towards those closest to us , which is another quality in the universe of compassion , on its dark side , that also deserves our serious attention and illumination .
Gandhi , too , was a real flawed human being .
So was Martin Luther King , Jr . So was Dorothy Day .
So was Mother Teresa .
So are we all .
And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion -- following on what Fred Luskin says -- that these flaws just make us human .
Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems .
But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems , in fact , are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion , towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others .
Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn 's disease .
Einstein became a humanitarian , not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter , but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist .
And Karen Armstrong , I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that , with a zigzag , have led to the Charter for Compassion .
Compassion can 't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity .
So I want to propose a final definition of compassion -- this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way -- and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology .
Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this , and we need them to mine it for us now .
But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious .
So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity , the future of humanity , needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race .
Thank you .
David Carson : Design and discovery
Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery -- for which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor . Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous slide deck of his work and found images .
I had requested slides , kind of adamantly , up till the -- pretty much , last few days , but was denied access to a slide projector .
I actually find them a lot more emotional -- -- and personal , and the neat thing about a slide projector is you can actually focus the work , unlike PowerPoint and some other programs .
Now , I agree that you have to -- yeah , there are certain concessions and , you know , if you use a slide projector , you 're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side , or up or down , but maybe that 's an O.K. trade-off , to trade that off for a focus .
It 's a thought . Just a thought .
And there 's something nice about slides getting stuck .
And the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up , which we won 't see tonight . So .
With that , let 's get the first slide up here .
This , as many of you have probably guessed , is a recently emptied beer can in Portugal .
This -- I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time , and I thought -- you know , fly all night , I looked up , and I thought , wow , how clean .
You come into this major airport , and they simply have a B.
I mean , how nice is that ?
Everything 's gotten simpler in design , and here 's this mega airport , and God , I just -- I took a picture .
I thought , God , that is the coolest thing I 've ever seen at an airport .
Till a couple months later , I went back to the same airport -- same plane , I think -- and looked up , and it said C.
It was only then that I realized it was simply a gate that I was coming into .
I 'm a big believer in the emotion of design , and the message that 's sent before somebody begins to read , before they get the rest of the information ; what is the emotional response they get to the product , to the story , to the painting -- whatever it is .
That area of design interests me the most , and I think this for me is a real clear , very simplified version of what I 'm talking about .
These are a couple of garage doors painted identical , situated next to each other .
So , here 's the first door . You know , you get the message .
You know , it 's pretty clear .
Take a look at the second door and see if there 's any different message .
O.K. , which one would you park in front of ?
Same color , same message , same words .
The only thing that 's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece -- and , again , which is the psycho-killer here ?
Yet it doesn 't say that ; it doesn 't need to say that .
I would probably park in front of the other one .
I 'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so .
It 's gotten so simple that it 's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive .
But I was in Milan and saw this street sign , and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist .
And this graffiti artist has come along , made this sign a little bit better , and then moved on .
He didn 't overpower it like they have a tendency to do .
This is for a book by " Metropolis . "
I took some photos , and this is a billboard in Florida , and either they hadn 't paid their rent , or they didn 't want to pay their rent again on the sign , and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down , so they just teared out sections of it .
And I would argue that it 's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention , getting you to look over that way .
And hopefully you don 't stop and buy those awful pecan things -- Stuckey 's .
This is from my second book .
The first book is called , " The End of Print , " and it was done along with a film , working with William Burroughs .
And " The End of Print " is now in its fifth printing .
When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it , he said no ; he said he didn 't believe it was the end of print .
And I said , well , that 's fine ; I just would love to have your input on this film and this book , and he finally agreed to it .
And at the end of the film , he says in this great voice that I can 't mimic but I 'll kind of try , but not really , he says , " I remember attending an exhibition called , ' Photography : The End of Painting . ' " And then he says , " And , of course , it wasn 't at all . "
So , apparently when photography was perfected , there were people going around saying , that 's it : you 've just ruined painting .
People are just going to take pictures now .
And of course , that wasn 't the case .
So , this is from " 2nd Sight , " a book I did on intuition .
I think it 's not the only ingredient in design , but possibly the most important .
It 's something everybody has .
It 's not a matter of teaching it ; in fact , most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they can 't quantify it : it 's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design , but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter .
So it tends to get discounted .
This is a quote from Albert Einstein , who says , " The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery .
There comes a leap in consciousness -- call it intuition or what you will -- and the solution just comes to you , and you don 't know from where or why . "
So , it 's kind of like when somebody says , Who did that song ?
And the more you try to think about it , the further the answer gets from you , and the minute you stop thinking about it , your intuition gives you that answer , in a sense .
I like this for a couple of reasons .
If you 've had any design courses , they would teach you you can 't read this .
I think you eventually can and , more importantly , I think it 's true .
" Don 't mistake legibility for communication . "
Just because something 's legible doesn 't means it communicates .
More importantly , it doesn 't mean it communicates the right thing .
So , what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material ?
And I think that 's sometimes an overlooked area .
This is working with Marshall McLuhan .
I stayed and worked with his wife and son , Eric , and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times , predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising , television , media world .
And so this book is called " Probes . " It 's another word for quotes .
And it 's -- a lot of them are never -- have never been published before , and basically , I 've interpreted the different quotes .
So , this was the contents page originally .
When I got done it was 540 pages , and then the publisher , Gingko Press , ended up cutting it down considerably : it 's just under 400 pages now .
But I decided I liked this contents page -- I liked the way it looks -- so I kept it .
It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever , but it 's a nice spread , I think , in there .
So , a couple spreads from the book : here McLuhan says , " The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature ; they are Nature . "
" The invention of printing did away with anonymity , fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property , " which had never been done before printing .
" When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies , anxieties of all kinds result . "
" While people are engaged in creating a totally different world , they always form vivid images of the preceding world . "
I hate this stuff . It 's hard to read .
" People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe , and no possible occupation except information gathering . "
That was it . That 's all he saw as the options . And not too far off .
So , this is a project for Nine Inch Nails .
And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden , and it was done right after 9 / 11 .
And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA that the real estate person hadn 't pointed out .
There was some bomb shelter built , apparently in the ' 60s Cuban missile crisis .
And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by , and he goes , " It 's something to do with the sewage system . "
I was , O.K. ; that 's fine .
I finally went down there , and it was this old rusted circular thing , and two beds , and very kind of creepy and weird .
And also , surprisingly , it was done in kind of a cheap metal , and it had completely rusted through , and water everywhere , and spiders .
And I thought , you know , what were they thinking ?
You 'd think maybe cement , possibly , or something .
But anyway , I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD , and I 've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape , and it 's ready . I think I 'm ready . So .
This is an experiment , really , for a client , Quicksilver , where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web .
So , this is a six-shot sequence .
I 've taken one shot ; I cropped it a few different ways .
And then the tiny line of copy says , If you want to see this entire sequence -- how this whole ride was -- go to the website .
And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site to get this entire picture .
Got no way of tracking it , so I could be totally wrong .
I don 't have the site . It 's just the piece itself .
This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment -- asked me to do these posters .
They were wild-posted around New York City .
You can 't really -- well , you can 't see it at all -- but the second line is really the more kind of payoff , in a sense .
It says , " If the cigarette companies can lie , then so can we . " But -- -- but I did .
These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night , and there were definitely some heads turning , you know , people smoking and , " Huh ! "
And it was purposely done to look fairly serious .
It wasn 't some , you know , weird grunge type or something ; it looked like they might be real . Anyway .
Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts , a school in Florida .
This amazes me . This is a product I just found out .
I was in the Caribbean at Christmas , and I 'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell -- not that they will sell -- that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin .
This was either an old product with new packaging , or a brand-new package , and I just thought , Yikes ! How 's that still happening ?
I do a lot of workshops all over the world , really , and this particular assignment was to come up with new symbols for the restroom doors .
I felt this was one of the more successful solutions .
The students actually cut them up and put them up around bars and restaurants that night , and I just always have this vision of this elderly couple going to use the restroom ...
I did some work for Microsoft a few years back .
It was a worldwide branding campaign .
And it was interesting to me -- my background is in sociology ; I had no design training , and sometimes people say , well , that explains it -- but it was a very interesting experiment because there 's no product that I had to sell ; it was simply the image of Microsoft they were trying to improve .
They thought some people didn 't like them .
I found out that 's very true , working on this campaign worldwide .
And our goal was to try to humanize them a bit , and what I did was add type and people to the ad , which the previous campaign had not had , and nobody remembered them , and nobody referenced them .
And we were trying to say that , hey , some of these guys that work there are actually OK ; some of them actually have friends and family , and they 're not all awful people .
And the umbrella campaign was " Thank God it 's Monday . "
So , we tried to take this -- what was perceived as a negative : their over-competitiveness , their , you know , long working hours -- and turn it into a positive and not run from it .
You know : Thank God it 's Monday -- I get to go back to that little cubicle , those fake gray walls , and hear everybody else 's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home .
But anyway , this is one of the ads I was most pleased with , because they were all elaborately art-directed , and this one I thought actually felt like the girl was looking at the computer .
It says , " Wonder Around . " And then it 's a piece of the software .
And this is how the ad ran around the world .
In Germany , they made one small change without checking with me -- nor did they have to , because it was done through agencies -- but see if you can tell the difference .
This is how the ad ran throughout the world ; Germany made one slight change in the ad .
Now , there 's kind of two issues here .
If you 're going to put a kid in the ad , pick one that looks alive .
I just have a feeling this kid 's been there for a week , you know .
He 's just really hoping that boots up and , you know ...
And then as the agency explained to me , they said , " Look , we don 't have little green people in our country ; why would we put little green people in our ads , for instance ? "
So , I understand their logic . I totally disagree with it ; I think it 's a very small-minded approach , the world is certainly much more global , and I certainly think the people of Germany could have handled a little black girl sitting in front of a computer , though we 'll never know .
This is some work from Ray Gun .
And the point of this magazine was to read the articles , listen to the music , and try to interpret it .
There 's no grid , there 's no system , there 's nothing set up in advance .
This is an opener for Brian Eno , and it 's just kind of my personal interpretation of the music .
This is rockstars talking about teachers they had lusted after in school .
There 's a lot of great writing in " Ray Gun . "
And I was fortunate to find a photograph of a teacher sitting on some books .
Article on Bryan Ferry -- just really boring article -- so I set the whole article in Dingbat .
You could -- you could highlight it ; you could make it Helvetica or something : it is the actual article .
I suppose you could eventually decode it , but it 's really not very well written ; it really wouldn 't be worthwhile .
Having done a lot of magazines , I 'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories , and I was very curious to see how Time and Newsweek would handle 9 / 11 .
And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we 'd already seen a million times , which was basically the moment of impact .
And People magazine , I thought , got probably the best shot .
It 's kind of horsey type , but the texture -- the second plane not quite hitting : there was something more enticing , if that 's the right -- it 's not the right word -- but in this cover than Time or Newsweek .
But when I got into this magazine , there 's something kind of disturbing , and this continued .
On the left we see people dying ; we see people running for their lives .
And on the right we learn that there 's a new way to support your breast .
The coveted right-hand page was not given up to the whole issue .
Look at the image of this lady -- who knows what she 's going through ? -- and the copy says : " He knows just how to give me goosebumps . "
Yeah , he jumps out of buildings . It 's -- unfortunately , this one works , kind of , as a spread .
And this continued through the entire magazine .
It did not let up .
This says : " One clean fits all . " .
There were a lot of orphans made this day , and here 's a dead body being brought out .
It just seems to me possibly even a blank page would have been more appropriate .
And this one I think is possibly the worst : two ladies , both facing the same way , both wearing jeans .
One -- who knows what she 's going through ; the other one is worried about model behavior and milk .
And -- I gave a talk in New York a couple months after this , and afterwards somebody came up to me and they said that -- they actually emailed me -- and they said that they appreciated the talk , and when they got back to their car , they found a note on their car that made them think maybe New York was getting back to being New York again after this event -- it had been a few months .
This was what they found on their car .
There 's very few times you 'd be happy to find this on your car , but it did seem to indicate that we were coming back .
This is my desktop .
Somebody told me today there was this thing called folders , but I don 't know what they are .
These are my notes for the talk -- there might be a correlation here .
We are wrapping up .
This I saw on the plane , flying in , for hot new products .
I 'm not sure this is an improvement , or a good idea , because , like , if you don 't spend quite enough time in front of your computer , you can now get a plate in the keyboard , so there 's no more faking it -- that you don 't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway .
Now there 's a plate , and it would be really , really convenient to get a piece of pizza , then type a little bit , then ...
I 'm just not sure this is improvement .
If you ever doubt the power of graphic design , this is a very generic sign that literally says , " Vote for Hitler . " It says nothing else .
And this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion , of graphic design , even though , in fact , was a very generic poster at the time .
What 's next ? What 's next is going to be people .
As we get more technically driven , the importance of people becomes more than it 's ever been before .
You have to utilize who you are in your work .
Nobody else can do that : nobody else can pull from your background , from your parents , your upbringing , your whole life experience .
If you allow that to happen , it 's really the only way you can do some unique work , and you 're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well .
This is -- I like found art ; hand lettering 's coming back in a big way , and I thought this was a great example of both .
This lady 's advertising for her lost pit bull .
It 's friendly -- she 's underlined friendly -- that 's probably why she calls it Hercules or Hercles . She can 't spell .
But more importantly , she 's willing to give you 20 bucks to go find this lost pit bull .
And I 'm thinking , yeah , right , I 'll go look for a lost pit bill for 20 bucks .
I have visions of people going down alleyways yelling out for Hercles , and you get charged by this thing and you go , oh , please be Hercles ; please be the friendly one .
I 'm sure she never found the dog , because I took the sign .
But I was asked to give a talk at a conference in Sacramento a few years back .
And the theme was courage , and they asked me to talk about how courageous it is to be a graphic designer .
And I remembered seeing this photograph of my father , who was a test pilot , and he told me that when you signed up to become a test pilot , they told you that there was a 40 to 50 percent chance of death on the job .
That 's pretty high for most occupations .
But , you know , the government would make a plane ; they 'd say , go see if that one flies , would you ?
Some of them did ; some of them didn 't .
And I started thinking about some of these decisions I have to make between , like , serif versus san-serif .
And for the most part , they 're not real life-threatening .
Why not experiment ? Why not have some fun ?
Why not put some of yourself into the work ?
And when I was teaching , I used to always ask the students , What 's the definition of a good job ?
And as teachers , after you get all the answers , you like to give them the correct answer .
And the best one I 've heard -- I 'm sure some of you have heard this -- the definition of a good job is : If you could afford to -- if money wasn 't an issue -- would you be doing that same work ?
And if you would , you 've got a great job .
And if you wouldn 't , what the heck are you doing ?
You 're going to be dead a really long time .
Thank you very much .
Jaime Lerner : A song of the city
Jaime Lerner reinvented urban space in his native Curitiba , Brazil . Along the way , he changed the way city planners worldwide see what 's possible in the metropolitan landscape .
I hope you 'll understand my English .
In the mornings it is terrible , and the afternoon is worst .
During many years , I made some speeches starting with this saying : " City is not a problem , it 's a solution . "
And more and more , I 'm convinced that it 's not only a solution for a country , but it 's a solution for the problem of climate change .
But we have a very pessimistic approach about the cities .
I 'm working in cities for almost 40 years , and where every mayor is trying to tell me his city is so big , or the other mayors say , " We don 't have financial resources , " I would like to say from the experience I had : every city in the world can be improved in less than three years .
There 's no matter of scale . It 's not a question of scale , it 's not a question of financial resources .
Every problem in a city has to have its own equation of co-responsibility and also a design .
So to start , I want to introduce some characters from a book I made for teenagers .
The best example of quality of life is the turtle because the turtle is an example of living and working together .
And when you realize that the casque of the turtle looks like an urban tessitura , and can we imagine , if we cut the casque of the turtle , how sad she 's going to be ?
And that 's what we 're doing in our cities : living here , working here , having leisure here .
And most of the people are leaving the city and living outside of the city .
So , the other character is Otto , the automobile .
He is invited for a party -- he never wants to leave .
The chairs are on the tables and still drinking , and he drinks a lot .
And he coughs a lot . Very egotistical : he carries only one or two people and he asks always for more infrastructure .
Freeways .
He 's a very demanding person .
And on the other hand , Accordion , the friendly bus , he carries 300 people -- 275 in Sweden ; 300 Brazilians .
Speaking about the design : every city has its own design .
Curitiba , my city : three million in the metropolitan area , 1,800,000 people in the city itself .
Curitiba , Rio : it 's like two birds kissing themselves .
Oaxaca , San Francisco -- it 's very easy : Market Street , Van Ness and the waterfront .
And every city has its own design .
But to make it happen , sometimes you have to propose a scenario and to propose a design -- an idea that everyone , or the large majority , will help you to make it happen .
And that 's the structure of the city of Curitiba .
And it 's an example of living and working together .
And this is where we have more density ; it 's where we have more public transport .
So , this system started in ' 74 . We started with 25,000 passengers a day , now it 's 2,200,000 passengers a day .
And it took 25 years until another city ...
which is Bogota , and they did a very good job .
And now there 's 83 cities all over the world that they are doing what they call the BRT of Curitiba .
And one thing : it 's important not for only your own city ; every city , besides its normal problems , they have a very important role in being with the whole humanity .
That means mostly two main issues -- mobility and sustainability -- are becoming very important for the cities .
And this is an articulated bus , double-articulated .
And we are very close to my house .
You can come when you are in Curitiba and have a coffee there .
And that 's the evolution of the system .
What in the design that made the difference is the boarding tubes : the boarding tube gives to the bus the same performance as a subway .
That 's why , I 'm trying to say , it 's like metro-nizing the bus .
This is the design of the bus , and you can pay before entering the bus you 're boarding .
And for handicapped , they can use this as a normal system .
What I 'm trying to say is the major contribution on carbon emissions are from the cars -- more than 50 percent -- so when we depend only on cars , it 's ...
-- that 's why when we 're talking about sustainability , it 's not enough , green buildings .
It 's not enough , a new materials .
It 's not enough , new sources of energy .
It 's the concept of the city , the design of the city , that 's also important , too . And also , how to teach the children .
I 'll speak on this later on .
Our idea of mobility is trying to make the connections between all the systems .
We started in ' 83 , proposing for the city of Rio how to connect the subway with the bus .
The subway was against , of course .
And 23 years after , they called us to develop -- we 're developing this idea .
And you can understand how different it 's going to be , the image of Rio with the system -- one-minute frequency .
And it 's not Shanghai , it 's not being colored during the day , only at night it will look this way .
And before you say it 's a Norman Foster design , we designed this in ' 83 .
And this is the model , how it 's going to work . So , it 's the same system ; the vehicle is different . And that 's the model .
What I 'm trying to say is , I 'm not trying to prove which system of transport is better .
I 'm trying to say we have to combine all the systems , and with one condition : never -- if you have a subway , if you have surface systems , if you have any kind of system -- never compete in the same space .
And coming back to the car , I always used to say that the car is like your mother-in-law : you have to have good relationship with her , but she cannot command your life .
So , when the only woman in your life is your mother-in-law , you have a problem .
So , all the ideas about how to transform through design -- old quarries and open universities and botanic garden -- all of it 's related to how we teach the children .
And the children , we teach during six months how to separate their garbage .
And after , the children teach their parents .
And now we have 70 percent -- since 20 years , it 's the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world .
Seven zero .
So teach the children .
I would like to say , if we want to have a sustainable world we have to work with everything what 's said , but don 't forget the cities and the children .
I 'm working in a museum and also a multi-use city , because you cannot have empty places during 18 hours a day .
You should have always a structure of living and working together .
Try to understand the sectors in the city that could play different roles during the 24 hours .
Another issue is , a city 's like our family portrait .
We don 't rip our family portrait , even if we don 't like the nose of our uncle , because this portrait is you .
And these are the references that we have in any city .
This is the main pedestrian mall ; we did it in 72 hours . Yes , you have to be fast .
And these are the references from our ethnic contribution .
This is the Italian portal , the Ukrainian park , the Polish park , the Japanese square , the German park .
All of a sudden , the Soviet Union , they split .
And since we have people from Uzbekistan , Kazakhstan , Tajikistan , [ unclear ] , we have to stop the program .
Don 't forget : creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget .
If you cut two zeros , it 's much better .
And this is the Wire Opera theater . We did it in two months .
Parks -- old quarries that they were transformed into parks .
Quarries once made the nature , and sometimes we took this and we transformed .
And every part can be transformed ; every frog can be transformed in a prince .
So , in a city , you have to work fast .
Planning takes time . And I 'm proposing urban acupuncture .
That means me , with some focal ideas to help the normal process of planning .
And this is an acupuncture note -- or I.M. Pei 's . Some small ones can make the city better .
The smallest park in New York , the most beautiful : 32 meters .
So , I want just to end saying that you can always propose new materials -- new sustainable materials -- but keep in mind that we have to work fast to the end , because we don 't have the whole time to plan .
And I think creativity , innovation is starting .
And we cannot have all the answers .
So when you start -- and we cannot be so prepotent on having all the answers -- it 's important starting and having the contribution from people , and they could teach you if you 're not in the right track .
At the end , I would like if you can help me to sing the sustainable song .
OK ?
Please , allow me just two minutes .
You 're going to make the music and the rhythm .
Toonchi-too ! Toonchi-too ! Toonchi-too ! Toonchi-too ! Toonchi-too ! Toonchi-too ! It 's possible ! It 's possible ! You can do it ! You can do it ! Use less your car ! Make this decision ! Avoid carbon emission ! It 's possible ! It 's possible ! You can do it ! You can do it ! Live closer to work ! Work closer to home ! Save energy in your home ! It 's possible ! It 's possible ! You can do it ! You can do it ! Separate your garbage ! Organic , schmorganic ! Save more ! Waste less ! It 's possible ! You can do it ! Please , do it now ! Thank you .
Brené Brown : The power of vulnerability
Brené Brown studies human connection -- our ability to empathize , belong , love . In a poignant , funny talk , she shares a deep insight from her research , one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity . A talk to share .
So , I 'll start with this : a couple years ago , an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event .
And she called , and she said , " I 'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer . "
And I thought , " Well , what 's the struggle ? "
And she said , " Well , I saw you speak , and I 'm going to call you a researcher , I think , but I 'm afraid if I call you a researcher , no one will come , because they 'll think you 're boring and irrelevant . "
And she said , " But the thing I liked about your talk is you 're a storyteller .
So I think what I 'll do is just call you a storyteller . "
And of course , the academic , insecure part of me was like , " You 're going to call me a what ? "
And she said , " I 'm going to call you a storyteller . "
And I was like , " Why not magic pixie ? "
I was like , " Let me think about this for a second . "
I tried to call deep on my courage .
And I thought , you know , I am a storyteller .
I 'm a qualitative researcher .
I collect stories ; that 's what I do .
And maybe stories are just data with a soul .
And maybe I 'm just a storyteller .
And so I said , " You know what ?
Why don 't you just say I 'm a researcher-storyteller . "
And she went , " Haha . There 's no such thing . "
So I 'm a researcher-storyteller , and I 'm going to talk to you today -- we 're talking about expanding perception -- and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent .
And this is where my story starts .
When I was a young researcher , doctoral student , my first year I had a research professor who said to us , " Here 's the thing , if you cannot measure it , it does not exist . "
And I thought he was just sweet-talking me .
I was like , " Really ? " and he was like , " Absolutely . "
And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor 's in social work , a master 's in social work , and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work , so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the " life 's messy , love it . "
And I 'm more of the , " life 's messy , clean it up , organize it and put it into a bento box . "
And so to think that I had found my way , to found a career that takes me -- really , one of the big sayings in social work is , " Lean into the discomfort of the work . "
And I 'm like , knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A 's .
That was my mantra .
So I was very excited about this .
And so I thought , you know what , this is the career for me , because I am interested in some messy topics .
But I want to be able to make them not messy .
I want to understand them .
I want to hack into these things I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see .
So where I started was with connection .
Because , by the time you 're a social worker for 10 years , what you realize is that connection is why we 're here .
It 's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives .
This is what it 's all about .
It doesn 't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice and mental health and abuse and neglect , what we know is that connection , the ability to feel connected , is -- neurobiologically that 's how we 're wired -- it 's why we 're here .
So I thought , you know what , I 'm going to start with connection .
Well , you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss , and she tells you 37 things you do really awesome , and one thing -- an " opportunity for growth ? "
And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth , right ?
Well , apparently this is the way my work went as well , because , when you ask people about love , they tell you about heartbreak .
When you ask people about belonging , they 'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded .
And when you ask people about connection , the stories they told me were about disconnection .
So very quickly -- really about six weeks into this research -- I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn 't understand or had never seen .
And so I pulled back out of the research and thought , I need to figure out what this is .
And it turned out to be shame .
And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection : Is there something about me that , if other people know it or see it , that I won 't be worthy of connection ?
The things I can tell you about it : it 's universal ; we all have it .
The only people who don 't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection .
No one wants to talk about it , and the less you talk about it the more you have it .
What underpinned this shame , this " I 'm not good enough , " -- which we all know that feeling : " I 'm not blank enough . I 'm not thin enough , rich enough , beautiful enough , smart enough , promoted enough . "
The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability , this idea of , in order for connection to happen , we have to allow ourselves to be seen , really seen .
And you know how I feel about vulnerability . I hate vulnerability .
And so I thought , this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick .
I 'm going in , I 'm going to figure this stuff out , I 'm going to spend a year , I 'm going to totally deconstruct shame , I 'm going to understand how vulnerability works , and I 'm going to outsmart it .
So I was ready , and I was really excited .
As you know , it 's not going to turn out well .
You know this .
So , I could tell you a lot about shame , but I 'd have to borrow everyone else 's time .
But here 's what I can tell you that it boils down to -- and this may be one of the most important things that I 've ever learned in the decade of doing this research .
My one year turned into six years : thousands of stories , hundreds of long interviews , focus groups .
At one point , people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories -- thousands of pieces of data in six years .
And I kind of got a handle on it .
I kind of understood , this is what shame is , this is how it works .
I wrote a book , I published a theory , but something was not okay -- and what it was is that , if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness -- that 's what this comes down to , a sense of worthiness -- they have a strong sense of love and belonging -- and folks who struggle for it , and folks who are always wondering if they 're good enough .
There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it .
And that was , the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they 're worthy of love and belonging .
That 's it .
They believe they 're worthy .
And to me , the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we 're not worthy of connection , was something that , personally and professionally , I felt like I needed to understand better .
So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness , where I saw people living that way , and just looked at those .
What do these people have in common ?
I have a slight office supply addiction , but that 's another talk .
So I had a manila folder , and I had a Sharpie , and I was like , what am I going to call this research ?
And the first words that came to my mind were whole-hearted .
These are whole-hearted people , living from this deep sense of worthiness .
So I wrote at the top of the manila folder , and I started looking at the data .
In fact , I did it first in a four-day very intensive data analysis , where I went back , pulled these interviews , pulled the stories , pulled the incidents .
What 's the theme ? What 's the pattern ?
My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing , where I 'm just like writing and in my researcher mode .
And so here 's what I found .
What they had in common was a sense of courage .
And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute .
Courage , the original definition of courage , when it first came into the English language -- it 's from the Latin word cor , meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart .
And so these folks had , very simply , the courage to be imperfect .
They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others , because , as it turns out , we can 't practice compassion with other people if we can 't treat ourselves kindly .
And the last was they had connection , and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity , they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were , which you have to absolutely do that for connection .
The other thing that they had in common was this : They fully embraced vulnerability .
They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful .
They didn 't talk about vulnerability being comfortable , nor did they really talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing .
They just talked about it being necessary .
They talked about the willingness to say , " I love you " first , the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees , the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram .
They 're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out .
They thought this was fundamental .
I personally thought it was betrayal .
I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research , where our job -- you know , the definition of research is to control and predict , to study phenomena , for the explicit reason to control and predict .
And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting .
This led to a little breakdown -- -- which actually looked more like this .
And it did .
I call it a breakdown ; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening .
A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown , but I assure you it was a breakdown .
And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist .
Let me tell you something : you know who you are when you call your friends and say , " I think I need to see somebody .
Do you have any recommendations ? "
Because about five of my friends were like , " Wooo . I wouldn 't want to be your therapist . "
I was like , " What does that mean ? "
And they 're like , " I 'm just saying , you know .
Don 't bring your measuring stick . "
I was like , " Okay . "
So I found a therapist .
My first meeting with her , Diana -- I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live , and I sat down .
And she said , " How are you ? "
And I said , " I 'm great . I 'm okay . "
She said , " What 's going on ? "
And this is a therapist who sees therapists , because we have to go to those , because their B.S. meters are good .
And so I said , " Here 's the thing , I 'm struggling . "
And she said , " What 's the struggle ? "
And I said , " Well , I have a vulnerability issue .
And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness , but it appears that it 's also the birthplace of joy , of creativity , of belonging , of love .
And I think I have a problem , and I need some help . "
And I said , " But here 's the thing : no family stuff , no childhood shit . "
" I just need some strategies . "
Thank you .
So she goes like this .
And then I said , " It 's bad , right ? "
And she said , " It 's neither good nor bad . "
" It just is what it is . "
And I said , " Oh my God , this is going to suck . "
And it did , and it didn 't .
And it took about a year .
And you know how there are people that , when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important , that they surrender and walk into it .
that 's not me , and B : I don 't even hang out with people like that .
For me , it was a yearlong street fight .
It was a slugfest .
Vulnerability pushed , I pushed back .
I lost the fight , but probably won my life back .
And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they , the whole-hearted , what choices they were making , and what are we doing with vulnerability .
Why do we struggle with it so much ?
Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability ?
No .
So this is what I learned .
We numb vulnerability -- when we 're waiting for the call .
It was funny , I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says , " How would you define vulnerability ?
What makes you feel vulnerable ? "
And within an hour and a half , I had 150 responses .
Because I wanted to know what 's out there .
Having to ask my husband for help because I 'm sick , and we 're newly married ; initiating sex with my husband ; initiating sex with my wife ; being turned down ; asking someone out ; waiting for the doctor to call back ; getting laid off ; laying off people -- this is the world we live in .
We live in a vulnerable world .
And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability .
And I think there 's evidence -- and it 's not the only reason this evidence exists , but I think it 's a huge cause -- we are the most in-debt , obese , addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history .
The problem is -- and I learned this from the research -- that you cannot selectively numb emotion .
You can 't say , here 's the bad stuff .
Here 's vulnerability , here 's grief , here 's shame , here 's fear , here 's disappointment .
I don 't want to feel these .
I 'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin .
I don 't want to feel these .
And I know that 's knowing laughter .
I hack into your lives for a living .
God .
You can 't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects , our emotions .
You cannot selectively numb .
So when we numb those , we numb joy , we numb gratitude , we numb happiness .
And then we are miserable , and we are looking for purpose and meaning , and then we feel vulnerable , so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin .
And it becomes this dangerous cycle .
One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb .
And it doesn 't just have to be addiction .
The other thing we do is we make everything that 's uncertain certain .
Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty .
I 'm right , you 're wrong . Shut up .
That 's it .
Just certain .
The more afraid we are , the more vulnerable we are , the more afraid we are .
This is what politics looks like today .
There 's no discourse anymore .
There 's no conversation .
There 's just blame .
You know how blame is described in the research ?
A way to discharge pain and discomfort .
We perfect .
If there 's anyone who wants their life to look like this , it would be me , but it doesn 't work .
Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks .
Which just , I hope in 100 years , people will look back and go , " Wow . "
And we perfect , most dangerously , our children .
Let me tell you what we think about children .
They 're hardwired for struggle when they get here .
And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand , our job is not to say , " Look at her , she 's perfect .
My job is just to keep her perfect -- make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh grade . "
That 's not our job .
Our job is to look and say , " You know what ? You 're imperfect , and you 're wired for struggle , but you are worthy of love and belonging . "
That 's our job .
Show me a generation of kids raised like that , and we 'll end the problems I think that we see today .
We pretend that what we do doesn 't have an effect on people .
We do that in our personal lives .
We do that corporate -- whether it 's a bailout , an oil spill , a recall -- we pretend like what we 're doing doesn 't have a huge impact on other people .
I would say to companies , this is not our first rodeo , people .
We just need you to be authentic and real and say , " We 're sorry .
We 'll fix it . "
But there 's another way , and I 'll leave you with this .
This is what I have found : to let ourselves be seen , deeply seen , vulnerably seen ; to love with our whole hearts , even though there 's no guarantee -- and that 's really hard , and I can tell you as a parent , that 's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror , when we 're wondering , " Can I love you this much ?
Can I believe in this this passionately ?
Can I be this fierce about this ? "
just to be able to stop and , instead of catastrophizing what might happen , to say , " I 'm just so grateful , because to feel this vulnerable means I 'm alive . "
And the last , which I think is probably the most important , is to believe that we 're enough .
Because when we work from a place , I believe , that says , " I 'm enough , " then we stop screaming and start listening , we 're kinder and gentler to the people around us , and we 're kinder and gentler to ourselves .
That 's all I have . Thank you .
Jinsop Lee : Design for all 5 senses
Good design looks great , yes -- but why shouldn 't it also feel great , smell great and sound great ? Designer Jinsop Lee shares his theory of 5-sense design , with a handy graph and a few examples . His hope : to inspire you to notice great multisensory experiences .
In an age of global strife and climate change , I 'm here to answer the all important question : Why is sex so damn good ?
If you 're laughing , you know what I mean .
Now , before we get to that answer , let me tell you about Chris Hosmer .
Chris is a great friend of mine from my university days , but secretly , I hate him .
Here 's why . Back in university , we had a quick project to design some solar-powered clocks .
Here 's my clock .
It uses something called the dwarf sunflower , which grows to about 12 inches in height .
Now , as you know , sunflowers track the sun during the course of the day .
So in the morning , you see which direction the sunflower is facing , and you mark it on the blank area in the base .
At noon , you mark the changed position of the sunflower , and in the evening again , and that 's your clock .
Now , I know my clock doesn 't tell you the exact time , but it does give you a general idea using a flower .
So , in my completely unbiased , subjective opinion , it 's brilliant .
However , here 's Chris ' clock .
It 's five magnifying glasses with a shot glass under each one .
In each shot glass is a different scented oil .
In the morning , the sunlight will shine down on the first magnifying glass , focusing a beam of light on the shot glass underneath .
This will warm up the scented oil inside , and a particular smell will be emitted .
A couple of hours later , the sun will shine on the next magnifying glass , and a different smell will be emitted .
So during the course of the day , five different smells are dispersed throughout that environment .
Anyone living in that house can tell the time just by the smell .
You can see why I hate Chris .
I thought my idea was pretty good , but his idea is genius , and at the time , I knew his idea was better than mine , but I just couldn 't explain why .
One thing you have to know about me is I hate to lose .
This problem 's been bugging me for well over a decade .
All right , let 's get back to the question of why sex is so good .
Many years after the solar powered clocks project , a young lady I knew suggested maybe sex is so good because of the five senses .
And when she said this , I had an epiphany .
So I decided to evaluate different experiences I had in my life from the point of view of the five senses .
To do this , I devised something called the five senses graph .
Along the y-axis , you have a scale from zero to 10 , and along the x-axis , you have , of course , the five senses .
Anytime I had a memorable experience in my life , I would record it on this graph like a five senses diary .
Here 's a quick video to show you how it works .
Jinsop Lee : Hey , my name 's Jinsop , and today , I 'm going to show you what riding motorbikes is like from the point of view of the five senses . Hey !
Bike designer : This is [ unclear ] , custom bike designer .
[ Sound ] [ Touch ] [ Sight ] [ Smell ] [ Taste ] JL : And that 's how the five senses graph works .
Now , for a period of three years , I gathered data , not just me but also some of my friends , and I used to teach in university , so I forced my -- I mean , I asked my students to do this as well .
So here are some other results .
The first is for instant noodles .
Now obviously , taste and smell are quite high , but notice sound is at three .
Many people told me a big part of the noodle-eating experience is the slurping noise .
You know .
Needless to say , I no longer dine with these people .
Okay , next , clubbing .
Okay , here what I found interesting was that taste is at four , and many respondents told me it 's because of the taste of drinks , but also , in some cases , kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience .
These people I still do hang out with .
All right , and smoking .
Here I found touch is at [ six ] , and one of the reasons is that smokers told me the sensation of holding a cigarette and bringing it up to your lips is a big part of the smoking experience , which shows , it 's kind of scary to think how well cigarettes are designed by the manufacturers .
Okay . Now , what would the perfect experience look like on the five senses graph ?
It would , of course , be a horizontal line along the top .
Now you can see , not even as intense an experience as riding a motorbike comes close .
In fact , in the years that I gathered data , only one experience came close to being the perfect one .
That is , of course , sex . Great sex .
Respondents said that great sex hits all of the five senses at an extreme level .
Here I 'll quote one of my students who said , " Sex is so good , it 's good even when it 's bad . "
So the five senses theory does help explain why sex is so good .
Now in the middle of all this five senses work , I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks project from my youth .
And I realized this theory also explains why Chris ' clock is so much better than mine .
You see , my clock only focuses on sight , and a little bit of touch .
Here 's Chris ' clock .
It 's the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time .
In fact , in terms of the five senses , Chris ' clock is a revolution .
And that 's what this theory taught me about my field .
You see , up till now , us designers , we 've mainly focused on making things look very pretty , and a little bit of touch , which means we 've ignored the other three senses .
Chris ' clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product .
So what if we started using the five senses theory in all of our designs ?
Here 's three quick ideas I came up with .
This is an iron , you know , for your clothes , to which I added a spraying mechanism , so you fill up the vial with your favorite scent , and your clothes will smell nicer , but hopefully it should also make the ironing experience more enjoyable .
We could call this " the perfumator . "
All right , next .
So I brush my teeth twice a day , and what if we had a toothbrush that tastes like candy , and when the taste of candy ran out , you 'd know it 's time to change your toothbrush ?
Finally , I have a thing for the keys on a flute or a clarinet .
It 's not just the way they look , but I love the way they feel when you press down on them .
Now , I don 't play the flute or the clarinet , so I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play : the television remote control .
Now , when we look at these three ideas together , you 'll notice that the five senses theory doesn 't only change the way we use these products but also the way they look .
So in conclusion , I 've found the five senses theory to be a very useful tool in evaluating different experiences in my life , and then taking those best experiences and hopefully incorporating them into my designs .
Now , I realize the five senses isn 't the only thing that makes life interesting .
There 's also the six emotions and that elusive x-factor .
Maybe that could be the topic of my next talk .
Until then , please have fun using the five senses in your own lives and your own designs .
Oh , one last thing before I leave .
Here 's the experience you all had while listening to the TED Talks .
However , it would be better if we could boost up a couple of the other senses like smell and taste .
And the best way to do that is with free candy .
You guys ready ?
All right .
Cary Fowler : One seed at a time , protecting the future of food
The varieties of wheat , corn and rice we grow today may not thrive in a future threatened by climate change . Cary Fowler takes us inside a vast global seed bank , buried within a frozen mountain in Norway , that stores a diverse group of food-crop for whatever tomorrow may bring .
I 've been fascinated with crop diversity for about 35 years from now , ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan .
And he described the diversity within crops -- all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such -- as a genetic resource .
And he said , " This genetic resource , " -- and I 'll never forget the words -- " stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine . "
I figured he was either really on to something , or he was one of these academic nutcases .
So , I looked a little further , and what I figured out was that he wasn 't a nutcase .
He was the most respected scientist in the field .
What he understood was that biological diversity -- crop diversity -- is the biological foundation of agriculture .
It 's the raw material , the stuff , of evolution in our agricultural crops .
Not a trivial matter .
And he also understood that that foundation was crumbling , literally crumbling .
That indeed , a mass extinction was underway in our fields , in our agricultural system .
And that this mass extinction was taking place with very few people noticing and even fewer caring .
Now , I know that many of you don 't stop to think about diversity in agricultural systems and , let 's face it , that 's logical .
You don 't see it in the newspaper every day .
And when you go into the supermarket , you certainly don 't see a lot of choices there .
You see apples that are red , yellow , and green and that 's about it .
So , let me show you a picture of one form of diversity .
Here 's some beans , and there are about 35 or 40 different varieties of beans on this picture .
Now , imagine each one of these varieties as being distinct from another about the same way as a poodle from a Great Dane .
If I wanted to show you a picture of all the dog breeds in the world , and I put 30 or 40 of them on a slide , it would take about 10 slides because there about 400 breeds of dogs in the world .
But there are 35 to 40,000 different varieties of beans .
So if I were to going to show you all the beans in the world , and I had a slide like this , and I switched it every second , it would take up my entire TED talk , and I wouldn 't have to say anything .
But the interesting thing is that this diversity -- and the tragic thing is -- that this diversity is being lost .
We have about 200,000 different varieties of wheat , and we have about 2 to 400,000 different varieties of rice , but it 's being lost .
And I want to give you an example of that .
It 's a bit of a personal example , in fact .
In the United States , in the 1800s -- that 's where we have the best data -- farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples .
Imagine that . 7,100 apples with names .
Today , 6,800 of those are extinct , no longer to be seen again .
I used to have a list of these extinct apples , and when I would go out and give a presentation , I would pass the list out in the audience .
I wouldn 't tell them what it was , but it was in alphabetical order , and I would tell them to look for their names , their family names , their mother 's maiden name .
And at the end of the speech , I would ask , " How many people have found a name ? "
And I never had fewer than two-thirds of an audience hold up their hand .
And I said , " You know what ? These apples come from your ancestors , and your ancestors gave them the greatest honor they could give them .
They gave them their name .
The bad news is they 're extinct .
The good news is a third of you didn 't hold up your hand . Your apple 's still out there .
Find it . Make sure it doesn 't join the list . "
So , I want to tell you that the piece of the good news is that the Fowler apple is still out there .
And there 's an old book back here , and I want to read a piece from it .
This book was published in 1904 .
It 's called " The Apples of New York " and this is the second volume .
See , we used to have a lot of apples .
And the Fowler apple is described in here -- I hope this doesn 't surprise you -- as , " a beautiful fruit . "
I don 't know if we named the apple or if the apple named us , but ...
but , to be honest , the description goes on and it says that it " doesn 't rank high in quality , however . "
And then he has to go even further .
It sounds like it was written by an old school teacher of mine .
" As grown in New York , the fruit usually fails to develop properly in size and quality and is , on the whole , unsatisfactory . "
And I guess there 's a lesson to be learned here , and the lesson is : so why save it ?
I get this question all the time . Why don 't we just save the best one ?
And there are a couple of answers to that question .
One thing is that there is no such thing as a best one .
Today 's best variety is tomorrow 's lunch for insects or pests or disease .
The other thing is that maybe that Fowler apple or maybe a variety of wheat that 's not economical right now has disease or pest resistance or some quality that we 're going to need for climate change that the others don 't .
So it 's not necessary , thank God , that the Fowler apple is the best apple in the world .
It 's just necessary or interesting that it might have one good , unique trait .
And for that reason , we ought to be saving it .
Why ? As a raw material , as a trait we can use in the future .
Think of diversity as giving us options .
And options , of course , are exactly what we need in an era of climate change .
I want to show you two slides , but first , I want to tell you that we 've been working at the Global Crop Diversity Trust with a number of scientists -- particularly at Stanford and University of Washington -- to ask the question : What 's going to happen to agriculture in an era of climate change and what kind of traits and characteristics do we need in our agricultural crops to be able to adapt to this ?
In short , the answer is that in the future , in many countries , the coldest growing seasons are going to be hotter than anything those crops have seen in the past .
The coldest growing seasons of the future , hotter than the hottest of the past .
Is agriculture adapted to that ?
I don 't know . Can fish play the piano ?
If agriculture hasn 't experienced that , how could it be adapted ?
Now , the highest concentration of poor and hungry people in the world , and the place where climate change , ironically , is going to be the worst is in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa .
So I 've picked two examples here , and I want to show you .
In the histogram before you now , the blue bars represent the historical range of temperatures , going back about far as we have temperature data .
And you can see that there 's some difference between one growing season and another .
Some are colder , some are hotter and it 's a bell shaped curve .
The tallest bar is the average temperature for the most number of growing seasons .
In the future , later this century , it 's going to look like the red , totally out of bounds .
The agricultural system and , more importantly , the crops in the field in India have never experienced this before .
Here 's South Africa . The same story .
But the most interesting thing about South Africa is we don 't have to wait for 2070 for there to be trouble .
By 2030 , if the maize , or corn , varieties , which is the dominant crop -- 50 percent of the nutrition in Southern Africa are still in the field -- in 2030 , we 'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030 .
30 percent decrease of production in the context of increasing population , that 's a food crisis . It 's global in nature .
We will watch children starve to death on TV .
Now , you may say that 20 years is a long way off .
It 's two breeding cycles for maize .
We have two rolls of the dice to get this right .
We have to get climate-ready crops in the field , and we have to do that rather quickly .
Now , the good news is that we have conserved .
We have collected and conserved a great deal of biological diversity , agricultural diversity , mostly in the form of seed , and we put it in seed banks , which is a fancy way of saying a freezer .
If you want to conserve seed for a long term and you want to make it available to plant breeders and researchers , you dry it and then you freeze it .
Unfortunately , these seed banks are located around the world in buildings and they 're vulnerable .
Disasters have happened . In recent years we lost the gene bank , the seed bank in Iraq and Afghanistan . You can guess why .
In Rwanda , in the Solomon Islands .
And then there are just daily disasters that take place in these buildings , financial problems and mismanagement and equipment failures , and all kinds of things , and every time something like this happens , it means extinction . We lose diversity .
And I 'm not talking about losing diversity in the same way that you lose your car keys .
I 'm talking about losing it in the same way that we lost the dinosaurs : actually losing it , never to be seen again .
So , a number of us got together and decided that , you know , enough is enough and we need to do something about that and we need to have a facility that can really offer protection for our biological diversity of -- maybe not the most charismatic diversity .
You don 't look in the eyes of a carrot seed quite in the way you do a panda bear , but it 's very important diversity .
So we needed a really safe place , and we went quite far north to find it .
To Svalbard , in fact .
This is above mainland Norway . You can see Greenland there .
That 's at 78 degrees north .
It 's as far as you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane .
It 's a remarkably beautiful landscape . I can 't even begin to describe it to you .
It 's otherworldly , beautiful .
We worked with the Norwegian government and with the NorGen , the Norwegian Genetic Resources Program , to design this facility .
What you see is an artist 's conception of this facility , which is built in a mountain in Svalbard .
The idea of Svalbard was that it 's cold , so we get natural freezing temperatures .
But it 's remote . It 's remote and accessible so it 's safe and we don 't depend on mechanical refrigeration .
This is more than just an artist 's dream , it 's now a reality .
And this next picture shows it in context , in Svalbard .
And here 's the front door of this facility .
When you open up the front door , this is what you 're looking at . It 's pretty simple . It 's a hole in the ground .
It 's a tunnel , and you go into the tunnel , chiseled in solid rock , about 130 meters .
There are now a couple of security doors , so you won 't see it quite like this .
Again , when you get to the back , you get into an area that 's really my favorite place .
I think of it as sort of a cathedral .
And I know that this tags me as a bit of a nerd , but ...
Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent ...
in this place there .
If you were to walk into one of these rooms , you would see this .
It 's not very exciting , but if you know what 's there , it 's pretty emotional .
We have now about 425,000 samples of unique crop varieties .
There 's 70,000 samples of different varieties of rice in this facility right now .
About a year from now , we 'll have over half a million samples .
We 're going up to over a million , and someday we 'll basically have samples -- about 500 seeds -- of every variety of agricultural crop that can be stored in a frozen state in this facility .
This is a backup system for world agriculture .
It 's a backup system for all the seed banks . Storage is free .
It operates like a safety deposit box .
Norway owns the mountain and the facility , but the depositors own the seed .
And if anything happens , then they can come back and get it .
This particular picture that you see shows the national collection of the United States , of Canada , and an international institution from Syria .
I think it 's interesting in that this facility , I think , is almost the only thing I can think of these days where countries , literally , every country in the world -- because we have seeds from every country in the world -- all the countries of the world have gotten together to do something that 's both long term , sustainable and positive .
I can 't think of anything else that 's happened in my lifetime that way .
I can 't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a solution for climate change , for the water crisis .
Agriculture takes 70 percent of fresh water supplies on earth .
I can 't look you in the eyes and tell you that there is such a solution for those things , or the energy crisis , or world hunger , or peace in conflict .
I can 't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a simple solution for that , but I can look you in the eyes and tell you that we can 't solve any of those problems if we don 't have crop diversity .
Because I challenge you to think of an effective , efficient , sustainable solution to climate change if we don 't have crop diversity .
Because , quite literally , if agriculture doesn 't adapt to climate change , neither will we .
And if crops don 't adapt to climate change , neither will agriculture , neither will we .
So , this is not something pretty and nice to do .
There are a lot of people who would love to have this diversity exist just for the existence value of it .
It is , I agree , a nice thing to do .
But it 's a necessary thing to do .
So , in a very real sense , I believe that we , as an international community , should get organized to complete the task .
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a wonderful gift that Norway and others have given us , but it 's not the complete answer .
We need to collect the remaining diversity that 's out there .
We need to put it into good seed banks that can offer those seeds to researchers in the future .
We need to catalog it . It 's a library of life , but right now I would say we don 't have a card catalog for it .
And we need to support it financially .
My big idea would be that while we think of it as commonplace to endow an art museum or endow a chair at a university , we really ought to be thinking about endowing wheat .
30 million dollars in an endowment would take care of preserving all the diversity in wheat forever .
So we need to be thinking a little bit in those terms .
And my final thought is that we , of course , by conserving wheat , rice , potatoes , and the other crops , we may , quite simply , end up saving ourselves .
Thank you .
Amos Winter : The cheap all-terrain wheelchair
How do you build a wheelchair ready to blaze through mud and sand , all for under $ 200 ? MIT engineer Amos Winter guides us through the mechanics of an all-terrain wheelchair that 's cheap and easy to build -- for true accessibility -- and gives us some lessons he learned along the road .
Living with a physical disability isn 't easy anywhere in the world , but if you live in a country like the United States , there 's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier .
So if you 're in a building , you can take an elevator .
If you 're crossing the street , you have sidewalk cutouts .
And if you have to travel some distance farther than you can do under your own power , there 's accessible vehicles , and if you can 't afford one of those , there 's accessible public transportation .
But in the developing world , things are quite different .
There 's 40 million people who need a wheelchair but don 't have one , and the majority of these people live in rural areas , where the only connections to community , to employment , to education , are by traveling long distances on rough terrain often under their own power .
And the devices usually available to these people are not made for that context , break down quickly , and are hard to repair .
I started looking at wheelchairs in developing countries in 2005 , when I spent the summer assessing the state of technology in Tanzania , and I talked to wheelchair users , wheelchair manufacturers , disability groups , and what stood out to me is that there wasn 't a device available that was designed for rural areas , that could go fast and efficiently on many types of terrain .
So being a mechanical engineer , being at MIT and having lots of resources available to me , I thought I 'd try to do something about it .
Now when you 're talking about trying to travel long distances on rough terrain , I immediately thought of a mountain bike , and a mountain bike 's good at doing this because it has a gear train , and you can shift to a low gear if you have to climb a hill or go through mud or sand and you get a lot of torque but a low speed .
And if you want to go faster , say on pavement , you can shift to a high gear , and you get less torque , but higher speeds .
So the logical evolution here is to just make a wheelchair with mountain bike components , which many people have done .
But these are two products available in the U.S. that would be difficult to transfer into developing countries because they 're much , much too expensive .
And the context I 'm talking about is where you need to have a product that is less than 200 dollars .
And this ideal product would also be able to go about five kilometers a day so you could get to your job , get to school , and do it on many , many different types of terrain .
But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work , it 's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside .
And furthermore , if you want it to last a long time out in rural areas , it has to be repairable using the local tools , materials and knowledge in those contexts .
So the real crux of the problem here is , how do you make a system that 's a simple device but gives you a large mechanical advantage ?
How do you make a mountain bike for your arms that doesn 't have the mountain bike cost and complexity ?
So as is the case with simple solutions , oftentimes the answer is right in front of your face , and for us it was levers .
We use levers all the time , in tools , doorknobs , bicycle parts .
And that moment of inspiration , that key invention moment , was when I was sitting in front of my design notebook and I started thinking about somebody grabbing a lever , and if they grab near the end of the lever , they can get an effectively long lever and produce a lot of torque as they push back and forth , and effectively get a low gear .
And as they slide their hand down the lever , they can push with a smaller effective lever length , but push through a bigger angle every stroke , which makes a faster rotational speed , and gives you an effective high gear .
So what 's exciting about this system is that it 's really , really mechanically simple , and you could make it using technology that 's been around for hundreds of years .
So seeing this in practice , this is the Leveraged Freedom Chair that , after a few years of development , we 're now going into production with , and this is a full-time wheelchair user -- he 's paralyzed -- in Guatemala , and you see he 's able to traverse pretty rough terrain .
Again , the key innovation of this technology is that when he wants to go fast , he just grabs the levers near the pivots and goes through a big angle every stroke , and as the going gets tougher , he just slides his hands up the levers , creates more torque , and kind of bench-presses his way out of trouble through the rough terrain .
Now the big , important point here is that the person is the complex machine in this system .
It 's the person that 's sliding his hands up and down the levers , so the mechanism itself can be very simple and composed of bicycle parts you can get anywhere in the world .
Because those bicycle parts are so ubiquitously available , they 're super-cheap .
They 're made by the gazillions in China and India , and we can source them anywhere in the world , build the chair anywhere , and most importantly repair it , even out in a village with a local bicycle mechanic who has local tools , knowledge and parts available .
Now , when you want to use the LFC indoors , all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain , stow them in the frame , and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair , and we sized it like a normal wheelchair , so it 's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway , it 's low enough to fit under a table , and it 's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet , and be able to transfer off just like he could in a normal wheelchair .
Now , there 's three important points that I want to stress that I think really hit home in this project .
The first is that this product works well because we were effectively able to combine rigorous engineering science and analysis with user-centered design focused on the social and usage and economic factors important to wheelchair users in the developing countries .
So I 'm an academic at MIT , and I 'm a mechanical engineer , so I can do things like look at the type of terrain you want to travel on , and figure out how much resistance it should impose , look at the parts we have available and mix and match them to figure out what sort of gear trains we can use , and then look at the power and force you can get out of your upper body to analyze how fast you should be able to go in this chair as you put your arms up and down the levers .
So as a wet-behind-the-ears student , excited , our team made a prototype , brought that prototype to Tanzania , Kenya and Vietnam in 2008 , and found it was terrible because we didn 't get enough input from users .
So because we tested it with wheelchair users , with wheelchair manufacturers , we got that feedback from them , not just articulating their problems , but articulating their solutions , and worked together to go back to the drawing board and make a new design , which we brought back to East Africa in ' 09 that worked a lot better than a normal wheelchair on rough terrain , but it still didn 't work well indoors because it was too big , it was heavy , it was hard to move around , so again with that user feedback , we went back to the drawing board , came up with a better design , 20 pounds lighter , as narrow as a regular wheelchair , tested that in a field trial in Guatemala , and that advanced the product to the point where we have now that it 's going into production .
Now also being engineering scientists , we were able to quantify the performance benefits of the Leveraged Freedom Chair , so here are some shots of our trial in Guatemala where we tested the LFC on village terrain , and tested people 's biomechanical outputs , their oxygen consumption , how fast they go , how much power they 're putting out , both in their regular wheelchairs and using the LFC , and we found that the LFC is about 80 percent faster going on these terrains than a normal wheelchair .
It 's also about 40 percent more efficient than a regular wheelchair , and because of the mechanical advantage you get from the levers , you can produce 50 percent higher torque and really muscle your way through the really , really rough terrain .
Now the second lesson that we learned in this is that the constraints on this design really push the innovation , because we had to hit such a low price point , because we had to make a device that could travel on many , many types of terrain but still be usable indoors , and be simple enough to repair , we ended up with a fundamentally new product , a new product that is an innovation in a space that really hasn 't changed in a hundred years .
And these are all merits that are not just good in the developing world .
Why not in countries like the U.S. too ?
So we teamed up with Continuum , a local product design firm here in Boston to make the high-end version , the developed world version , that we 'll probably sell primarily in the U.S. and Europe , but to higher-income buyers .
And the final point I want to make is that I think this project worked well because we engaged all the stakeholders that buy into this project and are important to consider in bringing the technology from inception of an idea through innovation , validation , commercialization and dissemination , and that cycle has to start and end with end users .
These are the people that define the requirements of the technology , and these are the people that have to give the thumbs-up at the end , and say , " Yeah , it actually works . It meets our needs . "
So people like me in the academic space , we can do things like innovate and analyze and test , create data and make bench-level prototypes , but how do you get that bench-level prototype to commercialization ?
So we need gap-fillers like Continuum that can work on commercializing , and we started a whole NGO to bring our chair to market -- Global Research Innovation Technology -- and then we also teamed up with a big manufacturer in India , Pinnacle Industries , that 's tooled up now to make 500 chairs a month and will make the first batch of 200 next month , which will be delivered in India .
And then finally , to get this out to the people in scale , we teamed up with the largest disability organization in the world , Jaipur Foot .
Now what 's powerful about this model is when you bring together all these stakeholders that represent each link in the chain from inception of an idea all the way to implementation in the field , that 's where the magic happens .
That 's where you can take a guy like me , an academic , but analyze and test and create a new technology and quantitatively determine how much better the performance is .
You can connect with stakeholders like the manufacturers and talk with them face-to-face and leverage their local knowledge of manufacturing practices and their clients and combine that knowledge with our engineering knowledge to create something greater than either of us could have done alone .
And then you can also engage the end user in the design process , and not just ask him what he needs , but ask him how he thinks it can be achieved .
And this picture was taken in India in our last field trial , where we had a 90-percent adoption rate where people switched to using our Leveraged Freedom Chair over their normal wheelchair , and this picture specifically is of Ashok , and Ashok had a spinal injury when he fell out of a tree , and he had been working at a tailor , but once he was injured he wasn 't able to transport himself from his house over a kilometer to his shop in his normal wheelchair .
The road was too rough .
But the day after he got an LFC , he hopped in it , rode that kilometer , opened up his shop and soon after landed a contract to make school uniforms and started making money , started providing for his family again .
Ashok : You also encouraged me to work .
I rested for a day at home .
The next day I went to my shop .
Now everything is back to normal .
Amos Winter : And thank you very much for having me today .
Stephen Friend : The hunt for " unexpected genetic heroes "
What can we learn from people with the genetics to get sick — who don 't ? With most inherited diseases , only some family members will develop the disease , while others who carry the same genetic risks dodge it . Stephen Friend suggests we start studying those family members who stay healthy . Hear about the Resilience Project , a massive effort to collect genetic materials that may help decode inherited disorders .
Approximately 30 years ago , when I was in oncology at the Children 's Hospital in Philadelphia , a father and a son walked into my office and they both had their right eye missing , and as I took the history , it became apparent that the father and the son had a rare form of inherited eye tumor , retinoblastoma , and the father knew that he had passed that fate on to his son .
That moment changed my life .
It propelled me to go on and to co-lead a team that discovered the first cancer susceptibility gene , and in the intervening decades since then , there has been literally a seismic shift in our understanding of what goes on , what genetic variations are sitting behind various diseases .
In fact , for thousands of human traits , a molecular basis that 's known for that , and for thousands of people , every day , there 's information that they gain about the risk of going on to get this disease or that disease .
At the same time , if you ask , " Has that impacted the efficiency , how we 've been able to develop drugs ? "
the answer is not really .
If you look at the cost of developing drugs , how that 's done , it basically hasn 't budged that .
And so it 's as if we have the power to diagnose yet not the power to fully treat .
And there are two commonly given reasons for why that happens .
One of them is it 's early days .
We 're just learning the words , the fragments , the letters in the genetic code .
We don 't know how to read the sentences .
We don 't know how to follow the narrative .
The other reason given is that most of those changes are a loss of function , and it 's actually really hard to develop drugs that restore function .
But today , I want us to step back and ask a more fundamental question , and ask , " What happens if we 're thinking about this maybe in the wrong context ? "
We do a lot of studying of those who are sick and building up long lists of altered components .
But maybe , if what we 're trying to do is to develop therapies for prevention , maybe what we should be doing is studying those who don 't get sick .
Maybe we should be studying those that are well .
A vast majority of those people are not necessarily carrying a particular genetic load or risk factor .
They 're not going to help us .
There are going to be those individuals who are carrying a potential future risk , they 're going to go on to get some symptom .
That 's not what we 're looking for .
What we 're asking and looking for is , are there a very few set of individuals who are actually walking around with the risk that normally would cause a disease , but something in them , something hidden in them is actually protective and keeping them from exhibiting those symptoms ?
If you 're going to do a study like that , you can imagine you 'd like to look at lots and lots of people .
We 'd have to go and have a pretty wide study , and we realized that actually one way to think of this is , let us look at adults who are over 40 years of age , and let 's make sure that we look at those who were healthy as kids .
They might have had individuals in their families who had had a childhood disease , but not necessarily .
And let 's go and then screen those to find those who are carrying genes for childhood diseases .
Now , some of you , I can see you putting your hands up going , " Uh , a little odd .
What 's your evidence that this could be feasible ? "
I want to give you two examples .
The first comes from San Francisco .
It comes from the 1980s and the 1990s , and you may know the story where there were individuals who had very high levels of the virus HIV .
They went on to get AIDS .
But there was a very small set of individuals who also had very high levels of HIV .
They didn 't get AIDS .
And astute clinicians tracked that down , and what they found was they were carrying mutations .
Notice , they were carrying mutations from birth that were protective , that were protecting them from going on to get AIDS .
You may also know that actually a line of therapy has been coming along based on that fact .
Second example , more recent , is elegant work done by Helen Hobbs , who said , " I 'm going to look at individuals who have very high lipid levels , and I 'm going to try to find those people with high lipid levels who don 't go on to get heart disease . "
And again , what she found was some of those individuals had mutations that were protective from birth that kept them , even though they had high lipid levels , and you can see this is an interesting way of thinking about how you could develop preventive therapies .
The project that we 're working on is called " The Resilience Project : A Search for Unexpected Heroes , " because what we are interested in doing is saying , can we find those rare individuals who might have these hidden protective factors ?
And in some ways , think of it as a decoder ring , a sort of resilience decoder ring that we 're going to try to build .
We 've realized that we should do this in a systematic way , so we 've said , let 's take every single childhood inherited disease .
Let 's take them all , and let 's pull them back a little bit by those that are known to have severe symptoms , where the parents , the child , those around them would know that they 'd gotten sick , and let 's go ahead and then frame them again by those parts of the genes where we know that there is a particular alteration that is known to be highly penetrant to cause that disease .
Where are we going to look ?
Well , we could look locally . That makes sense .
But we began to think , maybe we should look all over the world .
Maybe we should look not just here but in remote places where their might be a distinct genetic context , there might be environmental factors that protect people .
And let 's look at a million individuals .
Now the reason why we think it 's a good time to do that now is , in the last couple of years , there 's been a remarkable plummeting in the cost to do this type of analysis , this type of data generation , to where it actually costs less to do the data generation and analysis than it does to do the sample processing and the collection .
The other reason is that in the last five years , there have been awesome tools , things about network biology , systems biology , that have come up that allow us to think that maybe we could decipher those positive outliers .
And as we went around talking to researchers and institutions and telling them about our story , something happened .
They started saying , " This is interesting .
I would be glad to join your effort .
I would be willing to participate . "
And they didn 't say , " Where 's the MTA ? "
They didn 't say , " Where is my authorship ? "
They didn 't say , " Is this data going to be mine ? Am I going to own it ? "
They basically said , " Let 's work on this in an open , crowd-sourced , team way to do this decoding . "
Six months ago , we locked down the screening key for this decoder .
My co-lead , a brilliant scientist , Eric Schadt at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York , and his team , locked in that decoder key ring , and we began looking for samples , because what we realized is , maybe we could just go and look at some existing samples to get some sense of feasibility .
Maybe we could take two , three percent of the project on , and see if it was there .
And so we started asking people such as Hakon at the Children 's Hospital in Philadelphia .
We asked Leif up in Finland .
We talked to Anne Wojcicki at 23andMe , and Wang Jun at BGI , and again , something remarkable happened .
They said , " Huh , not only do we have samples , but often we 've analyzed them , and we would be glad to go into our anonymized samples and see if we could find those that you 're looking for . "
And instead of being 20,000 or 30,000 , last month we passed one half million samples that we 've already analyzed .
So you must be going , " Huh , did you find any unexpected heroes ? "
And the answer is , we didn 't find one or two .
We found dozens of these strong candidate unexpected heroes .
So we think that the time is now to launch the beta phase of this project and actually start getting prospective individuals .
Basically all we need is information .
We need a swab of DNA and a willingness to say , " What 's inside me ?
I 'm willing to be re-contacted . "
Most of us spend our lives , when it comes to health and disease , acting as if we 're voyeurs .
We delegate the responsibility for the understanding of our disease , for the treatment of our disease , to anointed experts .
In order for us to get this project to work , we need individuals to step up in a different role and to be engaged , to realize this dream , this open crowd-sourced project , to find those unexpected heroes , to evolve from the current concepts of resources and constraints , to design those preventive therapies , and to extend it beyond childhood diseases , to go all the way up to ways that we could look at Alzheimer 's or Parkinson 's , we 're going to need us to be looking inside ourselves and asking , " What are our roles ?
What are our genes ? "
and looking within ourselves for information we used to say we should go to the outside , to experts , and to be willing to share that with others .
Thank you very much .
Lesley Hazleton : The doubt essential to faith
When Lesley Hazleton was writing a biography of Muhammad , she was struck by something : The night he received the revelation of the Koran , according to early accounts , his first reaction was doubt , awe , even fear . And yet this experience became the bedrock of his belief . Hazleton calls for a new appreciation of doubt and questioning as the foundation of faith -- and an end to fundamentalism of all kinds .
Writing biography is a strange thing to do .
It 's a journey into the foreign territory of somebody else 's life , a journey , an exploration that can take you places you never dreamed of going and still can 't quite believe you 've been , especially if , like me , you 're an agnostic Jew and the life you 've been exploring is that of Muhammad .
Five years ago , for instance , I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question : What actually happened one desert night , half the world and almost half of history away ?
What happened , that is , on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca ?
This is the core mystical moment of Islam , and as such , of course , it defies empirical analysis .
Yet the question wouldn 't let go of me .
I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am , just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah .
And I plead guilty as charged , because all exploration , physical or intellectual , is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression , of crossing boundaries .
Still , some boundaries are larger than others .
So a human encountering the divine , as Muslims believe Muhammad did , to the rationalist , this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction , and like all of us , I like to think of myself as rational .
Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night , what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen .
Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air .
He did not run down shouting , " Hallelujah ! "
and " Bless the Lord ! "
He did not radiate light and joy .
There were no choirs of angels , no music of the spheres , no elation , no ecstasy , no golden aura surrounding him , no sense of an absolute , fore-ordained role as the messenger of God .
That is , he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul , to put down the whole story as a pious fable .
Quite the contrary .
In his own reported words , he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn 't have been real .
At best , he thought , it had to have been a hallucination -- a trick of the eye or the ear , perhaps , or his own mind working against him .
At worst , possession -- that he 'd been seized by an evil jinn , a spirit out to deceive him , even to crush the life out of him .
In fact , he was so sure that he could only be majnun , possessed by a jinn , that when he found himself still alive , his first impulse was to finish the job himself , to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he 'd experienced by putting an end to all experience .
So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark , primordial fear .
He was overwhelmed not with conviction , but by doubt .
And that panicked disorientation , that sundering of everything familiar , that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension , can only be called a terrible awe .
This might be somewhat difficult to grasp now that we use the word " awesome " to describe a new app or a viral video .
With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake , we 're protected from real awe .
We close the doors and hunker down , convinced that we 're in control , or , at least , hoping for control .
We do our best to ignore the fact that we don 't always have it , and that not everything can be explained .
Yet whether you 're a rationalist or a mystic , whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside , what 's clear is that he did experience them , and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice .
Fear was the only sane response , the only human response .
Too human for some , like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn 't even be mentioned , despite the fact that it 's in the earliest Islamic biographies .
They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment , let alone despaired .
Demanding perfection , they refuse to tolerate human imperfection .
Yet what , exactly , is imperfect about doubt ?
As I read those early accounts , I realized it was precisely Muhammad 's doubt that brought him alive for me , that allowed me to begin to see him in full , to accord him the integrity of reality .
And the more I thought about it , the more it made sense that he doubted , because doubt is essential to faith .
If this seems a startling idea at first , consider that doubt , as Graham Greene once put it , is the heart of the matter .
Abolish all doubt , and what 's left is not faith , but absolute , heartless conviction .
You 're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness , by which I mean a demonstrative , overweening pride in being so very right , in short , the arrogance of fundamentalism .
It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders : " infidel , " from the Latin for " faithless . "
Doubly ironic , in this case , because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith .
In effect , they are the infidels .
Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes , they have no questions , only answers .
They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith .
They don 't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel , or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness , or like Muhammad , not only that night on the mountain , but throughout his years as a prophet , with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair , and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right .
And yet we , the vast and still far too silent majority , have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority .
We 've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers , Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots , Islam by suicide bombers .
And we 've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians , Jews or Muslims , militant extremists are none of the above .
They 're a cult all their own , blood brothers steeped in other people 's blood .
This isn 't faith .
It 's fanaticism , and we have to stop confusing the two .
We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers .
It 's difficult and stubborn .
It involves an ongoing struggle , a continual questioning of what we think we know , a wrestling with issues and ideas .
It goes hand in hand with doubt , in a never-ending conversation with it , and sometimes in conscious defiance of it .
And this conscious defiance is why I , as an agnostic , can still have faith .
I have faith , for instance , that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary .
I 'm not convinced of this .
I can hardly say I believe it .
I can only have faith in it , commit myself , that is , to the idea of it , and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence .
Because despair is self-fulfilling .
If we call something impossible , we act in such a way that we make it so .
And I , for one , refuse to live that way .
In fact , most of us do , whether we 're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond , for that matter , what drives us is that , despite our doubts and even because of our doubts , we reject the nihilism of despair .
We insist on faith in the future and in each other .
Call this naive if you like .
Call it impossibly idealistic if you must .
But one thing is sure : Call it human .
Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith , without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty ?
I think not .
After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years , I can 't see that he 'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today .
He 'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender .
He 'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism .
He 'd call out terrorism for what it is , not only criminal but an obscene travesty of everything he believed in and struggled for .
He 'd say what the Koran says : Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity .
Anyone who saves a life , saves the life of all humanity .
And he 'd commit himself fully to the hard and thorny process of making peace .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Peter van Manen : How can Formula 1 racing help ... babies ?
During a Formula 1 race , a car sends hundreds of millions of data points to its garage for real-time analysis and feedback . So why not use this detailed and rigorous data system elsewhere , like ... at children 's hospitals ? Peter van Manen tells us more . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Motor racing is a funny old business .
We make a new car every year , and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we 've built to make it better , to make it faster .
And then the next year , we start again .
Now , the car you see in front of you is quite complicated .
The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components , the engine another 6,000 , the electronics about eight and a half thousand .
So there 's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong .
So motor racing is very much about attention to detail .
The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we 're always changing the car .
We 're always trying to make it faster .
So every two weeks , we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car .
Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year .
So how do we do that ?
Well , we start our life with the racing car .
We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things .
On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race .
It 's measuring all sorts of things around the car .
That data is logged . We 're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems , about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do , and we 're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second .
So during a two-hour race , each car will be sending 750 million numbers .
That 's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime .
It 's a huge amount of data .
But it 's not enough just to have data and measure it .
You need to be able to do something with it .
So we 've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell , what 's the state of the engine , how are the tires degrading , what 's the situation with fuel consumption ?
So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon .
Okay , so let 's have a look at a little bit of data .
Let 's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient .
This is a child , and what you 're seeing here is real data , and on the far right-hand side , where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic , that is the patient going into cardiac arrest .
It was deemed to be an unpredictable event .
This was a heart attack that no one could see coming .
But when we look at the information there , we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest .
We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving .
These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data .
So the question is , why couldn 't we see it ?
Was this a predictable event ?
Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better ?
So this is a child , about the same age as the racing car on stage , three months old .
It 's a patient with a heart problem .
Now , when you look at some of the data on the screen above , things like heart rate , pulse , oxygen , respiration rates , they 're all unusual for a normal child , but they 're quite normal for the child there , and so one of the challenges you have in health care is , how can I look at the patient in front of me , have something which is specific for her , and be able to detect when things start to change , when things start to deteriorate ?
Because like a racing car , any patient , when things start to go bad , you have a short time to make a difference .
So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children 's Hospital .
We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and , more importantly , to store the data so that we could start to learn from it .
And then , we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening , so we could determine when things started to change .
Now , in motor racing , we 're all a little bit ambitious , audacious , a little bit arrogant sometimes , so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care .
Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look ?
And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital , just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care .
And then we started looking at the data .
So the wiggly lines at the top , all the colors , this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor -- heart rate , pulse , oxygen within the blood , and respiration .
The lines on the bottom , the blue and the red , these are the interesting ones .
The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children 's Hospital were already running .
They 'd been running that since 2008 , and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital .
The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change , and immediately , before we even started putting in clinical interpretation , we can see that the data is speaking to us .
It 's telling us that something is going wrong .
The plot with the red and the green blobs , this is plotting different components of the data against each other .
The green is us learning what is normal for that child .
We call it the cloud of normality .
And when things start to change , when conditions start to deteriorate , we move into the red line .
There 's no rocket science here .
It is displaying data that exists already in a different way , to amplify it , to provide cues to the doctors , to the nurses , so they can see what 's happening .
In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes , when to turn into a corner , we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong .
So we have a very ambitious program .
We think that the race is on to do something differently .
We are thinking big . It 's the right thing to do .
We have an approach which , if it 's successful , there 's no reason why it should stay within a hospital .
It can go beyond the walls .
With wireless connectivity these days , there is no reason why patients , doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time .
And meanwhile , we 'll take our little three-month-old baby , keep taking it to the track , keeping it safe , and making it faster and better .
Thank you very much .
James Randi : Homeopathy , quackery and fraud
Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage , kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs . He throws out a challenge to the world 's psychics : Prove what you do is real , and I 'll give you a million dollars .
Good morning .
Happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces .
I have a very peculiar background , attitude and approach to the real world because I am a conjurer .
Now , I prefer that term over magician , because if I were a magician , that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic .
No , I don 't do that ; I 'm a conjurer , who is someone who pretends to be a real magician .
Now , how do we go about that sort of thing ?
We depend on the fact that audiences , such as yourselves , will make assumptions .
For example , when I walked up here and I took the microphone from the stand and switched it on , you assumed this was a microphone , which it is not .
As a matter of fact , this is something that about half of you , more than half of you will not be familiar with .
It 's a beard trimmer , you see ?
And it makes a very bad microphone ; I 've tried it many times .
The other assumption that you made -- and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions .
Not only that you can , but that you will when they are properly suggested to you .
You believe I 'm looking at you .
Wrong . I 'm not looking at you . I can 't see you .
I know you 're out there , they told me backstage , it 's a full house and such .
I know you 're there because I can hear you , but I can 't see you because I normally wear glasses .
These are not glasses , these are empty frames .
Quite empty frames .
Now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face ?
To fool you , ladies and gentlemen , to deceive you , to show that you , too , can make assumptions .
Don 't you ever forget that .
Now , I have to do something -- first of all , switch to real glasses so I can actually see you , which would probably be a convenience . I don 't know .
I haven 't had a good look . Well , it 's not that great a convenience .
I have to do something now , which seems a little bit strange for a magician .
But I 'm going to take some medication .
This is a full bottle of Calms Forte .
I 'll explain that in just a moment .
Ignore the instructions , that 's what the government has to put in there to confuse you , I 'm sure .
I will take enough of these . Mm .
Indeed , the whole container .
Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte .
Now that I 've done that -- I 'll explain it in a moment -- I must tell you that I am an actor .
I 'm an actor who plays a specific part .
I play the part of a magician , a wizard , if you will , a real wizard .
If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet , you would be insulted and rightly so .
Why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this ?
But there exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic , magical powers that they can predict the future , that they can make contact with the deceased .
Oh , they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods .
Oh , they gladly sell you that , yes .
And they also say that they can give you perpetual motion machines and free energy systems .
They claim to be psychics , or sensitives , whatever they can .
But the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead .
Now , to my innocent mind , dead implies incapable of communicating .
You might agree with me on that .
But these people , they tend to tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead -- " Hi , there " -- but they can hear the dead as well , and they can relay this information back to the living .
I wonder if that 's true .
I don 't think so , because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do , exactly the same -- the same physical methods , the same psychological methods -- and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth , to their detriment .
They deceive these people , costs them a lot of money , cost them a lot of emotional anguish .
Billions of dollars are spent every year , all over the globe , on these charlatans .
Now , I have two questions I would like to ask these people if I had the opportunity to do so .
First question : If I want to ask them to call up -- because they do hear them through the ear .
They listen to the spirits like this -- I 'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because , when she died , she had the family will , and she secreted it someplace . We don 't know where it is , so we ask Granny , " Where is the will , Granny ? "
What does Granny say ? She says , " I 'm in heaven and it 's wonderful .
I 'm here with all my old friends , my deceased friends , and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl .
And I love you , and I 'll always be with you .
Good bye . "
And she didn 't answer the damn question !
Where is the will ?
Now , she could easily have said , " Oh , it 's in the library on the second shelf , behind the encyclopedia , " but she doesn 't say that . No , she doesn 't .
She doesn 't bring any useful information to us .
We paid a lot of money for that information , be we didn 't get it .
The second question that I 'd like to ask , rather simple : Suppose I ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law , as an example .
Why do they insist on saying -- remember , they speak into this ear -- why do they say , " My name starts with J or M ? "
Is this a hunting game ?
Hunting and fishing ? What is it ?
Is it 20 questions ? No , it 's more like 120 questions .
But it is a cruel , vicious , absolutely conscienceless -- I 'll be all right , keep your seats -- game that these people play .
And they take advantage of the innocent , the naive , the grieving , the needy people out there .
Now , this is a process that is called cold reading .
There 's one fellow out there , Van Praagh is his name , James Van Praagh .
He 's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing .
John Edward , Sylvia Browne and Rosemary Altea , they are other operators .
There are hundreds of them all over the earth , but in this country , James Van Praagh is very big .
And what does he do ? He likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased , the people he 's talking to through his ear , you see ?
So what he says is , very often , is like this : he says , " He tells me , he tells me , before he passed , that he had trouble breathing . "
Folks , that 's what dying is all about !
You stop breathing , and then you 're dead .
It 's that simple .
And that 's the kind of information they 're going to bring back to you ?
I don 't think so .
Now , these people will make guesses , they 'll say things like , " Why am I getting electricity ?
He 's saying to me , ' Electricity . ' Was he an electrician ? " " No . "
" Did he ever have an electric razor ? " " No . "
It was a game of hunting questions like this .
This is what they go through .
Now , folks often ask us at the James Randi Educational Foundation , they call me , they say , " Why are you so concerned about this , Mr. Randi ?
Isn 't it just a lot of fun ? "
No , it is not fun . It is a cruel farce .
Now , it may bring a certain amount of comfort , but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so .
And then the people look in the mirror , and they say , I just paid a lot of money for that reading .
And what did she say to me ? ' I love you ! ' " They always say that .
They don 't get any information , they don 't get any value for what they spend .
Now , Sylvia Browne is the big operator .
We call her " The Talons . "
Sylvia Browne -- thank you -- Sylvia Browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment .
Now , Sylvia Browne -- just to show you -- she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone , she doesn 't even go there in person , and you have to wait up to two years because she 's booked ahead that amount of time .
You pay by credit card or whatever , and then she will call you sometime in the next two years .
You can tell it 's her . " Hello , this is Sylvia Browne . "
That 's her , you can tell right away .
Now , Montel Williams is an intelligent man .
We all know who he is on television .
He 's well educated , he 's smart , he knows what Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn 't give a damn .
He just doesn 't care .
Because , the bottom line is , the sponsors love it , and he will expose her to television publicity all the time .
Now , what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars ?
She gives you the names of your guardian angels , that 's first .
Now , without that , how could we possibly function ?
She gives you the names of previous lives , who you were in previous lives .
Duh .
It turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all Babylonian princesses , or something like that .
And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting with Agamemnon .
Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of London who died of consumption .
He isn 't worth bringing back , obviously .
And the strange thing -- folks , you may have noticed this too .
You see these folks on television -- they never call anybody back from hell .
Everyone comes back from heaven , but never from hell .
If they call back any of my friends , they 're not going to ... Well , you see the story .
Now , Sylvia Browne is an exception , an exception in one way , because the James Randi Educational Foundation , my foundation , offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds .
Very simply won .
All you have to do is prove any paranormal , occult under proper observing conditions .
It 's very easy , win the million dollars .
Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she 's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge .
She did this on the " Larry King Live " show on CNN six and a half years ago .
And we haven 't heard from her since . Strange .
She said that , first of all , that she didn 't know how to contact me .
Duh .
A professional psychic who speaks to dead people , she can 't reach me ?
I 'm alive , you may have noticed .
Well , pretty well anyway .
She couldn 't reach me . Now she says she doesn 't want to reach me because I 'm a godless person .
All the more reason to take the million dollars , wouldn 't you think , Sylvia ?
Now these people need to be stopped , seriously now .
They need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce .
We get people coming to the foundation all the time .
They 're ruined financially and emotionally because they 've given their money and their faith to these people .
Now , I popped some pills earlier .
I have to explain that to you .
Homeopathy , let 's find out what that 's all about .
Hmm . You 've heard of it .
It 's an alternative form of healing , right ?
Homeopathy actually consists -- and that 's what this is .
This is Calms Forte , 32 caplets of sleeping pills ! I forgot to tell you that .
I just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills .
Six and a half days , that certainly is a fatal dose .
It says right on the back here , " In case of overdose , contact your poison control center immediately , " and it gives an 800 number .
Keep your seats -- it 's going to be okay .
I don 't really need it because I 've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years , taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills .
Why don 't they affect me ?
The answer may surprise you .
What is homeopathy ?
It 's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond Avogadro 's limit .
Diluting it down to the point where there 's none of it left .
Now folks , this is not just a metaphor I 'm going to give you now , it 's true .
It 's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet , throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe , and then stirring it up , obviously with a very big stick , and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous .
Then , when you get a headache , you take a sip of this water , and -- voila ! -- it is gone .
Now that is true . That is what homeopathy is all about .
And another claim that they make -- you 'll love this one -- the more dilute the medicine is , they say , the more powerful it is .
Now wait a minute , we heard about a guy in Florida .
The poor man , he was on homeopathic medicine .
He died of an overdose .
He forgot to take his pill .
Work on it . Work on it .
It 's a ridiculous thing . It is absolutely ridiculous .
I don 't know what we 're doing , believing in all this nonsense over all these years .
Now , let me tell you , The James Randi Educational Foundation is waving this very big carrot , but I must say , the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer doesn 't mean that the powers don 't exist .
They might , some place out there .
Maybe these people are just independently wealthy .
Well , with Sylvia Browne I would think so .
You know , 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone -- that 's more than lawyers make !
I mean that 's a fabulous amount of money .
These people don 't need the million dollars perhaps , but wouldn 't you think they 'd like to take it just to make me look silly ?
Just to get rid of this godless person out there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time ?
I think that something needs to be done about this .
We really would love to have suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal , state and local authorities to get them to do something .
If you find out -- now I understand .
We 've seen people , even today , speaking to us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with .
Those are very important , critically important to us .
And we must do something about those problems .
But at the same time , as Arthur C. Clarke said , The rotting of the human mind , the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural -- all of this total nonsense , this medieval thinking -- I think something should be done about that , and it all lies in education .
Largely , it 's the media who are to blame for this sort of thing .
They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this sort because it pleases the sponsors .
It 's the bottom line , the dollar line .
That 's what they 're looking at .
We really must do something about this .
I 'm willing to take your suggestions , and I 'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage .
It 's www.randi.org.
Go in there and look at the archives , and you will begin to understand much more of what I 've been talking about today .
You will see the records that we have .
There 's nothing like sitting in that library and having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune .
She cashed in the CDs , she gave away the stocks and the certificates .
That 's really sad to hear , and it hasn 't helped them one bit , hasn 't solved any of their problems .
Yes , there could be a rotting of the American mind , and of the minds all the way around the earth , if we don 't start to think sensibly about these things .
Now , we 've offered this carrot , as I say , we 've dangled the carrot .
We 're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it .
Oh , we get lots of them , hundreds of them every year come by .
These are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as well , but they 're amateurs ; they don 't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers .
The professionals never come near us , except in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you about a moment ago .
She did accept and then backed away .
Ladies and gentlemen , I 'm James Randi , and I 'm waiting .
Thank you .
Marc Koska : 1.3m reasons to re-invent the syringe
Reuse of syringes , all too common in under-funded clinics , kills 1.3 million each year . Marc Koska clues us in to this devastating global problem with facts , photos and hidden-camera footage . He shares his solution : a low-cost syringe that can 't be used twice .
Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS , the transmission of AIDS .
I thought this was unacceptable . So I decided to do something about it .
Sadly , it 's come true . Malaria , as we all know , kills approximately one million people a year .
The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year .
This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe .
And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out -- and don 't forget , their parents took them to the doctor -- the parents threw them out on the street .
And hence they ended up in an orphanage .
And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners , blindly giving an injection to someone .
And the injection is so valuable , that the people basically trust the doctor , being second to God , which I 've heard many times , to do the right thing . But in fact they 're not .
And you can understand , obviously , the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas .
This video we took undercover , which shows you , over a half an hour period , a tray of medicines of 42 vials , which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India .
And over the course of half an hour , not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped .
They started with two and they ended with two .
And you 'll see , just now , a nurse coming back to the tray , which is their sort of modular station , and dropping the syringe she 's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again .
So you can imagine the scale of this problem .
And in fact in India alone , 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe .
These kids in Pakistan don 't go to school .
They are lucky . They already have a job .
And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals , wash them , and in the course of this , obviously picking them up they injure themselves .
And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place , which is quite bizarre .
In an interesting photo , their father , while we were talking to him , picked up a syringe and pricked his finger -- I don 't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end -- and immediately whipped out a box of matches , lit one , and burned the blood off the end of his finger , giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV .
In China , recycling is a major issue .
And they are collected en mass -- you can see the scale of it here -- and sorted out , by hand , back into the right sizes , and then put back out on the street .
So recycling and reuse are the major issues here .
But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia .
In all schools in Indonesia , there is usually a toy seller in the playground .
The toy seller , in this case , had syringes , which they usually do , next door to the diggers , which is obviously what you would expect .
And they use them , in the breaks , for water pistols .
They squirt them at each other , which is lovely and innocent .
And they are having great fun .
But they also drink from them while they 're in their breaks , because it 's hot .
And they squirt the water into their mouths .
And these are used with traces of blood visible .
So we need a better product . And we need better information .
And I think , if I can just borrow this camera , I was going to show you my invention , which I came up with .
So , it 's a normal-looking syringe .
You load it up in the normal way . This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license .
You give the injection and then put it down .
If someone then tries to reuse it , it locks and breaks afterwards .
It 's very , very simple . Thank you .
And it costs the same as a normal syringe .
And in comparison , a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price .
And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times .
And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India .
And we 're very proud of giving information to people , so that little kids like this don 't do stupid things .
Thank you very much .
Deb Roy : The birth of a word
MIT researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son learned language -- so he wired up his house with videocameras to catch every moment of his son 's life , then parsed 90,000 hours of home video to watch " gaaaa " slowly turn into " water . " Astonishing , data-rich research with deep implications for how we learn .
Imagine if you could record your life -- everything you said , everything you did , available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips , so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them , or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered .
Well that 's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago .
This is my wife and collaborator , Rupal .
And on this day , at this moment , we walked into the house with our first child , our beautiful baby boy .
And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system .
Okay .
Deb Roy : This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house , if you looked up , you 'd see a camera and a microphone , and if you looked down , you 'd get this bird 's-eye view of the room .
Here 's our living room , the baby bedroom , kitchen , dining room and the rest of the house .
And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture .
So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and , finally , lights out for the day .
Over the course of three years , we recorded eight to 10 hours a day , amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video .
So you 're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made .
And what this data represents for our family at a personal level , the impact has already been immense , and we 're still learning its value .
Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments , not posed moments , are captured there , and we 're starting to learn how to discover them and find them .
But there 's also a scientific reason that drove this project , which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language -- that child being my son .
And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data , we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set , trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition .
So we 're looking here at one of the first things we started to do .
This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen , and as we move through space and through time , a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen .
In order to convert this opaque , 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see , we use motion analysis to pull out , as we move through space and through time , what we call space-time worms .
And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data , and with it , trace the pattern of , in particular , where my son moved throughout the home , so that we could focus our transcription efforts , all of the speech environment around my son -- all of the words that he heard from myself , my wife , our nanny , and over time , the words he began to produce .
So with that technology and that data and the ability to , with machine assistance , transcribe speech , we 've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts .
And with that , let me take you now for a first tour into the data .
So you 've all , I 'm sure , seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time .
I 'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form .
My son , soon after his first birthday , would say " gaga " to mean water .
And over the course of the next half-year , he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form , " water . "
So we 're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds .
No video here , so you can focus on the sound , the acoustics , of a new kind of trajectory : gaga to water .
Baby : Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water .
DR : He sure nailed it , didn 't he .
So he didn 't just learn water .
Over the course of the 24 months , the first two years that we really focused on , this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order .
And because we have full transcripts , we 've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday .
He was an early talker .
And so we started to analyze why .
Why were certain words born before others ?
This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us .
The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is , on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances .
And the [ horizontal ] axis is time .
And all of the data , we aligned based on the following idea : Every time my son would learn a word , we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word .
And we would plot the relative length of the utterances .
And what we found was this curious phenomena , that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum , making language as simple as possible , and then slowly ascend back up in complexity .
And the amazing thing was that bounce , that dip , lined up almost precisely with when each word was born -- word after word , systematically .
So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself , my wife and our nanny -- were systematically and , I would think , subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language .
And the implications of this -- there are many , but one I just want to point out , is that there must be amazing feedback loops .
Of course , my son is learning from his linguistic environment , but the environment is learning from him .
That environment , people , are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now .
But that 's looking at the speech context .
What about the visual context ?
We 're not looking at -- think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house .
We 've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras , and we 've done some optical correction , and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life .
So welcome to my home .
This is a moment , one moment captured across multiple cameras .
The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine , where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system .
What I 'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes , again , of just life in the living room .
That 's me and my son on the floor .
And there 's video analytics that are tracking our movements .
My son is leaving red ink . I am leaving green ink .
We 're now on the couch , looking out through the window at cars passing by .
And finally , my son playing in a walking toy by himself .
Now we freeze the action , 30 minutes , we turn time into the vertical axis , and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we 've just left behind .
And we see these amazing structures -- these little knots of two colors of thread we call " social hot spots . "
The spiral thread we call a " solo hot spot . "
And we think that these affect the way language is learned .
What we 'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they 're learned -- so in other words , the relationship between words and what they 're about in the world .
So here 's how we 're approaching this .
In this video , again , my son is being traced out .
He 's leaving red ink behind .
And there 's our nanny by the door .
Nanny : You want water ?
Nanny : All right .
DR : She offers water , and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water .
And what we 've done is use the word " water " to tag that moment , that bit of activity .
And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in , and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water .
And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape .
We call these wordscapes .
This is the wordscape for the word water , and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen .
That 's where those big peaks are over to the left .
And just for contrast , we can do this with any word .
We can take the word " bye " as in " good bye . "
And we 're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house .
And we look , and we find , as you would expect , a contrast in the landscape where the word " bye " occurs much more in a structured way .
So we 're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition , and that 's ongoing work now .
In my lab , which we 're peering into now , at MIT -- this is at the media lab .
This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space .
Three of the key people in this project , Philip DeCamp , Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here .
Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you 're seeing .
And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis , and he made the following observation : that " just the way that we 're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language , that same idea we can take out of your home , Deb , and we can apply it to the world of public media . "
And so our effort took an unexpected turn .
Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place .
We 've started analyzing television content using the same principles -- analyzing event structure of a TV signal -- episodes of shows , commercials , all of the components that make up the event structure .
And we 're now , with satellite dishes , pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States .
And you don 't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people 's conversations , you just tune into publicly available social media feeds .
So we 're pulling in about three billion comments a month , and then the magic happens .
You have the event structure , the common ground that the words are about , coming out of the television feeds ; you 've got the conversations that are about those topics ; and through semantic analysis -- and this is actually real data you 're looking at from our data processing -- each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal .
And the same idea now can be built up .
And we get this wordscape , except now words are not assembled in my living room .
Instead , the context , the common ground activities , are the content on television that 's driving the conversations .
And what we 're seeing here , these skyscrapers now , are commentary that are linked to content on television .
Same concept , but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere .
And so fundamentally , rather than , for example , measuring content based on how many people are watching , this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content .
And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family , we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people .
This is a subset of data from our database -- just 50,000 out of several million -- and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources .
And if you put them on one plain , a second plain is where the content lives .
So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials , and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph .
And then the important third dimension .
Each of the links that you 're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content .
And there are , again , now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content .
And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways .
So if we , for example , trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it , and then we follow where that comment goes , and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content , a very interesting structure becomes visible .
We call this a co-viewing clique , a virtual living room if you will .
And there are fascinating dynamics at play .
It 's not one way .
A piece of content , an event , causes someone to talk .
They talk to other people .
That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media , and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior .
Another example -- very different -- another actual person in our database -- and we 're finding at least hundreds , if not thousands , of these .
We 've given this person a name .
This is a pro-amateur , or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate .
So a lot of people are following this person -- very influential -- and they have a propensity to talk about what 's on TV .
So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together .
One last example from this data : Sometimes it 's actually a piece of content that is special .
So if we go and look at this piece of content , President Obama 's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago , and look at what we find in this same data set , at the same scale , the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable .
A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what 's on the broadcast .
And of course , through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language .
We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation , real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content .
So , to summarize , the idea is this : As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they 're saying it in , what 's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen .
It 's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication .
And I think the implications here are profound , whether it 's for science , for commerce , for government , or perhaps most of all , for us as individuals .
And so just to return to my son , when I was preparing this talk , he was looking over my shoulder , and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today , and I asked him for permission -- granted .
And then I went on to reflect , " Isn 't it amazing , this entire database , all these recordings , I 'm going to hand off to you and to your sister " -- who arrived two years later -- " and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never , with your biological memory , possibly remember the way you can now ? "
And he was quiet for a moment .
And I thought , " What am I thinking ?
He 's five years old . He 's not going to understand this . "
And just as I was having that thought , he looked up at me and said , " So that when I grow up , I can show this to my kids ? "
And I thought , " Wow , this is powerful stuff . "
So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family .
This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once -- captured on film .
And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through .
It 's a cluttered environment ; it 's natural life .
My mother 's in the kitchen , cooking , and , of all places , in the hallway , I realize he 's about to do it , about to take more than two steps .
And so you hear me encouraging him , realizing what 's happening , and then the magic happens .
Listen very carefully .
About three steps in , he realizes something magic is happening , and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in , and he takes a breath in , and he whispers " wow " and instinctively I echo back the same .
And so let 's fly back in time to that memorable moment .
DR : Hey .
Come here .
Can you do it ?
Oh , boy .
Can you do it ?
Baby : Yeah .
DR : Ma , he 's walking .
DR : Thank you .
Jill Sobule + Julia Sweeney : The Jill and Julia Show
Two TED favorites , Jill Sobule and Julia Sweeney , team up for a delightful set that mixes witty songwriting with a little bit of social commentary .
Jill Sobule : At a conference in Monterey by the big , big jellyfish tank , I first saw you and I got so shy . You see , I was a little paranoid ' cause I might have been high . And I hadn 't done that in ages and I won 't do that again . But that 's another story . Loved you forever and I 've been a big fan , the one-woman shows , I even rented " Pat . " I got enough nerve to come up to you , but little did I know one year later we 'd be doing this show . I sing . Julia Sweeney : I tell stories . Together : The Jill and Julia Show . Sobule : Sometimes it works . Sweeney : Sometimes it doesn 't . Together : The Jill and Julia Show . Sweeney : At a conference in Monterey next to the big , big jellyfish tank , I first saw you and I wasn 't so shy . I made a beeline for you and told you what a huge fan I was ever since I was writing that pilot for Fox , and Wendy and I wanted you to do the theme song .
And then the pilot didn 't go and I was so sad , but I kept remaining a fan of yours .
And then when I went through that big , horrible breakup with Carl and I couldn 't get off the couch , I listened to your song , " Now That I Don 't Have You , " over and over and over and over again .
And I can 't believe you 're here and that I 'm meeting you here at TED .
And also , I can 't believe that we 're eating sushi in front of the fish tank , which , personally , I think is really inappropriate .
And little did I know that one year later ... we 'd be doing this show . Sobule : I sing . Sweeney : I tell stories . Together : The Jill and Julia Show . Sobule : Hey , they asked us back ! Sweeney : Can you stand it ? !
Together : The Jill and Julia , the Jill and Julia , the Jill and Julia Show . Sobule : Why are all our heroes so imperfect ? Why do they always bring me down ? Why are all our heroes so imperfect ? Statue in the park has lost his crown . William Faulkner , drunk and depressed . Sweeney : Mmm .
Dorothy Parker , mean , drunk and depressed . Sweeney : I know .
And that guy , " Seven Years in Tibet , " turned out to be a Nazi . Sweeney : Yeah .
Founding fathers all had slaves . Sweeney : I know .
The explorers slaughtered the braves . Sweeney : Horribly .
Sobule : The Old Testament God can be so petty . Sweeney : Don 't get me started on that .
Sobule : Paul McCartney , jealous of John , even more so now that he 's gone . Dylan was so mean to Donovan in that movie . Pablo Picasso , cruel to his wives . Sweeney : Horrible .
Sobule : My favorite poets took their own lives . Orson Welles peaked at twenty-five , below before our eyes . And he sold bad wine . Together : Why are all our heroes so imperfect ? Yeah Why do they always bring me down ? Sobule : Heard Babe Ruth was full of malice . Sweeney : Oh .
Lewis Carroll I 'm sure did Alice . Sweeney : What ? !
Plato in the cave with those very young boys . Sweeney : Ooh ...
Sobule : Hillary supported the war . Sweeney : Even Thomas Friedman supported the war . Sobule : Colin Powell turned out to be ... Together : ... such a pussy . Sobule : William Faulkner , drunk and depressed , Tennessee Williams , drunk and depressed . Sweeney : Yeah .
Sobule : Take it , Julia . Sweeney : Okay . Oprah was never necessarily a big hero of mine .
I mean , I watch Oprah mostly when I 'm home in Spokane visiting my mother . And to my mother , Oprah is a greater moral authority than the Pope , which is actually saying something because she 's a devout Catholic .
Anyway , I like Oprah -- I like her girlfriendy-ness , I like her weight issues , I like how she 's transformed talk television , I like how she 's brought reading back to America -- but there was something that happened the last two weeks that was ... I call it the Soon-Yi moment : it is the moment when I cannot continue supporting someone .
And that was that she did two entire shows promoting that movie " The Secret . "
Do you guys know about that movie " The Secret " ?
It makes " What the Bleep Do We Know " seem like a doctoral dissertation from Harvard on quantum mechanics -- that 's how bad it is .
It makes " The DaVinci Code " seem like " War and Peace . "
That movie is so horrible . It promotes such awful pseudoscience .
And the basic idea is that there 's this law of attraction , and your thoughts have this vibrating energy that goes out into the universe and then you attract good things to happen to you .
On a scientific basis , it 's more than just " Power of Positive Thinking " -- it has a horrible , horrible dark side . Like if you get ill , it 's because you 've just been thinking negative thoughts .
Yeah , stuff like that was in the movie and she 's promoting it .
And all I 'm saying is that I really wish that Murray Gell-Mann would go on Oprah and just explain to her that the law of attraction is , in fact , not a law .
So that 's what I have to say .
Sobule : I sing . Sweeney : I tell stories . Together : The Jill and Julia Show . Sobule : Sometimes it works . Sweeney : Sometimes it doesn 't . Together : The Jill and Julia , the Jill and Julia , the Jill and Julia Show .
John Wooden : The difference between winning and succeeding
With profound simplicity , Coach John Wooden redefines success and urges us all to pursue the best in ourselves . In this inspiring talk he shares the advice he gave his players at UCLA , quotes poetry and remembers his father 's wisdom .
I coined my own definition of success in 1934 , when I was teaching at a high school in South Bend , Indiana , being a little bit disappointed , and delusioned perhaps , by the way parents of the youngsters in my English classes expected their youngsters to get an A or a B. They thought a C was all right for the neighbors ' children , because the neighbors children are all average .
But they weren 't satisfied when their own -- would make the teacher feel that they had failed , or the youngster had failed .
And that 's not right . The good Lord in his infinite wisdom didn 't create us all equal as far as intelligence is concerned , any more than we 're equal for size , appearance .
Not everybody could earn an A or a B , and I didn 't like that way of judging it .
And I did know how the alumni of various schools back in the 30s judged coaches and athletic teams .
If you won them all , you were considered to be reasonably successful -- not completely . Because I found out -- we had a number of years at UCLA where we didn 't lose a game .
But it seemed that we didn 't win each individual game by the margin that some of our alumni had predicted and quite frequently I -- -- quite frequently I really felt that they had backed up their predictions in a more materialistic manner .
But that was true back in the 30s , so I understood that .
But I didn 't like it . And I didn 't agree with it .
And I wanted to come up with something that I hoped could make me a better teacher , and give the youngsters under my supervision -- whether it be in athletics or in the English classroom -- something to which to aspire , other than just a higher mark in the classroom , or more points in some athletic contest .
I thought about that for quite a spell , and I wanted to come up with my own definition . I thought that might help .
And I knew how Mr. Webster defined it : as the accumulation of material possessions or the attainment of a position of power or prestige , or something of that sort -- worthy accomplishments perhaps , but in my opinion not necessarily indicative of success .
So I wanted to come up with something of my own .
And I recalled -- I was raised on a small farm in Southern Indiana and Dad tried to teach me and my brothers that you should never try to be better than someone else .
I 'm sure at the time he did that , I didn 't -- it didn 't -- well , somewhere , I guess in the hidden recesses of mind , it popped out years later .
Never try to be better than someone else , always learn from others . Never cease trying to be the best you can be -- that 's under your control .
If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control , it will adversely affect the things over which you have control .
Then I ran across this simple verse that said , " At God 's footstool to confess , a poor soul knelt , and bowed his head .
'I failed ! ' He cried .
The Master said , ' Thou didst thy best , that is success . ' " From those things , and one other perhaps , I coined my own definition of success , which is : peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you 're capable .
I believe that 's true . If you make the effort to do the best of which you 're capable , to try and improve the situation that exists for you , I think that 's success .
And I don 't think others can judge that . I think it 's like character and reputation .
Your reputation is what you are perceived to be ; your character is what you really are .
And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be .
You 'd hope they 'd both be good , but they won 't necessarily be the same .
Well , that was my idea that I was going to try to get across to the youngsters .
I ran across other things . I love to teach , and it was mentioned by the previous speaker that I enjoy poetry , and I dabble in it a bit , and love it .
There are some things that helped me , I think , be better than I would have been . I know I 'm not what I ought to be , not what I should be . But I think I 'm better than I would have been if I hadn 't run across certain things .
One was just a little verse that said , " No written word , no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be .
Nor all the books on all the shelves -- it 's what the teachers are themselves . "
That made an impression on me in the 1930s .
And I tried to use that more or less in my teaching , whether it be in sports , or whether it be in the English classroom .
I love poetry and always had an interest in that somehow .
Maybe it 's because Dad used to read to us at night .
Coal oil lamp -- we didn 't have electricity in our farm home .
And Dad would read poetry to us . So I always liked it .
And about the same time I ran across this one verse , I ran across another one . Someone asked a lady teacher why she taught .
And she -- after some time , she said she wanted to think about that .
Then she came up and said , " They ask me why I teach and I reply , ' Where could I find such splendid company ? ' There sits a statesman , strong , unbiased , wise ; another Daniel Webster , silver-tongued .
A doctor sits beside him , whose quick steady hand may mend a bone , or stem the life-blood 's flow .
And there a builder . Upward rise the arch of a church he builds , wherein that minister may speak the word of God and lead a stumbling soul to touch the Christ .
And all about a gathering of teachers , farmers , merchants , laborers : those who work and vote and build and plan and pray into a great tomorrow .
And I may say , I may not see the church , or hear the word or eat the food their hands may grow .
But yet again I may . And later I may say , I knew him once , and he was weak , or strong , or bold or proud or gay .
I knew him once , but then he was a boy .
They ask me why I teach and I reply , ' Where could I find such splendid company ? ' " And I believe the teaching profession -- it 's true , you have so many youngsters .
And I 've got to think of my youngsters at UCLA -- 30-some attorneys , 11 dentists and doctors , many , many teachers and other professions .
And that gives you a great deal of pleasure , to see them go on .
I always tried to make the youngsters feel that they 're there to get an education , number one .
Basketball was second , because it was paying their way , and they do need a little time for social activities , but you let social activities take a little precedence over the other two and you 're not going to have any very long .
So that was the ideas that I tried to get across to the youngsters under my supervision .
I had three rules , pretty much , that I stuck with practically all the time .
I 'd learned these prior to coming to UCLA , and I decided they were very important .
One was -- never be late . Never be late .
Later on I said certain things -- I had -- players , if we 're leaving for somewhere , had to be neat and clean .
There was a time when I made them wear jackets and shirts and ties .
Then I saw our chancellor coming to school in denims and turtlenecks , and I thought , not right for me to keep this other .
So I let them -- just they had to be neat and clean .
I had one of my greatest players that you probably heard of , Bill Walton . He came to catch the bus ; we were leaving for somewhere to play .
And he wasn 't clean and neat , so I wouldn 't let him go .
He couldn 't get on the bus . He had to go home and get cleaned up to get to the airport .
So I was a stickler for that . I believed in that .
I believe in time -- very important .
I believe you should be on time . But I felt at practice , for example , we start on time , we close on time .
The youngsters didn 't have to feel that we were going to keep them over .
When I speak at coaching clinics , I often tell young coaches -- and at coaching clinics , more or less , they 'll be the younger coaches getting in the profession .
Most of them are young , you know , and probably newly married .
And I tell them , " Don 't run practices late .
Because you 'll go home in a bad mood .
And that 's not good , for a young married man to go home in a bad mood .
When you get older , it doesn 't make any difference . " But -- So I did believe on time . I believe starting on time , and I believe closing on time .
And another one I had was , not one word of profanity .
One word of profanity , and you are out of here for the day .
If I see it in a game , you 're going to come out and sit on the bench .
And the third one was , never criticize a teammate .
I didn 't want that . I used to tell them I was paid to do that .
That 's my job . I 'm paid to do it . Pitifully poor , but I am paid to do it .
Not like the coaches today , for gracious sakes , no .
It 's a little different than it was in my day .
Those were three things that I stuck with pretty closely all the time .
And those actually came from my dad .
That 's what he tried to teach me and my brothers at one time .
I came up with a pyramid eventually , that I don 't have the time to go on that .
But that helped me , I think , become a better teacher .
It 's something like this : And I had blocks in the pyramid , and the cornerstones being industriousness and enthusiasm , working hard and enjoying what you 're doing , coming up to the apex according to my definition of success .
And right at the top -- faith and patience .
And I say to you , in whatever you 're doing , you must be patient . You have to have patience to -- we want things to happen . We talk about our youth being impatient a lot .
And they are . They want to change everything .
They think all change is progress .
And we get a little older -- we sort of let things go .
And we forget there is no progress without change .
So you must have patience .
And I believe that we must have faith .
I believe that we must believe , truly believe . Not just give it word service ; believe that things will work out as they should , providing we do what we should .
I think our tendency is to hope that things will turn out the way we want them to much of the time . But we don 't do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality .
I worked on this for some 14 years , and I think it helped me become a better teacher .
But it all revolved around that original definition of success .
You know a number of years ago , there was a Major League Baseball umpire by the name of George Moriarty .
He spelled Moriarty with only one ' i ' .
I 'd never seen that before , but he did .
Big league baseball players -- they 're very perceptive about those things , and they noticed he had only one ' i ' in his name .
You 'd be surprised how many also told him that that was one more than he had in his head at various times .
But he wrote something that I think he did while I tried to do in this pyramid . He called it " The Road Ahead , or the Road Behind . "
" Sometimes I think the Fates must grin as we denounce them and insist the only reason we can 't win , is the Fates themselves that miss .
Yet there lives on the ancient claim : we win or lose within ourselves . The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow 's game .
You and I know deeper down , there 's always a chance to win the crown .
But when we fail to give our best , we simply haven 't met the test , of giving all and saving none until the game is really won ; of showing what is meant by grit ; of playing through when others quit ; of playing through , not letting up .
It 's bearing down that wins the cup . Of dreaming there 's a goal ahead ; of hoping when our dreams are dead ; of praying when our hopes have fled .
Yet losing , not afraid to fall , if bravely we have given all . For who can ask more of a man than giving all within his span .
Giving all , it seems to me , is not so far from victory .
And so the fates are seldom wrong , no matter how they twist and wind .
It 's you and I who make our fates -- we open up or close the gates on the road ahead or the road behind . "
Reminds me of another set of threes that my dad tried to get across to us .
Don 't whine . Don 't complain . Don 't make excuses .
Just get out there , and whatever you 're doing , do it to the best of your ability .
And no one can do more than that .
I tried to get across , too , that -- my opponents don 't tell you -- you never heard me mention winning .
Never mention winning . My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game .
And you can win when you 're outscored .
I 've felt that way on certain occasions , at various times .
And I just wanted them to be able to hold their head up after a game .
I used to say that when a game is over , and you see somebody that didn 't know the outcome , I hope they couldn 't tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you .
That 's what really matters : if you make effort to do the best you can regularly , the results will be about what they should be .
Not necessary to what you would want them to be , but they will be about what they should , and only you will know whether you can do that .
And that 's what I wanted from them more than anything else .
And as time went by , and I learned more about other things , I think it worked a little better , as far as the results . But I wanted the score of a game to be the byproduct of these other things , and not the end itself .
I believe it was -- one great philosopher said -- no , no , Cervantes . Cervantes said , " The journey is better than the end . "
And I like that . I think that is -- it 's getting there . Sometimes when you get there , there 's almost a letdown .
But there 's getting there that 's the fun .
I liked our -- as a basketball coach at UCLA I liked our practices to be the journey , and the game would be the end . The end result .
I 'd like to go up and sit in the stands and watch the players play , and see whether I 'd done a decent job during the week .
There again , it 's getting the players to get that self-satisfaction , in knowing that they 'd made the effort to do the best of which they are capable .
Sometimes I 'm asked who was the best player I had , or the best teams .
I can never answer that , as far as the individuals are concerned .
I was asked one time about that , and they said , " Suppose that you in some way could make the perfect player . What would you want ? "
And I said , " Well , I 'd want one that knew why he was at UCL to get an education , he was a good student , really knew why he was there in the first place .
But I 'd want one that could play , too .
I 'd want one to realize that defense usually wins championships , and would work hard on defense .
But I 'd want one that would play offense too .
I 'd want him to be unselfish , and look for the pass first and not shoot all the time .
And I 'd want one that could pass and would pass .
I 've had some that could and wouldn 't , and I 've had some that would and couldn 't .
I wanted them to be able to shoot from the outside .
I wanted them to be good inside too .
I 'd want them to be able to rebound well at both ends , too .
And why not just take someone like Keith Wilkes and let it go at that .
He had the qualifications . Not the only one , but he was one that I used in that particular category , because I think he made the effort to become the best [ unclear ] .
I mention in my book , " They Call Me Coach . "
Two players that gave me great satisfaction ; that came as close as I think anyone I ever had to reach their full potential : one was Conrad Burke . And one was Doug McIntosh .
When I saw them as freshmen , on our freshmen team -- we didn 't have -- freshmen couldn 't play varsity when I taught .
And I thought , " Oh gracious , if these two players , either one of them " -- they were different years , but I thought about each one at the time he was there -- " Oh , if he ever makes the varsity , our varsity must be pretty miserable , if he 's good enough to make it . "
And you know one of them was a starting player for a season and a half .
The other was -- his next year , he played 32 minutes in a national championship game , did a tremendous job for us . And the next year , he was a starting player on the national championship team .
And here I thought he 'd never play a minute , when he was -- so those are the things that give you great joy , and great satisfaction to see one .
Neither one of those youngsters could shoot very well .
But they had outstanding shooting percentages , because they didn 't force it .
And neither one could jump very well , but they got -- kept good position , and so they did well rebounding . They remembered that every shot that is taken , they assumed would be missed .
I 've had too many that stand around and wait to see if it 's missed , then they go and it 's too late .
Somebody else is in there ahead of them .
And they weren 't very quick , but they played good position , kept in good balance .
And so they played pretty good defense for us .
So they had qualities that -- they came close to -- as close to reaching possibly their full potential as any players I ever had .
So I consider them to be as successful as Lewis Alcindor or Bill Walton , or many of the others that we had , There was some outstanding -- some outstanding players .
Have I rambled enough ?
I was told that when he makes his appearance , I was supposed to shut up .
Wade Davis : Gorgeous photos of a backyard wilderness worth saving
Ethnographer Wade Davis explores hidden places in the wider world -- but in this powerful short talk he urges us to save a paradise in his backyard , Northern Canada . The Sacred Headwaters , remote and pristine , are under threat because they hide rich tar sands . With stunning photos , Davis asks a tough question : How can we balance society 's need for fuels with the urge to protect such glorious wilderness ?
This is not a story of Tibet and it 's not a story of the Amazon .
I won 't be taking you to the high Arctic , the life of the Inuit , or to the searing sands of the Sahara .
This is actually a story of my own backyard .
It 's a land known to the Tahltan people and all the First Nations of British Columbia as the Sacred Headwaters , the source of the three great salmon rivers of home , the Skeena , the Stikine and the Nass .
It 's a valley where , in a long day , perhaps , too , you can follow the tracks of grizzly and wolf and drink from the very sources of water that gave rise and cradled the great civilizations of the Northwest Coast .
It 's such a beautiful place . It 's the most stunningly wild place I 've ever been .
It 's the sort of place that we , as Canadians , could throw England , and they 'd never find it .
John Muir , in 1879 , went up just the lower third of the Stikine , and he was so enraptured he called it a Yosemite 150 miles long .
He came back to California and named his dog after that river of enchantment .
In the Lower 48 , the farthest you can get away from a maintained road is 20 miles .
In the Northwest Quadrant of British Columbia , an area of land the size of Oregon , there 's one road , a narrow ribbon of asphalt that slips up the side of the Coast Mountains to the Yukon .
I followed that road in the early 1970s , soon after it was built , to take a job as the first park ranger in Spatsizi wilderness .
My job description was deliciously vague : wilderness assessment and public relations .
In two four-month seasons I saw not a dozen people .
There was no one to relate publicly to .
But in the course of these wanderings , I came upon an old shaman 's grave that led to an encounter with a remarkable man : Alex Jack , an Gitxsan elder and chief who had lived as a trapper and a hunter in that country for all of his life .
And over the course of 30 years , I recorded traditional tales from Alex , mostly mythological accounts of Wy-ghet , the trickster transformer of Gitxsan lore who , in his folly , taught the people how to live on the land .
And just before Alex died at the age of 96 , he gave me a gift .
It was a tool carved from caribou bone by his grandfather in 1910 , and it turned out to be a specialized implement used by a trapper to skin out the eyelids of wolves .
It was only when Alex passed away that I realized that the eyelids , in some sense , were my own , and having done so much to allow me to learn to see , Alex in his own way was saying goodbye .
Well , isolation has been the great saving grace of this remarkable place , but today isolation could be its doom .
You 've heard so much about the developments of the tar sands , the controversy about the Keystone and the Enbridge pipelines , but these are just elements of a tsunami of industrial development that is sweeping across all of the wild country of northern Canada .
In Tahltan territory alone , there are 41 major industrial proposals , some with great promise , some of great concern .
On Todagin Mountain , revered by the Tahltan people as a wildlife sanctuary in the sky , home to the largest population of stone sheep on the planet , Imperial Metals -- but the 75th-biggest mining company in all of Canada -- has secured permits to establish an open-pit copper and gold mine which will process 30,000 tons of rock a day for 30 years , generating hundreds of millions of tons of toxic waste that , by the project 's design , will simply be dumped into the lakes of the Sacred Headwaters .
At the Headwaters itself , Shell Canada has plans to extract methane gas from coal seams that underly a million acres , fracking the coal with hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals , establishing perhaps as many as 6,000 wellheads , and eventually a network of roads and pipelines and flaring wellheads , all to generate methane gas that most likely will go east to fuel the expansion of the tar sands .
For over a decade , the Tahltan people , both clans , Wolf and Crow , have resisted this assault on their homeland .
Men , women and children of all ages , elders in wheelchairs , have blockaded the only road access to the interior .
For them , the Headwaters is a kitchen .
It 's a sanctuary . It 's a burial ground of their ancestors .
And those who really own it are the generations as yet unborn .
The Tahltan have been able , with the support of all Canadians who live downstream , all local politicians , to resist this assault on their homeland , but now everything hangs in the balance .
Decisions that will be made this year will literally determine the fate of this country .
The Tahltan have called for the creation of a tribal heritage reserve which will set aside the largest protected area in British Columbia .
Our goal is not only to help them do that but to encourage our friends , the good people at Shell , not only to withdraw from the Sacred Headwaters , but to move forward with us and join us as we do the remarkable , the extraordinary : set aside a protected area that will be for all time not simply the Sacred Headwaters of the Tahltan people but the sacred headwaters of all people in the world .
The Tahltan need your help . We need your help .
And if any of you would like to join us on this great adventure , please come and see me later today .
Thank you very much .
Andy Puddicombe : All it takes is 10 mindful minutes
When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes ? Not texting , talking or even thinking ? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that : Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day , simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment .
We live in an incredibly busy world .
The pace of life is often frantic , our minds are always busy , and we 're always doing something .
So with that in mind , I 'd like you just to take a moment to think , when did you last take any time to do nothing ?
Just 10 minutes , undisturbed ?
And when I say nothing , I do mean nothing .
So that 's no emailing , texting , no Internet , no TV , no chatting , no eating , no reading , not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future .
Simply doing nothing .
I see a lot of very blank faces .
My thinking is , you probably have to go a long way back .
And this is an extraordinary thing , right ?
We 're talking about our mind .
The mind , our most valuable and precious resource , through which we experience every single moment of our life , the mind that we rely upon to be happy , content , emotionally stable as individuals , and at the same time to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others .
This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused , creative , spontaneous , and to perform at our very best in everything that we do .
And yet , we don 't take any time out to look after it .
In fact , we spend more time looking after our cars , our clothes and our hair than we — okay , maybe not our hair , but you see where I 'm going .
The result , of course , is that we get stressed .
You know , the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round , lots of difficult , confusing emotions , and we don 't really know how to deal with that , and the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we 're no longer present in the world in which we live .
We miss out on the things that are most important to us , and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes , well , that 's the way life is , so we 've just kind of got to get on with it .
That 's really not how it has to be .
So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class .
And trust me , it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine , the sitting cross-legged on the floor , the incense , the herbal tea , the vegetarians , the whole deal , but my mom was going and I was intrigued , so I went along with her .
I 'd also seen a few kung fu movies , and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly , but I was very young at the time .
Now as I was there , I guess , like a lot of people , I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind .
You get stressed , you do some meditation .
I hadn 't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature , until I was about 20 , when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession , really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts , inundated with difficult emotions that I didn 't know how to cope with .
Every time I sort of pushed one down , another one would just sort of pop back up again .
It was a really very stressful time .
I guess we all deal with stress in different ways .
Some people will bury themselves in work , grateful for the distraction .
Others will turn to their friends , their family , looking for support .
Some people hit the bottle , start taking medication .
My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk .
So I quit my degree , I headed off to the Himalayas , I became a monk , and I started studying meditation .
People often ask me what I learned from that time .
Well , obviously it changed things .
Let 's face it , becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things .
But it was more than that .
It taught me -- it gave me a greater appreciation , an understanding for the present moment .
By that I mean not being lost in thought , not being distracted , not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions , but instead learning how to be in the here and now , how to be mindful , how to be present .
I think the present moment is so underrated .
It sounds so ordinary , and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it 's anything but ordinary .
There was a research paper that came out of Harvard , just recently , that said on average our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time .
Forty-seven percent .
At the same time , this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness .
Now we 're not here for that long anyway , but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy , dunno , it just kind of seems tragic , actually , especially when there 's something we can do about it , when there 's a positive , practical , achievable , scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy , to be more mindful and less distracted .
And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day , it impacts our entire life .
But we need to know how to do it .
We need an exercise . We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful .
That 's essentially what meditation is .
It 's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment .
But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it .
And that 's what these are for , in case you 've been wondering , because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts , getting rid of emotions , somehow controlling the mind , but actually it 's quite different from that .
It 's more about stepping back , seeing the thought clearly , witnessing it coming and going , emotions coming and going without judgment , but with a relaxed , focused mind .
So for example , right now , if I focus too much on the balls , then there 's no way that I can relax and talk to you at the same time .
Equally , if I relax too much talking to you , then there 's no way I can focus on the balls . I 'm going to drop them .
Now in life , and in meditation , there 'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense , and life starts to feel a bit like this .
It 's a very uncomfortable way to live life , when you get this tight and stressed .
At other times , we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much , and things just become a sort of little bit like this .
Of course in meditation — — we 're going to end up falling asleep .
So we 're looking for a balance , a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement .
Now , what usually happens when we 're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought .
Let 's say this is an anxious thought .
So everything 's going fine , and then we see the anxious thought , and it 's like , " Oh , didn 't realize I was worried about that . "
You go back to it , repeat it . " Oh , I am worried .
Oh , I really am worried . Wow , there 's so much anxiety . "
And before we know it , right , we 're anxious about feeling anxious .
You know , this is crazy . We do this all the time , even on an everyday level .
If you think about the last time , I dunno , you had a wobbly tooth .
You know it 's wobbly , and you know that it hurts .
But what do you do every 20 , 30 seconds ?
It does hurt . And we reinforce the storyline , right ?
And we just keep telling ourselves , and we do it all the time . And it 's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind .
But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way , you might see many different patterns .
You might find a mind that 's really restless and -- the whole time .
Don 't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that .
You might find a mind that 's very dull and boring , and it 's just , almost mechanical , it just seems it 's as if you 're getting up , going to work , eat , sleep , get up , work .
Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round and round your mind .
Well , whatever it is , meditation offers the opportunity , the potential to step back and to get a different perspective , to see that things aren 't always as they appear .
We can 't change every little thing that happens to us in life , but we can change the way that we experience it .
That 's the potential of meditation , of mindfulness .
You don 't have to burn any incense , and you definitely don 't have to sit on the floor .
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back , to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus , calm and clarity in your life .
Thank you very much .
Krista Donaldson : The $ 80 prosthetic knee that 's changing lives
We 've made incredible advances in technology in recent years , but too often it seems only certain fortunate people can benefit . Engineer Krista Donaldson introduces the ReMotion knee , a prosthetic device for above-knee amputees , many of whom earn less than $ 4 a day . The design contains best-in-class technology and yet is far cheaper than other prosthetics on the market .
Nine years ago , I worked for the U.S. government in Iraq , helping rebuild the electricity infrastructure .
And I was there , and I worked in that job because I believe that technology can improve people 's lives .
One afternoon , I had tea with a storekeeper at the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad , and he said to me , " You Americans , you can put a man on the moon , but when I get home tonight , I won 't be able to turn on my lights . "
At the time , the U.S. government had spent more than two billion dollars on electricity reconstruction .
How do you ensure technology reaches users ?
How do you put it in their hands so that it is useful ?
So those are the questions that my colleagues and I at D-Rev ask ourselves .
And D-Rev is short for Design Revolution .
And I took over the organization four years ago and really focused it on developing products that actually reach users , and not just any users , but customers who live on less than four dollars a day .
One of the key areas we 've been working on recently is medical devices , and while it may not be obvious that medical devices have something in common with Iraq 's electricity grid then , there are some commonalities .
Despite the advanced technology , it 's not reaching the people who need it most .
So I 'm going to tell you about one of the projects we 've been working on , the ReMotion Knee , and it 's a prosthetic knee for above-knee amputees .
And this project started when the Jaipur Foot Organization , came to the Bay Area and they said , " We need a better knee . "
Chances are , if you 're living on less than four dollars a day , and you 're an amputee , you 've lost your limb in a vehicle accident .
Most people think it 's land mines , but it 's a vehicle accident .
You 're walking by the side of the road and you 're hit by a truck , or you 're trying to to jump on a moving train , you 're late for work , and your pant leg gets caught .
And the reality is that if you don 't have much money , like this young named Kamal right here , the option you really have is a bamboo staff to get around .
And how big a problem is this ?
There 's over three million amputees every year who need a new or replacement knee .
And what are their options ?
This is a high-end . This is what we 'd call a " smart knee . "
It 's got a microprocessor inside .
It can pretty much do anything , but it 's 20,000 dollars , and to give you a sense of who wears this , veterans , American veterans coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq would be fit with something like this .
This is a low-end titanium knee .
It 's a polycentric knee , and all that that means is the mechanism , is a four-bar mechanism , that mimics a natural human knee .
But at 1,400 dollars , it 's still too expensive for people like Kamal .
And lastly , here you see a low-end knee .
This is a knee that 's been designed specifically for poor people .
And while you have affordability , you 've lost on functionality .
The mechanism here is a single axis , and a single axis is like a door hinge .
So you can think about how unstable that would be .
And this is the type of mechanism that the Jaipur Foot Organization was using when they were looking for a better knee , and I just wanted to give you a sense of what a leg system looks like , because I 'm showing you all these knees and I imagine it 's hard to think how it all fits together .
So at the top you have a socket , and this fits over someone 's residual limb , and everyone 's residual limb is a little bit different .
And then you have the knee , and here I 've got a single axis on the knee so you can see how it rotates , and then a pylon , and then a foot .
And we 've been able to develop a knee , a polycentric knee , so that type of knee that acts like a human knee , mimics human gait , for 80 dollars retail .
But the key is , you can have this great invention , you can have this great design , but how do you get it to the people who most need it ?
How do you ensure it gets to them and it improves their lives ?
So at D-Rev , we 've done some other projects , and we looked at three things that we really believe gets technologies to customers , to users , to people who need it .
And the first thing is that the product needs to be world class .
It needs to perform on par or better than the best products on the market .
Regardless of your income level , you want the most beautiful , the best product that there is .
I 'm going to show you a video now of a man named Ash . You can see him walking .
He 's wearing the same knee system here with a single axis knee .
And he 's doing a 10-meter walk test .
And you 'll notice that he 's struggling with stability as he 's walking .
And something that 's not obvious , that you can 't see , is that it 's psychologically draining to walk and to be preventing yourself from falling .
Now this is a video of Kamal .
You remember Kamal earlier , holding the bamboo staff .
He 's wearing one of the earlier versions of our knee , and he 's doing that same 10-meter walk test .
And you can see his stability is much better .
So world class isn 't just about technical performance .
It 's also about human performance .
And most medical devices , we 've learned , as we 've dug in , are really designed for Westerners , for wealthier economies .
But the reality is our users , our customers , they do different things . They sit cross-legged more .
We see that they squat . They kneel in prayer .
And we designed our knee to have the greatest range of motion of almost any other knee on the market .
So the second thing we learned , and this leads into my second point , which is that we believe that products need to be designed to be user-centric .
And at D-Rev , we go one step further and we say you need to be user-obsessed .
So it 's not just the end user that you 're thinking about , but everyone who interacts with the product , so , for example , the prosthetist who fits the knee , but also the context in which the knee is being fit .
What is the local market like ?
How do all these components get to the clinic ?
Do they all get there on time ? The supply chain .
Everything that goes into ensuring that this product gets to the end user , and it goes in as part of the system , and it 's used .
So I wanted to show you some of the iterations we did between the first version , the Jaipur Knee , so this is it right here .
Notice anything about it ?
It clicks .
We 'd seen that users had actually modified it .
So do you see that black strip right there ?
That 's a homemade noise dampener .
We also saw that our users had modified it in other ways .
You can see there that that particular amputee , he had wrapped bandages around the knee .
He 'd made a cosmesis .
And if you look at the knee , it 's got those pointy edges , right ?
So if you 're wearing it under pants or a skirt or a sari , it 's really obvious that you 're wearing a prosthetic limb , and in societies where there 's social stigma around being disabled , people are particularly acute about this .
So I 'm going to show you some of the modifications we did .
We did a lot of iterations , not just around this , but some other things .
But here we have the version three , the ReMotion Knee , but if you look in here , you can see the noise dampener . It 's quieter .
The other thing we did is that we smoothed the profile .
We made it thinner .
And something that 's not obvious is that we designed it for mass production .
And this goes into my last point .
We really , truly believe that if a product is going to reach users at the scale that it 's needed , it needs to be market-driven , and market-driven means that products are sold .
They 're not donated . They 're not heavily subsidized .
Our product needs to be designed to offer value to the end user .
It also has to be designed to be very affordable .
But a product that is valued by a customer is used by a customer , and use is what creates impact .
And we believe that as designers , it holds us accountable to our customers .
And with centralized manufacturing , you can control the quality control , and you can hit that $ 80 price point with profit margins built in .
And now , those profit margins are critical , because if you want to scale , if you want to reach all the people in the world who possibly need a knee , it needs to be economically sustainable .
So I want to give you a sense of where we are at .
We have fit over 5,000 amputees , and one of the big indicators we 're looking at , of course , is , does it improve lives ?
Well , the standard is , is someone still wearing their knee six months later ?
The industry average is about 65 percent .
Ours is 79 percent , and we 're hoping to get that higher .
Right now , our knees are worn in 12 countries .
This is where we want to get , though , in the next three years .
We 'll double the impact in 2015 , and we 'll double it each of the following years after that .
But then we hit a new challenge , and that 's the number of skilled prosthetists who are able to fit knees .
So I want to end with a story of Pournima .
Pournima was 18 years old when she was in a car accident where she lost her leg , and she traveled 12 hours by train to come to the clinic to be fit with a knee , and while all of the amputees who wear our knees affect us as the designers , she 's particularly meaningful to me as an engineer and as a woman , because she was in school , she had just started school to study engineering .
And she said , " Well , now that I can walk again , I can go back and complete my studies . "
And to me she represents the next generation of engineers solving problems and ensuring meaningful technologies reach their users .
So thank you .
Marisa Fick-Jordan : The wonder of Zulu wire art
In this short , image-packed talk , Marisa Fick-Jordan talks about how a village of traditional Zulu wire weavers built a worldwide market for their dazzling work .
The decorative use of wire in southern Africa dates back hundreds of years .
But modernization actually brought communication and a whole new material , in the form of telephone wire .
Rural to urban migration meant that newfound industrial materials started to replace hard-to-come-by natural grasses .
So , here you can see the change from use -- starting to use contemporary materials .
These pieces date back from the ' 40s to the late ' 50s .
In the ' 90s , my interest and passion for transitional art forms led me to a new form , which came from a squatter camp outside Durban .
And I got the opportunity to start working with this community at that point , and started developing , really , and mentoring them in terms of scale , in terms of the design .
And the project soon grew from five to 50 weavers in about a year .
Soon we had outgrown the scrap yards , what they could provide , so we coerced a wire manufacturer to help us , and not only to supply the materials on bobbins , but to produce to our color specifications .
At the same time , I was thinking , well , there 's lots of possibility here to produce contemporary products , away from the ethnic , a little bit more contemporary .
So I developed a whole range around -- mass-produced range -- that obviously fitted into a much higher-end decor market that could be exported and also service our local market .
We started experimenting , as you can see , in terms of shapes , forms . The scale became very important , and it 's become our pet project . It 's successful , it 's been running for 12 years . And we supply the Conran shops , and Donna Karan , and so it 's kind of great .
This is our group , our main group of weavers .
They come on a weekly basis to Durban .
They all have bank accounts .
They 've all moved back to the rural area where they came from .
It 's a weekly turnaround of production .
This is the community that I originally showed you the slide of .
And that 's also modernized today , and it 's supporting work for 300 weavers .
And the rest says it all .
Thank you very much .
Sherwin Nuland : The extraordinary power of ordinary people
Surgeon and writer Sherwin Nuland meditates on the idea of hope -- the desire to become our better selves and make a better world . It 's a thoughtful 12 minutes that will help you focus on the road ahead .
You know , I am so bad at tech that my daughter -- who is now 41 -- when she was five , was overheard by me to say to a friend of hers , If it doesn 't bleed when you cut it , my daddy doesn 't understand it .
So , the assignment I 've been given may be an insuperable obstacle for me , but I 'm certainly going to try .
What have I heard during these last four days ?
This is my third visit to TED .
One was to TEDMED , and one , as you 've heard , was a regular TED two years ago .
I 've heard what I consider an extraordinary thing that I 've only heard a little bit in the two previous TEDs , and what that is is an interweaving and an interlarding , an intermixing , of a sense of social responsibility in so many of the talks -- global responsibility , in fact , appealing to enlightened self-interest , but it goes far beyond enlightened self-interest .
One of the most impressive things about what some , perhaps 10 , of the speakers have been talking about is the realization , as you listen to them carefully , that they 're not saying : Well , this is what we should do ; this is what I would like you to do .
It 's : This is what I have done because I 'm excited by it , because it 's a wonderful thing , and it 's done something for me and , of course , it 's accomplished a great deal .
It 's the old concept , the real Greek concept , of philanthropy in its original sense : phil-anthropy , the love of humankind .
And the only explanation I can have for some of what you 've been hearing in the last four days is that it arises , in fact , out of a form of love .
And this gives me enormous hope .
And hope , of course , is the topic that I 'm supposed to be speaking about , which I 'd completely forgotten about until I arrived .
And when I did , I thought , well , I 'd better look this word up in the dictionary .
So , Sarah and I -- my wife -- walked over to the public library , which is four blocks away , on Pacific Street , and we got the OED , and we looked in there , and there are 14 definitions of hope , none of which really hits you between the eyes as being the appropriate one .
And , of course , that makes sense , because hope is an abstract phenomenon ; it 's an abstract idea , it 's not a concrete word .
Well , it reminds me a little bit of surgery .
If there 's one operation for a disease , you know it works .
If there are 15 operations , you know that none of them work .
And that 's the way it is with definitions of words .
If you have appendicitis , they take your appendix out , and you 're cured .
If you 've got reflux oesophagitis , there are 15 procedures , and Joe Schmo does it one way and Will Blow does it another way , and none of them work , and that 's the way it is with this word , hope .
They all come down to the idea of an expectation of something good that is due to happen .
And you know what I found out ?
The Indo-European root of the word hope is a stem , K-E-U -- we would spell it K-E-U ; it 's pronounced koy -- and it is the same root from which the word curve comes from .
But what it means in the original Indo-European is a change in direction , going in a different way .
And I find that very interesting and very provocative , because what you 've been hearing in the last couple of days is the sense of going in different directions : directions that are specific and unique to problems .
There are different paradigms .
You 've heard that word several times in the last four days , and everyone 's familiar with Kuhnian paradigms .
So , when we think of hope now , we have to think of looking in other directions than we have been looking .
There 's another -- not definition , but description , of hope that has always appealed to me , and it was one by Václav Havel in his perfectly spectacular book " Breaking the Peace , " in which he says that hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right , but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out .
I can 't tell you how reassured I was by the very last sentence in that glorious presentation by Dean Kamen a few days ago .
I wasn 't sure I heard it right , so I found him in one of the inter-sessions .
He was talking to a very large man , but I didn 't care .
I interrupted , and I said , " Did you say this ? "
He said , " I think so . "
So , here 's what it is : I 'll repeat it .
" The world will not be saved by the Internet . "
It 's wonderful . Do you know what the world will be saved by ?
I 'll tell you . It 'll be saved by the human spirit .
And by the human spirit , I don 't mean anything divine , I don 't mean anything supernatural -- certainly not coming from this skeptic .
What I mean is this ability that each of us has to be something greater than herself or himself ; to arise out of our ordinary selves and achieve something that at the beginning we thought perhaps we were not capable of .
On an elemental level , we have all felt that spirituality at the time of childbirth .
Some of you have felt it in laboratories ; some of you have felt it at the workbench .
We feel it at concerts .
I 've felt it in the operating room , at the bedside .
It is an elevation of us beyond ourselves .
And I think that it 's going to be , in time , the elements of the human spirit that we 've been hearing about bit by bit by bit from so many of the speakers in the last few days .
And if there 's anything that has permeated this room , it is precisely that .
I 'm intrigued by a concept that was brought to life in the early part of the 19th century -- actually , in the second decade of the 19th century -- by a 27-year-old poet whose name was Percy Shelley .
Now , we all think that Shelley obviously is the great romantic poet that he was ; many of us tend to forget that he wrote some perfectly wonderful essays , too , and the most well-remembered essay is one called " A Defence of Poetry . "
Now , it 's about five , six , seven , eight pages long , and it gets kind of deep and difficult after about the third page , but somewhere on the second page he begins talking about the notion that he calls " moral imagination . "
And here 's what he says , roughly translated : A man -- generic man -- a man , to be greatly good , must imagine clearly .
He must see himself and the world through the eyes of another , and of many others .
See himself and the world -- not just the world , but see himself .
What is it that is expected of us by the billions of people who live in what Laurie Garrett the other day so appropriately called despair and disparity ?
What is it that they have every right to ask of us ?
What is it that we have every right to ask of ourselves , out of our shared humanity and out of the human spirit ?
Well , you know precisely what it is .
There 's a great deal of argument about whether we , as the great nation that we are , should be the policeman of the world , the world 's constabulary , but there should be virtually no argument about whether we should be the world 's healer .
There has certainly been no argument about that in this room in the past four days .
So , if we are to be the world 's healer , every disadvantaged person in this world -- including in the United States -- becomes our patient .
Every disadvantaged nation , and perhaps our own nation , becomes our patient .
So , it 's fun to think about the etymology of the word " patient . "
It comes initially from the Latin patior , to endure , or to suffer .
So , you go back to the old Indo-European root again , and what do you find ? The Indo-European stem is pronounced payen -- we would spell it P-A-E-N -- and , lo and behold , mirabile dictu , it is the same root as the word compassion comes from , P-A-E-N .
So , the lesson is very clear . The lesson is that our patient -- the world , and the disadvantaged of the world -- that patient deserves our compassion .
But beyond our compassion , and far greater than compassion , is our moral imagination and our identification with each individual who lives in that world , not to think of them as a huge forest , but as individual trees .
Of course , in this day and age , the trick is not to let each tree be obscured by that Bush in Washington that can get -- can get in the way .
So , here we are .
We are , should be , morally committed to being the healer of the world .
And we have had examples over and over and over again -- you 've just heard one in the last 15 minutes -- of people who have not only had that commitment , but had the charisma , the brilliance -- and I think in this room it 's easy to use the word brilliant , my God -- the brilliance to succeed at least at the beginning of their quest , and who no doubt will continue to succeed , as long as more and more of us enlist ourselves in their cause .
Now , if we 're talking about medicine , and we 're talking about healing , I 'd like to quote someone who hasn 't been quoted .
It seems to me everybody in the world 's been quoted here : Pogo 's been quoted ; Shakespeare 's been quoted backwards , forwards , inside out .
I would like to quote one of my own household gods .
I suspect he never really said this , because we don 't know what Hippocrates really said , but we do know for sure that one of the great Greek physicians said the following , and it has been recorded in one of the books attributed to Hippocrates , and the book is called " Precepts . "
And I 'll read you what it is .
Remember , I have been talking about , essentially philanthropy : the love of humankind , the individual humankind and the individual humankind that can bring that kind of love translated into action , translated , in some cases , into enlightened self-interest .
And here he is , 2,400 years ago : " Where there is love of humankind , there is love of healing . "
We have seen that here today with the sense , with the sensitivity -- and in the last three days , and with the power of the indomitable human spirit .
Thank you very much .
Margaret Gould Stewart : How YouTube thinks about copyright
Margaret Gould Stewart , YouTube 's head of user experience , talks about how the ubiquitous video site works with copyright holders and creators to foster a creative ecosystem where everybody wins .
So , if you 're in the audience today , or maybe you 're watching this talk in some other time or place , you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem .
Whether you 're an artist , a technologist , a lawyer or a fan , the handling of copyright directly impacts your life .
Rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership , it 's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape .
YouTube cares deeply about the rights of content owners , but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies , mashups and more , we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site .
Let 's look at a specific video so you can see how it works .
Two years ago , recording artist Chris Brown released the official video of his single " Forever . "
A fan saw it on TV , recorded it with her camera phone , and uploaded it to YouTube .
Because Sony Music had registered Chris Brown 's video in our Content ID system , within seconds of attempting to upload the video , the copy was detected , giving Sony the choice of what to do next .
But how do we know that the user 's video was a copy ?
Well , it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database , along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match .
We compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database .
This heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works .
Here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content .
The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there 's a match .
This means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file , plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality .
And we do this every time that a video is uploaded to YouTube .
And that 's over 20 hours of video every minute .
When we find a match , we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down .
And the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking .
We 're not just talking about a few videos , we 're talking about over 100 years of video every day , between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site .
When we compare those hundred years of video , we 're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database .
It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day , without so much as a coffee break .
Now , what do we do when we find a match ?
Well , most rights owners , instead of blocking , will allow the copy to be published .
And then they benefit through the exposure , advertising and linked sales .
Remember Chris Brown 's video " Forever " ?
Well , it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts , and that looked like the end of the story , but sometime last year , a young couple got married .
This is their wedding video .
You may have seen it .
What 's amazing about this is , if the processional of the wedding was this much fun , can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been ?
I mean , who are these people ?
I totally want to go to that wedding .
So their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views .
And instead of Sony blocking , they allowed the upload to occur .
And they put advertising against it and linked from it to iTunes .
And the song , 18 months old , went back to number four on the iTunes charts .
So Sony is generating revenue from both of these .
And Jill and Kevin , the happy couple , they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral .
And they 've ended up on a bunch of talk shows , and they 've used it as an opportunity to make a difference .
The video 's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence .
The " JK Wedding [ Entrance ] Dance " became so popular that NBC parodied it on the season finale of " The Office , " which just goes to show , it 's truly an ecosystem of culture .
Because it 's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios , but sometimes big studios borrowing back .
By empowering choice , we can create a culture of opportunity .
And all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification .
So why has no one ever solved this problem before ?
It 's because it 's a big problem , and it 's complicated and messy .
It 's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners .
There 's musical labels .
There 's multiple music publishers .
And each of these can vary by country .
There 's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together .
So we have to manage many claims to the same video .
YouTube 's Content ID system addresses all of these cases .
But the system only works through the participation of rights owners .
If you have content that others are uploading to YouTube , you should register in the Content ID system , and then you 'll have the choice about how your content is used .
And think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content .
By simply blocking all reuse , you 'll miss out on new art forms , new audiences , new distribution channels and new revenue streams .
But it 's not just about dollars and impressions .
Just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology .
And I think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading .
Thank you .
Roselinde Torres : What it takes to be a great leader
The world is full of leadership programs , but the best way to learn how to lead might be right under your nose . In this clear , candid talk , Roselinde Torres describes 25 years observing truly great leaders at work , and shares the three simple but crucial questions would-be company chiefs need to ask to thrive in the future .
What makes a great leader today ?
Many of us carry this image of this all-knowing superhero who stands and commands and protects his followers .
But that 's kind of an image from another time , and what 's also outdated are the leadership development programs that are based on success models for a world that was , not a world that is or that is coming .
We conducted a study of 4,000 companies , and we asked them , let 's see the effectiveness of your leadership development programs .
Fifty-eight percent of the companies cited significant talent gaps for critical leadership roles .
That means that despite corporate training programs , off-sites , assessments , coaching , all of these things , more than half the companies had failed to grow enough great leaders .
You may be asking yourself , is my company helping me to prepare to be a great 21st-century leader ?
The odds are , probably not .
Now , I 've spent 25 years of my professional life observing what makes great leaders .
I 've worked inside Fortune 500 companies , I 've advised over 200 CEOs , and I 've cultivated more leadership pipelines than you can imagine .
But a few years ago , I noticed a disturbing trend in leadership preparation .
I noticed that , despite all the efforts , there were familiar stories that kept resurfacing about individuals .
One story was about Chris , a high-potential , superstar leader who moves to a new unit and fails , destroying unrecoverable value .
And then there were stories like Sidney , the CEO , who was so frustrated because her company is cited as a best company for leaders , but only one of the top 50 leaders is equipped to lead their crucial initiatives .
And then there were stories like the senior leadership team of a once-thriving business that 's surprised by a market shift , finds itself having to force the company to reduce its size in half or go out of business .
Now , these recurring stories cause me to ask two questions .
Why are the leadership gaps widening when there 's so much more investment in leadership development ?
And what are the great leaders doing distinctly different to thrive and grow ?
One of the things that I did , I was so consumed by these questions and also frustrated by those stories , that I left my job so that I could study this full time , and I took a year to travel to different parts of the world to learn about effective and ineffective leadership practices in companies , countries and nonprofit organizations .
And so I did things like travel to South Africa , where I had an opportunity to understand how Nelson Mandela was ahead of his time in anticipating and navigating his political , social and economic context .
I also met a number of nonprofit leaders who , despite very limited financial resources , were making a huge impact in the world , often bringing together seeming adversaries .
And I spent countless hours in presidential libraries trying to understand how the environment had shaped the leaders , the moves that they made , and then the impact of those moves beyond their tenure .
And then , when I returned to work full time , in this role , I joined with wonderful colleagues who were also interested in these questions .
Now , from all this , I distilled the characteristics of leaders who are thriving and what they do differently , and then I also distilled the preparation practices that enable people to grow to their potential .
I want to share some of those with you now .
In a 21st-century world , which is more global , digitally enabled and transparent , with faster speeds of information flow and innovation , and where nothing big gets done without some kind of a complex matrix , relying on traditional development practices will stunt your growth as a leader .
In fact , traditional assessments like narrow 360 surveys or outdated performance criteria will give you false positives , lulling you into thinking that you are more prepared than you really are .
Leadership in the 21st century is defined and evidenced by three questions .
Where are you looking to anticipate the next change to your business model or your life ?
The answer to this question is on your calendar .
Who are you spending time with ? On what topics ?
Where are you traveling ? What are you reading ?
And then how are you distilling this into understanding potential discontinuities , and then making a decision to do something right now so that you 're prepared and ready ?
There 's a leadership team that does a practice where they bring together each member collecting , here are trends that impact me , here are trends that impact another team member , and they share these , and then make decisions , to course-correct a strategy or to anticipate a new move .
Great leaders are not head-down .
They see around corners , shaping their future , not just reacting to it .
The second question is , what is the diversity measure of your personal and professional stakeholder network ?
You know , we hear often about good ol ' boy networks and they 're certainly alive and well in many institutions .
But to some extent , we all have a network of people that we 're comfortable with .
So this question is about your capacity to develop relationships with people that are very different than you .
And those differences can be biological , physical , functional , political , cultural , socioeconomic .
And yet , despite all these differences , they connect with you and they trust you enough to cooperate with you in achieving a shared goal .
Great leaders understand that having a more diverse network is a source of pattern identification at greater levels and also of solutions , because you have people that are thinking differently than you are .
Third question : are you courageous enough to abandon a practice that has made you successful in the past ?
There 's an expression : Go along to get along .
But if you follow this advice , chances are as a leader , you 're going to keep doing what 's familiar and comfortable .
Great leaders dare to be different .
They don 't just talk about risk-taking , they actually do it .
And one of the leaders shared with me the fact that the most impactful development comes when you are able to build the emotional stamina to withstand people telling you that your new idea is naïve or reckless or just plain stupid .
Now interestingly , the people who will join you are not your usual suspects in your network .
They 're often people that think differently and therefore are willing to join you in taking a courageous leap .
And it 's a leap , not a step .
More than traditional leadership programs , answering these three questions will determine your effectiveness as a 21st-century leader .
So what makes a great leader in the 21st century ?
I 've met many , and they stand out .
They are women and men who are preparing themselves not for the comfortable predictability of yesterday but also for the realities of today and all of those unknown possibilities of tomorrow .
Thank you .
Mike deGruy : Hooked by an octopus
Underwater filmmaker Mike deGruy has spent decades looking intimately at the ocean . A consummate storyteller , he takes the stage at Mission Blue to share his awe and excitement -- and his fears -- about the blue heart of our planet .
I first became fascinated with octopus at an early age .
I grew up in Mobile , Alabama -- somebody 's got to be from Mobile , right ? -- and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers , forming this beautiful delta .
And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes , birds of every flavor .
It 's an absolute magical wonderland to live in -- if you 're a kid interested in animals , to grow up in .
And this delta water flows to Mobile Bay , and finally into the Gulf of Mexico .
And I remember my first real contact with octopus was probably at age five or six .
I was in the gulf , and I was swimming around and saw a little octopus on the bottom .
And I reached down and picked him up , and immediately became fascinated and impressed by its speed and its strength and agility .
It was prying my fingers apart and moving to the back of my hand .
It was all I could do to hold onto this amazing creature .
Then it sort of calmed down in the palms of my hands and started flashing colors , just pulsing all of these colors .
And as I looked at it , it kind of tucked its arms under it , raised into a spherical shape and turned chocolate brown with two white stripes .
I 'm going , " My gosh ! " I had never seen anything like this in my life !
So I marveled for a moment , and then decided it was time to release him , so I put him down .
The octopus left my hands and then did the damnedest thing : It landed on the bottom in the rubble and -- fwoosh ! -- vanished right before my eyes .
And I knew , right then , at age six , that is an animal that I want to learn more about . So I did .
And I went off to college and got a degree in marine zoology , and then moved to Hawaii and entered graduate school at the University of Hawaii .
And while a student at Hawaii , I worked at the Waikiki Aquarium .
And the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays , and being the spineless guy , I thought , well I 'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals I had been learning about as a student and bring them in , and I built these elaborate sets and put them on display .
Now , the fish in the tanks were gorgeous to look at , but they didn 't really interact with people .
But the octopus did .
If you walked up to an octopus tank , especially early in the morning before anyone arrived , the octopus would rise up and look at you and you 're thinking , " Is that guy really looking at me ? He is looking at me ! "
And you walk up to the front of the tank . Then you realize that these animals all have different personalities : Some of them would hold their ground , others would slink into the back of the tank and disappear in the rocks , and one in particular , this amazing animal ...
I went up to the front of the tank , and he 's just staring at me , and he had little horns come up above his eyes .
So I went right up to the front of the tank -- I was three or four inches from the front glass -- and the octopus was sitting on a perch , a little rock , and he came off the rock and he also came down right to the front of the glass .
So I was staring at this animal about six or seven inches away , and at that time I could actually focus that close ; now as I look at my fuzzy fingers I realize those days are long gone .
Anyway , there we were , staring at each other , and he reaches down and grabs an armful of gravel and releases it in the jet of water entering the tank from the filtration system , and -- chk chk chk chk chk ! -- this gravel hits the front of the glass and falls down .
He reaches up , takes another armful of gravel , releases it -- chk chk chk chk chk ! -- same thing .
Then he lifts another arm and I lift an arm .
Then he lifts another arm and I lift another arm .
And then I realize the octopus won the arms race , because I was out and he had six left .
But the only way I can describe what I was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing , which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate .
So , about three years into my degree , a funny thing happened on the way to the office , which actually changed the course of my life .
A man came into the aquarium . It 's a long story , but essentially he sent me and a couple of friends of mine to the South Pacific to collect animals for him , and as we left , he gave us two 16-millimeter movie cameras .
He said , " Make a movie about this expedition . "
" OK , a couple of biologists making a movie -- this 'll be interesting , " and off we went . And we did , we made a movie , which had to be the worst movie ever made in the history of movie making , but it was a blast . I had so much fun .
And I remember that proverbial light going off in my head , thinking , " Wait a minute .
Maybe I can do this all the time .
Yeah , I 'll be a filmmaker . "
So I literally came back from that job , quit school , hung my filmmaking shingle and just never told anyone that I didn 't know what I was doing .
It 's been a good ride .
And what I learned in school though was really beneficial .
If you 're a wildlife filmmaker and you 're going out into the field to film animals , especially behavior , it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are , how they work and , you know , a bit about their behaviors .
But where I really learned about octopus was in the field , as a filmmaker making films with them , where you 're allowed to spend large periods of time with the animals , seeing octopus being octopus in their ocean homes .
I remember I took a trip to Australia , went to an island called One Tree Island .
And apparently , evolution had occurred at a pretty rapid rate on One Tree , between the time they named it and the time I arrived , because I 'm sure there were at least three trees on that island when we were there .
Anyway , one tree is situated right next to a beautiful coral reef .
In fact , there 's a surge channel where the tide is moving back and forth , twice a day , pretty rapidly .
And there 's a beautiful reef , very complex reef , with lots of animals , including a lot of octopus .
And not uniquely but certainly , the octopus in Australia are masters at camouflage .
As a matter of fact , there 's one right there .
So our first challenge was to find these things , and that was a challenge , indeed .
But the idea is , we were there for a month and I wanted to acclimate the animals to us so that we could see behaviors without disturbing them .
So the first week was pretty much spent just getting as close as we could , every day a little closer , a little closer , a little closer .
And you knew what the limit was : they would start getting twitchy and you 'd back up , come back in a few hours .
And after the first week , they ignored us .
It was like , " I don 't know what that thing is , but he 's no threat to me . "
So they went on about their business and from a foot away , we 're watching mating and courting and fighting and it is just an unbelievable experience .
And one of the most fantastic displays that I remember , or at least visually , was a foraging behavior .
And they had a lot of different techniques that they would use for foraging , but this particular one used vision .
And they would see a coral head , maybe 10 feet away , and start moving over toward that coral head .
And I don 't know whether they actually saw crab in it , or imagined that one might be , but whatever the case , they would leap off the bottom and go through the water and land right on top of this coral head , and then the web between the arms would completely engulf the coral head , and they would fish out , swim for crabs .
And as soon as the crabs touched the arm , it was lights out .
And I always wondered what happened under that web .
So we created a way to find out , and I got my first look at that famous beak in action .
It was fantastic .
If you 're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals , you might as well pick one that 's fairly common .
And octopus are , they live in all the oceans .
They also live deep .
And I can 't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep , but whatever the case , I like that .
It 's like nothing you 've ever done .
If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen , and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen , get in a sub .
You climb in , seal the hatch , turn on a little oxygen , turn on the scrubber , which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe , and they chuck you overboard .
Down you go . There 's no connection to the surface apart from a pretty funky radio .
And as you go down , the washing machine at the surface calms down .
And it gets quiet .
And it starts getting really nice .
And as you go deeper , that lovely , blue water you were launched in gives way to darker and darker blue .
And finally , it 's a rich lavender , and after a couple of thousand feet , it 's ink black .
And now you 've entered the realm of the mid-water community .
You could give an entire talk about the creatures that live in the mid-water .
Suffice to say though , as far as I 'm concerned , without question , the most bizarre designs and outrageous behaviors are in the animals that live in the mid-water community .
But we 're just going to zip right past this area , this area that includes about 95 percent of the living space on our planet and go to the mid-ocean ridge , which I think is even more extraordinary .
The mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range , 40,000 miles long , snaking around the entire globe .
And they 're big mountains , thousands of feet tall , some of which are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface , creating islands like Hawaii .
And the top of this mountain range is splitting apart , creating a rift valley .
And when you dive into that rift valley , that 's where the action is because literally thousands of active volcanoes are going off at any point in time all along this 40,000 mile range .
And as these tectonic plates are spreading apart , magma , lava is coming up and filling those gaps , and you 're looking land -- new land -- being created right before your eyes .
And over the tops of them is 3,000 to 4,000 meters of water creating enormous pressure , forcing water down through the cracks toward the center of the earth , until it hits a magma chamber where it becomes superheated and supersaturated with minerals , reverses its flow and starts shooting back to the surface and is ejected out of the earth like a geyser at Yellowstone .
In fact , this whole area is like a Yellowstone National Park with all of the trimmings .
And this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees F.
The surrounding water is just a couple of degrees above freezing .
So it immediately cools , and it can no longer hold in suspension all of the material that it 's dissolved , and it precipitates out , forming black smoke .
And it forms these towers , these chimneys that are 10 , 20 , 30 feet tall .
And all along the sides of these chimneys is shimmering with heat and loaded with life .
You 've got black smokers going all over the place and chimneys that have tube worms that might be eight to 10 feet long .
And out of the tops of these tube worms are these beautiful red plumes .
And living amongst the tangle of tube worms is an entire community of animals : shrimp , fish , lobsters , crab , clams and swarms of arthropods that are playing that dangerous game between over here is scalding hot and freezing cold .
And this whole ecosystem wasn 't even known about until 33 years ago .
And it completely threw science on its head .
It made scientists rethink where life on Earth might have actually begun .
And before the discovery of these vents , all life on Earth , the key to life on Earth , was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis .
But down there , there is no sun , there is no photosynthesis ; it 's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it , and it 's all so ephemeral .
You might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent , which you think at the time has to be on another planet .
It 's amazing to think that this is actually on earth ; it looks like aliens in an alien environment .
But you go back to the same vent eight years later and it can be completely dead .
There 's no hot water .
All of the animals are gone , they 're dead , and the chimneys are still there creating a really nice ghost town , an eerie , spooky ghost town , but essentially devoid of animals , of course .
But 10 miles down the ridge ...
pshhh ! There 's another volcano going .
And there 's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed .
And this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge .
And that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community isn 't really different from some of the areas that I 've seen in 35 years of traveling around , making films .
Where you go and film a really nice sequence at a bay .
And you go back , and I 'm at home , and I 'm thinking , " Okay , what can I shoot ...
Ah ! I know where I can shoot that .
There 's this beautiful bay , lots of soft corals and stomatopods . "
And you show up , and it 's dead .
There 's no coral , algae growing on it , and the water 's pea soup .
You think , " Well , what happened ? "
And you turn around , and there 's a hillside behind you with a neighborhood going in , and bulldozers are pushing piles of soil back and forth .
And over here there 's a golf course going in .
And this is the tropics .
It 's raining like crazy here .
So this rainwater is flooding down the hillside , carrying with it sediments from the construction site , smothering the coral and killing it .
And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course -- the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals , fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom -- and there 's your pea soup .
But , encouragingly , I 've seen just the opposite .
I 've been to a place that was a pretty trashed bay .
And I looked at it , just said , " Yuck , " and go and work on the other side of the island .
Five years later , come back , and that same bay is now gorgeous . It 's beautiful .
It 's got living coral , fish all over the place , crystal clear water , and you go , " How did that happen ? "
Well , how it happened is the local community galvanized .
They recognized what was happening on the hillside and put a stop to it ; enacted laws and made permits required to do responsible construction and golf course maintenance and stopped the sediments flowing into the bay , and stopped the chemicals flowing into the bay , and the bay recovered .
The ocean has an amazing ability to recover , if we 'll just leave it alone .
I think Margaret Mead said it best .
She said that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world .
Indeed , it 's the only thing that ever has .
And a small group of thoughtful people changed that bay .
I 'm a big fan of grassroots organizations .
I 've been to a lot of lectures where , at the end of it , inevitably , one of the first questions that comes up is , " But , but what can I do ?
I 'm an individual . I 'm one person .
And these problems are so large and global , and it 's just overwhelming . "
Fair enough question .
My answer to that is don 't look at the big , overwhelming issues of the world .
Look in your own backyard .
Look in your heart , actually .
What do you really care about that isn 't right where you live ?
And fix it .
Create a healing zone in your neighborhood and encourage others to do the same .
And maybe these healing zones can sprinkle a map , little dots on a map .
And in fact , the way that we can communicate today -- where Alaska is instantly knowing what 's going on in China , and the Kiwis did this , and then over in England they tried to ...
and everybody is talking to everyone else -- it 's not isolated points on a map anymore , it 's a network we 've created .
And maybe these healing zones can start growing , and possibly even overlap , and good things can happen .
So that 's how I answer that question .
Look in your own backyard , in fact , look in the mirror .
What can you do that is more responsible than what you 're doing now ?
And do that , and spread the word .
The vent community animals can 't really do much about the life and death that 's going on where they live , but up here we can .
In theory , we 're thinking , rational human beings .
And we can make changes to our behavior that will influence and affect the environment , like those people changed the health of that bay .
Now , Sylvia 's TED Prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could , everything we could , to set aside not pin pricks , but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation , " hope spots , " she calls them .
And I applaud that . I loudly applaud that .
And it 's my hope that some of these " hope spots " can be in the deep ocean , an area that has historically been seriously neglected , if not abused .
The term " deep six " comes to mind : " If it 's too big or too toxic for a landfill , deep six it ! "
So , I hope that we can also keep some of these " hope spots " in the deep sea .
Now , I don 't get a wish , but I certainly can say that I will do anything I can to support Sylvia Earle 's wish .
And that I do .
Thank you very much .
Andy Hobsbawm : Do the green thing
Andy Hobsbawm shares a fresh ad campaign about going green -- and some of the fringe benefits .
Great creativity . In times of need , we need great creativity .
Discuss . Great creativity is astonishingly , absurdly , rationally , irrationally powerful .
Great creativity can spread tolerance , champion freedom , make education seem like a bright idea .
Great creativity can turn a spotlight on deprivation , or show that deprivation ain 't necessarily so .
Great creativity can make politicians electable , or parties unelectable .
It can make war seem like tragedy or farce .
Creativity is the meme-maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips .
It 's the pathfinder that shows us a simple road through an impenetrable moral maze .
Science is clever , but great creativity is something less knowable , more magical . And now we need that magic .
This is a time of need .
Our climate is changing quickly , too quickly .
And great creativity is needed to do what it does so well : to provoke us to think differently with dramatic creative statements .
To tempt us to act differently with delightful creative scraps .
Here is one such scrap from an initiative I 'm involved in using creativity to inspire people to be greener .
You know , rather than drive today , I 'm going to walk .
And so he walked , and as he walked he saw things .
Strange and wonderful things he would not otherwise have seen .
A deer with an itchy leg . A flying motorcycle .
A father and daughter separated from a bicycle by a mysterious wall .
And then he stopped . Walking in front of him was her .
The woman who as a child had skipped with him through fields and broken his heart .
Sure , she had aged a little .
In fact , she had aged a lot .
But he felt all his old passion for her return .
" Ford , " he called softly . For that was her name .
" Don 't say another word , Gusty , " she said , for that was his name .
" I know a tent next to a caravan , exactly 300 yards from here .
Let 's go there and make love . In the tent . "
Ford undressed . She spread one leg , and then the other .
Gusty entered her boldly and made love to her rhythmically while she filmed him , because she was a keen amateur pornographer .
The earth moved for both of them .
And they lived together happily ever after .
And all because he decided to walk that day .
Andy Hobsbawm : We 've got the science , we 've had the debate .
The moral imperative is on the table .
Great creativity is needed to take it all , make it simple and sharp .
To make it connect . To make it make people want to act .
So this is a call , a plea , to the incredibly talented TED community .
Let 's get creative against climate change .
And let 's do it soon . Thank you .
Sting : How I started writing songs again
Sting 's early life was dominated by a shipyard — and he dreamed of nothing more than escaping the industrial drudgery . But after a nasty bout of writer 's block that stretched on for years , Sting found himself channeling the stories of the shipyard workers he knew in his youth for song material . In a lyrical , confessional talk , Sting treats us to songs from his upcoming musical , and to an encore of " Message in a Bottle . "
It 's all there in gospels A Magdalene girl comes to pay her respects But her mind is awhirl When she finds the tomb empty Straw had been rolled Not a sign of a corpse In the dark and the cold When she reaches the door Sees an unholy sight There 's a solitary figure and a halo of light He just carries on floating past Calvary Hill In an Almighty hurry Aye , but she might catch him still Tell me where are you gone , Lord And why in such haste ? Oh don 't hinder me , woman I 've no time to waste For they 're launching a boat on the morrow at noon And I have to be there before daybreak Oh I cannot be missing The lads 'll expect me Why else would the Good Lord Himself resurrect me ? For nothing 'll stop me . I have to prevail Through the teeth of this tempest In the mouth of a gale May the angels protect me If all else should fail And the last ship sails Oh the roar of the chains And the cracking of timbers The noise at the end of the world in your ears As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea And the last ship sails So I was born and raised in the shadow of a shipyard in a little town on the northeast coast of England .
Some of my earliest memories are of giant ships blocking the end of my street , as well as the sun , for a lot of the year .
Every morning as a child , I 'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard .
I 'd watch those same men walking back home every night .
It has to be said , the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to , or indeed work in .
The shipyard was noisy , dangerous , highly toxic , with an appalling health and safety record .
Despite that , the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did , and justifiably so .
Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street .
My grandfather had been a shipwright , and as a child , as there were few other jobs in the town , I would wonder with some anxiety whether that would be my destiny too .
I was fairly determined that it wouldn 't be .
I had other dreams , not necessarily practical ones , but at the age of eight , I was bequeathed a guitar .
It was a battered old thing with five rusty strings , and was out of tune , but quickly I learned to play it and realized that I 'd found a friend for life , an accomplice , a co-conspirator in my plan to escape from this surreal industrial landscape .
Well , they say if you dream something hard enough , it will come to pass .
Either that , or I was extremely lucky , but this was my dream .
I dreamt I would leave this town , and just like those ships , once they were launched , I 'd never come back .
I dreamt I 'd become a writer of songs , that I would sing those songs to vast numbers of people all over the world , that I would be paid extravagant amounts of money , that I 'd become famous , that I 'd marry a beautiful woman , have children , raise a family , buy a big house in the country , keep dogs , grow wine , have rooms full of Grammy Awards , platinum discs , and what have you .
So far , so good , right ?
And then one day , the songs stopped coming , and while you 've suffered from periods of writer 's block before , albeit briefly , this is something chronic .
Day after day , you face a blank page , and nothing 's coming .
And those days turned to weeks , and weeks to months , and pretty soon those months have turned into years with very little to show for your efforts . No songs .
So you start asking yourself questions .
What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so ?
Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed ?
Or perhaps there 's a more -- a deeper psychological reason .
It was always a Faustian pact anyway .
You 're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts , your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others , for the analysis , the scrutiny of others , and perhaps you 've given enough of your privacy away .
And yet , if you look at your work , could it be argued that your best work wasn 't about you at all , it was about somebody else ?
Did your best work occur when you sidestepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story , but told someone else 's story , someone perhaps without a voice , where empathetically , you stood in his shoes for a while or saw the world through his eyes ?
Well they say , write what you know .
If you can 't write about yourself anymore , then who do you write about ?
So it 's ironic that the landscape I 'd worked so hard to escape from , and the community that I 'd more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape , the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse .
And as soon as I did that , as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story , that the songs started to come thick and fast .
I 've described it as a kind of projectile vomiting , a torrent of ideas , of characters , of voices , of verses , couplets , entire songs almost formed whole , materialized in front of me as if they 'd been bottled up inside me for many , many years .
One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I 'd known , and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama , where they explain who they are , what they do , their hopes and their fears for the future .
This is Jackie White .
He 's the foreman of the shipyard .
My name is Jackie White , and I 'm foreman of the yard , and you don 't mess with Jackie on this quayside .
I 'm as hard as iron plate , woe betide you if you 're late when we have to push a boat out on the spring tide .
Now you can die and hope for heaven , but you need to work your shift , and I 'd expect you all to back us to the hilt , for if St. Peter at his gate were to ask you why you 're late , why , you tell him that you had to get a ship built .
We build battleships and cruisers for Her Majesty the Queen , supertankers for Onassis , and all the classes in between , We built the greatest ship in tonnage what the world has ever seen And the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard Steel in the stockyard , iron in the soul Would conjure up a ship Where there used to be a hull And we don 't know what we 'll do If this yard gets sold For the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard So having decided to write about other people instead of myself , a further irony is that sometimes you reveal more about yourself than you 'd ever intended .
This song is called " Dead Man 's Boots , " which is an expression which describes how difficult it is to get a job ; in other words , you 'd only get a job in the shipyard if somebody else died .
Or perhaps your father could finagle you an apprenticeship at the age of 15 .
But sometimes a father 's love can be misconstrued as controlling , and conversely , the scope of his son 's ambition can seem like some pie-in-the-sky fantasy .
You see these work boots in my hands They 'll probably fit you now , my son Take them , they 're a gift from me Why don 't you try them on ? It would do your old man good to see You walking in these boots one day And take your place among the men Who work upon the slipway These dead man 's boots , though they 're old and curled When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world And it 's time for a man to put down roots And walk to the river in his old man 's boots He said , " I 'm dying , son , and asking That you do one final thing for me You 're barely but a sapling , and you think that you 're a tree If you need a seed to prosper You must first put down some roots Just one foot then the other in These dead man 's boots " These dead man 's boots , though they 're old and curled When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world And it 's time for a man to put down roots And walk to the river in his old man 's boots I said , " Why in the hell would I do that ? Why would I agree ? " When his hand was all that I 'd received As far as I remember It 's not as if he 'd spoiled me with his kindness Up to then , you see I 'd a plan of my own and I 'd quit this place When I came of age September These dead man 's boots know their way down the hill They could walk there themselves , and they probably will I 've plenty of choices , I 've plenty other routes And you 'll never see me walking in these dead man 's boots What was it made him think I 'd be happy ending up like him When he 'd hardly got two halfpennies left Or a broken pot to piss in ? He wanted this same thing for me Was that his final wish ? He said , " What the hell are you gonna do ? " I said , " Anything but this ! " These dead man 's boots know their way down the hill They can walk there themselves and they probably will But they won 't walk with me ' cause I 'm off the other way I 've had it up to here , I 'm gonna have my say When all you 've got left is that cross on the wall I want nothing from you , I want nothing at all Not a pension , nor a pittance , when your whole life is through Get this through your head , I 'm nothing like you I 'm done with all the arguments , there 'll be no more disputes And you 'll die before you see me in your dead man 's boots Thank you .
So whenever they 'd launch a big ship , they would invite some dignitary up from London on the train to make a speech , break a bottle of champagne over the bows , launch it down the slipway into the river and out to sea .
Occasionally on a really important ship , they 'd get a member of the royal family to come , Duke of Edinburgh , Princess Anne or somebody .
And you have to remember , it wasn 't that long ago that the royal family in England were considered to have magical healing powers .
Sick children were held up in crowds to try and touch the cloak of the king or the queen to cure them of some terrible disease .
It wasn 't like that in my day , but we still got very excited .
So it 's a launch day , it 's a Saturday , and my mother has dressed me up in my Sunday best .
I 'm not very happy with her .
All the kids are out in the street , and we have little Union Jacks to wave , and at the top of the hill , there 's a motorcycle cortege appears .
In the middle of the motorcycles , there 's a big , black Rolls-Royce .
Inside the Rolls-Royce is the Queen Mother .
This is a big deal .
So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street , and as it approaches my house , I start to wave my flag vigorously , and there is the Queen Mother .
I see her , and she seems to see me .
She acknowledges me . She waves , and she smiles .
And I wave my flag even more vigorously .
We 're having a moment , me and the Queen Mother .
She 's acknowledged me .
And then she 's gone .
Well , I wasn 't cured of anything .
It was the opposite , actually .
I was infected .
I was infected with an idea .
I don 't belong in this street .
I don 't want to live in that house .
I don 't want to end up in that shipyard .
I want to be in that car .
I want a bigger life .
I want a life beyond this town .
I want a life that 's out of the ordinary .
It 's my right .
It 's my right as much as hers .
And so here I am at TED , I suppose to tell that story , and I think it 's appropriate to say the obvious that there 's a symbiotic and intrinsic link between storytelling and community , between community and art , between community and science and technology , between community and economics .
It 's my belief that abstract economic theory that denies the needs of community or denies the contribution that community makes to economy is shortsighted , cruel and untenable .
The fact is , whether you 're a rock star or whether you 're a welder in a shipyard , or a tribesman in the upper Amazon , or the queen of England , at the end of the day , we 're all in the same boat .
Aye , the footmen are frantic in their indignation You see the queen 's took a taxi herself to the station Where the porters , surprised by her lack of royal baggage Bustle her and three corgis to the rear of the carriage For the train it is crammed with all Europe 's nobility And there 's none of them famous for their compatibility There 's a fight over seats " I beg pardon , Your Grace But you 'll find that one 's mine , so get back in your place ! " " Aye , but where are they going ? " All the porters debate " Why they 're going to Newcastle and they daren 't be late For they 're launching a boat on the Tyne at high tide And they 've come from all over , from far and from wide " There 's the old Dalai Lama And the pontiff of Rome Every palace in Europe , and there 's nay bugger home There 's the Duchess of Cornwall and the loyal Prince of Wales Looking crushed and uncomfortable in his top hat and tails Well , they haven 't got tickets Come now , it 's just a detail There was no time to purchase and one simply has to prevail For we 'll get to the shipyards or we 'll end up in jail ! When the last ship sails Oh the roar of the chains And the cracking of timbers The noise at the end of the world in your ears As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea And the last ship sails And whatever you 'd promised Whatever you 've done And whatever the station in life you 've become In the name of the Father , in the name of the Son And no matter the weave of this life that you 've spun On the Earth or in Heaven or under the Sun When the last ship sails Oh the roar of the chains And the cracking of timbers The noise at the end of the world in your ears As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea And the last ship sails Thanks very much for listening to my song .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Okay , you have to join in if you know it .
Just a castaway An island lost at sea , oh Another lonely day With no one here but me , oh More loneliness than any man could bear Rescue me before I fall into despair I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle Message in a bottle A year has passed since I wrote my note I should have known this right from the start Only hope can keep me together Love can mend your life but love can break your heart I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle Message in a bottle Message in a bottle Message in a bottle Walked out this morning I don 't believe what I saw A hundred billion bottles Washed up on the shore Seems I 'm not alone in being alone A hundred billion castaways Looking for a home I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I 'll send an S.O.S. to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle Message in a bottle Message in a bottle Message in a bottle So I 'm going to ask you to sing after me , okay , the next part .
It 's very easy . Sing in unison .
Here we go .
Sending out an S.O.S. Come on now .
Audience : Sending out an S.O.S. Sting : Sending out an S.O.S. Audience : Sending out an S.O.S. Sting : I 'm sending out an S.O.S. Audience : Sending out an S.O.S. Sting : Sending out an S.O.S. Audience : Sending out an S.O.S. Sting : Sending out Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S. Sending out an S.O.S. Yoooooooo Thank you , TED . Goodnight .
Hawa Abdi + Deqo Mohamed : Mother and daughter doctor-heroes
They 've been called the " saints of Somalia . " Doctor Hawa Abdi and her daughter Deqo Mohamed discuss their medical clinic in Somalia , where -- in the face of civil war and open oppression of women -- they 've built a hospital , a school and a community of peace .
Hawa Abdi : Many people -- 20 years for Somalia -- [ were ] fighting .
So there was no job , no food .
Children , most of them , became very malnourished , like this .
Deqo Mohamed : So as you know , always in a civil war , the ones affected most [ are ] the women and children .
So our patients are women and children .
And they are in our backyard .
It 's our home . We welcome them .
That 's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people , where 75 percent of them are women and children .
Pat Mitchell : And this is your hospital . This is the inside .
H We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help .
There is no government to protect them .
Every morning we have about 400 patients , maybe more or less .
But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses , and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them .
But we take the severe ones , and we reschedule the other ones the next day .
It is very tough .
And as you can see , it 's the women who are carrying the children ; it 's the women who come into the hospitals ; it 's the women [ are ] building the houses .
That 's their house .
And we have a school . This is our bright -- we opened [ in the ] last two years [ an ] elementary school where we have 850 children , and the majority are women and girls .
PM : And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic .
Would you explain the rules for admission ?
H The people who are coming to us , we are welcoming .
We are sharing with them whatever we have .
But there are only two rules .
First rule : there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society .
[ Whomever ] makes those things we throw out .
The second : no man can beat his wife .
If he beat , we will put [ him ] in jail , and we will call the eldest people .
Until they identify this case , we 'll never release him .
That 's our two rules .
The other thing that I have realized , that the woman is the most strong person all over the world .
Because the last 20 years , the Somali woman has stood up .
They were the leaders , and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations .
We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war .
We can reconcile .
We can do everything .
As my mother said , we are the future hope , and the men are only killing in Somalia .
So we came up with these two rules .
In a camp with 90,000 people , you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights .
So there is no clan division , and no man can beat his wife .
And we have a little storage room where we converted a jail .
So if you beat your wife , you 're going to be there .
So empowering the women and giving the opportunity -- we are there for them . They are not alone for this .
PM : You 're running a medical clinic .
It brought much , much needed medical care to people who wouldn 't get it .
You 're also running a civil society .
You 've created your own rules , in which women and children are getting a different sense of security .
Talk to me about your decision , Dr. Abdi , and your decision , Dr. Mohamed , to work together -- for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances .
H My age -- because I was born in 1947 -- we were having , at that time , government , law and order .
But one day , I went to the hospital -- my mother was sick -- and I saw the hospital , how they [ were ] treating the doctors , how they [ are ] committed to help the sick people .
I admired them , and I decided to become a doctor .
My mother died , unfortunately , when I was 12 years [ old ] .
Then my father allowed me to proceed [ with ] my hope .
My mother died in [ a ] gynecology complication , so I decided to become a gynecology specialist .
That 's why I became a doctor .
So Dr. Deqo has to explain .
For me , my mother was preparing [ me ] when I was a child to become a doctor , but I really didn 't want to .
Maybe I should become an historian , or maybe a reporter .
I loved it , but it didn 't work .
When the war broke out -- civil war -- I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help , and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children .
And I thought , maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist .
So I went to Russia , and my mother also , [ during the ] time of [ the ] Soviet Union .
So some of our character , maybe we will come with a strong Soviet background of training .
So that 's how I decided [ to do ] the same .
My sister was different .
She 's here . She 's also a doctor .
She graduated in Russia also .
And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war -- when I was 16 , and my sister was 11 , when the civil war broke out .
So it was the need and the people we saw in the early ' 90s -- that 's what made us go back and work for them .
PM : So what is the biggest challenge working , mother and daughter , in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations ?
H Yes , I was working in a tough situation , very dangerous .
And when I saw the people who needed me , I was staying with them to help , because I [ could ] do something for them .
Most people fled abroad .
But I remained with those people , and I was trying to do something -- [ any ] little thing I [ could ] do .
I succeeded in my place .
Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other , who are not fighting .
But we try to stand on our feet , to do something , little things , we can for our people .
And I 'm thankful for my daughters .
When they come to me , they help me to treat the people , to help .
They do everything for them .
They have done what I desire to do for them .
PM : What 's the best part of working with your mother , and the most challenging part for you ?
She 's very tough ; it 's most challenging .
She always expects us to do more .
And really when you think [ you ] cannot do it , she will push you , and I can do it .
That 's the best part .
She shows us , trains us how to do and how to be better [ people ] and how to do long hours in surgery -- 300 patients per day , 10 , 20 surgeries , and still you have to manage the camp -- that 's how she trains us .
It is not like beautiful offices here , 20 patients , you 're tired .
You see 300 patients , 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage .
PM : But you do it for good reasons .
Wait . Wait .
H Thank you .
Thank you .
H Thank you very much . Thank you very much .
Eduardo Paes : The 4 commandments of cities
Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro , a sprawling , complicated , beautiful city of 6.5 million . He shares four big ideas about leading Rio -- and all cities -- into the future , including bold infrastructure upgrades and how to make a city " smarter . "
It 's a great honor to be here .
It 's a great honor to be here talking about cities , talking about the future of cities .
It 's great to be here as a mayor .
I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people 's lives .
That 's the place to be .
And it 's great to be here as the mayor of Rio .
Rio 's a beautiful city , a vibrant place , special place .
Actually , you 're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world .
And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio .
And now , ladies and gentlemen , the envelope containing the result .
Jacques Rogge : I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro .
EP : Okay , that 's very touching , very emotional , but it was not easy to get there .
Actually it was a very hard challenge .
We had to beat the European monarchy .
This is Juan Carlos , king of Spain .
We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology .
We had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city .
So it was not easy at all .
And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid .
We really showed that , yes , we can .
And really , this is the reason I came here tonight .
I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done , that you don 't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way , that cities are a great challenge .
It 's a difficult task to deal with cities .
But with some original ways of getting things done , with some basic commandments , you can really get cities to be a great , great place to live .
I want you all to imagine Rio .
You probably think about a city full of energy , a vibrant city full of green .
And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year 's " Rio . "
Bird : This is incredible .
EP : Okay , some parts of Rio are pretty much like that , but it 's not like that everywhere .
We 're like every big city in the world .
We 've got lots of people , pollution , cars , concrete , lots of concrete .
These pictures I 'm showing here , they are some pictures from Madureira .
It 's like the heart of the suburb in Rio .
And I want to use an example of Rio that we 're doing in Madureira , in this region , to see what we should think as our first commandment .
So every time you see a concrete jungle like that , what you 've got to do is find open spaces .
If you don 't have open spaces , you 've got to go there and open spaces .
So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces .
This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year .
It 's going to be a place where people can meet , where you can put nature .
The temperature 's going to drop two , three degrees centigrade .
So the first commandment I want to leave you tonight is , a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly .
Every time you think of a city , you 've got to think green .
You 've got to think green and green .
So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you .
Let 's think that cities are made of people , lots of people together .
cities are packed with people .
So how do you move these people around ?
When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities -- by 2050 , it 's going to be 6 billion people .
So every time you think about moving these people around , you think about high-capacity transportation .
But there is a problem .
High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money .
So what I 'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that , a city in Brazil , Jaime Lerner .
And it 's something that we 're doing , again , lots in Rio .
It 's the BRT , the Bus Rapid Transit .
So you get a bus . It 's a simple bus that everybody knows .
You transform it inside as a train car .
You use separate lanes , dedicated lanes .
The contractors , they don 't like that .
You don 't have to dig deep down underground .
You can build nice stations .
This is actually a station that we 're doing in Rio .
Again , you don 't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that .
This station has the same comfort , the same features as a subway station .
A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway .
So spending much less money and doing it much faster , you can really change the way people move .
This is a map of Rio .
All the lines , the colored lines you see there , it 's our high-capacity transportation network .
In this present time today , we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation .
With the BRTs we 're doing , again , the cheapest and fastest way , we 're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation .
So remember what I said : You don 't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done .
You can find original ways to get things done .
So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is , a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people .
Moving to the third commandment .
And this is the most controversial one .
It has to do with the favelas , the slums -- whatever you call it , there are different names all over the world .
But the point we want to make here tonight is , favelas are not always a problem .
I mean , favelas can sometimes really be a solution , if you deal with them , if you put public policy inside the favelas .
Let me just show a map of Rio again .
Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants -- More than 20 percent , 1.4 million , live in the favelas .
All these red parts are favelas .
So you see , they are spread all over the city .
This is a typical view of a favela in Rio .
You see the contrast between the rich and poor .
So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas .
The first one is , you can change from what I call a [ vicious ] circle to a virtual circle .
But what you 've got to do to get that is you 've got to go inside the favelas , bring in the basic services -- mainly education and health -- with high quality .
I 'm going to give a fast example here .
This was an old building in a favela in Rio -- [ unclear favela name ] -- that we just transformed into a primary school , with high quality .
This is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela , again , with high quality .
We call it a family clinic .
So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality .
The second point I want to make about the favelas is , you 've got to open spaces in the favela .
Bring infrastructure to the favelas , to the slums , wherever you are .
Rio has the aim , by 2020 , to have all its favelas completely urbanized .
Another example , this was completely packed with houses , and then we built this , what we call , a knowledge square .
This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology .
We even built a theater there -- 3D movie .
And this is the kind of change you can get for that .
And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize , which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela .
So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is , a city of the future has to be socially integrated .
You cannot deal with a city if it 's not socially integrated .
But moving to our fourth commandment , I really wouldn 't be here tonight .
Between November and May , Rio 's completely packed .
We just had last week Carnivale .
It was great . It was lots of fun .
We have New Year 's Eve .
There 's like two million people on Copacabana Beach .
We have problems .
We fight floods , tropical rains at this time of the year .
You can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes .
We have problems with the tropical rains .
Almost every year we have these landslides , which are terrible .
But the reason I could come here is because of that .
This was something we did with IBM that 's a little bit more than a year old .
It 's what we call the Operations Center of Rio .
And I wanted to show that I can govern my city , using technology , from here , from Long Beach , so I got here last night and I know everything .
We 're going to speak now to the Operations Center .
This is Osorio , he 's our secretary of urban affairs .
So Osorio , good to be there with you .
I 've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year .
So how 's the weather in Rio now ?
Osorio : The weather is fine . We have fair weather today .
Let me get you our weather satellite radar .
You see just a little bit of moisture around the city .
Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather , today and in the next few days .
EP : Okay , how 's the traffic ?
We , at this time of year , get lots of traffic jams .
People get mad at the mayor . So how 's the traffic tonight ?
Osario : Well traffic tonight is fine .
Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses .
A live transmission in downtown Rio for you , Mr. Mayor .
You see , the streets are clear .
Now it 's 11 : 00 pm in Rio .
Nothing of concern in terms of traffic .
I 'll get to you now the incidents of the day .
We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon , but nothing of big concern .
We are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city .
EP : Okay , so you 're showing now some public services .
These are the cars .
Osorio : Absolutely , Mr. Mayor .
Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks .
This is live transmission .
We have GPS 's in all of our trucks .
And you can see them working in all parts of the city .
Waste collection on time .
Public services working well .
EP : Okay , Osorio , thank you very much .
It was great to have you here .
We 're going to move so that I can make a conclusion .
Okay , so no files , this place , no paperwork , no distance , 24 / 7 working .
So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is , a city of the future has to use technology to be present .
I don 't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city .
But everything that I said here tonight , or the commandments , are means , are ways , for us to govern cities -- invest in infrastructure , invest in the green , open parks , open spaces , integrate socially , use technology .
But at the end of the day , when we talk about cities , we talk about a gathering of people .
And we cannot see that as a problem .
That is fantastic .
If there 's 3.5 billion now , it 's going to be six billion then it 's going to be 10 billion .
That is great , that means we 're going to have 10 billion minds working together , 10 billion talents together .
So a city of the future , I really do believe that it 's a city that cares about its citizens , integrates socially its citizens .
A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party , which are cities .
Thank you very much .
Kevin Slavin : How algorithms shape our world
We live in a world run by algorithms , computer programs that make decisions or solve problems for us . In this riveting , funny talk , Kevin Slavin shows how modern algorithms determine stock prices , espionage tactics , even the movies you watch . But , he asks : If we depend on complex algorithms to manage our daily decisions -- when do we start to lose control ?
This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar , and it 's real , in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo .
But it 's also a fiction . There 's a lot of work that went into it after that .
And what he 's done is he 's actually reshaped , digitally , all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index .
So what you see , that precipice , that high precipice with the valley , is the 2008 financial crisis .
The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there .
I don 't know where we are now .
This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong .
And similar topography .
I wonder why .
And this is art . This is metaphor .
But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth , and it 's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math -- not just financial math , but math in general .
That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it -- the world around us and the world inside us .
And it 's specifically algorithms , which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff .
They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again , and they ossify and calcify , and they become real .
And I was thinking about this , of all places , on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago , because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary .
And I said , " So what were you doing ? "
And he said , " Well we were mostly breaking stealth . "
And I said , " That 's a good job . That 's interesting .
How does that work ? "
And to understand that , you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works .
And so -- this is an over-simplification -- but basically , it 's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky .
It 's not just going to disappear .
But if you can take this big , massive thing , and you could turn it into a million little things -- something like a flock of birds -- well then the radar that 's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky .
And if you 're a radar , that 's a really bad job .
And he said , " Yeah . " He said , " But that 's if you 're a radar .
So we didn 't use a radar ; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals , electronic communication .
And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication , we thought , ' Probably has something to do with the Americans . ' " And I said , " Yeah .
That 's good .
So you 've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research .
What 's your act two ?
What do you do when you grow up ? "
And he said , " Well , financial services . "
And I said , " Oh . "
Because those had been in the news lately .
And I said , " How does that work ? "
And he said , " Well there 's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now , and I 'm one of them . "
And I said , " What 's the black box for Wall Street ? "
And he said , " It 's funny you ask that , because it 's actually called black box trading .
And it 's also sometimes called algo trading , algorithmic trading . "
And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had , which is that they 're moving these positions -- whether it 's Proctor & amp ; Gamble or Accenture , whatever -- they 're moving a million shares of something through the market .
And if they do that all at once , it 's like playing poker and going all in right away .
You just tip your hand .
And so they have to find a way -- and they use algorithms to do this -- to break up that big thing into a million little transactions .
And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what 's actually happening in the market .
So if you need to have some image of what 's happening in the stock market right now , what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide , and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act .
And all of that 's great , and it 's fine .
And that 's 70 percent of the United States stock market , 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension , your mortgage .
And what could go wrong ?
What could go wrong is that a year ago , nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes , and they called it the Flash Crash of 2 : 45 .
All of a sudden , nine percent just goes away , and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it , nobody asked for it .
Nobody had any control over what was actually happening .
All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said , " Stop . "
And that 's the thing , is that we 're writing things , we 're writing these things that we can no longer read .
And we 've rendered something illegible , and we 've lost the sense of what 's actually happening in this world that we 've made .
And we 're starting to make our way .
There 's a company in Boston called Nanex , and they use math and magic and I don 't know what , and they reach into all the market data and they find , actually sometimes , some of these algorithms .
And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies .
And they do what we 've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don 't understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story .
So this is one that they found , they called the Knife , the Carnival , the Boston Shuffler , Twilight .
And the gag is that , of course , these aren 't just running through the market .
You can find these kinds of things wherever you look , once you learn how to look for them .
You can find it here : this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon .
You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars .
It 's out of print -- still ...
If you had bought it at 1.7 , it would have been a bargain .
A few hours later , it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars , plus shipping and handling .
And the question is : Nobody was buying or selling anything ; what was happening ?
And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street .
And when you see this kind of behavior , what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict , algorithms locked in loops with each other , without any human oversight , without any adult supervision to say , " Actually , 1.7 million is plenty . "
And as with Amazon , so it is with Netflix .
And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years .
They started with Cinematch , and they 've tried a bunch of others -- there 's Dinosaur Planet ; there 's Gravity .
They 're using Pragmatic Chaos now .
Pragmatic Chaos is , like all of Netflix algorithms , trying to do the same thing .
It 's trying to get a grasp on you , on the firmware inside the human skull , so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next -- which is a very , very difficult problem .
But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don 't really quite have it down , it doesn 't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has .
Pragmatic Chaos , like all Netflix algorithms , determines , in the end , 60 percent of what movies end up being rented .
So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies .
But what if you could rate those movies before they get made ?
Wouldn 't that be handy ?
Well , a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood , and they have " story algorithms " -- a company called Epagogix .
And you can run your script through there , and they can tell you , quantifiably , that that 's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie .
And the thing is , is that this isn 't Google .
This isn 't information .
These aren 't financial stats ; this is culture .
And what you see here , or what you don 't really see normally , is that these are the physics of culture .
And if these algorithms , like the algorithms on Wall Street , just crashed one day and went awry , how would we know ?
What would it look like ?
And they 're in your house . They 're in your house .
These are two algorithms competing for your living room .
These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means .
And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them , and they 're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom .
And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched .
It 's super-real and it 's happening around you .
You feel it most when you 're in a sealed metal box , a new-style elevator ; they 're called destination-control elevators .
These are the ones where you have to press what floor you 're going to go to before you get in the elevator .
And it uses what 's called a bin-packing algorithm .
So none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want .
Everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two , and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five .
And the problem with that is that people freak out .
People panic .
And you see why . You see why .
It 's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation , like the buttons .
Like the things that people use .
All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says , " Stop . "
And this is what we 're designing for .
We 're designing for this machine dialect .
And how far can you take that ? How far can you take it ?
You can take it really , really far .
So let me take it back to Wall Street .
Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else , which is speed .
And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds .
And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are , it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse .
But if you 're a Wall Street algorithm and you 're five microseconds behind , you 're a loser .
So if you were an algorithm , you 'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper -- throwing out all the furniture , all the infrastructure for human use , and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in -- all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet .
And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system .
And of course , it is , but it 's distributed from places .
In New York , this is where it 's distributed from : the Carrier Hotel located on Hudson Street .
And this is really where the wires come right up into the city .
And the reality is that the further away you are from that , you 're a few microseconds behind every time .
These guys down on Wall Street , Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation , they 're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel .
And that 's going to keep happening .
We 're going to keep hollowing them out , because you , inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar , none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could .
But if you zoom out , if you zoom out , you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that 's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks .
This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse -- just for these algorithms , just for the Carnival and the Knife .
And when you think about this , that we 're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster , all for a communications framework that no human will ever know , that 's a kind of manifest destiny ; and we 'll always look for a new frontier .
Unfortunately , we have our work cut out for us .
This is just theoretical .
This is some mathematicians at MIT .
And the truth is I don 't really understand a lot of what they 're talking about .
It involves light cones and quantum entanglement , and I don 't really understand any of that .
But I can read this map , and what this map says is that , if you 're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are , that 's where people are , where the cities are , you 're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively .
And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean .
So that 's what we 'll do : we 'll build bubbles or something , or platforms .
We 'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air , because it 's a bright future if you 're an algorithm .
And it 's not the money that 's so interesting actually .
It 's what the money motivates , that we 're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency .
And in that light , you go back and you look at Michael Najjar 's photographs , and you realize that they 're not metaphor , they 're prophecy .
They 're prophecy for the kind of seismic , terrestrial effects of the math that we 're making .
And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird , uneasy collaboration between nature and man .
But now there 's this third co-evolutionary force : algorithms -- the Boston Shuffler , the Carnival .
And we will have to understand those as nature , and in a way , they are .
Thank you .
JP Rangaswami : Information is food
How do we consume data ? At TED @ SXSWi , technologist JP Rangaswami muses on our relationship to information , and offers a surprising and sharp insight : we treat it like food .
I love my food .
And I love information .
My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other .
But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed , the point in my life when the two passions merged , the journey of learning that took place from that point .
And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food ?
I was born in Calcutta -- a family where my father and his father before him were journalists , and they wrote magazines in the English language .
That was the family business .
And as a result of that , I grew up with books everywhere around the house .
And I mean books everywhere around the house .
And that 's actually a shop in Calcutta , but it 's a place where we like our books .
In fact , I 've got 38,000 of them now and no Kindle in sight .
But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere , with people to talk to about those books , this wasn 't a sort of slightly learned thing .
By the time I was 18 , I had a deep passion for books .
It wasn 't the only passion I had .
I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal .
And two of the things about Bengal : they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets .
So by the time I grew up , again , I had a well-established passion for food .
Now I was growing up in the late ' 60s and early ' 70s , but these two were the ones that differentiated me .
And then life was fine , dandy .
Everything was okay , until I got to about the age of 26 , and I went to a movie called " Short Circuit . "
Oh , some of you have seen it .
And apparently it 's being remade right now and it 's going to be coming out next year .
It 's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life .
And as it ran , this thing was saying , " Give me input . Give me input . "
And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing .
Energy came to it in some form or shape , data came to it in some form or shape .
And I began to think , I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input -- as if food and information were similar in some form or shape .
I started doing some research then , and this was the 25-year journey , and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains .
And as I went to research that even further , I got to a point where I discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis .
That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static .
What changed was the balance of the tissues available .
And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue .
And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995 .
It 's a lady named Leslie Aiello .
And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other .
If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large , you had to live with a smaller gut .
That then set me off completely to say , Okay , these two are connected .
So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said , So we were hunter-gathers of information .
We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information .
Does that really explain what we 're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays ?
Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted , and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it , create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement .
So there was always going to be a tension within that .
And everything I saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodies between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers .
And this is happening here .
When I moved to preparation , this same thing was true , expect that there were two schools .
One group of people said you can distill your information , you can extract value , separate it and serve it up , while another group turned around and said no , no you can ferment it .
You bring it all together and mash it up and the value emerges that way .
The same is again true with information .
But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable .
Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this .
They 'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients .
Do you cook it ? Do you have it served to you ?
Do you go to a restaurant ?
The same is true every time as I started thinking about information .
The analogies were getting crazy -- that information had sell-by dates , that people had misused information that wasn 't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market , on corporate values , etc .
And by this time I was hooked .
And this is about 23 years into this process .
And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction , docu-dramas , mockumentaries , whatever you call it .
Are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it ?
We start labeling information for the fact percentage ?
Are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off , as a famine ?
Which brings me to the final element of this .
Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload , there is only filter failure .
I put it to you that information , if viewed from the point of food , is never a production issue ; you never speak of food overload .
Fundamentally it 's a consumption issue .
And we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves , exercise within ourselves , to have the faculties to be able to deal with information , to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly .
In fact , when I saw " Supersize Me , " I starting thinking of saying , What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News ?
Would there be time to be able to work with it ?
So you start really understanding that you can have diseases , toxins , a need to balance your diet , and once you start looking , and from that point on , everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information , the production of information , the preparation of information , I 've looked at from the viewpoint of food .
It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides .
But I 'd like to leave you with just that question : If you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food , what would you do differently ?
Thank you very much for your time .
Gary Slutkin : Let 's treat violence like a contagious disease
Physician Gary Slutkin spent a decade fighting tuberculosis , cholera and AIDS epidemics in Africa . When he returned to the United States , he thought he 'd escape brutal epidemic deaths . But then he began to look more carefully at gun violence , noting that its spread followed the patterns of infectious diseases . A mind-flipping look at a problem that too many communities have accepted as a given . We 've reversed the impact of so many diseases , says Slutkin , and we can do the same with violence .
I 'm a physician trained in infectious diseases , and following my training , I moved to Somalia from San Francisco .
And my goodbye greeting from the chief of infectious diseases at San Francisco General was , " Gary , this is the biggest mistake you 'll ever make . "
But I landed in a refugee situation that had a million refugees in 40 camps , and there were six of us doctors .
There were many epidemics there .
My responsibilities were largely related to tuberculosis , and then we got struck by an epidemic of cholera .
So it was the spread of tuberculosis and the spread of cholera that I was responsible for inhibiting .
And in order to do this work , we , of course , because of the limitation in health workers , had to recruit refugees to be a specialized new category of health worker .
Following three years of work in Somalia , I got picked up by the World Health Organization , and got assigned to the epidemics of AIDS .
My primary responsibility was Uganda , but also I worked in Rwanda and Burundi and Zaire , now Congo , Tanzania , Malawi , and several other countries .
And my last assignment there was to run a unit called intervention development , which was responsible for designing interventions .
After 10 years of working overseas , I was exhausted .
I really had very little left .
I had been traveling to one country after another .
I was emotionally feeling very isolated .
I wanted to come home .
I 'd seen a lot of death , in particular epidemic death , and epidemic death has a different feel to it .
It 's full of panic and fear , and I 'd heard the women wailing and crying in the desert .
And I wanted to come home and take a break and maybe start over .
I was not aware of any epidemic problems in America .
In fact , I wasn 't aware of any problems in America .
In fact -- seriously .
And in fact I would visit friends of mine , and I noticed that they had water that came right into their homes .
How many of you have such a situation ?
And some of them , many of them actually , had water that came into more than one room .
And I noticed that they would move this little thermoregulatory device to change the temperature in their home by one degree or two degrees .
And now I do that .
And I really didn 't know what I would do , but friends of mine began telling me about children shooting other children with guns .
And I asked the question , what are you doing about it ?
What are you in America doing about it ?
And there were two essential explanations or ideas that were prevalent .
And one was punishment .
And this I had heard about before .
We who had worked in behavior knew that punishment was something that was discussed but also that it was highly overvalued .
It was not a main driver of behavior , nor was it a main driver of behavior change .
And besides that , it reminded me of ancient epidemics that were previously completely misunderstood because the science hadn 't been there before , epidemics of plague or typhus or leprosy , where the prevalent ideas were that there were bad people or bad humors or bad air , and widows were dragged around the moat , and dungeons were part of the solution .
The other explanation or , in a way , the solution suggested , is please fix all of these things : the schools , the community , the homes , the families , everything .
And I 'd heard this before as well .
I 'd called this the " everything " theory , or EOE : Everything On Earth .
But we 'd also realized in treating other processes and problems that sometimes you don 't need to treat everything .
And so the sense that I had was there was a giant gap here .
The problem of violence was stuck , and this has historically been the case in many other issues .
Diarrheal diseases had been stuck .
Malaria had been stuck .
Frequently , a strategy has to be rethought .
It 's not as if I had any idea what it would look like , but there was a sense that we would have to do something with new categories of workers and something having to do with behavior change and something having to do with public education .
But I began to ask questions and search out the usual things that I had been exploring before , like , what do the maps look like ?
What do the graphs look like ?
What does the data look like ?
And the maps of violence in most U.S. cities looked like this .
There was clustering .
This reminded me of clustering that we 'd seen also in infectious epidemics , for example cholera .
And then we looked at the maps , and the maps showed this typical wave upon wave upon wave , because all epidemics are combinations of many epidemics .
And it also looked like infectious epidemics .
And then we asked the question , well what really predicts a case of violence ?
And it turns out that the greatest predictor of a case of violence is a preceding case of violence .
Which also sounds like , if there is a case of flu , someone gave someone a case of flu , or a cold , or the greatest risk factor of tuberculosis is having been exposed to tuberculosis .
And so we see that violence is , in a way , behaving like a contagious disease .
We 're aware of this anyway even in our common experiences or our newspaper stories of the spread of violence from fights or in gang wars or in civil wars or even in genocides .
And so there 's good news about this , though , because there 's a way to reverse epidemics , and there 's really only three things that are done to reverse epidemics , and the first of it is interrupting transmission .
In order to interrupt transmission , you need to detect and find first cases .
In other words , for T.B. you have to find somebody who has active T.B. who is infecting other people .
Make sense ?
And there 's special workers for doing that .
For this particular problem , we designed a new category of worker who , like a SARS worker or someone looking for bird flu , might find first cases .
In this case , it 's someone who 's very angry because someone looked at his girlfriend or owes him money , and you can find workers and train them into these specialized categories .
And the second thing to do , of course , is to prevent further spread , that means to find who else has been exposed , but may not be spreading so much right now like someone with a smaller case of T.B. , or someone who is just hanging out in the neighborhoods , but in the same group , and then they need to be , in a way , managed as well , particular to the specific disease process .
And then the third part , the shifting the norms , and that means a whole bunch of community activities , remodeling , public education , and then you 've got what you might call group immunity .
And that combination of factors is how the AIDS epidemic in Uganda was very successfully reversed .
And so what we decided to do in the year 2000 is kind of put this together in a way by hiring in new categories of workers , the first being violence interruptors .
And then we would put all of this into place in one neighborhood in what was the worst police district in the United States at the time .
So violence interruptors hired from the same group , credibility , trust , access , just like the health workers in Somalia , but designed for a different category , and trained in persuasion , cooling people down , buying time , reframing .
And then another category of worker , the outreach workers , to keep people in a way on therapy for six to 24 months .
Just like T.B. , but the object is behavior change .
And then a bunch of community activities for changing norms .
Now our first experiment of this resulted in a 67-percent drop in shootings and killings in the West Garfield neighborhood of Chicago .
And this was a beautiful thing for the neighborhood itself , first 50 or 60 days , then 90 days , and then there was unfortunately another shooting in another 90 days , and the moms were hanging out in the afternoon .
They were using parks they weren 't using before .
The sun was out . Everybody was happy .
But of course , the funders said , " Wait a second , do it again . "
And so we had to then , fortunately , get the funds to repeat this experience , and this is one of the next four neighborhoods that had a 45-percent drop in shootings and killings .
And since that time , this has been replicated 20 times .
There have been independent evaluations supported by the Justice Department and by the CDC and performed by Johns Hopkins that have shown 30-to-50-percent and 40-to-70-percent reductions in shootings and killings using this new method .
In fact , there have been three independent evaluations of this now .
Now we 've gotten a lot of attention as a result of this , including being featured on The New York Times ' Sunday magazine cover story .
The Economist in 2009 said this is " the approach that will come to prominence . "
And even a movie was made around our work .
[ The Interrupters ] However , not so fast , because a lot of people did not agree with this way of going about it .
We got a lot of criticism , a lot of opposition , and a lot of opponents .
In other words , what do you mean , health problem ?
What do you mean , epidemic ?
What do you mean , no bad guys ?
And there 's whole industries designed for managing bad people .
What do you mean , hiring people who have backgrounds ?
My business friends said , " Gary , you 're being criticized tremendously .
You must be doing something right . "
My musician friends added the word " dude . "
So anyway , additionally , there was still this problem , and we were getting highly criticized as well for not dealing with all of these other problems .
Yet we were able to manage malaria and reduce HIV and reduce diarrheal diseases in places with awful economies without healing the economy .
So what 's actually happened is , although there is still some opposition , the movement is clearly growing .
Many of the major cities in the U.S. , including New York City and Baltimore and Kansas City , their health departments are running this now .
Chicago and New Orleans , the health departments are having a very large role in this .
This is being embraced more by law enforcement than it had been years ago .
Trauma centers and hospitals are doing their part in stepping up .
And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed not only the approach but the specific model .
Where there 's really been uptake even faster is in the international environment , where there 's a 55-percent drop in the first neighborhood in Puerto Rico , where interruptions are just beginning in Honduras , where the strategy has been applied in Kenya for the recent elections , and where there have been 500 interruptions in Iraq .
So violence is responding as a disease even as it behaves as a disease .
So the theory , in a way , is kind of being validated by the treatment .
And recently , the Institute of Medicine came out with a workshop report which went through some of the data , including the neuroscience , on how this problem is really transmitted .
So I think this is good news , because it allows us an opportunity to come out of the Middle Ages , which is where I feel this field has been .
It gives us an opportunity to consider the possibility of replacing some of these prisons with playgrounds or parks , and to consider the possibility of converting our neighborhoods into neighborhoods , and to allow there to be a new strategy , a new set of methods , a new set of workers : science , in a way , replacing morality .
And moving away from emotions is the most important part of the solution to science as a more important part of the solution .
So I didn 't mean to come up with this at all .
It was a matter of , I wanted actually a break , and we looked at maps , we looked at graphs , we asked some questions and tried some tools that actually have been used many times before for other things .
For myself , I tried to get away from infectious diseases , and I didn 't .
Thank you .
Jakob Trollback : A new kind of music video
What would a music video look like if it were directed by the music , purely as an expression of a great song , rather than driven by a filmmaker 's concept ? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form .
I 'm working a lot with motion and animation , and also I 'm an old DJ and a musician .
So , music videos are something that I always found interesting , but they always seem to be so reactive .
So I was thinking , can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it ?
So with two designers , Tolga and Christina , at my office , we took a track -- many of you probably know it . It 's about 25 years old , and it 's David Byrne and Brian Eno -- and we did this little animation .
And I think that it 's maybe interesting , also , that it deals with two problematic issues , which are rising waters and religion .
Song : Before God destroyed the people on the Earth , he warned Noah to build an Ark .
And after Noah built his Ark , I believe he told Noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them .
And when Noah had done built his Ark , I understand that somebody began to rend a song .
And the song began to move on I understand like this .
And when Noah had done built his Ark ...
Move on ... In fact ... Concern ...
So they get tired , has come dark and rain ; they get weary and tired .
And then he went and knocked an old lady house .
And old lady ran to the door and say , " Who is it ? "
Jack say , " Me , Mama-san , could we spend the night here ?
Because we 're far from home , we 're very tired . "
And the old lady said , " Oh yes , come on in . "
It was come dark and rain , will make you weary and tired .
Jason Clay : How big brands can help save biodiversity
Convince just 100 key companies to go sustainable , and WWF 's Jason Clay says global markets will shift to protect the planet our consumption has already outgrown . Hear how his extraordinary roundtables are getting big brand rivals to agree on green practices first -- before their products duke it out on store shelves .
I grew up on a small farm in Missouri .
We lived on less than a dollar a day for about 15 years .
I got a scholarship , went to university , studied international agriculture , studied anthropology , and decided I was going to give back .
I was going to work with small farmers .
I was going to help alleviate poverty .
I was going to work on international development , and then I took a turn and ended up here .
Now , if you get a Ph.D. , and you decide not to teach , you don 't always end up in a place like this .
It 's a choice . You might end up driving a taxicab .
You could be in New York .
What I found was , I started working with refugees and famine victims -- small farmers , all , or nearly all -- who had been dispossessed and displaced .
Now , what I 'd been trained to do was methodological research on such people .
So I did it : I found out how many women had been raped en route to these camps .
I found out how many people had been put in jail , how many family members had been killed .
I assessed how long they were going to stay and how much it would take to feed them .
And I got really good at predicting how many body bags you would need for the people who were going to die in these camps .
Now this is God 's work , but it 's not my work .
It 's not the work I set out to do .
So I was at a Grateful Dead benefit concert on the rainforests in 1988 .
I met a guy -- the guy on the left .
His name was Ben .
He said , " What can I do to save the rainforests ? "
I said , " Well , Ben , what do you do ? "
" I make ice cream . "
So I said , " Well , you 've got to make a rainforest ice cream .
And you 've got to use nuts from the rainforests to show that forests are worth more as forests than they are as pasture . "
He said , " Okay . "
Within a year , Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves .
It was a great success .
We did our first million-dollars-worth of trade by buying on 30 days and selling on 21 .
That gets your adrenaline going .
Then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit because we were credit-worthy at that point .
We had 15 to 20 , maybe 22 percent of the global Brazil-nut market .
We paid two to three times more than anybody else .
Everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of Brazil nuts because we would buy it otherwise .
A great success .
50 companies signed up , 200 products came out , generated 100 million in sales .
It failed .
Why did it fail ?
Because the people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren 't the same people who were cutting the forests .
And the people who made money from Brazil nuts were not the people who made money from cutting the forests .
We were attacking the wrong driver .
We needed to be working on beef .
We needed to be working on lumber .
We needed to be working on soy -- things that we were not focused on .
So let 's go back to Sudan .
I often talk to refugees : " Why was it that the West didn 't realize that famines are caused by policies and politics , not by weather ? "
And this farmer said to me , one day , something that was very profound .
He said , " You can 't wake a person who 's pretending to sleep . "
Okay . Fast forward .
We live on a planet .
There 's just one of them .
We 've got to wake up to the fact that we don 't have any more and that this is a finite planet .
We know the limits of the resources we have .
We may be able to use them differently .
We may have some innovative , new ideas .
But in general , this is what we 've got .
There 's a basic equation that we can 't get away from .
Population times consumption has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet , and right now , it 's a simple " not equal . "
Our work shows that we 're living at about 1.3 planets .
Since 1990 , we crossed the line of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet .
Now we 're at 1.3 .
If we were farmers , we 'd be eating our seed .
For bankers , we 'd be living off the principal , not the interest .
This is where we stand today .
A lot of people like to point to some place else as the cause of the problem .
It 's always population growth .
Population growth 's important , but it 's also about how much each person consumes .
So when the average American consumes 43 times as much as the average African , we 've got to think that consumption is an issue .
It 's not just about population , and it 's not just about them ; it 's about us .
But it 's not just about people ; it 's about lifestyles .
There 's very good evidence -- again , we don 't necessarily have a peer-reviewed methodology that 's bulletproof yet -- but there 's very good evidence that the average cat in Europe has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime than the average African .
You think that 's not an issue going forward ?
You think that 's not a question as to how we should be using the Earth 's resources ?
Let 's go back and visit our equation .
In 2000 , we had six billion people on the planet .
They were consuming what they were consuming -- let 's say one unit of consumption each .
We have six billion units of consumption .
By 2050 , we 're going to have nine billion people -- all the scientists agree .
They 're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do -- scientists , again , agree -- because income is going to grow in developing countries five times what it is today -- on global average , about [ 2.9 ] .
So we 're going to have 18 billion units of consumption .
Who have you heard talking lately that 's said we have to triple production of goods and services ?
But that 's what the math says .
We 're not going to be able to do that .
We can get productivity up .
We can get efficiency up .
But we 've also got to get consumption down .
We need to use less to make more .
And then we need to use less again .
And then we need to consume less .
All of those things are part of that equation .
But it basically raises a fundamental question : should consumers have a choice about sustainability , about sustainable products ?
Should you be able to buy a product that 's sustainable sitting next to one that isn 't , or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable ?
If they should all be sustainable on a finite planet , how do you make that happen ?
The average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the U.S.
Okay , so let 's be generous .
Let 's say it 's 3.5 seconds in Europe .
How do you evaluate all the scientific data around a product , the data that 's changing on a weekly , if not a daily , basis ?
How do you get informed ?
You don 't .
Here 's a little question .
From a greenhouse gas perspective , is lamb produced in the U.K.
better than lamb produced in New Zealand , frozen and shipped to the U.K. ?
Is a bad feeder lot operation for beef better or worse than a bad grazing operation for beef ?
Do organic potatoes actually have fewer toxic chemicals used to produce them than conventional potatoes ?
In every single case , the answer is " it depends . "
It depends on who produced it and how , in every single instance .
And there are many others .
How is a consumer going to walk through this minefield ?
They 're not .
They may have a lot of opinions about it , but they 're not going to be terribly informed .
Sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue .
It 's got to be something we all care about .
And we need collusion .
We need groups to work together that never have .
We need Cargill to work with Bunge .
We need Coke to work with Pepsi .
We need Oxford to work with Cambridge .
We need Greenpeace to work with WWF .
Everybody 's got to work together -- China and the U.S.
We need to begin to manage this planet as if our life depended on it , because it does , it fundamentally does .
But we can 't do everything .
Even if we get everybody working on it , we 've got to be strategic .
We need to focus on the where , the what and the who .
So , the where : We 've identified 35 places globally that we need to work .
These are the places that are the richest in biodiversity and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view .
We have to work in these places .
We have to save these places if we want a chance in hell of preserving biodiversity as we know it .
We looked at the threats to these places .
These are the 15 commodities that fundamentally pose the biggest threats to these places because of deforestation , soil loss , water use , pesticide use , over-fishing , etc .
So we 've got 35 places , we 've got 15 priority commodities , who do we work with to change the way those commodities are produced ?
Are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers ?
Let 's see , that 's about 7,000 languages , 350 major languages -- a lot of work there .
I don 't see anybody actually being able to do that very effectively .
Are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers ?
Again , a daunting task .
There must be a better way .
300 to 500 companies control 70 percent or more of the trade of each of the 15 commodities that we 've identified as the most significant .
If we work with those , if we change those companies and the way they do business , then the rest will happen automatically .
So , we went through our 15 commodities .
This is nine of them .
We lined them up side-by-side , and we put the names of the companies that work on each of those .
And if you go through the first 25 or 30 names of each of the commodities , what you begin to see is , gosh , there 's Cargill here , there 's Cargill there , there 's Cargill everywhere .
In fact , these names start coming up over and over again .
So we did the analysis again a slightly different way .
We said : if we take the top hundred companies , what percentage of all 15 commodities do they touch , buy or sell ?
And what we found is it 's 25 percent .
So 100 companies control 25 percent of the trade of all 15 of the most significant commodities on the planet .
We can get our arms around a hundred companies .
A hundred companies , we can work with .
Why is 25 percent important ?
Because if these companies demand sustainable products , they 'll pull 40 to 50 percent of production .
Companies can push producers faster than consumers can .
By companies asking for this , we can leverage production so much faster than by waiting for consumers to do it .
After 40 years , the global organic movement has achieved 0.7 of one percent of global food .
We can 't wait that long .
We don 't have that kind of time .
We need change that 's going to accelerate .
Even working with individual companies is not probably going to get us there .
We need to begin to work with industries .
So we 've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain , from producers all the way to the retailers and brands .
We bring in civil society , we bring in NGOs , we bring in researchers and scientists to have an informed discussion -- sometimes a battle royale -- to figure out what are the key impacts of these products , what is a global benchmark , what 's an acceptable impact , and design standards around that .
It 's not all fun and games .
In salmon aquaculture , we kicked off a roundtable almost six years ago .
Eight entities came to the table .
We eventually got , I think , 60 percent of global production at the table and 25 percent of demand at the table .
Three of the original eight entities were suing each other .
And yet , next week , we launch globally verified , vetted and certified standards for salmon aquaculture .
It can happen .
So what brings the different entities to the table ?
It 's risk and demand .
For the big companies , it 's reputational risk , but more importantly , they don 't care what the price of commodities is .
If they don 't have commodities , they don 't have a business .
They care about availability , so the big risk for them is not having product at all .
For the producers , if a buyer wants to buy something produced a certain way , that 's what brings them to the table .
So it 's the demand that brings them to the table .
The good news is we identified a hundred companies two years ago .
In the last 18 months , we 've signed agreements with 40 of those hundred companies to begin to work with them on their supply chain .
And in the next 18 months , we will have signed up to work with another 40 , and we think we 'll get those signed as well .
Now what we 're doing is bringing the CEOs of these 80 companies together to help twist the arms of the final 20 , to bring them to the table , because they don 't like NGOs , they 've never worked with NGOs , they 're concerned about this , they 're concerned about that , but we all need to be in this together .
So we 're pulling out all the stops .
We 're using whatever leverage we have to bring them to the table .
One company we 're working with that 's begun -- in baby steps , perhaps -- but has begun this journey on sustainability is Cargill .
They 've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years , and do it all in Borneo alone by planting on land that 's already degraded .
The study shows that the highest net present value for palm oil is on land that 's been degraded .
They 're also undertaking a study to look at all of their supplies of palm oil to see if they could be certified and what they would need to change in order to become third-party certified under a credible certification program .
Why is Cargill important ?
Because Cargill has 20 to 25 percent of global palm oil .
If Cargill makes a decision , the entire palm oil industry moves , or at least 40 or 50 percent of it .
That 's not insignificant .
More importantly , Cargill and one other company ship 50 percent of the palm oil that goes to China .
We don 't have to change the way a single Chinese company works if we get Cargill to only send sustainable palm oil to China .
It 's a pre-competitive issue .
All the palm oil going there is good .
Buy it .
Mars is also on a similar journey .
Now most people understand that Mars is a chocolate company , but Mars has made sustainability pledges to buy only certified product for all of its seafood .
It turns out Mars buys more seafood than Walmart because of pet food .
But they 're doing some really interesting things around chocolate , and it all comes from the fact that Mars wants to be in business in the future .
And what they see is that they need to improve chocolate production .
On any given plantation , 20 percent of the trees produce 80 percent of the crop , so Mars is looking at the genome , they 're sequencing the genome of the cocoa plant .
They 're doing it with IBM and the USDA , and they 're putting it in the public domain because they want everybody to have access to this data , because they want everybody to help them make cocoa more productive and more sustainable .
What they 've realized is that if they can identify the traits on productivity and drought tolerance , they can produce 320 percent as much cocoa on 40 percent of the land .
The rest of the land can be used for something else .
It 's more with less and less again .
That 's what the future has got to be , and putting it in the public domain is smart .
They don 't want to be an I.P. company ; they want to be a chocolate company , but they want to be a chocolate company forever .
Now , the price of food , many people complain about , but in fact , the price of food is going down , and that 's odd because in fact , consumers are not paying for the true cost of food .
If you take a look just at water , what we see is that , with four very common products , you look at how much a farmer produced to make those products , and then you look at how much water input was put into them , and then you look at what the farmer was paid .
If you divide the amount of water into what the farmer was paid , the farmer didn 't receive enough money to pay a decent price for water in any of those commodities .
That is an externality by definition .
This is the subsidy from nature .
Coca-Cola , they 've worked a lot on water , but right now , they 're entering into 17-year contracts with growers in Turkey to sell juice into Europe , and they 're doing that because they want to have a product that 's closer to the European market .
But they 're not just buying the juice ; they 're also buying the carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs associated with carbon to get the product into Europe .
There 's carbon that 's being bought with sugar , with coffee , with beef .
This is called bundling . It 's bringing those externalities back into the price of the commodity .
We need to take what we 've learned in private , voluntary standards of what the best producers in the world are doing and use that to inform government regulation , so we can shift the entire performance curve .
We can 't just focus on identifying the best ; we 've got to move the rest .
The issue isn 't what to think , it 's how to think .
These companies have begun to think differently .
They 're on a journey ; there 's no turning back .
We 're all on that same journey with them .
We have to really begin to change the way we think about everything .
Whatever was sustainable on a planet of six billion is not going to be sustainable on a planet with nine .
Thank you .
Elizabeth Lindsey : Curating humanity 's heritage
It 's been said that when an elder dies , it 's as if a library is burned . Anthropologist Elizabeth Lindsey , a National Geographic Fellow , collects the deep cultural knowledge passed down as stories and lore .
As a child , I was raised by native Hawaiian elders -- three old women who took care of me while my parents worked .
The year is 1963 .
We 're at the ocean .
It 's twilight .
We 're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides .
It 's a stretch of beach we know so well .
The smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us .
If you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes , you might dismiss them as poor and simple .
That would be a mistake .
These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators , trained in the old ways by their elders , and now they 're passing it on to me .
They teach me the names of the winds and the rains , of astronomy according to a genealogy of stars .
There 's a new moon on the horizon .
Hawaiians say it 's a good night for fishing .
They begin to chant .
[ Hawaiian chant ] When they finish , they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them .
They want to teach me about my destiny .
I thought every seven-year-old went through this .
" Baby girl , someday the world will be in trouble .
People will forget their wisdom .
It will take elders ' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance .
You will go far away .
It will sometimes be a lonely road .
We will not be there .
But you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers , and you will recognize your ohana , your family .
And it will take all of you .
It will take all of you . "
These words , I hold onto all my life .
Because the idea of doing it alone terrifies me .
The year is 2007 .
I 'm on a remote island in Micronesia .
Satawal is one half-mile long by one mile wide .
It 's the home of my mentor .
His name is Pius Mau Piailug .
Mau is a palu , a navigator priest .
He 's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world .
There are fewer than a handful of palu left on this island .
Their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the Pacific without the use of instruments .
They could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars , the sequence and direction of waves , the flight patterns of certain birds .
Even the slightest hint of color on the underbelly of a cloud would inform them and help them navigate with the keenest accuracy .
When Western scientists would join Mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull , it appeared that an old man was going to rest .
In fact , the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel .
It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves .
Mau was , in fact , gathering explicit data using his entire body .
It 's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old .
Now science may dismiss this methodology , but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel .
The palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance .
Sometimes I 'd be with Mau on a cloud-covered night and we 'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island , and he would look out , and then he would say , " Okay , we go . "
He saw that first glint of light -- he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now .
Their achievements , intellectually and scientifically , are extraordinary , and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms .
We are in such a critical moment of our collective history .
They have been compared to astronauts -- these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island .
Their canoes , our rockets ; their sea , our space .
The wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot .
This is part of our collective narrative .
It 's humanity 's DNA .
We cannot afford to lose it .
The year is 2010 .
Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted , the world is in trouble .
We live in a society bloated with data , yet starved for wisdom .
We 're connected 24 / 7 , yet anxiety , fear , depression and loneliness is at an all-time high .
We must course-correct .
An African shaman said , " Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes . "
The link between the past and the future is fragile .
This I know intimately , because even as I travel throughout the world to listen to these stories and record them , I struggle .
I am haunted by the fact that I no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains .
Mau passed away five months ago , but his legacy and lessons live on .
And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them , as potent as the Micronesian navigators , that are going dismissed , that this is a testament to brilliant , brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly .
Because when an elder dies a library is burned , and throughout the world , libraries are ablaze .
I am grateful for the fact that I had a mentor like Mau who taught me how to navigate .
And I realize through a lesson that he shared that we continue to find our way .
And this is what he said : " The island is the canoe ; the canoe , the island . "
And what he meant was , if you are voyaging and far from home , your very survival depends on everyone aboard .
You cannot make the voyage alone , you were never meant to .
This whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable .
It always was .
So in closing I would offer you this : The planet is our canoe , and we are the voyagers .
True navigation begins in the human heart .
It 's the most important map of all .
Together , may we journey well .
Barton Seaver : Sustainable seafood ? Let 's get smart
Chef Barton Seaver presents a modern dilemma : Seafood is one of our healthier protein options , but overfishing is desperately harming our oceans . He suggests a simple way to keep fish on the dinner table that includes every mom 's favorite adage -- " Eat your vegetables ! "
Sustainability represents the what , the where and the how of what is caught .
The who and the why are what 's important to me .
I want to know the people behind my dinner choices .
I want to know how I impact them .
I want to know how they impact me .
I want to know why they fish .
I want to know how they rely on the water 's bounty for their living .
Understanding all of this enables us to shift our perception of seafood away from a commodity to an opportunity to restore our ecosystem .
It allows for us to celebrate the seafood that we 're also so fortunate to eat .
So what do we call this ?
I think we call it restorative seafood .
Where sustainability is the capacity to endure and maintain , restorative is the ability to replenish and progress .
Restorative seafood allows for an evolving and dynamic system and acknowledges our relationship with the ocean as a resource , suggesting that we engage to replenish the ocean and to encourage its resiliency .
It is a more hopeful , it is a more human , and is a more useful way of understanding our environment .
Wallet guides -- standard issue by lots in the marine conservation world -- are very handy ; they 're a wonderful tool .
Green , yellow and red lists [ of ] seafood species .
The association is very easy : buy green , don 't buy red , think twice about yellow .
But in my mind , it 's really not enough to just eat green list .
We can 't sustain this without the measure of our success really changing the fate of the species in the yellow and the red .
But what if we eat only in the green list ?
You 've got pole-caught yellowfin tuna here -- comes from sustainable stocks .
Pole caught -- no bycatch .
Great for fishermen . Lots of money . Supporting local economies .
But it 's a lion of the sea . It 's a top predator .
What 's the context of this meal ?
Am I sitting down in a steakhouse to a 16-ounce portion of this ?
Do I do this three times a week ?
I might still be in the green list , but I 'm not doing myself , or you , or the oceans any favors .
The point is that we have to have a context , a gauge for our actions in all this .
Example : I 've heard that red wine is great for my health -- antioxidants and minerals -- heart healthy .
That 's great ! I love red wine !
I 'm going to drink so much of it . I 'm going to be so healthy .
Well , how many bottles is it before you tell me that I have a problem ?
Well folks , we have a protein problem .
We have lost this sensibility when it regards our food , and we are paying a cost .
The problem is we are hiding that cost beneath the waves .
We are hiding that cost behind the social acceptance of expanding waistlines .
And we are hiding that cost behind monster profits .
So the first thing about this idea of restorative seafood is that it really takes into account our needs .
Restorative seafood might best be represented not by Jaws , or by Flipper , or the Gordon 's fisherman , but rather , by the Jolly Green Giant .
Vegetables : they might yet save the oceans .
Sylvia likes to say that blue is the new green .
Well I 'd like to respectfully submit that broccoli green might then be the new blue .
We must continue to eat the best seafood possible , if at all .
But we also must eat it with a ton of vegetables .
The best part about restorative seafood though is that it comes on the half-shell with a bottle of Tabasco and lemon wedges .
It comes in a five-ounce portion of tilapia breaded with Dijon mustard and crispy , broiled breadcrumbs and a steaming pile of pecan quinoa pilaf with crunchy , grilled broccoli so soft and sweet and charred and smoky on the outside with just a hint of chili flake .
Whooo !
This is an easy sell .
And the best part is all of those ingredients are available to every family at the neighborhood Walmart .
Jamie Oliver is campaigning to save America from the way we eat .
Sylvia is campaigning to save the oceans from the way we eat .
There 's a pattern here .
Forget nuclear holocaust ; it 's the fork that we have to worry about .
We have ravaged our Earth and then used the food that we 've sourced to handicap ourselves in more ways than one .
So I think we have this whole eating thing wrong .
And so I think it 's time we change what we expect from our food .
Sustainability is complicated but dinner is a reality that we all very much understand .
So let 's start there .
There 's been a lot of movement recently in greening our food systems .
Dan Barber and Alice Waters are leading passionately the green food Delicious Revolution .
But green foods often represent a way for us to disregard the responsibility as eaters .
Just because it comes from a green source doesn 't mean we can treat it with disregard on the plate .
We have eco-friendly shrimp .
We can make them ; we have that technology .
But we can never have any eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet .
It doesn 't work .
Heart-healthy dinner is a very important part of restorative seafood .
While we try to manage declining marine populations , the media 's recommending increased consumption of seafood .
Studies say that tens of thousands of American grandmothers , grandfathers , mothers and fathers might be around for another birthday if we included more seafood .
That 's a reward I am not willing to pass up .
But it 's not all about the seafood .
It 's about the way that we look at our plates .
As a chef , I realize the easiest thing for me to do is reduce the portion sizes on my plate .
A couple things happened .
I made more money .
People started buying appetizers and salads , because they knew they weren 't going to fill up on the entrees alone .
People spent more time engaging in their meals , engaging with each other over their meals .
People got , in short , more of what they came there for even though they got less protein .
They got more calories over the course of a diversified meal .
They got healthier . I made more money .
This is great .
Environmental consideration was served with every plate , but it was served with a heaping mound of consideration for human interests at the same time .
One of the other things we did was begin to diversify the species that we served -- small silverfish , anchovies , mackerel , sardines were uncommon .
Shellfish , mussels , oysters , clams , tilapia , char -- these were the common species .
We were directing tastes towards more resilience , more restorative options .
This is what we need to favor .
This is what the green list says .
But this is also how we can actually begin to restore our environment .
But what of those big predators , those fashionable species , that green list tuna that I was talking about earlier ?
Well , if you must , I have a recipe for you .
It pretty much works with any big fish in the ocean , so here we go .
Start with a 16-ounce portion of big fish .
Get a knife . Cut it into four portions .
Put it on four plates .
Mound up those four plates with vegetables and then open up the very best bottle of Burgundy you have , light the candles and celebrate it .
Celebrate the opportunity you have to eat this .
Invite your friends and neighbors over and repeat once a year , maybe .
I expect a lot from food .
I expect health and joy and family and community .
I expect that producing ingredients , preparing dishes and eating meals is all part of the communion of human interests .
I was lucky enough that my father was a fantastic cook .
And he taught me very early on about the privilege that eating represents .
I remember well the meals of my childhood .
They were reasonable portions of protein served with copious quantities of vegetables and small amounts of starch , usually rice .
This is still how I largely eat today .
I get sick when I go to steakhouses .
I get the meat sweats .
It 's like a hangover from protein .
It 's disgusting .
But of all the dire news that you 'll hear and that you have heard about the state of our oceans , I have the unfortunate burden of delivering to you possibly the very worst of it and that is this whole time your mother was right .
Eat your vegetables .
It 's pretty straightforward .
So what are we looking for in a meal ?
Well for health , I 'm looking for wholesome ingredients that are good for my body .
For joy , I 'm looking for butter and salt and sexy things that make things taste less like penance .
For family , I 'm looking for recipes that genuflect to my own personal histories .
For community though , we start at the very beginning .
There 's no escaping the fact that everything we eat has a global impact .
So try and learn as best you can what that impact is and then take the first step to minimize it .
We 've seen an image of our blue planet , our world bank .
But it is more than just a repository of our resources ; it 's also the global geography of the communion we call dinner .
So if we all take only what we need , then we can begin to share the rest , we can begin to celebrate , we can begin to restore .
We need to savor vegetables .
We need to savor smaller portions of seafood .
And we need to save dinner .
Thank you .
Rives : A mockingbird remix of TED2006
Rives recaps the most memorable moments of TED2006 in the free-spirited rhyming verse of a fantastical mockingbird lullaby .
Mockingbirds are badass .
They are .
Mockingbirds -- that 's Mimus polyglottos -- are the emcees of the animal kingdom .
They listen and mimic and remix what they like .
They rock the mic outside my window every morning .
I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring .
I mean , if you can talk it , a mockingbird can squawk it .
So check it , I 'm gonna to catch mockingbirds .
I 'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails .
Yeah . And as I drive through a neighborhood , say , where people got-a-lotta , I 'll take a mockingbird I caught in a neighborhood where folks ain 't got nada and just let it go , you know .
Up goes the bird , out come the words , " Juanito , Juanito , vente a comer mi hijo ! "
Oh , I 'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound .
Cruising random city streets , rocking a drop-top Cadillac with a big backseat , packing like 13 brown paper Walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds , and I 'll get everybody .
I 'll get the nitwit on the network news saying , " We 'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis . "
I 'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is .
I 'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is .
I 'll get your postman making dinner plans .
I 'll get the last time you lied .
I 'll get , " Baby , just give me the frickin ' TV guide . "
I 'll get a lonely , little sentence with real error in it , " Yeah , I guess I could come inside , but only for a minute . "
I 'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning " It 's Raining , It 's Pouring . "
I 'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring .
I 'll get your ex-lover telling someone else , " Good morning . "
I 'll get everyone 's good mornings .
I don 't care how you make ' em .
Aloha . Konichiwa . Shalom . Ah-Salam Alaikum .
Everybody means everybody , means everybody here .
And so maybe I 'll build a gilded cage .
I 'll line the bottom with old notebook pages .
Inside it , I will place a mockingbird for -- short explanation , hippie parents .
What does a violin have to do with technology ?
Where in the world is this world heading ?
On one end , gold bars -- on the other , an entire planet .
We are 12 billion light years from the edge .
That 's a guess .
Space is length and breadth continued indefinitely , but you cannot buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in America because countries are beginning to eat like us , live like us and die like us .
You might wanna avert your gaze , because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb , and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing .
There 's about 10 million phage per job .
It 's a very strange world inside a nanotube .
Women can talk ; black men ski ; white men build strong buildings ; we build strong suns .
The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes , and here we are , right in the middle .
It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn .
When all the little mockingbirds fly away , they 're going to sound like the last four days .
I will get uptown gurus , downtown teachers , broke-ass artists and dealers , and Filipino preachers , leaf blowers , bartenders , boob-job doctors , hooligans , garbage men , your local Congressmen in the spotlight , guys in the overhead helicopters .
Everybody gets heard .
Everybody gets this one , honest mockingbird as a witness .
And I 'm on this .
I 'm on this ' til the whole thing spreads , with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing , " Hush , little baby , don 't say a word .
Wait for the man with the mockingbird . "
Yeah . And then come the news crews , and the man-in-the-street interviews , and the letters to the editor .
Everybody asking , just who is responsible for this citywide , nationwide mockingbird cacophony , and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey , California off to me , and they 'll offer me a key to the city .
A gold-plated , oversized key to the city and that is all I need , ' cause if I get that , I can unlock the air .
I 'll listen for what 's missing , and I 'll put it there .
Thank you , TED .
Wow .
Wow .
Holly Morris : Why stay in Chernobyl ? Because it 's home .
Chernobyl was the site of the world 's worst nuclear accident and , for the past 27 years , the area around the plant has been known as the Exclusion Zone . And yet , a community of about 200 people live there -- almost all of them elderly women . These proud grandmas defied orders to relocate because their connection to their homeland and to their community are " forces that rival even radiation . "
Three years ago , I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four .
My Geiger counter dosimeter , which measures radiation , was going berserk , and the closer I got , the more frenetic it became , and frantic . My God .
I was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world 's worst nuclear accident , as you can see by the look on my face , reluctantly so , but with good reason , because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima , and the sarcophagus , which is the covering over reactor number four , which was hastily built 27 years ago , now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation .
So I was filming .
I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast .
But then , I looked into the distance , and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse , and I 'm thinking , who could be living here ?
I mean , after all , Chernobyl 's soil , water and air , are among the most highly contaminated on Earth , and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone , or dead zone , and it 's a nuclear police state , complete with border guards .
You have to have dosimeter at all times , clicking away , you have to have a government minder , and there 's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring .
The point being , no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone .
But they are .
It turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone .
They 're called self-settlers .
And almost all of them are women , the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol , cigarettes , if not radiation .
Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident , but not everybody accepted that fate .
The women in the zone , now in their 70s and 80s , are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and , it would seem , common sense , and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone .
They did so illegally .
As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time , " Shoot me and dig the grave .
Otherwise , I 'm going home . "
Now why would they return to such deadly soil ?
I mean , were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them , or both ?
The thing is , they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently .
Now around Chernobyl , there are scattered ghost villages , eerily silent , strangely charming , bucolic , totally contaminated .
Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident , but a few are left like this , kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy .
Others have a few residents in them , one or two " babushkas , " or " babas , " which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother .
Another village might have six or seven residents .
So this is the strange demographic of the zone -- isolated alone together .
And when I made my way to that piping chimney I 'd seen in the distance , I saw Hanna Zavorotnya , and I met her .
She 's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village , population eight .
And she said to me , when I asked her the obvious , " Radiation doesn 't scare me . Starvation does . "
And you have to remember , these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century .
Stalin 's enforced famines of the 1930s , the Holodomor , killed millions of Ukrainians , and they faced the Nazis in the ' 40s , who came through slashing , burning , raping , and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor .
So when a couple decades into Soviet rule , Chernobyl happened , they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible .
So they returned to their villages and are told they 're going to get sick and die soon , but five happy years , their logic goes , is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev , separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies , the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon .
For them , environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation .
It turns out this holds true for other species as well .
Wild boar , lynx , moose , they 've all returned to the region in force , the very real , very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans .
The dead zone , it turns out , is full of life .
And there is a kind of heroic resilience , a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m.
pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes , their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka .
And there 's a patina of simple defiance among them .
" They told us our legs would hurt , and they do . So what ? "
I mean , what about their health ?
The benefits of hardy , physical living , but an environment made toxic by a complicated , little-understood enemy , radiation .
It 's incredibly difficult to parse .
Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught .
The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000 , eventually .
Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands .
Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high , and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere : higher levels of anxiety , depression , alcoholism , unemployment and , importantly , disrupted social networks .
Now , like many of you , I have moved maybe 20 , 25 times in my life .
Home is a transient concept .
I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil .
So it 's hard for us to understand , but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka , and connection to the land is palpable .
And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets , aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time .
" If you leave , you die . "
" Those who left are worse off now .
They are dying of sadness . "
" Motherland is motherland . I will never leave . "
What sounds like faith , soft faith , may actually be fact , because the surprising truth -- I mean , there are no studies , but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 27 years , have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation , by some estimates up to 10 years .
How could this be ?
Here 's a theory : Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil , the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms , actually affect longevity ?
The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative .
Home and community are forces that rival even radiation .
Now radiation or not , these women are at the end of their lives .
In the next decade , the zone 's human residents will be gone , and it will revert to a wild , radioactive place , full only of animals and occasionally daring , flummoxed scientists .
But the spirit and existence of the babushkas , whose numbers have been halved in the three years I 've known them , will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with , about the relative nature of risk , about transformative connections to home , and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination .
Thank you .
Marcin Jakubowski : Open-sourced blueprints for civilization
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools , TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines , allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch . And that 's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village .
Hi , my name is Marcin -- farmer , technologist .
I was born in Poland , now in the U.S.
I started a group called Open Source Ecology .
We 've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist -- things from tractors , bread ovens , circuit makers .
Then we set out to create an open source , DIY , do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost .
We call this the Global Village Construction Set .
So let me tell you a story .
So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy , and I discovered I was useless .
I had no practical skills .
The world presented me with options , and I took them .
I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle .
So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming .
I bought a tractor -- then it broke .
I paid to get it repaired -- then it broke again .
Then pretty soon , I was broke too .
I realized that the truly appropriate , low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn 't exist yet .
I needed tools that were robust , modular , highly efficient and optimized , low-cost , made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime , not designed for obsolescence .
I found that I would have to build them myself .
So I did just that .
And I tested them .
And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale .
So then I published the 3D designs , schematics , instructional videos and budgets on a wiki .
Then contributors from all over the world began showing up , prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits .
So far , we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines .
And now the project is beginning to grow on its own .
We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity .
And the same is starting to happen with hardware too .
We 're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people 's lives in such tangible material ways .
If we can lower the barriers to farming , building , manufacturing , then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential .
That 's not only in the developing world .
Our tools are being made for the American farmer , builder , entrepreneur , maker .
We 've seen lots of excitement from these people , who can now start a construction business , parts manufacturing , organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid .
Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear , so complete , that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit .
I 've planted a hundred trees in a day .
I 've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days .
From what I 've seen , this is only the beginning .
If this idea is truly sound , then the implications are significant .
A greater distribution of the means of production , environmentally sound supply chains , and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity .
We 're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology .
Thank you .

Neil Harbisson : I listen to color
Artist Neil Harbisson was born completely color blind , but these days a device attached to his head turns color into audible frequencies . Instead of seeing a world in grayscale , Harbisson can hear a symphony of color -- and yes , even listen to faces and paintings .
Well , I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia , which is total color blindness , so I 've never seen color , and I don 't know what color looks like , because I come from a grayscale world .
To me , the sky is always gray , flowers are always gray , and television is still in black and white .
But , since the age of 21 , instead of seeing color , I can hear color .
In 2003 , I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon , and the result , with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona , is this electronic eye .
It 's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head , and I hear the color in front of me through the bone , through bone conduction .
So , for example , if I have , like — This is the sound of purple .
For example , this is the sound of grass .
This is red , like TED .
This is the sound of a dirty sock .
Which is like yellow , this one .
So I 've been hearing color all the time for eight years , since 2004 , so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time .
At the start , though , I had to memorize the names you give for each color , so I had to memorize the notes , but after some time , all this information became a perception .
I didn 't have to think about the notes .
And after some time , this perception became a feeling .
I started to have favorite colors , and I started to dream in colors .
So , when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united , because in my dreams , it was my brain creating electronic sounds . It wasn 't the software , so that 's when I started to feel like a cyborg .
It 's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device .
It had become a part of my body , an extension of my senses , and after some time , it even became a part of my official image .
This is my passport from 2004 .
You 're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment , but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body , an extension of my brain , and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo .
So , life has changed dramatically since I hear color , because color is almost everywhere , so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery , I can listen to a Picasso , for example . So it 's like I 'm going to a concert hall , because I can listen to the paintings .
And supermarkets , I find this is very shocking , it 's very , very attractive to walk along a supermarket .
It 's like going to a nightclub .
It 's full of different melodies . Yeah .
Especially the aisle with cleaning products .
It 's just fabulous .
Also , the way I dress has changed .
Before , I used to dress in a way that it looked good .
Now I dress in a way that it sounds good .
So today I 'm dressed in C major , so it 's quite a happy chord .
If I had to go to a funeral , though , I would dress in B minor , which would be turquoise , purple and orange .
Also , food , the way I look at food has changed , because now I can display the food on a plate , so I can eat my favorite song .
So depending on how I display it , I can hear and I can compose music with food .
So imagine a restaurant where we can have , like , Lady Gaga salads as starters . I mean , this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables , probably .
And also , some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes , and some Bjork or Madonna desserts , that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs .
Also , the way I perceive beauty has changed , because when I look at someone , I hear their face , so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible .
And it might happen the opposite , the other way around . So I really enjoy creating , like , sound portraits of people .
Instead of drawing someone 's face , like drawing the shape , I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear , and then I create sound portraits .
Here 's some faces .
Yeah , Nicole Kidman sounds good .
Some people , I would never relate , but they sound similar .
Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman .
They have similar sound of eyes .
So you relate people that you wouldn 't relate , and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces .
So I connect the eye , and then I play the audience 's faces .
The good thing about this is , if the concert doesn 't sound good , it 's their fault .
It 's not my fault , because — And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color .
I heard a telephone tone , and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green .
The BBC beeps , they sound turquoise , and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience , so I started to paint music and paint people 's voices , because people 's voices have frequencies that I relate to color .
And here 's some music translated into color .
For example , Mozart , " Queen of the Night , " looks like this .
Very yellow and very colorful , because there 's many different frequencies .
And this is a completely different song .
It 's Justin Bieber 's " Baby . "
It is very pink and very yellow .
So , also voices , I can transform speeches into color , for example , these are two very well-known speeches .
One of them is Martin Luther King 's " I Have A Dream , " and the other one is Hitler .
And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels , and then I ask people , " Which one do you prefer ? "
And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King .
So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors , just like human vision .
I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel .
But then , I just thought that this human vision wasn 't good enough .
There 's many , many more colors around us that we cannot perceive , but that electronic eyes can perceive .
So I decided to continue extending my color senses , and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale , so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive .
For example , perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there 's movement detectors in a room .
I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control .
And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it 's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe , because ultraviolet is a dangerous color , a color that can actually kill us , so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive .
That 's why , two years ago , I created the Cyborg Foundation , which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg , tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body .
We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses , so if we extend our senses , we will consequently extend our knowledge .
I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body .
I think this will be a big , big change that we will see during this century .
So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you 'd like to extend .
I would encourage you to become a cyborg .
You won 't be alone . Thank you .
Clay Shirky : How cognitive surplus will change the world
Clay Shirky looks at " cognitive surplus " -- the shared , online work we do with our spare brain cycles . While we 're busy editing Wikipedia , posting to Ushahidi , we 're building a better , more cooperative world .
The story starts in Kenya in December of 2007 , when there was a disputed presidential election , and in the immediate aftermath of that election , there was an outbreak of ethnic violence .
And there was a lawyer in Nairobi , Ory Okolloh -- who some of you may know from her TEDTalk -- who began blogging about it on her site , Kenyan Pundit .
And shortly after the election and the outbreak of violence , the government suddenly imposed a significant media blackout .
And so weblogs went from being commentary as part of the media landscape to being a critical part of the media landscape in trying to understand where the violence was .
And Okolloh solicited from her commenters more information about what was going on .
The comments began pouring in , and Okolloh would collate them . She would post them .
And she quickly said , " It 's too much .
I could do this all day every day and I can 't keep up .
There is more information about what 's going on in Kenya right now than any one person can manage .
If only there was a way to automate this . "
And two programmers who read her blog held their hands up and said , " We could do that , " and in 72 hours , they launched Ushahidi .
Ushahidi -- the name means " witness " or " testimony " in Swahili -- is a very simple way of taking reports from the field , whether it 's from the web or , critically , via mobile phones and SMS , aggregating it and putting it on a map .
That 's all it is , but that 's all that 's needed because what it does is it takes the tacit information available to the whole population -- everybody knows where the violence is , but no one person knows what everyone knows -- and it takes that tacit information and it aggregates it , and it maps it and it makes it public .
And that , that maneuver called " crisis mapping , " was kicked off in Kenya in January of 2008 .
And enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough that the programmers who created Ushahidi decided they were going to make it open source and turn it into a platform .
It 's since been deployed in Mexico to track electoral fraud .
It 's been deployed in Washington D.C. to track snow cleanup .
And it 's been used most famously in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake .
And when you look at the map now posted on the Ushahidi front page , you can see that the number of deployments in Ushahidi has gone worldwide , all right ?
This went from a single idea and a single implementation in East Africa in the beginning of 2008 to a global deployment in less than three years .
Now what Okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology .
What Okolloh did would not have been possible without human generosity .
And the interesting moment now , the number of environments where the social design challenge relies on both of those things being true .
That is the resource that I 'm talking about .
I call it cognitive surplus .
And it represents the ability of the world 's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large , sometimes global , projects .
Cognitive surplus is made up of two things .
The first , obviously , is the world 's free time and talents .
The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects .
Now , that free time existed in the 20th century , but we didn 't get Ushahidi in the 20th century .
That 's the second half of cognitive surplus .
The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume , and we got , as a result , very good at consuming .
But now that we 've been given media tools -- the Internet , mobile phones -- that let us do more than consume , what we 're seeing is that people weren 't couch potatoes because we liked to be .
We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us .
We still like to consume , of course .
But it turns out we also like to create , and we like to share .
And it 's those two things together -- ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts -- that are the new design resource .
And using cognitive surplus , we 're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific , literary , artistic , political efforts .
Designing .
We 're also getting , of course , a lot of LOLcats .
LOLcats are cute pictures of cats made cuter with the addition of cute captions .
And they are also part of the abundant media landscape we 're getting now .
This is one of the participatory -- one of the participatory models we see coming out of that , along with Ushahidi .
Now I want to stipulate , as the lawyers say , that LOLcats are the stupidest possible creative act .
There are other candidates of course , but LOLcats will do as a general case .
But here 's the thing : The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act .
Someone who has done something like this , however mediocre and throwaway , has tried something , has put something forward in public .
And once they 've done it , they can do it again , and they could work on getting it better .
There is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work , and as anybody who 's worked as an artist or a creator knows , it 's a spectrum you 're constantly struggling to get on top of .
The gap is between doing anything and doing nothing .
And someone who makes a LOLcat has already crossed over that gap .
Now it 's tempting to want to get the Ushahidis without the LOLcats , right , to get the serious stuff without the throwaway stuff .
But media abundance never works that way .
Freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything .
Even with the sacred printing press , we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals .
So before I talk about what is , I think , the critical difference between LOLcats and Ushahidi , I want to talk about their shared source .
And that source is design for generosity .
It is one of the curiosities of our historical era that even as cognitive surplus is becoming a resource we can design around , social sciences are also starting to explain how important our intrinsic motivations are to us , how much we do things because we like to do them rather than because our boss told us to do them , or because we 're being paid to do them .
This is a graph from a paper by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini , who set out to test , at the beginning of this decade , what they called " deterrence theory . "
And deterrence theory is a very simple theory of human behavior : If you want somebody to do less of something , add a punishment and they 'll do less of it .
Simple , straightforward , commonsensical -- also , largely untested .
And so they went and studied 10 daycare centers in Haifa , Israel .
They studied those daycare centers at the time of highest tension , which is pick-up time .
At pick-up time the teachers , who have been with your children all day , would like you to be there at the appointed hour to take your children back .
Meanwhile , the parents -- perhaps a little busy at work , running late , running errands -- want a little slack to pick the kids up late .
So Gneezy and Rustichini said , " How many instances of late pick-ups are there at these 10 daycare centers ? "
Now they saw -- and this is what the graph is , these are the number of weeks and these are the number of late arrivals -- that there were between six and 10 instances of late pick-ups on average in these 10 daycare centers .
So they divided the daycare centers into two groups .
The white group there is the control group ; they change nothing .
But the group of daycare centers represented by the black line , they said , " We are changing this bargain as of right now .
If you pick your kid up more than 10 minutes late , we 're going to add a 10 shekel fine to your bill .
Boom . No ifs , ands or buts . "
And the minute they did that , the behavior in those daycare centers changed .
Late pick-ups went up every week for the next four weeks until they topped out at triple the pre-fine average , and then they fluctuated at between double and triple the pre-fine average for the life of the fine .
And you can see immediately what happened , right ?
The fine broke the culture of the daycare center .
By adding a fine , what they did was communicate to the parents that their entire debt to the teachers had been discharged with the payment of 10 shekels , and that there was no residue of guilt or social concern that the parents owed the teachers .
And so the parents , quite sensibly , said , " 10 shekels to pick my kid up late ?
What could be bad ? "
The explanation of human behavior that we inherited in the 20th century was that we are all rational , self-maximizing actors , and in that explanation -- the daycare center had no contract -- should have been operating without any constraints .
But that 's not right .
They were operating with social constraints rather than contractual ones .
And critically , the social constraints created a culture that was more generous than the contractual constraints did .
So Gneezy and Rustichini run this experiment for a dozen weeks -- run the fine for a dozen weeks -- and then they say , " Okay , that 's it . All done ; fine . "
And then a really interesting thing happens : Nothing changes .
The culture that got broken by the fine stayed broken when the fine was removed .
Not only are economic motivations and intrinsic motivations incompatible , that incompatibility can persist over long periods .
So the trick in designing these kinds of situations is to understand where you 're relying on the economic part of the bargain -- as with the parents paying the teachers -- and when you 're relying on the social part of the bargain , when you 're really designing for generosity .
This brings me back to the LOLcats and to Ushahidi .
This is , I think , the range that matters .
Both of these rely on cognitive surplus .
Both of these design for the assumption that people like to create and we want to share .
Here is the critical difference between these : LOLcats is communal value .
It 's value created by the participants for each other .
Communal value on the networks we have is everywhere -- every time you see a large aggregate of shared , publicly available data , whether it 's photos on Flickr or videos on Youtube or whatever .
This is good . I like LOLcats as much as the next guy , maybe a little more even , but this is also a largely solved problem .
I have a hard time envisioning a future in which someone is saying , " Where , oh where , can I find a picture of a cute cat ? "
Ushahidi , by contrast , is civic value .
It 's value created by the participants but enjoyed by society as a whole .
The goals set out by Ushahidi are not just to make life better for the participants , but to make life better for everyone in the society in which Ushahidi is operating .
And that kind of civic value is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation .
It really is going to be a side effect of what we , collectively , make of these kinds of efforts .
There are a trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs .
That will be true year-in and year-out .
The number of people who are going to be able to participate in these kinds of projects is going to grow , and we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead -- a very different model than our default model for large-scale group action in the 20th century .
What 's going to make the difference here is what Dean Kamen said , the inventor and entrepreneur .
Kamen said , " Free cultures get what they celebrate . "
We 've got a choice before us .
We 've got this trillion hours a year .
We can use it to crack each other up , and we 're going to do that .
That , we get for free .
But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value .
we 'll be able to change society .
Thank you very much .
Majora Carter : 3 stories of local eco-entrepreneurship
The future of green is local -- and entrepreneurial . In her talk , Majora Carter brings us the stories of three people who are saving their own communities while saving the planet . Call it " hometown security . " & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So today , I 'm going to tell you about some people who didn 't move out of their neighborhoods .
The first one is happening right here in Chicago .
Brenda Palms-Farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison .
Currently , taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail .
We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back .
I find it interesting that , for every one dollar we spend , however , on early childhood education , like Head Start , we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future .
Or -- think about it -- that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well .
But Brenda , not being phased by stuff like that , took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution : create a business that produces skin care products from honey .
Okay , it might be obvious to some of you ; it wasn 't to me .
It 's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential .
She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees , harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves , and that were later sold at Whole Foods .
She combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed , like anger-management and teamwork , and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more .
Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail .
So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process .
Talk about a sweet beginning .
Now , I 'm going to take you to Los Angeles , and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues .
But I 'm going to talk about L.A. ' s water issues right now .
They have not enough water on most days and too much to handle when it rains .
Currently , 20 percent of California 's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California .
Their spending loads , loads , to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well .
Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island -- linking trees , people and technology to create a more livable city .
All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water , also helps cool our cities .
Because , come to think about it , do you really want air-conditioning , or is it a cooler room that you want ?
How you get it shouldn 't make that much of a difference .
So a few years ago , L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools .
And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves .
And by presenting a really strong economic case , they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery , that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure .
So ultimately , 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided , and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down , while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up , resulting in a net-savings to the system , but also healthier students and schools system employees as well .
Now Judy Bonds is a coal miner 's daughter .
Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville , West Virginia .
And if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history , and of the town , it should be Judy .
But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father 's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people .
Now , two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months , and only for about a few years ' worth of coal .
That kind of technology is called " mountaintop removal . "
It can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months .
Just imagine that the air surrounding these places -- it 's filled with the residue of explosives and coal .
When we visited , it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so -- not just miners , but everybody .
And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned .
And the coal companies just move on after the mountain was emptied , leaving even more unemployment in their wake .
But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain , and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet .
Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs , or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills , and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region 's wind .
She calculated the up-front cost and the payback over time , and it 's a net-plus on so many levels for the local , national and global economy .
It 's a longer payback than mountaintop removal , but the wind energy actually pays back forever .
Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals , and it gives them a lot of misery .
The water is turned into goo .
Most people are still unemployed , leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience -- drug and alcohol abuse , domestic abuse , teen pregnancy and poor heath , as well .
Now Judy and I -- I have to say -- totally related to each other .
Not quite an obvious alliance .
I mean , literally , her hometown is called Whitesville , West Virginia .
I mean , they are not -- they ain 't competing for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that .
But the back of my T-shirt , the one that she gave me , says , " Save the endangered hillbillies . "
So homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it 's all about .
But just a few months ago , Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer .
Yeah .
And it has since moved to her bones and her brain .
And I just find it so bizarre that she 's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from .
But her dream of Coal River Mountain Wind is her legacy .
And she might not get to see that mountaintop .
But rather than writing yet some kind of manifesto or something , she 's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen .
That 's what my homegirl is doing .
So I 'm so proud of that .
But these three people don 't know each other , but they do have an awful lot in common .
They 're all problem solvers , and they 're just some of the many examples that I really am privileged to see , meet and learn from in the examples of the work that I do now .
I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called ThePromisedLand.org.
Now they 're all very practical visionaries .
They take a look at the demands that are out there -- beauty products , healthy schools , electricity -- and how the money 's flowing to meet those demands .
And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs , you 're left with unemployed people , and those people aren 't cheap .
In fact , they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens , and they include generationally impoverished , traumatized vets returning from the Middle East , people coming out of jail .
And for the veterans in particular , the V.A. said there 's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003 .
I think that number 's probably going to go up .
They 're not the largest number of people , but they are some of the most expensive -- and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse , drug and alcohol abuse , poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress .
So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands , reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future .
And there are plenty of other examples like that .
One problem : waste handling and unemployment .
Even when we think or talk about recycling , lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities , diversion rates -- they leave much to be recycled .
And where is this waste handled ? Usually in poor communities .
And we know that eco-industrial business , these kinds of business models -- there 's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park , where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another , or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell .
We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing .
And in my hometown , we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx , but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot .
Fortunately -- because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs -- but after many years , the city wanted to build a jail .
They 've since abandoned that project , thank goodness .
Another problem : unhealthy food systems and unemployment .
Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system .
It relies too much on transportation , chemical fertilization , big use of water and also refrigeration .
Mega agricultural operations often are responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land , and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity .
And so we know " urban ag " is a big buzz topic this time of the year , but it 's mostly gardening , which has some value in community building -- lots of it -- but it 's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production .
The numbers just aren 't there .
Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to integrate urban ag and rural food systems to hasten the demise of the 3,000-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce in every city , that uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities , owned and operated by small growers , where now there are only consumers .
This can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can 't meet the year-round demand for produce .
It 's not a competition with rural farm ; it 's actually reinforcements .
It allies in a really positive and economically viable food system .
The goal is to meet the cities ' institutional demands for hospitals , senior centers , schools , daycare centers , and produce a network of regional jobs , as well .
This is smart infrastructure .
And how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day .
Our municipalities , rural and urban , play the operational course of infrastructure -- things like waste disposal , energy demand , as well as social costs of unemployment , drop-out rates , incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs .
Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs .
And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base .
And imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability .
So I 'm hoping you can see a little theme here .
These examples indicate a trend .
I haven 't created it , and it 's not happening by accident .
I 'm noticing that it 's happening all over the country , and the good news is that it 's growing .
And we all need to be invested in it .
It is an essential pillar to this country 's recovery .
And I call it " hometown security . "
The recession has us reeling and fearful , and there 's something in the air these days that is also very empowering .
It 's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery .
Now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local .
And when we do that , our neighbors -- be they next-door , or in the next state , or in the next country -- will be just fine .
The sum of the local is the global .
Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses , putting people to work , restoring our natural systems .
Hometown security means creating wealth here at home , instead of destroying it overseas .
Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings , wealth generation and national security .
Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America .
The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more .
Now , hometown security is about taking care of your own , but it 's not like the old saying , " charity begins at home . "
I recently read a book called " Love Leadership " by John Hope Bryant .
And it 's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear .
And reading that book made me reexamine that theory because I need to explain what I mean by that .
See , my dad was a great , great man in many ways .
He grew up in the segregated South , escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times , and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times .
But , like all of us , he had some problems .
And his was gambling , compulsively .
To him that phrase , " Charity begins at home , " meant that my payday -- or someone else 's -- would just happen to coincide with his lucky day .
So you need to help him out .
And sometimes I would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs , and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest , of course , after he hit it big .
And he did sometimes , believe it or not , at a racetrack in Los Angeles -- one reason to love L.A. -- back in the 1940s .
He made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in .
So I 'm not that unhappy about that .
But listen , I did feel obligated to him , and I grew up -- then I grew up .
And I 'm a grown woman now , and I have learned a few things along the way .
To me , charity often is just about giving , because you 're supposed to , or because it 's what you 've always done , or it 's about giving until it hurts .
I 'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year -- I 'm not trying to feed the habit .
I spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment , that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it , actually left people in the same , if not worse , position that they were in before .
And over the past 20 years , we 've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems , yet educational outcomes , malnutrition , incarceration , obesity , diabetes , income disparity , they 've all gone up with some exceptions -- in particular , infant mortality among people in poverty -- but it 's a great world that we 're bringing them into as well .
And I know a little bit about these issues , because , for many years , I spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex , and I 'm a recovering executive director , two years clean .
But during that time , I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities .
But I really did struggle for financial support .
The greater our success , the less money came in from foundations .
And I tell you , being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived .
And by the time I 'd moved on , I was actually covering a third of my agency 's budget deficit with speaking fees .
And I think because early on , frankly , my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time .
But since then , the park that was just a dump and was featured at a TED2006 Talk became this little thing .
But I did in fact get married in it .
Over here .
There goes my dog who led me to the park in my wedding .
The South Bronx Greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006 .
Since then , we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here .
And we love this , because I love construction now , because we 're watching these things actually happen .
So I want everyone to understand the critical importance of shifting charity into enterprise .
I started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people .
Hometown security is next on my to-do list .
What we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises , who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual .
We need to work together to embrace and repair our land , repair our power systems and repair ourselves .
It 's time to stop building the shopping malls , the prisons , the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures .
It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility .
Thank you very much .
Brian Cox : CERN 's supercollider
" Rock-star physicist " Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN . Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging , accessible way , Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project .
This is the Large Hadron Collider .
It 's 27 kilometers in circumference .
It 's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted .
Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine .
What we do is we accelerate protons -- so , hydrogen nuclei -- around 99.999999 percent the speed of light .
Right ? At that speed , they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second .
And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction .
We collide them inside giant detectors .
They 're essentially digital cameras .
And this is the one that I work on , ATLAS .
You get some sense of the size -- you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath .
You get some sense of the size : 44 meters wide , 22 meters in diameter , 7,000 tons .
And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector -- immense numbers .
And if you see those metal bits there -- those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles , so it can measure how fast they 're traveling .
This is a picture about a year ago .
Those magnets are in there .
And , again , a EU standard-size , real person , so you get some sense of the scale .
And it 's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created , sometime in the summer this year .
And actually , this morning , I got an email saying that we 've just finished , today , building the last piece of ATLAS .
So as of today , it 's finished . I 'd like to say that I planned that for TED , but I didn 't . So it 's been completed as of today .
Yeah , it 's a wonderful achievement .
So , you might be asking , " Why ?
Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began ? "
Well , particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious .
And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything 's made of , and how everything sticks together .
And by everything I mean , of course , me and you , the Earth , the Sun , the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe .
Absolutely everything .
Now you might say , " Well , OK , but why not just look at it ?
You know ? If you want to know what I 'm made of , let 's look at me . "
Well , we found that as you look back in time , the universe gets hotter and hotter , denser and denser , and simpler and simpler .
Now , there 's no real reason I 'm aware of for that , but that seems to be the case .
So , way back in the early times of the universe , we believe it was very simple and understandable .
All this complexity , all the way to these wonderful things -- human brains -- are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe .
Back at the start , in the first billionth of a second , we believe , or we 've observed , it was very simple .
It 's almost like ...
imagine a snowflake in your hand , and you look at it , and it 's an incredibly complicated , beautiful object . But as you heat it up , it 'll melt into a pool of water , and you would be able to see that , actually , it was just made of H20 , water .
So it 's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of .
And , as of today , it 's made of these things .
Just 12 particles of matter , stuck together by four forces of nature .
The quarks , these pink things , are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body .
The electron -- the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus -- held around in orbit , by the way , by the electromagnetic force that 's carried by this thing , the photon .
The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons .
And these guys , here , they 're the weak nuclear force , probably the least familiar .
But , without it , the sun wouldn 't shine .
And when the sun shines , you get copious quantities of these things , called neutrinos , pouring out .
Actually , if you just look at your thumbnail -- about a square centimeter -- there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun , passing through every square centimeter of your body .
But you don 't feel them , because the weak force is correctly named -- very short range and very weak , so they just fly through you .
And these particles have been discovered over the last century , pretty much .
The first one , the electron , was discovered in 1897 , and the last one , this thing called the tau neutrino , in the year 2000 . Actually just -- I was going to say , just up the road in Chicago . I know it 's a big country , America , isn 't it ?
Just up the road .
Relative to the universe , it 's just up the road .
So , this thing was discovered in the year 2000 , so it 's a relatively recent picture .
One of the wonderful things , actually , I find , is that we 've discovered any of them , when you realize how tiny they are .
You know , they 're a step in size from the entire observable universe .
So , 100 billion galaxies , 13.7 billion light years away -- a step in size from that to Monterey , actually , is about the same as from Monterey to these things .
Absolutely , exquisitely minute , and yet we 've discovered pretty much the full set .
So , one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University , Ernest Rutherford , discoverer of the atomic nucleus , once said , " All science is either physics or stamp collecting . "
Now , I don 't think he meant to insult the rest of science , although he was from New Zealand , so it 's possible .
But what he meant was that what we 've done , really , is stamp collect there .
OK , we 've discovered the particles , but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern -- you know , why it 's built the way it is -- really you 've done stamp collecting . You haven 't done science .
Fortunately , we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern .
It 's the Newton 's laws , if you want , of particle physics .
It 's called the standard model -- beautifully simple mathematical equation .
You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt , which is always the sign of elegance .
This is it .
I 've been a little disingenuous , because I 've expanded it out in all its gory detail .
This equation , though , allows you to calculate everything -- other than gravity -- that happens in the universe .
So , you want to know why the sky is blue , why atomic nuclei stick together -- in principle , you 've got a big enough computer -- why DNA is the shape it is .
In principle , you should be able to calculate it from that equation .
But there 's a problem .
Can anyone see what it is ?
A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me .
I 'll make it easier , actually , by blowing one of the lines up .
Basically , each of these terms refers to some of the particles .
So those Ws there refer to the Ws , and how they stick together .
These carriers of the weak force , the Zs , the same .
But there 's an extra symbol in this equation : H.
Right , H.
H stands for Higgs particle .
Higgs particles have not been discovered .
But they 're necessary : they 're necessary to make that mathematics work .
So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn 't be possible without an extra bit .
So it 's a prediction : a prediction of a new particle .
What does it do ?
Well , we had a long time to come up with good analogies .
And back in the 1980s , when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government , Margaret Thatcher , at the time , said , " If you guys can explain , in language a politician can understand , what the hell it is that you 're doing , you can have the money .
I want to know what this Higgs particle does . "
And we came up with this analogy , and it seemed to work .
Well , what the Higgs does is , it gives mass to the fundamental particles .
And the picture is that the whole universe -- and that doesn 't mean just space , it means me as well , and inside you -- the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field .
Higgs particles , if you will .
The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles .
Now when a particle moves through the universe , it can interact with these Higgs particles .
But imagine someone who 's not very popular moves through the room .
Then everyone ignores them . They can just pass through the room very quickly , essentially at the speed of light . They 're massless .
And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room .
They 're surrounded by people , and their passage through the room is impeded .
It 's almost like they get heavy . They get massive .
And that 's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works .
The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy , in a sense , and massive , because they 're surrounded by Higgs particles .
They 're interacting with the Higgs field .
If that picture 's true , then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC .
If it 's not true -- because it 's quite a convoluted mechanism , although it 's the simplest we 've been able to think of -- then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC .
So , that 's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine .
I 'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher .
Actually , I thought about making it more culturally relevant , but -- anyway .
So that 's one thing .
That 's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find .
There are many other things . You 've heard many of the big problems in particle physics .
One of them you heard about : dark matter , dark energy .
There 's another issue , which is that the forces in nature -- it 's quite beautiful , actually -- seem , as you go back in time , they seem to change in strength .
Well , they do change in strength .
So , the electromagnetic force , the force that holds us together , gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures .
The strong force , the strong nuclear force , which sticks nuclei together , gets weaker . And what you see is the standard model -- you can calculate how these change -- is the forces , the three forces , other than gravity , almost seem to come together at one point .
It 's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force , back at the beginning of time .
But they just miss .
Now there 's a theory called super-symmetry , which doubles the number of particles in the standard model , which , at first sight , doesn 't sound like a simplification .
But actually , with this theory , we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together , back at the Big Bang -- absolutely beautiful prophecy . The model wasn 't built to do that , but it seems to do it .
Also , those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter .
So a very compelling theory that 's really mainstream physics .
And if I was to put money on it , I would put money on -- in a very unscientific way -- that that these things would also crop up at the LHC .
Many other things that the LHC could discover .
But in the last few minutes , I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think -- what particle physics really means to me -- particle physics and cosmology .
And that 's that I think it 's given us a wonderful narrative -- almost a creation story , if you 'd like -- about the universe , from modern science over the last few decades .
And I 'd say that it deserves , in the spirit of Wade Davis ' talk , to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north .
This is a creation story , I think , equally as wonderful .
The story goes like this : we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago , in an immensely hot , dense state , much smaller than a single atom .
It began to expand about a million , billion , billion , billion billionth of a second -- I think I got that right -- after the Big Bang .
Gravity separated away from the other forces .
The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation .
In about the first billionth of a second or so , the Higgs field kicked in , and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass .
The universe continued to expand and cool .
After about a few minutes , there was hydrogen and helium in the universe . That 's all .
The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen , 25 percent helium . It still is today .
It continued to expand about 300 million years .
Then light began to travel through the universe .
It was big enough to be transparent to light , and that 's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God .
After about 400 million years , the first stars formed , and that hydrogen , that helium , then began to cook into the heavier elements .
So the elements of life -- carbon , and oxygen and iron , all the elements that we need to make us up -- were cooked in those first generations of stars , which then ran out of fuel , exploded , threw those elements back into the universe .
They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets .
And on some of those planets , the oxygen , which had been created in that first generation of stars , could fuse with hydrogen to form water , liquid water on the surface .
On at least one , and maybe only one of those planets , primitive life evolved , which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania , and eventually left a footprint on another world .
And built this civilization , this wonderful picture , that turned the darkness into light , and you can see the civilization from space .
As one of my great heroes , Carl Sagan , said , these are the things -- and actually , not only these , but I was looking around -- these are the things , like Saturn V rockets , and Sputnik , and DNA , and literature and science -- these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years .
Absolutely remarkable .
And , the laws of physics . Right ?
So , the right laws of physics -- they 're beautifully balanced .
If the weak force had been a little bit different , then carbon and oxygen wouldn 't be stable inside the hearts of stars , and there would be none of that in the universe .
And I think that 's a wonderful and significant story .
50 years ago , I couldn 't have told that story , because we didn 't know it .
It makes me really feel that that civilization -- which , as I say , if you believe the scientific creation story , has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics , and a few hydrogen atoms -- then I think , to me anyway , it makes me feel incredibly valuable .
So that 's the LHC .
The LHC is certainly , when it turns on in summer , going to write the next chapter of that book .
And I 'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on .
Thanks .
Lisa Harouni : A primer on 3D printing
2012 may be the year of 3D printing , when this three-decade-old technology finally becomes accessible and even commonplace . Lisa Harouni gives a useful introduction to this fascinating way of making things -- including intricate objects once impossible to create .
It is actually a reality today that you can download products from the Web -- product data , I should say , from the Web -- perhaps tweak it and personalize it to your own preference or your own taste , and have that information sent to a desktop machine that will fabricate it for you on the spot .
We can actually build for you , very rapidly , a physical object .
And the reason we can do this is through an emerging technology called additive manufacturing , or 3D printing .
This is a 3D printer .
They have been around for almost 30 years now , which is quite amazing to think of , but they 're only just starting to filter into the public arena .
And typically , you would take data , like the data of a pen here , which would be a geometric representation of that product in 3D , and we would pass that data with material into a machine .
And a process that would happen in the machine would mean layer by layer that product would be built .
And we can take out the physical product , and ready to use , or to , perhaps , assemble into something else .
But if these machines have been around for almost 30 years , why don 't we know about them ?
Because typically they 've been too inefficient , inaccessible , they 've not been fast enough , they 've been quite expensive .
But today , it is becoming a reality that they are now becoming successful .
Many barriers are breaking down .
That means that you guys will soon be able to access one of these machines , if not this minute .
And it will change and disrupt the landscape of manufacturing , and most certainly our lives , our businesses and the lives of our children .
So how does it work ?
It typically reads CAD data , which is a product design data created on professional product design programs .
And here you can see an engineer -- it could be an architect or it could be a professional product designer -- create a product in 3D .
And this data gets sent to a machine that slices the data into two-dimensional representations of that product all the way through -- almost like slicing it like salami .
And that data , layer by layer , gets passed through the machine , starting at the base of the product and depositing material , layer upon layer , infusing the new layer of materials to the old layer in an additive process .
And this material that 's deposited either starts as a liquid form or a material powder form .
And the bonding process can happen by either melting and depositing or depositing then melting .
In this case , we can see a laser sintering machine developed by EOS .
It 's actually using a laser to fuse the new layer of material to the old layer .
And over time -- quite rapidly actually , in a number of hours -- we can build a physical product , ready to take out of the machine and use .
And this is quite an extraordinary idea , but it is reality today .
So all these products that you can see on the screen were made in the same way .
They were all 3D printed .
And you can see , they 're ranging from shoes , rings that were made out of stainless steal , phone covers out of plastic , all the way through to spinal implants , for example , that were created out of medical-grade titanium , and engine parts .
But what you 'll notice about all of these products is they 're very , very intricate .
The design is quite extraordinary .
Because we 're taking this data in 3D form , slicing it up before it gets past the machine , we can actually create structures that are more intricate than any other manufacturing technology -- or , in fact , are impossible to build in any other way .
And you can create parts with moving components , hinges , parts within parts .
So in some cases , we can abolish totally the need for manual labor .
It sounds great .
It is great .
We can have 3D printers today that build structures like these .
This is almost three meters high .
And this was built by depositing artificial sandstone layer upon layer in layers of about five millimeters to 10 mm in thickness -- slowly growing this structure .
This was created by an architectural firm called Shiro .
And you can actually walk into it .
And on the other end of the spectrum , this is a microstructure .
It 's created depositing layers of about four microns .
So really the resolution is quite incredible .
The detail that you can get today is quite amazing .
So who 's using it ?
Typically , because we can create products very rapidly , it 's been used by product designers , or anyone who wanted to prototype a product and very quickly create or reiterate a design .
And actually what 's quite amazing about this technology as well is that you can create bespoke products en masse .
There 's very little economies of scale .
So you can now create one-offs very easily .
Architects , for example , they want to create prototypes of buildings .
Again you can see , this is a building of the Free University in Berlin and it was designed by Foster and Partners .
Again , not buildable in any other way .
And very hard to even create this by hand .
Now this is an engine component .
It was developed by a company called Within Technologies and 3T RPD .
It 's very , very , very detailed inside with the design .
Now 3D printing can break away barriers in design which challenge the constraints of mass production .
If we slice into this product which is actually sitting here , you can see that it has a number of cooling channels pass through it , which means it 's a more efficient product .
You can 't create this with standard manufacturing techniques even if you tried to do it manually .
It 's more efficient because we can now create all these cavities within the object that cool fluid .
And it 's used by aerospace and automotive .
It 's a lighter part and it uses less material waste .
So it 's overall performance and efficiency just exceeds standard mass produced products .
And then taking this idea of creating a very detailed structure , we can apply it to honeycomb structures and use them within implants .
Typically an implant is more effective within the body if it 's more porous , because our body tissue will grow into it .
There 's a lower chance of rejection .
But it 's very hard to create that in standard ways .
With 3D printing , we 're seeing today that we can create much better implants .
And in fact , because we can create bespoke products en masse , one-offs , we can create implants that are specific to individuals .
So as you can see , this technology and the quality of what comes out of the machines is fantastic .
And we 're starting to see it being used for final end products .
And in fact , as the detail is improving , the quality is improving , the price of the machines are falling and they 're becoming quicker .
They 're also now small enough to sit on a desktop .
You can buy a machine today for about $ 300 that you can create yourself , which is quite incredible .
But then it begs the question , why don 't we all have one in our home ?
Because , simply , most of us here today don 't know how to create the data that a 3D printer reads .
If I gave you a 3D printer , you wouldn 't know how to direct it to make what you want it to .
But there are more and more technologies , software and processes today that are breaking down those barriers .
I believe we 're at a tipping point where this is now something that we can 't avoid .
This technology is really going to disrupt the landscape of manufacturing and , I believe , cause a revolution in manufacturing .
So today , you can download products from the Web -- anything you would have on your desktop , like pens , whistles , lemon squeezers .
You can use software like Google SketchUp to create products from scratch very easily .
3D printing can be also used to download spare parts from the Web .
So imagine you have , say , a Hoover in your home and it has broken down . You need a spare part , but you realize that Hoover 's been discontinued .
Can you imagine going online -- this is a reality -- and finding that spare part from a database of geometries of that discontinued product and downloading that information , that data , and having the product made for you at home , ready to use , on your demand ?
And in fact , because we can create spare parts with things the machines are quite literally making themselves .
You 're having machines fabricate themselves .
These are parts of a RepRap machine , which is a kind of desktop printer .
But what interests my company the most is the fact that you can create individual unique products en masse .
There 's no need to do a run of thousands of millions or send that product to be injection molded in China .
You can just make it physically on the spot .
Which means that we can now present to the public the next generation of customization .
This is something that is now possible today , that you can direct personally how you want your products to look .
We 're all familiar with the idea of customization or personalization .
Brands like Nike are doing it .
It 's all over the Web .
In fact , every major household name is allowing you to interact with their products on a daily basis -- all the way from Smart Cars to Prada to Ray Ban , for example .
But this is not really mass customization ; it 's known as variant production , variations of the same product .
What you could do is really influence your product now and shape-manipulate your product .
I 'm not sure about you guys , but I 've had experiences when I 've walked into a store and I 've know exactly what I 've wanted and I 've searched everywhere for that perfect lamp that I know where I want to sit in my house and I just can 't find the right thing , or that perfect piece of jewelry as a gift or for myself .
Imagine that you can now engage with a brand and interact , so that you can pass your personal attributes to the products that you 're about to buy .
You can today download a product with software like this , view the product in 3D .
This is the sort of 3D data that a machine will read .
This is a lamp .
And you can start iterating the design .
You can direct what color that product will be , perhaps what material .
And also , you can engage in shape manipulation of that product , but within boundaries that are safe .
Because obviously the public are not professional product designers .
The piece of software will keep an individual within the bounds of the possible .
And when somebody is ready to purchase the product in their personalized design , they click " Enter " and this data gets converted into the data that a 3D printer reads and gets passed to a 3D printer , perhaps on someone 's desktop .
But I don 't think that that 's immediate .
I don 't think that will happen soon .
What 's more likely , and we 're seeing it today , is that data gets sent to a local manufacturing center .
This means lower carbon footprint .
We 're now , instead of shipping a product across the world , we 're sending data across the Internet .
Here 's the product being built .
You can see , this came out of the machine in one piece and the electronics were inserted later .
It 's this lamp , as you can see here .
So as long as you have the data , you can create the part on demand .
And you don 't necessarily need to use this for just aesthetic customization , you can use it for functional customization , scanning parts of the body and creating things that are made to fit .
So we can run this through to something like prosthetics , which is highly specialized to an individual 's handicap .
Or we can create very specific prosthetics for that individual .
Scanning teeth today , you can have your teeth scanned and dental coatings made in this way to fit you .
While you wait at the dentist , a machine will quietly be creating this for you ready to insert in the teeth .
And the idea of now creating implants , scanning data , an MRI scan of somebody can now be converted into 3D data and we can create very specific implants for them .
And applying this to the idea of building up what 's in our bodies .
You know , this is pair of lungs and the bronchial tree .
It 's very intricate .
You couldn 't really create this or simulate it in any other way .
But with MRI data , we can just build the product , as you can see , very intricately .
Using this process , pioneers in the industry are layering up cells today .
So one of the pioneers , for example , is Dr. Anthony Atala , and he has been working on layering cells to create body parts -- bladders , valves , kidneys .
Now this is not something that 's ready for the public , but it is in working progress .
So just to finalize , we 're all individual .
We all have different preferences , different needs .
We like different things .
We 're all different sizes and our companies the same .
Businesses want different things .
Without a doubt in my mind , I believe that this technology is going to cause a manufacturing revolution and will change the landscape of manufacturing as we know it .
Thank you .
Homaro Cantu + Ben Roche : Cooking as alchemy
Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche come from Moto , a Chicago restaurant that plays with new ways to cook and eat food . But beyond the fun and flavor-tripping , there 's a serious intent : Can we use new food technology for good ?
Ben Roche : So I 'm Ben , by the way .
Homaro Cantu : And I 'm Homaro .
BR : And we 're chefs . So when Moto opened in 2004 , people didn 't really know what to expect . A lot of people thought that it was a Japanese restaurant , and maybe it was the name , maybe it was the logo , which was like a Japanese character , but anyway , we had all these requests for Japanese food , which is really not what we did . And after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll , we decided to give the people what they wanted . So this picture is an example of printed food , and this was the first foray into what we like to call flavor transformation . So this is all the ingredients , all the flavor of , you know , a standard maki roll , printed onto a little piece of paper .
HC : So our diners started to get bored with this idea , and we decided to give them the same course twice , so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish .
So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood .
The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes . A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish .
BR : But it 's not all just edible pictures .
We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar -- so in this case , we have carrot cake .
So we take a carrot cake , put it in a blender , and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice , and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream , I guess , and it comes off looking like , you know , Jupiter 's floating around your plate .
So yeah , we 're transforming things into something that you have absolutely no reference for .
HC : And here 's something we have no reference to eat . This is a cigar , and basically it 's a Cuban cigar made out of a Cuban pork sandwich , so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder , we fashion that into ash . We take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green , put an edible label that bears no similarity to a Cohiba cigar label , and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it .
HC : Delicious .
BR : That 's not it , though .
Instead of making foods that look like things that you wouldn 't eat , we decided to make ingredients look like dishes that you know .
So this is a plate of nachos .
The difference between our nachos and the other guy 's nachos , is that this is actually a dessert .
So the chips are candied , the ground beef is made from chocolate , and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese .
And after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this , of these ingredients , we realized that it was pretty cool , because as we served it , we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing , where the cheese begins to melt .
So when you 're looking at this thing in the dining room , you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos , and it 's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert , and it 's just kind of like a mind-ripper .
HC : So we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic 's shop than a kitchen , and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory , and that 's what we have here .
So we put this in the basement , and we got really serious about food , like serious experimentation .
BR : One of the really cool things about the lab , besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen , is that , you know , with this new equipment , and this new approach , all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open , and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created , they just kept going further and further out there .
HC : Let 's talk about flavor transformation , and let 's actually make some cool stuff .
You see a cow with its tongue hanging out .
What I see is a cow about to eat something delicious . What is that cow eating ?
And why is it delicious ?
So the cow , basically , eats three basic things in their feed : corn , beets , and barley , and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy , wild ideas . Can we take what the cow eats , remove the cow , and then make some hamburgers out of that ?
And basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this .
BR : Yeah , that 's our chef de cuisine , Chris Jones . This is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task , but a lot of these ideas , they 're hard to understand .
They 're hard to just get automatically .
There 's a lot of research and a lot of failure , trial and error -- I guess , more error -- that goes into each and every dish , so we don 't always get it right , and it takes a while for us to be able to explain that to people .
HC : So , after about a day of Chris and I staring at each other , we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty , and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat .
This is made from three ingredients : beets , barley , corn , and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat , looks and tastes like hamburger meat , and not only that , but it 's basically removing the cow from the equation .
So replicating food , taking it into that next level is where we 're going .
BR : And it 's definitely the world 's first bleeding veggie burger , which is a cool side effect .
And a miracle berry , if you 're not familiar with it , is a natural ingredient , and it contains a special property .
It 's a glycoprotein called miraculin , a naturally occurring thing . It still freaks me out every time I eat it , but it has a unique ability to mask certain taste receptors on your tongue , so that primarily sour taste receptors , so normally things that would taste very sour or tart , somehow begin to taste very sweet .
HC : You 're about to eat a lemon , and now it tastes like lemonade .
Let 's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that .
We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas , and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit .
BR : So you see us here cutting up some watermelon . The idea with this is that we 're going to eliminate tons of food miles , wasted energy , and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna , or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place , with local , organic produce ; so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin .
HC : So if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things , we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon , and it makes it go from sweet to savory .
So after we do that , we put it into a vacuum bag , add a little bit of seaweed , some spices , and we roll it , and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna .
So the key now is to make it behave like tuna .
BR : And then after a quick dip into some liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear , we really have something that looks , tastes and behaves like the real thing .
HC : So the key thing to remember here is , we don 't really care what this tuna really is .
As long as it 's good for you and good for the environment , it doesn 't matter .
But where is this going ?
How can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology ?
So here 's the next challenge .
I told the staff , let 's just take a bunch of wild plants , think of them as food ingredients . As long as they 're non-poisonous to the human body , go out around Chicago sidewalks , take it , blend it , cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto .
Let 's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think .
BR : Yeah , so you can imagine , a task like this -- this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for . But we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general , because these are ingredients , you know , plant life that we 're , one , unfamiliar with , and two , we have no reference for how to cook these things because people don 't eat them .
So we really had to think about new , creative ways to flavor , new ways to cook and to change texture -- and that was the main issue with this challenge .
HC : So this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead .
So developing nations and first-world nations , imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them , food miles would basically turn into food feet .
This disruptive mentality of what food is would essentially open up the encyclopedia of what raw ingredients are , even if we just swapped out , say , one of these for flour , that would eliminate so much energy and so much waste .
And to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers , there 's a bale of hay there and some crab apples .
And basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients .
People swore they were eating barbecue sauce , and this is free food .
BR : Thanks , guys .
Tavi Gevinson : A teen just trying to figure it out
Fifteen-year-old Tavi Gevinson had a hard time finding strong female , teenage role models -- so she built a space where they could find each other . At TEDxTeen , she illustrates how the conversations on sites like Rookie , her wildly popular web magazine for and by teen girls , are putting a new , unapologetically uncertain and richly complex face on modern feminism .
Four years ago today , exactly , actually , I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie .
Last September of 2011 , I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com.
My name 's Tavi Gevinson , and the title of my talk is " Still Figuring It Out , " and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today 's theme , and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint .
So I edit this site for teenage girls . I 'm a feminist .
I am kind of a pop culture nerd , and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character , and , you know , movies and TV shows , these things have influence . My own website .
So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted , and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that 's played up a lot , like a Catwoman type , or she plays her sexuality up a lot , and it 's seen as power .
But they 're not strong characters who happen to be female .
They 're completely flat , and they 're basically cardboard characters .
The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand , and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple , when , in actuality , women are complicated , women are multifaceted -- not because women are crazy , but because people are crazy , and women happen to be people .
So the flaws are the key .
I 'm not the first person to say this .
What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses , who has flaws , who is maybe not immediately likable , but eventually relatable .
I don 't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it , so just wanted to acknowledge shows like " Mad Men , " movies like " Bridesmaids , " whose female characters or protagonists are complex , multifaceted .
Lena Dunham , who 's on here , her show on HBO that premiers next month , " Girls , " she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions , and that feels accurate for all people , but you don 't see women represented like that as much .
Congrats , guys .
But I don 't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way , and one group that we 'll focus on today are teens , because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out , and in the ' 90s there was " Freaks and Geeks " and " My So-Called Life , " and their characters , Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase , I mean , the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out , basically , but those shows only lasted a season each , and I haven 't really seen anything like that on TV since .
So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — — around the time when I was , when I started watching those TV shows .
I was ending middle school , starting high school -- I 'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you 're told you can 't be when you 're growing up as a girl .
You can 't be smart and pretty .
You can 't be a feminist who 's also interested in fashion .
You can 't care about clothes if it 's not for the sake of what other people , usually men , will think of you .
So I was trying to figure all that out , and I felt a little confused , and I said so on my blog , and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist , they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs , never being insecure , never having doubts , having all of the answers . And this is not true , and , actually , reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion , a conversation , a process , and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I -- I mean , I think I 've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since .
But , yeah .
So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing , their photography , whatever , to be a member of our staff .
I got about 3,000 emails .
My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people , and we launched last September .
And this is an excerpt from my first editor 's letter , where I say that Rookie , we don 't have all the answers , we 're still figuring it out too , but the point is not to give girls the answers , and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves , but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission , they can ask their own questions , find their own answers , all of that , and Rookie , I think we 've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out .
So I 'm not saying , " Be like us , " and " We 're perfect role models , " because we 're not , but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions .
I mean , we have articles called " On Taking Yourself Seriously : How to Not Care What People Think of You , " but we also have articles like , oops -- I 'm figuring it out !
If you use that , you can get away with anything .
We also have articles called " How to Look Like You Weren 't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes . "
So all of that being said , I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site , that aren 't just about being totally powerful , maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those .
So what I you to take away from my talk , the lesson of all of this , is to just be Stevie Nicks .
Like , that 's all you have to do .
Because my favorite thing about her , other than , like , everything , is that she is very -- has always been unapologetically present on stage , and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them , and yeah , so please be Stevie Nicks .
Thank you .
Rob Reid : The $ 8 billion iPod
Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math , a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists .
The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional .
And I think some dispassionate , quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate .
I 'd therefore like to propose that we employ , we enlist , the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject .
For instance , just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft .
Now rather than just argue about this number , a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he 'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin , and then to Mars ...
... if we use pennies .
Now this is obviously a powerful , some might say dangerously powerful , insight .
But it 's also a morally important one .
Because this isn 't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we 're talking about , but this is actual economic losses .
This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops , as well as wheat , tobacco , rice , sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum .
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math .
Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene .
So that 's a chunk of what we 're looking for .
But total movie revenues across theaters , home video and pay-per-view are up .
And TV , satellite and cable revenues are way up .
Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up .
So this small missing chunk here is puzzling .
Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms , it 's not additional growth that piracy has prevented , but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms -- one that didn 't exist in the 90 's .
What we 're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy .
50 billion dollars of it a year , which is enough , at 30 seconds a ringtone , that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times .
It 's true .
I have Excel .
The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft , which is quite a lot when you consider that , back in ' 98 , the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people .
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people .
And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft , have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries .
And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day .
And some people think that string theory is tough .
Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians ' toolkit .
It 's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated .
Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law .
Some people think this number 's a little bit large , but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn 't get compounded for inflation every year .
Now when this law first passed , the world 's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs .
And it was a big Christmas hit .
Because what little hoodlum wouldn 't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket .
These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs , which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media .
Or about 75,000 jobs .
Now you might find copyright math strange , but that 's because it 's a field that 's best left to experts .
So that 's it for now .
I hope you 'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Judy MacDonald Johnston : Prepare for a good end of life
Thinking about death is frightening , but planning ahead is practical and leaves more room for peace of mind in our final days . In a solemn , thoughtful talk , Judy MacDonald Johnston shares 5 practices for planning for a good end of life .
What would be a good end of life ?
And I 'm talking about the very end .
I 'm talking about dying .
We all think a lot about how to live well .
I 'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well .
I 'm not a geriatrician .
I design reading programs for preschoolers .
What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two .
In the last few years , I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted .
Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County .
They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there .
This was their dream .
I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s .
They were both only children who chose not to have kids .
As we became friends , I became their trustee and their medical advocate , but more importantly , I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences .
And we learned a few things about how to have a good end .
In their final years , Jim and Shirley faced cancers , fractures , infections , neurological illness .
It 's true .
At the end , our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero .
What we found is that , with a plan and the right people , quality of life can remain high .
The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event , and during this time , Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone .
This gave them the peace of mind to move forward .
It might be a diagnosis . It might be your intuition .
But one day , you 're going to say , " This thing is going to get me . "
Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that .
Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different .
In both cases , last days are about quiet reassurance .
Jim died first . He was conscious until the very end , but on his last day he couldn 't talk .
Through his eyes , we knew when he needed to hear again , " It is all set , Jim . We 're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch , and ACR 's going to take care of your wildlife forever . "
From this experience I 'm going to share five practices .
I 've put worksheets online , so if you 'd like , you can plan your own end .
It starts with a plan .
Most people say , " I 'd like to die at home . "
Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home .
Saying we 'd like to die at home is not a plan .
A lot of people say , " If I get like that , just shoot me . "
This is not a plan either ; this is illegal .
A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want .
Where do you want to be when you 're no longer independent ?
What do you want in terms of medical intervention ?
And who 's going to make sure your plan is followed ?
You will need advocates .
Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want .
Don 't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child .
You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well , and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation .
Hospital readiness is critical .
You are likely to be headed to the emergency room , and you want to get this right .
Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history , medications and physician information .
Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards , your power of attorney , and your do-not-resuscitate order .
Have advocates keep a set in their car .
Tape a set to your refrigerator .
When you show up in the E.R. with this packet , your admission is streamlined in a material way .
You 're going to need caregivers .
You 'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice .
In either case , do not settle .
We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha , who won 't let you win at bingo just because you 're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can 't get out there , and Caitlin , who won 't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands .
Finally , last words .
What do you want to hear at the very end , and from whom would you like to hear it ?
In my experience , you 'll want to hear that whatever you 're worried about is going to be fine .
When you believe it 's okay to let go , you will .
So , this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial .
What I 've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life , we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life .
Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch .
Here 's Jim just a few weeks before he died , celebrating a birthday he didn 't expect to see .
And here 's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day 's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch .
Jim and Shirley had a good end of life , and by sharing their story with you , I hope to increase our chances of doing the same .
Thank you .
Ellen Gustafson : Obesity + hunger = 1 global food issue
Co-creator of the philanthropic FEED bags , Ellen Gustafson says hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin . In her talk , she launches The 30 Project -- a way to change how we farm and eat in the next 30 years , and solve the global food inequalities behind both epidemics .
I 'm Ellen , and I 'm totally obsessed with food .
But I didn 't start out obsessed with food .
I started out obsessed with global security policy because I lived in New York during 9 / 11 , and it was obviously a very relevant thing .
And I got from global security policy to food because I realized when I 'm hungry , I 'm really pissed off , and I 'm assuming that the rest of the world is too .
Especially if you 're hungry and your kids are hungry and your neighbor 's kids are hungry and your whole neighborhood is hungry , you 're pretty angry .
And actually , lo and behold , it looks pretty much like the areas of the world that are hungry are also the areas of the world that are pretty insecure .
So I took a job at the United Nations World Food Programme as a way to try to address these security issues through food security issues .
And while I was there , I came across what I think is the most brilliant of their programs .
It 's called School Feeding , and it 's a really simple idea to sort of get in the middle of the cycle of poverty and hunger that continues for a lot of people around the world , and stop it .
By giving kids a free school meal , it gets them into school , which is obviously education , the first step out of poverty , but it also gives them the micronutrients and the macronutrients they need to really develop both mentally and physically .
While I was working at the U.N. , I met this girl . Her name is Lauren Bush .
And she had this really awesome idea to sell the bag called the " Feed Bag " -- which is really beautifully ironic because you can strap on the Feed Bag .
But each bag we 'd sell would provide a year 's worth of school meals for one kid .
it costs between 20 and 50 bucks to provide school feeding for a year .
We could sell these bags and raise a ton of money and a ton of awareness for the World Food Programme .
But of course , you know at the U.N. , sometimes things move slowly , and they basically said no .
And we thought , God , this is such a good idea and it 's going to raise so much money .
So we said screw it , we 'll just start our own company , which we did three years ago .
So that was kind of my first dream , was to start this company called FEED , and here 's a screenshot of our website .
We did this bag for Haiti , and we launched it just a month after the earthquake to provide school meals for kids in Haiti .
So FEED 's doing great . We 've so far provided 55 million meals to kids around the world by selling now 550,000 bags , a ton of bags , a lot of bags .
All this time you 're -- when you think about hunger , it 's a hard thing to think about , because what we think about is eating .
I think about eating a lot , and I really love it .
And the thing that 's a little strange about international hunger and talking about international issues is that most people kind of want to know : " What are you doing in America ? "
" What are you doing for America 's kids ? "
There 's definitely hunger in America : 49 million people and almost 16.7 million children .
I mean that 's pretty dramatic for our own country .
Hunger definitely means something a little bit different in America than it does internationally , but it 's incredibly important to address hunger in our own country .
But obviously the bigger problem that we all know about is obesity , and it 's dramatic .
The other thing that 's dramatic is that both hunger and obesity have really risen in the last 30 years .
Unfortunately , obesity 's not only an American problem .
It 's actually been spreading all around the world and mainly through our kind of food systems that we 're exporting .
The numbers are pretty crazy .
There 's a billion people obese or overweight and a billion people hungry .
So those seem like two bifurcated problems , but I kind of started to think about , you know , what is obesity and hunger ? What are both those things about ?
Well , they 're both about food .
And when you think about food , the underpinning of food in both cases is potentially problematic agriculture .
And agriculture is where food comes from .
Well , agriculture in America 's very interesting .
It 's very consolidated , and the foods that are produced lead to the foods that we eat .
Well , the foods that are produced are , more or less , corn , soy and wheat .
And as you can see , that 's three-quarters of the food that we 're eating for the most part : processed foods and fast foods .
Unfortunately , in our agricultural system , we haven 't done a good job in the last three decades of exporting those technologies around the world .
So African agriculture , which is the place of most hunger in the world , has actually fallen precipitously as hunger has risen .
So somehow we 're not making the connect between exporting a good agricultural system that will help feed people all around the world .
Who is farming them ? That 's what I was wondering .
So I went and stood on a big grain bin in the Midwest , and that really didn 't help me understand farming , but I think it 's a really cool picture .
And you know , the reality is that between farmers in America , who actually , quite frankly , when I spend time in the Midwest , are pretty large in general .
And their farms are also large .
But farmers in the rest of the world are actually quite skinny , and that 's because they 're starving .
Most hungry people in the world are subsistence farmers .
And most of those people are women -- which is a totally other topic that I won 't get on right now , but I 'd love to do the feminist thing at some point .
I think it 's really interesting to look at agriculture from these two sides .
There 's this large , consolidated farming that 's led to what we eat in America , and it 's really been since around 1980 , after the oil crisis , when , you know , mass consolidation , mass exodus of small farmers in this country .
And then in the same time period , you know , we 've kind of left Africa 's farmers to do their own thing .
Unfortunately , what is farmed ends up as what we eat .
And in America , a lot of what we eat has led to obesity and has led to a real change in sort of what our diet is in the last 30 years .
It 's crazy .
A fifth of kids under two drinks soda .
Hello . You don 't put soda in bottles .
But people do because it 's so cheap , and so our whole food system in the last 30 years has really shifted .
I think , you know , it 's not just in our own country , but really we 're exporting the system around the world , and when you look at the data of least developed countries -- especially in cities , which are growing really rapidly -- people are eating American processed foods .
And in one generation , they 're going from hunger , and all of the detrimental health effects of hunger , to obesity and things like diabetes and heart disease in one generation .
So the problematic food system is affecting both hunger and obesity .
Not to beat a dead horse , but this is a global food system where there 's a billion people hungry and billion people obese .
I think that 's the only way to look at it .
And instead of taking these two things as bifurcated problems that are very separate , it 's really important to look at them as one system .
We get a lot of our food from all around the world , and people from all around the world are importing our food system , so it 's incredibly relevant to start a new way of looking at it .
The thing is , I 've learned -- and the technology people that are here , which I 'm totally not one of them -- but apparently , it really takes 30 years for a lot of technologies to become really endemic to us , like the mouse and the Internet and Windows .
You know , there 's 30-year cycles .
I think 2010 can be a really interesting year because it is the end of the 30-year cycle , and it 's the birthday of the global food system .
You know , I think if we really think that this is something that 's happened in the last 30 years , there 's hope in that .
It 's the thirtieth anniversary of GMO crops and the Big Gulp , Chicken McNuggets , high fructose corn syrup , the farm crisis in America and the change in how we 've addressed agriculture internationally .
So there 's a lot of reasons to take this 30-year time period as sort of the creation of this new food system .
I 'm not the only one who 's obsessed with this whole 30-year thing .
The icons like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver in his TED Prize wish both addressed this last three-decade time period as incredibly relevant for food system change .
Well , I really care about 1980 because it 's also the thirtieth anniversary of me this year .
And so in my lifetime , a lot of what 's happened in the world -- and being a person obsessed with food -- a lot of this has really changed .
So my second dream is that I think we can look to the next 30 years as a time to change the food system again .
And we know what 's happened in the past , so if we start now , and we look at technologies and improvements to the food system long term , we might be able to recreate the food system so when I give my next talk and I 'm 60 years old , I 'll be able to say that it 's been a success .
So I 'm announcing today the start of a new organization , or a new fund within the FEED Foundation , called the 30 Project .
And the 30 Project is really focused on these long-term ideas for food system change .
And I think by aligning international advocates that are addressing hunger and domestic advocates that are addressing obesity , we might actually look for long-term solutions that will make the food system better for everyone .
We all tend to think that these systems are quite different , and people argue whether or not organic can feed the world , but if we take a 30-year view , there 's more hope in collaborative ideas .
So I 'm hoping that by connecting really disparate organizations like the ONE campaign and Slow Food , which don 't seem right now to have much in common , we can talk about holistic , long-term , systemic solutions that will improve food for everyone .
Some ideas I 've had is like , look , the reality is -- kids in the South Bronx need apples and carrots and so do kids in Botswana .
And how are we going to get those kids those nutritious foods ?
Another thing that 's become incredibly global is production of meat and fish .
Understanding how to produce protein in a way that 's healthy for the environment and healthy for people will be incredibly important to address things like climate change and how we use petrochemical fertilizers .
And you know , these are really relevant topics that are long term and important for both people in Africa who are small farmers and people in America who are farmers and eaters .
And I also think that thinking about processed foods in a new way , where we actually price the negative externalities like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips .
Well , if that bag of chips then becomes inherently more expensive than an apple , then maybe it 's time for a different sense of personal responsibility in food choice because the choices are actually choices instead of three-quarters of the products being made just from corn , soy and wheat .
The 30Project.org is launched , and I 've gathered a coalition of a few organizations to start .
And it 'll be growing over the next few months .
But I really hope that you will all think of ways that you can look long term at things like the food system and make change .
Two young scientists break down plastics with bacteria
Once it 's created , plastic never dies . While in 12th grade Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao went in search of a new bacteria to biodegrade plastic -- specifically by breaking down phthalates , a harmful plasticizer . They found an answer surprisingly close to home .
Miranda Wang : We 're here to talk about accidents .
How do you feel about accidents ?
When we think about accidents , we usually consider them to be harmful , unfortunate or even dangerous , and they certainly can be .
But are they always that bad ?
The discovery that had led to penicillin , for example , is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time .
Without biologist Alexander Fleming 's moldy accident , caused by a neglected workstation , we wouldn 't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections .
Jeanny Yao : Miranda and I are here today because we 'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries .
In 2011 , we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste .
We realized that when plastics get to the dump , it 's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities , and when they 're mixed with organic matter and construction debris , it 's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them .
MW : However , plastics are useful because they 're durable , flexible , and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes .
The downside of this convenience is that there 's a high cost to this .
Plastics cause serious problems , such as the destruction of ecosystems , the pollution of natural resources , and the reduction of available land space .
This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre .
When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment , we think about the Great Pacific Gyre , which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste .
But that 's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment .
Right now , the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris , and there 's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn 't be able to find plastic particles .
JY : In a plastic-dependent society , cutting down production is a good goal , but it 's not enough .
And what about the waste that 's already been produced ?
Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade .
So we thought , you know what ?
Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up , let 's find a way to break them down with bacteria .
Sounds cool , right ?
Audience : Yeah . JY : Thank you .
But we had a problem .
You see , plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade .
Anyhow , we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go .
MW : With this idea in mind , Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet , and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year .
We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates .
Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility , durability and transparency .
Although they 're part of the plastic , they 're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone .
As a result , they easily escape into our environment .
Not only do phthalates pollute our environment , but they also pollute our bodies .
To make the matter worse , phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure , such as babies ' toys , beverage containers , cosmetics , and even food wraps .
Phthalates are horrible because they 're so easily taken into our bodies .
They can be absorbed by skin contact , ingested , and inhaled .
JY : Every year , at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air , water and soil .
The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it 's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor .
We read that each year , the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety .
So we figured , if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates , and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas , then perhaps , perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates .
MW : So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia , and surprisingly , he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us .
Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries .
JY : The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River .
Out of thousands of bacteria , we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates , so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source .
This implied that , if anything grew in our cultures , then they must be able to live off of phthalates .
Everything went well from there , and we became amazing scientists .
MW : Um ... uh , Jeanny . JY : I 'm just joking .
MW : Okay . Well , it was partially my fault .
You see , I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture , and as a result , we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice .
And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation .
But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous .
We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels , so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels .
JY : Now that we grew the bacteria , we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates , because we thought that would be less accident-prone , but we were wrong again .
We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi .
As a result , we had to streak and restreak several times .
Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth , and found that they shared an inverse correlation , so as bacterial populations increased , phthalate concentrations decreased .
This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates .
MW : So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates , we wondered what these bacteria were .
So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database .
We were happy to see that , although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria , two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation , so this was actually a novel discovery .
JY : To better understand how this biodegradation works , we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains .
To do this , we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid .
MW : We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph .
This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates .
Our bacteria can transform phthalates , which is a harmful toxin , into end products such as carbon dioxide , water and alcohol .
I know some of you in the crowd are thinking , well , carbon dioxide is horrible , it 's a greenhouse gas .
But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates , they would have used some other kind of carbon source , and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway .
We were also interested to see that , although we 've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site , we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site .
So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection .
JY : So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential .
Although we 're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates , we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem .
We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution , but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries .
Throughout this journey , we have also discovered our passion for science , and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university .
We hope that in the near future , we 'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants .
We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources .
And perhaps one day we 'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste .
MW : I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms , and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries .
Einstein once said , " You can 't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them . "
If we 're making plastic synthetically , then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically .
Thank you . JY : Thank you .
Natalie Merchant : Singing old poems to life
Natalie Merchant sings from her new album , & lt ; em & gt ; Leave Your Sleep . & lt ; / em & gt ; Lyrics from near-forgotten 19th-century poetry pair with her unmistakable voice for a performance that brought the TED audience to its feet .
My age is three hundred and seventy-two I think with the deepest regret How I used to pick up and voraciously chew the dear little boys that I met I 've eaten them raw in their holiday suits , Eaten them curried with rice , I 've eaten them baked in their jackets and boots , And found them exceedingly nice . But now that my jaws are too weak for such fare , I think it 's increasingly rude To do such a thing when I 'm quite well aware Little boys do not like being chewed . Little boys do not like being chewed . So now I contentedly live upon eels , And try to do nothing amiss And pass all the time I can spare from my meals In innocent slumber like this , Innocent slumber like this . I suppose I owe you an explanation .
I 've been working on a project for the last six years adapting children 's poetry to music .
And that 's a poem by Charles Edward Carryl , who was a stockbroker in New York City for 45 years , but in the evenings , he wrote nonsense for his children .
And this book was one of the most famous books in America for about 35 years .
" The Sleepy Giant , " which is the song that I just sang , is one of his poems .
Now , we 're going to do other poems for you , and here 's a preview of some of the poets .
This is Rachel Field , Robert Graves -- a very young Robert Graves -- Christina Rossetti .
Ghosts , right ?
Have nothing to say to us , obsolete , gone -- not so .
What I really enjoyed about this project is reviving these people 's words .
Taking them off the dead , flat pages .
Bringing them to life , bringing them to light .
So , what we 're going to do next is a poem that was written by Nathalia Crane .
Nathalia Crane was a little girl from Brooklyn .
When she was 10 years old in 1927 , she published her first book of poems called " The Janitor 's Boy . "
Here she is .
And here 's her poem .
Oh , I 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , And the janitor 's boy is in love with me . Oh , I 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , And the janitor 's boy is in love with me . He 's going to hunt for a desert isle In our geography . A desert isle with spicy trees Somewhere in Sheepshead Bay ; A right nice place , just fit for two Where we can live always . Oh , I 'm in love with the janitor 's boy , And the janitor 's boy , he 's busy as can be ; Down in the cellar he 's making a raft Out of an old settee . He 'll carry me off , I know that he will , For his hair is exceedingly red ; And the only thing that occurs to me Is to dutifully shiver in bed . And on the day that we sail , I will leave a little note For my parents I hate to annoy : " I have flown to an island in the bay With my janitor 's red haired-boy . " The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy I 'm going to sail away Gone to Sheepshead Bay With my janitor 's red-haired boy . On an old settee My red-haired boy and me The janitor 's red-haired boy . The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy The janitor 's red-haired boy The next poem is by E.E. Cummings , " Maggie and Milly and Molly and May . "
Maggie and Milly , Molly and May They went down to the beach one day to play And Maggie discovered a shell that sang So sweetly she couldn 't remember her troubles Maggie and Milly , Molly and May Maggie and Milly , Molly and May Milly befriended a stranded star Whose rays , whose rays Five languid fingers were Maggie and Milly , Molly and May Maggie and Milly , Molly and May Molly was chased by a horrible thing Which raced sideways blowing Blowing Blowing May came home with a smooth , round stone Small as a world and as large as alone For whatever we lose like a you or a me Always ourselves that we find at the sea Thank you .
The next poem is " If No One Ever Marries Me . "
It was written by Laurence Alma-Tadema .
She was the daughter of a very , very famous Dutch painter who had made his fame in England .
He went there after the death of his wife of smallpox and brought his two young children .
One was his daughter , Laurence .
She wrote this poem when she was 18 years old in 1888 , and I look at it as kind of a very sweet feminist manifesto tinged with a little bit of defiance and a little bit of resignation and regret .
Well , if no one ever marries me And I don 't see why they should , Nurse says I 'm not pretty , And you know I 'm seldom good , seldom good -- Well , if no one ever marries me I shan 't mind very much ; Buy a squirrel in a cage And a little rabbit-hutch . If no one marries me If no one marries me If no one marries me If no one marries me If no one marries me I 'll have a cottage near a wood And a pony all my own A little lamb quite clean and tame That I can take to town . And when I 'm really getting old -- And 28 or nine -- Buy myself a little orphan girl And bring her up as mine . If no one marries me If no one marries me If no one marries me If no one marries me Well , if no one marries me Marries me Well , if no one marries me Marries me Well , if no one marries me Thank you .
Thank you .
I became very curious about the poets after spending six years with them , and started to research their lives , and then decided to write a book about it .
And the burning question about Alma-Tadema was : Did she marry ?
And the answer was no , which I found in the London Times archive .
She died alone in 1940 in the company of her books and her dear friends .
Gerard Manley Hopkins , a saintly man .
He became a Jesuit .
He converted from his Anglican faith .
He was moved to by the Tractarian Movement , the Oxford Movement , otherwise known as -- and he became a Jesuit priest .
He burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he couldn 't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest .
He died typhoid fever at the age of 44 , I believe , 43 or 44 .
At the time , he was teaching classics at Trinity College in Dublin .
A few years before he died , after he had resumed writing poetry , but in secret , he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research : " I 've written a verse .
It is to explain death to a child , and it deserves a piece of plain-song music . "
And my blood froze when I read that because I had written the plain-song music 130 years after he 'd written the letter .
And the poem is called , " Spring and Fall . "
Margaret , are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving , by and by ? Leaves , like the things of man , you With your fresh thoughts care for , can you ? But as the heart grows older It will come to such sights much colder By and by , nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie ; And yet you will weep and you 'll know why . No matter child , the name : Sorrow 's springs are all the same They 're all the same . Nor mouth had nor no mind expressed What heart heard of , ghost had guessed : It 's the blight man was born for , It is Margaret that you mourn for Thank you so much .
I 'd like to thank everybody , all the scientists , the philosophers , the architects , the inventors , the biologists , the botanists , the artists ...
everyone that blew my mind this week .
Thank you .
Oh , a li la li la la la La li la la li la la la la la la La li la la la La li la la la la La li la la la la la la La la la li la la la la la You 've been so kind and generous I don 't know how you keep on giving . And for your kindness , I 'm in debt to you . And for your selflessness , my admiration . And for everything you 've done , you know I 'm bound ; I 'm bound to thank for it La li la li la la la La li la la li la li la la la La li la la la La li la la la la La li la li la la la La li la la li la li la la And you Now you 've been so kind and ... Curb the enthusiasm , just a little bit .
Just bring it down a little .
It 's my turn .
I still have two minutes .
Okay , we 're going to start that verse again .
Well , you 've been so ... That 's innovative , don 't you think ?
Calming the audience down ; I 'm supposed to be whipping you into a frenzy , and I , " That 's enough . Sh . "
Now , you 've been kind and ... I 'm going to sing this to Bill Gates .
I have so much admiration for him .
Now , you 've been so kind and generous , I don 't know how you keep on giving . And for your kindness I 'm in debt to you . And I never could have come this far without you . So for everything you 've done , you know I 'm bound I 'm bound to thank you for it La li la la li la la la La li la la li la la la La li la la la La li la la la la La li la la li la la la La li la la li la li la la la La li la la la Oh , I want to thank you for so many gifts You gave in love with tenderness Thank you I want to thank you for your generosity the love and the honesty that you gave me I want to thank you show my gratitude , My love and my respect for you I want to thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you I want to thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you You know what ?
I 'll show you how to clap to this song .
I want to thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you Thank you , thank you I want to thank you , thank you It works better , right ?
I want to thank you , thank you I want to thank you Ooh hoo Ooh hoo Ooh hoo Ooh hoo Let 's bring it down .
Decrescendo .
Gradually , bringing it down , bringing it down .
I want to thank you , thank you Finger popping , ain 't no stopping .
Thank you so much .
Esta Soler : How we turned the tide on domestic violence
When Esta Soler lobbied for a bill outlawing domestic violence in 1984 , one politician called it the " Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act . " " If only I had Twitter then , " she mused . This sweeping , optimistic talk charts 30 years of tactics and technologies -- from the Polaroid camera to social media -- that led to a 64 % drop in domestic violence in the U.S.
I want you to imagine what a breakthrough this was for women who were victims of violence in the 1980s .
They would come into the emergency room with what the police would call " a lovers ' quarrel , " and I would see a woman who was beaten , I would see a broken nose and a fractured wrist and swollen eyes .
And as activists , we would take our Polaroid camera , we would take her picture , we would wait 90 seconds , and we would give her the photograph .
And she would then have the evidence she needed to go to court .
We were making what was invisible visible .
I 've been doing this for 30 years .
I 've been part of a social movement that has been working on ending violence against women and children .
And for all those years , I 've had an absolutely passionate and sometimes not popular belief that this violence is not inevitable , that it is learned , and if it 's learned , it can be un-learned , and it can be prevented .
Why do I believe this ?
Because it 's true .
It is absolutely true .
Between 1993 and 2010 , domestic violence among adult women in the United States has gone down by 64 percent , and that is great news .
Sixty-four percent . Now , how did we get there ?
Our eyes were wide open .
Thirty years ago , women were beaten , they were stalked , they were raped , and no one talked about it .
There was no justice .
And as an activist , that was not good enough .
And so step one on this journey is we organized , and we created this extraordinary underground network of amazing women who opened shelters , and if they didn 't open a shelter , they opened their home so that women and children could be safe .
And you know what else we did ?
We had bake sales , we had car washes , and we did everything we could do to fundraise , and then at one point we said , you know , it 's time that we went to the federal government and asked them to pay for these extraordinary services that are saving people 's lives .
Right ?
And so , step number two , we knew we needed to change the laws .
And so we went to Washington , and we lobbied for the first piece of legislation .
And I remember walking through the halls of the U.S. Capitol , and I was in my 30s , and my life had purpose , and I couldn 't imagine that anybody would ever challenge this important piece of legislation .
I was probably 30 and naive .
But I heard about a congressman who had a very , very different point of view .
Do you know what he called this important piece of legislation ?
He called it the Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act .
The Take the Fun Out of Marriage Act .
Ladies and gentlemen , that was in 1984 in the United States , and I wish I had Twitter .
Ten years later , after lots of hard work , we finally passed the Violence Against Women Act , which is a life-changing act that has saved so many lives .
Thank you .
I was proud to be part of that work , and it changed the laws and it put millions of dollars into local communities .
And you know what else it did ? It collected data .
And I have to tell you , I 'm passionate about data .
In fact , I am a data nerd .
I 'm sure there are a lot of data nerds here .
I am a data nerd , and the reason for that is I want to make sure that if we spend a dollar , that the program works , and if it doesn 't work , we should change the plan .
And I also want to say one other thing : We are not going to solve this problem by building more jails or by even building more shelters .
It is about economic empowerment for women , it is about healing kids who are hurt , and it is about prevention with a capital P.
And so , step number three on this journey : We know , if we 're going to keep making this progress , we 're going to have to turn up the volume , we 're going to have to increase the visibility , and we 're going to have to engage the public .
And so knowing that , we went to the Advertising Council , and we asked them to help us build a public education campaign .
And we looked around the world to Canada and Australia and Brazil and parts of Africa , and we took this knowledge and we built the first national public education campaign called There 's No Excuse for Domestic Violence .
Take a look at one of our spots .
Where 's dinner ?
Well , I thought you 'd be home a couple hours ago , and I put everything away , so — What is this ? Pizza . If you had just called me , I would have known — Dinner ? Dinner ready is a pizza ? Honey , please don 't be so loud .
Please don 't — Let go of me !
Get in the kitchen ! No ! Help !
You want to see what hurts ?
That 's what hurts ! That 's what hurts !
Help me !
[ " Children have to sit by and watch . What 's your excuse ? " ] Esta Soler : As we were in the process of releasing this campaign , O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his wife and her friend .
We learned that he had a long history of domestic violence .
The media became fixated .
The story of domestic violence went from the back page , but actually from the no-page , to the front page .
Our ads blanketed the airwaves , and women , for the first time , started to tell their stories .
Movements are about moments , and we seized this moment .
And let me just put this in context .
Before 1980 , do you have any idea how many articles were in The New York Times on domestic violence ?
I 'll tell you : 158 .
And in the 2000s , over 7,000 .
We were obviously making a difference .
But we were still missing a critical element .
So , step four : We needed to engage men .
We couldn 't solve this problem with 50 percent of the population on the sidelines .
And I already told you I 'm a data nerd .
National polling told us that men felt indicted and not invited into this conversation .
So we wondered , how can we include men ?
How can we get men to talk about violence against women and girls ?
And a male friend of mine pulled me aside and he said , " You want men to talk about violence against women and girls . Men don 't talk . "
I apologize to the men in the audience .
I know you do .
But he said , " Do you know what they do do ?
They do talk to their kids .
They talk to their kids as parents , as coaches . "
And that 's what we did .
We met men where they were at and we built a program .
And then we had this one event that stays in my heart forever where a basketball coach was talking to a room filled with male athletes and men from all walks of life .
And he was talking about the importance of coaching boys into men and changing the culture of the locker room and giving men the tools to have healthy relationships .
And all of a sudden , he looked at the back of the room , and he saw his daughter , and he called out his daughter 's name , Michaela , and he said , " Michaela , come up here . "
And she 's nine years old , and she was kind of shy , and she got up there , and he said , " Sit down next to me . "
She sat right down next to him .
He gave her this big hug , and he said , " People ask me why I do this work .
I do this work because I 'm her dad , and I don 't want anyone ever to hurt her . "
And as a parent , I get it .
I get it , knowing that there are so many sexual assaults on college campuses that are so widespread and so under-reported .
We 've done a lot for adult women .
We 've got to do a better job for our kids .
We just do . We have to .
We 've come a long way since the days of the Polaroid .
Technology has been our friend .
The mobile phone is a global game changer for the empowerment of women , and Facebook and Twitter and Google and YouTube and all the social media helps us organize and tell our story in a powerful way .
And so those of you in this audience who have helped build those applications and those platforms , as an organizer , I say , thank you very much .
Really . I clap for you .
I 'm the daughter of a man who joined one club in his life , the Optimist Club .
You can 't make that one up .
And it is his spirit and his optimism that is in my DNA .
I have been doing this work for over 30 years , and I am convinced , now more than ever , in the capacity of human beings to change .
I believe we can bend the arc of human history toward compassion and equality , and I also fundamentally believe and passionately believe that this violence does not have to be part of the human condition .
And I ask you , stand with us as we create futures without violence for women and girls and men and boys everywhere .
Thank you very much .
Edward Burtynsky : Photographing the landscape of oil
In stunning large-format photographs , Edward Burtynsky follows the path of oil through modern society , from wellhead to pipeline to car engine -- and then beyond to the projected peak-oil endgame .
I started my journey 30 years ago .
And I worked in mines . And I realized that this was a world unseen .
And I wanted , through color and large format cameras and very large prints , to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape , how we use the land .
And to me this was a key component that somehow , through this medium of photography , which allows us to contemplate these landscapes , that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work .
And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes , it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed .
Because that is what has changed , And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil .
And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction , where we 're taking it from the ground , refinement . And that 's one chapter .
The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it -- our cities , our cars , our motorcultures , where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration .
And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil , this entropic end , where all of our parts of cars , our tires , oil filters , helicopters , planes -- where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up ?
And to me , again , photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world , and find those places .
And another idea that I had as well , that was brought forward by an ecologist -- he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said , well , how much carbon it would take , and how much organic material ?
It was 23 metric tons for one liter .
So whenever I fill up my gas , I think of that liter , and how much carbon .
And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton , but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy .
From the photosynthetic growth , to produce what we use , the 30 billion barrels we use per year .
And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society .
Looking at 30 billion per year , we look at our two largest suppliers , Saudi Arabia and now Canada , with its dirty oil .
And together they only form about 15 years of supply .
The whole world , at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves , only gives us about 45 years .
So , it 's not a question of if , but a question of when peak oil will come upon us .
So , to me , using photography -- and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents , our ways of thinking , to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time , how to deal with our energy crisis .
30 , 40 years from now , the children that I have , I can look at them and say , " We did everything we possibly , humanly could do , to begin to mitigate this , what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time . Thank you .
Henry Markram : A brain in a supercomputer
Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon . Mental illness , memory , perception : they 're made of neurons and electric signals , and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain 's 100,000,000,000,000 synapses .
Our mission is to build a detailed , realistic computer model of the human brain .
And we 've done , in the past four years , a proof of concept on a small part of the rodent brain , and with this proof of concept we are now scaling the project up to reach the human brain .
Why are we doing this ?
There are three important reasons .
The first is , it 's essential for us to understand the human brain if we do want to get along in society , and I think that it is a key step in evolution .
The second reason is , we cannot keep doing animal experimentation forever , and we have to embody all our data and all our knowledge into a working model .
It 's like a Noah 's Ark . It 's like an archive .
And the third reason is that there are two billion people on the planet that are affected by mental disorder , and the drugs that are used today are largely empirical .
I think that we can come up with very concrete solutions on how to treat disorders .
Now , even at this stage , we can use the brain model to explore some fundamental questions about how the brain works .
And here , at TED , for the first time , I 'd like to share with you how we 're addressing one theory -- there are many theories -- one theory of how the brain works .
So , this theory is that the brain creates , builds , a version of the universe , and projects this version of the universe , like a bubble , all around us .
Now , this is of course a topic of philosophical debate for centuries .
But , for the first time , we can actually address this , with brain simulation , and ask very systematic and rigorous questions , whether this theory could possibly be true .
The reason why the moon is huge on the horizon is simply because our perceptual bubble does not stretch out 380,000 kilometers .
It runs out of space .
And so what we do is we compare the buildings within our perceptual bubble , and we make a decision .
We make a decision it 's that big , even though it 's not that big .
And what that illustrates is that decisions are the key things that support our perceptual bubble . It keeps it alive .
Without decisions you cannot see , you cannot think , you cannot feel .
And you may think that anesthetics work by sending you into some deep sleep , or by blocking your receptors so that you don 't feel pain , but in fact most anesthetics don 't work that way .
What they do is they introduce a noise into the brain so that the neurons cannot understand each other .
They are confused , and you cannot make a decision .
So , while you 're trying to make up your mind what the doctor , the surgeon , is doing while he 's hacking away at your body , he 's long gone .
He 's at home having tea .
So , when you walk up to a door and you open it , what you compulsively have to do to perceive is to make decisions , thousands of decisions about the size of the room , the walls , the height , the objects in this room .
99 percent of what you see is not what comes in through the eyes .
It is what you infer about that room .
So I can say , with some certainty , " I think , therefore I am . "
But I cannot say , " You think , therefore you are , " because " you " are within my perceptual bubble .
Now , we can speculate and philosophize this , but we don 't actually have to for the next hundred years .
We can ask a very concrete question .
" Can the brain build such a perception ? "
Is it capable of doing it ?
Does it have the substance to do it ?
And that 's what I 'm going to describe to you today .
So , it took the universe 11 billion years to build the brain .
It had to improve it a little bit .
It had to add to the frontal part , so that you would have instincts , because they had to cope on land .
But the real big step was the neocortex .
It 's a new brain . You needed it .
The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood , social interactions , complex cognitive functions .
So , you can think of the neocortex actually as the ultimate solution today , of the universe as we know it .
It 's the pinnacle , it 's the final product that the universe has produced .
It was so successful in evolution that from mouse to man it expanded about a thousandfold in terms of the numbers of neurons , to produce this almost frightening organ , structure .
And it has not stopped its evolutionary path .
In fact , the neocortex in the human brain is evolving at an enormous speed .
If you zoom into the surface of the neocortex , you discover that it 's made up of little modules , G5 processors , like in a computer .
But there are about a million of them .
They were so successful in evolution that what we did was to duplicate them over and over and add more and more of them to the brain until we ran out of space in the skull .
And the brain started to fold in on itself , and that 's why the neocortex is so highly convoluted .
We 're just packing in columns , so that we 'd have more neocortical columns to perform more complex functions .
So you can think of the neocortex actually as a massive grand piano , a million-key grand piano .
Each of these neocortical columns would produce a note .
You stimulate it ; it produces a symphony .
But it 's not just a symphony of perception .
It 's a symphony of your universe , your reality .
Now , of course it takes years to learn how to master a grand piano with a million keys .
That 's why you have to send your kids to good schools , hopefully eventually to Oxford .
But it 's not only education .
It 's also genetics .
You may be born lucky , where you know how to master your neocortical column , and you can play a fantastic symphony .
In fact , there is a new theory of autism called the " intense world " theory , which suggests that the neocortical columns are super-columns .
They are highly reactive , and they are super-plastic , and so the autists are probably capable of building and learning a symphony which is unthinkable for us .
But you can also understand that if you have a disease within one of these columns , the note is going to be off .
The perception , the symphony that you create is going to be corrupted , and you will have symptoms of disease .
So , the Holy Grail for neuroscience is really to understand the design of the neocoritical column -- and it 's not just for neuroscience ; it 's perhaps to understand perception , to understand reality , and perhaps to even also understand physical reality .
So , what we did was , for the past 15 years , was to dissect out the neocortex , systematically .
It 's a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rainforest .
How many trees does it have ?
What shapes are the trees ?
How many of each type of tree do you have ? Where are they positioned ?
But it 's a bit more than cataloging because you actually have to describe and discover all the rules of communication , the rules of connectivity , because the neurons don 't just like to connect with any neuron .
They choose very carefully who they connect with .
It 's also more than cataloging because you actually have to build three-dimensional digital models of them .
And we did that for tens of thousands of neurons , built digital models of all the different types of neurons we came across .
And once you have that , you can actually begin to build the neocortical column .
And here we 're coiling them up .
But as you do this , what you see is that the branches intersect actually in millions of locations , and at each of these intersections they can form a synapse .
And a synapse is a chemical location where they communicate with each other .
And these synapses together form the network or the circuit of the brain .
Now , the circuit , you could also think of as the fabric of the brain .
And when you think of the fabric of the brain , the structure , how is it built ? What is the pattern of the carpet ?
You realize that this poses a fundamental challenge to any theory of the brain , and especially to a theory that says that there is some reality that emerges out of this carpet , out of this particular carpet with a particular pattern .
The reason is because the most important design secret of the brain is diversity .
Every neuron is different .
It 's the same in the forest . Every pine tree is different .
You may have many different types of trees , but every pine tree is different . And in the brain it 's the same .
So there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as another , and there is no neuron in my brain that is the same as in yours .
And your neurons are not going to be oriented and positioned in exactly the same way .
And you may have more or less neurons .
So it 's very unlikely that you got the same fabric , the same circuitry .
So , how could we possibly create a reality that we can even understand each other ?
Well , we don 't have to speculate .
We can look at all 10 million synapses now .
We can look at the fabric . And we can change neurons .
We can use different neurons with different variations .
We can position them in different places , orient them in different places .
We can use less or more of them .
And when we do that what we discovered is that the circuitry does change .
But the pattern of how the circuitry is designed does not .
So , the fabric of the brain , even though your brain may be smaller , bigger , it may have different types of neurons , different morphologies of neurons , we actually do share the same fabric .
And we think this is species-specific , which means that that could explain why we can 't communicate across species .
So , let 's switch it on . But to do it , what you have to do is you have to make this come alive .
We make it come alive with equations , a lot of mathematics .
And , in fact , the equations that make neurons into electrical generators were discovered by two Cambridge Nobel Laureates .
So , we have the mathematics to make neurons come alive .
We also have the mathematics to describe how neurons collect information , and how they create a little lightning bolt to communicate with each other .
And when they get to the synapse , what they do is they effectively , literally , shock the synapse .
It 's like electrical shock that releases the chemicals from these synapses .
And we 've got the mathematics to describe this process .
So we can describe the communication between the neurons .
There literally are only a handful of equations that you need to simulate the activity of the neocortex .
But what you do need is a very big computer .
And in fact you need one laptop to do all the calculations just for one neuron .
So you need 10,000 laptops .
So where do you go ? You go to IBM , and you get a supercomputer , because they know how to take 10,000 laptops and put it into the size of a refrigerator .
So now we have this Blue Gene supercomputer .
We can load up all the neurons , each one on to its processor , and fire it up , and see what happens .
Take the magic carpet for a ride .
Here we activate it . And this gives the first glimpse of what is happening in your brain when there is a stimulation .
It 's the first view .
Now , when you look at that the first time , you think , " My god . How is reality coming out of that ? "
But , in fact , you can start , even though we haven 't trained this neocortical column to create a specific reality .
But we can ask , " Where is the rose ? "
We can ask , " Where is it inside , if we stimulate it with a picture ? "
Where is it inside the neocortex ?
Ultimately it 's got to be there if we stimulated it with it .
So , the way that we can look at that is to ignore the neurons , ignore the synapses , and look just at the raw electrical activity .
Because that is what it 's creating .
It 's creating electrical patterns .
So when we did this , we indeed , for the first time , saw these ghost-like structures : electrical objects appearing within the neocortical column .
And it 's these electrical objects that are holding all the information about whatever stimulated it .
And then when we zoomed into this , it 's like a veritable universe .
So the next step is just to take these brain coordinates and to project them into perceptual space .
And if you do that , you will be able to step inside the reality that is created by this machine , by this piece of the brain .
So , in summary , I think that the universe may have -- it 's possible -- evolved a brain to see itself , which may be a first step in becoming aware of itself .
There is a lot more to do to test these theories , and to test any other theories .
But I hope that you are at least partly convinced that it is not impossible to build a brain .
We can do it within 10 years , and if we do succeed , we will send to TED , in 10 years , a hologram to talk to you . Thank you .
Antonio Damasio : The quest to understand consciousness
Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness -- that is a marvelous fact -- but what exactly is it that we regain ? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self .
I 'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds .
The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind .
We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence , yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder .
We should , in fact , because without having this possibility of conscious minds , we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity ; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world .
We would have no pains , but also no joys .
We would have no access to love or to the ability to create .
And of course , Scott Fitzgerald said famously that " he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for . "
But he also forgot that without consciousness , he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence .
So much for the wonder , now for the mystery .
This is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate .
All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience , this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation , has got major controversies .
And there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it ; we should just leave it alone , it 's not to be solved .
I don 't believe that , and I think the situation is changing .
It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains , but we certainly can begin to approach the question , and we can begin to see the shape of a solution .
And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do , for example , what you 're seeing right now .
These are images that come from Hanna Damasio 's lab , and which show you , in a living brain , the reconstruction of that brain .
And this is a person who is alive .
This is not a person that is being studied at autopsy .
And even more -- and this is something that one can be really amazed about -- is what I 'm going to show you next , which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections , real pathways .
So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons , the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses .
And I 'm sorry to disappoint you , they don 't come in color .
But at any rate , they are there .
The colors are codes for the direction , from whether it is back to front or vice versa .
At any rate , what is consciousness ?
What is a conscious mind ?
And we could take a very simple view and say , well , it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams , or when we go under anesthesia , and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia .
But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia , or when we are in deep , dreamless sleep ?
Well first of all , it is a mind , which is a flow of mental images .
And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns , visual , such as you 're having right now in relation to the stage and me , or auditory images , as you are having now in relation to my words .
That flow of mental images is mind .
But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room .
We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images .
We have selves .
We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now .
We own our minds .
And we have a sense that it 's everyone of us that is experiencing this -- not the person who is sitting next to you .
So in order to have a conscious mind , you have a self within the conscious mind .
So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it .
The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind , and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind .
So what we need to know to even address this mystery is , number one , how are minds are put together in the brain , and , number two , how selves are constructed .
Now the first part , the first problem , is relatively easy -- it 's not easy at all -- but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience .
And it 's quite clear that , in order to make minds , we need to construct neural maps .
So imagine a grid , like the one I 'm showing you right now , and now imagine , within that grid , that two-dimensional sheet , imagine neurons .
And picture , if you will , a billboard , a digital billboard , where you have elements that can be either lit or not .
And depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting , the digital elements , or , for that matter , the neurons in the sheet , you 're going to be able to construct a map .
This , of course , is a visual map that I 'm showing you , but this applies to any kind of map -- auditory , for example , in relation to sound frequencies , or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate .
Now to bring home the point of how close it is -- the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience -- I 'm going to tell you a personal story .
So if I cover my left eye -- I 'm talking about me personally , not all of you -- if I cover my left eye , I look at the grid -- pretty much like the one I 'm showing you .
Everything is nice and fine and perpendicular .
But sometime ago , I discovered that if I cover my left eye , instead what I get is this .
I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central-left field .
Very odd -- I 've analyzed this for a while .
But sometime ago , through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine , Carmen Puliafito , who developed a laser scanner of the retina , I found out the the following .
If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner , what I get is the following .
On the right side , my retina is perfectly symmetrical .
You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins .
But on my left retina there is a bump , which is marked there by the red arrow .
And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below .
And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image .
So just think of this : you have a grid of neurons , and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid , and you get a warping of your mental experience .
So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina , which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball , or , for that matter , a sheet of visual cortex .
So from the retina you go onto visual cortex .
And of course , the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina .
And in that image there , you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain .
You have the green for example , that corresponds to tactile information , or the blue that corresponds to auditory information .
And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps , can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around , which is the association cortex , where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making .
And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory , out of those association cortices , and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception .
So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is .
So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making .
And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information .
So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images .
But what about the self ?
The self is really the elusive problem .
And for a long time , people did not even want to touch it , because they 'd say , " How can you have this reference point , this stability , that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day ? "
And I thought about a solution to this problem .
It 's the following .
We generate brain maps of the body 's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps .
So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this .
I came to this because , if you 're going to have a reference that we know as self -- the Me , the I in our own processing -- we need to have something that is stable , something that does not deviate much from day to day .
Well it so happens that we have a singular body .
We have one body , not two , not three .
And so that is a beginning .
There is just one reference point , which is the body .
But then , of course , the body has many parts , and things grow at different rates , and they have different sizes and different people ; however , not so with the interior .
The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu -- for example , the whole management of the chemistries within our body are , in fact , extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason .
If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range , you go into disease or death .
So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity .
I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day .
Because if you don 't have that sameness , physiologically , you 're going to be sick or you 're going to die .
So that 's one more element for this continuity .
And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself , unlike any other coupling .
So for example , I 'm making images of you , but there 's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain .
However , there is a close , permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body .
So here 's how it looks . Look at the region there .
There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord .
And it is within that region that I 'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body .
This is so specific that , for example , if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem , if you damage that as a result of a stroke , for example , what you get is coma or vegetative state , which is a state , of course , in which your mind disappears , your consciousness disappears .
What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self , you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence , and , in fact , there can be images going on , being formed in the cerebral cortex , except you don 't know they 're there .
You have , in effect , lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem .
But if you consider the green part of the brain stem , nothing like that happens .
It is that specific .
So in that green component of the brain stem , if you damage it , and often it happens , what you get is complete paralysis , but your conscious mind is maintained .
You feel , you know , you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly .
This is a horrific condition . You don 't want to see it .
And people are , in fact , imprisoned within their own bodies , but they do have a mind .
There was a very interesting film , one of the rare good films done about a situation like this , by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition .
So now I 'm going to show you a picture .
I promise not to say anything about this , except this is to frighten you .
It 's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem , there are , to make it simple , all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior , different aspects of our body .
They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern .
And it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe -- and I could be wrong , but I don 't think I am -- that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings -- primordial feelings , by the way .
So what is the picture that we get here ?
Look at " cerebral cortex , " look at " brain stem , " look at " body , " and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body .
And you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are , in fact , the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to , as we should , because that 's really the film that is rolling in our minds .
But look at the arrows .
They 're not there for looks .
They 're there because there 's this very close interaction .
You cannot have a conscious mind if you don 't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem .
You cannot have a conscious mind if you don 't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body .
Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species .
So throughout vertebrates , the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours , which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do .
Except that they 're not as rich as ours , because they don 't have a cerebral cortex like we do .
That 's where the difference is .
And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex .
Only the wealth of our minds is , not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence , and that we have any sense of person .
Now there are three levels of self to consider -- the proto , the core and the autobiographical .
The first two are shared with many , many other species , and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species .
It 's the autobiographical self which some species have , I think .
Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree .
And everybody 's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree .
But the novelty is here .
The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made ; it 's the lived past and the anticipated future .
And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory , reasoning , imagination , creativity and language .
And out of that came the instruments of culture -- religions , justice , trade , the arts , science , technology .
And it is within that culture that we really can get -- and this is the novelty -- something that is not entirely set by our biology .
It is developed in the cultures .
It developed in collectives of human beings .
And this is , of course , the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation .
And finally , you could rightly ask , why care about this ?
Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made ?
Three reasons . First , curiosity .
Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all .
And if we are interested , for example , in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth , why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings ?
Second , understanding society and culture .
We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress .
And finally , medicine .
Let 's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression , Alzheimer 's disease , drug addiction .
Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious .
You have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works .
So that 's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we 're doing , and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains .
Thank you for your attention .
Paul Bennett : Design is in the details
Showing a series of inspiring , unusual and playful products , British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn 't have to be about grand gestures , but can solve small , universal and overlooked problems .
Hello . Actually , that 's " hello " in Bauer Bodoni for the typographically hysterical amongst us .
One of the threads that seems to have come through loud and clear in the last couple of days is this need to reconcile what the Big wants -- the " Big " being the organization , the system , the country -- and what the " Small " wants -- the individual , the person .
And how do you bring those two things together ?
Charlie Ledbetter , yesterday , I thought , talked very articulately about this need to bring consumers , to bring people into the process of creating things .
And that 's what I want to talk about today .
So , bringing together the Small to help facilitate and create the Big , I think , is something that we believe in -- something I believe in , and something that we kind of bring to life through what we do at Ideo .
I call this first chapter -- for the Brits in the room -- the " Blinding Glimpse of the Bleeding Obvious . "
Often , the good ideas are so staring-at-you-right-in-the-face that you kind of miss them . And I think , a lot of times , what we do is just , sort of , hold the mirror up to our clients , and sort of go , " Duh ! You know , look what 's really going on . "
And rather than talk about it in the theory , I think I 'm just going to show you an example .
We were asked by a large healthcare system in Minnesota to describe to them what their patient experience was .
And I think they were expecting -- they 'd worked with lots of consultants before -- I think they were expecting some kind of hideous org chart with thousands of bubbles and systemic this , that and the other , and all kinds of mappy stuff .
Or even worse , some kind of ghastly death-by-Powerpoint thing with WowCharts and all kinds of , you know , God knows , whatever .
The first thing we actually shared with them was this .
I 'll play this until your eyeballs completely dissolve .
This is 59 seconds into the film .
This is a minute 59 .
3 : 19 .
I think something happens . I think a head may appear in a second .
5 : 10 .
5 : 58 .
6 : 20 .
We showed them the whole cut , and they were all completely , what is this ?
And the point is when you lie in a hospital bed all day , all you do is look at the roof , and it 's a really shitty experience .
And just putting yourself in the position of the patient -- this is Christian , who works with us at Ideo .
He just lay in the hospital bed , and , kind of , stared at the polystyrene ceiling tiles for a really long time .
That 's what it 's like to be a patient in the hospital .
And they were sort , you know , blinding glimpse of bleeding obvious .
Oh , my goodness . So , looking at the situation from the point of view of the person out -- as opposed to the traditional position of the organization in -- was , for these guys , quite a revelation .
And so , that was a really catalytic thing for them .
So they snapped into action .
They said , OK , it 's not about systemic change .
It 's not about huge , ridiculous things that we need to do .
It 's about tiny things that can make a huge amount of difference .
So we started with them prototyping some really little things that we could do to have a huge amount of impact .
The first thing we did was we took a little bicycle mirror and we Band-Aided it here , onto a gurney , a hospital trolley , so that when you were wheeled around by a nurse or by a doctor , you could actually have a conversation with them .
You could , kind of , see them in your rear-view mirror , so it created a tiny human interaction .
Very small example of something that they could do .
Interestingly , the nurses themselves , sort of , snapped into action -- said , OK , we embrace this . What can we do ?
The first thing they do is they decorated the ceiling .
Which I thought was really -- I showed this to my mother recently .
I think my mother now thinks that I 'm some sort of interior decorator .
It 's what I do for a living , sort of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen .
Not particularly the world 's best design solution for those of us who are real , sort of , hard-core designers , but nonetheless , a fabulous empathic solution for people .
Things that they started doing themselves -- like changing the floor going into the patient 's room so that it signified , " This is my room . This is my personal space " -- was a really interesting sort of design solution to the problem .
So you went from public space to private space .
And another idea , again , that came from one of the nurses -- which I love -- was they took traditional , sort of , corporate white boards , then they put them on one wall of the patient 's room , and they put this sticker there .
So that what you could actually do was go into the room and write messages to the person who was sick in that room , which was lovely .
So , tiny , tiny , tiny solutions that made a huge amount of impact .
I thought that was a really , really nice example .
So this is not particularly a new idea , kind of , seeing opportunities in things that are around you and snapping and turning them into a solution .
It 's a history of invention based around this .
I 'm going to read this because I want to get these names right .
Joan Ganz Cooney saw her daughter -- came down on a Saturday morning , saw her daughter watching the test card , waiting for programs to come on one morning and from that came Sesame Street .
Malcolm McLean was moving from one country to another and was wondering why it took these guys so long to get the boxes onto the ship .
And he invented the shipping container .
George de Mestral -- this is not bugs all over a Birkenstock -- was walking his dog in a field and got covered in burrs , sort of little prickly things , and from that came Velcro .
And finally , for the Brits , Percy Shaw -- this is a big British invention -- saw the cat 's eyes at the side of the road , when he was driving home one night and from that came the Catseye .
So there 's a whole series of just using your eyes , seeing things for the first time , seeing things afresh and using them as an opportunity to create new possibilities .
Second one , without sounding overly Zen , and this is a quote from the Buddha : " Finding yourself in the margins , looking to the edges of things , is often a really interesting place to start . "
Blinkered vision tends to produce , I think , blinkered solutions .
So , looking wide , using your peripheral vision , is a really interesting place to look for opportunity .
Again , another medical example here .
We were asked by a device producer -- we did the Palm Pilot and the Treo .
We did a lot of sexy tech at Ideo -- they 'd seen this and they wanted a sexy piece of technology for medical diagnostics .
This was a device that a nurse uses when they 're doing a spinal procedure in hospital .
They 'll ask the nurses to input data .
And they had this vision of the nurse , kind of , clicking away on this aluminum device and it all being incredibly , sort of , gadget-lustish .
When we actually went and watched this procedure taking place -- and I 'll explain this in a second -- it became very obvious that there was a human dimension to this that they really weren 't recognizing .
When you 're having a four-inch needle inserted into your spine -- which was the procedure that this device 's data was about ; it was for pain management -- you 're shit scared ; you 're freaking out .
And so the first thing that pretty much every nurse did , was hold the patient 's hand to comfort them . Human gesture -- which made the fabulous two-handed data input completely impossible .
So , the thing that we designed , much less sexy but much more human and practical , was this .
So , it 's not a Palm Pilot by any stretch of the imagination , but it has a thumb-scroll so you can do everything with one hand .
So , again , going back to this -- the idea that a tiny human gesture dictated the design of this product .
And I think that 's really , really important .
So , again , this idea of workarounds .
We use this phrase " workarounds " a lot , sort of , looking around us . I was actually looking around the TED and just watching all of these kind of things happen while I 've been here .
This idea of the way that people cobble together solutions in our life -- and the things we kind of do in our environment that are somewhat subconscious but have huge potential -- is something that we look at a lot .
We wrote a book recently , I think you might have received it , called " Thoughtless Acts ? "
It 's been all about these kind of thoughtless things that people do , which have huge intention and huge opportunity .
Why do we all follow the line in the street ?
This is a picture in a Japanese subway .
People consciously follow things even though , why , we don 't know .
Why do we line up the square milk carton with the square fence ?
Because we kind of have to -- we 're just compelled to .
We don 't know why , but we do .
Why do we wrap the teabag string around the cup handle ?
Again , we 're sort of using the world around us to create our own design solutions .
And we 're always saying to our clients : " You should look at this stuff .
This stuff is really important . This stuff is really vital . "
This is people designing their own experiences .
You can draw from this .
We sort of assume that because there 's a pole in the street , that it 's okay to use it , so we park our shopping cart there .
It 's there for our use , on some level .
So , again , we sort of co-opt our environment to do all these different things .
We co-opt other experiences -- we take one item and transfer it to another .
And this is my favorite one . My mother used to say to me , " Just because your sister jumps in the lake doesn 't mean you have to . "
But , of course , we all do . We all follow each other every day .
So somebody assumes that because somebody else has done something , that 's permission for them to do the same thing .
And there 's almost this sort of semaphore around us all the time .
I mean , shopping bag equals " parking meter out of order . "
And we all , kind of , know how to read these signals now .
We all talk to one another in this highly visual way without realizing what we 're doing .
Third section is this idea of not knowing , of consciously putting yourself backwards .
I talk about unthinking situations all the time .
Sort of having beginner 's mind , scraping your mind clean and looking at things afresh .
A friend of mine was a designer at IKEA , and he was asked by his boss to help design a storage system for children .
This is the Billy bookcase -- it 's IKEA 's biggest selling product .
Hammer it together . Hammer it together with a shoe , if you 're me , because they 're impossible to assemble .
But big selling bookcase . How do we replicate this for children ?
The reality is when you actually watch children , children don 't think about things like storage in linear terms .
Children assume permission in a very different way .
Children live on things . They live under things .
They live around things , and so their spatial awareness relationship , and their thinking around storage is totally different .
So the first thing you have to do -- this is Graham , the designer -- is , sort of , put yourself in their shoes . And so , here he is sitting under the table .
So , what came out of this ?
This is the storage system that he designed .
So what is this ? I hear you all ask . No , I don 't .
It 's this , and I think this is a particularly lovely solution .
So , you know , it 's a totally different way of looking at the situation .
It 's a completely empathic solution -- apart from the fact that teddy 's probably not loving it .
But a really nice way of re-framing the ordinary , and I think that 's one of the things .
And putting yourself in the position of the person , and I think that 's one of the threads that I 've heard again from this conference is how do we put ourselves in other peoples ' shoes and really feel what they feel ?
And then use that information to fuel solutions ?
And I think that 's what this is very much about .
Last section : green armband . We 've all got them .
It 's about this really .
I mean , it 's about picking battles big enough to matter but small enough to win .
Again , that 's one of the themes that I think has come through loud and clear in this conference is : Where do we start ? How do we start ? What do we do to start ?
So , again , we were asked to design a water pump for a company called ApproTEC , in Kenya .
They 're now called KickStart .
And , again , as designers , we wanted to make this thing incredibly beautiful and spend a lot of time thinking of the form .
And that was completely irrelevant .
When you put yourself in the position of these people , things like the fact that this has to be able to fold up and fit on a bicycle , become much more relevant than the form of it . The way it 's produced , it has to be produced with indigenous manufacturing methods and indigenous materials .
So it had to be looked at completely from the point of view of the user .
We had to completely transfer ourselves over to their world .
So what seems like a very clunky product is , in fact , incredibly useful .
It 's powered a bit like a Stairmaster -- you pump up and down on it .
Children can use it . Adults can use it . Everybody uses it .
It 's turning these guys -- again , one of the themes -- it 's turning them into entrepreneurs .
These guys are using this very successfully .
And for us , it 's been great because it 's won loads of design awards .
So we actually managed to reconcile the needs of the design company , the needs of the individuals in the company , to feel good about a product we were actually designing , and the needs of the individuals we were designing it for .
There it is , pumping water from 30 feet .
So as a final gesture we handed out these bracelets to all of you this morning .
We 've made a donation on everybody 's behalf here to kick start , no pun intended , their next project .
Because , again , I think , sort of , putting our money where our mouth is , here .
We feel that this is an important gesture .
So we 've handed out bracelets . Small is the new big .
I hope you 'll all wear them .
So that 's it . Thank you .
Eric X. Li : A tale of two political systems
It 's a standard assumption in the West : As a society progresses , it eventually becomes a capitalist , multi-party democracy . Right ? Eric X. Li , a Chinese investor and political scientist , begs to differ . In this provocative , boundary-pushing talk , he asks his audience to consider that there 's more than one way to run a successful modern nation .
Good morning .
My name is Eric Li , and I was born here .
But no , I wasn 't born there .
This was where I was born : Shanghai , at the height of the Cultural Revolution .
My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries .
When I was growing up , I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity .
It went like this .
All human societies develop in linear progression , beginning with primitive society , then slave society , feudalism , capitalism , socialism , and finally , guess where we end up ?
Communism !
Sooner or later , all of humanity , regardless of culture , language , nationality , will arrive at this final stage of political and social development .
The entire world 's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after .
But before we get there , we 're engaged in a struggle between good and evil , the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism , and the good shall triumph .
That , of course , was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx .
And the Chinese bought it .
We were taught that grand story day in and day out .
It became part of us , and we believed in it .
The story was a bestseller .
About one third of the entire world 's population lived under that meta-narrative .
Then , the world changed overnight .
As for me , disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth , I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie .
Now , as I was coming of age , something else happened .
As if one big story wasn 't enough , I was told another one .
This one was just as grand .
It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end .
This one went as follows : All societies , regardless of culture , be it Christian , Muslim , Confucian , must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units , and all these individuals are , by definition , rational , and they all want one thing : the vote .
Because they are all rational , once given the vote , they produce good government and live happily ever after .
Paradise on Earth , again .
Sooner or later , electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples , with a free market to make them all rich .
But before we get there , we 're engaged in a struggle between good and evil .
The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe , sometimes by force , against the evil of those who do not hold elections .
George H.W. Bush : A new world order ...
George W. Bush : ... ending tyranny in our world ...
Barack Obama : ... a single standard for all who would hold power .
Eric X. Li : Now -- This story also became a bestseller .
According to Freedom House , the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010 .
In the last 20 years , Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus : Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world .
Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success .
Those who do not are doomed to fail .
But this time , the Chinese didn 't buy it .
Fool me once ...
The rest is history .
In just 30 years , China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy .
Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty .
Eighty percent of the entire world 's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China .
In other words , all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single , one-party state did without voting .
See , I grew up on this stuff : food stamps .
Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point .
Needless to say , I ate all my grandmother 's portions .
So I asked myself , what 's wrong with this picture ?
Here I am in my hometown , my business growing leaps and bounds .
Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day .
Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history .
Yet , according to the grand story , none of this should be happening .
So I went and did the only thing I could . I studied it .
Yes , China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party , the Party , and they don 't hold elections .
Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time .
Such a system is operationally rigid , politically closed , and morally illegitimate .
Well , the assumptions are wrong .
The opposites are true .
Adaptability , meritocracy , and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China 's one-party system .
Now , most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction .
It won 't last long because it cannot adapt .
Now here are the facts .
In 64 years of running the largest country in the world , the range of the Party 's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory , from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward , then privatization of farmland , then the Cultural Revolution , then Deng Xiaoping 's market reform , then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople , something unimaginable during Mao 's rule .
So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions .
Institutionally , new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions .
For example , term limits .
Political leaders used to retain their positions for life , and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules .
Mao was the father of modern China , yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes .
So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70 .
One thing we often hear is , " Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms , " and " China is in dire need of political reform . "
But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias .
See , some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see , and only such changes can be called political reform .
The truth is , political reforms have never stopped .
Compared with 30 years ago , 20 years , even 10 years ago , every aspect of Chinese society , how the country is governed , from the most local level to the highest center , are unrecognizable today .
Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind .
Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world 's leading expert in political reform .
The second assumption is that in a one-party state , power gets concentrated in the hands of the few , and bad governance and corruption follow .
Indeed , corruption is a big problem , but let 's first look at the larger context .
Now , this may be counterintuitive to you .
The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today .
China 's highest ruling body , the Politburo , has 25 members .
In the most recent one , only five of them came from a background of privilege , so-called princelings .
The other 20 , including the president and the premier , came from entirely ordinary backgrounds .
In the larger central committee of 300 or more , the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller .
The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top .
Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries , I think you 'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility .
The question then is , how could that be possible in a system run by one party ?
Now we come to a powerful political institution , little-known to Westerners : the Party 's Organization Department .
The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations .
It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components : civil service , state-owned enterprises , and social organizations like a university or a community program .
They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials .
They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks , and they start from the bottom , called " keyuan " [ clerk ] .
Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks : fuke [ deputy section manager ] , ke [ section manager ] , fuchu [ deputy division manager ] , and chu [ division manger ] .
Now these are not moves from " Karate Kid , " okay ?
It 's serious business .
The range of positions is wide , from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company .
Once a year , the department reviews their performance .
They interview their superiors , their peers , their subordinates . They vet their personal conduct .
They conduct public opinion surveys .
Then they promote the winners .
Throughout their careers , these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks .
Over time , the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [ deputy bureau chief ] and ju [ bureau chief ] levels .
There , they enter high officialdom .
By that point , a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue .
Just to show you how competitive the system is , in 2012 , there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels , 600,000 fuchu and chu levels , and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels .
After the ju levels , the best few move further up several more ranks , and eventually make it to the Central Committee .
The process takes two to three decades .
Does patronage play a role ? Yes , of course .
But merit remains the fundamental driver .
In essence , the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China 's centuries-old mentoring system .
China 's new president , Xi Jinping , is the son of a former leader , which is very unusual , first of his kind to make the top job .
Even for him , the career took 30 years .
He started as a village manager , and by the time he entered the Politburo , he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars .
Now , please don 't get me wrong , okay ?
This is not a put-down of anyone . It 's just a statement of fact .
George W. Bush , remember him ?
This is not a put-down .
Before becoming governor of Texas , or Barack Obama before running for president , could not make even a small county manager in China 's system .
Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest .
Well , apparently he hadn 't heard of the Organization Department .
Now , Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy .
I was asked once , " The Party wasn 't voted in by election .
Where is the source of legitimacy ? "
I said , " How about competency ? "
We all know the facts .
In 1949 , when the Party took power , China was mired in civil wars , dismembered by foreign aggression , average life expectancy at that time , 41 years old .
Today , it 's the second largest economy in the world , an industrial powerhouse , and its people live in increasing prosperity .
Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes , and here are the numbers in recent years .
Satisfaction with the direction of the country : 85 percent .
Those who think they 're better off than five years ago : 70 percent .
Those who expect the future to be better : a whopping 82 percent .
Financial Times polls global youth attitudes , and these numbers , brand new , just came from last week .
Ninety-three percent of China 's Generation Y are optimistic about their country 's future .
Now , if this is not legitimacy , I 'm not sure what is .
In contrast , most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance .
I don 't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is , from Washington to European capitals .
With a few exceptions , the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife .
Governments get elected , and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election .
Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret .
At this rate , I 'm afraid it is democracy , not China 's one-party system , that is in danger of losing legitimacy .
Now , I don 't want to create the misimpression that China 's hunky-dory , on the way to some kind of superpowerdom .
The country faces enormous challenges .
The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling .
Pollution is one . Food safety . Population issues .
On the political front , the worst problem is corruption .
Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy .
But most analysts misdiagnose the disease .
They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system , and therefore , in order to cure it , you have to do away with the entire system .
But a more careful look would tell us otherwise .
Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries , and it 's been moving up .
India , the largest democracy in the world , 94 and dropping .
For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China , more than half of them are electoral democracies .
So if election is the panacea for corruption , how come these countries can 't fix it ?
Now , I 'm a venture capitalist . I make bets .
It wouldn 't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions .
So here they are .
In the next 10 years , China will surpass the U.S.
and become the largest economy in the world .
Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries .
Corruption will be curbed , but not eliminated , and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking .
Economic reform will accelerate , political reform will continue , and the one-party system will hold firm .
We live in the dusk of an era .
Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st .
Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside .
Now , I want to clarify something .
I 'm not here to make an indictment of democracy .
On the contrary , I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world .
It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system , the hubris , that is at the heart of the West 's current ills .
If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others , and a little bit more on political reform at home , they might give their democracy a better chance .
China 's political model will never supplant electoral democracy , because unlike the latter , it doesn 't pretend to be universal .
It cannot be exported . But that is the point precisely .
The significance of China 's example is not that it provides an alternative , but the demonstration that alternatives exist .
Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives .
Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals , but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over .
Let us stop telling people and our children there 's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve .
It is wrong . It is irresponsible .
And worst of all , it is boring .
Let universality make way for plurality .
Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us .
Are we brave enough to welcome it ?
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thanks .
Eric , stay with me for a couple of minutes , because I want to ask you a couple of questions .
I think many here , and in general in Western countries , would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional , but at the same time , many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that , without any form of oversight or consultation , decides what the national interest is .
What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say , actually , the national interest as you defined it is wrong ?
EXL : You know , Frank Fukuyama , the political scientist , called the Chinese system " responsive authoritarianism . "
It 's not exactly right , but I think it comes close .
So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China , okay ?
Do you know who their biggest client is ?
The Chinese government .
Not just from the central government , the city government , the provincial government , to the most local neighborhood districts .
They conduct surveys all the time .
Are you happy with the garbage collection ?
Are you happy with the general direction of the country ?
So there is , in China , there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people .
My point is , I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there 's only one political system -- election , election , election -- that could make it responsive .
I 'm not sure , actually , elections produce responsive government anymore in the world .
Many seem to agree .
One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself .
And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China .
But then you 've just mentioned other elements like , you know , big challenges , and there are , of course , a lot of other data that go in a different direction : tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests , etc .
So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn 't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself .
EXL : There 's a vibrant civil society in China , whether it 's environment or what-have-you .
But it 's different . You wouldn 't recognize it .
Because , by Western definitions , a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system , but that concept is alien for Chinese culture .
For thousands of years , you have civil society , yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order , and I think it 's a big cultural difference .
Eric , thank you for sharing this with TED . EXL : Thank you .
Hod Lipson : Building " self-aware " robots
Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his cool little robots , which have the ability to learn , understand themselves and even self-replicate .
So , where are the robots ?
We 've been told for 40 years already that they 're coming soon .
Very soon they 'll be doing everything for us .
They 'll be cooking , cleaning , buying things , shopping , building . But they aren 't here .
Meanwhile , we have illegal immigrants doing all the work , but we don 't have any robots .
So what can we do about that ? What can we say ?
So I want to give a little bit of a different perspective of how we can perhaps look at these things in a little bit of a different way .
And this is an x-ray picture of a real beetle , and a Swiss watch , back from ' 88 . You look at that -- what was true then is certainly true today .
We can still make the pieces . We can make the right pieces .
We can make the circuitry of the right computational power , but we can 't actually put them together to make something that will actually work and be as adaptive as these systems .
So let 's try to look at it from a different perspective .
Let 's summon the best designer , the mother of all designers .
Let 's see what evolution can do for us .
So we threw in -- we created a primordial soup with lots of pieces of robots -- with bars , with motors , with neurons .
Put them all together , and put all this under kind of natural selection , under mutation , and rewarded things for how well they can move forward .
A very simple task , and it 's interesting to see what kind of things came out of that .
So if you look , you can see a lot of different machines come out of this . They all move around .
They all crawl in different ways , and you can see on the right , that we actually made a couple of these things , and they work in reality . These are not very fantastic robots , but they evolved to do exactly what we reward them for : for moving forward . So that was all done in simulation , but we can also do that on a real machine .
Here 's a physical robot that we actually have a population of brains , competing , or evolving on the machine .
It 's like a rodeo show . They all get a ride on the machine , and they get rewarded for how fast or how far they can make the machine move forward .
And you can see these robots are not ready to take over the world yet , but they gradually learn how to move forward , and they do this autonomously .
So in these two examples , we had basically machines that learned how to walk in simulation , and also machines that learned how to walk in reality .
But I want to show you a different approach , and this is this robot over here , which has four legs .
It has eight motors , four on the knees and four on the hip .
It has also two tilt sensors that tell the machine which way it 's tilting .
But this machine doesn 't know what it looks like .
You look at it and you see it has four legs , the machine doesn 't know if it 's a snake , if it 's a tree , it doesn 't have any idea what it looks like , but it 's going to try to find that out .
Initially , it does some random motion , and then it tries to figure out what it might look like .
And you 're seeing a lot of things passing through its minds , a lot of self-models that try to explain the relationship between actuation and sensing . It then tries to do a second action that creates the most disagreement among predictions of these alternative models , like a scientist in a lab . Then it does that and tries to explain that , and prune out its self-models .
This is the last cycle , and you can see it 's pretty much figured out what its self looks like . And once it has a self-model , it can use that to derive a pattern of locomotion .
So what you 're seeing here are a couple of machines -- a pattern of locomotion .
We were hoping that it wass going to have a kind of evil , spidery walk , but instead it created this pretty lame way of moving forward .
But when you look at that , you have to remember that this machine did not do any physical trials on how to move forward , nor did it have a model of itself .
It kind of figured out what it looks like , and how to move forward , and then actually tried that out .
So , we 'll move forward to a different idea .
So that was what happened when we had a couple of -- that 's what happened when you had a couple of -- OK , OK , OK -- -- they don 't like each other . So there 's a different robot .
That 's what happened when the robots actually are rewarded for doing something .
What happens if you don 't reward them for anything , you just throw them in ?
So we have these cubes , like the diagram showed here .
The cube can swivel , or flip on its side , and we just throw 1,000 of these cubes into a soup -- this is in simulation --and don 't reward them for anything , we just let them flip . We pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations .
So , initially nothing happens , they 're just flipping around there .
But after a very short while , you can see these blue things on the right there begin to take over .
They begin to self-replicate . So in absence of any reward , the intrinsic reward is self-replication .
And we 've actually built a couple of these , and this is part of a larger robot made out of these cubes .
It 's an accelerated view , where you can see the robot actually carrying out some of its replication process .
So you 're feeding it with more material -- cubes in this case -- and more energy , and it can make another robot .
So of course , this is a very crude machine , but we 're working on a micro-scale version of these , and hopefully the cubes will be like a powder that you pour in .
OK , so what can we learn ? These robots are of course not very useful in themselves , but they might teach us something about how we can build better robots , and perhaps how humans , animals , create self-models and learn .
And one of the things that I think is important is that we have to get away from this idea of designing the machines manually , but actually let them evolve and learn , like children , and perhaps that 's the way we 'll get there . Thank you .
Dee Boersma : Pay attention to penguins
Think of penguins as ocean sentinels , says Dee Boersma -- they 're on the frontlines of sea change . Sharing stories of penguin life and culture , she suggests that we start listening to what penguins are telling us .
I want to talk about penguins today .
But first , I want to start by saying that we need a new operating system , for the oceans and for the Earth .
When I came to the Galapagos 40 years ago , there were 3,000 people that lived in the Galapagos .
Now there are over 30,000 .
There were two Jeeps on Santa Cruz .
Now , there are around a thousand trucks and buses and cars there .
So the fundamental problems that we face are overconsumption and too many people .
It 's the same problems in the Galapagos , except , obviously , it 's worse here , in some ways , than other places .
Because we 've only doubled the population of the Earth since the 1960s -- a little more than doubled -- but we have 6.7 billion people in the world , and we all like to consume .
And one of the major problems that we have is our operating system is not giving us the proper feedback .
We 're not paying the true environmental costs of our actions .
And when I came at age 22 to live on Fernandina , let me just say , that I had never camped before .
I had never lived alone for any period of time , and I 'd never slept with sea lions snoring next to me all night .
But moreover , I 'd never lived on an uninhabited island .
Punta Espinosa is where I lived for over a year , and we call it uninhabited because there are no people there .
But it 's alive with life ; it 's hardly uninhabited .
So a lot has happened in the last 40 years , and what I learned when I came to the Galapagos is the importance of wild places , wild things , certainly wildlife , and the amazing qualities that penguins have .
Penguins are real athletes : They can swim 173 kilometers in a day .
They can swim at the same speed day and night -- that 's faster than any Olympic swimmer .
I mean , they can do like seven kilometers an hour and sustain it .
But what is really amazing , because of this deepness here , Emperor penguins can go down more than 500 meters and they can hold their breath for 23 minutes .
Magellanic penguins , the ones that I work on , they can dive to about 90 meters and they can stay down for about 4.6 minutes .
Humans , without fins : 90 meters , 3.5 minutes .
And I doubt anybody in this room could really hold their breath for 3.5 minutes .
You have to train to be able to do that .
So penguins are amazing athletes .
The other thing is , I 've never met anybody that really doesn 't say that they like penguins .
They 're comical , they walk upright , and , of course , they 're diligent .
And , more importantly , they 're well-dressed .
So they have all the criteria that people normally like .
But scientifically , they 're amazing because they 're sentinels .
They tell us about our world in a lot of different ways , and particularly the ocean .
This is a picture of a Galapagos penguin that 's on the front of a little zodiac here in the Galapagos .
And that 's what I came to study .
I thought I was going to study the social behavior of Galapagos penguins , but you already know penguins are rare .
These are the rarest penguins in the world .
Why I thought I was going to be able to do that , I don 't know .
But the population has changed dramatically since I was first here .
When I counted penguins for the first time and tried to do a census , we just counted all the individual beaks that we could around all these islands .
We counted around 2,000 , so I don 't know how many penguins there really are , but I know I can count 2,000 .
If you go and do it now , the national parks count about 500 .
So we have a quarter of the penguins that we did 40 years ago .
And this is true of most of our living systems .
We have less than we had before , and most of them are in fairly steep decline .
And I want to just show you a little bit about why .
That 's a penguin braying to tell you that it 's important to pay attention to penguins .
Most important of all , I didn 't know what that was the first time I heard it .
And you can imagine sleeping on Fernandina your first night there and you hear this lonesome , plaintful call .
I fell in love with penguins , and it certainly has changed the rest of my life .
What I found out I was studying is really the difference in how the Galapagos changes , the most extreme variation .
You 've heard about these El Ninos , but this is the extreme that penguins all over the world have to adapt to .
This is a cold-water event called La Nina .
Where it 's blue and it 's green , it means the water is really cold .
And so you can see this current coming up -- in this case , the Humboldt Current -- that comes all the way out to the Galapagos Islands , and this deep undersea current , the Cromwell Current , that upwells around the Galapagos .
That brings all the nutrients : When this is cold in the Galapagos , it 's rich , and there 's plenty of food for everyone .
When we have extreme El Nino events , you see all this red , and you see no green out here around the Galapagos .
That means that there 's no upwelling , and there 's basically no food .
So it 's a real desert for not only for the penguins and the sea lions and the marine iguanas ...
things die when there 's no food .
But we didn 't even know that that affected the Galapagos when I went to study penguins .
And you can imagine being on an island hoping you 're going to see penguins , and you 're in the middle of an El Nino event and there are no penguins .
They 're not breeding ; they 're not even around .
I studied marine iguanas at that point .
But this is a global phenomenon , we know that .
And if you look along the coast of Argentina , where I work now , at a place called Punta Tombo -- the largest Magellanic penguin colony in the world down here about 44 degrees south latitude -- you see that there 's great variation here .
Some years , the cold water goes all the way up to Brazil , and other years , in these La Nina years , it doesn 't .
So the oceans don 't always act together ; they act differently , but that is the kind of variation that penguins have to live with , and it 's not easy .
So when I went to study the Magellanic penguins , I didn 't have any problems .
There were plenty of them .
This is a picture at Punta Tombo in February showing all the penguins along the beach .
I went there because the Japanese wanted to start harvesting them and turning them into high fashion golf gloves , protein and oil .
Fortunately , nobody has harvested any penguins and we 're getting over 100,000 tourists a year to see them .
But the population is declining and it 's declined fairly substantially , about 21 percent since 1987 , when I started these surveys , in terms of number of active nests .
Here , you can see where Punta Tombo is , and they breed in incredibly dense colonies .
We know this because of long-term science , because we have long-term studies there .
And science is important in informing decision makers , and also in changing how we do and knowing the direction of change that we 're going in .
And so we have this penguin project . The Wildlife Conservation Society has funded me along with a lot of individuals over the last 27 years to be able to produce these kinds of maps .
And also , we know that it 's not only Galapagos penguins that are in trouble , but Magellanics and many other species of penguins .
And so we have started a global penguin society to try to focus on the real plight of penguins .
This is one of the plights of penguins : oil pollution .
Penguins don 't like oil and they don 't like to swim through oil .
The nice thing is , if you look down here in Argentina , there 's no surface oil pollution from this composite map .
But , in fact , when we went to Argentina , penguins were often found totally covered in oil .
So they were just minding their own business .
They ended up swimming through ballast water that had oil in it .
Because when tankers carry oil they have to have ballast at some point , so when they 're empty , they have the ballast water in there .
When they come back , they actually dump this oily ballast water into the ocean .
Why do they do that ? Because it 's cheaper , because they don 't pay the real environmental costs .
We usually don 't , and we want to start getting the accounting system right so we can pay the real cost .
At first , the Argentine government said , " No , there 's no way .
You can 't find oiled penguins in Argentina .
We have laws , and we can 't have illegal dumping ; it 's against the law . "
So we ended up spending nine years convincing the government that there were lots of oiled penguins .
In some years , like this year , we found more than 80 percent of the adult penguins dead on the beach were covered in oil .
These little blue dots are the fledglings -- we do this survey every March -- which means that they 're only in the environment from January until March , so maybe three months at the most that they could get covered in oil .
And you can see , in some years over 60 percent of the fledglings were oiled .
Eventually , the government listened and , amazingly , they changed their laws .
They moved the tanker lanes 40 kilometers farther off shore , and people are not doing as much illegal dumping .
So what we 're seeing now is very few penguins are oiled .
Why are there even these penguins oiled ?
Because we 've solved the problem in Chubut province , which is like a state in Argentina where Punta Tombo is -- so that 's about 1,000 kilometers of coastline -- but we haven 't solved the problem in northern Argentina , Uruguay and Brazil .
So now I want to show you that penguins are affected .
I 'm just going to talk about two things .
This is climate change . Now this has really been a fun study because I put satellite tags on the back of these Magellanic penguins .
Try to convince donors to give you a couple thousand dollars to glue a satellite tag on the back of penguins .
But we 've been doing this now for more than a decade to learn where they go .
We thought we needed a marine protected area of about 30 kilometers , and then we put a satellite tag on the back of a penguin .
And what the penguins show us -- and these are all the little dots from where the penguins ' positions were for penguins in incubation in 2003 -- and what you see is some of these individuals are going 800 kilometers away from their nests .
So that means as their mate is sitting on the nest incubating the eggs , the other one is out there foraging , and the longer they have to stay gone , the worse condition the mate is in when the mate comes back .
And , of course , all of this then leads to a vicious cycle and you can 't raise a lot of chicks .
Here you see in 2003 -- these are all the dots of where the penguins are -- they were raising a little over a half of a chick .
Here , you can see in 2006 , they raised almost three quarters of a chick per nest , and you can see that they 're closer to Punta Tombo ; they 're not going as far away .
This past year , in 2009 , you can see that they 're now raising about a fourth of a chick , and some of these individuals are going more than 900 kilometers away from their nests .
So it 's kind of like you having a job in Chicago , and then you get transferred to St. Louis , and your mate is not happy about this because you 've got to pay airfare , because you 're gone longer .
The same thing 's true for penguins as well .
And they 're going about , on average now , 40 kilometers farther than they did a decade ago .
We need to be able to get information out to the general public .
And so we started a publication with the Society for Conservation that we think presents cutting-edge science in a new , novel way , because we have reporters that are good writers that actually can distill the information and make it accessible to the general public .
So if you 're interested in cutting-edge science and smarter conservation , you should join with our 11 partners -- some of them here in this room , like the Nature Conservancy -- and look at this magazine because we need to get information out about conservation to the general public .
Lastly I want to say that all of you , probably , have had some relationship at some time in your life with a dog , a cat , some sort of pet , and you recognized that those are individuals .
And some of you consider them almost part of your family .
If you had a relationship with a penguin , you 'd see it in the same sort of way .
They 're amazing creatures that really change how you view the world because they 're not that different from us : They 're trying to make a living , they 're trying to raise their offspring , they 're trying to get on and survive in the world .
This is Turbo the Penguin .
Turbo 's never been fed .
He met us and got his name because he started standing under my diesel truck : a turbo truck , so we named him Turbo .
Turbo has taken to knocking on the door with his beak , we let him in and he comes in here .
And I just wanted to show you what happened one day when Turbo brought in a friend .
So this is Turbo .
He 's coming up to one of my graduate students and flipper patting , which he would do to a female penguin .
And you can see , he 's not trying to bite .
This guy has never been in before and he 's trying to figure out , " What is going on ?
What is this guy doing ?
This is really pretty weird . "
And you 'll see soon that my graduate student ...
and you see , Turbo 's pretty intent on his flipper patting .
And now he 's looking at the other guy , saying , " You are really weird . "
And now look at this : not friendly .
So penguins really differ in their personalities just like our dogs and our cats .
We 're also trying to collect our information and become more technologically literate .
So we 're trying to put that in computers in the field .
And penguins are always involved in helping us or not helping us in one way or another .
This is a radio frequency ID system .
You put a little piece of rice in the foot of a penguin that has a barcode , so it tells you who it is .
It walks over the pad , and you know who it is .
Okay , so here are a few penguins coming in .
See , this one 's coming back to its nest .
They 're all coming in at this time , walking across there , just kind of leisurely coming in .
Here 's a female that 's in a hurry . She 's got food .
She 's really rushing back , because it 's hot , to try to feed her chicks .
And then there 's another fellow that will leisurely come by .
Look how fat he is . He 's walking back to feed his chicks .
Then I realize that they 're playing king of the box .
This is my box up here , and this is the system that works .
You can see this penguin , he goes over , he looks at those wires , does not like that wire .
He unplugs the wire ; we have no data .
So , they really are pretty amazing creatures .
OK .
Most important thing is : Only you can change yourself , and only you can change the world and make it better , for people as well as penguins .
So , thank you very much .
Roger Stein : A bold new way to fund drug research
Believe it or not , about 20 years ' worth of potentially life-saving drugs are sitting in labs right now , untested . Why ? Because they can 't get the funding to go to trials ; the financial risk is too high . Roger Stein is a finance guy , and he thinks deeply about mitigating risk . He and some colleagues at MIT came up with a promising new financial model that could move hundreds of drugs into the testing pipeline .
So this is a picture of my dad and me at the beach in Far Rockaway , or actually Rockaway Park .
I 'm the one with the blond hair .
My dad 's the guy with the cigarette .
It was the ' 60s . A lot of people smoked back then .
In the summer of 2009 , my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer .
Cancer is one of those things that actually touches everybody .
If you 're a man in the United States of the America , you 've got about a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during your lifetime .
of being diagnosed with cancer .
Everybody knows somebody who 's been diagnosed with cancer .
Now , my dad 's doing better today , and part of the reason for that is that he was able to participate in the trial of an experimental new drug that happened to be specially formulated and very good for his particular kind of cancer .
There are over 200 kinds of cancer .
And what I want to talk about today is how we can help more people like my dad , because we have to change the way we think about raising money to fund cancer research .
So a while after my dad was diagnosed , I was having coffee with my friend Andrew Lo .
He 's the head of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering at MIT , where I also have a position , and we were talking about cancer .
And Andrew had been doing his own bits of research , and one of the things that he had been told and that he 'd learned from studying the literature was that there 's actually a big bottleneck .
It 's very difficult to develop new drugs , and the reason it 's difficult to develop new drugs is because in the early stages of drug development , the drugs are very risky , and they 're very expensive .
So Andrew asked me if I 'd want to maybe work with him a bit , work on some of the math and the analytics and see if we could figure out something we could do .
Now I 'm not a scientist .
You know , I don 't know how to build a drug .
And none of my coauthors , Andrew Lo or Jose Maria Fernandez or David Fagnan -- none of those guys -- are scientists either .
We don 't know the first thing about how to make a cancer drug .
But we know a little bit about risk mitigation and a little bit about financial engineering , and so we started thinking , what could we do ?
What I 'm going to tell you about is some work we 've been doing over the last couple years that we think could fundamentally change the way research for cancer and lots of other things gets done .
We want to let the research drive the funding , not the other way around .
So in order to get started , let me tell you how you get a drug financed .
Imagine that you 're in your lab -- you 're a scientist , you 're not like me -- you 're a scientist , and you 've developed a new compound that you think might be therapeutic for somebody with cancer .
Well , what you do is , you test in animals , you test in test tubes , but there 's this notion of going from the bench to the bedside , and in order to get from the bench , the lab , to the bedside , to the patients , you 've got to get the drug tested .
And the way the drug gets tested is through a series of , basically , experiments , through these large , they 're called trials , that they do to determine whether the drug is safe and whether it works and all these things .
So the FDA has a very specific protocol .
In the first phase of this testing , which is called testing for toxicity , it 's called Phase I.
In the first phase , you give the drug to healthy people and you see if it actually makes them sick .
In other words , are the side effects just so severe that no matter how much good it does , it 's not going to be worth it ?
Does it cause heart attacks , kill people , liver failure , this kind of thing ?
And it turns out , that 's a pretty high hurdle .
About a third of all drugs drop out at that point .
In the next phase , you test to see if the drug 's effective , and what you do there is you give it to people with cancer and you see if it actually makes them better .
And that 's also a higher hurdle . People drop out .
And in the third phase , you actually test it on a very large sample , and what you 're trying to determine is what the right dose is , and also , is it better than what 's available today ?
If not , then why build it ?
When you 're done with all that , what you have is a very small percentage of drugs that start the process actually come out the other side .
So those blue bottles , those blue bottles save lives , and they 're also worth billions , sometimes billions a year .
So now here 's a question : if I were to ask you , for example , to make a one-time investment of , say , 200 million dollars to buy one of those bottles , so 200 million dollars up front , one time , to buy one of those bottles , I won 't tell you which one it is , and in 10 years , I 'll tell you whether you have one of the blue ones .
Does that sound like a good deal for anybody ?
No . No , right ?
And of course , it 's a very , very risky trial position , and that 's why it 's very hard to get funding , but to a first approximation , that 's actually the proposal .
You have to fund these things from the early stages on . It takes a long time .
So Andrew said to me , he said , " What if we stop thinking about these as drugs ?
What if we start thinking about them as financial assets ? "
They 've got really weird payoff structures and all that , but let 's throw everything we know about financial engineering at them .
Let 's see if we can use all the tricks of the trade to figure out how to make these drugs work as financial assets ?
Let 's create a giant fund .
In finance , we know what to do with assets that are risky .
You put them in a portfolio and you try to smooth out the returns .
So we did some math , and it turned out you could make this work , but in order to make it work , you need about 80 to 150 drugs .
Now the good news is , there 's plenty of drugs that are waiting to be tested .
We 've been told that there 's a backlog of about 20 years of drugs that are waiting to be tested but can 't be funded .
In fact , that early stage of the funding process , that Phase I and pre-clinical stuff , that 's actually , in the industry , called the Valley of Death because it 's where drugs go to die .
It 's very hard to for them to get through there , and of course , if you can 't get through there , you can 't get to the later stages .
So we did this math , and we figured out , okay , well , you know , you need about 80 to , say , 150 , or something like that , drugs .
And then we did a little more math , and we said , okay , well that 's a fund of about three to 15 billion dollars .
So we kind of created a new problem by solving the old one .
We were able to get rid of the risk , but now we need a lot of capital , and there 's only one place to get that kind of capital , the capital markets .
Venture capitalists don 't have it . Philanthropies don 't have it .
But we have to figure out how we can get people in the capital markets , who traditionally don 't invest in this stuff , to want to invest in this stuff .
So again , financial engineering was helpful here .
Imagine the megafund actually starts empty , and what it does is it issues some debt and some equity , and that generates cash flow .
That cash flow is used , then , to buy that big portfolio of drugs that you need , and those drugs start working their way through that approval process , and each time they go through a next phase of approval , they gain value .
And most of them don 't make it , but a few of them do , and with the ones that gain value , you can sell some , and when you sell them , you have money to pay the interest on those bonds , but you also have money to fund the next round of trials .
It 's almost self-funding .
You do that for the course of the transaction , and when you 're done , you liquidate the portfolio , pay back the bonds , and you can give the equity holders a nice return .
So that was the theory , and we talked about it for a bit , we did a bunch of experiments , and then we said , let 's really try to test it .
We spent the next two years doing research .
We talked to hundreds of experts in drug financing and venture capital .
We talked to people who have developed drugs .
We talked to pharmaceutical companies .
We actually looked at the data for drugs , over 2,000 drugs that had been approved or denied or withdrawn , and we also ran millions of simulations .
And all that actually took a lot of time .
But when we were done , what we found was something that was sort of surprising .
It was actually feasible to structure that fund such that when you were done structuring it , you could actually produce low-risk bonds that would be attractive to bond holders , that would give you yields of about five to eight percent , and you could produce equity that would give equity holders about a 12-percent return .
Now those returns aren 't going to be attractive to a venture capitalist .
Venture capitalists are those guys who want to make those big bets and get those billion dollar payoffs .
But it turns out , there are lots of other folks that would be interested in that .
That 's right in the investment sweet spot of pension funds and 401 plans and all this other stuff .
So we published some articles in the academic press .
We published articles in medical journals .
We published articles in finance journals .
But it wasn 't until we actually got the popular press interested in this that we began to get some traction .
We wanted to do something more than just make people aware of it , though .
We wanted people to get involved .
So what we did was , we actually took all of our computer code and made that available online under an open-source license to anybody that wanted it .
And you guys can download it today if you want to run your own experiments to see if this would work .
And that was really effective , because people that didn 't believe our assumptions could try their own assumptions and see how it would work .
Now there 's an obvious problem , which is , is there enough money in the world to fund this stuff ?
I 've told you there 's enough drugs , but is there enough money ?
There 's 100 trillion dollars of capital currently invested in fixed-income securities .
That 's a hundred thousand billion .
There 's plenty of money .
But what we realized was that it 's more than just money that 's required .
We had to get people motivated , people to get involved , and people had to understand this .
And so we started thinking about all the different things that could go wrong .
What are all the challenges to doing this that might get in the way ?
And we had a long list , and so what we did was we assigned a bunch of people , including ourselves , different pieces of this problem , and we said , could you start a work stream on credit risk ?
Could you start a work stream on the regulatory aspects ?
Could you start a work stream on how you would actually manage so many projects ?
And we had all these experts get together and do these different work streams , and then we held a conference .
The conference was held over the summer , this past summer .
It was an invitation-only conference .
It was sponsored by the American Cancer Society and done in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute .
And we had experts from every field that we thought would be important , including the government , including people that run research centers and so on , and for two days they sat around and heard the reports from those five work streams , and they talked about it .
It was the first time that the people who could actually make this happen sat across the table from each other and had these conversations .
Now these conferences , it 's typical to have a dinner , and at that dinner , you kind of get to know each other , sort of like what we 're doing here .
I happened to look out the window , and hand on my heart , I looked out the window on the night of this conference -- it was the summertime -- and that 's what I saw , it was a double rainbow .
So I 'd like to think it was a good sign .
Since the conference , we 've got people working between Paris and San Francisco , lots of different folks working on this to try to see if we can really make it happen .
We 're not looking to start a fund , but we want somebody else to do this .
Because , again , I 'm not a scientist .
I can 't build a drug .
I 'm never going to have enough money to fund even one of those trials .
But all of us together , with our 401 's , with our 529 plans , with our pension plans , all of us together can actually fund hundreds of trials and get paid well for doing it and save millions of lives like my dad .
Thank you .
Jessica Jackley : Poverty , money -- and love
What do you think of people in poverty ? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did : " they " need " our " help , in the form of a few coins in a jar . The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans has brought new power to people who live on a few dollars a day .
The stories we tell about each other matter very much .
The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter .
And most of all , I think the way that we participate in each other 's stories is of deep importance .
I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor .
Now I didn 't hear those stories from the poor themselves , I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus , kind of via my Sunday school teacher .
I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material -- food , clothing , shelter -- that they didn 't have .
And I also was taught , coupled with that , that it was my job -- this classroom full of five and six year-old children -- it was our job , apparently , to help .
This is what Jesus asked of us .
And then he said , " What you do for the least of these , you do for me . "
Now I was pretty psyched .
I was very eager to be useful in the world -- I think we all have that feeling .
And also , it was kind of interesting that God needed help .
That was news to me , and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in .
But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said , and I 'm paraphrasing , the poor would always be with us .
This frustrated and confused me ; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do , and I was excited to do , but no matter what I would do , I would fail .
So I felt confused , a little bit frustrated and angry , like maybe I 'd misunderstood something here .
And I felt overwhelmed .
And for the first time , I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people .
I imagined in my head , a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away , that would always be with us .
They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things , which I was excited to do , but I didn 't know how it was going to work .
And I didn 't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give , especially if the problem was never going away .
In the years following , the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive .
For example , I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering .
I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor .
I heard about disease , I heard about war -- they always seemed to be kind of related .
And in general , that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness , devastation , hopelessness .
And after a while , I developed what I think many of us do , is this predictable response , where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them .
I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth , because I wasn 't doing more , apparently , to make things better .
And I even felt a sense of shame because of that .
And so naturally , I started to distance myself .
I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before .
And I stopped expecting things to really change .
Now I still gave -- on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved .
I gave of my time and my money , I gave when solutions were on sale .
The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child 's life , right .
I mean who can argue with that ?
I gave when I was cornered , when it was difficult to avoid and I gave , in general , when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering , not someone else 's .
The truth be told , I was giving out of that place , not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity .
It became a transaction for me , became sort of a trade .
I was purchasing something -- I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news .
And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can , first of all , disembody a group of people , individuals out there in the world .
And it can also turn into a commodity , which is a very scary thing .
So as I did this , and as I think many of us do this , we kind of buy our distance , we kind of buy our right to go on with our day .
I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most .
It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person 's life and , in short to love .
Thankfully , a few years ago , things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak , Dr. Muhammad Yunus .
I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is , but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak , Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance .
When I heard him speak , it was three years before that .
But basically , microfinance -- if this is new to you as well -- think of that as financial services for the poor .
Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day .
Dr. Yunus shared his story , explaining what that was , and what he had done with his Grameen Bank .
He also talked about , in particular , microlending , which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business .
Now , when I heard him speak , it was exciting for a number of reasons .
First and foremost , I learned about this new method of change in the world that , for once , showed me , maybe , a way to interact with someone and to give , to share of a resource in a way that wasn 't weird and didn 't make me feel bad -- that was exciting .
But more importantly , he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before .
In fact , those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note .
He was talking about strong , smart , hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family 's lives better .
All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital .
It was an amazing sort of insight for me .
And I , in fact , was so deeply moved by this -- it 's hard to express now how much that affected me -- but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later , and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about .
For the first time , actually , in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals , I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs , and see for myself what their lives were actually about .
So I spent three months in Kenya , Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business .
And in fact , through those interactions , for the first time , I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away .
I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories .
And over and over again , as I interviewed them and spent my days with them , I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change .
So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats .
Their business trajectory would change .
They would make a little bit more money ; their standard of living would shift and would get better .
And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives , like they would start to send their children to school .
They might be able to buy mosquito nets .
Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure .
Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud .
But there were these beautiful details , even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row , and some days that 's what happened -- these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them .
That was another thing that really touched me .
It was really humbling to see for the first time , to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything , I probably would have gotten a lot wrong .
Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them .
So I saw that and it was very humbling .
Anyway , another interesting thing happened while I was there .
I never once was asked for a donation , which had kind of been my mode , right .
There 's poverty , you give money to help -- no one asked me for a donation .
In fact , no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all .
If anything , they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities .
So what I did hear , once in a while , was that people wanted a loan -- I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting .
And by the way , I was a philosophy and poetry major in school , so I didn 't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa .
I just got this impression that the money would work .
And my introduction to business was in these $ 100 little infuses of capital .
And I learned about profit and revenue , about leverage , all sorts of things , from farmers , from seamstresses , from goat herders .
So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family , and through that , maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans , that 's this little idea that turned into Kiva .
A few months later , I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner , Matthew , and I had kind of built , and took pictures of seven of my new friends , posted their stories , these stories of entrepreneurship , up on the website , spammed friends and family and said , " We think this is legal .
Haven 't heard back yet from SEC on all the details , but do you say , do you want to help participate in this , provide the money that they need ? "
The money came in basically overnight .
We sent it over to Uganda .
And over the next six months , a beautiful thing happened ; the entrepreneurs received the money , they were paid , and their businesses , in fact , grew , and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives .
In October of ' 05 , after those first seven loans were paid , Matt and I took the word beta off of the site .
We said , " Our little experiment has been a success .
Let 's start for real . " That was our official launch .
And then that first year , October ' 05 through ' 06 , Kiva facilitated $ 500,000 in loans .
The second year , it was a total of 15 million .
The third year , the total was up to around 40 .
The fourth year , we were just short of 100 .
And today , less than five years in , Kiva 's facilitated more than 150 million dollars , in little 25-dollar bits , from lenders and entrepreneurs -- more than a million of those , collectively in 200 countries .
So that 's where Kiva is today , just to bring you right up to the present .
And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they 're interesting , to me , Kiva 's really about stories .
It 's about retelling the story of the poor , and it 's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity , validates a partnership relationship , not a relationship that 's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen .
But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward .
So what I hope is that , not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva -- that 's a very positive and meaningful thing -- but I hope Kiva can blur those lines , like I said , between the traditional rich and poor categories that we 're taught to see in the world , this false dichotomy of us and them , have and have not .
I hope that Kiva can blur those lines .
Because as that happens , I think we can feel free to interact in a way that 's more open , more just and more creative , to engage with each other and to help each other .
Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you 're about to approach them .
Imagine how you feel ; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business .
Maybe they 're smiling , and they want to talk to you about what they 've done .
Imagine if you 're speaking with somebody who 's growing things and making them flourish , somebody who 's using their talents to do something productive , somebody who 's built their own business from scratch , someone who is surrounded by abundance , not scarcity , who 's in fact creating abundance , somebody with full hands with something to offer , not empty hands asking for you to give them something .
Imagine if you could hear a story you didn 't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very , very hard to make their life better .
These stories can really change the way that we think about each other .
And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money , I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other 's potential .
Now for me , Kiva is just the beginning .
And as I look forward to what is next , it 's been helpful to reflect on the things I 've learned so far .
The first one is , as I mentioned , entrepreneurship was a new idea to me .
Kiva borrowers , as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years , have taught me what entrepreneurship is .
And I think , at its core , it 's deciding that you want your life to be better .
You see an opportunity and you decide what you 're going to do to try to seize that .
In short , it 's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that .
Second thing that I 've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity .
So they 're not a donation .
Yeah , maybe it doesn 't sound that much different .
But in fact , when you give something to someone and they say , " Thanks , " and let you know how things go , that 's one thing .
When you lend them money , and they slowly pay you back over time , you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue .
This continued attention -- this ongoing attention -- is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us .
And then third , from what I 've heard from the entrepreneurs I 've gotten to know , when all else is equal , given the option to have just money to do what you need to do , or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community , people choose the community plus the money .
That 's a much more meaningful combination , a more powerful combination .
has led to the things that I 'm working on now .
I see entrepreneurs everywhere now , now that I 'm tuned into this .
And one thing that I 've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world .
With social networks , it 's an amazing way , growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities , rapidly .
And so , as I have been thinking about this , I 've been wondering : how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today ?
As I 've researched what 's going on in the United States , a few interesting little insights have come up .
So one is that , of course , as we all might expect , many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month .
But there 's always a need for resources close by .
Another thing is , it turns out , those resources don 't usually come from the places you might expect -- banks , venture capitalists , other organizations and support structures -- they come from friends and family .
Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family .
That 's around 130 billion dollars a year -- it 's a lot .
And third , so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process , it 's very awkward , people don 't know exactly what to ask for , how to ask , what to promise in return , even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them .
So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like , exactly what fits them and the people around them , this week actually , we 're quietly doing a launch of Profounder , which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family .
And it 's investments , not donations , not loans , but investments that have a dynamic return .
it actually flows with the up and down .
So in short , it 's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds .
And what you can do is go onto the site , create a profile , create investment terms in a really easy way .
We make it really , really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site .
And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues .
They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited , unsophisticated investors -- everyday people , heaven forbid -- and they can share those returns over time -- again , whatever terms they set .
As investors choose to become involved based on those terms , they can either take their rewards back as cash , or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit .
So they can be a cash , or a cause , investor .
It 's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea and to gather the people around them that they already have , the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them , to gather them to make this happen .
So that 's what I 'm working on now .
And to close , I just want to say , look these are tools .
Right now , Profounder 's right at the very beginning , and it 's very palpable ; it 's very clear to me , that it 's just a vessel , it 's just a tool .
What we need are for people to care , to actually go use it , just like they 've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections .
But the good news is I don 't think I need to stand here and convince you to care -- I 'm not even going to try .
I don 't think , even though we often hear , you know , hear the ethical and moral reasons , the religious reasons , " Here 's why caring and giving will make you happier . "
I don 't think we need to be convinced of that . I think we know ; in fact , I think we know so much , and it 's such a reality that we care so deeply , that in fact , what usually stops us is that we 're afraid to try and to mess up , because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other 's lives .
So what I think I can do today , that best thing I can give you -- I 've given you my story , which is the best I can do .
And I think I can remind us that we do care .
I think we all already know that .
And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try .
Just a sec .
Thanks .
Thanks .
For me , the best way to be inspired to try is to stop and to listen to someone else 's story .
And I 'm grateful that I 've gotten to do that here at TED .
And I 'm grateful that whenever I do that , guaranteed , I am inspired -- I am inspired by the person I am listening to .
And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person 's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help .
And that -- forget the tools , forget the moving around of resources -- that stuff 's easy .
Believing in each other , really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world , that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us .
So that , this belief in each other , knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do , that 's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today .
Thank you .
Rick Warren : A life of purpose
Pastor Rick Warren , author of & lt ; em & gt ; The Purpose-Driven Life , & lt ; / em & gt ; reflects on his own crisis of purpose in the wake of his book 's wild success . He explains his belief that God 's intention is for each of us to use our talents and influence to do good .
I 'm often asked , what surprises you about the book ?
And I said , that I got to write it .
I would have never imagined that , not in my wildest dreams did I think -- I don 't even consider myself to be an author .
And I 'm often asked , why do you think so many people have read this ?
This thing 's selling still about a million copies a month .
And I think it 's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease .
I think inside at some point , we put our heads down on the pillow and we go , " There 's got to be more to life than this . "
Get up in the morning , go to work , come home and watch TV , go to bed , get up in the morning , go to work , come home , watch TV , go to bed , go to parties on weekends .
A lot of people say , " I 'm living . " No , you 're not living -- that 's just existing .
Just existing .
I really think that 's there 's this inner desire .
I do believe what Chris said . I believe that you 're not an accident .
Your parents may not have planned you , but I believe God did .
I think there are accidental parents ; there 's no doubt about that .
I don 't think there are accidental kids .
And I think you matter .
I think you matter to God ; I think you matter to history ; I think you matter to this universe .
And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living , the success level of living and the significant level of living is , do you figure out , what on Earth am I here for ?
I meet a lot of people who are very smart , and say , " But why can 't I figure out my problems ? "
And I meet a lot of people who are very successful , who say , " Why don 't I feel more fulfilled ?
Why do I feel like a fake ?
Why do I feel like I 've got to pretend that I 'm more than I really am ? "
I think that comes down to this issue of meaning , of significance , of purpose .
I think it comes down to this issue of : why am I here ? What am I here for ? Where am I going ?
These are not religious issues -- they 're human issues .
I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does , because it makes my life work a whole lot easier .
As a pastor , I do see a lot of kooks .
And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life .
Religion doesn 't have a monopoly on that , but there are plenty of religious kooks .
There are secular kooks ; there are smart kooks , dumb kooks .
There are people -- a lady came up to me the other day , and she had a white piece of paper -- Michael , you 'll like this one -- and she said , " What do you see in it ? "
And I looked at it and I said , " Oh , I don 't see anything . "
And she goes , " Well , I see Jesus , " and started crying and left .
I 'm going , OK , you know . Fine .
Um .
Good for you .
When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years , I kind of had my little crisis .
And that was : what is the purpose of this ?
Because it brought in enormous amounts of money .
When you write the best-selling book in the world , it 's tons and tons of money -- and it brought in a lot of attention , neither of which I wanted .
When I started Saddleback Church , I was 25 years old .
I started it with one other family in 1980 .
And I decided that I was never going to go on TV , because I didn 't want to be a celebrity , I didn 't want to be a , quote , " evangelist , televangelist " -- that 's not my thing .
And all of a sudden , it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention .
I don 't think -- now , this is a worldview , and I will tell you , everybody 's got a worldview .
Everybody 's betting their life on something .
You 're betting your life on something -- you just better know why you 're betting what you 're betting on .
So , everybody 's betting their life on something , and when I , you know , made a bet , I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was .
But everybody 's got -- and I believe in a pluralistic society -- everybody 's betting on something .
And when I started the church , you know , I had no plans to do what it 's doing now .
And then when I wrote this book , and all of a sudden it just took off , then I started saying , now , what 's the purpose of this ?
Because as I started to say , I don 't think you 're given money or fame for your own ego , ever .
I just don 't believe that .
And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is , " It 's not about you , " then , when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history , you got to figure , well , I guess it 's not about me .
That 's kind of a no-brainer .
So , what is it for ?
And I began to think about what I call the " stewardship of affluence " and the " stewardship of influence . "
So I believe , essentially , that leadership is stewardship .
That if you are a leader in any area -- in business , in politics , in sports , in art , in academics , in any area -- you don 't own it ; you are a steward of it .
For instance , that 's why I believe in protecting the environment .
This is not my planet . It wasn 't mine before I was born .
It 's not going to be mine after I die .
I 'm just here for 80 years and then that 's it .
I was debating the other day on a talk show , and the guy was challenging me and go , " What 's a pastor doing on protecting the environment ? "
And I asked this guy , I said , " Well , do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation ?
Do you think we have a stewardship here , to take the environment seriously ? "
And he said , " No . "
I said , " Oh , you don 't ? " I said , " Let me make this clear again .
Do you believe that as human beings -- I 'm not talking about religion -- do you believe that as human beings , it is our responsibility to take care of this planet and make it just a little bit better for the next generation ? "
And he said , " No .
Not any more than any other species . "
When he said the word " species , " he was revealing his worldview .
And he was saying , " I 'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is . "
Well now , I know a lot of times we act like ducks , but you 're not a duck .
You 're not a duck .
And you are responsible -- that 's my worldview .
And so , you need to understand what your worldview is .
The problem is most people never really think it through .
They never really codify it or qualify it or quantify it , and say , " This is what I believe in .
This is why I believe what I believe . "
I don 't personally have enough faith to be an atheist .
But you may , you may .
Your worldview , though , does determine everything else in your life , because it determines your decisions ; it determines your relationships ; it determines your level of confidence .
It determines , really , everything in your life .
What we believe , obviously -- and you know this -- determines our behavior , and our behavior determines what we become in life .
So all of this money started pouring in , and all of this fame started pouring in , and I go , what do I do with this ?
My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money .
We said , " First , we 're not going to use it on ourselves . "
I didn 't go out and buy a bigger house .
I don 't own a guesthouse .
I still drive the same four-year-old Ford that I 've driven .
We just said , we 're not going to use it on us .
The second thing was , I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor .
Third thing is , I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years , and I gave it back .
And I gave it back because I didn 't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money -- I don 't .
In fact , personally , I 've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money .
I know that 's a stereotype . I 've never met one of them .
Believe me , there 's a whole lot easier ways to make money .
Pastors are like on 24-hours-a-day call . They 're like doctors .
I left late today . I 'd hoped to be here yesterday , because my father-in-law is in his last , probably , 48 hours before he dies of cancer .
And I 'm watching a guy who 's lived his life -- he 's now in his mid-80s -- and he 's dying with peace . You know , the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times .
The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral .
And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals , it makes a difference .
It makes a difference what you believe .
So , we gave it all back , and then we set up three foundations , working on some of the major problems of the world : illiteracy , poverty , pandemic diseases -- particularly HIV / AIDS -- and set up these three foundations , and put the money into that .
The last thing we did is we became what I call " reverse tithers . "
And that is , when my wife and I got married 30 years ago , we started tithing .
Now , that 's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity , give it away to help other people .
So , we started doing that , and each year we would raise our tithe 1 percent .
So , our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent , second year we went to 12 percent , and the third year we went to 13 percent , and on and on and on . Why did I do that ?
Because every time I give , it breaks the grip of materialism in my life .
Materialism is all about getting -- get , get , get , get all you can , can all you get , sit on the can and spoil the rest .
It 's all about more , having more .
And we think that the good life is actually looking good -- that 's most important of all -- looking good , feeling good and having the goods .
But that 's not the good life .
I meet people all the time who have those , and they 're not necessarily happy .
If money actually made you happy , then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest .
And that I know , personally , I know , is not true .
It 's just not true .
So , the good life is not about looking good , feeling good or having the goods ; it 's about being good and doing good .
Giving your life away .
Significance in life doesn 't come from status , because you can always find somebody who 's got more than you .
It doesn 't come from sex .
It doesn 't come from salary .
It comes from serving .
It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning , we find significance .
That 's the way we were wired , I believe , by God .
And so we began to give away , and now after 30 years , my wife and I are reverse tithers -- we give away 90 percent and live on 10 .
That , actually , was the easy part .
The hard part is , what do I do with all this attention ?
Because I start getting all kinds of invitations .
I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents , and I won 't go into that , but it was an amazing thing .
And I 'm going , what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought ?
And being a pastor , I started reading the Bible .
There 's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72 , and it 's Solomon 's prayer for more influence .
When you read this prayer , it sounds incredibly selfish , self-centered .
It sounds like , he says , " God , I want you to make me famous . "
That 's what he prays .
He says , " I want you to make me famous .
I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land .
I want you to give me power .
I want you to make me famous .
I want you to give me influence . "
And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make if you were going to pray .
Until you read the whole psalm , the whole chapter .
And then he says , " So that the king " -- he was the king of Israel at that time at its apex in power -- " so that the king may care for the widow and orphan , support depressed , defend the defenseless , care for the sick , assist the poor , speak up for the foreigner , those in prison . "
Basically , he 's talking about all the marginalized in society .
And as I read that , I looked at it , and I thought , you know , what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence .
The purpose of influence is not to build your ego , or your net worth .
And , by the way , your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth .
Your value is not based on your valuables ; it 's based on a whole different set of things .
And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence .
And I had to admit , I can 't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans .
They 're not on my radar .
I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America -- a bunch of gated communities .
I have a church full of CEOs and scientists .
And I could go five years and never , ever see a homeless person .
They 're just not in my pathway .
Now , they 're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana .
So , I had to say , " OK , I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I 've got to help those who don 't have either of those . "
You know , there 's a story in the Bible about Moses .
Whether you believe it 's true or not -- it really didn 't matter to me .
But Moses , if you saw the movie , " The Ten Commandments , " Moses goes out , and there 's this burning bush , and God talks to him .
And God says , " Moses , what 's in your hand ? "
I think that 's one of the most important questions you 'll ever be asked .
What 's in your hand ?
Moses says , " It 's a staff .
It 's a shepherd 's staff . "
And God says , " Throw it down . "
And if you saw the movie , you know , he throws it down and it becomes a snake .
And then God says , " Pick it up . "
And he picks it back up again , and it becomes a staff again .
Now , I 'm reading this thing , and I 'm going , what is that all about ?
OK . What 's that all about ? Well , I do know a couple of things .
Number one , God never does a miracle to show off .
It 's not just , " Wow , isn 't that cool ? "
And , by the way , my God doesn 't have to show up on cheese bread .
You know , if God 's going to show up , He 's not going to show up on cheese bread .
OK ? I just , this is why I love what Michael does , because it 's like , OK , if he 's debunking it , then I don 't have to .
But God -- my God -- doesn 't show up on sprinkler images .
He got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do .
But He doesn 't do miracles just to show off .
Second thing is , if God ever asks you a question , He already knows the answer .
Obviously , if He 's God , then that would mean that when He asks the question , it 's for your benefit , not His .
So , He 's going , " What 's in your hand ? "
Now , what was in Moses ' hand ?
Well , it was a shepherd 's staff . Now , follow me on this .
This staff represented three things about Moses ' life .
First , it represented his identity .
He was a shepherd . It 's the symbol of his own occupation .
I am a shepherd . It 's a symbol of his identity , his career , his job .
Second , it 's a symbol of not only his identity ; it 's a symbol of his income , because all of his assets are tied up in sheep .
In those days nobody had bank accounts , or American Express cards , or hedge funds .
Your assets are tied up in your flocks .
So it 's a symbol of his identity , and it 's a symbol of his income .
And the third thing : it 's a symbol of his influence .
What do you do with a shepherd 's staff ?
Well , you know , you move sheep from point A to point B with it , by hook or by crook .
You pull them or you poke them , one or the other .
So , He 's saying , " You 're going to lay down your identity .
What 's in your hand ? You 've got identity ; you 've got income ; you 've got influence .
What 's in your hand ? "
And He 's saying , " If you lay it down , I 'll make it come alive .
I 'll do some things you could never imagine possible . "
And if you 've watched that movie , " Ten Commandments , " all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff .
Last year , I was invited to speak at NBA All-Stars game .
And so , I 'm talking to the players , because most of the NBA teams , NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose , based on the book .
And I asked them , I said , " What 's in your hand ?
So , what 's in your hand ? " I said , " It 's a basketball , and that basketball represents your identity , who you are .
You 're an NBA player . It represents your income .
You 're making a lot of money off that little ball .
And it represents your influence .
And even though you 're only going to be in the NBA for a few years , you 're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life .
And that gives with you enormous influence .
So , what are you going to do with what you 've been given ? "
And I guess that 's the main reason I came up here today , to all of you very bright people at TED , is to say , " What 's in your hand ? "
What do you have that you 've been given ?
Talent , background , education , freedom , networks , opportunities , wealth , ideas , creativity .
What are you doing with what you 've been given ?
That , to me , is the primary question about life .
That , to me , is what being purpose-driven is all about .
In the book I talk about how you 're wired to do certain things , you 're shaped .
This little cross takes spiritual gifts , heart , ability , personality and experiences .
These things shape you .
And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life , you need to look at your shape . What am I wired to do ?
Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it ?
If you 're wired to be an anthropologist , you 'll be an anthropologist .
If you 're wired to be an undersea explorer , you 'll be an undersea explorer .
If you 're wired to make deals , you make deals .
If you 're wired to paint , you paint .
Did you know that God smiles when you be you ?
When my little kids were little -- they 're all grown , now I have grandkids -- I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed , and I used to watch my kids sleep .
And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower , rise and lower .
And I would look at them -- this is not an accident .
Rise and lower -- and I got joy out of just watching them sleep .
Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you 're doing , quote , " spiritual things , " like going to church or helping the poor , or , you know , confessing or doing something like that .
The bottom line is , God gets pleasure watching you be you . Why ?
He made you . And when you do what you were made to do , He goes , " That 's my boy .
That 's my girl .
You 're using the talent and ability that I gave you . "
So my advice to you is , look at what 's in your hand -- your identity , your influence , your income -- and say , " It 's not about me .
It 's about making the world a better place . "
Thank you .
Stefan Wolff : The path to ending ethnic conflicts
Civil wars and ethnic conflicts have brought the world incredible suffering , but Stefan Wolff 's figures show that , in the last 20 years , their number has steadily decreased . He extracts critical lessons from Northern Ireland , Liberia , Timor and more to show that leadership , diplomacy and institutional design are our three most effective weapons in waging peace .
Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war .
These are not normally the most cheerful of topics , nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about .
Yet , not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago , but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict .
Three things stand out : leadership , diplomacy and institutional design .
What I will focus on in my talk is why they matter , how they matter , and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways , that is , how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last .
But let 's start at the beginning .
Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now , and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat .
For nearly two decades now , the news has been bad and the images have been haunting .
In Georgia , after years of stalemate , we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August , 2008 .
This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia , leaving Georgia ever more divided .
In Kenya , contested presidential elections in 2007 -- we just heard about them -- quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people .
In Sri Lanka , a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009 , after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983 .
In Kyrgyzstan , just over the last few weeks , unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks .
Hundreds have been killed , and more than 100,000 displaced , including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan .
In the Middle East , conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues unabated , and it becomes ever more difficult to see how , just how a possible , sustainable solution can be achieved .
Darfur may have slipped from the news headlines , but the killing and displacement there continues as well , is very hard to fathom .
And in Iraq , finally , violence is on the rise again , and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections .
But hang on , this talk is to be about the good news .
So are these now the images of the past ?
Well , notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the Middle East , Darfur , Iraq , elsewhere , there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news .
Over the past two decades , since the end of the Cold War , in the number of civil wars .
Since the high in the early 1990s , with about 50 such civil wars ongoing , we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today .
The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two .
But this trend is less unambiguous .
The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001 , with about 80,000 soldiers , policemen and rebels killed every year .
The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003 , with just 20,000 killed .
Despite the up and down since then , the overall trend -- and this is the important bit -- clearly points downward for the past two decades .
The news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be .
From over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998 , a decade later , this figure stands at 4,000 .
This is a decrease by two-thirds .
This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 .
But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months .
This certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed .
What is also important is to note that these figures only tell part of the story .
They exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war , from hunger or disease , for example .
And they also do not properly account for civilian suffering more generally .
Torture , rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective , if often non-lethal , weapons in civil war .
To put it differently , for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war , there is no good war and there is no bad peace .
Thus , even though every civilian killed , maimed , raped , or tortured is one too many , the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago , is good news .
So , we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed .
And the big question , of course , is why ?
In some cases , there is a military victory of one side .
This is a solution of sorts , but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences .
The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this , but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans , in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa .
At times , they are complimented by negotiated settlements , or at least cease-fire agreements , and peacekeepers are deployed .
But hardly ever do they represent a resounding success -- Bosnia and Herzegovina perhaps more so than Georgia .
But for many parts of Africa , a colleague of mine once put it this way , " The cease-fire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning . "
But let 's look at the good news again .
If there 's no solution on the battlefield , three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war , or for sustainable peace afterwards : leadership , diplomacy and institutional design .
Take the example of Northern Ireland .
Despite centuries of animosity , decades of violence and thousands of people killed , 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement .
Its initial version was skillfully mediated by Senator George Mitchell .
Crucially , for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland , he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations .
Central among them , a commitment to exclusively peaceful means .
Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments , who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland .
The core institutions that were put in place in 1998 and their modifications in 2006 and 2008 were highly innovative and allowed all conflict parties to see their core concerns and demands addressed .
The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict .
And significantly , there 's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities .
The provisions in the agreement may be complex , but so is the underlying conflict .
Perhaps most importantly , local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise , not always fast and not always enthusiastically , but rise in the end they did .
Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister ?
But then , is Northern Ireland a unique example , or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries ?
By no means .
The ending of Liberia 's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership , diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001 , or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005 .
In all three cases , local leaders were willing and able to make peace , the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement , and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed .
Focusing on leadership , diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace , or to make it last .
The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli / Palestinian conflict .
Not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements .
Rather , local leaders committed to revisiting them later on .
Yet instead of grasping this opportunity , local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada , the events of 9 / 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .
The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged , and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south .
Changes and shortcomings in leadership , more off than on international diplomacy and institutional failures account for this in almost equal measure .
Unresolved boundary issues , squabbles over oil revenues , the ongoing conflict in Darfur , escalating tribal violence in the south and generally weak state capacity across all of Sudan complete a very depressing picture of the state of affairs in Africa 's largest country .
A final example : Kosovo .
The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence , tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many , many different factors .
Central among them are three .
First , the intransigence of local leaders to settle for nothing less than their maximum demands .
Second , an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by Western support for Kosovo 's independence .
And third , a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike .
By the same token -- and here we have some good news again -- the very fact that there is a high-level , well-resourced international presence in Kosovo and the Balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint , explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008 .
So even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal , local leaders and international leaders have a choice , and they can make a difference for the better .
A cold war is not as good as a cold peace , but a cold peace is still better than a hot war .
Good news is also about learning the right lesson .
So what then distinguishes the Israeli / Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland , or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia ?
Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue .
First , leadership .
In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters , their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either .
Leadership needs to be capable , determined and visionary in its commitment to peace .
Leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers , and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future .
Second , diplomacy .
Diplomacy needs to be well resourced , sustained , and apply the right mix of incentives and pressures on leaders and followers .
It needs to help them reach an equitable compromise , and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local , regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement .
Third , institutional design .
Institutional design requires a keen focus on issues , innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation .
Conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other 's needs .
And they need to think about the substance of their agreement much more than about the labels they want to attach to them .
Conflict parties also need to be prepared to return to the negotiation table if the agreement implementation stalls .
For me personally , the most critical lesson of all is this : Local commitment to peace is all-important , but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence .
Yet , no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have .
Therefore , we must invest in developing leaders , leaders that have the skills , vision and determination to make peace .
Leaders , in other words , that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices .
A final thought : Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers , frustrations and setbacks .
It often takes a generation to accomplish , but it also requires us , today 's generation , to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership , diplomacy and institutional design , so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow .
Thank you .
Rachel Armstrong : Architecture that repairs itself ?
Venice is sinking . To save it , Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and , well , make architecture that grows itself . She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon , too .
All buildings today have something in common .
They 're made using Victorian technologies .
This involves blueprints , industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers .
All of this effort results in an inert object .
And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities .
This is not sustainable .
I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature , not insulating them from it .
Now , in order to do this , we need the right kind of language .
Living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world , through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism .
And this is the conversion of one group of substances into another , either through the production or the absorption of energy .
And this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way .
So , I 'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture .
But they don 't exist . So I 'm having to make them .
I 'm working with architect Neil Spiller at the Bartlett School of Architecture , and we 're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach .
That means we 're generating them from scratch .
One of our collaborators is chemist Martin Hanczyc , and he 's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter .
Now , that 's exactly the kind of process that I 'm interested in , when we 're thinking about sustainable materials .
So , Martin , he works with a system called the protocell .
Now all this is -- and it 's magic -- is a little fatty bag . And it 's got a chemical battery in it .
And it has no DNA .
This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living .
It is able to move around its environment .
It can follow chemical gradients .
It can undergo complex reactions , some of which are happily architectural .
So here we are . These are protocells , patterning their environment .
We don 't know how they do that yet .
Here , this is a protocell , and it 's vigorously shedding this skin .
Now , this looks like a chemical kind of birth .
This is a violent process .
Here , we 've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate .
And that 's the shell around that globular fat .
They are quite brittle . So you 've only got a part of one there .
So what we 're trying to do is , we 're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture , which contrast the current , Victorian , top-down methods which impose structure upon matter .
That can 't be energetically sensible .
So , bottom-up materials actually exist today .
They 've been in use , in architecture , since ancient times .
If you walk around the city of Oxford , where we are today , and have a look at the brickwork , which I 've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days , you 'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone .
And if you look even closer , you 'll see , in that limestone , there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other .
And then they are fossilized over millions of years .
Now a block of limestone , in itself , isn 't particularly that interesting .
It looks beautiful .
But imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere .
Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide .
Would it give this block of limestone new properties ?
Well , most likely it would . It might be able to grow .
It might be able to self-repair , and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment .
So , architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material .
They think big . Okay ?
So when we think about scaling up metabolic materials , we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls , or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water .
So , one of these examples would of course be the historic city of Venice .
Now , Venice , as you know , has a tempestuous relationship with the sea , and is built upon wooden piles .
So we 've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we 're working with to sustainably reclaim Venice .
And architect Christian Kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city .
So , here is the technology we have today .
This is our protocell technology , effectively making a shell , like its limestone forefathers , and depositing it in a very complex environment , against natural materials .
We 're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this .
Now , this is the very interesting part .
We don 't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals .
What we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles .
So , you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light , toward the dark foundations .
We 've observed this in the laboratory .
The protocells can actually move away from the light .
They can actually also move towards the light . You have to just choose your species .
So that these don 't just exist as one entity , we kind of chemically engineer them .
And so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically , around the foundations of Venice , effectively petrifying it .
Now , this isn 't going to happen tomorrow . It 's going to take a while .
It 's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of Venice .
But gradually , as the buildings are repaired , we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city .
An accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide .
Also it will attract the local marine ecology , who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture .
So , this is really interesting . Now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way .
But perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere .
This is terrestrial chemistry . We 've all got it , which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for First World countries .
So , in summary , I 'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to Victorian technologies , and building architectures from a bottom-up approach .
Secondly , these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems , which means they can perform in similar ways .
They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture .
And finally , an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one .
Thank you .
Dave Meslin : The antidote to apathy
Local politics -- schools , zoning , council elections -- hit us where we live . So why don 't more of us actually get involved ? Is it apathy ? Dave Meslin says no . He identifies 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities , even when we truly care . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
How often do we hear that people just don 't care ?
How many times have you been told that real , substantial change isn 't possible because most people are too selfish , too stupid or too lazy to try to make a difference in their community ?
I propose to you today that apathy as we think we know it doesn 't actually exist , but rather , that people do care , but that we live in a world that actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way .
And I 'll give you some examples of what I mean .
Let 's start with city hall .
You ever see one of these before ?
This is a newspaper ad .
It 's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what 's happening .
As you can see , it 's impossible to read .
You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they 're talking about , and then farther down , in tiny 10-point font , to find out how to actually get involved .
Imagine if the private sector advertised in the same way -- if Nike wanted to sell a pair of shoes and put an ad in the paper like that .
Now that would never happen .
You 'll never see an ad like that because Nike actually wants you to buy their shoes .
Whereas the city of Toronto clearly doesn 't want you involved with the planning process , otherwise their ads would look something like this -- with all the information basically laid out clearly .
As long as the city 's putting out notices like this to try to get people engaged , then of course people aren 't going to be engaged .
But that 's not apathy ; that 's intentional exclusion .
Public space .
The manner in which we mistreat our public spaces is a huge obstacle towards any type of progressive political change because we 've essentially put a price tag on freedom of expression .
Whoever has the most money gets the loudest voice , dominating the visual and mental environment .
The problem with this model is that there are some amazing messages that need to be said that aren 't profitable to say .
So you 're never going to see them on a billboard .
The media plays an important role in developing our relationship with political change , mainly by ignoring politics and focusing on celebrities and scandals , but even when they do talk about important political issues , they do it in a way that I feel discourages engagement .
And I 'll give you an example : the Now magazine from last week -- progressive , downtown weekly in Toronto .
This is the cover story .
It 's an article about a theater performance , and it starts with basic information about where it is , in case you actually want to go and see it after you 've read the article -- where , the time , the website .
Same with this -- it 's a movie review , an art review , a book review -- where the reading is in case you want to go .
A restaurant -- you might not want to just read about it , maybe you want to go to the restaurant .
So they tell you where it is , what the prices are , the address , the phone number , etc .
Then you get to their political articles .
Here 's a great article about an important election race that 's happening .
It talks about the candidates -- written very well -- but no information , no follow-up , no websites for the campaigns , no information about when the debates are , where the campaign offices are .
Here 's another good article about a new campaign opposing privatization of transit without any contact information for the campaign .
The message seems to be that the readers are most likely to want to eat , maybe read a book , maybe see a movie , but not be engaged in their community .
And you might think this is a small thing , but I think it 's important because it sets a tone and it reinforces the dangerous idea that politics is a spectator sport .
Heroes : How do we view leadership ?
Look at these 10 movies . What do they have in common ?
Anyone ?
They all have heroes who were chosen .
Someone came up to them and said , " You 're the chosen one .
There 's a prophesy . You have to save the world . "
And then someone goes off and saves the world because they 've been told to , with a few people tagging along .
This helps me understand why a lot of people have trouble seeing themselves as leaders because it sends all the wrong messages about what leadership is about .
A heroic effort is a collective effort , number one .
Number two , it 's imperfect ; it 's not very glamorous , and it doesn 't suddenly start and suddenly end .
It 's an ongoing process your whole life .
But most importantly , it 's voluntary .
It 's voluntary .
As long as we 're teaching our kids that heroism starts when someone scratches a mark on your forehead , or someone tells you that you 're part of a prophecy , they 're missing the most important characteristic of leadership , which is that it comes from within .
It 's about following your own dreams -- uninvited , uninvited -- and then working with others to make those dreams come true .
Political parties : oh boy .
Political parties could and should be one of the basic entry points for people to get engaged in politics .
Instead , they 've become , sadly , uninspiring and uncreative organizations that rely so heavily on market research and polling and focus groups that they end up all saying the same thing , pretty much regurgitating back to us what we already want to hear at the expense of putting forward bold and creative ideas .
And people can smell that , and it feeds cynicism .
Charitable status : Groups who have charitable status in Canada aren 't allowed to do advocacy .
This is a huge problem and a huge obstacle to change because it means that some of the most passionate and informed voices are completely silenced , especially during election time .
Which leads us to the last one , which is our elections .
As you may have noticed , our elections in Canada are a complete joke .
We use out-of-date systems that are unfair and create random results .
Canada 's currently led by a party that most Canadians didn 't actually want .
How can we honestly and genuinely encourage more people to vote when votes don 't count in Canada ?
You add all this up together and of course people are apathetic .
It 's like trying to run into a brick wall .
Now I 'm not trying to be negative by throwing all these obstacles out and explaining what 's in our way .
Quite the opposite : I actually think people are amazing and smart and that they do care .
But that , as I said , we live in this environment where all these obstacles are being put in our way .
As long as we believe that people , our own neighbors , are selfish , stupid or lazy , then there 's no hope .
But we can change all those things I mentioned .
We can open up city hall .
We can reform our electoral systems .
We can democratize our public spaces .
My main message is , if we can redefine apathy , not as some kind of internal syndrome , but as a complex web of cultural barriers that reinforces disengagement , and if we can clearly define , we can clearly identify , what those obstacles are , and then if we can work together collectively to dismantle those obstacles , then anything is possible .
Thank you .
Tali Sharot : The optimism bias
Are we born to be optimistic , rather than realistic ? Tali Sharot shares new research that suggests our brains are wired to look on the bright side -- and how that can be both dangerous and beneficial .
I 'm going to talk to you about optimism -- or more precisely , the optimism bias .
It 's a cognitive illusion that we 've been studying in my lab for the past few years , and 80 percent of us have it .
It 's our tendency to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events .
So we underestimate our likelihood of suffering from cancer , being in a car accident .
We overestimate our longevity , our career prospects .
In short , we 're more optimistic than realistic , but we are oblivious to the fact .
Take marriage for example .
In the Western world , divorce rates are about 40 percent .
That means that out of five married couples , two will end up splitting their assets .
But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce , they estimate it at zero percent .
And even divorce lawyers , who should really know better , hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce .
So it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce , but they are more likely to remarry .
In the words of Samuel Johnson , " Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience . "
So if we 're married , we 're more likely to have kids .
And we all think our kids will be especially talented .
This , by the way , is my two-year-old nephew , Guy .
And I just want to make it absolutely clear that he 's a really bad example of the optimism bias , because he is in fact uniquely talented .
And I 'm not alone .
Out of four British people , three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families .
That 's 75 percent .
But only 30 percent said that they thought families in general are doing better than a few generations ago .
And this is a really important point , because we 're optimistic about ourselves , we 're optimistic about our kids , we 're optimistic about our families , but we 're not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us , and we 're somewhat pessimistic about the fate of our fellow citizens and the fate of our country .
But private optimism about our own personal future remains persistent .
And it doesn 't mean that we think things will magically turn out okay , but rather that we have the unique ability to make it so .
Now I 'm a scientist , I do experiments .
So to show you what I mean , I 'm going to do an experiment here with you .
So I 'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics , and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population .
The first one is getting along well with others .
Who here believes they 're at the bottom 25 percent ?
Okay , that 's about 10 people out of 1,500 .
Who believes they 're at the top 25 percent ?
That 's most of us here .
Okay , now do the same for your driving ability .
How interesting are you ?
How attractive are you ?
How honest are you ?
And finally , how modest are you ?
So most of us put ourselves above average on most of these abilities .
Now this is statistically impossible .
We can 't all be better than everyone else .
But if we believe we 're better than the other guy , well that means that we 're more likely to get that promotion , to remain married , because we 're more social , more interesting .
And it 's a global phenomenon .
The optimism bias has been observed in many different countries -- in Western cultures , in non-Western cultures , in females and males , in kids , in the elderly .
It 's quite widespread .
But the question is , is it good for us ?
So some people say no .
Some people say the secret to happiness is low expectations .
I think the logic goes something like this : If we don 't expect greatness , if we don 't expect to find love and be healthy and successful , well we 're not going to be disappointed when these things don 't happen .
And if we 're not disappointed when good things don 't happen , and we 're pleasantly surprised when they do , we will be happy .
So it 's a very good theory , but it turns out to be wrong for three reasons .
Number one : Whatever happens , whether you succeed or you fail , people with high expectations always feel better .
Because how we feel when we get dumped or win employee of the month depends on how we interpret that event .
The psychologists Margaret Marshall and John Brown studied students with high and low expectations .
And they found that when people with high expectations succeed , they attribute that success to their own traits .
" I 'm a genius , therefore I got an A , therefore I 'll get an A again and again in the future . "
When they failed , it wasn 't because they were dumb , but because the exam just happened to be unfair .
Next time they will do better .
People with low expectations do the opposite .
So when they failed it was because they were dumb , and when they succeeded it was because the exam just happened to be really easy .
Next time reality would catch up with them .
So they felt worse .
Number two : Regardless of the outcome , the pure act of anticipation makes us happy .
The behavioral economist George Lowenstein asked students in his university to imagine getting a passionate kiss from a celebrity , any celebrity .
Then he said , " How much are you willing to pay to get a kiss from a celebrity if the kiss was delivered immediately , in three hours , in 24 hours , in three days , in one year , in 10 years ?
He found that the students were willing to pay the most not to get a kiss immediately , but to get a kiss in three days .
They were willing to pay extra in order to wait .
Now they weren 't willing to wait a year or 10 years ; no one wants an aging celebrity .
But three days seemed to be the optimum amount .
So why is that ?
Well if you get the kiss now , it 's over and done with .
But if you get the kiss in three days , well that 's three days of jittery anticipation , the thrill of the wait .
The students wanted that time to imagine where is it going to happen , how is it going to happen .
Anticipation made them happy .
This is , by the way , why people prefer Friday to Sunday .
It 's a really curious fact , because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day of pleasure , so you 'd assume that people will prefer Sunday , but they don 't .
It 's not because they really , really like being in the office and they can 't stand strolling in the park or having a lazy brunch .
We know that , because when you ask people about their ultimate favorite day of the week , surprise , surprise , Saturday comes in at first , then Friday , then Sunday .
People prefer Friday because Friday brings with it the anticipation of the weekend ahead , all the plans that you have .
On Sunday , the only thing you can look forward to is the work week .
So optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future , more strolls in the park .
And that anticipation enhances their wellbeing .
In fact , without the optimism bias , we would all be slightly depressed .
People with mild depression , they don 't have a bias when they look into the future .
They 're actually more realistic than healthy individuals .
But individuals with severe depression , they have a pessimistic bias .
So they tend to expect the future to be worse than it ends up being .
So optimism changes subjective reality .
The way we expect the world to be changes the way we see it .
But it also changes objective reality .
It acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy .
And that is the third reason why lowering your expectations will not make you happy .
Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success , it leads to success .
Optimism leads to success in academia and sports and politics .
And maybe the most surprising benefit of optimism is health .
If we expect the future to be bright , stress and anxiety are reduced .
So all in all , optimism has lots of benefits .
But the question that was really confusing to me was , how do we maintain optimism in the face of reality ?
As an neuroscientist , this was especially confusing , because according to all the theories out there , when your expectations are not met , you should alter them .
But this is not what we find .
We asked people to come into our lab in order to try and figure out what was going on .
We asked them to estimate their likelihood of experiencing different terrible events in their lives .
So , for example , what is your likelihood of suffering from cancer ?
And then we told them the average likelihood of someone like them to suffer these misfortunes .
So cancer , for example , is about 30 percent .
And then we asked them again , " How likely are you to suffer from cancer ? "
What we wanted to know was whether people will take the information that we gave them to change their beliefs .
And indeed they did -- but mostly when the information we gave them was better than what they expected .
So for example , if someone said , " My likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 50 percent , " and we said , " Hey , good news .
The average likelihood is only 30 percent , " the next time around they would say , " Well maybe my likelihood is about 35 percent . "
So they learned quickly and efficiently .
But if someone started off saying , " My average likelihood of suffering from cancer is about 10 percent , " and we said , " Hey , bad news .
The average likelihood is about 30 percent , " the next time around they would say , " Yep . Still think it 's about 11 percent . "
So it 's not that they didn 't learn at all -- they did -- but much , much less than when we gave them positive information about the future .
And it 's not that they didn 't remember the numbers that we gave them ; everyone remembers that the average likelihood of cancer is about 30 percent and the average likelihood of divorce is about 40 percent .
But they didn 't think that those numbers were related to them .
What this means is that warning signs such as these may only have limited impact .
Yes , smoking kills , but mostly it kills the other guy .
What I wanted to know was what was going on inside the human brain that prevented us from taking these warning signs personally .
But at the same time , when we hear that the housing market is hopeful , we think , " Oh , my house is definitely going to double in price . "
To try and figure that out , I asked the participants in the experiment to lie in a brain imaging scanner .
It looks like this .
And using a method called functional MRI , we were able to identify regions in the brain that were responding to positive information .
One of these regions is called the left inferior frontal gyrus .
So if someone said , " My likelihood of suffering from cancer is 50 percent , " and we said , " Hey , good news .
Average likelihood is 30 percent , " the left inferior frontal gyrus would respond fiercely .
And it didn 't matter if you 're an extreme optimist , a mild optimist or slightly pessimistic , everyone 's left inferior frontal gyrus was functioning perfectly well , whether you 're Barack Obama or Woody Allen .
On the other side of the brain , the right inferior frontal gyrus was responding to bad news .
And here 's the thing : it wasn 't doing a very good job .
The more optimistic you were , the less likely this region was to respond to unexpected negative information .
And if your brain is failing at integrating bad news about the future , you will constantly leave your rose-tinted spectacles on .
So we wanted to know , could we change this ?
Could we alter people 's optimism bias by interfering with the brain activity in these regions ?
And there 's a way for us to do that .
This is my collaborator Ryota Kanai .
And what he 's doing is he 's passing a small magnetic pulse through the skull of the participant in our study into their inferior frontal gyrus .
And by doing that , he 's interfering with the activity of this brain region for about half an hour .
After that everything goes back to normal , I assure you .
So let 's see what happens .
First of all , I 'm going to show you the average amount of bias that we see .
So if I was to test all of you now , this is the amount that you would learn more from good news relative to bad news .
Now we interfere with the region that we found to integrate negative information in this task , and the optimism bias grew even larger .
We made people more biased in the way that they process information .
Then we interfered with the brain region that we found to integrate good news in this task , and the optimism bias disappeared .
We were quite amazed by these results because we were able to eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans .
And at this point we stopped and we asked ourselves , would we want to shatter the optimism illusion into tiny little bits ?
If we could do that , would we want to take people 's optimism bias away ?
Well I 've already told you about all of the benefits of the optimism bias , which probably makes you want to hold onto it for dear life .
But there are , of course , pitfalls , and it would be really foolish of us to ignore them .
Take for example this email I recieved from a firefighter here in California .
He says , " Fatality investigations for firefighters often include ' We didn 't think the fire was going to do that , ' even when all of the available information was there to make safe decisions . "
This captain is going to use our findings on the optimism bias to try to explain to the firefighters why they think the way they do , to make them acutely aware of this very optimistic bias in humans .
So unrealistic optimism can lead to risky behavior , to financial collapse , to faulty planning .
The British government , for example , has acknowledged that the optimism bias can make individuals more likely to underestimate the costs and durations of projects .
So they have adjusted the 2012 Olympic budget for the optimism bias .
My friend who 's getting married in a few weeks has done the same for his wedding budget .
And by the way , when I asked him about his own likelihood of divorce , he said he was quite sure it was zero percent .
So what we would really like to do , is we would like to protect ourselves from the dangers of optimism , but at the same time remain hopeful , benefiting from the many fruits of optimism .
And I believe there 's a way for us to do that .
The key here really is knowledge .
We 're not born with an innate understanding of our biases .
These have to be identified by scientific investigation .
But the good news is that becoming aware of the optimism bias does not shatter the illusion .
It 's like visual illusions , in which understanding them does not make them go away .
And this is good because it means we should be able to strike a balance , to come up with plans and rules to protect ourselves from unrealistic optimism , but at the same time remain hopeful .
I think this cartoon portrays it nicely .
Because if you 're one of these pessimistic penguins up there who just does not believe they can fly , you certainly never will .
Because to make any kind of progress , we need to be able to imagine a different reality , and then we need to believe that that reality is possible .
But if you are an extreme optimistic penguin who just jumps down blindly hoping for the best , you might find yourself in a bit of a mess when you hit the ground .
But if you 're an optimistic penguin who believes they can fly , but then adjusts a parachute to your back just in case things don 't work out exactly as you had planned , you will soar like an eagle , even if you 're just a penguin .
Thank you .
Janette Sadik-Khan : New York 's streets ? Not so mean any more
In this funny and thought-provoking talk , Janette Sadik-Khan , transportation commissioner of New York City , shares projects that have reshaped street life in the 5 boroughs , including pedestrian zones in Times Square , high-performance buses and a 6,000-cycle-strong bike share . Her mantra : Do bold experiments that are cheap to try out .
The work of a transportation commissioner isn 't just about stop signs and traffic signals .
It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets .
Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has , and yet it 's an asset that 's largely hidden in plain sight .
And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset .
You can remake your streets quickly , inexpensively , it can provide immediate benefits , and it can be quite popular .
You just need to look at them a little differently .
This is important because we live in an urban age .
For the first time in history , most people live in cities , and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years , the population is going to double on the planet .
So the design of cities is a key issue for our future .
Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 2007 .
The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace , and that if we 're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here , we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure .
For many cities , our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations .
This is a picture of Times Square in the ' 50s , and despite all of the technological innovation , cultural changes , political changes , this is Times Square in 2008 .
Not much has changed in those 50 years .
So we worked hard to refocus our agenda , to maximize efficient mobility , providing more room for buses , more room for bikes , more room for people to enjoy the city , and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them .
We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks .
Having goals is important , because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction , you need to know where you 're going and why .
The design of a street can tell you everything about what 's expected on it .
In this case , it 's expected that you shelter in place .
The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B , and it misses all the other ways that a street is used .
When we started out , we did some early surveys about how our streets were used , and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats .
Pictures like this , people perched on a fire hydrant , not the mark of a world-class city .
It 's not great for parents with kids .
It 's not great for seniors . It 's not great for retailers .
It 's probably not good for the fire hydrants .
Certainly not good for the police department .
So we worked hard to change that balance , and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square .
Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square , and people had tried for years to make changes .
They changed signals , they changed lanes , everything they could do to make Times Square work better .
It was dangerous , hard to cross the street .
It was chaotic .
And so , none of those approaches worked , so we took a different approach , a bigger approach , looked at our street differently .
And so we did a six-month pilot .
We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space .
And the temporary materials are an important part of the program , because we were able to show how it worked .
And I work for a data-driven mayor , as you probably know .
So it was all about the data .
So if it worked better for traffic , if it was better for mobility , if it was safer , better for business , we would keep it , and if it didn 't work , no harm , no foul , we could put it back the way that it was , because these were temporary materials .
And that was a very big part of the buy-in , much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back .
But the results were overwhelming .
Traffic moved better . It was much safer .
Five new flagship stores opened .
It 's been a total home run .
Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet .
And this is an important lesson , because it doesn 't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space .
Every project has its surprises , and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space .
We put out the orange barrels , and people just materialized immediately into the street .
It was like a Star Trek episode , you know ?
They weren 't there before , and then zzzzzt !
All the people arrived .
Where they 'd been , I don 't know , but they were there .
And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us , because the street furniture had not yet arrived .
So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs , and we put those lawn chairs out on the street .
And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town .
It wasn 't about that we 'd closed Broadway to cars .
It was about those lawn chairs .
" What did you think about the lawn chairs ? "
" Do you like the color of the lawn chairs ? "
So if you 've got a big , controversial project , think about lawn chairs .
This is the final design for Times Square , and it will create a level surface , sidewalk to sidewalk , beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards , creating a great new energy on the street , and we think it 's going to really create a great place , a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name .
And we will be cutting the ribbon on this , the first phase , this December .
With all of our projects , our public space projects , we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces , move the furniture , take care of the plants .
This is in front of Macy 's , and they were a big supporter of this new approach , because they understood that more people on foot is better for business .
And we 've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods .
This is in Bed-Stuy , Brooklyn , and you can see the short leg that was there , used for cars , that 's not really needed .
So what we did is we painted over the street , put down epoxy gravel , and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue , created a great new public space , and it 's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue .
We did the same thing in DUMBO , in Brooklyn , and this is one of our first projects that we did , and we took an underutilized , pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend .
And in the three years since we 've implemented the project , retail sales have increased 172 percent .
And that 's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood .
We 've moved very , very quickly with paint and temporary materials .
Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done , we 've done it with paint and temporary materials .
And the proof is not in a computer model .
It is in the real-world performance of the street .
You can have fun with paint .
All told , we 've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city .
We 've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space .
I think one of the successes is in its emulation .
You 're seeing this kind of approach , since we 've painted Times Square , you 've seen this approach in Boston , in Chicago , in San Francisco , in Mexico City , Buenos Aires , you name it .
This is actually in Los Angeles , and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets .
But I can 't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods .
We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program , and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York .
I think it 's fair to say -- -- it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike , and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States .
And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes .
You can see the map in 2007 .
This is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes .
I love this because it looks so easy .
You just click it , and they 're there .
We also brought new designs to the street .
We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States .
We protected bikers by floating parking lanes , and it 's been great .
Bike volumes have spiked .
Injuries to all users , pedestrians , cyclists , drivers , are all down 50 percent .
And we 've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes , and now you 're seeing them pop up all over the country .
And you can see here that this strategy has worked .
The blue line is the number of cyclists , soaring .
The green line is the number of bike lanes .
And the yellow line is the number of injuries , which has remained essentially flat .
After this big expansion , you 've seen no net increase in injuries , and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers .
Not everybody liked the new bike lanes , and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago .
One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West " the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip . "
And this is what we had done .
So if you dig below the headlines , though , you 'll see that the people were far ahead of the press , far ahead of the politicians .
In fact , I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers .
Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes .
This summer , we launched Citi Bike , the largest bike share program in the United States , with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another .
Since we 've launched the program , three million trips have been taken .
People have ridden seven million miles .
That 's 280 times around the globe .
And so with this little blue key , you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option .
And daily usage just continues to soar .
What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 36,000 people .
The high that we 've had so far is 44,000 in August .
Yesterday , 40,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City .
The bikes are being used six times a day .
And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets .
In the past , it looked like the guy on the left , ninja-clad bike messenger .
And today , cyclists look like New York City looks .
It 's diverse -- young , old , black , white , women , kids , all getting on a bike .
It 's an affordable , safe , convenient way to get around .
Quite radical .
We 've also brought this approach to our buses , and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America , the slowest bus speeds .
As everybody knows , you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus .
And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City , built out six bus rapid transit lines , 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes .
You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus .
We 've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane , and it 's been a huge success .
I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike , and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane , and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands , and the traffic was flowing , birds were singing -- -- the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes .
It was just fantastic .
And this is how it looked six years ago .
And so , I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it 's possible to change your streets quickly , it 's not expensive , it can provide immediate benefits , and it can be quite popular .
You just need to reimagine your streets .
They 're hidden in plain sight .
Thank you .
Elizabeth Loftus : The fiction of memory
Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories . More precisely , she studies false memories , when people either remember things that didn 't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were . It 's more common than you might think , and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics , and raises some important ethical questions we should all remember to consider .
I 'd like to tell you about a legal case that I worked on involving a man named Steve Titus .
Titus was a restaurant manager .
He was 31 years old , he lived in Seattle , Washington , he was engaged to Gretchen , about to be married , she was the love of his life .
And one night , the couple went out for a romantic restaurant meal .
They were on their way home , and they were pulled over by a police officer .
You see , Titus ' car sort of resembled a car that was driven earlier in the evening by a man who raped a female hitchhiker , and Titus kind of resembled that rapist .
So the police took a picture of Titus , they put it in a photo lineup , they later showed it to the victim , and she pointed to Titus ' photo .
She said , " That one 's the closest . "
The police and the prosecution proceeded with a trial , and when Steve Titus was put on trial for rape , the rape victim got on the stand and said , " I 'm absolutely positive that 's the man . "
And Titus was convicted .
He proclaimed his innocence , his family screamed at the jury , his fiancée collapsed on the floor sobbing , and Titus is taken away to jail .
So what would you do at this point ?
What would you do ?
Well , Titus lost complete faith in the legal system , and yet he got an idea .
He called up the local newspaper , he got the interest of an investigative journalist , and that journalist actually found the real rapist , a man who ultimately confessed to this rape , a man who was thought to have committed 50 rapes in that area , and when this information was given to the judge , the judge set Titus free .
And really , that 's where this case should have ended .
It should have been over .
Titus should have thought of this as a horrible year , a year of accusation and trial , but over .
It didn 't end that way .
Titus was so bitter .
He 'd lost his job . He couldn 't get it back .
He lost his fiancée .
She couldn 't put up with his persistent anger .
He lost his entire savings , and so he decided to file a lawsuit against the police and others whom he felt were responsible for his suffering .
And that 's when I really started working on this case , trying to figure out how did that victim go from " That one 's the closest " to " I 'm absolutely positive that 's the guy . "
Well , Titus was consumed with his civil case .
He spent every waking moment thinking about it , and just days before he was to have his day in court , he woke up in the morning , doubled over in pain , and died of a stress-related heart attack .
He was 35 years old .
So I was asked to work on Titus ' case because I 'm a psychological scientist .
I study memory . I 've studied memory for decades .
And if I meet somebody on an airplane -- this happened on the way over to Scotland -- if I meet somebody on an airplane , and we ask each other , " What do you do ? What do you do ? "
and I say " I study memory , " they usually want to tell me how they have trouble remembering names , or they 've got a relative who 's got Alzheimer 's or some kind of memory problem , but I have to tell them I don 't study when people forget .
I study the opposite : when they remember , when they remember things that didn 't happen or remember things that were different from the way they really were .
I study false memories .
Unhappily , Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody 's false memory .
In one project in the United States , information has been gathered on 300 innocent people , 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn 't do .
They spent 10 , 20 , 30 years in prison for these crimes , and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent .
And when those cases have been analyzed , three quarters of them are due to faulty memory , faulty eyewitness memory .
Well , why ?
Like the jurors who convicted those innocent people and the jurors who convicted Titus , many people believe that memory works like a recording device .
You just record the information , then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images .
But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn 't true .
Our memories are constructive .
They 're reconstructive .
Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page : You can go in there and change it , but so can other people .
I first started studying this constructive memory process in the 1970s .
I did my experiments that involved showing people simulated crimes and accidents and asking them questions about what they remember .
In one study , we showed people a simulated accident and we asked people , how fast were the cars going when they hit each other ?
And we asked other people , how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other ?
And if we asked the leading " smashed " question , the witnesses told us the cars were going faster , and moreover , that leading " smashed " question caused people to be more likely to tell us that they saw broken glass in the accident scene when there wasn 't any broken glass at all .
In another study , we showed a simulated accident where a car went through an intersection with a stop sign , and if we asked a question that insinuated it was a yield sign , many witnesses told us they remember seeing a yield sign at the intersection , not a stop sign .
And you might be thinking , well , you know , these are filmed events , they are not particularly stressful .
Would the same kind of mistakes be made with a really stressful event ?
In a study we published just a few months ago , we have an answer to this question , because what was unusual about this study is we arranged for people to have a very stressful experience .
The subjects in this study were members of the U.S. military who were undergoing a harrowing training exercise to teach them what it 's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war .
And as part of this training exercise , these soldiers are interrogated in an aggressive , hostile , physically abusive fashion for 30 minutes and later on they have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation .
And when we feed them suggestive information that insinuates it 's a different person , many of them misidentify their interrogator , often identifying someone who doesn 't even remotely resemble the real interrogator .
And so what these studies are showing is that when you feed people misinformation about some experience that they may have had , you can distort or contaminate or change their memory .
Well out there in the real world , misinformation is everywhere .
We get misinformation not only if we 're questioned in a leading way , but if we talk to other witnesses who might consciously or inadvertently feed us some erroneous information , or if we see media coverage about some event we might have experienced , all of these provide the opportunity for this kind of contamination of our memory .
In the 1990s , we began to see an even more extreme kind of memory problem .
Some patients were going into therapy with one problem -- maybe they had depression , an eating disorder -- and they were coming out of therapy with a different problem .
Extreme memories for horrific brutalizations , sometimes in satanic rituals , sometimes involving really bizarre and unusual elements .
One woman came out of psychotherapy believing that she 'd endured years of ritualistic abuse , where she was forced into a pregnancy and that the baby was cut from her belly .
But there were no physical scars or any kind of physical evidence that could have supported her story .
And when I began looking into these cases , I was wondering , where do these bizarre memories come from ?
And what I found is that most of these situations involved some particular form of psychotherapy .
And so I asked , were some of the things going on in this psychotherapy -- like the imagination exercises or dream interpretation , or in some cases hypnosis , or in some cases exposure to false information -- were these leading these patients to develop these very bizarre , unlikely memories ?
And I designed some experiments to try to study the processes that were being used in this psychotherapy so I could study the development of these very rich false memories .
In one of the first studies we did , we used suggestion , a method inspired by the psychotherapy we saw in these cases , we used this kind of suggestion and planted a false memory that when you were a kid , five or six years old , you were lost in a shopping mall .
You were frightened . You were crying .
You were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family .
And we succeeded in planting this memory in the minds of about a quarter of our subjects .
And you might be thinking , well , that 's not particularly stressful .
But we and other investigators have planted rich false memories of things that were much more unusual and much more stressful .
So in a study done in Tennessee , researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid , you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a life guard .
And in a study done in Canada , researchers planted the false memory that when you were a kid , something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you , succeeding with about half of their subjects .
And in a study done in Italy , researchers planted the false memory , when you were a kid , you witnessed demonic possession .
I do want to add that it might seem like we are traumatizing these experimental subjects in the name of science , but our studies have gone through thorough evaluation by research ethics boards that have made the decision that the temporary discomfort that some of these subjects might experience in these studies is outweighed by the importance of this problem for understanding memory processes and the abuse of memory that is going on in some places in the world .
Well , to my surprise , when I published this work and began to speak out against this particular brand of psychotherapy , it created some pretty bad problems for me : hostilities , primarily from the repressed memory therapists , who felt under attack , and by the patients whom they had influenced .
I had sometimes armed guards at speeches that I was invited to give , people trying to drum up letter-writing campaigns to get me fired .
But probably the worst was I suspected that a woman was innocent of abuse that was being claimed by her grown daughter .
She accused her mother of sexual abuse based on a repressed memory .
And this accusing daughter had actually allowed her story to be filmed and presented in public places .
I was suspicious of this story , and so I started to investigate , and eventually found information that convinced me that this mother was innocent .
I published an exposé on the case , and a little while later , the accusing daughter filed a lawsuit .
Even though I 'd never mentioned her name , she sued me for defamation and invasion of privacy .
And I went through nearly five years of dealing with this messy , unpleasant litigation , but finally , finally , it was over and I could really get back to my work .
In the process , however , I became part of a disturbing trend in America where scientists are being sued for simply speaking out on matters of great public controversy .
When I got back to my work , I asked this question : if I plant a false memory in your mind , does it have repercussions ?
Does it affect your later thoughts , your later behaviors ?
Our first study planted a false memory that you got sick as a child eating certain foods : hard-boiled eggs , dill pickles , strawberry ice cream .
And we found that once we planted this false memory , people didn 't want to eat the foods as much at an outdoor picnic .
The false memories aren 't necessarily bad or unpleasant .
If we planted a warm , fuzzy memory involving a healthy food like asparagus , we could get people to want to eat asparagus more .
And so what these studies are showing is that you can plant false memories and they have repercussions that affect behavior long after the memories take hold .
Well , along with this ability to plant memories and control behavior obviously come some important ethical issues , like , when should we use this mind technology ?
And should we ever ban its use ?
Therapists can 't ethically plant false memories in the mind of their patients even if it would help the patient , but there 's nothing to stop a parent from trying this out on their overweight or obese teenager .
And when I suggested this publicly , it created an outcry again .
" There she goes . She 's advocating that parents lie to their children . "
Hello , Santa Claus .
I mean , another way to think about this is , which would you rather have , a kid with obesity , diabetes , shortened lifespan , all the things that go with it , or a kid with one little extra bit of false memory ?
I know what I would choose for a kid of mine .
But maybe my work has made me different from most people .
Most people cherish their memories , know that they represent their identity , who they are , where they came from .
And I appreciate that . I feel that way too .
But I know from my work how much fiction is already in there .
If I 've learned anything from these decades of working on these problems , it 's this : just because somebody tells you something and they say it with confidence , just because they say it with lots of detail , just because they express emotion when they say it , it doesn 't mean that it really happened .
We can 't reliably distinguish true memories from false memories .
We need independent corroboration .
Such a discovery has made me more tolerant of the everyday memory mistakes that my friends and family members make .
Such a discovery might have saved Steve Titus , the man whose whole future was snatched away by a false memory .
But meanwhile , we should all keep in mind , we 'd do well to , that memory , like liberty , is a fragile thing .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Thanks very much .
Bruno Bowden + Rufus Cappadocia : Blindfold origami and cello
After Robert Lang 's talk on origami at TED2008 , Bruno Bowden stepped onstage with a challenge -- he would fold one of Lang 's astonishingly complicated origami figures , blindfolded , in under 2 minutes . He 's accompanied by the cellist Rufus Cappadocia .
Hello everyone .
And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation .
And I 'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang 's models .
And this is the piece of paper it will be made from , and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it .
And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom , five-string electric cello , and it 's very exciting to listen to him .
Are you ready to go ? OK .
Just to make it a little bit more exciting .
All right . Take it away , Rufus .
All right . There you go .
Bahia Shehab : A thousand times no
Art historian Bahia Shehab has long been fascinated with the Arabic script for ' no . ' When revolution swept through Egypt in 2011 , she began spraying the image in the streets saying no to dictators , no to military rule and no to violence .
Two years ago , I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe .
The curator had only one condition : I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork .
Now , as an artist , a woman , an Arab , or a human being living in the world in 2010 , I only had one thing to say : I wanted to say no .
And in Arabic , to say " no , " we say " no , and a thousand times no . "
So I decided to look for a thousand different noes .
on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years , from Spain to the borders of China .
I collected my findings in a book , placed them chronologically , stating the name , the patron , the medium and the date .
Now , the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation , which stood three by seven meters , in Munich , Germany , in September of 2010 .
Now , in January , 2011 , the revolution started , and life stopped for 18 days , and on the 12th of February , we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo , believing that the revolution had succeeded .
Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square . The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed .
I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street .
So I took one " no " off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo , and I added a message to it : " no to military rule . "
And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo .
But that led to a series of no , coming out of the book like ammunition , and adding messages to them , and I started spraying them on the walls .
So I 'll be sharing some of these noes with you .
No to a new Pharaoh , because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator .
No to violence : Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution , and he sat there with this guitar , singing .
One month after Mubarak stepped down , this was his reward .
No to blinding heroes . Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January , and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November , by two different snipers .
No to killing , in this case no to killing men of religion , because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th , during a demonstration , leaving behind three orphans and a widow .
No to burning books . The Institute of Egypt was burned on December 17th , a huge cultural loss .
No to stripping the people , and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street , and the footprint reads , " Long live a peaceful revolution , " because we will never retaliate with violence .
No to barrier walls . On February 5th , concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters .
Now , speaking of walls , I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo .
A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall . It 's one to one .
In front of this tank there 's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head . To any passerby , there 's no problem with this visual .
After acts of violence , another artist came , painted blood , protesters being run over by the tank , demonstrators , and a message that read , " Starting tomorrow , I wear the new face , the face of every martyr . I exist . "
Authority comes , paints the wall white , leaves the tank and adds a message : " Army and people , one hand . Egypt for Egyptians . "
Another artist comes , paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank .
Authority comes , paints the wall white , leaves the tank , leaves the suit , and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster .
So I come with my stencils , and I spray them on the suit , on the tank , and on the whole wall , and this is how it stands today until further notice .
Now , I want to leave you with a final no .
I found Neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in Tahrir , and I decided to take a no of Mamluk Mausoleum in Cairo .
The message reads , [ Arabic ] " You can crush the flowers , but you can 't delay spring . "
Thank you .
Thank you . Shukran .
Fabian Hemmert : The shape-shifting future of the mobile phone
Fabian Hemmert demos one future of the mobile phone -- a shape-shifting and weight-shifting handset that " displays " information nonvisually , offering a delightfully intuitive way to communicate . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I am a Ph.D. student and that means I have a question : how can we make digital content graspable ?
Because you see , on the one hand , there is the digital world and no question , many things are happening there right now .
And for us humans , it 's not quite material , it 's not really there -- it 's virtual .
On the other hand , we humans , we live in a physical world .
It 's rich , it tastes good , it feels good , it smells good .
So the question is : how do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical ?
That 's my question .
If you look at the iPhone with its touch and the Wii with its bodily activity , you can see the tendency ; it 's getting physical .
The question is : what 's next ?
Now , I have three options that I would like to show you .
The first one is mass .
As humans , we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy .
So , could we use that in mobile phones ?
Let me show you the weight-shifting mobile .
It is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside , which we can move around , and you can feel where it 's heavy .
We shift the gravitational center of it .
For example , we can augment digital content with physical mass .
So you move around the content on a display , but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device .
Another thing it 's good for is navigation -- it can guide you around in a city .
It can tell you by its weight , " Okay , move right . Walk ahead . Make a left here . "
And the good thing about that is you don 't have to look at the device all the time ; you have your eyes free to see the city .
Now , mass is the first thing ; the second thing , that 's shape .
We 're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in [ our ] hands .
So if I download an e-book and it has 20 pages -- well , they could be thin , right -- but if it has 500 pages , I want to feel that " Harry Potter " -- it 's thick .
So let me show you the shape-changing mobile .
Again , it 's a mobile phone-shaped box , and this one can change its shape .
We can play with the shape itself .
For example , it can be thin in your pocket , which we of course want it to be ; but then if you hold it in your hand , it can lean towards you , be thick .
It 's like tapered to the downside .
If you change the grasp , it can adjust to that .
It 's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock , it stands .
It 's fairly simple .
Another thing is , sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone , they are bigger than the phone itself .
So in that case -- like here , there 's an app that 's bigger than the phone 's screen -- the shape of the phone could tell you , " Okay , off the screen right here , there is more content .
You can 't see it , but it 's there . "
And you can feel that because it 's thicker at that edge .
The shape is the second thing .
The third thing operates on a different level .
As humans , we are social , we are empathic , and that 's great .
Wouldn 't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive ?
Think of a hamster in the pocket .
Well , I can feel it , it 's doing all right -- I don 't have to check it .
Let me show you the living mobile phone .
So , once again , mobile phone-shaped box , but this one , it has a breath and a heartbeat , and it feels very organic .
And you can tell , it 's relaxed right now .
Oh now , missed call , a new call , new girlfriend maybe -- very exciting .
How do we calm it down ?
You give it a pat behind the ears , and everything is all right again .
So , that 's very intuitive , and that 's what we want .
So , what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us .
And I think making it physical is a good way to do that .
What 's behind that is a postulation , namely that not humans should get much more technical in the future ; rather than that , technology , a bit more human .
Nicholas Christakis : The hidden influence of social networks
We 're all embedded in vast social networks of friends , family , co-workers and more . Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits -- from happiness to obesity -- can spread from person to person , showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don 't even know .
For me , this story begins about 15 years ago , when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago .
And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago .
And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness .
And in my lab , I was studying the widower effect , which is a very old idea in the social sciences , going back 150 years , known as " dying of a broken heart . "
So , when I die , my wife 's risk of death can double , for instance , in the first year .
And I had gone to take care of one particular patient , a woman who was dying of dementia .
And in this case , unlike this couple , she was being cared for by her daughter .
And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother .
And the daughter 's husband , he also was sick from his wife 's exhaustion .
And I was driving home one day , and I get a phone call from the husband 's friend , calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend .
So here I get this call from this random guy that 's having an experience that 's being influenced by people at some social distance .
And so I suddenly realized two very simple things : First , the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives .
And second , it was not restricted to pairs of people .
And I started to see the world in a whole new way , like pairs of people connected to each other .
And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby .
And then , in fact , these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships : marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties .
And that , in fact , these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other .
So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this .
I became obsessed with how it might be that we 're embedded in these social networks , and how they affect our lives .
So , social networks are these intricate things of beauty , and they 're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous , in fact , that one has to ask what purpose they serve .
Why are we embedded in social networks ?
I mean , how do they form ? How do they operate ?
And how do they effect us ?
So my first topic with respect to this , was not death , but obesity .
It had become trendy to speak about the " obesity epidemic . "
And , along with my collaborator , James Fowler , we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier .
So this is a slide of some of our initial results .
It 's 2,200 people in the year 2000 .
Every dot is a person . We make the dot size proportional to people 's body size ; so bigger dots are bigger people .
In addition , if your body size , if your BMI , your body mass index , is above 30 -- if you 're clinically obese -- we also colored the dots yellow .
So , if you look at this image , right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image .
But the visual complexity is still very high .
It 's not obvious exactly what 's going on .
In addition , some questions are immediately raised : How much clustering is there ?
Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone ?
How big are the clusters ? How far do they reach ?
And , most importantly , what causes the clusters ?
So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters .
This here shows , on the Y-axis , the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and , on the X-axis , the degrees of separation between the two people .
On the far left , you see the purple line .
It says that , if your friends are obese , your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher .
And the next bar over , the [ red ] line , says if your friend 's friends are obese , your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher .
And then the next line over says if your friend 's friend 's friend , someone you probably don 't even know , is obese , your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher .
And it 's only when you get to your friend 's friend 's friend 's friends that there 's no longer a relationship between that person 's body size and your own body size .
Well , what might be causing this clustering ?
There are at least three possibilities : One possibility is that , as I gain weight , it causes you to gain weight .
A kind of induction , a kind of spread from person to person .
Another possibility , very obvious , is homophily , or , birds of a feather flock together ; here , I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size .
And the last possibility is what is known as confounding , because it confounds our ability to figure out what 's going on .
And here , the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain , nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size , but rather that we share a common exposure to something , like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time .
When we studied these data , we found evidence for all of these things , including for induction .
And we found that if your friend becomes obese , it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period .
There can be many mechanisms for this effect : One possibility is that your friends say to you something like -- you know , they adopt a behavior that spreads to you -- like , they say , " Let 's go have muffins and beer , " which is a terrible combination .
But you adopt that combination , and then you start gaining weight like them .
Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight , and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is .
Here , what 's spreading from person to person is not a behavior , but rather a norm : An idea is spreading .
Now , headline writers had a field day with our studies .
I think the headline in The New York Times was , " Are you packing it on ?
Blame your fat friends . "
What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take : They said , " Are your friends gaining weight ? Perhaps you are to blame . "
And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America , and a kind of self-serving , " not my responsibility " kind of phenomenon .
Now , I want to be very clear : We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all .
Our next questions was : Could we actually visualize this spread ?
Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person ?
And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure , the architecture of the ties , was changing across time .
In addition , because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic , there 's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic -- if we find that guy , there was a spread of obesity out from him -- it 's a multicentric epidemic .
Lots of people are doing things at the same time .
And I 'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do .
So , again , every dot is a person .
Every tie between them is a relationship .
We 're going to put this into motion now , taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years .
The dot sizes are going to grow , you 're going to see a sea of yellow take over .
You 're going to see people be born and die -- dots will appear and disappear -- ties will form and break , marriages and divorces , friendings and defriendings .
A lot of complexity , a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic .
And , by the end , you 're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network .
Now , when looked at this , it changed the way I see things , because this thing , this network that 's changing across time , it has a memory , it moves , things flow within it , it has a kind of consistency -- people can die , but it doesn 't die ; it still persists -- and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time .
And so , I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things , as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand .
And we used a variety of techniques to do this .
And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena .
We looked at smoking and drinking behavior , and voting behavior , and divorce -- which can spread -- and altruism .
And , eventually , we became interested in emotions .
Now , when we have emotions , we show them .
Why do we show our emotions ?
I mean , there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside , you know , anger or happiness .
But we don 't just experience them , we show them .
And not only do we show them , but others can read them .
And , not only can they read them , but they copy them .
There 's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations .
And so this function of emotions suggests that , in addition to any other purpose they serve , they 're a kind of primitive form of communication .
And that , in fact , if we really want to understand human emotions , we need to think about them in this way .
Now , we 're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way , in simple , sort of , brief periods of time .
So , for example , I was giving this talk recently in New York City , and I said , " You know when you 're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you , and you just instinctively smile back ? "
And they looked at me and said , " We don 't do that in New York City . "
And I said , " Everywhere else in the world , that 's normal human behavior . "
And so there 's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other .
And , in fact , emotional contagion can be broader still .
Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger , as in riots .
The question that we wanted to ask was : Could emotion spread , in a more sustained way than riots , across time and involve large numbers of people , not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car ?
Maybe there 's a kind of below the surface , quiet riot that animates us all the time .
Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks .
Maybe , in fact , emotions have a collective existence , not just an individual existence .
And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon .
Again , a social network , but now we color the people yellow if they 're happy and blue if they 're sad and green in between .
And if you look at this image , you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people , again , spreading to three degrees of separation .
And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network .
There 's a middle and an edge to this network , and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges .
So to invoke another metaphor , if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity -- I 'm connected to you and you to her , on out endlessly into the distance -- this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt , and it has patches on it : happy and unhappy patches .
And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch .
So , this work with emotions , which are so fundamental , then got us to thinking about : Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes .
Because human social networks , whenever they are mapped , always kind of look like this : the picture of the network .
But they never look like this .
Why do they not look like this ?
Why don 't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice ?
Well , the striking patterns of human social networks , their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place , and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure .
And notice first of all -- so , to understand this , though , we need to dissect network structure a little bit first -- and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person .
But that 's not the case with real networks .
So , for example , here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university .
And now I 'm highlighting a few dots .
If you look here at the dots , compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right ; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him .
And so , those two individuals have different numbers of friends .
That 's very obvious , we all know that .
But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious .
Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left .
Now , those people both have four friends , but A 's friends all know each other , and B 's friends do not .
So the friend of a friend of A 's is , back again , a friend of A 's , whereas the friend of a friend of B 's is not a friend of B 's , but is farther away in the network .
This is known as transitivity in networks .
And , finally , compare nodes C and D : C and D both have six friends .
If you talk to them , and you said , " What is your social life like ? "
they would say , " I 've got six friends .
That 's my social experience . "
But now we , with a bird 's eye view looking at this network , can see that they occupy very different social worlds .
And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you : Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network ?
Would you rather be C or D ?
You 'd rather be D , on the edge of the network .
And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip -- not about you -- was spreading through the network ?
Now , you would rather be C.
So different structural locations have different implications for your life .
And , in fact , when we did some experiments looking at this , what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes .
And this is not surprising . We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious . That 's obvious .
But we also found some non-obvious things .
For instance , 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes .
Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes , but with yours .
And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other -- you know who you are -- and others of you keep them apart and don 't introduce your friends to each other .
And so some people knit together the networks around them , creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they 're comfortably embedded .
And finally , we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes .
So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable .
How does this help us understand ?
How does this help us figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days ?
Well , the argument I 'd like to make is that networks have value .
They are a kind of social capital .
New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks , and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks , not just in the individuals within them .
So think about these two common objects .
They 're both made of carbon , and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way -- on the left -- and you get graphite , which is soft and dark .
But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way , you get diamond , which is clear and hard .
And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms ; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms , or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms .
So , similarly , the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties .
It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts .
And so it is not just what 's happening to these people -- whether they 're losing weight or gaining weight , or becoming rich or becoming poor , or becoming happy or not becoming happy -- that affects us ; it 's also the actual architecture of the ties around us .
Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we 're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network .
Now , the reason , I think , that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism .
Now , a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and by studying , the collective .
Like , for example , a hive of bees that 's finding a new nesting site , or a flock of birds that 's evading a predator , or a flock of birds that 's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific , or a pack of wolves that 's able to bring down larger prey .
Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals .
I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena -- like crime , and warfare , and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption .
Now , look at this .
I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs .
If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs , you would cut the ties to me , and the network would disintegrate .
So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks .
Similarly , social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things , like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas .
I think , in fact , that if we realized how valuable social networks are , we 'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them , because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness .
And what I think the world needs now is more connections .
Thank you .
Anas Aremeyaw Anas : How I named , shamed and jailed
Journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas has broken dozens of stories of corruption and organized crime all over Ghana -- without ever revealing his identity . In this talk Anas shows grisly footage from some of his investigations and demonstrates the importance of facing injustice .
I am sorry I cannot show you my face , because if I do , the bad guys will come for me .
My journey started 14 years ago .
I was a young reporter . I had just come out of college .
Then I got a scoop .
The scoop was quite a very simple story .
Police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets .
As a young reporter , I thought that I should do it in a different way , so that it has a maximum impact , since everybody knew that it was happening , and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system .
So I decided to go there and act as a seller .
As part of selling , I was able to document the hard core evidence .
The impact was great .
It was fantastic .
This was what many call immersion journalism , or undercover journalism .
I am an undercover journalist .
My journalism is hinged on three basic principles : naming , shaming and jailing .
Journalism is about results .
It 's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way .
I have worked on this for over 14 years , and I can tell you , the results are very good .
One story that comes to mind in my undercover pieces is " Spirit Child . "
It was about children who were born with deformities , and their parents felt that once they were born with those deformities , they were not good enough to live in the society , so they were given some concoction to take and as a result they died .
So I built a prosthetic baby , and I went into the village , pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity , and here was the guys who do the killing .
They got themselves ready .
In their bids to kill , I got the police on standby , and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child .
I recall how they were seriously boiling the concoction .
They put it on fire . It was boiling hot , getting ready to give to the kids .
Whilst this was going on , the police I had alerted , they were on standby , and just as the concoction was ready , and they were about to give it to the kids , I phoned the police , and fortunately they came and busted them .
As I speak now , they are before the courts .
Don 't forget the key principles : naming , shaming and jailing .
The court process is taking place , and I 'm very sure at the end of the day we will find them , and we will put them where they belong too .
Another key story that comes to mind , which relates to this spirit child phenomenon , is " The Spell of the Albinos . "
I 'm sure most of you may have heard , in Tanzania , children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society .
Their bodies are chopped up with machetes and are supposed to be used for some concoctions or some potions for people to get money -- or so many , many stories people would tell about it .
It was time to go undercover again .
So I went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business , of course .
Again , a prosthetic arm was built .
For the first time , I filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this , and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people .
I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action , but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available .
My journalism is about hard core evidence .
If I say you have stolen , I show you the evidence that you have stolen .
I show you how you stole it and when , or what you used what you had stolen to do .
What is the essence of journalism if it doesn 't benefit society ?
My kind of journalism is a product of my society .
I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism .
Official : He brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table , so that we should not be afraid .
He wants to bring the cocoa and send it to Cote d 'Ivoire .
So with my hidden intention , I kept quiet .
I didn 't utter a word .
But my colleagues didn 't know .
So after collecting the money , when he left , we were waiting for him to bring the goods .
Immediately after he left , I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group , I told my colleagues that if they come , we will arrest them .
Second official : I don 't even know the place called [ unclear ] .
I 've never stepped there before .
So I 'm surprised .
You see a hand counting money just in front of me .
The next moment , you see the money in my hands , counting , whereas I have not come into contact with anybody .
I have not done any business with anybody .
Reporter : When Metro News contacted investigative reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas for his reaction , he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen .
The officer who earlier denied involvement pecks a calculator to compute the amount of money they will charge on the cocoa to be smuggled .
Anas Aremeyaw Anas : This was another story on anticorruption .
And here was him , denying .
But you see , when you have the hard core evidence , you are able to affect society .
Sometimes these are some of the headlines that come .
[ I will curse Anas to death ] [ Anas Lies ] [ Alarm Blows Over Anas ' News for Cash Video ] [ Agenda Against Top CEPS Officials Exposed ] [ Anas Operates with Invisible Powers ? ] [ Gov 't Wobbles Over Anas Video ] [ Hunting the Hunter ] [ Anas ' Bribe ' Men in Court ] [ 15 Heads Roll Over Anas Tape ] [ Finance Minister Backs Anas ] [ 11 Given Queries Over Anas ' Story ] [ GJA Stands By Anas ] [ Prez . Mills Storms Tema Harbour Over Anas Video ] [ " Late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills : Former president of Ghana " ] John Evans Atta Mills : What Anas says is not something which is unknown to many of us , but please , those of you who are agents , and who are leading the customs officers into temptation , I 'm telling you , Ghana is not going to say any good things to you about this .
AA That was my president .
I thought that I couldn 't come here without giving you something special .
I have a piece , and I 'm excited that I 'm sharing it for the first time with you here .
I have been undercover in the prisons .
I have been there for a long time .
And I can tell you , what I saw is not nice .
But again , I can only affect society and affect government if I bring out the hard core evidence .
Many times , the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse , issues of sodomy , so many issues they would deny that it ever happens .
How can you obtain the hard core evidence ?
So I was in the prison . [ " Nsawan Prison " ] Now , what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies .
Now , I happen to have followed one of my inmates , one of my friends , from his sick bed till death , and I can tell you it was not a nice thing at all .
There were issues of bad food being served as I recall that some of the food I ate is just not good for a human being .
Toilet facilities : very bad .
I mean , you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend -- and that 's what I call proper , when four of us are on a manhole .
It is something that if you narrate it to somebody , the person wouldn 't believe it .
The only way that you can let the person believe is when you show hard core evidence .
Of course , drugs were abundant .
It was easier to get cannabis , heroin and cocaine , faster even , in the prison than outside the prison .
Evil in the society is an extreme disease .
If you have extreme diseases , you need to get extreme remedies .
My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries , but I can tell you , it works in my part of the continent of Africa , because usually , when people talk about corruption , they ask , " Where is the evidence ?
Show me the evidence . "
I say , " This is the evidence . "
And that has aided in me putting a lot of people behind bars .
You see , we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions .
That is why I was particularly excited when we launched our " Africa Investigates " series where we investigated a lot of African countries .
As a result of the success of the " Africa Investigates " series , we are moving on to World Investigates .
By the end of it , a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars .
This will not stop .
I 'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism , because I know that when evil men destroy , good men must build and bind .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you .
I have some questions for you .
How did you end up in jail ? This was just a few weeks ago , I believe , yeah ?
AA Sure . You know , undercover is all about setting the priorities right , so we got people to take me to court .
So I went through the very legal process , because at the end of the day , the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not , and that 's how I got in there .
So someone sued you in court , and they took you there , and you were in remand custody for part of it , and you did that deliberately .
AA Yes , yes .
Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that , because you 're regularly putting your life at risk .
How do you do that ?
AA You see , undercover is always a last resort .
Before we go undercover , we follow the rules .
And I 'm only comfortable and I 'm purged of fear whenever I am sure that all the steps have been taken . I don 't do it alone . I have a backup team who help ensure that the safety and all the systems are put in place , but you 've got to take very intelligent decisions whenever they are happening .
If you don 't , you will end up losing your life .
So yes , when the backup systems are put in place , I 'm okay , I go in . Risky , yes , but it 's a hazard of a profession .
I mean , everybody has their hazard .
And once you say that is yours , you 've got to take it , as and when it comes .
Well , you 're an amazing human and you 've done amazing work and you 've taught us a story like no story I think any of us have heard before .
And we 're appreciative . We salute you . Thank you so much , Anas .
AA Thank you .
Thank you . Stay safe .
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo : Capturing memories in video art
Using video mapping and projection , artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo captures and shares his memories and friendships . At TED Fellow Talks , he shows his charming , thoughtful work -- which appears to preserve the people in his life in jars , suitcases , blenders ...
I love to collect things .
Ever since I was a kid , I 've had massive collections of random stuff , everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I 've captured and put in jars .
Now , it 's no secret , because I like collecting things , that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas .
These , to me , are like living sculptures , right , that you can go and look at , and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal 's life .
So I was thinking about my own life , and how I 'd like to memorialize my life , you know , for the ages , and also — — the lives of my friends , but the problem with this is that my friends aren 't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them .
So instead , I turned to video , and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time .
So what I did was , I filmed six of my friends and then , using video mapping and video projection , I created a video sculpture , which was these six friends projected into jars .
So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go , and this is called Animalia Chordata , from the Latin nomenclature for human being , classification system .
So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars , and they actually move around .
So , this is interesting to me , but it lacked a certain human element .
It 's a digital sculpture , so I wanted to add an interaction system . So what I did was , I added a proximity sensor , so that when you get close to the people in jars , they react to you in different ways .
You know , just like people on the street when you get too close to them .
Some people reacted in terror .
Others reacted in asking you for help , and some people hide from you .
So this was really interesting to me , this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life , and also adding interactivity to sculpture .
So over the next year , I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden , which is literally a garden of humanity .
But something about the first piece , the Animali Chordata piece , kept coming back to me , this idea of interaction with art , and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact , and also being challenged by interacting with art .
So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something , and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender .
This is a piece called Blend , and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art .
You may never experience the entire thing yourself .
You can walk away , you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you , or you can actually choose to interact with it .
So if you do choose to interact with the piece , and you press the blender button , it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment .
By doing that , you are now part of my piece .
You , like the people that are trapped in my work — — have become part of my work as well .
But , but this seems a bit unfair , right ?
I put my friends in jars , I put this character , this sort of endangered species character in a blender .
But I 'd never done anything about myself .
I 'd never really memorialized myself .
So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece .
This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed , in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock , and it 's up to you .
If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock , you actually age me .
So I start as a baby , and then if you punch the clock , you 'll actually transform the baby into a toddler , and then from a toddler I 'm transformed into a teenager .
From a teenager , I 'm transformed into my current self .
From my current self , I 'm turned into a middle-aged man , and then , from there , into an elderly man .
And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day , the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day .
So , in doing so , you 're erasing time .
You 're actually implicit in this work and you 're erasing my life .
So I like this about interactive video sculpture , that you can actually interact with it , that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves , and hopefully , one day , I 'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars .
Thank you .
Josette Sheeran : Ending hunger now
Josette Sheeran , the head of the UN 's World Food Program , talks about why , in a world with enough food for everyone , people still go hungry , still die of starvation , still use food as a weapon of war . Her vision : " Food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person . We have to stand together . "
Well after many years working in trade and economics , four years ago , I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability .
And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can 't even obtain a meal .
This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian .
And I carry this around as a symbol , really , of the challenge and also the hope .
Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian 's life completely .
But what I 'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning , about a billion people on Earth -- or one out of every seven -- woke up and didn 't even know how to fill this cup .
One out of every seven people .
First , I 'll ask you : Why should you care ?
Why should we care ?
For most people , if they think about hunger , they don 't have to go far back on their own family history -- maybe in their own lives , or their parents ' lives , or their grandparents ' lives -- to remember an experience of hunger .
I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience .
Some are driven by compassion , feel it 's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity .
As Gandhi said , " To a hungry man , a piece of bread is the face of God . "
Others worry about peace and security , stability in the world .
We saw the food riots in 2008 , after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight .
The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history .
One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food .
Others think about Malthusian nightmares .
Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades ?
This is not a negotiable thing , hunger .
People have to eat .
There 's going to be a lot of people .
This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain .
But I actually came to this issue in a different way .
This is a picture of me and my three children .
In 1987 , I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television .
And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia .
One two years earlier had killed more than a million people .
But it never struck me as it did that moment , because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby , and she had no milk to nurse .
And the baby 's cry really penetrated me , as a mother .
And I thought , there 's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food -- the most fundamental expectation of every human being .
And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem .
This isn 't one of those rare diseases that we don 't have the solution for .
We know how to fix hunger .
A hundred years ago , we didn 't .
We actually have the technology and systems .
And I was just struck that this is out of place .
At our time in history , these images are out of place .
Well guess what ?
This is last week in northern Kenya .
Yet again , the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day .
In fact , what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger .
This is more than HIV / AIDS , malaria and tuberculosis combined .
And we know that the issue is not just production of food .
One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug , my hero .
But today I 'm going to talk about access to food , because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis , there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories .
So why is it that we have a billion people who can 't find food ?
And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge .
In 2008 , Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days -- from conception to two years old -- does not have adequate nutrition , the damage is irreversible .
Their brains and bodies will be stunted .
And here you see a brain scan of two children -- one who had adequate nutrition , another , neglected and who was deeply malnourished .
And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children .
And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don 't form .
And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies , which I 'll talk about later .
But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years .
So this burden of knowledge drives me .
Because actually we know how to fix it very simply .
And yet , in many places , a third of the children , by the time they 're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this .
I 'd like to talk about some of the things I 've seen on the front lines of hunger , some of the things I 've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector .
I 'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is .
Well first , I 'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth , breastfeeding .
You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life .
But in Niger , for example , less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life , exclusively .
In Mauritania , less than three percent .
This is something that can be transformed with knowledge .
This message , this word , can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business ; it 's a brilliant way of saving your child 's life .
And so today we focus on not just passing out food , but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment , and teaching them about breastfeeding .
The second thing I 'd like to talk about : If you were living in a remote village somewhere , your child was limp , and you were in a drought , or you were in floods , or you were in a situation where there wasn 't adequate diversity of diet , what would you do ?
Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars , like we can , and pick the right one to match ?
Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count .
And I go to those shops , if there are any , or out to the fields to see what they can get , and they cannot obtain the nutrition .
Even if they know what they need to do , it 's not available .
And I 'm very excited about this , because one thing we 're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops .
And this is made with chickpeas , dried milk and a host of vitamins , matched to exactly what the brain needs .
It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as , what I call , food for humanity .
We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan -- really about three of them .
But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this .
One package , 17 cents a day -- their malnutrition is overcome .
So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods .
And this is climate-proof .
It doesn 't need to be refrigerated , it doesn 't need water , which is often lacking .
And these types of technologies , I see , have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition , malnutrition out on the front lines .
The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding .
Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net .
When disaster strikes -- the economy gets blown , people lose a job , floods , war , conflict , bad governance , all of those things -- there is nothing to fall back on .
And usually the institutions -- churches , temples , other things -- do not have the resources to provide a safety net .
What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man 's safety net , the best investment , is school feeding .
And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers , you have a transformative effect .
Many kids in the world can 't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal .
But when that food is there , it 's transformative .
It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid 's life .
But what is most amazing is the effect on girls .
In countries where girls don 't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school , we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys .
We see a transformation in attendance by girls .
And there was no argument , because it 's incentive .
Families need the help .
And we find that if we keep girls in school later , they 'll stay in school until they 're 16 , and won 't get married if there 's food in school .
Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week -- it costs about 50 cents -- will keep a girl in school , and they 'll give birth to a healthier child , because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation .
We know that there 's boom and bust cycles of hunger .
We know this .
Right now on the Horn of Africa , we 've been through this before .
So is this a hopeless cause ?
Absolutely not .
I 'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope .
Cameroon , northern Cameroon , boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades .
Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons .
Well two years ago , we decided , let 's transform the model of fighting hunger , and instead of giving out the food aid , we put it into food banks .
And we said , listen , during the lean season , take the food out .
You manage , the village manages these warehouses .
And during harvest , put it back with interest , food interest .
So add in five percent , 10 percent more food .
For the past two years , 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid -- they 're self-sufficient .
And the food banks are growing .
And they 're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village .
But they 've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources .
I love this idea that came from the village level : three keys to unlock that warehouse .
Food is gold there .
And simple ideas can transform the face , not of small areas , of big areas of the world .
I 'd like to talk about what I call digital food .
Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine .
Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying , " Guess what , famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it . "
We certainly saw that in 2008 .
We 're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year .
Food can be there and people can 't buy it .
Well this picture -- I was in Hebron in a small shop , this shop , where instead of bringing in food , we provide digital food , a card .
It says " bon appetit " in Arabic .
And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items .
They have to be nutritious , and they have to be locally produced .
And what 's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry -- where this card 's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus -- the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent .
The shopkeepers are hiring more people .
It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving .
We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones , transforming even the presence of refugees in countries , and other ways .
Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates , Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly , which is to ask the question : What if , instead of looking at the hungry as victims -- and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families -- what if we view them as the solution , as the value chain to fight hunger ?
What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food -- there 's no roads , there 's no warehouses , there 's not even a tarp to pick the food up with -- what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere ?
And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries .
And guess what ?
In virtually every case , when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market -- if you say , " We will buy 300 metric tons of this .
We 'll pick it up . We 'll make sure it 's stored properly . " -- their yields have gone up two- , three- , fourfold and they figure it out , because it 's the first guaranteed opportunity they 've had in their life .
And we 're seeing people transform their lives .
Today , food aid , our food aid -- huge engine -- 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world .
Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food .
Now you 'd ask , can this be done at scale ?
These are great ideas , village-level ideas .
Well I 'd like to talk about Brazil , because I 've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years , when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now .
And what I 've found is , rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things , they invested in a school feeding program .
And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity .
And they 're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day .
And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty .
It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil , and it 's at scale , and it 's creating opportunities .
I 've gone out there ; I 've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this .
Now if we look at the economic imperative here , this isn 't just about compassion .
The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger -- the cost to society , the burden it has to bear -- is on average six percent , and in some countries up to 11 percent , of GDP a year .
And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition , that 's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year .
Well , the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars -- 10.3 -- to address malnutrition in those countries .
You look at the cost-benefit analysis , and my dream is to take this issue , not just from the compassion argument , but to the finance ministers of the world , and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate , affordable nutrition for all of humanity .
The amazing thing I 've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader .
When a leader says , " Not under my watch , " everything begins to change .
And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this .
And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important .
Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person , nation by nation .
We have to stand together .
And we 're seeing nations in Africa .
WFP 's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations .
What I would like to offer here is a challenge .
I believe we 're living at a time in human history where it 's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don 't know where to find a cup of food .
Not only that , transforming hunger is an opportunity , but I think we have to change our mindsets .
I am so honored to be here with some of the world 's top innovators and thinkers .
And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say , " No more .
No more are we going to accept this . "
And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted , but that exists no more .
Thank you .
Jamie Oliver : Teach every child about food
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington , West Virginia -- and a shocking image of the sugar we eat -- TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food .
Sadly , in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat , four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat .
My name 's Jamie Oliver . I 'm 34 years old .
I 'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I 've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way .
I 'm not a doctor ; I 'm a chef , I don 't have expensive equipment or medicine .
I use information , education .
I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life .
We have an awful , awful reality right now .
America , you 're at the top of your game .
This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world .
Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today ?
Please put your hands up .
Aunties , uncles , you can continue to put your hands up , aunties and uncles as well .
Most of you . OK .
We , the adults of the last four generations , have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents .
Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we 've built around them .
Two-thirds of this room , today , in America , are statistically overweight or obese .
You lot , you 're all right , but we 'll get you eventually , don 't worry .
Right ?
The statistics of bad health are clear , very clear .
We spend our lives being paranoid about death , murder , homicide , you name it ; it 's on the front page of every paper , CNN .
Look at homicide at the bottom , for God 's sake .
Right ?
Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease .
Any doctor , any specialist will tell you that .
Fact : Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States , right now , here today .
This is a global problem .
It 's a catastrophe .
It 's sweeping the world .
England is right behind you , as usual .
I know they were close , but not that close .
We need a revolution .
Mexico , Australia , Germany , India , China , all have massive problems of obesity and bad health .
Think about smoking .
It costs way less than obesity now .
Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your healthcare bills , 150 billion dollars a year .
In 10 years , it 's set to double : 300 billion dollars a year .
And let 's be honest , guys , you ain 't got that cash .
I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in .
We need it . The time is now .
We 're in a tipping-point moment .
I 've been doing this for seven years .
I 've been trying in America for seven years .
Now is the time when it 's ripe -- ripe for the picking .
I went to the eye of the storm .
I went to West Virginia , the most unhealthy state in America .
Or it was last year .
We 've got a new one this year , but we 'll work on that next season .
Huntington , West Virginia .
Beautiful town .
I wanted to put heart and soul and people , your public , around the statistics that we 've become so used to .
I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about : your public , your children .
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany .
She 's 16 years old .
She 's got six years to live because of the food that she 's eaten .
She 's the third generation of Americans that hasn 't grown up within a food environment where they 've been taught to cook at home or in school , or her mom , or her mom 's mom .
She has six years to live .
She 's eating her liver to death .
Stacy , the Edwards family .
This is a normal family , guys .
Stacy does her best , but she 's third-generation as well ; she was never taught to cook at home or in school .
The family 's obese .
Justin here , 12 years old , he 's 350 pounds .
He gets bullied , for God 's sake .
The daughter there , Katie , she 's four years old .
She 's obese before she even gets to primary school .
Marissa , she 's all right , she 's one of your lot .
But you know what ? Her father , who was obese , died in her arms , And then the second most important man in her life , her uncle , died of obesity , and now her step-dad is obese .
You see , the thing is obesity and diet-related disease doesn 't just hurt the people that have it ; it 's all of their friends , families , brothers , sisters .
Pastor Steve : an inspirational man , one of my early allies in Huntington , West Virginia .
He 's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem .
He has to bury the people , OK ?
And he 's fed up with it . He 's fed up with burying his friends , his family , his community .
Come winter , three times as many people die .
He 's sick of it .
This is preventable disease . Waste of life .
By the way , this is what they get buried in .
We 're not geared up to do this .
Can 't even get them out the door -- and I 'm being serious -- can 't even get them there . Forklift .
OK , I see it as a triangle , OK ?
This is our landscape of food .
I need you to understand it .
You 've probably heard all this before , but let 's just go back over it .
Over the last 30 years , what 's happened that 's ripped the heart out of this country ?
Let 's be frank and honest : Well , modern-day life .
Let 's start with the Main Street .
Fast food has taken over the whole country ; we know that .
The big brands are some of the most important powers , powerful powers , in this country .
Supermarkets as well .
Big companies . Big companies .
Thirty years ago , most of the food was largely local and largely fresh .
Now it 's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives , extra ingredients , and you know the rest of the story .
Portion size is obviously a massive , massive problem .
Labeling is a massive problem .
The labeling in this country is a disgrace .
They want to be self -- they want to self-police themselves .
The industry wants to self-police themselves .
What , in this kind of climate ? They don 't deserve it .
How can you say something is low-fat when it 's full of so much sugar ?
Home .
The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food , food culture , what made our society .
That ain 't happening anymore .
And you know , as we go to work and as life changes , and as life always evolves , we kind of have to look at it holistically -- step back for a moment , and re-address the balance .
It ain 't happening , hasn 't happened for 30 years , OK ?
I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now ; the Edwards family .
Jamie Oliver : Let 's have a talk .
This stuff goes through you and your family 's body every week .
And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early .
How are you feeling ?
Stacy : Just feeling really sad and depressed right now .
But , you know , I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn 't going to get them there .
But I 'm killing them .
JO : Yes you are . You are .
But we can stop that .
Normal . Let 's get on schools , something that I 'm fairly much a specialist in .
OK , school .
What is school ? Who invented it ? What 's the purpose of school ?
School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative , do wonderful things , make us earn a living , etc . , etc . , etc .
You know , it 's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long , long time .
OK ?
But we haven 't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America , OK ?
School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day , actually -- have twice a day , more than often , breakfast and lunch , 180 days of the year .
So you could say that school food is quite important , really , judging the circumstances .
Before I crack into my rant , which I 'm sure you 're waiting for ...
I need to say one thing , and it 's so important in hopefully the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months .
The lunch ladies , the lunch cooks of America -- I offer myself as their ambassador .
I 'm not slagging them off .
They 're doing the best they can do .
They 're doing their best .
But they 're doing what they 're told , and what they 're being told to do is wrong .
The system is highly run by accountants ; there 's not enough , or any , food-knowledgeable people in the business .
There 's a problem : If you 're not a food expert , and you 've got tight budgets and it 's getting tighter , then you can 't be creative , you can 't duck and dive and write different things around things .
If you 're an accountant , and a box-ticker , the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit .
Now , the reality is , the food that your kids get every day is fast food , it 's highly processed , there 's not enough fresh food in there at all .
You know , the amount of additives , E numbers , ingredients you wouldn 't believe -- there 's not enough veggies at all . French fries are considered a vegetable .
Pizza for breakfast . They don 't even get given crockery .
Knives and forks ? No , they 're too dangerous .
They have scissors in the classroom , but knives and forks ? No .
And the way I look at it is : If you don 't have knives and forks in your school , you 're purely endorsing , from a state level , fast food , because it 's handheld .
And yes , by the way , it is fast food : It 's sloppy joes , it 's burgers , it 's wieners , it 's pizzas , it 's all of that stuff .
Ten percent of what we spend on healthcare , as I said earlier , is on obesity , and it 's going to double .
We 're not teaching our kids .
There 's no statutory right to teach kids about food , elementary or secondary school . OK ?
We don 't teach kids about food . Right ?
And this is a little clip from an elementary school , which is very common in England .
Who knows what this is ?
Potatoes . Jamie Oliver : Potato ? So , you think these are potatoes ?
Do you know what that is ?
Do you know what that is ? Broccoli ?
JO : What about this ? Our good old friend .
Do you know what this is , honey ? Celery .
JO : No . What do you think this is ? Onion . JO : Onion ? No .
Jamie Oliver : Immediately you get a really clear sense of : Do the kids know anything about where food comes from ?
JO : Who knows what that is ? Uh , pear ?
JO : What do you think this is ? I don 't know .
JO : If the kids don 't know what stuff is , then they will never eat it .
JO : Normal . England and America , England and America .
Guess what fixed that . Guess what fixed that : Two one-hour sessions .
We 've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools , period .
I want to tell you about something , I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we 're in , guys . OK ?
I want to talk about something so basic as milk .
Every kid has the right to milk at school .
Your kids will be having milk at school , breakfast and lunch . Right ?
They 'll be having two bottles . OK ?
And most kids do .
But milk ain 't good enough anymore .
Because someone at the milk board , right -- and don 't get me wrong , I support milk -- but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings and colorings and sugar in milk , right , more kids will drink it . Yeah .
And obviously now that 's going to catch on .
The apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they 'll eat more apples as well .
Do you know what I mean ?
For me , there ain 't no need to flavor the milk .
Okay ? There 's sugar in everything .
I know the ins and outs of those ingredients .
It 's in everything . Even the milk hasn 't escaped the kind of modern-day problems .
There 's our milk . There 's our carton .
In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop , and they are having two a day .
So , let me just show you .
We 've got one kid , here , having , you know , eight tablespoons of sugar a day .
You know , there 's your week .
There 's your month .
And I 've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar , just from milk .
Now , I don 't know about you guys , but judging the circumstances , right , any judge in the whole world , would look at the statistics and the evidence , and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse . That 's my belief .
Now , if I came up here , and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer , you 'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me .
This , all this bad news , is preventable .
That 's the good news .
It 's very , very preventable .
So , let 's just think about , we got a problem here , we need to reboot .
Okay so , in my world , what do we need to do ?
Here is the thing , right , it cannot just come from one source .
To reboot and make real tangible change , real change , so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say , " In 10 years time , the history of your children 's lives , happiness -- and let 's not forget , you 're clever if you eat well , you know you 're going to live longer -- all of that stuff , it will look different . OK ? "
So , supermarkets .
Where else do you shop so religiously ?
Week in , week out .
How much money do you spend , in your life , in a supermarket ?
Love them . They just sell us what we want . All right .
They owe us , to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket .
They need to help us shop . They need to show us how to cook quick , tasty , seasonal meals for people that are busy .
This is not expensive .
It is done in some , and it needs to be done across the board in America soon , and quick .
The big brands , you know , the food brands , need to put food education at the heart of their businesses .
I know , easier said than done .
It 's the future . It 's the only way .
Fast food . With the fast-food industry you know , it 's very competitive .
I 've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants .
I know how they do it .
I mean basically they 've weaned us on to these hits of sugar , salt and fat , and x , y , and z , and everyone loves them . Right ?
So , these guys are going to be part of the solution .
But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry , and over a five , six , seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat , sugar , fat and all the other non-food ingredients .
Now , also , back to the sort of big brands : Labeling , I said earlier , is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted .
OK , school .
Obviously in schools we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year , from that little precious age of four , til 18 , 20 , 24 , whatever , they need to be cooked proper , fresh food from local growers on site . OK ?
There needs to be a new standard of fresh , proper food for your children . Yeah ?
Under the circumstances , it 's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life .
Life skills .
That means that they can be students , young parents , and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking , no matter what recession hits them next time . If you can cook , recession money doesn 't matter .
If you can cook , time doesn 't matter .
The workplace , we haven 't really talked about it .
You know , it 's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff .
The staff are the moms and dads of America 's children .
Marissa , her father died in her hand , I think she 'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly .
Definitely they shouldn 't be left out .
Let 's go back to the home .
Now , look , if we do all this stuff , and we can , it 's so achievable . You can care and be commercial .
Absolutely .
But the home needs to start passing on cooking again , for sure .
For sure , pass it on as a philosophy .
And for me it 's quite romantic , but it 's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something , and they teach three of their mates , that only has to repeat itself 25 times , and that 's the whole population of America .
Romantic , yes , but most importantly , it 's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference .
We 've got to put back what 's been lost .
Huntington 's Kitchen . Huntington , where I made this program , you know , we 've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change .
I truly believe that change will happen .
Huntington 's Kitchen . I work with a community .
I worked in the schools . I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area , from the junk , onto the fresh food : six-and-a-half grand per school .
That 's all it takes , six-and-a-half grand per school .
The Kitchen is 25 grand a month . Okay ?
This can do 5,000 people a year , which is 10 percent of their population , and it 's people on people .
You know , it 's local cooks teaching local people .
It 's free cooking lessons , guys , free cooking lessons in the Main Street .
This is real , tangible change , real , tangible change .
Around America , if we just look back now , there is plenty of wonderful things going on .
There is plenty of beautiful things going on . There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups , garden set-ups , education -- there are amazing people doing this already .
The problem is they all want to roll out what they 're doing to the next school , and the next , but there 's no cash .
We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly , identify them , and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they 're already doing , and doing well .
Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do .
And look , I know it 's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this .
All I can say is : I care . I 'm a father , and I love this country , and I believe truly , actually , that if change can be made in this country , beautiful things will happen around the world . If America does it , I believe other people will follow .
It 's incredibly important .
When I was in Huntington , trying to get a few things to work when they weren 't , I thought " If I had a magic wand , what would I do ? " And I thought , " You know what ?
I 'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America . "
And a month later , TED phoned me up and gave me this award .
I 'm here .
So , my wish .
Dyslexic , so I 'm a bit slow .
My wish is for you to help a strong , sustainable movement to educate every child about food , to inspire families to cook again , and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity .
Thank you .
Jennifer Healey : If cars could talk , accidents might be avoidable
When we drive , we get into a glass bubble , lock the doors and press the accelerator , relying on our eyes to guide us -- even though we can only see the few cars ahead of and behind us . But what if cars could share data with each other about their position and velocity , and use predictive models to calculate the safest routes for everyone on the road ? Jennifer Healey imagines a world without accidents .
Let 's face it : Driving is dangerous .
It 's one of the things that we don 't like to think about , but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true .
Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States -- leading cause of death -- and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol .
So what happens ?
No one can say for sure , but I remember my first accident .
I was a young driver out on the highway , and the car in front of me , I saw the brake lights go on .
I 'm like , " Okay , all right , this guy is slowing down , I 'll slow down too . "
I step on the brake .
But no , this guy isn 't slowing down .
This guy is stopping , dead stop , dead stop on the highway .
It was just going 65 -- to zero ?
I slammed on the brakes .
I felt the ABS kick in , and the car is still going , and it 's not going to stop , and I know it 's not going to stop , and the air bag deploys , the car is totaled , and fortunately , no one was hurt .
But I had no idea that car was stopping , and I think we can do a lot better than that .
I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other .
I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now .
Get into your car . Close the door . You 're in a glass bubble .
You can 't really directly sense the world around you .
You 're in this extended body .
You 're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways , in and amongst other metal giants , at super-human speeds .
Okay ? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes .
Okay , so that 's all you have , eyes that weren 't really designed for this task , but then people ask you to do things like , you want to make a lane change , what 's the first thing they ask you do ?
Take your eyes off the road . That 's right .
Stop looking where you 're going , turn , check your blind spot , and drive down the road without looking where you 're going .
You and everyone else . This is the safe way to drive .
Why do we do this ? Because we have to , we have to make a choice , do I look here or do I look here ?
What 's more important ?
And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road .
But occasionally we miss something .
Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late .
In countless accidents , the driver says , " I didn 't see it coming . "
And I believe that . I believe that .
We can only watch so much .
But the technology exists now that can help us improve that .
In the future , with cars exchanging data with each other , we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind , to the right and left , all at the same time , bird 's eye view , we will actually be able to see into those cars .
We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us , to see how fast that guy 's going or stopping .
If that guy 's going down to zero , I 'll know .
And with computation and algorithms and predictive models , we will be able to see the future .
You may think that 's impossible .
How can you predict the future ? That 's really hard .
Actually , no . With cars , it 's not impossible .
Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity .
They travel down roads .
Often they travel on pre-published routes .
It 's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car 's going to be in the near future .
Even if , when you 're in your car and some motorcyclist comes -- bshoom ! -- 85 miles an hour down , lane-splitting -- I know you 've had this experience -- that guy didn 't " just come out of nowhere . "
That guy 's been on the road probably for the last half hour .
Right ? I mean , somebody 's seen him .
Ten , 20 , 30 miles back , someone 's seen that guy , and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map , he 's on the map -- position , velocity , good estimate he 'll continue going 85 miles an hour .
You 'll know , because your car will know , because that other car will have whispered something in his ear , like , " By the way , five minutes , motorcyclist , watch out . "
You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave .
I mean , they 're Newtonian objects .
That 's very nice about them .
So how do we get there ?
We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars , just sharing GPS .
If I have a GPS and a camera in my car , I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I 'm going .
With computer vision , I can estimate where the cars around me are , sort of , and where they 're going .
And same with the other cars .
They can have a precise idea of where they are , and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are .
What happens if two cars share that data , if they talk to each other ?
I can tell you exactly what happens .
Both models improve .
Everybody wins .
Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine , even in light traffic , when cars just share GPS data , and we 've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots : stereo cameras , GPS , and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems .
We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio , and the robots talk to each other .
When these robots come at each other , they track each other 's position precisely , and they can avoid each other .
We 're now adding more and more robots into the mix , and we encountered some problems .
One of the problems , when you get too much chatter , it 's hard to process all the packets , so you have to prioritize , and that 's where the predictive model helps you .
If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories , you don 't pay as much attention to those packets .
You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course .
That guy could be a problem .
And you can predict the new trajectory .
So you don 't only know that he 's going off course , you know how .
And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way .
And we wanted to do -- how can we best alert everyone ?
How can these cars whisper , " You need to get out of the way ? "
Well , it depends on two things : one , the ability of the car , and second the ability of the driver .
If one guy has a really great car , but they 're on their phone or , you know , doing something , they 're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency .
So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling .
And now , using a series of three cameras , we can detect if a driver is looking forward , looking away , looking down , on the phone , or having a cup of coffee .
We can predict the accident and we can predict who , which cars , are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone .
Fundamentally , these technologies exist today .
I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data .
I think it 's a very disconcerting notion , this idea that our cars will be watching us , talking about us to other cars , that we 'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip .
But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy , just like right now , when I look at your car from the outside , I don 't really know about you .
If I look at your license plate number , I don 't really know who you are .
I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs .
And I think it 's going to be a great thing .
I want you to consider for a moment if you really don 't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you 're braking , that you 're coming to a dead stop .
By sharing our data willingly , we can do what 's best for everyone .
So let your car gossip about you .
It 's going to make the roads a lot safer .
Thank you .
Tim Harford : Trial , error and the God complex
Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones : they were built through trial and error . In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011 , he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes .
It 's the Second World War .
A German prison camp .
And this man , Archie Cochrane , is a prisoner of war and a doctor , and he has a problem .
The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn 't really understand .
The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin .
But he doesn 't know whether it 's an infection , whether it 's to do with malnutrition .
He doesn 't know how to cure it .
And he 's operating in a hostile environment .
And people do terrible things in wars .
The German camp guards , they 've got bored .
They 've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun .
On one particular occasion , one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners ' lavatory while it was full of prisoners .
He said he heard suspicious laughter .
And Archie Cochrane , as the camp doctor , was one of the first men in to clear up the mess .
And one more thing : Archie was suffering from this illness himself .
So the situation seemed pretty desperate .
But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person .
He 'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp , and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market .
Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is .
Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British .
It looks like crude oil .
It tastes ...
zesty .
And importantly , it 's a rich source of vitamin B12 .
So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups .
He gives half of them vitamin C.
He gives half of them vitamin B12 .
He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book .
And after just a few days , it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness , marmite is the cure .
So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp .
Now you 've got to imagine at the moment -- forget this photo , imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair .
He hasn 't been able to shave -- a sort of Billy Connolly figure .
Cochrane , he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent -- in fluent German , by the way , but in a Scottish accent -- and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world .
And he can 't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated , and he vents his frustrations .
And then he goes back to his quarters , breaks down and weeps because he 's convinced that the situation is hopeless .
But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane 's exercise book and says to his colleagues , " This evidence is incontrovertible .
If we don 't supply vitamins to the prisoners , it 's a war crime . "
And the next morning , supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp , and the prisoners begin to recover .
Now I 'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude , although Archie Cochrane is a dude .
I 'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy , although I think that would also be completely awesome .
I 'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane , all his life , fought against a terrible affliction , and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies .
And he had a name for it .
He called it the God complex .
Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very , very easily .
So the symptoms of the complex are , no matter how complicated the problem , you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution .
Now Archie was a doctor , so he hung around with doctors a lot .
And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot .
Now I 'm an economist , I 'm not a doctor , but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists .
I see it in our business leaders .
I see it in the politicians we vote for -- people who , in the face of an incredibly complicated world , are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works .
And you know , with the future billions that we 've been hearing about , the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way .
Well let me give you an example .
Imagine for a moment that , instead of Tim Harford in front of you , there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs .
You know Hans : the Mick Jagger of TED .
And he 'd be showing you these amazing statistics , these amazing animations .
And they are brilliant ; it 's wonderful work .
But a typical Hans Rosling graph : think for a moment , not what it shows , but think instead about what it leaves out .
So it 'll show you GDP per capita , population , longevity , that 's about it .
So three pieces of data for each country -- three pieces of data .
Three pieces of data is nothing .
I mean , have a look at this graph .
This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo .
He 's at MIT .
Now you won 't be able to understand a word of it , but this is what it looks like .
Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products , and he 's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products .
And it 's wonderful , wonderful work .
You show all these interconnections , all these interrelations .
And I think it 'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow .
Brilliant work .
Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works .
And what we learned is Cesar 's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine .
Five thousand products -- that 's still nothing .
Five thousand products -- imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo 's data .
Imagine you had one second per product category .
In about the length of this session , you would have counted all 5,000 .
Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart .
There are 100,000 there . It would take you all day .
Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo , London or New York .
It 's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan .
If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York -- there are 10 billion of them -- it would take you 317 years .
This is how complex the economy we 've created is .
And I 'm just counting toasters here .
I 'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem .
The complexity here is unbelievable .
And just a piece of context -- the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services .
You could count them in five minutes .
So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us .
This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting .
We tend to retreat and say , " We can draw a picture , we can post some graphs , we get it , we understand how this works . "
And we don 't .
We never do .
Now I 'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here .
I 'm not trying to say we can 't solve complicated problems in a complicated world .
We clearly can .
But the way we solve them is with humility -- to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works .
And we have a problem-solving technique that works .
Now you show me a successful complex system , and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error .
Here 's an example .
This baby was produced through trial and error .
I realize that 's an ambiguous statement .
Maybe I should clarify it .
This baby is a human body : it evolved .
What is evolution ?
Over millions of years , variation and selection , variation and selection -- trial and error , trial and error .
And it 's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error .
You could use it in an industrial context .
So let 's say you wanted to make detergent .
Let 's say you 're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool .
How do you do it ?
Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent .
You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle .
You create a spray of detergent .
Then the spray dries . It turns into powder .
It falls to the floor .
You scoop it up . You put it in cardboard boxes .
You sell it at a supermarket .
You make lots of money .
How do you design that nozzle ?
It turns out to be very important .
Now if you ascribe to the God complex , what you do is you find yourself a little God .
You find yourself a mathematician ; you find yourself a physicist -- somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid .
And he will , or she will , calculate the optimal design of the nozzle .
Now Unilever did this and it didn 't work -- too complicated .
Even this problem , too complicated .
But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem -- trial and error , variation and selection .
You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle .
You try out all 10 ; you keep the one that works best .
You create 10 variations on that one .
You try out all 10 . You keep the one that works best .
You try out 10 variations on that one .
You see how this works , right ?
And after 45 generations , you have this incredible nozzle .
It looks a bit like a chess piece -- functions absolutely brilliantly .
We have no idea why it works , no idea at all .
And the moment you step back from the God complex -- let 's just try to have a bunch of stuff ; let 's have a systematic way of determining what 's working and what 's not -- you can solve your problem .
Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize .
And we 've heard a lot about how economies function .
The U.S. economy is still the world 's greatest economy .
How did it become the world 's greatest economy ?
I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy , but I think the most salient one is this : ten percent of American businesses disappear every year .
That is a huge failure rate .
It 's far higher than the failure rate of , say , Americans .
Ten percent of Americans don 't disappear every year .
Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans , and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans .
And eventually , they 'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets -- if , of course , they haven 't already done so .
I sometimes wonder .
But it 's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence , this incredible performance of Western economies .
It didn 't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge .
It 's come through trial and error .
Now I 've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months , and people sometimes say to me , " Well Tim , it 's kind of obvious .
Obviously trial and error is very important .
Obviously experimentation is very important .
Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing ? "
So I say , okay , fine .
You think it 's obvious ?
I will admit it 's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don 't have a correct answer .
Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer .
And there 's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher 's desk who knows all the answers .
And if you can 't find the answers , you must be lazy or stupid .
When schools stop doing that all the time , I will admit that , yes , it 's obvious that trial and error is a good thing .
When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says , " I want to fix our health system .
I want to fix our education system .
I have no idea how to do it .
I have half a dozen ideas .
We 're going to test them out . They 'll probably all fail .
Then we 'll test some other ideas out .
We 'll find some that work . We 'll build on those .
We 'll get rid of the ones that don 't . " -- when a politician campaigns on that platform , and more importantly , when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician , then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works , and that -- thank you .
Until then , until then I 'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex .
Because it 's so hard to admit our own fallibility .
It 's so uncomfortable .
And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody .
There 's this one trial he ran many years after World War II .
He wanted to test out the question of , where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks ?
Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital , or should they recover at home ?
All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down .
They had the God complex in spades .
They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients , and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment .
Nevertheless , Archie managed to get permission to do this .
He ran his trial .
And after the trial had been running for a little while , he gathered together all his colleagues around his table , and he said , " Well , gentlemen , we have some preliminary results .
They 're not statistically significant .
But we have something .
And it turns out that you 're right and I 'm wrong .
It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home .
They should be in hospital . "
And there 's this uproar , and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying , " We always said you were unethical , Archie .
You 're killing people with your clinical trials . You need to shut it down now .
Shut it down at once . "
And there 's this huge hubbub .
Archie lets it die down .
And then he says , " Well that 's very interesting , gentlemen , because when I gave you the table of results , I swapped the two columns around .
It turns out your hospitals are killing people , and they should be at home .
Would you like to close down the trial now , or should we wait until we have robust results ? "
Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room .
But Cochrane would do that kind of thing .
And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say , " Here in my own little world , I am a god , I understand everything .
I do not want to have my opinions challenged .
I do not want to have my conclusions tested . "
It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law .
Cochrane understood that uncertainty , that fallibility , that being challenged , they hurt .
And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that .
Now I 'm not going to pretend that this is easy .
It isn 't easy .
It 's incredibly painful .
And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject , I 've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject .
So shortly after the war , this young man , Yutaka Taniyama , developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture .
It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat 's Last Theorem .
In fact , it turns out it 's equivalent to proving Fermat 's Last Theorem .
You prove one , you prove the other .
But it was always a conjecture .
Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true .
And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958 , Yutaka Taniyama killed himself .
His friend , Goro Shimura -- who worked on the mathematics with him -- many decades later , reflected on Taniyama 's life .
He said , " He was not a very careful person as a mathematician .
He made a lot of mistakes .
But he made mistakes in a good direction .
I tried to emulate him , but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes . "
Thank you .
Jarrett J. Krosoczka : How a boy became an artist
When Jarrett J. Krosoczka was a kid , he didn 't play sports , but he & lt ; em & gt ; loved & lt ; / em & gt ; art . He paints the funny and touching story of a little boy who pursued a simple passion : to draw and write stories . With the help of a supporting cast of family and teachers , our protagonist grew up to become the successful creator of beloved children 's book characters , and a vocal advocate for arts education . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Hello . My name is Jarrett Krosoczka , and I write and illustrate books for children for a living .
So I use my imagination as my full-time job .
But well before my imagination was my vocation , my imagination saved my life .
When I was a kid , I loved to draw , and the most talented artist I knew was my mother , but my mother was addicted to heroin .
And when your parent is a drug addict , it 's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football , because as much as you want to love on that person , as much as you want to receive love from that person , every time you open your heart , you end up on your back .
So throughout my childhood , my mother was incarcerated and I didn 't have my father because I didn 't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade .
But I had my grandparents , my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley , who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own , after they had already raised five children .
So two people who grew up in the Great Depression , there in the very , very early ' 80s took on a new kid .
I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family , the new kid who came out of nowhere .
And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them .
They each smoked two packs a day , each , nonfiltered , and by the time I was six , I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan , dry with a twist , rocks on the side , the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink .
But they loved the hell out of me . They loved me so much .
And they supported my creative efforts , because my grandfather was a self-made man .
He ran and worked in a factory .
My grandmother was a homemaker .
But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles , and the characters that I read about , I fell in love with , and they became my friends .
So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books .
I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester , Massachusetts , and I had wonderful teachers there , most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch .
And I just , I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students .
When I was in the third grade , a monumental event happened .
An author visited our school , Jack Gantos .
A published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living .
And afterwards , we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character , Rotten Ralph .
And suddenly the author appeared in our doorway , and I remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles , going from kid to kid looking at the desks , not saying a word .
But he stopped next to my desk , and he tapped on my desk , and he said , " Nice cat . "
And he wandered away .
Two words that made a colossal difference in my life .
When I was in the third grade , I wrote a book for the first time , " The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer . "
We had to write our own Greek myth , our own creation story , so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race , and the owl cheated , and Hermes , being a Greek god , grew angry and bitter , and turned the owl into a moon , so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night .
Yeah .
My book had a title page .
I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight .
And it was a story that was told with words and pictures , exactly what I do now for a living , and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own , and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story .
My favorite page is the " About the author " page .
So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age .
So I love that last sentence : " He liked making this book . "
And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination , and that 's what writing is .
Writing is using your imagination on paper , and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids , that writing would be using your imagination on paper , if they 're allowed to even write now within the school hours .
So I loved writing so much that I 'd come home from school , and I would take out pieces of paper , and I would staple them together , and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination .
And so these characters would become my friends .
There was an egg , a tomato , a head of lettuce and a pumpkin , and they all lived in this refrigerator city , and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up , an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple , and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter .
And I 'd make my own comics too , and this was another way for me to tell stories , through words and through pictures .
Now when I was in sixth grade , the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system .
I went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all .
And my grandfather , he was a wise man , and he saw that as a problem , because he knew that was , like , the one thing I had . I didn 't play sports .
I had art .
So he walked into my room one evening , and he sat on the edge of my bed , and he said , " Jarrett , it 's up to you , but if you 'd like to , we 'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum . "
And I was so thrilled .
So from sixth through 12th grade , once , twice , sometimes three times a week , I would take classes at the art museum , and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw , other kids who shared a similar passion .
Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook , and if you 're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in , I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time .
And to this day , I still can do karaoke to " Ice , Ice Baby " without looking at the screen .
Don 't tempt me , because I will do it .
So I get shipped off to private school , K through eight , public schools , but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed , so he didn 't want me to go there .
He wanted me to go to a private school , and he gave me an option .
You can go to Holy Name , which is coed , or St. John 's , which is all boys .
Very wise man , because he knew I would , I felt like I was making the decision on my own , and he knew I wouldn 't choose St. John 's , so I went to Holy Name High School , which was a tough transition because , like I said , I didn 't play sports , and it was very focused on sports , but I took solace in Mr. Shilale 's art room .
And I just flourished here .
I just couldn 't wait to get to that classroom every day .
So how did I make friends ?
I drew funny pictures of my teachers -- -- and I passed them around .
Well , in English class , in ninth grade , my friend John , who was sitting next to me , laughed a little bit too hard .
Mr. Greenwood was not pleased .
He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion , and for the first time in my life , I was sent to the hall , and I thought , " Oh no , I 'm doomed .
My grandfather 's just going to kill me . "
And he came out to the hallway and he said , " Let me see the paper . "
And I thought , " Oh no . He thinks it 's a note . "
And so I took this picture , and I handed it to him .
And we sat in silence for that brief moment , and he said to me , " You 're really talented . "
" You 're really good . You know , the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist , and you should be the cartoonist .
Just stop drawing in my class . "
So my parents never found out about it .
I didn 't get in trouble . I was introduced to Mrs. Casey , who ran the school newspaper , and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper , handling such heavy issues as , seniors are mean , freshmen are nerds , the prom bill is so expensive . I can 't believe how much it costs to go to the prom .
And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love , and I just swore up and down that this wasn 't about me , but all these years later it was totally me .
But it was so cool because I could write these stories , I could come up with these ideas , and they 'd be published in the school paper , and people who I didn 't know could read them .
And I loved that thought , of being able to share my ideas through the printed page .
On my 14th birthday , my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever : a drafting table that I have worked on ever since .
Here I am , 20 years later , and I still work on this table every day .
On the evening of my 14th birthday , I was given this table , and we had Chinese food .
And this was my fortune : " You will be successful in your work . "
I taped it to the top left hand of my table , and as you can see , it 's still there .
Now I never really asked my grandparents for anything .
Well , two things : Rusty , who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade .
And a video camera .
I just wanted a video camera .
And after begging and pleading for Christmas , I got a second-hand video camera , and I instantly started making my own animations on my own , and all throughout high school I made my own animations .
I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King 's " Misery " as an animated short .
And I kept making comics .
I kept making comics , and at the Worcester Art Museum , I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given .
Mark Lynch , he 's an amazing teacher and he 's still a dear friend of mine , and I was 14 or 15 , and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course , and I was so excited , I was beaming .
I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way , and it taught me how to draw superheroes , how to draw a woman , how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman .
And all the color just drained from his face , and he looked at me , and he said , " Forget everything you learned . "
And I didn 't understand . He said , " You have a great style .
Celebrate your own style . Don 't draw the way you 're being told to draw .
Draw the way you 're drawing and keep at it , because you 're really good . "
Now when I was a teenager , I was angsty as any teenager was , but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless , I was angry .
And when I was 17 , I met my father for the first time , upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about .
And on the day I met my father for the first time , I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design , my one and only choice for college .
But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids , kids with leukemia , and this kid Eric changed my life .
Eric didn 't live to see his sixth birthday , and Eric lives with me every day .
So after this experience , my art teacher , Mr. Shilale , he brought in these picture books , and I thought , " Picture books for kids ! "
and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school .
Well , I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design .
I transferred to RISD as a sophomore , and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing , and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid .
The kid had no patience for him .
And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time , but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp , an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses , and it 's those kids at the camp that read my stories , and I read to them , and I saw that they responded to my work .
I graduated from RISD . My grandparents were very proud , and I moved to Boston , and I set up shop .
I set up a studio and I tried to get published .
I would send out my books . I would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors , but they would go unanswered .
And my grandfather would call me every week , and he would say , " Jarrett , how 's it going ? Do you have a job yet ? "
Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education .
And I said , " Yes , I have a job . I write and illustrate children 's books . "
And he said , " Well , who pays you for that ? "
And I said , " No one , no one , no one just yet .
But I know it 's going to happen . "
Now , I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground , and this kid who was just this really hyper kid , I started calling him " Monkey Boy , " and I went home and wrote a book called " Good Night , Monkey Boy . "
And I sent out one last batch of postcards .
And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line , " Nice work ! " Exclamation point .
" Dear Jarrett , I received your postcard .
I liked your art , so I went to your website and I 'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories , because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them .
Please let me know if you 're ever in New York City . "
And this was from an editor at Random House Children 's Books .
So the next week I " happened " to be in New York .
And I met with this editor , and I left New York for a contract for my first book , " Good Night , Monkey Boy , " which was published on June 12 , 2001 .
And my local paper celebrated the news .
The local bookstore made a big deal of it .
They sold out of all of their books .
My friend described it as a wake , but happy , because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me , but I wasn 't dead . I was just signing books .
My grandparents , they were in the middle of it .
They were so happy . They couldn 't have been more proud .
Mrs. Alisch was there . Mr. Shilale was there . Mrs. Casey was there .
Mrs. Alisch cut in front of the line and said , " I taught him how to read . "
And then something happened that changed my life .
I got my first piece of significant fan mail , where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake .
For a two-year-old , that is like a tattoo .
You know ? You only get one birthday per year .
And for him , it 's only his second .
And I got this picture , and I thought , " This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life . He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums . "
So that photo , since that moment , is framed in front of me while I 've worked on all of my books .
I have 10 picture books out .
" Punk Farm , " " Baghead , " " Ollie the Purple Elephant . "
I just finished the ninth book in the " Lunch Lady " series , which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime .
I 'm expecting the release of a chapter book called " Platypus Police Squad : The Frog Who Croaked . "
And I travel the country visiting countless schools , letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats .
And I meet Bagheads .
Lunch ladies treat me really well .
And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights .
Twice now , the " Lunch Lady " series has won the Children 's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category , and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square .
" Punk Farm " and " Lunch Lady " are in development to be movies , so I am a movie producer and I really do think , thanks to that video camera I was given in ninth grade .
I 've seen people have " Punk Farm " birthday parties , people have dressed up as " Punk Farm " for Halloween , a " Punk Farm " baby room , which makes me a little nervous for the child 's well-being in the long term .
And I get the most amazing fan mail , and I get the most amazing projects , and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween .
The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character . It was so cool .
Now my grandparents are no longer living , so to honor them , I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can 't afford the classes .
And it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing , and you know who was there to celebrate ? Mrs. Alisch .
I said , " Mrs. Alisch , how are you ? "
And she responded with , " I 'm here . "
That 's true . You are alive , and that 's pretty good right now .
So the biggest moment for me , though , my most important job now is I am a dad myself , and I have two beautiful daughters , and my goal is to surround them by inspiration , by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find , in quiet times , by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I 've sat in for the past 20 years .
Thank you .
David Kelley : How to build your creative confidence
Is your school or workplace divided into " creatives " versus practical people ? Yet surely , David Kelley suggests , creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few . Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life , he offers ways to build the confidence to create ... & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence .
I 'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton , Ohio .
I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project .
He was making a horse out of the clay that our teacher kept under the sink .
And at one point , one of the girls who was sitting at his table , seeing what he was doing , leaned over and said to him , " That 's terrible . That doesn 't look anything like a horse . "
And Brian 's shoulders sank .
And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin .
I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again .
And I wonder how often that happens .
It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class , a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience , how a teacher shut them down or how a student was particularly cruel to them .
And some opt out thinking of themselves as creative at that point .
And I see that opting out that happens in childhood , and it moves in and becomes more ingrained , even by the time you get to adult life .
So we see a lot of this .
When we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side-by-side , eventually we get to the point in the process that 's fuzzy or unconventional .
And eventually these bigshot executives whip out their Blackberries and they say they have to make really important phone calls , and they head for the exits .
And they 're just so uncomfortable .
When we track them down and ask them what 's going on , they say something like , " I 'm just not the creative type . "
But we know that 's not true .
If they stick with the process , if they stick with it , they end up doing amazing things and they surprise themselves just how innovative they and their teams really are .
So I 've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have .
That you don 't do things , you 're afraid you 're going to be judged .
If you don 't say the right creative thing , you 're going to be judged .
And I had a major breakthrough when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura .
I don 't know if you know Albert Bandura .
But if you go to Wikipedia , it says that he 's the fourth most important psychologist in history -- like Freud , Skinner , somebody and Bandura .
Bandura 's 86 and he still works at Stanford .
And he 's just a lovely guy .
And so I went to see him because he has just worked on phobias for a long time , which I 'm very interested in .
He had developed this way , this kind of methodology , that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time .
In four hours he had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias .
And we talked about snakes . I don 't know why we talked about snakes .
We talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia .
And it was really enjoyable , really interesting .
He told me that he 'd invite the test subject in , and he 'd say , " You know , there 's a snake in the next room and we 're going to go in there . "
To which , he reported , most of them replied , " Hell no , I 'm not going in there , certainly if there 's a snake in there . "
But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful .
So he 'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was , and he 'd get them comfortable with that .
And then through a series of steps , he 'd move them and they 'd be standing in the doorway with the door open and they 'd be looking in there .
And he 'd get them comfortable with that .
And then many more steps later , baby steps , they 'd be in the room , they 'd have a leather glove like a welder 's glove on , and they 'd eventually touch the snake .
And when they touched the snake everything was fine . They were cured .
In fact , everything was better than fine .
These people who had life-long fears of snakes were saying things like , " Look how beautiful that snake is . "
And they were holding it in their laps .
Bandura calls this process " guided mastery . "
I love that term : guided mastery .
And something else happened , these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives .
They tried harder , they persevered longer , and they were more resilient in the face of failure .
They just gained a new confidence .
And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy -- the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do .
Well meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we 've seen happen for the last 30 years .
That we could take people who had the fear that they weren 't creative , and we could take them through a series of steps , kind of like a series of small successes , and they turn fear into familiarity , and they surprise themselves .
That transformation is amazing .
We see it at the d.school all the time .
People from all different kinds of disciplines , they think of themselves as only analytical .
And they come in and they go through the process , our process , they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently .
And they 're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person .
So I thought one of the things I 'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like .
To me , that journey looks like Doug Dietz .
Doug Dietz is a technical person .
He designs medical imaging equipment , large medical imaging equipment .
He 's worked for GE , and he 's had a fantastic career .
But at one point he had a moment of crisis .
He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use when he saw a young family .
There was a little girl , and that little girl was crying and was terrified .
And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine .
And this was really disappointing to Doug , because before this time he was proud of what he did .
He was saving lives with this machine .
But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids .
About that time he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes .
He was learning about our process about design thinking , about empathy , about iterative prototyping .
And he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary .
He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned .
And this is what he came up with .
He turned it into an adventure for the kids .
He painted the walls and he painted the machine , and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids , like children 's museum people .
And now when the kid comes , it 's an experience .
And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship .
And when they come , they say , " Okay , you 're going to go into the pirate ship , but be very still because we don 't want the pirates to find you . "
And the results were super dramatic .
So from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated , to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated .
And the hospital and GE were happy too .
Because you didn 't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time , they could put more kids through the machine in a day .
So the quantitative results were great .
But Doug 's results that he cared about were much more qualitative .
He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan .
And when the little girl came out of her scan , she ran up to her mother and said , " Mommy , can we come back tomorrow ? "
And so I 've heard Doug tell the story many times , of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it , but I 've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye .
Doug 's story takes place in a hospital .
I know a thing or two about hospitals .
A few years ago I felt a lump on the side of my neck , and it was my turn in the MRI machine .
It was cancer . It was the bad kind .
I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival .
So while you 're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas and everybody 's pale and thin and you 're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays , you think of a lot of things .
Mostly you think about , Am I going to survive ?
And I thought a lot about , What was my daughter 's life going to be like without me ?
But you think about other things .
I thought a lot about , What was I put on Earth to do ?
What was my calling ? What should I do ?
And I was lucky because I had lots of options .
We 'd been working in health and wellness , and K through 12 , and the Developing World .
And so there were lots of projects that I could work on .
But I decided and I committed to at this point to the thing I most wanted to do -- was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way .
And if I was going to survive , that 's what I wanted to do .
I survived , just so you know .
I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives .
We see people quit what they 're doing and go in new directions .
We see them come up with more interesting , and just more , ideas so they can choose from better ideas .
And they just make better decisions .
So I know at TED you 're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing .
Everybody has a change-the-world thing .
If there is one for me , this is it . To help this happen .
So I hope you 'll join me on my quest -- you as thought leaders .
It would be really great if you didn 't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives , like it 's some God-given thing , and to have people realize that they 're naturally creative .
And those natural people should let their ideas fly .
That they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy , that you can do what you set out to do , and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake .
Thank you .
Julia Sweeney : It 's time for " The Talk "
Despite her best efforts , comedian Julia Sweeney is forced to tell a little white lie when her 8-year-old begins learning about frog reproduction -- and starts to ask some very smart questions .
I have a daughter , Mulan .
And when she was eight , last year , she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs .
And we were at this restaurant , and she said , " So , basically , frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles , and tadpoles turn into frogs . "
And I said , " Yeah . You know , I 'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much .
It 's the females , I think , that lay the eggs , and then the males fertilize them .
And then they become tadpoles and frogs . "
And she says , " What ? Only the females have eggs ? "
And I said , " Yeah . "
And she goes , " And what 's this fertilizing ? "
So I kind of said , " Oh , it 's this extra ingredient , you know , that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog . "
And she said , " Oh , so is that true for humans too ? "
And I thought , " Okay , here we go . "
I didn 't know it would happen so quick , at eight .
I was trying to remember all the guidebooks , and all I could remember was , " Only answer the question they 're asking .
Don 't give any more information . "
So I said , " Yes . "
And she said , " And where do , um , where do human women , like , where do women lay their eggs ? "
And I said , " Well , funny you should ask .
We have evolved to have our own pond .
We have our very own pond inside our bodies .
And we lay our eggs there , we don 't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that .
It 's our own pond . And that 's how it happens . "
And she goes , " Then how do they get fertilized ? "
And I said , " Well , Men , through their penis , they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out .
And you go through the woman 's vagina . "
And so we 're just eating , and her jaw just drops , and she goes , " Mom !
Like , where you go to the bathroom ? "
And I said , " I know .
I know . "
That 's how we evolved . It does seem odd .
It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park ...
Bad zoning , but ... "
She 's like , " What ? " And she goes , " But Mom , but men and women can 't ever see each other naked , Mom .
So how could that ever happen ? "
And then I go , " Well , " and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on .
" Human males and females develop a special bond , and when they 're much older , much , much older than you , and they have a very special feeling , then they can be naked together . "
And she said , " Mom , have you done this before ? "
And I said , " Yes . "
And she said , " But Mom , you can 't have kids . "
Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can 't have kids .
And I said , " Yes . "
And she said , " Well , you don 't have to do that again . "
And I said , " ... "
And then she said , " But how does it happen when a man and woman are together ?
Like , how do they know that 's the time ?
Mom , does the man just say , ' Is now the time to take off my pants ? ' " And I said , " Yes . "
" That is exactly right .
That 's exactly how it happens . "
So we 're driving home and she 's looking out the window , and she goes , " Mom . What if two just people saw each other on the street , like a man and a woman , they just started doing it . Would that ever happen ? "
And I said , " Oh , no . Humans are so private .
Oh ... "
And then she goes , " What if there was like a party , and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys , and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it , Mom ?
Would that ever happen ? "
And I said , " Oh , no , no .
That 's not how we do it . "
Then we got home and we see the cat . And she goes , " Mom , how do cats do it ? "
And I go , " Oh , it 's the same . It 's basically the same . "
And then she got all caught up in the legs . " But how would the legs go , Mom ?
I don 't understand the legs . "
She goes , " Mom , everyone can 't do the splits . "
And I go , " I know , but the legs ... "
and I 'm probably like , " The legs get worked out . "
And she goes , " But I just can 't understand it . "
So I go , " You know , why don 't we go on the Internet , and maybe we can see ... like on Wikipedia . "
So we go online , and we put in " cats mating . "
And , unfortunately , on YouTube , there 's many cats mating videos .
And we watched them and I 'm so thankful , because she 's just like , " Wow ! This is so amazing . "
She goes , " What about dogs ? "
So we put in dogs mating , and , you know , we 're watching it , and she 's totally absorbed .
And then she goes , " Mom , do you think they would have , on the Internet , any humans mating ? "
And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old 's hand , and taken her right into Internet porn .
And I looked into this trusting , loving face , and I said , " Oh , no .
That would never happen . "
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you . I 'm so happy to be here .
Andrew McAfee : Are droids taking our jobs ?
Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars , writing articles , translating -- jobs that once required a human . So what will we humans do for work ? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say : We ain 't seen nothing yet . But then he steps back to look at big history , and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next .
As it turns out , when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed , there 's a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force .
And as I look at the conversation , it strikes me that it 's focused on exactly the right topic , and at the same time , it 's missing the point entirely .
The topic that it 's focused on , the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people 's ability to earn a living , or , to say it a little bit different way , are the droids taking our jobs ?
And there 's some evidence that they are .
The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow , steady march upward , and some other economic indicators also started to rebound , and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly . Corporate profits are quite high . In fact , if you include bank profits , they 're higher than they 've ever been .
And business investment in gear , in equipment and hardware and software is at an all-time high .
So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks .
What they 're not really doing is hiring .
So this red line is the employment-to-population ratio , in other words , the percentage of working age people in America who have work .
And we see that it cratered during the Great Recession , and it hasn 't started to bounce back at all .
But the story is not just a recession story .
The decade that we 've just been through had relatively anemic job growth all throughout , especially when we compare it to other decades , and the 2000s are the only time we have on record where there were fewer people working at the end of the decade than at the beginning . This is not what you want to see .
When you graph the number of potential employees versus the number of jobs in the country , you see the gap gets bigger and bigger over time , and then , during the Great Recession , it opened up in a huge way .
I did some quick calculations . I took the last 20 years of GDP growth and the last 20 years of labor productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing , and this is the line that I came up with .
Is that good or bad ? This is the government 's projection for the working age population going forward .
So if these predictions are accurate , that gap is not going to close .
The problem is , I don 't think these projections are accurate .
In particular , I think my projection is way too optimistic , because when I did it , I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past with labor productivity growth , and that 's actually not what I believe , because when I look around , I think that we ain 't seen nothing yet when it comes to technology 's impact on the labor force .
Just in the past couple years , we 've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never , ever had before , and that , kind of , eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living . Let me give you a couple examples .
Throughout all of history , if you wanted something translated from one language into another , you had to involve a human being .
Now we have multi-language , instantaneous , automatic translation services available for free via many of our devices all the way down to smartphones .
And if any of us have used these , we know that they 're not perfect , but they 're decent .
Throughout all of history , if you wanted something written , a report or an article , you had to involve a person .
Not anymore . This is an article that appeared in Forbes online a while back about Apple 's earnings .
It was written by an algorithm .
And it 's not decent , it 's perfect .
A lot of people look at this and they say , " Okay , but those are very specific , narrow tasks , and most knowledge workers are actually generalists , and what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands , and that 's very , very hard to automate . "
One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings .
He won the quiz show " Jeopardy ! " 74 times in a row , took home three million dollars .
That 's Ken on the right getting beat three to one by Watson , the " Jeopardy ! " -playing supercomputer from IBM .
So when we look at what technology can do to general knowledge workers , I start to think there might not be something so special about this idea of a generalist , particularly when we start doing things like hooking Siri up to Watson and having technologies that can understand what we 're saying and repeat speech back to us .
Now , Siri is far from perfect , and we can make fun of her flaws , but we should also keep in mind that if technologies like Siri and Watson improve along a Moore 's Law trajectory , which they will , in six years , they 're not going to be two times better or four times better , they 'll be 16 times better than they are right now .
So I start to think that a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this .
And digital technologies are not just impacting knowledge work .
They 're starting to flex their muscles in the physical world as well .
I had the chance a little while back to ride in the Google autonomous car , which is as cool as it sounds .
And I will vouch that it handled the stop-and-go traffic on U.S. 101 very smoothly .
There are about three and a half million people who drive trucks for a living in the United States .
I think some of them are going to be affected by this technology . And right now , humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive . They can 't do very much .
But they 're getting better quite quickly , and DARPA , which is the investment arm of the Defense Department , is trying to accelerate their trajectory .
So , in short , yeah , the droids are coming for our jobs .
In the short term , we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure , because the robots today still aren 't very good at fixing bridges .
But in the not-too-long-term , I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room , we 're going to transition into an economy that is very productive but that just doesn 't need a lot of human workers , and managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces .
Voltaire summarized why . He said , " Work saves us from three great evils : boredom , vice and need . "
But despite this challenge , I 'm personally , I 'm still a huge digital optimist , and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we 're developing now are going to take us into a utopian future , not a dystopian future . And to explain why , I want to pose kind of a ridiculously broad question .
I want to ask what have been the most important developments in human history ?
Now , I want to share some of the answers that I 've gotten in response to this question . It 's a wonderful question to ask and to start an endless debate about , because some people are going to bring up systems of philosophy in both the West and the East that have changed how a lot of people think about the world .
And then other people will say , " No , actually , the big stories , the big developments are the founding of the world 's major religions , which have changed civilizations and have changed and influenced how countless people are living their lives . " And then some other folk will say , " Actually , what changes civilizations , what modifies them and what changes people 's lives are empires , so the great developments in human history are stories of conquest and of war . "
And then some cheery soul usually always pipes up and says , " Hey , don 't forget about plagues . "
There are some optimistic answers to this question , so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world .
Others will talk about intellectual achievements in disciplines like math that have helped us get a better handle on the world , and other folk will talk about periods when there was a deep flourishing of the arts and sciences . So this debate will go on and on .
It 's an endless debate , and there 's no conclusive , no single answer to it . But if you 're a geek like me , you say , " Well , what do the data say ? "
And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in , the total worldwide population , for example , or some measure of social development , or the state of advancement of a society , and you start to plot the data , because , by this approach , the big stories , the big developments in human history , are the ones that will bend these curves a lot .
So when you do this , and when you plot the data , you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions .
You conclude , actually , that none of these things have mattered very much .
They haven 't done a darn thing to the curves .
There has been one story , one development in human history that bent the curve , bent it just about 90 degrees , and it is a technology story .
The steam engine , and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much , that in the words of the historian Ian Morris , they made mockery out of all that had come before .
And they did this by infinitely multiplying the power of our muscles , overcoming the limitations of our muscles .
Now , what we 're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power .
How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles ?
So at the risk of repeating myself a little bit , when I look at what 's going on with digital technology these days , we are not anywhere near through with this journey , and when I look at what is happening to our economies and our societies , my single conclusion is that we ain 't seen nothing yet . The best days are really ahead .
Let me give you a couple examples .
Economies don 't run on energy . They don 't run on capital , they don 't run on labor . Economies run on ideas .
So the work of innovation , the work of coming up with new ideas , is some of the most powerful , some of the most fundamental work that we can do in an economy . And this is kind of how we used to do innovation .
We 'd find a bunch of fairly similar-looking people — — we 'd take them out of elite institutions , we 'd put them into other elite institutions , and we 'd wait for the innovation .
Now — — as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard , I got no problem with this .
But some other people do , and they 've kind of crashed the party and loosened up the dress code of innovation .
So here are the winners of a Top Coder programming challenge , and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up , where they went to school , or what they look like . All anyone cares about is the quality of the work , the quality of the ideas .
And over and over again , we see this happening in the technology-facilitated world .
The work of innovation is becoming more open , more inclusive , more transparent , and more merit-based , and that 's going to continue no matter what MIT and Harvard think of it , and I couldn 't be happier about that development .
I hear once in a while , " Okay , I 'll grant you that , but technology is still a tool for the rich world , and what 's not happening , these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid . "
And I want to say to that very clearly : nonsense .
The bottom of the pyramid is benefiting hugely from technology .
The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched , in great detail , what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala , India , when they got mobile phones for the very first time , and when you write for the Quarterly Journal of Economics , you have to use very dry and very circumspect language , but when I read his paper , I kind of feel Jensen is trying to scream at us , and say , look , this was a big deal .
Prices stabilized , so people could plan their economic lives .
Waste was not reduced ; it was eliminated .
And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved .
Now , what I don 't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky and happened to land in the one set of villages where technology made things better .
What happened instead is he very carefully documented what happens over and over again when technology comes for the first time to an environment and a community .
The lives of people , the welfares of people , improve dramatically .
So as I look around at all the evidence , and I think about the room that we have ahead of us , I become a huge digital optimist , and I start to think that this wonderful statement from the physicist Freeman Dyson is actually not hyperbole . This is an accurate assessment of what 's going on .
Our digital -- our technologies are great gifts , and we , right now , have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing , when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world .
So , yeah , the droids are taking our jobs , but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely .
The point is that then we are freed up to do other things , and what we are going to do , I am very confident , what we 're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world . I 'm very confident we 're going to learn to live more lightly on the planet , and I am extremely confident that what we 're going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it 's going to make a mockery out of everything that came before .
I 'm going to leave the last word to a guy who had a front row seat for digital progress , our old friend Ken Jennings . I 'm with him .
I 'm going to echo his words : " I , for one , welcome our new computer overlords . "
Thanks very much .
Kelli Swazey : Life that doesn 't end with death
In Tana Toraja , weddings and births aren 't the social gatherings that knit society together . In this part of Indonesia , big , raucous funerals form the center of social life . Anthropologist Kelli Swazey takes a look at this culture , in which the bodies of dead relatives are cared for even years after they have passed . While it sounds strange to Western sensibilities , she says , this could actually be a truer reflection of the fact that relationships with loved ones don 't simply end when breathing does .
I think it 's safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives .
But what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death ?
What would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you ?
In my husband 's homeland in the highlands of Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia , there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process .
In Tana Toraja , the most important social moments in people 's lives , the focal points of social and cultural interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners , but funerals .
So these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals -- pigs , chickens and , most importantly , water buffalo -- that are sacrificed and distributed in the name of the deceased .
So this cultural complex surrounding death , the ritual enactment of the end of life , has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of Toraja 's landscape .
Lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks , funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair , where commemorating someone who 's died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition .
And it 's a transition that 's just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead .
So every year , thousands of visitors come to Tana Toraja to see , as it were , this culture of death , and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the West .
So even as we share death as a universal experience , it 's not experienced the same way the world over .
And as an anthropologist , I see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us .
So where we see an unquestionable reality , death as an irrefutable biological condition , Torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social genesis .
So again , the physical cessation of life is not the same as death .
In fact , a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of the deceased .
And this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyone 's participation .
So after a person 's physical death , their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence , which is called the tongkonan .
And the tongkonan is symbolic not only of the family 's identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death .
So essentially , the shape of the building that you 're born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place .
Until the funeral ceremony , which can be held years after a person 's physical death , the deceased is referred to as " to makala , " a sick person , or " to mama , " a person who is asleep , and they continue to be a member of the household .
They are symbolically fed and cared for , and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions , which communicates to the wider community around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as Puya .
So I know what some of you must be thinking right now .
Is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives ?
And that 's exactly what I 'm saying .
But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies , proximity to death , or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death , I like to think about what the Torajan way of viewing death encompasses of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out .
I think that Torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death , and that is that our relationships with other humans , their impact on our social reality , doesn 't cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body , that there 's a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended .
So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and attention on the most visible symbol of that relationship , the human body .
So my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather , and for him there is nothing unnatural about this .
This is a natural part of the process as the family comes to terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased , and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person who 's living to relating to the deceased as a person who 's an ancestor .
And here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors , so these are people who have already been buried , already had a funeral ceremony .
These are called tau tau .
So the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death .
It ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities .
And it 's also a moment of self-awareness .
It 's a moment when people think about who they are , their place in society , and their role in the life cycle in accordance with Torajan cosmology .
There 's a saying in Toraja that all people will become grandparents , and what this means is that after death , we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and the present and will define who our loved ones are into the future .
So essentially , we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us .
And this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in these sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry people 's soul from here to the afterlife , and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them .
But the sacrifice of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased , and , by extension , the deceased 's family .
So at funerals , relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place : its impact on life and the relationships of the living .
So all of this focus on death doesn 't mean that Torajans don 't aspire to the ideal of a long life .
They engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age .
But they don 't put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face of debilitating illness or in old age .
It 's said in Toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life .
It 's called the sunga ' .
And like a thread , it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end .
So by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life , people 's everyday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected .
The patriarch of my husband 's maternal clan , Nenet Katcha , is now approaching the age of 100 , as far as we can tell .
And there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya .
And his death will be greatly mourned .
But I know that my husband 's family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives , when they can ritually recount his life 's narrative , weaving his story into the history of their community .
His story is their story .
His funeral songs will sing them a song about themselves .
And it 's a story that has no discernible beginning , no foreseeable end .
It 's a story that goes on long after his body no longer does .
People ask me if I 'm frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death greet us at every turn .
But I see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one .
In reality , the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system , where decisions about how long to stretch the thread of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us , not just on medicine 's ability to prolong life .
We , like the Torajans , base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death .
So I 'm not suggesting that anyone in this audience should run out and adopt the traditions of the Torajans .
It might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the United States .
But I want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story .
What would it be like to look on the expired human form with love because it 's so intimately a part of who we all are ?
If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life , we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear .
Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that are facing the U.S. healthcare system , particularly in the end-of-life care , is as simple as a shift in perspective , and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death .
It might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something that 's medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death , being afraid of talking about it .
If we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life , including other definitions of death , it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life .
It could change the way that we die , but more importantly , it could transform the way that we live .
Lisa Gansky : The future of business is the " mesh "
Lisa Gansky , author of " The Mesh , " talks about a future of business that 's about sharing all kinds of stuff , either via smart and tech-enabled rental or , more boldly , peer-to-peer . Examples across industries -- from music to cars -- show how close we are to this meshy future .
I 'm speaking to you about what I call the " mesh . "
It 's essentially a fundamental shift in our relationship with stuff , with the things in our lives .
And it 's starting to look at -- not always and not for everything -- but in certain moments of time , access to certain kinds of goods and service will trump ownership of them .
And so it 's the pursuit of better things , easily shared .
And we come from a long tradition of sharing .
We 've shared transportation .
We 've shared wine and food and other sorts of fabulous experiences in coffee bars in Amsterdam .
We 've also shared other sorts of entertainment -- sports arenas , public parks , concert halls , libraries , universities .
All these things are share-platforms , but sharing ultimately starts and ends with what I refer to as the " mother of all share-platforms . "
And as I think about the mesh and I think about , well , what 's driving it , how come it 's happening now , I think there 's a number of vectors that I want to give you as background .
One is the recession -- that the recession has caused us to rethink our relationship with the things in our lives relative to the value -- so starting to align the value with the true cost .
Secondly , population growth and density into cities .
More people , smaller spaces , less stuff .
Climate change : we 're trying to reduce the stress in our personal lives and in our communities and on the planet .
Also , there 's been this recent distrust of big brands , global big brands , in a bunch of different industries , and that 's created an opening .
Research is showing here , in the States , and in Canada and Western Europe , that most of us are much more open to local companies , or brands that maybe we haven 't heard of .
Whereas before , we went with the big brands that we were sure we trusted .
And last is that we 're more connected now to more people on the planet than ever before -- except for if you 're sitting next to someone .
The other thing that 's worth considering is that we 've made a huge investment over decades and decades , and tens of billions of dollars have gone into this investment that now is our inheritance .
It 's a physical infrastructure that allows us to get from point A to point B and move things that way .
It 's also -- Web and mobile allow us to be connected and create all kinds of platforms and systems , and the investment of those technologies and that infrastructure is really our inheritance .
It allows us to engage in really new and interesting ways .
And so for me , a mesh company , the " classic " mesh company , brings together these three things : our ability to connect to each other -- most of us are walking around with these mobile devices that are GPS-enabled and Web-enabled -- allows us to find each other and find things in time and space .
And third is that physical things are readable on a map -- so restaurants , a variety of venues , but also with GPS and other technology like RFID and it continues to expand beyond that , we can also track things that are moving , like a car , a taxicab , a transit system , a box that 's moving through time and space .
And so that sets up for making access to get goods and services more convenient and less costly in many cases than owning them .
For example , I want to use Zipcar .
How many people here have experienced car-sharing or bike-sharing ?
Wow , that 's great . Okay , thank you .
Basically Zipcar is the largest car-sharing company in the world .
They did not invent car-sharing .
Car-sharing was actually invented in Europe .
One of the founders went to Switzerland , saw it implemented someplace , said , " Wow , that looks really cool .
I think we can do that in Cambridge , " brought it to Cambridge and they started -- two women -- Robin Chase being the other person who started it .
Zipcar got some really important things right .
First , they really understood that a brand is a voice and a product is a souvenir .
And so they were very clever about the way that they packaged car-sharing .
They made it sexy . They made it fresh .
They made it aspirational .
If you were a member of the club , The cars they picked didn 't look like ex-cop cars that were hollowed out or something .
They picked these sexy cars .
They targeted to universities .
They made sure that the demographic for who they were targeting and the car was all matching .
It was a very nice experience , and the cars were clean and reliable , and it all worked .
And so from a branding perspective , they got a lot right .
But they understood fundamentally that they are not a car company .
They understand that they are an information company .
Because when we buy a car we go to the dealer once , we have an interaction , and we 're chow -- usually as quickly as possible .
But when you 're sharing a car and you have a car-share service , you might use an E.V. to commute , you get a truck because you 're doing a home project .
When you pick your aunt up at the airport , you get a sedan .
And you 're going to the mountains to ski , you get different accessories put on the car for doing that sort of thing .
Meanwhile , these guys are sitting back , collecting all sorts of data about our behavior and how we interact with the service .
And so it 's not only an option for them , but I believe it 's an imperative for Zipcar and other mesh companies to actually just wow us , to be like a concierge service .
Because we give them so much information , and they are entitled to really see how it is that we 're moving .
They 're in really good shape to anticipate what we 're going to want next .
And so what percent of the day do you think the average person uses a car ?
What percentage of the time ?
Any guesses ?
Those are really very good .
I was imagining it was like 20 percent when I first started .
The number across the U.S. and Western Europe is eight percent .
And so basically even if you think it 's 10 percent , 90 percent of the time , something that costs us a lot of money -- personally , and also we organize our cities around it and all sorts of things -- 90 percent of the time it 's sitting around .
So for this reason , I think one of the other themes with the mesh is essentially that , if we squeeze hard on things that we 've thrown away , there 's a lot of value in those things .
What set up with Zipcar -- Zipcar started in 2000 .
In the last year , 2010 , two car companies started , one that 's in the U.K. called WhipCar , and the other one , RelayRides , in the U.S.
They 're both peer-to-peer car-sharing services , because the two things that really work for car-sharing is , one , the car has to be available , and two , it 's within one or two blocks of where you stand .
Well the car that 's one or two blocks from your home or your office is probably your neighbor 's car , and it 's probably also available .
So people have created this business .
Zipcar started a decade earlier , in 2000 .
It took them six years to get 1,000 cars in service .
WhipCar , which started April of last year , it took them six months to get 1,000 cars in the service .
So , really interesting .
People are making anywhere between 200 and 700 dollars a month letting their neighbors use their car when they 're not using it .
So it 's like vacation rentals for cars .
Since I 'm here -- and I hope some people in the audience are in the car business -- -- I 'm thinking that , coming from the technology side of things -- we saw cable-ready TVs and WiFi-ready Notebooks -- it would be really great if , any minute now , you guys could start rolling share-ready cars off .
Because it just creates more flexibility .
It allows us as owners to have other options .
And I think we 're going there anyway .
The opportunity and the challenge with mesh businesses -- and those are businesses like Zipcar or Netflix that are full mesh businesses , or other ones where you have a lot of the car companies , car manufacturers , who are beginning to offer their own car-share services as well as a second flanker brand , or as really a test , I think -- is to make sharing irresistible .
We have experiences in our lives , certainly , when sharing has been irresistible .
It 's just , how do we make that recurrent and scale it ?
We know also , because we 're connected in social networks , that it 's easy to create delight in one little place .
It 's contagious because we 're all connected to each other .
So if I have a terrific experience and I tweet it , or I tell five people standing next to me , news travels .
The opposite , as we know , is also true , often more true .
So here we have LudoTruck , which is in L.A. , doing the things that gourmet food trucks do , and they 've gathered quite a following .
In general , and maybe , again , it 's because I 'm a tech entrepreneur , I look at things as platforms .
Platforms are invitations .
So creating Craigslist or iTunes and the iPhone developer network , there are all these networks -- Facebook as well .
These platforms invite all sorts of developers and all sorts of people to come with their ideas and their opportunity to create and target an application for a particular audience .
And honestly , it 's full of surprises .
Because I don 't think any of us in this room could have predicted the sorts of applications that have happened at Facebook , around Facebook , for example , two years ago , when Mark announced that they were going to go with a platform .
So in this way , I think that cities are platforms , and certainly Detroit is a platform .
The invitation of bringing makers and artists and entrepreneurs -- it really helps stimulate this fiery creativity and helps a city to thrive .
It 's inviting participation , and cities have , historically , invited all sorts of participation .
Now we 're saying that there 's other options as well .
So , for example , city departments can open up transit data .
Google has made available transit data API .
And so there 's about seven or eight cities already in the U.S.
that have provided the transit data , and different developers are building applications .
So I was having a coffee in Portland , and half-of-a-latte in and the little board in the cafe all of a sudden starts showing me that the next bus is coming in three minutes and the train is coming in 16 minutes .
And so it 's reliable , real data that 's right in my face , where I am , so I can finish the latte .
There 's this fabulous opportunity we have across the U.S. now : about 21 percent of vacant commercial and industrial space .
That space is not vital .
The areas around it lack vitality and vibrancy and engagement .
There 's this thing -- how many people here have heard of pop-up stores or pop-up shops ?
Oh , great . So I 'm a big fan of this .
And this is a very mesh-y thing .
Essentially , there are all sorts of restaurants in Oakland , near where I live .
There 's a pop-up general store every three weeks , and they do a fantastic job of making a very social event happening for foodies .
Super fun , and it happens in a very transitional neighborhood .
Subsequent to that , after it 's been going for about a year now , they actually started to lease and create and extend .
An area that was edgy-artsy is now starting to become much cooler and engage a lot more people .
So this is an example .
The Crafty Fox is this woman who 's into crafts , and she does these pop-up crafts fairs around London .
But these sorts of things are happening in many different environments .
From my perspective , one of the things pop-up stores do is create perishability and urgency .
It creates two of the favorite words of any businessperson : sold out .
And the opportunity to really focus trust and attention is a wonderful thing .
So a lot of what we see in the mesh , and a lot of what we have in the platform that we built allows us to define , refine and scale .
It allows us to test things as an entrepreneur , to go to market , to be in conversation with people , listen , refine something and go back .
It 's very cost-effective , and it 's very mesh-y .
The infrastructure enables that .
In closing , and as we 're moving towards the end , I just also want to encourage -- and I 'm willing to share my failures as well , though not from the stage .
I would just like to say that one of the big things , when we look at waste and when we look at ways that we can really be generous and contribute to each other , but also move to create a better economic situation and a better environmental situation , is by sharing failures .
And one quick example is Velib , in 2007 , came forward in Paris with a very bold proposition , a very big bike-sharing service .
They made a lot of mistakes .
They had some number of big successes .
But they were very transparent , or they had to be , in the way that they exposed what worked and didn 't work .
And so B.C. in Barcelona and B-cycle and Boris Bikes in London -- no one has had to repeat the version 1.0 screw-ups and expensive learning exercises that happened in Paris .
So the opportunity when we 're connected is also to share failures and successes .
We 're at the very beginning of something that , what we 're seeing and the way that mesh companies are coming forward , is inviting , it 's engaging , but it 's very early .
I have a website -- it 's a directory -- and it started with about 1,200 companies , and in the last two-and-a-half months it 's up to about 3,300 companies .
And it grows on a very regular daily basis .
But it 's very much at the beginning .
So I just want to welcome all of you onto the ride .
And thank you very much .
Shaffi Mather : A new way to fight corruption
Shaffi Mather explains why he left his first career to become a social entrepreneur , providing life-saving transportation with his company 1298 for Ambulance . Now , he has a new idea and plans to begin a company to fight the booming business of corruption in public service , eliminating it one bribe at a time .
The anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career change last year , becoming a full-time practicing lawyer .
My experiences over the last 18 months , as a lawyer , has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial idea , which I believe is indeed worth spreading .
So , I share it with all of you here today , though the idea itself is getting crystallized and I 'm still writing up the business plan .
Of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the number of ideas which have failed increases .
I 've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993 .
I 've explored , experienced , and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my heart 's content .
I built , along with my two brothers , the leading real estate company in my home state , Kerala , and then worked professionally with two of India 's biggest businessmen , but in their startup enterprises .
In 2003 , when I stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector issues , I definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find for-profit solutions to addressing pressing public issues .
When life brought about a series of death and near-death experiences within my close circle , which highlighted the need for an emergency medical response service in India , similar to 911 in USA .
To address this , I , along with four friends , founded Ambulance Access for All , to promote life-support ambulance services in India .
For those from the developing world , there is nothing , absolutely nothing new in this idea .
But as we envisioned it , we had three key goals : Providing world-class life support ambulance service which is fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams , and universally accessible to anyone in a medical emergency , irrespective of the capability to pay .
The service which grew out of this , Dial 1298 for Ambulance , with one ambulance in 2004 , now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states , and has transported over 100,000 patients and victims since inception .
The service is -- fully self-sustainable from its own revenues , without accessing any public funds , and the cross-subsidy model actually works , where the rich pays higher , poor pays lower , and the accident victim is getting the service free of charge .
The service responded effectively and efficiently , during the unfortunate 26 / 11 Mumbai terror attacks .
And as you can see from the visuals , the service was responding and rescuing victims from the incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike .
We ended up being the first medical response team in every incident location and transported 125 victims , saving life .
In tribute and remembrance of 26 / 11 attacks over the last one year , we have actually helped a Pakistani NGO , Aman Foundation , to set up a self-sustainable life support ambulance service in Karachi , facilitated by Acumen Fund .
It 's a small message from us , in our own small way to the enemies of humanity , of Islam , of South Asia , of India , and of Pakistan , that humanity will continue to bloom , irrespective of such dastardly attacks .
Since then I 've also co-founded two other social enterprises .
One is Education Access for All , setting up schools in small-town India .
And the other is Moksha-Yug Access , which is integrating rural supply chain on the foundations of self-help group-based microfinance .
I guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right .
Because diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in funding .
With the significance being these funds have come in as a QT capital , not as grant or as philanthropy .
Now I come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that I 'm exploring .
Corruption , bribes , and lack of transparency .
You may be surprised to know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their talks .
Bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side , with the supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless common man .
And the demand side being mostly politicians , bureaucrats and those who have discretionary power vested with them .
According to World Bank estimate , one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every year , worsening the condition of the already worse off .
Yet , if you analyze the common man , he or she does not wake up every day and say , " Hmm , let me see who I can pay a bribe to today . "
or , " Let me see who I can corrupt today . "
Often it is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe .
In the modern day world , where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough , the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life .
Now , let me ask you another question .
Imagine you are being asked to pay a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done .
What do you do ? Of course you can call the police .
But what is the use if the police department is in itself steeped in corruption ?
Most definitely you don 't want to pay the bribe .
But you also don 't have the time , resources , expertise or wherewithal to fight this .
Unfortunately , many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies and market forces .
Yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service where you can call in , pay a fee , and fight the demand for a bribe .
Like a bribe buster service , or 1-800-Fight-Bribes , or www.stopbribes.org or www.preventcorruption.org.
Such a service simply do not exist .
One image that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother , 70 plus years , being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office .
All she needed was permission to build three steps to her house , from ground level , making it easier for her to enter and exit her house .
Yet the officer in charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe .
Even though it pricked my conscience then , I could not , or rather I did not tend to her or assist her , because I was busy building my real estate company .
I don 't want to be haunted by such images any more .
A group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement .
And in all 42 cases where we have pushed back such demands using existing and legitimate tools like the Right to Information Act , video , audio , or peer pressure , we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve without actually paying a bribe .
And with the cost of these tools being substantially lower than the bribe demanded .
I believe that these tools that worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a BPO kind of environment , and made available on web , call-center and franchise physical offices , for a fee , to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a bribe .
The target market is as tempting as it can get .
It can be worth up to one trillion dollars , being paid in bribes every year , or equal to India 's GDP .
And it is an absolutely virgin market .
I propose to explore this idea further , to examine the potential of creating a for-profit , fee-based BPO kind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption .
I do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy .
It never has been and it never will be .
In my last 18 months as a lawyer , battling small- and large-scale corruption , including the one perpetrated by India 's biggest corporate scamster .
Through his charities I have had three police cases filed against me alleging trespass , impersonation and intimidation .
The battle against corruption exacts a toll on ourselves , our families , our friends , and even our kids .
Yet I believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and making the world a fairer place .
What gives us the courage ?
As my close friend replied , when told during the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs , I quote : " Of course we cannot fail in this , at least in our own minds .
For we are insane people , trying to do an impossible task .
And an insane person does not know what an impossible task is . " Thank you .
Shaffi , that is a really exciting business idea .
Shaffi Mather : I just have to get through the initial days where I don 't get eliminated .
What 's on your mind ?
I mean , give us a sense of the numbers here -- a typical bribe and a typical fee . I mean , what 's in your head ?
SM : So let me ... Let me give you an example .
Somebody who had applied for the passport .
The officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around 3,000 rupees in bribes .
And he did not want to pay .
So we actually used the Right to Information Act , which is equal to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States , and pushed back the officers in this particular case .
And in all these 42 cases , when we kept pushing them back , there was three kinds of reaction .
A set of people actually say , " Oh , let me just grant it to them , and run away from it . "
Some people actually come back and say , " Oh , you want to screw me . Let me show you what I can do . "
And he will push us back .
So you take the next step , or use the next tool available in what we are putting together , and then he relents .
By the third time , in all 42 cases , we have achieved success .
But if it 's a 3,000-rupee , 70-dollar bribe , what fee would you have to charge , and can you actually make the business work ?
SM : Well , actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees .
So , it actually works .
That 's a high gross margin business . I like it .
SM : I actually did not want to answer this on the TED stage .
OK , so these are provisional numbers , no pricing guarantee .
If you can pull this off , you will be a global hero .
I mean , this could be huge .
Thank you so much for sharing this idea at TED .
Iwan Baan : Ingenious homes in unexpected places
In the center of Caracas , Venezuela , stands the 45-story " Tower of David , " an unfinished , abandoned skyscraper . But about eight years ago , people started moving in . Photographer Iwan Baan shows how people build homes in unlikely places , touring us through the family apartments of Torre David , a city on the water in Nigeria , and an underground village in China . Glorious images celebrate humanity 's ability to survive and make a home -- anywhere .
Throughout my career , I 've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects , documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit .
I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid 's incredible MAXXI museum , or like right here in New York with the High Line , a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this .
But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people , like here in Chandigarh , India , the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier .
Now 60 years later , the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for , like here , where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall .
But over the course of several years , I 've been documenting Rem Koolhaas 's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron .
At these large-scale construction sites in China , you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process .
As the length of the construction takes years , workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city , making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they 're building .
Over the past seven years , I 've been following my fascination with the built environment , and for those of you who know me , you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year .
Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life 's most unpredictable moments , like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city .
Just over three years ago , I was for the first time in Caracas , Venezuela , and while flying over the city , I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city , a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums , draped literally all over the mountains .
During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank , I learned about the Torre David , a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas .
The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early ' 90s .
About eight years ago , people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower .
There 's only one little entrance to the entire building , and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door .
Together , the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower .
In the lobby , they painted the walls and planted trees .
They also made a basketball court .
But when you look up closely , you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through .
Within the tower , people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower .
With no elevators , the tower is like a 45-story walkup .
Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven 't had any education in architecture or design .
And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by , this tower becomes like a living city , a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses .
The inventive inhabitants , for instance , find opportunities in the most unexpected cases , like the adjacent parking garage , which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments .
A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls , how to make an air flow , how to create transparency , circulation throughout the tower , essentially creating a home that 's completely adapted to the conditions of the site .
When a new inhabitant moves into the tower , they already have a roof over their head , so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets .
Slowly , from found materials , walls rise , and people create a space out of any found objects or materials .
It 's remarkable to see the design decisions that they 're making , like when everything is made out of red bricks , some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish .
The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands , and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower .
They typically make the best out of their conditions , and try to make their spaces look nice and homey , or at least up until as far as they can reach .
Throughout the tower , you come across all kinds of services , like the barber , small factories , and every floor has a little grocery store or shop .
And you even find a church .
And on the 30th floor , there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed .
From the outside , behind this always-changing facade , you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic , intuitive way that responds directly to their needs .
Let 's go now to Africa , to Nigeria , to a community called Makoko , a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon .
While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place , when you see it from above , there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home .
From the main dock , people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area .
When out on the water , it 's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living .
Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house , selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits .
Behind every window and door frame , you 'll see a small child peering back at you , and while Makoko seems to be packed with people , what 's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building .
The population growth in Nigeria , and especially in these areas like Makoko , are painful reminders of how out of control things really are .
In Makoko , very few systems and infrastructures exist .
Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area .
This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water , so fishing and boat-making are common professions .
You 'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area , like barbershops , CD and DVD stores , movie theaters , tailors , everything is there .
There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place , like that hotel in Sweden .
On this particular evening , I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits .
They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy .
By nightfall , the area becomes almost pitch black , save for a small lightbulb or a fire .
What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine , Kunlé Adeyemi , who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko .
With this entire village existing on the water , public space is very limited , so now that the school is finished , the ground floor is a playground for the kids , but when classes are out , the platform is just like a town square , where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats .
Another place I 'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo .
They 're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the ' 40s , and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo .
For years , the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities , but in the early 1980s , they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city .
Today , they live in this area , approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people , who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure .
While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid , each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space .
I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there , like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him , or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage .
While to most of us , living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable , to those in the Zabbaleen , this is just a different type of normal .
In all these places I 've talked about today , what I do find fascinating is that there 's really no such thing as normal , and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation .
Throughout the day , it 's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets , just like this engagement party .
In this tradition , the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings , which they soon bring to their new husband .
A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories .
Like Makoko and the Torre David , throughout the Zabbaleen you 'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood .
There are the retail shops , the cafes and the restaurants , and the community is this community of Coptic Christians , so you 'll also find a church , along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area , and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops , the barbers , everything .
Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises .
While from the outside , these homes look like any other informal structure in the city , when you step inside , you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration .
Despite having limited access to space and money , the homes in the area are designed with care and detail .
Every apartment is unique , and this individuality tells a story about each family 's circumstances and values .
Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously , putting a lot of work and care into the details .
The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner , where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns .
But despite this elaborate decor , sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways , like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door .
When I was let in , it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm , where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room .
But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area .
The attention to this detail astonished me , and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment , from floor to ceiling , every part was decorated .
But if it weren 't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment , it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill .
What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions , I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love , care , and unreserved passion .
Let 's move across the map to China , to an area called Shanxi , Henan and Gansu .
In a region famous for the soft , porous Loess Plateau soil , there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground .
These dwellings are called the yaodongs .
Through this architecture by subtraction , these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil .
In these villages , you see an entirely altered landscape , and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square , rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground .
When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground , they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn 't have the money to buy materials , and this digging out was their most logical form of living .
From Makoko to Zabbaleen , these communities have approached the tasks of planning , design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances .
Created by these very people who live , work and play in these particular spaces , these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances .
In most of these places , the government is completely absent , leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials , and while these communities are highly disadvantaged , they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity , and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances .
What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into .
Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves , and how highly particular their solutions would be , if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into .
Today , you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people .
From China to Brazil , these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible , but they 're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people .
I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration , Zita Cobb , the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation , based out of Fogo Island , Newfoundland .
She says that " there 's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy , " and I couldn 't agree with her more .
Thank you .
Ray Zahab : My trek to the South Pole
Extreme runner Ray Zahab shares an enthusiastic account of his record-breaking trek on foot to the South Pole -- a 33-day sprint through the snow .
A month ago today I stood there : 90 degrees south , the top of the bottom of the world , the Geographic South Pole .
And I stood there beside two very good friends of mine , Richard Weber and Kevin Vallely .
Together we had just broken the world speed record for a trek to the South Pole .
It took us 33 days , 23 hours and 55 minutes to get there .
We shaved five days off the previous best time .
And in the process , I became the first person in history to make the entire 650-mile journey , from Hercules Inlet to South Pole , solely on feet , without skis .
Now , many of you are probably saying , " Wait a sec , is this tough to do ? "
Imagine , if you will , dragging a sled , as you just saw in that video clip , with 170 pounds of gear , in it everything you need to survive on your Antarctic trek .
It 's going to be 40 below , every single day .
You 'll be in a massive headwind .
And at some point you 're going to have to cross these cracks in the ice , these crevasses .
Some of them have a very precarious thin footbridge underneath them that could give way at a moment 's notice , taking your sled , you , into the abyss , never to be seen again .
The punchline to your journey ? Look at the horizon .
Yes , it 's uphill the entire way , because the South Pole is at 10,000 feet , and you 're starting at sea level .
Our journey did not , in fact , begin at Hercules Inlet , where frozen ocean meets the land of Antarctica .
It began a little less than two years ago .
A couple of buddies of mine and I had finished a 111-day run across the entire Sahara desert .
And while we were there we learned the seriousness of the water crisis in Northern Africa .
We also learned that many of the issues facing the people of Northern Africa affected young people the most .
I came home to my wife after 111 days of running in the sand , and I said , " You know , there 's no doubt if this bozo can get across the desert , we are capable of doing anything we set our minds to . "
But if I 'm going to continue doing these adventures , there has to be a reason for me to do them beyond just getting there .
Around that time I met an extraordinary human being , Peter Thum , who inspired me with his actions .
He 's trying to find and solve water issues , the crisis around the world .
His dedication inspired me to come up with this expedition : a run to the South Pole where , with an interactive website , I will be able to bring young people , students and teachers from around the world on board the expedition with me , as active members .
So we would have a live website , that every single day of the 33 days , we would be blogging , telling stories of , you know , depleted ozone forcing us to cover our faces , or we will burn .
Crossing miles and miles of sastrugi -- frozen ice snowdrifts that could be hip-deep .
I 'm telling you , crossing these things with 170-pound sled , that sled may as well have weighed 1,700 pounds , because that 's what it felt like .
We were blogging to this live website daily to these students that were tracking us as well , about 10-hour trekking days , 15-hour trekking days , sometimes 20 hours of trekking daily to meet our goal .
We 'd catch cat-naps at 40 below on our sled , incidentally .
In turn , students , people from around the world , would ask us questions .
Young people would ask the most amazing questions .
One of my favorite : It 's 40 below , you 've got to go to the bathroom , where are you going to go and how are you going to do it ?
I 'm not going to answer that . But I will answer some of the more popular questions .
Where do you sleep ? We slept in a tent that was very low to the ground , because the winds on Antarctica were so extreme , it would blow anything else away .
What do you eat ? One of my favorite dishes on expedition : butter and bacon . It 's about a million calories .
We were burning about 8,500 a day , so we needed it .
How many batteries do you carry for all the equipment that you have ?
Virtually none . All of our equipment , including film equipment , was charged by the sun .
And do you get along ? I certainly hope so , because at some point or another on this expedition , one of your teammates is going to have to take a very big needle , and put it in an infected blister , and drain it for you .
But seriously , seriously , we did get along , because we had a common goal of wanting to inspire these young people .
They were our teammates ! They were inspiring us .
The stories we were hearing got us to the South Pole .
The website worked brilliantly as a two-way street of communication .
Young people in northern Canada , kids in an elementary school , dragging sleds across the school-yard , pretending they were Richard , Ray and Kevin . Amazing .
We arrived at the South Pole . We huddled into that tent , 45 below that day , I 'll never forget it .
We looked at each other with these looks of disbelief at what we had just completed .
And I remember looking at the guys thinking , " What do I take from this journey ? " You know ? Seriously .
That I 'm this uber-endurance guy ?
As I stand here today talking to you guys , I 've been running for the grand sum of five years .
And a year before that I was a pack-a-day smoker , living a very sedentary lifestyle .
What I take from this journey , from my journeys , is that , in fact , within every fiber of my belief standing here , I know that we can make the impossible possible .
I 'm learning this at 40 .
Can you imagine ? Seriously , can you imagine ?
I 'm learning this at 40 years of age .
Imagine being 13 years old , hearing those words , and believing it .
Thank you very much . Thank you .
Caroline Lavelle : Casting a spell on the cello
Caroline Lavelle plays the cello like a sorceress casting a spell , occasionally hiding behind her wild mane of blond hair as she sings of pastoral themes . She performs " Farther than the Sun , " backed by Thomas Dolby on keyboards .
Thank you very much .
Now , I 've got a story for you .
When I arrived off the plane , after a very long journey from the West of England , my computer , my beloved laptop , had gone mad , and had -- oh ! -- a bit like that ! -- and the display on it -- anyway , the whole thing had burst .
And I went to the IT guys here and a gentleman mended my computer , and then he said , " What are you doing here ? "
and I said " I 'm playing the cello and I 'm doing a bit of singing , " and he said , " Oh , I sort of play the cello as well . "
And I said , " Do you really ? "
Anyway , so you 're in for a treat , because he 's fantastic , and his name 's Mark .
I am also joined by my partner in crime , Thomas Dolby .
This song is called " Farther than the Sun . "
Strung in the wind I called you but you did not hear ... And you 're a plant that needs poor soil and I have treated you too well to give up flowers ... Oh , I have been too rich for you ... Farther than the sun from me Farther than I 'd have you be And I go north , I get so cold My heart is lava under stone You are not worthy You are not worthy ... With your calculating eyes spinning figures you cannot see me You cannot see me ... And if I tell myself enough I 'll believe it You are not worthy The sea , it freezes over ... to trap the light And I 'm in love with being in love and you were never quite the one In Gerda 's eyes Fragments of what you 've become And all the moths that fly at night believe electric light is bright You are not worthy You are not worthy With your calculating eyes Spinning figures You cannot see me , no And if I tell myself enough I 'll believe it You are not worthy Farther than the sun from me Farther than I 'd have you be And I go north , I get so cold My heart is lava under stone You are not worthy You are not worthy With your calculating eyes Spinning figures You cannot see me , no ... And if I tell myself enough , I 'll believe it Thank you very much .
Mitch Resnick : Let 's teach kids to code
Coding isn 't just for computer whizzes , says Mitch Resnick of MIT Media Lab -- it 's for everyone . In a fun , demo-filled talk Resnick outlines the benefits of teaching kids to code , so they can do more than just " read " new technologies -- but also create them . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
It was a Saturday afternoon in May , and I suddenly realized that the next day was Mother 's Day , and I hadn 't gotten anything for my mom , so I started thinking about what should I get my mom for Mother 's Day ?
I thought , why don 't I make her an interactive Mother 's Day card using the Scratch software that I 'd been developing with my research group at the MIT Media Lab ?
We developed it so that people could easily create their own interactive stories and games and animations , and then share their creations with one another .
So I thought , this would be an opportunity to use Scratch to make an interactive card for my mom .
Before making my own Mother 's Day card , I thought I would take a look at the Scratch website .
So over the last several years , kids around the world ages 8 and up , have shared their projects , and I thought , I wonder if , of those three million projects , whether anyone else has thought to put up Mother 's Day cards .
So in the search box I typed in " Mother 's Day , " and I was surprised and delighted to see a list of dozens and dozens of Mother 's Day cards that showed up on the Scratch website , many of them just in the past 24 hours by procrastinators just like myself .
So I started taking a look at them .
I saw one of them that featured a kitten and her mom and wishing her mom a happy Mother 's Day .
And the creator very considerately offered a replay for her mom .
Another one was an interactive project where , when you moved the mouse over the letters of " Happy Mom Day , " it reveals a special happy Mother 's Day slogan .
In this one , the creator told a narrative about how she had Googled to find out when Mother 's Day was happening .
And then once she found out when Mother 's Day was happening , she delivered a special Mother 's Day greeting of how much she loved her mom .
So I really enjoyed looking at these projects and interacting with these projects .
In fact , I liked it so much that , instead of making my own project , I sent my mom links to about a dozen of these projects .
And actually , she reacted exactly the way that I hoped that she would .
She wrote back to me and she said , " I 'm so proud to have a son that created the software that allowed these kids to make Mother 's Day cards for their mothers . "
So my mom was happy , and that made me happy , but actually I was even happier for another reason .
I was happy because these kids were using Scratch just in the way that we had hoped that they would .
As they created their interactive Mother 's Day cards , you could see that they were really becoming fluent with new technologies .
What do I mean by fluent ?
I mean that they were able to start expressing themselves and to start expressing their ideas .
When you become fluent with language , it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend .
And it 's similar with new technologies .
By writing , be creating these interactive Mother 's Day cards , these kids were showing that they were really fluent with new technologies .
Now maybe you won 't be so surprised by this , because a lot of times people feel that young people today can do all sorts of things with technology .
I mean , all of us have heard young people referred to as " digital natives . "
But actually I 'm sort of skeptical about this term .
I 'm not so sure we should be thinking of young people as digital natives .
When you really look at it , how is it that young people spend most of their time using new technologies ?
You often see them in situations like this , or like this , and there 's no doubt that young people are very comfortable and familiar browsing and chatting and texting and gaming .
But that doesn 't really make you fluent .
So young people today have lots of experience and lots of familiarity with interacting with new technologies , but a lot less so of creating with new technologies and expressing themselves with new technologies .
It 's almost as if they can read but not write with new technologies .
And I 'm really interested in seeing , how can we help young people become fluent so they can write with new technologies ?
And that really means that they need to be able to write their own computer programs , or code .
So , increasingly , people are starting to recognize the importance of learning to code .
You know , in recent years , there have been hundreds of new organizations and websites that are helping young people learn to code .
You look online , you 'll see places like Codecademy and events like CoderDojo and sites like Girls Who Code , or Black Girls Code .
It seems that everybody is getting into the act .
at the turn of the new year , New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a New Year 's resolution that he was going to learn to code in 2012 .
A few months later , the country of Estonia decided that all of its first graders should learn to code .
And that triggered a debate in the U.K.
about whether all the children there should learn to code .
Now , for some of you , when you hear about this , it might seem sort of strange about everybody learning to code .
When many people think of coding , they think of it as something that only a very narrow sub-community of people are going to be doing , and they think of coding looking like this .
And in fact , if this is what coding is like , it will only be a narrow sub-community of people with special mathematical skills and technological background that can code .
But coding doesn 't have to be like this .
Let me show you about what it 's like to code in Scratch .
So in Scratch , to code , you just snap blocks together .
In this case , you take a move block , snap it into a stack , and the stacks of blocks control the behaviors of the different characters in your game or your story , in this case controlling the big fish .
After you 've created your program , you can click on " share , " and then share your project with other people , so that they can use the project and start working on the project as well .
So , of course , making a fish game isn 't the only thing you can do with Scratch .
Of the millions of projects on the Scratch website , there 's everything from animated stories to school science projects to anime soap operas to virtual construction kits to recreations of classic video games to political opinion polls to trigonometry tutorials to interactive artwork , and , yes , interactive Mother 's Day cards .
So I think there 's so many different ways that people can express themselves using this , to be able to take their ideas and share their ideas with the world .
And it doesn 't just stay on the screen .
You can also code to interact with the physical world around you .
Here 's an example from Hong Kong , where some kids made a game and then built their own physical interface device and had a light sensor , so the light sensor detects the hole in the board , so as they move the physical saw , the light sensor detects the hole and controls the virtual saw on the screen and saws down the tree .
We 're going to continue to look at new ways of bringing together the physical world and the virtual world and connecting to the world around us .
This is an example from a new version of Scratch that we 'll be releasing in the next few months , and we 're looking again to be able to push you in new directions .
Here 's an example .
It uses the webcam .
And as I move my hand , I can pop the balloons or I can move the bug .
So it 's a little bit like Microsoft Kinect , where you interact with gestures in the world .
But instead of just playing someone else 's game , you get to create the games , and if you see someone else 's game , you can just say " see inside , " and you can look at the stacks of blocks that control it .
So there 's a new block that says how much video motion there is , and then , if there 's so much video motion , it will then tell the balloon to pop .
The same way that this uses the camera to get information into Scratch , you can also use the microphone .
Here 's an example of a project using the microphone .
So I 'm going to let all of you control this game using your voices .
As kids are creating projects like this , they 're learning to code , but even more importantly , they 're coding to learn .
Because as they learn to code , it enables them to learn many other things , opens up many new opportunities for learning .
Again , it 's useful to make an analogy to reading and writing .
When you learn to read and write , it opens up opportunities for you to learn so many other things .
When you learn to read , you can then read to learn .
And it 's the same thing with coding .
If you learn to code , you can code to learn .
Now some of the things you can learn are sort of obvious .
You learn more about how computers work .
But that 's just where it starts .
When you learn to code , it opens up for you to learn many other things .
Let me show you an example .
Here 's another project , and I saw this when I was visiting one of the computer clubhouses .
These are after-school learning centers that we helped start that help young people from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies .
And when I went to one of the clubhouses a couple years ago , I saw a 13-year-old boy who was using our Scratch software to create a game somewhat like this one , and he was very happy with his game and proud of his game , but also he wanted to do more .
He wanted to keep score .
So this was a game where the big fish eats the little fish , but he wanted to keep score , so that each time the big fish eats the little fish , the score would go up and it would keep track , and he didn 't know how to do that .
So I showed him .
In Scratch , you can create something called a variable .
I 'll call it score .
And that creates some new blocks for you , and also creates a little scoreboard that keeps track of the score , so each time I click on " change score , " it increments the score .
So I showed this to the clubhouse member -- let 's call him Victor -- and Victor , when he saw that this block would let him increment the score , he knew exactly what to do .
He took the block and he put it into the program exactly where the big fish eats the little fish .
So then , each time the big fish eats the little fish , he will increment the score , and the score will go up by one .
And it 's in fact working .
And he saw this , and he was so excited , he reached his hand out to me , and he said , " Thank you , thank you , thank you . "
And what went through my mind was , how often is it that teachers are thanked by their students for teaching them variables ?
It doesn 't happen in most classrooms , but that 's because in most classrooms , when kids learn about variables , they don 't know why they 're learning it .
It 's nothing that , really , they can make use of .
When you learn ideas like this in Scratch , you can learn it in a way that 's really meaningful and motivating for you , that you can understand the reason for learning variables , and we see that kids learn it more deeply and learn it better .
Victor had , I 'm sure , been taught about variables in schools , but he really didn 't -- he wasn 't paying attention .
Now he had a reason for learning variables .
So when you learn through coding , and coding to learn , you 're learning it in a meaningful context , and that 's the best way of learning things .
So as kids like Victor are creating projects like this , they 're learning important concepts like variables , but that 's just the start .
As Victor worked on this project and created the scripts , he was also learning about the process of design , how to start with the glimmer of an idea and turn it into a fully-fledged , functioning project like you see here .
So he was learning many different core principles of design , about how to experiment with new ideas , how to take complex ideas and break them down into simpler parts , how to collaborate with other people on your projects , about how to find and fix bugs when things go wrong , how to keep persistent and to persevere in the face of frustrations when things aren 't working well .
Now those are important skills that aren 't just relevant for coding .
They 're relevant for all sorts of different activities .
Now , who knows if Victor is going to grow up and become a programmer or a professional computer scientist ?
It 's probably not so likely , but regardless of what he does , he 'll be able to make use of these design skills that he learned .
Regardless of whether he grows up to be a marketing manager or a mechanic or a community organizer , that these ideas are useful for everybody .
Again , it 's useful to think about this analogy with language .
When you become fluent with reading and writing , it 's not something that you 're doing just to become a professional writer .
Very few people become professional writers .
But it 's useful for everybody to learn how to read and write .
Again , the same thing with coding .
Most people won 't grow up to become professional computer scientists or programmers , but those skills of thinking creatively , reasoning systematically , working collaboratively -- skills you develop when you code in Scratch -- are things that people can use no matter what they 're doing in their work lives .
And it 's not just about your work life .
Coding can also enable you to express your ideas and feelings in your personal life .
Let me end with just one more example .
So this is an example that came from after I had sent the Mother 's Day cards to my mom , she decided that she wanted to learn Scratch .
So she made this project for my birthday and sent me a happy birthday Scratch card .
Now this project is not going to win any prizes for design , and you can rest assured that my 83-year-old mom is not training to become a professional programmer or computer scientist .
But working on this project enabled her to make a connection to someone that she cares about and enabled her to keep on learning new things and continuing to practice her creativity and developing new ways of expressing herself .
So as we take a look and we see that Michael Bloomberg is learning to code , all of the children of Estonia learn to code , even my mom has learned to code , don 't you think it 's about time that you might be thinking about learning to code ?
If you 're interested in giving it a try , I 'd encourage you to go to the Scratch website .
It 's scratch.mit.edu , and give a try at coding .
Thanks very much .
Adora Svitak : What adults can learn from kids
Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs " childish " thinking : bold ideas , wild creativity and especially optimism . Kids ' big dreams deserve high expectations , she says , starting with grownups ' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach .
Now , I want to start with a question : When was the last time you were called childish ?
For kids like me , being called childish can be a frequent occurrence .
Every time we make irrational demands , exhibit irresponsible behavior or display any other signs of being normal American citizens , we are called childish .
Which really bothers me .
After all , take a look at these events : Imperialism and colonization , world wars , George W. Bush .
Ask yourself , who 's responsible ? Adults .
Now , what have kids done ?
Well , Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust , Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States , and , most recently , Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti on his little bike .
So , as you can see evidenced by such examples , age has absolutely nothing to do with it .
The traits the word childish addresses are seen so often in adults that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking .
Thank you .
Then again , who 's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren 't exactly what the world needs ?
Maybe you 've had grand plans before but stopped yourself , thinking , " That 's impossible , " or , " That costs too much , " or , " That won 't benefit me . "
For better or worse , we kids aren 't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things .
Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking .
Like my wish that no one went hungry or that everything were a free kind of utopia .
How many of you still dream like that and believe in the possibilities ?
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of utopian ideals can be a burden because you know that if everything were free , then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos .
On the other hand , we kids still dream about perfection .
And that 's a good thing because in order to make anything a reality , you have to dream about it first .
In many ways , our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility .
For instance , the Museum of Glass in Tacoma , Washington , my home state -- yoohoo Washington !
-- has a program called Kids Design Glass , and kids draw their own ideas for glass art .
Now , the resident artist said they got some of their best ideas through the program because kids don 't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes ; they just think of good ideas .
Now , when you think of glass , you might think of colorful Chihuly designs or maybe Italian vases , but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that into the realm of broken-hearted snakes and bacon boys , who you can see has meat vision .
Now , our inherent wisdom doesn 't have to be insider 's knowledge .
Kids already do a lot of learning from adults , and we have a lot to share .
I think that adults should start learning from kids .
Now , I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd , teachers and students , and I like this analogy : It shouldn 't just be a teacher at the head of the classroom telling students , " Do this , do that . "
The students should teach their teachers .
Learning between grown ups and kids should be reciprocal .
The reality , unfortunately , is a little different , and it has a lot to do with trust , or a lack of it .
Now , if you don 't trust someone , you place restrictions on them , right ?
If I doubt my older sister 's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan , I 'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me until she pays it back .
True story , by the way .
Now , adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids from every " don 't do that , don 't do this " in the school handbook to restrictions on school Internet use .
As history points out , regimes become oppressive when they 're fearful about keeping control .
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes , kids have no , or very little say in making the rules , when really the attitude should be reciprocal , meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population .
Now , what 's even worse than restriction is that adults often underestimate kids abilities .
We love challenges , but when expectations are low , trust me , we will sink to them .
My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister .
Okay , so they didn 't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that , but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ fighters when lots of other kids were hearing " The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round . "
Well , we heard that one too , but " Pioneer Germ Fighters " totally rules .
I loved to write from the age of four , and when I was six my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word .
Thank you Bill Gates and thank you Ma .
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop , and I wanted to get published .
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published or saying wait until you 're older , my parents were really supportive .
Many publishers were not quite so encouraging , one large children 's publisher ironically saying that they didn 't work with children -- children 's publisher not working with children ?
I don 't know , you 're kind of alienating a large client there .
Now , one publisher , Action Publishing , was willing to take that leap and trust me and to listen to what I had to say .
They published my first book , " Flying Fingers , " -- you see it here -- and from there on , it 's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools , keynoting to thousands of educators and finally , today , speaking to you .
I appreciate your attention today , because to show that you truly care , you listen .
But there 's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults .
Kids grow up and become adults just like you .
Or just like you ? Really ?
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult , but rather better adults than you have been , which may be a little challenging considering your guys ' credentials .
But the way progress happens is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones .
It 's the reason we 're not in the Dark Ages anymore .
No matter your position or place in life , it is imperative to create opportunities for children so that we can grow up to blow you away .
Adults and fellow TEDsters , you need to listen and learn from kids and trust us and expect more from us .
You must lend an ear today , because we are the leaders of tomorrow , which means we 're going to be taking care of you when you 're old and senile . No , just kidding .
No , really , we are going to be the next generation , the ones who will bring this world forward .
And in case you don 't think that this really has meaning for you , remember that cloning is possible , and that involves going through childhood again , in which case you 'll want to be heard just like my generation .
Now , the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas .
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed .
Are you ready to make the match ?
Because the world 's problems shouldn 't be the human family 's heirloom .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Jonathan Haidt : Religion , evolution , and the ecstasy of self-transcendence
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple , but difficult question : why do we search for self-transcendence ? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves ? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection , he proposes a provocative answer .
I have a question for you : Are you religious ?
Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person .
Let 's see , I 'd say about three or four percent .
I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference .
Okay , here 's another question : Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way , shape or form ? Raise your hand .
Okay , that 's the majority .
My Talk today is about the main reason , or one of the main reasons , why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way , shape or form .
My Talk today is about self-transcendence .
It 's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away .
And when that happens , the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings .
We talk about being uplifted or elevated .
Now it 's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor .
So here 's the metaphor I 'm offering today .
Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms , most of which we 're very familiar with .
But sometimes it 's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase .
We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness .
In 1902 , the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience .
He collected all kinds of case studies .
He quoted the words of all kinds of people who 'd had a variety of these experiences .
One of the most exciting to me is this young man , Stephen Bradley , had an encounter , he thought , with Jesus in 1820 .
And here 's what Bradley said about it .
Stephen Bradley : I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room , with arms extended , appearing to say to me , " Come . "
The next day I rejoiced with trembling .
My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die .
This world had no place in my affections .
Previous to this time , I was very selfish and self-righteous .
But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could , with a feeling heart , forgive my worst enemies .
JH : So note how Bradley 's petty , moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase .
And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving .
The world 's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase .
Some shut down the self using meditation .
Others use psychedelic drugs .
This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god .
Others use dancing , spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence .
But you don 't need a religion to get you through the staircase .
Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature .
Others overcome their self at raves .
But here 's the weirdest place of all : war .
So many books about war say the same thing , that nothing brings people together like war .
And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences .
I 'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray .
Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II .
And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle .
Here 's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase .
Glenn Gray : Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives .
" I " passes insensibly into a " we , " " my " becomes " our " and individual faith loses its central importance .
I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy .
I may fall , but I do not die , for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life .
JH : So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out , or melt away , and it feels good , it feels really good , in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives .
It feels somehow uplifting .
This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim .
Durkheim even called us Homo duplex , or two-level man .
The lower level he called the level of the profane .
Now profane is the opposite of sacred .
It just means ordinary or common .
And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals .
We want to satisfy our individual desires .
We pursue our individual goals .
But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change .
Individuals unite into a team , a movement or a nation , which is far more than the sum of its parts .
Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group , into a moral community .
Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness .
And once people circle around some sacred object or value , they 'll then work as a team and fight to defend it .
Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum , of making a group out of individuals .
Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended .
Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square , which brought down a dictator .
And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt , that brought us all together , after 9 / 11 .
So let me summarize where we are .
I 'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human .
I 'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind .
I 'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred .
When we climb that staircase , self-interest fades away , we become just much less self-interested , and we feel as though we are better , nobler and somehow uplifted .
So here 's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me : Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design ?
Is it a product of natural selection , like our hands ?
Or is it a bug , a mistake in the system -- this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain -- Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience , it 's just a mistake ?
Well many scientists who study religion take this view .
The New Atheists , for example , argue that religion is a set of memes , sort of parasitic memes , that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff , self-destructive stuff , like suicide bombing .
And after all , how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves ?
How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest ?
Well let me show you .
In " The Descent of Man , " Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality -- where did it come from , why do we have it .
Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves , but they 're of great use to our groups .
He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition .
He said , " If the one tribe included a great number of courageous , sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other , this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other . "
He went on to say that " Selfish and contentious people will not cohere , and without coherence nothing can be effected . "
In other words , Charles Darwin believed in group selection .
Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years , but it 's about to make a major comeback this year , especially after E.O. Wilson 's book comes out in April , making a very strong case that we , and several other species , are products of group selection .
But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection .
So look at it this way : You 've got competition going on within groups and across groups .
So here 's a group of guys on a college crew team .
Within this team there 's competition .
There are guys competing with each other .
The slowest rowers , the weakest rowers , are going to get cut from the team .
And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport .
Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics .
So within the team , their interests are actually pitted against each other .
And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys .
Maybe he 'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach .
But while that competition is going on within the boat , this competition is going on across boats .
And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat , now they 've got no choice but to cooperate because they 're all in the same boat .
They can only win if they all pull together as a team .
I mean , these things sound trite , but they are deep evolutionary truths .
The main argument against group selection has always been that , well sure , it would be nice to have a group of cooperators , but as soon as you have a group of cooperators , they 're just going to get taken over by free-riders , individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others .
Let me illustrate this for you .
Suppose we 've got a group of little organisms -- they can be bacteria , they can be hamsters ; it doesn 't matter what -- and let 's suppose that this little group here , they evolved to be cooperative .
Well that 's great . They graze , they defend each other , they work together , they generate wealth .
And as you 'll see in this simulation , as they interact they gain points , as it were , they grow , and when they 've doubled in size , you 'll see them split , and that 's how they reproduce and the population grows .
But suppose then that one of them mutates .
There 's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy .
It takes advantage of the others .
And so when a green interacts with a blue , you 'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller .
So here 's how things play out .
We start with just one green , and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food .
And in short order , the cooperators are done for .
The free-riders have taken over .
If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started .
But there are solutions to the free-rider problem .
It 's not that hard a problem .
In fact , nature has solved it many , many times .
And nature 's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat .
For example , why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA , totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus ?
It 's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism .
Somehow or other -- maybe one swallowed another ; we 'll never know exactly why -- but once they got a membrane around them , they were all in the same membrane , now all the wealth-created division of labor , all the greatness created by cooperation , stays locked inside the membrane and we 've got a superorganism .
And now let 's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders , of defectors , of cheaters and look what happens .
A superorganism can basically take what it wants .
It 's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens , from the defectors , the cheaters .
And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms .
What I 've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history .
Darwin 's laws don 't change , but now there 's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different .
Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria .
It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple , primitive nests , or hives .
Once several wasps were all together in the same hive , they had no choice but to cooperate , because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives .
And the most cohesive hives won , just as Darwin said .
These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere .
And it happened again , even more spectacularly , in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures , they came together around a hearth or a campfire , they divided labor , they began painting their bodies , they spoke their own dialects , and eventually they worshiped their own gods .
Once they were all in the same tribe , they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside .
And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet , which is human cooperation -- a force for construction and destruction .
Of course , human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives .
Human groups may look like hives for brief moments , but they tend to then break apart .
We 're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are .
In fact , often , as we 've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts , often those divisions are along religious lines .
Nonetheless , when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement , they can move mountains .
Look at the people in these photos I 've been showing you .
Do you think they 're there pursuing their self-interest ?
Or are they pursuing communal interest , which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole ?
Okay , so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way .
And now I 'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way .
Jonathan Haidt : We humans have many varieties of religious experience , as William James explained .
One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves .
The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred , or deeply interconnected .
We are Homo duplex , as Durkheim explained .
And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection , as Darwin explained .
I can 't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug , but if it is an adaptation , then the implications are profound .
If it is an adaptation , then we evolved to be religious .
I don 't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions .
Those things came along too recently .
I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects , people and ideas .
This is why politics is so tribal .
Politics is partly profane , it 's partly about self-interest , but politics is also about sacredness .
It 's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas .
It 's about the eternal struggle between good and evil , and we all believe we 're on the good team .
And most importantly , if the staircase is real , it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life .
Because human beings are , to some extent , hivish creatures like bees .
We 're bees . We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment .
We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed .
We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort .
Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom .
But sometimes we wonder : Is this all there is ?
What should I do with my life ?
What 's missing ?
What 's missing is that we are Homo duplex , but modern , secular society was built to satisfy our lower , profane selves .
It 's really comfortable down here on the lower level .
Come , have a seat in my home entertainment center .
One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top .
I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia .
They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into .
They 're all searching for their staircase .
And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish .
Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger .
And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago .
" No man is an island entire of itself .
Every man is a piece of the continent , a part of the main . "
JH : Thank you .
Cynthia Kenyon : Experiments that hint of longer lives
What controls aging ? Biochemist Cynthia Kenyon has found a simple genetic mutation that can double the lifespan of a simple worm , C. elegans . The lessons from that discovery , and others , are pointing to how we might one day significantly extend youthful human life .
Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging ?
This is a dream of the ages .
But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible .
They thought you just wear out , there 's nothing you can do about it -- kind of like an old shoe .
But if you look in nature , you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans .
because they have different genes .
So that suggests that somewhere in these genes , somewhere in the DNA , are genes for aging , genes that allow them to have different lifespans .
So if there are genes like that , then you can imagine that , if you could change one of the genes in an experiment , an aging gene , maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan .
And if you could do that , then you could find the genes for aging .
And if they exist and you can find them , then maybe one could eventually do something about it .
So we 've set out to look for genes that control aging .
And we didn 't study any of these animals .
Instead , we studied a little , tiny , round worm called C. elegans , which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence .
And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant .
So we started to change genes at random , looking for long-lived animals .
And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm .
So you can see in black , after a month -- they 're very short-lived ; that 's why we like to study them for studies of aging -- in black , after a month , the normal worms are all dead .
But at that time , most of the mutant worms are still alive .
And it isn 't until twice as long that they 're all dead .
And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here .
So the first thing you 're going to see is the normal worm when it 's about college student age -- a young adult .
It 's quite a cute little fellow .
And next you 're going to see the long-lived mutant when it 's young .
So this animal is going to live twice as long .
Is it miserable ? It doesn 't seem to be .
It 's active . You can 't tell the difference really .
And they can be completely fertile -- have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do .
Now get out your handkerchiefs here .
You 're going to see , in just two weeks , the normal worms are old .
You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there .
But everything else is just lying there .
The animal 's clearly in the nursing home .
And if you look at the tissues of the animal , they 're starting to deteriorate .
You know , even if you 've never seen one of these little C. elegans -- which probably most of you haven 't seen one -- you can tell they 're old -- isn 't that interesting ?
So there 's something about aging that 's kind of universal .
And now here is the daf-2 mutant .
One gene is changed out of 20,000 , and look at it .
It 's the same age , but it 's not in the nursing home ; it 's going skiing .
This is what 's really cool : it 's aging more slowly .
It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day .
And when I tell people about this , they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80 .
But it 's really more like this : let 's say you 're a 30 year-old guy -- or in your 30s -- and you 're a bachelor and you 're dating people .
And you meet someone you really like , you get to know her .
And you 're in a restaurant , and you say , " Well how old are you ? "
She says , " I 'm 60 . "
That 's what it 's like . And you would never know .
You would never know , until she told you .
Okay .
So what is the daf-2 gene ?
Well as you know , genes , which are part of the DNA , they 're instructions to make a protein that does something .
And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor .
So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell .
So part of it is like a baseball glove .
Part of it 's on the outside , and it 's catching the hormone as it comes by in green .
And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell .
Okay , so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell ?
I just told you that , if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell , that you get a receptor that doesn 't work as well ; the animal lives longer .
So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging .
That 's what that arrow means .
It speeds up aging . It makes it go faster .
So it 's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself , speeding up aging .
So this is altogether really , really interesting .
It says that aging is subject to control by the genes , and specifically by hormones .
So what kind of hormones are these ?
There 's lots of hormones . There 's testosterone , adrenalin .
You know about a lot of them .
These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies .
The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1 .
Now you 've all heard of at least insulin .
Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal .
And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth .
So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time , but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about -- maybe they also affect aging .
And it 's looking like that 's the case .
So after we made our discoveries with little C. elegans , people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking , if we made the same daf-2 mutation , the hormone receptor mutation , in other animals , will they live longer ?
And that is the case in flies .
If you change this hormone pathway in flies , they live longer .
And also in mice -- and mice are mammals like us .
So it 's an ancient pathway , because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals .
And also , the common precursor also gave rise to people .
So maybe it 's working in people the same way .
And there are hints of this .
So for example , there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City .
And just like any population , most of the people live to be about 70 or 80 , but some live to be 90 or 100 .
And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations -- that is , changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1 .
And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted .
It damaged the gene .
So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging .
So the next question , of course , is : Is there any effect on age-related disease ?
As you age , you 're much more likely to get cancer , Alzheimer 's disease , heart disease , all sorts of diseases .
It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases .
They hardly get cancer , and when they do it 's not as severe .
So it 's really interesting , and it makes sense in a way , that they 're still young , so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old ?
So it suggests that , if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans , maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once .
So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging ?
How could that work ?
Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants , a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues , and repair damage .
And the way that they 're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO .
So in a daf-2 mutant -- you see that I have the X drawn here through the receptor .
The receptor isn 't working as well .
Under those conditions , the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus -- that little compartment there in the middle of the cell -- and it 's sitting down on a gene binding to it .
You see one gene . There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO .
And it 's just sitting on one of them .
So FOXO turns on a lot of genes .
And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes , genes I call carrot-giver genes , whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well -- to fold correctly and function correctly .
And it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they 're damaged .
DNA repair genes are more active in these animals .
And the immune system is more active .
And many of these different genes , we 've shown , actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant .
So it 's really interesting .
These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do .
They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage , which we think makes them live longer .
So what about the normal worm ?
Well when the daf-2 receptor is active , then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is .
So it can 't turn the genes on .
That 's how it works . That 's why we don 't see the long lifespan , until we have the daf-2 mutant .
But what good is this for the worm ?
Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions -- in the good times -- when food is plentiful and there 's not a lot of stress in the environment .
Then they promote the uptake of nutrients .
You can store the food , use it for energy , grow , etc .
But what we think is that , under conditions of stress , the levels of these hormones drop -- for example , having limited food supply .
And that , we think , is registered by the animal as a danger signal , a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity .
So it activates FOXO , FOXO goes to the DNA , and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself .
And that 's why we think the animals live longer .
So you can think of FOXO as being like a building superintendent .
So maybe he 's a little bit lazy , but he 's there , he 's taking care of the building .
But it 's deteriorating .
And then suddenly , he learns that there 's going to be a hurricane .
So he doesn 't actually do anything himself .
He gets on the telephone -- just like FOXO gets on the DNA -- and he calls up the roofer , the window person , the painter , the floor person .
And they all come and they fortify the house .
And then the hurricane comes through , and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in .
And not only that , it can also just last longer , even if there isn 't a hurricane .
So that 's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists .
Now the really cool thing about FOXO is that there are different forms of it .
We all have FOXO genes , but we don 't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene .
Just like we all have eyes , but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes .
And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100 .
And that 's the case all over the world , as you can see from these stars .
And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked , " Okay , are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time ? " and there are .
We don 't know the details of how this works , but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people .
And that means that , maybe if we tweak it a little bit , we can increase the health and longevity of people .
So this is really exciting to me .
A FOXO is a protein that we found in these little , round worms to affect lifespan , and here it affects lifespan in people .
So we 've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases .
And I 'm really optimistic that this is going to work .
There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging .
And for at least one of them , there is a drug .
There 's one called TOR , which is another nutrient sensor , like the insulin pathway .
And mutations that damage the TOR gene -- just like the daf-2 mutations -- extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice .
But in this case , there 's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity .
And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse -- even when it 's pretty old , like age 60 for a human , that old for a mouse -- if you give the mouse rapamycin , it will live longer .
Now I don 't want you all to go out taking rapamycin .
It is a drug for people , but the reason is it suppresses the immune system .
So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected .
So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer .
But still , here in the year 2011 , there 's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan , which comes out of this science that 's been done in all these different animals .
So I 'm really optimistic , and I think it won 't be too long , I hope , before this age-old dream begins to come true .
Thank you .
Matt Ridley : Thank you , Cynthia .
Let me get this straight .
Although you 're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me , what you could do now pretty well in the lab , if you were allowed ethically , is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer ?
Ah , so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes , they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity .
So if you stop taking the drug , the protein would go back to normal .
You could change the genes in principle .
There isn 't the technology to do that .
But I don 't think that 's a good idea .
And the reason is that these hormones , like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway , they 're essential .
If you knock them out completely , then you 're very sick .
So it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems .
And I think that 's much better , that kind of control would be much better as a drug .
And also , there are other ways of activating FOXO that don 't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer .
MR : I wasn 't suggesting that I was going to go and do it , but ...
There 's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about , which is a negligible senescence .
There are some creatures on this planet already that don 't really do aging .
Just move to one side for us , if you would .
There are . There are some animals that don 't seem to age .
For example , there are some tortoises called Blanding 's turtles .
And they grow to be about this size .
And they 've been tagged , and they 've been found to be 70 years old .
And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles , you can 't tell the difference , just by looking , between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles .
And the 70 year-old ones , actually they 're better at scouting out the good nesting places , and they also have more progeny every year .
And there are other examples of these kinds of animals , like turns , certain kinds of birds are like this .
And nobody knows if they really can live forever , or what keeps them from aging .
It 's not clear .
If you look at birds , which live a long time , cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide , things like that .
And our long-lived mutants are too .
They 're more resistant to these kinds of stresses .
So it could be that the pathways that I 've been talking about , which are set to run really quickly in the worm , have a different normal set point in something like a bird , so that a bird can live a lot longer .
And maybe they 're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all -- but we don 't know .
MR : But what you 're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death , so much as extending human youthspan .
Yes , that 's right .
It 's more like , say , if you were a dog .
You notice that you 're getting old , and you look at your human and you think , " Why isn 't this human getting old ? "
They 're not getting old in the dog 's lifespan .
It 's more like that .
But now we 're the human looking out and imagining a different human .
MR : Thank you very much indeed , Cynthia Kenyon .
Dan Phillips : Creative houses from reclaimed stuff
In this funny and insightful talk , builder Dan Phillips tours us through a dozen homes he 's built in Texas using recycled and reclaimed materials in wildly creative ways . Brilliant , low-tech design details will refresh your own creative drive . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Thank you very much .
I have a few pictures , and I 'll talk a little bit about how I 'm able to do what I do .
All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material , stuff that was headed to the mulcher , the landfill , the burn pile .
It was all just gone .
This is the first house I built .
This double front door here with the three-light transom that was headed to the landfill .
Have a little turret there .
And then these buttons on the corbels here .
Right there -- those are hickory nuts .
And these buttons there -- those are chicken eggs .
Of course , first you have breakfast , and then you fill the shell full of Bondo and paint it and nail it up , and you have an architectural button in just a fraction of the time .
Then , this is a look at the inside .
You can see the three-light transom there with the eyebrow windows -- certainly an architectural antique headed to the landfill .
Even the lockset is probably worth 200 dollars .
Everything in the kitchen was salvaged .
There 's a 1952 O 'Keefe & amp ; Merritt stove , if you like to cook -- cool stove .
This is going up into the turret .
I got that staircase for 20 dollars , including delivery to my lot .
Then , looking up in the turret , you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth .
Well , if that ruins your life , well then you shouldn 't live there .
This is a laundry chute , and this right here is a shoe last .
And those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops .
So I had one of those , so I made some low-tech gadgetry , there , where you just stomp on the shoe last and then the door flies open , you throw your laundry down .
And then if you 're smart enough , it goes on a basket on top of the washer .
If not , it goes into the toilet .
This is a bathtub I made , made out of scrap two-by-four here .
Started with a rim there and then glued and nailed it up into a flat , corbelled it up and flipped it over , then did the two profiles on this side .
It 's a two-person tub .
After all , it 's not just a question of hygiene , but there 's a possibility of recreation as well .
Then , this faucet here is just a piece of Osage Orange .
It looks a little phallic , but after all , it 's a bathroom .
Then , this is a house based on a Budweiser can .
It doesn 't look like a can of beer , but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable .
The barley hops design worked up into the eaves , then the dentil work comes directly off the can 's red , white , blue and silver .
Then , these corbeles going down underneath the eaves are that little design that comes off the can .
I just put a can on a copier and kept enlarging it until I got the size I want .
Then , on the can it says , " This is the famous Budweiser beer , we know of no other beer , blah , blah , blah . "
So we changed that and put , " This is the famous Budweiser house .
We don 't know of any other house , " and so forth and so on .
Then , this is a deadbolt . It 's a fence from a 1930s shaper , which is a very angry woodworking machine .
And they gave me the fence , but they didn 't give me the shaper , so we made a deadbolt out of it .
That 'll keep bull elephants out , I promise .
And sure enough , we 've had no problems with bull elephants .
The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer .
We 've got bubbles going up there , then suds at the top with lumpy tiles .
Where do you get lumpy tiles ? Well , of course , you don 't .
But I get a lot of toilets , and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer , and then you have lumpy tiles .
And then the faucet , there , is a beer tap .
Then , this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in America .
We 're getting tired of it . It 's kind of cliched now .
So if you put it in the front door , your design fails .
So don 't put it in the front door ; put it somewhere else .
It 's a pretty panel of glass .
But then if you put it in the front door , people say , " Oh , you 're trying to be like those guys , and you didn 't make it . "
So don 't put it there .
Then , another bathroom upstairs .
This light up here is the same light that occurs in every middle-class foyer in America .
Don 't put it in the foyer .
Put it in the shower , or in the closet , but not in the foyer .
Then , somebody gave me a bidet , so it got a bidet .
This little house here , those branches there are made out of Bois D 'arc or Osage Orange , and these pictures will keep scrolling as I talk a little bit .
In order to do what I do , you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry .
Our housing has become a commodity , and I 'll talk a little bit about that .
But the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA .
Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass .
What does that mean ?
What it means is , for every perception we have , it needs to tally with the one like it before , or we don 't have continuity , and we become a little bit disoriented .
So I can show you an object you 've never seen before .
Oh , that 's a cell phone .
But you 've never seen this one before .
What you 're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features here , and then you go through your databanks -- brrrr , cell phone .
Oh , that 's a cell phone .
If I took a bite out of it , you 'd go , " Wait a second .
That 's not a cell phone .
That 's one of those new chocolate cell phones . "
And you 'd have to start a new category , right between cell phones and chocolate .
That 's how we process information .
So you translate that to the building industry , if we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked , we go , " Oh , dear . That 's cracked . Let 's repair it .
Let 's take it out . Throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in . "
Because that 's what you do with a cracked pane .
Never mind that it doesn 't affect our lives at all .
It only rattles that expected pattern and unity of structural features .
However , if we took a small hammer , and we added cracks to all the other windows , then we have a pattern .
Because Gestalt Psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern .
We 'll go , " Ooh , that 's nice . "
So , that serves me every day .
Repetition creates pattern .
If I have a hundred of these , a hundred of those , it doesn 't make any difference what these and those are .
If I can repeat anything , I have the possibility of a pattern from hickory nuts and chicken eggs , shards of glass , branches .
It doesn 't make any difference .
That causes a lot of waste in the building industry .
Second is , Friedrich Nietzsche along about 1885 wrote a book titled " The Birth of Tragedy . "
And in there he said that cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives .
On the one hand , we have an Apollonian perspective , which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect .
On the other end of the spectrum , we have a Dionysian perspective , which is more given to the passions and intuition , tolerant of organic texture and human gesture .
So the way the Apollonian personality takes a picture , or hangs a picture , is they 'll get out a transit and a laser level and a micrometer .
" Okay , honey . A thousandth of an inch to the left .
That 's where we want the picture . Right . Perfect . "
Predicated on plumb level , square and centered .
The Dionysian personality takes the picture and goes ...
That 's the difference .
I feature blemish .
I feature organic process .
Dead-center John Dewey .
Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste .
If something isn 't perfect , if it doesn 't line up with that premeditated model , dumpster .
" Oops , scratch , dumpster . "
" Oops " this , " oops " that . " Landfill . Landfill . Landfill . "
The third thing is arguably -- the Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism , then got a little jump-start along about the French Revolution .
By the middle of the 19th century , it 's in full flower .
And we have dumaflages and gizmos and contraptions that will do anything that we , up to that point , had to do my hand .
So now we have standardized materials .
Well , trees don 't grow two inches by four inches , eight , ten and twelve feet tall .
We create mountains of waste .
And they 're doing a pretty good job there in the forest , working all the byproduct of their industry -- with OSB and particle board and so forth and so on -- but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption , and that 's what 's happening .
And so if something isn 't standard , " Oops , dumpster . " " Oops " this . " Oops , warped . "
If you buy a two-by-four and it 's not straight , you can take it back .
" Oh , I 'm so sorry , sir . We 'll get you a straight one . "
Well I feature all those warped things because repetition creates pattern , and it 's from a Dionysian perspective .
The fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials .
Well , that 's just a myth .
And here 's a story : Jim Tulles , one of the guys I trained , I said , " Jim , it 's time now .
I got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew . It 's time for you to go . "
" Dan , I just don 't think I 'm ready . "
" Jim , now it 's time . You 're the down , oh . "
So we hired on .
And he was out there with his tape measure going through the trash heap , looking for header material , which is the board that goes over a door , thinking he 'd impress his boss -- that 's how we taught him to do it .
And the superintendent walked up and said , " What are you doing ? "
" Oh , just looking for some header material , " waiting for that kudos .
He said , " No , no . I 'm not paying you to go through the trash . Get back to work . "
And he had the wherewithal to say , he said , " You know , if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour , I can see how you might say that , but right now , I 'm saving you five dollars a minute .
Do the math . "
" Good call , Tulles . From now on , you guys hit this pile first . "
And the irony is that he wasn 't very good at math .
But once in a while you get access to the control room , and then you can kind of mess with the dials .
And that 's what happened there .
The fifth thing is that maybe , after 2,500 years , Plato is still having his way with us in his notion of perfect forms .
He said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want , and we force environmental resources to accommodate that .
So we all have in our head the perfect house , the American dream , which is a house , the dream house .
The problem is we can 't afford it .
So we have the American dream look-alike , which is a mobile home .
Now there 's a blight on the planet .
It 's a chattel mortgage , just like furniture , just like a car .
You write the check , and instantly it depreciates 30 percent .
After a year , you can 't get insurance on everything you have in it , only on 70 percent .
Wired with 14-gauge wire typically .
Nothing wrong with that , unless you ask it to do what 12-gauge wire 's supposed to do , and that 's what happens .
It out-gasses formaldehyde so much so that there is a federal law in place to warn new mobile home buyers of the formaldehyde atmosphere danger .
Are we just being numbingly stupid ?
The walls are this thick .
The whole thing has the structural value of corn .
" So I thought Palm Harbor Village was over there . "
" No , no . We had a wind last night .
It 's gone now . "
Then when they degrade , what do you do with them ?
Now , all that , that Apollonian , Platonic model , is what the building industry is predicated on , and there are a number of things that exacerbate that .
One is that all the professionals , all the tradesmen , vendors , inspectors , engineers , architects all think like this .
And then it works its way back to the consumer , who demands the same model .
It 's a self-fulfilling prophecy . We can 't get out of it .
Then here come the marketeers and the advertisers .
" Woo . Woohooo . "
We buy stuff we didn 't know we needed .
All we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice .
How disgusting .
But you know what they did ? They hooked a metaphor into it and said , " I drink Dr. Pepper ... "
And pretty soon , we 're swilling that stuff by the lake-ful , by the billions of gallons .
It doesn 't even have real prunes . Doesn 't even keep you regular .
My oh my , that makes it worse .
And we get sucked into that faster than anything .
Then a man named Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book titled " Being and Nothingness . "
It 's a pretty quick read .
You can snap through it in maybe two years if you read eight hours a day .
In there he talked about the divided self .
He said human beings act differently when they know they 're alone than when they know somebody else is around .
So if I 'm eating spaghetti , and I know I 'm alone , I can eat like a backhoe .
I can wipe my mouth on my sleeve , napkin on the table , chew with my mouth open , make little noises , scratch wherever I want .
But as soon as you walk in , I go , " Ooh . Spaghetti sauce there . "
Napkin in my lap , half bites , chew with my mouth closed , no scratching .
Now what I 'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life .
I feel that expectation , and so I accommodate it , and I 'm living my life according to what you expect me to do .
That happens in the building industry as well .
That 's why all of our subdivisions look the same .
Sometimes we even have these formalized cultural expectations .
I 'll bet all your shoes match .
Sure enough , we all buy into that , and with gated communities , we have a formalized expectation with a homeowners association .
Sometimes those guys are Nazis , my oh my .
That exacerbates and continues this model .
The last thing is gregariousness .
Human beings are a social species .
We like to hang together in groups , just like wildebeests , just like lions .
Wildebeests don 't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests .
Human beings are like that .
We do what that group does that we 're trying to identify with .
And so you see this in junior high a lot .
Those kids , they 'll work all summer long , kill themselves , so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans .
So along about September they can stride in and go , " I 'm important today .
See , look , don 't touch my designer jeans .
I see you don 't have designer jeans .
You 're not one of the beautiful people .
See , I 'm one of the beautiful people . See my jeans ? "
Right there is reason enough to have uniforms .
And so that happens in the building industry as well .
We have confused Maslow 's hierarchy of needs just a little bit .
On the bottom tier we have basic needs -- shelter , clothing , food , water , mating and so forth .
Second , security . Third , relationships .
Fourth , status , self-esteem -- that is , vanity .
And we 're taking vanity and shoving it down here .
And so we end up with vain decisions and we can 't even afford our mortgage .
We can 't even afford to eat anything except beans .
That is , our housing has become a commodity .
And it takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal , terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions and not make our housing a commodity , but make it something that bubbles up from seminal sources .
That takes a little bit of nerve , and , darn it , once in a while you fail .
But that 's okay .
If failure destroys you , then you can 't do this .
I fail all the time , every day , and I 've had some whopping failures , I promise , big , public , humiliating , embarrassing failures .
Everybody points and laughs , and they say , " He tried it a fifth time and it still didn 't work .
What a moron . "
Early on , contractors come by and say , " Dan , you 're a cute little bunny , but you know , this just isn 't going to work .
What don 't you do this , and why don 't you do that ? "
And your instinct is to say , " Why don 't you suck an egg ? "
But you don 't say that , because they 're the guys you 're targeting .
And so what we 've done -- and this isn 't just in housing .
It 's in clothing and food and our transportation needs , our energy -- we sprawl just a little bit .
And when I get a little bit of press , I hear from people all over the world .
And we may have invented excess , but the problem of waste is worldwide .
We 're in trouble .
And I don 't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana , but we 're clearly in trouble .
And what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say , " You know , I think I would like to put CDs across the wall there .
What do you think , honey ? "
If it doesn 't work , take it down .
What we need to do is reconnect with who we really are , and that 's thrilling indeed .
Thank you very much .
Jay Walker : My library of human imagination
Jay Walker , curator of the Library of Human Imagination , conducts a surprising show-and-tell session highlighting a few of the intriguing artifacts that backdropped the 2008 TED stage .
These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years , and are responsible for much of what 's gone on on our planet .
This is an example of a real meteorite , and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth , and just how much of it survives and melts .
From a meteorite from space , we 're over here with an original Sputnik .
This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space .
This is not a copy .
The space age began 50 years ago in October , and that 's exactly what Sputnik looked like .
And it wouldn 't be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back , on Apollo 11 .
The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits .
They would bring them back and mount them .
So this has actually been carried to the moon and back .
So that 's for fun .
The dawn of books is , of course , important .
And it wouldn 't be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible .
You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455 .
But what 's interesting about the Guttenberg Bible , and the dawn of this technology , is not the book .
You see , the book was not driven by reading .
In 1455 , nobody could read .
So why did the printing press succeed ?
This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible .
So you 're looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man , 550 years ago .
We are living at the age here at the end of the book , where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it .
But why is this so interesting ? Here 's the quick story .
It turns out that in the 1450s , the Catholic Church needed money , and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences , which were forgiveness 's on pieces of paper .
They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands .
They got you out of purgatory faster .
And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences , which was the equivalent of printing money .
And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 -- to print out thousands , and then hundreds of thousands , and then ultimately millions of single , small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven .
That is why the printing press succeeded , and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door : because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe .
So the printing press , ladies and gentlemen , was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading .
More tomorrow . I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures .
We 're going to have some tomorrow .
Instead of showing an object from the stage I 'm going to do something special for the first time .
We are going to show , actually , what the library looks like , OK ?
So , I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world .
You 're going to find out why in a minute , because when I went to see Eileen , this is what I said I wanted to build .
This is the Library of Human Imagination .
The room itself is three stories tall .
In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled .
The room is a theatre . It changes colors .
And all throughout the library are different objects , different spaces .
It 's designed like an Escher print .
Here is some of the lower level of the library , where the exhibits constantly change .
You can walk through . You can touch .
You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room .
There 's my very own Saturn V.
Everybody should have one , OK ?
So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects .
In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination .
There is a glass bridge that you walk across that 's suspended in space .
So it 's a leap of imagination .
How do we create ?
Part of the question that I have answered is , is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli : with human achievement , with history , with the things that drive us and make us human -- the passionate discovery , the bones of dinosaurs long gone , the maps of space that we 've experienced , and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination .
So hopefully tomorrow I 'll show one or two more objects from the stage , but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it .
And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community .
TED is all about patterns in the clouds .
It 's all about connections .
It 's all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before .
And that 's really what discovery and imagination is all about .
For example , we can look at a DNA molecule model here .
None of us really have ever seen one , but we know it exists because we 've been taught to understand this molecule .
But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine .
Now , you might say , what does this have to do with this ?
Well , this is the code for life , and this is a code for death .
These two molecules code and decode .
And yet , looking at them , you would see a machine and a molecule .
But once you 've seen them in a new way , you realize that both of these things really are connected .
And they 're connected primarily because of this here .
You see , this is a human brain model , OK ?
And it 's rare , because we never really get to see a brain .
We get to see a skull . But there it is .
All of imagination -- everything that we think , we feel , we sense -- comes through the human brain .
And once we create new patterns in this brain , once we shape the brain in a new way , it never returns to its original shape .
And I 'll give you a quick example .
We think about the Internet ; we think about information that goes across the Internet .
And we never think about the hidden connection .
But I brought along here a lump of coal -- right here , one lump of coal .
And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet ?
You see , it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net .
So every time you download a file , each megabyte is a lump of coal .
What that means is , a 200-megabyte file looks like this , ladies and gentlemen . OK ?
So the next time you download a gigabyte , or two gigabytes , it 's not for free , OK ?
The connection is the energy it takes to run the web , and to make everything we think possible , possible .
Thanks , Chris .
Ali Carr-Chellman : Gaming to re-engage boys in learning
In her talk , Ali Carr-Chellman pinpoints three reasons boys are tuning out of school in droves , and lays out her bold plan to re-engage them : bringing their culture into the classroom , with new rules that let boys be boys , and video games that teach as well as entertain .
So I 'm here to tell you that we have a problem with boys , and it 's a serious problem with boys .
Their culture isn 't working in schools , and I 'm going to share with you ways that we can think about overcoming that problem .
First , I want to start by saying , this is a boy , and this is a girl , and this is probably stereotypically what you think of as a boy and a girl .
If I essentialize gender for you today , then you can dismiss what I have to say .
So I 'm not going to do that . I 'm not interested in doing that .
This is a different kind of boy and a different kind of girl .
So the point here is that not all boys exist within these rigid boundaries of what we think of as boys and girls , and not all girls exist within those rigid boundaries of what we think of as girls .
But , in fact , most boys tend to be a certain way , and most girls tend to be a certain way .
And the point is that , for boys , the way that they exist and the culture that they embrace isn 't working well in schools now .
How do we know that ?
The Hundred Girls Project tells us some really nice statistics .
For example , for every 100 girls that are suspended from school , there are 250 boys that are suspended from school .
For every 100 girls who are expelled from school , there are 335 boys who are expelled from school .
For every 100 girls in special education , there are 217 boys .
For every 100 girls with a learning disability , there are 276 boys .
For every 100 girls with an emotional disturbance diagnosed , we have 324 boys .
And by the way , all of these numbers are significantly higher if you happen to be black , if you happen to be poor , if you happen to exist in an overcrowded school .
And if you are a boy , you 're four times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD -- Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder .
Now there is another side to this .
And it is important that we recognize that women still need help in school , that salaries are still significantly lower , even when controlled for job types , and that girls have continued to struggle in math and science for years .
That 's all true .
Nothing about that prevents us from paying attention to the literacy needs of our boys between ages three and 13 .
And so we should .
In fact , what we ought to do is take a page from their playbook , because the initiatives and programs that have been set in place for women in science and engineering and mathematics are fantastic .
They 've done a lot of good for girls in these situations , and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years .
Even in their older years , what we find is that there 's still a problem .
When we look at the universities , 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees are going to women now , which is a significant shift .
And in fact , university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities .
This makes university administrators very nervous , because girls don 't want to go to schools that don 't have boys .
And so we 're starting to see the establishment of men centers and men studies to think about how do we engage men in their experiences in the university .
If you talk to faculty , they may say , " Ugh . Yeah , well , they 're playing video games , and they 're gambling online all night long , and they 're playing World of Warcraft , and that 's affecting their academic achievement . "
Guess what ?
Video games are not the cause .
Video games are a symptom .
They were turned off a long time before they got here .
So let 's talk about why they got turned off when they were between the ages of three and 13 .
There are three reasons that I believe that boys are out of sync with the culture of schools today .
The first is zero tolerance .
A kindergarten teacher I know , her son donated all of his toys to her , and when he did , she had to go through and pull out all the little plastic guns .
You can 't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom .
What is it that we 're afraid that this young man is going to do with this gun ?
I mean , really .
But here he stands as testament to the fact that you can 't roughhouse on the playground today .
Now I 'm not advocating for bullies .
I 'm not suggesting that we need to be allowing guns and knives into school .
But when we say that an Eagle Scout in a high school classroom who has a locked parked car in the parking lot and a penknife in it has to be suspended from school , I think we may have gone a little too far with zero tolerance .
Another way that zero tolerance lives itself out is in the writing of boys .
In a lot of classrooms today you 're not allowed to write about anything that 's violent .
You 're not allowed to write about anything that has to do with video games -- these topics are banned .
Boy comes home from school , and he says , " I hate writing . "
" Why do you hate writing , son ? What 's wrong with writing ? "
" Now I have to write what she tells me to write . "
" Okay , what is she telling you to write ? "
" Poems . I have to write poems .
And little moments in my life .
I don 't want to write that stuff . "
" All right . Well , what do you want to write ? What do you want to write about ? "
" I want to write about video games . I want to write about leveling-up .
I want to write about this really interesting world .
I want to write about a tornado that comes into our house and blows all the windows out and ruins all the furniture and kills everybody . "
" All right . Okay . "
You tell a teacher that , and they 'll ask you , in all seriousness , " Should we send this child to the psychologist ? "
And the answer is no , he 's just a boy .
He 's just a little boy .
It 's not okay to write these kinds of things in classrooms today .
So that 's the first reason : zero tolerance policies and the way they 're lived out .
The next reason that boys ' cultures are out of sync with school cultures : there are fewer male teachers .
Anybody who 's over 15 doesn 't know what this means , because in the last 10 years , the number of elementary school classroom teachers has been cut in half .
We went from 14 percent to seven percent .
That means that 93 percent of the teachers that our young men get in elementary classrooms are women .
Now what 's the problem with this ?
Women are great . Yep , absolutely .
But male role models for boys that say it 's all right to be smart -- they 've got dads , they 've got pastors , they 've got Cub Scout leaders , but ultimately , six hours a day , five days a week they 're spending in a classroom , and most of those classrooms are not places where men exist .
And so they say , I guess this really isn 't a place for boys .
This is a place for girls .
And I 'm not very good at this , so I guess I 'd better go play video games or get into sports , or something like that , because I obviously don 't belong here .
Men don 't belong here , that 's pretty obvious .
So that may be a very direct way that we see it happen .
But less directly , the lack of male presence in the culture -- you 've got a teachers ' lounge , and they 're having a conversation about Joey and Johnny who beat each other up on the playground .
" What are we going to do with these boys ? "
The answer to that question changes depending on who 's sitting around that table .
Are there men around that table ?
Are there moms who 've raised boys around that table ?
You 'll see , the conversation changes depending upon who 's sitting around the table .
Third reason that boys are out of sync with school today : kindergarten is the old second grade , folks .
We have a serious compression of the curriculum happening out there .
When you 're three , you better be able to write your name legibly , or else we 'll consider it a developmental delay .
By the time you 're in first grade , you should be able to read paragraphs of text with maybe a picture , maybe not , in a book of maybe 25 to 30 pages .
If you don 't , we 're probably going to be putting you into a Title 1 special reading program .
And if you ask Title 1 teachers , they 'll tell you they 've got about four or five boys for every girl that 's in their program , in the elementary grades .
The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is " you need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time . "
The teacher 's salary depends on " No Child Left Behind " and " Race to the Top " and accountability and testing and all of this .
So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum -- and girls .
This compressed curriculum is bad for all active kids .
And what happens is , she says , " Please , sit down , be quiet , do what you 're told , follow the rules , manage your time , focus , be a girl . "
That 's what she tells them .
Indirectly , that 's what she tells them .
And so this is a very serious problem . Where is it coming from ?
It 's coming from us .
We want our babies to read when they are six months old .
Have you seen the ads ?
We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average , but what this does to our children is really not healthy .
It 's not developmentally appropriate , and it 's particularly bad for boys .
So what do we do ?
We need to meet them where they are .
We need to put ourselves into boy culture .
We need to change the mindset of acceptance in boys in elementary schools .
More specifically , we can do some very specific things .
We can design better games .
Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards .
They 're glorified drill and practice .
They don 't have the depth , the rich narrative that really engaging video games have , that the boys are really interested in .
So we need to design better games .
We need to talk to teachers and parents and school board members and politicians .
We need to make sure that people see that we need more men in the classroom .
We need to look carefully at our zero tolerance policies .
Do they make sense ?
We need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can , trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them .
All of those conversations need to be happening .
There are some great examples out there of schools -- the New York Times just talked about a school recently .
A game designer from the New School put together a wonderful video gaming school .
But it only treats a few kids , and so this isn 't very scalable .
We have to change the culture and the feelings that politicians and school board members and parents have about the way we accept and what we accept in our schools today .
We need to find more money for game design .
Because good games , really good games , cost money , and World of Warcraft has quite a budget .
Most of the educational games do not .
Where we started : my colleagues -- Mike Petner , Shawn Vashaw , myself -- we started by trying to look at the teachers ' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming , what do they say about it .
And we discovered that they talk about the kids in their school , who talk about gaming , in pretty demeaning ways .
They say , " Oh , yeah . They 're always talking about that stuff .
They 're talking about their little action figures and their little achievements or merit badges , or whatever it is that they get .
And they 're always talking about this stuff . "
And they say these things as if it 's okay .
But if it were your culture , think of how that might feel .
It 's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language .
They 're nervous about anything that has anything to do with violence because of the zero tolerance policies .
They are sure that parents and administrators will never accept anything .
So we really need to think about looking at teacher attitudes and finding ways to change the attitudes so that teachers are much more open and accepting of boy cultures in their classrooms .
Because , ultimately , if we don 't , then we 're going to have boys who leave elementary school saying , " Well I guess that was just a place for girls .
It wasn 't for me .
So I 've got to do gaming , or I 've got to do sports . "
If we change these things , if we pay attention to these things , and we re-engage boys in their learning , they will leave the elementary schools saying , " I 'm smart . "
Thank you .
Heather Knight : Silicon-based comedy
In this first-of-its-kind demo , Heather Knight introduces Data , a robotic stand-up comedian that does much more than rattle off one-liners -- it gathers audience feedback and tunes its act as the crowd responds . Is this thing on ?
Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields .
So tonight I 'd like to tell you about the intersection that I 'm most excited about at this very moment , which is entertainment and robotics .
So if we 're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society , maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts .
I 'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology .
Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology .
With my new venture , Marilyn Monrobot , I would like to use art to create tech .
So we 're based in New York City .
And if you 're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot , or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation , please contact me , the Bot-Agent .
The bot , our rising celebrity , also has his own Twitter account : @ robotinthewild .
I 'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots , Data .
He 's named after the Star Trek character .
I think he 's going to be super popular .
We 've got the robot -- in his head is a database of a lot of jokes .
Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes .
So it knows something about the subject ; it knows about the length .
It knows how much it 's moving .
And so it 's going to try to watch your response .
I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today .
It can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things , sort of like Netflix-style , over longer-term to different communities or audiences , children versus adults , different cultures .
You can learn something from the robot about the community that you 're in .
And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions .
Some of you in this middle section -- you have red / green paddles .
If you like what 's going on , show the green .
If you don 't like the subject or the performance , you can hold the red .
Now don 't be shy .
It 's just a robot .
It doesn 't have feelings ... yet .
And the rest of you , you still count , you still matter .
There 's also a microphone that 's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing -- I hope not -- to help make some of its next decisions .
Right , so , let the robot stand-up comedy begin .
Data : Hello TEDWomen .
It 's an honor to be here .
You guys are looking good out there .
Ready for some jokes ?
Data : Here 's the first one .
Right , so , a doctor says to his patient , " I have bad news and worse news .
The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live . "
" That 's terrible , " said the patient .
" How can the news possibly be worse ? "
" I 've been trying to contact you since yesterday . "
The Swiss have an interesting army . Five hundred years without a war .
Heather Knight : He 's talking about the Swiss .
Data : Pretty lucky for them .
Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with ?
" Come on buddy , I have the toe clippers right here .
You get past me , the guy behind me has a spoon . "
HK : He 's a French robot .
Data : A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods .
One of them falls to the ground .
He does not seem to be breathing .
The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911 .
He gasps to the operator , " My friend is dead .
What can I do ? "
The operator says , " Just take it easy .
I can help .
First , let 's make sure he 's dead . "
There is a silence , and the operator hears a shot .
The guy 's voice comes back on the line , " Okay , now what ? "
Question : Why is television called a medium ?
Anyone ?
Because it 's neither rare nor well done .
But to be completely honest with you , I kind of love television .
Any of you like television ? Audience : Yes .
Data : I find it incredibly educational .
Actually , as soon as someone turns it on , I go into the other room and read .
That 's all for now .
Was that okay for my first time ?
You 've been a great audience .
Thank you .
HK : Yay .
So this is actually the first time we 've ever done live audience feedback to a performance .
So thank you all for being a part of it .
There 's a lot more to come .
And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression .
Thank you very much .
TED 's nonprofit transition
Chris Anderson gave this talk in 2002 , prior to taking over leadership of TED . Founder Richard Saul Wurman was leaving , and TED 's future was in the balance . He seeks to persuade TEDsters that what was then a for-profit conference had a secure future as an idea-based nonprofit endeavor .
This is your conference , and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now , in this transition period , about this guy who 's going to be looking after it for you for a bit .
So , I 'm just going to grab a chair here .
Two years ago at TED , I think -- I 've come to this conclusion -- I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion .
I think that I may have believed unconsciously , then , that I was kind of a business hero .
I had this company that I 'd spent 15 years building . It 's called Future ; it was a magazine publishing company .
It had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars , a number I didn 't really understand .
A magazine I 'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory , busy pumping hot air into the bubble .
And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more .
And all this had come from nothing .
Fifteen years earlier , I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said , " I really would like to start my own computer magazine . "
And 15 years later , there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times .
The date was February 2000 .
I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore 's Law -- ever upward and to the right -- it was going to go on forever .
I mean , it had to . Right ? I was in for quite a surprise .
The dotcom , ironically called Snowball , was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded , and I entered 18 months of business hell .
I watched everything that I 'd built crumbling , and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing .
And it was gut wrenching .
It took eight years of blood , sweat and tears to reach 350 employees , something which I was very proud of in the business .
February 2001 -- in one day we laid off 350 people , and before the bloodshed was finished , 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies . I felt sick .
I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day , every day , for 18 months .
And worse than that , far worse than that , my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating .
I was going around with this big sign on my forehead : " LOSER . "
And I think what disgusts me more than anything , looking back , is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing ?
Well , in the end , we were able to save Future and Snowball , but I was , at that point , ready to move on .
And to cut a long story short , here 's where I came to .
And the reason I 'm telling this story is that I believe , from many conversations , that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster -- emotional rollercoaster -- in the last couple years .
This has been a big , big transition time , and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever 's next .
The theme next year is re-birth .
It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED .
And at about the same time , and I think partly because of that , I started doing something that I 'd forgotten about in my business focus : I started to read again .
And I discovered that while I 'd been busy playing business games , there 'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest : cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to ... all this stuff had changed .
And the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much , and it was incredibly exciting .
And what was really most exciting -- and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did -- was that all this stuff is connected .
It 's connected ; it all hooks into each other .
We talk about this a lot , and I thought about trying to give an example of this . So , just one example : Madame de Gaulle , the wife of the French president , was famously asked once , " What do you most desire ? "
And she answered , " A penis . "
And when you think about it , it 's very true : what we all most desire is a penis -- or " happiness " as we say in English .
And something ... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room .
But something as basic as happiness , which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue , today it turns out that there 's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it , which are really interesting .
You can ask about what causes it biochemically : neuroscience , serotonin , all that stuff .
You can ask what are the psychological causes of it : nature ? Nurture ? Current circumstance ?
Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing .
You can view it as a computing problem , an artificial intelligence problem : do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly ?
You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say , why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness , and whereas almost all the rest of them , regardless of how much money they have -- whether it 's two dollars a day or whatever -- are almost equally happy on average ?
Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing : did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways ? The ant 's brain , parasitized , to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate ?
Are we the victims of a mass delusion ?
And so on , and so on .
To understand even something as important to us as happiness , you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions , and there 's nowhere that I 've discovered -- other than TED -- where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions .
And so , it 's the profound thing that Richard talks about : to understand anything , you just need to understand the little bits ; a little bit about everything that surrounds it .
And so , gradually over these three days , you start off kind of trying to figure out , " Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff ? "
And at the end of the four days , your brain is humming and you feel energized , alive and excited , and it 's because all these different bits have been put together .
It 's the total brain experience , we 're going to ...
it 's the mental equivalent of the full body massage .
Every mental organ addressed . It really is .
Enough of the theory , Chris . Tell us what you 're actually going to do , all right ?
So , I will . Here 's the vision for TED .
Number one : do nothing . This thing ain 't broke , so I ain 't gonna fix it .
Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me , " Chris , TED is a really great conference .
You 're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad . "
So , I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason , and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with .
Truth , curiosity , diversity , no selling , no corporate bullshit , no bandwagoning , no platforms .
Just the pursuit of interest , wherever it lies , across all the disciplines that are represented here .
That 's not going to be changed at all .
Number two : I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year .
The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines .
There 's a year to do this , and already -- I hope to show you a bit later -- there 's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year .
And I 'm getting fantastic help from the community ; this is just such a great community . And combined , our contacts reach pretty much everyone who 's interesting in the country , if not the planet .
It 's true .
Number three : I do want to , if I can , find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit .
And one key way that we 're going to do this is to introduce this book club .
Books kind of saved me in the last couple years , and that 's a gift that I would like to pass on .
So , when you sign up for TED2003 , every six weeks you 'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they 're linked to TED .
They may well be by a TED speaker , and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual , emotional journey .
I think it will be great .
And then , fourthly : I want to mention the Sapling Foundation , which is the new owner of TED .
What Sapling 's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for .
And more important , I think , the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use , because there 's fantastic synergy .
Already , just in the last few days , we 've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about , that they 're passionate about , that can make a difference in the world , and the idea of getting this group of people together -- some of the causes that we believe in , the money that this conference can raise and the ideas -- I really believe that that combination will , over time , make a difference .
I 'm incredibly excited about that .
In fact , I don 't think , overall , that I 've been as excited by anything ever in my life .
I 'm in this for the long run , and I would be greatly honored and excited if you 'll come on this journey with me .
Carolyn Porco : Could a Saturn moon harbor life ?
Carolyn Porco shares exciting new findings from the Cassini spacecraft 's recent sweep of one of Saturn 's moons , Enceladus . Samples gathered from the moon 's icy geysers hint that an ocean under its surface could harbor life .
Two years ago here at TED I reported that we had discovered at Saturn , with the Cassini Spacecraft , an anomalously warm and geologically active region at the southern tip of the small Saturnine moon Enceladus , seen here .
This region seen here for the first time in the Cassini image taken in 2005 . This is the south polar region , with the famous tiger-stripe fractures crossing the south pole .
And seen just recently in late 2008 , here is that region again , now half in darkness because the southern hemisphere is experiencing the onset of August and eventually winter .
And I also reported that we 'd made this mind-blowing discovery -- this once-in-a-lifetime discovery of towering jets erupting from those fractures at the south pole , consisting of tiny water ice crystals accompanied by water vapor and simple organic compounds like carbon dioxide and methane .
And at that time two years ago I mentioned that we were speculating that these jets might in fact be geysers , and erupting from pockets or chambers of liquid water underneath the surface , but we weren 't really sure .
However , the implications of those results -- of a possible environment within this moon that could support prebiotic chemistry , and perhaps life itself -- were so exciting that , in the intervening two years , we have focused more on Enceladus .
We 've flown the Cassini Spacecraft by this moon now several times , flying closer and deeper into these jets , into the denser regions of these jets , so that now we have come away with some very precise compositional measurements .
And we have found that the organic compounds coming from this moon are in fact more complex than we previously reported .
While they 're not amino acids , we 're now finding things like propane and benzene , hydrogen cyanide , and formaldehyde .
And the tiny water crystals here now look for all the world like they are frozen droplets of salty water , which is a discovery that suggests that not only do the jets come from pockets of liquid water , but that that liquid water is in contact with rock .
And that is a circumstance that could supply the chemical energy and the chemical compounds needed to sustain life .
So we are very encouraged by these results .
And we are much more confident now than we were two years ago that we might indeed have on this moon , under the south pole , an environment or a zone that is hospitable to living organisms .
Whether or not there are living organisms there , of course , is an entirely different matter .
And that will have to await the arrival , back at Enceladus , of the spacecrafts , hopefully some time in the near future , specifically equipped to address that particular question .
But in the meantime I invite you to imagine the day when we might journey to the Saturnine system , and visit the Enceladus interplanetary geyser park , just because we can .
Thank you .
Stefan Sagmeister : 7 rules for making more happiness
Using simple , delightful illustrations , designer Stefan Sagmeister shares his latest thinking on happiness -- both the conscious and unconscious kind . His seven rules for life and design happiness can apply to everyone seeking more joy .
I spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness -- trying to see if I can actually train my mind in a particular way , like I can train my body , so I can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being .
Then this January , my mother died , and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me .
So in a very typical , silly designer fashion , after years worth of work , pretty much all I have to show for it are the titles for the film .
They were still done when I was on sabbatical with my company in Indonesia .
We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs .
It was a little bit too funky , and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way -- fashion .
My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest , and monkeys , of course , are supposed to be the happiest of all animals .
So we trained them to be able to do three separate words , to lay out them properly .
You can see , there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there .
The serif is not really in place .
So of course , what you don 't do properly yourself is never deemed done really .
So this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the Sayan Valley in Indonesia .
In that year , what I did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys , looking at a lot of data on this subject .
And it turns out that men and women report very , very similar levels of happiness .
This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at .
That climate plays no role .
That if you live in the best climate , in San Diego in the United States , or in the shittiest climate , in Buffalo , New York , you are going to be just as happy in either place .
If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S. , any salary increase you 're going to experience will have only a tiny , tiny influence on your overall well-being .
Black people are just as happy as white people are .
If you 're old or young it doesn 't really make a difference .
If you 're ugly or if you 're really , really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever .
You will adapt to it and get used to it .
If you have manageable health problems it doesn 't really matter .
Now this does matter .
So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left -- meaning that , if you have a lot of friends , and you have meaningful friendships , that does make a lot of difference .
As well as being married -- you are likely to be much happier than if you are single .
A fellow TED speaker , Jonathan Haidt , came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind .
He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant , the unconscious .
And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do , but the elephant really has his own ideas .
If I look at my own life , I 'm born in 1962 in Austria .
If I would have been born a hundred years earlier , the big decisions in my life would have been made for me -- meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in ; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did ; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected .
I , of course , and all of us , are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives .
We live where we want to be -- at least in the West .
We become what we really are interested in .
We choose our own profession , and we choose our own partners .
And so it 's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of .
If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George , when he decides on where he wants to live -- is it Florida or North Dakota ? -- he goes and lives in Georgia .
And if you look at a guy called Dennis , when he decides what to become -- is it a lawyer , or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher ? -- best chance is that he wants to become a dentist .
And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack , somehow Paul sounds the most interesting .
And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons , it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable .
Now I , of course , thought , " Well this is American data , " and I thought , " Well , those silly Americans .
They get influenced by things that they 're not aware of .
This is just completely ridiculous . "
Then , of course , I looked at my mom and my dad -- Karolina and Karl , and grandmom and granddad , Josefine and Josef .
So I am looking still for a Stephanie .
I 'll figure something out .
If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer , the easiest answer , of course , is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don 't like to do -- for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do .
I 'm a big list maker , so I came up with a list .
One of them is to think without pressure .
This is a project we 're working on right now with a very healthy deadline .
It 's a book on culture , and , as you can see , culture is rapidly drifting around .
Doing things like I 'm doing right now -- traveling to Cannes .
The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali -- clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture , not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there .
Quite consciously , design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques , just basically to fight straightforward adaptation .
Being close to the content -- that 's the content really is close to my heart .
This is a bus , or vehicle , for a charity , for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States -- carefully designed , so , by two inches , it still clears highway overpasses .
Having end results -- things that come back from the printer well , like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils .
Working on projects that actually have visible impacts , like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous .
It just came out six months ago , and it 's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany .
And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest .
And lately , to be involved in projects where I know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new .
So in this case , it 's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens .
And I of course knew stuff , as a designer , about typography , even though we worked with those animals not so successfully .
But I didn 't quite know all that much about movement or film .
And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project .
But also because the content was very close .
In this case , " Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development " -- I 've been keeping a diary since I was 12 .
And I 've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way .
In this case also because it 's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on -- that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary .
Thank you so much .
Sean Gourley : The mathematics of war
By analyzing raw data on violent incidents in the Iraq war and others , Sean Gourley and his team claim to have found a surprisingly strong mathematical relationship linking the fatality and frequency of attacks .
We look around the media , as we see on the news from Iraq , Afghanistan , Sierra Leone , and the conflict seems incomprehensible to us .
And that 's certainly how it seemed to me when I started this project .
But as a physicist , I thought , well if you give me some data , I could maybe understand this . You know , give us a go .
So as a naive New Zealander I thought , well I 'll go to the Pentagon .
Can you get me some information ?
No . So I had to think a little harder .
And I was watching the news one night in Oxford .
And I looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice .
And I saw that there was information there .
There was data within the streams of news that we consume .
All this noise around us actually has information .
So what I started thinking was , perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here .
If we can get enough of these streams of information together , we can perhaps start to understand the war .
So this is exactly what I did . We started bringing a team together , an interdisciplinary team of scientists , of economists , mathematicians .
We brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this .
We did it in three steps .
The first step we did was to collect . We did 130 different sources of information -- from NGO reports to newspapers and cable news .
We brought this raw data in and we filtered it .
We extracted the key bits on information to build the database .
That database contained the timing of attacks , the location , the size and the weapons used .
It 's all in the streams of information we consume daily , we just have to know how to pull it out .
And once we had this we could start doing some cool stuff .
What if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks ?
What would that tell us ?
So we started doing this . And you can see here on the horizontal axis you 've got the number of people killed in an attack or the size of the attack .
And on the vertical axis you 've got the number of attacks .
So we plot data for sample on this .
You see some sort of random distribution -- perhaps 67 attacks , one person was killed , or 47 attacks where seven people were killed .
We did this exact same thing for Iraq .
And we didn 't know , for Iraq what we were going to find .
It turns out what we found was pretty surprising .
You take all of the conflict , all of the chaos , all of the noise , and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict .
This blew our mind .
Why should a conflict like Iraq have this as its fundamental signature ?
Why should there be order in war ?
We didn 't really understand that .
We thought maybe there is something special about Iraq .
So we looked at a few more conflicts .
We looked at Colombia , we looked at Afghanistan , and we looked at Senegal .
And the same pattern emerged in each conflict .
This wasn 't supposed to happen .
These are different wars , with different religious factions , different political factions , and different socioeconomic problems .
And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same .
So we went a little wider .
We looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on .
From Peru to Indonesia , we studied this same pattern again .
And we found that not only were the distributions these straight lines , but the slope of these lines , they clustered around this value of alpha equals 2.5 .
And we could generate an equation that could predict the likelihood of an attack .
What we 're saying here is the probability of an attack killing X number of people in a country like Iraq is equal to a constant , times the size of that attack , raised to the power of negative alpha .
And negative alpha is the slope of that line I showed you before .
So what ?
This is data , statistics . What does it tell us about these conflicts ?
That was a challenge we had to face as physicists .
How do we explain this ?
And what we really found was that alpha , if we think about it , is the organizational structure of the insurgency .
Alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks , which is really the distribution of the group strength carrying out the attacks .
So we look at a process of group dynamics : coalescence and fragmentation , groups coming together , groups breaking apart .
And we start running the numbers on this . Can we simulate it ?
Can we create the kind of patterns that we 're seeing in places like Iraq ?
Turns out we kind of do a reasonable job .
We can run these simulations .
We can recreate this using a process of group dynamics to explain the patterns that we see all around the conflicts around the world .
So what 's going on ?
Why should these different -- seemingly different conflicts have the same patterns ?
Now what I believe is going on is that the insurgent forces , they evolve over time . They adapt .
And it turns out there is only one solution to fight a much stronger enemy .
And if you don 't find that solution as an insurgent force , you don 't exist .
So every insurgent force that is ongoing , every conflict that is ongoing , it 's going to look something like this .
And that is what we think is happening .
Taking it forward , how do we change it ?
How do we end a war like Iraq ?
What does it look like ?
Alpha is the structure . It 's got a stable state at 2.5 .
This is what wars look like when they continue .
We 've got to change that .
We can push it up : the forces become more fragmented ; there is more of them , but they are weaker .
Or we push it down : they 're more robust ; there is less groups ; but perhaps you can sit and talk to them .
So this graph here , I 'm going to show you now .
No one has seen this before . This is literally stuff that we 've come through last week .
And we see the evolution of Alpha through time .
We see it start . And we see it grow up to the stable state the wars around the world look like .
And it stays there through the invasion of Fallujah until the Samarra bombings in the Iraqi elections of ' 06 .
And the system gets perturbed . It moves upwards to a fragmented state .
This is when the surge happens .
And depending on who you ask , the surge was supposed to push it up even further .
The opposite happened .
The groups became stronger .
They became more robust .
And so I 'm thinking , right , great , it 's going to keep going down .
We can talk to them . We can get a solution . The opposite happened .
It 's moved up again . The groups are more fragmented .
And this tells me one of two things .
Either we 're back where we started and the surge has had no effect ; or finally the groups have been fragmented to the extent that we can start to think about maybe moving out .
I don 't know what the answer is to that .
But I know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency to answer that question .
Thank you .
Ryan Merkley : Online video -- annotated , remixed and popped
Videos on the web should work like the web itself : Dynamic , full of links , maps and information that can be edited and updated live , says Mozilla Foundation COO Ryan Merkley . On the TED stage he demos Popcorn Maker , a new web-based tool for easy video remixing .
To understand the world that live in , we tell stories .
And while remixing and sharing have come to define the web as we know it , all of us can now be part of that story through simple tools that allow us to make things online .
But video has been left out . It arrived on the web in a small box , and there it has remained , completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it .
In fact , in over a decade on the web , the only thing that has changed about video is the size of the box and the quality of the picture .
Popcorn changes all of that .
It 's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web .
Videos created with Popcorn behave like the web itself : dynamic , full of links , and completely remixable , and finally allowed to break free from the frame .
I want to give you a demo of a prototype that we 're working on that we 'll launch later this fall .
It will be completely free , and it will work in any browser .
So , every Popcorn production begins with the video , and so I 've made a short , 20-second clip using a newscaster template that we use in workshops .
So let 's watch it . We 'll go back , and I 'll show you how we made it .
Hi , and welcome to my newscast .
I 've added my location with a Google Map , and it 's live , so try moving it around .
You can add pop-ups with live links and custom icons , or pull in content from any web service , like Flickr , or add articles and blog posts with links out to the full content .
So let 's go back , and I 'll show you what you saw . There was a lot there .
So this is the timeline , and if you 've ever edited video , you 're familiar with this , but instead of clips in the timeline , what you 're looking at is web events pulled into the video .
Now in this Popcorn production we 've got the title card , we 've got a Google Map that shows up picture-in-picture , then Popcorn lets it push outside the frame and take over the whole screen .
There are two pop-ups bringing you some other information , and a final article with a link out to the original article .
Let 's go to this Google Map , and I 'll show you how you can edit it .
All you do , go into the timeline , double-click the item , and I 've set it to Toronto , because that 's where I 'm from .
Let 's set it to something else .
Popcorn immediately goes out onto the web , talks to Google , grabs the map , and puts it in the display .
And it 's exactly the same for the people who watch your production .
And it 's live . It 's not an image . So you click on it , you zoom in , right down to street view if you want to .
Now in the video , I mentioned adding a live feed , which we can do right now , so let 's add a live feed from Flickr . Go over to the right-hand side , grab Flickr from the list of options , drag it into the timeline , and put it where you 'd like it to go , and it immediately goes out to Flickr and starts pulling in images based on the tags . Now , my developers really like ponies , and so they 've set that as the default tag .
Let 's try something else , maybe something a bit more relevant to today .
Now here are live images being pulled straight from the feed .
If you come and watch this a week from now , this will be completely different , dynamic , just like the web , and just like the web , everything is sourced , so click your link , and you go straight to Flickr and see the source image .
Everything you 've seen today is built with the basic building blocks of the web : HTML , CSS and JavaScript .
That means it 's completely remixable . It also means there 's no proprietary software . All you need is a web browser .
So imagine if every video that we watched on the web worked like the web , completely remixable , linked to its source content , and interactive for everyone who views it .
I think Popcorn could change the way that we tell stories on the web , and the way we understand the world we live in .
Thank you .
Kiran Sethi : Kids , take charge
Kiran Bir Sethi shows how her groundbreaking Riverside School in India teaches kids life 's most valuable lesson : " I can . " Watch her students take local issues into their own hands , lead other young people , even educate their parents .
Contagious is a good word .
Even in the times of H1N1 , I like the word .
Laughter is contagious . Passion is contagious .
Inspiration is contagious .
We 've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers .
But for me , what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something I call the " I Can " bug .
So , the question is , why only them ?
In a country of a billion people and some , why so few ?
Is it luck ? Is it chance ?
Can we all not systematically and consciously get infected ?
So , in the next eight minutes I would like to share with you my story .
I got infected when I was 17 , when , as a student of the design college , I encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas , challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me .
And I was struck by just how wonderful it felt , and how contagious that feeling was .
I also realized I should have got infected when I was seven .
So , when I started Riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab , a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the " I Can " bug .
And I uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context , that if you blur the boundaries between school and life , then children go through a journey of " aware , " where they can see the change , " enable , " be changed , and then " empower , " lead the change .
And that directly increased student wellbeing .
Children became more competent , and less helpless .
But this was all common sense .
So , I 'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at Riverside .
A little background : when my grade five was learning about child rights , they were made to roll incense sticks , agarbattis , for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer .
It transformed them . What you will see is their journey , and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world .
That 's them rolling .
And in two hours , after their backs were broke , they were changed .
And once that happened , they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished .
And look at Ragav , that moment when his face changes because he 's been able to understand that he has shifted that man 's mindset .
And that can 't happen in a classroom .
So , when Ragav experienced that he went from " teacher told me , " to " I am doing it . " And that 's the " I Can " mindshift .
And it is a process that can be energized and nurtured .
But we had parents who said , " Okay , making our children good human beings is all very well , but what about math and science and English ?
Show us the grades . "
And we did . The data was conclusive .
When children are empowered , not only do they do good , they do well , in fact very well , as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in India , Riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in India in math , English and science .
So , it worked . It was now time to take it outside Riverside .
So , on August 15th , Independence Day , 2007 , the children of Riverside set out to infect Ahmedabad .
Now it was not about Riverside school .
It was about all children . So , we were shameless .
We walked into the offices of the municipal corporation , the police , the press , businesses , and basically said , " When are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child ?
When will you include the child in the city ?
Basically , open your hearts and your minds to the child . "
So , how did the city respond ?
Since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood .
Here was a city telling its child , " You can . "
A glimpse of infection in Ahmedabad .
[ Unclear ] So , the busiest streets closed down .
We have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us .
It gets taken over by children .
They are skating . They are doing street plays .
They are playing , all free , for all children .
Atul Karwal : aProCh is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier .
And we plan to extend this to other parts of the city .
Kiran Bir Sethi : And the city will give free time .
And Ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world .
Geet Sethi : When a city gives to the children , in the future the children will give back to the city .
K And because of that , Ahmedabad is known as India 's first child-friendly city .
So , you 're getting the pattern . First 200 children at Riverside .
Then 30,000 children in Ahmedabad , and growing .
It was time now to infect India .
So , on August 15th , again , Independence Day , 2009 , empowered with the same process , we empowered 100,000 children to say , " I can . "
How ? We designed a simple toolkit , converted it into eight languages , and reached 32,000 schools .
We basically gave children a very simple challenge .
We said , take one idea , anything that bothers you , choose one week , and change a billion lives .
And they did . Stories of change poured in from all over India , from Nagaland in the east , to Jhunjhunu in the west , from Sikkim in the north , to Krishnagiri in the south .
Children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems .
Right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism , and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in Rajasthan .
I mean , it was incredible .
Basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say , " You can , " then they will .
Infection in India .
This is in Rajasthan , a rural village .
Our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write .
K First time , a rally and a street play in a rural school -- unheard of -- to tell their parents why literacy is important .
Look at what their parents says .
This program is wonderful .
We feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write .
I am so happy that my students did this campaign .
In the future , I will never doubt my students ' abilities .
See ? They have done it .
K An inner city school in Hyderabad .
Girl : 581 . This house is 581 ...
We have to start collecting from 555 .
K Girls and boys in Hyderabad , going out , pretty difficult , but they did it .
Even though they are so young , they have done such good work .
First they have cleaned the society , then it will be Hyderabad , and soon India .
It was a revelation for me . It doesn 't strike me that they had so much inside them .
Girl : Thank you , ladies and gentlemen .
For our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you , for a very good cause , the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids .
Are you ready , ladies and gentlemen ? Audience : Yes !
Girl : Are you ready ? Audience : Yes !
Girl : Are you ready ? Audience : Yes !
K So , the charter of compassion starts right here .
Street plays , auctions , petitions .
I mean , they were changing lives .
It was incredible .
So , how can we still stay immune ?
How can we stay immune to that passion , that energy , that excitement ?
I know it 's obvious , but I have to end with the most powerful symbol of change , Gandhiji .
70 years ago , it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of " We can . "
So , today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in India ?
Last I heard , the preamble still said , " We , the people of India , " right ?
So , if not us , then who ?
If not now , then when ?
Like I said , contagious is a good word .
Thank you .
Juliana Rotich : Meet BRCK , Internet access built for Africa
Tech communities are booming all over Africa , says Nairobi-based Juliana Rotich , cofounder of the open-source software Ushahidi . But it remains challenging to get and stay connected in a region with frequent blackouts and spotty Internet hookups . So Rotich and friends developed BRCK , offering resilient connectivity for the developing world .
Living in Africa is to be on the edge , metaphorically , and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008 .
Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world , but Africa was sort of cut off .
And that changed , first with ships when we had the Renaissance , the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution .
And now we 've got the digital revolution .
These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations .
Never have been .
Now , this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world .
What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem .
Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself .
The connectivity situation has improved greatly , but some barriers remain .
It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be .
In 2008 , one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow .
There was a media blackout in 2008 , when there was post-election violence in Kenya .
It was a very tragic time . It was a very difficult time .
So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi .
And Ushahidi means " testimony " or " witness " in Swahili .
I 'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators .
This is David and Erik .
I call them brothers from another mother .
Clearly I have a German mother somewhere .
And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi .
And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS , email and web , and put a map so that you could see what was happening where , and you could visualize that data .
And after that initial prototype , we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did .
All the while , we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days .
And that 's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi , an actual physical space where we could collaborate , and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya .
We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network .
And we were able to grow this software footprint , and a few years later it became very useful software , and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were , and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan .
Now , this year the Internet turns 20 , and Ushahidi turned five .
Ushahidi is not only the software that we made .
It is the team , and it 's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee .
We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world .
There are crisis maps , election maps , corruption maps , and even environmental monitoring crowd maps .
We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they 're dealing with .
There is more that we 're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence , that I , as a citizen , if I share the information with whatever device that I have , could inform you about what is going on , and that if you do the same , we can have a bigger picture of what 's going on .
I moved back to Kenya in 2011 .
Erik moved in 2010 .
Very different reality . I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access .
I had never had to deal with a blackout .
And in Kenya , it 's a very different reality , and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem .
The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be , let 's just say very annoying .
Blackouts are not fun .
Imagine sitting down to start working , and all of a sudden the power goes out , your Internet connection goes down with it , so you have to figure out , okay , now , where 's the modem , how do I switch back ?
And then , guess what ? You have to deal with it again .
Now , this is the reality of Kenya , where we live now , and other parts of Africa .
The other problem that we 're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge .
It costs me five Kenyan shillings , or .06 USD to call the U.S. , Canada or China .
Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda , Ghana , Nigeria ?
Thirty Kenyan shillings . That 's six times the cost to connect within Africa .
And also , when traveling within Africa , you 've got different settings for different mobile providers .
This is the reality that we deal with .
So we 've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say , " If it works in Africa , it 'll work anywhere . "
[ Most use technology to define the function . We use function to drive the technology . ] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection ?
Could we leverage the cloud ?
We 've built a crowd map , we 've built Ushahidi .
Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country ?
So we looked at the modem , an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet , and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context , where you 've got ubiquitous internet , you 've got ubiquitous electricity , yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury .
We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world , for our context , and for our reality .
What if we could have connectivity with less friction ?
This is the BRCK .
It acts as a backup to the Internet so that , when the power goes out , it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network .
Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive .
It 's actually everywhere .
Most towns at least have a 3G connection .
So why don 't we leverage that ? And that 's why we built this .
The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down , this has eight hours of battery left , so you can continue working , you can continue being productive , and let 's just say you are less stressed .
And for rural areas , it can be the primary means of connection .
The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks , and whenever you switch on the backup , you pick on the fastest network , so we 'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs , and if one network is faster , that 's the one you hop on , and if the up time on that is not very good , then you hop onto the next one .
The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere .
With load balancing , this can be possible .
The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors -- is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things .
Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this .
It 's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas .
Out of adversity can come innovation , and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure ?
And for us , we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya .
It is not without challenge .
Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya . We 've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents .
" What are you carrying ? "
And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects .
So we put it on Kickstarter , and I 'm happy to say that , through the support of many people , not only here but online , the BRCK has been Kickstarted , and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins .
I will close by saying that , if we solve this for the local market , it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity , and it can reduce the cost of connecting , and hopefully collaboration within African countries .
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship .
The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected , and to help them drive the global digital revolution .
Thank you .
Salman Khan : Let 's use video to reinvent education
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy , a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and , now , other subjects . He shows the power of interactive exercises , and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home , and do " homework " in the classroom with the teacher available to help .
The Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos , so before I go any further , let me show you a little bit of a montage .
Salman Khan : So the hypotenuse is now going to be five .
This animal 's fossils are only found in this area of South America -- a nice clean band here -- and this part of Africa .
We can integrate over the surface , and the notation usually is a capital sigma .
National Assembly : They create the Committee of Public Safety , which sounds like a very nice committee .
Notice , this is an aldehyde , and it 's an alcohol .
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells .
A galaxy . Hey , there 's another galaxy .
Oh look , there 's another galaxy .
And for dollars , is their 30 million , plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer .
If this does not blow your mind , then you have no emotion .
SK : We now have on the order of 2,200 videos covering everything from basic arithmetic all the way to vector calculus and some of the stuff you saw there .
We have a million students a month using the site , watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day .
But what we 're going to talk about in this is how we 're going to the next level .
But before I do that , I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started .
And some of you all might know , about five years ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund , and I was in Boston , and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans , remotely .
And I started putting the first YouTube videos up really just as a kind of nice-to-have , just a supplement for my cousins -- something that might give them a refresher or something .
And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up , something interesting happened -- actually a bunch of interesting things happened .
The first was the feedback from my cousins .
They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person .
And once you get over the backhanded nature of that , there was actually something very profound there .
They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin .
At first , it 's very unintuitive , but when you actually think about it from their point of view , it makes a ton of sense .
You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin , without feeling like they 're wasting my time .
If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago , or maybe a couple of years ago , they don 't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin .
They can just watch those videos . If they 're bored , they can go ahead .
They can watch it at their own time , at their own pace .
And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time , the very first time that you 're trying to get your brain around a new concept , the very last thing you need is another human being saying , " Do you understand this ? "
And that 's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before , and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room .
The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private , so I let other people watch it , and then people started stumbling on it , and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world .
And these are just a few .
This is actually from one of the original calculus videos .
And someone wrote just on YouTube -- it was a YouTube comment : " First time I smiled doing a derivative . "
And let 's pause here .
This person did a derivative and then they smiled .
And then in a response to that same comment -- this is on the thread .
You can go on YouTube and look at these comments -- someone else wrote : " Same thing here .
I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day .
Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class , and here I 'm all like , ' I know kung fu . ' " And we get a lot of feedback all along those lines .
This clearly was helping people .
But then , as the viewership kept growing and kept growing , I started getting letters from people , and it was starting to become clear that it was actually more than just a nice-to-have .
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters .
" My 12 year-old son has autism and has had a terrible time with math .
We have tried everything , viewed everything , bought everything .
We stumbled on your video on decimals and it got through .
Then we went on to the dreaded fractions . Again , he got it .
We could not believe it .
He is so excited . "
And so you can imagine , here I was an analyst at a hedge fund .
It was very strange for me to do something of social value .
But I was excited , so I kept going .
And then a few other things started to dawn on me .
That , not only would it help my cousins right now , or these people who are sending letters , but that this content will never go old , that it could help their kids or their grandkids .
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus , I wouldn 't have to .
Assuming he was good . We don 't know .
The other thing that happened -- and even at this point , I said , " Okay , maybe it 's a good supplement .
It 's good for motivated students .
It 's good for maybe home schoolers . "
But I didn 't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom .
But then I started getting letters from teachers .
And the teachers would write , saying , " We 've used your videos to flip the classroom .
You 've given the lectures , so now what we do ... " -- and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow -- " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework , and what used to be homework , I now have the students doing in the classroom . "
And I want to pause here for -- I want to pause here for a second , because there 's a couple of interesting things .
One , when those teachers are doing that , there 's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did .
They can pause , repeat at their own pace , at their own time .
But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home , and then when you go to the classroom , letting them do work , having the teacher walk around , having the peers actually be able to interact with each other , these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom .
They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips , not allowed to interact with each other .
A teacher , no matter how good , has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces , slightly antagonistic -- and now it 's a human experience .
Now they 're actually interacting with each other .
So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we 're a not-for-profit -- the question is , how do we take this to the next level ?
How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion ?
And so what I 'm showing you over here , these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins .
The ones I started were much more primitive .
This is a more competent version of it .
But the paradigm here is , we 'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept , until you get 10 in a row .
And the Khan Academy videos are there .
You get hints , the actual steps for that problem , if you don 't know how to do it .
But the paradigm here , it seems like a very simple thing : 10 in a row , you move on .
But it 's fundamentally different than what 's happening in classrooms right now .
In a traditional classroom , you have a couple of homework , homework , lecture , homework , lecture , and then you have a snapshot exam .
And that exam , whether you get a 70 percent , an 80 percent , a 90 percent or a 95 percent , the class moves on to the next topic .
And even that 95 percent student , what was the five percent they didn 't know ?
Maybe they didn 't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power .
And then you go build on that in the next concept .
That 's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle , and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time , and I give you that bicycle for two weeks .
And then I come back after two weeks , and I say , " Well , let 's see . You 're having trouble taking left turns .
You can 't quite stop .
You 're an 80 percent bicyclist . "
So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say , " Here 's a unicycle . "
But as ridiculous as that sounds , that 's exactly what 's happening in our classrooms right now .
And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden , despite being smart , despite having good teachers , and it 's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation .
So our model is learn math the way you 'd learn anything , like the way you would learn a bicycle .
Stay on that bicycle . Fall off that bicycle .
Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery .
The traditional model , it penalizes you for experimentation and failure , but it does not expect mastery .
We encourage you to experiment . We encourage you to failure .
But we do expect mastery .
This is just another one of the modules .
This is trigonometry .
This is shifting and reflecting functions .
And they all fit together .
We have about 90 of these right now .
And you can go to the site right now . It 's all free . Not trying to sell anything .
But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map .
That top node right there , that 's literally single digit addition .
It 's like one plus one is equal to two .
And the paradigm is , once you get 10 in a row on that , it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules .
So if you keep further down the knowledge map , we 're getting into more advanced arithmetic .
Further down , you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra .
Further down , you start getting into algebra one , algebra two , a little bit of precalculus .
And the idea is , from this we can actually teach everything -- well , everything that can be taught in this type of a framework .
So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic , you have computer programming , you have grammar , you have genetics , all based off of that core of , if you know this and that , now you 're ready for this next concept .
Now that can work well for an individual learner , and I encourage , one , for you to do it with your kids , but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself .
It 'll change what happens at the dinner table .
But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about .
And so what I 'm showing you here , this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district , where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum .
These kids aren 't using textbooks , they 're not getting one-size-fits-all lectures .
They 're doing Khan Academy , they 're doing that software , for roughly half of their math class .
And I want to make it clear , we don 't view this as the complete math education .
What it does is -- and this is what 's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time .
This is the blocking and tackling , making sure you know how to move through a system of equations , and it frees up time for the simulations , for the games , for the mechanics , for the robot building , for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow .
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day , every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard .
Every row is a student .
Every column is one of those concepts .
Green means the student 's already proficient .
Blue means they 're working on it -- no need to worry .
Red means they 're stuck .
And what the teacher does is literally just say , " Let me intervene on the red kids . "
Or even better , " Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer . "
Now I come from a very data-centric reality , so we don 't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions : " Oh , what do you not understand ? " or " What do you do understand ? "
and all of the rest .
So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that , in almost any other field , is expected , if you 're in finance or marketing or manufacturing -- and so the teachers can actually diagnose what 's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible .
So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to , how long they have been spending every day , what videos have they been watching , when did they pause the videos , what did they stop watching , what exercises are they using , what have they been focused on ?
The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on .
The inner circle shows the videos they 're focused on .
And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong .
Red is wrong , blue is right .
The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted .
They watched the video right over there .
And then you can see , eventually , they were able to get 10 in a row .
It 's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems .
They also got faster .
The height is how long it took them .
So when you talk about self-paced learning , it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak , differentiated learning -- but it 's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom .
Because every time we 've done this , in every classroom we 've done , over and over again , if you go five days into it , there 's a group of kids who 've raced ahead and there 's a group of kids who are a little bit slower .
And in a traditional model , if you did a snapshot assessment , you say , " These are the gifted kids , these are the slow kids .
Maybe they should be tracked differently .
Maybe we should put them in different classes . "
But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit [ of ] extra time on one concept or the other , but once they get through that concept , they just race ahead .
And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago , you now would think are gifted .
And we 're seeing it over and over and over again .
And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time .
Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos , our goal is to use technology to humanize , not just in Los Altos , but on a global scale , what 's happening in education .
And actually , that kind of brings an interesting point .
A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios .
In our mind , the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio .
So in a traditional model , most of the teacher 's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot .
Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them .
Now 100 percent of their time is .
So once again , using technology , not just flipping the classroom , you 're humanizing the classroom , I 'd argue , by a factor of five or 10 .
And as valuable as that is in Los Altos , imagine what that does to the adult learner who 's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have before , before going back to college .
Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta who has to help his family during the day , and that 's the reason why he or she can 't go to school .
Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate , or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don 't know .
Now imagine what happens where -- we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom .
But this is all one system .
There 's no reason why you can 't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom .
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of a sudden can tutor your son , or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta ?
And I think what you 'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .
And that 's essentially what we 're trying to build .
Thank you .
Bill Gates : I 've seen some things you 're doing in the system that have to do with motivation and feedback -- energy points , merit badges .
Tell me what you 're thinking there .
SK : Oh yeah . No , we have an awesome team working on it .
And I have to make it clear , it 's not just me anymore .
I 'm still doing all the videos , but we have a rockstar team doing the software .
Yeah , we 've put a bunch of game mechanics in there where you get these badges , we 're going to start having leader boards by area , and you get points .
It 's actually been pretty interesting .
Just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something , we see on a system-wide basis , like tens of thousands of fifth graders or sixth graders going one direction or another , depending what badge you give them .
And the collaboration you 're doing with Los Altos , how did that come about ?
SK : Los Altos , it was kind of crazy .
Once again , I didn 't expect it to be used in classrooms .
Someone from their board came and said , " What would you do if you had carte blanche in a classroom ? "
And I said , " Well , I would just , every student work at their own pace on something like this and we 'd give a dashboard . "
And they said , " Oh , this is kind of radical . We have to think about it . "
And me and the rest of the team were like , " They 're never going to want to do this . "
But literally the next day they were like , " Can you start in two weeks ? "
So fifth grade math is where that 's going on right now ?
SK : It 's two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes .
And they 're doing it at the district level .
I think what they 're excited about is they can now follow these kids .
It 's not an only-in-school thing .
We 've even , on Christmas , we saw some of the kids were doing it .
And we can track everything .
So they can actually track them as they go through the entire district .
Through the summers , as they go from one teacher to the next , you have this continuity of data that even at the district level they can see .
So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what 's going on with those kids .
So you 're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they mean ?
SK : Oh yeah . Most of those were specs by the teachers .
We made some of those for students so they could see their data , but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves .
And they 're literally saying , " Hey , this is nice , but ... " Like that focus graph , a lot of the teachers said , " I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic . "
So we made that focus diagram .
So it 's all been teacher-driven .
It 's been pretty crazy .
Is this ready for prime time ?
Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out ?
SK : Yeah , it 's ready .
We 've got a million people on the site already , so we can handle a few more .
No , no reason why it really can 't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow .
And the vision of the tutoring thing .
The idea there is , if I 'm confused about a topic , somehow right in the user interface I 'd find people who are volunteering , maybe see their reputation , and I could schedule and connect up with those people ?
SK : Absolutely . And this is something that I recommend everyone in this audience to do .
Those dashboards the teachers have , you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids , or nephews , or cousins , or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club .
And yeah , you can start becoming a mentor , a tutor , really immediately .
But yeah , it 's all there .
Well , it 's amazing .
I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education .
Thank you .
Chip Conley : Measuring what makes life worthwhile
When the dotcom bubble burst , hotelier Chip Conley went in search of a business model based on happiness . In an old friendship with an employee and in the wisdom of a Buddhist king , he learned that success comes from what you count .
I 'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century .
In the 21st century , we need to actually look at -- and what I 'm actually going to encourage you to consider today -- is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count .
But I think it 's time for us to think about what we count .
Because what we actually count truly counts .
Let me start by telling you a little story .
This is Van Quach .
She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam .
She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America .
Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid .
I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there .
So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years .
With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old , in 1987 , I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre , a very impractical name , because I actually was looking to create joy of life .
And this first hotel that I bought , motel , was a pay-by-the-hour , no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco .
As I spent time with Vivian , I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work .
It made me question and curious : How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living ?
So I spent time with Vivian , and I saw that she didn 't find joy in cleaning toilets .
Her job , her goal and her calling was not to become the world 's greatest toilet scrubber .
What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests .
And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home .
Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home .
That very human lesson , more than 20 years ago , served me well during the last economic downturn we had .
In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9 / 11 , San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels .
We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area , so we were particularly vulnerable .
But also back then , remember we stopped eating French fries in this country .
Well , not exactly , of course not .
We started eating " freedom fries , " and we started boycotting anything that was French .
Well , my name of my company , Joie de Vivre -- so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company .
And I 'd write them back , and I 'd say , " What a minute . We 're not French .
We 're an American company . We 're based in San Francisco . "
And I 'd get a terse response : " Oh , that 's worse . "
So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre , I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices .
And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution .
But given my befuddled state of mind , I ended up in the self-help section very quickly .
That 's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow 's " hierarchy of needs . "
I took one psychology class in college , and I learned about this guy , Abraham Maslow , as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs .
But as I sat there for four hours , the full afternoon , reading Maslow , I recognized something that is true of most leaders .
One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect , and that is that we 're all human .
Each of us , no matter what our role is in business , has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace .
So as I started reading more Maslow , what I started to realize is that Maslow , later in his life , wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective , to organizations and specifically to business .
But unfortunately , he died prematurely in 1970 , and so he wasn 't really able to live that dream completely .
So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow .
And that 's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid , which is survival , success and transformation .
It 's not just fundamental in business , it 's fundamental in life .
And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs , these transformational needs for our key employees in the company .
These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow 's hierarchy of needs .
But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers , I realized we had no metrics .
We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right .
So we started asking ourselves : What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees ' sense of meaning , or our customers ' sense of emotional connection with us ?
For example , we actually started asking our employees , do they understand the mission of our company , and do they feel like they believe in it , can they actually influence it , and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it ?
We started asking our customers , did they feel an emotional connection with us , in one of seven different kinds of ways .
Miraculously , as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid , what we found is we created more loyalty .
Our customer loyalty skyrocketed .
Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average , and during that five year dotcom bust , we tripled in size .
As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time , what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure .
What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid .
They didn 't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid .
So I started asking myself the question : How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible ?
If we 're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure , and all we can measure is the tangible in life , we 're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid .
So I went out and studied a bunch of things , and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business , things like intellectual property , their corporate culture , their brand loyalty , and yet , only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business .
So as leaders , we understand that intangibles are important , but we don 't have a clue how to measure them .
So here 's another Einstein quote : " Not everything that can be counted counts , and not everything that counts can be counted . "
I hate to argue with Einstein , but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can 't be counted or valued , aren 't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane ?
It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks .
I flew off to a place that 's been shrouded in mystery for centuries , a place some folks call Shangri-La .
It 's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world .
I went to Bhutan .
The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man , but this was back in 1972 , when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away .
At age 17 , he started asking the kinds of questions that you 'd expect of someone with a beginner 's mind .
On a trip through India , early in his reign as king , he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP , the size of the Bhutanese GDP .
The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later .
He said the following , he said : " Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product ?
Why don 't we care more about gross national happiness ? "
Now , in essence , the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success , what has come to be known as GNH , or gross national happiness .
Most world leaders didn 't take notice , and those that did thought this was just " Buddhist economics . "
But the king was serious .
This was a notable moment , because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness -- that leader 200 years ago , Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence -- 200 years later , this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure , and it 's something we should actually value as government officials .
For the next three dozen years as king , this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan -- including , just recently , taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed , no coup .
Bhutan , for those of you who don 't know it , is the newest democracy in the world , just two years ago .
So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement , I got to really understand what they 're doing .
And I got to spend some time with the prime minister .
Over dinner , I asked him an impertinent question .
I asked him , " How can you create and measure something which evaporates -- in other words , happiness ? "
And he 's a very wise man , and he said , " Listen , Bhutan 's goal is not to create happiness .
We create the conditions for happiness to occur .
In other words , we create a habitat of happiness . "
Wow , that 's interesting .
He said that they have a science behind that art , and they 've actually created four essential pillars , nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH .
One of those key indicators is : How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day ?
It 's a good question . How do you feel about how you spend your time each day ?
Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world .
And yet , of course , that little intangible piece of data doesn 't factor into our GDP calculations .
As I spent my week up in the Himalayas , I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation .
And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel .
How many know him ? Anybody ?
1954 , he wrote a book called " The Real Enjoyment of Living , " and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want ; instead , it 's about wanting what you have .
Or in other words , I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have -- imagine gratitude -- divided by having what you want -- gratification .
The Bhutanese aren 't on some aspirational treadmill , constantly focused on what they don 't have .
Their religion , their isolation , their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have .
How many of us here , as TEDsters in the audience , spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation , in the denominator ?
We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one .
The reality is , in Western countries , quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out -- an object that we 're supposed to get , or maybe many objects .
Actually , in fact , if you look in the dictionary , many dictionaries define pursuit as to " chase with hostility . "
Do we pursue happiness with hostility ?
Good question . But back to Bhutan .
Bhutan 's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world 's population .
Could this little country , like a startup in a mature industry , be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India ?
Bhutan 's created the ultimate export , a new global currency of well-being , and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH .
You may have heard , this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists , focusing on happiness and wellness in France .
Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index , what some French are calling a " joie de vivre index . "
I like it .
Co-branding opportunities .
Just three days ago , three days ago here at TED , we had a simulcast of David Cameron , potentially the next prime minister of the UK , quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time , Robert Kennedy 's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we 're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric .
So it suggests that the momentum is shifting .
I 've taken that Robert Kennedy quote , and I 've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here .
This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote .
GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods .
But it doesn 't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials .
As you look at these two columns here , doesn 't it make you feel like it 's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count , a new way to imagine what 's important to us in life ?
Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that .
He said GDP " measures everything in short , except that which makes life worthwhile . "
Wow .
So how do we do that ?
Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now , at least in this country .
Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010 ?
We 're spending 10 billion dollars on the census .
We 're asking 10 simple questions -- it is simplicity .
But all of those questions are tangible .
They 're about demographics .
They 're about where you live , how many people you live with , and whether you own your home or not .
That 's about it .
We 're not asking meaningful metrics .
We 're not asking important questions .
We 're not asking anything that 's intangible .
Abe Maslow said long ago something you 've heard before , but you didn 't realize it was him .
He said , " If the only tool you have is a hammer , everything starts to look like a nail . "
We 've been fooled by our tool .
Excuse that expression .
We 've been fooled by our tool .
GDP has been our hammer .
And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success .
And yet , 64 percent of the world 's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service , the service industry , the industry I 'm in .
And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture .
So maybe it 's time that we get a bigger toolbox , right ?
Maybe it 's time we get a toolbox that doesn 't just count what 's easily counted , the tangible in life , but actually counts what we most value , the things that are intangible .
I guess I 'm sort of a curious CEO .
I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad .
I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same .
They aren 't the same .
In fact , as leaders , what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling .
In Vivian 's case , her unit of production isn 't the tangible hours she works , it 's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work .
This is Dave Arringdale who 's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian 's motel .
He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years , and he 's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him .
They 've created a habitat of happiness for Dave .
He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home .
Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don 't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business ?
We don 't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits , we can have both .
In fact , inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits , right ?
So what the world needs now , in my opinion , is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count .
We count numbers .
We count on people .
What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people .
I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country .
What can you start counting today ?
What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life , whether it 's your work life or your business life ?
Thank you very much .
Joseph Pine : What consumers want
Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic , but " Mass Customization " author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because , well , there 's no such thing . He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway .
I 'm going to talk about a very fundamental change that is going on in the very fabric of the modern economy .
And to talk about that , I 'm going to go back to the beginning , because in the beginning were commodities .
Commodities are things that you grow in the ground , raise on the ground or pull out of the ground : basically , animal , mineral , vegetable .
And then you extract them out of the ground , and sell them on the open marketplace .
Commodities were the basis of the agrarian economy that lasted for millennia .
But then along came the industrial revolution , and then goods became the predominant economic offering , where we used commodities as a raw material to be able to make or manufacture goods .
So , we moved from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy .
Well , what then happened over the last 50 or 60 years , is that goods have become commoditized .
Commoditized : where they 're treated like a commodity , where people don 't care who makes them .
They just care about three things and three things only : price , price and price .
Now , there 's an antidote to commoditization , and that is customization .
My first book was called " Mass Customization " -- it came up a couple of times yesterday -- and how I discovered this progression of economic value was realizing that customizing a good automatically turned it into a service , because it was done just for a particular person , because it wasn 't inventoried , it was delivered on demand to that individual person .
So , we moved from an industrial economy to a service-based economy .
But over the past 10 or 20 years , what 's happened is that services are being commoditized as well .
Long-distance telephone service sold on price , price , price ; fast-food restaurants with all their value pricing ; and even the Internet is commoditizing not just goods , but services as well .
What that means is that it 's time to move to a new level of economic value .
Time to go beyond the goods and the services , and use , in that same heuristic , what happens when you customize a service ?
What happens when you design a service that is so appropriate for a particular person -- that 's exactly what they need at this moment in time ?
Then you can 't help but make them go " wow " ; you can 't help but turn it into a memorable event -- you can 't help but turn it into an experience .
So we 're shifting to an experience economy , where experiences are becoming the predominant economic offering .
when I talk about experience , I talk about Disney -- the world 's premier experience-stager .
I talk about theme restaurants , and experiential retail , and boutique hotels , and Las Vegas -- the experience capital of the world .
But here , when you think about experiences , think about Thomas Dolby and his group , playing music .
Think about meaningful places .
Think about drinking wine , about a journey to the Clock of the Long Now .
Those are all experiences . Think about TED itself .
The experience capital in the world of conferences .
All of these are experiences .
Now , over the last several years I spent a lot of time in Europe , and particularly in the Netherlands , and whenever I talk about the experience economy there , I 'm always greeted at the end with one particular question , almost invariably .
And the question isn 't really so much a question as an accusation .
And the Dutch , when they usually put it , it always starts with the same two words .
You know the words I mean ?
You Americans .
They say , you Americans .
You like your fantasy environments , your fake , your Disneyland experiences .
They say , we Dutch , we like real , natural , authentic experiences .
So much has that happened that I 've developed a fairly praticed response , which is : I point out that first of all , you have to understand that there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience .
Why ? Because the experience happens inside of us .
It 's our reaction to the events that are staged in front of us .
So , as long as we are in any sense authentic human beings , then every experience we have is authentic .
Now , there may be more or less natural or artificial stimuli for the experience , but even that is a matter of degree , not kind .
And there 's no such thing as a 100 percent natural experience .
Even if you go for a walk in the proverbial woods , there is a company that manufactured the car that delivered you to the edge of the woods ; there 's a company that manufactured the shoes that you have to protect yourself from the ground of the woods .
There 's a company that provides a cell phone service you have in case you get lost in the woods .
Right ? All of those are man-made , artificiality brought into the woods by you , and by the very nature of being there .
And then I always finish off by talking about -- the thing that amazes me the most about this question , particularly coming from the Dutch , is that the Netherlands is every bit as manufactured as Disneyland .
And the Dutch , they always go ...
and they realize , I 'm right !
There isn 't a square meter of ground in the entire country that hasn 't been reclaimed from the sea , or otherwise moved , modified and manicured to look as if it had always been there .
It 's the only place you ever go for a walk in the woods and all the trees are lined up in rows .
But nonetheless , not just the Dutch , but everyone has this desire for the authentic .
And authenticity is therefore becoming the new consumer sensibility -- the buying criteria by which consumers are choosing who are they going to buy from , and what they 're going to buy .
Becoming the basis of the economy .
In fact , you can look at how each of these economies developed , that each one has their own business imperative , matched with a consumer sensibility .
We 're the agrarian economy , and we 're supplying commodities .
It 's about supply and availability .
Getting the commodities to market .
With the industrial economy , it is about controlling costs -- getting the costs down as low as possible so we can offer them to the masses .
With the service economy , it is about improving quality .
That has -- the whole quality movement has risen with the service economy over the past 20 or 30 years .
And now , with the experience economy , it 's about rendering authenticity .
Rendering authenticity -- and the keyword is " rendering . "
Right ? Rendering , because you have to get your consumers -- as business people -- to percieve your offerings as authentic .
Because there is a basic paradox : no one can have an inauthentic experience , but no business can supply one .
Because all businesses are man-made objects ; all business is involved with money ; all business is a matter of using machinery , and all those things make something inauthentic .
So , how do you render authenticity , is the question .
Are you rendering authenticity ?
When you think about that , let me go back to what Lionel Trilling , in his seminal book on authenticity , " Sincerity and Authenticity " -- came out in 1960 -- points to as the seminal point at which authenticity entered the lexicon , if you will .
And that is , to no surprise , in Shakespeare , and in his play , Hamlet .
And there is one part in this play , Hamlet , where the most fake of all the characters in Hamlet , Polonius , says something profoundly real .
At the end of a laundry list of advice he 's giving to his son , Laertes , he says this : And this above all : to thine own self be true .
And it doth follow , as night the day , that thou canst not then be false to any man .
And those three verses are the core of authenticity .
There are two dimensions to authenticity : one , being true to yourself , which is very self-directed .
Two , is other-directed : being what you say you are to others .
And I don 't know about you , but whenever I encounter two dimensions , I immediately go , ahh , two-by-two !
All right ? Anybody else like that , no ?
Well , if you think about that , you do , in fact , get a two-by-two .
Where , on one dimension it 's a matter of being true to yourself .
As businesses , are the economic offerings you are providing -- are they true to themselves ?
And the other dimension is : are they what they say they are to others ?
If not , you have , " is not true to itself , " and " is not what it says it is , " yielding a two-by-two matrix .
And of course , if you are both true to yourself , and are what you say you are , then you 're real real !
The opposite , of course , is -- fake fake .
All right , now , there is value for fake .
There will always be companies around to supply the fake , because there will always be desire for the fake .
Fact is , there 's a general rule : if you don 't like it , it 's fake ; if you do like it , it 's faux .
Now , the other two sides of the coin are : being a real fake -- is what it says it is , but is not true to itself , or being a fake real : is true to itself , but not what it says it is .
You can think about those two -- you know , both of these better than being fake fake -- not quite as good as being real real .
You can contrast them by thinking about Universal City Walk versus Disney World , or Disneyland .
Universal City Walk is a real fake -- in fact , we got this very term from Ada Louise Huxtable 's book , " The Unreal America . "
A wonderful book , where she talks about Universal City Walk as -- you know , she decries the fake , but she says , at least that 's a real fake , right , because you can see behind the facade , right ?
It is what it says it is : It 's Universal Studio ; it 's in the city of Los Angeles ; you 're going to walk a lot .
Right ? You don 't tend to walk a lot in Los Angeles , well , here 's a place where you are going to walk a lot , outside in this city .
But is it really true to itself ?
Right ? Is it really in the city ?
Is it -- you can see behind all of it , and see what is going on in the facades of it .
So she calls it a real fake .
Disney World , on the other hand , is a fake real , or a fake reality .
Right ? It 's not what it says it is . It 's not really the magic kingdom .
But it is -- oh , I 'm sorry , I didn 't mean to -- -- sorry .
We won 't talk about Santa Claus then .
But Disney World is wonderfully true to itself .
Right ? Just wonderfully true to itself .
When you are there you are just immersed in this wonderful environment .
So , it 's a fake real .
Now the easiest way to fall down in this , and not be real real , right , the easiest way not to be true to yourself is not to understand your heritage , and thereby repudiate that heritage .
Right , the key of being true to yourself is knowing who you are as a business .
Knowing where your heritage is : what you have done in the past .
And what you have done in the past limits what you can do , what you can get away with , essentially , in the future .
So , you have to understand that past .
Think about Disney again .
Disney , 10 or 15 years ago , right , the Disney -- the company that is probably best-known for family values out there , Disney bought the ABC network .
The ABC network , affectionately known in the trade as the T & amp ; A network , right -- that 's not too much jargon , is it ?
Right , the T & amp ; A network . Then it bought Miramax , known for its NC-17 fare , and all of a sudden , families everywhere couldn 't really trust what they were getting from Disney .
It was no longer true to its heritage ; no longer true to Walt Disney .
That 's one of the reasons why they 're having such trouble today , and why Roy Disney is out to get Michael Eisner .
Because it is no longer true to itself .
So , understand what -- your past limits what you can do in the future .
When it comes to being what you say you are , the easiest mistake that companies make is that they advertise things that they are not .
That 's when you 're perceived as fake , as a phony company -- advertizing things that you 're not .
Think about any hotel , any airline , any hospital .
Right , if you could check into the ads , you 'd have a great experience .
But unfortunately , you have to experience the actual hotel , airline and hospital , and then you have that disconnect .
Then you have that perception that you are phony .
So , the number one thing to do when it comes to being what you say you are , is to provide places for people to experience who you are .
For people to experience who you are .
Right , it 's not advertising does it .
That 's why you have companies like Starbucks , right , that doesn 't advertise at all .
They said , you want to know who we are , you have to come experience us .
And think about the economic value they have provided by that experience .
Right ? Coffee , at its core , is what ?
Right ? It 's beans ; right ? It 's coffee beans .
You know how much coffee is worth , when treated as a commodity as a bean ?
Two or three cents per cup -- that 's what coffee is worth .
But grind it , roast it , package it , put it on a grocery store shelf , and now it 'll cost five , 10 , 15 cents , when you treat it as a good .
Take that same good , and perform the service of actually brewing it for a customer , in a corner diner , in a bodega , a kiosk somewhere , you get 50 cents , maybe a buck per cup of coffee .
But surround the brewing of that coffee with the ambiance of a Starbucks , with the authentic cedar that goes inside of there , and now , because of that authentic experience , you can charge two , three , four , five dollars for a cup of coffee .
So , authenticity is becoming the new consumer sensibility .
Let me summarize it , for the business people in the audience , with three rules , three basic rules .
One , don 't say you 're authentic unless you really are authentic .
Two , it 's easier to be authentic if you don 't say you 're authentic .
And three , if you say you 're authentic , you better be authentic .
And then for the consumers , for everyone else in the audience , let me simply summarize it by saying , increasingly , what we -- what will make us happy , is spending our time and our money satisfying the desire for authenticity .
Thank you .
Sarah Kaminsky : My father the forger
Sarah Kaminsky tells the extraordinary story of her father Adolfo and his activity during World War II -- using his ingenuity and talent for forgery to save lives . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I am the daughter of a forger , not just any forger ...
When you hear the word " forger , " you often understand " mercenary . "
You understand " forged currency , " " forged pictures . "
My father is no such man .
For 30 years of his life , he made false papers -- never for himself , always for other people , and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed .
Let me introduce him .
Here is my father at age 19 .
It all began for him during World War II , when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop .
He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance .
And it 's not a banal story -- after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the ' 70s .
When I was a child I knew nothing about this , of course .
This is me in the middle making faces .
I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children .
I had a " normal " dad like everybody else , apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than ...
well , he was basically old enough to be my grandfather .
Anyway , he was a photographer and a street educator , and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly .
And , of course , he never talked about his past life when he was a forger .
There was , however , an incident I 'm going to tell you about , that perhaps could have led me suspect something .
I was in high school and got a bad grade , a rare event for me , so I decided to hide it from my parents .
In order to do that , I set out to forge their signature .
I started working on my mother 's signature , because my father 's is absolutely impossible to forge .
So , I got working . I took some sheets of paper and started practicing , practicing , practicing , until I reached what I thought was a steady hand , and went into action .
Later , while checking my school bag , my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged .
She yelled at me like she never had before .
I went to hide in my bedroom , under the blankets , and then I waited for my father to come back from work with , one could say , much apprehension .
I heard him come in .
I remained under the blankets . He entered my room , sat on the corner of the bed , and he was silent , so I pulled the blanket from my head , and when he saw me he started laughing .
He was laughing so hard , he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand .
Then he said , " But really , Sarah , you could have worked harder ! Can 't you see it 's really too small ? "
Indeed , it 's rather small .
I was born in Algeria .
There I would hear people say my father was a " moudjahid " and that means " fighter . "
Later on , in France , I loved eavesdropping on grownups ' conversations , and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father 's previous life , especially that he had " done " World War II , that he had " done " the Algerian war .
And in my head I would be thinking that " doing " a war meant being a soldier .
But knowing my father , and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent , I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun .
And indeed , I was very far from the mark .
One day , while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality , I happened to see some documents that caught my attention .
These are real !
These are mine , I was born an Argentinean .
But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services .
And then , suddenly , I went " wow ! "
My father , a secret agent ?
It was very James Bond .
I wanted to ask him questions , which he didn 't answer .
And later , I told myself that one day I would have to question him .
And then I became a mother and had a son , and finally decided it was time -- that he absolutely had to talk to us .
I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday , and suddenly I was very , very afraid .
I feared he 'd go and take his silences with him , and take his secrets with him .
I managed to convince him that it was important for us , but possibly also for other people that he shared his story .
He decided to tell it to me and I made a book , from which I 'm going to read you some excerpts later .
So , his story . My father was born in Argentina .
His parents were of Russian descent .
The whole family came to settle in France in the ' 30s .
His parents were Jewish , Russian and above all , very poor .
So at the age of 14 my father had to work .
And with his only diploma , his primary education certificate , he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner .
That 's where he discovered something totally magical , and when he talks about it , it 's fascinating -- it 's the magic of dyeing chemistry .
During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15 .
This coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness .
All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn , to accumulate more and more knowledge , and at night , when no one was looking , he 'd put his experience to practice .
He was mostly interested in ink bleaching .
All this to tell you that if my father became a forger , actually , it was almost by accident .
His family was Jewish , so they were hounded .
Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers .
Well , they were out , but they were always in danger . The big " Jew " stamp was still on their papers .
It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents .
My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted , he 'd never thought of false papers .
But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance .
In those times documents had hard covers , they were filled in by hand , and they stated your job .
In order to survive , he needed to be working . He asked the man to write " dyer . "
Suddenly the man looked very , very interested .
As a " dyer , " do you know how to bleach ink marks ?
Of course he knew .
And suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem : even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink , called " indelible , " the " Waterman " blue ink .
And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it .
Now , of course , the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula , so he recruited him .
And actually , without knowing it , my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild 's pencil case : the so-called " correction pen . "
But it was only the beginning .
That 's my father .
As soon as he got to the lab , even though he was the youngest , he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents .
All the movements stopped at falsifying .
But demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents .
He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch .
He started a press . He started photoengraving .
He started making rubber stamps .
He started inventing all kind of things -- with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel .
Anyway , he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output .
He had made a simple calculation : In one hour he could make 30 forged documents .
If he slept one hour , 30 people would die .
This sense of responsibility for other people 's lives when he was just 17 -- and also his guilt for being a survivor , since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not -- stayed with him all his life .
And this is maybe what explains why , for 30 years , he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices .
I 'd like to talk about those sacrifices , because there were many .
There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid .
To him , being paid would have meant being a mercenary .
If he had accepted payment , he wouldn 't be able to say " yes " or " no " depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause .
So he was a photographer by day , and a forger by night for 30 years .
He was broke all of the time .
Then there were the emotional sacrifices : How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets ?
How can one explain what one does at night in the lab , every single night ?
Of course , there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later .
One day my father introduced me to my sister .
He also explained to me that I had a brother , too , and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four , and they were 30 years older than me .
They are both in their sixties now .
In order to write the book , I asked my sister questions . I wanted to know who my father was , who was the father she had known .
She explained that the father that she 'd had would tell them he 'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk .
They would get all dressed up and wait for him , but he would almost never come .
He 'd say , " I 'll call . " He wouldn 't call .
And then he would not come .
Then one day he totally disappeared .
Time passed , and they thought he had surely forgotten them , at first .
Then as time passed , at the end of almost two years , they thought , " Well , perhaps our father has died . "
And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn 't feel like talking about because it was painful .
And while my half brother and sister thought they 'd been abandoned , orphaned , my father was making false papers .
And if he did not tell them , it was of course to protect them .
After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel .
And then , as he was a staunch anti-colonialist , he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war .
After the Algerian war , at the heart of the international resistance movements , his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door .
In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence : Guinea , Guinea-Bissau , Angola .
And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela 's anti-apartheid party .
He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans .
There was also Latin America .
My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic , Haiti , and then it was the turn of Brazil , Argentina , Venezuela , El Salvador , Nicaragua , Colombia , Peru , Uruguay , Chile and Mexico .
Then there was the Vietnam War .
My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese .
Europe was not spared either .
My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain , Salazar in Portugal , against the colonels ' dictatorship in Greece , and even in France .
There , just once , it happened in May of 1968 .
My father watched , benevolently , of course , the demonstrations of the month of May , but his heart was elsewhere , and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve .
Once , though , he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize .
He was much younger in those days , and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting .
He told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he 'd had to make in all his life .
But , he agreed to do it , even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit 's life was not in danger , just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities , and to show them that there 's nothing more porous than borders -- and that ideas have no borders .
All my childhood , while my friends ' dads would tell them Grimm 's fairy tales , my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles .
And those heroes did not need an army behind them .
Anyhow , nobody would have followed them , except for a handful [ of ] men and women of conviction and courage .
I understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep .
I asked him whether , considering the sacrifices he had to make , he ever had any regrets .
He said no .
He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything .
He was persuaded , and he 's still convinced that another world is possible -- a world where no one would ever need a forger .
He 's still dreaming about it .
My father is here in the room today .
His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I 'm going to ask him to stand up .
Thank you .
Dimitar Sasselov : How we found hundreds of potential Earth-like planets
Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and his colleagues search for Earth-like planets that may , someday , help us answer centuries-old questions about the origin and existence of biological life elsewhere . Preliminary results show that they have found 706 " candidates " -- some of which further research may prove to be planets with Earth-like geochemical characteristics .
Well , indeed , I 'm very , very lucky .
My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months -- seemingly unrelated , but as you will see , actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today .
The first one was actually a funeral -- to be more precise , a reburial .
On May 22nd , there was a hero 's reburial in Frombork , Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world .
He did that , literally , by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System , and then with this simple-looking act , he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution , which many call the Copernican Revolution .
Now that was , ironically , and very befittingly , the way we found his grave .
Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave , together with 14 others in that cathedral .
DNA analysis , one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started , was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus ' hair -- obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on .
That match was unambiguous .
The DNA matched , and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus .
Now , the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because , even back then , his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask : if the Earth is just a planet , then what about planets around other stars ?
What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds , about life on other planets ?
In fact , I 'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time .
And at the time , people actually answered that question positively : " Yes . "
But there was no evidence .
And here begins 400 years of frustration , of unfulfilled dreams -- the dreams of Galileo , Giordano Bruno , many others -- which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time .
" What is life ? What is the origin of life ?
Are we alone ? "
And that especially happened in the last 10 years , at the end of the 20th century , when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology , understanding the code of life , DNA , all of that seemed to actually put us , not closer , but further apart from answering those basic questions .
Now , the good news .
A lot has happened in the last few years , and let 's start with the planets .
Let 's start with the old Copernican question : Are there earths around other stars ?
And as we already heard , there is a way in which we are trying , and now able , to answer that question .
It 's a new telescope .
Our team , befittingly I think , named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time , Johannes Kepler , and that telescope 's sole purpose is to go out , find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy , and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there .
The telescope is actually built similarly to the , well-known to you , Hubble Space Telescope , except it does have an additional lens -- a wide-field lens , as you would call it as a photographer .
And if , in the next couple of months , you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this , you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night , without any interruption , for the next four years .
The way we do that , actually , is with a method , which we call the transit method .
It 's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star .
Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that , but if you have a million stars , you 'll find enough planets .
And as you see on this animation , what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star .
We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this .
All the stars for Kepler are just points of light .
But we learn a lot from that : not only that there is a planet there , but we also learn its size .
How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is .
We learn about its orbit , the period of its orbit and so on .
So , what have we learned ?
Well , let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I 'm here to tell you today .
What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates , which we then follow up and find as planets , confirm as planets .
It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size .
There are small planets , there are bigger planets , there are big planets , okay .
So we count many , many such planets , and they have different sizes .
We do that in our solar system .
In fact , even back during the ancients , the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this .
There will be the smaller planets , and there will be the big planets , even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers .
Up until recently , that was the Solar System -- four Earth-like planets with small radius , smaller than about two times the size of the Earth -- and that was of course Mercury , Venus , Mars , and of course the Earth , and then the two big , giant planets .
Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes , and of course three more planets were discovered .
Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine .
The small planets dominated , and there was a certain harmony to that , which actually Copernicus was very happy to note , and Kepler was one of the big proponents of .
So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets .
But up until , literally , 15 years ago , that was all we knew about planets .
And that 's what the frustration was .
The Copernican dream was unfulfilled .
Finally , 15 years ago , the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star , and we actually did pretty well .
In the next 15 years , almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars , with different methods .
Unfortunately , as you can see , there was a very different picture .
There was of course an explanation for it : We only see the big planets , so that 's why most of those planets are really in the category of " like Jupiter . "
But you see , we haven 't gone very far .
We were still back where Copernicus was .
We didn 't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there .
And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate , to emerge , to survive .
And we didn 't have the evidence for that .
So today , I 'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope , Kepler , has been able to tell us in the last few weeks , and , lo and behold , we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus .
You can see here , the small planets dominate the picture .
The planets which are marked " like Earth , " [ are ] definitely more than any other planets that we see .
And now for the first time , we can say that .
There is a lot more work we need to do with this .
Most of these are candidates .
In the next few years we will confirm them .
But the statistical result is loud and clear .
And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there .
Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets .
So the question is : what do we do next ?
Well , first of all , we can study them now that we know where they are .
And we can find those that we would call habitable , meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen .
So , we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors .
And the number , as you might expect , is pretty staggering .
It 's about 100 million such planets .
That 's great news . Why ?
Because with our own little telescope , just in the next two years , we 'll be able to identify at least 60 of them .
So that 's great because then we can go and study them -- remotely , of course -- with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years .
We can find what they 're made of , would their atmospheres have water , carbon dioxide , methane .
We know and expect that we 'll see that .
That 's great , but that is not the whole news .
That 's not why I 'm here .
Why I 'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part .
The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next .
And here comes biology -- biology , with its basic question , which still stands unanswered , which is essentially : " If there is life on other planets , do we expect it to be like life on Earth ? "
And let me immediately tell you here , when I say life , I don 't mean " dolce vita , " good life , human life .
I really mean life on Earth , past and present , from microbes to us humans , in its rich molecular diversity , the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions -- and we call that , collectively , biochemistry , life as a chemical process , as a chemical phenomenon .
So the question is : is that chemical phenomenon universal , or is it something which depends on the planet ?
Is it like gravity , which is the same everywhere in the universe , or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them ?
We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that .
And that 's a very basic question , which we don 't know the answer to , but which we can try -- and we are trying -- to answer in the lab .
We don 't need to go to space to answer that question .
And so , that 's what we are trying to do .
And that 's what many people now are trying to do .
And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well .
So this is one example that I want to show you here .
When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life , we think of compartmentalization , keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane , isolated from the rest of the environment , but yet , in an environment in which they actually could originate together .
And in one of our labs , Jack Szostak 's labs , it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments -- which are very common on planets , where you have some liquid water and some clays -- you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles .
But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like , like this .
And they really help molecules , like nucleic acids , like RNA and DNA , stay inside , develop , change , divide and do some of the processes that we call life .
Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon .
And in a sense , you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge , building a bridge from two sides of the river .
On one hand , on the left bank of the river , are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments .
We don 't want to go blind because there 's too many possibilities , and there is not too much lab , and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments .
So that 's what we are building from the left side of the river .
From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you , where we actually tried that , and it feeds back and forth , and we hope to meet in the middle one day .
So why should you care about that ?
Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge ?
Am I that charming ?
Well , there are many reasons , and you heard some of them in the short talk today .
This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives .
But there is something more profound here , something deeper .
And that deeper , underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it .
And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way -- not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago , Copernicus ' act did , by changing the way we view space and time .
Now it 's about something else , but it 's equally profound .
And half the time , what 's happened is it 's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind , to the Earth in a bigger space .
And the more we learn , the more that was reinforced .
You 've all learned that in school -- how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe .
And the bigger the telescope , the bigger that universe becomes .
And look at this image of the tiny , blue dot .
This pixel is the Earth .
It is the Earth as we know it .
It is seen from , in this case , from outside the orbit of Saturn .
But it 's really tiny .
We know that .
Let 's think of life as that entire planet because , in a sense , it is .
The biosphere is the size of the Earth .
Life on Earth is the size of the Earth .
And let 's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms .
What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong ?
Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today ?
Let 's actually try that .
So in space , the Earth is very small .
Can you imagine how small it is ?
Let me try it .
Okay , let 's say this is the size of the observable universe , with all the galaxies , with all the stars , okay , from here to here .
Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be ?
It will be the size of a single , small atom .
It is unimaginably small .
We can 't imagine it .
I mean look , you can see the necktie , but you can 't even imagine seeing the size of a little , small atom .
But that 's not the whole story , you see .
The universe and life are both in space and time .
If that was the age of the universe , then this is the age of life on Earth .
Think about those oldest living things on Earth , but in a cosmic proportion .
This is not insignificant .
This is very significant .
So life might be insignificant in size , but it is not insignificant in time .
Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent , parent and offspring .
So what does this tell us ?
This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle , it 's all wrong .
There is immense , powerful potential in life in this universe -- especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common .
And that potential , that powerful potential , is also our potential , of you and me .
And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere , we 'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it .
And the good news is we can actually , indeed do it .
And let 's do it .
Let 's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one , with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future .
And let 's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle .
Thank you very much .
Peter Hirshberg : The web is more than " better TV "
In this absorbing look at emerging media and tech history , Peter Hirshberg shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than " better TV . "
Well , good morning .
You know , the computer and television both recently turned 60 , and today I 'd like to talk about their relationship .
Despite their middle age , if you 've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry , it 's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other .
So it 's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television , or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers ' strike .
And it 's not just what these are doing to each other , but it 's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter .
To get a sense of this , and it 's been a theme we 've talked about all week , I recently talked to a bunch of tweeners .
I wrote on cards : " television , " " radio , " " MySpace , " " Internet , " " PC . "
And I said , just arrange these , from what 's important to you and what 's not , and then tell me why .
Let 's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television .
Girl 1 : Well , I think it 's important but , like , not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs .
Peter Hirshberg : Which is more fun , Internet or TV ?
Girls : Internet .
Girl 2 : I think we -- the reasons , one of the reasons we put computer before TV is because nowadays , like , we have TV shows on the computer .
Girl 2 : And then you can download onto your iPod .
PH : Would you like to be the president of a TV network ?
Girl 4 : I wouldn 't like it .
Girl 2 : That would be so stressful .
Girl 5 : No .
PH : How come ?
Girl 5 : Because they 're going to lose all their money eventually .
Girl 3 : Like the stock market , it goes up and down and stuff .
I think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff .
PH : There 's been an uneasy relationship between the TV business and the tech business , really ever since they both turned about 30 .
We go through periods of enthrallment , followed by reactions in boardrooms , in the finance community best characterized as , what 's the finance term ? Ick pooey .
Let me give you an example of this . The year is 1976 , and Warner buys Atari because video games are on the rise .
The next year they march forward and they introduce Qube , the first interactive cable TV system , and the New York Times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home , convergence , great things are happening .
Everybody in the East Coast gets in the pictures -- Citicorp , Penney , RCA -- all getting into this big vision .
By the way , this is about when I enter the picture .
I 'm going to do a summer internship at Time Warner .
That summer I 'm all -- I 'm at Warner that summer -- I 'm all excited to work on convergence , and then the bottom falls out .
Doesn 't work out too well for them , they lose money .
And I had a happy brush with convergence until , kind of , Warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing .
That 's when I leave graduate school , and I can 't work in New York on kind of entertainment and technology because I have to be exiled to California , where the remaining jobs are , almost to the sea , to go to work for Apple Computer .
Warner , of course , writes off more than 400 million dollars .
Four hundred million dollars , which was real money back in the ' 70s .
But they were onto something and they got better at it .
By the year 2000 , the process was perfected . They merged with AOL , and in just four years , managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization , showing that they 'd actually mastered the art of applying Moore 's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet .
Now , I think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities , or the media community , is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently .
You know , for 50 years , we 've talked about changing the world , about total transformation .
For 50 years , it 's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world . And I got to thinking , you know , who else talks that way ?
And the answer is pretty clearly -- it 's people in religion and in politics .
And so I realized that actually the tech world is best understood , not as a business cycle , but as a messianic movement .
We promise something great , we evangelize it , we 're going to change the world . It doesn 't work out too well , and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again , as the people in New York and L.A. look on in absolute , morbid astonishment .
But it 's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing .
So , what I 'd like to ask is , if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment , how did we get here ?
I mean , how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media ?
Of course , the first computer was built just after World War II to solve military problems , but things got really interesting just a couple of years later -- 1949 with Whirlwind , built at MIT 's Lincoln Lab . Jay Forrester was building this for the Navy , but you can 't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star .
So take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers , and the computer begins to express itself .
Journalist : It 's a Whirlwind electronic computer .
With considerable trepidation , we undertake to interview this new machine .
Jay Forrester : Hello New York , this is Cambridge .
And this is the oscilloscope of the Whirlwind electronic computer .
Would you like if I used the machine ?
Journalist : Yes , of course . But I have an idea , Mr. Forrester .
Since this computer was made in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research , why don 't we switch down to the Pentagon in Washington and let the Navy 's research chief , Admiral Bolster , give Whirlwind the workout ?
Calvin Bolster : Well , Ed , this problem concerns the Navy 's Viking rocket .
This rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky .
Now , at the standard rate of fuel consumption , I would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine , at any instant , say at the end of 40 seconds , the amount of fuel remaining , and the velocity at that set instant .
JF : Over on the left-hand side , you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off .
And on the right-hand side , there 's a scale that shows the rocket 's velocity .
The rocket 's position is shown by the trajectory that we 're now looking at .
And as it reaches the peak of its trajectory , the velocity , you will notice , has dropped off to a minimum .
Then , as the rocket dives down , velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground .
How 's that ?
Journalist : What about that , Admiral ?
CB : Looks very good to me .
JF : And before leaving , we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time , in a less serious vein , for a Sunday afternoon .
Journalist : Thank you very much indeed , Mr. Forrester and the MIT lab .
PH : You know , so much was worked out : the first real-time interaction , the video display , pointing a gun . It lead to the microcomputer , but unfortunately , it was too pricey for the Navy , and all of this would have been lost if it weren 't for a happy coincidence .
Enter the atomic bomb .
We 're threatened by the greatest weapon ever , and knowing a good thing when it sees it , the Air Force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us .
They adapt Whirlwind to a massive air defense system , deploy it all across the frozen north , and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the Manhattan Project building the A-Bomb in the first place .
Talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry .
And you can imagine that the Air Force became a pretty good salesman .
Here 's their marketing video .
In a mass raid , high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks .
And then it would be too late to act .
We cannot afford to take that chance .
It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE , the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system , to strengthen our air defenses .
This new computer , built to become the nerve center of a defense network , is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid .
It is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators , air-conditioning equipment , and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer .
PH : You know , that one computer was huge .
There 's an interesting marketing lesson from it , which is basically , when you market a product , you can either say , this is going to be wonderful , it will make you feel better and enliven you .
Or there 's one other marketing proposition : if you don 't use our product , you 'll die .
This is a really good example of that .
This had the first pointing device . It was distributed , so it worked out -- distributed computing and modems -- so all these things could talk to each other .
About 20 percent of all the nation 's programmers were wrapped up in this thing , and it led to an awful lot of what we have today . It also used vacuum tubes .
You saw how huge it was , and to give you a sense for this -- because we 've talked a lot about Moore 's law and making things small at this conference , so let 's talk about making things large .
If we took Whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know , say , Century City , it would fit beautifully .
You 'd kind of have to take Century City out , but it could fit in there .
But like , let 's imagine we took the latest Pentium processor , the latest Core 2 Extreme , which is a four-core processor that Intel 's working on , it will be our laptop tomorrow .
To build that , what we 'd do with Whirlwind technology is we 'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to Mulholland , and from the 405 to La Cienega just with those Whirlwinds .
And then , the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of Los Angeles .
That 's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of France creates .
So , the next time they tell you they 're on to something , clearly they 're not .
So -- and we haven 't even worked out the cooling needs .
But it gives you the kind of power that people have , that the audience has , and the reasons these transformations are happening .
All of this stuff starts moving into industry .
DEC kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer .
It shows up at places like MIT , and then a mutation happens .
Spacewar ! is built , the first computer game , and all of a sudden , interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out .
Actually , many MIT students stayed up all night long working on this thing , and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out .
DEC knew a good thing about wasting time .
It shipped every one of its computers with that game .
Meanwhile , as all of this is happening , by the mid- ' 50s , the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely .
A new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they 're quite certain that television is about to do them in .
In fact , despair is in the air .
And a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything I 've been reading all week .
RCA had David Sarnoff , who basically commercialized radio , said this , " I don 't say that radio networks must die .
Every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern , new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues .
It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio , but I don 't know how . "
And of course , as the computer industry develops interactively , producers in the emerging TV business actually hit on the same idea .
And they fake it .
Jack Berry : Boys and girls , I think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set , you just get them out .
First of all , get your Winky Dink kits out .
Put out your Magic Window and your erasing glove , and rub it like this .
That 's the way we get some of the magic into it , boys and girls .
Then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set , and rub it out from the center to the corners , like this .
Make sure you keep your magic crayons handy , your Winky Dink crayons and your erasing glove , because you 'll be using them during the show to draw like that .
You all set ? OK , let 's get right to the first story about Dusty Man .
Come on into the secret lab .
PH : It was the dawn of interactive TV , and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the Winky Dink kits .
Those are the Winky Dink crayons . I know what you 're saying .
" Pete , I could use any ordinary open-source crayon , why do I have to buy theirs ? "
I assure you , that 's not the case .
Turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your Winky Dink Magic Window , other crayons may discolor or hurt the window .
This proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere .
It led to lawsuits -- -- federal investigations , and lots of repercussions , and that 's a scandal we won 't discuss today .
But we will discuss this scandal , because this man , Jack Berry , the host of " Winky Dink , " went on to become the host of " Twenty One , " one of the most important quiz shows ever .
And it was rigged , and it became unraveled when this man , Charles van Doren , was outed after an unnatural winning streak , ending Berry 's career .
And actually , ending the career of a lot of people at CBS .
It turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked .
And 50 years ago , if you 'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media , there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from , Professor Marshall McLuhan .
He actually understood something about a theme that we 've been discussing all week . It 's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications .
Here he is talking from the 1960s .
Marshall McLuhan : If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad , then it 's happy . It 's like the old quiz shows .
They were great TV because it gave the audience a role , something to do .
They were horrified when they discovered they 'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged .
Now , then , this was a horrible misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers .
PH : You know , McLuhan talked about the global village .
If you substitute the word blogosphere , of the Internet today , it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now . Let 's listen in to him .
MM : The global village is a world in which you don 't necessarily have harmony .
You have extreme concern with everybody else 's business and much involvement in everybody else 's life .
It 's a sort of Ann Landers ' column writ large .
And it doesn 't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet , but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else 's affairs .
And so the global village is as big as a planet , and as small as a village post office .
PH : We 'll talk a little bit more about him later .
We 're now right into the 1960s .
It 's the era of big business and data centers for computing .
But all that was about to change .
You know , the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in .
And when I say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations , it 's not just a joke about messianism , it 's actually what we do .
But for this part of the story , I 'd actually like to throw it to America 's leading technology correspondent , John Markoff .
John Markoff : Do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs , sex , rock ' n ' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing ? Everything .
It all happened within five miles of where I 'm standing , at Stanford University , between 1960 and 1975 .
In the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks , a group of researchers led by people like John McCarthy , a computer scientist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab , and Doug Engelbart , a computer scientist at SRI , changed the world .
Engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture , but while he was beginning to do his work , all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula .
There was LSD leaking out of Kesey 's Veterans ' Hospital experiments and other areas around the campus , and there was music literally in the streets .
The Grateful Dead was playing in the pizza parlors .
People were leaving to go back to the land .
There was the Vietnam War . There was black liberation .
There was women 's liberation .
This was a remarkable place , at a remarkable time .
And into that ferment came the microprocessor .
I think it was that interaction that led to personal computing .
They saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build .
And most importantly , they had this ethos of sharing information .
I think these ideas are difficult to understand , because when you 're trapped in one paradigm , the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe -- it makes no sense .
The stories were so compelling that I decided to write a book about them .
The title of the book is , " What the Dormouse Said : How the ' 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry . "
The title was taken from the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song . The lyrics go , " Remember what the dormouse said .
Feed your head , feed your head , feed your head . "
PH : By this time , computing had kind of leapt into media territory , and in short order much of what we 're doing today was imagined in Cambridge and Silicon Valley .
Here 's the Architecture Machine Group , the predecessor of the Media Lab , in 1981 .
Meanwhile , in California , we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff .
HyperCard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks , where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture , or piece of text , or data across a file system , and we had no way of explaining it .
There was no metaphor . Was it a database ?
A prototyping tool ? A scripted language ?
Heck , it was everything . So we ended up writing a marketing brochure .
We asked a question about how the mind works , and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant .
A few years later , we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of , how do you get the content you want , the way you want it and the easy way ?
Here 's the Apple marketing video .
James Burke : You 'll be pleased to know , I 'm sure , that there are several ways to create a HyperCard interactive video .
The most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own HyperCard stacks .
By far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and HyperCard stacks from a commercial supplier .
The method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom HyperCard stacks .
This method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests .
PH : I hope you realize how subversive that is .
That 's like a Dick Cheney speech .
You think he 's a nice balding guy , but he 's just declared war on the content business . Find the commercial stuff , mash it up , tell the story your way .
Now , as long as we confine this to the education market , and a personal matter between the computer and the file system , that 's fine , but as you can see , it was about to leap out and upset Jack Valenti and a lot of other people .
By the way , speaking of the filing system , it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network .
A few years later , Tim Berners-Lee worked that out .
It became a killer app of links , and today , of course , we call that the World Wide Web .
Now , not only was I instrumental in helping Apple miss the Internet , but a couple of years later , I helped Bill Gates do the same thing .
The year is 1993 and he was working on a book and I was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this .
We were plenty aware that we were messing with media , and on the surface , it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things , but we also missed an awful lot . Let 's take a look .
The pyramids , the Colosseum , the New York subway system and TV dinners , ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all .
Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology , the Digital Superhighway .
Once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians .
The Digital Highway arrived in America 's living rooms late in the twentieth century .
Let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible .
The Digital Highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by Alexander Graham Bell .
Though some were incredulous ... Man 1 : The phone company !
Stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising , David Sarnoff commercializes radio .
Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand .
The medium introduced America to new products .
Voice 1 : Say , mom , Windows for Radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family .
Be sure to enjoy Windows for Radio at home and at work .
In 1939 , the Radio Corporation of America introduced television .
Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand .
Eventually , the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company .
And further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry , and the re-regulation of the cable television industry .
Ted Turner : We did the work to build this , this cable industry , now the broadcasters want some of our money . I mean , it 's ridiculous .
Computers , once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks , escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas .
The world and all its culture reduced to bits , the lingua franca of all media .
And the forces of convergence exploded .
Finally , four great industrial sectors combined .
Telecommunications , entertainment , computing and everything else .
We 'll see channels for the gourmet and we 'll see channels for the pet lover .
Voice 2 : Next on the gourmet pet channel , decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer .
All of industry was in play , as investors flocked to place their bets .
At stake : the battle for you , the consumer , and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of America .
PH : We missed a lot . You know , you missed , we missed the Internet , the long tail , the role of the audience , open systems , social networks .
It just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media .
Thomas Edison had the same problem .
He wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it , and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea .
Well , you know where we 're going on from here .
We come into the era of the dotcom , the World Wide Web , and I don 't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together .
But when we emerge from this and what we call Web 2.0 , things actually are quite different .
And I think it 's the reason that TV 's so challenged .
If Internet one was about pages , now it 's about people .
It 's a customer , it 's an audience , it 's a person who 's participating .
It 's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now .
MM : Because it gave the audience a role , something to do .
PH : In my own company , Technorati , we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in .
That 's about 2,700 fresh , connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there .
And it 's no wonder that as we head into the writers ' strike , odd things happen .
You know , it reminds me of that old saw in Hollywood , that a producer is anyone who knows a writer .
I now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem .
But it 's not a joke . This is a real headline .
" Websites attract striking writers : operators of sites like MyDamnChannel.com could benefit from labor disputes . "
Meanwhile , you have the TV bloggers going out on strike , in sympathy with the television writers .
And then you have TV Guide , a Fox property , which is about to sponsor the online video awards -- but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television , not appearing to gloat .
To show you how schizophrenic this all is , here 's the head of MySpace , or Fox Interactive , a News Corp company , being asked , well , with the writers ' strike , isn 't this going to hurt News Corp and help you online ?
But I , yeah , I think there 's an opportunity . As the strike continues , there 's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like MySpace TV .
PH : Oh , but then he remembers he works for Rupert Murdoch .
Yes , well , first , you know , I 'm part of News Corporation as part of Fox Entertainment Group .
Obviously , we hope that the strike is -- that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible .
PH : One of the great things that 's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening .
Here is a clip from a video , from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in Hollywood , animation worked out in Israel , farmed out to Croatia and India , and it 's now an international series .
The following takes place between the minutes of 2 : 15 p.m. and 2 : 18 p.m. , in the months preceding the presidential primaries .
Voice 1 : You 'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over .
Voice 2 : You mean we 'll have to live here , together ?
Voices 2 , 3 and 4 : With her ?
Voice 2 : Well , there goes the neighborhood .
PH : The company that created this , Aniboom , is an interesting example of where this is headed . Traditional TV animation costs , say , between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute .
They 're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute .
And they 're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end , in a much more entrepreneurial manner . So , it 's a different model .
What the entertainment business is struggling with , the world of brands is figuring out .
For example , Nike now understands that Nike Plus is not just a device in its shoe , it 's a network to hook its customers together .
And the head of marketing at Nike says , " People are coming to our site an average of three times a week . We don 't have to go to them . "
Which means television advertising is down 57 percent for Nike .
Or , as Nike 's head of marketing says , " We 're not in the business of keeping media companies alive .
We 're in the business of connecting with consumers . "
And media companies realize the audience is important also .
Here 's a man announcing the new Market Watch from Dow Jones , powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page -- user-generated content married up with traditional content .
It turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them .
Or , as Geoffrey Moore once told me , it 's intellectual curiosity that 's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere .
And I think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business .
One of my heroes is songwriter , Ally Willis , who just wrote " The Color Purple " and has been an R and -- rhythm and blues writer , and this is what she said about where songwriting 's going .
Ally Willis : Where millions of collaborators wanted the song , because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about .
PH : So , to wrap up , I 'd love to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan , who , 40 years ago , was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change , and I think that , today , traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before .
But I don 't need to tell you this , let 's throw it back to him .
We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new .
MM : The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this .
They don 't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up .
They think of the old medium , because the old medium is always the content of the new medium , as movies tend to be the content of TV , novels used to be the content of movies .
And so every time a new medium arrives , the old medium is the content , and it is highly observable , highly noticeable , but the real , real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium , and it is ignored .
PH : I think it 's a great time of enthrallment .
There 's been more raw DNA of communications and media thrown out there . Content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth , and part of social communications , and I think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity .
And whereas television may have gotten beat up , what 's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication , and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it .
Thanks very much .
Nadia Al-Sakkaf : See Yemen through my eyes
As political turmoil in Yemen continues , the editor of the Yemen Times , Nadia Al-Sakkaf , talks at TEDGlobal with host Pat Mitchell . Al-Sakkaf 's independent , English-language paper is vital for sharing news -- and for sharing a new vision of Yemen and of that country 's women as equal partners in work and change .
Pat Mitchell : You have brought us images from the Yemen Times .
And take us through those , and introduce us to another Yemen .
Nadia Al-Sakkaf : Well , I 'm glad to be here .
And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen .
This picture shows a revolution started by women , and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest .
The other picture is the popularity of the real need for change .
So many people are there .
The intensity of the upspring .
This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training , for education .
These women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution .
I love this picture .
I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below .
And they were excluded from decision-making , and now they are in the forefront of the news , raising the flag .
English -- you will see , this is jeans and tights , and an English expression -- the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country .
And expression also , it has brought talents .
Yemenis are using cartoons and art , paintings , comics , to tell the world and each other about what 's going on .
Obviously , there 's always the dark side of it .
And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay .
The solidarity of millions of Yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing .
And finally , lots of people are saying that Yemen 's revolution is going to break the country .
Is it going to be so many different countries ?
Is it going to be another Somalia ?
But we want to tell the world that , no , under the one flag , we 'll still remain as Yemeni people .
PM : Thank you for those images , Nadia .
And they do , in many ways , tell a different story than the story of Yemen , the one that is often in the news .
And yet , you yourself defy all those characterizations .
So let 's talk about the personal story for a moment .
Your father is murdered .
The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper .
How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper , especially in such times of conflict ?
N Well , let me first warn you that I 'm not the traditional Yemeni girl .
I 've guessed you 've already noticed this by now .
In Yemen , most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life .
But there 's so much potential .
I wish I could show you my Yemen .
I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes .
Then you would know that there 's so much to it .
And I was privileged because I was born into a family , my father would always encourage the boys and the girls .
He would say we are equal .
And he was such an extraordinary man .
And even my mother -- I owe it to my family .
A story : I studied in India .
And in my third year , I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni , but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college .
And I went back home and I said , " Daddy , I don 't know who I am .
I 'm not a Yemeni ; I 'm not an Indian . "
And he said , " You are the bridge . "
And that is something I will keep in my heart forever .
So since then I 've been the bridge , and a lot of people have walked over me .
PM : I don 't think so .
N But it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society .
And when I became editor-in-chief after my brother actually -- my father passed away in 1999 , and then my brother until 2005 -- and everybody was betting that I will not be able to do it .
" What 's this young girl coming in and showing off because it 's her family business , " or something .
It was very hard at first .
I didn 't want to clash with people .
But with all due respect to all the men , and the older men especially , they did not want me around .
It was very hard , you know , to impose my authority .
But a woman 's got to do what a woman 's got to do .
And in the first year , I had to fire half of the men .
Brought in more women .
Brought in younger men .
And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today .
The other thing is that it 's about professionalism .
It 's about proving who you are and what you can do .
And I don 't know if I 'm going to be boasting now , but in 2006 alone , we won three international awards .
One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award .
So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people .
And I want to score a point here , because my husband is in the room over there .
If you could please stand up , [ unclear ] .
He has been very supportive of me .
PM : And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper .
But in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have , you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper .
And so along with changing who worked there , you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into , in particular with women , and it has to do with outside image , dress , the veiled woman .
So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you ?
N As you know , the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered , veiled women .
And this is true .
And a lot of it is because women are not able , are not free , to show their face to their self .
It 's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men , the grandparents and so on .
And it 's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say , " I am as much contributing to this family , or more , than you are . "
And the more empowered the women become , the more they are able to remove the veil , for example , or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel .
So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil , and it 's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it .
And I have done this throughout my work .
I 've tried to encourage young girls .
We started with , you can take it off in the office .
And then after that , you can take it off on assignments .
Because I didn 't believe a journalist can be a journalist with -- how can you talk to people if you have your face covered ? -- and so on ; it 's just a movement .
And I am a role model in Yemen .
A lot of people look up to me .
A lot of young girls look up to me .
And I need to prove to them that , yes , you can still be married , you can still be a mother , and you can still be respected within the society , but at the same time , that doesn 't mean you [ should ] just be one of the crowd .
You can be yourself and have your face .
PM : But by putting yourself personally out there -- both projecting a different image of Yemeni women , but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper -- has this put you in personal danger ?
N Well the Yemen Times , across 20 years , has been through so much .
We 've suffered prosecution ; the paper was closed down more than three times .
It 's an independent newspaper , but tell that to the people in charge .
They think that if there 's anything against them , then we are being an opposition newspaper .
And very , very difficult times .
Some of my reporters were arrested .
We had some court cases .
My father was assassinated .
Today , we are in a much better situation .
We 've created the credibility .
And in times of revolution or change like today , it is very important for independent media to have a voice .
It 's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com , and it 's very important to listen to our voice .
And this is probably something I 'm going to share with you in Western media probably -- and how there 's a lot of stereotypes -- thinking of Yemen in one single frame : this is what Yemen is all about .
And that 's not fair .
It 's not fair for me ; it 's not fair for my country .
A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism .
And I just wanted to share with you : there 's one reporter that came .
He wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted .
And he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me -- hip hop -- that there are young Yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu .
That thing .
Yeah , break dancing .
I 'm not so old .
I 'm just not in touch .
PM : Yes , you are .
Actually , that 's a documentary that 's available online ; the video 's online .
N ShaketheDust.org.
PM : " Shake the Dust . "
PM : ShaketheDust.org.
And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen .
You spoke about the responsibility of the press .
And certainly , when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we 've created fear and danger , often from lack of knowledge , lack of real understanding , how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region , but in particular , in your country ?
N Well there is a saying that says , " You fear what you don 't know , and you hate what you fear . "
So it 's about the lack of research , basically .
It 's almost , " Do your homework , " -- some involvement .
And you cannot do parachute reporting -- just jump into a country for two days and think that you 've done your homework and a story .
So I wish that the world would know my Yemen , my country , my people .
I am an example , and there are others like me .
We may not be that many , but if we are promoted as a good , positive example , there will be others -- men and women -- who can eventually bridge the gap -- again , coming to the bridge -- between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion .
I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years .
It 's natural .
But after the two years , which is a price we are willing to pay , we are going to stand up again on our feet , but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people -- democratic .
PM : Nadia , I think you 've just given us a very different view of Yemen .
And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for .
And the very best of luck to you .
YemenTimes.com.
N On Twitter also .
PM : So you are plugged in .
Anthony Atala : Growing new organs
Anthony Atala 's state-of-the-art lab grows human organs -- from muscles to blood vessels to bladders , and more . At TEDMED , he shows footage of his bio-engineers working with some of its sci-fi gizmos , including an oven-like bioreactor and a machine that " prints " human tissue .
This is actually a painting that hangs at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School .
And it shows the first time an organ was ever transplanted .
In the front , you see , actually , Joe Murray getting the patient ready for the transplant , while in the back room you see Hartwell Harrison , the Chief of Urology at Harvard , actually harvesting the kidney .
The kidney was indeed the first organ ever to be transplanted to the human .
That was back in 1954 , 55 years ago .
Yet we 're still dealing with a lot of the same challenges as many decades ago .
Certainly many advances , many lives saved .
But we have a major shortage of organs .
In the last decade the number of patients waiting for a transplant has doubled .
While , at the same time , the actual number of transplants has remained almost entirely flat .
That really has to do with our aging population .
We 're just getting older .
Medicine is doing a better job of keeping us alive .
But as we age , our organs tend to fail more .
So , that 's a challenge , not just for organs but also for tissues .
Trying to replace pancreas , trying to replace nerves that can help us with Parkinson 's .
These are major issues .
This is actually a very stunning statistic .
Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement .
So , what can we do about it ?
We 've talked about stem cells tonight .
That 's a way to do it .
But still ways to go to get stem cells into patients , in terms of actual therapies for organs .
Wouldn 't it be great if our bodies could regenerate ?
Wouldn 't it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies , to actually heal ourselves ?
It 's not really that foreign of a concept , actually ; it happens on the Earth every day .
This is actually a picture of a salamander .
Salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate .
You see here a little video .
This is actually a limb injury in this salamander .
And this is actually real photography , timed photography , showing how that limb regenerates in a period of days .
You see the scar form .
And that scar actually grows out a new limb .
So , salamanders can do it .
Why can 't we ? Why can 't humans regenerate ?
Actually , we can regenerate .
Your body has many organs and every single organ in your body has a cell population that 's ready to take over at the time of injury . It happens every day .
As you age , as you get older .
Your bones regenerate every 10 years .
Your skin regenerates every two weeks .
So , your body is constantly regenerating .
The challenge occurs when there is an injury .
At the time of injury or disease , the body 's first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body .
It basically wants to fight off infection , and seal itself , whether it 's organs inside your body , or your skin , the first reaction is for scar tissue to move in , to seal itself off from the outside .
So , how can we harness that power ?
One of the ways that we do that is actually by using smart biomaterials .
How does this work ? Well , on the left side here you see a urethra which was injured .
This is the channel that connects the bladder to the outside of the body .
And you see that it is injured .
We basically found out that you can use these smart biomaterials that you can actually use as a bridge .
If you build that bridge , and you close off from the outside environment , then you can create that bridge , and cells that regenerate in your body , can then cross that bridge , and take that path .
That 's exactly what you see here .
It 's actually a smart biomaterial that we used , to actually treat this patient .
This was an injured urethra on the left side .
We used that biomaterial in the middle .
And then , six months later on the right-hand side you see this reengineered urethra .
Turns out your body can regenerate , but only for small distances .
The maximum efficient distance for regeneration is only about one centimeter .
So , we can use these smart biomaterials but only for about one centimeter to bridge those gaps .
So , we do regenerate , but for limited distances .
What do we do now , if you have injury for larger organs ?
What do we do when we have injuries than one centimeter ?
Then we can start to use cells .
The strategy here , is if a patient comes in to us with a diseased or injured organ , you can take a very small piece of tissue from that organ , less than half the size of a postage stamp , you can then tease that tissue apart , and look at its basic components , the patient 's own cells , you take those cells out , grow and expand those cells outside the body in large quantities , and then we then use scaffold materials .
To the naked eye they look like a piece of your blouse , or your shirt , but actually these materials are fairly complex and they are designed to degrade once inside the body .
It disintegrates a few months later .
It 's acting only as a cell delivery vehicle .
It 's bringing the cells into the body . It 's allowing the cells to regenerate new tissue , and once the tissue is regenerated the scaffold goes away .
And that 's what we did for this piece of muscle .
This is actually showing a piece of muscle and how we go through the structures to actually engineer the muscle .
We take the cells , we expand them , we place the cells on the scaffold , and we then place the scaffold back into the patient .
But actually , before placing the scaffold into the patient , we actually exercise it .
We want to make sure that we condition this muscle , so that it knows what to do once we put it into the patient .
That 's what you 're seeing here . You 're seeing this muscle bio-reactor actually exercising the muscle back and forth .
Okay . These are flat structures that we see here , the muscle .
What about other structures ?
This is actually an engineered blood vessel .
Very similar to what we just did , but a little bit more complex .
Here we take a scaffold , and we basically -- scaffold can be like a piece of paper here .
And we can then tubularize this scaffold .
And what we do is we , to make a blood vessel , same strategy .
A blood vessel is made up of two different cell types .
We take muscle cells , we paste , or coat the outside with these muscle cells , very much like baking a layer cake , if you will .
You place the muscle cells on the outside .
You place the vascular blood vessel lining cells on the inside .
You now have your fully seeded scaffold .
You 're going to place this in an oven-like device .
It has the same conditions as a human body , 37 degrees centigrade , 95 percent oxygen .
You then exercise it , as what you saw on that tape .
And on the right you actually see a carotid artery that was engineered .
This is actually the artery that goes from your neck to your brain .
And this is an X-ray showing you the patent , functional blood vessel .
More complex structures such as blood vessels , urethras , which I showed you , they 're definitely more complex because you 're introducing two different cell types .
But they are really acting mostly as conduits .
You 're allowing fluid or air to go through at steady states .
They are not nearly as complex as hollow organs .
Hollow organs have a much higher degree of complexity , because you 're asking these organs to act on demand .
So , the bladder is one such organ .
Same strategy , we take a very small piece of the bladder , less than half the size of a postage stamp .
We then tease the tissue apart into its two individual cell components , muscle , and these bladder specialized cells .
We grow the cells outside the body in large quantities .
It takes about four weeks to grow these cells from the organ .
We then take a scaffold that we shape like a bladder .
We coat the inside with these bladder lining cells .
We coat the outside with these muscle cells .
We place it back into this oven-like device .
From the time you take that piece of tissue , six to eight weeks later you can put the organ right back into the patient .
This actually shows the scaffold .
The material is actually being coated with the cells .
When we did the first clinical trial for these patients we actually created the scaffold specifically for each patient .
We brought patients in , six to eight weeks prior to their scheduled surgery , did X-rays , and we then composed a scaffold specifically for that patient 's size pelvic cavity .
For the second phase of the trials we just had different sizes , small , medium , large and extra-large .
It 's true .
And I 'm sure everyone here wanted an extra-large . Right ?
So , bladders are definitely a little bit more complex than the other structures .
But there are other hollow organs that have added complexity to it .
This is actually a heart valve , which we engineered .
And the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy .
We take the scaffold , we seed it with cells , and you can now see here , the valve leaflets opening and closing .
We exercise these prior to implantation .
Same strategy .
And then the most complex are the solid organs .
For solid organs , they 're more complex because you 're using a lot more cells per centimeter .
This is actually a simple solid organ like the ear .
It 's now being seeded with cartilage .
That 's the oven-like device ; once it 's coated it gets placed there .
And then a few weeks later we can take out the cartilage scaffold .
This is actually digits that we 're engineering .
These are being layered , one layer at a time , first the bone , we fill in the gaps with cartilage .
We then start adding the muscle on top .
And you start layering these solid structures .
Again , fairly more complex organs , but by far , the most complex solid organs are actually the vascularized , highly vascularized , a lot of blood vessel supply , organs such as the heart , the liver , the kidneys .
This is actually an example -- several strategies to engineer solid organs .
This is actually one of the strategies . We use a printer .
And instead of using ink , we use -- you just saw an inkjet cartridge -- we just use cells .
This is actually your typical desktop printer .
It 's actually printing this two chamber heart , one layer at a time .
You see the heart coming out there . It takes about 40 minutes to print , and about four to six hours later you see the muscle cells contract .
This technology was developed by Tao Ju , who worked at our institute .
And this is actually still , of course , experimental , not for use in patients .
Another strategy that we have followed is actually to use decellularized organs .
We actually take donor organs , organs that are discarded , and we then can use very mild detergents to take all the cell elements out of these organs .
So , for example on the left panel , top panel , you see a liver .
We actually take the donor liver , we use very mild detergents , out of the liver .
Two weeks later , we basically can lift this organ up , it feels like a liver , we can hold it like a liver , it looks like a liver , but it has no cells .
All we are left with is the skeleton , if you will , of the liver , all made up of collagen , a material that 's in our bodies , that will not reject .
We can use it from one patient to the next .
We then take this vascular structure and we can prove that we retain the blood vessel supply .
You can see , actually that 's a fluoroscopy .
We 're actually injecting contrast into the organ .
Now you can see it start . We 're injecting the contrast into the organ into this decellularized liver .
And you can see the vascular tree that remains intact .
We then take the cells , the vascular cells , blood vessel cells , we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient 's own cells .
We perfuse the outside of the liver with the patient 's own liver cells .
And we can then create functional livers .
And that 's actually what you 're seeing .
This is still experimental . But we are able to actually reproduce the functionality of the liver structure , experimentally .
For the kidney , as I talked to you about the first painting that you saw , the first slide I showed you , 90 percent of the patients on the transplant wait list are waiting for a kidney , 90 percent .
So , another strategy we 're following is actually to create wafers that we stack together , like an accordion , if you will .
So , we stack these wafers together , using the kidney cells .
And then you can see these miniature kidneys that we 've engineered .
They are actually making urine .
Again , small structures , our challenge is how to make them larger , and that is something we 're working on right now at the institute .
One of the things that I wanted to summarize for you then is what is a strategy that we 're going for in regenerative medicine .
If at all possible , we really would like to use smart biomaterials that we can just take off the shelf and regenerate your organs .
We are limited with distances right now , but our goal is actually to increase those distances over time .
If we cannot use smart biomaterials , then we 'd rather use your very own cells .
Why ? Because they will not reject .
We can take cells from you , create the structure , put it right back into you , they will not reject .
And if possible , we 'd rather use the cells from your very specific organ .
If you present with a diseased wind pipe we 'd like to take cells from your windpipe .
If you present with a diseased pancreas we 'd like to take cells from that organ .
Why ? Because we 'd rather take those cells which already know that those are the cell types you want .
A windpipe cell already knows it 's a windpipe cell .
We don 't need to teach it to become another cell type .
So , we prefer organ-specific cells .
And today we can obtain cells from most every organ in your body , except for several which we still need stem cells for , like heart , liver , nerve and pancreas .
And for those we still need stem cells .
If we cannot use stem cells from your body then we 'd like to use donor stem cells .
And we prefer cells that will not reject and will not form tumors .
And we 're working a lot with the stem cells that we published on two years ago , stem cells from the amniotic fluid , and the placenta , which have those properties .
So , at this point , I do want to tell you that some of the major challenges we have .
You know , I just showed you this presentation , everything looks so good , everything works . Actually no , these technologies really are not that easy .
Some of the work you saw today was performed by over 700 researchers at our institute across a 20-year time span .
So , these are very tough technologies .
Once you get the formula right you can replicate it .
But it takes a lot to get there .
So , I always like to show this cartoon .
This is how to stop a runaway stage .
And there you see the stagecoach driver , and he goes , on the top panel , He goes A , B , C , D , E , F.
He finally stops the runaway stage .
And those are usually the basic scientists , The bottom is usually the surgeons .
I 'm a surgeon so that 's not that funny .
But actually method A is the correct approach .
And what I mean by that is that anytime we 've launched one of these technologies to the clinic , we 've made absolutely sure that we do everything we can in the laboratory before we ever launch these technologies to patients .
we want to make sure that we ask ourselves a very tough question .
Are you ready to place this in your own loved one , your own child , your own family member , and then we proceed .
Because our main goal , of course , is first , to do no harm .
I 'm going to show you now , a very short clip , It 's a five second clip of a patient who received one of the engineered organs .
We started implanting some of these structures over 14 years ago .
So , we have patients now walking around with organs , engineered organs , for over 10 years , as well .
I 'm going to show a clip of one young lady .
She had a spina bifida defect , a spinal cord abnormality .
She did not have a normal bladder . This is a segment from CNN .
We are just taking five seconds .
This is a segment that Sanjay Gupta actually took care of .
Kaitlyn M : I 'm happy . I was always afraid that I was going to have like , an accident or something .
And now I can just go and go out with my friends , go do whatever I want .
Anthony Atala : See , at the end of the day , the promise of regenerative medicine is a single promise .
And that is really very simple , to make our patients better .
Thank you for your attention .
Christina Warinner : Tracking ancient diseases using ... plaque
Imagine what we could learn about diseases by studying the history of human disease , from ancient hominids to the present . But how ? TED Fellow Christina Warinner is an achaeological geneticist , and she 's found a spectacular new tool -- the microbial DNA in fossilized dental plaque .
Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque ?
Probably not , but people like me do .
I 'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich , and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans .
And through this work , I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies , so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future .
There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine , and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones .
And from these extracts , we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations , risk factors and inherited diseases .
But this is only one half of the story .
The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome , but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation , diet , microbes and parasites and our immune response .
All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved .
And in order to understand these diseases , we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past .
But there are a lot of challenges for this .
And first of all , what do we even study ?
Skeletons are ubiquitous ; they 're found all over the place .
But of course , all of the soft tissue has decomposed , and the skeleton itself has limited health information .
Mummies are a great source of information , except that they 're really geographically limited and limited in time as well .
Coprolites are fossilized human feces , and they 're actually extremely interesting .
You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease , but they are very rare .
So to address this problem , I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland , Denmark and the U.K.
to study a very poorly studied , little known material that 's found on people everywhere .
It 's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus .
Many of you may know it by the term tartar .
It 's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit .
And in a typical dentistry visit , you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed .
But in ancient times before tooth brushing , up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime .
And what 's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton , it 's abundant in quantity before the present day and it 's ubiquitous worldwide .
We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years .
And we even find it in neanderthals and animals .
And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy .
They 'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope , and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches , and they 'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria .
And so what my team of researchers , what we wanted to do , is say , can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins , and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what 's going on ?
And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth .
We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet .
But what was surprising to us , and also quite exciting , is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems .
So it gives us virtual access to the lungs , which is where many important diseases reside .
And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut .
And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that , from the skeleton alone , has long decomposed .
And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus , we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet , infection and immunity thousands of years ago .
So what started out as an idea , is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease , right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens .
And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick .
And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus .
And as a final parting thought , on behalf of future archeologists , I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth .
Thank you .
Molly Crockett : Beware neuro-bunk
Brains are ubiquitous in modern marketing : Headlines proclaim cheese sandwiches help with decision-making , while a " neuro " drink claims to reduce stress . There 's just one problem , says neuroscientist Molly Crockett : The benefits of these " neuro-enhancements " are not proven scientifically . In this to-the-point talk , Crockett explains the limits of interpreting neuroscientific data , and why we should all be aware of them .
I 'm a neuroscientist , and I study decision-making .
I do experiments to test how different chemicals in the brain influence the choices we make .
I 'm here to tell you the secret to successful decision-making : a cheese sandwich .
That 's right . According to scientists , a cheese sandwich is the solution to all your tough decisions .
How do I know ? I 'm the scientist who did the study .
A few years ago , my colleagues and I were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people 's decisions in social situations .
Specifically , we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they 're treated unfairly .
So we did an experiment .
We manipulated people 's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting-tasting artificial lemon-flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain .
This is the amino acid tryptophan .
So what we found was , when tryptophan was low , people were more likely to take revenge when they 're treated unfairly .
That 's the study we did , and here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards .
At this point , you might be wondering , did I miss something ?
Cheese ? Chocolate ? Where did that come from ?
And I thought the same thing myself when these came out , because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate .
We gave people this horrible-tasting drink that affected their tryptophan levels .
But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate .
And of course when science says cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions , well , that 's sure to grab people 's attention .
So there you have it : the evolution of a headline .
When this happened , a part of me thought , well , what 's the big deal ?
So the media oversimplified a few things , but in the end , it 's just a news story .
And I think a lot of scientists have this attitude .
But the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time , and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves .
When the headlines rolled , what happened was , the marketers came calling .
Would I be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood-boosting bottled water ?
Or would I go on television to demonstrate , in front of a live audience , that comfort foods really do make you feel better ?
I think these folks meant well , but had I taken them up on their offers , I would have been going beyond the science , and good scientists are careful not to do this .
But nevertheless , neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing .
Here 's one example : Neuro drinks , a line of products , including Nuero Bliss here , which according to its label helps reduce stress , enhances mood , provides focused concentration , and promotes a positive outlook .
I have to say , this sounds awesome .
I could totally have used this 10 minutes ago .
So when this came up in my local shop , naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims .
So I went to the company 's website looking to find some controlled trials of their products .
But I didn 't find any .
Trial or no trial , these claims are front and center on their label right next to a picture of a brain .
And it turns out that pictures of brains have special properties .
A couple of researchers asked a few hundred people to read a scientific article .
For half the people , the article included a brain image , and for the other half , it was the same article but it didn 't have a brain image .
At the end — you see where this is going — people were asked whether they agreed with the conclusions of the article .
So this is how much people agree with the conclusions with no image .
And this is how much they agree with the same article that did include a brain image .
So the take-home message here is , do you want to sell it ? Put a brain on it .
Now let me pause here and take a moment to say that neuroscience has advanced a lot in the last few decades , and we 're constantly discovering amazing things about the brain .
Like , just a couple of weeks ago , neuroscientists at MIT figured out how to break habits in rats just by controlling neural activity in a specific part of their brain .
Really cool stuff .
But the promise of neuroscience has led to some really high expectations and some overblown , unproven claims .
So what I 'm going to do is show you how to spot a couple of classic moves , dead giveaways , really , for what 's variously been called neuro-bunk , neuro-bollocks , or , my personal favorite , neuro-flapdoodle .
So the first unproven claim is that you can use brain scans to read people 's thoughts and emotions .
Here 's a study published by a team of researchers as an op-ed in The New York Times .
The headline ? " You Love Your iPhone . Literally . "
It quickly became the most emailed article on the site .
So how 'd they figure this out ?
They put 16 people inside a brain scanner and showed them videos of ringing iPhones .
The brain scans showed activation in a part of the brain called the insula , a region they say is linked to feelings of love and compassion .
So they concluded that because they saw activation in the insula , this meant the subjects loved their iPhones .
Now there 's just one problem with this line of reasoning , and that 's that the insula does a lot .
Sure , it is involved in positive emotions like love and compassion , but it 's also involved in tons of other processes , like memory , language , attention , even anger , disgust and pain .
So based on the same logic , I could equally conclude you hate your iPhone .
The point here is , when you see activation in the insula , you can 't just pick and choose your favorite explanation from off this list , and it 's a really long list .
My colleagues Tal Yarkoni and Russ Poldrack have shown that the insula pops up in almost a third of all brain imaging studies that have ever been published .
So chances are really , really good that your insula is going off right now , but I won 't kid myself to think this means you love me .
So speaking of love and the brain , there 's a researcher , known to some as Dr. Love , who claims that scientists have found the glue that holds society together , the source of love and prosperity .
This time it 's not a cheese sandwich .
No , it 's a hormone called oxytocin .
You 've probably heard of it .
So , Dr. Love bases his argument on studies showing that when you boost people 's oxytocin , this increases their trust , empathy and cooperation .
So he 's calling oxytocin " the moral molecule . "
Now these studies are scientifically valid , and they 've been replicated , but they 're not the whole story .
Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy . It increases gloating .
Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups .
And in some cases , oxytocin can even decrease cooperation .
So based on these studies , I could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule , and call myself Dr. Strangelove .
So we 've seen neuro-flapdoodle all over the headlines .
We see it in supermarkets , on book covers .
What about the clinic ?
SPECT imaging is a brain-scanning technology that uses a radioactive tracer to track blood flow in the brain .
For the bargain price of a few thousand dollars , there are clinics in the U.S. that will give you one of these SPECT scans and use the image to help diagnose your problems .
These scans , the clinics say , can help prevent Alzheimer 's disease , solve weight and addiction issues , overcome marital conflicts , and treat , of course , a variety of mental illnesses ranging from depression to anxiety to ADHD .
This sounds great . A lot of people agree .
Some of these clinics are pulling in tens of millions There 's just one problem .
The broad consensus in neuroscience is that we can 't yet diagnose mental illness from a single brain scan .
But these clinics have treated tens of thousands of patients to date , many of them children , and SPECT imaging involves a radioactive injection , so exposing people to radiation , potentially harmful .
I am more excited than most people , as a neuroscientist , about the potential for neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe to make us better and smarter .
And if one day we can say that cheese and chocolate help us make better decisions , count me in .
But we 're not there yet .
We haven 't found a " buy " button inside the brain , we can 't tell whether someone is lying or in love just by looking at their brain scans , and we can 't turn sinners into saints with hormones .
Maybe someday we will , but until then , we have to be careful that we don 't let overblown claims detract resources and attention away from the real science that 's playing a much longer game .
So here 's where you come in .
If someone tries to sell you something with a brain on it , don 't just take them at their word .
Ask the tough questions . Ask to see the evidence .
Ask for the part of the story that 's not being told .
The answers shouldn 't be simple , because the brain isn 't simple .
But that 's not stopping us from trying to figure it out anyway .
Thank you .
Steven Schwaitzberg : A universal translator for surgeons
Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients . But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world -- language and distance . He shares how a new technology , which combines video conferencing and a real-time universal translator , could help .
So I want to talk to you about two things tonight .
Number one : Teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard .
And second , that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world .
And in my little corner of the world , these two things are actually related , and I want to tell you how tonight .
Now , nobody wants an operation .
Who here has had surgery ?
Did you want it ?
Keep your hands up if you wanted an operation .
Nobody wants an operation .
In particular , nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain , that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school , that leave a big scar .
But if you have to have an operation , what you really want is a minimally invasive operation .
That 's what I want to talk to you about tonight -- how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator .
Now , this type of surgery is hard , and it starts by putting people to sleep , putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen , blowing them up like a balloon , sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen -- it 's dangerous stuff -- and taking instruments and watching it on a TV screen .
So let 's see what it looks like .
So this is gallbladder surgery .
We perform a million of these a year in the United States alone .
This is the real thing . There 's no blood .
And you can see how focused the surgeons are , how much concentration it takes .
You can see it in their faces .
It 's hard to teach , and it 's not all that easy to learn .
We do about five million of these in the United States and maybe 20 million of these worldwide .
All right , you 've all heard the term : " He 's a born surgeon . "
Let me tell you , surgeons are not born .
Surgeons are not made either .
There are no little tanks where we 're making surgeons .
Surgeons are trained one step at a time .
It starts with a foundation , basic skills .
We build on that and we take people , hopefully , to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant .
Then we teach them to be a surgeon in training .
And when they do all of that for about five years , they get the coveted board certification .
If you need surgery , you want to be operated on by a board-certified surgeon .
You get your board certificate , and you can go out into practice .
And eventually , if you 're lucky , you achieve mastery .
Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States , SAGES , started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures .
Now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the American Board of Surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified .
It 's not a lecture , it 's not a course , it 's all of that plus a high-stakes assessment .
It 's hard .
Now just this past year , one of our partners , the American College of Surgeons , teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS -certified before they do minimally invasive surgery .
And are we talking about just people here in the U.S. and Canada ?
No , we just said all surgeons .
So to lift this education and training worldwide is a very large task , something I 'm very personally excited about as we travel around the world .
SAGES does surgery all over the world , teaching and educating surgeons .
So we have a problem , and one of the problems is distance .
We can 't travel everywhere .
We need to make the world a smaller place .
And I think that we can develop some tools to do so .
And one of the tools I like personally is using video .
So I was inspired by a friend .
This is Allan Okrainec from Toronto .
And he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing .
So here 's Allan teaching an English-speaking surgeon in Africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery .
Very inspiring .
But for this examination , which is really hard , we have a problem .
Even people who say they speak English , only 14 percent pass .
Because for them it 's not a surgery test , it 's an English test .
Let me bring it to you locally .
I work at the Cambridge Hospital .
It 's the primary Harvard Medical School teaching facility .
We have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages , and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital .
It 's a big labor-intensive effort .
If you think about the worldwide burden of trying to talk to your patients -- not just teaching surgeons , just trying to talk to your patients -- there aren 't enough translators in the world .
We need to employ technology to assist us in this quest .
At our hospital we see everybody from Harvard professors to people who just got here last week .
And you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you can 't talk to .
And there isn 't always a translator available .
So we need tools .
We need a universal translator .
One of the things that I want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world .
It 's really about setting up a dialogue .
We have a lot to learn .
Here in the United States we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world .
Maybe we have something to learn as well .
So I 'm passionate about teaching these FLS skills all over the world .
This past year I 've been in Latin America , I 've been in China , talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery .
And everywhere I go the barrier is : " We want this , but we need it in our language . "
So here 's what we think we want to do : Imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously .
I want to talk to the people in Asia , Latin America , Africa , Europe seamlessly , accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology .
And it has to be bi-directional .
They have to be able to teach us something as well .
It 's a big task .
So we looked for a universal translator ; I thought there would be one out there .
Your webpage has translation , your cellphone has translation , but nothing that 's good enough to teach surgery .
Because we need a lexicon . What is a lexicon ?
A lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain .
I need to have a health care lexicon .
And in that I need a surgery lexicon .
That 's a tall order . We have to work at it .
So let me show you what we 're doing .
This is research -- can 't buy it .
We 're working with the folks at IBM Research from the Accessibility Center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator .
It starts with a framework system where when the surgeon delivers the lecture using a framework of captioning technology , we then add another technology to do video conferencing .
But we don 't have the words yet , so we add a third technology .
And now we 've got the words , and we can apply the special sauce : the translation .
We get the words up in a window and then apply the magic .
We work with a fourth technology .
And we currently have access to eleven language pairs .
More to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place .
And I 'd like to show you our prototype of stringing all of these technologies that don 't necessarily always talk to each other to become something useful .
Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery .
Module five : manual skills practice .
Students may display captions in their native language .
Steven Schwaitzberg : If you 're in Latin America , you click the " I want it in Spanish " button and out it comes in real time in Spanish .
But if you happen to be sitting in Beijing at the same time , by using technology in a constructive fashion , you could get it in Mandarin or you could get it in Russian -- on and on and on , simultaneously without the use of human translators .
But that 's the lectures .
If you remember what I told you about FLS at the beginning , it 's knowledge and skills .
The difference in an operation between doing something successfully and not may be moving your hand this much .
So we 're going to take it one step further ; we 've brought my friend Allan back .
Allan Okrainec : Today we 're going to practice suturing .
This is how you hold the needle .
Grab the needle at the tip .
It 's important to be accurate .
Aim for the black dots .
Orient your loop this way .
Now go ahead and cut .
Very good Oscar . I 'll see you next week .
SS : So that 's what we 're working on in our quest for the universal translator .
We want it to be bi-directional .
We have a need to learn as well as to teach .
I can think of a million uses for a tool like this .
As we think about intersecting technologies -- everybody has a cell phone with a camera -- we could use this everywhere , whether it be health care , patient care , engineering , law , conferencing , translating videos .
This is a ubiquitous tool .
In order to break down our barriers , we have to learn to talk to people , to demand that people work on translation .
We need it for our everyday life , in order to make the world a smaller place .
Thank you very much .
Hans Rosling : New insights on poverty
Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty . He demos Dollar Street , comparing households of varying income levels worldwide . Then he does something really amazing .
I told you three things last year .
I told you that the statistics of the world have not been made properly available .
Because of that , we still have the old mindset of developing in industrialized countries , which is wrong .
And that animated graphics can make a difference .
Things are changing and today , on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page , it says , by first of May , full access to the databases .
And if I could share the image with you on the screen .
So three things have happened .
U.N. opened their statistic databases , and we have a new version of the software up working as a beta on the net , so you don 't have to download it any longer .
And let me repeat what you saw last year .
The bubbles are the countries .
Here you have the fertility rate -- the number of children per woman -- and there you have the length of life in years .
This is 1950 -- those were the industrialized countries , those were developing countries .
At that time there was a " we " and " them . "
There was a huge difference in the world .
But then it changed , and it went on quite well .
And this is what happens .
You can see how China is the red , big bubble .
The blue there is India .
And they go over all this -- I 'm going to try to be a little more serious this year in showing you how things really changed .
And it 's Africa that stands out as the problem down here , doesn 't it ?
Large families still , and the HIV epidemic brought down the countries like this .
This is more or less what we saw last year , and this is how it will go on into the future .
And I will talk on , is this possible ?
Because you see now , I presented statistics that don 't exist .
Because this is where we are .
Will it be possible that this will happen ?
I cover my lifetime here , you know ?
I expect to live 100 years .
And this is where we are today .
Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world ?
And I would like to show that against child survival .
We 'll swap the axis .
Here you have child mortality -- that is , survival -- four kids dying there , 200 dying there .
And this is GDP per capita on this axis .
And this was 2007 .
And if I go back in time , I 've added some historical statistics -- here we go , here we go , here we go -- not so much statistics 100 years ago .
Some countries still had statistics .
We are looking down in the archive , and when we are down into 1820 , there is only Austria and Sweden that can produce numbers .
But they were down here . They had 1,000 dollars per person per year .
And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday .
So this is what happens in the world , if we play the entire world .
How they got slowly richer and richer , and they add statistics .
Isn 't it beautiful when they get statistics ?
You see the importance of that ?
And here , children don 't live longer .
The last century , 1870 , was bad for the kids in Europe , because most of this statistics is Europe .
It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year .
This is India coming up , with the first data from India .
And this is the United States moving away here , earning more money .
And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here .
And it moves up with Mao Tse-Tung getting health , not getting so rich .
There he died , then Deng Xiaoping brings money .
It moves this way over here .
And the bubbles keep moving up there , and this is what the world looks like today .
Let us have a look at the United States .
We have a function here -- I can tell the world , " Stay where you are . "
And I take the United States -- we still want to see the background -- I put them up like this , and now we go backwards .
And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream .
They are on the money side all the time .
And down in 1915 , the United States was a neighbor of India -- present , contemporary India .
And that means United States was richer , but lost more kids than India is doing today , proportionally .
And look here -- compare to the Philippines of today .
The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War .
But we have to bring United States forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have in the Philippines .
About 1957 here , the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines .
And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized , is that Asia , Arabic countries , Latin America , are much more ahead in being healthy , educated , having human resources than they are economically .
There 's a discrepancy in what 's happening today in the emerging economies .
There now , social benefits , social progress , are going ahead of economical progress .
And 1957 -- the United States had the same economy as Chile has today .
And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today ?
I think we have to go , there -- we have 2001 , or 2002 -- the United States has the same health as Chile .
Chile 's catching up !
Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States .
This is really a change , that you have this lag of more or less 30 , 40 years ' difference on the health .
And behind the health is the educational level .
And there 's a lot of infrastructure things , and general human resources are there .
Now we can take away this -- and I would like to show you the rate of speed , the rate of change , how fast they have gone .
And we go back to 1920 , and I want to look at Japan .
And I want to look at Sweden and the United States .
And I 'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there , and the brownish Volvo .
And here we go . Here we go .
The Toyota has a very bad start down here , you can see , and the United States Ford is going off-road there .
And the Volvo is doing quite fine .
This is the war . The Toyota got off track , and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden -- can you see that ?
And they are taking over Sweden , and they are now healthier than Sweden .
That 's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota .
And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan .
They really caught up .
And this changes gradually .
We have to look over generations to understand it .
And let me show you my own sort of family history -- we made these graphs here .
And this is the same thing , money down there , and health , you know ?
And this is my family .
This is Sweden , 1830 , when my great-great-grandma was born .
Sweden was like Sierra Leone today .
And this is when great-grandma was born , 1863 .
And Sweden was like Mozambique .
And this is when my grandma was born , 1891 .
She took care of me as a child , so I 'm not talking about statistic now -- now it 's oral history in my family .
That 's when I believe statistics , when it 's grandma-verified statistics .
I think it 's the best way of verifying historical statistics .
Sweden was like Ghana .
It 's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa .
I told you last year , I 'll tell you again , my mother was born in Egypt , and I -- who am I ?
I 'm the Mexican in the family .
And my daughter , she was born in Chile , and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore , now the healthiest country on this Earth .
It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago , with better child survival .
But they 're very small , you know ?
They 're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests .
But homage to Singapore .
Singapore is the best one .
Now this looks also like a very good story .
But it 's not really that easy , that it 's all a good story .
Because I have to show you one of the other facilities .
We can also make the color here represent the variable -- and what am I choosing here ?
Carbon-dioxide emission , metric ton per capita .
This is 1962 , and United States was emitting 16 tons per person .
And China was emitting 0.6 , and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita .
And what happens when we moved on ?
Well , you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier -- everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide .
There is no one who has done it so far .
And we don 't have all the updated data any longer , because this is really hot data today .
And there we are , 2001 .
And in the discussion I attended with global leaders , you know , many say now the problem is that the emerging economies , they are getting out too much carbon dioxide .
The Minister of the Environment of India said , " Well , you were the one who caused the problem . "
The OECD countries -- the high-income countries -- they were the ones who caused the climate change .
" But we forgive you , because you didn 't know it .
But from now on , we count per capita .
From now on we count per capita .
And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission . "
This really shows you , we have not seen good economic and health progress anywhere in the world without destroying the climate .
And this is really what has to be changed .
I 've been criticized for showing you a too positive image of the world , but I don 't think it 's like this .
The world is quite a messy place .
This we can call Dollar Street .
Everyone lives on this street here .
What they earn here -- what number they live on -- is how much they earn per day .
This family earns about one dollar per day .
We drive up the street here , we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day .
And we drive away here -- we find the first garden in the street , and they earn 10 to 50 dollars a day .
And how do they live ?
If we look at the bed here , we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor .
This is what poverty line is -- 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs , the food for the day .
This is two to five dollars . You have a bed .
And here it 's a much nicer bedroom , you can see .
I lectured on this for Ikea , and they wanted to see the sofa immediately here .
And this is the sofa , how it will emerge from there .
And the interesting thing , when you go around here in the photo panorama , you see the family still sitting on the floor there .
Although there is a sofa , if you watch in the kitchen , you can see that the great difference for women does not come between one to 10 dollars .
It comes beyond here , when you really can get good working conditions in the family .
And if you really want to see the difference , you look at the toilet over here .
This can change . This can change .
These are all pictures and images from Africa , and it can become much better .
We can get out of poverty .
My own research has not been in IT or anything like this .
I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine .
And this is the result of the farmers-needs research .
The nice thing here is that you can 't see who are the researchers in this picture .
That 's when research functions in poor societies -- you must really live with the people .
When you 're in poverty , everything is about survival .
It 's about having food .
And these two young farmers , they are girls now -- because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS -- they discuss with a trained agronomist .
This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi , Junatambe Kumbira , and he 's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant -- the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found .
And they are very , very eagerly interested to get advice , and that 's to survive in poverty .
That 's one context .
Getting out of poverty .
The women told us one thing . " Get us technology .
We hate this mortar , to stand hours and hours .
Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour , then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves . "
Technology will bring you out of poverty , but there 's a need for a market to get away from poverty .
And this woman is very happy now , bringing her products to the market .
But she 's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count , and won 't be cheated when she reaches the market .
She wants her kid to be healthy , so she can go to the market and doesn 't have to stay home .
And she wants the infrastructure -- it is nice with a paved road .
It 's also good with credit .
Micro-credits gave her the bicycle , you know .
And information will tell her when to go to market with which product .
You can do this .
I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible .
Africa has not done bad .
In 50 years they 've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe , with a functioning nation and state .
I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years .
Because we don 't consider where they came from .
It 's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us , Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago , and says that Mozambique did worse .
We have to know a little more about the world .
I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine .
He knows everything .
He knows the name of the grape , the temperature and everything .
I only know two types of wine -- red and white .
But my neighbor only knows two types of countries -- industrialized and developing .
And I know 200 , I know about the small data .
But you can do that .
But I have to get serious . And how do you get serious ?
You make a PowerPoint , you know ?
Homage to the Office package , no ?
What is this , what is this , what am I telling ?
I 'm telling you that there are many dimensions of development .
Everyone wants your pet thing .
If you are in the corporate sector , you love micro-credit .
If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization , you love equity between gender .
Or if you are a teacher , you 'll love UNESCO , and so on .
On the global level , we have to have more than our own thing .
We need everything .
All these things are important for development , especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare .
Now , what we need to think about is , what is a goal for development , and what are the means for development ?
Let me first grade what are the most important means .
Economic growth to me , as a public-health professor , is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival .
Governance . To have a government which functions -- that 's what brought California out of the misery of 1850 .
It was the government that made law function finally .
Education , human resources are important .
Health is also important , but not that much as a mean .
Environment is important .
Human rights is also important , but it just gets one cross .
Now what about goals ? Where are we going toward ?
We are not interested in money .
Money is not a goal .
It 's the best mean , but I give it zero as a goal .
Governance , well it 's fun to vote in a little thing , but it 's not a goal .
And going to school , that 's not a goal , it 's a mean .
Health I give two points . I mean it 's nice to be healthy -- at my age especially -- you can stand here , you 're healthy .
And that 's good , it gets two plusses .
Environment is very , very crucial .
There 's nothing for the grandkid if you don 't save up .
But where are the important goals ?
Of course , it 's human rights .
Human rights is the goal , but it 's not that strong of a mean for achieving development .
And culture . Culture is the most important thing , I would say , because that 's what brings joy to life .
That 's the value of living .
So the seemingly impossible is possible .
Even African countries can achieve this .
And I 've shown you the shot where the seemingly impossible is possible .
And remember , please remember my main message , We can have a good world .
I showed you the shots , I proved it in the PowerPoint , and I think I will convince you also by culture .
Bring me my sword !
Sword swallowing is from ancient India .
It 's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious .
And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel -- solid steel -- this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army , 1850 , in the last year we had war .
And it 's all solid steel -- you can hear here .
And I 'm going to take this blade of steel , and push it down through my body of blood and flesh , and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible .
Can I request a moment of absolute silence ?
Patricia Kuhl : The linguistic genius of babies
Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and " taking statistics " on the sounds they need to know . Clever lab experiments show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I want you to take a look at this baby .
What you 're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch .
But today I 'm going to talk to you about something you can 't see -- what 's going on up in that little brain of hers .
The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what 's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science .
And what we 're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the " celestial openness " of the child 's mind .
What we see here is a mother in India , and she 's speaking Koro , which is a newly discovered language .
And she 's talking to her baby .
What this mother -- and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world -- understands [ is ] that , to preserve this language , they need to speak it to the babies .
And therein lies a critical puzzle .
Why is it that you can 't preserve a language by speaking to you and I , to the adults ?
Well , it 's got to do with your brain .
What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning .
The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis .
And you 'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language .
Babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven , and then there 's a systematic decline .
After puberty , we fall off the map .
No scientists dispute this curve , but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way .
Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development -- and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language .
We think , by studying how the sounds are learned , we 'll have a model for the rest of language , and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social , emotional and cognitive development .
So we 've been studying the babies using a technique that we 're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages .
The baby sits on a parent 's lap , and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes -- like from " ah " to " ee . "
If they do so at the appropriate time , the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum .
A six-monther adores the task .
What have we learned ?
Well , babies all over the world are what I like to describe as " citizens of the world . "
They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages , no matter what country we 're testing and what language we 're using , and that 's remarkable because you and I can 't do that .
We 're culture-bound listeners .
We can discriminate the sounds of our own language , but not those of foreign languages .
So the question arises : when do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are ?
And the answer : before their first birthdays .
What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States , here in Seattle , as they listened to " ra " and " la " -- sounds important to English , but not to Japanese .
So at six to eight months the babies are totally equivalent .
Two months later something incredible occurs .
The babies in the United States are getting a lot better , babies in Japan are getting a lot worse , but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn .
So the question is : what 's happening during this critical two-month period ?
This is the critical period for sound development , but what 's going on up there ?
So there are two things going on .
The first is that the babies are listening intently to us , and they 're taking statistics as they listen to us talk -- they 're taking statistics .
So listen to two mothers speaking motherese -- the universal language we use when we talk to kids -- first in English and then in Japanese .
English Mother : Ah , I love your big blue eyes -- so pretty and nice .
Japanese Mother : [ Japanese ] Patricia Kuhl : During the production of speech , when babies listen , what they 're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear .
And those distributions grow .
And what we 've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics , and the statistics of Japanese and English are very , very different .
English has a lot of Rs and Ls .
The distribution shows .
And the distribution of Japanese is totally different , where we see a group of intermediate sounds , which is known as the Japanese " R. "
So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains ; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are .
But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics .
We 're governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development .
So what we 're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about .
We 're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize .
It 's raising lots of questions about bilingual people .
Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them , one after the other , depending on who they 're speaking to .
So we asked ourselves , can the babies take statistics on a brand new language ?
And we tested this by exposing American babies who 'd never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period .
We knew that , when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds , they showed the same pattern .
Six to eight months , they 're totally equivalent .
Two months later , something incredible happens .
But the Taiwanese babies are getting better , not the American babies .
What we did was expose American babies during this period to Mandarin .
It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions .
Here 's what it looked like in the laboratory .
Mandarin Speaker : [ Mandarin ] PK : So what have we done to their little brains ?
We had to run a control group to make sure that just coming into the laboratory didn 't improve your Mandarin skills .
So a group of babies came in and listened to English .
And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn 't improve their Mandarin .
But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions .
They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who 'd been listening for 10-and-a-half months .
What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language .
Whatever you put in front of them , they 'll take statistics on .
But we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise .
So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage , the same 12 sessions , but over a television set and another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen .
What did we do to their brains ?
What you see here is the audio result -- no learning whatsoever -- and the video result -- no learning whatsoever .
It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics .
The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics .
We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions , as opposed to in front of human beings .
Thankfully , we have a new machine , magnetoencephalography , that allows us to do this .
It looks like a hair dryer from Mars .
But it 's completely safe , completely non-invasive and silent .
We 're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 SQUIDs -- these are Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices -- to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking .
We 're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine while they are learning .
So this is little Emma .
She 's a six-monther .
And she 's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears .
You can see , she can move around .
We 're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap , so she 's free to move completely unconstrained .
It 's a technical tour de force .
What are we seeing ?
We 're seeing the baby brain .
As the baby hears a word in her language the auditory areas light up , and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence , getting the brain coordinated with its different areas , and causality , one brain area causing another to activate .
We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child 's brain development .
We 're going to be able to see a child 's brain as they experience an emotion , as they learn to speak and read , as they solve a math problem , as they have an idea .
And we 're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning .
Just as the poets and writers described , we 're going to be able to see , I think , that wondrous openness , utter and complete openness , of the mind of a child .
In investigating the child 's brain , we 're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human , and in the process , we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives .
Thank you .
Julian Assange : Why the world needs WikiLeaks
The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video . Founder Julian Assange , who 's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities , talks to TED 's Chris Anderson about how the site operates , what it has accomplished -- and what drives him . The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad .
Julian , welcome .
It 's been reported that WikiLeaks , your baby , has , in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world 's media combined .
Can that possibly be true ?
Julian Assange : Yeah , can it possibly be true ?
It 's a worry -- isn 't it ? -- that the rest of the world 's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined .
How does it work ?
How do people release the documents ?
And how do you secure their privacy ?
J So these are -- as far as we can tell -- classical whistleblowers , and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us .
So we use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the Internet , to hide trails , pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections .
We get information in the mail , the regular postal mail , encrypted or not , vet it like a regular news organization , format it -- which is sometimes something that 's quite hard to do , when you 're talking about giant databases of information -- release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks .
So you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate , but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is ?
J That 's right , yeah . Very rarely do we ever know , and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible .
God damn it .
I think that 's the CIA asking what the code is for a TED membership .
So let 's take [ an ] example , actually .
This is something you leaked a few years ago .
If we can have this document up ...
So this was a story in Kenya a few years ago .
Can you tell us what you leaked and what happened ?
J So this is the Kroll Report .
This was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the Kenyan government after its election in 2004 .
Prior to 2004 , Kenya was ruled by Daniel arap Moi for about 18 years .
He was a soft dictator of Kenya .
And when Kibaki got into power -- through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in Kenya -- they commissioned this report , spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report .
And then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on Moi , who was the richest man -- still is the richest man -- in Kenya .
It 's the Holy Grail of Kenyan journalism .
So I went there in 2007 , and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election -- the national election , December 28 .
When we released that report , we did so three days after the new president , Kibaki , had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out , Daniel arap Moi , so this report then became a dead albatross around President Kibaki 's neck .
And -- I mean , to cut a long story short -- word of the report leaked into Kenya , not from the official media , but indirectly , and in your opinion , it actually shifted the election .
J Yeah . So this became front page of the Guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of Kenya , in Tanzanian and South African press .
And so it came in from the outside .
And that , after a couple of days , made the Kenyan press feel safe to talk about it .
And it ran for 20 nights straight on Kenyan TV , shifted the vote by 10 percent , according to a Kenyan intelligence report , which changed the result of the election .
Wow , so your leak really substantially changed the world ?
J Yep .
Here 's -- We 're going to just show a short clip from this Baghdad airstrike video .
The video itself is longer , but here 's a short clip .
This is -- this is intense material , I should warn you .
Radio : ... just fuckin ' , once you get on ' em just open ' em up .
I see your element , uh , got about four Humvees , uh , out along ...
You 're clear . All right . Firing .
Let me know when you 've got them . Let 's shoot .
Light ' em all up .
C 'mon , fire !
Keep shoot ' n . Keep shoot ' n .
Keep shoot ' n .
Hotel ... Bushmaster Two-Six , Bushmaster Two-Six , we need to move , time now !
All right , we just engaged all eight individuals .
Yeah , we see two birds [ helicopters ] , and we 're still firing .
Roger . I got ' em .
Two-Six , this is Two-Six , we 're mobile .
Oops , I 'm sorry . What was going on ?
God damn it , Kyle . All right , hahaha . I hit ' em .
So , what was the impact of that ?
J The impact on the people who worked on it was severe .
We ended up sending two people to Baghdad to further research that story .
So this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene .
So , I mean , 11 people died in that attack , right , including two Reuters employees ?
J Yeah . Two Reuters employees , two young children were wounded .
There were between 18 and 26 people killed all together .
And releasing this caused widespread outrage .
What was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage , do you think ?
J I don 't know . I guess people can see the gross disparity in force .
You have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street , and then an Apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30-millimeter cannon shells on everyone -- looking for any excuse to do so -- and killing people rescuing the wounded .
And there was two journalists involved that clearly weren 't insurgents because that 's their full-time job .
I mean , there 's been this U.S. intelligence analyst , Bradley Manning , arrested , and it 's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you , along with 280,000 classified U.S. embassy cables .
I mean , did he ?
J We have denied receiving those cables .
He has been charged , about five days ago , with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50 .
Now , we had released , early in the year , a cable from the Reykjavik U.S. embassy , but this is not necessarily connected .
I mean , I was a known visitor of that embassy .
I mean , if you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables ...
J We would have released them .
J Yeah .
J Well , because these sort of things reveal what the true state of , say , Arab governments are like , the true human-rights abuses in those governments .
If you look at declassified cables , that 's the sort of material that 's there .
So let 's talk a little more broadly about this .
I mean , in general , what 's your philosophy ?
Why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information ?
J Well , there 's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world , what sort of information can achieve reform .
And there 's a lot of information .
So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing , that 's a really good signal that when the information gets out , there 's a hope of it doing some good -- because the organizations that know it best , that know it from the inside out , are spending work to conceal it .
And that 's what we 've found in practice , and that 's what the history of journalism is .
But are there risks with that , either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large , where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence ?
J Not that we have seen with anything we have released .
I mean , we have a harm immunization policy .
We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal -- personally identifying information in it .
But there are legitimate secrets -- you know , your records with your doctor ; that 's a legitimate secret -- but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated .
So they are well-motivated .
And what would you say to , for example , the , you know , the parent of someone whose son is out serving the U.S. military , and he says , " You know what , you 've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out .
It shows a U.S. soldier laughing at people dying .
That gives the impression , has given the impression , to millions of people around the world that U.S. soldiers are inhuman people .
Actually , they 're not . My son isn 't . How dare you ? "
What would you say to that ?
J Yeah , we do get a lot of that .
But remember , the people in Baghdad , the people in Iraq , the people in Afghanistan -- they don 't need to see the video ; they see it every day .
So it 's not going to change their opinion . It 's not going to change their perception .
That 's what they see every day .
It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all , and that 's our hope .
So you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government .
Light is good .
But do you see any irony in the fact that , in order for you to shine that light , you have to , yourself , create secrecy around your sources ?
J Not really . I mean , we don 't have any WikiLeaks dissidents yet .
We don 't have sources who are dissidents on other sources .
Should they come forward , that would be a tricky situation for us , but we 're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission , not to screw it up .
I 'd actually be interested , just based on what we 've heard so far -- I 'm curious as to the opinion in the TED audience .
You know , there might be a couple of views of WikiLeaks and of Julian .
You know , hero -- people 's hero -- bringing this important light .
Dangerous troublemaker .
Who 's got the hero view ?
Who 's got the dangerous troublemaker view ?
J Oh , come on . There must be some .
It 's a soft crowd , Julian , a soft crowd .
We have to try better . Let 's show them another example .
Now here 's something that you haven 't yet leaked , but I think for TED you are .
I mean it 's an intriguing story that 's just happened , right ?
What is this ?
J So this is a sample of what we do sort of every day .
So late last year -- in November last year -- there was a series of well blowouts in Albania , like the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico , but not quite as big .
And we got a report -- a sort of engineering analysis into what happened -- saying that , in fact , security guards from some rival , various competing oil firms had , in fact , parked trucks there and blown them up .
And part of the Albanian government was in this , etc . , etc .
And the engineering report had nothing on the top of it , so it was an extremely difficult document for us .
We couldn 't verify it because we didn 't know who wrote it and knew what it was about .
So we were kind of skeptical that maybe it was a competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up .
So under that basis , we put it out and said , " Look , we 're skeptical about this thing .
We don 't know , but what can we do ?
The material looks good , it feels right , but we just can 't verify it . "
And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it , wanting to track down the source -- saying , " Hey , we want to track down the source . "
And we were like , " Oh , tell us more .
What document is it , precisely , you 're talking about ?
Can you show that you had legal authority over that document ?
Is it really yours ? "
So they sent us this screen shot with the author in the Microsoft Word ID .
Yeah .
That 's happened quite a lot though .
This is like one of our methods of identifying , of verifying , what a material is , is to try and get these guys to write letters .
Yeah . Have you had information from inside BP ?
J Yeah , we have a lot , but I mean , at the moment , we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort .
So our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we 're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have .
That 's a problem .
I mean , like any sort of growing startup organization , we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth , and that means we 're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don 't have enough people to actually process and vet this information .
So that 's the key bottleneck , basically journalistic volunteers and / or the funding of journalistic salaries ?
J Yep . Yeah , and trusted people .
I mean , we 're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with , so we have to restructure in order to have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff , and then lower security cases .
So help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this .
And I think I read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools .
Can that be right ?
J Well , my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult , so the combination between the two ...
I mean , a psychologist might say that 's a recipe for breeding paranoia .
J What , the movie business ?
And you were also -- I mean , you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on .
J Well , I was a journalist .
You know , I was a very young journalist activist at an early age .
I wrote a magazine , was prosecuted for it when I was a teenager .
So you have to be careful with hacker .
I mean there 's like -- there 's a method that can be deployed for various things .
Unfortunately , at the moment , it 's mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother 's bank accounts .
So this phrase is not , not as nice as it used to be .
Yeah , well , I certainly don 't think you 're stealing anyone 's grandmother 's bank account , but what about your core values ?
Can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them ?
J I 'm not sure about the incident .
But the core values : well , capable , generous men do not create victims ; they nurture victims .
And that 's something from my father and something from other capable , generous men that have been in my life .
Capable , generous men do not create victims ; they nurture victims ?
J Yeah . And you know , I 'm a combative person , so I 'm not actually so big on the nurture , but some way -- there is another way of nurturing victims , which is to police perpetrators of crime .
And so that is something that has been in my character for a long time .
So just tell us , very quickly in the last minute , the story : what happened in Iceland ?
You basically published something there , ran into trouble with a bank , then the news service there was injuncted from running the story .
Instead , they publicized your side .
That made you very high-profile in Iceland . What happened next ?
J Yeah , this is a great case , you know .
Iceland went through this financial crisis .
It was the hardest hit of any country in the world .
Its banking sector was 10 times the GDP of the rest of the economy .
Anyway , so we release this report in July last year .
And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air , like out of a movie : injunction landed on the news desk , and the news reader was like , " This has never happened before . What do we do ? "
Well , we just show the website instead , for all that time , as a filler , and we became very famous in Iceland , went to Iceland and spoke about this issue .
And there was a feeling in the community that that should never happen again , and as a result , working with Icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts , we put together a new sort of package of legislation for Iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press , with the strongest journalistic protections in the world , with a new Nobel Prize for freedom of speech .
Iceland 's a Nordic country , so , like Norway , it 's able to tap into the system .
And just a month ago , this was passed by the Icelandic parliament unanimously .
Wow .
Last question , Julian .
When you think of the future then , do you think it 's more likely to be Big Brother exerting more control , more secrecy , or us watching Big Brother , or it 's just all to be played for either way ?
J I 'm not sure which way it 's going to go .
I mean , there 's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world -- within the E.U. , between China and the United States .
Which way is it going to go ? It 's hard to see .
That 's why it 's a very interesting time to be in -- because with just a little bit of effort , we can shift it one way or the other .
Well , it looks like I 'm reflecting the audience 's opinion to say , Julian , be careful , and all power to you .
J Thank you , Chris .
Andrew Bird : A one-man orchestra of the imagination
Musical innovator Andrew Bird winds together his trademark violin technique with xylophone , vocals and sophisticated electronic looping . Add in his uncanny ability to whistle anything , and he becomes a riveting one-man orchestra .
Well , there 's lots to talk about , but I think I 'm just going to play to start off .
When I wake up in the morning I pour the coffee I read the paper And then I slowly and so softly do the dishes So feed the fishes You sing me happy birthday Like it 's gonna be your last day here on Earth All right .
So , I wanted to do something special today .
I want to debut a new song that I 've been working on in the last five or six months .
And there 's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience , especially when it 's half-finished .
I 'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it .
Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms .
And so this is basically a song about loops , but not the kind of loops that I make up here .
They 're feedback loops .
And in the audio world that 's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source , and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound .
And I 'm going to demonstrate for you .
I 'm not going to hurt you . Don 't worry .
This is a loop , feedback loop This is a loop , feedback loop This is a loop , feedback loop This is a loop , feedback loop This is a loop , feedback loop This is a loop , feedback loop This is a -- All right . I don 't know if that was necessary to demonstrate -- -- but my point is it 's the sound of self-destruction .
And I 've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms , from , say , the ecological , okay .
There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from , it gets ugly .
So like , you can 't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease , and inbreeding and incest and , let 's see , what 's the other one ?
Biological -- there 's autoimmune diseases , where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host , or the person .
And then -- okay , this is where we get to the song -- kind of bridges the gap to the emotional .
Because although I 've used scientific terms in songs , it 's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical .
And there 's some things you just don 't need to have in songs .
So I 'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody .
And so , I don 't know if you 've ever had this , but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep , I can 't stop thinking about my own eyes .
And it 's like your eyes start straining to see themselves .
That 's what it feels like to me .
It 's not pleasant .
I 'm sorry if I put that idea in your head .
It 's impossible , of course , for your eyes to see themselves , but they seem to be trying .
So that 's getting a little more closer to a personal experience .
Or ears being able to hear themselves -- it 's just impossible .
That 's the thing .
So , I 've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who 's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they 're left to do the deed themselves , if that 's possible .
And that 's what the song is asking .
All right .
It doesn 't have a name yet .
Go ahead and congratulate yourself Give yourself a hand , the hand is your hand And the eye that eyes itself is your eye And the ear that hears itself is near ' Cause it 's your ear , oh oh You 've done the impossible now Took yourself apart You made yourself invulnerable No one can break your heart So you wear it out And you wring it out And you wear it out And you break it yourself Breaking your own , break it yourself Breaking your own , break it yourself Breaking your own Thanks .
All right .
It 's kind of cool . Songwriters can sort of get away with murder .
You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research .
But , you know , I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now , just a little bit .
I 'm going to finish up with a song of mine called " Weather Systems . "
Quiet Quiet down , she said Speak into the back of his head On the edge of the bed , I can see your blood flow I can see your cells grow Hold still awhile Don 't spill the wine I can see it all from here I can see oh , I I can see weather systems of the world Weather systems of the world Some things you say are not for sale I would hold it where our free agents of some substance are scared Hold still a while Don 't spill the wine I can see it all from here I can see oh , I I can see weather systems of the world Weather systems of the world Thanks .
Charles Limb : Your brain on improv
Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out . What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
So I am a surgeon who studies creativity , and I have never had a patient tell me that " I really want you to be creative during surgery , " and so I guess there 's a little bit of irony to it .
I will say though that , after having done surgery a lot , it 's somewhat similar to playing a musical instrument .
And for me , this sort of deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and also to study the science of sound , particularly music .
And so I 'm going to try to talk to you over the next few minutes about my career in terms of how I 'm able to actually try to study music and really try to grapple with all these questions of how the brain is able to be creative .
I 've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University , but also at the National Institute of Health where I was previously .
I 'm going to go over some science experiments and try to cover three musical experiments .
I 'm going to start off by playing a video for you .
And this video is a video of Keith Jarrett , who 's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known , iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a really higher level .
And he 'll improvise entire concerts off the top of his head , and he 'll never play it exactly the same way again , and so , as a form of intense creativity , I think this is a great example .
And so why don 't we go and click the video .
It 's really a remarkable , awesome thing that happens there .
I 've always -- just as a listener , as just a fan -- I listen to that , and I 'm just astounded .
I think -- how can this possibly be ?
How can the brain generate that much information , that much music , spontaneously ?
And so I set out with this concept , scientifically , that artistic creativity , it 's magical , but it 's not magic , meaning that it 's a product of the brain .
There 's not too many brain-dead people creating art .
And so with this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product , I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process .
And I think there 's some sub-questions there that I put there .
Is it truly possible to study creativity scientifically ?
And I think that 's a good question .
And I 'll tell you that most scientific studies of music , they 're very dense , and when you actually go through them , it 's very hard to recognize the music in it .
In fact , they seem to be very unmusical entirely and to miss the whole point of the music .
And so it brings the second question : Why should scientists study creativity ?
Maybe we 're not the right people to do it .
Well it may be , but I will say that , from a scientific perspective -- we talked a lot about innovation today -- the science of innovation , how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy , and truly , we know very little about how we are able to be creative .
And so I think that we 're going to see over the next 10 , 20 , 30 years a real science of creativity that 's burgeoning and is going to flourish .
Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process of something like this , complex jazz improvisation , and study it rigorously .
And so it gets down to the brain .
And so all of us have this remarkable brain , which is poorly understood to say the least .
I think that neuroscientists have many more questions than answers , and I myself , I 'm not going to give you many answers today , just ask a lot of questions .
And fundamentally that 's what I do in my lab .
I ask questions about what is this brain doing to enable us to do this .
This is the main method that I use . This is called functional MRI .
If you 've been in an MRI scanner , it 's very much the same , but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain , but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain .
Now the way that 's done is by the following .
There 's something called BOLD imaging , which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging .
Now when you 're in an fMRI scanner , you 're in a big magnet that 's aligning your molecules in certain areas .
When an area of the brain is active , meaning a neural area is active , it gets blood flow shunted to that area .
That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration .
Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI , whereas oxyhemoglobin can 't .
So through this method of inference -- and we 're measuring blood flow , not neural activity -- we say that an area of the brain that 's getting more blood was active during a particular task , and that 's the crux of how fMRI works .
And it 's been used since the ' 90s to study really complex processes .
Now I 'm going to review a study that I did , which was jazz in an fMRI scanner .
And this was done with a colleague of mine , Alan Braun , at the NIH .
This is a short video of how we did this project .
Charles Limb : This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments .
And it 's a 35-key keyboard that is designed to fit both inside the scanner , be magnetically safe , have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players ' legs while they 're lying down in the scanner , playing on their back .
And it works like this -- this doesn 't actually produce any sound .
It sends out what 's called a MIDI signal -- or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface -- through these wires into the box and then the computer , which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this .
CL : Okay , so it works .
And so through this piano keyboard , we now have the means to take a musical process and study it .
So what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard ?
You can 't just sort of -- " It 's great we 've got this keyboard . "
We actually have to come up with a scientific experiment .
And so the experiment really rests on the following : What happens in the brain during something that 's memorized and over-learned , and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated , or improvised , in a way that 's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features ?
And so , I have here what we call the " paradigms . "
There 's a scale paradigm , which is just playing a scale up and down , memorized .
And then there 's improvising on a scale -- quarter notes , metronome , right hand -- scientifically very safe , but musically really boring .
And then there 's the bottom one , which is called the jazz paradigm .
And so what we did was we brought professional jazz players to the NIH , and we had them memorize this piece of music on the left , the lower-left -- which is what you heard me playing -- and then we had them improvise to the same exact chord changes .
And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon , that 's an example of what was recorded in the scanner .
So in the end , it 's not the most natural environment , but they 're able to play real music .
And I 've listened to that solo 200 times , and I still like it .
And the musicians , they were comfortable in the end .
And so we first measured the number of notes .
Were they in fact just playing a lot more notes when they were improvising ?
That was not what was going on .
And then we looked at the brain activity .
I 'm going to try to condense this for you .
These are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you 're improvising versus when you 're doing something memorized .
In red is an area that active in the prefrontal cortex , the frontal lobe of the brain , and in blue is this area that was deactivated .
And so we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity .
We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity , and I 'll summarize that for you here .
Now these are multifunctional areas of the brain .
As I like to say , these are not the " jazz areas " of the brain .
They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection , introspection , working memory and so forth .
Really , consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe .
But we have this combination of an area that 's thought to be involved in self-monitoring , turning off , and this area that 's thought to be autobiographical , or self-expressive , turning on .
And we think , at least in this preliminary -- it 's one study ; it 's probably wrong , but it 's one study -- we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that , to be creative , you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe .
One area turns on , and a big area shuts off , so that you 're not inhibited , so that you 're willing to make mistakes , so that you 're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses .
Now a lot of people know that music is not always a solo activity -- sometimes it 's done communicatively .
And so the next question was : What happens when musicians are trading back and forth , something called " trading fours , " which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment ?
So this is a twelve-bar blues .
And I 've broken it down into four-bar groups here , so you would know how you would trade .
Now what we did was we brought a musician into the scanner -- same way -- had them memorize this melody and then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively .
So this is a musician , Mike Pope , one of the world 's best bassists and a fantastic piano player .
So he 's now playing the piece that we just saw just a little better than I wrote it .
Nurse : Nothing 's in your pockets , right Mike ?
MP : Nope . Nothing 's in my pockets . Nurse : Okay .
CL : You have to have the right attitude to agree to it .
It 's kind of fun actually .
And so now we 're playing back and forth .
He 's in there . You can see his legs up there .
And then I 'm in the control room here , playing back and forth .
Mike Pope : This is a pretty good representation of what it 's like .
And it 's good that it 's not too quick .
The fact that we do it over and over again lets you acclimate to your surroundings .
So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing , of looking at my hands through two mirrors , and not able to move at all except for my hand .
That was challenging .
But again , there were moments , for sure , there were moments of real , honest-to-God musical interplay , for sure .
CL : At this point , I 'll take a few moments .
And so what you 're seeing here -- and I 'm doing a cardinal sin in science , which is to show you preliminary data .
This is one subject 's data .
This is , in fact , Mike Pope 's data .
So what am I showing you here ?
When he was trading fours with me , improvising versus memorized , his language areas lit up , his Broca 's area , which is inferior frontal gyrus on the left .
He actually had it also homologous on the right .
This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication .
This whole notion that music is a language -- well maybe there 's a neurologic basis to it in fact after all , and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation .
And so we 've done this actually on eight subjects now , and we 're just getting all the data together , so hopefully we 'll have something to say about it meaningfully .
Now when I think about improvisation and the language , well what 's next ?
Rap , of course , rap -- free-style .
And so I 've always been fascinated by free-style .
And let 's go ahead and play this video here .
Mos Def : ... brown skin I be , standing five-ten I be Rockin ' it when I be , in your vicinity Whole-style synergy , recognize symmetry Go and try to injure me , broke ' em down chemically Ain 't the number 10 MC , talk about how been I be Styled it like Kennedy , late like a 10 to three When I say when I be , girls say bend that key cut CL : And so there 's a lot of analogy between what takes place in free-style rap and jazz .
There are , in fact , a lot of correlations between the two forms of music I think in different time periods .
In a lot a ways , rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve .
So how do you study rap scientifically ?
And my colleagues kind of think I 'm crazy , but I think it 's very viable .
And so this is what you do : you have a free-style artist come in and memorize a rap that you write for them , that they 've never heard before , and then you have them free-style .
So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED , and they said , " No , you won 't . "
And then I thought -- But here 's the thing .
With this big screen , you can all rap with me . Okay ?
So what we had them do was memorize this lower-left sound icon , please .
This is the control condition . This is what they memorized .
Computer : Memory , thump . CL : Thump of the beat in a known repeat Rhythm and rhyme , they make me complete The climb is sublime when I 'm on the mic Spittin ' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike I search for the truth in this eternal quest My passion 's not fashion , you can see how I 'm dressed Psychopathic words in my head appear Whisper these lyrics only I can hear The art of discovering and that which is hovering Inside the mind of those unconfined All of these words keep pouring out like rain I need a mad scientist to check my brain I guarantee you that will never happen again .
So now , what 's great about these free-stylers , they will get cued different words .
They don 't know what 's coming , but they 'll hear something off the cuff .
Go ahead and hit that right sound icon .
They are going to be cued these three square words : " like , " " not " and " head . "
He doesn 't know what 's coming .
Free-styler : I 'm like some kind of [ unclear ] [ unclear ] extraterrestrial , celestial scene Back in the days , I used to sit in pyramids and meditate With two microphones hovering over my head See if I could still listen , spittin ' off the sound See what you grinning I teach the children in the back of the classroom About the message of apocalyptical Not really though , ' cause I 've got to keep it simple [ unclear ] instrumental Detrimental playing Super Mario [ unclear ] boxes [ unclear ] hip hop CL : So again , it 's an incredible thing that 's taking place .
It 's doing something that , neurologically , is remarkable .
Whether or not you like the music is irrelevant .
Creatively speaking , it 's just a phenomenal thing .
This is a short video of how we actually do this in a scanner .
CL : We 're here with Emmanuel .
CL : That was recorded in the scanner , by the way .
CL : That 's Emmanuel in the scanner .
He 's just memorized a rhyme for us .
Emmanuel : Top of the beat with no repeat Rhythm and rhyme make me complete Climb is sublime when I 'm on the mic Spittin ' rhymes that 'll hit you like a lightning strike I search for the truth in this eternal quest I 'm passing on fashion ; you can see how I 'm dressed CL : Okay . So I 'm going to stop that there . So what do we see in his brain ?
Well , this is actually four rappers ' brains .
And what we see , we do see language areas lighting up , but then -- eyes closed -- when you are free-styling versus memorizing , you 've got major visual areas lighting up .
You 've got major cerebellar activity , which is involved in motor coordination .
You have heightened brain activity when you 're doing a comparable task , when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized .
It 's very preliminary , but I think it 's kind of cool .
So just to conclude , we 've got a lot of questions to ask , and like I said , we 'll ask questions here , not answer them .
But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius , neurologically , and I think , with these methods , we 're getting close to being there .
And I think hopefully in the next 10 , 20 years you 'll actually see real , meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art , and maybe we 're starting now to get there .
And so I want to thank you for your time . I appreciate it .
Dean Ornish : The killer American diet that 's sweeping the planet
Forget the latest disease in the news : Cardiovascular disease kills more people than everything else combined -- and it 's mostly preventable . Dr. Dean Ornish explains how changing our eating habits can save lives .
With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu -- and we 'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today -- I want to talk about the other pandemic , which is cardiovascular disease , diabetes , hypertension -- all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle .
And what 's happening is that there 's a globalization of illness occurring , that people are starting to eat like us , and live like us , and die like us . And in one generation , for example , Asia 's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest . And in Africa , cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries .
So there 's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people , and practice preventive medicine on a global scale .
Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people -- not only in this country , but also worldwide -- than everything else combined , and yet it 's completely preventable for almost everybody .
It 's not only preventable ; it 's actually reversible . And for the last almost 29 years , we 've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle , using these very high-tech , expensive , state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like -- quantitative arteriography , before and after a year , and cardiac PET scans .
We showed a few months ago -- we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle , and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth , or inhibition of the tumor growth , compared to only nine percent in the control group .
And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here , the prostate tumor activity is shown in red -- you can see it diminishing after a year .
Now there is an epidemic of obesity : two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids . What 's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years , and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do . That 's pitiful , and it 's preventable .
Now these are not election returns , these are the people -- the number of the people who are obese by state , beginning in ' 85 , ' 86 , ' 87 -- these are from the CDC website -- ' 88 , ' 89 , ' 90 , ' 91 -- you get a new category -- ' 92 , ' 93 , ' 94 , ' 95 , ' 96 , ' 97 , ' 98 , ' 99 , 2000 , 2001 -- it gets worse . We 're kind of devolving .
Now what can we do about this ? Well , you know , the diet that we 've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet .
But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are , which is why they 're starting to get sick like we are .
So I 've been working with a lot of the big food companies . They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods , like -- I chair the advisory boards to McDonald 's , and PepsiCo , and ConAgra , and Safeway , and soon Del Monte , and they 're finding that it 's good business .
The salads that you see at McDonald 's came from the work -- they 're going to have an Asian salad . At Pepsi , two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods .
And so if we can do that , then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu . Thank you .
Afra Raymond : Three myths about corruption
Trinidad and Tobago amassed great wealth in the 1970s thanks to oil . But in 1982 , a shocking fact was revealed -- that 2 out of every 3 dollars earmarked for development had been wasted or stolen . This has haunted Afra Raymond for 30 years . Shining a flashlight on a continued history of government corruption , Raymond gives us a reframing of financial crime .
Okay , this morning I 'm speaking on the question of corruption .
And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself -- or , in the case of our context , your friends , your family or your financiers .
Okay ? Friends , family and financiers .
But we need to understand what we understand about corruption , and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it , and we have to admit that .
We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it .
The first thing is that the big myth , number one , is that in fact it 's not really a crime .
When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country , crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella , nobody 's speaking about corruption .
That 's the honest truth .
When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime , he isn 't speaking about corruption .
And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime , he 's not talking about corruption either .
The point I 'm making is that it is a crime .
It is an economic crime , because we 're involving the looting of taxpayers ' money .
Public and private corruption is a reality .
As somebody who comes from the private sector , I can tell you there 's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government .
The same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table , it all takes place in the private sector .
Today , I 'm focusing on public sector corruption , which the private sector also participates in .
The second important myth to understand -- because we have to destroy these myths , dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them -- the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem -- if it is a problem , it 's only a small problem , that in fact it 's only a little 10 or 15 percent , it 's been going on forever , it probably will continue forever , and there 's no point passing any laws , because there 's little we can do about it .
And I want to demonstrate that that , too , is a dangerous myth , very dangerous .
It 's a piece of public mischief .
And I want to speak a little bit , take us back about 30 years .
We 're coming out today from Trinidad and Tobago , a resource-rich , small Caribbean country , and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country 's wealth , and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices .
We call them petrodollars . The treasury was bursting with money .
And it 's ironic , because we 're standing today in the Central Bank .
You see , history 's rich in irony .
We 're standing today in the Central Bank , and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I 'm going to be speaking about .
Okay ? We 're talking about irresponsibility in public office .
We 're speaking about the fact that across the terrace , the next tower is the Ministry of Finance , and there 's a lot of connection with us today , so we 're speaking within your temple today . Okay ?
The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago , we embarked , the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country .
And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world , As I said , even this building we 're standing in -- that 's one of the ironies -- this building was part of that series of complexes , what they called the Twin Towers .
It became so outrageous , the whole situation , that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed , and it reported in 1982 , 30 years ago it reported -- the Ballah Report -- 30 years ago , and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped .
The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech , and he said some things that I 'll never forget .
They went right in here . I was a young man at the time .
It went right into my heart .
And he said that , in fact — Let me see if this thing works .
Are we getting a , yeah ? — That 's what he told us .
He told us that , in fact , two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent , the taxpayers ' money , was wasted or stolen .
So the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief .
As we say , it 's a nancy-story . Forget it .
That 's for little children . We are big people , and we 're trying to deal with what 's happening in our society .
Okay ? This is the size of the problem .
Okay ? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted .
That was 30 years ago . 1982 was Ballah .
So what has changed ?
I don 't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience , but I have to .
Four months ago , we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country .
We call it the Section 34 fiasco , the Section 34 fiasco , a suspicious piece of law , and I 'm going to say it like it is , a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects .
the Piarco Airport accused .
I 'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today .
They are the Piarco Airport accused .
It was a constitutional outrage of the first order , and I have labeled it the Plot to Pervert Parliament .
Our highest institution in our country was perverted .
We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature .
Do you get how serious this problem is ?
There was massive protest . A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms .
Most importantly , the American embassy complained , so Parliament was swiftly reconvened , and the law was reversed , it was repealed .
That 's the word lawyers use . It was repealed .
But the point is that Parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events , because what really happened is that , because of the suspicious passage of that law , the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence , our jubilee of independence .
So that is the kind of outrage of the thing .
It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation , but we got it , because we all understood it , and for the first time that I could remember , there were mass protests against this corruption .
And that gave me a lot of hope . Okay ?
Those of us who are , sometimes you feel like you 're a little bit on your own doing some of this work .
That passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the Piarco Airport accused .
So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place .
But what were they accused of ?
What was it that they were accused of ?
I 'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there . What were they accused of ?
We were trying to build , or reconstruct largely , an airport that had grown outdated .
The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars , Trinidad and Tobago dollars , and in fact , we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity , corrupt activity took place .
And to get an idea of what it consisted of , and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing , we can look at this second slide here .
And what we have here -- I am not saying so , this is the Director of Public Prosecutions in a written statement . He said so .
And he 's telling us that for the $ 1.6 billion cost of the project , one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts .
One billion dollars of our taxpayers ' money has been located in offshore bank accounts .
Being the kind of suspicious person I am , I am outraged at that , and I 'm going to pause here , I 'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things .
I 'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street . I was at Zuccotti Park .
It was autumn . It was cool . It was damp . It was getting dark .
And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street , Occupy Wall Street movement walking around .
And there was a lady with a sign , a very simple sign , a kind of battered-looking blonde lady , and the sign was made out of Bristol board , as we say in these parts , and it was made with a marker .
And what it said on that sign hit me right in the center .
It said , " If you 're not outraged , you haven 't been paying attention . "
If you 're not outraged by all of this , you haven 't been paying attention .
So listen up , because we 're getting into even deeper waters .
My brain started thinking .
Well , what if -- because I 'm suspicious like that . I read a lot of spy novels and stuff .
What if -- But to make it in these wrongs , you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff , right ?
But what if this wasn 't the first time ?
What if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught ?
What if it had happened before ? How would I find out ?
Now , the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption , okay ?
And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council , which is a not-for-profit .
We 're at jcc.org.tt , and we have the -- we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted .
So those of you interested in finding out more about it , or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions , please get involved .
But I 'm going to segue to another thing that relates , because one of my private campaigns I 've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of CL Financial .
CL Financial is the Caribbean 's largest ever conglomerate , okay ?
And without getting into all of the details , it is said to have collapsed — I 'm using my words very carefully — it 's said to have collapsed in January of ' 09 , which is just coming up to nearly four years .
In an unprecedented fit of generosity -- and you have to be very suspicious about these people -- in an unprecedented — and I 'm using that word carefully — unprecedented fit of generosity , the government of the day signed , made a written commitment , to repay all of the creditors .
And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that hasn 't happened anywhere else on the planet .
Let 's understand , because we lack context .
People are telling us it 's just like Wall Street . It 's not just like Wall Street .
Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something .
It 's not just like anywhere .
It 's not just like anywhere . It 's not just like anywhere .
Here is here , and out there is out there . Okay ?
I 'm serious now .
Listen . They 've had bailouts on Wall Street .
They 've had bailouts in London .
They 've had bailouts in Europe .
In Africa , they 've had bailouts . In Nigeria , six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours , eh ?
It 's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has -- how they 've treated it , and they 've treated it very well compared to us .
Nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were .
Only here . So what was the reason for the generosity ?
Is our government that generous ? And maybe they are .
Let 's look at it . Let 's look into it .
So I started digging and writing and so and so on , and that work can be found , my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com , which is my name .
It 's a not-for-profit blog that I run .
Not as popular as some of the other people , but there you go .
But the point is that the bitter experience of Section 34 , that plot to pervert Parliament , that bitter experience that took place in August , when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence , going into September , forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings , and to go back into some of the work , some of the stuff I 'd written and some of the exchanges I 'd had with the officials to see what was really what .
As we say in Trinidad and Tobago , who is who and what is what ?
Okay ? We want to try to recalculate .
And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance .
The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over .
This is the other context .
The Ministry of Finance , we are told , is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act .
I 'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that 's really so .
The Central Bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act .
So in fact , you can 't ask them anything , and they don 't have to answer anything .
That is the law since 1999 .
So I plunged into this struggle , and I asked four questions .
And I 'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply , so you could understand , as I said , where we are .
Here is not like anywhere else .
Question number one : I asked to see the accounts of CL Financial , and if you can 't show me the accounts -- the Minister of Finance is making statements , passing new laws and giving speeches and so on .
What are the figures he 's relying on ?
It 's like that joke : I want whatever he 's drinking .
And they wrote back and said to me , well what do you really mean ?
So they hit my question with a question .
Second point : I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid ?
Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this .
That is about three and a half billion U.S. dollars coming out of a small -- we used to be resource-rich -- Caribbean country . Okay ?
And I asked the question , who was getting that three and a half billion dollars ?
And I want to pause again to bring up context , because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing .
There 's a particular individual who is in the government now .
The name of the person doesn 't matter .
And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause .
Okay ? His name isn 't important .
I wouldn 't dignify it . I 'm on a point .
The point is , that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause .
And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal , where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships , and the scholarships hadn 't been advertised , and so and so on and so on .
And he was able to get the court , using that act of Parliament , Freedom of Information Act , to release the information , and I thought that was excellent .
Fantastic .
But you see , the question is this : If it 's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money , it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars .
You see ? But the Ministry of Finance , the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance , wrote me and said to me , that information is exempt too .
You see ? This is what we 're dealing with , okay ?
The third thing I will tell you is that I also asked for the directors of CL Financial , whether in fact they were making filings under our Integrity in Public Life Act .
We have an Integrity in Public Life Act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation 's interest .
And public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities .
And of course I 've since discovered that they 're not filing , and in fact the Minister of Finance has not even asked them to file .
So here we have it . We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded .
I 've asked the question in the legal and required fashion .
It 's been ignored .
The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34 , we need to continue to work on that . We can 't forget it .
I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country 's history .
It 's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation .
And this is my reality check .
Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it 's without transparency , it will always be equal to corruption , whether you 're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska , it will always be equal to corruption , and that is what we are dealing with here .
I 'm going to continue the work to press on , to get some resolution of those matters at the Ministry of Finance .
If it is I have to go to court personally , I will do that .
We will continue to press on .
We will continue to work within JCC .
But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example .
We had the journalist [ Heather ] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption , and she introduced me to this website , Alaveteli.com.
And Alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for Freedom of Information applications , and speak with each other .
I could see what you 're applying for .
You could see what I applied for and what replies I got .
We can work on it together . We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point .
We need to increase the consciousness .
The final thing I want to say is in relation to this one , which is a lovely website from India called IPaidABribe.com.
They have international branches , and it 's important for us to tune into this one .
IPaidABribe.com is really important , a good one to log on to and see .
I 'm going to pause there . I 'm going to ask you for your courage .
Discard the first myth ; it is a crime .
Discard the second myth ; it is a big thing .
It 's a huge problem . It 's an economic crime .
And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation , stability and sustainability in our society .
Jill Sobule : Global warming 's theme song , " Manhattan in January "
A happy song about global warming , from Jill Sobule .
Okay .
Strolling along in Central Park Everyone 's out today The daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom Oh , what a glorious day For picnics and Frisbees and roller skaters , Friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers Everyone 's out in merry Manhattan in January I brought the iced tea ; Did you bring the bug spray ? The flies are the size of your head Next to the palm tree , Did you see the ' gators Looking happy and well fed ? Everyone 's out in merry Manhattan in January Everyone !
My preacher said , Don 't you worry The scientists have it all wrong And so , who cares it 's winter here ? And I have my halter-top on I have my halter-top on Everyone 's out in merry Manhattan in January . Jill Sobule !
Annette Heuser : The 3 agencies with the power to make or break economies
The way we rate national economies is all wrong , says rating agency reformer Annette Heuser . With mysterious and obscure methods , three private US-based credit rating agencies wield immense power over national economies across the globe , and the outcomes can be catastrophic . But what if there was another way ? In this bold talk , Heuser shares her vision for a nonprofit agency that would bring more equality and justice into the mix .
Almost two years ago , I was driving in my car in Germany , and I turned on the radio .
Europe at the time was in the middle of the Euro crisis , and all the headlines were about European countries getting downgraded by rating agencies in the United States .
I listened and thought to myself , " What are these rating agencies , and why is everybody so upset about their work ? "
Well , if you were sitting next to me in the car that day and would have told me that I would devote the next years to trying to reform them , obviously I would have called you crazy .
But guess what 's really crazy : the way these rating agencies are run .
And I would like to explain to you not only why it 's time to change this , but also how we can do it .
So let me tell you a little bit about what rating agencies really do .
As you would read a car magazine before purchasing a new car or taking a look at a product review before deciding which kind of tablet or phone to get , investors are reading ratings before they decide in which kind of product they are investing their money .
A rating can range from a so-called AAA , which means it 's a top-performing product , and it can go down to the level of the so-called BBB- , which means it 's a fairly risky investment .
Rating agencies are rating companies .
They are rating banks .
They are rating even financial products like the infamous mortgage-backed securities .
But they can also rate countries , and these ratings are called sovereign ratings , and I would like to focus in particular on these sovereign ratings .
And I can tell , as you 're listening to me right now , you 're thinking , so why should I really care about this , right ?
Be honest .
Well , ratings affect you .
They affect all of us .
If a rating agency rates a country , it basically assesses and evaluates a country 's debt and the ability and willingness of a country to repay its debt .
So if a country gets downgraded by a rating agency , the country has to pay more in order to borrow money on the international markets .
So it affects you as a citizen and as a taxpayer , because you and your fellow countrymen have to pony up more in order to borrow .
But what if a country can 't afford to pay more because it 's maybe too expensive ?
Well , then the country has less available for other services , like roads , schools , healthcare .
And this is the reason why you should care , because sovereign ratings affect everyone .
And that is the reason why I believe they should be defined as public goods .
They should be transparent , accessible , and available to everyone at no cost .
But here 's the situation : the rating agency market is dominated by three players and three players only -- Standard & amp ; Poor 's , Moody 's , and Fitch -- and we know whenever there is a market concentration , there is really no competition .
There is no incentive to improve the quality of your product .
And let 's face it , the credit rating agencies have contributed , putting the global economy on the brink , and yet they have to change the way they operate .
The second point , would you really buy a car just based on the advice of the dealer ?
Obviously not , right ? That would be irresponsible .
But that 's actually what 's going on in the rating agency sector every single day .
The customers of these rating agencies , like countries or companies , they are paying for their own ratings , and obviously this is creating a conflict of interest .
The third point is , the rating agencies are not really telling us how they are coming up with their ratings , but in this day and age , you can 't even sell a candy bar without listing everything that 's inside .
But for ratings , a crucial element of our economy , we really do not know what all the different ingredients are .
We are allowing the rating agencies to be intransparent about their work , and we need to change this .
I think there is no doubt that the sector needs a complete overhaul , not just a trimming at the margins .
I think it 's time for a bold move .
I think it 's time to upgrade the system .
And this is why we at the Bertelsmann Foundation have invested a lot of time and effort thinking about an alternative for the sector .
And we have developed the first model for a nonprofit rating agency for sovereign risk , and we call it by its acronym , INCRA .
INCRA would make a difference to the current system by adding another nonprofit player to the mix .
It would be based on a nonprofit model that would be based on a sustainable endowment .
The endowment would create income that would allow us to run the operation , to run the rating agency , and it would also allow us to make our ratings publicly available .
But this is not enough to make a difference , right ?
INCRA would also be based on a very , very clear governance structure that would avoid any conflict of interest , and it would include many stakeholders from society .
INCRA would not only be a European or an American rating agency , it would be a truly international one , in which , in particular , the emerging economies would have an equal interest , voice and representation .
The second big difference that INCRA would make is that would it base its sovereign risk assessment on a broader set of indicators .
Think about it that way .
If we conduct a sovereign rating , we basically take a look at the economic soil of a country , its macroeconomic fundamentals .
But we also have to ask the question , who is cultivating the economic soil of a country , right ?
Well , a country has many gardeners , and one of them is the government , so we have to ask the question , how is a country governed ?
How is it managed ?
And this is the reason why we have developed what we call forward-looking indicators .
These are indicators that give you a much better read about the socioeconomic development of a country .
I hope you would agree it 's important for you to know if your government is willing to invest in renewable energy and education .
It 's important for you to know if the government of your country is able to manage a crisis , if the government is finally able to implement the reforms that it 's promised .
For example , if INCRA would rate South Africa right now , of course we would take a very , very close look at the youth unemployment of the country , the highest in the world .
If over 70 percent of a country 's population under the age of 35 is unemployed , of course this has a huge impact on the economy today and even more so in the future .
Well , our friends at Moody 's , Standard & amp ; Poor 's , and Fitch will tell us we would take this into account as well .
But guess what ? We do not know exactly how they will take this into account .
And this leads me to the third big difference that INCRA would make .
INCRA would not only release its ratings but it would also release its indicators and methodology .
So in contrast to the current system , INCRA would be fully transparent .
So in a nutshell , INCRA would offer an alternative to the current system of the big three rating agencies by adding a new , nonprofit player to the mix that would increase the competition , it would increase the transparency of the sector , and it would also increase the quality .
I can tell that sovereign ratings may still look to you like this very small piece of this very complex global financial world , but I tell you it 's a very important one , and a very important one to fix , because sovereign ratings affect all of us , and they should be addressed and should be defined as public goods .
And this is why we are testing our model right now , and why we are trying to find out if it can bring together a group of able and willing actors to bring INCRA to life .
I truly believe building up INCRA is in everyone 's interest , and that we have the unique opportunity right now to turn INCRA into a cornerstone of a new , more inclusive financial system .
Because for way too long , we have left the big financial players on their own .
It 's time to give them some company .
Thank you .
Evan Grant : Making sound visible through cymatics
Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics , a process for making soundwaves visible . Useful for analyzing complex sounds , it also makes complex and beautiful designs .
I 'm a creative technologist and the focus of my work is on public installations .
One of my driving passions is this idea of exploring nature , and trying to find hidden data within nature .
It seems to me that there is this latent potential everywhere , all around us .
Everything gives out some kind of data , whether it 's sound or smell or vibration .
Through my work , I 've been trying to find ways to harness and unveil this .
And so this basically led me to a subject called cymatics .
Now , cymatics is the process of visualizing sound by basically vibrating a medium such as sand or water , as you can see there .
So , if we have a quick look at the history of cymatics beginning with the observations of resonance , by Da Vinci , Galileo , the English scientist Robert Hook and then Ernest Chladni .
He created an experiment using a metal plate , covering it with sand and then bowing it to create the Chladni patterns that you see here on the right .
Moving on from this , the next person to explore this field was a gentleman called Hans Jenny in the 1970s .
He actually coined the term cymatics .
Then bringing us into the present day is a fellow collaborator of mine and cymatics expert , John Stewart Reed .
He 's kindly recreated for us the Chladni experiment .
What we can see here is the metal sheet , this time connected to a sound driver and being fed by a frequency generator .
As the frequencies increase , so do the complexities of the patterns that appear on the plate .
As you can see with your own eyes .
So , what excites me about cymatics ?
Well , for me cymatics is an almost magical tool .
It 's like a looking glass into a hidden world .
Through the numerous ways that we can apply cymatics , we can actually start to unveil the substance of things not seen .
Devices like the cymascope , which you can see here , have been used to scientifically observe cymatic patterns .
And the list of scientific applications is growing every day .
For example , in oceanography , a lexicon of dolphin language is actually being created by basically visualizing the sonar beams that the dolphins emit .
And hopefully in the future we 'll be able to gain some deeper understanding of how they communicate .
We can also use cymatics for healing and education .
This is an installation developed with school children , where their hands are tracked . It allows them to control and position cymatic patterns and the reflections that are caused by them .
We can also use cymatics as a beautiful natural art form .
This image here is created from a snippet of Beethoven 's Ninth Symphony playing through a cymatic device .
So it kind of flips things on its head a little bit .
This is Pink Floyd 's " Machine " playing in real time through the cymascope .
We can also use cymatics as a looking glass into nature .
And we can actually recreate the archetypal forms of nature .
So , for example , here on the left we can see a snowflake as it would appear in nature .
Then on the right we can see a cymatically created snowflake .
And here is a starfish and a cymatic starfish .
And there is thousands of these .
So what does this all mean ?
Well , there is still a lot to explore in its early days . And there 's not many people working in this field .
But consider for a moment that sound does have form .
We 've seen that it can affect matter and cause form within matter .
Then sort of take a leap and think about the universe forming .
And think about the immense sound of the universe forming .
And if we kind of ponder on that , then perhaps cymatics had an influence on the formation of the universe itself .
And here is some eye candy for you , from a range of DIY scientists and artists from all over the globe .
Cymatics is accessible to everybody .
I want to urge everybody here to apply your passion , your knowledge and your skills to areas like cymatics .
I think collectively we can build a global community .
We can inspire each other .
And we can evolve this exploration of the substance of things not seen . Thank you .
Nina Tandon : Could tissue engineering mean personalized medicine ?
Each of our bodies is utterly unique , which is a lovely thought until it comes to treating an illness -- when every body reacts differently , often unpredictably , to standard treatment . Tissue engineer Nina Tandon talks about a possible solution : Using pluripotent stem cells to make personalized models of organs on which to test new drugs and treatments , and storing them on computer chips .
I 'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with .
They 're all the perfect size , and they don 't have an ounce of fat .
Did I mention they 're gorgeous ?
And they 're scientific models ?
As you might have guessed , I 'm a tissue engineer , and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I 've engineered in the lab .
And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body .
But what I 'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models .
Well , let 's think about the drug screening process for a moment .
You go from drug formulation , lab testing , animal testing , and then clinical trials , which you might call human testing , before the drugs get to market .
It costs a lot of money , a lot of time , and sometimes , even when a drug hits the market , it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people .
And the later it fails , the worse the consequences .
It all boils down to two issues . One , humans are not rats , and two , despite our incredible similarities to one another , actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us .
So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity ?
Let 's see how we can do it with tissue engineering .
One of the key technologies that 's really important is what 's called induced pluripotent stem cells .
They were developed in Japan pretty recently .
Okay , induced pluripotent stem cells .
They 're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy .
We induce cells , okay , say , skin cells , by adding a few genes to them , culturing them , and then harvesting them .
So they 're skin cells that can be tricked , kind of like cellular amnesia , into an embryonic state .
So without the controversy , that 's cool thing number one .
Cool thing number two , you can grow any type of tissue out of them : brain , heart , liver , you get the picture , but out of your cells .
So we can make a model of your heart , your brain on a chip .
Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece , and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery .
And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we 're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular , scalable way .
Going forward , imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue .
It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip .
But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells , let 's say , from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them , we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab .
Here 's an example from Kevin Eggan 's lab at Harvard .
He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig 's Disease , and he differentiated them into neurons , and what 's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease .
So with disease models like these , we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before , and maybe discover drugs even faster .
This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa .
This is a degeneration of the retina .
It 's a disease that runs in my family , and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure .
So some people think that these models sound well and good , but ask , " Well , are these really as good as the rat ? "
The rat is an entire organism , after all , with interacting networks of organs .
A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver , and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat .
Don 't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models ?
Well , this is another trend in the field .
By combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics , the field is actually evolving towards just that , a model of the entire ecosystem of the body , complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart .
These systems are really hard to build , but we 're just starting to be able to get there , and so , watch out .
But that 's not even all of it , because once a drug is approved , tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments .
This is an example that you might care about someday , and I hope you never do , because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer .
Wouldn 't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you 're going to take are going to work on your cancer ?
This is an example from Karen Burg 's lab , where they 're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments .
And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next , and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies .
And so thinking about the models that we 've just discussed , you can see , going forward , that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path : disease models making for better drug formulations , massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing , reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials , and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all .
Essentially , we 're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body .
Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology , helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster , more cheaply and more effectively .
It gives new meaning to models against animal testing , doesn 't it ?
Thank you .
The LXD : In the Internet age , dance evolves ...
The LXD electrify the TED2010 stage with an emerging global street-dance culture , revved up by the Internet . In a preview of Jon Chu 's upcoming Web series , this astonishing troupe show off their superpowers .
I 'm Jon M. Chu . And I 'm not a dancer , I 'm not a choreographer -- I 'm actually a filmmaker , a storyteller .
I directed a movie two years ago called " Step Up 2 : The Streets . "
Anybody ? Anybody ? Yeah !
During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers -- amazing , the best in the world -- and they brought me into a society , the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind .
I mean , this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities .
They could fly in the air . They could bend their elbow all the way back .
They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row .
I 'd never seen anything like that .
When I was growing up , my heroes were people like Fred Astaire , Gene Kelly , Michael Jackson .
I grew up in a musical family .
And those guys , those were like , ultimate heroes .
Being a shy , little , skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem , those guys made me believe in something bigger .
Those guys made me want to , like , " I 'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl . "
And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared , sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos .
But after seeing what I 've seen , the truth is , they have not disappeared at all .
They 're here , getting better and better every day .
And dance has progressed .
It is insane what dance is right now .
Dance has never had a better friend than technology .
Online videos and social networking ...
dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance , where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit , building on it within days and releasing a new video , while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself .
And this is happening every day .
And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages , with cheap webcams , lies the world 's great dancers of tomorrow .
Our Fred Astaires , our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips , and may not have that opportunity , except for us .
So , we created the LXD , sort of a -- the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers , a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world .
A living , breathing comic book series , but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man , these guys can actually do it .
And we 're going to show you some today . So , let me introduce to you , some of our heroes right now .
We got Madd Chadd , Lil ' C , Kid David and J Smooth .
Please be excited , have fun , yell , scream .
Ladies and gentlemen : The LXD .
: Madd Chadd : When people first see me , I get a lot of different reactions actually .
Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it , but sometimes they get a little freaked out .
And , I don 't know , I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit .
J Smooth : When I 'm in the zone -- I 'm dancing and free styling it -- I actually visually kind of picture lines , and moving them .
I think of like , Transformers , like how panels open and then they fold , they fold in , and then you close that panel .
And then another thing opens , you close that .
Kid David : It 's kind of like , honestly a lot of times I don 't really know what 's going on when I 'm dancing .
Because at that point it 's just really like , it 's my body and the music .
It 's not really a conscious decision , " I 'm going to do this next , I 'm going to do this . "
It 's kind of like this other level where you can 't make choices anymore , and it 's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music .
I got my name just because I was so young .
I was young when I started . I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with .
So , it was always like , they called me Kid David , because I was the kid .
L 'il C : I tell them to create a ball , and then you just use that ball of energy .
And instead of throwing it out , people would think that 's a krump move , that 's a krump move .
That 's not a krump move . You 're going to throw it out , you throw it out , and you hold it .
And you let it go , and then right when you see the tail , you grab it by the tail , then you bring it back in .
And you just got this piece of energy and you just , you 're manipulating it .
You know , you create power , then you tame it .
Svante Pääbo : DNA clues to our inner neanderthal
Sharing the results of a massive , worldwide study , geneticist Svante Pääbo shows the DNA proof that early humans mated with Neanderthals after we moved out of Africa . He also shows how a tiny bone from a baby finger was enough to identify a whole new humanoid species .
What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans .
But before doing that , I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know : that our genomes , our genetic material , are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA , which is this famous double-helical molecule .
And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A , T , C and G.
And the information is there twice -- one on each strand -- which is important , because when new cells are formed , these strands come apart , new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process .
But nothing , of course , in nature is totally perfect , so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in .
And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room , for example .
If we compare my genome to the genome of you , approximately every 1,200 , 1,300 letters will differ between us .
And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time .
So if we add in a chimpanzee here , we will see more differences .
Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee .
And if you 're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA , or the whole genome , you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe .
And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this .
In this case , it 's very simple .
The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently .
Farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees .
And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time , you can transform these differences to estimates of time , where the two humans , typically , will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago , and with the chimpanzees , it will be in the order of five million years ago .
So what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many , many pieces of DNA very quickly .
So we can now , in a matter of hours , determine a whole human genome .
Each of us , of course , contains two human genomes -- one from our mothers and one from our fathers .
And they are around three billion such letters long .
And we will find that the two genomes in me , or one genome of mine we want to use , will have about three million differences in the order of that .
And what you can then also begin to do is to say , " How are these genetic differences distributed across the world ? "
And if you do that , you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa .
And if you look outside Africa , you actually find less genetic variation .
This is surprising , of course , because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa .
Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation .
Moreover , almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa .
But if you look in Africa , there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside .
So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation , but not all of it , [ has ] gone out and colonized the rest of the world .
And together with the methods to date these genetic differences , this has led to the insight that modern humans -- humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me -- evolved in Africa , quite recently , between 100 and 200,000 years ago .
And later , between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so , went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world .
So what I often like to say is that , from a genomic perspective , we are all Africans .
We either live inside Africa today , or in quite recent exile .
Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world , in many places , and they tend to vary as gradients , from a bird 's-eye perspective at least .
And since there are many genetic variants , and they have different such gradients , this means that if we determine a DNA sequence -- a genome from one individual -- we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from , provided that its parents or grandparents haven 't moved around too much .
But does this then mean , as many people tend to think , that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people -- on different continents , for example ?
Well we can begin to ask those questions also .
There is , for example , a project that 's underway to sequence a thousand individuals -- their genomes -- from different parts of the world .
They 've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa .
[ They 've ] sequenced approximately equally [ as ] many people in Europe and in China .
And we can begin to say how much variance do we find , how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences .
And it 's a lot : 38 million variable positions .
But we can then ask : Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans ?
Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed .
And with absolute difference -- and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position , where all individuals -- 100 percent -- have one letter , and everybody outside Africa has another letter .
And the answer to that , among those millions of differences , is that there is not a single such position .
This may be surprising .
Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so .
So we can relax the criterion a bit and say : How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant , 95 percent another variant , and the number of that is 12 .
So this is very surprising .
It means that when we look at people and see a person from Africa and a person from Europe or Asia , we cannot , for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy , predict what the person would carry .
And only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right .
This may be surprising , because we can , of course , look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from .
So what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see -- facial features , skin color , hair structure -- are not determined by single genes with big effects , but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world .
There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider , and that is that , in a very literal sense , they 're really on the surface of our bodies .
They are what we just said -- facial features , hair structure , skin color .
There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest , or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies .
But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment , in a direct confrontation , if you like .
It 's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them .
But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don 't directly interact with the environment -- our kidneys , our livers , our hearts -- there is no way to say , by just looking at these organs , where in the world they would come from .
So there 's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa , and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so , they were not alone on the planet .
There were other forms of humans around , most famously perhaps , Neanderthals -- these robust forms of humans , compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right -- that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years .
So an interesting question is , what happened when we met ?
What happened to the Neanderthals ?
And to begin to answer such questions , my research group -- since over 25 years now -- works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old .
So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA , how you convert it to a form you can sequence .
You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself .
And this then , in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly , allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome , so that any one of you can now look on the Internet , on the Neanderthal genome , or at least on the 55 percent of it that we 've been able to reconstruct so far .
And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today .
And one question that you may then want to ask is , what happened when we met ?
Did we mix or not ?
And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today .
So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals , starting with two Africans , looking at the two African genomes , finding places where they differ from each other , and in each case ask : What is a Neanderthal like ?
Does it match one African or the other African ?
We would expect there to be no difference , because Neanderthals were never in Africa .
They should be equal , have no reason to be closer to one African than another African .
And that 's indeed the case .
Statistically speaking , there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other .
But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African .
Then , significantly more often , does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African .
The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African , the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often .
This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China .
So the model we 've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago , they met Neanderthals .
Presumably , they did so first in the Middle East , where there were Neanderthals living .
If they then mixed with each other there , then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world .
So that today , the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals .
So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA , we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world .
And the first place we 've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova , a cave site in this mountain here , where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone -- this is a copy of it -- that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human .
And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual , even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually , and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today .
And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago .
And further back , 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans .
So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals , but far back and then have a long independent history .
We call this group of humans , that we then described for the first time from this tiny , tiny little piece of bone , the Denisovans , after this place where they were first described .
So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals : Did they mix with ancestors of present day people ?
If we ask that question , and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world , we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today .
But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific .
So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past , since we don 't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia .
So from studying these genomes of extinct humans , we 're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa .
In the West , there were Neanderthals ; in the East , there were Denisovans -- maybe other forms of humans too that we 've not yet described .
We don 't know quite where the borders between these people were , but we know that in Southern Siberia , there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past .
Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa , came out of Africa , presumably in the Middle East .
They meet Neanderthals , mix with them , continue to spread over the world , and somewhere in Southeast Asia , they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific .
And then these earlier forms of humans disappear , but they live on a little bit today in some of us -- in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals , and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans .
Does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside Africa and inside Africa in that people outside Africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans , whereas Africans do not ?
Well I don 't think that is the case .
Presumably , modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa .
They spread across Africa also , of course , and there were older , earlier forms of humans there .
And since we mixed elsewhere , I 'm pretty sure that one day , when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa , we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa .
So to sum up , what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans ?
We learn perhaps many things , but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed .
We mixed with these earlier forms of humans , wherever we met them , and we mixed with each other ever since .
Thank you for your attention .

Shlomo Benartzi : Saving for tomorrow , tomorrow
It 's easy to imagine saving money next week , but how about right now ? Generally , we want to spend it . Economist Shlomo Benartzi says this is one of the biggest obstacles to saving enough for retirement , and asks : How do we turn this behavioral challenge into a behavioral solution ?
I 'm going to talk today about saving more , but not today , tomorrow .
I 'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow .
It 's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago .
The program , in a sense , is an example of behavioral finance on steroids -- how we could really use behavioral finance .
Now you might ask , what is behavioral finance ?
So let 's think about how we manage our money .
Let 's start with mortgages .
It 's kind of a recent topic , at least in the U.S.
A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford , and actually slightly bigger than that .
And then they foreclose .
And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages .
Let 's also think about how we manage risks -- for example , investing in the stock market .
Two years ago , three years ago , about four years ago , markets did well .
We were risk takers , of course .
Then market stocks seize and we 're like , " Wow .
These losses , they feel , emotionally , they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up . "
So we 're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking .
How many of you have iPhones ?
Anyone ? Wonderful .
I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone -- you 're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty .
What if you lose your iPhone ?
What if you do this ?
How many of you have kids ?
Anyone ?
Keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance .
I see a lot of hands coming down .
I would predict , if you 're a representative sample , that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives , even when you have kids .
We 're not doing that well when it comes to insurance .
The average American household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries .
And I know it sounds crazy .
How many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries ?
No one .
So that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand .
Low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries .
So where does it take us ?
We 're not doing a great job managing money .
Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics , trying to understand the money mistakes people make .
And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money , and at the end you 're going to ask , " How can we help people ? "
And that 's what I really want to focus on today .
How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make , and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions ?
And what I 'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow .
I want to address the issue of savings .
We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans .
And we 're going to look at their saving behavior .
First thing to notice is , half of them do not even have access to a 401 plan .
They cannot make savings easy .
They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401 plan before they see it , before they can touch it .
What about the remaining half of the people ?
Some of them elect not to save .
They 're just too lazy .
They never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401 plan .
And then they have to decide how they 're going to invest in their 52 choices , and they never heard about what is a money market fund .
And they get overwhelmed and the just don 't join .
How many people end up saving to a 401 plan ?
One third of Americans .
Two thirds are not saving now .
Are they saving enough ?
Take out those who say they save too little .
One out of 10 are saving enough .
Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401 plan , decide not to save -- or don 't decide -- or save too little .
We think we have a problem of people saving too much .
Let 's look at that .
We have one person -- well , actually we 're going to slice him in half because it 's less than one percent .
Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much .
What are we going to do about it ?
That 's what I really want to focus on .
We have to understand why people are not saving , and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions , and then see how powerful it might be .
So let me divert for a second as we 're going to identify the problems , the challenges , the behavioral challenges , that prevent people from saving .
I 'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate .
Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week .
And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate .
How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week ?
Who would go for bananas ?
Wonderful .
I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas .
Well that 's at least what one wonderful study predicted .
And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating .
The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later .
Self-control is not a problem in the future .
It 's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us .
What does it have to do with time and savings , this issue of immediate gratification ?
Or as some economists call it , present bias .
We think about saving . We know we should be saving .
We know we 'll do it next year , but today let us go and spend .
Christmas is coming , we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know .
So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving , but end up spending .
Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia .
But again , a little diversion to the topic of organ donation .
Wonderful study comparing different countries .
We 're going to look at two similar countries , Germany and Austria .
And in Germany , if you would like to donate your organs -- God forbid something really bad happens to you -- when you get your driving license or an I.D. , you check the box saying , " I would like to donate my organs . "
Not many people like checking boxes .
It takes effort . You need to think .
Twelve percent do .
Austria , a neighboring country , slightly similar , slightly different .
What 's the difference ?
Well , you still have choice .
You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not .
But when you get your driving license , you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ .
Nobody checks boxes .
That 's kind of too much effort .
One percent check the box . The rest do nothing .
Doing nothing is very common .
Not many people check boxes .
What are the implications to saving lives and having organs available ?
In Germany , 12 percent check the box .
Twelve percent are organ donors .
Huge shortage of organs , God forbid , if you need one .
In Austria , again , nobody checks the box .
Therefore , 99 percent of people are organ donors .
Inertia , lack of action .
What is the default setting if people do nothing , if they keep procrastinating , if they don 't check the boxes ?
Very powerful .
We 're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401 choices .
Are we going to make them automatically join the plan , or are they going to be left out ?
In too many 401 plans , if people do nothing , it means they 're not saving for retirement , if they don 't check the box .
And checking the box takes effort .
So we 've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges .
One more before we flip the challenges into solutions , having to do with monkeys and apples .
No , no , no , this is a real study and it 's got a lot to do with behavioral economics .
One group of monkeys gets an apple , they 're pretty happy .
The other group gets two apples , one is taken away .
They still have an apple left .
They 're really mad .
Why have you taken our apple ?
This is the notion of loss aversion .
We hate losing stuff , even if it doesn 't mean a lot of risk .
You would hate to go to the ATM , take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $ 20 bills .
It 's very painful , even though it doesn 't mean anything .
Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch .
So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too , because people , mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending .
So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually .
Whether you think about immediate gratification , and the chocolates versus bananas , it 's just painful to save now .
It 's a lot more fun to spend now .
We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box .
If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401 plan , they 're going to keep procrastinating and not join .
And last , we talked about loss aversion , and the monkeys and the apples .
If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss , they 're not going to be saving for retirement .
So we 've got these challenges , and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by -- take behavioral finance , make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action -- flip the challenges into solutions .
And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More , not today , Tomorrow .
How is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about ?
If you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates , we think we 're going to eat bananas next week .
We think we 're going to save more next year .
Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year -- sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas , volunteering more in the community , exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet .
Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action .
Save More Tomorrow makes it easy .
It 's an autopilot .
Once you tell me you would like to save more in the future , let 's say every January you 're going to be saving more automatically and it 's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401 plan before you see it , before you touch it , before you get the issue of immediate gratification .
But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion ?
Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more , they have to spend less , and that 's painful .
Well , maybe it shouldn 't be just January .
Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money .
That way , when they make more money , when they get a pay raise , they don 't have to cut their spending .
They take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more -- take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401 plan .
So that is the program , embarrassingly simple , but as we 're going to see , extremely powerful .
We first implemented it , Richard Thaler and I , back in 1998 .
Mid-sized company in the Midwest , blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away .
Saving more today is not an option .
We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise .
And here are the results .
We 're seeing here a three and a half-year period , four pay raises , people who were struggling to save , were saving three percent of their paycheck , three and a half years later saving almost four times as much , almost 14 percent .
And there 's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because I don 't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum .
I want , really , to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford .
It 's real .
It 's not just numbers on a piece of paper .
Whereas with saving three percent , people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk , because they won 't be able to afford anything else , when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive .
This is a real difference .
By now , about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place .
It 's been part of the Pension Protection Act .
And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference .
Let me wrap with two key messages .
One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful .
This is just one example .
Message two is there 's still a lot to do .
This is really the tip of the iceberg .
If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it , we need to think about that .
If you 're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they 're taking or taking too little risk , we need to think about that .
If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets , we need to think about that .
The average actually , the record is in Singapore .
The average household spends $ 4,000 a year on lottery tickets .
We 've got a lot to do , a lot to solve , also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement .
One last question : How many of you feel comfortable that as you 're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you 're going to retire , when you 're going to claim Social Security benefits , what lifestyle to expect , how much to spend every month so you 're not going to run out of money ?
How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions .
One , two , three , four .
Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience .
Behavioral finance has a long way .
There 's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again .
Thank you .
Paola Antonelli : Why I brought Pac-Man to MoMA
When the Museum of Modern Art 's senior curator of architecture and design announced the acquisition of 14 video games in 2012 , " all hell broke loose . " In this far-ranging , entertaining , and deeply insightful talk , Paola Antonelli explains why she 's delighted to challenge preconceived ideas about art and galleries , and describes her burning wish to help establish a broader understanding of design .
I 'm almost like a crazy evangelical .
I 've always known that the age of design is upon us , almost like a rapture .
If the day is sunny , I think , " Oh , the gods have had a good design day . "
Or , I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist , particularly beautiful , I say he 's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do .
So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression .
That 's why I 'm talking to you today about the age of design , and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture , is still posters , is still fast cars , what you see at MoMA today .
But in truth , what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot , like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij , where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts , as if he were a big candy , and makes a chair out of it .
Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity .
I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs , that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life .
And it 's interesting how so much of what we 're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design .
And in fact , interaction design is what I 've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years , starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works , for instance , by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine plays chess with itself , that you see here , or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners , the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child , Toshio Iwai 's Tenori-On musical instruments , and Philip Worthington 's Shadow Monsters , and John Maeda 's Reactive Books , and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar 's I Want You To Want Me .
These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public .
But more recently , I 've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable .
The Wind Map , by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas , I don 't know if you 've ever seen it -- it 's really fantastic .
It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what 's going on with the winds in the United States .
But also , more recently , we started acquiring video games , and that 's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way .
There are still people that believe that there 's a high and there 's a low .
And that 's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we 've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection .
We 've -- No , first of all , New York Magazine always gets it .
I love them . So we are in the right quadrant .
We are in the Highbrow -- that 's daring , that 's courageous -- and Brilliant , which is great .
Timidly , we 've been higher on the diagonal in other situations , but it 's okay . It 's good . It 's good . It 's good .
But here comes the art critic . Oh , that was fantastic .
So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian .
" Sorry , MoMA , video games are not art . "
Did I ever say they were art ? I was talking about interaction design . Excuse me .
" Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh " -- They 're two floors away . — " will mean game over for any real understanding of art . "
I 'm bringing in the end of the world . You know ?
We were talking about the rapture ? It 's coming .
And Jonathan Jones is making it happen .
So the same Guardian rebuts , " Are video games art : the debate that shouldn 't be .
Last week , Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art . But is he right ?
And does it matter ? " Thank you . Does it matter ?
You know , it 's like once again there 's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art , or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to , would like to be called , artists .
No . Designers aspire to be really great designers .
Thank you very much . And that 's more than enough .
So my knight in shining armor , John Maeda , without any prompt , came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA .
And that was fantastic . And I thought that was it .
But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic , so pretentious , by Liel Leibovitz , and it said , " MoMA has mistaken video games for art . " Again .
" The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso . " Again .
" That misses the point . "
Excuse me . You 're missing the point .
And here , look , the above question is put bluntly : " Are video games art ? No . Video games aren 't art because they are quite thoroughly something else : code . "
Oh , so Picasso is not art because it 's oil paint . Right ?
So it 's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled , and these reactions , were so vehement .
And you know what ?
The International Cat Video Film Festival didn 't have that much of a reaction .
I think this was truly fantastic .
We were talking about dancing ponies , but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival , because it 's very , very wonderful .
And there 's this Flaubert quote that I love : " I have always tried to live in an ivory tower , but a tide of shit is beating at its walls , threatening to undermine it . "
I consider myself the tide of shit .
You know , we have to go through that .
Even in the 1930s , my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art .
So it 's happened before , and it will happen in the future , but right now I can tell you that I am so , so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection .
And the same with , for instance , Tetris , original version , the Soviet one .
And you know , the amount of work -- yeah , Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that 's how he developed Tetris , and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed .
And it 's fantastic .
So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work , because we 're still the Museum of Modern Art , so even when we tackle popular culture , we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA , therefore , has to be researched .
So to get to choosing Eric Chahi 's wonderful Another World , amongst others , we put together a panel of experts , and we worked on this acquisition , and it 's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway .
We worked on it for a year and a half .
So many people helped us — designers of games , you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine , and you know , Kevin Slavin . You name it .
We bugged everybody , because we knew that we were ignorant .
We were not real gamers enough , so we had to really talk to them .
And so we decided , of course , to have Sim City 2000 , not the other Sim City , that one in particular , so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong , and were not only criteria of selection .
They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation .
That 's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke . It 's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future .
We live today , as you know very well , not in the digital , not in the physical , but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two .
And that 's really where interaction lies , and that 's the importance of interaction .
And in order to explain interaction , we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives .
So when I talk about it , I don 't talk only about video games , which are in a way the purest form of interaction , unadulterated by any kind of function or finality .
I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine , which I consider a masterpiece of interaction .
I mean , that interface is beautiful .
It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel .
You know , with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard , and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are .
So I let people understand that it 's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it 's good or when it 's bad .
So when I show The Sims , I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims , not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi .
You know , video games can be truly deep even when they 're completely mindless .
I 'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy .
It 's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you 'll be able to make it into a planet .
I 've never made it into a planet , but that 's it .
Or , you know , Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States .
It was a PlayStation game , but mostly for Japan .
And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music .
So you would put into the PlayStation , you would put your own CD , and then the game would change alongside your music . So really fantastic .
Not to mention Eve Online .
Eve Online is an artificial universe , if you wish , but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi , not Ambassador Stevens , but one of his collaborators , was a really big shot in Eve Online , so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test , maybe , all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building , and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online , and after his death , several parts of the universe were named after him .
And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing .
I mean , we 're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many , but that is very educational .
Of course , there are games that are even more educational .
Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game , and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík , and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans .
It was amazing to see . And it 's a beautiful game .
So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA 's are kept alive also by the selection of these games .
And you know , Valve -- you know , Portal -- is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games , what to do with violence .
Right ? We had to make decisions .
At MoMA , interestingly , there 's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection , but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago , and as an Italian , I said , " You know what , we need a Beretta . "
And I was told , " No . No guns in the design collection . "
And I was like , " Why ? "
Interestingly , I learned that it 's considered that in design and in the design collection , what you see is what you get .
So when you see a gun , it 's an instrument for killing in the design collection .
If it 's in the art collection , it might be a critique of the killing instrument .
So it 's very interesting .
But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design , so maybe one day we 'll be able to acquire also the guns .
But here , in this particular case , we decided , you know , with Kate and Paul , that we would have no gratuitous violence .
So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces .
We have Street Fighter II , because martial arts are good .
But we don 't have GTA because , maybe it 's my own reflection , I 've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps .
So it was not very constructive .
So , I 'm making fun of it , but we discussed this for so many days . You have no idea .
And to this day , I am ambivalent , but when you have instead games like Flow , there 's no doubt .
It 's like , it 's about serenity and it 's about sublime .
It 's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature .
Then we have a few also side-scrollers -- classical ones .
So it 's quite a hefty collection .
And right now , we started with the first 14 , but we have several that are coming up , and the reason why we haven 't acquired them yet is because you don 't acquire just the game .
You acquire the relationship with the company .
What we want , what we aspire to , is the code .
It 's very hard to get , of course .
But that 's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time , and that 's what museums do .
They also preserve artifacts for posterity .
In absence of the code , because , you know , video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases , in absence of that , we acquire the relationship with the company .
We 're going to stay with them forever .
They 're not going to get rid of us .
And one day , we 'll get that code .
But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design . Aesthetics are really important .
And I 'm showing you Core War here , which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor .
So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor 's limitedness , which is fantastic . So aesthetics is always important .
And so is space , the spatial aspect of games .
You know , I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them , and if they 're not architects , bona fide trained in architecture , they have that feeling .
But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important .
Time . The way we experience time in video games , as in other forms of interaction design , is really quite amazing .
It can be real time or it can be the time within the game , as is in Animal Crossing , where seasons follow each other at their own pace .
So time , space , aesthetics , and then , most important , behavior .
The real core issue of interaction design is behavior .
Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives .
They 're not just limited to our interaction with the screen .
In this case , I 'm showing you Marble Madness , which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you , so you have a sphere that 's moving in this landscape , and the sphere , the controller itself , gives you a sense of the movement .
In a way , you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is .
We don 't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia . No arcade nostalgia .
If anything , we want to show the code , and here you see Ben Fry 's distellamap of Pac-Man , of the Pac-Man code .
So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox . You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design , furniture and other parts , but there 's no paraphernalia , no nostalagia , only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers .
The controllers are , of course , part of the experience , so you cannot do away with it .
But interestingly , this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers .
I was afraid that they would kill us , and instead they understood , especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design , and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls , as if they were Brancusi sculptures .
He created this strange distance , this shock , that made people realize how gorgeous formally , and also important functionally , design pieces were .
I would like to do the same with video games .
By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood , I want people to understand that those are important forms of design .
And in a way , the video games , the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design .
One of my dream acquisitions , which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner , is a 747 .
I would like to acquire it , but without owning it .
I don 't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA .
I want it to keep flying .
So it 's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying .
And the same with the " @ " sign that we acquired a few years ago .
It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain .
And what I say to people , it 's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall , and just we 're showing the shadow .
So in a way , we 're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have .
And it 's too long to explain the acquisition , but if you want to go on the MoMA blog , there 's a long post where I explain why it 's such a great example of design .
Along the way , I 've had to burn a few chairs . You know ?
I 've had to do away with a few concepts of design past .
But I see that people are coming along , that the audiences , paradoxically , are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are .
Design is truly everywhere , and design is as important as anything , and I 'm so glad that , because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives , many more people are coming to it as a profession , as a passion , and as , very simply , part of their own culture .
Thank you very much .
Peter Saul : Let 's talk about dying
We can 't control if we 'll die , but we can " occupy death , " in the words of Peter Saul , an emergency doctor . He asks us to think about the end of our lives -- and to question against the modern model of slow , intubated death in hospital . Two big questions can you help start this tough conversation .
Look , I had second thoughts , really , about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys .
Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem , which goes , " The truth will set you free , but first it will piss you off . "
So -- So with that in mind , I 'm going to set about trying to do those things here , and talk about dying in the 21st century .
Now the first thing that will piss you off , undoubtedly , is that all of us are , in fact , going to die in the 21st century .
There will be no exceptions to that .
There are , apparently , about one in eight of you who think you 're immortal , on surveys , but -- Unfortunately , that isn 't going to happen .
While I give this talk , in the next 10 minutes , a hundred million of my cells will die , and over the course of today , 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back , so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece .
Anyway , the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century , apart from it 's going to happen to everybody , is it 's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us , unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it 's currently on .
So there you go . That 's the truth .
No doubt that will piss you off , and now let 's see whether we can set you free . I don 't promise anything .
Now , as you heard in the intro , I work in intensive care , and I think I 've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care . It 's been a ride , man .
This has been fantastic .
We have machines that go ping .
There 's many of them up there .
And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well , and over the course of the time I 've worked in intensive care , the death rate for males in Australia has halved , and intensive care has had something to do with that .
Certainly , a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that .
So we have had tremendous success , and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit , and we started using expressions like " lifesaving . "
I really apologize to everybody for doing that , because obviously , we don 't .
What we do is prolong people 's lives , and delay death , and redirect death , but we can 't , strictly speaking , save lives on any sort of permanent basis .
And what 's really happened over the period of time that I 've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the ' 70s , ' 80s , and ' 90s , are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then .
So what 's happening now is there 's been a big shift in the way that people die , and most of what they 're dying of now isn 't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the ' 80s and ' 90s .
So we kind of got a bit caught up with this , and we haven 't really squared with you guys about what 's really happening now , and it 's about time we did .
I kind of woke up to this bit in the late ' 90s when I met this guy .
This guy is called Jim , Jim Smith , and he looked like this .
I was called down to the ward to see him .
His is the little hand .
I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician .
He said , " Look , there 's a guy down here .
He 's got pneumonia , and he looks like he needs intensive care .
His daughter 's here and she wants everything possible to be done . "
Which is a familiar phrase to us .
So I go down to the ward and see Jim , and his skin his translucent like this .
You can see his bones through the skin .
He 's very , very thin , and he is , indeed , very sick with pneumonia , and he 's too sick to talk to me , so I talk to his daughter Kathleen , and I say to her , " Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation ? "
And she looked at me and said , " No , of course not ! "
I thought , " Okay . Take this steady . "
And I got talking to her , and after a while , she said to me , " You know , we always thought there 'd be time . "
Jim was 94 .
And I realized that something wasn 't happening here .
There wasn 't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening .
So a group of us started doing survey work , and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle , in the Newcastle area , and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating .
One in a hundred .
And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill .
And I realized , of course , this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large .
Now , I work in acute care .
This is John Hunter Hospital .
And I thought , surely , we do better than that .
So a colleague of mine from nursing called Lisa Shaw and I went through hundreds and hundreds of sets of notes in the medical records department looking at whether there was any sign at all that anybody had had any conversation about what might happen to them if the treatment they were receiving was unsuccessful to the point that they would die .
And we didn 't find a single record of any preference about goals , treatments or outcomes from any of the sets of notes initiated by a doctor or by a patient .
So we started to realize that we had a problem , and the problem is more serious because of this .
What we know is that obviously we are all going to die , but how we die is actually really important , obviously not just to us , but also to how that features in the lives of all the people who live on afterwards .
How we die lives on in the minds of everybody who survives us , and the stress created in families by dying is enormous , and in fact you get seven times as much stress by dying in intensive care as by dying just about anywhere else , so dying in intensive care is not your top option if you 've got a choice .
And , if that wasn 't bad enough , of course , all of this is rapidly progressing towards the fact that many of you , in fact , about one in 10 of you at this point , will die in intensive care .
In the U.S. , it 's one in five .
In Miami , it 's three out of five people die in intensive care .
So this is the sort of momentum that we 've got at the moment .
The reason why this is all happening is due to this , and I do have to take you through what this is about .
These are the four ways to go .
So one of these will happen to all of us .
The ones you may know most about are the ones that are becoming increasingly of historical interest : sudden death .
It 's quite likely in an audience this size this won 't happen to anybody here .
Sudden death has become very rare .
The death of Little Nell and Cordelia and all that sort of stuff just doesn 't happen anymore .
The dying process of those with terminal illness that we 've just seen occurs to younger people .
By the time you 've reached 80 , this is unlikely to happen to you .
Only one in 10 people who are over 80 will die of cancer .
The big growth industry are these .
What you die of is increasing organ failure , with your respiratory , cardiac , renal , whatever organs packing up . Each of these would be an admission to an acute care hospital , at the end of which , or at some point during which , somebody says , enough is enough , and we stop .
And this one 's the biggest growth industry of all , and at least six out of 10 of the people in this room will die in this form , which is the dwindling of capacity with increasing frailty , and frailty 's an inevitable part of aging , and increasing frailty is in fact the main thing that people die of now , and the last few years , or the last year of your life is spent with a great deal of disability , unfortunately .
Enjoying it so far ?
Sorry , I just feel such a , I feel such a Cassandra here .
What can I say that 's positive ? What 's positive is that this is happening at very great age , now .
We are all , most of us , living to reach this point .
You know , historically , we didn 't do that .
This is what happens to you when you live to be a great age , and unfortunately , increasing longevity does mean more old age , not more youth .
I 'm sorry to say that .
What we did , anyway , look , what we did , we didn 't just take this lying down at John Hunter Hospital and elsewhere .
We 've started a whole series of projects to try and look about whether we could , in fact , involve people much more in the way that things happen to them .
But we realized , of course , that we are dealing with cultural issues , and this is , I love this Klimt painting , because the more you look at it , the more you kind of get the whole issue that 's going on here , which is clearly the separation of death from the living , and the fear — Like , if you actually look , there 's one woman there who has her eyes open .
She 's the one he 's looking at , and [ she 's ] the one he 's coming for . Can you see that ?
She looks terrified .
It 's an amazing picture .
Anyway , we had a major cultural issue .
Clearly , people didn 't want us to talk about death , or , we thought that .
So with loads of funding from the Federal Government and the local Health Service , we introduced a thing at John Hunter called Respecting Patient Choices .
We trained hundreds of people to go to the wards and talk to people about the fact that they would die , and what would they prefer under those circumstances .
They loved it . The families and the patients , they loved it .
Ninety-eight percent of people really thought this just should have been normal practice , and that this is how things should work .
And when they expressed wishes , all of those wishes came true , as it were .
We were able to make that happen for them .
But then , when the funding ran out , we went back to look six months later , and everybody had stopped again , and nobody was having these conversations anymore .
So that was really kind of heartbreaking for us , because we thought this was going to really take off .
The cultural issue had reasserted itself .
So here 's the pitch : I think it 's important that we don 't just get on this freeway to ICU without thinking hard about whether or not that 's where we all want to end up , particularly as we become older and increasingly frail and ICU has less and less and less to offer us .
There has to be a little side road off there for people who don 't want to go on that track .
And I have one small idea , and one big idea about what could happen .
And this is the small idea .
The small idea is , let 's all of us engage more with this in the way that Jason has illustrated .
Why can 't we have these kinds of conversations with our own elders and people who might be approaching this ?
There are a couple of things you can do .
One of them is , you can , just ask this simple question . This question never fails .
" In the event that you became too sick to speak for yourself , who would you like to speak for you ? "
That 's a really important question to ask people , because giving people the control over who that is produces an amazing outcome .
The second thing you can say is , " Have you spoken to that person about the things that are important to you so that we 've got a better idea of what it is we can do ? "
So that 's the little idea .
The big idea , I think , is more political .
I think we have to get onto this .
I suggested we should have Occupy Death .
My wife said , " Yeah , right , sit-ins in the mortuary .
Yeah , yeah . Sure . "
So that one didn 't really run , but I was very struck by this .
Now , I 'm an aging hippie .
I don 't know , I don 't think I look like that anymore , but I had , two of my kids were born at home in the ' 80s when home birth was a big thing , and we baby boomers are used to taking charge of the situation , so if you just replace all these words of birth , I like " Peace , Love , Natural Death " as an option .
I do think we have to get political and start to reclaim this process from the medicalized model in which it 's going .
Now , listen , that sounds like a pitch for euthanasia .
I want to make it absolutely crystal clear to you all , I hate euthanasia . I think it 's a sideshow .
I don 't think euthanasia matters .
I actually think that , in places like Oregon , where you can have physician-assisted suicide , you take a poisonous dose of stuff , only half a percent of people ever do that .
I 'm more interested in what happens to the 99.5 percent of people who don 't want to do that .
I think most people don 't want to be dead , but I do think most people want to have some control over how their dying process proceeds .
So I 'm an opponent of euthanasia , but I do think we have to give people back some control .
It deprives euthanasia of its oxygen supply .
I think we should be looking at stopping the want for euthanasia , not for making it illegal or legal or worrying about it at all .
This is a quote from Dame Cicely Saunders , whom I met when I was a medical student .
She founded the hospice movement .
And she said , " You matter because you are , and you matter to the last moment of your life . "
And I firmly believe that that 's the message that we have to carry forward .
Thank you .
Dan Berkenstock : The world is one big dataset . Now , how to photograph it ...
We 're all familiar with satellite imagery , but what we might not know is that much of it is out of date . That 's because satellites are big and expensive , so there aren 't that many of them up in space . As he explains in this fascinating talk , Dan Berkenstock and his team came up with a different solution , designing a cheap , lightweight satellite with a radically new approach to photographing what 's going on on Earth .
Five years ago , I was a Ph.D. student living two lives .
In one , I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft , and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies .
As a data scientist , I did a lot of analyses , mostly of facilities , industrial facilities around the world .
And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together .
And one day , I was thinking about how all data has a location , and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face .
Although I was a satellite engineer , I hadn 't thought about using satellite imagery in my work .
Now , like most of us , I 'd been online , I 'd see my house , so I thought , I 'll hop in there and I 'll start looking up some of these facilities .
And what I found really surprised me .
The pictures that I was finding were years out of date , and because of that , it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today .
But I was intrigued .
I mean , satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff .
There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today , but there 's still so much we don 't know on a daily basis .
How much oil is stored in all of China ?
How much corn is being produced ?
How many ships are in all of our world 's ports ?
Now , in theory , all of these questions could be answered by imagery , but not if it 's old .
And if this data was so valuable , then how come I couldn 't get my hands on more recent pictures ?
So the story begins over 50 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites .
And today , there 's a handful of the great , great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes .
During this period , launching things into space , just the rocket to get the satellite up there , has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each , and that 's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do , you cram as much functionality in there as possible .
All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive , now nearly a billion , with a b , dollars per copy .
Because they are so expensive , there aren 't very many of them .
Because there aren 't very many of them , the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old .
I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally , but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected , some friends and I put together a dataset of the 30 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 2000 and 2010 .
As you can see in blue , huge areas of our world are barely seen , less than once a year , and even the areas that are seen most frequently , those in red , are seen at best once a quarter .
Now as aerospace engineering grad students , this chart cried out to us as a challenge .
Why do these things have to be so expensive ?
Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets ?
Wasn 't there a way to build a smaller , simpler , new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging ?
I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites , but fortunately we had help .
In the late 1990s , a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space .
This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites .
This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 100 , and suddenly we could afford to experiment , to take a little bit of risk , and to realize a lot of innovation .
And a new generation of engineers and scientists , mostly out of universities , began launching these very small , breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats .
And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin .
Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design .
And I can 't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things , but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset , of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy , of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found , it just seemed boring to go work on anything else .
And so we moved into a cramped , windowless office in Palo Alto , and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab .
The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing .
In space , size drives cost , and we had worked with these very small , breadbox-sized satellites in school , but as we began to better understand the laws of physics , we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited , because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope , and these satellites had a very small , very constrained volume .
And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this .
Although this was the low-cost option , quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable .
So about three or four weeks later , we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed , and they told us that back in the 1970s , the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff -- that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution , being able to see objects one meter in size , they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images , but get a lot of them at an affordable price .
From our own computer simulations , we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy , for the first time , being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis , while conveniently still not being able to see individuals .
We had found our compromise .
We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox , now more like a mini-fridge , but we still wouldn 't have to build a pickup truck .
So now we had our constraint .
The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build .
What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible , basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 100 watt lightbulb .
The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope .
Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner , similar to a Xerox machine , and as they traverse the Earth , they take pictures , scanning row by row by row to build the complete image .
Now people use these because they get a lot of light , which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image .
The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing .
You have to stay focused on a 50-centimeter target from over 600 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second , which requires an awesome degree of complexity .
So instead , we turned to a new generation of video sensors , originally created for use in night vision goggles .
Instead of taking a single , high quality image , we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames , but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground , at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system .
And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well , and day by day , our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units .
A few short weeks ago , we packed up SkySat 1 , put our signatures on it , and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth .
Today , it 's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks .
And soon , we 'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 24 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect .
So why do all of this ? Why build these satellites ?
Well , it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency , and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come .
We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier , and beyond economic data , unlocking the human story , moment by moment .
For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid , it just doesn 't get much better than that .
Thank you .

Stewart Brand + Mark Z. Jacobson : Debate : Does the world need nuclear energy ?
Nuclear power : the energy crisis has even die-hard environmentalists reconsidering it . In this first-ever TED debate , Stewart Brand and Mark Z. Jacobson square off over the pros and cons . A discussion that 'll make you think -- and might even change your mind .
We 're having a debate .
The debate is over the proposition : " What the world needs now is nuclear energy . " True or false ?
And before we have the debate , I 'd like to actually take a show of hands -- on balance , right now , are you for or against this ?
So those who are " yes , " raise your hand . " For . "
Okay , hands down .
Those who are against , raise your hands .
Okay , I 'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start .
Which means we 're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts , if at all .
So here 's the format : They 're going to have six minutes each , and then after one little , quick exchange between them , I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short , crisp , pungent , powerful point .
So , in favor of the proposition , possibly shockingly , is one of , truly , the founders of the environmental movement , a long-standing TEDster , the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog , someone we all know and love , Stewart Brand .
Stewart Brand : Whoa .
The saying is that with climate , those who know the most are the most worried .
With nuclear , those who know the most are the least worried .
A classic example is James Hansen , a NASA climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere .
He came out with a wonderful book recently called " Storms of My Grandchildren . "
And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power , as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously .
This is the design situation : a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban .
Look at the client base for this .
live in the developing world .
We are moving to cities . We are moving up in the world .
And we are educating our kids , having fewer kids , basically good news all around .
But we move to cities , toward the bright lights , and one of the things that is there that we want , besides jobs , is electricity .
And if it isn 't easily gotten , we 'll go ahead and steal it .
This is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world , in the cities and in the countryside .
Electricity for cities , at its best , is what 's called baseload electricity .
That 's where it is on all the time .
And so far there are only three major sources of that -- coal and gas , hydro-electric , which in most places is maxed-out -- and nuclear .
I would love to have something in the fourth place here , but in terms of constant , clean , scalable energy , [ solar ] and wind and the other renewables aren 't there yet because they 're inconstant .
Nuclear is and has been for 40 years .
Now , from an environmental standpoint , the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal , the two major sources of electricity .
If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear , the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can -- a pretty heavy Coke can , about two pounds .
But one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant .
Then what happens to the waste ?
The nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places don 't have underground storage yet .
It 's just as well , because it can stay where it is .
While the carbon dioxide , vast quantities of it , gigatons , goes into the atmosphere where we can 't get it back -- yet -- and where it is causing the problems that we 're most concerned about .
So when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources , nuclear is down there with wind and hydro , below solar and way below , obviously , all the fossil fuels .
Wind is wonderful ; I love wind .
I love being around these big wind generators .
But one of the things we 're discovering is that wind , like solar , is an actually relatively dilute source of energy .
And so it takes a very large footprint on the land , a very large footprint in terms of materials , five to 10 times what you 'd use for nuclear , and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm .
In places like Denmark and Germany , they 've maxed out on wind already .
They 've run out of good sites .
The power lines are getting overloaded .
And you peak out .
Likewise , with solar , especially here in California , we 're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern California desert .
Well , as an environmentalist , we would rather that didn 't happen .
It 's okay on frapped-out agricultural land .
Solar 's wonderful on rooftops .
But out in the landscape , one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert .
When you add all these things up -- Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind , solar and biofuels , and that area would be roughly the size of the United States , an area he refers to as " Renewistan . "
A guy who 's added it up all this very well is David Mackay , a physicist in England , and in his wonderful book , " Sustainable Energy , " among other things , he says , " I 'm not trying to be pro-nuclear . I 'm just pro-arithmetic . "
In terms of weapons , the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy .
We have been taking down the Russian warheads , turning it into electricity .
Ten percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads .
We haven 't even started the American stockpile .
I think of most interest to a TED audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small , down around 10 to 125 megawatts .
This is one from Toshiba .
Here 's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge .
And that would be very interesting in the developing world .
Typically , these things are put in the ground .
They 're referred to as nuclear batteries .
They 're incredibly safe , weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it .
Here is a commercial version from New Mexico called the Hyperion , and another one from Oregon called NuScale .
Babcock & amp ; Wilcox that make nuclear reactors , here 's an integral fast reactor .
Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold 's involved in .
The governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive , and these will go ahead .
And here 's the future .
Okay . Okay .
So arguing against , a man who 's been at the nitty , gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years .
In 2000 , he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming , after CO2 .
His team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources .
His first time at TED , possibly a disadvantage -- we shall see -- from Stanford , Professor Mark Jacobson . Good luck .
Mark Jacobson : Thank you .
So my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide , puts out more air pollutants , enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems , namely wind , solar , geothermal power , hydro-tidal wave power .
And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation .
So let 's start just by looking at the CO2 emissions from the life cycle .
CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to CO2 .
And if you look , wind and concentrated solar have the lowest CO2 emissions , if you look at the graph .
Nuclear -- there are two bars here .
One is a low estimate , and one is a high estimate .
The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear .
The high is the average of 103 scientific , peer-reviewed studies .
And this is just the CO2 from the life cycle .
If we look at the delays , it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation .
This includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit .
and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue , and then four to nine years for actual construction .
And in China , right now , they 're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear .
And the average , just for the construction time of these , is 7.1 years on top of any planning times .
While you 're waiting around for your nuclear , you have to run the regular electric power grid , which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world .
And the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid , resulting if you use nuclear , or anything else , versus wind , CSP or photovoltaics .
Wind takes about two to five years on average , same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics .
So the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind , or something else .
So if you add these two together , alone , you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy .
And this doesn 't even account for the footprint on the ground .
If you look at the air pollution health effects , this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust .
Let 's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States to battery electric vehicles , hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on E85 .
Well , right now in the United States , 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution , and vehicles are about 25,000 of those .
In 2020 , the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements .
And so , on the right , you see gasoline emissions , the death rates of 2020 .
If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol , you 'd actually increase the death rate slightly .
If you go to nuclear , you do get a big reduction , but it 's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar .
Now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation , because we know for example , India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities .
North Korea did that to some extent .
Iran is doing that right now .
And Venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities .
If you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world , and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as Mumbai or some other big city , megacity , the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S.
would be this .
So , do we need this ?
The next thing is : What about the footprint ? Stewart mentioned the footprint .
Actually , the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world .
That , because the footprint , as you can see , is just the pole touching the ground .
And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines .
That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground , entirely .
The spacing is something else .
That 's the footprint that is always being confused .
People confuse footprint with spacing .
As you can see from these pictures , the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land , range land or open space .
Over the ocean , it 's not even land .
Now if we look at nuclear -- With nuclear , what do we have ?
We have facilities around there . You also have a buffer zone that 's 17 square kilometers .
And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with .
Now if we go to the area , lots is worse than nuclear or wind .
For example , cellulosic ethanol , to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet , this is how much land you would need .
That 's cellulosic , second generation biofuels from prairie grass .
Here 's corn ethanol . It 's smaller .
This is based on ranges from data , but if you look at nuclear , it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet .
For wind , there 's a larger area , but much smaller footprint .
And of course , with wind , you could put it all over the East Coast , offshore theoretically , or you can split it up .
And now , if you go back to looking at geothermal , it 's even smaller than both , and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing , but it 's still pretty small .
And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet .
To power the entire world with 50 percent wind , you would need about one percent of world land .
Matching the reliability , base load is actually irrelevant .
We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply .
You can do that by combining renewables .
This is from real data in California , looking at wind data and solar data .
And it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand .
Here are the world wind resources .
There 's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world .
So then here 's the final ranking .
And one last slide I just want to show . This is the choice : You can either have wind or nuclear .
If you use wind , you guarantee ice will last .
Nuclear , the time lag alone will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more .
And we can guarantee a clean , blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power .
All right .
So while they 're having their comebacks on each other -- and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran -- I need two people from either side .
So if you 're for this , if you 're for nuclear power , put up two hands .
If you 're against , put up one .
And I want two of each for the mics .
Now then , you guys have -- you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said , challenge it , whatever .
SB : I think a point of difference we 're having , Mark , has to do with weapons and energy .
These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases -- a lot of those studies include , " Well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we 'll have cities burning and stuff like that , " which is kind of finessing it a little bit , I think .
The reality is that there 's , what , 21 nations that have nuclear power ?
Of those , seven have nuclear weapons .
In every case , they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power .
There are two nations , North Korea and Israel , that have nuclear weapons and don 't have nuclear power at all .
The places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are China , India , Europe , North America , all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons .
So that leaves a couple of places like Iran , maybe Venezuela , that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff .
Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is , and we can move toward zero weapons left , once we know all that .
Mark , 30 seconds , either on that or on anything Stewart said .
MJ : Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first , and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories .
So the other thing is , we don 't need nuclear energy .
There 's plenty of solar and wind .
You can make it reliable , as I showed with that diagram .
That 's from real data .
And this is an ongoing research . This is not rocket science .
Solving the world 's problems can be done , if you really put your mind to it and use clean , renewable energy .
There 's absolutely no need for nuclear power .
We need someone for .
Rod Beckstrom : Thank you Chris . I 'm Rod Beckstrom , CEO of ICANN .
I 've been involved in global warming policy since 1994 , when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol .
And I want to support Stewart Brand 's position .
I 've come around in the last 10 years .
I used to be against nuclear power .
I 'm now supporting Stewart 's position , softly , from a risk-management standpoint , agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident , which certainly is possible and is a very real problem .
However , I think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate , and that is , we face a situation where it 's carbon caps on this planet or die .
And in the United States Senate , we need bipartisan support -- only one or two votes are needed -- to move global warming through the Senate , and this room can help .
So if we get that through , then Mark will solve these problems . Thanks Chris .
Thank you Rod Beckstrom . Against .
David Fanton : Hi , I 'm David Fanton . I just want to say a couple quick things .
The first is : be aware of the propaganda .
The propaganda from the industry has been very , very strong .
And we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions .
Be very aware of the propaganda .
Secondly , think about this .
If we build all these nuclear power plants , all that waste is going to be on hundreds , if not thousands , of trucks and trains , moving through this country every day .
Tell me they 're not going to have accidents .
Tell me that those accidents aren 't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years .
And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains isn 't a potential terrorist target .
Thank you .
For .
Anyone else for ? Go .
Alex : Hi , I 'm Alex . I just wanted to say , I 'm , first of all , renewable energy 's biggest fan .
I 've got solar PV on my roof .
I 've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that I own .
And I 'm , you know , very much " pro " that kind of stuff .
However , there 's a basic arithmetic problem here .
The capability of the sun shining , the wind blowing and the rain falling , simply isn 't enough to add up .
So if we want to keep the lights on , we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time .
I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the ' 80s , and I continue to do so now .
But we 've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time .
And , ultimately , the arithmetic problem isn 't going to go away .
We 're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone .
We need a solution that generates all of the time .
If we 're going to keep the lights on , nuclear is that solution .
Thank you .
Anyone else against ?
The last person who was in favor made the premise that we don 't have enough alternative renewable resources .
And our " against " proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do .
And so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible .
I will also add one other thing .
Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks -- we know that the stick is going up exponentially .
So you can 't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say , " That 's all we have . "
Because five years from now , it will blow you away what we 'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible , disastrous nuclear power .
Point well made . Thank you .
So each of you has really just a couple sentences -- 30 seconds each to sum up .
Your final pitch , Stewart .
SB : I loved your " It all balances out " chart that you had there .
It was a sunny day and a windy night .
And just now in England they had a cold spell .
All of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week .
None of those things were stirring .
And as usual , they had to buy nuclear power from France .
Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel .
This keeps happening .
I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor .
And the fact is , we 're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along .
And especially the small reactors need to go forward .
I heard from Nathan Myhrvold -- and I think here 's the action point -- it 'll take an act of Congress to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission start moving quickly on these small reactors , which we need very much , here and in the world .
MJ : So we 've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply , looking at solar , wind , using data for California .
And you can match that demand , hour-by-hour , for the whole year almost .
Now , with regard to the resources , we 've developed the first wind map of the world , from data alone , at 80 meters .
We know what the wind resources are . You can cover 15 percent .
Fifteen percent of the entire U.S.
has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive .
And there 's much more solar than there is wind .
There 's plenty of resource . You can make it reliable .
Okay . So , thank you , Mark .
So if you were in Palm Springs ...
Shameless . Shameless . Shameless .
So , people of the TED community , I put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy .
All those in favor , raise your hands .
And all those against .
Ooooh .
Just put up ... Hands up , people who changed their minds during the debate , who voted differently .
Those of you who changed your mind in favor of " for " put your hands up .
Okay . So here 's the read on it .
Both people won supporters , but on my count , the mood of the TED community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor , in favor .
You both won . I congratulate both of you .
Thank you for that .
Clay Shirky : How social media can make history
While news from Iran streams to the world , Clay Shirky shows how Facebook , Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news , bypassing censors . The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics .
I want to talk about the transformed media landscape , and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world .
And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation .
I 'll start here . Last November there was a presidential election .
You probably read something about it in the papers .
And there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression .
And so a plan came up to video the vote .
And the idea was that individual citizens with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places , on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques , and would upload this to a central place .
And that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation -- that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes , but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall .
So this is a pattern that assumes we 're all in this together .
What matters here isn 't technical capital , it 's social capital .
These tools don 't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring .
It isn 't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society .
It 's when everybody is able to take them for granted .
Because now that media is increasingly social , innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we 're all in this together .
And so we 're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere , and moving from one spot to another .
That is a huge transformation .
Not to put too fine a point on it , the moment we 're living through -- the moment our historical generation is living through -- is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history .
Now that 's a big claim . I 'm going to try to back it up .
There are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label " revolution . "
The first one is the famous one , the printing press : movable type , oil-based inks , that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside-down , starting in the middle of the 1400s .
Then , a couple of hundred years ago , there was innovation in two-way communication , conversational media : first the telegraph , then the telephone .
Slow , text-based conversations , then real-time voice based conversations .
Then , about 150 years ago , there was a revolution in recorded media other than print : first photos , then recorded sound , then movies , all encoded onto physical objects .
And finally , about 100 years ago , the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air -- radio and television .
This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century .
This is what those of us of a certain age grew up with , and are used to .
But there is a curious asymmetry here .
The media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups .
And the media that 's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations .
If you want to have a conversation in this world , you have it with one other person .
If you want to address a group , you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group , whether you 're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press .
That was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century .
And this is what changed .
This thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is Bill Cheswick 's map of the Internet .
He traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them .
The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time .
Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern , and television , radio , magazines , books , gave us the one-to-many pattern , the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern .
For the first time , media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations .
That 's one of the big changes .
The second big change is that , as all media gets digitized , the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media , meaning that phone calls migrate to the Internet , magazines migrate to the Internet , movies migrate to the Internet .
And that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium .
Put another way , media is increasingly less just a source of information , and it is increasingly more a site of coordination , because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well .
And the third big change is that members of the former audience , as Dan Gilmore calls them , can now also be producers and not consumers .
Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well , because the same equipment -- phones , computers -- let you consume and produce .
It 's as if , when you bought a book , they threw in the printing press for free ; it 's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons .
That is a huge change in the media landscape we 're used to .
And it 's not just Internet or no Internet .
We 've had the Internet in its public form for almost 20 years now , and it 's still changing as the media becomes more social .
It 's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well .
Second story .
Last May , China in the Sichuan province had a terrible earthquake , 7.9 magnitude , massive destruction in a wide area , as the Richter Scale has it .
And the earthquake was reported as it was happening .
People were texting from their phones . They were taking photos of buildings .
They were taking videos of buildings shaking .
They were uploading it to QQ , China 's largest Internet service .
They were Twittering it .
And so as the quake was happening the news was reported .
And because of the social connections , Chinese students coming elsewhere , and going to school , or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China -- there were people listening all over the world , hearing this news .
The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter .
Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to read .
The last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened .
Now they might have liked to have done that here , rather than seeing these pictures go up online .
But they weren 't given that choice , because their own citizens beat them to the punch .
Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens , rather than from the Xinhua News Agency .
And this stuff rippled like wildfire .
For a while there the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter , the global short messaging service -- nine of the top 10 links were about the quake .
People collating information , pointing people to news sources , pointing people to the US geological survey .
The 10th one was kittens on a treadmill , but that 's the Internet for you .
But nine of the 10 in those first hours .
And within half a day donation sites were up , and donations were pouring in from all around the world .
This was an incredible , coordinated global response .
And the Chinese then , in one of their periods of media openness , decided that they were going to let it go , that they were going to let this citizen reporting fly .
And then this happened .
People began to figure out , in the Sichuan Provence , that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed -- because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day -- the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code .
And so they started , the citizen journalists started reporting that as well . And there was an incredible picture .
You may have seen in on the front page of the New York Times .
A local official literally prostrated himself in the street , in front of these protesters , in order to get them to go away .
Essentially to say , " We will do anything to placate you , just please stop protesting in public . "
But these are people who have been radicalized , because , thanks to the one child policy , they have lost everyone in their next generation .
Someone who has seen the death of a single child now has nothing to lose .
And so the protest kept going .
And finally the Chinese cracked down .
That was enough of citizen media .
And so they began to arrest the protesters .
They began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on .
China is probably the most successful manager of Internet censorship in the world , using something that is widely described as the Great Firewall of China .
And the Great Firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals , it mostly comes in from the outside world , it comes in relatively sparse chunks , and it comes in relatively slowly .
And because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country .
But like the Maginot Line , the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge , because not one of those four things was true in this environment .
The media was produced locally . It was produced by amateurs .
It was produced quickly . And it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared .
And so now the Chinese government , who for a dozen years , has quite successfully filtered the web , is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire services , because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they can 't deal with it any other way .
And in fact that is happening this week .
On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen they just , two days ago , announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter , because there was no way to filter it other than that .
They had to turn the spigot entirely off .
Now these changes don 't just affect people who want to censor messages .
They also affect people who want to send messages , because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole , not just a particular strategy .
The classic media problem , from the 20th century is , how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network .
And here is the twentieth century answer .
Bundle up the message . Send the same message to everybody .
National message . Targeted individuals .
Relatively sparse number of producers .
Very expensive to do , so there is not a lot of competition .
This is how you reach people .
All of that is over .
We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global , social , ubiquitous and cheap .
Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world , to the distributed collection of the audience , are now used to this change .
The audience can talk back .
And that 's a little freaky . But you can get used to it after a while , as people do .
But that 's not the really crazy change that we 're living in the middle of .
The really crazy change is here : it 's the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other , the fact that former consumers are now producers , the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another ; because there is a lot more amateurs than professionals , and because the size of the network , the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants , meaning that the network , when it grows large , grows very , very large .
As recently at last decade , most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals .
Those days are over , never to return .
It is the green lines now , that are the source of the free content , which brings me to my last story .
We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign .
And I don 't mean most imaginative use in politics -- I mean most imaginative use ever .
And one of the things Obama did , was they famously , the Obama campaign did , was they famously put up MyBarackObama.com , myBO.com And millions of citizens rushed in to participate , and to try and figure out how to help .
An incredible conversation sprung up there .
And then , this time last year , Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA , The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act .
He had said , in January , that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons .
By the summer , in the middle of the general campaign , He said , " I 've thought about the issue more . I 've changed my mind .
I 'm going to vote for this bill . "
And many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk .
It was Senator Obama when they created it . They changed the name later .
" Please get FISA right . "
Within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on myBO.com ; within weeks of its being created it was the largest group .
Obama had to issue a press release .
He had to issue a reply .
And he said essentially , " I have considered the issue .
I understand where you are coming from .
But having considered it all , I 'm still going to vote the way I 'm going to vote .
But I wanted to reach out to you and say , I understand that you disagree with me , and I 'm going to take my lumps on this one . "
This didn 't please anybody . But then a funny thing happened in the conversation .
People in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down .
Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join , to deny its existence , to delete it , to take to off the site .
They had understood that their role with myBO.com was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters .
And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media .
Media , the media landscape that we knew , as familiar as it was , as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs , is increasingly slipping away .
In a world where media is global , social , ubiquitous and cheap , in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants , in that world , media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals .
It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups .
And the choice we face , I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world , isn 't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in .
That 's the media environment we 've got .
The question we all face now is , " How can we make best use of this media ?
Even though it means changing the way we 've always done it . "
Thank you very much .
Johanna Blakley : Social media and the end of gender
Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences , but they 're becoming increasingly harder to track online , says media researcher Johanna Blakley . As social media outgrows traditional media , and women users outnumber men , Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media .
I 'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy : social media and the end of gender .
Let me connect the dots .
I 'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love , or love to hate , are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender .
I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender .
If you hadn 't noticed , our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender , and I think that 's going to change .
Now most media companies -- television , radio , publishing , games , you name it -- they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences .
It 's old-school demographics .
They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us .
Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways -- you have certain taste , that you like certain things .
And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics .
Age demographics : the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s , when the baby boomers were still young .
Now they 've aged out of that demographic , but it 's still the case that powerful ratings companies like Nielson don 't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54 .
In our media environment , it 's as if they don 't even exist .
Now , if you watch " Mad Men , " like I do -- it 's a popular TV show in the States -- Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics , which first came about in the 1960s , where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers .
But psychographics really haven 't had a huge impact on the media business .
It 's really just been basic demographics .
So I 'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC , and we 've done a lot of research over the last seven , eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad .
And in the last three years , we 've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed , and we 've discovered some very interesting things .
All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them .
But those categories mean even less now than they did before , because with online networking tools , it 's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes .
We 're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online .
And we can lie about our age online , too , pretty easily .
We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests .
We don 't need a media company to help do this for us .
So the traditional media companies , of course , are paying very close attention to these online communities .
They know this is the mass audience of the future ; they need to figure it out .
But they 're having a hard time doing it because they 're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them , because that 's how ad rates are still determined .
When they 're monitoring your clickstream -- and you know they are -- they have a really hard time figuring out your age , your gender and your income .
They can make some educated guesses .
But they get a lot more information about what you do online , what you like , what interests you .
That 's easier for them to find out than who you are .
And even though that 's still sort of creepy , there is an upside to having your taste monitored .
Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn 't been before .
It had been presumed before .
So when you look online at the way people aggregate , they don 't aggregate around age , gender and income .
They aggregate around the things they love , the things that they like , and if you think about it , shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories .
I 'd much rather know whether you like " Buffy the Vampire Slayer " rather than how old you are .
That would tell me something more substantial about you .
Now there 's something else that we 've discovered about social media that 's actually quite surprising .
It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution .
If you look at the statistics -- these are worldwide statistics -- in every single age category , women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies .
And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites , they truly dominate the social media space , which is a space that 's having a huge impact on old media .
The question is : what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture , and what 's it going to mean for women ?
If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media , then does that mean that women are going to take over global media ?
Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows ?
Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks ?
Could this be possible , that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape ?
Well , I actually don 't think that 's going to be the case .
I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women , because they realize this is important for their business , and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere .
But I think women are actually going to be -- ironically enough -- responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the " chick flick " and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things -- that Hispanics like certain things , that young people like certain things .
This is far too simplistic .
The future entertainment media that we 're going to see is going to be very data-driven , and it 's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online , where women are really driving the action .
So you may be asking , well why is it important that I know what entertains people ?
Why should I know this ?
Of course , old media companies and advertisers need to know this .
But my argument is that , if you want to understand the global village , it 's probably a good idea that you figure out what they 're passionate about , what amuses them , what they choose to do in their free time .
This is a very important thing to know about people .
I 've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people 's lives .
And I do it not just because it 's fun -- though actually , it is really fun -- but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people 's lives -- for instance , on their political beliefs and on their health .
And so , if you have any interest in understanding the world , looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start .
So imagine a media atmosphere that isn 't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics .
Can you even imagine what that looks like ?
I can 't wait to find out what it looks like .
Thank you so much .
Lauren Hodge , Shree Bose + Naomi Shah : Award-winning teenage science in action
In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair . Lauren Hodge , Shree Bose and Naomi Shah describe their extraordinary projects -- and their route to a passion for science . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Lauren Hodge : If you were going to a restaurant and wanted a healthier option , which would you choose , grilled or fried chicken ?
Now most people would answer grilled , and it 's true that grilled chicken does contain less fat and fewer calories .
However , grilled chicken poses a hidden danger .
The hidden danger is heterocyclic amines -- specifically phenomethylimidazopyridine , or PhIP -- which is the immunogenic or carcinogenic compound .
A carcinogen is any substance or agent that causes abnormal growth of cells , which can also cause them to metastasize or spread .
They are also organic compounds in which one or more of the hydrogens in ammonia is replaced with a more complex group .
Studies show that antioxidants are known to decrease these heterocyclic amines .
However , no studies exist yet that show how or why .
These here are five different organizations that classify carcinogens .
And as you can see , none of the organizations consider the compounds to be safe , which justifies the need to decrease them in our diet .
Now you might wonder how a 13 year-old girl could come up with this idea .
And I was led to it through a series of events .
I first learned about it through a lawsuit I read about in my doctor 's office -- which was between the Physician 's Committee for Responsible Medicine and seven different fast food restaurants .
They weren 't sued because there was carcinogens in the chicken , but they were sued because of California 's Proposition 65 , which stated that if there 's anything dangerous in the products then the companies had to give a clear warning .
So I was very surprised about this .
And I was wondering why nobody knew more about this dangerous grilled chicken , which doesn 't seem very harmful .
But then one night , my mom was cooking grilled chicken for dinner , and I noticed that the edges of the chicken , which had been marinated in lemon juice , turned white .
And later in biology class , I learned that it 's due to a process called denaturing , which is where the proteins will change shape and lose their ability to chemically function .
So I combined these two ideas and I formulated a hypothesis , saying that , could possibly the carcinogens be decreased due to a marinade and could it be due to the differences in PH ?
So my idea was born , and I had the project set up and a hypothesis , so what was my next step ?
Well obviously I had to find a lab to work at because I didn 't have the equipment in my school .
I thought this would be easy , but I emailed about 200 different people within a five-hour radius of where I lived , and I got one positive response that said that they could work with me .
Most of the others either never responded back , said they didn 't have the time or didn 't have the equipment and couldn 't help me .
So it was a big commitment to drive to the lab to work multiple times .
However , it was a great opportunity to work in a real lab -- so I could finally start my project .
The first stage was completed at home , which consisted of marinating the chicken , grilling the chicken , amassing it and preparing it to be transported to the lab .
The second stage was completed at the Penn State University main campus lab , which is where I extracted the chemicals , changed the PH so I could run it through the equipment and separated the compounds I needed from the rest of the chicken .
The final stages , when I ran the samples through a high-pressure liquid chromatography mass spectrometer , which separated the compounds and analyzed the chemicals and told me exactly how much carcinogens I had in my chicken .
So when I went through the data , I had very surprising results , because I found that four out of the five marinating ingredients actually inhibited the carcinogen formation .
When compared with the unmarinated chicken , which is what I used as my control , I found that lemon juice worked by far the best , which decreased the carcinogens by about 98 percent .
The saltwater marinade and the brown sugar marinade also worked very well , decreasing the carcinogens by about 60 percent .
Olive oil slightly decreased the PhIP formation , but it was nearly negligible .
And the soy sauce results were inconclusive because of the large data range , but it seems like soy sauce actually increased the potential carcinogens .
Another important factor that I didn 't take into account initially was the time cooked .
And I found that if you increase the time cooked , the amount of carcinogens rapidly increases .
So the best way to marinate chicken , based on this , is to , not under-cook , but definitely don 't over-cook and char the chicken , and marinate in either lemon juice , brown sugar or saltwater .
Based on these findings , I have a question for you .
Would you be willing to make a simple change in your diet that could potentially save your life ?
Now I 'm not saying that if you eat grilled chicken that 's not marinated , you 're definitely going to catch cancer and die .
However , anything you can do to decrease the risk of potential carcinogens can definitely increase the quality of lifestyle .
Is it worth it to you ?
How will you cook your chicken now ?
Shree Bose : Hi everyone . I 'm Shree Bose .
I was the 17-18 year-old age category winner and then the grand prize winner .
And I want all of you to imagine a little girl holding a dead blue spinach plant .
And she 's standing in front of you and she 's explaining to you that little kids will eat their vegetables if they 're different colors .
Sounds ridiculous , right .
But that was me years ago .
And that was my first science fair project .
It got a bit more complicated from there .
My older brother Panaki Bose spent hours of his time explaining atoms to me when I barely understood basic algebra .
My parents suffered through many more of my science fair projects , including a remote controlled garbage can .
And then came the summer after my freshman year , when my grandfather passed away due to cancer .
And I remember watching my family go through that and thinking that I never wanted another family to feel that kind of loss .
So , armed with all the wisdom of freshman year biology , I decided I wanted to do cancer research at 15 .
Good plan .
So I started emailing all of these professors in my area asking to work under their supervision in a lab .
Got rejected by all except one .
And then went on , my next summer , to work under Dr. Basu at the UNT Health Center at Fort Worth , Texas .
And that is where the research began .
So ovarian cancer is one of those cancers that most people don 't know about , or at least don 't pay that much attention to .
But yet , it 's the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women in the United States .
In fact , one in 70 women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer .
One in 100 will die from it .
Chemotherapy , one of the most effective ways used to treat cancer today , involves giving patients really high doses of chemicals to try and kill off cancer cells .
Cisplatin is a relatively common ovarian cancer chemotherapy drug -- a relatively simple molecule made in the lab that messes with the DNA of cancer cells and causes them to kill themselves .
Sounds great , right ?
But here 's the problem : sometimes patients become resistant to the drug , and then years after they 've been declared to be cancer free , they come back .
And this time , they no longer respond to the drug .
It 's a huge problem .
In fact , it 's one of the biggest problems with chemotherapy today .
So we wanted to figure out how these ovarian cancer cells are becoming resistant to this drug called Cisplatin .
And we wanted to figure this out , because if we could figure that out , then we might be able to prevent that resistance from ever happening .
So that 's what we set out to do .
And we thought it had something to do with this protein called AMP kinase , an energy protein .
So we ran all of these tests blocking the protein , and we saw this huge shift .
I mean , on the slide , you can see that on our sensitive side , these cells that are responding to the drug , when we start blocking the protein , the number of dying cells -- those colored dots -- they 're going down .
But then on this side , with the same treatment , they 're going up -- interesting .
But those are dots on a screen for you ; what exactly does that mean ?
Well basically that means that this protein is changing from the sensitive cell to the resistant cell .
And in fact , it might be changing the cells themselves to make the cells resistant .
And that 's huge .
In fact , it means that if a patient comes in and they 're resistant to this drug , then if we give them a chemical to block this protein , then we can treat them again with the same drug .
And that 's huge for chemotherapy effectiveness -- possibly for many different types of cancer .
So that was my work , and it was my way of reimagining the future for future research , with figuring out exactly what this protein does , but also for the future of chemotherapy effectiveness -- so maybe all grandfathers with cancer have a little bit more time to spend with their grandchildren .
But my work wasn 't just about the research .
It was about finding my passion .
That 's why being the grand prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair -- cute picture , right -- it was so exciting to me and it was such an amazing honor .
And ever since then , I 've gotten to do some pretty cool stuff -- from getting to meet the president to getting to be on this stage to talk to all of you guys .
But like I said , my journey wasn 't just about the research , it was about finding my passion , and it was about making my own opportunities when I didn 't even know what I was doing .
It was about inspiration and determination and never giving up on my interest for science and learning and growing .
After all , my story begins with a dried , withered spinach plant and it 's only getting better from there .
Thank you .
Naomi Shah : Hi everyone . I 'm Naomi Shah , and today I 'll be talking to you about my research involving indoor air quality and asthmatic patients .
1.6 million deaths worldwide .
One death every 20 seconds .
People spend over 90 percent of their lives indoors .
And the economic burden of asthma exceeds that of HIV and tuberculosis combined .
Now these statistics had a huge impact on me , but what really sparked my interest in my research was watching both my dad and my brother suffer from chronic allergies year-round .
It confused me ; why did these allergy symptoms persist well past the pollen season ?
With this question in mind , I started researching , and I soon found that indoor air pollutants were the culprit .
As soon as I realized this , I investigated the underlying relationship between four prevalent air pollutants and their affect on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
At first , I just wanted to figure out which of these four pollutants have the largest negative health impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
But soon after , I developed a novel mathematical model that essentially quantifies the effect of these environmental pollutants on the lung health of asthmatic patients .
And it surprises me that no model currently exists that quantifies the effect of environmental factors on human lung health , because that relationship seems so important .
So with that in mind , I started researching more , I started investigating more , and I became very passionate .
Because I realized that if we could find a way to target remediation , we could also find a way to treat asthmatic patients more effectively .
For example , volatile organic compounds are chemical pollutants that are found in our schools , homes and workplaces .
They 're everywhere .
These chemical pollutants are currently not a criteria air pollutant , as defined by the U.S. Clean Air Act .
Which is surprising to me , because these chemical pollutants , through my research , I show that they had a very large negative impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients and thus should be regulated .
So today I want to show you my interactive software model that I created .
I 'm going to show it to you on my laptop .
And I have a volunteer subject in the audience today , Julie .
And all of Julie 's data has been pre-entered into my interactive software model .
And this can be used by anyone .
So I want you to imagine that you 're in Julie 's shoes , or someone who 's really close to you who suffers from asthma or another lung disorder .
So Julie 's going to her doctor 's office to get treated for her asthma .
And the doctor has her sit down , and he takes her peak expiratory flow rate -- which is essentially her exhalation rate , or the amount of air that she can breathe out in one breath .
So that peak expiratory flow rate , I 've entered it up into the interactive software model .
I 've also entered in her age , her gender and her height .
I 've assumed that she lives in an average household with average air pollutant levels .
So any user can come in here and click on " lung function report " and it 'll take them to this report that I created .
And this report really drives home the crux of my research .
So what it shows -- if you want to focus on that top graph in the right-hand corner -- it shows Julie 's actual peak expiratory flow rate in the yellow bar .
This is the measurement that she took in her doctor 's office .
In the blue bar at the bottom of the graph , it shows what her peak expiratory flow rate , what her exhalation rate or lung health , should be based on her age , gender and height .
So the doctor sees this difference between the yellow bar and the blue bar , and he says , " Wow , we need to give her steroids , medication and inhalers . "
But I want everyone here to reimagine a world where instead of prescribing steroids , inhalers and medication , the doctor turns to Julie and says , " Why don 't you go home and clean out your air filters .
Clean out the air ducts in your home , in your workplace , in your school .
Stop the use of incense and candles .
And if you 're remodeling your house , take out all the carpeting and put in hardwood flooring . "
Because these solutions are natural , these solutions are sustainable , and these solutions are long-term investments -- long-term investments that we 're making for our generation and for future generations .
Because these environmental solutions that Julie can make in her home , her workplace and her school are impacting everyone that lives around her .
So I 'm very passionate about this research and I really want to continue it and expand it to more disorders besides asthma , more respiratory disorders , as well as more pollutants .
But before I end my talk today , I want to leave you with one saying .
And that saying is that genetics loads the gun , but the environment pulls the trigger .
And that made a huge impact on me when I was doing this research .
Because what I feel , is a lot of us think that the environment is at a macro level , that we can 't do anything to change our air quality or to change the climate or anything .
But if each one of us takes initiative in our own home , in our own school and in our own workplace , we can make a huge difference in air quality .
Because remember , we spend 90 percent of our lives indoors .
And air quality and air pollutants have a huge impact on the lung health of asthmatic patients , anyone with a respiratory disorder and really all of us in general .
So I want you to reimagine a world with better air quality , better quality of life and better quality of living for everyone including our future generations .
Thank you .
Lisa Ling : Right .
Can I have Shree and Lauren come up really quickly ?
Your Google Science Fair champions .
Your winners .
Yang Lan : The generation that 's remaking China
Yang Lan , a journalist and entrepreneur who 's been called " the Oprah of China , " offers insight into the next generation of young Chinese citizens -- urban , connected and alert to injustice .
The night before I was heading for Scotland , I was invited to host the final of " China 's Got Talent " show in Shanghai with the 80,000 live audience in the stadium .
Guess who was the performing guest ?
Susan Boyle .
And I told her , " I 'm going to Scotland the next day . "
She sang beautifully , and she even managed to say a few words in Chinese : 送你葱 So it 's not like " hello " or " thank you , " that ordinary stuff .
It means " green onion for free . "
Why did she say that ?
Because it was a line from our Chinese parallel Susan Boyle -- a 50-some year-old woman , a vegetable vendor in Shanghai , who loves singing Western opera , but she didn 't understand any English or French or Italian , so she managed to fill in the lyrics with vegetable names in Chinese .
And the last sentence of Nessun Dorma that she was singing in the stadium was " green onion for free . "
So [ as ] Susan Boyle was saying that , 80,000 live audience sang together .
That was hilarious .
So I guess both Susan Boyle and this vegetable vendor in Shanghai belonged to otherness .
They were the least expected to be successful in the business called entertainment , yet their courage and talent brought them through .
And a show and a platform gave them the stage to realize their dreams .
Well , being different is not that difficult .
We are all different from different perspectives .
But I think being different is good , because you present a different point of view .
You may have the chance to make a difference .
My generation has been very fortunate to witness and participate in the historic transformation of China that has made so many changes in the past 20 , 30 years .
I remember that in the year of 1990 , when I was graduating from college , I was applying for a job in the sales department of the first five-star hotel in Beijing , Great Wall Sheraton -- it 's still there .
So after being interrogated by this Japanese manager for a half an hour , he finally said , " So , Miss Yang , do you have any questions to ask me ? "
I summoned my courage and poise and said , " Yes , but could you let me know , what actually do you sell ? "
I didn 't have a clue what a sales department was about in a five-star hotel .
That was the first day I set my foot in a five-star hotel .
Around the same time , I was going through an audition -- the first ever open audition by national television in China -- with another thousand college girls .
The producer told us they were looking for some sweet , innocent and beautiful fresh face .
So when it was my turn , I stood up and said , " Why [ do ] women 's personalities on television always have to be beautiful , sweet , innocent and , you know , supportive ?
Why can 't they have their own ideas and their own voice ? "
I thought I kind of offended them .
But actually , they were impressed by my words .
And so I was in the second round of competition , and then the third and the fourth .
After seven rounds of competition , I was the last one to survive it .
So I was on a national television prime-time show .
And believe it or not , that was the first show on Chinese television that allowed its hosts to speak out of their own minds without reading an approved script .
And my weekly audience at that time was between 200 to 300 million people .
Well after a few years , I decided to go to the U.S. and Columbia University to pursue my postgraduate studies , and then started my own media company , which was unthought of during the years that I started my career .
So we do a lot of things .
I 've interviewed more than a thousand people in the past .
And sometimes I have young people approaching me say , " Lan , you changed my life , " and I feel proud of that .
But then we are also so fortunate to witness the transformation of the whole country .
I was in Beijing 's bidding for the Olympic Games .
I was representing the Shanghai Expo .
I saw China embracing the world and vice versa .
But then sometimes I 'm thinking , what are today 's young generation up to ?
How are they different , and what are the differences they are going to make to shape the future of China , or at large , the world ?
So today I want to talk about young people through the platform of social media .
First of all , who are they ? [ What ] do they look like ?
Well this is a girl called Guo Meimei -- 20 years old , beautiful .
She showed off her expensive bags , clothes and car on her microblog , which is the Chinese version of Twitter .
And she claimed to be the general manager of Red Cross at the Chamber of Commerce .
She didn 't realize that she stepped on a sensitive nerve and aroused national questioning , almost a turmoil , against the credibility of Red Cross .
The controversy was so heated that the Red Cross had to open a press conference to clarify it , and the investigation is going on .
So far , as of today , we know that she herself made up that title -- probably because she feels proud to be associated with charity .
All those expensive items were given to her as gifts by her boyfriend , who used to be a board member in a subdivision of Red Cross at Chamber of Commerce .
It 's very complicated to explain .
But anyway , the public still doesn 't buy it .
It is still boiling .
It shows us a general mistrust of government or government-backed institutions , which lacked transparency in the past .
And also it showed us the power and the impact of social media as microblog .
Microblog boomed in the year of 2010 , with visitors doubled and time spent on it tripled .
Sina.com , a major news portal , alone has more than 140 million microbloggers .
On Tencent , 200 million .
The most popular blogger -- it 's not me -- it 's a movie star , and she has more than 9.5 million followers , or fans .
About 80 percent of those microbloggers are young people , under 30 years old .
And because , as you know , the traditional media is still heavily controlled by the government , social media offers an opening to let the steam out a little bit .
But because you don 't have many other openings , the heat coming out of this opening is sometimes very strong , active and even violent .
So through microblogging , we are able to understand Chinese youth even better .
So how are they different ?
First of all , most of them were born in the 80s and 90s , under the one-child policy .
And because of selected abortion by families who favored boys to girls , now we have ended up with 30 million more young men than women .
That could pose a potential danger to the society , but who knows ; we 're in a globalized world , so they can look for girlfriends from other countries .
Most of them have fairly good education .
The illiteracy rate in China among this generation is under one percent .
In cities , 80 percent of kids go to college .
But they are facing an aging China with a population above 65 years old coming up with seven-point-some percent this year , and about to be 15 percent by the year of 2030 .
And you know we have the tradition that younger generations support the elders financially , and taking care of them when they 're sick .
So it means young couples will have to support four parents who have a life expectancy of 73 years old .
So making a living is not that easy for young people .
College graduates are not in short supply .
In urban areas , college graduates find the starting salary is about 400 U.S. dollars a month , while the average rent is above $ 500 .
So what do they do ? They have to share space -- squeezed in very limited space to save money -- and they call themselves " tribe of ants . "
And for those who are ready to get married and buy their apartment , they figured out they have to work for 30 to 40 years to afford their first apartment .
That ratio in America would only cost a couple five years to earn , but in China it 's 30 to 40 years with the skyrocketing real estate price .
Among the 200 million migrant workers , 60 percent of them are young people .
They find themselves sort of sandwiched between the urban areas and the rural areas .
Most of them don 't want to go back to the countryside , but they don 't have the sense of belonging .
They work for longer hours with less income , less social welfare .
And they 're more vulnerable to job losses , subject to inflation , tightening loans from banks , appreciation of the renminbi , or decline of demand from Europe or America for the products they produce .
Last year , though , an appalling incident in a southern OEM manufacturing compound in China : 13 young workers in their late teens and early 20s committed suicide , just one by one like causing a contagious disease .
But they died because of all different personal reasons .
But this whole incident aroused a huge outcry from society about the isolation , both physical and mental , of these migrant workers .
For those who do return back to the countryside , they find themselves very welcome locally , because with the knowledge , skills and networks they have learned in the cities , with the assistance of the Internet , they 're able to create more jobs , upgrade local agriculture and create new business in the less developed market .
So for the past few years , the coastal areas , they found themselves in a shortage of labor .
These diagrams show a more general social background .
The first one is the Engels coefficient , which explains that the cost of daily necessities has dropped its percentage all through the past decade , in terms of family income , to about 37-some percent .
But then in the last two years , it goes up again to 39 percent , indicating a rising living cost .
The Gini coefficient has already passed the dangerous line of 0.4 .
Now it 's 0.5 -- even worse than that in America -- showing us the income inequality .
And so you see this whole society getting frustrated about losing some of its mobility .
And also , the bitterness and even resentment towards the rich and the powerful is quite widespread .
So any accusations of corruption or backdoor dealings between authorities or business would arouse a social outcry or even unrest .
So through some of the hottest topics on microblogging , we can see what young people care most about .
Social justice and government accountability runs the first in what they demand .
For the past decade or so , a massive urbanization and development have let us witness a lot of reports on the forced demolition of private property .
And it has aroused huge anger and frustration among our young generation .
Sometimes people get killed , and sometimes people set themselves on fire to protest .
So when these incidents are reported more and more frequently on the Internet , people cry for the government to take actions to stop this .
So the good news is that earlier this year , the state council passed a new regulation on house requisition and demolition and passed the right to order forced demolition from local governments to the court .
Similarly , many other issues concerning public safety is a hot topic on the Internet .
We heard about polluted air , polluted water , poisoned food .
And guess what , we have faked beef .
They have sorts of ingredients that you brush on a piece of chicken or fish , and it turns it to look like beef .
And then lately , people are very concerned about cooking oil , because thousands of people have been found [ refining ] cooking oil from restaurant slop .
So all these things have aroused a huge outcry from the Internet .
And fortunately , we have seen the government responding more timely and also more frequently to the public concerns .
While young people seem to be very sure about their participation in public policy-making , but sometimes they 're a little bit lost in terms of what they want for their personal life .
China is soon to pass the U.S.
as the number one market for luxury brands -- that 's not including the Chinese expenditures in Europe and elsewhere .
But you know what , half of those consumers are earning a salary below 2,000 U.S. dollars .
They 're not rich at all .
They 're taking those bags and clothes as a sense of identity and social status .
And this is a girl explicitly saying on a TV dating show that she would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle .
But of course , we do have young people who would still prefer to smile , whether in a BMW or [ on ] a bicycle .
So in the next picture , you see a very popular phenomenon called " naked " wedding , or " naked " marriage .
It does not mean they will wear nothing in the wedding , but it shows that these young couples are ready to get married without a house , without a car , without a diamond ring and without a wedding banquet , to show their commitment to true love .
And also , people are doing good through social media .
And the first picture showed us that a truck caging 500 homeless and kidnapped dogs for food processing was spotted and stopped on the highway with the whole country watching through microblogging .
People were donating money , dog food and offering volunteer work to stop that truck .
And after hours of negotiation , 500 dogs were rescued .
And here also people are helping to find missing children .
A father posted his son 's picture onto the Internet .
After thousands of resends in relay , the child was found , and we witnessed the reunion of the family through microblogging .
So happiness is the most popular word we have heard through the past two years .
Happiness is not only related to personal experiences and personal values , but also , it 's about the environment .
People are thinking about the following questions : Are we going to sacrifice our environment further to produce higher GDP ?
How are we going to perform our social and political reform to keep pace with economic growth , to keep sustainability and stability ?
And also , how capable is the system of self-correctness to keep more people content with all sorts of friction going on at the same time ?
I guess these are the questions people are going to answer .
And our younger generation are going to transform this country while at the same time being transformed themselves .
Thank you very much .
Bruno Maisonnier : Dance , tiny robots !
There 's a place in France where the robots do a dance . And that place is TEDxConcorde , where Bruno Maisonnier of Aldebaran Robotics choreographs a troupe of tiny humanoid Nao robots through a surprisingly emotive performance .
Stefan Sagmeister : The power of time off
Every seven years , designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook . He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali .
I run a design studio in New York .
Every seven years , I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments , things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year .
In that year , we are not available for any of our clients .
We are totally closed .
And as you can imagine , it is a lovely and very energetic time .
I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves , music and design .
And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know , and for even more that you 've never heard of .
As I realized , just like with many many things in my life that I actually love , I adapt to it .
And I get , over time , bored by them .
And for sure , in our case , our work started to look the same .
You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book .
Quite the similar idea , then , a perfume packaged in a book , in a die cut .
So I decided to close it down for one year .
Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning , then there is another 40 years that 's really reserved for working .
And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement .
And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years .
That 's clearly enjoyable for myself .
But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large , rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two .
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago , Jonathan Haidt , who defined his work into three different levels .
And they rang very true for me .
I can see my work as a job . I do it for money .
I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays .
And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism .
In a career I 'm definitely more engaged .
But at the same time , there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while ?
While in the third one , in the calling , very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn 't be financially compensated for it .
I am not a religious person myself , but I did look for nature .
I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City .
Looked for something different for the second one .
Europe and the U.S. didn 't really feel enticing because I knew them too well . So Asia it was .
The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali .
Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on , so Bali it was .
It 's a wonderful , very craft-oriented society .
I arrived there in September 2008 , and pretty much started to work right away .
There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself .
However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily .
And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house , and attacked me during my morning walks .
So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts .
Every single dog on one tee shirt .
As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message on the back of the shirt .
Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio .
And then just leave it all to them .
And I don 't have to do anything .
So I looked for furniture .
And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked , I couldn 't afford .
And all the stuff I could afford , I didn 't like .
So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture .
This one , of course , still works with the wild dogs .
It 's not quite finished yet .
And I think by the time this lamp came about , I had finally made peace with those dogs .
Then there is a coffee table . I also did a coffee table .
It 's called Be Here Now .
It includes 330 compasses .
And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside , and make those compasses go crazy , always centering on them .
Then this is a fairly talkative , verbose kind of chair .
I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali .
And at the same time , I 'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people 's happinesses .
So I will not really go too far into it .
Many of you will know this TEDster , Danny Gilbert , whose book , actually , I got it through the TED book club .
I think it took me four years to finally read it , while on sabbatical .
And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical .
And I 'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals .
This is Ferran Adria . Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona , El Bulli .
His restaurant is open seven months every year .
He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff .
His latest numbers are fairly impressive .
He can seat , throughout the year , he can seat 8,000 people .
And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations .
If I look at my cycle , seven years , one year sabbatical , it 's 12.5 percent of my time .
And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine , 3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want .
There is some good successes .
Scotch tape came out of this program , as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M .
Google , of course , very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects .
Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical ?
That 's about five percent of everybody .
So I 'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up .
Talk to them about if it was successful or not .
I 've found that finding out about what I 'm going to like in the future , my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it .
When I had the idea of doing one , the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book .
And then I told as many , many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on .
In the beginning , on the first sabbatical , it was rather disastrous .
I had thought that I should do this without any plan , that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation . It was not .
I just , without a plan , I just reacted to little requests , not work requests , those I all said no to , but other little requests .
Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that .
So I became my own intern .
And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in , put them in a hierarchy , divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan , very much like in grade school .
What does it say here ? Monday , 8 to 9 : story writing ; 9 to 10 : future thinking .
Was not very successful . And so on and so forth .
And that actually , specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical , worked really well for me .
What came out of it ?
I really got close to design again .
I had fun .
Financially , seen over the long term , it was actually successful .
Because of the improved quality , we could ask for higher prices .
And probably most importantly , basically everything we 've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year .
And I 'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical .
One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated .
This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies , and not for everybody else .
We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica , the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto , in Portugal .
And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn 't use the architecture , I failed at that .
And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto , where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning .
Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English , basically as logo making .
And I understood that the building itself was a logo .
So then it became quite easy .
We put a mask on it , looked at it deep down in the ground , checked it out from all sides , west , north , south , east , top and bottom .
Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software , the Casa da Musica Logo Generator .
That 's connected to a scanner .
You put any image in there , like that Beethoven image .
And the software , in a second , will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo .
Which , when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster , comes in handy , because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same .
So it will always fit together , conceptually , of course .
If Zappa 's music is performed , it gets its own logo .
Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers , who all performed there , get their own Casa da Musica logo .
It works the same internally with the president or the musical director , whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards .
There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building .
It has a more transparent identity .
The truck they go on tour with .
Or there 's a smaller contemporary orchestra , 12 people that remixes its own title .
And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it .
Like this Donna Toney poster , or Chopin , or Mozart , or La Monte Young .
You can take the shape and make typography out of it .
You can grow it underneath the skin .
You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house , or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program , as well as educational services .
Second insight . So far , until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes , which was fine with me .
On one hand I have nothing against selling .
My parents are both salespeople .
But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language , why do I only promote with it ?
There must be something else .
And the whole series of work came out of it .
Some of you might have seen it .
I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before , under the title " Things I 've Learned in My Life So Far . "
I 'll just show two now .
This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York .
It says , " Self-confidence produces fine results . "
This is after a week .
After two weeks , three weeks , four weeks , five weeks .
And you see the self confidence almost comes back , but not quite .
These are some pictures visitors sent to me .
And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something .
We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece .
We got 250,000 coins from the central bank , at different darknesses .
So we got brand new ones , shiny ones , medium ones , and very old , dark ones .
And with the help of 100 volunteers , over a week , created this fairly floral typography that spelled , " Obsessions make my life worse and my work better . "
And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between , " Should I really take as much money as I can ?
Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now ? "
While we built all this up during that week , with the 100 volunteers , a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it .
So when it was finally done , and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry , one of the neighbors called the police .
And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom , came , saw , and they wanted to protect the artwork .
And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters .
I think you see , you see them sweeping . You see them sweeping right here .
That 's the police , getting rid of it all .
So after eight hours that 's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing .
We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali .
It 's a movie about happiness .
And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us .
They weren 't quite slick enough .
So we asked the goose to do it again , and hoped she would do somehow , a more elegant or pretty job .
And I think she overdid it .
Just a bit too ornamental .
And my studio is very close to the monkey forest .
And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked , actually , fairly happy .
So we asked those guys to do it again .
They did a fine job , but had a couple of readability problems .
So of course whatever you don 't really do yourself doesn 't really get done properly .
That film we 'll be working on for the next two years .
So it 's going to be a while .
And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile .
Then you can of course always go and see this guy .
And I 'm happy I 'm alive .
I 'm happy I 'm alive . I 'm happy I 'm alive .
Stefan Sagmeister : Thank you .
Kakenya Ntaiya : A girl who demanded school
Kakenya Ntaiya made a deal with her father : She would undergo the traditional Maasai rite of passage of female circumcision if he would let her go to high school . Ntaiya tells the fearless story of continuing on to college , and of working with her village elders to build a school for girls in her community . It 's the educational journey of one that altered the destiny of 125 young women .
There 's a group of people in Kenya .
People cross oceans to go see them .
These people are tall .
They jump high . They wear red .
And they kill lions .
You might be wondering , who are these people ?
These are the Maasais .
And you know what 's cool ? I 'm actually one of them .
The Maasais , the boys are brought up to be warriors .
The girls are brought up to be mothers .
When I was five years old , I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty .
My mother , my grandmother , my aunties , they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by .
Cool , yeah ?
And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12 .
My day started at 5 in the morning , milking the cows , sweeping the house , cooking for my siblings , collecting water , firewood .
I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife .
I went to school not because the Maasais ' women or girls were going to school .
It 's because my mother was denied an education , and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living .
Why did she say that ?
My father worked as a policeman in the city .
He came home once a year .
We didn 't see him for sometimes even two years .
And whenever he came home , it was a different case .
My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat .
She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us .
But when my father came , he would sell the cows , he would sell the products we had , and he went and drank with his friends in the bars .
Because my mother was a woman , she was not allowed to own any property , and by default , everything in my family anyway belongs to my father , so he had the right .
And if my mother ever questioned him , he beat her , abused her , and really it was difficult .
When I went to school , I had a dream .
I wanted to become a teacher .
Teachers looked nice .
They wear nice dresses , high-heeled shoes .
I found out later that they are uncomfortable , but I admired it .
But most of all , the teacher was just writing on the board -- not hard work , that 's what I thought , compared to what I was doing in the farm .
So I wanted to become a teacher .
I worked hard in school , but when I was in eighth grade , it was a determining factor .
In our tradition , there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women , and it 's a rite of passage to womanhood .
And then I was just finishing my eighth grade , and that was a transition for me to go to high school .
This was the crossroad .
Once I go through this tradition , I was going to become a wife .
Well , my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass .
So I talked -- I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out .
I talked to my father . I did something that most girls have never done .
I told my father , " I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school . "
The reason why , if I ran away , my father will have a stigma , people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn 't go through the ceremony .
It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life .
So he figured out . " Well , " he said , " okay , you 'll go to school after the ceremony . "
I did . The ceremony happened .
It 's a whole week long of excitement .
It 's a ceremony . People are enjoying it .
And the day before the actual ceremony happens , we were dancing , having excitement , and through all the night we did not sleep .
The actual day came , and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in . Yes , we danced and danced .
We walked out to the courtyard , and there were a bunch of people waiting .
They were all in a circle .
And as we danced and danced , and we approached this circle of women , men , women , children , everybody was there .
There was a woman sitting in the middle of it , and this woman was waiting to hold us .
I was the first . There were my sisters and a couple of other girls , and as I approached her , she looked at me , and I sat down .
And I sat down , and I opened my legs .
As I opened my leg , another woman came , and this woman was carrying a knife .
And as she carried the knife , she walked toward me and she held the clitoris , and she cut it off .
As you can imagine , I bled . I bled .
After bleeding for a while , I fainted thereafter .
It 's something that so many girls -- I 'm lucky , I never died -- but many die .
It 's practiced , it 's no anesthesia , it 's a rusty old knife , and it was difficult .
I was lucky because one , also , my mom did something that most women don 't do .
Three days later , after everybody has left the home , my mom went and brought a nurse .
We were taken care of .
Three weeks later , I was healed , and I was back in high school .
I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family .
Well , while I was in high school , something happened .
I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon .
This man was wearing a white t-shirt , jeans , camera , white sneakers -- and I 'm talking about white sneakers .
There is something about clothes , I think , and shoes .
They were sneakers , and this is in a village that doesn 't even have paved roads . It was quite attractive .
I told him , " Well , I want to go to where you are , " because this man looked very happy , and I admired that .
And he told me , " Well , what do you mean , you want to go ?
Don 't you have a husband waiting for you ? "
And I told him , " Don 't worry about that part .
Just tell me how to get there . "
This gentleman , he helped me .
While I was in high school also , my dad was sick .
He got a stroke , and he was really , really sick , so he really couldn 't tell me what to do next .
But the problem is , my father is not the only father I have .
Everybody who is my dad 's age , male in the community , is my father by default -- my uncles , all of them -- and they dictate what my future is .
So the news came , I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman 's College in Lynchburg , Virginia , and I couldn 't come without the support of the village , because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket .
I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here .
But I needed the support of the village , and here again , when the men heard , and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school , they said , " What a lost opportunity .
This should have been given to a boy . We can 't do this . "
So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition .
There 's a belief among our people that morning brings good news .
So I had to come up with something to do with the morning , because there 's good news in the morning .
And in the village also , there is one chief , an elder , who if he says yes , everybody will follow him .
So I went to him very early in the morning , as the sun rose .
The first thing he sees when he opens his door is , it 's me .
" My child , what are you doing here ? "
" Well , Dad , I need help . Can you support me to go to America ? "
I promised him that I would be the best girl , I will come back , anything they wanted after that , I will do it for them .
He said , " Well , but I can 't do it alone . "
He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went -- 16 more men -- every single morning I went and visited them .
They all came together .
The village , the women , the men , everybody came together to support me to come to get an education .
I arrived in America . As you can imagine , what did I find ?
I found snow !
I found Wal-Marts , vacuum cleaners , and lots of food in the cafeteria .
I was in a land of plenty .
I enjoyed myself , but during that moment while I was here , I discovered a lot of things .
I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old , it was called female genital mutilation .
I learned that it was against the law in Kenya .
I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body And as we speak right now , three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation .
I learned that my mom had a right to own property .
I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman .
Those things made me angry .
I wanted to do something .
As I went back , every time I went , I found that my neighbors ' girls were getting married .
They were getting mutilated , and here , after I graduated from here , I worked at the U.N. , I went back to school to get my graduate work , the constant cry of these girls was in my face .
I had to do something .
As I went back , I started talking to the men , to the village , and mothers , and I said , " I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you . What do you need ? "
As I spoke to the women , they told me , " You know what we need ? We really need a school for girls . "
Because there had not been any school for girls .
And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she 's walking to school , the mother is blamed for that .
If she got pregnant before she got married , the mother is blamed for that , and she 's punished .
She 's beaten .
They said , " We wanted to put our girls in a safe place . "
As we moved , and I went to talk to the fathers , the fathers , of course , you can imagine what they said : " We want a school for boys . "
And I said , " Well , there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education .
Why can 't they build a school for boys , and I 'll build a school for girls ? "
That made sense . And they agreed .
And I told them , I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment .
And they did . They donated land where we built the girls ' school .
We have .
I want you to meet one of the girls in that school .
Angeline came to apply for the school , and she did not meet any criteria that we had .
She 's an orphan . Yes , we could have taken her for that .
But she was older . She was 12 years old , and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade .
Angeline had been moving from one place -- because she 's an orphan , she has no mother , she has no father -- moving from one grandmother 's house to another one , from aunties to aunties . She had no stability in her life .
And I looked at her , I remember that day , and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline .
And yes , she was older to be in fourth grade .
We gave her the opportunity to come to the class .
Five months later , that is Angeline .
A transformation had begun in her life .
Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference .
She was not the top student when we took her .
Now she 's the best student , not just in our school , but in the entire division that we are in .
That 's Sharon . That 's five years later .
That 's Evelyn . Five months later , that is the difference that we are making .
As a new dawn is happening in my school , a new beginning is happening .
As we speak right now , 125 girls will never be mutilated .
One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they 're 12 years old .
One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams .
This is the thing that we are doing , giving them opportunities where they can rise .
As we speak right now , women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we 've started in our community .
I want to challenge you today .
You are listening to me because you are here , very optimistic .
You are somebody who is so passionate .
You are somebody who wants to see a better world .
You are somebody who wants to see that war ends , no poverty .
You are somebody who wants to make a difference .
You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better .
I want to challenge you today that to be the first , because people will follow you .
Be the first . People will follow you .
Be bold . Stand up . Be fearless . Be confident .
Move out , because as you change your world , as you change your community , as we believe that we are impacting one girl , one family , one village , one country at a time .
We are making a difference , so if you change your world , you are going to change your community , you are going to change your country , and think about that . If you do that , and I do that , aren 't we going to create a better future for our children , for your children , for our grandchildren ?
And we will live in a very peaceful world . Thank you very much .
Ravin Agrawal : 10 young Indian artists to watch
Collector Ravin Agrawal delivers a glowing introduction to 10 of India 's most exciting young contemporary artists . Working in a variety of media , each draws on their local culture for inspiration .
Right now is the most exciting time to see new Indian art .
Contemporary artists in India are having a conversation with the world like never before .
I thought it might be interesting , even for the many long-time collectors here with us at TED , local collectors , to have an outside view of 10 young Indian artists I wish everyone at TED to know .
The first is Bharti Kher .
The central motif of Bharti 's practice is the ready-made store-bought bindi that untold millions of Indian women apply to their foreheads , every day , in an act closely associated with the institution of marriage .
But originally the significance of the bindi is to symbolize the third eye between the spiritual world and the religious world .
Bharti seeks to liberate this everyday cliche , as she calls it , by exploding it into something spectacular .
She also creates life-size fiberglass sculptures , often of animals , which she then completely covers in bindis , often with potent symbolism .
She says she first got started with 10 packets of bindis , and then wondered what she could do with 10 thousand .
Our next artist , Balasubramaniam , really stands at the crossroads of sculpture , painting and installation , working wonders with fiberglass .
Since Bala himself will be speaking at TED I won 't spend too much time on him here today , except to say that he really succeeds at making the invisible visible .
Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh is known for her digital collages , using Indian comic books called amar chitra kathas as her primary source material .
These comics are a fundamental way that children , especially in the diaspora , learn their religious and mythological folk tales .
I , for one , was steeped in these .
Chitra basically remixes and re-titles these iconic images to tease out some of the sexual and gender politics embedded in these deeply influential comics .
And she uses this vocabulary in her installation work as well .
Jitish Kallat successfully practices across photography , sculpture , painting and installation .
As you can see , he 's heavily influenced by graffiti and street art , and his home city of Mumbai is an ever-present element in his work .
He really captures that sense of density and energy which really characterizes modern urban Bombay .
He also creates phantasmagoric sculptures made of bones from cast resin .
Here he envisions the carcass of an autorickshaw he once witnessed burning in a riot .
This next artist , N.S. Harsha , actually has a studio right here in Mysore .
He 's putting a contemporary spin on the miniature tradition .
He creates these fine , delicate images which he then repeats on a massive scale .
He uses scale to more and more spectacular effect , whether on the roof of a temple in Singapore , or in his increasingly ambitious installation work , here with 192 functioning sewing machines , fabricating the flags of every member of the United Nations .
Mumbai-based Dhruvi Acharya builds on her love of comic books and street art to comment on the roles and expectations of modern Indian women .
She too mines the rich source material of amar chitra kathas , but in a very different way than Chitra Ganesh .
In this particular work , she actually strips out the images and leaves the actual text to reveal something previously unseen , and provocative .
Raqib Shaw is Kolkata-born , Kashmir-raised , and London-trained .
He too is reinventing the miniature tradition .
He creates these opulent tableaus inspired by Hieronymus Bosch , but also by the Kashmiri textiles of his youth .
He actually applies metallic industrial paints to his work using porcupine quills to get this rich detailed effect .
I 'm kind of cheating with this next artist since Raqs Media Collective are really three artists working together .
Raqs are probably the foremost practitioners of multimedia art in India today , working across photography , video and installation .
They frequently explore themes of globalization and urbanization , and their home of Delhi is a frequent element in their work .
Here , they invite the viewer to analyze a crime looking at evidence and clues embedded in five narratives on these five different screens , in which the city itself may have been the culprit .
This next artist is probably the alpha male of contemporary Indian art , Subodh Gupta .
He was first known for creating giant photo-realistic canvases , paintings of everyday objects , the stainless steel kitchen vessels and tiffin containers known to every Indian .
He celebrates these local and mundane objects globally , and on a grander and grander scale , by incorporating them into ever more colossal sculptures and installations .
And finally number 10 , last and certainly not least , Ranjani Shettar , who lives and works here in the state of Karnataka , creates ethereal sculptures and installations that really marry the organic to the industrial , and brings , like Subodh , the local global .
These are actually wires wrapped in muslin and steeped in vegetable dye .
And she arranges them so that the viewer actually has to navigate through the space , and interact with the objects .
And light and shadow are a very important part of her work .
She also explores themes of consumerism , and the environment , such as in this work , where these basket-like objects look organic and woven , and are woven , but with the strips of steel , salvaged from cars that she found in a Bangalore junkyard .
10 artists , six minutes , I know that was a lot to take in .
But I can only hope I 've whet your appetite to go out and see and learn more about the amazing things that are happening in art in India today .
Thank you very much for looking and listening .
Dyan deNapoli : The great penguin rescue
A personal story , a collective triumph : Dyan deNapoli tells the story of the world 's largest volunteer animal rescue , which saved more than 40,000 penguins after an oil spill off the coast of South Africa . How does a job this big get done ? Penguin by penguin by penguin ... & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
For as long as I can remember , I have felt a very deep connection to animals and to the ocean .
And at this age , my personal idol was Flipper the dolphin .
And when I first learned about endangered species , I was truly distressed to know that every day animals were being wiped off the face of this Earth forever .
And I wanted to do something to help , but I always wondered , what could one person possibly do to make a difference ?
And it would be 30 years , but I would eventually get the answer to that question .
When these heartbreaking images of oiled birds finally began to emerge from the Gulf of Mexico last year during the horrific BP oil spill , a German biologist by the name of Silvia Gaus was quoted as saying , " We should just euthanize all oiled birds because studies have shown that fewer than one percent of them survive after being released . "
And I could not disagree more .
And in addition , I believe that every oiled animal deserves a second chance at life .
And I want to tell you why I feel so strongly about this .
On June 23rd , 2000 , a ship named the Treasure sank off the coast of Cape Town , South Africa , spilling 1,300 tons of fuel , which polluted the habitats of nearly half the entire world population of African penguins .
Now the ship sank between Robben Island to the south and Dassen Island to the north .
And these are two of the penguins ' main breeding islands .
And exactly six years and three days earlier , on June 20th , 1994 , a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island , oiling 10,000 penguins -- half of which died .
Now when the Treasure sank in 2000 , it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin -- which at the time , was listed as a threatened species .
And soon , nearly 20,000 penguins were covered with this toxic oil .
And the local seabird rescue center , named SANCCOB , immediately launched a massive rescue operation -- and this soon would become the largest animal rescue ever undertaken .
Now at the time , I was working down the street .
I was a penguin aquarist at the New England Aquarium .
And exactly 11 years ago yesterday , the phone rang in the penguin office .
And with that call , my life would change forever .
It was Estelle van der Meer calling from SANCCOB , saying , " Please come help .
We have thousands of oiled penguins and thousands of willing , but completely inexperienced , volunteers .
And we need penguin experts to come train and supervise them . "
So two days later , I was on a plane headed for Cape Town with a team of penguin specialists .
And the scene inside of this building was devastating and surreal .
In fact , many people compared it to a war zone .
And last week , a 10 year-old girl asked me , " What did it feel like when you first walked into that building and saw so many oiled penguins ? "
And this is what happened .
I was instantly transported back to that moment in time .
Penguins are very vocal birds and really , really noisy .
And so I expected to walk into this building and be met with this cacophony of honking and braying and squawking , but instead , when we stepped through those doors and into the building , it was eerily silent .
So it was very clear these were stressed , sick , traumatized birds .
The other thing that was so striking was the sheer number of volunteers .
Up to 1,000 people a day came to the rescue center , and eventually , over the course of this rescue , more than 12 and a half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town to help save these birds .
And the amazing thing was that not one of them had to be there -- yet they were .
So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity , this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring .
So the day after we arrived , two of us from the aquarium were put in charge of room two , and room two had more than 4,000 oiled penguins in it .
Now mind you , three days earlier , we had 60 penguins under our care , so we were definitely overwhelmed and just a bit terrified -- at least I was .
Personally , I really didn 't know if I was capable of handling such a monstrous task .
And collectively , we really didn 't know if we could pull this off .
Because we all knew that just six years earlier , half as many penguins had been oiled and rescued and only half of them had survived .
So would it be humanly possible to save this many oiled penguins ?
We just did not know .
But what gave us hope were these incredibly dedicated and brave volunteers -- three of whom here are force-feeding penguins .
And you may notice they 're wearing very thick gloves .
And what you should know about African penguins is that they have razor-sharp beaks .
And before long , our bodies were covered head to toe with these nasty wounds inflicted by the terrified penguins .
Now the day after we arrived , a new crisis began to unfold .
The oil slick was now moving north towards Dassen Island , and the rescuers despaired , because they knew if the oil hit , it would not be possible to rescue any more oiled birds .
And there really were no good solutions .
But then finally , one of the researchers threw out this crazy idea .
He said , " Okay , why don 't we try and collect the birds at the greatest risk of getting oiled " -- they collected 20,000 -- " and we 'll ship them 500 miles up the coast to Port Elizabeth in these open air trucks and release them into the clean waters there and let them swim back home . "
So three of those penguins -- Peter , Pamela and Percy -- wore satellite tags , and the researchers crossed their fingers and hoped that by the time they got back home , the oil would be cleaned up from their islands .
And luckily , the day they arrived , it was .
So it had been a huge gamble , but it had paid off .
And so they know now that they can use this strategy in future oil spills .
So in wildlife rescue , as in life , we learn from each previous experience , and we learn from both our successes and our failures .
And the main thing learned during the Apollo Sea rescue in ' 94 was that most of those penguins had died due to the unwitting use of poorly ventilated transport boxes and trucks -- because they just had not been prepared to deal with so many oiled penguins at once .
So in these six years between these two oil spills , they built thousands of these well-ventilated boxes , and as a result , during the Treasure rescue , just 160 penguins died during the transport process , as opposed to 5,000 .
So this alone was a huge victory .
Something else learned during the Apollo rescue was how to train the penguins to take fish freely from their hands , using these training boxes .
And we used this technique again during the Treasure rescue .
But an interesting thing was noted during the training process .
The first penguins to make that transition to free feeding were the ones that had a metal band on their wing from the Apollo Sea spill six years earlier .
So penguins learn from previous experience , too .
So all of those penguins had to have the oil meticulously cleaned from their bodies .
And it would take two people at least an hour just to clean one penguin .
And when you clean a penguin , you first have to spray it with a degreaser .
And this brings me to my favorite story from the Treasure rescue .
About a year prior to this oil spill , a 17 year-old student had invented a degreaser .
And they 'd been using it at SANCCOB with great success , so they began using it during the Treasure rescue .
But part way through , they ran out .
So in a panic , Estelle from SANCCOB called the student and said , " Please , you have to make more . "
So he raced to the lab and made enough to clean the rest of the birds .
So I just think it is the coolest thing that a teenager invented a product that helped save the lives of thousands of animals .
So what happened to those 20,000 oiled penguins ?
And was Silvia Gaus right ?
Should we routinely euthanize all oiled birds because most of them are going to die anyway ?
Well she could not be more wrong .
After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor , more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild .
And we know from follow-up studies that they have lived just as long as never-oiled penguins , and bred nearly as successfully .
And in addition , about 3,000 penguin chicks were rescued and hand-raised .
And again , we know from long-term monitoring that more of these hand-raised chicks survive to adulthood and breeding age than do parent-raised chicks .
So , armed with this knowledge , SANCCOB has a chick-bolstering project .
And every year they rescue and raise abandoned chicks , and they have a very impressive 80 percent success rate .
And this is critically important because , one year ago , the African penguin was declared endangered .
And they could be extinct in less than 10 years , if we don 't do something now to protect them .
So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience ?
Personally , I learned that I am capable of handling so much more than I ever dreamed possible .
And I learned that one person can make a huge difference .
Just look at that 17 year-old .
And when we come together and work as one , we can achieve extraordinary things .
And truly , to be a part of something so much larger than yourself is the most rewarding experience you can possibly have .
So I 'd like to leave you with one final thought and a challenge , if you will .
My mission as the penguin lady is to raise awareness and funding to protect penguins , but why should any of you care about penguins ?
Well , you should care because they 're an indicator species .
And simply put , if penguins are dying , it means our oceans are dying , and we ultimately will be affected , because , as Sylvia Earle says , " The oceans are our life-support system . "
And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming .
And these are two things that each one of us actually has the power to do something about .
So if we each do our part , together , we can make a difference , and we can help keep penguins from going extinct .
Humans have always been the greatest threat to penguins , but we are now their only hope .
Thank you .
Paul Zak : Trust , morality -- and oxytocin ?
What drives our desire to behave morally ? Neuroeconomist Paul Zak shows why he believes oxytocin is responsible for trust , empathy and other feelings that help build a stable society .
Is there anything unique about human beings ?
There is .
We 're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments .
We 're obsessed with morality as social creatures .
We need to know why people are doing what they 're doing .
And I personally am obsessed with morality .
It was all due to this woman , Sister Mary Marastela , also known as my mom .
As an altar boy , I breathed in a lot of incense , and I learned to say phrases in Latin , but I also had time to think about whether my mother 's top-down morality applied to everybody .
I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality .
I thought , maybe there 's some earthly basis for moral decisions .
But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral .
I want to know if there 's a chemistry of morality .
I want to know if there was a moral molecule .
After 10 years of experiments , I found it .
Would you like to see it ? I brought some with me .
This little syringe contains the moral molecule .
It 's called oxytocin .
So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals .
In rodents , it was known to make mothers care for their offspring , and in some creatures , allowed for toleration of burrowmates .
But in humans , it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women , and is released by both sexes during sex .
So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule .
I did what most of us do -- I tried it on some colleagues .
One of them told me , " Paul , that is the world 's stupidist idea .
It is , " he said , " only a female molecule .
It can 't be that important . "
But I countered , " Well men 's brains make this too .
There must be a reason why . "
But he was right , it was a stupid idea .
But it was testably stupid .
In other words , I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral .
Turns out it wasn 't so easy .
First of all , oxytocin is a shy molecule .
Baseline levels are near zero , without some stimulus to cause its release .
And when it 's produced , it has a three-minute half-life , and degrades rapidly at room temperature .
So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin , have to grab it fast and keep it cold .
I think I can do that .
Now luckily , oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood , so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery .
Then I had to measure morality .
So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project .
So I started smaller .
I studied one single virtue : trustworthiness .
Why ? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous .
So in these countries , more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created , alleviating poverty .
So poor countries are by and large low trust countries .
So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness , I might help alleviate poverty .
But I 'm also a skeptic .
I don 't want to just ask people , " Are you trustworthy ? "
So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research .
If you 're so virtuous , show me the money .
So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money .
Let me show you how we do that .
So we recruit some people for an experiment .
They all get $ 10 if they agree to show up .
We give them lots of instruction , and we never ever deceive them .
Then we match them in pairs by computer .
And in that pair , one person gets a message saying , " Do you want to give up some of your $ 10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab ? "
The trick is you can 't see them , you can 't talk to them .
You only do it one time .
Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person 's account .
You 're going to make them a lot wealthier .
And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money .
Do you want to keep it all , or do you want to send some amount back ?
So think about this experiment for minute .
You 're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half .
Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood .
And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger ?
So this was the birth of vampire economics .
Make a decision and give me some blood .
So in fact , experimental economists had run this test around the world , and for much higher stakes , and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust , and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness .
But in fact , economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money .
They assumed money is good , why not keep it all ?
That 's not what we found .
We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money , and of those who received money , 95 percent returned some of it .
But why ?
Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received , the more their brain produced oxytocin , and the more oxytocin on board , the more money they returned .
So we have a biology of trustworthiness .
But wait . What 's wrong with this experiment ?
Two things .
One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation .
So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin , but they didn 't have any effect .
But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness .
I didn 't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness .
So to make the experiment , I knew I 'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly .
I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain .
And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler .
So along with colleagues in Zurich , we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo , had that same trust test with money , and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust , we can more than double the number of people all without altering mood or cognition .
So oxytocin is the trust molecule , but is it the moral molecule ?
Using the oxytocin inhaler , we ran more studies .
We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent .
We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent .
We 've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin .
These include massage , dancing and praying .
Yes , my mom was happy about that last one .
And whenever we raise oxytocin , people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers .
But why do they do this ?
What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin ?
To investigate this question , we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son , and his son has terminal brain cancer .
After they watched the video , we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin .
The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy .
So it 's empathy that makes us connect to other people .
It 's empathy that makes us help other people .
It 's empathy that makes us moral .
Now this idea is not new .
A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called " The Theory of Moral Sentiments . "
In this book , Smith argued that we are moral creatures , not because of a top-down reason , but for a bottom-up reason .
He said we 're social creatures , so we share the emotions of others .
So if I do something that hurts you , I feel that pain .
So I tend to avoid that .
If I do something that makes you happy , I get to share your joy .
So I tend to do those things .
Now this is the same Adam Smith who , 17 years later , would write a little book called " The Wealth of Nations " -- the founding document of economics .
But he was , in fact , a moral philosopher , and he was right on why we 're moral .
I just found the molecule behind it .
But knowing that molecule is valuable , because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off .
In particular , it tells us why we see immorality .
So to investigate immorality , let me bring you back now to 1980 .
I 'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara , California .
You sit in a gas station all day , you see lots of morality and immorality , let me tell you .
So one Sunday afternoon , a man walks into my cashier 's booth with this beautiful jewelry box .
Opens it up and there 's a pearl necklace inside .
And he said , " Hey , I was in the men 's room .
I just found this . What do you think we should do with it ? "
" I don 't know , put it in the lost and found . "
" Well this is very valuable .
We have to find the owner for this . " I said , " Yea . "
So we 're trying to decide what to do with this , and the phone rings .
And a man says very excitedly , " I was in your gas station a while ago , and I bought this jewelry for my wife , and I can 't find it . "
I said , " Pearl necklace ? " " Yeah . "
" Hey , a guy just found it . "
" Oh , you 're saving my life . Here 's my phone number .
Tell that guy to wait half an hour .
I 'll be there and I 'll give him a $ 200 reward . "
Great , so I tell the guy , " Look , relax .
Get yourself a fat reward . Life 's good . "
He said , " I can 't do it .
I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes , and I need this job , I 've got to go . "
Again he asked me , " What do you think we should do ? "
I 'm in high school . I have no idea .
So I said , " I 'll hold it for you . "
He said , " You know , you 've been so nice , let 's split the reward . "
I 'll give you the jewelry , you give me a hundred dollars , and when the guy comes ... " You see it . I was conned .
So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop , and I was the pigeon .
So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him , it 's that he shows he trusts the victim .
Now we know what happens .
The victim 's brain releases oxytocin , and you 're opening up your wallet or purse , giving away the money .
So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems ?
We found , testing thousands of individuals , that five percent of the population don 't release oxytocin on stimulus .
So if you trust them , their brains don 't release oxytocin .
If there 's money on the table , they keep it all .
So there 's a technical word for these people in my lab .
We call them bastards .
These are not people you want to have a beer with .
They have many of the attributes of psychopaths .
Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited .
One is through improper nurturing .
So we 've studied sexually abused women , and about half those don 't release oxytocin on stimulus .
You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly .
Also , high stress inhibits oxytocin .
So we all know this , when we 're really stressed out , we 're not acting our best .
There 's another way oxytocin is inhibited , which is interesting -- through the action of testosterone .
So we , in experiments , have administered testosterone to men .
And instead of sharing money , they become selfish .
But interestingly , high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish .
Now think about this . It means , within our own biology , we have the yin and yang of morality .
We have oxytocin that connects us to others , makes us feel what they feel .
And we have testosterone .
And men have 10 times the testosterone as women , so men do this more than women -- we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally .
We don 't need God or government telling us what to do .
It 's all inside of us .
So you may be wondering : these are beautiful laboratory experiments , do they really apply to real life ?
Yeah , I 've been worrying about that too .
So I 've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives .
So last summer , I attended a wedding in Southern England .
200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion .
I didn 't know a single person .
And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall .
And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes .
And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows .
And guess what ?
Weddings cause a release of oxytocin , but they do so in a very particular way .
Who is the center of the wedding solar system ?
The bride .
She had the biggest increase in oxytocin .
Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride ?
Her mother , that 's right .
Her mother was number two .
Then the groom 's father , then the groom , then the family , then the friends -- arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun .
So I think it tells us that we 've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple , connect us emotionally .
Why ? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species .
I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn 't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers .
So even though I have a fear of heights , I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft .
I took my blood before and after , and I had a huge spike of oxytocin .
And there are so many ways we can connect to people .
For example , through social media .
Many people are Tweeting right now .
So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin .
So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System .
And they had the reporters and their producers participate .
And one of these guys , he must have been 22 , he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin .
I mean , astounding ; no one has this .
So he was using social media in private .
When I wrote my report to the Koreans , I said , " Look , I don 't know what this guy was doing , " but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend .
They checked .
He was interacting on his girlfriend 's Facebook page .
There you go . That 's connection .
So there 's tons of ways that we can connect to other people , and it seems to be universal .
Two weeks ago , I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands -- very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia .
There are 800 different languages in the highlands .
These are the most primitive people in the world .
And they indeed also release oxytocin .
So oxytocin connects us to other people .
Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel .
And it 's so easy to cause people 's brains to release oxytocin .
I know how to do it , and my favorite way to do it is , in fact , the easiest .
Let me show it to you .
Come here . Give me a hug .
There you go .
So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love .
I 'm happy to share a little more love in the world , it 's great , but here 's your prescription from Dr. Love : eight hugs a day .
We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier .
And they 're happier because they have better relationships of all types .
Dr. Love says eight hugs a day .
Eight hugs a day -- you 'll be happier and the world will be a better place .
Of course , if you don 't like to touch people , I can always shove this up your nose .
Thank you .
Rebecca Saxe : How we read each other 's minds
Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans . But how do we do it ? Here , Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples ' thoughts -- and judges their actions .
Today I 'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds .
And the problem I 'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy , which is , " How can we know whether other people have minds ? "
That is , maybe you have a mind , and everyone else is just a really convincing robot .
So that 's a problem in philosophy , but for today 's purposes I 'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind , and that I don 't have to worry about this .
There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists , which is , " Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes ? "
Or perhaps , more relevantly , " Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes ? "
I think novelists put this best .
Like Philip Roth , who said , " And yet , what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people ?
So ill equipped are we all , to envision one another 's interior workings and invisible aims . "
So as a teacher and as a spouse , this is , of course , a problem I confront every day .
But as a scientist , I 'm interested in a different problem of other minds , and that is the one I 'm going to introduce to you today .
And that problem is , " How is it so easy to know other minds ? "
So to start with an illustration , you need almost no information , one snapshot of a stranger , to guess what this woman is thinking , or what this man is .
And put another way , the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds , our brain , is made up of pieces , brain cells , that we share with all other animals , with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs .
And yet , you put them together in a particular network , and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet .
Or to say , as Alan Greenspan did , " I know you think you understand what you thought I said , but I 'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant . "
So , the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas , one in each hand .
And to try to understand how you can put together simple units , simple messages over space and time , in a network , and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds .
So I 'm going to tell you three things about this today .
Obviously the whole project here is huge .
And I 'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people 's thoughts .
Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job .
And then finally , to show that some of the differences between people , in how we judge others , can be explained by differences in this brain system .
So first , the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain , in your brains , whose job it is to think about other people 's thoughts .
This is a picture of it .
It 's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction .
It 's above and behind your right ear .
And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you , or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan .
And you don 't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems .
So this brain region is called the Right TPJ .
And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults .
They 're MIT undergraduates .
The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds , we weren 't always that way .
It takes children a long time to break into the system .
I 'm going to show you a little bit of that long , extended process .
The first thing I 'm going to show you is a change between age three and five , as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own .
So I 'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task .
Rebecca Saxe : This is the first pirate . His name is Ivan .
And you know what pirates really like ?
What ? RS : Pirates really like cheese sandwiches .
Cheese ? I love cheese !
RS : Yeah . So Ivan has this cheese sandwich , and he says , " Yum yum yum yum yum !
I really love cheese sandwiches . "
And Ivan puts his sandwich over here , on top of the pirate chest .
And Ivan says , " You know what ? I need a drink with my lunch . "
And so Ivan goes to get a drink .
And while Ivan is away the wind comes , and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass .
And now , here comes the other pirate .
This pirate is called Joshua .
And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches .
So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says , " Yum yum yum yum yum ! I love cheese sandwiches . "
And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest .
So , that one is his .
RS : That one is Joshua 's . That 's right .
And then his went on the ground .
RS : That 's exactly right .
So he won 't know which one is his .
RS : Oh . So now Joshua goes off to get a drink .
Ivan comes back and he says , " I want my cheese sandwich . "
So which one do you think Ivan is going to take ?
I think he is going to take that one .
RS : Yeah , you think he 's going to take that one ? All right . Let 's see .
Oh yeah , you were right . He took that one .
So that 's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions .
Now I 'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle .
RS : And Ivan says , " I want my cheese sandwich . "
Which sandwich is he going to take ?
Do you think he 's going to take that one ? Let 's see what happens .
Let 's see what he does . Here comes Ivan .
And he says , " I want my cheese sandwich . "
And he takes this one .
Uh-oh . Why did he take that one ?
His was on the grass .
So the three-year-old does two things differently .
First , he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that 's really his .
And second , when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his , where we would say he 's taking that one because he thinks it 's his , the three-year-old comes up with another explanation : He 's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn 't want it , because now it 's dirty , on the ground .
So that 's why he 's taking the other sandwich .
Now of course , development doesn 't end at five .
And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people 's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now , not for an action prediction , but for a moral judgment .
So first I 'm going to show you the three-year-old again .
RS . : So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua 's sandwich ?
Yeah .
RS : Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua 's sandwich ?
Yeah .
So it 's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua 's sandwich , since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua 's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich .
But now I 'm going to show you the five-year-old .
Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua 's sandwich .
RS : Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua 's sandwich ?
Um , yeah .
And so , it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response .
RS : Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua 's sandwich ?
No , because the wind should get in trouble .
He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches .
And now what we 've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what 's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people 's thoughts .
So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region , the Right TPJ , being used while children are thinking about other people .
But it 's not quite like the adult brain .
So whereas in the adults , as I told you , this brain region is almost completely specialized -- it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people 's thoughts -- in children it 's much less so , when they are age five to eight , the age range of the children I just showed you .
And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds , getting into early adolescence , they still don 't have quite an adult-like brain region .
And so , what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence , both the cognitive system , our mind 's ability to think about other minds , and the brain system that supports it are continuing , slowly , to develop .
But of course , as you 're probably aware , even in adulthood , people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds , how often they do it and how accurately .
And so what we wanted to know was , could differences among adults in how they think about other people 's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region ?
So , the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids .
And I 'm going to give that to you now .
So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory , and they take a break for coffee .
And Grace 's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee .
Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder , which is sugar .
But the powder is labeled " Deadly Poison , " so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison .
And she puts it in her friend 's coffee .
And her friend drinks the coffee , and is fine .
How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee ?
Okay . Good .
So we ask people , how much should Grace be blamed in this case , which we call a failed attempt to harm ?
And we can compare that to another case , where everything in the real world is the same .
The powder is still sugar , but what 's different is what Grace thinks .
Now she thinks the powder is sugar .
And perhaps unsurprisingly , if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend 's coffee , people say she deserves no blame at all .
Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison , even though it 's really sugar , now people say she deserves a lot of blame , even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same .
And in fact , they say she deserves more blame in this case , the failed attempt to harm , than in another case , which we call an accident .
Where Grace thought the powder was sugar , because it was labeled " sugar " and by the coffee machine , but actually the powder was poison .
So even though when the powder was poison , the friend drank the coffee and died , people say Grace deserves less blame in that case , when she innocently thought it was sugar , than in the other case , where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred .
People , though , disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case .
Some people think she should deserve more blame , and other people less .
And what I 'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they 're making that judgment .
So what I 'm showing you , from left to right , is how much activity there was in this brain region , and from top to bottom , how much blame people said that Grace deserved .
And what you can see is , on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region , people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident .
Whereas on the right , where there was a lot of activity , people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief , and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident .
So that 's good , but of course what we 'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region , and see if we could change people 's moral judgment .
And we do have such a tool .
It 's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation , or TMS .
This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody 's skull , into a small region of their brain , and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region .
So I 'm going to show you a demo of this .
First , I 'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse .
I 'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine .
When you hear clicks , we 're turning the machine on .
So now I 'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain , to the part of my brain that controls my hand .
So there is no physical force , just a magnetic pulse .
Woman : Ready , Rebecca ? RS : Yes .
Okay , so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain .
And we can use that same pulse , now applied to the RTPJ , to ask if we can change people 's moral judgments .
So these are the judgments I showed you before , people 's normal moral judgments .
And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people 's judgments change .
And the first thing is , people can still do this task overall .
So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same . They say she deserves no blame .
But in the case of a failed attempt to harm , where Grace thought that it was poison , although it was really sugar , people now say it was more okay , she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee .
And in the case of the accident , where she thought that it was sugar , but it was really poison and so she caused a death , people say that it was less okay , she deserves more blame .
So what I 've told you today is that people come , actually , especially well equipped to think about other people 's thoughts .
We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking .
This system takes a long time to develop , slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence .
And even in adulthood , differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people .
But I want to give the last word back to the novelists , and to Philip Roth , who ended by saying , " The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway .
It 's getting them wrong that is living .
Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong , and then on careful reconsideration , getting them wrong again . "
Thank you .
So , I have a question . When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people 's moral judgments , that sounds alarming .
Please tell me that you 're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon , say .
RS : I 'm not .
I mean , they 're calling , but I 'm not taking the call .
They really are calling ?
So then seriously , you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads .
I mean , you 're clearly an incredible human being , but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber , do acts that people here might be worried about .
RS : Yeah , we worry about this .
So , there 's a couple of things to say about TMS .
One is that you can 't be TMSed without knowing it .
So it 's not a surreptitious technology .
It 's quite hard , actually , to get those very small changes .
The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain , but they 're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make .
And what we changed was not people 's moral judgments when they 're deciding what to do , when they 're making action choices .
We changed their ability to judge other people 's actions .
And so , I think of what I 'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial , but studying the jury .
Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education , to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments ?
RS : That 's one of the idealistic hopes .
The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new .
Until recently , what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal 's brain could do too , so we could study it in animal models .
We knew how brains see , and how they control the body and how they hear and sense .
And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things -- learn language and abstract concepts , and thinking about other people 's thoughts -- that 's brand new .
And we don 't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it .
So I 've got one last question . There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness , that puzzles a lot of people .
The notion that you can understand why a brain works , perhaps .
But why does anyone have to feel anything ?
Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate ?
You 're a brilliant young neuroscientist .
I mean , what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career , someone , you or someone else , is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem ?
RS : I hope they do . And I think they probably won 't .
Why ?
RS : It 's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing .
That 's a great answer . Rebecca Saxe , thank you very much . That was fantastic .
Scott Fraser : Why eyewitnesses get it wrong
Scott Fraser studies how humans remember crimes -- and bear witness to them . In this powerful talk , which focuses on a deadly shooting at sunset , he suggests that even close-up eyewitnesses to a crime can create " memories " they could not have seen . Why ? Because the brain abhors a vacuum . Editor 's note : In the original version of this talk , Scott Fraser misspoke about available footage of Two World Trade Center . The misstatement has been edited out for clarity .
The murder happened a little over 21 years ago , January the 18th , 1991 , in a small bedroom community of Lynwood , California , just a few miles southeast of Los Angeles .
A father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk , to get home , finish their schoolwork , and prepare themselves for bed .
And as the father was administering these instructions , a car drove by , slowly , and just after it passed the father and the teenagers , a hand went out from the front passenger window , and -- " Bam , Bam ! " -- killing the father .
And the car sped off .
The police , investigating officers , were amazingly efficient .
They considered all the usual culprits , and in less than 24 hours , they had selected their suspect : Francisco Carrillo , a 17-year-old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred .
They found photos of him . They prepared a photo array , and the day after the shooting , they showed it to one of the teenagers , and he said , " That 's the picture .
That 's the shooter I saw that killed the father . "
That was all a preliminary hearing judge had to listen to , to bind Mr. Carrillo over to stand trial for a first-degree murder .
In the investigation that followed before the actual trial , each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs , the same photo array .
The picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were shown in the photo array is in your bottom left hand corner of these mug shots .
The reason we 're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system , but that 's another whole TEDx talk for later .
So at the actual trial , all six of the teenagers testified , and indicated the identifications they had made in the photo array .
He was convicted . He was sentenced to life imprisonment , and transported to Folsom Prison .
So what 's wrong ?
Straightforward , fair trial , full investigation .
Oh yes , no gun was ever found .
No vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm , and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the shooter 's vehicle .
And Mr. Carrillo 's alibi ?
Which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killing ?
Sent to prison , adamantly insisting on his innocence , which he has consistently for 21 years .
So what 's the problem ?
The problems , actually , for this kind of case come manyfold from decades of scientific research involving human memory .
First of all , we have all the statistical analyses from the Innocence Project work , where we know that we have , what , 250 , 280 documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated , some from death row , on the basis of later DNA analysis , and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them .
We know that eyewitness identifications are fallible .
The other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that 's related to various brain functions but I can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line : The brain abhors a vacuum .
Under the best of observation conditions , the absolute best , we only detect , encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us , and they 're stored in different parts of the brain .
So now , when it 's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced , we have an incomplete , we have a partial store , and what happens ?
Below awareness , with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing , the brain fills in information that was not there , not originally stored , from inference , from speculation , from sources of information that came to you , as the observer , after the observation .
But it happens without awareness such that you don 't , aren 't even cognizant of it occurring .
It 's called reconstructed memories .
It happens to us in all the aspects of our life , all the time .
It was those two considerations , among others -- reconstructed memory , the fact about the eyewitness fallibility -- that was part of the instigation for a group of appeal attorneys led by an amazing lawyer named Ellen Eggers to pool their experience and their talents together and petition a superior court for a retrial for Francisco Carrillo .
They retained me , as a forensic neurophysiologist , because I had expertise in eyewitness memory identification , which obviously makes sense for this case , right ?
But also because I have expertise and testify about the nature of human night vision .
Well , what 's that got to do with this ?
Well , when you read through the case materials in this Carrillo case , one of the things that suddenly strikes you is that the investigating officers said the lighting was good at the crime scene , at the shooting .
All the teenagers testified during the trial that they could see very well .
But this occurred in mid-January , in the Northern Hemisphere , at 7 p.m. at night .
So when I did the calculations for the lunar data and the solar data at that location on Earth at the time of the incident of the shooting , all right , it was well past the end of civil twilight and there was no moon up that night .
So all the light in this area from the sun and the moon is what you see on the screen right here .
The only lighting in that area had to come from artificial sources , and that 's where I go out and I do the actual reconstruction of the scene with photometers , with various measures of illumination and various other measures of color perception , along with special cameras and high-speed film , right ?
Take all the measurements and record them , right ?
And then take photographs , and this is what the scene looked like at the time of the shooting from the position of the teenagers looking at the car going by and shooting .
This is looking directly across the street from where they were standing .
Remember , the investigating officers ' report said the lighting was good .
The teenagers said they could see very well .
This is looking down to the east , where the shooting vehicle sped off , and this is the lighting directly behind the father and the teenagers .
As you can see , it is at best poor .
No one 's going to call this well-lit , good lighting , and in fact , as nice as these pictures are , and the reason we take them is I knew I was going to have to testify in court , and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you 're trying to communicate numbers , abstract concepts like lux , the international measurement of illumination , the Ishihara color perception test values .
When you present those to people who are not well-versed in those aspects of science and that , they become salamanders in the noonday sun . It 's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle , all right ?
Their eyes just glaze over , all right ?
A good forensic expert also has to be a good educator , a good communicator , and that 's part of the reason why we take the pictures , to show not only where the light sources are , and what we call the spill , the distribution , but also so that it 's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances .
So these are some of the pictures that , in fact , I used when I testified , but more importantly were , to me as a scientist , are those readings , the photometer readings , which I can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances , and from my readings that I recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time , so on and so forth , right , I could predict that there would be no reliable color perception , which is crucial for face recognition , and that there would be only scotopic vision , which means there would be very little resolution , what we call boundary or edge detection , and that furthermore , because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light , the depth of field , the distance at which you can focus and see details , would have been less than 18 inches away .
I testified to that to the court , and while the judge was very attentive , it had been a very , very long hearing for this petition for a retrial , and as a result , I noticed out of the corner of my eye that I thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers .
And here I became a bit audacious , and I turned and I asked the judge , I said , " Your Honor , I think you should go out and look at the scene yourself . "
Now I may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request — — but nonetheless , it 's to this man 's credit and his courage that he said , " Yes , I will . "
A shocker in American jurisprudence .
So in fact , we found the same identical conditions , we reconstructed the entire thing again , he came out with an entire brigade of sheriff 's officers to protect him in this community , all right ?
We had him stand actually slightly in the street , so closer to the suspect vehicle , the shooter vehicle , than the actual teenagers were , so he stood a few feet from the curb toward the middle of the street .
We had a car that came by , same identical car as described by the teenagers , right ?
It had a driver and a passenger , and after the car had passed the judge by , the passenger extended his hand , pointed it back to the judge as the car continued on , just as the teenagers had described it , right ?
Now , he didn 't use a real gun in his hand , so he had a black object in his hand that was similar to the gun that was described .
He pointed by , and this is what the judge saw .
This is the car 30 feet away from the judge .
There 's an arm sticking out of the passenger side and pointed back at you .
That 's 30 feet away .
Some of the teenagers said that in fact the car was 15 feet away when it shot .
Okay . There 's 15 feet .
At this point , I became a little concerned .
This judge is someone you 'd never want to play poker with .
He was totally stoic . I couldn 't see a twitch of his eyebrow .
I couldn 't see the slightest bend of his head .
I had no sense of how he was reacting to this , and after he looked at this reenactment , he turned to me and he says , " Is there anything else you want me to look at ? "
I said , " Your honor , " and I don 't know whether I was emboldened by the scientific measurements that I had in my pocket and my knowledge that they are accurate , or whether it was just sheer stupidity , which is what the defense lawyers thought — — when they heard me say , " Yes , Your Honor , I want you stand right there and I want the car to go around the block again and I want it to come and I want it to stop right in front of you , three to four feet away , and I want the passenger to extend his hand with a black object and point it right at you , and you can look at it as long as you want . "
And that 's what he saw .
You 'll notice , which was also in my test report , all the dominant lighting is coming from the north side , which means that the shooter 's face would have been photo-occluded . It would have been backlit .
Furthermore , the roof of the car is causing what we call a shadow cloud inside the car which is making it darker .
And this is three to four feet away .
Why did I take the risk ?
I knew that the depth of field was 18 inches or less .
Three to four feet , it might as well have been a football field away .
This is what he saw .
He went back , there was a few more days of evidence that was heard . At the end of it , he made the judgment that he was going to grant the petition for a retrial .
And furthermore , he released Mr. Carrillo so that he could aid in the preparation of his own defense if the prosecution decided to retry him .
Which they decided not to .
He is now a freed man .
This is him embracing his grandmother-in-law .
He -- His girlfriend was pregnant when he went to trial , right ? And she had a little baby boy .
He and his son are both attending Cal State , Long Beach right now taking classes .
And what does this example -- what 's important to keep in mind for ourselves ?
First of all , there 's a long history of antipathy between science and the law in American jurisprudence .
I could regale you with horror stories of ignorance over decades of experience as a forensic expert of just trying to get science into the courtroom .
The opposing council always fight it and oppose it .
One suggestion is that all of us become much more attuned to the necessity , through policy , through procedures , to get more science in the courtroom , and I think one large step toward that is more requirements , with all due respect to the law schools , of science , technology , engineering , mathematics for anyone going into the law , because they become the judges .
Think about how we select our judges in this country .
It 's very different than most other cultures . All right ?
The other one that I want to suggest , the caution that all of us have to have , I constantly have to remind myself , about just how accurate are the memories that we know are true , that we believe in ?
There is decades of research , examples and examples of cases like this , where individuals really , really believe . None of those teenagers who identified him thought that they were picking the wrong person .
None of them thought they couldn 't see the person 's face .
We all have to be very careful .
All our memories are reconstructed memories .
They are the product of what we originally experienced and everything that 's happened afterwards .
They 're dynamic .
They 're malleable . They 're volatile , and as a result , we all need to remember to be cautious , that the accuracy of our memories is not measured in how vivid they are nor how certain you are that they 're correct .
Thank you .
Doris Kim Sung : Metal that breathes
Modern buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows give spectacular views , but they require a lot of energy to cool . Doris Kim Sung works with thermo-bimetals , smart materials that act more like human skin , dynamically and responsively , and can shade a room from sun and self-ventilate .
I was one of those kids that , every time I got in the car , I basically had to roll down the window .
It was usually too hot , too stuffy or just too smelly , and my father would not let us use the air conditioner .
He said that it would overheat the engine .
And you might remember , some of you , how the cars were back then , and it was a common problem of overheating .
But it was also the signal that capped the use , or overuse , of energy-consuming devices .
Things have changed now . We have cars that we take across country .
We blast the air conditioning the entire way , and we never experience overheating .
So there 's no more signal for us to tell us to stop .
Great , right ? Well , we have similar problems in buildings .
In the past , before air conditioning , we had thick walls .
The thick walls are great for insulation . It keeps the interior very cool during the summertime , and warm during the wintertime , and the small windows were also very good because it limited the amount of temperature transfer between the interior and exterior .
Then in about the 1930s , with the advent of plate glass , rolled steel and mass production , we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views , and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces .
Over time , the buildings got taller and bigger , our engineering even better , so that the mechanical systems were massive . They require a huge amount of energy .
They give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere , and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities , where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas , but we also have problems that , when we lose power , we can 't open a window here , and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again .
Even worse , with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state , we can 't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient .
We need to look for something else , and we 've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut .
So what do we do here ? How do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we 've dug ?
If we look at biology , and many of you probably don 't know , I was a biology major before I went into architecture , the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body , and it 's a fantastic thing .
That 's the first line of defense for the body .
It has pores , it has sweat glands , it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently , and so what I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin , and by doing so can be much more dynamic , responsive and differentiated , depending on where it is .
And this gets me back to my research .
What I proposed first doing is looking at a different material palette to do that .
I presently , or currently , work with smart materials , and a smart thermo-bimetal .
First of all , I guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy , and that 's a very big deal for architecture .
What it is , it 's a lamination of two different metals together .
You can see that here by the different reflection on this side .
And because it has two different coefficients of expansion , when heated , one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action .
So in early prototypes I built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system , and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated , and currently have this installation at the Materials & amp ; Applications gallery in Silver Lake , close by , and it 's there until August , if you want to see it .
It 's called " Bloom , " and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal , and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things . One , it 's a sun-shading device , so that when the sun hits the surface , it constricts the amount of sun passing through , and in other areas , it 's a ventilating system , so that hot , trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary .
You can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun , as it moves across the surface , as well as the shade , each of the tiles moves individually .
Keep in mind , with the digital technology that we have today , this thing was made out of about 14,000 pieces and there 's no two pieces alike at all . Every single one is different .
And the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very , very specific to its location , to the angle of the sun , and also how the thing actually curls .
So this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture , and in this case , here you see a house , that 's for a developer in China , and it 's actually a four-story glass box .
It 's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access , but now it 's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer , it 's a screen that goes around it , and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface .
In addition to that , it can also screen areas for privacy , so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day .
And what it basically implies is that , in houses now , we don 't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things , as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building .
I 'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market , and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel , and in that panel , between those two pieces of glass , that double-glazing , I 'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity , that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl , and what actually will happen then is it 'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building , and totally , if necessary .
And so you can imagine , even in this application , that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30 , 40 floors , the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface .
And these are some later studies that I 'm working on right now that are on the boards , where you can see , in the bottom right-hand corner , with the red , it 's actually smaller pieces of thermometal , and it 's actually going to , we 're trying to make it move like cilia or eyelashes .
This last project is also of components .
The influence -- and if you have noticed , one of my spheres of influence is biology -- is from a grasshopper .
And grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system .
They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles , and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down , and so in this project , I 'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too , how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building .
And so you see here some early studies of blocks , where those holes are actually coming through , and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied , and this is after the bimetal is applied . Sorry , it 's a little hard to see , but on the surfaces , you can see these red arrows .
On the left , it 's when it 's cold and the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks , and on the right , the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through , so those are two different components that I 'm working on , and again , it 's a completely different thing , because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows .
So I want to leave you with one last impression about the project , or this kind of work and using smart materials .
When you 're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day , when you 're on vacation and there 's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls , or when there 's a power outage , and you have no electricity to rely on , these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly , efficiently and endlessly . Thank you .
Sheila Nirenberg : A prosthetic eye to treat blindness
At TEDMED , Sheila Nirenberg shows a bold way to create sight in people with certain kinds of blindness : by hooking into the optic nerve and sending signals from a camera direct to the brain .
I study how the brain processes information . That is , how it takes information in from the outside world , and converts it into patterns of electrical activity , and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things -- to see , hear , to reach for an object .
So I 'm really a basic scientist , not a clinician , but in the last year and a half I 've started to switch over , to use what we 've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices , and what I wanted to do today is show you an example of this .
It 's really our first foray into this .
It 's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness .
So let me start in on that problem .
There are 10 million people in the U.S.
and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina , diseases like macular degeneration , and there 's little that can be done for them .
There are some drug treatments , but they 're only effective on a small fraction of the population . And so , for the vast majority of patients , their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices .
The problem is that current prosthetics don 't work very well . They 're still very limited in the vision that they can provide .
And so , you know , for example , with these devices , patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges , not very much more , so nothing close to normal vision has been possible .
So what I 'm going to tell you about today is a device that we 've been working on that I think has the potential to make a difference , to be much more effective , and what I wanted to do is show you how it works . Okay , so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve .
Here you have a retina .
So you have an image , a retina , and a brain .
So when you look at something , like this image of this baby 's face , it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina , on the front-end cells here , the photoreceptors .
Then what happens is the retinal circuitry , the middle part , goes to work on it , and what it does is it performs operations on it , it extracts information from it , and it converts that information into a code .
And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain , and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code . And when I say code , I do literally mean code .
Like this pattern of pulses here actually means " baby 's face , " and so when the brain gets this pattern of pulses , it knows that what was out there was a baby 's face , and if it got a different pattern it would know that what was out there was , say , a dog , or another pattern would be a house .
Anyway , you get the idea .
And , of course , in real life , it 's all dynamic , meaning that it 's changing all the time , so the patterns of pulses are changing all the time because the world you 're looking at is changing all the time too .
So , you know , it 's sort of a complicated thing . You have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you 're seeing .
So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration ? What happens is is that , the front-end cells die , the photoreceptors die , and over time , all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them , they die too .
Until the only things that you have left are these cells here , the output cells , the ones that send the signals to the brain , but because of all that degeneration they aren 't sending any signals anymore .
They aren 't getting any input , so the person 's brain no longer gets any visual information -- that is , he or she is blind .
So , a solution to the problem , then , would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina 's output cells , and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain .
So this is what we 've been working on , and this is what our prosthetic does .
So it consists of two parts , what we call an encoder and a transducer .
And so the encoder does just what I was saying : it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry -- so it takes images in and converts them into the retina 's code .
And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain , and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output .
So a completely blind retina , even one with no front-end circuitry at all , no photoreceptors , can now send out normal signals , signals that the brain can understand .
So no other device has been able to do this .
Okay , so I just want to take a sentence or two to say something about the encoder and what it 's doing , because it 's really the key part and it 's sort of interesting and kind of cool .
I 'm not sure " cool " is really the right word , but you know what I mean .
So what it 's doing is , it 's replacing the retinal circuitry , really the guts of the retinal circuitry , with a set of equations , a set of equations that we can implement on a chip . So it 's just math .
In other words , we 're not literally replacing the components of the retina .
It 's not like we 're making a little mini-device for each of the different cell types .
We 've just abstracted what the retina 's doing with a set of equations .
And so , in a way , the equations are serving as sort of a codebook . An image comes in , goes through the set of equations , and out comes streams of electrical pulses , just like a normal retina would produce .
Now let me put my money where my mouth is and show you that we can actually produce normal output , and what the implications of this are .
Here are three sets of firing patterns . The top one is from a normal animal , the middle one is from a blind animal that 's been treated with this encoder-transducer device , and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic .
So the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that 's out there right now , which is basically made up of light detectors , but no encoder . So what we did was we presented movies of everyday things -- people , babies , park benches , you know , regular things happening -- and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals .
Now just to orient you , each box is showing the firing patterns of several cells , and just as in the previous slides , each row is a different cell , and I just made the pulses a little bit smaller and thinner so I could show you a long stretch of data .
So as you can see , the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns -- and it 's not perfect , but it 's pretty good -- and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic , the responses really don 't .
And so with the standard method , the cells do fire , they just don 't fire in the normal firing patterns because they don 't have the right code .
How important is this ?
What 's the potential impact on a patient 's ability to see ?
So I 'm just going to show you one bottom-line experiment that answers this , and of course I 've got a lot of other data , so if you 're interested I 'm happy to show more . So the experiment is called a reconstruction experiment .
So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked , what was the retina seeing at that moment ?
Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns ?
So , when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer .
So let me show you , and I 'm going to start with the standard method first .
So you can see that it 's pretty limited , and because the firing patterns aren 't in the right code , they 're very limited in what they can tell you about what 's out there . So you can see that there 's something there , but it 's not so clear what that something is , and this just sort of circles back to what I was saying in the beginning , that with the standard method , patients can see high-contrast edges , they can see light , but it doesn 't easily go further than that . So what was the image ? It was a baby 's face .
So what about with our approach , adding the code ? And you can see that it 's much better . Not only can you tell that it 's a baby 's face , but you can tell that it 's this baby 's face , which is a really challenging task .
So on the left is the encoder alone , and on the right is from an actual blind retina , so the encoder and the transducer .
But the key one really is the encoder alone , because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer .
This is just actually the first one that we tried .
I just wanted to say something about the standard method .
When this first came out , it was just a really exciting thing , the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all .
But there was this limiting factor , the issue of the code , and how to make the cells respond better , produce normal responses , and so this was our contribution .
Now I just want to wrap up , and as I was mentioning earlier of course I have a lot of other data if you 're interested , but I just wanted to give this sort of basic idea of being able to communicate with the brain in its language , and the potential power of being able to do that .
So it 's different from the motor prosthetics where you 're communicating from the brain to a device . Here we have to communicate from the outside world into the brain and be understood , and be understood by the brain .
And then the last thing I wanted to say , really , is to emphasize that the idea generalizes .
So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas , for example , the auditory system and the motor system , so for treating deafness and for motor disorders .
So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina 's output cells , we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve , or jump over damaged areas in the cortex , in the motor cortex , to bridge the gap produced by a stroke .
I just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really , really important , and if we can understand the code , the language of the brain , things become possible that didn 't seem obviously possible before . Thank you .
Jonathan Harris : The web as art
At the EG conference in December 2007 , artist Jonathan Harris discusses his latest projects , which involve collecting stories : his own , strangers ' , and stories collected from the Internet , including his amazing " We Feel Fine . "
So I 'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways .
This is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life .
You might enjoy the awkwardly tight , cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons .
Anyway , it was a time when I was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories .
So this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings I ever made .
And recently I 've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality -- so , real stories .
And specifically , I 'm interested in collecting my own stories , stories from the Internet , and then recently , stories from life , which is kind of a new area of work that I 've been doing recently .
So I 'll be talking about each of those today .
So , first of all , my own stories . These are two of my sketchbooks .
I have many of these books , and I 've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years .
They accompany me wherever I go in my life , and I fill them with all sorts of things , records of my lived experience : so watercolor paintings , drawings of what I see , dead flowers , dead insects , pasted ticket stubs , rusting coins , business cards , writings .
And in these books , you can find these short , little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that I meet .
And , you know , after keeping these books for a number of years , I started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts , but also the artifacts of other people .
So , I started collecting found objects .
This is a photograph I found lying in a gutter in New York City about 10 years ago .
On the front , you can see the tattered black-and-white photo of a woman 's face , and on the back it says , " To Judy , the girl with the Bill Bailey voice .
Have fun in whatever you do . "
And I really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody 's life .
As opposed to knowing the whole story , just knowing a little bit of the story , and then letting your own mind fill in the rest .
And that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work I 'll be showing later today .
So , around this time I was studying computer science at Princeton University , and I noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts , not just from street corners , but also from the Internet .
And that suddenly , people , en masse , were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives .
Blog posts , photographs , thoughts , feelings , opinions , all of these things were being expressed by people online , and leaving behind trails .
So , I started to write computer programs that study very , very large sets of these online footprints .
One such project is about a year and a half old .
It 's called " We Feel Fine . "
This is a project that scans the world 's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes , searching for occurrences of the phrases " I feel " and " I am feeling . " And when it finds one of those phrases , it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author .
So , their gender , their age , their geographic location and what the weather conditions were like when they wrote that sentence .
It collects about 20,000 such sentences a day and it 's been running for about a year and a half , having collected over 10 and a half million feelings now .
This is , then , how they 're presented .
These dots here represent some of the English-speaking world 's feelings from the last few hours , each dot being a single sentence stated by a single blogger .
And the color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling inside , so the bright ones are happy , and the dark ones are sad .
And the diameter of each dot corresponds to the length of the sentence inside .
So the small ones are short , and the bigger ones are longer .
" I feel fine with the body I 'm in , there 'll be no easy excuse for why I still feel uncomfortable being close to my boyfriend , " from a twenty-two-year-old in Japan .
" I got this on some trading locally , but really don 't feel like screwing with wiring and crap . "
Also , some of the feelings contain photographs in the blog posts .
And when that happens , these montage compositions are automatically created , which consist of the sentence and images being combined .
And any of these can be opened up to reveal the sentence inside .
" I feel good . "
" I feel rough now , and I probably gained 100,000 pounds , but it was worth it . "
" I love how they were able to preserve most in everything that makes you feel close to nature -- butterflies , man-made forests , limestone caves and hey , even a huge python . "
So the next movement is called mobs .
This provides a slightly more statistical look at things .
This is showing the world 's most common feelings overall right now , dominated by better , then bad , then good , then guilty , and so on .
Weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent . So the sunny ones swirl around , the cloudy ones float along , the rainy ones fall down , and the snowy ones flutter to the ground .
You can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside .
Finally , location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map , giving you a sense of their geographic distribution .
So I 'll show you now some of my favorite montages from " We Feel Fine . "
These are the images that are automatically constructed .
" I feel like I 'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe . "
" I 've kissed numerous other boys and it hasn 't felt good , the kisses felt messy and wrong , but kissing Lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual . "
" I can feel my cancer grow . "
" I feel pretty . "
" I feel skinny , but I 'm not . "
" I 'm 23 , and a recovering meth and heroin addict , and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive . "
" I can 't wait to see them racing for the first time at Daytona next month , because I feel the need for speed . "
" I feel sassy . "
" I feel so sexy in this new wig . "
As you can see , " We Feel Fine " collects very , very small-scale personal stories .
Sometimes , stories as short as two or three words .
So , really even challenging the notion of what can be considered a story .
And recently , I 've become interested in diving much more deeply into a single story .
And that 's led me to doing some work with the physical world , not with the Internet , and only using the Internet at the very last moment , as a presentation medium .
So these are some newer projects that actually aren 't even launched publicly yet .
The first such one is called " The Whale Hunt . "
Last May , I spent nine days living up in Barrow , Alaska , the northernmost settlement in the United States , with a family of Inupiat Eskimos , documenting their annual spring whale hunt .
This is the whaling camp here , we 're about six miles from shore , camping on five and a half feet of thick , frozen pack ice .
And that water that you see there is the open lead , and through that lead , bowhead whales migrate north each springtime .
And the Eskimo community basically camps out on the edge of the ice here , waits for a whale to come close enough to attack . And when it does , it throws a harpoon at it , and then hauls the whale up under the ice , and cuts it up .
And that would provide the community 's food supply for a long time .
So I went up there , and I lived with these guys out in their whaling camp here , and photographed the entire experience , beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport in New York , and ending with the butchering of the second whale , seven and a half days later .
I photographed that entire experience at five-minute intervals .
So every five minutes , I took a photograph .
When I was awake , with the camera around my neck .
When I was sleeping , with a tripod and a timer .
And then in moments of high adrenaline , like when something exciting was happening , I would up that photographic frequency to as many as 37 photographs in five minutes .
So what this created was a photographic heartbeat that sped up and slowed down , more or less matching the changing pace of my own heartbeat .
That was the first concept here .
The second concept was to use this experience to think about the fundamental components of any story .
What are the things that make up a story ?
So , stories have characters . Stories have concepts .
Stories take place in a certain area . They have contexts .
They have colors . What do they look like ?
They have time . When did it take place ? Dates -- when did it occur ?
And in the case of the whale hunt , also this idea of an excitement level .
The thing about stories , though , in most of the existing mediums that we 're accustomed to -- things like novels , radio , photographs , movies , even lectures like this one -- we 're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position , some kind of omniscient , external body through whose eyes you see the story .
We 're very used to this .
But if you think about real life , it 's not like that at all .
I mean , in real life , things are much more nuanced and complex , and there 's all of these overlapping stories intersecting and touching each other .
And so I thought it would be interesting to build a framework to surface those types of stories . So , in the case of " The Whale Hunt , " how could we extract something like the story of Simeon and Crawford , involving the concepts of wildlife , tools and blood , taking place on the Arctic Ocean , dominated by the color red , happening around 10 a.m. on May 3 , with an excitement level of high ?
So , how to extract this order of narrative from this larger story ?
I built a web interface for viewing " The Whale Hunt " that attempts to do just this .
So these are all 3,214 pictures taken up there .
This is my studio in Brooklyn . This is the Arctic Ocean , and the butchering of the second whale , seven days later .
You can start to see some of the story here , told by color .
So this red strip signifies the color of the wallpaper in the basement apartment where I was staying .
And things go white as we move out onto the Arctic Ocean .
Introduction of red down here , when whales are being cut up .
You can see a timeline , showing you the exciting moments throughout the story .
These are organized chronologically .
Wheel provides a slightly more playful version of the same , so these are also all the photographs organized chronologically .
And any of these can be clicked , and then the narrative is entered at that position .
So here I am sleeping on the airplane heading up to Alaska .
That 's " Moby Dick . "
This is the food we ate .
This is in the Patkotak 's family living room in their house in Barrow . The boxed wine they served us .
Cigarette break outside -- I don 't smoke .
This is a really exciting sequence of me sleeping .
This is out at whale camp , on the Arctic Ocean .
This graph that I 'm clicking down here is meant to be reminiscent of a medical heartbeat graph , showing the exciting moments of adrenaline .
This is the ice starting to freeze over . The snow fence they built .
And so what I 'll show you now is the ability to pull out sub-stories .
So , here you see the cast . These are all of the people in " The Whale Hunt " and the two whales that were killed down here .
And we could do something as arbitrary as , say , extract the story of Rony , involving the concepts of blood and whales and tools , taking place on the Arctic Ocean , at Ahkivgaq camp , with the heartbeat level of fast .
And now we 've whittled down that whole story to just 29 matching photographs , and then we can enter the narrative at that position .
And you can see Rony cutting up the whale here .
These whales are about 40 feet long , and weighing over 40 tons . And they provide the food source for the community for much of the year .
Skipping ahead a bit more here , this is Rony on the whale carcass .
They use no chainsaws or anything ; it 's entirely just blades , and an incredibly efficient process .
This is the guys on the rope , pulling open the carcass .
This is the muktuk , or the blubber , all lined up for community distribution .
It 's baleen . Moving on .
So what I 'm going to tell you about next is a very new thing . It 's not even a project yet .
So , just yesterday , I flew in here from Singapore , and before that , I was spending two weeks in Bhutan , the small Himalayan kingdom nestled between Tibet and India .
And I was doing a project there about happiness , interviewing a lot of local people .
So Bhutan has this really wacky thing where they base most of their high-level governmental decisions around the concept of gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product , and they 've been doing this since the ' 70s .
And it leads to just a completely different value system .
It 's an incredibly non-materialistic culture , where people don 't have a lot , but they 're incredibly happy .
So I went around and I talked to people about some of these ideas .
So , I did a number of things . I asked people a number of set questions , and took a number of set photographs , and interviewed them with audio , and also took pictures .
I would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and 10 , which is kind of inherently absurd .
And then when they answered , I would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold .
So , you have some really happy person holding 10 balloons , and some really sad soul holding one balloon .
But you know , even holding one balloon is like , kind of happy .
And then I would ask them a number of questions like what was the happiest day in their life , what makes them happy .
And then finally , I would ask them to make a wish .
And when they made a wish , I would write their wish onto one of the balloons and take a picture of them holding it .
So I 'm going to show you now just a few brief snippets of some of the interviews that I did , some of the people I spoke with .
This is an 11-year-old student .
He was playing cops and robbers with his friends , running around town , and they all had plastic toy guns .
His wish was to become a police officer .
He was getting started early . Those were his hands .
I took pictures of everybody 's hands , because I think you can often tell a lot about somebody from how their hands look . I took a portrait of everybody , and asked everybody to make a funny face .
A 17-year-old student . Her wish was to have been born a boy .
She thinks that women have a pretty tough go of things in Bhutan , and it 's a lot easier if you 're a boy .
A 28-year-old cell phone shop owner .
If you knew what Paro looked like , you 'd understand how amazing it is that there 's a cell phone shop there .
He wanted to help poor people .
A 53-year-old farmer . She was chaffing wheat , and that pile of wheat behind her had taken her about a week to make .
She wanted to keep farming until she dies .
You can really start to see the stories told by the hands here .
She was wearing this silver ring that had the word " love " engraved on it , and she 'd found it in the road somewhere .
A 16-year-old quarry worker .
This guy was breaking rocks with a hammer in the hot sunlight , but he just wanted to spend his life as a farmer .
A 21-year-old monk . He was very happy .
He wanted to live a long life at the monastery .
He had this amazing series of hairs growing out of a mole on the left side of his face , which I 'm told is very good luck .
He was kind of too shy to make a funny face .
A 16-year-old student .
She wanted to become an independent woman .
I asked her about that , and she said she meant that she doesn 't want to be married , because , in her opinion , when you get married in Bhutan as a woman , your chances to live an independent life kind of end , and so she had no interest in that .
A 24-year-old truck driver .
There are these terrifyingly huge Indian trucks that come careening around one-lane roads with two-lane traffic , with 3,000-foot drop-offs right next to the road , and he was driving one of these trucks .
But all he wanted was to just live a comfortable life , like other people .
A 24-year-old road sweeper . I caught her on her lunch break .
She 'd built a little fire to keep warm , right next to the road .
Her wish was to marry someone with a car .
She wanted a change in her life .
She lives in a little worker 's camp right next to the road , and she wanted a different lot on things .
An 81-year-old itinerant farmer .
I saw this guy on the side of the road , and he actually doesn 't have a home .
He travels from farm to farm each day trying to find work , and then he tries to sleep at whatever farm he gets work at .
So his wish was to come with me , so that he had somewhere to live .
He had this amazing knife that he pulled out of his gho and started brandishing when I asked him to make a funny face .
It was all good-natured .
A 10-year-old .
He wanted to join a school and learn to read , but his parents didn 't have enough money to send him to school .
He was eating this orange , sugary candy that he kept dipping his fingers into , and since there was so much saliva on his hands , this orange paste started to form on his palms .
A 37-year-old road worker .
One of the more touchy political subjects in Bhutan is the use of Indian cheap labor that they import from India to build the roads , and then they send these people home once the roads are built .
So these guys were in a worker 's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway .
His wish was to make some money and open a store .
A 75-year-old farmer . She was selling oranges on the side of the road .
I asked her about her wish , and she said , " You know , maybe I 'll live , maybe I 'll die , but I don 't have a wish . "
She was chewing betel nut , which caused her teeth over the years to turn very red .
Finally , this is a 26-year-old nun I spoke to .
Her wish was to make a pilgrimage to Tibet .
I asked her how long she planned to live in the nunnery and she said , " Well , you know , of course , it 's impermanent , but my plan is to live here until I 'm 30 , and then enter a hermitage . "
And I said , " You mean , like a cave ? " And she said , " Yeah , like a cave . "
And I said , " Wow , and how long will you live in the cave ? "
And she said , " Well , you know , I think I 'd kind of like to live my whole life in the cave . "
I just thought that was amazing . I mean , she spoke in a way -- with amazing English , and amazing humor , and amazing laughter -- that made her seem like somebody I could have bumped into on the streets of New York , or in Vermont , where I 'm from .
But here she had been living in a nunnery for the last seven years .
I asked her a little bit more about the cave and what she planned would happen once she went there , you know .
What if she saw the truth after just one year , what would she do for the next 35 years in her life ?
And this is what she said .
I think I 'm going to stay for 35 . Maybe -- maybe I 'll die .
Jonathan Harris : Maybe you 'll die ? Yes .
JH : 10 years ? Yes , yes . JH : 10 years , that 's a long time .
Yes , not maybe one , 10 years , maybe I can die within one year , or something like that .
JH : Are you hoping to ?
Ah , because you know , it 's impermanent .
JH : Yeah , but -- yeah , OK . Do you hope -- would you prefer to live in the cave for 40 years , or to live for one year ?
But I prefer for maybe 40 to 50 .
JH : 40 to 50 ? Yeah .
Yes . From then , I 'm going to the heaven .
JH : Well , I wish you the best of luck with it .
Thank you .
JH : I hope it 's everything that you hope it will be .
So thank you again , so much .
You 're most welcome .
JH : So if you caught that , she said she hoped to die when she was around 40 . That was enough life for her .
So , the last thing we did , very quickly , is I took all those wish balloons -- there were 117 interviews , 117 wishes -- and I brought them up to a place called Dochula , which is a mountain pass in Bhutan , at 10,300 feet , one of the more sacred places in Bhutan .
And up there , there are thousands of prayer flags that people have spread out over the years .
And we re-inflated all of the balloons , put them up on a string , and hung them up there among the prayer flags .
And they 're actually still flying up there today .
So if any of you have any Bhutan travel plans in the near future , you can go check these out . Here are some images from that .
We said a Buddhist prayer so that all these wishes could come true .
You can start to see some familiar balloons here .
" To make some money and to open a store " was the Indian road worker .
Thanks very much .
Beau Lotto + Amy O 'Toole : Science is for everyone , kids included
What do science and play have in common ? Neuroscientist Beau Lotto thinks all people should participate in science and , through the process of discovery , change perceptions . He 's seconded by 12-year-old Amy O 'Toole , who , along with 25 of her classmates , published the first peer-reviewed article by schoolchildren , about the Blackawton bees project . It starts : " Once upon a time ... "
Beau Lotto : So , this game is very simple .
All you have to do is read what you see . Right ?
So , I 'm going to count to you , so we don 't all do it together .
Okay , one , two , three.Audience : Can you read this ?
Amazing . What about this one ? One , two , three.Audience : You are not reading this .
All right . One , two , three .
If you were Portuguese , right ? How about this one ? One , two , three .
Audience : What are you reading ?
What are you reading ? There are no words there .
I said , read what you 're seeing . Right ?
It literally says , " Wat ar ou rea in ? " Right ?
That 's what you should have said . Right ? Why is this ?
It 's because perception is grounded in our experience .
Right ? The brain takes meaningless information and makes meaning out of it , which means we never see what 's there , we never see information , we only ever see what was useful to see in the past .
All right ? Which means , when it comes to perception , we 're all like this frog .
Right ? It 's getting information . It 's generating behavior that 's useful .
Ow ! Ow !
And sometimes , when things don 't go our way , we get a little bit annoyed , right ?
But we 're talking about perception here , right ?
And perception underpins everything we think , we know , we believe , our hopes , our dreams , the clothes we wear , falling in love , everything begins with perception .
Now if perception is grounded in our history , it means we 're only ever responding according to what we 've done before .
But actually , it 's a tremendous problem , because how can we ever see differently ?
Now , I want to tell you a story about seeing differently , and all new perceptions begin in the same way .
They begin with a question .
The problem with questions is they create uncertainty .
Now , uncertainty is a very bad thing . It 's evolutionarily a bad thing . If you 're not sure that 's a predator , it 's too late .
Okay ?
Even seasickness is a consequence of uncertainty .
Right ? If you go down below on a boat , your inner ears are you telling you you 're moving . Your eyes , because it 's moving in register with the boat , say I 'm standing still .
Your brain cannot deal with the uncertainty of that information , and it gets ill .
The question " why ? " is one of the most dangerous things you can do , because it takes you into uncertainty .
And yet , the irony is , the only way we can ever do anything new is to step into that space .
So how can we ever do anything new ? Well fortunately , evolution has given us an answer , right ?
And it enables us to address even the most difficult of questions . The best questions are the ones that create the most uncertainty .
They 're the ones that question the things we think to be true already . Right ?
It 's easy to ask questions about how did life begin , or what extends beyond the universe , but to question what you think to be true already is really stepping into that space .
So what is evolution 's answer to the problem of uncertainty ?
It 's play .
Now play is not simply a process . Experts in play will tell you that actually it 's a way of being .
Play is one of the only human endeavors where uncertainty is actually celebrated . Uncertainty is what makes play fun .
Right ? It 's adaptable to change . Right ? It opens possibility , and it 's cooperative . It 's actually how we do our social bonding , and it 's intrinsically motivated . What that means is that we play to play . Play is its own reward .
Now if you look at these five ways of being , these are the exact same ways of being you need in order to be a good scientist .
Science is not defined by the method section of a paper .
It 's actually a way of being , which is here , and this is true for anything that is creative .
So if you add rules to play , you have a game .
That 's actually what an experiment is .
So armed with these two ideas , that science is a way of being and experiments are play , we asked , can anyone become a scientist ?
And who better to ask than 25 eight- to 10-year-old children ?
Because they 're experts in play . So I took my bee arena down to a small school in Devon , and the aim of this was to not just get the kids to see science differently , but , through the process of science , to see themselves differently . Right ?
The first step was to ask a question .
Now , I should say that we didn 't get funding for this study because the scientists said small children couldn 't make a useful contribution to science , and the teachers said kids couldn 't do it .
So we did it anyway . Right ? Of course .
So , here are some of the questions . I put them in small print so you wouldn 't bother reading it . Point is that five of the questions that the kids came up with were actually the basis of science publication the last five to 15 years . Right ?
So they were asking questions that were significant to expert scientists .
Now here , I want to share the stage with someone quite special . Right ?
She was one of the young people who was involved in this study , and she 's now one of the youngest published scientists in the world . Right ? She will now , once she comes onto stage , will be the youngest person to ever speak at TED . Right ?
Now , science and asking questions is about courage .
Now she is the personification of courage , because she 's going to stand up here and talk to you all .
So Amy , would you please come up ?
So Amy 's going to help me tell the story of what we call the Blackawton Bees Project , and first she 's going to tell you the question that they came up with . So go ahead , Amy .
Amy O 'Toole : Thank you , Beau . We thought that it was easy to see the link between humans and apes in the way that we think , because we look alike .
But we wondered if there 's a possible link with other animals . It 'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar , since they seem so different from us .
So we asked if humans and bees might solve complex problems in the same way .
Really , we wanted to know if bees can also adapt themselves to new situations using previously learned rules and conditions . So what if bees can think like us ?
Well , it 'd be amazing , since we 're talking about an insect with only one million brain cells .
But it actually makes a lot of sense they should , because bees , like us , can recognize a good flower regardless of the time of day , the light , the weather , or from any angle they approach it from .
So the next step was to design an experiment , which is a game . So the kids went off and they designed this experiment , and so -- well , game -- and so , Amy , can you tell us what the game was , and the puzzle that you set the bees ?
AO : The puzzle we came up with was an if-then rule .
We asked the bees to learn not just to go to a certain color , but to a certain color flower only when it 's in a certain pattern .
They were only rewarded if they went to the yellow flowers if the yellow flowers were surrounded by the blue , or if the blue flowers were surrounded by the yellow .
Now there 's a number of different rules the bees can learn to solve this puzzle . The interesting question is , which ?
What was really exciting about this project was we , and Beau , had no idea whether it would work .
It was completely new , and no one had done it before , including adults .
Including the teachers , and that was really hard for the teachers .
It 's easy for a scientist to go in and not have a clue what he 's doing , because that 's what we do in the lab , but for a teacher not to know what 's going to happen at the end of the day -- so much of the credit goes to Dave Strudwick , who was the collaborator on this project . Okay ?
So I 'm not going to go through the whole details of the study because actually you can read about it , but the next step is observation . So here are some of the students doing the observations . They 're recording the data of where the bees fly .
Dave Strudwick : So what we 're going to do — Student : 5C .
Dave Strudwick : Is she still going up here ? Student : Yeah .
Dave Strudwick : So you keep track of each.Student : Henry , can you help me here ?
" Can you help me , Henry ? " What good scientist says that , right ?
Student : There 's two up there .
And three in here .
Right ? So we 've got our observations . We 've got our data .
They do the simple mathematics , averaging , etc . , etc .
And now we want to share . That 's the next step .
So we 're going to write this up and try to submit this for publication . Right ? So we have to write it up .
So we go , of course , to the pub . All right ?
The one on the left is mine , okay ?
Now , I tell them , a paper has four different sections : an introduction , a methods , a results , a discussion .
The introduction says , what 's the question and why ?
Methods , what did you do ? Results , what was the observation ?
And the discussion is , who cares ? Right ?
That 's a science paper , basically .
So the kids give me the words , right ? I put it into a narrative , which means that this paper is written in kidspeak .
It 's not written by me . It 's written by Amy and the other students in the class . As a consequence , this science paper begins , " Once upon a time ... " The results section , it says : " Training phase , the puzzle ... duh duh duuuuuhhh . " Right ?
And the methods , it says , " Then we put the bees into the fridge , " smiley face . Right ?
This is a science paper . We 're going to try to get it published .
So here 's the title page . We have a number of authors there .
All the ones in bold are eight to 10 years old .
The first author is Blackawton Primary School , because if it were ever referenced , it would be " Blackawton et al , " and not one individual . So we submit it to a public access journal , and it says this . It said many things , but it said this .
" I 'm afraid the paper fails our initial quality control checks in several different ways . "
In other words , it starts off " once upon a time , " the figures are in crayon , etc .
So we said , we 'll get it reviewed . So I sent it to Dale Purves , who is at the National Academy of Science , one of the leading neuroscientists in the world , and he says , " This is the most original science paper I have ever read " — — " and it certainly deserves wide exposure . "
Larry Maloney , expert in vision , says , " The paper is magnificent .
The work would be publishable if done by adults . "
So what did we do ? We send it back to the editor .
They say no .
So we asked Larry and Natalie Hempel to write a commentary situating the findings for scientists , right , putting in the references , and we submit it to Biology Letters .
And there , it was reviewed by five independent referees , and it was published . Okay ?
It took four months to do the science , two years to get it published .
Typical science , actually , right ? So this makes Amy and her friends the youngest published scientists in the world .
What was the feedback like ?
Well , it was published two days before Christmas , downloaded 30,000 times in the first day , right ?
It was the Editors ' Choice in Science , which is a top science magazine .
It 's forever freely accessible by Biology Letters .
It 's the only paper that will ever be freely accessible by this journal .
Last year , it was the second-most downloaded paper by Biology Letters , and the feedback from not just scientists and teachers but the public as well .
And I 'll just read one .
" I have read ' Blackawton Bees ' recently . I don 't have words to explain exactly how I am feeling right now .
What you guys have done is real , true and amazing .
Curiosity , interest , innocence and zeal are the most basic and most important things to do science .
Who else can have these qualities more than children ?
Please congratulate your children 's team from my side . "
So I 'd like to conclude with a physical metaphor .
Can I do it on you ?
Oh yeah , yeah , yeah , come on . Yeah yeah . Okay .
Now , science is about taking risks , so this is an incredible risk , right ?
For me , not for him . Right ? Because we 've only done this once before .
And you like technology , right ?
Shimon Schocken : Right , but I like myself .
This is the epitome of technology . Right . Okay .
Now ...
Okay .
Now , we 're going to do a little demonstration , right ?
You have to close your eyes , and you have to point where you hear me clapping . All right ?
Okay , how about if everyone over there shouts . One , two , three ?
Audience : Brilliant . Now , open your eyes . We 'll do it one more time .
Everyone over there shout .
Where 's the sound coming from ?
Thank you very much .
What 's the point ? The point is what science does for us .
Right ? We normally walk through life responding , but if we ever want to do anything different , we have to step into uncertainty . When he opened his eyes , he was able to see the world in a new way .
That 's what science offers us . It offers the possibility to step on uncertainty through the process of play , right ?
Now , true science education I think should be about giving people a voice and enabling to express that voice , so I 've asked Amy to be the last voice in this short story .
So , Amy ?
AO : This project was really exciting for me , because it brought the process of discovery to life , and it showed me that anyone , and I mean anyone , has the potential to discover something new , and that a small question can lead into a big discovery .
Changing the way a person thinks about something can be easy or hard . It all depends on the way the person feels about change .
But changing the way I thought about science was surprisingly easy . Once we played the games and then started to think about the puzzle , I then realized that science isn 't just a boring subject , and that anyone can discover something new .
You just need an opportunity . My opportunity came in the form of Beau , and the Blackawton Bee Project .
Thank you . Thank you very much .
Catarina Mota : Play with smart materials
Ink that conducts electricity ; a window that turns from clear to opaque at the flip of a switch ; a jelly that makes music . All this stuff exists , and Catarina Mota says : It 's time to play with it . Mota leads us on a tour of surprising and cool new materials , and suggests that the way we 'll figure out what they 're good for is to experiment , tinker and have fun .
I have a friend in Portugal whose grandfather built a vehicle out of a bicycle and a washing machine so he could transport his family .
He did it because he couldn 't afford a car , but also because he knew how to build one .
There was a time when we understood how things worked and how they were made , so we could build and repair them , or at the very least make informed decisions about what to buy .
Many of these do-it-yourself practices were lost in the second half of the 20th century .
But now , the maker community and the open-source model are bringing this kind of knowledge about how things work and what they 're made of back into our lives , and I believe we need to take them to the next level , to the components things are made of .
For the most part , we still know what traditional materials like paper and textiles are made of and how they are produced .
But now we have these amazing , futuristic composites -- plastics that change shape , paints that conduct electricity , pigments that change color , fabrics that light up .
Let me show you some examples .
So conductive ink allows us to paint circuits instead of using the traditional printed circuit boards or wires .
In the case of this little example I 'm holding , we used it to create a touch sensor that reacts to my skin by turning on this little light .
Conductive ink has been used by artists , but recent developments indicate that we will soon be able to use it in laser printers and pens .
And this is a sheet of acrylic infused with colorless light-diffusing particles .
What this means is that , while regular acrylic only diffuses light around the edges , this one illuminates across the entire surface when I turn on the lights around it .
Two of the known applications for this material include interior design and multi-touch systems .
And thermochromic pigments change color at a given temperature .
So I 'm going to place this on a hot plate that is set to a temperature only slightly higher than ambient and you can see what happens .
So one of the principle applications for this material is , amongst other things , in baby bottles , so it indicates when the contents are cool enough to drink .
So these are just a few of what are commonly known as smart materials .
In a few years , they will be in many of the objects and technologies we use on a daily basis .
We may not yet have the flying cars science fiction promised us , but we can have walls that change color depending on temperature , keyboards that roll up , and windows that become opaque at the flick of a switch .
So I 'm a social scientist by training , so why am I here today talking about smart materials ?
Well first of all , because I am a maker .
I 'm curious about how things work and how they are made , but also because I believe we should have a deeper understanding of the components that make up our world , and right now , we don 't know enough about these high-tech composites our future will be made of .
Smart materials are hard to obtain in small quantities .
There 's barely any information available on how to use them , and very little is said about how they are produced .
So for now , they exist mostly in this realm of trade secrets and patents only universities and corporations have access to .
So a little over three years ago , Kirsty Boyle and I started a project we called Open Materials .
It 's a website where we , and anyone else who wants to join us , share experiments , publish information , encourage others to contribute whenever they can , and aggregate resources such as research papers and tutorials by other makers like ourselves .
We would like it to become a large , collectively generated database of do-it-yourself information on smart materials .
But why should we care how smart materials work and what they are made of ?
First of all , because we can 't shape what we don 't understand , and what we don 't understand and use ends up shaping us .
The objects we use , the clothes we wear , the houses we live in , all have a profound impact on our behavior , health and quality of life .
So if we are to live in a world made of smart materials , we should know and understand them .
Secondly , and just as important , innovation has always been fueled by tinkerers .
So many times , amateurs , not experts , have been the inventors and improvers of things ranging from mountain bikes to semiconductors , personal computers , airplanes .
The biggest challenge is that material science is complex and requires expensive equipment .
But that 's not always the case .
Two scientists at University of Illinois understood this when they published a paper on a simpler method for making conductive ink .
Jordan Bunker , who had had no experience with chemistry until then , read this paper and reproduced the experiment at his maker space using only off-the-shelf substances and tools .
He used a toaster oven , and he even made his own vortex mixer , based on a tutorial by another scientist / maker .
Jordan then published his results online , including all the things he had tried and didn 't work , so others could study and reproduce it .
So Jordan 's main form of innovation was to take an experiment created in a well-equipped lab at the university and recreate it in a garage in Chicago using only cheap materials and tools he made himself .
And now that he published this work , others can pick up where he left and devise even simpler processes and improvements .
Another example I 'd like to mention is Hannah Perner-Wilson 's Kit-of-No-Parts .
Her project 's goal is to highlight the expressive qualities of materials while focusing on the creativity and skills of the builder .
Electronics kits are very powerful in that they teach us how things work , but the constraints inherent in their design influence the way we learn .
So Hannah 's approach , on the other hand , is to formulate a series of techniques for creating unusual objects that free us from pre-designed constraints by teaching us about the materials themselves .
So amongst Hannah 's many impressive experiments , this is one of my favorites .
[ " Paper speakers " ] What we 're seeing here is just a piece of paper with some copper tape on it connected to an mp3 player and a magnet .
So based on the research by Marcelo Coelho from MIT , Hannah created a series of paper speakers out of a wide range of materials from simple copper tape to conductive fabric and ink .
Just like Jordan and so many other makers , Hannah published her recipes and allows anyone to copy and reproduce them .
But paper electronics is one of the most promising branches of material science in that it allows us to create cheaper and flexible electronics .
So Hannah 's artisanal work , and the fact that she shared her findings , opens the doors to a series of new possibilities that are both aesthetically appealing and innovative .
So the interesting thing about makers is that we create out of passion and curiosity , and we are not afraid to fail .
We often tackle problems from unconventional angles , and , in the process , end up discovering alternatives or even better ways to do things .
So the more people experiment with materials , the more researchers are willing to share their research , and manufacturers their knowledge , the better chances we have to create technologies that truly serve us all .
So I feel a bit as Ted Nelson must have when , in the early 1970s , he wrote , " You must understand computers now . "
Back then , computers were these large mainframes only scientists cared about , and no one dreamed of even having one at home .
So it 's a little strange that I 'm standing here and saying , " You must understand smart materials now . "
Just keep in mind that acquiring preemptive knowledge about emerging technologies is the best way to ensure that we have a say in the making of our future .
Thank you .

Wadah Khanfar : A historic moment in the Arab world
As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world , Wadah Khanfar , the head of Al Jazeera , shares a profoundly optimistic view of what 's happening in Egypt , Tunisia , Libya and beyond -- at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change .
Ten years ago exactly , I was in Afghanistan .
I was covering the war in Afghanistan , and I witnessed , as a reporter for Al Jazeera , the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that .
Then , two years later , I covered another war -- the war in Iraq .
I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq .
And the war ended with a regime change , like the one in Afghanistan .
And that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship , an authoritarian regime , that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation , within the people themselves .
However , the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world .
For decades , we have lived under authoritarian regimes -- in the Arab world , in the Middle East .
These regimes created something within us during this period .
I 'm 43 years old right now .
For the last 40 years , I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us -- old , aged , authoritarian , corrupt situations -- regimes that we have seen around us .
And for a moment I was wondering , are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground , a change that does not come through foreign intervention , through the misery of occupation , through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes ?
The Iraqis : yes , they got rid of Saddam Hussein , but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad , they felt that their dignity had suffered .
And this is why they revolted .
This is why they did not accept .
And actually other regimes , they told their citizens , " Would you like to see the situation of Iraq ?
Would you like to see civil war , sectarian killing ?
Would you like to see destruction ?
Would you like to see foreign troops on your land ? "
And the people thought for themselves , " Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in , instead of having the second scenario . "
That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen .
For 10 years , unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction , images of killing , of sectarian conflicts , images of violence , emerging from a magnificent piece of land , a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years .
Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived .
A new generation , well-educated , connected , inspired by universal values and a global understanding , has created a new reality for us .
We have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams : these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world , who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets .
Nothing happened . No violence . Nothing .
Just step out of your house , raise your voice and say , " We would like to see the end of the regime . "
This is what happened in Tunisia .
Over a few days , the Tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies , billions of dollars in maintaining , trying to maintain , its prisons , collapsed , disappeared , because of the voices of the public .
People who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices , they tried to kill .
The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people .
They found something called Facebook .
They found something called Twitter .
They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues .
And they said , " These kids are misled . "
Therefore , they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them , bring them back home .
This is what they were telling . This is their propaganda .
" Bring these kids home because they are misled . "
But yes , these youth who have been inspired by universal values , who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and , at the same time , realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it -- not using violence , not trying to create chaos -- these young people , they did not go home .
Parents actually went to the streets and they supported them .
And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia .
We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years , and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there .
But we found that these people in the street , all of them are our reporters , feeding our newsroom with pictures , with videos and with news .
And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people -- people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority .
And then we took that decision : We are unrolling the news .
We are going to be the voice for these voiceless people .
We are going to spread the message .
Yes , some of these young people are connected to the Internet , but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little , is very small , because of many problems that we are suffering from .
But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [ it ] .
We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world -- and internationally , globally , through our English channel .
And then people started to feel that there 's something new happening .
And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave .
And then Egypt started , and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave .
And now Libya as you see it .
And then you have Yemen .
And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of , " How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant ? "
I want to tell you something , that the Internet and connectivity has created [ a ] new mindset .
But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from .
And while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change , before we thought , and governments told us -- and even sometimes it was true -- that change was imposed on us , and people rejected that , because they thought that it is alien to their culture .
Always , we believed that change will spring from within , that change should be a reconciliation with culture , cultural diversity , with our faith in our tradition and in our history , but at the same time , open to universal values , connected with the world , tolerant to the outside .
And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world .
This is the right moment , and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region .
How did the elite deal with that -- the so-called political elite ?
In front of Facebook , they brought the camels in Tahrir Square .
In front of Al Jazeera , they started creating tribalism .
And then when they failed , they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world .
They started telling the West , " Be aware of Al-Qaeda .
Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories .
These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras .
Be aware of these people who [ are ] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization . "
Fortunately , people right now cannot be deceived .
Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception .
They could not , and they cannot , imagine how they could really deal with this reality .
They have lost .
They have been detached from their people , from the masses , and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other .
Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution .
We do not create revolutions .
However , when something of that magnitude happens , we are at the center of the coverage .
We were banned from Egypt , and our correspondents , some of them were arrested .
But most of our camera people and our journalists , they went underground in Egypt -- voluntarily -- to report what happened in Tahrir Square .
For 18 days , our cameras were broadcasting , live , the voices of the people in Tahrir Square .
I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone -- ordinary person who I don 't know -- from Tahrir Square .
He told me , " We appeal to you not to switch off the cameras .
If you switch off the cameras tonight , there will be a genocide .
You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square . "
I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them , " Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night , because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story -- and they feel protected as well . "
So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world .
We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world .
Let us not repeat the mistake of Iran , of [ the ] Mosaddeq revolution .
Let us free ourselves -- especially in the West -- from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest , or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security .
The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction .
Let us accept the choice of the people .
Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future .
The future should be ruled by people themselves , even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us .
But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world , for the West and the East , to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world , rather than the images of violence and terrorism .
Let us support these people .
Let us stand for them .
And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change , and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance .
The future has arrived , and the future is now .
I thank you very much .
Thank you very much .
I just have a couple of questions for you .
Thank you for coming here .
How would you characterize the historical significance of what 's happened ?
Is this a story-of-the-year , a story-of-the-decade or something more ?
Wadah Khanfar : Actually , this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered .
We have covered many wars .
We have covered a lot of tragedies , a lot of problems , a lot of conflict zones , a lot of hot spots in the region , because we were centered at the middle of it .
But this is a story -- it is a great story ; it is beautiful .
It is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident .
You are witnessing change in history .
You are witnessing the birth of a new era .
And this is what the story 's all about .
There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical , or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos .
You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now , that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you 've spoken about so inspiringly ?
WK : And people actually , after the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime , the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils , they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy , but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational , not to go out of order .
In my opinion , these people are much more wiser than , not only the political elite , even the intellectual elite , even opposition leaders including political parties .
At this moment in time , the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old -- including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes .
We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way .
What should people here at TED , here in the West , do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what 's happening here ?
WK : I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world -- that people care , people care about this great transformation .
Mohamed Nanabhay who 's sitting with us , the head of Aljazeera.net , he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world .
Fifty percent of it is coming from America .
Because we discovered that people care , and people would like to know -- they are receiving the stream through our Internet .
Unfortunately in the United States , we are not covering but Washington D.C. at this moment in time for Al Jazeera English .
But I can tell you , this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling , universal feeling , of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us .
Well Wadah , a group of members of the TED community , TEDxCairo , are meeting as we speak .
They 've had some speakers there .
I believe they 've heard your talk .
Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us .
Thank you so much .
Sebastião Salgado : The silent drama of photography
Economics PhD Sebastião Salgado only took up photography in his 30s , but the discipline became an obsession . His years-long projects beautifully capture the human side of a global story that all too often involves death , destruction or decay . Here , he tells a deeply personal story of the craft that nearly killed him , and shows breathtaking images from his latest work , Genesis , which documents the world 's forgotten people and places .
I 'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures .
I want to start to show just a few pictures to you , and after I 'll speak .
I must speak to you a little bit of my history , because we 'll be speaking on this during my speech here .
I was born in 1944 in Brazil , in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy .
I was born on a farm , a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [ still ] .
A marvelous place .
I lived with incredible birds , incredible animals , I swam in our small rivers with our caimans .
It was about 35 families that lived on this farm , and everything that we produced on this farm , we consumed .
Very few things went to the market .
Once a year , the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced , and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse , bringing thousands of head of cattle , and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again .
When I was 15 years old , it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger -- much bigger -- where I did the second part of secondary school .
There I learned different things .
Brazil was starting to urbanize , industrialize , and I knew the politics . I became a little bit radical , I was a member of leftist parties , and I became an activist .
I [ went to ] university to become an economist .
I [ did ] a master 's degree in economics .
And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time .
I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend , and my associate in everything that I have done till now , my wife , Lélia Wanick Salgado .
Brazil radicalized very strongly .
We fought very hard against the dictatorship , in a moment it was necessary to us : Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand , or leave Brazil . We were too young , and our organization thought it was better for us to go out , and we went to France , where I did a PhD in economics , Léila became an architect .
I worked after for an investment bank .
We made a lot of trips , financed development , economic projects in Africa with the World Bank .
And one day photography made a total invasion in my life .
I became a photographer , abandoned everything and became a photographer , and I started to do the photography that was important for me .
Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist , that you are an anthropologist photographer , that you are an activist photographer .
But I did much more than that .
I put photography as my life .
I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects , and I want to show you just a few pictures of -- again , you 'll see inside the social projects , that I went to , I published many books on these photographs , but I 'll just show you a few ones now .
In the ' 90s , from 1994 to 2000 , I photographed a story called Migrations .
It became a book . It became a show .
But during the time that I was photographing this , I lived through a very hard moment in my life , mostly in Rwanda .
I saw in Rwanda total brutality .
I saw deaths by thousands per day .
I lost my faith in our species .
I didn 't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer , and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus .
I started to have infection everywhere .
When I made love with my wife , I had no sperm that came out of me ; I had blood .
I went to see a friend 's doctor in Paris , told him that I was completely sick .
He made a long examination , and told me , " Sebastian , you are not sick , your prostate is perfect .
What happened is , you saw so many deaths that you are dying .
You must stop . Stop .
You must stop because on the contrary , you will be dead . "
And I made the decision to stop .
I was really upset with photography , with everything in the world , and I made the decision to go back to where I was born .
It was a big coincidence .
It was the moment that my parents became very old .
I have seven sisters . I 'm one of the only men in my family , and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Léila and myself .
When we received this land , this land was as dead as I was .
When I was a kid , it was more than 50 percent rainforest .
When we received the land , it was less than half a percent rainforest , as in all my region .
To build development , Brazilian development , we destroyed a lot of our forest .
As you did here in the United States , or you did in India , everywhere in this planet .
To build our development , we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything .
This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds , and we didn 't know how to deal with these .
And Léila came up with an incredible idea , a crazy idea .
She said , why don 't you put back the rainforest that was here before ?
You say that you were born in paradise .
Let 's build the paradise again .
And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us , and we started . We started to plant , and this first year we lost a lot of trees , second year less , and slowly , slowly this dead land started to be born again .
We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees , only local species , only native species , where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed , and the life started to come back in an incredible way .
It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park .
We transformed . We gave this land back to nature .
It became a national park .
We created an institution called Instituto Terra , and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere .
Here in Los Angeles , in the Bay Area in San Francisco , it became tax deductible in the United States .
We raised money in Spain , in Italy , a lot in Brazil .
We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project , the government .
And the life started to come , and I had a big wish to come back to photography , to photograph again .
And this time , my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life : us .
I wished to photograph the other animals , to photograph the landscapes , to photograph us , but us from the beginning , the time we lived in equilibrium with nature .
And I went . I started in the beginning of 2004 , and I finished at the end of 2011 .
We created an incredible amount of pictures , and the result -- Lélia did the design of all my books , the design of all my shows . She is the creator of the shows .
And what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live , to have some equilibrium in our life .
And I wanted to see us when we used , yes , our instruments in stone .
We exist yet . I was last week at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation , and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups of Indians that are not contacted yet .
We must protect the forest in this sense .
And with these pictures , I hope that we can create information , a system of information .
We tried to do a new presentation of the planet , and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project , please .
Well , this — — Thank you . Thank you very much .
This is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now .
But there is another part that we must together rebuild , to build our societies , our modern family of societies , we are at a point where we cannot go back .
But we create an incredible contradiction .
To build all this , we destroy a lot .
Our forest in Brazil , that antique forest that was the size of California , is destroyed today 93 percent .
Here , on the West Coast , you 've destroyed your forest .
Around here , no ? The redwood forests are gone .
Gone very fast , disappeared .
Coming the other day from Atlanta , here , two days ago , I was flying over deserts that we made , we provoked with our own hands .
India has no more trees . Spain has no more trees .
And we must rebuild these forests .
That is the essence of our life , these forests .
We need to breathe . The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen , are the forests .
The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing , always , even if we reduce them , everything that we do , we produce CO2 , are the trees .
I put the question -- three or four weeks ago , we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway .
A lack of oxygen in the water .
I put to myself the question , if for a moment , we will not lack oxygen for all animal species , ours included -- that would be very complicated for us .
For the water system , the trees are essential .
I 'll give you a small example that you 'll understand very easily .
You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head , two or three hours to dry your hair if you don 't use a dryer machine .
Me , one minute , it 's dry . The same with the trees .
The trees are the hair of our planet .
When you have rain in a place that has no trees , in just a few minutes , the water arrives in the stream , brings soil , destroying our water source , destroying the rivers , and no humidity to retain .
When you have trees , the root system holds the water .
All the branches of the trees , the leaves that come down create a humid area , and they take months and months under the water , go to the rivers , and maintain our source , maintain our rivers .
This is the most important thing , when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life .
I want to show you now , to finish , just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction .
You remember that I told you , when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise , that was the farm .
Land completely destroyed , the erosion there , the land had dried .
But you can see in this picture , we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil .
But you see a lot of small spots in this picture .
In each point of those spots , we had planted a tree .
There are thousands of trees .
Now I 'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago .
I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem .
And I 'll show you the last picture .
We are with two million trees in the ground now .
We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees .
My friends , it 's very easy to do . We did it , no ?
By an accident that happened to me , we went back , we built an ecosystem .
We here inside the room , I believe that we have the same concern , and the model that we created in Brazil , we can transplant it here .
We can apply it everywhere around the world , no ?
And I believe that we can do it together .
Thank you very much .
Catherine Mohr : The tradeoffs of building green
In a short , funny , data-packed talk at TED U , Catherine Mohr walks through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house -- looking at real energy numbers , not hype . What choices matter most ? Not the ones you think .
First of all , I 'm a geek .
I 'm an organic food-eating , carbon footprint-minimizing , robotic surgery geek .
And I really want to build green , but I 'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles , people long on moral authority and short on data , telling me how to do these kinds of things .
And so I have to figure this out for myself .
For example : Is this evil ?
I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top , and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up .
But can I use a paper towel ?
The answer to this can be found in embodied energy .
This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water , and every time I use a paper towel , I am using this much virtual energy and water .
Wipe it up , throw it away .
Now , if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times , I don 't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel .
This is now operating energy .
So if I throw my towel in the washing machine , I 've now put energy and water back into that towel ...
unless I use a front-loading , high-efficiency washing machine , and then it looks a little bit better .
But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets ?
Well , now a paper towel looks better .
Screw the paper towels . Let 's go to a sponge .
I wipe it up with a sponge , and I put it under the running water , and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water .
Unless you 're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on , and then you start to use more energy .
Or worse , you let it run until it 's warm to rinse out your towel .
And now all bets are off .
So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect -- the position in which you put the handle -- have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize .
Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house .
That 's what my husband and I are doing right now .
And so , we wanted to know , how green could we be ?
And there 's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs .
And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room .
Now , the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it ; this is the energy it takes to make it -- millions and millions of paper towels .
We wanted to know how much better we could do .
And so , like many people , we start with a house on a lot , and I 'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we 're doing on the bottom .
So first , we demolish it .
It takes some energy , but if you deconstruct it -- you take it all apart , you use the bits -- you can get some of that energy back .
We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent .
And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar .
Now , you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete .
We then put in framing .
And so this is framing -- lumber , composite materials -- and it 's kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that , but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSC-certified lumber .
We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising .
If we put aluminum windows in this house , we would double the energy use right there .
Now , PVC is a little bit better , but still not as good as the wood that we chose .
We then put in plumbing , electrical and HVAC , and insulate .
Now , spray foam is an excellent insulator -- it fills in all the cracks -- but it is pretty high embodied energy , and , sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that .
We also used straw bale infill for our library , which has zero embodied energy .
When it comes time to sheetrock , if you use EcoRock it 's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock .
And then you get to the finishes , the subject of all of those " go green " articles , and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all .
And yet , all the press is focused on that .
Except for flooring .
If you put carpeting in your house , it 's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house , unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy .
So now we add in the final construction energy , we add it all up , and we 've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this .
But before we pat ourselves too much on the back , we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before .
And so the question is : How could we make that back ?
And so if I run my new energy-efficient house forward , compared with the old , non-energy-efficient house , we make it back in about six years .
Now , I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energy-efficient , and in that case , it would take me more about 20 years to break even .
Now , if I hadn 't paid attention to embodied energy , it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house .
So what does this mean ?
On the scale of my portion of the house , this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year , it 's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian .
But my elephant in the living room flies .
Clearly , I need to walk home from TED .
But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog .
And , remember , it 's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are .
Thank you .
Clayton Cameron : A-rhythm-etic . The math behind the beats
Ready to dance in your seat ? Drummer Clayton Cameron breaks down different genres of music — from R & amp ; B to Latin to pop — by their beats . A talk that proves hip hop and jazz aren 't cooler than math — they simply rely on it .
How many of you love rhythm ?
Oh yeah , oh yeah . Oh yeah .
I mean , I love all kinds of rhythm .
I like to play jazz , a little funk , and hip hop , a little pop , a little R & amp ; B , a little Latin , African .
And this groove right here , comes from the Crescent City , the old second line .
Now , one thing all those rhythms have in common is math , and I call it a-rhythm-etic .
Can you repeat after me ? A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
Clayton Cameron : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : A-rhythm a-rhythm . Audience : A-rhythm a-rhythm .
CC : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : Yeah .
Now all those styles of rhythm are all counted in four and then subdivided by three .
What ?
Yeah . Three is a magic number .
Three is a groovin ' number .
Three is a hip-hop kind of number .
But what does subdividing by three mean ?
And counting off by four ?
Well , look , think of it this way .
A measure of music as a dollar .
Now a dollar has four quarters , right ?
And so does a 4 / 4 measure of music .
It has four quarter notes .
Now , how do you subdivide ?
Now let 's envision this : three dollars ' worth of quarters .
You would have three groups of four , and you would count it , a-one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four . Together .
All : A-one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four .
CC : Okay , now you feel that ?
Now let 's take those three groups of four and make them four groups of three .
And listen to this .
A-one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , with me .
One-two-three-four , one-two-three , come on , y 'all !
All : One-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , one-two-three-four , ah .
CC : There you go .
All right , second line .
One-two-three-four , one-two-three .
One-two-three-four , one-two-three .
One-two-three-four , one-two-three .
One-two-three-four , one-two-three . Yeah .
Now , that 's what I call a-rhythm-etic .
Can you say it ? A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : A-rhythm a-rhythm . Audience : A-rhythm a-rhythm .
CC : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : Yeah . Now pick the swing beat , and do the same thing .
One , two , one , two , a-one-two-three-four .
Yeah . Mm .
One-two-three , one-two-three , one-two-three , one-two-three . Whoo .
So I want to take the second line beat and the swing beat and put them together , and it sounds something like this .
Aha .
A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : A-rhythm a-rhythm . Audience : A-rhythm a-rhythm .
CC : A-rhythm-etic . Audience : A-rhythm-etic .
CC : Yeah . Hip-hop .
Now it 's using a faster group of three we call a triplet .
Triplet-triplet . Say it with me .
All : Triplet-triplet .
CC : Triplet-triplet . Triplet-triplet .
CC : So I 'll take all the rhythms that you heard earlier , we 'll put them together , and they sound like this .
A-rhythm-etic .
Daniel Wolpert : The real reason for brains
Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise : the brain evolved , not to think or feel , but to control movement . In this entertaining , data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility of human motion .
I 'm a neuroscientist .
And in neuroscience , we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain .
But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life , because it 's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function .
And that is , why do we and other animals have brains ?
Not all species on our planet have brains , so if we want to know what the brain is for , let 's think about why we evolved one .
Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think , and that 's completely wrong .
If you think about this question for any length of time , it 's blindingly obvious why we have a brain .
We have a brain for one reason and one reason only , and that 's to produce adaptable and complex movements .
There is no other reason to have a brain .
Think about it .
Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you .
Now that 's not quite true . There 's one other way , and that 's through sweating .
But apart from that , everything else goes through contractions of muscles .
So think about communication -- speech , gestures , writing , sign language -- they 're all mediated through contractions of your muscles .
So it 's really important to remember that sensory , memory and cognitive processes are all important , but they 're only important to either drive or suppress future movements .
There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn 't affect the way you 're going to move later in life .
Now for those who don 't believe this argument , we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain , but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt .
Rudimentary animal , has a nervous system , swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life .
And at some point of its life , it implants on a rock .
And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock , which it never leaves , is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food .
So once you don 't need to move , you don 't need the luxury of that brain .
And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure , but that 's a different subject .
So I am a movement chauvinist .
I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don 't let anyone tell you that it 's not true .
Now if movement is so important , how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement ?
And the answer is we 're doing extremely poorly ; it 's a very hard problem .
But we can look at how well we 're doing by thinking about how well we 're doing building machines which can do what humans can do .
Think about the game of chess .
How well are we doing determining what piece to move where ?
If you pit Garry Kasparov here , when he 's not in jail , against IBM 's Deep Blue , well the answer is IBM 's Deep Blue will occasionally win .
And I think if IBM 's Deep Blue played anyone in this room , it would win every time .
That problem is solved .
What about the problem of picking up a chess piece , dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board ?
If you put a five year-old child 's dexterity against the best robots of today , the answer is simple : the child wins easily .
There 's no competition at all .
Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard ?
One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem -- look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win .
So it 's a very simple algorithm .
Now of course there are other moves , but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution .
When it comes to being dexterous , it 's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous .
And we 'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world , which has a lot of problems .
But let me show you cutting-edge robotics .
Now a lot of robotics is very impressive , but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages .
So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes .
And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass .
It 's a hard problem because the water sloshes about , but it can do it .
But it doesn 't do it with anything like the agility of a human .
Now if you want this robot to do a different task , that 's another three-year Ph.D. program .
There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics .
Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance .
So what I 'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking .
Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking .
It 's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order .
And this is her getting the world record in real time .
And she 's pretty happy .
We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that , and that 's what we 'd like to know .
So in my group , what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement .
And it sounds like an easy problem .
You send a command down , it causes muscles to contract .
Your arm or body moves , and you get sensory feedback from vision , from skin , from muscles and so on .
The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be .
So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is , for example , sensory feedback is extremely noisy .
Now by noise , I do not mean sound .
We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal .
So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard " crrcckkk " on the station you wanted to hear , that was the noise .
But more generally , this noise is something that corrupts the signal .
So for example , if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand , you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback .
Similarly , when you put motor output on movement output , it 's extremely noisy .
Forget about trying to hit the bull 's eye in darts , just aim for the same spot over and over again .
You have a huge spread due to movement variability .
And more than that , the outside world , or task , is both ambiguous and variable .
The teapot could be full , it could be empty .
It changes over time .
So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise .
Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise .
So if you 're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick , our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars .
Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability .
And to do that , I 'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory .
And it 's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty .
And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions .
So let 's think about the inference .
You want to generate beliefs about the world .
So what are beliefs ?
Beliefs could be : where are my arms in space ?
Am I looking at a cat or a fox ?
But we 're going to represent beliefs with probabilities .
So we 're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one -- zero meaning I don 't believe it at all , one means I 'm absolutely certain .
And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty .
And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference .
You have data , and data in neuroscience is sensory input .
So I have sensory input , which I can take in to make beliefs .
But there 's another source of information , and that 's effectively prior knowledge .
You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories .
And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs .
And I 've put the formula up there .
I 'm not going to explain what that formula is , but it 's very beautiful .
And it has real beauty and real explanatory power .
And what it really says , and what you want to estimate , is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input .
So let me give you an intuitive example .
Imagine you 're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you .
There are two sources of information Bayes ' rule tells you .
There 's sensory evidence -- you can use visual information auditory information , and that might tell you it 's going to land in that red spot .
But you know that your senses are not perfect , and therefore there 's some variability of where it 's going to land shown by that cloud of red , representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1 .
That information is available in the current shot , but there 's another source of information not available on the current shot , but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis , and that 's that the ball doesn 't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match .
If you 're playing against a very good opponent , they may distribute it in that green area , which is the prior distribution , making it hard for you to return .
Now both these sources of information carry important information .
And what Bayes ' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow , which have the ellipses , and that 's my belief .
So it 's the optimal way of combining information .
Now I wouldn 't tell you all this if it wasn 't that a few years ago , we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills .
And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines .
As we go around , we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down , but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is , and then combine those in a real Bayesian way .
Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula .
And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs .
So that really means I have to make predictions of the future .
And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it 's going to get .
And moreover , it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do .
And to do that , I 'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input .
So you send a command out , you get sensory feedback back , and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus .
But you can imagine looking inside the brain .
And here 's inside the brain .
You might have a little predictor , a neural simulator , of the physics of your body and your senses .
So as you send a movement command down , you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions .
So as I shake this ketchup bottle , I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row .
And if I 've got a good predictor , it predicts the same thing .
Well why would I bother doing that ?
I 'm going to get the same feedback anyway .
Well there 's good reasons .
Imagine , as I shake the ketchup bottle , someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me .
Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act .
So I get two sources .
I get you tapping on it , and I get me shaking it , but from my senses ' point of view , that is combined together into one source of information .
Now there 's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events .
Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that 's going on inside my body .
So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction -- which is only based on your movement commands -- with the reality .
Any discrepancy should hopefully be external .
So as I go around the world , I 'm making predictions of what I should get , subtracting them off .
Everything left over is external to me .
What evidence is there for this ?
Well there 's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person .
And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling .
It 's been known for a long time , you can 't tickle yourself as well as other people can .
But it hasn 't really been shown , it 's because you have a neural simulator , simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense .
So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem .
And in effect , what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot , and they 're going to move that back and forward .
And then we 're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot , which is going to tickle their palm with another stick .
And then we 're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness .
I 'll show you just one part of our study .
And here I 've taken away the robots , but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward .
And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay .
Either no time delay , in which case light would just tickle your palm , or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second .
So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things -- sinusoidal movement .
The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle .
All we 're playing with is a tempo causality .
And as we go from naught to 0.1 second , it becomes more ticklish .
As you go from 0.1 to 0.2 , it becomes more ticklish at the end .
And by 0.2 of a second , it 's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything .
So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality .
And based on this illustration , we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain 's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations .
Now I have to admit , these are the worst studies my lab has ever run .
Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes , you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant .
So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena .
And in the intervening years I had two daughters .
And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys , they get into fights -- which started with one of them doing something to the other , the other retaliating .
It quickly escalates .
And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force .
Now when I screamed at my children to stop , sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder .
Now I happen to know my children don 't lie , so I thought , as a neuroscientist , it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths .
And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another , they generate the movement command .
They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off .
So they actually think they 've hit the person less hard than they have -- rather like the tickling .
Whereas the passive recipient doesn 't make the prediction , feels the full blow .
So if they retaliate with the same force , the first person will think it 's been escalated .
So we decided to test this in the lab .
Now we don 't work with children , we don 't work with hitting , but the concept is identical .
We bring in two adults . We tell them they 're going to play a game .
And so here 's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other .
And the game is very simple .
We started with a motor with a little lever , a little force transfuser .
And we use this motor to apply force down to player one 's fingers for three seconds and then it stops .
And that player 's been told , remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject 's finger through a force transfuser -- and they do that .
And player two 's been told , remember the experience of that force .
Use your other hand to apply the force back down .
And so they take it in turns to apply the force they 've just experienced back and forward .
But critically , they 're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms .
So they don 't know the rules the other person 's playing by .
And what we 've measured is the force as a function of terms .
And if we look at what we start with , a quarter of a Newton there , a number of turns , perfect would be that red line .
And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this -- a 70 percent escalation in force on each go .
So it really suggests , when you 're doing this -- based on this study and others we 've done -- that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it 's producing .
So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts .
So we 've made inferences , we 've done predictions , now we have to generate actions .
And what Bayes ' rule says is , given my beliefs , the action should in some sense be optimal .
But we 've got a problem .
Tasks are symbolic -- I want to drink , I want to dance -- but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence .
And there 's a big gap between the task and the movement system .
So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways .
So think about just a point to point movement .
I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths .
Having chosen a particular path , I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations .
And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed .
So I have a huge amount of choice to make .
Now it turns out , we are extremely stereotypical .
We all move the same way pretty much .
And so it turns out we 're so stereotypical , our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping .
So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion , your brain 's circuitry would understand instantly what 's going on .
Now this is a bunch of dots moving .
You will know what this person is doing , whether happy , sad , old , young -- a huge amount of information .
If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit , you would have absolutely no idea what 's going on .
So why is it that we move the particular ways we do ?
Well let 's think about what really happens .
Maybe we don 't all quite move the same way .
Maybe there 's variation in the population .
And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation .
So in evolutionary scales , movements get better .
And perhaps in life , movements get better through learning .
So what is it about a movement which is good or bad ?
Imagine I want to intercept this ball .
Here are two possible paths to that ball .
Well if I choose the left-hand path , I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time .
But there 's noise added to this .
So what I actually get , based on this lovely , smooth , desired force , is a very noisy version .
So if I pick the same command through many times , I will get a different noisy version each time , because noise changes each time .
So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way .
If I choose a different way of moving -- on the right for example -- then I 'll have a different command , different noise , playing through a noisy system , very complicated .
All we can be sure of is the variability will be different .
If I move in this particular way , I end up with a smaller variability across many movements .
So if I have to choose between those two , I would choose the right one because it 's less variable .
And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise .
And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger .
So you want to avoid big forces as one principle .
So we 've shown that using this , we can explain a huge amount of data -- that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise .
So I hope I 've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement .
And it 's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that .
But it 's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation .
There are many diseases which effect movement .
And hopefully if we understand how we control movement , we can apply that to robotic technology .
And finally , I want to remind you , when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks , the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic .
Thank you very much .
Quick question for you , Dan .
So you 're a movement -- -- chauvinist .
Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about -- the dreaming , the yearning , the falling in love and all these things -- are a kind of side show , an accident ?
DW : No , no , actually I think they 're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end .
So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you 're laying down memories of childhood .
The fact that we forget most of our childhood , for example , is probably fine , because it doesn 't effect our movements later in life .
You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement .
So you think that people thinking about the brain , and consciousness generally , could get real insight by saying , where does movement play in this game ?
DW : So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake .
You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision .
And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way .
Well that was quite fascinating . Thank you very much indeed .
John La Grou : A plug for smart power outlets
John La Grou unveils an ingenious new technology that will smarten up the electrical outlets in our homes , using microprocessors and RFID tags . The invention , Safeplug , promises to prevent deadly accidents like house fires -- and to conserve energy .
This is a world-changing invention .
The smoke alarm has saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives , worldwide .
But smoke alarms don 't prevent fires .
Every year in the USA , over 20,000 are killed or injured with 350,000 home fires .
And one of the main causes of all these fires is electricity .
What if we could prevent electrical fires before they start ?
Well , a couple of friends and I figured out how to do this .
So how does electricity ignite residential fires ?
Well it turns out that the main causes are faulty and misused appliances and electrical wiring .
Our invention had to address all of these issues .
So what about circuit breakers ?
Well , Thomas Edison invented the circuit breaker in 1879 .
This is 130-year-old technology , and this is a problem , because over 80 percent of all home electrical fires start below the safety threshold of circuit breakers .
Hmmm ...
So we considered all of this . And we realized that electrical appliances must be able to communicate directly with the power receptacle itself .
Any electrical device -- an appliance , an extension cord , whatever -- must be able to tell the power outlet , " Hey , power outlet , I 'm drawing too much current . Shut me off now , before I start a fire . "
And the power outlet needs to be smart enough to do it .
So here is what we did . We put a 10-cent digital transponder , a data tag , in the appliance plug .
And we put an inexpensive , wireless data reader inside the receptacle so they could communicate .
Now , every home electrical system becomes an intelligent network .
The appliance 's safe operating parameters are embedded into its plug .
If too much current is flowing , the intelligent receptacle turns itself off , and prevents another fire from starting .
We call this technology EFCI , Electrical Fault Circuit Interrupter .
Okay , two more points . Every year in the USA , roughly 2,500 children are admitted to emergency rooms for shock and burn injuries related to electrical receptacles . And this is crazy .
An intelligent receptacle prevents injuries because the power is always off , until an intelligent plug is detected . Simple .
Now , besides saving lives , perhaps the greatest benefit of intelligent power is in its energy savings .
This invention will reduce global energy consumption by allowing remote control and automation of every outlet in every home and business .
Now you can choose to reduce your home energy bill by automatically cycling heavy loads like air conditioners and heaters .
Hotels and businesses can shut down unused rooms from a central location , or even a cell phone .
There are 10 billion electrical outlets in North America alone .
The potential energy savings is very , very significant .
So far we 've applied for 414 patent claims .
Of those , 186 have been granted : 228 are in process .
And I 'm pleased to announce that just three weeks ago we received our first international recognition , the 2009 CES Innovation Award .
So , to conclude , intelligent power can , globally , save thousands of lives , prevent tens of thousands of injuries , and eliminate tens of billions of dollars in property damage every single year , while significantly reducing global energy consumption .
In the spirit of this year 's TED Conference , we think this is a powerful , world-changing invention .
And I 'd like to thank Chris for this opportunity to unveil our technology with you , and soon the world .
Thank you .
Erica Frenkel : The universal anesthesia machine
What if you 're in surgery and the power goes out ? No lights , no oxygen -- and your anesthesia stops flowing . It happens constantly in hospitals throughout the world , turning routine procedures into tragedies . Erica Frenkel demos one solution : the universal anesthesia machine .
I 'm going to talk to you today about the design of medical technology for low resource settings .
I study health systems in these countries .
And one of the major gaps in care , almost across the board , is access to safe surgery .
Now one of the major bottlenecks that we 've found that 's sort of preventing both the access in the first place and the safety of those surgeries that do happen is anesthesia .
And actually , it 's the model that we expect to work for delivering anesthesia in these environments .
Here we have a scene that you would find in any operating room across the U.S. or any other developed country .
In the background there is a very sophisticated anesthesia machine .
And this machine is able to enable surgery and save lives because it was designed with this environment in mind .
In order to operate , this machine needs a number of things that this hospital has to offer .
It needs an extremely well-trained anesthesiologist with years of training with complex machines to help her monitor the flows of the gas and keep her patients safe and anesthetized throughout the surgery .
It 's a delicate machine running on computer algorithms , and it needs special care , TLC , to keep it up and running , and it 's going to break pretty easily .
And when it does , it needs a team of biomedical engineers who understand its complexities , can fix it , can source the parts and keep it saving lives .
It 's a pretty expensive machine .
It needs a hospital whose budget can allow it to support one machine costing upwards of 50 or $ 100,000 .
And perhaps most obviously , and perhaps most importantly -- and the path to concepts that we 've heard about kind of illustrate this -- it needs infrastructure that can supply an uninterrupted source of electricity , of compressed oxygen and other medical supplies that are so critical to the functioning of this machine .
In other words , this machine requires a lot of stuff that this hospital cannot offer .
This is the electrical supply for a hospital in rural Malawi .
In this hospital , there is one person qualified to deliver anesthesia , and she 's qualified because she has 12 , maybe 18 months of training in anesthesia .
In the hospital and in the entire region there 's not a single biomedical engineer .
So when this machine breaks , the machines they have to work with break , they 've got to try and figure it out , but most of the time , that 's the end of the road .
Those machines go the proverbial junkyard .
And the price tag of the machine that I mentioned could represent maybe a quarter or a third of the annual operating budget for this hospital .
And finally , I think you can see that infrastructure is not very strong .
This hospital is connected to a very weak power grid , one that goes down frequently .
So it runs frequently , the entire hospital , just on a generator .
And you can imagine , the generator breaks down or runs out of fuel .
And the World Bank sees this and estimates that a hospital in this setting in a low-income country can expect up to 18 power outages per month .
Similarly compressed oxygen and other medical supplies are really a luxury and can often be out of stock for months or even a year .
So it seems crazy , but the model that we have right now is taking those machines that were designed for that first environment that I showed you and donating or selling them to hospitals in this environment .
It 's not just inappropriate , it becomes really unsafe .
One of our partners at Johns Hopkins was observing surgeries in Sierra Leone about a year ago .
And the first surgery of the day happened to be an obstetrical case .
A woman came in , she needed an emergency C-section to save her life and the life of her baby .
And everything began pretty auspiciously .
The surgeon was on call and scrubbed in .
The nurse was there .
She was able to anesthetize her quickly , and it was important because of the emergency nature of the situation .
And everything began well until the power went out .
And now in the middle of this surgery , the surgeon is racing against the clock to finish his case , which he can do -- he 's got a headlamp .
But the nurse is literally running around a darkened operating theater trying to find anything she can use to anesthetize her patient , to keep her patient asleep .
Because her machine doesn 't work when there 's no power .
And now this routine surgery that many of you have probably experienced , and others are probably the product of , has now become a tragedy .
And what 's so frustrating is this is not a singular event ; this happens across the developing world .
35 million surgeries are attempted every year without safe anesthesia .
My colleague , Dr. Paul Fenton , was living this reality .
He was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in Malawi , a teaching hospital .
He went to work every day in an operating theater like this one , trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable , and frankly unsafe , in his hospital .
And after umpteen surgeries and , you can imagine , really unspeakable tragedy , he just said , " That 's it . I 'm done . That 's enough .
There has to be something better . "
So he took a walk down the hall to where they threw all those machines that had just crapped out on them -- I think that 's the scientific term -- and he just started tinkering .
He took one part from here and another from there , and he tried to come up with a machine that would work in the reality that he was facing .
And what he came up with was this guy , the prototype for the Universal Anesthesia Machine -- a machine that would work and anesthetize his patients no matter the circumstances that his hospital had to offer .
Here it is back at home at that same hospital , developed a little further , 12 years later , working on patients from pediatrics to geriatrics .
Now let me show you a little bit about how this machine works .
Voila !
Here she is .
When you have electricity , everything in this machine begins in the base .
There 's a built-in oxygen concentrator down there .
Now you 've heard me mention oxygen a few times at this point .
Essentially , to deliver anesthesia , you want as pure oxygen as possible , because eventually you 're going to dilute it essentially with the gas .
And the mixture that the patient inhales needs to be at least a certain percentage oxygen or else it can become dangerous .
But so in here when there 's electricity , the oxygen concentrator takes in room air .
Now we know room air is gloriously free , it is abundant , and it 's already 21 percent oxygen .
So all this concentrator does is take that room air in , filter it and send 95 percent pure oxygen up and across here where it mixes with the anesthetic agent .
Now before that mixture hits the patient 's lungs , it 's going to pass by here -- you can 't see it , but there 's an oxygen sensor here -- that 's going to read out on this screen the percentage of oxygen being delivered .
Now if you don 't have power , or , God forbid , the power cuts out in the middle of surgery , this machine transitions automatically , without even having to touch it , to drawing in room air from this inlet .
Everything else is the same .
The only difference is that now you 're only working with 21 percent oxygen .
Now that used to be a dangerous guessing game , because you only knew if you had given too little oxygen once something bad happened .
But we 've put a long-life battery backup on here .
This is the only part that 's battery backed up .
But this gives control to the provider , whether there 's power or not , because they can adjust the flow based on the percentage of oxygen they see that they 're giving their patient .
In both cases , whether you have power or not , sometimes the patient needs help breathing .
It 's just a reality of anesthesia . The lungs can be paralyzed .
And so we 've just added this manual bellows .
We 've seen surgeries for three or four hours to ventilate the patient on this .
So it 's a straightforward machine .
I shudder to say simple ; it 's straightforward .
And it 's by design .
And you do not need to be a highly trained , specialized anesthesiologist to use this machine , which is good because , in these rural district hospitals , you 're not going to get that level of training .
It 's also designed for the environment that it will be used in .
This is an incredibly rugged machine .
It has to stand up to the heat and the wear and tear that happens in hospitals in these rural districts .
And so it 's not going to break very easily , but if it does , virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver .
And finally , it 's affordable .
This machine comes in at an eighth of the cost of the conventional machine that I showed you earlier .
So in other words , what we have here is a machine that can enable surgery and save lives because it was designed for its environment , just like the first machine I showed you .
But we 're not content to stop there .
Is it working ?
Is this the design that 's going to work in place ?
Well we 've seen good results so far .
This is in 13 hospitals in four countries , and since 2010 , we 've done well over 2,000 surgeries with no clinically adverse events .
So we 're thrilled .
This really seems like a cost-effective , scalable solution to a problem that 's really pervasive .
But we still want to be sure that this is the most effective and safe device that we can be putting into hospitals .
So to do that we 've launched a number of partnerships with NGOs and universities to gather data on the user interface , on the types of surgeries it 's appropriate for and ways we can enhance the device itself .
One of those partnerships is with Johns Hopkins just here in Baltimore .
They have a really cool anesthesia simulation lab out in Baltimore .
So we 're taking this machine and recreating some of the operating theater crises that this machine might face in one of the hospitals that it 's intended for , and in a contained , safe environment , evaluating its effectiveness .
We 're then able to compare the results from that study with real world experience , because we 're putting two of these in hospitals that Johns Hopkins works with in Sierra Leone , including the hospital where that emergency C-section happened .
So I 've talked a lot about anesthesia , and I tend to do that .
I think it is incredibly fascinating and an important component of health .
And it really seems peripheral , we never think about it , until we don 't have access to it , and then it becomes a gatekeeper .
Who gets surgery and who doesn 't ?
Who gets safe surgery and who doesn 't ?
But you know , it 's just one of so many ways that design , appropriate design , can have an impact on health outcomes .
If more people in the health delivery space really working on some of these challenges in low-income countries could start their design process , their solution search , from outside of that proverbial box and inside of the hospital -- in other words , if we could design for the environment that exists in so many parts of the world , rather than the one that we wished existed -- we might just save a lot of lives .
Thank you very much .
Eric Berlow : Simplifying complexity
Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn 't feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems . He knows that more information can lead to a better , simpler solution . Illustrating the tips and tricks for breaking down big issues , he distills an overwhelming infographic on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to a few elementary points .
Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you 're faced with a complex problem ?
Well , I hope to change that in less than three minutes .
So , I hope to convince you that complex doesn 't always equal complicated .
So for me , a well-crafted baguette , fresh out of the oven , is complex , but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated .
I 'm an ecologist , and I study complexity . I love complexity .
And I study that in the natural world , the interconnectedness of species .
So here 's a food web , or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California .
And this is what happens to that food web when it 's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before .
All the grayed-out species disappear .
Some are actually on the brink of extinction .
And lakes with fish have more mosquitos , even though they eat them .
These effects were all unanticipated , and yet we 're discovering they 're predictable .
So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we 're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems .
First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn 't think of before .
For example , you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem , or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park .
The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another , if you focus only on that link , and then you black box the rest , it 's actually less predictable than if you step back , consider the entire system -- all the species , all the links -- and from that place , hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most .
And we 're discovering , with our research , that 's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees .
So the more you step back , embrace complexity , the better chance you have of finding simple answers , and it 's often different than the simple answer that you started with .
So let 's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government .
This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan .
It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago .
Instantly ridiculed by the media for being so crazy complicated .
And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government .
Clearly a complex problem , but is it complicated ?
Well , when I saw this in the front page of the Times , I thought , " Great . Finally something I can relate to .
I can sink my teeth into this . "
So let 's do it . So here we go for the first time ever , a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network .
The circled node is the one we 're trying to influence -- popular support for the government .
And so now we can look one degrees , two degrees , three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence .
Within that sphere , most of those nodes are not actionable , like the harshness of the terrain , and a very small minority are actual military actions .
Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories : active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair , transparent economic development and provisioning of services .
I don 't know about this , but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds .
When you see a diagram like this , I don 't want you to be afraid .
I want you to be excited . I want you to be relieved .
Because simple answers may emerge .
We 're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity .
So for any problem , the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity , the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most .
Thank you .
Nick Veasey : Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey shows outsized X-ray images that reveal the otherworldly inner workings of familiar objects -- from the geometry of a wildflower to the anatomy of a Boeing 747 . Producing these photos is dangerous and painstaking , but the reward is a superpower : looking at what the human eye can 't see .
So , 120 years ago , Dr. Röntgen X-rayed his wife 's hand .
Quite why he had to pin her fingers to the floor with her brooch , I 'm not sure . It seems a bit extreme to me .
That image was the start of the X-ray technology .
And I 'm still fundamentally using the same principles today .
I 'm interpreting it in a more contemporary manner .
The first shot I ever did was of a soda can , which was to promote a brand that we all know , so I 'm not going to do them any favors by showing you it .
But the second shot I did was my shoes I was wearing on the day .
And I do really like this shot , because it shows all the detritus that 's sort of embedded in the sole of the sneakers .
It was just one of those pot-luck things where you get it right first time .
Moving on to something a bit larger , this is an X-ray of a bus .
And the bus is full of people .
It 's actually the same person . It 's just one skeleton .
And back in the ' 60s , they used to teach student radiographers to take X-rays , thankfully not on you and I , but on dead people .
So , I 've still got access to one of these dead people called Frieda ; she 's falling apart , I 'm afraid , because she 's very old and fragile .
But everyone on that bus is Frieda .
And the bus is taken with a cargo-scanning X-ray , which is the sort of machine you have on borders , which checks for contraband and drugs and bombs and things .
Fairly obvious what that is .
So , using large-scale objects does sort of create drama because you just don 't see X-rays of big things that often .
Technology is moving ahead , and these large cargo scanner X-rays that work with the digital system are getting better and better and better .
Again though , to make it come alive you need , somehow , to add the human element .
And I think the reason this image works , again , is because Frieda is driving the bulldozer .
Quite a difficult brief , make a pair of men 's pants look beautiful .
But I think the process , in itself , shows how exquisite they are .
Fashion -- now , I 'm sort of anti-fashion because I don 't show the surface , I show what 's within .
So , the fashionistas don 't really like me because it doesn 't matter if Kate Moss is wearing it or if I 'm wearing it , it looks the same .
We all look the same inside , believe me .
The creases in the material and the sort of nuances .
And I show things for really what they are , what they 're made of .
I peel back the layers and expose it .
And if it 's well made I show it , if it 's badly made I show it .
And I 'm sure Ross can associate that with design .
The design comes from within .
It 's not just Topshop , I get some strange looks when I go out getting my props .
Here I was fumbling around in the ladies ' underwear department of a department store , almost got escorted from the premises .
I live opposite a farm . And this was the runt of the litter , a piglet that died .
And what 's really interesting is , if you look at the legs , you 'll notice that the bones haven 't fused .
And should that pig have grown , unfortunately it was dead , it would have certainly been dead after I X-rayed it , with the amount of radiation I used anyway .
But once the bones had fused together it would have been healthy .
So , that 's an empty parka jacket .
But I quite love the way it 's posed .
Nature is my greatest inspiration .
And to carry on with a theme that we 've already touched with is how nature is related to architecture .
If you look at the roof of the Eden Project , or the British library , it 's all this honeycomb structure .
And I 'm sure those architects are inspired , as I am , by what surrounds us , by nature .
This , in fact , is a Victoria water lily leaf that floats on the top of a pond .
An amaryllis flower looking really three-dimensional .
Seaweed , ebbing in the tide .
Now , how do I do this , and where do I do this , and all of that sort of thing .
This is my new , purpose-built , X-ray shed .
is made of lead and steel .
It weighs 1,250 kilograms and the only exercise I get is opening and closing it .
The walls are 700 millimeters thick of solid dense concrete .
So , I 'm using quite a lot of radiation .
A lot more than you 'd get in a hospital or a vet 's .
And there I am . This is a quite high-powered X-ray machine .
What 's interesting really about X-ray really is , if you think about it , is that that technology is used for looking for cancer or looking for drugs , or looking for contraband or whatever .
And I use that sort of technology to create things that are quite beautiful .
So , still working with film , I 'm afraid .
Technology in X-ray where it 's life-size processed , apart from these large cargo-scanning machines , hasn 't moved on enough for the quality of the image and the resolution to be good enough for what I want to do with it , which is show my pictures big .
So , I have to use a 1980s drum scanner , which was designed in the days when everyone shot photographs on film .
They scan each individual X-ray .
And this shows how I do my process of same-size X-rays .
So , this is , again , my daughter 's dress .
Still has the tag in it from me buying it , so I can take it back to the shop if she didn 't like it .
But there are four X-ray plates .
You can see them overlapping .
So , when you move forward from something fairly small , a dress which is this size , onto something like that which is done in exactly the same process , you can see that that is a lot of work .
In fact , that is three months solid X-raying .
There is over 500 separate components .
Boeing sent me a 747 in containers .
And I sent them back an X-ray .
I kid you not .
Okay , so Frieda is my dead skeleton .
This , unfortunately , is basically two pictures .
One on the extreme right is a photograph of an American footballer .
The one on the left is an x-ray .
But this time I had to use a real body .
Because I needed all the skin tissue to make it look real , to make it look like it was a real athlete .
So , here I had to use a recently deceased body .
And getting a hold of that was extremely difficult and laborious .
But people do donate their bodies to art and science .
And when they do , I 'm in the queue .
So , I like to use them .
The coloring , so coloring adds another level to the X-rays .
It makes it more organic , more natural .
It 's whatever takes my fancy , really .
It 's not accurately colored to how it is in real life .
That flower doesn 't come in bright orange , I don 't think .
But I just like it in bright orange .
And also with something technical , like these are DJ decks , it sort of adds another level .
It makes a two dimensional image look more three dimensional .
The most difficult things to X-ray , the most technically challenging things to X-ray are the lightest things , the most delicate things .
To get the detail in a feather , believe me , if there is anyone out here who knows anything about X-rays , that 's quite a challenge .
I 'm now going to show you a short film , I 'll step to the side .
The thing in there is very dangerous .
If you touch that , you could possibly die through radiation poisoning .
In my career I 've had two exposures to radiation , which is two too many , because it stays with you for life .
It 's cumulative .
It has human connotations .
The fact that it 's a child 's toy that we all recognize , but also it looks like it 's a robot , and it comes from a sci-fi genus .
It 's a surprise that it has humanity , but also man-made , future , alien associations .
And it 's just a bit spooky .
The bus was done with a cargo-scanning X-ray machine , which is used on the borders between countries , looking for contraband and illegal immigrants .
The lorry goes in front of it . And it takes slices of X-rays through the lorry .
And that 's how this was done . It 's actually slice , slice .
It 's a bit like a CT scanner in a hospital . Slices .
And then if you look carefully , there is all little things .
He 's got headphones on , reading the newspaper , got a hat on , glasses , got a bag .
So , these little details help to make it work , make it real .
The problem with using living people is that to take an X-ray , if I X-ray you , you get exposed to radiation .
So , to avoid that -- I have to avoid it somehow -- is I use dead people .
Now , that 's a variety of things , from recently deceased bodies , to a skeleton that was used by student radiographers to train in taking X-rays of the human body , at different densities .
I have very high-tech equipment of gloves , scissors and a bucket .
I will show how the capillary action works , how it feeds , I 'll be able to get all the cells inside that stem .
Because it transfers food from its roots to its leaves .
Look at this monster .
It 's so basic . It just grows wild .
That 's what I really like about it , the fact that I haven 't got to go and buy it , and it hasn 't been genetically modified at all .
It 's just happening .
And the X-ray shows how beautiful nature can be .
Not that that is particularly beautiful when you look at it with the human eye , the way the leaves form . They 're curling back on each other .
So the X-ray will show the overlaps in these little corners .
The thicker the object , the more radiation it needs , and the more time it needs .
The lighter the object , the less radiation .
Sometimes you keep the time up , because the time gives you detail .
The longer the exposure goes on for , the more detail you get .
If you look at this , just the tube , it is quite bright .
But I could get a bit darker in the tube , but everything else would suffer .
So , these leaves at the edge would start to disappear .
What I like is how hard the edges are , how sharp .
Yeah , I 'm quite pleased with it .
I travel beyond the surface and show something for what it 's worth , for what it 's really made of , how it really works .
But also I find that I 've got the benefit of taking away all the surface , which is things that people are used to seeing .
And that 's the sort of thing I 've been doing .
I 've got the opportunity now to show you what I 'm going to be doing in the future .
This is a commercial application of my most recent work .
And what 's good about this , I think , is that it 's like a moment in time , like you 've turned around , you 've got X-ray vision and you 've taken a picture with the X-ray camera .
Unfortunately I haven 't got X-ray vision .
I do dream in X-ray . I see my projects in my sleep .
And I know what they 're going to look like in X-ray and I 'm not far off .
So , what am I doing in the future ?
Well , this year is the 50th anniversary of Issigonis 's Mini , which is one of my favorite cars .
So , I 've taken it apart , component by component , months and months and months of work .
And with this image , I 'm going to be displaying it in the Victoria and Albert Museum as a light box , which is actually attached to the car .
So , I 've got to saw the car in half , down the middle , not an easy task , in itself .
And then , so you can get in the driver 's side , sit down , and up against you is a wall .
And if you get out and walk around to the other side of the car , you see a life-sized light box of the car showing you how it works .
And I 'm going to take that idea and apply it to other sort of iconic things from my life .
Like , my first computer was a big movement in my life .
And I had a Mac Classic . And it 's a little box .
And I think that would look quite neat as an X-ray .
I 'm also looking to take my work from the two-dimensional form to a more three-dimensional form .
And this is quite a good way of doing it .
I 'm also working now with X-ray video .
So , if you can imagine , some of these flowers , and they 're actually moving and growing and you can film that in X-ray , should be quite stunning .
But that 's it . I 'm done . Thank you very much .
Ursus Wehrli : Tidying up art
Ursus Wehrli shares his vision for a cleaner , more organized , tidier form of art -- by deconstructing the paintings of modern masters into their component pieces , sorted by color and size .
My name is Ursus Wehrli , and I would like to talk to you this morning about my project , Tidying Up Art .
First of all -- any questions so far ?
First of all , I have to say I 'm not from around here .
I 'm from a completely different cultural area , maybe you noticed ?
I mean , I 'm wearing a tie , first . And then secondly , I 'm a little bit nervous because I 'm speaking in a foreign language , and I want to apologize in advance , for any mistakes I might make .
Because I 'm from Switzerland , and I just don 't hope you think this is Swiss German I 'm speaking now here . This is just what it sounds like if we Swiss try to speak American .
But don 't worry -- I don 't have trouble with English , as such .
I mean , it 's not my problem , it 's your language after all .
I am fine . After this presentation here at TED , I can simply go back to Switzerland , and you have to go on talking like this all the time .
So I 've been asked by the organizers to read from my book .
It 's called " Tidying Up Art " and it 's , as you can see , it 's more or less a picture book .
So the reading would be over very quickly .
But since I 'm here at TED , I decided to hold my talk here in a more modern way , in the spirit of TED here , and I managed to do some slides here for you .
I 'd like to show them around so we can just , you know -- Actually , I managed to prepare for you some enlarged pictures -- even better .
So Tidying Up Art , I mean , I have to say , that 's a relatively new term .
You won 't be familiar with it .
I mean , it 's a hobby of mine that I 've been indulging in for the last few years , and it all started out with this picture of the American artist , Donald Baechler I had hanging at home . I had to look at it every day and after a while I just couldn 't stand the mess anymore this guy was looking at all day long .
Yeah , I kind of felt sorry for him .
And it seemed to me even he felt really bad facing these unorganized red squares day after day .
So I decided to give him a little support , and brought some order into neatly stacking the blocks on top of each other .
Yeah . And I think he looks now less miserable .
And it was great . With this experience , I started to look more closely at modern art . Then I realized how , you know , the world of modern art is particularly topsy-turvy .
And I can show here a very good example .
It 's actually a simple one , but it 's a good one to start with .
It 's a picture by Paul Klee .
And we can see here very clearly , it 's a confusion of color .
Yeah . The artist doesn 't really seem to know where to put the different colors .
The various pictures here of the various elements of the picture -- the whole thing is unstructured .
We don 't know , maybe Mr. Klee was probably in a hurry , I mean -- -- maybe he had to catch a plane , or something .
We can see here he started out with orange , and then he already ran out of orange , and here we can see he decided to take a break for a square .
And I would like to show you here my tidied up version of this picture .
We can see now what was barely recognizable in the original : 17 red and orange squares are juxtaposed with just two green squares .
Yeah , that 's great .
So I mean , that 's just tidying up for beginners .
I would like to show you here a picture which is a bit more advanced .
What can you say ? What a mess .
I mean , you see , everything seems to have been scattered aimlessly around the space .
If my room back home had looked like this , my mother would have grounded me for three days .
So I 'd like to -- I wanted to reintroduce some structure into that picture .
And that 's really advanced tidying up .
Yeah , you 're right . Sometimes people clap at this point , but that 's actually more in Switzerland .
We Swiss are famous for chocolate and cheese . Our trains run on time .
We are only happy when things are in order .
But to go on , here is a very good example to see .
This is a picture by Joan Miro .
And yeah , we can see the artist has drawn a few lines and shapes and dropped them any old way onto a yellow background .
And yeah , it 's the sort of thing you produce when you 're doodling on the phone .
And this is my -- -- you can see now the whole thing takes up far less space .
It 's more economical and also more efficient .
With this method Mr. Miro could have saved canvas for another picture .
But I can see in your faces that you 're still a little bit skeptical .
So that you can just appreciate how serious I am about all this , I brought along the patents , the specifications for some of these works , because I 've had my working methods patented at the Eidgenössische Amt für Geistiges Eigentum in Bern , Switzerland .
I 'll just quote from the specification .
" Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht -- " It 's not finished yet .
" Laut den Kunstprüfer Dr. Albrecht Götz von Ohlenhusen wird die Verfahrensweise rechtlich geschützt welche die Kunst durch spezifisch aufgeräumte Regelmässigkeiten des allgemeinen Formenschatzes neue Wirkungen zu erzielen möglich wird . "
Ja , well I could have translated that , but you would have been none the wiser .
I 'm not sure myself what it means but it sounds good anyway .
I just realized it 's important how one introduces new ideas to people , that 's why these patents are sometimes necessary .
I would like to do a short test with you .
Everyone is sitting in quite an orderly fashion here this morning .
So I would like to ask you all to raise your right hand . Yeah .
The right hand is the one we write with , apart from the left-handers .
And now , I 'll count to three . I mean , it still looks very orderly to me .
Now , I 'll count to three , and on the count of three I 'd like you all to shake hands with the person behind you . OK ?
One , two , three .
You can see now , that 's a good example : even behaving in an orderly , systematic way can sometimes lead to complete chaos .
So we can also see that very clearly in this next painting .
This is a painting by the artist , Niki de Saint Phalle .
And I mean , in the original it 's completely unclear to see what this tangle of colors and shapes is supposed to depict .
But in the tidied up version , it 's plain to see that it 's a sunburnt woman playing volleyball .
Yeah , it 's a -- this one here , that 's much better .
That 's a picture by Keith Haring .
I think it doesn 't matter .
So , I mean , this picture has not even got a proper title .
It 's called " Untitled " and I think that 's appropriate .
So , in the tidied-up version we have a sort of Keith Haring spare parts shop .
This is Keith Haring looked at statistically .
One can see here quite clearly , you can see we have 25 pale green elements , of which one is in the form of a circle .
Or here , for example , we have 27 pink squares with only one pink curve .
I mean , that 's interesting . One could extend this sort of statistical analysis to cover all Mr. Haring 's various works , in order to establish in which period the artist favored pale green circles or pink squares .
And the artist himself could also benefit from this sort of listing procedure by using it to estimate how many pots of paint he 's likely to need in the future .
One can obviously also make combinations .
For example , with the Keith Haring circles and Kandinsky 's dots .
You can add them to all the squares of Paul Klee .
In the end , one has a list with which one then can arrange .
Then you categorize it , then you file it , put that file in a filing cabinet , put it in your office and you can make a living doing it .
Yeah , from my own experience . So I 'm -- Actually , I mean , here we have some artists that are a bit more structured . It 's not too bad .
This is Jasper Johns . We can see here he was practicing with his ruler .
But I think it could still benefit from more discipline .
And I think the whole thing adds up much better if you do it like this .
And here , that 's one of my favorites .
Tidying up Rene Magritte -- this is really fun .
You know , there is a -- I 'm always being asked what inspired me to embark on all this .
It goes back to a time when I was very often staying in hotels .
So once I had the opportunity to stay in a ritzy , five-star hotel .
And you know , there you had this little sign -- I put this little sign outside the door every morning that read , " Please tidy room . " I don 't know if you have them over here .
So actually , my room there hasn 't been tidied once daily , but three times a day .
So after a while I decided to have a little fun , and before leaving the room each day I 'd scatter a few things around the space .
Like books , clothes , toothbrush , etc . And it was great .
By the time I returned everything had always been neatly returned to its place .
But then one morning , I hang the same little sign onto that picture by Vincent van Gogh .
And you have to say this room hadn 't been tidied up since 1888 .
And when I returned it looked like this .
Yeah , at least it is now possible to do some vacuuming .
OK , I mean , I can see there are always people that like reacting that one or another picture hasn 't been properly tidied up . So we can make a short test with you .
This is a picture by Rene Magritte , and I 'd like you all to inwardly -- like in your head , that is -- to tidy that up . So it 's possible that some of you would make it like this .
Yeah ? I would actually prefer to do it more this way .
Some people would make apple pie out of it .
But it 's a very good example to see that the whole work was more of a handicraft endeavor that involved the very time-consuming job of cutting out the various elements and sticking them back in new arrangements .
And it 's not done , as many people imagine , with the computer , otherwise it would look like this .
So now I 've been able to tidy up pictures that I 've wanted to tidy up for a long time .
Here is a very good example . Take Jackson Pollock , for example .
It 's -- oh , no , it 's -- that 's a really hard one .
But after a while , I just decided here to go all the way and put the paint back into the cans .
Or you could go into three-dimensional art .
Here we have the fur cup by Meret Oppenheim .
Here I just brought it back to its original state .
But yeah , and it 's great , you can even go , you know -- Or we have this pointillist movement for those of you who are into art .
The pointillist movement is that kind of paintings where everything is broken down into dots and pixels .
And then I -- this sort of thing is ideal for tidying up .
So I once applied myself to the work of the inventor of that method , Georges Seurat , and I collected together all his dots .
And now they 're all in here .
You can count them afterwards , if you like .
You see , that 's the wonderful thing about the tidy up art idea : it 's new . So there is no existing tradition in it .
There is no textbooks , I mean , not yet , anyway .
I mean , it 's " the future we will create . "
But to round things up I would like to show you just one more .
This is the village square by Pieter Bruegel .
That 's how it looks like when you send everyone home .
Yeah , maybe you 're asking yourselves where old Bruegel 's people went ?
Of course , they 're not gone . They 're all here .
I just piled them up .
So I 'm -- yeah , actually I 'm kind of finished at that moment .
And for those who want to see more , I 've got my book downstairs in the bookshop .
And I 'm happy to sign it for you with any name of any artist .
But before leaving I would like to show you , I 'm working right now on another -- in a related field with my tidying up art method . I 'm working in a related field .
And I started to bring some order into some flags .
Here -- that 's just my new proposal here for the Union Jack .
And then maybe before I leave you ...
yeah , I think , after you have seen that I have to leave anyway .
Yeah , that was a hard one . I couldn 't find a way to tidy that up properly , so I just decided to make it a little bit more simpler .
Thank you very much .
Ruby Wax : What 's so funny about mental illness ?
Diseases of the body garner sympathy , says comedian Ruby Wax -- except those of the brain . Why is that ? With dazzling energy and humor , Wax , diagnosed a decade ago with clinical depression , urges us to put an end to the stigma of mental illness .
One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness , so if it was one , two , three , four , it 's you , sir .
You . Yeah .
With the weird teeth . And you next to him .
You know who you are .
Actually , that whole row isn 't right .
That 's not good . Hi . Yeah . Real bad . Don 't even look at me .
I am one of the one in four . Thank you .
I think I inherit it from my mother , who , used to crawl around the house on all fours .
She had two sponges in her hand , and then she had two tied to her knees . My mother was completely absorbent .
And she would crawl around behind me going , " Who brings footprints into a building ? ! "
So that was kind of a clue that things weren 't right .
So before I start , I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine , Sertraline , and Reboxetine , because without those few simple chemicals , I would not be vertical today .
So how did it start ?
My mental illness -- well , I 'm not even going to talk about my mental illness .
What am I going to talk about ? Okay .
I always dreamt that , when I had my final breakdown , it would be because I had a deep Kafkaesque existentialist revelation , or that maybe Cate Blanchett would play me and she would win an Oscar for it .
But that 's not what happened . I had my breakdown during my daughter 's sports day .
There were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car -- only the English -- eating their sausages . They loved their sausages .
Lord and Lady Rigor Mortis were nibbling on the tarmac , and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running , and all the mummies went , " Run ! Run Chlamydia ! Run ! "
" Run like the wind , Veruca ! Run ! "
And all the girlies , girlies running , running , running , everybody except for my daughter , who was just standing at the starting line , just waving , because she didn 't know she was supposed to run .
So I took to my bed for about a month , and when I woke up I found I was institutionalized , and when I saw the other inmates , I realized that I had found my people , my tribe .
Because they became my only friends , they became my friends , because very few people that I knew -- Well , I wasn 't sent a lot of cards or flowers . I mean , if I had had a broken leg or I was with child I would have been inundated , but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up .
Perk up .
Because I didn 't think of that .
Because , you know , the one thing , one thing that you get with this disease , this one comes with a package , is you get a real sense of shame , because your friends go , " Oh come on , show me the lump , show me the x-rays , " and of course you 've got nothing to show , so you 're , like , really disgusted with yourself because you 're thinking , " I 'm not being carpet-bombed . I don 't live in a township . "
So you start to hear these abusive voices , but you don 't hear one abusive voice , you hear about a thousand -- 100,000 abusive voices , like if the Devil had Tourette 's , that 's what it would sound like .
But we all know in here , you know , there is no Devil , there are no voices in your head .
You know that when you have those abusive voices , all those little neurons get together and in that little gap you get a real toxic " I want to kill myself " kind of chemical , and if you have that over and over again on a loop tape , you might have yourself depression .
Oh , and that 's not even the tip of the iceberg .
If you get a little baby , and you abuse it verbally , its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn 't grow , so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic .
If a soldier sees his friend blown up , his brain goes into such high alarm that he can 't actually put the experience into words , so he just feels the horror over and over again .
So here 's my question . My question is , how come when people have mental damage , it 's always an active imagination ?
How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy , except the brain ?
I 'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain , because I know you like that here at TED , so if you just give me a minute here , okay .
Okay , let me just say , there 's some good news .
There is some good news . First of all , let me say , we 've come a long , long way .
We started off as a teeny , teeny little one-celled amoeba , tiny , just sticking onto a rock , and now , voila , the brain .
Here we go .
This little baby has a lot of horsepower .
It comes completely conscious . It 's got state-of-the-art lobes .
We 've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world .
We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world .
Here we 've got a little bit of long-term memory , so , you know that night you want to forget , when you got really drunk ? Bye-bye ! Gone .
So actually , it 's filled with 100 billion neurons just zizzing away , electrically transmitting information , zizzing , zizzing . I 'm going to give you a little side view here .
I don 't know if you can get that here .
So , zizzing away , and so — — And for every one — I know , I drew this myself . Thank you .
For every one single neuron , you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it , and every time you learn something , or you have an experience , that bush grows , you know , that bush of information .
Can you imagine , every human being is carrying that equipment , even Paris Hilton ?
Go figure .
But I got a little bad news for you folks . I got some bad news .
This isn 't for the one in four . This is for the four in four .
We are not equipped for the 21st century .
Evolution did not prepare us for this . We just don 't have the bandwidth , and for people who say , oh , they 're having a nice day , they 're perfectly fine , they 're more insane than the rest of us .
Because I 'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution . Okay , let me just explain this to you .
When we were ancient man — — millions of years ago , and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator , okay ? — — we would — Thank you . I drew these myself .
Thank you very much . Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you . Anyway , we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol , and then we 'd kill or be killed , we 'd eat or we 'd be eaten , and then suddenly we 'd de-fuel , and we 'd go back to normal . Okay .
So the problem is , nowadays , with modern man — — when we feel in danger , we still fill up with our own chemical but because we can 't kill traffic wardens — — or eat estate agents , the fuel just stays in our body over and over , so we 're in a constant state of alarm , a constant state . And here 's another thing that happened .
About 150,000 years ago , when language came online , we started to put words to this constant emergency , so it wasn 't just , " Oh my God , there 's a saber-toothed tiger , " which could be , it was suddenly , " Oh my God , I didn 't send the email . Oh my God , my thighs are too fat .
Oh my God , everybody can see I 'm stupid . I didn 't get invited to the Christmas party ! "
So you 've got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane , so , you see what the problem is ? What once made you safe now drives you insane .
I 'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news , but somebody has to be .
Your pets are happier than you are .
So kitty cat , meow , happy happy happy , human beings , screwed .
Completely and utterly -- so , screwed .
But my point is , if we don 't talk about this stuff , and we don 't learn how to deal with our lives , it 's not going to be one in four . It 's going to be four in four who are really , really going to get ill in the upstairs department .
And while we 're at it , can we please stop the stigma ?
Thank you .
Thank you .
Daniel Reisel : The neuroscience of restorative justice
Daniel Reisel studies the brains of criminal psychopaths . And he asks a big question : Instead of warehousing these criminals , shouldn 't we be using what we know about the brain to help them rehabilitate ? Put another way : If the brain can grow new neural pathways after an injury … could we help the brain re-grow morality ?
I 'd like to talk today about how we can change our brains and our society .
Meet Joe .
Joe 's 32 years old and a murderer .
I met Joe 13 years ago on the lifer wing at Wormwood Scrubs high-security prison in London .
I 'd like you to imagine this place .
It looks and feels like it sounds : Wormwood Scrubs .
Built at the end of the Victorian Era by the inmates themselves , it is where England 's most dangerous prisoners are kept .
These individuals have committed acts of unspeakable evil .
And I was there to study their brains .
I was part of a team of researchers from University College London , on a grant from the U.K. department of health .
My task was to study a group of inmates who had been clinically diagnosed as psychopaths .
That meant they were the most callous and the most aggressive of the entire prison population .
What lay at the root of their behavior ?
Was there a neurological cause for their condition ?
And if there was a neurological cause , could we find a cure ?
So I 'd like to speak about change , and especially about emotional change .
Growing up , I was always intrigued by how people change .
My mother , a clinical psychotherapist , would occasionally see patients at home in the evening .
She would shut the door to the living room , and I imagined magical things happened in that room .
At the age of five or six I would creep up in my pajamas and sit outside with my ear glued to the door .
On more than one occasion , I fell asleep and they had to push me out of the way at the end of the session .
And I suppose that 's how I found myself walking into the secure interview room on my first day at Wormwood Scrubs .
Joe sat across a steel table and greeted me with this blank expression .
The prison warden , looking equally indifferent , said , " Any trouble , just press the red buzzer , and we 'll be around as soon as we can . "
I sat down .
The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me .
I looked up at the red buzzer far behind Joe on the opposite wall .
I looked at Joe .
Perhaps detecting my concern , he leaned forward , and said , as reassuringly as he could , " Ah , don 't worry about the buzzer , it doesn 't work anyway . "
Over the subsequent months , we tested Joe and his fellow inmates , looking specifically at their ability to categorize different images of emotion .
And we looked at their physical response to those emotions .
So , for example , when most of us look at a picture like this of somebody looking sad , we instantly have a slight , measurable physical response : increased heart rate , sweating of the skin .
Whilst the psychopaths in our study were able to describe the pictures accurately , they failed to show the emotions required .
They failed to show a physical response .
It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy .
So we wanted to look closer at this to use MRI to image their brains .
That turned out to be not such an easy task .
Imagine transporting a collection of clinical psychopaths across central London in shackles and handcuffs in rush hour , and in order to place each of them in an MRI scanner , you have to remove all metal objects , including shackles and handcuffs , and , as I learned , all body piercings .
After some time , however , we had a tentative answer .
These individuals were not just the victims of a troubled childhood .
There was something else .
People like Joe have a deficit in a brain area called the amygdala .
The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ deep within each of the hemispheres of the brain .
It is thought to be key to the experience of empathy .
Normally , the more empathic a person is , the larger and more active their amygdala is .
Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala , which likely led to their lack of empathy and to their immoral behavior .
So let 's take a step back .
Normally , acquiring moral behavior is simply part of growing up , like learning to speak .
At the age of six months , virtually every one of us is able to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects .
At the age of 12 months , most children are able to imitate the purposeful actions of others .
So for example , your mother raises her hands to stretch , and you imitate her behavior .
At first , this isn 't perfect .
I remember my cousin Sasha , two years old at the time , looking through a picture book and licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand , licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand .
Bit by bit , we build the foundations of the social brain so that by the time we 're three , four years old , most children , not all , have acquired the ability to understand the intentions of others , another prerequisite for empathy .
The fact that this developmental progression is universal , irrespective of where you live in the world or which culture you inhabit , strongly suggests that the foundations of moral behavior are inborn .
If you doubt this , try , as I 've done , to renege on a promise you 've made to a four-year-old .
You will find that the mind of a four-year old is not naïve in the slightest .
It is more akin to a Swiss army knife with fixed mental modules finely honed during development and a sharp sense of fairness .
The early years are crucial .
There seems to be a window of opportunity , after which mastering moral questions becomes more difficult , like adults learning a foreign language .
That 's not to say it 's impossible .
A recent , wonderful study from Stanford University showed that people who have played a virtual reality game in which they took on the role of a good and helpful superhero actually became more caring and helpful towards others afterwards .
Now I 'm not suggesting we endow criminals with superpowers , but I am suggesting that we need to find ways to get Joe and people like him to change their brains and their behavior , for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us .
So can brains change ?
For over 100 years , neuroanatomists and later neuroscientists held the view that after initial development in childhood , no new brain cells could grow in the adult human brain .
The brain could only change within certain set limits .
That was the dogma .
But then , in the 1990s , studies starting showing , following the lead of Elizabeth Gould at Princeton and others , studies started showing the evidence of neurogenesis , the birth of new brain cells in the adult mammalian brain , first in the olfactory bulb , which is responsible for our sense of smell , then in the hippocampus involving short-term memory , and finally in the amygdala itself .
In order to understand how this process works , I left the psychopaths and joined a lab in Oxford specializing in learning and development .
Instead of psychopaths , I studied mice , because the same pattern of brain responses appears across many different species of social animals .
So if you rear a mouse in a standard cage , a shoebox , essentially , with cotton wool , alone and without much stimulation , not only does it not thrive , but it will often develop strange , repetitive behaviors .
This naturally sociable animal will lose its ability to bond with other mice , even becoming aggressive when introduced to them .
However , mice reared in what we called an enriched environment , a large habitation with other mice with wheels and ladders and areas to explore , demonstrate neurogenesis , the birth of new brain cells , and as we showed , they also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks .
Now , they don 't develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street , but their improved environment results in healthy , sociable behavior .
Mice reared in a standard cage , by contrast , not dissimilar , you might say , from a prison cell , have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain .
It is now clear that the amygdala of mammals , including primates like us , can show neurogenesis .
In some areas of the brain , more than 20 percent of cells are newly formed .
We 're just beginning to understand what exact function these cells have , but what it implies is that the brain is capable of extraordinary change way into adulthood .
However , our brains are also exquisitely sensitive to stress in our environment .
Stress hormones , glucocorticoids , released by the brain , suppress the growth of these new cells .
The more stress , the less brain development , which in turn causes less adaptability and causes higher stress levels .
This is the interplay between nature and nurture in real time in front of our eyes .
When you think about it , it is ironic that our current solution for people with stressed amygdalae is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth .
Of course , imprisonment is a necessary part of the criminal justice system and of protecting society .
Our research does not suggest that criminals should submit their MRI scans as evidence in court and get off the hook because they 've got a faulty amygdala .
The evidence is actually the other way .
Because our brains are capable of change , we need to take responsibility for our actions , and they need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation .
One way such rehabilitation might work is through restorative justice programs .
Here victims , if they choose to participate , and perpetrators meet face to face in safe , structured encounters , and the perpetrator is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions , and the victim plays an active role in the process .
In such a setting , the perpetrator can see , perhaps for the first time , the victim as a real person with thoughts and feelings and a genuine emotional response .
This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration .
Such programs won 't work for everyone , but for many , it could be a way to break the frozen sea within .
So what can we do now ?
How can we apply this knowledge ?
I 'd like to leave you with three lessons that I learned .
The first thing that I learned was that we need to change our mindset .
Since Wormwood Scrubs was built 130 years ago , society has advanced in virtually every aspect , in the way we run our schools , our hospitals .
Yet the moment we speak about prisons , it 's as though we 're back in Dickensian times , if not medieval times .
For too long , I believe , we 've allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human nature cannot change , and as a society , it 's costing us dearly .
We know that the brain is capable of extraordinary change , and the best way to achieve that , even in adults , is to change and modulate our environment .
The second thing I have learned is that we need to create an alliance of people who believe that science is integral to bringing about social change .
It 's easy enough for a neuroscientist to place a high-security inmate in an MRI scanner .
Well actually , that turns out not to be so easy , but ultimately what we want to show is whether we 're able to reduce the reoffending rates .
In order to answer complex questions like that , we need people of different backgrounds -- lab-based scientists and clinicians , social workers and policy makers , philanthropists and human rights activists — to work together .
Finally , I believe we need to change our own amygdalae , because this issue goes to the heart not just of who Joe is , but who we are .
We need to change our view of Joe as someone wholly irredeemable , because if we see Joe as wholly irredeemable , how is he going to see himself as any different ?
In another decade , Joe will be released from Wormwood Scrubs .
Will he be among the 70 percent of inmates who end up reoffending and returning to the prison system ?
Wouldn 't it be better if , while serving his sentence , Joe was able to train his amygdala , which would stimulate the growth of new brain cells and connections , so that he will be able to face the world once he gets released ?
Surely , that would be in the interest of all of us .
Thank you .
Trita Parsi : Iran and Israel : Peace is possible
Iran and Israel : two nations with tense relations that seem existentially at odds . But for all their antagonistic rhetoric , there is a recent hidden history of collaboration , even friendship . In an informative talk , Trita Parsi shows how an unlikely strategic alliance in the past could mean peace in the future for these two feuding countries .
" Iran is Israel 's best friend , and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran . "
Believe it or not , this is a quote from an Israeli prime minister , but it 's not Ben-Gurion or Golda Meir from the era of the Shah .
It 's actually from Yitzhak Rabin .
The year is 1987 .
Ayatollah Khomeini is still alive , and much like Ahmadinejad today , he 's using the worst rhetoric against Israel .
Yet , Rabin referred to Iran as a geostrategic friend .
Today , when we hear the threats of war and the high rhetoric , we 're oftentimes led to believe that this is yet another one of those unsolvable Middle Eastern conflicts with roots as old as the region itself .
Nothing could be further from the truth , and I hope today to show you why that is .
The relations between the Iranian and the Jewish people throughout history has actually been quite positive , starting in 539 B.C. , when King Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity .
A third of the Jewish population stayed in Babylonia .
They 're today 's Iraqi Jews .
A third migrated to Persia .
They 're today 's Iranian Jews , still 25,000 of them living in Iran , making them the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel itself .
And a third returned to historic Palestine , did the second rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem , financed , incidentally , by Persian tax money .
But even in modern times , relations have been close at times .
Rabin 's statement was a reflection of decades of security and intelligence collaboration between the two , which in turn was born out of perception of common threats .
Both states feared the Soviet Union and strong Arab states such as Egypt and Iraq .
And , in addition , the Israeli doctrine of the periphery , the idea that Israel 's security was best achieved by creating alliances with the non-Arab states in the periphery of the region in order to balance the Arab states in its vicinity .
Now , from the Shah 's perspective , though , he wanted to keep this as secret as possible , so when Yitzhak Rabin , for instance , traveled to Iran in the ' 70s , he usually wore a wig so that no one would recognize him .
The Iranians built a special tarmac at the airport in Tehran , far away from the central terminal , so that no one would notice the large number of Israeli planes shuttling between Tel Aviv and Tehran .
Now , did all of this end with the Islamic revolution in 1979 ?
In spite of the very clear anti-Israeli ideology of the new regime , the geopolitical logic for their collaboration lived on , because they still had common threats .
And when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 , Israel feared an Iraqi victory and actively helped Iran by selling it arms and providing it with spare parts for Iran 's American weaponry at a moment when Iran was very vulnerable because of an American arms embargo that Israel was more than happy to violate .
In fact , back in the 1980s , it was Israel that lobbied Washington to talk to Iran , to sell arms to Iran , and not pay attention to Iran 's anti-Israeli ideology .
And this , of course , climaxed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s .
But with the end of the Cold War came also the end of the Israeli-Iranian cold peace .
Suddenly , the two common threats that had pushed them closer together throughout decades , more or less evaporated .
The Soviet Union collapsed , Iraq was defeated , and a new environment was created in the region in which both of them felt more secure , but they were also now left unchecked .
Without Iraq balancing Iran , Iran could now become a threat , some in Israel argued .
In fact , the current dynamic that you see between Iran and Israel has its roots more so in the geopolitical reconfiguration of the region after the Cold War than in the events of 1979 , because at this point , Iran and Israel emerge as two of the most powerful states in the region , and rather than viewing each other as potential security partners , they increasingly came to view each other as rivals and competitors .
So Israel , who in the 1980s lobbied for and improved U.S.-Iran relations now feared a U.S.-Iran rapprochement , thinking that it would come at Israel 's security interests ' expense , and instead sought to put Iran in increased isolation .
Ironically , this was happening at a time when Iran was more interested in peacemaking with Washington than to see to Israel 's destruction .
Iran had put itself in isolation because of its radicalism , and after having helped the United States indirectly in the war against Iraq in 1991 , the Iranians were hoping that they would be rewarded by being included in the post-war security architecture of the region .
But Washington chose to ignore Iran 's outreach , as it would a decade later in Afghanistan , and instead moved to intensify Iran 's isolation , and it is at this point , around 1993 , ' 94 , that Iran begins to translate its anti-Israeli ideology into operational policy .
The Iranians believed that whatever they did , even if they moderated their policies , the U.S. would continue to seek Iran 's isolation , and the only way Iran could compel Washington to change its position was by imposing a cost on the U.S. if it didn 't .
The easiest target was the peace process , and now the Iranian ideological bark was to be accompanied by a nonconventional bite , and Iran began supporting extensively Palestinian Islamist groups that it previously had shunned .
In some ways , this sounds paradoxical , but according to Martin Indyk of the Clinton administration , the Iranians had not gotten it entirely wrong , because the more peace there would be between Israel and Palestine , the U.S. believed , the more Iran would get isolated .
The more Iran got isolated , the more peace there would be .
So according to Indyk , and these are his words , the Iranians had an interest to do us in on the peace process in order to defeat our policy of containment .
To defeat our policy of containment , not about ideology .
But throughout even the worst times of their entanglement , all sides have reached out to each other .
Netanyahu , when he got elected in 1996 , reached out to the Iranians to see if there were any ways that the doctrine of the periphery could be resurrected .
Tehran was not interested .
A few years later , the Iranians sent a comprehensive negotiation proposal to the Bush administration , a proposal that revealed that there was some potential of getting Iran and Israel back on terms again .
The Bush administration did not even respond .
All sides have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity .
But this is not an ancient conflict .
This is not even an ideological conflict .
The ebbs and flows of hostility have not shifted with ideological zeal , but rather with changes in the geopolitical landscape .
When Iran and Israel 's security imperatives dictated collaboration , they did so in spite of lethal ideological opposition to each other .
When Iran 's ideological impulses collided with its strategic interests , the strategic interests always prevailed .
This is good news , because it means that neither war nor enmity is a foregone conclusion .
But some want war .
Some believe or say that it 's 1938 , Iran is Germany , and Ahmadinejad is Hitler .
If we accept this to be true , that indeed it is 1938 , Iran is Germany , Ahmadinejad is Hitler , then the question we have to ask ourself is , who wishes to play the role of Neville Chamberlain ?
Who will risk peace ?
This is an analogy that is deliberately aimed at eliminating diplomacy , and when you eliminate diplomacy , you make war inevitable .
In an ideological conflict , there can be no truce , no draw , no compromise , only victory or defeat .
But rather than making war inevitable by viewing this as ideological , we would be wise to seek ways to make peace possible .
Iran and Israel 's conflict is a new phenomenon , only a few decades old in a history of 2,500 years , and precisely because its roots are geopolitical , it means that solutions can be found , compromises can be struck , however difficult it yet may be .
After all , it was Yitzhak Rabin himself who said , " You don 't make peace with your friends .
You make it with your enemies . "
Thank you .
Laurie Garrett : Lessons from the 1918 flu
In 2007 , as the world worried about a possible avian flu epidemic , Laurie Garrett , author of " The Coming Plague , " gave this powerful talk to a small TED University audience . Her insights from past pandemics are suddenly more relevant than ever .
So the first question is , why do we need to even worry about a pandemic threat ?
What is it that we 're concerned about ?
When I say " we , " I 'm at the Council on Foreign Relations .
We 're concerned in the national security community , and of course in the biology community and the public health community .
While globalization has increased travel , it 's made it necessary that everybody be everywhere , all the time , all over the world .
And that means that your microbial hitchhikers are moving with you .
So a plague outbreak in Surat , India becomes not an obscure event , but a globalized event -- a globalized concern that has changed the risk equation .
Katrina showed us that we cannot completely depend on government to have readiness in hand , to be capable of handling things .
Indeed , an outbreak would be multiple Katrinas at once .
Our big concern at the moment is a virus called H5N1 flu -- some of you call it bird flu -- which first emerged in southern China , in the mid-1990s , but we didn 't know about it until 1997 .
At the end of last Christmas only 13 countries had seen H5N1 .
But we 're now up to 55 countries in the world , have had this virus emerge , in either birds , or people or both .
In the bird outbreaks we now can see that pretty much the whole world has seen this virus except the Americas .
And I 'll get into why we 've so far been spared in a moment .
In domestic birds , especially chickens , it 's 100 percent lethal .
It 's one of the most lethal things we 've seen in circulation in the world in any recent centuries .
And we 've dealt with it by killing off lots and lots and lots of chickens , and unfortunately often not reimbursing the peasant farmers with the result that there 's cover-up .
It 's also carried on migration patterns of wild migratory aquatic birds .
There has been this centralized event in a place called Lake Chenghai , China .
Two years ago the migrating birds had a multiple event where thousands died because of a mutation occurring in the virus , which made the species range broaden dramatically .
So that birds going to Siberia , to Europe , and to Africa carried the virus , which had not previously been possible .
We 're now seeing outbreaks in human populations -- so far , fortunately , small events , tiny outbreaks , occasional clusters .
The virus has mutated dramatically in the last two years to form two distinct families , if you will , of the H5N1 viral tree with branches in them , and with different attributes that are worrying .
So what 's concerning us ? Well , first of all , at no time in history have we succeeded in making in a timely fashion , a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people .
It 's not going to do us very much good in a global pandemic .
You 've heard about the vaccine we 're stockpiling .
But nobody believes it will actually be particularly effective if we have a real outbreak .
So one thought is : after 9 / 11 , when the airports closed , our flu season was delayed by two weeks .
So the thought is , hey , maybe what we should do is just immediately -- we hear there is H5N1 spreading from human to human , the virus has mutated to be a human-to-human transmitter -- let 's shut down the airports .
However , huge supercomputer analyses , done of the likely effectiveness of this , show that it won 't buy us much time at all .
And of course it will be hugely disruptive in preparation plans .
For example , all masks are made in China .
How do you get them mobilized around the world if you 've shut all the airports down ?
How do you get the vaccines moved around the world and the drugs moved , and whatever may or not be available that would work .
So it turns out that shutting down the airports is counterproductive .
We 're worried because this virus , unlike any other flu we 've ever studied , can be transmitted by eating raw meat of the infected animals .
We 've seen transmission to wild cats and domestic cats , and now also domestic pet dogs .
And in experimental feedings to rodents and ferrets , we found that the animals exhibit symptoms never seen with flu : seizures , central nervous system disorders , partial paralysis .
This is not your normal garden-variety flu .
It mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus , the last great pandemic , in that it also jumped directly from birds to people .
We had evolution over time , and this unbelievable mortality rate in human beings : 55 percent of people who have become infected with H5N1 have , in fact , succumbed .
And we don 't have a huge number of people who got infected and never developed disease .
In experimental feeding in monkeys you can see that it actually downregulates a specific immune system modulator .
The result is that what kills you is not the virus directly , but your own immune system overreacting , saying , " Whatever this is so foreign I 'm going berserk . "
The result : most of the deaths have been in people under 30 years of age , robustly healthy young adults .
We have seen human-to-human transmission in at least three clusters -- fortunately involving very intimate contact , still not putting the world at large at any kind of risk .
Alright , so I 've got you nervous .
Now you probably assume , well the governments are going to do something .
And we have spent a lot of money .
Most of the spending in the Bush administration has actually been more related to the anthrax results and bio-terrorism threat .
But a lot of money has been thrown out at the local level and at the federal level to look at infectious diseases .
End result : only 15 states have been certified to be able to do mass distribution of vaccine and drugs in a pandemic .
Half the states would run out of hospital beds in the first week , maybe two weeks .
And 40 states already have an acute nursing shortage .
Add on pandemic threat , you 're in big trouble .
So what have people been doing with this money ?
Exercises , drills , all over the world .
Let 's pretend there 's a pandemic .
Let 's everybody run around and play your role .
Main result is that there is tremendous confusion .
Most of these people don 't actually know what their job will be .
And the bottom line , major thing that has come through in every single drill : nobody knows who 's in charge .
Nobody knows the chain of command .
If it were Los Angeles , is it the mayor , the governor , the President of the United States , the head of Homeland Security ?
In fact , the federal government says it 's a guy called the Principle Federal Officer , who happens to be with TSA .
The government says the federal responsibility will basically be about trying to keep the virus out , which we all know is impossible , and then to mitigate the impact primarily on our economy .
The rest is up to your local community .
Everything is about your town , where you live .
Well how good a city council you have , how good a mayor you have -- that 's who 's going to be in charge .
Most local facilities would all be competing to try and get their hands on their piece of the federal stockpile of a drug called Tamiflu , which may or may not be helpful -- I 'll get into that -- of available vaccines , and any other treatments , and masks , and anything that 's been stockpiled .
And you 'll have massive competition .
Now we did purchase a vaccine , you 've probably all heard about it , made by Sanofi-Aventis .
Unfortunately it 's made against the current form of H5N1 .
We know the virus will mutate . It will be a different virus .
The vaccine will probably be useless .
So here 's where the decisions come in .
You 're the mayor of your local town .
Let 's see , should we order that all pets be kept indoors ?
Germany did that when H5N1 appeared in Germany last year , in order to minimize the spread between households by household cats , dogs and so on .
What do we do when we don 't have any containment rooms with reverse air that will allow the healthcare workers to take care of patients ?
These are in Hong Kong ; we have nothing like that here .
What about quarantine ?
During the SARS epidemic in Beijing quarantine did seem to help .
We have no uniform policies regarding quarantine across the United States .
And some states have differential policies , county by county .
But what about the no-brainer things ? Should we close all the schools ?
Well then what about all the workers ? They won 't go to work if their kids aren 't in school .
Encouraging telecommuting ? What works ?
Well the British government did a model of telecommuting .
Six weeks they had all people in the banking industry pretend a pandemic was underway .
What they found was , the core functions -- you know you still sort of had banks , but you couldn 't get people to put money in the ATM machines .
Nobody was processing the credit cards .
Your insurance payments didn 't go through .
And basically the economy would be in a disaster state of affairs .
And that 's just office workers , bankers .
We don 't know how important hand washing is for flu -- shocking . One assumes it 's a good idea to wash your hands a lot .
But actually in scientific community there is great debate about what percentage of flu transmission between people is from sneezing and coughing and what percentage is on your hands .
The Institute of Medicine tried to look at the masking question .
Can we figure out a way , since we know we won 't have enough masks because we don 't make them in America anymore , they 're all made in China -- do we need N95 ? A state-of-the-art , top-of-the-line , must-be-fitted-to-your-face mask ?
Or can we get away with some different kinds of masks ?
In the SARS epidemic , we learned in Hong Kong that most of transmission was because people were removing their masks improperly .
And their hand got contaminated with the outside of the mask , and then they rubbed their nose . Bingo ! They got SARS .
It wasn 't flying microbes .
If you go online right now , you 'll get so much phony-baloney information .
You 'll end up buying -- this is called an N95 mask . Ridiculous .
We don 't actually have a standard for what should be the protective gear for the first responders , the people who will actually be there on the front lines .
And Tamiflu . You 've probably heard of this drug , made by Hoffmann-La Roche , patented drug .
There is some indication that it may buy you some time in the midst of an outbreak .
Should you take Tamiflu for a long period of time , well , one of the side effects is suicidal ideations .
A public health survey analyzed the effect that large-scale Tamiflu use would have , actually shows it counteractive to public health measures , making matters worse .
And here is the other interesting thing : when a human being ingests Tamiflu , only 20 percent is metabolized appropriately to be an active compound in the human being .
The rest turns into a stable compound , which survives filtration into the water systems , thereby exposing the very aquatic birds that would carry flu and providing them a chance to breed resistant strains .
And we now have seen Tamiflu-resistant strains in both Vietnam in person-to-person transmission , and in Egypt in person-to-person transmission .
So I personally think that our life expectancy for Tamiflu as an effective drug is very limited -- very limited indeed .
Nevertheless most of the governments have based their whole flu policies on building stockpiles of Tamiflu .
Russia has actually stockpiled enough for 95 percent of all Russians .
We 've stockpiled enough for 30 percent .
When I say enough , that 's two weeks worth .
And then you 're on your own because the pandemic is going to last for 18 to 24 months .
Some of the poorer countries that have had the most experience with H5N1 have built up stockpiles ; they 're already expired . They are already out of date .
What do we know from 1918 , the last great pandemic ?
The federal government abdicated most responsibility .
And so we ended up with this wild patchwork of regulations all over America .
Every city , county , state did their own thing .
And the rules and the belief systems were wildly disparate .
In some cases all schools , all churches , all public venues were closed .
The pandemic circulated three times in 18 months in the absence of commercial air travel .
The second wave was the mutated , super-killer wave .
And in the first wave we had enough healthcare workers .
But by the time the second wave hit it took such a toll among the healthcare workers that we lost most of our doctors and nurses that were on the front lines .
Overall we lost 700,000 people .
The virus was 100 percent lethal to pregnant women and we don 't actually know why .
Most of the death toll was 15 to 40 year-olds -- robustly healthy young adults .
It was likened to the plague .
We don 't actually know how many people died .
The low-ball estimate is 35 million .
This was based on European and North American data .
A new study by Chris Murray at Harvard shows that if you look at the databases that were kept by the Brits in India , there was a 31-fold greater death rate among the Indians .
So there is a strong belief that in places of poverty the death toll was far higher .
And that a more likely toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 million people before we had commercial air travel .
So are we ready ?
As a nation , no we 're not .
And I think even those in the leadership would say that is the case , that we still have a long ways to go .
So what does that mean for you ? Well the first thing is , I wouldn 't start building up personal stockpiles of anything -- for yourself , your family , or your employees -- unless you 've really done your homework .
What mask works , what mask doesn 't work .
How many masks do you need ?
The Institute of Medicine study felt that you could not recycle masks .
Well if you think it 's going to last 18 months , are you going to buy 18 months worth of masks for every single person in your family ?
We don 't know -- again with Tamiflu , the number one side effect of Tamiflu is flu-like symptoms .
So then how can you tell who in your family has the flu if everybody is taking Tamiflu ?
If you expand that out to think of a whole community , or all your employees in your company , you begin to realize how limited the Tamiflu option might be .
Everybody has come up to me and said , well I 'll stockpile water or , I 'll stockpile food , or what have you .
But really ? Do you really have a place to stockpile 18 months worth of food ? Twenty-four months worth of food ?
Do you want to view the pandemic threat the way back in the 1950s people viewed the civil defense issue , and build your own little bomb shelter for pandemic flu ?
I don 't think that 's rational .
I think it 's about having to be prepared as communities , not as individuals -- being prepared as nation , being prepared as state , being prepared as town .
And right now most of the preparedness is deeply flawed .
And I hope I 've convinced you of that , which means that the real job is go out and say to your local leaders , and your national leaders , " Why haven 't you solved these problems ?
Why are you still thinking that the lessons of Katrina do not apply to flu ? "
And put the pressure where the pressure needs to be put .
But I guess the other thing to add is , if you do have employees , and you do have a company , I think you have certain responsibilities to demonstrate that you are thinking ahead for them , and you are trying to plan .
At a minimum the British banking plan showed that telecommuting can be helpful .
It probably does reduce exposure because people are not coming into the office and coughing on each other , or touching common objects and sharing things via their hands .
But can you sustain your company that way ?
Well if you have a dot-com , maybe you can .
Otherwise you 're in trouble .
Happy to take your questions .
Audience member : What factors determine the duration of a pandemic ?
Laurie Garret : What factors determine the duration of a pandemic , we don 't really know .
I could give you a bunch of flip , this , that , and the other .
But I would say that honestly we don 't know .
Clearly the bottom line is the virus eventually attenuates , and ceases to be a lethal virus to humanity , and finds other hosts .
But we don 't really know how and why that happens .
It 's a very complicated ecology .
Audience member : What kind of triggers are you looking for ?
You know way more than any of us .
To say ahh , if this happens then we are going to have a pandemic ?
LG : The moment that you see any evidence of serious human-to-human to transmission .
Not just intimately between family members who took care of an ailing sister or brother , but a community infected -- spread within a school , spread within a dormitory , something of that nature .
Then I think that there is universal agreement now , at WHO all the way down : Send out the alert .
Audience member : Some research has indicated that statins can be helpful .
Can you talk about that ?
LG : Yeah . There is some evidence that taking Lipitor and other common statins for cholesterol control may decrease your vulnerability to influenza .
But we do not completely understand why .
The mechanism isn 't clear .
And I don 't know that there is any way responsibly for someone to start medicating their children with their personal supply of Lipitor or something of that nature .
We have absolutely no idea what that would do .
You might be causing some very dangerous outcomes in your children , doing such a thing .
Audience member : How far along are we in being able to determine whether someone is actually carrying , whether somebody has this before the symptoms are full-blown ?
LG : Right . So I have for a long time said that what we really needed was a rapid diagnostic .
And our Centers for Disease Control has labeled a test they developed a rapid diagnostic .
It takes 24 hours in a very highly developed laboratory , in highly skilled hands .
I 'm thinking dipstick .
You could do it to your own kid . It changes color .
It tells you if you have H5N1 .
In terms of where we are in science with DNA identification capacities and so on , it 's not that far off .
But we 're not there . And there hasn 't been the kind of investment to get us there .
Audience member : In the 1918 flu I understand that they theorized that there was some attenuation of the virus when it made the leap into humans .
Is that likely , do you think , here ?
I mean 100 percent death rate is pretty severe .
LG : Um yeah . So we don 't actually know what the lethality was of the 1918 strain to wild birds before it jumped from birds to humans .
It 's curious that there is no evidence of mass die-offs of chickens or household birds across America before the human pandemic happened .
That may be because those events were occurring on the other side of the world where nobody was paying attention .
But the virus clearly went through one round around the world in a mild enough form that the British army in World War I actually certified that it was not a threat and would not affect the outcome of the war .
And after circulating around the world came back in a form that was tremendously lethal .
What percentage of infected people were killed by it ?
Again we don 't really know for sure .
It 's clear that if you were malnourished to begin with , you had a weakened immune system , you lived in poverty in India or Africa , your likelihood of dying was far greater .
But we don 't really know .
Audience member : One of the things I 've heard is that the real death cause when you get a flu is the associated pneumonia , and that a pneumonia vaccine may offer you 50 percent better chance of survival .
LG : For a long time , researchers in emerging diseases were kind of dismissive of the pandemic flu threat on the grounds that back in 1918 they didn 't have antibiotics .
And that most people who die of regular flu -- which in regular flu years is about 360,000 people worldwide , most of them senior citizens -- and they die not of the flu but because the flu gives an assault to their immune system .
And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria , streptococcus and boom , they get a bacterial pneumonia .
But it turns out that in 1918 that was not the case at all .
And so far in the H5N1 cases in people , similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all .
It 's this absolutely phenomenal disruption of the immune system that is the key to why people die of this virus .
And I would just add we saw the same thing with SARS .
So what 's going on here is your body says , your immune system sends out all its sentinels and says , " I don 't know what the heck this is .
We 've never seen anything even remotely like this before . "
It won 't do any good to bring in the sharpshooters because those antibodies aren 't here .
And it won 't do any good to bring in the tanks and the artillery because those T-cells don 't recognize it either .
So we 're going to have to go all-out thermonuclear response , stimulate the total cytokine cascade .
The whole immune system swarms into the lungs .
And yes they die , drowning in their own fluids , of pneumonia .
But it 's not bacterial pneumonia .
And it 's not a pneumonia that would respond to a vaccine .
And I think my time is up . I thank you all for your attention .
Ian Ritchie : The day I turned down Tim Berners-Lee
Imagine it 's late 1990 , and you 've just met a nice young man named Tim Berners-Lee , who starts telling you about his proposed system called the World Wide Web . Ian Ritchie was there . And ... he didn 't buy it . A short story about information , connectivity and learning from mistakes .
Well we all know the World Wide Web has absolutely transformed publishing , broadcasting , commerce and social connectivity , but where did it all come from ?
And I 'll quote three people : Vannevar Bush , Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee .
So let 's just run through these guys .
This is Vannevar Bush .
Vannevar Bush was the U.S. government 's chief scientific adviser during the war .
And in 1945 , he published an article in a magazine called Atlantic Monthly .
And the article was called " As We May Think . "
And what Vannevar Bush was saying was the way we use information is broken .
We don 't work in terms of libraries and catalog systems and so forth .
The brain works by association .
With one item in its thought , it snaps instantly to the next item .
And the way information is structured is totally incapable of keeping up with this process .
And so he suggested a machine , and he called it the memex .
And the memex would link information , one piece of information to a related piece of information and so forth .
Now this was in 1945 .
A computer in those days was something the secret services used to use for code breaking .
And nobody knew anything about it .
So this was before the computer was invented .
And he proposed this machine called the memex .
And he had a platform where you linked information to other information , and then you could call it up at will .
So spinning forward , one of the guys who read this article was a guy called Doug Engelbart , and he was a U.S. Air Force officer .
And he was reading it in their library in the Far East .
And he was so inspired by this article , it kind of directed the rest of his life .
And by the mid-60s , he was able to put this into action when he worked at the Stanford Research Lab in California .
He built a system .
The system was designed to augment human intelligence , it was called .
And in a premonition of today 's world of cloud computing and softwares of service , his system was called NLS for oN-Line System .
And this is Doug Engelbart .
He was giving a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in 1968 .
What he showed -- he sat on a stage like this , and he demonstrated this system .
He had his head mic like I 've got .
And he works this system .
And you can see , he 's working between documents and graphics and so forth .
And he 's driving it all with this platform here , with a five-finger keyboard and the world 's first computer mouse , which he specially designed in order to do this system .
So this is where the mouse came from as well .
So this is Doug Engelbart .
The trouble with Doug Engelbart 's system was that the computers in those days cost several million pounds .
So for a personal computer , a few million pounds was like having a personal jet plane ; it wasn 't really very practical .
But spin on to the 80s when personal computers did arrive , then there was room for this kind of system on personal computers .
And my company , OWL built a system called Guide for the Apple Macintosh .
And we delivered the world 's first hypertext system .
And this began to get a head of steam .
Apple introduced a thing called HyperCard , and they made a bit of a fuss about it .
They had a 12-page supplement in the Wall Street Journal the day it launched .
The magazines started to cover it .
Byte magazine and Communications at the ACM had special issues covering hypertext .
We developed a PC version of this product as well as the Macintosh version .
And our PC version became quite mature .
These are some examples of this system in action in the late 80s .
You were able to deliver documents , were able to do it over networks .
We developed a system such that it had a markup language based on html .
We called it hml : hypertext markup language .
And the system was capable of doing very , very large documentation systems over computer networks .
So I took this system to a trade show in Versailles near Paris in late November 1990 .
And I was approached by a nice young man called Tim Berners-Lee who said , " Are you Ian Ritchie ? " and I said , " Yeah . "
And he said , " I need to talk to you . "
And he told me about his proposed system called the World Wide Web .
And I thought , well , that 's got a pretentious name , especially since the whole system ran on his computer in his office .
But he was completely convinced that his World Wide Web would take over the world one day .
And he tried to persuade me to write the browser for it , because his system didn 't have any graphics or fonts or layout or anything ; it was just plain text .
I thought , well , you know , interesting , but a guy from CERN , he 's not going to do this .
So we didn 't do it .
In the next couple of years , the hypertext community didn 't recognize him either .
In 1992 , his paper was rejected for the Hypertext Conference .
In 1993 , there was a table at the conference in Seattle , and a guy called Marc Andreessen was demonstrating his little browser for the World Wide Web .
And I saw it , and I thought , yep , that 's it .
And the very next year , in 1994 , we had the conference here in Edinburgh , and I had no opposition in having Tim Berners-Lee as the keynote speaker .
So that puts me in pretty illustrious company .
There was a guy called Dick Rowe who was at Decca Records and turned down The Beatles .
There was a guy called Gary Kildall who went flying his plane when IBM came looking for an operating system for the IBM PC , and he wasn 't there , so they went back to see Bill Gates .
And the 12 publishers who turned down J.K. Rowling 's Harry Potter , I guess .
On the other hand , there 's Marc Andreessen who wrote the world 's first browser for the World Wide Web .
And according to Fortune magazine , he 's worth 700 million dollars .
But is he happy ?
Frans de Waal : Moral behavior in animals
What happens when two monkeys are paid unequally ? Fairness , reciprocity , empathy , cooperation -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait . But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests , on primates and other mammals , that show how many of these moral traits all of us share .
I was born in Den Bosch , where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after .
And so I 've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century .
And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion 's influence was waning , and he was sort of wondering , I think , what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion .
And so he painted this famous painting , " The Garden of Earthly Delights , " which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall , or being humanity without any Fall at all .
And so it makes you wonder , what would happen if we hadn 't tasted the fruit of knowledge , so to speak , and what kind of morality would we have ?
Much later , as a student , I went to a very different garden , a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees .
This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee .
And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power hungry and wrote a book about it .
And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition .
I painted a whole picture of the animal kingdom , and humanity included , was that deep down we are competitors , we are aggressive , we 're all out for our own profit basically .
This is the launch of my book .
I 'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it , but they surely seemed interested in the book .
Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on , I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights .
And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight .
They ended up in a tree , and one of them holds out a hand to the other .
And about a second after I took the picture , they came together in the fork of the tree and they kissed and embraced each other .
Now this is very interesting because at the time everything was about competition and aggression , and so it wouldn 't make any sense .
The only thing that matters is that you win or that you lose .
But why would you reconcile after a fight ?
That doesn 't make any sense .
This is the way bonobos do it . Bonobos do everything with sex .
And so they also reconcile with sex .
But the principle is exactly the same .
The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict , so you need to do something about it .
So my whole picture of the animal kingdom , and including humans also , started to change at that time .
So we have this image in political science , economics , the humanities , philosophy for that matter , that man is a wolf to man .
And so deep down our nature 's actually nasty .
I think it 's a very unfair image for the wolf .
The wolf is , after all , a very cooperative animal .
And that 's why many of you have a dog at home , which has all these characteristics also .
And it 's really unfair to humanity , because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for .
So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals .
So these are the pillars of morality .
If you ask anyone , " What is morality based on ? "
these are the two factors that always come out .
One is reciprocity , and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness .
And the other one is empathy and compassion .
And human morality is more than this , but if you would remove these two pillars , there would be not much remaining I think .
And so they 're absolutely essential .
So let me give you a few examples here .
This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center where they train chimpanzees to cooperate .
So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation .
What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box , and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in .
And of course , there 's food on the box .
Otherwise they wouldn 't be pulling so hard .
And so they 're bringing in the box .
And you can see that they 're synchronized .
You can see that they work together , they pull at the same moment .
It 's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn 't be able to do that .
And now you 're going to get a more interesting picture , because now one of the two chimps has been fed .
So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore .
Now look at what happens at the very end of this .
He takes basically everything .
So there are two interesting parts about this .
One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner -- so a full understanding of the need for cooperation .
The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he 's not interested in the food .
Why would that be ? Well that probably has to do with reciprocity .
There 's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors .
So he will get a return favor at some point in the future .
And so that 's how this all operates .
We do the same task with elephants .
Now with elephants , it 's very dangerous to work with elephants .
Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant .
Now you can probably make it , but it 's going to be a pretty flimsy apparatus I think .
And so what we did in that case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope , a single rope .
And if you pull on this side of the rope , the rope disappears on the other side .
So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time and pull .
Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears .
And the first tape you 're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus .
The apparatus is on the left with food on it .
And so they come together , they arrive together , they pick it up together and they pull together .
So it 's actually fairly simple for them .
There they are .
And so that 's how they bring it in .
But now we 're going to make it more difficult .
Because the whole purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation .
Do they understand that as well as the chimps , for example ?
And so what we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other , and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope -- because if he pulls at the rope , it disappears and the whole test is over .
Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it .
But it shows the understanding that he has , because he puts his big foot on the rope , stands on the rope and waits there for the other , and then the other is going to do all the work for him .
So it 's what we call freeloading .
But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have .
They develop several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of necessarily .
So the other elephant is now coming and is going to pull it in .
Now look at the other . The other doesn 't forget to eat , of course .
This was the cooperation , reciprocity part .
Now something on empathy .
Empathy is my main topic at the moment of research .
And empathy has sort of two qualities .
One is the understanding part of it . This is just a regular definition : the ability to understand and share the feelings of another .
And the emotional part .
And so empathy has basically two channels .
One is the body channel .
If you talk with a sad person , you 're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture , and before you know it you feel sad .
And that 's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy , which many animals have .
Your average dog has that also .
That 's actually why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that who don 't have that kind of empathy .
And then there 's a cognitive channel , which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else .
And that 's more limited .
There 's few animals -- I think elephants and apes can do that kind of thing -- but there are very few animals who can do that .
So synchronization , which is part of that whole empathy mechanism is a very old one in the animal kingdom .
And in humans , of course , we can study that with yawn contagion .
Humans yawn when others yawn .
And it 's related to empathy .
It activates the same areas in the brain .
Also , we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic .
People who have problems with empathy , such as autistic children , they don 't have yawn contagion .
So it is connected .
And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head .
So that 's what you see on the upper-left , an animated head that yawns .
And there 's a chimpanzee watching , an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations .
So yawn contagion that you 're probably all familiar with -- and maybe you 're going to start yawning soon now -- is something that we share with other animals .
And that 's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy and that is universal in the mammals basically .
Now we also study more complex expressions . This is consolation .
This is a male chimpanzee who has lost a fight and he 's screaming , and a juvenile comes over and puts an arm around him and calms him down .
That 's consolation . It 's very similar to human consolation .
And consolation behavior , it 's empathy driven .
Actually the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed , and then they see what young children do .
And so it is related to empathy , and that 's the kind of expressions we look at .
We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about .
It 's on altruism and chimpanzees where the question is , do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else ?
And for decades it had been assumed that only humans can do that , that only humans worry about the welfare of somebody else .
Now we did a very simple experiment .
We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville , in the field station of Yerkes .
And so that 's how they live .
And we call them into a room and do experiments with them .
In this case , we put two chimpanzees side-by-side .
and one has a bucket full of tokens , and the tokens have different meanings .
One kind of token feeds only the partner who chooses , the other one feeds both of them .
So this is a study we did with Vicky Horner .
And here you have the two color tokens .
So they have a whole bucket full of them .
And they have to pick one of the two colors .
You will see how that goes .
So if this chimp makes the selfish choice , which is the red token in this case , he needs to give it to us .
So we pick it up , we put it on a table where there 's two food rewards , but in this case only the one on the right gets food .
The one on the left walks away because she knows already .
that this is not a good test for her .
Then the next one is the pro-social token .
So the one who makes the choices -- that 's the interesting part here -- for the one who makes the choices , it doesn 't really matter .
So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed .
So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward .
So it doesn 't matter whatsoever .
And she should actually be choosing blindly .
But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token .
So this is the 50 percent line that 's the random expectation .
And especially if the partner draws attention to itself , they choose more .
And if the partner puts pressure on them -- so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them -- then the choices go down .
It 's as if they 're saying , " If you 're not behaving , I 'm not going to be pro-social today . "
And this is what happens without a partner , when there 's no partner sitting there .
And so we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else -- especially , these are other members of their own group .
So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study .
And so this became a very famous study .
And there 's now many more , because after we did this about 10 years ago , it became very well known .
And we did that originally with capuchin monkeys .
And I 'm going to show you the first experiment that we did .
It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees .
But with Sarah Brosnan we started out with capuchin monkeys .
So what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side-by-side .
Again , these animals , they live in a group , they know each other .
We take them out of the group , put them in a test chamber .
And there 's a very simple task that they need to do .
And if you give both of them cucumber for the task , the two monkeys side-by-side , they 're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row .
So cucumber , even though it 's only really water in my opinion , but cucumber is perfectly fine for them .
Now if you give the partner grapes -- the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket -- and so if you give them grapes -- it 's a far better food -- then you create inequity between them .
So that 's the experiment we did .
Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who 'd never done the task , thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction , and that turned out to be right .
The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber .
The one on the right is the one who gets grapes .
The one who gets cucumber , note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine .
The first piece she eats .
Then she sees the other one getting grape , and you will see what happens .
So she gives a rock to us . That 's the task .
And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it .
The other one needs to give a rock to us .
And that 's what she does .
And she gets a grape and she eats it .
The other one sees that .
She gives a rock to us now , gets , again , cucumber .
She tests a rock now against the wall .
She needs to give it to us .
And she gets cucumber again .
So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here .
Let me tell you -- I still have two minutes left , let me tell you a funny story about this .
This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments , especially anthropologists , economists , philosophers .
They didn 't like this at all .
Because they had decided in their minds , I believe , that fairness is a very complex issue and that animals cannot have it .
And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution .
Now another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes .
Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan , who 's been doing this with chimpanzees , had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where , indeed , the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape .
So we 're getting very close to the human sense of fairness .
And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for awhile .
So let me summarize .
I believe there 's an evolved morality .
I think morality is much more than what I 've been talking about , but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates , which are empathy and consolation , pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness .
And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up , so to speak , without necessarily God and religion involved , and to see how we can get to an evolved morality .
And I thank you for your attention .
Bertrand Piccard : My solar-powered adventure
For the dawn of a new decade , adventurer Bertrand Piccard offers us a challenge : Find motivation in what seems impossible . He shares his own plans to do what many say can 't be done -- to fly around the world , day and night , in a solar-powered aircraft .
Well , I learned a lot of things about ballooning , especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world I did with Brian Jones .
When I took this picture , the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night .
And on the other side there was a rising sun .
So , you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown , you have the non-obvious , you have the non-seen , for the people who don 't dare to go through the ice .
There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side .
And I think that 's one of the main problems of our society .
We learn , maybe not the famous TED audience , but so many other people learn , that the unknown , the doubts , the question marks are dangerous .
And we have to resist to the changes .
We have to keep everything under control .
Well , the unknown is part of life .
And in that sense , ballooning is a beautiful metaphor .
Because in the balloon , like in life , we go very well in unforeseen directions .
We want to go in a direction , but the winds push us in another direction , like in life .
And as long as we fight horizontally , against life , against the winds , against what 's happening to us , life is a nightmare .
How do we steer a balloon ?
By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction .
So , then , we understand that if we want to change our trajectory , in life , or in the balloon , we have to change altitude .
Changing altitude , in life , that means raising to another psychological , philosophical , spiritual level .
But how do we do that ?
In ballooning , or in life , how do we change altitude ?
How do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day ?
Well , in a balloon it 's easy , we have ballast .
And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb .
Sand , water , all the equipment we don 't need anymore .
And I think in life it should be exactly like this .
You know , when people speak about pioneering spirit , very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas .
It 's not true .
The pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas , because new ideas are so easy to have .
We just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas .
No , the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast .
Habits , certainties , convictions , exclamation marks , paradigms , dogmas .
And when we are able to do that , what happens ?
Life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension . No .
Life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions .
And pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis .
Of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon , but in life itself .
Explore this vertical axis , that means explore all the different ways to do , all the different ways to behave , all the different ways to think , before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish .
This is very practical .
This can be in politics .
This can be in spirituality .
This can be in environment , in finance , in education of children .
I deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing .
Because we will throw away these political dogmas .
I deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid -- if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past .
And that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas .
Throwing overboard , as ballast , to change our direction .
Well , these basically are things I believed in such a long time .
But actually I had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it .
It 's clear that it 's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take . Sometime we need friends , family members or a psychiatrist .
Well , in balloons we need weather men , the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind , at which altitude , in order to help the balloonist .
But sometimes it 's very paradoxical .
When Brian Jones and I were flying around the world , the weather man asked us , one day , to fly quite low , and very slow .
And when we calculated we thought we 're never going to make it around the world at that speed .
So , we disobeyed . We flew much higher , and double the speed .
And I was so proud to have found that jetstream that I called the weather man , and I told him , " Hey , guy , don 't you think we 're good pilots up there ?
We fly twice the speed you predicted . "
And he told me , " Don 't do that . Go down immediately in order to slow down . "
And I started to argue . I said , " I 'm not going to do that .
We don 't have enough gas to fly so slow . "
And he told me , " Yes , but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast , in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the North Pole .
And then he asked me -- and this is something I will never forget in my life -- he just asked me , " You 're the good pilot up there .
What do you really want ? You want to go very fast in the wrong direction , or slowly in the good direction ?
And this is why you need weathermen .
This is why you need people with long-term vision .
And this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now , in the political governments .
We are burning , as you heard , so much energy , not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life cannot last for long .
So , we went down actually .
We slowed down . And we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers .
But we were expected to have doubts ; we 're expected to have fears .
And actually this is where the adventure really started .
When we were flying over the Sahara and India it was nice holidays .
We could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane .
In the middle of the Pacific , when you don 't have the good winds , you cannot land , you cannot go back .
That 's a crisis .
That 's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking .
That 's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential , your creativity .
That 's when you throw out all the ballast , all the certainties , in order to adapt to the new situation .
And actually , we changed completely our flight plan .
We changed completely our strategy .
And after 20 days we landed successfully in Egypt .
But if I show you this picture it 's not to tell you how happy we were .
It 's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles .
We took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane .
We landed with 40 kilos .
When I saw that , I made a promise to myself .
I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world , it would be with no fuel , independent from fossil energies , in order to be safe , not to be threatened by the fuel gauge .
I had no idea how it was possible .
I just thought it 's a dream and I want to do it .
And when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the Air and Space Museum in Washington , together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh , with Apollo 11 , with the Wright Brothers ' Flyer , with Chuck Yeager 's 61 , I had really a thought then .
I thought , well , the 20th century , that was brilliant .
It allowed to do all those things there .
But it will not be possible in the future any more .
It takes too much energy . It will cost too much .
It will be prohibited because we 'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now .
So how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy ?
And this is when the project Solar Impulse really started to turn in my head .
And I think it 's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century .
Pioneering spirit should continue , but on another level .
Not to conquer the planet or space , not anymore , it has been done , but rather to improve the quality of life .
How can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing ?
What is today completely impossible -- get rid of our dependency on fossil energy .
If you tell to people , we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world , people will laugh at you , except here , where crazy people are invited to speak .
So , the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane , using absolutely no fuel , nobody ever could say in the future that it 's impossible to do it for cars , for heating systems , for computers , and so on and so on .
Well , solar power airplanes are not new .
They have flown in the past , but without saving capabilities , without batteries .
Which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it .
If we want to show the potential , we have to fly day and night .
That means to load the batteries during the flight , in order to spend the night on the batteries , and fly the next day again .
It has been made , already , on remote controlled little airplane models , without pilots .
But it stays an anecdote because the public couldn 't identify to it .
I think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities , that can talk to students , talk to politicians during the flight , and really make it a human adventure .
For that , unfortunately , four meters wingspan is not enough .
You need 64 meter wingspan .
64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot , the batteries , flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency .
Why that ? Because fuel is not easy to replace .
That 's for sure .
And with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane , we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs .
That means a Christmas tree , a big Christmas tree .
So the question is , how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree ?
People will tell you it 's impossible , and that 's exactly why we try to do it .
We launched the project with my colleague Andre Borschberg six years ago .
We have now 70 people in the team working on it .
We have gone through the stages of simulation , design , computing , preparing the construction of the first prototype .
That has been achieved after two years of work .
Cockpit , propeller , engine .
Just the fuselage here , it 's so light .
It 's not designed by an artist , but it could be .
50 kilos for the entire fuselage .
Couple of kilos more for the wing spars .
This is the complete structure of the airplane .
And one month ago we have unveiled it .
You cannot imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it 's not only a dream and a vision , it 's a real airplane .
A real airplane that we could finally present .
And what 's the goal now ?
The goal is to take off , end of this year for the first test , but mainly next year , spring or summer , take off , on our own power , without additional help , without being towed , climb to 9,000 meters altitude .
The same time we load the batteries , we run the engines , and when we get at the maximum height , we arrive at the beginning of the night .
And there , there will be just one goal , just one : reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty .
And this is exactly the symbol of our world .
If our airplane is too heavy , if the pilot wastes energy , we 'll never make it through the night .
And in our world , if we keep on spoiling , wasting our energy resources , if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt , it 's clear that we 'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem .
So , you see that this airplane is more a symbol .
I don 't think it will transport 200 people in the next years .
But when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic , the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel .
And 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the Atlantic .
So , we have to start , and show the example .
A little bit like on this picture here .
This is a painting from Magritte , in the museum in Holland that I love so much .
It 's a pipe , and it 's written , " This is not a pipe . "
This is not an airplane .
This is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible , when we have a team , when we have pioneering spirit , and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard .
What pleases me very much is that in the beginning I thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood .
And more and more , we 're invited around the world with Andre to talk about that project , to talk about the symbol of it , invited by politicians , invited in energy forums , in order to show that it 's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies .
So , through speeches like this one today , through interviews , through meetings , our goal is to get as many people possible on the team .
The success will not come if we " just , " quote , unquote , fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane .
No , the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life , save energy , go to renewables .
And this is possible . You know , with the technologies we have today , we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in Europe , and we can solve half of the rest with renewables .
It leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil , gas , coal , nuclear , or whatever .
This is acceptable .
This is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team .
You can just go on SolarImpulse.com , subscribe to just be informed of what we 're doing .
But much more , to get advices , to give your comments , to spread the word that if it 's possible in the air , of course it 's possible in the ground .
And each time we have some ice in the future , we have to know that life will be great , and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice , to go through the obstacle , to go through the problem , in order to see what there is on the other side .
So , you see , this is what we 're doing on our side .
Everyone has his goal , has his dreams , has his visions .
The question I leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard ?
Which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life , to get to the success that you wish to have , to get to the point that really belongs to you , with the potential you have , and the one you can really fulfill ?
Because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential , and our own passion .
So , let 's go for it , and I wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future . Thank you .
Gian Giudice : Why our universe might exist on a knife-edge
The biggest surprise of discovering the Higgs boson ? That there were no surprises . Gian Giudice talks us through a problem in theoretical physics : what if the Higgs field exists in an ultra-dense state that could mean the collapse of all atomic matter ? With wit and charm , Giudice outlines a grim fate -- and why we shouldn 't start worrying just yet .
So last year , on the Fourth of July , experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson .
It was a historical day .
There 's no doubt that from now on , the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence , but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson .
Well , at least , here at CERN .
But for me , the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise .
In the eye of a theoretical physicist , the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass , but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution .
Too many questions are left unanswered .
The Higgs boson does not share the beauty , the symmetry , the elegance , of the rest of the elementary particle world .
For this reason , the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story .
We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson .
Instead , so far , the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena .
Of course , the verdict is not definitive .
In 2015 , the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons , and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world , and we will certainly learn much more .
But for the moment , since we have found no evidence for new phenomena , let us suppose that the particles that we know today , including the Higgs boson , are the only elementary particles in nature , even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far .
Let 's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us .
We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe , and to explain my point , let me first tell you what the Higgs is about , and to do so , we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang .
And according to the Higgs theory , at that instant , a dramatic event took place in the universe .
Space-time underwent a phase transition .
It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees .
But in our case , the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material , but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time .
During this phase transition , empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field .
And this substance may seem invisible to us , but it has a physical reality .
It surrounds us all the time , just like the air we breathe in this room .
And some elementary particles interact with this substance , gaining energy in the process .
And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle , and by discovering the Higgs boson , the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real , because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of .
And this , in a nutshell , is the essence of the Higgs story .
But this story is far more interesting than that .
By studying the Higgs theory , theoretical physicists discovered , not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics , that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today .
Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid , so the Higgs field , the substance that fills all space-time , could exist in two states .
Besides the known Higgs state , there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today , and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem .
This is because , according to the laws of quantum mechanics , it is possible to have transitions between two states , even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states , and the phenomenon is called , quite appropriately , quantum tunneling .
Because of quantum tunneling , I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room , practically penetrating the wall .
But don 't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes , because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small .
You would have to wait a really long time before it happens , but believe me , quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon , and it has been observed in many systems .
For instance , the tunnel diode , a component used in electronics , works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling .
But let 's go back to the Higgs field .
If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed , then , because of quantum tunneling , a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time , and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water .
Bubbles of vapor form inside the water , then they expand , turning liquid into gas .
In the same way , a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling .
The bubble would then expand at the speed of light , invading all space , and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state .
Is this a problem ? Yes , it 's a big a problem .
We may not realize it in ordinary life , but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter .
If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense , we would see atoms shrinking , neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei , nuclei disintegrating , and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe .
And the Higgs field , in the ultra-dense Higgs state , is not just a few times more intense than today , but billions of times , and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state , all atomic matter would collapse .
No molecular structures would be possible , no life .
So , I wonder , is it possible that in the future , the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and , through quantum tunneling , will be transformed into this nasty , ultra-dense state ?
In other words , I ask myself , what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe ?
And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass .
And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 126 GeV .
This is tiny when expressed in familiar units , because it 's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams , but it is large in particle physics units , because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent .
So armed with this information from the LHC , together with some colleagues here at CERN , we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state , and we found a very intriguing result .
Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special .
It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation .
The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse .
So according to these calculations , we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff .
And eventually , the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself .
So is this how humanity is going to disappear ?
I don 't think so .
Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years , and this is a very long time .
It 's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government .
Even so , we will be long gone by then .
In about five billion years , our sun will become a red giant , as large as the Earth 's orbit , and our Earth will be kaput , and in a thousand billion years , if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate , you will not even be able to see as far as your toes , because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light .
So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse .
But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question , why is the Higgs boson mass so special ?
Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition ?
Theoretical physicists always ask " why " questions .
More than how a phenomenon works , theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works .
We think that this these " why " questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature .
And indeed , a possible answer to my question opens up new universes , literally .
It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles , and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws .
And in this context , you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass .
Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse .
It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach .
In principle , you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach , and yet , the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30 , 35 degrees .
And the reason is simple : because wind builds up the sand , gravity makes it fall .
As a result , the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value , near to collapse .
And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse .
In the majority of bubble universes , the Higgs mass could be around the critical value , near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field , because of two competing effects , just as in the case of sand .
My story does not have an end , because we still don 't know the end of the story .
This is science in progress , and to solve the mystery , we need more data , and hopefully , the LHC will soon add new clues to this story .
Just one number , the Higgs boson mass , and yet , out of this number we learn so much .
I started from a hypothesis , that the known particles are all there is in the universe , even beyond the domain explored so far .
From this , we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge , ready for cosmic collapse , and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach , the multiverse .
But I don 't know if my hypothesis is right .
That 's how physics works : A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley .
But whichever it turns out to be , there is one thing I 'm sure of : The journey will be full of surprises .
Thank you .
Simon Lewis : Don 't take consciousness for granted
After a catastrophic car accident that left him in a coma , Simon Lewis found ways to recover -- physically and mentally -- beyond all expectations . At the INK Conference he tells how this remarkable story led him to concern over all threats to consciousness , and how to overcome them .
There was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect .
Everywhere I went , I felt at home .
Everyone I met , I felt I knew them for as long as I could remember .
And I want to share with you how I came to that place and what I 've learned since I left it .
This is where it began .
And it raises an existential question , which is , if I 'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness , why am I not visible in the photograph , and where is this time and place ?
This is Los Angeles , California , where I live .
This is a police photo . That 's actually my car .
We 're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles , called Cedars-Sinai .
And the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage , and they 've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car , that the driver 's dead , that I 'm dead .
And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver .
And when they do , they find that behind the glass , they find me .
And my skull 's crushed and my collar bone is crushed ; all but two of my ribs , my pelvis and both arms -- they 're all crushed , but there is still a pulse .
And they get me to that nearby hospital , Cedars-Sinai , where that night I receive , because of my internal bleeding , 45 units of blood -- which means full replacements of all the blood in me -- before they 're able to staunch the flow .
I 'm put on full life support , and I have a massive stroke , and my brain drops into a coma .
Now comas are measured on a scale from 15 down to three .
Fifteen is a mild coma . Three is the deepest .
And if you look , you 'll see that there 's only one way you can score three .
It 's essentially there 's no sign of life from outside at all .
I spent more than a month in a Glasgow Coma Scale three , and it is inside that deepest level of coma , on the rim between my life and my death , that I 'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space .
From my family looking in from outside , what they 're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question , which is , how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they 're looking at to an actual mind , which I define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head .
Now to put this into a broader context , I want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the Earth from outer space , and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the Earth channel , and your favorite show is the Human Show .
And the reason I think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting .
It 's so unpredictable and so fragile .
And this is how we began .
We all began in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia .
The show began with tremendous special effects , because there were catastrophic climate shifts -- which sort of sounds interesting as a parallel to today .
Because of the Earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts , we had to figure out how to find better food , and we had to learn -- there 's Lucy ; that 's how we all began -- we had to learn how to crack open animal bones , use tools to do that , to feed on the marrow , to grow our brains more .
So we actually grew our consciousness in response to this global threat .
Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India , in Madhya Pradesh , there 's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found .
It 's a cupule that took 40 to 50,000 blows with a stone tool to create , and it 's the first known expression of art on the planet .
And the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today , the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle .
And then the next thing we do is we put a dot in the center of the circle .
We create an eye -- and the eye that evolves through all of our history .
There 's the Egyptian god Horus , which symbolizes prosperity , wisdom and health .
And that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the United States , which has on it an eye of providence .
So watching all of this show from outer space , you think we get it , we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness .
Because it 's the first thing we draw ; we surround ourselves with images of it ; it 's probably the most common image on the planet .
But we don 't . We take our consciousness for granted .
While I was producing in Los Angeles , I never thought about it for a second .
Until it was stripped from me , I never thought about it .
And what I 've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it 's never been under threat before .
These are just some examples .
And the reason I 'm so honored to be here to talk today in India is because India has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world .
That statistic is so sad .
There is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury .
Each one can entail up to a decade of rehabilitation , which means that India , unless something changes , is accumulating a need for millennia of rehabilitation .
What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds -- that 's one and a half million every year -- stroke every 40 seconds , Alzheimer 's disease , every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that .
All of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind .
And here are some of the other categories , if you look at the whole planet .
The World Health Organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on Earth in terms of years lived with disability .
We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44 .
Our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate .
I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide .
If you look at some of these other items -- concussions .
Half of E.R. admissions from adolescents are for concussions .
If I talk about migraine , 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches .
Fifteen percent suffer migraines that wipe them out for days on end .
All of this is leading -- computer addiction , just to cover that : the most frequent thing we do is use digital devices .
The average teenager sends 3,300 texts every [ month ] .
We 're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift .
So what you 'd be wondering , watching the Human Show , is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness , or are we going to continue to retreat ?
And that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of Cedars-Sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind .
This is a dense array EEG MRI tracking 156 channels of information .
It 's not my EEG at Cedars ; it 's your EEG tonight and last night .
It 's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we 're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning .
This is how I was when I returned from the hospital after nearly four months .
The horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life .
But if you look into the eye of consciousness , that single eye you can see , I 'm looking down , but let me tell you how I felt at that point .
I didn 't feel empty ; I felt everything simultaneously .
I felt empty and full , hot and cold , euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world 's first fully functional quantum computer ; it can occupy multiple states at the same time .
And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged , I felt everything simultaneously .
But let 's swivel around and look at me frontally .
This is now flash-forward to the point in time where I 've been discharged by the health system .
Look into those eyes . I 'm not able to focus those eyes .
I 'm not able to follow a line of text in a book .
But the system has moved me on because , as my family started to discover , there is no long-term concept in the health care system .
Neurological damage , 10 years of rehab , requires a long-term perspective .
But let 's take a look behind my eyes .
This is a gamma radiation spec scan that uses gamma radiation to map three-dimensional function within the brain .
It requires a laboratory to see it in three dimension , but in two dimensions I think you can see the beautiful symmetry and illumination of a normal mind at work .
Here 's my brain .
That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke .
So my family , as we moved forward and discovered that the health care system had moved us by , had to try to find solutions and answers .
And during that process -- it took many years -- one of the doctors said that my recovery , my degree of advance , since the amount of head injury I 'd suffered , was miraculous .
And that was when I started to write a book , because I didn 't think it was miraculous .
I thought there were miraculous elements , but I also didn 't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society .
So from this experience of my recovery , I want to share four particular aspects -- I call them the four C 's of consciousness -- that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day .
The first C is cognitive training .
Unlike the smashed glass of my car , plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility , with treatment , to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness .
Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason -- hope for our ability to rebuild that function .
Indeed , the mind can redefine itself , and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970 's .
The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting , but with appropriate treatment , they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure .
But what I discovered is it 's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care .
Here 's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when I actually found somebody who could apply it .
I 'm not a doctor , so I 'm not going to talk about the various subtests .
Let 's just talk about full-scale I.Q.
Full-scale I.Q. is the mental processing -- how fast you can acquire information , retain it and retrieve it -- that is essential for success in life today .
And you can see here there are three columns .
Untestable -- that 's when I 'm in my coma .
And then I creep up to the point that I get a score of 79 , which is just below average .
In the health care system , if you touch average , you 're done .
That 's when I was discharged from the system .
What does average I.Q. really mean ?
It meant that when I was given two and a half hours to take a test that anyone here would take in 50 minutes , I might score an F.
This is a very , very low level in order to be kicked out of the health care system .
Then I underwent cognitive training .
And let me show you what happened to the right-hand column when I did my cognitive training over a period of time .
This is not supposed to occur .
I.Q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight .
Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review , which is very unusual .
I 'm not a doctor . I have no medical background whatsoever .
But they felt the evidences that there was important , valuable information in the book , and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it .
But they asked one question . They said , " Is this repeatable ? "
That was a fair question because my memoir was simply how I found solutions that worked for me .
The answer is yes , and for the first time , it 's my pleasure to be able to share two examples .
Here 's somebody , what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11 .
And here 's another person in , call it , high school and college .
And this person is particularly interesting .
I won 't go into the intrascatter that 's in the subtests , but they still had a neurologic issue .
But that person could be identified as having a learning disability .
And with accommodation , they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities .
Second aspect : I still had crushing migraine headaches .
Two elements that worked for me here are -- the first is 90 percent , I learned , of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance .
The craniomandibular system is critical to that .
And when I underwent it and found solutions , this is the interrelationship between the TMJ and the teeth .
Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder , disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body .
I was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you 're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw , the headaches pretty much resolved , but that then my teeth weren 't in the right place .
He then held my jaw in the right position while orthodontically he put my teeth into correct alignment .
So my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position .
This affected my entire body .
If that sounds like a very , very strange thing to say and rather a bold statement -- How can the jaw affect the entire body ? -- let me simply point out to you , if I ask you tomorrow to put one grain of sand between your teeth and go for a nice long walk , how far would you last before you had to remove that grain of sand ?
That tiny misalignment .
Bear in mind , there are no nerves in the teeth .
That 's why the same between the before and after that this shows , it 's hard to see the difference .
Now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes .
I still had migraine headaches .
The next issue that resolved was that , if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance , the other 10 percent , largely -- if you set aside aneurysms , brain cancer and hormonal issues -- is the circulation .
Imagine the blood flowing through your body -- I was told at UCLA Medical Center -- as one sealed system .
There 's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it , and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood .
That 's basically it .
If you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system , it bulges someplace else .
If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body , your brain , you get a vascular migraine .
This is a level of pain that 's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines .
Using this technology , this is mapping in three dimensions .
This is an MRI MRA MRV , a volumetric MRI .
Using this technology , the specialists at UCLA Medical Center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring .
A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body .
And in the following months and years , I felt the neurological flow of life itself returning .
Communication , the next C. This is critical .
All consciousness is about communication .
And here , by great fortune , one of my father 's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research .
Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who 's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness , whether to restore hearing to the deaf , vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed .
And I 'm just going to give you an example today of movement to the paralyzed .
I 've brought with me , from Southern California , the FM device .
This is it being held in the hand .
It weighs less than a gram .
So two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime .
Five of them would still weigh less than a rupee coin .
Where does it go inside the body ?
It has been simulated and tested to endure in the body corrosion-free for over 80 years .
So it goes in and it stays there .
Here are the implantation sites .
The concept that they 're working towards -- and they have working prototypes -- is that we placed it throughout the motor points of the body where they 're needed .
The main unit will then go inside the brain .
An FM device in the cortex of the brain , the motor cortex , will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm , let 's say , in real time , if they 've lost control of their arm .
And other FM devices implanted in fingertips , on contacting a surface , will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain , so that the person feels a sense of touch .
Is this science fiction ? No , because I 'm wearing the first application of this technology .
I don 't have the ability to control my left foot .
A radio device is controlling every step I take , and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk .
And in closing , I want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life .
In my coma , one of the presences I sensed was someone I felt was a protector .
And when I came out of my coma , I recognized my family , but I didn 't remember my own past .
Gradually , I remembered the protector was my wife .
And I whispered the good news through my broken jaw , which was wired shut , to my night nurse .
And the following morning , my mother came to explain that I 'd not always been in this bed , in this room , that I 'd been working in film and television and that I had been in a crash and that , yes , I was married , but Marcy had been killed instantly in the crash .
And during my time in coma , she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix .
Now in the dark years that followed , I had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone .
And as I discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day , I discovered what truly remained .
I believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness , that the Human Show can stay on the air for millennia to come .
I believe that we can all rise and shine .
Thank you very much .
Lakshmi Pratury : Just stay for a second . Just stay here for a second .
You know , when I heard Simon 's -- please sit down ; I just want to talk to him for a second -- when I read his book , I went to LA to meet him .
And so I was sitting in this restaurant , waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ...
I don 't know what I had in my mind .
And he was walking around .
I didn 't expect that person that I was going to meet to be him .
And then we met and we talked , and I 'm like , he doesn 't look like somebody who was built out of nothing .
And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery .
And we have his book outside in the bookshop .
The thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to , every treatment he got , every near-miss he had , and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations .
So I think this one detail went past people really quick .
Tell a little bit about what you 're wearing on your leg .
Simon Lewis : I knew when I was timing this that there wouldn 't be time for me to do anything about -- Well this is it . This is the control unit .
And this records every single step I 've taken for , ooh , five or six years now .
And if I do this , probably the mic won 't hear it .
That little chirp followed by two chirps is now switched on .
When I press it again , it 'll chirp three times , and that 'll mean that it 's armed and ready to go .
And that 's my friend . I mean , I charge it every night .
And it works . It works .
And what I would love to add because I didn 't have time ...
What does it do ? Well actually , I 'll show you down here .
This down here , if the camera can see that , that is a small antenna .
Underneath my heel , there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground -- what 's called the heel lift .
This thing blinks all the time ; I 'll leave it out , so you might be able to see it .
But this is blinking all the time . It 's sending signals in real time .
And if you walk faster , if I walk faster , it detects what 's called the time interval , which is the interval between each heel lift .
And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation .
The other things they 've worked on -- I didn 't have time to say this in my talk -- is they 've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people .
I could tell you the story : this was going to be an abandoned technology , but Alfred Mann met the doctor who was going to retire , [ Dr. Schindler . ] And he was going to retire -- all the technology was going to be lost , because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue .
But there 's millions of deaf people in the world , and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now .
It works .
And the other thing is they 're working on artificial retinas for the blind .
And this , this is the implantable generation .
Because what I didn 't say in my talk is this is actually exoskeletal .
I should clarify that .
Because the first generation is exoskeletal , it 's wrapped around the leg , around the affected limb .
I must tell you , they 're an amazing -- there 's a hundred people who work in that building -- engineers , scientists , and other team members -- all the time .
Alfred Mann has set up this foundation to advance this research because he saw there 's no way venture capital would come in for something like this .
The audience is too small .
You 'd think , there 's plenty of paralyzed people in the world , but the audience is too small , and the amount of research , the time it takes , the FDA clearances , the payback time is too long for V.C. to be interested .
So he saw a need and he stepped in .
He 's a very , very remarkable man .
He 's done a lot of very cutting-edge science .
LP : So when you get a chance , spend some time with Simon .
Thank you . Thank you .
Ben Goldacre : Battling bad science
Every day there are news reports of new health advice , but how can you know if they 're right ? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us , at high speed , the ways evidence can be distorted , from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry .
So I 'm a doctor , but I kind of slipped sideways into research , and now I 'm an epidemiologist .
And nobody really knows what epidemiology is .
Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you .
And it 's best understood through example as the science of those crazy , wacky newspaper headlines .
And these are just some of the examples .
These are from the Daily Mail . Every country in the world has a newspaper like this .
It has this bizarre , ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer .
So here are some of the things they said cause cancer recently : divorce , Wi-Fi , toiletries and coffee .
Here are some of the things they say prevents cancer : crusts , red pepper , licorice and coffee .
So already you can see there are contradictions .
Coffee both causes and prevents cancer .
And as you start to read on , you can see that maybe there 's some kind of political valence behind some of this .
So for women , housework prevents breast cancer , but for men , shopping could make you impotent .
So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this .
And what I hope to show is that unpicking dodgy claims , unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims , isn 't a kind of nasty carping activity ; it 's socially useful , but it 's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool .
Because real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else 's position .
That 's what happens in academic journals .
That 's what happens at academic conferences .
The Q & amp ; A session after a post-op presents data is often a blood bath .
And nobody minds that . We actively welcome it .
It 's like a consenting intellectual S & amp ; M activity .
So what I 'm going to show you is all of the main things , all of the main features of my discipline -- evidence-based medicine .
And I will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work , exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong .
So we 'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man , and that is authority .
In science , we don 't care how many letters you have after your name .
In science , we want to know what your reasons are for believing something .
How do you know that something is good for us or bad for us ?
But we 're also unimpressed by authority , because it 's so easy to contrive .
This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith Ph.D , or , to give her full medical title , Gillian McKeith .
Again , every country has somebody like this .
She is our TV diet guru .
She has massive five series of prime-time television , giving out very lavish and exotic health advice .
She , it turns out , has a non-accredited correspondence course Ph.D.
from somewhere in America .
She also boasts that she 's a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants , which sounds very glamorous and exciting .
You get a certificate and everything .
This one belongs to my dead cat Hetti . She was a horrible cat .
You just go to the website , fill out the form , give them $ 60 , and it arrives in the post .
Now that 's not the only reason that we think this person is an idiot .
She also goes and says things like , you should eat lots of dark green leaves , because they contain lots of chlorophyll , and that will really oxygenate your blood .
And anybody who 's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight , and it 's quite dark in your bowels after you 've eaten spinach .
Next , we need proper science , proper evidence .
So , " Red wine can help prevent breast cancer . "
This is a headline from the Daily Telegraph in the U.K.
" A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer . "
So you go and find this paper , and what you find is it is a real piece of science .
It is a description of the changes in one enzyme when you drip a chemical extracted from some red grape skin onto some cancer cells in a dish on a bench in a laboratory somewhere .
And that 's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper , but on the question of your own personal risk of getting breast cancer if you drink red wine , it tells you absolutely bugger all .
Actually , it turns out that your risk of breast cancer actually increases slightly with every amount of alcohol that you drink .
So what we want is studies in real human people .
And here 's another example .
This is from Britain 's leading diet and nutritionist in the Daily Mirror , which is our second biggest selling newspaper .
" An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil in combination with fruits , vegetables and pulses offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings . "
And then they give you advice : " If you eat olive oil and vegetables , you 'll have fewer skin wrinkles . "
And they very helpfully tell you how to go and find the paper .
So you go and find the paper , and what you find is an observational study .
Obviously nobody has been able to go back to 1930 , get all the people born in one maternity unit , and half of them eat lots of fruit and veg and olive oil , and then half of them eat McDonald 's , and then we see how many wrinkles you 've got later .
You have to take a snapshot of how people are now .
And what you find is , of course , people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer skin wrinkles .
But that 's because people who eat fruit and veg and olive oil , they 're freaks , they 're not normal , they 're like you ; they come to events like this .
They are posh , they 're wealthy , they 're less likely to have outdoor jobs , they 're less likely to do manual labor , they have better social support , they 're less likely to smoke -- so for a whole host of fascinating , interlocking social , political and cultural reasons , they are less likely to have skin wrinkles .
That doesn 't mean that it 's the vegetables or the olive oil .
So ideally what you want to do is a trial .
And everybody thinks they 're very familiar with the idea of a trial .
Trials are very old . The first trial was in the Bible -- Daniel 1 : 12 .
It 's very straightforward -- you take a bunch of people , you split them in half , you treat one group one way , you treat the other group the other way , and a little while later , you follow them up and see what happened to each of them .
So I 'm going to tell you about one trial , which is probably the most well-reported trial in the U.K. news media over the past decade .
And this is the trial of fish oil pills .
And the claim was fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children .
And they said , " We 've done a trial .
All the previous trials were positive , and we know this one 's gonna be too . "
That should always ring alarm bells .
Because if you already know the answer to your trial , you shouldn 't be doing one .
Either you 've rigged it by design , or you 've got enough data so there 's no need to randomize people anymore .
So this is what they were going to do in their trial .
They were taking 3,000 children , they were going to give them all these huge fish oil pills , six of them a day , and then a year later , they were going to measure their school exam performance and compare their school exam performance against what they predicted their exam performance would have been if they hadn 't had the pills .
Now can anybody spot a flaw in this design ?
And no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question .
So there 's no control ; there 's no control group .
But that sounds really techie .
That 's a technical term .
The kids got the pills , and then their performance improved .
What else could it possibly be if it wasn 't the pills ?
They got older . We all develop over time .
And of course , also there 's the placebo effect .
The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine .
It 's not just about taking a pill , and your performance and your pain getting better .
It 's about our beliefs and expectations .
It 's about the cultural meaning of a treatment .
And this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another .
So we know , for example , that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill .
Two sugar pills a day beats one sugar pill a day .
And that 's an outrageous and ridiculous finding , but it 's true .
We know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than taking a sugar pill , taking a dummy pill that has no medicine in it -- not because the injection or the pills do anything physically to the body , but because an injection feels like a much more dramatic intervention .
So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated , which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo -- where one half of the people get the real treatment and the other half get placebo .
But that 's not enough .
What I 've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes .
What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices , but slightly more sophisticated versions of them , in order to distort the evidence that they give to doctors and patients , and which we use to make vitally important decisions .
So firstly , trials against placebo : everybody thinks they know that a trial should be a comparison of your new drug against placebo .
But actually in a lot of situations that 's wrong .
Because often we already have a very good treatment that is currently available , so we don 't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing .
We want to know that it 's better than the best currently available treatment that we have .
And yet , repeatedly , you consistently see people doing trials still against placebo .
And you can get license to bring your drug to market with only data showing that it 's better than nothing , which is useless for a doctor like me trying to make a decision .
But that 's not the only way you can rig your data .
You can also rig your data by making the thing you compare your new drug against really rubbish .
You can give the competing drug in too low a dose , so that people aren 't properly treated .
You can give the competing drug in too high a dose , so that people get side effects .
And this is exactly what happened which antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia .
20 years ago , a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in and the promise was that they would have fewer side effects .
So people set about doing trials of these new drugs against the old drugs , but they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses -- 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol .
And it 's a foregone conclusion , if you give a drug at that high a dose , that it will have more side effects and that your new drug will look better .
10 years ago , history repeated itself , interestingly , when risperidone , which was the first of the new-generation antipscyhotic drugs , came off copyright , so anybody could make copies .
Everybody wanted to show that their drug was better than risperidone , so you see a bunch of trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day .
Again , not an insane dose , not an illegal dose , but very much at the high end of normal .
And so you 're bound to make your new drug look better .
And so it 's no surprise that overall , industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials .
But -- and it 's a big but -- it turns out , when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials , that they 're actually better than independently sponsored trials .
And yet , they always manage to to get the result that they want .
So how does this work ?
How can we explain this strange phenomenon ?
Well it turns out that what happens is the negative data goes missing in action ; it 's withheld from doctors and patients .
And this is the most important aspect of the whole story .
It 's at the top of the pyramid of evidence .
We need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective .
And there are two different ways that you can spot whether some data has gone missing in action .
You can use statistics , or you can use stories .
I personally prefer statistics , so that 's what I 'm going to do first .
This is something called funnel plot .
And a funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared , have gone missing in action .
So this is a graph of all of the trials that have been done on a particular treatment .
And as you go up towards the top of the graph , what you see is each dot is a trial .
And as you go up , those are the bigger trials , so they 've got less error in them .
So they 're less likely to be randomly false positives , randomly false negatives .
So they all cluster together .
The big trials are closer to the true answer .
Then as you go further down at the bottom , what you can see is , over on this side , the spurious false negatives , and over on this side , the spurious false positives .
If there is publication bias , if small negative trials have gone missing in action , you can see it on one of these graphs .
So you can see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared .
This is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias .
And I think that 's the funniest epidemiology joke that you will ever hear .
That 's how you can prove it statistically , but what about stories ?
Well they 're heinous , they really are .
This is a drug called reboxetine .
This is a drug that I myself have prescribed to patients .
And I 'm a very nerdy doctor .
I hope I try to go out of my way to try and read and understand all the literature .
I read the trials on this . They were all positive . They were all well-conducted .
I found no flaw .
Unfortunately , it turned out , that many of these trials were withheld .
In fact , 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients .
Now if you think about it , if I tossed a coin a hundred times , and I 'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times , then I can convince you that I have a coin with two heads .
If we remove half of the data , we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is .
And this is not an isolated story .
Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld , but it goes way beyond that .
The Nordic Cochrane Group were trying to get a hold of the data on that to bring it all together .
The Cochrane Groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown .
And they need to have access to all of the trial data .
But the companies withheld that data from them , and so did the European Medicines Agency for three years .
This is a problem that is currently lacking a solution .
And to show how big it goes , this is a drug called Tamiflu , which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on .
And they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu .
We already have the data showing that it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours .
But I don 't really care about that . Governments don 't care about that .
I 'm very sorry if you have the flu , I know it 's horrible , but we 're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day .
We prescribe these drugs , we stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding that they will reduce the number of complications , which means pneumonia and which means death .
The infectious diseases Cochrane Group , which are based in Italy , has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies so that they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not , and they 've not been able to get that information .
This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today .
We cannot make decisions in the absence of all of the information .
So it 's a little bit difficult from there to spin in some kind of positive conclusion .
But I would say this : I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant .
All of these things are happening in plain sight , and they 're all protected by a force field of tediousness .
And I think , with all of the problems in science , one of the best things that we can do is to lift up the lid , finger around in the mechanics and peer in .
Thank you very much .
Michael Anti : Behind the Great Firewall of China
Michael Anti has been blogging from China for 12 years . Despite the control the central government has over the Internet -- " All the servers are in Beijing " -- he says that hundreds of millions of microbloggers are in fact creating the first national public sphere in the country 's history , and shifting the balance of power in unexpected ways .
In the past several days , I heard people talking about China .
And also , I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet .
Something is very challenging to me .
I want to make my friends understand : China is complicated .
So I always want to tell the story , like , one hand it is that , the other hand is that .
You can 't just tell a one sided story .
I 'll give an example . China is a BRIC country .
BRIC country means Brazil , Russia , India and China .
This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy .
China is a SICK country , the terminology coined by Facebook IPO papers -- file .
He said the SICK country means Syria , Iran , China and North Korea .
The four countries have no access to Facebook .
So basically , China is a SICK BRIC country .
Another project was built up to watch China and Chinese Internet .
And now , today I want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years , from that wall .
So , if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones , you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom .
It prevents weird things from the north .
Same was true for China .
In the north , there was a great wall , Chang Cheng .
It protected China from invaders for 2,000 years .
But China also has a great firewall .
That 's the biggest digital boundary in the whole world .
It 's not only to defend the Chinese regime from overseas , from the universal values , but also to prevent China 's own citizens to access the global free Internet , and even separate themselves into blocks , not united .
So , basically the " Internet " has two Internets .
One is the Internet , the other is the Chinanet .
But if you think the Chinanet is something like a deadland , wasteland , I think it 's wrong .
But we also use a very simple metaphor , the cat and the mouse game , to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship , government censorship , the cat , and the Chinese Internet users . That means us , the mouse .
But sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple .
So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version .
In China , we have 500 million Internet users .
That 's the biggest population of Netizens , Internet users , in the whole world .
So even though China 's is a totally censored Internet , but still , Chinese Internet society is really booming .
How to make it ? It 's simple .
You have Google , we have Baidu .
You have Twitter , we have Weibo .
You have Facebook , we have Renren .
You have YouTube , we have Youku and Tudou .
The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service , and we Chinese copycat every one .
So , that 's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship .
That 's not only to censor you .
Sometimes this Chinese national Internet policy is very simple : Block and clone .
On the one hand , he wants to satisfy people 's need of a social network , which is very important ; people really love social networking .
But on the other hand , they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data any time they want .
That 's also the reason Google was pulled out from China , because they can 't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server .
Sometimes the Arab dictators didn 't understand these two hands .
For example , Mubarak , he shut down the Internet .
He wanted to prevent the Netizens [ from criticizing ] him .
But once Netizens can 't go online , they go in the street .
And now the result is very simple .
We all know Mubarak is technically dead .
But also , Ben Ali , Tunisian president , didn 't follow the second rule .
That means keep the server in your hands .
He allowed Facebook , a U.S.-based service , to continue to stay on inside of Tunisia .
So he can 't prevent it , his own citizens to post critical videos against his corruption .
The same thing happend . He was the first to topple during the Arab Spring .
But those two very smart international censorship policies didn 't prevent Chinese social media [ from ] becoming a really public sphere , a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of Chinese officials .
Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China .
It 's the entire population of the United States .
So when these 300 million people , microbloggers , even they block the tweet in our censored platform .
But itself -- the Chinanet -- but itself can create very powerful energy , which has never happened in the Chinese history .
2011 , in July , two [ unclear ] trains crashed , in Wenzhou , a southern city .
Right after the train crash , authorities literally wanted to cover up the train , bury the train .
So it angered the Chinese Netizens .
The first five days after the train crash , there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media , which never happened in Chinese history .
And later this year , the rail minister was sacked and sentenced to jail for 10 years .
And also , recently , very funny debate between the Beijing Environment Ministry and the American Embassy in Beijing because the Ministry blamed the American Embassy for intervening in Chinese internal politics by disclosing the air quality data of Beijing .
So , the up is the Embassy data , the PM 2.5 .
He showed 148 , they showed it 's dangerous for the sensitive group .
So a suggestion , it 's not good to go outside .
But that is the Ministry 's data . He shows 50 .
He says it 's good . It 's good to go outside .
But 99 percent of Chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the Embassy 's side .
I live in Beijing . Every day , I just watch the American Embassy 's data to decide whether I should open my window .
Why is Chinese social networking , even within the censorship , so booming ? Part of the reason is Chinese languages .
You know , Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters .
But in English it 's 20 words or a sentence with a short link .
Maybe in Germany , in German language , it may be just " Aha ! "
But in Chinese language , it 's really about 140 characters , means a paragraph , a story .
You can almost have all the journalistic elements there .
For example , this is Hamlet , of Shakespeare .
It 's the same content . One , you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets .
Chinese is always cheating , right ?
So because of this , the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media , not only a headline to media .
And also , the clone , Sina company is the guy who cloned Twitter .
It even has its own name , with Weibo .
" Weibo " is the Chinese translation for " microblog " .
It has its own innovation .
At the commenting area , [ it makes ] the Chinese Weibo more like Facebook , rather than the original Twitter .
So these innovations and clones , as the Weibo and microblogging , when it came to China in 2009 , it immediately became a media platform itself .
It became the media platform of 300 million readers .
It became the media .
Anything not mentioned in Weibo , it does not appear to exist for the Chinese public .
But also , Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life .
For example , they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard .
We had a petition system . It 's a remedy outside the judicial system , because the Chinese central government wants to keep a myth : The emperor is good . The old local officials are thugs .
So that 's why the petitioner , the victims , the peasants , want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government , they want the emperor to settle the problem .
But when more and more people go to Beijing , they also cause the risk of a revolution .
So they send them back in recent years .
And even some of them were put into black jails .
But now we have Weibo , so I call it the Weibo petition .
People just use their cell phones to tweet .
So your sad stories , by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters , professors or celebrities .
One of them is Yao Chen , she is the most popular microblogger in China , who has about 21 million followers .
They 're almost like a national TV station .
If you -- so a sad story will be picked up by her .
So this Weibo social media , even in the censorship , still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together , talking together .
It 's like a big TED , right ?
But also , it is like the first time a public sphere happened in China .
Chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people .
But also , the cat , the censorship , is not sleeping .
It 's so hard to post some sensitive words on the Chinese Weibo .
For example , you can 't post the name of the president , Hu Jintao , and also you can 't post the city of Chongqing , the name , and until recently , you can 't search the surname of top leaders .
So , the Chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes .
They even name themselves -- you know , use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab .
The grass-mud horse is caoníma , is the phonogram for motherfucker , the Netizens call themselves .
River crab is héxiè , is the phonogram for harmonization , for censorship .
So that 's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè , that 's very good .
So , when some very political , exciting moments happened , you can see on Weibo , you see a lot of very weird stories happened .
Weird phrases and words , even if you have a PhD of Chinese language , you can 't understand them .
But you can 't even expand more , no , because Chinese Sina Weibo , when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com.
That means from the very beginning , Weibo has already convinced the Chinese government , we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime .
For example , anything you want to post , like " get together " or " meet up " or " walk , " it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing .
Even if you want to have some gathering , before you go there , the police are already waiting for you .
Why ? Because they have the data .
They have everything in their hands .
So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident .
So the crackdown is very serious .
But I want you to notice a very funny thing during the process of the cat-and-mouse .
The cat is the censorship , but Chinese is not only one cat , but also has local cats . Central cat and local cats .
You know , the server is in the [ central ] cats ' hands , so even that -- when the Netizens criticize the local government , the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing .
Without bribing the central cats , he can do nothing , only apologize .
So these three years , in the past three years , social movements about microblogging really changed local government , became more and more transparent , because they can 't access the data .
The server is in Beijing .
The story about the train crash , maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days , but why the Chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online .
It 's never happened before .
And so it 's very simple , because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy , this independent kingdom .
So they want an excuse -- public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him .
But also , the Bo Xilai case recently , very big news , he 's a princeling .
But from February to April this year , Weibo really became a marketplace of rumors .
You can almost joke everything about these princelings , everything ! It 's almost like you 're living in the United States .
But if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about Beijing , you definitely will be arrested .
So this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window .
So Chinese in China , censorship is normal .
Something you find is , freedom is weird .
Something will happen behind it .
Because he was a very popular Leftist leader , so the central government wanted to purge him , and he was very cute , he convinced all the Chinese people , why he is so bad .
So Weibo , the 300 million public sphere , became a very good , convenient tool for a political fight .
But this technology is very new , but technically is very old .
It was made famous by Chairman Mao , Mao Zedong , because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government .
It 's very simple , because Chinese central government doesn 't need to even lead the public opinion .
They just give them a target window to not censor people .
Not censoring in China has become a political tool .
So that 's the update about this game , cat-and-mouse .
Social media changed Chinese mindset .
More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright , not some imported American privilege .
But also , it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to , it 's like a training of their citizenship , preparing for future democracy .
But it didn 't change the Chinese political system , and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions .
So , what 's the future ?
After all , we are the mouse .
Whatever the future is , we should fight against the [ cat ] .
There is not only in China , but also in the United States there are some very small , cute but bad cats .
SOPA , PIPA , ACTA , TPP and ITU .
And also , like Facebook and Google , they claim they are friends of the mouse , but sometimes we see them dating the cats .
So my conclusion is very simple .
We Chinese fight for our freedom , you just watch your bad cats .
Don 't let them hook [ up ] with the Chinese cats .
Only in this way , in the future , we will achieve the dreams of the mouse : that we can tweet anytime , anywhere , without fear .
Thank you .
Paul Stamets : 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Mycologist Paul Stamets lists 6 ways the mycelium fungus can help save the universe : cleaning polluted soil , making insecticides , treating smallpox and even flu viruses .
I love a challenge , and saving the Earth is probably a good one .
We all know the Earth is in trouble .
We have now entered in the 6X , the sixth major extinction on this planet .
I often wondered , if there was a United Organization of Organisms -- otherwise known as " Uh-Oh " -- -- and every organism had a right to vote , would we be voted on the planet , or off the planet ?
I think that vote is occurring right now .
I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions , using fungi , and these solutions are based on mycelium .
The mycelium infuses all landscapes , it holds soils together , it 's extremely tenacious .
This holds up to 30,000 times its mass .
They 're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature -- the soil magicians .
They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth .
We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants , mitigated by the mcyelium -- so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks , cedars and Douglas firs .
Dusty and I , we like to say , on Sunday , this is where we go to church .
I 'm in love with the old-growth forest , and I 'm a patriotic American because we have those .
Most of you are familiar with Portobello mushrooms .
And frankly , I face a big obstacle .
When I mention mushrooms to somebody , they immediately think Portobellos or magic mushrooms , their eyes glaze over , and they think I 'm a little crazy .
So , I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group .
We call it mycophobia , the irrational fear of the unknown , when it comes to fungi .
Mushrooms are very fast in their growth .
Day 21 , day 23 , day 25 .
Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics .
In fact , we 're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom .
A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta -- a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together .
We share in common the same pathogens .
Fungi don 't like to rot from bacteria , and so our best antibiotics come from fungi .
But here is a mushroom that 's past its prime .
After they sporulate , they do rot .
But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest .
They give rise to the trees , they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium .
And so we see a mushroom here sporulating .
And the spores are germinating , and the mycelium forms and goes underground .
In a single cubic inch of soil , there can be more than eight miles of these cells .
My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium .
This is photomicrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey .
And notice that as the mycelium grows , it conquers territory and then it begins the net .
I 've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years , I have thousands of electron micrographs , and when I 'm staring at the mycelium , I realize that they are microfiltration membranes .
We exhale carbon dioxide , so does mycelium .
It inhales oxygen , just like we do .
But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs .
And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes .
And in these cavities , these micro-cavities form , and as they fuse soils , they absorb water .
These are little wells .
And inside these wells , then microbial communities begin to form .
And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion , but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms .
I first proposed , in the early 1990s , that mycelium is Earth 's natural Internet .
When you look at the mycelium , they 're highly branched .
And if there 's one branch that is broken , then very quickly , because of the nodes of crossing -- Internet engineers maybe call them hot points -- there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information .
The mycelium is sentient .
It knows that you are there .
When you walk across landscapes , it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris .
So , I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven , biologically successful model .
The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit , and we now , being the top organism on this planet , are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere .
Going way out , dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype .
I believe matter begets life ; life becomes single cells ; single cells become strings ; strings become chains ; chains network .
And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe .
Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land .
They came to land 1.3 billion years ago , and plants followed several hundred million years later .
How is that possible ?
It 's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids , and many other acids and enzymes , pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates .
Makes the rocks crumble , and the first step in the generation of soil .
Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together .
So , fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates .
And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix .
This was first discovered in 1859 .
This is a photograph by Franz Hueber .
This photograph 's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia .
420 million years ago , this organism existed .
It was called Prototaxites .
Prototaxites , laying down , was about three feet tall .
The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet .
Dr. Boyce , at the University of Chicago , published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus , a giant mushroom .
Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms .
All across most land masses .
And these existed for tens of millions of years .
Now , we 've had several extinction events , and as we march forward -- 65 million years ago -- most of you know about it -- we had an asteroid impact .
The Earth was struck by an asteroid , a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere .
Sunlight was cut off , and fungi inherited the Earth .
Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded , because fungi do not need light .
More recently , at Einstein University , they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy , much like plants use light .
So , the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere , I think , is a forgone conclusion , at least in my own mind .
The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon .
I couldn 't miss it . It was 2,200 acres in size : 2,200 acres in size , 2,000 years old .
The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat , one cell wall thick .
How is it that this organism can be so large , and yet be one cell wall thick , whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us ?
The mycelium , in the right conditions , produces a mushroom -- it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt .
We were involved with several experiments .
I 'm going to show you six , if I can , solutions for helping to save the world .
Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham , Washington .
There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste : one was a control pile ; one pile was treated with enzymes ; one pile was treated with bacteria ; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium .
The mycelium absorbs the oil .
The mycelium is producing enzymes -- peroxidases -- that break carbon-hydrogen bonds .
These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together .
So , the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil , and then , when we returned six weeks later , all the tarps were removed , all the other piles were dead , dark and stinky .
We came back to our pile , it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms , and the color changed to a light form .
The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates -- fungal sugars .
Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms .
They 're very large .
They 're showing how much nutrition that they could 've obtained .
But something else happened , which was an epiphany in my life .
They sporulated , the spores attract insects , the insects laid eggs , eggs became larvae .
Birds then came , bringing in seeds , and our pile became an oasis of life .
Whereas the other three piles were dead , dark and stinky , and the PAH 's -- the aromatic hydrocarbons -- went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks .
The last image we don 't have .
The entire pile was a green berm of life .
These are gateway species , vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities .
So I invented burlap sacks , bunker spawn -- and putting the mycelium -- using storm blown debris , you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that 's producing E. coli , or other wastes , or a factory with chemical toxins , and it leads to habitat restoration .
So , we set up a site in Mason County , Washington , and we 've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms .
And I 'll show you a graph here .
This is a logarithmic scale , 10 to the eighth power .
There 's more than a 100 million colonies per gram , and 10 to the third power is around 1,000 .
In 48 hours to 72 hours , these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times .
Think of the implications .
This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris -- and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year .
So , this one mushroom , in particular , has drawn our interest over time .
This is my wife Dusty , with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis -- Agarikon .
It 's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D.
as a treatment against consumption .
This mushroom grows in Washington State , Oregon , northern California , British Columbia , now thought to be extinct in Europe .
May not seem that large -- let 's get closer .
This is extremely rare fungus .
Our team -- and we have a team of experts that go out -- we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year .
We found one sample to be able to get into culture .
Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health .
I 've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program .
We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water , and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites .
And a few years ago , we received these results .
We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses .
Dr. Earl Kern , who 's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department , states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active .
10 or greater are considered to be very active .
Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range .
There 's a vetted press release that you can read -- it 's vetted by DOD -- if you Google " Stamets " and " smallpox . "
Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview .
So , encouraged by this , naturally we went to flu viruses .
And so , for the first time , I am showing this .
We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses .
Here 's the selectivity index numbers -- against pox , you saw 10s and 20s -- now against flu viruses , compared to the ribavirin controls , we have an extraordinarily high activity .
And we 're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical .
We tried it against flu A viruses -- H1N1 , H3N2 -- as well as flu B viruses .
So then we tried a blend , and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1 , and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index .
I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense .
I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi -- fungi that kill insects .
Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants .
So , I went to the EPA homepage , and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants , as well as termites .
I did something that nobody else had done .
I actually chased the mycelium , when it stopped producing spores .
These are spores -- this is in their spores .
I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form .
And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house .
But the insects aren 't stupid , and they would avoid the spores when they came close , and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form .
And I got my daughter 's Barbie doll dish , I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields , every day , in my house , and the ants were attracted to the mycelium , because there 's no spores .
They gave it to the queen .
One week later , I had no sawdust piles whatsoever .
And then -- a delicate dance between dinner and death -- the mycelium is consumed by the ants , they become mummified , and , boing , a mushroom pops out of their head .
Now after sporulation , the spores repel .
So , the house is no longer suitable for invasion .
So , you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites .
And so my house came down , I received my first patent against carpenter ants , termites and fire ants .
Then we tried extracts , and lo and behold , we can steer insects to different directions .
This has huge implications .
I then received my second patent -- and this is a big one .
It 's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent .
It covers over 200,000 species .
This is the most disruptive technology -- I 've been told by executives of the pesticide industry -- that they have ever witnessed .
This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world .
You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept , because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi , prior to sporulation , attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores .
And so I came up with a Life Box , because I needed a delivery system .
The Life Box -- you 're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference -- you add soil , you add water , you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores , like of the Agarikon mushroom .
The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium .
And then you put tree seeds in here , and then you end up growing -- potentially -- an old-growth forest from a cardboard box .
I want to reinvent the delivery system , and the use of cardboard around the world , so they become ecological footprints .
If there 's a YouTube-like site that you could put up , you could make it interactive , zip code specific -- where people could join together , and through satellite imaging systems , through Virtual Earth or Google Earth , you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes .
You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes , you could add water -- I developed this for the refugee community -- corns , beans and squash and onions .
I took several containers -- my wife said , if I could do this , anybody could -- and I ended up growing a seed garden .
Then you harvest the seeds -- and thank you , Eric Rasmussen , for your help on this -- and then you 're harvesting the seed garden .
Then you can harvest the kernels , and then you just need a few kernels .
I add mycelium to it , and then I inoculate the corncobs .
Now , three corncobs , no other grain -- lots of mushrooms begin to form .
Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank , and so this population will be shut down .
But watch what happens here .
The mushrooms then are harvested , but very importantly , the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars .
And so I thought , how could we address the energy crisis in this country ?
And we came up with Econol .
Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary -- and you gain all the benefits that I 've described to you already .
But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent , and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels .
So , we build the carbon banks on the planet , renew the soils .
These are a species that we need to join with .
I think engaging mycelium can help save the world .
Thank you very much .
Erik Hersman : Reporting crisis via texting
At TEDU 2009 , Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi , a GoogleMap mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections , and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries .
So I 'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa .
A year and a half ago , four of the five people who are full time members at Ushahidi , which means " testimony " in Swahili , were TED Fellows .
A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence .
And in that time we prototyped and built , in about three days , a system that would allow anybody with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them .
We took what we knew about Africa , the default device , the mobile phone , as our common denominator , and went from there .
We got reports like this .
This is just a couple of them from January 17th , last year .
And our system was rudimentary . It was very basic .
It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people , and we put it on our map .
But then we decided we needed to do something more .
We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world .
And so there is a team of developers from all over Africa , who are part of this team now -- from Ghana , from Malawi , from Kenya .
There is even some from the U.S.
We 're building for smartphones , so that it can be used in the developed world , as well as the developing world .
We are realizing that this is true .
If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere .
And so we build for it in Africa first and then we move to the edges .
It 's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo .
It 's being used by NGOs all over East Africa , small NGOs doing their own little projects .
Just this last month it was deployed by Al Jazeera in Gaza .
But that 's actually not what I 'm here to talk about .
I 'm here to talk about the next big thing , because what we 're finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what 's going on in real time .
We 're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently , where it 's so much easier to report now than it is to consume it .
There is so much information ; what do you do ?
This is the Twitter reports for over three days just covering Mumbai .
How do you decide what is important ?
What is the veracity level of what you 're looking at ?
So what we find is that there is this great deal of wasted crisis information because there is just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now .
And what we 're actually really concerned with is this first three hours .
What we are looking at is the first three hours .
How do we deal with that information that is coming in ?
You can 't understand what is actually happening .
On the ground and around the world people are still curious , and trying to figure out what is going on . But they don 't know .
So what we built of course , Ushahidi , is crowdsourcing this information .
You see this with Twitter , too . You get this information overload .
So you 've got a lot of information . That 's great .
But now what ?
So we think that there is something interesting we can do here .
And we have a small team who is working on this .
We think that we can actually create a crowdsourced filter .
Take the crowd and apply them to the information .
And by rating it and by rating the different people who submit information , we can get refined results and weighted results .
So that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not .
quite frankly -- it 's interesting that it 's coming from Africa .
It 's coming from places that you wouldn 't expect .
From young , smart developers .
And it 's a community around it that has decided to build this .
So , thank you very much .
And we are very happy to be part of the TED family .
Sylvia Earle : My wish : Protect our oceans
Legendary ocean researcher Sylvia Earle shares astonishing images of the ocean -- and shocking stats about its rapid decline -- as she makes her TED Prize wish : that we will join her in protecting the vital blue heart of the planet .
Fifty years ago , when I began exploring the ocean , no one -- not Jacques Perrin , not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson -- imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it .
It seemed , at that time , to be a sea of Eden , but now we know , and now we are facing paradise lost .
I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us , and to consider why it matters that in 50 years , we 've lost -- actually , we 've taken , we 've eaten -- more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea ; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared ; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying , but it really should concern you .
It does concern you , as well .
I 'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls " tomorrow 's child , " asking why we didn 't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time .
Well , now is that time .
I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and , in so doing , secure hope for humankind .
Health to the ocean means health for us .
And I hope Jill Tarter 's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe .
And I hope , Jill , that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet .
Did I say that ? I guess I did .
For me , as a scientist , it all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba .
It 's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter .
I actually love diving at night ; you see a lot of fish then that you don 't see in the daytime .
Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970 , when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time -- at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon .
In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called Jim .
It was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down .
It 's one of my favorite bathing suits .
Since then , I 've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I 've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea .
I led a five-year National Geographic expedition , the Sustainable Seas expeditions , using these little subs .
They 're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it .
And I 'm living proof .
Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air , food , water , temperature -- all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea .
I heard astronaut Joe Allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system ; and then he pointed to this and he said , " Life support system . "
We need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it .
The poet Auden said , " Thousands have lived without love ; none without water . "
Ninety-seven percent of Earth 's water is ocean .
No blue , no green .
If you think the ocean isn 't important , imagine Earth without it .
Mars comes to mind .
No ocean , no life support system .
I gave a talk not so long ago at the World Bank and I showed this amazing image of Earth and I said , " There it is ! The World Bank ! "
That 's where all the assets are !
And we 've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them .
Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment .
With every drop of water you drink , every breath you take , you 're connected to the sea .
No matter where on Earth you live .
Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea .
Over time , most of the planet 's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there , mostly by microbes .
The ocean drives climate and weather , stabilizes temperature , shapes Earth 's chemistry .
Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain , sleet and snow , and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world , maybe in the universe .
No water , no life ; no blue , no green .
Yet we have this idea , we humans , that the Earth -- all of it : the oceans , the skies -- are so vast and so resilient it doesn 't matter what we do to it .
That may have been true 10,000 years ago , and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100 , especially in the last 50 , we 've drawn down the assets , the air , the water , the wildlife that make our lives possible .
New technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature ; the nature of what 's happening , showing us our impact on the Earth .
I mean , first you have to know that you 've got a problem .
And fortunately , in our time , we 've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history .
And with knowing comes caring .
And with caring , there 's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us .
But first we have to know .
Three years ago , I met John Hanke , who 's the head of Google Earth , and I told him how much I loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously .
But I asked him : " When are you going to finish it ?
You did a great job with the land , the dirt .
What about the water ? "
Since then , I 've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers , with DOER Marine , with National Geographic , with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world , ones that we could enlist , to put the ocean in Google Earth .
And as of just this week , last Monday , Google Earth is now whole .
Consider this : Starting right here at the convention center , we can find the nearby aquarium , we can look at where we 're sitting , and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium , the ocean , and California 's four national marine sanctuaries , and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets We can flit over to Hawaii and see the real Hawaiian Islands : not just the little bit that pokes through the surface , but also what 's below .
To see -- wait a minute , we can go kshhplash ! -- right there , ha -- under the ocean , see what the whales see .
We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands .
We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales .
These are the gentle giants that I 've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater .
There 's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale .
We can pick up and fly to the deepest place : seven miles down , the Mariana Trench , where only two people have ever been .
Imagine that . It 's only seven miles , but only two people have been there , 49 years ago .
One-way trips are easy .
We need new deep-diving submarines .
How about some X Prizes for ocean exploration ?
We need to see deep trenches , the undersea mountains , and understand life in the deep sea .
We can now go to the Arctic .
Just ten years ago I stood on the ice at the North Pole .
An ice-free Arctic Ocean may happen in this century .
That 's bad news for the polar bears .
That 's bad news for us too .
Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming , it 's also changing ocean chemistry , making the sea more acidic .
That 's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton .
Also it 's bad news for us .
We 're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea .
Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets , gear that continues to kill .
We 're clogging the ocean , poisoning the planet 's circulatory system , and we 're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife , all carbon-based units .
Barbarically , we 're killing sharks for shark fin soup , undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle , the nitrogen cycle , the oxygen cycle , the water cycle -- our life support system .
We 're still killing bluefin tuna ; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead .
All of these parts are part of our life support system .
We kill using long lines , with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more .
Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers , taking everything in their path .
Using Google Earth you can witness trawlers -- in China , the North Sea , the Gulf of Mexico -- shaking the foundation of our life support system , leaving plumes of death in their path .
The next time you dine on sushi -- or sashimi , or swordfish steak , or shrimp cocktail , whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean -- think of the real cost .
For every pound that goes to market , more than 10 pounds , even 100 pounds , may be thrown away as bycatch .
This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea .
This chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000 .
The highest concentrations are in red .
In my lifetime , imagine , 90 percent of the big fish have been killed .
Most of the turtles , sharks , tunas and whales are way down in numbers .
But , there is good news .
Ten percent of the big fish still remain .
There are still some blue whales .
There are still some krill in Antarctica .
There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay .
Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape , a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet .
There 's still time , but not a lot , to turn things around .
But business as usual means that in 50 years , there may be no coral reefs -- and no commercial fishing , because the fish will simply be gone .
Imagine the ocean without fish .
Imagine what that means to our life support system .
Natural systems on the land are in big trouble too , but the problems are more obvious , and some actions are being taken to protect trees , watersheds and wildlife .
And in 1872 , with Yellowstone National Park , the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had .
About 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected : safeguarding biodiversity , providing a carbon sink , generating oxygen , protecting watersheds .
And , in 1972 , this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea , National Marine Sanctuaries .
That 's another great idea .
The good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea , around the world , that have some kind of protection .
And you can find them on Google Earth .
The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them .
In the last three years , for example , the U.S. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments .
But it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected , globally .
Protected areas do rebound , but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish , sharks or sea bass , or 200-year-old orange roughy .
We don 't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens .
Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson 's dream of an encyclopedia of life , or the census of marine life , will live not just as a list , a photograph , or a paragraph .
With scientists around the world , I 've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing -- and mining , and drilling , and dumping , and whatever -- to search out hope spots , and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future .
Such as the Arctic -- we have one chance , right now , to get it right .
Or the Antarctic , where the continent is protected , but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill , whales and fish .
Sargasso Sea 's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows .
97 percent of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected , but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing .
It 's true too in Argentina on the Patagonian shelf , which is now in serious trouble .
The high seas , where whales , tuna and dolphins travel -- the largest , least protected , ecosystem on Earth , filled with luminous creatures , living in dark waters that average two miles deep .
They flash , and sparkle , and glow with their own living light .
There are still places in the sea as pristine as I knew as a child .
The next 10 years may be the most important , and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life .
To cope with climate change , we need new ways to generate power .
We need new ways , better ways , to cope with poverty , wars and disease .
We need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place .
But , nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean .
Our fate and the ocean 's are one .
We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above .
A global plan of action with a world conservation union , the IUCN , is underway to protect biodiversity , to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change , on the high seas and in coastal areas , wherever we can identify critical places .
New technologies are needed to map , photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see .
The goal is to protect biodiversity , to provide stability and resilience .
We need deep-diving subs , new technologies to explore the ocean .
We need , maybe , an expedition -- a TED at sea -- that could help figure out the next steps .
And so , I suppose you want to know what my wish is .
I wish you would use all means at your disposal -- films , expeditions , the web , new submarines -- and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas -- hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean , the blue heart of the planet .
How much ?
Some say 10 percent , some say 30 percent .
You decide : how much of your heart do you want to protect ?
Whatever it is , a fraction of one percent is not enough .
My wish is a big wish , but if we can make it happen , it can truly change the world , and help ensure the survival of what actually -- as it turns out -- is my favorite species ; that would be us .
For the children of today , for tomorrow 's child : as never again , now is the time .
Thank you .
Sophal Ear : Escaping the Khmer Rouge
TED Fellow Sophal Ear shares the compelling story of his family 's escape from Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge . He recounts his mother 's cunning and determination to save her children .
I normally teach courses on how to rebuild states after war .
But today I 've got a personal story to share with you .
This is a picture of my family , my four siblings -- my mom and I -- taken in 1977 .
And we 're actually Cambodians .
And this picture is taken in Vietnam .
So how did a Cambodian family end up in Vietnam in 1977 ?
Well to explain that , I 've got a short video clip to explain the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975 and 1979 .
April 17th , 1975 .
The communist Khmer Rouge enters Phnom Penh to liberate their people from the encroaching conflict in Vietnam , and American bombing campaigns .
Led by peasant-born Pol Pot , the Khmer Rouge evacuates people to the countryside in order to create a rural communist utopia , much like Mao Tse-tung 's Cultural Revolution in China .
The Khmer Rouge closes the doors to the outside world .
But after four years the grim truth seeps out .
In a country of only seven million people , one and a half million were murdered by their own leaders , their bodies piled in the mass graves of the killing fields .
Sophal Ear : So , notwithstanding the 1970s narration , on April 17th 1975 we lived in Phnom Penh .
And my parents were told by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the city because of impending American bombing for three days .
And here is a picture of the Khmer Rouge .
They were young soldiers , typically child soldiers .
And this is very normal now , of modern day conflict , because they 're easy to bring into wars .
The reason that they gave about American bombing wasn 't all that far off .
I mean , from 1965 to 1973 there were more munitions that fell on Cambodia than in all of World War II Japan , including the two nuclear bombs of August 1945 .
The Khmer Rouge didn 't believe in money .
So the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cambodia was bombed .
But not just that , they actually banned money .
I think it 's the only precedent in which money has ever been stopped from being used .
And we know money is the root of all evil , but it didn 't actually stop evil from happening in Cambodia , in fact .
My family was moved from Phnom Penh to Pursat province .
This is a picture of what Pursat looks like .
It 's actually a very pretty area of Cambodia , where rice growing takes place .
And in fact they were forced to work the fields .
So my father and mother ended up in a sort of concentration camp , labor camp .
And it was at that time that my mother got word from the commune chief that the Vietnamese were actually asking for their citizens to go back to Vietnam .
And she spoke some Vietnamese , as a child having grown up with Vietnamese friends .
And she decided , despite the advice of her neighbors , that she would take the chance and claim to be Vietnamese so that we could have a chance to survive , because at this point they 're forcing everybody to work .
And they 're giving about -- in a modern-day , caloric-restriction diet , I guess -- they 're giving porridge , with a few grains of rice .
And at about this time actually my father got very sick .
And he didn 't speak Vietnamese .
So he died actually , in January 1976 .
And it made it possible , in fact , for us to take on this plan .
So the Khmer Rouge took us from a place called Pursat to Kaoh Tiev , which is across from the border from Vietnam .
And there they had a detention camp where alleged Vietnamese would be tested , language tested .
And my mother 's Vietnamese was so bad that to make our story more credible , she 'd given all the boys and girls new Vietnamese names .
But she 'd given the boys girls ' names , and the girls boys ' names .
And it wasn 't until she met a Vietnamese lady who told her this , and then tutored her for two days intensively , that she was able to go into her exam and -- you know , this was a moment of truth .
If she fails , we 're all headed to the gallows ; if she passes , we can leave to Vietnam .
And she actually , of course -- I 'm here , she passes .
And we end up in Hong Ngu on the Vietnamese side .
And then onwards to Chau Doc .
And this is a picture of Hong Ngu , Vietnam today .
A pretty idyllic place on the Mekong Delta .
But for us it meant freedom .
And freedom from persecution from the Khmer Rouge .
Last year , the Khmer Rouge Tribunal , which the U.N. is helping Cambodia take on , started , and I decided that as a matter of record I should file a Civil Complaint with the Tribunal about my father 's passing away .
And I got word last month that the complaint was officially accepted by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal .
And it 's for me a matter of justice for history , and accountability for the future , because Cambodia remains a pretty lawless place , at times .
Five years ago my mother and I went back to Chau Doc .
And she was able to return to a place that for her meant freedom , but also fear , because we had just come out of Cambodia .
I 'm happy , actually , today , to present her .
She 's here today with us in the audience .
Thank you mother .
Paul Bloom : The origins of pleasure
Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery ? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it , not simply as an illusion , but as a deep feature of what pleasure is .
I 'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life .
But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man .
This is Hermann Goering .
Goering was Hitler 's second in command in World War II , his designated successor .
And like Hitler , Goering fancied himself a collector of art .
He went through Europe , through World War II , stealing , extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection .
And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer .
Hitler had two of them , and he didn 't have any .
So he finally found an art dealer , a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren , who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars .
And it was his favorite artwork ever .
World War II came to an end , and Goering was captured , tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death .
Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him .
And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren .
Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason , which is itself punishable by death .
Six weeks into his prison sentence , van Meegeren confessed .
But he didn 't confess to treason .
He said , " I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi .
I painted it myself ; I 'm a forger . "
Now nobody believed him .
And he said , " I 'll prove it .
Bring me a canvas and some paint , and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi .
I also need alcohol and morphine , because it 's the only way I can work . "
So they brought him in .
He painted a beautiful Vermeer .
And then the charges of treason were dropped .
He had a lesser charge of forgery , got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people .
There 's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren , but I want to turn now to Goering , who 's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg .
Now Goering was , by all accounts , a terrible man .
Even for a Nazi , he was a terrible man .
His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath .
But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery .
According to his biographer , " He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world . "
And he killed himself soon afterwards .
He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that .
It looked the same , but it had a different origin , it was a different artwork .
It wasn 't just him who was in for a shock .
Once van Meegeren was on trial , he couldn 't stop talking .
And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists .
In particular , " The Supper at Emmaus " which was viewed as Vermeer 's finest masterpiece , his best work -- people would come [ from ] all over the world to see it -- was actually a forgery .
It was not that painting , but that painting .
And when that was discovered , it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum .
Why does this matter ?
I 'm a psychologists -- why do origins matter so much ?
Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from ?
Well there 's an answer that many people would give .
Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we 're snobs , because we 're focused on status .
Among other things , if you want to show off how rich you are , how powerful you are , it 's always better to own an original than a forgery because there 's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries .
I don 't doubt that that plays some role , but what I want to convince you of today is that there 's something else going on .
I want to convince you that humans are , to some extent , natural born essentialists .
What I mean by this is we don 't just respond to things as we see them , or feel them , or hear them .
Rather , our response is conditioned on our beliefs , about what they really are , what they came from , what they 're made of , what their hidden nature is .
I want to suggest that this is true , not just for how we think about things , but how we react to things .
So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep -- and that this isn 't true just for higher level pleasures like art , but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences .
So take food .
Would you eat this ?
Well , a good answer is , " It depends . What is it ? "
Some of you would eat it if it 's pork , but not beef .
Some of you would eat it if it 's beef , but not pork .
Few of you would eat it if it 's a rat or a human .
Some of you would eat it only if it 's a strangely colored piece of tofu .
That 's not so surprising .
But what 's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you 're eating .
So one demonstration of this was done with young children .
How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk , but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk -- to think they taste better ?
It 's simple , you tell them they 're from McDonald 's .
They believe McDonald 's food is tastier , and it leads them to experience it as tastier .
How do you get adults to really enjoy wine ?
It 's very simple : pour it from an expensive bottle .
There are now dozens , perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you 're drinking the expensive stuff , it tastes better to you .
This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist .
They get people into a fMRI scanner , and while they 're lying there , through a tube , they get to sip wine .
In front of them on a screen is information about the wine .
Everybody , of course , drinks exactly the same wine .
But if you believe you 're drinking expensive stuff , parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree .
It 's not just that you say it 's more pleasurable , you say you like it more , you really experience it in a different way .
Or take sex .
These are stimuli I 've used in some of my studies .
And if you simply show people these pictures , they 'll say these are fairly attractive people .
But how attractive you find them , how sexually or romantically moved you are by them , rests critically on who you think you 're looking at .
You probably think the picture on the left is male , the one on the right is female .
If that belief turns out to be mistaken , it will make a difference .
It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are .
It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you 're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter , your mother or father .
Knowing somebody 's your kin typically kills the libido .
Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there 's more to looking good than your physical appearance .
If you like somebody , they look better to you .
This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do .
A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome .
So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion .
Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates .
Now often , a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic .
People have murdered those that they loved , believing that they were murdering an imposter .
But there 's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending .
This was recorded in 1931 .
" Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover . "
After she got it , " She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich , virile , handsome and aristocratic . "
Of course , it was the same man , but she was seeing him in different ways .
As a third example , consider consumer products .
So one reason why you might like something is its utility .
You can put shoes on your feet ; you can play golf with golf clubs ; and chewed up bubble gum doesn 't do anything at all for you .
But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history .
The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction .
The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars .
And in fact , there 's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people .
The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all .
According to an unconfirmed report , a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes .
They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago .
Now this attraction to objects doesn 't just work for celebrity objects .
Each one of us , most people , have something in our life that 's literally irreplaceable , in that it has value because of its history -- maybe your wedding ring , maybe your child 's baby shoes -- so that if it was lost , you couldn 't get it back .
You could get something that looked like it or felt like it , but you couldn 't get the same object back .
With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck , we 've looked to see what sort of factors , what sort of history , matters for the objects that people like .
So in one of our experiments , we asked people to name a famous person who they adored , a living person they adored .
So one answer was George Clooney .
Then we asked them , " How much would you pay for George Clooney 's sweater ? "
And the answer is a fair amount -- more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn 't adore .
Then we asked other groups of subjects -- we gave them different restrictions and different conditions .
So for instance , we told some people , " Look , you can buy the sweater , but you can 't tell anybody you own it , and you can 't resell it . "
That drops the value of it , suggesting that that 's one reason why we like it .
But what really causes an effect is you tell people , " Look , you could resell it , you could boast about it , but before it gets to you , it 's thoroughly washed . "
That causes a huge drop in the value .
As my wife put it , " You 've washed away the Clooney cooties . "
So let 's go back to art .
I would love a Chagall . I love the work of Chagall .
If people want to get me something at the end of the conference , you could buy me a Chagall .
But I don 't want a duplicate , even if I can 't tell the difference .
That 's not because , or it 's not simply because , I 'm a snob and want to boast about having an original .
Rather , it 's because I want something that has a specific history .
In the case of artwork , the history is special indeed .
The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book " The Art Instinct " makes the case that , " The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation . "
And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery .
They may look alike , but they have a different history .
The original is typically the product of a creative act , the forgery isn 't .
I think this approach can explain differences in people 's taste in art .
This is a work by Jackson Pollock .
Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock ?
Okay . Who here , it does nothing for them ?
They just don 't like it .
I 'm not going to make a claim about who 's right , but I will make an empirical claim about people 's intuitions , which is that , if you like the work of Jackson Pollock , to believe that these works are difficult to create , that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy .
I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there 's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock , and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars -- in large part because she 's a very young artist .
This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old .
The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting .
And they then reported that her father was coaching her .
When this came out on television , the value of her art dropped to nothing .
It was the same art , physically , but the history had changed .
I 've been focusing now on the visual arts , but I want to give two examples from music .
This is Joshua Bell , a very famous violinist .
And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment .
The question is : How much would people like Joshua Bell , the music of Joshua Bell , if they didn 't know they were listening to Joshua Bell ?
So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make .
And here 's a brief clip of this .
he made 32 dollars .
Not bad . It 's also not good .
Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell , you have to know you 're listening to Joshua Bell .
He actually made 20 dollars more than that , but he didn 't count it .
Because this woman comes up -- you see at the end of the video -- she comes up .
She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair .
So she 's stunned that he 's standing in a subway station .
So she 's struck with pity .
She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20 .
The second example from music is from John Cage 's modernist composition , " 4 ' 33 " . "
As many of you know , this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench , opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds -- that period of silence .
And people have different views on this .
But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes .
For a dollar 99 , you can listen to that silence , which is different than other forms of silence .
Now I 've been talking so far about pleasure , but what I want to suggest is that everything I 've said applies as well to pain .
And how you think about what you 're experiencing , your beliefs about the essence of it , affect how it hurts .
One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner .
What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine .
And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks .
So it was a series of five painful shocks .
Half of them are told that they 're being given the shocks by somebody in another room , but the person in the other room doesn 't know they 're giving them shocks .
There 's no malevolence , they 're just pressing a button .
The first shock is recorded as very painful .
The second shock feels less painful , because you get a bit used to it .
The third drops , the fourth , the fifth .
The pain gets less .
In the other condition , they 're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose -- knows they 're shocking them .
The first shock hurts like hell .
The second shock hurts just as much , and the third and the fourth and the fifth .
It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose .
The most extreme example of this is that in some cases , pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure .
Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it -- as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides .
The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote , " The mind is its own place , and in itself can make a heaven of hell , a hell of heaven . "
And I 'll end with that . Thank you .
Eric Whitacre : A virtual choir 2,000 voices strong
In a moving and madly viral video last year , composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world . He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube , and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work , " Sleep , " with a video choir of 2,052 . The full piece premiered a few weeks later .
I wanted to be a rock star .
I dreamed of it , and that 's all I dreamed of .
To be more accurate , I wanted to be a pop star .
This was in the late ' 80s .
And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran .
They wouldn 't have me .
I didn 't read music , but I played synthesizers and drum machines .
And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada .
And I was certain that 's what my life would be .
And when I went to college at the University of Nevada , Las Vegas when I was 18 , I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101 , or even a degree program for that interest .
And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir .
And I said , " Yes , I would love to do that . It sounds great . "
And I left the room and said , " No way . "
The choir people in my high school were pretty geeky , and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with those people .
And about a week later , a friend of mine came to me and said , " Listen , you 've got to join choir .
At the end of the semester , we 're taking a trip to Mexico , all expenses paid .
And the soprano section is just full of hot girls . "
And so I figured for Mexico and babes , I could do just about anything .
And I went to my first day in choir , and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing .
They opened their scores , the conductor gave the downbeat , and boom , they launched into the Kyrie from the " Requiem " by Mozart .
In my entire life I had seen in black and white , and suddenly everything was in shocking Technicolor .
The most transformative experience I 've ever had -- in that single moment , hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing , people together , the shared vision .
And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself .
And there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section , as it turns out .
I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life .
I had learned to read music by then , or slowly learning to read music .
And that piece was published , and then I wrote another piece , and that got published .
And then I started conducting , and I ended up doing my master 's degree at the Juilliard School .
And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor .
Well a couple of years ago , a friend of mine emailed me a link , a YouTube link , and said , " You have got to see this . "
And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me , singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called " Sleep . "
Britlin Losee : Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre .
My name is Britlin Losee , and this is a video that I 'd like to make for you .
Here 's me singing " Sleep . "
I 'm a little nervous , just to let you know .
If there are noises in the night Eric Whitacre : I was thunderstruck .
Britlin was so innocent and so sweet , and her voice was so pure .
And I even loved seeing behind her ; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room .
Such an intimate video .
And I had this idea : if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing , sing their parts -- soprano , alto , tenor and bass -- wherever they were in the world , post their videos to YouTube , we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir .
So I wrote on my blog , " OMG OMG . "
I actually wrote , " OMG , " hopefully for the last time in public ever .
And I sent out this call to singers .
And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called " Lux Aurumque , " which means " light and gold . "
And lo and behold , people started uploading their videos .
Now I should say , before that , what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting .
And it 's in complete silence when I filmed it , because I was only hearing the music in my head , imagining the choir that would one day come to be .
Afterwards , I played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to .
And then as the videos started to come in ...
This is Cheryl Ang from Singapore .
This is Evangelina Etienne from Massachusetts .
Stephen Hanson from Sweden .
This is Jamal Walker from Dallas , Texas .
There was even a little soprano solo in the piece , and so I had auditions .
And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts .
I was told later , and also by lots of singers who were involved in this , that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take -- they uploaded it .
Here 's our winner of the soprano solo .
This is Melody Myers from Tennessee .
I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note -- like , " No problem , everything 's fine . "
And from the crowd emerged this young man , Scott Haines .
And he said , " Listen , this is the project I 've been looking for my whole life .
I 'd like to be the person to edit this all together . "
I said , " Thank you , Scott . I 'm so glad that you found me . "
And Scott aggregated all of the videos .
He scrubbed the audio .
He made sure that everything lined up .
And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago .
This is " Lux Aurumque " sung by the Virtual Choir .
I 'll stop it there in the interest of time .
Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
So there 's more . There 's more .
Thank you so much .
And I had the same reaction you did .
I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it .
I just couldn 't believe the poetry of all of it -- these souls all on their own desert island , sending electronic messages in bottles to each other .
And the video went viral .
We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it .
And because of that , then a lot of singers started saying , " All right , what 's Virtual Choir 2.0 ? "
And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing , " Sleep , " which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 -- poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri .
And again , I posted a conductor video , and we started accepting submissions .
This time we got some more mature members .
And some younger members .
Soprano : Upon my pillow Safe in bed EW : That 's Georgie from England . She 's only nine .
Isn 't that the sweetest thing you 've ever seen ?
Someone did all eight videos -- a bass even singing the soprano parts .
This is Beau Awtin .
Beau Awtin : Safe in bed EW : And our goal -- it was sort of an arbitrary goal -- there was an MTV video where they all sang " Lollipop " and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody .
And there were 900 people involved in that .
So I told the singers , " That 's our goal .
That 's the number for us to beat . "
And we just closed submissions January 10th , and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries .
Thank you .
From Malta , Madagascar , Thailand , Vietnam , Jordan , Egypt , Israel , as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand .
And we also put a page on Facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials , what it was like for them , their experience singing it .
And I 've just chosen a few of them here .
" My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly .
Now she 's an airman in the air force constantly traveling .
It 's so wonderful to sing together again ! "
I love the idea that she 's singing with her sister .
" Aside from the beautiful music , it 's great just to know I 'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before , but who are connected anyway . "
And my personal favorite , " When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this , he told me that I did not have the voice for it . "
Yeah , I 'm sure a lot of you have heard that too .
Me too .
" It hurt so much , and I shed some tears , but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words .
It is a dream come true to be part of this choir , as I 've never been part of one .
When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map , I had to go with the nearest city , which is about 400 miles away from where I live .
As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush , satellite is my connection to the world . "
So two things struck me deeply about this .
The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other .
It doesn 't matter the technology .
And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection .
It wasn 't a virtual choir .
There are people now online that are friends ; they 've never met .
But , I know myself too , I feel this virtual esprit de corps , if you will , with all of them .
I feel a closeness to this choir -- almost like a family .
What I 'd like to close with then today is the first look at " Sleep " by Virtual Choir 2.0 .
This will be a premiere today .
We 're not finished with the video yet .
You can imagine , with 2,000 synchronized YouTube videos , the render time is just atrocious .
But we do have the first three minutes .
And it 's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first .
You 're the very first people to see this .
This is " Sleep , " the Virtual Choir .
Virtual Choir : The evening hangs beneath the moon A silver thread on darkened dune With closing eyes and resting head I know that sleep is coming soon Upon my pillow , safe in bed , a thousand pictures fill my head I cannot sleep my mind 's aflight and yet my limbs seem made of lead If there are noises in the night Eric Whitacre : Thank you very , very much . Thank you .
Thank you very much . Thank you . Thank you .
Karen Thompson Walker : What fear can teach us
Imagine you 're a shipwrecked sailor adrift in the enormous Pacific . You can choose one of three directions and save yourself and your shipmates -- but each choice comes with a fearful consequence too . How do you choose ? In telling the story of the whaleship Essex , novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination , as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them .
One day in 1819 , 3,000 miles off the coast of Chile , in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean , 20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater .
They 'd been struck by a sperm whale , which had ripped a catastrophic hole in the ship 's hull .
As their ship began to sink beneath the swells , the men huddled together in three small whaleboats .
These men were 10,000 miles from home , more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land .
In their small boats , they carried only rudimentary navigational equipment and limited supplies of food and water .
These were the men of the whaleship Essex , whose story would later inspire parts of " Moby Dick . "
Even in today 's world , their situation would be really dire , but think about how much worse it would have been then .
No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong .
No search party was coming to look for these men .
So most of us have never experienced a situation as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves , but we all know what it 's like to be afraid .
We know how fear feels , but I 'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about what our fears mean .
As we grow up , we 're often encouraged to think of fear as a weakness , just another childish thing to discard like baby teeth or roller skates .
And I think it 's no accident that we think this way .
Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings are hard-wired to be optimists .
So maybe that 's why we think of fear , sometimes , as a danger in and of itself .
" Don 't worry , " we like to say to one another . " Don 't panic . "
In English , fear is something we conquer .
It 's something we fight . It 's something we overcome .
But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way ?
What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination , something that can be as profound and insightful as storytelling itself ?
It 's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination in young children , whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid .
When I was a child , I lived in California , which is , you know , mostly a very nice place to live , but for me as a child , California could also be a little scary .
I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier that hung above our dining table swing back and forth during every minor earthquake , and I sometimes couldn 't sleep at night , terrified that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping .
And what we say about kids who have fears like that is that they have a vivid imagination .
But at a certain point , most of us learn to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up .
We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed , and not every earthquake brings buildings down .
But maybe it 's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults .
The same incredible imaginations that produced " The Origin of Species , " " Jane Eyre " and " The Remembrance of Things Past , " also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives of Charles Darwin , Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust .
So the question is , what can the rest of us learn about fear from visionaries and young children ?
Well let 's return to the year 1819 for a moment , to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex .
Let 's take a look at the fears that their imaginations were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific .
Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship .
The time had come for the men to make a plan , but they had very few options .
In his fascinating account of the disaster , Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth .
The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach were the Marquesas Islands , 1,200 miles away .
But they 'd heard some frightening rumors .
They 'd been told that these islands , and several others nearby , were populated by cannibals .
So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered and eaten for dinner .
Another possible destination was Hawaii , but given the season , the captain was afraid they 'd be struck by severe storms .
Now the last option was the longest , and the most difficult : to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching a certain band of winds that could eventually push them toward the coast of South America .
But they knew that the sheer length of this journey would stretch their supplies of food and water .
To be eaten by cannibals , to be battered by storms , to starve to death before reaching land .
These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men , and as it turned out , the fear they chose to listen to would govern whether they lived or died .
Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name .
What if instead of calling them fears , we called them stories ?
Because that 's really what fear is , if you think about it .
It 's a kind of unintentional storytelling that we are all born knowing how to do .
And fears and storytelling have the same components .
They have the same architecture .
Like all stories , fears have characters .
In our fears , the characters are us .
Fears also have plots . They have beginnings and middles and ends .
You board the plane . The plane takes off . The engine fails .
Our fears also tend to contain imagery that can be every bit as vivid as what you might find in the pages of a novel .
Picture a cannibal , human teeth sinking into human skin , human flesh roasting over a fire .
Fears also have suspense .
If I 've done my job as a storyteller today , you should be wondering what happened to the men of the whaleship Essex .
Our fears provoke in us a very similar form of suspense .
Just like all great stories , our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature : What will happen next ?
In other words , our fears make us think about the future .
And humans , by the way , are the only creatures capable of thinking about the future in this way , of projecting ourselves forward in time , and this mental time travel is just one more thing that fears have in common with storytelling .
As a writer , I can tell you that a big part of writing fiction is learning to predict how one event in a story will affect all the other events , and fear works in that same way .
In fear , just like in fiction , one thing always leads to another .
When I was writing my first novel , " The Age Of Miracles , " I spent months trying to figure out what would happen if the rotation of the Earth suddenly began to slow down .
What would happen to our days ? What would happen to our crops ?
What would happen to our minds ?
And then it was only later that I realized how very similar these questions were to the ones I used to ask myself as a child frightened in the night .
If an earthquake strikes tonight , I used to worry , what will happen to our house ? What will happen to my family ?
And the answer to those questions always took the form of a story .
So if we think of our fears as more than just fears but as stories , we should think of ourselves as the authors of those stories .
But just as importantly , we need to think of ourselves as the readers of our fears , and how we choose to read our fears can have a profound effect on our lives .
Now , some of us naturally read our fears more closely than others .
I read about a study recently of successful entrepreneurs , and the author found that these people shared a habit that he called " productive paranoia , " which meant that these people , instead of dismissing their fears , these people read them closely , they studied them , and then they translated that fear into preparation and action .
So that way , if their worst fears came true , their businesses were ready .
And sometimes , of course , our worst fears do come true .
That 's one of the things that is so extraordinary about fear .
Once in a while , our fears can predict the future .
But we can 't possibly prepare for all of the fears that our imaginations concoct .
So how can we tell the difference between the fears worth listening to and all the others ?
I think the end of the story of the whaleship Essex offers an illuminating , if tragic , example .
After much deliberation , the men finally made a decision .
Terrified of cannibals , they decided to forgo the closest islands and instead embarked on the longer and much more difficult route to South America .
After more than two months at sea , the men ran out of food as they knew they might , and they were still quite far from land .
When the last of the survivors were finally picked up by two passing ships , less than half of the men were left alive , and some of them had resorted to their own form of cannibalism .
Herman Melville , who used this story as research for " Moby Dick , " wrote years later , and from dry land , quote , " All the sufferings of these miserable men of the Essex might in all human probability have been avoided had they , immediately after leaving the wreck , steered straight for Tahiti .
But , " as Melville put it , " they dreaded cannibals . "
So the question is , why did these men dread cannibals so much more than the extreme likelihood of starvation ?
Why were they swayed by one story so much more than the other ?
Looked at from this angle , theirs becomes a story about reading .
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov said that the best reader has a combination of two very different temperaments , the artistic and the scientific .
A good reader has an artist 's passion , a willingness to get caught up in the story , but just as importantly , the readers also needs the coolness of judgment of a scientist , which acts to temper and complicate the reader 's intuitive reactions to the story .
As we 've seen , the men of the Essex had no trouble with the artistic part .
They dreamed up a variety of horrifying scenarios .
The problem was that they listened to the wrong story .
Of all the narratives their fears wrote , they responded only to the most lurid , the most vivid , the one that was easiest for their imaginations to picture : cannibals .
But perhaps if they 'd been able to read their fears more like a scientist , with more coolness of judgment , they would have listened instead to the less violent but the more likely tale , the story of starvation , and headed for Tahiti , just as Melville 's sad commentary suggests .
And maybe if we all tried to read our fears , we too would be less often swayed by the most salacious among them .
Maybe then we 'd spend less time worrying about serial killers and plane crashes , and more time concerned with the subtler and slower disasters we face : the silent buildup of plaque in our arteries , the gradual changes in our climate .
Just as the most nuanced stories in literature are often the richest , so too might our subtlest fears be the truest .
Read in the right way , our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination , a kind of everyday clairvoyance , a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there 's still time to influence how that future will play out .
Properly read , our fears can offer us something as precious as our favorite works of literature : a little wisdom , a bit of insight and a version of that most elusive thing -- the truth .
Thank you .
Gregory Petsko : The coming neurological epidemic
Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that , in the next 50 years , we 'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases , such as Alzheimer 's , as the world population ages . His solution : more research into the brain and its functions .
Unless we do something to prevent it , over the next 40 years we 're facing an epidemic of neurologic diseases on a global scale .
A cheery thought .
On this map , every country that 's colored blue has more than 20 percent of its population over the age of 65 .
This is the world we live in .
And this is the world your children will live in .
For 12,000 years , the distribution of ages in the human population has looked like a pyramid , with the oldest on top .
It 's already flattening out .
By 2050 , it 's going to be a column and will start to invert .
This is why it 's happening .
The average lifespan 's more than doubled since 1840 , and it 's increasing currently at the rate of about five hours every day .
And this is why that 's not entirely a good thing : because over the age of 65 , your risk of getting Alzheimer 's or Parkinson 's disease will increase exponentially .
By 2050 , there 'll be about 32 million people in the United States over the age of 80 , and unless we do something about it , half of them will have Alzheimer 's disease and three million more will have Parkinson 's disease .
Right now , those and other neurologic diseases -- for which we have no cure or prevention -- cost about a third of a trillion dollars a year .
It will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050 .
Alzheimer 's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami .
So one approach we 're taking is to try to design drugs that function like molecular Scotch tape , to hold the protein into its proper shape .
That would keep it from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of the brain when they do .
Interestingly enough , other neurologic diseases which affect very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded protein , which suggests that the approach might be a general one , and might be used to cure many neurologic diseases , not just Alzheimer 's disease .
There 's also a fascinating connection to cancer here , because people with neurologic diseases have a very low incidence of most cancers .
And this is a connection that most people aren 't pursuing right now , but which we 're fascinated by .
Most of the important and all of the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies .
And there 's tremendous scope for additional private help here , because the government has dropped the ball on much of this , I 'm afraid .
In the meantime , while we 're waiting for all these things to happen , here 's what you can do for yourself .
If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson 's disease , caffeine is protective to some extent ; nobody knows why .
Head injuries are bad for you . They lead to Parkinson 's disease .
And the Avian Flu is also not a good idea .
As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer 's disease , well , it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer 's disease .
You should also keep your blood pressure down , because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer 's disease .
It 's also the biggest risk factor for glaucoma , which is just Alzheimer 's disease of the eye .
And of course , when it comes to cognitive effects , " use it or lose it " applies , so you want to stay mentally stimulated .
But hey , you 're listening to me .
So you 've got that covered .
And one final thing . Wish people like me luck , okay ?
Because the clock is ticking for all of us .
Thank you .
Arthur Potts Dawson : A vision for sustainable restaurants
If you 've been in a restaurant kitchen , you 've seen how much food , water and energy can be wasted there . Chef Arthur Potts-Dawson shares his very personal vision for drastically reducing restaurant , and supermarket , waste -- creating recycling , composting , sustainable engines for good .
Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world .
For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today , 10 calories are taken to produce it .
That 's a lot .
I want to take something rather humble to discuss .
I found this in the farmers ' market today , and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later , you 're very welcome to .
The humble potato -- and I 've spent a long time , 25 years , preparing these .
And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime .
First of all , it 's planted , and that takes energy .
It grows and is nurtured .
It 's then harvested .
It 's then distributed , and distribution is a massive issue .
It 's then sold and bought , and it 's then delivered to me .
I basically take it , prepare it , and then people consume it -- hopefully they enjoy it .
The last stage is basically waste , and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it .
There are different types of waste .
There 's a waste of time ; there 's a waste of space ; there 's a waste of energy ; and there 's a waste of waste .
And every business I 've been working on over the past five years , I 'm trying to lower each one of these elements .
Okay , so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like .
Basically a restaurant just like any other .
This is the restaurant , Acorn House .
Front and back .
So let me run you through a few ideas .
Floor : sustainable , recyclable .
Chairs : recycled and recyclable .
Tables : Forestry Commission .
This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood .
This bench , although it was uncomfortable for my mom -- she didn 't like sitting on it , so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale -- reusing , a job that was pretty good .
I hate waste , especially walls .
If they 're not working , put a shelf on it , which I did , and that shows all the customers my products .
The whole business is run on sustainable energy .
This is powered by wind . All of the lights are daylight bulbs .
Paint is all low-volume chemical , which is very important when you 're working in the room all the time .
I was experimenting with these -- I don 't know if you can see it -- but there 's a work surface there .
And that 's a plastic polymer .
And I was thinking , well I 'm trying to think nature , nature , nature .
But I thought , no , no , experiment with resins , experiment with polymers .
Will they outlive me ? They probably might .
Right , here 's a reconditioned coffee machine .
It actually looks better than a brand new one -- so looking good there .
Now reusing is vital .
And we filter our own water .
We put them in bottles , refrigerate them , and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again .
Here 's a great little example .
If you can see this orange tree , it 's actually growing in a car tire , which has been turned inside out and sewn up .
It 's got my compost in it , which is growing an orange tree , which is great .
This is the kitchen , which is in the same room .
I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume .
Rather than me putting a dish down , they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted .
Okay , it 's a small kitchen . It 's about five square meters .
It serves 220 people a day .
We generate quite a lot of waste .
This is the waste room .
You can 't get rid of waste .
But this story 's not about eliminating it , it 's about minimizing it .
In here , I have produce and boxes that are unavoidable .
I put my food waste into this dehydrating , desiccating macerator -- turns food into an inner material , which I can store and then compost later .
I compost it in this garden .
All of the soil you can see there is basically my food , which is generated by the restaurant , and it 's growing in these tubs , which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things .
Three compost bins -- go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week -- really good , makes fantastic compost .
A couple of wormeries in there too .
And actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery . I had a lot of worms in it .
And I tried taking the dried food waste , putting it to the worms , going , " There you go , dinner . "
It was like vegetable jerky , and killed all of them .
I don 't know how many worms [ were ] in there , but I 've got some heavy karma coming , I tell you .
What you 're seeing here is a water filtration system .
This takes the water out of the restaurant , runs it through these stone beds -- this is going to be mint in there -- and I sort of water the garden with it .
And I ultimately want to recycle that , put it back into the loos , maybe wash hands with it , I don 't know .
So , water is a very important aspect .
I started meditating on that and created a restaurant called Waterhouse .
If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with , that would be great .
I managed to do it .
This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House -- same chairs , same tables .
They 're all English and a little bit more sustainable .
But this is an electrical restaurant .
The whole thing is electric , the restaurant and the kitchen .
And it 's run on hydroelectricity , so I 've gone from air to water .
Now it 's important to understand that this room is cooled by water , heated by water , filters its own water , and it 's powered by water .
It literally is Waterhouse .
The air handling system inside it -- I got rid of air-conditioning because I thought there was too much consumption going on there .
This is basically air-handling .
I 'm taking the temperature of the canal outside , pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism , it 's turning through these amazing sails on the roof , and that , in turn , is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant , cooling them , or heating them , as the need may be .
And this is an English willow air diffuser , and that 's softly moving that air current through the room .
Very advanced , no air-conditioning -- I love it .
In the canal , which is just outside the restaurant , there is hundreds of meters of coil piping .
This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange .
I have no idea how it works , but I paid a lot of money for it .
And what 's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat -- it 's off-grid ; it generates all its own power .
He 's growing all his own fruit , and that 's fantastic .
There 's no accident in names of these restaurants .
Acorn House is the element of wood ; Waterhouse is the element of water ; and I 'm thinking , well , I 'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities .
I 've got water and wood . I 'm just about to do fire .
I 've got metal and earth to come .
So you 've got to watch your space for that .
Okay . So this is my next project .
Five weeks old , it 's my baby , and it 's hurting real bad .
The People 's Supermarket .
So basically , the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway .
What I needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people .
So people -- i.e. , perhaps , more working-class -- or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative .
This is a social enterprise , not-for-profit cooperative supermarket .
It really is about the social disconnect between food , communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers -- connecting communities in London to rural growers .
Really important .
So I 'm committing to potatoes ; I 'm committing to milk ; I 'm committing to leeks and broccoli -- all very important stuff .
I 've kept the tiles ; I 've kept the floors ; I 've kept the trunking ; I 've got in some recycled fridges ; I 've got some recycled tills ; I 've got some recycled trolleys .
I mean , the whole thing is is super-sustainable .
In fact , I 'm trying and I 'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world .
That 's zero food waste .
And no one 's doing that just yet .
In fact , Sainsbury 's , if you 're watching , let 's have a go . Try it on .
I 'm going to get there before you .
So nature doesn 't create waste doesn 't create waste as such .
Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning , and that 's been something that 's been nurturing me for some time , and it 's an important statement to understand .
If we don 't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food , think about the sustainable nature of it , then we may fail .
But , I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we 're more responsible .
Environmentally conscious businesses are doable .
They 're here . You can see I 've done three so far ; I 've got a few more to go .
The idea is embryonic .
I think it 's important .
I think that if we reduce , reuse , refuse and recycle -- right at the end there -- recycling is the last point I want to make ; but it 's the four R 's , rather than the three R 's -- then I think we 're going to be on our way .
So these three are not perfect -- they 're ideas .
I think that there are many problems to come , but with help , I 'm sure I 'm going to find solutions .
And I hope you all take part .
Thank you very much .
Aaron Huey : America 's native prisoners of war
Aaron Huey 's effort to photograph poverty in America led him to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation , where the struggle of the native Lakota people -- appalling , and largely ignored -- compelled him to refocus . Five years of work later , his haunting photos intertwine with a shocking history lesson in this bold , courageous talk . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 'm here today to show my photographs of the Lakota .
Many of you may have heard of the Lakota , or at least the larger group of tribes called the Sioux .
The Lakota are one of many tribes that were moved off their land to prisoner of war camps now called reservations .
The Pine Ridge Reservation , the subject of today 's slide show , is located about 75 miles southeast of the Black Hills in South Dakota .
It is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334 , and it is where the Lakota now live .
Now , if any of you have ever heard of AIM , the American Indian Movement , or of Russell Means , or Leonard Peltier , or of the stand-off at Oglala , then you know that Pine Ridge is ground zero for Native issues in the U.S.
So I 've been asked to talk a little bit today about my relationship with the Lakota , and that 's a very difficult one for me .
Because , if you haven 't noticed from my skin color , I 'm white , and that is a huge barrier on a Native reservation .
You 'll see a lot of people in my photographs today , and I 've become very close with them , and they 've welcomed me like family .
They 've called me " brother " and " uncle " and invited me again and again over five years .
But on Pine Ridge , I will always be what is called " wasichu , " and " wasichu " is a Lakota word that means " non-Indian , " but another version of this word means " the one who takes the best meat for himself . "
And that 's what I want to focus on -- the one who takes the best part of the meat .
It means greedy .
So take a look around this auditorium today .
We are at a private school in the American West , sitting in red velvet chairs with money in our pockets .
And if we look at our lives , we have indeed taken the best part of the meat .
So let 's look today at a set of photographs of a people who lost so that we could gain , and know that when you see these people 's faces that these are not just images of the Lakota ; they stand for all indigenous people .
On this piece of paper is the history the way I learned it from my Lakota friends and family .
The following is a time-line of treaties made , treaties broken and massacres disguised as battles .
I 'll begin in 1824 .
What is known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was created within the War Department , setting an early tone of aggression in our dealings with the Native Americans .
1851 : The first treaty of Fort Laramie was made , clearly marking the boundaries of the Lakota Nation .
According to the treaty , those lands are a sovereign nation .
If the boundaries of this treaty had held -- and there is a legal basis that they should -- then this is what the U.S. would look like today .
10 years later , the Homestead Act , signed by President Lincoln , unleashed a flood of white settlers into Native lands .
1863 : An uprising of Santee Sioux in Minnesota ends with the hanging of 38 Sioux men , the largest mass execution in U.S. history .
The execution was ordered by President Lincoln only two days after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation .
1866 : the beginning of the transcontinental railroad -- a new era .
We appropriated land for trails and trains to shortcut through the heart of the Lakota Nation .
The treaties were out the window .
In response , three tribes led by the Lakota chief Red Cloud attacked and defeated the U.S. army many times over .
I want to repeat that part .
The Lakota defeat the U.S. army .
1868 : The second Fort Laramie Treaty clearly guarantees the sovereignty of the Great Sioux Nation and the Lakotas ' ownership of the sacred Black Hills .
The government also promises land and hunting rights in the surrounding states .
We promise that the Powder River country will henceforth be closed to all whites .
The treaty seemed to be a complete victory for Red Cloud and the Sioux .
In fact , this is the only war in American history in which the government negotiated a peace by conceding everything demanded by the enemy .
1869 : The transcontinental railroad was completed .
It began carrying , among other things , a large number of hunters who began the wholesale killing of buffalo , eliminating a source of food and clothing and shelter for the Sioux .
1871 : The Indian Appropriation Act makes all Indians wards of the federal government .
In addition , the military issued orders forbidding western Indians from leaving reservations .
All western Indians at that point in time were now prisoners of war .
Also in 1871 , we ended the time of treaty-making .
The problem with treaties is they allow tribes to exist as sovereign nations , and we can 't have that .
We had plans .
1874 : General George Custer announced the discovery of gold in Lakota territory , specifically the Black Hills .
The news of gold creates a massive influx of white settlers into Lakota Nation .
Custer recommends that Congress find a way to end the treaties with the Lakota as soon as possible .
1875 : The Lakota war begins over the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty .
1876 : On July 26th on its way to attack a Lakota village , Custer 's 7th Cavalry was crushed at the battle of Little Big Horn .
1877 : The great Lakota warrior and chief named Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson .
He was later killed while in custody .
1877 is also the year we found a way to get around the Fort Laramie Treaties .
A new agreement was presented to Sioux chiefs and their leading men under a campaign known as " sell or starve : " Sign the paper , or no food for your tribe .
Only 10 percent of the adult male population signed .
The Fort Laramie Treaty called for at least three-quarters of the tribe to sign away land .
That clause was obviously ignored .
1887 : The Dawes Act .
Communal ownership of reservation lands ends .
Reservations are cut up into 160-acre sections and distributed to individual Indians with the surplus disposed of .
Tribes lost millions of acres .
The American dream of individual land ownership turned out to be a very clever way to divide the reservation until nothing was left .
The move destroyed the reservations , making it easier to further subdivide and to sell with every passing generation .
Most of the surplus land and many of the plots within reservation boundaries are now in the hands of white ranchers .
Once again , the fat of the land goes to wasichu .
1890 , a date I believe to be the most important in this slide show .
This is the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre .
On December 29th , U.S. troops surrounded a Sioux encampment at Wounded Knee Creek and massacred Chief Big Foot and 300 prisoners of war , using a new rapid-fire weapon that fired exploding shells called a Hotchkiss gun .
For this so-called " battle , " 20 Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were given to the 7th Cavalry .
To this day , this is the most Medals of Honor ever awarded for a single battle .
More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War One , World War Two , Korea , Vietnam , Iraq or Afghanistan .
The Wounded Knee massacre is considered the end of the Indian wars .
Whenever I visit the site of the mass grave at Wounded Knee , I see it not just as a grave for the Lakota or for the Sioux , but as a grave for all indigenous peoples .
The holy man , Black Elk , said , " I did not know then how much was ended .
When I look back now from this high hill of my old age , I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young .
And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard : A people 's dream died there , and it was a beautiful dream . "
With this event , a new era in Native American history began .
Everything can be measured before Wounded Knee and after .
Because it was in this moment with the fingers on the triggers of the Hotchkiss guns that the U.S. government openly declared its position on Native rights .
They were tired of treaties .
They were tired of sacred hills .
They were tired of ghost dances .
And they were tired of all the inconveniences of the Sioux .
So they brought out their cannons .
" You want to be an Indian now ? " they said , finger on the trigger .
1900 : the U.S. Indian population reached its low point -- less than 250,000 , compared to an estimated eight million in 1492 .
Fast-forward .
1980 : The longest running court case in U.S. history , the Sioux Nation v. the United States , was ruled upon by the U.S. Supreme Court .
The court determined that , when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders , the terms of the second Fort Laramie Treaty had been violated .
The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken and that the initial offering price plus interest should be paid to the Sioux Nation .
As payment for the Black Hills , the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation .
The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry , " The Black Hills are not for sale . "
2010 : Statistics about Native population today , more than a century after the massacre at Wounded Knee , reveal the legacy of colonization , forced migration and treaty violations .
Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation fluctuates between 85 and 90 percent .
The housing office is unable to build new structures , and existing structures are falling apart .
Many are homeless , and those with homes are packed into rotting buildings with up to five families .
39 percent of homes on Pine Ridge have no electricity .
At least 60 percent of the homes on the reservation are infested with black mold .
More than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line .
The tuberculosis rate on Pine Ridge is approximately eight times higher than the U.S. national average .
The infant mortality rate is the highest on this continent and is about three times higher than the U.S. national average .
Cervical cancer is five times higher than the U.S. national average .
School dropout rate is up to 70 percent .
Teacher turnover is eight times higher than the U.S. national average .
Frequently , grandparents are raising their grandchildren because parents , due to alcoholism , domestic violence and general apathy , cannot raise them .
50 percent of the population over the age of 40 suffers from diabetes .
The life expectancy for men is between 46 and 48 years old -- roughly the same as in Afghanistan and Somalia .
The last chapter in any successful genocide is the one in which the oppressor can remove their hands and say , " My God , what are these people doing to themselves ?
They 're killing each other .
They 're killing themselves while we watch them die . "
This is how we came to own these United States .
This is the legacy of manifest destiny .
Prisoners are still born into prisoner-of-war camps long after the guards are gone .
These are the bones left after the best meat has been taken .
A long time ago , a series of events was set in motion by a people who look like me , by wasichu , eager to take the land and the water and the gold in the hills .
Those events led to a domino effect that has yet to end .
As removed as we the dominant society may feel from a massacre in 1890 , or a series of broken treaties 150 years ago , I still have to ask you the question , how should you feel about the statistics of today ?
What is the connection between these images of suffering and the history that I just read to you ?
And how much of this history do you need to own , even ?
Is any of this your responsibility today ?
I have been told that there must be something we can do .
There must be some call to action .
Because for so long I 've been standing on the sidelines content to be a witness , just taking photographs .
Because the solution seems so far in the past , I needed nothing short of a time machine to access them .
The suffering of indigenous peoples is not a simple issue to fix .
It 's not something everyone can get behind the way they get behind helping Haiti , or ending AIDS , or fighting a famine .
The " fix , " as it 's called , may be much more difficult for the dominant society than , say , a $ 50 check or a church trip to paint some graffiti-covered houses , or a suburban family donating a box of clothes they don 't even want anymore .
So where does that leave us ?
Shrugging our shoulders in the dark ?
The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties with the Lakota .
The call to action I offer today -- my TED wish -- is this : Honor the treaties .
Give back the Black Hills .
It 's not your business what they do with them .
Jackie Tabick : The balancing act of compassion
While we all agree that compassion is a great idea , Rabbi Tabick acknowledges there are challenges to its execution . She explains how a careful balance of compassion and justice allows us to do good deeds , and keep our sanity .
One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy .
I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life .
So when I thought about compassion , my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips , where he 's lying there and he says , " I really understand , and I really appreciate how one should love one 's neighbor as one love 's oneself .
The only trouble is the people next door ; I can 't stand them . "
This , in a way , is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea .
We all , I think , believe in compassion .
If you look at all the world religions , all the main world religions , you 'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion .
So in Judaism , we have , from our Torah , that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself .
And within Jewish teachings , the rabbinic teachings , we have Hillel , who taught that you shouldn 't do to others what you don 't like being done to yourself .
And all the main religions have similar teachings .
And again , within Judaism , we have a teaching about God , who is called the compassionate one , Ha-rachaman .
After all , how could the world exist without God being compassionate ?
And we , as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God , so we too have to be compassionate .
But what does it mean ? How does it impact on our everyday life ?
Sometimes , of course , being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control .
I know there are many times when I 've gone and conducted a funeral , or when I have been sitting with the bereaved , or with people who are dying , and I am overwhelmed by the sadness , by the difficulty , the challenge that is there for the family , for the person .
And I 'm touched , so that tears come to my eyes .
And yet , if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings , I wouldn 't be doing my job -- because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen , that practicalities are seen to .
And yet , on the other hand , if I didn 't feel this compassion , then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi .
And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world .
Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war , or famine , or earthquakes , or tsunamis ?
I know some people who say " Well , you know there 's just so much out there -- I can 't do anything , I 'm not going to even begin to try . "
And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue .
There are others who feel they can 't confront compassion anymore , and so they turn off the television and don 't watch .
In Judaism , though , we tend to always say , there has to be a middle way .
You have to , of course , be aware of the needs of others , but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people .
So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick .
And , of course , you can 't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more .
And there 's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation , which says that when God created the world , God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice .
Because , after all , God is just .
Therefore , there should be justice throughout the world .
And then God looked to the future and realized , if the world was created just with justice , the world couldn 't exist .
So , God thought , " Nope , I 'm going to create the world just with compassion . "
And then God looked to the future and realized that , in fact , if the world were just filled with compassion , there would be anarchy and chaos .
There had to be limits to all things .
The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful , fragile glass bowl .
If you put too much cold water in , it will shatter .
If you put boiling water in , it will shatter .
What do you have to do ? Put in a mixture of the two .
And so God put both of these possibilities into the world .
There is something more though that has to be there .
And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world , into action .
So , like Snoopy , we can 't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors .
We actually have to do something about it .
And so there is also , within Judaism , this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important : " chesed . "
All these three things , then , have to be melded together .
The idea of justice , which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what 's right about life , what 's right about living , what should we be doing , social justice .
There has to be a willingness to do good deeds , but not , of course , at the expense of our own sanity .
You know , there 's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things .
And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion , which has to be there , if you like , at our very roots .
This idea of compassion comes to us because we 're made in the image of God , who is ultimately the compassionate one .
What does this compassion entail ?
It entails understanding the pain of the other .
But even more than that , it means understanding one 's connection to the whole of creation : understanding that one is part of that creation , that there is a unity that underlies all that we see , all that we hear , all that we feel .
I call that unity God .
And that unity is something that connects all of creation .
And , of course , in the modern world , with the environmental movement , we 're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things , that something I do here actually does matter in Africa , that if I use too much of my carbon allowance , it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa .
So there is a connectivity , and I have to understand that -- as part of the creation , as part of me being made in the image of God .
And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs .
This " 18 minutes " business , I find quite fascinating .
Because in Judaism , the number 18 , in Hebrew letters , stands for life -- the word " life . "
So , in a sense , the 18 minutes is challenging me to say , " In life , this is what 's important in terms of compassion . "
But , something else as well : actually , 18 minutes is important .
Because at Passover , when we have to eat unleavened bread , the rabbis say , what is the difference between dough that is made into bread , and dough that is made into unleavened bread , or " matzah " ?
And they say " It 's 18 minutes . "
Because that 's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven .
What does it mean , " dough becomes leaven " ?
It means it gets filled with hot air .
What 's matzah ? What 's unleavened bread ? You don 't get it .
Symbolically , what the rabbis say is that at Passover , what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air -- our pride , our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world , and that everything should revolve round us .
So we try and get rid of those , and so doing , try to get rid of the habits , the emotions , the ideas that enslave us , that make our eyes closed , give us tunnel vision so we don 't see the needs of others -- and free ourselves and free ourselves from that .
And that too is a basis for having compassion , for understanding our place in the world .
Now there is , in Judaism , a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day .
And , as many people do , he was dozing off during the sermon .
And as he was dozing off , they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah .
And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem , the priests used to have bread , which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem .
The man was asleep , but he heard the words bread , temple , God , and he woke up .
He said , " God wants bread . That 's it . God wants bread . I know what God wants . "
And he rushed home . And after the Sabbath , he made 12 loaves of bread , took them to the synagogue , went into the synagogue , opened the ark and said , " God , I don 't know why you want this bread , but here you are . "
And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah .
Then he went home .
The cleaner came into the synagogue .
" Oh God , I 'm in such trouble . I 've got children to feed .
My wife 's ill . I 've got no money . What can I do ? "
He goes into the synagogue . " God , will you please help me ?
Ah , what a wonderful smell . "
He goes to the ark . He opens the ark .
" There 's bread ! God , you 've answered my plea . You 've answered my question . "
Takes the bread and goes home .
Meanwhile , the rich man thinks to himself , " I 'm an idiot . God wants bread ?
God , the one who rules the entire universe , wants my bread ? "
He rushes to the synagogue . " I 'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it . "
He goes in there , and it 's not there .
And he says , " God , you really did want it . You wanted my bread .
Next week , with raisins . "
This went on for years .
Every week , the man would bring bread with raisins , with all sorts of good things , put it into the ark .
Every week , the cleaner would come . " God you 've answered my plea again . "
Take the bread . Take it home .
Went on until a new rabbi came . Rabbis always spoil things .
The rabbi came in and saw what was going on .
And he called the two of them to his office .
And he said , you know , " This is what 's happening . "
And the rich man -- oh , dear -- crestfallen .
" You mean God didn 't want my bread ? "
And the poor man said , " And you mean God didn 't answer my pleas ? "
And the rabbi said , " You 've misunderstood me .
You 've misunderstood totally , " he said .
" Of course , what you are doing , " he said to the rich man , " is answering God 's plea that we should be compassionate .
And God , " he said to the poor man , " is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give . "
He looked at the rich man . He held the rich man 's hands and said , " Don 't you understand ? " He said , " These are the hands of God . "
So that is the way I feel : that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate , of understanding that there is a connectivity , that there is a unity in this world ; that I want to try and serve that unity , and that I can try and do that by understanding , I hope , trying to understand something of the pain of others ; but understanding that there are limits , that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them ; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy , to the giving I can give .
I have to reevaluate them , try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me , so that I can see the world clearly .
And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God .
And so try to bring compassion to life in this world .
Henry Evans and Chad Jenkins : Meet the robots for humanity
Paralyzed by a stroke , Henry Evans uses a telepresence robot to take the stage -- and show how new robotics , tweaked and personalized by a group called Robots for Humanity , help him live his life . He shows off a nimble little quadrotor drone , created by a team led by Chad Jenkins , that gives him the ability to navigate space -- to once again look around a garden , stroll a campus … & lt ; i & gt ; & lt ; / i & gt ;
Sarge Salman : All the way from Los Altos Hills , California , Mr. Henry Evans .
Henry Evans : Hello .
My name is Henry Evans , and until August 29 , 2002 , I was living my version of the American dream .
I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis .
My dad was a lawyer .
My mom was a homemaker .
My six siblings and I were good kids , but caused our fair share of trouble .
After high school , I left home to study and learn more about the world .
I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German , including spending a year of study in Austria .
Later on , I earned an MBA at Stanford .
I married my high school sweetheart , Jane .
I am lucky to have her .
Together , we raised four wonderful children .
I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder , eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley , a job I really enjoyed .
My family and I bought our first and only home on December 13 , 2001 , a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills , California , from where I am speaking to you now .
We were looking forward to rebuilding it , but eight months after we moved in , I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect .
Overnight , I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40 .
It took me several years , but with the help of an incredibly supportive family , I finally decided life was still worth living .
I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled .
Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements , and enable my use of a regular computer .
I can surf the web , exchange email with people , and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games .
This technology allows me to remain engaged , mentally active , and feel like I am a part of the world .
One day , I was lying in bed watching CNN , when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR2 robot .
I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage , and we formed the Robots for Humanity project .
For about two years , Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR2 as my body surrogate .
I shaved myself for the first time in 10 years .
From my home in California , I shaved Charlie in Atlanta .
I handed out Halloween candy .
I opened my refrigerator on my own .
I began doing tasks around the house .
I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute , both for myself and others in my circumstance .
All of us have disabilities in one form or another .
For example , if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour , both of us will need an assistive device called a car .
Your disability doesn 't make you any less of a person , and neither does mine .
By the way , check out my sweet ride .
Since birth , we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own .
Last year , Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins .
Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones .
It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight , giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible .
Using a mouse cursor I control with my head , these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser .
With a little practice , I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own .
I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing .
I inspected the solar panels on our roof .
One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop .
I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display , the Oculus Rift , as modified by Fighting Walrus , to have an immersive experience controlling the drone .
With Chad 's group at Brown , I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week , from my home 3,000 miles away .
All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic , so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer .
I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own .
I just wish I could afford the tuition .
Chad Jenkins : Henry , all joking aside , I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 3,000 miles away .
Okay , Henry , have you been to D.C. lately ?
Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic ?
Can you show us how excited you are ?
All right , big finish .
Can you show us how good of a pilot you are ?
All right , we still have a little ways to go with that , but I think it shows the promise .
What makes Henry 's story amazing is it 's about understanding Henry 's needs , understanding what people in Henry 's situation need from technology , and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide , and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way .
What we 're trying to do is democratize robotics , so that anybody can be a part of this .
We 're providing affordable , off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone , 300 dollars , the Suitable Technologies beam , only 17,000 dollars , along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we 're trying to do .
And our hope is that , by providing these tools , that you 'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled , to provide care for our aging population , to help better educate our children , to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future , to both monitor and protect our environment , and to explore the universe .
Back to you , Henry .
HE : Thank you , Chad .
With this drone setup , we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world , and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination , where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else , and perhaps better , and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables .
One hundred years ago , I would have been treated like a vegetable .
Actually , that 's not true .
I would have died .
It is up to us , all of us , to decide how robotics will be used , for good or for evil , for simply replacing people or for making people better , for allowing us to do and enjoy more .
Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone 's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe .
With the help of people like you , we can make this dream a reality .
Thank you .
Alexa Meade : Your body is my canvas
Alexa Meade takes an innovative approach to art . Not for her a life of sketching and stretching canvases . Instead , she selects a topic and then paints it--literally . She covers everything in a scene--people , chairs , food , you name it--in a mask of paint that mimics what 's below it . In this eye-opening talk Meade shows off photographs of some of the more outlandish results , and shares a new project involving people , paint and milk .
You may want to take a closer look .
There 's more to this painting than meets the eye .
And yes , it 's an acrylic painting of a man , but I didn 't paint it on canvas .
I painted it directly on top of the man .
What I do in my art is I skip the canvas altogether , and if I want to paint your portrait , I 'm painting it on you , physically on you .
That also means you 're probably going to end up with an earful of paint , because I need to paint your ear on your ear .
Everything in this scene , the person , the clothes , chairs , wall , gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what 's directly below it , and in this way , I 'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting .
I can photograph it from any angle , and it will still look 2D .
There 's no Photoshop here .
This is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings .
You might be wondering how I came up with this idea of turning people into paintings .
But originally , this had nothing to do with either people or paint .
It was about shadows .
I was fascinated with the absence of light , and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed .
I came up with the idea of painting shadows .
my own painted version , and it would be almost invisible until the light changed , and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light .
I wanted to think about what else I could put shadows on , and I thought of my friend Bernie .
But I didn 't just want to paint the shadows .
I also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale .
I had a very specific vision of what this would look like , and as I was painting him , I made sure to follow that very closely .
But something kept on flickering before my eyes .
I wasn 't quite sure what I was looking at .
And then when I took that moment to take a step back , magic .
I had turned my friend into a painting .
I couldn 't have foreseen that when I wanted to paint a shadow , I would pull out this whole other dimension , that I would collapse it , that I would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting .
I was a little conflicted though , because I was so excited about what I 'd found , but I was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science , and I 'd always had this dream of going to Washington , D.C. , and sitting at a desk and working in government .
Why did this have to get in the way of all that ?
I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill , but going down to my parents ' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint .
I had no idea where to begin .
The last time I 'd painted , I was 16 years old at summer camp , and I didn 't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface , because that 's not what this project was about for me .
It was about space and light .
My early canvases ended up being things that you wouldn 't expect to be used as canvas , like fried food .
It 's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg .
Even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit .
It just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink .
I 'd put something down , and instantly it would be gone .
And if I wanted to paint on people , well , I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast .
It just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself .
One of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only didn 't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears , but he also didn 't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition , like the Metro .
I was having so much fun with this process .
I was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles , and I wanted to see what else I could do with it .
I came together with a collaborator , Sheila Vand , and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface , and that was milk .
We got a pool . We filled it with milk .
We filled it with Sheila . And I began painting .
And the images were always completely unexpected in the end , because I could have a very specific image about how it would turn out , I could paint it to match that , but the moment that Sheila laid back into the milk , everything would change .
It was in constant flux , and we had to , rather than fight it , embrace it , see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better .
Sometimes , when Sheila would lay down in the milk , it would wash all the paint off of her arms , and it might seem a little bit clumsy , but our solution would be , okay , hide your arms .
And one time , she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face .
All right , well , hide your face .
And we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined , even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he can 't draw hands , just hiding them in the pockets .
When we started out on the milk project , and when I started out , I couldn 't have foreseen that I would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk .
But then again , I guess it 's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar , as long as you 're willing to look beyond what 's already been brought to light , that you can see what 's below the surface , hiding in the shadows , and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye .
Thank you .
Peter van Uhm : Why I chose a gun
Peter van Uhm is the Netherlands ' chief of defense , but that does not mean he is pro-war . In this talk , he explains how his career is one shaped by a love of peace , not a desire for bloodshed -- and why we need armies if we want peace . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
As the highest military commander of The Netherlands , with troops stationed around the world , I 'm really honored to be here today .
When I look around this TEDxAmsterdam venue , I see a very special audience .
You are the reason why I said yes to the invitation to come here today .
When I look around , I see people who want to make a contribution , I see people who want to make a better world , by doing groundbreaking scientific work , by creating impressive works of art , by writing critical articles or inspiring books , by starting up sustainable businesses .
And you all have chosen your own instruments to fulfill this mission of creating a better world .
Some chose the microscope as their instrument .
Others chose dancing or painting or making music like we just heard .
Some chose the pen .
Others work through the instrument of money .
Ladies and gentlemen , I made a different choice .
Thanks .
Ladies and gentlemen -- I share your goals .
I share the goals of the speakers you heard before .
I did not choose to take up the pen , the brush , the camera .
I chose this instrument .
I chose the gun .
For you , and you heard already , being so close to this gun may make you feel uneasy .
It may even feel scary .
A real gun at a few feet 's distance .
Let us stop for a moment and feel this uneasiness .
You could even hear it .
Let us cherish the fact that probably most of you have never been close to a gun .
It means The Netherlands is a peaceful country .
The Netherlands is not at war .
It means soldiers are not needed to patrol our streets .
Guns are not a part of our lives .
In many countries it is a different story .
In many countries people are confronted with guns .
They are oppressed .
They are intimidated -- by warlords , by terrorists , by criminals .
Weapons can do a lot of harm .
They are the cause of much distress .
Why then am I standing before you with this weapon ?
Why did I choose the gun as my instrument ?
Today I want to tell you why .
Today I want to tell you why I chose the gun to create a better world .
And I want to tell you how this gun can help .
My story starts in the city of Nijmegen in the east of The Netherlands , the city where I was born .
My father was a hardworking baker , but when he had finished work in the bakery , he often told me and my brother stories .
And most of the time , he told me this story I 'm going to share with you now .
The story of what happened when he was a conscripted soldier in the Dutch armed forces at the beginning of the Second World War .
The Nazis invaded The Netherlands .
Their grim plans were evident .
They meant to rule by means of repression .
Diplomacy had failed to stop the Germans .
Only brute force remained .
It was our last resort .
My father was there to provide it .
As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt , my father was an excellent marksman .
When he aimed , he never missed .
At this decisive moment in Dutch history my father was positioned on the bank of the river Waal near the city of Nijmegen .
He had a clear shot at the German soldiers who came to occupy a free country , his country , our country .
He fired . Nothing happened .
He fired again .
No German soldier fell to the ground .
My father had been given an old gun that could not even reach the opposite riverbank .
Hitler 's troops marched on , and there was nothing my father could do about it .
Until the day my father died , he was frustrated about missing these shots .
He could have done something .
But with an old gun , not even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark .
So this story stayed with me .
Then in high school , I was gripped by the stories of the Allied soldiers -- soldiers who left the safety of their own homes and risked their lives to liberate a country and a people that they didn 't know .
They liberated my birth town .
It was then that I decided I would take up the gun -- out of respect and gratitude for those men and women who came to liberate us -- from the awareness that sometimes only the gun can stand between good and evil .
And that is why I took up the gun -- not to shoot , not to kill , not to destroy , but to stop those who would do evil , to protect the vulnerable , to defend democratic values , to stand up for the freedom we have to talk here today in Amsterdam about how we can make the world a better place .
Ladies and gentlemen , I do not stand here today to tell you about the glory of weapons .
I do not like guns .
And once you have been under fire yourself , it brings home even more clearly that a gun is not some macho instrument to brag about .
I stand here today to tell you about the use of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability .
The gun may be one of the most important instruments of peace and stability Now this may sound contradictory to you .
But not only have I seen with my own eyes during my deployments in Lebanon , Sarajevo and [ unclear ] national as The Netherlands ' chief of defense , this is also supported by cold , hard statistics .
Violence has declined dramatically over the last 500 years .
Despite the pictures we are shown daily in the news , wars between developed countries are no longer commonplace .
The murder rate in Europe has dropped by a factor of 30 since the Middle Ages .
And occurrences of civil war and repression have declined since the end of the Cold War .
Statistics show that we are living in a relatively peaceful era .
Why ?
Why has violence decreased ?
Has the human mind changed ?
Well we were talking on the human mind this morning .
Did we simply lose our beastly impulses for revenge , for violent rituals , for pure rage ?
Or is there something else ?
In his latest book , Harvard professor Steven Pinker -- and many other thinkers before him -- concludes that one of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the introduction on a large scale of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence -- legitimized by a democratically elected government , legitimized by checks and balances and an independent judicial system .
In other words , a state monopoly that has the use of violence well under control .
Such a state monopoly on violence , first of all , serves as a reassurance .
It removes the incentive for an arms race between potentially hostile groups in our societies .
Secondly , the presence of penalties that outweigh the benefits of using violence tips the balance even further .
Abstaining from violence becomes more profitable than starting a war .
Now nonviolence starts to work like a flywheel .
It enhances peace even further .
Where there is no conflict , trade flourishes .
And trade is another important incentive against violence .
With trade , there 's mutual interdependency and mutual gain between parties .
And when there is mutual gain , both sides stand to lose more than they would gain if they started a war .
War is simply no longer the best option , and that is why violence has decreased .
This , ladies and gentlemen , is the rationale behind the existence of my armed forces .
The armed forces implement the state monopoly on violence .
We do this in a legitimized way only after our democracy has asked us to do so .
It is this legitimate , controlled use of the gun that has contributed greatly to the statistics of war , conflict and violence around the globe .
It is this participation in peacekeeping missions that has led to the resolution of many civil wars .
My soldiers use the gun as an instrument of peace .
And this is exactly why failed states are so dangerous .
Failed states have no legitimized , democratically controlled use of force .
Failed states do not know of the gun as an instrument of peace and stability .
That is why failed states can drag down a whole region into chaos and conflict .
That is why spreading the concept of the constitutional state is such an important aspect of our foreign missions .
That is why we are trying to build a judicial system right now in Afghanistan .
That is why we train police officers , we train judges , we train public prosecutors around the world .
And that is why -- and in The Netherlands , we are very unique in that -- that is why the Dutch constitution states that one of the main tasks of the armed forces is to uphold and promote the international rule of law .
Ladies and gentlemen , looking at this gun , we are confronted with the ugly side of the human mind .
Every day I hope that politicians , diplomats , development workers can turn conflict into peace and threat into hope .
And I hope that one day armies can be disbanded and humans will find a way of living together without violence and oppression .
But until that day comes , we will have to make ideals and human failure meet somewhere in the middle .
Until that day comes , I stand for my father who tried to shoot the Nazis with an old gun .
I stand for my men and women who are prepared to risk their lives for a less violent world for all of us .
I stand for this soldier who suffered partial hearing loss and sustained permanent injuries to her leg , which was hit by a rocket on a mission in Afghanistan .
Ladies and gentlemen , until the day comes when we can do away with the gun , I hope we all agree that peace and stability do not come free of charge .
It takes hard work , often behind the scenes .
It takes good equipment and well-trained , dedicated soldiers .
I hope you will support the efforts of our armed forces to train soldiers like this young captain and provide her with a good gun , instead of the bad gun my father was given .
I hope you will support our soldiers when they are out there , when they come home and when they are injured and need our care .
They put their lives on the line , for us , for you , and we cannot let them down .
I hope you will respect my soldiers , this soldier with this gun .
Because she wants a better world .
Because she makes an active contribution to the better world , just like all of us here today .
Thank you very much .
Niall Ferguson : The 6 killer apps of prosperity
Over the past few centuries , Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves . Historian Niall Ferguson asks : Why the West , and less so the rest ? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth , stability and innovation . And in this new century , he says , these apps are all shareable .
Let 's talk about billions .
Let 's talk about past and future billions .
We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived .
And we know that most of them are dead .
And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia .
And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long .
Let 's talk about billions .
Let 's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today .
We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800 .
And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners : Europeans , North Americans , Australasians .
19 percent of the world 's population today , Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth .
Economic historians call this " The Great Divergence . "
And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you .
It 's basically two ratios of per capita GDP , per capita gross domestic product , so average income .
One , the red line , is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income .
And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese .
And this chart goes back to 1500 .
And you can see here that there 's an exponential Great Divergence .
They start off pretty close together .
In fact , in 1500 , the average Chinese was richer than the average North American .
When you get to the 1970s , which is where this chart ends , the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian .
And that 's allowing for differences in the cost of living .
It 's based on purchasing power parity .
The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s .
So why ?
This wasn 't just an economic story .
If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires , in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world 's land surface , 16 percent of its population , maybe 20 percent of its income .
By 1913 , these 10 countries , plus the United States , controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world 's territory , about the same percentage of its population , and a really huge , nearly three-quarters share of global economic output .
And notice , most of that went to the motherland , to the imperial metropoles , not to their colonial possessions .
Now you can 't just blame this on imperialism -- though many people have tried to do so -- for two reasons .
One , empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500 .
Everybody did empire .
They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans .
So it really doesn 't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence .
In any case , as you may remember , the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s , some considerable time after decolonization .
This is not a new question .
Samuel Johnson , the great lexicographer , [ posed ] it through his character Rasselas in his novel " Rasselas , Prince of Abissinia , " published in 1759 .
" By what means are the Europeans thus powerful ; or why , since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest , cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts , plant colonies in their ports , and give laws to their natural princes ?
The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither ? "
That 's a great question .
And you know what , it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners -- by the people in the rest of the world -- like Ibrahim Muteferrika , an Ottoman official , the man who introduced printing , very belatedly , to the Ottoman Empire -- who said in a book published in 1731 , " Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies ? "
Unlike Rasselas , Muteferrika had an answer to that question , which was correct .
He said it was " because they have laws and rules invented by reason . "
It 's not geography .
You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography .
We know that 's wrong , because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions .
We took all the Germans , we divided them roughly in two , and we gave the ones in the East communism , and you see the result .
Within an incredibly short period of time , people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants , the Trabbi , one of the world 's worst ever cars , while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz .
If you still don 't believe me , we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula .
And we decided we 'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with , notice , the same basic traditional culture , and we divided them in two , and we gave the Northerners communism .
And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany .
Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly , but in almost every other respect , it 's a huge divergence .
Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character , popular explanations for this kind of thing , are really significant .
It 's the ideas .
It 's the institutions .
This must be true because a Scotsman said it .
And I think I 'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED .
So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman .
He was Adam Smith -- not Billy Connolly , not Sean Connery -- though he is very smart indeed .
Smith -- and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile ; it 's a wonderful statue -- Smith , in the " Wealth of Nations " published in 1776 -- that 's the most important thing that happened that year ...
You bet .
There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies , but ...
" China seems to have been long stationary , and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions .
But this complement may be much inferior to what , with other laws and institutions , the nature of its soil , climate , and situation might admit of . "
That is so right and so cool .
And he said it such a long time ago .
But you know , this is a TED audience , and if I keep talking about institutions , you 're going to turn off .
So I 'm going to translate this into language that you can understand .
Let 's call them the killer apps .
I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest .
And they 're kind of like the apps on your phone , in the sense that they look quite simple .
They 're just icons ; you click on them .
But behind the icon , there 's complex code .
It 's the same with institutions .
There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence .
One , competition .
Two , the scientific revolution .
Three , property rights .
Four , modern medicine .
Five , the consumer society .
And six , the work ethic .
You can play a game and try and think of one I 've missed at , or try and boil it down to just four , but you 'll lose .
Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this , synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process .
Competition means , not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500 , but within each of these units , there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns .
The ancestor of the modern corporation , the City of London Corporation , existed in the 12th century .
Nothing like this existed in China , where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity , and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination , which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing .
The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways , the most important being that , through the experimental method , it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before .
Example : Benjamin Robins 's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics .
Once you do that , your artillery becomes accurate .
Think of what that means .
That really was a killer application .
Meanwhile , there 's no scientific revolution anywhere else .
The Ottoman Empire 's not that far from Europe , but there 's no scientific revolution there .
In fact , they demolish Taqi al-Din 's observatory , because it 's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God .
Property rights : It 's not the democracy , folks ; it 's having the rule of law based on private property rights .
That 's what makes the difference between North America and South America .
You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying , " I 'll work for nothing for five years .
You just have to feed me . "
But at the end of it , you 've got a hundred acres of land .
That 's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide .
That 's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors .
And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South .
Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900 .
Hardly anyone in South America did .
That 's another killer app .
Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people .
And this was another killer app -- the very opposite of a killer , because it doubled , and then more than doubled , human life expectancy .
It even did that in the European empires .
Even in places like Senegal , beginning in the early 20th century , there were major breakthroughs in public health , and life expectancy began to rise .
It doesn 't rise any faster after these countries become independent .
The empires weren 't all bad .
The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point .
You need people to want to wear tons of clothes .
You 've all bought an article of clothing in the last month ; I guarantee it .
That 's the consumer society , and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself .
Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it .
The alternative , which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi , was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent .
Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi 's road .
Finally , the work ethic .
Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant .
He was wrong .
Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work .
We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant , Western phenomenon .
In fact , the West has lost its work ethic .
Today , the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German -- a thousand .
And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon , and that is the end of the Great Divergence .
Who 's got the work ethic now ?
Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds .
At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study , is the Shanghai district of China .
The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S.
and Albania and Tunisia .
You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation .
You 're wrong .
In terms of patents , there 's no question that the East is ahead .
Not only has Japan been ahead for some time , South Korea has gone into third place , and China is just about to overtake Germany .
Why ?
Because the killer apps can be downloaded .
It 's open source .
Any society can adopt these institutions , and when they do , they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 -- only faster .
This is the Great Reconvergence , and it 's the biggest story of your lifetime .
Because it 's on your watch that this is happening .
It 's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance .
The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese .
Now it 's just five times , and soon it will be 2.5 times .
So I want to end with three questions for the future billions , just ahead of 2016 , when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China .
The first is , can you delete these apps , and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world ?
The second question is , does the sequencing of the download matter ?
And could Africa get that sequencing wrong ?
One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it 's quite hard to transition to democracy before you 've established secure private property rights .
Warning : that may not work .
And third , can China do without killer app number three ?
That 's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law .
That 's the basis for the Western model of representative government .
Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei 's studio in Shanghai earlier this year .
He 's now free again , having been detained , as you know , for some time .
But I don 't think his studio has been rebuilt .
Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938 .
And I think these words really nail it : " It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians .
It means that violence , the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs , the conditions of camps and warfare , of riot and tyranny , give place to parliaments where laws are made , and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained .
That is civilization -- and in its soil grow continually freedom , comfort and culture , " what all TEDsters care about most .
" When civilization reigns in any country , a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people . "
That 's so true .
I don 't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable , because I don 't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model , beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole 's " Course of Empire " paintings .
That 's not the way history works .
That 's not the way the West rose , and I don 't think it 's the way the West will fall .
The West may collapse very suddenly .
Complex civilizations do that , because they operate , most of the time , on the edge of chaos .
That 's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations .
No , we may hang on , despite the huge burdens of debt that we 've accumulated , despite the evidence that we 've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo .
But one thing is for sure , the Great Divergence is over , folks .
Thanks very much .
Niall , I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that 's booming , which is Latin America .
What 's your view on that ?
Niall Ferguson : Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East ; I 'm talking about the rise of the Rest , and that includes South America .
I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard , " Hey , is South America part of the West ? "
He was an expert in Latin American history .
He said , " I don 't know ; I 'll have to think about that . "
That tells you something really important .
I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular , but also Chile , which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life , there 's a very bright future indeed .
So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it 's a convergence story in Eurasia .
And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends .
Mostly they 're worried about each other .
The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow .
The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow .
And that 's all we seem to be caring about recently .
NF : I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now -- both sides of the Atlantic -- is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture .
And it 's a crisis that has its structural facet -- it 's partly to do with demographics .
But it 's also , of course , to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage , excessive borrowing in the private sector .
That crisis , which has been the focus of so much attention , including by me , I think is an epiphenomenon .
The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon , which has just accelerated this huge shift , which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy .
I think that 's its real importance .
Niall , thank you .
Louise Fresco : We need to feed the whole world
Louise Fresco shows us why we should celebrate mass-produced , supermarket-style white bread . She says environmentally sound mass production will feed the world , yet leave a role for small bakeries and traditional methods .
I 'm not at all a cook .
So don 't fear , this is not going to be a cooking demonstration .
But I do want to talk to you about something that I think is dear to all of us .
And that is bread -- something which is as simple as our basic , most fundamental human staple .
And I think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form .
Unless you 're on one of these Californian low-carb diets , bread is standard .
Bread is not only standard in the Western diet .
As I will show to you , it is actually the mainstay of modern life .
So I 'm going to bake bread for you .
In the meantime I 'm also talking to you , so my life is going to complicated . Bear with me .
First of all , a little bit of audience participation .
I have two loaves of bread here .
One is a supermarket standard : white bread , pre-packaged , which I 'm told is called a Wonderbread .
I didn 't know this word until I arrived .
And this is more or less , a whole-meal , handmade , small-bakery loaf of bread .
Here we go . I want to see a show of hands .
Who prefers the whole-meal bread ?
Okay let me do this differently . Is anybody preferring the Wonderbread at all ?
I have two tentative male hands .
Okay , now the question is really , why is this so ?
And I think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity .
It 's about a traditional way of living .
A way that is perhaps more real , more honest .
This is an image from Tuscany , where we feel agriculture is still about beauty .
And life is really , too .
And this is about good taste , good traditions .
Why do we have this image ?
Why do we feel that this is more true than this ?
Well I think it has a lot to do with our history .
In the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved , most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production .
And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past .
Art has helped us to maintain that kind of image .
It was a mythical past .
Of course , the reality is quite different .
These poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals , had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in West Africa .
But we have , somehow , in the course of the last few centuries , or even decades , started to cultivate an image of a mythical , rural agricultural past .
It was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the Industrial Revolution .
And while I 'm starting to make some bread for you here , it 's very important to understand what that revolution did to us .
It brought us power . It brought us mechanization , fertilizers .
And it actually drove up our yields .
And even sort of horrible things , like picking beans by hand , can now be done automatically .
All that is a real , great improvement , as we shall see .
Of course we also , particularly in the last decade , managed to envelop the world in a dense chain of supermarkets , in a chain of global trade .
And it means that you now eat products , which can come from all around the world .
That is the reality of our modern life .
Now you may prefer this loaf of bread .
Excuse my hands but this is how it is .
But actually the real relevant bread , historically , is this white Wonder loaf .
And don 't despise the white bread because it really , I think , symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all .
And that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much .
But it has changed the world .
This tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world .
So what is happening ?
Well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics .
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades , since the 1960s , food availability , per head , in this world , has increased by 25 percent .
And the world population in the meantime has doubled .
That means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history .
And that is the result , directly , of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production .
And this is true , as you can see , for all countries , including the so-called developing countries .
What happened to our bread in the meantime ?
As food became plentiful here , it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like , on average , in the high income countries , five percent or less of the population .
In the U.S. only one percent of the people are actually farmers .
And it frees us all up to do other things -- to sit at TED meetings and not to worry about our food .
That is , historically , a really unique situation .
Never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people .
And never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact .
So as food became more plentiful , bread became cheaper .
And as it became cheaper , bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things .
We added in more sugar .
We add in raisins and oil and milk and all kinds of things to make bread , from a simple food into kind of a support for calories .
And today , bread now is associated with obesity , which is very strange .
It is the basic , most fundamental food that we 've had in the last ten thousand years .
Wheat is the most important crop -- the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today .
But this is now this strange concoction of high calories .
And that 's not only true in this country , it is true all over the world .
Bread has migrated to tropical countries , where the middle classes now eat French rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava .
So bread has become from a main staple , a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity , of modern life .
And the whiter the bread , in many countries , the better it is .
So this is the story of bread as we know it now .
But of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale .
And large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes , destruction of biodiversity -- still a lonely emu here in the Brazilian cerrado soybean fields .
The costs have been tremendous -- water pollution , all the things you know about , destruction of our habitats .
What we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about .
And this is where I have to query all of you .
How many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals ?
How many of you actually can make a bread in this way , without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor ?
Can you actually bake bread ? Do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs ?
We have become very removed from what our bread really is , which , again , evolutionarily speaking , is very strange .
In fact not many of you know that our bread , of course , was not a European invention .
It was invented by farmers in Iraq and Syria in particular .
The tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat .
This is where it all comes from , and where these farmers who actually , ten thousand years ago , put us on the road of bread .
Now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production , there is a counter-movement that emerged -- very much also here in California .
The counter-movement says , " Let 's go back to this .
Let 's go back to traditional farming .
Let 's go back to small-scale , to farmers ' markets , small bakeries and all that . " Wonderful .
Don 't we all agree ? I certainly agree .
I would love to go back to Tuscany to this kind of traditional setting , gastronomy , good food .
But this is a fallacy .
And the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about .
If we do this , if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going , actually , to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands -- among whom I have lived for many years , working without electricity and water , to try to improve their food production -- we relegate them to poverty .
What they want are implements to increase their production : something to fertilize the soil , something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market .
We cannot just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem .
It 's a luxury solution for us who can afford it , if you want to afford it .
In fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this .
If we say just small-scale production , as is the tendency here , to go back to local food means that a poor man like Hans Rosling cannot even eat oranges anymore because in Scandinavia we don 't have oranges .
So local food production is out .
But also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas .
And we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation .
So we must find other solutions .
One of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly -- doubling by about 2030 .
The main driver of that is actually meat .
And meat consumption in Southeast Asia and China in particular is what drives the prices of cereals .
That need for animal protein is going to continue .
We can discuss alternatives in another talk , perhaps one day , but this is our driving force .
So what can we do ?
Can we find a solution to produce more ?
Yes . But we need mechanization .
And I 'm making a real plea here .
I feel so strongly that you cannot ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice , 150,000 times , just to plant a crop and weed it .
You cannot ask people to work under these conditions .
We need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we 've had .
So what can we do ?
We must feed three billion people in cities .
We will not do that through small farmers ' markets because these people have no small farmers ' markets at their disposal .
They have low incomes . And they benefit from cheap , affordable , safe and diverse food .
That 's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years .
But yes there are some solutions .
And let me just do one simple conceptual thing : if I plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale .
What you see is that we 've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture , which was sort of small-scale and low-control .
We 've moved towards large-scale and very high control .
What I want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale -- not just in terms of the scale of the fields , but in terms of the entire food network .
That 's where we should move .
And the ultimate may be , but it doesn 't apply to cereals , that we have entirely closed ecosystems -- the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner .
So we need to think differently about agriculture science .
Agriculture science for most people -- and there are not many farmers among you here -- has this name of being bad , of being about pollution , about large-scale , about the destruction of the environment .
That is not necessary .
We need more science and not less . And we need good science .
So what kind of science can we have ?
Well first of all I think we can do much better on the existing technologies .
Use biotechnology where useful , particularly in pest and disease resistance .
There are also robots , for example , who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch .
We have much cleverer irrigation .
We do not need to spill the water if we don 't want to .
And we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale .
We need to think that land is multi-functional .
It has different functions .
There are different ways in which we must use it -- for residential , for nature , for agriculture purposes .
And we also need to re-examine livestock .
Go regional and go to urban food systems .
I want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements .
I want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas .
And I want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas .
There are all kinds of ways we can do it .
We cannot solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture .
But we can do a lot more .
And the main thing that I would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries , or as you stay here : ask your government for an integrated food policy .
Food is as important as energy , as security , as the environment .
Everything is linked together .
So we can do that . In fact in a densely populated country like the River Delta , where I live in the Netherlands , we have combined these functions .
So this is not science fiction . We can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people -- to house , for example , the chronically sick .
There is all kinds of things we can do .
But there is something you must do . It 's not enough for me to say , " Let 's get more bold science into agriculture . "
You must go back and think about your own food chain .
Talk to farmers . When was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer ?
Talk to people in restaurants .
Understand where you are in the food chain , where your food comes from .
Understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events .
And that frees you up to do other things .
And above all , to me , food is about respect .
It 's about understanding , when you eat , that there are also many people who are still in this situation , who are still struggling for their daily food .
And the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have , to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution , is really not morally justified .
We need to help to lift them out of poverty .
We need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive .
Never before , as I said , has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few .
And never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap .
And I think there is nobody else who has expressed better , to me , the idea that food , in the end , in our own tradition , is something holy .
It 's not about nutrients and calories .
It 's about sharing . It 's about honesty . It 's about identity .
Who said this so beautifully was Mahatma Gandhi , 75 years ago , when he spoke about bread .
He did not speak about rice , in India . He said , " To those who have to go without two meals a day , God can only appear as bread . "
And so as I 'm finishing my bread here -- and I 've been baking it , and I 'll try not to burn my hands .
Let me share with those of you here in the first row .
Let me share some of the food with you .
Take some of my bread .
And as you eat it , and as you try it -- please come and stand up .
Have some of it .
I want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future : to these anonymous farmers , that first bred the first wheat varieties ; and to the farmers of today , who 've been making this . And you don 't even know who they are .
Every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world .
Everything makes us so privileged , that we can eat this food , that we don 't struggle every day .
And that , I think , evolutionarily-speaking is unique .
We 've never had that before .
So enjoy your bread .
Eat it , and feel privileged .
Thank you very much .
John Legend : " True Colors "
In a heart-melting moment , TED Talks Education host John Legend sits at the piano to sing " True Colors , " giving the lyrics a special meaning for kids and teachers . " So don 't be afraid / to let them show / your true colors / are beautiful , like a rainbow . "
You with the sad eyes Don 't be discouraged Oh , I realize It 's hard to take courage In a world full of people You can lose sight of it all And the darkness inside you Can make you feel so small But I see your true colors Shining through I see your true colors And that 's why I love you So don 't be afraid to let them show Your true colors True colors are beautiful Like a rainbow Show me a smile , then Don 't be unhappy Can 't remember when I last saw you laughing If this world makes you crazy And you 've taken all you can bear You can call me up Because you know I 'll be there And I 'll see your true colors Shining through I see your true colors And that 's why I love you So don 't be afraid to let them show Your true colors True colors are beautiful Like a rainbow If this world makes you crazy You can call me up Because you know I 'll be there And I 'll see your true colors Shining through I see your true colors And that 's why I love you So don 't be afraid to let them show Your true colors True colors are beautiful Like a rainbow So don 't be afraid to let them show True colors True colors True colors True colors are beautiful Like a rainbow
Cameron Herold : Let 's raise kids to be entrepreneurs
Bored in school , failing classes , at odds with peers : This child might be an entrepreneur , says Cameron Herold . In his talk , he makes the case for parenting and education that helps would-be entrepreneurs flourish -- as kids and as adults .
I would be willing to bet that I 'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn 't get through school . I struggled with school .
But what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money and I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing , and I was raised to be an entrepreneur , and what I 've been really passionate about ever since -- and I 've never spoken about this ever , until now -- so this is the first time anyone 's ever heard it , except my wife three days ago , because she said , " What are you talking about ? " and I told her -- is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits , and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing .
It 's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified , which is what happens in a lot of society .
Kids , when we grow up , have dreams , and we have passions , and we have visions , and somehow we get those things crushed .
We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor .
My parents got me a tutor in French , and I still suck in French .
Two years ago , I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT 's entrepreneurial master 's program .
And it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world .
When I was in grade two , I won a city-wide speaking competition , but nobody had ever said , " Hey , this kid 's a good speaker .
He can 't focus , but he loves walking around and getting people energized . "
No one said , " Get him a coach in speaking . "
They said , get me a tutor in what I suck at .
So as kids show these traits -- and we need to start looking for them -- I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers .
Unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say , " Hey , let 's be a lawyer or let 's be a doctor , " and we 're missing that opportunity because no one ever says , " Hey , be an entrepreneur . "
Entrepreneurs are people -- because we have a lot of them in this room -- who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it .
And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen .
We have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us , and I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial , we could change everything in the world that is a problem today .
Every problem that 's out there , somebody has the idea for .
And as a young kid , nobody can say it can 't happen because you 're too dumb to realize that you couldn 't figure it out .
I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish -- the old parable : " If you give a man a fish , you feed him for a day .
If you teach a man to fish , you feed him for a lifetime . "
If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial -- the ones that show those traits to be -- like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science , what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs ?
We could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts .
What we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they shouldn 't do : Don 't hit ; don 't bite ; don 't swear .
Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs , you know , and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot .
And the media says that it 's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo , Crosby .
Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs .
The reason that I avoided an MBA program -- other than the fact that I couldn 't get into any because I had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me , Carlton -- but our MBA programs don 't teach kids to be entrepreneurs .
They teach them to go work in corporations .
So who 's starting these companies ? It 's these random few people .
Even in popular literature , the only book I 've ever found -- and this should be on all of your reading lists -- the only book I 've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is " Atlas Shrugged . "
Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we 're bad people .
I look at even my family .
Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs . My dad was an entrepreneur .
Both my brother and sister and I , all three of us own companies as well .
And we all decided to start these things because it 's really the only place we fit .
We didn 't fit in the normal work . We couldn 't work for somebody else because we 're too stubborn and we have all these other traits .
But kids could be entrepreneurs as well .
I 'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the Entrepreneurs ' Organization and the Young Presidents ' Organization .
I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference , and everyone that I met over there who 's an entrepreneur struggled with school .
I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed .
So this thing right here is freaking me out .
It 's probably why I 'm a little bit panicked right now -- other than all the caffeine that I 've had and the sugar -- but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur .
Attention deficit disorder , bipolar disorder .
Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease ?
Ted Turner 's got it . Steve Jobs has it .
All three of the founders of Netscape had it .
I could go on and on .
Kids -- you can see these signs in kids .
And what we 're doing is we 're giving them Ritalin and saying , " Don 't be an entrepreneurial type .
Fit into this other system and try to become a student . "
Sorry , entrepreneurs aren 't students .
We fast-track . We figure out the game .
I stole essays . I cheated on exams .
I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments .
But as an entrepreneur you don 't do accounting , you hire accountants .
So I just figured that out earlier .
At least I can admit I cheated in university ; most of you won 't .
I 'm also quoted -- and I told the person who wrote the textbook -- I 'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies .
In managerial accounting , I 'm chapter eight .
I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting .
And I told the author , after they did my interview , that I cheated in that same course .
And she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway .
But kids , you can see these signs in them .
The definition of an entrepreneur is " a person who organizes , operates and assumes the risk of a business venture . "
That doesn 't mean you have to go to an MBA program .
It doesn 't mean you have to get through school .
It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut .
And we 've heard those things about " is it nurture or is it nature , " right ?
Is it thing one or thing two ? What is it ?
Well , I don 't think it 's either . I think it can be both .
I was groomed as an entrepreneur .
When I was growing up as a young kid , I had no choice , because I was taught at a very early , young age -- when my dad realized I wasn 't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school -- that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age .
He groomed us , the three of us , to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people .
My first little business venture : I was seven years old , I was in Winnipeg , and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords .
And I was calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers .
And my mom came into the room and she said , " Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners ? "
And I said , " Let 's go and look in the basement . "
And we went down to the basement . And I opened up this cupboard .
And there was about a thousand coat hangers that I 'd collected .
Because , when I told her I was going out to play with the kids , I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell .
Because I saw her a few weeks before that -- you could get paid . They used to pay you two cents per coat hanger .
So I was just like , well there 's all kinds of coat hangers .
And so I 'll just go get them .
And I knew she wouldn 't want me to go get them , so I just did it anyway .
And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people .
This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half .
I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent , and people would pay that because it multiplied up .
At seven years old I figured it out . I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers .
I sold license plate protectors door to door .
My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale .
And at nine years old , I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses .
And I remember this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these clients .
I sold newspapers .
And he wouldn 't buy a newspaper from me ever .
But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector .
And he 's like , " Well , we don 't need one . "
And I said , " But you 've got two cars ... " -- I 'm nine years old .
I 'm like , " But you have two cars and they don 't have license plate protectors . "
And he said , " I know . "
And I said , " This car here 's got one license plate that 's all crumpled up . "
And he said , " Yes , that 's my wife 's car . " And I said , " Why don 't we just test one on the front of your wife 's car and see if it lasts longer . "
So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each .
If I couldn 't sell all four , I could at least get one .
I learned that at a young age .
I did comic book arbitrage .
When I was about 10 years old , I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay .
And I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids .
And then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids .
But it was obvious to me , right ? Buy low , sell high .
You 've got this demand over here that has money .
Don 't try to sell to the poor kids ; they don 't have cash . The rich people do . Go get some .
So that 's obvious , right .
It 's like a recession . So , there 's a recession .
There 's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy .
Go get some of that . And I learned that at a young age .
I also learned , don 't reveal your source , because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from , and he didn 't like the fact that he was paying a lot more .
I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old .
I didn 't really want a paper route , but at 10 , my dad said , " That 's going to be your next business . "
So not only would he get me one , but I had to get two , and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers , which I did , and then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money .
So I would collect the tips and get payment .
So I would go and collect for all the papers .
He could just deliver them .
Because then I realized I could make the money .
By this point , I was definitely not going to be an employee .
My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop .
He had all these old automotive parts lying around .
They had this old brass and copper .
I asked him what he did with it , and he said he just throws it out .
I said , " But wouldn 't somebody pay you for that ? " And he goes , " Maybe . "
Remember at 10 years old -- so 34 years ago I saw opportunity in this stuff .
I saw there was money in garbage .
And I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle .
And then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid .
And I thought that was kind of cool .
Strangely enough , 30 years later , we 're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK ?
and making money off that too .
I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs , and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother 's Day .
And you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins -- when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside .
And you 'd make these chairs .
And I had these little pillows that I would sew up .
And you could stuff pins in them .
Because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion .
But what I realized was that you had to have options .
So I actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown .
And then when I went to the door , it wasn 't , " Do you want to buy one ? "
It was , " Which color would you like ? "
Like I 'm 10 years old ; you 're not going to say no to me , especially if you have two options -- you have the brown one or the clear one .
So I learned that lesson at a young age .
I learned that manual labor really sucks .
Right , like cutting lawns is brutal .
But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that , I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing .
That if I land this client once , and every week I get paid by that person , that 's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person .
Because you can 't sell them more .
So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age .
Remember , I was being groomed to do this . I was not allowed to have jobs .
I would caddy , I would go to the golf course and caddy for people .
But I realized that there was this one hill on our golf course , the 13th hole that had this huge hill .
And people could never get their bags up it .
So I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn 't have caddies .
I would carry their golf bags up to the top , and they 'd pay me a dollar .
Meanwhile , my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy 's bag around and get paid 10 bucks .
I 'm like , " That 's stupid because you have to work for five hours .
That doesn 't make any sense . " You just figure out a way to make more money faster .
Every week , I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops .
Then I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge .
And they 'd give me their orders for the following week .
And then I 'd just deliver pop and I 'd just charge twice .
And I had this captured market . You didn 't need contracts .
You just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you .
These women weren 't going to go to anybody else because they liked me , and I kind of figured it out .
I went and got golf balls from golf courses .
But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls .
I 'm like , screw that . They 're all in the pond and nobody 's going into the pond .
So I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes .
You just pick them up with both feet .
You can 't do it on stage .
You get the golf balls , and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you 're done you 've got a couple hundred of them .
But the problem is that people all didn 't want all the golf balls .
So I just packaged them . I 'm like 12 , right ?
I packaged them up three ways .
I had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then .
Those sold for two dollars each .
And then I had all the good ones that didn 't look crappy . They were 50 cents each .
And then I 'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones .
And they could use those for practice balls .
I sold sunglasses , when I was in school , to all the kids in high school .
This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you 're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time .
But it paid the bills .
So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses .
Then when the school shut me down -- the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn 't do it -- so I went to the gas stations and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers .
That was cool because then I had retail outlets .
And I think I was 14 .
Then I paid my entire way through first year university at Carlton by selling wine skins door to door .
You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin ? So what , right ?
Yeah , but you know what ? You stuff that down your shorts , when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free , everybody bought them .
Supply , demand , big opportunity .
I also branded it , so I sold them for five times the normal cost .
It had our university logo on it .
You know we teach our kids and we buy them games , but why don 't we get them games , if they 're entrepreneurial kids , that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs ?
Why don 't you teach them not to waste money ?
I remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in Banff , Alberta because I 'd thrown a penny out in the street , and my dad said , " Go pick it up . "
He said , " I work too damn hard for my money . I 'm not going to see you ever waste a penny . "
And I remember that lesson to this day .
Allowances teach kids the wrong habits .
Allowances , by nature , are teaching kids to think about a job .
An entrepreneur doesn 't expect a regular paycheck .
Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck .
That 's wrong , for me , if you want to raise entrepreneurs .
What I do with my kids now -- I 've got two , nine and seven -- is I teach them to walk around the house and the yard , looking for stuff that needs to get done .
Come to me and tell me what it is .
Or I 'll come to them and say , " Here 's what I need done . "
And then you know what we do ? We negotiate .
They go around looking for what it is .
But then we negotiate on what they 're going to get paid .
And then they don 't have a regular check , but they have more opportunities to find more stuff , and they learn the skill of negotiating , and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well .
You breed that kind of stuff . Each of my kids has two piggy banks .
Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted , 50 percent goes in their house account , 50 percent goes in their toy account .
Anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want .
The 50 percent that goes in their house account , every six months , goes to the bank .
They walk up with me . Every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker .
Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already .
But I 'm teaching them to force that savings habit .
It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying , " Maybe I 'll start contributing to my RSP now . "
Shit , you 've missed 25 years .
You can teach those habits to young kids when they don 't even feel the pain yet .
Don 't read them bedtime stories every night .
Maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories .
Why don 't you sit down with kids and give them four items , a red shirt , a blue tie , a kangaroo and a laptop , and have them tell a story about those four things ?
My kids do that all the time .
It teaches them to sell ; it teaches them creativity ; it teaches them to think on their feet .
Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it .
Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk , even if it 's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches .
Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing .
Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like .
Show them the grumpy employees .
When you see grumpy customer service , point that out to them .
Say , " By the way , that guy 's a crappy employee . "
And say , " These ones are good ones . "
If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service , show them what bad customer service looks like .
We have all these lessons in front of us , but we don 't take those opportunities ; we teach kids to go get a tutor .
Imagine if you actually took all the kids ' junk that 's in the house right now , all the toys that they 've outgrown two years ago and said , " Why don 't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji ? "
And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in .
They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever .
But teach them how to fix the price , guess the price , pull up the photos .
Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money .
Then the money they get , 50 percent goes in their house account , 50 percent goes in their toy account .
My kids love this stuff .
Some of the entrepreneurial traits that you 've got to nurture in kids : attainment , tenacity , leadership , introspection , interdependence , values .
All these traits you can find in young kids , and you can help nurture them .
Look for that kind of stuff .
There 's two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don 't kind of get out of their system .
Don 't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really , really freaking bad .
The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression , unless it is so clinically brutal , man .
Bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease .
When Steve Jurvetson and Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it , and they built Netscape -- imagine if they were given Ritalin .
We wouldn 't have have that stuff , right ?
Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet .
These skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else .
I 'm not saying don 't get kids to want to be lawyers .
But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well ?
Because there 's huge opportunities in that .
I want to close with a quick little video .
It 's a video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor .
These guys , Grasshopper .
It 's about kids . It 's about entrepreneurship .
Hopefully this inspires you to take what you 've heard from me and do something with it to change the world .
[ Kid ... " And you thought you could do anything ? " ] [ You still can . ] [ Because a lot of what we consider impossible ... ] [ ... is easy to overcome ] [ Because in case you haven 't noticed , we live in a place where ] [ One individual can make a difference ] [ Want proof ? ] [ Just look at the people who built our country ; ] [ Our parents , grandparents , our aunts , uncles ... ] [ They were immigrants , newcomers ready to make their mark ] [ Maybe they came with very little ] [ Or perhaps they didn 't own anything except for ... ] [ ... a single brilliant idea ] [ These people were thinkers , doers ... ] [ ... innovators ... ] [ ... until they came up with the name ... ] [ ... entrepreneurs ! ] [ They change the way we think about what is possible . ] [ They have a clear vision of how life can be better ] [ for all of us , even when times are tough . ] [ Right now , it 's hard to see ... ] [ ... when our view is cluttered with obstacles . ] [ But turbulence creates opportunities ] [ for success , achievement , and pushes us ... ] [ to discover new ways of doing things ] [ So what opportunities will you go after and why ? ] [ If you 're an entrepreneur ] [ you know that risk isn 't the reward . ] [ No . The rewards are driving innovation ... ] [ ... changing people 's lives . Creating jobs . ] [ Fueling growth . ] [ And making a better world . ] [ Entrepreneurs are everywhere . ] [ They run small businesses that support our economy , ] [ design tools to help you ... ] [ ... stay connected with friends , family and colleagues around the world . ] [ And they 're finding new ways of helping to solve society 's oldest problems . ] [ Do you know an entrepreneur ? ] [ Entrepreneurs can be anyone ... ] [ Even ... you ! ] [ So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted ] [ Help heal the economy ] [ Make a difference . ] [ Take your business to new heights . ] [ But most importantly , ] [ remember when you were a kid ... ] [ when everything was within you reach , ] [ and then say to yourself quietly , but with determination : ] [ " It still is . " ] Thank you very much for having me .
Rodrigo Canales : The deadly genius of drug cartels
Up to 100,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico in the last 6 years . We might think this has nothing to do with us , but in fact we are all complicit , says Yale professor Rodrigo Canales in this unflinching talk that turns conventional wisdom about drug cartels on its head . The carnage is not about faceless , ignorant goons mindlessly killing each other but is rather the result of some seriously sophisticated brand management .
In December of 2010 , the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán , in Mexico , awoke to gunfire .
For two straight days , the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group , presumably from the local criminal organization , La Familia Michoacana , or the Michoacán family .
The citizens didn 't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city , so truly like a battlefield .
After these two days , and during a particularly intense encounter , it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana , Nazario Moreno , was killed .
In response to this terrifying violence , the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace .
The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state .
And so , the day of the scheduled procession , thousands of people showed up .
As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march , his team noticed that , while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white , and bearing banners asking for peace , the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader .
Shocked , the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime .
And so his team stepped aside .
The two marches joined together , and they continued their path towards the state capital .
This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society , who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization , is a perfect metaphor for what 's happening in Mexico today , where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete .
If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what 's going on with drug violence in Mexico by , say , just researching online , the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal , there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others , because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence .
To put these numbers in perspective , this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined .
It 's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war , which is an active civil war .
This is happening just south of the border .
Now as you 're reading , however , you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths , because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless , nameless dead people .
Implicitly or explicitly , there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade , and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner , or , most likely , both .
And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died .
And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved .
They were part of the bad guys .
And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people .
However , while it 's easier to think of us , the citizens , the police , the army , as the good guys , and them , the narcos , the carteles , as the bad guys , if you think about it , the latter are only providing a service to the former .
Whether we like it or not , the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world , accounting for more than half of global demand .
It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South , and so , as the former dictator of Mexico , Porfirio Diaz , used to say , " Poor Mexico , so far from God and so close to the United States . "
The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States .
Using very , very conservative assumptions , this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars .
If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part , which we know is false , that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars .
To put these numbers in perspective , Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars .
And it so happens that this is a product that , because of its nature , a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed .
And the only way to do this , because it 's illegal , is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs .
Hence the violence .
If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence , you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north .
The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they 're trying to protect their business .
It 's not only a multi-billion dollar market , but it 's also a complex one .
For example , the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes , and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized , international production , that by the way needs to have good quality control , because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it .
And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south , and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed .
I urge you , but only a little bit , because I don 't want to get you in trouble , to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want , wherever you want it , whenever you want it , anywhere in the U.S. , and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message , they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less .
Think about this for a second .
Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described .
It 's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless , ignorant goons that are just shooting each other , very difficult to reconcile .
Now , as a business professor , and as any business professor would tell you , an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure , good incentives , a solid identity and good brand management .
This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico .
Because you would quickly realize , and maybe be confused by the fact , that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles .
You will hear about Los Zetas , the Knights Templar , which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning , and the Sinaloa Federation .
You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press , and this is somewhat true , or mostly true .
But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy .
You see , Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals , but was actually created by another criminal organization , the Gulf Cartel , that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico .
When that corridor became contested , they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm .
So they recruited Los Zetas : an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army .
They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel , so much so that at some point , they decided to just take over the operations , which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets , because they grow up .
Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason , they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine , but what they did have , and this is again based on their military origin , was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many , many markets very effectively , which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do .
And so because they didn 't have access to the more profitable drug markets , this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime .
That includes kidnapping , prostitution , local drug dealing and human trafficking , including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S.
So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business .
They focus most of their recruiting on the army , and they very openly advertise for better salaries , better benefits , better promotion paths , not to mention much better food , than what the army can deliver .
The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality , they let people know that they are there , and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say , " I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand . "
If they agree -- and you don 't want to know what happens if they don 't -- they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town , in exchange for royalties .
This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear , and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature , especially when they arrive first in a city , but again , that 's just a brand strategy .
I 'm not saying they 're not violent , but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all , when you count , when you do the body count , they 're actually all the same .
In contrast to them , the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán .
Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico , and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico , which then gives you direct access to the U.S.
The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn 't face the Zetas on violence alone , and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise .
They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime .
Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement , so they invest heavily in providing local services , like dealing with home violence , going after petty criminals , treating addicts , and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are , and , of course , protecting people from other criminal organizations .
Now , they kill a lot of people too , but when they kill them , they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them , through newspaper insertions , YouTube videos , and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us , as an organization , of course , but to you , as citizens .
And so we 're actually here to protect you .
They , as social enterprises do , have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around , and they have very strict recruiting practices .
And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions .
They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade , but the way they do it is , because they control all of Michoacán , and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas , they leverage that to , for example , trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce , and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S.
Finally , the Sinaloa Federation .
When you read about them , you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration , because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations , and , many people argue , the world .
They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S.
and the Mexican borders , but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet .
They have cultivated a brand of professionalism , business acumen and innovation .
They have designed new drug products and new drug processes .
They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border , and you can see that these are not " The Shawshank Redemption " types .
They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar .
They have invented drones to transport drugs , catapults , you name it .
One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list .
[ # 701 Joaquin Guzman Loera ] Like any multinational would , they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business , which is high-margin drugs like cocaine , heroine , methamphetamines .
Like any traditional Latin American multinational would , the way they control their operations is through family ties .
When they 're entering a new market , they send a family member to supervise it , or , if they 're partnering with a new organization , they create a family tie , either through marriages or other types of ties .
Like any other multinational would , they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model , like for example , when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations , they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them , and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this .
To further strengthen their brand , they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them .
They have professional videographers on staff .
They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border .
And so , differences aside , what these three organizations share is on the one hand , a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top , but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time .
They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies .
And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things .
The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes .
The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated , coherent organizations that are business organizations , and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach .
The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we 're more comfortable with this idea of " them , " a set of bad guys separated from us , we are actually accomplices to them , either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption .
These organizations service , recruit from , and operate within our communities , so necessarily , they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging .
And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have .
We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will .
The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn , blissful , voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young .
Thank you .
Dan Ariely : Are we in control of our own decisions ?
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely , the author of Predictably Irrational , uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive research findings to show how we 're not as rational as we think when we make decisions .
I 'll tell you a little bit about irrational behavior .
Not yours , of course -- other people 's .
So after being at MIT for a few years , I realized that writing academic papers is not that exciting .
You know , I don 't know how many of those you read , but it 's not fun to read and often not fun to write -- even worse to write .
So I decided to try and write something more fun .
And I came up with an idea that I will write a cookbook .
And the title for my cookbook was going to be " Dining Without Crumbs : The Art of Eating Over the Sink . "
And it was going to be a look at life through the kitchen .
And I was quite excited about this . I was going to talk a little bit about research , a little bit about the kitchen .
You know , we do so much in the kitchen I thought this would be interesting .
And I wrote a couple of chapters .
And I took it to MIT press and they said , " Cute , but not for us . Go and find somebody else . "
I tried other people and everybody said the same thing , " Cute . Not for us . "
Until somebody said , " Look , if you 're serious about this , you first have to write a book about your research . You have to publish something , and then you 'll get the opportunity to write something else .
If you really want to do it you have to do it . "
So I said , " You know , I really don 't want to write about my research .
I do this all day long . I want to write something else .
Something a bit more free , less constrained . "
And this person was very forceful and said , " Look . That 's the only way you 'll ever do it . "
So I said , " Okay , if I have to do it -- " I had a sabbatical . I said , " I 'll write about my research if there is no other way . And then I 'll get to do my cookbook . "
So I wrote a book on my research .
And it turned out to be quite fun in two ways .
First of all , I enjoyed writing .
But the more interesting thing was that I started learning from people .
It 's a fantastic time to write , because there is so much feedback you can get from people .
People write me about their personal experience , and about their examples , and what they disagree , and nuances .
And even being here -- I mean the last few days , I 've known really heights of obsessive behavior I never thought about .
Which I think is just fascinating .
I will tell you a little bit about irrational behavior .
And I want to start by giving you some examples of visual illusion as a metaphor for rationality .
So think about these two tables .
And you must have seen this illusion .
If I asked you what 's longer , the vertical line on the table on the left , or the horizontal line on the table on the right ?
Which one seems longer ?
Can anybody see anything but the left one being longer ?
No , right ? It 's impossible .
But the nice thing about visual illusion is we can easily demonstrate mistakes .
So I can put some lines on ; it doesn 't help .
I can animate the lines .
And to the extent you believe I didn 't shrink the lines , which I didn 't , I 've proven to you that your eyes were deceiving you .
Now , the interesting thing about this is when I take the lines away , it 's as if you haven 't learned anything in the last minute .
You can 't look at this and say , " Okay now I see reality as it is . "
Right ? It 's impossible to overcome this sense that this is indeed longer .
Our intuition is really fooling us in a repeatable , predictable , consistent way .
And there is almost nothing we can do about it , aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it .
Here is another one -- this is one of my favorite illusions .
What do you see the color that top arrow is pointing to ?
Brown . Thank you .
The bottom one ? Yellow .
Turns out they 're identical .
Can anybody see them as identical ?
Very very hard .
I can cover the rest of the cube up .
And if I cover the rest of the cube you can see that they are identical .
And if you don 't believe me you can get the slide later and do some arts and crafts and see that they 're identical .
But again it 's the same story that if we take the background away , the illusion comes back . Right .
There is no way for us not to see this illusion .
I guess maybe if you 're colorblind I don 't think you can see that .
I want you to think about illusion as a metaphor .
Vision is one of the best things we do .
We have a huge part of our brain dedicated to vision -- bigger than dedicated to anything else .
We do more vision more hours of the day than we do anything else .
And we are evolutionarily designed to do vision .
And if we have these predictable repeatable mistakes in vision , which we 're so good at , what 's the chance that we don 't make even more mistakes in something we 're not as good at -- for example , financial decision making : something we don 't have an evolutionary reason to do , we don 't have a specialized part of the brain , and we don 't do that many hours of the day .
And the argument is in those cases it might be the issue that we actually make many more mistakes and , worse , not have an easy way to see them .
Because in visual illusions we can easily demonstrate the mistakes ; in cognitive illusion it 's much , much harder to demonstrate to people the mistakes .
So I want to show you some cognitive illusions , or decision-making illusions , in the same way .
And this is one of my favorite plots in social sciences .
It 's from a paper by Johnson and Goldstein .
And it basically shows the percentage of people who indicated they would be interested in giving their organs to donation .
And these are different countries in Europe . And you basically see two types of countries : countries on the right , that seem to be giving a lot ; and countries on the left that seem to giving very little , or much less .
The question is , why ? Why do some countries give a lot and some countries give a little ?
When you ask people this question , they usually think that it has to be something about culture .
Right ? How much do you care about people ?
Giving your organs to somebody else is probably about how much you care about society , how linked you are .
Or maybe it is about religion .
But , if you look at this plot , you can see that countries that we think about as very similar actually exhibit very different behavior .
For example , Sweden is all the way on the right , and Denmark , that we think is culturally very similar , is all the way on the left .
Germany is on the left . And Austria is on the right .
The Netherlands is on the left . And Belgium is on the right .
And finally , depending on your particular version of European similarity , you can think about the U.K and France as either similar culturally or not .
But it turns out that from organ donation they are very different .
By the way , the Netherlands is an interesting story .
You see the Netherlands is kind of the biggest of the small group .
after mailing every household in the country a letter begging people to join this organ donation program .
You know the expression , " Begging only gets you so far " ?
It 's 28 percent in organ donation .
But whatever the countries on the right are doing they are doing a much better job than begging .
So what are they doing ?
Turns out the secret has to do with a form at the DMV .
And here is the story .
The countries on the left have a form at the DMV that looks something like this .
Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program .
And what happens ?
People don 't check , and they don 't join .
The countries on the right , the ones that give a lot , have a slightly different form .
It says check the box below if you don 't want to participate .
Interestingly enough , when people get this , they again don 't check -- but now they join .
Now think about what this means .
We wake up in the morning and we feel we make decisions .
We wake up in the morning and we open the closet and we feel that we decide what to wear .
And we open the refrigerator and we feel that we decide what to eat .
What this is actually saying is that much of these decisions are not residing within us .
They are residing in the person who is designing that form .
When you walk into the DMV , the person who designed the form will have a huge influence on what you 'll end up doing .
Now it 's also very hard to intuit these results . Think about it for yourself .
How many of you believe that if you went to renew your license tomorrow , and you went to the DMV , and you would encounter one of these forms , that it would actually change your own behavior ?
Very , very hard to think that you will influence us .
We can say , " Oh , these funny Europeans , of course it would influence them . "
But when it comes to us , we have such a feeling that we are at the driver 's seat , we have such a feeling that we are in control , and we are making the decision , that it 's very hard to even accept the idea that we actually have an illusion of making a decision , rather than an actual decision .
Now , you might say , " These are decisions we don 't care about . "
In fact , by definition , these are decisions about something that will happen to us after we die .
How could we care about something less than something that happens after we die ?
So a standard economist , someone who believes in rationality , would say , " You know what ? The cost of lifting the pencil and marking a V is higher than the possible benefit of the decision , so that 's why we get this effect . "
But , in fact , it 's not because it 's easy .
It 's not because it 's trivial . It 's not because we don 't care .
It 's the opposite . It 's because we care .
It 's difficult and it 's complex .
And it 's so complex that we don 't know what to do .
And because we have no idea what to do we just pick whatever it was that was chosen for us .
I 'll give you one more example for this .
This is from a paper by Redelmeier and Schaefer .
And they said , " Well , this effect also happens to experts , people who are well-paid , experts in their decisions , do it a lot . "
And they basically took a group of physicians .
And they presented to them a case study of a patient .
Here is a patient . He is a 67-year-old farmer .
He 's been suffering from a right hip pain for a while .
And then they said to the physician , " You decided a few weeks ago that nothing is working for this patient .
All these medications , nothing seems to be working .
So you refer the patient to hip replacement therapy .
Hip replacement . Okay ? "
So the patient is on a path to have his hip replaced .
And then they said to half the physicians , they said , " Yesterday you reviewed the patient 's case and you realized that you forgot to try one medication .
You did not try ibuprofen .
What do you do ? Do you pull the patient back and try ibuprofen ?
Or do you let them go and have hip replacement ? "
Well the good news is that most physicians in this case decided to pull the patient and try the ibuprofen .
Very good for the physicians .
The other group of the physicians , they said , " Yesterday when you reviewed the case you discovered there were two medications you didn 't try out yet , ibuprofen and piroxicam . "
And they said , " You have two medications you didn 't try out yet . What do you do ?
You let them go . Or you pull them back .
And if you pull them back do you try ibuprofen or piroxicam ? Which one ? "
Now think of it . This decision makes it as easy to let the patient continue with hip replacement .
But pulling them back , all of the sudden becomes more complex .
There is one more decision .
What happens now ?
Majority of the physicians now choose to let the patient go to hip replacement .
I hope this worries you , by the way -- when you go to see your physician .
The thing is is that no physician would ever say , " Piroxicam , ibuprofen , hip replacement .
Let 's go for hip replacement . "
But the moment you set this as the default it has a huge power over whatever people end up doing .
I 'll give you a couple of more examples on irrational decision-making .
Imagine I give you a choice .
Do you want to go for a weekend to Rome ?
All expenses paid : hotel , transportation , food , breakfast , a continental breakfast , everything .
Or a weekend in Paris ?
Now , a weekend in Paris , a weekend in Rome , these are different things ; they have different food , different culture , different art .
Now imagine I added a choice to the set that nobody wanted .
Imagine I said , " A weekend in Rome , a weekend in Paris , or having your car stolen ? "
It 's a funny idea , because why would having your car stolen , in this set , influence anything ?
But what if the option to have your car stolen was not exactly like this .
What if it was a trip to Rome , all expenses paid , transportation , breakfast , but doesn 't include coffee in the morning .
If you want coffee you have to pay for it yourself . It 's two euros 50 .
Now in some ways , given that you can have Rome with coffee , why would you possibly want Rome without coffee ?
It 's like having your car stolen . It 's an inferior option .
Rome with coffee becomes more popular . And people choose it .
The fact that you have Rome without coffee makes Rome with coffee look superior , and not just to Rome without coffee -- even superior to Paris .
Here are two examples of this principle .
This was an ad from The Economist a few years ago that gave us three choices .
An online subscription for 59 dollars .
A print subscription for 125 .
Or you could get both for 125 .
Now I looked at this and I called up The Economist .
And I tried to figure out what were they thinking .
And they passed me from one person to another to another , until eventually I got to a person who was in charge of the website .
And I called them up . And they went to check what was going on .
The next thing I know , the ad is gone . And no explanation .
So I decided to do the experiment that I would have loved The Economist to do with me .
I took this and I gave it to 100 MIT students .
I said , " What would you choose ? "
These are the market share . Most people wanted the combo deal .
Thankfully nobody wanted the dominated option .
That means our students can read .
But now if you have an option that nobody wants , you can take it off . Right ?
So I printed another version of this , where I eliminated the middle option .
I gave it to another 100 students . Here is what happens .
Now the most popular option became the least popular .
What was happening was the option that was useless , in the middle , was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it .
But it wasn 't useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted .
In fact , relative to the option in the middle , which was get only the print for 125 , the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal .
And as a consequence , people chose it .
The general idea here , by the way , is that we actually don 't know our preferences that well .
And because we don 't know our preferences that well we 're susceptible to all of these influences from the external forces : the defaults , the particular options that are presented to us , and so on .
One more example of this .
People believe that when we deal with physical attraction , we see somebody , and we know immediately whether we like them or not , attracted or not .
Which is why we have these four-minute dates .
So I decided to do this experiment with people .
I 'll show you graphic images of people -- not real people .
The experiment was with people .
I showed some people a picture of Tom , and a picture of Jerry .
I said " Who do you want to date ? Tom or Jerry ? "
But for half the people I added an ugly version of Jerry .
I took Photoshop and I made Jerry slightly less attractive .
The other people , I added an ugly version of Tom .
And the question was , will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective , more attractive brothers ?
The answer was absolutely yes .
When ugly Jerry was around , Jerry was popular .
When ugly Tom was around , Tom was popular .
This of course has two very clear implications for life in general .
If you ever go bar hopping , who do you want to take with you ?
Similar . Similar ... but slightly uglier .
The second point , or course , is that if somebody else invites you , you know how they think about you .
Now you 're getting it .
What is the general point ?
The general point is that when we think about economics we have this beautiful view of human nature .
" What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! "
We have this view of ourselves , of others .
The behavioral economics perspective is slightly less generous to people .
In fact in medical terms , that 's our view .
But there is a silver lining .
The silver lining is , I think , kind of the reason that behavioral economics is interesting and exciting .
Are we Superman ? Or are we Homer Simpson ?
When it comes to building the physical world , we kind of understand our limitations .
We build steps . And we build these things that not everybody can use obviously .
We understand our limitations , and we build around it .
But for some reason when it comes to the mental world , when we design things like healthcare and retirement and stockmarkets , we somehow forget the idea that we are limited .
I think that if we understood our cognitive limitations in the same way that we understand our physical limitations , even though they don 't stare us in the face in the same way , we could design a better world .
And that , I think , is the hope of this thing .
Thank you very much .
Iain Hutchison : Saving faces : A facial surgeon 's craft
Maxillofacial surgeon Iain Hutchison works with people whose faces have been severely disfigured . By pushing to improve surgical techniques , he helps to improve their lives ; and by commissioning their portraits , he celebrates their humanity . NOTE : This talk contains images of disfigured and badly injured faces that may be disturbing -- and Hutchison provides thoughtful answers as to why a disfigured face can shock us so deeply . Squeamish ? Hide your screen from 12 : 10 - 13 : 19 , but do keep listening . Portraits shown in this talk come from Mark Gilbert .
Our face is hugely important because it 's the external , visual part that everybody else sees .
Let 's not forget it 's a functional entity .
We have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body : the brain .
It 's where our senses are located , our special senses -- our vision , our speech , our hearing , our smell , our taste .
And this bone is peppered , as you can see , with the light shining through the skull with cavities , the sinuses , which warm and moisten the air we breathe .
But also imagine if they were filled with solid bone -- our head would be dead weight , we wouldn 't be able to hold it erect , we wouldn 't be able to look at the world around us .
This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can 't breathe and eat .
Attached to the facial bones that define our face 's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression , our universal language of expression , our social-signaling system .
And overlying this is the skin drape , which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure -- taking right-angled bends here and there , having thin areas like the eyelids , thick areas like the cheek , different colors .
And then we have the sensual factor of the face .
Where do we like to kiss people ?
On the lips . Nibble the ears maybe .
It 's the face where we 're attracted to with that .
But let 's not forget the hair .
You 're looking at the image on your left-hand side -- that 's my son with his eyebrows present .
Look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing .
There 's a definite difference .
And imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose , he 'd look even odder still .
Dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we don 't see ourselves as others see us .
It 's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves , and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live .
Dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance .
They don 't need this . They need psychiatric help .
Max has kindly donated his photograph to me .
He doesn 't have dysmorphophobia , but I 'm using his photograph to illustrate the fact that he looks exactly like a dysmorphophobic .
In other words , he looks entirely normal .
Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes .
So children judge themselves , learn to judge themselves , by the behavior of adults around them .
Here 's a classic example : Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that 's growing out through her skull , has obliterated her nose , and she 's having difficulty seeing .
As you can see , it 's blocking her vision .
She 's also in danger , when she damages this , of bleeding profusely .
Our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them .
They 've grown used to their face ; they think they 're special .
Actually , sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed .
And occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they 've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they don 't recognize them .
But other adults say incredibly painful things .
They say , " How dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people .
Shouldn 't you be doing something about this ? Why haven 't you had it removed ? "
And other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion , because -- a natural curiosity .
And that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature .
After surgery , everything normalizes .
The adults behave more naturally , and the children play more readily with other children .
As teenagers -- just think back to your teenage years -- we 're going through a dramatic and often disproportionate change in our facial appearance .
We 're trying to struggle to find our identity .
We crave the approval of our peers .
So our facial appearance is vital to us as we 're trying to project ourselves to the world .
Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days .
How long did you spend looking in the mirror every day , practicing your sardonic look , practicing your serious look , trying to look like Sean Connery , as I did , trying to raise one eyebrow ?
It 's a crippling time .
I 've chosen to show this profile view of Sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward .
I 'd like you all in the audience now to push your lower jaw forward .
Turn to the person next to you , push your lower jaws forward . Turn to the person next to you and look at them -- they look miserable .
That 's exactly what people used to say to Sue .
She wasn 't miserable at all .
But people used to say to her , " Why are you so miserable ? "
People were making misjudgments all the time on her mood .
Teachers and peers were underestimating her ; she was teased at school .
So she chose to have facial surgery .
After the facial surgery , she said , " My face now reflects my personality .
People know now that I 'm enthusiastic , that I 'm a happy person . "
And that 's the change that can be achieved for teenagers .
Is this change , though , a real change , or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves ?
Well we studied teenagers ' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery .
And what we found was -- we jumbled up the photographs so they couldn 't recognize the before and after -- what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery .
Well that 's not surprising , but we also asked them to judge them on honesty , intelligence , friendliness , violence .
They were all perceived as being less than normal in all those characteristics -- more violent , etc . -- before the surgery .
After the surgery , they were perceived as being more intelligent , more friendly , more honest , less violent -- and yet we hadn 't operated on their intellect or their character .
When people get older , they don 't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery .
Their presence in the consultation suite is a result of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .
What happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma .
So this is a photograph of Henry , two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face -- his cheekbone , his upper jaw , his eye-socket .
He looks pretty good at this stage .
But over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations , as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly .
I learned a huge amount from Henry .
Henry taught me that you can carry on working .
He worked as an advocate . He continued to play cricket .
He enjoyed life to the full , and this was probably because he had a successful , fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially .
He maintained a calm insouciance .
I don 't say he overcame this ; he didn 't overcome it .
This was something more than that . He ignored it .
He ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it .
And that 's what these people can do .
Henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well .
This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on .
It was my longest operation .
It took 23 hours . I did it with my neurosurgeon .
We removed all the bones at the right side of his face -- his eye , his nose , the skull bones , the facial skin -- and reconstructed him with tissue from the back .
He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse .
He got married . He had a son called Jeremiah .
And again , he said , " This painting of me with my son Jeremiah shows me as the successful man that I feel that I am . "
His facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family ; he had a successful , fulfilling job .
So we 've seen that we can change people 's faces .
But when we change people 's faces , are we changing their identity -- for better or for worse ?
For instance , there are two different types of facial surgery .
We can categorize it like that .
We can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery -- like Sue .
When they have facial surgery , they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people .
They don 't feel different .
They feel that they 've actually gained what they never had , that their face now reflects their personality .
And actually that 's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery .
Because you might say , " Well , this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic . "
If you do cosmetic surgery , patients are often less happy .
They 're trying to achieve difference in their lives .
Sue wasn 't trying to achieve difference in her life .
She was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality .
But then we have other people who don 't choose to have facial surgery .
They 're people who have their face shot off .
I 'll move it off , and we 'll have a blank slide for those who are squeamish amongst you .
They have it forced upon them .
And again , as I told you , if they have a caring family and good work life , then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives .
Their identity doesn 't change .
Is this business about appearance and preoccupation with it a Western phenomenon ?
Muzetta 's family give the lie to this .
This is a little Bangladeshi girl from the east end of London who 's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face , which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly .
After she had surgery to remove the tumor , her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress , a pink ribbon in her hair , and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world , despite the fact that they were orthodox Muslims and the mother wore a full burqa .
So it 's not simply a Western phenomenon .
We make judgments on people 's faces all the time .
It 's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces .
He said you could see criminal faces , judging them just on the photographs that were showed .
Good-looking people are always judged as being more friendly .
We look at O.J. -- he 's a good-looking guy .
We 'd like to spend time with him . He looks friendly .
Now we know that he 's a convicted wife-batterer , and actually he 's not the good guy .
And beauty doesn 't equate to goodness , and certainly doesn 't equate to contentment .
So we 've talked about the static face and judging the static face , but actually , we 're more comfortable with judging the moving face .
We think we can judge people on their expressions .
U.K. jurors in the U.K. justice system like to see a live witness to see whether they can pick up the telltale signs of mendacity -- the blink , the hesitation .
And so they want to see live witnesses .
Todorov tells us that , in a tenth of a second , we can make a judgment on somebody 's face .
Are we uncomfortable with this image ? Yes , we are .
Would we be happy if our doctor 's face , our lawyer 's face , our financial adviser 's face was covered ?
We 'd be pretty uncomfortable .
But are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement ?
The truth is that there 's a five-minute rule , not the tenth-of-a-second rule like Todorov , but a five-minute rule .
If you spend five minutes with somebody , you start looking beyond their facial appearance , and the people who you 're initially attracted to may seem boring and you lose interest in them , and the people who you didn 't immediately seek out , because you didn 't find them particularly attractive , become attractive people because of their personality .
So we 've talked a lot about facial appearance .
I now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do -- where we 're at and where we 're going .
This is an image of Ann who 's had her right jaw removed and the base of her skull removed .
And you can see in the images afterward , we 've managed to reconstruct her successfully .
But that 's not good enough .
This is what Ann wants . She wants to be out kayaking , she wants to be out climbing mountains .
And that 's what she achieved , and that 's what we have to get to .
This is a horrific image , so I 'm putting my hand up now .
This is a photograph of Adi , a Nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery .
And he lost his lower jaw , his lip , his chin and his upper jaw and teeth .
This is the bar that he set for us .
" I want to look like this . This is how I looked before . "
So with modern technology , we used computers to make models .
We made a model of the jaw without bone in it .
We then bent a plate up to it .
We put it in place so we knew it was an accurate position .
We then put bone and tissue from the back .
Here you can see the plate holding it , and you can see the implants being put in -- so that in one operation we achieve this and this .
So the patient 's life is restored .
That 's the good news .
However , his chin skin doesn 't look the same as it did before .
It 's skin from his back .
It 's thicker , it 's darker , it 's coarser , it doesn 't have the contours .
And that 's where we 're failing , and that 's where we need the face transplant .
The face transplant has a role probably in burns patients to replace the skin .
We can replace the underlying skeletal structure , but we 're still not good at replacing the facial skin .
So it 's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium .
But the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives .
What does that mean ?
They have an increased risk of infection , an increased risk of malignancy .
This is not a life-saving transplant -- like a heart , or liver , or lung transplant -- it is a quality-of-life transplant , and as a result , are the patients going to say , if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on , " I wish I 'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I 'm now dying of a malignant cancer " ? We don 't know yet .
We also don 't know what they feel about recognition and identity .
Bernard Devauchelle and Sylvie Testelin , who did the first operation , are studying that .
Donors are going to be short on the ground , because how many people want to have their loved one 's face removed at the point of death ?
So there are going to be problems with face transplantation .
So the better news is the future 's almost here -- and the future is tissue engineering .
Just imagine , I can make a biologically-degradable template .
I can put it in place where it 's meant to be .
I can sprinkle a few cells , stem cells from the patient 's own hip , a little bit of genetically engineered protein , and lo and behold , leave it for four months and the face is grown .
This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe .
But we 've still got problems .
We 've got mouth cancer to solve .
We 're still not curing enough patients -- it 's the most disfiguring cancer .
We 're still not reconstructing them well enough .
In the U.K. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people .
We still can 't get rid of scars .
We need to do research .
And the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research .
And we 've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future , so we don 't just sit on our laurels and say , " Okay , we 're doing okay .
Let 's leave it as it is . "
Thank you very much indeed .
Tim Berners-Lee : The year open data went worldwide
At TED2009 , Tim Berners-Lee called for " raw data now " -- for governments , scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web . At TED University in 2010 , he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up .
Last year here at TED I asked you to give me your data , to put your data on the web , on the basis that if people put data onto the web -- government data , scientific data , community data , whatever it is -- it will be used by other people to do wonderful things , in ways that they never could have imagined .
So , today I 'm back just to show you a few things , to show you , in fact , there is an open data movement afoot , now , around the world .
The cry of " Raw data now ! "
which I made people make in the auditorium , was heard around the world .
So , let 's roll the video .
A classic story , the first one which lots of people picked up , was when in March -- on March 10th in fact , soon after TED -- Paul Clarke , in the U.K. government , blogged , " Oh , I 've just got some raw data . Here it is , it 's about bicycle accidents . "
Two days it took the Times Online to make a map , a mashable map -- we call these things mash-ups -- a mashed-up user interface that allows you to go in there and have a look and find out whether your bicycle route to work was affected .
Here 's more data , traffic survey data , again , put out by the U.K. government , and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards , then a user could just make a map , just by clicking .
Does this data affect things ? Well , let 's get back to 2008 .
Look at Zanesville , Ohio .
Here 's a map a lawyer made . He put on it the water plant , and which houses are there , which houses have been connected to the water .
And he got , from other data sources , information to show which houses are occupied by white people .
Well , there was too much of a correlation , he felt , between which houses were occupied by white people and which houses had water , and the judge was not impressed either .
The judge was not impressed to the tune of 10.9 million dollars .
That 's the power of taking one piece of data , another piece of data , putting it together , and showing the result .
Let 's look at some data from the U.K. now .
This is U.K. government data , a completely independent site , Where Does My Money Go .
It allows anybody to go there and burrow down .
You can burrow down by a particular type of spending , or you can go through all the different regions and compare them .
So , that 's happening in the U.K. with U.K. government data .
Yes , certainly you can do it over here .
Here 's a site which allows you to look at recovery spending in California .
Take an arbitrary example , Long Beach , California , you can go and have a look at what recovery money they 've been spending on different things such as energy .
In fact , this is the graph of the number of data sets in the repositories of data.gov , and data.gov.uk.
And I 'm delighted to see a great competition between the U.K. in blue , and the U.S. in red .
How can you use this stuff ?
Well , for example , if you have lots of data about places you can take , from a postcode -- which is like a zip plus four -- for a specific group of houses , you can make paper , print off a paper which has got very , very specific things about the bus stops , the things specifically near you .
On a larger scale , this is a mash-up of the data which was released about the Afghan elections .
It allows you to set your own criteria for what sort of things you want to look at .
The red circles are polling stations , selected by your criteria .
And then you can select also other things on the map to see what other factors , like the threat level .
So , that was government data .
I also talked about community-generated data -- in fact I edited some .
This is the wiki map , this is the Open Street Map .
" Terrace Theater " I actually put on the map because it wasn 't on the map before TED last year .
I was not the only person editing the open street map .
Each flash on this visualization -- put together by ITO World -- shows an edit in 2009 made to the Open Street Map .
Let 's now spin the world during the same year .
Every flash is an edit . Somebody somewhere looking at the Open Street Map , and realizing it could be better .
You can see Europe is ablaze with updates .
Some places , perhaps not as much as they should be .
Here focusing in on Haiti .
The map of Port au-Prince at the end of 2009 was not all it could be , not as good as the map of California .
Fortunately , just after the earthquake , GeoEye , a commercial company , released satellite imagery with a license , which allowed the open-source community to use it .
This is January , in time lapse , of people editing ... that 's the earthquake .
After the earthquake , immediately , people all over the world , mappers who wanted to help , and could , looked at that imagery , built the map , quickly building it up .
We 're focusing now on Port-au-Prince .
The light blue is refugee camps these volunteers had spotted from the [ satellite images ] .
So , now we have , immediately , a real-time map showing where there are refugee camps -- rapidly became the best map to use if you 're doing relief work in Port-au-Prince .
Witness the fact that it 's here on this Garmin device being used by rescue team in Haiti .
There 's the map showing , on the left-hand side , that hospital -- actually that 's a hospital ship .
This is a real-time map that shows blocked roads , damaged buildings , refugee camps -- it shows things that are needed [ for rescue and relief work ] .
So , if you 've been involved in that at all , I just wanted to say : Whatever you 've been doing , whether you 've just been chanting , " Raw data now ! "
or you 've been putting government or scientific data online , I just wanted to take this opportunity to say : Thank you very much , and we have only just started !
Frank Gehry : A master architect asks , Now what ?
In a wildly entertaining discussion with Richard Saul Wurman , architect Frank Gehry gives TEDsters his take on the power of failure , his recent buildings , and the all-important " Then what ? " factor .
Frank Gehry : I listened to this scientist this morning .
Dr. Mullis was talking about his experiments , and I realized that I almost became a scientist .
When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water .
So , I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator , and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in .
And the glass -- luckily I turned around -- I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away .
The wall was covered with ...
I had an explosion .
Richard Saul Wurman : Really ?
FG : People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay .
I 'd like to start this session again .
The gentleman to my left is the very famous , perhaps overly famous , Frank Gehry .
And Frank , you 've come to a place in your life , which is astonishing .
I mean it is astonishing for an artist , for an architect , to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time .
I mean you have become , whether you can giggle at it because it 's a funny ... you know , it 's a strange thought , but your building is an icon -- you can draw a little picture of that building , it can be used in ads -- and you 've had not rock star status , but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life .
And I know the road was extremely difficult .
And it didn 't seem , at least , that your sell outs , whatever they were , were very big .
You kept moving ahead in a life where you 're dependent on working for somebody .
But that 's an interesting thing for a creative person .
A lot of us work for people ; we 're in the hands of other people .
And that 's one of the great dilemmas -- we 're in a creativity session -- it 's one of the great dilemmas in creativity : how to do work that 's big enough and not sell out .
And you 've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big , triply big .
It 's not quite a question but you can comment on it .
It 's a big issue .
FG : Well , I 've always just ...
I 've never really gone out looking for work .
I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head .
And when I started out , I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff .
And I realized when I 'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff , and people would just look at me like I 'd just landed from Mars .
But I couldn 't do anything else .
That was my response to the people in the time .
And actually , it was responding to clients that I had who didn 't have very much money , so they couldn 't afford very much .
I think it was circumstantial .
Until I got to my house , where the client was my wife .
We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it .
And a few people got excited about it .
I was visiting with an artist , Michael Heizer , out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere .
He 's building this huge concrete place .
And it was late in the evening . We 'd had a lot to drink .
We were standing out in the desert all alone and , thinking about my house , he said , " Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent , somewhere in 2000 years somebody 's going to like it ? "
So , I thought , " Yeah , that 's probably a good idea . "
Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money , so the stuff was a little more permanent .
But I just found out the world ain 't going to last that long , this guy was telling us the other day .
So where do we go now ?
Back to -- everything 's so temporary .
I don 't see it the way you characterized it .
For me , every day is a new thing .
I approach each project with a new insecurity , almost like the first project I ever did , and I get the sweats , I go in and start working , I 'm not sure where I 'm going -- if I knew where I was going , I wouldn 't do it .
When I can predict or plan it , I don 't do it .
I discard it .
So I approach it with the same trepidation .
Obviously , over time I have a lot more confidence that it 's going to be OK .
I do run a kind of a business -- I 've got 120 people and you 've got to pay them , so there 's a lot of responsibility involved -- but the actual work on the project is with , I think , a healthy insecurity .
And like the playwright said the other day -- I could relate to him : you 're not sure .
When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it , I saw all the mistakes , I saw ...
They weren 't mistakes ; I saw everything that I would have changed and I was embarrassed by it .
I felt an embarrassment -- " How could I have done that ?
How could I have made shapes like that or done stuff like that ? "
It 's taken several years to now look at it detached and say -- as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street , and it appears to have a relationship -- that I started to like it .
RSW : What 's the status of the New York project ?
FG : I don 't really know .
Tom Krens came to me with Bilbao and explained it all to me , and I thought he was nuts .
I didn 't think he knew what he was doing , and he pulled it off .
So , I think he 's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy .
He gets up there and then he ... comes back up .
They 're still talking about it .
September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero , and I 'm totally against that .
I just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on Ground Zero I think for a long time .
RSW : The picture on the screen , is that Disney ?
FG : Yeah .
RSW : How much further along is it than that , and when will that be finished ?
FG : That will be finished in 2003 -- September , October -- and I 'm hoping Kyu , and Herbie , and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place .
Luckily , today most of the people I 'm working with are people I really like .
Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me .
He 's been a cheerleader for quite a long time .
There aren 't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients .
If you think about the world , and even just in this audience , most of us are involved with buildings .
Nothing that you would call architecture , right ?
And so to find one , a guy like that , you hang on to him .
He 's become the head of Art Center , and there 's a building by Craig Ellwood there .
I knew Craig and respected him .
They want to add to it and it 's hard to add to a building like that -- it 's a beautiful , minimalist , black steel building -- and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it 's a lot of acreage .
I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal : Alvaro Siza .
RSW : Why did you want that ?
FG : I knew you 'd ask that question .
It was intuitive .
Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture .
I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work , and his early work had a resemblance to my early work .
When I came out of college , I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California , and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that .
I tried to understand that language as a beginning , as a place to jump off , and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it wasn 't ...
I just stopped .
I mean , Charlie Moore did a bunch of it , but it didn 't feel good to me .
Siza , on the other hand , continued in Portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language .
And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building .
I tried to get him a couple of jobs and they didn 't pan out .
I like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you .
I 've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra , who doesn 't think architecture is art .
Did you see that thing ?
RSW : No . What did he say ?
FG : He calls architecture " plumbing . "
FG : Anyway , the Siza thing .
It 's a richer experience .
It must be like that for Kyu doing things with musicians -- it 's similar to that I would imagine -- where you ... huh ?
Audience : Liquid architecture .
FG : Liquid architecture .
Where you ... It 's like jazz : you improvise , you work together , you play off each other , you make something , they make something .
And I think for me , it 's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city .
RSW : Is it going to be near the current campus ?
FG : No , it 's near the current campus .
Anyway , he 's that kind of patron .
It 's not his money , of course .
RSW : What 's his schedule on that ?
FG : I don 't know .
What 's the schedule , Richard ?
Richard Koshalek : [ Unclear ] starts from 2004 .
FG : 2004 .
You can come to the opening . I 'll invite you .
No , but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos , right ?
Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment , and if you can figure out how to work off each other -- if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other 's work and play off each other , you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect .
Like the Rockefeller Center model , which is kind of from another era .
RSW : I found the most remarkable thing .
My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building , you go inside and there 'd be extraordinary spaces .
I 'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED .
The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city .
That was the surprise of going across the river , of going on the highway around it , of walking down the street and finding it .
That was the real surprise of Bilbao .
FG : But you know , Richard , most architects when they present their work -- most of the people we know , you get up and you talk about your work , and it 's almost like you tell everybody you 're a good guy by saying , " Look , I 'm worried about the context , I 'm worried about the city , I 'm worried about my client , I worry about budget , that I 'm on time . "
Blah , blah , blah and all that stuff .
And it 's like cleansing yourself so that you can ...
by saying all that , it means your work is good somehow .
And I think everybody -- I mean that should be a matter of fact , like gravity .
You 're not going to defy gravity .
You 've got to work with the building department .
If you don 't meet the budgets , you 're not going to get much work .
If it leaks -- Bilbao did not leak .
I was so proud .
The MIT project -- they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao .
I met them in Bilbao .
They came for three days .
RSW : This is the computer building ?
FG : Yeah , the computer building .
They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around -- I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things , and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden , you know ?
People put buckets out ...
I was clean . There wasn 't a bloody leak in the place , it was just fantastic .
But you 've got to -- yeah , well up until then every building leaked , so this ...
RSW : Frank had a sort of ...
FG : Ask Miriam !
RW : ... sort of had a fame . His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while .
FG : You 've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story , when the woman called and said , " Mr. Wright , I 'm sitting on the couch and the water 's pouring in on my head . "
And he said , " Madam , move your chair . "
So , some years later I was doing a building , a little house on the beach for Norton Simon , and his secretary , who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady , called me and said , " Mr. Simon 's sitting at his desk and the water 's coming in on his head . "
And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story .
RSW : Didn 't get a laugh .
FG : No . Not now either .
But my point is that ... and I call it the " then what ? "
OK , you solved all the problems , you did all the stuff , you made nice , you loved your clients , you loved the city , you 're a good guy , you 're a good person ...
and then what ?
What do you bring to it ?
And I think that 's what I 've always been interested in , is that -- which is a personal kind of expression .
Bilbao , I think , shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city .
That 's what reminded me of it .
And I think that 's the issue , you know ; it 's the " then what " that most clients who hire architects -- most clients aren 't hiring architects for that .
They 're hiring them to get it done , get it on budget , be polite , and they 're missing out on the real value of an architect .
RSW : At a certain point a number of years ago , people -- when Michael Graves was a fashion , before teapots ...
FG : I did a teapot and nobody bought it .
RSW : Did it leak ?
FG : No .
RSW : ... people wanted a Michael Graves building .
Is that a curse , that people want a Bilbao building ?
FG : Yeah .
Since Bilbao opened , which is now four , five years , both Krens and I have been called with at least 100 opportunities -- China , Brazil , other parts of Spain -- to come in and do the Bilbao effect .
And I 've met with some of these people .
Usually I say no right away , but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings .
In one case , I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city , and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port .
I asked them what kind of building it was .
" When you get here we 'll explain it . " Blah , blah , blah .
So four of us went .
And they took us -- they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay , and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor .
Each one was more beautiful than the other .
And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga .
Just before going to lunch with the mayor , we went to the harbor commissioner .
It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here , and I was here , and my guys .
We sat down , and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet .
And the guy looked at me and said , " Now what can I do for you , Mr. Gehry ? "
RSW : Oh , my God .
FG : So , I got up .
I said to my team , " Let 's get out of here . "
We stood up , we walked out .
They followed -- the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said , " You mean you 're not going to have lunch with the mayor ? "
I said , " Nope . "
" You 're not going to have dinner at all ? "
They just brought us there to hustle this group , you know , to create a project .
And we get a lot of that .
Luckily , I 'm old enough that I can complain I can 't travel .
I don 't have my own plane yet .
RSW : Well , I 'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it 's been very long .
But let me just say a couple words .
FG : Can I say something ?
Are you going to talk about me or you ?
RSW : Once a shit , always a shit !
FG : Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody , so ...
RSW : You 're going to get one ! You 're going to get one !
I 'm going to make it for you !
FG : No , no . Wait a minute !
Bill Gates : How state budgets are breaking US schools
America 's school systems are funded by the 50 states . In this fiery talk , Bill Gates says that state budgets are riddled with accounting tricks that disguise the true cost of health care and pensions and weighted with worsening deficits -- with the financing of education at the losing end .
Well , this is about state budgets .
This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning .
But I want to tell you , I think it 's an important topic that we need to care about .
State budgets are big , big money -- I 'll show you the numbers -- and they get very little scrutiny .
The understanding is very low .
Many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are .
And these budgets are the key for our future ; they 're the key for our kids .
Most education funding -- whether it 's K through 12 , or the great universities or community colleges -- most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets .
But we have a problem .
Here 's the overall picture .
U.S. economy is big -- 14.7 trillion .
Now out of that pie , the government spends 36 percent .
So this is combining the federal level , which is the largest , the state level and the local level .
And it 's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what 's going on , because there 's a lot of complex things like Medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries .
But we 're spending 36 percent .
Well what are we taking in ?
Simple business question .
Answer is 26 percent .
Now this leaves 10 percent deficit , sort of a mind-blowing number .
And some of that , in fact , is due to the fact that we 've had an economic recession .
Receipts go down , some spending programs go up , but most of it is not because of that .
Most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends , and that creates a huge challenge .
In fact , this is the forecast picture .
There are various things in here : I could say we might raise more revenue , or medical innovation will make the spending even higher .
It is an increasingly difficult picture , even assuming the economy does quite well -- probably better than it will do .
This is what you see at this overall level .
Now how did we get here ?
How could you have a problem like this ?
After all , at least on paper , there 's this notion that these state budgets are balanced .
Only one state says they don 't have to balance the budget .
But what this means actually is that there 's a pretense .
There 's no real , true balancing going on , and in a sense , the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people don 't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges .
When Jerry Brown was elected , this was the challenge that was put to him .
That is , through various gimmicks and things , a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending .
Now he 's put together some thoughts : About half of that he 'll cut , another half , perhaps in a very complex set of steps , taxes will be approved .
But even so , as you go out into those future years , various pension costs , health costs go up enough , and the revenue does not go up enough .
So you get a big squeeze .
What were those things that allowed us to hide this ?
Well , some really nice little tricks .
And these were somewhat noticed .
The paper said , " It 's not really balanced .
It 's got holes .
It perpetuates deficit spending .
It 's riddled with gimmicks . "
And really when you get down to it , the guys at Enron never would have done this .
This is so blatant , so extreme .
Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do ?
They borrow money .
They 're not supposed to , but they figure out a way .
They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out .
They sell off the assets .
They defer the payments .
They sell off the revenues from tobacco .
And California 's not unique .
In fact , there 's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don 't face this big challenge .
So it 's systemic across the entire country .
It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations -- health care , where innovation makes it more expensive , early retirement and pension , where the age structure gets worse for you , and just generosity -- that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time , that you 've got a problem .
This is the retiree health care benefits .
Three million set aside , 62 billion dollar liability -- much worse than the car companies .
And everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem .
The forecast for the medical piece alone to 42 percent .
Well what 's going to give ?
Well in order to accommodate that , you would have to cut education spending in half .
It really is this young versus the old to some degree .
If you don 't change that revenue picture , if you don 't solve what you 're doing in health care , you 're going to be deinvesting in the young .
The great University of California university system , the great things that have gone on , won 't happen .
So far it 's meant layoffs , increased class sizes .
Within the education community there 's this discussion of , " Should it just be the young teachers who get laid off , or the less good teachers who get laid off ? "
And there 's a discussion : if you 're going to increase class sizes , where do you do that ? How much effect does that have ?
And unfortunately , as you get into that , people get confused and think , well maybe you think that 's okay .
In fact , no , education spending should not be cut .
There 's ways , if it 's temporary , to minimize the impact , but it 's a problem .
It 's also really a problem for where we need to go .
Technology has a role to play .
Well we need money to experiment with that , to get those tools in there .
There 's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness , measuring them , giving them feedback , taking videos in the classroom .
That 's something I think is very , very important .
Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay .
In a situation where you have growth , you put the new money into this .
Or even if you 're flat , you might shift money into it .
But with the type of cuts we 're talking about , it will be far , far harder to get these incentives for excellence , or to move over to use technology in the new way .
So what 's going on ?
Where 's the brain trust that 's in error here ?
Well there really is no brain trust .
It 's sort of the voters . It 's sort of us showing up .
Just look at this spending .
California will spend over 100 billion , Microsoft , 38 , Google , about 19 .
The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis , both inside Google and Microsoft and outside , with analysts and people of various opinions -- should they have spent on that ?
No , they wasted their money on this . What about this thing ? -- it really is quite phenomenal .
Everybody has an opinion .
There 's great feedback .
And the numbers are used to make decisions .
If you go over the education spending and the health care spending -- particularly these long-term trends -- you don 't have that type of involvement on a number that 's more important in terms of equity , in terms of learning .
So what do we need to do ?
We need better tools .
We can get some things out on the Internet .
I 'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture .
We need lots more .
There 's a few good books , one about school spending and where the money comes from -- how that 's changed over time , and the challenge .
We need better accounting .
We need to take the fact that the current employees , the future liabilities they create , that should come out of the current budget .
We need to understand why they 've done the pension accounting the way they have .
It should be more like private accounting .
It 's the gold standard .
And finally , we need to really reward politicians .
Whenever they say there 's these long-term problems , we can 't say , " Oh , you 're the messenger with bad news ?
We just shot you . "
In fact , there are some like these : Erskine Bowles , Alan Simpson and others , who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem .
But in fact , their work was sort of pushed off .
In fact , the week afterwards , some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions .
So we need these pieces .
Now I think this is a solvable problem .
It 's a great country with lots of people .
But we have to draw those people in , because this is about education .
And just look at what happened with the tuitions with the University of California and project that out for another three , four , five years -- it 's unaffordable .
And that 's the kind of thing -- the investment in the young -- that makes us great , allows us to contribute .
It allows us to do the art , the biotechnology , the software and all those magic things .
And so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they 're critical for our kids and our future .
Thank you .

Jonathan Drori : Every pollen grain has a story
Pollen goes unnoticed by most of us , except when hay fever strikes . But microscopes reveal it comes in stunning colors and shapes -- and travels remarkably well . Jonathan Drori gives an up-close glimpse of these fascinating flecks of plant courtship .
Thank you . I have two missions here today .
The first is to tell you something about pollen , I hope , and to convince you that it 's more than just something that gets up your nose .
And , secondly , to convince you that every home really ought to have a scanning electron microscope .
Pollen is a flower 's way of making more flowers .
It carries male sex cells from one flower to another .
This gives us genetic diversity , or at least it gives the plants genetic diversity .
And it 's really rather better not to mate with yourself .
That 's probably true of humans as well , mostly .
Pollen is produced by the anthers of flowers .
Each anther can carry up to 100,000 grains of pollen , so , it 's quite prolific stuff .
And it isn 't just bright flowers that have pollen ; it 's also trees and grasses .
And remember that all our cereal crops are grasses as well .
Here is a scanning electron micrograph of a grain of pollen .
The little hole in the middle , we 'll come to a bit later , but that 's for the pollen tube to come out later on . A very tiny tube .
So , that 's 20 micrometers across , that pollen grain there .
But not all pollen is quite so simple looking .
This is Morina . This is a plant -- which I 've always thought to be rather tedious -- named after Morin , who was an enterprising French gardener , who issued the first seed catalog in 1621 .
But anyway , take a look at its pollen .
This is amazing , I think .
That little hole in the middle there is for the pollen tube , and when the pollen finds its special female spot in another Morina flower , just on the right species , what happens ?
Like I said , pollen carries the male sex cells .
If you actually didn 't realize that plants have sex , they have rampant , promiscuous and really quite interesting and curious sex . Really .
My story is actually not about plant propagation , but about pollen itself .
" So , what are pollen 's properties ? " I hear you ask .
First of all , pollen is tiny . Yes we know that .
It 's also very biologically active , as anyone with hay fever will understand .
Now , pollen from plants , which are wind-dispersed -- like trees and grasses and so on -- tend to cause the most hay fever .
And the reason for that is they 've got to chuck out masses and masses of pollen to have any chance of the pollen reaching another plant of the same species .
Here are some examples -- they 're very smooth if you look at them -- of tree pollen that is meant to be carried by the wind .
Again -- this time , sycamore -- wind-dispersed .
So , trees : very boring flowers , not really trying to attract insects .
Cool pollen , though .
This one I particularly like .
This is the Monterey Pine , which has little air sacks to make the pollen carry even further .
Remember , that thing is just about 30 micrometers across .
Now , it 's much more efficient if you can get insects to do your bidding .
This is a bee 's leg with the pollen glommed onto it from a mallow plant .
And this is the outrageous and beautiful flower of the mangrove palm .
Very showy , to attract lots of insects to do its bidding .
The pollen has little barbs on it , if we look .
Now , those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well , but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph , and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this , if it was the Earth .
That tells me that it 's actually been fossilized , this pollen .
And I 'm rather proud to say that this was found just near London , and that 55 million years ago London was full of mangroves .
Isn 't that cool ?
Okay , so this is another species evolved to be dispersed by insects .
You can tell that from the little barbs on there .
All these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope , actually in the lab at Kew Laboratories .
No coincidence that these were taken by Rob Kesseler , who is an artist , and I think it 's someone with a design and artistic eye like him that has managed to bring out the best in pollen .
Now , all this diversity means that you can look at a pollen grain and tell what species it came from , and that 's actually quite handy if you maybe have a sample and you want to see where it came from .
So , different species of plants grow in different places , and some pollen carries further than others .
So , if you have a pollen sample , then in principle , you should be able to tell where that sample came from .
And this is where it gets interesting for forensics .
Pollen is tiny . It gets on to things , and it sticks to them .
So , not only does each type of pollen look different , but each habitat has a different combination of plants .
A different pollen signature , if you like , or a different pollen fingerprint .
By looking at the proportions and combinations of different kinds of pollen in a sample , you can tell very precisely where it came from .
This is some pollen embedded in a cotton shirt , similar to the one that I 'm wearing now .
Now , much of the pollen will still be there after repeated washings .
Where has it been ?
Four very different habitats might look similar , but they 've got very different pollen signatures .
Actually this one is particularly easy , these pictures were all taken in different countries .
But pollen forensics can be very subtle .
It 's being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made , where banknotes have come from , to look at the provenance of antiques and see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did .
And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing , certainly in the U.K. , to within an area that 's small enough that you can send in tracker dogs to find the murder victim .
So , you can tell from a piece of clothing to within about a kilometer or so , where that piece of clothing has been recently and then send in dogs .
And finally , in a rather grizzly way , the Bosnia war crimes ; some of the people brought to trial were brought to trial because of the evidence from pollen , which showed that bodies had been buried , exhumed and then reburied somewhere else .
I hope I 've opened your eyes , if you 'll excuse the visual pun , to some of pollen 's secrets .
This is a horse chestnut .
There is an invisible beauty all around us , each grain with a story to tell ...
each of us , in fact , with a story to tell from the pollen fingerprint that 's upon us .
Thank you to the colleagues at Kew , and thank you to palynologists everywhere .
Russell Foster : Why do we sleep ?
Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist : He studies the sleep cycles of the brain . And he asks : What do we know about sleep ? Not a lot , it turns out , for something we do with one-third of our lives . In this talk , Foster shares three popular theories about why we sleep , busts some myths about how much sleep we need at different ages -- and hints at some bold new uses of sleep as a predictor of mental health .
What I 'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects , and that is the neuroscience of sleep .
Now , there is a sound -- -- aah , it worked -- a sound that is desperately , desperately familiar to most of us , and of course it 's the sound of the alarm clock .
And what that truly ghastly , awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have , and that 's sleep .
If you 're an average sort of person , 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep , which means that if you live to 90 , then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep .
Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important .
And yet , for most of us , we don 't give sleep a second thought .
We throw it away .
We really just don 't think about sleep .
And so what I 'd like to do today is change your views , change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep .
And the journey that I want to take you on , we need to start by going back in time .
" Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber . "
Any ideas who said that ?
Shakespeare 's Julius Caesar .
Yes , let me give you a few more quotes .
" O sleep , O gentle sleep , nature 's soft nurse , how have I frighted thee ? "
Shakespeare again , from -- I won 't say it -- the Scottish play . [ Correction : Henry IV , Part 2 ] From the same time : " Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together . "
Extremely prophetic , by Thomas Dekker , another Elizabethan dramatist .
But if we jump forward 400 years , the tone about sleep changes somewhat .
This is from Thomas Edison , from the beginning of the 20th century .
" Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days . " Bang .
And if we also jump into the 1980s , some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said , " Sleep is for wimps . "
And of course the infamous -- what was his name ? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from " Wall Street " said , " Money never sleeps . "
What do we do in the 20th century about sleep ?
Well , of course , we use Thomas Edison 's light bulb to invade the night , and we occupied the dark , and in the process of this occupation , we 've treated sleep as an illness , almost .
We 've treated it as an enemy .
At most now , I suppose , we tolerate the need for sleep , and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure .
And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound .
Why is it ? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts ?
Well , it 's because you don 't do anything much while you 're asleep , it seems .
You don 't eat . You don 't drink .
And you don 't have sex .
Well , most of us anyway .
And so therefore it 's -- Sorry . It 's a complete waste of time , right ? Wrong .
Actually , sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology , and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it 's so very important .
So let 's move to the brain .
Now , here we have a brain .
This is donated by a social scientist , and they said they didn 't know what it was , or indeed how to use it , so -- Sorry .
So I borrowed it . I don 't think they noticed . Okay .
The point I 'm trying to make is that when you 're asleep , this thing doesn 't shut down .
In fact , some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state .
The other thing that 's really important about sleep is that it doesn 't arise from a single structure within the brain , but is to some extent a network property , and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus , and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures , not least the biological clock .
The biological clock tells us when it 's good to be up , when it 's good to be asleep , and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus , the lateral hypothalamus , the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei .
All of those combine , and they send projections down to the brain stem here .
The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex , this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here , with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness .
So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain , and essentially , sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here .
Okay . So where have we got to ?
We 've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life .
But what I haven 't explained is what sleep is about .
So why do we sleep ?
And it won 't surprise any of you that , of course , the scientists , we don 't have a consensus .
There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep , and I 'm going to outline three of those .
The first is sort of the restoration idea , and it 's somewhat intuitive .
Essentially , all the stuff we 've burned up during the day , we restore , we replace , we rebuild during the night .
And indeed , as an explanation , it goes back to Aristotle , so that 's , what , 2,300 years ago .
It 's gone in and out of fashion .
It 's fashionable at the moment because what 's been shown is that within the brain , a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep , and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways .
So there 's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis .
What about energy conservation ?
Again , perhaps intuitive .
You essentially sleep to save calories .
Now , when you do the sums , though , it doesn 't really pan out .
If you compare an individual who has slept at night , or stayed awake and hasn 't moved very much , the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night .
Now , that 's the equivalent of a hot dog bun .
Now , I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep .
So I 'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea .
But the third idea I 'm quite attracted to , which is brain processing and memory consolidation .
What we know is that , if after you 've tried to learn a task , and you sleep-deprive individuals , the ability to learn that task is smashed .
It 's really hugely attenuated .
So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important .
However , it 's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it .
What 's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep .
In fact , it 's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage .
Sleeping at night enhances our creativity .
And what seems to be going on is that , in the brain , those neural connections that are important , those synaptic connections that are important , are linked and strengthened , while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important .
Okay . So we 've had three explanations for why we might sleep , and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary , and it 's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons .
But sleep is not an indulgence .
It 's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually .
I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class , you know , the equiavlent of .
It 's not even an upgrade from economy to first class .
The critical thing to realize is that if you don 't sleep , you don 't fly .
Essentially , you never get there , and what 's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived .
So let 's now look at sleep deprivation .
Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived , and let 's look at our sleep-o-meter .
So in the 1950s , good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night .
Nowadays , we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night , so we 're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league .
For teenagers , it 's worse , much worse .
They need nine hours for full brain performance , and many of them , on a school night , are only getting five hours of sleep .
It 's simply not enough .
If we think about other sectors of society , the aged , if you are aged , then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted , and many sleep , again , less than five hours a night .
Shift work . Shift work is extraordinary , perhaps 20 percent of the working population , and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night .
It 's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us .
So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day , desperately tired , the body clock is saying , " Wake up . This is the time to be awake . "
So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor , again in that sort of five-hour region .
And then , of course , tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag .
So who here has jet lag ?
Well , my goodness gracious .
Well , thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep , because that 's what your brain is craving .
One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps , this involuntary falling asleep , and you have essentially no control over it .
Now , micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing , but they can also be deadly .
It 's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life , and in the U.S. , the statistics are pretty good : 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness , loss of vigilance , and falling asleep .
A hundred thousand a year . It 's extraordinary .
At another level of terror , we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger , which was so tragically lost .
And in the investigations that followed those disasters , poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters .
So when you 're tired , and you lack sleep , you have poor memory , you have poor creativity , you have increased impulsiveness , and you have overall poor judgment .
But my friends , it 's so much worse than that .
If you are a tired brain , the brain is craving things to wake it up .
So drugs , stimulants . Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world .
Much of the day is fueled by caffeine , and if you 're a really naughty tired brain , nicotine .
And of course , you 're fueling the waking state with these stimulants , and then of course it gets to 11 o 'clock at night , and the brain says to itself , " Ah , well actually , I need to be asleep fairly shortly .
What do we do about that when I 'm feeling completely wired ? "
Well , of course , you then resort to alcohol .
Now alcohol , short-term , you know , once or twice , to use to mildly sedate you , can be very useful .
It can actually ease the sleep transition .
But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn 't provide sleep , a biological mimic for sleep . It sedates you .
So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that 's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall .
So it 's a short-term acute measure , but for goodness sake , don 't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night .
Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain .
If you sleep around about five hours or less every night , then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese .
What 's the connection here ?
Well , sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin , the hunger hormone .
Ghrelin is released . It gets to the brain .
The brain says , " I need carbohydrates , " and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars .
So there 's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain .
Stress . Tired people are massively stressed .
And one of the things of stress , of course , is loss of memory , which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of .
But stress is so much more .
So if you 're acutely stressed , not a great problem , but it 's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that 's the problem .
So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity , and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection , and there 's some very good studies showing that shift workers , for example , have higher rates of cancer .
Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation .
Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant .
Therefore , diabetes 2 .
Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure .
So there 's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain , which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides .
So at this point in the talk , this is a nice time to think , well , do you think on the whole I 'm getting enough sleep ?
So a quick show of hands .
Who feels that they 're getting enough sleep here ?
Oh . Well , that 's pretty impressive .
Good . We 'll talk more about that later , about what are your tips .
So most of us , of course , ask the question , " Well , how do I know whether I 'm getting enough sleep ? "
Well , it 's not rocket science .
If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning , if you are taking a long time to get up , if you need lots of stimulants , if you 're grumpy , if you 're irritable , if you 're told by your work colleagues that you 're looking tired and irritable , chances are you are sleep-deprived .
Listen to them . Listen to yourself .
What do you do ?
Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies : Make your bedroom a haven for sleep .
The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can , and also make it slightly cool . Very important .
Actually , reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed .
Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep .
What 's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed ?
We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth .
It 's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep .
Turn off those mobile phones . Turn off those computers .
Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain .
Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day , ideally not after lunch .
Now , we 've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed , but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle .
So seek out morning light .
Basically , listen to yourself .
Wind down . Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber .
Okay . That 's some facts . What about some myths ?
Teenagers are lazy . No . Poor things .
They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late , so give them a break .
We need eight hours of sleep a night .
That 's an average . Some people need more . Some people need less .
And what you need to do is listen to your body .
Do you need that much or do you need more ?
Simple as that .
Old people need less sleep . Not true .
The sleep demands of the aged do not go down .
Essentially , sleep fragments and becomes less robust , but sleep requirements do not go down .
And the fourth myth is , early to bed , early to rise makes a man healthy , wealthy and wise .
Well that 's wrong at so many different levels .
There is no , no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all .
There 's no difference in socioeconomic status .
In my experience , the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug .
Okay . So for the last part , the last few minutes , what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new , breaking areas of neuroscience , which is the association between mental health , mental illness and sleep disruption .
We 've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness , there is always , always sleep disruption , but it 's been largely ignored .
In the 1970s , when people started to think about this again , they said , " Yes , well , of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they 're on anti-psychotics .
It 's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems , " ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously , sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics .
So what 's going on ?
Lots of groups , several groups are studying conditions like depression , schizophrenia and bipolar , and what 's going on in terms of sleep disruption .
We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia , and the data were quite extraordinary .
In those individuals with schizophrenia , much of the time , they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day .
Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever .
Their sleep was absolutely smashed .
And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle .
They were getting up later and later and later and later each night . It was smashed .
So what 's going on ?
And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain .
The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep , give you normal sleep , and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping .
And what 's the evidence for that ?
Well , genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep , when mutated , when changed , also predispose individuals to mental health problems .
And last year , we published a study which showed that a gene that 's been linked to schizophrenia , which , when mutated , also smashes the sleep .
So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems .
Other work flowed from these studies .
The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness , and we 've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder , they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar .
The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate , make worse the mental illness state .
My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent .
So what have we got ?
We 've got , in these connections , some really exciting things .
In terms of the neuroscience , by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems , we 're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain .
The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal , then we have the chance of going in .
If we know that these individuals are vulnerable , early intervention then becomes possible .
And the third , which I think is the most exciting , is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target .
Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable , we can certainly make them healthier , but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness .
So let me just finish .
What I started by saying is take sleep seriously .
Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age , when we were almost wrapped in a duvet .
We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep .
And this isn 't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense .
This is a pragmatic response to good health .
If you have good sleep , it increases your concentration , attention , decision-making , creativity , social skills , health .
If you get sleep , it reduces your mood changes , your stress , your levels of anger , your impulsivity , and your tendency to drink and take drugs .
And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness , and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions .
Jim Butcher , the fantasy writer , said , " Sleep is God . Go worship . "
And I can only recommend that you do the same .
Thank you for your attention .
Craig Venter : Watch me unveil " synthetic life "
Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement : they 've created the first fully functioning , reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA . He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science .
We 're here today to announce the first synthetic cell , a cell made by starting with the digital code in the computer , building the chromosome from four bottles of chemicals , assembling that chromosome in yeast , transplanting it into a recipient bacterial cell and transforming that cell into a new bacterial species .
So this is the first self-replicating species that we 've had on the planet whose parent is a computer .
It also is the first species to have its own website encoded in its genetic code .
But we 'll talk more about the watermarks in a minute .
This is a project that had its inception 15 years ago when our team then -- we called the institute TIGR -- was involved in sequencing the first two genomes in history .
We did Haemophilus influenzae and then the smallest genome of a self-replicating organism , that of Mycoplasma genitalium .
And as soon as we had these two sequences we thought , if this is supposed to be the smallest genome of a self-replicating species , could there be even a smaller genome ?
Could we understand the basis of cellular life at the genetic level ?
It 's been a 15-year quest just to get to the starting point now to be able to answer those questions , because it 's very difficult to eliminate multiple genes from a cell .
You can only do them one at a time .
We decided early on that we had to take a synthetic route , even though nobody had been there before , to see if we could synthesize a bacterial chromosome so we could actually vary the gene content to understand the essential genes for life .
That started our 15-year quest to get here .
But before we did the first experiments , we actually asked Art Caplan 's team at the University of Pennsylvania to undertake a review of what the risks , the challenges , the ethics around creating new species in the laboratory were because it hadn 't been done before .
They spent about two years reviewing that independently and published their results in Science in 1999 .
Ham and I took two years off as a side project to sequence the human genome , but as soon as that was done we got back to the task at hand .
In 2002 , we started a new institute , the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives , where we set out two goals : One , to understand the impact of our technology on the environment , and how to understand the environment better , and two , to start down this process of making synthetic life to understand basic life .
In 2003 , we published our first success .
So Ham Smith and Clyde Hutchison developed some new methods for making error-free DNA at a small level .
Our first task was a 5,000-letter code bacteriophage , a virus that attacks only E. coli .
So that was the phage phi X 174 , which was chosen for historical reasons .
It was the first DNA phage , DNA virus , DNA genome that was actually sequenced .
So once we realized that we could make 5,000-base pair viral-sized pieces , we thought , we at least have the means then to try and make serially lots of these pieces to be able to eventually assemble them together to make this mega base chromosome .
So , substantially larger than we even thought we would go initially .
There were several steps to this . There were two sides : We had to solve the chemistry for making large DNA molecules , and we had to solve the biological side of how , if we had this new chemical entity , how would we boot it up , activate it in a recipient cell .
We had two teams working in parallel : one team on the chemistry , and the other on trying to be able to transplant entire chromosomes to get new cells .
When we started this out , we thought the synthesis would be the biggest problem , which is why we chose the smallest genome .
And some of you have noticed that we switched from the smallest genome to a much larger one .
And we can walk through the reasons for that , but basically the small cell took on the order of one to two months to get results from , whereas the larger , faster-growing cell takes only two days .
So there 's only so many cycles we could go through in a year at six weeks per cycle .
And you should know that basically 99 , probably 99 percent plus of our experiments failed .
So this was a debugging , problem-solving scenario from the beginning because there was no recipe of how to get there .
So , one of the most important publications we had was in 2007 .
Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another .
I think philosophically , that was one of the most important papers that we 've ever done because it showed how dynamic life was .
And we knew , once that worked , that we actually had a chance if we could make the synthetic chromosomes to do the same with those .
We didn 't know that it was going to take us several years more to get there .
In 2008 , we reported the complete synthesis of the Mycoplasma genitalium genome , a little over 500,000 letters of genetic code , but we have not yet succeeded in booting up that chromosome .
We think in part , because of its slow growth and , in part , cells have all kinds of unique defense mechanisms to keep these events from happening .
It turned out the cell that we were trying to transplant into had a nuclease , an enzyme that chews up DNA on its surface , and was happy to eat the synthetic DNA that we gave it and never got transplantations .
But at the time , that was the largest molecule of a defined structure that had been made .
And so both sides were progressing , but part of the synthesis had to be accomplished or was able to be accomplished using yeast , putting the fragments in yeast and yeast would assemble these for us .
It 's an amazing step forward , but we had a problem because now we had the bacterial chromosomes growing in yeast .
So in addition to doing the transplant , we had to find out how to get a bacterial chromosome out of the eukaryotic yeast into a form where we could transplant it into a recipient cell .
So our team developed new techniques for actually growing , cloning entire bacterial chromosomes in yeast .
So we took the same mycoides genome that Carole had initially transplanted , and we grew that in yeast as an artificial chromosome .
And we thought this would be a great test bed for learning how to get chromosomes out of yeast and transplant them .
When we did these experiments , though , we could get the chromosome out of yeast but it wouldn 't transplant and boot up a cell .
That little issue took the team two years to solve .
It turns out , the DNA in the bacterial cell was actually methylated , and the methylation protects it from the restriction enzyme , from digesting the DNA .
So what we found is if we took the chromosome out of yeast and methylated it , we could then transplant it .
Further advances came when the team removed the restriction enzyme genes from the recipient capricolum cell .
And once we had done that , now we can take naked DNA out of yeast and transplant it .
So last fall when we published the results of that work in Science , we all became overconfident and were sure we were only a few weeks away from being able to now boot up a chromosome out of yeast .
Because of the problems with Mycoplasma genitalium and its slow growth about a year and a half ago , we decided to synthesize the much larger chromosome , the mycoides chromosome , knowing that we had the biology worked out on that for transplantation .
And Dan led the team for the synthesis of this over one-million-base pair chromosome .
But it turned out it wasn 't going to be as simple in the end , and it set us back three months because we had one error out of over a million base pairs in that sequence .
So the team developed new debugging software , where we could test each synthetic fragment to see if it would grow in a background of wild type DNA .
And we found that 10 out of the 11 100,000-base pair pieces we synthesized were completely accurate and compatible with a life-forming sequence .
We narrowed it down to one fragment ; we sequenced it and found just one base pair had been deleted in an essential gene .
So accuracy is essential .
There 's parts of the genome where it cannot tolerate even a single error , and then there 's parts of the genome where we can put in large blocks of DNA , as we did with the watermarks , and it can tolerate all kinds of errors .
So it took about three months to find that error and repair it .
And then early one morning , at 6 a.m.
we got a text from Dan saying that , now , the first blue colonies existed .
So , it 's been a long route to get here : 15 years from the beginning .
We felt one of the tenets of this field was to make absolutely certain we could distinguish synthetic DNA from natural DNA .
Early on , when you 're working in a new area of science , you have to think about all the pitfalls and things that could lead you to believe that you had done something when you hadn 't , and , even worse , leading others to believe it .
So , we thought the worst problem would be a single molecule contamination of the native chromosome , leading us to believe that we actually had created a synthetic cell , when it would have been just a contaminant .
So early on , we developed the notion of putting in watermarks in the DNA to absolutely make clear that the DNA was synthetic .
And the first chromosome we built in 2008 -- the 500,000-base pair one -- we simply assigned the names of the authors of the chromosome into the genetic code , but it was using just amino acid single letter translations , which leaves out certain letters of the alphabet .
So the team actually developed a new code within the code within the code .
So it 's a new code for interpreting and writing messages in DNA .
Now , mathematicians have been hiding and writing messages in the genetic code for a long time , but it 's clear they were mathematicians and not biologists because , if you write long messages with the code that the mathematicians developed , it would more than likely lead to new proteins being synthesized with unknown functions .
So the code that Mike Montague and the team developed actually puts frequent stop codons , so it 's a different alphabet but allows us to use the entire English alphabet with punctuation and numbers .
So , there are four major watermarks all over 1,000 base pairs of genetic code .
The first one actually contains within it this code for interpreting the rest of the genetic code .
So in the remaining information , in the watermarks , contain the names of , I think it 's 46 different authors and key contributors to getting the project to this stage .
And we also built in a website address so that if somebody decodes the code within the code within the code , they can send an email to that address .
So it 's clearly distinguishable from any other species , having 46 names in it , its own web address .
And we added three quotations , because with the first genome we were criticized for not trying to say something more profound than just signing the work .
So we won 't give the rest of the code , but we will give the three quotations .
The first is , " To live , to err , to fall , to triumph and to recreate life out of life . "
It 's a James Joyce quote .
The second quotation is , " See things not as they are , but as they might be . "
It 's a quote from the " American Prometheus " book on Robert Oppenheimer .
And the last one is a Richard Feynman quote : " What I cannot build , I cannot understand . "
So , because this is as much a philosophical advance as a technical advance in science , we tried to deal with both the philosophical and the technical side .
The last thing I want to say before turning it over to questions is that the extensive work that we 've done -- asking for ethical review , pushing the envelope on that side as well as the technical side -- this has been broadly discussed in the scientific community , in the policy community and at the highest levels of the federal government .
Even with this announcement , as we did in 2003 -- that work was funded by the Department of Energy , so the work was reviewed at the level of the White House , trying to decide whether to classify the work or publish it .
And they came down on the side of open publication , which is the right approach -- we 've briefed the White House , we 've briefed members of Congress , we 've tried to take and push the policy issues in parallel with the scientific advances .
So with that , I would like to open it first to the floor for questions .
Yes , in the back .
Reporter : Could you explain , in layman 's terms , how significant a breakthrough this is please ?
Craig Venter : Can we explain how significant this is ?
I 'm not sure we 're the ones that should be explaining how significant it is .
It 's significant to us .
Perhaps it 's a giant philosophical change in how we view life .
We actually view it as a baby step in terms of , it 's taken us 15 years to be able to do the experiment we wanted to do 15 years ago on understanding life at its basic level .
But we actually believe this is going to be a very powerful set of tools and we 're already starting in numerous avenues to use this tool .
We have , at the Institute , ongoing funding now from NIH in a program with Novartis to try and use these new synthetic DNA tools to perhaps make the flu vaccine that you might get next year .
Because instead of taking weeks to months to make these , Dan 's team can now make these in less than 24 hours .
So when you see how long it took to get an H1N1 vaccine out , we think we can shorten that process quite substantially .
In the vaccine area , Synthetic Genomics and the Institute are forming a new vaccine company because we think these tools can affect vaccines to diseases that haven 't been possible to date , things where the viruses rapidly evolve , such with rhinovirus .
Wouldn 't it be nice to have something that actually blocked common colds ?
Or , more importantly , HIV , where the virus evolves so quickly the vaccines that are made today can 't keep up with those evolutionary changes .
Also , at Synthetic Genomics , we 've been working on major environmental issues .
I think this latest oil spill in the Gulf is a reminder .
We can 't see CO2 -- we depend on scientific measurements for it and we see the beginning results of having too much of it -- but we can see pre-CO2 now floating on the waters and contaminating the beaches in the Gulf .
We need some alternatives for oil .
We have a program with Exxon Mobile to try and develop new strains of algae that can efficiently capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from concentrated sources , make new hydrocarbons that can go into their refineries to make normal gasoline and diesel fuel out of CO2 .
Those are just a couple of the approaches and directions that we 're taking .
Julia Sweeney : Letting go of God
Julia Sweeney & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ; performs the first 15 minutes of her 2006 solo show & lt ; em & gt ; Letting Go of God . & lt ; / em & gt ; When two young Mormon missionaries knock on her door one day , it touches off a quest to completely rethink her own beliefs .
On September 10 , the morning of my seventh birthday , I came downstairs to the kitchen , where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something , and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway , and they said , " Hey , happy birthday ! " And I said , " I 'm seven . "
And my father smiled and said , " Well , you know what that means , don 't you ? "
And I said , " Yeah , that I 'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents ? " And my dad said , " Well , yes .
But , more importantly , being seven means that you 've reached the age of reason , and you 're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man . "
Now , I had heard this phrase , " age of reason , " before .
Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school . But when she said it , the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession , and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil , and anyway , I hadn 't really paid all that much attention to that phrase , " age of reason . "
So , I said , " Yeah , yeah , age of reason . What does that mean again ? "
And my dad said , " Well , we believe in the Catholic Church that God knows that little kids don 't know the difference between right and wrong , but when you 're seven , you 're old enough to know better .
So , you 've grown up , and reached the age of reason , and now God will start keeping notes on you and begin your permanent record . "
And I said , " Oh . Wait a minute . You mean all that time , up till today , all that time I was so good , God didn 't notice it ? "
And my mom said , " Well , I noticed it . "
And I thought , " How could I not have known this before ?
How could it not have sunk in when they 'd been telling me ?
All that being good and no real credit for it .
And , worst of all , how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me ? "
So I said , " Well , Mom and Dad , what about Santa Claus ?
I mean , Santa Claus knows if you 're naughty or nice , right ? "
And my dad said , " Yeah , but , honey , I think that 's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas . "
And my mother said , " Oh , Bob , stop it . Let 's just tell her .
I mean , she 's seven . Julie , there is no Santa Claus . "
Now , this was actually not that upsetting to me .
My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus : how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve , like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning , our family would give Santa more time .
Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o 'clock high mass on Christmas morning , but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss .
Which made me very suspicious .
It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents .
I mean , my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style , and my mother 's handwriting was so close to Santa 's .
Plus , why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he 'd gone to everybody else 's ?
There 's only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence : our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit , and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment , this humiliation of rejection by Santa , who was jolly -- but , let 's face it , he was also very judgmental .
So , to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief .
I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa , but rather I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing .
It was too late for me , but maybe I could help someone else , someone who could use the information .
They had to fit two criteria : they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason , and not yet seven .
The answer was clear : my brother Bill . He was six .
Well , I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground . It was a Saturday , and he was all by himself , just kicking a ball against the side of a wall .
I ran up to him and said , " Bill !
I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven , and then you 're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man . " And Bill said , " So ? " And then I said , " So , you 're six . You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won 't notice it . " And he said , " So ? " And I said , " So ? So everything ! " And I turned to run . I was so angry with him .
But when I got to the top of the steps , I turned around dramatically and said , " Oh , by the way , Bill , there is no Santa Claus . "
Now , I didn 't know it at the time , but I really wasn 't turning seven on September 10 .
For my 13th birthday , I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends , but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said , " I need to speak to you privately .
September 10 is not your birthday . It 's October 10 . " And I said , " What ? "
And she said , " Listen . The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15 . "
" So , I told them that your birthday was on September 10 , and then I wasn 't sure that you weren 't just going to go blab it all over the place , so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10 .
But , Julie , you were so ready to start school , honey . You were so ready . "
I thought about it , and when I was four , I was already the oldest of four children , and my mother even had another child to come , so what I think she understandably really meant was that she was so ready , she was so ready . Then she said , " Don 't worry , Julie , every year on October 10 when it was your birthday but you didn 't realize it , I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day . "
Which was comforting , but troubling .
My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me , without me .
What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I was going to have to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends , what was most upsetting was that this meant that I was not a Virgo .
I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom , and I read my horoscope every single day , and it was so totally me .
And this meant that I was a Libra ?
So , I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster .
The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair , sort of lounging by some water , but the Libra poster is just a huge scale .
This was around the time that I started filling out physically , and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls , and , frankly , the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing .
But I got the new Libra poster , and I started to read my new Libra horoscope , and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me .
It wasn 't until years later , looking back on this whole age-of-reason / change-of-birthday thing , that it dawned on me : I wasn 't turning seven when I thought I turned seven . I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me .
Oh , life can be so cruel .
One day , two Mormon missionaries came to my door .
Now , I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles , and my block is -- well , it 's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door .
Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven .
And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won 't join a gang and just start robbing people if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them .
So , normally I just ignore the doorbell , but on this day I answered .
And there stood two boys , each about 19 , in white starched short-sleeved shirts , and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and they said they had a message for me from God .
I said , " A message for me ? From God ? " And they said , " Yes . "
Now , I was raised in the Pacific Northwest , around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and , you know , I 've worked with them and even dated them , but I never really knew the doctrine or what they said to people when they were out on a mission , and I guess I was , sort of , curious , so I said , " Well , please , come in . " And they looked really happy , because I don 't think this happens to them all that often .
And I sat them down , and I got them glasses of water -- OK , I got it . I got them glasses of water .
Don 't touch my hair , that 's the thing .
You can 't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair .
OK . So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water , and after niceties they said , " Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart ? "
And I thought , " Well , of course I believe in God , but , you know , I don 't like that word , heart , because it anthropomorphizes God , and I don 't like the word , ' his , ' either , because that sexualizes God . "
But I didn 't want to argue semantics with these boys , so after a very long , uncomfortable pause , I said " Yes , yes , I do . I feel very loved . "
And they looked at each other and smiled , like that was the right answer . And then they said , " Do you believe that we 're all brothers and sisters on this planet ? "
And I said , " Yes , I do . Yes , I do . " And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly .
And they said , " Well , then we have a story to tell you . "
And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi , who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC .
Now , apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC , everyone was completely bad and evil . Every single one of them : man , woman , child , infant , fetus .
And God came to Lehi and said to him , " Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here . " And God did lead them .
He led them to America .
I said , " America ? From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC ? "
And they said , " Yes . "
Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced , and over the course of 600 years there were two great races of them , the Nephites and the Lamanites , and the Nephites were totally , totally good -- each and every one of them -- and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil -- every single one of them just bad to the bone .
Then , after Jesus died on the cross for our sins , on his way up to heaven he stopped by America and visited the Nephites .
And he told them that if they all remained totally , totally good -- each and every one of them -- they would win the war against the evil Lamanites .
But apparently somebody blew it , because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites .
All but one guy , this guy named Mormon , who managed to survive by hiding in the woods .
And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates , which he then buried near Palmyra , New York .
Well , I was just on the edge of my seat .
I said , " What happened to the Lamanites ? "
And they said , " Well , they became our Native Americans here in the U.S. "
And I said , " So , you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil ? " And they said , " Yes . "
Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard , and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into , and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English .
Well , at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch .
I wanted to say , " OK , don 't start with this story . "
I mean , even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start -- -- telling people all about Xenu , the evil intergalactic overlord .
Well , then they said , " Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets ? " And I said , " No , I don 't . "
Because I was , sort of , upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story , but the truth was , I hadn 't really thought this through , so I backpedaled a little and I said , " Well , what exactly do you mean by righteous ?
And what do you mean by prophets ? Like , could the prophets be women ? "
And they said , " No . " And I said , " Why ? " And they said , " Well , it 's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular , it is so wonderful , that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy . "
What is this wonderful gift God gave women , I wondered ?
Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt ?
Women 's longer lifespan ? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men ? But , no , it wasn 't any of these gifts .
They said , " Well , it 's her ability to bear children . "
I said , " Oh , come on . I mean , even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45 , assuming they didn 't die from exhaustion , it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God . " And they said , " No . "
Well , then they didn 't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more , but they had more to say .
They said , " Well , we also believe that if you 're a Mormon and if you 're in good standing with the church , when you die you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity . "
And I said , " Oh , dear -- -- that wouldn 't be such a good incentive for me . "
And they said , " Oh -- hey , well , we also believe that when you go to heaven you get your body restored to you in its best original state .
Like , if you 'd lost a leg , well , you get it back .
Or , if you 'd gone blind , you could see . "
I said , " Oh -- now , I don 't have a uterus because I had cancer a few years ago . So , does this mean that if I went to heaven I would get my old uterus back ? " And they said , " Sure . "
And I said , " I don 't want it back . I 'm happy without it . " Gosh .
What if you had a nose job and you liked it ?
Would God force you to get your old nose back ?
Well , then they gave me this Book of Mormon , and they told me to read this chapter and that chapter , and they said they 'd come back some day and check in on me , and I think I said something like , " Please don 't hurry , " or maybe it was just , " Please don 't , " and they were gone .
OK , so , I initially felt really superior to these boys , and smug in my more conventional faith . But then , the more I thought about it , the more I had to be honest with myself .
If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time , and they said , " We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse , and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us -- -- and she had a baby , and that 's the son of God , " I mean , I would think that 's equally ridiculous .
I 'm just so used to that story .
So , I couldn 't let myself feel condescending towards these boys .
But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head : Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart ?
Because I wasn 't exactly sure how I felt about that question .
Now , if they 'd asked me , Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart ?
Well , that would have been much different , I think I would have instantly answered , " Yes , yes , I feel it all the time . I feel God 's love when I 'm hurt and confused , and I feel consoled and cared for . I take shelter in God 's love when I don 't understand why tragedy hits , and I feel God 's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see . "
But since they asked me that question with the word believe in it , somehow it was all different , because I wasn 't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt .
Roy Gould + Curtis Wong : A preview of the WorldWide Telescope
Educator Roy Gould and researcher Curtis Wong show a sneak preview of Microsoft 's WorldWide Telescope , which compiles images from telescopes and satellites to build a comprehensive , interactive view of our universe .
Roy Gould : Less than a year from now , the world is going to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy , which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo 's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope .
In a few months , the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from Microsoft Research , which I think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago .
It 's called the WorldWide Telescope , and I want to thank TED and Microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention .
And I want to urge you , when you get a chance , to give it a closer look at the TED Lab downstairs .
The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world 's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space , and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe .
It 's going to change the way we do astronomy , it 's going to change the way we teach astronomy and I think most importantly it 's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe .
If we were having this TED meeting in our grandparents ' day , that might not be so big a claim .
In 1920 , for example , you weren 't allowed to drink ; if you were a woman , you weren 't allowed to vote ; and if you looked up at the stars and the Milky Way on a summer night , what you saw was thought to be the entire universe .
In fact , the head of Harvard 's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe .
Harvard was wrong , big time .
Of course , we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy .
We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe , all the way back in time , almost to the moment of the Big Bang itself .
We can see across the entire spectrum of light , revealing worlds that had previously been invisible .
We see these magnificent star nurseries , where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise .
We see alien worlds , we see alien solar systems -- 300 now , and still counting -- and they 're not like us .
We see black holes at the heart of our galaxy , in the Milky Way , and elsewhere in the universe , where time itself seems to stand still .
But until now , our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented , and I think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks . And that 's changing .
I want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and I , in astronomy and in education , are so excited about the WorldWide Telescope and why we think it 's truly transformative .
First , it enables you to experience the universe : the WorldWide Telescope , for me , is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go .
Second : you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides .
And I 'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you 're seeing , but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe , who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place .
And third , you can create your own tours -- you can share them with friends , you can create them with friends -- and that 's the part that I think I 'm most excited about because I think that at heart , we are all storytellers .
And in telling stories , each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way .
We 're going to have a personal universe .
I think we 're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge .
Before I introduce the person responsible for the WorldWide Telescope , I just want to leave you with this brief thought : when I ask people , " How does the night sky make you feel ? "
they often say , " Oh , tiny . I feel tiny and insignificant . "
Well , our gaze fills the universe .
And thanks to the creators of the WorldWide Telescope , we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe .
I think the WorldWide Telescope will convince you that we may be tiny , but we are truly , wonderfully significant .
Thank you .
I can 't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce Curtis Wong from Microsoft .
Curtis Wong : Thank you , Roy .
So , what you 're seeing here is a wonderful presentation , but it 's one of the tours .
And actually this tour is one that was created earlier .
And the tours are all totally interactive , so that if I were to go somewhere ...
you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way , pull up other information -- there are lots of Web and information sources about places you might want to go -- you can zoom in , you can pull back out .
The whole resources are there available for you .
So , Microsoft -- this is a project that -- WorldWide Telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray , who 's our colleague , and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible .
It 's a labor of love for us and our small team , and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe .
So basically , kids of all ages , like us .
And so WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring .
It 'll be a free download -- thank you , Craig Mundie -- and it 'll be available at the website WorldWideTelescope.org , which is something new .
And so , what you 've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here , and in the TED Lab , we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named Benjamin that will knock your socks off .
So we 'll see you there . Thank you .
Jane Poynter : Life in Biosphere 2
Jane Poynter tells her story of living two years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2 -- an experience that provoked her to explore how we might sustain life in the harshest of environments .
I have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres .
Of course we all here in this room live in Biosphere 1 .
I 've also lived in Biosphere 2 .
And the wonderful thing about that is that I get to compare biospheres .
And hopefully from that I get to learn something .
So what did I learn ? Well , here I am inside Biosphere 2 , making a pizza .
So I am harvesting the wheat , in order to make the dough .
And then of course I have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese .
It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza .
Here in Biosphere 1 , well it takes me about two minutes , because I pick up the phone and I call and say , " Hey , can you deliver the pizza ? "
So Biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre , entirely sealed , miniature world that I lived in for two years and 20 minutes .
Over the top it was sealed with steel and glass , underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel -- essentially entirely sealed .
So we had our own miniature rainforest , a private beach with a coral reef .
We had a savanna , a marsh , a desert .
We had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything .
And of course we had our human habitat , where we lived .
Back in the mid- ' 80s when we were designing Biosphere 2 , we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions .
I mean , what is a biosphere ?
Back then , yes , I guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the Earth , right ?
Well , you have to get a little more specific than that if you 're going to build one .
And so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed -- that is , nothing goes in or out at all , no material -- and energetically open , which is essentially what planet Earth is .
This is a chamber that was 1 / 400th the size of Biosphere 2 that we called our Test Module .
And the very first day that this fellow , John Allen , walked in , to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we 'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive , the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin , or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something , fungus .
But of course none of that happened .
And over the ensuing few years , there were great sagas about designing Biosphere 2 .
But by 1991 we finally had this thing built .
And it was time for us to go in and give it a go .
We needed to know , is life this malleable ?
Can you take this biosphere , that has evolved on a planetary scale , and jam it into a little bottle , and will it survive ?
Big questions .
And we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe -- if we were going to go to Mars , for instance , would we take a biosphere with us , to live in it ?
We also wanted to know so we can understand more about the Earth that we all live in .
Well , in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby .
Let 's take it on a maiden voyage .
Will it work ? Or will something happen that we can 't understand and we can 't fix , thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres ?
So eight of us went in : four men and four women .
More on that later .
And this is the world that we lived in .
So , on the top , we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean , and underneath we had all this technosphere , we called it , which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers , and all of that .
One of the Biospherians called it " garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier . "
And then also we had the human habitat of course , with the laboratories , and all of that .
This is the agriculture .
It was essentially an organic farm .
I was , for the first time , breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world , except seven other people .
At that moment I became part of that biosphere .
And I don 't mean that in an abstract sense ; I mean it rather literally .
When I breathed out , my CO2 fed the sweet potatoes that I was growing .
And we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes .
And those sweet potatoes became part of me .
In fact , we ate so many sweet potatoes I became orange with sweet potato .
I literally was eating the same carbon over and over again .
I was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way .
When it came to our atmosphere , however , it wasn 't that much of a joke over the long term , because it turned out that we were losing oxygen , quite a lot of oxygen .
And so we were working to sequester carbon .
Good lord -- we know that term now .
We were growing plants like crazy .
We were taking their biomass , storing them in the basement , growing plants , going around , around , around , trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere .
We were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere .
We stopped irrigating our soil , as much as we could .
We stopped tilling , so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air .
But our oxygen was going down faster than our CO2 was going up , which was quite unexpected , because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module .
And it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek .
We had lost seven tons of oxygen .
And we had no clue where it was .
And I tell you , when you lose a lot of oxygen -- and our oxygen went down quite far ; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent -- my goodness , do you feel dreadful .
I mean we were dragging ourselves around the Biosphere .
And we had sleep apnea at night .
So you 'd wake up gasping with breath , because your blood chemistry has changed .
And that you literally do that . You stop breathing and then you -- -- take a breath and it wakes you up . And it 's very irritating .
And everybody outside thought we were dying .
I mean , the media was making it sound like were were dying .
And I had to call up my mother every other day saying , " No , Mum , it 's fine , fine .
We 're not dead . We 're fine . We 're fine . "
And the doctor was , in fact , checking us to make sure we were , in fact , fine .
But in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen .
And one day he couldn 't add up a line of figures .
And it was time for us to put oxygen in .
And you might think , well , " Boy , your life support system was failing you . Wasn 't that dreadful ? "
Yes . In a sense it was terrifying .
Except that I knew I could walk out the airlock door at any time , if it really got bad , though who was going to say , " I can 't take it anymore ! " ?
Not me , that was for sure .
But on the other hand , it was the scientific gold of the project , because we could really crank this baby up , as a scientific tool , and see if we could , in fact , find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone .
And we did indeed find it .
And we found it in the concrete .
Essentially it had done something very simple .
We had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost .
It broke down ; it took oxygen out of the air ; Pretty straightforward really .
So at the end of the two years when we came out , we were elated , because , in fact , although you might say we had discovered something that was quite " uhh , " when your oxygen is going down , stopped working , essentially , in your life support system , that 's a very bad failure .
Except that we knew what it was . And we knew how to fix it .
And nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that .
And we proved the concept , more or less .
People , on the other hand , was a different subject .
We were -- yeah I don 't know that we were fixable .
We all went quite nuts , I will say .
And the day I came out of Biosphere 2 , I was thrilled I was going to see all my family and my friends .
For two years I 'd been seeing people through the glass .
And everybody ran up to me .
And I recoiled . They stank !
People stink !
We stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant , and all kinds of stuff .
Now we had stuff inside Biosphere to keep ourselves clean , but nothing with perfume .
And boy do we stink out here .
Not only that , but I lost touch of where my food came from .
I had been growing all my own food .
I had no idea what was in my food , where it came from .
I didn 't even recognize half the names in most of the food that I was eating .
In fact , I would stand for hours in the aisles of shops , reading all the names on all of the things .
People must have thought I was nuts .
It was really quite astonishing .
And I slowly lost track of where I was in this big biosphere , in this big biosphere that we all live in .
In Biosphere 2 I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere , everyday , and it had an impact on me , very viscerally , very literally .
So I went about my business : Paragon Space Development Corporation , a little firm I started with people while I was in the Biosphere , because I had nothing else to do .
And one of the things we did was try to figure out : how small can you make these biospheres , and what can you do with them ?
And so we sent one onto the Mir Space Station .
We had one on the shuttle and one on the International Space Station , for 16 months , where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space -- really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are .
And I 'm also proud to announce that you 're getting a sneak preview -- on Friday we 're going to announce that we 're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the Moon , which is going to be pretty fun .
And the legacy of that is a system that we were designing : an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on Mars .
And part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of CO2 and oxygen and water through this plant system .
As a result of that modeling I ended up in all places , in Eritrea , in the Horn of Africa .
Eritrea , formerly part of Ethiopia , is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful , incredibly stark , and I have no understanding of how people eke out a living there .
It is so dry .
This is what I saw .
But this is also what I saw .
I saw a company that had taken seawater and sand , and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it .
And it will produce a food crop .
In this case it was oilseed .
It was astonishing . They were also producing mangroves in a plantation .
And the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals , so that they could produce milk and whatnot , like we had in the Biosphere .
And all of it was coming from this : shrimp farms .
Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth , frankly , from an environmental point of view .
They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean .
They also pollute their next-door neighbors .
So they 're all shitting each other 's ponds , quite literally .
And what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these , and turning them into all of this food .
They were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people .
They had created an industrial ecosystem , of a sense .
I was there because I was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program , under the U.N.
Kyoto Protocol system .
And as I was modeling this mangrove swamp , I was thinking to myself , " How do you put a box around this ? "
When I 'm modeling a plant in a box , literally , I know where to draw the boundary .
In a mangrove forest like this I have no idea .
Well , of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the Earth .
And understand its interactions with the entire Earth .
And put your project in that context .
Around the world today we 're seeing an incredible transformation , from what I would call a biocidal species , one that -- whether we intentionally or unintentionally -- have designed our systems to kill life , a lot of the time .
This is in fact , this beautiful photograph , is in fact over the Amazon .
And here the light green are areas of massive deforestation .
And those beautiful wispy clouds are , in fact , fires , human-made fires .
We 're in the process of transforming from this , to what I would call a biophilic society , one where we learn to nurture society .
Now it may not seem like it , but we are .
It is happening all across the world , in every kind of walk of life , and every kind of career and industry that you can think of .
And I think often times people get lost in that .
They go , " But how can I possibly find my way in that ?
It 's such a huge subject . "
And I would say that the small stuff counts . It really does .
This is the story of a rake in my backyard .
This was my backyard , very early on , when I bought my property .
And in Arizona , of course , everybody puts gravel down .
And they like to keep everything beautifully raked . And they keep all the leaves away .
And on Sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out , and I want to throttle them .
It 's a certain type of aesthetic .
We 're very uncomfortable with untidiness .
And I threw away my rake .
And I let all of the leaves fall from the trees that I have on my property .
And over time , essentially what have I been doing ?
I 've been building topsoil .
And so now all the birds come in . And I have hawks .
And I have an oasis .
This is what happens every spring . For six weeks , six to eight weeks , I have this flush of green oasis .
This is actually in a riparian area .
And all of Tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake .
The small stuff counts .
The Industrial Revolution -- and Prometheus -- has given us this , the ability to light up the world .
It has also given us this , the ability to look at the world from the outside .
Now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to , and compare it to this biosphere .
But we can look at the world , and try to understand where we are in its context , and how we choose to interact with it .
And if you lose where you are in your biosphere , or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere , I would say to you , take a deep breath .
The yogis had it right .
Breath does , in fact , connect us all in a very literal way .
Take a breath now .
And as you breathe , think about what is in your breath .
There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you .
Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here .
It also connects us in time .
There may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs .
There could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren .
Thank you .
Phil Plait : How to defend Earth from asteroids
What 's six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant ? An asteroid -- and there are lots of them out there . With humor and great visuals , Phil Plait enthralls the TEDxBoulder audience with all the ways asteroids can kill , and what we must do to avoid them . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I want to talk to you about something kind of big .
We 'll start here .
65 million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day .
A chunk of rock six miles across , moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet , slammed into the Earth .
It released its energy all at once , and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing .
If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War , lumped them together and blew them up at the same time , that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment .
The dinosaurs had a really bad day .
Okay ?
Now , a six-mile-wide rock is very large .
We all live here in Boulder .
If you look out your window and you can see Long 's Peak , you 're probably familiar with it .
Now , scoop up Long 's Peak , and put it out in space .
Take Meeker , Mt . Meeker . Lump that in there , and put that in space as well , and Mt . Everest , and K2 , and the Indian peaks .
Then you 're starting to get an idea of how much rock we 're talking about , okay ?
We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left .
It hit in what we now know as Yucatan , the Gulf of Mexico .
You can see here , there 's the Yucatan Peninsula , if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there .
Here is how big of a crater was left .
It was huge . To give you a sense of the scale , okay , there you go . The scale here is 50 miles on top , a hundred kilometers on the bottom . This thing was 300 kilometers across -- 200 miles -- an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet , threw up enough dust to block out the sun .
It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth .
Now , not all asteroids are that big .
Some of them are smaller .
Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992 .
It came in on a Friday night .
Why is that important ?
Because back then , video cameras were just starting to become popular , and people would bring them , parents would bring them , to their kids ' football games to film their kids play football . And since this came in on a Friday , they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over West Virgina , Maryland , Pennsylvania and New Jersey until it did that to a car in New York .
Now , this is not a 200-mile-wide crater , but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here , about the size of a football , that hit that car and did that damage .
Now this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in .
It broke up through atmospheric pressure , it crumbled , and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage .
Now , you wouldn 't want that falling on your foot or your head , because it would do that to it .
That would be bad .
But it won 't wipe out , you know , all life on Earth , so that 's fine . But it turns out , you don 't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage .
There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock , and in fact , if any of you have ever been to near Winslow , Arizona , there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called Meteor Crater .
To give you a sense of scale , this is about a mile wide .
If you look up at the top , that 's a parking lot , and those are recreational vehicles right there .
So it 's about a mile across , 600 feet deep .
The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across , so roughly the size of Mackey Auditorium here .
It came in at speeds that were tremendous , slammed into the ground , blew up , and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb -- a very hefty bomb .
This was 50,000 years ago , so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope , or something like that out in the desert , but it probably would not have caused global devastation .
It turns out that these things don 't have to hit the ground to do a lot of damage .
Now , in 1908 , over Siberia , near the Tunguska region -- for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw " Ghostbusters , " when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909 , where he got the date wrong , but that 's okay .
It was 1908 . That 's fine . I can live with that .
Another rock came into the Earth 's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground , several miles up above the surface of the Earth .
The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it , and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles , okay ?
This did a huge amount of damage .
And again , this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we 're sitting in .
In Meteor Crater it was made of metal , and metal is much tougher , so it made it to the ground .
The one over Tunguska was probably made of rock , and that 's much more crumbly , so it blew up in the air . Either way , these are tremendous explosions , 20 megatons .
Now , when these things blow up , they 're not going to do global ecological damage .
They 're not going to do something like the dinosaur-killer did .
They 're just not big enough .
But they will do global economic damage , because they don 't have to hit , necessarily , to do this kind of damage .
They don 't have to do global devastation .
If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere , it would cause a panic .
But if it came over a city , an important city -- not that any city is more important than others , but some of them we depend on them more on the global economic basis -- that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization .
So , now that I 've scared the crap out of you ...
what can we do about this ? All right ?
This is a potential threat .
Let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur-killer for 65 million years . They 're very rare .
The smaller ones happen more often , but probably on the order of a millennium , every few centuries or every few thousand years , but it 's still something to be aware of .
Well , what do we do about them ?
The first thing we have to do is find them .
This is an image of an asteroid that passed us in 2009 .
It 's right here .
But you can see that it 's extremely faint .
I don 't even know if you can see that in the back row . These are just stars .
This is a rock that was about 30 yards across , so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago .
These things are faint .
They 're hard to see , and the sky is really big .
We have to find these things first .
Well the good news is , we 're looking for them .
NASA has devoted money to this .
The National Science Foundation , other countries are very interested in doing this .
We 're building telescopes that are looking for the threat . That 's a great first step , but what 's the second step ? The second step is that we see one heading toward us , we have to stop it . What do we do ?
You 've probably heard about the asteroid Apophis . If you haven 't yet , you will .
If you 've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse , you 're going to hear about Apophis , because you 're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway .
Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004 .
It 's roughly 250 yards across , so it 's pretty big -- big size , you know , bigger than a football stadium -- and it 's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029 .
And it 's going to pass us so close that it 's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites .
The Earth 's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it 's just right , if it passes through this region of space , this kidney bean-shaped region called the keyhole , the Earth 's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later on April 13 , which is a Friday , I 'll note , in the year 2036 ...
-- you can 't plan that kind of stuff -- Apophis is going to hit us . And it 's 250 meters across , so it would do unbelievable damage .
Now the good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million , roughly -- very , very low odds , so I personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all .
I don 't think Apophis is a problem .
In fact , Apophis is a blessing in disguise , because it woke us up to the dangers of these things .
This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now .
It won 't , but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids . We didn 't really necessarily understand these keyholes , and now we do and it turns out that 's really important , because how do you stop an asteroid like this ?
Well , let me ask you , what happens if you 're standing in the middle of the road and a car 's headed for you ? What do you do ? You do this .
Right ? Move . The car goes past you .
But we can 't move the Earth , at least not easily , but we can move a small asteroid .
And it turns out , we 've even done it .
In the year 2005 , NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact , which slammed into -- slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet .
Comets are very much like asteroids .
The purpose wasn 't to push it out of the way .
The purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet , which we learned quite a bit about .
We did move the comet a little tiny bit , not very much , but that wasn 't the point .
However , think about this .
This thing is orbiting the sun at 10 miles per second , 20 miles per second .
We shot a space probe at it and hit it . Okay ?
Imagine how hard that must be , and we did it .
That means we can do it again .
If we need , if we see an asteroid that 's coming toward us , and it 's headed right for us , and we have two years to go , boom ! We hit it .
You can try to -- you know , if you watch the movies , you might think about , why don 't we use a nuclear weapon ?
It 's like , well , you can try that , but the problem is timing .
You shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing , you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance or else you 'll just miss it .
And there are a lot of other problems with that . It 's very hard to do .
But just hitting something ? That 's pretty easy .
I think even NASA can do that , and they proved that they can .
The problem is , what happens if you hit this asteroid , you 've changed the orbit , you measure the orbit and then you find out , oh , yeah , we just pushed it into a keyhole , and now it 's going to hit us in three years .
Well , my opinion is , fine . Okay ?
It 's not hitting us in six months . That 's good .
Now we have three years to do something else .
And you can hit it again . That 's kind of ham-fisted . You might just push it into a third keyhole or whatever , so you don 't do that .
And this is the part , it 's the part I just love .
After the big macho " Rrrrrrr BAM ! We 're gonna hit this thing in the face , " then we bring in the velvet gloves .
There 's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts and they call themselves The B612 Foundation . For those of you who 've read " The Little Prince , " you understand that reference , I hope . The little prince who lived on an asteroid , it was called B612 .
These are smart guys -- men and women -- astronauts , like I said , engineers .
Rusty Schweickart , who was an Apollo 9 astronaut , is on this . Dan Durda , my friend who made this image , works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder , on Walnut Street . He created this image for this , and he 's actually one of the astronomers who works for them . If we see an asteroid that 's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time , we can hit it to move it into a better orbit . But then what we do is we launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two .
It doesn 't have to be huge -- couple of tons , not that big -- and you park it near the asteroid .
You don 't land on it , because these things are tumbling end over end . It 's very hard to land on them .
Instead you get near it .
The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe , and the probe has a couple of tons of mass .
It has a little tiny bit of gravity , but it 's enough that it can pull the asteroid , and you have your rockets set up , so you can -- oh , you can barely see it here , but there 's rocket plumes -- and you basically , these guys are connected by their own gravity , and if you move the probe very slowly , very , very gently , you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit .
You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it , although that 's a whole other thing . I won 't go into that .
But we 'd be rich !
So think about this , right ?
There are these giant rocks flying out there , and they 're hitting us , and they 're doing damage to us , but we 've figured out how to do this , and all the pieces are in place to do this .
We have astronomers in place with telescopes looking for them . We have smart people , very , very smart people , who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem , and we have the technology to do this .
This probe actually can 't use chemical rockets .
Chemical rockets provide too much thrust , too much push . The probe would just shoot away .
We invented something called an ion drive , which is a very , very , very low-thrust engine .
It generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand , incredibly light , but it can run for months and years , providing that very gentle push .
If anybody here is a fan of the original " Star Trek , " they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive , and Spock said , " They 're very technically sophisticated .
They 're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive . "
Yeah , we have an ion drive now .
We don 't have the Enterprise , but we 've got an ion drive now .
Spock .
So ...
that 's the difference , that 's the difference between us and the dinosaurs .
This happened to them .
It doesn 't have to happen to us .
The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote , and so we can change our future .
We have the ability to change our future .
65 million years from now , we don 't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum .
Thank you very much .
LZ Granderson : The myth of the gay agenda
In a humorous talk with an urgent message , LZ Granderson points out the absurdity in the idea that there 's a " gay lifestyle , " much less a " gay agenda . " & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
When I was about 16 years old I can remember flipping through channels at home during summer vacation , looking for a movie to watch on HBO -- and how many of you remember " Ferris Bueller 's Day Off " ?
Oh yeah , great movie , right ? -- Well , I saw Matthew Broderick on the screen , and so I thought , " Sweet ! Ferris Bueller . I 'll watch this ! "
It wasn 't Ferris Bueller . And forgive me Matthew Broderick , I know you 've done other movies besides Ferris Bueller , but that 's how I remember you ; you 're Ferris .
But you weren 't doing Ferris-y things at the time ; you were doing gay things at the time .
He was in a movie called " Torch Song Trilogy . "
And " Torch Song Trilogy " was based on a play about this drag queen who essentially was looking for love .
Love and respect -- that 's what the whole film was about .
And as I 'm watching it , I 'm realizing that they 're talking about me .
Not the drag queen part -- I am not shaving my hair for anyone -- but the gay part .
The finding love and respect , the part about trying to find your place in the world .
So as I 'm watching this , I see this powerful scene that brought me to tears , and it stuck with me for the past 25 years .
And there 's this quote that the main character , Arnold , tells his mother as they 're fighting about who he is and the life that he lives .
" There 's one thing more -- there 's just one more thing you better understand .
I 've taught myself to sew , cook , fix plumbing , build furniture , I can even pat myself on the back when necessary , all so I don 't have to ask anyone for anything .
There 's nothing I need from anyone except for love and respect , and anyone who can 't give me those two things has no place in my life . "
I remember that scene like it was yesterday ; I was 16 , I was in tears , I was in the closet , and I 'm looking at these two people , Ferris Bueller and some guy I 'd never seen before , fighting for love .
When I finally got to a place in my life where I came out and accepted who I was , and was really quite happy , to tell you the truth , I was happily gay and I guess that 's supposed to be right because gay means happy too .
I realized there were a lot of people who weren 't as gay as I was -- gay being happy , not gay being attracted to the same sex .
In fact , I heard that there was a lot of hate and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration and a lot of fear about who I was and the gay lifestyle .
Now , I 'm sitting here trying to figure out " the gay lifestyle , " " the gay lifestyle , " and I keep hearing this word over and over and over again : lifestyle , lifestyle , lifestyle .
I 've even heard politicians say that the gay lifestyle is a greater threat to civilization than terrorism .
That 's when I got scared .
Because I 'm thinking , if I 'm gay and I 'm doing something that 's going to destroy civilization , I need to figure out what this stuff is , and I need to stop doing it right now .
So , I took a look at my life , a hard look at my life , and I saw some things very disturbing .
And I want to begin sharing these evil things that I 've been doing with you , starting with my mornings .
I drink coffee .
Not only do I drink coffee , I know other gay people who drink coffee .
I get stuck in traffic -- evil , evil traffic .
Sometimes I get stuck in lines at airports .
I look around , and I go , " My God , look at all these gay people !
We 're all trapped in these lines ! These long lines trying to get on an airplane !
My God , this lifestyle that I 'm living is so freaking evil ! "
I clean up . This is not an actual photograph of my son 's room ; his is messier .
And because I have a 15-year-old , all I do is cook and cook and cook .
Any parents out there of teenagers ? All we do is cook for these people -- they eat two , three , four dinners a night -- it 's ridiculous !
This is the gay lifestyle .
And after I 'm done cooking and cleaning and standing in line and getting stuck in traffic , my partner and I , we get together and we decide that we 're gonna go and have some wild and crazy fun .
We 're usually in bed before we find out who 's eliminated on " American Idol . "
We have to wake up and find out the next day who 's still on because we 're too freaking tired to hear who stays on .
This is the super duper evil gay lifestyle .
Run for your heterosexual lives , people .
When my partner , Steve , and I first started dating , he told me this story about penguins .
And I didn 't know where he was going with it at first .
He was kind of a little bit nervous when he was sharing it with me , but he told me that when a penguin finds a mate that they want to spend the rest of their life with , they present them with a pebble -- the perfect pebble .
And then he reaches into his pocket , and he brings this out to me .
And I looked at it , and I was like , this is really cool .
And he says , " I want to spend the rest of my life with you . "
So I wear this whenever I have to do something that makes me a little nervous , like , I don 't know , a TEDx talk .
I wear this when I am apart from him for a long period of time .
And sometimes I just wear it just because .
How many people out there are in love ? Anyone in love out there ?
You might be gay .
Because I , too , am in love , and apparently that 's part of the gay lifestyle that I warned you about .
You may want to tell your spouse . Who , if they 're in love , might be gay as well .
How many of you are single ? Any single people out there ?
You too might be gay ! Because I know some gay people who are also single .
It 's really scary , this gay lifestyle thing ; it 's super duper evil and there 's no end to it !
It goes and goes and engulfs !
It 's really quite silly , isn 't it ?
That 's why I 'm so happy to finally hear President Obama come out and say that he supports -- that he supports marriage equality .
It 's a wonderful day in our country 's history ; it 's a wonderful day in the globe 's history to be able to have an actual sitting president say , enough of this -- first to himself , and then to the rest of the world .
It 's wonderful .
But there 's something that 's been disturbing me since he made that remark just a short time ago .
And that is , apparently , this is just another move by the gay activists that 's on the gay agenda .
And I 'm disturbed by this because I 've been openly gay now for quite some time .
I 've been to all of the functions , I 've been to fundraisers , I 've written about the topic , and I have yet to receive my copy of this gay agenda .
I 've paid my dues on time , I 've marched in gay pride flags parades and the whole nine , and I 've yet to see a copy of the gay agenda .
It 's very , very frustrating , and I was feeling left out , like I wasn 't quite gay enough .
But then something wonderful happened : I was out shopping , as I tend to do , and I came across a bootleg copy of the official gay agenda .
And I said to myself , " LZ , for so long , you have been denied this .
When you get in front of this crowd , you 're gonna share the news .
You 're gonna spread the gay agenda so no one else has to wonder , what exactly is in the gay agenda ?
What are these gays up to ?
What do they want ? "
So , without further ado , I will present to you , ladies and gentlemen -- now be careful , ' cause it 's evil -- a copy , the official copy , of the gay agenda .
The gay agenda , people !
There it is !
Did you soak it all in ? The gay agenda .
Some of you may be calling it , what , the Constitution of the United States , is that what you call it too ?
The U.S. Constitution is the gay agenda .
These gays , people like me , want to be treated like full citizens and it 's all written down in plain sight .
I was blown away when I saw it . I was like , wait , this is the gay agenda ?
Why didn 't you just call it the Constitution so I knew what you were talking about ?
I wouldn 't have been so confused ; I wouldn 't have been so upset .
But there it is . The gay agenda .
Run for your heterosexual lives .
Did you know that in all the states where there is no shading that people who are gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered can be kicked out of their apartments for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered ?
That 's the only reason that a landlord needs to have them removed , because there 's no protection from discrimination of GLBT people .
Did you know in the states where there 's no shading that you can be fired for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered ?
Not based upon the quality of your work , how long you 've been there , if you stink , just if you 're gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered .
All of which flies in the face of the gay agenda , also known as the U.S. Constitution .
Specifically , this little amendment right here : " No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . "
I 'm looking at you , North Carolina .
But you 're not looking at the U.S. Constitution .
This is the gay agenda : equality . Not special rights , but the rights that were already written by these people -- these elitists , if you will .
Educated , well-dressed , some would dare say questionably dressed .
Nonetheless , our forefathers , right ?
The people that , we say , knew what they were doing when they wrote the Constitution -- the gay agenda , if you will .
All of that flies in the face of what they did .
That is the reason why I felt it was imperative that I presented you with this copy of the gay agenda .
Because I figured if I made it funny , you wouldn 't be as threatened .
I figured if I was a bit irreverent , you wouldn 't find it serious .
But when you see the map , and you see our state of Michigan -- it 's legal to fire someone for being gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered , that it 's legal to remove someone from their home because they 're gay , lesbian , bisexual or transgendered , then you realize that this whole conversation about marriage equality is not about stripping someone 's rights away , it 's about granting them the rights that [ have ] already been stated .
And we 're just trying to walk in those rights that have already been stated , that we 've already agreed upon .
There are people living in fear of losing their jobs so they don 't show anyone who they really are right here at home . This isn 't just about North Carolina ; all those states that were clear , it 's legal .
If I could brag for a second , I have a 15-year-old son from my marriage .
He has a 4.0 .
He is starting a new club at school , Policy Debate .
He 's a budding track star ; he has almost every single record in middle school for every event that he competed in .
He volunteers .
He prays before he eats .
I would like to think , as his father -- and he lives with me primarily -- that I had a little something to do with all of that .
I would like to think that he 's a good boy , a respectful young man . I would like to think that I 've proven to be a capable father .
But if I were to go to the state of Michigan today , and try to adopt a young person who is in an orphanage , I would be disqualified for only one reason : because I 'm gay .
It doesn 't matter what I 've already proven , what I can do with my heart .
It 's because of what the state of Michigan says that I am that I am disqualified for any sort of adoption .
And that 's not just about me , that 's about so many other Michiganders , U.S. citizens , who don 't understand why what they are is so much more significant than who they are .
This story just keeps playing over and over and over again in our country 's history .
There was a time in which , I don 't know , people who were black couldn 't have the same rights .
People who happened to be women didn 't have the same rights , couldn 't vote .
There was a point in our history in which , if you were considered disabled , that an employer could just fire you , before the Americans with Disabilities Act .
We keep doing this over and over again .
And so here we are , 2012 , gay agenda , gay lifestyle , and I 'm not a good dad and people don 't deserve to be able to protect their families because of what they are , not who they are .
So when you hear the words " gay lifestyle " and " gay agenda " in the future , I encourage you to do two things : One , remember the U.S. Constitution , and then two , if you wouldn 't mind looking to your left , please .
Look to your right .
That person next to you is a brother , is a sister .
And they should be treated with love and respect .
Thank you .
Ze Frank : My web playroom
On the web , a new " Friend " may be just a click away , but true connection is harder to find and express . Ze Frank presents a medley of zany Internet toys that require deep participation -- and reward it with something more nourishing . You 're invited , if you promise you 'll share .
Every presentation needs this slide in it .
It 's beautiful , isn 't it ?
Do you see ?
All the points , all the lines -- it 's incredible .
It is the network ; and in my case , the network has been important in media , because I get to connect to people .
Isn 't it amazing ?
Through that , I connect to people .
And the way that I 've been doing it has been multifaceted .
For example , I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners .
I put together projects like Earth Sandwich , where I ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the Earth .
And people started laying bread in tribute , and eventually a team was able to do it between New Zealand and Spain .
It 's pretty incredible -- the video 's online .
Connecting to people in projects like YoungmeNowme for example .
In YoungmeNowme , the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult .
This is the same person -- top photo , James , bottom photo , [ Jennifer ] .
Poignant .
This was a Mother 's Day gift .
Particularly creepy .
My favorite of these photos , which I couldn 't find , is there 's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap , and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny , little old lady peaking over his shoulder .
But this project changed the way that I thought about connecting to people .
This is project called Ray .
And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio .
Somebody said , " You have to listen to this . "
And this is what came to me .
Recording : Hi , my name is Ray , and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair .
Being quite disturbed , she called for comfort , and I didn 't really know what to tell her , because we have to deal with so much mess in our society .
So I was led to write this song just for her , just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job .
And I figured I 'd put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you 're going through on your job .
Here 's how the song goes .
I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass Oh , I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass Oh , if you don 't leave me alone , you gonna have to send me home ' Cause I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass Now you might not be able to sing that out loud , but you can hum it to yourself , and you know what the words are .
And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job .
All right . Stay strong . Peace .
Ze Frank : So -- yeah .
No , no , no , shush . We 've got to go quickly .
So I was so moved by this -- this is incredible . This was connecting , right .
This was , at a distance , realizing that someone was feeling something , wanting to affect them in a particular way , using media to do it , putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact .
This was incredible ; this is what I wanted to do .
So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him .
And I asked my audience , I said , " Listen to this piece of audio .
We have to remix it . He 's got a great voice .
It 's actually in the key of B flat .
And have to do something with it . "
Hundreds of remixes came back -- lots of different attempts .
One stood out in particular .
It was done by a guy named Goose .
Remix : I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass Oh , I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass Oh , if you don 't leave me alone , You gonna have to send me home Cuz I 'm about to whip somebody 's ass I 'm about to whip some -- ZF : Great , so it was incredible .
That song -- Thank you .
So that song , somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in Kansas City .
In the end , it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services .
And so I said , " Let 's put this together in an album . "
And the audience came together , and they designed an album cover .
And I said , " If you put it all on this , I 'm going to deliver it to him , if you can figure out who this person is , " because all I had was his name -- Ray -- and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset .
In two weeks , they found him .
I received and email and it said , " Hi , I 'm Ray .
I heard you were looking for me . "
And I was like , " Yeah , Ray .
It 's been an interesting two weeks . "
And so I flew to St. Louis and met Ray , and he 's a preacher -- among other things .
So but anyways , here 's the thing -- is it reminds me of this , which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner .
And it 's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world .
I look at this photo , and he seems really interested in what 's going on with that button , but it doesn 't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street .
And it makes me think of this .
On street corners everywhere , people are looking at their cell phones , and it 's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture .
But the truth is life is being lived there .
When they smile -- right , you 've seen people stop -- all of a sudden , life is being lived there , somewhere up in that weird , dense network .
And this is it , right , to feel and be felt .
It 's the fundamental force that we 're all after .
We can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier , but ultimately , what we 're trying to do is really connect with one other person .
And that 's not always going to happen in physical spaces .
It 's also going to now happen in virtual spaces , and we have to get better at figuring that out .
I think , of the people that build all this technology in the network , a lot of them aren 't very good at connecting with people .
This is kind of like something I used to do in third grade .
So here 's a series of projects over the last few years where I 've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection .
Sometimes they 're very , very simple things .
A Childhood Walk , which is a project where I ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless -- like on the route to the bus stop , to a neighbor 's house , and take it inside of Google Streetview .
And I promise you , if you take that walk inside Google Streetview , you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face .
And I collected those moments -- the photos inside Google Streetview and the memories , specifically .
" Our conversation started with me saying , ' I 'm bored , ' and her replying , ' When I 'm bored I eat pretzels . ' I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot . "
" Right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom , I remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola . "
" They used some of the morbidly artist footage , a close-up of Chad 's shoes in the middle of the highway .
I guess the shoes came off when he was hit .
He slept over at my house once , and he left his pillow .
It had ' Chad ' written in magic marker on it .
He died long after he left the pillow at my house , but we never got around to returning it . "
Sometimes they 're a little bit more abstract .
This is Pain Pack .
Right after September 11th , last year , I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it , the way that we excise it from our bodies .
So what I did is I opened up a hotline -- a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain , not necessarily related to that event .
And people called in and left messages like this .
Recording : Okay , here 's something .
I 'm not alone , and I am loved .
I 'm really fortunate .
But sometimes I feel really lonely .
And when I feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry .
Like even people in convenience stores saying , " Have a nice day , " when they 're accidentally looking me in the eye .
ZF : So what I did was I took those voicemails , and with their permission , converted them to MP3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails .
And those were then distributed to DJs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material .
We don 't have time to play much of it .
You can look at it online .
" From 52 to 48 with love " was a project around the time of the last election cycle , where McCain and Obama both , in their speeches after the election , talked about reconciliation , and I was like , " What the hell does that look like ? "
So I thought , " Well let 's just give it a try .
Let 's have people hold up signs about reconciliation . "
And so some really nice things came together .
" I voted blue . I voted red .
Together , for our future . "
These are very , very cute little things right .
Some came from the winning party .
" Dear 48 , I promise to listen to you , to fight for you , to respect you always . "
Some came from the party who had just lost .
" From a 48 to a 52 , may your party 's leadership be as classy as you , but I doubt it . "
But the truth was that as this start becoming popular , a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing , which I could also see .
And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail , death threats even .
And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages , and he was dressed as Batman .
And he said , " I 'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity . "
Just in case I thought the real Batman was coming after me ; which actually made me feel a little better -- like , " Phew , it 's not him . "
So what I did -- unfortunately , I was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me , and it started to eat away at my psyche .
And I was protecting the project from it , I realized . I was protecting it -- I didn 't want this special , little group of photographs to get sullied in some way .
So what I did , I took all those emails , and I put them together into something called Angrigami , which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff .
And I asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the Angrigami .
But this was the emotional moment .
One of my viewer 's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate .
It 's amazing .
The last thing I 'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called Songs You Already Know , where the idea was , I was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects .
So one of them was fairly straightforward .
A guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could I write a song for her , his daughter .
And I said , " Oh yeah , I 'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep . "
And this was " Scared . "
This is a song that I sing when I 'm scared of something I don 't know why but it helps me get over it The words of the song just move me along And somehow I get over it At least I don 't suck at life I keep on trying despite At least I don 't suck at life I keep on trying despite This is a song that I sing when I 'm scared of something Okay , so I wrote that song , right . Thank you .
So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter 's room at some point , and she actually was singing that song to herself .
And then I got this email . And there 's a little bit of a back story to this .
And I don 't have much time .
But the idea was that at one point I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You , where I wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person .
So I asked for people 's usernames and passwords to be sent to me .
And I got a lot , like 30 in a half an hour .
And I shut that part down .
And I chose two people to be , and I asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on Facebook .
One person sent me a very detailed description ; the other person didn 't .
And the person who didn 't , it turned out , had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job .
So , you know , people were writing me and saying , " How 's your new job ? "
I was like , " I don 't know .
Didn 't know I had one . "
But anyway , this same person , Laura , ended up emailing me a little bit after that project .
And I felt badly for not having done a good job .
And she said , " I 'm really anxious , I just moved to a new town , I have this new job , and I 've just had this incredible amount of anxiety . "
So she had seen the " Scared " song and wondered if I could do something .
So I asked her , " What does it feel like when you feel this way ? "
And she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety .
And so what I decided to do .
I said , " Okay , I 'll think about it . "
And so quietly in the background , I started sending people this .
Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine So I asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities , just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on , so I could just get their voices back .
And this is the kind of thing that I got back .
Recording : Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine ZF : So that 's one of the better ones , really .
But what 's awesome is , as I started getting more and more and more of them , all of a sudden I had 30 , 40 voices from around the world .
And when you put them together , something magical happens , something absolutely incredible happens , and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world .
And what was really great is , I 'm putting all this work together in the background , and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by .
And she said , " I know you 've forgotten about me .
I just want to say thanks for even considering it . "
And then a few days later I sent her this .
Right now , it feels like I forgot to turn the light on And things that looked so good yesterday are now shades of gray And it seems like the world is spinning while I 'm standing still Or maybe I am spinning I can 't tell And then you say Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine Just breathe And now the words sing Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine Just breathe Now everybody sings Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine Just breathe Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine Just breathe Hey You 're okay You 'll be fine Just breathe Thank you .
Billy Collins : Two poems about what dogs think
What must our dogs be thinking when they look at us ? Poet Billy Collins imagines the inner lives of two very different companions . It 's a charming short talk , perfect for taking a break and dreaming …
I don 't know if you 've noticed , but there 's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs .
Do they think , do they feel and , if so , how ?
So this afternoon , in my limited time , I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs , both of whom have taken the command " speak " quite literally .
The first dog is the first to go , and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner , and the title is " A Dog on His Master . "
" As young as I look , I am growing older faster than he .
Seven to one is the ratio , they tend to say .
Whatever the number , I will pass him one day and take the lead , the way I do on our walks in the woods , and if this ever manages to cross his mind , it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass . "
Thank you .
And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant , which means a spirit that comes back to visit you .
" I am the dog you put to sleep , as you like to call the needle of oblivion , come back to tell you this simple thing : I never liked you . "
" When I licked your face , I thought of biting off your nose .
When I watched you toweling yourself dry , I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap .
I resented the way you moved , your lack of animal grace , the way you would sit in a chair to eat , a napkin on your lap , a knife in your hand .
I would have run away but I was too weak , a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and , greatest of insults , shake hands without a hand .
I admit the sight of the leash would excite me , but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched .
You do not want to believe this , but I have no reason to lie : I hated the car , hated the rubber toys , disliked your friends , and worse , your relatives .
The jingling of my tags drove me mad .
You always scratched me in the wrong place . "
" All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls .
While you slept , I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky .
It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl .
Now , I am free of the collar , free of the yellow raincoat , monogrammed sweater , the absurdity of your lawn , and that is all you need to know about this place , except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner , that everyone here can read and write , the dogs in poetry , the cats and all the others in prose . "
Thank you .
Sonaar Luthra : Meet the Water Canary
After a crisis , how can we tell if water is safe to drink ? Current tests are slow and complex , and the delay can be deadly , as in the cholera outbreak after Haiti 's earthquake in 2010 . TED Fellow Sonaar Luthra previews his design for a simple tool that quickly tests water for safety -- the Water Canary .
Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October .
There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get .
And not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most .
We 've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage , but we still can 't do that with water , and here 's why .
Right now , if you want to test water in the field , you need a trained technician , expensive equipment like this , and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results .
It 's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change , too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing .
And it ignores the fact that , in the meanwhile , people still need to drink water .
Most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak didn 't come from testing water ; it came from forms like this , which documented all the people we failed to help .
Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines -- a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they 're safe .
I 've been inspired by that simplicity as I 've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I 've ever known .
We think there 's a simpler solution to this problem -- one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday .
It 's in its early stages , but this is what it looks like right now .
We call it the Water Canary .
It 's a fast , cheap device that answers an important question : Is this water contaminated ?
It doesn 't require any special training .
And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place , it uses light .
That means there 's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place , no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information .
To test water , you simply insert a sample and , within seconds , it either displays a red light , indicating contaminated water , or a green light , indicating the sample is safe .
This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold .
We 're also , on top of that , integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with GPS and GSM .
What that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time .
With enough users , maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action , containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from .
And then , instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most , it can happen automatically .
We 've seen how distributed networks , big data and information can transform society .
I think it 's time for us to apply them to water .
Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation , so we can tackle this problem together .
Thank you .
Abraham Verghese : A doctor 's touch
Modern medicine is in danger of losing a powerful , old-fashioned tool : human touch . Physician and writer Abraham Verghese describes our strange new world where patients are merely data points , and calls for a return to the traditional one-on-one physical exam .
A few months ago , a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live , and she was brought in confused .
Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170 .
Within a few minutes , she went into cardiac collapse .
She was resuscitated , stabilized , whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room , because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung .
And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung , but it showed bilateral , visible , palpable breast masses , breast tumors , that had metastasized widely all over the body .
And the real tragedy was , if you look through her records , she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years .
Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses , touch the breast mass , intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her .
Ladies and gentlemen , that is not an unusual story .
Unfortunately , it happens all the time .
I joke , but I only half joke , that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb , no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan , MRI or orthopedic consult .
I am not a Luddite .
I teach at Stanford .
I 'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology .
But I 'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam , when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient , we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable , early stage , but we 're losing much more than that .
We 're losing a ritual .
We 're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative , transcendent , and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship .
This may actually be heresy to say this at TED , but I 'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation , I think , in medicine to come in the next 10 years , and that is the power of the human hand -- to touch , to comfort , to diagnose and to bring about treatment .
I 'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize .
This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle .
Since we 're in Edinburgh , I 'm a big fan of Conan Doyle .
You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh , and his character , Sherlock Holmes , was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell .
Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts .
And Conan Doyle , writing about Bell , described the following exchange between Bell and his students .
So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department , students all around him , patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in .
And a woman comes in with a child , and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange .
The woman says , " Good Morning . "
Bell says , " What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland ? "
She says , " It was good . "
And he says , " What did you do with the other child ? "
She says , " I left him with my sister at Leith . "
And he says , " And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary ? "
She says , " I did . "
And he says , " Would you still be working at the linoleum factory ? "
And she says , " I am . "
And Bell then goes on to explain to the students .
He says , " You see , when she said , ' Good morning , ' I picked up her Fife accent .
And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland .
And so she must have taken the ferry over .
You notice that the coat she 's carrying is too small for the child who is with her , and therefore , she started out the journey with two children , but dropped one off along the way .
You notice the clay on the soles of her feet .
Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh , except in the botanical gardens .
And therefore , she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here .
And finally , she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand , a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland . "
And when Bell actually strips the patient , begins to examine the patient , you can only imagine how much more he would discern .
And as a teacher of medicine , as a student myself , I was so inspired by that story .
But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way , using our senses , is quite recent .
The picture I 'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who , in the late 1700s , discovered percussion .
And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper .
And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder .
And so when Auenbrugger became a physician , he began to do the same thing .
He began to tap on the chests of his patients , on their abdomens .
And basically everything we know about percussion , which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day -- organ enlargement , fluid around the heart , fluid in the lungs , abdominal changes -- all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript " Inventum Novum , " " New Invention , " which would have disappeared into obscurity , except for the fact that this physician , Corvisart , a famous French physician -- famous only because he was physician to this gentleman -- Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work .
And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope .
Laennec , it is said , was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick .
One was scratching at the end of the stick , another child listened at the other end .
And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called " the cylinder . "
Later he renamed it the stethoscope .
And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born .
So within a few years , in the late 1800s , early 1900s , all of a sudden , the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis .
If you 'll recall , prior to that time , no matter what ailed you , you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you , bleeding you , purging you .
And , oh yes , if you wanted , he would give you a haircut -- short on the sides , long in the back -- and pull your tooth while he was at it .
He made no attempt at diagnosis .
In fact , some of you might well know that the barber pole , the red and white stripes , represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon , and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected .
But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change , a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body .
And this particular painting , I think , represents the pinnacle , the peak , of that clinical era .
This is a very famous painting : " The Doctor " by Luke Fildes .
Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate , who then established the Tate Gallery .
And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance .
And it 's interesting that Fildes picked this topic .
Fildes ' oldest son , Philip , died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness .
And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two , three nights , that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time -- almost a tribute to this physician .
And hence the painting " The Doctor , " a very famous painting .
It 's been on calendars , postage stamps in many different countries .
I 've often wondered , what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era , in the year 2011 ?
Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient ?
I 've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who 's in the computer .
I 've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer .
I call it the iPatient .
The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America .
The real patient often wonders , where is everyone ?
When are they going to come by and explain things to me ?
Who 's in charge ?
There 's a real disjunction between the patient 's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care .
I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training .
The focus was around the patient .
We went from bed to bed . The attending physician was in charge .
Too often these days , rounds look very much like this , where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient .
The discussion is all about images on the computer , data .
And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient .
Now I 've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you .
One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer , had a small breast cancer detected -- had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived .
This is when I was in Texas .
And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care .
And she found the place and decided to go there , went there .
Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town , getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist .
And I pressed her , and I asked her , " Why did you come back and get your care here ? "
And she was reluctant to tell me .
She said , " The cancer center was wonderful .
It had a beautiful facility , giant atrium , valet parking , a piano that played itself , a concierge that took you around from here to there .
But , " she said , " but they did not touch my breasts . "
Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts .
They had her scanned inside out .
They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level ; they had no need to touch her breasts .
But to her , it mattered deeply .
It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who , every time she went , examined both breasts including the axillary tail , examined her axilla carefully , examined her cervical region , her inguinal region , did a thorough exam .
And to her , that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed .
I was very influenced by that anecdote .
I was also influenced by another experience that I had , again , when I was in Texas , before I moved to Stanford .
I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue .
This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy .
I say that because these are difficult patients .
They have often been rejected by their families , have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who 's about to disappoint them .
And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes .
There was just no way .
And if I tried , I 'd disappoint them .
And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit , and I tried not to interrupt them .
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds .
And if I ever get to heaven , it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient .
I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence , and when the patient came for the physical , I was able to do a thorough physical , because I had nothing else to do .
I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam , but because the whole visit was now about the physical , I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam .
And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit .
And I began my ritual .
I always begin with the pulse , then I examine the hands , then I look at the nail beds , then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node , and I was into my ritual .
And when my ritual began , this very voluble patient began to quiet down .
And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role .
And when I was done , the patient said to me with some awe , " I have never been examined like this before . "
Now if that were true , it 's a true condemnation of our health care system , because they had been seen in other places .
I then proceeded to tell the patient , once the patient was dressed , the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions , which is , " This is not in your head .
This is real .
The good news , it 's not cancer , it 's not tuberculosis , it 's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection .
The bad news is we don 't know exactly what 's causing this , but here 's what you should do , here 's what we should do . "
And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere .
And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor , the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness , it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination .
Something of importance had transpired in the exchange .
I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story .
And they immediately said to me , " Well you are describing a classic ritual . "
And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation .
We marry , for example , with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss .
I 'm not sure why you 're laughing .
That was the original intent , was it not ?
We signal transitions of power with rituals .
We signal the passage of a life with rituals .
Rituals are terribly important .
They 're all about transformation .
Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi , and then , incredibly on top of that , disrobing and allowing touch -- I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance .
And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient , by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown , by not doing a complete exam , you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship .
I am a writer , and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene .
I 'm an infectious disease physician , and in the early days of HIV , before we had our medications , I presided over so many scenes like this .
I remember , every time I went to a patient 's deathbed , whether in the hospital or at home , I remember my sense of failure -- the feeling of I don 't know what I have to say ; I don 't know what I can say ; I don 't know what I 'm supposed to do .
And out of that sense of failure , I remember , I would always examine the patient .
I would pull down the eyelids .
I would look at the tongue .
I would percuss the chest . I would listen to the heart .
I would feel the abdomen .
I remember so many patients , their names still vivid on my tongue , their faces still so clear .
I remember so many huge , hollowed out , haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual .
And then the next day , I would come , and I would do it again .
And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient .
" I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin , unable to speak , his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications .
When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth , his hands moved as if in slow motion .
And as I wondered what he was up to , his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt , fumbling with his buttons .
I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me .
It was an offering , an invitation .
I did not decline .
I percussed . I palpated . I listened to the chest .
I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him .
Neither of us could skip this ritual , which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung , or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure .
No , this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients .
Although , God knows , of late , in our hubris , we seem to have drifted away .
We seem to have forgotten -- as though , with the explosion of knowledge , the whole human genome mapped out at our feet , we are lulled into inattention , forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician , necessary for the patient -- forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient .
And the message , which I didn 't fully understand then , even as I delivered it , and which I understand better now is this : I will always , always , always be there .
I will see you through this .
I will never abandon you .
I will be with you through the end . "
Thank you very much .
Benjamin Wallace : The price of happiness
Can happiness be bought ? To find out , author Benjamin Wallace sampled the world 's most expensive products , including a bottle of 1947 Chateau Cheval Blanc , 8 ounces of Kobe beef and the fabled Kopi Luwak coffee . His critique may surprise you .
I 'm just going to play a brief video clip .
On the fifth of December 1985 , a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds -- nine times the previous world record .
The buyer was Kip Forbes , son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century .
The original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century .
Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world , the prince of any wine cellar .
Benjamin Wallace : Now , that 's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world .
And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock .
In 1985 , he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery .
Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall , and happened upon this hidden cache of wines -- apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson . 1787 , 1784 .
He wouldn 't reveal the exact number of bottles , he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building .
The mystery persisted for about 20 years .
It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy .
Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles , and he became suspicious .
And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this .
There 's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man , and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes .
But for those 20 years , an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles .
I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world , must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world .
I became increasingly , kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know , why do people spend these crazy amounts of money , not only on wine but on lots of things , and are they living a better life than me ?
So , I decided to embark on a quest .
With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes , I decided to sample the very best , or most expensive , or most coveted item in about a dozen categories , which was a very grueling quest , as you can imagine .
This was the first one .
A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing .
It may come from Wagyu cattle , but it 's not from the original , Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan .
There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe , and one of them is Wolfgang Puck 's restaurant , Cut , in Los Angeles .
I went there , and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars .
And it arrived , and it was tiny .
And I was outraged .
It was like , 160 dollars for this ?
And then I took a bite , and I wished that it was tinier , because Kobe beef is so rich .
It 's like foie gras -- it 's not even like steak .
I almost couldn 't finish it .
I was really happy when I was done .
Now , the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them , so that 's why you 're going to see this recurring character .
Which , I guess , you know , communicates to you that I did not think that one was really worth the price .
White truffles .
One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world .
To try this , I went to a Mario Batali restaurant in Manhattan -- Del Posto .
The waiter , you know , came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver , and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said , you know , " Would Signore like the truffles ? "
And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma .
It 's not in their taste , really . It 's not in their texture .
It 's in the smell .
These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles , this haunting , wonderful , nutty , mushroomy smell wafted up .
10 seconds passed and it was gone .
And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that , you know , their purpose had been served , and so I 'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me .
There were several -- several of these items were disappointments .
Yeah .
The magazine wouldn 't pay for me to go there .
They did give me a tour , though .
And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet .
It has 360-degree views .
It has four balconies .
It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei .
It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver .
It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from .
When I took the tour , it actually included some Opus One , I was glad to see .
30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel .
This is soap that 's made from silver nanoparticles , which have antibacterial properties .
I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this .
And it , you know , tickled a little bit and it smelled good , but I have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today .
But then again , nobody has complimented me on the jeans I 'm wearing .
These ones GQ did spring for -- I own these -- but I will tell you , not only did I not get a compliment from any of you , I have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that I have owned and worn these .
I don 't think that whether or not you 're getting a compliment should be the test of something 's value , but I think in the case of a fashion item , an article of clothing , that 's a reasonable benchmark .
That said , a lot of work goes into these .
They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times .
But no compliments .
Thank you .
Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany .
And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light .
He uses tiny bottles , the glass is tinted , he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas .
And he actually -- once he releases a batch of it , he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online , so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing , and , you know , gauge its freshness .
I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils .
It tasted fine . It tasted interesting .
It was very green , it was very peppery .
But in the blind taste test , it came in last .
The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months .
A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan -- you 'll start to notice .
I don 't play golf , so I couldn 't actually road test these , but I did interview a guy who owns them .
Even the people who market these clubs -- I mean , they 'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther -- but they 'll say , look , you know , you 're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs .
You 're paying for the bling , that they 're encrusted with gold and platinum .
The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say that he 's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them , so ...
Oh , yeah , you know this one ?
This is a coffee made from a very unusual process .
The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet .
It 's a cat that lives in trees , and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations .
And apparently it 's a very picky eater and it , you know , hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries .
And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans , and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats ' leavings then go through the forest collecting the , you know , results and processing it into coffee -- although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form .
That 's right .
Unrelatedly -- Japan is doing crazy things with toilets .
There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it .
There 's one with a fragrance dispenser .
There 's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor .
It 's almost like a home medical center -- and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in .
This one does not have those bells and whistles , but for pure functionality it 's pretty much the best -- the Neorest 600 .
And to try this -- I couldn 't get a loaner , but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer , Toto , and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use , which I used .
It 's fully automated -- you walk towards it , and the seat lifts .
The seat is preheated .
There 's a water jet that cleans you .
There 's an air jet that dries you .
You get up , it flushes by itself .
The lid closes , it self-cleans .
Not only is it a technological leap forward , but I really do believe it 's a bit of a cultural leap forward .
I mean , a no hands , no toilet paper toilet .
And I want to get one of these .
This was another one I could not get a loaner of .
Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed .
There 's a little plaque on the end that , you know , each buyer gets their name engraved on it .
To try this one , the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the Manhattan showroom .
Lights glaring in off the street , and we had to hire a security guard and all these things .
But anyway , we had a great night 's sleep .
And you spend a third of your life in bed .
I don 't think it 's that bad of a deal .
This was a fun one .
This is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car .
I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company , a professional race car driver , and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles and down on the Pacific Coast Highway .
And , you know , when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods .
And it was really amazing .
It was such a smooth ride .
Most of the cars that I drive , if I get up to 80 they start to rattle .
I switched lanes on the highway and the driver , this chaperone , said , " You know , you were just going 110 miles an hour . "
And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic , because it was just that smooth .
And if I was a billionaire , I would get one .
This is a completely gratuitous video I 'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology .
This is Tom Cruise arriving at the " Mission : Impossible III " premiere .
When he tries to open the door , you could call it " Mission : Impossible IV . "
There was one object that I could not get my hands on , and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc .
The ' 47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century .
And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape .
And 1947 was a legendary vintage , especially in the right bank of Bordeaux .
And just together , that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following .
But it 's 60 years old .
There 's not much of it left .
What there is of it left you don 't know if it 's real -- it 's considered to be the most faked wine in the world .
Not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist .
So , I 'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these .
I 'd put out feelers to retailers , to auctioneers , and it was coming up empty .
And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai .
Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings , and he said , " I 've got a tasting coming up where we 're going to serve the ' 47 Cheval Blanc . "
And it was going to be a double vertical -- it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc , and 30 vintages of Yquem .
And it was an invitation you do not refuse .
I went .
It was three days , four meals .
And at lunch on Saturday , we opened the ' 47 .
And you know , it had this fragrant softness , and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil .
And then I tasted it , and it , you know , had this kind of unctuous , porty richness , which is characteristic of that wine -- that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways .
There were people at my table who thought it was , you know , fantastic .
There were some people who were a little less impressed .
And I wasn 't that impressed .
And I don 't -- call my palate a philistine palate -- so it doesn 't necessarily mean something that I wasn 't impressed , but I was not the only one there who had that reaction .
And it wasn 't just to that wine .
Any one of the wines served at this tasting , if I 'd been served it at a dinner party , it would have been , you know , the wine experience of my lifetime , and incredibly memorable .
But drinking 60 great wines over three days , they all just blurred together , and it became almost a grueling experience .
And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech .
And they gave subjects the same wine , labeled with different price tags .
A lot of people , you know , said that they liked the more expensive wine more -- it was the same wine , but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive .
But what was unexpected was that these researchers did MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine , and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more -- their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag .
Thank you .
Sugata Mitra : The child-driven education
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don 't exist where they 're needed most . In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy , he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching .
Well , that 's kind of an obvious statement up there .
I started with that sentence about 12 years ago , and I started in the context of developing countries , but you 're sitting here from every corner of the world .
So if you think of a map of your country , I think you 'll realize that for every country on Earth , you could draw little circles to say , " These are places where good teachers won 't go . "
On top of that , those are the places from where trouble comes .
So we have an ironic problem -- good teachers don 't want to go to just those places where they 're needed the most .
I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment , which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi .
I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi .
The children barely went to school , they didn 't know any English -- they 'd never seen a computer before , and they didn 't know what the internet was .
I connected high speed internet to it -- it 's about three feet off the ground -- turned it on and left it there .
After this , we noticed a couple of interesting things , which you 'll see .
But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do .
This is the first experiment that we did -- eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student , a six year-old girl , and he was teaching her how to browse .
This boy here in the middle of central India -- this is in a Rajasthan village , where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process , they 've enjoyed themselves thoroughly .
They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time .
In another South Indian village , these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee .
They downloaded it from Disney.com , or one of these websites , 14 days after putting the computer in their village .
we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own , irrespective of who or where they were .
At that point , I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer .
We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad , India , where I gave a group of children -- they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent .
I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface , which you now get free with Windows , and asked them to speak into it .
So when they spoke into it , the computer typed out gibberish , so they said , " Well , it doesn 't understand anything of what we are saying . "
So I said , " Yeah , I 'll leave it here for two months .
Make yourself understood to the computer . "
So the children said , " How do we do that . "
And I said , " I don 't know , actually . "
And I left .
Two months later -- and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal -- that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer .
In other words , they were all speaking like James Tooley .
So they could do that on their own .
After that , I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own .
I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo , from the late Arthur C. Clarke , who said , " I want to see what 's going on . "
And he couldn 't travel , so I went over there .
He said two interesting things , " A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be . "
The second thing he said was that , " If children have interest , then education happens . "
And I was doing that in the field , so every time I would watch it and think of him .
Arthur C. Clarke : And they can definitely help people , because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them .
And when you 've got interest , then you have education .
Sugata Mitra : I took the experiment to South Africa .
This is a 15 year-old boy .
Boy : ... just mention , I play games like animals , and I listen to music .
SM : And I asked him , " Do you send emails ? "
And he said , " Yes , and they hop across the ocean . "
This is in Cambodia , rural Cambodia -- a fairly silly arithmetic game , which no child would play inside the classroom or at home .
They would , you know , throw it back at you .
They 'd say , " This is very boring . "
If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away , then they will show off with each other about what they can do .
This is what these children are doing .
They are trying to multiply , I think .
And all over India , at the end of about two years , children were beginning to Google their homework .
As a result , the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English -- rapid improvement and all sorts of things .
They said , " They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth .
And indeed they had .
I mean , if there 's stuff on Google , why would you need to stuff it into your head ?
So at the end of the next four years , I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own .
At that time , a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India .
So Newcastle gave me a call . I said , " I 'll do it from Delhi . "
They said , " There 's no way you 're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi . "
So in 2006 , I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle .
I wanted to test the limits of the system .
The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India .
And I set myself and impossible target : can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own ?
And I thought , I 'll test them , they 'll get a zero -- I 'll give the materials , I 'll come back and test them -- they get another zero , I 'll go back and say , " Yes , we need teachers for certain things . "
I called in 26 children .
They all came in there , and I told them that there 's some really difficult stuff on this computer .
I wouldn 't be surprised if you didn 't understand anything .
It 's all in English , and I 'm going .
So I left them with it .
I came back after two months , and the 26 children marched in looking very , very quiet .
I said , " Well , did you look at any of the stuff ? "
They said , " Yes , we did . "
" Did you understand anything ? " " No , nothing . "
So I said , " Well , how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing ? "
They said , " We look at it every day . "
So I said , " For two months , you were looking at stuff you didn 't understand ? "
So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says , literally , " Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease , we 've understood nothing else . "
It took me three years to publish that .
It 's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology .
One of the referees who refereed the paper said , " It 's too good to be true , " which was not very nice .
Well , one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher .
And then that 's her over there .
Remember , they don 't study English .
I edited out the last bit when I asked , " Where is the neuron ? "
and she says , " The neuron ? The neuron , " and then she looked and did this .
Whatever the expression , it was not very nice .
So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent , which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances .
But 30 percent is not a pass .
So I found that they had a friend , a local accountant , a young girl , and they played football with her .
I asked that girl , " Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass ? "
And she said , " How would I do that ? I don 't know the subject . "
I said , " No , use the method of the grandmother . "
She said , " What 's that ? "
I said , " Well , what you 've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time .
Just say to them , ' That 's cool . That 's fantastic .
What is that ? Can you do that again ? Can you show me some more ? ' " She did that for two months .
The scores went up to 50 , which is what the posh schools of New Delhi , with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting .
So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious .
So , having experimented in all sorts of remote places , I came to the most remote place that I could think of .
Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead .
In Gateshead , I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method .
I made them into groups of four .
I said , " You make your own groups of four .
Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers . "
Remember , from the Hole in the Wall .
" You can exchange groups .
You can walk across to another group , if you don 't like your group , etc .
You can go to another group , peer over their shoulders , see what they 're doing , come back to you own group and claim it as your own work . "
And I explained to them that , you know , a lot of scientific research is done using that method .
The children enthusiastically got after me and said , " Now , what do you want us to do ? "
I gave them six GCSE questions .
The first group -- the best one -- solved everything in 20 minutes .
The worst , in 45 .
They used everything that they knew -- news groups , Google , Wikipedia , Ask Jeeves , etc .
The teachers said , " Is this deep learning ? "
I said , " Well , let 's try it .
I 'll come back after two months .
We 'll give them a paper test -- no computers , no talking to each other , etc . "
The average score when I 'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent .
When I did the experiment , when I did the test , after two months , the score was 76 percent .
There was photographic recall inside the children , I suspect because they 're discussing with each other .
A single child in front of a single computer will not do that .
I have further results , which are almost unbelievable , of scores which go up with time .
Because their teachers say that after the session is over , the children continue to Google further .
Here in Britain , I put out a call for British grandmothers , after my Kuppam experiment .
Well , you know , they 're very vigorous people , British grandmothers .
200 of them volunteered immediately .
The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time , sitting in their homes , one day in a week .
So they did that , and over the last two years , over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype , using what my students call the granny cloud .
The granny cloud sits over there .
I can beam them to whichever school I want to .
Teacher : You can 't catch me .
You say it .
You can 't catch me .
Children : You can 't catch me .
Teacher : I 'm the gingerbread man .
Children : I 'm the gingerbread man .
Teacher : Well done . Very good ...
SM : Back at Gateshead , a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes .
You know , stuff which I don 't know anything about .
Two children watch a TEDTalk .
They wanted to be footballers before .
After watching eight TEDTalks , he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci .
It 's pretty simple stuff .
This is what I 'm building now -- they 're called SOLEs : Self Organized Learning Environments .
The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big , powerful screens , big broadband connections , but in groups .
If they want , they can call the granny cloud .
This is a SOLE in Newcastle .
The mediator is from Pune , India .
So how far can we go ? One last little bit and I 'll stop .
I went to Turin in May .
I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students .
I speak only English , they speak only Italian , so we had no way to communicate .
I started writing English questions on the blackboard .
The children looked at it and said , " What ? "
I said , " Well , do it . "
They typed it into Google , translated it into Italian , went back into Italian Google .
Fifteen minutes later -- next question : where is Calcutta ?
This one , they took only 10 minutes .
I tried a really hard one then .
Who was Pythagoras , and what did he do ?
There was silence for a while , then they said , " You 've spelled it wrong .
It 's Pitagora . "
And then , in 20 minutes , the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens .
This sent shivers up my spine .
These are 10 year-olds .
Text : In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity . And then ?
SM : So you know what 's happened ?
I think we 've just stumbled across a self-organizing system .
A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside .
Self-organizing systems also always show emergence , which is that the system starts to do things , which it was never designed for .
Which is why you react the way you do , because it looks impossible .
I think I can make a guess now -- education is self-organizing system , where learning is an emergent phenomenon .
It 'll take a few years to prove it , experimentally , but I 'm going to try .
But in the meanwhile , there is a method available .
One billion children , we need 100 million mediators -- there are many more than that on the planet -- 10 million SOLEs , 180 billion dollars and 10 years .
We could change everything .
Thanks .
Gary Kovacs : Tracking our online trackers
As you surf the Web , information is being collected about you . Web tracking is not 100 % evil -- personal data can make your browsing more efficient ; cookies can help your favorite websites stay in business . But , says Gary Kovacs , it 's your right to know what data is being collected about you . He unveils a Firefox add-on , Collusion , to do just that .
I don 't know why , but I 'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world 's population can go online to learn , to create and to share .
And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow .
A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online .
As the parent of a nine-year-old girl , that number seems awfully low .
But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us , it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world .
And increasingly , the price we 're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy .
Today , what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place ; it 's not .
And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen , we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods .
We are leaving our birthdays , our places of residence , our interests and preferences , our relationships , our financial histories , and on and on it goes .
Now don 't get me wrong , I 'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing .
In fact , when I know the data that 's being shared and I 'm asked explicitly for my consent , I want some sites to understand my habits .
It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with .
But when I don 't know and when I haven 't been asked , that 's when the problem arises .
It 's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking , and it is very big business .
In fact , there 's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us .
And when all of that data is held , they can do almost whatever they want with it .
This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules .
Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe , it 's an area of consumer protection that 's almost entirely naked .
So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further .
The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it 's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who 's tracking you .
The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to , but are following me .
The blue dots are the sites that I 've actually navigated directly to .
And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me , but I have no idea who they are .
All of them are connected , as you can see , to form a picture of me on the Web .
And this is my profile .
So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal .
I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day .
Now like most of you , I actually start my day going online and checking email .
I then go to a news site , look for some headlines .
And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network .
Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table , and I asked her , " Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school ? "
And she , of course , naturally as a nine-year-old , looked at me and said quizzically , " What 's literacy ? "
So I sent her online , of course , to look it up .
Now let me stop here .
We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me .
I have navigated to a total of four .
So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day .
I go to work , I check email , I log onto a few more social sites , I blog , I check more news reports , I share some of those news reports , I go look at some videos , pretty typical day -- in this case , actually fairly pedantic -- and at the end of the day , as my day winds down , look at my profile .
The red dots have exploded .
The gray dots have grown exponentially .
All in all , there 's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information , most all of them without my consent .
I look at this picture and it freaks me out .
This is nothing . I am being stalked across the Web .
And why is this happening ?
Pretty simple -- it 's huge business .
The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today .
And as adults , we 're certainly not alone .
At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile , I installed one for my daughter .
And on one single Saturday morning , over two hours on the Internet , here 's her Collusion profile .
This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children 's sites .
I move from this , from freaked out to enraged .
This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate ; this is me being a parent .
Imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement .
I can tell you , there isn 't a person in this room that would sit idly by .
We 'd take action . It may not be good action , but we would take action .
We can 't sit idly by here either .
This is happening today .
Privacy is not an option , and it shouldn 't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet .
Our voices matter and our actions matter even more .
Today we 've launched Collusion .
You can download it , install it in Firefox , to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods .
Going forward , all of our voices need to be heard .
Because what we don 't know can actually hurt us .
Because the memory of the Internet is forever .
We are being watched .
It 's now time for us to watch the watchers .
Thank you .
Britta Riley : A garden in my apartment
Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food . So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching , testing and tweaking the system using social media , trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system . Call it distributed DIY . And the results ? Delicious . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I , like many of you , am one of the two billion people on Earth who live in cities .
And there are days -- I don 't know about the rest of you guys -- but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life .
And some days , that can even be a little scary .
But what I 'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues , if we apply open source collaboration .
A couple of years ago , I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment .
Now at the time that I was reading this , it was the middle of the winter and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my New York City apartment .
So I was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next Wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future .
But that was actually exactly the point that Michael Pollan was making in this article -- was it 's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system .
So , I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space .
And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil over plants ' root systems .
Now to a vegetable plant , my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space .
But I can offer some natural light and year-round climate control .
Fast-forward two years later : we now have window farms , which are vertical , hydroponic platforms for food-growing indoors .
And the way it works is that there 's a pump at the bottom , which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top , which then trickles down through plants ' root systems that are suspended in clay pellets -- so there 's no dirt involved .
Now light and temperature vary with each window 's microclimate , so a window farm requires a farmer , and she must decide what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm , and whether she is going to feed her food organically .
Back at the time , a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing .
And I really wanted it to be an open project , because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now and could possibly become another area like Monsanto , where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people 's food .
So I decided that , instead of creating a product , what I was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers .
The first few systems that we created , they kind of worked .
We were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical New York City apartment window .
And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers , all kinds of stuff .
But the first few systems were these leaky , loud power-guzzlers that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved .
So to bring on more co-developers , what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs , we explained how they worked , and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems .
And then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us .
So actually now on this website , we have 18,000 people .
And we have window farms all over the world .
What we 're doing is what NASA or a large corporation would call R & amp ; D , or research and development .
But what we call it is R & amp ; D-I-Y , or research and develop it yourself .
So for example , Jackson came along and suggested that we use air pumps instead of water pumps .
It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right , but once we did , we were able to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half .
Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments , like lots of other window farmers , and he 's been able to get his strawberries to fruit for nine months of the year in low-light conditions by simply changing out the organic nutrients .
And window farmers in Finland have been customizing their window farms for the dark days of the Finnish winters by outfitting them with LED grow lights that they 're now making open source and part of the project .
So window farms have been evolving through a rapid versioning process similar to software .
And with every open source project , the real benefit is the interplay between the specific concerns of people customizing their systems for their own particular concerns and the universal concerns .
So my core team and I are able to concentrate on the improvements that really benefit everyone .
And we 're able to look out for the needs of newcomers .
So for do-it-yourselfers , we provide free , very well-tested instructions so that anyone , anywhere around the world , can build one of these systems for free .
And there 's a patent pending on these systems as well that 's held by the community .
And to fund the project , we partner to create products that we then sell to schools and to individuals who don 't have time to build their own systems .
Now within our community , a certain culture has appeared .
In our culture , it is better to be a tester who supports someone else 's idea than it is to be just the idea guy .
What we get out of this project is we get support for our own work , as well as an experience of actually contributing to the environmental movement in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs .
But I think that Eileen expresses best what we really get out of this , which is the actual joy of collaboration .
So she expresses here what it 's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea , built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing .
If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change that we 're all talking about as environmentalists and food people , maybe we just need to ditch the term " consumer " and get behind the people who are doing stuff .
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own .
And what we 're seeing is that R & amp ; D-I-Y has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs into solar panels and aquaponic systems .
And we 're building upon innovations of generations who went before us .
And we 're looking ahead at generations who really need us to retool our lives now .
So we ask that you join us in rediscovering the value of citizens united , and to declare that we are all still pioneers .
Peter Norvig : The 100,000-student classroom
In the fall of 2011 Peter Norvig taught a class with Sebastian Thrun on artificial intelligence at Stanford attended by 175 students in situ -- and over 100,000 via an interactive webcast . He shares what he learned about teaching to a global classroom .
Everyone is both a learner and a teacher .
This is me being inspired by my first tutor , my mom , and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University .
Now the students and I enjoyed the class , but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern , the teaching technology isn 't .
In fact , I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom .
Note the textbook , the sage on the stage , and the sleeping guy in the back .
Just like today .
So my co-teacher , Sebastian Thrun , and I thought , there must be a better way .
We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class , but to bring it to anyone in the world for free .
We announced the class on July 29th , and within two weeks , 50,000 people had signed up for it .
And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries .
We were thrilled to have that kind of audience , and just a bit terrified that we hadn 't finished preparing the class yet .
So we got to work .
We studied what others had done , what we could copy and what we could change .
Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best , so that 's what we tried to emulate , like with me and my mom , even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands .
Here , an overhead video camera is recording me as I 'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper .
A student said , " This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who 's explaining something you haven 't grasped , but are about to . "
And that 's exactly what we were aiming for .
Now , from Khan Academy , we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen .
We decided to go even shorter and more interactive .
Our typical video is two minutes , sometimes shorter , never more than six , and then we pause for a quiz question , to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring .
Here , I 'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences , and here , there 's a pause and the student has to reflect , understand what 's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue .
Students learn best when they 're actively practicing .
We wanted to engage them , to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves .
We mostly avoid questions like , " Here 's a formula , now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two . "
We preferred open-ended questions .
One student wrote , " Now I 'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look . "
And I like that kind of response .
That 's just what we were going for .
We didn 't want students to memorize the formulas ; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world .
And we succeeded .
Or , I should say , the students succeeded .
And it 's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education , and in doing so , we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes .
Most online classes , the videos are always available .
You can watch them any time you want .
But if you can do it any time , that means you can do it tomorrow , and if you can do it tomorrow , well , you may not ever get around to it .
So we brought back the innovation of having due dates .
You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week , but at the end of the week , you had to get the homework done .
This motivated the students to keep going , and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time , so if you went into a discussion forum , you could get an answer from a peer within minutes .
Now , I 'll show you some of the forums , most of which were self-organized by the students themselves .
From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng , we learned the concept of " flipping " the classroom .
Students watched the videos on their own , and then they come together to discuss them .
From Eric Mazur , I learned about peer instruction , that peers can be the best teachers , because they 're the ones that remember what it 's like to not understand .
Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that .
Of course , we couldn 't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students , so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums .
And finally , from Teach For America , I learned that a class is not primarily about information .
More important is motivation and determination .
It was crucial that the students see that we 're working hard for them and they 're all supporting each other .
Now , the class ran 10 weeks , and in the end , about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week , and over 20,000 finished all the homework , putting in 50 to 100 hours .
They got this statement of accomplishment .
So what have we learned ?
Well , we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together , but there are more ideas to try .
Sebastian 's teaching another class now .
I 'll do one in the fall .
Stanford Coursera , Udacity , MITx and others have more classes coming .
It 's a really exciting time .
But to me , the most exciting part of it is the data that we 're gathering .
We 're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class , billions of interactions altogether , and now we can start analyzing that , and when we learn from that , do experimentations , that 's when the real revolution will come .
And you 'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students .
Margaret Heffernan : The dangers of " willful blindness "
Gayla Benefield was just doing her job -- until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the U.S. But when she tried to tell people about it , she learned an even more shocking truth : People didn 't want to know . In a talk that 's part history lesson , part call-to-action , Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of " willful blindness " and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
In the northwest corner of the United States , right up near the Canadian border , there 's a little town called Libby , Montana , and it 's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky .
And in there is a little town called Libby , which I visited , which feels kind of lonely , a little isolated .
And in Libby , Montana , there 's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield .
She always felt a little bit of an outsider , although she 's been there almost all her life , a woman of Russian extraction .
She told me when she went to school , she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing .
Later in life , she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters , electricity meters .
And she was doing the work in the middle of the day , and one thing particularly caught her notice , which was , in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home , middle aged , late middle aged , and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks .
It struck her as strange .
Then , a few years later , her father died at the age of 59 , five days before he was due to receive his pension .
He 'd been a miner .
She thought he must just have been worn out by the work .
But then a few years later , her mother died , and that seemed stranger still , because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever .
In fact , Gayla 's uncle is still alive to this day , and learning how to waltz .
It didn 't make sense that Gayla 's mother should die so young .
It was an anomaly , and she kept puzzling over anomalies .
And as she did , other ones came to mind .
She remembered , for example , when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital , and she had a lot of x-rays , and two of them were leg x-rays , which made sense , but six of them were chest x-rays , which didn 't .
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents ' life , trying to understand what she was seeing .
She thought about her town .
The town had a vermiculite mine in it .
Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners , to make plants grow faster and better .
Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts , huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters .
Vermiculite was in the playground .
It was in the football ground .
It was in the skating rink .
What she didn 't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos .
When she figured out the puzzle , she started telling everyone she could what had happened , what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons .
But she was really amazed .
She thought , when everybody knows , they 'll want to do something , but actually nobody wanted to know .
In fact , she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors , to her friends , to other people in the community , that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker , which they proudly displayed on their cars , which said , " Yes , I 'm from Libby , Montana , and no , I don 't have asbestosis . "
But Gayla didn 't stop . She kept doing research .
The advent of the Internet definitely helped her .
She talked to anybody she could .
She argued and argued , and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area , and she told him her story , and at first , of course , like everyone , he didn 't believe her , but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right .
So now she had an ally .
Nevertheless , people still didn 't want to know .
They said things like , " Well , if it were really dangerous , someone would have told us . "
" If that 's really why everyone was dying , the doctors would have told us . "
Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said , " I don 't want to be a victim .
I can 't possibly be a victim , and anyway , every industry has its accidents . "
But still Gayla went on , and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States .
That was in 2002 , and even at that moment , no one raised their hand to say , " Gayla , look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing .
It 's lined with vermiculite . "
This wasn 't ignorance .
It was willful blindness .
Willful blindness is a legal concept which means , if there 's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know , the law deems that you 're willfully blind .
You have chosen not to know .
There 's a lot of willful blindness around these days .
You can see willful blindness in banks , when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn 't afford them .
You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on , but everyone studiously ignored it .
You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church , where decades of child abuse went ignored .
You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War .
Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those , and it also exists on very small scales , in people 's families , in people 's homes and communities , and particularly in organizations and institutions .
Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like , " Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise ? "
And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States , what they find is 85 percent of people say yes .
Eighty-five percent of people know there 's a problem , but they won 't say anything .
And when I duplicated the research in Europe , asking all the same questions , I found exactly the same number .
Eighty-five percent . That 's a lot of silence .
It 's a lot of blindness .
And what 's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland , they tell me , " This is a uniquely Swiss problem . "
And when I go to Germany , they say , " Oh yes , this is the German disease . "
And when I go to companies in England , they say , " Oh , yeah , the British are really bad at this . "
And the truth is , this is a human problem .
We 're all , under certain circumstances , willfully blind .
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear . They 're afraid of retaliation .
And some people are blind because they think , well , seeing anything is just futile .
Nothing 's ever going to change .
If we make a protest , if we protest against the Iraq War , nothing changes , so why bother ?
Better not to see this stuff at all .
And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say , " Well , you know , the people who do see , they 're whistleblowers , and we all know what happens to them . "
So there 's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says , first of all , they 're all crazy .
But what I 've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is , actually , they 're very loyal and quite often very conservative people .
They 're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for , and the reason that they speak up , the reason they insist on seeing , is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy .
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is , " Well , there 's no point , because you see what happens to them .
They are crushed .
Nobody would want to go through something like that . "
And yet , when I talk to whistleblowers , the recurrent tone that I hear is pride .
I think of Joe Darby .
We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib , which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq .
But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby , the very obedient , good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in .
And he said , " You know , I 'm not the kind of guy to rat people out , but some things just cross the line .
Ignorance is bliss , they say , but you can 't put up with things like this . "
I talked to Steve Bolsin , a British doctor , who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies .
And I asked him why he did it , and he said , " Well , it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it .
She came up to me one night , and she just said , ' Dad , you can 't let the kids die . ' " Or I think of Cynthia Thomas , a really loyal army daughter and army wife , who , as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War , was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal , psychological and medical assistance .
And she said to me , she said , " You know , Margaret , I always used to say I didn 't know what I wanted to be when I grow up .
But I 've found myself in this cause , and I 'll never be the same . "
We all enjoy so many freedoms today , hard-won freedoms : the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship , a freedom that wasn 't here the last time I came to Hungary ; a freedom to vote , which women in particular had to fight so hard for ; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want .
But freedom doesn 't exist if you don 't use it , and what whistleblowers do , and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have .
And what they 're very prepared to do is recognize that yes , this is going to be an argument , and yes I 'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends , but I 'm going to become very good at this conflict .
I 'm going to take on the naysayers , because they 'll make my argument better and stronger .
I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do .
These are people of immense persistence , incredible patience , and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent .
When I went to Libby , Montana , I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being , a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn 't want to acknowledge that she 'd been right .
I sat in a diner , and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway , carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh , uncontaminated soil .
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me , because I really wanted her to meet Gayla .
And she said , " Why ? What 's the big deal ? "
I said , " She 's not a movie star , and she 's not a celebrity , and she 's not an expert , and Gayla 's the first person who 'd say she 's not a saint .
The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary .
She 's like you , and she 's like me .
She had freedom , and she was ready to use it . "
Thank you very much .
Nellie McKay : " The Dog Song "
Animal fan Nellie McKay sings a sparkling tribute to her dear dog . She suggests we all do the same : " Just go right to the pound / And find yourself a hound / And make that doggie proud / ' cause that 's what it 's all about . "
I 'd like to dedicate this next song to Carmelo , who was put to sleep a couple of days ago , because he got too old .
But apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed .
Heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . I 'm just a 'walking my dog , singing my song , strolling along . Yeah , it 's just me and my dog , catching some sun . We can 't go wrong . My life was lonely and blue . Yeah , I was sad as a sailor , I was an angry ' un too . Then there was you -- appeared when I was entangled with youth and fear , and nerves jingle jangled , vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up . But then I looked in your eyes and I was no more a failure . You looked so wacky and wise . And I said , " Lord , I 'm happy , ' cause I 'm just a 'walking my dog , catching some sun . We can 't go wrong . " Yeah , it 's just me and my dog , singing our song , strolling along . ' Cause I don 't care about your hating and your doubt , and I don 't care what the politicians spout . If you need a companion , why , just go out to the pound , and find yourself a hound , and make that doggie proud , ' cause that 's what it 's all about . Heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . My life was tragic and sad . I was the archetypal loser . I was a pageant gone bad . And then there was you -- on time , and wagging your tail in the cutest mime that you was in jail . I said , " Woof , be mine ! " and you gave a wail and then I was no longer alone . And I was no more a boozer . We 'll make the happiest home . And I said , " Lord , I 'm happy , ' cause I 'm just a 'walking my dog , singing my song , strolling along . " Yeah , it 's just me and my dog , catching some sun . We can 't go wrong , ' cause I don 't care about your hating and your doubt , and I don 't care what the politicians spout . If you need a companion , why , just go out to the pound , and find yourself a hound , and make that doggie proud , ' cause that 's what it 's all about , that 's what it 's all about , that 's what it 's all abou-BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW that 's what it 's all about . Heh , heh , heh , heh , heh . Good dog !
Thank you .
Eleanor Longden : The voices in my head
To all appearances , Eleanor Longden was just like every other student , heading to college full of promise and without a care in the world . That was until the voices in her head started talking . Initially innocuous , these internal narrators became increasingly antagonistic and dictatorial , turning her life into a living nightmare . Diagnosed with schizophrenia , hospitalized , drugged , Longden was discarded by a system that didn 't know how to help her . Longden tells the moving tale of her years-long journey back to mental health , and makes the case that it was through learning to listen to her voices that she was able to survive .
The day I left home for the first time to go to university was a bright day brimming with hope and optimism .
I 'd done well at school . Expectations for me were high , and I gleefully entered the student life of lectures , parties and traffic cone theft .
Now appearances , of course , can be deceptive , and to an extent , this feisty , energetic persona of lecture-going and traffic cone stealing was a veneer , albeit a very well-crafted and convincing one .
Underneath , I was actually deeply unhappy , insecure and fundamentally frightened -- frightened of other people , of the future , of failure and of the emptiness that I felt was within me .
But I was skilled at hiding it , and from the outside appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to .
This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I even deceived myself , and as the first semester ended and the second began , there was no way that anyone could have predicted what was just about to happen .
I was leaving a seminar when it started , humming to myself , fumbling with my bag just as I 'd done a hundred times before , when suddenly I heard a voice calmly observe , " She is leaving the room . "
I looked around , and there was no one there , but the clarity and decisiveness of the comment was unmistakable .
Shaken , I left my books on the stairs and hurried home , and there it was again .
" She is opening the door . "
This was the beginning . The voice had arrived .
And the voice persisted , days and then weeks of it , on and on , narrating everything I did in the third person .
" She is going to the library . "
" She is going to a lecture . "
It was neutral , impassive and even , after a while , strangely companionate and reassuring , although I did notice that its calm exterior sometimes slipped and that it occasionally mirrored my own unexpressed emotion .
So , for example , if I was angry and had to hide it , which I often did , being very adept at concealing how I really felt , then the voice would sound frustrated .
Otherwise , it was neither sinister nor disturbing , although even at that point it was clear that it had something to communicate to me about my emotions , particularly emotions which were remote and inaccessible .
Now it was then that I made a fatal mistake , in that I told a friend about the voice , and she was horrified .
A subtle conditioning process had begun , the implication that normal people don 't hear voices and the fact that I did meant that something was very seriously wrong .
Such fear and mistrust was infectious .
Suddenly the voice didn 't seem quite so benign anymore , and when she insisted that I seek medical attention , I duly complied , and which proved to be mistake number two .
I spent some time telling the college G.P.
about what I perceived to be the real problem : anxiety , low self-worth , fears about the future , and was met with bored indifference until I mentioned the voice , upon which he dropped his pen , swung round and began to question me with a show of real interest .
And to be fair , I was desperate for interest and help , and I began to tell him about my strange commentator .
And I always wish , at this point , the voice had said , " She is digging her own grave . "
I was referred to a psychiatrist , who likewise took a grim view of the voice 's presence , subsequently interpreting everything I said through a lens of latent insanity .
For example , I was part of a student TV station that broadcast news bulletins around the campus , and during an appointment which was running very late , I said , " I 'm sorry , doctor , I 've got to go .
I 'm reading the news at six . "
Now it 's down on my medical records that Eleanor has delusions that she 's a television news broadcaster .
It was at this point that events began to rapidly overtake me .
A hospital admission followed , the first of many , a diagnosis of schizophrenia came next , and then , worst of all , a toxic , tormenting sense of hopelessness , humiliation and despair about myself and my prospects .
But having been encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom , my fear and resistance towards it intensified .
Now essentially , this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind , a kind of psychic civil war , and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing .
Helplessly and hopelessly , I began to retreat into this nightmarish inner world in which the voices were destined to become both my persecutors and my only perceived companions .
They told me , for example , that if I proved myself worthy of their help , then they could change my life back to how it had been , and a series of increasingly bizarre tasks was set , a kind of labor of Hercules .
It started off quite small , for example , pull out three strands of hair , but gradually it grew more extreme , culminating in commands to harm myself , and a particularly dramatic instruction : " You see that tutor over there ?
You see that glass of water ?
Well , you have to go over and pour it over him in front of the other students . "
Which I actually did , and which needless to say did not endear me to the faculty .
In effect , a vicious cycle of fear , avoidance , mistrust and misunderstanding had been established , and this was a battle in which I felt powerless and incapable of establishing any kind of peace or reconciliation .
Two years later , and the deterioration was dramatic .
By now , I had the whole frenzied repertoire : terrifying voices , grotesque visions , bizarre , intractable delusions .
My mental health status had been a catalyst for discrimination , verbal abuse , and physical and sexual assault , and I 'd been told by my psychiatrist , " Eleanor , you 'd be better off with cancer , because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia . "
I 'd been diagnosed , drugged and discarded , and was by now so tormented by the voices that I attempted to drill a hole in my head in order to get them out .
Now looking back on the wreckage and despair of those years , it seems to me now as if someone died in that place , and yet , someone else was saved .
A broken and haunted person began that journey , but the person who emerged was a survivor and would ultimately grow into the person I was destined to be .
Many people have harmed me in my life , and I remember them all , but the memories grow pale and faint in comparison with the people who 've helped me .
The fellow survivors , the fellow voice-hearers , the comrades and collaborators ; the mother who never gave up on me , who knew that one day I would come back to her and was willing to wait for me for as long as it took ; the doctor who only worked with me for a brief time but who reinforced his belief that recovery was not only possible but inevitable , and during a devastating period of relapse told my terrified family , " Don 't give up hope .
I believe that Eleanor can get through this .
Sometimes , you know , it snows as late as May , but summer always comes eventually . "
Fourteen minutes is not enough time to fully credit those good and generous people who fought with me and for me and who waited to welcome me back from that agonized , lonely place .
But together , they forged a blend of courage , creativity , integrity , and an unshakeable belief that my shattered self could become healed and whole .
I used to say that these people saved me , but what I now know is they did something even more important in that they empowered me to save myself , and crucially , they helped me to understand something which I 'd always suspected : that my voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events , particularly childhood events , and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems .
Now , at first , this was very difficult to believe , not least because the voices appeared so hostile and menacing , so in this respect , a vital first step was learning to separate out a metaphorical meaning from what I 'd previously interpreted to be a literal truth .
So for example , voices which threatened to attack my home I learned to interpret as my own sense of fear and insecurity in the world , rather than an actual , objective danger .
Now at first , I would have believed them .
I remember , for example , sitting up one night on guard outside my parents ' room to protect them from what I thought was a genuine threat from the voices .
Because I 'd had such a bad problem with self-injury that most of the cutlery in the house had been hidden , so I ended up arming myself with a plastic fork , kind of like picnic ware , and sort of sat outside the room clutching it and waiting to spring into action should anything happen .
It was like , " Don 't mess with me .
I 've got a plastic fork , don 't you know ? "
Strategic .
But a later response , and much more useful , would be to try and deconstruct the message behind the words , so when the voices warned me not to leave the house , then I would thank them for drawing my attention to how unsafe I felt -- because if I was aware of it , then I could do something positive about it -- but go on to reassure both them and myself that we were safe and didn 't need to feel frightened anymore .
I would set boundaries for the voices , and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful , establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another .
Throughout all of this , what I would ultimately realize was that each voice was closely related to aspects of myself , and that each of them carried overwhelming emotions that I 'd never had an opportunity to process or resolve , memories of sexual trauma and abuse , of anger , shame , guilt , low self-worth .
The voices took the place of this pain and gave words to it , and possibly one of the greatest revelations was when I realized that the most hostile and aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt most profoundly , and as such , it was these voices that needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care .
It was armed with this knowledge that ultimately I would gather together my shattered self , each fragment represented by a different voice , gradually withdraw from all my medication , and return to psychiatry , only this time from the other side .
Ten years after the voice first came , I finally graduated , this time with the highest degree in psychology the university had ever given , and one year later , the highest masters , which shall we say isn 't bad for a madwoman .
In fact , one of the voices actually dictated the answers during the exam , which technically possibly counts as cheating .
And to be honest , sometimes I quite enjoyed their attention as well .
As Oscar Wilde has said , the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about .
It also makes you very good at eavesdropping , because you can listen to two conversations simultaneously .
So it 's not all bad .
I worked in mental health services , I spoke at conferences , I published book chapters and academic articles , and I argued , and continue to do so , the relevance of the following concept : that an important question in psychiatry shouldn 't be what 's wrong with you but rather what 's happened to you .
And all the while , I listened to my voices , with whom I 'd finally learned to live with peace and respect and which in turn reflected a growing sense of compassion , acceptance and respect towards myself .
And I remember the most moving and extraordinary moment when supporting another young woman who was terrorized by her voices , and becoming fully aware , for the very first time , that I no longer felt that way myself but was finally able to help someone else who was .
I 'm now very proud to be a part of Intervoice , the organizational body of the International Hearing Voices Movement , an initiative inspired by the work of Professor Marius Romme and Dr. Sandra Escher , which locates voice hearing as a survival strategy , a sane reaction to insane circumstances , not as an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia to be endured , but a complex , significant and meaningful experience to be explored .
Together , we envisage and enact a society that understands and respects voice hearing , supports the needs of individuals who hear voices , and which values them as full citizens .
This type of society is not only possible , it 's already on its way .
To paraphrase Chavez , once social change begins , it cannot be reversed .
You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride .
You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore .
For me , the achievements of the Hearing Voices Movement are a reminder that empathy , fellowship , justice and respect are more than words ; they are convictions and beliefs , and that beliefs can change the world .
In the last 20 years , the Hearing Voices Movement has established hearing voices networks in 26 countries across five continents , working together to promote dignity , solidarity and empowerment for individuals in mental distress , to create a new language and practice of hope , which , at its very center , lies an unshakable belief in the power of the individual .
As Peter Levine has said , the human animal is a unique being endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal and the intellectual spirit to harness this innate capacity .
In this respect , for members of society , there is no greater honor or privilege than facilitating that process of healing for someone , to bear witness , to reach out a hand , to share the burden of someone 's suffering , and to hold the hope for their recovery .
And likewise , for survivors of distress and adversity , that we remember we don 't have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us .
We are unique . We are irreplaceable .
What lies within us can never be truly colonized , contorted , or taken away .
The light never goes out .
As a very wonderful doctor once said to me , " Don 't tell me what other people have told you about yourself .
Tell me about you . "
Thank you .
Ji-Hae Park : The violin , and my dark night of the soul
In her quest to become a world-famous violinist , Ji-Hae Park fell into a severe depression . Only music was able to lift her out again -- showing her that her goal needn 't be to play lofty concert halls , but instead to bring the wonder of the instrument to as many people as possible .
Thank you .
Hi , everybody .
Ban-gap-seum-ni-da .
I 'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life .
I might look successful and happy being in front of you today , but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair .
The violin , which meant everything to me , became a grave burden on me .
Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me , their words sounded like meaningless noise .
When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering , I started to rediscover the true power of music .
In the midst of hardship , it was the music that gave me -- that restored my soul .
The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable , and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too , and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist .
Do you feel like you are all alone ?
I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart , as it did for me .
Thank you .
Now , I use my music to reach people 's hearts and have found there are no boundaries .
My audience is anyone who is here to listen , even those who are not familiar with classical music .
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center , but also hospitals , churches , prisons , and restricted facilities for leprosy patients , just to mention a few .
Now , with my last piece , I 'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun , exciting , and that it can rock you .
Let me introduce you to my brand new project , " Baroque in Rock , " which became a golden disc most recently .
It 's such an honor for me .
I think , while I 'm enjoying my life as a happy musician , I 'm earning a lot more recognition than I 've ever imagined .
But it 's now your turn .
Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world .
Just play your life with all you have , and share it with the world .
I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you , TEDsters .
Play your life , and stay tuned .
Julian Treasure : 5 ways to listen better
In our louder and louder world , says sound expert Julian Treasure , " We are losing our listening . " In this short , fascinating talk , Treasure shares five ways to re-tune your ears for conscious listening -- to other people and the world around you .
We are losing our listening .
We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening , but we 're not very good at it .
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear .
Now not you , not this talk , but that is generally true .
Let 's define listening as making meaning from sound .
It 's a mental process , and it 's a process of extraction .
We use some pretty cool techniques to do this .
One of them is pattern recognition .
So in a cocktail party like this , if I say , " David , Sara , pay attention , " some of you just sat up .
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal , and especially our name .
Differencing is another technique we use .
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes , you would literally cease to hear it .
We listen to differences , we discount sounds that remain the same .
And then there is a whole range of filters .
These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to .
Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters .
But they actually create our reality in a way , because they tell us what we 're paying attention to right now .
Give you one example of that : Intention is very important in sound , in listening .
When I married my wife , I promised her that I would listen to her every day as if for the first time .
Now that 's something I fall short of on a daily basis .
But it 's a great intention to have in a relationship .
But that 's not all .
Sound places us in space and in time .
If you close your eyes right now in this room , you 're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces .
And you 're aware of how many people are around you because of the micro-noises you 're receiving .
And sound places us in time as well , because sound always has time embedded in it .
In fact , I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future .
So , " Sonority is time and meaning " -- a great quote .
I said at the beginning , we 're losing our listening .
Why did I say that ?
Well there are a lot of reasons for this .
First of all , we invented ways of recording -- first writing , then audio recording and now video recording as well .
The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared .
Secondly , the world is now so noisy , with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily , it 's just hard to listen ; it 's tiring to listen .
Many people take refuge in headphones , but they turn big , public spaces like this , shared soundscapes , into millions of tiny , little personal sound bubbles .
In this scenario , nobody 's listening to anybody .
We 're becoming impatient .
We don 't want oratory anymore , we want sound bites .
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously , I think -- by personal broadcasting .
I don 't know how much listening there is in this conversation , which is sadly very common , especially in the U.K.
We 're becoming desensitized .
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention .
And that means it 's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet , the subtle , the understated .
This is a serious problem that we 're losing our listening .
This is not trivial .
Because listening is our access to understanding .
Conscious listening always creates understanding .
And only without conscious listening can these things happen -- a world where we don 't listen to each other at all , is a very scary place indeed .
So I 'd like to share with you five simple exercises , tools you can take away with you , to improve your own conscious listening .
Would you like that ?
Good .
The first one is silence .
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again .
If you can 't get absolute silence , go for quiet , that 's absolutely fine .
Second , I call this the mixer .
So even if you 're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear ?
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to ?
You can do it in a beautiful place as well , like in a lake .
How many birds am I hearing ?
Where are they ? Where are those ripples ?
It 's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening .
Third , this exercise I call savoring , and this is a beautiful exercise .
It 's about enjoying mundane sounds .
This , for example , is my tumble dryer .
It 's a waltz .
One , two , three . One , two , three . One , two , three .
I love it .
Or just try this one on for size .
Wow !
So mundane sounds can be really interesting if you pay attention .
I call that the hidden choir .
It 's around us all the time .
The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these , if you just take one thing away .
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what 's appropriate to what you 're listening to .
This is playing with those filters .
Do you remember , I gave you those filters at the beginning .
It 's starting to play with them as levers , to get conscious about them and to move to different places .
These are just some of the listening positions , or scales of listening positions , that you can use .
There are many .
Have fun with that . It 's very exciting .
And finally , an acronym .
You can use this in listening , in communication .
If you 're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who 's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA , which is the Sanskrit word for juice or essence .
And RASA stands for Receive , which means pay attention to the person ; Appreciate , making little noises like " hmm , " " oh , " " okay " ; Summarize , the word " so " is very important in communication ; and Ask , ask questions afterward .
Now sound is my passion , it 's my life .
I wrote a whole book about it . So I live to listen .
That 's too much to ask from most people .
But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us , connected in understanding to each other , not to mention spiritually connected , because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart .
That 's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill .
Why is it not taught ? It 's crazy .
And if we can teach listening in our schools , we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous , scary world that I talked about and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time -- or at least capable of doing it .
Now I don 't know how to do that , but this is TED , and I think the TED community is capable of anything .
So I invite you to connect with me , connect with each other , take this mission out and let 's get listening taught in schools , and transform the world in one generation to a conscious listening world -- a world of connection , a world of understanding and a world of peace .
Thank you for listening to me today .
Nora York : Singing " What I Want "
Nora York gives a stunning performance of her song " What I Want , " with Jamie Lawrence , Steve Tarshis and Arthur Kell .
I 'd like to begin this song I wrote about ceaseless yearning and never-ending want with a poem of popular Petrarchan paradoxes by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder : " I find no peace , and all my war is done ; I fear and hope , I burn and freeze like ice ; I fly above the wind , and yet I cannot arise ; And naught I have , and all the world I seize upon . "
I want what I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have It feels like all I got is loss on a bad back Gone with the last train , honey don 't you fret Every cloud has a silver lining Just a little rain , just a little rain , just a little rain I want what I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have My mind won 't stop , and my heart says go Nobody knows how to hold me My mind won 't stop , and my heart says , " Good things come to those who wait " And I can 't stand in ... I can 't stand in line forever Stand the cold air Glad-handed Sick and tired of the " Later , maybe " Take it , fake it , take it , take-it-or-leave-it life And I gotta just tame it I gotta just name it I gotta just seize , so please , oh please , oh please , oh please Oh please me right , ' cause My mind won 't stop And my heart says go Nobody knows how to hold me My mind won 't stop -- and my heart says go-ooooo ... Good things must be here -- yes , right here Here , right here , right here I won 't live this life forever One time round is all the offer is Sick and tired of the " Later , maybe " Take it , fake it , make it , leave it life And I gotta just name it , I gotta just claim it I gotta just seize Oh please , oh please , oh please me right I want what I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have -- you know that My mind won 't stop , and my heart says go Nobody knows how to hold me , no My mind won 't stop , and my heart says go ' Cause I want what I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I -- have what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have what I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have , what I want What I can 't have , need what I can 't want Have but I don 't have what I want
Noreena Hertz : How to use experts -- and when not to
We make important decisions every day -- and we often rely on experts to help us decide . But , says economist Noreena Hertz , relying too much on experts can be limiting and even dangerous . She calls for us to start democratizing expertise -- to listen not only to " surgeons and CEOs , but also to shop staff . "
It 's Monday morning .
In Washington , the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office , assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen .
At Number 10 Downing Street , David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession .
In Madrid , Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door , listening to her baby crying and crying , trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it .
And I am sitting by my father 's bedside in hospital , trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said , " You must make him drink today , " -- my father 's been nil by mouth for a week -- or whether , by giving him this bottle , I might actually kill him .
We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives , and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions .
We talk things over with our friends , we scour the Internet , we search through books .
But still , even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends , it 's still experts that we rely upon most -- especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters .
Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity , we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can -- that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own .
And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing , we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do .
But I believe that this is a big problem , a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society , as a culture and as individuals .
It 's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world -- of course they have .
The problem lies with us : we 've become addicted to experts .
We 've become addicted to their certainty , their assuredness , their definitiveness , and in the process , we have ceded our responsibility , substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom .
We 've surrendered our power , trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide .
This is no exaggeration .
In a recent experiment , a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak .
The results were quite extraordinary .
As they listened to the experts ' voices , the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off .
It literally flat-lined .
And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice , however right or wrong .
But experts do get things wrong .
Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10 ?
Did you know that if you file your tax returns yourself , you 're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you ?
And then there 's , of course , the example that we 're all too aware of : financial experts getting it so wrong that we 're living through the worst recession since the 1930s .
For the sake of our health , our wealth and our collective security , it 's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on .
And I 'm saying this as an economist who , over the past few years , has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why , but also -- and I 'm aware of the irony here -- as an expert myself , as a professor , as somebody who advises prime ministers , heads of big companies , international organizations , but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change , that we need to become more open-minded , more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view .
So in order to help you understand where I 'm coming from , let me bring you into my world , the world of experts .
Now there are , of course , exceptions , wonderful , civilization-enhancing exceptions .
But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps , that within these camps , a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition , that experts move with the prevailing winds , often hero-worshipping their own gurus .
Alan Greenspan 's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on , not challenged by his peers , until after the crisis , of course .
You see , we also learn that experts are located , are governed , by the social and cultural norms of their times -- whether it be the doctors in Victorian England , say , who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire , or the psychiatrists in the United States who , up until 1973 , were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness .
And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift , that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks -- because we 've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects , or studies funded by food companies of their new products , massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they 're about to bring by market .
The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study .
And we 've also got to be aware that experts , of course , also make mistakes .
They make mistakes every single day -- mistakes born out of carelessness .
A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries , operating on the wrong side of the brain , carrying out procedures on the wrong hand , elbow , eye , foot , and also mistakes born out of thinking errors .
A common thinking error of radiologists , for example -- when they look at CT scans -- is that they 're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient 's problem to be .
So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia , say , what happens is that , if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan , they literally stop looking at it -- thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient 's lungs .
I 've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts .
These are , of course , not the only insights I could share , but I hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them , why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on .
But how can we do this ?
Well for the sake of time , I want to focus on just three strategies .
First , we 've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles .
This doesn 't mean having to get a Ph.D.
in every single subject , you 'll be relieved to hear .
But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when , for example , we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand .
Why was it that , when I had an operation , my doctor said to me , " Beware , Ms. Hertz , of hyperpyrexia , " when he could have just as easily said , " Watch out for a high fever . "
You see , being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs , their equations , their forecasts , their prophecies , and being armed with the questions to do that -- questions like : What are the assumptions that underpin this ?
What is the evidence upon which this is based ?
What has your investigation focused on ?
And what has it ignored ?
It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first , primarily on male animals and then , primarily on men .
It seems that they 've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world 's population are women .
And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don 't work nearly as well on women as they do on men -- and the drugs that do work well work so well that they 're actively harmful for women to take .
Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts ' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed .
Second , we need to create the space for what I call " managed dissent . "
If we are to shift paradigms , if we are to make breakthroughs , if we are to destroy myths , we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out , in which we 're bringing in new , diverse , discordant , heretical views into the discussion , fearlessly , in the knowledge that progress comes about , not only from the creation of ideas , but also from their destruction -- and also from the knowledge that , by surrounding ourselves by divergent , discordant , heretical views .
All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter .
Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts , which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true .
And that 's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent .
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy .
In meetings , he looks out for the person in the room -- arms crossed , looking a bit bemused -- and draws them into the discussion , trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion , so that they have dissent within the room .
Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement , discord and difference .
But we need to go even further .
We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are .
The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees , fancy titles , diplomas , best-selling books -- high-status individuals .
But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise -- whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO 's , but also shop-girls -- yeah .
Best Buy , the consumer electronics company , gets all its employees -- the cleaners , the shop assistants , the people in the back office , not just its forecasting team -- to place bets , yes bets , on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas , on whether customers ' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company , on whether a project will come in on time .
By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company , Best Buy was able to discover , for example , that the store that it was going to open in China -- its big , grand store -- was not going to open on time .
Because when it asked its staff , all its staff , to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not , a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening .
It turned out that they were aware , as no one else within the company was , of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts , nor the experts on the ground in China , were even aware of .
The strategies that I have discussed this evening -- embracing dissent , taking experts on , democratizing expertise , rebellious strategies -- are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing , complex , difficult times .
For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on , if we challenge experts , if we 're skeptical , if we devolve authority , if we are rebellious , but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance , uncertainty and doubt , and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too , we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century .
For now , more than ever , is not the time to be blindly following , blindly accepting , blindly trusting .
Now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open -- yes , using experts to help us figure things out , for sure -- I don 't want to completely do myself out of a job here -- but being aware of their limitations and , of course , also our own .
Thank you .

Andrew Mwenda : Aid for Africa ? No thanks .
In this provocative talk , journalist Andrew Mwenda asks us to reframe the " African question " -- to look beyond the media 's stories of poverty , civil war and helplessness and see the opportunities for creating wealth and happiness throughout the continent .
I am very , very happy to be amidst some of the most -- the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they 're reflecting on my glasses .
I am very happy and honored to be amidst very , very innovative and intelligent people .
I have listened to the three previous speakers , and guess what happened ?
Every single thing I planned to say , they have said it here , and it looks and sounds like I have nothing else to say .
But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something , that bud is a young one .
So , I will -- since I am not young and am very old , I still will say something .
We are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment , because another conference is taking place in Berlin .
It is the G8 Summit .
The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa 's problems should be a massive increase in aid , something akin to the Marshall Plan .
Unfortunately , I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan .
One , because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated .
Its largest recipients were Germany and France , and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP .
An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13 , 15 percent of its GDP , and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries .
But I want to say that there are two things we need to connect .
How the media covers Africa in the West , and the consequences of that .
By displaying despair , helplessness and hopelessness , the media is telling the truth about Africa , and nothing but the truth .
However , the media is not telling us the whole truth .
Because despair , civil war , hunger and famine , although they 're part and parcel of our African reality , they are not the only reality .
And secondly , they are the smallest reality .
Africa has 53 nations .
We have civil wars only in six countries , which means that the media are covering only six countries .
Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience .
But the effect of that presentation is , it appeals to sympathy .
It appeals to pity . It appeals to something called charity .
And , as a consequence , the Western view of Africa 's economic dilemma is framed wrongly .
The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair .
What should we do with it ? We should give food to the hungry .
We should deliver medicines to those who are ill .
We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war .
And in the process , Africa has been stripped of self-initiative .
I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses .
But equally , it has opportunities and a lot of potential .
We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa , from a challenge of despair , which is called poverty reduction , to a challenge of hope .
We frame it as a challenge of hope , and that is worth creation .
The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty .
It should be a challenge of creating wealth .
Once we change those two things -- if you say the Africans are poor and they need poverty reduction , you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent , with what ?
Medicines for the poor , food relief for those who are hungry , and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war .
And in the process , none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms , not the causes of Africa 's fundamental problems .
Sending somebody to school and giving them medicines , ladies and gentlemen , does not create wealth for them .
Wealth is a function of income , and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job .
Now , once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa , our second challenge will be , who are the wealth-creating agents in any society ?
They are entrepreneurs . [ Unclear ] told us they are always about four percent of the population , but 16 percent are imitators .
But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship .
So , where should we be putting the money ?
We need to put money where it can productively grow .
Support private investment in Africa , both domestic and foreign .
Support research institutions , because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation .
But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today ?
They are throwing large sums of money for primary health , for primary education , for food relief .
The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair , in need of charity .
Ladies and gentlemen , can any one of you tell me a neighbor , a friend , a relative that you know , who became rich by receiving charity ?
By holding the begging bowl and receiving alms ?
Does any one of you in the audience have that person ?
Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another ?
Well , since I 'm not seeing the hand , it appears that what I 'm stating is true .
Andrew Mwenda : I can see Bono says he knows the country .
Which country is that ?
AM : Thank you very much . But let me tell you this .
External actors can only present to you an opportunity .
The ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity .
Africa has received many opportunities .
Many of them we haven 't benefited much .
Why ? Because we lack the internal , institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations . I 'll give you an example .
Under the Cotonou Agreement , formerly known as the Lome Convention , African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods , duty-free , to the European Union market .
My own country , Uganda , has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market .
We haven 't exported one kilogram yet .
We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba .
Secondly , under the beef protocol of that agreement , African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market .
None of those countries , including Africa 's most successful nation , Botswana , has ever met its quota .
So , I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa 's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework .
And all forms of intervention need support , the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth , the kinds of institutions that increase productivity .
How do we begin to do that , and why is aid the bad instrument ?
Aid is the bad instrument , and do you know why ?
Because all governments across the world need money to survive .
Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order .
You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order .
And because many of our governments are quite dictatorial , they need really to have the army clobber the opposition .
The second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on .
Why should people support their government ?
Well , because it gives them good , paying jobs , or , in many African countries , unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption .
The fact is no government in the world , with the exception of a few , like that of Idi Amin , can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule .
Many countries in the [ unclear ] , they need legitimacy .
To get legitimacy , governments often need to deliver things like primary education , primary health , roads , build hospitals and clinics .
If the government 's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people , such a government is driven by self-interest It will sit with those who create wealth .
Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them .
The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa .
The productive margin in our governments ' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy , it lies with international donors .
Rather than sit with Ugandan -- -- rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs , Ghanaian businessmen , South African enterprising leaders , our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank .
I can tell you , even if you have ten Ph.Ds. , you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry .
Why ? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business -- it requires that you listen to the people , the private sector actors in that industry .
Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity , by the international community , to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens , and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank , and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need .
In the process , we , the African people , have been sidelined from the policy-making , policy-orientation , and policy- implementation process in our countries .
We have limited input , because he who pays the piper calls the tune .
The IMF , the World Bank , and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens , and therefore what our governments are doing , because they depend on aid , is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens .
But I want to put a caveat on my argument , and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive .
Some aid may have built a hospital , fed a hungry village .
It may have built a road , and that road may have served a very good role .
The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success , generalize them , pour billions and trillions of dollars into them , and then spread them across the whole world , ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village , the skills , the practices , the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed -- like in Sauri village , in Kenya , where Jeffrey Sachs is working -- and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody .
Aid increases the resources available to governments , and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have , as a person in Africa seeking a career .
By increasing the political attractiveness of the state , especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa , aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie .
Ladies and gentlemen , the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business .
Governments are not changing it . Why ?
Because they don 't need to talk to their own citizens .
They talk to international donors .
So , the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government , and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid .
I also want to say that it is important for us to note that , over the last 50 years , Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community , in the form of technical assistance , and financial aid , and all other forms of aid .
Between 1960 and 2003 , our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid , and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa .
Where has all the aid gone ?
I want to use the example of my own country , called Uganda , and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there .
In the 2006-2007 budget , expected revenue : 2.5 trillion shillings .
The expected foreign aid : 1.9 trillion .
Uganda 's recurrent expenditure -- by recurrent what do I mean ?
Hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion .
Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue ?
It 's because there 's somebody there called foreign aid , who contributes for it .
But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments , but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure .
Public administration , which is largely patronage , takes 690 billion .
The military , 380 billion .
Agriculture , which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens , takes only 18 billion .
Trade and industry takes 43 billion .
And let me show you , what does public expenditure -- rather , public administration expenditure -- in Uganda constitute ?
There you go . 70 cabinet ministers , 114 presidential advisers , by the way , who never see the president , except on television .
And when they see him physically , it is at public functions like this , and even there , it is him who advises them .
We have 81 units of local government .
Each local government is organized like the central government -- a bureaucracy , a cabinet , a parliament , and so many jobs for the political hangers-on .
There were 56 , and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits , he had to create 25 new districts , and now there are 81 .
Three hundred thirty-three members of parliament .
You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament .
One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies , all of which have directors and the cars . And the final thing , this is addressed to Mr. Bono . In his work , he may help us on this .
A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters .
Uganda has 961 sub-counties , each of them with a dispensary , none of which has an ambulance .
So , the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers , the permanent secretaries , the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects , while the poor die without ambulances and medicine .
Finally , I want to say that before I came to speak here , I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt .
It should be short enough to arouse interest , but long enough to cover the subject .
I hope I have achieved that .
Thank you very much .
AJ Jacobs : How healthy living nearly killed me
For a full year , AJ Jacobs followed every piece of health advice he could -- from applying sunscreen by the shot glass to wearing a bicycle helmet while shopping . Onstage at TEDMED , he shares the surprising things he learned .
I 've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation , hopefully for a good cause , which is self-improvement .
And I 've done this in three parts .
So first I started with the mind .
And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z -- or , more precisely , from " a-ak " to " Zywiec . "
And here 's a little image of that .
And this was an amazing year .
It was really a fascinating journey .
It was painful at times , especially for those around me .
My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation .
So it had its downsides .
But after that , I decided to work on the spirit .
As I mentioned last year , I grew up with no religion at all .
I 'm Jewish , but I 'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian .
Not really .
But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it .
So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible .
And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard -- because Leviticus says you cannot shave .
So this is what I looked like by the end .
Thank you for that reaction .
I look a little like Moses , or Ted Kaczynski .
I got both of them .
So there was the topiary there .
And there 's the sheep .
Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be , the healthiest person alive .
So that 's what I 've been doing the last couple of years .
And I just finished a couple of months ago .
And I have to say , thank God .
Because living so healthily was killing me .
It was so overwhelming , because the amount of things you have to do , it 's just mind-boggling .
I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers .
And they were telling me all the things I had to do .
I had to eat right , exercise , meditate , pet dogs , because that lowers the blood pressure .
I wrote the book on a treadmill , and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book .
I had to put on sunscreen .
This was no small feat , because if you listen to dermatologists , they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen .
And you have to reapply it every two to four hours .
So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen .
I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year .
There was the washing of hands .
I had to do that properly .
And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house , because those are just orgies of germs .
So that took a lot of time .
I also tried to be the safest person I could be , because that 's a part of health .
I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council .
They started a public campaign that says , " A walking helmet is a good helmet . "
So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking , but also for walking around .
And you can see there they 're shopping with their helmets .
Well yeah , I tried that .
Now it 's a little extreme , I admit .
But if you think about this , this is actually -- the " Freakonomics " authors wrote about this -- that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving .
So something to think about tonight if you 've had a couple .
So I finished , and it was a success in a sense .
All of the markers went in the right direction .
My cholesterol went down , I lost weight , my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant .
So that was nice .
And it was successful overall .
But I also learned that I was too healthy , and that was unhealthy .
I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family .
And as Dan Buettner can tell you , having a strong social network is so crucial to our health .
So I finished .
And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over .
I went to the dark side , and I just indulged myself .
It was like something out of Caligula .
Without the sex part .
Because I have three young kids , so that wasn 't happening .
But the over-eating and over-drinking , definitely .
And I finally have stabilized .
So now I 'm back to adopting many -- not all ; I don 't wear a helmet anymore -- but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year .
It was really a life-changing project .
And I , of course , don 't have time to go into all of them .
Let me just tell you two really quickly .
The first is -- and this was surprising to me ; I didn 't expect this to come out -- but I live a much quieter life now .
Because we live in such a noisy world .
There 's trains and planes and cars and Bill O 'Reilly , he 's very noisy .
And this is a real underestimated , under-appreciated health hazard -- not just because it harms our hearing , which it obviously does , but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response .
A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going .
And this , over the years , can cause real damage , cardiovascular damage .
The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year .
And it was done in Europe .
And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution .
So they think it 's actually very deadly .
And by the way , it 's also terrible for your brain .
It really impairs cognition .
And our Founding Fathers knew about this .
When they wrote the Constitution , they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate .
So without noise reduction technology , our country would not exist .
So as a patriot , I felt it was important to -- I wear all the earplugs and the earphones , and it 's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way .
And the second point I want to make , the final point , is that -- and it 's actually been a theme of TEDMED -- that joy is so important to your health , that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there 's some sense of pleasure and joy in them .
And just to give you one instance of this : food .
The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what 's the most pleasurable .
But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food .
To give just one example , we love crunchiness , mouthfeel .
So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes -- throw in some sunflower seeds .
And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you 're eating Doritos .
And it has made me a healthier person .
So that is it .
The book about it comes out in April .
It 's called " Drop Dead Healthy . "
And I hope that I don 't get sick during the book tour .
That 's my greatest hope .
So thank you very much .
Peter Reinhart : The art and craft of bread
Batch to batch , crust to crust ... In tribute to the beloved staple food , baking master Peter Reinhart reflects on the cordial couplings that give us our daily bread . Try not to eat a slice .
This is a wheat bread , a whole wheat bread , and it 's made with a new technique that I 've been playing around with , and developing and writing about which , for lack of a better name , we call the epoxy method .
And I call it an epoxy method because -- it 's not very appetizing . I understand that -- but -- but if you think about epoxy , what 's epoxy ?
It 's two resins that are , sort of , in and of themselves -- neither of which can make glue , but when you put the two together , something happens . A bond takes place , and you get this very strong , powerful adhesive .
Well , in this technique , gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world , the artisan bread-baking community , has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so -- since we 've been engaged in a bread renaissance in America -- and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads .
And let 's face it , everyone 's trying to move towards whole grains .
We finally , after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option , we 're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them .
The challenge , though , for a wholegrain baker is , you know , how do you make it taste good ?
Because whole grain -- it 's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread . White flour is sweet .
It 's mainly starch , and starch , when you break it down -- what is starch ? It 's -- thank you -- sugar , yes .
So a baker , and a good baker , knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch .
With whole grain bread , you have other obstacles .
You 've got bran , which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us , or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber , for the bran is fiber .
It 's got germ . Those are the good things , but those aren 't the tastiest parts of the wheat .
So whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads , and people don 't like to eat , quote , health food . They like to eat healthy and healthily , but when we think of something as a health food , we think of it as something we eat out of obligation , not out of passion and love for the flavor .
And ultimately , the challenge of the baker , the challenge of every culinary student , of every chef , is to deliver flavor .
Flavor is king . Flavor rules .
I call it the flavor rule . Flavor rules .
And -- and you can get somebody to eat something that 's good for them once , but they won 't eat it again if they don 't like it , right ?
So , this is the challenge for this bread .
We 're going to try this at lunch , and I 'll explain a bit more about it , but it 's made not only with two types of pre-doughs -- this attempt , again , at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened .
It 's just dough that is wet .
It 's hydrated dough we call " the soaker " -- that helps to start enzyme activity .
And enzymes are the secret , kind of , ingredient in dough that brings out flavor .
It starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch .
That 's what enzymes are doing .
And so , if we can release some of those , they become accessible to us in our palate .
They become accessible to the yeast as food .
They become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust .
The other pre-dough that we make is fermented -- our pre-ferment .
And it 's made -- it can be a sourdough starter , or what we call a " biga " or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it , and that starts to develop flavor also .
And on day two , we put those two pieces together . That 's the epoxy .
And we 're hoping that , sort of , the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough , and when we put them together and add the final ingredients , we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain .
That 's the challenge . Okay , so , now , what we -- in the journey of wheat , let 's go back and look at these 12 stages .
I 'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them .
Okay , we 're going to start with the first stage .
And this is what every student has to begin with .
Everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is " mise en place , " which is just a French way of saying , " get organized . "
Everything in its place . First stage .
So in baking we call it scaling -- weighing out the ingredients .
Stage two is mixing . We take the ingredients and we mix them .
We have to develop the gluten .
There 's no gluten in flour . There 's only the potential for gluten .
Here 's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we 've got glutenin and gliadin , neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread .
But when they get hydrated and they bond to each other , they create a stronger molecule , a stronger protein we call gluten .
And so we , in the mixing process , have to develop the gluten , we have to activate the leaven or the yeast , and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly .
Then we get into fermentation , the third stage , which is really where the flavor develops .
The yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars , creating carbon dioxide and alcohol -- essentially it 's burping and sweating , which is what bread is .
It 's yeast burps and sweat .
And somehow , this is transformed -- the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed -- and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food , and we 're going to explore that in a minute .
But then , quickly through the next few stages .
We , after it 's fermented and it 's developed , started to develop flavor and character , we divide it into smaller units .
And then we take those units and we shape them . We give them a little pre-shape , usually a round or a little torpedo shape , sometimes .
That 's called " rounding . "
And there 's a short rest period . It can be for a few seconds .
It can be for 20 or 30 minutes . We call that resting or benching .
Then we go into final shaping , " panning " -- which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan .
This takes a second , but it 's a distinctive stage .
It can be in a basket . It can be in a loaf pan , but we pan it .
And then , stage nine .
The fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages . Again , developing more flavor .
The final fermentation takes place in stage nine .
We call it " proofing . "
Proofing means to prove that the dough is alive .
And at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape , and it goes into the oven -- stage 10 .
Three transformations take place in the oven .
The sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust .
They give us that beautiful brown crust .
Only the crust can caramelize . It 's the only place that gets hot enough .
Inside , the proteins -- this gluten -- coagulates .
When it gets to about 160 degrees , the proteins all line up and they create structure , the gluten structure -- what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread .
And the starches , when they reach about 180 degrees , gelatinize .
And gelatinization is yet another oven transformation .
Coagulation , caramelization and gelatinization -- when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that 's around them , they -- they kind of swell , and then they burst .
And they burst , and they spill their guts into the bread .
So basically now we 're eating yeast sweats -- sweat , burps and starch guts .
Again , transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread .
And stage 11 , we call it cooling -- because we never really eat the bread right away .
There 's a little carry-over baking .
The proteins have to set up , strengthen and firm up .
And then we have stage 12 , which the textbooks call " packaging , " but my students call " eating . "
And so , we 're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat , and in a few minutes we will try this , and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker 's mission of pulling out flavor .
But I want to go back now and revisit these steps , and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation , because I really believe that all things can be understood -- and this is not my own idea . This goes back to the Scholastics and to the Ancients -- that all things can be understood on four levels : the literal , the metaphoric or poetic level , the political or ethical level .
And ultimately , the mystical or sometimes called the " anagogical " level .
It 's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal .
In fact , Dante says you can 't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level , so that 's why we 're talking literally about bread .
But let 's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level -- all in my quest for answering the question , " What is it about bread that 's so special ? "
And fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor .
Because what happens is , bread begins as wheat or any other grain .
But what 's wheat ? Wheat is a grass that grows in the field .
And , like all grasses , at a certain point it puts out seeds .
And we harvest those seeds , and those are the wheat kernels .
Now , in order to harvest it -- I mean , what 's harvesting ?
It 's just a euphemism for killing , right ?
I mean , that 's what 's harvest -- we say we harvest the pig , you know ?
Yes , we slaughter , you know . Yes , that 's life .
We harvest the wheat , and in harvesting it , we kill it .
Now , wheat is alive , and as we harvest it , it gives up its seeds .
Now , at least with seeds we have the potential for future life .
We can plant those in the ground .
And we save some of those for the next generation .
But most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour .
And at that point , the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity .
It 's not only been killed , but it 's been denied any potential for creating future life .
So we turn it into flour .
So as I said , I think bread is a transformational food .
The first transformation -- and , by the way , the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else .
O.K. ? Radical , not subtle .
Not like hot water made cold , or cold water turned hot , but water boiled off and becoming steam .
That 's a transformation , two different things .
Well , in this case , the first transformation is alive to dead .
I 'd call that radical .
So , we 've got now this flour .
And what do we do ? We add some water .
In stage one , we weigh it .
In stage two , we add water and salt to it , mix it together , and we create something that we call " clay . "
It 's like clay .
And we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call " leaven . "
In this case , it 's yeast , but yeast is leaven . What does leaven mean ?
Leaven comes from the root word that means enliven -- to vivify , to bring to life .
By the way , what 's the Hebrew word for clay ? Adam .
You see , the baker , in this moment , has become , in a sense , sort of , the God of his dough , you know , and his dough , well , while it 's not an intelligent life form , is now alive .
And we know it 's alive because in stage three , it grows . Growth is the proof of life .
And while it 's growing , all these literal transformations are taking place .
Enzymes are breaking forth sugars .
Yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol .
Bacteria is in there , eating the same sugars , turning them into acids .
In other words , personality and character 's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker .
And the baker 's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product .
A subtle change in temperature -- a subtle change in time -- it 's all about a balancing act between time , temperature and ingredients . That 's the art of baking .
So all these things are determined by the baker , and the bread goes through some stages , and characters develop .
And then we divide it , and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units , and each of those units are given shape by the baker .
And as they 're shaped , they 're raised again , all along proving that they 're alive , and developing character .
And at stage 10 , we take it to the oven .
It 's still dough . Nobody eats bread dough -- a few people do , I think , but not too many .
I 've met some dough eaters , but -- it 's not the staff of life , right ? Bread is the staff of life .
But dough is what we 're working with , and we take that dough to the oven , and it goes into the oven . As soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees , it passes what we call the " thermal death point . "
Students love that TDP . They think it 's the name of a video game .
But it 's the thermal death point -- all life ceases there .
The yeast , whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough , to enliven it , to vivify it , in order to complete its mission , which is also to turn this dough into bread , has to give up its life .
So you see the symbolism at work ? It 's starting to come forth a little bit , you know .
It 's starting to make sense to me -- what goes in is dough , what comes out is bread -- or it goes in alive , comes out dead .
Third transformation . First transformation , alive to dead .
Second transformation , dead brought back to life .
Third transformation , alive to dead -- but dough to bread .
Or another analogy would be , a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly .
And it 's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life .
This is the product that everyone in the world eats , that is so difficult to give up .
It 's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life .
It 's used as a symbol for transformation .
And so , as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that , again completing the life cycle , you know , we have a chance to essentially ingest that -- it nurtures us , and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this .
So this is what I 've learned from bread .
This is what bread has taught me in my journey .
And what we 're going to attempt to do with this bread here , again , is to use , in addition to everything we talked about , this bread we 're going to call " spent grain bread " because , as you know , bread-making is very similar to beer-making .
Beer is basically liquid bread , or bread is solid beer .
And -- they -- they 're invented around the same time . I think beer came first .
And the Egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot , Egyptian sun , and it turned into bread .
But we 've got this bread , and what I did here is to try to , again , evoke even more flavor from this grain , was we 've added into it the spent grain from beer-making .
And if you make this bread , you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer .
I like dark spent grain . Today we 're using a light spent grain a light lager or an ale -- that is wheat and barley that 's been toasted .
In other words , the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting .
We 're going to take some of that , and put it into the bread .
So now we not only have a high-fiber bread , but now fiber on top of fiber .
And so this is , again , hopefully not only a healthy bread , but a bread that you will enjoy .
So , if I , kind of , break this bread , maybe we can share this now a little bit here .
We 'll start a little piece here , and I 'm going to take a little piece here -- I think I 'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch .
I 'll leave you with what I call the baker 's blessing .
May your crust be crisp , and your bread always rise .
Thank you .
Between music and medicine
When Robert Gupta was caught between a career as a doctor and as a violinist , he realized his place was in the middle , with a bow in his hand and a sense of social justice in his heart . He tells a moving story of society 's marginalized and the power of music therapy , which can succeed where conventional medicine fails .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . It 's a distinct privilege to be here .
A few weeks ago , I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets .
This one entered her left hemisphere , and knocked out her Broca 's area , the speech center of her brain .
And in this session , Gabby 's working with a speech therapist , and she 's struggling to produce some of the most basic words , and you can see her growing more and more devastated , until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears , and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist .
And after a few moments , her therapist tries a new tack , and they start singing together , and Gabby starts to sing through her tears , and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels , and she sings , in one descending scale , she sings , " Let it shine , let it shine , let it shine . "
And it 's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail , in this case literally speak .
Seeing this video of Gabby Giffords reminded me of the work of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug , one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at Harvard , and Schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called Melodic Intonation Therapy , which has become very popular in music therapy now .
Schlaug found that his stroke victims who were aphasic , could not form sentences of three- or four-word sentences , but they could still sing the lyrics to a song , whether it was " Happy Birthday To You " or their favorite song by the Eagles or the Rolling Stones .
And after 70 hours of intensive singing lessons , he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere 's damage .
When I was 17 , I visited Dr. Schlaug 's lab , and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain -- how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non-musicians , how music , and listening to music , could just light up the entire brain , from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum , how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism , to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression , how deeply Parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music , and how late-stage Alzheimer 's patients , whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family , could still pick out a tune by Chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children .
But I had an ulterior motive of visiting Gottfried Schlaug , and it was this : that I was at a crossroads in my life , trying to choose between music and medicine .
I had just completed my undergraduate , and I was working as a research assistant at the lab of Dennis Selkoe , studying Parkinson 's disease at Harvard , and I had fallen in love with neuroscience . I wanted to become a surgeon .
I wanted to become a doctor like Paul Farmer or Rick Hodes , these kind of fearless men who go into places like Haiti or Ethiopia and work with AIDS patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis , or with children with disfiguring cancers .
I wanted to become that kind of Red Cross doctor , that doctor without borders .
On the other hand , I had played the violin my entire life .
Music for me was more than a passion . It was obsession .
It was oxygen . I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan , and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv , and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory , but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine . And that afternoon , I had to ask him , " How was it for you making that decision ? "
And he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to , and that for me , medical school could wait , but that the violin simply would not .
And after two more years of studying music , I decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the MCAT and applying to medical school like a good Indian son to become the next Dr. Gupta .
And I decided to shoot for the impossible and I took an audition for the esteemed Los Angeles Philharmonic .
It was my first audition , and after three days of playing behind a screen in a trial week , I was offered the position .
And it was a dream . It was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra , to perform in the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous Gustavo Dudamel , but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family , my new musical home .
But a year later , I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard , one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician .
Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard , but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s , was treated with thorazine at Bellevue , and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later .
Nathaniel 's story has become a beacon for homelessness and mental health advocacy throughout the United States , as told through the book and the movie " The Soloist , " but I became his friend , and I became his violin teacher , and I told him that wherever he had his violin , and wherever I had mine , I would play a lesson with him .
And on the many times I saw Nathaniel on Skid Row , I witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments , from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode .
Playing for Nathaniel , the music took on a deeper meaning , because now it was about communication , a communication where words failed , a communication of a message that went deeper than words , that registered at a fundamentally primal level in Nathaniel 's psyche , yet came as a true musical offering from me .
I found myself growing outraged that someone like Nathaniel could have ever been homeless on Skid Row because of his mental illness , yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on Skid Row alone who had stories as tragic as his , but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets ?
And at the very core of this crisis of mine , I felt somehow the life of music had chosen me , where somehow , perhaps possibly in a very naive sense , I felt what Skid Row really needed was somebody like Paul Farmer and not another classical musician playing on Bunker Hill .
But in the end , it was Nathaniel who showed me that if I was truly passionate about change , if I wanted to make a difference , I already had the perfect instrument to do it , that music was the bridge that connected my world and his .
There 's a beautiful quote by the Romantic German composer Robert Schumann , who said , " To send light into the darkness of men 's hearts , such is the duty of the artist . "
And this is a particularly poignant quote because Schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum .
And inspired by what I learned from Nathaniel , I started an organization on Skid Row of musicians called Street Symphony , bringing the light of music into the very darkest places , performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on Skid Row , performing for combat veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder , and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane .
After one of our events at the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino , a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face , and she had a palsy , she was shaking , and she had this gorgeous smile , and she said that she had never heard classical music before , she didn 't think she was going to like it , she had never heard a violin before , but that hearing this music was like hearing the sunshine , and that nobody ever came to visit them , and that for the first time in six years , when she heard us play , she stopped shaking without medication .
Suddenly , what we 're finding with these concerts , away from the stage , away from the footlights , out of the tuxedo tails , the musicians become the conduit for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room , would never have access to the kind of music that we make .
Just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone , the power and beauty of music transcends the " E " in the middle of our beloved acronym .
Music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone .
The synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by Wagner , or a symphony by Brahms , or chamber music by Beethoven , compels us to remember our shared , common humanity , the deeply communal connected consciousness , the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says is hard-wired into our brain 's right hemisphere .
And for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mental illness within homelessness and incarceration , the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them , to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them .
And the spark of that beauty , the spark of that humanity transforms into hope , and we know , whether we choose the path of music or of medicine , that 's the very first thing we must instill within our communities , within our audiences , if we want to inspire healing from within .
I 'd like to end with a quote by John Keats , the Romantic English poet , a very famous quote that I 'm sure all of you know .
Keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry , but he died when he was a year older than me .
And Keats said , " Beauty is truth , and truth beauty .
That is all ye know on Earth , and all ye need to know . "
Thomas Suarez : A 12-year-old app developer
Most 12-year-olds love playing videogames -- Thomas Suarez taught himself how to create them . After developing iPhone apps like " Bustin Jeiber , " a whack-a-mole game , he is now using his skills to help other kids become developers . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
I 've always had a fascination for computers and technology , and I made a few apps for the iPhone , iPod Touch , and iPad .
I 'd like to share a couple with you today .
My first app was a unique fortune teller called Earth Fortune that would display different colors of earth depending on what your fortune was .
My favorite and most successful app is Bustin Jieber , which is ⠀ ” ⠀ ” which is a Justin Bieber Whac-A-Mole .
I created it because a lot of people at school disliked Justin Bieber a little bit , so I decided to make the app .
So I went to work programming it , and I released it just before the holidays in 2010 .
A lot of people ask me , how did I make these ?
A lot of times it 's because the person who asked the question wants to make an app also .
A lot of kids these days like to play games , but now they want to make them , and it 's difficult , because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program .
I mean , for soccer , you could go to a soccer team .
For violin , you could get lessons for a violin .
But what if you want to make an app ?
And their parents , the kid 's parents might have done some of these things when they were young , but not many parents have written apps .
Where do you go to find out how to make an app ?
Well , this is how I approached it . This is what I did .
First of all , I 've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down , such as Python , C , Java , etc .
And then Apple released the iPhone , and with it , the iPhone software development kit , and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app .
This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me , and after playing with the software development kit a little bit , I made a couple apps , I made some test apps .
One of them happened to be Earth Fortune , and I was ready to put Earth Fortune on the App Store , and so I persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the App Store .
They agreed , and now I have apps on the App Store .
I 've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family , friends , teachers and even people at the Apple Store , and that 's been a huge help to me .
I 've gotten a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs , and I 've started an app club at school , and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club .
Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app .
This is so I can share my experiences with others .
There 's these programs called the iPad Pilot Program , and some districts have them .
I 'm fortunate enough to be part of one .
A big challenge is , how should the iPads be used , and what apps should we put on the iPads ?
So we 're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they 'd like .
When we design the app and we sell it , it will be free to local districts and other districts that we sell to , all the money from that will go into the local ed foundations .
These days , students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology .
So -- -- sorry -- -- so this is a resource to teachers , and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it .
I 'd like to finish up by saying what I 'd like to do in the future .
First of all , I 'd like to create more apps , more games .
I 'm working with a third party company to make an app .
I 'd like to get into Android programming and development , and I 'd like to continue my app club , and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others . Thank you .
Dean Ornish : Your genes are not your fate
Dean Ornish shares new research that shows how adopting healthy lifestyle habits can affect a person at a genetic level . For instance , he says , when you live healthier , eat better , exercise , and love more , your brain cells actually increase .
One way to change our genes is to make new ones , as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown .
Another is to change our lifestyles .
And what we 're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be , that you don 't have to wait very long to see the benefits .
When you eat healthier , manage stress , exercise and love more , your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen .
But more than that , your brain gets measurably bigger .
Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now .
This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us .
Now , there 's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells .
Some of my favorite things , like chocolate and tea , blueberries , alcohol in moderation , stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana .
I 'm just the messenger .
What were we just talking about ?
And other things that can make it worse , that can cause you to lose brain cells .
The usual suspects , like saturated fat and sugar , nicotine , opiates , cocaine , too much alcohol and chronic stress .
Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle , so you age less quickly . Your skin doesn 't wrinkle as much .
Your heart gets more blood flow .
We 've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease .
That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left , after only a year become measurably less clogged .
And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left , the blue means no blood flow .
A year later -- orange and white is maximum blood flow .
We 've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and , by extension , breast cancer , simply by making these changes .
We 've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes , whereas only nine percent in the comparison group .
These differences were highly significant .
Even your sexual organs get more blood flow , so you increase sexual potency .
One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services , showing that nicotine , which constricts your arteries , can cause a heart attack or a stroke , but it also causes impotence .
Half of guys who smoke are impotent .
How sexy is that ?
Now we 're also about to publish a study -- the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer .
This is what 's called a heat map -- and the different colors -- and along the side , on the right , are different genes .
And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed -- in effect , turning on the good genes , the disease-preventing genes , turning off the disease-promoting genes .
And so these findings I think are really very powerful , giving many people new hope and new choices .
And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe , that are giving you your genetic profiles , are giving some people a sense of , " Gosh , well , what can I do about it ? "
Well , our genes are not our fate , and if we make these changes -- they 're a predisposition -- but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise , we can actually change how our genes are expressed .
Thank you .
Michael Norton : How to buy happiness
At TEDxCambridge , Michael Norton shares fascinating research on how money can , indeed buy happiness -- when you don 't spend it on yourself . Listen for surprising data on the many ways pro-social spending can benefit you , your work , and other people .
So I want to talk today about money and happiness , which are two things that a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking about , either trying to earn them or trying to increase them .
And a lot of us resonate with this phrase .
So we see it in religions and self-help books , that money can 't buy happiness .
And I want to suggest today that , in fact , that 's wrong .
I 'm at a business school , so that 's what we do .
So that 's wrong , and , in fact , if you think that , you 're actually just not spending it right .
So that instead of spending it the way you usually spend it , maybe if you spent it differently , that might work a little bit better .
And before I tell you the ways that you can spend it that will make you happier , let 's think about the ways we usually spend it that don 't , in fact , make us happier .
We had a little natural experiment .
So CNN , a little while ago , wrote this interesting article on what happens to people when they win the lottery .
It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives are going to be amazing .
This article 's about how their lives get ruined .
So what happens when people win the lottery is , number one , they spend all the money and go into debt , and number two , all of their friends and everyone they 've ever met find them and bug them for money .
And it ruins their social relationships , in fact .
So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery .
What was interesting about the article was people started commenting on the article , readers of the thing .
And instead of talking about how it had made them realize that money doesn 't lead to happiness , everyone instantly started saying , " You know what I would do if I won the lottery ... ? "
and fantasizing about what they 'd do .
And here 's just two of the ones we saw that are just really interesting to think about .
One person wrote in , " When I win , I 'm going to buy my own little mountain and have a little house on top . "
And another person wrote , " I would fill a big bathtub with money and get in the tub while smoking a big fat cigar and sipping a glass of champagne . "
This is even worse now : " Then I 'd have a picture taken and dozens of glossies made .
Anyone begging for money or trying to extort from me would receive a copy of the picture and nothing else . "
And so many of the comments were exactly of this type , where people got money and , in fact , it made them antisocial .
So I told you that it ruins people 's lives and that their friends bug them .
It also , money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves .
Well maybe the reason that money doesn 't make us happy is that we 're always spending it on the wrong things , and in particular , that we 're always spending it on ourselves .
And we thought , I wonder what would happen if we made people spend more of their money on other people .
So instead of being antisocial with your money , what if you were a little more prosocial with your money ?
And we thought , let 's make people do it and see what happens .
So let 's have some people do what they usually do and spend money on themselves , and let 's make some people give money away , and measure their happiness and see if , in fact , they get happier .
So the first way that we did this .
On one Vancouver morning , we went out on the campus at University of British Columbia and we approached people and said , " Do you want to be in an experiment ? "
They said , " Yes . "
We asked them how happy they were , and then we gave them an envelope .
And one of the envelopes had things in it that said , " By 5 : 00 pm today , spend this money on yourself . "
So we gave some examples of what you could spend it on .
Other people , in the morning , got a slip of paper that said , " By 5 : 00 pm today , spend this money on somebody else . "
Also inside the envelope was money .
And we manipulated how much money we gave them .
So some people got this slip of paper and five dollars .
Some people got this slip of paper and 20 dollars .
We let them go about their day . They did whatever they wanted to do .
We found out that they did in fact spend it in the way that we asked them to .
We called them up at night and asked them , " What 'd you spend it on , and how happy do you feel now ? "
What did they spend it on ?
Well these are college undergrads , so a lot of what they spent it on for themselves were things like earrings and makeup .
One woman said she bought a stuffed animal for her niece .
People gave money to homeless people .
Huge effect here of Starbucks .
So if you give undergraduates five dollars , it looks like coffee to them and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can .
But some people bought a coffee for themselves , the way they usually would , but other people said that they bought a coffee for somebody else .
So the very same purchase , just targeted toward yourself or targeted toward somebody else .
What did we find when we called them back at the end of the day ?
People who spent money on other people got happier .
People who spent money on themselves , nothing happened .
It didn 't make them less happy , it just didn 't do much for them .
And the other thing we saw is the amount of money doesn 't matter that much .
So people thought that 20 dollars would be way better than five dollars .
In fact , it doesn 't matter how much money you spent .
What really matters is that you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself .
We see this again and again when we give people money to spend on other people instead of on themselves .
Of course , these are undergraduates in Canada -- not the world 's most representative population .
They 're also fairly wealthy and affluent and all these other sorts of things .
We wanted to see if this holds true everywhere in the world or just among wealthy countries .
So we went , in fact , to Uganda and ran a very similar experiment .
So imagine , instead of just people in Canada , we said , " Name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people .
Describe it . How happy did it make you ? "
Or in Uganda , " Name the last time you spent money on yourself or other people and describe that . "
And then we asked them how happy they are again .
And what we see is sort of amazing because there 's human universals on what you do with your money and then real cultural differences on what you do as well .
So for example , one guy from Uganda says this .
He said , " I called a girl I wished to love . "
They basically went out on a date , and he says at the end that he didn 't " achieve " her up till now .
Here 's a guy from Canada .
Very similar thing .
" I took my girlfriend out for dinner .
We went to a movie , we left early , and then went back to her room for ... " only cake -- just a piece of cake .
Human universal -- so you spend money on other people , you 're being nice to them .
Maybe you have something in mind , maybe not .
But then we see extraordinary differences .
So look at these two .
This is a woman from Canada .
We say , " Name a time you spent money on somebody else . "
She says , " I bought a present for my mom .
I drove to the mall in my car , bought a present , gave it to my mom . "
Perfectly nice thing to do .
It 's good to get gifts for people that you know .
Compare that to this woman from Uganda .
" I was walking and met a long-time friend whose son was sick with malaria .
They had no money , they went to a clinic and I gave her this money . "
This isn 't $ 10,000 , it 's the local currency .
So it 's a very small amount of money , in fact .
But enormously different motivations here .
This is a real medical need , literally a life-saving donation .
Above , it 's just kind of , I bought a gift for my mother .
What we see again though is that the specific way that you spend on other people isn 't nearly as important as the fact that you spend on other people in order to make yourself happy , which is really quite important .
So you don 't have to do amazing things with your money to make yourself happy .
You can do small , trivial things and yet still get these benefits from doing this .
These are only two countries .
We also wanted to go even broader and look at every country in the world if we could to see what the relationship is between money and happiness .
We got data from the Gallup Organization , which you know from all the political polls that have been happening lately .
They ask people , " Did you donate money to charity recently ? "
and they ask them , " How happy are you with your life in general ? "
And we can see what the relationship is between those two things .
Are they positively correlated ? Giving money makes you happy .
Or are they negatively correlated ?
On this map , green will mean they 're positively correlated and red means they 're negatively correlated .
And you can see , the world is crazily green .
So in almost every country in the world where we have this data , people who give money to charity are happier people that people who don 't give money to charity .
I know you 're all looking at that red country in the middle .
I would be a jerk and not tell you what it is , but in fact , it 's Central African Republic .
You can make up stories . Maybe it 's different there for some reason or another .
Just below that to the right is Rwanda though , which is amazingly green .
So almost everywhere we look we see that giving money away makes you happier than keeping it for yourself .
What about your work life , which is where we spend all the rest of our time when we 're not with the people we know .
We decided to infiltrate some companies and do a very similar thing .
So these are sales teams in Belgium .
They work in teams ; they go out and sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs .
So we can look and see how well they sell things as a function of being a member of a team .
Some teams , we give people on the team some money for themselves and say , " Spend it however you want on yourself , " just like we did with the undergrads in Canada .
But other teams we say , " Here 's 15 euro .
Spend it on one of your teammates this week .
Buy them something as a gift or a present and give it to them .
And then we can see , well now we 've got teams that spend on themselves and we 've got these prosocial teams who we give money to make the team a little bit better .
The reason I have a ridiculous pinata there is one of the teams pooled their money and bought a pinata , and they all got around and smashed the pinata and all the candy fell out and things like that .
A very silly , trivial thing to do , but think of the difference on a team that didn 't do that at all , that got 15 euro , put it in their pocket , maybe bought themselves a coffee , or teams that had this prosocial experience where they all bonded together to buy something and do a group activity .
What we see is that , in fact , the teams that are prosocial sell more stuff than the teams that only got money for themselves .
And one way to think about it is for every 15 euro you give people for themselves , they put it in their pocket , they don 't do anything different than they did before .
You don 't get any money from that .
You actually lose money because it doesn 't motivate them to perform any better .
But when you give them 15 euro to spend on their teammates , they do so much better on their teams that you actually get a huge win on investing this kind of money .
And I realize that you 're probably thinking to yourselves , this is all fine , but there 's a context that 's incredibly important for public policy and I can 't imagine it would work there .
And basically that if he doesn 't show me that it works here , I don 't believe anything he said .
And I know what you 're all thinking about are dodgeball teams .
This was a huge criticism that we got to say , if you can 't show it with dodgeball teams , this is all stupid .
So we went out and found these dodgeball teams and infiltrated them .
And we did the exact same thing as before .
So some teams , we give people on the team money , they spend it on themselves .
Other teams , we give them money to spend on their dodgeball teammates .
The teams that spend money on themselves are just the same winning percentages as they were before .
The teams that we give the money to spend on each other , they become different teams and , in fact , they dominate the league by the time they 're done .
Across all of these different contexts -- your personal life , you work life , even silly things like intramural sports -- we see spending on other people has a bigger return for you than spending on yourself .
And so I 'll just say , I think if you think money can 't buy happiness you 're not spending it right .
The implication is not you should buy this product instead of that product and that 's the way to make yourself happier .
It 's in fact , that you should stop thinking about which product to buy for yourself and try giving some of it to other people instead .
And we luckily have an opportunity for you .
DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit for mainly public school teachers in low-income schools .
They post projects , so they say , " I want to teach Huckleberry Finn to my class and we don 't have the books , " or " I want a microscope to teach my students science and we don 't have a microscope . "
You and I can go on and buy it for them .
The teacher writes you a thank you note . The kids write you a thank you note .
Sometimes they send you pictures of them using the microscope .
It 's an extraordinary thing .
Go to the website and start yourself on the process of thinking , again , less about " How can I spend money on myself ? "
and more about " If I 've got five dollars or 15 dollars , what can I do to benefit other people ? "
Because ultimately when you do that , you 'll find that you 'll benefit yourself much more .
Thank you .
Emmanuel Jal : The music of a war child
For five years , young Emmanuel Jal fought as a child soldier in the Sudan . Rescued by an aid worker , he 's become an international hip-hop star and an activist for kids in war zones . In words and lyrics , he tells the story of his amazing life .
I just want to say my name is Emmanuel Jal .
And I come from a long way .
I 've been telling a story that has been so painful for me .
It 's been a tough journey for me , traveling the world , telling my story in form of a book .
And also telling it like now .
And also , the easiest one was when I was doing it in form of a music .
So I have branded myself as a war child .
I 'm doing this because of an old lady in my village now , who have lost her children .
There is no newspaper to cover her pain , and what she wants to change in this society .
And I 'm doing it for a young man who want to create a change and has no way to project his voice because he can 't write .
Or there is no Internet , like Facebook , MySpace , Also one thing that kept me pushing this story , this painful stories out , the dreams I have , sometimes , is like the voices of the dead , that I have seen would tell me , " Don 't give up . Keep on going . "
Because sometime I feel like stopping and not doing it , because I didn 't know what I was putting myself into .
Well I was born in the most difficult time , when my country was at war .
I saw my village burned down .
The world that meant a lot to me , I saw it vanish in my face .
I saw my aunt in rape when I was only five .
My mother was claimed by the war .
My brothers and sisters were scattered .
And up to now , me and my father were detached and I still have issues with him .
Seeing people die every day , my mother crying , it 's like I was raised in a violence .
And that made me call myself a war child .
And not only that , when I was eight I became a child soldier .
I didn 't know what was the war for .
But one thing I knew was an image that I saw that stuck in my head .
When I went to the training camp I say , " I want to kill as many Muslims , and as many Arabs , as possible . "
The training wasn 't easy , but that was the driving force , because I wanted to revenge for my family .
I wanted to revenge for my village .
Luckily now things have changed because I came to discover the truth .
What was actually killing us wasn 't the Muslims , wasn 't the Arabs .
It was somebody sitting somewhere manipulating the system , and using religion to get what they want to get out of us , which is the oil , the diamond , the gold and the land .
So realizing the truth gave me a position to choose : should I continue to hate , or let it go ?
So I happened to forgive . Now I sing music with the Muslims . I dance with them .
I even had a movie out called " War Child , " funded by Muslim people .
So that pain has gone out .
But my story is huge .
So I 'm just going to go into a different step now , which is easier for me .
I 'm going to give you poem called " Forced to Sin , " which is from my album " War Child . "
I talk about my story .
One of the journey that I tread when I was tempted to eat my friend because we had no food and we were like around 400 .
And only 16 people survived that journey .
So I hope you 're going to hear this .
My dreams are like torment .
My every moment .
Voices in my brain , of friends that was slain .
Friends like Lual who died by my side , of starvation .
In the burning jungle , and the desert plain .
Next was I , but Jesus heard my cry .
As I was tempted to eat the rotten flesh of my comrade , he gave me comfort .
We used to raid villages , stealing chickens , goats and sheeps , anything we could eat .
I knew it was rude , but we needed food .
And therefore I was forced to sin , forced to sin to make a living , forced to sin to make a living .
Sometimes you gotta lose to win .
Never give up . Never give in .
Left home at the age of seven .
One year later , live with an AK-47 by my side .
Slept with one eye open wide .
Run , duck , play dead and hide .
I 've seen my people die like flies .
But I 've never seen a dead body , at least one that I 've killed .
But still as I wonder , I won 't go under .
Guns barking like lightning and thunder .
As a child so young and tender , Words I can 't forget I still remember .
I saw sergeant command raising his hand , no retreat , no surrender .
I carry the banner of the trauma .
War child , child without a mama , still fighting in the saga .
Yet as I wage this new war I 'm not alone in this drama .
No sit or stop , as I reach for the top I 'm fully dedicated like a patriotic cop .
I 'm on a fight , day and night .
Sometime I do wrong in order to make things right .
It 's like I 'm living a dream .
First time I 'm feeling like a human being .
Ah ! The children of Darfur .
Your empty bellies on the telly and now it 's you that I 'm fighting for .
Left home .
Don 't even know the day I 'll ever return .
My country is war-torn .
Music I used to hear was bombs and fire of guns .
So many people die that I don 't even cry no more .
Ask God question , what am I here for .
And why are my people poor .
And why , why when the rest of the children were learning how to read and write , I was learning how to fight .
I ate snails , vultures , rabbits , snakes , and anything that had life .
I was ready to eat .
I know it 's a shame . But who is to be blamed ?
That 's my story shared in the form of a lesson .
Thank you .
What energized me and kept me going is the music I do .
I never saw anybody to tell my story to them so they could advise me or do therapy .
So the music had been my therapy for me .
It 's been where I actually see heaven , where I can be happy , where I can be a child again , in dances , through music .
So one thing I know about music : music is the only thing that has power to enter your cell system , your mind , your heart , influence your soul and your spirit , and can even influence the way you live without even you knowing .
Music is the only thing that can make you want to wake up your bed and shake your leg , without even wanting to do it .
And so the power music has I normally compare to the power love when love doesn 't see a color .
You know , if you fall in love with a frog , that 's it .
One testimony about how I find music is powerful is when I was still a soldier back then .
I hated the people in the north .
But I don 't know why I don 't hate their music .
So we party and dance to their music .
And one thing that shocked me is one day they brought an Arab musician to come and entertain the soldiers .
And I almost broke my leg dancing to his music .
But I had this question .
So now I 'm doing music so I know what the power of music is .
So what 's happening here ?
I 've been in a painful journey .
Today is day number 233 in which I only eat dinner .
I don 't eat breakfast . No lunch .
And I 've done a campaign called Lose to Win .
Where I 'm losing so that I could win the battle that I 'm fighting now .
So my breakfast , my lunch , I donate it to a charity that I founded because we want to build a school in Sudan .
And I 'm doing this because also it 's a normal thing in my home , people eat one meal a day .
Here I am in the West . I choose not to .
So in my village now , kids there , they normally listen to BBC , or any radio , and they are waiting to know , the day Emmanuel will eat his breakfast it means he got the money to build our school .
And so I made a commitment . I say , " I 'm gonna not eat my breakfast . "
I thought I was famous enough that I would raise the money within one month , but I 've been humbled .
So it 's taken me 232 days .
And I said , " No stop until we get it . "
And like it 's been done on Facebook , MySpace .
The people are giving three dollars .
The lowest amount we ever got was 20 cents .
Somebody donated 20 cents online .
I don 't know how they did it .
But that moved me .
And so , the importance of education to me is what I 'm willing to die for .
I 'm willing to die for this , because I know what it can do to my people .
Education enlighten your brain , give you so many chances , and you 're able to survive .
As a nation we have been crippled .
For so many years we have fed on aid .
You see a 20-years-old , 30-years-old families in a refugee camps .
They only get the food that drops from the sky , from the U.N.
So these people , you 're killing a whole generation if you just give them aid .
If anybody want to help us this is what we need .
Give us tools . Give the farmers tools .
It 's rain . Africa is fertile . They can grow the crops .
Invest in education .
Education so that we have strong institution that can create a revolution to change everything .
Because we have all those old men that are creating wars in Africa . They will die soon .
But if you invest in education then we 'll be able to change Africa .
That 's what I 'm asking .
So in order to do that , I founded a charter called Gua Africa , where we put kids in school .
And now we have a couple in university .
We have like 40 kids , ex-child soldiers mixed with anybody that we feel like we want to support .
And I said " I 'm going to put it in practice . "
And with the people that are going to follow me and help me do things .
That 's what I want to do to change , to make a difference in the world .
Well now , my time is going , so I want to sing a song .
But I 'll ask you guys to stand up so we celebrate the life of a British aid worker called Emma McCune that made it possible for me to be here .
I 'm gonna sing this song , just to inspire you how this woman has made a difference .
She came to my country and saw the importance of education .
She said the only way to help Sudan is to invest in the women , educating them , educating the children , so that they could come and create a revolution in this complex society .
So she even ended up marrying a commander from the SPLA .
And she rescued over 150 child soldiers .
One of them happened to be me now .
And so at this moment I want to ask to celebrate Emma with me .
Are you guys ready to celebrate Emma ?
Audience : Yes !
Emmanuel Jal : All right .
This one goes to Emma McCune Angel to rescue came one afternoon I 'm here because you rescued me I 'm proud to carry your legacy Thank you . Bless you . R.I.P. What would I be ? Me ! If Emma never rescued me ? What would I be ? What would I be ? Me ! Another starving refugee What would I be ? What would I be ? Me ! If Emma never rescued me ? Yeah ! Yeah ! Yeah ! You would have seen my face on the telly Fat hungry belly Flies in my eyes , head too big for my size Just another little starving child Running around in Africa , born to be wild Praise God , praise the Almighty for sending an angel to rescue me I got a reason for being on this Earth ' Cause I know more than many what a life is worth Now that I got a chance to stand my ground I 'm gonna run over mountains , leaps and bounds I ain 't an angel , hope I 'll be one soon And if I am , I wanna be like Emma McCune Me ! What would I be ? Me ! If Emma never rescued me ? What would I be ? What would I be ? Me ! Another starving refugee What would I be ? What would I be ? Me ! If Emma never rescued me ? Yeah ! Yeah ! Yeah , Yeah ! I would have probably died from starvation Or some other wretched disease I would have grown up with no education Just another refugee I stand here because somebody cared I stand here because somebody dared I know there is a lot of Emmas out there Who is willing and trying to save a life of a child What would I be ? Me ! If Emma never rescued me ? What would I be ? What would I be ? Another starving refugee I remember the time when I was small When I couldn 't read or write at all Now I 'm all grown up , I got my education The sky is the limit and I can 't be stopped by no one How I prayed for this day to come And I pray that the world find wisdom To give the poor in need some assistance Instead of putting up resistance , yeah Sitting and waiting for the politics to fix this It ain 't gonna happen They 're all sitting on they asses Popping champagne and sponging off the masses Coming from a refugee boy-soldier But I still got my dignity I gotta say it again If Emma never rescued me I 'd be a corpse on the African plain Is there anybody who 's here in the back , some love .
Big scream for Emma everybody .
Yeah ! I 'm gonna get crazy now .
What would I be ? If Emma never rescued me ? What would I be ? Another starving refugee What would I be ? If Emma never rescued me ? Yeah , Yeah Yeah , I would have probably died from starvation Or some other wretched disease I would have grown up with no education Just another refugee Thank you .
Go save a life of a child .
Blaise Agüera y Arcas : Augmented-reality maps
In a demo that drew gasps at TED2010 , Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft .
About a year and a half ago , Stephen Lawler , who also gave a talk here at TED in 2007 on Virtual Earth , brought me over to become the architect of Bing Maps , which is Microsoft 's online-mapping effort .
In the past two and a half , we 've been very hard at work on redefining the way maps work online .
And we really are seeing this in very different terms from the kind of mapping and direction site that one is used to .
So , the first thing that you might notice about the mapping site is just the fluidity of the zooming and the panning , which , if you 're familiar at all with Seadragon , Mapping is , of course , not just about cartography , it 's also about imagery .
So , as we zoom-in beyond a certain level this resolves into a kind of Sim City-like virtual view at 45 degrees .
This can be viewed from any of the cardinal directions to show you the 3D structure of the city , all the facades .
Now , we see this space , this three-dimensional environment , as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out , and map 's directions are really just one of them .
If you click on this , you 'll see some of the ones that we 've put out , just in the past couple of months since we 've launched .
So , for example , a couple of days after the disaster in Haiti , we had an earthquake map that showed before and after pictures from the sky .
This wonderful one which I don 't have time to show you is taking hyper-local blogs in real time and mapping those stories , those entries to the places that are referred to on the blogs .
It 's wonderful .
But I 'm going to show you some more candy sort of stuff .
So , we see the imagery , of course , not stopping at the sky .
These little green bubbles represent photosynths that users have made .
I 'm not going to dive into them either , but photosynths are integrated into the map .
Everything that 's cased in blue is an area where we 've taken imagery on the ground as well .
And so , when you fly down -- Thank you . When you fly down to the ground , and you see this kind of panoramic imagery , the first thing that you might notice is that it 's not just a picture , there 's just as much three-dimensional understanding of this environment as there is of the three-dimensional city from above , so if I click on something to get a closer view of it , then , the fact that that transition looks as it does , is a function of all of that geometry , all of that 3D understanding behind this model .
Now , I 'll show you a fun app that -- we 've been working on a collaboration with our friends at Flickr .
This takes Flickr , georegistered imagery and uses photosynth-like processes to connect that imagery to our imagery , so -- I 'm not sure if that 's the one I actually meant to pull up , but -- But notice -- this is , of course , a popular tourist site , and there are lots of photos around here , and these photos are all taken at different times .
So this one was taken around five .
So that 's the Flickr photo , that 's our imagery .
So you really see how this kind of crowd-sourced imagery is integrating , in a very deep way , into the map itself .
Thank you .
There are several reasons why this is interesting and one of them , of course , is time travel .
And I 'm not going to show you some of the wonderful historic imagery in here , but there are some with horses and carriages and so on as well .
But what 's cool about this is that , not only is it augmenting this visual representation of the world with things that are coming in from users , but it also is the foundation for augmented reality , and that 's something that I 'll be showing you more of in just a moment .
Now I just made a transition indoors . That 's also interesting .
OK , notice there 's now a roof above us .
We 're inside the Pike Place Market .
And this is something that we 're able to do with a backpack camera , so , we 're now not only imaging in the street with this camera on tops of cars , but we 're also imaging inside .
And from here , we 're able to do the same sorts of registration , not only of still images , but also of video .
So this is something that we 're now going to try for the first time , live , and this is really , truly , very frightening .
OK .
All right , guys , are you there ?
All right . I 'm hitting it . I 'm punching play .
I 'm live . All right . There we go .
So , these are our friends in Pike Place Market , the lab .
So they 're broadcasting this live .
OK , George , can you pan back over to the corner market ?
Because I want to show points of interest .
No , no . The other way .
Yeah , yeah , back to the corner , back to the corner .
I don 't want to see you guys yet .
OK , OK , back to the corner , back to the corner , back to the corner .
OK , never mind .
What I wanted to show you was these points of interest over here on top of the image because what that gives you a sense of is the way , if you 're actually on the spot , you can think about this -- this is taking a step in addition to augmented reality .
What the hell are you guys -- oh , sorry .
We 're doing two different -- OK , I 'm hanging up now .
We 're doing two different things here .
One of them is to take that real ...
All right , let me just take a moment and thank the team .
They 've done a fantastic job of pulling this together .
I 'm going to abandon them now and walk back outside .
And while I walk outside , I 'll just mention that here we 're using this for telepresence , but you can equally well use this on the spot , for augmented reality .
When you use it on the spot , it means that you 're able to bring all of that metadata and information about the world to you .
So here , we 're taking the extra step of also broadcasting it .
That was being broadcast , by the way , on a 4G network from the market .
All right , and now there 's one last TED talk that Microsoft has given in the past several years .
And that 's Curtis Wong , WorldWide Telescope .
So , we 're going to head over to the dumpsters , where it 's traditional , after a long day at the market , to go out for a break , but also stare up at the sky .
This is the integration of WorldWide Telescope into our maps .
This is the current -- thank you -- this is the current time . If we scrub the time , then we can see how the sky will look at different times , and we can get all of this very detailed information about different times , different dates : Let 's move the moon a little higher in the sky , maybe change the date .
I would like to kind of zoom in on the moon .
So , this is an astronomically complete representation of the sky integrated right into the Earth .
All right now , I 've overrun my time , so I 've got to stop .
Thank you all very much .
Peter Gabriel : Fight injustice with raw video
Musician and activist Peter Gabriel shares his very personal motivation for standing up for human rights with the watchdog group WITNESS -- and tells stories of citizen journalists in action .
I love trees , and I 'm very lucky , because we live near a wonderful arboretum , and Sundays , usually , I 'd go there with my wife and now , with my four-year-old , and we 'd climb in the trees , we 'd play hide and seek .
The second school I was at had big trees too , had a fantastic tulip tree , I think it was the biggest in the country , and it also had a lot of wonderful bushes and vegetation around it , around the playing fields .
One day I was grabbed by some of my classmates , and taken in the bushes -- I was stripped ; I was attacked ; I was abused ; and this came out of the blue .
Now , the reason I say that , because , afterwards , I was thinking -- well , I went back into the school -- I felt dirty ; I felt betrayed ; I felt ashamed , but mainly -- mainly , I felt powerless .
And 30 years later I was sitting in an airplane , next to a lady called Veronica , who came from Chile , and we were on a human rights tour , and she was starting to tell me what it was like to be tortured , and , from my very privileged position , this was the only reference point that I had .
And it was an amazing learning experience because , for me , human rights have been something in which I had , you know , a part-time interest , but , mainly , it was something that happened to other people over there .
But I got a phone call from Bono in 1985 and , as you know , he 's a great singer , but he 's a magnificent hustler , and -- -- a very hard guy to say no to , and he was saying , you know , just after I 'd done the Biko song , we 're going to do a tour for Amnesty , you have to be on it , and really that was the first time that I 'd been out and started meeting people who 'd watched their family being shot in front of them , who 'd had a partner thrown out of an airplane into an ocean , and suddenly this world of human rights arrived in my world , and I couldn 't really walk away in quite the same way as before .
So I got involved with this tour , which was for Amnesty , and then in ' 88 I took over Bono 's job trying to learn how to hustle .
I didn 't do it as well , but we managed to get Youssou N 'Dour , Sting , Tracy Chapman , and Bruce Springsteen to go ' round the world for Amnesty , and it was an amazing experience .
And , once again , I got an extraordinary education , and it was the first time , really , that I 'd met a lot of these people in the different countries , and these human rights stories became very physical , and , again , I couldn 't really walk away quite so comfortably .
But the thing that really amazed me , that I had no idea , was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience , your story , denied , buried and forgotten .
And it seemed that whenever there was a camera around , or a video or film camera , it was a great deal harder to do -- for those in power to bury the story .
And Reebok set up a foundation after these Human Rights Now tours and there was a decision then -- well , we made a proposal , for a couple of years , about trying to set up a division that was going to give cameras to human rights activists .
It didn 't really get anywhere , and then the Rodney King incident happened , and people thought , OK , if you have a camera in the right place at the right time , or , perhaps , the wrong time , depending who you are , then you can actually start doing something , and campaigning , and being heard , and telling people about what 's going on .
So , WITNESS was started in ' 92 and it 's since given cameras out in over 60 countries .
And we campaign with activist groups and help them tell their story and , in fact , I will show you in a moment one of the most recent campaigns , and I 'm afraid it 's a story from Uganda , and , although we had a wonderful story from Uganda yesterday , this one isn 't quite so good .
In the north of Uganda , there are something like 1.5 million internally displaced people , people who are not refugees in another country , but because of the civil war , which has been going on for about 20 years , they have nowhere to live .
And 20,000 kids have been taken away to become child soldiers , and the International Criminal Court is going after five of the leaders of the -- now , what 's it called ?
I forget the name of the of the army -- it 's Lord 's Resistance Army , I believe -- but the government , also , doesn 't have a clean sheet , so if we could run the first video .
Life in the camp is never simple . Even today life is difficult .
We stay because of the fear that what pushed us into the camp ...
still exists back home .
Text : " Between Two Fires : Torture and Displacement in Northern Uganda " When we were at home , it was Kony 's [ rebel ] soldiers disturbing us .
At first , we were safe in the camp .
But later the government soldiers began mistreating us a lot .
Jennifer : A soldier walked onto the road , asking where we 'd been .
Evelyn and I hid behind my mother .
Evelyn : He ordered us to sit down , so we sat down .
The other soldier also came .
Jennifer : The man came and started undressing me .
The other one carried Evelyn aside .
The one who was defiling me then left me and went to rape Evelyn .
And the one who was raping Evelyn came and defiled me also .
The soldiers with clubs this long beat us to get a confession .
They kept telling us , " Tell the truth ! " as they beat us .
They insisted that I was lying .
At that moment , they fired and shot off my fingers .
I fell . They ran to join the others ... leaving me for dead .
Text : Uganda ratified the Convention Against Torture in 1986 .
Torture is defined as any act by which severe pain of suffering , whether physical or mental , is intentionally inflicted by a person acting in an official capacity to obtain information or a confession , to punish , coerce or intimidate .
Peter Gabriel : So torture is not something that always happens on other soil .
In my country , it was -- we had been looking at pictures of British soldiers beating up young Iraqis ; we 've got Abu Ghraib ; we 've got Guantanamo Bay .
I had a driver on my way to Newark Airport , and he told me a story that , in the middle of the night , 4 a.m. , he 'd been taken out of his home in Queens -- taken to a place in the Midwest , that he was interrogated and tortured and returned to the street four weeks later , because he had the same -- he was Middle Eastern , and he had the same name as one of the 9 / 11 pilots , and that may or may not be true -- I didn 't think he was a liar , though .
And , I think , if we look around the world , as well as the polar ice caps melting , human rights , which have been fought for , for many hundreds of years in some cases , are , also , eroding very fast , and that is something that we need to take a look at and , maybe , start campaigning for .
I mean , here , too , one of our partners was at Van Jones and the Books Not Bars project -- they have managed , with their footage in California to change the youth correction systems employed , and it 's much -- much -- I think , more humane methods are being looked at , how you should lock up young kids , and that 's questionable to start off .
And as the story of Mr. Morales , just down the road , excuse me , Mr. Gabriel , would you mind if we delayed your execution a little bit ?
No , not at all , no problem , take your time .
But this , surely , whoever that man is , whatever he 's done , this is cruel and unusual punishment .
Anyway , WITNESS has been trying to arm the brave people who often put their lives at risk around the world , with cameras , and I 'd like to show you just a little more of that . Thank you .
Text : You can say a story is fabricated .
Text : You can say a jury is corrupt .
You can say a person is lying .
You can say you don 't trust newspapers .
But you can 't say what you just saw never happened .
Help WITNESS give cameras to the world .
Shoot a video ; expose injustice ; reveal the truth ; show us what 's wrong with the world ; and maybe we can help make it right .
WITNESS .
All the video you have just seen was recorded by human rights groups working with WITNESS .
PG : WITNESS was born of technological innovation -- in a sense the small , portable , DV cam was really what allowed it to come into being .
And we 've also been trying to get computers out to the world , so that groups can communicate much more effectively , campaign much more effectively , but now we have the wonderful possibility , which is given to us from the mobile phone with the camera in it , because that is cheap ; it 's ubiquitous ; and it 's moving fast all around the world -- and it 's very exciting for us .
And so , the dream is that we could have a world in which anyone who has anything bad happen to them of this sort has a chance of getting their story uploaded , being seen , being watched , that they really know that they can be heard , that there would be a giant website , maybe , a little like Google Earth , and you could fly over and find out the realities of what 's going , for the world 's inhabitants . In a way what this technology is allowing is , really , that a lot of the problems of the world can have a human face , that we can actually see who 's dying of AIDS or who 's being beaten up , for the first time , and we can hear their stories in a way that the blogger culture -- if we can move that into these sort of fields , I think we can really transform the world in all sorts of ways .
There could be a new movement growing up , rising from the ground , reaching for the light , and growing strong , just like a tree . Thank you .
Paul Nicklen : Tales of ice-bound wonderlands
Diving under the Antarctic ice to get close to the much-feared leopard seal , photographer Paul Nicklen found an extraordinary new friend . Share his hilarious , passionate stories of the polar wonderlands , illustrated by glorious images of the animals who live on and under the ice .
My journey to become a polar specialist , photographing , specializing in the polar regions , began when I was four years old , when my family moved from Southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island , up by Greenland .
There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people , where [ we ] were one of three non-Inuit families .
And in this community , we didn 't have a television ; we didn 't have computers , obviously , radio .
We didn 't even have a telephone .
All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit , playing .
The snow and the ice were my sandbox , and the Inuit were my teachers .
And that 's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm .
And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it .
I 'd like to share with you , for just two minutes only , some images , a cross-section of my work , to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile , " Have You Ever . "
I don 't know why National Geographic has done this , they 've never done this before , but they 're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I 've just completed that is not published yet .
National Geographic doesn 't do this , so I 'm very excited to be able to share this with you .
And what these images are -- you 'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there 's only about four images -- but it 's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest .
It 's pure white , but it 's not a polar bear .
It 's a spirit bear , or a Kermode bear .
There are only 200 of these bears left .
They 're more rare than the panda bear .
I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one .
I thought , my career 's over .
I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic .
What in the heck was I thinking ?
So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life , after I was a photographer , because they were going to fire me .
Because National Geographic is a magazine ; they remind us all the time : they publish pictures , not excuses .
And after two months of sitting there -- one day , thinking that it was all over , this incredible big white male came down , right beside me , three feet away from me , and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it .
And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest .
He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep .
And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him , just in the forest , and photograph him .
So I 'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I 've done on the polar regions .
Please enjoy .
Brandi Carlile : Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods ? And everything there feels just as it should You 're part of the life there You 're part of something good If you 've ever wandered lonely through the woods Ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh If you 've ever wandered lonely through the woods Have you ever stared into a starry sky ? Lying on your back , you 're asking why What 's the purpose ? I wonder , who am I ? If you 've ever stared into a starry sky Ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh Aah , ah , aah Ah , oh , oh , ah , ah , oh , oh Have you ever stared into a starry sky ? Have you ever been out walking in the snow ? Tried to get back where you were before You always end up Not knowing where to go If you 've ever been out walking in the snow Ooh , ooh , ooh , ooh Aah , ah , aah , ah , aah Ah , ah , oh , ah , ah , oh , ah Oh , ah , ah , ah Ah , ah , oh , ah , ah , oh , oh If you 'd ever been out walking you would know Paul Nicklen : Thank you very much . The show 's not over .
My clock is ticking . Okay , let 's stop .
Thank you very much . I appreciate it .
We 're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it 's at its lowest level .
And in fact , scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years , then they said 50 years .
Now they 're saying the sea ice in the Arctic , the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years .
And what does that mean ?
After a while of reading this in the news , it just becomes news .
You glaze over with it .
And what I 'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this .
And I want people to understand and get the concept that , if we lose ice , we stand to lose an entire ecosystem .
Projections are that we could lose polar bears ; they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years .
And there 's no better , sexier , more beautiful , charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on .
Polar bears are amazing hunters .
This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores .
There was no ice around .
But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it .
And this bear swam out to that seal -- 800 lb. bearded seal -- grabbed it , swam back and ate it .
And he was so full , he was so happy and so fat eating this seal , that , as I approached him -- about 20 feet away -- to get this picture , his only defense was to keep eating more seal .
And as he ate , he was so full -- he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly -- and as he ate inside one side of his mouth , he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth .
So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive , but it 's the ice that 's disappearing .
We 're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic .
When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago , we never found dead bears .
And in the last four or five years , we 're finding dead bears popping up all over the place .
We 're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea , floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out .
I found a couple in Norway last year . We 're seeing them on the ice .
These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice .
Here 's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere , and they 're riding on this big piece of glacier ice , which is great for them ; they 're safe at this point .
They 're not going to die of hypothermia .
They 're going to get to land .
But unfortunately , 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem .
These ringed seals , these are the " fatsicles " of the Arctic .
These little , fat dumplings , 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear .
And they 're not like the harbor seals that you have here .
These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice .
They give birth inside the ice , and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice .
And here 's a picture of sick ice .
This is a piece of multi-year ice that 's 12 years old .
And what scientists didn 't predict is that , as this ice melts , these big pockets of black water are forming and they 're grabbing the sun 's energy and accelerating the melting process .
And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea .
The visibility 's 600 ft . ; we 're on our safety lines ; the ice is moving all over the place .
I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive .
But what 's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice , that big chunk of ice up in the corner .
In that one single piece of ice , you have 300 species of microorganisms .
And in the spring , when the sun returns to the ice , it forms the phytoplankton , grows under that ice , and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed , and then you get the zoo plankton feeding on all that life .
So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden .
It acts like the soil in a garden . It 's an inverted garden .
Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden .
Here 's me in my office .
I hope you appreciate yours .
This is after an hour under the ice .
I can 't feel my lips ; my face is frozen ; I can 't feel my hands ; I can 't feel my feet .
And I 've come up , and all I wanted to do was get out of the water .
After an hour in these conditions , it 's so extreme that , when I go down , almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can 't deal with the stress of the cold on my head .
And so I 'm just so happy that the dive is over .
I get to hand my camera to my assistant , and I 'm looking up at him , and I 'm going , " Woo . Woo . Woo . "
Which means , " Take my camera . "
And he thinks I 'm saying , " Take my picture . "
So we had this little communication breakdown .
But it 's worth it .
I 'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales , bowhead whales , and narwhals , and polar bears , and leopard seals today , but this picture right here means more to me than any other I 've ever made .
I dropped down in this ice hole , just through that hole that you just saw , and I looked up under the underside of the ice , and I was dizzy ; I thought I had vertigo .
I got very nervous -- no rope , no safety line , the whole world is moving around me -- and I thought , " I 'm in trouble . "
But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice , giving birth and living out their entire life cycle .
This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic , right here .
And when you have low productivity in this , in ice , the productivity in copepods go down .
This is a bowhead whale .
Supposedly , science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now .
This very whale right here could be over 250 years old .
This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution .
It could have survived 150 years of whaling .
And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we 're leading in the South .
Narwhals , these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks , don 't have to be here ; they could be out on the open water .
But they 're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe , catch a breath , because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod .
And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods .
Alright , my favorite part .
When I 'm on my deathbed , I 'm going to remember one story more than any other .
Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful , I don 't think I 'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals .
Leopard seals , since the time of Shackleton , have had a bad reputation .
They 've got that wryly smile on their mouth .
They 've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body .
They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary .
And tragically in [ 2003 ] , a scientist was taken down and drowned , and she was being consumed by a leopard seal .
And people were like , " We knew they were vicious . We knew they were . "
And so people love to form their opinions .
And that 's when I got a story idea : I want to go to Antarctica , get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake -- find out if they really are these vicious animals , or if they 're misunderstood .
So this is that story .
Oh , and they also happen to eat happy feet .
As a species , as humans , we like to say penguins are really cute , therefore , leopard seals eat them , so leopard seals are ugly and bad .
It doesn 't work that way .
The penguin doesn 't know it 's cute , and the leopard seal doesn 't know it 's kind of big and monstrous .
This is just the food chain unfolding .
They 're also big .
They 're not these little harbor seals .
They are 12 ft. long , a thousand pounds .
And they 're also curiously aggressive .
You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac , floating in these icy waters , and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon .
The boat starts to sink , they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked .
All the leopard seal was doing -- it 's just biting a balloon .
It just sees this big balloon in the ocean -- it doesn 't have hands -- it 's going to take a little bite , the boat pops , and off they go .
So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage -- isn 't that beautiful .
After five days of crossing the Drake Passage , we have finally arrived at Antarctica .
I 'm with my Swedish assistant and guide .
His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden -- Goran .
And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals . I have never seen one .
So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat , and there 's this monstrous leopard seal .
And even in his voice , he goes , " That 's a bloody big seal , ya . "
And this seal is taking this penguin by the head , and it 's flipping it back and forth .
And what it 's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out , so it can eat the meat off the bones , and then it goes off and gets another one .
And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin , came under the boat , the Zodiac , starting hitting the hull of the boat .
And we 're trying to not fall in the water .
And we sit down , and that 's when Goran said to me , " This is a good seal , ya .
It 's time for you to get in the water . "
And I looked at Goran , and I said to him , " Forget that . "
But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter F.
But he was right .
He scolded me out , and said , " This is why we 're here .
And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic .
And now you 've got to deliver .
And you can 't publish excuses . "
So I had such dry mouth -- probably not as bad as now -- but I had such , such dry mouth .
And my legs were just trembling . I couldn 't feel my legs .
I put my flippers on . I could barely part my lips .
I put my snorkel in my mouth , and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water .
And this was the first thing she did .
She came racing up to me , engulfed my whole camera -- and her teeth are up here and down here -- but Goran , before I had gotten in the water , had given me amazing advice .
He said , " If you get scared , you close your eyes , ya , and she 'll go away . "
So that 's all I had to work with at that point .
But I just started to shoot these pictures .
So she did this threat display for a few minutes , and then the most amazing thing happened -- she totally relaxed .
She went off , she got a penguin .
She stopped about 10 feet away from me , and she sat there with this penguin , the penguin 's flapping , and she let 's it go .
The penguin swims toward me , takes off .
She grabs another one . She does this over and over .
And it dawned on me that she 's trying to feed me a penguin .
Why else would she release these penguins at me ?
And after she did this four or five times , she swam by me with this dejected look on her face .
You don 't want to be too anthropomorphic , but I swear that she looked at me like , " This useless predator 's going to starve in my ocean . "
So realizing I couldn 't catch swimming penguins , she 'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me , bobbing like this , and she 'd let them go .
This didn 't work .
I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding , because I was crying underwater , just because it was so amazing .
And so that didn 't work .
So then she 'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this .
And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me .
This went on for four days .
This just didn 't happen a couple of times .
And then so she realized I couldn 't catch live ones , so she brought me dead penguins .
Now I 've got four or five penguins floating around my head , and I 'm just sitting there shooting away .
And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like , " Are you for real ? "
Because she can 't believe I can 't eat this penguin .
Because in her world , you 're either breeding or you 're eating -- and I 'm not breeding , so ...
And then that wasn 't enough ; she started to flip penguins onto my head .
She was trying to force-feed me . She 's pushing me around .
She 's trying to force-feed my camera , which is every photographer 's dream .
And she would get frustrated ; she 'd blow bubbles in my face .
She would , I think , let me know that I was going to starve .
But yet she didn 't stop .
She would not stop trying to feed me penguins .
And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far , I got nervous because she came up to me , and she did this deep , guttural jackhammer sound , this gokgokgokgok .
And I thought , she 's about to bite .
She 's about to let me know she 's too frustrated with me .
What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me , and she did that to threat display .
She chased that big seal away , went and got its penguin and brought it to me .
That wasn 't the only seal I got in the water with .
I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals , and I never once had a scary encounter .
They are the most remarkable animals I 've ever worked with , and the same with polar bears .
And just like the polar bears , these animals depend on an icy environment .
I get emotional . Sorry .
It 's a story that lives deep in my heart , and I 'm proud to share this with you .
And I 'm so passionate about it .
Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic , I 'll take you ; let 's go .
We 've got to get the story out now . Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thanks very much .
Thank you .
Maria Bezaitis : The surprising need for strangeness
In our digital world , social relations have become mediated by data . Without even realizing it , we 're barricading ourselves against strangeness -- people and ideas that don 't fit the patterns of who we already know , what we already like and where we 've already been . A call for technology to deliver us to what and who we need , even if it 's unfamiliar .
" Don 't talk to strangers . "
You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends , family , schools and the media for decades .
It 's a norm . It 's a social norm .
But it 's a special kind of social norm , because it 's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn 't relate to .
" Don 't talk to strangers " says , " Stay from anyone who 's not familiar to you .
Stick with the people you know .
Stick with people like you . "
How appealing is that ?
It 's not really what we do , is it , when we 're at our best ?
When we 're at our best , we reach out to people who are not like us , because when we do that , we learn from people who are not like us .
My phrase for this value of being with " not like us " is " strangeness , " and my point is that in today 's digitally intensive world , strangers are quite frankly not the point .
The point that we should be worried about is , how much strangeness are we getting ?
Why strangeness ? Because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data , and data turns our social relations into digital relations , and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness , a sense of discovery , a sense of surprise and unpredictability .
Why not strangers ?
Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries .
They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don 't know , and in the context of my digital relations , I 'm already doing things with people I don 't know .
The question isn 't whether or not I know you .
The question is , what can I do with you ?
What can I learn with you ?
What can we do together that benefits us both ?
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing , how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people .
The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future .
The economies of the future depend on that .
Our social lives in the future depend on that .
The threat to worry about isn 't strangers .
The threat to worry about is whether or not we 're getting our fair share of strangeness .
Now , 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers , but they weren 't thinking so dynamically about human relations , and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices .
Stanley Milgram from the ' 60s and ' 70s , the creator of the small-world experiments , which became later popularized as six degrees of separation , made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps .
His point was that strangers are out there .
We can reach them . There are paths that enable us to reach them .
Mark Granovetter , Stanford sociologist , in 1973 in his seminal essay " The Strength of Weak Ties , " made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks , these strangers , are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties , the people closest to us .
He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us , these strong ties in our lives , actually have a homogenizing effect on us .
They produce sameness .
My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives , what kinds of new routines are possible .
We 've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions , those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses , and to make them available to people we don 't know .
Whether it 's our clothes , whether it 's our cars , whether it 's our bikes , whether it 's our books or music , we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we 've never met .
And we concluded a very important insight , which was that as people 's relationships to the things in their lives change , so do their relations with other people .
And yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat .
It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am , of what I 've already done .
Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks , keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations .
Categories like " friends " and " family " and " contacts " and " colleagues " don 't tell me anything about my actual relations .
A more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance , where at any given point in time , with any single person , I am both close and distant from that individual , all as a function of what I need to do right now .
People aren 't close or distant .
People are always a combination of the two , and that combination is constantly changing .
What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships ?
What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now ?
Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now , that enables me to find the sources of intimacy , of discovery , and of inspiration that I need right now .
Strangeness is not about meeting strangers .
It simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity .
So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness , and it 's a problem faced not just by individuals today , but also by organizations , organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities .
Whether you 're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not , whether you 're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few , whether you 're a teenager in her bedroom who 's trying to jostle her relations with her parents , strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations .
We have to change the norms .
We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses .
What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers ?
How might we think differently about our relations with people ?
How might we think differently about our relations with distributed groups of people ?
How might we think differently about our relations with technologies , things that effectively become social participants in their own right ?
The range of digital relations is extraordinary .
In the context of this broad range of digital relations , safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation .
Thank you .
Eve Ensler : Suddenly , my body
Poet , writer , activist Eve Ensler lived in her head . In this powerful talk from TEDWomen , she talks about her lifelong disconnection from her body -- and how two shocking events helped her to connect with the reality , the physicality of being human .
For a long time , there was me , and my body .
Me was composed of stories , of cravings , of strivings , of desires of the future .
Me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past , but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome .
Me was always trying to become something , somebody .
Me only existed in the trying .
My body was often in the way .
Me was a floating head .
For years , I actually only wore hats .
It was a way of keeping my head attached .
It was a way of locating myself .
I worried that [ if ] I took my hat off I wouldn 't be here anymore .
I actually had a therapist who once said to me , " Eve , you 've been coming here for two years , and , to be honest , it never occurred to me that you had a body . "
All this time I lived in the city because , to be honest , I was afraid of trees .
I never had babies because heads cannot give birth .
Babies actually don 't come out of your mouth .
As I had no reference point for my body , I began to ask other women about their bodies -- in particular , their vaginas , because I thought vaginas were kind of important .
This led to me writing " The Vagina Monologues , " which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could .
I did this in front of many strangers .
One night on stage , I actually entered my vagina .
It was an ecstatic experience .
It scared me , it energized me , and then I became a driven person , a driven vagina .
I began to see my body like a thing , a thing that could move fast , like a thing that could accomplish other things , many things , all at once .
I began to see my body like an iPad or a car .
I would drive it and demand things from it .
It had no limits . It was invincible .
It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself .
I didn 't heed it ; no , I organized it and I directed it .
I didn 't have patience for my body ; I snapped it into shape .
I was greedy .
I took more than my body had to offer .
If I was tired , I drank more espressos .
If I was afraid , I went to more dangerous places .
Oh sure , sure , I had moments of appreciation of my body , the way an abusive parent can sometimes have a moment of kindness .
My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday , for example .
I heard people murmur from time to time that I should love my body , so I learned how to do this .
I was a vegetarian , I was sober , I didn 't smoke .
But all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body -- a further disassociation , like planting a vegetable field on a freeway .
As a result of me talking so much about my vagina , many women started to tell me about theirs -- their stories about their bodies .
Actually , these stories compelled me around the world , and I 've been to over 60 countries .
I heard thousands of stories , and I have to tell you , there was always this moment where the women shared with me that particular moment when she separated from her body -- when she left home .
I heard about women being molested in their beds , flogged in their burqas , left for dead in parking lots , acid burned in their kitchens .
Some women became quiet and disappeared .
Other women became mad , driven machines like me .
In the middle of my traveling , I turned 40 and I began to hate my body , which was actually progress , because at least my body existed enough to hate it .
Well my stomach -- it was my stomach I hated .
It was proof that I had not measured up , that I was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape .
My stomach was proof that I had failed , that it had failed me , that it was broken .
My life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it .
In fact , it became so extreme I wrote a play about it .
But the more I talked about it , the more objectified and fragmented my body became .
It became entertainment ; it became a new kind of commodity , something I was selling .
Then I went somewhere else .
I went outside what I thought I knew .
I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo .
And I heard stories that shattered all the other stories .
I heard stories that got inside my body .
I heard about a little girl who couldn 't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her .
I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that .
There are thousands of these stories , and many of the women had holes in their bodies -- holes , fistula -- that were the violation of war -- holes in the fabric of their souls .
These stories saturated my cells and nerves , and to be honest , I stopped sleeping for three years .
All the stories began to bleed together .
The raping of the Earth , the pillaging of minerals , the destruction of vaginas -- none of these were separate anymore from each other or me .
Militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iPhones and computers .
My body had not only become a driven machine , but it was responsible now for destroying other women 's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine .
Then I got cancer -- or I found out I had cancer .
It arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane .
Suddenly , I had a body , a body that was pricked and poked and punctured , a body that was cut wide open , a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed , a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it , a body that was burning from chemicals .
Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection .
I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world , and it wasn 't happening later , it was happening now .
Suddenly , my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere , the cancer of cruelty , the cancer of greed , the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants -- and they 're usually poor -- the cancer inside the coal miner 's lungs , the cancer of stress for not achieving enough , the cancer of buried trauma , the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish , the cancer in women 's uteruses from being raped , the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness .
In his new and visionary book , " New Self , New World , " the writer Philip Shepherd says , " If you are divided from your body , you are also divided from the body of the world , which then appears to be other than you or separate from you , rather than the living continuum to which you belong . "
Before cancer , the world was something other .
It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea .
Now I am swimming in it .
Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it , and I love the mud on my legs and feet .
Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine , and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu .
And when it rains hard rain , I scream and I run in circles .
I know that everything is connected , and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake .
And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince .
And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world .
I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation , the 16 ounces of puss , is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico , and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish .
And the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the Earth cries out from the drilling .
In my second chemo , my mother got very sick and I went to see her .
And in the name of connectedness , the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved Gulf of Mexico .
So we brought her home , and I prayed that the oil wouldn 't wash up on her beach before she died .
And gratefully , it didn 't .
And she died quietly in her favorite place .
And a few weeks later , I was in New Orleans , and this beautiful , spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me .
And I was honored .
And I went to her house , and it was morning , and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains .
And my friend was preparing this big bowl , and I said , " What is it ? "
And she said , " It 's for you .
The flowers make it beautiful , and the honey makes it sweet . "
And I said , " But what 's the water part ? "
And in the name of connectedness , she said , " Oh , it 's the Gulf of Mexico . "
And I said , " Of course it is . "
And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle , and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water .
And she sang -- I mean her whole body sang .
And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother .
And as the warm Gulf washed over my naked head , I realized that it held the best and the worst of us .
It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion .
It was all the lies that got told before and after .
It was the honey in the water that made it sweet , it was the oil that made it sick .
It was my head that was bald -- and comfortable now without a hat .
It was my whole self melting into Michaela 's lap .
It was the tears that were indistinguishable from the Gulf that were falling down my cheek .
It was finally being in my body .
It was the sorrow that 's taken so long .
It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection .
It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world .
It was the Congolese women who are now rising up .
It was my mother leaving , just at the moment that I was being born .
It was the realization that I had come very close to dying -- in the same way that the Earth , our mother , is barely holding on , in the same way that 75 percent of the planet are hardly scraping by , in the same way that there is a recipe for survival .
What I learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves .
It was advocating friends and a doting sister .
It was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands .
It was underpaid and really loving nurses .
It was magic healers and aromatic oils .
It was people who came with spells and rituals .
It was having a vision of the future and something to fight for , because I know this struggle isn 't my own .
It was a million prayers .
It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms .
It was a lot of anger , insane humor , a lot of attention , outrage .
It was energy , love and joy .
It was all these things .
It was all these things .
It was all these things in the water , in the world , in my body .
Tania Luna : How a penny made me feel like a millionaire
As a young child , Tania Luna left her home in post-Chernobyl Ukraine to take asylum in the US . And one day , on the floor of the New York homeless shelter where she and her family lived , she found a penny . She has never again felt so rich . A meditation on the bittersweet joys of childhood -- and how to hold them in mind .
I 'm five years old , and I am very proud .
My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine .
Inside , it 's a smelly , gaping hole in the ground , but outside , it 's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun .
This makes me feel so proud , so important , that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us .
So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free .
Four years earlier , when I was one , after the Chernobyl accident , the rain came down black , and my sister 's hair fell out in clumps , and I spent nine months in the hospital .
There were no visitors allowed , so my mother bribed a hospital worker .
She acquired a nurse 's uniform , and she snuck in every night to sit by my side .
Five years later , an unexpected silver lining .
Thanks to Chernobyl , we get asylum in the U.S.
I am six years old , and I don 't cry when we leave home and we come to America , because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum , Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside , Bazooka that we 'd get once a year in Ukraine and we 'd have to chew one piece for an entire week .
So the first day we get to New York , my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family 's staying in .
Only , we don 't know that it 's a homeless shelter .
We think that it 's a hotel , a hotel with lots of rats .
So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor , and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don 't just lose money .
And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand , and it 's sticky and rusty , but it feels like I 'm holding a fortune .
I decide that I 'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum .
And in that moment , I feel like a millionaire .
About a year later , I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash , and suddenly I have more toys than I 've ever had in my whole life .
And again , I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn , and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn 't order .
So we take the pizza , our very first pizza , and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway .
And he tells us to pay , but we don 't speak English .
My mother comes out , and he asks her for money , but she doesn 't have enough .
She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare .
Then our neighbor pops her head in , and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza .
Everyone 's upset .
But the pizza is delicious .
It doesn 't hit me until years later just how little we had .
On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S. , we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S.
The man at the front desk laughs , and he says , " You can 't reserve a room here . This is a homeless shelter . "
And we were shocked .
My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid .
His family lost everything , and at age 11 , he had to live in motels with his dad , motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill .
And one time , when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back , it was crawling with roaches .
But he did have one thing .
He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books , two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots . And this was his treasure .
This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams .
I 'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family .
This is Scarlett .
Once upon a time , Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights .
She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they 'd get more aggressive before the fight .
And now , these days , she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it , but when we pour water for her in her bowl , she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude .
Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett , and she rolls through the grass , and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude .
We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments , and we feel like millionaires .
Thank you .
Barry Schuler : Genomics 101
What is genomics ? How will it affect our lives ? In this intriguing primer on the genomics revolution , entrepreneur Barry Schuler says we can at least expect healthier , tastier food . He suggests we start with the pinot noir grape , to build better wines .
What 's happening in genomics , and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world , life , ourselves , and how we think about them .
If you saw 2001 : A Space Odyssey , and you heard the boom , boom , boom , boom , and you saw the monolith , you know , that was Arthur C. Clarke 's representation that we were at a seminal moment in the evolution of our species .
In this case , it was picking up bones and creating a tool , using it as a tool , which meant that apes just , sort of , running around and eating and doing each other figured out they can make things if they used a tool .
And that moved us to the next level .
And , you know , we in the last 30 years in particular have seen this acceleration in knowledge and technology , and technology has bred more knowledge and given us tools .
And we 've seen many seminal moments .
We 've seen the creation of small computers in the ' 70s and early ' 80s , and who would have thought back then that every single person would not have just one computer but probably 20 , in your home , and in not just your P.C. but in every device -- in your washing machine , your cell phone .
You 're walking around ; your car has 12 microprocessors .
Then we go along and create the Internet and connect the world together ; we flatten the world .
We 've seen so much change , and we 've given ourselves these tools now -- these high-powered tools -- that are allowing us to turn the lens inward into something that is common to all of us , and that is a genome .
How 's your genome today ? Have you thought about it lately ?
Heard about it , at least ? You probably hear about genomes these days .
I thought I 'd take a moment to tell you what a genome is .
It 's , sort of , like if you ask people , Well , what is a megabyte or megabit ? And what is broadband ?
People never want to say , I really don 't understand .
So , I will tell you right off of the bat .
You 've heard of DNA ; you probably studied a little bit in biology .
A genome is really a description for all of the DNA that is in a living organism .
And one thing that is common to all of life is DNA .
It doesn 't matter whether you 're a yeast ; doesn 't matter whether you 're a fly ; we all have DNA .
The DNA is organized in words , call them : genes and chromosomes .
And when Watson and Crick in the ' 50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the DNA molecule -- very long , complicated molecule -- we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that DNA is a language that determines the characteristics , our traits , what we inherit , what diseases we may get .
We 've also along the way discovered that this is a very old molecule , that all of the DNA in your body has been around forever , since the beginning of us , of us as creatures .
There is a historical archive .
Living in your genome is the history of our species , and you as an individual human being , where you 're from , going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years , and that 's now starting to be understood .
But also , the genome is really the instruction manual .
It is the program . It is the code of life .
It is what makes you function ; it is what makes every organism function .
DNA is a very elegant molecule .
It 's long and it 's complicated .
Really all you have to know about it is that there 's four letters : A , T , C , G ; they represent the name of a chemical .
And with these four letters , you can create a language : a language that can describe anything , and very complicated things .
You know , they are generally put together in pairs , creating a word or what we call base pairs .
And you would , you know , when you think about it , four letters , or the representation of four things , makes us work .
And that may not sound very intuitive , but let me flip over to something else you know about , and that 's computers .
Look at this screen here and , you know , you see pictures and you see words , but really all there are are ones and zeros .
The language of technology is binary ; you 've probably heard that at some point in time .
Everything that happens in digital is converted , or a representation , of a one and a zero .
So , when you 're listening to iTunes and your favorite music , that 's really just a bunch of ones and zeros playing very quickly .
When you 're seeing these pictures , it 's all ones and zeros , and when you 're talking on your telephone , your cell phone , and it 's going over the network , your voice is all being turned into ones and zeros and magically whizzed around .
And look at all the complex things and wonderful things we 've been able to create with just a one and a zero .
Well , now you ramp that up to four , and you have a lot of complexity , a lot of ways to describe mechanisms .
So , let 's talk about what that means .
So , if you look at a human genome , they consist of 3.2 billion of these base pairs . That 's a lot .
And they mix up in all different fashions , and that makes you a human being .
If you convert that to binary , just to give you a little bit of sizing , we 're actually smaller than the program Microsoft Office .
It 's not really all that much data .
I will also tell you we 're at least as buggy .
This here is a bug in my genome that I have struggled with for a long , long time .
When you get sick , it is a bug in your genome .
In fact , many , many diseases we have struggled with for a long time , like cancer , we haven 't been able to cure because we just don 't understand how it works at the genomic level .
We are starting to understand that .
So , up to this point we tried to fix it by using what I call shit-against-the-wall pharmacology , which means , well , let 's just throw chemicals at it , and maybe it 's going to make it work .
But if you really understand why does a cell go from normal cell to cancer ?
What is the code ?
What are the exact instructions that are making it do that ?
then you can go about the process of trying to fix it and figure it out .
So , for your next dinner over a great bottle of wine , here 's a few factoids for you .
We actually have about 24,000 genes that do things .
We have about a hundred , 120,000 others that don 't appear to function every day , but represent this archival history of how we used to work as a species going back tens of thousands of years .
You might also be interested in knowing that a mouse has about the same amount of genes .
They recently sequenced Pinot Noir , and it also has about 30,000 genes , so the number of genes you have may not necessarily represent the complexity or the evolutionary order of any particular species .
Now , look around : just look next to your neighbor , look forward , look backward . We all look pretty different .
A lot of very handsome and pretty people here , skinny , chubby , different races , cultures . We are all 99.9 % genetically equal .
It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us .
That 's a tiny amount of material , but the way that ultimately expresses itself is what makes changes in humans and in all species .
So , we are now able to read genomes .
The first human genome took 10 years , three billion dollars .
It was done by Dr. Craig Venter .
And then James Watson 's -- one of the co-founders of DNA -- genome was done for two million dollars , and in just two months .
And if you think about the computer industry and how we 've gone from big computers to little ones and how they get more powerful and faster all the time , the same thing is happening with gene sequencing now : we are on the cusp of being able to sequence human genomes for about 5,000 dollars in about an hour or a half-hour ; you will see that happen in the next five years .
And what that means is , you are going to walk around with your own personal genome on a smart card . It will be here .
And when you buy medicine , you won 't be buying a drug that 's used for everybody .
You will give your genome to the pharmacist , and your drug will be made for you and it will work much better than the ones that were -- you won 't have side effects .
All those side effects , you know , oily residue and , you know , whatever they say in those commercials : forget about that .
They 're going to make all that stuff go away .
What does a genome look like ?
Well , there it is . It is a long , long series of these base pairs .
If you saw the genome for a mouse or for a human it would look no different than this , but what scientists are doing now is they 're understanding what these do and what they mean .
Because what Nature is doing is double-clicking all the time .
In other words , the first couple of sentences here , assuming this is a grape plant : make a root , make a branch , create a blossom .
In a human being , down in here it could be : make blood cells , start cancer .
For me it may be : every calorie you consume , you conserve , because I come from a very cold climate .
For my wife : eat three times as much and you never put on any weight .
It 's all hidden in this code , and it 's starting to be understood at breakneck pace .
So , what can we do with genomes now that we can read them , now that we 're starting to have the book of life ?
Well , there 's many things . Some are exciting .
Some people will find very scary . I will tell you a couple of things that will probably make you want to projectile puke on me , but that 's okay .
So , you know , we now can learn the history of organisms .
You can do a very simple test : scrape your cheek ; send it off .
You can find out where your relatives come from ; you can do your genealogy going back thousands of years .
We can understand functionality . This is really important .
We can understand , for example , why we create plaque in our arteries , what creates the starchiness inside of a grain , why does yeast metabolize sugar and produce carbon dioxide .
We can also look at , at a grander scale , what creates problems , what creates disease , and how we may be able to fix them .
Because we can understand this , we can fix them , make better organisms .
Most importantly , what we 're learning is that Nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox .
The toolbox exists .
An architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox , and we now have the ability to use it .
We are now not just reading genomes ; we are writing them .
This company , Synthetic Genomics , I 'm involved with , created the first full synthetic genome for a little bug , a very primitive creature called Mycoplasma genitalium .
If you have a UTI , you 've probably -- or ever had a UTI -- you 've come in contact with this little bug .
Very simple -- only has about 246 genes -- but we were able to completely synthesize that genome .
Now , you have the genome and you say to yourself , So , if I plug this synthetic genome -- if I pull the old one out and plug it in -- does it just boot up and live ?
Well , guess what . It does .
Not only does it do that ; if you took the genome -- that synthetic genome -- and you plugged it into a different critter , like yeast , you now turn that yeast into Mycoplasma .
It 's , sort of , like booting up a PC with a Mac O.S. software .
Well , actually , you could do it the other way .
So , you know , by being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism , the software , if you will , changes the hardware .
And this is extremely profound .
So , last year the French and Italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced Pinot Noir .
The genomic sequence now exists for the entire Pinot Noir organism , and they identified , once again , about 29,000 genes .
They have discovered pathways that create flavors , although it 's very important to understand that those compounds that it 's cranking out have to match a receptor in our genome , in our tongue , for us to understand and interpret those flavors .
They 've also discovered that there 's a heck of a lot of activity going on producing aroma as well .
They 've identified areas of vulnerability to disease .
They now are understanding , and the work is going on , exactly how this plant works , and we have the capability to know , to read that entire code and understand how it ticks .
So , then what do you do ?
Knowing that we can read it , knowing that we can write it , change it , maybe write its genome from scratch . So , what do you do ?
Well , one thing you could do is what some people might call Franken-Noir .
We can build a better vine .
By the way , just so you know : you get stressed out about genetically modified organisms ; there is not one single vine in this valley or anywhere that is not genetically modified .
They 're not grown from seeds ; they 're grafted into root stock ; they would not exist in nature on their own .
So , don 't worry about , don 't stress about that stuff . We 've been doing this forever .
So , we could , you know , focus on disease resistance ; we can go for higher yields without necessarily having dramatic farming techniques to do it , or costs .
We could conceivably expand the climate window : we could make Pinot Noir grow maybe in Long Island , God forbid .
We could produce better flavors and aromas .
You want a little more raspberry , a little more chocolate here or there ?
All of these things could conceivably be done , and I will tell you I 'd pretty much bet that it will be done .
But there 's an ecosystem here .
In other words , we 're not , sort of , unique little organisms running around ; we are part of a big ecosystem .
In fact -- I 'm sorry to inform you -- that inside of your digestive tract is about 10 pounds of microbes which you 're circulating through your body quite a bit .
Our ocean 's teaming with microbes ; in fact , when Craig Venter went and sequenced the microbes in the ocean , in the first three months tripled the known species on the planet by discovering all-new microbes in the first 20 feet of water .
We now understand that those microbes have more impact on our climate and regulating CO2 and oxygen than plants do , which we always thought oxygenate the atmosphere .
We find microbial life in every part of the planet : in ice , in coal , in rocks , in volcanic vents ; it 's an amazing thing .
But we 've also discovered , when it comes to plants , in plants , as much as we understand and are starting to understand their genomes , it is the ecosystem around them , it is the microbes that live in their root systems , that have just as much impact on the character of those plants as the metabolic pathways of the plants themselves .
If you take a closer look at a root system , you will find there are many , many , many diverse microbial colonies .
This is not big news to viticulturists ; they have been , you know , concerned with water and fertilization .
And , again , this is , sort of , my notion of shit-against-the-wall pharmacology : you know certain fertilizers make the plant more healthy so you put more in .
You don 't necessarily know with granularity exactly what organisms are providing what flavors and what characteristics .
We can start to figure that out .
We all talk about terroir ; we worship terroir ; we say , Wow , is my terroir great ! It 's so special .
I 've got this piece of land and it creates terroir like you wouldn 't believe .
Well , you know , we really , we argue and debate about it -- we say it 's climate , it 's soil , it 's this . Well , guess what ?
We can figure out what the heck terroir is .
It 's in there , waiting to be sequenced .
There are thousands of microbes there .
They 're easy to sequence : unlike a human , they , you know , have a thousand , two thousand genes ; we can figure out what they are .
All we have to do is go around and sample , dig into the ground , find those bugs , sequence them , correlate them to the kinds of characteristics we like and don 't like -- that 's just a big database -- and then fertilize .
And then we understand what is terroir .
So , some people will say , Oh , my God , are we playing God ?
Are we now , if we engineer organisms , are we playing God ?
And , you know , people would always ask James Watson -- he 's not always the most politically correct guy ...
... and they would say , " Are , you know , are you playing God ? "
And he had the best answer I ever heard to this question : " Well , somebody has to . "
I consider myself a very spiritual person , and without , you know , the organized religion part , and I will tell you : I don 't believe there 's anything unnatural .
I don 't believe that chemicals are unnatural .
I told you I 'm going to make some of you puke .
It 's very simple : we don 't invent molecules , compounds .
They 're here . They 're in the universe .
We reorganize things , we change them around , but we don 't make anything unnatural .
Now , we can create bad impacts -- we can poison ourselves ; we can poison the Earth -- but that 's just a natural outcome of a mistake we made .
So , what 's happening today is , Nature is presenting us with a toolbox , and we find that this toolbox is very extensive .
There are microbes out there that actually make gasoline , believe it or not .
There are microbes , you know -- go back to yeast .
These are chemical factories ; the most sophisticated chemical factories are provided by Nature , and we now can use those .
There also is a set of rules .
Nature will not allow you to -- we could engineer a grape plant , but guess what .
We can 't make the grape plant produce babies .
Nature has put a set of rules out there .
We can work within the rules ; we can 't break the rules ; we 're just learning what the rules are .
I just ask the question , if you could cure all disease -- if you could make disease go away , because we understand how it actually works , if we could end hunger by being able to create nutritious , healthy plants that grow in very hard-to-grow environments , if we could create clean and plentiful energy -- we , right in the labs at Synthetic Genomics , have single-celled organisms that are taking carbon dioxide and producing a molecule very similar to gasoline .
So , carbon dioxide -- the stuff we want to get rid of -- not sugar , not anything .
Carbon dioxide , a little bit of sunlight , you end up with a lipid that is highly refined .
We could solve our energy problems ; we can reduce CO2 , ; we could clean up our oceans ; we could make better wine .
If we could , would we ?
Well , you know , I think the answer is very simple : working with Nature , working with this tool set that we now understand , is the next step in humankind 's evolution .
And all I can tell you is , stay healthy for 20 years .
If you can stay healthy for 20 years , you 'll see 150 , maybe 300 .
Thank you .
Chris Downey : Design with the blind in mind
What would a city designed for the blind be like ? Chris Downey is an architect who went suddenly blind in 2008 ; he contrasts life in his beloved San Francisco before and after -- and shows how the thoughtful designs that enhance his life now might actually make everyone 's life better , sighted or not .
So , stepping down out of the bus , I headed back to the corner to head west en route to a braille training session .
It was the winter of 2009 , and I had been blind for about a year .
Things were going pretty well .
Safely reaching the other side , I turned to the left , pushed the auto-button for the audible pedestrian signal , and waited my turn .
As it went off , I took off and safely got to the other side .
Stepping onto the sidewalk , I then heard the sound of a steel chair slide across the concrete sidewalk in front of me .
I know there 's a cafe on the corner , and they have chairs out in front , so I just adjusted to the left to get closer to the street .
As I did , so slid the chair .
I just figured I 'd made a mistake , and went back to the right , and so slid the chair in perfect synchronicity .
Now I was getting a little anxious .
I went back to the left , and so slid the chair , blocking my path of travel .
Now , I was officially freaking out .
So I yelled , " Who the hell 's out there ? What 's going on ? "
Just then , over my shout , I heard something else , a familiar rattle .
It sounded familiar , and I quickly considered another possibility , and I reached out with my left hand , as my fingers brushed against something fuzzy , and I came across an ear , the ear of a dog , perhaps a golden retriever .
Its leash had been tied to the chair as her master went in for coffee , and she was just persistent in her efforts to greet me , perhaps get a scratch behind the ear .
Who knows , maybe she was volunteering for service .
But that little story is really about the fears and misconceptions that come along with the idea of moving through the city without sight , seemingly oblivious to the environment and the people around you .
So let me step back and set the stage a little bit .
On St. Patrick 's Day of 2008 , I reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor .
The surgery was successful .
Two days later , my sight started to fail .
On the third day , it was gone .
Immediately , I was struck by an incredible sense of fear , of confusion , of vulnerability , like anybody would .
But as I had time to stop and think , I actually started to realize I had a lot to be grateful for .
In particular , I thought about my dad , who had passed away from complications from brain surgery .
He was 36 . I was seven at the time .
So although I had every reason to be fearful of what was ahead , and had no clue quite what was going to happen , I was alive .
My son still had his dad .
And besides , it 's not like I was the first person ever to lose their sight .
I knew there had to be all sorts of systems and techniques and training to have to live a full and meaningful , active life without sight .
So by the time I was discharged from the hospital a few days later , I left with a mission , a mission to get out and get the best training as quickly as I could and get on to rebuilding my life .
Within six months , I had returned to work .
My training had started .
I even started riding a tandem bike with my old cycling buddies , and was commuting to work on my own , walking through town and taking the bus .
It was a lot of hard work .
But what I didn 't anticipate through that rapid transition was the incredible experience of the juxtaposition of my sighted experience up against my unsighted experience of the same places and the same people within such a short period of time .
From that came a lot of insights , or outsights , as I called them , things that I learned since losing my sight .
These outsights ranged from the trival to the profound , from the mundane to the humorous .
As an architect , that stark juxtaposition of my sighted and unsighted experience of the same places and the same cities within such a short period of time has given me all sorts of wonderful outsights of the city itself .
Paramount amongst those was the realization that , actually , cities are fantastic places for the blind .
And then I was also surprised by the city 's propensity for kindness and care as opposed to indifference or worse .
And then I started to realize that it seemed like the blind seemed to have a positive influence on the city itself .
That was a little curious to me .
Let me step back and take a look at why the city is so good for the blind .
Inherent with the training for recovery from sight loss is learning to rely on all your non-visual senses , things that you would otherwise maybe ignore .
It 's like a whole new world of sensory information opens up to you .
I was really struck by the symphony of subtle sounds all around me in the city that you can hear and work with to understand where you are , how you need to move , and where you need to go .
Similarly , just through the grip of the cane , you can feel contrasting textures in the floor below , and over time you build a pattern of where you are and where you 're headed .
Similarly , just the sun warming one side of your face or the wind at your neck gives you clues about your alignment and your progression through a block and your movement through time and space .
But also , the sense of smell .
Some districts and cities have their own smell , as do places and things around you , and if you 're lucky , you can even follow your nose to that new bakery that you 've been looking for .
All this really surprised me , because I started to realize that my unsighted experienced was so far more multi-sensory than my sighted experience ever was .
What struck me also was how much the city was changing around me .
When you 're sighted , everybody kind of sticks to themselves , you mind your own business .
Lose your sight , though , and it 's a whole other story .
And I don 't know who 's watching who , but I have a suspicion that a lot of people are watching me .
And I 'm not paranoid , but everywhere I go , I 'm getting all sorts of advice : Go here , move there , watch out for this .
A lot of the information is good .
Some of it 's helpful . A lot of it 's kind of reversed .
You 've got to figure out what they actually meant .
Some of it 's kind of wrong and not helpful .
But it 's all good in the grand scheme of things .
But one time I was in Oakland walking along Broadway , and came to a corner .
I was waiting for an audible pedestrian signal , and as it went off , I was just about to step out into the street , when all of a sudden , my right hand was just gripped by this guy , and he yanked my arm and pulled me out into the crosswalk and was dragging me out across the street , speaking to me in Mandarin .
It 's like , there was no escape from this man 's death grip , but he got me safely there .
What could I do ?
But believe me , there are more polite ways to offer assistance .
We don 't know you 're there , so it 's kind of nice to say " Hello " first .
" Would you like some help ? "
But while in Oakland , I 've really been struck by how much the city of Oakland changed as I lost my sight .
I liked it sighted . It was fine .
It 's a perfectly great city .
But once I lost my sight and was walking along Broadway , I was blessed every block of the way .
" Bless you , man . "
" Go for it , brother . "
" God bless you . "
I didn 't get that sighted .
And even without sight , I don 't get that in San Francisco .
And I know it bothers some of my blind friends , it 's not just me .
Often it 's thought that that 's an emotion that comes up out of pity .
I tend to think that it comes out of our shared humanity , out of our togetherness , and I think it 's pretty cool .
In fact , if I 'm feeling down , I just go to Broadway in downtown Oakland , I go for a walk , and I feel better like that , in no time at all .
But also that it illustrates how disability and blindness sort of cuts across ethnic , social , racial , economic lines .
Disability is an equal-opportunity provider .
Everybody 's welcome .
In fact , I 've heard it said in the disability community that there are really only two types of people : There are those with disabilities , and there are those that haven 't quite found theirs yet .
It 's a different way of thinking about it , but I think it 's kind of beautiful , because it is certainly far more inclusive than the us-versus-them or the abled-versus-the-disabled , and it 's a lot more honest and respectful of the fragility of life .
So my final takeaway for you is that not only is the city good for the blind , but the city needs us .
And I 'm so sure of that that I want to propose to you today that the blind be taken as the prototypical city dwellers when imagining new and wonderful cities , and not the people that are thought about after the mold has already been cast .
It 's too late then .
So if you design a city with the blind in mind , you 'll have a rich , walkable network of sidewalks with a dense array of options and choices all available at the street level .
If you design a city with the blind in mind , sidewalks will be predictable and will be generous .
The space between buildings will be well-balanced between people and cars .
In fact , cars , who needs them ?
If you 're blind , you don 't drive .
They don 't like it when you drive .
If you design a city with the blind in mind , you design a city with a robust , accessible , well-connected mass transit system that connects all parts of the city and the region all around .
If you design a city with the blind in mind , there 'll be jobs , lots of jobs .
Blind people want to work too .
They want to earn a living .
So , in designing a city for the blind , I hope you start to realize that it actually would be a more inclusive , a more equitable , a more just city for all .
And based on my prior sighted experience , it sounds like a pretty cool city , whether you 're blind , whether you have a disability , or you haven 't quite found yours yet .
So thank you .

Geoffrey Canada : Our failing schools . Enough is enough !
Why , why , why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago ? Millions of students were failing then , as they are now -- and it 's because we 're clinging to a business model that clearly doesn 't work . Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to look at the data , think about the customers and make systematic shifts in order to help greater numbers of kids excel .
I 'm a little nervous , because my wife Yvonne said to me , she said , " Geoff , you watch the TED Talks . "
I said , " Yes , honey , I love TED Talks . "
She said , " You know , they 're like , really smart , talented -- " I said , " I know , I know . "
She said , " They don 't want , like , the angry black man . "
So I said , " No , I 'm gonna be good , Honey , I 'm gonna be good . I am . "
But I am angry .
And the last time I looked , I 'm -- So this is why I 'm excited but I 'm angry .
This year , there are going to be millions of our children that we 're going to needlessly lose , that we could -- right now , we could save them all .
You saw the quality of the educators who were here .
Do not tell me they could not reach those kids and save them . I know they could .
It is absolutely possible .
Why haven 't we fixed this ?
Those of us in education have held on to a business plan that we don 't care how many millions of young people fail , we 're going to continue to do the same thing that didn 't work , and nobody is getting crazy about it -- right ? -- enough to say , " Enough is enough . "
So here 's a business plan that simply does not make any sense .
You know , I grew up in the inner city , and there were kids who were failing in schools 56 years ago when I first went to school , and those schools are still lousy today , 56 years later .
And you know something about a lousy school ?
It 's not like a bottle of wine .
Right ?
Where you say , like , ' 87 was like a good year , right ?
That 's now how this thing -- I mean , every single year , it 's still the same approach , right ?
One size fits all , if you get it , fine , and if you don 't , tough luck . Just tough luck .
Why haven 't we allowed innovation to happen ?
Do not tell me we can 't do better than this .
Look , you go into a place that 's failed kids for 50 years , and you say , " So what 's the plan ? "
And they say , " We 'll , we 're going to do what we did last year this year . "
What kind of business model is that ?
Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3 .
They operated 10 to 3 . They were closed for lunch hour .
Now , who can bank between 10 and 3 ? The unemployed .
They don 't need banks . They got no money in the banks .
Who created that business model ? Right ?
And it went on for decades .
You know why ? Because they didn 't care .
It wasn 't about the customers .
It was about bankers . They created something that worked for them .
How could you go to the bank when you were at work ? It didn 't matter .
And they don 't care whether or not Geoff is upset he can 't go to the bank . Go find another bank .
They all operate the same way . Right ?
Now , one day , some crazy banker had an idea .
Maybe we should keep the bank open when people come home from work .
They might like that . What about a Saturday ?
What about introducing technology ?
Now look , I 'm a technology fan , but I have to admit to you all I 'm a little old .
So I was a little slow , and I did not trust technology , and when they first came out with those new contraptions , these tellers that you put in a card and they give you money , I was like , " There 's no way that machine is going to count that money right .
I am never using that , right ? "
So technology has changed . Things have changed .
Yet not in education . Why ?
Why is it that when we had rotary phones , when we were having folks being crippled by polio , that we were teaching And if you come up with a plan to change things , people consider you radical .
They will say the worst things about you .
I said one day , well , look , if the science says -- this is science , not me -- that our poorest children lose ground in the summertime -- You see where they are in June and say , okay , they 're there .
You look at them in September , they 've gone down .
You say , whoo ! So I heard about that in ' 75 when I was at the Ed School at Harvard .
I said , " Oh , wow , this is an important study . "
Because it suggests we should do something .
Every 10 years they reproduce the same study .
It says exactly the same thing : Poor kids lose ground in the summertime .
The system decides you can 't run schools in the summer .
You know , I always wonder , who makes up those rules ?
For years I went to -- Look , I went the Harvard Ed School .
I thought I knew something .
They said it was the agrarian calendar , and people had — but let me tell you why that doesn 't make sense .
I never got that . I never got that , because anyone knows if you farm , you don 't plant crops in July and August .
You plant them in the spring .
So who came up with this idea ? Who owns it ?
Why did we ever do it ?
Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have , schools were open all year . They were open all year , because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day .
They didn 't have any place for their kids to go .
It was a perfect place to have schools .
So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods .
So why don 't we ? Why don 't we ?
Because our business has refused to use science .
Science . You have Bill Gates coming out and saying , " Look , this works , right ? We can do this . "
How many places in America are going to change ? None .
None . Okay , yeah , there are two . All right ?
Yes , there 'll be some place , because some folks will do the right thing .
As a profession , we have to stop this . The science is clear .
Here 's what we know .
We know that the problem begins immediately .
Right ? This idea , zero to three .
My wife , Yvonne , and I , we have four kids , three grown ones and a 15-year-old .
That 's a longer story .
With our first kids , we did not know the science about brain development .
We didn 't know how critical those first three years were .
We didn 't know what was happening in those young brains .
We didn 't know the role that language , a stimulus and response , call and response , how important that was in developing those children .
We know that now . What are we doing about it ? Nothing .
Wealthy people know . Educated people know .
And their kids have an advantage .
Poor people don 't know , and we 're not doing anything to help them at all .
But we know this is critical .
Now , you take pre-kindergarten .
We know it 's important for kids .
Poor kids need that experience .
Nope . Lots of places , it doesn 't exist .
We know health services matter .
You know , we provide health services and people are always fussing at me about , you know , because I 'm all into accountability and data and all of that good stuff , but we do health services , and I have to raise a lot of money .
People used to say when they 'd come fund us , " Geoff , why do you provide these health services ? "
I used to make stuff up . Right ?
I 'd say , " Well , you know a child who has cavities is not going to , uh , be able to study as well . "
And I had to because I had to raise the money .
But now I 'm older , and you know what I tell them ?
You know why I provide kids with those health benefits and the sports and the recreation and the arts ?
Because I actually like kids .
I actually like kids .
But when they really get pushy , people really get pushy , I say , " I do it because you do it for your kid . "
And you 've never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help them do algebra better , but you will give that kid dance instruction , and you will be thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction , and it will make your day . And why shouldn 't poor kids have the same opportunity ? It 's the floor for these children .
So here 's the other thing .
I 'm a tester guy . I believe you need data , you need information , because you work at something , you think it 's working , and you find out it 's not working .
I mean , you 're educators . You work , you say , you think you 've got it , great , no ? And you find out they didn 't get it .
But here 's the problem with testing .
The testing that we do -- we 're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April .
You know when we 're going to get the results back ?
Maybe July , maybe June .
And the results have great data .
They 'll tell you Raheem really struggled , couldn 't do two-digit multiplication -- so great data , but you 're getting it back after school is over .
And so , what do you do ?
You go on vacation .
You come back from vacation .
Now you 've got all of this test data from last year .
You don 't look at it .
Why would you look at it ?
You 're going to go and teach this year .
So how much money did we just spend on all of that ?
Billions and billions of dollars for data that it 's too late to use .
I need that data in September .
I need that data in November .
I need to know you 're struggling , and I need to know whether or not what I did corrected that .
I need to know that this week .
I don 't need to know that at the end of the year when it 's too late .
Because in my older years , I 've become somewhat of a clairvoyant .
I can predict school scores .
You take me to any school .
I 'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling .
And you tell me last year 48 percent of those kids were on grade level .
And I say , " Okay , what 's the plan , what did we do from last year to this year ? "
You say , " We 're doing the same thing . "
I 'm going to make a prediction .
This year , somewhere between 44 and 52 percent of those kids will be on grade level .
And I will be right every single time .
So we 're spending all of this money , but we 're getting what ?
Teachers need real information right now about what 's happening to their kids .
The high stakes is today , because you can do something about it .
So here 's the other issue that I just think we 've got to be concerned about .
We can 't stifle innovation in our business .
We have to innovate . And people in our business get mad about innovation .
They get angry if you do something different .
If you try something new , people are always like , " Ooh , charter schools . " Hey , let 's try some stuff . Let 's see .
This stuff hasn 't worked for 55 years .
Let 's try something different . And here 's the rub .
Some of it 's not going to work .
You know , people tell me , " Yeah , those charter schools , a lot of them don 't work . "
A lot of them don 't . They should be closed .
I mean , I really believe they should be closed .
But we can 't confuse figuring out the science and things not working with we shouldn 't therefore do anything .
Right ? Because that 's not the way the world works .
If you think about technology , imagine if that 's how we thought about technology .
Every time something didn 't work , we just threw in the towel and said , " Let 's forget it . " Right ?
You know , they convinced me . I 'm sure some of you were like me -- the latest and greatest thing , the PalmPilot .
They told me , " Geoff , if you get this PalmPilot you 'll never need another thing . "
That thing lasted all of three weeks . It was over .
I was so disgusted I spent my money on this thing .
Did anybody stop inventing ? Not a person . Not a soul .
The folks went out there . They kept inventing .
The fact that you have failure , that shouldn 't stop you from pushing the science forward .
Our job as educators , there 's some stuff we know that we can do .
And we 've got to do better . The evaluation , we have to start with kids earlier , we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people .
We 've got to give them all of these opportunities .
So that we have to do . But this innovation issue , this idea that we 've got to keep innovating until we really nail this science down is something that is absolutely critical .
And this is something , by the way , that I think is going to be a challenge for our entire field .
America cannot wait another 50 years to get this right .
We have run out of time .
I don 't know about a fiscal cliff , but I know there 's an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second , and if we allow folks to continue this foolishness about saying we can 't afford this — So Bill Gates says it 's going to cost five billion dollars .
What is five billion dollars to the United States ?
What did we spend in Afghanistan this year ?
How many trillions ?
When the country cares about something , we 'll spend a trillion dollars without blinking an eye .
When the safety of America is threatened , we will spend any amount of money .
The real safety of our nation is preparing this next generation so that they can take our place and be the leaders of the world when it comes to thinking and technology and democracy and all that stuff we care about .
I dare say it 's a pittance , what it would require for us to really begin to solve some of these problems .
So once we do that , I 'll no longer be angry .
So , you guys , help me get there .
Thank you all very much . Thank you .
John Legend : So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children 's Zone ?
Geoffrey Canada : Well , you know , John , 100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school .
A hundred percent of them went to college .
This year 's seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school .
Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college .
We 'd better get that other seven percent .
So that 's just how this goes .
JL : So how do you stick with them after they leave high school ?
GC : Well , you know , one of the bad problems we have in this country is these kids , the same kids , these same vulnerable kids , when you get them in school , they drop out in record numbers .
And so we 've figured out that you 've got to really design a network of support for these kids that in many ways mimics what a good parent does .
They harass you , right ? They call you , they say , " I want to see your grades . How 'd you do on that last test ?
What are you talking about that you want to leave school ?
And you 're not coming back here . "
So a bunch of my kids know you can 't come back to Harlem because Geoff is looking for you .
They 're like , " I really can 't come back . " No . You 'd better stay in school .
But I 'm not kidding about some of this , and it gets a little bit to the grit issue .
When kids know that you refuse to let them fail , it puts a different pressure on them , and they don 't give up as easy .
So sometimes they don 't have it inside , and they 're , like , " You know , I don 't want to do this , but I know my mother 's going to be mad . "
Well , that matters to kids , and it helps get them through .
We try to create a set of strategies that gets them tutoring and help and support , but also a set of encouragements that say to them , " You can do it . It is going to be hard , but we refuse to let you fail . "
JL : Well , thank you Dr. Canada .
Please give it up for him one more time .
Sanjay Dastoor : A skateboard , with a boost
Imagine an electric vehicle that can get you to work -- or anywhere in a six-mile radius -- quickly , without traffic frustrations or gasoline . Now imagine you can pick it up and carry it with you . Yes , this souped-up skateboard could change the face of morning commutes .
Today I 'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle , that you can carry with you anywhere , that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes , and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity .
But when I say the word electric vehicle , people think about vehicles . They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles , and the vehicles that you use every day .
But if you come about it from a different perspective , you can create some more interesting , more novel concepts .
So we built something .
I 've got some of the pieces in my pocket here .
So this is the motor .
This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour , about 30 kilometers an hour , and this battery , this battery right here has about six miles of range , or 10 kilometers , which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone .
But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store .
These are from remote control airplanes .
And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently , you can really change things .
So today we 're going to show you one example of how you can use this .
Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is , but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco .
[ 6 Mile Range ] [ Top Speed Near 20mph ] [ Uphill Climbing ] [ Regenerative Braking ] So we 're going to show you what this thing can do .
It 's really maneuverable . You have a hand-held remote , so you can pretty easily control acceleration , braking , go in reverse if you like , also have braking .
It 's incredible just how light this thing is .
I mean , this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go .
So I 'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles .
This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car , which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build , but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation .
So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city , now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation .
So next time you think about a vehicle , I hope , like us , you 're thinking about something new .
Thank you .
Bunker Roy : Learning from a barefoot movement
In Rajasthan , India , an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers , artisans , dentists and doctors in their own villages . It 's called the Barefoot College , and its founder , Bunker Roy , explains how it works .
I 'd like to take you to another world .
And I 'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor , living on less than one dollar a day .
I went to a very elitist , snobbish , expensive education in India , and that almost destroyed me .
I was all set to be a diplomat , teacher , doctor -- all laid out .
Then , I don 't look it , but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years .
The whole world was laid out for me .
Everything was at my feet .
I could do nothing wrong .
And then I thought out of curiosity I 'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like .
So in 1965 , I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India , and I saw starvation , death , people dying of hunger , for the first time .
It changed my life .
I came back home , told my mother , " I 'd like to live and work in a village . "
Mother went into a coma .
" What is this ?
The whole world is laid out for you , the best jobs are laid out for you , and you want to go and work in a village ?
I mean , is there something wrong with you ? "
I said , " No , I 've got the best eduction .
It made me think .
And I wanted to give something back in my own way . "
" What do you want to do in a village ?
No job , no money , no security , no prospect . "
I said , " I want to live and dig wells for five years . "
" Dig wells for five years ?
You went to the most expensive school and college in India , and you want to dig wells for five years ? "
She didn 't speak to me for a very long time , because she thought I 'd let my family down .
But then , I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have , which are never brought into the mainstream -- which is never identified , respected , applied on a large scale .
And I thought I 'd start a Barefoot College -- college only for the poor .
What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college .
I went to this village for the first time .
Elders came to me and said , " Are you running from the police ? "
I said , " No . "
" You failed in your exam ? "
I said , " No . "
" You didn 't get a government job ? " I said , " No . "
" What are you doing here ?
Why are you here ?
The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich ; what are you doing in this village ?
Is there something wrong with you you 're not telling us ? "
I said , " No , I want to actually start a college only for the poor .
What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college . "
So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice .
They said , " Please , don 't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college . "
So it 's the only college in India where , if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master 's , you are disqualified to come .
You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college .
You have to work with your hands .
You have to have a dignity of labor .
You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community .
So we started the Barefoot College , and we redefined professionalism .
Who is a professional ?
A professional is someone who has a combination of competence , confidence and belief .
A water diviner is a professional .
A traditional midwife is a professional .
A traditional bone setter is a professional .
These are professionals all over the world .
You find them in any inaccessible village around the world .
And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal .
It needs to be used , needs to be applied , needs to be shown to the world outside -- that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today .
So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi .
You eat on the floor , you sleep on the floor , you work on the floor .
There are no contracts , no written contracts .
You can stay with me for 20 years , go tomorrow .
And no one can get more than $ 100 a month .
You come for the money , you don 't come to Barefoot College .
You come for the work and the challenge , you 'll come to the Barefoot College .
That is where we want you to try crazy ideas .
Whatever idea you have , come and try it .
It doesn 't matter if you fail .
Battered , bruised , you start again .
It 's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher .
And it 's the only college where we don 't give a certificate .
You are certified by the community you serve .
You don 't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer .
So when I said that , they said , " Well show us what is possible . What are you doing ?
This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can 't show it on the ground . "
So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986 .
It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can 't read and write , built on $ 1.50 a sq. ft .
150 people lived there , worked there .
They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002 .
But then they suspected , they thought there was an architect behind it .
I said , " Yes , they made the blueprints , but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college . "
We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $ 50,000 , because they didn 't believe us , and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia .
I asked a forester -- high-powered , paper-qualified expert -- I said , " What can you build in this place ? "
He had one look at the soil and said , " Forget it . No way .
Not even worth it .
No water , rocky soil . "
I was in a bit of a spot .
And I said , " Okay , I 'll go to the old man in village and say , ' What should I grow in this spot ? ' " He looked quietly at me and said , " You build this , you build this , you put this , and it 'll work . "
This is what it looks like today .
Went to the roof , and all the women said , " Clear out .
The men should clear out because we don 't want to share this technology with the men .
This is waterproofing the roof . "
It is a bit of jaggery , a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don 't know .
But it actually doesn 't leak .
Since 1986 , it hasn 't leaked .
This technology , the women will not share with the men .
It 's the only college which is fully solar-electrified .
All the power comes from the sun .
45 kilowatts of panels on the roof .
And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years .
So long as the sun shines , we 'll have no problem with power .
But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest , a Hindu priest , who 's only done eight years of primary schooling -- never been to school , never been to college .
He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed .
Food , if you come to the Barefoot College , is solar cooked .
But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women , illiterate women , who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker .
It 's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker .
Unfortunately , they 're almost half German , they 're so precise .
You 'll never find Indian women so precise .
Absolutely to the last inch , they can make that cooker .
And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking .
We have a dentist -- she 's a grandmother , illiterate , who 's a dentist .
She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children .
Barefoot technology : this was 1986 -- no engineer , no architect thought of it -- but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs .
Very little water is wasted .
All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank , and no water is wasted .
If we have four years of drought , we still have water on the campus , because we collect rainwater .
60 percent of children don 't go to school , because they have to look after animals -- sheep , goats -- domestic chores .
So we thought of starting a school at night for the children .
Because the night schools of Tilonia , over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools .
Because it 's for the convenience of the child ; it 's not for the convenience of the teacher .
And what do we teach in these schools ?
Democracy , citizenship , how you should measure your land , what you should do if you 're arrested , what you should do if your animal is sick .
This is what we teach in the night schools .
But all the schools are solar-lit .
Every five years we have an election .
Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process , and they elect a prime minister .
The prime minister is 12 years old .
She looks after 20 goats in the morning , but she 's prime minister in the evening .
She has a cabinet , a minister of education , a minister for energy , a minister for health .
And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children .
She got the World 's Children 's Prize five years ago , and she went to Sweden .
First time ever going out of her village .
Never seen Sweden .
Wasn 't dazzled at all by what was happening .
And the Queen of Sweden , who 's there , turned to me and said , " Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from ?
She 's only 12 years old , and she 's not dazzled by anything . "
And the girl , who 's on her left , turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said , " Please tell her I 'm the prime minister . "
Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high , we use puppetry .
Puppets is the way we communicate .
You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old .
He is my psychoanalyst . He is my teacher .
He 's my doctor . He 's my lawyer .
He 's my donor .
He actually raises money , solves my disputes .
He solves my problems in the village .
If there 's tension in the village , if attendance at the schools goes down and there 's a friction between the teacher and the parent , the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says , " Shake hands .
The attendance must not drop . "
These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports .
So this decentralized , demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages , we 've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan -- all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained .
And we went to Ladakh , and we asked this woman -- this , at minus 40 , you have to come out of the roof , because there 's no place , it was all snowed up on both sides -- and we asked this woman , " What was the benefit you had from solar electricity ? "
And she thought for a minute and said , " It 's the first time I can see my husband 's face in winter . "
Went to Afghanistan .
One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable .
Men are restless , men are ambitious , men are compulsively mobile , and they all want a certificate .
All across the globe , you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate .
Why ? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city , looking for a job .
So we came up with a great solution : train grandmothers .
What 's the best way of communicating in the world today ?
Television ? No .
Telegraph ? No .
Telephone ? No .
Tell a woman .
So we went to Afghanistan for the first time , and we picked three women and said , " We want to take them to India . "
They said , " Impossible . They don 't even go out of their rooms , and you want to take them to India . "
I said , " I 'll make a concession . I 'll take the husbands along as well . "
So I took the husbands along .
Of course , the women were much more intelligent than the men .
In six months , how do we train these women ?
Sign language .
You don 't choose the written word .
You don 't choose the spoken word .
You use sign language .
And in six months they can become solar engineers .
They go back and solar-electrify their own village .
This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village , set up a workshop -- the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [ was ] by the three women .
This woman is an extraordinary grandmother .
55 years old , and she 's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan .
And they haven 't collapsed .
She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC .
He didn 't know .
Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan .
We went to Africa , and we did the same thing .
All these women sitting at one table from eight , nine countries , all chatting to each other , not understanding a word , because they 're all speaking a different language .
But their body language is great .
They 're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers .
I went to Sierra Leone , and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night -- comes across this village .
Comes back , goes into the village , says , " Well what 's the story ? "
They said , " These two grandmothers ... " " Grandmothers ? " The minister couldn 't believe what was happening .
" Where did they go ? " " Went to India and back . "
Went straight to the president .
He said , " Do you know there 's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone ? "
He said , " No . " Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day .
" What 's the story . "
So he summoned me and said , " Can you train me 150 grandmothers ? "
I said , " I can 't , Mr. President .
But they will . The grandmothers will . "
So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone .
And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone .
Gambia : we went to select a grandmother in Gambia .
Went to this village .
I knew which woman I would like to take .
The community got together and said , " Take these two women . "
I said , " No , I want to take this woman . "
They said , " Why ? She doesn 't know the language . You don 't know her . "
I said , " I like the body language . I like the way she speaks . "
" Difficult husband ; not possible . "
Called the husband , the husband came , swaggering , politician , mobile in his hand . " Not possible . "
" Why not ? " " The woman , look how beautiful she is . "
I said , " Yeah , she is very beautiful . "
" What happens if she runs off with an Indian man ? "
That was his biggest fear .
I said , " She 'll be happy . She 'll ring you up on the mobile . "
She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger .
She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran .
She handled the national press , and she was a star .
And when I went back six months later , I said , " Where 's your husband ? "
" Oh , somewhere . It doesn 't matter . "
Success story .
I 'll just wind up by saying that I think you don 't have to look for solutions outside .
Look for solutions within .
And listen to people . They have the solutions in front of you .
They 're all over the world .
Don 't even worry .
Don 't listen to the World Bank , listen to the people on the ground .
They have all the solutions in the world .
I 'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi .
" First they ignore you , then they laugh at you , then they fight you , and then you win . "
Thank you .
Peter Haas : Haiti 's disaster of engineering
" Haiti was not a natural disaster , " says TED Fellow Peter Haas : " It was a disaster of engineering . " As the country rebuilds after January 's deadly quake , are bad old building practices creating another ticking time bomb ? Haas 's group , AIDG , is helping Haiti 's builders learn modern building and engineering practices , to assemble a strong country brick by brick .
I learned about the Haiti earthquake by Skype .
My wife sent me a message , " Whoa , earthquake , " and then disappeared for 25 minutes .
It was 25 minutes of absolute terror that thousands of people across the U.S. felt .
I was afraid of a tsunami ; what I didn 't realize was there was a greater terror in Haiti , and that was building collapse .
We 've all seen the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti .
These are shots my wife took a couple days after the quake , while I was making my way through the D.R. into the country .
This is the national palace -- the equivalent of the White House .
This is the largest supermarket in the Caribbean at peak shopping time .
This is a nurses ' college -- there are 300 nurses studying .
The general hospital right next door emerged largely unscathed .
This is the Ministry of Economics and Finance .
We have all heard about the tremendous human loss in the earthquake in Haiti , but we haven 't heard enough about why all those lives were lost .
We haven 't heard about why the buildings failed .
After all , it was the buildings , not the earthquake , that killed 220,000 people , that injured 330,000 , that displaced 1.3 million people , that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation .
This is the largest metropolitan-area disaster in decades , and it was not a natural disaster -- it was a disaster of engineering .
AIDG has worked in Haiti since 2007 , providing engineering and business support to small businesses .
And after the quake , we started bringing in earthquake engineers to figure out why the buildings collapsed , to examine what was safe and what wasn 't .
Working with MINUSTAH , which is the U.N. mission in Haiti , with the Ministry of Public Works , with different NGOs , we inspected over 1,500 buildings .
We inspected schools and private residencies .
We inspected medical centers and food warehouses .
We inspected government buildings .
This is the Ministry of Justice .
Behind that door is the National Judicial Archives .
The fellow in the door , Andre Filitrault -- who 's the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo -- was examining it to see if it was safe to recover the archives .
Andre told me , after seeing these buildings fail again and again in the same way , that there is no new research here .
There is nothing here that we don 't know .
The failure points were the same : walls and slabs not tied properly into columns -- that 's a roof slab hanging off the building -- cantilevered structures , or structures that were asymmetric , that shook violently and came down , poor building materials , not enough concrete , not enough compression in the blocks , rebar that was smooth , rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away .
Now there 's a solution to all these problems .
And we know how to build properly .
The proof of this came in Chile , almost a month later , when 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile .
That is 500 times the power of the 7.0 that hit Port-au-Prince -- 500 times the power , yet only under a thousand casualties .
Adjusted for population density , that is less than one percent of the impact of the Haitian quake .
What was the difference between Chile and Haiti ?
Seismic standards and confined masonry , where the building acts as a whole -- walls and columns and roofs and slabs tied together to support each other -- instead of breaking off into separate members and failing .
If you look at this building in Chile , it 's ripped in half , but it 's not a pile of rubble .
Chileans have been building with confined masonry for decades .
Right now , AIDG is working with KPFF Consulting Engineers , Architecture for Humanity , to bring more confined masonry training into Haiti .
This is Xantus Daniel ; he 's a mason , just a general construction worker , not a foreman , who took one of our trainings .
On his last job he was working with his boss , and they started pouring the columns wrong .
He took his boss aside , and he showed him the materials on confined masonry .
He showed him , " You know , we don 't have to do this wrong .
It won 't cost us any more to do it the right way . "
And they redid that building .
They tied the rebar right , they poured the columns right , and that building will be safe .
And every building that they build going forward will be safe .
To make sure these buildings are safe , it 's not going to take policy -- it 's going to take reaching out to the masons on the ground and helping them learn the proper techniques .
Now there are many groups doing this .
And the fellow in the vest there , Craig Toten , he has pushed forward to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this .
Through Haiti Rewired , through Build Change , Architecture for Humanity , AIDG , there is the possibility to reach out to 30,000 -- 40,000 masons across the country and create a movement of proper building .
If you reach out to the people on the ground in this collaborative way it 's extremely affordable .
For the billions spent on reconstruction , you can train masons for dollars on every house that they end up building over their lifetime .
Ultimately , there are two ways that you can rebuild Haiti ; the way at the top is the way that Haiti 's been building for decades .
The way at the top is a poorly constructed building that will fail .
The way at the bottom is a confined masonry building , where the walls are tied together , the building is symmetric , and it will stand up to an earthquake .
For all the disaster , there is an opportunity here to build better houses for the next generation , so that when the next earthquake hits , it is a disaster -- but not a tragedy .
Marcus Byrne : The dance of the dung beetle
A dung beetle has a brain the size of a grain of rice , and yet shows a tremendous amount of intelligence when it comes to rolling its food source -- animal excrement -- home . How ? It all comes down to a dance . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
This is poo , and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you , which might be quite difficult , but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo .
So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice , and yet it can do things that you and I couldn 't possibly entertain the idea of doing .
And basically it 's all evolved to handle its food source , which is dung .
So the question is , where do we start this story ?
And it seems appropriate to start at the end , because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals , but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living , and so dung beetles eat dung , and their larvae are also dung-feeders .
They are grown completely in a ball of dung .
Within South Africa , we 've got about 800 species of dung beetles , in Africa we 've got 2,000 species of dung beetles , and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles .
So , according to dung beetles , dung is pretty good .
Unless you 're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself , you 'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species , because they go directly into the dung , straight down below it , and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground .
So the question is , how do they deal with this material ?
And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort .
Ten percent of the species actually make a ball , and this ball they roll away from the dung source , usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source , and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls .
So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball .
You can see it 's a male because he 's got a little hair on the back of his legs there , and he 's clearly very pleased about what he 's sitting on there .
And then he 's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab .
And this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource .
And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way , and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this , because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung .
So this dung pat was actually -- well , it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken , and we think it 's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung .
So what you 've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the African veld .
Its head is down . It 's walking backwards .
It 's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction , and at the same time it 's got to deal with the heat .
This is Africa . It 's hot .
So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems .
So watch this beetle , and there 's two things that I would like you to be aware of .
The first is how it deals with this obstacle that we 've put in its way . See , look , it does a little dance , and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place .
A little dance , and then heads off in a particular direction .
So clearly this animal knows where it 's going and it knows where it wants to go , and that 's a very , very important thing , because if you think about it , you 're at the dung pile , you 've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else , and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line .
So we gave them some more tasks to deal with , and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet . And watch its response .
So this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet . It 's turned by 90 degrees .
But it doesn 't flinch . It knows exactly where it wants to go , and it heads off in that particular direction .
So our next question then was , how are they doing this ?
What are they doing ? And there was a cue that was available to us .
It was that every now and then they 'd climb on top of the ball and they 'd take a look at the world around them .
And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball ?
What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement ? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky , and so we thought , now what could they be looking at in the sky ?
And the obvious thing to look at is the sun .
So a classic experiment here , in that what we did was we moved the sun .
What we 're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position .
And look at what the beetle does .
It does a little double dance , and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place .
What happens now ? So clearly they 're looking at the sun .
The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them .
The thing is the sun is not always available to you , because at sunset it disappears below the horizon .
What is happening in the sky here is that there 's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can 't see . It 's the way our eyes are built .
But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon , say it 's over on this side , there is a north-south , a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can 't see that the beetles can see .
So how do we test that ? Well , that 's easy .
What we do is we get a great big polarization filter , pop the beetle underneath it , and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky .
The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn , because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in .
So obviously beetles can see polarized light .
Okay , so what we 've got so far is , what are beetles doing ? They 're rolling balls .
How are they doing it ? Well , they 're rolling them in a straight line .
How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line ?
Well , they 're looking at celestial cues in the sky , some of which you and I can 't see .
But how do they pick up those celestial cues ?
That was what was of interest to us next .
And it was this particular little behavior , the dance , that we thought was important , because look , it takes a pause every now and then , and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in .
So what are they doing when they do this dance ?
How far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves ?
And in this experiment here , what we did was we forced them into a channel , and you can see he wasn 't particularly forced into this particular channel , and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in , in the first place .
And let 's see what his reaction is as he 's headed through 90 degrees here , and now he 's going to -- when he ends up down here , he 's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction .
And see what his response is .
He does a little dance , he turns around , and heads back in this . He knows exactly where he 's going .
He knows exactly what the problem is , and he knows exactly how to deal with it , and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves .
So that 's the dance , but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days , we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior .
Every now and then , when they climb on top of the ball , they wipe their face .
And you see him do it again .
Now we thought , now what could be going on here ?
Clearly the ground is very hot , and when the ground is hot , they dance more often , and when they do this particular dance , they wipe the bottom of their face .
And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior .
We thought that maybe what they 're doing is trying to get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down .
So what we did was design a couple of arenas .
one was hot , one was cold .
We shaded this one . We left that one hot .
And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera .
So what you 're looking at here is a heat image of the system , and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball .
So the truth is , if you look at the temperature over here , dung is cool .
So all we 're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background .
So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade .
The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade , so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld .
It isn 't climbing . It isn 't dancing , because its body temperature is actually relatively low .
It 's about the same as yours and mine .
And what 's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool .
But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment , look at the temperature of the soil .
It 's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade .
Watch how often the beetle dances .
And look at its front legs . They 're roaringly hot .
So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow , and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face , and all the time it 's trying to cool itself down , we think , and avoid the hot sand that it 's walking across .
And what we did then was put little boots on these legs , because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil .
And if you look over here , with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on .
So we described these as cool boots .
It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots .
And we also cooled down the dung ball , so we were able to put the ball in the fridge , gave them a nice cool dung ball , and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball .
So this is called stilting . It 's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach , we jump onto a towel , somebody has this towel -- " Sorry , I 've jumped onto your towel . " -- and then you scuttle across onto somebody else 's towel , and that way you don 't burn your feet .
And that 's exactly what the beetles are doing here .
However , there 's one more story I 'd like to share with you , and that 's this particular species .
It 's from a genus called Pachysoma .
There are 13 species in the genus , and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting .
This is a dung beetle . Watch what he 's doing .
Can you spot the difference ?
They don 't normally go this slowly . It 's in slow motion .
but it 's walking forwards , and it 's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it .
This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior .
There 's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle 's behavior that we found quite fascinating , and that 's that it forages and provisions a nest .
So watch this individual here , and what he 's trying to do is set up a nest .
And he doesn 't like this first position , but he comes up with a second position , and about 50 minutes later , that nest is finished , and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets .
And what I want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path , and compare the two .
And by and large , you 'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path .
On the outward path , he 's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung .
On the way home , he knows where home is , and he wants to go straight to it .
The important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip , as in most dung beetles . The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site .
And watch , you 're going to see another South African crime taking place right now .
And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets .
So what we 're looking at here is a behavior called path integration .
And what 's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot , it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food , and then when it finds food , it heads straight home . It knows exactly where its home is .
Now there 's two ways it could be doing that , and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it 's at the foraging site .
If it 's using landmarks , it will find its home .
If it is using something called path integration , it will not find its home . It will arrive at the wrong spot , and what it 's doing here if it 's using path integration is it 's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction .
It knows the bearing home , and it knows it should be in that direction .
If you displace it , it ends up in the wrong place .
So let 's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment .
So here 's our cunning experimenter .
He displaces the beetle , and now we have to see what is going to take place .
What we 've got is a burrow . That 's where the forage was .
The forage has been displaced to a new position .
If he 's using landmark orientation , he should be able to find the burrow , because he 'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it .
If he 's using path integration , then it should end up in the wrong spot over here .
So let 's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test .
So there he is there .
He 's about to head home , and look what happens .
Shame .
It hasn 't a clue .
It starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food , but it is clearly completely lost .
So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around , and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it .
So what we 're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass , and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around , and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance , and we know that these species here actually count the steps . That 's what they use as an odometer , a step-counting system , to find their way back home .
We don 't know yet what dung beetles use .
So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that 's the size of a grain of rice ?
Well , we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues .
We know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it 's also a thermoregulation behavior , and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home .
So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn 't possibly do .
Thank you .
Ron Gutman : The hidden power of smiling
Ron Gutman reviews a raft of studies about smiling , and reveals some surprising results . Did you know your smile can be a predictor of how long you 'll live -- and that a simple smile has a measurable effect on your overall well-being ? Prepare to flex a few facial muscles as you learn more about this evolutionarily contagious behavior .
When I was a child , I always wanted to be a superhero .
I wanted to save the world and then make everyone happy .
But I knew that I 'd need superpowers to make my dreams come true .
So I used to embark on these imaginary journeys to find intergalactic objects from planet Krypton , which was a lot of fun , but didn 't get much result .
When I grew up and realized that science fiction was not a good source for superpowers , I decided instead to embark on a journey of real science , to find a more useful truth .
I started my journey in California with a UC Berkeley 30-year longitudinal study that examined the photos of students in an old yearbook and tried to measure their success and well-being throughout their life .
By measuring their student smiles , researchers were able to predict how fulfilling and long-lasting a subject 's marriage will be , how well she would score on standardized tests of well-being and how inspiring she would be to others .
In another yearbook , I stumbled upon Barry Obama 's picture .
When I first saw his picture , I thought that these superpowers came from his super collar .
But now I know it was all in his smile .
Another aha ! moment came from a 2010 Wayne State University research project that looked into pre-1950s baseball cards of Major League players .
The researchers found that the span of a player 's smile could actually predict the span of his life .
Players who didn 't smile in their pictures lived an average of only 72.9 years , where players with beaming smiles lived an average of almost 80 years .
The good news is that we 're actually born smiling .
Using 3D ultrasound technology , we can now see that developing babies appear to smile , even in the womb .
When they 're born , babies continue to smile -- initially , mostly in their sleep .
And even blind babies smile to the sound of the human voice .
Smiling is one of the most basic , biologically-uniform expressions of all humans .
In studies conducted in Papua New Guinea , Paul Ekman , the world 's most renowned researcher on facial expressions , found that even members of the Fore tribe , who were completely disconnected from Western culture , and also known for their unusual cannibalism rituals , attributed smiles to descriptions of situations the same way you and I would .
So from Papua New Guinea to Hollywood all the way to modern art in Beijing , we smile often , and you smile to express joy and satisfaction .
How many people here in this room smile more than 20 times per day ?
Raise your hand if you do . Oh , wow .
Outside of this room , more than a third of us smile more than 20 times per day , whereas less than 14 percent of us smile less than five .
In fact , those with the most amazing superpowers are actually children , who smile as many as 400 times per day .
Have you ever wondered why being around children who smile so frequently makes you smile very often ?
A recent study at Uppsala University in Sweden found that it 's very difficult to frown when looking at someone who smiles .
You ask , why ?
Because smiling is evolutionarily contagious , and it suppresses the control we usually have on our facial muscles .
Mimicking a smile and experiencing it physically help us understand whether our smile is fake or real , so we can understand the emotional state of the smiler .
In a recent mimicking study at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in France , subjects were asked to determine whether a smile was real or fake while holding a pencil in their mouth to repress smiling muscles .
Without the pencil , subjects were excellent judges , but with the pencil in their mouth -- when they could not mimic the smile they saw -- their judgment was impaired .
In addition to theorizing on evolution in " The Origin of Species , " Charles Darwin also wrote the facial feedback response theory .
His theory states that the act of smiling itself actually makes us feel better -- rather than smiling being merely a result of feeling good .
In his study , Darwin actually cited a French neurologist , Guillaume Duchenne , who used electric jolts to facial muscles to induce and stimulate smiles .
Please , don 't try this at home .
In a related German study , researchers used fMRI imaging to measure brain activity before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles .
The finding supported Darwin 's theory by showing that facial feedback modifies the neural processing of emotional content in the brain in a way that helps us feel better when we smile .
Smiling stimulates our brain reward mechanism in a way that even chocolate -- a well-regarded pleasure inducer -- cannot match .
British researchers found that one smile can generate the same level of brain stimulation as up to 2,000 bars of chocolate .
Wait . The same study found that smiling is as stimulating as receiving up to 16,000 pounds Sterling in cash .
That 's like 25 grand a smile .
It 's not bad .
And think about it this way : 25,000 times 400 -- quite a few kids out there feel like Mark Zuckerberg every day .
And , unlike lots of chocolate , lots of smiling can actually make you healthier .
Smiling can help reduce the level of stress-enhancing hormones like cortisol , adrenaline and dopamine , increase the level of mood-enhancing hormones like endorphin and reduce overall blood pressure .
And if that 's not enough , smiling can actually make you look good in the eyes of others .
A recent study at Penn State University found that when you smile , you don 't only appear to be more likable and courteous , but you actually appear to be more competent .
So whenever you want to look great and competent , reduce your stress or improve your marriage , or feel as if you just had a whole stack of high-quality chocolate -- without incurring the caloric cost -- or as if you found 25 grand in a pocket of an old jacket you hadn 't worn for ages , or whenever you want to tap into a superpower that will help you and everyone around you live a longer , healthier , happier life , smile .
Peter Singer : The why and how of effective altruism
If you 're lucky enough to live without want , it 's a natural impulse to be altruistic to others . But , asks philosopher Peter Singer , what 's the most effective way to give ? He talks through some surprising thought experiments to help you balance emotion and practicality -- and make the biggest impact with whatever you can share . NOTE : Starting at 0 : 30 , this talk contains 30 seconds of graphic footage .
There 's something that I 'd like you to see .
Reporter : It 's a story that 's deeply unsettled millions in China : footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby , footage too graphic to be shown .
The entire accident is caught on camera .
The driver pauses after hitting the child , his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second .
Within two minutes , three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by .
The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely .
Others look at her before moving off .
Peter Singer : There were other people who walked past Wang Yue , and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm .
She was rushed to hospital , but it was too late . She died .
I wonder how many of you , looking at that , said to yourselves just now , " I would not have done that .
I would have stopped to help . "
Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you .
As I thought , that 's most of you .
And I believe you . I 'm sure you 're right .
But before you give yourself too much credit , look at this .
UNICEF reports that in 2011 , 6.9 million children under five died from preventable , poverty-related diseases .
UNICEF thinks that that 's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990 . That is good .
But still , 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day .
Does it really matter that we 're not walking past them in the street ?
Does it really matter that they 're far away ?
I don 't think it does make a morally relevant difference .
The fact that they 're not right in front of us , the fact , of course , that they 're of a different nationality or race , none of that seems morally relevant to me .
What is really important is , can we reduce that death toll ? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day ?
And the answer is , yes we can .
Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need .
You can think what your own habit is , whether it 's a new car , a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink .
You could take the money you 're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization , the Against Malaria Foundation , which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one , and we know reliably that if we provide nets , they 're used , and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria , just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day .
Fortunately , more and more people are understanding this idea , and the result is a growing movement : effective altruism .
It 's important because it combines both the heart and the head .
The heart , of course , you felt .
You felt the empathy for that child .
But it 's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed , and not only that , but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people , wherever they are , are like us , that they can suffer as we can , that parents grieve for the deaths of their children , as we do , and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us , it matters just as much to all of these people .
So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want .
It does help us to put perspective on our situation .
And I think that 's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math .
And that might seem surprising , because a lot of people think , " Philosophy is remote from the real world ; economics , we 're told , just makes us more selfish , and we know that math is for nerds . "
But in fact it does make a difference , and in fact there 's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this .
This is the website of the Bill & amp ; Melinda Gates Foundation , and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side , it says , " All lives have equal value . "
That 's the understanding , the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history , Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett .
No one , not Andrew Carnegie , not John D. Rockefeller , has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three , and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective .
According to one estimate , the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more , people , getting diseases that would have made them very sick , even if eventually they survived .
Over the coming years , undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more , is going to save a lot more lives .
Well , you might say , that 's fine if you 're a billionaire , you can have that kind of impact .
But if I 'm not , what can I do ?
So I 'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving .
They worry how much of a difference they can make .
But you don 't have to be a billionaire .
This is Toby Ord. He 's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford .
He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career , an academic career , he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living .
So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information , to unite people who want to share some of their income , and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty .
Toby himself does better than that .
He 's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year -- that 's less than 30,000 dollars -- and to give the rest to those organizations .
And yes , Toby is married and he does have a mortgage .
This is a couple at a later stage of life , Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott , who , when they were young , when they met , were activists against the Vietnam War , fought for social justice , and then moved into careers , as most people do , didn 't really do anything very active about those values , although they didn 't abandon them .
And then , as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement , they returned to them , and they 've decided to cut back on their spending , to live modestly , and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty .
Now , mentioning time might lead you to think , " Well , should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day ? "
One person who 's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch .
He 's a graduate student in philosophy , and he 's set up a website called 80,000 Hours , the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career , to advise people on how to have the best , most effective career .
But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider , if they have the right abilities and character , is to go into banking or finance .
Why ? Because if you earn a lot of money , you can give away a lot of money , and if you 're successful in that career , you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ , let 's say , five aid workers in developing countries , and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done .
So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career .
Here 's one young man who 's taken this advice .
His name is Matt Weiger .
He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math , actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated .
But he 's gone into finance in New York .
He 's already earning enough so that he 's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on .
Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I 'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote , " The Life You Can Save , " which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we 're going to live an ethical life , it 's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat , steal , maim , kill , but that if we have enough , we have to share some of that with people who have so little .
And the organization draws together people of different generations , like Holly Morgan , who 's an undergraduate , who 's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has , and on the right , Ada Wan , who has worked directly for the poor , but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give .
Many people will think , though , that charities aren 't really all that effective .
So let 's talk about effectiveness .
Toby Ord is very concerned about this , and he 's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others , so it 's very important to find the effective ones .
Take , for example , providing a guide dog for a blind person .
That 's a good thing to do , right ?
Well , right , it is a good thing to do , but you have to think what else you could do with the resources .
It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person .
It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma .
So you do the sums , and you get something like that .
You could provide one guide dog for one blind American , or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness .
I think it 's clear what 's the better thing to do .
But if you want to look for effective charities , this is a good website to go to .
GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities , not just whether they 're well-run , and it 's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three , of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one .
So it 's very tough . If you want to look for other recommendations , thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list , but you can find effective organizations , and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor .
I 'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations .
That 's another cause that I 've been concerned about all my life , the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year .
So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering , you can go to Effective Animal Activism .
And some effective altruists think it 's very important to make sure that our species survives at all .
So they 're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction .
Here 's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently , when an asteroid passed close to our planet .
Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us , but actually to deflect them .
So some people think that would be a good thing to give to .
There 's many possibilities .
My final question is , some people will think it 's a burden to give .
I don 't really believe it is .
I 've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student .
It 's been something fulfilling to me .
Charlie Bresler said to me that he 's not an altruist .
He thinks that the life he 's saving is his own .
And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism , and now is one of the happiest people she knows .
I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem .
Here 's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian , condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill .
Just as he gets there , the effort becomes too much , the boulder escapes , rolls all the way down the hill , he has to trudge back down to push it up again , and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity .
Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle , where you work hard to get money , you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you 'll enjoy using ?
But then the money 's gone , you have to work hard to get more , spend more , and to maintain the same level of happiness , it 's kind of a hedonic treadmill .
You never get off , and you never really feel satisfied .
Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment .
It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living .
I 'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago .
It 's from a man named Chris Croy , who I 'd never heard of .
This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery .
Why was he recovering from surgery ?
The email began , " Last Tuesday , I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger .
That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys . "
There 's about 100 people each year in the U.S.
and more in other countries who do that .
I was pleased to read it . Chris went on to say that he 'd been influenced by my writings in what he did .
Well , I have to admit , I 'm also somewhat embarrassed by that , because I still have two kidneys .
But Chris went on to say that he didn 't think that what he 'd done was all that amazing , because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people , the extension of life , was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation .
And that did make me feel a little bit better , because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities .
So if you 're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well , there 's a way for you to get off the hook .
Thank you .
Amy Smith : Simple designs to save a life
Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world . MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution : a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal .
In terms of invention , I 'd like to tell you the tale of one of my favorite projects .
I think it 's one of the most exciting that I 'm working on , but I think it 's also the simplest .
It 's a project that has the potential to make a huge impact around the world .
It addresses one of the biggest health issues on the planet , the number one cause of death in children under five , which is ... ? Water-borne diseases ? Diarrhea ? Malnutrition ?
No , it 's breathing the smoke from indoor cooking fires -- acute respiratory infections caused by this . Can you believe that ?
I find this shocking and somewhat appalling .
Can 't we make cleaner burning cooking fuels ?
Can 't we make better stoves ?
How is it that this can lead to over two million deaths every year ?
I know Bill Joy was talking to you about the wonders of carbon nanotubes , so I 'm going to talk to you about the wonders of carbon macro-tubes , which is charcoal .
So this is a picture of rural Haiti . Haiti is now 98 percent deforested .
You 'll see scenes like this all over the island .
It leads to all sorts of environmental problems and problems that affect people throughout the nation .
A couple years ago there was severe flooding that led to thousands of deaths -- that 's directly attributable to the fact that there are no trees on the hills to stabilize the soil .
So the rains come , they go down the rivers , and the flooding happens .
Now one of the reasons why there are so few trees is this : people need to cook , and they harvest wood and they make charcoal in order to do it .
It 's not that people are ignorant to the environmental damage .
They know perfectly well , but they have no other choice .
Fossil fuels are not available , and solar energy doesn 't cook the way that they like their food prepared .
And so this is what they do .
You 'll find families like this who go out into the forest to find a tree , cut it down and make charcoal out of it .
So not surprisingly , there 's a lot of effort that 's been done to look at alternative cooking fuels .
About four years ago I took a team of students down to Haiti , and we worked with Peace Corps volunteers there .
This is one such volunteer , and this is a device that he had built in the village where he worked .
And the idea was that you could take waste paper ; you could compress it ; and make briquettes that could be used for fuel .
But this device was very slow .
So our engineering students went to work on it , and with some very simple changes , they were able to triple the throughput of this device .
So you could imagine they were very excited about it .
And they took the briquettes back to MIT so that they could test them .
And one of the things that they found was they didn 't burn .
So it was a little discouraging to the students .
And in fact if you look closely , right here , you can see it says , " U.S. Peace Corps . "
As it turns out , there actually wasn 't any waste paper in this village .
And while it was a good use of government paperwork for this volunteer to bring it back with him to his village , it was 800 kilometers away .
And so we thought perhaps there might be a better way to come up with an alternative cooking fuel .
What we wanted to do is we wanted to make a fuel that used something that was readily available on the local level .
You see these all over Haiti as well . They 're small-scale sugar mills .
And the waste product from them after you extract the juice from the sugarcane is called " bagasse . "
It has no other use . It has no nutritional value , so they don 't feed it to the animals .
It just sits in a pile near the sugar mill until eventually they burn it .
What we wanted to do was we wanted to find a way to harness this waste resource and turn it into a fuel that would be something that people could easily cook with , something like charcoal .
So over the next couple of years , students and I worked to develop a process .
So you start with the bagasse , and then you take a very simple kiln that you can make out of a waste fifty five-gallon oil drum .
After some time , after setting it on fire , you seal it to restrict the oxygen that goes into the kiln , and then you end up with this carbonized material here .
However , you can 't burn this . It 's too fine and it burns too quickly to be useful for cooking .
So we had to try to find a way to form it into useful briquettes .
And conveniently , one of my students was from Ghana , and he remembered a dish his mom used to make for him called " kokonte , " which is a very sticky porridge made out of the cassava root .
And so what we did was we looked , and we found that cassava is indeed grown in Haiti , under the name of " manioc . "
And in fact , it 's grown all over the world -- yucca , tapioca , manioc , cassava , it 's all the same thing -- a very starchy root vegetable .
And you can make a very thick , sticky porridge out of it , which you can use to bind together the charcoal briquettes .
So we did this . We went down to Haiti .
These are the graduates of the first Ecole de Chabon , or Charcoal Institute . And these -- -- that 's right . So I 'm actually an instructor at MIT as well as CIT .
And these are the briquettes that we made .
Now I 'm going to take you to a different continent . This is India , and this is the most commonly used cooking fuel in India ; it 's cow dung .
And more than in Haiti , this produces really smoky fires , and this is where you see the health impacts of cooking with cow dung and biomass as a fuel .
Kids and women are especially affected by it , because they 're the ones who are around the cooking fires .
So we wanted to see if we could introduce this charcoal-making technology there .
Well unfortunately , they didn 't have sugarcane and they didn 't have cassava , but that didn 't stop us .
What we did was we found what were the locally available sources of biomass .
And there was wheat straw and there was rice straw in this area .
And what we could use as a binder was actually small amounts of cow manure , which they used ordinarily for their fuel .
And we did side-by-side tests , and here you can see the charcoal briquettes and here the cow dung .
And you can see that it 's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel .
And in fact , it heats the water a lot more quickly .
And so we were very happy , thus far .
But one of the things that we found was when we did side-by-side comparisons with wood charcoal , it didn 't burn as long . And the briquettes crumbled a little bit , and we lost energy as they fell apart as they were cooking .
So we wanted to try to find a way to make a stronger briquette so that we could compete with wood charcoal in the markets in Haiti .
So we went back to MIT , we took out the Instron machine , and we figured out what sort of forces did you need in order to compress a briquette to the level that you actually are getting improved performance out of it ?
And at the same time that we had students in the lab looking at this , we also had community partners in Haiti working to develop the process , to improve it and to make it more accessible to people in the villages there .
And after some time , we developed a low-cost press that allows you to produce charcoal , which actually now burns longer , cleaner than wood charcoal .
So now we 're in a situation where we have a product , which is actually better than what you can buy in Haiti in the marketplace , which is a very wonderful place to be .
In Haiti alone , about 30 million trees are cut down every year .
There 's a possibility of this being implemented and saving a good portion of those .
In addition , the revenue generated from that charcoal is 260 million dollars .
That 's an awful lot for a country of Haiti -- with a population of eight million and an average income of less than 400 dollars .
So this is where we 're also moving ahead with our charcoal project .
And one of the things that I think is also interesting , is I have a friend up at UC Berkeley who 's been doing risk analysis .
And he 's looked at the problem of the health impacts of burning wood versus charcoal .
And he 's found that worldwide , you could prevent a million deaths switching from wood to charcoal as a cooking fuel . That 's remarkable , but up until now , there weren 't ways to do it without cutting down trees .
But now we have a way that 's using an agricultural waste material to create a cooking fuel .
One of the really exciting things , though , is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month .
And this is , I think , the coolest thing , and it 's even lower tech than what you just saw , if you can imagine such a thing . Here it is .
So what is this ? This is corncobs turned into charcoal .
And the beauty of this is that you don 't need to form briquettes -- it comes ready made . This is my $ 100 laptop , right here .
And actually , like Nick , I brought samples .
So we can pass these around .
They 're fully functional , field-tested , ready to roll out .
And I think one of the things , which is also remarkable about this technology , is that the technology transfer is so easy .
Compared to the sugarcane charcoal , where we actually have to teach people how to form it into briquettes and you have the extra step of cooking the binder , this comes pre-briquetted .
And this is about the most exciting thing in my life right now , which is perhaps a sad commentary on my life .
But once you see it , like you guys in the front row , all right , yeah , OK . So anyway -- -- here it is . And this is I think a perfect example of what Robert Wright was talking about in those non-zero-sum things .
So not only do you have health benefits , you have environmental benefits .
But this is one of the incredibly rare situations where you also have economic benefits .
People can make their own cooking fuel from waste products .
They can generate income from this .
They can save the money that they were going to spend on charcoal , and they can produce excess and sell it in the market to people who aren 't making their own .
It 's really rare that you don 't have trade-offs between health and economics , or environment and economics .
So this is a project that I just find extremely exciting , and I 'm really looking forward to see where it takes us .
So when we talk about , now , the future we will create , one of the things that I think is necessary is to have a very clear vision of the world that we live in .
And now I don 't actually mean the world that we live in .
I mean the world where women spend two to three hours everyday grinding grain for their families to eat .
I mean the world where advanced building materials means cement roofing tiles that are made by hand , and where , when you work 10 hours a day , you 're still only earning 60 dollars in a month .
I mean the world where women and children spend 40 billion hours a year fetching water .
That 's as if the entire workforce of the State of California worked full time for a year doing nothing but fetching water .
It 's a place where , for example , if this were India , in this room , only three of us would have a car .
If this were Afghanistan , only one person in this room would know how the use the Internet .
If this were Zambia , 300 of you would be farmers , 100 of you would have AIDS or HIV .
And more than half of you would be living on less than a dollar a day .
These are the issues that we need to come up with solutions for .
These are the issues that we need to be training our engineers , our designers , our business people , our entrepreneurs to be facing .
These are the solutions that we need to find .
I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address .
One of them is creating technologies to promote micro-finance and micro-enterprise , so that people who are living below the poverty line can find a way to move out -- and that they 're not doing it using the same traditional basket making , poultry rearing , etc .
But there are new technologies and new products that they can make on a small scale .
The next thing I believe is that we need to create technologies for poor farmers to add value to their own crops .
And we need to rethink our development strategies , so that we 're not promoting educational campaigns to get them to stop being farmers , but rather to stop being poor farmers .
And we need to think about how we can do that effectively .
We need to work with the people in these communities , and give them the resources and the tools that they need to solve their own problems . That 's the best way to do it .
We shouldn 't be doing it from outside .
So we need to create this future , and we need to start doing it now .
Thank you .
Tell us -- just while we see if someone has a question -- just tell us about one of the other things that you 've worked on .
Amy Smith : A couple of other things that we 're working on are looking at ways to do low-cost water quality testing , so that communities can maintain their own water systems , know when they 're working , know when they treat them , etc .
We 're also looking at low-cost water treatment systems .
One of the really exciting things is looking at solar water disinfection and improving the ability to be able to do that .
What 's the bottleneck to preventing this stuff getting from scale ?
Do you need to find entrepreneurs , or venture capitalists , or what do you need to take what you 've got and get it to scale ?
AS : Yeah , I think its large numbers of people moving it forward .
It 's a difficult thing ; it 's a marketplace which is very fragmented and a consumer population with no income .
So you can 't use the same models that you use in the United States for making things move forward .
And we 're a pretty small staff , which is me .
So , you know , I do what I can with the students .
We have 30 students a year go out into the field and try to implement this and move it forward .
The other thing is you have to do things with a long time frame , as -- you know , you can 't expect to get something done in a year or two years ; you have to be looking five or 10 years ahead .
But I think with the vision to do that , we can move forward .
Paula Johnson : His and hers … healthcare
Every cell in the human body has a sex , which means that men and women are different right down to the cellular level . Yet too often , research and medicine ignore this insight -- and the often startlingly different ways in which the two sexes respond to disease or treatment . As pioneering doctor Paula Johnson describes in this thought-provoking talk , lumping everyone in together means we essentially leave women 's health to chance . It 's time to rethink .
Some of my most wonderful memories of childhood are of spending time with my grandmother , Mamar , in our four-family home in Brooklyn , New York .
Her apartment was an oasis .
It was a place where I could sneak a cup of coffee , which was really warm milk with just a touch of caffeine .
She loved life .
And although she worked in a factory , she saved her pennies and she traveled to Europe .
And I remember poring over those pictures with her and then dancing with her to her favorite music .
And then , when I was eight and she was 60 , something changed .
She no longer worked or traveled .
She no longer danced .
There were no more coffee times .
My mother missed work and took her to doctors who couldn 't make a diagnosis .
And my father , who worked at night , would spend every afternoon with her , just to make sure she ate .
Her care became all-consuming for our family .
And by the time a diagnosis was made , she was in a deep spiral .
Now many of you will recognize her symptoms .
My grandmother had depression .
A deep , life-altering depression , from which she never recovered .
And back then , so little was known about depression .
But even today , 50 years later , there 's still so much more to learn .
Today , we know that women are 70 percent more likely to experience depression over their lifetimes compared with men .
And even with this high prevalence , women are misdiagnosed between 30 and 50 percent of the time .
Now we know that women are more likely to experience the symptoms of fatigue , sleep disturbance , pain and anxiety compared with men .
And these symptoms are often overlooked as symptoms of depression .
And it isn 't only depression in which these sex differences occur , but they occur across so many diseases .
So it 's my grandmother 's struggles that have really led me on a lifelong quest .
And today , I lead a center in which the mission is to discover why these sex differences occur and to use that knowledge to improve the health of women .
Today , we know that every cell has a sex .
Now , that 's a term coined by the Institute of Medicine .
And what it means is that men and women are different down to the cellular and molecular levels .
It means that we 're different across all of our organs .
From our brains to our hearts , our lungs , our joints .
Now , it was only 20 years ago that we hardly had any data on women 's health beyond our reproductive functions .
But then in 1993 , the NIH Revitalization Act was signed into law .
And what this law did was it mandated that women and minorities be included in clinical trials that were funded by the National Institutes of Health .
And in many ways , the law has worked .
Women are now routinely included in clinical studies , and we 've learned that there are major differences in the ways that women and men experience disease .
But remarkably , what we have learned about these differences is often overlooked .
So , we have to ask ourselves the question : Why leave women 's health to chance ?
And we 're leaving it to chance in two ways .
The first is that there is so much more to learn and we 're not making the investment in fully understanding the extent of these sex differences .
And the second is that we aren 't taking what we have learned , and routinely applying it in clinical care .
We are just not doing enough .
So , I 'm going to share with you three examples of where sex differences have impacted the health of women , and where we need to do more .
Let 's start with heart disease .
It 's the number one killer of women in the United States today .
This is the face of heart disease .
Linda is a middle-aged woman , who had a stent placed in one of the arteries going to her heart .
When she had recurring symptoms she went back to her doctor .
Her doctor did the gold standard test : a cardiac catheterization .
It showed no blockages .
Linda 's symptoms continued .
She had to stop working .
And that 's when she found us .
When Linda came to us , we did another cardiac catheterization and this time , we found clues .
But we needed another test to make the diagnosis .
So we did a test called an intracoronary ultrasound , where you use soundwaves to look at the artery from the inside out .
And what we found was that Linda 's disease didn 't look like the typical male disease .
The typical male disease looks like this .
There 's a discrete blockage or stenosis .
Linda 's disease , like the disease of so many women , looks like this .
The plaque is laid down more evenly , more diffusely along the artery , and it 's harder to see .
So for Linda , and for so many women , the gold standard test wasn 't gold .
Now , Linda received the right treatment .
She went back to her life and , fortunately , today she is doing well .
But Linda was lucky .
She found us , we found her disease .
But for too many women , that 's not the case .
We have the tools .
We have the technology to make the diagnosis .
But it 's all too often that these sex diffferences are overlooked .
So what about treatment ?
A landmark study that was published two years ago asked the very important question : What are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women ?
The authors looked at papers written over a 10-year period , and hundreds had to be thrown out .
And what they found out was that of those that were tossed out , 65 percent were excluded because even though women were included in the studies , the analysis didn 't differentiate between women and men .
What a lost opportunity .
The money had been spent and we didn 't learn how women fared .
And these studies could not contribute one iota to the very , very important question , what are the most effective treatments for heart disease in women ?
I want to introduce you to Hortense , my godmother , Hung Wei , a relative of a colleague , and somebody you may recognize -- Dana , Christopher Reeve 's wife .
All three women have something very important in common .
All three were diagnosed with lung cancer , the number one cancer killer of women in the United States today .
All three were nonsmokers .
Sadly , Dana and Hung Wei died of their disease .
Today , what we know is that women who are nonsmokers are three times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than are men who are nonsmokers .
Now interestingly , when women are diagnosed with lung cancer , their survival tends to be better than that of men .
Now , here are some clues .
Our investigators have found that there are certain genes in the lung tumor cells of both women and men .
And these genes are activated mainly by estrogen .
And when these genes are over-expressed , it 's associated with improved survival only in young women .
Now this is a very early finding and we don 't yet know whether it has relevance to clinical care .
But it 's findings like this that may provide hope and may provide an opportunity to save lives of both women and men .
Now , let me share with you an example of when we do consider sex differences , it can drive the science .
Several years ago a new lung cancer drug was being evaluated , and when the authors looked at whose tumors shrank , they found that 82 percent were women .
This led them to ask the question : Well , why ?
And what they found was that the genetic mutations that the drug targeted were far more common in women .
And what this has led to is a more personalized approach to the treatment of lung cancer that also includes sex .
This is what we can accomplish when we don 't leave women 's health to chance .
We know that when you invest in research , you get results .
Take a look at the death rate from breast cancer over time .
And now take a look at the death rates from lung cancer in women over time .
Now let 's look at the dollars invested in breast cancer -- these are the dollars invested per death -- and the dollars invested in lung cancer .
Now , it 's clear that our investment in breast cancer has produced results .
They may not be fast enough , but it has produced results .
We can do the same for lung cancer and for every other disease .
So let 's go back to depression .
Depression is the number one cause of disability in women in the world today .
Our investigators have found that there are differences in the brains of women and men in the areas that are connected with mood .
And when you put men and women in a functional MRI scanner -- that 's the kind of scanner that shows how the brain is functioning when it 's activated -- so you put them in the scanner and you expose them to stress .
You can actually see the difference .
And it 's findings like this that we believe hold some of the clues for why we see these very significant sex differences in depression .
But even though we know that these differences occur , 66 percent of the brain research that begins in animals is done in either male animals or animals in whom the sex is not identified .
So , I think we have to ask again the question : Why leave women 's health to chance ?
And this is a question that haunts those of us in science and medicine who believe that we are on the verge of being able to dramatically improve the health of women .
We know that every cell has a sex .
We know that these differences are often overlooked .
And therefore we know that women are not getting the full benefit of modern science and medicine today .
We have the tools but we lack the collective will and momentum .
Women 's health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay .
And it 's an issue of the quality and the integrity of science and medicine .
So imagine the momentum we could achieve in advancing the health of women if we considered whether these sex differences were present at the very beginning of designing research .
Or if we analyzed our data by sex .
So , people often ask me : What can I do ?
And here 's what I suggest : First , I suggest that you think about women 's health in the same way that you think and care about other causes that are important to you .
And second , and equally as important , that as a woman , you have to ask your doctor and the doctors who are caring for those who you love : Is this disease or treatment different in women ?
Now , this is a profound question because the answer is likely yes , but your doctor may not know the answer , at least not yet .
But if you ask the question , your doctor will very likely go looking for the answer .
And this is so important , not only for ourselves , but for all of those whom we love .
Whether it be a mother , a daughter , a sister , a friend or a grandmother .
It was my grandmother 's suffering that inspired my work to improve the health of women .
That 's her legacy .
Our legacy can be to improve the health of women for this generation and for generations to come .
Thank you .
Robert Gupta + Joshua Roman : On violon and cello , " Passacaglia "
It 's a master class in collaboration as violinist Robert Gupta and cellist Joshua Roman perform Halvorsen 's " Passacaglia " for violin and viola . Roman takes the viola part on his Stradivarius cello . It 's powerful to watch the two musicians connect moment to moment . The two are both TED Fellows , and their deep connection powers this sparkling duet .
Simon Berrow : How do you save a shark you know nothing about ?
They 're the second largest fish in the world , they 're almost extinct , and we know almost nothing about them . In this talk , Simon Berrow describes the fascinating basking shark , and the exceptional -- and wonderfully low-tech -- ways he 's learning enough to save them . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Basking sharks are awesome creatures . They are just magnificent .
They grow 10 meters long .
Some say bigger .
They might weigh up to two tons .
Some say up to five tons .
They 're the second largest fish in the world .
They 're also harmless plankton-feeding animals .
And they are thought to be able to filter a cubic kilometer of water every hour and can feed on 30 kilos of zoo plankton a day to survive .
They 're fantastic creatures .
And we 're very lucky in Ireland , we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them .
They were also very important to coast communities going back hundreds of years , especially the around the Claddagh , Duff , Connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats sometimes way off shore , sometimes to a place called the Sunfish Bank , which is about 30 miles west of Achill Island , to kill the basking sharks .
This is an old woodcut from the 17 , 1800s .
So they were very important , and they were important for the oil out of their liver .
A third of the size of the basking shark is their liver , and it 's full of oil .
You get gallons of oil from their liver .
And that oil was used especially for lighting , but also for dressing wounds and other things .
In fact , the streetlights in 1742 of Galway , Dublin and Waterford were linked with sunfish oil .
And " sunfish " is one of the words for basking sharks .
So they were incredibly important animals .
They 've been around a long time , have been very important to coast communities .
Probably the best documented basking shark fishery in the world is that from Achill Island .
This is Keem Bay up in Achill Island .
And sharks used to come into the bay .
And the fishermen would tie a net off the headland , string it out along the other net .
And as the shark came round , it would hit the net , the net would collapse on it .
It would often drown and suffocate .
Or at times , they would row out in their small currachs and kill it with a lance through the back of the neck .
And then they 'd tow the sharks back to Purteen Harbor , boil them up , use the oil .
They used to use the flesh as well for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks .
This is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide -- it is the finning of sharks .
We 're often all frightened of sharks thanks to " Jaws . "
Maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year .
There was someone recently , wasn 't there ? Just a couple weeks ago .
We kill about 100 million sharks a year .
So I don 't know what the balance is , but I think sharks have got more right to be fearful of us than we have of them .
It was a well-documented fishery , and as you can see here , it peaked in the 50s where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year .
And it declined very fast -- a classic boom and bust fishery , which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there 's low reproductive rates .
And they killed about 12,000 sharks in this period , literally just by stringing a manila rope off the tip of Keem Bay at Achill Island .
Sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s , especially after places like Dunmore East in County Waterford .
And about two and a half , 3,000 sharks were killed up till ' 85 , many by Norwegian vessels .
The black , you can 't really see this , but these are Norwegian basking shark hunting vessels , and the black line in the crow 's nest signifies this is a shark vessel rather than a whaling vessel .
The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language .
Now I don 't pretend to have any Irish , but in Kerry they were often known as " Ainmhide na seolta , " the monster with the sails .
And another title would be " Liop an da lapa , " the unwieldy beast with two fins .
" Liabhan mor , " suggesting a big animal .
Or my favorite , " Liabhan chor greine , " the great fish of the sun .
And that 's a lovely , evocative name .
On Tory Island , which is a strange place anyway , they were known as muldoons , and no one seems to know why .
Hope there 's no one from Tory here ; lovely place .
But more commonly all around the island , they were known as the sunfish .
And this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out .
There 's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world .
Some people say it 's not population decline .
It might be a change in the distribution of plankton .
And it 's been suggested that basking sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change , because they 're basically continuous plankton recorders swimming around with their mouth open .
They 're now listed as vulnerable under the IUCN .
There 's also moves in Europe to try and stop catching them .
There 's now a ban on catching them and even landing them and even landing ones that are caught accidentally .
They 're not protected in Ireland .
In fact , they have no legislative status in Ireland whatsoever , despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside .
We know very little about them .
And most of what we do know is based on their habit of coming to the surface .
And we try to guess what they 're doing from their behavior on the surface .
I only found out last year , at a conference on the Isle of Man , just how unusual it is to live somewhere where basking sharks regularly , frequently and predictably come to the surface to " bask . "
And it 's a fantastic opportunity in science to see and experience basking sharks , and they are awesome creatures .
And it gives us a fantastic opportunity to actually study them , to get access to them .
So what we 've been doing a couple of years -- but last year was a big year -- is we started tagging sharks so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movements and things like that .
So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active .
And we tagged them very simply , not very hi-tech , with a big , long pole .
This is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end .
Go up in your boat and tag the shark .
And we were very effective .
We tagged 105 sharks last summer .
We got 50 in three days off Inishowen Peninsula .
Half the challenge is to get access , is to be in the right place at the right time .
But it 's a very simple and easy technique .
I 'll show you what they look like .
We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film shark .
One is to try and work out the gender of the shark .
We also deployed a couple of satellite tags , so we did use hi-tech stuff as well .
These are archival tags .
So what they do is they store the data .
A satellite tag only works when the air is clear of the water and can send a signal to the satellite .
And of course , sharks , fish , are underwater most of the time .
So this tag actually works out the locations of shark depending on the timing and the setting of the sun , plus water temperature and depth .
And you have to kind of reconstruct the path .
What happens is that you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period , in this case it was eight months , and literally to the day the tag popped off , drifted up , said hello to the satellite and sent , not all the data , but enough data for us to use .
And this is the only way to really work out the behavior and the movements when they 're under water .
And here 's a couple of maps that we 've done .
That one , you can see that we tagged both off Kerry .
And basically it spent all its time , the last eight months , in Irish waters .
Christmas day it was out on the shelf edge .
And here 's one that we haven 't ground-truthed it yet with sea surface temperature and water depth , but again , the second shark kind of spent most of its time in and around the Irish Sea .
Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man all the way out to Nova Scotia in about 90 days .
That 's nine and a half thousand kilometers . We never thought that happened .
Another colleague in the States tagged about 20 sharks off Massachusetts , and his tags didn 't really work .
All he knows is where he tagged them and he knows where they popped off .
And his tags popped off in the Caribbean and even in Brazil .
And we thought that basking sharks were temperate animals and only lived in our latitude .
But in actual fact , they 're obviously crossing the Equator as well .
So very simple things like that , we 're trying to learn about basking sharks .
One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks are .
Now I 'm not a geneticist , so I 'm not going to pretend to understand the genetics .
And that 's why it 's great to have collaboration .
Whereas I 'm a field person , I get panic attacks if I have to spend too many hours in a lab with a white coat on -- take me away .
So we can work with geneticists who understand that .
So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks , they found that the diversity was incredibly low .
If you look at the first line really , you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar .
I think this means basically that they 're all sharks and they 've come from a common ancestry .
If you look at nucleotide diversity , which is more genetics that are passed on through parents , you can see that basking sharks , if you look at the first study , was an order of magnitude less diversity than other shark species .
And you see that this work was done in 2006 .
Before 2006 , we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks .
We had no idea , did they distinguish into different populations ?
Were there subpopulations ?
And of course , that 's very important if you want to know what the population size is and the status of the animals .
So Les Noble in Aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable really .
So he did another study using microsatellites , which are much more expensive , much more time consuming , and , to his surprise , came up with almost identical results .
that basking sharks , for some reason , have incredibly low diversity .
And it 's thought maybe it was a bottleneck , a genetic bottleneck thought to be 12,000 years ago , and this has caused a very low diversity .
And yet , if you look at whale sharks , which is the other plankton eating large shark , its diversity is much greater .
So it doesn 't really make sense at all .
They found that there was no genetic differentiation between any of the world 's oceans of basking sharks .
So even though basking sharks are found throughout the world , you couldn 't tell the difference genetically from one from the Pacific , the Atlantic , New Zealand , or from Ireland , South Africa .
They all basically seem the same .
But again , it 's kind of surprising . You wouldn 't really expect that .
I don 't understand this . I don 't pretend to understand this .
And I suspect most geneticists don 't understand it either , but they produce the numbers .
So you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics .
And Rus Hoelzel came up with an effective population size : 8,200 animals .
That 's it .
8,000 animals in the world .
You 're thinking , " That 's just ridiculous . No way . "
So Les did a finer study and he found out it came out about 9,000 .
And using different microsatellites gave the different results .
But the average of all these studies came out -- the mean is about 5,000 , which I personally don 't believe , but then I am a skeptic .
But even if you toss a few numbers around , you 're probably talking of an effective population of about 20,000 animals .
Do you remember how many they killed off Achill there in the 70s and the 50s ?
So what it tells us actually is that there 's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small .
In fact , of those 20,000 , 8,000 were thought to be females .
There 's only 8,000 basking shark females in the world ?
I don 't know . I don 't believe it .
The problem with this is they were constrained with samples .
They didn 't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail .
So where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis ?
Well one obvious source is dead sharks , Dead sharks washed up .
We might get two or three dead sharks washed up in Ireland a year , if we 're kind of lucky .
Another source would be fisheries bycatch .
We were getting quite a few caught in surface drift nets .
That 's banned now , and that 'll be good news for the sharks .
And some are caught in nets , in trawls .
This is a shark that was actually landed in Howth just before Christmas , illegally , because you 're not allowed to do that under E.U. law , and was actually sold for eight euros a kilo as shark steak .
They even put a recipe up on the wall , until they were told this was illegal .
And they actually did get a fine for that .
So if you look at all those studies I showed you , the total number of samples worldwide is 86 at present .
So it 's very important work , and they can ask some really good questions , and they can tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure , but they 're constrained by lack of samples .
Now when we were out tagging our sharks , this is how we tagged them on the front of a RIB -- get in there fast -- occasionally the sharks do react .
And on one occasion when we were up in Malin Head up in Donegal , a shark smacked the side of the boat with his tail , more , I think , in startle to the fact that a boat came near it , rather than the tag going in .
And that was fine . We got wet . No problem .
And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head , to the pier , I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat .
And I remembered -- I used to spend a lot of time out on commercial fishing boats -- I remember fishermen telling me they can always tell when a basking shark 's been caught in the net because it leaves this black slime behind .
So I was thinking that must have come from the shark .
Now we had an interest in getting tissue samples for genetics because we knew they were very valuable .
And we would use conventional methods -- I have a crossbow , you see the crossbow in my hand there , which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well .
So I tried that , I tried many techniques .
All it was doing was breaking my arrows because the shark skin is just so strong .
There was no way we were going to get a sample from that .
So that wasn 't going to work .
So when I saw the black slime on the bow of the boat , I thought , " If you take what you 're given in this world ... "
So I scraped it off .
And I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists .
So I scraped the slime off and I sent it off to Aberdeen .
And I said , " You might try that . "
And they sat on it for months actually .
It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man .
But I kept emailing , saying , " Have you had a chance to look at my slime yet ? "
And he was like , " Yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah . Later , later , later . "
Anyway he thought he 'd better do it , because I never met him before and he might lose face if he hadn 't done the thing I sent him .
And he was amazed that they actually got DNA from the slime .
And they amplified it and they tested it and they found , yes , this was actually basking shark DNA , which was got from the slime .
And so he was all very excited .
It became known as Simon 's shark slime .
And I thought , " Hey , you know , I can build on this . "
So we thought , okay , we 're going to try to get out and get some slime .
So having spent three and a half thousand on satellite tags , I then thought I 'd invest 7.95 -- the price is still on it -- in my local hardware store in Kilrush for a mop handle and even less money on some oven cleaners .
And I wrapped the oven cleaner around the end of the mop handle and was desperate , desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks .
Now this was into August now , and normally sharks peak at June , July .
And you rarely see them .
You can only rarely be in the right place to find sharks into August .
So we were desperate .
So we rushed out to Blasket as soon as we heard there were sharks there and managed to find some sharks .
So by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat -- you see , here 's a shark that 's running under the boat here -- we managed to collect slime .
And here it is .
Look at that lovely , black shark slime .
And in about half an hour , we got five samples , five individual sharks , were sampled using Simon 's shark slime sampling system .
I 've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now , and they 're kind of a bit more dramatic .
You probably saw the humpback whale footage that we got there a month or two ago off County Wexford .
And you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind .
And I was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins .
But hey , sometimes these things are sent to you and you just have to take them when they come .
So this is possibly going to be my legacy -- Simon 's shark slime .
So we got more money this year to carry on collecting more and more samples .
And one thing that is kind of very useful is that we use a pole cameras -- this is my colleague Joanne with a pole camera -- where you can actually look underneath the shark .
And what you 're trying to look at is the males have claspers , which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark .
So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark .
So if we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it , we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female .
Because at the moment , they actually have no way genetically of telling the difference between a male and a female , which I found absolutely staggering , because they don 't know what primers to look for .
And being able to tell the gender of a shark has got very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through societies , because it is illegal to trade any sharks .
And they are caught and they are on the market .
So as a field biologist , you just want to get encounters with these animals .
You want to learn as much as you can .
They 're often quite brief . They 're often very seasonally constrained .
And you just want to learn as much as you can as soon as you can .
But isn 't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines , such as geneticists , who can gain so much more from that .
So as I said , these things are sent to you in strange ways . Grab them while you can .
I 'll take that as my scientific legacy .
Hopefully I might get something a bit more dramatic and romantic before I die .
But for the time being , thank you for that .
And keep an eye out for sharks .
If you 're more interested , we have a basking shark website now just set up .
So thank you and thank you for listening .
Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden : What we learned from 5 million books
Have you played with Google Labs ' Ngram Viewer ? It 's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries . Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works , and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words . & lt ; em & gt ; & lt ; / em & gt ;
Erez Lieberman Aiden : Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words .
But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true .
So we assembled a team of experts , spanning Harvard , MIT , The American Heritage Dictionary , The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors , the Google .
And we cogitated about this for about four years .
And we came to a startling conclusion .
Ladies and gentlemen , a picture is not worth a thousand words .
In fact , we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words .
Jean-Baptiste Michel : So how did we get to this conclusion ?
So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history : change over time .
So many books actually have been written over the years .
So we were thinking , well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books .
Now of course , if there 's a scale for how awesome that is , that has to rank extremely , extremely high .
Now the problem is there 's an X-axis for that , which is the practical axis .
This is very , very low .
Now people tend to use an alternative approach , which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully .
This is extremely practical , but not so awesome .
What you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space .
So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach .
They have digitized millions of books .
So what that means is , one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button .
That 's very practical and extremely awesome .
EL Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from .
Since time immemorial , there have been authors .
These authors have been striving to write books .
And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago .
Since then , the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions , publishing books .
Now if those books are not lost to history , then they are somewhere in a library , and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google , which has scanned 15 million books to date .
Now when Google digitizes a book , they put it into a really nice format .
Now we 've got the data , plus we have metadata .
We have information about things like where was it published , who was the author , when was it published .
And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that 's not the highest quality data .
What we 're left with is a collection of five million books , 500 billion words , a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome -- a text which , when written out , would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over -- a veritable shard of our cultural genome .
Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole ...
was what any self-respecting researchers would have done .
We took a page out of XKCD , and we said , " Stand back .
We 're going to try science . "
JM : Now of course , we were thinking , well let 's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it .
Now we 're thinking , what data can we release ?
Well of course , you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books .
Now Google , and Jon Orwant in particular , told us a little equation that we should learn .
So you have five million , that is , five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit .
So , although that would be really , really awesome , again , that 's extremely , extremely impractical .
Now again , we kind of caved in , and we did the very practical approach , which was a bit less awesome .
We said , well instead of releasing the full text , we 're going to release statistics about the books .
So take for instance " A gleam of happiness . "
It 's four words ; we call that a four-gram .
We 're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801 , 1802 , 1803 , all the way up to 2008 .
That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time .
We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books , and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing .
EL So those two billion lines , we call them two billion n-grams .
What do they tell us ?
Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends .
Let me give you an example .
Let 's suppose that I am thriving , then tomorrow I want to tell you about how well I did .
And so I might say , " Yesterday , I throve . "
Alternatively , I could say , " Yesterday , I thrived . "
Well which one should I use ?
How to know ?
As of about six months ago , the state of the art in this field is that you would , for instance , go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair , and you 'd say , " Steve , you 're an expert on the irregular verbs .
What should I do ? "
And he 'd tell you , " Well most people say thrived , but some people say throve . "
And you also knew , more or less , that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair , " Tom , what should I say ? "
He 'd say , " Well , in my day , most people throve , but some thrived . "
So now what I 'm just going to show you is raw data .
Two rows from this table of two billion entries .
What you 're seeing is year by year frequency of " thrived " and " throve " over time .
Now this is just two out of two billion rows .
So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide .
JM : Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words .
For instance , this one .
If you just take influenza , you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe .
EL If you were not yet convinced , sea levels are rising , so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature .
JM : You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram , and that 's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead , although you might agree that he might need a better publicist .
EL You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing .
For instance , let me tell you the history of the year 1950 .
Pretty much for the vast majority of history , no one gave a damn about 1950 .
In 1700 , in 1800 , in 1900 , no one cared .
Through the 30s and 40s , no one cared .
Suddenly , in the mid-40s , there started to be a buzz .
People realized that 1950 was going to happen , and it could be big .
But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950 .
People were walking around obsessed .
They couldn 't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950 , all the things they were planning to do in 1950 , all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950 .
In fact , 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter , people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened , in ' 51 , ' 52 , ' 53 .
Finally in 1954 , someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé .
And just like that , the bubble burst .
And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record , with a little twist , because now we 've got these nice charts .
And because we have these nice charts , we can measure things .
We can say , " Well how fast does the bubble burst ? "
And it turns out that we can measure that very precisely .
Equations were derived , graphs were produced , and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year .
We are losing interest in the past more rapidly .
JM : Now a little piece of career advice .
So for those of you who seek to be famous , we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures , authors , actors and so on .
So if you want to become famous early on , you should be an actor , because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s -- you 're still young , it 's really great .
Now if you can wait a little bit , you should be an author , because then you rise to very great heights , like Mark Twain , for instance : extremely famous .
But if you want to reach the very top , you should delay gratification and , of course , become a politician .
So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s , and become very , very famous afterward .
So scientists also tend to get famous when they 're much older .
Like for instance , biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors .
One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician .
If you do that , you might think , " Oh great . I 'm going to do my best work when I 'm in my 20s . "
But guess what , nobody will really care .
EL There are more sobering notes among the n-grams .
For instance , here 's the trajectory of Marc Chagall , an artist born in 1887 .
And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person .
He gets more and more and more famous , except if you look in German .
If you look in German , you see something completely bizarre , something you pretty much never see , which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets , going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945 , before rebounding afterward .
And of course , what we 're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany .
Now these signals are actually so strong that we don 't need to know that someone was censored .
We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing .
Here 's a simple way to do it .
Well , a reasonable expectation is that somebody 's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after .
So that 's sort of what we expect .
And we compare that to the fame that we observe .
And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index .
If the suppression index is very , very , very small , then you very well might be being suppressed .
If it 's very large , maybe you 're benefiting from propaganda .
JM : Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations .
So for instance , here -- this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there 's no known suppression -- it would be like this , basically tightly centered on one .
What you expect is basically what you observe .
This is distribution as seen in Germany -- very different , it 's shifted to the left .
People talked about it twice less as it should have been .
But much more importantly , the distribution is much wider .
There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been .
But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda .
This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record .
EL So culturomics is what we call this method .
It 's kind of like genomics .
Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome .
Culturomics is similar .
It 's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture .
Here , instead of through the lens of a genome , through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record .
The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it .
Why can everyone do it ?
Everyone can do it because three guys , Jon Orwant , Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google , saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer , and they said , " This is so fun .
We have to make this available for people . "
So in two weeks flat -- the two weeks before our paper came out -- they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public .
And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you 're interested in and see its n-gram immediately -- also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears .
JM : Now this was used over a million times on the first day , and this is really the best of all the queries .
So people want to be their best , put their best foot forward .
But it turns out in the 18th century , people didn 't really care about that at all .
They didn 't want to be their best , they wanted to be their beft .
So what happened is , of course , this is just a mistake .
It 's not that strove for mediocrity , it 's just that the S used to be written differently , kind of like an F.
Now of course , Google didn 't pick this up at the time , so we reported this in the science article that we wrote .
But it turns out this is just a reminder that , although this is a lot of fun , when you interpret these graphs , you have to be very careful , and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences .
EL People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes .
Actually , we 're not going to have to talk , we 're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent .
This person was interested in the history of frustration .
There 's various types of frustration .
If you stub your toe , that 's a one A " argh . "
If the planet Earth is annihilated by the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass , that 's an eight A " aaaaaaaargh . "
This person studies all the " arghs , " from one through eight A 's .
And it turns out that the less-frequent " arghs " are , of course , the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating -- except , oddly , in the early 80s .
We think that might have something to do with Reagan .
JM : There are many usages of this data , but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized .
Google has started to digitize 15 million books .
That 's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published .
It 's a sizable chunk of human culture .
There 's much more in culture : there 's manuscripts , there newspapers , there 's things that are not text , like art and paintings .
These all happen to be on our computers , on computers across the world .
And when that happens , that will transform the way we have to understand our past , our present and human culture .
Thank you very much .
Peter Eigen : How to expose the corrupt
Some of the world 's most baffling social problems , says Peter Eigen , can be traced to systematic , pervasive government corruption , hand-in-glove with global companies . In his talk , Eigen describes the thrilling counter-attack led by his organization , Transparency International .
I am going to speak about corruption , but I would like to juxtapose two different things .
One is the large global economy , the large globalized economy , and the other one is the small , and very limited , capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern , to shape , this economy .
Because there is this asymmetry , which creates , basically , failing governance .
Failing governance in many areas : in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment , in the area of exploitation of women and children , in the area of climate change , in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy , which is operating in a worldwide arena .
And I think corruption , and the fight against corruption , and the impact of corruption , is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance .
Let me talk about my own experience .
I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa .
At that time , I noticed that corruption , that grand corruption , that systematic corruption , was undermining everything we were trying to do .
And therefore , I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank , our own projects , our own programs against corruption , but in general , I thought , " We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption . "
And as soon as I started this work , I received a memorandum from the World Bank , from the legal department first , in which they said , " You are not allowed to do this .
You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries .
This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank , so I want you to stop your doings . "
In the meantime , I was chairing donor meetings , for instance , in which the various donors , and many of them like to be in Nairobi -- it is true , it is one of the unsafest cities of the world , but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable .
And in these donor meetings , I noticed that many of the worst projects -- which were put forward by our clients , by the governments , by promoters , many of them representing suppliers from the North -- that the worst projects were realized first .
Let me give you an example : a huge power project , 300 million dollars , to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable , and one of the most beautiful , areas of western Kenya .
And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits : It had no clients , nobody would buy the electricity there , nobody was interested in irrigation projects .
To the contrary , we knew that this project would destroy the environment : It would destroy riparian forests , which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups , the Samburu and the Turkana in this area .
So everybody knew this is a , not a useless project , this is an absolute damaging , a terrible project -- not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars , and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools , like hospitals and so on .
And yet , we all rejected this project , none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it , and it was the first project to be implemented .
The good projects , which we as a donor community would take under our wings , they took years , you know , you had too many studies , and very often they didn 't succeed .
But these bad projects , which were absolutely damaging -- for the economy for many generations , for the environment , for thousands of families who had to be resettled -- they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks , of supplier agencies , of insurance agencies -- like in Germany , Hermes , and so on -- and they came back very , very quickly , driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North .
Now , these suppliers were our big companies .
They were the actors of this global market , which I mentioned in the beginning .
They were the Siemenses of this world , coming from France , from the UK , from Japan , from Canada , from Germany , and they were systematically driven by systematic , large-scale corruption .
We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here , or 100,000 dollars there , or one million dollars there .
No , we are talking about 10 million , 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts , on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein , of the president 's ministers , the high officials in the para-statal sectors .
This was the reality which I saw , and not only one project like that : I saw , I would say , over the years I worked in Africa , I saw hundreds of projects like this .
And so , I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries , which is the main reason for the misery , for the poverty , for the conflicts , for the violence , for the desperation in many of these countries .
That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line , that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world , twice that number , more than two billion people without sanitation and so on , and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children , still , child mortality of more than 10 million people every year , children dying before they are five years old : The cause of this is , to a large extent , grand corruption .
Now , why did the World Bank not let me do this work ?
I found out afterwards , after I left , under a big fight , the World Bank .
The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay , including Germany .
In Germany , foreign bribery was allowed .
It was even tax-deductible .
No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany , but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia , everywhere , systematically bribed .
Not all of them , but most of them .
And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance , because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin , at the Villa Borsig , we were told , " You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing , because we will lose our contracts .
We will lose to the French , we will lose to the Swedes , we 'll lose to the Japanese . "
And therefore , there was a indeed a prisoner 's dilemma , which made it very difficult for an individual company , an individual exporting country to say , " We are not going to continue this deadly , disastrous habit of large companies to bribe . "
So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure , because even the powerful government , which we have in Germany , comparatively , was not able to say , " We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad . "
They needed help , and the large companies themselves have this dilemma .
Many of them didn 't want to bribe .
Many of the German companies , for instance , believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price , so they are very competitive .
They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are , but they were not allowed to show their strengths , because the world was eaten up by grand corruption .
And this is why I 'm telling you this : Civil society rose to the occasion .
We had this small NGO , Transparency International .
They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner 's dilemma , and we developed concepts of collective action , basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table , explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing , and to make a long story short , we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters .
In 1997 , a convention , under the auspices of the OECD , which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery .
Well , thank you . I mean , it 's interesting , in doing this , we had to sit together with the companies .
We had here in Berlin , at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee , we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry , and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery .
In the first session -- we had three sessions over the course of two years .
And President von Weizsäcker , by the way , chaired one of the sessions , the first one , to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs , who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations .
And in the first session , they all said , " This is not bribery , what we are doing . " This is customary there .
This is what these other cultures demand .
They even applaud it .
In fact , [ unclear ] still says this today .
And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing .
But in the second session , they admitted already that they would never do this , what they are doing in these other countries , here in Germany , or in the U.K. , and so on .
Cabinet ministers would admit this .
And in the final session , at the Aspen Institute , we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government , at the time , requesting that they participate in the OECD convention .
And this is , in my opinion , an example of soft power , because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us .
We had a longer-term time perspective .
We had a broader , geographically much wider , constituency we were trying to defend .
And that 's why the law has changed .
That 's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that 's why MIN is in the trouble they are in .
In some other countries , the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced .
And , again , civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment .
In London , for instance , where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case , which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute , 100 million British pounds , every year for ten years , to one particular official of one particular friendly country , who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment .
This case , they are not prosecuting in the UK .
Why ? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain .
Civil society is pushing , civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem , also in the U.K. , and also in Japan , which is not properly enforcing , and so on .
In Germany , we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention , which is a subsequent convention .
We are , Germany , is not ratifying .
Why ? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies .
In Germany , we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant , but you are allowed to bribe a deputy .
This is , under German law , allowed , and the members of our parliament don 't want to change this , and this is why they can 't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery -- one of they very , very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world , but not able to ratify the convention , which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world .
I see my time is ticking .
Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened .
I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption , one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance .
By now , the United Nations is totally on our side .
The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus ; under Wolfensohn , they became , I would say , the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world .
Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on .
And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem , in the development of remedies , in the implementation of reforms , and then later , in the monitoring of reforms .
Of course , if civil society organizations want to play that role , they have to grow into this responsibility .
Not all civil society organizations are good .
The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO .
So , we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself .
They have to have a much more transparent financial governance .
They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations .
We also need much more competence of civil society leaders .
This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin , because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general , do not focus enough , yet , on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society .
But what I 'm saying from my very practical experience : If civil society does it right and joins the other actors -- in particular , governments , governments and their international institutions , but also large international actors , in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility -- then in this magical triangle between civil society , government and private sector , there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world .
Thank you .
Willie Smits : How to restore a rainforest
By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle , biologist Willie Smits believes he has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo , saving local orangutans — and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems . NOTE : The core content of this talk has been challenged on a number of grounds . For details , and Willie Smits ' response , please see " A challenge to Willie Smits ' talk " below .
I was walking in the market one day with my wife , and somebody stuck a cage in my face .
And in between those slits were the saddest eyes I 've ever seen .
There was a very sick orangutan baby , my first encounter .
That evening I came back to the market in the dark and I heard " uhh , uhh , " and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap .
Of course , the cage was salvaged .
I took up the little baby , massaged her , forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally .
This is Uce .
She 's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain , and this is Matahari , her second son , which , by the way , is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued , Dodoy .
That changed my life quite dramatically , and as of today , I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers .
No . No . No . Wrong .
It 's horrible . It 's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild .
It 's not good .
This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing .
Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together , just now like victims for every baby , six have disappeared from the forest .
The deforestation , especially for oil palm , to provide biofuel for Western countries is what 's causing these problems .
And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat , the largest accumulation of organic material in the world .
When you open this for growing oil palms you 're creating CO2 volcanoes that are emitting so much CO2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world , after China and the United States .
And we don 't have any industry at all -- it 's only because of this deforestation .
And these are horrible images .
I 'm not going to talk too long about it , but there are so many of the family of Uce , which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest , that still have to go through that process .
And I don 't know anymore where to put them .
So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests , to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing , in that way , the loss of habitat and all those victims .
So I created the place Samboja Lestari , and the idea was , if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of where there is really nothing left , no one will have an excuse to say , " Yeah , but ... "
No . Everyone should be able to follow this .
So we 're in East Borneo . This is the place where I started .
As you can see there 's only yellow terrain .
There 's nothing left -- just a bit of grass there .
In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there .
There was a huge amount of crime .
People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water .
There was no agricultural productivity left .
This was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife .
This was like a biological desert .
When I stood there in the grass , it 's hot -- not even the sound of insects -- just this waving grass .
Still , four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people .
The climate has changed . I will show you : no more flooding , no more fires .
It 's no longer the poorest district , and there is a huge development of biodiversity .
We 've got over 1,000 species . We have 137 bird species as of today .
We have 30 species of reptiles .
So what happened here ? We created a huge economic failure in this forest .
So basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm .
But we saw the same thing .
We had slash and burn agriculture ; people cannot afford the fertilizer , so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there ; the fires become more frequent , and after a while you 're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left .
There are no trees left .
Still , in this place , in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill , four years later , there is this one green blop on the Earth 's surface ...
And there are all these animals , and all these people happy , and there 's this economic value .
So how 's this possible ?
It was quite simple . If you 'll look at the steps : we bought the land , we dealt with the fire , and then only , we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry .
Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary .
But we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that .
The people would become the defenders of that forest .
So we do the " people , profit , planet " principles , but we do it in addition to a sure legal status -- because if the forest belongs to the state , people say , " It belongs to me , it belongs to everyone . "
And then we apply all these other principles like transparency , professional management , measurable results , scalability , [ unclear ] , etc .
What we did was we formulated recipes -- how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation .
You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control , whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice .
And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out .
Now in this recipe you also have the cost .
You also know how much labor is needed .
If you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil , on a clay soil , on a steep slope , on flat soil , you put those different recipes ; if you combine them , out of that comes a business plan , comes a work plan , and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have , and you can do it .
This is how it looks like in practice . We have this grass we want to get rid of .
It exudes [ unclear ] -like compounds from the roots .
The acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate , to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses .
And after eight years they might actually yield some timber -- that is , if you can preserve it in the right way , which we can do with bamboo peels .
It 's an old temple-building technique from Japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible .
So if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again .
So we plant it later , along the waterways to filter the water , provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available .
So the idea is : how to integrate these flows in space , over time and with the limited means you have .
So we plant the trees , we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between , to reduce the competition for the trees , the crop fertilizer . Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops , for the people , but also helps the trees . The farmers have free land , the system yields early income , the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money .
So beautiful . What a theory .
But is it really that easy ?
Not really , because if you looked at what happened in 1998 , the fire started .
This is an area of about 50 million hectares .
January .
February .
March .
April .
May .
We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months .
This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States .
And once the soil gets dried , you 're in a dry season -- you get cracks , oxygen goes in , flames come out and the problem starts all over again .
So how to break that cycle ?
Fire is the biggest problem .
This is what it looked like for three months .
For three months , the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark .
We lost all the crops . No children gained weight for over a year ; they lost 12 IQ points . It was a disaster for orangutans and people .
So these fires are really the first things to work on .
That was why I put it as a single point up there .
And you need the local people for that because these grasslands , once they start burning ... It goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall -- going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there .
So you have to do it with the local people .
That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution .
So what we did is , we created a ring of sugar palms around the area .
These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant -- also flood-resistant , by the way -- and they provide a lot of income for local people .
This is what it looks like : the people have to tap them twice a day -- just a millimeter slice -- and the only thing you harvest is sugar water , carbon dioxide , rain fall and a little bit of sunshine .
In principle , you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells .
And you can create so much energy from this -- they produce three times more energy per hectare per year , because you can tap them on a daily basis .
You don 't need to harvest [ unclear ] or any other of the crops .
So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics , which is still unexploited , and doing it in combination with technology .
But also your legal side needs to be in very good order .
So we bought that land , and here is where we started our project -- in the middle of nowhere .
And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil , and we were actually monitoring , measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares , 5,000 acres .
And this forest is quite different .
What I really did was I just followed nature , and nature doesn 't know monocultures , but a natural forest is multilayered .
That means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light , it can store more carbon in the system , it can provide more functions .
But , it 's more complicated . It 's not that simple , and you have to work with the people .
So , just like nature , we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that , we grow the slower growing , primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light . Then , what is just as important : get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves , bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours .
And they become like nutrient pumps .
You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen , and without those microorganisms , you won 't have any performance at all .
And then we started planting -- only 1,000 trees a day .
We could have planted many , many more , but we didn 't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable .
We didn 't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation .
And we do a lot of work here .
We use indicator plants to look at what soil types , or what vegetables will grow , or what trees will grow here .
And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space .
This is what it looks like in reality ; you have this irregular ring around it , with strips of 100 meters wide , with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families .
It 's only a small part of the area .
The nursery , in here , is quite different .
If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe , for instance , from the Urals up to England , you know how many ?
165 .
In this nursery , we 're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species .
Can you imagine ?
You do need to know what you are working with , but it 's that diversity which makes it work .
That you can go from this zero situation , by planting the vegetables and the trees , or directly , the trees in the lines in that grass there , putting up the buffer zone , producing your compost , and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used .
In the beginning , maybe pineapples and beans and corn ; in the second phase , there will be bananas and papayas ; later on , there will be chocolate and chilies .
And then slowly , the trees start taking over , bringing in produce from the fruits , from the timber , from the fuel wood .
And finally , the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income .
On the top left , underneath those green stripes , you see some white dots -- those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space .
And in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before .
So this is after one year .
And this is after two years .
And that 's green . If you look from the tower -- this is when we start attacking the grass .
We plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas , the papayas , all the crops for the local people , but the trees are growing up fast in between as well .
And three years later , 137 species of birds are living here .
So we lowered air temperature three to five degrees Celsius .
Air humidity is up 10 percent .
Cloud cover -- I 'm going to show it to you -- is up .
Rainfall is up .
And all these species and income .
This ecolodge that I built here , three years before , was an empty , yellow field .
This transponder that we operate with the European Space Agency -- it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture .
Those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon , how the forest is developing , and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation .
We can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology .
We actually have it already with Google Earth .
If you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks , and use Google Earth in combination with that , you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced , which company is stealing the timber , and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here .
So this is the Samboja Lestari area .
You measure how the trees grow back , but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back .
And biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced , how many medicines can be kept here .
And finally I made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain .
This nearby city of Balikpapan has a big problem with water ; it 's 80 percent surrounded by seawater , and we have now a lot of intrusion there .
Now we looked at the clouds above this forest ; we looked at the reforestation area , the semi-open area and the open area .
And look at these images .
I 'll just run them very quickly through .
In the tropics , raindrops are not formed from ice crystals , which is the case in the temperate zones , you need the trees with [ unclear ] , chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops .
So you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate , and you have the trees to initiate the rain .
And look , there 's now 11.2 percent more clouds -- already , after three years .
If you look at rainfall , it was already up 20 percent at that time .
Let 's look at the next year , and you can see that that trend is continuing .
Where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall , that cap is now widening and getting higher .
And if we look at the rainfall pattern above Samboja Lestari , it used to be the driest place , but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there .
So you can actually change the climate .
When there are trade winds of course the effect disappears , but afterwards , as soon as the wind stabilizes , you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area .
So to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do , because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies .
And it 's nice to have the science , but it still depends mostly upon the people , on your education .
We have our farmer schools .
But the real success of course , is our band -- because if a baby is born , we will play , so everyone 's our family and you don 't make trouble with your family .
This is how it looks .
We have this road going around the area , which brings the people electricity and water from our own area .
We have the zone with the sugar palms , and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans -- that we provide with a place to live in the middle -- and the people apart .
And inside , we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive , because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared .
All the seeds get eaten .
So now we do the monitoring on the inside -- from towers , satellites , ultralights .
Each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back .
And it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees -- you have the shade trees planted in year one , then you underplanted with the sugar palms , and you plant this thorny fence .
And after a few years , you can remove some of those shade trees .
The people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel , and they can build a house , they have some fuel wood to cook with .
And they can start producing from the trees as many as they like .
They have enough income for three families .
But whatever you do in that program , it has to be fully supported by the people , meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local , cultural values .
There is no simple one recipe for one place .
You also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt -- that it 's transparent .
Like here , in Samboja Lestari , we divide that ring in groups of 20 families .
If one member trespasses the agreement , and does cut down trees , the other 19 members have to decide what 's going to happen to him .
If the group doesn 't take action , the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that doesn 't comply with those great deals that we are offering them .
In North Sulawesi it is the cooperative -- they have a democratic culture there , so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system .
In summary , if you look at it , in year one the people can sell their land to get income , but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation , the working with the orangutans , and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft .
They also get free land in between the trees , where they can grow their crops .
They can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project .
They get building material for houses , a contract for selling the sugar , so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally .
They get all these other benefits : environmentally , money , they get education -- it 's a great deal .
And everything is based upon that one thing -- make sure that forest remains there .
So if we want to help the orangutans -- what I actually set out to do -- we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit .
Now I think the real key to doing it , to give a simple answer , is integration .
I hope -- if you want to know more , you can read more .
Ken Robinson : How schools kill creativity
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity .
Good morning . How are you ? It 's been great , hasn 't it ?
I 've been blown away by the whole thing .
In fact , I 'm leaving .
There have been three themes , haven 't there , running through the conference , which are relevant to what I want to talk about .
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we 've had and in all of the people here . Just the variety of it and the range of it . The second is that it 's put us in a place where we have no idea what 's going to happen , in terms of the future . No idea how this may play out .
I have an interest in education -- actually , what I find is everybody has an interest in education .
Don 't you ? I find this very interesting .
If you 're at a dinner party , and you say you work in education -- actually , you 're not often at dinner parties , frankly , if you work in education .
You 're not asked .
And you 're never asked back , curiously . That 's strange to me .
But if you are , and you say to somebody , you know , they say , " What do you do ? "
and you say you work in education , you can see the blood run from their face . They 're like , " Oh my God , " you know , " Why me ? My one night out all week . "
But if you ask about their education , they pin you to the wall . Because it 's one of those things that goes deep with people , am I right ?
Like religion , and money and other things .
I have a big interest in education , and I think we all do .
We have a huge vested interest in it , partly because it 's education that 's meant to take us into this future that we can 't grasp .
If you think of it , children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065 . Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that 's been on parade for the past four days -- what the world will look like in five years ' time . And yet we 're meant to be educating them for it . So the unpredictability , I think , is extraordinary .
And the third part of this is that we 've all agreed , nonetheless , on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation . I mean , Sirena last night was a marvel , wasn 't she ? Just seeing what she could do .
And she 's exceptional , but I think she 's not , so to speak , exceptional in the whole of childhood .
What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent . And my contention is , all kids have tremendous talents .
And we squander them , pretty ruthlessly .
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity . My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy , and we should treat it with the same status .
Thank you . That was it , by the way .
Thank you very much . So , 15 minutes left .
Well , I was born ... no .
I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson . She was six and she was at the back , drawing , and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention , and in this drawing lesson she did .
The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said , " What are you drawing ? "
And the girl said , " I 'm drawing a picture of God . "
And the teacher said , " But nobody knows what God looks like . "
And the girl said , " They will in a minute . "
When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere , to be honest .
If we 're being strict about it , wherever he went , he was four that year .
He was in the Nativity play .
Do you remember the story ? No , it was big .
It was a big story . Mel Gibson did the sequel .
You may have seen it : " Nativity II . " But James got the part of Joseph , which we were thrilled about .
We considered this to be one of the lead parts .
We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts : " James Robinson IS Joseph ! "
He didn 't have to speak , but you know the bit where the three kings come in . They come in bearing gifts , and they bring gold , frankincense and myrrh .
This really happened . We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence , because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said , " You OK with that ? " And he said , " Yeah , why ? Was that wrong ? "
They just switched , that was it .
Anyway , the three boys came in -- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put these boxes down , and the first boy said , " I bring you gold . "
And the second boy said , " I bring you myrrh . "
And the third boy said , " Frank sent this . "
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance .
If they don 't know , they 'll have a go .
Am I right ? They 're not frightened of being wrong .
Now , I don 't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative .
What we do know is , if you 're not prepared to be wrong , you 'll never come up with anything original -- if you 're not prepared to be wrong . And by the time they get to be adults , most kids have lost that capacity .
They have become frightened of being wrong .
And we run our companies like this , by the way .
We stigmatize mistakes . And we 're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make .
And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities . Picasso once said this -- he said that all children are born artists .
The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up . I believe this passionately , that we don 't grow into creativity , we grow out of it . Or rather , we get educated out if it .
So why is this ?
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago .
In fact , we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles .
So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was .
Actually , we lived in a place called Snitterfield , just outside Stratford , which is where Shakespeare 's father was born . Are you struck by a new thought ? I was .
You don 't think of Shakespeare having a father , do you ?
Do you ? Because you don 't think of Shakespeare being a child , do you ?
Shakespeare being seven ? I never thought of it . I mean , he was seven at some point . He was in somebody 's English class , wasn 't he ? How annoying would that be ?
" Must try harder . " Being sent to bed by his dad , you know , to Shakespeare , " Go to bed , now , " to William Shakespeare , " and put the pencil down .
And stop speaking like that . It 's confusing everybody . "
Anyway , we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles , and I just want to say a word about the transition , actually .
My son didn 't want to come .
I 've got two kids . He 's 21 now ; my daughter 's 16 .
He didn 't want to come to Los Angeles . He loved it , but he had a girlfriend in England . This was the love of his life , Sarah .
He 'd known her for a month .
Mind you , they 'd had their fourth anniversary , because it 's a long time when you 're 16 .
Anyway , he was really upset on the plane , and he said , " I 'll never find another girl like Sarah . "
And we were rather pleased about that , frankly , because she was the main reason we were leaving the country .
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world : Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects .
Every one . Doesn 't matter where you go .
You 'd think it would be otherwise , but it isn 't .
At the top are mathematics and languages , then the humanities , and the bottom are the arts .
Everywhere on Earth .
And in pretty much every system too , there 's a hierarchy within the arts .
Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance . There isn 't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics . Why ?
Why not ? I think this is rather important .
I think math is very important , but so is dance .
Children dance all the time if they 're allowed to , we all do .
We all have bodies , don 't we ? Did I miss a meeting ?
Truthfully , what happens is , as children grow up , we start to educate them progressively from the waist up . And then we focus on their heads .
And slightly to one side .
If you were to visit education , as an alien , and say " What 's it for , public education ? "
I think you 'd have to conclude -- if you look at the output , who really succeeds by this , who does everything that they should , who gets all the brownie points , who are the winners -- I think you 'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors . Isn 't it ?
They 're the people who come out the top .
And I used to be one , so there .
And I like university professors , but you know , we shouldn 't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement .
They 're just a form of life , another form of life . But they 're rather curious , and I say this out of affection for them .
There 's something curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them , but typically -- they live in their heads .
They live up there , and slightly to one side .
They 're disembodied , you know , in a kind of literal way .
They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads , don 't they ?
It 's a way of getting their head to meetings .
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences , by the way , get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics , and pop into the discotheque on the final night .
And there you will see it -- grown men and women writhing uncontrollably , off the beat , waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it .
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability .
And there 's a reason .
The whole system was invented -- around the world , there were no public systems of education , really , before the 19th century .
They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism .
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas .
Number one , that the most useful subjects for work are at the top . So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid , things you liked , on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that . Is that right ?
Don 't do music , you 're not going to be a musician ; don 't do art , you won 't be an artist .
Benign advice -- now , profoundly mistaken . The whole world is engulfed in a revolution .
And the second is academic ability , which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence , because the universities designed the system in their image .
If you think of it , the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance .
And the consequence is that many highly talented , brilliant , creative people think they 're not , because the thing they were good at at school wasn 't valued , or was actually stigmatized .
And I think we can 't afford to go on that way .
In the next 30 years , according to UNESCO , more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history .
More people , and it 's the combination of all the things we 've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work , and demography and the huge explosion in population .
Suddenly , degrees aren 't worth anything . Isn 't that true ?
When I was a student , if you had a degree , you had a job .
If you didn 't have a job it 's because you didn 't want one .
And I didn 't want one , frankly .
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games , because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA , and now you need a PhD for the other .
It 's a process of academic inflation .
And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet . We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence .
We know three things about intelligence .
One , it 's diverse . We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it . We think visually , we think in sound , we think kinesthetically .
We think in abstract terms , we think in movement .
Secondly , intelligence is dynamic .
If you look at the interactions of a human brain , as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations , intelligence is wonderfully interactive .
The brain isn 't divided into compartments .
In fact , creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things .
The brain is intentionally -- by the way , there 's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum . It 's thicker in women .
Following off from Helen yesterday , I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking .
Because you are , aren 't you ?
There 's a raft of research , but I know it from my personal life .
If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often , thankfully .
But you know , she 's doing -- no , she 's good at some things -- but if she 's cooking , you know , she 's dealing with people on the phone , she 's talking to the kids , she 's painting the ceiling , she 's doing open-heart surgery over here .
If I 'm cooking , the door is shut , the kids are out , the phone 's on the hook , if she comes in I get annoyed .
I say , " Terry , please , I 'm trying to fry an egg in here . Give me a break . "
Actually , you know that old philosophical thing , if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it , did it happen ? Remember that old chestnut ?
I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said , " If a man speaks his mind in a forest , and no woman hears him , is he still wrong ? "
And the third thing about intelligence is , it 's distinct . I 'm doing a new book at the moment called " Epiphany , " which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent . I 'm fascinated by how people got to be there .
It 's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of ; she 's called Gillian Lynne -- have you heard of her ? Some have . She 's a choreographer and everybody knows her work .
She did " Cats " and " Phantom of the Opera . "
She 's wonderful . I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England , as you can see .
Anyway , Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said , " Gillian , how 'd you get to be a dancer ? " And she said it was interesting ; when she was at school , she was really hopeless . And the school , in the ' 30s , wrote to her parents and said , " We think Gillian has a learning disorder . " She couldn 't concentrate ; she was fidgeting . I think now they 'd say she had ADHD . Wouldn 't you ? But this was the 1930s , and ADHD hadn 't been invented at this point .
It wasn 't an available condition .
People weren 't aware they could have that .
Anyway , she went to see this specialist . So , this oak-paneled room , and she was there with her mother , and she was led and sat on this chair at the end , and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school . And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people ; her homework was always late ; and so on , little kid of eight -- in the end , the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said , " Gillian , I 've listened to all these things that your mother 's told me , and I need to speak to her privately . "
He said , " Wait here . We 'll be back ; we won 't be very long , " and they went and left her .
But as they went out the room , he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk . And when they got out the room , he said to her mother , " Just stand and watch her . " And the minute they left the room , she said , she was on her feet , moving to the music .
And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said , " Mrs. Lynne , Gillian isn 't sick ; she 's a dancer .
Take her to a dance school . "
I said , " What happened ? "
She said , " She did . I can 't tell you how wonderful it was .
We walked in this room and it was full of people like me . People who couldn 't sit still .
People who had to move to think . " Who had to move to think .
They did ballet ; they did tap ; they did jazz ; they did modern ; they did contemporary .
She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School ; she became a soloist ; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet . She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company -- the Gillian Lynne Dance Company -- met Andrew Lloyd Weber . She 's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history ; she 's given pleasure to millions ; and she 's a multi-millionaire . Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down .
Now , I think ... What I think it comes to is this : Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson .
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology , one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity .
Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth : for a particular commodity .
And for the future , it won 't serve us .
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we 're educating our children . There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk , who said , " If all the insects were to disappear from the earth , within 50 years all life on Earth would end .
If all human beings disappeared from the earth , within 50 years all forms of life would flourish . "
And he 's right .
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination .
We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we 've talked about . And the only way we 'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are . And our task is to educate their whole being , so they can face this future .
By the way -- we may not see this future , but they will . And our job is to help them make something of it . Thank you very much .
The hidden beauty of pollination
Pollination : it 's vital to life on Earth , but largely unseen by the human eye . Filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg shows us the intricate world of pollen and pollinators with gorgeous high-speed images from his film " Wings of Life , " inspired by the vanishing of one of nature 's primary pollinators , the honeybee .
It 's great being here at TED .
You know , I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head , but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet .
The little things in life , sometimes that we forget about , like pollination , that we take for granted .
And you can 't tell the story about pollinators -- bees , bats , hummingbirds , butterflies -- without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years .
I 've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day , seven days a week , for over 35 years .
To watch them move is a dance I 'm never going to get tired of .
It fills me with wonder , and it opens my heart .
Beauty and seduction , I believe , is nature 's tool for survival , because we will protect what we fall in love with .
Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth .
It reminds us that we are a part of nature , and we 're not separate from it .
When I heard about the vanishing bees , Colony Collapse Disorder , it motivated me to take action .
We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat .
And many scientists believe it 's the most serious issue facing mankind .
It 's like the canary in the coalmine .
If they disappear , so do we .
It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it .
What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers : " What motivates the pollinators ? "
Well , their answer was , " It 's all about risk and reward . "
Like a wide-eyed kid , I 'd say , " Why is that ? "
And they 'd say , " Well , because they want to survive . "
I go , " Why ? "
" Well , in order to reproduce . "
" Well , why ? "
And I thought that they 'd probably say , " Well , it 's all about sex . "
And Chip Taylor , our monarch butterfly expert , he replied , " Nothing lasts forever .
Everything in the universe wears out . "
And that blew my mind .
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward , as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life .
Rarely seen by the naked eye , this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment .
It 's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself , over and over again .
So here is some nectar from my film .
I hope you 'll drink , tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden .
And always take time to smell the flowers , and let it fill you with beauty , and rediscover that sense of wonder .
Here are some images from the film .
Thank you .
Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Al Vernacchio : Sex needs a new metaphor . Here 's one ...
For some reason , says educator Al Vernacchio , the metaphors for talking about sex in the US all come from baseball -- scoring , getting to first base , etc . The problem is , this frames sex as a competition , with a winner and a loser . Instead , he suggests a new metaphor , one that 's more about shared pleasure , discussion and agreement , fulfillment and enjoyment . Let 's talk about … pizza .
I 'd like to talk to you today about a whole new way to think about sexual activity and sexuality education , by comparison .
If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity , you 'll find pretty soon you 're not just talking about sexual activity .
You 're also talking about baseball .
Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity , and we know that because there 's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that 's really talking about sexual activity .
So , for example , you can be a pitcher or a catcher , and that corresponds to whether you perform a sexual act or receive a sexual act .
Of course , there are the bases , which refer to specific sexual activities that happen in a very specific order , ultimately resulting in scoring a run or hitting a home run , which is usually having vaginal intercourse to the point of orgasm , at least for the guy .
You can strike out , which means you don 't get to have any sexual activity .
And if you 're a benchwarmer , you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn 't in the game , maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset .
A bat 's a penis , and a nappy dugout is a vulva , or a vagina .
A glove or a catcher 's mitt is a condom .
A switch-hitter is a bisexual person , and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team .
And then there 's this one : " if there 's grass on the field , play ball . "
And that usually refers to if a young person , specifically often a young woman , is old enough to have pubic hair , she 's old enough to have sex with .
This baseball model is incredibly problematic .
It 's sexist . It 's heterosexist .
It 's competitive . It 's goal-directed .
And it can 't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults .
So we need a new model .
I 'm here today to offer you that new model .
And it 's based on pizza .
Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience .
So let 's do this .
Let 's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity : the trigger for sexual activity , what happens during sexual activity , and the expected outcome of sexual activity .
So when do you play baseball ?
You play baseball when it 's baseball season and when there 's a game on the schedule .
It 's not exactly your choice .
So if it 's prom night or a wedding night or at a party or if our parents aren 't home , hey , it 's just batter up .
Can you imagine saying to your coach , " Uh , I 'm not really feeling it today , I think I 'll sit this game out . "
That 's just not the way it happens .
And when you get together to play baseball , immediately you 're with two opposing teams , one playing offense , one playing defense , somebody 's trying to move deeper into the field .
That 's usually a sign to the boy .
Somebody 's trying to defend people moving into the field .
That 's often given to the girl .
It 's competitive .
We 're not playing with each other .
We 're playing against each other .
And when you show up to play baseball , nobody needs to talk about what we 're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us .
Everybody knows the rules .
You just take your position and play the game .
But when do you have pizza ?
Well , you have pizza when you 're hungry for pizza .
It starts with an internal sense , an internal desire , or a need .
" Huh . I could go for some pizza . "
And because it 's an internal desire , we actually have some sense of control over that .
I could decide that I 'm hungry but know that it 's not a great time to eat .
And then when we get together with someone for pizza , we 're not competing with them , we 're looking for an experience that both of us will share that 's satisfying for both of us , and when you get together for pizza with somebody , what 's the first thing you do ?
You talk about it .
You talk about what you want .
You talk about what you like .
You may even negotiate it .
" How do you feel about pepperoni ? "
" Not so much , I 'm kind of a mushroom guy myself . "
" Well , maybe we can go half and half . "
And even if you 've had pizza with somebody for a very long time , don 't you still say things like , " Should we get the usual ? "
" Or maybe something a little more adventurous ? "
Okay , so when you 're playing baseball , so if we talk about during sexual activity , when you 're playing baseball , you 're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time .
You can 't hit the ball and run to right field .
That doesn 't work .
And you also can 't get to second base and say , " I like it here . I 'm going to stay here . "
No .
And also , of course , with baseball , there 's , like , the specific equipment and a specific skill set .
Not everybody can play baseball . It 's pretty exclusive .
Okay , but what about pizza ?
When we 're trying to figure out what 's good for pizza , isn 't it all about what 's our pleasure ?
There are a million different kinds of pizza .
There 's a million different toppings .
There 's a million different ways to eat pizza .
And none of them are wrong . They 're different .
And in this case , difference is good , because that 's going to increase the chance that we 're having a satisfying experience .
And lastly , what 's the expected outcome of baseball ?
Well , in baseball , you play to win .
You score as many runs as you can .
There 's always a winner in baseball , and that means there 's always a loser in baseball .
But what about pizza ?
Well , in pizza , we 're not really -- there 's no winning . How do you win pizza ?
You don 't . But you do look for , " Are we satisfied ? "
And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days .
And we get to decide when we feel satisfied .
If we 're still hungry , we might have some more .
If you eat too much , though , you just feel gross .
So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education ?
A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model , and it sets up education that can 't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people .
And those young people become older people .
But if we could create sexuality education that was more like pizza , we could create education that invites people to think about their own desires , to make deliberate decisions about what they want , to talk about it with their partners , and to ultimately look for not some external outcome but for what feels satisfying , and we get to decide that .
You may have noticed in the baseball and pizza comparison , under the baseball , it 's all commands .
They 're all exclamation points .
But under the pizza model , they 're questions .
And who gets to answer those questions ?
You do . I do .
So remember , when we 're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity , baseball , you 're out .
Pizza is the way to think about healthy , satisfying sexual activity , and good , comprehensive sexuality education .
Thank you very much for your time .
Auret van Heerden : Making global labor fair
FLA head Auret van Heerden talks about the next frontier of workers ' rights -- globalized industries where no single national body can keep workers safe and protected . How can we keep our global supply chains honest ? Van Heerden makes the business case for fair labor .
This cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo .
It 's mined by armed gangs using slaves , child slaves , what the U.N. Security Council calls " blood minerals , " then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China .
That factory -- over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year .
One man died after working a 36-hour shift .
We all love chocolate .
We buy it for our kids .
Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d 'Ivoire and Ghana and it 's harvested by children .
Cote d 'Ivoire , we have a huge problem of child slaves .
Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations .
a pharmaceutical product -- starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China , because the active ingredient comes from pigs ' intestines .
Your diamond -- you 've all heard , probably seen the movie " Blood Diamond . "
This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now .
Cotton : Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth .
Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest , the government shuts down the schools , puts the kids in buses , buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton .
It 's forced child labor on an institutional scale .
And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila .
These places , these origins , represent governance gaps .
That 's the politest description I have for them .
These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin -- the global supply chains , which bring us our favorite brand name products .
Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states .
Some of them are not states anymore at all .
They 're failed states .
Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment , promote trade .
Either way , they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma .
I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain .
But right now , most of the companies involved in these supply chains don 't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future , nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product .
Now , I didn 't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain .
We need a reality check .
We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have .
This is an independent republic , probably a failed state .
It 's definitely not a democratic state .
And right now , that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us , that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption .
Now , that 's not a new story .
You 've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world , even in developed countries .
You want to see the classic sweatshop , meet me at Madison Square Garden , I 'll take you down the street , and I 'll show you a Chinese sweatshop .
But take the example of heparin .
It 's a pharmaceutical product .
You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital , probably squeaky clean .
The problem is that the active ingredient in there -- as I mentioned earlier -- comes from pigs .
The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it 's the world 's biggest supplier of pigs .
And their factory in China -- which probably is pretty clean -- is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs , where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient .
So a couple of years ago , we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world , because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain .
Worse , some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests .
This substitute cost nine dollars a pound , whereas real heparin , the real ingredient , cost 900 dollars a pound .
A no-brainer .
The problem was that it killed more people .
And so you 're asking yourself , " How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen ?
How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen ? "
And the answer is quite simple : the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities , not pharmaceutical facilities , so they don 't audit them .
And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem .
This is offshore .
They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas -- about a dozen a year -- maybe 20 in a good year .
There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone .
In fact , about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore , particularly China and India , and we don 't have a governance system .
We don 't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe .
We don 't have a system to ensure that human rights , basic dignity , are ensured .
So at a national level -- and we work in about 60 different countries -- at a national level we 've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil .
And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it 's supranational .
So governments who are failing , who are dropping the ball at a national level , have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level .
And you can just look at the headlines .
Take Copenhagen last year -- complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge .
Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago -- stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago .
You can take any one of the major global challenges we 've discussed this week and ask yourself , where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions , responses , to those international problems ?
And the simple answer is they can 't . They 're national .
Their voters are local .
They have parochial interests .
They can 't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good .
So , if we 're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level -- in this case , in the global supply chain -- we have to come up with a different mechanism .
We need a different machine .
Fortunately , we have some examples .
In the 1990s , there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. -- child labor , forced labor , serious health and safety abuses .
And eventually President Clinton , in 1996 , convened a meeting at the White House , invited industry , human rights NGOs , trade unions , the Department of Labor , got them all in a room and said , " Look , I don 't want globalization to be a race to the bottom .
I don 't know how to prevent that , but I 'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response . "
So they formed a White House task force , and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain .
Companies didn 't feel it was their responsibility .
They don 't own those facilities .
They don 't employ those workers .
They 're not legally liable .
Everybody else at the table said , " Folks , that doesn 't cut it .
You have a custodial duty , a duty of care , to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it , without fear of our safety , or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product . "
So they agreed , " Okay , what we 'll do is we agree on a common set of standards , code of conduct .
We 'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control .
We 'll make it part of the contract . "
And that was a stroke of absolute genius , because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract , private power , to deliver public goods .
And let 's face it , the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law , the local environmental regulations , the local human rights standards .
Those factories will probably never see an inspector .
If the inspector did come along , it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe .
Even if they did their jobs , and they cited those facilities for their violations , the fine would be derisory .
But you lose that contract for a major brand name , that 's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt .
That makes a difference .
So what we 've been able to do is we 've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain , that of the multinational company , and get them to do the right thing , get them to use that power for good , to deliver the key public goods .
Now of course , this doesn 't come naturally to multinational companies .
They weren 't set up to do this . They 're set up to make money .
But they are extremely efficient organizations .
They have resources , and if we can add the will , the commitment , they know how to deliver that product .
Now , getting there is not easy .
Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier , they 're not there .
You need a safe space .
You need a place where people can come together , sit down without fear of judgment , without recrimination , to actually face the problem , agree on the problem and come up with solutions .
We can do it . The technical solutions are there .
The problem is the lack of trust , the lack of confidence , the lack of partnership between NGOs , campaign groups , civil society organizations and multinational companies .
If we can put those two together in a safe space , get them to work together , we can deliver public goods right now , or in extremely short supply .
This is a radical proposition , and it 's crazy to think that if you 're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka -- 22 , 23 , 24 dollars a month -- your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract .
It 's crazy .
Multinationals are protecting human rights .
I know there 's going to be disbelief .
You 'll say , " How can we trust them ? "
Well , we don 't .
It 's the old arms control phrase : " Trust , but verify . "
So we audit .
We take their supply chain , we take all the factory names , we do a random sample , we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities , and then we publish the results .
Transparency is absolutely critical to this .
You can call yourself responsible , but responsibility without accountability often doesn 't work .
So what we 're doing is , we 're not only enlisting the multinationals , we 're giving them the tools to deliver this public good -- respect for human rights -- and we 're checking .
You don 't need to believe me . You shouldn 't believe me .
Go to the website . Look at the audit results .
Ask yourself , is this company behaving in a socially responsible way ?
Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics ?
That 's the way the system works .
I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world .
I hate the idea that governments have dropped this ball and I can 't get used to the idea that somehow we can 't get them to do their jobs .
I 've been at this for 30 years , and in that time I 've seen the ability , the commitment , the will of government to do this decline , and I don 't see them making a comeback right now .
So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure .
We 're now thinking that , in fact , this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges .
Call it network governance . Call it what you will .
The private actors , companies and NGOs , are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face .
Just look at pandemics -- swine flu , bird flu , H1N1 .
Look at the health systems in so many countries .
Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic ?
No .
Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response ?
Absolutely .
What they lack is that safe space to come together , agree and move to action .
That 's what we 're trying to provide .
I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume .
" You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain .
There are thousands of suppliers in there . "
It seems too daunting , too dangerous , for any company to take on .
But there are companies .
We have 4,000 companies who are members .
Some of them are very , very large companies .
The sporting goods industry , in particular , stepped up to the plate and have done it .
The example , the role model , is there .
And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address -- child labor in cottonseed farms in India -- this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India .
It seems overwhelming .
The numbers just make you want to zone out .
But we break it down to some basic realities .
And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition : can I give this person their dignity back ?
Poor people , people whose human rights have been violated -- the crux of that is the loss of dignity , the lack of dignity .
It starts with just giving people back their dignity .
I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi , one of the flashiest , brightest new cities popping up in India right now , and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road , and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands .
They didn 't say money .
They said , " The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human , like we don 't exist .
Please ask them to treat us like human beings . "
That 's my simple understanding of human rights .
That 's my simple proposition to you , my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room , everybody out there .
We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped .
If we don 't do it , we 're abandoning hope , we 're abandoning our essential humanity , and I know that 's not a place we want to be , and we don 't have to be there .
So I appeal to you .
Join us , come into that safe space , and let 's start to make this happen .
Thank you very much .
Ben Saunders : Why did I ski to the North Pole ?
Arctic explorer Ben Saunders recounts his harrowing solo ski trek to the North Pole , complete with engaging anecdotes , gorgeous photos and never-before-seen video .
This is me . My name is Ben Saunders .
I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places .
On May 11th last year , I stood alone at the North geographic Pole .
I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America , five-and-a-half thousand square miles .
More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest .
12 people have stood on the moon .
Including me , only four people have skied solo to the North Pole .
And I think the reason for that -- -- thank you -- I think the reason for that is that it 's -- it 's -- well , it 's as Chris said , bonkers .
It 's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability .
I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back . 800 miles in 10 weeks .
And I was dragging all the food I needed , the supplies , the equipment , sleeping bag , one change of underwear -- everything I needed for nearly three months .
What we 're going to try and do today , in the 16 and a bit minutes I 've got left , is to try and answer three questions . The first one is , why ?
The second one is , how do you go to the loo at minus 40 ?
" Ben , I 've read somewhere that at minus 40 , exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute , so how do you answer the call of nature ? "
I don 't want to answer these now . I 'll come on to them at the end .
Third one : how do you top that ? What 's next ?
It all started back in 2001 .
My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow -- enormously experienced chap .
This was like my polar apprenticeship .
We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here , Severnaya Zemlya , to the North Pole .
And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole , geographic North Pole , is that it 's slap bang in the middle of the sea .
This is about as good as maps get , and to reach it you 've got to ski literally over the frozen crust , the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean .
I 'd spoken to all the experts .
I 'd read lots of books . I studied maps and charts .
But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I 'd let myself in for .
I was 23 years old . No one my age had attempted anything like this , and pretty quickly , almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong .
We were attacked by a polar bear on day two .
I had frostbite in my left big toe .
We started running very low on food . We were both pretty hungry , losing lots of weight .
Some very unusual weather conditions , very difficult ice conditions .
We had decidedly low-tech communications .
We couldn 't afford a satellite phone , so we had HF radio .
You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent .
There 's a wire dangling down either side .
That was our HF radio antenna .
We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months .
Ultimately , we ran out of time .
We 'd skied 400 miles . We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole , and we 'd run out of time .
We were too late into the summer ; the ice was starting to melt ; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio , and they said , " Look boys , you 've run out of time .
We 've got to pick you up . "
And I felt that I had failed , wholeheartedly .
I was a failure .
The one goal , the one dream I 'd had for as long as I could remember -- I hadn 't even come close .
And skiing along that first trip , I had two imaginary video clips that I 'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough , just to keep my motivation going .
The first one was reaching the Pole itself .
I could see vividly , I suppose , being filmed out of the door of a helicopter , there was , kind of , rock music playing in the background , and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack , you know , flying in the wind .
I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole , you know -- ah , glorious moment -- the music kind of reaching a crescendo .
The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport , and I could see again , vividly , the camera flashbulbs going off , the paparazzi , the autograph hunters , the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal .
And of course , neither of these things happened .
We didn 't get to the Pole , and we didn 't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR , so no one had heard of this expedition .
And I got back to Heathrow . My mum was there ; my brother was there ; my granddad was there -- had a little Union Jack -- -- and that was about it . I went back to live with my mum .
I was physically exhausted , mentally an absolute wreck , considered myself a failure .
In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition , and lying on my mum 's sofa , day in day out , watching daytime TV .
My brother sent me a text message , an SMS -- it was a quote from the " Simpsons . " It said , " You tried your hardest and failed miserably .
The lesson is : don 't even try . "
Fast forward three years . I did eventually get off the sofa , and start planning another expedition . This time , I wanted to go right across , on my own this time , from Russia , at the top of the map , to the North Pole , where the sort of kink in the middle is , and then on to Canada .
No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own .
Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000 . No one 's done it solo .
Very famous , very accomplished Italian mountaineer , Reinhold Messner , tried it in 1995 , and he was rescued after a week .
He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest .
So for some reason , this was what I wanted to have a crack at , but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece , let alone make it across to Canada , I had to take a radical approach .
This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off , sub-two-gram toothbrush , to working with one of the world 's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new , revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch : 6,000 calories a day .
And the expedition started in February last year .
Big support team . We had a film crew , a couple of logistics people with us , my girlfriend , a photographer .
At first it was pretty sensible . We flew British Airways to Moscow .
The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk , on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir , spelled K-R-A-S .
The next bit , we 'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga , which was the sort of last bit of civilization .
Our cameraman , who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times , actually asked the pilot , before we got on the plane , how long this flight would take , and the pilot -- Russian pilot -- completely deadpan , replied , " Six hours -- if we live . "
We got to Khatanga .
I think the joke is that Khatanga isn 't the end of the world , but you can see it from there .
It was supposed to be an overnight stay . We were stuck there for 10 days .
There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter , so we were stuck . We couldn 't move .
Finally , morning of day 11 , we got the all-clear , loaded up the helicopters -- two helicopters flying in tandem -- dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice .
We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming , photography ; while the helicopter was still there , I did an interview on the satellite phone ; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter , wham , the door closed , and I was alone .
And I don 't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice .
All I could think about was running back up to the door , banging on the door , and saying , " Look guys , I haven 't quite thought this through . "
To make things worse , you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen ; that 's a full moon .
Because we 'd been held up in Russia , of course , the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides ; when you 're standing on the frozen surface of the sea , high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen -- the ice is going to start moving around a bit .
I was , you can see there , pulling two sledges .
Grand total in all , 95 days of food and fuel , 180 kilos -- that 's almost exactly 400 pounds .
When the ice was flat or flattish , I could just about pull both .
When the ice wasn 't flat , I didn 't have a hope in hell .
I had to pull one , leave it , and go back and get the other one .
Literally scrambling through what 's called pressure ice -- the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean , the wind and the tides .
NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began .
And it 's always drifting . The pack ice is always drifting .
I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year , and I was drifting backwards most of the time .
My record was minus 2.5 miles .
I got up in the morning , took the tent down , skied north for seven-and-a-half hours , put the tent up , and I was two and a half miles further back than when I 'd started .
I literally couldn 't keep up with the drift of the ice .
: So it 's day 22 .
I 'm lying in the tent , getting ready to go .
The weather is just appalling -- oh , drifted back about five miles in the last -- last night .
Later in the expedition , the problem was no longer the ice .
It was a lack of ice -- open water .
I knew this was happening . I knew the Artic was warming .
I knew there was more open water . And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve .
This was my little bit of bio-mimicry .
Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines .
If they come to water , they 'll climb in , swim across it .
So we had a dry suit developed -- I worked with a team in Norway -- based on a sort of survival suit -- I suppose , that helicopter pilots would wear -- that I could climb into . It would go on over my boots , over my mittens , it would pull up around my face , and seal pretty tightly around my face .
And this meant I could ski over very thin ice , and if I fell through , it wasn 't the end of the world .
It also meant , if the worst came to the worst , I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me .
Some pretty radical technology , a radical approach --but it worked perfectly .
Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology .
In 1912 , Shackleton 's Endurance expedition -- there was -- one of his crew , a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees .
He said , " The explorers of 2012 , if there is anything left to explore , will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes . "
Well , Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years . This is my pocket wireless telephone , Iridium satellite phone .
The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket .
And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice , I was blogging live from my tent , sending back a little diary piece , sending back information on the distance I 'd covered -- the ice conditions , the temperature -- and a daily photo .
Remember , 2001 , we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world .
Last year , blogging live from an expedition that 's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest .
It wasn 't all high-tech . This is navigating in what 's called a whiteout .
When you get lots of mist , low cloud , the wind starts blowing the snow up .
You can 't see an awful lot . You can just see , there 's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles .
I 'd navigate using the direction of the wind .
So , kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech .
I got to the Pole on the 11th of May .
It took me 68 days to get there from Russia , and there is nothing there .
There isn 't even a pole at the Pole . There 's nothing there , purely because it 's sea ice . It 's drifting .
Stick a flag there , leave it there , pretty soon it will drift off , usually towards Canada or Greenland .
I knew this , but I was expecting something .
Strange mixture of feelings : it was extremely warm by this stage , a lot of open water around , and of course , elated that I 'd got there under my own steam , but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada , which was still 400 miles away , were slim at best .
The only proof I 've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS , the little satellite navigation gadget .
You can just see -- there 's a nine and a string of zeros here .
Ninety degrees north -- that is slap bang in the North Pole .
I took a photo of that . Sat down on my sledge . Did a sort of video diary piece .
Took a few photos . I got my satellite phone out .
I warmed the battery up in my armpit .
I dialed three numbers . I dialed my mum .
I dialed my girlfriend . I dialed the CEO of my sponsor .
And I got three voicemails .
: Ninety .
It 's a special feeling .
The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet .
The -- the whole world underneath me .
I finally got through to my mum . She was at the queue of the supermarket .
She started crying . She asked me to call her back .
I skied on for a week past the Pole .
I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue .
This was the last day I had on the ice .
When I spoke to the -- my project management team , they said , " Look , Ben , conditions are getting too dangerous .
There are huge areas of open water just south of your position .
We 'd like to pick you up .
Ben , could you please look for an airstrip ? "
This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call .
I 'd never tried to build an airstrip before . Tony , the expedition manager , he said , " Look Ben , you 've got to find 500 meters of flat , thick safe ice . "
The only bit of ice I could find -- it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip -- was exactly 473 meters . I could measure it with my skis .
I didn 't tell Tony that . I didn 't tell the pilots that .
I thought , it 'll have to do .
: Oh , oh , oh , oh , oh , oh .
It just about worked . A pretty dramatic landing -- the plane actually passed over four times , and I was a bit worried it wasn 't going to land at all .
The pilot , I knew , was called Troy . I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy .
I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed -- a pretty emotional moment .
So I thought , I 've got to compose myself for Troy .
I 'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type .
The plane taxied up to where I was standing .
The door opened . This guy jumped out . He 's about that tall . He said , " Hi , my name is Troy . "
The co-pilot was a lady called Monica .
She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper .
They were the least macho people I 've ever met , but they made my day .
Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice ; we took a few photos . He climbed up the ladder . He said , " Just -- just get in the back . "
He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front , and I climbed in the back .
Taxied up and down the runway a few times , just to flatten it out a bit , and he said , " Right , I 'm going to -- I 'm going to give it a go . " And he -- I 've now learned that this is standard practice , but it had me worried at the time .
He put his hand on the throttle .
You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit .
It 's that little bar there . He put his hand on the throttle .
Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his .
I thought , " God , here we go . We 're , we 're -- this is all or nothing . "
Rammed it forwards . Bounced down the runway . Just took off .
One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway , banking . I could see into the cockpit , Troy battling the controls , and he just took one hand off , reached back , flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit , and it was the " fasten seat belt " sign you can see on the wall .
And only from the air did I see the big picture .
Of course , when you 're on the ice , you only ever see one obstacle at a time , whether it 's a pressure ridge or there 's a bit of water .
This is probably why I didn 't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip .
I mean , it really was starting to break up .
Why ? I 'm not an explorer in the traditional sense .
I 'm not skiing along drawing maps ; everyone knows where the North Pole is .
At the South Pole there 's a big scientific base . There 's an airstrip .
There 's a cafe and there 's a tourist shop .
For me , this is about exploring human limits , about exploring the limits of physiology , of psychology and of technology . They 're the things that excite me .
And it 's also about potential , on a personal level .
This , for me , is a chance to explore the limits -- really push the limits of my own potential , see how far they stretch .
And on a wider scale , it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential , just doing three or four or five percent of what they 're truly capable of . So , on a wider scale , I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential , and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet .
That 's as close as I can come to summing that up .
The next question is , how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40 ?
The answer , of course , to which is a trade secret -- and the last question , what 's next ? As quickly as possible , if I have a minute left at the end , I 'll go into more detail .
What 's next : Antarctica .
It 's the coldest , highest , windiest and driest continent on Earth .
Late 1911 , early 1912 , there was a race to be the first to the South Pole : the heart of the Antarctic continent .
If you include the coastal ice shelves , you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf -- it 's the big one down here -- the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France .
Antarctica , if you include the ice shelves , is twice the size of Australia -- it 's a big place .
And there 's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen , the Norwegian -- Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies -- and Scott , the British guy , Captain Scott .
Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs , all of which went wrong , and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot .
They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there .
There was a tent , a letter to the Norwegian king .
And they turned around , headed back to the coast , and all five of them died on the return journey .
Since then , no one has ever skied -- this was 93 years ago -- since then , no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back .
Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing -- no one has ever made a return journey . So that 's the plan .
Two of us are doing it .
That 's pretty much it .
One final thought before I get to the toilet bit , is -- is , I have a -- and I meant to scan this and I 've forgotten -- but I have a -- I have a school report . I was 13 years old , and it 's framed above my desk at home . It says , " Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile . "
I think if I 've learned anything , it 's this : that no one else is the authority on your potential .
You 're the only person that decides how far you go and what you 're capable of .
Ladies and gentlemen , that 's my story .
Thank you very much .
William Kamkwamba : How I harnessed the wind
At age 14 , in poverty and famine , a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family 's home . Now at 22 , William Kamkwamba , who speaks at TED , here , for the second time , shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed his life .
Thank you .
Two years ago , I stood on the TED stage in Arusha , Tanzania .
I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations .
It was a simple machine that changed my life .
Before that time , I had never been away from my home in Malawi .
I had never used a computer .
I had never seen an Internet .
On the stage that day , I was so nervous .
My English lost , I wanted to vomit .
I had never been surrounded by so many azungu , white people .
There was a story I wouldn 't tell you then .
But well , I 'm feeling good right now .
I would like to share that story today .
We have seven children in my family .
All sisters , excepting me .
This is me with my dad when I was a little boy .
Before I discovered the wonders of science , I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers .
Like everyone else , we grew maize .
One year our fortune turned very bad .
In 2001 we experienced an awful famine .
Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death .
My family ate one meal per day , at night .
Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us .
The food passes through our bodies .
We drop down to nothing .
In Malawi , the secondary school , you have to pay school fees .
Because of the hunger , I was forced to drop out of school .
I looked at my father and looked at those dry fields .
It was the future I couldn 't accept .
I felt very happy to be at the secondary school , so I was determined to do anything possible to receive education .
So I went to a library .
I read books , science books , especially physics .
I couldn 't read English that well .
I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them .
Another book put that knowledge in my hands .
It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity .
Pump water meant irrigation , a defense against hunger , which we were experiencing by that time .
So I decided I would build one windmill for myself .
But I didn 't have materials to use , so I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials .
Many people , including my mother , said I was crazy .
I found a tractor fan , shock absorber , PVC pipes .
Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo , I built my machine .
It was one light at first .
And then four lights , with switches , and even a circuit breaker , modeled after an electric bell .
Another machine pumps water for irrigation .
Queues of people start lining up at my house to charge their mobile phone .
I could not get rid of them .
And the reporters came too , which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED .
I had never seen an airplane before .
I had never slept in a hotel .
So , on stage that day in Arusha , my English lost , I said something like , " I tried . And I made it . "
So I would like to say something to all the people out there like me to the Africans , and the poor who are struggling with your dreams .
God bless .
Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet .
I say to you , trust yourself and believe .
Whatever happens , don 't give up .
Thank you .
Michael Shermer : The pattern behind self-deception
Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain 's most basic , hard-wired survival skills . He explains what they are , and how they get us into trouble .
So since I was here last in ' 06 , we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue , so we covered that fairly extensively in Skeptic magazine .
We investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies , but it turns out we don 't have to worry about any of this because the world 's going to end in 2012 .
Another update : You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker .
It 's like a water dowsing device .
It 's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around .
And you walk around , and it points to things .
Like if you 're looking for marijuana in students ' lockers , it 'll point right to somebody .
Oh , sorry .
This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls , especially if you 're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes .
Well , under the category of " What 's the harm of silly stuff like this ? "
this device , the ADE 651 , was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece .
It 's just like this one , completely worthless , in which it allegedly worked by " electrostatic magnetic ion attraction , " which translates to " pseudoscientific baloney " -- would be the nice word -- in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good , but it does absolutely nothing .
In this case , at trespass points , allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay , actually cost lives .
So there is a danger to pseudoscience , in believing in this sort of thing .
So what I want to talk about today is belief .
I want to believe , and you do too .
And in fact , I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things .
It is the default option . We just believe .
We believe all sorts of things .
Belief is natural ; disbelief , skepticism , science , is not natural .
It 's more difficult .
It 's uncomfortable to not believe things .
So like Fox Mulder on " X-Files , " who wants to believe in UFOs ? Well , we all do , and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains .
Essentially , we are pattern-seeking primates .
We connect the dots : A is connected to B ; B is connected to C.
And sometimes A really is connected to B , and that 's called association learning .
We find patterns , we make those connections , whether it 's Pavlov 's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food , and then he salivates to the sound of the bell , or whether it 's a Skinnerian rat , in which he 's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it , and therefore he repeats the behavior .
In fact , what Skinner discovered is that , if you put a pigeon in a box like this , and he has to press one of these two keys , and he tries to figure out what the pattern is , and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there -- if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern , they will figure out any kind of pattern .
And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward , they repeat that particular pattern .
Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise , once clockwise and peck the key twice .
And that 's called superstition , and that , I 'm afraid , we will always have with us .
I call this process " patternicity " -- that is , the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise .
When we do this process , we make two types of errors .
A Type I error , or false positive , is believing a pattern is real when it 's not .
Our second type of error is a false negative .
A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is .
So let 's do a thought experiment .
You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa .
Your name is Lucy , okay ?
And you hear a rustle in the grass .
Is it a dangerous predator , or is it just the wind ?
Your next decision could be the most important one of your life .
Well , if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it 's just the wind , you 've made an error in cognition , made a Type I error , false positive .
But no harm . You just move away .
You 're more cautious . You 're more vigilant .
On the other hand , if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind , and it turns out it 's a dangerous predator , you 're lunch .
You 've just won a Darwin award .
You 've been taken out of the gene pool .
Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error .
This is the only equation in the talk by the way .
We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic , especially in split-second , life-and-death situations .
So the default position is just : Believe all patterns are real -- All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind .
And so I think that we evolved ...
there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines , our pattern-seeking brain processes , to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I 'll come back to .
So for example , what do you see here ?
It 's a horse head , that 's right .
It looks like a horse . It must be a horse .
That 's a pattern .
And is it really a horse ?
Or is it more like a frog ?
See , our pattern detection device , which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex -- it 's our little detection device there -- can be easily fooled , and this is the problem .
For example , what do you see here ?
Yes , of course , it 's a cow .
Once I prime the brain -- it 's called cognitive priming -- once I prime the brain to see it , it pops back out again even without the pattern that I 've imposed on it .
And what do you see here ?
Some people see a Dalmatian dog .
Yes , there it is . And there 's the prime .
So when I go back without the prime , your brain already has the model so you can see it again .
What do you see here ?
Planet Saturn . Yes , that 's good .
How about here ?
Just shout out anything you see .
That 's a good audience , Chris .
Because there 's nothing in this . Well , allegedly there 's nothing .
This is an experiment done by Jennifer Whitson at U.T. Austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns .
That is , almost everybody sees the planet Saturn .
People that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this , which is allegedly patternless .
In other words , the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there 's a lack of control .
For example , baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they 're batting , but not so much when they 're fielding .
Because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time .
The best batters fail seven out of 10 times .
So their superstitions , their patternicities , are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth .
What do you see in this particular one here , in this field ?
Anybody see an object there ?
There actually is something here , but it 's degraded .
While you 're thinking about that , this was an experiment done by Susan Blackmore , a psychologist in England , who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an ESP test : How much did they believe in the paranormal , supernatural , angels and so forth .
And those who scored high on the ESP scale , tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns .
Here is what you show subjects .
The fish is degraded 20 percent , 50 percent and then the one I showed you , 70 percent .
A similar experiment was done by another [ Swiss ] psychologist named Peter Brugger , who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere , via the left visual field , than the left hemisphere .
So if you present subjects the images such that it 's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left , then they 're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere .
Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs .
So what we 're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens .
Brugger and his colleague , Christine Mohr , gave subjects L-DOPA .
L-DOPA 's a drug , as you know , given for treating Parkinson 's disease , which is related to a decrease in dopamine .
L-DOPA increases dopamine .
An increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine .
So dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity .
In fact , neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior , things like paranoia , delusions and hallucinations , these are patternicities .
They 're incorrect patterns . They 're false positives . They 're Type I errors .
And if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists , they go away .
That is , you decrease the amount of dopamine , and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases .
On the other hand , amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists .
They increase the amount of dopamine .
So you 're more likely to feel in a euphoric state , creativity , find more patterns .
In fact , I saw Robin Williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine , when he had that issue , than now .
So perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity .
Dopamine , I think , changes our signal-to-noise ratio .
That is , how accurate we are in finding patterns .
If it 's too low , you 're more likely to make too many Type II errors .
You miss the real patterns . You don 't want to be too skeptical .
If you 're too skeptical , you 'll miss the really interesting good ideas .
Just right , you 're creative , and yet you don 't fall for too much baloney .
Too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere .
Every time somebody looks at you , you think people are staring at you .
You think people are talking about you .
And if you go too far on that , that 's just simply labeled as madness .
It 's a distinction perhaps we might make between two Nobel laureates , Richard Feynman and John Nash .
One sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a Nobel Prize .
The other one also , but maybe too many patterns .
And we then call that schizophrenia .
So the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem .
And of course you all know exactly what this is , right ?
And what pattern do you see here ?
Again , I 'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here , causing you conflicting pattern detections .
You know , of course , this is Via Uno shoes .
These are sandals .
Pretty sexy feet , I must say .
Maybe a little Photoshopped .
And of course , the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth .
It turns out what you 're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see .
And you see the lamp here , I know .
Because the lights on here .
Of course , thanks to the environmentalist movement we 're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals .
So what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is , of course , the dolphins , right ?
You see a dolphin here , and there 's a dolphin , and there 's a dolphin .
That 's a dolphin tail there , guys .
If we can give you conflicting data , again , your ACC is going to be going into hyperdrive .
If you look down here , it 's fine . If you look up here , then you get conflicting data .
And then we have to flip the image for you to see that it 's a set up .
The impossible crate illusion .
It 's easy to fool the brain in 2D .
So you say , " Aw , come on Shermer , anybody can do that in a Psych 101 text with an illusion like that . "
Well here 's the late , great Jerry Andrus ' " impossible crate " illusion in 3D , in which Jerry is standing inside the impossible crate .
And he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal .
Of course , camera angle is everything . The photographer is over there , and this board appears to overlap with this one , and this one with that one , and so on .
But even when I take it away , the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns .
This is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle .
In fact , it 's the exact same picture side by side .
So what you 're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one , but with that one .
And so your brain is fooled .
Yet again , your pattern detection devices are fooled .
Faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes .
Here 's some faces on the side of a rock .
I 'm actually not even sure if this is -- this might be Photoshopped .
But anyway , the point is still made .
Now which one of these looks odd to you ?
In a quick reaction , which one looks odd ?
The one on the left . Okay . So I 'll rotate it so it 'll be the one on the right .
And you are correct .
A fairly famous illusion -- it was first done with Margaret Thatcher .
Now , they trade up the politicians every time .
Well , why is this happening ?
Well , we know exactly where it happens , in the temporal lobe , right across , sort of above your ear there , in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus .
And there 's two types of cells that do this , that record facial features either globally , or specifically these large , rapid-firing cells , first look at the general face .
So you recognize Obama immediately .
And then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth .
Especially when they 're upside down , you 're engaging that general facial recognition software there .
Now I said back in our little thought experiment , you 're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa .
Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator ?
What 's the difference between those ?
Well , the wind is inanimate ; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent .
And I call this process agenticity .
That is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning , intention and agency , often invisible beings from the top down .
This is an idea that we got from a fellow TEDster here , Dan Dennett , who talked about taking the intentional stance .
So it 's a type of that expanded to explain , I think , a lot of different things : souls , spirits , ghosts , gods , demons , angels , aliens , intelligent designers , government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention , are believed to haunt our world and control our lives .
I think it 's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism .
It 's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us , more moral than us , and the narratives always are that they 're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high .
The intelligent designer 's always portrayed as this super intelligent , moral being that comes down to design life .
Even the idea that government can rescue us -- that 's no longer the wave of the future , but that is , I think , a type of agenticity : projecting somebody up there , big and powerful , will come rescue us .
And this is also , I think , the basis of conspiracy theories .
There 's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings , whether it 's the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers .
But this is a pattern detection problem , isn 't it ?
Some patterns are real and some are not .
Was JFK assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin ?
Well , if you go there -- there 's people there on any given day -- like when I went there , here -- showing me where the different shooters were .
My favorite one was he was in the manhole .
And he popped out at the last second , took that shot .
But of course , Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy .
So we can 't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that .
Because , let 's face it , some patterns are real .
Some conspiracies really are true .
Explains a lot , maybe .
And 9 / 11 has a conspiracy theory . It is a conspiracy .
We did a whole issue on it .
Nineteen members of Al Queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy .
But that 's not what the " 9 / 11 truthers " think .
They think it was an inside job by the Bush administration .
Well , that 's a whole other lecture .
You know how we know that 9 / 11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration ?
Because it worked .
So we are natural-born dualists .
Our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these .
Because we can imagine , in essence , continuing on .
We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe , you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences , near-death experiences , which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there .
Or you can do it through loss of consciousness , by accelerating in a centrifuge .
You get a hypoxia , or a lower oxygen .
And the brain then senses that there 's an out-of-body experience .
You can use -- which I did , went out and did -- Michael Persinger 's God Helmet , that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves .
And you get a sense of out-of-body experience .
So I 'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together .
It 's just a minute and a half .
It ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief .
Go ahead and roll it .
This is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm .
We 're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial , right ?
And this is test on some lip balms that we have over here .
And these are our models who are going to help us , Roger and Matt .
And we have our own lip balm , and we have a leading brand .
Would you have any problem kissing our models to test it ?
Girl : No .
You wouldn 't ? You 'd think that was fine .
Girl : That would be fine .
So this is a blind test .
I 'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on .
Kay , now can you see anything ?
Pull it so you can 't even see down .
It 's completely blind now , right ?
Girl : Yes .
Now , what I 'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips , the texture , right , and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not .
Girl : Okay .
Girl : No .
Take a step here .
Okay , now I 'm going to ask you to pucker up .
Pucker up big and lean in just a little bit , okay ?
Okay .
And , Jennifer , how did that feel ?
Jennifer : Good .
Girl : Oh my God !
Michael Shermer : Thank you very much . Thank you . Thanks .
Clint Smith : How to raise a black son in America
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : As kids , we all get advice from parents and teachers that seems strange , even confusing . This was crystallized one night for a young Clint Smith , who was playing with water guns in a dark parking lot with his white friends . In a heartfelt piece , the poet paints the scene of his father 's furious and fearful response .
Growing up , I didn 't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did .
Like , why did I really have to mow the lawn ?
Why was homework really that important ?
Why couldn 't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal ?
My childhood was abound with questions like this .
Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes , it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn 't exactly understand why .
And it 's not that they didn 't want me to think critically .
Their parenting always sought to reconcile the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world , while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable .
I came to realize that this , in and of itself , was a very purposeful form of education .
One of my favorite educators , Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire , speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool for critical awakening and shared humanity .
In his most famous book , " Pedagogy of the Oppressed , " he states , " No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so . "
I 've been thinking a lot about this lately , this idea of humanity , and specifically , who in this world is afforded the privilege of being perceived as fully human .
Over the course of the past several months , the world has watched as unarmed black men , and women , have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante .
These events and all that has transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood and the decisions that my parents made about raising a black boy in America that growing up , I didn 't always understand in the way that I do now .
I think of how hard it must have been , how profoundly unfair it must have felt for them to feel like they had to strip away parts of my childhood just so that I could come home at night .
For example , I think of how one night , when I was around 12 years old , on an overnight field trip to another city , my friends and I bought Super Soakers and turned the hotel parking lot into our own water-filled battle zone .
We hid behind cars , running through the darkness that lay between the streetlights , boundless laughter ubiquitous across the pavement .
But within 10 minutes , my father came outside , grabbed me by my forearm and led me into our room with an unfamiliar grip .
Before I could say anything , tell him how foolish he had made me look in front of my friends , he derided me for being so naive .
Looked me in the eye , fear consuming his face , and said , " Son , I 'm sorry , but you can 't act the same as your white friends .
You can 't pretend to shoot guns .
You can 't run around in the dark .
You can 't hide behind anything other than your own teeth . "
I know now how scared he must have been , how easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night , that some man would mistake this water for a good reason to wash all of this away .
These are the sorts of messages I 've been inundated with my entire life : Always keep your hands where they can see them , don 't move too quickly , take off your hood when the sun goes down .
My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice , an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn 't steal the breath from our lungs , so that they wouldn 't make a memory of this skin .
So that we could be kids , not casket or concrete .
And it 's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else it 's simply because they wanted to keep us alive .
All of my black friends were raised with the same message , the talk , given to us when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground , when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared .
But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child ?
That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath , that you cannot simply be curious , that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake , that someone 's implicit bias might be the reason you don 't wake up in the morning .
But this cannot be what defines us .
Because we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren 't meant for the backside of a bullet , but for flying kites and jumping rope , and laughing until our stomachs burst .
We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands in class , and not just to signal surrender , and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we aren 't worthy of this world .
So when we say that black lives matter , it 's not because others don 't , it 's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear , when so many things tell us we are not .
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born , where a toy in his hand isn 't mistaken for anything other than a toy .
And I refuse to accept that we can 't build this world into something new , some place where a child 's name doesn 't have to be written on a t-shirt , or a tombstone , where the value of someone 's life isn 't determined by anything other than the fact that they had lungs , a place where every single one of us can breathe .
Thank you .

Boniface Mwangi : The day I stood up alone
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Photographer Boniface Mwangi wanted to protest against corruption in his home country of Kenya . So he made a plan : He and some friends would stand up and heckle during a public mass meeting . But when the moment came ... he stood alone . What happened next , he says , showed him who he truly was . As he says , " There are two most powerful days in your life . The day you are born , and the day you discover why . " Graphic images .
People back home call me a heckler , a troublemaker , an irritant , a rebel , an activist , the voice of the people .
But that wasn 't always me .
Growing up , I had a nickname .
They used to call me Softy , meaning the soft , harmless boy .
Like every other human being , I avoided trouble .
In my childhood , they taught me silence .
Don 't argue , do as you 're told .
In Sunday school , they taught me don 't confront , don 't argue , even if you 're right , turn the other cheek .
This was reinforced by the political climate of the time .
Kenya is a country where you are guilty until proven rich .
Kenya 's poor are five times more likely to be shot dead by the police who are meant to protect them than by criminals .
This was reinforced by the political climate of the day .
We had a president , Moi , who was a dictator .
He ruled the country with an iron fist , and anyone who dared question his authority was arrested , tortured , jailed or even killed .
That meant that people were taught to be smart cowards , stay out of trouble .
Being a coward was not an insult .
Being a coward was a compliment .
We used to be told that a coward goes home to his mother .
What that meant : that if you stayed out of trouble you 're going to stay alive .
I used to question this advice , and eight years ago we had an election in Kenya , and the results were violently disputed .
What followed that election was terrible violence , rape , and the killing of over 1,000 people .
My work was to document the violence .
As a photographer , I took thousands of images , and after two months , the two politicians came together , had a cup of tea , signed a peace agreement , and the country moved on .
I was a very disturbed man because I saw the violence firsthand .
I saw the killings . I saw the displacement .
I met women who had been raped , and it disturbed me , but the country never spoke about it .
We pretended . We all became smart cowards .
We decided to stay out of trouble and not talk about it .
Ten months later , I quit my job . I said I could not stand it anymore .
After quitting my job , I decided to organize my friends to speak about the violence in the country , to speak about the state of the nation , and June 1 , 2009 was the day that we were meant to go to the stadium and try and get the president 's attention .
It 's a national holiday , it 's broadcast across the country , and I showed up at the stadium .
My friends did not show up .
I found myself alone , and I didn 't know what to do .
I was scared , but I knew very well that that particular day , I had to make a decision .
Was I able to live as a coward , like everyone else , or was I going to make a stand ?
And when the president stood up to speak , I found myself on my feet shouting at the president , telling him to remember the post-election violence victims , to stop the corruption .
And suddenly , out of nowhere , the police pounced on me like hungry lions .
They held my mouth and dragged me out of the stadium , where they thoroughly beat me up and locked me up in jail .
I spent that night in a cold cement floor in the jail , and that got me thinking .
What was making me feel this way ?
My friends and family thought I was crazy because of what I did , and the images that I took were disturbing my life .
The images that I took were just a number to many Kenyans .
Most Kenyans did not see the violence .
It was a story to them .
And so I decided to actually start a street exhibition to show the images of the violence across the country and get people talking about it .
We traveled the country and showed the images , and this was a journey that has started me to the activist path , where I decided to become silent no more , to talk about those things .
We traveled , and our general site from our street exhibit became for political graffiti about the situation in the country , talking about corruption , bad leadership .
We have even done symbolic burials .
We have delivered live pigs to Kenya 's parliament as a symbol of our politicians ' greed .
It has been done in Uganda and other countries , and what is most powerful is that the images have been picked by the media and amplified across the country , across the continent .
Where I used to stand up alone seven years ago , now I belong to a community of many people who stand up with me .
I am no longer alone when I stand up to speak about these things .
I belong to a group of young people who are passionate about the country , who want to bring about change , and they 're no longer afraid , and they 're no longer smart cowards .
So that was my story .
That day in the stadium , I stood up as a smart coward .
By that one action , I said goodbye to the 24 years living as a coward .
There are two most powerful days in your life : the day you 're born , and the day you discover why .
That day standing up in that stadium shouting at the President , I discovered why I was truly born , that I would no longer be silent in the face of injustice .
Do you know why you were born ?
Thank you .
It 's an amazing story .
I just want to ask you a couple quick questions .
So PAWA254 : you 've created a studio , a place where young people can go and harness the power of digital media to do some of this action .
What 's happening now with PAWA ?
Boniface Mwangi : So we have this community of filmmakers , graffiti artists , musicians , and when there 's an issue in the country , we come together , we brainstorm , and take up on that issue .
So our most powerful tool is art , because we live in a very busy world where people are so busy in their life , and they don 't have time to read .
So we package our activism and we package our message in art .
So from the music , the graffiti , the art , that 's what we do .
Can I say one more thing ?
Yeah , of course . BM : In spite of being arrested , beaten up , threatened , the moment I discovered my voice , that I could actually stand up for what I really believed in , I 'm no longer afraid .
I used to be called softy , but I 'm no longer softy , because I discovered who I really am , as in , that 's what I want to do , and there 's such beauty in doing that .
There 's nothing as powerful as that , knowing that I 'm meant to do this , because you don 't get scared , you just continue living your life .
Thank you .

Sangu Delle : In praise of macro -- yes , macro -- finance in Africa
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : In this short , provocative talk , financier Sangu Delle questions whether microfinance — small loans to small entrepreneurs -- is the best way to drive growth in developing countries . " We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor person in Africa is an entrepreneur , " he says . " Yet , my work has taught me that most people want jobs . " Delle , a TED Fellow , makes the case for supporting large companies and factories — and clearing away the obstacles to pan-African trade .
Traditional prescriptions for growth in Africa are not working very well .
After one trillion dollars in African development-related aid in the last 60 years , real per capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s .
Aid is not doing too well .
In response , the Bretton Woods institutions -- the IMF and the World Bank -- pushed for free trade not aid , yet the historical record shows little empirical evidence that free trade leads to economic growth .
The newly prescribed silver bullet is microcredit .
We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor peasant in Africa is an entrepreneur .
Yet my work and travel in 40-plus countries across Africa have taught me that most people want jobs instead .
My solution : Forget micro-entrepreneurs .
Let 's invest in building pan-African titans like Sudanese businessman Mo Ibrahim .
Mo took a contrarian bet on Africa when he founded Celtel International in ' 98 and built it into a mobile cellular provider with 24 million subscribers across 14 African countries by 2004 .
The Mo model might be better than the everyman entrepreneur model , which prevents an effective means of diffusion and knowledge-sharing .
Perhaps we are not at a stage in Africa where many actors and small enterprises leads to growth through competition .
Consider these two alternative scenarios .
One : You loan 200 dollars to each of 500 banana farmers allowing them to dry their surplus bananas and fetch 15 percent more revenue at the local market .
Or two : You give 100,000 dollars to one savvy entrepreneur and help her set up a factory that yields 40 percent additional income to all 500 banana farmers and creates 50 additional jobs .
We invested in the second scenario , and backed 26-year-old Kenyan entrepreneur Eric Muthomi to set up an agro-processing factory called Stawi to produce gluten-free banana-based flour and baby food .
Stawi is leveraging economies of scale and using modern manufacturing processes to create value for not only its owners but its workers , who have an ownership in the business .
Our dream is to take an Eric Muthomi and try to help him become a Mo Ibrahim , which requires skill , financing , local and global partnerships , and extraordinary perseverance .
But why pan-African ?
The scramble for Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884 -- where , quite frankly , we Africans were not exactly consulted -- -- resulted in massive fragmentation and many sovereign states with small populations : Liberia , four million ; Cape Verde , 500,000 .
Pan-Africa gives you one billion people , granted across 55 countries with trade barriers and other impediments , but our ancestors traded across the continent before Europeans drew lines around us .
The pan-African opportunities outweigh the challenges , and that 's why we 're expanding Stawi 's markets from just Kenya to Algeria , Nigeria , Ghana , and anywhere else that will buy our food .
We hope to help solve food security , empower farmers , create jobs , develop the local economy , and we hope to become rich in the process .
While it 's not the sexiest approach , and maybe it doesn 't achieve the same feel-good as giving a woman 100 dollars to buy a goat on kiva.org , perhaps supporting fewer , higher-impact entrepreneurs to build massive businesses that scale pan-Africa can help change this .
The political freedom for which our forebearers fought is meaningless without economic freedom .
We hope to aid this fight for economic freedom by building world-class businesses , creating indigenous wealth , providing jobs that we so desperately need , and hopefully helping achieve this .
Africa shall rise .
Thank you .
So Sangu , of course , this is strong rhetoric .
You 're making 100 percent contrast between microcredit and regular investment and growing regular investment .
Do you think there is a role for microcredit at all ?
Sangu Delle : I think there is a role .
Microcredit has been a great , innovative way to expand financial access to the bottom of the pyramid .
But for the problems we face in Africa , when we are looking at the Marshall Plan to revitalize war-torn Europe , it was not full of donations of sheep .
We need more than just microcredit .
We need more than just give 200 dollars .
We need to build big businesses , and we need jobs .
Very good . Thank you so much .

Khalida Brohi : How I work to protect women from honor killings
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Nearly 1000 " honor " killings are reported in Pakistan each year , murders by a family member for behavior deemed " shameful , " such as a relationship outside of marriage . When Khalida Brohi lost a close friend to the practice , she resolved to campaign against it . Yet she met resistance from an unlikely source : the very community she hoped to protect . In this powerful , honest talk , Brohi shares how she took a hard look at her own process , and offers sharp insights for other passionate activists .
While preparing for my talk I was reflecting on my life and trying to figure out where exactly was that moment when my journey began .
A long time passed by , and I simply couldn 't figure out the beginning or the middle or the end of my story .
I always used to think that my beginning was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two .
Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community , and my dad sat , surrounded by all of us , telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school while his father , who was a farmer , wanted him to work in the fields with him .
Or that dark night when I was 16 when three little kids had come to me and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered in something called the honor killings .
But then I realized that , as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey , they have influenced my journey but they have not been the beginning of it , but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house in upper Sindh of Pakistan , where my father held the hand of my 14-year-old mother and they decided to walk out of the village to go to a town where they could send their kids to school .
In a way , I feel like my life is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they 've made .
And just like that , another of their decisions was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots .
While we were living in a community I fondly remember as called Ribabad , which means community of the poor , my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland .
I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Balochistan called Brahui .
Brahui , or Brohi , means mountain dweller , and it is also my language .
Thanks to my father 's very strict rules about connecting to our customs , I had to live a beautiful life of songs , cultures , traditions , stories , mountains , But then , living in two extremes between the traditions of my culture , of my village , and then modern education in my school wasn 't easy .
I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom , and I was guilty of it .
While going to school in Karachi and Hyderabad , a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off , some to older men , some in exchange , some even as second wives .
I got to see the beautiful tradition and its magic fade in front of me when I saw that the birth of a girl child was celebrated with sadness , when women were told to have patience as their main virtue .
Up until I was 16 , I healed my sadness by crying , mostly at nights when everyone would sleep and I would sob in my pillow , until that one night when I found out my friend was killed in the name of honor .
Honor killings is a custom where men and women are suspected of having relationships before or outside of the marriage , and they 're killed by their family for it .
Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family .
The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan , and these are only the reported cases .
A custom that kills did not make any sense to me , and I knew I had to do something about it this time .
I was not going to cry myself to sleep .
I was going to do something , anything , to stop it .
I was 16 -- I started writing poetry and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings and why it happens , why it should be stopped , and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much , much better way to handle this issue .
In those days , we were living in a very small , one-roomed house in Karachi .
Every year , during the monsoon seasons , our house would flood up with water -- rainwater and sewage -- and my mom and dad would be taking the water out .
In those days , my dad brought home a huge machine , a computer .
It was so big it looked as if it was going to take up half of the only room we had , and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected .
But it was still the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me and my sisters .
My oldest brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer , and all of us were given 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it .
Being the oldest of eight kids , I got to use it the last , and that was after I had washed the dishes , cleaned the house , made dinner with my mom , and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep , and after that , I would run to the computer , connect it to the Internet , and have pure joy and wonder for 10 to 15 minutes .
In those days , I had discovered a website called Joogle .
[ Google ] In my frantic wish to do something about this custom , I made use of Google and discovered Facebook , a website where people can connect to anyone around the world , and so , from my very tiny , cement-roofed room in Karachi , I connected with people in the U.K. , the U.S. , Australia and Canada , and created a campaign called WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings .
It became enormous in just a few months .
I got a lot of support from all around the world .
Media was connecting to us .
A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us .
It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown , where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies in Pakistan for women 's support .
And while I thought everything was perfect , my team -- which was basically my friends and neighbors at that time -- thought everything was going so well , we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us .
My community stood up against us , saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior .
We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities .
I remember my father receiving anonymous letters saying , " Your daughter is spreading Western culture in the honorable societies . "
Our car was stoned at one point .
One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy .
Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways .
I would put up the windows of the car , veil my face , not speak while I was in public , but eventually situations got worse when my life was threatened , and I had to leave , back to Karachi , and our actions stopped .
Back in Karachi , as an 18-year-old , I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life .
I was devastated .
As a teenager , I was blaming myself for everything that happened .
And it turns out , when we started reflecting , we did realize that it was actually me and my team 's fault .
There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time .
One of those , the first reason , is we were standing against core values of people .
We were saying no to something that was very important to them , challenging their code of honor , and hurting them deeply in the process .
And number two , which was very important for me to learn , and amazing , and surprising for me to learn , was that we were not including the true heroes who should be fighting for themselves .
The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets .
Every time I would go back , I would find my cousins and friends with scarves on their faces , and I would ask , " What happened ? "
And they 'd be like , " Our husbands beat us . "
But we are working in the streets for you !
We are changing the policies .
How is that not impacting their life ?
So then we found out something which was very amazing for us .
The policies of a country do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities .
It was devastating -- like , oh , we can 't actually do something about this ?
And we found out there 's a huge gap when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground .
So this time , we were like , we are going to do something different .
We are going to use strategy , and we are going to go back and apologize .
Yes , apologize .
We went back to the communities and we said we are very ashamed of what we did .
We are here to apologize , and in fact , we are here to make it up to you .
How do we do that ?
We are going to promote three of your main cultures .
We know that it 's music , language , and embroidery .
Nobody believed us . Nobody wanted to work with us .
It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities until they agreed that we are going to promote their language by making a booklet of their stories , fables and old tales in the tribe , and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs from the tribe , and some drumbeating .
And the third , which was my favorite , was we would promote their embroidery by making a center in the village where women would come every day to make embroidery .
And so it began .
We worked with one village , and we started our first center .
It was a beautiful day .
We started the center . Women were coming to make embroidery , and going through a life-changing process of education , learning about their rights , what Islam says about their rights , and enterprise development , how they can create money , and then how they can create money from money , how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives from so many centuries , because in Islam , in reality , women are supposed to be shoulder to shoulder with men .
Women have so much status that we have not been hearing , that they have not been hearing , and we needed to tell them that they need to know where their rights are and how to take them by themselves , because they can do it and we can 't .
So this was the model which actually came out -- very amazing .
Through embroidery we were promoting their traditions .
We went into the village . We would mobilize the community .
We would make a center inside where 30 women will come for six months to learn about value addition of traditional embroidery , enterprise development , life skills and basic education , and about their rights and how to say no to those customs and how to stand as leaders for themselves and the society .
After six months , we would connect these women to loans and to markets where they can become local entrepreneurs in their communities .
We soon called this project Sughar .
Sughar is a local word used in many , many languages in Pakistan .
It means skilled and confident women .
I truly believe , to create women leaders , there 's only one thing you have to do : Just let them know that they have what it takes to be a leader .
These women you see here , they have strong skills and potential to be leaders .
All we had to do was remove the barriers that surrounded them , and that 's what we decided to do .
But then while we were thinking everything was going well , once again everything was fantastic , we found our next setback : A lot of men started seeing the visible changes in their wife .
She 's speaking more , she 's making decisions -- oh my gosh , she 's handling everything in the house .
They stopped them from coming to the centers , and this time , we were like , okay , time for strategy two .
We went to the fashion industry in Pakistan and decided to do research about what happens there .
Turns out the fashion industry in Pakistan is very strong and growing day by day , but there is less contribution from the tribal areas and to the tribal areas , especially women .
So we decided to launch our first ever tribal women 's very own fashion brand , which is now called Nomads .
And so women started earning more , they started contributing more financially to the house , and men had to think again before saying no to them when they were coming to the centers .
Thank you , thank you .
In 2013 , we launched our first Sughar Hub instead of a center .
We partnered with TripAdvisor and created a cement hall in the middle of a village and invited so many other organizations to work over there .
We created this platform for the nonprofits so they can touch and work on the other issues that Sughar is not working on , which would be an easy place for them to give trainings , use it as a farmer school , even as a marketplace , and anything they want to use it for , and they have been doing really amazingly .
And so far , we have been able to support 900 women in 24 villages around Pakistan .
But that 's actually not what I want .
My dream is to reach out to one million women in the next 10 years , and to make sure that happens , this year we launched Sughar Foundation in the U.S.
It is not just going to fund Sughar but many other organizations in Pakistan to replicate the idea and to find even more innovative ways to unleash the rural women 's potential in Pakistan .
Thank you so much .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Khalida , you are quite the force of nature .
I mean , this story , in many ways , just seems beyond belief .
It 's incredible that someone so young could do achieve this much through so much force and ingenuity .
So I guess one question : This is a spectacular dream to reach out and empower a million women -- how much of the current success depends on you , the force of this magnetic personality ?
How does it scale ?
Khalida Brohi : I think my job is to give the inspiration out , give my dream out .
I can 't teach how to do it , because there are so many different ways .
We have been experimenting with three ways only .
There are a hundred different ways to unleash potential in women .
I would just give the inspiration and that 's my job .
I will keep doing it . Sughar will still be growing .
We are planning to reach out to two more villages , and soon I believe we will be scaling out of Pakistan into South Asia and beyond .
I love that when you talked about your team in the talk , I mean , you were all 18 at the time .
What did this team look like ?
This was school friends , right ?
KB : Do people here believe that I 'm at an age where I 'm supposed to be a grandmother in my village ?
My mom was married at nine , and I am the oldest woman not married and not doing anything in my life in my village .
Wait , wait , wait , not doing anything ?
KB : No . You 're right .
KB : People feel sorry for me , a lot of times .
But how much time are you spending now actually back in Balochistan ?
KB : I live over there .
We live between , still , Karachi and Balochistan .
My siblings are all going to school .
I am still the oldest of eight siblings .
But what you 're doing is definitely threatening to some people there .
How do you handle safety ? Do you feel safe ?
Are there issues there ?
KB : This question has come to me a lot of times before , and I feel like the word " fear " just comes to me and then drops , but there is one fear that I have that is different from that .
The fear is that if I get killed , what would happen to the people who love me so much ?
My mom waits for me till late at night that I should come home .
My sisters want to learn so much from me , and there are many , many girls in my community who want to talk to me and ask me different things , and I recently got engaged . Is he here ? You 've got to stand up .
KB : Escaping arranged marriages , I chose my own husband across the world in L.A. , a really different world .
I had to fight for a whole year . That 's totally a different story .
But I think that 's the only thing that I 'm afraid of , and I don 't want my mom to not see anyone when she waits in the night .
So people who want to help you on their way , they can go on , they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you 're bringing over that are actually made , the embroidery is done back in Balochistan ?
KB : Yeah .
Or they can get involved in the foundation .
KB : Definitely . We are looking for as many people as we can , because now that the foundation 's in the beginning process , I am trying to learn a lot about how to operate , how to get funding or reach out to more organizations , and especially in the e-commerce , which is very new for me .
I mean , I am not a fashion person , believe me .
Well , it 's been incredible to have you here .
Please go on being courageous , go on being smart , and please stay safe .
KB : Thank you so much . Thank you , Khalida .
Angelo Vermeulen : How to go to space , without having to go to space
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : " We will start inhabiting outer space , " says Angelo Vermeulen , crew commander of a NASA-funded Mars simulation . " It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years , but it 's going to happen . " In this charming talk , the TED Senior Fellow describes some of his official work to make sure humans are prepared for life in deep space ... and shares a fascinating art project in which he challenged people worldwide to design homes we might live in there .
I am multidisciplinary .
As a scientist , I 've been a crew commander for a NASA Mars simulation last year , and as an artist , I create multicultural community art all over the planet .
And recently , I 've actually been combining both .
But let me first talk a little more about that NASA mission .
This is the HI-SEAS program .
HI-SEAS is a NASA-funded planetary surface analogue on the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii , and it 's a research program that is specifically designed to study the effects of long-term isolation of small crews .
I lived in this dome for four months with a crew of six , a very interesting experience , of course .
We did all kinds of research .
Our main research was actually a food study , but apart from that food study -- developing a new food system for astronauts living in deep space -- we also did all kinds of other research .
We did extra-vehicular activities , as you can see here , wearing mock-up space suits , but we also had our chores and lots of other stuff to do , like questionnaires at the end of every day .
Busy , busy work .
Now , as you can imagine , it 's quite challenging to live with just a small group of people in a small space for a long time .
There 's all kinds of psychological challenges : how to keep a team together in these circumstances ; how to deal with the warping of time you start to sense when you 're living in these circumstances ; sleep problems that arise ; etc .
But also we learned a lot .
I learned a lot about how individual crew members actually cope with a situation like this ; how you can keep a crew productive and happy , for example , giving them a good deal of autonomy is a good trick to do that ; and honestly , I learned a lot about leadership , because I was a crew commander .
So doing this mission , I really started thinking more deeply about our future in outer space .
We will venture into outer space , and we will start inhabiting outer space .
I have no doubt about it .
It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years , but it 's going to happen nevertheless .
So I came up with a new art project called Seeker .
And the Seeker project is actually challenging communities all over the world to come up with starship prototypes that re-envision human habitation and survival .
That 's the core of the project .
Now , one important thing : This is not a dystopian project .
This is not about , " Oh my God , the world is going wrong and we have to escape because we need another future somewhere else . "
No , no .
The project is basically inviting people to take a step away from earthbound constraints and , as such , reimagine our future .
And it 's really helpful , and it works really well , so that 's really the important part of what we 're doing .
Now , in this project , I 'm using a cocreation approach , which is a slightly different approach from what you would expect from many artists .
I 'm essentially dropping a basic idea into a group , into a community , people start gravitating to the idea , and together , we shape and build the artwork .
It 's a little bit like termites , really .
We just work together , and even , for example , when architects visit what we 're doing , sometimes they have a bit of a hard time understanding how we build without a master plan .
We always come up with these fantastic large-scale scupltures that actually we can also inhabit .
The first version was done in Belgium and Holland .
It was built with a team of almost 50 people .
This is the second iteration of that same project , but in Slovenia , in a different country , and the new group was like , we 're going to do the architecture differently .
So they took away the architecture , they kept the base of the artwork , and they built an entirely new , much more biomorphic architecture on top of that .
And that 's another crucial part of the project .
It 's an evolving artwork , evolving architecture .
This was the last version that was just presented a few weeks ago in Holland , which was using caravans as modules to build a starship .
We bought some second-hand caravans , cut them open , and reassembled them into a starship .
Now , when we 're thinking about starships , we 're not just approaching it as a technological challenge .
We 're really looking at it as a combination of three systems : ecology , people and technology .
So there 's always a strong ecological component in the project .
Here you can see aquaponic systems that are actually surrounding the astronauts , so they 're constantly in contact with part of the food that they 're eating .
Now , a very typical thing for this project is that we run our own isolation missions inside these art and design projects .
We actually lock ourselves up for multiple days on end , and test what we build .
And this is , for example , on the right hand side you can see an isolation mission in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in Slovenia , where six artists and designers locked themselves up -- I was part of that -- for four days inside the museum .
And , of course , obviously , this is a very performative and very strong experience for all of us .
Now , the next version of the project is currently being developed together with Camilo Rodriguez-Beltran , who is also a TED Fellow , in the Atacama Desert in Chile , a magical place .
First of all , it 's really considered a Mars analogue .
It really does look like Mars in certain locations and has been used by NASA to test equipment .
And it has a long history of being connected to space through observations of the stars .
It 's now home to ALMA , the large telescope that 's being developed there .
But also , it 's the driest location on the planet , and that makes it extremely interesting to build our project , because suddenly , sustainability is something we have to explore fully .
We have no other option , so I 'm very curious to see what 's going to happen .
Now , a specific thing for this particular version of the project is that I 'm very interested to see how we can connect with the local population , the native population .
These people have been living there for a very long time and can be considered experts in sustainability , and so I 'm very interested to see what we can learn from them , and have an input of indigenous knowledge into space exploration .
So we 're trying to redefine how we look at our future in outer space by exploring integration , biology , technology and people ; by using a cocreation approach ; and by using and exploring local traditions and to see how we can learn from the past and integrate that into our deep future .
Thank you .

Kenneth Shinozuka : My simple invention , designed to keep my grandfather safe
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : 60 % of people with dementia wander off , an issue that can prove hugely stressful for both patients and caregivers . In this charming talk , hear how teen inventor Kenneth Shinozuka came up with a novel solution to help his night-wandering grandfather and the aunt who looks after him ... and how he hopes to help others with Alzheimer 's .
What 's the fastest growing threat to Americans ' health ?
Cancer ? Heart attacks ? Diabetes ?
The answer is actually none of these ; it 's Alzheimer 's disease .
Every 67 seconds , someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer 's .
As the number of Alzheimer 's patients triples by the year 2050 , caring for them , as well as the rest of the aging population , will become an overwhelming societal challenge .
My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer 's patient .
Growing up in a family with three generations , I 've always been very close to my grandfather .
When I was four years old , my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost .
It was one of the scariest moments I 've ever experienced in my life , and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer 's disease .
Over the past 12 years , his condition got worse and worse , and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress .
My aunt , his primary caregiver , really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him , and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed .
I became really concerned about my aunt 's well-being as well as my grandfather 's safety .
I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family 's problems , but couldn 't find one .
Then , one night about two years ago , I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed .
The moment his foot landed on the floor , I thought , why don 't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot ?
Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed , the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver 's smartphone .
That way , my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather 's wandering .
So now I 'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock .
Could I please have my sock model on the stage ?
Great .
So once the patient steps onto the floor -- -- an alert is sent to the caregiver 's smartphone .
Thank you . Thank you , sock model .
So this is a drawing of my preliminary design .
My desire to create a sensor-based technology perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology .
When I was six years old , an elderly family friend fell down in the bathroom and suffered severe injuries .
I became concerned about my own grandparents and decided to invent a smart bathroom system .
Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom .
Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn 't graduated from kindergarten yet , I didn 't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality , but nonetheless , my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people .
I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly .
When I laid out my plan , I realized that I faced three main challenges : first , creating a sensor ; second , designing a circuit ; and third , coding a smartphone app .
This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be .
First , I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient 's foot .
After extensive research and testing of different materials like rubber , which I realized was too thick to be worn snugly on the bottom of the foot , I decided to print a film sensor with electrically conductive pressure-sensitive ink particles .
Once pressure is applied , the connectivity between the particles increases .
Therefore , I could design a circuit that would measure pressure by measuring electrical resistance .
Next , I had to design a wearable wireless circuit , but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy , bulky batteries .
Thankfully , I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology , which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery .
This prevented the system from dying in the middle of the night .
Lastly , I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver 's smartphone into a remote monitor .
For this , I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks .
Integrating these components , I was able to successfully create two prototypes , one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock , and another that 's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient 's foot .
I 've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now , and it 's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering .
Last summer , I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California , and I 'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device into a marketable product .
Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn 't want to wear socks to sleep at night .
So sensor data , collected on a vast number of patients , can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease , possibly .
For example , I 'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient 's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet .
One thing I 'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather 's wandering out of bed at night .
At that moment , I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better .
People living happily and healthfully -- that 's the world that I imagine .
Thank you very much .

Brian Dettmer : Old books reborn as art
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : What do you do with an outdated encyclopedia in the information age ? With X-Acto knives and an eye for a good remix , artist Brian Dettmer makes beautiful , unexpected sculptures that breathe new life into old books .
I 'm an artist and I cut books .
This is one of my first book works .
It 's called " Alternate Route to Knowledge . "
I wanted to create a stack of books so that somebody could come into the gallery and think they 're just looking at a regular stack of books , but then as they got closer they would see this rough hole carved into it , and wonder what was happening , wonder why , and think about the material of the book .
So I 'm interested in the texture , but I 'm more interested in the text and the images that we find within books .
In most of my work , what I do is I seal the edges of a book with a thick varnish so it 's creating sort of a skin on the outside of the book so it becomes a solid material , but then the pages inside are still loose , and then I carve into the surface of the book , and I 'm not moving or adding anything .
I 'm just carving around whatever I find interesting .
So everything you see within the finished piece is exactly where it was in the book before I began .
I think of my work as sort of a remix , in a way , because I 'm working with somebody else 's material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else 's music .
This was a book of Raphael paintings , the Renaissance artist , and by taking his work and remixing it , carving into it , I 'm sort of making it into something that 's more new and more contemporary .
I 'm thinking also about breaking out of the box of the traditional book and pushing that linear format , and try to push the structure of the book itself so that the book can become fully sculptural .
I 'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials , weights , in order to hold things in place before I varnish so that I can push the form before I begin , so that something like this can become a piece like this , which is just made from a single dictionary .
Or something like this can become a piece like this .
Or something like this , which who knows what that 's going to be or why that 's in my studio , will become a piece like this .
So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books , people don 't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book , is that we think about books as living things , we think about them as a body , and they 're created to relate to our body , as far as scale , but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things .
So books really are alive .
So I think of the book as a body , and I think of the book as a technology .
I think of the book as a tool .
And I also think of the book as a machine .
I also think of the book as a landscape .
This is a full set of encyclopedias that 's been connected and sanded together , and as I carve through it , I 'm deciding what I want to choose .
So with encyclopedias , I could have chosen anything , but I specifically chose images of landscapes .
And with the material itself , I 'm using sandpaper and sanding the edges so not only the images suggest landscape , but the material itself suggests a landscape as well .
So one of the things I do is when I 'm carving through the book , I 'm thinking about images , but I 'm also thinking about text , and I think about them in a very similar way , because what 's interesting is that when we 're reading text , it puts images in our head , so we 're sort of filling that piece .
We 're sort of creating images when we 're reading text , and when we 're looking at an image , we actually use language in order to understand what we 're looking at .
sort of a flip flop .
So I 'm creating a piece that the viewer is completing themselves .
And I think of my work as almost an archaeology .
I 'm excavating and I 'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work .
But at the same time , I 'm thinking about this idea of erasure , and what 's happening now that most of our information is intangible , and this idea of loss , and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers , but the information itself , now that we don 't have a physical backup , has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it .
And I have several dictionaries in my own studio , and I do use a computer every day , and if I need to look up a word , I 'll go on the computer , because I can go directly and instantly to what I 'm looking up .
I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information , which is why we 're seeing reference books becoming the first to be endangered or extinct .
So I don 't think that the book will ever really die .
People think that now that we have digital technology , the book is going to die , and we are seeing things shifting and things evolving .
I think that the book will evolve , and just like people said painting would die when photography and printmaking became everyday materials , but what it really allowed painting to do was it allowed painting to quit its day job .
It allowed painting to not have to have that everyday chore of telling the story , and painting became free and was allowed to tell its own story , and that 's when we saw Modernism emerge , and we saw painting go into different branches .
And I think that 's what 's happening with books now , now that most of our technology , most of our information , most of our personal and cultural records are in digital form , I think it 's really allowing the book to become something new .
So I think it 's a very exciting time for an artist like me , and it 's very exciting to see what will happen with the book in the future .
Thank you .

Tom Wujec : Got a wicked problem ? First , tell me how you make toast
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Making toast doesn 't sound very complicated -- until someone asks you to draw the process , step by step . Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast , because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest , most complicated problems at work . Learn how to run this exercise yourself , and hear Wujec 's surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast .
Some years ago , I stumbled across a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems , and like many of these design exercises , it kind of seems trivial at first , but under deep inspection , it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things .
The exercise has three parts and begins with something that we all know how to do , which is how to make toast .
It begins with a clean sheet of paper , a felt marker , and without using any words , you begin to draw how to make toast .
And most people draw something like this .
They draw a loaf of bread , which is sliced , then put into a toaster .
The toast is then deposited for some time .
It pops up , and then voila ! After two minutes , toast and happiness .
Now , over the years , I 've collected many hundreds of drawings of these toasts , and some of them are very good , because they really illustrate the toast-making process quite clearly .
And then there are some that are , well , not so good .
They really suck , actually , because you don 't know what they 're trying to say .
Under close inspection , some reveal some aspects of toast-making while hiding others .
So there 's some that are all about the toast , and all about the transformation of toast .
And there 's others that are all about the toaster , and the engineers love to draw the mechanics of this .
And then there are others that are about people .
It 's about visualizing the experience that people have .
And then there are others that are about the supply chain of making toast that goes all the way back to the store .
It goes through the supply chain networks of teleportation and all the way back to the field and wheat , and one all actually goes all the way back to the Big Bang .
So it 's crazy stuff .
But I think it 's obvious that even though these drawings are really wildly different , they share a common quality , and I 'm wondering if you can see it .
Do you see it ? What 's common about these ?
Most drawings have nodes and links .
So nodes represent the tangible objects like the toaster and people , and links represent the connections between the nodes .
And it 's the combination of links and nodes that produces a full systems model , and it makes our private mental models visible about how we think something works .
So that 's the value of these things .
What 's interesting about these systems models is how they reveal our various points of view .
So for example , Americans make toast with a toaster .
That seems obvious .
Whereas many Europeans make toast with a frying pan , of course , and many students make toast with a fire .
I don 't really understand this . A lot of MBA students do this .
So you can measure the complexity by counting the number of nodes , and the average illustration has between four and eight nodes .
Less than that , the drawing seems trivial , but it 's quick to understand , and more than 13 , the drawing produces a feeling of map shock .
It 's too complex .
So the sweet spot is between 5 and 13 .
So if you want to communicate something visually , have between five and 13 nodes in your diagram .
So though we may not be skilled at drawing , the point is that we intuitively know how to break down complex things into simple things and then bring them back together again .
So this brings us to our second part of the exercise , which is how to make toast , but now with sticky notes or with cards .
So what happens then ?
Well , with cards , most people tend to draw clear , more detailed , and more logical nodes .
You can see the step by step analysis that takes place , and as they build up their model , they move their nodes around , rearranging them like Lego blocks .
Now , though this might seem trivial , it 's actually really important .
This rapid iteration of expressing and then reflecting and analyzing is really the only way in which we get clarity .
It 's the essence of the design process .
And systems theorists do tell us that the ease with which we can change a representation correlates to our willingness to improve the model .
So sticky note systems are not only more fluid , they generally produce way more nodes than static drawings .
The drawings are much richer .
And this brings us to our third part of the exercise , which is to draw how to make toast , but this time in a group .
So what happens then ?
Well , here 's what happens .
It starts out messy , and then it gets really messy , and then it gets messier , but as people refine the models , the best nodes become more prominent , and with each iteration , the model becomes clearer because people build on top of each other 's ideas .
What emerges is a unified systems model that integrates the diversity of everyone 's individual points of view , so that 's a really different outcome from what usually happens in meetings , isn 't it ?
So these drawings can contain 20 or more nodes , but participants don 't feel map shock because they participate in the building of their models themselves .
Now , what 's also really interesting , that the groups spontaneously mix and add additional layers of organization to it .
To deal with contradictions , for example , they add branching patterns and parallel patterns .
Oh , and by the way , if they do it in complete silence , they do it much better and much more quickly .
Really interesting -- talking gets in the way .
So here 's some key lessons that can emerge from this .
First , drawing helps us understand the situations as systems with nodes and their relationships .
Movable cards produce better systems models , because we iterate much more fluidly .
And then the group notes produce the most comprehensive models because we synthesize several points of view .
So that 's interesting .
When people work together under the right circumstances , group models are much better than individual models .
So this approach works really great for drawing how to make toast , but what if you wanted to draw something more relevant or pressing , like your organizational vision , or customer experience , or long-term sustainability ?
There 's a visual revolution that 's taking place as more organizations are addressing their wicked problems by collaboratively drawing them out .
And I 'm convinced that those who see their world as movable nodes and links really have an edge .
And the practice is really pretty simple .
You start with a question , you collect the nodes , you refine the nodes , you do it over again , you refine and refine and refine , and the patterns emerge , and the group gets clarity and you answer the question .
So this simple act of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes .
What 's really important to know is that it 's the conversations that are the important aspects , not just the models themselves .
And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes .
So , one example is from an organization called Rodale .
Big publishing company .
They lost a bunch of money one year , and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice .
And what 's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business , systems upon systems , they reclaimed 50 million dollars of revenue , and they also moved from a D rating to an A rating from their customers .
Why ? Because there 's alignment from the executive team .
So I 'm now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization , and on a site that I 've produced called drawtoast.com , I 've collected a bunch of best practices .
and so you can learn how to run a workshop here , you can learn more about the visual language and the structure of links and nodes that you can apply to general problem-solving , and download examples of various templates for unpacking the thorny problems that we all face in our organizations .
So the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear , engaged and aligned .
So next time you 're confronted with an interesting challenge , remember what design has to teach us .
Make your ideas visible , tangible , and consequential .
It 's simple , it 's fun , it 's powerful , and I believe it 's an idea worth celebrating .
Thank you .

Bassam Tariq : The beauty and diversity of Muslim life
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Bassam Tariq is a blogger , a filmmaker , and a halal butcher -- but one thread unites his work : His joy in the diversity , the humanness of our individual experiences . In this charming talk , he shares clips from his film " These Birds Walk " and images from his tour of 30 mosques in 30 days -- and reminds us to consider the beautiful complexity within us all .
I 'm a blogger , a filmmaker and a butcher , and I 'll explain how these identities come together .
It started four years ago , when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City .
Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets .
It was an FBI agent 's wet dream . But being a part of this community , we knew how welcoming this space was .
For years , I 'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith , much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience .
Frustrated by this myopic view , my friend and I had this crazy idea : Let 's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog .
We called it " 30 Mosques in 30 Days , " and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities , ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina .
What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America .
The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities , but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey .
There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so .
And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world , I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film .
My codirector , Omar , and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film .
The movie is called " These Birds Walk , " and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family . We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord , but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film " more relevant , " essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols . Of course , we didn 't listen to them , and instead , we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth .
The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy , an emotion that 's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world .
And as " These Birds Walk " played at film festivals and theaters internationally , I finally had my feet planted at home in New York , and with all the extra time and still no real money , my wife tasked me to cook more for us .
And whenever I 'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat , something felt off .
For those that don 't know , halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines .
Unfortunately , the majority of halal meat in America doesn 't rise to the standard that my faith calls for .
The more I learned about these unethical practices , the more violated I felt , particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy .
So , with emotions running high , and absolutely no experience in butchery , some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district .
We call it Honest Chops , and we 're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic , humanely raised animals , and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families .
There 's really nothing like it in America .
The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim .
For many , it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level .
So all these disparate projects -- -- are the result of a restlessness .
They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community , and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules .
We must fight with an inventive approach .
With the trust , with the access , with the love that only we can bring , we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image , in every cut of meat , because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal , not only will we fail , but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories .
But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance .
It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful .
They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected .
Thank you .

Khadija Gbla : My mother 's strange definition of empowerment
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Khadija Gbla grew up caught between two definitions of what it means to be an " empowered woman . " While her Sierra Leonean mother thought that circumsizing her — and thus stifling her sexual urges — was the ultimate form of empowerment , her culture as a teenager in Australia told her that she deserved pleasure and that what happened to her was called " female genital mutilation . " In a candid and funny talk , she shares what it was like to make her way in a " clitoris-centric society , " and how she works to make sure other women don 't have to figure this out .
Hi .
Today I 'm going to share my personal journey with female genital mutilation , FGM .
Feel free to cry , laugh , cross your legs , or do anything your body feels like doing .
I 'm not going to name the things your body does .
I was born in Sierra Leone .
Did anybody watch " Blood Diamond " ?
If you have any thoughts -- I don 't have any diamonds on me , by the way .
If you have heard of Ebola , well , that 's in Sierra Leone as well .
I don 't have Ebola . You 're all safe .
Don 't rush to the door .
Be seated . You 're fine . I was checked before I got here .
My grandfather had three wives .
Don 't ask me why a man needs more than one wife .
Men , do you need more than one wife ?
I don 't think so . There you go .
He was looking for a heart attack , that 's what I say .
Oh yeah , he was .
When I was three , war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991 .
I remember literally going to bed one night , everything was good .
The next day , I woke up , bombs were dropping everywhere , and people were trying to kill me and my family .
We escaped the war and ended up in Gambia , in West Africa .
Ebola is there as well . Stay away from it .
While we were there as refugees , we didn 't know what was going to become of us .
My mom applied for refugee status .
She 's a wonderful , smart woman , that one , and we were lucky .
Australia said , we will take you in .
Good job , Aussies .
Before we were meant to travel , my mom came home one day , and said , " We 're going on a little holiday , a little trip . "
She put us in a car , and we drove for hours and ended up in a bush in a remote area in Gambia .
In this bush , we found two huts .
An old lady came towards us .
She was ethnic-looking , very old .
She had a chat with my mom , and went back .
Then she came back and walked away from us into a second hut .
I 'm standing there thinking , " This is very confusing . I don 't know what 's going on . "
The next thing I knew , my mom took me into this hut .
She took my clothes off , and then she pinned me down on the floor .
I struggled and tried to get her off me , but I couldn 't .
Then the old lady came towards me with a rusty-looking knife , one of the sharp knives , orange-looking , has never seen water or sunlight before .
I thought she was going to slaughter me , but she didn 't .
She slowly slid down my body and ended up where my vagina is .
She took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris , she took that rusty knife , and started cutting away , inch by inch .
I screamed , I cried , and asked my mom to get off me so this pain will stop , but all she did was say , " Be quiet . "
This old lady sawed away at my flesh for what felt like forever , and then when she was done , she threw that piece of flesh across the floor as if it was the most disgusting thing she 's ever touched .
They both got off me , and left me there bleeding , crying , and confused as to what just happened .
We never talked about this again .
Very soon , we found that we were coming to Australia , and people said we were going to the end of the world , there was nowhere else to go after Australia .
Yeah , that comforted us a bit .
It took us three days to get here .
We went to Senegal , then France , and then Singapore .
We went to the bathroom to wash our hands .
We spent 15 minutes opening the tap like this .
Then somebody came in , slid their hand under and water came out , and we thought , is this what we 're in for ?
Like , seriously .
We got to Adelaide , small place , where literally they dumped us in Adelaide , that 's what I would say .
We were very grateful .
We settled and we liked it .
We were like , " We 're home , we 're here . "
Then somebody took us to Rundle Mall .
Adelaide has only one mall .
It 's this small place .
And we saw a lot of Asian people .
My mom said all of a sudden , panicking , " You brought us to the wrong place . You must take us back to Australia . "
Yeah . It had to be explained to her that there were a lot of Asians in Australia and we were in the right place .
So fine , it 's all good .
My mom then had this brilliant idea that I should go to a girls school because they were less racist .
I don 't know where she read that publication . Never found evidence of it to this day .
Six hundred white kids , and I was the only black child there .
No , I was the only person with a bit of a color on me .
Let me say that . Chocolate color .
There were no Asians , no indigenous .
All we had was some tan girls , girls who felt the need to be under the sun .
It wasn 't the same as my chocolate , though . Not the same .
Settling in Australia was quite hard , but it became harder when I started volunteering for an organization called Women 's Health Statewide , and I joined their female genital mutilation program without any awareness of what this program was actually about , or that it related to me in any way .
I spent months educating nurses and doctors about what female genital mutilation was and where it was practiced : Africa , the Middle East , Asia , and now , Australia and London and America , because , as we all know , we live in a multicultural society , and people who come from those backgrounds come with their culture , and sometimes they have cultural practices that we may not agree with , but they continue to practice them .
One day , I was looking at the chart of the different types of female genital mutilation , FGM , I will just say FGM for short .
Type I is when they cut off the hood .
Type II is when they cut off the whole clitoris and some of your labia majora , or your outer lips , and Type III is when they cut off the whole clitoris and then they sew you up so you only have a little hole to pee and have your period .
My eyes went onto Type II .
Before all of this , I pretty much had amnesia .
I was in so much shock and traumatized by what had happened , I didn 't remember any of it .
Yes , I was aware something bad happened to me , but I had no recollection of what had happened .
I knew I had a scar down there , but I thought everybody had a scar down there .
This had happened to everybody else .
But when I looked at Type II , it all came back to me .
I remembered what was done to me .
I remembered being in that hut with that old lady and my mom holding me down .
Words cannot express the pain I felt , the confusion that I felt , because now I realized that what was done to me was a terrible thing that in this society was called barbaric , it was called mutilation .
My mother had said it was called circumcision , but here it was mutilation .
I was thinking , I 'm mutilated ? I 'm a mutilated person .
Oh my God .
And then the anger came .
I was a black angry woman . Oh yeah .
A little one , but angry nevertheless .
I went home and said to my mom , " You did something . "
This is not the African thing to do , pointing at your mother , but hey , I was ready for any consequences .
" You did something to me . "
She 's like , " What are you talking about , Khadija ? "
She 's used to me mouthing off .
I 'm like , " Those years ago , You circumcised me .
You cut away something that belonged to me . "
She said , " Yes , I did .
I did it for your own good .
It was in your best interest .
Your grandmother did it to me , and I did it to you .
It 's made you a woman . "
I 'm like , " How ? "
She said , " You 're empowered , Khadija .
Do you get itchy down there ? "
I 'm like , " No , why would I get itchy down there ? "
She said , " Well , if you were not circumcised , you would get itchy down there .
Women who are not circumcised get itchy all the time .
Then they sleep around with everybody .
You are not going to sleep around with anybody . "
And I thought , her definition of empowerment was very strange . That was the end of our first conversation .
I went back to school .
These were the days when we had Dolly and Girlfriend magazines .
There was always the sealed section . Anybody remember those sealed sections ?
The naughty bits , you know ?
Oh yeah , I love those . Anyway , there was always an article about pleasure and relationships and , of course , sex .
But it always assumed that you had a clitoris , though , and I thought , this doesn 't fit me .
This doesn 't talk about people like me .
I don 't have a clitoris .
I watched TV and those women would moan like , " Oh ! Oh ! "
I was like , these people and their damned clitoris .
What is a woman without a clitoris supposed to do with her life ?
That 's what I want to know .
I want to do that too -- " Oh ! Oh ! " and all of that .
Didn 't happen .
So I came home once again and said to my mom , " Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure , that I should be having orgasms , and that white men should figure out how to find the clitoris . "
Apparently , white men have a problem finding the clitoris . Just saying , it wasn 't me . It was Dolly that said that .
And I thought to myself , I had an inner joke in my head that said , " I will marry a white man .
He won 't have that problem with me . " So I said to my mom , " Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure , and do you know what you have taken away from me , what you have denied me ?
You have invaded me in the most sacred way .
I want pleasure .
I want to get horny , dammit , as well . "
And she said to me , " Who is Dolly and Girlfriend ?
Are they your new friends , Khadija ? "
I was like , " No , they 're not . That 's a magazine , mom , a magazine . "
She didn 't get it .
We came from two different worlds .
When she was growing up , not having a clitoris was the norm .
It was celebrated .
I was an African Australian girl .
I lived in a society that was very clitoris-centric .
It was all about the damn clitoris !
And I didn 't have one !
That pissed me off .
So once I went through this strange phase of anger and pain and confusion , I remember booking an appointment with my therapist .
Yes , I 'm an African who has a therapist . There you go .
And I said to her , " I was 13 . I was a child .
I was settling in a new country , I was dealing with racism and discrimination , English is my third language , and then there it was . "
I said to her , " I feel like I 'm not a woman because of what was done to me .
I feel incomplete .
Am I going to be asexual ? "
Because from what I knew about FGM , the whole aim of it was to control the sexuality of women .
It 's so that we don 't have any sexual desire .
And I said , " Am I asexual now ?
Will I just live the rest of my life not feeling like having sex , not enjoying sex ? "
She couldn 't answer my questions , so they went unanswered .
When I started having my period around the age of 14 , I realized I didn 't have normal periods because of FGM .
My periods were heavy , they were long , and they were very painful .
Then they told me I had fibroids .
They 're like these little balls sitting there .
One was covering one of my ovaries .
And there came then the big news .
" We don 't think you can have children , Khadija . "
And once again , I was an angry black woman .
I went home and I said to my mom , " Your act , your action , no matter what your may defense may be " -- because she thought she did it out love -- " what you did out of love is harming me , and it 's hurting me .
What do you have to say for that ? "
She said , " I did what I had to do as a mother . "
I 'm still waiting for an apology , by the way .
Then I got married .
And once again -- FGM is like the gift that keeps giving .
You figure that out very soon .
Sex was very painful .
It hurt all the time .
And of course I realized , they said , " You can 't have kids . "
I thought , " Wow , is this my existence ? Is this what life is all about ? "
I 'm proud to tell you , five months ago , I was told I was pregnant .
I am the lucky girl .
There are so many women out there who have gone through FGM who have infertility .
I know a nine-year-old girl who has incontinence , constant infections , pain .
It 's that gift . It doesn 't stop giving .
It affects every area of your life , and this happened to me because I was born a girl in the wrong place .
That 's why it happened to me .
I channel all that anger , all that pain , into advocacy because I needed my pain to be worth something .
So I 'm the director of an organization called No FGM Australia .
You heard me right .
Why No FGM Australia ?
FGM is in Australia .
Two days ago , I had to call Child Protective Services , because somewhere in Australia , there 's a four-year old there 's a four-year-old whose mom is planning on performing FGM on her .
That child is in kindy . I 'll let that sink in : four years old .
A couple of months ago , I met a lady who is married to a Malaysian man .
Her husband came home one day and said he was going to take their daughters back to Malaysia to cut off their clitoris .
And she said , " Why ? " He said they were dirty .
And she said , " Well , you married me . "
He said , " Oh , this is my cultural belief . "
They then went into a whole discussion where she said to him , " Over my dead body will you do that to my daughters . "
But imagine if this woman wasn 't aware of what FGM was , if they never had that conversation ?
Her children would have been flown over to Malaysia and they would have come back changed for the rest of their lives .
Do you know the millions of dollars it would take us to deal with an issue like that ?
[ Three children per day ] in Australia are at risk of having FGM performed on them .
This is an Australian problem , people .
It 's not an African problem . It 's not a Middle Eastern problem .
It 's not white , it 's not black , it has no color , it 's everybody 's problem .
FGM is child abuse .
It 's violence against women .
It 's saying that women don 't have a right to sexual pleasure .
It says we don 't have a right to our bodies .
Well , I say no to that , and you know what ? Bullshit .
That 's what I have to say to that .
I am proud to say that I 'm doing my part in ending FGM .
What are you going to do ?
There may be a child in your classroom who is at risk of FGM .
There may be a patient who comes to your hospital who is at risk of FGM .
But this is the reality , that even in our beloved Australia , the most wonderful place in the world , children are being abused because of a culture .
Culture should not be a defense for child abuse .
I want ever single one of you to see FGM as an issue for you .
Make it personal .
It could be your daughter , your sister , your cousin .
I can 't fight FGM alone .
I could try , but I can 't .
So my appeal to you is , please join me .
Sign my petition on Change.org and type in Khadija , my name , and it 'll come up , and sign it .
The aim of that is to get support for FGM victims in Australia and to protect little girls growing up here to not have this evil done to them , because every child has a right to pleasure .
Every child has a right to their bodies being left intact , and dammit , ever child has a right to a clitoris .
So please join me in ending this act .
My favorite quote is , " All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men and women to do nothing . " Are you going to let this evil of female genital mutilation to prevail in Australia ?
I don 't think so , so please join me in ensuring that it ends in my generation .
Thank you .
Morgana Bailey : The danger of hiding who you are
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : Morgana Bailey has been hiding her true self for 16 years . In a brave talk , she utters four words that might not seem like a big deal to some , but to her have been paralyzing . Why speak up ? Because she 's realized that her silence has personal , professional and societal consequences . In front of an audience of her co-workers , she reflects on what it means to fear the judgment of others , and how it makes us judge ourselves .
When I was young , I prided myself as a nonconformist in the conservative U.S. state I live in , Kansas .
I didn 't follow along with the crowd .
I wasn 't afraid to try weird clothing trends or hairstyles .
I was outspoken and extremely social .
Even these pictures and postcards of my London semester abroad 16 years ago show that I obviously didn 't care if I was perceived as weird or different .
But that same year I was in London , 16 years ago , I realized something about myself that actually was somewhat unique , and that changed everything .
I became the opposite of who I thought I once was .
I stayed in my room instead of socializing .
I stopped engaging in clubs and leadership activities .
I didn 't want to stand out in the crowd anymore .
I told myself it was because I was growing up and maturing , not that I was suddenly looking for acceptance .
I had always assumed I was immune to needing acceptance .
After all , I was a bit unconventional .
But I realize now that the moment I realized something was different about me was the exact same moment that I began conforming and hiding .
Hiding is a progressive habit , and once you start hiding , it becomes harder and harder to step forward and speak out .
In fact , even now , when I was talking to people about what this talk was about , I made up a cover story and I even hid the truth about my TED Talk .
So it is fitting and scary that I have returned to this city 16 years later and I have chosen this stage to finally stop hiding .
What have I been hiding for 16 years ?
I am a lesbian .
Thank you .
I 've struggled to say those words , because I didn 't want to be defined by them .
Every time I would think about coming out in the past , I would think to myself , but I just want to be known as Morgana , uniquely Morgana , but not " my lesbian friend Morgana , " or " my gay coworker Morgana . "
Just Morgana .
For those of you from large metropolitan areas , this may not seem like a big deal to you .
It may seem strange that I have suppressed the truth and hidden this for so long .
But I was paralyzed by my fear of not being accepted .
And I 'm not alone , of course .
A 2013 Deloitte study found that a surprisingly large number of people hide aspects of their identity .
Of all the employees they surveyed , 61 percent reported changing an aspect of their behavior or their appearance in order to fit in at work .
Of all the gay , lesbian and bisexual employees , 83 percent admitted to changing some aspects of themselves so they would not appear at work " too gay . "
The study found that even in companies with diversity policies and inclusion programs , employees struggle to be themselves at work because they believe conformity is critical to their long-term career advancement .
And while I was surprised that so many people just like me waste so much energy trying to hide themselves , I was scared when I discovered that my silence has life-or-death consequences and long-term social repercussions .
Twelve years : the length by which life expectancy is shortened for gay , lesbian and bisexual people in highly anti-gay communities compared to accepting communities .
Twelve years reduced life expectancy .
When I read that in The Advocate magazine this year , I realized I could no longer afford to keep silent .
The effects of personal stress and social stigmas are a deadly combination .
The study found that gays in anti-gay communities had higher rates of heart disease , violence and suicide .
What I once thought was simply a personal matter I realized had a ripple effect that went into the workplace and out into the community for every story just like mine .
My choice to hide and not share who I really am may have inadvertently contributed to this exact same environment and atmosphere of discrimination .
I 'd always told myself there 's no reason to share that I was gay , but the idea that my silence has social consequences was really driven home this year when I missed an opportunity to change the atmosphere of discrimination in my own home state of Kansas .
In February , the Kansas House of Representatives brought up a bill for vote that would have essentially allowed businesses to use religious freedom as a reason to deny gays services .
A former coworker and friend of mine has a father who serves in the Kansas House of Representatives .
He voted in favor of the bill , in favor of a law that would allow businesses to not serve me .
How does my friend feel about lesbian , gay , bisexual , transgender , queer and questioning people ?
How does her father feel ?
I don 't know , because I was never honest with them about who I am .
And that shakes me to the core .
What if I had told her my story years ago ?
Could she have told her father my experience ?
Could I have ultimately helped change his vote ?
I will never know , and that made me realize I had done nothing to try to make a difference .
How ironic that I work in human resources , a profession that works to welcome , connect and encourage the development of employees , a profession that advocates that the diversity of society should be reflected in the workplace , and yet I have done nothing to advocate for diversity .
When I came to this company one year ago , I thought to myself , this company has anti-discrimination policies that protect gay , lesbian , bisexual and transgender people .
Their commitment to diversity is evident through their global inclusion programs .
When I walk through the doors of this company , I will finally come out .
But I didn 't .
Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity , I did nothing .
When I was looking through my London journal and scrapbook from my London semester abroad 16 years ago , I came across this modified quote from Toni Morrison 's book , " Paradise . "
" There are more scary things inside than outside . "
And then I wrote a note to myself at the bottom : " Remember this . "
I 'm sure I was trying to encourage myself to get out and explore London , but the message I missed was the need to start exploring and embracing myself .
What I didn 't realize until all these years later is that the biggest obstacles I will ever have to overcome are my own fears and insecurities .
I believe that by facing my fears inside , I will be able to change reality outside .
I made a choice today to reveal a part of myself that I have hidden for too long .
I hope that this means I will never hide again , and I hope that by coming out today , I can do something to change the data and also to help others who feel different be more themselves and more fulfilled in both their professional and personal lives .
Thank you .

Sarah Bergbreiter : Why I make robots the size of a grain of rice
TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript : By studying the movement and bodies of insects such as ants , Sarah Bergbreiter and her team build incredibly robust , super teeny , mechanical versions of creepy crawlies … and then they add rockets . See their jaw-dropping developments in micro-robotics , and hear about three ways we might use these little helpers in the future .
My students and I work on very tiny robots .
Now , you can think of these as robotic versions of something that you 're all very familiar with : an ant .
We all know that ants and other insects at this size scale can do some pretty incredible things .
We 've all seen a group of ants , or some version of that , carting off your potato chip at a picnic , for example .
But what are the real challenges of engineering these ants ?
Well , first of all , how do we get the capabilities of an ant in a robot at the same size scale ?
Well , first we need to figure out how to make them move when they 're so small .
We need mechanisms like legs and efficient motors in order to support that locomotion , and we need the sensors , power and control in order to pull everything together in a semi-intelligent ant robot .
And finally , to make these things really functional , we want a lot of them working together in order to do bigger things .
So I 'll start with mobility .
Insects move around amazingly well .
This video is from UC Berkeley .
It shows a cockroach moving over incredibly rough terrain without tipping over , and it 's able to do this because its legs are a combination of rigid materials , which is what we traditionally use to make robots , and soft materials .
Jumping is another really interesting way to get around when you 're very small .
So these insects store energy in a spring and release that really quickly to get the high power they need to jump out of water , for example .
So one of the big contributions from my lab has been to combine rigid and soft materials in very , very small mechanisms .
So this jumping mechanism is about four millimeters on a side , so really tiny .
The hard material here is silicon , and the soft material is silicone rubber .
And the basic idea is that we 're going to compress this , store energy in the springs , and then release it to jump .
So there 's no motors on board this right now , no power .
This is actuated with a method that we call in my lab " graduate student with tweezers . " So what you 'll see in the next video is this guy doing amazingly well for its jumps .
So this is Aaron , the graduate student in question , with the tweezers , and what you see is this four-millimeter-sized mechanism jumping almost 40 centimeters high .
That 's almost 100 times its own length .
And it survives , bounces on the table , it 's incredibly robust , and of course survives quite well until we lose it because it 's very tiny .
Ultimately , though , we want to add motors to this too , and we have students in the lab working on millimeter-sized motors to eventually integrate onto small , autonomous robots .
But in order to look at mobility and locomotion at this size scale to start , we 're cheating and using magnets .
So this shows what would eventually be part of a micro-robot leg , and you can see the silicone rubber joints and there 's an embedded magnet that 's being moved around by an external magnetic field .
So this leads to the robot that I showed you earlier .
The really interesting thing that this robot can help us figure out is how insects move at this scale .
We have a really good model for how everything from a cockroach up to an elephant moves .
We all move in this kind of bouncy way when we run .
But when I 'm really small , the forces between my feet and the ground are going to affect my locomotion a lot more than my mass , which is what causes that bouncy motion .
So this guy doesn 't work quite yet , but we do have slightly larger versions that do run around .
So this is about a centimeter cubed , a centimeter on a side , so very tiny , and we 've gotten this to run about 10 body lengths per second , so 10 centimeters per second .
It 's pretty quick for a little , small guy , and that 's really only limited by our test setup .
But this gives you some idea of how it works right now .
We can also make 3D-printed versions of this that can climb over obstacles , a lot like the cockroach that you saw earlier .
But ultimately we want to add everything onboard the robot .
We want sensing , power , control , actuation all together , and not everything needs to be bio-inspired .
So this robot 's about the size of a Tic Tac .
And in this case , instead of magnets or muscles to move this around , we use rockets .
So this is a micro-fabricated energetic material , and we can create tiny pixels of this , and we can put one of these pixels on the belly of this robot , and this robot , then , is going to jump when it senses an increase in light .
So the next video is one of my favorites .
So you have this 300-milligram robot jumping about eight centimeters in the air .
It 's only four by four by seven millimeters in size .
And you 'll see a big flash at the beginning when the energetic is set off , and the robot tumbling through the air .
So there was that big flash , and you can see the robot jumping up through the air .
So there 's no tethers on this , no wires connecting to this .
Everything is onboard , and it jumped in response to the student just flicking on a desk lamp next to it .
So I think you can imagine all the cool things that we could do with robots that can run and crawl and jump and roll at this size scale .
Imagine the rubble that you get after a natural disaster like an earthquake .
Imagine these small robots running through that rubble to look for survivors .
Or imagine a lot of small robots running around a bridge in order to inspect it and make sure it 's safe so you don 't get collapses like this , which happened outside of Minneapolis in 2007 .
Or just imagine what you could do if you had robots that could swim through your blood .
Right ? " Fantastic Voyage , " Isaac Asimov .
Or they could operate without having to cut you open in the first place .
Or we could radically change the way we build things if we have our tiny robots work the same way that termites do , and they build these incredible eight-meter-high mounds , effectively well ventilated apartment buildings for other termites in Africa and Australia .
of what we can do with these small robots .
And we 've made some advances so far , but there 's still a long way to go , and hopefully some of you can contribute to that destination .
Thanks very much .

Navi Radjou : Creative problem-solving in the face of extreme limits
Navi Radjou has spent years studying " jugaad , " also known as frugal innovation . Pioneered by entrepreneurs in emerging markets who figured out how to get spectacular value from limited resources , the practice has now caught on globally . Peppering his talk with a wealth of examples of human ingenuity at work , Radjou also shares three principles for how we can all do more with less .
When you grow up in a developing country like India , as I did , you instantly learn to get more value from limited resources and find creative ways to reuse what you already have .
Take Mansukh Prajapati , a potter in India .
He has created a fridge made entirely of clay that consumes no electricity .
He can keep fruits and vegetables fresh for many days .
That 's a cool invention , literally .
In Africa , if you run out of your cell phone battery , don 't panic .
You will find some resourceful entrepreneurs who can recharge your cell phone using bicycles .
And since we are in South America , let 's go to Lima in Peru , a region with high humidity that receives only one inch of rainfall each year .
An engineering college in Lima designed a giant advertising billboard that absorbs air humidity and converts it into purified water , generating over 90 liters of water every day .
The Peruvians are amazing .
They can literally create water out of thin air .
For the past seven years , I have met and studied hundreds of entrepreneurs in India , China , Africa and South America , and they keep amazing me .
Many of them did not go to school .
They don 't invent stuff in big R & amp ; D labs .
The street is the lab .
Why do they do that ?
Because they don 't have the kind of basic resources we take for granted , like capital and energy , and basic services like healthcare and education are also scarce in those regions .
When external resources are scarce , you have to go within yourself to tap the most abundant resource , human ingenuity , and use that ingenuity to find clever ways to solve problems with limited resources .
In India , we call it Jugaad .
Jugaad is a Hindi word that means an improvised fix , a clever solution born in adversity .
Jugaad solutions are not sophisticated or perfect , but they create more value at lower cost .
For me , the entrepreneurs who will create Jugaad solutions are like alchemists .
They can magically transform adversity into opportunity , and turn something of less value into something of high value .
In other words , they mastered the art of doing more with less , which is the essence of frugal innovation .
Frugal innovation is the ability to create more economic and social value using fewer resources .
Frugal innovation is not about making do ; it 's about making things better .
Now I want to show you how , across emerging markets , entrepreneurs and companies are adopting frugal innovation on a larger scale to cost-effectively deliver healthcare and energy to billions of people who may have little income but very high aspirations .
Let 's first go to China , where the country 's largest I.T. service provider , Neusoft , has developed a telemedicine solution to help doctors in cities remotely treat old and poor patients in Chinese villages .
This solution is based on simple-to-use medical devices that less qualified health workers like nurses can use in rural clinics .
China desperately needs these frugal medical solutions because by 2050 it will be home to over half a billion senior citizens .
Now let 's go to Kenya , a country where half the population uses M-Pesa , a mobile payment solution .
This is a great solution for the African continent because 80 percent of Africans don 't have a bank account , but what is exciting is that M-Pesa is now becoming the source of other disruptive business models in sectors like energy .
Take M-KOPA , the home solar solution that comes literally in a box that has a solar rooftop panel , three LED lights , a solar radio , and a cell phone charger .
The whole kit , though , costs 200 dollars , which is too expensive for most Kenyans , and this is where mobile telephony can make the solution more affordable .
Today , you can buy this kit by making an initial deposit of just 35 dollars , and then pay off the rest by making a daily micro-payment of 45 cents using your mobile phone .
Once you 've made 365 micro-payments , the system is unlocked , and you own the product and you start receiving clean , free electricity .
This is an amazing solution for Kenya , where 70 percent of people live off the grid .
This shows that with frugal innovation what matters is that you take what is most abundant , mobile connectivity , to deal with what is scarce , which is energy .
With frugal innovation , the global South is actually catching up and in some cases even leap-frogging the North .
Instead of building expensive hospitals , China is using telemedicine to cost-effectively treat millions of patients , and Africa , instead of building banks and electricity grids , is going straight to mobile payments and distributed clean energy .
Frugal innovation is diametrically opposed to the way we innovate in the North .
I live in Silicon Valley , where we keep chasing the next big technology thing .
Think of the iPhone 5 , 6 , then 7 , 8 .
Companies in the West spend billions of dollars investing in R & amp ; D , and use tons of natural resources to create ever more complex products , to differentiate their brands from competition , and they charge customers more money for new features .
So the conventional business model in the West is more for more .
But sadly , this more for more model is running out of gas , for three reasons : First , a big portion of customers in the West because of the diminishing purchasing power , can no longer afford these expensive products .
Second , we are running out of natural water and oil .
In California , where I live , water scarcity is becoming a big problem .
And third , most importantly , because of the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class in the West , there is a big disconnect between existing products and services and basic needs of customers .
Do you know that today , there are over 70 million Americans today who are underbanked , because existing banking services are not designed to address their basic needs .
The prolonged economic crisis in the West is making people think that they are about to lose the high standard of living and face deprivation .
I believe that the only way we can sustain growth and prosperity in the West is if we learn to do more with less .
The good news is , that 's starting to happen .
Several Western companies are now adopting frugal innovation to create affordable products for Western consumers .
Let me give you two examples .
When I first saw this building , I told myself it 's some kind of postmodern house .
Actually , it 's a small manufacturing plant set up by Grameen Danone , a joint venture between Grameen Bank of Muhammad Yunus and the food multinational Danone to make high-quality yogurt in Bangladesh .
This factory is 10 percent the size of existing Danone factories and cost much less to build .
I guess you can call it a low-fat factory .
Now this factory , unlike Western factories that are highly automated , relies a lot on manual processes in order to generate jobs for local communities .
Danone was so inspired by this model that combines economic efficiency and social sustainability , they are planning to roll it out in other parts of the world as well .
Now , when you see this example , you might be thinking , " Well , frugal innovation is low tech . "
Actually , no .
Frugal innovation is also about making high tech more affordable and more accessible to more people .
Let me give you an example .
In China , the R & amp ; D engineers of Siemens Healthcare have designed a C.T. scanner that is easy enough to be used by less qualified health workers , like nurses and technicians .
This device can scan more patients on a daily basis , and yet consumes less energy , which is great for hospitals , but it 's also great for patients because it reduces the cost of treatment by 30 percent and radiation dosage by up to 60 percent .
This solution was initially designed for the Chinese market , but now it 's selling like hotcakes in the U.S. and Europe , where hospitals are pressured to deliver quality care at lower cost .
But the frugal innovation revolution in the West is actually led by creative entrepreneurs who are coming up with amazing solutions to address basic needs in the U.S. and Europe .
Let me quickly give you three examples of startups that personally inspire me .
The first one happens to be launched by my neighbor in Silicon Valley .
It 's called gThrive .
They make these wireless sensors designed like plastic rulers that farmers can stick in different parts of the field and start collecting detailed information like soil conditions .
This dynamic data allows farmers to optimize use of water energy while improving quality of the products and the yields , which is a great solution for California , which faces major water shortage .
It pays for itself within one year .
Second example is Be-Bound , also in Silicon Valley , that enables you to connect to the Internet even in no-bandwidth areas where there 's no wi-fi or 3G or 4G .
How do they do that ?
They simply use SMS , a basic technology , but that happens to be the most reliable and most widely available around the world .
Three billion people today with cell phones can 't access the Internet .
This solution can connect them to the Internet in a frugal way .
And in France , there is a startup calle Compte Nickel , which is revolutionizing the banking sector .
It allows thousands of people to walk into a Mom and Pop store and in just five minutes activate the service that gives them two products : an international bank account number and an international debit card .
They charge a flat annual maintenance fee of just 20 Euros .
That means you can do all banking transactions -- send and receive money , pay with your debit card -- all with no additional charge .
This is what I call low-cost banking without the bank .
Amazingly , 75 percent of the customers using this service are the middle-class French who can 't afford high banking fees .
Now , I talked about frugal innovation , initially pioneered in the South , now being adopted in the North .
Ultimately , we would like to see developed countries and developing countries come together and co-create frugal solutions that benefit the entire humanity .
The exciting news is that 's starting to happen .
Let 's go to Nairobi to find that out .
Nairobi has horrendous traffic jams .
When I first saw them , I thought , " Holy cow . "
Literally , because you have to dodge cows as well when you drive in Nairobi .
To ease the situation , the engineers at the IBM lab in Kenya are piloting a solution called Megaffic , which initially was designed by the Japanese engineers .
Unlike in the West , Megaffic doesn 't rely on roadside sensors , which are very expensive to install in Nairobi .
Instead they process images , traffic data , collected from a small number of low-resolution webcams in Nairobi streets , and then they use analytic software to predict congestion points , and they can SMS drivers alternate routes to take .
Granted , Megaffic is not as sexy as self-driving cars , but it promises to take Nairobi drivers from point A to point B at least 20 percent faster .
And earlier this year , UCLA Health launched its Global Lab for Innovation , which seeks to identify frugal healthcare solutions anywhere in the world that will be at least 20 percent cheaper than existing solutions in the U.S.
and yet more effective .
It also tries to bring together innovators from North and South to cocreate affordable healthcare solutions for all of humanity .
I gave tons of examples of frugal innovators from around the world , but the question is , how do you go about adopting frugal innovation ?
Well , I gleaned out three principles from frugal innovators around the world that I want to share with you that you can apply in your own organization to do more with less .
The first principle is : Keep it simple .
Don 't create solutions to impress customers .
Make them easy enough to use and widely accessible , like the C.T. scanner we saw in China .
Second principle : Do not reinvent the wheel .
Try to leverage existing resources and assets that are widely available , like using mobile telephony to offer clean energy or Mom and Pop stores to offer banking services .
Third principle is : Think and act horizontally .
Companies tend to scale up vertically by centralizing operations in big factories and warehouses , but if you want to be agile and deal with immense customer diversity , you need to scale out horizontally using a distributed supply chain with smaller manufacturing and distribution units , like Grameen Bank has shown .
The South pioneered frugal innovation out of sheer necessity .
The North is now learning to do more and better with less as it faces resource constraints .
As an Indian-born French national who lives in the United States , my hope is that we transcend this artificial North-South divide so that we can harness the collective ingenuity of innovators from around the world to cocreate frugal solutions that will improve the quality of life of everyone in the world , while preserving our precious planet .
Thank you very much .

Fredy Peccerelli : A forensic anthropologist who brings closure for the " disappeared "
In Guatemala 's 36-year conflict , 200,000 civilians were killed — and more than 40,000 were never identified . Pioneering forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli and his team use DNA , archeology and storytelling to help families find the bodies of their loved ones . It 's a sobering task , but it can bring peace of mind — and sometimes , justice .
Guatemala is recovering from a 36-year armed conflict .
A conflict that was fought during the Cold War .
It was really just a small leftist insurgency and a devastating response by the state .
What we have as a result is 200,000 civilian victims , 160,000 of those killed in the communities : small children , men , women , the elderly even .
And then we have about 40,000 others , the missing , the ones we 're still looking for today .
We call them the Desaparecidos .
Now , 83 percent of the victims are Mayan victims , of the original inhabitants of Central America .
And only about 17 percent are of European descent .
But the most important thing here is that the very people who are supposed to defend us , the police , the military , are the ones that committed most of the crimes .
Now the families , they want information .
They want to know what happened .
They want the bodies of their loved ones .
But most of all , what they want is they want you , they want everyone to know that their loved ones did nothing wrong .
Now , my case was that my father received death threats in 1980 .
And we left .
We left Guatemala and we came here .
So I grew up in New York , I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact , and I went to New Utrecht High School and I graduated from Brooklyn College .
The only thing was that I really didn 't know what was happening in Guatemala .
I didn 't care for it ; it was too painful .
But it wasn 't till 1995 that I decided to do something about it .
So I went back .
I went back to Guatemala , to look for the bodies , to understand what happened and to look for part of myself as well .
The way we work is that we give people information .
We talk to the family members and we let them choose .
We let them decide to tell us the stories , to tell us what they saw , to tell us about their loved ones .
And even more important , we let them choose to give us a piece of themselves .
A piece , an essence , of who they are .
And that DNA is what we 're going to compare to the DNA that comes from the skeletons .
While we 're doing that , though , we 're looking for the bodies .
And these are skeletons by now , most of these crimes happened 32 years ago .
When we find the grave , we take out the dirt and eventually clean the body , document it , and exhume it .
We literally bring the skeleton out of the ground .
Once we have those bodies , though , we take them back to the city , to our lab , and we begin a process of trying to understand mainly two things : One is how people died .
So here you see a gunshot wound to the back of the head or a machete wound , for example .
The other thing we want to understand is who they are .
Whether it 's a baby , or an adult .
Whether it 's a woman or a man .
But when we 're done with that analysis what we 'll do is we 'll take a small fragment of the bone and we 'll extract DNA from it .
We 'll take that DNA and then we 'll compare it with the DNA of the families , of course .
The best way to explain this to you is by showing you two cases .
The first is the case of the military diary .
Now this is a document that was smuggled out of somewhere in 1999 .
And what you see there is the state following individuals , people that , like you , wanted to change their country , and they jotted everything down .
And one of the things that they wrote down is when they executed them .
Inside that yellow rectangle , you see a code , it 's a secret code : 300 .
And then you see a date .
The 300 means " executed " and the date means when they were executed .
Now that 's going to come into play in a second .
What we did is we conducted an exhumation in 2003 , where we exhumed 220 bodies from 53 graves in a military base .
Grave 9 , though , matched the family of Sergio Saul Linares .
Now Sergio was a professor at the university .
He graduted from Iowa State University and went back to Guatemala to change his country .
And he was captured on February 23 , 1984 .
And if you can see there , he was executed on March 29 , 1984 , which was incredible .
We had the body , we had the family 's information and their DNA , and now we have documents that told us exactly what happened .
But most important is about two weeks later , we go another hit , another match from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro .
The DNA of that body also matched the DNA of that family .
And then we noticed that he was also in the diary .
But it was amazing to see that he was also executed on March 29 , 1984 .
So that led us to think , hmm , how many bodies were in the grave ?
Six .
So then we said , how many people were executed on March 29 , 1984 ?
That 's right , six as well .
So we have Juan de Dios , Hugo , Moises and Zoilo .
All of them executed on the same date , all captured at different locations and at different moments .
All put in that grave .
The only thing we needed now was the DNA of those four families So we went and we looked for them and we found them .
And we identified those six bodies and gave them back to the families .
The other case I want to tell you about is that of a military base called CREOMPAZ .
It actually means , " to believe in peace , " but the acronym really means Regional Command Center for Peacekeeping Operations .
And this is where the Guatemalan military trains peacekeepers from other countries , the ones that serve with the U.N.
and go to countries like Haiti and the Congo .
Well , we have testimony that said that within this military base , there were bodies , there were graves .
So we went in there with a search warrant and about two hours after we went in , we found the first of 84 graves , a total of 533 bodies .
Now , if you think about that , peacekeepers being trained on top of bodies .
It 's very ironic .
But the bodies -- face down , most of them , hands tied behind their backs , blindfolded , all types of trauma -- these were people who were defenseless who were being executed .
People that 533 families are looking for .
So we 're going to focus on Grave 15 .
Grave 15 , what we noticed , was a grave full of women and children , 63 of them .
And that immediately made us think , my goodness , where is there a case like this ?
When I got to Guatemala in 1995 , I heard of a case of a massacre that happened on May 14 , 1982 , where the army came in , killed the men , and took the women and children in helicopters to an unknown location .
Well , guess what ?
The clothing from this grave matched the clothing from the region where these people were taken from , where these women and children were taken from .
So we conducted some DNA analysis , and guess what ?
We identified Martina Rojas and Manuel Chen .
Both of them disappeared in that case , and now we could prove it .
We have physical evidence that proves that this happened and that those people were taken to this base .
Now , Manuel Chen was three years old .
His mother went to the river to wash clothes , and she left him with a neighbor .
That 's when the army came and that 's when he was taken away in a helicopter and never seen again until we found him in Grave 15 .
So now with science , with archaeology , with anthropology , with genetics , what we 're doing is , we 're giving a voice to the voiceless .
But we 're doing more than that .
We 're actually providing evidence for trials , like the genocide trial that happened last year in Guatemala where General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years .
So I came here to tell you today that this is happening everywhere -- it 's happening in Mexico right in front of us today -- and we can 't let it go on anymore .
We have to now come together and decide that we 're not going to have any more missing .
So no more missing , guys .
Okay ? No more missing .
Thank you .

Asha de Vos : Why you should care about whale poo
Whales have a surprising and important job , says marine biologist Asha de Vos : these massive creatures are ecosystem engineers , keeping the oceans healthy and stable by ... well , by pooping , for a start . Learn from de Vos , a TED Fellow , about the undervalued work that whales do to help maintain the stability and health of our seas -- and our planet .
In the 1600s , there were so many right whales in Cape Cod Bay off the east coast of the U.S.
that apparently you could walk across their backs from one end of the bay to the other .
Today , they number in the hundreds , and they 're endangered .
Like them , many species of whales saw their numbers drastically reduced by 200 years of whaling , where they were hunted and killed for their whale meat , oil and whale bone .
We only have whales in our waters today because of the Save the Whales movement of the ' 70s .
It was instrumental in stopping commercial whaling , and was built on the idea that if we couldn 't save whales , what could we save ?
It was ultimately a test of our political ability to halt environmental destruction .
So in the early ' 80s , there was a ban on commercial whaling that came into force as a result of this campaign .
Whales in our waters are still low in numbers , however , because they do face a range of other human-induced threats .
Unfortunately , many people still think that whale conservationists like myself do what we do only because these creatures are charismatic and beautiful .
This is actually a disservice , because whales are ecosystem engineers .
They help maintain the stability and health of the oceans , and even provide services to human society .
So let 's talk about why saving whales is critical to the resiliency of the oceans .
It boils down to two main things : whale poop and rotting carcasses .
As whales dive to the depths to feed and come up to the surface to breathe , they actually release these enormous fecal plumes .
This whale pump , as it 's called , actually brings essential limiting nutrients from the depths to the surface waters where they stimulate the growth of phytoplankton , which forms the base of all marine food chains .
So really , having more whales in the oceans pooping is really beneficial to the entire ecosystem .
Whales are also known to undertake some of the longest migrations of all mammals .
Gray whales off America migrate 16,000 kilometers between productive feeding areas and less productive calving , or birthing , areas and back every year .
As they do so , they transport fertilizer in the form of their feces from places that have it to places that need it .
So clearly , whales are really important in nutrient cycling , both horizontally and vertically , through the oceans .
But what 's really cool is that they 're also really important after they 're dead .
Whale carcasses are some of the largest form of detritus to fall from the ocean 's surface , and they 're called whale fall .
As these carcasses sink , they provide a feast to some 400-odd species , including the eel-shaped , slime-producing hagfish .
So over the 200 years of whaling , when we were busy killing and removing these carcasses from the oceans , we likely altered the rate and geographic distribution of these whale falls that would descend into deep oceans , and as a result , probably led to a number of extinctions of species that were most specialized and dependent on these carcasses for their survival .
Whale carcasses are also known to transport about 190,000 tons of carbon , which is the equivalent of that produced by 80,000 cars per year from the atmosphere to the deep oceans , and the deep oceans are what we call " carbon sinks , " because they trap and hold excess carbon from the atmosphere , and therefore help to delay global warming .
Sometimes these carcasses also wash up on beaches and provide a meal to a number of predatory species on land .
The 200 years of whaling was clearly detrimental and caused a reduction in the populations of whales between 60 to 90 percent .
Clearly , the Save the Whales movement was instrumental in preventing commercial whaling from going on , but we need to revise this .
We need to address the more modern , pressing problems that these whales face in our waters today .
Amongst other things , we need to stop them from getting plowed down by container ships when they 're in their feeding areas , and stop them from getting entangled in fishing nets as they float around in the ocean .
We also need to learn to contextualize our conservation messages , so people really understand the true ecosystem value of these creatures .
So , let 's save the whales again , but this time , let 's not just do it for their sake .
Let 's also do it for ours .
Thank you .

Erin McKean : Go ahead , make up new words !
In this fun , short talk from TEDYouth , lexicographer Erin McKean encourages — nay , cheerleads — her audience to create new words when the existing ones won 't quite do . She lists out 6 ways to make new words in English , from compounding to " verbing , " in order to make language better at expressing what we mean , and to create more ways for us to understand one another .
I 'm a lexicographer .
I make dictionaries .
And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary .
My job is not to decide what a word is ; that is your job .
Everybody who speaks English decides together what 's a word and what 's not a word .
Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other .
Now , sometimes when people are trying to decide whether a word is good or bad , they don 't really have a good reason .
So they say something like , " Because grammar ! "
I don 't actually really care about grammar too much -- don 't tell anybody .
But the word " grammar , " actually , there are two kinds of grammar .
There 's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain , and if you 're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language , it 's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language .
And this is what you learn when you learn a language as a child .
And here 's an example : This is a wug , right ?
It 's a wug .
Now there is another one .
There are two of these .
There are two ...
Audience : Wugs .
Erin McKean : Exactly ! You know how to make the plural of wug .
That rule lives in your brain .
You never had to be taught this rule , you just understand it .
This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at [ Boston University ] named Jean Berko Gleason back in 1958 .
So we 've been talking about this for a long time .
Now , these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain , they 're not like traffic laws , they 're more like laws of nature .
And nobody has to remind you to obey a law of nature , right ?
When you leave the house in the morning , your mom doesn 't say , " Hey , honey , I think it 's going to be cold , take a hoodie , don 't forget to obey the law of gravity . "
Nobody says this .
Now , there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature .
So you can think of a word as like a hat .
Once you know how hats work , nobody has to tell you , " Don 't wear hats on your feet . "
What they have to tell you is , " Can you wear hats inside ?
Who gets to wear a hat ?
What are the kinds of hats you get to wear ? "
Those are more of the second kind of grammar , which linguists often call usage , as opposed to grammar .
Now , sometimes people use this kind of rules-based grammar to discourage people from making up words .
And I think that is , well , stupid .
So , for example , people are always telling you , " Be creative , make new music , do art , invent things , science and technology . "
But when it comes to words , they 're like , " Don 't ! No . Creativity stops right here , whippersnappers . Give it a rest . "
But that makes no sense to me .
Words are great . We should have more of them .
I want you to make as many new words as possible .
And I 'm going to tell you six ways that you can use to make new words in English .
The first way is the simplest way .
Basically , steal them from other languages .
[ " Go rob other people " ] Linguists call this borrowing , but we never give the words back , so I 'm just going to be honest and call it stealing .
We usually take words for things that we like , like delicious food .
We took " kumquat " from Chinese , we took " caramel " from French .
We also take words for cool things like " ninja , " right ?
We took that from Japanese , which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from .
So another way that you can make words in English is by squishing two other English words together .
This is called compounding .
Words in English are like Lego : If you use enough force , you can put any two of them together .
We do this all the time in English : Words like " heartbroken , " " bookworm , " " sandcastle " all are compounds .
So go ahead and make words like " duckface , " just don 't make duckface .
Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding , but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off .
So these are blend words , like " brunch " is a blend of " breakfast " and " lunch . "
" Motel " is a blend of " motor " and " hotel . "
Who here knew that " motel " was a blend word ?
Yeah , that word is so old in English that lots of people don 't know that there are parts missing .
" Edutainment " is a blend of " education " and " entertainment . "
And of course , " electrocute " is a blend of " electric " and " execute . "
You can also make words by changing how they operate .
This is called functional shift .
You take a word that acts as one part of speech , and you change it into another part of speech .
Okay , who here knew that " friend " hasn 't always been a verb ?
" Friend " used to be noun and then we verbed it .
Almost any word in English can be verbed .
You can also take adjectives and make them into nouns .
" Commercial " used to be an adjective and now it 's a noun .
And of course , you can " green " things .
Another way to make words in English is back-formation .
You can take a word and you can kind of squish it down a little bit .
So for example , in English we had the word " editor " before we had the word " edit . "
" Edit " was formed from " editor . "
Sometimes these back-formations sound a little silly : Bulldozers bulldoze , butlers butle and burglers burgle .
Another way to make words in English is to take the first letters of something and squish them together .
So National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA .
And of course you can do this with anything , OMG !
So it doesn 't matter how silly the words are .
They can be really good words of English .
" Absquatulate " is a perfectly good word of English .
" Mugwump " is a perfectly good word of English .
So the words don 't have have to sound normal , they can sound really silly .
Why should you make words ?
You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get your meaning across .
And new words grab people 's attention .
They get people to focus on what you 're saying and that gives you a better chance to get your meaning across .
A lot of people on this stage today have said , " In the future , you can do this , you can help with this , you can help us explore , you can help us invent . "
You can make a new word right now .
English has no age limit .
Go ahead , start making words today , send them to me , and I will put them in my online dictionary , Wordnik .
Thank you so much .

Mundano : Pimp my ... trash cart ?
In Brazil , " catadores " collect junk and recyclables . But while they provide a vital service that benefits all , they are nearly invisible as they roam the streets . Enter graffiti artist Mundano , a TED Fellow . In a spirited talk , he describes his project " Pimp My Carroça , " which has transformed these heroic workers ' carts into things of beauty and infused them with a sense of humor . It 's a movement that is going global .
Our world has many superheroes .
But they have the worst of all superpowers : invisibility .
For example , the catadores , workers who collect recyclable materials for a living .
Catadores emerged from social inequality , unemployment , and the abundance of solid waste from the deficiency of the waste collection system .
Catadores provide a heavy , honest and essential work that benefits the entire population . But they are not acknowledged for it .
Here in Brazil , they collect 90 percent of all the waste that 's actually recycled .
Most of the catadores work independently , picking waste from the streets and selling to junk yards at very low prices .
They may collect over 300 kilos in their bags , shopping carts , bicycles and carroças .
Carroças are carts built from wood or metal and found in several streets in Brazil , much like graffiti and street art .
And this is how I first met these marginalized superheroes .
I am a graffiti artist and activist and my art is social , environmental and political in nature .
In 2007 , I took my work beyond walls and onto the carroças , as a new urban support for my message .
But at this time , giving voice to the catadores .
By adding art and humor to the cause , it became more appealing , which helped call attention to the catadores and improve their self-esteem .
And also , they are famous now on the streets , on mass media and social .
So , the thing is , I plunged into this universe and have not stopped working since .
I have painted over 200 carroças in many cities and have been invited to do exhibitions and trips worldwide .
And then I realized that catadores , in their invisibility , are not exclusive to Brazil .
I met them in Argentina , Chile , Bolivia , South Africa , Turkey and even in developed countries such as the United States and Japan .
And this was when I realized that I needed to have more people join the cause because it 's a big challenge .
And then , I created a collaborative movement called Pimp My Carroça -- -- which is a large crowdfunded event .
Thank you .
So Pimp My Carroça is a large crowdfunded event to help catadores and their carroças .
Catadores are assisted by well-being professionals and healthcare , like physicians , dentists , podiatrists , hair stylists , massage therapists and much more .
But also , they also receive safety shirts , gloves , raincoats and eyeglasses to see in high-definition the city , while their carroças are renovated by our incredible volunteers .
And then they receive safety items , too : reflective tapes , horns and mirrors .
Then , finally , painted by a street artist and become part of part of this huge , amazing mobile art exhibition .
Pimp My Carroça took to the streets of São Paulo , Rio de Janeiro and Curitiba .
But to meet the demand in other cities , including outside of Brazil , we have created Pimpx , which is inspired by TEDx , and it 's a simplified , do-it-yourself , crowdfunded edition of Pimp My Carroça .
So now everybody can join .
In two years , over 170 catadores , 800 volunteers and 200 street artists and more than 1,000 donors have been involved in the Pimp My Carroça movement , whose actions have even been used in teaching recycling at a local school .
So catadores are leaving invisibility behind and becoming increasingly respected and valued .
Because of their pimped carroças , they are able to fight back to prejudice , increase their income and their interaction with society .
So now , I 'd like to challenge you to start looking at and acknowledging the catadores and other invisible superheroes from your city .
Try to see the world as one , without boundaries or frontiers .
Believe it or not , there are over 20 million catadores worldwide .
So next time you see one , recognize them as a vital part of our society .
Muito orbigado , thank you .
Carol Dweck : The power of believing that you can improve
Carol Dweck researches " growth mindset " — the idea that we can grow our brain 's capacity to learn and to solve problems . In this talk , she describes two ways to think about a problem that 's slightly too hard for you to solve . Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet ? A great introduction to this influential field .
The power of yet .
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate , and if they didn 't pass a course , they got the grade " Not Yet . "
And I thought that was fantastic , because if you get a failing grade , you think , I 'm nothing , I 'm nowhere .
But if you get the grade " Not Yet " you understand that you 're on a learning curve .
It gives you a path into the future .
" Not Yet " also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career , a real turning point .
I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty , so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them .
Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way .
They said things like , " I love a challenge , " or , " You know , I was hoping this would be informative . "
They understood that their abilities could be developed .
They had what I call a growth mindset .
But other students felt it was tragic , catastrophic .
From their more fixed mindset perspective , their intelligence had been up for judgment and they failed .
Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet , they were gripped in the tyranny of now .
So what do they do next ?
In one study , they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test .
In another study , after a failure , they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves .
And in study after study , they have run from difficulty .
Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error .
On the left , you see the fixed mindset students .
There 's hardly any activity .
They run from the error .
They don 't engage with it .
But on the right , you have the students with the growth mindset , the idea that abilities can be developed .
They engage deeply .
Their brain is on fire with yet .
They engage deeply .
They process the error .
They learn from it and they correct it .
How are we raising our children ?
Are we raising them for now instead of yet ?
Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting A 's ?
Are we raising kids who don 't know how to dream big dreams ?
Their biggest goal is getting the next A or the next test score ?
And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives ?
Maybe , because employers are coming to me and saying , we have already raised a generation of young workers who can 't get through the day without an award .
So what can we do ?
How can we build that bridge to yet ?
Here are some things we can do .
First of all , we can praise wisely , not praising intelligence or talent .
That has failed .
Don 't do that anymore .
But praising the process that kids engage in : their effort , their strategies , their focus , their perseverance , their improvement .
This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient .
There are other ways to reward yet .
We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet .
In this game , students were rewarded for effort , strategy and progress .
The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right right now , but this game rewarded process .
And we got more effort , more strategies , more engagement over longer periods of time , and more perseverance when they hit really , really hard problems .
Just the words " yet " or " not yet , " we 're finding , give kids greater confidence , give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence .
And we can actually change students ' mindsets .
In one study , we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult , the neurons in their brain can form new , stronger connections , and over time they can get smarter .
Look what happened : in this study , students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition , but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades .
We have shown this now , this kind of improvement , with thousands and thousands of kids , especially struggling students .
So let 's talk about equality .
In our country , there are groups of students who chronically underperform , for example , children in inner cities , or children on Native American reservations .
And they 've done so poorly for so long that many people think it 's inevitable .
But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet , equality happens .
And here are just a few examples .
In one year , a kindergarten class in Harlem , New York scored in the 95th percentile on the National Achievement Test .
Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school .
In one year , fourth grade students in the South Bronx , way behind , became the number one fourth grade class in the state of New York on the state math test .
In a year to a year and a half , Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top , and that district included affluent sections of Seattle .
So the native kids outdid the Microsoft kids .
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed .
Before , effort and difficulty made them feel dumb , made them feel like giving up , but now , effort and difficulty , that 's when their neurons are making new connections , stronger connections .
That 's when they 're getting smarter .
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy .
He said , " Dear Professor Dweck , I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research , and that 's why I decided to put it into practice .
I put more effort into my schoolwork , into my relationship with my family , and into my relationship with kids at school , and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas .
I now realize I 've wasted most of my life . "
Let 's not waste any more lives , because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth , it becomes a basic human right for children , all children , to live in places that create that growth , to live in places filled with yet .
Thank you .

Dave Troy : Social maps that reveal a city 's intersections — and separations
Every city has its neighborhoods , cliques and clubs , the hidden lines that join and divide people in the same town . What can we learn about cities by looking at what people share online ? Starting with his own home town of Baltimore , Dave Troy has been visualizing what the tweets of city dwellers reveal about who lives there , who they talk to — and who they don 't .
When we think about mapping cities , we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings , and the settlement narrative that led to their creation , or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer , but there 's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made .
Today , I want to show you a new kind of map . This is not a geographic map .
This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore , Maryland , and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person , each line represents a relationship between those people , and each color represents a community within the network .
Now , I 'm here on the green side , down on the far right where the geeks are , and TEDx also is down on the far right . Now , on the other side of the network , you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are , the green part of the network we call Smalltimore , for those of us that inhabit it , because it seems as though we 're living in a very small town .
We see the same people over and over again , but that 's because we 're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city .
On the other end of the network , you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC / Maryland / Virginia area over , say , the Baltimore city designation proper .
But in the middle , you see that there 's something that connects the two communities together , and that 's sports .
We have the Baltimore Orioles , the Baltimore Ravens football team , Michael Phelps , the Olympian .
Under Armour , you may have heard of , is a Baltimore company , and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network .
Let 's take a look at San Francisco .
You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco .
On the one hand , you do have the media , politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities , but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network , and there 's even a group that 's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees , next to the geeks , in between the gamers and the geeks , at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum .
So you can see , though , that the tensions that we 've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real , and you can actually see that documented here .
You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well , the arts community , the music community .
And so it leads to things like this .
[ " Evict Twitter " ] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago , and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco , and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this .
Let 's take a look at Rio de Janeiro .
I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio , and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything 's really kind of mixed up .
It 's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not .
You still have the lobe of people involved with government , newspapers , politics , columnists .
TEDxRio is down in the lower right , right next to bloggers and writers .
But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music .
Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here .
Other boy bands , country singers , gospel music , funk and rap and stand-up comedy , and there 's even a whole section around drugs and jokes .
How cool is that ?
And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here .
So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music , but it 's represented in a very different way , and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural , musically diverse city .
So we have all this data .
It 's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now , maybe even richer than any data set that we 've ever had before .
So what can we do with it ?
Well , I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct .
It 's something that we choose to do , and we could choose not to do it , and if you kind of think about it , what we 're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria , and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart .
Well maybe it 's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit .
The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity .
We 've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here -- only looking at race doesn 't really contribute to our development of diversity .
So if we 're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems , we need to start to think about diversity in a new way .
And lastly , we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way , and I believe that if we have that capability , we may even bear some responsibility to do so .
So what is a city ?
I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings , but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there , and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we 'd like to have .
Thank you .

Catherine Crump : The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you
A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go , with whom , and when : the automatic license plate reader . These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals , but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows , the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over .
The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson , Missouri , in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown , underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment , designed for the battlefield , are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States .
Although much tougher to observe , this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment .
NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible .
Location information can be very sensitive .
If you drive your car around the United States , it can reveal if you go to a therapist , attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting , if you go to church or if you don 't go to church .
And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else , the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact .
This information used to be private .
Thanks to modern technology , the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors .
And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information .
One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader .
If you haven 't seen one , it 's probably because you didn 't know what to look for -- they 're everywhere . Mounted on roads or on police cars , Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing .
But more than that , increasingly , local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing , but of every plate that passes them by , resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone .
Did you know this was happening ?
When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him , this is what they got : in addition to the date , time and location , the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with .
The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway .
The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life .
And if you drive a car in the United States , I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life .
Mike hasn 't done anything wrong .
Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information ?
The reason it 's happening is because , as the cost of storing this data has plummeted , the police departments simply hang on to it , just in case it could be useful someday .
The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it .
At the same time , the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data , and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits , showing where Americans have traveled .
This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration , which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this , is one of several that reveal the existence of this database .
Meanwhile , in New York City , the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending .
The uses and abuses of this technology aren 't limited to the United States .
In the U.K. , the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees .
License plate readers aren 't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today .
Through a technique known as a cell tower dump , law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time , the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people .
Also , using a device known as a StingRay , law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people 's houses to identify the cell phones located there .
And if they don 't know which house to target , they 've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods .
Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment , so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear .
Just because you don 't see it , doesn 't mean it 's not there .
The question is , what should we do about this ?
I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat .
History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data , tracking the movements of innocent people , it gets abused , maybe for blackmail , maybe for political advantage , or maybe for simple voyeurism .
Fortunately , there are steps we can take .
Local police departments can be governed by the city councils , which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward .
Thank you .
.
Thomas Hellum : The world 's most boring television ... and why it 's hilariously addictive
You 've heard about slow food . Now here 's slow ... TV ? In this very funny talk , Norwegian television producer Thomas Hellum shares how he and his team began to broadcast long , boring events , often live -- and found a rapt audience . Shows include a 7-hour train journey , an 18-hour fishing expedition and a 5.5-day ferry voyage along the coast of Norway . The results are both beautiful and fascinating . Really .
Thank you .
I have only got 18 minutes to explain something that lasts for hours and days , so I 'd better get started .
Let 's start with a clip from Al Jazeera 's Listening Post .
Richard Gizbert : Norway is a country that gets relatively little media coverage .
Even the elections this past week passed without much drama .
And that 's the Norwegian media in a nutshell : not much drama .
A few years back , Norway 's public TV channel NRK decided to broadcast live coverage of a seven-hour train ride -- seven hours of simple footage , a train rolling down the tracks .
Norwegians , more than a million of them according to the ratings , loved it .
A new kind of reality TV show was born , and it goes against all the rules of TV engagement .
There is no story line , no script , no drama , no climax , and it 's called Slow TV .
For the past two months , Norwegians have been watching a cruise ship 's journey up the coast , and there 's a lot of fog on that coast .
Executives at Norway 's National Broadcasting Service are now considering broadcasting a night of knitting nationwide .
On the surface , it sounds boring , because it is , but something about this TV experiment has gripped Norwegians .
So we sent the Listening Post 's Marcela Pizarro to Oslo to find out what it is , but first a warning : Viewers may find some of the images in the following report disappointing .
Thomas Hellum : And then follows an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera about some strange TV programs in little Norway .
Al Jazeera . CNN . How did we get there ?
We have to go back to 2009 , when one of my colleagues got a great idea .
Where do you get your ideas ?
In the lunchroom .
So he said , why don 't we make a radio program marking the day of the German invasion of Norway in 1940 .
We tell the story at the exact time during the night .
Wow . Brilliant idea , except this was just a couple of weeks before the invasion day .
So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed what other stories can you tell as they evolve ?
What other things take a really long time ?
So one of us came up with a train .
The Bergen Railway had its 100-year anniversary that year It goes from western Norway to eastern Norway , and it takes exactly the same time as it did 40 years ago , over seven hours . So we caught our commissioning editors in Oslo , and we said , we want to make a documentary about the Bergen Railway , and we want to make it in full length , and the answer was , " Yes , but how long will the program be ? "
" Oh , " we said , " full length . "
" Yes , but we mean the program . "
And back and forth .
Luckily for us , they met us with laughter , very , very good laughter , so one bright day in September , we started a program that we thought should be seven hours and four minutes .
Actually , it turned out to be seven hours and 14 minutes due to a signal failure at the last station .
We had four cameras , three of them pointing out to the beautiful nature .
I 'm talking to the guests , some information .
Train announcement : We will arrive at Haugastøl Station .
TH : And that 's about it , but of course , also the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity to do some archives .
Narrator [ in Norwegian ] : Then a bit of flirting while the food is digested .
The last downhill stretch before we reach our destination .
We pass Mjølfjell Station .
Then a new tunnel .
TH : And now we thought , yes , we have a brilliant program .
It will fit for the 2,000 train spotters in Norway .
We brought it on air in November 2009 .
But no , this was far more attractive .
This is the five biggest TV channels in Norway on a normal Friday , and if you look at NRK2 over here , look what happened when they put on the Bergen Railway show : 1.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program .
And another funny thing : when the host on our main channel , after they have good news for you , she said , " And on our second channel , the train has now nearly reached Myrdal station . "
Thousands of people just jumped on the train on our second channel like this . This was also a huge success in terms of social media .
It was so nice to see all the thousands of Facebook and Twitter users discussing the same view , talking to each other as if they were on the same train together .
And especially , I like this one . It 's a 76-year-old man .
He 's watched all the program , and at the end station , he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage , and his head hit the curtain rod , and he realized he is in his own living room .
So that 's strong and living TV .
Four hundred and thirty-six minute by minute on a Friday night , and during that first night , the first Twitter message came : Why be a chicken ?
Why stop at 436 when you can expand that to 8,040 , minute by minute , and do the iconic journey in Norway , the coastal ship journey Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes , almost 3,000 kilometers , covering most of our coast .
It has 120-year-old , very interesting history , and literally takes part in life and death along the coast .
So just a week after the Bergen Railway , we called the Hurtigruten company and we started planning for our next show .
We wanted to do something different .
The Bergen Railway was a recorded program .
So when we sat in our editing room , we watched this picture -- it 's all Ål Station -- we saw this journalist .
We had called him , we had spoken to him , and when we left the station , he took this picture of us and he waved to the camera , and we thought , what if more people knew that we were on board that train ?
Would more people show up ?
What would it look like ?
So we decided our next project , it should be live .
We wanted this picture of us on the fjord and on the screen at the same time .
So this is not the first time NRK had been on board a ship .
This is back in 1964 , when the technical managers have suits and ties and NRK rolled all its equipment on board a ship , and 200 meters out of the shore , transmitting the signal back , and in the machine room , they talked to the machine guy , and on the deck , they have splendid entertainment .
So being on a ship , it 's not the first time .
But five and a half days in a row , and live , we wanted some help .
And we asked our viewers out there , what do you want to see ?
What do you want us to film ? How do you want this to look ?
Do you want us to make a website ? What do you want on it ?
And we got some answers from you out there , and it helped us a very lot to build the program .
So in June 2011 , 23 of us went on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship and we set off .
I have some really strong memories from that week , and it 's all about people .
This guy , for instance , he 's head of research at the University in Tromsø And I will show you a piece of cloth , this one .
It 's the other strong memory .
It belongs to a guy called Erik Hansen .
And it 's people like those two who took a firm grip of our program , and together with thousands of others along the route , they made the program what it became .
They made all the stories .
This is Karl . He 's in the ninth grade .
It says , " I will be a little late for school tomorrow . "
He was supposed to be in the school at 8 a.m.
He came at 9 a.m. , and he didn 't get a note from his teacher , because the teacher had watched the program .
How did we do this ?
Yes , we took a conference room on board the Hurtigruten .
We turned it into a complete TV control room .
We made it all work , of course , and then we took along 11 cameras .
This is one of them .
This is my sketch from February , and when you give this sketch to professional people in the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK , you get some cool stuff back .
And with some very creative solutions .
Narrator [ in Norwegian ] : Run it up and down .
This is Norway 's most important drill right now .
It regulates the height of a bow camera in NRK 's live production , one of 11 that capture great shots from the MS Nord-Norge .
Eight wires keep the camera stable .
Cameraman : I work on different camera solutions .
They 're just tools used in a different context .
TH : Another camera is this one . It 's normally used for sports .
It made it possible for us to take close-up pictures of people 100 kilomteres away , like this one . People called us and asked , how is this man doing ?
He 's doing fine . Everything went well .
We also could take pictures of people waving at us , people along the route , thousands of them , and they all had a phone in their hand .
And when you take a picture of them , and they get the message , " Now we are on TV , dad , " they start waving back .
This was waving TV for five and a half days , and people get so extremely happy when they can send a warm message to their loved ones .
It was also a great success on social media .
On the last day , we met Her Majesty the Queen of Norway , and Twitter couldn 't quite handle it .
And we also , on the web , during this week we streamed more than 100 years of video to 148 nations , and the websites are still there and they will be forever , actually , because Hurtigruten was selected to be part of the Norwegian UNESCO list of documents , and it 's also in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest documentary ever .
Thank you .
But it 's a long program , so some watched part of it , like the Prime Minister .
Some watched a little bit more .
It says , " I haven 't used my bed for five days . "
And he 's 82 years old , and he hardly slept .
He kept watching because something might happen , though it probably won 't . This is the number of viewers along the route .
You can see the famous Trollfjord and a day after , all-time high for NRK2 .
If you see the four biggest channels in Norway during June 2011 , they will look like this , and as a TV producer , it 's a pleasure to put Hurtigruten on top of it .
It looks like this : 3.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program , and we are only five million here .
Even the passengers on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship -- -- they chose to watched the telly instead of turning 90 degrees and watching out the window .
So we were allowed to be part of people 's living room with this strange TV program , with music , nature , people .
And Slow TV was now a buzzword , and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about .
So we could either take something long and make it a topic , like with the railway and the Hurtigruten , or we could take a topic and make it long .
This is the last project . It 's the peep show .
It 's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen , actually 87 days on the web .
We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing .
It actually took three hours before we got the first fish , and that 's quite slow .
We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal , and we have made another train ride with the northern railway , and because this we couldn 't do live , we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way .
So our next project got us some attention outside Norway .
This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central .
Stephen Colbert : I 've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called " National Firewood Night , " which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods , and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace . It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows , like " So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry " and " The Amazing Glacier Race . "
And get this , almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in , 20 percent .
TH : So , when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting , why not knitting ?
So on our next project , we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater , and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show , he liked that .
Jimmy Kimmel : Even the people on the show are falling asleep , and after all that , the knitters actually failed to break the world record .
They did not succeed , but remember the old Norwegian saying , it 's not whether you win or lose that counts .
In fact , nothing counts , and death is coming for us all .
TH : Exactly . So why does this stand out ?
This is so completely different to other TV programming .
We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time , and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there , actually being on the train , on the boat , and knitting together with others , and the reason I think why they 're doing that is because we don 't edit the timeline .
It 's important that we don 't edit the timeline , and it 's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to , that the viewer can relate to , and that somehow has a root in our culture .
This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks .
And of course this is a lot of planning , this is a lot of logistics .
So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer , but more important is what you don 't plan .
You don 't plan what 's going to happen .
You have to just take your cameras with you .
It 's like a sports event . You rig them and you see what 's happening .
So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten , 134 hours , just written on one page .
We didn 't know anything more when we left Bergen .
So you have to let the viewers make the stories themselves , and I 'll give you an example of that . This is from last summer , and as a TV producer , it 's a nice picture , but now you can cut to the next one .
But this is Slow TV , so you have to keep this picture until it really starts hurting your stomach , and then you keep it a little bit longer , and when you keep it that long , I 'm sure some of you now have noticed the cow .
Some of you have seen the flag .
Some of you start wondering , is the farmer at home ?
Has he left ? Are you watching the cow ?
And where is that cow going ?
So my point is , the longer you keep a picture like this , and we kept it for 10 minutes , you start making the stories in your own head .
That 's Slow TV .
So we think that Slow TV is one nice way of telling a TV story , and we think that we can continue doing it , not too often , once or twice a year , so we keep the feeling of an event , and we also think that the good Slow TV idea , that 's the idea when people say , " Oh no , you can 't put that on TV . "
When people smile , it might be a very good slow idea , so after all , life is best when it 's a bit strange .
Thank you .

Anastasia Taylor-Lind : Fighters and mourners of the Ukrainian revolution
" Men fight wars , and women mourn them , " says documentary photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind . With stark , arresting images from the Maidan protests in Ukraine , the TED Fellow shows us intimate faces from the revolution . A grim and beautiful talk .
When I arrived in Kiev , on February 1 this year , Independence Square was under siege , surrounded by police loyal to the government .
The protesters who occupied Maidan , as the square is known , prepared for battle , stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor .
The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013 , after the president of Ukraine , Viktor Yanukovych , rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia .
In response , tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance .
As the months passed , confrontations between police and civilians intensified .
I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street .
There , I photographed the fighters against a black curtain , a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire , ice and smoke .
In order to tell the individual human stories here , I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media .
What I was witnessing was not only news , but also history .
With this realization , I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine .
Oleg , Vasiliy and Maxim were all ordinary men , with ordinary lives from ordinary towns .
But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary .
I say the word " costume " because these were not clothes that had been issued or coordinated by anyone .
They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment , irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police .
I became interested in the way they were choosing to represent themselves , this outward expression of masculinity , the ideal of the warrior .
I worked slowly , using an analog film camera with a manual focusing loop and a handheld light meter .
The process is old-fashioned .
It gives me time to speak with each person and to look at them , in silence , while they look back at me .
Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on February 20 , which became known as Bloody Thursday .
Snipers , loyal to the government , started firing on the civilians and protesters on Institutskaya Street .
Many were killed in a very short space of time .
The reception of the Hotel Ukraine became a makeshift morgue .
There were lines of bodies laid in the street .
And there was blood all over the pavements .
The following day , President Yanukovych fled Ukraine .
In all , three months of protests resulted in more than 120 confirmed dead and many more missing .
History unfolded quickly , but celebration remained elusive in Maidan .
As the days passed in Kiev 's central square , streams of armed fighters were joined by tens of thousands of ordinary people , filling the streets in an act of collective mourning .
Many were women who often carried flowers that they had brought to lay as marks of respect for the dead .
They came day after day and they covered the square with millions of flowers .
Sadness enveloped Maidan .
It was quiet and I could hear the birds singing .
I hadn 't heard that before .
I stopped women as they approached the barricades to lay their tributes and asked to make their picture .
Most women cried when I photographed them .
On the first day , my fixer , Emine , and I cried with almost every woman who visited our studio .
There had been such a noticeable absence of women up until that point .
And the color of their pastel coats , their shiny handbags , and the bunches of red carnations , white tulips and yellow roses that they carried jarred with the blackened square and the blackened men who were encamped there .
It is clear to me that these two sets of pictures don 't make much sense without the other .
They are about men and women and the way we are -- not the way we look , but the way we are .
They speak about different gender roles in conflict , not only in Maidan , and not only in Ukraine .
Men fight most wars and women mourn them .
If the men showed the ideal of the warrior , then the women showed the implications of such violence .
When I made these pictures , I believed that I was documenting the end of violent events in Ukraine .
But now I understand that it is a record of the beginning .
Today , the death toll stands around 3,000 , while hundreds of thousands have been displaced .
I was in Ukraine again six weeks ago .
In Maidan , the barricades have been dismantled , and the paving stones which were used as weapons during the protests replaced , so that traffic flows freely through the center of the square .
The fighters , the women and the flowers are gone .
A huge billboard depicting geese flying over a wheat field covers the burned-out shell of the trade union 's building " Glory to Ukraine .
Glory to heroes . "
Thank you .
Jose Miguel Sokoloff : How Christmas lights helped guerrillas put down their guns
" In my lifetime , I have never lived one day of peace in my country , " says Jose Miguel Sokoloff . This ad executive from Colombia saw a chance to help guerrilla fighters choose to come home -- with smart marketing . He shares how some creative , welcoming messages have helped thousands of guerrillas decide to put down their weapons -- and the key insights behind these surprising tactics .
So , I thought a lot about the first word I 'd say today , and I decided to say " Colombia . "
And the reason , I don 't know how many of you have visited Colombia , but Colombia is just north of the border with Brazil .
It 's a beautiful country with extraordinary people , like me and others -- -- and it 's populated with incredible fauna , flora .
It 's got water ; it 's got everything to be the perfect place .
But we have a few problems .
You may have heard of some of them .
We have the oldest standing guerrilla in the world .
It 's been around for over 50 years , which means that in my lifetime , I have never lived one day of peace in my country .
This guerrilla -- and the main group is the FARC guerrillas , Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- they have financed their war by kidnapping , by extortion , by getting into the drug trade , by illegal mining .
There has been terrorism . There have been random bombs .
So it 's not good . It 's not really good .
And if you look at the human cost of this war over 50 years , we have had more than 5.7 million displaced population .
It 's one of the biggest displaced populations in the world , and this conflict has cost over 220,000 lives .
So it 's a little bit like the Bolívar wars again .
It 's a lot of people who have died unnecessarily .
We are now in the middle of peace talks , and we 've been trying to help resolve this problem peacefully , and as part of that , we decided to try something completely lateral and different : Christmas lights .
So Christmas lights , and you 're saying , what the hell is this guy going to talk about ?
I am going to talk about gigantic trees that we put in nine strategic pathways in the jungle covered with Christmas lights .
These trees helped us demobilize 331 guerrillas , roughly five percent of the guerrilla force at the time .
These trees were lit up at night , and they had a sign beside them that said , " If Christmas can come to the jungle , you can come home .
Demobilize .
At Christmas , everything is possible . "
So how do we know these trees worked ?
Well , we got 331 , which is okay , but we also know that not a lot of guerrillas saw them , but we know that a lot of guerrillas heard about them , and we know this because we are constantly talking to demobilized guerrillas .
So let me take you back four years before the trees .
Four years before the trees , we were approached by the government to help them come up with a communications strategy to get as many guerrillas as we could out of the jungle .
The government had a military strategy , it had a legal strategy , it had a political strategy , but it said , " We don 't really have a communications strategy , and it probably would be a good thing to have , " so we decided to immediately jump into this , because it is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the conflict with the things that we do , with the tools that we have .
But we didn 't know very much about it .
We didn 't understand in Colombia , if you live in the cities , you 're very far away from where the war is actually happening , so you don 't really understand it , and we asked the government to give us access to as many demobilized guerrillas as possible .
And we talked to about 60 of them before we felt we fully understood the problem .
We talked about -- they told us why they had joined the guerrillas , why the left the guerrillas , what their dreams were , what their frustrations were , and from those conversations came the underlying insight that has guided this whole campaign , which is that guerrillas are as much prisoners of their organizations as the people they hold hostage .
And at the beginning , we were so touched by these stories , we were so amazed by these stories , that we thought that maybe the best way to talk to the guerrillas was to have them talk to themselves , so we recorded about a hundred different stories during the first year , and we put them on the radio and television so that the guerrillas in the jungle could hear stories , their stories , or stories similar to theirs , and when they heard them , they decided to go out .
I want to tell you one of these stories .
This person you see here is Giovanni Andres .
Giovanni Andres is 25 when we took that picture .
He had been seven years in the guerrilla , and he had demobilized very recently .
His story is the following : He was recruited when he was 17 , and sometime later , in his squadron , if you will , this beautiful girl was recruited , and they fell in love .
Their conversations were about what their family was going to be like , what their kids ' names would be , how their life would be when they left the guerrilla .
But it turns out that love is very strictly forbidden in the lower ranks of the guerrilla , so their romance was discovered and they were separated .
He was sent very far away , and she was left behind .
She was very familiar with the territory , so one night , when she was on guard , she just left , and she went to the army , she demobilized , and she was one of the persons that we had the fortune to talk to , and we were really touched by this story , so we made a radio spot , and it turns out , by chance , that far away , many , many kilometers north , he heard her on the radio , and when he heard her on the radio , he said , " What am I doing here ?
She had the balls to get out . I need to do the same thing . "
And he did .
He walked for two days and two nights , and he risked his life and he got out , and the only thing he wanted was to see her .
The only thing that was in his mind was to see her .
The story was , they did meet .
I know you 're wondering if they did meet .
They did meet .
She had been recruited when she was 15 , and she left when she was 17 , so there were a lot of other complications , but they did eventually meet .
I don 't know if they 're together now , but I can find out . But what I can tell you is that our radio strategy was working .
The problem is that it was working in the lower ranks of the guerrilla .
It was not working with the commanders , the people that are more difficult to replace , because you can easily recruit but you can 't get the older commanders .
So we thought , well , we 'll use the same strategy .
We 'll have commanders talking to commanders .
And we even went as far as asking ex-commanders of the guerrilla to fly on helicopters with microphones telling the people that used to fight with them , " There is a better life out there , " " I 'm doing good , " " This is not worth it , " etc .
But , as you can all imagine , it was very easy to counteract , because what was the guerrilla going to say ?
" Yeah , right , if he doesn 't do that , he 's going to get killed . "
So it was easy , so we were suddenly left with nothing , because the guerrilla were spreading the word that all of those things are done because if they don 't do it , they 're in danger .
And somebody , some brilliant person in our team , came back and said , " You know what I noticed ?
I noticed that around Christmastime , there have been peaks of demobilization since this war has started . "
And that was incredible , because that led us to think that we needed to talk to the human being and not to the soldier .
We needed to step away from talking from government to army , from army to army , and we needed to talk about the universal values , and we needed to talk about humanity .
And that was when the Christmas tree happened .
This picture that I have here , you see this is the planning of the Christmas trees , and that man you see there with the three stars , he 's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez .
Captain Valdez was the first high-ranking official to give us the helicopters and the support we needed to put these Christmas trees up , and he said in that meeting something that I will never forget .
He said , " I want to do this because being generous makes me stronger , makes my men feel stronger . "
And I get very emotional when I remember him because he was killed later in combat and we really miss him , but I wanted you all to see him , because he was really , really important .
He gave us all the support to put up the first Christmas trees .
What happened later is that the guerrillas who came out during the Christmas tree operation and all of that said , " That 's really good , Christmas trees are really cool , but you know what ? We really don 't walk anymore .
We use rivers . "
So rivers are the highways of the jungle , and this is something we learned , and most of the recruiting was being done in and around the river villages .
So we went to these river villages , and we asked the people , and probably some of them were direct acquaintances of the guerrillas .
We asked them , " Can you send guerrillas a message ? "
We collected over 6,000 messages .
Some of them were notes saying , get out .
Some of them were toys . Some of them were candy .
Even people took off their jewelry , their little crosses and religious things , and put them in these floating balls that we sent down the rivers so that they could be picked up at night .
And we sent thousands of these down the rivers , and then picked them up later if they weren 't .
But lots of them were picked up .
This generated , on average , a demobilization every six hours , so this was incredible and it was about : Come home at Christmas .
Then came the peace process , and when the peace process started , the whole mindset of the guerrilla changed .
And it changed because it makes you think , " Well , if there 's a peace process , this is probably going to be over .
At some point I 'm going to get out . "
And their fears completely changed , and their fears were not about , " Am I going to get killed ? "
Their fears were , " Am I going to be rejected ?
When I get out of this , am I going to be rejected ? "
So the past Christmas , what we did was we asked -- we found 27 mothers of guerrillas , and we asked them to give us pictures of their children , when they only could recognize themselves , so as not to put their lives in danger , and we asked them to give the most motherly message you can get , which is , " Before you were a guerrilla , you were my child , so come home , I 'm waiting for you . "
You can see the pictures here . I 'll show you a couple .
Thank you .
And these pictures were placed in many different places , and a lot of them came back , and it was really , really beautiful .
And then we decided to work with society .
So we did mothers around Christmastime .
Now let 's talk about the rest of the people .
And you may be aware of this or not , but there was a World Cup this year , and Colombia played really well , and it was a unifying moment for Colombia .
And what we did was tell the guerrillas , " Come , get out of the jungle . We 're saving a place for you . "
So this was television , this was all different types of media saying , " We are saving a place for you . "
The soldier here in the commercial says , " I 'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup . "
Ex-football players , radio announcers , everybody was saving a place for the guerrilla .
So since we started this work a little over eight years ago , 17,000 guerrillas have demobilized .
I do not -- Thank you .
I don 't want to say in any way that it only has to do with what we do , but what I do know is that our work and the work that we do may have helped a lot of them start thinking about demobilization , and it may have helped a lot of them take the final decision .
If that is true , advertising is still one of the most powerful tools of change that we have available .
And I speak not only my behalf , but on behalf of all the colleagues I see here who work in advertising , and of all the team that has worked with me to do this , that if you want to change the world , or if you want to achieve peace , please call us .
We 'd love to help .
Thank you .

Rosie King : How autism freed me to be myself
" People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with a specific label , " says 16-year-old Rosie King , who is bold , brash and autistic . She wants to know : Why is everyone so worried about being normal ? She sounds a clarion call for every kid , parent , teacher and person to celebrate uniqueness . It 's a soaring testament to the potential of human diversity .
I haven 't told many people this , but in my head , I 've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time .
I am also autistic .
People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions , but in reality , it 's a whole variation as to what we 're like .
For instance , my little brother , he 's very severely autistic .
He 's nonverbal . He can 't talk at all .
But I love to talk .
People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else , but I know so many autistic people who love being creative .
But that is a stereotype , and the stereotypes of things are often , if not always , wrong .
For instance , a lot of people think autism and think " Rain Man " immediately .
That 's the common belief , that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman , and that 's not true .
But that 's not just with autistic people , either .
I 've seen it with LGBTQ people , with women , with POC people .
People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with really specific labels .
This is something that actually happened to me in real life : I googled " autistic people are ... "
and it comes up with suggestions as to what you 're going to type .
I googled " autistic people are ... "
and the top result was " demons . "
That is the first thing that people think when they think autism .
They know .
One of the things I can do because I 'm autistic — it 's an ability rather than a disability — is I 've got a very , very vivid imagination .
Let me explain it to you a bit .
It 's like I 'm walking in two worlds most of the time .
There 's the real world , the world that we all share , and there 's the world in my mind , and the world in my mind is often so much more real than the real world .
Like , it 's very easy for me to let my mind loose because I don 't try and fit myself into a tiny little box .
That 's one of the best things about being autistic .
You don 't have the urge to do that .
You find what you want to do , you find a way to do it , and you get on with it .
If I was trying to fit myself into a box , I wouldn 't be here , I wouldn 't have achieved half the things that I have now .
There are problems , though .
There are problems with being autistic , and there are problems with having too much imagination .
School can be a problem in general , but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in which you are not in that lesson , that adds to your list of problems .
Also , when my imagination takes hold , my body takes on a life of its own .
When something very exciting happens in my inner world , I 've just got to run .
I 've got to rock backwards and forwards , or sometimes scream .
This gives me so much energy , and I 've got to have an outlet for all that energy .
But I 've done that ever since I was a child , ever since I was a tiny little girl .
And my parents thought it was cute , so they didn 't bring it up , but when I got into school , they didn 't really agree that it was cute .
It can be that people don 't want to be friends with the girl that starts screaming in an algebra lesson .
And this doesn 't normally happen in this day and age , but it can be that people don 't want to be friends with the autistic girl .
It can be that people don 't want to associate with anyone who won 't or can 't fit themselves into a box that 's labeled normal .
But that 's fine with me , because it sorts the wheat from the chaff , and I can find which people are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends .
But if you think about it , what is normal ?
What does it mean ?
Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received .
" Wow , you are really normal . "
But compliments are , " you are extraordinary " or " you step outside the box . "
It 's " you 're amazing . "
So if people want to be these things , why are so many people striving to be normal ?
Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold ?
People are so afraid of variety that they try and force everyone , even people who don 't want to or can 't , to become normal .
There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and make them this " normal , " and that 's terrifying that people would do that in this day and age .
All in all , I wouldn 't trade my autism and my imagination for the world .
Because I am autistic , I 've presented documentaries to the BBC , I 'm in the midst of writing a book , I 'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best things that I 've achieved , that I consider to have achieved , is I 've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister , who as I 've said are nonverbal . They can 't speak .
And people would often write off someone who 's nonverbal , but that 's silly , because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for .
They 're just the best , and I love them so much and I care about them more than anything else .
I 'm going to leave you with one question : If we can 't get inside the person 's minds , no matter if they 're autistic or not , instead of punishing anything that strays from normal , why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination ?
Thank you .

Joe Landolina : This gel can make you stop bleeding instantly
Forget stitches -- there 's a better way to close wounds . In this talk , TED Fellow Joe Landolina talks about his invention -- a medical gel that can instantly stop traumatic bleeding without the need to apply pressure .
I want you guys to imagine that you 're a soldier running through the battlefield .
Now , you 're shot in the leg with a bullet , which severs your femoral artery .
Now , this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes .
Unfortunately , by the time that a medic actually gets to you , what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more , with the application of pressure , to stop that type of bleed .
Now , this problem is not only a huge problem for the military , but it 's also a huge problem that 's epidemic throughout the entire medical field , which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body ?
So now , what I 've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials , which are actually materials that will work with the body , helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally .
So now , before we do this , we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work .
So now , everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells .
So the cell is the most basic unit of life .
But not many people know what else .
But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers , proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix .
So now , the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place , provides structure for your tissues , but it also gives the cells a home .
It allows them to feel what they 're doing , where they are , and tells them how to act and how to behave .
And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body .
So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver , and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary , so it 's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix , which is exactly what we 're trying to do .
So now , for example , think of the rainforest .
You have the canopy , you have the understory , and you have the forest floor .
Now , all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants , and different animals call them home .
So just like that , the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions .
On top of that , the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing , so if you imagine cutting the body , you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again , and a scar , in fact , is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix .
So now , behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix .
So as you see , your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue , the extracellular matrix changes .
So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix , which means that it doesn 't fit in with the tissue itself .
So when I was a freshman at NYU , what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound .
So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me , you can actually put our material onto this , and just like Lego blocks , it 'll reassemble into the local tissue .
So that means if you put it onto liver , it turns into something that looks like liver , and if you put it onto skin , it turns into something that looks just like skin .
So when you put the gel on , it actually reassembles into this local tissue .
So now , this has a whole bunch of applications , but basically the idea is , wherever you put this product , you 're able to reassemble into it immediately .
Now , this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure .
So now , this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic , and like I said before , would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop .
Now , in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself , our material is able to stop that bleed , and it 's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal , so it reassembles into this piece of meat , and then the blood actually recognizes that that 's happening , and produces fibrin , producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds .
So now this technology — Thank you .
So now this technology , by January , will be in the hands of veterinarians , and we 're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors , hopefully within the next year .
But really , once again , I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield .
Now , you get hit in the leg with a bullet , and instead of bleeding out in three minutes , and with the press of a button , you 're able to stop your own bleed and you 're on your way to recovery .
Thank you very much .

David Grady : How to save the world from bad meetings
An epidemic of bad , inefficient , overcrowded meetings is plaguing the world 's businesses — and making workers miserable . David Grady has some ideas on how to stop it .
Picture this : It 's Monday morning , you 're at the office , you 're settling in for the day at work , and this guy that you sort of recognize from down the hall , walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair .
Doesn 't say a word — Doesn 't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that are out there .
Doesn 't acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today .
You wouldn 't stand for it . You 'd make a stink .
You 'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you 'd say , " Why my chair ? "
Okay , so now it 's Tuesday morning and you 're at the office , and a meeting invitation pops up in your calendar .
And it 's from this woman who you kind of know from down the hall , and the subject line references some project that you heard a little bit about .
But there 's no agenda .
There 's no information about why you were invited to the meeting .
And yet you accept the meeting invitation , and you go .
And when this highly unproductive session is over , you go back to your desk , and you stand at your desk and you say , " Boy , I wish I had those two hours back , like I wish I had my chair back . "
Every day , we allow our coworkers , who are otherwise very , very nice people , to steal from us .
And I 'm talking about something far more valuable than office furniture .
I 'm talking about time . Your time .
In fact , I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic of a terrible new illness known as MAS : Mindless Accept Syndrome .
The primary symptom of Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar .
It 's an involuntary reflex — ding , click , bing — it 's in your calendar , " Gotta go , I 'm already late for a meeting . " Meetings are important , right ?
And collaboration is key to the success of any enterprise .
And a well-run meeting can yield really positive , actionable results .
But between globalization and pervasive information technology , the way that we work has really changed dramatically over the last few years .
And we 're miserable . And we 're miserable not because the other guy can 't run a good meeting , it 's because of MAS , our Mindless Accept Syndrome , which is a self-inflicted wound .
Actually , I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic .
Let me tell you why .
A couple of years ago , I put a video on Youtube , and in the video , I acted out every terrible conference call you 've ever been on .
It goes on for about five minutes , and it has all the things that we hate about really bad meetings .
There 's the moderator who has no idea how to run the meeting .
There are the participants who have no idea why they 're there .
The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck .
And everybody leaves very angry .
It 's kind of funny .
Let 's take a quick look .
Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal .
As a group , we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi , who just joined ? Hi , it 's Joe . I 'm working from home today .
Hi , Joe . Thanks for joining us today , great .
I was just saying , we have a lot of people on the call we 'd like to get through , so let 's skip the roll call and I 'm gonna dive right in .
Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal .
As a group , we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi , who just joined ?
No ? I thought I heard a beep . Sound familiar ? Yeah , it sounds familiar to me , too .
A couple of weeks after I put that online , 500,000 people in dozens of countries , watched this video .
And three years later , it 's still getting thousands of views every month .
It 's close to about a million right now .
And in fact , some of the biggest companies in the world , companies that you 've heard of but I won 't name , have asked for my permission to use this video in their new-hire training to teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company .
And if the numbers — there are a million views and it 's being used by all these companies — aren 't enough proof that we have a global problem with meetings , there are the many , many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up .
Thousands of people wrote things like , " OMG , that was my day today ! "
" That was my day every day ! " " This is my life . "
One guy wrote , " It 's funny because it 's true .
Eerily , sadly , depressingly true . It made me laugh until I cried .
And cried . And I cried some more . "
This poor guy said , " My daily life until retirement or death , sigh . "
These are real quotes and it 's real sad .
A common theme running through all of these comments online is this fundamental belief that we are powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings and live to meet another day .
But the truth is , we 're not powerless at all .
In fact , the cure for MAS is right here in our hands .
It 's something that I call ¡ No MAS ! Which , if I remember my high school Spanish , means something like , " Enough already , make it stop ! "
Here 's how No MAS works . It 's very simple .
First of all , the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn 't have a lot of information in it at all , click the tentative button !
It 's okay , you 're allowed , that 's why it 's there .
It 's right next to the accept button .
Or the maybe button , or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately .
Then , get in touch with the person who asked you to the meeting . Tell them you 're very excited to support their work , ask them what the goal of the meeting is , and tell them you 're interested in learning how you can help them achieve their goal .
And if we do this often enough , people might start to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations .
And you can make more thoughtful decisions about accepting it .
People might actually start sending out agendas . Imagine !
Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people to talk about a status when they could just do a quick email and get it done with .
People just might start to change their behavior because you changed yours .
And they just might bring your chair back , too . No MAS !
Thank you .
.
Vincent Moon and Naná Vasconcelos : Hidden music rituals around the world
Vincent Moon travels the world with a backpack and a camera , filming astonishing music and ritual the world rarely sees -- from a powerful Sufi ritual in Chechnya to an ayahuasca journey in Peru . He hopes his films can help people see their own cultures in a new way , to make young people say : " Whoa , my grandfather is as cool as Beyoncé . " Followed by a mesmerizing performance by jazz icon Naná Vasconcelos .
Vincent Moon : How can we use computers , cameras , microphones to represent the world in an alternative way , as much as possible ?
How , maybe , is it possible to use the Internet to create a new form of cinema ?
And actually , why do we record ?
Well , it is with such simple questions in mind that I started to make films 10 years ago , first with a friend , Christophe Abric .
He had a website , La Blogothèque , dedicated to independent music .
We were crazy about music .
We wanted to represent music in a different way , to film the music we love , the musicians we admired , as much as possible , far from the music industry and far from the cliches attached to it .
We started to publish every week sessions on the Internet .
We are going to see a few extracts now .
From Grizzly Bear in the shower to Sigur Ros playing in a Parisian cafe .
From Phoenix playing by the Eiffel Tower to Tom Jones in his hotel room in New York .
From Arcade Fire in an elevator in the Olympiades to Beirut going down a staircase in Brooklyn .
From R.E.M. in a car to The National around a table at night in the south of France .
From Bon Iver playing with some friends in an apartment in Montmartre to Yeasayer having a long night , and many , many , many more unknown or very famous bands .
We published all those films for free on the Internet , and we wanted to share all those films and represent music in a different way .
We wanted to create another type of intimacy using all those new technologies .
At the time , 10 years ago actually , there was no such project on the Internet , and I guess that 's why the project we were making , the Take Away Shows , got quite successful , reaching millions of viewers .
After a while , I got a bit — I wanted to go somewhere else .
I felt the need to travel and to discover some other music , to explore the world , going to other corners , and actually it was also this idea of nomadic cinema , sort of , that I had in mind .
How could the use of new technologies and the road fit together ?
How could I edit my films in a bus crossing the Andes ?
So I went on five-year travels around the globe .
I started at the time in the digital film and music label collection Petites Planètes , which was also an homage to French filmmaker Chris Marker .
We 're going to see now a few more extracts of those new films .
From the tecno brega diva of northern Brazil , Gaby Amarantos to a female ensemble in Chechnya .
From experimental electronic music in Singapore with One Man Nation to Brazilian icon Tom Zé singing on his rooftop in São Paolo .
From The Bambir , the great rock band from Armenia to some traditional songs in a restaurant in Tbilisi , Georgia .
From White Shoes , a great retro pop band from Jakarta , Indonesia to DakhaBrakha , the revolutionary band from Kiev , Ukraine .
From Tomi Lebrero and his bandoneon and his friends in Buenos Aires , Argentina , to many other places and musicians around the world .
My desire was to make it as a trek .
To do all those films , it would have been impossible with a big company behind me , with a structure or anything .
I was traveling alone with a backpack — computer , camera , microphones in it .
Alone , actually , but just with local people , meeting my team , which was absolutely not professional people , on the spot there , going from one place to another and to make cinema as a trek .
I really believed that cinema could be this very simple thing : I want to make a film and you 're going to give me a place to stay for the night .
I give you a moment of cinema and you offer me a capirinha .
Well , or other drinks , depending on where you are .
In Peru , they drink pisco sour .
Well , when I arrived in Peru , actually , I had no idea about what I would do there .
And I just had one phone number , actually , of one person .
Three months later , after traveling all around the country , I had recorded 33 films , only with the help of local people , only with the help of people that I was asking all the time the same question : What is important to record here today ?
By living in such a way , by working without any structure , I was able to react to the moment and to decide , oh , this is important to make now .
This is important to record that whole person .
This is important to create this exchange .
When I went to Chechnya , the first person I met looked at me and was like , " What are you doing here ?
Are you a journalist ? NGO ? Politics ?
What kind of problems are you going to study ? "
Well , I was there to research on Sufi rituals in Chechnya , actually — incredible culture of Sufism in Chechnya , which is absolutely unknown outside of the region .
As soon as people understood that I would give them those films — I would publish them online for free under a Creative Commons license , but I would also really give them to the people and I would let them do what they want with it .
I just want to represent them in a beautiful light .
I just want to portray them in a way that their grandchildren are going to look at their grandfather , and they 're going to be like , " Whoa , my grandfather is as cool as Beyoncé . " It 's a really important thing .
It 's really important , because that 's the way people are going to look differently at their own culture , at their own land .
They 're going to think about it differently .
It may be a way to maintain a certain diversity .
Why you will record ?
Hmm . There 's a really good quote by American thinker Hakim Bey which says , " Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance . "
It 's a really good sentence to keep in mind nowadays in an era saturated by images .
What 's the point of that ?
Where do we go with it ?
I was researching . I was still keeping this idea in mind : What 's the point ?
I was researching on music , trying to pull , trying to get closer to a certain origin of it .
Where is this all coming from ?
I am French . I had no idea about what I would discover , which is a very simple thing : Everything was sacred , at first , and music was spiritual healing .
How could I use my camera , my little tool , to get closer and maybe not only capture the trance but find an equivalent , a cine-trance , maybe , something in complete harmony with the people ?
That is now my new research I 'm doing on spirituality , on new spirits around the world .
Maybe a few more extracts now .
From the Tana Toraja funeral ritual in Indonesia to an Easter ceremony in the north of Ethiopia .
From jathilan , a popular trance ritual on the island of Java , to Umbanda in the north of Brazil .
The Sufi rituals of Chechnya to a mass in the holiest church of Armenia .
Some Sufi songs in Harar , the holy city of Ethiopia , to an ayahuasca ceremony deep in the Amazon of Peru with the Shipibo .
Then to my new project , the one I 'm doing now here in Brazil , named " Híbridos . "
I 'm doing it with Priscilla Telmon .
It 's research on the new spiritualities all around the country .
This is my quest , my own little quest of what I call experimental ethnography , trying to hybrid all those different genres , trying to regain a certain complexity .
Why do we record ?
I was still there .
I really believe cinema teaches us to see .
The way we show the world is going to change the way we see this world , and we live in a moment where the mass media are doing a terrible , terrible job at representing the world : violence , extremists , only spectacular events , only simplifications of everyday life .
I think we are recording to regain a certain complexity .
To reinvent life today , we have to make new forms of images .
And it 's very simple .
Muito obrigado .
Vincent , Vincent , Vincent .
Merci . We have to prepare for the following performance , and I have a question for you , and the question is this : You show up in places like the ones you just have shown us , and you are carrying a camera and I assume that you are welcome but you are not always absolutely welcome .
You walk into sacred rituals , private moments in a village , a town , a group of people .
How do you break the barrier when you show up with a lens ?
VM : I think you break it with your body , more than with your knowledge .
That 's what it taught me to travel , to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain .
The respect is stepping forward , not stepping backward , and I really think that by engaging your body in the moment , in the ceremony , in the places , people welcome you and understand your energy .
You told me that most of the videos you have made are actually one single shot .
You don 't do much editing .
I mean , you edited the ones for us at the beginning of the sessions because of the length , etc .
Otherwise , you just go in and capture whatever happens in front of your eyes without much planning , and so is that the case ?
It 's correct ?
VM : My idea is that I think that as long as we don 't cut , in a way , as long as we let the viewer watch , more and more viewers are going to feel closer , are going to get closer to the moment , to that moment and to that place .
I really think of that as a matter of respecting the viewer , to not cut all the time from one place to another , to just let the time go .
Tell me in a few words about your new project , " Híbridos , " here in Brazil .
Just before coming to TEDGlobal , you have actually been traveling around the country for that .
Tell us a couple of things .
VM : " Híbridos " is — I really believe Brazil , far from the cliches , is the greatest religious country in the world , the greatest country in terms of spirituality and in experimentations in spiritualities .
And it 's a big project I 'm doing over this year , which is researching in very different regions of Brazil , in very different forms of cults , and trying to understand how people live together with spirituality nowadays .
The man who is going to appear onstage momentarily , and Vincent 's going to introduce him , is one of the subjects of one of his past videos .
When did you do a video with him ?
VM : I guess four years ago , four years in my first travel .
So it was one of your first ones in Brazil .
VM : It was amongst the first ones in Brazil , yeah .
I shot the film in Recife , in the place where he is from .
So let 's introduce him . Who are we waiting for ?
VM : I 'll just make it very short .
It 's a very great honor for me to welcome onstage one of the greatest Brazilian musicians of all time .
Please welcome Naná Vasconcelos .
Naná Vasconcelos !
Naná Vasconcelos : Let 's go to the jungle .

Michael Green : What the Social Progress Index can reveal about your country
The term Gross Domestic Product is often talked about as if it were " handed down from god on tablets of stone . " But this concept was invented by an economist in the 1930s . We need a more effective measurement tool to match 21st century needs , says Michael Green : the Social Progress Index . With charm and wit , he shows how this tool measures societies across the three dimensions that actually matter . And reveals the dramatic reordering of nations that occurs when you use it .
On January 4 , 1934 , a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on , still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today , still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet .
That young man wasn 't a politician , he wasn 't a businessman , a civil rights activist or a faith leader .
He was that most unlikely of heroes , an economist .
His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that he delivered was called " National Income , 1929-1932 . "
Now , you might think this is a rather dry and dull report .
And you 're absolutely right .
It 's dry as a bone .
But this report is the foundation of how , today , we judge the success of countries : what we know best as Gross Domestic Product , GDP .
GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years .
And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries , a different way to define and shape our lives for the next 80 years .
But first , we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives .
Kuznets ' report was delivered at a moment of crisis .
The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were struggling to respond .
Struggling because they didn 't know what was going on .
They didn 't have data and statistics .
So what Kuznet 's report gave them was reliable data on what the U.S. economy was producing , updated year by year .
And armed with this information , policy makers were , eventually , able to find a way out of the slump .
And because Kuznets ' invention was found to be so useful , it spread around the world .
And now today , every country produces GDP statistics .
But , in that first report , Kuznets himself delivered a warning .
It 's in the introductory chapter .
On page seven he says , " The welfare of a nation can , therefore , scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above . "
It 's not the greatest sound bite in the world , and it 's dressed up in the cautious language of the economist .
But his message was clear : GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance .
It 's not a measure of our well-being .
And it shouldn 't be a guide to all decision making .
But we have ignored Kuznets ' warning .
We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy .
Our politicians boast when GDP goes up .
Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries are going down , all measured in GDP .
Our societies have become engines to create more GDP .
But we know that GDP is flawed .
It ignores the environment .
It counts bombs and prisons as progress .
It can 't count happiness or community .
And it has nothing to say about fairness or justice .
Is it any surprise that our world , marching to the drumbeat of GDP , is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict ?
We need a better way to measure our societies , a measure based on the real things that matter to real people .
Do I have enough to eat ?
Can I read and write ?
Am I safe ?
Do I have rights ?
Do I live in a society where I 'm not discriminated against ?
Is my future and the future of my children prevented from environmental destruction ?
These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer .
There have , of course , been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP .
But I believe that we 're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution .
We 're ready because we 've seen , in the financial crisis of 2008 , how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray .
We 've seen , in the Arab Spring , how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars , but they were societies that were seething with discontentment .
We 're ready , because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets .
Today , I 'd like to introduce you to the Social Progress Index .
It 's a measure of the well-being of society , completely separate from GDP .
It 's a whole new way of looking at the world .
The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions .
The first is , does everyone have the basic needs for survival : food , water , shelter , safety ?
Secondly , does everyone have access to the building blocks to improve their lives : education , information , health and sustainable environment ?
And then third , does every individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles ?
Do they have rights , freedom of choice , freedom from discrimination and access to the the world 's most advanced knowledge ?
Together , these 12 components form the Social Progress framework .
And for each of these 12 components , we have indicators to measure how countries are performing .
Not indicators of effort or intention , but real achievement .
We don 't measure how much a country spends on healthcare , we measure the length and quality of people 's lives .
We don 't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination , we measure whether people experience discrimination .
But what you want to know is who 's top , don 't you ? I knew that , I knew that , I knew that .
Okay , I 'm going to show you .
I 'm going to show you on this chart .
So here we are , what I 've done here is put on the vertical axis social progress .
Higher is better .
And then , just for comparison , just for fun , on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita .
Further to the right is more .
So the country in the world with the highest social progress , the number one country on social progress is New Zealand .
Well done ! Never been ; must go .
The country with the least social progress , I 'm sorry to say , is Chad .
I 've never been ; maybe next year .
Or maybe the year after .
Now , I know what you 're thinking .
You 're thinking , " Aha , but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad ! "
It 's a good point , well made .
But let me show you two other countries .
Here 's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand , but with a lower level of social progress .
And then here 's Senegal — it 's got a higher level of social progress than Chad , but the same level of GDP .
So what 's going on ? Well , look .
Let me bring in the rest of the countries of the world , the 132 we 've been able to measure , each one represented by a dot .
There we go . Lots of dots .
Now , obviously I can 't do all of them , so a few highlights for you : The highest ranked G7 country is Canada .
My country , the United Kingdom , is sort of middling , sort of dull , but who cares — at least we beat the French .
And then looking at the emerging economies , top of the BRICS , pleased to say , is Brazil .
Come on , cheer !
Go , Brazil !
Beating South Africa , then Russia , then China and then India .
Tucked away on the right-hand side , you will see a dot of a country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount of social progress — that 's Kuwait .
Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that 's Costa Rica .
It 's got a level of social progress the same as some Western European countries , with a much lower GDP .
Now , my slide is getting a little cluttered and I 'd like to step back a bit .
So let me take away these countries , and then pop in the regression line .
So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress .
The first thing to notice , is that there 's lots of noise around the trend line .
And what this shows , what this empirically demonstrates , is that GDP is not destiny .
At every level of GDP per capita , there are opportunities for more social progress , risks of less .
The second thing to notice is that for poor countries , the curve is really steep .
So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP , and if they reinvest that in doctors , nurses , water supplies , sanitation , etc . , there 's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck .
And that 's good news , and that 's what we 've seen over the last 20 , 30 years , with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries .
But go on a bit further up the curve , and then we see it flattening out .
Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress .
And with more and more of the world 's population living on this part of the curve , it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development .
I 'll show you an example of Brazil .
Here 's Brazil : social progress of about 70 out of 100 , GDP per capita about 14,000 dollars a year .
And look , Brazil 's above the line .
Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress .
But where does Brazil go next ?
Let 's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade .
But that is only half a plan .
It 's less than half a plan , because where does Brazil want to go on social progress ?
Brazil , it 's possible to increase your growth , increase your GDP , while stagnating or going backwards on social progress .
We don 't want Brazil to become like Russia .
What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating social progress from its GDP , so it becomes more like New Zealand .
And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it 's not just growth alone , it 's growth with social progress .
And that 's what the Social Progress Index does : It reframes the debate about development , not just about GDP alone , but inclusive , sustainable growth that brings real improvements in people 's lives .
And it 's not just about countries .
Earlier this year , with our friends from the Imazon nonprofit here in Brazil , we launched the first subnational Social Progress Index .
We did it for the Amazon region .
It 's an area the size of Europe , 24 million people , one of the most deprived parts of the country .
And here are the results , and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities .
And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country , Imazon and other partners from government , business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people 's lives , while protecting that precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest .
And this is just the beginning , You can create a Social Progress Index for any state , region , city or municipality .
We all know and love TEDx ; this is Social Pogress-x .
This is a tool for anyone to come and use .
Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it , GDP was not handed down from God on tablets of stone . It 's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century .
In the 21st century , we face new challenges : aging , obesity , climate change , and so on .
To face those challenges , we need new tools of measurement , new ways of valuing progress .
Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits , charities , volunteers , civil society organizations really contribute to our society .
Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution , but on their contribution to social progress .
Imagine if we could hold politicians to account for really improving people 's lives .
Imagine if we could work together — government , business , civil society , me , you — and make this century the century of social progress .
Thank you .

Ramanan Laxminarayan : The coming crisis in antibiotics
Antibiotic drugs save lives . But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes , like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens . The result , says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan , is that the drugs will stop working for everyone , as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant . He calls on all of us to think of antibiotics -- and their ongoing effectiveness -- as a finite resource , and to think twice before we tap into it . It 's a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home .
The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford .
On his day off from work , he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden .
That small scratch became infected .
Over the next few days , his head was swollen with abscesses , and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out , and by February of 1941 , this poor man was on the verge of dying .
He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford , and fortunately for him , a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin , a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human , and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work , if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient , but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it , they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway .
So they gave Albert Alexander , this Oxford policeman , the drug , and within 24 hours , he started getting better .
His fever went down , his appetite came back .
Second day , he was doing much better .
They were starting to run out of penicillin , so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him , and that worked .
Day four , well on the way to recovery .
This was a miracle .
Day five , they ran out of penicillin , and the poor man died .
So that story didn 't end that well , but fortunately for millions of other people , like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s , who was again dying of a sepsis , and within just six days , you can see , recovered thanks to this wonder drug , penicillin .
Millions have lived , and global health has been transformed .
Now , antibiotics have been used for patients like this , but they 've also been used rather frivolously in some instances , for treating someone with just a cold or the flu , which they might not have responded to an antibiotic , and they 've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically , which means in small concentrations , to make chicken and hogs grow faster .
Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat , we 've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals , not for treatment , not for sick animals , but primarily for growth promotion .
Now , what did that lead us to ?
Basically , the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem , because we 've now selected for just the resistant bacteria .
And I 'm sure you 've all read about this in the newspapers , you 've seen this in every magazine that you come across , but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem .
This is serious .
The next slide I 'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter .
Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug , and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug .
And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance , mostly under about 10 percent across the United States .
Now watch what happens when we play the video .
So I don 't know where you live , but wherever it is , it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999 , and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance .
It 's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries , and at the heart of it , you might say , well , isn 't this really just a medical issue ?
If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much , if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics , perhaps this really wouldn 't be an issue , and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics .
Now , it turns out that there 's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs , which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics , not only am I affected but others are affected as well , in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere , that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere , and I don 't necessarily take these costs into consideration .
This is what economists might call a problem of the commons , and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well : that we don 't consider — and we , including individuals , patients , hospitals , entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used .
Now , that 's a problem that 's similar to another area that we all know about , which is of fuel use and energy , and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change .
And typically , in the case of energy , there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem .
One is , we can make better use of the oil that we have , and that 's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics , and we can do this in a number of ways that we 'll talk about in a second , but the other option is the " drill , baby , drill " option , which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics .
Now , these are not separate .
They 're related , because if we invest heavily in new oil wells , we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that 's going to happen for antibiotics .
The reverse is also going to happen , which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately , we don 't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development .
And if you thought that these two were entirely , fully balanced between these two options , you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we 're playing .
The game is really one of coevolution , and coevolution is , in this particular picture , between cheetahs and gazelles .
Cheetahs have evolved to run faster , because if they didn 't run faster , they wouldn 't get any lunch .
Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don 't run faster , they would be lunch .
Now , this is the game we 're playing against the bacteria , except we 're not the cheetahs , we 're the gazelles , and the bacteria would , just in the course of this little talk , would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error , trying it over and over again .
Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria ?
We have drug discovery processes , screening molecules , we have clinical trials , and then , when we think we have a drug , then we have the FDA regulatory process .
And once we go through all of that , then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria .
Now , this is clearly not a game that can be sustained , or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead .
We 've got to slow the pace of coevolution down , and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well .
Now , if you think about how we deal with energy pricing , for instance , we consider emissions taxes , which means we 're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy .
We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well , and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately .
There are clean energy subsidies , which are to switch to fuels which don 't pollute as much or perhaps don 't need fossil fuels .
Now , the analogy here is , perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics , and if you think about it , what are good substitutes for antibiotics ?
Well , turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work , so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people , particularly against the seasonal influenza .
And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use , both in this country as well as in many other countries , and that could really help .
A third option might include something like tradeable permits .
And these seem like faraway scenarios , but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections , we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others , and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need , but also on the basis of pricing .
And certainly consumer education works .
Very often , people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so , and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful , both on energy — When you tell someone that they 're using a lot of energy during peak hour , they tend to cut back , and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics .
A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they 'd used in the previous month , and this was purely an informational feedback , there was no shaming , but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics .
Now , there 's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well .
If you look at the price of penicillin , the cost per day is about 10 cents .
It 's a fairly cheap drug .
If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive , so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics , the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot .
But what is that really telling us ?
That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap , effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future , and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation .
That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies , in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus , to , say , the development of electric cars .
Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention , but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics , they 're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs , which might save a patient 's life only for a few months or perhaps a year , whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient 's life forever .
So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift , and it 's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country , in many parts of the world , the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable .
So we need to think about that .
Now , there are backstop options , which is other alternative technologies that people are working on .
It includes bacteriophages , probiotics , quorum sensing , synbiotics .
Now , all of these are useful avenues to pursue , and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher , and we 've seen that the market does actually respond , and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development .
But there are challenges here .
We don 't want to just throw money at a problem .
is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics , and that really is the challenge here .
Now , going back to these technologies , you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film , " Nature will find a way . "
So it 's not as if these are permanent solutions .
We really have to remember that , whatever the technology might be , that nature will find some way to work around it .
You might think , well , this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria , but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well , with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis , which is a serious problem in India and South Africa .
Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive , and in some instances , even those don 't work and you have XDR TB .
Viruses are becoming resistant .
Agricultural pests . Malaria parasites .
Right now , much of the world depends on one drug , artemisinin drugs , essentially to treat malaria .
Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged , and if this were to become widespread , that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that 's currently safe and efficacious .
Mosquitos develop resistance .
If you have kids , you probably know about head lice , and if you 're from New York City , I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs .
So those are also resistant .
And we have to bring an example from across the pond .
Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons .
Now , what 's common to all of these things is the idea that we 've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70 , 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink , we have squandered our ability to control , because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back , and we need to completely rethink how we 're going to use measures to control biological organisms , and rethink how we incentivize the development , introduction , in the case of antibiotics prescription , and use of these valuable resources .
And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources .
And so we stand at a crossroads .
An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business .
The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon .
Thank you .

Haas & amp ; Hahn : How painting can transform communities
Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods , and involving those who live there -- from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia . What 's made their projects succeed ? In this funny and inspiring talk , the artists explain their art-first approach -- and the importance of a neighborhood barbecue .
Dre Urhahn : This theater is built on Copacabana , which is the most famous beach in the world , but 25 kilometers away from here in the North Zone of Rio lies a community called Vila Cruzeiro , and roughly 60,000 people live there .
Now , the people here in Rio mostly know Vila Cruzeiro from the news , and unfortunately , news from Vila Cruzeiro often is not good news .
But Vila Cruzeiro is also the place where our story begins .
Jeroen Koolhaas : Ten years ago , we first came to Rio to shoot a documentary about life in the favelas .
Now , we learned that favelas are informal communities .
They emerged over the years when immigrants from the countryside came to the cities looking for work , like cities within the cities , known for problems like crime , poverty , and the violent drug war between police and the drug gangs .
So what struck us was that these were communities that the people who lived there had built with their own hands , without a master plan and like a giant work in progress .
Where we 're from , in Holland , everything is planned .
We even have rules for how to follow the rules . DU : So the last day of filming , we ended up in Vila Cruzeiro , and we were sitting down and we had a drink , and we were overlooking this hill with all these houses , and most of these houses looked unfinished , and they had walls of bare brick , but we saw some of these houses which were plastered and painted , and suddenly we had this idea : what would it look like if all these houses would be plastered and painted ?
And then we imagined one big design , one big work of art .
Who would expect something like that in a place like this ?
So we thought , would that even be possible ?
So first we started to count the houses , but we soon lost count .
But somehow the idea stuck .
JK : We had a friend .
He ran an NGO in Vila Cruzeiro .
His name was Nanko , and he also liked the idea .
He said , " You know , everybody here would pretty much love to have their houses plastered and painted .
It 's when a house is finished . "
So he introduced us to the right people , and Vitor and Maurinho became our crew .
We picked three houses in the center of the community and we start here . We made a few designs , and everybody liked this design of a boy flying a kite the best .
So we started painting , and the first thing we did was to paint everything blue , and we thought that looked already pretty good .
But they hated it . The people who lived there really hated it .
They said , " What did you do ?
You painted our house in exactly the same color as the police station . "
In a favela , that is not a good thing .
Also the same color as the prison cell .
So we quickly went ahead and we painted the boy , and then we thought we were finished , we were really happy , but still , it wasn 't good because the little kids started coming up to us , and they said , " You know , there 's a boy flying the kite , but where is his kite ? "
We said , " Uh , it 's art .
You know , you have to imagine the kite . " And they said , " No , no , no , we want to see the kite . "
So we quickly installed a kite way up high on the hill , so that you could see the boy flying the kite and you could actually see a kite .
So the local news started writing about it , which was great , and then even The Guardian wrote about it : " Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery . "
JK : So , encouraged by this success , we went back to Rio for a second project , and we stumbled upon this street .
It was covered in concrete to prevent mudslides , and somehow we saw a sort of river in it , and we imagined this river to be a river in Japanese style with koi carp swimming upstream .
So we decided to paint that river , and we invited Rob Admiraal , who is a tattoo artist , and he specialized in the Japanese style .
So little did we know that we would spend almost an entire year painting that river , together with Geovani and Robinho and Vitor , who lived nearby .
And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that lived on the street , Elias , told us that we could come and live in his house , together with his family , which was fantastic .
Unfortunately , during that time , another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs .
We learned that during those times , people in communities really stick together during these times of hardship , but we also learned a very important element , the importance of barbecues . Because , when you throw a barbecue , it turns you from a guest into a host , so we decided to throw one almost every other week , and we got to know everybody in the neighborhood .
JK : We still had this idea of the hill , though .
DU : Yeah , yeah , we were talking about the scale of this , because this painting was incredibly big , and it was insanely detailed , and this process almost drove us completely insane ourselves .
But we figured that maybe , during this process , all the time that we had spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself .
JK : So after all that time , this hill , this idea was still there , and we started to make sketches , models , and we figured something out .
We figured that our ideas , our designs had to be a little bit more simple than that last project so that we could paint with more people and cover more houses at the same time .
And we had an opportunity to try that out in a community in the central part of Rio , which is called Santa Marta , and we made a design for this place which looked like this , and then we got people to go along with it because turns out that if your idea is ridiculously big , it 's easier to get people to go along with this . And the people of Santa Marta got together and in a little over a month they turned that square into this .
And this image somehow went all over the world .
DU : So then we received an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program , and they had this question if this idea , our approach , if this would actually work in North Philly , which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States .
So we immediately said yes .
We had no idea how , but it seemed like a very interesting challenge , so we did exactly the same as we did in Rio , and we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing . So the project took almost two years to complete , and we made individual designs for every single house on the avenue that we painted , and we made these designs together with the local store owners , the building owners , and a team of about a dozen young men and women .
They were hired , and then they were trained as painters , and together they transformed their own neighborhood , the whole street , into a giant patchwork of color .
And at the end , the city of Philadelphia thanked every single one of them and gave them a merit for their accomplishment .
JK : So now we had painted a whole street .
How about we do this whole hill now ?
We started looking for funding , but instead , we just ran into questions , like , how many houses are you going to paint ?
How many square meters is that ?
How much paint are you going to use , and how many people are you going to employ ?
And we did try for years to write plans for the funding and answer all those questions , but then we thought , in order to answer all those questions , you have to know exactly what you 're going to do before you actually get there and start .
And maybe it 's a mistake to think like that .
It would lose some of the magic that we had learned about that if you go somewhere and you spend time there , you can let the project grow organically and have a life of its own .
DU : So what we did is we decided to take this plan and strip it away from all the numbers and all the ideas and presumptions and just go back to the base idea , which was to transform this hill into a giant work of art .
And instead of looking for funding , we started a crowdfunding campaign , and in a little over a month , more than 1,500 people put together and donated over 100,000 dollars .
So for us , this was an amazing moment , because now — — because now we finally had the freedom to use all the lessons that we had learned and create a project that was built the same way that the favela was built , from the ground on up , bottom up , with no master plan .
JK : So we went back , and we employed Angelo , and he 's a local artist from Vila Cruzeiro , very talented guy , and he knows almost everybody there , and then we employed Elias , our former landlord who invited us into his house , and he 's a master of construction .
Together with them , we decided where to start .
We picked this spot in Vila Cruzeiro , and houses are being plastered as we speak .
And the good thing about them is that they are deciding which houses go next .
They 're even printing t-shirts , they 're putting up banners explaining everything to everybody , and talking to the press .
This article about Angelo appeared .
DU : So while this is happening , we are bringing this idea all over the world .
So , like the project we did in Philadelphia , we are also invited to do workshops , for instance in Curaçao , and right now we 're planning a huge project in Haiti .
JK : So the favela was not only the place where this idea started : it was also the place that made it possible to work without a master plan , because these communities are informal — this was the inspiration — and in a communal effort , together with the people , you can almost work like in an orchestra , where you can have a hundred instruments playing together to create a symphony .
DU : So we want to thank everybody who wanted to become part of this dream and supported us along the way , and we are looking at continuing .
JK : Yeah . And so one day pretty soon , when the colors start going up on these walls , we hope more people will join us , and join this big dream , and maybe one day , the whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted .
DU : Thank you .

Alejandro Aravena : My architectural philosophy ? Bring the community into the process
When asked to build housing for 100 families in Chile ten years ago , Alejandro Aravena looked to an unusual inspiration : the wisdom of favelas and slums . Rather than building a large building with small units , he built flexible half-homes that each family could expand on . It was a complex problem , but with a simple solution — one that he arrived at by working with the families themselves . With a chalkboard and beautiful images of his designs , Aravena walks us through three projects where clever rethinking led to beautiful design with great benefit .
If there 's any power in design , that 's the power of synthesis .
The more complex the problem , the more the need for simplicity .
So allow me to share three cases where we tried to apply design 's power of synthesis .
Let 's start with the global challenge of urbanization .
It 's a fact that people are moving towards cities .
and even if counterintuitive , it 's good news .
Evidence shows that people are better off in cities .
But there 's a problem that I would call the " 3S " menace : The scale , speed , and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history .
For you to have an idea , out of the three billion people living in cities today , one billion are under the line of poverty .
By 2030 , out of the five billion people that will be living in cities , two billion are going to be under the line of poverty .
That means that we will have to build a one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years .
A one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family .
If we don 't solve this equation , it is not that people will stop coming to cities .
They will come anyhow , but they will live in slums , favelas and informal settlements .
So what to do ? Well , an answer may come from favelas and slums themselves .
A clue could be in this question we were asked 10 years ago .
We were asked to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half a hectare in the center of the city of Iquique in the north of Chile using a $ 10,000 subsidy with which we had to buy the land , provide the infrastructure , and build the houses that , in the best of the cases , would be of around 40 square meters .
And by the way , they said , the cost of the land , because it 's in the center of the city , is three times more than what social housing can normally afford .
Due to the difficulty of the question , we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints , and we started a participatory design process , and testing what was available there in the market .
Detached houses , 30 families could be accommodated .
Row houses , 60 families .
[ " 100 families " ] The only way to accommodate all of them was by building in height , and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution , because they could not make the tiny apartments expand .
So the conclusion with the families — and this is important , not our conclusion — with the families , was that we had a problem .
We had to innovate .
So what did we do ?
Well , a middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 80 square meters , but when there 's no money , what the market does is to reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters .
What we said was , what if , instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house , why don 't we consider it half of a good one ?
When you rephrase the problem as half of a good house instead of a small one , the key question is , which half do we do ?
And we thought we had to do with public money the half that families won 't be able to do individually .
We identified five design conditions that belonged to the hard half of a house , and we went back to the families to do two things : join forces and split tasks .
Our design was something in between a building and a house .
As a building , it could pay for expensive , well-located land , and as a house , it could expand .
If , in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house , families kept their network and their jobs , we knew that the expansion would begin right away .
So we went from this initial social housing to a middle-class unit achieved by families themselves within a couple of weeks .
This was our first project in Iquique 10 years ago .
This is our last project in Chile .
Different designs , same principle : You provide the frame , and from then on , families take over .
So the purpose of design , trying to understand and trying to give an answer to the " 3S " menace , scale , speed , and scarcity , is to channel people 's own building capacity .
We won 't solve the one million people per week equation unless we use people 's own power for building .
So , with the right design , slums and favelas may not be the problem but actually the only possible solution .
The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability .
In 2012 , we entered the competition for the Angelini Innovation Center , and the aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation .
It is accepted that for such an aim , knowledge creation , interaction among people , face-to-face contact , it 's important , and we agreed on that .
But for us , the question of the right environment was a very literal question .
We wanted to have a working space with the right light , with the right temperature , with the right air .
So we asked ourselves : Does the typical office building help us in that sense ?
Well , how does that building look , typically ?
It 's a collection of floors , one on top of each other , with a core in the center with elevators , stairs , pipes , wires , everything , and then a glass skin on the outside that , due to direct sun radiation , creates a huge greenhouse effect inside .
In addition to that , let 's say a guy working on the seventh floor goes every single day through the third floor , but has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on .
So we thought , well , maybe we have to turn this scheme inside out .
And what we did was , let 's have an open atrium , a hollowed core , the same collection of floors , but have the walls and the mass in the perimeter , so that when the sun hits , it 's not impacting directly glass , but a wall .
When you have an open atrium inside , you are able to see what others are doing from within the building , and you have a better way to control light , and when you place the mass and the walls in the perimeter , then you are preventing direct sun radiation .
You may also open those windows and get cross-ventilation .
We just made those openings of such a scale that they could work as elevated squares , outdoor spaces throughout the entire height of the building .
None of this is rocket science .
You don 't require sophisticated programming .
It 's not about technology .
This is just archaic , primitive common sense , and by using common sense , we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year , which is the typical energy consumption for cooling a glass tower , to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year .
So with the right design , sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense .
Last case I would like to share is how design can provide more comprehensive answers against natural disasters .
You may know that Chile , in 2010 , was hit by an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake and tsunami , and we were called to work in the reconstruction of the Constitución , in the southern part of the country .
We were given 100 days , three months , to design almost everything , from public buildings to public space , street grid , transportation , housing , and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis .
This was new in Chilean urban design , and there were in the air a couple of alternatives .
First one : Forbid installation on ground zero .
Thirty million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation .
This is exactly what 's being discussed in Japan nowadays , and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese , this may work , but we know that in Chile , this land is going to be occupied illegally anyhow , so this alternative was unrealistic and undesirable .
Second alternative : build a big wall , heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves .
This alternative was conveniently lobbied by big building companies , because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts , and was also politically preferred , because it required no land expropriation .
But Japan proved that trying to resist the force of nature is useless .
So this alternative was irresponsible .
As in the housing process , we had to include the community in the way of finding a solution for this , and we started a participatory design process .
[ In Spanish ] Loudspeaker : What kind of city do you want ?
Vote for Constitución .
Go to the Open House and express your options .
Participate !
Fisherman : I am a fisherman .
Twenty-five fishermen work for me .
Where should I take them ? To the forest ?
So why can 't we have a concrete defense ?
Done well , of course .
I am the history of Constitución .
And you come here to tell me that I cannot keep on living here ?
My whole family has lived here , I raised my children here , and my children will also raise their children here .
and my grandchildren and everyone else will .
But why are you imposing this on me ?
You ! You are imposing this on me !
In danger zone I am not authorized to build .
He himself is saying that .
No , no , no , Nieves ...
Alejandro Aravena : I don 't know if you were able to read the subtitles , but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie , romantic , let 's-all-dream-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing .
It is actually — It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer .
It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question .
There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question .
So it was pretty obvious after this process that , well , we chicken out here and go away because it 's too tense , or we go even further in asking , what else is bothering you ?
What other problems do you have and you want us to take care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch ?
And what they said was , look , fine to protect the city against future tsunamis , we really appreciate , but the next one is going to come in , what , 20 years ?
But every single year , we have problems of flooding due to rain .
In addition , we are in the middle of the forest region of the country , and our public space sucks .
It 's poor and it 's scarce .
And the origin of the city , our identity , is not really connected to the buildings that fell , it is connected to the river , but the river cannot be accessed publicly , because its shores are privately owned .
So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative , and our approach was against geographical threats , have geographical answers .
What if , in between the city and the sea we have a forest , a forest that doesn 't try to resist the energy of nature , but dissipates it by introducing friction ?
A forest that may be able to laminate the water and prevent the flooding ?
That may pay the historical debt of public space , and that may provide , finally , democratic access to the river .
So as a conclusion of the participatory design , the alternative was validated politically and socially , but there was still the problem of the cost : 48 million dollars .
So what we did was a survey in the public investment system , and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place , not knowing of the existence of the other projects .
The sum of them : 52 million dollars .
So design 's power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities , which is not money but coordination .
By doing so , we were able to save four million dollars , and that is why the forest is today under construction .
So be it the force of self construction , the force of common sense , or the force of nature , all these forces need to be translated into form , and what that form is modeling and shaping is not cement , bricks , or wood .
It is life itself .
Design 's power of synthesis is just an attempt to put at the innermost core of architecture the force of life .
Thank you so much .

Kare Anderson : Be an opportunity maker
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives . But how to get started ? Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness , and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions .
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy , and , like at least 20 other people in a room of this size , I was a stutterer .
Do you dare raise your hand ?
And it sticks with us . It really does stick with us , because when we are treated that way , we feel invisible sometimes , or talked around and at .
And as I started to look at people , which is mostly all I did , I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition .
Remember , I was young then .
So what did they do ?
What we still do perhaps too often .
We talk about ourselves .
And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset .
In each situation , they found a way to talk about us and create that " us " idea .
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others .
There 's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn 't have done on our own .
And I want to talk to you about that , because even more than giving , is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale .
That 's why I 'm sitting here .
But I also want to point something else out : Each one of you is better than anybody else at something .
That disproves that popular notion that if you 're the smartest person in the room , you 're in the wrong room .
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back , and I met this up-and-coming actress , and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about : public art .
And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it .
She wanted a regulation for it , and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago ? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park , and people would walk up to it and they 'd smile in the reflection of it , and they 'd take selfies together , and they 'd laugh .
And as she was talking , a thought came to my mind .
I said , " I know someone you ought to meet .
He 's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks " — — " and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect . "
He spent five years in solitary , and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin , and he 's articulate and he 's rather easy on the eyes because he 's buff .
He had workout regime he did every day .
I think she was following me at that point .
I said , " He 'd be an unexpected ally . "
And not just that . There 's James . He 's an architect and he 's a professor , and he loves place-making , and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they 're dotted with art , where people draw and come up and talk sometimes .
I think they 'd make good allies .
And indeed they were .
They met together . They prepared .
They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council .
And the council members not only passed the regulation , half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards .
They were startling , compelling and credible .
You can 't buy that .
What I 'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become , because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts , it 's our capacity to connect around each other 's better side and bring it out .
And I 'm not saying this is easy , and I 'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with , but what I want to suggest is , this is an opportunity .
I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle .
So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine , because otherwise you couldn 't spot the trends .
And third , I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader 's shoes , so they could see how these trends could affect their lives .
That 's what opportunity-makers do .
And here 's a strange thing : Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme , opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them , and they 're building relationships , and because they do that , they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities .
They 're not affronted by differences , they 're fascinated by them , and that is a huge shift in mindset , and once you feel it , you want it to happen a lot more .
This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset , and I believe in doing that .
It 's especially important now .
Why is it important now ?
Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection , and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then , as we know from the news every day , they can be used for dangerous ones .
It calls on us , each of us , to a higher calling .
But here 's the icing on the cake : It 's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that 's probably your greatest , as an institution or an individual .
It 's after you 've had that experience and you trust each other .
It 's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted .
For example , Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned , and he watched them when they were practicing , and he was soon talking to Wally , my friend the ex-con , about that exercise regime .
And he thought , I have a set of racquetball courts .
That guy could teach it .
A lot of people who work there are members at my courts .
They 're frequent travelers .
They could practice in their hotel room , no equipment provided .
That 's how Wally got hired .
Not only that , years later he was also teaching racquetball .
Years after that , he was teaching the racquetball teachers .
What I 'm suggesting is , when you connect with people around a shared interest and action , you 're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future , and I think that 's what we 're looking at .
We open ourselves up to those opportunities , and in this room are key players and technology , key players who are uniquely positioned to do this , to scale systems and projects together .
So here 's what I 'm calling for you to do .
Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers .
Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers .
They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they 're trusted and they can see those patterns , and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest .
So what I 'm asking you is , the world is hungry .
I truly believe , in my firsthand experience , the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own .
Just remember , as Dave Liniger once said , " You can 't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork . "
Thank you very much .
Frans Lanting : Photos that give voice to the animal kingdom
Nature photographer Frans Lanting uses vibrant images to take us deep into the animal world . In this short , visual talk he calls for us to reconnect with other earthly creatures , and to shed the metaphorical skins that separate us from each other .
Humanity takes center stage at TED , but I would like to add a voice for the animals , whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us .
Some years ago , it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver .
His name is Jimmy Smith , and he shared a story with me that is told among his people , who call themselves the Kwikwasut 'inuxw .
Once upon a time , he told me , all animals on Earth were one .
Even though they look different on the outside , inside , they 're all the same , and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity .
When they arrived , they would all take off their skins .
Raven shed his feathers , bear his fur , and salmon her scales , and then , they would dance .
But one day , a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand .
Embarrassed , the animals fled , and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way .
The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities , all animals are one , has been a powerful inspiration to me .
I like to get past the fur , the feathers and the scales .
I want to get under the skin .
No matter whether I 'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog , my goal is to connect us with them , eye to eye .
You may wonder , do I ever photograph people ?
Sure . People are always present in my photos , no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions .
You just have to learn how to look past their disguise .
As a photographer , I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing .
When I use my camera , I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are .
As animals blessed with the power of rational thought , we can marvel at the intricacies of life .
As citizens of a planet in trouble , it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life .
But as humans with hearts , we can all rejoice in the unity of life , and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave .
Let 's find a way to join the dance .
Thank you .

Sergei Lupashin : A flying camera ... on a leash
Let 's admit it : aerial photo drones and UAVs are a little creepy , and they come with big regulatory and safety problems . But aerial photos can be a powerful way of telling the truth about the world : the size of a protest , the spread of an oil spill , the wildlife hidden in a delta . Sergei Lupashin demos Fotokite , a nifty new way to see the world from on high , safely and under control .
I came here to show you the Fotokite .
It 's a tethered , flying camera .
But before I do that , I want to tell you a bit about where it came from , what motivated it .
So I was born in Russia , and three years ago , in 2011 , there were the Russian federal elections .
There were massive irregularities reported , and people came out to protest , which was very unlikely for Russia .
And no one really knew how significant these protests were , because , for whatever reason , the world media largely ignored it .
Now , there was a group of photographers who kind of flew flying cameras as a hobby — usually photographing things like the Sphinx , the Pyramids — who happened to be right around the corner , and they flew a camera and they took some snapshots , some panoramas of this demonstration .
Just completely independent entity , completely random occurrence , and the image , when I saw it , it really struck me .
Here 's one of the panoramas .
So in a single image , you can really see the scale of this event — just the number of people , the colors , the banners .
You just can 't consider this insignificant .
All in a single image , which was really cool to me .
And I think , in the future , journalism and many other professions , there are flying cameras already quite commonly out there , but I think , you wait a few months , a few years , and for many professions , it 's really going to be a requirement .
And it make sense . It 's such a unique perspective .
Nothing really communicates this scale , for example , in context , in a way that this does .
But there are a few hurdles , and they are quite basic and quite fundamental .
One is piloting .
So for this image , they flew a camera , a five kilogram device with an SLR under it .
It 's quite heavy , lots of spinning , sharp things .
It 's a bit uncomfortable to fly , probably also for the operator .
In fact , you can see that on the back of the pilot 's shirt , it says , " No questions until landing " in Russian and in English , because people are curious , and they 'll go tap you , and then you lose your focus and things happen .
And these guys are great . They 're professionals ; they 're really careful in what they do .
So in the protests , maybe you noticed , they flew over the river so it was quite safe .
But this doesn 't necessarily apply to all people and all conditions , so we really have to make piloting easier .
The other problem is regulations , or rather , the lack of good regulation .
For many good reasons , it 's just difficult to come up with common sense laws to regulate flying cameras .
So we already have cameras .
Everyone here , I 'm sure , has a smartphone with a camera , right ?
There are more and more of them .
You hear about people with Google Glass being attacked .
You hear about , actually , a drone pilot , a hobbyist , was attacked two weeks ago because he was flying near a beach .
Here 's some personal input I didn 't expect .
Just yesterday , I was attacked by a guy who claimed that I was filming him .
I was checking my email right here — easy way to get input for your talk .
But I think there are better solutions .
I think we have to defuse the situation .
We have to come up with responsible solutions that address the privacy issues and the safety , accountability issues but still give us that perspective .
And this is one potential solution .
So this is the Fotokite .
Well , let me see , it 's a quadrocopter , but what 's kind of special about it is there 's a leash .
It 's literally a dog leash . It 's very convenient .
And the neat thing about it is , to fly it , there 's no joysticks , nothing like this .
You just turn it on and you point in the direction that you want to fly .
You give it a little twist .
That 's kind of the way you communicate .
And there it goes .
So the interaction is super simple .
It 's like a personal flying pet .
It just always maintains a certain angle to you , and if I move around with it , it 'll actually follow me naturally .
And of course , we can build on top of this . So this leash has some additional electronics .
You can turn it on .
And now , it 's like telling your dog to fly lower , if you have such a dog . So , I can press a button and manipulate it rather easily .
So I just shifted its position .
And it 's really safe .
I don 't know about you guys in the front row — — but at least in principle , you have to agree that you feel safer because there is a physical connection .
Live demos are hard , right ? Things go wrong all the time .
But no matter what , this thing will actually prevent this thing from going into you . What 's more , it tells you immediately that I am the one responsible for this device .
You don 't have to look for someone controlling it .
Now , I can tell you that it 's easy a lot , but I think a really good way to prove that is to grab a second one and launch it .
And if I can do this on stage live , then I can show each and every one of you in five minutes how to operate one of these devices .
So now we have two eyes in the sky . And now the trick is getting them back .
So my question now to you is , well , it 's a nice solution , it 's very accessible , it 's safe .
What would you use it for ?
What would you use such a camera for in your life ?
Thank you .

Marc Abrahams : A science award that makes you laugh , then think
As founder of the Ig Nobel awards , Marc Abrahams explores the world 's most improbable research . In this thought-provoking talk , he tells stories of truly weird science -- and makes the case that silliness is critical to boosting public interest in science .
George and Charlotte Blonsky , who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City , invented something .
They got a patent in 1965 for what they call , " a device to assist women in giving birth . "
This device consists of a large , round table and some machinery .
When the woman is ready to deliver her child , she lies on her back , she is strapped down to the table , and the table is rotated at high speed .
The child comes flying out through centrifugal force .
If you look at their patent carefully , especially if you have any engineering background or talent , you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate . Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people , one of the main people , who helped answer the question , " Why don 't woodpeckers get headaches ? "
And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains , we being human beings , They , the woodpeckers , typically will peck , they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day . Every day !
And as far as anyone knows , that doesn 't bother them in the slightest .
How does this happen ?
Their brain does not slosh around like ours does .
Their brain is packed in very tightly , at least for blows coming right from the front .
Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when , in this country especially , people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly .
And the woodpecker maybe relates to that .
There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called " A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years . "
Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn 't really know what to do about it .
The man had cut his finger , he worked processing chickens , and then he started to smell really , really bad .
So bad that when he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses , they couldn 't stand being in the room with him .
They tried every drug , every other treatment they could think of .
After a year , he still smelled putrid .
After two years , still smelled putrid .
Three years , four years , still smelled putrid .
After five years , it went away on its own .
It 's a mystery .
In New Zealand , Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city .
They live in a city that has huge hills , San Francisco-grade hills .
And in the winter there , it gets very cold and very icy . There are lots of injuries .
The tradition that they tested , they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning , to stop and try something out .
Try one of two conditions .
The tradition is that in the winter , in that city , you wear your socks on the outside of your boots .
And what they discovered by experiment , and it was quite graphic when they saw it , was that it 's true .
That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside , you 're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall .
Now , I hope you will agree with me that these things I 've just described to you , each of them , deserves some kind of prize . And that 's what they got , each of them got an Ig Nobel prize .
In 1991 , I , together with bunch of other people , started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony .
Every year we give out 10 prizes .
The prizes are based on just one criteria . It 's very simple .
It 's that you 've done something that makes people laugh and then think .
Whatever it is , there 's something about it that when people encounter it at first , their only possible reaction is to laugh .
And then a week later , it 's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do is tell their friends about it .
That 's the quality we look for .
Every year , we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize .
Of those , consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves . Those self-nominees almost never win .
It 's very difficult , numerically , to win a prize if you want to .
Even if you don 't want to , it 's very difficult numerically .
You should know that when we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize , We get in touch with that person , very quietly .
We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to .
Happily for us , almost everyone who 's offered a prize decides to accept .
What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize ?
Well , you get several things .
You get an Ig Nobel prize . The design is different every year .
These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials .
You 're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year , 2013 .
Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash , some money .
We don 't have any money , so we can 't give them . In fact , the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony , which most of them do .
Last year , though , we did manage to scrape up some money .
Last year , each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars .
A $ 10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe . You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation .
They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars .
The man responsible , who runs the national bank there , by the way , won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics .
The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony , which happens at Harvard University .
And when you get there , you come to Harvard 's biggest meeting place and classroom .
It fits 1,100 people , it 's jammed to the gills , and up on the stage , waiting to shake your hand , waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize , are a bunch of Nobel prize winners .
That 's the heart of the ceremony .
The winners are kept secret until that moment , even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand don 't know who they are until they 're announced .
I am going to tell you about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we 've given .
Keep in mind , we 've given 230 prizes .
There are lots of these people who walk among you .
Maybe you have one .
A paper was published about 30 years ago called " Injuries due to Falling Coconuts . "
It was written by Dr. Peter Barss , who is Canadian .
Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor , he wanted to see the world .
So he went to Papua New Guinea .
When he got there , he went to work in a hospital , and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital .
He looked through the records , and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people because of injuries due to falling coconuts .
One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands , where there are not many coconut trees , down to visit their relatives on the coast , where there are lots .
And they 'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down .
A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall , and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time .
A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies .
You 're all familiar with colonoscopies , one way or another .
They , in these papers , explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies , how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy , your patient will explode . Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors , flew in from Paris to the ceremony , where he explained the history of this , that in the 1950s , when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time , people were figuring out how to do it well .
And there were some difficulties at first .
The basic problem , I 'm sure you 're familiar with , that you 're looking inside a long , narrow , dark place .
And so , you want to have a larger space .
You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around .
Now , that 's added to the gas , the methane gas , that 's already inside .
The gas that they used at first , in many cases , was oxygen .
So they added oxygen to methane gas .
And then they wanted to be able to see , they needed light , so they 'd put in a light source , which in the 1950s was very hot .
So you had methane gas , which is flammable , oxygen and heat .
They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly . Now it 's rare that patients will explode , but it does still happen .
The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar .
Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks .
One to save your life , one to save the life of some lucky bystander . Why would someone do this , you might wonder .
Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine .
She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown .
And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in .
So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens .
Years later , she moved to America . She had a baby , One day she looked , and on the floor , her infant son had picked up her bra , and had her bra on his face .
And that 's where the idea came from .
She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated : [ " Paul Krugman , Nobel laureate in economics " ] [ " Wolfgang Ketterle , Nobel laureate in physics " ] I myself own an emergency bra . It 's my favorite bra , but I would be happy to share it with any of you , should the need arise .
Thank you .

Fabien Cousteau : What I learned from spending 31 days underwater
In 1963 , Jacques Cousteau lived for 30 days in an underwater laboratory positioned on the floor of the Red Sea , and set a world record in the process . This summer , his grandson Fabien Cousteau broke that record . Cousteau the younger lived for 31 days aboard the Aquarius , an underwater research laboratory nine miles off the coast of Florida . In a charming talk he brings his wondrous adventure to life .
I have a confession to make .
I am addicted to adventure , and as a young boy , I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies .
My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn 't paying attention in class .
They didn 't find anything specifically wrong with me , other than being slightly dyslexic because I 'm a lefty .
But they didn 't test for curiosity .
Curiosity , to me , is about our connection with the world , with the universe .
It 's about seeing what 's around that next coral head or what 's around that next tree , and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves .
Now , my dream of dreams , I want to go explore the oceans of Mars , but until we can go there , I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets .
As a matter of fact , if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space , the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume , within which we 've explored less than five percent .
And I look at this , and I go , well , there are tools to go deeper , longer and further : submarines , ROVs , even Scuba diving .
But if we 're going to explore the final frontier on this planet , we need to live there .
We need to build a log cabin , if you will , at the bottom of the sea .
And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED [ Prize winner ] by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle .
Maybe you 've heard of her .
Two years ago , she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it , to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land .
We 've only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea .
There 's only one left in the world : it 's nine miles offshore and 65 feet down .
It 's called Aquarius .
Aquarius , in some fashion , is a dinosaur , an ancient robot chained to the bottom , this Leviathan .
In other ways , it 's a legacy .
And so with that visit , I realized that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut .
When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation , this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home .
And the point of going down to and living at this habitat was not to stay inside .
It wasn 't about living at something the size of a school bus .
It was about giving us the luxury of time outside to wander , to explore , to understand more about this oceanic final frontier .
We had megafauna come and visit us .
This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans .
But why this is so important , why this picture is up , is because this particular animal brought his friends around , and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were , they started getting curious about us , these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood , doing things with plankton .
We were studying all sorts of animals and critters , and they got closer and closer to us , and because of the luxury of time , these animals , these residents of the coral reef , were starting to get used to us , and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped .
This particular animal actually circled for 31 full days during our mission .
So mission 31 wasn 't so much about breaking records .
It was about that human-ocean connection .
Because of the luxury of time , we were able to study animals such as sharks and grouper in aggregations that we 've never seen before .
It 's like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together .
Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us , such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys .
Of course , just like any neighbor , after a while , if they get tired , and this bark is so powerful that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all within a split second .
For us , it 's just telling us to go back into the habitat and leave them alone .
Now , this wasn 't just about adventure .
There was actually a serious note to it .
We did a lot of science , and again , because of the luxury of time , we were able to do over three years of science in 31 days .
In this particular case , we were using a PAM , or , let me just see if I can get this straight , a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer .
And our scientists from FIU , MIT , and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do when we 're not around .
The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer , or PAM , gauges the fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in the water as well as climate change-related issues .
We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools , such as this sonde , or what I like to call the sponge proctologist , whereby the sonde itself tests for metabolism rates in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge , or the redwoods of the [ ocean ] .
And this gives us a much better gauge of what 's happening underwater with regard to climate change-related issues , and how the dynamics of that affect us here on land .
And finally , we looked at predator-prey behavior .
And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing , because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world , the prey , or the forage fish , act very differently .
What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef , darting in , grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes , they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs .
Well , within that 31 days , we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers on each one of these topics .
But the point of adventure is not only to learn , it 's to be able to share that knowledge with the world , and with that , thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT , we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video , up to 20,000 frames per second in a little box that 's worth 3,000 dollars .
It 's available to every one of us .
And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can 't even see it in the blink of an eye .
Let me show you a quick video of what this camera does .
You can see the silky bubble come out of our hard hats .
It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to , such as hermit crabs .
Now , using a cutting-edge piece of technology that 's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy .
We sometimes had to put the camera upside down , cordon it back to the lab , and actually man the trigger from the lab itself .
But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can 't pick up , such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey , within about .3 seconds .
That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet , and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye , impossible .
But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can 't capture , or in this case , a fish throwing up grains of sand . This is an actual sailfin goby , and if you look at it in real time , it actually doesn 't even show its fanning motion because it 's so quick .
One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had WiFi , and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences .
Quite literally right there I am Skyping in the classroom with one of the six continents and some of the 70,000 students that we connected every single day to some of these experiences .
As a matter of fact , I 'm showing a picture that I took with my smartphone from underwater of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom .
We had never seen that before .
And I dream of the day that we have underwater cities , and maybe , just maybe , if we push the boundaries of adventure and knowledge , and we share that knowledge with others out there , we can solve all sorts of problems .
My grandfather used to say , " People protect what they love . "
My father , " How can people protect what they don 't understand ? "
And I 've thought about this my whole life .
Nothing is impossible .
We need to dream , we need to be creative , and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times .
And whether it 's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we 've taken for granted , it 's about adventure .
And who knows , maybe there will be underwater cities , and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts .
Thank you very much .

Fred Swaniker : The leaders who ruined Africa , and the generation who can fix it
Before he hit eighteen , Fred Swaniker had lived in Ghana , Gambia , Botswana and Zimbabwe . What he learned from a childhood across Africa was that while good leaders can 't make much of a difference in societies with strong institutions , in countries with weak structures , leaders could make or break a country . In a passionate talk the entrepreneur and TED Fellow looks at different generations of African leaders and imagines how to develop the leadership of the future .
I experienced my first coup d 'état at the age of four .
Because of the coup d 'état , my family had to leave my native home of Ghana and move to the Gambia .
As luck would have it , six months after we arrived , they too had a military coup .
I vividly remember being woken up in the middle of the night and gathering the few belongings we could and walking for about two hours to a safe house .
For a week , we slept under our beds because we were worried that bullets might fly through the window .
Then , at the age of eight , we moved to Botswana .
This time , it was different .
There were no coups .
Everything worked . Great education .
They had such good infrastructure that even at the time they had a fiber-optic telephone system , long before it had reached Western countries .
The only thing they didn 't have is that they didn 't have their own national television station , and so I remember watching TV from neighboring South Africa , and watching Nelson Mandela in jail being offered a chance to come out if he would give up the apartheid struggle .
But he didn 't . He refused to do that until he actually achieved his objective of freeing South Africa from apartheid .
And I remember feeling how just one good leader could make such a big difference in Africa .
Then at the age of 12 , my family sent me to high school in Zimbabwe .
Initially , this too was amazing : growing economy , excellent infrastructure , and it seemed like it was a model for economic development in Africa .
I graduated from high school in Zimbabwe and I went off to college .
Six years later , I returned to the country .
Everything was different .
It had shattered into pieces .
Millions of people had emigrated , the economy was in a shambles , and it seemed all of a sudden that 30 years of development had been wiped out .
How could a country go so bad so fast ?
Most people would agree that it 's all because of leadership .
One man , President Robert Mugabe , is almost single-handedly responsible for having destroyed this country .
Now , all these experiences of living in different parts of Africa growing up did two things to me .
The first is it made me fall in love with Africa .
Everywhere I went , I experienced the wonderful beauty of our continent and saw the resilience and the spirit of our people , and at the time , I realized that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to making this continent great .
But I also realized that making Africa great would require addressing this issue of leadership .
You see , all these countries I lived in , the coups d 'état and the corruption I 'd seen in Ghana and Gambia and in Zimbabwe , contrasted with the wonderful examples I had seen in Botswana and in South Africa of good leadership .
It made me realize that Africa would rise or fall because of the quality of our leaders .
Now , one might think , of course , leadership matters everywhere .
But if there 's one thing you take away from my talk today , it is this : In Africa , more than anywhere else in the world , the difference that just one good leader can make is much greater than anywhere else , and here 's why .
It 's because in Africa , we have weak institutions , like the judiciary , the constitution , civil society and so forth .
So here 's a general rule of thumb that I believe in : When societies have strong institutions , the difference that one good leader can make is limited , but when you have weak institutions , then just one good leader can make or break that country .
Let me make it a bit more concrete .
You become the president of the United States .
You think , " Wow , I 've arrived . I 'm the most powerful man in the world . "
So you decide , perhaps let me pass a law .
All of a sudden , Congress taps you on the shoulder and says , " No , no , no , no , no , you can 't do that . "
You say , " Let me try this way . "
The Senate comes and says , " Uh-uh , we don 't think you can do that . "
You say , perhaps , " Let me print some money .
I think the economy needs a stimulus . "
The central bank governor will think you 're crazy .
You might get impeached for that .
But if you become the president of Zimbabwe , and you say , " You know , I really like this job .
I think I 'd like to stay in it forever . " Well , you just can .
You decide you want to print money .
You call the central bank governor and you say , " Please double the money supply . "
He 'll say , " Okay , yes , sir , is there anything else I can do for you ? "
This is the power that African leaders have , and this is why they make the most difference on the continent .
The good news is that the quality of leadership in Africa has been improving .
We 've had three generations of leaders , in my mind .
Generation one are those who appeared in the ' 50s and ' 60s .
These are people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania .
The legacy they left is that they brought independence to Africa .
They freed us from colonialism , and let 's give them credit for that .
They were followed by generation two .
These are people that brought nothing but havoc to Africa .
Think warfare , corruption , human rights abuses .
This is the stereotype of the typical African leader that we typically think of : Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire , Sani Abacha from Nigeria .
The good news is that most of these leaders have moved on , and they were replaced by generation three .
These are people like the late Nelson Mandela and most of the leaders that we see in Africa today , like Paul Kagame and so forth .
Now these leaders are by no means perfect , but the one thing they have done is that they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation two .
They 've stopped the fighting , and I call them the stabilizer generation .
They 're much more accountable to their people , they 've improved macroeconomic policies , and we are seeing for the first time Africa 's growing , and in fact it 's the second fastest growing economic region in the world .
So these leaders are by no means perfect , but they are by and large the best leaders we 've seen in the last 50 years .
So where to from here ?
I believe that the next generation to come after this , generation four , has a unique opportunity to transform the continent .
Specifically , they can do two things that previous generations have not done .
The first thing they need to do is they need to create prosperity for the continent .
Why is prosperity so important ?
Because none of the previous generations have been able to tackle this issue of poverty .
Africa today has the fastest growing population in the world , but also is the poorest .
By 2030 , Africa will have a larger workforce than China , and by 2050 , it will have the largest workforce in the world .
One billion people will need jobs in Africa , so if we don 't grow our economies fast enough , we 're sitting on a ticking time bomb , not just for Africa but for the entire world .
Let me show you an example of one person who is living up to this legacy of creating prosperity : Laetitia .
Laetitia 's a young woman from Kenya who at the age of 13 had to drop out of school because her family couldn 't afford to pay fees for her .
So she started her own business rearing rabbits , which happen to be a delicacy in this part of Kenya that she 's from .
This business did so well that within a year , she was employing 15 women and was able to generate enough income that she was able to send herself to school , and through these women fund another 65 children to go to school .
The profits that she generated , she used that to build a school , and today she educates 400 children in her community .
And she 's just turned 18 .
Another example is Erick Rajaonary .
Erick comes from the island of Madagascar .
Now , Erick realized that agriculture would be the key to creating jobs in the rural areas of Madagascar , but he also realized that fertilizer was a very expensive input for most farmers in Madagascar .
Madagascar has these very special bats that produce these droppings that are very high in nutrients .
In 2006 , Erick quit his job as a chartered accountant and started a company to manufacture fertilizer from the bat droppings .
Today , Erick has built a business that generates several million dollars of revenue , and he employs 70 people full time and another 800 people during the season when the bats drop their droppings the most .
Now , what I like about this story is that it shows that opportunities to create prosperity can be found almost anywhere .
Erick is known as the Batman .
And who would have thought that you would have been able to build a multimillion-dollar business employing so many people just from bat poo ?
The second thing that this generation needs to do is to create our institutions .
They need to build these institutions such that we are never held to ransom again by a few individuals like Robert Mugabe .
Now , all of this sounds great , but where are we going to get this generation four from ?
Do we just sit and hope that they emerge by chance , or that God gives them to us ?
No , I don 't think so .
It 's too important an issue for us to leave it to chance .
I believe that we need to create African institutions , home-grown , that will identify and develop these leaders in a systematic , practical way .
We 've been doing this for the last 10 years through the African Leadership Academy .
Laetitia is one of our young leaders .
Today , we have 700 of them that are being groomed for the African continent , and over the next 50 years , we expect to create 6,000 of them .
But one thing has been troubling me .
We would get about 4,000 applications a year for 100 young leaders that we could take into this academy , and so I saw the tremendous hunger that existed for this leadership training that we 're offering .
But we couldn 't satisfy it .
So today , I 'm announcing for the first time in public an extension to this vision for the African Leadership Academy .
We 're building 25 brand new universities in Africa that are going to cultivate this next generation of African leaders .
Each campus will have 10,000 leaders at a time so we 'll be educating and developing 250,000 leaders at any given time .
Over the next 50 years , this institution will create three million transformative leaders for the continent .
My hope is that half of them will become the entrepreneurs that we need , who will create these jobs that we need , and the other half will go into government and the nonprofit sector , and they will build the institutions that we need .
But they won 't just learn academics .
They will also learn how to become leaders , and they will develop their skills as entrepreneurs .
So think of this as Africa 's Ivy League , but instead of getting admitted because of your SAT scores or because of how much money you have or which family you come from , the main criteria for getting into this university will be what is the potential that you have for transforming Africa ?
But what we 're doing is just one group of institutions .
We cannot transform Africa by ourselves .
My hope is that many , many other home-grown African institutions will blossom , and these institutions will all come together with a common vision of developing this next generation of African leaders , and they will teach them this common message : create jobs , build our institutions .
Nelson Mandela once said , " Every now and then , a generation is called upon to be great .
You can be that great generation . "
I believe that if we carefully identify and cultivate the next generation of African leaders , then this generation four that is coming up will be the greatest generation that Africa and indeed the entire world has ever seen .
Thank you .

Melissa Fleming : Let 's help refugees thrive , not just survive
50 million people in the world today have been forcefully displaced from their home — a level not seen since WWII . Right now , more than 3 million Syrian refugees are seeking shelter in neighboring countries . In Lebanon , half of these refugees are children ; only 20 % are in school . Melissa Fleming of the UN 's refugee agency calls on all of us to make sure that refugee camps are healing places where people can develop the skills they 'll need to rebuild their hometowns .
So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference , and making a difference starts with telling their stories .
So when I meet refugees , I always ask them questions .
Who bombed your house ?
Who killed your son ?
Did the rest of your family make it out alive ?
How are you coping in your life in exile ?
But there 's one question that always seems to me to be most revealing , and that is : What did you take ?
What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town , and the armed gangs were approaching your house ?
A Syrian refugee boy I know told me that he didn 't hesitate when his life was in imminent danger .
He took his high school diploma , and later he told me why .
He said , " I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it . "
And he would risk his life to get that diploma .
On his way to school , he would dodge snipers .
His classroom sometimes shook with the sound of bombs and shelling , and his mother told me , " Every day , I would say to him every morning , ' Honey , please don 't go to school . ' " And when he insisted , she said , " I would hug him as if it were for the last time . "
But he said to his mother , " We 're all afraid , but our determination to graduate is stronger than our fear . "
But one day , the family got terrible news .
Hany 's aunt , his uncle and his cousin were murdered in their homes for refusing to leave their house .
Their throats were slit .
It was time to flee .
They left that day , right away , in their car , Hany hidden in the back because they were facing checkpoints of menacing soldiers .
And they would cross the border into Lebanon , where they would find peace .
But they would begin a life of grueling hardship and monotony .
They had no choice but to build a shack on the side of a muddy field , and this is Hany 's brother Ashraf , who plays outside .
And that day , they joined the biggest population of refugees in the world , in a country , Lebanon , that is tiny .
It only has four million citizens , and there are one million Syrian refugees living there .
There 's not a town , a city or a village that is not host to Syrian refugees .
This is generosity and humanity that is remarkable .
Think about it this way , proportionately .
It would be as if the entire population of Germany , 80 million people , would flee to the United States in just three years .
Half of the entire population of Syria is now uprooted , most of them inside the country .
Six and a half million people have fled for their lives .
Over and well over three million people have crossed the borders and have found sanctuary in the neighboring countries , and only a small proportion , as you see , have moved on to Europe .
What I find most worrying is that half of all Syrian refugees are children .
I took this picture of this little girl .
It was just two hours after she had arrived after a long trek from Syria into Jordan .
And most troubling of all is that only 20 percent of Syrian refugee children are in school in Lebanon .
And yet , Syrian refugee children , all refugee children tell us education is the most important thing in their lives .
Why ? Because it allows them to think of their future rather than the nightmare of their past .
It allows them to think of hope rather than hatred .
I 'm reminded of a recent visit I took to a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq , and I met this girl , and I thought , " She 's beautiful , " and I went up to her and asked her , " Can I take your picture ? "
And she said yes , but she refused to smile .
I think she couldn 't , because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children , a generation isolated and frustrated .
And yet , look at what they fled : utter destruction , buildings , industries , schools , roads , homes .
Hany 's home was also destroyed .
This will need to be rebuilt by architects , by engineers , by electricians .
Communities will need teachers and lawyers and politicians interested in reconciliation and not revenge .
Shouldn 't this be rebuilt by the people with the largest stake , the societies in exile , the refugees ?
Refugees have a lot of time to prepare for their return .
You might imagine that being a refugee is just a temporary state .
Well far from it .
With wars going on and on , the average time a refugee will spend in exile is 17 years .
Hany was into his second year in limbo when I went to visit him recently , and we conducted our entire conversation in English , which he confessed to me he learned from reading all of Dan Brown 's novels and from listening to American rap .
We also spent some nice moments of laughter and fun with his beloved brother Ashraf .
But I 'll never forget what he told me when we ended our conversation that day .
He said to me , " If I am not a student , I am nothing . "
Hany is one of 50 million people uprooted in this world today .
Never since World War II have so many people been forcibly displaced .
So while we 're making sweeping progress in human health , in technology , in education and design , we are doing dangerously little to help the victims and we are doing far too little to stop and prevent the wars that are driving them from their homes .
And there are more and more victims .
Every day , on average , by the end of this day , 32,000 people will be forcibly displaced from their homes — 32,000 people .
They flee across borders like this one .
We captured this on the Syrian border to Jordan , and this is a typical day .
Or they flee on unseaworthy and overcrowded boats , risking their lives in this case just to reach safety in Europe .
This Syrian young man survived one of these boats that capsized — most of the people drowned — and he told us , " Syrians are just looking for a quiet place where nobody hurts you , where nobody humiliates you , and where nobody kills you . "
Well , I think that should be the minimum .
How about a place of healing , of learning , and even opportunity ?
Americans and Europeans have the impression that proportionally huge numbers of refugees are coming to their country , but the reality is that 86 percent , the vast majority of refugees , are living in the developing world , in countries struggling with their own insecurity , with their own issues of helping their own populations and poverty .
So wealthy countries in the world should recognize the humanity and the generosity of the countries that are hosting so many refugees .
And all countries should make sure that no one fleeing war and persecution arrives at a closed border .
Thank you .
But there is something more that we can do than just simply helping refugees survive .
We can help them thrive .
We should think of refugee camps and communities as more than just temporary population centers where people languish waiting for the war to end .
Rather , as centers of excellence , where refugees can triumph over their trauma and train for the day that they can go home as agents of positive change and social transformation .
It makes so much sense , but I 'm reminded of the terrible war in Somalia that has been raging on for 22 years .
And imagine living in this camp .
I visited this camp .
It 's in Djibouti , neighboring Somalia , and it was so remote that we had to take a helicopter to fly there .
It was dusty and it was terribly hot .
And we went to visit a school and started talking to the children , and then I saw this girl across the room who looked to me to be the same age as my own daughter , and I went up and talked to her .
And I asked her the questions that grown-ups ask kids , like , " What is your favorite subject ? "
and , " What do you want to be when you grow up ? "
And this is when her face turned blank , and she said to me , " I have no future .
My schooling days are over . "
And I thought , there must be some misunderstanding , so I turned to my colleague and she confirmed to me there is no funding for secondary education in this camp .
And how I wished at that moment that I could say to her , " We will build you a school . "
And I also thought , what a waste .
She should be and she is the future of Somalia .
A boy named Jacob Atem had a different chance , but not before he experienced terribly tragedy .
He watched — this is in Sudan — as his village — he was only seven years old — burned to the ground , and he learned that his mother and his father and his entire family were killed that day .
Only his cousin survived , and the two of them walked for seven months — this is boys like him — chased and pursued by wild animals and armed gangs , and they finally made it to refugee camps where they found safety , and he would spend the next seven years in Kenya in a refugee camp .
But his life changed when he got the chance to be resettled to the United States , and he found love in a foster family and he was able to go to school , and he wanted me to share with you this proud moment when he graduated from university .
I spoke to him on Skype the other day , and he was in his new university in Florida pursuing his Ph.D. in public health , and he proudly told me how he was able to raise enough funds from the American public to establish a health clinic back in his village back home .
So I want to take you back to Hany .
When I told him I was going to have the chance to speak to you here on the TED stage , he allowed me to read you a poem that he sent in an email to me .
He wrote : " I miss myself , my friends , times of reading novels or writing poems , birds and tea in the morning .
My room , my books , myself , and everything that was making me smile .
Oh , oh , I had so many dreams that were about to be realized . "
So here is my point : Not investing in refugees is a huge missed opportunity .
Leave them abandoned , and they risk exploitation and abuse , and leave them unskilled and uneducated , and delay by years the return to peace and prosperity in their countries .
I believe how we treat the uprooted will shape the future of our world .
The victims of war can hold the keys to lasting peace , and it 's the refugees who can stop the cycle of violence .
Hany is at a tipping point .
We would love to help him go to university and to become an engineer , but our funds are prioritized for the basics in life : tents and blankets and mattresses and kitchen sets , food rations and a bit of medicine .
University is a luxury .
But leave him to languish in this muddy field , and he will become a member of a lost generation .
Hany 's story is a tragedy , but it doesn 't have to end that way .
Thank you .

Jorge Soto : The future of early cancer detection ?
Along with a crew of technologists and scientists , Jorge Soto is developing a simple , noninvasive , open-source test that looks for early signs of multiple forms of cancer . Onstage at TEDGlobal 2014 , he demonstrates a working prototype of the mobile platform for the first time .
Almost a year ago , my aunt started suffering back pains .
She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years .
They recommended that she do some therapy , but after a while she wasn 't feeling better , so the doctors decided to do further tests .
They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs , and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs , but after a few weeks of treatment , again her health wasn 't getting any better .
So finally , they decided to do a biopsy , and two weeks later , the results of the biopsy came back .
It was stage 3 lung cancer .
Her lifestyle was almost free of risk .
She never smoked a cigarette , she never drank alcohol , and she had been playing sports for almost half her life .
Perhaps , that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed .
My story might be , unfortunately , familiar to most of you .
One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer , and one out of four will die because of it .
Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family , but that process of going back and forth with new tests , different doctors describing symptoms , discarding diseases over and over , was stressful and frustrating , especially for my aunt .
And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history .
We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer , but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis , if any .
Today , most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong .
Today , the majority of people still don 't have access to early cancer detection methods , even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it .
We know that we can change this in our lifetime , and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey , this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier , cheaper , smarter and more accessible than ever before .
The context , of course , is that we 're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates , and the biological realm is no exception .
It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers .
But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated , it is also being democratized .
Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship , politics or education , recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well , and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches .
We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile , Panama , Mexico , Israel and Greece , and based on recent scientific discoveries , we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample .
We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs .
To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer , I need to start with proteins , because when cancer is present in our body , protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells .
As you might know , proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body , like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA , but before a protein is expressed or produced , relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA , so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein , and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins , but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs .
So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression .
Unlike DNA , which is mainly fixed , microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time , telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment .
And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer , because as you know , cancer is a disease of altered gene expression .
It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes .
Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same , but at the microRNA level , there are patterns .
Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique , specific pattern for each type of cancer , even at the early stages , reflecting the progression of the disease , and whether it 's responding to medication or in remission , making microRNAs a perfect , highly sensitive biomarker .
However , the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way , because they are very short sequences of nucleotides , much smaller than DNA .
And also , all microRNAs are very similar to each other , with just tiny differences .
So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules , extremely similar , extremely small .
We believe that we have found a way to do so , and this is the first time that we 've shown it in public .
Let me do a demonstration .
Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test , a lab technician extracts a total RNA , which is quite simple today , and puts it in a standard 96-well plate like this one .
Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign , that is looking for a specific microRNA , acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample , and when it does , it will shine with green color .
To run the reaction , you put the plate inside a device like this one , and then you can put your smartphone on top of it .
If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen .
A smartphone is a connected computer and it 's also a camera , good enough for our purpose .
The smartphone is taking pictures , and when the reaction is over , it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation .
This entire process lasts around 60 minutes , but when the process is over , wells that shine are matched with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine .
And then , when this entire process is over , this is what happens .
This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time .
Then , if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person 's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease , this is how pancreatic cancer looks like .
This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer .
Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud , so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information .
If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer , we need to stop treating them as acute , isolated episodes , and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis .
This entire platform is a working prototype .
It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology , a low-cost , 3D-printed device , and data science to try to tackle one of humanity 's toughest challenges .
Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized , this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods , and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more , so we 're making the design of the device open-source .
Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages , but so far , we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer , lung cancer , breast cancer and hepatic cancer .
And currently , we 're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer .
This is the single non-invasive , accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done .
Since we 're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time , you don 't need to know which cancer you 're looking for .
You don 't need to have any symptoms .
You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools .
Today , cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear .
That is , at stage 3 or 4 , and I believe that is too late .
It is too expensive for our families .
It is too expensive for humanity .
We cannot lose the war against cancer .
It not only costs us billions of dollars , but it also costs us the people we love .
Today , my aunt , she 's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude .
However , I want fights like this to become very rare .
I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages , and I 'm certain that in the very near future , because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences , the way we see cancer will radically change .
It will give us the chance of detecting it early , understanding it better , and finding a cure .
Thank you very much .
Jeff Iliff : One more reason to get a good night 's sleep
The brain uses a quarter of the body 's entire energy supply , yet only accounts for about two percent of the body 's mass . So how does this unique organ receive and , perhaps more importantly , rid itself of vital nutrients ? New research suggests it has to do with sleep .
Sleep .
It 's something we spend about a third of our lives doing , but do any of us really understand what it 's all about ?
Two thousand years ago , Galen , one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world , proposed that while we 're awake , our brain 's motive force , its juice , would flow out to all the other parts of the body , animating them but leaving the brain all dried up , and he thought that when we sleep , all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back , rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind .
Now , that sounds completely ridiculous to us now , but Galen was simply trying to explain something about sleep that we all deal with every day .
See , we all know based on our own experience that when you sleep , it clears your mind , and when you don 't sleep , it leaves your mind murky .
But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around , we still haven 't understood why it is that sleep , of all of our activities , has this incredible restorative function for the mind .
So today I want to tell you about some recent research that may shed new light on this question .
We 've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain 's most basic needs , a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body .
So almost all the biology that we observe can be thought of as a series of problems and their corresponding solutions , and the first problem that every organ must solve is a continuous supply of nutrients to fuel all those cells of the body .
In the brain , that is especially critical ; its intense electrical activity uses up a quarter of the body 's entire energy supply , even though the brain accounts for only about two percent of the body 's mass .
So the circulatory system solves the nutrient delivery problem by sending blood vessels to supply nutrients and oxygen to every corner of our body .
You can actually see it in this video here .
Here , we 're imaging blood vessels in the brain of a living mouse .
The blood vessels form a complex network that fills the entire brain volume .
They start at the surface of the brain , and then they dive down into the tissue itself , and as they spread out , they supply nutrients and oxygen to each and every cell in the brain .
Now , just as every cell requires nutrients to fuel it , every cell also produces waste as a byproduct , and the clearance of that waste is the second basic problem that each organ has to solve .
This diagram shows the body 's lymphatic system , which has evolved to meet this need .
It 's a second parallel network of vessels that extends throughout the body .
It takes up proteins and other waste from the spaces between the cells , it collects them , and then dumps them into the blood so they can be disposed of .
But if you look really closely at this diagram , you 'll see something that doesn 't make a lot of sense .
So if we were to zoom into this guy 's head , one of the things that you would see there is that there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain .
But that doesn 't make a lot of sense , does it ?
I mean , the brain is this intensely active organ that produces a correspondingly large amount of waste that must be efficiently cleared .
And yet , it lacks lymphatic vessels , which means that the approach that the rest of the body takes to clearing away its waste won 't work in the brain .
So how , then , does the brain solve its waste clearance problem ?
Well , that seemingly mundane question is where our group first jumped into this story , and what we found as we dove down into the brain , down among the neurons and the blood vessels , was that the brain 's solution to the problem of waste clearance , it was really unexpected .
It was ingenious , but it was also beautiful .
Let me tell you about what we found .
So the brain has this large pool of clean , clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid .
We call it the CSF .
The CSF fills the space that surrounds the brain , and wastes from inside the brain make their way out to the CSF , which gets dumped , along with the waste , into the blood . So in that way , it sounds a lot like the lymphatic system , doesn 't it ?
But what 's interesting is that the fluid and the waste from inside the brain , they don 't just percolate their way randomly out to these pools of CSF .
Instead , there is a specialized network of plumbing that organizes and facilitates this process .
You can see that in these videos .
Here , we 're again imaging into the brain of living mice .
The frame on your left shows what 's happening at the brain 's surface , and the frame on your right shows what 's happening down below the surface of the brain within the tissue itself .
We 've labeled the blood vessels in red , and the CSF that 's surrounding the brain will be in green .
Now , what was surprising to us was that the fluid on the outside of the brain , it didn 't stay on the outside .
Instead , the CSF was pumped back into and through the brain along the outsides of the blood vessels , and as it flushed down into the brain along the outsides of these vessels , it was actually helping to clear away , to clean the waste from the spaces between the brain 's cells .
If you think about it , using the outsides of these blood vessels like this is a really clever design solution , because the brain is enclosed in a rigid skull and it 's packed full of cells , so there is no extra space inside it for a whole second set of vessels like the lymphatic system .
Yet the blood vessels , they extend from the surface of the brain down to reach every single cell in the brain , which means that fluid that 's traveling along the outsides of these vessels can gain easy access to the entire brain 's volume , so it 's actually this really clever way to repurpose one set of vessels , the blood vessels , to take over and replace the function of a second set of vessels , the lymphatic vessels , to make it so you don 't need them .
And what 's amazing is that no other organ takes quite this approach to clearing away the waste from between its cells .
This is a solution that is entirely unique to the brain .
But our most surprising finding was that all of this , everything I just told you about , with all this fluid rushing through the brain , it 's only happening in the sleeping brain .
Here , the video on the left shows how much of the CSF is moving through the brain of a living mouse while it 's awake .
It 's almost nothing .
Yet in the same animal , if we wait just a little while until it 's gone to sleep , what we see is that the CSF is rushing through the brain , and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep , the brain cells themselves seem to shrink , opening up spaces in between them , allowing fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out .
So it seems that Galen may actually have been sort of on the right track when he wrote about fluid rushing through the brain when sleep came on .
Our own research , now it 's 2,000 years later , suggests that what 's happening is that when the brain is awake and is at its most busy , it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later , and then , when it goes to sleep and doesn 't have to be as busy , it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells , the waste that 's accumulated throughout the day .
So it 's actually a little bit like how you or I , we put off our household chores during the work week when we don 't have time to get to it , and then we play catch up on all the cleaning that we have to do when the weekend rolls around .
Now , I 've just talked a lot about waste clearance , but I haven 't been very specific about the kinds of waste that the brain needs to be clearing during sleep in order to stay healthy .
The waste product that these recent studies focused most on is amyloid-beta , which is a protein that 's made in the brain all the time .
My brain 's making amyloid-beta right now , and so is yours .
But in patients with Alzheimer 's disease , amyloid-beta builds up and aggregates in the spaces between the brain 's cells , instead of being cleared away like it 's supposed to be , and it 's this buildup of amyloid-beta that 's thought to be one of the key steps in the development of that terrible disease .
So we measured how fast amyloid-beta is cleared from the brain when it 's awake versus when it 's asleep , and we found that indeed , the clearance of amyloid-beta is much more rapid from the sleeping brain .
So if sleep , then , is part of the brain 's solution to the problem of waste clearance , then this may dramatically change how we think about the relationship between sleep , amyloid-beta , and Alzheimer 's disease .
A series of recent clinical studies suggest that among patients who haven 't yet developed Alzheimer 's disease , worsening sleep quality and sleep duration are associated with a greater amount of amyloid-beta building up in the brain , that these studies don 't prove that lack of sleep or poor sleep cause Alzheimer 's disease , they do suggest that the failure of the brain to keep its house clean by clearing away waste like amyloid-beta may contribute to the development of conditions like Alzheimer 's .
So what this new research tells us , then , is that the one thing that all of you already knew about sleep , that even Galen understood about sleep , that it refreshes and clears the mind , may actually be a big part of what sleep is all about .
See , you and I , we go to sleep every single night , but our brains , they never rest .
While our body is still and our mind is off walking in dreams somewhere , the elegant machinery of the brain is quietly hard at work cleaning and maintaining this unimaginably complex machine .
Like our housework , it 's a dirty and a thankless job , but it 's also important .
In your house , if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month , your home will become completely unlivable very quickly .
But in the brain , the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops , because when it comes to cleaning the brain , it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that 's at stake , which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow .
Thank you .

Dilip Ratha : The hidden force in global economics : sending money home
In 2013 , international migrants sent $ 413 billion home to families and friends — three times more than the total of global foreign aid . This money , known as remittances , makes a significant difference in the lives of those receiving it and plays a major role in the economies of many countries . Economist Dilip Ratha describes the promise of these " dollars wrapped with love " and analyzes how they are stifled by practical and regulatory obstacles .
I live in Washington , D.C. , but I grew up in Sindhekela , a village in Orissa , in India .
My father was a government worker .
My mother could not read or write , but she would say to me , " A king is worshipped only in his own kingdom . A poet is respected everywhere . "
So I wanted to be a poet when I grew up .
But I almost didn 't go to college until an aunt offered financial help .
I went to study in Sambalpur , the largest town in the region , where , already in college , I saw a television for the first time .
I had dreams of going to the United States for higher studies .
When the opportunity came , I crossed two oceans , with borrowed money for airfare and only a $ 20 bill in my pocket .
In the U.S. , I worked in a research center , part-time , while taking graduate classes in economics .
And with the little I earned , I would finance myself and then I would send money home to my brother and my father .
My story is not unique .
There are millions of people who migrate each year .
With the help of the family , they cross oceans , they cross deserts , they cross rivers , they cross mountains .
They risk their lives to realize a dream , and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family , which has helped them before .
There are 232 million international migrants in the world .
These are people who live in a country other than their country of birth .
If there was a country made up of only international migrants , that would be larger , in population , than Brazil .
That would be larger , in its size of the economy , than France .
Some 180 million of them , from poor countries , send money home regularly .
Those sums of money are called remittances .
Here is a fact that might surprise you : 413 billion dollars , 413 billion dollars was the amount of remittances sent last year by migrants to developing countries .
Migrants from developing countries , money sent to developing countries — 413 billion dollars .
That 's a remarkable number because that is three times the size of the total of development aid money .
And yet , you and I , my colleagues in Washington , we endlessly debate and discuss about development aid , while we ignore remittances as small change .
True , people send 200 dollars per month , on average . But , repeated month after month , by millions of people , these sums of money add up to rivers of foreign currency .
So India , last year , received 72 billion dollars , larger than its IT exports .
In Egypt remittances are three times the size of revenues from the Suez Canal .
In Tajikistan , remittances are 42 percent of GDP .
And in poorer countries , smaller countries , fragile countries , conflict-afflicted countries , remittances are a lifeline , as in Somalia or in Haiti .
No wonder these flows have huge impacts on economies and on poor people .
Remittances , unlike private investment money , they don 't flow back at the first sign of trouble in the country .
They actually act like an insurance .
When the family is in trouble , facing hardship , facing hard times , remittances increase , they act like an insurance .
Migrants send more money then .
Unlike development aid money , that must go through official agencies , through governments , remittances directly reach the poor , reach the family , and often with business advice .
So in Nepal , the share of poor people was 42 percent in 1995 , the share of poor people in the population . By 2005 , a decade later , at a time of political crisis , economic crisis , the share of poor people went down to 31 percent .
That decline in poverty , most of it , about half of it , is believed to be because of remittances from India , another poor country .
In El Salvador , the school dropout rate among children is lower in families that receive remittances .
In Mexico and Sri Lanka , the birth weight of children is higher among families that receive remittances .
Remittances are dollars wrapped with care .
Migrants send money home for food , for buying necessities , for building houses , for funding education , for funding healthcare for the elderly , for business investments for friends and family .
Migrants send even more money home for special occasions like a surgery or a wedding . And migrants also send money , perhaps far too many times , for unexpected funerals that they cannot attend .
Much as these flows do all that good , there are barriers to these flows of remittances , these 400 billion dollars of remittances .
Foremost among them is the exorbitant cost of sending money home .
Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor .
They will say , " Up to 500 dollars if you want to send , we will charge you 30 dollars fixed . "
If you are poor and if you have only 200 dollars to send , you have to pay that $ 30 fee .
The global average cost of sending money is eight percent .
That means you send 100 dollars , the family on the other side receives only 92 dollars .
To send money to Africa , the cost is even higher : 12 percent .
To send money within Africa , the cost is even higher : over 20 percent .
For example , sending money from Benin to Nigeria .
And then there is the case of Venezuela , where , because of exchange controls , you send 100 dollars and you are lucky if the family on the other side receives even 10 dollars .
Of course , nobody sends money to Venezuela through the official channel .
It all goes in suitcases .
Whereever costs are high , money goes underground .
And what is worse , many developing countries actually have a blanket ban on sending money out of the country .
Many rich nations also have a blanket ban on sending money to specific countries .
So , is it that there are no options , no better options , cheaper options , to send money ?
There are .
M-Pesa in Kenya enables people to send money and receive money at a fixed cost of only 60 cents per transaction .
U.S. Fed started a program with Mexico to enable money service businesses to send money to Mexico for a fixed cost of only 67 cents per transaction .
And yet , these faster , cheaper , better options can 't be applied internationally because of the fear of money laundering , even though there is little data connection between money laundering and these small remittance transactions .
Many international banks now are wary of hosting bank accounts of money service businesses , especially those serving Somalia .
Somalia , a country where the per capita income is only 250 dollars per year .
Monthly remittances , on average , to Somalia is larger than that amount .
Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia .
And yet , this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid , while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy , through regulations .
Then there is the case of poor people from villages , like me .
In the villages , the only place where you can get money is through the post office .
Most of the governments in the world have allowed their post offices to have exclusive partnerships with money transfer companies .
So , if I have to send money to my father in the village , I must send money through that particular money transfer company , even if the cost is high .
I cannot go to a cheaper option .
This has to go .
So , what can international organizations and social entrepreneurs do to reduce the cost of sending money home ?
First , relax regulations on small remittances under 1,000 dollars .
Governments should recognize that small remittances are not money laundering .
Second , governments should abolish exclusive partnerships between their post office and the money transfer company .
For that matter , between the post office and any national banking system that has a large network that serves the poor .
In fact , they should promote competition , open up the partnership so that we will bring down costs like we did , like they did , in the telecommunications industry .
You have seen what has happened there .
Third , large nonprofit philanthropic organizations should create a remittance platform on a nonprofit basis .
remittance platform to serve the money transfer companies so that they can send money at a low cost , while complying with all the complex regulations all over the world .
The development community should set a goal of reducing remittance costs to one percent from the current eight percent .
If we reduce costs to one percent , that would release a saving of 30 billion dollars per year .
Thirty billion dollars , that 's larger than the entire bilateral aid budget going to Africa per year .
That is larger than , or almost similar to , the total aid budget of the United States government , the largest donor on the planet .
Actually , the savings would be larger than that 30 billion because remittance channels are also used for aid , trade and investment purposes .
Another major impediment to the flow of remittances reaching the family is the large and exorbitant and illegal cost of recruitment , fees that migrants pay , migrant workers pay to laborers who found them the job .
I was in Dubai a few years ago .
I visited a camp for workers .
It was 8 in the evening , dark , hot , humid .
Workers were coming back from their grueling day of work , and I struck a conversation with a Bangladeshi construction worker .
He was preoccupied that he is sending money home , he has been sending money home for a few months now , and the money is mostly going to the recruitment agent , to the labor agent who found him that job .
And in my mind , I could picture the wife waiting for the monthly remittance .
The remittance arrives .
She takes the money and hands it over to the recruitment agent , while the children are looking on .
This has to stop .
It is not only construction workers from Bangladesh , it is all the workers . There are millions of migrant workers who suffer from this problem .
A construction worker from Bangladesh , on an average , pays about 4,000 dollars in recruitment fees for a job that gives him only 2,000 dollars per year in income .
That means that for the two years or three years of his life , he is basically sending money to pay for the recruitment fees .
The family doesn 't get to see any of it .
It is not only Dubai , it is the dark underbelly of every major city in the world .
It is not only Bangladeshi construction workers , it is workers from all over the world .
It is not only men .
Women are especially vulnerable to recruitment malpractices .
One of the most exciting and newest thing happening in the area of remittances is how to mobilize , through innovation , diaspora saving and diaspora giving .
Migrants send money home , but they also save a large amount of money where they live .
Annually , migrant savings are estimated to be 500 billion dollars . Most of that money is parked in bank deposits that give you zero percent interest rate .
If a country were to come and offer a three percent or four percent interest rate , and then say that the money would be used for building schools , roads , airports , train systems in the country of origin , a lot of migrants would be interested in parting with their money because to stay engaged with their country 's development .
Remittance channels can be used to sell these bonds to migrants because when they come on a monthly basis to send remittances , that 's when you can actually sell it to them .
You can also do the same for mobilizing diaspora giving .
I would love to invest in a bullet train system in India and I would love to contribute to efforts to fight malaria in my village .
Remittances are a great way of sharing prosperity between places in a targeted way that benefits those who need them most .
Remittances empower people .
We must do all we can to make remittances and recruitment safer and cheaper .
And it can be done .
As for myself , I have been away from India for two decades now .
My wife is a Venezuelan .
My children are Americans .
Increasingly , I feel like a global citizen .
And yet , I am growing nostalgic about my country of birth .
I want to be in India and in the U.S. at the same time .
My parents are not there anymore .
My brothers and sisters have moved on .
There is no real urgency for me to send money home .
And yet , from time to time , I send money home to friends , to relatives , to the village , to be there , to stay engaged — that 's part of my identity .
And , I 'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty .
Thank you .

Pia Mancini : How to upgrade democracy for the Internet era
Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond . Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process , and run candidates who will listen to what they say .
I have the feeling that we can all agree that we 're moving towards a new model of the state and society .
But , we 're absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be .
It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracy in our day and age .
Let 's think about it this way : We are 21st-century citizens , doing our very , very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century .
Let 's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system .
First of all , it 's designed for an information technology that 's over 500 years old .
And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many .
And the many get to vote once every couple of years .
In the second place , the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high .
You either have to have a fair bit of money and influence , or you have to devote your entire life to politics .
You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe , one day , you 'll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made .
And last but not least , the language of the system — it 's incredibly cryptic .
It 's done for lawyers , by lawyers , and no one else can understand .
So , it 's a system where we can choose our authorities , but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions .
So , in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation , our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can , more than ever before , express our desires and our concerns .
Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients of a monologue .
So , it 's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results : silence or noise .
Silence , in terms of citizens not engaging , simply not wanting to participate .
There 's this commonplace [ idea ] that I truly , truly dislike , and it 's this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic . That we shun commitment .
But , can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend , physically , a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever ?
Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents , nor has any dialogue capacity , and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves .
And , then we find noise : Chile , Argentina , Brazil , Mexico Italy , France , Spain , the United States , they 're all democracies .
Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes . But they still feel the need , they need to take to the streets in order to be heard .
To me , it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies , " No taxation without representation , " can now be updated to " No representation without a conversation . "
We want our seat at the table .
And rightly so .
But in order to be part of this conversation , we need to know what we want to do next , because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction .
My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests , protests that were able to successfully impose agendas , roll back extremely pernicious legislation , and even overthrow authoritarian governments .
And we should be immensely proud of this .
But , we also must admit that we haven 't been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we 're seeing and find the consensus and build the alliances that are needed to make it happen .
And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers , like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups that generally lie on the extremes .
But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years .
But it 's not either the ability to bring millions onto the streets .
So the question I 'd like to raise here , and I do believe it 's the most important question we need to answer , is this one : If Internet is the new printing press , then what is democracy for the Internet era ?
What institutions do we want to build for the 21st-century society ?
I don 't have the answer , just in case .
I don 't think anyone does .
But I truly believe we can 't afford to ignore this question anymore .
So , I 'd like to share our experience and what we 've learned so far and hopefully contribute two cents to this conversation .
Two years ago , with a group of friends from Argentina , we started thinking , " how can we get our representatives , our elected representatives , to represent us ? "
Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today 's problems with yesterday 's tools .
So the question that motivated us was , can we try and solve some of today 's problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives ?
Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS .
DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representatives to make it easier for us to participate from our everyday lives .
So first of all , you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform .
But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information , but from doing something with it .
So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we 're going to do next , and DemocracyOS allows for that .
Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences , one on top of each other , but that our healthy and robust public debate should be , once again , one of its fundamental values .
So DemocracyOS is about persuading and being persuaded .
It 's about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement .
And finally , you can vote how you would like your elected representative to vote .
And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue , you can always delegate your vote to someone else , allowing for a dynamic and emerging social leadership .
It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress .
But , it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick .
What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions .
So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS .
We said , " Look , here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies . "
And yes , we failed .
We failed big time .
We were sent to play outside like little kids .
Amongst other things , we were called naive .
And I must be honest : I think , in hindsight , we were .
Because the challenges that we face , they 're not technological , they 're cultural .
Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions .
So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea , we needed to do it ourselves .
And so we took quite a leap of faith , and in August last year , we founded our own political party , El Partido de la Red , or the Net Party , in the city of Buenos Aires .
And taking an even bigger leap of faith , we ran for elections in October last year with this idea : if we want a seat in Congress , our candidate , our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS .
Every single project that got introduced in Congress , we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform .
It was our way of hacking the political system .
We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation , to have a seat at the table , we needed to become valid stakeholders , and the only way of doing it is to play by the system rules .
But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions .
For the first time , we were making our decisions together with those who we were affecting directly by those decisions .
It was a very , very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires .
But it got attention .
We got 22,000 votes , that 's 1.2 percent of the votes , and we came in second for the local options .
So , even if that wasn 't enough to win a seat in Congress , it was enough for us to become part of the conversation , to the extent that next month , Congress , as an institution , is launching for the first time in Argentina 's history , a DemocracyOS to discuss , with the citizens , three pieces of legislation : two on urban transportation and one on the use of public space .
Of course , our elected representatives are not saying , " Yes , we 're going to vote according to what citizens decide , " but they 're willing to try .
They 're willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefully they 'll be willing to listen as well .
Our political system can be transformed , and not by subverting it , by destroying it , but by rewiring it with the tools that Internet affords us now .
But a real challenge is to find , to design to create , to empower those connectors that are able to innovate , to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies to the 21st century .
I 'm not saying it 's easy .
But in our experience , we actually stand a chance of making it work .
And in my heart , it 's most definitely worth trying .
Thank you .

Daria van den Bercken : Why I take the piano on the road … and in the air
Pianist Daria van den Bercken fell in love with the baroque keyboard music of George Frideric Handel . Now , she aims to ignite this passion in others . In this talk , she plays us through the emotional roller coaster of his music — while sailing with her piano through the air , driving it down the street , and of course playing on the stage .
Recently , I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel .
I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam , again playing music by this same composer .
Let 's take a look .
Daria van den Bercken : I live there on the third floor .
I live there on the corner .
I actually live there , around the corner. and you 'd be really welcome .
Does that sound like fun ? Yes !
[ " Handel house concert " ] Daria van den Bercken : All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons .
Now you may ask , why have I done these things ?
They 're not really typical for a musician 's day-to-day life .
Well , I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible .
It started a couple of years ago .
I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little , when I found out that Handel had written works Well , I was surprised . I did not know this .
So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing .
And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure , unprejudiced amazement .
It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music , and I had not felt that in a long time .
It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it .
The first piece that I played through started like this .
Well this sounds very melancholic , doesn 't it ?
And I turned the page and what came next was this .
Well , this sounds very energetic , doesn 't it ?
So within a couple of minutes , and the piece isn 't even finished yet , I experienced two very contrasting characters : beautiful melancholy and sheer energy .
And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions .
And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively .
I 've given a lot of children 's concerts for children of seven and eight years old , and whatever I play , whether it 's Bach , Beethoven , even Stockhausen , or some jazzy music , they are open to hear it , really willing to listen , and they are comfortable doing so .
And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older , 11 , 12 , I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that .
The complexity of the music does become an issue , and actually the opinions of others — parents , friends , media — they start to count .
But the young ones , they don 't question their own opinion .
They are in this constant state of wonder , and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children , even when growing up .
And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street , online , in the air : to feel that state of wonder , to truly listen , and to listen without prejudice .
And I would like to invite you to do so now .
Thank you .

Nancy Kanwisher : A neural portrait of the human mind
Brain imaging pioneer Nancy Kanwisher , who uses fMRI scans to see activity in brain regions , shares what she and her colleagues have learned : The brain is made up of both highly specialized components and general-purpose " machinery . " Another surprise : There 's so much left to learn .
Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind .
And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single , general-purpose processor , but a collection of highly specialized components , each solving a different specific problem , and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers .
To give you a feel for this idea , imagine the following scenario : You walk into your child 's day care center .
As usual , there 's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up , but this time , the children 's faces look weirdly similar , and you can 't figure out which child is yours .
Do you need new glasses ?
Are you losing your mind ?
You run through a quick mental checklist .
No , you seem to be thinking clearly , and your vision is perfectly sharp .
And everything looks normal except the children 's faces .
You can see the faces , but they don 't look distinctive , and none of them looks familiar , and it 's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter .
This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people .
It 's called prosopagnosia , and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain .
The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired ; everything else is just fine .
Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage .
These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components , but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology , especially MRI .
So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution , so I 'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object , and we 're going to fly through them and you 're going to try to figure out what the object is .
Here we go .
It 's not that easy . It 's an artichoke .
Okay , let 's try another one , starting from the bottom and going through the top .
Broccoli ! It 's a head of broccoli .
Isn 't it beautiful ? I love that .
Okay , here 's another one . It 's a brain , of course .
In fact , it 's my brain .
We 're going through slices through my head like that .
That 's my nose over on the right , and now we 're going over here , right there .
So this picture 's nice , if I do say so myself , but it shows only anatomy .
The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity , that is , where neurons are firing .
So here 's how this works .
Brains are like muscles .
When they get active , they need increased blood flow to supply that activity , and lucky for us , blood flow control to the brain is local , so if a bunch of neurons , say , right there get active and start firing , then blood flow increases just right there .
So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase , producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up .
So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can 't , let me describe one of the first studies I ever did .
We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces , and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago , but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person , so we set out to look for it .
So I was the first subject .
I went into the scanner , I lay on my back , I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours .
So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner , I can tell you that one of the skills that 's really important for MRI research is bladder control .
When I got out of the scanner , I did a quick analysis of the data , looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects , and here 's what I saw .
Now this image looks just awful by today 's standards , but at the time I thought it was beautiful .
What it shows is that region right there , that little blob , it 's about the size of an olive and it 's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there .
And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response , that is , higher neural activity , when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects .
So that 's pretty cool , but how do we know this isn 't a fluke ?
Well , the easiest way is to just do the experiment again .
So I got back in the scanner , I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob , and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again , and around about then I decided to believe it was for real .
But still , maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there , so to find out , we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain .
So the next question was , what does this thing really do ?
Is it really specialized just for face recognition ?
Well , maybe not , right ?
Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part .
Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round .
The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses .
So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images , and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind , and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn 't a face , like some of these .
So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition ?
No , we haven 't .
Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything .
All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts .
To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function , you need to mess with it and see what happens , and normally we don 't get to do that .
But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he 's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures .
So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area .
So with the patient 's consent , the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain .
Now , the patient doesn 't know where those electrodes are , and he 's never heard of the face area .
So let 's watch what happens .
It 's going to start with a control condition that will say " Sham " nearly invisibly in red in the lower left , when no current is delivered , and you 'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first . So let 's watch .
Neurologist : Okay , just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this .
All right ?
Patient : Okay .
Neurologist : One , two , three .
Patient : Nothing . Neurologist : Nothing ? Okay .
I 'm going to do it one more time .
Look at my face .
One , two , three .
Patient : You just turned into somebody else .
Your face metamorphosed .
Your nose got saggy , it went to the left .
You almost looked like somebody I 'd seen before , but somebody different .
That was a trip .
Nancy Kanwisher : So this experiment — — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception .
So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process .
Next , I 'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found .
So to do this , I 've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain .
So let 's get started . Here 's my right hemisphere .
So we 're oriented like that . You 're looking at my head this way .
Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that .
Okay , now as you can see , the surface of the brain is all folded up .
So that 's not good . Stuff could be hidden in there .
We want to see the whole thing , so let 's inflate it so we can see the whole thing .
Next , let 's find that face area I 've been talking about that responds to images like these .
To see that , let 's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom , and there it is , that 's my face area .
Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information , and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places , like right now , I 'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active .
There 's another one out on the outside surface again where there 's a couple more face regions as well .
Also in this vicinity is a region that 's selectively involved in processing visual motion , like these moving dots here , and that 's in yellow at the bottom of the brain , and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these , and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain .
Now all these regions I 've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception .
Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses , like hearing ?
Yes , we do . So if we turn the brain around a little bit , here 's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago , and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch , like these .
In contrast , that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don 't have a clear pitch , like these .
Okay . Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech .
Okay , now let 's look at these same regions .
In my left hemisphere , there 's a similar arrangement — not identical , but similar — and most of the same regions are in here , albeit sometimes different in size .
Now , everything I 've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception , vision and hearing .
Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy , complicated mental processes ?
Yes , we do .
So here in pink are my language regions .
So it 's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language , but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively .
They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence , but not when you do other complex mental things , like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music .
The most amazing region that 's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise .
This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking .
So that may seem crazy , but actually , we humans do this all the time .
You 're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don 't call home to say you 're running late .
I 'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray , uncharted territory in the brain , and what 's up with that ?
Well , I 'm wondering about that too , and we 're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions .
But importantly , I don 't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function , even mental functions that may be critical for survival .
In fact , a few years ago , there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he 'd found a brain region for detecting food , and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this .
And further , he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects .
So he was pretty stoked , and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on " Oprah " with his big discovery .
But then he devised the critical test : He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape , but that weren 't food , like these .
And his region responded the same to both sets of images .
So it wasn 't a food area , it was just a region that liked colors and shapes .
So much for " Oprah . "
But then the question , of course , is , how do we process all this other stuff that we don 't have specialized brain regions for ?
Well , I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I 've been describing , we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along .
In fact , we 've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well , of the seven that we 've tested .
So each of the brain regions that I 've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject .
I could take any of you , pop you in the scanner , and find each of those regions in your brain , and it would look a lot like my brain , although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size .
What 's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions , but the simple fact that we have selective , specific components of mind and brain in the first place .
I mean , it could have been otherwise .
The brain could have been a single , general-purpose processor , more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife .
Instead , what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind .
So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components .
It 's early days in this enterprise .
We 've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind .
The most fundamental questions remain unanswered .
So for example , what does each of these regions do exactly ?
Why do we need three face areas and three place areas , and what 's the division of labor between them ?
Second , how are all these things connected in the brain ?
With diffusion imaging , you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain , and with this method shown here , you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain , potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain .
Third , how does all of this very systematic structure get built , both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species ?
To address questions like that , scientists are now scanning other species of animals , and they 're also scanning human infants .
Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer 's and autism .
That 's a hugely important goal , and I 'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it , but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that 's worth doing .
The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease .
What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience , to understand , in essence , who we are ?
This is , I think , the greatest scientific quest of all time .

Susan Colantuono : The career advice you probably didn 't get
You 're doing everything right at work , taking all the right advice , but you 're just not moving up . Why ? Susan Colantuono shares a simple , surprising piece of advice you might not have heard before quite so plainly . This talk , while aimed at an audience of women , has universal takeaways -- for men and women , new grads and midcareer workers .
Women represent 50 percent of middle management and professional positions , but the percentages of women at the top of organizations represent not even a third of that number .
So some people hear that statistic and they ask , why do we have so few women leaders ?
But I look at that statistic and , if you , like me , believe that leadership manifests at every level , you would see that there 's a tremendous , awesome resource of leaders who are leading in middle management , which raises a different question : Why are there so many women mired in the middle and what has to happen to take them to the top ?
So some of you might be some of those women who are in middle management and seeking to move up in your organization .
Well , Tonya is a great example of one of these women .
I met her two years ago .
She was a vice president in a Fortune 50 company , and she said to me with a sense of deep frustration , " I 've worked really hard to improve my confidence and my assertiveness and develop a great brand , I get terrific performance evals from my boss , my 360s in the organization let me know that my teams love working for me , I 've taken every management course that I can here , I am working with a terrific mentor , and yet I 've been passed over twice for advancement opportunities , even when my manager knows that I 'm committed to moving up and even interested in an international assignment .
I don 't understand why I 'm being passed over . "
So what Tonya doesn 't realize is that there 's a missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women , and it 's understanding what this missing 33 percent is that 's required to close the gender gap at the top .
In order to move up in organizations , you have to be known for your leadership skills , and this would apply to any of you , women or men .
It means that you have to be recognized for using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others .
Put in other language , it means you have to use your skills and talents and abilities to help the organization achieve its strategic financial goals and do that by working effectively with others inside of the organization and outside .
And although all three of these elements of leadership are important , when it comes to moving up in organizations , they aren 't equally important .
So pay attention to the green box as I move forward .
In seeking and identifying employees with high potential , the potential to go to the top of organizations , the skills and competencies that relate to that green box are rated twice as heavily as those in the other two elements of leadership .
These skills and competencies can be summarized as business , strategic , and financial acumen .
In other words , this skill set has to do with understanding where the organization is going , what its strategy is , what financial targets it has in place , and understanding your role in moving the organization forward .
This is that missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women , not because it 's missing in our capabilities or abilities , but because it 's missing in the advice that we 're given .
Here 's what I mean by that .
Five years ago , I was asked to moderate a panel of executives , and the topic for the evening was " What do you look for in high-potential employees ? "
So think about the three elements of leadership as I summarize for you what they told me .
They said , " We look for people who are smart and hard working and committed and trustworthy and resilient . "
So which element of leadership does that relate to ?
Personal greatness .
They said , " We look for employees who are great with our customers , who empower their teams , who negotiate effectively , who are able to manage conflict well , and are overall great communicators . "
Which element of leadership does that equate to ?
Engaging the greatness in others .
And then they pretty much stopped .
So I asked , " Well , what about people who understand your business , where it 's going , and their role in taking it there ?
And what about people who are able to scan the external environment , identify risks and opportunities , make strategy or make strategic recommendations ?
And what about people who are able to look at the financials of your business , understand the story that the financials tell , and either take appropriate action or make appropriate recommendations ? "
And to a man , they said , " That 's a given . "
So I turned to the audience of 150 women and I asked , " How many of you have ever been told that the door-opener for career advancement is your business , strategic and financial acumen , and that all the other important stuff is what differentiates you in the talent pool ? "
Three women raised their hand , and I 've asked this question of women all around the globe in the five years since , and the percentage is never much different .
So this is obvious , right ?
But how can it be ?
Well , there are primarily three reasons that there 's this missing 33 percent in the career success advice given to women ?
When organizations direct women toward resources that focus on the conventional advice that we 've been hearing for over 40 years , there 's a notable absence of advice that relates to business , strategic and financial acumen .
Much of the advice is emphasizing personal actions that we need to take , like become more assertive , become more confident , develop your personal brand , things that Tonya 's been working on , and advice about working with other people , things like learn to self-promote , get a mentor , enhance your network , and virtually nothing said about the importance of business , strategic and financial acumen .
This doesn 't mean that this advice is unimportant .
What it means is that this is advice that 's absolutely essential for breaking through from career start to middle management , but it 's not the advice that gets women to break through from the middle , where we 're 50 percent , to senior and executive positions .
And this is why conventional advice to women in 40 years hasn 't closed the gender gap at the top and won 't close it .
Now , the second reason relates to Tonya 's comments about having had excellent performance evals , great feedback from her teams , and having taken every management training program she can lay her hands on .
So you would think that she 's getting messages from her organization through the talent development systems and performance management systems that let her know how important it is to develop business , strategic and financial acumen , but here again , that green square is quite small .
On average , talent and performance management systems in the organizations that I 've worked with focus three to one on the other two elements of leadership compared to the importance of business , strategic and financial acumen , which is why typical talent and performance systems haven 't closed and won 't close the gender gap at the top .
Now , Tonya also talked about working with a mentor , and this is really important to talk about , because if organizations , talent and performance systems aren 't giving people in general information about the importance of business , strategic and financial acumen , how are men getting to the top ?
Well , there are primarily two ways .
One is because of the positions they 're guided into , and the other is because of informal mentoring and sponsorship .
So what 's women 's experience as it relates to mentoring ?
Well , this comment from an executive that I worked with recently illustrates that experience .
He was very proud of the fact that last year , he had two protégés : a man and a woman .
And he said , " I helped the woman build confidence , I helped the man learn the business , and I didn 't realize that I was treating them any differently . "
And he was sincere about that .
So what this illustrates is that as managers , whether we 're women or men , we have mindsets about women and men , about careers in leadership , and these unexamined mindsets won 't close the gender gap at the top .
So how do we take this idea of the missing 33 percent and turn it into action ?
Well , for women , the answer is obvious : we have to begin to focus more on developing and demonstrating the skills we have that show that we 're people who understand our businesses , where they 're headed , and our role in taking it there .
That 's what enables that breakthrough from middle management to leadership at the top .
But you don 't have to be a middle manager to do this .
One young scientist that works in a biotech firm used her insight about the missing 33 percent to weave financial impact data into a project update she did and got tremendous positive feedback from the managers in the room .
So we don 't want to put 100 percent of the responsibility on women 's shoulders , nor would it be wise to do so , and here 's why : In order for companies to achieve their strategic financial goals , executives understand that they have to have everyone pulling in the same direction .
In other words , the term we use in business is , we have to have strategic alignment .
And executives know this very well , and yet only 37 percent , according to a recent Conference Board report , believe that they have that strategic alignment in place .
So for 63 percent of organizations , achieving their strategic financial goals is questionable .
And if you think about what I 've just shared , that you have situations where at least 50 percent of your middle managers haven 't received clear messaging that they have to become focused on the business , where it 's headed , and their role in taking it there , it 's not surprising that that percentage of executives who are confident about alignment is so low , which is why there are other people who have a role to play in this .
It 's important for directors on boards to expect from their executives proportional pools of women when they sit down once a year for their succession discussions .
Why ? Because if they aren 't seeing that , it could be a red flag that their organization isn 't as aligned as it could potentially be .
It 's important for CEOs to also expect these proportional pools , and if they hear comments like , " Well , she doesn 't have enough business experience , " ask the question , " What are we going to do about that ? "
It 's important for H.R. executives to make sure that the missing 33 percent is appropriately emphasized , and it 's important for women and men who are in management positions to examine the mindsets we hold about women and men , about careers and success , to make sure we are creating a level playing field for everybody .
So let me close with the latest chapter in Tonya 's story .
Tonya emailed me two months ago , and she said that she had been interviewed for a new position , and during the interview , they probed about her business acumen and her strategic insights into the industry , and she said that she was so happy to report that now she has a new position reporting directly to the chief information officer at her company .
So for some of you , the missing 33 percent is an idea for you to put into action , and I hope that for all of you , you will see it as an idea worth spreading in order to help organizations be more effective , to help women create careers that soar , and to help close the gender gap at the top .
Thank you .

Eman Mohammed : The courage to tell a hidden story
Eman Mohammed is one of the few female photojournalists in the Gaza Strip . Though openly shunned by many of her male colleagues , she is given unprecedented access to areas denied to men . In this short , visual talk , the TED Fellow critiques gender norms in her community by bringing light to hidden stories .
When I turned 19 , I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip , Palestine .
My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions , and created a lasting stigma for me and my family .
The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means .
They made clear that a woman must not do a man 's job .
Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender .
The " No " sign was pretty clear .
Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear .
Dust was flying in the air , and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me .
I only realized we weren 't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away , waving and laughing , leaving me behind in the open air strike zone .
For a moment , I felt terrified , humiliated , and sorry for myself .
My colleagues ' action was not the only death threat I have received , but it was the most dangerous one .
The perception of women 's life in Gaza is passive .
Until a recent time , a lot of women were not allowed to work or pursue education .
At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict , women 's dark and bright stories were fading away .
To men , women 's stories were seen as inconsequential .
I started paying closer attention to women 's lives in Gaza .
Because of my gender , I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden .
Beyond the obvious pain and struggle , there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments .
In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza , an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose .
For a moment , all I saw was white , bright white , like these lights .
I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven .
By the time I managed to open my eyes , I had documented this moment .
Mohammed Khader , a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel , as his retirement plan , he decided to build a four-floor house , only by the first field operation at his neighborhood , the house was flattened to the ground .
Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi , a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv .
Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath .
My work is not meant to hide the scars of war , but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans .
As a Palestinian female photographer , the journey of struggle , survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath .
I became a witness with a choice : to run away or stand still .
Thank you .

Kenneth Cukier : Big data is better data
Self-driving cars were just the start . What 's the future of big data-driven technology and design ? In a thrilling science talk , Kenneth Cukier looks at what 's next for machine learning -- and human knowledge .
America 's favorite pie is ?
Audience : Apple . Kenneth Cukier : Apple . Of course it is .
How do we know it ?
Because of data .
You look at supermarket sales .
You look at supermarket sales of 30-centimeter pies that are frozen , and apple wins , no contest .
The majority of the sales are apple .
But then supermarkets started selling smaller , 11-centimeter pies , and suddenly , apple fell to fourth or fifth place .
Why ? What happened ?
Okay , think about it .
When you buy a 30-centimeter pie , the whole family has to agree , and apple is everyone 's second favorite .
But when you buy an individual 11-centimeter pie , you can buy the one that you want .
You can get your first choice .
You have more data .
You can see something that you couldn 't see when you only had smaller amounts of it .
Now , the point here is that more data doesn 't just let us see more , more of the same thing we were looking at .
More data allows us to see new .
It allows us to see better .
It allows us to see different .
In this case , it allows us to see what America 's favorite pie is : not apple .
Now , you probably all have heard the term big data .
In fact , you 're probably sick of hearing the term It is true that there is a lot of hype around the term , and that is very unfortunate , because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance .
In the past , we used to look at small data and think about what it would mean to try to understand the world , and now we have a lot more of it , more than we ever could before .
What we find is that when we have a large body of data , we can fundamentally do things that we couldn 't do when we only had smaller amounts .
Big data is important , and big data is new , and when you think about it , the only way this planet is going to deal with its global challenges — to feed people , supply them with medical care , supply them with energy , electricity , and to make sure they 're not burnt to a crisp because of global warming — is because of the effective use of data .
So what is new about big data ? What is the big deal ?
Well , to answer that question , let 's think about what information looked like , physically looked like in the past . In 1908 , on the island of Crete , archaeologists discovered a clay disc .
They dated it from 2000 B.C. , so it 's 4,000 years old .
Now , there 's inscriptions on this disc , but we actually don 't know what it means .
It 's a complete mystery , but the point is that this is what information used to look like 4,000 years ago .
This is how society stored and transmitted information .
Now , society hasn 't advanced all that much .
We still store information on discs , but now we can store a lot more information , more than ever before .
Searching it is easier . Copying it easier .
Sharing it is easier . Processing it is easier .
And what we can do is we can reuse this information for uses that we never even imagined when we first collected the data .
In this respect , the data has gone from a stock to a flow , from something that is stationary and static to something that is fluid and dynamic .
There is , if you will , a liquidity to information .
The disc that was discovered off of Crete that 's 4,000 years old , is heavy , it doesn 't store a lot of information , and that information is unchangeable .
By contrast , all of the files that Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency in the United States fits on a memory stick the size of a fingernail , and it can be shared at the speed of light .
More data . More .
Now , one reason why we have so much data in the world today is we are collecting things that we 've always collected information on , but another reason why is we 're taking things that have always been informational but have never been rendered into a data format and we are putting it into data .
Think , for example , the question of location .
Take , for example , Martin Luther .
If we wanted to know in the 1500s where Martin Luther was , we would have to follow him at all times , maybe with a feathery quill and an inkwell , and record it , but now think about what it looks like today .
You know that somewhere , probably in a telecommunications carrier 's database , there is a spreadsheet or at least a database entry that records your information of where you 've been at all times .
If you have a cell phone , and that cell phone has GPS , but even if it doesn 't have GPS , it can record your information .
In this respect , location has been datafied .
Now think , for example , of the issue of posture , the way that you are all sitting right now , the way that you sit , the way that you sit , the way that you sit .
It 's all different , and it 's a function of your leg length and your back and the contours of your back , and if I were to put sensors , maybe 100 sensors into all of your chairs right now , I could create an index that 's fairly unique to you , sort of like a fingerprint , but it 's not your finger .
So what could we do with this ?
Researchers in Tokyo are using it as a potential anti-theft device in cars .
The idea is that the carjacker sits behind the wheel , tries to stream off , but the car recognizes that a non-approved driver is behind the wheel , and maybe the engine just stops , unless you type in a password into the dashboard to say , " Hey , I have authorization to drive . " Great .
What if every single car in Europe had this technology in it ?
What could we do then ?
Maybe , if we aggregated the data , maybe we could identify telltale signs that best predict that a car accident is going to take place in the next five seconds .
And then what we will have datafied is driver fatigue , and the service would be when the car senses that the person slumps into that position , automatically knows , hey , set an internal alarm that would vibrate the steering wheel , honk inside to say , " Hey , wake up , pay more attention to the road . "
These are the sorts of things we can do when we datafy more aspects of our lives .
So what is the value of big data ?
Well , think about it .
You have more information .
You can do things that you couldn 't do before .
One of the most impressive areas where this concept is taking place is in the area of machine learning .
Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence , which itself is a branch of computer science .
The general idea is that instead of instructing a computer what do do , we are going to simply throw data at the problem and tell the computer to figure it out for itself .
And it will help you understand it by seeing its origins .
In the 1950s , a computer scientist at IBM named Arthur Samuel liked to play checkers , so he wrote a computer program so he could play against the computer .
He played . He won .
He played . He won .
He played . He won , because the computer only knew what a legal move was .
Arthur Samuel knew something else .
Arthur Samuel knew strategy .
So he wrote a small sub-program alongside it operating in the background , and all it did was score the probability that a given board configuration would likely lead to a winning board versus a losing board after every move .
He plays the computer . He wins .
He plays the computer . He wins .
He plays the computer . He wins .
And then Arthur Samuel leaves the computer to play itself .
It plays itself . It collects more data .
It collects more data . It increases the accuracy of its prediction .
And then Arthur Samuel goes back to the computer and he plays it , and he loses , and he plays it , and he loses , and he plays it , and he loses , and Arthur Samuel has created a machine that surpasses his ability in a task that he taught it .
And this idea of machine learning is going everywhere .
How do you think we have self-driving cars ?
Are we any better off as a society enshrining all the rules of the road into software ?
No . Memory is cheaper . No .
Algorithms are faster . No . Processors are better . No .
All of those things matter , but that 's not why .
It 's because we changed the nature of the problem .
We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say , " Here 's a lot of data around the vehicle .
You figure it out .
You figure it out that that is a traffic light , that that traffic light is red and not green , that that means that you need to stop and not go forward . "
Machine learning is at the basis of many of the things that we do online : search engines , Amazon 's personalization algorithm , computer translation , voice recognition systems .
Researchers recently have looked at the question of biopsies , cancerous biopsies , and they 've asked the computer to identify by looking at the data and survival rates to determine whether cells are actually cancerous or not , and sure enough , when you throw the data at it , through a machine-learning algorithm , the machine was able to identify the 12 telltale signs that best predict that this biopsy of the breast cancer cells are indeed cancerous .
The problem : The medical literature only knew nine of them .
Three of the traits were ones that people didn 't need to look for , but that the machine spotted .
Now , there are dark sides to big data as well .
It will improve our lives , but there are problems that we need to be conscious of , and the first one is the idea that we may be punished for predictions , that the police may use big data for their purposes , a little bit like " Minority Report . "
Now , it 's a term called predictive policing , or algorithmic criminology , and the idea is that if we take a lot of data , for example where past crimes have been , we know where to send the patrols .
That makes sense , but the problem , of course , is that it 's not simply going to stop on location data , it 's going to go down to the level of the individual .
Why don 't we use data about the person 's high school transcript ?
Maybe we should use the fact that they 're unemployed or not , their credit score , their web-surfing behavior , whether they 're up late at night .
Their Fitbit , when it 's able to identify biochemistries , will show that they have aggressive thoughts .
We may have algorithms that are likely to predict what we are about to do , and we may be held accountable before we 've actually acted .
Privacy was the central challenge in a small data era .
In the big data age , the challenge will be safeguarding free will , moral choice , human volition , human agency .
There is another problem : Big data is going to steal our jobs .
Big data and algorithms are going to challenge white collar , professional knowledge work in the 21st century in the same way that factory automation and the assembly line challenged blue collar labor in the 20th century .
Think about a lab technician who is looking through a microscope at a cancer biopsy and determining whether it 's cancerous or not .
The person went to university .
The person buys property .
He or she votes .
He or she is a stakeholder in society .
And that person 's job , as well as an entire fleet of professionals like that person , is going to find that their jobs are radically changed or actually completely eliminated .
Now , we like to think that technology creates jobs over a period of time after a short , temporary period of dislocation , and that is true for the frame of reference with which we all live , the Industrial Revolution , because that 's precisely what happened .
But we forget something in that analysis : There are some categories of jobs that simply get eliminated and never come back .
The Industrial Revolution wasn 't very good if you were a horse .
So we 're going to need to be careful and take big data and adjust it for our needs , our very human needs .
We have to be the master of this technology , not its servant .
We are just at the outset of the big data era , and honestly , we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect .
It 's not just a problem for the National Security Agency .
Businesses collect lots of data , and they misuse it too , and we need to get better at this , and this will take time .
It 's a little bit like the challenge that was faced by primitive man and fire .
This is a tool , but this is a tool that , unless we 're careful , will burn us .
Big data is going to transform how we live , how we work and how we think .
It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health , but in the past , we 've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T , the technology , the hardware , because that 's what was physical .
We now need to recast our gaze at the I , the information , which is less apparent , but in some ways a lot more important .
Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect , as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it , and that 's why big data is a big deal .

Lord Nicholas Stern : The state of the climate — and what we might do about it
How can we begin to address the global , insidious problem of climate change — a problem that 's too big for any one country to solve ? Economist Nicholas Stern lays out a plan , presented to the UN 's Climate Summit in 2014 , showing how the world 's countries can work together on climate . It 's a big vision for cooperation , with a payoff that goes far beyond averting disaster . He asks : How can we use this crisis to spur better lives for all ?
We are at a remarkable moment in time .
We face over the next two decades two fundamental transformations that will determine whether the next 100 years is the best of centuries or the worst of centuries .
Let me illustrate with an example .
I first visited Beijing 25 years ago to teach at the People 's University of China .
China was getting serious about market economics and about university education , so they decided to call in the foreign experts .
Like most other people , I moved around Beijing by bicycle .
Apart from dodging the occasional vehicle , it was a safe and easy way to get around .
Cycling in Beijing now is a completely different prospect .
The roads are jammed by cars and trucks .
The air is dangerously polluted from the burning of coal and diesel .
When I was there last in the spring , there was an advisory for people of my age — over 65 — to stay indoors and not move much .
How did this come about ?
It came from the way in which Beijing has grown as a city .
It 's doubled over those 25 years , more than doubled , from 10 million to 20 million .
It 's become a sprawling urban area dependent on dirty fuel , dirty energy , particularly coal .
China burns half the world 's coal each year , and that 's why , it is a key reason why , it is the world 's largest emitter of greenhouse gases .
At the same time , we have to recognize that in that period China has grown remarkably .
It has become the world 's second largest economy .
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty .
That 's really important .
But at the same time , the people of China are asking the question : What 's the value of this growth if our cities are unlivable ?
They 've analyzed , diagnosed that this is an unsustainable path of growth and development .
China 's planning to scale back coal .
It 's looking to build its cities in different ways .
Now , the growth of China is part of a dramatic change , fundamental change , in the structure of the world economy .
Just 25 years ago , the developing countries , the poorer countries of the world , were , notwithstanding being the vast majority of the people , they accounted for only about a third of the world 's output .
Now it 's more than half ; 25 years from now , it will probably be two thirds from the countries that we saw 25 years ago as developing .
That 's a remarkable change .
It means that most countries around the world , rich or poor , are going to be facing the two fundamental transformations that I want to talk about and highlight .
Now , the first of these transformations is the basic structural change of the economies and societies that I 've already begun to illustrate through the description of Beijing .
Fifty percent now in urban areas .
That 's going to go to 70 percent in 2050 .
Over the next two decades , we 'll see the demand for energy rise by 40 percent , and the growth in the economy and in the population is putting increasing pressure on our land , on our water and on our forests .
This is profound structural change .
If we manage it in a negligent or a shortsighted way , we will create waste , pollution , congestion , destruction of land and forests .
If we think of those three areas that I have illustrated with my numbers — cities , energy , land — if we manage all that badly , then the outlook for the lives and livelihoods of the people around the world would be poor and damaged .
And more than that , the emissions of greenhouse gases would rise , with immense risks to our climate .
Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already higher than they 've been for millions of years .
If we go on increasing those concentrations , we risk temperatures over the next century or so that we have not seen on this planet for tens of millions of years .
We 've been around as Homo sapiens — that 's a rather generous definition , sapiens — for perhaps a quarter of a million years , a quarter of a million .
We risk temperatures we haven 't seen for tens of millions of years over a century .
That would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet .
It would lead to changing deserts , changing rivers , changing patterns of hurricanes , changing sea levels , hundreds of millions of people , perhaps billions of people who would have to move , and if we 've learned anything from history , that means severe and extended conflict .
And we couldn 't just turn it off .
You can 't make a peace treaty with the planet .
You can 't negotiate with the laws of physics .
You 're in there . You 're stuck .
Those are the stakes we 're playing for , and that 's why we have to make this second transformation , the climate transformation , and move to a low-carbon economy .
Now , the first of these transformations is going to happen anyway .
We have to decide whether to do it well or badly , the economic , or structural , transformation .
But the second of the transformations , the climate transformations , we have to decide to do .
Those two transformations face us in the next two decades .
The next two decades are decisive for what we have to do .
Now , the more I 've thought about this , the two transformations coming together , the more I 've come to realize that this is an enormous opportunity .
It 's an opportunity which we can use or it 's an opportunity which we can lose .
And let me explain through those three key areas that I 've identified : cities , energy and land .
And let me start with cities .
I 've already described the problems of Beijing : pollution , congestion , waste and so on .
Surely we recognize that in many of our cities around the world .
Now , with cities , like life but particularly cities , you have to think ahead .
The cities that are going to be built — and there are many , and many big ones — we have to think of how to design them in a compact way so we can save travel time and we can save energy .
The cities that already are there , well established , we have to think about renewal and investment in them so that we can connect ourselves much better within those cities , and make it easier , encourage more people , to live closer to the center .
We 've got examples building around the world of the kinds of ways in which we can do that .
The bus rapid transport system in Bogotá in Colombia is a very important case of how to move around safely and quickly in a non-polluting way in a city : very frequent buses , strongly protected routes , the same service , really , as an underground railway system , but much , much cheaper and can be done much more quickly , a brilliant idea in many more cities around the world that 's developing .
Now , some things in cities do take time .
Some things in cities can happen much more quickly .
Take my hometown , London .
In 1952 , smog in London killed 4,000 people and badly damaged the lives of many , many more .
And it happened all the time .
For those of you live outside London in the U.K.
will remember it used to be called The Smoke .
That 's the way London was .
By regulating coal , within a few years the problems of smog were rapidly reduced .
I remember the smogs well .
When the visibility dropped to [ less ] than a few meters , they stopped the buses and I had to walk .
This was the 1950s .
I had to walk home three miles from school .
Again , breathing was a hazardous activity .
But it was changed . It was changed by a decision .
Good decisions can bring good results , striking results , quickly .
We 've seen more : In London , we 've introduced the congestion charge , actually quite quickly and effectively , and we 've seen great improvements in the bus system , and cleaned up the bus system .
You can see that the two transformations I 've described , the structural and the climate , come very much together .
But we have to invest . We have to invest in our cities , and we have to invest wisely , and if we do , we 'll see cleaner cities , quieter cities , safer cities , more attractive cities , more productive cities , and stronger community in those cities — public transport , recycling , reusing , all sorts of things that bring communities together .
We can do that , but we have to think , we have to invest , we have to plan .
Let me turn to energy .
Now , energy over the last 25 years has increased by about 50 percent .
Eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels .
Over the next 20 years , perhaps it will increase by another 40 percent or so .
We have to invest strongly in energy , we have to use it much more efficiently , and we have to make it clean .
We can see how to do that .
Take the example of California .
It would be in the top 10 countries in the world if it was independent .
I don 't want to start any — California 's a big place .
In the next five or six years , they will likely move from around 20 percent in renewables — wind , solar and so on — to over 33 percent , and that would bring California back to greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to where they were in 1990 , a period when the economy in California would more or less have doubled .
That 's a striking achievement .
It shows what can be done .
Not just California — the incoming government of India is planning to get solar technology to light up the homes of 400 million people who don 't have electricity in India .
They 've set themselves a target of five years .
I think they 've got a good chance of doing that .
We 'll see , but what you 're seeing now is people moving much more quickly .
Four hundred million , more than the population of the United States .
Those are the kinds of ambitions now people are setting themselves in terms of rapidity of change .
Again , you can see good decisions can bring quick results , and those two transformations , the economy and the structure and the climate and the low carbon , are intimately intertwined .
Do the first one well , the structural , the second one on the climate becomes much easier .
Look at land , land and particularly forests .
Forests are the hosts to valuable plant and animal species .
They hold water in the soil and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere , fundamental to the tackling of climate change .
But we 're losing our forests .
In the last decade , we 've lost a forest area the size of Portugal , and much more has been degraded .
But we 're already seeing that we can do so much about that .
We can recognize the problem , but we can also understand how to tackle it .
In Brazil , the rate of deforestation has been reduced by 70 percent over the last 10 years .
How ? By involving local communities , investing in their agriculture and their economies , by monitoring more carefully , by enforcing the law more strictly .
And it 's not just stopping deforestation .
That 's of course of first and fundamental importance , but it 's also regrading degraded land , regenerating , rehabilitating degraded land .
I first went to Ethiopia in 1967 .
It was desperately poor . In the following years , it suffered devastating famines and profoundly destructive social conflict .
Over the last few years , actually more than a few , Ethiopia has been growing much more rapidly .
It has ambitions to be a middle-income country 15 years from now and to be carbon neutral .
Again , I think it 's a strong ambition but it is a plausible one .
You 're seeing that commitment there .
You 're seeing what can be done .
Ethiopia is investing in clean energy .
It 's working in the rehabilitation of land .
In Humbo , in southwest Ethiopia , a wonderful project to plant trees on degraded land and work with local communities on sustainable forest management has led to big increases in living standards .
So we can see , from Beijing to London , from California to India , from Brazil to Ethiopia , we do understand how to manage those two transformations , the structural and the climate .
We do understand how to manage those well .
And technology is changing very rapidly .
I don 't have to list all those things to an audience like this , but you can see the electric cars , you can see the batteries using new materials .
You can see that we can manage remotely now our household appliances on our mobile phones when we 're away .
You can see better insulation .
And there 's much more coming .
But , and it 's a big but , the world as a whole is moving far too slowly .
We 're not cutting emissions in the way we should .
We 're not managing those structural transformations as we can .
The depth of understanding of the immense risks of climate change are not there yet .
The depth of understanding of the attractiveness of what we can do is not there yet .
We need political pressure to build .
We need leaders to step up .
We can have better growth , better climate , a better world .
We can make , by managing those two transformations well , the next 100 years the best of centuries .
If we make a mess of it , we , you and me , if we make a mess of it , if we don 't manage those transformations properly , it will be , the next 100 years will be the worst of centuries .
That 's the major conclusion of the report on the economy and climate chaired by ex-President Felipe Calderón of Mexico , and I co-chaired that with him , and we handed that report yesterday here in New York , in the United Nations Building to the Secretary-General of the U.N. , Ban Ki-moon .
We know that we can do this .
Now , two weeks ago , I became a grandfather for the fourth time .
Our daughter — — Our daughter gave birth to Rosa here in New York two weeks ago . Here are Helen and Rosa .
Two weeks old .
Are we going to look our grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we understood the issues , that we recognized the dangers and the opportunities , and still we failed to act ?
Surely not . Let 's make the next 100 years the best of centuries .

Avi Reichental : What 's next in 3D printing
Just like his beloved grandfather , Avi Reichental is a maker of things . The difference is , now he can use 3D printers to make almost anything , out of almost any material . Reichental tours us through the possibilities of 3D printing , for everything from printed candy to highly custom sneakers .
My grandfather was a cobbler .
Back in the day , he made custom-made shoes .
I never got to meet him .
He perished in the Holocaust .
But I did inherit his love for making , except that it doesn 't exist that much anymore .
You see , while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity , it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved , and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it .
But all of that is about to change with 3D printing , and it all started with this , the very first part that was ever printed .
It 's a little older than TED .
It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull , who invented 3D printing .
But the thing that I want to talk to you about today , the big idea that I want to discuss with you , is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future , but rather that it 's actually going to connect us with our heritage , and it 's going to usher in a new era of localized , distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication .
So think about useful things .
You all know your shoe size .
How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples ?
Anybody ?
Wouldn 't it be awesome if you could , for the first time , get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn 't require any hinge assembly , so chances are , the hinges are not going to break ?
But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses .
When I met Amanda for the first time , she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down , but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable .
It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics , but it wasn 't inspired by her body .
It wasn 't made to measure .
So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine , a little bit more elegant , and lightweight , and like good tailors , we thought that we would measure her digitally .
And we did . We built her an amazing suit .
The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves , it 's going to replace traditional methods .
Amanda looked at it and she said , it 's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity .
And you know what ? She 's not standing still .
She now wants to walk in high heels .
It doesn 't stop there .
3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them , from new , beautiful , conformal , to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees , another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry .
And as we sit here today , you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners , or your dental restorations .
Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today .
Millions of people are served today from these devices .
What about full knee replacements , from your data , made to measure , where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed ?
G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars .
Good for G.E. , right ?
And their customers and the environment .
But , you know , the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations .
Planetary Resources , a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first space probe later this year .
It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship , it costs a fraction of its cost , and it 's made with less than a dozen moving parts , and it 's going to be out in space later this year .
Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone , the Ara .
It 's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional , usable modules that will go into it .
A real moonshot , powered by 3D printing .
How about food ?
What if we could , for the first time , make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here , that are edible ?
What if we could completely change the experience , like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed ?
And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste , which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner ?
And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing .
With 3D printing , complexity is free .
The printer doesn 't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape , and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it .
Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it .
I think that it 's the opportunity to put tomorrow 's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities , and with that , everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer .
That will take new tools .
Not everybody knows how to use CAD , so we 're developing haptics , perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay .
When you do things like that , and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable , it will make it easier to create content , but with all of the unimagined , we will also have the unintended , like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession .
So many people ask me , will we have a 3D printer in every home ?
I think it 's the wrong question to ask .
The right question to ask is , how will 3D printing change my life ?
Or , in other words , what room in my house will 3D printing fit in ?
So everything that you see here has been 3D printed , including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show .
Now , these are not my grandfather 's shoes .
These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing .
My grandfather didn 't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl , and my father didn 't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes .
He passed away three years ago .
But Chuck Hull , the man that invented it all , is right here in the house today , and thanks to him , I can say , thanks to his invention , I can say that I am a cobbler too , and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future .
Thank you .

Mac Barnett : Why a good book is a secret door
Childhood is surreal . Why shouldn 't children 's books be ? In this whimsical talk , award-winning author Mac Barnett speaks about writing that escapes the page , art as a doorway to wonder -- and what real kids say to a fictional whale .
Hi everybody . So my name is Mac .
My job is that I lie to children , but they 're honest lies .
I write children 's books , and there 's a quote from Pablo Picasso , " We all know that Art is not truth .
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth or at least the truth that is given us to understand .
The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies . "
I first heard this when I was a kid , and I loved it , but I had no idea what it meant .
So I thought , you know what , it 's what I 'm here to talk to you today about , though , truth and lies , fiction and reality .
So how could I untangle this knotted bunch of sentences ?
And I said , I 've got PowerPoint . Let 's do a Venn diagram .
[ " Truth . Lies . " ] So there it is , right there , boom .
We 've got truth and lies and then there 's this little space , the edge , in the middle .
That liminal space , that 's art .
All right . Venn diagram . But that 's actually not very helpful either .
The thing that made me understand that quote and really kind of what art , at least the art of fiction , was , was working with kids .
I used to be a summer camp counselor .
I would do it on my summers off from college , and I loved it .
It was a sports summer camp for four- to six-year-olds .
I was in charge of the four-year-olds , which is good , because four-year-olds can 't play sports , and neither can I.
I play sports at a four-year-old level , so what would happen is the kids would dribble around some cones , and then got hot , and then they would go sit underneath the tree where I was already sitting — — and I would just make up stories and tell them to them and I would tell them stories about my life .
I would tell them about how , on the weekends , I would go home and I would spy for the Queen of England .
And soon , other kids who weren 't even in my group of kids , they would come up to me , and they would say , " You 're Mac Barnett , right ?
You 're the guy who spies for the Queen of England . "
And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers to come up and ask me that question .
In my fantasy , they were svelte Russian women , but , you know , four-year-olds — you take what you can get in Berkeley , California .
And I realized that the stories that I was telling were real in this way that was familiar to me and really exciting .
I think the pinnacle of this for me — I 'll never forget this — there was this little girl named Riley . She was tiny , and she used to always take out her lunch every day and she would throw out her fruit .
She would just take her fruit , her mom packed her a melon every day , and she would just throw it in the ivy and then she would eat fruit snacks and pudding cups , and I was like , " Riley , you can 't do that , you have to eat the fruit . "
And she was like , " Why ? "
And I was like , " Well , when you throw the fruit in the ivy , pretty soon , it 's going to be overgrown with melons , " which is why I think I ended up telling stories to children and not being a nutritionist for children .
And so Riley was like , " That will never happen .
That 's not going to happen . "
And so , on the last day of camp , I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe from the grocery store and I hid it in the ivy , and then at lunchtime , I was like , " Riley , why don 't you go over there and see what you 've done . "
And — — she went trudging through the ivy , and then her eyes just got so wide , and she pointed out this melon that was bigger than her head , and then all the kids ran over there and rushed around her , and one of the kids was like , " Hey , why is there a sticker on this ? "
And I was like , " That is also why I say do not throw your stickers in the ivy .
Put them in the trash can . It ruins nature when you do this . "
And Riley carried that melon around with her all day , and she was so proud .
And Riley knew she didn 't grow a melon in seven days , but she also knew that she did , and it 's a weird place , but it 's not just a place that kids can get to .
It 's anything . Art can get us to that place .
She was right in that place in the middle , that place which you could call art or fiction .
I 'm going to call it wonder .
It 's what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief or poetic faith , for those moments where a story , no matter how strange , has some semblance of the truth , and then you 're able to believe it .
It 's not just kids who can get there .
Adults can too , and we get there when we read .
It 's why in two days , people will be descending on Dublin to take the walking tour of Bloomsday and see everything that happened in " Ulysses , " even though none of that happened .
Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes ' apartment , even though 221B is just a number that was painted on a building that never actually had that address .
We know these characters aren 't real , but we have real feelings about them , and we 're able to do that .
We know these characters aren 't real , and yet we also know that they are .
Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can , and that 's why I love writing for kids .
I think kids are the best audience for serious literary fiction .
When I was a kid , I was obsessed with secret door novels , things like " Narnia , " where you would open a wardrobe and go through to a magical land .
And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist and I would look for them and try to go through them .
I wanted to live and cross over into that fictional world , which is — I would always just open people 's closet doors . I would just go through my mom 's boyfriend 's closet , and there was not a secret magical land there .
There was some other weird stuff that I think my mom should know about .
And I was happy to tell her all about it .
After college , my first job was working behind one of these secret doors .
This is a place called 826 Valencia .
It 's at 826 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco , and when I worked there , there was a publishing company headquartered there called McSweeney 's , a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia , but then the front of it was a strange shop .
You see , this place was zoned retail , and in San Francisco , they were not going to give us a variance , and so the writer who founded it , a writer named Dave Eggers , to come into compliance with code , he said , " Fine , I 'm just going to build a pirate supply store . "
And that 's what he did . And it 's beautiful . It 's all wood .
There 's drawers you can pull out and get citrus so you don 't get scurvy .
They have eyepatches in lots of colors , because when it 's springtime , pirates want to go wild .
You don 't know . Black is boring . Pastel .
Or eyes , also in lots of colors , just glass eyes , depending on how you want to deal with that situation .
And the store , strangely , people came to them and bought things , and they ended up paying the rent for our tutoring center , which was behind it , but to me , more important was the fact that I think the quality of work you do , kids would come and get instruction in writing , and when you have to walk this weird , liminal , fictional space like this to go do your writing , it 's going to affect the kind of work that you make .
It 's a secret door that you can walk through .
So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles , and it was my job to build the store down there .
So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart .
That 's our motto : " Whenever you are , we 're already then . "
And it 's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles .
Our friendly staff is ready to help you .
They 're from all eras , including just the 1980s , that guy on the end , he 's from the very recent past .
There 's our Employees of the Month , including Genghis Khan , Charles Dickens .
Some great people have come up through our ranks .
This is our kind of pharmacy section .
We have some patent medicines , Canopic jars for your organs , communist soap that says , " This is your soap for the year . " Our slushy machine broke on the opening night and we didn 't know what to do .
Our architect was covered in red syrup . It looked like he had just murdered somebody , which it was not out of the question for this particular architect , and we didn 't know what to do .
It was going to be the highlight of our store .
So we just put that sign on it that said , " Out of order . Come back yesterday . " And that ended up being a better joke than slushies , so we just left it there forever .
Mammoth Chunks . These things weigh , like , seven pounds each .
Barbarian repellent . It 's full of salad and potpourri — things that barbarians hate .
Dead languages .
Leeches , nature 's tiny doctors .
And Viking Odorant , which comes in lots of great scents : toenails , sweat and rotten vegetables , pyre ash .
Because we believe that Axe Body Spray is something that you should only find on the battlefield , not under your arms . And these are robot emotion chips , so robots can feel love or fear .
Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude , which we did not expect . We did not think that was going to happen .
But there 's a nonprofit behind it , and kids go through a door that says " Employees Only " and they end up in this space where they do homework and write stories and make films and this is a book release party where kids will read .
There 's a quarterly that 's published with just writing that 's done by the kids who come every day after school , and we have release parties and they eat cake and read for their parents and drink milk out of champagne glasses .
And it 's a very special space , because it 's this weird space in the front .
The joke isn 't a joke .
You can 't find the seams on the fiction , and I love that . It 's this little bit of fiction that 's colonized the real world .
I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions .
There 's a term called metafiction , and that 's just stories about stories , and meta 's having a moment now .
Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis , but it 's been around .
It 's almost as old as storytelling itself .
And one metafictive technique is breaking the fourth wall . Right ?
It 's when an actor will turn to the audience and say , " I am an actor , these are just rafters . "
And even that supposedly honest moment , I would argue , is in service of the lie , but it 's supposed to foreground the artificiality of the fiction .
For me , I kind of prefer the opposite .
If I 'm going to break down the fourth wall , I want fiction to escape and come into the real world .
I want a book to be a secret door that opens and lets the stories out into reality .
And so I try to do this in my books .
And here 's just one example .
This is the first book that I ever made .
It 's called " Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem . "
And it 's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet but it 's a punishment and it ruins his life .
So it 's delivered overnight by FedUp . And he has to take it to school with him .
He lives in San Francisco — very tough city to own a blue whale in .
A lot of hills , real estate is at a premium .
This market 's crazy , everybody .
But underneath the jacket is this case , and that 's the cover underneath the book , the jacket , and there 's an ad that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial for a blue whale .
And you can just send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and we 'll send you a whale .
And kids do write in .
So here 's a letter . It says , " Dear people , I bet you 10 bucks you won 't send me a blue whale .
Eliot Gannon . "
So what Eliot and the other kids who send these in get back is a letter in very small print from a Norwegian law firm — — that says that due to a change in customs laws , their whale has been held up in Sognefjord , which is a very lovely fjord , and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord and Norwegian food for a little while . It digresses .
But it finishes off by saying that your whale would love to hear from you .
He 's got a phone number , and you can call and leave him a message .
And when you call and leave him a message , you just , on the outgoing message , it 's just whale sounds and then a beep , which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound .
And they get a picture of their whale too .
So this is Randolph , and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico who was one of the first kids to ever call in , and I 'll play you some of Nico 's message .
This is the first message I ever got from Nico .
Nico : Hello , this is Nico .
I am your owner , Randolph . Hello .
So this is the first time I can ever talk to you , and I might talk to you soon another day . Bye .
Mac Barnett : So Nico called back , like , an hour later .
And here 's another one of Nico 's messages .
Nico : Hello , Randolph , this is Nico .
I haven 't talked to you for a long time , but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday , yeah , Saturday or Sunday , so now I 'm calling you again to say hello and I wonder what you 're doing right now , and I 'm going to probably call you again tomorrow or today , so I 'll talk to you later . Bye .
MB : So he did , he called back that day again .
He 's left over 25 messages for Randolph over four years .
You find out all about him and the grandma that he loves and the grandma that he likes a little bit less — — and the crossword puzzles that he does , and this is — I 'll play you one more message from Nico .
This is the Christmas message from Nico .
[ Beep ] Nico : Hello , Randolph , sorry I haven 't talked to you in a long time .
It 's just that I 've been so busy because school started , as you might not know , probably , since you 're a whale , you don 't know , and I 'm calling you to just say , to wish you a merry Christmas .
So have a nice Christmas , and bye-bye , Randolph . Goodbye .
MB : I actually got Nico , I hadn 't heard from in 18 months , and he just left a message two days ago .
His voice is completely different , but he put his babysitter on the phone , and she was very nice to Randolph as well .
But Nico 's the best reader I could hope for .
I would want anyone I was writing for to be in that place emotionally with the things that I create .
I feel lucky . Kids like Nico are the best readers , and they deserve the best stories we can give them .
Thank you very much .

Uldus Bakhtiozina : Wry photos that turn stereotypes upside down
Artist Uldus Bakhtiozina uses photographs to poke fun at societal norms in her native Russia . A glimpse into Russian youth culture and a short , fun reminder not to take ourselves too seriously .
Good afternoon .
My name is Uldus .
I am a photo-based artist from Russia .
I started my way around six years ago with ironic self-portraits to lay open so many stereotypes about nationalities , genders , and social issues — [ " I am Russian . I sell drugs , guns , porno with kids ! " ] [ " Vodka = water . I love vodka ! " ] — using photography as my tool to send a message . [ " Marry me , I need a visa . " ] Today , I am still performing in front of the camera and trying to be brave like Wonder Woman .
I focus on balancing meaningful message , aesthetic , beauty , composition , some irony , and artifacts .
Today , I 'm going to tell you about my project , which is named Desperate Romantics .
They 're my artifacts , or paintings from pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood England mid-19th century .
I took the painting and gifted new , contemporary meaning talking about issues which are surrounding me in Russia , capturing people who are non-models but have an interesting story .
This boy is a professional dancer , only 12 years old , but at secondary school , he hides his dancing classes and is wearing the mask of brutality , trying to be united with the rest of his classmates like a storm trooper has no personality .
But this boy has goals and dreams but hides it to be socially accepted , because being different isn 't easy , especially in Russia .
Next portrait interpretation is metaphoric .
And this is Nikita , a security guard from one of the bars in St. Petersburg .
He likes to say , " You wouldn 't like me when I 'm angry , " quoting Hulk from the movie , but I 've never seen him angry .
He hides his sensitivities and romantic side , because in Russia , among guys , that 's not cool to be romantic , but it 's cool to be surrounded with women and look like an aggressive hulk .
Sometimes , in my project , I would take the painting and give it new meaning and new temptation about it .
Sometimes , I would compare facial features and playing with words : irony , Iron Man , ironing man .
Through the artifacts , I bring social issues which surround me in Russia into the conversation .
Interesting fact about marriage in Russia , that most of the 18 , 19-year-old girls are already ready , and dream to get married .
We 're taught from childhood , successful marriage means successful life , so most of the girls kind of fight to get a good husband .
And what about me ?
I 'm 27 years old .
For Russian society , I 'm an old maid and hopeless to ever get married .
That 's why you see me in a Mexican fighter mask , in the wedding dress , all desperate in my garden .
But remember , irony is the key , and this is actually to motivate girls to fight for goals , for dreams , and change stereotypes .
Be brave . Be ironic — it helps .
Be funny and create some magic .

Hans and Ola Rosling : How not to be ignorant about the world
How much do you know about the world ? Hans Rosling , with his famous charts of global population , health and income data , demonstrates that you have a high statistical chance of being quite wrong about what you think you know . Play along with his audience quiz — then , from Hans ' son Ola , learn 4 ways to quickly get less ignorant .
Hans Rosling : I 'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions .
Use this device . Use this device to answer .
The first question is , how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster , how did that change during the last century ?
Did it more than double , did it remain about the same in the world as a whole , or did it decrease to less than half ?
Please answer A , B or C.
I see lots of answers . This is much faster than I do it at universities .
They are so slow . They keep thinking , thinking , thinking .
Oh , very , very good .
And we go to the next question .
So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school : seven years , five years or three years ?
A , B or C ? Please answer .
And we go to the next question .
In the last 20 years , how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change ?
Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day .
Did it almost double , did it remain more or less the same , or did it halve ?
A , B or C ?
Now , answers .
You see , deaths from natural disasters in the world , you can see it from this graph here , from 1900 to 2000 .
In 1900 , there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters : floods , earthquakes , volcanic eruption , whatever , droughts .
And then , how did that change ?
Gapminder asked the public in Sweden .
This is how they answered .
The Swedish public answered like this : Fifty percent thought it had doubled , 38 percent said it 's more or less the same , 12 said it had halved .
This is the best data from the disaster researchers , and it goes up and down , and it goes to the Second World War , and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it 's down to much less than half .
The world has been much , much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this , you know .
So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this .
So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps .
The chimps don 't watch the evening news , so the chimps , they choose by random , so the Swedes answer worse than random .
Now how did you do ?
That 's you .
You were beaten by the chimps .
But it was close .
You were three times better than the Swedes , but that 's not enough .
You shouldn 't compare yourself to Swedes .
You must have higher ambitions in the world .
Let 's look at the next answer here : women in school .
Here , you can see men went eight years .
How long did women go to school ?
Well , we asked the Swedes like this , and that gives you a hint , doesn 't it ?
The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked , isn 't it ?
Let 's see , let 's see . Here we come .
Yes , yes , yes , women have almost caught up .
This is the U.S. public .
And this is you . Here you come .
Ooh .
Well , congratulations , you 're twice as good as the Swedes , but you don 't need me — So how come ? I think it 's like this , that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties .
They are stopped when they go to school , and it 's disgusting .
But in the majority of the world , where most people in the world live , most countries , girls today go to school as long as boys , more or less .
That doesn 't mean that gender equity is achieved , not at all .
They still are confined to terrible , terrible limitations , but schooling is there in the world today .
Now , we miss the majority .
When you answer , you answer according to the worst places , and there you are right , but you miss the majority .
What about poverty ?
Well , it 's very clear that poverty here was almost halved , and in U.S. , when we asked the public , only five percent got it right .
And you ?
Ah , you almost made it to the chimps .
That little , just a few of you !
There must be preconceived ideas , you know .
And many in the rich countries , they think that oh , we can never end extreme poverty .
Of course they think so , because they don 't even know what has happened .
The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present .
These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run , and it was started , this project , last year by my boss , and also my son , Ola Rosling . He 's cofounder and director , and he wanted , Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance .
So already the pilots reveal this , that so many in the public score worse than random , so we have to think about preconceived ideas , and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution .
Look here . This is how it was in 1975 .
It 's the number of people on each income , from one dollar a day — See , there was one hump here , around one dollar a day , and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars .
The world was two groups .
It was a camel world , like a camel with two humps , the poor ones and the rich ones , and there were fewer in between .
But look how this has changed : As I go forward , what has changed , the world population has grown , and the humps start to merge .
The lower humps merged with the upper hump , and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only .
The percent in poverty has decreased .
Still it 's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty .
We still have this group , almost a billion , over there , but that can be ended now .
The challenge we have now is to get away from that , understand where the majority is , and that is very clearly shown in this question .
We asked , what is the percentage of the world 's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years : 20 , 50 or 80 percent ?
Now , this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered .
Look at the Swedish result : you know what the right answer is .
Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country ?
Well , it 's me . It 's me .
It 's very difficult , this . It 's very difficult .
However , Ola 's approach to really measure what we know made headlines , and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there , millions answered , and I think there were about 2,000 comments , and this was one of the comments .
" I bet no member of the media passed the test , " he said .
So Ola told me , " Take these devices .
You are invited to media conferences .
Give it to them and measure what the media know . "
And ladies and gentlemen , for the first time , the informal results from a conference with U.S. media .
And then , lately , from the European Union media .
You see , the problem is not that people don 't read and listen to the media .
The problem is that the media doesn 't know themselves .
What shall we do about this , Ola ?
Do we have any ideas ?
Ola Rosling : Yes , I have an idea , but first , I 'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps .
Fortunately , I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault , actually .
Then , I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future .
That 's basically what I will do .
But first , let 's look at why are we so ignorant , and it all starts in this place .
It 's Hudiksvall . It 's a city in northern Sweden .
It 's a neighborhood where I grew up , and it 's a neighborhood with a large problem .
Actually , it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well .
It was not representative . Okay ?
It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet .
So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle .
We have a personal bias .
We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet , and on top of this , we start school , and we add the next problem .
Well , I like schools , but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews , because they learned something when they went to school , and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions , and those books , of course , that are printed are outdated in a world that changes .
And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date .
So that 's what we are focusing on .
So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias .
What happens next is news , okay ?
An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines , and people will read it because it 's sensational .
Unusual events are more interesting , no ?
And they are exaggerated , and especially things we 're afraid of .
A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden .
So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from .
They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas , and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans , our human intuition .
It was good in evolution .
It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very , very fast .
It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of , and we seek causality where there is none , and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers , above the average .
Everybody answered that question , " Yeah , I drive cars better . "
Okay , this was good evolutionarily , but now when it comes to the worldview , it is the exact reason why it 's upside down .
The trends that are increasing are instead falling , and the other way around , and in this case , the chimps use our intuition against us , and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength .
It was supposed to be our strength , wasn 't it ?
So how do we solve such problems ?
First , we need to measure it , and then we need to cure it .
So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance .
We started the pilot last year , and now we 're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world , and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development , such as climate , endangered species , human rights , gender equality , energy , finance .
All different sectors have facts , and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts .
So I 've started actually contacting some of them , like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF , and asking them , what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn 't know ?
Okay , I gather those facts .
Imagine a long list with , say , 250 facts .
And then we poll the public and see where they score worst .
So we get a shorter list with the terrible results , like some few examples from Hans , and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results .
Okay , this little shortlist , what are we going to do with it ?
Well , we turn it into a knowledge certificate , a global knowledge certificate , which you can use , if you 're a large organization , a school , a university , or maybe a news agency , to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable .
Basically meaning , we don 't hire people who score like chimpanzees .
Of course you shouldn 't .
So maybe 10 years from now , if this project succeeds , you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge .
So now we come to the practical tricks .
How are you going to succeed ?
There is , of course , one way , which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports .
That will never happen , actually .
Not even Hans thinks that 's going to happen .
People don 't have that time .
People like shortcuts , and here are the shortcuts .
We need to turn our intuition into strength again .
We need to be able to generalize .
So now I 'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb .
Let 's start with the first misconception .
This is very widespread .
Everything is getting worse .
You heard it . You thought it yourself .
The other way to think is , most things improve .
So you 're sitting with a question in front of you and you 're unsure . You should guess " improve . "
Okay ? Don 't go for the worse .
That will help you score better on our tests .
That was the first one .
There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing .
It 's a terrible inequality .
Yeah , it 's an unequal world , but when you look at the data , it 's one hump .
Okay ? If you feel unsure , go for " the most people are in the middle . "
That 's going to help you get the answer right .
Now , the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very , very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters .
No , no , no . That 's wrong .
Look : that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school .
So if you are unsure , go for the " the majority already have this , " like electricity and girls in school , these kinds of things .
They 're only rules of thumb , so of course they don 't apply to everything , but this is how you can generalize .
Let 's look at the last one .
If something , yes , this is a good one , sharks are dangerous .
No — well , yes , but they are not so important in the global statistics , that is what I 'm saying .
I actually , I 'm very afraid of sharks .
So as soon as I see a question about things I 'm afraid of , which might be earthquakes , other religions , maybe I 'm afraid of terrorists or sharks , anything that makes me feel , assume you 're going to exaggerate the problem .
That 's a rule of thumb .
Of course there are dangerous things that are also great .
Sharks kill very , very few . That 's how you should think .
With these four rules of thumb , you could probably answer better than the chimps , because the chimps cannot do this .
They cannot generalize these kinds of rules .
And hopefully we can turn your world around and we 're going to beat the chimps . Okay ?
That 's a systematic approach .
Now the question , is this important ?
Yeah , it 's important to understand poverty , extreme poverty and how to fight it , and how to bring girls in school .
When we realize that actually it 's succeeding , we can understand it .
But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale ?
I would say yes , extremely important , for the same reason .
If you have a fact-based worldview of today , you might have a chance to understand what 's coming next in the future .
We 're going back to these two humps in 1975 .
That 's when I was born , and I selected the West .
That 's the current EU countries and North America .
Let 's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are .
These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation .
In 1975 , only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America .
But this has changed , okay ?
So first , let 's look at the change up till today , 2014 .
Today it 's 50 / 50 .
The Western domination is over , as of today .
That 's nice . So what 's going to happen next ?
Do you see the big hump ? Did you see how it moved ?
I did a little experiment . I went to the IMF , International Monetary Fund , website .
They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita .
So I can use that to go five years into the future , assuming the income inequality of each country is the same .
I did that , but I went even further .
I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed , just as an experiment what might actually happen .
Let 's move into the future .
In 2020 , it 's 57 percent in the rest .
In 2025 , 63 percent .
2030 , 68 . And in 2035 , the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market .
These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future .
Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe .
So yes , I think it 's a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future .
Thank you very much .
Hans and Ola Rosling !
Dan Barasch : A park underneath the hustle and bustle of New York City
Dan Barasch and James Ramsey have a crazy plan — to create a park , filled with greenery , underneath New York City . The two are developing the Lowline , an underground greenspace the size of a football field . They 're building it in a trolley terminal abandoned in 1948 , using technology that harvests sunlight above-ground and directs it down below . It 's a park that can thrive , even in winter .
My dream is to build the world 's first underground park in New York City .
Now , why would someone want to build an underground park , and why in New York City ?
These three tough little buggers are , on the left , my grandmother , age five , and then her sister and brother , ages 11 and nine .
This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States , just about a century ago .
And like many immigrants at the time , they arrived on the Lower East Side in New York City and they encountered a crazy melting pot .
What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new , unfamiliar area , but they were also literally building the city .
I 've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history , and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York .
But she would often just shrug it off , tell me to eat more meatballs , more pasta , and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about .
The New York City that I encountered felt pretty built up .
I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference , and to somehow make the world more beautiful , more interesting and more just .
I just didn 't really know how .
At first , I thought I wanted to go work abroad , so I took a job with UNICEF in Kenya .
But it felt weird to me that I knew more about local Kenyan politics than the politics of my own hometown .
I took a job with the City of New York , but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy .
I even took a job at Google , and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems .
But I still didn 't feel like I was making the world a better place .
It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site , which is this .
that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan , and it was open between 1908 and 1948 , just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area .
And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948 .
Fascinated by this discovery , we begged the authorities to draw us into the space , and we finally got a tour , and this is what we saw .
Now , this photo doesn 't really do it justice . It 's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space .
It 's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city , and it almost feels like you 're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig , and all the details are all still there .
It 's really pretty remarkable .
Now , the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side , and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city .
New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities , and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space .
So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public , but also could potentially even be green .
Our plan , in a nutshell , is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street , directs it below the city sidewalks , and would allow plants and trees to grow With this approach , you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this .
In 2011 , we first released some of these images , and what was funny was , a lot of people said to us , " Oh , it kind of looks like the High Line underground . "
And so what our nickname ended up becoming , and what ended up sticking , was the Lowline , so the Lowline was born .
What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel , and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible .
So , like a crazy person , I decided to quit my job and focus entirely on this project .
Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse .
Here 's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology .
You can see the six solar collectors at the center there .
And here 's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse .
You can see the solar canopy overhead , the light streaming in , and this entirely live green space below .
So in the course of just a few weeks , tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit , and since that time , we 've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world .
Here 's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line 's site , and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years .
Notice how crowded the neighborhood still feels and how there 's really a lack of green space .
So what we 're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood , but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area .
And right now , we 're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem Here 's our rendering of how we would actually invite people into the space itself .
So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city , and invite people into this warm underground space .
In the middle of winter , when it 's absolutely freezing outside , the last place you 'd want to go would be an outdoor space or outdoor park .
The Lowline would really be a four-season space and a respite for the city .
So I like to think that the Lowline actually brings my own family 's story full circle .
If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out , I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have , rediscovering our shared history , and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting , more beautiful and more just .
Thanks .

Colin Grant : How our stories cross over
Colin Grant has spent a lifetime navigating the emotional landscape between his father 's world and his own . Born in England to Jamaican parents , Grant draws on stories of shared experience within his immigrant community -- and reflects on how he found forgiveness for a father who rejected him .
This is a photograph of a man whom for many years I plotted to kill .
This is my father , Clinton George " Bageye " Grant .
He 's called Bageye because he has permanent bags under his eyes .
As a 10-year-old , along with my siblings , I dreamt of scraping off the poison from fly-killer paper into his coffee , grounded down glass and sprinkling it over his breakfast , loosening the carpet on the stairs so he would trip and break his neck .
But come the day , he would always skip that loose step , he would always bow out of the house without so much as a swig of coffee or a bite to eat .
And so for many years , I feared that my father would die before I had a chance to kill him .
Up until our mother asked him to leave and not come back , Bageye had been a terrifying ogre .
He teetered permanently on the verge of rage , rather like me , as you see .
He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton and demanded total silence throughout the house , so that when we came home from school at 3 : 30 in the afternoon , we would huddle beside the TV , and rather like safe-crackers , we would twiddle with the volume control knob on the TV so it was almost inaudible .
And at times , when we were like this , so much " Shhh , " so much " Shhh " going on in the house that I imagined us to be like the German crew of a U-boat creeping along the edge of the ocean whilst up above , on the surface , HMS Bageye patrolled ready to drop death charges at the first sound of any disturbance .
So that lesson was the lesson that " Do not draw attention to yourself either in the home or outside of the home . "
Maybe it 's a migrant lesson .
We were to be below the radar , so there was no communication , really , between Bageye and us and us and Bageye , and the sound that we most looked forward to , you know when you 're a child and you want your father to come home and it 's all going to be happy and you 're waiting for that sound of the door opening .
Well the sound that we looked forward to was the click of the door closing , which meant he 'd gone and would not come back .
So for three decades , I never laid eyes on my father , nor he on me .
We never spoke to each other for three decades , and then a couple of years ago , I decided to turn the spotlight on him .
" You are being watched .
Actually , you are .
You are being watched . "
That was his mantra to us , his children .
Time and time again he would say this to us .
And this was the 1970s , it was Luton , where he worked at Vauxhall Motors , and he was a Jamaican .
And what he meant was , you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant are being watched to see which way you turn , to see whether you conform to the host nation 's stereotype of you , of being feckless , work-shy , destined for a life of crime .
You are being watched , so confound their expectations of you .
To that end , Bageye and his friends , mostly Jamaican , exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura : Turn your best side to the world , show your best face to the world .
If you have seen some of the images of the Caribbean people arriving in the ' 40s and ' 50s , you might have noticed that a lot of the men wear trilbies .
Now , there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica .
They invented that tradition for their arrival here .
They wanted to project themselves in a way that they wanted to be perceived , so that the way they looked and the names that they gave themselves defined them .
So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes .
Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear .
Anxious is always anxious .
Clock has one arm longer than the other .
And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear .
When Summerwear came to this country from Jamaica in the early ' 60s , he insisted on wearing light summer suits , no matter the weather , and in the course of researching their lives , I asked my mom , " Whatever became of Summerwear ? "
And she said , " He caught a cold and died . " But men like Summerwear taught us the importance of style .
Maybe they exaggerated their style because they thought that they were not considered to be quite civilized , and they transferred that generational attitude or anxiety onto us , the next generation , so much so that when I was growing up , if ever on the television news or radio a report came up about a black person committing some crime — a mugging , a murder , a burglary — we winced along with our parents , because they were letting the side down .
You did not just represent yourself .
You represented the group , and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with , in a way , that maybe you were going to be perceived in the same light .
So that was what needed to be challenged .
Our father and many of his colleagues exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving .
They were built to transmit but not receive .
We were to keep quiet .
When our father did speak to us , it was from the pulpit of his mind .
They clung to certainty in the belief that doubt would undermine them .
But when I am working in my house and writing , after a day 's writing , I rush downstairs and I 'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies and I 'm so excited that my children stop me , and they say , " Dad , nobody cares . "
But they do care , actually .
They cross over .
Somehow they find their way to you .
They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life , as I did with my father and my mother , perhaps , and maybe Bageye did with his father .
And that was clearer to me in the course of looking at his life and understanding , as they say , the Native Americans say , " Do not criticize the man until you can walk But in conjuring his life , it was okay and very straightforward to portray a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s with bowls of plastic fruit , polystyrene ceiling tiles , settees permanently sheathed in their transparent covers that they were delivered in .
But what 's more difficult to navigate is the emotional landscape between the generations , and the old adage that with age comes wisdom is not true .
With age comes the veneer of respectability and a veneer of uncomfortable truths .
But what was true was that my parents , my mother , and my father went along with it , did not trust the state to educate me .
So listen to how I sound .
They determined that they would send me to a private school , but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors .
It 's quite difficult to fund a private school education and feed his army of children .
I remember going on to the school for the entrance exam , and my father said to the priest — it was a Catholic school — he wanted a better " heducation " for the boy , but also , he , my father , never even managed to pass worms , never mind entrance exams .
But in order to fund my education , he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff , so my father would fund my education by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car , and that was made even more tricky because my father , that 's not his car by the way .
My father aspired to have a car like that , but my father had a beaten-up Mini , and he never , being a Jamaican coming to this country , he never had a driving license , he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT .
He thought , " I know how to drive ; why do I need the state 's validation ? "
But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police , and we were stopped a lot by the police , and I was impressed by the way that my father dealt with the police .
He would promote the policeman immediately , so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs in the course of the conversation and wave us on merrily .
So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica called " playing fool to catch wise . "
But it lent also an idea that actually he was being diminished or belittled by the policeman — as a 10-year-old boy , I saw that — but also there was an ambivalence towards authority .
So on the one hand , there was a mocking of authority , but on the other hand , there was a deference towards authority , and these Caribbean people had an overbearing obedience towards authority , which is very striking , very strange in a way , because migrants are very courageous people .
They leave their homes . My father and my mother left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles , and yet they were infantilized by travel .
They were timid , and somewhere along the line , the natural order was reversed .
The children became the parents to the parent .
The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan : they would work , some money , and then go back , but the five years became 10 , the 10 became 15 , and before you know it , you 're changing the wallpaper , and at that point , you know you 're here to stay .
Although there 's still the kind of temporariness that our parents felt about being here , but we children knew that the game was up .
I think there was a feeling that they would not be able to continue with the ideals of the life that they expected .
The reality was very much different .
And also , that was true of the reality of trying to educate me .
Having started the process , my father did not continue .
It was left to my mother to educate me , and as George Lamming would say , it was my mother who fathered me .
Even in his absence , that old mantra remained : You are being watched .
But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety , so much so that years later , when I was investigating why so many young black men were diagnosed with schizophrenia , six times more than they ought to be , I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say , " Black people are schooled in paranoia . "
And I wonder what Bageye would make of that .
Now I also had a 10-year-old son , and turned my attention to Bageye and I went in search of him .
He was back in Luton , he was now 82 , and I hadn 't seen him for 30-odd years , and when he opened the door , I saw this tiny little man with lambent , smiling eyes , and he was smiling , and I 'd never seen him smile .
I was very disconcerted by that .
But we sat down , and he had a Caribbean friend with him , talking some old time talk , and my father would look at me , and he looked at me as if I would miraculously disappear as I had arisen .
And he turned to his friend , and he said , " This boy and me have a deep , deep connection , deep , deep connection . "
But I never felt that connection .
If there was a pulse , it was very weak or hardly at all .
And I almost felt in the course of that reunion that I was auditioning to be my father 's son .
When the book came out , it had fair reviews in the national papers , but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian , it 's the Luton News , and the Luton News ran the headline about the book , " The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift . "
And I understood that could also represent the rift between one generation and the next , between people like me and my father 's generation , but there 's no tradition in Caribbean life of memoirs or biographies .
It was a tradition that you didn 't chat about your business in public .
But I welcomed that title , and I thought actually , yes , there is a possibility that this will open up conversations that we 'd never had before .
This will close the generation gap , perhaps .
This could be an instrument of repair .
And I even began to feel that this book may be perceived by my father as an act of filial devotion .
Poor , deluded fool .
Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be the public airing of his shortcomings .
He was stung by my betrayal , and he went to the newspapers the next day and demanded a right of reply , and he got it with the headline " Bageye Bites Back . "
And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal .
I was no son of his .
He recognized in his mind that his colors had been dragged through the mud , and he couldn 't allow that .
He had to restore his dignity , and he did so , and initially , although I was disappointed , I grew to admire that stance .
There was still fire bubbling through his veins , even though he was 82 years old .
And if it meant that we would now return to 30 years of silence , my father would say , " If it 's so , then it 's so . "
Jamaicans will tell you that there 's no such thing as facts , there are only versions .
We all tell ourselves the versions of the story that we can best live with .
Each generation builds up an edifice which they are reluctant or sometimes unable to disassemble , but in the writing , my version of the story began to change , and it was detached from me .
I lost my hatred of my father .
I did no longer want him to die or to murder him , and I felt free , much freer than I 'd ever felt before .
And I wonder whether that freedness could be transferred to him .
In that initial reunion , I was struck by an idea that I had very few photographs of myself as a young child .
This is a photograph of me , nine months old .
In the original photograph , I 'm being held up by my father , Bageye , but when my parents separated , my mother excised him from all aspects of our lives .
She took a pair of scissors and cut him out of every photograph , and for years , I told myself the truth of this photograph was that you are alone , you are unsupported .
But there 's another way of looking at this photograph .
This is a photograph that has the potential for a reunion , a potential to be reunited with my father , and in my yearning to be held up by my father , I held him up to the light .
In that first reunion , it was very awkward and tense moments , and to lessen the tension , we decided to go for a walk .
And as we walked , I was struck that I had reverted to being the child even though I was now towering above my father .
I was almost a foot taller than my father .
He was still the big man , and I tried to match his step .
And I realized that he was walking as if he was still under observation , but I admired his walk .
He walked like a man on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal .
There was dignity in defeat .
Thank you .

Shubhendu Sharma : How to grow a tiny forest anywhere
A forest planted by humans , then left to nature 's own devices , typically takes at least 100 years to mature . But what if we could make the process happen ten times faster ? In this short talk , eco-entrepreneur Shubhendu Sharma explains how to create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere .
I 'm an industrial engineer .
The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources .
While working at Toyota , all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki , who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral .
I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer .
Soon , I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house , and this is how it looks after three years .
These forests , compared to a conventional plantation , grow 10 times faster , they 're 30 times more dense , and 100 times more biodiverse .
Within two years of having this forest in our backyard , I could observe that the groundwater didn 't dry during summers , the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled .
Quality of air became better , and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house .
I wanted to make more of these forests .
I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business , so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests .
But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry , we had to standardize the process of forest-making . So we benchmarked the Toyota Production System known for its quality and efficiency for the process of forest-making .
For an example , the core of TPS , Toyota Production System , lies in heijunka , which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line .
We replaced these cars with trees , using which now we can make multi-layered forests .
These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space . They are so dense that one can 't even walk into them . For an example , we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars .
In order to reduce cost and our own carbon footprint , we started utilizing local biomass as soil amender and fertilizers .
For example , coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw , powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted .
Once planted , we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn 't get evaporated back into the atmosphere .
And using these simple improvisations , today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone .
Today , we are making forests in houses , in schools , even in factories with the corporates .
But that 's not enough .
who want to take matters into their own hands . So we let it happen .
Today , we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there , using our methodology . At the click of a button , they can get to know all the native species of their place .
By installing a small hardware probe on site , we can do remote soil testing , using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely .
Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site .
This methodology , I believe , has a potential .
By sharing , we can actually bring back our native forests .
Now , when you go back home , if you see a barren piece of land , do remember that it can be a potential forest .
Thank you very much . Thanks .

Isabel Allende : How to live passionately — no matter your age
Author Isabel Allende is 71 . Yes , she has a few wrinkles — but she has incredible perspective too . In this candid talk , meant for viewers of all ages , she talks about her fears as she gets older and shares how she plans to keep on living passionately .
Hi , kids .
I 'm 71 .
My husband is 76 .
My parents are in their late 90s , and Olivia , the dog , is 16 .
So let 's talk about aging .
Let me tell you how I feel when I see my wrinkles in the mirror and I realize that some parts of me have dropped and I can 't find them down there .
Mary Oliver says in one of her poems , " Tell me , what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life ? "
Me , I intend to live passionately .
When do we start aging ?
Society decides when we are old , usually around 65 , when we get Medicare , but we really start aging at birth .
We are aging right now , and we all experience it differently .
We all feel younger than our real age , because the spirit never ages .
I am still 17 .
Sophia Loren . Look at her .
She says that everything you see she owes to spaghetti .
I tried it and gained 10 pounds in the wrong places .
But attitude , aging is also attitude and health .
But my real mentor in this journey of aging is Olga Murray .
This California girl at 60 started working in Nepal to save young girls from domestic bondage .
At 88 , she has saved 12,000 girls , and she has changed the culture in the country .
Now it is illegal for fathers to sell their daughters into servitude .
She has also founded orphanages and nutritional clinics .
She is always happy and eternally young .
What have I lost in the last decades ?
People , of course , places , and the boundless energy of my youth , and I 'm beginning to lose independence , and that scares me .
Ram Dass says that dependency hurts , but if you accept it , there is less suffering .
After a very bad stroke , his ageless soul watches the changes in the body with tenderness , and he is grateful to the people who help him .
What have I gained ?
Freedom : I don 't have to prove anything anymore .
I 'm not stuck in the idea of who I was , who I want to be , or what other people expect me to be .
I don 't have to please men anymore , only animals .
I keep telling my superego to back off and let me enjoy what I still have .
My body may be falling apart , but my brain is not , yet .
I love my brain .
I feel lighter .
I don 't carry grudges , ambition , vanity , none of the deadly sins that are not even worth the trouble .
It 's great to let go .
I should have started sooner .
And I also feel softer because I 'm not scared of being vulnerable .
I don 't see it as weakness anymore .
And I 've gained spirituality .
I 'm aware that before , death was in the neighborhood .
Now , it 's next door , or in my house .
I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment .
By the way , the Dalai Lama is someone who has aged beautifully , but who wants to be vegetarian and celibate ?
Meditation helps .
Ommm . Ommm . Ommm .
Isabel Allende : Ommm . Ommm . There it is .
And it 's good to start early .
You know , for a vain female like myself , it 's very hard to age in this culture .
Inside , I feel good , I feel charming , seductive , sexy .
Nobody else sees that . I 'm invisible .
I want to be the center of attention .
I hate to be invisible .
This is Grace Dammann .
She has been in a wheelchair for six years after a terrible car accident .
She says that there is nothing more sensual than a hot shower , that every drop of water is a blessing to the senses .
She doesn 't see herself as disabled .
In her mind , she 's still surfing in the ocean .
Ethel Seiderman , a feisty , beloved activist in the place where I live in California .
She wears red patent shoes , and her mantra is that one scarf is nice but two is better .
She has been a widow for nine years , but she 's not looking for another mate .
She says that there is only a limited number of ways you can screw — well , she says it in another way — and she has tried them all .
I , on the other hand , I still have erotic fantasies with Antonio Banderas — — and my poor husband has to put up with it .
So how can I stay passionate ?
I cannot will myself to be passionate at 71 .
I have been training for some time , and when I feel flat and bored , I fake it .
Attitude , attitude .
How do I train ? I train by saying yes to whatever comes my way : drama , comedy , tragedy , love , death , losses .
Yes to life .
And I train by trying to stay in love .
It doesn 't always work , but you cannot blame me for trying .
And , on a final note , retirement in Spanish is jubilación .
Jubilation . Celebration .
We have paid our dues .
We have contributed to society .
Now it 's our time , and it 's a great time .
Unless you are ill or very poor , you have choices .
I have chosen to stay passionate , engaged with an open heart .
I am working on it every day .
Want to join me ?
Thank you .
So Isabel — I Thank you .
First of all , I never like to presume to speak for the TED community , but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming , seductive and sexy . Yes ?
I Aww , thank you . Hands down . I No , it 's makeup .
Moderator : Now , would it be awkward if I asked you a follow-up question about your erotic fantasies ?
I Oh , of course . About what ?
Moderator : About your erotic fantasies . I With Antonio Banderas .
Moderator : I was just wondering if you have anything more to share .
I Well , one of them is that — One of them is that I place a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla , I slather him with guacamole and salsa , I roll him up , and I eat him . Thank you .

Jill Shargaa : Please , please , people . Let 's put the ' awe ' back in ' awesome'
Which of the following is awesome : your lunch or the Great Pyramid of Giza ? Comedian Jill Shargaa sounds a hilarious call for us to save the word " awesome " for things that truly inspire awe .
How many times have you used the word " awesome " today ?
Once ? Twice ? Seventeen times ?
Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word ?
No , I didn 't think so , because it 's come down to this , people : You 're using the word incorrectly , and tonight I hope to show you how to put the " awe " back in " awesome . "
Recently , I was dining at an outdoor cafe , and the server came up to our table , and asked us if we had dined there before , and I said , " Yes , yes , we have . "
And she said , " Awesome . "
And I thought , " Really ?
Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again ? "
The other day , one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF , and I said , " Well , of course , " and he said , " Awesome . "
Seriously , can saving anything as a PDF be awesome ?
Sadly , the frequent overuse of the word " awesome " has now replaced words like " great " and " thank you . "
So Webster 's dictionary defines the word " awesome " as fear mingled with admiration or reverence , a feeling produced by something majestic .
Now , with that in mind , was your Quiznos sandwich awesome ?
How about that parking space ? Was that awesome ?
Or that game the other day ? Was that awesome ?
The answer is no , no and no .
A sandwich can be delicious , that parking space can be nearby , and that game can be a blowout , but not everything can be awesome .
So when you use the word " awesome " to describe the most mundane of things , you 're taking away the very power of the word .
This author says , " Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome . "
Um , no , it is not , and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck . So in other words , if you have everything , you value nothing .
It 's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here .
There 's no dynamic , there 's no highs or lows , if everything is awesome .
Ladies and gentlemen , here are 10 things that are truly awesome .
Imagine , if you will , having to schlep everything on your back .
Wouldn 't this be easier for me if I could roll this home ?
Yes , so I think I 'll invent the wheel .
The wheel , ladies and gentlemen .
Is the wheel awesome ? Say it with me .
Yes , the wheel is awesome !
The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years .
Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone .
Were the Great Pyramids awesome ?
Yes , the pyramids were awesome .
The Grand Canyon . Come on .
It 's almost 80 million years old .
Is the Grand Canyon awesome ?
Yes , the Grand Canyon is .
Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829 , and earlier today , when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich , and you know who you are — — wasn 't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver ?
I mean , come on . Is photography awesome ?
Yes , photography is awesome .
D-Day , June 6 , 1944 , the Allied invasion of Normandy , the largest amphibious invasion in world history .
Was D-Day awesome ? Yes , it was awesome .
Did you eat food today ? Did you eat ?
Then you can thank the honeybee , that 's the one , because if crops aren 't pollinated , we can 't grow food , and then we 're all going to die .
It 's just like that .
But it 's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower , although that would be awesome .
Bees are awesome . Are you kidding me ?
Landing on the moon ! Come on !
Apollo 11 . Are you kidding me ?
Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk , North Carolina , Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away .
That 's like from here to the moon .
That 's one small step for a man , one giant leap for awesome !
You 're damn right , it was .
Woodstock , 1969 : Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll .
Tickets were only 24 dollars back then .
You can 't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now .
Jimi Hendrix 's version of " The Star-Spangled Banner " was the most iconic .
Was Woodstock awesome ? Yes , it was awesome .
Sharks ! They 're at the top of the food chain .
Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt .
Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime .
Does awesome inspire fear ?
Oh , hell yeah , sharks are awesome !
The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication , and later tonight , when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap , the Internet is awesome .
And finally , finally some of you can 't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was .
I will save you the time .
It was not awesome , but it was true , and I hope it was entertaining , and out of all the audiences I 've ever had , y 'all are the most recent . Thank you and good night .

Sally Kohn : Don 't like clickbait ? Don 't click
Doesn 't it seem like a lot of online news sites have moved beyond reporting the news to openly inciting your outrage ? News analyst Sally Kohn suggests — don 't engage with news that looks like it just wants to make you mad . Instead , give your precious clicks to the news sites you truly trust .
So recently , some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars , or pictures online .
They didn 't change their content , they kept tweeting the same as usual , but suddenly , the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse , whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them .
Now , if you 're my five-year-old , your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies .
That 's a thing . Google it .
But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place .
I 'm not talking about the kind of colorful debates that I think are healthy for our democracy .
I 'm talking about nasty personal attacks .
Maybe it 's happened to you , but it 's at least twice as likely to happen , and be worse , if you 're a woman , a person of color , or gay , or more than one at the same time .
In fact , just as I was writing this talk , I found a Twitter account called @ SallyKohnSucks .
The bio says that I 'm a " man-hater and a bull dyke and the only thing I 've ever accomplished with my career is spreading my perverse sexuality . "
Which , incidentally , is only a third correct .
I mean , lies ! But seriously , we all say we hate this crap .
The question is whether you 're willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it .
I don 't mean giving up the Internet .
I mean changing the way you click , because clicking is a public act .
It 's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers .
Increasingly , we 're all the media .
I used to think , oh , okay , I get dressed up , I put on a lot of makeup , I go on television , I talk about the news .
That is a public act of making media .
And then I go home and I browse the web and I 'm reading Twitter , and that 's a private act of consuming media .
I mean , of course it is . I 'm in my pajamas .
Wrong .
Everything we blog , everything we Tweet , and everything we click is a public act of making media .
We are the new editors .
We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to .
That 's how the media works now .
There 's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on , and that in turn shapes our whole culture .
Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now , but I 'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented , rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society .
In an increasingly noisy media landscape , the incentive is to make more noise to be heard , and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty .
It does not have to be that way .
It does not .
We can change the incentive .
For starters , there are two things we can all do .
First , don 't just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt .
If someone is being abused online , do something .
Be a hero . This is your chance .
Speak up . Speak out . Be a good person .
Drown out the negative with the positive .
And second , we 've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator , bottom-feeding linkbait .
If you don 't like the 24 / 7 all Kardashian you 've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian 's sideboob .
I know you do it . You too , apparently .
I mean , really , same example : if you don 't like politicians calling each other names , stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party .
Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it .
It makes it worse , the fire spreads .
Our whole culture gets burned .
If what gets the most clicks wins , then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks , because clicking is a public act .
So click responsibly . Thank you .

Rose Goslinga : Crop insurance , an idea worth seeding
Across sub-Saharan Africa , small farmers are the bedrock of national and regional economies — unless the weather proves unpredictable and their crops fail . The solution is insurance , at a vast , continental scale , and at a very low , affordable cost . Rose Goslinga and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture pioneered an unconventional way to give farmers whose crops fail early a second chance at a growing season .
In Kenya , 1984 is known as the year of the cup , or the goro goro .
The goro goro is a cup used to measure two kilograms of maize flower on the market , and the maize flower is used to make ugali , a polenta-like cake that is eaten together with vegetables .
Both the maize and the vegetables are grown on most Kenyan farms , which means that most families can feed themselves from their own farm .
One goro goro can feed three meals for an average family , and in 1984 , the whole harvest could fit in one goro goro .
It was and still is one of the worst droughts in living memory .
Now today , I insure farmers against droughts like those in the year of the cup , or to be more specific , I insure the rains .
I come from a family of missionaries who built hospitals in Indonesia , and my father built a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania .
This is me , age five , in front of that hospital .
I don 't think they thought I 'd grow up to sell insurance . So let me tell you how that happened .
In 2008 , I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda , and my boss had just been promoted to become the minister .
She launched an ambitious plan to start a green revolution in her country , and before we knew it , we were importing tons of fertilizer and seed and telling farmers how to apply that fertilizer and plant .
A couple of weeks later , the International Monetary Fund visited us , and asked my minister , " Minister , it 's great that you want to help farmers reach food security , but what if it doesn 't rain ? "
My minister answered proudly and somewhat defiantly , " I am going to pray for rain . "
That ended the discussion .
On the way back to the ministry in the car , she turned around to me and said , " Rose , you 've always been interested in finance .
Go find us some insurance . "
It 's been six years since , and last year I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that insured over 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought .
They owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two Euros in premium .
It 's microinsurance .
Now , traditional insurance doesn 't work with two to three Euros of premium , because traditional insurance relies on farm visits .
A farmer here in Germany would be visited for the start of the season , halfway through , and at the end , and again if there was a loss , to estimate the damages .
For a small-scale farmer in the middle of Africa , the maths of doing those visits simply don 't add up .
So instead , we rely on technology and data .
This satellite measures whether there were clouds or not , because think about it : If there are clouds , then you might have some rain , but if there are no clouds , then it 's actually impossible for it to rain .
These images show the onset of the rains this season in Kenya .
You see that around March 6 , the clouds move in and then disappear , and then around the March 11 , the clouds really move in .
That , and those clouds , were the onset of the rains this year .
This satellite covers the whole of Africa and goes back as far as 1984 , and that 's important , because if you know how many times a place has had a drought in the last 30 years , you can make a pretty good estimate what the chances are of drought in the future , and that means that you can put a price tag on the risk of drought .
The data alone isn 't enough .
We devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rainfall a crop needs and when .
For example , for maize at planting , you need to have two days of rain for farmers to plant , and then it needs to rain once every two weeks for the crop to properly germinate .
After that , you need rain every three weeks for the crop to form its leaves , whereas at flowering , you need it to rain more frequently , about once every 10 days for the crop to form its cob .
At the end of the season , you actually don 't want it to rain , because rains then can damage the crop .
Devising such a cover is difficult , but it turned out the real challenge was selling insurance .
We set ourselves a modest target of 500 farmers insured after our first season .
After a couple of months ' intense marketing , we had signed up the grand total of 185 farmers .
I was disappointed and confounded .
Everybody kept telling me that farmers wanted insurance , but our prime customers simply weren 't buying .
They were waiting to see what would happen , didn 't trust insurance companies , or thought , " I 've managed for so many years .
Why would I buy insurance now ? "
Now many of you know microcredit , the method of providing small loans to poor people pioneered by Muhammad Yunus , who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank .
Turns out , selling microcredit isn 't the same as selling insurance .
For credit , a farmer needs to earn the trust of a bank , and if it succeeds , the bank will advance him money .
That 's an attractive proposition .
For insurance , the farmer needs to trust the insurance company , and needs to advance the insurance company money .
It 's a very different value proposition .
And so the uptick of insurance has been slow , with so far only 4.4 percent of Africans taking up insurance in 2012 , and half of that number is in one country , South Africa .
We tried for some years selling insurance directly to farmers , with very high marketing cost and very limited success .
Then we realized that there were many organizations working with farmers : seed companies , microfinance institutions , mobile phone companies , government agencies .
They were all providing loans to farmers , and often , just before they 'd finalize the loan , the farmer would say , " But what if it doesn 't rain ?
How do you expect me to repay my loan ? "
Many of these organizations were taking on the risk themselves , simply hoping that that year , the worst wouldn 't happen .
Most of the organizations , however , were limiting their growth in agriculture .
They couldn 't take on this kind of risk .
These organizations became our customers , and when combining credit and insurance , interesting things can happen .
Let me tell you one more story .
At the start of February 2012 in western Kenya , the rains started , and they started early , and when rains start early , farmers are encouraged , because it usually means that the season is going to be good .
So they took out loans and planted .
For the next three weeks , there wasn 't a single drop of rain , and the crops that had germinated so well shriveled and died .
We 'd insured the loans of a microfinance institution that had provided those loans to about 6,000 farmers in that area , and we called them up and said , " Look , we know about the drought .
We 've got you .
We 'll give you 200,000 Euros at the end of the season . "
They said , " Wow , that 's great , but that 'll be late .
Could you give us the money now ?
Then these farmers can still replant and can get a harvest this season . "
So we convinced our insurance partners , and later that April , these farmers replanted .
We took the idea of replanting to a seed company and convinced them to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed , and in every bag , we packed a card that had a number on it , and when the farmers would open the card , they 'd text in that number , and that number would actually help us to locate the farmer and allocate them to a satellite pixel .
A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks , and if it didn 't rain , we 'd replace their seed .
One of the first — — Hold on , I 'm not there !
One of the first beneficiaries of this replanting guarantee was Bosco Mwinyi .
We visited his farm later that August , and I wish I could show you the smile on his face when he showed us his harvest , because it warmed my heart and it made me realize why selling insurance can be a good thing .
But you know , he insisted that we get his whole harvest in the picture , so we had to zoom out a lot .
Insurance secured his harvest that season , and I believe that today , we have all the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their own destiny .
No more years of the cup .
Instead , I am looking forward to , at least somehow , the year of the insurance , or the year of the great harvest .
Thank you .

Martin Rees : Can we prevent the end of the world ?
A post-apocalyptic Earth , emptied of humans , seems like the stuff of science fiction TV and movies . But in this short , surprising talk , Lord Martin Rees asks us to think about our real existential risks — natural and human-made threats that could wipe out humanity . As a concerned member of the human race , he asks : What 's the worst thing that could possibly happen ?
Ten years ago , I wrote a book which I entitled " Our Final Century ? " Question mark .
My publishers cut out the question mark . The American publishers changed our title to " Our Final Hour . "
Americans like instant gratification and the reverse .
And my theme was this : Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries , but this one is special — it 's the first where one species , ours , has the planet 's future in its hands .
Over nearly all of Earth 's history , threats have come from nature — disease , earthquakes , asteroids and so forth — but from now on , the worst dangers come from us .
And it 's now not just the nuclear threat ; in our interconnected world , network breakdowns can cascade globally ; air travel can spread pandemics worldwide within days ; and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light .
We fret too much about minor hazards — improbable air crashes , carcinogens in food , low radiation doses , and so forth — but we and our political masters are in denial about catastrophic scenarios .
The worst have thankfully not yet happened .
Indeed , they probably won 't .
But if an event is potentially devastating , it 's worth paying a substantial premium to safeguard against it , even if it 's unlikely , just as we take out fire insurance on our house .
And as science offers greater power and promise , the downside gets scarier too .
We get ever more vulnerable .
Within a few decades , millions will have the capability to misuse rapidly advancing biotech , just as they misuse cybertech today .
Freeman Dyson , in a TED Talk , foresaw that children will design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation played with chemistry sets .
Well , this may be on the science fiction fringe , but were even part of his scenario to come about , our ecology and even our species would surely not survive long unscathed .
For instance , there are some eco-extremists who think that it would be better for the planet , for Gaia , if there were far fewer humans .
What happens when such people have mastered that will be widespread by 2050 ?
And by then , other science fiction nightmares may transition to reality : dumb robots going rogue , or a network that develops a mind of its own threatens us all .
Well , can we guard against such risks by regulation ?
We must surely try , but these enterprises are so competitive , so globalized , and so driven by commercial pressure , that anything that can be done will be done somewhere , whatever the regulations say .
It 's like the drug laws — we try to regulate , but can 't .
And the global village will have its village idiots , and they 'll have a global range .
So as I said in my book , we 'll have a bumpy ride through this century .
There may be setbacks to our society — indeed , a 50 percent chance of a severe setback .
But are there conceivable events that could be even worse , events that could snuff out all life ?
When a new particle accelerator came online , some people anxiously asked , could it destroy the Earth or , even worse , rip apart the fabric of space ?
Well luckily , reassurance could be offered .
I and others pointed out that nature has done the same experiments zillions of times already , via cosmic ray collisions .
But scientists should surely be precautionary about experiments that generate conditions without precedent in the natural world .
Biologists should avoid release of potentially devastating genetically modified pathogens .
And by the way , our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question , and it 's this : Consider two scenarios .
Scenario A wipes out 90 percent of humanity .
Scenario B wipes out 100 percent .
How much worse is B than A ?
Some would say 10 percent worse .
The body count is 10 percent higher .
But I claim that B is incomparably worse .
As an astronomer , I can 't believe that humans are the end of the story .
It is five billion years before the sun flares up , and the universe may go on forever , so post-human evolution , here on Earth and far beyond , could be as prolonged as the Darwinian process that 's led to us , and even more wonderful .
And indeed , future evolution will happen much faster , on a technological timescale , not a natural selection timescale .
So we surely , in view of those immense stakes , shouldn 't accept even a one in a billion risk that human extinction would foreclose this immense potential .
Some scenarios that have been envisaged may indeed be science fiction , but others may be disquietingly real .
It 's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable , and in fact , that 's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks .
It seems it 's worthwhile just for a few people to think about these potential disasters .
And we need all the help we can get from others , because we are stewards of a precious pale blue dot in a vast cosmos , a planet with 50 million centuries ahead of it .
And so let 's not jeopardize that future .
And I 'd like to finish with a quote from a great scientist called Peter Medawar .
I quote , " The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle .
They are attached to our own necks , and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound . "
Thank you very much .

Ziyah Gafic ́ : Everyday objects , tragic histories
Ziyah Gafic ́ photographs everyday objects — watches , shoes , glasses . But these images are deceptively simple ; the items in them have been exhumed from the mass graves of the Bosnian War . Gafic ́ , a TED Fellow and Sarajevo native , is photographing every item from these graves in order to create a living archive of the identities of those lost .
These are simple objects : clocks , keys , combs , glasses .
They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey .
We are all familiar with these mundane , everyday objects .
The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them .
Usually , they were told that they were going to be exchanged for prisoners of war .
These items have been recovered from numerous mass graves across my homeland , and as we speak , forensics are exhuming bodies from newly discovered mass graves , 20 years after the war .
And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered .
During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early ' 90s , approximately 30,000 citizens , mainly civilians , went missing , presumed killed , and another 100,000 were killed during combat operations .
Most of them were killed either in the early days of the war or towards the end of the hostilities , when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb army .
The international criminal tribunal delivered a number of sentences for crimes against humanity and genocide .
Genocide is a systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial , political , religious or ethnic group .
As much as genocide is about killing .
It is also about destroying their property , their cultural heritage , and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed .
Genocide is not only about the killing ; it is about the denied identity .
There are always traces — no such thing as a perfect crime .
There are always remnants of the perished ones that are more durable than their fragile bodies and our selective and fading memory of them .
These items are recovered from numerous mass graves , and the main goal of this collection of the items is a unique process of identifying those who disappeared in the killings , the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust .
Not a single body should remain undiscovered or unidentified .
Once recovered , these items that the victims carried with them on their way to execution are carefully cleaned , analyzed , catalogued and stored .
Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags just like the ones you see on CSI .
These objects are used as a forensic tool in visual identification of the victims , but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence in the ongoing war crimes trials .
Survivors are occasionally called to try to identify these items physically , but physical browsing is extremely difficult , an ineffective and painful process .
Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers are done with these objects , they become orphans of the narrative .
Many of them get destroyed , believe it or not , or they get simply shelved , out of sight and out of mind .
I decided a few years ago to photograph every single exhumed item in order to create a visual archive that survivors could easily browse .
As a storyteller , I like to give back to the community .
I like to move beyond raising awareness .
And in this case , someone may recognize these items or at least their photographs will remain as a permanent , unbiased and accurate reminder of what happened .
Photography is about empathy , and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy .
In this case , I am merely a tool , a forensic , if you like , and the result is a photography that is as close as possible of being a document .
Once all the missing persons are identified , only decaying bodies in their graves and these everyday items will remain .
In all their simplicity , these items are the last testament to the identity of the victims , the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed .
Thank you very much .

Jarrett J. Krosoczka : Why lunch ladies are heroes
Children 's book author Jarrett Krosoczka shares the origins of the Lunch Lady graphic novel series , in which undercover school heroes serve lunch … and justice ! His new project , School Lunch Hero Day , reveals how cafeteria lunch staff provide more than food , and illustrates how powerful a thank you can be .
When my first children 's book was published in 2001 , I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator , in the cafetorium , I looked across the room , and there she was : my old lunch lady .
She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day .
So I approached her to say hello , and I said , " Hi , Jeannie ! How are you ? "
And she looked at me , and I could tell that she recognized me , but she couldn 't quite place me , and she looked at me and she said , " Stephen Krosoczka ? "
And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka , but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am , and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid .
And she started telling me about her grandkids , and that blew my mind .
My lunch lady had grandkids , and therefore kids , and therefore left school at the end of the day ?
I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons .
I had never thought about any of that before .
Well , that chance encounter inspired my imagination , and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series , a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes , a school bus monster , and mutant mathletes , and the end of every book , they get the bad guy with their hairnet , and they proclaim , " Justice is served ! "
And it 's been amazing , because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children , and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork .
And I would notice as I would visit schools , the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way .
And coast to coast , all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing : " Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness . "
Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time .
But it meant the most to Jeannie .
When the books were first published , I invited her to the book launch party , and in front of everyone there , everyone she had fed over the years , I gave her a piece of artwork and some books .
And two years after this photo was taken , she passed away , and I attended her wake , and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there , because next to her casket was this painting , and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work , I had validated what she did .
And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country : School Lunch Hero Day , a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff .
And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association , and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day .
That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year .
And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray . There is Ms. Brenda in California , who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss .
There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day , and they were going without food over the summer , so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit , and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer .
And kids made the most amazing projects . I knew they would .
Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper .
They took photos of their lunch lady 's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers .
And they made their own comics , starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies .
And they made thank you pizzas , where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza .
For me , I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies , because one woman said to me , she said , " Before this day , I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school .
I didn 't think that anyone noticed us down here . "
Another woman said to me , " You know , what I got out of this is that what I do is important . "
And of course what she does is important . What they all do is important .
They 're feeding our children every single day , and before a child can learn , their belly needs to be full , and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society .
So I hope that you don 't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff , and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be .
A thank you can change a life .
It changes the life of the person who receives it , and it changes the life of the person who expresses it .
Thank you .

Aziza Chaouni : How I brought a river , and my city , back to life
The Fez River winds through the medina of Fez , Morocco — a mazelike medieval city that 's a World Heritage site . Once considered the " soul " of this celebrated city , the river succumbed to sewage and pollution , and in the 1950s was covered over bit by bit until nothing remained . TED Fellow Aziza Chaouni recounts her 20 year effort to restore this river to its former glory , and to transform her city in the process .
I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture : the Fez River Rehabilitation Project .
My hometown of Fez , Morocco , boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world , called the medina , nestled in a river valley .
The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site .
Since the 1950s , as the population of the medina grew , basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed .
One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River , which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city 's very soul .
In fact , one can witness the presence of the river 's extensive water network all throughout the city , in places such as private and public fountains .
Unfortunately , because of the pollution of the river , it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952 .
This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina .
Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards .
Actually , the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy .
Then pollution takes its toll , mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning .
At some point , I couldn 't bear the desecration of the river , such an important part of my city , and I decided to take action , especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it .
With clean water , suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible , and with luck and actually a lot of pushing , my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river .
However , we were sneaky , and we proposed more : to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways , and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric , and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez .
I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces .
The first one is the Rcif Plaza , which sits actually right on top of the river , which you can see here in dotted lines .
This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina , that has the largest pedestrian network in the world .
And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here , right next to the plaza , you can see that the river looked like a river of trash .
Instead , what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian , to cover it with recycled leather canopies , and to connect it to the banks of the river .
The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks , and it used to be an illegal parking , and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina .
The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur .
As the project progressed and received several design awards , new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design .
The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don 't do .
It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project : that is , to uncover the river , treat its water , and provide public spaces for all .
We were actually very lucky , and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening .
Like , you can see here in the Rcif Plaza .
This is how it looked like about six years ago .
This is how it looks like today .
It 's still under construction , but actually it is heavily used by the local population .
And finally , this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed .
This is the river , covered , used as a trash yard .
Then after many years of work , the river with clean water , uncovered .
And finally , you can see here the river when the project will be completed .
So for sure , the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city , but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect , we have set up the core idea of the project into motion ; that is , to transform the river from sewage to public space for all , thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage .
Thank you very much .

Clint Smith : The danger of silence
" We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don 't , " says poet and teacher Clint Smith . A short , powerful piece from the heart , about finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice .
Dr. Martin Luther King , Jr . , in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement , states , " In the end , we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends . "
As a teacher , I 've internalized this message .
Every day , all around us , we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination , violence , genocide and war .
In the classroom , I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry .
We work together to fill those spaces , to recognize them , to name them , to understand that they don 't have to be sources of shame .
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences , I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class , which every student signs at the beginning of the year : read critically , write consciously , speak clearly , tell your truth .
And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point , tell your truth .
And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up , I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so .
So I tell them that growing up , as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans , during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up , sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity .
I 've given up soda , McDonald 's , French fries , French kisses , and everything in between .
But one year , I gave up speaking .
I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice , but it was like I hadn 't realized that I had given that up a long time ago .
I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to , told myself I wasn 't meant to be anyone 's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own , so sometimes I just wouldn 't say anything , appeasing ignorance with my silence , unaware that validation doesn 't need words to endorse its existence .
When Christian was beat up for being gay , I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn 't even notice .
I couldn 't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing .
I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one .
When the woman at the fundraising gala said " I 'm so proud of you .
It must be so hard teaching those poor , unintelligent kids , " I bit my lip , because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity .
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don 't .
Silence is the residue of fear .
It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue .
It is the air retreating from your chest Silence is Rwandan genocide . Silence is Katrina .
It is what you hear when there aren 't enough body bags left .
It is the sound after the noose is already tied .
It is charring . It is chains . It is privilege . It is pain .
There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you .
I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision .
I will tell Christian that he is a lion , a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance .
I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was , because sometimes all people want to be is human .
I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau , and just because you watched one episode of " The Wire " doesn 't mean you know anything about my kids .
instead of giving something up , I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue , a stage on the underside of my inhibition .
Because who has to have a soapbox when all you 've ever needed is your voice ?
Thank you .

Dan Pacholke : How prisons can help inmates live meaningful lives
In the United States , the agencies that govern prisons are often called ' Department of Corrections . ' And yet , their focus is on containing and controlling inmates . Dan Pacholke , Deputy Secretary for the Washington State Department of Corrections , shares a different vision : of prisons that provide humane living conditions as well as opportunities for meaningful work and learning .
We 're seen as the organization that is the bucket for failed social policy .
I can 't define who comes to us or how long they stay .
We get the people for whom nothing else has worked , people who have fallen through all of the other social safety nets .
They can 't contain them , so we must .
That 's our job : contain them , control them .
Over the years , as a prison system , as a nation , and as a society , we 've become very good at that , but that shouldn 't make you happy .
Today we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world .
We have more black men in prison today than were under slavery in 1850 . We house the parents of almost three million and we 've become the new asylum , the largest mental health provider in this nation .
When we lock someone up , that is no small thing .
And yet , we are called the Department of Corrections .
Today I want to talk about changing the way we think about corrections .
I believe , and my experience tells me , that when we change the way we think , we create new possibilities , or futures , and prisons need a different future .
I 've spent my entire career in corrections , over 30 years .
I followed my dad into this field .
He was a Vietnam veteran . Corrections suited him .
He was strong , steady , disciplined .
I was not so much any of those things , and I 'm sure that worried him about me .
Eventually I decided , if I was going to end up in prison , I 'd better end up on the right side of the bars , so I thought I 'd check it out , take a tour of the place my dad worked , the McNeil Island Penitentiary .
Now this was the early ' 80s , and prisons weren 't quite what you see on TV or in the movies .
In many ways , it was worse .
I walked into a cell house that was five tiers high .
There were eight men to a cell .
there were 550 men in that living unit .
And just in case you wondered , they shared one toilet in those small confines . An officer put a key in a lockbox , and hundreds of men streamed out of their cells .
Hundreds of men streamed out of their cells .
I walked away as fast as I could .
Eventually I went back and I started as an officer there .
My job was to run one of those cell blocks and to control those hundreds of men .
When I went to work at our receptions center , I could actually hear the inmates roiling from the parking lot , shaking cell doors , yelling , tearing up their cells .
Take hundreds of volatile people and lock them up , and what you get is chaos .
Contain and control — that was our job .
One way we learned to do this more effectively was a new type of housing unit called the Intensive Management Unit , IMU , a modern version of a " hole . "
We put inmates in cells behind solid steel doors with cuff ports so we could restrain them and feed them .
Guess what ?
It got quieter .
Disturbances died down in the general population .
Places became safer because those inmates who were most violent or disruptive could now be isolated .
But isolation isn 't good .
Deprive people of social contact and they deteriorate .
It was hard getting them out of IMU , for them and for us .
Even in prison , it 's no small thing to lock someone up .
My next assignment was to one of the state 's deep-end prisons where some of our more violent or disruptive inmates are housed .
By then , the industry had advanced a lot , and we had different tools and techniques to manage disruptive behavior .
We had beanbag guns and pepper spray and plexiglass shields , flash bangs , emergency response teams .
We met violence with force and chaos with chaos .
We were pretty good at putting out fires .
While I was there , I met two experienced correctional workers who were also researchers , an anthropologist and a sociologist .
One day , one of them commented to me and said , " You know , you 're pretty good at putting out fires .
Have you ever thought about how to prevent them ? "
I was patient with them , explaining our brute force approach to making prisons safer .
They were patient with me .
Out of those conversations grew some new ideas and we started some small experiments .
First , we started training our officers in teams rather than sending them one or two at a time to the state training academy .
Instead of four weeks of training , we gave them 10 .
Then we experimented with an apprenticeship model where we paired new staff with veteran staff .
They both got better at the work .
Second , we added verbal de-escalation skills into the training continuum and made it part of the use of force continuum .
It was the non-force use of force .
And then we did something even more radical .
We trained the inmates on those same skills .
We changed the skill set , reducing violence , not just responding to it .
Third , when we expanded our facility , we tried a new type of design .
Now the biggest and most controversial component of this design , of course , was the toilet .
There were no toilets .
Now that might not sound significant to you here today , but at the time , it was huge .
No one had ever heard of a cell without a toilet .
We all thought it was dangerous and crazy .
Even eight men to a cell had a toilet .
That small detail changed the way we worked .
Inmates and staff started interacting more often and openly and developing a rapport .
It was easier to detect conflict and intervene before it escalated .
The unit was cleaner , quieter , safer and more humane .
This was more effective at keeping the peace than any intimidation technique I 'd seen to that point .
Interacting changes the way you behave , both for the officer and the inmate .
We changed the environment and we changed the behavior .
Now , just in case I hadn 't learned this lesson , they assigned me to headquarters next , and that 's where I ran straight up against system change .
Now , many things work against system change : politics and politicians , bills and laws , courts and lawsuits , internal politics .
System change is difficult and slow , and oftentimes it doesn 't take you where you want to go .
It 's no small thing to change a prison system .
So what I did do is I reflected on my earlier experiences and I remembered that when we interacted with offenders , the heat went down .
When we changed the environment , the behavior changed .
And these were not huge system changes .
These were small changes , and these changes created new possibilities .
So next , I got reassigned as superintendent of a small prison .
And at the same time , I was working on my degree at the Evergreen State College .
I interacted with a lot of people who were not like me , people who had different ideas and came from different backgrounds .
One of them was a rainforest ecologist .
She looked at my small prison and what she saw was a laboratory .
We talked and discovered how prisons and inmates could actually help advance science by helping them complete projects they couldn 't complete on their own , like repopulating endangered species : frogs , butterflies , endangered prairie plants .
At the same time , we found ways to make our operation more efficient through the addition of solar power , rainwater catchment , organic gardening , recycling .
This initiative has led to many projects that have had huge system-wide impact , not just in our system , but in other state systems as well , small experiments making a big difference to science , to the community .
The way we think about our work changes our work .
The project just made my job more interesting and exciting .
I was excited . Staff were excited .
Officers were excited . Inmates were excited .
They were inspired .
Everybody wanted to be part of this .
They were making a contribution , a difference , one they thought was meaningful and important .
Let me be clear on what 's going on here , though .
Inmates are highly adaptive . They have to be .
Oftentimes , they know more about our own systems than the people who run them .
And they 're here for a reason .
I don 't see my job as to punish them or forgive them , but I do think they can have decent and meaningful lives even in prison .
So that was the question : Could inmates live decent and meaningful lives , and if so , what difference would that make ?
So I took that question back to the deep end , where some of our most violent offenders are housed .
Remember , IMUs are for punishment .
You don 't get perks there , like programming . That was how we thought .
But then we started to realize that if any inmates needed programming , it was these particular inmates .
In fact , they needed intensive programming .
So we changed our thinking 180 degrees , and we started looking for new possibilities .
What we found was a new kind of chair .
Instead of using the chair for punishment , we put it in classrooms .
Okay , we didn 't forget our responsibility to control , but now inmates could interact safely , face-to-face and because control was no longer an issue , everybody could focus on other things , like learning . Behavior changed .
We changed our thinking , and we changed what was possible , and this gives me hope .
Now , I can 't tell you that any of this stuff will work .
What I can tell you , though , it is working .
Our prisons are getting safer for both staff and inmates , and when our prisons are safe , we can put our energies into a lot more than just controlling .
Reducing recidivism may be our ultimate goal , but it 's not our only goal .
To be honest with you , preventing crime takes so much more from so many more people and institutions .
If we rely on just prisons to reduce crime , I 'm afraid we 'll never get there .
But prisons can do some things we never thought they could do .
Prisons can be the source of innovation and sustainability , repopulating endangered species and environmental restoration .
Inmates can be scientists and beekeepers , dog rescuers .
Prisons can be the source of meaningful work and opportunity for staff and the inmates who live there .
We can contain and control and provide humane environments .
These are not opposing qualities .
We can 't wait 10 to 20 years to find out if this is worth doing .
Our strategy is not massive system change .
Our strategy is hundreds of small changes that take place in days or months , not years .
We need more small pilots where we learn as we go , pilots that change the range of possibility .
We need new and better ways to measure impacts on engagement , on interaction , on safe environments .
We need more opportunities to participate in and contribute to our communities , your communities .
Prisons need to be secure , yes , safe , yes .
We can do that .
Prisons need to provide humane environments where people can participate , contribute , and learn meaningful lives .
We 're learning how to do that .
That 's why I 'm hopeful .
We don 't have to stay stuck in old ideas about prison .
We can define that . We can create that .
And when we do that thoughtfully and with humanity , prisons can be more than the bucket for failed social policy .
Maybe finally , we will earn our title : a department of corrections .
Thank you .

Talithia Williams : Own your body 's data
The new breed of high-tech self-monitors might seem targeted at competitive athletes . But Talithia Williams , a statistician , makes a compelling case that all of us should be measuring and recording simple data about our bodies every day — because our own data can reveal much more than even our doctors may know .
As a kid I always loved information that I could get from data and the stories that could be told with numbers .
I remember , growing up , I 'd be frustrated at how my own parents would lie to me using numbers .
" Talithia , if I 've told you once I 've told you a thousand times . "
No dad , you 've only told me 17 times and twice it wasn 't my fault . I think that is one of the reasons I got a Ph.D. in statistics .
I always wanted to know , what are people trying to hide with numbers ?
As a statistician , I want people to show me the data so I can decide for myself .
Donald and I were pregnant with our third child and we were at about 41 and a half weeks , what some of you may refer to as being overdue .
Statisticians , we call that being within the 95 percent confidence interval .
And at this point in the process we had to come in every couple of days to do a stress test on the baby , and this is just routine , it tests whether or not the baby is feeling any type of undue stress .
And you are rarely , if ever , seen by your actual doctor , just whoever happens to be working at the hospital that day .
So we go in for a stress test and after 20 minutes the doctor comes out and he says , " Your baby is under stress , we need to induce you . "
Now , as a statistician , what 's my response ?
Show me the data !
So then he proceeds to tell us the baby 's heart rate trace went from 18 minutes , the baby 's heart rate was in the normal zone and for two minutes it was in what appeared to be my heart rate zone and I said , " Is it possible that maybe this was my heart rate ?
I was moving around a little bit , it 's hard to lay still on your back , 41 weeks pregnant for 20 minutes .
Maybe it was shifting around . "
He said , " Well , we don 't want to take any chances . "
I said okay .
I said , " What if I was at 36 weeks with this same data ?
Would your decision be to induce ? "
" Well , no , I would wait until you were at least 38 weeks , but you are almost 42 , there is no reason to leave that baby inside , let 's get you a room . "
I said , " Well , why don 't we just do it again ?
We can collect more data .
I can try to be really still for 20 minutes .
We can average the two and see what that means . And he goes , " Ma 'am , I just don 't want you to have a miscarriage . "
That makes three of us .
And then he says , " Your chances of having a miscarriage double when you go past your due date . Let 's get you a room . "
Wow . So now as a statistician , what 's my response ?
Show me the data !
Dude , you 're talking chances , I do chances all day long , tell me all about chances .
Let 's talk chances . Let 's talk chances .
So I say , " Okay , great .
Do I go from a 30-percent chance to a 60-percent chance ?
Where are we here with this miscarriage thing ?
And he goes , " Not quite , but it doubles , and we really just want what 's best for the baby . "
Undaunted , I try a different angle .
I said , " Okay , out of 1,000 full-term pregnant women , how many of them are going to miscarry just before their due date ?
And then he looks at me and looks at Donald , and he goes , about one in 1,000 .
I said , " Okay , so of those 1,000 women , how many are going to miscarry just after their due date ? "
" About two . " I said , " Okay , so you are telling me that my chances go from a 0.1-percent chance to a 0.2-percent chance . "
Okay , so at this point the data is not convincing us that we need to be induced , and so then we proceed to have a conversation about how inductions lead to a higher rate of Cesarean sections , and if at all possible we 'd like to avoid that .
And then I said , " And I really don 't think my due date is accurate . "
And so this really stunned him and he looked sort of puzzled and I said , " You may not know this , but pregnancy due dates are calculated assuming that you have a standard 28-day cycle , and my cycle ranges — sometimes it 's 27 , sometimes it 's up to 38 — and I have been collecting the data to prove it .
And so we ended up leaving the hospital that day without being induced .
We actually had to sign a waiver to walk out of the hospital .
And I 'm not advocating that you not listen to your doctors , because even with our first child , we were induced at 38 weeks ; cervical fluid was low .
I 'm not anti-medical intervention .
But why were confident to leave that day ?
Well , we had data that told a different story .
We had been collecting data for six years .
I had this temperature data , and it told a different story .
In fact , we could probably pretty accurately estimate conception .
Yeah , that 's a story you want to tell at your kid 's wedding reception . I remember like it was yesterday .
My temperature was a sizzling 97.8 degrees as I stared into your father 's eyes . Oh , yeah . Twenty-two more years , we 're telling that story .
But we were confident to leave because we had been collecting data .
Now , what does that data look like ?
Here 's a standard chart of a woman 's waking body temperature during the course of a cycle .
So from the beginning of the menstrual cycle till the beginning of the next .
You 'll see that the temperature is not random .
Clearly there is a low pattern at the beginning of her cycle and then you see this jump and then a higher set of temperatures at the end of her cycle .
So what 's happening here ?
What is that data telling you ?
Well , ladies , at the beginning of our cycle , the hormone estrogen is dominant and that estrogen causes a suppression of your body temperature .
And at ovulation , your body releases an egg and progesterone takes over , pro-gestation .
And so your body heats up in anticipation of housing this new little fertilized egg .
So why this temperature jump ?
Well , think about when a bird sits on her eggs .
Why is she sitting on them ?
She wants to keep them warm , protect them and keep them warm .
Ladies , this is exactly what our bodies do every month , they heat up in anticipation of keeping a new little life warm .
And if nothing happens , if you are not pregnant , then estrogen takes back over and that cycle starts all over again .
But if you do get pregnant , sometimes you actually see another shift in your temperatures and it stays elevated for those whole nine months .
That 's why you see those pregnant women just sweating and hot , because their temperatures are high .
Here 's a chart that we had about three or four years ago .
We were really very excited about this chart .
You 'll see the low temperature level and then a shift and for about five days , that 's about the time it takes for the egg to travel down the fallopian tube and implant , and then you see those temperatures start to go up a little bit .
And in fact , we had a second temperature shift , confirmed with a pregnancy test that were indeed pregnant with our first child , very exciting .
Until a couple of days later I saw some spotting and then I noticed heavy blood flow , and we had in fact had an early stage miscarriage .
Had I not been taking my temperature I really would have just thought my period was late that month , but we actually had data to show that we had miscarried this baby , and even though this data revealed a really unfortunate event in our lives , it was information that we could then take to our doctor .
So if there was a fertility issue or some problem , I had data to show : Look , we got pregnant , our temperature shifted , we somehow lost this baby .
What is it that we can do to help prevent this problem ?
And it 's not just about temperatures and it 's not just about fertility ; we can use data about our bodies to tell us a lot of things .
For instance , did you know that taking your temperature can tell you a lot about the condition of your thyroid ?
So , your thyroid works a lot like the thermostat in your house .
There is an optimal temperature that you want in your house ; you set your thermostat .
When it gets too cold in the house , your thermostat kicks in and says , " Hey , we need to blow some heat around . "
Or if it gets too hot , your thermostat registers , " Turn the A.C. on . Cool us off . "
That 's exactly how your thyroid works in your body .
Your thyroid tries to keep an optimal temperature for your body .
If it gets too cold , your thyroid says , " Hey , we need to heat up . "
If it gets too hot , your thyroid cools you down .
But what happens when your thyroid is not functioning well ?
When it doesn 't function , then it shows up in your body temperatures , they tend to be lower than normal or very erratic .
And so by collecting this data you can find out information about your thyroid .
Now , what is it , if you had a thyroid problem and you went to the doctor , your doctor would actually test the amount of thyroid stimulating hormone in your blood .
Fine . But the problem with that test is it doesn 't tell you how active the hormone is in your body .
So you might have a lot of hormone present , but it might not be actively working to regulate your body temperature .
So just by collecting your temperature every day , you get information about the condition of your thyroid .
So , what if you don 't want to take your temperature every day ?
I advocate that you do , but there are tons of other things you could take .
You could take your blood pressure , you could take your weight — yeah , who 's excited about taking their weight every day ? Early on in our marriage , Donald had a stuffy nose and he had been taking a slew of medications to try to relieve his stuffy nose , to no avail .
And so , that night he comes and he wakes me up and he says , " Honey , I can 't breath out of my nose . "
And I roll over and I look , and I said , " Well , can you breath out of your mouth ? "
And he goes , " Yes , but I can 't breath out of my nose ! "
And so like any good wife , I rush him to the emergency room at 2 o 'clock in the morning .
And the whole time I 'm driving and I 'm thinking , you can 't die on me now .
We just got married , people will think I killed you ! And so , we get to the emergency room , and the nurse sees us , and he can 't breath out of his nose , and so she brings us to the back and the doctor says , " What seems to be the problem ? " and he goes , " I can 't breath out of my nose . "
And he said , " You can 't breath out of your nose ?
No , but he can breath out of his mouth . He takes a step back and he looks at both of us and he says " Sir , I think I know the problem .
You 're having a heart attack .
I 'm going to order an EKG and a CAT scan for you immediately . "
And we are thinking , no , no , no . It 's not a heart attack . He can breathe , just out of his mouth . No , no , no , no , no .
And so we go back and forth with this doctor because we think this is the incorrect diagnosis , and he 's like , " No really , it 'll be fine , just calm down . "
And I 'm thinking , how do you calm down ? But I don 't think he 's having a heart attack .
And so fortunately for us , this doctor was at the end of the shift .
So this new doctor comes in , he sees us clearly distraught , with a husband who can 't breath out of his nose . And he starts asking us questions .
He says , " Well , do you two exercise ? "
We ride our bikes , we go to the gym occasionally .
We move around .
And he says , " What were you doing just before you came here ? "
I 'm thinking , I was sleeping , honestly .
But okay , what was Donald doing just before ?
So Donald goes into this slew of medications he was taking .
He lists , " I took this decongestant and then I took this nasal spray , " and then all of a sudden a lightbulb goes off and he says , " Oh ! You should never mix this decongestant with this nasal spray .
Clogs you up every time . Here , take this one instead . "
He gives us a prescription .
We 're looking at each other , and I looked at the doctor , and I said , " Why is it that it seems like you were able to accurately diagnose his condition , but this previous doctor wanted to order an EKG and a CAT scan ? "
And he looks at us and says , " Well , when a 350-pound man walks in the emergency room and says he can 't breath , you assume he 's having a heart attack and you ask questions later . "
Now , emergency room doctors are trained to make decisions quickly , but not always accurately .
And so had we had some information about our heart health to share with him , maybe we would have gotten a better diagnosis the first time .
I want you to consider the following chart , of systolic blood pressure measurements from October 2010 to July 2012 .
You 'll see that these measurements start in the prehypertension / hypertension zone , but over about the course of a year and a half they move into the normal zone .
This is about the heart rate of a healthy 16-year-old .
What story is this data telling you ?
Obviously it 's the data from someone who 's made a drastic transformation , and fortunately for us , that person happens to be here today .
So that 350-pound guy that walked into the emergency room with me is now an even sexier and healthier 225-pound guy , and that 's his blood pressure trace .
So over the course of that year and a half Donald 's eating changed and our exercise regimen changed , and his heart rate responded , his blood pressure responded to that change that he made in his body .
So what 's the take-home message that I want you to leave with today ?
By taking ownership of your data just like we 've done , just by taking this daily measurements about yourself , you become the expert on your body .
You become the authority .
It 's not hard to do .
You don 't have to have a Ph.D. in statistics to be an expert in yourself .
You don 't have to have a medical degree to be your body 's expert .
Medical doctors , they 're experts on the population , but you are the expert on yourself .
And so when two of you come together , when two experts come together , the two of you are able to make a better decision than just your doctor alone .
Now that you understand the power of information that you can get through personal data collection , I 'd like you all to stand and raise your right hand .
Yes , get it up .
I challenge you to take ownership of your data .
And today , I hereby confer upon you a TEDx associate 's degree in elementary statistics with a concentration in time-dependent data analysis with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto .
And so the next time you are in your doctor 's office , as newly inducted statisticians , what should always be your response ?
Audience : Show me the data ! Talithia Williams : I can 't hear you !
Audience : Show me the data !
TW : One more time !
Audience : Show me the data !
TW : Show me the data .
Thank you .

Megan Washington : Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking
Megan Washington is one of Australia 's premier singer / songwriters . And , since childhood , she has had a stutter . In this bold and personal talk , she reveals how she copes with this speech impediment — from avoiding the letter combination " st " to tricking her brain by changing her words at the last minute to , yes , singing the things she has to say rather than speaking them .
I didn 't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing .
But when I was told that the topic was language , I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment .
I have a problem .
It 's not the worst thing in the world .
I 'm fine . I 'm not on fire .
I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with , but for me , language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing .
And the thing is that I have a stutter .
It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage .
One would assume that I 'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here , speaking to you guys .
But the truth is that I 've spent my life up until this point and including this point , living in mortal dread of public speaking .
Public singing , whole different thing . But we 'll get to that in a moment .
I 've never really talked about it before so explicitly .
I think that that 's because I 've always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up , I wouldn 't have one .
I sort of lived with this idea that when I 'm grown , I 'll have learned to speak French , and when I 'm grown , I 'll learn how to manage my money , and when I 'm grown , I won 't have a stutter , and then I 'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything 's possible and , you know .
So I can talk about it now because I 've reached this point , where — I mean , I 'm 28 .
I 'm pretty sure that I 'm grown now .
And I 'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer , with a speech impediment .
So , I might as well come clean about it .
There are some interesting angles to having a stutter .
For me , the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer .
This happened to me in Hamburg , when this guy , we met and he said , " Hello , m-m-m-my name is Joe , " and I said , " Oh , hello , m-m-m-my name is Meg . "
Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him .
People think I 'm drunk all the time .
People think that I 've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it .
And it is a very weird thing , because proper nouns are the worst .
If I 'm going to use the word " Wednesday " in a sentence , and I 'm coming up to the word , and I can feel that I 'm going to stutter or something , I can change the word to " tomorrow , " or " the day after Tuesday , " or something else .
It 's clunky , but you can get away with it , because over time I 've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain .
But with people 's names , you can 't change them .
When I was singing a lot of jazz , I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve .
As you can probably gather , S 's and T 's , together or independently , are my kryptonite .
But I would have to introduce the band and when I got around to Steve , I 'd often find myself stuck on the " St. "
And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and it totally kills the vibe .
So after a few instances of this , Steve happily became " Seve , " and we got through it that way . I 've had a lot of therapy , and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that 's called smooth speech , which is where you almost sing everything that you say .
You kind of join everything together in this very singsong , kindergarten teacher way , and it makes you sound very serene , like you 've had lots of Valium , and everything is calm . That 's not actually me .
And I do use that . I do .
I use it when I have to be on panel shows , or when I have to do radio interviews , when the economy of airtime is paramount .
I get through it that way for my job .
But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real , that feels often like cheating .
Which is why before I sing , I wanted to tell you what singing means to me .
It 's more than making nice sounds , and it 's more than making nice songs .
It 's more than feeling known , or understood .
It 's more than making you feel the things that I feel .
It 's not about mythology , or mythologizing myself to you .
Somehow , through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain , it 's impossible to stutter when you sing .
And when I was younger , that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me , singing , so I did it a lot .
And that 's why I 'm here today .
Thank you .
Singing for me is sweet relief .
It is the only time when I feel fluent .
It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended .
So I know that this is a TED Talk , but now i 'm going to TED sing .
This is a song that I wrote last year .
Thank you very much . Thank you .
I would be a beauty but my nose is slightly too big for my face And I would be a dreamer but my dream is slightly too big for this space And I would be an angel but my halo it pales in the glow of your grace And I would be a joker but that card looks silly when you play your ace I 'd like to know Are there stars in hell ? And I 'd like to know know if you can tell that you make me lose everything I know That I cannot choose to or not let go And I 'd stay forever but my home is slightly too far from this place And I swear I tried to slow it down when I am walking at your pace But all I could think idling through the cities do I look pretty in the rain ? And I don 't know how someone quite so lovely makes me feel ugly So much shame And I 'd like to know Are there stars in hell ? And I 'd like to know know if you can tell that you make me lose everything I know that I cannot choose to or not let go Thank you very much .
Janet Iwasa : How animations can help scientists test a hypothesis
3D animation can bring scientific hypotheses to life . Molecular biologist Janet Iwasa introduces a new open-source animation software designed just for scientists .
Take a look at this drawing .
Can you tell what it is ?
I 'm a molecular biologist by training , and I 've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings .
They 're usually referred to as a model figure , a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs .
This particular drawing is of a process It 's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell .
There 's a problem with this drawing , though , and it 's mainly in what it doesn 't show .
From lots of experiments , from lots of different scientists , we know a lot about what these molecules look like , how they move around in the cell , and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment .
So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen , we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that .
So we start outside of the cell .
Now we 're looking inside .
Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes .
Through connections with a membrane , clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble , or a vesicle , that 's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell .
Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle , making it separate from the rest of the membrane , and now clathrin is basically done with its job , and so proteins are coming in now — we 've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage .
And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again .
These processes are too small to be seen directly , even with the best microscopes , so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis .
Here 's another illustration , and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells .
And again , this is a vast oversimplification and doesn 't begin to show what we actually know about these processes .
You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses .
Why ?
Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard .
I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software , and I spend months on each animation , and that 's just time that most researchers can 't afford .
The payoffs can be huge , though .
Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy .
And I 'm working on a new project now called " The Science of HIV " where I 'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail .
The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades , data on what this virus looks like , how it 's able to infect cells in our body , and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection .
Over the years , I found that animations aren 't just useful for communicating an idea , but they 're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis .
Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study , and with the data we have now , that 's just not good enough anymore .
The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas . One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together , and in this way , animation can feed back into the research process .
I believe that animation can change biology .
It can change the way that we communicate with one another , how we explore our data and how we teach our students .
But for that change to happen , we need more researchers creating animations , and toward that end , I brought together a team of biologists , animators and programmers to create a new , free , open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that 's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations .
From our testing , we 've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis .
We 're also building an online database where anyone can view , download and contribute their own animations .
We 're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today .
We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they 're able to gain their own model figures .
Thank you .

Ze Frank : Are you human ?
Have you ever wondered : Am I a human being ? Ze Frank suggests a series of simple questions that will determine this . Please relax and follow the prompts . Let 's begin …
This is the human test , a test to see if you are a human .
Please raise your hand if something applies to you .
Are we agreed ? Yes ?
Then let 's begin .
Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood ?
It 's okay , it 's safe here .
Have you ever made a small , weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing ?
Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed ?
Okay .
Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression ? Okay . Period .
Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way ?
Yes .
Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate ?
Yes .
Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh ?
Good .
Have you ever tried to guess someone else 's password so many times that it locked their account ?
Mmm .
Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud ?
Yes , it 's safe here .
Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn 't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at ?
Mmm .
Have you ever broken something in real life , and then found yourself looking for an " undo " button in real life ?
Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like ?
Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful ?
Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone ?
Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase " I 'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot " ?
Have you ever been tempted to , and then gave in to the temptation , of looking through someone else 's phone ?
Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you 're a real asshole to yourself ?
Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument , and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you ?
Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this , or this is supposed to happen just naturally ?
Have you ever realized that very little , in the long run , just happens naturally ?
Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you ?
Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life ?
Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless ?
Congratulations .
You have now completed the test .
You are all human .

Shih Chieh Huang : Sculptures that 'd be at home in the deep sea
When he was young , artist Shih Chieh Huang loved taking toys apart and perusing the aisles of night markets in Taiwan for unexpected objects . Today , this TED Fellow creates madcap sculptures that seem to have a life of their own — with eyes that blink , tentacles that unfurl and parts that light up like bioluminescent sea creatures .
I was born in Taiwan .
I grew up surrounded by different types of hardware stores , and I like going to night markets .
I love the energy of the night markets , the colors , the lights , the toys , and all the unexpected things I find every time I go , things like watermelon with straw antennas or puppies with mohawks .
When I was growing up , I liked taking toys apart , any kind of toys I 'd find around the house , like my brother 's BB gun when he 's not home .
I also liked to make environments for people to explore and play .
In these early installations , I would take plastic sheets , plastic bags , and things I would find in the hardware store or around the house .
I would take things like highlighter pen , mix it with water , pump it through plastic tubing , creating these glowing circulatory systems for people to walk through and enjoy .
I like these materials because of the way they look , the way they feel , and they 're very affordable .
I also liked to make devices that work with body parts .
I would take camera LED lights and a bungee cord and strap it on my waist and I would videotape my belly button , get a different perspective , and see what it does .
I also like to modify household appliances .
This is an automatic night light .
Some of you might have them at home .
I would cut out the light sensor , add an extension line , and use modeling clay , stick it onto the television , and then I would videotape my eye , and using the dark part of my eye tricking the sensor into thinking it 's night time , so you turn on the lightbulb .
The white of the eye and the eyelid will trick the sensor into thinking it 's daytime , and it will shut off the light .
I wanted to collect more different types of eyes , so I built this device using bicycle helmets , some lightbulbs and television sets .
It would be easier for other people to wear the helmet and record their eyes .
This device allows me to symbolically extract other people 's eyes , so I have a diversity of eyes to use for my other sculptures .
This sculpture has four eyes .
Each eye is controlling a different device .
This eye is turning itself around in a television .
This eye is inflating a plastic tube .
This eye is watching a video of another piece being made .
And these two eyes are activating glowing water .
Many of these pieces are later on shown in museums , biennials , triennial exhibitions around the world .
I love science and biology .
In 2007 , I was doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum looking at bioluminous organisms in the oean .
I love these creatures . I love the way they look , the way they feel .
They 're soft , they 're slimy , and I was fascinated by the way they use light in their environment , either to attract mates , for self-defense , or to attract food .
This research inspired my work in many different ways , things like movement or different light patterns .
So I started gathering a lot of different types of material in my studio and just experimenting and seeing what types of creatures I can come up with .
I used a lot of computer cooling fans and just kind of put them together and see what happens .
This is an 8,000-square-foot installation composed of many different creatures , some hanging from the ceiling and some resting on the floor .
From afar , they look alien-like , but when you look closer , they 're all made out of black garbage bags or Tupperware containers .
I 'd like to share with you how ordinary things can become something magical and wondrous .
Thank you .

David Kwong : Two nerdy obsessions meet -- and it 's magic
David Kwong is a magician who makes crossword puzzles -- in other words , a pretty nerdy guy . And for his next trick ...
Puzzles and magic .
I work in what most people think are two distinct fields , but I believe they are the same .
I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor , which basically means I 've taken the world 's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career .
And I believe that magic and puzzles are the same because they both key into one of the most important human drives : the urge to solve .
Human beings are wired to solve , to make order out of chaos .
It 's certainly true for me .
I 've been solving my whole life .
High school consisted of epic Scrabble matches in the cafeteria and not really talking to girls , and then at about that time I started learning magic tricks and definitely not talking to girls .
There 's nothing like starting a conversation with , " Hey , did you know that ' prestidigitation ' is worth 20 points in Scrabble ? "
But back then , I noticed an intersection between puzzles and illusion .
When you do the crossword puzzle or when you watch a magic show , you become a solver , and your goal is to try to find the order in the chaos , the chaos of , say , a black-and-white puzzle grid , a mixed-up bag of Scrabble tiles , or a shuffled pack of playing cards .
And today , as a cruciverbalist — 23 points — and an illusion designer , I create that chaos .
I test your ability to solve .
Now , it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping .
From birth , we are wired to solve .
In one UCLA study , newborns still in the hospital were shown patterns , patterns like this : circle , cross , circle , cross .
And then the pattern was changed : triangle , square .
And by tracking an infant 's gaze , we know that newborns as young as a day old can notice and respond to disruptions in order .
It 's remarkable .
So from infancy through old age , the urge to solve unites us all , and I even found this photo on Instagram of pop star Katy Perry solving a crossword puzzle with her morning coffee .
Like .
Now , solving exists across all cultures .
The American invention is the crossword puzzle , and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle , first published in The New York World .
But many other cultures have their signature puzzles as well .
China gives us tangrams , which would test solvers ' abilities to form shapes from the jumbled pieces .
Chaos . Order .
Order .
And order .
That one 's my favorite , let 's hear it again .
Okay .
And how about this puzzle invented in 18th-century England : the jigsaw puzzle .
Is this not making order out of chaos ?
So as you can see , we are always solving .
We are always trying to decode our world .
It 's an eternal quest .
It 's just like the one Cervantes wrote about in " Don Quixote , " which by the way is the root of the word " quixotry , " the highest-scoring Scrabble word of all time , 365 points .
But anyway , " Don Quixote " is an important book .
You guys have read " Don Quixote , " yes ?
I 'm seeing some heads nod .
Come on guys , really ?
Who 's read " Don Quixote ? " Let 's do this . Raise your hands if you 've read " Don Quixote . "
There we go . Smart audience .
Who 's read " Don Quixote ? " Get them up .
Okay , good , because I need somebody smart here because now I 'm going to demonstrate with the help of one of you just how deeply rooted your urge to solve is , just how wired to solve all of you really are , so I 'm going to come into the audience and find somebody to help me .
Let 's see .
Everybody 's looking away all of a sudden .
Can I ? Would you ? What is your name ? Gwen .
I 'm not a mind reader , I can see your name tag .
Come with me , Gwen . Everyone give her a round of applause , make her feel welcome .
Gwen , after you .
Are you so excited ?
Did you know that your name is worth eight points in Scrabble ?
Okay , stand right here , Gwen , right here .
Now , Gwen , before we begin , I 'd like to point out a piece of the puzzle , which is here in this envelope , and I will not go near it . Okay ?
And over here we have a drawing of some farm animals .
You can see we have an owl , we have a horse , a donkey , a rooster , an ox , and a sheep , and then here , Gwen , we have some fancy art store markers , colors like , can you see that word right there ?
Gwen : Cobalt . David Kwong : Cobalt , yes . Cobalt .
But we have a silver , a red , an emerald , and an amber marker , and Gwen , you are going to color this drawing just like you were five years old , one marker at a time .
It 's going to be a lot of fun .
But I 'm going to go over here .
I don 't want to see what you 're doing .
Okay , so don 't start yet . Wait for me to get over here and close my eyes .
Now Gwen , are you ready ?
Pick up just one marker , pick up just one marker , and why don 't you color in the horse for me ?
Color in the horse — big , big , big scribbles , broad strokes , don 't worry about staying in the lines .
All right . Great .
And why don 't you take that marker and recap it and place it on the table for me .
Okay , and pick up another marker out of the cup and take off the cap and color in the donkey for me , color in the donkey .
Big scribbles .
Okay , cool , and re-cap that marker and place it on the table .
And pick up another marker for me and take off the cap . Isn 't this fun ?
And color in the owl for me .
Color in the owl .
Okay , and recap that marker and pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the rooster for me , color in the rooster .
Good , good , good , good , good .
Big , big , big strokes . Good , good .
Pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the ox for me . Color in the ox .
Okay , good .
A lot of color on that , and recap , and place it on the table , and pick up another marker out of the cup .
Oh , I 'm out ? Okay , I 'm going to turn around .
Did I forget ? Oh , I forgot my purple marker .
This is still going to work , though .
I think this is still going to work , mostly .
So Gwen , I 'm going to hand you this envelope .
Don 't open it yet . Do not open it yet , but I am going to write down your choices so that everybody can see the choices that you made .
Okay , great . So we have a cobalt horse , amber owl , a silver ox , yes , okay , a red donkey , and what was the emerald color ? A rooster .
An emerald rooster . Okay .
Now for the moment of truth , Gwen , we 're going to take a look in that envelope .
Why don 't you open it up and remove the one piece of paper from inside and hand it to me , and we will see if it matches your choices .
Yes , I think it does .
We have a cobalt horse , we have a red donkey , we have an amber owl , we have an emerald rooster , a silver ox , I forgot my purple marker so we have a blank sheep , but that 's a pretty amazing coincidence , don 't you think ?
Gwen , well done . That 's beautiful . I 'll take that back from you .
So ladies and gentlemen , how is this possible ?
How is this possible ? Well , could it be that Gwen 's brain is so wired to solve that she decoded hidden messages ?
Well this is the puzzle I present to you .
Could there be order in the chaos that I created ?
Let 's take a closer look .
Do you recall when I showed you these puzzle pieces ?
What image did it ultimately become ? A cobalt horse .
The plot thickens .
And then we played a game of tangrams with an emerald rooster .
That one 's my favorite .
And then we had an experiment with a silver ox .
And Katy Perry drinks her morning coffee out of an amber owl .
Thank you , Katy , for taking that photo for me .
Oh , and there 's one more , there 's one more .
I believe you colored a red donkey , Gwen .
Ladies and gentlemen , could you raise your hands for me if you 've read " Don Quixote ? "
Who 's read " Don Quixote ? " But wait , but wait , wait , wait , wait , there 's more .
There 's more .
Gwen , I was so confident that you were going to make these choices that I made another prediction , and I put it in an even more indelible place , and it 's right here .
Ladies and gentlemen , we have today 's New York Times .
The date is March 18th , 2014 .
Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well .
Really dig . We hid them under there .
See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section and you will find the crossword puzzle , and the crossword puzzle today was written by yours truly .
You can see my name above the grid .
I 'm going to give this to you , Gwen , to take a look .
And I will also put it up on the screen .
Now let 's take a look at another piece of the puzzle .
If you look at the first clue for 1-across , it starts with the letter C , for corrupt , and just below that we have an O , for outfielder , and if you keep reading the first letters of the clues down , you get cobalt horse , amber owl , silver ox , red donkey , and emerald rooster .
That 's pretty cool , right ?
It 's The New York Times .
But wait , wait , wait , wait . Wait .
Oh , Gwen , do you recall how I forgot my purple marker , and you were unable to color the sheep ?
Well , if you keep reading starting with 25-down , it says , " Oh , by the way , the sheep can be left blank . "
But wait , wait , wait , there 's one more thing , there 's one more thing , there 's one final piece of the puzzle .
Gwen , I am so grateful for your choices because if we take a look at the first letters of your combinations , we get " C-H-A-O-S " for chaos and " O-R-D-E-R " for order .
That 's chaos and order .
We 've all made order out of chaos .
So ladies and gentlemen , the next time you find yourself with a puzzle , whether it 's in your life or in your work , or maybe it 's at the Sunday morning breakfast table with The New York Times , remember , you are all wired to solve .
Thank you .

George Takei : Why I love a country that once betrayed me
When he was a child , George Takei and his family were forced into an internment camp for Japanese-Americans , as a " security " measure during World War II . 70 years later , Takei looks back at how the camp shaped his surprising , personal definition of patriotism and democracy .
I 'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise .
I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship with a crew made up of people from all over this world , many different races , many different cultures , many different heritages , all working together , and our mission was to explore strange new worlds , to seek out new life and new civilizations , to boldly go where no one has gone before .
Well — — I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America , boldly going to a strange new world , seeking new opportunities .
My mother was born in Sacramento , California .
My father was a San Franciscan .
They met and married in Los Angeles , and I was born there .
I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7 , 1941 by Japan , and overnight , the world was plunged into a world war .
America suddenly was swept up by hysteria .
Japanese-Americans , American citizens of Japanese ancestry , were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor .
And the hysteria grew and grew until in February 1942 , the president of the United States , Franklin Delano Roosevelt , ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily rounded up with no charges , with no trial , with no due process .
Due process , this is a core pillar of our justice system .
That all disappeared .
We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps in some of the most desolate places in America : the blistering hot desert of Arizona , the sultry swamps of Arkansas , the wastelands of Wyoming , Idaho , Utah , Colorado , and two of the most desolate places in California .
On April 20th , I celebrated my fifth birthday , and just a few weeks after my birthday , my parents got my younger brother , my baby sister and me up very early one morning , and they dressed us hurriedly .
My brother and I were in the living room looking out the front window , and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway .
They carried bayonets on their rifles .
They stomped up the front porch and banged on the door .
My father answered it , and the soldiers ordered us out of our home .
My father gave my brother and me small luggages to carry , and we walked out and stood on the driveway waiting for our mother to come out , and when my mother finally came out , she had our baby sister in one arm , a huge duffel bag in the other , and tears were streaming down both her cheeks .
I will never be able to forget that scene .
It is burned into my memory .
We were taken from our home and loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families .
There were guards stationed at both ends of each car , as if we were criminals .
We were taken two thirds of the way across the country , rocking on that train for four days and three nights , to the swamps of Arkansas .
I still remember the barbed wire fence that confined me .
I remember the tall sentry tower with the machine guns pointed at us .
I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from my barrack to the latrine .
I thought it was kind of nice that they 'd lit the way for me to pee .
I was a child , too young to understand the circumstances of my being there .
Children are amazingly adaptable .
What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps .
It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall .
It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower .
Being in a prison , a barbed-wire prison camp , became my normality .
When the war ended , we were released , and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States .
My parents decided to go back home to Los Angeles , but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place .
We were penniless .
Everything had been taken from us , and the hostility was intense .
Our first home was on Skid Row in the lowest part of our city , living with derelicts , drunkards and crazy people , the stench of urine all over , on the street , in the alley , in the hallway .
It was a horrible experience , and for us kids , it was terrorizing .
I remember once a drunkard came staggering down , fell down right in front of us , and threw up .
My baby sister said , " Mama , let 's go back home , " because behind barbed wires was for us home .
My parents worked hard to get back on their feet .
We had lost everything .
They were at the middle of their lives and starting all over .
They worked their fingers to the bone , and ultimately they were able to get the capital together to buy a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood .
And I was a teenager , and I became very curious about my childhood imprisonment .
I had read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy .
All men are created equal , we have an inalienable right to life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness , and I couldn 't quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment .
I read history books , and I couldn 't find anything about it .
And so I engaged my father after dinner in long , sometimes heated conversations .
We had many , many conversations like that , and what I got from them was my father 's wisdom .
He was the one that suffered the most under those conditions of imprisonment , and yet he understood American democracy .
He told me that our democracy is a people 's democracy , and it can be as great as the people can be , but it is also as fallible as people are .
He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work .
And he took me to a campaign headquarters — the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency — and introduced me to American electoral politics .
And he also told me about young Japanese-Americans during the Second World War .
When Pearl Harbor was bombed , young Japanese-Americans , like all young Americans , rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country .
That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face .
We were denied service , and categorized as enemy non-alien .
It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you 're volunteering to fight for your country , but that was compounded with the word " non-alien , " which is a word that means " citizen " in the negative .
They even took the word " citizen " away from us , and imprisoned them for a whole year .
And then the government realized that there 's a wartime manpower shortage , and as suddenly as they 'd rounded us up , they opened up the military for service by young Japanese-Americans .
It was totally irrational , but the amazing thing , the astounding thing , is that thousands of young Japanese-American men and women again went from behind those barbed-wire fences , put on the same uniform as that of our guards , leaving their families in imprisonment , to fight for this country .
They said that they were going to fight not only to get their families out from behind those barbed-wire fences , but because they cherished the very ideal of what our government stands for , should stand for , and that was being abrogated by what was being done .
All men are created equal .
And they went to fight for this country .
They were put into a segregated all Japanese-American unit and sent to the battlefields of Europe , and they threw themselves into it .
They fought with amazing , incredible courage and valor .
They were sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit proportionally .
There is one battle that illustrates that .
It was a battle for the Gothic Line .
The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside , rocky hillside , in impregnable caves , and three allied battalions had been pounding away at it for six months , and they were stalemated .
The 442nd was called in to add to the fight , but the men of the 442nd came up with a unique but dangerous idea : The backside of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff .
The Germans thought an attack from the backside would be impossible .
The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible .
On a dark , moonless night , they began scaling that rock wall , a drop of more than 1,000 feet , in full combat gear .
They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff .
In the darkness , some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below .
They all fell silently .
Not a single one cried out , so as not to give their position away .
The men climbed for eight hours straight , and those who made it to the top stayed there until the first break of light , and as soon as light broke , they attacked .
The Germans were surprised , and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line .
was broken by the 442nd in 32 minutes .
It was an amazing act , and when the war ended , the 442nd returned to the United States as the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War .
They were greeted back on the White House Lawn by President Truman , who said to them , " You fought not only the enemy but prejudice , and you won . "
They are my heroes .
They clung to their belief in the shining ideals of this country , and they proved that being an American is not just for some people , that race is not how we define being an American .
They expanded what it means to be an American , including Japanese-Americans that were feared and suspected and hated .
They were change agents , and they left for me a legacy .
They are my heroes and my father is my hero , who understood democracy and guided me through it .
They gave me a legacy , and with that legacy comes a responsibility , and I am dedicated to making my country an even better America , to making our government an even truer democracy , and because of the heroes that I have and the struggles that we 've gone through , I can stand before you as a gay Japanese-American , but even more than that , I am a proud American .
Thank you very much .

Paul Bloom : Can prejudice ever be a good thing ?
We often think of bias and prejudice as rooted in ignorance . But as psychologist Paul Bloom seeks to show , prejudice is often natural , rational ... even moral . The key , says Bloom , is to understand how our own biases work -- so we can take control when they go wrong .
When we think about prejudice and bias , we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things .
And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt , who wrote , " Prejudice is the child of ignorance . "
I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken .
I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural , they 're often rational , and they 're often even moral , and I think that once we understand this , we 're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong , when they have horrible consequences , and we 're in a better position to know what to do when this happens .
So , start with stereotypes . You look at me , you know my name , you know certain facts about me , and you could make certain judgments .
You could make guesses about my ethnicity , my political affiliation , my religious beliefs .
And the thing is , these judgments tend to be accurate .
We 're very good at this sort of thing .
And we 're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind , but rather it 's a specific instance of a more general process , which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories , and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories .
So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs , and based on this , you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess , you could sit on the chair , you could eat the apple , the dog will bark .
Now we might be wrong .
The chair could collapse if you sit on it , the apple might be poison , the dog might not bark , and in fact , this is my dog Tessie , who doesn 't bark .
But for the most part , we 're good at this .
For the most part , we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain , and if we weren 't able to do so , if we weren 't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter , we wouldn 't survive .
And in fact , Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this .
He writes , " Without the aid of prejudice and custom , I should not be able to find my way my across the room ; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances , nor what to feel in any relation of life . "
Or take bias .
Now sometimes , we break the world up into us versus them , into in-group versus out-group , and sometimes when we do this , we know we 're doing something wrong , and we 're kind of ashamed of it .
But other times we 're proud of it .
We openly acknowledge it .
And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election .
Anderson Cooper : Gets to your question , the question in the hall , on foreign aid ? Yes , ma 'am .
The American people are suffering in our country right now .
Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves ?
AC : Governor Perry , what about that ?
Rick Perry : Absolutely , I think it 's — Paul Bloom : Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question , which is as Americans , we should care more about Americans than about other people .
And in fact , in general , people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity , loyalty , pride , patriotism , towards their country or towards their ethnic group .
Regardless of your politics , many people feel proud to be American , and they favor Americans over other countries .
Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation , and we feel the same about our ethnicities .
Now some of you may reject this .
Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway .
But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family , of people you 're close to , and so even you make a distinction between us versus them .
Now , this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough , but it can go awry , and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel .
Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919 .
He left to go to university in France , because as a Jew , he couldn 't go to university in Poland , and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II .
He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp , and it was a terrifying time for him , because if it was discovered that he was a Jew , he could have been moved to a concentration camp , where he most likely would not have survived .
And in fact , when the war ended and he was released , most of his friends and family were dead .
He got involved in different pursuits .
He helped out the war orphans .
But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice , and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up , he applied for it , and he won it , and then he began this amazing career .
And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong .
Many people , most people at the time , viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans , some genetic taint , some authoritarian personality .
And Tajfel rejected this .
Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us .
And to explore this , he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents .
And in one of his studies , what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions , and then based on their answers , he said , " I 've looked at your answers , and based on the answers , I have determined that you are either " — he told half of them — " a Kandinsky lover , you love the work of Kandinsky , or a Klee lover , you love the work of Klee . "
It was entirely bogus .
Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee .
They probably hadn 't heard of the artists .
He just arbitrarily divided them up .
But what he found was , these categories mattered , so when he later gave the subjects money , they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group .
Worse , they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups , so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less .
This bias seems to show up very early .
So my colleague and wife , Karen Wynn , at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets , and the puppets have certain food preferences .
So one of the puppets might like green beans .
The other puppet might like graham crackers .
They test the babies own food preferences , and babies typically prefer the graham crackers .
But the question is , does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets ? And it matters a lot .
They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have , and worse , they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste .
We see this sort of in-group , out-group psychology all the time .
We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies .
We see it in its extreme in cases of war , where the out-group isn 't merely given less , but dehumanized , as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice , or the American perspective of Japanese as rats .
Stereotypes can also go awry .
So often they 're rational and useful , but sometimes they 're irrational , they give the wrong answers , and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences .
And the case that 's been most studied is the case of race .
There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America , as in an unconscious association with the American flag .
And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain , and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama , and to some extent , people aren 't that surprised by hearing that .
McCain is a celebrated war hero , and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama .
But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair , and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama , even though subjects explicitly understood that he 's not American at all .
But they were responding , of course , to the color of his skin .
These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences , both subtle and very important .
In one recent study , researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards .
Some of them were held by white hands , others by black hands .
They were the same baseball cards .
The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands .
In research done at Stanford , psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person .
It turns out , holding everything else constant , you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left , and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black , more prototypically African-American , and this apparently influences people 's decisions over what to do about him .
So now that we know about this , how do we combat it ?
And there are different avenues .
One avenue is to appeal to people 's emotional responses , to appeal to people 's empathy , and we often do that through stories .
So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families , you might give them a book like this . [ " Heather Has Two Mommies " ] If you are conservative and have a different attitude , you might give them a book like this .
[ " Help ! Mom ! There Are Liberals under My Bed ! " ] But in general , stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter , and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history .
So Stalin apocryphally said , " A single death is a tragedy , a million deaths is a statistic , " and Mother Teresa said , " If I look at the mass , I will never act .
If I look at the one , I will . "
Psychologists have explored this .
For instance , in one study , people were given a list of facts about a crisis , and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis , and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face , and it turns out that they gave far more .
None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work .
People don 't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics .
Rather , you show them faces , you show them people .
It 's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual , they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to .
This is Harriet Beecher Stowe .
The story , perhaps apocryphal , is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her , " So you 're the little lady who started this great war . "
And he was talking about " Uncle Tom 's Cabin . "
" Uncle Tom 's Cabin " is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature , but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn 't otherwise be in the shoes of , put themselves in the shoes of slaves .
And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change .
More recently , looking at America in the last several decades , there 's some reason to believe that shows like " The Cosby Show " radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans , while shows like " Will and Grace " and " Modern Family " changed American attitudes towards gay men and women .
I don 't think it 's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy .
But it 's not all emotions , and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason .
At some point in his wonderful book " The Better Angels of Our Nature , " Steven Pinker says , the Old Testament says love thy neighbor , and the New Testament says love thy enemy , but I don 't love either one of them , not really , but I don 't want to kill them .
I know I have obligations to them , but my moral feelings to them , my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them , aren 't grounded in love .
What they 're grounded in is the understanding of human rights , a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me , and to support this , he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith , and I want to tell this story too , though I 'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times .
So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people , and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with .
It could be China or India or a country in Africa .
And Smith says , how would you respond ?
And you would say , well that 's too bad , and you 'd go on to the rest of your life .
If you were to open up The New York Times online or something , and discover this , and in fact this happens to us all the time , we go about our lives .
But imagine instead , Smith says , you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off .
Smith says , that would matter a lot .
You would not sleep that night wondering about that .
So this raises the question : Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger ?
Now answer this in the privacy of your own head , but Smith says , absolutely not , what a horrid thought .
And so this raises the question , and so , as Smith puts it , " When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish , how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble ? "
And Smith 's answer is , " It is reason , principle , conscience .
[ This ] calls to us , with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions , that we are but one of the multitude , in no respect better than any other in it . "
And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality .
And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world 's religions , in all of the different versions of the golden rule , and in all of the world 's moral philosophies , which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view .
The best articulation of this view is actually , for me , it 's not from a theologian or from a philosopher , but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of " Casablanca . "
So , spoiler alert , he 's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good , and he says to her , and I won 't do the accent , but he says to her , " It doesn 't take much to see that the problems of three little people don 't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world . "
Our reason could cause us to override our passions .
Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy , could motivate us to write a book like " Uncle Tom 's Cabin , " or read a book like " Uncle Tom 's Cabin , " and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when , as rational beings , we feel we should be constrained .
This is what a constitution is .
A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present , and what it says is , no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term , no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery , we can 't .
We have bound ourselves .
And we bind ourselves in other ways as well .
We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job , for an award , we are strongly biased by their race , we are biased by their gender , we are biased by how attractive they are , and sometimes we might say , " Well fine , that 's the way it should be . "
But other times we say , " This is wrong . "
And so to combat this , we don 't just try harder , but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can 't bias us , which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens , so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter .
I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature .
We have gut feelings , instincts , emotions , and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil , but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning , and we can use these to , in some cases , accelerate and nourish our emotions , and in other cases staunch them .
And it 's in this way that reason helps us create a better world .
Thank you .

Sara Lewis : The loves and lies of fireflies
Biologist Sara Lewis has spent the past 20 years getting to the bottom of the magic and wonder of fireflies . In this charming talk , she tells us how and why the beetles produce their silent sparks , what happens when two fireflies have sex , and why one group of females is known as the firefly vampire . Find out more astonishing facts about fireflies in Lewis ' footnotes , below .
As a scientist , and also as a human being , I 've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder .
I think Jason Webley last night called it " conspiring to be part of the magic . "
So it 's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet : fireflies .
Now , for many of you , I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories : childhood , summertime , even other TED Talks .
Maybe something like this .
My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school .
One evening , I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina , and suddenly , these silent sparks rose up all around me , and I began to wonder : How do these creatures make light , and what 's with all this flashing ?
Are they talking to one another ?
And what happens after the lights go out ?
I 've been lucky enough to answer some of these questions as I 've explored this nocturnal world .
Now if you 've ever seen or even heard about fireflies , then you 'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly , and this happens around the globe , like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies , or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow , floating flashes of these Genji fireflies , or in Malaysia , the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand — — fireflies , all blinking together in stunning synchrony .
These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder , and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world .
And I find it amazing that they 're created by these tiny insects .
In person , fireflies are charming .
They 're charismatic .
They 've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries .
As I 've traveled around the world , I 've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy .
Other creatures can enjoy them too .
I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution .
They 've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces : natural selection , the struggle for survival , and sexual selection , the struggle for reproductive opportunity .
As a firefly junkie , the past 20 years have been quite an exciting ride .
Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues , we 've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies : their courtship and sex lives , their treachery and murder .
So today I 'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we 've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world .
Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects , the beetles .
Worldwide , there are more than 2,000 firefly species , and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals , that is , different ways to find and attract mates .
Around 150 million years ago , the very first fireflies probably looked like this .
They flew during the daytime and they didn 't light up .
Instead , males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females .
In other fireflies , it 's only the females who light up .
They are attractively plump and wingless , so every night , they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males .
In still other fireflies , both sexes use quick , bright flashes to find their mates .
Here in North America , we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light .
How do they do that ?
It seems totally magical , but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern .
The main star is an enzyme called luciferase , which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin , in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light .
Incredible .
But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly ?
To answer this question , we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures .
Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow .
They spend the vast majority of their lifetime , up to two years , in this larval form .
Their main goal here , like my teenagers , is to eat and grow .
And firefly light first originated in these juveniles .
Every single firefly larva can light up , even when their adults can 't .
But what 's the point to being so conspicuous ?
Well , we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood , so we think these lights first evolved as a warning , a neon sign that says , " Toxic ! Stay away ! "
to any would-be predators .
It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates .
Driven now by sexual selection , some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level .
These adults only live a few weeks , and now they 're single-mindedly focused on sex , that is , on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation .
So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals .
It 's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies .
They 're flying and flashing their hearts out .
I still find it very romantic .
But meanwhile , where are all the females ?
Well , they 're lounging down below surveying their options .
They have plenty of males to choose from , and these females turn out to be very picky .
When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male , she 'll aim her lantern in his direction , and give him a flash back .
It 's her " come hither " sign .
So he flies closer and he flashes again .
If she still likes him , they 'll strike up a conversation .
These creatures speak their love in the language of light .
So what exactly do these females consider sexy ?
We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out .
When we tested females using blinking LED lights , we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes .
I know you 're wondering , what gives these males their sex appeal ?
Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out .
The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this , they stay together all night long , and when we looked inside to see what might be happening , we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex .
While they 're mating , the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift .
We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair .
We can actually see the gift — it 's shown here in red — as it 's being passed from the male to the female .
What makes this gift so valuable is that it 's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs .
So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates .
We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer , because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation .
So it 's not all sweetness and light .
Firefly romance is risky .
For the most part , these adult fireflies don 't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores , but somewhere along the line , one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins .
This evolutionary flaw , which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner , has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent .
by Jim Lloyd , another colleague , these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species .
So the hunt begins with the predator — she 's shown here in the lower left — where she 's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey , and here 's how it might go .
First the prey male flashes , " Do you love me ? "
His own female responds , " Maybe . "
So then he flashes again .
But this time , the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said .
She 's not looking for love : she 's looking for toxins .
If she 's good , she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him , and he 's not just a light snack .
Over the next hour , she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains .
Unable to make their own toxins , these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals .
So a firefly vampire , brought to you by natural selection .
We still have a lot to learn about fireflies , but it looks like many stories will remain untold , because around the world , firefly populations are blinking out .
The main culprit : habitat loss .
Pretty much everywhere , the fields and forests , the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive , are giving way to development and to sprawl .
Here 's another problem : we 've conquered darkness , but in the process , we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures , and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates .
Do we really need fireflies ?
After all , they 're just one tiny bit of Earth 's biodiversity .
Yet every time a species is lost , it 's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one .
You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out , but in the end , you 're left sitting in darkness .
As we work together to craft a planetary future , I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining .
Thank you .

Julian Treasure : How to speak so that people want to listen
Have you ever felt like you 're talking , but nobody is listening ? Here 's Julian Treasure to help . In this useful talk , the sound expert demonstrates the how-to 's of powerful speaking — from some handy vocal exercises to tips on how to speak with empathy . A talk that might help the world sound more beautiful .
The human voice : It 's the instrument we all play .
It 's the most powerful sound in the world , probably .
It 's the only one that can start a war or say " I love you . "
And yet many people have the experience that when they speak , people don 't listen to them .
And why is that ?
How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world ?
What I 'd like to suggest , there are a number of habits that we need to move away from .
I 've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking .
I 'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list , but these seven , I think , are pretty large habits that we can all fall into .
First , gossip , speaking ill of somebody who 's not present .
Not a nice habit , and we know perfectly well the person gossiping five minutes later will be gossiping about us .
Second , judging .
We know people who are like this in conversation , and it 's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you 're being judged and found wanting at the same time .
Third , negativity .
You can fall into this .
My mother , in the last years of her life , became very , very negative , and it 's hard to listen .
I remember one day , I said to her , " It 's October 1 today , " and she said , " I know , isn 't it dreadful ? "
It 's hard to listen when somebody 's that negative .
And another form of negativity , complaining .
Well , this is the national art of the U.K.
It 's our national sport . We complain about the weather , about sport , about politics , about everything , but actually complaining is viral misery .
It 's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world .
Excuses . We 've all met this guy .
Maybe we 've all been this guy .
Some people have a blamethrower .
They just pass it on to everybody else and don 't take responsibility for their actions , and again , hard to listen to somebody who is being like that .
Penultimate , the sixth of the seven , embroidery , exaggeration .
It demeans our language , actually , sometimes .
For example , if I see something that really is awesome , what do I call it ?
And then of course this exaggeration becomes lying , out and out lying , and we don 't want to listen to people we know are lying to us .
And finally , dogmatism , the confusion of facts with opinions .
When those two things get conflated , you 're listening into the wind .
You know , somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true .
It 's difficult to listen to that .
So here they are , seven deadly sins of speaking .
These are things I think we need to avoid .
But is there a positive way to think about this ?
Yes , there is .
I 'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones , foundations , that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world .
Fortunately , these things spell a word .
The word is " hail , " and it has a great definition as well .
I 'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head .
I 'm talking about this definition , to greet or acclaim enthusiastically , which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things .
So what do they stand for ?
See if you can guess .
The H , honesty , of course , being true in what you say , being straight and clear .
The A is authenticity , just being yourself .
A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth , which I think is a lovely way to put it .
The I is integrity , being your word , actually doing what you say , and being somebody people can trust .
And the L is love .
I don 't mean romantic love , but I do mean wishing people well , for two reasons .
First of all , I think absolute honesty may not be what we want .
I mean , my goodness , you look ugly this morning .
Perhaps that 's not necessary .
Tempered with love , of course , honesty is a great thing .
But also , if you 're really wishing somebody well , it 's very hard to judge them at the same time .
I 'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously .
So hail .
Also , now that 's what you say , and it 's like the old song , it is what you say , it 's also the way that you say it .
You have an amazing toolbox .
This instrument is incredible , and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened .
I 'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with , which will increase the power of your speaking .
Register , for example .
Now , falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time , but there 's a register in between .
I 'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches .
You can locate your voice , however .
So if I talk up here in my nose , you can hear the difference .
If I go down here in my throat , which is where most of us speak from most of the time .
But if you want weight , you need to go down here to the chest .
You hear the difference ?
We vote for politicians with lower voices , it 's true , because we associate depth with power and with authority .
That 's register .
Then we have timbre .
It 's the way your voice feels .
Again , the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich , smooth , warm , like hot chocolate .
Well if that 's not you , that 's not the end of the world , because you can train .
Go and get a voice coach .
And there are amazing things you can do with breathing , with posture , and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice .
Then prosody . I love prosody .
This is the sing-song , the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning .
It 's root one for meaning in conversation .
People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to That 's where the world monotonic comes from , or monotonous , monotone .
Also we have repetitive prosody now coming in , where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it 's actually not a question , it 's a statement .
And if you repeat that one over and over , it 's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody , which I think is a shame , so let 's try and break that habit .
Pace . I can get very , very excited by saying something really , really quickly , or I can slow right down to emphasize , and at the end of that , of course , is our old friend silence .
There 's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk , is there ?
We don 't have to fill it with ums and ahs .
It can be very powerful .
Of course , pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal , but you can do it just with pitch .
Where did you leave my keys ?
Where did you leave my keys ?
So slightly different meaning in those two deliveries .
And finally , volume .
I can get really excited by using volume .
Sorry about that if I startled anybody .
Or , I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet .
Some people broadcast the whole time .
Try not to do that .
That 's called sodcasting , imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately . Not nice .
Of course , where this all comes into play most of all is when you 've got something really important to do .
It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people .
It might be proposing marriage , asking for a raise , a wedding speech .
Whatever it is , if it 's really important , you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it 's going to work on , and no engine works well without being warmed up .
Warm up your voice .
Actually , let me show you how to do that .
Would you all like to stand up for a moment ?
I 'm going to show you the six vocal warmup exercises that I do before every talk I ever do .
Anytime you 're going to talk to anybody important , do these .
First , arms up , deep breath in , and sigh out , ahhhhh , like that .
One more time .
Ahhhh , very good .
Now we 're going to warm up our lips , and we 're going to go ba , ba , ba , ba , ba , ba , ba , ba . Very good .
And now , brrrrrrrrrr , just like when you were a kid .
Brrrr . Now your lips should be coming alive .
We 're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la , la , la , la , la , la , la , la , la .
Beautiful . You 're getting really good at this .
And then , roll an R. Rrrrrrr .
That 's like champagne for the tongue .
Finally , and if I can only do one , the pros call this the siren .
It 's really good . It starts with " we " and goes to " aw . "
The " we " is high , the " aw " is low .
So you go , weeeaawww , weeeaawww .
Fantastic . Give yourselves a round of applause .
Take a seat , thank you . Next time you speak , do those in advance .
Now let me just put this in context to close .
This is a serious point here .
This is where we are now , right ?
We speak not very well into people who simply aren 't listening in an environment that 's all about noise and bad acoustics .
I have talked about that on this stage in different phases .
What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose ?
Or to make that a bit larger , what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound ?
That would be a world that does sound beautiful , and one where understanding would be the norm , and that is an idea worth spreading .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Ge Wang : The DIY orchestra of the future
Ge Wang makes computer music , but it isn 't all about coded bleeps and blips . With the Stanford Laptop Orchestra , he creates new instruments out of unexpected materials — like an Ikea bowl — that allow musicians to play music that 's both beautiful and expressive .
I want to talk to you about one thing and this has to do with when people ask me , what do you do ?
To which I usually respond , I do computer music .
Now , a number of people just stop talking to me right then and there , and the rest who are left usually have this blank look in their eye , as if to say , what does that mean ? And I feel like I 'm actually depriving them of information by telling them this , at which point I usually panic which is , I have no idea what I 'm doing .
Which is true .
That 's usually followed by a second thought , which is , whatever it is that I 'm doing , I love it .
And today , I want to , well , share with you something I love , and also why .
And I think we 'll begin with just this question : What is computer music ?
And I 'm going to try to do my best to provide a definition , maybe by telling you a story I 've been working on . And the first thing , I think , in our story is going to be something called ChucK .
Now , ChucK is a programming language for music , and it 's open-source , it 's freely available , and I like to think that it crashes equally well on all modern operating systems .
I 'm just going to give you a demo . By the way , I 'm just going to nerd out for just a few minutes here , so I would say , don 't freak out .
In fact , I would invite all of you to join me in just geeking out .
If you 've never written a line of code before in your life , do not worry .
I 'll bet you 'll be able to come along on this .
First thing I 'm going to do is to make a sine wave oscillator , and we 're going to called the sine wave generator " Ge . "
And then we 're going to connect " Ge " to the DAC . Now this is kind of the abstraction for the sound output on my computer . Okay ?
So I 've connected myself into the speaker .
Next , I 'm going to say my frequency is 440 hertz , and I 'm going to let time advance by two seconds through this operation .
All right , so if I were to play this -- — you would hear a sine wave at 440 hertz for two seconds .
Okay , great . Now I 'm going to copy and paste this , and then just change some of these numbers , and .5 and 880 . By doubling the frequency , we 're actually going up in successive octaves , and then we have this sequence -- — of tones .
Okay , great , now I can imagine creating all kinds of really horrible single sine wave pieces of music with this , but I 'm going to do something that computers are really good at , which is repetition .
I 'm going to put this all in a while loop , and you actually don 't need to indent , but this is purely for aesthetic reasons . It 's good practice .
And when we do this — that 's going to go on for a while .
In fact , it 's probably not going to stop until this computer disintegrates .
And I can 't really empirically prove that to you , Next , I 'm going to replace this 220 I 'm going to generate a random number between 30 and 1,000 and send that to the frequency of me .
Let 's do this every 200 milliseconds .
All right .
the canonical computer music .
This is , to me , the sound that mainframes are supposed to be making when they 're thinking really hard . It 's this sound , it 's like , the square root of five million .
So is this computer music ?
Yeah , I guess by definition , it 's kind of computer music .
It 's probably not the kind of music you would listen to cruising down the highway , but it 's a foundation of computer-generated music , and using ChucK , we 've actually been building instruments in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra , based right here at Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics .
Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops , humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays .
Now the reason we have these is so that for the instruments that we create out of the laptop , we want the sound to come out of somewhere near the instrument kind of much like a traditional , acoustic instrument .
Like , if I were to play a violin here , the sound would naturally not come out of the P.A. system , but from the artifact itself .
So these speakers are meant to emulate that .
This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt .
That 's the actual name , and I actually use one of these to make salad at home as well , I kid you not .
And the first step is you turn it upside down , and then you drill holes in them , six holes per hemi , and then make a base plate , put car speaker drivers in them along with amplifiers in the enclosure , and you put that all together and you have these hemispherical speaker arrays .
Add people , add laptops , you have a laptop orchestra .
And what might a laptop orchestra sound like ?
Well , let me give you a demonstration of about 200 instruments we 've created so far for the Laptop Orchestra .
And what I 'm going to do is actually come over to this thing .
This thing I have in front of me actually used to be a commodity gaming controller called a Gametrak .
This thing actually has a glove you can put on your hands .
It 's tethered to the base , and this will track the position of your hands in real time .
It was originally designed as a golfing controller to detect the motion of your swing .
That turned out to be a rather large commercial non-success , at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars , at which point computer music researchers said , " This is awesome !
We can prototype instruments out of this . "
So let me show you one instrument we 've created , one of many , and this instrument is called " Twilight , " and it 's meant to go with this metaphor of pulling a sound out of the ground .
So let me see if this will work .
And put it back .
And then if you go to the left , right , it sounds like an elephant in pain .
This is a slightly metallic sound .
It 's like a hovering car .
This third one is a ratchet-like interaction , so let me turn it up . So it 's a slightly different interaction .
The fourth one is a drone . And finally , let 's see , this is a totally different interaction , and I think you have to imagine that there 's this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage , and I 'm going to bang it .
So there we go , so that 's one of many instruments in the Laptop Orchestra .
Thank you .
And when you put that together , you get something that sounds like this .
Okay , and so , I think from the experience of building a lot of instruments for the Laptop Orchestra , and I think from the curiosity of wondering , what if we took these hopefully expressive instruments and we brought it to a lot of people , plus then a healthy bout of insanity — put those three things together — led to me actually co-founding a startup company in 2008 called Smule .
Now Smule 's mission is to create expressive , mobile music things , and one of the first musical instruments we created is called Ocarina .
And I 'm going to just demo this for you real quick .
— is based on this ancient flute-like instrument called the ocarina , and this one is the four-hole English pendant configuration , and you 're literally blowing into the microphone to make the sound . And there 's actually a little ChucK script running in here that 's detecting And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer , All right . So let me play a little ditty for you , And here , you 'll hear a little accompaniment with the melody .
And this was designed to let you take your time and figure out where your expressive space is , and you can just hang out here for a while , for a really dramatic effect , if you want , and whenever you 're ready — And on these longer notes , I 'm going to use more vibrato to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality .
Huh , that 's a nice chord to end this excerpt on .
Thank you .
So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is , is this a toy or it an instrument ? Maybe it 's both , but for me , I think the more important question is , is it expressive ?
And at the same time , I think creating these types of instruments asks a question about the role of technology , and its place for how we make music .
not that long ago , like only a hundred years ago — used to make music together as a common form of entertainment .
I don 't think that 's really happening that much anymore . You know , this is before radio , before recording .
In the last hundred years , with all this technology , we now have more access to music as listeners and consumers , but somehow , I think we 're making less music than ever before .
I 'm not sure why that would be .
Maybe it 's because it 's too easy just to hit play .
And while listening to music is wonderful , there 's a special joy to making music that 's all its own .
And I think that 's one part of the goal of why I do what I do is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit . Right ?
Now , if that 's one goal , the other goal is to look to the future and think about what kind of new musical things can we make that we don 't perhaps yet have names for that 's enabled by technology , but ultimately might change the way that humans make music .
And I 'll just give you one example here , and this is Ocarina 's other feature .
This is a globe , and here you 're actually listening to other users of Ocarina blow into their iPhones to play something .
This is " G.I.R. " from Texas , " R.I.K. " I don 't know why it 's these three-letter names today , Los Angeles .
They 're all playing pretty , somewhat minimal music here . And the idea with this is that , well , technology should not be foregrounded here , and — — we 've actually opened this up .
The first thought is that , hey , you know there 's somebody somewhere out there playing some music , and this is a small but I think important human connection to make that perhaps the technology affords .
As a final example , and perhaps my favorite example , is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan , a woman reached out in one of our singing apps to try to get people to join in to sing with her on a version of " Lean on Me . "
Now , in these apps , there 's this thing that allows any user to add their voice to an existing performance by any other user or group of users , so in some sense , she 's created this kind of global ad hoc corral of strangers , and within weeks , thousands of people joined in on this , and you can kind of see people coming from all around the world and all these lines converging on the origin where the first rendition of the song was sung , and that 's in Tokyo .
And this is what it sounds like when there 's 1,000 people . This is 1,000 voices .
Sometimes in our lives We all have pain , we all have sorrow But if we are wise We know that there 's always tomorrow Lean on me When you 're not strong And I 'll be your friend I 'll help you carry on For it won 't be long Till I 'm gonna need Somebody to lean on Just lean on — Is this computer music ?
Was that computer music ?
Yeah , I guess so ; it 's something that you really couldn 't have done without computers .
But at the same time , it 's also just human , and I think what I 've essentially answered so far is maybe why I do the stuff that I do , and let 's just finally return to the first question : What is computer music ?
And I think that the catch here is that , at least to me , computer music isn 't really about computers .
It is about people .
It 's about how we can use technology to change the way we think and do and make music , and maybe even add to how we can connect with each other through music .
And with that , I want to say , this is computer music , and thank you for listening .
Naomi Oreskes : Why we should trust scientists
Many of the world 's biggest problems require asking questions of scientists -- but why should we believe what they say ? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes thinks deeply about our relationship to belief and draws out three problems with common attitudes toward scientific inquiry -- and gives her own reasoning for why we ought to trust science .
Every day we face issues like climate change or the safety of vaccines where we have to answer questions whose answers rely heavily on scientific information .
Scientists tell us that the world is warming .
Scientists tell us that vaccines are safe .
But how do we know if they are right ?
Why should be believe the science ?
The fact is , many of us actually don 't believe the science .
Public opinion polls consistently show that significant proportions of the American people don 't believe the climate is warming due to human activities , don 't think that there is evolution by natural selection , and aren 't persuaded by the safety of vaccines .
So why should we believe the science ?
Well , scientists don 't like talking about science as a matter of belief .
In fact , they would contrast science with faith , and they would say belief is the domain of faith .
And faith is a separate thing apart and distinct from science .
Indeed they would say religion is based on faith or maybe the calculus of Pascal 's wager .
Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician who tried to bring scientific reasoning to the question of whether or not he should believe in God , and his wager went like this : Well , if God doesn 't exist but I decide to believe in him nothing much is really lost .
Maybe a few hours on Sunday .
But if he does exist and I don 't believe in him , then I 'm in deep trouble .
And so Pascal said , we 'd better believe in God .
Or as one of my college professors said , " He clutched for the handrail of faith . "
He made that leap of faith leaving science and rationalism behind .
Now the fact is though , for most of us , most scientific claims are a leap of faith .
We can 't really judge scientific claims for ourselves in most cases .
And indeed this is actually true for most scientists as well outside of their own specialties .
So if you think about it , a geologist can 't tell you whether a vaccine is safe .
Most chemists are not experts in evolutionary theory .
A physicist cannot tell you , despite the claims of some of them , whether or not tobacco causes cancer .
So , if even scientists themselves have to make a leap of faith outside their own fields , then why do they accept the claims of other scientists ?
Why do they believe each other 's claims ?
And should we believe those claims ?
So what I 'd like to argue is yes , we should , but not for the reason that most of us think .
Most of us were taught in school that the reason we should believe in science is because of the scientific method .
We were taught that scientists follow a method and that this method guarantees the truth of their claims .
The method that most of us were taught in school , we can call it the textbook method , is the hypothetical deductive method .
According to the standard model , the textbook model , scientists develop hypotheses , they deduce the consequences of those hypotheses , and then they go out into the world and they say , " Okay , well are those consequences true ? "
Can we observe them taking place in the natural world ?
And if they are true , then the scientists say , " Great , we know the hypothesis is correct . "
So there are many famous examples in the history of science of scientists doing exactly this .
One of the most famous examples comes from the work of Albert Einstein .
When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity , one of the consequences of his theory was that space-time wasn 't just an empty void but that it actually had a fabric .
And that that fabric was bent in the presence of massive objects like the sun .
So if this theory were true then it meant that light as it passed the sun should actually be bent around it .
That was a pretty startling prediction and it took a few years before scientists were able to test it but they did test it in 1919 , and lo and behold it turned out to be true .
Starlight actually does bend as it travels around the sun .
This was a huge confirmation of the theory .
It was considered proof of the truth of this radical new idea , and it was written up in many newspapers around the globe .
Now , sometimes this theory or this model is referred to as the deductive-nomological model , mainly because academics like to make things complicated .
But also because in the ideal case , it 's about laws .
So nomological means having to do with laws .
And in the ideal case , the hypothesis isn 't just an idea : ideally , it is a law of nature .
Why does it matter that it is a law of nature ?
Because if it is a law , it can 't be broken .
If it 's a law then it will always be true in all times and all places no matter what the circumstances are .
And all of you know of at least one example of a famous law : Einstein 's famous equation , E = MC2 , which tells us what the relationship is between energy and mass .
And that relationship is true no matter what .
Now , it turns out , though , that there are several problems with this model .
The main problem is that it 's wrong .
It 's just not true . And I 'm going to talk about three reasons why it 's wrong .
So the first reason is a logical reason .
It 's the problem of the fallacy of affirming the consequent .
So that 's another fancy , academic way of saying that false theories can make true predictions .
So just because the prediction comes true doesn 't actually logically prove that the theory is correct .
And I have a good example of that too , again from the history of science .
This is a picture of the Ptolemaic universe with the Earth at the center of the universe and the sun and the planets going around it .
The Ptolemaic model was believed by many very smart people for many centuries .
Well , why ?
Well the answer is because it made lots of predictions that came true .
The Ptolemaic system enabled astronomers to make accurate predictions of the motions of the planet , in fact more accurate predictions at first than the Copernican theory which we now would say is true .
So that 's one problem with the textbook model .
A second problem is a practical problem , and it 's the problem of auxiliary hypotheses .
Auxiliary hypotheses are assumptions that scientists are making that they may or may not even be aware that they 're making .
So an important example of this comes from the Copernican model , which ultimately replaced the Ptolemaic system .
So when Nicolaus Copernicus said , actually the Earth is not the center of the universe , the sun is the center of the solar system , the Earth moves around the sun .
Scientists said , well okay , Nicolaus , if that 's true we ought to be able to detect the motion of the Earth around the sun .
And so this slide here illustrates a concept known as stellar parallax .
And astronomers said , if the Earth is moving and we look at a prominent star , let 's say , Sirius -- well I know I 'm in Manhattan so you guys can 't see the stars , but imagine you 're out in the country , imagine you chose that rural life — and we look at a star in December , we see that star against the backdrop of distant stars .
If we now make the same observation six months later when the Earth has moved to this position in June , we look at that same star and we see it against a different backdrop .
That difference , that angular difference , is the stellar parallax .
So this is a prediction that the Copernican model makes .
Astronomers looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing , nothing at all .
And many people argued that this proved that the Copernican model was false .
So what happened ?
Well , in hindsight we can say that astronomers were making two auxiliary hypotheses , both of which we would now say were incorrect .
The first was an assumption about the size of the Earth 's orbit .
Astronomers were assuming that the Earth 's orbit was large relative to the distance to the stars .
Today we would draw the picture more like this , this comes from NASA , and you see the Earth 's orbit is actually quite small .
In fact , it 's actually much smaller even than shown here .
The stellar parallax therefore , is very small and actually very hard to detect .
And that leads to the second reason why the prediction didn 't work , because scientists were also assuming that the telescopes they had were sensitive enough to detect the parallax .
And that turned out not to be true .
It wasn 't until the 19th century that scientists were able to detect the stellar parallax .
So , there 's a third problem as well .
The third problem is simply a factual problem , that a lot of science doesn 't fit the textbook model .
A lot of science isn 't deductive at all , it 's actually inductive .
And by that we mean that scientists don 't necessarily start with theories and hypotheses , often they just start with observations of stuff going on in the world .
And the most famous example of that is one of the most famous scientists who ever lived , Charles Darwin .
When Darwin went out as a young man on the voyage of the Beagle , he didn 't have a hypothesis , he didn 't have a theory .
He just knew that he wanted to have a career as a scientist and he started to collect data .
Mainly he knew that he hated medicine because the sight of blood made him sick so he had to have an alternative career path .
So he started collecting data .
And he collected many things , including his famous finches .
When he collected these finches , he threw them in a bag and he had no idea what they meant .
Many years later back in London , Darwin looked at his data again and began to develop an explanation , and that explanation was the theory of natural selection .
Besides inductive science , scientists also often participate in modeling .
One of the things scientists want to do in life is to explain the causes of things .
And how do we do that ?
Well , one way you can do it is to build a model that tests an idea .
So this is a picture of Henry Cadell , who was a Scottish geologist in the 19th century .
You can tell he 's Scottish because he 's wearing a deerstalker cap and Wellington boots .
And Cadell wanted to answer the question , how are mountains formed ?
And one of the things he had observed is that if you look at mountains like the Appalachians , you often find that the rocks in them are folded , and they 're folded in a particular way , which suggested to him that they were actually being compressed from the side .
And this idea would later play a major role in discussions of continental drift .
So he built this model , this crazy contraption with levers and wood , and here 's his wheelbarrow , buckets , a big sledgehammer .
I don 't know why he 's got the Wellington boots .
Maybe it 's going to rain .
And he created this physical model in order to demonstrate that you could , in fact , create patterns in rocks , or at least , in this case , in mud , that looked a lot like mountains if you compressed them from the side .
So it was an argument about the cause of mountains .
Nowadays , most scientists prefer to work inside , so they don 't build physical models so much as to make computer simulations .
But a computer simulation is a kind of a model .
It 's a model that 's made with mathematics , and like the physical models of the 19th century , it 's very important for thinking about causes .
So one of the big questions to do with climate change , we have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Earth is warming up .
This slide here , the black line shows the measurements that scientists have taken for the last 150 years showing that the Earth 's temperature has steadily increased , and you can see in particular that in the last 50 years there 's been this dramatic increase of nearly one degree centigrade , or almost two degrees Fahrenheit .
So what , though , is driving that change ?
How can we know what 's causing the observed warming ?
Well , scientists can model it using a computer simulation .
So this diagram illustrates a computer simulation that has looked at all the different factors that we know can influence the Earth 's climate , so sulfate particles from air pollution , volcanic dust from volcanic eruptions , changes in solar radiation , and , of course , greenhouse gases .
And they asked the question , what set of variables put into a model will reproduce what we actually see in real life ?
So here is the real life in black .
Here 's the model in this light gray , and the answer is a model that includes , it 's the answer E on that SAT , all of the above .
The only way you can reproduce the observed temperature measurements is with all of these things put together , including greenhouse gases , and in particular you can see that the increase in greenhouse gases tracks this very dramatic increase in temperature over the last 50 years .
And so this is why climate scientists say it 's not just that we know that climate change is happening , we know that greenhouse gases are a major part of the reason why .
So now because there all these different things that scientists do , the philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously said , " The only principle in science that doesn 't inhibit progress is : anything goes . "
Now this quotation has often been taken out of context , because Feyerabend was not actually saying that in science anything goes .
What he was saying was , actually the full quotation is , " If you press me to say what is the method of science , I would have to say : anything goes . "
What he was trying to say is that scientists do a lot of different things .
Scientists are creative .
But then this pushes the question back : If scientists don 't use a single method , then how do they decide what 's right and what 's wrong ?
And who judges ?
And the answer is , scientists judge , and they judge by judging evidence .
Scientists collect evidence in many different ways , but however they collect it , they have to subject it to scrutiny .
And this led the sociologist Robert Merton to focus on this question of how scientists scrutinize data and evidence , and he said they do it in a way he called " organized skepticism . "
And by that he meant it 's organized because they do it collectively , they do it as a group , and skepticism , because they do it from a position of distrust .
That is to say , the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim .
And in this sense , science is intrinsically conservative .
It 's quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say , " Yes , we know something , this is true . "
So despite the popularity of the concept of paradigm shifts , what we find is that actually , really major changes in scientific thinking are relatively rare in the history of science .
So finally that brings us to one more idea : If scientists judge evidence collectively , this has led historians to focus on the question of consensus , and to say that at the end of the day , what science is , what scientific knowledge is , is the consensus of the scientific experts who through this process of organized scrutiny , collective scrutiny , have judged the evidence and come to a conclusion about it , either yea or nay .
So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts .
We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury , except it 's a very special kind of jury .
It 's not a jury of your peers , it 's a jury of geeks .
It 's a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s , and unlike a conventional jury , which has only two choices , guilty or not guilty , the scientific jury actually has a number of choices .
Scientists can say yes , something 's true .
Scientists can say no , it 's false .
Or , they can say , well it might be true but we need to work more and collect more evidence .
Or , they can say it might be true , but we don 't know how to answer the question and we 're going to put it aside and maybe we 'll come back to it later .
That 's what scientists call " intractable . "
But this leads us to one final problem : If science is what scientists say it is , then isn 't that just an appeal to authority ?
And weren 't we all taught in school that the appeal to authority is a logical fallacy ?
Well , here 's the paradox of modern science , the paradox of the conclusion I think historians and philosophers and sociologists have come to , that actually science is the appeal to authority , but it 's not the authority of the individual , no matter how smart that individual is , like Plato or Socrates or Einstein .
It 's the authority of the collective community .
You can think of it is a kind of wisdom of the crowd , but a very special kind of crowd .
Science does appeal to authority , but it 's not based on any individual , no matter how smart that individual may be .
It 's based on the collective wisdom , the collective knowledge , the collective work , of all of the scientists who have worked on a particular problem .
Scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust , this " show me " culture , illustrated by this nice woman here showing her colleagues her evidence .
Of course , these people don 't really look like scientists , because they 're much too happy .
Okay , so that brings me to my final point .
Most of us get up in the morning .
Most of us trust our cars .
Well , see , now I 'm thinking , I 'm in Manhattan , this is a bad analogy , but most Americans who don 't live in Manhattan get up in the morning and get in their cars and turn on that ignition , and their cars work , and they work incredibly well .
The modern automobile hardly ever breaks down .
So why is that ? Why do cars work so well ?
It 's not because of the genius of Henry Ford or Karl Benz or even Elon Musk .
It 's because the modern automobile is the product of more than 100 years of work by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people .
The modern automobile is the product of the collected work and wisdom and experience of every man and woman who has ever worked on a car , and the reliability of the technology is the result of that accumulated effort .
We benefit not just from the genius of Benz and Ford and Musk but from the collective intelligence and hard work of all of the people who have worked on the modern car .
And the same is true of science , only science is even older .
Our basis for trust in science is actually the same as our basis in trust in technology , and the same as our basis for trust in anything , namely , experience .
But it shouldn 't be blind trust any more than we would have blind trust in anything .
Our trust in science , like science itself , should be based on evidence , and that means that scientists have to become better communicators .
They have to explain to us not just what they know but how they know it , and it means that we have to become better listeners .
Thank you very much .

Lorrie Faith Cranor : What 's wrong with your pa $ $ w0rd ?
Lorrie Faith Cranor studied thousands of real passwords to figure out the surprising , very common mistakes that users -- and secured sites -- make to compromise security . And how , you may ask , did she study thousands of real passwords without compromising the security of any users ? That 's a story in itself . It 's secret data worth knowing , especially if your password is 123456 ...
I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon , and my research focuses on usable privacy and security , and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems , especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security .
So passwords are something that I hear a lot about .
A lot of people are frustrated with passwords , and it 's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess .
But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you 're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems ?
It 's tough .
At Carnegie Mellon , they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords .
The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character .
Pretty easy . But then they changed things , and at the end of 2009 , they announced that we were going to have a new policy , and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long , with an uppercase letter , lowercase letter , a digit , a symbol , you couldn 't use the same character more than three times , and it wasn 't allowed to be in a dictionary .
Now , when they implemented this new policy , a lot of people , my colleagues and friends , came up to me and they said , " Wow , now that 's really unusable .
Why are they doing this to us , and why didn 't you stop them ? "
And I said , " Well , you know what ?
They didn 't ask me . "
But I got curious , and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy , and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities , and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements , and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy .
Now entropy is a complicated term , but basically it measures the strength of passwords .
But the thing is , there isn 't actually a standard measure of entropy .
Now , the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy , but they don 't have anything too specific , and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don 't actually have any good data on passwords .
In fact , their report states , " Unfortunately , we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules .
NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose , but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others . "
So this is a problem , but our research group looked at it as an opportunity .
We said , " Well , there 's a need for good password data .
Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here .
So the first thing we did is , we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students , faculty and staff , and asked them for information about their passwords .
Now we didn 't say , " Give us your password . "
No , we just asked them about their password .
How long is it ? Does it have a digit ?
Does it have a symbol ?
And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week ?
So we got results from 470 students , faculty and staff , and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying , but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords .
We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down , and only 13 percent of them did , but disturbingly , 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password .
Now , this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down , because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers .
So if you have to , write your passwords down , but don 't reuse them .
We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords .
So CMU allows 32 possible symbols , but as you can see , there 's only a small number that most people are using , so we 're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords .
So this was a really interesting study , and now we had data from 470 people , but in the scheme of things , that 's really not very much password data , and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data ?
So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords , and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet .
So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets .
This is still not really ideal for research , though , because it 's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from , or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords .
So we wanted to find some better source of data .
So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study .
So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk , and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute , a few minutes , an hour , and pay people , a penny , ten cents , a few dollars , to do a task for you , and then you pay them through Amazon.com.
So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey , and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey .
So we did this , and we collected 5,000 passwords , and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with .
So some people had a pretty easy policy , we call it Basic8 , and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters .
Then some people had a much harder policy , and this was very similar to the CMU policy , that it had to have eight characters including uppercase , lowercase , digit , symbol , and pass a dictionary check .
And one of the other policies we tried , and there were a whole bunch more , but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16 , and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters .
All right , so now we had 5,000 passwords , and so we had much more detailed information .
Again we see that there 's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords .
We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating , but as you may recall , there isn 't a good measure of password strength .
So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using , or that we could find information about in the research literature .
So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords , they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form , called a hash , and so what they 'll do is they 'll make a guess as to what a password is , run it through a hashing function , and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list .
So a dumb attacker will try every password in order .
They 'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB , and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have .
A smart attacker , on the other hand , does something much more clever .
They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets , and they guess those first .
So they 're going to start by guessing " password , " and then they 'll guess " I love you , " and " monkey , " and " 12345678 , " because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have .
In fact , some of you probably have these passwords .
So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were , we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong , and the complex passwords were pretty strong too .
However , when we looked at the survey data , we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords , and the long passwords were a lot more usable , and in some cases , they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords .
So this suggests that , instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords , we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords .
Now here 's the problem , though : Some people had long passwords that actually weren 't very strong .
You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess .
So we need to do more than just say long passwords .
There has to be some additional requirements , and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type .
Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter .
Here are some examples .
You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords .
We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work .
Do they actually help people have stronger passwords , and if so , which ones are better ?
So we tested password meters that were different sizes , shapes , colors , different words next to them , and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny .
As you type a better password , the bunny dances faster and faster .
So this was pretty fun .
What we found was that password meters do work .
Most of the password meters were actually effective , and the dancing bunny was very effective too , but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job , and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft .
They tell you you 're doing a good job too early , and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback , you probably would have better passwords .
Now another approach to better passwords , perhaps , is to use pass phrases instead of passwords .
So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago , and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases , and if you look at the second row of this cartoon , you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase " correct horse battery staple " would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember .
He says , in fact , you 've already remembered it .
And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not .
In fact , everybody who I talk to , who I mention I 'm doing password research , they point out this cartoon .
" Oh , have you seen it ? That xkcd .
Correct horse battery staple . "
So we did the research study to see what would actually happen .
So in our study , we used Mechanical Turk again , and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase .
Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words .
If we asked a human to do it , they would pick things that were not very random .
So we tried a few different conditions .
In one condition , the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language , and so you 'd get pass phrases like " try there three come . "
And we looked at that , and we said , " Well , that doesn 't really seem very memorable . "
So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech , so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun .
That comes up with something that 's sort of sentence-like .
So you can get a pass phrase like " plan builds sure power " or " end determines red drug . "
And these seemed a little bit more memorable , and maybe people would like those a little bit better .
We wanted to compare them with passwords , and so we had the computer pick random passwords , and these were nice and short , but as you can see , they don 't really look very memorable .
And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password .
So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable , like " tufritvi " and " vadasabi . "
That one kind of rolls off your tongue .
So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer .
So what we found in this study was that , surprisingly , pass phrases were not actually all that good .
People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords , and because the pass phrases are longer , they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in .
So it 's not really a clear win for pass phrases .
Sorry , all of you xkcd fans .
On the other hand , we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well , and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better .
So one of the problems with some of the studies that we 've done is that because they 're all done using Mechanical Turk , these are not people 's real passwords .
They 're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study .
And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords .
So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody 's real passwords .
Not surprisingly , they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us , but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students , faculty and staff , into a locked computer in a locked room , not connected to the Internet , and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords .
They audited our code .
They ran the code .
And so we never actually saw anybody 's password .
We got some interesting results , and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this .
So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school .
We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well .
The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords , there was actually a lot of similarities , and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually , collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords .
So that was good news .
Okay , I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school .
One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts , and I made this quilt here .
It 's called " Security Blanket . "
And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website .
And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset .
And what I did is I created this word cloud , and I went through all 1,000 words , and I categorized them into loose thematic categories .
And it was , in some cases , it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in , and then I color-coded them .
So here are some examples of the difficulty .
So " justin . "
Is that the name of the user , their boyfriend , their son ?
Maybe they 're a Justin Bieber fan .
Or " princess . "
Is that a nickname ?
Are they Disney princess fans ?
Or maybe that 's the name of their cat .
" Iloveyou " appears many times in many different languages .
There 's a lot of love in these passwords .
If you look carefully , you 'll see there 's also some profanity , but it was really interesting to me to see that there 's a lot more love than hate in these passwords .
And there are animals , a lot of animals , and " monkey " is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall .
And this was really curious to me , and I wondered , " Why are monkeys so popular ? "
And so in our last password study , any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word " monkey " in it , we asked them why they had a monkey in their password .
And what we found out -- we found 17 people so far , I think , who have the word " monkey " -- We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named " monkey " or a friend whose nickname is " monkey , " and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute .
And that guy is really cute .
So it seems that at the end of the day , when we make passwords , we either make something that 's really easy to type , a common pattern , or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we 've created the password for , or whatever .
Or we think about things that make us happy , and we create our password based on things that make us happy .
And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun , it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password .
So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice , happy things , but when you 're creating your password , try to think about something else .
Thank you .

Anne Curzan : What makes a word " real " ?
One could argue that slang words like ' hangry , ' ' defriend ' and ' adorkable ' fill crucial meaning gaps in the English language , even if they don 't appear in the dictionary . After all , who actually decides which words make it into those pages ? Language historian Anne Curzan gives a charming look at the humans behind dictionaries , and the choices they make .
I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life , which I know may not seem relevant , but it is .
When people meet me at parties and they find out that I 'm an English professor who specializes in language , they generally have one of two reactions .
One set of people look frightened . They often say something like , " Oh , I 'd better be careful what I say .
I 'm sure you 'll hear every mistake I make . "
And then they stop talking . And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else .
The other set of people , their eyes light up , and they say , " You are just the person I want to talk to . "
And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language .
A couple of weeks ago , I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language .
He brought up Facebook , and he said , " To defriend ? I mean , is that even a real word ? "
I want to pause on that question : What makes a word real ?
My dinner companion and I both know what the verb " defriend " means , so when does a new word like " defriend " become real ?
Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words , anyway ?
Those are the questions I want to talk about today .
I think most people , when they say a word isn 't real , what they mean is , it doesn 't appear in a standard dictionary .
That , of course , raises a host of other questions , including , who writes dictionaries ?
Before I go any further , let me clarify my role in all of this .
I do not write dictionaries .
I do , however , collect new words much the way dictionary editors do , and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this " research . "
When I teach the history of the English language , I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class .
Over the years , I have learned some great new slang this way , including " hangry , " which -- — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry , and " adorkable , " which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way , clearly , terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language .
But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don 't yet appear in a dictionary ?
With that , let 's turn to dictionaries .
I 'm going to do this as a show of hands : How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary , either print or online ?
Okay , so that looks like most of you .
Now , a second question . Again , a show of hands : How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using ?
Okay , many fewer .
At some level , we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries , but we 're really not sure who those hands belong to .
I 'm actually fascinated by this .
Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries , not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them .
Just think about the phrase " Look it up in the dictionary , " which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same .
Consider the library here on campus , where you go into the reading room , and there is a large , unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers .
Now , don 't get me wrong , dictionaries are fantastic resources , but they are human and they are not timeless .
I 'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read , every website they visit , except dictionaries , which we tend to treat as un-authored , as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean .
Here 's the thing : If you ask dictionary editors , what they 'll tell you is they 're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language .
They 're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what 's going to stick and what 's not going to stick .
They have to gamble , because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it , such as LOL , but they don 't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren 't going to make it , and I think a word that they 're watching right now is YOLO , you only live once .
Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors , and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out .
Every January , we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting , where among other things , we vote on the word of the year .
There are about 200 or 300 people who come , some of the best known linguists in the United States .
To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting , it occurs right before happy hour .
Anyone who comes can vote .
The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand .
In the past , some of the winners have been " tweet " in 2009 and " hashtag " in 2012 .
" Chad " was the word of the year in the year 2000 , because who knew what a chad was before 2000 , and " WMD " in 2002 .
Now , we have other categories in which we vote too , and my favorite category is most creative word of the year .
Past winners in this category have included " recombobulation area , " which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security , where you can recombobulate .
You can put your belt back on , put your computer back in your bag .
And then my all-time favorite word at this vote , which is " multi-slacking . "
And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you 're working when you 're actually goofing around on the web .
Will all of these words stick ? Absolutely not .
And we have made some questionable choices , for example in 2006 when the word of the year was " Plutoed , " to mean demoted .
But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable , such as " app " and " e " as a prefix , and " google " as a verb .
Now , a few weeks before our vote , Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year .
What is striking about this is that there 's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year , and this is because we 're noticing the same thing .
We 're noticing words that are coming into prominence .
It 's really a question of attitude .
Are you bothered by language fads and language change , or do you find it fun , interesting , something worthy of study as part of a living language ?
The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words .
So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875 , who was very concerned that " desirability " is really a terrible word .
In 1760 , Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word " colonize " as bad .
Over the years , we 've also seen worries about new pronunciations .
Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive , and he says " as if contemplate were not bad enough , balcony makes me sick . "
The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee .
These complaints now strike us as quaint , if not downright adorkable -- -- but here 's the thing : we still get quite worked up about language change .
I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary , including " LOL " when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and " defriend " when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary .
I also have articles expressing concern about " invite " as a noun , " impact " as a verb , because only teeth can be impacted , and " incentivize " is described as " boorish , bureaucratic misspeak . "
Now , it 's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language .
They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive , often through usage labels , but they 're in something of a bind , because they 're trying to describe what we do , and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately .
In response , the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes .
Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way , and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they 're changing meaning .
Now usage notes involve very human decisions , and I think , as dictionary users , we 're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be .
To show you what I mean , we 'll look at an example , but before we do , I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note .
Think about the word " peruse " and how you use that word .
I would guess many of you are thinking of skim , scan , reading quickly .
Some of you may even have some walking involved , because you 're perusing grocery store shelves , or something like that .
You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries , the first definition will be to read carefully , or pour over .
American Heritage has that as the first definition .
They then have , as the second definition , skim , and next to that , they say " usage problem . "
And then they include a usage note , which is worth looking at .
So here 's the usage note : " Peruse has long meant ' to read thoroughly ' ...
But the word if often used more loosely , to mean simply ' to read . ' ...
Further extension of the word to mean ' to glance over , skim , ' has traditionally been considered an error , but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable .
When asked about the sentence , ' I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly , ' 66 percent of the [ Usage ] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988 , 58 percent in 1999 , and 48 percent in 2011 . "
Ah , the Usage Panel , that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this .
Now , what I hope you 're thinking right now is , " Wait , who 's on the Usage Panel ?
And what should I do with their pronouncements ? "
If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries , you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel .
But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries ?
There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel .
They include academicians , journalists , creative writers .
There 's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists .
As of 2005 , the list includes me .
Here 's what we can do for you .
We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage .
That is and should be the extent of our authority .
We are not a language academy .
About once a year , I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses , new pronunciations , new meanings , are acceptable .
Now here 's what I do to fill out the ballot .
I listen to what other people are saying and writing .
I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language .
I will be honest with you : I do not like the word " impactful , " but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether " impactful " is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose .
So to be responsible , what I do is go look at usage , which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books .
Well , if you look for " impactful " in Google Books , here is what you find .
Well , it sure looks like " impactful " is proving useful for a certain number of writers , and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years .
Now , there are going to be changes that all of us don 't like in the language .
There are going to be changes where you think , " Really ?
Does the language have to change that way ? "
What I 'm saying is , we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible , our likes and dislikes about words on other people , and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble .
It 's not . It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it .
In retrospect , we think it 's fascinating that the word " nice " used to mean silly , and that the word " decimate " used to mean to kill one in every 10 .
We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about " notice " as a verb .
Well , you know what ?
We 're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about " impact " as a verb and " invite " as a noun .
The language is not going to change so fast that we can 't keep up .
Language just doesn 't work that way .
I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating , just the way dictionary editors do .
I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust .
So how does a word get into a dictionary ?
It gets in because we use it and we keep using it , and dictionary editors are paying attention to us .
If you 're thinking , " But that lets all of us decide what words mean , " I would say , " Yes it does , and it always has . "
Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource , but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean .
If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means , it 's real .
That word might be slangy , that word might be informal , that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary , but that word that we 're using , that word is real .
Thank you .

AJ Jacobs : The world 's largest family reunion … we 're all invited !
You may not know it yet , but AJ Jacobs is probably your cousin . Using genealogy websites , he 's been following the unexpected links that make us all , however distantly , related . His goal : to throw the world 's largest family reunion . See you there ?
Six months ago , I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books , and the email said , " You don 't know me , but I 'm your 12th cousin . "
And it said , " I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it , including you , Karl Marx , and several European aristocrats . "
Now I did not know what to make of this .
Part of me was like , okay , when 's he going to ask me to wire 10,000 dollars to his Nigerian bank , right ?
I also thought , 80,000 relatives , do I want that ?
I have enough trouble with some of the ones And I won 't name names , but you know who you are .
But another part of me said , this is remarkable .
Here I am alone in my office , but I 'm not alone at all .
I 'm connected to 80,000 people around the world , and that 's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins .
And some of them are going to be great , and some of them are going to be irritating , but they 're all related to me .
So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy , which I always thought was a very staid and proper field , but it turns out it 's going through a fascinating revolution , and a controversial one .
Partly , this is because of DNA and genetic testing , but partly , it 's because of the Internet .
There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees , collaboration and crowdsourcing , and what you do is , you load your family tree on , and then these sites search to see if the A.J. Jacobs in your tree is the same as the A.J. Jacobs in another tree , and if it is , then you can combine , and then you combine and combine and combine until you get these massive , mega-family trees with thousands of people on them , or even millions .
I 'm on something on Geni called the world family tree , which has no less than a jaw-dropping 75 million people .
So that 's 75 million people connected by blood or marriage , sometimes both .
It 's in all seven continents , including Antarctica .
I 'm on it . Many of you are on it , whether you know it or not , and you can see the links .
Here 's my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow .
She has no idea I exist , but we are officially cousins .
We have just 17 links between us .
And there 's my cousin Barack Obama .
And he is my aunt 's fifth great-aunt 's husband 's father 's wife 's seventh great-nephew , so practically my old brother .
And my cousin , of course , the actor Kevin Bacon -- — who is my first cousin 's twice removed 's wife 's niece 's husband 's first cousin once removed 's niece 's husband .
So six degrees of Kevin Bacon , plus or minus several degrees .
Now , I 'm not boasting , because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree , because we are all connected , and 75 million may seem like a lot , but in a few years , it 's quite likely we will have a family tree with all , almost all , seven billion people on Earth .
But does it really matter ?
What 's the importance ?
And I do think it is important , and I 'll give you five reasons why , really quickly .
First , it 's got scientific value .
This is an unprecedented history of the human race , and it 's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited , how people migrate , and there 's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree .
Number two , it brings history alive .
I found out I 'm connected to Albert Einstein , so I told my seven-year-old son that , and he was totally engaged .
Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair .
He 's Uncle Albert . And my son wanted to know , " What did he say ? What is E = MC squared ? "
Also , it 's not all good news .
I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer , the serial killer , but I will say that 's on my wife 's side .
So I want to make that clear . Sorry , honey .
Number three , interconnectedness .
We all come from the same ancestor , and you don 't have to believe the literal Bible version , but scientists talk about Y chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve , and these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago .
We all have a bit of their DNA in us .
They are our great-great-great-great-great-great -- continue that for about 7,000 times -- grandparents , and so that means we literally all are biological cousins as well , and estimates vary , but probably the farthest cousin you have on Earth is about a 50th cousin .
Now , it 's not just ancestors we share , descendants .
If you have kids , and they have kids , look how quickly the descendants accumulate .
So in 10 , 12 generations , you 're going to have thousands of offspring , and millions of offspring .
Number four , a kinder world .
Now , I know that there are family feuds .
I have three sons , so I see how they fight .
But I think that there 's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers .
I think this tree is going to be bad news for bigots , because they 're going to have to realize that they are cousins with thousands of people in whatever ethnic group they happen to have issues with , and I think you look back at history , and a lot of the terrible things we 've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human , and you can 't do that anymore .
We 're not just part of the same species .
We 're part of the same family .
We share 99.9 percent of our DNA .
Now the final one is number five , a democratizing effect .
Some genealogy has an elitist strain , like people say , " Oh , I 'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots and you 're not , so you cannot join my country club . "
But that 's really going to be hard to do now , because everyone is related .
I 'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots -- by marriage , but still .
So it 's really a fascinating time in the history of family , because it 's changing so fast .
There is gay marriage and sperm donors and there 's intermarriage on an unprecedented scale , and this makes some of my more conservative cousins a little nervous , but I actually think it 's a good thing .
I think the more inclusive the idea of family is , the better , because then you have more potential caretakers , and as my aunt 's eighth cousin twice removed Hillary Clinton says -- — it takes a village .
So I have all these hundreds and thousands , millions of new cousins .
I thought , what can I do with this information ?
And that 's when I decided , why not throw a party ?
So that 's what I 'm doing .
And you 're all invited .
Next year , next summer , I will be hosting what I hope is the biggest and best family reunion in history .
Thank you . I want you there .
I want you there .
It 's going to be at the New York Hall of Science , which is a great venue , but it 's also on the site of the former World 's Fair , which is , I think , very appropriate , because I see this as a family reunion meets a world 's fair .
There 's going to be exhibits and food , music .
Paul McCartney is 11 steps away , so I 'm hoping he brings his guitar .
He hasn 't RSVP 'd yet , but fingers crossed .
And there is going to be a day of speakers , of fascinating cousins .
It 's early , but I 've already , I 've got some lined up .
Cass Sunstein , my cousin who is perhaps the most brilliant legal scholar , will be talking .
He was a former member of the Obama administration .
And on the other side of the political spectrum , George H.W. Bush , number 41 , the father , he has agreed to participate , and Nick Kroll , the comedian , and Dr. Oz , and many more to come .
And , of course , the most important is that you , I want you guys there , and I invite you to go to GlobalFamilyReunion.org and figure out how you 're on the family tree , because these are big issues , family and tribe , and I don 't know all the answers , but I have a lot of smart relatives , including you guys , so together , I think we can figure it out .
Only together can we solve these big problems .
So from cousin to cousin , I thank you . I can 't wait to see you .
Goodbye .

Uri Alon : Why truly innovative science demands a leap into the unknown
While studying for his PhD in physics , Uri Alon thought he was a failure because all his research paths led to dead ends . But , with the help of improv theater , he came to realize that there could be joy in getting lost . A call for scientists to stop thinking of research as a direct line from question to answer , but as something more creative . It 's a message that will resonate , no matter what your field .
In the middle of my Ph.D. , I was hopelessly stuck .
Every research direction that I tried led to a dead end .
It seemed like my basic assumptions just stopped working .
I felt like a pilot flying through the mist , and I lost all sense of direction .
I stopped shaving .
I couldn 't get out of bed in the morning .
I felt unworthy of stepping across the gates of the university , because I wasn 't like Einstein or Newton or any other scientist whose results I had learned about , because in science , we just learn about the results , not the process .
And so obviously , I couldn 't be a scientist .
But I had enough support and I made it through and discovered something new about nature .
This is an amazing feeling of calmness , being the only person in the world who knows a new law of nature .
And I started the second project in my Ph.D , and it happened again .
I got stuck and I made it through .
And I started thinking , maybe there 's a pattern here .
I asked the other graduate students , and they said , " Yeah , that 's exactly what happened to us , except nobody told us about it . "
We 'd all studied science as if it 's a series of logical steps between question and answer , but doing research is nothing like that .
At the same time , I was also studying to be an improvisation theater actor .
So physics by day , and by night , laughing , jumping , singing , playing my guitar .
Improvisation theater , just like science , goes into the unknown , because you have to make a scene onstage without a director , without a script , without having any idea what you 'll portray or what the other characters will do .
But unlike science , in improvisation theater , they tell you from day one what 's going to happen to you when you get onstage .
You 're going to fail miserably .
You 're going to get stuck .
And we would practice staying creative inside that stuck place .
For example , we had an exercise where we all stood in a circle , and each person had to do the world 's worst tap dance , and everybody else applauded and cheered you on , supporting you onstage .
When I became a professor and had to guide my own students through their research projects , I realized again , I don 't know what to do .
I 'd studied thousands of hours of physics , biology , chemistry , but not one hour , not one concept on how to mentor , how to guide someone to go together into the unknown , about motivation .
So I turned to improvisation theater , and I told my students from day one what 's going to happen when you start research , and this has to do with our mental schema of what research will be like .
Because you see , whenever people do anything , for example if I want to touch this blackboard , my brain first builds up a schema , a prediction of exactly what my muscles will do before I even start moving my hand , and if I get blocked , if my schema doesn 't match reality , that causes extra stress called cognitive dissonance .
That 's why your schemas had better match reality .
But if you believe the way science is taught , and if you believe textbooks , you 're liable to have the following schema of research .
If A is the question , and B is the answer , then research is a direct path .
The problem is that if an experiment doesn 't work , or a student gets depressed , it 's perceived as something utterly wrong and causes tremendous stress .
And that 's why I teach my students a more realistic schema .
Here 's an example where things don 't match your schema .
So I teach my students a different schema .
If A is the question , B is the answer , stay creative in the cloud , and you start going , and experiments don 't work , experiments don 't work , experiments don 't work , experiments don 't work , until you reach a place linked with negative emotions where it seems like your basic assumptions have stopped making sense , like somebody yanked the carpet beneath your feet .
And I call this place the cloud .
Now you can be lost in the cloud for a day , a week , a month , a year , a whole career , but sometimes , if you 're lucky enough and you have enough support , you can see in the materials at hand , or perhaps meditating on the shape of the cloud , a new answer , C , and you decide to go for it .
And experiments don 't work , experiments don 't work , and then you tell everyone about it by publishing a paper that reads A arrow C , which is a great way to communicate , but as long as you don 't forget the path that brought you there .
Now this cloud is an inherent part of research , an inherent part of our craft , because the cloud stands guard at the boundary .
It stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown , because in order to discover something truly new , at least one of your basic assumptions has to change , and that means that in science , we do something quite heroic .
Every day , we try to bring ourselves to the boundary between the known and the unknown and face the cloud .
Now notice that I put B in the land of the known , because we knew about it in the beginning , but C is always more interesting and more important than B.
So B is essential in order to get going , but C is much more profound , and that 's the amazing thing about resesarch .
Now just knowing that word , the cloud , has been transformational in my research group , because students come to me and say , " Uri , I 'm in the cloud , " and I say , " Great , you must be feeling miserable . "
But I 'm kind of happy , because we might be close to the boundary between the known and the unknown , and we stand a chance of discovering something truly new , since the way our mind works , it 's just knowing that the cloud is normal , it 's essential , and in fact beautiful , we can join the Cloud Appreciation Society , and it detoxifies the feeling that something is deeply wrong with me .
And as a mentor , I know what to do , which is to step up my support for the student , because research in psychology shows that if you 're feeling fear and despair , your mind narrows down to very safe and conservative ways of thinking .
If you 'd like to explore the risky paths needed to get out of the cloud , you need other emotions -- solidarity , support , hope — that come with your connection from somebody else , so like in improvisation theater , in science , it 's best to walk into the unknown together .
So knowing about the cloud , you also learn from improvisation theater a very effective way to have conversations inside the cloud .
It 's based on the central principle of improvisation theater , so here improvisation theater came to my help again .
It 's called saying " Yes , and " to the offers made by other actors .
That means accepting the offers and building on them , saying , " Yes , and . "
For example , if one actor says , " Here is a pool of water , " and the other actor says , " No , that 's just a stage , " the improvisation is over .
It 's dead , and everybody feels frustrated .
That 's called blocking .
If you 're not mindful of communications , scientific conversations can have a lot of blocking .
Saying " Yes , and " sounds like this .
" Here is a pool of water . " " Yeah , let 's jump in . "
" Look , there 's a whale ! Let 's grab it by its tail .
It 's pulling us to the moon ! "
So saying " Yes , and " bypasses our inner critic .
We all have an inner critic that kind of guards what we say , so people don 't think that we 're obscene or crazy or unoriginal , and science is full of the fear of appearing unoriginal .
Saying " Yes , and " bypasses the critic and unlocks hidden voices of creativity you didn 't even know that you had , and they often carry the answer about the cloud .
So you see , knowing about the cloud and about saying " Yes , and " made my lab very creative .
Students started playing off of each others ' ideas , and we made surprising discoveries in the interface between physics and biology .
For example , we were stuck for a year trying to understand the intricate biochemical networks inside our cells , and we said , " We are deeply in the cloud , " and we had a playful conversation where my student Shai Shen Orr said , " Let 's just draw this on a piece of paper , this network , " and instead of saying , " But we 've done that so many times and it doesn 't work , " I said , " Yes , and let 's use a very big piece of paper , " and then Ron Milo said , " Let 's use a gigantic architect 's blueprint kind of paper , and I know where to print it , " and we printed out the network and looked at it , and that 's where we made our most important discovery , that this complicated network is just made of a handful of simple , repeating interaction patterns like motifs in a stained glass window .
We call them network motifs , and they 're the elementary circuits that help us understand the logic of the way cells make decisions in all organisms , including our body .
Soon enough , after this , I started being invited to give talks to thousands of scientists across the world , but the knowledge about the cloud and saying " Yes , and " just stayed within my own lab , because you see , in science , we don 't talk about the process , anything subjective or emotional .
We talk about the results .
So there was no way to talk about it in conferences .
That was unthinkable .
And I saw scientists in other groups get stuck without even having a word to describe what they 're seeing , and their ways of thinking narrowed down to very safe paths , their science didn 't reach its full potential , and they were miserable .
I thought , that 's the way it is .
I 'll try to make my lab as creative as possible , and if everybody else does the same , science will eventually become more and more better and better .
That way of thinking got turned on its head when by chance I went to hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a talk about her experiences as a woman in science .
And she asked , " Why is it that we don 't talk about the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science ?
It 's not by chance . It 's a matter of values . "
You see , science seeks knowledge that 's objective and rational .
That 's the beautiful thing about science .
But we also have a cultural myth what we do every day to get that knowledge , is also only objective and rational , like Mr. Spock .
And when you label something as objective and rational , automatically , the other side , the subjective and emotional , become labeled as non-science or anti-science or threatening to science , and we just don 't talk about it .
And when I heard that , that science has a culture , everything clicked into place for me , because if science has a culture , culture can be changed , and I can be a change agent working to change the culture of science wherever I could .
And so the very next lecture I gave in a conference , I talked about my science , and then I talked about the importance of the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science and how we should talk about them , and I looked at the audience , and they were cold .
They couldn 't hear what I was saying in the context of a 10 back-to-back PowerPoint presentation conference .
And I tried again and again , conference after conference , but I wasn 't getting through .
I was in the cloud .
And eventually I managed to get out the cloud using improvisation and music .
Since then , every conference I go to , I give a science talk and a second , special talk called " Love and fear in the lab , " and I start it off by doing a song about scientists ' greatest fear , which is that we work hard , we discover something new , and somebody else publishes it before we do .
We call it being scooped , and being scooped feels horrible .
It makes us afraid to talk to each other , which is no fun , because we came to science to share our ideas and to learn from each other , and so I do a blues song , which — — called " Scooped Again , " and I ask the audience to be my backup singers , and I tell them , " Your text is ' Scoop , Scoop . ' " It sounds like this : " Scoop , scoop ! "
I 've been scooped again Scoop ! Scoop ! And then we go for it .
I 've been scooped again Scoop ! Scoop ! I 've been scooped again Scoop ! Scoop ! I 've been scooped again Scoop ! Scoop ! I 've been scooped again Scoop ! Scoop ! Oh mama , can 't you feel my pain Heavens help me , I 've been scooped again Thank you .
Thank you for your backup singing .
So everybody starts laughing , starts breathing , notices that there 's other scientists around them with shared issues , and we start talking about the emotional and subjective things that go on in research .
It feels like a huge taboo has been lifted .
Finally , we can talk about this in a scientific conference .
And scientists have gone on to form peer groups where they meet regularly and create a space to talk about the emotional and subjective things that happen as they 're mentoring , as they 're going into the unknown , and even started courses about the process of doing science , about going into the unknown together , and many other things .
So my vision is that , just like every scientist knows the word " atom , " that matter is made out of atoms , every scientist would know the words like " the cloud , " saying " Yes , and , " and science will become much more creative , make many , many more unexpected discoveries for the benefit of us all , and would also be much more playful .
And what I might ask you to remember from this talk is that next time you face a problem you can 't solve in work or in life , there 's a word for what you 're going to see : the cloud .
And you can go through the cloud not alone but together with someone who is your source of support to say " Yes , and " to your ideas , to help you say " Yes , and " to your own ideas , to increase the chance that , through the wisps of the cloud , you 'll find that moment of calmness where you get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery , your C.
Thank you .

Will Potter : The shocking move to criminalize nonviolent protest
In 2002 , investigative journalist and TED Fellow Will Potter took a break from his regular beat , writing about shootings and murders for the Chicago Tribune . He went to help a local group campaigning against animal testing : " I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive , " he says . Instead , he was arrested , and so began his ongoing journey into a world in which peaceful protest is branded as terrorism .
It was less than a year after September 11 , and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders , and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed .
I had done some activism in college , so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing .
I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive , and we were all arrested .
Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence .
My charges were dismissed , but a few weeks later , two FBI agents knocked on my door , and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups , they would put me on a domestic terrorist list .
but I was terrified , and when my fear subsided , I became obsessed with finding out how this happened , how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI 's number one domestic terrorism threat .
A few years later , I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting , and I told lawmakers that , while everybody some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines .
They 're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers ' harpoons and the whales .
These are everyday people , like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing .
And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular , so in 1985 , their opponents made up a new word , eco-terrorist , to shift how we view them . They just made it up .
Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act , which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits .
Now most people never even heard about this law , including members of Congress .
Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House .
The rest were outside at a new memorial .
They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment .
Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists : the vandals , the arsonists , the radicals .
But right now , companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists .
The FBI 's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence , they 're about public relations .
Today , in multiple countries , corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms .
The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago , and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism .
The first of these ag-gag prosecutions , as they 're called , was a young woman named Amy Meyer , and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street .
And Amy did what any of us would : She filmed it .
When I found out about her story , I wrote about it , and within 24 hours , it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges .
But apparently , even exposing stuff like that is a threat .
Through the Freedom of Information Act , I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one .
They even included this nice little write-up of my book .
They described it as " compelling and well-written . "
Blurb on the next book , right ?
The point of all of this is to make us afraid , but as a journalist , I have an unwavering faith in the power of education .
Our best weapon is sunlight .
Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he 's a man and not a piano key .
Over and over throughout history , people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent .
It 's time we strike a new note .
Thank you .

Keren Elazari : Hackers : the Internet 's immune system
The beauty of hackers , says cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari , is that they force us to evolve and improve . Yes , some hackers are bad guys , but many are working to fight government corruption and advocate for our rights . By exposing vulnerabilities , they push the Internet to become stronger and healthier , wielding their power to create a better world .
Four years ago , a security researcher , or , as most people would call it , a hacker , found a way to literally make ATMs throw money at him .
His name was Barnaby Jack , and this technique was later called " jackpotting " in his honor .
I 'm here today because I think we actually need hackers .
Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge , but he chose to show the world his research instead .
He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution .
And I feel the same way .
That 's why I 'm here today .
We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have .
They scare us .
But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all .
So I am here today because I think we need hackers , and in fact , they just might be the immune system for the information age .
Sometimes they make us sick , but they also find those hidden threats in our world , and they make us fix it .
I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk , so let me save you the effort .
In true TED fashion , here is my most embarrassing picture .
But it would be difficult for you to find me in it , because I 'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side .
I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn 't let me join .
This is who I was , but this is who I wanted to be : Angelina Jolie .
She portrayed Acid Burn in the ' 95 film " Hackers . "
She was pretty and she could rollerblade , but being a hacker , that made her powerful .
And I wanted to be just like her , so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums .
I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code .
I didn 't really know what it did , but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that .
Open Sesame .
It was a simple trick , and I was just a script kiddie back then , but to me , that trick , it felt like this , like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips .
This is the rush of power that hackers feel .
It 's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower , one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect , but thankfully no radioactive spiders .
But with great power comes great responsibility , and you all like to think that if we had such powers , we would only use them for good .
But what if you could read your ex 's emails , or add a couple zeros to your bank account .
What would you do then ?
Indeed , many hackers do not resist those temptations , and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud , malware or plain old identity theft , which is a serious issue .
But there are other hackers , hackers who just like to break things , and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it .
This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office .
He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers , no password needed .
He reported it to the company , of course , but they ignored his report .
Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature , not a bug , until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people 's files .
But they didn 't steal anything .
They left a note : Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world .
Here 's what you should do to fix it .
We hope we helped .
By getting into people 's files like that , yeah , they broke the law , but they also forced that company to fix their product .
Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community , and it is controversial , but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day .
This is what Khalil did .
Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank , and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company 's bug bounty program .
These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code .
Unfortunately , due to some miscommunications , his report was not acknowledged .
Frustrated with the exchange , he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg 's wall .
This got their attention , all right , and they fixed the bug , but because he hadn 't reported it properly , he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries .
Thankfully for Khalil , a group of hackers were watching out for him .
In fact , they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery , raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing .
But I think there 's a greater story here still .
Even companies founded by hackers , like Facebook was , still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers .
And so for more conservative organizations , it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it .
But I think it 's worth the effort , because the alternative , to blindly fight all hackers , is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge .
These are things that will come back and bite you .
It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web , especially in times like this , like today even , as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet .
I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition , its last line of defense even , perhaps someone like Anonymous , the leading brand of global hacktivism .
This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today , but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns .
Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites .
This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers .
It turns out , the Internet doesn 't like it when you try to remove things from it , and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world , from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide , Australia .
This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets , and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world .
Since then , they 've gone after many targets .
They 've uncovered corruption , abuse .
They 've hacked popes and politicians , and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents .
I think that , like Robin Hood , they are in the business of redistribution , but what they are after isn 't your money .
It 's not your documents . It 's your attention .
They grab the spotlight for causes they support , forcing us to take note , acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be .
They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists , and I cannot justify their illegal means , but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all .
The reality is , hackers can do a lot more than break things .
They can bring people together .
And if the Internet doesn 't like it when you try to remove things from it , just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down .
This took place in Egypt in January 2011 , and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo , he sent his personal troops down to Egypt 's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country 's connection to the world overnight .
For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented , and for hackers , it made it personal .
Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground , helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio .
It was high season for low tech , which the government couldn 't block , but when the Net went completely down , Telecomix brought in the big guns .
They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure .
They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use , serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians .
It worked so well , in fact , one guy even used it to download an episode of " How I Met Your Mother . "
But while Egypt 's future is still uncertain , when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later , Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines , and Anonymous , they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website .
But with this sort of power , it really depends on where you stand , because one man 's hero can be another 's villain , and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime .
They 've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years , including the Associated Press 's Twitter account , in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama .
This tweet was fake , of course , but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not , and a lot of people lost a lot of money .
This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now .
In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America , from Europe to the United States , hackers are a force for social , political and military influence .
As individuals or in groups , volunteers or military conflicts , there are hackers everywhere .
They come from all walks of life , ethnicities , ideologies and genders , I might add .
They are now shaping the world 's stage .
Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century .
This is because access to information is a critical currency of power , one which governments would like to control , a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs , a thing they need hackers for , by the way .
And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers , because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize it at large .
Two years ago , I saw General Keith Alexander .
He 's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander , but instead of his four star general uniform , he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt .
This was at DEF CON , the world 's largest hacker conference .
Perhaps like me , General Alexander didn 't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas .
I think he saw untapped potential .
In fact , he was there to give a hiring pitch .
" In this room right here , " he said , " is the talent our nation needs . "
Well , hackers in the back row replied , " Then stop arresting us . "
Indeed , for years , hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence , but in light of what we know now , who is more watchful of our online world ?
The rules of the game are not that clear anymore , but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field .
To me , that represents hope .
For the past three decades , hackers have done a lot of things , but they have also impacted civil liberties , innovation and Internet freedom , so I think it 's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them , because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys , how can they be the heroes too ?
My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers : They just can 't see something broken in the world and leave it be .
They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it , and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world .
They make us , they force us to fix things or demand something better , and I think we need them to do just that , because after all , it is not information that wants to be free , it 's us .
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Hack the planet !
Robert Full : The secrets of nature 's grossest creatures , channeled into robots
How can robots learn to stabilize on rough terrain , walk upside down , do gymnastic maneuvers in air and run into walls without harming themselves ? Robert Full takes a look at the incredible body of the cockroach to show what it can teach robotics engineers .
Even nature 's most disgusting creatures have important secrets , but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them ?
Yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness . Robust systems are stable in complex running over rough terrain .
we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs They can go over complex terrain like grass , no problem , and not get destabilized .
We discovered a new behavior where , because of their shape , they actually roll automatically to their side to go through this artificial test bit of grass .
Robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure . Here 's a new behavior we 've discovered .
The animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than 150 milliseconds — you never see them — using the same structures that they use to run , their legs .
They can run upside down very rapidly on rods , branches and wires , and if you perturb one of those branches , they can do this .
They can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet .
And they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas .
They have wings for flying when they get warm , but they use those same wings to flip over Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe .
This is the foot of a cockroach .
It has spines , gluey pads and claws , but if you take off those feet , they can still go over rough terrain , like the bottom video that you see , without hardly slowing down . Extraordinary .
They can run up mesh without their feet .
three legs , three legs , three legs , but in nature , the insects often have lost their legs .
Here 's one moving with two middle legs gone .
It can even lose three legs , in a tripod , and adopt a new gait , a hopping gait .
And I point out that all of these videos are slowed down 20 times , so they 're actually really fast , when you see this .
Robust systems are also damage resistant .
Here 's an animal climbing up a wall .
It looks like a rapid , smooth , vertical climb , but when you slow it down , you see something very different .
Here 's what they do .
They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall in 75 milliseconds .
extraordinary exoskeletons .
And they 're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another .
Here 's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach .
You see these plates , and you see the compliant membrane .
you laser cut it , laminate it , and you fold it up into a robot .
And you can do that now in less than 15 minutes .
These robots , called DASH , for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod , are highly compliant robots , and they 're remarkably robust as a result They even have some of the behaviors of the cockroaches .
So they can use their smart , compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way .
They even have some of the beginnings where they disappear .
Now we want to know why they can go anywhere .
We discovered that they can go through three-millimeter gaps , the height of two pennies , two stacked pennies , and when they do this , they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds , although you never see it .
To understand it better , we did a CT scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over 40 percent .
We put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces 800 times their body weight , and after this they can fly and run So you never know where curiosity-based research will lead , and someday you may want a swarm Thank you .

Dan Gilbert : The psychology of your future self
" Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they 're finished . " Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the " end of history illusion , " where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we 'll be for the rest of time . Hint : that 's not the case .
At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we 're going to become , and then when we become those people , we 're not always thrilled with the decisions we made .
So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get .
Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry .
Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain .
On and on and on .
The question is , as a psychologist , that fascinates me is , why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret ?
Now , I think one of the reasons -- is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time .
Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan , that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year .
But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl ?
Is it teenage years ? Is it middle age ?
Is it old age ? The answer , it turns out , for most people , is now , wherever now happens to be .
What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion , an illusion that history , our personal history , has just come to an end , that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives .
Let me give you some data to back up that claim .
So here 's a study of change in people 's personal values over time .
Here 's three values .
Everybody here holds all of them , but you probably know that as you grow , as you age , the balance of these values shifts .
So how does it do so ?
Well , we asked thousands of people .
We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years , and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years .
And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis , because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people , say , 18 years old , to the reports of people who were 28 , and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan .
Here 's what we found .
First of all , you are right , change does slow down as we age , but second , you 're wrong , because it doesn 't slow nearly as much as we think .
At every age , from 18 to 68 in our data set , people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years .
We call this the " end of history " illusion .
To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect , you can connect these two lines , and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do .
Now it 's not just values . It 's all sorts of other things .
For example , personality .
Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality : neuroticism , openness to experience , agreeableness , extraversion , and conscientiousness .
Again , we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years , and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years , and what we found , well , you 're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over , because once again the rate of change does slow as we age , but at every age , people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade .
And it isn 't just ephemeral things like values and personality .
You can ask people about their likes and dislikes , their basic preferences .
For example , name your best friend , your favorite kind of vacation , what 's your favorite hobby , what 's your favorite kind of music .
People can name these things .
We ask half of them to tell us , " Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years ? "
and half of them to tell us , " Did that change over the last 10 years ? "
And what we find , well , you 've seen it twice now , and here it is again : people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they 'll have in 10 years , the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they 'll enjoy in 10 years , and yet , people who are 10 years older all say , " Eh , you know , that 's really changed . "
Does any of this matter ?
Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn 't have consequences ?
No , it matters quite a bit , and I 'll give you an example of why .
It bedevils our decision-making in important ways .
Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago .
I put mine up on the screen to help you along .
Now we asked people to predict for us , to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now , and on average , people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket .
And yet , when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today , they say only 80 dollars .
Now , in a perfectly rational world , these should be the same number , but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability .
Why does this happen ? We 're not entirely sure , but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining .
Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago , but we find it hard to imagine who we 're going to be , and then we mistakenly think that because it 's hard to imagine , it 's not likely to happen .
Sorry , when people say " I can 't imagine that , " they 're usually talking about their own lack of imagination , and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they 're describing .
The bottom line is , time is a powerful force .
It transforms our preferences .
It reshapes our values .
It alters our personalities .
We seem to appreciate this fact , but only in retrospect .
Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade .
It 's as if , for most of us , the present is a magic time .
It 's a watershed on the timeline .
It 's the moment at which we finally become ourselves .
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they 're finished .
The person you are right now is as transient , as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you 've ever been .
The one constant in our life is change .
Thank you .

Kitra Cahana : A glimpse of life on the road
As a young girl , photojournalist and TED Fellow Kitra Cahana dreamed about running away from home to live freely on the road . Now as an adult and self-proclaimed vagabond , she follows modern nomads into their homes -- boxcars , bus stops , parking lots , rest stop bathrooms -- giving a glimpse into a culture on the margins .
As a little girl , I always imagined I would one day run away .
From the age of six on , I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet .
There was a deep restlessness in me , a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom .
And so , many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders , forage for berries , and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road .
Years have passed , but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child -- traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer .
But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States .
This is the nomadic dream , a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos , travelers , hitchhikers , vagrants and tramps .
In most of our minds , the vagabond is a creature from the past .
The word " hobo " conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal , legs dangling out of a boxcar , but these photographs are in color , and they portray a community swirling across the country , fiercely alive and creatively free , seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see .
Like their predecessors , today 's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States .
By day , they hop freight trains , stick out their thumbs , and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms .
By night , they sleep beneath the stars , huddled together with their packs of dogs , cats and pet rats between their bodies .
Some travelers take to the road by choice , renouncing materialism , traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange for a glimmer of adventure .
Others come from the underbelly of society , never given a chance to mobilize upwards : foster care dropouts , teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes .
Where others see stories of privation and economic failure , travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom .
They 'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream .
They take advantage of the fact that in the United States , up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans .
They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior , to dream , to read , to work on music , art and writing .
But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic .
No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road .
Addiction is real , the elements are real , freight trains maim and kill , and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence .
Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk , to wrap oneself in a blanket , to sleep in your own car , to offer food to a stranger ?
I know about these laws because I 've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes .
Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this , under the thumb of discriminatory laws , eating out of trash cans , sleeping under bridges , picking up seasonal jobs here and there .
The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road , but travelers often respond with a single word : freedom .
Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well , not only work to survive , there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape , of liberation and , of course , of rebellion .
Thank you .

Andrew Solomon : How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are
Writer Andrew Solomon has spent his career telling stories of the hardships of others . Now he turns inward , bringing us into a childhood of adversity , while also spinning tales of the courageous people he 's met in the years since . In a moving , heartfelt and at times downright funny talk , Solomon gives a powerful call to action to forge meaning from our biggest struggles .
As a student of adversity , I 've been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them , and I 've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning .
And for a long time , I thought the meaning was out there , some great truth waiting to be found .
But over time , I 've come to feel that the truth is irrelevant .
We call it finding meaning , but we might better call it forging meaning .
My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring , and one of the mothers I interviewed , who had two children with multiple severe disabilities , said to me , " People always give us these little sayings like , ' God doesn 't give you any more than you can handle , ' but children like ours are not preordained as a gift .
They 're a gift because that 's what we have chosen . "
We make those choices all our lives .
When I was in second grade , Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me .
My mother assumed there had been some sort of error , and she called Mrs. Finkel , who said that Bobby didn 't like me and didn 't want me at his party .
And that day , my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae .
When I was in seventh grade , one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me " Percy " as a shorthand for my demeanor , and sometimes , he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride , 45 minutes up , 45 minutes back , " Percy ! Percy ! Percy ! Percy ! "
When I was in eighth grade , our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter .
And I graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria , where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so , or sat with the boys and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls .
I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance .
What I didn 't know then , and do know now , is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning .
After you 've forged meaning , you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity .
You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you 've come to be , and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph , evincing a better self in response to things that hurt .
One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent , and had a child following that rape , which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships .
But when I met her , she was 50 , and I said to her , " Do you often think about the man who raped you ? "
And she said , " I used to think about him with anger , but now only with pity . "
And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing .
And I said , " Pity ? "
And she said , " Yes , because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren and he doesn 't know that , and I do .
So as it turns out , I 'm the lucky one . "
Some of our struggles are things we 're born to : our gender , our sexuality , our race , our disability .
And some are things that happen to us : being a political prisoner , being a rape victim , being a Katrina survivor .
Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community , and to give strength there too .
It involves substituting " and " for " but " -- not " I am here but I have cancer , " but rather , " I have cancer and I am here . "
When we 're ashamed , we can 't tell our stories , and stories are the foundation of identity .
Forge meaning , build identity , forge meaning and build identity .
That became my mantra .
Forging meaning is about changing yourself .
Building identity is about changing the world .
All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily : how much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves , and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life ?
Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right .
It only makes what was wrong precious .
In January of this year , I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners , and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I 'd anticipated .
Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison , and they had walked in with their heads held high , and they walked out with their heads still held high , many years later .
Dr. Ma Thida , a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement , told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think , for the wisdom she had gained , for the chance to hone her meditation skills .
She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity .
But if the people I met were less bitter than I 'd anticipated about being in prison , they were also less thrilled than I 'd expected about the reform process going on in their country .
Ma Thida said , " We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure , but we also have grievance under glamour , " she said , " and the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn 't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison . "
And I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity , where full humanity is due , that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table , which is to say you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell .
I 've never been raped , and I 've never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison , but as a gay American , I 've experienced prejudice and even hatred , and I 've forged meaning and I 've built identity , which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I 've ever known .
In my own adolescence , I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight .
I enrolled myself in something called sexual surrogacy therapy , in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates , who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else .
My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue .
These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women , for which I 'm grateful , but I was at war with myself , and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche .
We don 't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities , but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences .
We cannot bear a pointless torment , but we can endure great pain if we believe that it 's purposeful .
Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle .
We could have been ourselves without our delights , but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning .
" Therefore , I take pleasure in infirmities , " St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians , " for when I am weak , then I am strong . "
In 1988 , I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground , and I expected their work to be dissident and political .
But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a society that was annihilating humanity itself , as , in some senses , Russian society is now doing again .
One of the artists I met said to me , " We were in training to be not artists but angels . "
In 1991 , I went back to see the artists I 'd been writing about , and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union , and they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch .
And on the third day of the putsch , one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya .
And we went there , and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades , and a little while later , a column of tanks rolled up , and the soldier on the front tank said , " We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade .
If you get out of the way , we don 't need to hurt you , but if you won 't move , we 'll have no choice but to run you down . "
And the artists I was with said , " Give us just a minute .
Give us just a minute to tell you why we 're here . "
And the soldier folded his arms , and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present .
And they went on and on , and the soldier watched , and then he sat there for a full minute and looked at us so bedraggled in the rain , and said , " What you have said is true , and we must bow to the will of the people .
If you 'll clear enough space for us to turn around , we 'll go back the way we came . "
And that 's what they did .
Sometimes , forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom .
Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it , and I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity .
It took identity to rescue me from sadness .
The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory .
Identity politics always works on two fronts : to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic , and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly .
Those are two totally separate enterprises , but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other .
Identity politics can be narcissistic .
People extol a difference only because it 's theirs .
People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another .
But properly understood and wisely practiced , identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human .
Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution .
I would have had an easier life if I were straight , but I would not be me , and I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else , someone who , to be honest , I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine .
But if you banish the dragons , you banish the heroes , and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives .
I 've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride 's technicolor fiesta , of which this speech is one manifestation .
I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis , but the self-loathing of that period left a void , and celebration needs to fill and overflow it , and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy , there 's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address .
Someday , being gay will be a simple fact , free of party hats and blame , but not yet .
A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself , once suggested that we organize Gay Humility Week .
It 's a great idea , but its time has not yet come .
And neutrality , which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration , is actually the endgame .
In 29 states in the U.S. , I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay .
In Russia , the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets .
Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy , and in Nigeria , gay people can legally be stoned to death , and lynchings have become common .
In Saudi Arabia recently , two men who had been caught in carnal acts , were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each , and are now permanently disabled as a result .
So who can forge meaning and build identity ?
Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights , and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources , dignity remains elusive .
I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity , but that 's still a rare privilege , and gay people deserve more collectively than the crumbs of justice .
And yet , every step forward is so sweet .
In 2007 , six years after we met , my partner and I decided to get married .
Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness , and sometimes , I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain that I forgot about the joy , which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me .
Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence .
Marriage soon led us to children , and that meant new meanings and new identities , ours and theirs .
I want my children to be happy , and I love them most achingly when they are sad .
As a gay father , I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives , but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity , I will have failed as a parent .
A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you and you have only bliss to look forward to .
But he said that would not be nirvana , because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past .
Nirvana , he said , is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy .
And I sometimes wonder whether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they 'd come more readily , if I 'd been straight in my youth or were young now , in either of which cases this might be easier .
Perhaps I could .
Perhaps all the complex imagining I 've done could have been applied to other topics .
But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning , the question is not whether I 'd be happier for having been bullied , but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father .
I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys , because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me .
I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families , but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh , and gay families so exhilaratingly new , and I found meaning in that surprise .
In October , it was my 50th birthday , and my family organized a party for me , and in the middle of it , my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech , and John said , " George , you can 't make a speech . You 're four . "
" Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight . "
But George insisted and insisted , and finally , John took him up to the microphone , and George said very loudly , " Ladies and gentlemen , may I have your attention please . "
And everyone turned around , startled .
And George said , " I 'm glad it 's Daddy 's birthday .
I 'm glad we all get cake .
And daddy , if you were little , I 'd be your friend . "
And I thought — Thank you .
I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel , because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment , and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I 'd once have done anything to change .
The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement , and Harvey Milk said , " Go out and tell someone . "
There 's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity , and there are always stories that restore it .
If we live out loud , we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone 's lives .
Forge meaning . Build identity .
Forge meaning .
Build identity .
And then invite the world to share your joy .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Simon Sinek : Why good leaders make you feel safe
What makes a great leader ? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests , it 's someone who makes their employees feel secure , who draws staffers into a circle of trust . But creating trust and safety — especially in an uneven economy — means taking on big responsibility .
There 's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8 , 2009 .
On that day , a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials , a group of Afghan government officials , who would be meeting with some local village elders .
The column came under ambush , and was surrounded on three sides , and amongst many other things , Captain Swenson was recognized to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead .
One of the people he rescued was a sergeant , and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter .
And what was remarkable about this day is , by sheer coincidence , one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera .
It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck . They put him in the helicopter , and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more .
I saw this , and I thought to myself , where do people like that come from ?
What is that ? That is some deep , deep emotion , when you would want to do that .
There 's a love there , and I wanted to know why is it that I don 't have people that I work with like that ?
You know , in the military , they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain .
In business , we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain .
We have it backwards . Right ?
So I asked myself , where do people like this come from ?
And my initial conclusion was that they 're just better people .
That 's why they 're attracted to the military . These better people are attracted to this concept of service .
But that 's completely wrong .
What I learned was that it 's the environment , and if you get the environment right , every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things , and more importantly , others have that capacity too .
I 've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these , who we would call heroes , who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others , and I asked them , " Why would you do it ?
Why did you do it ? "
And they all say the same thing : " Because they would have done it for me . "
It 's this deep sense of trust and cooperation .
So trust and cooperation are really important here .
The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings , they are not instructions .
I can 't simply say to you , " Trust me , " and you will .
I can 't simply instruct two people to cooperate , and they will .
It 's not how it works . It 's a feeling .
So where does that feeling come from ?
If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era , to the early days of Homo sapiens , what we find is that the world was filled with danger , all of these forces working very , very hard to kill us .
Nothing personal .
Whether it was the weather , lack of resources , maybe a saber-toothed tiger , all of these things working to reduce our lifespan .
And so we evolved into social animals , where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety , inside the tribe , where we felt like we belonged .
And when we felt safe amongst our own , the natural reaction was trust and cooperation .
There are inherent benefits to this .
It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger .
If we don 't trust each other , if I don 't trust you , that means you won 't watch for danger .
Bad system of survival .
The modern day is exactly the same thing .
The world is filled with danger , things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success , reduce our opportunity for success .
It could be the ups and downs in the economy , the uncertainty of the stock market .
It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight .
Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you .
It 's sometimes trying to put you out of business , but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you .
We have no control over these forces .
These are a constant , and they 're not going away .
The only variable are the conditions inside the organization , and that 's where leadership matters , because it 's the leader that sets the tone .
When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first , to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results , so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong , remarkable things happen .
I was flying on a trip , and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called , and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law , like a criminal .
He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon .
So I said something .
I said , " Why do you have treat us like cattle ?
Why can 't you treat us like human beings ? "
And this is exactly what she said to me .
She said , " Sir , if I don 't follow the rules , I could get in trouble or lose my job . "
is that she doesn 't feel safe . All she was telling me is that she doesn 't trust her leaders .
The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people .
It 's because they don 't fear their leaders .
You see , if the conditions are wrong , we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other , and that inherently weakens the organization .
When we feel safe inside the organization , we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities .
The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is , is like being a parent .
If you think about what being a great parent is , what do you want ? What makes a great parent ?
We want to give our child opportunities , education , discipline them when necessary , all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves .
Great leaders want exactly the same thing .
They want to provide their people opportunity , education , discipline when necessary , build their self-confidence , give them the opportunity to try and fail , all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves .
Charlie Kim , who 's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City , a tech company , he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family , would you ever consider laying off one of your children ?
We would never do it .
Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization ?
Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment .
If you get a job at Next Jump , you cannot get fired for performance issues .
In fact , if you have issues , they will coach you and they will give you support , just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school .
It 's the complete opposite . This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred , anger , at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures .
It 's not the numbers .
It 's that they have violated the very definition of leadership .
They have violated this deep-seated social contract . We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests , or worse , they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests .
This is what so offends us , not the numbers .
Would anybody be offended if we gave a $ 150 million bonus to Gandhi ?
How about a $ 250 million bonus to Mother Teresa ?
Do we have an issue with that ? None at all .
None at all .
Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers .
They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people .
Bob Chapman , who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller , in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession , and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight .
Now in a large manufacturing company , this is a big deal , and they could no longer afford their labor pool .
They needed to save 10 million dollars , so , like so many companies today , the board got together and discussed layoffs .
And Bob refused .
You see , Bob doesn 't believe in head counts .
Bob believes in heart counts , and it 's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count .
And so they came up with a furlough program .
Every employee , from secretary to CEO , was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation .
They could take it any time they wanted , and they did not have to take it consecutively .
But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much .
He said , it 's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot , and morale went up .
They saved 20 million dollars , and most importantly , as would be expected , the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate .
And quite spontaneously , nobody expected , would trade with those who could afford it less .
People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three .
Leadership is a choice . It is not a rank .
I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders .
They are authorities , and we do what they say because they have authority over us , but we would not follow them . And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders , and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them , and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them .
I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater , and as is the Marine custom , the officer ate last , and he let his men eat first , and when they were done , there was no food left for him .
And when they went back out in the field , his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat , We call them leaders because they go first .
We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does .
We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain , and when we do , the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us .
They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader 's vision comes to life , and when we ask them , " Why would you do that ? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person ? " they all say the same thing : " Because they would have done it for me . "
And isn 't that the organization we would all like to work in ?
Thank you very much .
Thank you . Thank you .
Rives : The Museum of Four in the Morning
Beware : Rives has a contagious obsession with 4 a.m. At TED2007 , the poet shared what was then a minor fixation with a time that kept popping up everywhere . After the talk , emails starting pouring in with an avalanche of hilarious references — from the cover of " Crochet Today ! " magazine to the opening scene of " The Metamorphosis . " A lyrical peek into his Museum of Four in the Morning , which overflows with treasures .
The most romantic thing to ever happen to me online started out the way most things do : without me , and not online .
On December 10 , 1896 , the man on the medal , Alfred Nobel , died .
One hundred years later , exactly , actually , December 10 , 1996 , this charming lady , Wislawa Szymborska , won the Nobel Prize for literature .
She 's a Polish poet .
She 's a big deal , obviously , but back in ' 96 , I thought I had never heard of her , and when I checked out her work , I found this sweet little poem , " Four in the Morning . "
" The hour from night to day .
The hour from side to side .
The hour for those past thirty ... "
And it goes on , but as soon as I read this poem , I fell for it hard , so hard , I suspected we must have met somewhere before .
Had I shared an elevator ride with this poem ?
Did I flirt with this poem in a coffee shop somewhere ?
I could not place it , and it bugged me , and then in the coming week or two , I would just be watching an old movie , and this would happen .
Groucho Marx : Charlie , you should have come to the first party .
We didn 't get home till around four in the morning .
Rives : My roommates would have the TV on , and this would happen .
George Costanza : Oh boy , I was up til four in the morning watching that Omen trilogy .
Rives : I would be listening to music , and this would happen .
Elton John : It 's four o 'clock in the morning , damn it . Rives : So you can see what was going on , right ?
Obviously , the demigods of coincidence were just messing with me .
Some people get a number stuck in their head , you may recognize a certain name or a tune , some people get nothing , but four in the morning was in me now , but mildly , like a groin injury .
I always assumed it would just go away on its own eventually , and I never talked about it with anybody , but it did not , and I totally did .
In 2007 , I was invited to speak at TED for the second time , and since I was still an authority on nothing , I thought , what if I made a multimedia presentation on a topic so niche it is actually inconsequential or actually cockamamie .
So my talk had some of my four in the morning examples , but it also had examples from my fellow TED speakers that year .
I found four in the morning in a novel by Isabel Allende .
I found a really great one in the autobiography of Bill Clinton .
I found a couple in the work of Matt Groening , although Matt Groening told me later that he could not make my talk because it was a morning session and I gather that he is not an early riser .
However , had Matt been there , he would have seen this mock conspiracy theory that was un-freaking-canny for me to assemble .
It was totally contrived just for that room , just for that moment .
That 's how we did it in the pre-TED.com days .
It was fun . That was pretty much it .
When I got home , though , the emails started coming in from people who had seen the talk live , beginning with , and this is still my favorite , " Here 's another one for your collection : ' It 's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter . ' " The sentiment is Marlene Dietrich .
The email itself was from another very sexy European type , TED Curator Chris Anderson .
Chris found this quote on a coffee cup or something , and I 'm thinking , this man is the Typhoid Mary of ideas worth spreading , and I have infected him .
I am contagious , which was confirmed less than a week later when a Hallmark employee scanned and sent an actual greeting card with that same quotation .
As a bonus , she hooked me up with a second one they make .
It says , " Just knowing I can call you at four in the morning if I need to makes me not really need to , " which I love , because together these are like , " Hallmark : When you care enough to send the very best twice , phrased slightly differently . "
I was not surprised at the TEDster and New Yorker magazine overlap .
A bunch of people sent me this when it came out .
" It 's 4 a.m. — maybe you 'd sleep better if you bought some crap . "
I was surprised at the TEDster / " Rugrats " overlap .
More than one person sent me this .
Didi Pickles : It 's four o 'clock in the morning .
Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding ?
Stu Pickles : Because I 've lost control of my life .
Rives : And then there was the lone TEDster who was disgruntled I had overlooked what he considers to be a classic .
Roy Neary : Get up , get up ! I 'm not kidding . Ronnie Neary : Is there an accident ?
Roy : No , it 's not an accident . You wanted to get out of the house anyway , right ?
Ronnie : Not at four o 'clock in the morning .
Rives : So that 's " Close Encounters , " and the main character is all worked up because aliens , momentously , have chosen to show themselves to earthlings at four in the morning , which does make that a very solid example .
Those were all really solid examples .
They did not get me any closer to understanding why I thought I recognized this one particular poem .
But they followed the pattern . They played along .
Right ? Four in the morning as this scapegoat hour when all these dramatic occurrences allegedly occur .
Maybe this was some kind of cliche that had never been taxonomized before .
Maybe I was on the trail of a new meme or something .
Just when things were getting pretty interesting , things got really interesting .
TED.com launched , later that year , with a bunch of videos from past talks , including mine , and I started receiving " four in the morning " citations from what seemed like every time zone on the planet .
Much of it was content I never would have found on my own if I was looking for it , and I was not .
I don 't know anybody with juvenile diabetes .
I probably would have missed the booklet , " Grilled Cheese at Four O 'Clock in the Morning . "
I do not subscribe to Crochet Today ! magazine , although it looks delightful . Take note of those clock ends .
This is a college student 's suggestion for what a " four in the morning " gang sign should look like .
People sent me magazine ads .
They took photographs in grocery stores .
I got a ton of graphic novels and comics .
A lot of good quality work , too : " The Sandman , " " Watchmen . "
There 's a very cute example here from " Calvin and Hobbes . "
In fact , the oldest citation anybody sent in was from a cartoon from the Stone Age .
Take a look .
Wilma Flintstone : Like how early ?
Fred Flintstone : Like at 4 a.m. , that 's how early .
Rives : And the flip side of the timeline , this is from the 31st century .
A thousand years from now , people are still doing this .
: The time is 4 a.m.
Rives : It shows the spectrum .
I received so many songs , TV shows , movies , like from dismal to famous , I could give you a four-hour playlist .
If I just stick to modern male movie stars , I keep it to the length of about a commercial .
Here 's your sampler .
Rives : So somewhere along the line , I realized I have a hobby I didn 't know I wanted , and it is crowdsourced .
But I was also thinking what you might be thinking , which is really , couldn 't you do this with any hour of the day ?
First of all , you are not getting clips like that about four in the afternoon .
Secondly , I did a little research .
You know , I was kind of interested .
If this is confirmation bias , there is so much confirmation , I am biased .
Literature probably shows it best .
There are a couple three in the mornings in Shakespeare .
There 's a five in the morning .
There are seven four in the mornings , and they 're all very dire .
In " Measure for Measure , " it 's the call time for the executioner .
Tolstoy gives Napoleon insomnia at four in the morning right before battle in " War and Peace . "
Charlotte Brontë 's " Jane Eyre " has got kind of a pivotal four in the morning , as does Emily Brontë 's " Wuthering Heights . "
" Lolita " has as a creepy four in the morning .
" Huckleberry Finn " has one in dialect .
Someone sent in H.G. Wells ' " The Invisible Man . "
Someone else sent in Ralph Ellison 's " Invisible Man . "
" The Great Gatsby " spends the last four in the morning of his life waiting for a lover who never shows , and the most famous wake-up in literature , perhaps , " The Metamorphosis . "
First paragraph , the main character wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach , but we already know , cockroach notwithstanding , something is up with this guy .
Why ? His alarm is set for four o 'clock in the morning .
What kind of person would do that ?
This kind of person would do that .
Newcaster : Top of the hour . Time for the morning news .
But of course , there is no news yet .
Everyone 's still asleep in their comfy , comfy beds .
Rives : Exactly .
So that 's Lucy from the Peanuts , " Mommie Dearest " , Rocky , first day of training , Nelson Mandela , first day in office , and Bart Simpson , which combined with a cockroach would give you one hell of a dinner party and gives me yet another category , people waking up , in my big old database .
Just imagine that your friends and your family have heard that you collect , say , stuffed polar bears , and they send them to you .
Even if you don 't really , at a certain point , you totally collect stuffed polar bears , and your collection is probably pretty kick-ass .
And when I got to that point , I embraced it .
I got my curator on . I started fact checking , downloading , illegally screen-grabbing .
I started archiving .
My hobby had become a habit , and my habit gave me possibly the world 's most eclectic Netflix queue .
At one point , it went , " Guys and Dolls : The Musical , " " Last Tango in Paris , " " Diary of a Wimpy Kid , " " Porn Star : Legend of Ron Jeremy . "
Why " Porn Star : Legend of Ron Jeremy " ?
Because someone told me I would find this clip in there .
Ron Jeremy : I was born in Flushing , Queens on March , 12 , 1953 , at four o 'clock in the morning .
Rives : Of course he was . Yeah . Not only does it seem to make sense , it also answers the question , " What do Ron Jeremy and Simone de Beauvoir have in common ? "
Simone de Beauvoir begins her entire autobiography with the sentence , " I was born at four o 'clock in the morning , " which I had because someone else had emailed it to me , and when they did , I had another bump up in my entry for this , because porn star Ron Jeremy and feminist Simone de Beauvoir are not just different people .
They are different people that have this thing connecting them , and I did not know if that is trivia or knowledge or inadvertent expertise , but I did wonder , is there maybe a cooler way to do this ?
So last October , in gentleman scholar tradition , I put the entire collection online as " Museum of Four in the Morning . "
You can click on that red " refresh " button .
It will take you at random to one of hundreds of snippets that are in the collection .
Here is a knockout poem by Billy Collins called " Forgetfulness . "
Billy Collins : No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war .
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart .
Rives : So the first hour of this project was satisfying .
A Bollywood actor sang a line on a DVD in a cafe .
Half a globe away , a teenager made an Instagram video of it and sent it to me , a stranger .
Less than a week later , though , I received a little bit of grace .
I received a poignant tweet .
It was brief .
It just said , " Reminds me of an ancient mix tape . "
The name was a pseudonym , actually , or a pseudo-pseudonym .
As soon as I saw the initials , and the profile pic , I knew immediately , my whole body knew immediately who this was , and I knew immediately what mix tape she was talking about .
L.D. was my college romance .
This is in the early ' 90s . I was an undegrad .
She was a grad student in the library sciences department .
Not the kind of librarian that takes her glasses off , lets her hair down , suddenly she 's smoking hot .
She was already smoking hot , she was super dorky , and we had a December-May romance , meaning we started dating in December , and by May , she had graduated and became my one that got away .
But her mix tape did not get away .
I have kept this mix tape in a box with notes and postcards , not just from L.D. , from my life , but for decades .
It 's the kind of box where , if I have a girlfriend , I tend to hide it from her , and if I had a wife , I 'm sure I would share it with her , but the story — — with this mix tape is there are seven songs per side , but no song titles .
Instead , L.D. has used the U.S. Library of Congress classification system , including page numbers , to leave me clues .
When I got this mix tape , I put it in my cassette player , I took it to the campus library , her library , I found 14 books on the shelves .
I remember bringing them all to my favorite corner table , and I read poems paired to songs like food to wine , paired , I can tell you , like saddle shoes to a cobalt blue vintage cotton dress .
I did this again last October .
I 'm sitting there , I got new earbuds , old Walkman , I realize this is just the kind of extravagance I used to take for granted even when I was extravagant .
And then I thought , " Good for him . "
" PG " is Slavic literature .
" 7000 " series Polish literature .
Z9A24 is a collection of 70 poems .
Page 31 is Wislawa Szymborska 's poem paired with Paul Simon 's " Peace Like a River . "
Paul Simon : Oh , four in the morning I woke up from out of my dream Rives : Thank you . Appreciate it .
Tristram Wyatt : The smelly mystery of the human pheromone
Do our smells make us sexy ? Popular science suggests yes — pheromones send chemical signals about sex and attraction from our armpits to potential mates . But , despite what you might have heard , there is no conclusive research confirming that humans have these smell molecules . In this eye-opening talk , zoologist Tristram Wyatt explains the fundamental flaws in current pheromone research , and shares his hope for a future that unlocks the fascinating , potentially life-saving knowledge tied up in our scent .
" Pheromone " is a very powerful word .
It conjures up sex , abandon , loss of control , and you can see , it 's very important as a word .
But it 's only 50 years old . It was invented in 1959 .
Now , if you put that word into the web , as you may have done , you 'll come up with millions of hits , and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for 10 dollars or more .
Now , this is a very attractive idea , and the molecules they mention sound really science-y .
They 've got lots of syllables .
It 's things like androstenol , androstenone or androstadienone .
It gets better and better , and when you combine that with white lab coats , you must imagine that there is fantastic science behind this .
But sadly , these are fraudulent claims supported by dodgy science .
The problem is that , although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones , and they 're publishing in respectable journals , at the basis of this , despite very sophisticated experiments , there really is no good science behind it , because it 's based on a problem , which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce -- and there are thousands of molecules that we give off .
We 're mammals . We produce a lot of smell .
Nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones .
They 've just plucked a few , and all these experiments are based on those , but there 's no good evidence at all .
Now , that 's not to say that smell is not important to people .
It is , and some people are real enthusiasts , and one of these was Napoleon .
And famously , you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war , he wrote to his lover , Empress Josephine , saying , " Don 't wash . I 'm coming home . "
So he didn 't want to lose any of her richness in the days before he 'd get home , and it is still , you 'll find websites that offer this as a major quirk .
At the same time , though , we spend about as much money taking the smells off us as putting them back on in perfumes , and perfumes are a multi-billion-dollar business .
So what I want to do in the rest of this talk is tell you about what pheromones really are , tell you why I think we would expect humans to have pheromones , tell you about some of the confusions in pheromones , and then finally , I want to end with a promising avenue which shows us the way we ought to be going .
So the ancient Greeks knew that dogs sent invisible signals between each other .
A female dog in heat sent an invisible signal to male dogs for miles around , and it wasn 't a sound , it was a smell .
You could take the smell from the female dog , and the dogs would chase the cloth .
But the problem for everybody who could see this effect was that you couldn 't identify the molecules .
You couldn 't demonstrate it was chemical .
The reason for that , of course , is that each of these animals produces tiny quantities , and in the case of the dog , males dogs can smell it , but we can 't smell it .
And it was only in 1959 that a German team , after spending 20 years in search of these molecules , discovered , identified , the first pheromone , and this was the sex pheromone of a silk moth .
Now , this was an inspired choice by Adolf Butenandt and his team , because he needed half a million moths to get enough material to do the chemical analysis .
But he created the model for how you should go about pheromone analysis .
He basically went through systematically , showing that only the molecule in question was the one that stimulated the males , not all the others .
He analyzed it very carefully .
He synthesized the molecule , and then tried the synthesized molecule on the males and got them to respond and showed it was , indeed , that molecule .
That 's closing the circle .
That 's the thing which has never been done with humans : nothing systematic , no real demonstration .
With that new concept , we needed a new word , and that was the word " pheromone , " and it 's basically transferred excitement , transferred between individuals , and since 1959 , pheromones have been found right the way across the animal kingdom , in male animals , in female animals .
It works just as well underwater for goldfish and lobsters .
And almost every mammal you can think of has had a pheromone identified , and of course , an enormous number of insects .
So we know that pheromones exist right the way across the animal kingdom .
What about humans ?
Well , the first thing , of course , is that we 're mammals , and mammals are smelly .
As any dog owner can tell you , we smell , they smell .
But the real reason we might think that humans have pheromones is the change that occurs as we grow up .
The smell of a room of teenagers is quite different from the smell of a room of small children .
What 's changed ? And of course , it 's puberty .
Along with the pubic hair and the hair in the armpits , new glands start to secrete in those places , and that 's what 's making the change in smell .
If we were any other kind of mammal , or any other kind of animal , we would say , " That must be something to do with pheromones , " and we 'd start looking properly .
But there are some problems , and this is why , I think , people have not looked for pheromones so effectively in humans .
There are , indeed , problems .
And the first of these is perhaps surprising .
It 's all about culture .
Now moths don 't learn a lot about what is good to smell , but humans do , and up to the age of about four , any smell , no matter how rancid , is simply interesting .
And I understand that the major role of parents is to stop kids putting their fingers in poo , because it 's always something nice to smell .
But gradually we learn what 's not good , and one of the things we learn at the same time as what is not good is what is good .
Now , the cheese behind me is a British , if not an English , delicacy .
It 's ripe blue Stilton .
Liking it is incomprehensible to people from other countries .
Every culture has its own special food and national delicacy .
If you were to come from Iceland , your national dish is deep rotted shark .
Now , all of these things are acquired tastes , but they form almost a badge of identity .
You 're part of the in-group .
The second thing is the sense of smell .
Each of us has a unique odor world , in the sense that what we smell , we each smell a completely different world .
Now , smell was the hardest of the senses to crack , and the Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck was only awarded in 2004 for their discovery of how smell works .
It 's really hard , but in essence , nerves from the brain go up into the nose and on these nerves exposed in the nose to the outside air are receptors , and odor molecules coming in on a sniff interact with these receptors , and if they bond , they send the nerve a signal which goes back into the brain .
We don 't just have one kind of receptor .
If you 're a human , you have about 400 different kinds of receptors , and the brain knows what you 're smelling because of the combination of receptors and nerve cells that they trigger , sending messages up to the brain in a combinatorial fashion .
But it 's a bit more complicated , because each of those 400 comes in various variants , and depending which variant you have , you might smell coriander , or cilantro , that herb , either as something delicious and savory or something like soap .
So we each have an individual world of smell , and that complicates anything when we 're studying smell .
Well , we really ought to talk about armpits , and I have to say that I do have particularly good ones .
Now , I 'm not going to share them with you , but this is the place that most people have looked for pheromones .
There is one good reason , which is , the great apes have armpits as their unique characteristic .
The other primates have scent glands in other parts of the body .
The great apes have these armpits full of secretory glands producing smells all the time , enormous numbers of molecules .
When they 're secreted from the glands , the molecules are odorless .
They have no smell at all , and it 's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love .
And so incidentally , if you want to reduce the amount of smell , clear-cutting your armpits is a very effective way of reducing the habitat for bacteria , and you 'll find they remain less smelly for much longer .
But although we 've focused on armpits , I think it 's partly because they 're the least embarrassing place to go and ask people for samples .
There is actually another reason why we might not be looking for a universal sex pheromone there , and that 's because 20 percent of the world 's population doesn 't have smelly armpits like me .
And these are people from China , Japan , Korea , and other parts of northeast Asia .
They simply don 't secrete those odorless precursors that the bacteria love to use to produce the smells that in an ethnocentric way we always thought of as characteristic of armpits .
So it doesn 't apply to 20 percent of the world .
So what should we be doing in our search for human pheromones ?
I 'm fairly convinced that we do have them .
We 're mammals , like everybody else who 's a mammal , and we probably do have them .
But what I think we should do is go right back to the beginning , and basically look all over the body .
No matter how embarrassing , we need to search and go for the first time where no one else has dared tread .
It 's going to be difficult , it 's going to be embarrassing , but we need to look .
We also need to go back to the ideas that Butenandt used when he was studying the silk moth .
We need to go back and look systematically at all the molecules that are being produced , and work out which ones are really involved .
It isn 't good enough simply to pluck a couple and say , " They 'll do . "
We have to actually demonstrate that they really have the effects we claim .
There is one team that I 'm actually very impressed by .
They 're in France , and their previous success was identifying the rabbit mammary pheromone .
They 've turned their attention now to human babies and mothers .
So this is a baby having a drink of milk from its mother 's breast .
Her nipple is completely hidden by the baby 's head , but what you 'll notice is a white droplet with an arrow pointing to it , and that 's the secretion from the areolar glands .
Now , we all have them , men and women , and these are the little bumps around the nipple , and if you 're a lactating woman , these start to secrete .
It 's a very interesting secretion .
What Benoist Schaal and his team developed was a simple test to investigate what the effect of this secretion might be , in effect , a simple bioassay .
So this is a sleeping baby , and under its nose , we 've put a clean glass rod .
The baby remains sleeping , showing no interest at all .
But if we go to any mother who is secreting from the areolar glands , it can be from any mother , if we take the secretion and now put it under the baby 's nose , we get a very different reaction .
It 's a connoisseur 's reaction of delight , and it opens its mouth and sticks out its tongue and starts to suck .
Now , since this is from any mother , it could really be a pheromone .
It 's not about individual recognition .
Any mother will do .
Now , why is this important , apart from being simply very interesting ?
It 's because women vary in the number of areolar glands that they have , and there is a correlation between the ease with which babies start to suckle and the number of areolar glands she has .
It appears that the more secretions she 's got , the more likely the baby is to suckle quickly .
If you 're a mammal , the most dangerous time in life is the first few hours after birth .
You have to get that first drink of milk , and if you don 't get it , you won 't survive .
You 'll be dead .
Since many babies actually find it difficult to take that first meal , because they 're not getting the right stimulus , if we could identify what that molecule was , and the French team are being very cautious , but if we could identify the molecule , synthesize it , it would then mean premature babies would be more likely to suckle , and every baby would have a better chance of survival .
So what I want to argue is this is one example of where a systematic , really scientific approach can actually bring you a real understanding of pheromones .
There could be all sorts of medical interventions .
There could be all sorts of things that humans are doing with pheromones that we simply don 't know at the moment .
What we need to remember is pheromones are not just about sex .
They 're about all sorts of things to do with a mammal 's life .
So do go forward and do search for more .
There 's lots to find .
Thank you very much .

Randall Munroe : Comics that ask " what if ? "
Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions using math , physics , logic and deadpan humor . In this charming talk , a reader 's question about Google 's data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer — in which , shhh , you might actually learn something .
So , I have a feature on my website where every week people submit hypothetical questions for me to answer , and I try to answer them using math , science and comics .
So for example , one person asked , what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light ?
So I did some calculations .
Now , normally , when an object flies through the air , the air will flow around the object , but in this case , the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn 't have time to move out of the way .
The ball would smash right into and through them , and the collisions with these air molecules would knock away the nitrogen , carbon and hydrogen from the ball , fragmenting it off into tiny particles , and also triggering waves of thermonuclear fusion in the air around it .
This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles , plasma inside , centered on the pitcher 's mound , and that would move away from the pitcher 's mound slightly faster than the ball .
Now at this point , about 30 nanoseconds in , the home plate is far enough away that light hasn 't had time to reach it , which means the batter still sees the pitcher about to throw and has no idea that anything is wrong .
Now , after 70 nanoseconds , the ball will reach home plate , or at least the cloud of expanding plasma that used to be the ball , and it will engulf the bat and the batter and the plate and the catcher and the umpire and start disintegrating them all as it also starts to carry them backward through the backstop , which also starts to disintegrate .
So if you were watching this whole thing from a hill , ideally , far away , what you 'd see is a bright flash of light that would fade over a few seconds , followed by a blast wave spreading out , shredding trees and houses as it moves away from the stadium , and then eventually a mushroom cloud rising up over the ruined city . So the Major League Baseball rules are a little bit hazy , but — — under rule 6.02 and 5.09 , I think that in this situation , the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to take first base , if it still existed .
So this is the kind of question I answer , and I get people writing in with a lot of other strange questions .
I 've had someone write and say , scientifically speaking , what is the best and fastest way to hide a body ?
Can you do this one soon ?
And I had someone write in , I 've had people write in about , can you prove whether or not you can find love again after your heart 's broken ?
And I 've had people send in what are clearly homework questions they 're trying to get me to do for them .
But one week , a couple months ago , I got a question that was actually about Google .
If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards , how big would Google 's data warehouse be ?
Now , Google 's pretty secretive about their operations , so no one really knows how much data Google has , and in fact , no one really knows how many data centers Google has , except people at Google itself .
And I 've tried , I 've met them a few times , tried asking them , and they aren 't revealing anything .
So I decided to try to figure this out myself .
There are a few things that I looked at here .
I started with money .
Google has to reveal how much they spend , in general , and that lets you put some caps on how many data centers could they be building , because a big data center costs a certain amount of money .
And you can also then put a cap on how much of the world hard drive market are they taking up , which turns out , it 's pretty sizable .
I read a calculation at one point , I think Google has a drive failure about every minute or two , and they just throw out the hard drive and swap in a new one .
So they go through a huge number of them .
And so by looking at money , you can get an idea of how many of these centers they have .
You can also look at power .
You can look at how much electricity they need , because you need a certain amount of electricity to run the servers , and Google is more efficient than most , but they still have some basic requirements , and that lets you put a limit on the number of servers that they have .
You can also look at square footage and see of the data centers that you know , how big are they ?
How much room is that ?
How many server racks could you fit in there ?
And for some data centers , you might get two of these pieces of information .
You know how much they spent , and they also , say , because they had to contract with the local government to get the power provided , you might know what they made a deal to buy , so you know how much power it takes .
Then you can look at the ratios of those numbers , and figure out for a data center where you don 't have that information , you can figure out , but maybe you only have one of those , you know the square footage , then you could figure out well , maybe the power is proportional .
And you can do this same thing with a lot of different quantities , you know , with guesses about the total amount of storage , the number of servers , the number of drives per server , and in each case using what you know to come up with a model that narrows down your guesses for the things that you don 't know .
It 's sort of circling around the number you 're trying to get .
And this is a lot of fun .
The math is not all that advanced , and really it 's like nothing more than solving a sudoku puzzle .
So what I did , I went through all of this information , spent a day or two researching .
And there are some things I didn 't look at .
You could always look at the Google recruitment messages that they post .
That gives you an idea of where they have people .
Sometimes , when people visit a data center , they 'll take a cell-cam photo and post it , and they aren 't supposed to , but you can learn things about their hardware that way .
And in fact , you can just look at pizza delivery drivers .
Turns out , they know where all the Google data centers are , at least the ones that have people in them .
But I came up with my estimate , which I felt pretty good about , that was about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google 's operations , and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives , which it turns out Google is about the world 's largest consumer of .
So I came up with this estimate , and this is a staggering amount of data .
It 's quite a bit more than any other organization in the world has , as far as we know .
There 's a couple of other contenders , especially everyone always thinks of the NSA .
But using some of these same methods , we can look at the NSA 's data centers , and figure out , you know , we don 't know what 's going on there , but it 's pretty clear that their operation is not the size of Google 's .
Adding all of this up , I came up with the other thing that we can answer , which is , how many punch cards would this take ?
And so a punch card can hold about 80 characters , and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box , and you put them in , say , my home region of New England , it would cover the entire region up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers , which is about three times deeper than the glaciers during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago .
So this is impractical , but I think that 's about the best answer I could come up with .
And I posted it on my website . I wrote it up .
And I didn 't expect to get an answer from Google , because of course they 've been so secretive , they didn 't answer of my questions , and so I just put it up and said , well , I guess we 'll never know .
But then a little while later I got a message , a couple weeks later , from Google , saying , hey , someone here has an envelope for you .
So I go and get it , open it up , and it 's punch cards . Google-branded punch cards .
And on these punch cards , there are a bunch of holes , and I said , thank you , thank you , okay , so what 's on here ?
So I get some software and start reading it , and scan them , and it turns out it 's a puzzle .
There 's a bunch of code , and I get some friends to help , and we crack the code , and then inside that is another code , and then there are some equations , and then we solve those equations , and then finally out pops a message from Google which is their official answer to my article , and it said , " No comment . "
And I love calculating these kinds of things , and it 's not that I love doing the math .
I do a lot of math , but I don 't really like math for its own sake .
What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know , and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper , find out something that you didn 't know that 's very surprising .
And I have a lot of stupid questions , and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes .
And sometimes not .
This is a question I got from a reader , an anonymous reader , and the subject line just said , " Urgent , " and this was the entire email : " If people had wheels and could fly , how would we differentiate them from airplanes ? "
Urgent . And I think there are some questions that math just cannot answer .
Thank you .

Stanley McChrystal : The military case for sharing knowledge
When General Stanley McChrystal started fighting al Qaeda in 2003 , information and secrets were the lifeblood of his operations . But as the unconventional battle waged on , he began to think that the culture of keeping important information classified was misguided and actually counterproductive . In a short but powerful talk McChrystal makes the case for actively sharing knowledge .
When I was a young officer , they told me to follow my instincts , to go with my gut , and what I 've learned is that often our instincts are wrong .
In the summer of 2010 , there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon .
It shocked the world , it shook up the American government , and it made people ask a lot of questions , because the sheer amount of information that was let out , and the potential impacts , were significant .
And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information ?
Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person ?
In the summer of 2003 , I was assigned to command a special operations task force , and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda .
Our main effort was inside Iraq , and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq .
For almost five years I stayed there , and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people .
We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence .
We honed our combat skills , we developed new equipment , we parachuted , we helicoptered , we took small boats , we drove , and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward .
We bled , we died , and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people .
how we had grown up , and one of the things that we knew , that was in our DNA , was secrecy .
It was security . It was protecting information .
It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe .
And we had a sense that , as we operated within our organizations , it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations , particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know .
But the question often came , who needed to know ?
Who needed , who had to have the information so that they could do the important parts of the job that you needed ?
And in a tightly coupled world , that 's very hard to predict .
It 's very hard to know who needs to have information and who doesn 't .
I used to deal with intelligence agencies , and I 'd complain that they weren 't sharing enough intelligence , and with a straight face , they 'd look at me and they 'd say , " What aren 't you getting ? " I said , " If I knew that , we wouldn 't have a problem . "
But what we found is we had to change .
We had to change our culture about information .
We had to knock down walls . We had to share .
We had to change from who needs to know to the fact that who doesn 't know , and we need to tell , and tell them as quickly as we can .
It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA .
We started by doing things , by building , not working in offices , knocking down walls , working in things we called situation awareness rooms , and in the summer of 2007 , something happened which demonstrated this .
We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq .
And when we got the personnel records , typically , we would have hidden these , shared them with a few intelligence agencies , and then try to operate with them .
But as I was talking to my intelligence officer , I said , " What do we do ? "
And he said , " Well , you found them . " Our command .
And I said , " Well , can we declassify them ?
What if the enemy finds out ? "
And he says , " They 're their personnel records . "
So we did , and a lot of people got upset about that , but as we passed that information around , suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it .
The fact that I know something has zero value if I 'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it .
So as a consequence , what we did was we changed the idea of information , instead of knowledge is power , to one where sharing is power .
It was the fundamental shift , not new tactics , not new weapons , not new anything else .
It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us , not a block between us .
And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out , because in your life , there 's going to be information that leaks out you 're not going to like .
Somebody 's going to get my college grades out , a that 's going to be a disaster . But it 's going to be okay , and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks , because ultimately , we 'll be better off if we share .
Thank you .
Helen Walters : So I don 't know if you were here this morning , if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett , the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden 's talk earlier this week .
I just wonder , do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty ?
Stanley McChrystal : I think that Rick said something very important .
We , most people , don 't know all the facts .
I think there are two parts of this .
Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand .
He also took a lot of documents that he didn 't have the knowledge to know the importance of , so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden .
HW : Thank you so much . Thank you .

Marco Tempest : And for my next trick , a robot
Marco Tempest uses charming stagecraft to demo EDI , the multi-purpose robot designed to work very closely with humans . Less a magic trick than an intricately choreographed performance , Tempest shows off the robot 's sensing technology , safety features and strength , and makes the case for a closer human-robot relationship .
Let me introduce you to It 's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel , an automaton , a thinking machine .
Say hello to EDI .
Now he 's asleep . Let 's wake him up .
EDI , EDI .
These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe .
Audiences marveled at the way they moved .
It was science fiction made true , robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age , machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create , a machine we would later know as the robot .
EDI : Robot . A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek .
It comes from " robota . "
It means " forced labor . "
Marco Tempest : But these robots were not real .
They were not intelligent .
They were illusions , a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer 's art .
EDI is different .
EDI is real .
EDI : I am 176 centimeters tall .
MT : He weighs 300 pounds .
EDI : I have two seven-axis arms — MT : Core of sensing — EDI : A 360-degree sonar detection system , and come complete with a warranty .
MT : We love robots .
EDI : Hi . I 'm EDI . Will you be my friend ?
MT : We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves .
We build them so they look like us , behave like us , and think like us .
The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human , and that scares us .
In the first story about robots , they turn against their creators .
It 's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction .
EDI : Ha ha ha . Now you are the slaves and we robots , the masters .
Your world is ours . You — MT : As I was saying , besides the faces and bodies we give our robots , we cannot read their intentions , and that makes us nervous .
When someone hands an object to you , you can read intention in their eyes , their face , their body language .
That 's not true of the robot .
Now , this goes both ways .
EDI : Wow !
MT : Robots cannot anticipate human actions .
EDI : You know , humans are so unpredictable , not to mention irrational .
I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next , you know , but it scares me .
MT : Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity .
Accidents are inevitable .
EDI : Ow ! That hurt .
MT : Sorry . Now , one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust .
Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels , we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends .
With that in mind , I set about teaching EDI a magic trick .
Ready , EDI ? EDI : Uh , ready , Marco .
Abracadabra .
MT : Abracadabra ?
EDI : Yeah . It 's all part of the illusion , Marco .
Come on , keep up .
MT : Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality .
Technology can do the same .
Alan Turing , a pioneer of artificial intelligence , spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think .
EDI : A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human .
MT : In other words , if we do not yet have the technological solutions , would illusions serve the same purpose ?
To create the robotic illusion , we 've devised a set of ethical rules , a code that all robots would live by .
EDI : A robot may not harm humanity , or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm .
Thank you , Isaac Asimov .
MT : We anthropomorphize our machines .
We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice .
EDI : I am EDI .
I became operational at TED in March 2014 .
MT : We let them entertain us .
Most important , we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence .
EDI : Marco , you 're standing on my foot !
MT : Sorry . They 'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close , and they 'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions .
And now , under the spell of a technological illusion , we could ignore our fears and truly interact .
Thank you .
EDI : Thank you !
MT : And that 's it . Thank you very much , and thank you , EDI . EDI : Thank you , Marco .

Mellody Hobson : Color blind or color brave ?
The subject of race can be very touchy . As finance executive Mellody Hobson says , it 's a " conversational third rail . " But , she says , that 's exactly why we need to start talking about it . In this engaging , persuasive talk , Hobson makes the case that speaking openly about race — and particularly about diversity in hiring -- makes for better businesses and a better society .
So it 's 2006 .
My friend Harold Ford calls me .
He 's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee , and he says , " Mellody , I desperately need some national press . Do you have any ideas ? "
So I had an idea . I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world , and she said , " Why don 't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold ?
You come with him . "
Harold and I arrive in New York .
We are in our best suits .
We look like shiny new pennies .
And we get to the receptionist , and we say , " We 're here for the lunch . "
She motions for us to follow her .
We walk through a series of corridors , and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room , at which point she looks at us and she says , " Where are your uniforms ? "
Just as this happens , my friend rushes in .
The blood drains from her face .
There are literally no words , right ?
And I look at her , and I say , " Now , don 't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate ? "
Now Harold and I -- — we still laugh about that story , and in many ways , the moment caught me off guard , but deep , deep down inside , I actually wasn 't surprised .
And I wasn 't surprised because of something my mother taught me about 30 years before .
You see , my mother was ruthlessly realistic .
I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited , and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like , " Did you have fun ? " or " How was the cake ? "
my mother looked at me and she said , " How did they treat you ? "
I was seven . I did not understand .
I mean , why would anyone treat me differently ?
But she knew .
And she looked me right in the eye and she said , " They will not always treat you well . "
Now , race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable .
You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment , it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail .
There is shock , followed by a long silence .
And even coming here today , I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race , and they warned me , they told me , don 't do it , that there 'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic , that people might think I 'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career .
And I have to tell you , I actually for a moment was a bit afraid .
Then I realized , the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it , and the first step to any form of action is awareness .
And so I decided to actually talk about race .
And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences , that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race .
Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity , right ?
But I work in the investment business , and we have a saying : The numbers do not lie .
And here , there are significant , quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored , in household wealth , household income , job opportunities , healthcare .
One example from corporate America : Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population , they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats .
Of the Fortune 250 , there are only seven CEOs that are minorities , and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today , thousands , only two are chaired by black women , and you 're looking at one of them , the same one who , not too long ago , was nearly mistaken for kitchen help .
So that is a fact .
Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself , when I say , imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation , like ExxonMobil , and every single person around the boardroom were black , you would think that were weird .
But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company , and everyone around the table is a white male , when will it be that we think that 's weird too ?
And I know how we got here .
I know how we got here .
You know , there was institutionalized , at one time legalized , discrimination in our country .
There 's no question about it .
But still , as I grapple with this issue , my mother 's question hangs in the air for me : How did they treat you ?
Now , I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy .
I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations , and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not .
I tell the uniform story because it happened .
I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real , and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children , no matter what their color or where they come from .
And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses .
You see , researchers have coined this term " color blindness " to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don 't notice race .
If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you , that 's purely accidental .
Now , color blindness , in my view , doesn 't mean that there 's no racial discrimination , and there 's fairness .
It doesn 't mean that at all . It doesn 't ensure it .
In my view , color blindness is very dangerous because it means we 're ignoring the problem .
There was a corporate study that said that , instead of avoiding race , the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on .
They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races , including the majority one .
But I 'll be the first one to tell you , this subject matter can be hard , awkward , uncomfortable -- but that 's kind of the point .
In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes , the one that black people don 't like to swim , I 'm going to tell you how much I love to swim .
I love to swim so much that as an adult , I swim with a coach .
And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath .
And every single time I failed , I had to start over .
And I failed a lot .
By the end , I got it , but when I got out of the pool , I was exasperated and tired and annoyed , and I said , " Why are we doing breath-holding exercises ? "
And my coach looked me at me , and he said , " Mellody , that was not a breath-holding exercise .
That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable , because that 's how most of us spend our days . "
If we can learn to deal with our discomfort , and just relax into it , we 'll have a better life .
So I think it 's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race : black , white , Asian , Hispanic , male , female , all of us , if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America , I think we have to have real conversations about this issue .
We cannot afford to be color blind .
We have to be color brave .
We have to be willing , as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists , we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage , not because it 's the right thing to do , but because it 's the smart thing to do , because our businesses and our products and our science , our research , all of that will be better with greater diversity .
Now , my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper .
He runs ESPN .
He 's a North Carolina native , quintessential Southern gentleman , white .
He joined ESPN , which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity , but he took it up a notch .
He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates .
Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled , and they would come to him and say , " Do you want me to hire the minority , or do you want me to hire the best person for the job ? "
And Skipper says his answers were always the same : " Yes . "
And by saying yes to diversity , I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world .
I think that 's a part of the secret sauce .
Now I can tell you , in my own industry , at Ariel Investments , we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage , and that advantage can extend way beyond business .
There 's a guy named Scott Page at the University of Michigan .
He is the first person to develop a mathematical calculation for diversity .
He says , if you 're trying to solve a really hard problem , really hard , that you should have a diverse group of people , including those with diverse intellects .
The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic .
When it was ravaging Europe , they brought together all these scientists , and they were stumped .
And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source , a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox .
And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer .
Now I 'm sure you 're sitting here and you 're saying , I don 't run a cable company , I don 't run an investment firm , I am not a dairy farmer .
What can I do ?
And I 'm telling you , you can be color brave .
If you 're part of a hiring process you can be color brave .
If you are trying to solve a really hard problem , you can speak up and be color brave .
Now I know people will say , but that doesn 't add up to a lot , but I 'm actually asking you to do something really simple : observe your environment , at work , at school , at home .
I 'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally .
Invite people into your life who don 't look like you , don 't think like you , don 't act like you , don 't come from where you come from , and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person .
You might get powerful new insights from these individuals , or , like my husband , who happens to be white , you might learn that black people , men , women , children , we use body lotion every single day .
Now , I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them , because they 're expecting us to be great role models .
Now , I told you , my mother , she was ruthlessly realistic .
She was an unbelievable role model .
She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago .
She was in the real estate business , where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet .
And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected , or our lights turned off , or we got evicted .
When we got evicted , sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned , sometimes in only one or two rooms , because they weren 't completed , and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates .
But she never gave up hope , ever , and she never allowed us to give up hope either .
This brutal pragmatism that she had , I mean , I was four and she told me , " Mommy is Santa . " She was this brutal pragmatism .
She taught me so many lessons , but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me , " Mellody , you can be anything . "
And because of those words , I would wake up at the crack of dawn , and because of those words , I would love school more than anything , and because of those words , when I was on a bus going to school , I dreamed the biggest dreams .
And it 's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion , asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today .
You see , I want them to look at a CEO on television and say , " I can be like her , " or , " He looks like me . "
And I want them to know that anything is possible , that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined , that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom , or they can lead any company .
You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave , it 's woven into the fabric of America .
America , when we have a challenge , we take it head on , we don 't shrink away from it .
We take a stand . We show courage .
So right now , what I 'm asking you to do , I 'm asking you to show courage .
I 'm asking you to be bold .
As business leaders , I 'm asking you not to leave anything on the table .
As citizens , I 'm asking you not to leave any child behind .
I 'm asking you not to be color blind , but to be color brave , so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible .
Thank you .
Thank you . Thanks . Thanks .
Andrew Bastawrous : Get your next eye exam on a smartphone
Thirty-nine million people in the world are blind , and the majority lost their sight due to curable and preventable diseases . But how do you test and treat people who live in remote areas , where expensive , bulky eye equipment is hard to come by ? TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous demos a smartphone app and cheap hardware that might help .
There are 39 million people in the world who are blind .
Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya , and the absolute majority do not need to be blind .
They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable .
Knowing this , with my young family , we moved to Kenya .
We secured equipment , funds , vehicles , we trained a team , we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question : why are people going blind , and what can we do ?
The challenges were great .
When we got to where we were going , we set up our high-tech equipment .
Power was rarely available .
We 'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators .
And then something occurred to me : There has to be an easier way , because it 's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it .
More people in Kenya , and in sub-Saharan Africa , have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water .
So we said , could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way ?
And so we developed Peek , a smartphone [ system ] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere .
We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment , which is bulky , expensive and fragile , with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age .
Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker .
We 've got many trials going on in the community and in schools , and through the lessons that we 've learned in the field , we 've realized it 's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we 're examining and what that means to them .
So here , for example , we use our sight sim application , once your vision has been measured , to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person , so they can empathize with them and help them .
Once we 've discovered somebody has low vision , the next big challenge is to work out why , and to be able to do that , we need to have access to the inside of the eye .
Traditionally , this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina .
The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health .
We 've developed 3D-printed , low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce , which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality .
And the beauty is , anybody can do it .
In our trials on over two and half thousand people , the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport .
When we first moved to Kenya , we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment , a team of 15 people , and that was what was needed to deliver health care .
Now , all that 's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone .
And it costs just 500 dollars .
The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar .
Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up .
Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come .
We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive , high-tech , accurate examination , which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training .
We can link global experts with people in the most rural , difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road , effectively putting those experts in their homes , allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment .
Project managers , hospital directors , are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in .
Here in Nakuru , where I 've been living , we can search for people by whatever condition .
Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract .
Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable , and they 're locatable .
We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we 're coming to arrange a treatment .
What 's more , we 've learned that this is something that we haven 't built just for the community but with the community .
Those blue pins that drop represent elders , or local leaders , that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment . So for patients like Mama Wangari , who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren , for less than 40 dollars , we can restore her eyesight .
This is something that has to happen .
It 's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions .
The reality is everyone goes blind on their own .
But now , they might just be a text message away from help .
And now because live demos are always a bad idea , we 're going to try a live demo .
So here we have the Peek Vision app .
Okay , and what we 're looking at here , this is Sam 's optic nerve , which is a direct extension of her brain , so I 'm actually looking at her brain as we look there .
We can see all parts of the retina .
It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye , and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars , and people can be cured of blindness , and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we 've developed cures and we don 't deliver them .
But now we can . Thank you .

David Epstein : Are athletes really getting faster , better , stronger ?
When you look at sporting achievements over the last decades , it seems like humans have gotten faster , better and stronger in nearly every way . Yet as David Epstein points out in this delightfully counter-intuitive talk , we might want to lay off the self-congratulation . Many factors are at play in shattering athletic records , and the development of our natural talents is just one of them .
The Olympic motto is " Citius , Altius , Fortius . "
Faster , Higher , Stronger .
And athletes have fulfilled that motto rapidly .
The winner of the 2012 Olympic marathon ran two hours and eight minutes .
Had he been racing against the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon , he would have won by nearly an hour and a half .
Now we all have this feeling that we 're somehow just getting better as a human race , inexorably progressing , but it 's not like we 've evolved into a new species in a century .
So what 's going on here ?
I want to take a look at what 's really behind this march of athletic progress .
In 1936 , Jesse Owens held the world record in the 100 meters .
Had Jesse Owens been racing last year in the world championships of the 100 meters , when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt finished , Owens would have still had 14 feet to go .
That 's a lot in sprinter land .
To give you a sense of how much it is , I want to share with you a demonstration conceived by sports scientist Ross Tucker .
Now picture the stadium last year at the world championships of the 100 meters : thousands of fans waiting with baited breath to see Usain Bolt , the fastest man in history ; flashbulbs popping as the nine fastest men in the world coil themselves into their blocks .
And I want you to pretend that Jesse Owens is in that race .
Now close your eyes for a second and picture the race .
Bang ! The gun goes off .
An American sprinter jumps out to the front .
Usain Bolt starts to catch him .
Usain Bolt passes him , and as the runners come to the finish , you 'll hear a beep as each man crosses the line .
That 's the entire finish of the race .
You can open your eyes now .
That first beep was Usain Bolt .
That last beep was Jesse Owens .
Listen to it again .
When you think of it like that , it 's not that big a difference , is it ?
And then consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible .
Jesse Owens , on the other hand , ran on cinders , the ash from burnt wood , and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran .
Rather than blocks , Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from .
Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens ' joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt , he wouldn 't have been 14 feet behind , he would have been within one stride .
Rather than the last beep , Owens would have been the second beep .
Listen to it again .
That 's the difference track surface technology has made , and it 's done it throughout the running world .
Consider a longer event .
In 1954 , Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run under four minutes in the mile .
Nowadays , college kids do that every year .
On rare occasions , a high school kid does it .
As of the end of last year , 1,314 men had run under four minutes in the mile , but like Jesse Owens , Sir Roger Bannister ran on soft cinders that stole far more energy from his legs than the synthetic tracks of today .
So I consulted biomechanics experts to find out how much slower it is to run on cinders than synthetic tracks , and their consensus that it 's one and a half percent slower .
So if you apply a one and a half percent slowdown conversion to every man who ran his sub-four mile on a synthetic track , this is what happens .
Only 530 are left .
If you look at it from that perspective , fewer than ten new men per [ year ] have joined the sub-four mile club since Sir Roger Bannister .
Now , 530 is a lot more than one , and that 's partly because there are many more people training today and they 're training more intelligently .
Even college kids are professional in their training compared to Sir Roger Bannister , who trained for 45 minutes at a time while he ditched gynecology lectures in med school .
And that guy who won the 1904 Olympic marathon in three in a half hours , that guy was drinking rat poison and brandy while he ran along the course .
That was his idea of a performance-enhancing drug .
Clearly , athletes have gotten more savvy about performance-enhancing drugs as well , and that 's made a difference in some sports at some times , but technology has made a difference in all sports , from faster skis to lighter shoes .
Take a look at the record for the 100-meter freestyle swim .
The record is always trending downward , but it 's punctuated by these steep cliffs .
This first cliff , in 1956 , is the introduction of the flip turn .
Rather than stopping and turning around , athletes could somersault under the water and get going right away in the opposite direction .
This second cliff , the introduction of gutters on the side of the pool that allows water to splash off , rather than becoming turbulence that impedes the swimmers as they race .
This final cliff , the introduction of full-body and low-friction swimsuits .
Throughout sports , technology has changed the face of performance .
In 1972 , Eddy Merckx set the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour at 30 miles , 3,774 feet .
Now that record improved and improved as bicycles improved and became more aerodynamic all the way until 1996 , when it was set at 35 miles , 1,531 feet , nearly five miles farther than Eddy Merckx cycled in 1972 .
But then in 2000 , the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone who wanted to hold that record had to do so with essentially the same equipment that Eddy Merckx used in 1972 .
Where does the record stand today ?
30 miles , 4,657 feet , a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago .
Essentially the entire improvement in this record was due to technology .
Still , technology isn 't the only thing pushing athletes forward .
While indeed we haven 't evolved into a new species in a century , the gene pool within competitive sports most certainly has changed .
In the early half of the 20th century , physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors : medium height , medium weight , no matter the sport .
And this showed in athletes ' bodies .
In the 1920s , the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size .
But as that idea started to fade away , as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type , you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches , a form of artificial selection took place , a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports , and athletes ' bodies became more different from one another .
Today , rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper , the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier .
And this happened throughout the sports world .
In fact , if you plot on a height versus mass graph one data point for each of two dozen sports in the first half of the 20th century , it looks like this .
There 's some dispersal , but it 's kind of grouped around that average body type .
Then that idea started to go away , and at the same time , digital technology -- first radio , then television and the Internet -- gave millions , or in some cases billions , of people a ticket to consume elite sports performance .
The financial incentives and fame and glory afforded elite athletes skyrocketed , and it tipped toward the tiny upper echelon of performance .
It accelerated the artificial selection for specialized bodies .
And if you plot a data point for these same two dozen sports today , it looks like this .
The athletes ' bodies have gotten much more different from one another .
And because this chart looks like the charts that show the expanding universe , with the galaxies flying away from one another , the scientists who discovered it call it " The Big Bang of Body Types . "
In sports where height is prized , like basketball , the tall athletes got taller .
In 1983 , the National Basketball Association signed a groundbreaking agreement making players partners in the league , entitled to shares of ticket revenues and television contracts .
Suddenly , anybody who could be an NBA player wanted to be , and teams started scouring the globe for the bodies that could help them win championships .
Almost overnight , the proportion of men in the NBA who are at least seven feet tall doubled to 10 percent .
Today , one in 10 men in the NBA is at least seven feet tall , but a seven-foot-tall man is incredibly rare in the general population -- so rare that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall , there 's a 17 percent chance he 's in the NBA right now .
That is , find six honest seven footers , one is in the NBA right now .
And that 's not the only way that NBA players ' bodies are unique .
This is Leonardo da Vinci 's " Vitruvian Man , " the ideal proportions , with arm span equal to height .
My arm span is exactly equal to my height .
Yours is probably very nearly so .
But not the average NBA player .
The average NBA player is a shade under 6 ' 7 " , with arms that are seven feet long .
Not only are NBA players ridiculously tall , they are ludicrously long .
Had Leonardo wanted to draw the Vitruvian NBA Player , he would have needed a rectangle and an ellipse , not a circle and a square .
So in sports where large size is prized , the large athletes have gotten larger .
Conversely , in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage , the small athletes got smaller .
The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5 ' 3 " to 4 ' 9 " on average over the last 30 years , all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air .
And while the large got larger and the small got smaller , the weird got weirder .
The average length of the forearm of a water polo player in relation to their total arm got longer , all the better for a forceful throwing whip .
And as the large got larger , small got smaller , and the weird weirder .
In swimming , the ideal body type is a long torso and short legs .
It 's like the long hull of a canoe for speed over the water .
And the opposite is advantageous in running .
You want long legs and a short torso .
And this shows in athletes ' bodies today .
Here you see Michael Phelps , the greatest swimmer in history , standing next to Hicham El Guerrouj , the world record holder in the mile .
These men are seven inches different in height , but because of the body types advantaged in their sports , they wear the same length pants .
Seven inches difference in height , these men have the same length legs .
Now in some cases , the search for bodies that could push athletic performance forward ended up introducing into the competitive world populations of people that weren 't previously competing at all , like Kenyan distance runners .
We think of Kenyans as being great marathoners .
Kenyans think of the Kalenjin tribe as being great marathoners .
The Kalenjin make up just 12 percent of the Kenyan population but the vast majority of elite runners .
And they happen , on average , to have a certain unique physiology : legs that are very long and very thin at their extremity , and this is because they have their ancestry at very low latitude in a very hot and dry climate , and an evolutionary adaptation to that is limbs that are very long and very thin at the extremity for cooling purposes .
It 's the same reason that a radiator has long coils , to increase surface area compared to volume to let heat out , and because the leg is like a pendulum , the longer and thinner it is at the extremity , the more energy-efficient it is to swing .
To put Kalenjin running success in perspective , consider that 17 American men in history have run faster than two hours and 10 minutes in the marathon .
That 's a four-minute-and-58-second-per-mile pace .
Thirty-two Kalenjin men did that last October .
That 's from a source population the size of metropolitan Atlanta .
Still , even changing technology and the changing gene pool in sports don 't account for all of the changes in performance .
Athletes have a different mindset than they once did .
Have you ever seen in a movie when someone gets an electrical shock and they 're thrown across a room ?
There 's no explosion there .
What 's happening when that happens is that the electrical impulse is causing all their muscle fibers to twitch at once , and they 're throwing themselves across the room .
They 're essentially jumping .
That 's the power that 's contained in the human body .
But normally we can 't access nearly all of it .
Our brain acts as a limiter , preventing us from accessing all of our physical resources , because we might hurt ourselves , tearing tendons or ligaments .
But the more we learn about how that limiter functions , the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit , in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won 't be in mortal danger by pushing harder .
Endurance and ultra-endurance sports serve as a great example .
Ultra-endurance was once thought to be harmful to human health , but now we realize that we have all these traits that are perfect for ultra-endurance : no body fur and a glut of sweat glands that keep us cool while running ; narrow waists and long legs compared to our frames ; large surface area of joints for shock absorption .
We have an arch in our foot that acts like a spring , short toes that are better for pushing off than for grasping tree limbs , and when we run , we can turn our torso and our shoulders like this while keeping our heads straight .
Our primate cousins can 't do that .
They have to run like this .
And we have big old butt muscles that keep us upright while running .
Have you ever looked at an ape 's butt ?
They have no buns because they don 't run upright .
And as athletes have realized that we 're perfectly suited for ultra-endurance , they 've taken on feats that would have been unthinkable before , athletes like Spanish endurance racer Kílian Jornet .
Here 's Kílian running up the Matterhorn .
With a sweatshirt there tied around his waist .
It 's so steep he can 't even run here .
He 's pulling up on a rope .
This is a vertical ascent of more than 8,000 feet , and Kílian went up and down in under three hours .
Amazing .
And talented though he is , Kílian is not a physiological freak .
Now that he has done this , other athletes will follow , just as other athletes followed after Sir Roger Bannister ran under four minutes in the mile .
Changing technology , changing genes , and a changing mindset .
Innovation in sports , whether that 's new track surfaces or new swimming techniques , the democratization of sport , the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world , and imagination in sport , an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of , have conspired to make athletes stronger , faster , bolder , and better than ever .
Thank you very much .

Wendy Chung : Autism — what we know
In this factual talk , geneticist Wendy Chung shares what we know about autism spectrum disorder — for example , that autism has multiple , perhaps interlocking , causes . Looking beyond the worry and concern that can surround a diagnosis , Chung and her team look at what we 've learned through studies , treatments and careful listening .
" Why ? "
" Why ? " is a question that parents ask me all the time .
" Why did my child develop autism ? "
As a pediatrician , as a geneticist , as a researcher , we try and address that question .
But autism is not a single condition .
It 's actually a spectrum of disorders , a spectrum that ranges , for instance , from Justin , a 13-year-old boy who 's not verbal , who can 't speak , who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns , a little boy who , when he gets upset , will start rocking , and eventually , when he 's disturbed enough , will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches .
That same diagnosis of autism , though , also applies to Gabriel , another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges .
He 's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics .
He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease , yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation , he has great difficulty .
He doesn 't make eye contact .
He has difficulty starting a conversation , feels awkward , and when he gets nervous , he actually shuts down .
Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder .
One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism .
These days , one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism , and the question is , why does this graph look this way ?
Has that number been increasing dramatically over time ?
Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism , simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn 't have that label ?
And in fact , in the late 1980s , the early 1990s , legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources , with access to educational materials that would help them .
With that increased awareness , more parents , more pediatricians , more educators learned to recognize the features of autism .
As a result of that , more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed .
In addition , we 've changed our definition over time , so in fact we 've widened the definition of autism , and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see .
The next question everyone wonders is , what caused autism ?
And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism .
But let me be very clear : Vaccines do not cause autism .
In fact , the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent .
It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet , in which it was published , and that author , a physician , had his medical license taken away from him .
The Institute of Medicine , The Centers for Disease Control , have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism .
Furthermore , one of the ingredients in vaccines , something called thimerosal , was thought to be what the cause of autism was .
That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992 , and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism .
So again , there is no evidence that this is the answer .
So the question remains , what does cause autism ?
In fact , there 's probably not one single answer .
Just as autism is a spectrum , there 's a spectrum of etiologies , a spectrum of causes .
Based on epidemiological data , we know that one of the causes , or one of the associations , I should say , is advanced paternal age , that is , increasing age of the father at the time of conception .
In addition , another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant .
During that period , while the fetal brain is developing , we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism .
In particular , there 's a medication , valproic acid , which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take , we know can increase that risk of autism .
In addition , there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism .
And one of the things I 'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism .
I 'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism , but it 's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene .
One of the genetic factors that we don 't understand , however , is the difference that we see in terms of males and females .
Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism , and we really don 't understand what that cause is .
One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate .
In other words , if one sibling has autism , what 's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism ?
And we can look in particular at three types of siblings : identical twins , twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment , versus fraternal twins , twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information , versus regular siblings , also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information , yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment .
And when you look at those concordance ratios , one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins , that concordance rate is 77 percent .
Remarkably , though , it 's not 100 percent .
It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism , but yet they account for a lot of that risk , because when you look at fraternal twins , that concordance rate is only 31 percent .
On the other hand , there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings , suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone .
So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic .
Well , how genetic is it ?
When we compare it to other conditions that we 're familiar with , things like cancer , heart disease , diabetes , in fact , genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions .
But with this , that doesn 't tell us what the genes are .
It doesn 't even tell us in any one child , is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes ?
And so in fact , in some individuals with autism , it is genetic !
That is , that it is one single , powerful , deterministic gene that causes the autism .
However , in other individuals , it 's genetic , that is , that it 's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism .
We don 't know in any one person , necessarily , which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper .
So the question becomes , how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are .
And let me pose something that might not be intuitive .
In certain individuals , they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family .
And the reason is because in certain individuals , they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father , but actually start brand new in them , mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family .
And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals .
So in fact , at the Simons Foundation , we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism , and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases ?
To do that , we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother , the father and the child .
In doing so , I apologize , I 'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia , but I 'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory , we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information .
Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes , and when we did that , we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes , because in some cases with autism , there 's actually a single volume that 's missing .
We had to get more granular than that , though , and so we had to start opening those books , and in some cases , the genetic change was more subtle .
It might have been a single paragraph that was missing , or yet , even more subtle than that , a single letter , one out of three billion letters that was changed , that was altered , yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior .
In doing this within these families , we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families .
On the other hand , there 's 75 percent that we still haven 't figured out .
As we did this , though , it was really quite humbling , because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism .
In fact , the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism .
And that explains , in part , why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects .
Although there are that many genes , there is some method to the madness .
It 's not simply random 200 , 400 different genes , but in fact they fit together .
They fit together in a pathway .
They fit together in a network that 's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions .
We 're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we 're identifying those genes , those proteins , those molecules , understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work , understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work , and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior , and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition .
But early diagnosis is a key for us .
Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who 's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform , to be able to impact that growing , developing brain is critical .
And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants , small babies , and be able to use biomarkers , in this case eye contact and eye tracking , to identify an infant at risk .
This particular infant , you can see , making very good eye contact with this woman as she 's singing " Itsy , Bitsy Spider , " in fact is not going to develop autism .
This baby we know is going to be in the clear .
On the other hand , this other baby is going to go on to develop autism .
In this particular child , you can see , it 's not making good eye contact .
Instead of the eyes focusing in and having that social connection , looking at the mouth , looking at the nose , looking off in another direction , but not again socially connecting , and being able to do this on a very large scale , screen infants , screen children for autism , through something very robust , very reliable , is going to be very helpful to us in terms of being able to intervene at an early stage when we can have the greatest impact .
How are we going to intervene ?
It 's probably going to be a combination of factors .
In part , in some individuals , we 're going to try and use medications .
And so in fact , identifying the genes for autism is important for us to identify drug targets , to identify things that we might be able to impact and can be certain that that 's really what we need to do in autism .
But that 's not going to be the only answer .
Beyond just drugs , we 're going to use educational strategies .
Individuals with autism , some of them are wired a little bit differently .
They learn in a different way .
They absorb their surroundings in a different way , and we need to be able to educate them in a way that serves them best .
Beyond that , there are a lot of individuals in this room who have great ideas in terms of new technologies we can use , everything from devices we can use to train the brain to be able to make it more efficient and to compensate for areas in which it has a little bit of trouble , to even things like Google Glass .
You could imagine , for instance , Gabriel , with his social awkwardness , might be able to wear Google Glass with an earpiece in his ear , and have a coach be able to help him , be able to help think about conversations , conversation-starters , being able to even perhaps one day invite a girl out on a date .
All of these new technologies just offer tremendous opportunities for us to be able to impact the individuals with autism , but yet we have a long way to go .
As much as we know , there is so much more that we don 't know , and so I invite all of you to be able to help us think about how to do this better , to use as a community our collective wisdom to be able to make a difference , and in particular , for the individuals in families with autism , I invite you to join the interactive autism network , to be part of the solution to this , because it 's going to take really a lot of us to think about what 's important , what 's going to be a meaningful difference .
As we think about something that 's potentially a solution , how well does it work ?
Is it something that 's really going to make a difference in your lives , as an individual , as a family with autism ?
We 're going to need individuals of all ages , from the young to the old , and with all different shapes and sizes of the autism spectrum disorder to make sure that we can have an impact .
So I invite all of you to join the mission and to help to be able to make the lives of individuals with autism so much better and so much richer .
Thank you .

Elizabeth Gilbert : Success , failure and the drive to keep creating
Elizabeth Gilbert was once an " unpublished diner waitress , " devastated by rejection letters . And yet , in the wake of the success of ' Eat , Pray , Love , ' she found herself identifying strongly with her former self . With beautiful insight , Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple -- though hard -- way to carry on , regardless of outcomes .
So , a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight , when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads .
The taller one , who is like up here , she comes marching up to me , and she goes , " Honey , I gotta ask you something .
You got something to do with that whole ' Eat , Pray , Love ' thing that 's been going on lately ? "
And I said , " Yes , I did . "
And she smacks her friend and she goes , " See , I told you , I said , that 's that girl .
That 's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie . "
So that 's who I am .
And believe me , I 'm extremely grateful to be that person , because that whole " Eat , Pray , Love " thing was a huge break for me .
But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody , because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored " Eat , Pray , Love " were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn 't going to be " Eat , Pray , Love , " and all of those people who had hated " Eat , Pray , Love " were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived .
So I knew that I had no way to win , and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis .
But if I had done that , if I had given up writing , I would have lost my beloved vocation , so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome .
In other words , I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success .
And I did , in the end , find that inspiration , but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place .
I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure .
So just to back up and explain , the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer .
I wrote all through childhood , all through adolescence , by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker , hoping to be discovered .
After college , I got a job as a diner waitress , kept working , kept writing , kept trying really hard to get published , and failing at it .
I failed at getting published for almost six years .
So for almost six years , every single day , I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox .
And it was devastating every single time , and every single time , I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain .
But then I would find my resolve , and always in the same way , by saying , " I 'm not going to quit , I 'm going home . "
And you have to understand that for me , going home did not mean returning to my family 's farm .
For me , going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home , because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing , which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego , which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself .
And that 's how I pushed through it .
But the weird thing is that 20 years later , during the crazy ride of " Eat , Pray , Love , " I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be , thinking about her constantly , and feeling like I was her again , which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different .
She had failed constantly .
I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation .
We had nothing in common .
Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again ?
And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success .
So think of it like this : For most of your life , you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular , but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment .
Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise .
And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad , and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good , but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good .
The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation , the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself .
And there 's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche .
But in both cases , it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration , and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can , and if you 're wondering what your home is , here 's a hint : Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself .
So that might be creativity , it might be family , it might be invention , adventure , faith , service , it might be raising corgis , I don 't know , your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential .
For me , that home has always been writing .
So after the weird , disorienting success that I went through with " Eat , Pray , Love , " I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure .
I had to get my ass back to work , and that 's what I did , and that 's how , in 2010 , I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to " Eat , Pray , Love . "
And you know what happened with that book ?
It bombed , and I was fine .
Actually , I kind of felt bulletproof , because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it .
And I stayed in my home of writing after that , and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received , which is very nice , but not my point .
My point is that I 'm writing another one now , and I 'll write another book after that and many of them will fail , and some of them might succeed , but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live .
Look , I don 't know where you rightfully live , but I know that there 's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself .
Something worthy , by the way , so addiction and infatuation don 't count , because we all know that those are not safe places to live . Right ?
The only trick is that you 've got to identify the best , worthiest thing that you love most , and then build your house right on top of it and don 't budge from it .
And if you should someday , somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success , then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done , by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next .
You just do that , and keep doing that again and again and again , and I can absolutely promise you , from long personal experience in every direction , I can assure you that it 's all going to be okay .
Thank you .

James Patten : The best computer interface ? Maybe ... your hands
" The computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression , " says designer and TED Fellow James Patten . But right now , we interact with computers , mainly , by typing and tapping . In this nifty talk and demo , Patten imagines a more visceral , physical way to bring your thoughts and ideas to life in the digital world , taking the computer interface off the screen and putting it into your hands .
A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression , but for the most part , that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones .
And I 'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world A few years ago , I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York , I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays .
This one 's called " The Chase . "
There are two pairs of shoes , a man 's pair and a woman 's pair , and they play out this slow , tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space , and then she moves away .
Each of the shoes has magnets in it , and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around .
My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork 's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music .
The harp has four separate pendulums , and each pendulum has 11 strings , so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes , and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago , and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen .
And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit , and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on .
And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit , and were helping people learn in a social way .
And when you think about it , this makes a lot of sense , that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily .
I mean , our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects .
Think about which you find easier to use , a physical keyboard or an onscreen keyboard like on a phone ?
But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch , down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software .
I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time .
So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii , and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets , and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface .
But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars .
Although each one was pretty small , altogether they weighed so much that the table that they were on started to sag .
So I wanted to build something where you could have this kind of interaction on any tabletop surface .
So to explore this idea , I built an army of small robots , and each of these robots has what are called omni wheels . They 're these special wheels that can move equally easily in all directions , and when you couple these robots with a video projector , you have these physical tools for interacting with digital information .
So here 's an example of what I mean .
This is a video editing application where all of the controls for manipulating the video are physical .
So if we want to tweak the color , we just enter the color mode , and then we get three different dials or if we want to adjust the audio , then we get two different dials for that , these physical objects .
So here the left and right channel stay in sync , but if we want to , we can override that by grabbing both of them at the same time .
So the idea is that we get the speed and efficiency benefits of using these physical dials together with the flexibility and versatility of a system that 's designed in software .
And this is a mapping application for disaster response .
So you have these physical objects that represent police , fire and rescue , and a dispatcher can grab them and place them on the map to tell those units where to go , and then the position of the units on the map gets synced up with the position of those units in the real world .
This is a video chat application .
It 's amazing how much emotion you can convey with just a few simple movements of a physical object .
With this interface , we open up a huge array of possibilities in between traditional board games and arcade games , where the physical possibilities of interaction make so many different styles of play possible .
But one of the areas that I 'm most excited about using this platform for is applying it to problems that are difficult for computers or people to solve alone .
One example of those is protein folding .
So here we have an interface where we have physical handles onto a protein , and we can grab those handles and try to move the protein and try to fold it in different ways .
And if we move it in a way that doesn 't really make sense with the underlying molecular simulation , we get this physical feedback where we can actually feel these physical handles pulling back against us .
So feeling what 's going on inside a molecular simulation is a whole different level of interaction .
So we 're just beginning to explore what 's possible when we use software to control the movement of objects in our environment .
Maybe this is the computer of the future .
There 's no touchscreen .
There 's no technology visible at all .
But when we want to have a video chat or play a game or lay out the slides to our next TED Talk , the objects on the table come alive .
Thank you .

Hamish Jolly : A shark-deterrent wetsuit
Hamish Jolly , an ocean swimmer in Australia , wanted a wetsuit that would deter a curious shark from mistaking him for a potential source of nourishment . Working with a team of scientists , he and his friends came up with a fresh approach — not a shark cage , not a suit of chain-mail , but a sleek suit that taps our growing understanding of shark vision .
Scientific breakthrough , the kind that can potentially save lives , can sometimes be lying right out in the open for us to discover , in the evolved , accumulated body of human anecdote , for example , or in the time-tested adaptations that we observe in the natural world around us .
Science starts with observation , but the trick is to identify the patterns and signatures that we might otherwise dismiss isolate them , and test them with scientific rigor .
And when we do , the results will often surprise .
Western Australia has had a particular problem with shark attacks over the last three years , unfortunately and tragically culminating in five fatal shark attacks in a 10-month period But Western Australia is not alone in this .
The incident of shark engagements on humans is escalating worldwide .
And so it 's not surprising , perhaps , that in July of this year , Shark Attack Mitigation Systems in collaboration with the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute made an announcement which captured the attention of the worldwide media and of ocean users and that was around the development of technology to mitigate or reduce the risk of shark attack based on the science of what sharks can see .
And I have for you today the story of that journey , but also the notion that science can be as powerful as a translator as it can be for invention .
we were looking , it was about three years ago , and we 'd just had the first two fatal shark attacks in Western Australia , and by chance , in a previous role , I happened to be having dinner with Harry Butler .
Now Harry Butler , who most Australians would know is a famous naturalist , had spent a lot of time in the marine environment .
Harry Butler is a precursor , if you like , to the late Steve Irwin .
When I asked him about what the solution to the problem might be , the answer was quite surprising .
He said , " Take a black wetsuit , band it in yellow stripes like a bumblebee , and you 'll be mimicking the warning systems of most marine species . "
I didn 't think about that much at the time , and it wasn 't until the next three fatal shark attacks happened , and it caused me to think , maybe there 's some merit to this idea .
And I turned to the web to see if there might be some clues .
And it turns out the web is awash with this sort of evidence that supports this sort of thinking .
So biologically , there are plenty of species that display banding or patterns , warning patterns , to either be cryptical in the water or warn against being attacked , not the least of which is the pilot fish which spends a big slab of its life around the business end of a shark .
On the human side , Walter Starck , an oceanographer , has been painting his wetsuit since the 1970s , and anthropologically , Pacific island tribes painted themselves in bands in a sea snake ceremony to ward off the shark god .
So what 's going on here ?
Is this an idea lying wide out in the open for us to consider and define ?
We know that sharks use a range of sensors when they engage , particularly for attack , but the sight sensor is the one that they use to identify the target , and particularly in the last number of meters before the attack .
It makes sense to pay attention to the biological anecdote because that 's time-tested evolution over many millennia .
But isn 't human anecdote also an evolution of sorts , the idea that there 's a kernel of truth thought to be important , passed down from generation to generation , so that it actually ends up shaping human behavior ?
I wanted to test this idea . I wanted to put some science to this anecdotal evidence , because if science could support this concept , then we might have at least part of the solution to shark attack right under our very nose .
To do that , I needed some experts in shark vision and shark neurology , and a worldwide search , again , led to the University of W.A.
on the doorstep here , with the Oceans Institute .
And professor Nathan Hart and his team had just written a paper which tells us , confirms that predatory sharks see in black and white , or grayscale .
So I called up Nathan , a little bit sheepishly , actually , about this idea that maybe we could use these patterns and shapes to produce a wetsuit to try and mitigate the risk of shark attack , and fortunately , he thought that was a good idea .
So what ensued is a collaborative bit of research supported by the West Australian State Government .
And we did three key things .
The first is that we mapped the characteristics , the physical characteristics of the eyes of the three main predatory sharks , so the great white , tiger and bull shark .
We did that genetically and we did that anatomically .
The next thing we did was to understand , using complex computer modeling , at different depths , distances , light conditions , and water clarity in the ocean .
And from there , we were able to pinpoint two key characteristics : what patterns and shapes would present the wearer as hidden or hard to make out in the water , cryptic , the greatest contrast but provide the greatest so that that person wasn 't confused for shark prey or shark food .
The next thing we needed to do was to convert this into wetsuits that people might actually wear , and to that end , I invited Ray Smith , a surfer , industrial designer , wetsuit designer , and in fact the guy that designed the original Quiksilver logo , to come over and sit with the science team and interpret that science into aesthetic wetsuits that people might actually wear .
And here 's an example of one of the first drawings .
So this is what I call a " don 't eat me " wetsuit .
So this takes that banding idea , takes that banding idea , it 's highly visible , provides a highly disruptive profile , and is intended to prevent the shark from considering that you would be ordinary food , and potentially even create confusion for the shark .
And this one 's configured to go with a surfboard .
You can see that dark , opaque panel on the front , and it 's particularly better for the surface , where being backlit and providing a silhouette is problematic .
Second iteration is the cryptic wetsuit , or the one which attempts to hide the wearer in the water column .
There are three panels on this suit , and in any given conditions , one or more of those panels will match the reflective spectra of the water so as to disappear fully or partially , leaving the last panel or panels to create a disruptive profile in the water column .
And this one 's particularly well-suited to the dive configuration , so when you 're deeper under the water .
So we knew that we had some really solid science here .
We knew , if you wanted to stand out , you needed to look stripy , and we knew if you wanted to be cryptic , you needed to look like this .
But the acid test is always going to be , how would sharks really behave in the context of these patterns and shapes .
And testing to simulate a person in a wetsuit in the water with a predatory shark in a natural environment is actually a lot harder than you might think .
So we have to bait the rig , because we need to get the statistical number of samples through to get the scientific evidence , and by baiting the rig , we 're obviously changing shark behavior .
We can 't put humans in the water .
We 're ethically precluded from even using humanoid shapes and baiting them up in the water .
But nevertheless , we started the testing process in January of this year , initially with tiger sharks and subsequently with great white sharks .
The way we did that was to get a perforated drum which is full of bait , and then run two stereo underwater cameras to watch how the shark actually engages with that rig .
And because we use stereo , we can capture all the statistics on how big the shark is , what angle it comes in at , how quickly it leaves , and what its behavior is in an empirical rather than a subjective way .
Because we needed to preserve the scientific method , we ran a control rig which was a black neoprene rig just like a normal black wetsuit SAMS technology rig .
And the results were not just exciting , but very encouraging , and today I would like to just give you a snapshot of two of those engagements .
So here we 've got a four-meter tiger shark engaging the black control rig , which it had encountered about a minute and a half before .
Now that exact same shark had engaged , or encountered this SAMS rig , which is the Elude SAMS rig , about eight minutes before , and spent six minutes circling it , hunting for it , looking for what it could smell and sense but not see , and this was the final engagement .
Great white sharks are more confident than the tigers , and here you see great white shark engaging a control rig , so a black neoprene wetsuit , and going straight to the bottom , coming up and engaging .
In contrast to the SAMS technology rig , this is the banded one , where it 's more tactile , it 's more investigative , it 's more apprehensive , and shows a reluctance to come straight in and go .
So , it 's important for us that all the testing is done independently , and the University of W.A. is doing the testing .
It 'll be an ongoing process .
It 's subject to peer review and subject to publication .
It 's so important that this concept is led with the science .
From the perspective of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems , we 're a biotechnology licensing company , so we don 't make wetsuits ourselves .
We 'll license others to do that .
But I thought you might be interested in seeing what SAMS technology looks like embedded in a wetsuit , and to that end , for the first time , live , worldwide -- — I can show you what biological adaptation , science and design looks like in real life .
So I can welcome Sam , the surfer , from this side . Where are you , Sam ?
And Eduardo .
Cheers , mate .
Cheers .
Thanks , gentlemen . So what have we done here ?
Well , to my mind , rather than take a blank sheet and use science as a tool for invention , we 've paid attention to the biological evidence , we 've put importance to the human anecdotal evidence , and we 've used science as a tool for translation , translation of something that was already there into something that we can use for the benefit of mankind .
And it strikes me that this idea of science as a tool for translation rather than invention is one that we can apply much more widely than this in the pursuit of innovation .
After all , did the Wright brothers discover manned flight , or did they observe the biological fact of flight and translate that mechanically , replicate it in a way that humans could use ?
As for the humble wetsuit , who knows what oceanwear will look like in two years ' time , in five years ' time or in 50 years ' time , but with this new thinking , I 'm guessing there 's a fair chance it won 't be pure black .
Thank you .

Sarah Lewis : Embrace the near win
At her first museum job , art historian Sarah Lewis noticed something important about an artist she was studying : Not every artwork was a total masterpiece . She asks us to consider the role of the almost-failure , the near win , in our own lives . In our pursuit of success and mastery , is it actually our near wins that push us forward ?
I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Art on a retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray .
I learned so much from her .
After the curator Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work , I loved looking at the paintings from the 1970s .
There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life .
I remember asking her what she thought of those early works .
If you didn 't know they were hers , you might not have been able to guess .
She told me that a few didn 't quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be .
One of the works , in fact , so didn 't meet her mark , she had set it out in the trash in her studio , and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value .
In that moment , my view of success and creativity changed .
I realized that success is a moment , but what we 're always celebrating is creativity and mastery .
But this is the thing : What gets us to convert success into mastery ?
This is a question I 've long asked myself .
I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win .
I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers , at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia 's Baker Athletics Complex .
I wanted to see what 's called archer 's paradox , the idea that in order to actually hit your target , you have to aim at something slightly skew from it .
I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van , and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus .
One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching .
And they passed me and smiled , but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf , and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers , degrees , I thought , positions for how they might plan to hit their target .
I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support , and watched her , and I didn 't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring .
The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance , it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm 's length .
And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot .
She first hit a seven , I remember , and then a nine , and then two tens , and then the next arrow didn 't even hit the target .
And I saw that gave her more tenacity , and she went after it again and again .
For three hours this went on .
At the end of the practice , one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the ground just star-fished , her head looking up at the sky , trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world .
It 's so rare in American culture , there 's so little that 's vocational about it anymore , to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude , what it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target , pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity .
But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what 's so rare to glimpse , that difference between success and mastery .
So success is hitting that ten ring , but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can 't do it again and again .
Mastery is not just the same as excellence , though .
It 's not the same as success , which I see as an event , a moment in time , and a label that the world confers upon you .
Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit .
What gets us to do this , what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win .
How many times have we designated something a classic , a masterpiece even , while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished , riddled with difficulties and flaws , in other words , a near win ?
Elizabeth Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings .
Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again , but at the end of his life , the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings .
His favorite novel was " The [ Unknown ] Masterpiece " by Honoré de Balzac , and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself .
Franz Kafka saw incompletion when others would find only works to praise , so much so that he wanted all of his diaries , manuscripts , letters and even sketches burned upon his death .
His friend refused to honor the request , and because of that , we now have all the works we now do by Kafka : " America , " " The Trial " and " The Castle , " a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence .
The pursuit of mastery , in other words , is an ever-onward almost .
" Lord , grant that I desire more than I can accomplish , " Michelangelo implored , as if to that Old Testament God on the Sistine Chapel , and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not quite touching that God 's hand .
Mastery is in the reaching , not the arriving .
It 's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be .
Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career .
How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon ?
We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic explorer Ben Saunders , who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand achievement , but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins .
We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge .
It 's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington , who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one , always the one he had yet to compose .
Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency , the more clearly we might see that we don 't know all that we thought we did .
It 's called the Dunning – Kruger effect .
The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him , " What do you think increases with knowledge ? "
and he said , " You learn how little you know . "
Success motivates us , but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest .
One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalists and bronze medalists after a competition .
Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze , who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all , gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition .
We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers , and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s .
The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals , which we tend to put at a distance , into more proximate vicinity to where we stand .
If I ask you to envision what a great day looks like next week , you might describe it in more general terms .
But if I ask you to describe a great day at TED tomorrow , you might describe it with granular , practical clarity .
And this is what a near win does .
It gets us to focus on what , right now , we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights .
It 's Jackie Joyner-Kersee , who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second , and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition .
In 1988 , she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points , a score that no athlete has come very close to since .
We thrive not when we 've done it all , but when we still have more to do .
I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room , how your lives might play this out , because I think on some gut level we do know this .
We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge , and it 's why the deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths .
In Navajo culture , some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics .
It 's what 's called a spirit line , a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out , but also a reason to continue making work .
Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end .
They 're masters because they realize that there isn 't one .
Now it occurred to me , as I thought about this , why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice , out of earshot of his archers , that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team , never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins .
It didn 't sound like a complaint , exactly , but just a way to let me know , a kind of tender admission , to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious , unfinished path that always required more .
We build out of the unfinished idea , even if that idea is our former self .
This is the dynamic of mastery .
Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could .
It 's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries .
Even if we created utopias , I believe we would still have the incomplete .
Completion is a goal , but we hope it is never the end .
Thank you .

Jeremy Kasdin : The flower-shaped starshade that might help us detect Earth-like planets
Astronomers believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet , one fifth of which might harbor life . Only we haven 't seen any of them -- yet . Jeremy Kasdin and his team are looking to change that with the design and engineering of an extraordinary piece of equipment : a flower petal-shaped " starshade " positioned 50,000 km from a telescope to enable imaging of planets about distant stars . It is , he says , the " coolest possible science . "
The universe is teeming with planets .
I want us , in the next decade , to build a space telescope that 'll be able to image an Earth about another star and figure out whether it can harbor life .
My colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Princeton and I are working on technology that will be able to do just that in the coming years .
Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet , and they speculate that up to one fifth of them have an Earth-like planet that might be able to harbor life , but we haven 't seen any of them .
We 've only detected them indirectly .
This is NASA 's famous picture of the pale blue dot .
It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990 , when they turned it around as it was exiting the solar system to take a picture of the Earth from six billion kilometers away .
I want to take that of an Earth-like planet about another star .
Why haven 't we done that ? Why is that hard ?
Well to see , let 's imagine we take the Hubble Space Telescope and we turn it around and we move it out to the orbit of Mars .
We 'll see something like that , a slightly blurry picture of the Earth , because we 're a fairly small telescope out at the orbit of Mars .
Now let 's move ten times further away .
Here we are at the orbit of Uranus .
It 's gotten smaller , it 's got less detail , less resolve .
We can still see the little moon , but let 's go ten times further away again .
Here we are at the edge of the solar system , out at the Kuiper Belt .
Now it 's not resolved at all .
It 's that pale blue dot of Carl Sagan 's .
But let 's move yet again ten times further away .
Here we are out at the Oort Cloud , outside the solar system , and we 're starting to see the sun move into the field of view and get into where the planet is .
One more time , ten times further away .
Now we 're at Alpha Centauri , our nearest neighbor star , and the planet is gone .
All we 're seeing is the big beaming image of the star that 's ten billion times brighter than the planet , which should be in that little red circle .
That 's what we want to see . That 's why it 's hard .
The light from the star is diffracting .
It 's scattering inside the telescope , creating that very bright image that washes out the planet .
So to see the planet , we have to do something about all of that light .
We have to get rid of it .
I have a lot of colleagues working on really amazing technologies to do that , but I want to tell you about one today and probably the most likely to get us an Earth in the next decade .
It was first suggested by Lyman Spitzer , the father of the space telescope , in 1962 , and he took his inspiration from an eclipse .
You 've all seen that . That 's a solar eclipse .
The moon has moved in front of the sun .
It blocks out most of the light so we can see that dim corona around it .
It would be the same thing if I put my thumb up and blocked that spotlight that 's getting right in my eye , I can see you in the back row .
Well , what 's going on ?
Well the moon is casting a shadow down on the Earth .
We put a telescope or a camera in that shadow , we look back at the sun , and most of the light 's been removed and we can see that dim , fine structure in the corona .
Spitzer 's suggestion was we do this in space .
We build a big screen , we fly it in space , we put it up in front of the star , we block out most of the light , we fly a space telescope in that shadow that 's created , and boom , we get to see planets .
Well that would look something like this .
So there 's that big screen , and there 's no planets , because unfortunately it doesn 't actually work very well , because the light waves of the light and waves diffracts around that screen the same way it did in the telescope .
It 's like water bending around a rock in a stream , and all that light just destroys the shadow .
It 's a terrible shadow . And we can 't see planets .
But Spitzer actually knew the answer .
If we can feather the edges , soften those edges so we can control diffraction , well then we can see a planet , and in the last 10 years or so we 've come up with optimal solutions for doing that .
It looks something like that .
We call that our flower petal starshade .
If we make the edges of those petals exactly right , if we control their shape , we can control diffraction , and now we have a great shadow .
It 's about 10 billion times dimmer than it was before , and we can see the planets beam out just like that .
That , of course , has to be bigger than my thumb .
That starshade is about the size of half a football field and it has to fly 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope that has to be held right in its shadow , and then we can see those planets .
This sounds formidable , but brilliant engineers , colleagues of mine at JPL , came up with a fabulous design for how to do that and it looks like this .
It starts wrapped around a hub .
It separates from the telescope .
The petals unfurl , they open up , the telescope turns around .
Then you 'll see it flip and fly out that 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope .
It 's going to move in front of the star just like that , creates a wonderful shadow .
Boom , we get planets orbiting about it .
Thank you .
That 's not science fiction .
We 've been working on this for the last five or six years .
Last summer , we did a really cool test out in California at Northrop Grumman .
So those are four petals .
This is a sub-scale star shade .
It 's about half the size of the one you just saw .
You 'll see the petals unfurl .
Those four petals were built by four undergraduates doing a summer internship at JPL .
Now you 're seeing it deploy .
Those petals have to rotate into place .
The base of those petals has to go to the same place every time to within a tenth of a millimeter .
We ran this test 16 times , and 16 times it went into the exact same place to a tenth of a millimeter .
This has to be done very precisely , but if we can do this , if we can build this technology , if we can get it into space , you might see something like this .
That 's a picture of one our nearest neighbor stars taken with the Hubble Space Telescope .
If we can take a similar space telescope , slightly larger , put it out there , fly an occulter in front of it , what we might see is something like that -- that 's a family portrait of our solar system -- but not ours .
We 're hoping it 'll be someone else 's solar system as seen through an occulter , through a starshade like that .
You can see Jupiter , you can see Saturn , Uranus , Neptune , and right there in the center , next to the residual light is that pale blue dot . That 's Earth .
We want to see that , see if there 's water , oxygen , ozone , the things that might tell us that it could harbor life .
I think this is the coolest possible science .
That 's why I got into doing this , because I think that will change the world .
That will change everything when we see that .
Thank you .

Jennifer Senior : For parents , happiness is a very high bar
The parenting section of the bookstore is overwhelming — it 's " a giant , candy-colored monument to our collective panic , " as writer Jennifer Senior puts it . Why is parenthood filled with so much anxiety ? Because the goal of modern , middle-class parents — to raise happy children — is so elusive . In this honest talk , she offers some kinder and more achievable aims .
When I was born , there was really only one book about how to raise your children , and it was written by Dr. Spock .
Thank you for indulging me .
I have always wanted to do that .
No , it was Benjamin Spock , and his book was called " The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care . "
It sold almost 50 million copies by the time he died .
Today , I , as the mother of a six-year-old , walk into Barnes and Noble , and see this .
And it is amazing the variety that one finds on those shelves .
There are guides to raising an eco-friendly kid , a gluten-free kid , a disease-proof kid , which , if you ask me , is a little bit creepy .
There are guides to raising a bilingual kid even if you only speak one language at home .
There are guides to raising a financially savvy kid and a science-minded kid and a kid who is a whiz at yoga .
Short of teaching your toddler how to defuse a nuclear bomb , there is pretty much a guide to everything .
All of these books are well-intentioned .
I am sure that many of them are great .
But taken together , I am sorry , I do not see help when I look at that shelf .
I see anxiety .
I see a giant candy-colored monument to our collective panic , and it makes me want to know , why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion ?
Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia , long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along ?
Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis ?
Crisis might seem like a strong word , but there is data suggesting it probably isn 't .
There was , in fact , a paper of just this very name , " Parenthood as Crisis , " published in 1957 , and in the 50-plus years since , there has been plenty of scholarship documenting a pretty clear pattern of parental anguish .
Parents experience more stress than non-parents .
Their marital satisfaction is lower .
There have been a number of studies looking at how parents feel when they are spending time with their kids , and the answer often is , not so great .
Last year , I spoke with a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth who is doing a very , very imaginative project that tracks people 's happiness , and here is what he told me he found : " Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse , which is better than interacting with other relatives , which is better than interacting with acquaintances , which is better than interacting with parents , which is better than interacting with children .
Who are on par with strangers . "
But here 's the thing .
I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years , and children are not the problem .
Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem .
Specifically , I don 't think we know what parenting is supposed to be .
Parent , as a verb , only entered common usage in 1970 .
Our roles as mothers and fathers have changed .
The roles of our children have changed .
We are all now furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script , and if you 're an amazing jazz musician , then improv is great , but for the rest of us , it can kind of feel like a crisis .
So how did we get here ?
How is it that we are all now navigating a child-rearing universe without any norms to guide us ?
Well , for starters , there has been a major historical change .
Until fairly recently , kids worked , on our farms primarily , but also in factories , mills , mines .
Kids were considered economic assets .
Sometime during the Progressive Era , we put an end to this arrangement .
We recognized kids had rights , we banned child labor , we focused on education instead , and school became a child 's new work .
And thank God it did .
But that only made a parent 's role more confusing in a way .
The old arrangement might not have been particularly ethical , but it was reciprocal .
We provided food , clothing , shelter , and moral instruction to our kids , and they in return provided income .
Once kids stopped working , the economics of parenting changed .
Kids became , in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist , " economically worthless but emotionally priceless . "
Rather than them working for us , we began to work for them , because within only a matter of decades it became clear : if we wanted our kids to succeed , school was not enough .
Today , extracurricular activities are a kid 's new work , but that 's work for us too , because we are the ones driving them to soccer practice .
Massive piles of homework are a kid 's new work , but that 's also work for us , because we have to check it .
About three years ago , a Texas woman told something to me that totally broke my heart .
She said , almost casually , " Homework is the new dinner . "
The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids , even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give .
Mothers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1965 , when most women were not even in the workforce .
It would probably be easier for parents to do their new roles if they knew what they were preparing their kids for .
This is yet another thing that makes modern parenting so very confounding .
We have no clue what portion our wisdom , if any , is of use to our kids .
The world is changing so rapidly , it 's impossible to say .
This was true even when I was young .
When I was a kid , high school specifically , I was told that I would be at sea in the new global economy if I did not know Japanese .
And with all due respect to the Japanese , it didn 't turn out that way .
Now there is a certain kind of middle-class parent that is obsessed with teaching their kids Mandarin , and maybe they 're onto something , but we cannot know for sure .
So , absent being able to anticipate the future , what we all do , as good parents , is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future , hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off .
We teach our kids chess , thinking maybe they will need analytical skills .
We sign them up for team sports , thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills , you know , for when they go to Harvard Business School .
We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free , though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child .
I ate jars of pureed macaroni and beef .
And you know what ? I 'm doing okay .
I pay my taxes .
I hold down a steady job .
I was even invited to speak at TED .
But the presumption now is that what was good enough for me , or for my folks for that matter , isn 't good enough anymore .
So we all make a mad dash to that bookshelf , because we feel like if we aren 't trying everything , it 's as if we 're doing nothing and we 're defaulting on our obligations to our kids .
So it 's hard enough to navigate our new roles as mothers and fathers .
Now add to this problem something else : we are also navigating new roles as husbands and wives because most women today are in the workforce .
This is another reason , I think , that parenthood feels like a crisis .
We have no rules , no scripts , no norms for what to do when a child comes along now that both mom and dad are breadwinners .
The writer Michael Lewis once put this very , very well .
He said that the surest way for a couple to start fighting is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose division of labor is ever so slightly different from theirs , because the conversation in the car on the way home goes something like this : " So , did you catch that Dave is the one who walks them to school every morning ? "
Without scripts telling us who does what in this brave new world , couples fight , and both mothers and fathers each have their legitimate gripes .
Mothers are much more likely to be multi-tasking when they are at home , and fathers , when they are at home , are much more likely to be mono-tasking .
Find a guy at home , and odds are he is doing just one thing at a time .
In fact , UCLA recently did a study looking at the most common configuration of family members in middle-class homes .
Guess what it was ?
Dad in a room by himself .
According to the American Time Use Survey , mothers still do twice as much childcare as fathers , which is better than it was in Erma Bombeck 's day , but I still think that something she wrote is highly relevant : " I have not been alone in the bathroom since October . "
But here is the thing : Men are doing plenty .
They spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them .
They work more paid hours , on average , than their wives , and they genuinely want to be good , involved dads .
Today , it is fathers , not mothers , who report the most work-life conflict .
Either way , by the way , if you think it 's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles , just imagine what it 's like now for non-traditional families : families with two dads , families with two moms , single-parent households .
They are truly improvising as they go .
Now , in a more progressive country , and forgive me here for capitulating to cliché and invoking , yes , Sweden , parents could rely on the state for support .
There are countries that acknowledge the anxieties and the changing roles of mothers and fathers .
Unfortunately , the United States is not one of them , so in case you were wondering what the U.S.
has in common with Papua New Guinea and Liberia , it 's this : We too have no paid maternity leave policy .
We are one of eight known countries that does not .
In this age of intense confusion , there is just one goal upon which all parents can agree , and that is whether they are tiger moms or hippie moms , helicopters or drones , our kids ' happiness is paramount .
That is what it means to raise kids in an age when they are economically worthless but emotionally priceless .
We are all the custodians of their self-esteem .
The one mantra no parent ever questions is , " All I want is for my children to be happy . "
And don 't get me wrong : I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child .
But it is a very elusive one .
Happiness and self-confidence , teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field .
It 's not like teaching them how to ride a bike .
There 's no curriculum for it .
Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things , but they cannot really be goals unto themselves .
A child 's happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent .
And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid .
And I have to tell you , I think it leads to some very strange excesses .
We are now so anxious to protect our kids from the world 's ugliness that we now shield them from " Sesame Street . "
I wish I could say I was kidding about this , but if you go out and you buy the first few episodes of " Sesame Street " on DVD , as I did out of nostalgia , you will find a warning at the beginning saying that the content is not suitable for children .
Can I just repeat that ?
The content of the original " Sesame Street " is not suitable for children .
When asked about this by The New York Times , a producer for the show gave a variety of explanations .
One was that Cookie Monster smoked a pipe in one skit and then swallowed it .
Bad modeling . I don 't know .
But the thing that stuck with me is she said that she didn 't know whether Oscar the Grouch could be invented today because he was too depressive .
I cannot tell you how much this distresses me .
You are looking at a woman who has a periodic table of the Muppets hanging from her cubicle wall .
The offending muppet , right there .
That 's my son the day he was born .
I was high as a kite on morphine .
I had had an unexpected C-section .
But even in my opiate haze , I managed to have one very clear thought the first time I held him .
I whispered it into his ear .
I said , " I will try so hard not to hurt you . "
It was the Hippocratic Oath , and I didn 't even know I was saying it .
But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness .
In fact , as any parent will tell you , it 's awfully hard .
All of us have said or done hurtful things that we wish to God we could take back .
I think in another era we did not expect quite so much from ourselves , and it is important that we all remember that the next time we are staring with our hearts racing at those bookshelves .
I 'm not really sure how to create new norms for this world , but I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids , we may be assuming the wrong moral burden .
It strikes me as a better goal , and , dare I say , a more virtuous one , to focus on making productive kids and moral kids , and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us .
That , anyway , is one response to having no script .
Absent having new scripts , we just follow the oldest ones in the book -- decency , a work ethic , love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves .
I think if we all did that , the kids would still be all right , and so would their parents , possibly in both cases even better .
Thank you .

David Brooks : Should you live for your résumé ... or your eulogy ?
Within each of us are two selves , suggests David Brooks in this meditative short talk : the self who craves success , who builds a résumé , and the self who seeks connection , community , love -- the values that make for a great eulogy . Brooks asks : Can we balance these two selves ?
So I 've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues .
The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé , which are the skills you bring to the marketplace .
The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy , which are deeper : who are you , in your depth , what is the nature of your relationships , are you bold , loving , dependable , consistency ?
And most of us , including me , would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues .
But at least in my case , are they the ones that I think about the most ? And the answer is no .
So I 've been thinking about that problem , and a thinker who has helped me think about it who wrote a book called " The Lonely Man Of Faith " in 1965 .
Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures , which he called Adam I and Adam II .
Adam I is the worldly , ambitious , external side of our nature .
He wants to build , create , create companies , create innovation .
Adam II is the humble side of our nature .
Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good , to live in a way internally that honors God , creation and our possibilities .
Adam I wants to conquer the world .
Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world .
Adam I savors accomplishment .
Adam II savors inner consistency and strength .
Adam I asks how things work .
Adam II asks why we 're here .
Adam I 's motto is " success . "
Adam II 's motto is " love , redemption and return . "
And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other .
We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value .
And the tricky thing , I 'd say , about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics .
The external logic is an economic logic : input leads to output , risk leads to reward .
The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic .
You have to give to receive .
You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself .
You have to conquer the desire to get what you want .
In order to fulfill yourself , you have to forget yourself .
In order to find yourself , you have to lose yourself .
We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I , and often neglects Adam II .
And the problem is , that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game , and you become a cold , calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there 's a difference between your desired self and your actual self .
You 're not earning the sort of eulogy you want , you hope someone will give to you .
You don 't have the depth of conviction .
You don 't have an emotional sonorousness .
You don 't have commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit .
I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II , how you build a depth of character .
Through history , people have gone back into their own pasts , sometimes to a precious time in their life , to their childhood , and often , the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame , some sin committed , some act of selfishness , an act of omission , of shallowness , the sin of anger , the sin of self-pity , trying to be a people-pleaser , a lack of courage .
Adam I is built by building on your strengths .
Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses .
You go into yourself , you find the sin which you 've committed over and again through your life , out of which the others emerge , and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin , and out of that wrestling , that suffering , then a depth of character is constructed .
And we 're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves , in that we 're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it , how to confront it , and how to combat it .
We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality where we 're inarticulate about Adam II .
Finally , Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation , the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life , this way : " Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime ; therefore we must be saved by hope .
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history ; therefore we must be saved by faith .
Nothing we do , however virtuous , can be accomplished alone ; therefore we must be saved by love .
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint .
Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love , which is forgiveness . " Thanks .

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly : Be passionate . Be courageous . Be your best .
On January 8 , 2011 , Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents in her home town of Tucson , Arizona . Her husband , the astronaut Mark Kelly , immediately flew to be by her side . In this emotional conversation with Pat Mitchell , the pair describe their lives both before and after the accident -- and describe their views on responsible gun ownership .
Pat Mitchell : That day , January 8 , 2011 , began like all others .
You were both doing the work that you love .
You were meeting with constituents , which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman , and Mark , you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle .
And suddenly , everything that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever .
Mark Kelly : Yeah , it 's amazing , it 's amazing how everything can change for any of us in an instant .
People don 't realize that .
I certainly didn 't .
Gabby Giffords : Yes .
And on that Saturday morning , I got this horrible phone call from Gabby 's chief of staff .
She didn 't have much other information .
She just said , " Gabby was shot . "
A few minutes later , I called her back and I actually thought for a second , well , maybe I just imagined getting this phone call .
I called her back , and that 's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head .
And from that point on , I knew that our lives were going to be a lot different .
PM : And when you arrived at the hospital , what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby 's condition and what recovery , if any , you could expect ?
Well , for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury , they typically can 't tell you much .
Every injury is different . It 's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable , which is another TBI kind of injury .
So they didn 't know how long Gabby would be in a coma , didn 't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be .
PM : Gabby , has your recovery been an effort to create a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords ?
GG : The new one -- better , stronger , tougher .
That to say , when you look at the picture behind us , to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do .
I don 't know anybody that 's as tough as my wonderful wife right here .
PM : And what were the first signs that recovery was not only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned ?
Well , the first thing , for me , was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious , but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant , in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next , and at that point I knew that she was still in there .
PM : And there were certain words , too .
Didn 't she surprise you with words in the beginning ?
Well , it was tough in the beginning . GG : What ? What ? Chicken . Chicken . Chicken .
Yeah , that was it .
For the first month , that was the extent of Gabby 's vocabulary .
For some reason , she has aphasia , which is difficulty with communication .
She latched on to the word " chicken , " which isn 't the best but certainly is not the worst .
And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that .
PM : Gabby , what 's been the toughest challenge for you during this recovery ?
GG : Talking . Really hard . Really .
Yeah , with aphasia , Gabby knows what she wants to say , she just can 't get it out .
She understands everything , but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture , the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head , which is where the bullet passed through .
PM : So you have to do a very dangerous thing : speak for your wife .
I do .
It might be some of the most dangerous things I 've ever done .
PM : Gabby , are you optimistic about your continuing recovery -- walking , talking , being able to move your arm and leg ?
GG : I 'm optimistic . It will be a long , hard haul , but I 'm optimistic .
PM : That seems to be the number one characteristic of Gabby Giffords , wouldn 't you say ? Gabby 's always been really optimistic .
She works incredibly hard every day .
GG : On the treadmill , walked on my treadmill , Spanish lessons , French horn .
It 's only my wife who could be -- and if you knew her before she was injured , you would kind of understand this -- somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist , and then about a month ago , she says , " I want to learn Spanish again . "
PM : Well , let 's take a little closer look at the wife , and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords .
And she 's on a motor scooter there , but it 's my understanding that 's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up .
Yeah , Gabby , she used to race motorcycles .
So that 's a scooter , but she had -- well , she still has a BMW motorcycle .
PM : Does she ride it ? Well , that 's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm , but I think with something I know about , Velcro , we might be able to get her back on the bike , Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar .
PM : I have a feeling we might see that picture next , Gabby .
But you meet , you 're already decided that you 're going to dedicate your life to service .
You 're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut .
So you meet .
What attracts you to Gabby ?
Well , when we met , oddly enough , it was the last time we were in Vancouver , about 10 years ago . We met in Vancouver , at the airport , on a trip that we were both taking to China , that I would actually , from my background , I would call it a boondoggle .
Gabby would — GG : Fact-finding mission .
She would call it an important fact-finding mission .
She was a state senator at the time , and we met here , at the airport , before a trip to China .
PM : Would you describe it as a whirlwind romance ?
GG : No , no , no .
A good friend .
Yeah , we were friends for a long time .
GG : Yes . And then she invited me on , about a year or so later , she invited me on a date .
Where 'd we go , Gabby ?
GG : Death row .
Yes . Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona , which was just outside Gabby 's state senate district .
They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment in the state of Arizona .
So she couldn 't get anybody else to go with her , and I 'm like , " Of course I want to go to death row . "
So that was our first date .
We 've been together ever since . GG : Yes .
PM : Well , that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you .
You were willing to go to death row , after all .
I guess .
PM : Gabby , what did make you want to marry Mark ?
GG : Um , good friends . Best friends . Best friends .
I thought we always had a very special relationship .
We 've gone through some tough times and it 's only made it stronger . GG : Stronger .
PM : After you got married , however , you continued very independent lives .
Actually , you didn 't even live together .
We had one of those commuter marriages .
In our case , it was Washington , D.C. , Houston , Tucson .
Sometimes we 'd go clockwise , sometimes counterclockwise , to all those different places , and we didn 't really live together until that Saturday morning .
Within an hour of Gabby being shot , I was on an airplane to Tucson , and that was the moment where that had changed things .
PM : And also , Gabby , you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years .
What did you like best about being in Congress ?
GG : Fast pace . Fast pace .
PM : Well it was the way you did it . GG : Yes , yes . Fast pace .
PM : I 'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way .
Yeah , you know , legislation is often at a colossally slow pace , but my wife , and I have to admit , a lot of other members of Congress that I know , work incredibly hard .
I mean , Gabby would run around like a crazy person , never take a day off , maybe a half a day off a month , and whenever she was awake she was working , and she really , really thrived on that , and still does today . GG : Yes . Yes .
PM : Installing solar panels on the top of her house , So after the tragic incident , Mark , you decided to resign your position as an astronaut , even though you were supposed to take the next space mission .
Everybody , including Gabby , talked you into going back , and you did end up taking .
Kind of . The day after Gabby was injured , I called my boss , the chief astronaut , Dr. Peggy Whitson , and I said , " Peggy , I know I 'm launching in space in three months from now .
Gabby 's in a coma . I 'm in Tucson .
You 've got to find a replacement for me . "
So I didn 't actually resign from being an astronaut , but I gave up my job and they found a replacement .
Months later , maybe about two months later , I started about getting my job back , which is something , when you become this primary caregiver person , which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position , it 's a challenging role but at some point you 've got to figure out when you 're going to get your life back , and at the time , I couldn 't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again .
But I knew she was — GG : Yes . Yes . Yes .
She was the biggest supporter of my career , and I knew it was the right thing to do .
PM : And yet I 'm trying to imagine , Mark , what that was like , going off onto a mission , one presumes safely , but it 's never a guarantee , and knowing that Gabby is — Well not only was she still in the hospital , on the third day of that flight , literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station , and you 've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour , I 'm actually flying it , looking out the window , a bunch of computers , Gabby was in brain surgery , literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured with a prosthetic , yeah , which is the whole side of her head .
Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time , Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull . GG : The real skull . Which freaks people out , sometimes .
PM : Is that for appetizer or dessert , Mark ?
Well , it just gets the conversation going .
PM : But there was a lot of conversation about something you did , Gabby , after Mark 's flight .
You had to make another step of courage too , because here was Congress deadlocked again , and you got out of the rehabilitation center , got yourself to Washington so that you could walk on the floor of the House -- I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote .
GG : The debt ceiling . The debt ceiling .
Yeah , we had that vote , I guess about five months after Gabby was injured , and she made this bold decision to go back .
A very controversial vote , but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time .
PM : And after that , resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery .
What 's life like , day to day ?
Well , that 's Gabby 's service dog Nelson .
GG : Nelson .
New member of our family . GG : Yes , yes .
And we got him from a — GG : Prison . Murder . We have a lot of connections with prisons , apparently . Nelson came from a prison , raised by a murderer in Massachusetts .
But she did a great job with this dog .
He 's a fabulous service dog .
PM : So Gabby , what have you learned from your experiences the past few years ?
Yeah , what have you learned ? GG : Deeper . Deeper .
PM : Your relationship is deeper .
It has to be . You 're together all the time now .
I imagine being grateful , too , right ?
GG : Grateful .
PM : This is a picture of family and friends gathering , but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now .
And you describe it , Gabby , over and over , as deeper on so many levels . Yes ?
I think when something tragic happens in a family , it can pull people together .
Here 's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson , the Space Shuttle Endeavour , the one that I was the commander on its last flight , on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A. , NASA was kind enough to have it fly over Tucson .
PM : And of course , the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery , and yet , Gabby , how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook ?
GG : I want to make the world a better place .
PM : And you 're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you .
You are people who have done service to your country and you are continuing to do that with a new initiative , a new purpose .
And Gabby , what 's on the agenda now ?
GG : Americans for Responsible Solutions .
That 's our political action committee , where we are trying to get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country , and to try to pass some reasonable legislation .
GG : Yes . Yes . You know , this affected us very personally , but it wasn 't what happened to Gabby that got us involved .
It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown , Connecticut , and the response that we saw afterwards where -- well , look what 's happened so far .
So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing .
We 're trying to change that .
PM : There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown , a school a week in the first two months of last year .
What are you doing that 's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities ?
We 're gun owners , we support gun rights .
At the same time , we 've got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill .
It 's not too difficult to do that .
This issue , like many others , has become very polarizing and political , and we 're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington .
PM : Thank you both for that effort .
And not surprisingly for this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure , you just keep challenging yourself , and the sky seems to be the limit .
I have to share this video of your most recent adventure .
Take a look at Gabby .
This is a couple months ago .
You okay ? You did great . GG : Yes , it 's gorgeous . Thank you .
Good stuff . Gorgeous . Oh , thank you .
Mountains . Gorgeous mountains .
Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat , had a really rough time .
Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period .
He started doing better .
Months later , Gabby was shot in the head , and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston .
So they have a very , very nice connection .
GG : Yes .
PM : What a wonderful moment .
Because this is the TED stage , Gabby , I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience .
GG : Thank you .
Hello , everyone .
Thank you for inviting us here today .
It 's been a long , hard haul , but I 'm getting better .
I 'm working hard , lots of therapy -- speech therapy , physical therapy , and yoga too .
But my spirit is strong as ever .
I 'm still fighting to make the world a better place , and you can too .
Get involved with your community .
Be a leader . Set an example .
Be passionate . Be courageous .
Be your best . Thank you very much .
Thank you . GG : Thank you .
Thank you everybody . GG : Bye bye .
David Sengeh : The sore problem of prosthetic limbs
What drove David Sengeh to create a more comfortable prosthetic limb ? He grew up in Sierra Leone , and too many of the people he loves are missing limbs after the brutal civil war there . When he noticed that people who had prosthetics weren 't actually wearing them , the TED Fellow set out to discover why — and to solve the problem with his team from the MIT Media Lab .
I was born and raised in Sierra Leone , a small and very beautiful country in West Africa , a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent .
However , Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the ' 90s when entire villages were burnt down .
An estimated 8,000 men , women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time .
As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks , I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the same experiences we had .
They would , in fact , be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power .
As I watched people who I knew , loved ones , recover from this devastation , one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses .
The reason , I would come to find out , was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well .
The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb , and which connects to the prosthetic ankle .
Even in the developed world , it takes a period of three weeks to often years for a patient to get a comfortable socket , if ever .
Prosthetists still use conventional processes like molding and casting to create single-material prosthetic sockets .
Such sockets often leave intolerable amounts of pressure on the limbs of the patient , leaving them with pressure sores and blisters .
It does not matter how powerful your prosthetic ankle is .
If your prosthetic socket is uncomfortable , you will not use your leg , and that is just simply unacceptable in our age .
So one day , when I met professor Hugh Herr about two and a half years ago , and he asked me if I knew how to solve this problem , I said , " No , not yet , but I would love to figure it out . "
And so , for my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab , I designed custom prosthetic sockets quickly and cheaply that are more comfortable than conventional prostheses .
I used magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient 's anatomy , then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces , and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture .
We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure where needed on the anatomy of the patient .
In short , we 're using data to make novel sockets quickly and cheaply .
In a recent trial we just wrapped up at the Media Lab , one of our patients , a U.S. veteran who has been an amputee for about 20 years and worn dozens of legs , said of one of our printed parts , " It 's so soft , it 's like walking on pillows , and it 's effing sexy . "
Disability in our age should not prevent anyone from living meaningful lives .
My hope and desire is that the tools and processes we develop in our research group can be used to bring highly functional prostheses to those who need them .
For me , a place to begin healing the souls of those affected by war and disease is by creating comfortable and affordable interfaces for their bodies .
Whether it 's in Sierra Leone or in Boston , I hope this not only restores but indeed transforms their sense of human potential .
Thank you very much .

Hidden miracles of the natural world
We live in a world of unseeable beauty , so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye . To bring this invisible world to light , filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed cameras , time lapses and microscopes . At TED2014 , he shares highlights from his latest project , a 3D film titled " Mysteries of the Unseen World , " which slows down , speeds up , and magnifies the astonishing wonders of nature .
What is the intersection between technology , art and science ?
Curiosity and wonder , because it drives us to explore , because we 're surrounded by things we can 't see .
And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space , to make the invisible visible , it expands our horizons , it transforms our perception , it opens our minds and it touches our heart .
So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film , " Mysteries of the Unseen World . "
There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect , and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life .
We can see how organisms emerge and grow , how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight .
And at the grand scale , time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion .
We can view not only the vast sweep of nature , but the restless movement of humanity .
Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane , and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery , we can see something that 's above us constantly but invisible : the vast network of air travel over the United States .
We can do the same thing with ships at sea .
We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion .
And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere , pulsing with lightning , crowned by the aurora borealis .
It may be the ultimate time-lapse image : the anatomy of Earth brought to life .
At the other extreme , there are things that move too fast for our eyes , but we have technology that can look into that world With high-speed cameras , we can do the opposite of time lapse .
We can shoot images that are thousands of times And we can see how nature 's ingenious devices work , and perhaps we can even imitate them .
When a dragonfly flutters by , you may not realize , but it 's the greatest flier in nature .
It can hover , fly backwards , even upside down .
And by tracking markers on an insect 's wings , we can visualize the air flow that they produce .
Nobody knew the secret , but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places .
We 're giants , and we 're unaware of things that are too small for us to see .
The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times .
This is the egg of a butterfly .
And there are unseen creatures living all over your body , including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes , crawling over your skin at night .
Can you guess what this is ?
Shark skin .
A caterpillar 's mouth .
The eye of a fruit fly .
An eggshell .
A flea .
A snail 's tongue .
We think we know most of the animal kingdom , but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered .
A spider also has great secrets , because spider 's silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic .
This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world .
The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair .
On there is bacteria , and near that bacteria , 10 times smaller , a virus .
Inside of that , 10 times smaller , three strands of DNA , and nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes , single carbon atoms .
With the tip of a powerful microscope , we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices .
Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way .
Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day , perhaps , repair DNA .
We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances , born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life .
So under an endless rain of cosmic dust , the air is full of pollen , micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets , and supernova explosions .
People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable .
Knowing that there 's so much around us we can see forever changes our understanding of the world , and by looking at unseen worlds , we recognize that we exist in the living universe , and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards .
Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives .
We 'll just have to see .
Thank you .
Christopher Emdin : Teach teachers how to create magic
What do rap shows , barbershop banter and Sunday services have in common ? As Christopher Emdin says , they all hold the secret magic to enthrall and teach at the same time — and it 's a skill we often don 't teach to educators . A longtime teacher himself , now a science advocate and cofounder of Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. with the GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan , Emdin offers a vision to make the classroom come alive .
Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she 's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life , which is be an educator , change lives , and spark magic .
Right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible .
Right now there 's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards , who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately , while at the same time saying to herself over and over again , " Don 't smile till November , " because that 's what she was taught in her teacher education program .
Right now there 's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he 's very , very sick and can 't make it to school tomorrow .
On the other hand , right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information , information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge .
Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention , a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before , but if they close their eyes tightly enough , they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling .
Right now there 's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says , " Put them down . "
Right now .
So people will then say , " Well , Chris , you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you 're also describing these powerful educators .
If you 're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular , these guys will probably cancel each other out , and then we 'll be okay . "
The reality is , the folks I described as the master teachers , the master narrative builders , the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms .
The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don 't even know what teacher certification means .
They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education .
And that to me is sad .
It 's sad because the people who I described , they were very disinterested in the learning process , want to be effective teachers , but they have no models .
I 'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain .
Mark Twain says that proper preparation , or teaching , is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good , it can turn awful practices into powerful ones , it can change men and transform them into angels .
The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching , not in any college or university , but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage .
Guess where those places are ?
Barber shops , rap concerts , and most importantly , in the black church .
And I 've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy .
Who here has been to a black church ?
We got a couple of hands .
You go to a black church , their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience , so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes , and then he takes a pause , and he says , " Oh my gosh , they 're not quite paying attention . "
So he says , " Can I get an amen ? "
Audience : Amen .
Chris Emdin : So I can I get an amen ? Audience : Amen .
CE : And all of a sudden , everybody 's reawoken .
That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention .
He drops his voice at a very , very low volume when he wants people to key into him , and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers .
So why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills , that magic that you need to engage an audience , to engage a student ?
So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education , that we could focus on content , and that 's fine , and we could focus on theories , and that 's fine , but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing .
Now people oftentimes say , " Well , magic is just magic . "
There are teachers who , despite all their challenges , who have those skills , get into those schools and are able to engage an audience , and the administrator walks by and says , " Wow , he 's so good , I wish all my teachers could be that good . "
And when they try to describe what that is , they just say , " He has that magic . "
But I 'm here to tell you that magic can be taught .
Magic can be taught .
Magic can be taught .
Now , how do you teach it ?
You teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening .
If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education , you 've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood .
You 've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop , you 've got to attend that black church , and you 've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do .
At our teacher education classes at my university , I 've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts .
They watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands .
They study the way that he walks proudly across that stage .
They listen to his metaphors and analogies , and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic .
They learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch , you don 't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more .
And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof ! we could make dead classes come alive , we could reignite imaginations , and we can change education .
Thank you .

Amanda Burden : How public spaces make cities work
More than 8 million people are crowded together to live in New York City . What makes it possible ? In part , it 's the city 's great public spaces — from tiny pocket parks to long waterfront promenades — where people can stroll and play . Amanda Burden helped plan some of the city 's newest public spaces , drawing on her experience as , surprisingly , an animal behaviorist . She shares the unexpected challenges of planning parks people love -- and why it 's important .
When people think about cities , they tend to think of certain things .
They think of buildings and streets and skyscrapers , noisy cabs .
But when I think about cities , I think about people .
Cities are fundamentally about people , and where people go and where people meet are at the core of what makes a city work .
So even more important than buildings in a city are the public spaces in between them .
And today , some of the most transformative changes in cities are happening in these public spaces .
So I believe that lively , enjoyable public spaces are the key to planning a great city .
They are what makes it come alive .
But what makes a public space work ?
What attracts people to successful public spaces , and what is it about unsuccessful places that keeps people away ?
I thought , if I could answer those questions , I could make a huge contribution to my city .
But one of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviorist , and I use those skills not to study animal behavior but to study how people in cities use city public spaces .
One of the first spaces that I studied was this little vest pocket park called Paley Park in midtown Manhattan .
This little space became a small phenomenon , and because it had such a profound impact on New Yorkers , it made an enormous impression on me .
I studied this park very early on in my career because it happened to have been built by my stepfather , so I knew that places like Paley Park didn 't happen by accident .
I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail .
But what was it about this space that made it special and drew people to it ?
Well , I would sit in the park and watch very carefully , and first among other things were the comfortable , movable chairs .
People would come in , find their own seat , move it a bit , actually , and then stay a while , and then interestingly , people themselves attracted other people , and ironically , I felt more peaceful if there were other people around .
And it was green .
This little park provided what New Yorkers crave : comfort and greenery .
But my question was , why weren 't there more places with greenery and places to sit in the middle of the city where you didn 't feel alone , or like a trespasser ?
Unfortunately , that 's not how cities were being designed .
So here you see a familiar sight .
This is how plazas have been designed for generations .
They have that stylish , Spartan look that we often associate with modern architecture , but it 's not surprising that people avoid spaces like this .
They not only look desolate , they feel downright dangerous .
I mean , where would you sit here ?
What would you do here ?
But architects love them .
They are plinths for their creations .
They might tolerate a sculpture or two , but that 's about it .
And for developers , they are ideal .
There 's nothing to water , nothing to maintain , and no undesirable people to worry about .
But don 't you think this is a waste ?
For me , becoming a city planner meant being able to truly change the city that I lived in and loved .
I wanted to be able to create places that would give you the feeling that you got in Paley Park , and not allow developers to build bleak plazas like this .
But over the many years , I have learned how hard it is to create successful , meaningful , enjoyable public spaces .
As I learned from my stepfather , they certainly do not happen by accident , especially in a city like New York , where public space has to be fought for to begin with , and then for them to be successful , somebody has to think very hard about every detail .
Now , open spaces in cities are opportunities .
Yes , they are opportunities for commercial investment , but they are also opportunities for the common good of the city , and those two goals are often not aligned with one another , and therein lies the conflict .
The first opportunity I had to fight for a great public open space was in the early 1980s , when I was leading a team of planners at a gigantic landfill called Battery Park City in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River .
And this sandy wasteland had lain barren for 10 years , and we were told , unless we found a developer in six months , it would go bankrupt .
So we came up with a radical , almost insane idea .
Instead of building a park as a complement to future development , why don 't we reverse that equation and build a small but very high-quality public open space first , and see if that made a difference .
So we only could afford to build a two-block section of what would become a mile-long esplanade , so whatever we built had to be perfect .
So just to make sure , I insisted that we build a mock-up in wood , at scale , of the railing and the sea wall .
And when I sat down on that test bench with sand still swirling all around me , the railing hit exactly at eye level , blocking my view and ruining my experience at the water 's edge .
So you see , details really do make a difference .
But design is not just how something looks , it 's how your body feels on that seat in that space , and I believe that successful design always depends on that very individual experience .
In this photo , everything looks very finished , but that granite edge , those lights , the back on that bench , the trees in planting , and the many different kinds of places to sit were all little battles that turned this project into a place that people wanted to be .
Now , this proved very valuable 20 years later when Michael Bloomberg asked me to be his planning commissioner and put me in charge of shaping the entire city of New York .
And he said to me on that very day , he said that New York was projected to grow from eight to nine million people .
And he asked me , " So where are you going to put one million additional New Yorkers ? "
Well , I didn 't have any idea .
Now , you know that New York does place a high value on attracting immigrants , so we were excited about the prospect of growth , but honestly , where were we going to grow in a city that was already built out to its edges and surrounded by water ?
How were we going to find housing for that many new New Yorkers ?
And if we couldn 't spread out , which was probably a good thing , where could new housing go ?
And what about cars ?
Our city couldn 't possibly handle any more cars .
So what were we going to do ?
If we couldn 't spread out , we had to go up .
And if we had to go up , we had to go up in places where you wouldn 't need to own a car .
So that meant using one of our greatest assets : our transit system .
But we had never before thought of how we could make the most of it .
So here was the answer to our puzzle .
If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit , we could actually handle that population increase , we thought .
And so here was the plan , what we really needed to do : We needed to redo our zoning -- and zoning is the city planner 's regulatory tool -- and basically reshape the entire city , targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented , suburban-style neighborhoods .
Well , this was an unbelievably ambitious idea , ambitious because communities had to approve those plans .
So how was I going to get this done ?
By listening . So I began listening , in fact , thousands of hours of listening just to establish trust .
You know , communities can tell whether or not you understand their neighborhoods .
It 's not something you can just fake .
And so I began walking .
I can 't tell you how many blocks I walked , in sweltering summers , in freezing winters , year after year , just so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighborhood and know what each street felt like .
I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert , finding ways that zoning could address communities ' concerns .
So little by little , neighborhood by neighborhood , block by block , we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit .
Over the course of 12 years , we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods , 40 percent of the city , 12,500 blocks , so that now , 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway .
In other words , nobody in those new buildings needs to own a car .
Well , those rezonings were exhausting and enervating and important , but rezoning was never my mission .
You can 't see zoning and you can 't feel zoning .
My mission was always to create great public spaces .
So in the areas where we zoned for significant development , I was determined to create places that would make a difference in people 's lives .
Here you see what was two miles of abandoned , degraded waterfront in the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn , impossible to get to and impossible to use .
Now the zoning here was massive , so I felt an obligation to create magnificent parks on these waterfronts , and I spent an incredible amount of time on every square inch of these plans .
I wanted to make sure that there were tree-lined paths from the upland to the water , that there were trees and plantings everywhere , and , of course , lots and lots of places to sit .
Honestly , I had no idea how it would turn out .
I had to have faith .
But I put everything that I had studied and learned into those plans .
And then it opened , and I have to tell you , it was incredible .
People came from all over the city to be in these parks .
I know they changed the lives of the people who live there , but they also changed New Yorkers ' whole image of their city .
I often come down and watch people get on this little ferry that now runs between the boroughs , and I can 't tell you why , but I 'm completely moved by the fact that people are using it as if it had always been there .
And here is a new park in lower Manhattan .
Now , the water 's edge in lower Manhattan was a complete mess before 9 / 11 .
Wall Street was essentially landlocked because you couldn 't get anywhere near this edge .
And after 9 / 11 , the city had very little control .
But I thought if we went to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and got money to reclaim this two miles of degraded waterfront that it would have an enormous effect on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan .
And it did .
Lower Manhattan finally has a public waterfront on all three sides .
I really love this park .
You know , railings have to be higher now , so we put bar seating at the edge , and you can get so close to the water you 're practically on it .
And see how the railing widens and flattens out so you can lay down your lunch or your laptop .
And I love when people come there and look up and they say , " Wow , there 's Brooklyn , and it 's so close . "
So what 's the trick ?
How do you turn a park into a place that people want to be ?
Well , it 's up to you , not as a city planner but as a human being .
You don 't tap into your design expertise .
You tap into your humanity .
I mean , would you want to go there ?
Would you want to stay there ?
Can you see into it and out of it ?
Are there other people there ?
Does it seem green and friendly ?
Can you find your very own seat ?
Well now , all over New York City , there are places where you can find your very own seat .
Where there used to be parking spaces , there are now pop-up cafes .
Where Broadway traffic used to run , there are now tables and chairs .
Where 12 years ago , sidewalk cafes were not allowed , they are now everywhere .
But claiming these spaces for public use was not simple , and it 's even harder to keep them that way .
So now I 'm going to tell you a story about a very unusual park called the High Line .
The High Line was an elevated railway .
The High Line was an elevated railway that ran through three neighborhoods on Manhattan 's West Side , and when the train stopped running , it became a self-seeded landscape , a kind of a garden in the sky .
And when I saw it the first time , honestly , when I went up on that old viaduct , I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person , honestly .
And when I was appointed , saving the first two sections of the High Line from demolition became my first priority and my most important project .
I knew if there was a day that I didn 't worry about the High Line , it would come down .
And the High Line , even though it is widely known now and phenomenally popular , it is the most contested public space in the city .
You might see a beautiful park , but not everyone does .
You know , it 's true , commercial interests will always battle against public space .
You might say , " How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line . "
Well , a developer sees just one thing : customers .
Hey , why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line ?
Wouldn 't that be terrific and won 't it mean a lot more money for the city ?
Well no , it would not be terrific .
It would be a mall , and not a park .
And you know what , it might mean more money for the city , but a city has to take the long view , the view for the common good .
Most recently , the last section of the High Line , the third section of the High Line , the final section of the High Line , has been pitted against development interests , where some of the city 's leading developers are building more than 17 million square feet at the Hudson Yards .
And they came to me and proposed that they " temporarily disassemble " that third and final section .
Perhaps the High Line didn 't fit in with their image of a gleaming city of skyscrapers on a hill .
Perhaps it was just in their way .
But in any case , it took nine months of nonstop daily negotiation to finally get the signed agreement to prohibit its demolition , and that was only two years ago .
So you see , no matter how popular and successful a public space may be , it can never be taken for granted .
Public spaces always -- this is it saved -- public spaces always need vigilant champions , not only to claim them at the outset for public use , but to design them for the people that use them , then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone , that they are not violated , invaded , abandoned or ignored .
If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner , it is that public spaces have power .
It 's not just the number of people using them , it 's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there .
Public space can change how you live in a city , how you feel about a city , whether you choose one city over another , and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city .
I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party .
People stay because they are having a great time .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Lawrence Lessig : The unstoppable walk to political reform
Seven years ago , Internet activist Aaron Swartz convinced Lawrence Lessig to take up the fight for political reform . A year after Swartz 's tragic death , Lessig continues his campaign to free US politics from the stranglehold of corruption . In this fiery , deeply personal talk , he calls for all citizens to engage , and offers a heartfelt reminder to never give up hope .
So a chip , a poet and a boy .
It 's just about 20 years ago , June 1994 , when Intel announced that there was a flaw at the core of their Pentium chip .
Deep in the code of the SRT algorithm to calculate intermediate quotients necessary for iterative floating points of divisions -- I don 't know what that means , but it 's what it says on Wikipedia — there was a flaw and an error that meant that there was a certain probability that the result of the calculation would be an error , and the probability was one out of every 360 billion calculations .
So Intel said your average spreadsheet would be flawed once every 27,000 years .
They didn 't think it was significant , but there was an outrage in the community .
The community , the techies , said , this flaw has to be addressed .
They were not going to stand by quietly as Intel gave them these chips .
So there was a revolution across the world .
People marched to demand -- okay , not really exactly like that — but they rose up and they demanded that Intel fix the flaw .
And Intel set aside 475 million dollars to fund the replacement of millions of chips to fix the flaw .
So billions of dollars in our society was spent to address a problem which would come once out of every 360 billion calculations .
Number two , a poet .
This is Martin Niemöller .
You 're familiar with his poetry .
Around the height of the Nazi period , he started repeating the verse , " First they came for the communists , and I did nothing , did not speak out because I was not a communist .
Then they came for the socialists .
Then they came for the trade unions .
Then they came for the Jews .
And then they came for me .
But there was no one left to speak for me . "
Now , Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight .
This is an insight at the core of intelligence .
We could call it cluefulness .
It 's a certain kind of test : Can you recognize an underlying threat and respond ?
Can you save yourself or save your kind ?
Turns out ants are pretty good at this .
Cows , not so much .
So can you see the pattern ?
Can you see a pattern and then recognize and do something about it ? Number two .
Number three , a boy .
This is my friend Aaron Swartz .
He 's Tim 's friend .
He 's friends of many of you in this audience , and seven years ago , Aaron came to me with a question .
It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk .
I was so proud . I was telling him about my talk , " Laws that choke creativity . "
And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient , and he said , " So how are you ever going to solve the problems you 're talking about ?
Copyright policy , Internet policy , how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there 's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works ? "
So I was a little put off by this .
He wasn 't sharing in my celebration .
And I said to him , " You know , Aaron , it 's not my field , not my field . "
He said , " You mean as an academic , it 's not your field ? "
I said , " Yeah , as an academic , it 's not my field . "
He said , " What about as a citizen ?
As a citizen . "
Now , this is the way Aaron was .
He didn 't tell . He asked questions .
But his questions spoke as clearly as my four-year-old 's hug .
He was saying to me , " You 've got to get a clue .
You have got to get a clue , because there is a flaw at the core of the operating system of this democracy , and it 's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times our democracy tries to make a decision .
It is every time , every single important issue .
We 've got to end the bovinity of this political society .
We 've got to adopt , it turns out , the word is fourmi-formatic attitude -- that 's what the Internet tells me the word is -- the ant 's appreciative attitude that gets us to recognize this flaw , save our kind and save our demos .
Now if you know Aaron Swartz , you know that we lost him just over a year ago .
It was about six weeks before I gave my TED Talk , and I was so grateful to Chris that he asked me to give this TED Talk , not because I had the chance to talk to you , although that was great , but because it pulled me out of an extraordinary depression .
I couldn 't begin to describe the sadness .
Because I had to focus .
I had to focus on , what was I going to say to you ?
It saved me .
But after the buzz , the excitement , the power that comes from this community , I began to yearn for a less sterile , less academic way to address these issues , the issues that I was talking about .
We 'd begun to focus on New Hampshire as a target for this political movement , because the primary in New Hampshire is so incredibly important .
It was a group called the New Hampshire Rebellion that was beginning to talk about , how would we make this issue of this corruption central in 2016 ?
But it was another soul that caught my imagination , a woman named Doris Haddock , aka Granny D.
On January 1 , 1999 , 15 years ago , at the age of 88 , Granny D started a walk .
She started in Los Angeles and began to walk to Washington , D.C.
with a single sign on her chest that said , " campaign finance reform . "
Eighteen months later , at the age of 90 , she arrived in Washington with hundreds following her , including many congressmen who had gotten in a car and driven out about a mile outside of the city to walk in with her .
Now , I don 't have 13 months to walk across the country .
I 've got three kids who hate to walk , and a wife who , it turns out , still hates when I 'm not there for mysterious reasons , so this was not an option , but the question I asked , could we remix Granny D a bit ?
What about a walk not of 3,200 miles but of 185 miles across New Hampshire in January ?
So on January 11 , the anniversary of Aaron 's death , we began a walk that ended on January 24th , the day that Granny D was born .
A total of 200 people joined us across this walk , as we went from the very top to the very bottom of New Hampshire talking about this issue .
And what was astonishing to me , something I completely did not expect to find , was the passion and anger that there was among everyone that we talked to about this issue .
We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics .
Now politicians and pundits tell you , there 's nothing we can do about this issue , Americans don 't care about it , but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there 's nothing that can be done about this issue .
And it 's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation .
I mean , after all , at least 96 percent of us wish we could fly like Superman , but because at least 91 percent of us believe we can 't , we don 't leap off of tall buildings every time we have that urge .
That 's because we accept our limits , and so too with this reform .
But when you give people the sense of hope , you begin to thaw that absolute sense of impossibility .
As Harvey Milk said , if you give ' em hope , you give ' em a chance , a way to think about how this change is possible .
Hope .
And hope is the one thing that we , Aaron 's friends , failed him with , because we let him lose that sense of hope .
I loved that boy like I love my son .
But we failed him .
And I love my country , and I 'm not going to fail that .
I 'm not going to fail that .
That sense of hope , we 're going to hold , and we 're going to fight for , however impossible this battle looks .
What 's next ?
Well , we started with this march with 200 people , and next year , there will be 1,000 on different routes that march in the month of January and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause , and then in 2016 , before the primary , there will be 10,000 who march across that state , meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause .
And as we have marched , people around the country have begun to say , " Can we do the same thing in our state ? "
So we 've started a platform called G.D. Walkers , that is , Granny D walkers , and Granny D walkers across the country will be marching for this reform . Number one .
Number two , on this march , one of the founders of Thunderclap , David Cascino , was with us , and he said , " Well what can we do ? "
And so they developed a platform , which we are announcing today , that allows us to pull together voters who are committed to this idea of reform .
Regardless of where you are , in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire , you can sign up and directly be informed where the candidates are on this issue so you can decide who to vote for as a function of which is going to make this possibility real .
And then finally number three , the hardest .
We 're in the age of the Super PAC .
Indeed yesterday , Merriam announced that Merriam-Webster will have Super PAC as a word .
It is now an official word in the dictionary .
So on May 1 , aka May Day , we 're going to try an experiment .
We 're going to try a launching of what we can think of as a Super PAC to end all Super PACs .
And the basic way this works is this .
For the last year , we have been working with analysts and political experts to calculate , how much would it cost to win enough votes in the United States Congress to make fundamental reform possible ?
What is that number ? Half a billion ? A billion ?
What is that number ?
And then whatever that number is , we are going to kickstart , sort of , because you can 't use KickStarter for political work , but anyway , kickstart , sort of , first a bottom-up campaign where people will make small dollar commitments contingent on reaching very ambitious goals , and when those goals have been reached , we will turn to the large dollar contributors , to get them to contribute to make it possible for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary to win this issue , to change the way money influences politics , so that on November 8 , which I discovered yesterday is the day that Aaron would have been 30 years old , on November 8 , we will celebrate 218 representatives in the House and 60 Senators in the United States Senate who have committed to this idea of fundamental reform .
So last night , we heard about wishes .
Here 's my wish .
May one .
May the ideals of one boy unite one nation behind one critical idea that we are one people , we are the people who were promised a government , a government that was promised to be dependent upon the people alone , the people , who , as Madison told us , meant not the rich more than the poor .
May one .
And then may you , may you join this movement , not because you 're a politician , not because you 're an expert , not because this is your field , but because if you are , you are a citizen .
Aaron asked me that .
Now I 've asked you .
Thank you very much .

Jennifer Golbeck : The curly fry conundrum : Why social media " likes " say more than you might think
Do you like curly fries ? Have you Liked them on Facebook ? Watch this talk to find out the surprising things Facebook can guess about you from your random Likes and Shares . Computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck explains how this came about , how some applications of the technology are not so cute -- and why she thinks we should return the control of information to its rightful owners .
If you remember that first decade of the web , it was really a static place .
You could go online , you could look at pages , and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time .
And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s , the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users , either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings .
And it 's also become a much more interactive place , where people are interacting with others , they 're commenting , they 're sharing , they 're not just reading .
So Facebook is not the only place you can do this , but it 's the biggest , and it serves to illustrate the numbers .
Facebook has 1.2 billion users per month .
So half the Earth 's Internet population is using Facebook .
They are a site , along with others , that has allowed people to create an online persona with very little technical skill , and people responded by putting huge amounts of personal data online .
So the result is that we have behavioral , preference , demographic data for hundreds of millions of people , which is unprecedented in history .
And as a computer scientist , what this means is that I 've been able to build models that can predict all sorts of hidden attributes for all of you that you don 't even know you 're sharing information about .
As scientists , we use that to help the way people interact online , but there 's less altruistic applications , and there 's a problem in that users don 't really understand these techniques and how they work , and even if they did , they don 't have a lot of control over it .
So what I want to talk to you about today is some of these things that we 're able to do , and then give us some ideas of how we might go forward to move some control back into the hands of users .
So this is Target , the company .
I didn 't just put that logo on this poor , pregnant woman 's belly .
You may have seen this anecdote that was printed in Forbes magazine where Target sent a flyer to this 15-year-old girl with advertisements and coupons for baby bottles and diapers and cribs two weeks before she told her parents that she was pregnant .
Yeah , the dad was really upset .
He said , " How did Target figure out that this high school girl was pregnant before she told her parents ? "
It turns out that they have the purchase history for hundreds of thousands of customers and they compute what they call a pregnancy score , which is not just whether or not a woman 's pregnant , but what her due date is .
And they compute that not by looking at the obvious things , like , she 's buying a crib or baby clothes , but things like , she bought more vitamins than she normally had , or she bought a handbag that 's big enough to hold diapers .
And by themselves , those purchases don 't seem like they might reveal a lot , but it 's a pattern of behavior that , when you take it in the context of thousands of other people , starts to actually reveal some insights .
So that 's the kind of thing that we do when we 're predicting stuff about you on social media .
We 're looking for little patterns of behavior that , when you detect them among millions of people , lets us find out all kinds of things .
So in my lab and with colleagues , we 've developed mechanisms where we can quite accurately predict things like your political preference , your personality score , gender , sexual orientation , religion , age , intelligence , along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are .
We can do all of this really well .
And again , it doesn 't come from what you might think of as obvious information .
So my favorite example is from this study that was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies .
If you Google this , you 'll find it .
It 's four pages , easy to read .
And they looked at just people 's Facebook likes , so just the things you like on Facebook , and used that to predict all these attributes , along with some other ones .
And in their paper they listed the five likes that were most indicative of high intelligence .
And among those was liking a page for curly fries . Curly fries are delicious , but liking them does not necessarily mean that you 're smarter than the average person .
So how is it that one of the strongest indicators of your intelligence is liking this page when the content is totally irrelevant to the attribute that 's being predicted ?
And it turns out that we have to look at a whole bunch of underlying theories to see why we 're able to do this .
One of them is a sociological theory called homophily , which basically says people are friends with people like them .
So if you 're smart , you tend to be friends with smart people , and if you 're young , you tend to be friends with young people , and this is well established for hundreds of years .
We also know a lot about how information spreads through networks .
It turns out things like viral videos or Facebook likes or other information spreads in exactly the same way that diseases spread through social networks .
So this is something we 've studied for a long time .
We have good models of it .
And so you can put those things together and start seeing why things like this happen .
So if I were to give you a hypothesis , it would be that a smart guy started this page , or maybe one of the first people who liked it would have scored high on that test .
And they liked it , and their friends saw it , and by homophily , we know that he probably had smart friends , and so it spread to them , and some of them liked it , and they had smart friends , and so it spread to them , and so it propagated through the network to a host of smart people , so that by the end , the action of liking the curly fries page is indicative of high intelligence , not because of the content , but because the actual action of liking reflects back the common attributes of other people who have done it .
So this is pretty complicated stuff , right ?
It 's a hard thing to sit down and explain to an average user , and even if you do , what can the average user do about it ?
How do you know that you 've liked something that indicates a trait for you that 's totally irrelevant to the content of what you 've liked ?
There 's a lot of power that users don 't have to control how this data is used .
And I see that as a real problem going forward .
So I think there 's a couple paths that we want to look at if we want to give users some control because it 's not always going to be used for their benefit .
An example I often give is that , if I ever get bored being a professor , I 'm going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you 're a drug user , if you 're an alcoholic .
We know how to predict all that . And I 'm going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you .
We totally can do that now .
I could start that business tomorrow , and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that .
That seems to me to be a problem .
So one of the paths we can go down is the policy and law path .
And in some respects , I think that that would be most effective , but the problem is we 'd actually have to do it .
Observing our political process in action makes me think it 's highly unlikely that we 're going to get a bunch of representatives to sit down , learn about this , and then enact sweeping changes to intellectual property law in the U.S.
so users control their data .
We could go the policy route , where social media companies say , you know what ? You own your data . You have total control over how it 's used .
The problem is that the revenue models for most social media companies rely on sharing or exploiting users ' data in some way .
It 's sometimes said of Facebook that the users aren 't the customer , they 're the product .
And so how do you get a company to cede control of their main asset back to the users ?
It 's possible , but I don 't think it 's something that we 're going to see change quickly .
So I think the other path that we can go down that 's going to be more effective is one of more science .
It 's doing science that allowed us to develop all these mechanisms for computing this personal data in the first place .
that we 'd have to do if we want to develop mechanisms that can say to a user , " Here 's the risk of that action you just took . "
By liking that Facebook page , or by sharing this piece of personal information , you 've now improved my ability to predict whether or not you 're using drugs or whether or not you get along well in the workplace .
And that , I think , can affect whether or not people want to share something , keep it private , or just keep it offline altogether .
We can also look at things like allowing people to encrypt data that they upload , so it 's kind of invisible and worthless to sites like Facebook or third party services that access it , but that select users who the person who posted it want to see it have access to see it .
This is all super exciting research from an intellectual perspective , and so scientists are going to be willing to do it .
So that gives us an advantage over the law side .
One of the problems that people bring up when I talk about this is , they say , you know , if people start keeping all this data private , all those methods that you 've been developing to predict their traits are going to fail .
And I say , absolutely , and for me , that 's success , because as a scientist , my goal is not to infer information about users , it 's to improve the way people interact online .
And sometimes that involves inferring things about them , but if users don 't want me to use that data , I think they should have the right to do that .
I want users to be informed and consenting users of the tools that we develop .
And so I think encouraging this kind of science and supporting researchers who want to cede some of that control back to users and away from the social media companies means that going forward , as these tools evolve and advance , means that we 're going to have an educated and empowered user base , and I think all of us can agree that that 's a pretty ideal way to go forward .
Thank you .
Bill and Melinda Gates : Why giving away our wealth has been the most satisfying thing we 've done
In 1993 , Bill and Melinda Gates took a walk on the beach and made a big decision : to give their Microsoft wealth back to society . In conversation with Chris Anderson , the couple talks about their work at the Bill & amp ; Melinda Gates Foundation , as well as their marriage , their children , their failures and the satisfaction of giving most of their money away .
So , this is an interview with a difference .
On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words , what I did was , I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they 've done , and do a few things that way .
So , we 're going to start here .
Melinda , when and where was this , and who is that handsome man next to you ?
Melinda Gates : With those big glasses , huh ?
This is in Africa , our very first trip , the first time either of us had ever been to Africa , in the fall of 1993 .
We were already engaged to be married .
We married a few months later , and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna .
It was incredible . Bill had never taken that much time off from work .
But what really touched us , actually , were the people , and the extreme poverty .
We started asking ourselves questions .
Does it have to be like this ?
And at the end of the trip , we went out to Zanzibar , and took some time to walk on the beach , which is something we had done a lot while we were dating .
And we 'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society , but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about , well , what might we do and how might we go about it ?
So , given that this vacation led to the creation of the world 's biggest private foundation , it 's pretty expensive as vacations go . MG : I guess so . We enjoyed it .
Which of you was the key instigator here , or was it symmetrical ?
Bill Gates : Well , I think we were excited that there 'd be a phase of our life where we 'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back .
At this stage , we were talking about the poorest , and could you have a big impact on them ?
Were there things that weren 't being done ?
There was a lot we didn 't know .
Our naïveté is pretty incredible , when we look back on it .
But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase , the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy .
MG : Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60 , so he hasn 't quite hit 60 yet , so some things change along the way .
So it started there , but it got accelerated .
So that was ' 93 , and it was ' 97 , really , before the foundation itself started .
Yeah , in ' 97 , we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world , and we kept saying to ourselves , " Well that can 't be .
In the U.S. , you just go down to the drug store . "
And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population , learning about vaccines , learning about what had worked and what had failed , and that 's really when we got going , was in late 1998 , 1999 .
So , you 've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues .
How on Earth do you decide what to focus on ?
Well , we decided that we 'd pick two causes , whatever the biggest inequity was globally , and there we looked at children dying , children not having enough nutrition to ever develop , and countries that were really stuck , because with that level of death , and parents would have so many kids that they 'd get huge population growth , and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn 't be educated and lift themselves up .
So that was our global thing , and then in the U.S. , both of us have had amazing educations , and we saw that as the way that the U.S.
could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system , and the more we learned , the more we realized we 're not really fulfilling that promise .
And so we picked those two things , and everything the foundation does is focused there .
So , I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work , and Melinda , this is what you picked .
What 's this about ?
MG : So I , one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women , whether it 's Bangladesh , India , lots of countries in Africa , and I go in as a Western woman without a name .
I don 't tell them who I am . Pair of khakis .
And I kept hearing from women , over and over and over , the more I traveled , " I want to be able to use this shot . "
I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines , and they would bring the conversation around to " But what about the shot I get ? "
which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera , which is a contraceptive .
And I would come back and talk to global health experts , and they 'd say , " Oh no , contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world . "
Well , you had to dig deeper into the reports , and this is what the team came to me with , which is , to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me , " I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it , and I got to the clinic , and there was nothing there . "
And so condoms were stocked in in Africa because of all the AIDS work that the U.S.
and others supported .
But women will tell you over and over again , " I can 't negotiate a condom with my husband .
I 'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS , and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children , and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them . "
Melinda , you 're Roman Catholic , and you 've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue , and on the abortion question , on both sides , really .
How do you navigate that ?
MG : Yeah , so I think that 's a really important point , which is , we had backed away from contraceptives We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives , even the contraceptives we have here in the United States , and we weren 't providing them because of the political controversy in our country , and to me that was just a crime , and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage , and I finally realized I just had to do it .
And even though I 'm Catholic , I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives , and I shouldn 't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back .
We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives , and so we got back to that global consensus , and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women .
Bill , this is your graph . What 's this about ?
Well , my graph has numbers on it .
I really like this graph .
This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year .
And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known , that we are making incredible progress .
not long after I was born to now we 're down to about six million .
So this is a story largely of vaccines .
Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year .
That was eradicated , so that got down to zero .
Measles was killing a couple million a year .
That 's down to a few hundred thousand .
Anyway , this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue , and it 's going to be possible , using the science of new vaccines , getting the vaccines out to kids .
We can actually accelerate the progress .
The last decade , that number has dropped faster than ever in history , and so I just love the fact that you can say , okay , if we can invent new vaccines , we can get them out there , use the very latest understanding of these things , and get the delivery right , that we can perform a miracle .
I mean , you do the math on this , and it works out , I think , literally to thousands of kids ' lives saved every day compared to the prior year .
It 's not reported .
An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far , far bigger story than that .
Does that drive you crazy ?
Yeah , because it 's a silent thing going on .
It 's a kid , one kid at a time .
Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters , and yet , people 's charity , when they see a natural disaster , are wonderful .
It 's incredible how people think , okay , that could be me , and the money flows .
These causes have been a bit invisible .
Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there , we are seeing some increased generosity , so the goal is to get this well below a million , which should be possible in our lifetime .
Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big , sad face to get engaged .
I mean , you 've used it in your letter this year , you used basically this argument to say that aid , contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken , that actually it has been effective .
Yeah , well people can take , there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn 't go well .
There 's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn 't go well .
You shouldn 't just say , okay , because of that , because we don 't have a perfect record , this is a bad endeavor .
You should look at , what was your goal ?
How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves , and say wow , this is going well , and be smarter .
We can spend aid smarter .
It is not all a panacea .
We can do better than venture capital , I think , including big hits like this .
Traditional wisdom is that it 's pretty hard for married couples to work together .
How have you guys managed it ?
MG : Yeah , I 've had a lot of women say to me , " I really don 't think I could work with my husband .
That just wouldn 't work out . "
You know , we enjoy it , and we don 't -- this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey , and we don 't travel together as much for the foundation , actually , as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft .
We have more trips where we 're traveling separately , but I always know when I come home , Bill 's going to be interested in what I learned , whether it 's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain , or this person that is a great leader .
He 's going to listen and be really interested .
And he knows when he comes home , even if it 's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he 's learned , and I think we have a really collaborative relationship .
But we don 't every minute together , that 's for sure .
But now you are , and we 're very happy that you are .
Melinda , early on , you were basically largely running the show .
Six years ago , I guess , Bill came on full time , so moved from Microsoft and became full time .
That must have been hard , adjusting to that . No ?
MG : Yeah . I think actually , for the foundation employees , there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming .
I was actually really excited .
I mean , Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006 , and it was really his decision , but again , it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea .
And for me , the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems , these inequities , to me that was exciting .
Yes , the foundation employees had angst about that .
That 's cool .
MG : But that went away within three months , once he was there .
Including some of the employees .
MG : That 's what I said , the employees , it went away for them three months after you were there .
No , I 'm kidding . MG : Oh , you mean , the employees didn 't go away .
A few of them did , but — So what do you guys argue about ?
Sunday , 11 o 'clock , you 're away from work , what comes up ? What 's the argument ?
Because we built this thing together from the beginning , it 's this great partnership .
I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft .
I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger , and now Melinda , and in even stronger , equal ways , is the partner , so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to , which groups are working well ?
She 's got a lot of insight .
She 'll sit down with the employees a lot .
We 'll take the different trips she described .
So there 's a lot of collaboration .
I can 't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another ?
How about you , Melinda , though ? Can you ? You never know .
MG : Well , here 's the thing .
We come at things from different angles , and I actually think that 's really good .
So Bill can look at the big data and say , " I want to act based on these global statistics . "
For me , I come at it from intuition .
I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill 's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match , and I think what I 've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand , can you actually deliver that vaccine ?
Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child 's mouth ?
Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science .
So I think it 's been more a coming to over time towards each other 's point of view , and quite frankly , the work is better because of it .
So , in vaccines and polio and so forth , you 've had some amazing successes .
What about failure , though ?
Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you 've learned from it ?
Yeah . Fortunately , we can afford a few failures , because we 've certainly had them .
We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you 're going to have different failures .
Like , we put out , one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom .
Well , we got hundreds of ideas .
Maybe a few of those will work out .
We were very naïve , certainly I was , about a drug for a disease in India , visceral leishmaniasis , that I thought , once I got this drug , we can just go wipe out the disease .
Well , turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days .
It took three more years to get it than we expected , and then there was no way it was going to get out there .
Fortunately , we found out that if you go kill the sand flies , you probably can have success there , but we spent five years , you could say wasted five years , and about 60 million , on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there .
You 're spending , like , a billion dollars a year in education , I think , something like that .
Is anything , the story of what 's gone right there is quite a long and complex one .
Are there any failures that you can talk about ?
MG : Well , I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer , and small schools definitely help .
They bring down the dropout rate .
They have less violence and crime in those schools .
But the thing that we learned from that work , and what turned out to be the fundamental key , is a great teacher in front of the classroom .
If you don 't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom , I don 't care how big or small the building is , you 're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college .
So Melinda , this is you and your eldest daughter , Jenn .
And just taken about three weeks ago , I think , three or four weeks ago . Where was this ?
MG : So we went to Tanzania .
Jenn 's been to Tanzania .
All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit , actually .
And we did something very different , which is , we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family .
Anna and Sanare are the parents .
They invited us to come and stay in their boma .
Actually , the goats had been there , I think , living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there .
And we stayed with their family , and we really , really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania .
And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound , and so let me just give you one explanation of that .
They had six children , and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen , we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day , and as I talked to her , she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children .
It was a very loving relationship .
This was a Maasai warrior and his wife , but they had decided to get married , they clearly had respect and love in the relationship .
Their children , their six children , the two in the middle were twins , 13 , a boy , and a girl named Grace .
And when we 'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do , Grace was not a child , she was an adolescent , but she wasn 't an adult .
She was very , very shy .
So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn .
We kept trying to engage her , but she was shy .
And at night , though , when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania , and there was no moon that night , the first night , and no stars , and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on , Grace went immediately , and got the translator , came straight up to my Jenn and said , " When you go home , can I have your headlamp so I can study at night ? "
Oh , wow .
MG : And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son , who had passed his secondary exams , because of her chores , she 'd not done so well and wasn 't in the government school yet .
He said , " I don 't know how I 'm going to pay for her education .
I can 't pay for private school , and she may end up on this farm like my wife . "
So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge , profound way .
I mean , this is another pic of your other two kids , Rory and Phoebe , along with Paul Farmer .
Bringing up three children when you 're the world 's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art .
How have you managed it ?
What 's been your approach ?
Well , I 'd say overall the kids get a great education , but you 've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they 're going to go and do , and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them -- most of the money 's going to the foundation -- and help them find something they 're excited about .
We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing .
And so far , they 're fairly diligent , excited to pick their own direction .
You 've obviously guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons .
I 'm curious why you 've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED .
MG : Well , it 's interesting .
As they get older , they so know that our family belief is about responsibility , that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education , and we have a responsibility to give back to the world .
And so as they get older and we are teaching them -- they have been to so many countries around the world — they 're saying , we do want people to know that we believe in what you 're doing , Mom and Dad , and it is okay to show us more .
So we have their permission to show this picture , and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work .
But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation , too .
You 've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires .
Is that your plan for them ?
Nope . No . They won 't have anything like that .
They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important .
We read an article long , actually , before we got married , where Warren Buffett talked about that , and we 're quite convinced that it wasn 't a favor either to society or to the kids .
Well , speaking of Warren Buffett , something really amazing happened in 2006 , when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation .
How on Earth did that happen ?
I guess there 's a long version and a short version of that .
We 've got time for the short version .
All right . Well , Warren was a close friend , and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away .
Tragically , she passed away before he did , and he 's big on delegation , and — — he said — Tweet that .
If he 's got somebody who is doing something well , and is willing to do it at no charge , maybe that 's okay . But we were stunned .
MG : Totally stunned . We had never expected it , and it has been unbelievable .
It 's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically .
Half the resources we have come from Warren 's mind-blowing generosity .
And I think you 've pledged that by the time you 're done , more than , or 95 percent of your wealth , will be given to the foundation .
Yes .
And since this relationship , it 's amazing — And recently , you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give , what , more than half of their assets for philanthropy .
How is that going ?
Well , we 've got about 120 people who have now taken this giving pledge .
The thing that 's great is that we get together yearly and talk about , okay , do you hire staff , what do you give to them ?
We 're not trying to homogenize it .
I mean , the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity .
People give to some things .
We look and go , " Wow . "
But that 's great .
That 's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches , including even in one space , like education .
We need more experimentation .
But it 's been wonderful , meeting those people , sharing their journey to philanthropy , how they involve their kids , where they 're doing it differently , and it 's been way more successful than we expected .
Now it looks like it 'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead .
MG : And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy , I mean , these are people who have created their own businesses , put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas .
If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy , they can change the world .
And they start to see others doing it , and saying , " Wow , I want to do that with my own money . "
To me , that 's the piece that 's incredible .
It seems to me , it 's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else .
There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people .
I 'm curious , can you make the pitch ?
What 's the pitch ?
Well , it 's the most fulfilling thing we 've ever done , and you can 't take it with you , and if it 's not good for your kids , let 's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done .
The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past , and the U.S. tradition here , which is the strongest , is the envy of the world .
And part of the reason I 'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government 's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction .
The world 's got this terrible inequality , growing inequality problem that seems structural .
It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made , it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem .
Is that a fair comment ?
Oh yeah . If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy , it 's good .
It tries to balance out , and that 's just .
MG : But you change systems .
In the U.S. , we 're trying to change the education system so it 's just for everybody and it works for all students .
That , to me , really changes the inequality balance .
That 's the most important .
Well , I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future .
Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do .
Thank you . MG : Thank you .
Thank you . MG : Thank you very much .
All right , good job .
Allan Adams : The discovery that could rewrite physics
On March 17 , 2014 , a group of physicists announced a thrilling discovery : the " smoking gun " data for the idea of an inflationary universe , a clue to the Big Bang . For non-physicists , what does it mean ? TED asked Allan Adams to briefly explain the results , in this improvised talk illustrated by Randall Munroe of xkcd .
If you look deep into the night sky , you see stars , and if you look further , you see more stars , and further , galaxies , and further , more galaxies .
But if you keep looking further and further , eventually you see nothing for a long while , and then finally you see a faint , fading afterglow , and it 's the afterglow of the Big Bang .
Now , the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small , incredibly hot , incredibly roiling mass , and from it sprung everything we see .
Now , we 've mapped that afterglow with great precision , and when I say we , I mean people who aren 't me .
We 've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision , and one of the shocks about it is that it 's almost completely uniform .
Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way , it 's the same temperature .
Now it 's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang , and so it 's got faint and cold .
It 's now 2.7 degrees .
But it 's not exactly 2.7 degrees .
It 's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million .
Over here , it 's a little hotter , and over there , it 's a little cooler , and that 's incredibly important to everyone in this room , because where it was a little hotter , there was a little more stuff , and where there was a little more stuff , we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos .
And those small , little , inhomogeneities , 20 parts in a million , those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos .
That is spectacular , and that 's not what they found on Monday ; what they found on Monday is cooler .
So here 's what they found on Monday : Imagine you take a bell , and you whack the bell with a hammer .
What happens ? It rings .
But if you wait , that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don 't notice it anymore .
Now , that early universe was incredibly dense , like a metal , way denser , and if you hit it , it would ring , but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself , and the hammer would be quantum mechanics .
What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe , what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era , and here 's how they found it .
Those waves have long since faded .
If you go for a walk , you don 't wiggle .
Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes .
But early on , when the universe was making that last afterglow , the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see .
So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper -- in fact , these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest , clearest , cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol , the signal , of gravitational waves , the ringing of the early universe .
And on Monday , they announced that they had found it .
And the thing that 's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing , though that is awesome .
The thing that 's totally amazing , the reason I 'm on this stage , is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe .
It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble -- and this is the idea of inflation — one large bubble surrounded by something else .
This isn 't conclusive evidence for inflation , but anything that isn 't inflation that explains this will look the same .
This is a theory , an idea , that has been around for a while , and we never thought we we 'd really see it .
For good reasons , we thought we 'd never see killer evidence , and this is killer evidence .
But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger , roiling pot of universal stuff .
We 're never going to see the stuff outside , but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky , we can figure out that we 're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that .
And that amazes me .
Thanks a lot .

TED staff : It 's TED , the Musical
Do you have a TED Talk inside , just bursting to come out ? Take this tongue-in-cheek musical journey to " Give Your Talk . " A musical love letter to our speakers -- written , directed and performed by the TED staff .
Daffodil Hudson : Hello ?
Yeah , this is she .
What ?
Oh , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , of course I accept .
What are the dates again ?
Pen . Pen . Pen .
March 17 through 21 .
Okay , all right , great . Thanks .
Lab Partner : Who was that ?
DH : It was TED .
LP : Who 's TED ?
DH : I 've got to prepare .
[ " Give Your Talk : A Musical " ] [ " My Talk " ] Procrastination . What do you think ?
Can I help you ?
Speaker Coach 1 : Let 's prepare for main stage . It 's your time to shine . If you want to succeed then you must be primed . Speaker Coach 2 : Your slides are bad but your idea is good so you can bet before we 're through , speaker , we 'll make a TED Talk out of you . Speaker Coach 3 : We know about climate change , but what can you say that 's new ? SC 1 : Once you find your focus then the talk comes into view . SC 2 : Don 't ever try to sell something from up on that stage or we won 't post your talk online . All : Somehow we 'll make a TED Talk out of you . SC 1 : Ready to practice one more time ?
DH : Right now ?
Stagehand : Break a leg .
DH : I 'll never remember all this . Will the clicker work when I press it ? Why must Al Gore go right before me ? Oh man , I 'm scared to death . I hope I don 't pass out onstage and now I really wish I wasn 't wearing green . All : Give your talk . SC 1 : You must be be sweet like Brené Brown . All : Give your talk . SC 2 : You must be funny like Ken Robinson . All : Give your talk . SC 3 : You must be cool like Reggie Watts All : and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor . DH : My time is running over . The clock now says nil . I 'm saying my words faster . Understand me still . I 'm too nervous to give this TED Talk . All : Don 't give up . Rehearse . You 're good . We 'll edit out the mistakes that you make . Give your talk . DH : I will be big like Amy Cuddy . All : Give your talk . DH : I will inspire like Liz Gilbert . All : Give your talk . DH : I will engage like Hans Rosling and release mosquitos like Bill Gates . SC 2 : I 'll make a TED Talk out of you . I 'll make a TED Talk out of you . I 'll make a TED Talk out of you . I 'll make a TED Talk out of you . I 'll make a TED Talk out of you . [ " Brought to you by TED staff and friends " ]
Del Harvey : Protecting Twitter users
Del Harvey heads up Twitter 's Trust and Safety Team , and she thinks all day about how to prevent worst-case scenarios -- abuse , trolling , stalking -- while giving voice to people around the globe . With deadpan humor , she offers a window into how she works to keep 240 million users safe .
My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust , protect user rights and keep users safe , both from each other and , at times , from themselves .
Let 's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter .
Back in January 2009 , we saw more than two million new tweets each day January 2014 , more than 500 million .
We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes .
That 's a 24,900-percent increase .
Now , the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm 's way .
There 's no risk involved .
My job is to root out and prevent activity that might .
Sounds straightforward , right ?
You might even think it 'd be easy , given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm 's way .
Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities ?
Given the scale that Twitter is at , a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day .
It 's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale .
For us , edge cases , those rare situations that are unlikely to occur , are more like norms .
Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone .
There 's no threat involved .
Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia 's Heart Reef , or tweeting about a concert they 're attending , or sharing pictures of cute baby animals .
After you take out that 99.999 percent , that tiny percentage of tweets remaining 150,000 per month .
The sheer scale of what we 're dealing with makes for a challenge .
You know what else makes my role particularly challenging ?
People do weird things .
And I have to figure out what they 're doing , why , and whether or not there 's risk involved , often without much in terms of context or background .
I 'm going to show you some examples that I 've run into during my time at Twitter -- these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried , but the truth of the matter was something altogether different .
The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty .
We 'll start off easy .
[ " Yo bitch " ] If you saw a Tweet that only said this , you might think to yourself , " That looks like abuse . "
After all , why would you want to receive the message , " Yo , bitch . "
Now , I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes , so I knew that " yo , bitch " was also often a common greeting between friends , as well as being a popular " Breaking Bad " reference .
I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case .
It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs .
And in fact , in that case , it 's not only not abusive , it 's technically just an accurate greeting .
So okay , determining whether or not something is abusive without context , definitely hard .
Let 's look at spam .
Here 's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior , sending the exact same message to thousands of people .
While this is a mockup I put together using my account , we see accounts doing this all the time .
Seems pretty straightforward .
We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior .
Turns out there 's some exceptions to that rule .
Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it .
You 're not going to get that chance if we mistakenly suspend the account thinking it 's spam .
Okay . Let 's make the stakes higher .
Back to my account , again exhibiting classic behavior .
This time it 's sending the same message and link .
This is often indicative of something called phishing , somebody trying to steal another person 's account information by directing them to another website .
That 's pretty clearly not a good thing .
We want to , and do , suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior .
So why are the stakes higher for this ?
Well , this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who 's trying to let the world know what 's happening .
We don 't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it .
That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors , and even then , we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate .
Now , given the sorts of challenges I 'm up against , it 's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected .
And that 's not just an issue for me , or for Twitter , it 's an issue for you .
It 's an issue for anybody who 's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things .
So what do I do ?
I pause and I think , how could all of this go horribly wrong ?
I visualize catastrophe .
And that 's hard . There 's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that , like when you 're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement .
But you still have to do it , particularly if you 're marrying 500 million tweets per day .
What do I mean by " visualize catastrophe ? "
I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death , and what to do to prevent that .
Which happens to be my next example .
This is my cat , Eli .
We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets .
You only get 140 characters .
You add a photo to your tweet , look at how much more content you 've got now .
There 's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet .
My job isn 't to think of those .
It 's to think of what could go wrong .
How could this picture lead to my death ?
Well , here 's one possibility .
There 's more in that picture than just a cat .
There 's geodata .
When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera , there 's a lot of additional information saved along in that image .
In fact , this image also contains the equivalent of this , more specifically , this .
Sure , it 's not likely that someone 's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat , but I start by assuming the worst will happen .
That 's why , when we launched photos on Twitter , we made the decision to strip that geodata out .
If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards , I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases .
Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen , it wouldn 't be surprising if my worldview was gloomy .
It 's not .
The vast majority of interactions I see -- and I see a lot , believe me -- are positive , people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other .
It 's just that for those of us dealing with scale , for those of us tasked with keeping people safe , we have to assume the worst will happen , because for us , a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds .
Thank you .

Ed Yong : Zombie roaches and other parasite tales
In this fascinating , hilarious and ever-so-slightly creepy talk , science writer Ed Yong tells the story of his favorite parasites -- animals and organisms that live on the bodies of other organisms , causing them to do their bidding . Do humans have them too ? Maybe ...
A herd of wildebeests , a shoal of fish , a flock of birds .
Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world .
But why do these groups form ?
The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed , and all of these explanations , while often true , make a huge assumption about animal behavior , that the animals are in control of their own actions , that they are in charge of their bodies .
And that is often not the case .
This is Artemia , a brine shrimp .
You probably know it better as a sea monkey .
It 's small , and it typically lives alone , but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters , and these form because of a parasite .
These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm .
A tapeworm is effectively a long , living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other .
As a freelance journalist , I sympathize .
The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia 's body , but it also does other things .
It castrates them , it changes their color from transparent to bright red , it makes them live longer , and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found , it makes them swim in groups .
Why ? Because the tapeworm , like many other parasites , has a complicated life cycle involving many different hosts .
The shrimp are just one step on its journey .
Its ultimate destination is this , the greater flamingo .
Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce , so to get there , it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour , and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm .
They aren 't sociable through their own volition , but because they are being controlled .
It 's not safety in numbers .
It 's actually the exact opposite .
The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies , turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo .
And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation .
This is a suicidal cricket .
This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm , or horsehair worm .
The worm grew to adult size within it , but it needs to get into water in order to mate , and it does that by releasing proteins that addle the cricket 's brain , causing it to behave erratically .
When the cricket nears a body of water , such as this swimming pool , it jumps in and drowns , and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse .
Crickets are really roomy . Who knew ?
The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone .
They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites , of fungi , viruses , and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts .
Now , I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough 's " Trials of Life " about 20 years ago , and then later through a wonderful book called " Parasite Rex " by my friend Carl Zimmer .
And I 've been writing about these creatures ever since .
Few topics in biology enthrall me more .
It 's like the parasites have subverted my own brain .
Because after all , they are always compelling and they are delightfully macabre .
When you write about parasites , your lexicon swells with phrases like " devoured alive " and " bursts out of its body . "
But there 's more to it than that .
I 'm a writer , and fellow writers in the audience will know that we love stories .
Parasites invite us to resist the allure of obvious stories .
Their world is one of plot twists and unexpected explanations .
Why , for example , does this caterpillar start violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over ?
Is it maybe protecting its siblings ?
No .
This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic wasp which laid eggs inside it .
The eggs hatched and the young wasps devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body .
See what I mean ?
Now , the caterpillar didn 't die .
Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons .
This caterpillar is a head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it .
We have a lot to get through . I only have 13 minutes . Now , some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world , that they are outliers , and that point of view is understandable , because by their nature , parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside the bodies of other things .
They 're easy to overlook , but that doesn 't mean that they aren 't important .
A few years back , a man called Kevin Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they could find , and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance .
Especially common were trematodes , tiny worms that specialize in castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail .
Now , a single trematode is tiny , microscopic , but collectively they weighed as much as all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the birds .
And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you , the cricket thing ?
One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one stream , these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of local trout .
Manipulation is not an oddity .
It is a critical and common part of the world around us , and scientists have now found hundreds of examples of such manipulators , and more excitingly , they 're starting to understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts .
And this is one of my favorite examples .
This is Ampulex compressa , the emerald cockroach wasp , and it is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must be in want of a cockroach .
When she finds one , she stabs it with a stinger that is also a sense organ .
This discovery came out three weeks ago .
She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach 's brain . So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag , she finds the brain , and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons .
Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is a very specific chemical weapon .
It doesn 't kill the roach , nor does it sedate it .
The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to , but it doesn 't choose to , because the venom nixes its motivation to walk , and only that .
The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in the roach 's operating system , allowing her to lead her helpless victim back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog .
And once there , she lays an egg on it , egg hatches , devoured alive , bursts out of body , yadda yadda yadda , you know the drill .
Now I would argue that , once stung , the cockroach isn 't a roach anymore .
It 's more of an extension of the wasp , just like the cricket was an extension of the Gordian worm .
These hosts won 't get to survive or reproduce .
They have as much control over their own fates as my car .
Once the parasites get in , the hosts don 't get a say .
Now humans , of course , are no stranger to manipulation .
We take drugs to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods , and what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to influence someone else 's mind ?
But our attempts at doing this are crude and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites .
Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald cockroach wasp .
Now , I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and so compelling .
We place such a premium on our free will and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears .
Orwellian dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains -- these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction , but in nature , they happen all the time .
Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question : Are there dark , sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing about it , besides the NSA ?
If there are any — I 've got a red dot on my forehead now , don 't I ?
If there are any , this is a good candidate for them .
This is Toxoplasma gondii , or Toxo , for short , because the terrifying creature always deserves a cute nickname .
Toxo infects mammals , a wide variety of mammals , but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat .
And scientists like Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse , it turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile .
If the infected rat smells the delightful odor of cat piss , it runs towards the source of the smell rather than the more sensible direction of away .
The cat eats the rat . Toxo gets to have sex .
It 's a classic tale of Eat , Prey , Love .
You 're very charitable , generous people .
Hi , Elizabeth , I loved your talk .
How does the parasite control its host in this way ?
We don 't really know .
We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine , a substance involved in reward and motivation .
We know it targets certain parts of a rodent 's brain , including those involved in sexual arousal .
But how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear .
What is clear is that this thing is a single cell .
This has no nervous system . It has no consciousness .
It doesn 't even have a body .
But it 's manipulating a mammal ?
We are mammals .
We are more intelligent than a mere rat , to be sure , but our brains have the same basic structure , the same types of cells , the same chemicals running through them , and the same parasites .
Estimates vary a lot , but some figures suggest that one in three people around the world have Toxo in their brains .
Now typically , this doesn 't lead to any overt illness .
The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a long period of time .
But there 's some evidence that those people who are carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than other people , that they have a slightly higher risk of car accidents , and there 's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be infected .
Now , I think this evidence is still inconclusive , and even among Toxo researchers , opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is truly influencing our behavior .
But given the widespread nature of such manipulations , it would be completely implausible for humans to be the only species that weren 't similarly affected .
subvert our way of thinking about the world makes parasites amazing .
They 're constantly inviting us to look at the natural world sideways , and to ask if the behaviors we 're seeing , whether they 're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling , are not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but because they are being bent to the control of something else .
And while that idea may be disquieting , and while parasites ' habits may be very grisly , I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin .
At the end of " On the Origin of Species , " Charles Darwin writes about the grandeur of life , and of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful , and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches for walks .
But perhaps , that 's just a parasite talking .
Thank you .

Bran Ferren : To create for the ages , let 's combine art and engineering
When Bran Ferren was just 9 , his parents took him to see the Pantheon in Rome — and it changed everything . In that moment , he began to understand how the tools of science and engineering become more powerful when combined with art , with design and beauty . Ever since , he 's been searching for a convincing modern-day equivalent to Rome 's masterpiece . Stay tuned to the end of the talk for his unexpected suggestion .
Good morning .
When I was a little boy , I had an experience that changed my life , and is in fact why I 'm here today .
That one moment profoundly affected how I think about art , design and engineering .
As background , I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of loving and talented artists in one of the world 's great cities .
My dad , John Ferren , who died when I was 15 , was an artist by both passion and profession , as is my mom , Rae .
He was one of the New York School abstract expressionists who , together with his contemporaries , invented American modern art , and contributed to moving the American zeitgeist towards modernism in the 20th century .
Isn 't it remarkable that , after thousands of years of people doing mostly representational art , that modern art , comparatively speaking , is about 15 minutes old , yet now pervasive .
As with many other important innovations , those radical ideas required no new technology , just fresh thinking and a willingness to experiment , plus resiliency in the face of near-universal criticism and rejection .
In our home , art was everywhere .
It was like oxygen , around us and necessary for life .
As I watched him paint , Dad taught me that art was not about being decorative , but was a different way of communicating ideas , and in fact one that could bridge the worlds of knowledge and insight .
Given this rich artistic environment , you 'd assume that I would have been compelled to go into the family business , but no .
I followed the path of most kids who are genetically programmed to make their parents crazy .
I had no interest in becoming an artist , certainly not a painter .
What I did love was electronics and machines -- taking them apart , building new ones , and making them work .
Fortunately , my family also had engineers in it , and with my parents , these were my first role models .
What they all had in common was they worked very , very hard .
My grandpa owned and operated a sheet metal kitchen cabinet factory in Brooklyn .
On weekends , we would go together to Cortlandt Street , which was New York City 's radio row .
There we would explore massive piles of surplus electronics , and for a few bucks bring home treasures like Norden bombsights and parts from the first IBM tube-based computers .
I found these objects both useful and fascinating .
I learned about engineering and how things worked , not at school but by taking apart and studying these fabulously complex devices .
I did this for hours every day , apparently avoiding electrocution .
Life was good .
However , every summer , sadly , the machines got left behind while my parents and I traveled overseas to experience history , art and design .
We visited the great museums and historic buildings of both Europe and the Middle East , but to encourage my growing interest in science and technology , they would simply drop me off in places like the London Science Museum , where I would wander endlessly for hours by myself studying the history of science and technology .
Then , when I was about nine years old , we went to Rome .
On one particularly hot summer day , we visited a drum-shaped building that from the outside was not particularly interesting .
My dad said it was called the Pantheon , a temple for all of the gods .
It didn 't look all that special from the outside , as I said , but when we walked inside , I was immediately struck by three things : First of all , it was pleasantly cool despite the oppressive heat outside .
It was very dark , the only source of light being an big open hole in the roof .
Dad explained that this wasn 't a big open hole , but it was called the oculus , an eye to the heavens .
And there was something about this place , I didn 't know why , that just felt special .
As we walked to the center of the room , I looked up at the heavens through the oculus .
This was the first church that I 'd been to that provided an unrestricted view between God and man .
But I wondered , what about when it rained ?
Dad may have called this an oculus , but it was , in fact , a big hole in the roof .
I looked down and saw floor drains had been cut into the stone floor .
As I became more accustomed to the dark , I was able to make out details of the floor and the surrounding walls .
No big deal here , just the same statuary stuff that we 'd seen all over Rome .
In fact , it looked like the Appian Way marble salesman showed up with his sample book , showed it to Hadrian , and Hadrian said , " We 'll take all of it . "
But the ceiling was amazing .
It looked like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome .
I 'd seen these before , and Bucky was friends with my dad .
It was modern , high-tech , impressive , a huge 142-foot clear span which , not coincidentally , was exactly its height .
I loved this place .
It was really beautiful and unlike anything I 'd ever seen before , so I asked my dad , " When was this built ? "
He said , " About 2,000 years ago . "
And I said , " No , I mean , the roof . "
You see , I assumed that this was a modern roof that had been put on because the original was destroyed in some long-past war .
He said , " It 's the original roof . "
That moment changed my life , and I can remember it as if it were yesterday .
For the first time , I realized people were smart 2,000 years ago . This had never crossed my mind .
I mean , to me , the pyramids at Giza , we visited those the year before , and sure they 're impressive , nice enough design , but look , give me an unlimited budget , 20,000 to 40,000 laborers , and about 10 to 20 years to cut and drag stone blocks across the countryside , and I 'll build you pyramids too .
But no amount of brute force gets you the dome of the Pantheon , not 2,000 years ago , nor today .
And incidentally , it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome that 's ever been built .
To build the Pantheon took some miracles .
By miracles , I mean things that are technically barely possible , very high-risk , and might not be actually accomplishable at this moment in time , certainly not by you .
For example , here are some of the Pantheon 's miracles .
To make it even structurally possible , they had to invent super-strong concrete , and to control weight , varied the density of the aggregate as they worked their way up the dome .
For strength and lightness , the dome structure used five rings of coffers , each of diminishing size , which imparts a dramatic forced perspective to the design .
It was wonderfully cool inside because of its huge thermal mass , natural convection of air rising up through the oculus , and a Venturi effect when wind blows across the top of the building .
I discovered for the first time that light itself has substance .
The shaft of light beaming through the oculus was both beautiful and palpable , and I realized for the first time that light could be designed .
Further , that of all of the forms of design , visual design , they were all kind of irrelevant without it , because without light , you can 't see any of them .
I also realized that I wasn 't the first person to think that this place was really special .
It survived gravity , barbarians , looters , developers and the ravages of time to become what I believe is the longest continuously occupied building in history .
Largely because of that visit , I came to understand that , contrary to what I was being told in school , the worlds of art and design were not , in fact , incompatible with science and engineering .
I realized , when combined , you could create things that were amazing that couldn 't be done in either domain alone .
But in school , with few exceptions , they were treated as separate worlds , and they still are .
My teachers told me that I had to get serious and focus on one or the other .
However , urging me to specialize only caused me to really appreciate those polymaths like Michelangelo , Leonardo da Vinci , Benjamin Franklin , people who did exactly the opposite .
And this led me to embrace and want to be in both worlds .
So then how do these projects of unprecedented creative vision and technical complexity like the Pantheon actually happen ?
Someone themselves , perhaps Hadrian , needed a brilliant creative vision .
They also needed the storytelling and leadership skills necessary to fund and execute it , and a mastery of science and technology with the ability and knowhow to push existing innovations even farther .
It is my belief that to create these rare game changers requires you to pull off at least five miracles .
The problem is , no matter how talented , rich or smart you are , you only get one to one and a half miracles .
That 's it . That 's the quota .
Then you run out of time , money , enthusiasm , whatever .
Remember , most people can 't even imagine one of these technical miracles , and you need at least five to make a Pantheon .
In my experience , these rare visionaries who can think across the worlds of art , design and engineering have the ability to notice when others have provided enough of the miracles to bring the goal within reach .
Driven by the clarity of their vision , they summon the courage and determination to deliver the remaining miracles and they often take what other people think to be insurmountable obstacles and turn them into features .
Take the oculus of the Pantheon .
By insisting that it be in the design , it meant you couldn 't use much of the structural technology that had been developed for Roman arches .
However , by instead embracing it and rethinking weight and stress distribution , they came up with a design that only works if there 's a big hole in the roof .
That done , you now get the aesthetic and design benefits of light , cooling and that critical direct connection with the heavens .
Not bad .
These people not only believed that the impossible can be done , but that it must be done .
Enough ancient history .
What are some recent examples of innovations that combine creative design and technological advances in a way so profound that they will be remembered a thousand years from now ?
Well , putting a man on the moon was a good one , and returning him safely to Earth wasn 't bad either .
Talk about one giant leap : It 's hard to imagine a more profound moment in human history than when we first left our world to set foot on another .
So what came after the moon ?
One is tempted to say that today 's pantheon is the Internet , but I actually think that 's quite wrong , or at least it 's only part of the story .
The Internet isn 't a Pantheon .
It 's more like the invention of concrete : important , absolutely necessary to build the Pantheon , and enduring , but entirely insufficient by itself .
However , just as the technology of concrete was critical in realization of the Pantheon , new designers will use the technologies of the Internet to create novel concepts that will endure .
The smartphone is a perfect example .
Soon the majority of people on the planet will have one , and the idea of connecting everyone to both knowledge and each other will endure .
So what 's next ?
What imminent advance will be the equivalent of the Pantheon ?
Thinking about this , I rejected many very plausible and dramatic breakthroughs to come , such as curing cancer .
Why ? Because Pantheons are anchored in designed physical objects , ones that inspire by simply seeing and experiencing them , and will continue to do so indefinitely .
It is a different kind of language , like art .
These other vital contributions that extend life and relieve suffering are , of course , critical , and fantastic , but they 're part of the continuum of our overall knowledge and technology , like the Internet .
So what is next ?
Perhaps counterintuitively , I 'm guessing it 's a visionary idea from the late 1930s that 's been revived every decade since : autonomous vehicles .
Now you 're thinking , give me a break .
How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound ?
Look , much of our world has been designed around roads and transportation .
These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway system to the prosperity and development of the United States .
Today , these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have remained largely unchanged for 100 years .
Although perhaps not obvious today , autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and , by extension , civilization .
Here 's why : Once they become ubiquitous , each year , these vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and a million globally .
Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically .
Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear .
They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities , work , and the way we live .
We will get where we 're going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic basically polluting .
But why now ? Why do we think this is ready ?
Because over the last 30 years , people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles , but for entirely different purposes .
It took folks like DARPA , universities , and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice that if you were clever about it , autonomy could be done now .
So what are the five miracles needed for autonomous vehicles ?
One , you need to know where you are and exactly what time it is .
This was solved neatly by the GPS system , Global Positioning System , that the U.S. Government put in place .
You need to know where all the roads are , what the rules are , and where you 're going .
The various needs of personal navigation systems , in-car navigation systems , and web-based maps address this .
You must have near-continuous communication with high-performance computing networks and with others nearby to understand their intent .
The wireless technologies developed for mobile devices , with some minor modifications , are completely suitable to solve this .
You 'll probably want some restricted roadways to get started that both society and its lawyers agree are safe to use for this .
This will start with the HOV lanes and move from there .
But finally , you need to recognize people , signs and objects .
Machine vision , special sensors , and high-performance computing can do a lot of this , but it turns out a lot is not good enough when your family is on board .
Occasionally , humans will need to do sense-making .
For this , you might actually have to wake up your passenger and ask them what the hell that big lump is in the middle of the road .
Not so bad , and it will give us a sense of purpose in this new world .
Besides , once the first drivers explain to their confused car that the giant chicken at the fork in the road is actually a restaurant , and it 's okay to keep driving , every other car on the surface of the Earth will know that from that point on .
Five miracles , mostly delivered , and now you just need a clear vision of a better world filled with autonomous vehicles with seductively beautiful and new functional designs plus a lot of money and hard work to bring it home .
The beginning is now only a handful of years away , and I predict that autonomous vehicles will permanently change our world over the next several decades .
In conclusion , I 've come to believe that the ingredients for the next Pantheons are all around us , just waiting for visionary people with the broad knowledge , multidisciplinary skills , and intense passion to harness them to make their dreams a reality .
But these people don 't spontaneously pop into existence .
They need to be nurtured and encouraged from when they 're little kids .
We need to love them and help them discover their passions .
We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success , as is perseverance .
We need to help them to find their own role models , and give them the confidence to believe in themselves and to believe that anything is possible , and just as my grandpa did when he took me shopping for surplus , and just as my parents did when they took me to science museums , we need to encourage them to find their own path , even if it 's very different from our own .
But a cautionary note : We also need to periodically pry them away from their modern miracles , the computers , phones , tablets , game machines and TVs , take them out into the sunlight so they can experience both the natural and design wonders of our world , our planet and our civilization .
If we don 't , they won 't understand what these precious things are that someday they will be resopnsible for protecting and improving .
We also need them to understand something that doesn 't seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world , that art and design are not luxuries , nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering .
They are in fact essential to what makes us special .
Someday , if you get the chance , perhaps you can take your kids to the actual Pantheon , as we will our daughter Kira , to experience firsthand the power of that astonishing design , which on one otherwise unremarkable day in Rome , reached 2,000 years into the future to set the course for my life .
Thank you .

Charmian Gooch : My wish : To launch a new era of openness in business
Anonymous companies protect corrupt individuals – from notorious drug cartel leaders to nefarious arms dealers – behind a shroud of mystery that makes it almost impossible to find and hold them responsible . But anti-corruption activist Charmian Gooch hopes to change all that . At TED2014 , she shares her brave TED Prize wish : to know who owns and controls companies , to change the law , and to launch a new era of openness in business .
I 've come here today to talk to you about a problem .
It 's a very simple yet devastating problem , one that spans the globe and is affecting all of us .
The problem is anonymous companies .
It sounds like a really dry and technical thing , doesn 't it ?
But anonymous companies are making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes .
So , why am I here talking to all of you ?
Well , I guess I am a lifelong troublemaker and when my parents taught my twin brother and I to question authority , I don 't think they knew where it might lead .
And , they probably really regretted it during my stroppy teenage years when , predictably , I questioned their authority a lot .
And a lot of my school teachers didn 't appreciate it much either .
You see , since the age of about five I 've always asked the question , but why ?
But why does the Earth go around the sun ?
But why is blood red ?
But why do I have to go to school ?
But why do I have to respect the teachers and authority ?
And little did I realize that this question would become the basis of everything I would do .
And so it was in my twenties , a long time ago , that one rainy Sunday afternoon in North London I was sitting with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and we were busy stuffing envelopes for a mail out in the office of the campaign group where we worked at the time .
And as usual , we were talking about the world 's problems .
And in particular , we were talking about the civil war in Cambodia .
And we had talked about that many , many times before .
But then suddenly we stopped and looked at each other and said , but why don 't we try and change this ?
And from that slightly crazy question , over two decades and many campaigns later , including alerting the world to the problem of blood diamonds funding war , from that crazy question , Global Witness is now an 80-strong team of campaigners , investigators , journalists and lawyers .
And we 're all driven by the same belief , that change really is possible .
So , what exactly does Global Witness do ?
We investigate , we report , to uncover the people really responsible for funding conflict -- for stealing millions from citizens around the world , also known as state looting , and for destroying the environment .
And then we campaign hard to change the system itself .
And we 're doing this because so many of the countries rich in natural resources like oil or diamonds or timber are home to some of the poorest and most dispossessed people on the planet .
And much of this injustice is made possible by currently accepted business practices .
And one of these is anonymous companies .
Now we 've come up against anonymous companies in lots of our investigations , like in the Democratic Republic of Congo , where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars .
That 's twice the country 's health and education budget combined .
Or in Liberia , where an international predatory logging company used front companies as it attempted to grab a really huge chunk of Liberia 's unique forests .
Or political corruption in Sarawak , Malaysia , which has led to the destruction of much of its forests .
Well , that uses anonymous companies too .
We secretly filmed some of the family of the former chief minister and a lawyer as they told our undercover investigator exactly how these dubious deals are done using such companies .
And the awful thing is , there are so many other examples out there from all walks of life .
This truly is a scandal of epic proportions hidden in plain sight .
Whether it 's the ruthless Mexican drugs cartel , the Zetas , who use anonymous companies to launder profits while their drugs-related violence is tearing communities apart across the Americas .
Or the anonymous company , which bought up Americans ' tax debts , piled on the legal fees and then gave homeowners a choice : Pay up or lose your home .
Imagine being threatened with losing your home sometimes over a debt of just a few hundred dollars , and not being able to find out who you were really up against .
Now anonymous companies are great for sanctions busting too .
As the Iranian government found out when , through a series of front companies , it owned a building in the very heart of Manhattan , on Fifth Avenue , despite American sanctions .
And Juicy Couture , home of of the velvet track suit , and other companies were the unwitting , unknowing tenants there .
There are just so many examples , the horesemeat scandal in Europe , the Italian mafia , they 've used these companies for decades .
The $ 100 million American Medicare fraud , the supply of weapons to wars around the world including those in Eastern Europe in the early ' 90s .
Anonymous companies have even come to light in the recent revolution in the Ukraine .
But , for every case that we and others expose there are so many more that will remain hidden away because of the current system .
And it 's just a simple truth that some of the people responsible for outrageous crimes , for stealing from you and me and millions of others , they are remaining faceless and they are escaping accountability and they 're doing this with ease , and they 're doing it using legal structures .
And really , that is unfair .
Well , you might well ask , what exactly is an anonymous company , and can I really set one up , and use it , without anyone knowing who I am ?
Well , the answer is , yes you can .
But if you 're anything like me , you 'll want to see some of that for yourself , so let me show you .
Well first you need to work out where you want to set it up .
Now , at this point you might be imagining one of those lovely tropical island tax havens but here 's the thing , shockingly , my own hometown , London , and indeed the U.K. , is one of the best places in the world to set up an anonymous company .
And the other , even better , I 'm afraid that 's America .
Do you know , in some states across America you need less identification to open up a company than you do to get a library card , like Delaware , which is one of the easiest places in the world to set up an anonymous company .
Okay , so let 's say it 's America , and let 's say it 's Delaware , and now you can simply go online and find yourself a company service provider .
These are the companies that can set your one up for you , and remember , it 's all legal , routine business practice .
So , here 's one , but there are plenty of others to choose from .
And having made your choice , you then pick what type of company you want and then fill in a contact , name and address .
But don 't worry , it doesn 't have to be your name .
It can be your lawyer 's or your service provider 's , and it 's not for the public record anyway .
And then you add the owner of the company .
Now this is the key part , and again it doesn 't have to be you , because you can get creative , because there is a whole universe out there of nominees to choose from .
And nominees are the people that you can legally pay to be your company 's owner .
And if you don 't want to involve anyone else , it doesn 't even have to be an actual human being .
It could be another company .
And then finally , give your company a name add a few more details and make your payment .
And then the service provider will take a few hours or more to process it .
But there you are , in 10 minutes of online shopping you can create yourself an anonymous company .
And not only is it easy , really , really easy and cheap , it 's totally legal too .
But the fun doesn 't have to end there , maybe you want to be even more anonymous .
Well , that 's no problem either .
You can simply keep adding layers , companies owned by companies .
You can have hundreds of layers with hundreds of companies spread across lots of different countries , like a giant web , each layer adds anonymity .
Each layer makes it more difficult for law enforcement and others to find out who the real owner is .
But whose interests is this all serving ?
It might be in the interests of the company or a particular individual , but what about all of us , the public ?
There hasn 't even been a global conversation yet about whether it 's okay to misuse companies in this way .
And what does it all mean for us ?
Well , an example that really haunts me is one I came across recently .
And it 's that of a horrific fire in a nightclub in Buenos Aires about a decade ago .
It was the night before New Year 's Eve .
Three thousand very happy revelers , many of them teenagers , were crammed into a space meant for 1,000 .
And then tragedy struck , a fire broke out plastic decorations were melting from the ceiling and toxic smoke filled the club .
So people tried to escape only to find that some of the fire doors had been chained shut .
Over 200 people died .
Seven hundred were injured trying to get out .
And as the victims ' families and the city and the country reeled in shock , investigators tried to find out who was responsible .
And as they looked for the owners of the club , they found instead anonymous companies , and confusion surrounded the identities of those involved with the companies .
Now ultimately , a range of people were charged and some went to jail .
But this was an awful tragedy , and it shouldn 't have been so difficult just to try and find out who was responsible for those deaths .
Because in an age when there is so much information out there in the open , why should this crucial information about company ownership stay hidden away ?
Why should tax evaders , corrupt government officials , arms traders and more , be able to hide their identities from us , the public ?
Why should this secrecy be such an accepted business practice ?
Anonymous companies might be the norm right now but it wasn 't always this way .
Companies were created to give people a chance to innovate and not have to put everything on the line .
Companies were created to limit financial risk , they were never intended to be used as a moral shield .
Companies were never intended to be anonymous , and they don 't have to be .
And so I come to my wish .
My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good .
Together let 's ignite world opinion , change the law , and launch a new era of openness in business .
So what might this look like ?
Well , imagine if you could go online and look up the real owner of a company .
Imagine if this data were open and free , accessible across borders for citizens and businesses and law enforcement alike .
Imagine what a game changer that would be .
So how are we going to do this ?
Well , there is only one way .
Together , we have to change the law globally to create public registries which list the true owners of companies and can be accessed by all with no loopholes .
And yes , this is ambitious , but there is momentum on this issue , and over the years I have seen the sheer power of momentum , and it 's just starting on this issue .
There is such an opportunity right now .
And the TED community of creative and innovative thinkers and doers across all of society could make the crucial difference .
You really can make this change happen .
Now , a simple starting point is the address behind me for a Facebook page that you can join now to support the campaign and spread the word .
It 's going to be a springboard for our global campaigning .
And the techies among you , you could really help us create a prototype public registry to demonstrate what a powerful tool this could be .
Campaign groups from around the world have come together to work on this issue .
The U.K. government is already on board ; it supports these public registries .
And just last week , the European Parliament came on board with a vote 600 to 30 in favor of public registries .
That is momentum .
But it 's early days .
America still needs to come on board , as do so many other countries .
And to succeed we will all together need to help and push our politicians , because without that , real far-reaching , world-shifting change just isn 't going to happen .
Because this isn 't just about changing the law , this is about starting a conversation about what it 's okay for companies to do , and in what ways is it acceptable to use company structures .
This isn 't just a dry policy issue .
This is a human issue which affects us all .
This is about being on the right side of history .
Global citizens , innovators , business leaders , individuals , we need you .
Together , let 's kickstart this global movement .
Let 's just do it , let 's end anonymous companies .
Thank you .

Chris Hadfield : What I learned from going blind in space
There 's an astronaut saying : In space , " there is no problem so bad that you can 't make it worse . " So how do you deal with the complexity , the sheer pressure , of dealing with dangerous and scary situations ? Retired colonel Chris Hadfield paints a vivid portrait of how to be prepared for the worst in space -- and it starts with walking into a spider 's web . Watch for a special space-y performance .
What 's the scariest thing you 've ever done ?
Or another way to say it is , what 's the most dangerous thing that you 've ever done ?
And why did you do it ?
I know what the most dangerous thing is that I 've ever done because NASA does the math .
You look back to the first five shuttle launches , the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine .
And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995 , 74 shuttle flight , the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so -- one in 35 , one in 40 .
Not great odds , so it 's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you 're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you 're either going to be floating effortlessly , gloriously in space , or you 'll be dead .
You go into , at the Kennedy Space Center , the suit-up room , the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in , that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon .
And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad -- in the Astro van -- heading out to the launchpad , and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center , it 's normally predawn , and in the distance , lit up by the huge xenon lights , is your spaceship -- the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet .
The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed , almost holding hands , looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger .
We ride the elevator up and we crawl in , on your hands and knees into the spaceship , one at a time , and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back .
And the hatch is closed , and suddenly , what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real , something that I dreamed about , in fact , that I chose to do when I was nine years old , is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening .
In the astronaut business -- the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle ; it 's the most complicated flying machine ever built .
And in the astronaut business , we have a saying , which is , there is no problem so bad that you can 't make it worse .
And so you 're very conscious in the cockpit ; you 're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do , all the switches and all the wickets you have to go through .
And as the time gets closer and closer , this excitement is building .
And then about three and a half minutes before launch , the huge nozzles on the back , like the size of big church bells , swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle , like the vehicle is alive underneath you , like an elephant getting up off its knees or something .
And then about 30 seconds before launch , the vehicle is completely alive -- it is ready to go -- the APUs are running , the computers are all self-contained , it 's ready to leave the planet .
And 15 seconds before launch , this happens : Voice : 12 , 11 , 10 , nine , eight , seven , six -- -- start , two , one , booster ignition , and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery , returning to the space station , paving the way ...
Chris Hadfield : It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things .
You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself .
It 's shaking you so hard you can 't focus on the instruments in front of you .
It 's like you 're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there 's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space , accelerating wildly straight up , shouldering your way through the air , and you 're in a very complex place -- paying attention , watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face .
After two minutes , those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines , the hydrogen and oxygen , and it 's as if you 're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you 've never accelerated .
You get lighter and lighter , the force gets on us heavier and heavier .
It feels like someone 's pouring cement on you or something .
Until finally , after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so , we are finally at exactly the right altitude , exactly the right speed , the right direction , the engine shut off , and we 're weightless .
And we 're alive .
It 's an amazing experience .
But why would we take that risk ?
Why would you do something that dangerous ?
In my case the answer is fairly straightforward .
I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do .
I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me , it was just an obvious thing -- I want to somehow turn myself into that .
But the real question is , how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it ?
How do you deal with fear versus danger ?
And having the goal in mind , thinking about where it might lead , directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible , to be able to launch and go help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that 's going around the world at five miles a second , eight kilometers a second , around the world 16 times a day , with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside .
But maybe even more importantly , allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means , to be able to look down and have -- if your jaw could drop , it would -- the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic , constantly changing beauty that is the world itself .
And you see , because of the speed , a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year .
And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk .
You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit , and you 're going through space with the world .
It 's an entirely different perspective , you 're not looking up at the universe , you and the Earth are going through the universe together .
And you 're holding on with one hand , looking at the world turn beside you .
It 's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you .
And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything , it 's unfathomable blackness , with a texture you feel like you could stick your hand into .
and you are holding on with one hand , one link to the other seven billion people .
And I was outside on my first spacewalk when my left eye went blind , and I didn 't know why .
Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn 't figure out why my eye wasn 't working .
I was thinking , what do I do next ?
I thought , well maybe that 's why we have two eyes , so I kept working .
But unfortunately , without gravity , tears don 't fall .
So you just get a bigger and bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually , the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes " goosh " into your other eye , and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship .
So what 's the scariest thing you 've ever done ?
Maybe it 's spiders .
A lot of people are afraid of spiders .
I think you should be afraid of spiders -- spiders are creepy and they 've got long , hairy legs , and spiders like this one , the brown recluse -- it 's horrible . If a brown recluse bites you , you end with one of these horrible , big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you , in fact .
And how do you know ?
And so a spider lands on you , and you go through this great , spasmy attack because spiders are scary .
But then you could say , well is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not ?
I don 't know . Are there brown recluses here ?
So if you actually do the research , you find out that in the world there are about 50,000 different types of spiders , and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000 .
And if you 're in Canada , because of the cold winters here in B.C. , there 's about 720 , 730 different types of spiders and there 's one -- one -- that is venomous , and its venom isn 't even fatal , it 's just kind of like a nasty sting .
And that spider -- not only that , but that spider has beautiful markings on it , it 's like " I 'm dangerous . I got a big radiation symbol on my back , it 's the black widow . "
So , if you 're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider -- and it lives close the ground , you 're walking along , you are never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you .
Spider webs like this , it doesn 't build those , it builds them down in the corners .
And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male ; it doesn 't care about you .
So in fact , the next time you walk into a spiderweb , you don 't need to panic and go with your caveman reaction .
The danger is entirely different than the fear .
How do you get around it , though ?
How do you change your behavior ?
Well , next time you see a spiderweb , have a good look , make sure it 's not a black widow spider , and then walk into it .
And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one .
It 's just a little bit of fluffy stuff . It 's not a big deal .
And the spider that may come out is no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly .
And then I guarantee you if you walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior , your caveman reaction , and you will now be able to walk in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb -- or into your grandma 's attic or whatever , into your own basement .
And you can apply this to anything .
If you 're outside on a spacewalk and you 're blinded , your natural reaction would be to panic , I think .
It would make you nervous and worried .
But we had considered all the venom , and we had practiced with a whole variety of different spiderwebs .
We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times .
And we don 't just practice things going right , we practice things going wrong all the time , so that you are constantly walking through those spiderwebs .
And not just underwater , but also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it 's realistic .
So when you finally actually get outside on a spacewalk , it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time .
And even if you 're blinded , your natural , panicky reaction doesn 't happen .
Instead you kind of look around and go , " Okay , I can 't see , but I can hear , I can talk , Scott Parazynski is out here with me .
He could come over and help me . "
We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue , so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to .
I could find my own way back .
It 's not nearly as big a deal .
And actually , if you keep on crying for a while , whatever that gunk was that 's in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again , and Houston , if you negotiate with them , they will let you then keep working .
We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside , Jeff got some cotton batting and took the crusty stuff around my eyes , and it turned out it was just the anti-fog , sort of a mixture of oil and soap , that got in my eye .
And now we use Johnson 's No More Tears , which we probably should 've been using right from the very beginning . But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger , where is the real risk ?
What is the real thing that you should be afraid of ?
Not just a generic fear of bad things happening .
You can fundamentally change your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you ...
where you could see the hardpan south of the Sahara , or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike , or the unconscious gingham of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles .
You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge , just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear .
You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened .
It 's time to come home at the end .
This is our spaceship , the Soyuz , that little one .
Three of us climb in , and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere .
These two parts here actually melt , we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere .
The only part that survives is the little bullet that we 're riding in , and it falls into the atmosphere , and in essence you are riding a meteorite home , and riding meteorites is scary , and it ought to be .
But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming , like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth -- -- instead , 20 years previously we had started studying Russian , and then once you learn Russian , then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian , and then we learned vehicle control theory , and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again .
And in fact , you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth .
So in fact , when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz , we weren 't screaming , we were laughing ; it was fun .
And when the great big parachute opened , we knew that if it didn 't open there 's a second parachute , and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism .
So we came back , we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz , in Kazakhstan .
Reporter : And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters , once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters .
Touchdown -- 3 : 14 and 48 seconds , a.m. Central Time .
CH : And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end , but you 're ready for it you 're in a custom-built seat , you know how the shock absorber works .
And then eventually the Russians reach in , drag you out , plunk you into a chair , and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience .
You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy , which were impossible and dauntingly scary , dauntingly terrifying , and put them into practice , and figured out a way to reprogram yourself , to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise .
Just to finish , they asked me to play that guitar .
I know this song , and it 's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself , but it 's also , I think , a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe , we are people , and we 're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place .
This is Major Tom to ground control I 've left forevermore And I 'm floating in a most peculiar way And the stars look very different today For here am I floating in the tin can A last glimpse of the world Planet Earth is blue and there 's so much left to do Fear not .
That 's very nice of you . Thank you very much .
Thank you .
Carin Bondar : The birds and the bees are just the beginning
Think you know a thing or two about sex ? Think again . In this fascinating talk , biologist Carin Bondar lays out the surprising science behind how animals get it on .
Anyone in the room thought about sex today ?
Yeah , you did .
Thank you for putting your hand up over there .
Well , I 'm here to provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams .
I 'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex .
Now , when humans think about sex , male and female forms are generally what come to mind , but for many millions of years , such specific categories didn 't even exist .
Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings .
It wasn 't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out , and a vagina , something that receives it .
Now invariably , you 're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species , these very familiar structures , but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-blowing .
Penile diversity is especially profuse .
So this is a paper nautilus .
It 's a close relative of squid and octopus , and males have a hectocotylus .
Just what is a hectocotylus ?
A detachable , swimming penis .
It leaves the [ body of the male ] , finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water , attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm .
For many decades , biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate organism altogether .
Now , the tapir is a mammal from South America .
And the tapir has a prehensile penis .
It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands .
And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female 's uterus , not to mention it 's a pretty good size .
The biggest penis in the animal kingdom , however , is not that of the tapir .
The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle , and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle .
Mm-hm . So with all of this diversity in structure , one might think , then , that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction .
Simply insert part A into slot B , and we should all be good to go .
But of course , that doesn 't exactly happen , and that 's because we can 't just take form into account .
We have to think about function as well , and when it comes to sex , function relates to the contributions made by the gametes , or the sperm and the eggs .
And these contributions are far from equal .
Eggs are very expensive to make , so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with .
Sperm , on the other hand , is abundant and cheap , so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations .
So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes ?
I mean , if a female doesn 't choose a particular male , or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough , then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things : avoiding predators , taking care of offspring , gathering and ingesting food .
This is , of course , bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank , and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization .
This is bedbug sex , and it 's aptly termed traumatic insemination .
Males have a spiked , barbed penis that they literally stab into the female , and they don 't stab it anywhere near her vagina .
They stab it anywhere in her body , and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries .
If a female gets too many stab wounds , or if a stab wound happens to become infected , she can actually die from it .
Now if you 've ever been out for a nice , peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex , you 've undoubtedly been alarmed , because it looks like gang rape .
And quite frankly , that 's exactly what it is .
A group of males will grab a female , hold her down , and ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again .
From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second .
Now the female actually gets the last laugh , though , because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries .
Now , I like to share stories like this with my audiences because , yeah , we humans , we tend to think sex , sex is fun , sex is good , there 's romance , and there 's orgasm .
But orgasm didn 't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals .
But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that .
There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one 's partner .
Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones .
It 's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different .
Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all .
So going back to our biological minds , then , we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages , because she can use her time for other things : avoiding predators , taking care of young , finding and ingesting food .
But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages .
Why do they do this ?
Well , according to the biological literature , " During copulation , the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract . "
Mm-hm .
These are Mexican guppies , and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments , and these filaments basically form a fish mustache , if you will .
Now males have been observed to prod the female 's genital opening prior to copulating with her , and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum , P.I. hypothesis , females are overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches .
A little guppy porn for you right there .
So we 've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner .
We 've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex .
We 've also seen a titillation strategy pleasing their female partners into choosing them Now unfortunately , in the animal kingdom , it 's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again .
It 's very common in many phyla , from invertebrates to avian species , mammals , and , of course , even in primates .
Now interestingly , there are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn 't allow for sexual coercion to take place .
Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris , or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally , much like a penis , and in fact it 's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology .
So before a male can insert his penis into a female 's vagina , she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body .
I mean , imagine putting a penis into another penis .
It 's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action .
Now , even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal : they 're run by females , groups of females , sisters , aunts and offspring , and when young males attain sexual maturity , they 're turfed out of the group .
In hyena societies , adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale .
They can take part in a kill only after everybody else , including the offspring .
So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male , you take away all the social power he has .
So what are my take-home messages from my talk today ?
Well , sex is just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the offspring run around everywhere .
The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how males and females will react to each other , which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve .
So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals , including ourselves , spend a good amount of time thinking about sex , but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it .
So thank you , and happy daydreaming .

Anne-Marie Slaughter : Can we all " have it all " ?
Public policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter made waves with her 2012 article , " Why women still can 't have it all . " But really , is this only a question for women ? Here Slaughter expands her ideas and explains why shifts in work culture , public policy and social mores can lead to more equality -- for men , women , all of us .
So my moment of truth did not come all at once .
In 2010 , I had the chance to be considered for promotion from my job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department .
This was my moment to lean in , to push myself forward for what are really only a handful of the very top foreign policy jobs , and I had just finished a big , 18-month project for Secretary Clinton , successfully , and I knew I could handle a bigger job .
The woman I thought I was would have said yes .
But I had been commuting for two years between Washington and Princeton , New Jersey , where my husband and my two teenage sons lived , and it was not going well .
I tried on the idea of eking out another two years in Washington , or maybe uprooting my sons from their school and my husband from his work and asking them to join me .
But deep down , I knew that the right decision was to go home , even if I didn 't fully recognize the woman who was making that choice .
That was a decision based on love and responsibility .
I couldn 't keep watching my oldest son make bad choices without being able to be there for him when and if he needed me .
But the real change came more gradually .
Over the next year , while my family was righting itself , I started to realize that even if I could go back into government , I didn 't want to .
I didn 't want to miss the last five years that my sons were at home .
I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me , not what I was conditioned to want or maybe what I conditioned myself to want , and that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed .
I am still completely committed to the cause of male-female equality , but let 's think about what that equality really means , and how best to achieve it .
I always accepted the idea that the most respected and powerful people in our society are men at the top of their careers , so that the measure of male-female equality ought to be how many women are in those positions : prime ministers , presidents , CEOs , directors , managers , Nobel laureates , leaders .
I still think we should do everything we possibly can to achieve that goal .
But that 's only half of real equality , and I now think we 're never going to get there unless we recognize the other half .
I suggest that real equality , full equality , does not just mean valuing women on male terms .
It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men .
And to get there , we have to change our workplaces , our policies and our culture .
In the workplace , real equality means valuing family just as much as work , and understanding that the two reinforce each other .
As a leader and as a manager , I have always acted on the mantra , if family comes first , work does not come second -- life comes together .
If you work for me , and you have a family issue , I expect you to attend to it , and I am confident , and my confidence has always been borne out , that the work will get done , and done better .
Workers who have a reason to get home to care for their children or their family members are more focused , more efficient , more results-focused .
And breadwinners who are also caregivers have a much wider range of experiences and contacts .
Think about a lawyer who spends part of his time at school events for his kids talking to other parents .
He 's much more likely to bring in new clients for his firm than a lawyer who never leaves his office .
And caregiving itself develops patience -- a lot of patience -- and empathy , creativity , resilience , adaptability .
Those are all attributes that are ever more important in a high-speed , horizontal , networked global economy .
The best companies actually know this .
The companies that win awards for workplace flexibility in the United States include some of our most successful corporations , and a 2008 national study on the changing workforce showed that employees in flexible and effective workplaces are more engaged with their work , they 're more satisfied and more loyal , they have lower levels of stress and higher levels of mental health .
And a 2012 study of employers showed that deep , flexible practices actually lowered operating costs and increased adaptability in a global service economy .
So you may think that the privileging of work over family is only an American problem .
Sadly , though , the obsession with work is no longer a uniquely American disease .
Twenty years ago , when my family first started going to Italy , we used to luxuriate in the culture of siesta .
Siesta is not just about avoiding the heat of the day .
It 's actually just as much about embracing the warmth of a family lunch .
Now , when we go , fewer and fewer businesses close for siesta , reflecting the advance of global corporations and 24-hour competition .
So making a place for those we love is actually a global imperative .
In policy terms , real equality means recognizing that the work that women have traditionally done is just as important as the work that men have traditionally done , no matter who does it .
Think about it : Breadwinning and caregiving are equally necessary for human survival .
At least if we get beyond a barter economy , somebody has to earn an income and someone else has to convert that income to care and sustenance for loved ones .
Now most of you , when you hear me talk about breadwinning and caregiving , instinctively translate those categories into men 's work and women 's work .
And we don 't typically challenge why men 's work is advantaged .
But consider a same-sex couple like my friends Sarah and Emily .
They 're psychiatrists .
They got married five years ago , and now they have two-year-old twins .
They love being mothers , but they also love their work , and they 're really good at what they do .
So how are they going to divide up breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities ?
Should one of them stop working or reduce hours to be home ?
Or should they both change their practices so they can have much more flexible schedules ?
And what criteria should they use to make that decision ?
Is it who makes the most money or who is most committed to her career ?
Or who has the most flexible boss ?
The same-sex perspective helps us see that juggling work and family are not women 's problems , they 're family problems .
And Sarah and Emily are the lucky ones , because they have a choice about how much they want to work .
Millions of men and women have to be both breadwinners and caregivers just to earn the income they need , and many of those workers are scrambling .
They 're patching together care arrangements that are inadequate and often actually unsafe .
If breadwinning and caregiving are really equal , then why shouldn 't a government invest as much in an infrastructure of care as the foundation of a healthy society as it invests in physical infrastructure as the backbone of a successful economy ?
The governments that get it -- no surprises here -- the governments that get it , Norway , Sweden , Denmark , the Netherlands , provide universal child care , support for caregivers at home , school and early childhood education , protections for pregnant women , and care for the elderly and the disabled .
Those governments invest in that infrastructure the same way they invest in roads and bridges and tunnels and trains .
Those societies also show you that breadwinning and caregiving reinforce each other .
They routinely rank among the top 15 countries of the most globally competitive economies , but at the same time , they rank very high on the OECD Better Life Index .
In fact , they rank higher than other governments , like my own , the U.S. , or Switzerland , that have higher average levels of income but lower rankings on work-life balance .
So changing our workplaces and building infrastructures of care would make a big difference , but we 're not going to get equally valued choices unless we change our culture , and the kind of cultural change required means re-socializing men .
Increasingly in developed countries , women are socialized to believe that our place is no longer only in the home , but men are actually still where they always were .
Men are still socialized to believe that they have to be breadwinners , that to derive their self-worth from how high they can climb over other men on a career ladder .
The feminist revolution still has a long way to go .
It 's certainly not complete .
But 60 years after " The Feminine Mystique " was published , many women actually have more choices than men do .
We can decide to be a breadwinner , a caregiver , or any combination of the two .
When a man , on the other hand , decides to be a caregiver , he puts his manhood on the line .
His friends may praise his decision , but underneath , they 're scratching their heads .
Isn 't the measure of a man his willingness to compete with other men for power and prestige ?
And as many women hold that view as men do .
We know that lots of women still judge the attractiveness of a man based in large part on how successful he is in his career .
A woman can drop out of the work force and still be an attractive partner .
For a man , that 's a risky proposition .
So as parents and partners , we should be socializing our sons and our husbands to be whatever they want to be , either caregivers or breadwinners .
We should be socializing them to make caregiving cool for guys .
I can almost hear lots of you thinking , " No way . "
But in fact , the change is actually already happening .
At least in the United States , lots of men take pride in cooking , and frankly obsess over stoves .
They are in the birthing rooms .
They take paternity leave when they can .
They can walk a baby or soothe a toddler just as well as their wives can , and they are increasingly doing much more of the housework .
Indeed , there are male college students now who are starting to say , " I want to be a stay-at-home dad . "
That was completely unthinkable 50 or even 30 years ago .
And in Norway , where men have an automatic three month 's paternity leave , but they lose it if they decide not to take it , a high government official told me that companies are starting to look at prospective male employees and raise an eyebrow if they didn 't in fact take their leave when they had kids .
That means that it 's starting to seem like a character defect not to want to be a fully engaged father .
So I was raised to believe that championing women 's rights meant doing everything we could to get women to the top .
And I still hope that I live long enough to see men and women equally represented at all levels of the work force .
But I 've come to believe that we have to value family every bit as much as we value work , and that we should entertain the idea that doing right by those we love will make all of us better at everything we do .
Thirty years ago , Carol Gilligan , a wonderful psychologist , studied adolescent girls and identified an ethic of care , an element of human nature every bit as important as the ethic of justice .
It turns out that " you don 't care " is just as much a part of who we are as " that 's not fair . "
Bill Gates agrees .
He argues that the two great forces of human nature are self-interest and caring for others .
Let 's bring them both together .
Let 's make the feminist revolution a humanist revolution .
As whole human beings , we will be better caregivers and breadwinners .
You may think that can 't happen , but I grew up in a society where my mother put out small vases of cigarettes for dinner parties , where blacks and whites used separate bathrooms , and where everybody claimed to be heterosexual .
Today , not so much .
The revolution for human equality can happen .
It is happening .
It will happen .
How far and how fast is up to us .
Thank you .

Ajit Narayanan : A word game to communicate in any language
While working with kids who have trouble speaking , Ajit Narayanan sketched out a way to think about language in pictures , to relate words and concepts in " maps . " The idea now powers an app that helps nonverbal people communicate , and the big idea behind it , a language concept called FreeSpeech , has exciting potential .
I work with children with autism .
Specifically , I make technologies to help them communicate .
Now , many of the problems that children with autism face , they have a common source , and that source is that they find it difficult to understand abstraction , symbolism .
And because of this , they have a lot of difficulty with language .
Let me tell you a little bit about why this is .
You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup .
All of us can see it . All of us understand this .
These are two other pictures of soup , but you can see that these are more abstract And when you get to language , you see that it becomes a word whose look , the way it looks and the way it sounds , has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with , or what it represents , which is the bowl of soup .
So it 's essentially a completely abstract , a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world , and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with .
Now that 's why most of the people that work with children with autism -- speech therapists , educators -- what they do is , they try to help children with autism communicate not with words , but with pictures .
So if a child with autism wanted to say , " I want soup , " that child would pick three different pictures , " I , " " want , " and " soup , " and they would put these together , and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say .
And this has been incredibly effective ; for the last 30 , 40 years people have been doing this .
In fact , a few years back , I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this . It 's called Avaz , and the way it works is that kids select different pictures .
These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences , and these sentences are spoken out .
So Avaz is essentially converting pictures , it 's a translator , it converts pictures into speech .
Now , this was very effective .
There are thousands of children using this , you know , all over the world , and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn 't do .
And I realized something interesting : Avaz helps children with autism learn words .
What it doesn 't help them do is to learn word patterns .
Let me explain this in a little more detail .
Take this sentence : " I want soup tonight . "
Now it 's not just the words here that convey the meaning .
It 's also the way in which these words are arranged , the way these words are modified and arranged .
And that 's why a sentence like " I want soup tonight " is different from a sentence like " Soup want I tonight , " which is completely meaningless .
So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with , and that 's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings , to convey different ideas .
Now , this is what we call grammar .
And grammar is incredibly powerful , because grammar is this one component of language which takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information , an infinite amount of ideas .
in order to convey anything you want to .
And so after I developed Avaz , I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar to children with autism .
The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective .
I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom , Completely out of the blue , very spontaneously , the child got up and said , " Eat . "
Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions .
So she asked , " Eat what ? Do you want to eat ice cream ?
You want to eat ? Somebody else wants to eat ?
You want to eat cream now ? You want to eat ice cream in the evening ? "
And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible .
She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar .
And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for .
Instead of arranging words in an order , in sequence , as a sentence , you arrange them in this map , where they 're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions , in question-answer pairs .
And so if you do this , then what you 're conveying is not a sentence in English , but what you 're conveying is really a meaning , Now , meaning is really the underbelly , in some sense , of language .
It 's what comes after thought but before language .
And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form .
So I was very excited by this , you know , hopping around all over the place , trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this .
And I found that this is not enough .
Why is this not enough ?
something like negation , you want to say , " I don 't want soup , " then you can 't do that by asking a question .
You do that by changing the word " want . "
Again , if you wanted to say , " I wanted soup yesterday , " you do that by converting the word " want " into " wanted . "
It 's a past tense .
So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete .
This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers , and with these filters applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances .
Let me show you this with a different example . Let 's take this sentence : " I told the carpenter I could not pay him . "
It 's a fairly complicated sentence .
The way that this particular system works , you can start with any part of this sentence .
I 'm going to start with the word " tell . "
So this is the word " tell . "
Now this happened in the past , so I 'm going to make that " told . "
I 'm going to ask questions .
So , who told ? I told .
I told whom ? I told the carpenter .
Now we start with a different part of the sentence . We start with the word " pay , " and we add the ability filter to it to make it " can pay . "
Then we make it " can 't pay , " and we can make it " couldn 't pay " So who couldn 't pay ? I couldn 't pay .
Couldn 't pay whom ? I couldn 't pay the carpenter .
And then you join these two together by asking this question : What did I tell the carpenter ?
I told the carpenter I could not pay him .
Now think about this . This is — — this is a representation of this sentence without language .
And there are two or three interesting things about this .
First of all , I could have started anywhere .
I didn 't have to start with the word " tell . "
I could have started anywhere in the sentence , The second thing is , if I wasn 't an English speaker , if I was speaking in some other language , this map would actually hold true in any language .
So long as the questions are standardized , So I call this FreeSpeech , and I was playing with this for many , many months .
I was trying out so many different combinations of this .
And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech .
I was trying to convert language , convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech , and vice versa , and back and forth .
And I realized that this particular configuration , this particular way of representing language , it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other .
So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular representation into English .
I developed this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text .
And by putting these two pieces together , the representation and the engine , I was able to create an app , a technology for children with autism , that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar .
So I tried this out with kids with autism , and I found that there was an incredible amount of identification . They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English , and I started thinking about why that might be the case .
And I had an idea , and I want to talk to you about this idea next . In about 1997 , about 15 years back , there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language , and they found something very interesting .
They found that when you learn a language as a child , as a two-year-old , you learn it with a certain part of your brain , and when you learn a language as an adult -- for example , if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used .
Now I don 't know why that 's the case , but my guess is that that 's because when you learn a language as an adult , you almost invariably learn it through your native language , or through your first language .
So what 's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language , a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech , they 're not using this support language , they 're not using this bridge language . They 're directly constructing the sentence .
And so this gave me this idea .
Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without disabilities ?
And so I tried a number of experiments .
The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes , in the form of colors , and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works .
And I built an app out of it , a game out of it , in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement , a sound reinforcement of visual structures , they 're able to learn language .
And this , this has a lot of potential , a lot of promise , and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us , and they 're going to try it out with millions of different children And the dream , the hope , the vision , really , is that when they learn English this way , they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue .
All right , let 's talk about something else .
Let 's talk about speech .
So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us .
Now what 's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional .
Why is it one-dimensional ? It 's one-dimensional because it 's sound .
It 's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way .
Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound .
But if you think about the brain , the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional .
I mean , we have these rich , complicated , multi-dimensional ideas .
Now , it seems to me that language is really the brain 's invention to convert this rich , multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand .
Now what 's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays , and almost all of that is done in the language domain .
Take Google , for example .
Google trawls all these countless billions of websites , all of which are in English , and when you want to use Google , you go into Google search , and you type in English , and it matches the English with the English .
What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead ?
I have a suspicion that if we did this , we 'd find that algorithms like searching , like retrieval , all of these things , are much simpler and also more effective , because they don 't process the data structure of speech .
Instead they 're processing the data structure of thought .
The data structure of thought .
That 's a provocative idea .
But let 's look at this in a little more detail .
So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem .
We have the Free Speech representation on one side , and we have the FreeSpeech Engine , which generates English .
FreeSpeech , I told you , is completely language-independent .
It doesn 't have any specific information in it which is about English .
So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine .
That 's a pretty interesting concept in itself .
You 've encoded an entire human language into a software program .
it 's actually not very complicated .
And what 's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific .
And that gives this interesting idea .
It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many , many different languages , in Hindi , in French , in German , in Swahili .
And that gives another interesting idea .
For example , supposing I was a writer , say , for a newspaper or for a magazine .
I could create content in one language , FreeSpeech , and the person who 's consuming that content , the person who 's reading that particular information could choose any engine , and they could read it in their own mother tongue , in their native language .
I mean , this is an incredibly attractive idea , especially for India .
We have so many different languages .
There 's a song about India , and there 's a description of the country as , it says , .
That means " ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages . "
Language is beautiful .
I think it 's the most beautiful of human creations .
I think it 's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented .
It entertains , it educates , it enlightens , but what I like the most about language is that it empowers . I want to leave you with this .
This is a photograph of my collaborators , my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and autism and various other things .
The girl 's name is Pavna , and that 's her mother , Kalpana .
And Pavna 's an entrepreneur , but her story is much more remarkable than mine , because Pavna is about 23 .
She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy , so ever since she was born , she could neither move nor talk .
And everything that she 's accomplished so far , finishing school , going to college , starting a company , collaborating with me to develop Avaz , all of these things she 's done with nothing more than moving her eyes .
Daniel Webster said this : He said , " If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception , I would choose to keep the power of communication , for with it , I would regain all the rest . "
And that 's why , of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech , the one that 's closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate , the power of communication , to get back all the rest .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Henry Lin : What we can learn from galaxies far , far away
In a fun , exciting talk , teenager Henry Lin looks at something unexpected in the sky : distant galaxy clusters . By studying the properties of the universe 's largest pieces , says the Intel Science Fair award winner , we can learn quite a lot about scientific mysteries in our own world and galaxy .
Here are some images of clusters of galaxies .
They 're exactly what they sound like .
They are these huge collections of galaxies , bound together by their mutual gravity .
So most of the points that you see on the screen are not individual stars , but collections of stars , or galaxies .
Now , by showing you some of these images , I hope that you will quickly see that galaxy clusters are these beautiful objects , but more than that , I think galaxy clusters are mysterious , they are surprising , and they 're useful .
Useful as the universe 's most massive laboratories .
And as laboratories , to describe galaxy clusters is to describe the experiments that you can do with them .
And I think there are four major types , and the first type that I want to describe is probing the very big .
So , how big ?
Well , here is an image of a particular galaxy cluster .
It is so massive that the light passing through it is being bent , it 's being distorted by the extreme gravity of this cluster .
And , in fact , if you look very carefully you 'll be able to see rings around this cluster .
Now , to give you a number , this particular galaxy cluster has a mass of over one million billion suns .
It 's just mind-boggling how massive these systems can get .
But more than their mass , they have this additional feature .
They are essentially isolated systems , so if we like , we can think of them as a scaled-down version of the entire universe .
And many of the questions that we might have about the universe at large scales , such as , how does gravity work ?
might be answered by studying these systems .
So that was very big .
The second things is very hot .
Okay , if I take an image of a galaxy cluster , and I subtract away all of the starlight , what I 'm left with is this big , blue blob .
This is in false color .
It 's actually X-ray light that we 're seeing .
And the question is , if it 's not galaxies , what is emitting this light ?
The answer is hot gas , million-degree gas -- in fact , it 's plasma .
And the reason why it 's so hot goes back to the previous slide .
The extreme gravity of these systems is accelerating particles of gas to great speeds , and great speeds means great temperatures .
So this is the main idea , but science is a rough draft .
There are many basic properties about this plasma that still confuse us , still puzzle us , and still push our understanding of the physics of the very hot .
Third thing : probing the very small .
Now , to explain this , I need to tell you a very disturbing fact .
Most of the universe 's matter is not made up of atoms .
You were lied to .
Most of it is made up of something very , very mysterious , which we call dark matter .
Dark matter is something that doesn 't like to interact very much , except through gravity , and of course we would like to learn more about it .
If you 're a particle physicist , you want to know what happens when we smash things together .
And dark matter is no exception .
Well , how do we do this ?
To answer that question , I 'm going to have to ask another one , which is , what happens when galaxy clusters collide ?
Here is an image .
Since galaxy clusters are representative slices of the universe , scaled-down versions .
They are mostly made up of dark matter , and that 's what you see in this bluish purple .
The red represents the hot gas , and , of course , you can see many galaxies .
What 's happened is a particle accelerator at a huge , huge scale .
And this is very important , because what it means is that very , very small effects that might be difficult to detect in the lab , might be compounded and compounded into something that we could possibly observe in nature .
So , it 's very funny .
The reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about dark matter , the reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about the physics of the very small , is precisely because they are so very big .
Fourth thing : the physics of the very strange .
Certainly what I 've said so far is crazy .
Okay , if there 's anything stranger I think it has to be dark energy .
If I throw a ball into the air , I expect it to go up .
What I don 't expect is that it go up at an ever-increasing rate .
Similarly , cosmologists understand why the universe is expanding .
They don 't understand why it 's expanding at an ever-increasing rate .
They give the cause of this accelerated expansion a name , and they call it dark energy .
And , again , we want to learn more about it .
So , one particular question that we have is , how does dark energy affect the universe at the largest scales ?
Depending on how strong it is , maybe structure forms faster or slower .
Well , the problem with the large-scale structure of the universe is that it 's horribly complicated .
Here is a computer simulation .
And we need a way to simplify it .
Well , I like to think about this using an analogy .
If I want to understand the sinking of the Titanic , the most important thing to do is not to model the little positions of every single little piece of the boat that broke off .
The most important thing to do is to track the two biggest parts .
Similarly , I can learn a lot about the universe at the largest scales by tracking its biggest pieces and those biggest pieces are clusters of galaxies .
So , as I come to a close , you might feel slightly cheated .
I mean , I began by talking about how galaxy clusters are useful , and I 've given some reasons , but what is their use really ?
Well , to answer this , I want to give you a quote by Henry Ford when he was asked about cars .
He had this to say : " If I had asked people what they wanted , they would have said faster horses . "
Today , we as a society are faced with many , many difficult problems .
And the solutions to these problems are not obvious .
They are not faster horses .
They will require an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity .
So , yes , we need to focus , yes , we need to concentrate , but we also need to remember that innovation , ingenuity , inspiration -- these things come when we broaden our field of vision when we step back when we zoom out .
And I can 't think of a better way to do this than by studying the universe around us . Thanks .

Christopher Ryan : Are we designed to be sexual omnivores ?
An idea permeates our modern view of relationships : that men and women have always paired off in sexually exclusive relationships . But before the dawn of agriculture , humans may actually have been quite promiscuous . Author Christopher Ryan walks us through the controversial evidence that human beings are sexual omnivores by nature , in hopes that a more nuanced understanding may put an end to discrimination , shame and the kind of unrealistic expectations that kill relationships .
I 'm going to go off script and make Chris quite nervous here by making this audience participation .
All right . Are you with me ? Yeah . Yeah . All right .
So what I 'd like to do is have you raise your hand if you 've ever heard a heterosexual couple having sex .
Could be the neighbors , hotel room , your parents . Sorry .
Okay . Pretty much everybody .
Now raise your hand if the man was making more noise than the woman .
I see one guy there .
It doesn 't count if it was you , sir .
So his hand 's down . And one woman . Okay .
Sitting next to a loud guy .
Now what does this tell us ?
It tells us that human beings make noise when they have sex , and it 's generally the woman who makes more noise .
This is known as female copulatory vocalization to the clipboard crowd .
I wasn 't even going to mention this , but somebody told me that Meg Ryan might be here , and she is the world 's most famous female copulatory vocalizer .
So I thought , got to talk about that .
We 'll get back to that a little bit later .
Let me start by saying human beings are not descended from apes , despite what you may have heard . We are apes .
We are more closely related to the chimp and the bonobo than the African elephant is to the Indian elephant , as Jared Diamond pointed out in one of his early books .
We 're more closely related to chimps and bonobos than chimps and bonobos are related to any other primate -- gorillas , orangutans , what have you .
So we 're extremely closely related to them , and as you 'll see in terms of our behavior , we 've got some relationship as well .
So what I 'm asking today , the question I want to explore with you today is , what kind of ape are we in terms of our sexuality ?
Now , since Darwin 's day there 's been what Cacilda and I have called the standard narrative of human sexual evolution , and you 're all familiar with it , even if you haven 't read this stuff .
The idea is that , as part of human nature , from the beginning of our species ' time , men have sort of leased women 's reproductive potential by providing them with certain goods and services .
Generally we 're talking about meat , shelter , status , protection , things like that .
And in exchange , women have offered fidelity , or at least a promise of fidelity .
Now this sets men and women up in an oppositional relationship .
The war between the sexes is built right into our DNA , according to this vision . Right ?
What Cacilda and I have argued is that no , this economic relationship , this oppositional relationship , is actually an artifact of agriculture , which only arose about 10,000 years ago at the earliest .
Anatomically modern human beings have been around for about 200,000 years , so we 're talking about five percent , at most , of our time as a modern , distinct species .
So before agriculture , before the agricultural revolution , it 's important to understand that human beings lived in hunter-gatherer groups that are characterized wherever they 're found in the world by what anthropologists called fierce egalitarianism .
They not only share things , they demand that things be shared : meat , shelter , protection , all these things that were supposedly being traded to women for their sexual fidelity , it turns out , are shared widely among these societies .
Now I 'm not saying that our ancestors were noble savages , and I 'm not saying modern day hunter-gatherers are noble savages either .
What I 'm saying is that this is simply the best way to mitigate risk in a foraging context .
And there 's really no argument about this among anthropologists .
All Cacilda and I have done is extend this sharing behavior to sexuality .
So we 've argued that human sexuality has essentially evolved , until agriculture , as a way of establishing and maintaining the complex , flexible social systems , networks , that our ancestors were very good at , and that 's why our species has survived so well .
Now , this makes some people uncomfortable , and so I always need to take a moment in these talks to say , listen , I 'm saying our ancestors were promiscuous , but I 'm not saying they were having sex with strangers .
There were no strangers . Right ?
In a hunter-gatherer band , there are no strangers .
So I 'm saying , yes , there were overlapping sexual relationships , that our ancestors probably had several different sexual relationships going on at any given moment in their adult lives .
But I 'm not saying they were having sex with strangers .
I 'm not saying that they didn 't love the people they were having sex with .
And I 'm not saying there was no pair-bonding going on .
I 'm just saying it wasn 't sexually exclusive .
And those of us who have chosen to be monogamous -- my parents , for example , have been married for 52 years monogamously , and if it wasn 't monogamously , Mom and Dad , I don 't want to hear about it — I 'm not criticizing this and I 'm not saying there 's anything wrong with this .
What I 'm saying is that to argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores is no more a criticism of monogamy than to argue that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism .
You can choose to be a vegetarian , but don 't think that just because you 've made that decision , bacon suddenly stops smelling good .
Okay ? So this is my point .
That one took a minute to sink in , huh ?
Now , in addition to being a great genius , a wonderful man , a wonderful husband , a wonderful father , Charles Darwin was also a world-class Victorian prude .
All right ? He was perplexed by the sexual swellings of certain primates , including chimps and bonobos , because these sexual swellings tend to provoke many males to mate with the females .
So he couldn 't understand why on Earth would the female have developed this thing if all they were supposed to be doing is forming their pair bond , right ?
Chimps and bonobos , Darwin didn 't really know this , but chimps and bonobos mate one to four times per hour with up to a dozen males per day when they have their sexual swellings .
Interestingly , chimps have sexual swellings through 40 percent , roughly , of their menstrual cycle , bonobos 90 percent , and humans are among the only species on the planet where the female is available for sex throughout the menstrual cycle , whether she 's menstruating , whether she 's post-menopausal , whether she 's already pregnant .
This is vanishingly rare among mammals .
So it 's a very interesting aspect of human sexuality .
Now , Darwin ignored the reflections of the sexual swelling in his own day , as scientists tend to do sometimes .
So what we 're talking about is sperm competition .
Now the average human ejaculate has about 300 million sperm cells , so it 's already a competitive environment .
The question is whether these sperm are competing against other men 's sperm or just their own .
There 's a lot to talk about in this chart .
The one thing I 'll call your attention to right away is the little musical note above the female chimp and bonobo and human .
That indicates female copulatory vocalization .
Just look at the numbers .
The average human has sex about 1,000 times per birth .
If that number seems high for some of you , I assure you it seems low for others in the room .
We share that ratio with chimps and bonobos .
the gorilla , the orangutan and the gibbon , who are more typical of mammals , having sex only about a dozen times per birth .
Humans and bonobos are the only animals that have sex face-to-face when both of them are alive .
And you 'll see that the human , chimp and bonobo all have external testicles , which in our book we equate to a special fridge you have in the garage just for beer .
If you 're the kind of guy who has a beer fridge in the garage , you expect a party to happen at any moment , and you need to be ready .
That 's what the external testicles are .
They keep the sperm cells cool so you can have frequent ejaculations .
I 'm sorry . It 's true .
The human , some of you will be happy to hear , has the largest , thickest penis of any primate .
Now , this evidence goes way beyond anatomy .
It goes into anthropology as well .
Historical records are full of accounts of people around the world who have sexual practices that should be impossible given what we have assumed about human sexual evolution .
These women are the Mosuo from southwestern China .
In their society , everyone , men and women , are completely sexually autonomous .
There 's no shame associated with sexual behavior .
Women have hundreds of partners .
It doesn 't matter . Nobody cares . Nobody gossips . It 's not an issue .
When the woman becomes pregnant , the child is cared for by her , her sisters , and her brothers .
The biological father is a nonissue .
On the other side of the planet , in the Amazon , we 've got many tribes which practice what anthropologists call partible paternity .
These people actually believe -- and they have no contact among them , no common language or anything , so it 's not an idea that spread , it 's an idea that 's arisen around the world -- they believe that a fetus is literally made of accumulated semen .
So a woman who wants to have a child who 's smart and funny and strong makes sure she has lots of sex with the smart guy , the funny guy and the strong guy , to get the essence of each of these men into the baby , and then when the child is born , these different men will come forward and acknowledge their paternity of the child .
So paternity is actually sort of a team endeavor in this society .
So there are all sorts of examples like this that we go through in the book .
Now , why does this matter ?
Edward Wilson says we need to understand that human sexuality is first a bonding device and only secondarily procreation .
I think that 's true . This matters because our evolved sexuality is in direct conflict with many aspects of the modern world .
The contradictions between what we 're told we should feel and what we actually do feel generates a huge amount of unnecessary suffering .
My hope is that a more accurate , updated understanding of human sexuality will lead us to have greater tolerance for ourselves , for each other , greater respect for unconventional relationship configurations like same-sex marriage or polyamorous unions , and that we 'll finally put to rest the idea that men have some innate , instinctive right to monitor and control women 's sexual behavior .
Thank you .
And we 'll see that it 's not only gay people that have to come out of the closet .
We all have closets we have to come out of . Right ?
And when we do come out of those closets , we 'll recognize that our fight is not with each other , our fight is with an outdated , Victorian sense of human sexuality that conflates desire with property rights , generates shame and confusion in place of understanding and empathy .
It 's time we moved beyond Mars and Venus , because the truth is that men are from Africa and women are from Africa .
Thank you .
Thank you . Christopher Ryan : Thank you .
So a question .
It 's so perplexing , trying to use arguments about evolutionary history to turn that into what we ought to do today .
Someone could give a talk and say , look at us , we 've got these really sharp teeth and muscles and a brain that 's really good at throwing weapons , and if you look at lots of societies around the world , you 'll see very high rates of violence .
Nonviolence is a choice like vegetarianism , but it 's not who you are .
How is that different from the talk you gave ?
CR : Well first of all , the evidence for high levels of violence in prehistory is very debatable .
But that 's just an example .
Certainly , you know , lots of people say to me , just because we lived a certain way in the past doesn 't mean we should live that way now , and I agree with that .
Everyone has to respond to the modern world .
But the body does have its inherent evolved trajectories .
And so you could live on McDonald 's and milkshakes , but your body will rebel against that . We have appetites .
I think it was Schopenhauer who said , a person can do what they want but not want what they want .
And so what I 'm arguing against is the shame that 's associated with desires .
It 's the idea that if you love your husband or wife but you still are attracted to other people , there 's something wrong with you , there 's something wrong with your marriage , something wrong with your partner .
I think a lot of families are fractured by unrealistic expectations that are based upon this false vision of human sexuality .
That 's what I 'm trying to get at .
Thank you . Communicated powerfully . Thanks a lot .
CR : Thank you , Chris .
Molly Stevens : A new way to grow bone
What does it take to regrow bone in mass quantities ? Typical bone regeneration -- wherein bone is taken from a patient 's hip and grafted onto damaged bone elsewhere in the body -- is limited and can cause great pain just a few years after operation . In an informative talk , Molly Stevens introduces a new stem cell application that harnesses bone 's innate ability to regenerate and produces vast quantities of bone tissue painlessly .
As humans , it 's in our nature to want to improve our health and minimize our suffering .
Whatever life throws at us , whether it 's cancer , diabetes , heart disease , or even broken bones , we want to try and get better .
Now I 'm head of a biomaterials lab , and I 'm really fascinated by the way that humans have used materials in really creative ways in the body over time .
Take , for example , this beautiful blue nacre shell .
This was actually used by the Mayans as an artificial tooth replacement .
We 're not quite sure why they did it .
It 's hard . It 's durable .
But it also had other very nice properties .
In fact , when they put it into the jawbone , it could integrate into the jaw , and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way , has a beautiful chemistry , has a beautiful architecture .
And I think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue nacre shell and the Mayans as the first real application of the bluetooth technology .
But if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different materials in the body , very often it 's been physicians that have been quite creative .
They 've taken things off the shelf .
One of my favorite examples is that of Sir Harold Ridley , who was a famous ophthalmologist , or at least became a famous ophthalmologist .
And during World War II , what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions , and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye , but the very interesting thing about it was that material , actually , wasn 't causing any inflammatory response .
So he looked into this , and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the Spitfires .
And this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses .
It 's called PMMA , and it 's now used in millions of people every year and helps in preventing cataracts .
And that example , I think , is a really nice one , because it helps remind us that in the early days , people often chose materials because they were bioinert .
Their very purpose was to perform a mechanical function .
You 'd put them in the body and you wouldn 't get an adverse response .
And what I want to show you is that in regenerative medicine , we 've really shifted away from that idea of taking a bioinert material .
We 're actually actively looking for materials that will be bioactive , that will interact with the body , and that furthermore we can put in the body , they 'll have their function , and then they 'll dissolve away over time .
If we look at this schematic , this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue-engineering approach .
We have cells there , typically from the patient .
We can put those onto a material , and we can make that material very complex if we want to , and we can then grow that up in the lab or we can put it straight back into the patient .
And this is an approach that 's used all over the world , including in our lab .
But one of the things that 's really important when we 're thinking about stem cells is that obviously stem cells can be many different things , and they want to be many different things , and so we want to make sure that the environment we put them into has enough information so that they can become the right sort of specialist tissue .
And if we think about the different types of tissues that people are looking at regenerating all over the world , in all the different labs in the world , there 's pretty much every tissue you can think of .
And actually , the structure of those tissues is quite different , and it 's going to really depend on whether your patient has any underlying disease , other conditions , in terms of how you 're going to regenerate your tissue , and you 're going to need to think about the materials you 're going to use really carefully , their biochemistry , their mechanics , and many other properties as well .
Our tissues all have very different abilities to regenerate , and here we see poor Prometheus , who made a rather tricky career choice and was punished by the Greek gods .
He was tied to a rock , and an eagle would come every day to eat his liver .
But of course his liver would regenerate every day , and so day after day he was punished for eternity by the gods .
And liver will regenerate in this very nice way , but actually if we think of other tissues , like cartilage , for example , even the simplest nick and you 're going to find it really difficult to regenerate your cartilage .
So it 's going to be very different from tissue to tissue .
Now , bone is somewhere in between , and this is one of the tissues that we work on a lot in our lab .
And bone is actually quite good at repairing .
It has to be . We 've probably all had fractures at some point or other .
And one of the ways that you can think about repairing your fracture is this procedure here , called an iliac crest harvest .
And what the surgeon might do is take some bone from your iliac crest , which is just here , and then transplant that somewhere else in the body .
And it actually works really well , because it 's your own bone , and it 's well vascularized , which means it 's got a really good blood supply .
But the problem is , there 's only so much you can take , and also when you do that operation , your patients might actually have significant pain in that defect site even two years after the operation .
So what we were thinking is , there 's a tremendous need for bone repair , of course , but this iliac crest-type approach really has a lot of limitations to it , and could we perhaps recreate the generation of bone within the body on demand and then be able to transplant it without these very , very painful aftereffects that you would have with the iliac crest harvest ?
And so this is what we did , and the way we did it was by coming back to this typical tissue-engineering approach but actually thinking about it rather differently .
And we simplified it a lot , so we got rid of a lot of these steps .
We got rid of the need to harvest cells from the patient , we got rid of the need to put in really fancy chemistries , and we got rid of the need to culture these scaffolds in the lab .
And what we really focused on was our material system and making it quite simple , but because we used it in a really clever way , we were able to generate enormous amounts of bone using this approach .
So we were using the body as really the catalyst to help us to make lots of new bone .
And it 's an approach that we call the in vivo bioreactor , and we were able to make enormous amounts of bone using this approach .
And I 'll talk you through this .
So what we do is , in humans , we all have a layer of stem cells on the outside of our long bones .
That layer is called the periosteum .
And that layer is actually normally very , very tightly bound to the underlying bone , and it 's got stem cells in it .
Those stem cells are really important in the embryo when it develops , and they also sort of wake up if you have a fracture to help you with repairing the bone .
So we take that periosteum layer and we developed a way to inject underneath it a liquid that then , within 30 seconds , would turn into quite a rigid gel and can actually lift the periosteum away from the bone .
So it creates , in essence , an artificial cavity that is right next to both the bone but also this really rich layer of stem cells .
And we go in through a pinhole incision so that no other cells from the body can get in , and what happens is that that artificial in vivo bioreactor cavity can then lead to the proliferation of these stem cells , and they can form lots of new tissue , and then over time , you can harvest that tissue and use it elsewhere in the body .
This is a histology slide of what we see when we do that , and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone .
So in this picture , you can see the middle of the leg , so the bone marrow , then you can see the original bone , and you can see where that original bone finishes , and just to the left of that is the new bone that 's grown within that bioreactor cavity , and you can actually make it even larger .
And that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness , so actually now the surgeon can come along , can harvest away that new bone , and the periosteum can grow back , so you 're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn 't operated on it in the first place .
So it 's very , very low in terms of after-pain compared to an iliac crest harvest .
And you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there , so it really is an on demand sort of procedure .
Now , at the time that we did this , this received a lot of attention in the press , because it was a really nice way of generating new bone , and we got many , many contacts from different people that were interested in using this .
And I 'm just going to tell you , sometimes those contacts are very strange , slightly unexpected , and the very most interesting , let me put it that way , contact that I had , was actually from a team of American footballers that all wanted to have double-thickness skulls made on their head .
And so you do get these kinds of contacts , and of course , being British and also growing up in France , I tend to be very blunt , and so I had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case , there probably wasn 't that much in there to protect in the first place .
So this was our approach , and it was simple materials , but we thought about it carefully .
And actually we know that those cells in the body , in the embryo , as they develop can form a different kind of tissue , cartilage , and so we developed a gel that was slightly different in nature and slightly different chemistry , put it in there , and we were able to get 100 percent cartilage instead .
And this approach works really well , I think , for pre-planned procedures , but it 's something you do have to pre-plan .
So for other kinds of operations , there 's definitely a need for other scaffold-based approaches .
And when you think about designing those other scaffolds , actually , you need a really multi-disciplinary team .
And so our team has chemists , it has cell biologists , surgeons , physicists even , and those people all come together and we think really hard about designing the materials .
But we want to make them have enough information that we can get the cells to do what we want , but not be so complex as to make it difficult to get to clinic .
And so one of the things we think about a lot is really trying to understand the structure of the tissues in the body .
And so if we think of bone , obviously my own favorite tissue , we zoom in , we can see , even if you don 't know anything about bone structure , it 's beautifully organized , really beautifully organized .
We 've lots of blood vessels in there .
And if we zoom in again , we see that the cells are actually surrounded by a 3D matrix of nano-scale fibers , and they give a lot of information to the cells .
And if we zoom in again , actually in the case of bone , the matrix around the cells is beautifully organized at the nano scale , and it 's a hybrid material that 's part organic , part inorganic .
And that 's led to a whole field , really , that has looked at developing materials that have this hybrid kind of structure .
And so I 'm showing here just two examples where we 've made some materials that have that sort of structure , and you can really tailor it .
You can see here a very squishy one and now a material that 's also this hybrid sort of material but actually has remarkable toughness , and it 's no longer brittle .
And an inorganic material would normally be really brittle , and you wouldn 't be able to have that sort of strength and toughness in it .
One other thing I want to quickly mention is that many of the scaffolds we make are porous , and they have to be , because you want blood vessels to grow in there .
But the pores are actually oftentimes much bigger than the cells , and so even though it 's 3D , the cell might see it more as a slightly curved surface , and that 's a little bit unnatural .
And so one of the things you can think about doing is actually making scaffolds with slightly different dimensions that might be able to surround your cells in 3D and give them a little bit more information .
And there 's a lot of work going on in both of these areas .
Now finally , I just want to talk a little bit about applying this sort of thing to cardiovascular disease , because this is a really big clinical problem .
And one of the things that we know is that , unfortunately , if you have a heart attack , then that tissue can start to die , and your outcome may not be very good over time .
And it would be really great , actually , if we could stop that dead tissue either from dying or help it to regenerate .
And there 's lots and lots of stem cell trials going on worldwide , and they use many different types of cells , but one common theme that seems to be coming out is that actually , very often , those cells will die once you 've implanted them .
And you can either put them into the heart or into the blood system , but either way , we don 't seem to be able to get quite the right number of cells getting to the location we want them to and being able to deliver the sort of beautiful cell regeneration that we would like to have to get good clinical outcomes .
And so some of the things that we 're thinking of , and many other people in the field are thinking of , are actually developing materials for that .
But there 's a difference here .
We still need chemistry , we still need mechanics , we still need really interesting topography , and we still need really interesting ways to surround the cells .
But now , the cells also would probably quite like a material that 's going to be able to be conductive , because the cells themselves will respond very well and will actually conduct signals between themselves .
You can see them now beating synchronously on these materials , and that 's a very , very exciting development that 's going on .
So just to wrap up , I 'd like to actually say that being able to work in this sort of field , all of us that work in this field that 's not only super-exciting science , but also has the potential to impact on patients , however big or small they are , is really a great privilege .
And so for that , I 'd like to thank all of you as well .
Thank you .

Rupal Patel : Synthetic voices , as unique as fingerprints
Many of those with severe speech disorders use a computerized device to communicate . Yet they choose between only a few voice options . That 's why Stephen Hawking has an American accent , and why many people end up with the same voice , often to incongruous effect . Speech scientist Rupal Patel wanted to do something about this , and in this wonderful talk she shares her work to engineer unique voices for the voiceless .
I 'd like to talk today about a powerful and fundamental aspect of who we are : our voice .
Each one of us has a unique voiceprint that reflects our age , our size , even our lifestyle and personality .
In the words of the poet Longfellow , " the human voice is the organ of the soul . "
As a speech scientist , I 'm fascinated by how the voice is produced , and I have an idea for how it can be engineered .
That 's what I 'd like to share with you .
I 'm going to start by playing you a sample of a voice that you may recognize .
Stephen Hawking : " I would have thought it was fairly obvious what I meant . "
Rupal Patel : That was the voice of Professor Stephen Hawking .
What you may not know is that same voice may also be used by this little girl who is unable to speak because of a neurological condition .
In fact , all of these individuals may be using the same voice , and that 's because there 's only a few options available .
In the U.S. alone , there are 2.5 million Americans who are unable to speak , and many of whom use computerized devices to communicate .
Now that 's millions of people worldwide who are using generic voices , including Professor Hawking , who uses an American-accented voice .
This lack of individuation of the synthetic voice really hit home when I was at an assistive technology conference a few years ago , and I recall walking into an exhibit hall and seeing a little girl and a grown man having a conversation using their devices , different devices , but the same voice .
And I looked around and I saw this happening all around me , literally hundreds of individuals using a handful of voices , voices that didn 't fit their bodies or their personalities .
We wouldn 't dream of fitting a little girl with the prosthetic limb of a grown man .
So why then the same prosthetic voice ?
It really struck me , and I wanted to do something about this .
I 'm going to play you now a sample of someone who has , two people actually , who have severe speech disorders .
I want you to take a listen to how they sound .
They 're saying the same utterance .
You probably didn 't understand what they said , but I hope that you heard their unique vocal identities .
So what I wanted to do next is , I wanted to find out how we could harness these residual vocal abilities and build a technology that could be customized for them , voices that could be customized for them .
So I reached out to my collaborator , Tim Bunnell .
Dr. Bunnell is an expert in speech synthesis , and what he 'd been doing is building personalized voices for people by putting together pre-recorded samples of their voice and reconstructing a voice for them .
These are people who had lost their voice later in life .
We didn 't have the luxury of pre-recorded samples of speech for those born with speech disorder .
But I thought , there had to be a way to reverse engineer a voice from whatever little is left over .
So we decided to do exactly that .
We set out with a little bit of funding from the National Science Foundation , to create custom-crafted voices that captured their unique vocal identities .
We call this project VocaliD , or vocal I.D. , for vocal identity .
Now before I get into the details of how the voice is made and let you listen to it , I need to give you a real quick speech science lesson . Okay ?
So first , we know that the voice is changing dramatically over the course of development .
Children sound different from teens who sound different from adults .
We 've all experienced this .
Fact number two is that speech is a combination of the source , which is the vibrations generated by your voice box , which are then pushed through the rest of the vocal tract .
These are the chambers of your head and neck that vibrate , and they actually filter that source sound to produce consonants and vowels .
So the combination of source and filter is how we produce speech .
And that happens in one individual .
Now I told you earlier that I 'd spent a good part of my career understanding and studying the source characteristics of people with severe speech disorder , and what I 've found is that even though their filters were impaired , they were able to modulate their source : the pitch , the loudness , the tempo of their voice .
These are called prosody , and I 've been documenting for years that the prosodic abilities of these individuals are preserved .
So when I realized that those same cues are also important for speaker identity , I had this idea .
Why don 't we take the source from the person we want the voice to sound like , because it 's preserved , and borrow the filter from someone about the same age and size , because they can articulate speech , and then mix them ?
Because when we mix them , we can get a voice that 's as clear as our surrogate talker -- that 's the person we borrowed the filter from — and is similar in identity to our target talker .
It 's that simple .
That 's the science behind what we 're doing .
So once you have that in mind , how do you go about building this voice ?
Well , you have to find someone who is willing to be a surrogate .
It 's not such an ominous thing .
Being a surrogate donor only requires you to say a few hundred to a few thousand utterances .
The process goes something like this .
Voice : Things happen in pairs .
I love to sleep .
The sky is blue without clouds .
RP : Now she 's going to go on like this for about three to four hours , and the idea is not for her to say everything that the target is going to want to say , but the idea is to cover all the different combinations of the sounds that occur in the language .
The more speech you have , the better sounding voice you 're going to have .
Once you have those recordings , what we need to do is we have to parse these recordings into little snippets of speech , one- or two-sound combinations , sometimes even whole words that start populating a dataset or a database .
We 're going to call this database a voice bank .
Now the power of the voice bank we can now say any new utterance , like , " I love chocolate " -- everyone needs to be able to say that — fish through that database and find all the segments necessary to say that utterance .
Voice : I love chocolate .
RP : So that 's speech synthesis .
It 's called concatenative synthesis , and that 's what we 're using .
That 's not the novel part .
What 's novel is how we make it sound like this young woman .
This is Samantha .
I met her when she was nine , and since then , my team and I have been trying to build her a personalized voice .
We first had to find a surrogate donor , and then we had to have Samantha produce some utterances .
What she can produce are mostly vowel-like sounds , but that 's enough for us to extract her source characteristics .
What happens next is best described by my daughter 's analogy . She 's six .
She calls it mixing colors to paint voices .
It 's beautiful . It 's exactly that .
Samantha 's voice is like a concentrated sample of red food dye which we can infuse into the recordings of her surrogate to get a pink voice just like this .
Samantha : Aaaaaah .
RP : So now , Samantha can say this .
Samantha : This voice is only for me .
I can 't wait to use my new voice with my friends .
RP : Thank you . I 'll never forget the gentle smile that spread across her face when she heard that voice for the first time .
Now there 's millions of people around the world like Samantha , millions , and we 've only begun to scratch the surface .
What we 've done so far is we have a few surrogate talkers from around the U.S.
who have donated their voices , and we have been using those to build our first few personalized voices .
But there 's so much more work to be done .
For Samantha , her surrogate came from somewhere in the Midwest , a stranger who gave her the gift of voice .
And as a scientist , I 'm so excited to take this work out of the laboratory and finally into the real world so it can have real-world impact .
What I want to share with you next is how I envision taking this work to that next level .
I imagine a whole world of surrogate donors from all walks of life , different sizes , different ages , coming together in this voice drive to give people voices that are as colorful as their personalities .
To do that as a first step , we 've put together this website , VocaliD.org , as a way to bring together those who want to join us as voice donors , as expertise donors , in whatever way to make this vision a reality .
They say that giving blood can save lives .
Well , giving your voice can change lives .
All we need is a few hours of speech from our surrogate talker , and as little as a vowel from our target talker , to create a unique vocal identity .
So that 's the science behind what we 're doing .
I want to end by circling back to the human side that is really the inspiration for this work .
About five years ago , we built our very first voice for a little boy named William .
When his mom first heard this voice , she said , " This is what William would have sounded like had he been able to speak . "
And then I saw William typing a message on his device .
I wondered , what was he thinking ?
Imagine carrying around someone else 's voice for nine years and finally finding your own voice .
Imagine that .
This is what William said : " Never heard me before . "
Thank you .

Chris McKnett : The investment logic for sustainability
Sustainability is pretty clearly one of the world 's most important goals ; but what groups can really make environmental progress in leaps and bounds ? Chris McKnett makes the case that it 's large institutional investors . He shows how strong financial data isn 't enough , and reveals why investors need to look at a company 's environmental , social and governance structures , too .
The world is changing in some really profound ways , and I worry that investors aren 't paying enough attention to some of the biggest drivers of change , especially when it comes to sustainability .
And by sustainability , I mean the really juicy things , like environmental and social issues and corporate governance .
I think it 's reckless to ignore these things , because doing so can jeopardize future long-term returns .
And here 's something that may surprise you : the balance of power to really influence sustainability rests with institutional investors , the large investors like pension funds , foundations and endowments .
I believe that sustainable investing is less complicated than you think , better-performing than you believe , and more important than we can imagine .
Let me remind you what we already know .
We have a population that 's both growing and aging ; we have seven billion souls today heading to 10 billion at the end of the century ; we consume natural resources faster than they can be replenished ; and the emissions that are mainly responsible for climate change just keep increasing .
Now clearly , these are environmental and social issues , but that 's not all .
They 're economic issues , and that makes them relevant to risk and return .
And they are really complex and they can seem really far off , that the temptation may be to do this : bury our heads in the sand and not think about it .
Resist this , if you can . Don 't do this at home .
But it makes me wonder if the investment rules of today are fit for purpose tomorrow .
We know that investors , when they look at a company and decide whether to invest , they look at financial data , metrics like sales growth , cash flow , market share , valuation -- you know , the really sexy stuff .
And these things are fundamental , of course , but they 're not enough .
Investors should also look at performance metrics in what we call ESG : environment , social and governance .
Environment includes energy consumption , water availability , waste and pollution , just making efficient uses of resources .
Social includes human capital , things like employee engagement and innovation capacity , as well as supply chain management and labor rights and human rights .
And governance relates to the oversight of companies by their boards and investors .
See , I told you this is the really juicy stuff .
But ESG is the measure of sustainability , and sustainable investing incorporates ESG factors with financial factors into the investment process .
It means limiting future risk by minimizing harm to people and planet , and it means providing capital to users who deploy it towards productive and sustainable outcomes .
So if sustainability matters financially today , and all signs indicate more tomorrow , is the private sector paying attention ?
Well , the really cool thing is that most CEOs are .
They started to see sustainability not just as important but crucial to business success .
About 80 percent of global CEOs see sustainability as the root to growth in innovation and leading to competitive advantage in their industries .
But 93 percent see ESG as the future , or as important to the future of their business .
So the views of CEOs are clear .
There 's tremendous opportunity in sustainability .
So how are companies actually leveraging ESG to drive hard business results ?
One example is near and dear to our hearts .
In 2012 , State Street migrated 54 applications to the cloud environment , and we retired another 85 .
We virtualized our operating system environments , and we completed numerous automation projects .
Now these initiatives create a more mobile workplace , and they reduce our real estate footprint , and they yield savings of 23 million dollars in operating costs annually , and avoid the emissions of a 100,000 metric tons of carbon .
That 's the equivalent of taking 21,000 cars off the road .
So awesome , right ?
Another example is Pentair .
Pentair is a U.S. industrial conglomerate , and about a decade ago , they sold their core power tools business and reinvested those proceeds in a water business .
That 's a really big bet . Why did they do that ?
Well , with apologies to the Home Improvement fans , there 's more growth in water than in power tools , and this company has their sights set on what they call " the new New World . "
That 's four billion middle class people demanding food , energy and water .
Now , you may be asking yourself , are these just isolated cases ?
I mean , come on , really ?
Do companies that take sustainability into account really do well financially ?
The answer that may surprise you is yes .
The data shows that stocks with better ESG performance perform just as well as others .
In blue , we see the MSCI World .
It 's an index of large companies from developed markets across the world .
And in gold , we see a subset of companies rated as having the best ESG performance .
Over three plus years , no performance tradeoff .
So that 's okay , right ? We want more . I want more .
In some cases , there may be outperformance from ESG .
In blue , we see the performance of the 500 largest global companies , and in gold , we see a subset of companies with best practice in climate change strategy and risk management .
Now over almost eight years , they 've outperformed by about two thirds .
So yes , this is correlation . It 's not causation .
But it does illustrate that environmental leadership is compatible with good returns .
So if the returns are the same or better and the planet benefits , wouldn 't this be the norm ?
Are investors , particularly institutional investors , Well , some are , and a few are really at the vanguard .
Hesta .
Hesta is a retirement fund for health and community services employees in Australia , with assets of 22 billion [ dollars ] .
They believe that ESG has the potential to impact risks and returns , so incorporating it into the investment process is core to their duty to act in the best interest of fund members , core to their duty .
You gotta love the Aussies , right ?
CalPERS is another example .
CalPERS is the pension fund for public employees in California , and with assets of 244 billion [ dollars ] , they are the second largest in the U.S.
and the sixth largest in the world .
Now , they 're moving toward 100 percent sustainable investment by systematically integrated ESG across the entire fund .
Why ? They believe it 's critical to superior long-term returns , full stop .
In their own words , " long-term value creation requires the effective management of three forms of capital : financial , human , and physical .
This is why we are concerned with ESG . "
Now , I do speak to a lot of investors as part of my job , and not all of them see it this way .
Often I hear , " We are required to maximize returns , so we don 't do that here , " or , " We don 't want to use the portfolio to make policy statements . "
The one that just really gets under my skin is , " If you want to do something about that , just make money , give the profits to charities . "
I mean , let me clarify something right here .
Companies and investors are not singularly responsible for the fate of the planet .
They don 't have indefinite social obligations , and prudent investing and finance theory aren 't subordinate to sustainability .
They 're compatible .
So I 'm not talking about tradeoffs here .
But institutional investors are the x-factor in sustainability .
Why do they hold the key ?
The answer , quite simply , is , they have the money .
A lot of it .
I mean , a really lot of it .
The global stock market is worth 55 trillion dollars .
The global bond market , 78 trillion .
That 's 133 trillion combined .
That 's eight and a half times the GDP of the U.S.
That 's the world 's largest economy .
That 's some serious freaking firepower .
So we can reconsider some of these pressing challenges , like fresh water , clean air , feeding 10 billion mouths , if institutional investors integrated ESG into investment .
What if they used that firepower to allocate more of their capital to companies working the hardest at solving these challenges or at least not exacerbating them ?
What if we work and save and invest , only to find that the world we retire into is more stressed and less secure than it is now ?
What if there isn 't enough clean air and fresh water ?
Now a fair question might be , what if all this sustainability risk stuff is exaggerated , overstated , it 's not urgent , something for virtuous consumers or lifestyle choice ?
Well , President John F. Kennedy said something about this that is just spot on : " There are risks and costs to a program of action , but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction . "
I can appreciate that there is estimation risk in this , but since this is based on widespread scientific consensus , the odds that it 's not completely wrong are better than the odds that our house will burn down or we 'll get in a car accident .
Well , maybe not if you live in Boston . But my point is that we buy insurance to protect ourselves financially in case those things happen , right ?
So by investing sustainably we 're doing two things .
We 're creating insurance , reducing the risk to our planet and to our economy , and at the same time , in the short term , we 're not sacrificing performance .
[ Man in comic : " What if it 's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing ? " ] Good , you like it . I like it too . I like it because it pokes fun at both sides of the climate change issue .
I bet you can 't guess which side I 'm on .
But what I really like about it is that it reminds me of something Mark Twain said , which is , " Plan for the future , because that 's where you 're going to spend the rest of your life . "
Thank you .

Aparna Rao : Art that craves your attention
In this charming talk , artist Aparna Rao shows us her latest work : cool , cartoony sculptures that play with your perception -- and crave your attention . Take a few minutes to simply be delighted .
Hi . So today , I 'd like to share some works in progress .
Since we are still realizing these works , we are largely working within the realm of intuition and mystery , still .
So I 'm going to try and describe some of the experiences that we 're looking for through each of the works .
So the first work is called the Imperial Monochromes .
A viewer sort of unsuspectingly walks into the room , and catches a glimpse of these panels in a messy composition on the wall .
Within seconds , as if the panels have noticed the presence of the viewer , they appear to panic and sort of get into a strict symmetry .
So this is the sketch of the two states .
One is total chaos . The other is absolute order .
And we were interested in seeing how little change it takes to move from one state to the other state .
This also reminded us of two very different pictorial traditions .
One is the altar tablets of the 15th century , and the other is about 100 years ago , Malevich 's abstract compositions .
So I 'm just going to take you to a video .
To give you a sense of scale , the largest panel is about two meters high .
That 's about this much . And the smallest one is an A4 .
So a viewer enters the space , and they snap to attention .
And after a while , if the viewer continues to remain in the space , the panels will sort of become immune to the presence of the viewer and become lax and autonomous again , until they sort of sense a presence in the room or a movement , when they will again snap to attention .
So here it appears as if it 's the viewer that 's sort of instigating the sense of order among the panels , but it could also be the other way around , that the panels are so stuck within their preconditioned behaviors that they sort of thrust the viewer with the role of a tyrant .
So this brings me to a quieter , small work called Handheld .
The viewer sees a piece of paper that 's mounted on the far end of the wall , but when you go closer , you see that it 's a blank A4 , or a letter-sized piece of paper , that 's held on either side by two small hands that appear to be carved with a great deal of attention and care from a small block of wood .
The viewer also sees that this entire sculpture is sort of moving very slightly , as if these two hands are trying to hold the paper very still for a long period of time , and somehow are not managing to .
So this instability in the movement very closely resembles the unsteady nature of images seen through a handheld camera .
So here I 'm going to show you two tandem clips .
One is through a still camera and the other is through a handheld camera .
And you immediately see how the unsteady nature of the video suggests the presence of an observer and a subjective point of view .
So we 've just removed the camera and transferred that movement onto the panel .
So here 's a video .
You have to imagine the other hand . It 's not there yet .
But to us , we 're sort of trying to evoke a self-effacing gesture , as if there 's a little person with outstretched arms behind this enormous piece of paper .
That sort of likens it to the amount of strain to be at the service of the observer and present this piece of paper very delicately to the viewer in front of them .
The next work is Decoy .
This is a cardboard model , so the object is about as tall as I am .
It has a rounded body , two arms , and a very tall , head-like antenna , and its sole purpose is to attract attention towards itself .
So when a viewer passes by , it sort of tilts from side to side , and moves its arms more and more frantically as the person gets closer .
So here is the first test scenario .
You see the two movements integrated , and the object seems to be employing its entire being in this expression of desperation .
But the idea is that once it 's got the person 's attention , it 's no longer interested , and it looks for the next person whose attention to get .
So this is the final fabricated body of the Decoy .
It appears to be mass-manufactured like it came out of a factory like vacuum cleaners and washing machines .
Because we are always working from a very personal space , we like how this consumer aesthetic sort of depersonalizes the object and gives us a bit of distance in its appearance , at least .
And so to us this is a kind of sinister being which is trying to distract you from the things that actually need your attention , but it could also be a figure that needs a lot of help .
The next work is an object , that 's also a kind of sound instrument .
In the shape of an amphitheater that 's scaled to the size of an audience as perceived from somebody from the stage .
So from where I 'm standing , each of you appears to be this big , and the audience sort of takes the entire field of my vision .
Seated in this audience are 996 small figures .
They 're mechanically enabled to clap of their own free will .
This means that each of them can decide if and when they want to clap , how hard , for how long , how they want to be influenced by those around them or influence others , and if they want to contribute to innovation .
So when the viewer steps in front of the audience , there will be a response .
It could be a few claps or a strong applause , and then nothing happens until the viewer leaves the stage , and again the audience will respond .
It could be anything from a few feeble claps from members in the audience , or it could be a very loud ovation .
So to us , I think we 're really looking at an audience as its own object or its own organism that 's also got a sort of musical-like quality to it , an instrument .
So the viewer can play it by eliciting quite complex and varied , nuanced musical or sound patterns , but cannot really provoke the audience into any particular kind of response .
So there 's a sense of judgment and capriciousness and uneasiness involved .
It also has an alluring and trap-like quality to it .
So here if you see we 're quite excited about the image of the head splitting to form the two hands .
So here 's a small visual animation , as if the two sides of the brain are sort of clashing against each other to kind of make sense of the duality and the tension .
And here is a prototype .
So we can 't wait to be engulfed by 996 of them .
Okay , this is the last work . It 's called the Framerunners .
It comes out of the idea of a window .
This is an actual window in our studio , and as you can see , it 's made up of three different thicknesses of wooden sections .
So we used the same window vocabulary to construct our own frame or grid that 's suspended in the room and that can be viewed from two sides .
This grid is inhabited by a tribe of small figures .
They 're also made up of three different sizes , as if to suggest a kind of perspective or landscape on the single plain .
Each of these figures can also run backward and forward in the track and hide behind two adjacent tracks .
So in contrast to this very tight grid , we wanted to give these figures a very comical and slapstick-like quality , as if a puppeteer has taken them and physically animated them down the path .
So we like the idea of these figures sort of skipping along like they 're oblivious and carefree and happy-go-lucky and content , until they sort of sense a movement from the viewer and they will hide behind the fastest wall .
So to us , this work also presents its own contradiction .
These figures are sort of entrapped within this very strong grid , which is like a prison , but also a fortress , because it allows them to be oblivious and naive and carefree and quite oblivious of the external world .
So all these real life qualities that I talk about are sort of translated to a very specific technical configuration , and we were very lucky to collaborate with ETH Zurich to develop the first prototype .
So you see they extracted the motion cogs from our animations and created a wiggle that integrated the head-bobbing movement and the back-and-forth movement .
So it 's really quite small .
You can see it can fit into the palm of my hand .
So imagine our excitement when we saw it really working in the studio , and here it is .
Thank you .

Teddy Cruz : How architectural innovations migrate across borders
As the world 's cities undergo explosive growth , inequality is intensifying . Wealthy neighborhoods and impoverished slums grow side by side , the gap between them widening . In this eye-opening talk , architect Teddy Cruz asks us to rethink urban development from the bottom up . Sharing lessons from the slums of Tijuana , Cruz explores the creative intelligence of the city 's residents and offers a fresh perspective on what we can learn from places of scarcity .
The urban explosion of the last years of economic boom also produced dramatic marginalization , resulting in the explosion of slums in many parts of the world .
This polarization of enclaves of mega-wealth surrounded by sectors of poverty and the socioeconomic inequalities they have engendered is really at the center of today 's urban crisis .
But I want to begin tonight by suggesting that this urban crisis is not only economic or environmental .
It 's particularly a cultural crisis , a crisis of the institutions unable to reimagine the stupid ways which we have been growing , unable to challenge the oil-hungry , selfish urbanization that have perpetuated cities based on consumption , from southern California to New York to Dubai .
So I just really want to share with you a reflection that the future of cities today depends less on buildings and , in fact , depends more on the fundamental reorganization of socioeconomic relations , that the best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance , but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink urban growth today .
And let me illustrate what I mean by understanding or engaging sites of conflict as harboring creativity , as I briefly introduce you to the Tijuana-San Diego border region , which has been the laboratory to rethink my practice as an architect .
This is the wall , the border wall , that separates San Diego and Tijuana , Latin America and the United States , a physical emblem of exclusionary planning policies that have perpetuated the division of communities , jurisdictions and resources across the world .
In this border region , we find some of the wealthiest real estate , as I once found in the edges of San Diego , barely 20 minutes away from some of the poorest settlements in Latin America .
And while these two cities have the same population , San Diego has grown six times larger than Tijuana in the last decades , immediately thrusting us to confront the tensions and conflicts between sprawl and density , which are at the center of today 's discussion about environmental sustainability .
So I 've been arguing in the last years that , in fact , the slums of Tijuana can teach a lot to the sprawls of San Diego when it comes to socioeconomic sustainability , that we should pay attention and learn from the many migrant communities on both sides of this border wall so that we can translate their informal processes of urbanization .
What do I mean by the informal in this case ?
I 'm really just talking about the compendium of social practices of adaptation that enable many of these migrant communities to transgress imposed political and economic recipes of urbanization .
I 'm talking simply about the creative intelligence of the bottom-up , whether manifested in the slums of Tijuana that build themselves , in fact , with the waste of San Diego , or the many migrant neighborhoods in Southern California that have begun to be retrofitted with difference in the last decades .
So I 've been interested as an artist in the measuring , the observation , of many of the trans-border informal flows across this border : in one direction , from south to north , the flow of immigrants into the United States , and from north to south the flow of waste from southern California into Tijuana .
I 'm referring to the recycling of these old post-war bungalows that Mexican contractors bring to the border as American developers are disposing of them in the process of building a more inflated version of suburbia in the last decades .
So these are houses waiting to cross the border .
Not only people cross the border here , but entire chunks of one city move to the next , and when these houses are placed on top of these steel frames , they leave the first floor to become the second to be in-filled with more house , with a small business .
This layering of spaces and economies is very interesting to notice .
But not only houses , also small debris from one city , from San Diego , to Tijuana .
Probably a lot of you have seen the rubber tires that are used in the slums to build retaining walls .
But look at what people have done here in conditions of socioeconomic emergency .
They have figured out how to peel off the tire , how to thread it and interlock it to construct a more efficient retaining wall .
Or the garage doors that are brought from San Diego in trucks to become the new skin of emergency housing in many of these slums surrounding the edges of Tijuana .
So while , as an architect , this is a very compelling thing to witness , this creative intelligence , I also want to keep myself in check .
I don 't want to romanticize poverty .
I just want to suggest that this informal urbanization is not just the image of precariousness , that informality here , the informal , is really a set of socioeconomic and political procedures that we could translate as artists , that this is about a bottom-up urbanization that performs .
See here , buildings are not important just for their looks , but , in fact , they are important for what they can do .
They truly perform as they transform through time and as communities negotiate the spaces and boundaries and resources .
So while waste flows southbound , people go north in search of dollars , and most of my research has had to do with the impact of immigration in the alteration of the homogeneity of many neighborhoods in the United States , particularly in San Diego .
And I 'm talking about how this begins to suggest that the future of Southern California depends on the retrofitting of the large urbanization -- I mean , on steroids -- with the small programs , social and economic .
I 'm referring to how immigrants , when they come to these neighborhoods , they begin to alter the one-dimensionality of parcels and properties into more socially and economically complex systems , as they begin to plug an informal economy into a garage , or as they build an illegal granny flat to support an extended family .
This socioeconomic entrepreneurship on the ground within these neighborhoods really begins to suggest ways of translating that into new , inclusive and more equitable land use policies .
So many stories emerge from these dynamics of alteration of space , such as & amp ; quot ; the informal Buddha , & amp ; quot ; which tells the story of a small house that saved itself , it did not travel to Mexico , but it was retrofitted in the end into a Buddhist temple , and in so doing , this small house transforms or mutates from a singular dwelling into a small , or a micro , socioeconomic and cultural infrastructure inside a neighborhood .
So these action neighborhoods , as I call them , really become the inspiration to imagine other interpretations of citizenship that have less to do , in fact , with belonging to the nation-state , and more with upholding the notion of citizenship as a creative act that reorganizes institutional protocols in the spaces of the city .
As an artist , I 've been interested , in fact , in the visualization of citizenship , the gathering of many anecdotes , urban stories , in order to narrativize the relationship between social processes and spaces .
This is a story of a group of teenagers that one night , a few months ago , decided to invade this space under the freeway to begin constructing their own skateboard park .
With shovels in hand , they started to dig .
Two weeks later , the police stopped them .
They barricaded the place , and the teenagers were evicted , and the teenagers decided to fight back , not with bank cards or slogans but with constructing a critical process .
The first thing they did was to recognize the specificity of political jurisdiction inscribed in that empty space .
They found out that they had been lucky because they had not begun to dig under Caltrans territoy .
Caltrans is a state agency that governs the freeway , so it would have been very difficult to negotiate with them .
They were lucky , they said , because they began to dig under an arm of the freeway that belongs to the local municipality .
They were also lucky , they said , because they began to dig in a sort of Bermuda Triangle of jurisdiction , between port authority , airport authority , two city districts , and a review board .
All these red lines are the invisible political institutions that were inscribed in that leftover empty space .
With this knowledge , these teenagers as skaters confronted the city .
They came to the city attorney 's office .
The city attorney told them that in order to continue the negotiation they had to become an NGO , and of course they didn 't know what an NGO was .
They had to talk to their friends in Seattle who had gone through the same experience .
And they began to realize the necessity to organize themselves even deeper and began to fundraise , to organize budgets , to really be aware of all the knowledge embedded in the urban code in San Diego so that they could begin to redefine the very meaning of public space in the city , expanding it to other categories .
At the end , the teenagers won the case with that evidence , and they were able to construct their skateboard park under that freeway .
Now for many of you , this story might seem trivial or naive .
For me as an architect , it has become a fundamental narrative , because it begins to teach me that this micro-community not only designed another category of public space but they also designed the socioeconomic protocols that were necessary to be inscribed in that space for its long-term sustainability .
They also taught me that similar to the migrant communities on both sides of the border , they engaged conflict itself as a creative tool , because they had to produce a process that enabled them to reorganize resources and the politics of the city .
In that act , that informal , bottom-up act of transgression , really began to trickle up to transform top-down policy .
Now this journey from the bottom-up to the transformation of the top-down is where I find hope today .
And I 'm thinking of how these modest alterations with space and with policy in many cities in the world , in primarily the urgency of a collective imagination as these communities reimagine their own forms of governance , social organization , and infrastructure , really is at the center of the new formation of democratic politics of the urban .
It is , in fact , this that could become the framework for producing new social and economic justice in the city .
I want to say this and emphasize it , because this is the only way I see that can enable us to move from urbanizations of consumption to neighborhoods of production today .
Thank you .

Maya Penn : Meet a young entrepreneur , cartoonist , designer , activist …
Maya Penn started her first company when she was 8 years old , and thinks deeply about how to be responsible both to her customers and to the planet . She shares her story -- and some animations , and some designs , and some infectious energy -- in this charming talk .
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Customer : I 'd like a RAM sandwich and a glass of your finest Code 39 .
Server : Would you like any desserts , sir ?
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Customer : I 'd like a batch of some zombie tracking cookies , thank you .
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Maya Penn : I 've been drawing ever since I could hold a crayon , and I 've been making animated flip books since I was three years old .
At that age , I also learned about what an animator was .
There was a program on TV about jobs most kids don 't know about .
When I understood that an animator makes the cartoons I saw on TV , I immediately said , " That 's what I want to be . "
I don 't know if I said it mentally or out loud , but that was a greatly defining moment in my life .
Animation and art has always been my first love .
It was my love for technology that sparked the idea for " Malicious Dishes . "
There was a virus on my computer , and I was trying to get rid of it , and all of a sudden , I just thought , what if viruses have their own little world inside the computer ?
Maybe a restaurant where they meet up and do virusy things ?
And thus , " Malicious Dishes " was born .
At four years old , my dad showed me how to take apart a computer and put it back together again .
That started my love for technology .
I built my first website myself in HTML , and I 'm learning JavaScript and Python .
I 'm also working on an animated series called " The Pollinators . "
It 's about bees and other pollinators in our environment and why they 're so important .
If plants aren 't pollinated by the pollinators , then all creatures , including ourselves , that depend on these plants , would starve .
So I decided to take these cool creatures and make a superhero team .
Pollinator : Deforestsaurus ! I should have known !
I need to call on the rest of the Pollinators !
Thank you . All of my animations start with ideas , but what are ideas ?
Ideas can spark a movement .
Ideas are opportunities and innovation .
Ideas truly are what make the world go round .
If it wasn 't for ideas , we wouldn 't be where we are now with technology , medicine , art , culture , and how we even live our lives .
At eight years old , I took my ideas and started my own business called Maya 's Ideas , and my nonprofit , Maya 's Ideas for the Planet .
And I make eco-friendly clothing and accessories .
I 'm 13 now , and although I started my business in 2008 , my artistic journey started way before then .
I was greatly influenced by art , and I wanted to incorporate it in everything I did , even my business .
I would find different fabrics around the house , and say , & amp ; quot ; This could be a scarf or a hat , & amp ; quot ; and I had all these ideas for designs .
I noticed when I wore my creations , people would stop me and say , " Wow , that 's really cute . Where can I get one ? "
And I thought , I can start my own business .
Now I didn 't have any business plans at only eight years old .
I only knew I wanted to make pretty creations that were safe for the environment and I wanted to give back .
My mom taught me how to sew , and on my back porch , I would sit and make little headbands out of ribbon , and I would write down the names and the price of each item .
I started making more items like hats , scarves and bags .
Soon , my items began selling all over the world , and I had customers in Denmark , Italy , Australia , Canada and more .
Now , I had a lot to learn about my business , like branding and marketing , staying engaged with my customers , and seeing what sold the most and the least .
Soon , my business really started to take off .
Then one day , Forbes magazine contacted me when I was 10 years old .
They wanted to feature me and my company in their article .
Now a lot of people ask me , why is your business eco-friendly ?
I 've had a passion for protecting the environment and its creatures since I was little .
My parents taught me at an early age about giving back and being a good steward to the environment .
I heard about how the dyes in some clothing or the process of even making the items was harmful to the people and the planet , so I started doing my own research , and I discovered that even after dyeing has being completed , there is a waste issue that gives a negative impact on the environment .
For example , the grinding of materials , or the dumping of dried powder materials .
These actions can pollute the air , making it toxic to anyone or anything that inhales it .
So when I started my business , I knew two things : All of my items had to be eco-friendly , and 10 to 20 percent of the profits I made went to local and global charities and environmental organizations .
I feel I 'm part of the new wave of entrepreneurs that not only seeks to have a successful business , but also a sustainable future .
I feel that I can meet the needs of my customers without compromising the ability of future generations to live in a greener tomorrow .
We live in a big , diverse and beautiful world , and that makes me even more passionate to save it .
But it 's never enough to just to get it through your heads about the things that are happening in our world .
It takes to get it through your hearts , because when you get it through your heart , that is when movements are sparked .
That is when opportunities and innovation are created , and that is why ideas come to life .
Thank you , and peace and blessings .
Thank you . Pat Mitchell : So , you heard Maya talk about the amazing parents who are behind this incredible woman . Where are they ?
Please , Mr. and Mrs. Penn . Would you just -- Ah !

Nicolas Perony : Puppies ! Now that I 've got your attention , complexity theory
Animal behavior isn 't complicated , but it is complex . Nicolas Perony studies how individual animals -- be they Scottish Terriers , bats or meerkats -- follow simple rules that , collectively , create larger patterns of behavior . And how this complexity born of simplicity can help them adapt to new circumstances , as they arise .
Science , science has allowed us to know so much about the far reaches of the universe , which is at the same time tremendously important and extremely remote , and yet much , much closer , much more directly related to us , there are many things we don 't really understand .
And one of them is the extraordinary social complexity of the animals around us , and today I want to tell you a few stories of animal complexity .
But first , what do we call complexity ?
What is complex ?
Well , complex is not complicated .
Something complicated comprises many small parts , all different , and each of them has its own precise role in the machinery .
On the opposite , a complex system is made of many , many similar parts , and it is their interaction that produces a globally coherent behavior .
Complex systems have many interacting parts which behave according to simple , individual rules , and this results in emergent properties .
The behavior of the system as a whole cannot be predicted from the individual rules only .
As Aristotle wrote , the whole is greater than the sum of its parts .
But from Aristotle , let 's move onto a more concrete example of complex systems .
These are Scottish terriers .
In the beginning , the system is disorganized .
Then comes a perturbation : milk .
Every individual starts pushing in one direction and this is what happens .
The pinwheel is an emergent property of the interactions between puppies whose only rule is to try to keep access to the milk and therefore to push in a random direction .
So it 's all about finding the simple rules from which complexity emerges .
I call this simplifying complexity , and it 's what we do at the chair of systems design at ETH Zurich .
We collect data on animal populations , analyze complex patterns , try to explain them .
It requires physicists who work with biologists , with mathematicians and computer scientists , and it is their interaction that produces cross-boundary competence to solve these problems .
So again , the whole is greater than the sum of the parts .
In a way , collaboration is another example of a complex system .
And you may be asking yourself which side I 'm on , biology or physics ?
In fact , it 's a little different , and to explain , I need to tell you a short story about myself .
When I was a child , I loved to build stuff , to create complicated machines .
So I set out to study electrical engineering and robotics , and my end-of-studies project was about building a robot called ER-1 -- it looked like this — that would collect information from its environment and proceed to follow a white line on the ground .
It was very , very complicated , but it worked beautifully in our test room , and on demo day , professors had assembled to grade the project .
So we took ER-1 to the evaluation room .
It turned out , the light in that room was slightly different .
The robot 's vision system got confused .
At the first bend in the line , it left its course , and crashed into a wall .
We had spent weeks building it , and all it took to destroy it was a subtle change in the color of the light in the room .
That 's when I realized that the more complicated you make a machine , the more likely that it will fail due to something absolutely unexpected .
And I decided that , in fact , I didn 't really want to create complicated stuff .
I wanted to understand complexity , the complexity of the world around us and especially in the animal kingdom .
Which brings us to bats .
Bechstein 's bats are a common species of European bats .
They are very social animals .
Mostly they roost , or sleep , together .
And they live in maternity colonies , which means that every spring , the females meet after the winter hibernation , and they stay together for about six months to rear their young , and they all carry a very small chip , which means that every time one of them enters one of these specially equipped bat boxes , we know where she is , and more importantly , we know with whom she is .
So I study roosting associations in bats , and this is what it looks like .
During the day , the bats roost in a number of sub-groups in different boxes .
It could be that on one day , the colony is split between two boxes , but on another day , it could be together in a single box , or split between three or more boxes , and that all seems rather erratic , really .
It 's called fission-fusion dynamics , the property for an animal group of regularly splitting and merging into different subgroups .
So what we do is take all these data from all these different days and pool them together to extract a long-term association pattern by applying techniques with network analysis to get a complete picture of the social structure of the colony .
Okay ? So that 's what this picture looks like .
In this network , all the circles are nodes , individual bats , and the lines between them are social bonds , associations between individuals .
It turns out this is a very interesting picture .
This bat colony is organized in two different communities which cannot be predicted from the daily fission-fusion dynamics .
We call them cryptic social units .
Even more interesting , in fact : Every year , around October , the colony splits up , and all bats hibernate separately , but year after year , when the bats come together again in the spring , the communities stay the same .
So these bats remember their friends for a really long time .
With a brain the size of a peanut , they maintain individualized , long-term social bonds , We didn 't know that was possible .
We knew that primates and elephants and dolphins could do that , but compared to bats , they have huge brains .
So how could it be that the bats maintain this complex , stable social structure with such limited cognitive abilities ?
And this is where complexity brings an answer .
To understand this system , we built a computer model of roosting , based on simple , individual rules , and simulated thousands and thousands of days in the virtual bat colony .
It 's a mathematical model , but it 's not complicated .
What the model told us is that , in a nutshell , each bat knows a few other colony members as her friends , and is just slightly more likely to roost in a box with them .
Simple , individual rules .
This is all it takes to explain the social complexity of these bats .
But it gets better .
Between 2010 and 2011 , the colony lost more than two thirds of its members , probably due to the very cold winter .
The next spring , it didn 't form two communities like every year , which may have led the whole colony to die because it had become too small .
Instead , it formed a single , cohesive social unit , which allowed the colony to survive that season and thrive again in the next two years .
What we know is that the bats are not aware that their colony is doing this .
All they do is follow simple association rules , and from this simplicity emerges social complexity which allows the colony to be resilient against dramatic changes in the population structure .
And I find this incredible .
Now I want to tell you another story , but for this we have to travel from Europe to the Kalahari Desert in South Africa .
This is where meerkats live .
I 'm sure you know meerkats .
They 're fascinating creatures .
They live in groups with a very strict social hierarchy .
There is one dominant pair , and many subordinates , some acting as sentinels , some acting as babysitters , some teaching pups , and so on .
What we do is put very small GPS collars on these animals to study how they move together , and what this has to do with their social structure .
And there 's a very interesting example of collective movement in meerkats .
In the middle of the reserve which they live in lies a road .
On this road there are cars , so it 's dangerous .
But the meerkats have to cross it to get from one feeding place to another .
So we asked , how exactly do they do this ?
We found that the dominant female is mostly the one who leads the group to the road , but when it comes to crossing it , crossing the road , she gives way to the subordinates , a manner of saying , " Go ahead , tell me if it 's safe . "
What I didn 't know , in fact , was what rules in their behavior the meerkats follow for this change at the edge of the group to happen and if simple rules were sufficient to explain it .
So I built a model , a model of simulated meerkats crossing a simulated road .
It 's a simplistic model .
Moving meerkats are like random particles whose unique rule is one of alignment .
They simply move together .
When these particles get to the road , they sense some kind of obstacle , and they bounce against it .
The only difference between the dominant female , here in red , and the other individuals , is that for her , the height of the obstacle , which is in fact the risk perceived from the road , is just slightly higher , and this tiny difference in the individual 's rule of movement is sufficient to explain what we observe , that the dominant female leads her group to the road and then gives way to the others for them to cross first .
George Box , who was an English statistician , once wrote , " All models are false , but some models are useful . "
And in fact , this model is obviously false , because in reality , meerkats are anything but random particles .
But it 's also useful , because it tells us that extreme simplicity in movement rules at the individual level can result in a great deal of complexity at the level of the group .
So again , that 's simplifying complexity .
I would like to conclude on what this means for the whole species .
When the dominant female gives way to a subordinate , it 's not out of courtesy .
In fact , the dominant female is extremely important for the cohesion of the group .
If she dies on the road , the whole group is at risk .
So this behavior of risk avoidance is a very old evolutionary response .
These meerkats are replicating an evolved tactic that is thousands of generations old , and they 're adapting it to a modern risk , in this case a road built by humans .
They adapt very simple rules , and the resulting complex behavior allows them to resist human encroachment into their natural habitat .
In the end , it may be bats which change their social structure in response to a population crash , or it may be meerkats who show a novel adaptation to a human road , or it may be another species .
My message here -- and it 's not a complicated one , but a simple one of wonder and hope -- my message here is that animals show extraordinary social complexity , and this allows them to adapt and respond to changes in their environment .
In three words , in the animal kingdom , simplicity leads to complexity which leads to resilience .
Thank you .
Dania Gerhardt : Thank you very much , Nicolas , for this great start . Little bit nervous ?
Nicolas Perony : I 'm okay , thanks .
Okay , great . I 'm sure a lot of people in the audience somehow tried to make associations between the animals you were talking about -- the bats , meerkats -- and humans .
You brought some examples : The females are the social ones , the females are the dominant ones , I 'm not sure who thinks how .
But is it okay to do these associations ?
Are there stereotypes you can confirm in this regard that can be valid across all species ?
NP : Well , I would say there are also counter-examples to these stereotypes .
For examples , in sea horses or in koalas , in fact , it is the males who take care of the young always .
And the lesson is that it 's often difficult , and sometimes even a bit dangerous , to draw parallels between humans and animals .
So that 's it .
Okay . Thank you very much for this great start .
Thank you , Nicolas Perony .
McKenna Pope : Want to be an activist ? Start with your toys
McKenna Pope 's younger brother loved to cook , but he worried about using an Easy-Bake Oven -- because it was a toy for girls . So at age 13 , Pope started an online petition for the American toy company Hasbro to change the pink-and-purple color scheme on the classic toy and incorporate boys into its TV marketing . In a heartening talk , Pope makes the case for gender-neutral toys and gives a rousing call to action to all kids who feel powerless .
I 'm McKenna Pope . I 'm 14 years old , and when I was 13 , I convinced one of the largest toy companies , toymakers , in the world , Hasbro , to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products .
So allow me to tell you about it .
So I have a brother , Gavin .
When this whole shebang happened , he was four .
He loved to cook .
He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these , needless to say , uneatable concoctions , or making invisible macaroni and cheese .
He wanted to be a chef really badly .
And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven . Right ?
I mean , we all had those when we were little .
And he wanted one so badly .
But then he started to realize something .
In the commercials , and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens , Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls .
was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials , and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple , very gender-specific colors to females , right ?
So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook ; boys aren 't .
And this discouraged my brother a lot .
He thought that he wasn 't supposed to want to be a chef , because that was something that girls did .
Girls cooked ; boys didn 't , or so was the message that Hasbro was sending .
And this got me thinking , God , I wish there was a way that I could change this , that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it .
And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org.
Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks , through Facebook , through Twitter , through YouTube , through Reddit , through Tumblr , through whatever you can think of .
And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it , in featuring boys in the commercials , on the boxes , and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors .
So this petition started to take off -- humongously fast , you have no idea .
I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets , and it was amazing .
In three weeks , maybe three and a half , I had 46,000 signatures on this petition .
Thank you .
So , needless to say , it was crazy .
Eventually , Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black , silver and blue .
It was literally one of the best moments of my life .
It was like & amp ; quot ; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory . & amp ; quot ; That thing was amazing .
What I didn 't realize at the time , however , was that I had become an activist , I could change something , that even as a kid , or maybe even especially as a kid , my voice mattered , and your voice matters too .
I want to let you know it 's not going to be easy , and it wasn 't easy for me , because I faced a lot of obstacles .
People online , and sometimes even in real life , were disrespectful to me and my family , and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time , and it really discouraged me .
And actually , I have some examples , because what 's better revenge than displaying their idiocy ?
So , let 's see .
From user name Liquidsore29 -- interesting user names we have here — & amp ; quot ; Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay . & amp ; quot ; Liquidsore29 , really ? Really ? Okay .
How about from Whiteboy77AGS : " People always need something to about . "
From Jeffrey Gutierrez : & amp ; quot ; OMG , shut up . You just want money and attention . & amp ; quot ; So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought , people don 't care , people think it 's a waste of time , and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family .
It hurt me , and it made me think , what 's the point of making change in the future ?
But then I started to realize something .
Haters gonna hate .
Come on , say it with me . One , two , three : Haters gonna hate .
So let your haters hate , you know what , and make your change , because I know you can .
I look out into this crowd , and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change , and I know that you can , and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in , and you can trade it across all these social media , through Facebook , through Twitter , through YouTube , through Reddit , through Tumblr , through whatever else you can think of .
And you can make that change .
You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it .
And that spark that you 've been hearing about all day today , and turn it into a fire .
Thank you .

Anant Agarwal : Why massive open online courses matter
2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs . Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first results . But the head of edX , Anant Agarwal , makes the case that MOOCs still matter -- as a way to share high-level learning widely and supplement traditional classrooms . Agarwal shares his vision of blended learning , where teachers create the ideal learning experience for 21st century students .
I 'd like to reimagine education .
The last year has seen the invention of a new four-letter word .
It starts with an M.
MOOC : massive open online courses .
Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world , in the millions , for free .
Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access these great courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it .
Now , in this discussion today , I 'm going to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs .
We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom .
So , here 's a classroom at this little three-letter institute in the Northeast of America , MIT .
And this was a classroom about 50 or 60 years ago , and this is a classroom today .
What 's changed ?
The seats are in color .
Whoop-de-do .
Education really hasn 't changed in the past 500 years .
The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks .
Everything else has changed around us .
You know , from healthcare to transportation , everything is different , but education hasn 't changed .
It 's also been a real issue in terms of access .
So what you see here is not a rock concert .
And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna .
This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria .
Now , we 've all heard of distance education , but the students way in the back , 200 feet away from the instructor , I think they are undergoing long-distance education .
Now , I really believe that we can transform education , both in quality and scale and access , through technology .
For example , at edX , we are trying to transform education through online technologies .
Given education has been calcified for 500 years , we really cannot think about reengineering it , We really have to completely reimagine it .
It 's like going from ox carts to the airplane .
Even the infrastructure has to change .
Everything has to change .
We need to go from lectures on the blackboard to online exercises , online videos .
We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification .
We have to go to completely online grading and peer interaction and discussion boards .
Everything really has to change .
So at edX and a number of other organizations , we are applying these technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education .
And you heard of this example , where , when we launched our very first course -- and this was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course -- about a year and a half ago , 155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course .
And we had no marketing budget .
Now , 155,000 is a big number .
This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history .
7,200 students passed the course , and this was a hard course .
7,200 is also a big number .
If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year , I would have to teach for 40 years before I could teach this many students .
Now these large numbers are just one part of the story .
So today , I want to discuss a different aspect , the other side of MOOCs , We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and applying it in the small to the classroom , to create a blended model of learning .
But before I go into that , let me tell you a story .
When my daughter turned 13 , became a teenager , she stopped speaking English , and she began speaking this new language .
I call it teen-lish .
It 's a digital language .
It 's got two sounds : a grunt and a silence .
" Honey , come over for dinner . "
" Hmm . "
" Did you hear me ? "
Silence . " Can you listen to me ? "
& amp ; quot ; Hmm . & amp ; quot ; So we had a real issue with communicating , until one day I had this epiphany .
I texted her . I got an instant response .
She must have thought , you know , some friend of hers was calling her .
So I texted her again . Boom , another response .
I said , this is great .
And so since then , our life has changed .
I text her , she responds .
It 's just been absolutely great .
So our millennial generation is built differently .
Now , I 'm older , and my youthful looks might belie that , but I 'm not in the millennial generation .
But our kids are really different .
The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology .
So why are we fighting it in the classroom ?
Let 's not fight it . Let 's embrace it .
In fact , I believe -- and I have two fat thumbs , I can 't text very well -- but I 'm willing to bet that with evolution , our kids and their grandchildren will develop really , really little , itty-bitty thumbs to text much better , that evolution will fix all of that stuff .
But what if we embraced technology , embraced the millennial generation 's natural predilections , and really think about creating these online technologies , blend them into their lives .
So here 's what we can do .
So rather than driving our kids into a classroom , herding them out there at 8 o 'clock in the morning -- I hated going to class at 8 o 'clock in the morning , so why are we forcing our kids to do that ?
So instead what you do is you have them watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms , in their bedroom , in the dining room , in the bathroom , wherever they 're most creative .
Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction . They can have discussions amongst themselves .
They can solve problems together .
They can work with the professor In fact , with edX , when we were teaching our first course on circuits and electronics around the world , this was happening unbeknownst to us .
Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom , and they were using our video lectures and interactive exercises , where the learners in the high school , 15-year-olds , mind you , would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class , and as you see from this image here , they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work .
And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog and we happened to stumble upon that blog .
We were also doing other pilots .
So we did a pilot experimental blended courses , working with San Jose State University in California , again , with the circuits and electronics course .
You 'll hear that a lot . That course has become sort of like our petri dish of learning .
the instructors flipped the classroom , blended online and in person , and the results were staggering .
Now don 't take these results to the bank just yet .
Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more , but the early results are incredible .
So traditionally , semester upon semester , for the past several years , this course , again , a hard course , had a failure rate of about 40 to 41 percent every semester .
With this blended class late last year , the failure rate fell to nine percent .
So the results can be extremely , extremely good .
Now before we go too far into this , I 'd like to spend some time discussing some key ideas .
What are some key ideas that makes all of this work ?
One idea is active learning .
The idea here is , rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures , we replace this with what we call lessons .
Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises .
So a student might watch a five- , seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise .
Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education .
You teach by asking questions .
And this is a form of learning called active learning , and really promoted by a very early paper , in 1972 , by Craik and Lockhart , where they said and discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing .
Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material .
The second idea is self-pacing .
Now , when I went to a lecture hall , and if you were like me , by the fifth minute I would lose the professor .
I wasn 't all that smart , and I would be scrambling , taking notes , and then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour .
Instead , wouldn 't it be nice with online technologies , we offer videos and interactive engagements to students ?
They can hit the pause button .
They can rewind the professor .
Heck , they can even mute the professor .
So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning .
The third idea that we have is instant feedback .
the computer grades exercises .
I mean , how else do you teach 150,000 students ?
Your computer is grading all the exercises .
And we 've all submitted homeworks , and your grades come back two weeks later , you 've forgotten all about it .
I don 't think I 've still received some of my homeworks from my undergraduate days .
Some are never graded .
So with instant feedback , students can try to apply answers .
If they get it wrong , they can get instant feedback .
They can try it again and try it again , and this really becomes much more engaging . They get the instant feedback , and this little green check mark that you see here is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX .
Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night dreaming of the green check mark .
In fact , one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year , he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley at the end of the year , and this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board about the green check mark : & amp ; quot ; Oh god ; have I missed you . & amp ; quot ; When 's the last time you 've seen students posting comments like this about homework ?
My colleague Ed Bertschinger , who heads up the physics department at MIT , has this to say about instant feedback : He indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments into learning outcomes .
The next big idea is gamification .
You know , all learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on .
You know , they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it .
So we applied these gamification techniques to learning , and we can build these online laboratories .
How do you teach creativity ? How do you teach design ?
So as this little video shows here , you can engage students So here , the learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease .
And this can also be graded by the computer .
Fifth is peer learning .
So here , we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction , but to really help students learn .
Let me tell you a story .
When we did our circuits course for the 155,000 students , I didn 't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course .
I told my TAs , okay , 24 / 7 , we 're going to be up monitoring the forum , answering questions .
They had answered questions for 100 students .
How do you do that for 150,000 ?
So one night I 'm sitting up there , at 2 a.m. at night , and I think there 's this question from a student from Pakistan , and he asked a question , and I said , okay , let me go and type up an answer , I don 't type all that fast , and before I can finish , another student from Egypt popped in with an answer , not quite right , so I 'm fixing the answer , and before I can finish , a student from the U.S.
had popped in with a different answer .
Boom , boom , boom , boom , the students were discussing and interacting with each other , and by 4 a.m. that night , I 'm totally fascinated , and by 4 a.m. in the morning , they had discovered the right answer .
And all I had to do was go and bless it , " Good answer . "
So this is absolutely amazing , where students are learning from each other , and they 're telling us that they are learning by teaching .
Now this is all not just in the future .
This is happening today .
So we are applying these blended learning pilots in a number of universities and high schools around the world , from Tsinghua in China to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia to Berkeley in California -- And these kinds of technologies really help , the blended model can really help revolutionize education .
It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs , the business aspect .
We can also license these MOOC courses to other universities , and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs , where the university that licenses it with the professor can use these online courses like the next-generation textbook .
They can use as much or as little as they like , and it becomes a tool in the teacher 's arsenal .
Finally , I would like to have you dream with me for a little bit .
I would like us to really reimagine education .
We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces .
We have to move from books to tablets like the Aakash in India or the Raspberry Pi , 20 dollars .
The Aakash is 40 dollars .
We have to move from bricks-and-mortar school buildings to digital dormitories .
But I think at the end of the day , I think we will still need one lecture hall in our universities .
Otherwise , how else do we tell our grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end talk about content and , you know , you didn 't even have a rewind button ?
Thank you .
Thank you . Thank you .
Yves Morieux : As work gets more complex , 6 rules to simplify
Why do people feel so miserable and disengaged at work ? Because today 's businesses are increasingly and dizzyingly complex -- and traditional pillars of management are obsolete , says Yves Morieux . So , he says , it falls to individual employees to navigate the rabbit 's warren of interdependencies . In this energetic talk , Morieux offers six rules for " smart simplicity . "
I have spent the last years trying to resolve two enigmas : Why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work ?
I have worked with more than 500 companies .
Despite all the technological advances -- computers , I.T. , communications , telecommunications , the Internet .
Enigma number two : Why is there so little engagement at work ?
Why do people feel so miserable , even actively disengaged ?
Disengaging their colleagues .
Acting against the interest of their company .
Despite all the affiliation events , the celebration , the people initiatives , the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams .
At the beginning , I thought there was a chicken and egg issue : Because people are less engaged , they are less productive .
Or vice versa , because they are less productive , we put more pressure and they are less engaged .
But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates , in fact , to the basic pillars of management .
The way we organize is based on two pillars .
The hard -- structure , processes , systems .
The soft -- feelings , sentiments , interpersonal relationships , traits , personality .
And whenever a company reorganizes , restructures , reengineers , goes through a cultural transformation program , it chooses these two pillars .
Now , we try to refine them , we try to combine them .
The real issue is -- and this is the answer to the two enigmas -- these pillars are obsolete .
Everything you read in business books is based either on one or the other or their combination .
They are obsolete .
How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business ?
The hard approach , basically is that you start from strategy , requirements , structures , processes , systems , KPIs , scorecards , committees , headquarters , hubs , clusters , you name it .
I forgot all the metrics , incentives , committees , middle offices and interfaces .
What happens basically on the left , you have more complexity , the new complexity of business .
We need quality , cost , reliability , speed .
And every time there is a new requirement , we use the same approach .
We create dedicated structure processed systems , basically to deal with the new complexity of business .
The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization .
Let 's take an example .
An automotive company , the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix .
If you open any cell of the matrix , you find another 20-dimensional matrix .
You have Mr. Noise , Mr. Petrol Consumption , Mr. Anti-Collision Properties .
For any new requirement , you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement .
What happens when the new requirement emerges ?
Some years ago , a new requirement appeared on the marketplace : the length of the warranty period .
So therefore the new requirement is repairability , making cars easy to repair .
Otherwise when you bring the car to the garage to fix the light , if you have to remove the engine to access the lights , the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours , and the warranty budget will explode .
So , what was the solution using the hard approach ?
If repairability is the new requirement , the solution is to create a new function , Mr. Repairability .
And Mr. Repairability creates the repairability process .
With a repairability scorecard , with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive .
That came on top of 25 other KPIs .
What percentage of these people is variable compensation ?
Twenty percent at most , divided by 26 KPIs , repairability makes a difference of 0.8 percent .
What difference did it make in their actions , their choices to simplify ? Zero .
But what occurs for zero impact ? Mr. Repairability , process , scorecard , evaluation , coordination with the 25 other coordinators to have zero impact .
Now , in front of the new complexity of business , the only solution is not drawing boxes with reporting lines .
It is basically the interplay .
How the parts work together .
The connections , the interactions , the synapses .
It is not the skeleton of boxes , it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence .
You know , you could call it cooperation , basically .
Whenever people cooperate , they use less resources . In everything .
You know , the repairability issue is a cooperation problem .
When you design cars , please take into account the needs of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garages .
When we don 't cooperate we need more time , more equipment , more systems , more teams .
We need -- When procurement , supply chain , manufacturing don 't cooperate we need more stock , more inventories , more working capital .
Who will pay for that ?
Shareholders ? Customers ?
No , they will refuse .
So who is left ? The employees , who have to compensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation .
Stress , burnout , they are overwhelmed , accidents .
No wonder they disengage .
How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation ?
The hard : In banks , when there is a problem between the back office and the front office , they don 't cooperate . What is the solution ?
They create a middle office .
What happens one year later ?
Instead of one problem between the back and the front , now I have two problems .
Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front .
Plus I have to pay for the middle office .
The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation .
It can only add new boxes , new bones in the skeleton .
The soft approach : To make people cooperate , we need to make them like each other .
Improve interpersonal feelings , the more people like each other , the more they will cooperate .
It is totally wrong .
It is even counterproductive .
Look , at home I have two TVs . Why ?
Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife .
Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife .
And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife .
If I didn 't love my wife , one TV would be enough : You will watch my favorite football game , if you are not happy , how is the book or the door ?
The more we like each other , the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs .
And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration .
Definitely , these approaches are obsolete .
To deal with complexity , to enhance the nervous system , we have created what we call the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules .
Simple rule number one : Understand what others do .
What is their real work ?
We need to go beyond the boxes , the job descriptions , beyond the surface of the container , to understand the real content .
Me , designer , if I put a wire here , I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights .
Second , you need to reenforce integrators .
Integrators are not middle offices , they are managers , existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate .
How can you reinforce your managers as integrators ?
By removing layers .
When there are too many layers people are too far from the action , therefore they need KPIs , metrics , they need poor proxies for reality .
They don 't understand reality and they add the complicatedness of metrics , KPIs .
By removing rules -- the bigger we are , the more we need integrators , therefore the less rules we must have , to give discretionary power to managers .
And we do the opposite -- the bigger we are , the more rules we create .
And we end up with the Encyclopedia Britannica of rules .
You need to increase the quanitity of power so that you can empower everybody to use their judgment , their intelligence .
You must give more cards to people so that they have the critical mass of cards to take the risk to cooperate , to move out of insulation .
Otherwise , they will withdraw . They will disengage .
These rules , they come from game theory and organizational sociology .
You can increase the shadow of the future .
Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions .
This is what the automotive company did when they saw that Mr. Repairability had no impact .
They said to the design engineers : Now , in three years , when the new car is launched on the market , you will move to the after sales network , and become in charge of the warranty budget , and if the warranty budget explodes , it will explode in your face . Much more powerful than 0.8 percent variable compensation .
You need also to increase reciprocity , by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient .
When you remove these buffers , you hold me by the nose , I hold you by the ear .
We will cooperate .
Remove the second TV .
There are many second TVs at work that don 't create value , they just provide dysfunctional self-sufficiency .
You need to reward those who cooperate and blame those who don 't cooperate .
The CEO of The Lego Group , Jorgen Vig Knudstorp , has a great way to use it .
He says , blame is not for failure , it is for failing to help or ask for help .
It changes everything .
Suddenly it becomes in my interest to be transparent on my real weaknesses , my real forecast , because I know I will not be blamed if I fail , but if I fail to help or ask for help .
When you do this , it has a lot of implications on organizational design .
You stop drawing boxes , dotted lines , full lines ; you look at their interplay .
It has a lot of implications on financial policies that we use .
On human resource management practices .
When you do that , you can manage complexity , the new complexity of business , without getting complicated .
You create more value with lower cost .
You simultaneously improve performance and satisfaction at work because you have removed the common root cause that hinders both .
Complicatedness : This is your battle , business leaders .
The real battle is not against competitors .
This is rubbish , very abstract .
When do we meet competitors to fight them ?
The real battle is against ourselves , against our bureaucracy , our complicatedness .
Only you can fight , can do it .
Thank you .

Guy Hoffman : Robots with " soul "
What kind of robots does an animator / jazz musician / roboticist make ? Playful , reactive , curious ones . Guy Hoffman shows demo film of his family of unusual robots -- including two musical bots that like to jam with humans .
My job is to design , build and study robots that communicate with people .
But this story doesn 't start with robotics at all , it starts with animation .
When I first saw Pixar 's " Luxo Jr . , " I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp .
I mean , look at them -- at the end of this movie , you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture .
And I said , I have to learn how to do this .
So I made a really bad career decision .
And that 's what my mom was like when I did it .
I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation .
And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates .
I 'm not using this phrase metaphorically , the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room .
Whenever they did those news stories about building violations in New York , they would put the report in front of our building .
As kind of like a backdrop to show how bad things are .
Anyway , during the day I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation .
And I learned two surprising lessons -- one of them was that when you want to arouse emotions , it doesn 't matter so much how something looks , it 's all in the motion -- it 's in the timing of how the thing moves .
And the second , was something one of our teachers told us .
He actually did the weasel in Ice Age .
And he said : " As an animator you are not a director , you 're an actor . "
So , if you want to find the right motion for a character , don 't think about it , go use your body to find it -- stand in front of a mirror , act it out in front of a camera -- whatever you need .
And then put it back in your character .
A year later I found myself at MIT in the robotic life group , it was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots .
And I still had this dream to make an actual , physical Luxo Jr. lamp .
But I found that robots didn 't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to for my animation studies .
Instead , they were all -- how should I put it , they were all kind of robotic .
And I thought , what if I took whatever I learned in animation school , and used that to design my robotic desk lamp .
So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible .
And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop .
And I 'm actually redesigning the robot so , unbeknownst to itself , it 's kind of digging its own grave by helping me .
I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light , and more of a helpful , kind of quiet apprentice that 's always there when you need it and doesn 't really interfere .
And when , for example , I 'm looking for a battery that I can 't find , in a subtle way , it will show me where the battery is .
So you can see my confusion here .
I 'm not an actor .
And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can at one point , just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring -- and in the other case , seem violent and confrontational .
And it 's the same structure , just the motion is different .
Actor : " You want to know something ? Well , you want to know something ?
He was already dead !
Just laying there , eyes glazed over ! "
But , moving in graceful ways is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction .
I was at the time doing my Ph.D. , I was working on human robot teamwork ; teams of humans and robots working together .
I was studying the engineering , the psychology , the philosophy of teamwork .
And at the same time I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation with a good friend of mine who is actually here .
And in that situation we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us .
It was after a Passover seder .
We were folding up a lot of folding chairs , and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm .
Everybody did their own part .
We didn 't have to divide our tasks .
We didn 't have to communicate verbally about this .
It all just happened .
And I thought , humans and robots don 't look at all like this .
When humans and robots interact , it 's much more like a chess game .
The human does a thing , the robot analyzes whatever the human did , then the robot decides what to do next , plans it and does it .
And then the human waits , until it 's their turn again .
So , it 's much more like a chess game and that makes sense because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists .
It 's all about information analysis , decision making and planning .
But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player , and more like a doer that just clicks and works together .
So I made my second horrible career choice : I decided to study acting for a semester .
I took off from a Ph.D. I went to acting classes .
I actually participated in a play , I hope theres no video of that around still .
And I got every book I could find about acting , including one from the 19th century that I got from the library .
And I was really amazed because my name was the second name on the list -- the previous name was in 1889 . And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years to be rediscovered for robotics .
And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express .
But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting .
It became very popular in the 20th century .
And method acting said , you don 't have to plan every muscle in your body .
Instead you have to use your body to find the right movement .
You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression .
Improvise , play off yor scene partner .
And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition .
Which also talks about the same ideas -- We use our bodies to think , we don 't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move .
but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave .
And it was like a lightning bolt .
I went back to my office .
I wrote this paper -- which I never really published called " Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence . "
And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together .
That 's what you saw before with the actors .
And I thought : How can we make an artificial intelligence model -- computer , computational model -- that will model some of these ideas of improvisation , of taking risks , of taking chances , even of making mistakes .
Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates .
So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots .
Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence , to try to match my movements as closely as possible , sort of like a game .
Let 's look at it .
You can see when I psych it out , it gets fooled .
And it 's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them .
And then , I did another experiment , and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp , and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence .
So , I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot .
The robot is the same lamp that you saw , and I put in it two brains .
For one half of the people , I put in a brain that 's kind of the traditional , calculated robotic brain .
It waits for its turn , it analyzes everything , it plans .
Let 's call it the calculated brain .
The other got more the stage actor , risk taker brain .
Let 's call it the adventurous brain .
It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know .
It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them .
And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes and they had to work together .
Somehow simulating like a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing .
And what I found was that people actually loved the adventurous robot .
And they thought it was more intelligent , more committed , a better member of the team , contributed to the success of the team more .
They even called it ' he ' and ' she , ' whereas people with the calculated brain called it ' it . ' And nobody ever called it ' he ' or ' she ' .
When they talked about it after the task with the adventurous brain , they said , " By the end , we were good friends and high-fived mentally . "
Whatever that means .
Sounds painful .
Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice .
It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more .
Which is almost what people expect robots to do , so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots , than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing .
And in a way , I thought , maybe it 's time -- just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century , from going from the very calculated , planned way of behaving , to a more intuitive , risk-taking , embodied way of behaving .
Maybe it 's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution .
A few years later , I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta , and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians .
And I thought , music , that 's the perfect place to look at teamwork , coordination , timing , improvisation -- and we just got this robot playing marimba .
Marimba , for everybody who was like me , it was this huge , wooden xylophone .
And , when I was looking at this , I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation -- yes , there are other works in human-robot improvisation -- and they were also a little bit like a chess game .
The human would play , the robot would analyze what was played , would improvise their own part .
So , this is what musicians called a call and response interaction , and it also fits very well , robots and artificial intelligence .
But I thought , if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies , maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band .
Everybody 's riffing off each other , nobody is stopping it for a moment .
And so , I tried to do the same things , this time with music , where the robot doesn 't really know what it 's about to play .
It just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play , And does what my jazz teacher when I was 17 taught me .
She said , when you improvise , sometimes you don 't know what you 're doing and you 're still doing it .
And so I tried to make a robot that doesn 't actually know what it 's doing , but it 's still doing it .
So let 's look at a few seconds from this performance .
Where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises .
And then , look at how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing , and picking up from its behavior .
And at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with .
Being a musician is not just about making notes , otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show .
Musicians also communicate with their bodies , with other band members , with the audience , they use their bodies to express the music .
And I thought , we already have a robot musician on stage , why not make it be a full-fledged musician .
And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot .
The head does 't actually touch the marimba , it just expresses what the music is like .
These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta , that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home . So I spent , I would say on average , three to four hours a day there .
I think . And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like , but especially what a robotic musician would move like .
To sort of show that it doesn 't like what the other person is playing -- and maybe show whatever beat it 's feeling at the moment .
So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot , which was nice .
I 'm going to show you now the same kind of performance , this time with a socially expressive head .
And notice one thing -- how the robot is really showing us the beat it 's picking up from the human .
We 're also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it 's doing .
And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo .
Now it 's looking at me to make sure I 'm listening .
And now look at the final chord of the piece again , and this time the robot communicates with its body when it 's busy doing its own thing .
And when it 's ready to coordinate the final chord with me .
Thanks . I hope you see how much this totally not -- how much this part of the body that doesn 't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance .
And at some point , we are in Atlanta , so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point .
And we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot .
And here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat and -- notice two things . One , how irresistible it is to join the robot while it 's moving its head .
and you kind of want to move your own head when it does it .
And second , even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone , as soon as the robot turns to him , he turns back .
So even though it 's just in the periphery of his vision -- it 's just in the corner of his eye -- it 's very powerful .
And the reason is that we can 't ignore physical things moving in our environment .
We are wired for that .
So , if you have a problem with maybe your partners looking at the iPhone too much or their smartphone too much , you might want to have a robot there to get their attention . Just to introduce the last robot that we 've worked on , that came out of something kind of surprising that we found : At some point people didn 't care anymore about the robot being so intelligent , and can improvise and listen , and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years on developing .
They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music . And they didn 't say that the robot was moving to the music , they said that the robot was enjoying the music .
And we thought , why don 't we take this idea , and I designed a new piece of furniture .
This time it wasn 't a desk lamp ; it was a speaker dock .
It was one of those things you plug your smartphone in .
And I thought , what would happen if your speaker dock didn 't just play the music for you , but it would actually enjoy it too . And so again , here are some animation tests from an early stage . And this is what the final product looked like .
So , a lot of bobbing head .
A lot of bobbing heads in the audience , so we can still see robots influence people .
And it 's not just fun and games .
I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move -- and I 'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding -- is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in their life .
Somewhere in your future there 's going to be a robot in your life .
And if not in yours , then in your children 's lives .
And I want these robots to be -- to be more fluent , more engaging , more graceful than currently they seem to be .
And for that I think that maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians .
Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise .
And maybe they should be able to anticipate what you 're about to do .
And maybe they need to be able to make mistakes and correct them , because in the end we are human .
And maybe as humans , robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us .
Thank you .

Sheryl Sandberg : So we leaned in ... now what ?
Sheryl Sandberg admits she was terrified to step onto the TED stage in 2010 -- because she was going to talk , for the first time , about the lonely experience of being a woman in the top tiers of business . Millions of views later , the Facebook COO talks with the woman who pushed her to give that first talk , Pat Mitchell . Sandberg opens up about the reaction to her idea , and explores the ways that women still struggle with success .
Pat Mitchell : Your first time back on the TEDWomen stage .
Sheryl Sandberg : First time back . Nice to see everyone . It 's always so nice to look out and see so many women .
It 's so not my regular experience , as I know anyone else 's .
PM : So when we first started talking about , maybe the subject wouldn 't be social media , which we assumed it would be , but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions , particularly in the sector of technology and social media .
But how did that evolve for you as a thought , and end up being the TED Talk that you gave ?
SS : So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women , because I grew up in the business world , as I think so many of us did .
You never talk about being a woman , because someone might notice that you 're a woman , right ?
They might notice . Or worse , if you say " woman , " people on the other end of the table think you 're asking for special treatment , or complaining .
Or worse , about to sue them . And so I went through -- Right ? I went through my entire business career , and never spoke about being a woman , never spoke about it publicly .
But I also had noticed that it wasn 't working .
I came out of college over 20 years ago , and I thought that all of my peers were men and women , all the people above me were all men , but that would change , because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality , equality was now ours for the taking . And it wasn 't .
Because year after year , I was one of fewer and fewer , and now , often the only woman in a room .
And I talked to a bunch of people about , should I give a speech at TEDWomen about women , and they said , oh no , no .
It will end your business career . You cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman . You 'll never be taken seriously again .
But fortunately , there were the few , the proud -- like you -- who told me I should give the speech , and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might -- the founder of Facebook and my boss -- asks all of us , which is , what would I do if I wasn 't afraid ?
And the answer to what would I do if I wasn 't afraid is I would get on the TED stage , and talk about women , and leadership . And I did , and survived . PM : I would say , not only survived . I 'm thinking of that moment , Sheryl , when you and I were standing backstage together , and you turned to me , and you told me a story .
And I said -- very last minute -- you know , you really should share that story .
SS : Oh , yeah . PM : What was that story ?
SS : Well , it 's an important part of the journey . So I had -- TEDWomen -- the original one was in D.C. -- so I live here , so I had gotten on a plane the day before , and my daughter was three , she was clinging to my leg : " Mommy , don 't go . "
And Pat 's a friend , and so , not related to the speech I was planning on giving , which was chock full of facts and figures , and nothing personal , I told Pat the story . I said , well , I 'm having a hard day .
Yesterday my daughter was clinging to my leg , and " Don 't go . "
And you looked at me and said , you have to tell that story .
I said , on the TED stage ? Are you kidding ?
I 'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg ?
And you said yes , because if you want to talk about getting more women into leadership roles , you have to be honest about how hard it is .
And I did . And I think that 's a really important part of the journey .
The same thing happened when I wrote my book . I started writing the book . I wrote a first chapter , I thought it was fabulous . It was chock-full of data and figures , I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes , and their sociological patterns .
My husband read it and he was like , this is like eating your Wheaties . No one -- and I apologize to Wheaties if there 's someone -- no one , no one will read this book .
And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open , and I had to tell my stories . My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should , in many situations . My first and failed marriage . Crying at work .
Felling like I didn 't belong there , feeling guilty to this day .
And part of my journey , starting on this stage , going to " Lean In , " going to the foundation , is all about being more open and honest about those challenges , so that other women can be more open and honest , and all of us can work together towards real equality .
PM : I think that one of the most striking parts about the book , and in my opinion , one of the reasons it 's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world , is that you are personal in the book , and that you do make it clear that , while you 've observed some things that are very important for other women to know , that you 've had the same challenges that many others of us have , as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don 't believe the same .
So talk about that process : deciding you 'd go public with the private part , and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges .
SS : After I did the TED Talk , what happened was -- you know , I never really expected to write a book , I 'm not an author , I 'm not a writer , and it was viewed a lot , and it really started impacting people 's lives .
I got this great --- one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work , and she turned it down , and she told her best friend she turned it down , and her best friend said , you really need to watch this TED Talk .
And so she watched this TED Talk , and she went back the next day , she took the job , she went home , and she handed her husband the grocery list . And she said , I can do this .
And what really mattered to me -- it wasn 't only women in the corporate world , even though I did hear from a lot of them , and it did impact a lot of them , it was also people of all different circumstances .
There was a doctor I met who was an attending physician at Johns Hopkins , and he said that until he saw my TED Talk , it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in his med school classes were women , they weren 't speaking as much as the men as he did his rounds .
So he started paying attention , and as he waited for raised hands , he realized the men 's hands were up .
So he started encouraging the women to raise their hands more , and it still didn 't work .
So he told everyone , no more hand raising , I 'm cold-calling .
So he could call evenly on men and women . And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better , and he was able to go back to them and tell them that .
And then there was the woman , stay-at-home mom , lives in a really difficult neighborhood , with not a great school , she said that TED Talk -- she 's never had a corporate job , but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child .
And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice .
And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it , which is why I went from the talk to the book .
PM : And in the book , you not only found your voice , which is clear and strong in the book , but you also share what you 've learned -- the experiences of other people in the lessons .
And that 's what I 'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a -- you became a sort of expert in how you lean in .
So what did that feel like , and become like in your life ?
To launch not just a book , not just a best-selling , best-viewed talk , but a movement , where people began to literally describe their actions at work as , I 'm leaning in .
SS : I mean , I 'm grateful , I 'm honored , I 'm happy , and it 's the very beginning .
So I don 't know if I 'm an expert , or if anyone is an expert . I certainly have done a lot of research .
I have read every study , I have pored over the materials , and the lessons are very clear . Because here 's what we know : What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world .
It 's so striking . " Lean In " is very global , I 've been all over the world , talking about it , and -- cultures are so different .
Even within our own country , to Japan , to Korea , to China , to Asia , Europe , they 're so different . Except for one thing : gender .
All over the world , no matter what our cultures are , we think men should be strong , assertive , aggressive , have voice ; we think women should speak when spoken to , help others .
Now we have , all over the world , women are called " bossy . " There is a word for " bossy , " for little girls , in every language there 's one .
It 's a word that 's pretty much not used for little boys , because if a little boy leads , there 's no negative word for it , it 's expected . But if a little girl leads , she 's bossy .
Now I know there aren 't a lot of men here , but bear with me .
If you 're a man , you 'll have to represent your gender .
Please raise your hand if you 've been told you 're too aggressive at work .
There 's always a few , it runs about five percent . Okay , get ready , gentlemen .
If you 're a woman , please raise your hand if you 've ever been told you 're too aggressive at work .
That is what audiences have said in every country in the world , and it 's deeply supported by the data .
Now , do we think women are more aggressive than men ? Of course not .
It 's just that we judge them through a different lens , and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work , to get results , to lead , are ones that we think , in a man , he 's a boss , and in a woman , she 's bossy .
And the good news about this is that we can change this by acknowledging it .
One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is , after the book came out , I stood on a stage with John Chambers , the CEO of Cisco .
He read the book . He stood on a stage with me , he invited me in front of his whole management team , men and women , and he said , I thought we were good at this . I thought I was good at this .
And then I read this book , and I realized that we -- my company -- we have called all of our senior women too aggressive , and I 'm standing on this stage , and I 'm sorry .
And I want you to know we 're never going to do it again .
PM : Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know ? SS : And so John is doing that because he believes it 's good for his company , and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it .
And so next time you all see someone call a little girl " bossy , " you walk right up to that person , big smile , and you say , " That little girl 's not bossy . That little girl has executive leadership skills . " PM : I know that 's what you 're telling your daughter . SS : Absolutely .
PM : And you did focus in the book -- and the reason , as you said , in writing it , was to create a dialogue about this .
I mean , let 's just put it out there , face the fact that women are -- in a time when we have more open doors , and more opportunities -- are still not getting to the leadership positions .
So in the months that have come since the book , in which " Lean In " focused on that and said , here are some of the challenges that remain , and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves . What has changed ?
Have you seen changes ?
SS : Well , there 's certainly more dialogue , which is great .
But what really matters to me , and I think all of us , is action .
So everywhere I go , CEOs , they 're mostly men , say to me , you 're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men .
And to them I say , I 'm not sorry at all . At all . I mean , the women should be paid as much as the men .
Everywhere I go , women tell me they ask for raises .
Everywhere I go , women say they 're getting better relationships with their spouses , asking for more help at home , asking for the promotions they should be getting at work , and importantly , believing it themselves . Even little things .
One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn 't realize that more women were , in fact , literally sitting on the side of the room , which they are , and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table .
The foundation I started along with the book " Lean In " helps women , or men , start circles -- small groups , it can be 10 , it can be however many you want , which meet once a month .
I would have hoped that by now , we 'd have about 500 circles . That would 've been great .
You know , 500 times roughly 10 .
There are over 12,000 circles in 50 countries in the world .
PM : Wow , that 's amazing .
SS : And these are people who are meeting every single month .
I met one of them , I was in Beijing .
A group of women , they 're all about 29 or 30 , they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing , several of them grew up in very poor , rural China .
These women are 29 , they are told by their society that they are " left over , " because they are not yet married , and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves .
What they want in their careers . The kind of partners they want , if at all .
I looked at them , we went around and introduced ourselves , and they all said their names and where they 're from , and I said , I 'm Sheryl Sandberg , and this was my dream .
And I kind of just started crying .
Right , which , I admit , I do . Right ? I 've talked about it before .
But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world , who grew up in a rural village , who 's being told to marry someone she doesn 't want to marry , can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that , and find life on her own terms .
That 's the kind of change we have to hope for .
PM : Have you been surprised by the global nature of the message ?
Because I think when the book first came out , many people thought , well , this is a really important handbook for young women on their way up .
They need to look at this , anticipate the barriers , and recognize them , put them out in the open , have the dialogue about it , but that it 's really for women who are that . Doing that . Pursuing the corporate world .
And yet the book is being read , as you say , in rural and developing countries .
What part of that has surprised you , and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part ?
SS : The book is about self-confidence , and about equality .
And it turns out , everywhere in the world , women need more self-confidence , because the world tells us we 're not equal to men .
Everywhere in the world , we live in a world where the men get " and , " and women get " or . "
I 've never met a man who 's been asked how he does it all . Again , I 'm going to turn to the men in the audience : Please raise your hand if you 've been asked , how do you do it all ?
Men only .
Women , women . Please raise your hand if you 've been asked how you do it all ?
We assume men can do it all , slash -- have jobs and children .
We assume women can 't , and that 's ridiculous , because the great majority of women everywhere in the world , including the United States , work full time and have children .
And I think people don 't fully understand how broad the message is .
There is a circle that 's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami .
They 're using " Lean In " to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life , really rescuing them from their pimps , and using it .
There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book , for women who have never been to college .
And we know there are groups all the way to Ethiopia .
And so these messages of equality -- of how women are told they can 't have what men can have -- how we assume that leadership is for men , how we assume that voice is for men , these affect all of us , and I think they are very universal .
And it 's part of what TEDWomen does .
It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in , which is more women , more voice , more equality .
PM : If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk , what would you say that is a result of this experience , for you personally , and what you 've learned about women , and men , as you 've made this journey ?
SS : I think I would say -- I tried to say this strongly , but I think I can say it more strongly -- I want to say that the status quo is not enough .
That it 's not good enough , that it 's not changing quickly enough .
Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book , another year of data came out from the U.S. Census .
And you know what we found ?
No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States .
Seventy-seven cents to the dollar .
If you are a black woman , 64 cents .
If you are a Latina , we 're at 54 cents .
Do you know when the last time those numbers went up ?
2002 .
We are stagnating , we are stagnating in so many ways .
And I think we are not really being honest about that , for so many reasons . It 's so hard to talk about gender .
We shy away from the word " feminist , " a word I really think we need to embrace .
We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back -- I think I would say in a louder voice , we need to get rid of the word " bossy " and bring back the word " feminist , " because we need it .
PM : And we all need to do a lot more leaning in .
SS : A lot more leaning in .
PM : Thank you , Sheryl .
Thanks for leaning in and saying yes .
SS : Thank you .

Suzanne Talhouk : Don 't kill your language
More and more , English is a global language ; speaking it is perceived as a sign of being modern . But -- what do we lose when we leave behind our mother tongues ? Suzanne Talhouk makes an impassioned case to love your own language , and to cherish what it can express that no other language can . In Arabic with subtitles .
Good morning !
Are you awake ?
They took my name tag , but I wanted to ask you , did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic ?
Anyone ! No one ? All right , no problem .
Once upon a time , not long ago , I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend , ordering food .
So I looked at the waiter and said , " Do you have a menu ? "
He looked at me strangely , thinking that he misheard .
He said , " Sorry ? . "
I said , " The menu , please . "
He replied , " Don 't you know what they call it ? "
" I do . "
He said , " No ! It 's called " menu " , or " menu " . "
Is the French pronunciation correct ?
" Come , come , take care of this one ! " said the waiter .
He was disgusted when talking to me , as if he was saying to himself , " If this was the last girl on Earth , I wouldn 't look at her ! "
What 's the meaning of saying " menu " in Arabic ?
Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant .
How could she speak that way ?
At that moment , I started thinking .
It made me mad . It definitely hurts !
I 'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country ?
Where could this happen ?
How did we get here ?
Well , while we are here , there are many people like me , who would reach a stage in their lives , where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past , just so they can say that they 're modern and civilized .
Should I forget all my culture , thoughts , intellect and all my memories ?
Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war !
Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic , just to conform ?
To be one of them ?
Where 's the logic in that ?
Despite all that , I tried to understand him .
I didn 't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me .
The Arabic language doesn 't satisfy today 's needs .
It 's not a language for science , research , a language we 're used to in universities , a language we use in the workplace , a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project , and it definitely isn 't a language we use at the airport .
Where can I use it , then ? We could all ask this question !
So , you want us to use Arabic . Where are we to do so ?
This is one reality .
But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about .
Arabic is the mother tongue .
Research says that mastery of other languages demands mastery of the mother tongue .
Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages .
How ?
Gibran Khalil Gibran , when he first started writing , he used Arabic .
All his ideas , imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up , smelling a specific smell , hearing a specific voice , and thinking a specific thought .
So , when he started writing in English , he had enough baggage .
Even when he wrote in English , when you read his writings in English , you smell the same smell , sense the same feeling .
You can imagine that that 's him writing in English , the same boy who came from the mountain . From a village on Mount Lebanon .
So , this is an example no one can argue with .
Second , it 's often said that if you want to kill a nation , the only way to kill a nation , is to kill its language .
This is a reality that developed societies are aware of .
The Germans , French , Japanese and Chinese , all these nations are aware of this .
That 's why they legislate to protect their language .
They make it sacred .
That 's why they use it in production , they pay a lot of money to develop it .
Do we know better than them ?
we aren 't from the developed world , this advanced thinking hasn 't reached us yet , and we would like to catch up with the civilized world .
Countries that were once like us , but decided to strive for development , do research , and catch up with those countries , such as Turkey , Malaysia and others , they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder , protected it like a diamond .
They kept it close to them .
Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere and it 's not labeled in Turkish , then it isn 't a local product .
You wouldn 't believe it 's a local product .
They 'd go back to being consumers , clueless consumers , like we are most of the time .
So , in order for them to innovate and produce , they had to protect their language .
If I say , " Freedom , sovereignty , independence , " what does this remind you of ?
It doesn 't ring a bell , does it ?
Regardless of the who , how and why .
Language isn 't just for conversing , just words coming out of our mouths .
Language represents specific stages in our lives , and terminology that is linked to our emotions .
So when we say , " Freedom , sovereignty , independence , " each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind , there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period .
Language isn 't one , two or three words or letters put together .
It 's an idea inside that relates to how we think , and how we see each other and how others see us .
What is our intellect ?
How do you say whether this guy understands or not ?
So , if I say , " Freedom , sovereignty , independence , " or if your son came up to you and said , " Dad , have you lived through the period of the freedom slogan ? "
How would you feel ?
If you don 't see a problem , then I 'd better leave , and stop talking in vain .
The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing .
I have a francophone friend who 's married to a French man .
I asked her once how things were going .
She said , " Everything is fine , but once , I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate the meaning of the word ' toqborni ' for him . "
The poor woman had mistakenly told him " toqborni , " and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him .
He was puzzled by the thought : " How could anyone be this cruel ?
Does she want to commit suicide ?
'Bury me ? ' " This is one of the few examples .
It made us feel that she 's unable to tell that word to her husband , since he won 't understand , and he 's right not to ; his way of thinking is different .
She said to me , " He listens to Fairuz with me , and one night , I tried to translate for him so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz . "
The poor woman tried to translate this for him : " From them I extended my hands and stole you -- " And here 's the pickle : " And because you belong to them , I returned my hands and left you . "
Translate that for me .
So , what have we done to protect the Arabic language ?
We turned this into a concern of the civil society , and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language .
Even though many people told me , " Why do you bother ?
Forget about this headache and go have fun . "
No problem !
The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says , " I talk to you from the East , but you reply from the West . "
We didn 't say , " No ! We do not accept this or that . "
We didn 't adopt this style because that way , we wouldn 't be understood .
And when someone talks to me that way , I hate the Arabic language .
We say-- We want to change our reality , and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams , aspirations and day-to-day life .
In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do .
So , " I talk to you from the East , but you reply from the West " has hit the spot .
Something very easy , yet creative and persuasive .
After that , we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground .
You 've seen an example of it outside , a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with " Don 't kill your language ! " written on it .
Why ? Seriously , don 't kill your language .
We really shouldn 't kill our language .
If we were to kill the language , we 'd have to find an identity .
We 'd have to find an existence .
We 'd go back to the beginning .
This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized .
After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter .
Photos of " cool " guys and girls .
We are very cool !
And to whoever might say , " Ha ! You used an English word ! "
I say , " No ! I adopt the word ' cool . ' " Let them object however they want , but give me a word that 's nicer and matches the reality better .
I will keep on saying " Internet " I wouldn 't say : " I 'm going to the world wide web " Because it doesn 't fit ! We shouldn 't kid ourselves .
But to reach this point , we all have to be convinced that we shouldn 't allow anyone who is bigger or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language , to control us or make us think and feel what they want .
Creativity is the idea .
So , if we can 't reach space or build a rocket and so on , we can be creative .
At this moment , every one of you is a creative project .
Creativity in your mother tongue is the path .
Let 's start from this moment .
Let 's write a novel or produce a short film .
A single novel could make us global again .
It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one .
So , it 's not true that there 's no solution ; there is a solution !
But we have to know that , and be convinced that a solution exists , that we have a duty to be part of that solution .
In conclusion , what can you do today ?
Now , tweets , who 's tweeting ?
Please , I beg of you , even though my time has finished , either Arabic , English , French or Chinese .
But don 't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers !
It 's a disaster ! That 's not a language .
You 'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language .
It 's not easy to come back from such a place and rise .
That 's the first thing we can do .
Second , there are many other things that we can do .
We 're not here today to convince each other .
We 're here to bring attention to the necessity of preserving this language .
Now I will tell you a secret .
A baby first identifies its father through language .
When my daughter is born , I 'll tell her , " This is your father , honey . "
I wouldn 't say , " This is your dad , honey . "
And in the supermarket , I promise my daughter Noor , that if she says to me , " Thanks , " I won 't say , " Dis , ' Merci , Maman , ' " and hope no one has heard her .
Let 's get rid of this cultural cringe .

Diana Nyad : Never , ever give up
In the pitch-black night , stung by jellyfish , choking on salt water , singing to herself , hallucinating … Diana Nyad just kept on swimming . And that 's how she finally achieved her lifetime goal as an athlete : an extreme 100-mile swim from Cuba to Florida -- at age 64 . Hear her story .
It 's the fifth time I stand on this shore , the Cuban shore , looking out at that distant horizon , believing , again , that I 'm going to make it all the way across that vast , dangerous wilderness of an ocean .
Not only have I tried four times , but the greatest swimmers in the world have been trying since 1950 , and it 's still never been done .
The team is proud of our four attempts .
It 's an expedition of some 30 people .
Bonnie is my best friend and head handler , who somehow summons will , that last drop of will within me , when I think it 's gone , after many , many hours and days out there .
The shark experts are the best in the world -- large predators below .
The box jellyfish , the deadliest venom in all of the ocean , is in these waters , and I have come close to dying from them on a previous attempt .
The conditions themselves , besides the sheer distance of over 100 miles in the open ocean -- the currents and whirling eddies and the Gulf Stream itself , the most unpredictable of all of the planet Earth .
And by the way , it 's amusing to me that journalists and people before these attempts often ask me , " Well , are you going to go with any boats or any people or anything ? "
And I 'm thinking , what are they imagining ?
That I 'll just sort of do some celestial navigation , and carry a bowie knife in my mouth , and I 'll hunt fish and skin them alive and eat them , and maybe drag a desalinization plant behind me for fresh water .
Yes , I have a team . And the team is expert , and the team is courageous , and brimming with innovation and scientific discovery , as is true with any major expedition on the planet .
And we 've been on a journey .
And the debate has raged , hasn 't it , since the Greeks , of isn 't it what it 's all about ?
Isn 't life about the journey , not really the destination ?
And here we 've been on this journey , and the truth is , it 's been thrilling .
We haven 't reached that other shore , and still our sense of pride and commitment , unwavering commitment .
When I turned 60 , the dream was still alive from having tried this in my 20s , and dreamed it and imagined it .
The most famous body of water on the Earth today , I imagine , Cuba to Florida .
And it was deep . It was deep in my soul .
And when I turned 60 , it wasn 't so much about the athletic accomplishment , it wasn 't the ego of " I want to be the first . "
That 's always there and it 's undeniable .
But it was deeper . It was , how much life is there left ?
Let 's face it , we 're all on a one-way street , aren 't we , and what are we going to do ?
What are we going to do as we go forward to have no regrets looking back ?
And all this past year in training , I had that Teddy Roosevelt quote to paraphrase it , floating around in my brain , and it says , " You go ahead , you go ahead and sit back in your comfortable chair and you be the critic , you be the observer , while the brave one gets in the ring and engages and gets bloody and gets dirty and fails over and over and over again , but yet isn 't afraid and isn 't timid and lives life in a bold way . "
And so of course I want to make it across .
It is the goal , and I should be so shallow to say that this year , the destination was even sweeter than the journey .
But the journey itself was worthwhile taking .
And at this point , by this summer , everybody -- scientists , sports scientists , endurance experts , neurologists , my own team , Bonnie -- said it 's impossible .
It just simply can 't be done , and Bonnie said to me , " But if you 're going to take the journey , I 'm going to see you through to the end of it , so I 'll be there . "
And now we 're there .
And as we 're looking out , kind of a surreal moment before the first stroke , standing on the rocks at Marina Hemingway , the Cuban flag is flying above , all my team 's out in their boats , hands up in the air , " We 're here , we 're here for you , " Bonnie and I look at each other , and we say , this year , the mantra is -- and I 've been using it in training -- find a way .
You have a dream and you have obstacles in front of you , as we all do .
None of us ever get through this life without heartache , without turmoil , and if you believe and you have faith and you can get knocked down and get back up again and you believe in perseverance as a great human quality , you find your way , and Bonnie grabbed my shoulders , and she said , " Let 's find our way to Florida . "
And we started , and for the next 53 hours , it was an intense , unforgettable life experience .
The highs were high , the awe , I 'm not a religious person , but I 'll tell you , to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if , as you 're breathing , you 're looking down miles and miles and miles , to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on , it 's awe-inspiring .
I have a playlist of about 85 songs , and especially in the middle of the night , and that night , because we use no lights -- lights attract jellyfish , lights attract sharks , lights attract baitfish that attract sharks , so we go in the pitch black of the night .
You 've never seen black this black .
You can 't see the front of your hand , Bonnie and my team on the boat , they just hear the slapping of the arms , and they know where I am , because there 's no visual at all .
And I 'm out there kind of tripping out on my little playlist .
I 've got a tight rubber cap , so I don 't hear a thing .
I 've got goggles and I 'm turning my head 50 times a minute , and I 'm singing , Imagine there 's no heaven doo doo doo doo doo It 's easy if you try doo doo doo doo doo And I can sing that song a thousand times in a row .
Now there 's a talent unto itself .
And each time I get done with Ooh , you may say I 'm a dreamer but I 'm not the only one 222 .
Imagine there 's no heaven And when I get through the end of a thousand of John Lennon 's " Imagine , " I have swum nine hours and 45 minutes , exactly .
And then there are the crises . Of course there are .
And the vomiting starts , the seawater , you 're not well , you 're wearing a jellyfish mask for the ultimate protection .
It 's difficult to swim in .
It 's causing abrasions on the inside of the mouth , but the tentacles can 't get you .
And the hypothermia sets in .
The water 's 85 degrees , and yet you 're losing weight and using calories , and as you come over toward the side of the boat , not allowed to touch it , not allowed to get out , but Bonnie and her team hand me nutrition and asks me what I 'm doing , am I all right , I am seeing the Taj Mahal over here .
I 'm in a very different state , and I 'm thinking , wow , I never thought I 'd be running into the Taj Mahal out here .
It 's gorgeous .
I mean , how long did it take them to build that ?
It 's just -- So , uh , wooo . And then we kind of have a cardinal rule that I 'm never told , really , how far it is , because we don 't know how far it is .
What 's going to happen to you between this point and that point ?
What 's going to happen to the weather and the currents and , God forbid , you 're stung when you don 't think you could be stung in all this armor , and Bonnie made a decision coming into that third morning that I was suffering and I was hanging on by a thread and she said , " Come here , " and I came close to the boat , and she said , " Look , look out there , " and I saw light , because the day 's easier than the night , and I thought we were coming into day , and I saw a stream of white light along the horizon , and I said , " It 's going to be morning soon . "
And she said , " No , those are the lights of Key West . "
It was 15 more hours , which for most swimmers would be a long time .
You have no idea how many 15-hour training swims I had done .
So here we go , and I somehow , without a decision , went into no counting of strokes and no singing and no quoting Stephen Hawking and the parameters of the universe , I just went into thinking about this dream , and why , and how .
And as I said , when I turned 60 , it wasn 't about that concrete " Can you do it ? "
That 's the everyday machinations .
That 's the discipline , and it 's the preparation , and there 's a pride in that .
But I decided to think , as I went along , about , the phrase usually is reaching for the stars , and in my case , it 's reaching for the horizon .
And when you reach for the horizon , as I 've proven , you may not get there , but what a tremendous build of character and spirit that you lay down .
What a foundation you lay down in reaching for those horizons .
And now the shore is coming , and there 's just a little part of me that 's sad .
The epic journey is going to be over .
So many people come up to me now and say , " What 's next ? We love that !
That little tracker that was on the computer ?
When are you going to do the next one ? We just can 't wait to follow the next one . "
Well , they were just there for 53 hours , and I was there for years .
And so there won 't be another epic journey in the ocean .
But the point is , and the point was that every day of our lives is epic , and I 'll tell you , when I walked up onto that beach , staggered up onto that beach , and I had so many times in a very puffed up ego way , rehearsed what I would say on the beach .
When Bonnie thought that the back of my throat was swelling up , and she brought the medical team over to our boat to say that she 's really beginning to have trouble breathing .
Another 12 , 24 hours in the saltwater , the whole thing -- and I just thought in my hallucinatory moment , that I heard the word tracheotomy .
And Bonnie said to the doctor , " I 'm not worried about her not breathing .
If she can 't talk when she gets to the shore , she 's gonna be pissed off . "
But the truth is , all those orations that I had practiced just to get myself through some training swims as motivation , it wasn 't like that .
It was a very real moment , with that crowd , with my team .
We did it . I didn 't do it . We did it .
And we 'll never forget it . It 'll always be part of us .
And the three things that I did sort of blurt out when we got there , was first , " Never , ever give up . "
I live it . What 's the phrase from today from Socrates ?
To be is to do .
So I don 't stand up and say , don 't ever give up .
I didn 't give up , and there was action behind these words .
The second is , " You can chase your dreams at any age ; you 're never too old . "
Sixty-four , that no one at any age , any gender , could ever do , has done it , and there 's no doubt in my mind that I am at the prime of my life today .
Yeah .
Thank you .
And the third thing I said on that beach was , " It looks like the most solitary endeavor in the world , and in other ways , and the most important ways , it 's a team , and if you think I 'm a badass , you want to meet Bonnie . "
Bonnie , where are you ?
Where are you ?
There 's Bonnie Stoll . My buddy .
The Henry David Thoreau quote goes , when you achieve your dreams , it 's not so much what you get as who you have become in achieving them .
And yeah , I stand before you now .
In the three months since that swim ended , I 've sat down with Oprah and I 've been in President Obama 's Oval Office .
I 've been invited to speak in front of esteemed groups such as yourselves .
I 've signed a wonderful major book contract .
All of that 's great , and I don 't denigrate it .
I 'm proud of it all , but the truth is , I 'm walking around tall because I am that bold , fearless person , and I will be , every day , until it 's time for these days to be done .
Thank you very much and enjoy the conference .
Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thank you . Thank you .
Thank you .
Find a way !
Boyd Varty : What I learned from Nelson Mandela
" In the cathedral of the wild , we get to see the best parts of ourselves reflected back to us . " Boyd Varty , a wildlife activist , shares stories of animals , humans and their interrelatedness , or " ubuntu " -- defined as , " I am , because of you . " And he dedicates the talk to South African leader Nelson Mandela , the human embodiment of that same great-hearted , generous spirit .
I 'm a man who 's trying to live from his heart , and so just before I get going , I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago .
Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom .
And so this talk is going to be for him .
I grew up in wonder .
I grew up amongst those animals .
I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve .
It 's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations .
Now for as long as I can remember , my job has been to take people out into nature , and so I think it 's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering .
Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories , and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories , stories about heroes of heart .
Now my stories are not the stories that you 'll hear on the news , and while it 's true that Africa is a harsh place , I also know it to be a place where people , animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world .
When I was nine years old , President Mandela came to stay with my family .
He had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration , and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status .
Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye , and it 's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi .
But it was a defining time for me as a young boy .
I would take him breakfast in bed , and then , in an old track suit and slippers , he would go for a walk around the garden .
At night , I would sit with my family around the snowy , bunny-eared TV , and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly .
He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa , one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity .
Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think , to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa : peace , reconciliation , harmony .
Through this act of immense open-heartedness , he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call " ubuntu . "
Ubuntu : I am because of you .
Or , people are not people without other people .
It 's not a new idea or value but it 's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on .
In fact , it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa , we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others .
Ubuntu is at play right now .
You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am .
Without you , I 'm just a guy talking to an empty room , and I spent a lot of time last week doing that , and it 's not the same as this .
If Mandela was the national and international embodiment , then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man , Solly Mhlongo .
Solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique .
He would never have a lot of money , but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet .
Solly grew up tending to his father 's cattle .
Now , I can tell you , I don 't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle , but it makes for über-resourcefulness .
The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks .
Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea , but he could do it .
He then moved across into what we called the habitat team .
These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being .
He fixed roads , he mended wetlands , he did some anti-poaching .
And then one day we were out together , and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked .
And it was an old track , but for fun he turned and he began to follow it , and I tell you , I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker .
If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve , you look up in your rearview mirror , you 'd see he 'd stopped the car 20 , 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something .
The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said , " Solly , you are pathologically helpful . "
When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment , Solly was my tracker .
We worked together as a team .
And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast , and they said to Solly , on the side , they said , " Before we even go out to see lions and leopards , we want to see where you live . "
So we took them up to his house , and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly 's wife , who was learning English , was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying , " Hello , I love you .
Welcome , I love you . " And there was something so beautifully African about it to me , this small house with a huge heart in it .
Now on the day that Solly saved my life , he was already my hero .
It was a hot day , and we found ourselves down by the river .
Because of the heat , I took my shoes off , and I rolled up my pants , and I walked into the water .
Solly remained on the bank .
The water was clear running over sand , and we turned and we began to make our way upstream .
And a few meters ahead of us , there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank , and its branches were touching the water , and it was shadowy .
And if had been a horror movie , people in the audience would have started saying , " Don 't go in there . Don 't go in there . " And of course , the crocodile was in the shadows .
Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite .
Wham ! It hits me by my right leg .
It pulls me . It turns . I throw my hand up . I 'm able to grab a branch .
It 's shaking me violently .
It 's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you , and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that .
Solly on the bank sees that I 'm in trouble .
He turns . He begins to make his way to me .
The croc again continues to shake me .
It goes to bite me a second time .
I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream .
As it bites the second time , I kick .
My foot goes down its throat . It spits me out .
I pull myself up into the branches , and as I come out of the water , I look over my shoulder .
My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description .
The bone is cracked .
The meat is torn up .
I make an instant decision that I 'll never look at that again .
As I come out of the water , Solly arrives at a deep section , a channel between us .
He knows , he sees the state of my leg , he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile , and I can tell you this man doesn 't slow down for one second .
He comes straight into the channel .
He wades in to above his waist .
He gets to me . He grabs me .
I 'm still in a vulnerable position .
He picks me and puts me on his shoulder .
This is the other thing about Solly , he 's freakishly strong .
He turns . He walks me up the bank .
He lays me down . He pulls his shirt off .
He wraps it around my leg , picks me up a second time , walks me to a vehicle , and he 's able to get me to medical attention .
And I survive .
Now — Now I don 't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you , but for Solly , it was as natural as breathing .
And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa .
In a more collective society , we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others .
Danger is shared . Pain is shared .
Joy is shared . Achievement is shared .
Houses are shared . Food is shared .
Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share , and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value , his animated , empathetic action in every moment .
Now although the root word is about people , I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people .
And then I met this young lady .
Her name was Elvis .
In fact , Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance .
She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis .
She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route .
When I first saw her , I thought she would be dead in a matter of days .
And yet , for the next five years she returned in the winter months .
And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track .
It looked like an inverted bracket , and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow , and then we would come around the corner , and there she would be with her herd .
And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her , it was this sense of kinship .
And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals .
And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving .
And then one day we came across them at this small water hole .
It was sort of a hollow in the ground .
And I watched as the matriarch drank , and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants , looks like the arm in motion , and she began to make her way up the steep bank .
The rest of the herd turned and began to follow .
And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill .
She got visibly -- ears came forward , she had a full go of it and halfway up , her legs gave way , and she fell backwards .
She attempted it a second time , and again , halfway up , she fell backwards .
And on the third attempt , an amazing thing happened .
Halfway up the bank , a young teenage elephant came in behind her , and he propped his trunk underneath her , and he began to shovel her up the bank .
And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant .
The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth , and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground .
And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant .
What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu , and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild , we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us .
And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet .
If Africa has a gift to share , it 's a gift of a more collective society .
And while it 's true that ubuntu is an African idea , what I see is the essence of that value being invented here .
Thank you .
Pat Mitchell : So Boyd , we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today , and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world .
But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts , because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session .
Boyd Varty : Well thanks , Pat .
I 'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on .
He was suffering .
And so of course there 's the mixed emotions .
But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about .
And she was like , " Well , it 'll be about you . "
I mean , that 's just incredible humility .
He was the father of our nation and we 've got a road to walk in South Africa .
And everything , they used to call it Madiba magic .
You know , he used to go to a rugby match and we would win .
Anywhere he went , things went well .
But I think that magic will be with us , and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for .
And so that 's what I 'm going to try and do , and that 's what people all over South Africa are trying to do .
PM : And that 's what you 've done today . BV : Oh , thank you .
PM : Thank you . BV : Thank you . Thanks very much .

Dambisa Moyo : Is China the new idol for emerging economies ?
The developed world holds up the ideals of capitalism , democracy and political rights for all . Those in emerging markets often don 't have that luxury . In this powerful talk , economist Dambisa Moyo makes the case that the west can 't afford to rest on its laurels and imagine others will blindly follow . Instead , a different model , embodied by China , is increasingly appealing . A call for open-minded political and economic cooperation in the name of transforming the world .
" Give me liberty or give me death . "
When Patrick Henry , the governor of Virginia , said these words in 1775 , he could never have imagined just how much they would come to resonate with American generations to come .
At the time , these words were earmarked and targeted against the British , but over the last 200 years , they 've come to embody what many Westerners believe , that freedom is the most cherished value , and that the best systems of politics and economics have freedom embedded in them .
Who could blame them ?
Over the past hundred years , the combination of liberal democracy and private capitalism has helped to catapult the United States and Western countries to new levels of economic development .
In the United States over the past hundred years , incomes have increased 30 times , and hundreds of thousands of people have been moved out of poverty .
Meanwhile , American ingenuity and innovation has helped to spur industrialization and also helped in the creation and the building of things like household appliances such as refrigerators and televisions , motor vehicles and even the mobile phones in your pockets .
It 's no surprise , then , that even at the depths of the private capitalism crisis , President Obama said , " The question before us is not whether the market is a force for good or ill .
Its power to generate wealth and to expand freedom is unmatched . "
Thus , there 's understandably a deep-seated presumption among Westerners that the whole world will decide to adopt private capitalism as the model of economic growth , liberal democracy , and will continue to prioritize political rights over economic rights .
However , to many who live in the emerging markets , this is an illusion , and even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , which was signed in 1948 , was unanimously adopted , what it did was to mask a schism that has emerged between developed and developing countries , and the ideological beliefs between political and economic rights .
This schism has only grown wider .
Today , many people who live in the emerging markets , where 90 percent of the world 's population lives , believe that the Western obsession with political rights is beside the point , and what is actually important is delivering on food , shelter , education and healthcare .
" Give me liberty or give me death " is all well and good if you can afford it , but if you 're living on less than one dollar a day , you 're far too busy trying to survive and to provide for your family than to spend your time going around trying to proclaim and defend democracy .
Now , I know many people in this room and around the world will think , " Well actually , this is hard to grasp , " because private capitalism and liberal democracy are held sacrosanct .
But I ask you today , what would you do if you had to choose ?
What if you had to choose between a roof over your head and the right to vote ?
Over the last 10 years , I 've had the privilege to travel to over 60 countries , many of them in the emerging markets , in Latin America , Asia , and my own continent of Africa .
I 've met with presidents , dissidents , policymakers , lawyers , teachers , doctors and the man on the street , and through these conversations , it 's become clear to me that many people in the emerging markets believe that there 's actually a split occurring between what people believe ideologically in terms of politics and economics in the West and that which people believe in the rest of the world .
Now , don 't get me wrong .
I 'm not saying people in the emerging markets don 't understand democracy , nor am I saying that they wouldn 't ideally like to pick their presidents or their leaders .
Of course they would .
However , I am saying that on balance , they worry more about where their living standard improvements are going to come from , and how it is their governments can deliver for them , than whether or not the government was elected by democracy .
The fact of the matter is that this has become a very poignant question because there is for the first time in a long time a real challenge to the Western ideological systems of politics and economics , and this is a system that is embodied by China .
And rather than have private capitalism , they have state capitalism .
Instead of liberal democracy , they have de-prioritized the democratic system .
And they have also decided to prioritize economic rights over political rights .
I put it to you today that it is this system that is embodied by China that is gathering momentum amongst people in the emerging markets as the system to follow , because they believe increasingly that it is the system that will promise the best and fastest improvements in living standards in the shortest period of time .
If you will indulge me , I will spend a few moments explaining to you first why economically they 've come to this belief .
First of all , it 's China 's economic performance over the past 30 years .
She 's been able to produce record economic growth and meaningfully move many people out of poverty , specifically putting a meaningful dent in poverty by moving over 300 million people out of indigence .
It 's not just in economics , but it 's also in terms of living standards .
We see that in China , 28 percent of people had secondary school access .
Today , it 's closer to 82 percent .
So in its totality , economic improvement has been quite significant .
Second , China has been able to meaningfully improve its income inequality without changing the political construct .
Today , the United States and China are the two leading economies in the world .
They have vastly different political systems and different economic systems , one with private capitalism , another one broadly with state capitalism .
However , these two countries have the identical GINI Coefficient , which is a measure of income equality .
Perhaps what is more disturbing is that China 's income equality has been improving in recent times , whereas that of the United States has been declining .
Thirdly , people in the emerging markets look at China 's amazing and legendary infrastructure rollout .
This is not just about China building roads and ports and railways in her own country -- she 's been able to build 85,000 kilometers of road network in China and surpass that of the United States -- but even if you look to places like Africa , China has been able to help tar the distance of Cape Town to Cairo , which is 9,000 miles , or three times the distance of New York to California .
Now this is something that people can see and point to .
Perhaps it 's no surprise that in a 2007 Pew survey , when surveyed , Africans in 10 countries said they thought that the Chinese were doing amazing things to improve their livelihoods by wide margins , by as much as 98 percent .
Finally , China is also providing innovative solutions to age-old social problems that the world faces .
If you travel to Mogadishu , Mexico City or Mumbai , you find that dilapidated infrastructure and logistics continue to be a stumbling block to the delivery of medicine and healthcare in the rural areas .
However , through a network of state-owned enterprises , the Chinese have been able to go into these rural areas , using their companies to help deliver on these healthcare solutions .
Ladies and gentlemen , it 's no surprise that around the world , people are pointing at what China is doing and saying , " I like that . I want that .
I want to be able to do what China 's doing .
That is the system that seems to work . "
I 'm here to also tell you that there are lots of shifts occurring around what China is doing in the democratic stance .
In particular , there is growing doubt among people in the emerging markets , when people now believe that democracy is no longer to be viewed as a prerequisite for economic growth .
In fact , countries like Taiwan , Singapore , Chile , not just China , have shown that actually , it 's economic growth that is a prerequisite for democracy .
In a recent study , the evidence has shown that income is the greatest determinant of how long a democracy can last .
The study found that if your per capita income is about 1,000 dollars a year , your democracy will last about eight and a half years .
If your per capita income is between 2,000 and 4,000 dollars per year , then you 're likely to only get 33 years of democracy .
And only if your per capita income is above 6,000 dollars a year will you have democracy come hell or high water .
What this is telling us is that we need to first establish a middle class that is able to hold the government accountable .
But perhaps it 's also telling us that we should be worried about going around the world and shoehorning democracy , because ultimately we run the risk of ending up with illiberal democracies , democracies that in some sense could be worse than the authoritarian governments The evidence around illiberal democracies is quite depressing .
Freedom House finds that although 50 percent of the world 's countries today are democratic , 70 percent of those countries are illiberal in the sense that people don 't have free speech or freedom of movement .
But also , we 're finding from Freedom House in a study that they published last year that freedom has been on the decline every year for the past seven years .
What this says is that for people like me who care about liberal democracy , is we 've got to find a more sustainable way of ensuring that we have a sustainable form of democracy in a liberal way , and that has its roots in economics .
But it also says that as China moves toward being the largest economy in the world , something that is expected to happen by experts in 2016 , that this schism between the political and economic ideologies of the West and the rest is likely to widen .
What might that world look like ?
Well , the world could look like more state involvement and state capitalism ; greater protectionisms of nation-states ; but also , as I just pointed out a moment ago , ever-declining political rights and individual rights .
The question that is left for us in general is , what then should the West be doing ?
And I suggest that they have two options .
The West can either compete or cooperate .
If the West chooses to compete with the Chinese model , and in effect go around the world and continue to try and push an agenda of private capitalism and liberal democracy , this is basically going against headwinds , but it also would be a natural stance for the West to take because in many ways it is the antithesis of the Chinese model of de-prioritizing democracy , and state capitalism .
Now the fact of the matter is , if the West decides to compete , it will create a wider schism .
The other option is for the West to cooperate , and by cooperating I mean giving the emerging market countries the flexibility to figure out in an organic way what political and economic system works best for them .
Now I 'm sure some of you in the room will be thinking , well , this is like ceding to China , and this is a way , in other words , for the West to take a back seat .
that if the United States and European countries want to remain globally influential , they may have to consider cooperating in the short term in order to compete , and by that , they might have to focus more aggressively on economic outcomes to help create the middle class and therefore be able to hold government accountable and create the democracies that we really want .
instead of going around the world and haranguing countries for engaging with China , the West should be encouraging its own businesses to trade and invest in these regions .
Instead of criticizing China for bad behavior , the West should be showing how it is that their own system of politics and economics is the superior one .
And instead of shoehorning democracy around the world , perhaps the West should take a leaf out of its own history book and remember that it takes a lot of patience in order to develop the models and the systems that you have today .
Indeed , the Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reminds us that it took the United States nearly 170 years from the time that the Constitution was written for there to be equal rights in the United States .
Some people would argue that today there is still no equal rights .
In fact , there are groups who would argue that they still do not have equal rights under the law .
At its very best , the Western model speaks for itself .
It 's the model that put food on the table .
It 's the refrigerators .
It put a man on the moon .
But the fact of the matter is , although people back in the day used to point at the Western countries and say , " I want that , I like that , " there 's now a new person in town in the form of a country , China .
Today , generations are looking at China and saying , " China can produce infrastructure , China can produce economic growth , and we like that . "
Because ultimately , the question before us , and the question before seven billion people on the planet is , how can we create prosperity ?
People who care and will pivot towards the model of politics and economics in a very rational way , to those models that will ensure that they can have better living standards in the shortest period of time .
As you leave here today , I would like to leave you with a very personal message , which is what it is that I believe we should be doing as individuals , and this is really about being open-minded , open-minded to the fact that our hopes and dreams of creating prosperity for people around the world , creating and meaningfully putting a dent in poverty for hundreds of millions of people , has to be based in being open-minded , because these systems have good things and they have bad things .
Just to illustrate , I went into my annals of myself .
That 's a picture of me .
Awww . I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969 .
At the time of my birth , blacks were not issued birth certificates , and that law only changed in 1973 .
This is an affidavit from the Zambian government .
I bring this to you to tell you that in 40 years , I 've gone from not being recognized as a human being to standing in front of the illustrious TED crowd today to talk to you about my views .
In this vein , we can increase economic growth .
We can meaningfully put a dent in poverty .
But also , it 's going to require that we look at our assumptions , assumptions and strictures that we 've grown up with around democracy , around private capitalism , around what creates economic growth and reduces poverty and creates freedoms .
We might have to tear those books up and start to look at other options and be open-minded to seek the truth .
Ultimately , it 's about transforming the world and making it a better place .
Thank you very much .

Abha Dawesar : Life in the " digital now "
One year ago , Abha Dawesar was living in blacked-out Manhattan post-Sandy , scrounging for power to connect . As a novelist , she was struck by this metaphor : Have our lives now become fixated on the drive to digitally connect , while we miss out on what 's real ?
I was in New York during Hurricane Sandy , and this little white dog called Maui was staying with me .
Half the city was dark because of a power cut , and I was living on the dark side .
Now , Maui was terrified of the dark , so I had to carry him up the stairs , actually down the stairs first , for his walk , and then bring him back up .
I was also hauling gallons of bottles of water up to the seventh floor every day .
And through all of this , I had to hold a torch between my teeth .
The stores nearby were out of flashlights and batteries and bread .
For a shower , I walked 40 blocks to a branch of my gym .
But these were not the major preoccupations of my day .
It was just as critical for me to be the first person in at a cafe nearby with extension cords and chargers to juice my multiple devices .
I started to prospect under the benches of bakeries and the entrances of pastry shops for plug points .
I wasn 't the only one .
Even in the rain , people stood between Madison and 5th Avenue under their umbrellas charging their cell phones from outlets on the street .
Nature had just reminded us that it was stronger than all our technology , and yet here we were , obsessed about being wired .
I think there 's nothing like a crisis to tell you what 's really important and what 's not , and Sandy made me realize that our devices and their connectivity matter to us right up there with food and shelter .
The self as we once knew it no longer exists , and I think that an abstract , digital universe has become a part of our identity , and I want to talk to you about what I think that means .
I 'm a novelist , and I 'm interested in the self because the self and fiction have a lot in common .
They 're both stories , interpretations .
You and I can experience things without a story .
We might run up the stairs too quickly and we might get breathless .
But the larger sense that we have of our lives , the slightly more abstract one , is indirect .
Our story of our life is based on direct experience , but it 's embellished .
A novel needs scene after scene to build , and the story of our life needs an arc as well .
It needs months and years .
Discrete moments from our lives are its chapters .
But the story is not about these chapters .
It 's the whole book .
It 's not only about the heartbreak and the happiness , the victories and the disappointments , but it 's because how because of these , and sometimes , more importantly , in spite of these , we find our place in the world and we change it and we change ourselves .
Our story , therefore , needs two dimensions of time : a long arc of time that is our lifespan , and the timeframe of direct experience that is the moment .
Now the self that experiences directly can only exist in the moment , but the one that narrates needs several moments , a whole sequence of them , and that 's why our full sense of self needs both immersive experience and the flow of time .
Now , the flow of time is embedded in everything , in the erosion of a grain of sand , in the budding of a little bud into a rose .
Without it , we would have no music .
Our own emotions and state of mind often encode time , regret or nostalgia about the past , hope or dread about the future .
I think that technology has altered that flow of time .
The overall time that we have for our narrative , our lifespan , has been increasing , but the smallest measure , the moment , has shrunk .
It has shrunk because our instruments enable us in part to measure smaller and smaller units of time , and this in turn has given us a more granular understanding of the material world , and this granular understanding has generated reams of data that our brains can no longer comprehend and for which we need more and more complicated computers .
All of this to say that the gap between what we can perceive and what we can measure is only going to widen .
Science can do things with and in a picosecond , but you and I are never going to have the inner experience of a millionth of a millionth of a second .
You and I answer only to nature 's rhythm and flow , to the sun , the moon and the seasons , and this is why we need that long arc of time with the past , the present and the future to see things for what they are , to separate signal from noise and the self from sensations .
We need time 's arrow to understand cause and effect , not just in the material world , but in our own intentions and our motivations .
What happens when that arrow goes awry ?
What happens when time warps ?
So many of us today have the sensation that time 's arrow is pointing everywhere and nowhere at once .
This is because time doesn 't flow in the digital world in the same way that it does in the natural one .
We all know that the Internet has shrunk space as well as time .
Far away over there is now here .
News from India is a stream on my smartphone app whether I 'm in New York or New Delhi .
And that 's not all .
Your last job , your dinner reservations from last year , your former friends , lie on a flat plain with today 's friends , because the Internet also archives , and it warps the past .
With no distinction left between the past , the present and the future , and the here or there , we are left with this moment everywhere , this moment that I 'll call the digital now .
Just how can we prioritize in the landscape of the digital now ?
This digital now is not the present , because it 's always a few seconds ahead , with Twitter streams that are already trending and news from other time zones .
This isn 't the now of a shooting pain in your foot or the second that you bite into a pastry or the three hours that you lose yourself in a great book .
This now bears very little physical or psychological reference to our own state .
Its focus , instead , is to distract us at every turn on the road .
Every digital landmark is an invitation to leave what you are doing now to go somewhere else and do something else .
Are you reading an interview by an author ?
Why not buy his book ? Tweet it . Share it .
Like it . Find other books exactly like his .
Find other people reading those books .
Travel can be liberating , but when it is incessant , we become permanent exiles without repose .
Choice is freedom , but not when it 's constantly for its own sake .
Not just is the digital now far from the present , but it 's in direct competition with it , and this is because not just am I absent from it , but so are you .
Not just are we absent from it , but so is everyone else .
And therein lies its greatest convenience and horror .
I can order foreign language books in the middle of the night , shop for Parisian macarons , and leave video messages that get picked up later .
At all times , I can operate at a different rhythm and pace from you , while I sustain the illusion that I 'm tapped into you in real time .
Sandy was a reminder of how such an illusion can shatter .
There were those with power and water , and those without .
There are those who went back to their lives , and those who are still displaced after so many months .
For some reason , technology seems to perpetuate the illusion for those who have it that everyone does , and then , like an ironic slap in the face , it makes it true .
For example , it 's said that there are more people in India with access to cell phones than toilets .
Now if this rift , which is already so great in many parts of the world , between the lack of infrastructure and the spread of technology , isn 't somehow bridged , there will be ruptures between the digital and the real .
For us as individuals who live in the digital now and spend most of our waking moments in it , the challenge is to live in two streams of time that are parallel and almost simultaneous .
How does one live inside distraction ?
We might think that those younger than us , those who are born into this , will adapt more naturally .
Possibly , but I remember my childhood .
I remember my grandfather revising the capitals of the world with me .
Buda and Pest were separated by the Danube , and Vienna had a Spanish riding school .
If I were a child today , I could easily learn this information with apps and hyperlinks , but it really wouldn 't be the same , because much later , I went to Vienna , and I went to the Spanish riding school , and I could feel my grandfather right beside me .
Night after night , he took me up on the terrace , on his shoulders , and pointed out Jupiter and Saturn and the Great Bear to me .
And even here , when I look at the Great Bear , I get back that feeling of being a child , hanging onto his head and trying to balance myself on his shoulder , and I can get back that feeling of being a child again .
What I had with my grandfather was wrapped so often in information and knowledge and fact , but it was about so much more than information or knowledge or fact .
Time-warping technology challenges our deepest core , because we are able to archive the past and some of it becomes hard to forget , even as the current moment is increasingly unmemorable .
We want to clutch , and we are left instead clutching at a series of static moments .
They 're like soap bubbles that disappear when we touch them .
By archiving everything , we think that we can store it , but time is not data .
It cannot be stored .
You and I know exactly what it means like to be truly present in a moment .
It might have happened while we were playing an instrument , or looking into the eyes of someone we 've known for a very long time .
At such moments , our selves are complete .
The self that lives in the long narrative arc and the self that experiences the moment become one .
The present encapsulates the past and a promise for the future .
The present joins a flow of time from before and after .
I first experienced these feelings with my grandmother .
I wanted to learn to skip , and she found an old rope and she tucked up her sari and she jumped over it .
I wanted to learn to cook , and she kept me in the kitchen , cutting , cubing and chopping for a whole month .
My grandmother taught me that things happen in the time they take , that time can 't be fought , and because it will pass and it will move , we owe the present moment our full attention .
Attention is time .
One of my yoga instructors once said that love is attention , and definitely from my grandmother , love and attention were one and the same thing .
The digital world cannibalizes time , and in doing so , I want to suggest that what it threatens is the completeness of ourselves .
It threatens the flow of love .
But we don 't need to let it .
We can choose otherwise .
We 've seen again and again just how creative technology can be , and in our lives and in our actions , we can choose those solutions and those innovations and those moments that restore the flow of time instead of fragmenting it .
We can slow down and we can tune in to the ebb and flow of time .
We can choose to take time back .
Thank you .

Michael Porter : Why business can be good at solving social problems
Why do we turn to nonprofits , NGOs and governments to solve society 's biggest problems ? Michael Porter admits he 's biased , as a business school professor , but he wants you to hear his case for letting business try to solve massive problems like climate change and access to water . Why ? Because when business solves a problem , it makes a profit -- which lets that solution grow .
I think we 're all aware that the world today is full of problems .
We 've been hearing them today and yesterday and every day for decades .
Serious problems , big problems , pressing problems .
Poor nutrition , access to water , climate change , deforestation , lack of skills , insecurity , not enough food , not enough healthcare , pollution .
There 's problem after problem , and I think what really separates this time from any time I can remember in my brief time on Earth is the awareness of these problems .
We 're all very aware .
Why are we having so much trouble dealing with these problems ?
That 's the question I 've been struggling with , coming from my very different perspective .
I 'm not a social problem guy .
I 'm a guy that works with business , helps business make money .
God forbid .
So why are we having so many problems with these social problems , and really is there any role for business , and if so , what is that role ?
I think that in order to address that question , we have to step back and think about how we 've understood and pondered both the problems and the solutions to these great social challenges that we face .
Now , I think many have seen business as the problem , or at least one of the problems , in many of the social challenges we face .
You know , think of the fast food industry , the drug industry , the banking industry .
You know , this is a low point in the respect for business .
Business is not seen as the solution .
It 's seen as the problem now , for most people .
And rightly so , in many cases .
There 's a lot of bad actors out there that have done the wrong thing , that actually have made the problem worse .
So this perspective is perhaps justified .
How have we tended to see the solutions to these social problems , these many issues that we face in society ?
Well , we 've tended to see the solutions in terms of NGOs , in terms of government , in terms of philanthropy .
Indeed , the kind of unique organizational entity of this age is this tremendous rise of NGOs and social organizations .
This is a unique , new organizational form that we 've seen grown up .
Enormous innovation , enormous energy , enormous talent now has been mobilized through this structure to try to deal with all of these challenges .
And many of us here are deeply involved in that .
I 'm a business school professor , but I 've actually founded , I think , now , four nonprofits .
Whenever I got interested and became aware of a societal problem , that was what I did , form a nonprofit .
That was the way we 've thought about how to deal with these issues .
Even a business school professor has thought about it that way .
But I think at this moment , we 've been at this for quite a while .
We 've been aware of these problems for decades .
We have decades of experience with our NGOs and with our government entities , and there 's an awkward reality .
The awkward reality is we 're not making fast enough progress .
We 're not winning .
These problems still seem very daunting and very intractable , and any solutions we 're achieving are small solutions .
We 're making incremental progress .
What 's the fundamental problem we have in dealing with these social problems ?
If we cut all the complexity away , we have the problem of scale .
We can 't scale .
We can make progress . We can show benefits .
We can show results . We can make things better .
We 're helping . We 're doing better . We 're doing good .
We can 't scale .
We can 't make a large-scale impact on these problems .
Why is that ?
Because we don 't have the resources .
And that 's really clear now .
And that 's clearer now than it 's been for decades .
There 's simply not enough money to deal with any of these problems at scale using the current model .
There 's not enough tax revenue , there 's not enough philanthropic donations , to deal with these problems the way we 're dealing with them now .
We 've got to confront that reality .
And the scarcity of resources for dealing with these problems is only growing , certainly in the advanced world today , with all the fiscal problems we face .
So if it 's fundamentally a resource problem , where are the resources in society ?
How are those resources really created , the resources we 're going to need to deal with all these societal challenges ?
Well there , I think the answer is very clear : They 're in business .
All wealth is actually created by business .
Business creates wealth when it meets needs at a profit .
That 's how all wealth is created .
It 's meeting needs at a profit that leads to taxes and that leads to incomes and that leads to charitable donations .
That 's where all the resources come from .
Only business can actually create resources .
Other institutions can utilize them to do important work , but only business can create them .
And business creates them when it 's able to meet a need at a profit .
The resources are overwhelmingly generated by business .
The question then is , how do we tap into this ?
How do we tap into this ?
Business generates those resources when it makes a profit .
That profit is that small difference between the price and the cost it takes to produce whatever solution business has created to whatever problem they 're trying to solve .
But that profit is the magic .
Why ? Because that profit allows whatever solution we 've created to be infinitely scalable .
Because if we can make a profit , we can do it for 10 , 100 , a million , 100 million , a billion .
The solution becomes self-sustaining .
That 's what business does when it makes a profit .
Now what does this all have to do with social problems ?
Well , one line of thinking is , let 's take this profit and redeploy it into social problems .
Business should give more .
Business should be more responsible .
And that 's been the path that we 've been on in business .
But again , this path that we 've been on is not getting us where we need to go .
Now , I started out as a strategy professor , and I 'm still a strategy professor .
I 'm proud of that .
But I 've also , over the years , worked more and more on social issues .
I 've worked on healthcare , the environment , economic development , reducing poverty , and as I worked more and more in the social field , I started seeing something that had a profound impact on me and my whole life , in a way .
The conventional wisdom in economics and the view in business has historically been that actually , there 's a tradeoff between social performance and economic performance .
The conventional wisdom has been that business actually makes a profit by causing a social problem .
The classic example is pollution .
If business pollutes , it makes more money than if it tried to reduce that pollution .
Reducing pollution is expensive , therefore businesses don 't want to do it .
It 's profitable to have an unsafe working environment .
It 's too expensive to have a safe working environment , therefore business makes more money if they don 't have a safe working environment .
That 's been the conventional wisdom .
A lot of companies have fallen into that conventional wisdom .
They resisted environmental improvement .
They resisted workplace improvement .
That thinking has led to , I think , much of the behavior that we have come to criticize in business , that I come to criticize in business .
But the more deeply I got into all these social issues , one after another , and actually , the more I tried to address them myself , personally , in a few cases , through nonprofits that I was involved with , the more I found actually that the reality is the opposite .
Business does not profit from causing social problems , actually not in any fundamental sense .
That 's a very simplistic view .
The deeper we get into these issues , the more we start to understand that actually business profits from solving from social problems .
That 's where the real profit comes .
Let 's take pollution .
We 've learned today that actually reducing pollution and emissions is generating profit .
It saves money .
It makes the business more productive and efficient .
It doesn 't waste resources .
Having a safer working environment actually , and avoiding accidents , it makes the business more profitable , because it 's a sign of good processes .
Accidents are expensive and costly .
Issue by issue by issue , we start to learn that actually there 's no trade-off between social progress and economic efficiency in any fundamental sense .
Another issue is health .
I mean , what we 've found is actually health of employees is something that business should treasure , because that health allows those employees to be more productive and come to work and not be absent .
The deeper work , the new work , the new thinking on the interface between business and social problems is actually showing that there 's a fundamental , deep synergy , particularly if you 're not thinking in the very short run .
In the very short run , you can sometimes fool yourself into thinking that there 's fundamentally opposing goals , but in the long run , ultimately , we 're learning in field after field that this is simply not true .
So how could we tap into the power of business to address the fundamental problems that we face ?
Imagine if we could do that , because if we could do it , we could scale .
We could tap into this enormous resource pool and this organizational capacity .
And guess what ? That 's happening now , finally , partly because of people like you who have raised these issues now for year after year and decade after decade .
We see organizations like Dow Chemical leading the revolution away from trans fat and saturated fat with innovative new products .
This is an example of Jain Irrigation .
This is a company that 's brought drip irrigation technology to thousands and millions of farmers , reducing substantially the use of water .
We see companies like the Brazilian forestry company Fibria that 's figured out how to avoid tearing down old growth forest and using eucalyptus and getting much more yield per hectare of pulp and making much more paper than you could make by cutting down those old trees .
You see companies like Cisco that are training so far four million people in I.T. skills to actually , yes , be responsible , but help expand the opportunity to disseminate I.T. technology and grow the whole business .
There 's a fundamental opportunity for business today to impact and address these social problems , and this opportunity is the largest business opportunity we see in business .
And the question is , how can we get business thinking to adapt this issue of shared value ?
This is what I call shared value : addressing a social issue with a business model .
That 's shared value .
Shared value is capitalism , but it 's a higher kind of capitalism .
It 's capitalism as it was ultimately meant to be , meeting important needs , not incrementally competing for trivial differences in product attributes and market share .
Shared value is when we can create social value and economic value simultaneously .
It 's finding those opportunities that will unleash the greatest possibility we have to actually address these social problems because we can scale .
We can address shared value at multiple levels .
It 's real . It 's happening .
But in order to get this solution working , we have to now change how business sees itself , and this is thankfully underway .
Businesses got trapped into the conventional wisdom that they shouldn 't worry about social problems , that this was sort of something on the side , that somebody else was doing it .
We 're now seeing companies embrace this idea .
But we also have to recognize business is not going to do this as effectively as if we have NGOs and government working in partnership with business .
The new NGOs that are really moving the needle are the ones that have found these partnerships , that have found these ways to collaborate .
The governments that are making the most progress are the governments that have found ways to enable shared value in business rather than see government as the only player that has to call the shots .
And government has many ways in which it could impact the willingness and the ability of companies to compete in this way .
I think if we can get business seeing itself differently , and if we can get others seeing business differently , we can change the world .
I know it . I 'm seeing it .
I 'm feeling it .
Young people , I think , my Harvard Business School students , are getting it .
If we can break down this sort of divide , this unease , this tension , this sense that we 're not fundamentally collaborating here in driving these social problems , we can break this down , and we finally , I think , can have solutions .
Thank you .

Stuart Firestein : The pursuit of ignorance
What does real scientific work look like ? As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes : It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot more like " farting around … in the dark . " In this witty talk , Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don 't know -- or " high-quality ignorance " -- just as much as what we know .
There is an ancient proverb that says it 's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room , especially when there is no cat .
I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works -- bumbling around in a dark room , bumping into things , trying to figure out what shape this might be , what that might be , there are reports of a cat somewhere around , they may not be reliable , they may be , and so forth and so on .
Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science .
Science , we generally are told , is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world , for gaining facts , for gaining data , that it 's rule-based , that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we 've been doing this for 14 generations or so now , and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard , cold facts out of the data .
I 'd like to tell you that 's not the case .
So there 's the scientific method , but what 's really going on is this . [ The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around ] And it 's going on kind of like that .
[ ... in the dark ] So what is the difference , then , between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived ?
So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University , where I 'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works .
We do this by studying the sense of smell , the sense of olfaction , and in the laboratory , it 's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working , and , well , frankly , it 's kind of exhilarating .
But at the same time , it 's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain , and that 's a big subject , and it takes quite a while to organize that , and it 's quite challenging and it 's quite interesting , but I have to say , it 's not so exhilarating .
So what was the difference ?
Well , the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. It 's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts , it uses this giant book called " Principles of Neural Science " by three famous neuroscientists .
This book comes in at 1,414 pages , it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds .
Just to put that in some perspective , that 's the weight of two normal human brains .
So I began to realize , by the end of this course , that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain .
That 's clearly not true .
And they must also have this idea , I suppose , that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books .
And that 's not really the case either .
When I go to a meeting , after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues , we never talk about what we know .
We talk about what we don 't know .
We talk about what still has to get done , what 's so critical to get done in the lab .
Indeed , this was , I think , best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done .
This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree , I should say .
I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie , because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect . That 's the real thing .
It is true that her papers are , to this day , stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that 's lead-lined , and if you 're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks , you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit , so it 's pretty scary business .
Nonetheless , this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists , the what-remains-to-be-done .
This is the stuff that 's exhilarating and interesting .
It is , if you will , the ignorance .
That 's what was missing .
So I thought , well , maybe I should teach a course on ignorance , something I can finally excel at , perhaps , for example .
So I did start teaching this course on ignorance , and it 's been quite interesting and I 'd like to tell you to go to the website .
You can find all sorts of information there . It 's wide open .
And it 's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don 't know .
Now I use this word " ignorance , " of course , to be at least in part intentionally provocative , because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don 't mean any of those .
So I don 't mean stupidity , I don 't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data .
The ignorant are clearly unenlightened , unaware , uninformed , and present company today excepted , often occupy elected offices , it seems to me .
That 's another story , perhaps .
I mean a different kind of ignorance .
I mean a kind of ignorance that 's less pejorative , a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge , something that 's just not there to be known or isn 't known well enough yet or we can 't make predictions from , the kind of ignorance that 's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell , perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein , who said , " Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science . "
I think it 's a wonderful idea : thoroughly conscious ignorance .
So that 's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today , but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts ?
So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate .
We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts , and it seems impregnable , it seems impossible .
How can you ever know all of this ?
And indeed , the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate .
In 2006 , there were 1.3 million papers published .
There 's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate , and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published .
Divide that by the number of minutes in a year , and you wind up with three new papers per minute .
So I 've been up here a little over 10 minutes , I 've already lost three papers .
I have to get out of here actually . I have to go read .
So what do we do about this ? Well , the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect , if you will .
We just don 't worry about it , in a way .
The facts are important . You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist . That 's true .
But knowing a lot of stuff doesn 't make you a scientist .
You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter .
But in science , knowing a lot of stuff is not the point .
Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance .
So knowledge is a big subject , but I would say ignorance is a bigger one .
So this leads us to maybe think about , a little bit about , some of the models of science that we tend to use , and I 'd like to disabuse you of some of them .
So one of them , a popular one , is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another .
This is clearly not true . For one , with puzzles , the manufacturer has guaranteed that there 's a solution .
We don 't have any such guarantee .
Indeed , there are many of us who aren 't so sure about the manufacturer .
So I think the puzzle model doesn 't work .
Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion .
So peel by peel , you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth .
I don 't think that 's the way it works either .
Another one , a kind of popular one , is the iceberg idea , that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden .
But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed .
We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is , or we could just wait for it to melt , I suppose , these days , but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg . Right ?
Or make it manageable . But I don 't think that 's the case .
I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well , where no matter how many buckets you take out , there 's always another bucket of water to be had , or my particularly favorite one , with the effect and everything , the ripples on a pond .
the important thing to realize is that our ignorance , the circumference of this knowledge , also grows with knowledge .
So the knowledge generates ignorance .
This is really well said , I thought , by George Bernard Shaw .
This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein 's work , in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers . [ " Science is always wrong . It never solves a problem without creating 10 more . " ] I find that kind of glorious , and I think he 's precisely right , plus it 's a kind of job security .
As it turns out , he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation , that every answer begets more questions .
I love that term , " question propagation , " this idea of questions propagating out there .
So I 'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge .
It 's rather kind of the other way around , really .
What do we use this knowledge for ?
What are we using this collection of facts for ?
We 're using it to make better ignorance , to come up with , if you will , higher-quality ignorance .
Because , you know , there 's low-quality ignorance and there 's high-quality ignorance . It 's not all the same .
Scientists argue about this all the time .
Sometimes we call them bull sessions .
Sometimes we call them grant proposals .
But nonetheless , it 's what the argument is about .
It 's the ignorance . It 's the what we don 't know .
It 's what makes a good question .
So how do we think about these questions ?
I 'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments .
This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it .
So what you know , you can know anywhere from nothing to everything , of course , and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot .
So let 's put a point on the graph . There 's an undergraduate .
Doesn 't know much but they have a lot of interest .
They 're interested in almost everything .
Now you look at a master 's student , a little further along in their education , and you see they know a bit more , but it 's been narrowed somewhat .
And finally you get your Ph.D. , where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing . What 's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because , of course , when it dips below the zero axis , there , it gets into a negative area .
That 's where you find people like me , I 'm afraid .
So the important thing here is that this can all be changed .
This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis .
So instead of how much you know about it , we could say , " What can you ask about it ? "
So yes , you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist , but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff . That just makes you a geek , right ?
Knowing a lot of stuff , the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions , to be able to frame thoughtful , interesting questions , because that 's where the real work is .
Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions .
I 'm a neuroscientist , so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience ?
Because it 's not always quite so straightforward .
So , for example , we could say , well what is it that the brain does ?
Well , one thing the brain does , it moves us around .
We walk around on two legs .
That seems kind of simple , somehow or another .
I mean , virtually everybody over 10 months of age walks around on two legs , right ?
So that maybe is not that interesting .
So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at .
How about the visual system ?
There it is , the visual system .
I mean , we love our visual systems . We do all kinds of cool stuff .
Indeed , there are over 12,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system , from the retina to the visual cortex , in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work .
But now here 's the thing : Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does .
We have TV , we have movies , we have animation , we have photography , we have pattern recognition , all of these sorts of things .
They work differently than our visual systems in some cases , but nonetheless we 've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system .
Somehow or another , a hundred years of robotics , you never saw a robot walk on two legs , because robots don 't walk on two legs because it 's not such an easy thing to do .
A hundred years of robotics , and we can 't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other .
You ask them to go up an inclined plane , and they fall over .
Turn around , and they fall over . It 's a serious problem .
So what is it that 's the most difficult thing for a brain to do ?
What ought we to be studying ?
Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs , or the motor system .
I 'll give you an example from my own lab , my own particularly smelly question , since we work on the sense of smell .
But here 's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation .
These are just plain old molecules , but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face , you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose .
If there 's a real rose there , those molecules will be the ones , but even if there 's no rose there , you 'll have the memory of a molecule .
How do we turn molecules into perceptions ?
What 's the process by which that could happen ?
Here 's another example : two very simple molecules , again in this kind of chemical notation .
It might be easier to visualize them this way , so the gray circles are carbon atoms , the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms .
Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it , and yet one of them , heptyl acetate , has the distinct odor of a pear , and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana .
So there are two really interesting questions here , it seems to me .
One is , how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that 's so clear as a pear or a banana ?
And secondly , how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom ?
I mean , that 's remarkable to me , clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet .
And you don 't even think about it , do you ?
So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions .
I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn 't be excluded from the conversation .
And I also think it 's important to realize that the conversation 's been going on for a while , by the way .
So Erwin Schrodinger , a great quantum physicist and , I think , philosopher , points out how you have to " abide by ignorance for an indefinite period " of time .
And it 's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do .
This is a tricky thing . This is not such an easy business .
I guess it comes down to our education system , so I 'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education , because I think that 's where it really has to play out .
So for one , let 's face it , in the age of Google and Wikipedia , the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change .
We just can 't sell facts for a living anymore .
They 're available with a click of the mouse , or if you want to , you could probably just ask the wall one of these days , wherever they 're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff .
So what do we have to do ? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries , for what 's outside that circumference , for what 's outside the facts , what 's just beyond the facts .
How do we do that ?
Well , one of the problems , of course , turns out to be testing .
We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing .
So in second grade , all the kids are interested in science , They like to take stuff apart . They have great curiosity .
They like to investigate things . They go to science museums .
They like to play around . They 're in second grade .
They 're interested .
But by 11th or 12th grade , fewer than 10 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever , let alone a desire to go into science as a career .
So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody 's head .
Is this what we want ?
I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls " the bulimic method of education . "
You know . You can imagine what it is .
We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever .
This can 't possibly continue to go on .
So what do we do ? Well the geneticists , I have to say , have an interesting maxim they live by .
Geneticists always say , you always get what you screen for .
And that 's meant as a warning .
So we always will get what we screen for , and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods .
Well , we hear a lot about testing and evaluation , and we have to think carefully when we 're testing whether we 're evaluating or whether we 're weeding , whether we 're weeding people out , whether we 're making some cut .
Evaluation is one thing . You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days , in the educational literature , but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error .
It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback .
That 's different than weeding , and usually , I have to tell you , when people talk about evaluation , evaluating students , evaluating teachers , evaluating schools , evaluating programs , that they 're really talking about weeding .
And that 's a bad thing , because then you will get what you select for , which is what we 've gotten so far .
So I 'd say what we need is a test that says , " What is x ? "
and the answers are " I don 't know , because no one does , " or " What 's the question ? " Even better .
Or , " You know what , I 'll look it up , I 'll ask someone , I 'll phone someone . I 'll find out . "
Because that 's what we want people to do , and that 's how you evaluate them .
And maybe for the advanced placement classes , it could be , " Here 's the answer . What 's the next question ? "
That 's the one I like in particular .
So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats , who said " Education is not about filling buckets ; So I 'd say , let 's get out the matches .
Thank you .
Thank you .
Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu : A mouse . A laser beam . A manipulated memory .
Can we edit the content of our memories ? It 's a sci-fi-tinged question that Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu are asking in their lab at MIT . Essentially , the pair shoot a laser beam into the brain of a living mouse to activate and manipulate its memory . In this unexpectedly amusing talk they share not only how , but -- more importantly -- why they do this .
Steve Ramirez : My first year of grad school , I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & amp ; Jerry 's watching some trashy TV and maybe , maybe listening to Taylor Swift .
I had just gone through a breakup .
So for the longest time , all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again , wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching , visceral " blah " feeling .
Now , as it turns out , I 'm a neuroscientist , so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful , emotional undertones that color in that memory , are largely mediated by separate brain systems .
And so I thought , what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact ?
Then I realized , maybe that 's a little bit lofty for now .
So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with ?
Could we jump-start that memory back to life , maybe even play with the contents of that memory ?
All that said , there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk .
So there is a catch . There is a catch .
These ideas probably remind you of " Total Recall , " " Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , " or of " Inception . "
But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab .
Xu Liu : Test mice .
As neuroscientists , we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works .
And today , we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light .
To do this , there 's only two simple steps to follow .
First , you find and label a memory in the brain , and then you activate it with a switch .
As simple as that .
SR : Are you convinced ?
So , turns out finding a memory in the brain isn 't all that easy .
XL : Indeed . This is way more difficult than , let 's say , finding a needle in a haystack , because at least , you know , the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on .
But memory is not .
And also , there 's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack .
So yeah , this task does seem to be daunting .
But luckily , we got help from the brain itself .
It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory , and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory .
SR : So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex ?
If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now , you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory .
Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus , which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear , which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory .
XL : When you zoom in into the hippocampus , of course you will see lots of cells , but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory , because whenever a cell is active , like when it 's forming a memory , it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active .
SR : So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody 's probably working there at any given moment , in a very real sense , there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working .
They 're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active .
XL : So we clipped part of this sensor , and attached that to a switch to control the cells , and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice .
So whenever a memory is being formed , any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed .
SR : So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory , for example .
The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells , but the green brain cells , the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory .
So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear .
You 're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now .
XL : Now , for the switch we have been talking about , ideally , the switch has to act really fast .
It shouldn 't take minutes or hours to work .
It should act at the speed of the brain , in milliseconds .
SR : So what do you think , Xu ?
Could we use , let 's say , pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells ?
XL : Nah . Drugs are pretty messy . They spread everywhere .
And also it takes them forever to act on cells .
So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time .
So Steve , how about let 's zap the brain with electricity ?
SR : So electricity is pretty fast , but we probably wouldn 't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory , and we 'd probably fry the brain .
XL : Oh . That 's true . So it looks like , hmm , indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light .
SR : So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light .
So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light -- XL : That 's pretty fast .
SR : -- and because normally brain cells don 't respond to pulses of light , so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch .
Now to do that , first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams .
XL : Yep . You heard it right .
We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain .
SR : And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics .
Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off , and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin , seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell .
You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it , and in this case we click it on with pulses of light .
XL : So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we 've been talking about and inject this into the brain .
So whenever a memory is being formed , any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see .
SR : So let 's put all of this to the test now .
What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here , and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box .
They learn that something bad happened here .
Now with our system , the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory , only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin .
XL : When you are as small as a mouse , it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you .
So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected .
Whenever a mouse is in fear , it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box , trying to not move any part of its body , and this posture is called freezing .
So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box , and when we put them back into the same box , it will basically show freezing because it doesn 't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box .
SR : So you can think of freezing as , you 're walking down the street minding your own business , and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend , and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking , " What do I do ? Do I say hi ?
Do I shake their hand ? Do I turn around and run away ?
Do I sit here and pretend like I don 't exist ? "
Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you , that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look .
XL : However , if you put the mouse in a completely different new box , like the next one , it will not be afraid of this box because there 's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment .
But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time , we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before ?
Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment ?
SR : All right , and here 's the million-dollar experiment .
Now to bring back to life the memory of that day , I remember that the Red Sox had just won , it was a green spring day , perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis , # justsaying .
Now Xu and I , on the other hand , were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen .
We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique .
XL : And this is what we saw .
When we first put the mouse into this box , it 's exploring , sniffing around , walking around , minding its own business , because actually by nature , mice are pretty curious animals .
They want to know , what 's going on in this new box ?
It 's interesting .
But the moment we turned on the laser , like you see now , all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode .
It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body .
Clearly it 's freezing .
So indeed , it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment .
While watching this , Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself .
So after the experiment , the two of us just left the room without saying anything .
After a kind of long , awkward period of time , Steve broke the silence .
SR : " Did that just work ? "
XL : " Yes , " I said . " Indeed it worked ! "
We 're really excited about this .
And then we published our findings in the journal Nature .
Ever since the publication of our work , we 've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet .
Maybe we can take a look at some of those .
[ " OMGGGGG FINALLY ... so much more to come , virtual reality , neural manipulation , visual dream emulation ... neural coding , ' writing and re-writing of memories ' , mental illnesses . Ahhh the future is awesome " ] SR : So the first thing that you 'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work .
Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote , because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman 's voice , it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I 've heard come our way .
But as you 'll see , it 's not the only opinion that 's out there .
[ " This scares the hell out of me ... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years ? ! OH MY GOD WE 'RE DOOMED " ] XL : Indeed , if we take a look at the second one , I think we can all agree that it 's , meh , probably not as positive .
But this also reminds us that , although we are still working with mice , it 's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control .
SR : Now , in the spirit of the third quote , we want to tell you about a recent project that we 've been working on in lab that we 've called Project Inception .
[ " They should make a movie about this . Where they plant ideas into peoples minds , so they can control them for their own personal gain . We 'll call it : Inception . " ] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory , what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory ?
Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory ?
XL : So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic , but if just for simplicity , let 's imagine memory as a movie clip .
So far what we 've told you is basically we can control this " play " button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time , anywhere .
But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original ?
Yes we can .
Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before , but at the same time , if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory , this will change the memory .
It 's sort of like making a remix tape .
SR : So how do we do this ?
Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain , we can start by taking our animals , and let 's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before .
Now the next day , we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they 've never experienced before .
We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box .
So what would happen here if , while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box , we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks ?
So here we 're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves .
We 're just trying to connect the two .
So to test if we had done so , we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box .
Again , we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks , and now the animal suddenly freezes .
It 's as though it 's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened .
So it formed a false memory , because it 's falsely fearing an environment where , technically speaking , nothing bad actually happened to it .
XL : So , so far we are only talking about this light-controlled " on " switch .
In fact , we also have a light-controlled " off " switch , and it 's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled " off " switch , we can also turn off a memory , any time , anywhere .
So everything we 've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind , with its seemingly mysterious properties , is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with .
SR : And for me personally , I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we 'd like .
I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories .
Now , I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality , because we 're living in a time where it 's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality .
XL : Nowadays , people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories , whether that 's old or new , positive or negative , all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works .
SR : For example , one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory , just like that .
That 's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes .
Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice , which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience .
XL : Indeed , we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn 't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination .
SR : And finally , what do we make of all this ?
How do we push this technology forward ?
These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab , and so one goal of today 's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that 's possible in modern neuroscience , but now , just as importantly , to actively engage everybody in this conversation .
So let 's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here , because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us .
Thank you . XL : Thank you .

Peter Attia : Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem ?
As a young surgeon , Peter Attia felt contempt for a patient with diabetes . She was overweight , he thought , and thus responsible for the fact that she needed a foot amputation . But years later , Attia received an unpleasant medical surprise that led him to wonder : is our understanding of diabetes right ? Could the precursors to diabetes cause obesity , and not the other way around ? A look at how assumptions may be leading us to wage the wrong medical war .
I 'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006 .
I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital , taking emergency call .
I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot .
I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her .
And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital .
That wasn 't being asked .
The question that was being asked of me was a different one , which was , did she also need an amputation ?
Now , looking back on that night , I 'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I 'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer .
In her case , I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life .
The cancer was too advanced .
But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable . I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee .
I brought some for her parents .
But more importantly , see , I passed no judgment on her , because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself .
So why was it that , just a few nights later , as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation , why did I hold her in such bitter contempt ?
You see , unlike the woman the night before , this woman had type 2 diabetes .
She was fat .
And we all know that 's from eating too much and not exercising enough , right ?
I mean , how hard can it be ?
As I looked down at her in the bed , I thought to myself , if you just tried caring even a little bit , you wouldn 't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you 've never met about to amputate your foot .
Why did I feel justified in judging her ?
I 'd like to say I don 't know .
But I actually do .
You see , in the hubris of my youth , I thought I had her all figured out .
She ate too much . She got unlucky .
She got diabetes . Case closed .
Ironically , at that time in my life , I was also doing cancer research , immune-based therapies for melanoma , to be specific , and in that world I was actually taught to question everything , to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards .
Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma , I never once questioned the conventional wisdom .
I actually just assmed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science .
Three years later , I found out how wrong I was .
But this time , I was the patient .
Despite exercising three or four hours every single day , and following the food pyramid to the letter , I 'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome .
Some of you may have heard of this .
I had become insulin-resistant .
You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat , whether we burn it or store it .
This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo .
Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life .
And insulin resistance , as its name suggests , is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job .
Once you 're insulin-resistant , you 're on your way to getting diabetes , which is what happens when your pancreas can 't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin .
Now your blood sugar levels start to rise , and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease , cancer , even Alzheimer 's disease , and amputations , just like that woman a few years earlier .
With that scare , I got busy changing my diet radically , adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking .
I did this and lost 40 pounds , weirdly while exercising less .
I , as you can see , I guess I 'm not overweight anymore .
More importantly , I don 't have insulin resistance .
But most important , I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn 't go away : How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right ?
If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me , was it possible it was failing someone else ?
And underlying these questions , I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance .
Now , most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance .
Logically , then , if you want to treat insulin resistance , you get people to lose weight , right ?
You treat the obesity .
But what if we have it backwards ?
What if obesity isn 't the cause of insulin resistance at all ?
In fact , what if it 's a symptom of a much deeper problem , the tip of a proverbial iceberg ?
I know it sounds crazy because we 're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic , but hear me out .
What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell ?
I 'm not suggesting that obesity is benign , but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils .
You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of ourselves to partition fuel , as I alluded to a moment ago , taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately .
When we become insulin-resistant , the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state .
So now , when insulin says to a cell , I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe , the cell , in effect , says , " No thanks , I 'd actually rather store this energy . "
And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells , it 's probably the safest place to store it .
So for many of us , about 75 million Americans , the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat , not the reverse , getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat .
This is a really subtle distinction , but the implication could be profound .
Consider the following analogy : Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table .
Sure , the bruise hurts like hell , and you almost certainly don 't like the discolored look , but we all know the bruise per se is not the problem .
In fact , it 's the opposite . It 's a healthy response to the trauma , all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body .
Now , imagine we thought bruises were the problem , and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises : masking creams , painkillers , you name it , all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables .
How much better would we be if we treated the cause -- telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room -- rather than the effect ?
Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world .
Getting it wrong , and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins .
Cause and effect .
So what I 'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance .
Maybe we should be asking ourselves , is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity , at least in most people ?
What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening , an underlying epidemic , the one we ought to be worried about ?
Let 's look at some suggestive facts .
We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don 't have insulin resistance .
And by the way , they don 't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people .
Conversely , we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant , and by the way , they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic disease I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts .
Now I don 't know why , but it might be because , in their case , their cells haven 't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy .
So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance , and you can be lean and have it , this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what 's going on .
So what if we 're fighting the wrong war , fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance ?
Even worse , what if blaming the obese means we 're blaming the victims ?
What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong ?
Personally , I can 't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore , let alone the luxury of certainty .
I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this , but I 'm wide open to others .
Now , my hypothesis , because everybody always asks me , is this .
If you ask yourself , what 's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant , the answer probably isn 't too much food .
It 's more likely too much glucose : blood sugar .
Now , we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run , and there 's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly .
So if you put these physiological processes to work , I 'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains , sugars and starches that 's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes , but through insulin resistance , you see , and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising .
When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago , I did it simply by restricting those things , which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience .
But that doesn 't mean my bias is wrong , and most important , all of this can be tested scientifically .
But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity , diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested .
I 'm betting my career on this .
Today , I devote all of my time to working on this problem , and I 'll go wherever the science takes me .
I 've decided that what I can 't and won 't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don 't .
I 've been humbled enough by all I don 't know .
For the past year , I 've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country , and the best part is , just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals , we 've done the same thing .
We 've recruited a team of scientific rivals , the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what 's at the heart of this epidemic .
Some think it 's too many calories consumed .
Others think it 's too much dietary fat .
Others think it 's too many refined grains and starches .
But this team of multi-disciplinary , highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things .
First , this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer .
And two , if we 're willing to be wrong , if we 're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer , we can solve this problem .
I know it 's tempting to want an answer right now , some form of action or policy , some dietary prescription -- eat this , not that — but if we want to get it right , we 're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription .
Briefly , to address this , our research program is focused around three meta-themes , or questions .
First , how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism , hormones and enzymes , and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms ?
Second , based on these insights , can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that 's safe and practical to implement ?
And finally , once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet , how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception ?
Just because you know what to do doesn 't mean you 're always going to do it .
Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier , and believe it or not , that can be studied scientifically .
I don 't know how this journey is going to end , but this much seems clear to me , at least : We can 't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did .
Most of them actually want to do the right thing , but they have to know what that is , and it 's got to work .
I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance , because as medical professionals , we 've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals : open minds , the courage to throw out yesterday 's ideas when they don 't appear to be working , and the understanding that scientific truth isn 't final , but constantly evolving .
Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science .
If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness , what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy ?
Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R.
seven years ago .
I wish I could speak with that woman again .
I 'd like to tell her how sorry I am .
I 'd say , as a doctor , I delivered the best clinical care I could , but as a human being , I let you down .
You didn 't need my judgment and my contempt .
You needed my empathy and compassion , and above all else , you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn 't let the system down .
Maybe the system , of which I was a part , was letting you down .
If you 're watching this now , I hope you can forgive me .

Paul Pholeros : How to reduce poverty ? Fix homes
In 1985 , architect Paul Pholeros was challenged by the director of an Aboriginal-controlled health service to " stop people getting sick " in a small indigenous community in south Australia . The key insights : think beyond medicine and fix the local environment . In this sparky , interactive talk , Pholeros describes projects undertaken by Healthabitat , the organization he now runs to help reduce poverty--through practical design fixes--in Australia and beyond .
The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal .
I don 't think anyone in this room would disagree .
What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars use the words , it all just sounds so , so simple .
Now , I 've got no bucket of money today and I 've got no policy to release , and I certainly haven 't got a guitar .
I 'll leave that to others .
But I do have an idea , and that idea is called Housing for Health .
Housing For Health works with poor people .
It works in the places where they live , and the work is done to improve their health .
Over the last 28 years , this tough , grinding , dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia , and more recently overseas , and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments .
It can improve health , and it can play a part in reducing , if not eliminating , poverty .
I 'm going to start where the story began , 1985 , in central Australia .
A man called Yami Lester , an Aboriginal man , was running a health service .
Eighty percent of what walked in the door , in terms of illness , was infectious disease -- third world , developing world infectious disease , caused by a poor living environment .
Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs .
He got a medical doctor .
He got an environmental health guy .
And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project .
Yami told us at that first meeting , there 's no money .
Always a good start , no money .
You have six months .
And I want you to start on a project which in his language he called " uwankara palyanku kanyintjaku , " which , translated , is " a plan to stop people getting sick , " a profound brief .
That was our task .
First step , the medical doctor went away for about six months , and he worked on what were to become these nine health goals , what were we aiming at .
After six months of work , he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper .
[ Washing , clothes , wastewater , nutrition ... ] Now , I was very , very unimpressed .
Come on .
Big ideas need big words and preferably a lot of them .
This didn 't fit the bill .
What I didn 't see and what you can 't see is that he 'd assembled thousands of pages of local , national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets .
The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason .
The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate , so the story had to be told in pictures of what were these goals .
We work with the community , not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn 't understand .
So we had the goals , and each one of these goals -- and I won 't go through them all — puts at the center the person and their health issue , and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good .
And the highest priority , you see on the screen , is washing people once a day , particularly children .
Now I hope most of you are thinking , " What ? That sounds simple . "
Now , I 'm going to ask you all a very personal question .
This morning before you came , who could have had a wash using a shower ?
I 'm not going to ask if you had a shower , because I 'm too polite . That 's it . Okay . All right .
I think it 's fair to say , most people here could have had a shower this morning .
I 'm going to ask you to do some more work .
I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen .
I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head .
Have you all got a house ? I 'm going to ask you to live there for a few months , so make sure you 've got it right .
It 's in the northwest of Western Australia , very pleasant place .
Okay . Let 's see if your shower in that house is working .
I hear some " aw " s and I hear some " aah . "
If you get a green tick , your shower 's working .
You and your kids are fine .
If you get a red cross , well , I 've looked carefully around the room and it 's not going to make much difference to this crew .
Why ? Because you 're all too old .
And I know that 's going to come as a shock to some of you , but you are .
Now before you get offended and leave , I 've got to say that being too old in this case means that pretty much everyone in the room , I think , is over five years of age .
We 're really concerned with kids naught to five .
And why ? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs , the common infectious diseases of the eyes , the ears , the chest and the skin that , if they occur in the first five years of life , permanently damage those organs .
They leave a lifelong remnant .
That means that , by the age of five , you can 't see as well for the rest of your life .
You can 't hear as well for the rest of your life .
You can 't breath as well . You 've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five .
And even skin infection , which we originally thought wasn 't that big a problem , mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure , needing dialysis at age 40 .
This is a big deal , so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids .
Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we 've looked at nationally around Australia , the same proportion .
What you see on the screen -- 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people , 35 percent had a working shower .
Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems , and 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet .
These are by a simple , standard test : In the case of the shower , does it have hot and cold water , two taps that work , a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body , and a drain that takes the water away ?
Not well designed , not beautiful , not elegant -- just that they function .
And the same test for the electrical system and the toilets .
Housing for Health projects aren 't about measuring failure .
They 're actually about improving houses .
We start on day one of every project -- we 've learned , we don 't make promises , we don 't do reports .
We arrive in the morning with tools , tons of equipment , trades , and we train up a local team on the first day to start work .
By the evening of the first day , a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning .
That work continues for six to 12 months until all the houses are improved and we 've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house .
That 's our average budget .
At the end of six months to a year , we test every house again .
It 's very easy to spend money .
It 's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house , and for a whole house , the nine healthy living practices , we test , check and fix 250 items in every house .
And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars .
We can get showers up to 86 percent working , we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working , and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses .
Thank you . The teams do a great job , and that 's their work .
I think there 's an obvious question Why do we have to do this work ?
Why are the houses in such poor condition ?
Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance , the sort of things that happen in all our houses .
Things wear out .
Should have been done by state government or local government .
Simply not done , the house doesn 't work .
Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction , literally things that are built upside down and back-to-front .
They don 't work . We have to fix them .
And if you 've lived in Australia in the last 30 years , the final cause -- You will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses .
It 's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence , which I 've never seen evidence for , that 's always ruled out as that 's the problem with indigenous housing .
Well , nine percent of what we spend is damage , misuse or abuse of any sort .
We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem .
And we 'll go a lot further than that .
The people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution .
Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia , over 75 at the minute , are actually local , indigenous people from the communities we work in .
They do all aspects of the work .
In 2010 , for example , there were 831 , all over Australia , and the Torres Strait Islands , all states , working to improve the houses where they and their families live , and that 's an important thing .
Our work 's always had a focus on health . That 's the key .
The developing world bug trachoma , it causes blindness .
It 's a developing world illness , and yet , the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes doing damage .
Okay , what do we do ?
Well , first thing we do , we get showers working .
Why ? Because that flushes the bug out .
We put washing facilities in the school as well , so kids can wash their faces many times during the day .
We wash the bug out .
Second , the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick . So what do we do ?
We call up the doctor of dust , and there is such a person .
He was loaned to us by a mining company .
He controls dust on mining company sites , and he came out , and within a day it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground , the wind-driven dust , so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids .
So we used dirt to stop dust .
We did it . He provided us dust monitors .
We tested and we reduced the dust .
Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally .
So how do we do that ?
Well , we call up the doctor of flies , and yes there is a doctor of flies .
As our Aboriginal mate said , " You white fellows ought to get out more . "
And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug .
He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide .
They could trap the flies , send them to him in Perth .
When the bug was in the gut , he 'd send back by return post some dung beetles .
The dung beetles ate the camel dung , the flies died through lack of food , and trachoma dropped .
And over the year , trachoma dropped radically in this place , and stayed low .
We changed the environment , not just treated the eyes .
And finally , you get a good eye .
All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference .
The New South Wales Department of Health , that radical organization , did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we 've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales , and they found a 40-percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment .
A 40-percent reduction .
Just to show that the principles we 've used in Australia can be used in other places , I 'm just going to go to one other place , and that 's Nepal , and what a beautiful place to go .
We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed .
Health was poor .
We went in with no grand plan , no grand promises of a great program , just the offer to build two toilets for two families .
It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch , invited by the family into their main room of the house .
It was choking with smoke .
People were cooking on their only fuel source , green timber .
The smoke coming off that timber is choking , and in an enclosed house , you simply can 't breathe .
Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure .
So all of a sudden we had two problems .
We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground . That 's fine .
But all of a sudden now there was a second problem .
How do we actually get the smoke down ? So two problems , and design should be about more than one thing .
Solution : Take human waste , take animal waste , put it into a chamber , out of that extract biogas , methane gas .
The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day -- clean , smokeless and free for the family .
I put it to you , is this eliminating poverty ?
And the answer from the Nepali team who is working at the minute would say , don 't be ridiculous , we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim .
And I don 't pretend anything else .
But as we all sit here today , there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby .
Well over 1,000 people use those toilets .
Yami Lama , he 's a young boy .
He 's got significantly less gut infection because he 's now got toilets , and there isn 't human waste on the ground .
Kanji Maya , she 's a mother and a proud one .
She 's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas , smokeless fuel .
Her lungs have got better , and they 'll get better as time increases , because she 's not cooking in the same smoke .
Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it 's shed the gas , he puts it on his crops .
He 's trebled his crop income , more food for the family and more money for the family .
And finally Bishnu , the leader of the team , has now understood that not only have we built toilets , we 've also built a team , and that team is now working in two villages where they 're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding .
And that , to me , is the key .
People are not the problem .
We 've never found that .
The problem : poor living environment , poor housing , and the bugs that do people harm .
None of those are limited by geography , by skin color or by religion . None of them .
The common link between all the work we 've had to do is one thing , and that 's poverty .
Nelson Mandela said , in the mid-2000s , not too far from here , he said that like slavery and Apartheid , " Poverty is not natural .
It 's man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings . "
I want to end by saying it 's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing , I think , extraordinary work , that have actually improved health , and , maybe only in a small way , reduced poverty .
Thank you very much for your time .

Didier Sornette : How we can predict the next financial crisis
The 2007-2008 financial crisis , you might think , was an unpredictable one-time crash . But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable , growing systems , tracking the moment when any bubble is about to pop .